Quick-thinking employee outsmarts boss’s demand to work faster with a brilliant move

Considering the cut-throat competition in the corporate world, speed has become the ultimate currency and quality has taken a back seat. Recently, a Reddit post by u/0x1337D00D highlighted this chronic workplace dilemma, after an employee took a bold stand against their boss, who used to prioritize rapid execution over meaningful results. The story resonates with many professionals trapped in the corporate systems, aiming to achieve 100% efficiency while working under unrealistic deadlines.

The person began the Reddit post by giving a little information about their new supervisor and wrote, "I work at a big retail chain, where the stockroom is the wild west and chaos is the norm. We recently got a new supervisor, Sarah, who seems to think she’s running the Navy SEALs or something. She’s obsessed with speed—constantly on us about how we need to get things done faster. It doesn’t matter if it’s done right, as long as it’s done fast."

Further, the employee narrated how once Sarah cornered them while they were in the middle of an inventory check and said, "You’re taking way too long with these. Just get through them quickly. We don’t have time to check every single item!” Initially, the employee tried to explain to Sarah that such massive inventory checks are time-consuming and that rushing things is not a good idea.

However, the supervisor was in no mood to understand. She cut them off in the middle of the conversation and said, “If you can’t speed this up, maybe this job isn’t the right fit for you." The next day, the employee was again scheduled for another inventory check. Frustrated with Sarah's obsession with speed, the worker decided to teach Sarah a lesson. "Instead of my usual process where I count everything carefully, I decided to play Sarah’s game. I glanced at the shelves and made numbers that seemed about right. I didn’t even bother opening boxes to check if what was inside matched the labels. I fly through the whole process, marking items off like I was speed-running a video game. What usually takes me 2 hours, I finished in just 20 minutes," they wrote. Seeing the work completed in much less time made Sarah extremely delighted as she approached the worker with a wide grin on her face and said, "See, that wasn’t so hard, was it? If you keep this up, you might even get a little bonus this month.”

Following that day, everything was perfect for a week until the store manager, Mike, called for an emergency team meeting. As the meeting began, he informed the team about the inventory reports being a total disaster. Moreover, when a furious Mike confronted Sarah about the inventory reports, she tried to blame the team and said, “They must’ve messed up the counts. They weren’t thorough enough.”

Taking the opportunity, the employee took a stand and informed Mike that they were just following Sarah's order and that it was she who asked them to skip checking the items and just get the work done quickly. Sarah was issued a formal warning and the next day she along with a few other employees spent 12 hours redoing the entire inventory check from scratch. After this incident, Sarah changed for the good and stopped harping on the team about the speed.

"The best part? A couple of weeks later, I get a small bonus for 'outstanding attention to detail' in helping fix the inventory mess. Oh! the irony. Sarah couldn't even look me in the eye when I got the bonus slip. And every time she walks by me now, I just give her a friendly smile and say, 'Don't worry, boss, I'm working as fast as you want!'" concluded the individual on Reddit.

The post garnered a lot of attention online with overwhelming responses from the people. u/bolivar-shagnasty wrote, "Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast. Tell Sarah if she wants to run a military-style operation then she should adopt military-style approaches." u/CoderJoe1 commented, "She was right, you got a little bonus." Similarly, @u/FrizzWitch666 wrote, "I love 'boss with no sense gets what's coming to them' first thing in the morning. Coffee is much better with a dose of silent rebellion and HAHA!"