When I was doing my articles at a small law firm — an internship to be admitted as an attorney — I was the go-to person for everything at the office e.g. setting up computers, buying stationery, paying bills, going to court, seeing clients, etc. After being admitted as an attorney, I continued doing all this because the secretary only did about 20% of what a secretary would usually do and refused to do anything else. My boss did some shady business (didn’t pay taxes, etc.) so he couldn’t just fire her for fear of her ratting him out. He also never disciplined her. We are not in the US.
Since we worked from my boss’s mother’s house, the secretary also spent about 50% of her day just chatting with his mother and they became fast friends. Guess who was always the evil one that everyone ganged up on? Yours truly. I was made out to be incompetent at my job, and I used to cry a lot and almost became an alcoholic from work stress.
One day, the secretary got really upset with me after I asked her to buy stationery since we didn’t even have staples. After a heated argument, she told me:
Secretary: “You are not the office manager, and you should stop lording it about as if you were!”
Bear in mind that I was her senior both as an attorney and in the number of years I’d worked at the firm. My boss did nothing and rather got upset with me, as did his mother.
I decided then and there that I was done doing both secretary work and my attorney work because I was working roughly fifty to sixty hours per week — the standard was forty — trying to get everything done without receiving overpay. (The unemployment rate in my country was around 30%, and in the legal field, the supply of lawyers exceeded the demand.) The secretary knew this and my boss knew this, but no one cared that I was basically working myself into an early grave.
Cue malicious compliance. If everyone agreed that I was not the office manager, then I would stop managing the flow of the office and only do my attorney work. I stopped paying the bills, buying the stationery, reminding my boss of important meetings, etc.
Within two weeks, the electricity was cut off for ten days because it wasn’t paid and my boss’s elderly mother and the rest of his family had no electricity. We also could not work for those ten days. Once the electricity was turned back on, the phone lines were cut because of non-payment. Again, we could not work. The post piled up. There was no stationery. We couldn’t do service of court documents because our service providers cut us off. It went on for weeks. I simply worked around the issues and sorted my life out. (One example: when the WiFi was off, I used my cellphone as a hotspot for my laptop without telling anyone.)
In the end, my boss and his mother begged me to do what I used to do, but I refused. Since I was focusing more on my actual work, my fees increased, and my pay increased, as well.
Shortly thereafter, I moved away from that office to our secondary office and worked alongside lovely colleagues who all did what they got paid to do. I have been at this new office — the same firm, just a different location — for the last two years.
