Comment by wyldfire
4 hours ago
> blaming them for not accepting email is kind of silly.
I definitely agree - but if the organization creates pain as an externality, then there's no incentive for them to change. Making them realize the cost of their decisions seems appropriate and just and not-even-abusive. Yelling at the person on the phone is bad and doesn't help anyone. Malicious compliance like this helps motivate them to escalate their concerns to people who can change the policy.
Indeed.
If Karen from Compliance cared, she could (and should) inform her superiors of what just happened. Let them know how much their procedure cost, in time and money. Call the IT people and say "I have a fax machine printing 500 pages". Get it noted somewhere. Reported. Make statistics out of it.
It can be as simple as an e-mail. Or she can send the entire stack of pages as a souvenir. If she cannot be bothered to do anything about it, then maybe it's not such a problem for her after all.
But keeping silent about it, is being complicit.