Declassified CIA Docs Show How To Low-Key Sabotage Your Company By Being A Miserable Coworker

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If you’re heavily invested in bringing down your current employer while maintaining a low profile, this recently declassified CIA guide has got you covered.

The “Simple Sabotage Field Manual: Strategic Services” was created during World War II and distributed to spies and concerned citizens with one goal: destroying productivity in businesses operating within the Axis Powers.

As stated in the Independent:

It was produced to detail the “simple acts which the ordinary individual citizen-saboteur can perform”, allowing citizens to do damage to countries and companies using normal kit and “in such a way as to involve a minimum danger of injury, detection and reprisal”.

The entire guide is available here. It’s exhaustive but worth a read. I burned a half-hour today reading through it while nodding my head and mumbling “mmm hmm” as I thought about all of the passive hell raisers I’ve worked with in the past and whether or not they were on a covert op or just assholes.

Here are some of the highlights:

∙Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
∙Make speeches. Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” with long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences.
∙When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committees as large as possible – never less than five.
∙Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
∙Misunderstand orders. Ask endless questions or engage in long correspondence about such orders. Quibble over them when you can.
∙Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
∙Be unreasonable and urge your fellow-conferees to be “reasonable” and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
∙Don’t order new working’ materials until your current stocks have been virtually exhausted, so that the slightest delay in filling your order will mean a shutdown.
∙To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give undeserved promotions. Discriminate against efficient workers; complain unjustly about their work.
∙Fill out forms illegibly so that they will have to be done over; make mistakes or omit requested information in forms.
∙Spread disturbing rumors that sound like inside dope.

Inside dope? I’m in.

Being a spy is usually on every kid’s fantasy job list in between astronaut and Scott Disick. This just adds a whole new element to the espionage game. I mean, you don’t have to be a genetically altered Jason Bourne freak show to run a covert op. There’s a place for know-it-all assholes who lack self-awareness, too. This is huge news for Todd over in Logistics.

Next time that conference call runs long because some dude wants to beat a dead horse and share a personal story that has you rolling your eyes and doing the dice-roll hand motion, keep in mind that you may be dealing with a saboteur. Head on a swivel..

[via Independent]

Image via Shutterstock

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Dave

Lawyer. Writer. Dude doing business. I'm the meatloaf guy from tv.

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