She was fired for taking 10 minutes to reply to emails. Then she made sure they’d regret it.

She had been on the job for four months when she was pulled without warning into a meeting with her manager, HR, and legal. Effective immediately, she was fired. The reason given: she took ten minutes to respond to emails.

“That was a bullsh*t reason,” she wrote in a post to Reddit’s r/MaliciousCompliance that has since racked up more than 19,000 upvotes. “To be honest, I was furious.”

The job itself had never been easy. She’d been hired as a speaker coordinator for a company that planned large conferences, and from the start, as she described it to Bored Panda, there was no onboarding, no training, and no clear point of contact. “I was simply given the log-in info for a couple of different websites and told to get to work.” She was the only person in the role. All the institutional knowledge about speakers, schedules, and upcoming events lived entirely with her.

Her manager spoke limited English, which made communication difficult in ways that weren’t anyone’s fault but created real problems. When she once asked her manager for a call to clarify something, the response came back: “No cranne. Self skills is a must. I am bird without head.” It took her several days to piece together that her manager was trying to say she was overwhelmed and needed her employee to be more self-sufficient.

She adapted, figured things out, and by her own account, kept the speakers happy. Then came the meeting, the firing, and the reason that didn’t add up. Ten minutes to reply to an email. No written warning. No verbal warning. Nothing.

During the exit interview, HR asked her to hand over her files and walk them through where things stood with an upcoming event scheduled in 17 days. She reached into her bag and pulled out her copy of the NDA she’d signed when she started.

As she told it on Reddit, she pointed to a specific clause: as a former employer, they were now prohibited from receiving confidential information about the position under the terms of the very agreement they’d had her sign. “As per my NDA, I am not to discuss intimate details or share documents relating to this position with any employer, past or future. Since this firing was effective immediately, you are now a former employer and I am bound by my NDA.”

HR pushed back. She held firm. Legal was brought in. Legal read the clause and confirmed she was correct.

The event, by her account, was a disaster. More than half the speakers pulled out once communication broke down. Her former manager nearly lost her job over it. The employee, for her part, closed her Reddit post with the mocking subject line that had gotten her fired in the first place: “All because I ~tAKe ToO lONg tO ResPoND tO EMaILS~”

The story resonated because it captures something many workers recognize: the particular frustration of being let go without cause, without warning, and without recourse, and the rare satisfaction of finding that the company had, in this case, handed her exactly the recourse she needed. Save your contracts. Read the fine print. Sometimes the NDA works both ways.

This article originally appeared earlier this year.

The post She was fired for taking 10 minutes to reply to emails. Then she made sure they’d regret it. appeared first on Upworthy.