The Great Data Purge: When Cost-Cutting Goes Nuclear at JP Morgan
What happens when a global banking giant decides to save money by slashing digital storage, and a loyal employee follows the order to the letter—even when it means deleting everything? If you think "chaos," you’re not wrong. Today, we dive into a real-life saga from the trenches of JP Morgan’s Toronto branch, where cost-cutting ambitions collided with operational reality, and the resulting carnage was as predictable as it was hilarious.
Picture this: Your boss wants to look good on some spreadsheet at head office, so they order a scorched-earth policy on your email, voicemail, and files. The kicker? You’re the person who actually needs those files to do your job. It’s a recipe for disaster served with a side of malicious compliance.
When Compliance Gets Malicious (and Hilarious)
The story, as shared by Redditor u/karenskygreen on r/MaliciousCompliance, is a classic case of “doing exactly what you’re told”—and watching your workplace implode. As their division circled the drain, the director at JP Morgan Toronto was desperate to stand out in a company-wide cost-cutting initiative. The target: digital storage—emails, voicemails, project files. The order: make deep cuts, no questions asked.
For u/karenskygreen, a project worker who thrived on reusing past materials, this was madness. But when he flagged the obvious problem to his manager—a “suckup” who never questioned orders—he got the corporate equivalent of a shrug. So, he did what any self-respecting employee would do in this scenario: nuked his entire digital history. Emails? Gone. Voicemails? Obliterated. Files? Vaporized. (Well, except for the hundreds of pages he started printing out, until his micromanaging boss caught wind and shut that down.)
Community member u/WoodenWhaleNectarine summed up the mood perfectly: “If I would be required to lose all my previous work, I would bump up the estimate by a factor of 2.5 and tell them that this is what they requested.” In other words, you want a clean slate? You get a clean slate—and all the inefficiency that comes with it.
The Comedy (and Tragedy) of Corporate Directives
The real kicker came when the fallout began to hit. Suddenly, management was upset that u/karenskygreen’s storage numbers looked so good—too good. In a quarterly review (apparently, JP Morgan loved those), his boss dinged him for... voicemail storage? You can’t make this stuff up. As the original poster noted, “They...bring up...in..a review...my..voicemail...storage.” In a place where projects depended on historic data, this was bureaucratic absurdity at its finest.
Redditors were quick to point out the obvious: “Would it not have been less costly for JPM to simply purchase and install more storage media?” asked u/Illuminatus-Prime. The answer, of course, is yes. But when head office wants to see numbers go down, common sense is the first casualty.
Others, like u/myrandomevents, raised legal and regulatory eyebrows: “I’d have imagined that Canada’s version of the SEC would have required that a lot of that information...be retrievable for years.” Indeed, as u/annoyedCDNthrowaway reminded everyone, the Canada Revenue Agency requires companies to keep financial records for seven years—or else. But as u/karenskygreen clarified, “The Canadian office was just a puppet, we all had dumb terminals. All information including our daily work, emails, all of it was stored on servers in the US.” So while the local purge was dramatic, the real data lived (and presumably survived) elsewhere.
The Real Cost of “Winning” the Spreadsheet
Perhaps the most delicious irony came next. With all his reference material gone, the OP’s job became much harder. When new projects landed, he had to increase his time estimates by 10%—and that didn’t sit well with management. But how could he plan efficiently without the history they’d ordered him to destroy? “Tell me I’m wrong?” he challenged his boss. “No, but you can’t do that.” The solution? “Just make it up within the tolerances.” But with 300+ pages of requirements to review, the numbers didn’t lie.
As u/ZumboPrime wryly observed, “I’m not sure how this is malicious compliance. OP deleted all the reference he needed, and his managers blamed him for it until he left. No fallout for the people who demanded it.” Sometimes, the only person who suffers is the one who follows the rules.
The story ends on a predictable note: “I never made it to my next quarterly review, I found a new job.” (One commenter joked, “So what happened after? Did you ever meet them working at Macdonalds?”)
Lessons from the Reddit Peanut Gallery
What makes this tale sing isn’t just the Kafkaesque management or the nuclear compliance—it’s the chorus of Reddit voices chiming in with their own stories and sharp observations. From jokes about “letting loose the dogs of war” to horror stories about government document retention (shoutout to u/NightMgr and the 800-page AIX manual), the thread is proof that corporate absurdity is universal—and everyone has a story.
And as u/bungojot pointed out, sometimes the only thing standing between your company and regulatory doom is a storage closet full of dusty boxes no one dares shred.
So, the next time your boss orders you to “eliminate history,” remember: sometimes, the best compliance is malicious, and the best revenge is a new job.
Have you ever been caught in a corporate catch-22? Share your stories below—sometimes, misery (and malicious compliance) loves company!
Original Reddit Post: Eliminate history ? Ok sure.