Spanish Air Base Tries to Enforce a Ridiculous Rule: The Great Car Registration War
Someone in r/maliciouscompliance told me that you guys would like this story, too. I used AI for translation, as English is not my first language. I hope this is a valid exemption from the "no AI" rule, I 100% wrote it by myself. TLDR at the end.
This is a story from my time in the Air Force. We took part in an international exercise in Spain. For this, we deployed several aircraft and around 200 personnel to a Spanish air base. I myself was there ahead of the main contingent with a small advance party of about 15 men to prepare everything. One of our tasks was to register roughly 50 rented vehicles at the base gate and bring them onto the base. To do this, the Spanish authorities introduced a rule that each of us could only register five vehicles under our name. So we drove the vehicles up to the gate and then each of us gradually brought in three to five cars, including registering them in our names, which was noted on the vehicle’s access pass.
At first, this went smoothly and we were able to hand over the vehicle keys to the comrades arriving later. However, after two or three days, problems started. An official notice was issued stating that from now on, each person was only allowed to have one vehicle registered under their name. So we gathered additional people and drove to the gate to transfer the excess vehicles from one person to another. The whole process took about two hours, but eventually it was done.
That arrangement lasted for about a week. Then suddenly, cars trying to leave the base were being turned back. The guards would no longer let them leave unless the person under whose name the car was registered was actually sitting in the vehicle. We then sought talks with the local authorities and explained that we assigned vehicles according to current operational needs and that it was impossible to comply with this new rule. However, we were dismissed rather smugly with the explanation that if it was absolutely necessary, the vehicle could simply be re-registered. From that point on, it very much felt like deliberate harassment to me.
But we still had good old malicious compliance! We instructed all soldiers that whenever time allowed, they should drive to the gate in pairs and have vehicles re-registered. Either from a person who already had a car to someone without one, or, if both already had a registered vehicle, simply swap them around. Within a very short time, the guard office was completely clogged up, and the official probably had to process around 50 vehicle registration changes a day. And what can I say, after two days of the guard office being blocked by endless vehicle re-registrations, it suddenly no longer mattered whether the registered person was sitting in the car or not!
tl;dr: During a military exercise in Spain, the local base kept introducing increasingly absurd vehicle registration rules for rented cars. After soldiers were forced to constantly re-register vehicles just to move around, they responded with malicious compliance by flooding the guard office with nonstop registration changes until the authorities gave up and dropped the rule.