In my early days as part of the workforce, I had a supervisor I could not stand. He was a passive-aggressive micromanager with no sense of humor. My coworkers and I took great pleasure in inflicting small torments upon him. My friend John discovered that if you loosened the screw on a pair of scissors to just the right spot, it would cause the blades to tighten up while in use. John would bring in a small screwdriver and regularly sabotage the boss’s scissors. And we’d watch with glee as he struggled with them. One day he stormed out of his office, waving the scissors in the air, and accused us of tampering with his things. John, his voice dripping with sarcasm, said, “Yes, every day I bring in a tiny screwdriver, wait until you use the restroom, and loosen the screw on your scissors so you can’t use them.” The poor bastard muttered an apology for thinking something so ridiculous and took the rest of the day off. It was a small but satisfying victory. In hindsight, he wasn’t really that terrible of a boss. Certainly not as bad as the office manager who, rather than apologize for spitefully throwing away an expensive birthday cake, insisted on inspecting employee lunches for possible health code violations. But vengeance is sweet, dare I say delicious? Okay, okay, that was bad, lol!
Share your stories of workplace revenge. Nonviolent only please!
…I don’t know if it counts as revenge exactly…but I might have one?
…I do a pretty random assortment of different stuff for different people & some years back I signed on to do a fortnight’s work for a private club sorting out some stuff to do with an out of date membership database…& wound up working there most days of the week for a few years…it wasn’t a bad gig in some ways but most of those ways had to do with the people I worked with rather than the pay or the boss…but the staff meals were pretty tasty & when I got stuck there late it wasn’t unheard of for someone to appear at my side bearing a g&t
…then some new investors threw some money into the place & proceeded to start throwing their weight around which rather took the shine off things…mostly I just tried to ignore them but one day one of them decided to try to figure out what it was I did…to be fair that wasn’t something with a straightforward answer since on a given day it could range from answering phones to tinkering with databases to getting people to actually pay their dues to resurrecting the credit card machines & the tills before the lunch service imploded…but he rubbed me the wrong way so instead what I did was walk him through the concept of opportunity cost & explain that from my point of view it effectively cost me money to work there…he looked a bit shellshocked & left me alone…which I considered a win
…imagine my surprise when the next day I found out that between that little speech & the manager’s answer to what I did being apparently a lot more complimentary than they were expecting…it turned out I’d talked myself into a raise
…might not quite have been vengeance…but vindication can also be pretty sweet?
Close enough to count. I’m impressed that you were able to talk yourself into a raise. I’m sure you deserved it but that unfortunately that doesn’t always matter to the folks with the checkbook.
…to be honest at the time I was most of the way to being sure I’d actually been talking myself out the door…I wasn’t a fan of the “new boss(es)” or inclined to think their attempts to demonstrate they knew what they were doing actually demonstrated much other than that they didn’t get the stuff that was good about the place & were more liable to ruin it than improve any aspect of it
…haven’t been back there in a while but by the time I ceased working for them almost none of the staff who were there when I started were left & I was more or less sure I’d been right about the whole deal?
Sounds like you were.
Sometimes the best revenge is living well. I worked for a bank about 5 years ago as marketing director. I did a really good job, if I do say so myself. I took over from a do-nothing and made a big impact from Day 1. But they hired a new VP and she wanted me replaced. Never said it, but the clear implication was that I was too old (she was early 30s) and they needed someone new. My first (but not last) real experience with age discrimination.
My boss, also the head of HR, had an incredibly bizarre conversation with me. “We are outsourcing marketing and I will work directly with that company.”
“Umm, okay, so what will I be doing?”
“We are outsourcing marketing and I will work directly with that company.”
“So exactly what are you saying?”
“We are outsourcing marketing and I will work directly with that company.”
“So I won’t need to do marketing?”
“We are outsourcing marketing and I will work directly with that company.”
This went on for a few minutes before I realized I wasn’t going to get a straight answer and stopped asking questions.
I don’t think there’s an HR reason to do that, but that’s literally all she would say. I took it to mean I needed to find another job and I did (there were other signs — moved out of my office to a smaller one, etc.)
Fast forward to about three years ago. I’ve moved out of marketing and into administration (see age discrimination) and I’ve got a job in operations now. I get an email from my old boss. “Wondering if you might consider coming back to the bank. We have a new vice president and he’s very interested in you.”
Nah. I’m good.
Bwahahaha! You should have asked if they were outsourcing market and wanted you to work directly with that company.
* outsourcing marketing *
Monday is grocery shopping day and I reply from my phone in the parking lots of various stores. Although I make plenty of errors at hone too.
I haven’t engaged in workplace vengeance in so long that I can’t actually remember some of the shit that I did. However, one of my favorite pranks in an office setting is to note if any of the people I’m on good terms with type with the hunt-and-peck method. Then, when they were out to lunch or off for a day, I would rearrange all the keys so they were in alphabetical order. There was one person in particular who didn’t look up at her screen until she’d typed almost a whole page of gibberish. It took her a bit to realize what had happened, and then she immediately knew it was me because who else would pull that gag. I can’t remember what she did to get back at me but I’m sure it was likewise hilarious.
That’s a good prank! I have a good friend who was in a workplace where pranks were ongoing. His best one – smearing chocolate icing on all the toilet seats. Too bad he did it on a day one of the corporate bigwigs from Europe was visiting.
Holy shit.
@butcherbakertoiletrymaker It was aimed at an extra squeamish coworker. Then he couldn’t even claim the prank until later, by then the joke was on him.
This was a small blip on my bumpy road in corporate life. I worked with a woman who was a complete rage-aholic and possibly bipolar, in retrospect. I could deal with her, and in fact she was very smart and talented. One of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met.
However, I ran a small department and I was working with a freelancer. A job opened up and I was pitching it to him. What I did (still do) is very niche and it’s difficult to find people who can do it, and 99% of people wouldn’t want to do it, but I find it fascinating and I’ll do it as long as I’m able. She stormed into my office screaming about how incompetent we all were. The freelancer/possible new hire somewhat quailed. I calmed her down and sent her on her way. “It’s really a wonderful place to work and if you take the job I’ll do my best to make sure you never have to interact with her. She has her moods…”
This was a Friday. Friday night I got a call at home from her boss. I had a different boss, and I was essentially the rage-aholic’s peer, but through a different reporting structure. “I heard something happened today. X is very difficult to deal with but I hear…” So I told her boss about it and threw in, “And she said, in front of the freelancer/new hire, that she wished she had your job because she’d fire half the staff because you, personally, are driving the company into the ground.” “Did she?” [This was true.] She was given her walking papers on Monday.
I also got a more junior colleague fired for sexual harassment. For some reason he glommed on to me and in the course of our workdays he would occasionally share his comments about the relative merits of our women colleagues. As an out gay male, I guess he figured I was male enough to understand what he was talking about, but not a potential romantic rival. He was married with a young daughter. Little did he know or care that I was buddies with some of his victims. I finally brought this up over a working lunch with his boss, and that boss said, “Well, no one has complained about him…” “Well, I’m complaining about him because he’s making my friends upset. This is a workplace, not a happy hour bar.” He was gone in a couple of weeks. Ah, the pre-#metoo turn-of-the-20th-century.
Err, turn of the 21st century. Even I’m not that old.
Way to stick up for your coworkers! I’m sure they appreciated it.
When I was in HS I worked a part time retail job and got the always angry assistant manger fired. She believed she should be running the store instead of the very good manager we had. When the manager was on vacation the assistant screamed at me on the sales floor in front of customers and I walked out. She called the district manager and told her she wanted me fired. The DM called and asked for my side of the story. She fired the assistant instead of me. I would never have intentionally tried to get anyone fired, like you I’m sure. But everyone is responsible for their own actions and I wasn’t going to lose my job to protect her.
In film production – there are different departments run by their own Department Head – ie the Key Grip is the head grip – the Gaffer is the head of the electrics – the Production Designer is the head of the art department and so on. There is also a Production Manager or Line Producer( a lot of times both nowadays) who deals primarily with budgets and overall production needs like rates and staffing requirements and is really over all of the department heads.
I was hired on a film by the department head of my particular department but the Production Manager wanted her to hire some one he wanted. She refused and hired me any way. He was pissed so he gave me the lowest rate for my classification and basically refused any requests I had for anything – manpower, equipment – you name it. At times, it made the job very difficult, but I just took everything he dished out and made everything work. Also, although we weren’t technically working out of our travel zone – it was a long drive through “the deer gauntlet” every morning and night to get to the location. To help my department, I rented a condo near the set for us to stay in if anyone was too tired to drive home. Production normally rents hotel rooms if you are outside the travel zone- but we were not. Anyway, I found out that the production manager was giving a stipend to other departments that were doing the same thing. When I inquired about it, I was told that no one was getting a stipend and they didn’t know what I was talking about.
Anyway, like I said, I just took it all in stride and got shit done. Also, my boss turned out to be a complete nut job so that made it harder for everyone including the PM. Flash forward to the end of the movie – a big group of producers and crew went to one of those decorate a plate/mug kind of events as a fun bonding thing. I didn’t go. The next day I find on my desk a plate made with the movie title and the back of it signed by the Production Manager. There was also a little note he left that said ” Sorry, I was totally wrong about you. I know it’s pathetic but here’s a plate.”
He also paid me back for the condo and gave me an extra week’s pay at wrap. He called me a couple of times after that job for other ones, but I was already working.
Hopefully, this all makes sense.
He was an ass, but at least one that was able to apologize. I’m glad he paid you back for the condo too.
I got nothing, work is good now, I put my horrible bosses behind me, but this morning, the DOT was rough, and I cleansed my palate with a giant buttered croissant, much better.
It’s a tough world out there. I have to keep reminding myself it could have been even worse if Cheetolini had managed to steal the election. Maybe I should try the buttered croissant remedy.
…kinda feel like I owe some sort of apology, there
…glad there was a croissant on hand to soften the blow…it eases the conscience somewhat
no worries, i’m not one to shoot the messenger…
tea and toast has always been my comfort food, now that i’m a grown-up, tea and croissant
no workplace revenge stories for me…. younger me allowed the annoyances at work to drag me down to their level…and on the whole it did not improve my work days or for that matter my employment longevity
nowadays im just quietly competent and people that annoy me rarely stay employed long enough to become a major problem…there are perks to flying underneath the radar…whenever people need to get gone im not on the list….probably coz management forgot i exist
*floats around the shop floor like a wee ghostie…occasionally knocking shit over and blaming others*
anyways…for the time being im enjoying staying out of the limelight..quietly gathering certificates and skills
and once ive collected enough of them im going to take over the world!
they’ll never see me coming
@farscythe, just like your ninja stealthy cat!
@farscythe That’s a big revenge plan right there!
I’ve been lucky until the current workplace to have worked with capable professionals as an engineer. Any issues I managed to deal with by hook or by crook. As a mere production grunt? Uh, no.
The place I work at has some pretty good coworkers and decent pay for what you do. Makes it hard to leave sometimes. Management? I would have fired most of the fuckers had the shoe been on the other foot (which it hasn’t.) I liked about 70% of the managers they fired or left. As a rule the managers here tend to be petty and jealous of those who can lead/do things/earn respect of the people they are in charge of.
First of all the story needs some background. Around 7 years ago, some higher up (I’ll call J, who would come up later in the story) came up with the idea to make a specialized production team in order ramp up production of a key drug. They picked a bunch of experienced capable techs (including me who only had less than a year of experience but I was the smartest tech they had.) There was a dogfight to pick those who would lead us. Everyone thought they deserved to be (big time career advancement.)
Things were good. I showed the skills that kept me at Nortel during massive layoffs and made about 40% of the process adjustments to speed up the process from 14 hours down to 10 hours. I was respected by my peers. Things were great till my own dick got me trouble.
I got involved with a woman I never should have. She took me down a dark scary path that nearly ruined me. Anyway, she fucked up and got charged with DUI and blamed me for it. She claimed she was involved with people you don’t want to fuck with and threatened to kill me.
Up to then my attendance was spotless. Then I started missing days (mostly when she wanted to snort coke and needed someone to rant at) or coming late (driving her ass to her work and back.) To make matter worse she got kicked out of her apartment and moved in with me. My life at work got worse, I had my supervisor riding my ass about my attendance (not his fault.) I got a warning letter, then another, and then another. Between her using/abusing me and my supervisor slapping me with HR shit, I wasn’t doing great. I was also using coke (she needed someone to snort with) but I am lucky that I don’t have an addictive personality or I would have been done.
What made things worse was that other folks had worse attendance records than mine were getting away with it. I had 11 call ins over a 13 month period and I was getting the ‘treatment’ aka being railroaded out. (see petty and jealous.)
I got suspended for being late 3 hours. I was put into a meeting with the manager and my supervisor. The manager tried to rub in the fact I didn’t get an interview for a key job on the team (I already knew that and the guy they hand picked turned out to be a complete fuck up-I sneered openly at my manager the day that happened.) Also told me he didn’t expect me here in three months.
I was both pissed and terrified. Terrified because the job was the only thing I had. Pissed because I let this happen to me. I had a long talk with cokehead hoping to appeal to her vanity/humanity to stop snorting this shit till I could get management off my ass. Also pissed at what a fucking dick my manager and supervisor were, but there wasn’t much I could do as I put myself in the hole.
Luckily, I didn’t have a call in as I worked off the suspension. I stopped snorting what little coke I did. When cokehead wanted me to stay to listen to her rant and rave, I left to go to work. She still had a grip on me, but I started breaking free a little bit at a time. I was also isolated from friends and family at that point. I started seeing both again.
My supervisor K left to be a fucking manager. At this time, I saw both the manager and supervisor’s linkedin pages. They took credit for the work that I and others did. Fuckers.
I moved back to my old dept and my new incompetent supervisor carried on the treatment on me. He slapped me with a shit review using info collected by his buddies. It blew up in his face as I was also the main trainer on the team. I had trained 100% of his new techs. If I was terrible then he shouldn’t have kept me training new techs, but he did FOR 8 MONTHS!
By this point, I had figured out that cokehead wasn’t a mafia princess and was hounding her to leave. I stopped cleaning and cooking. My house was shitheap/garbage dump. I made her living conditions so miserable for six months that she left. I was finally free of her, but not really she could come back.
One week in June 2016 changed that. She came back trying to reclaim the house and I was waiting for her in ambush prepared for whatever she threw up at me. I called the cops on her, explained the situation, showed the texts and asked her to leave. She claimed I was a sexual predator and that the neighbors knew all about it. I brought out all the neighbors and the cops interviewed them. To her surprise, I had chats with both my neighbors. They knew nothing because there was nothing. I finally got the drop on her and kicked her out (later she would try to come back twice, but ended with cops asking her to leave.)
That Monday I went to my new manager and explained my situation. I also demanded a Performance improvement Plan as it was my right in the management SOP. If I was as bad as my review claimed then I need help and no longer train new techs. My manager was surprised and agreed. I was on PIP. It also meant no overtime which I needed as coke head left me a pile of debt to pay, but I could deal with the financial pain.
It blew up on my new supervisor as it turned out no one else could train new techs and since I was off that job they didn’t have anyone to train them which ruined affected my new boss’ own review. His failure to get rid of me (and his own incompetence) would be a reason his 18 year career ended some four years later.
Next I went to J. More background: I kicked and elbowed my way into an interview with his dept a year earlier. This pissed off recruiting because I had showed J. that they were a bunch of scumbags who kept pushing their friends/family into jobs they had no business doing. J. insisted on seeing the whole list not their “selected” list of candidates (he had been complaining about the quality of candidates at the time which is how I got a chance before I ruined it.)
Anyway I had to skip out on my interview because of coke head that day. J was pissed with me and I had become the laughing stock off the office. Later, IJ came up to me and asked what the hell was wrong with me (because the senior managers were laughing at me as I later found out I was the hot topic of office gossip for six months.) I explained my situation to J. He was still disappointed with me, but he forgave me. Later, helped J find a good Asian food store (he was Hawaiian and he missed stuff from home.) This small favor would come back to help me.
I explained that some of his boys were playing games using his dept as cover. J didn’t like that and had a nice long bad chat with them. It didn’t go well for them as they found themselves in J’s doghouse for a long time (4 years.)
I called this my Michael Corleone week as I knocked out the people in my life who made my life hell.
I still had some scores to settle. My next supervisor P knew I hated K. He hated K because he was an arrogant braggart who stabbed a lot of people in the back to get where he was. K loved to blame our dept for his failures. P knew I was also one of the guys who knew SAP inside and out and let me go thru the batch records. I plowed through a year’s worth of records which showed we had gotten our product out on time and that we actually weren’t the problem K’s dept had. P asked me to present to management. I did so with a big grin on my face as K turned bright red while the senior managers asked him why he was wrong.
When I got inadvertently promoted (temporarily) I had to present my dept’s key performance indicators to senior management. I knew this shit better than management so I did a very good job in identifying issues. My former manager tried to attack my numbers twice. I ended up slapping him down in front of senior management both times (again I knew this shit better than he actually did.) I didn’t endear myself to him but I didn’t give a fuck. I was nasty enough to him as I’ve been told that I’m on his permanent shit list (he’s a director now.)
All the director’s big projects are fucked up right now. I could lift a finger to help, but why would I? I also know the director is a big arrogant asshole who thinks he’s the smartest guy in the world. Doesn’t need my help to figure it out.
K would suffer an ignominious ending thanks to himself. He was a lucky guy because he was put in charge of good teams/depts. However, there is one dept that is a real challenge. He got moved there because he claimed he was the best. Instead he showed what a chickenshit he was by claiming stress leave after running that dept for a month. Upper management later asked him to leave. The day he left, his dept celebrated.
@ManchuCandidate Wow, I’m so glad you were able to get rid of the cokehead, get your life back on track. I can completely relate to your story, I had my own toxic relationship that cost me almost everything. Funny thing though, when I had nothing left to lose he lost most of leverage over me. And I managed to dig myself out of the pit I was in. @bryanlsplinter is right, living well is the best revenge.
Yeah, sometimes I learned that it is best to leave people to their own devices and become the cause of their own demise.
It is too much effort to go to paying people back. The times I did were because the opportunity was handed to me on a platter.
Good for the emotional satisfaction but bad for the “career” as I showed not only that I am good at what I do, but I also hold grudges and more than capable/willing of paying people back. I am loathed and feared among certain upper management.
Having them loathe and fear you sounds like the perfect pay back!
I’ve never gotten anyone fired, and I’ve had a few lousy bosses, but mostly I’ve been pretty lucky in the workplace over the years …
BUT.
At a previous journalism job, where I was an editor but not a hiring manager, I had a problem with my weekend reporter. He had been recently hired with a degree from what’s widely considered a Good School (important to certain people in the hiring chain). He was … odd, very Christian, very sheltered, very socially awkward. But he had a much bigger issue: He stunk at the job.
I worked with a lot of younger, less-experienced reporters over the years. Helping them improve was part of my job, so I hoped he would improve. But he didn’t. Finally after a few months I had a sit-down with his boss to say “Look, this kid ain’t getting it.” He wasn’t surprised; he’d also read his pre-edit copy and was aware of most of my concerns. But nothing happened, and my 11-hour Saturdays became 12- or 13-hour Saturdays almost entirely because his stuff took me so much longer to go through and fix.
So again, I went to our top editor and this time did not complain but merely said “This reporter is going to get us in trouble if we continue to send him out to cover news” which I hoped would be taken more seriously.
Maybe it was. But a few weeks later, I took a rare Saturday off — it required 2 people to cover for me — to go to a college reunion party. My school is in the middle of nowhere and at that time, cell coverage on the drive through the mountains was somewhat spotty. But when I started to get close and the towers were back in range, my phone started going crazy. This was back in the olden times when unlimited texting was not common, so I had a stunning number of messages waiting for me. Looking at them in reverse order, I was really confused at first.
But here’s what had happened: There’d been a double murder-suicide early that morning and he’d been sent to the scene. He got snippy with the cops and then, somehow, insanely, literally walked into the crime scene itself before it was fully cleaned up. Not surprisingly, he was arrested! And the paper was going to make a big stink about it until a sheriff on the scene, who our crime reporter had a good relationship with, said — and I quote with a line I will never forget — “he was basically standing in brains.”
Anyway! He was duly shown the door shortly after all this and my work life improved a little bit (though I did leave the job not that long afterward and that improved things a lot more!) Sorry for the story length — I need an editor 🙂
We’ve all made mistakes when we were young. Hopefully, he learned a few things and is doing well.
OMG! That’s crazy, lol. I would have thought that was journalism 101- don’t walk into a crime scene. A sheltered Christian with an attitude of entitlement. Is he working for Fox News now?
Last I knew, as of a few years ago, he was still plying his trade in the business at a smaller paper in Pennsylvania.
And I honestly wouldn’t say he was entitled, and he didn’t strike me as right-wing (little “c” conservative, perhaps, but it’s hard to picture that kid being a Trump fan in the least.) If anything, I think he realized he wasn’t performing well at the job so he was trying to make a good impression on his bosses by going the extra mile to get information that the cops were really slow in parceling out … but yeah, a murder scene is NOT the time and place to push those boundaries.