the file poacher, the reluctant apology, and other stories of jerks getting their comeuppance

by Alison Green on January 28, 2025

Last week we talked about jerks getting their comeuppance, and here are eight of the most satisfying stories you shared.

1. The thief

At an old job, I was continually denied raises by the bully finance director (who somehow was always able to find money for his own raises.) He oversaw all purchases for the business’s renovation, which included lots of furniture, TVs, tech stuff, etc. All expensive stuff. He was one of many jerks and I eventually moved on, but I heard from a coworker a couple years later that he was fired one day when an expensive TV that went missing from storage was suddenly discovered. In a picture his wife posted on Facebook of their new living room. This caused an audit and it turned out he was stealing A LOT of stuff and money from work, so he and his cronies all got fired and he had a very public trial. All I wanted was a raise when my job duties expanded, and instead his ass went to jail.

2. The coffee

When I was 30, I looked like a 15-year-old and many assumed I was an intern or perhaps a lowly admin they could disrespect. I had had enough of this when an old man leaned over to me before a commission meeting started (I was the staff liaison to this commission and basically led the meetings but he didn’t know that yet). He asked me to go get him coffee (!) without even looking at me. I said in a neutral tone, “No thank you” and then got up to start the meeting. I said, “Hey everyone, just a quick note, Bob here says he’d fetch (I really emphasized this word) coffee for anyone who needs it, so just tell him how you take it.” He got very flustered and muttered something like, “uh, uh” and I turned to him and said, “So are we good here?” and I paused for effect and let him memorize my shape, face, and tone until he said, “Yep, got it” and barely spoke up again for the rest of the year.

3. The file poacher

I did an external benchmarking project in Excel for my boss, sent it off, and forgot about it. 12+ months later, one of the “too cool to wear a suit” marketing team presented the exact same file to the executive team (I was there to present something else). It even still had my quirky choice of colors in the conditional formatting.

He stood there saying it had been a lot of research and work and just needed to be updated for the latest year’s data. Then he was asked to make some changes on the spot. He needed to get into the source sheet, which he couldn’t find. I meekly suggested it was a hidden sheet and told him how to unhide it. But then there was no data on the source sheet. I pointed out it the columns started at AW so there must be some hidden columns. He tried and tried to unhide them and nothing happened. He muttered the sheet must have corrupted. He also struggled to remove some colors on the output sheet. I said nothing else, but raised my eyebrow at my boss.

Finally my boss suggested I try, as I was known for being good with Excel. I walked down to his laptop and, without saying a word, took the page protection off the sheet using my password. Someone jokingly asked if I had an all powerful admin password. I shook my head and said no, that I remembered the password for the file. I was then asked why I knew the password to a marketing file, to which I replied that they hadn’t changed the password on the file since I created it 18 months ago, and that I’d had to hide and password protect the detail as some of the numbers were still confidential at that point. I also said the random colors on the front sheet which he couldn’t remove were due to conditional formatting based on criteria my boss had asked for the year before.

I took my seat again (back of the room) and watched as Mr. Marketing squirmed as he was asked why he was taking credit for another team’s work. My boss smirked and Mr. Marketing never poached another file off me again.

4. The building

I took a fundraising job at a nonprofit, and it didn’t take long to realize that the place was toxic. The CEO, who was also the founder, was an absolute terror, which was apparently known to everyone but me. I started looking for another job because I just couldn’t deal with the abuse, and somehow my boss found out and fired me before I had the chance to quit, despite the fact that I was absolutely destroying my fundraising goals. The board refused to manage the CEO in any way, shape, or form, despite these well-known issues.

About five years later, when the org was in its 30th year, the org finally had the funds and build a gorgeous new building for its operations, it was everything they’d all dreamed of, especially the toxic founder … who the board then promptly fired for his years of toxic behavior, and specifically cited my firing five years prior as one of the reasons. Knowing that he never got to enjoy his magnificent new space was just the best chef’s kiss ever.

5. The accreditation

Ten years ago, I was a trainer working for a very well-known organization which was in a highly visible dispute with the government, and was regularly in the headlines. If you were remotely engaged with current affairs in my country then, you would recognize both the dispute and the company. Our part of the organization ran credentialled training for a highly-trusted, highly-regulated profession — think legal, engineering, that kind of thing. Our training was accredited by the regulator, and our clients had to take 50 accredited hours every year as a condition of keeping their licenses. All the training courses had had the content approved, but for each individual session, the dates, times, venue, trainer, and bullet-pointed list of content had to be sent to the regulator.

My lovely manager was away for a year on maternity leave, and single most useless man I have ever met was employed in her stead, through the Old Boys network. He was unbelievably useless in every possible way, and chauvinist. Not actively toxic, just incompetent and a waste of space, and extremely condescending to us little ladies. So the two other trainers and I and the admin team who supported us just bypassed him and got on with things.

A few months in, the admin responsible for getting all our courses accredited left. Before she left, she informed Useless Manager about the process for getting courses accredited and said that the other admin didn’t have time to do this and he would need to figure something out. About five months after that, just before Lovely Manager returned, we found out that Useless Manager’s solution had been to ignore it. For nearly six months, we had been delivering “accredited” courses to our highly-regulated profession, which they needed to complete annually to keep their licenses, and not a single one of them was actually accredited.

My co-trainers and I (all women) scheduled a meeting with our manager to “understand the issue,” and we basically treated it like a Select Committee. First, we made him explain what had happened and how. Then we asked questions like, “But you were aware that this was a requirement, yes or no?” “Just so we are clear, do you understand that if any of the thousand or so clients we’ve seen in the last few months got audited, they could lose their licence because they’d claimed 50 accredited hours and these hours weren’t accredited? And that would be entirely on us?” “Could I just ask you to reflect on the impact of Company’s highly visible dispute with the government if this got into the media?”

Frankly, we shouldn’t have been allowed to do it and he shouldn’t have sat through it. But he was Useless, so he didn’t actually know how to shut us down. He squirmed. He stuttered. He blustered. We sat very and looked at him very, very disapprovingly. At some point, I sighed and said, “All I can say is that I’m very, very disappointed.” (Which was the point where one of my colleagues nearly lost it.)

After half an hour, we told him he could go, waited until he’d left the room, and then all cracked up laughing and repeating the highlights back to each other. He worked out the rest of the month without contacting or speaking to any of us again. He’s probably now CEO of something because useless, chauvinist men fail upwards.

The resolution was that Lovely Manager came back, worked with the regulator, and got them to agree to backdate approval and treat it as an admin issue. I still get chills thinking about how bad it could have been though.

6. The apology

In my last job, I helped salespeople with proposals, and a lot of them had very specific requirements that we would be thrown out for not following. On one proposal, we had to have a “wet signature” from the salesman handling the proposal (meaning, we couldn’t use his digital signature on file, he had to sign it with a pen himself). This salesman was notorious for putting things off until the last minute, and since this municipality was a few hours’ drive away and fairly rural (so there was no guarantee of overnight delivery), I told him I had to have the signature by X date in order to be able to guarantee it would get here. I was very, very clear with him, many times, in different formats, about this requirement and the timeline.

He kept putting it off, and finally came the afternoon before it had to be submitted to sign it. I told him, again, that I couldn’t guarantee it would get there, and he brushed me off, saying basically, “It’ll be fine.” Of course, it wasn’t, and as I guessed, it didn’t get delivered on time and was not considered.

He raised an absolute stink and was so mad. We had a conversation about it with my boss where I explained, again, why it happened and that he couldn’t keep putting things off until the last minute. He said he understood, apologized, asked me to be clearer about the timeline next time (????), and we parted ways. After that conversation, I thought we were on the same page until the next morning he sent an email to his boss, with me, my boss, and the entire senior leadership team CC’ed, where he said he had talked to me about the issue, explained why it couldn’t happen again, and had gotten my word that I wouldn’t let it happen again.

I was FUMING. I left the office to go on a walk because I was so angry I couldn’t think straight. When I got back, my boss had replied all to the email saying, “[Salesman], this email does not accurately represent what happened at all, and I think you know that.” She laid out the entire issue from beginning to end, and a few hours later, the salesman’s boss came by my desk with him to apologize and promise that he would follow my timelines in the future.

The organization was, in general, very salesperson-friendly (which mostly meant they let them run roughshod over everyone and never made them do anything they didn’t want to), so this forced apology was a very gratifying experience for me and, vicariously, for everyone else who had ever been burned by this salesman.

7. The ultimatum

I worked in an office that had the worst receptionist. She held grudges and did as little work as possible. She was so difficult in the seven years I was there that she was switched around to different managers. She did not like her last manager. She marched into the CEO’s office and said, “Get me a different manager or I quit.” The CEO responded, “Go pack up your desk.” She was stunned. You really shouldn’t give an ultimatum unless you are willing to suffer the consequences.

8. The course review

A number of years ago, I was hired as an instructional designer to help support a large group of faculty who were creating online asynchronous courses for a new degree program. A key part of my job was ensuring that all the courses fulfilled certain mission-critical standards like accessibility and learning outcomes. I had a checklist with these deliverables and I was required to regularly review all the courses throughout their development cycle.

One of the faculty assigned to this project was an absolute diva. Dr. Diva had convinced college leadership that he was a GROUNDBREAKING ONLINE EDUCATION MIRACLE WORKER and so far ahead of the curve that it was practically a circle. He was invited to conferences to talk about his magical methods and featured in college promotional materials and he was on a first-name basis with all of the muckety-mucks. In other words, he was a VERY. BIG. DEAL. around campus.

He was also very unhappy that his course was being included in the review process. Reviews were fine for other faculty but certainly not for him.

Nonetheless, I do my first review, and it’s a bloodbath. His course is a half-baked disaster. Cherry on top, it also had two very serious “doing it this way could open the institution to serious liability” concerns. I give my boss a heads-up on what I find, and he gives me the go-ahead to write my report and send an email outlining the shortcomings to the faculty.

Dr. Diva goes nuclear. He responds by sending me this huge, vitriolic email, a 9.8 on the email Richter scale. But berating me is not enough. He also calls my manager and demands that I be fired! Immediately!

When my manager refuses, he gets really angry. So he decides to cash in all his VIP IOUs and organizes a huge meeting about me and my review, ostensibly under the guise of urgent concerns about instructional designers impinging on academic freedom. He corrals a couple of senior VPs, the head of the faculty union, a bunch of senior managers, an associate dean or two, my boss, and my boss’s boss to attend. If there’d been a natural disaster on the day of the meeting, a third of the college leadership might have been wiped out.

Unfortunately for Dr. Diva, the meeting did not go as planned. The powers-that-be start by reviewing my report. They ask my boss questions about my review processes and the project’s goals, and they start to get a little confused. What they’re seeing and reading doesn’t seem to match up at all with the sky-is-falling academic freedoms are at risk disaster that their superstar had claimed. In fact, when they dig a little further, they begin to realize that my report is actually very fair and accurate and that all of the pedagogical superpowers he’s long claimed to have don’t actually exist.

Hmm … Would Dr. Diva like to speak about how he plans to address these deficits to ensure alignment with the program’s outcomes and college standards? And why did Dr. Diva think that receiving a routine review warranted both my firing and a meeting with such a large and busy group of people?

I’m pleased to report that Dr. Diva burned pretty much all of his chips that day, and his visibility in all things promotional went from very high to practically invisible. Rumor also had it that a number of his other courses suddenly found themselves being audited for program alignment. There was even a nice coda to all the stress and tumult. Months later, I found myself in an elevator with my boss and one of the VPs who’d attended the meeting with Dr. Diva. When my boss introduced me, the VP just looked at me, nodded, and said, “You do good work.”

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{ 162 comments }

{ 162 comments… read them below or add one }

  1. ID Gal*

    Fellow Instructional Designer here! Dr. Diva’s foe is my new hero! I’d like a poster of you to hang up in my office!

    I have a similar story. Many years ago I was doing freelance work with a local university. My job was to create a cohesive course out of the notes given to me by the professor. In reading over the material he wanted included in the course, however, it sounded familiar. And with good reason: he’d lifted huge chunks of text from the textbook with zero credit given to the author. Total plagiarism.

    When I met with him about this topic, he said “that doesn’t make any sense because our school has a deal with the publishers and therefore we are able to quote whatever we want out of those textbooks.” (?) My response was that he was not “quoting” – he was plagiarizing. He stuck to his guns! So I asked him what he would do if a student of his had lifted large chunks of material from a book clearly published by someone other than the student. Silence. He finally got it.

    I could not work there after that, so I lost out on some money, but he was censured by his department chair and that gave me some satisfaction!

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    1. anon for this*

      Librarian here, so much this! I find faculty do things all the time that they would fail students for doing. Kudos to you for creating the space for him to get it.

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      1. allhailtheboi*

        Current undergrad – everytime my lecturers don’t reference correctly and I can’t find their source, yet I lose marks for a lost comma in my reference list, I want to SCREAM.

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        1. foureyedlibrarian*

          I can second anon for this as another librarian. Also, try Zotero! It’s a free citation management software.

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          1. constant_craving*

            I’d be careful to check its output though. I use it to manage references and it’s great for that, but it doesn’t always follow correct formatting- things like capitalization are frequently off. I assume this is based on whatever data it’s pulling from the articles being formatted incorrectly.

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            1. Madame Desmortes*

              Correct assumption! For extra added fun, not all citation styles want the same style of capitalization for titles.

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            2. LurkersRUs*

              Also a librarian and a huge fan of Zotero. I love it but you really do have to check the records to ensure formatting is correct. It’s particularly a problem with items pulled in using Zotero Connector (web pages, blog posts, etc). And some database vendors (I’m looking at you EBSCO) have the metadata for their records configured in a way that Zotero DOES not like. I imported about 80 citations for newspaper articles from an EBSCO database last week and Zotero tagged them as either blog posts or magazine articles.

              And yes, capitalization is also an issue, although if the title in the record is in sentence case, the specific bibliographic formats seem to do a better job of handling it correctly.

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      2. Ess Ess*

        Agreed! Long ago I worked at a university and I also took some classes so I was on the list of students. At one point, they sent out a mass email to students with a link to a university webpage describing exactly what is considered plagiarism and also copyright violation and that the university does not tolerate either of these. Using the works of others MUST have attribution, and have permission to use copyrighted works.

        I immediately sent them an email asking them if they had permission to use the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon about stealing that they used as a header on the plagiarism webpage since I knew that the cartoonist (at that time) did not allow unauthorized use of his work. Within 15 minutes, I saw that the cartoon had been quietly removed from the website.

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    3. Artemesia*

      I loved this story. Having worked in academia helping get programs ready for accreditation because I had instructional design skills and knew how to write behavioral objectives etc etc I know Dr. Diva. It is never about academic freedom.

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      1. Seal*

        Another librarian here. I think everyone in academia knows a Dr. Diva.

        Also, academic freedom does include the right to plagiarize or otherwise violate copyright law.

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          1. Seal*

            NOOOOO!!!!!! It does NOT include the right to plagiarize, etc. DOES NOT!!!

            This concludes the universe’s periodic reminder to always proofread before hitting send.

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  2. TechTurnedOp*

    That last one… I work in higher education in the UK, and I can absolutely imagine someone behaving like the Dr Diva. I can also imagine the Internal Moderator as we’d call OP, facing it off.

    It would be a glorious showdown to watch. The Karma would be amazing.

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      1. MigraineMonth*

        I think Mr. Marketing didn’t realize that the person whose work they were ripping off was also in the meeting, so they probably would have asked the commenter to update with the latest year’s data, make these tweaks, thanks a ton, and taken credit for that work too.

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  4. Yes And*

    I have to wonder if Dr. Diva had already made himself some enemies, and they were just waiting for an excuse to pounce. Those Dr. Diva types just don’t fall from grace that quickly because one person asked reasonable questions.

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    2. MigraineMonth*

      Ah, but the genius of Dr. Diva’s tantrum is that he gathered all of his supporters together to get disillusioned all at once. He turned 1/3 of the college leadership against him, in no small part because he made them take time out of their busy schedules to come to an extremely unnecessary meeting.

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    3. Hroethvitnir*

      It’s pretty unusual to assemble *most* of the bigwigs, then proceed to demonstrate that your courses are poorly designed, potentially illegal, and you clearly wanted to fire someone for not hiding it.

      That’s a high level of foot shooting.

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  5. Goldenrod*

    These are all amazing…but I’m especially dying at #2.

    “Bob here said he’d fetch coffee…” AMAZING. :D

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    1. Zona the Great*

      My ability to be this cunning has ebbed and flowed over the years. This story will always be one of my proudest moments.

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    1. Zona the Great*

      I also love past me! I fear this bombastic side of me only comes out sometimes. I grant you all permission to recreate this epic incident.

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    1. Charlotte Lucas*

      I was wondering the same thing! (Unless they needed some members to leave so they could have a quorum in firing Bad CEO.)

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    3. Silver Robin*

      Yeah if the CEO was worth firing then, he was worth firing five years prior. Was he somehow absolutely necessary in the acquisition of the building? What leverage was there that kept him for so long???

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    4. RCB*

      Unfortunately this is VERY typical for boards, they won’t act and there is never any comeuppance for them. In this case the board was all people with very good jobs (or just VERY wealthy people) whose lives were not impacted at all by any of the drama going on in the organization, so they were happy to have their prestigious board position without having to actually do anything remotely confrontational.

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    5. Dhaskoi*

      This was my thought too – they let the injustice happen, never did s*** for OP, then used it to further their own agenda.

      I feel like there’s a lawsuit in there somewhere.

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    6. Jennifer Strange*

      I wonder if one of two folks who had been on the board at the time of the LW’s firing wanted to axe him then, but didn’t have a coalition built yet. Unfortunately, you need to get others behind you to make those changes sometimes.

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  8. What_the_What*

    NGL I am confused by number 4 (“The Building”). The board refused to manage the CEO and allowed him to be toxic for 5 years…. just to let him go before he could enjoy a new office? Were they playing some sort of long game? I dunno. That one didn’t resonate with me. If someone I didn’t like got fired 5 years after I left, I doubt I’d care an iota. Maybe I’m weird.

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    1. Hlao-roo*

      Someone left a reply on the original comment that I think helps explain this:

      I’m not the commenter, but I’m also a nonprofit fundraiser, and assume that it took five years because the board considered the CEO the face of the organization during (reverent hush) the Capital Campaign. Some nonprofit execs are talk like they’re building the kingdom of Heaven when they talk about the Capital Campaign… bro, it’s an office. MAAAYBE a clinic or school. But still.

      Basically, the CEO had to do all* of the work to get the new office set up, and then did not get to enjoy it.

      *Not literally all of the work, but be the face of the Capital Campaign and everything that goes along with that

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      1. iglwif*

        This and also: People can be incredibly toxic to their employees while simultaneously being very effective in their public-facing role, especially if that public-facing role is mostly glad-handing and making rich donors feel good about themselves. Because high-ranking people who are horrible to everyone below them can be very, very good at buttering up those above!

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        1. RC*

          Oh this is true… I feel like the correlation between popularity amongst rich a-holes and toxicity to subordinates is pretty close to R=1

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        2. RCB*

          This is much closer to the truth. The “product” that the organization put out was top-notch and well loved by the community even though the toxic nature of the CEO and the organization were also well known. The board is all people who have great jobs and do not at all have to worry about board drama screwing up their lives so they liked the prestige of being on the board but didn’t worry too much about having to actually manage anything.

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          1. pope suburban*

            I worked for someone like this. He wasn’t terribly likeable even when he was kissing up, but he would roll over and give people whatever they wanted, so that passed well enough for him. He treated us like vermin, especially the inside staff, who were – sheer coincidence, I’m sure – all women. None of the people he toadied up to would have believed he would be so caustic and vile toward us, and frankly a good number of them either wouldn’t have cared or would have approved. Frankly he was a coward; he feared any kind of confrontation and he desperately wanted to fit in with the real rich, and he approached it by behaving this way.

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            1. Seal*

              I’ve worked for that guy. He could be very funny, charming, and personable, but had a nasty streak and a hair-trigger temper that was usually aimed at the women he managed. All of his kissing up was for his personal benefit; despite doing nothing but bully his staff for 5 years, he inexplicably failed upward thanks to the glowing references he received by sucking up to few key people. Apparently there weren’t enough backsides to kiss there, because he managed to get fired within a year. As I recall, we held an impromptu happy hour once we got the news.

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        4. hbc*

          Yeah, I think this is it. As a bonus, if the kiss-up-punch-down CEO is chasing off all the employees, it’s not like the board can reasonably think “Oh, the second in command who’s been here for 5 months will be able to seamlessly fill the gap while we search for another CEO.”

          Not saying they made the right choice, but they were probably weighing his continued toxicity against the project not happening at all. They canned him the minute they felt like they could afford to.

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        6. Crencestre*

          True eniugh! They kiss up and kick down, all the while priding themselves on their solendid diplomatic and managerial skills…until someone like the OPs in this heartwarming column reveal their TRUE natures for all the world to see.

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        7. BatManDan*

          People get promoted (and keep their jobs) as long as the problems they solve are more important to the org than the problems they create. For example, this particular CEO, and many others that are brought in “to turn things around” and then get shown the door!

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    2. RCB*

      OP #4 here. It wasn’t an office, but I kept it vague so as not to give away too many details. It also wasn’t a capital campaign issue (responding to the other commenter who thought maybe they were in the middle of a capital campaign and wanted to see it through). He also wasn’t publicly wonderful and privately awful, it was no secret that he was a toxic person.

      No one has said what the straw was that broke the camel’s back with the board, though I do think a couple of new board members came on the board and maybe talked some sense into them, but aside from that it’s not clear exactly how they finally came to their senses, but it was a glorious day when I heard the news.

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      1. StarTrek Nutcase*

        I grew up hearing about Board doings from my dad and it continues today hearing from my brother. Boards of nonprofits are a special breed. Most members can happily trip along just enjoying being on the board (and only concerned if a PR crisis happens). Then a decade or two later a new member comes onboard and actually shows real interest in “serving”. Even that’s a crapshoot because success in the profit sector doesn’t transfer easily to nonprofits. Anecdotally, an active board can really make or break a nonprofit by holding an ED to high standards.

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      3. Ama*

        As an ex-nonprofit employee “new board member who had to slowly garner support to fire the CEO” was actually my guess. I have seen that happen so many times.

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    3. Artemesia*

      I assume he was key to their fundraising for the building. You can be good as outside man at the skunkworks without being worth a darn as the inside man.

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      1. RCB*

        He actually wasn’t at all, the new building came about because of one of the generous supporters over the years, who was VERY wealthy, was not doing well health-wise and wanted to make the new building happen as a legacy project before he passed so he donated the money needed to make it happen.

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  9. allhailtheboi*

    I am feeling rubbish today and having a collection of funny, entertaining stories has made me smile on a horrid day. Thanks Alison and all the people who contributed.

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  10. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

    Oh! I forgot I have a story that may fall into this category!

    At a previous job, we had two owners- a 40% owner and a 60% owner. This didn’t dynamic didn’t come up very often and I’m not sure I knew the percentages at this point in the story. 60% left 40% to run his side of the business without interfering, though 60%’s other business was run out of the same office, so he was always there and he was knowledgeable about the business. We negotiated projects with our customers- prices, times, etc. 40% negotiated a really tough project that would be very hard to accomplish but the underlings (two of us at the time, though one refused to help, so pretty much me) had to do their best. 40% was out of the office one day and I had an aspect of the project go tits up pretty spectacularly- over budget (we lost money), not delivered on time, burned good will of the customer, etc. I asked 60% for help and we muddle through as best we can.

    Next day, the dust settles and 60% calls all of us- bosses, other coworker, myself- into his office to have a chat about what went wrong. He starts the conversation off with, “I’m mad about this, but not at Resident. She did everything she could to make this work and you set her up for failure. Here’s how.” And he lays out everything that wrong and how nothing I could have done have changed the situation- and how everything I tried to fix the situation was the most logical solution at the time.

    40% wasn’t a bad guy- I just think he was trying to get the business and figured he’d smooth any kinks out later. And no one got in trouble, but it was nice that my efforts were recognized as being the best they could under the circumstances.

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    1. Ally McBeal*

      Ah, tale as old as time – a product or service is sold and then the person responsible for the sale vanishes when the product team runs into a snag. I’m glad it all worked out in the end in terms of keeping your reputation/not getting thrown under the bus!

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      1. Wendy Darling*

        I had a previous job where this was actually the business model! Once sales got a contract signed the account was handed off to a customer success manager and an execution team, who were responsible for implementing whatever absolute madness the salesperson claimed we could make them. These teams’ success was evaluated on the basis of client renewals, so if we couldn’t give clients what they wanted and they therefore dropped us we were penalized, but the salespeople who misrepresented our offerings were completely out of the picture by then. Once the client signed, the salesperson got their commission and washed their hands of the whole thing!

        It turns out I am very bad at tactfully explaining that things our salespeople claimed our product could do were not only not possible in our product, but not possible AT ALL except perhaps in some top secret R&D lab.

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        1. Anon (and on and on)*

          My husband worked for a company like this! He was the IT person responsible for installing computer and phone networks, and at times security systems. He’d show up onsite and have to explain to the poor client that whatever the salesperson had told him was physically impossible. My favorite was having to explain why one camera in a fixed position couldn’t give a 360-degree view of the parking lot….

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        2. Hannah Lee*

          The old “don’t confuse sell with deliver” business model.

          The bill always comes due for that at some point.

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      2. Disappointed Australien*

        I select for companies owned by salespeople when I’m looking for work. Owning the company means the head sales peep is the one on the hook for mistakes.

        Some of them are utter disasters and lurch from death march to death march, but the rest tend to be very switched on. My current boss is the latter, he wanders off and comes back with weird requests and dumb ideas, we sit down and plot out what each will cost/how hard they will be, and he explains which ones are crucial to the company and which ones would be kind of neat if they worked. Our customers are numerous and happy!

        But it can get weird, I once worked for a company that made POS software for small retailers. And also someone who sold earthmoving equipment. Apparently their needs are similar?

        Reply ↓
    2. Hroethvitnir*

      Stressful as it must have been, that’s a pretty nice story! Leaders standing up for their employees that comprehensively is way too rare. If they even see it when they panic.

      Reply ↓
  11. Zona the Great*

    Anyone else read #1 in The Dude’s voice? The last sentence could have said, “All Dude wanted was his raise back”.

    Reply ↓
  13. Maxwell Waxmell*

    The instructional design corner of higher ed is a special brand of bonkers. I once had a course reviewer send back a lot of 900 items that needed to be fixed in one course, including repeated references to “Muslins.” The course was about cultural sensitivity. It was not about fabrics.

    And yet

    No one with any ownership of the course cared enough to fix it. The course continued to run with all 900-some errors and for all I know still looks like that.

    Reply ↓
    2. NMitford*

      I once reviewed a linguistics paper where grammar was spelled “grammer” over a 100 times, and the professor declined to correct it. At another institution, the college catalog we offered a degree in astrology instead of astronomy, and no one felt there was time to fix it before it went to press. Sometimes I miss academia, but not always.

      Reply ↓
      1. cloudy*

        I worked for a doctoral program some years back when I was just out of college and when tasked to prepare the student handbook for the incoming class I noticed that all of the different disciplines were misspelled on the cover page. All of them. For every version of the guide going back several years. And despite numerous professors, staff members, and students looking at it (theoretically), somehow nobody had noticed or bothered to fix it?

        It was almost funny to me. Welcome, new PhD students! To our doctoral programs… in Soociology, Pyschology, Histroy, Ecomomics, Polical Sceince, and Anthroplogy (and so on).

        Suppose it shows us how closely people actually read those handbooks.

        Reply ↓
        1. InHigherEd*

          This would keep me laughing for years, and may do so even hearing about it second hand. Literal LOL for that one.

          It’s like the David Sedaris story about “The Family that Reads Together.”

          Reply ↓
      2. Rainy*

        Oh, man, that reminds me of my absolute worst course catalog typo experience. When I was in undergrad, the summer course catalog (printed) listed a course I wanted to take as being in Building A Room 200. I enrolled for the course via the punch in phone system (yes, I am a dinosaur–specifically, an ankylosaur) and wrote down what the computerized voice said, which was that that course would be in Building A Room 200. Apparently at some point after I registered, the prof switched the room to Building B Room 205. There was a known issue with summer schedules, namely that if you were taking all-summer or summer I courses, the (printed) schedule they mailed out didn’t arrive until 10 days to 2 weeks after summer classes started. Five other students and I missed the first class meeting because we went to Building A Room 200. I went to the professor’s office afterward to see what was up, and he told me that I should have double-checked (somehow? based on an issue I didn’t know was happening?) and that I might as well drop the course now because I was going to fail. I got the syllabus and course readings from him (he handed out photocopies rather than having us buy a text or coursepack), and noted glumly that the first exam was happening the next day (accelerated schedule for the summer version of the course). He told me that people who took this course in summer usually got a full letter grade lower than they would have if they took it during the regular semester and reiterated that I should give up and drop now while I could still get my money back.

        The other students who’d missed the first meeting either dropped without seeing him, or believed him and dropped–I didn’t see any of them in class after that. He called me out publicly the next day in the middle of class for missing the first meeting, which was not my most humiliating life experience but wasn’t great.

        My middle name might as well be “I’ll show you,” so I stayed in. I got 100 on the exam the next day (missed the bonus question), 103 on the next one, and 105 (the max) on the next three exams and the final. The week before summer term ended he pulled me aside after class to give me flyers for the classes he was teaching during the regular academic year, all related to the class I was finishing with him, and told me that he’d looked at my student record and if I took any three of them I could declare and complete a minor before I graduated in May. Whiplash.

        I did end up really liking the guy–he was brilliant and a great teacher, and had literally written the book in his field, hence the photocopies. But man, that phone enrollment system caused so many problems.

        Reply ↓
      3. Nightengale*

        It was a unfortunate pagination more than an error, but back in the days of paper course guides, my biology department offered a course called

        Senior tutorial in programmed cell development and

        (next page)

        Death
        Professor’s name
        time TBA

        — We all pretty much leaned into it and called it the “death course” The TBA part just added to the hilarity. Death, to be announced. But it was an amazing course taught by an exceptionally good professor.

        Reply ↓
      4. Seal*

        To be fair, both disciplines study celestial objects, albeit for different reasons.

        Once upon a time, one of my side gigs was sponsoring an event and a group of us were working on publicity. A very cool poster was created, proofread by at least a half a dozen people, proofread a final time as a group, and finally sent out to our target audience. It wasn’t until we started getting phone calls that anyone realized we’d neglected to include the date, time, and location. Besides THAT, everyone loved the poster!

        To this day, I never send out an event announcement without triple checking that it includes the date, time, and location. However, I’ve been known to schedule meetings without inviting the attendees, which is arguably more embarrassing.

        Reply ↓
        1. Beany*

          So, so many landing pages for new restaurants or businesses don’t tell you where they are or what their operating hours are. So, so many websites for big marathons fill their landing pages with photos of happy past participants and cool race swag, but bury (or just don’t include) information on the date & time of the race, or where the starting line will be. It’s frustrating.

          Reply ↓
    3. Anon for This*

      We got a new Registrar a little while ago and now that they are settled in they decided to clean up the course catalog. After auditing, they decided to 100% trash the existing catalog and start over because it would be less work. As the person who put together the data, this was 100% the correct decision.

      Reply ↓
      1. Rainy*

        My PhD program was at a school that still scheduled all final exam times and rooms by hand. Not even “MWF classes starting between 8 and 9 have their finals in the same classroom on Monday of finals week from 8-11” or something. It was literally three people and thousands of 3×5 index cards in a room figuring it out anew every single semester. I assume they have some kind of system now, but back then it was entirely possible to be a few weeks from finals and still not know when or where your exams would be.

        Reply ↓
    4. Pay no attention...*

      I’m a graphic designer not instructional designer and I once had to produce a series of brochures and reports for a development campaign for a long-tenured Big Important EdD and he not only insisted on capitalizing every instance of doctor (medical) and student in the text, he would randomly bold, italicize and/or underline words “for emphasis.” So it would read something like, “The medical program at University is taught by highly-trainedinnovative Doctors. University will continue to add Students until enrollments exceeds 400. ”

      It read like a maniac wrote it, and they were handing this out to potential donors. I would try to fix it on the proof and he would make me change it back. I was also working with his Dean and mentioned it and he just nodded and said he understood but just humor him and change it back.

      Reply ↓
    5. Crencestre*

      “Muslins”, eh? Guess the prof who wrote that description didn’t cotton to proofreading their own material! Hope nobody needled them too much about THAT little whopper. Of course, the reviewer DID catch it – nobody pulled the wool over THEIR eyes…

      Reply ↓
        1. Crencestre*

          Well, I see you’re continuing the thread of our discussion! And that’s certainly better than being a knit-wit.

          (BTW, run mad; don’t faint, I had a couple of reasons to smile at your reply to my post because I literally do spin yarns! I’m a handspinner and weaver, and I demonstrate both at the living history museum where I work. And yes, my specialty IS textile history – so this particular example of bungled bureaucracy was irresistible!)

          Reply ↓
  14. Saturday*

    The gall of the guy in #6 who can’t be bothered to put his signature on something in time, but then goes way out of his way to blame it on someone else! So glad OP’s boss said NOPE to that.

    Reply ↓
    2. iglwif*

      A boss who has your back in public is GOLD.

      I had one like that in a past job … alas, he got laid off a few months before I did.

      Reply ↓
    3. MM*

      Well, unfortunately that blatant lying and blaming someone else in an email to all the upper managment is all too common a thing for salespeople to do, in my experience.

      Reply ↓
  15. Three Flowers*

    OP 8, you’re my new hero. As a faculty developer who gets dragged into shitshow course reviews because we don’t have instructional designers or QA, and has to figure out how to put too-big-for-their-britches mediocre faculty in their place without getting fired, I send you one thousand kudos. Amazing work, no notes.

    Reply ↓
    1. misspiggy*

      And OP’s boss. 8 seemed like a great example of what a good worker and a good boss can achieve against emperors with no clothes.

      Reply ↓
  16. airport gemstone*

    Is it even appropriate for interns or lower level employees to be asked to get someone coffee in most settings if there is nothing really stopping senior employee getting it themselves?

    Reply ↓
    1. Angstrom*

      At my office it’s normal to be asked to make sure that coffee & drinks are available as part of prep for an important meeting, but I’ve never seen anyone be asked to pour a cup for someone senior.

      Reply ↓
      1. Slow Gin Lizz*

        I feel like in this day and age everyone is so very picky about how they want their coffee – no one just has it either black or one cream and sugar anymore – so having one person in charge of getting everyone their drinks isn’t really a thing anymore. At my last few all-staff meetings, coffee has been available and everyone prepares their own cup how they want it.

        So not only was that guy being sexist and ageist, but totally behind the times too. Unless that story took place 30 years ago, I guess.

        Reply ↓
      2. Elizabeth West*

        That’s how it was at ToxicOldJob. Part of my meeting prep was to make the beverages and order sandwiches if they wanted. I didn’t mind that, but I would have pushed back if they’d asked me to serve.

        BossWife did show me a trick, though. If you put a glass pitcher of ice water on a paper plate (to protect the table), the plate will stick to the pitcher when you pick it up — unless you sprinkle salt on the paper plate first. She grew up wealthy, so I’ve no idea where she picked that up.

        Reply ↓
    3. mreasy*

      It’s different to be asked to order a box of coffee and a box of pastries for an executive meeting and quite another to be asked by a senior staff member to get them, specifically, an individual coffee.

      Reply ↓
    4. MigraineMonth*

      I’ve never seen it. I’ve been offered coffee at job interviews (I don’t know if the receptionist/interviewer would have poured it or had me pour my own), but I think that’s more guest-culture than seniority. I’ve also had someone excitedly make me an espresso while teaching me how to use the machine, but I think that man was just enthusiastic about the espresso machine.

      I’ll fetch coffee for someone who has mobility issues (as long as they don’t call me “honey” or “darling”) or if they’re a guest, but other than that I’ll just point you towards the break room. Or the nearest coffee shop, where I’m sure they’d be happy to make it just the way you like.

      Reply ↓
    5. londonedit*

      Where I work it’s normal for the editorial assistant to set up the meeting room with a jug of water and glasses (sometimes also biscuits) while the boss goes to greet the author/whoever we’re meeting and brings them to the meeting room. But my boss is just as likely to then ask whether anyone wants a tea or coffee, and then to go and make said tea and coffee, as anyone else – it definitely isn’t the job of the junior member of staff.

      Reply ↓
  18. BabyFishMouth*

    #2 makes me want to stand up and applaud. And also wonder, where are these meetings with actual coffee fetchers being held? I have never been in one of those. Ever. Are they real?

    Reply ↓
    2. ScruffyInternHerder*

      In my industry, you’d NEVER dream of asking a coworker of any standing to fetch you a coffee.

      You would, no matter your standing, offer it to a guest who you are hosting at your office. Depending on the situation, a junior to you employee might go grab it, you might go grab it yourself, or if the meeting is Big Enough ™ and/or Important Enough ™ then reception/admin has made sure that there are several pots available with the fixings in the conference room.

      But never a coworker.

      Reply ↓
    3. That Paralegal*

      I work in a law office and *visiting* lawyers occasionally ask me to make them a coffee. This makes me think it’s normal for them to ask staff to fetch coffee for them.

      The lawyers who work here, in the office? Would NEVER. I am, very definitely, not a barista. There’s a lovely coffee shop directly across the street. Everybody’s legs work.

      Reply ↓
    4. BigLawEx*

      In every meeting I’ve been in in Europe in the last ten years, someone has offered coffee and when I finally learned to accept someone makes it and brings it. (An espresso drink.)

      In the US people offer water. I was just offered aloe and lemon-infused water last week. I accepted it.

      Yes, all of the people getting coffee have been women. Mixed genders on the offer, though.

      Reply ↓
    4. Fish Microwaver*

      Sadly in this case the useless chauvinistic man failed upwards because apart from the “Select Committee ” there were no consequences for his laziness. The competent woman returned to her role, sorted the issue and it was written off as an admin oversight. Not cool at all.

      Reply ↓
    5. Certaintroublemaker*

      In my dreams, the useless, chauvinistic man from #5 “failed upward” to managing the lying, procrastinating salesman from #6 and the poaching marketer from #3, with the abrasive receptionist from #7 as his admin.

      Reply ↓
  20. BowTiesAreCool*

    #5. Oh my FSM. I work in compliance in a completely different industry, but…you do not miss regulatory deadlines. You just don’t. If entire departments have to work overnight to make it happen*, you meet the deadline.

    (* you have huge problems as an org if you get anywhere near that point)

    Reply ↓
    1. Slow Gin Lizz*

      Yeah, I feel like there were a lot of checks and balances missing at that org for useless dude to have completely screwed that up. Should there not have been someone there who was checking the license to see if it was being renewed? For something that important, there should have been more than just that one useless guy making sure it happened.

      Reply ↓
      1. Apex Mountain*

        Yes,I was wondering about that also.. Plus the manager just backdating it months later… a little iffy but I guessed nobody noticed anyway

        Reply ↓
        1. Leenie*

          She didn’t just backdate under the radar, which would have been illegal and really risky. The regulator agreed to it:

          “…worked with the regulator, and got them to agree to backdate approval and treat it as an admin issue”

          Reply ↓
  21. Meg*

    I was working a temp job for an industry where we had weekly staff meetings to discuss where we were with the project. The project was a temp, so we all knew it would only last two months. One of the staff members was a fresh college graduate who would roll her eyes at everything. Would discount everyone else’s ideas. No one could do anything correctly to her standards. I was talking about how I was going to handle a piece of the project and again, rolled eyes and interjections about how my idea wouldn’t work. So, I just looked at her and said “Oh, Jane, looks like you have that covered! Thank you for taking it off my list.” I then made a huge production of taking it off my to-do list and then officially updated my to-do list, noting that Jane was doing that piece of the project and sent the update to both boss and Jane.

    Reply ↓
      1. Meg*

        It hasn’t shaken out yet! I have a backup plan for if Jane doesn’t do it, but I am considering it off my plate! And if it is brought up, I will be pointing to this convo heavily.

        Reply ↓
    2. Just Another Cog*

      It so reminds me of a woman who was hired to do miscellaneous projects. She was hired on the recommendation of her friend who worked for us. This lady whined constantly about the projects she was given and complained she was bored. One day she marched up to the owner’s office and demanded she be given more interesting work to do or her last day was two weeks from then because she was sure there were better jobs out there. Owner said “No time like the present! You can pack your stuff up and go so you can start looking this afternoon.” There was a collective sigh in the office after she left.

      Reply ↓
  24. CzechMate*

    The fact that two out of eight of these are related to training/teaching/credentialing/accreditation is validating but also gives me hives.

    Reply ↓
  27. Apex Mountain*

    From the experience I’ve had, on #5 lovely manager “backdating” the accreditation would be pretty problematic. But I’m in the US, i believe OP is elsewhere (since someone had a yearlong parental leave!)

    Reply ↓
    1. MigraineMonth*

      Except that’s not what happened. The manager spoke with the regulators, and the *regulators* agreed to backdate the accreditation. It sounds like they have a process for “there was an admin snafu, but we’ve reviewed it now and everything’s above board”, which is an excellent thing to have a process for.

      Reply ↓
    2. GammaGirl1908*

      Also, part of getting the regulators to backdate probably was showing proof of years of prior organized documentation and history and paperwork and excellent admin habits, and that the one person who was the wrench in the works was gone. That is, showing just how much of an anomaly this was, and how the organization had solved the problem and would make sure it never happened again. It did NOT happen willy-nilly.

      Reply ↓
  28. Can’t think of anything clever*

    I love ultimatums. I replaced a manager who had been manipulated by them for years. “If you don’t do x I’m quitting” and he’d do x. Right from the beginning I would tell them we wouldn’t be doing x and that if after talking it over with family (whomever) they still felt that way HR Lady had the paperwork and would help with any questions. The fourth time one person tried it she brought a union rep with her. I handed her the paperwork. Union rep was trying so hard not to laugh. She didn’t quit.

    Reply ↓
  30. HiddenT*

    I had to send this to my mom for that last story, she reads AAM on occasion but I had to make sure she saw this one. She was an instructional designer in a former life.

    Reply ↓
  31. Definitely not me*

    Dr. Diva is emblematic of “Eminence-based evidence” used to get many low-quality, shouldn’t-pass-peer-review “studies” that somehow get published in prestigious scientific journals, merely because the researcher has been at Elite University for so long that nobody dare question them. Nutritional science is near the top of that list. Pure garbage.

    Reply ↓
    2. linger*

      Although the point of blind peer review at prestigious scientific journals is that the writer’s institution shouldn’t matter. And most journals publishing nutritional science are by definition “prestigious” only within that highly problematic field.
      Ben Goldacre, in “Bad Science”, has some very entertaining chapters on, amongst other things, homeopathy, and such well-known media nutritionists as Gillian McKeith (whose PhD came from a non-accredited institution, which sold the same certificate to Goldacre’s dead cat) who amongst other things has claimed that chlorophyll is high in oxygen [which might only have a slight glimmer of tenuous connection to some truth in the unlikely and hazardous event that the inside of your gut was bathed in bright sunlight] and Patrick Holford (who, alongside a long and lucrative career selling pills, founded his own institute which granted his own degree and published his own studies, thus avoiding meaningful peer review — then unaccountably was hired as actual faculty of an actual university). Goldacre is however making the serious point that such pseudoscience damages the reputation of real scientists, and he continues with the far more serious real-world impact of Matthias Rath and Andrew Wakefield in undermining healthcare outcomes for millions of people.

      Reply ↓
  32. ReallyBadPerson*

    All of these give me hope that there will be comeuppance for jerks and evil people on a day when I need to hear it.

    Reply ↓
  33. Feline Meteorologist*

    I am DEFINITELY keeping “this email does not accurately represent what happened at all, and I think you know that” in my arsenal!

    Reply ↓
  34. Union Rep*

    Oh Lord I feel #8 so hard. I work for a faculty union now, but I started organizing in grad school, where members regularly skirmished with our faculty supervisors over being made to create and run their online courses because the faculty didn’t know how and wouldn’t learn. Now I get to explain to people that “your syllabus must have due dates for the assignments, and you must provide a reliable way for students to turn in their work” isn’t an infringement on their academic freedom just because the syllabus is on a computer. 99% of edtech is still squarely in opposition to what a university should be for, but fighting that back would be a lot easier if my folks would do their dang jobs so the other staff could do more useful things with their time.

    Reply ↓
  35. Certaintroublemaker*

    LW1, schaudenfraude that includes a public trial and jail time is truly delicious. Enjoy the comeuppance!

    Reply ↓
  36. Heffalump*

    #2: When a friend of mine was a few years out of college, he was working as a chemist in a paper mill. One day his manager said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but can you grow some facial hair so people don’t think we hire 15-year-old chemists?”

    Reply ↓
    1. WS*

      My dad was asked if he was “the work-experience kid” by his new boss at his new job (which takes a university degree these days but at the time was a technical college certificate). He was 25. He grew a moustache and still has it!

      Reply ↓
      1. EngineeringFun*

        At 25 F with a masters of engineering, I had an admin insist I was the high school intern. I started wearing blazers after that!

        Reply ↓
  37. Commupance*

    #4 the building didn’t seem satisfying to me. Five years to get rid of said jerk after his reign of terror? Founder, yes, but meh. That’s just a bit of kismet way too late in coming.

    Reply ↓
  39. nonee*

    It’s not a perfect story because I still lost my job, but once I realised that my boss Sophie wasn’t only being awful to me (nitpicking me down to facial expressions I’m sure I never had after every. single. meeting!, undermining me to other teams, taking credit for any good work), I took my complaints to her boss Chris, with whom I’d previously had a good working relationship. He surveyed all of Sophie’s reports (half a dozen of us), and we all said the same thing – that Sophie was toxic. We even found out through the grapevine that she’d been asked to leave previous organisations for the same reasons, including making a direct report suicidal. Chris was appalled, and said he’d handle it with HR.

    The whole team below Sophie got laid off as part of “right-sizing”.

    But Sophie was asked to resign less than four weeks after we all left the team, because the span was long enough for Chris to realise that we hadn’t all been making things up just because we didn’t like her, and she was incompetent to the point that she couldn’t run the monthly reporting she’d always claimed credit for.

    Reply ↓
    1. Cookie Monster*

      That’s amazing that they somehow thought you all were the problem and not Sophie. I would love to have been a fly on the wall when they all realized their mistake in firing you all.

      Reply ↓
      1. nonee*

        It also turned out that a previous team member had talked to Chris about her before, when she found a role in another team due to Sophie, but he wrote the team member off as just being “negative”. It was a real lesson in healthy workplace cynicism for me.

        I *do* remember and cherish the look on Chris’ face when we were having our initial discussion. I asked if they’d checked any references on Sophie, he said of course. And then I asked if they’d asked to speak to any of her previous team members. He gaped at me like a goldfish – such a thing having never crossed his mind. I hope he never forgets how wrong he was.

        Reply ↓
      2. nonee*

        To be honest, Sophie was an amazing ass-kisser. She managed up like you’ve never seen. I’d never come across anyone as blatantly manipulative, and I hope I never do again!

        Reply ↓
  41. Sara without an H*

    I have several times been the Resident Excel Expert at places where I’ve worked. The File Poacher (no.3) warmed the cockles of my heart.

    Reply ↓
  42. Just A Little Admin in a Big World*

    As someone who works at a university and knows a couple Dr Divas… well done, OP8. Well done.

    Reply ↓
  43. IDs Unite*

    Former ID here (now I manage a team of them) who previously worked in higher ed. Let’s just say that was my shortest job stint ever. I have never been so looked down upon and disrespected as I did working with college professors.

    Reply ↓

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