let’s discuss jerks getting their comeuppance

by Alison Green on January 23, 2025

Little is more satisfying than seeing a jerk get a well-deserved comeuppance. For example, some satisfying stories shared here in the past:

•   •   •

“I worked with a horrid VP of Sales – arrogant, obnoxious, just a nightmare. We were in an internal meeting and he used the phrase ‘get in a circle jerk’ with them (and even used the hand motion). Then smirked at me, the only woman in the room and the youngest by far.

I’d had enough so (fake) innocently asked, loudly, ‘What’s a circle jerk?’ He tried to move on but I asked again, ‘Sorry I don’t understand, what is a circle jerk – if I’m negotiating the contract I need to know the terms.’ Everyone froze. The CEO walked in and asked, ‘So where are we?’ I loudly said, ‘Well, we are waiting for ____ to explain what a circle jerk is as he’s really worried about it being part of the contract.’ It was absolute gold and a career highlight that sadly can’t go on a resume!”

•   •   •

“A colleague kept stealing my work – copy-pasting stuff from documents I’d written, and claiming PowerPoint decks as her own. So I embedded my name in everything I made – in the footer or the slide master, in a tiny white font. Then when she claimed the work was hers in a meeting I asked for the mouse to ‘point to something’ and ‘accidentally’ highlighted where it said ‘documents created by (my name) on date.’”

•   •   •

“Years ago I was working for a new group of attorneys – at the same time as my mom was undergoing chemo treatments. Suffice to say, I was super stressed all the time, which took its own toll on my immune system, so I ended up sick myself quite a bit. One of the attorneys actually suggested that I was sick ‘all the time’ because I was out ‘partying too much.’ None of the attorneys knew anything about my personal life, mostly because they never would ask, so he had no idea how insulting this was. Later that year I was fired.

Two years ago I ran into the ‘you party too much’ attorney who was out at a bar with his wife. I had DREAMED of this day for years. I walked up to him and was SUPER nice initially, said it was nice to see him, etc, and then said since I didn’t get to say goodbye to him when I left the firm abruptly, I had to address something he had said to me. He meekly asked, ‘Hope nothing bad?’ I said he had suggested that I was sick a lot because I ‘partied too much.’ His wife is now VERY interested why her husband had been talking to me about partying, I’m sure. I explained that in fact, I wasn’t partying, I was dealing with a stressful job with a bunch of assholes while my mom was undergoing chemo treatments. His face went WHITE at this point as he stammered that he had no idea. ‘And that is exactly the point,’ I explained, ‘you don’t know what is going on in someone’s life. You’re an asshole.’ I have never felt so vindicated in my entire life as I did in that moment, and in front of his wife no less. It was entirely worth the wait.”

•   •   •

In the comment section, please share your stories of jerks getting their comeuppance!

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{ 441 comments }

{ 441 comments… read them below or add one }

    1. juliebulie*

      I would like to have been a fly on the wall during the ride home. (The jerk’s ride home, I mean. I bet his wife had Questions.)

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      1. LifebeforeCorona*

        It reminds me of a Golden Girls episode. Dorothy was sick and her doctor dismissed her issues and said to get her hair done to make herself feel better. She saw another doctor who correctly diagnosed her condition. Later she ran into the first doctor and gave him an earful.

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    4. Example_3*

      #3 was me! I have been having a not-great week and just being reminded of that glorious day has made the week a bit brighter.

      Reply ↓
  2. Tobias Funke*

    #1 is brilliant, playing dumb is my absolute favorite tactic when someone is being inappropriate.
    #3 is the catharsis we all need, reminds me of the golden girls episode in which Dorothy has been diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome following being dismissed by doctors, then she confronts the worst one in a fancypants restaurant in front of his wife. Just glorious.

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    1. Successful Birthday Rememberer*

      I need to know more about the circle jerk one. What did the CEO say? What happened to jerk VP?

      Reply ↓
    2. Jennifer Strange*

      Yes! I remember that Golden Girls episode! Sad that women being ignored by doctors has been going on that long.

      Reply ↓
      1. LunaLena*

        I’d say even way longer than that, there was definitely a time when any woman experiencing illness was just written off as suffering from hysteria. Even Hippocrates followed Plato’s beliefs that womanly illness was a result of a “sad wandering uterus” that wasn’t getting enough sex. In fact the word “hysteria” comes from the Greek word for “uterus.”

        It really explains a lot about history, when you think about it.

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        1. Unwatered Office Plant*

          Ironically, now that something akin to a wandering uterus is a legitimate, documented condition (endometriosis), getting a diagnosis typically takes many years and many doctors ignoring serious symptoms.

          Reply ↓
        2. Jill Swinburne*

          I mean, the vibrator was invented because they thought that women suffering from a range of maladies, including depression, could be sorted with a nice O. Highly recommend the very funny film Hysteria on that subject.

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      2. *daha**

        Did she still have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in subsequent episodes? Or was it just ignored for the rest of the series?

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          1. Cruciatus*

            The number of children the women would have from one week to the next was always mind boggling! I realize they probably weren’t expecting this show to still be around and binged today, but come on! Pick a number of kids and stick with it!

            Reply ↓
          2. Another Kristin*

            It was a different time and TV was what you’d call “ephemeral content”. Unless the show hit 100+ episodes and started being syndicated, it was very possible that the first time a show aired would also be the only time.

            Reply ↓
            1. Moira's Rose's Garden*

              This is also why shows like TGG had the same character actors on more than once, but playing different guest roles!

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              1. STW*

                My favorite thing about Midsomer Murders is that the “new” Barnaby (the new lead had to be called Barnaby because the show is called Detective Barnaby in some of the foreign syndication markets) is played by the same actor who played a sex pest murder suspect several years before :D

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        2. Cruciatus*

          Ignored as already stated, but the storyline was due to a creator or producer having been diagnosed with it and this was their way to bring attention to it.

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      4. ICodeForFood*

        Oh, it’s been going on longer than that… My mom felt lousy, with pain in her lower back that she assumed was a cold that had settled in her kidneys, for a whole year in 1977. She was told to “go home, lose weight, and be happy.” Turned out she had lung cancer.
        When a doctor ignores you and tells you it’s all in your head, it means that doctor can’t figure it out and it’s time to find another doctor.

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        1. I Have RBF*

          My father had been having random pains, and then a broken cocyx, and his doctor told he was “just getting old”. It kept getting worse, and my sister mentioned it to me, and I suggested taking him to a teaching hospital. They did, and there they diagnosed Stage IV angiosarcoma. By the time he was diagnosed, he was in such bad shape he was admitted to the ICU, and died a few weeks later.

          His local doctor was a quack.

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    3. CeeDoo*

      I was literally formulating a Dr Budd parallel reply here, and you did it for me. I hope the ahole former boss felt like an amoebe on a flea on a rat. Too low for even the dogs to bite.

      Reply ↓
    5. HailRobonia*

      Re. playing dumb: My hubby accidentally did this when his brother told a racist joke. Hubby legitimately didn’t get it, and asked his brother to explain it. Brother tried to explain it while awkwardly backtracking at the same time in true “I’m not racist but…” fashion.

      Reply ↓
      2. Hilarity Ensued*

        For a brief time, my internet home had an autocorrect for the “I’m not [x], but…”, where the phrase was changed to “I’m [x], and…”

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    7. Elizabeth West*

      #1 — Yep, that exact phrase was used in a Teams meeting at an old job, by a PM who apparently did that a lot, since they immediately called him out. Someone even said, “We’ve got an HR form all filled out with Bob’s name on it.” There was another woman remotely in the meeting, and since they clocked it, we decided not to file a separate report. Why he was still there is a mystery to me, but whatever.

      I also used to do that at ToxicExJob when BullyBoss would oh-so-innocently try to get my goat. It took the wind right out of his sails, lol.

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      1. Artemesia*

        He was still there because significant numbers of management think this is manly and assertive and masterful and they’d love to have a whole team of white sexist racist dudes. (and if they are black, misogynist dudes). We are seeing that being advocated aggressively in real time right now nationally. Let’s roll back DEI to 1965 and salt the earth under it — us a clear demand for the way it was before Civil Rights or Women’s rights.

        Reply ↓
  3. Never the Twain*

    I guess there’s an AI component to the ‘You may also like…’ bit at the end of the questions, which is why it suggests ‘my office is doing “circle work” with “offerings to the ancestors” ‘.
    ‘Sounds similar’?
    (Having said that, I’m of to read it)

    Reply ↓
      1. Hlao-roo*

        Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s word-matching based on the number of times a letter will use a name like “Jane” or “Fergus” and then the suggested letters are on totally different topics but also use the same stand-in name.

        Reply ↓
        1. Ann O'Nemity*

          Oh, that’s funny. It did not occur to me that the “You May Also Like” is grouping by fictional name. I’d love to read through the collection of Wakeen stories, imagining that it’s all the same guy.

          Reply ↓
    2. Nessa*

      Alison fixed it when I tweeted her, but I somehow once got the page one sees when they’ve been blocked at the IP level for being a terrible Internet citizen in the comments (I assume, among other extremes) as a related post. It literally said Access Denied above the other two generated links, and when I clicked out of curiosity, it gave me what it says if that is you. Of course I wasn’t truly blocked, and was able to easily navigate away, but it was a very funny automatic generation. XD

      Reply ↓
  4. Garth*

    I’m not proud of this but a long time ago I doctored an email to make one of my toxic work enemies look rude and incompetent (which he was anyway)

    Unfortunately I was the jerk who got the comeuppance when i was found out and terminated.

    Reply ↓
    2. CeeDoo*

      I used to doctor emails to make them look like I had sent them days before I did. Not the whole email, just that part that pastes in at the top. None of the emails were important enough to CSI them and find the actual date and time (it was 1998 and I was not a Stellar Employee).

      Reply ↓
    3. Butterfly Counter*

      My enemy-coworker was in a room just prior to my being there and he left his work, Google, LinkedIn, and a few other sites’ login and passwords cheatsheet for me to find. Oh boy, but did my shoulder angel and devil fight it out that day. (Angel won, but I still dream about the havoc I could have wrought on him.)

      Reply ↓
      1. anon for this*

        I collect/document fk ups made by the concubine of the assistant dean of my workplace (yes, she is grandboss to her live in boyfriend and the entire org hates them) and share them with my boss. You never know when you might need to throw a few caltrops in their path.

        Reply ↓
  5. Somehow I Manage*

    This doesn’t belong with the gold provided in the examples, but it did feel pretty amazing at the time.

    I worked in sales, locally but for a large corporation. Corporate was awful and had no idea or care how things worked on the ground. We had sales goals moved mid-month. We had commission percentages cut. It was pretty miserable. I had been interviewing and was hoping for an offer, but had nothing officially lined up yet. My sales manager was on vacation, and GM was in town (he supervised two different offices in two different cities). He pulled me and the other salesperson into his office. Gave us a big old speech about being team players, and then point blank asked if we were on the team or if we were leaving. We both told him we were on the team. Because again… we were. Nothing official lined up. I got an offer a couple days later and faxed him my resignation. He called and gave me the what for and accused me of lying to him. I told him that when he asked the question, my answer was 100% honest. I was on the team. I had no idea that I would be resigning. He was not pleased. But damn did it feel good to be able to pull the rug out from under him a bit.

    Spoiler: He was fired about 6 months later.

    Reply ↓
    1. Office Plant Queen*

      Also even if you had lied… What did he expect? You ask a loaded question with consequences for someone’s livlihood, you are going to get the answer they think you want to hear and that will let them keep their job

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        1. Somehow I Manage*

          I’m pretty sure I was thinking it as I answered. And my fellow salesperson knew I was looking (so was she) and we had a good chucked about what was unsaid following the meeting.

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      2. Anon yo*

        And even if you had lied for the glorious pleasure of lying to these kinds of jerk etc is he gonna do about it?
        It’s funny, I’m very honest, like honest to where my husband mentioned that he can hate my degree of honestly, but does appreciate it. But people like this? I can lie happily, smilingly and just not care. Not only do I not care, it’s fun! I owe you shiiiite. And I will play with that to my hearts content.

        Reply ↓
      3. Somehow I Manage*

        Based on the fact that he was red-faced at the time, I can’t imagine that honesty would have bought me points that day.

        It would have been a couple of tense days as I waited to hear about the offer I got while not working.

        Reply ↓
      4. JustaTech*

        I had a coworker who had a very similar experience, except she handed in her resignation the same day (she was waiting for the offer).

        Surprisingly she is one of the only former coworkers the Big Boss doesn’t talk smack about.

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    4. RedinSC*

      I’ve been in that same position, I was asked point blank, “Do you see your future here with us” and I 100% said YES, while hoping for an offer that came in 2 weeks later.

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      2. Lenora Rose*

        You didn’t specify what kind of future you saw. You could fully see a complete dystopia ahead and still answer that the way they wanted…

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    2. A Simple Narwhal*

      Me too! The stories in the post were so good, I’m excited to see what else the commenters have to share.

      Reply ↓
  7. animaniactoo*

    We had a project manager who complained a lot about the projects she had to handle for me.

    I filled out the form and there would be something slightly off – like I filled out 246 instead of 264 in detailing a color – very annoying, totally my fault. But it was not nearly as regular as she tried to make it seem… and my boss flipped her lid and was like “this should be a quick clarification question, not a file a complaint issue”.

    But the PM kept highlighting every small minor thing and making it out like I was incompetent and not doing my job (despite my then 15 year history of Doing My Job Very Well). My manager investigated…. asked my co-workers on my team what they were seeing, etc. Asked people on other teams how working with me/my projects was.

    Turned out that the reason the PM was having so many problems with my projects is… I was the only one still trying to make her do her job by sending her the request forms for the next stage of the project, and hadn’t just given up and started doing it all myself. So. That kind of backfired on her. I still enjoy a great deal of schadenfreude anytime I think about it.

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    1. But Of Course*

      I’m pretty sure I’m on about your third paragraph with someone at my job who decided not to follow up on something extremely time-sensitive. My boss has been quite a bit more civil since she demanded the email chain that demonstrates my coworker should not have waited AN ENTIRE WEEK before following up on something that I missed by accident (my boss’s solution was that I shouldn’t make mistakes) but made us miss the deadline in an unfixable way.

      Reply ↓
  8. Did you really just ask that?*

    We had a teacher who believed that only she knew the correct way to teach children and the rest of us were absolutely terrible. Not surprisingly, she was not actually a good teacher. She had no problem whatsoever yelling at teachers in front of children and in general being a terrible human. One day her inflated sense of self-worth and efficacy led her to get into an argument with the principal. She told him that if he didn’t give into her demands – it happened so long ago that I don’t remember what they were – that she would leave to go work at a different school in our district.

    He reached into his desk, pulled out a transfer request sheet, slid it across his desk, and told her he’d sign it as soon as she filled it out. No one was sorry to see her go. She continued to cause issues at the new school, but that was no longer our problem.

    Reply ↓
      1. Momma Bear*

        It really is. I love it when problem people threaten to leave. It’s like the bit in Loki where he says something like, “Yes, very sad, so anyway…”

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    2. londonedit*

      I think this sort of thing is one of the best jerk-comeuppances! Bluff well and truly called. We had a similar thing with an obnoxious colleague years ago – apparently they managed to get themselves a new job offer, but decided they wanted to try to create some sort of bidding war between their current employer (the company I worked for) and the company offering the job. Unfortunately they weren’t anywhere near good enough or generally pleasant enough for us to actually be bothered about retaining them. So they went to HR and said look, I’ve been offered X, I want Y from you if I’m going to stay. HR, after a brief consultation with our boss, said ‘Oh, sorry but no can do, good luck in your new role’. Ha.

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    3. Slippers*

      Oh man! This just reminded me of when I managed volunteers for the hospital gift shop. It was mostly 80 year old ladies who’d been doing it their entire lives, but we had a 60 year old lady come in and really liven things up…in both good ways and bad. She became tyrannical toward the other volunteers, badmouthing them to me whenever she had an opportunity. Some things she wasn’t wrong about, but still, they’re volunteers. They worked their shifts. Just because they want to sell homemade hotpads and you want to sell Hobby Lobby-esque wall hangings, we’re going to have to compromise. One day I was in the middle of yet another conflict mediation between the older volunteers and this lady and she said “Well maybe I’ll just have to resign my post, then.” and I said “Yes, Jan, maybe that would be for the best.” She was shocked, SHOCKED I tell you that I accepted her resignation. She was certain we’d go to pieces but somehow we managed to make it work.

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      1. Kari From Up North*

        I too manage volunteers in a hospital gift shop and we had a Jan. She resigned in a huff. I told her ‘I’m sorry to see you go.’

        She bad-mouthed me to all of the other volunteers that would listen because I didn’t beg her to stay. Unlike the Temptations, I am too proud to beg.

        Life was so much better for everyone after she left.

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      2. Jonathan MacKay*

        “Maybe I’ll just have to resign” reads to me like when I said “I’m starting to think that maybe today should be my last day” at my last job (Which is where the whole – “Change the labels on everything coming from China” thing was happening). I wasn’t intending to quit, but it was taking as an effective immediately resignation. In my mind, I was fired, because I was not given any opportunity to clarify that it was a statement made in frustration.

        The difference between the two I think is one is much more clearly a statement of intent.

        Either way, I was glad to get out of there, and landed the job where I am now two months later – pay bump and an extra week off included.

        Reply ↓
        1. Mallory Janis Ian*

          Yeah, you have to be very careful about saying anything resembling, “I quit” because it can be taken quite literally.

          I’ve told this story here before, but an assistant at an old workplace of mine got into a yelling match with her boss and in the heat of the moment shouted, “I QUIT”; and her boss immediately shouted back, “I ACCEPT YOUR RESIGNATION!” This was on a Friday, and the assistant came back in on Monday and tried to take it all back; they let her work out a two-week “notice” period but did not rescind the acceptance of the resignation.

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          2. Elizabeth West*

            That happened at another old job of mine — a consultant got into a screaming fight with the manager/owner. She walked out, never to return. The entire office was sitting there like: 0_0

            I don’t recall what the fight was about, but boy was it memorable.

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      3. Csethiro Ceredin*

        We had something similar at my work. A staff member who complained about EVERYTHING, even things we had zero control over, handed in her resignation. We, hiding our glee, accepted.

        Then in her exit interview she expressed outrage that the HR rep hadn’t begged her to change her mind. This was, she said, HR’s job, and she felt very disrespected.

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    4. HR Chick*

      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, 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.

      Reply ↓
  9. raincoaster*

    Let’s not forget that hero CEO who saw a senior exec stealing huge quantities of food that was meant for the rank and file, and insisted on signing him up for the food bank since he couldn’t seem to feed his family.

    Reply ↓
      1. Hlao-roo*

        Found it! The story is 4. The thief and the hero on the post “the thief and the hero, the crockpot discrimination, and other stories of potlucks at work” from November 22, 2022. I’ll post a link in a follow-up comment.

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        1. Abogado Avocado.*

          Ding, ding, ding, Alison! I think this is your next book: Ask a Manager’s Top 10 Lists of Bad Bosses, Malicious Compliance, Etc.

          I would pay to have a copy!

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          3. Syfy Geek*

            And we could leave it open to a Bad Boss selection who may or may not resemble our bad boss, and leave it in the break room?

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  10. HappyMarketer*

    I had an awful first boss – she was incredibly cold, unsupportive and just not qualified to do her job. After I (and several others) left, we all received requests to give her a reference – she was interviewing and had specifically asked the hiring manager not to contact ‘the churn’, so naturally the hiring manager reached out to us all immediately. After a lot of soul searching I simply confirmed she had been my manager and said I couldn’t give her a further reference, others declined but one had left the industry and decided to go to town… She did not get the job. Two good lessons – treat your juniors well and always go beyond the provided reference list!

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    1. Rusty Shackelford*

      I had the pleasure of being contacted by a colleague for a reference on my former boss, who had *definitely* not put me on her list of references. It’s delightful being able to give simple objective facts that scream do not hire this person.

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      1. Lily Rowan*

        Oh yes. I had a colleague who apparently put me down as her supervisor as a reference, and didn’t even tell me she had given anyone my name, so when I got the cold call and they asked me about my experience supervising her, all I could say was that I had not supervised her at all!

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        1. epicdemiologist*

          That has also happened to me, with a grad student. Not only was I not his supervisor (I told him that, and he argued with me), I wasn’t anyone’s supervisor. When his prospective employer contacted me, I told them that.

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    2. SFI*

      I once had an ex-boyfriend, who dumped me on our 1 year anniversary and I was quite heartbroken over it, give me as a reference since we worked together on his small business. He did not warn me, as we were not speaking. I still don’t understand his thought process. I was also 20, so this was the first time anyone had ever called me for a reference.

      The interviewer asked me if my ex had any goals and my first instinct was to tell him about how he used to go on about how he really wanted to live in a castle.

      I do not remember if he got the job or not.

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    3. CommanderBanana*

      HAH. I just left a job with a toxic boss – 100% turnover on the team in the 2 years I was there, a lying liar who lies, throws temper tantrums, was noticeably rude to the POCs on our team, you name it, she was doing it – and I found out that a few months before I left Boss reached out to one of the former team members to ask her about a job at her new firm.

      Former team member called our HR, told her that under no circumstances would she ever work with Boss again and that any reference requests needed to go to HR, and never responded to her.

      Reply ↓
    4. Anon for this*

      I have been on the other side of this. Still employed (10+ years with company) when former horrible boss wanted to be re-hired. I told my manager that I would quit rather than work with or for him again. (And I meant it.)

      I don’t know how that played out. But he was not re-hired and I did not have to quit.

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  11. RCB*

    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 on him, 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 5 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 5 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.

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    2. BarkeepersFriendFan*

      I’m glad they did it, but I don’t know why they waited so long to act on it. Why lose so many great employees first?

      Reply ↓
  12. marymoocow*

    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.

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    1. raincoaster*

      Ohhhh, that’s awesome!

      Reminds me of the chief of a British spy agency who got fired shortly into his new role. His wife posted photos of their vacation to celebrate him getting the new job, which she named. BOOM, fired.

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      1. TechWorker*

        Ohh this is kind of sad though! Like it’s stupid and I bet she felt super guilty vs it proving either of them is a jerk…

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        1. Caffeine Monkey*

          Well, it showed they were hanging out with an associate of David Irving, a well-known Holocaust denier, so it could be argued it proved they were jerks.

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      2. LifebeforeCorona*

        That reminds me of someone who received a large settlement along with a non-disclosure agreement. His daughter posted on social media that the family was going on a vacation with the money that dad got in a settlement, IIRC she even named the amount. The father had to pay back all of the settlement.

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    2. Sreppils*

      This isn’t work related, but my ex-boyfriend’s mom, who was a bully and openly demeaning to me, was caught embezzling from her friend’s company where she did the books, racking up thousands of dollars of personal charges on the company credit card over years. Pretty sure I went to Florida on spring break with those embezzled funds. Cherry on top is she actually had to serve time for it.

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      1. AndersonDarling*

        Whenever I hear a story where a boss is an out of control bully, I immediately know the bully is embezzling or committing fraud. The louder and more abusive they are, then the more they are trying to hide.

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        2. metadata minion*

          I don’t dispute that this is a pattern, but I think there’s also quite a lot of people who just thrive on having power over other people. Or whose “thing to hide” is that they’re a terrible manager/leader and the business is failing.

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          1. linger*

            Or whose first instinct is to accuse others of the same things they’re doing. Partly because they believe attack is the best form of defense; but mostly because they think everyone else is like them: they can’t imagine that anyone who could, would refrain from taking every possible advantage by whatever means available.
            The converse also holds: they are allowed to get away with it so long in part because decent humans imagine others are similarly decent and so wouldn’t do such a thing.

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    3. Anonymel*

      In a similar-ish vein: our family is military. We had moved from overseas back to the states and until we acquired housing our goods were stored. After delivery a few things were missing (always to be expected TBH) but not just small things, also our sofa, a huge TV, etc.. After a few weeks of back and forth phone calls with the moving/storage people, Dad had HAD ENOUGH. He decided to go down there and talk to someone face to face about where our stuff was or when were we getting reimbursed so we could buy new stuff. He gets there, opens the door, sees nobody. Hears some voices so he follows the voices to the employee breakroom….where the employees are sitting on OUR COUCH, watching OUR TV. Base transportation and moving org got involved, that company lost their contract, we were given far more money than the furniture had originall cost and got a lovely new living room set and an even bigger TV :)

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    5. NotAnotherManager!*

      I always kind of wonder how this works at home – I mean, did the spouse just not realize where stuff was coming from? Are they complicit or oblivious? For us, a TV like that would be a joint-decision purchase because of the cost (and, in our case, I manage the finances anyway, so I’d have seen if we did *not* have a thousands-of-dollars charge for it). My spouse also works for the government and is subject to gifting limits/rules (which he complies with by taking nothing, not even a coffee or sandwich, so there’s never a question), too, so I’m guessing any office theft would involve jail time.

      Reply ↓
      1. soontoberetired*

        they will claim they didn’t question it – that’s what happened in a case here. the person embezzling bought the spouse a new car, themselves a new car, they ate out every night, paid off the mortgage, all sorts of stuff that was way beyond the salary. At trial the spouse said they knew nothing of what was going on, never questioned it. No one actually believed that.

        I’ve heard different stories on how it was caught – internal audit or someone else getting suspicious of all the stuff the person was buying. The company did institute a bunch of new controls after it, and the person did jail time and lots of lovely stuff was sold to get some of the money back.

        Reply ↓
        1. MigraineMonth*

          I think there are a lot of couples where only one person keeps close track of the finances, and the partner relies on them to be honest. Often that person is more comfortable with math, money or budgeting. So one person balances the checkbook and tells the other “We’ll have to cut back on eating out if we want to afford that vacation to Florida in three months” or similar. It’s a system that works very well for many and can go horribly wrong.

          Also, there’s every chance an embezzler is passing off extra money as performance bonuses, gifts from the boss, a raise, etc. Unless the spouse is checking pay stubs or W2 forms, they wouldn’t necessarily realize they shouldn’t be able to afford a second car.

          Reply ↓
          1. BobCat*

            I saw a documentary on Bernie Madoff and this is how his wife was portrayed. She allegedly knew nothing about Bernie’s Ponzi scheme but it was difficult for the court of public opinion to believe that because of the huge amount of money involved.

            Reply ↓
          2. Kevin Sours*

            There is a certain “I’m the breadwinner I control the finances” dynamic that while not healthy is still a thing in some relationships. Doubly so with “alpha” executive types and probably even more so when something hinky is going on. Coupled with a “I don’t really want to know where this is coming from” dynamic when something seems off it’s entirely plausible that the spouse doesn’t really know exactly what’s going on.

            Reply ↓
          3. You Spent The Tesla... and the House*

            I can attest to this. Early in our marriage I had no idea that my husband’s income had dropped SIGNIFICANTLY as we continued to live life as normal. I was still involved with the finances somewhat, but not everything, nor regularly. We had been planning to pay cash for a brand new Tesla and home renovations (so think 6 figures here) but my husband decided to spend that on things like maintaining our shopping, eating out and vacationing habits as usual. Imagine by shock and confusion when I dropped by the bank one day for something random. Our marriage nearly didn’t survive this and now I handle all the finances, but I can assure you I was absolutely clueless.

            Reply ↓
      2. LifebeforeCorona*

        Sometimes the person gets careless because they got away with it for so long. We had someone showing off a very expensive piece of equipment that was bought for the office. When they retired, the equipment left with them. Checks and balances were not enforced there.

        Reply ↓
  13. Old Job*

    I once held a “team leader” position. I wasn’t responsible for managing the other members of the team, but I got a small stipend for extra admin work that supported the team goals. We got a new boss who kept adding things to my plate that were beyond the scope of my position. I replied to each email with the PDF of job description attached. She continued to (try to) add more and more to my plate.

    When I resigned from the position, I included the job description and listed out the extras I was being asked to do in my letter to GrandBoss. The following week, he held a meeting with the team leaders and Boss reiterating expectations for the role and letting us know that we should reach out with concerns.

    Boss left shortly after.

    Reply ↓
    1. Menace to Sobriety*

      I’m currently in the same boat! Small salary bump and a few extra perks (clothing stipend, cell phone stipend, etc…) to be a team/site lead. Sign some time cards, be the liaison between my company and our client. But my boss keeps pushing me to manage the people. Deal with the contracts, the finances, etc… I’m like dude, I’m 100% billable to my client and I don’t have time to also do YOUR job. I’ve realized he just… doesn’t know how to do his job so he pawns it off on his team leads.

      Reply ↓
  14. Midwest Cheesehead*

    A VP who allowed me to be used as a weird political chess piece in a reorganization and let a very bad director move me under his croney was just re-orged out of our company. In helping to clean up the messes he and that bad director left, I’ve been getting a lot of experience and visibility.

    Said bad director openly kept me from working with senior leadership despite my long, successful track record of working with them. He openly discriminated against me while I was pregnant, and encouraged my manager to overwhelm me with work while I was 38 weeks pregnant dealing with something that left it really hard to type. This bad director is also about to be re-orged out, and I could not be happier.

    Reply ↓
    1. ferrina*

      So glad they got removed! It’s awful to play politics with someone who can’t opt-out, and that kind of mess is really something that someone needs to opt in to (been there, done that, got lots of interesting experience on my resume and some fun therapy sessions.)

      Reply ↓
  15. Zona the Great*

    I’ve told this story before but 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.

    Reply ↓
    2. Eleri*

      As someone who also looks young, this was really beautiful to me. :D I used to work at a university, and I was constantly mistaken for a student – I look young, I don’t wear makeup, and I love being comfy so I usually wore university hoodies. I didn’t mind most of the time (most people were nice), but when someone disrespected me because they thought I was a student, it was really irritating. Not only on a personal level, but because they showed themselves to be someone who was fine with denigrating the very population of people we were there to support.

      Reply ↓
      1. CeeDoo*

        I used to encounter that in my earlier years teaching. All those people who were disrespectful to me when they thought I was a student were just outing themselves as people who treated students disrespectfully. You’d generally find that in most of their discipline referrals, there were actions those teachers took that escalated situations that should not have been escalated.

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      2. CommanderBanana*

        Hah! I often get mistaken for support staff / hotel staff / whatever staff (I do not know why. Resting Competent Face? Carrying a binder? Usually wearing a blazer? Being a woman so I must be Here to Help?) and it’s always interesting to see how people treat someone they think doesn’t matter.

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      3. LifebeforeCorona*

        I looked very young for my age and for a while I worked as a civilian for the military. The military is very big on rank, it matters a lot. I was the junior admin to a general who also had a secretary. My job was to do all the running around, getting paperwork signed etc. and because I had a high level security clearance I also did some work for lower ranked officers if I had the time. I loved when a lower ranked officer saw my baby face and demanded that I do some work for them. My response was always, let me check with General Motors first.

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    5. Spacewoman Spiff*

      Oh my gosh, I love this so much. I never have had a ton of problems with this, but one time about 5 years ago, a colleague introduced me in a Zoom as “This is _____, who looks like she’s 21.” I usually don’t have a problem pushing back when I disagree with something but I just froze in the moment, it was so unexpected. I mean, who says something like that? So weird, sexist, and undermining of all my experience…years later, I still daydream about how I might have shut him down. So, I really love that you thought so quickly and put Bob in his place.

      Reply ↓
      3. Eleri*

        I had something similar happen to me at an industry conference recently. I was introducing myself to a vendor, and mentioned I had nearly 20 years of experience in higher education – and he responded with, “Most of that as a student I bet! ha ha”. I froze too, but hopefully my face properly conveyed my annoyance. I’m not good with snappy comebacks but I am good with looking annoyed and/or confused.

        Note to vendors: When you’re trying to sell your company to potential clients, don’t make comments about their appearance, no matter how flattering you think you’re being.

        Reply ↓
        1. Jaydee*

          I would have been confused too because the math doesn’t make any sense. I assume he was trying to say you looked young, but even 4 years of undergrad + another 4-6 for a masters and PhD would
          a) not be “most” of 20 years and
          b) probably still put you in your mid-30s, older if you didn’t go straight through all that schooling or worked in any field other than higher ed for a few years.

          But at least you know he’s flexible. He got his foot right up to his mouth without even realizing it.

          Reply ↓
      4. kicking-k*

        This happened to me recently but in an oblique manner: we have a wall of staff photos and it was commented that I look like I’m 20 in mine. So does that imply I look young, or that I look significantly older in real life? I’m 45 and… it’s just a normal, recent-ish photo of me. I decided not to ask the person who said it (otherwise not a jerk) to unpack it on the grounds that I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

        Reply ↓
    8. Csethiro Ceredin*

      I have also told this story here, but someone applying for a job here looked between me and the older man I was panelling with, and asked me “any coffee, sweetie?” I was in my 30s and looked younger.

      I was so shocked I just flatly said “no” but when we introduced ourselves I had enormous pleasure in giving him my c-suite title. He visibly blanched, and my colleague made a stifled snorting noise.

      He didn’t get the job.

      Reply ↓
      1. MigraineMonth*

        After giving your title: “…and it looks like that’s all we have time for today. Thank you so much for coming in, and I hope you learned a lot!”

        Reply ↓
        1. Csethiro Ceredin*

          That would have been even better! We did the interview, and he was far from impressive in multiple ways.

          Reply ↓
      2. Kevin Sours*

        I don’t get it. How hard is “excuse me is there somewhere I can get a cup of coffee?”. Even strictly from the angle of the candidates person self interest being condescending to a member of an interview panel seems…. unwise… even if you haven’t misjudged their seniority. (I can’t imagine including someone on a panel who’s input I wasn’t interested in getting).

        Though I know my wife has experienced having the answers to her questions being directed at the (less senior) male member of the panel. But that, also, did not go well for the candidate.

        Reply ↓
  16. accidental roast comic*

    Years ago I worked at a small-ish company with a standard-issue jerk CEO. Very vain, always trying to ape the cool factor of tech in the mid-2010s (even though we as a company were nowhere remotely close to tech), thought he was an innovator (he was the founder’s son). Most of the people in my department were embarrassingly sycophantic in his presence.
    One afternoon, right around 5 PM, he wanders over to my team and sits jauntily on the marketing director’s desk to take everyone captive at the end of the day. I would like to be packing up to go, but I’m in my cubicle, trying to fix an issue with production orders. Importantly, I am the only one on my team who is on the other side of the cube wall. The CEO is holding court in the main cube pod, telling a long story about how he tried his hand at stand-up at a local bar. Everyone is nodding along and telling him how cool that is. He reassures us that everyone in the bar laughed, and asks, “Should I do my set?” The people in my department cheer him on. I wish I could remember the jokes he told, but those are gone from my memory now. My coworkers laugh uproariously.
    Now, I have to get up and print something out, and the printer is next to the desk where the CEO is. I stood up to walk over there, and the CEO said, “[Name]! I didn’t know you were still here. What did you think of my ‘tight five’?” I started the print job, turned around slowly, and responded with a wide-eyed innocence, “Well, if you had heard me laugh you wouldn’t have been surprised to see me.”
    The whole department actually laughed at that (I promise, you could really tell the difference!) and the CEO’s face turned sour for just the tiniest half-second before trying to compose himself as unruffled. I’ve never been so quick on my feet again–but thankfully it’s because I didn’t need to be. I quit soon after!

    Reply ↓
  17. Bird Lady*

    When I was working a retail management job straight out of college, my grandmother passed away and her funeral was scheduled for the day I was supposed to open the store. Our store manager, who was very supportive and generally a great manager, couldn’t cover my shift because she was hospitalized at the time. I asked both of the assistant managers, and they both declined to switch shifts with me. It had just snowed and they wanted to hit the slopes to get that fresh powder.

    I had to call another store to ask their help in covering my shift, which they did gladly and actually sent me flowers. It was a relief to say goodbye with my family.

    Well, wouldn’t you know one of the assistant managers who decided skiing was more important than my bereavement asked to switch shifts with me, claiming she had a doctor’s appointment. I refused to switch to give her a bit of a hard time. I was young, and feeling petty.

    Which was great. Because I totally discovered she was using specific shifts to shoplift from the store. The company prosecuted her for the lost goods and she lost her job. Apparently, she and another associate would “damage-out” items they wanted which the company then let us buy at 75% off. The shift she wanted was the one scheduled with her accomplice.

    Karma, man.

    Reply ↓
    1. Pastor Petty Labelle*

      the company failed to notice that when those 2 worked together that there was a higher level of allegedly damaged items than on other shifts?

      Reply ↓
      1. But Of Course*

        Eh, personnel teams can be weird. I used to work fast food back in the 90s at a slower location. There were nominally four positions – grill, fryer, drive, and counter. I could work it better with one specific manager alone for breakfast than I could with a fully-staffed kitchen and two floaters for lunch. Part of it was the volume, but a bigger part of it was competence – we knew where each other was, we knew what was needed, we knew who was handling the fryer for an order, we were prompt and mindful of order times, we both knew how to prep, etc. The whole thing just ran smoother than it did when you had six people, five of whom couldn’t prep, the one who could was stuck on drive, the fry station was making too many fries to “get ahead” and then not having baskets to cook in the right order for actual orders, all the things that come up on a busy rush plus lack of thoughtfulness by a fair few of the staff.

        I could see a damages scam not being noticed if the team was seen as so competent they had time to pull and record damages that other shifts couldn’t.

        Reply ↓
        1. Strive to Excel*

          A lot of internal stuff is set up to detect things above a certain $ amount, and anything under that isn’t noticed until it’s caught in person. Or you can end up with a situation where the amount was set based on X store, which is twice the size of Y store. Y store has people pulling this scam, but because their normal size is half the size of X they naturally have fewer damages. No one spots this until someone runs a comparison of damages by size of store, which may or may not be an actual audit report anyone’s doing.

          There’s a reason why the two most effective anti-fraud measures are a) automatic electronic controls and b) an anonymous tipline.

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      2. Disappointed Australien*

        Damaged items are usually bursty and it can be easy to reappropriate items other people have marked as damaged. I’ve written POS software that had a whole audit system in place to detect this, and helped customers work through these kind of investigations.

        One fun aspect is telling the difference between customers scamming the store by bringing in “damaged” items at busy times, and staff marking returned items as “damaged” when it’s so busy other staff won’t notice. Often using honest staff to carry out some steps in order to hide their tracks. Plus combinations of that. The detectable ones usually find one system that works and just keep doing it until someone notices and they all get fired and/or prosecuted.

        Reply ↓
        1. Strive to Excel*

          I still remember reading the news story about a grocery store that was suffering a ton of shrinkage but it wasn’t following any of the expected patterns for employee theft. Not using damages, not using self-check, etc.

          Finally someone noticed that there were 5 checkstands in the store but only 4 were showing up in the computer system.

          Any time collusion gets going everything is a lot harder to catch.

          Reply ↓
  18. Wallaby, Well I'll Be*

    I can only dream of an asshole getting their comeuppance. I have only seen assholes rewarded for this behavior. They fail up, and up, and up, kicking everyone else down along the way. It’s hard for me to believe any of these stories are real. I hope they are. I hope there are assholes out there getting what is coming to them. I sure have never seen it happen.

    Reply ↓
    1. Shellfish Constable*

      This comment makes me sad — partially because feels true but partially because it’s so easy to forget that there really are good people out there fighting like hell to take down the a**holes. Wallaby, I hope someday you get to be witness to some jerk a**hole’s downfall! And when you do, please come back and tell everyone about it. :)

      Reply ↓
    2. Poisoned Apple Tablet*

      This was working with my bitter enemy was like. She could miss critical details, be abusive to the entire team, scream at people, and offload all of her work onto me and others, and she always got away with it! Even praised for catching errors that “saved the day” when she was the one that made such critical errors in the first place. She was promoted, got new client projects to work on, and was given authority. I was actually surprised when layoffs happened and she was let go, I thought for sure she’d manage to dodge that too and manage to stick around. Some people just don’t change and don’t get the justice we hope for. I still have nightmares about her to this day.

      Reply ↓
      1. Lady Ann*

        There’s a manager at my former employer like this. She is a terrible manager, childish, and outright abusive to staff. Several good people have quit, directly citing her behavior. But because she has connections in the community that help bring in revenue, they won’t fire her. It’s very short sighted, imo, because they’re losing good people who could be developed into competent leadership in favor of short term financial gains. But I’m not the boss.

        Reply ↓
      2. Wallaby, Well I'll Be*

        This perfectly describes a former manager of mine. She was promoted after HR decided that she wasn’t fit to manage people. Then she was promoted again. And again. Then she quit, and wrote a ridiculous, self-aggrandizing post on linkedin about how brave she was to work for and then quit this company, that was lauded shared widely amongst our industry. I wish I had her audacity.

        Reply ↓
    4. NotAnotherManager!*

      It’s a spectrum – I’ve definitely worked with assholes who Dilbert Principled their way to to the top, but I’ve also seen some glorious falls from subtle ones only a few of us noticed to full-on public humiliations. But there are definitely some things I’m still seething over and felt went rewarded or at least unpunished – I don’t personally have a lot of tolerance with those who shit on people below them in the org chart.

      Reply ↓
    5. Anon for this*

      The only time I’ve seen it happen was on a “karma” level, not anything anyone did, and was actually really sad. The person in question, who made my life a misery for years (when I had no opportunity to change job) had lots of major things go wrong in the decade after I finally left, including eventually a terminal illness. I don’t feel even a crumb of satisfaction because I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.

      Reply ↓
    6. Throwaway Account*

      I hear ya, Wallaby!
      I see a lot of failing up. A good friend almost lost a very prestigious job because their boss (who had failed up) was called for a reference and said that my friend was lacking in specific area (which is actually their main skill!). Friend knows this bc the prestigious job was smart enough to tell her what boss said and allowed her to marshall other references to address the so called “lack”. And friend got the job!

      Old toxic workplace is filled with folks who failed up and who are mean and rude to employees (and violated labor laws). And current boss has completely failed up. It is so sad.

      I don’t think I have any stories of anyone getting their comeuppance.

      Reply ↓
    1. NotAnotherManager!*

      This is one I would literally have paid admission to watch. It’s like I-QUIT-in-fish level epic. I love it when people who are being grossly inappropriate have to explain themselves. I am not above feigning that I don’t get -ist jokes and having the teller spell it out in increasingly uncomfortable detail (“I don’t understand what you mean by ‘how women are’… how specifically are we?”).

      (My mother does not get off-color humor, and one of my younger siblings went through a dirty joke phase in middle school. I had to explain SO many of them because my mother is not one to be satisfied with, “Oh, Mom, you do not WANT to know.” I am really good at it and can explain nearly anything in neutral tone and clinical terms now.)

      Reply ↓
      1. Dust Bunny*

        My mother very much does not appreciate off-color humor.

        There is an episode of Anthony Bourdain where he’s in Louisiana. It features a guy who is a favorite musician of mine and my brother’s, so we were eager to see it. Like 30 seconds in Bourdain makes a pun on the word “taint”.

        My brother launched out of his seat and left the room.

        Our mother: “What did he say?” (meaning Bourdain).

        Me: “Sorry, I missed it.”

        Later, I cornered my brother and let him know that I knew that he had deliberately abandoned me in the room with Mom and an off-color joke, and he readily admitted that he had; he wasn’t going to be the one to explain it to her.

        Reply ↓
        1. Pupils*

          Flashbacks to sitting in my grandpa’s van, waiting for my brother’s wedding reception to start, explaining to him and my dad what a taint is. (Or rather, what it aint)

          Reply ↓
  20. Long suffering accountant*

    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 colours in the conditional formatting.

    He stood there saying it had been a lot of research and work and just needed updated for the latest years data. Then he was asked to make some changes on the spot. He needed to get into the source sheet, which he just 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 colours 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, just 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 colours on the front sheet which he couldn’t remove were due to conditional formatting based in criteria my boss had asked for the 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 teams work. My boss smirked and Mr Marketing never poached another file off me again.

    Reply ↓
    4. A Simple Narwhal*

      Absolutely delicious. I love that someone actually flat out called him out for stealing your work, I sincerely hope he saw repercussions for that.

      Reply ↓
    5. ferrina*

      This is one of my favorite stories. I’ve had so many reports stolen, and it does my soul good to see one reclaimed. So glorious!

      Reply ↓
  21. Anonymous Coward - An NDA may still be in force*

    I worked in technology at a firm that had significant nation-wide physical presence in a mrket that was pretty competitive – 3 firms were the entire market.

    The market began to compress and that lead to the executives firing the CTO that had been around for decades with somone that had a more modern background. He identified a set of issues with our data and processes that were valid concerns but if you knew tech, the resolution required waaaay more expense to resolve than cost in lost revenue. Sort of a “the cure is worse than the disease” situation. He spent 6 figures on an attempted Salesforce implementation. Suggested pulling in contractors from the company he’d left. Basically showed he was stuffed shirt.

    Eventually the company threw in the towel and let go of most of the 12 person team I was on (that generated 1/3 of the revenue for the ~150 person company. I’m still salty about it). I came in after finding out went to the new manager of the department, gathered my things and gave him my personal email address so he could let me know when they fired this dude.

    He did so 2 months later.

    4 years later I’m at a great contracting company and someone comes in. I can’t see the receptionist but I unconsciously get uncomfortable. THAT DUDE comes in for an interview. I got super anxious. Lots of IMs with coworkers.

    He completes the interview and leaves. I keep my head down and before the main door closes I’m in the CEO’s office telling him I worked with him and he’s stuffed shirt. That I wouldn’t trust him and wouldn’t feel comfortable working with him either. The CEO tells me that since he was let go from that old company the whisper network of tech people in the entire region knew he was stuffed shirt and wasn’t hiring him for anything substantial. The position he was applying for was basically two levels down from where he was at the old company.

    Reply ↓
  22. WorkplaceSurvivor*

    I had a super toxic boss that was in over her head. Long story short as she got more stressed she got nastier and nastier with me. Even to the point where when I asked for accommodations, she told me “some people with ADHD just have to make arts and crafts for a living.”

    I laughed in her face at that and hung up the phone (hybrid role). Then I scheduled a skip meeting with her boss to quit the next day with my excel spreadsheet of documented nasty comments.

    Well here’s where the universe had my back. Turns out, the whole department was going up in flames, so during the time I’d booked with him… my grandboss GOT LET GO. And then I was booked into a meeting with HR for the next hour… and was let go with 3 months severance on the same day… same hour… I was going to quit.

    Oh and bonus- you bet my boss also got fired that day! :)

    Reply ↓
    1. A Simple Narwhal*

      Oh that’s awesome! I have a friend who hated his job, so he got another one and was about to quit when he was unexpectedly laid off. So not only did he already have a new job lined up, but he got to claim unemployment for the couple weeks before it started on top of the generous severance package. He thanks his lucky stars for the timing: “I was going to quit anyway and then they paid me to do it”.

      So glad they paid you to do something you were about to do for free!

      Reply ↓
    2. MigraineMonth*

      I’m glad it worked out well for you, but if it takes the elimination of an entire department to give one toxic person their comeuppance, that seems like a bit of a pyrrhic victory?

      Reply ↓
      2. WorkplaceSurvivor*

        That’s a fair point! I’d argue tho that the department needed to go- my grandboss wasn’t quite as bad as her, but he wasn’t great either. We were swimming in more than just personality issues, understaffed to the point of 60+ hour weeks on the regular, no overtime.

        Side note- love the use of pyrrhic victory here.

        Reply ↓
  23. HigherEd Escapee*

    A long time ago I worked for a very small non profit. There are a lot of stories that came out of this place, including the one about my very good dog pooping next to the VP’s desk on the day they let me go, but it was the Executive Director who got his in the long run.
    As there isn’t any honor among thieves and the ED and VP ended up getting rid of me and the only other full time staffer within a week of each other, it was kind of a waiting game to see what happened to this place and whether it could run on ego alone. (This ED, for reference, once asked me if my choice of jewelry for the day was because he was Jewish. I was wearing a cross, I had no idea he was Jewish, who does that?)
    About two years later, and re-staffed with part time non-benefitted young people, the politician who was earmarking funds for this nonprofit to operate suddenly died. They shuttered within 6 months and now the ED is teaching as an adjunct. Oops.
    Schadenfreude is delicious.

    Reply ↓
    1. Nessa*

      I don’t spend a lot of time in the comments when things are live, so it’s always wonderful to see when somebody says they submitted something that ended up in a post. Almost like a minor Internet celebrity or something. XD I do very much remember your story.

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  24. Anon4This*

    This is a bit less “comeuppance-y” than others, but it makes me smile at times:

    I was put on a PIP about three years into my first job. Now, I’ll admit I was partially at fault – the job wasn’t a good match for me – but the thing that really bothered me was being told I was too much of a clock-watcher because I would “leave exactly on time”. Now, I was hourly and had a year’s worth of timesheets to show this wasn’t the case (and if you’re thinking “Hey, being hourly, wouldn’t they WANT you to leave exactly on time?” I was specifically told I was “allowed” to work late as though it were a gift). Adding insult to injury, my supervisor who put me on the PIP was part-time, so she only worked four days a week, arrived after me, left before, and hardly ever stayed late/came in on the weekends for our department’s events (this was fundraising).

    So before my PIP was over I was able to find another job that was better suited for me (and which I LOVED). Now, I was still friends with a couple of folks at the company and would text with them now and then. That’s how I found out that it ended up taking six months to replace me (this was an entry level position, mind you!). It’s also how I found out that my former supervisor suddenly found herself having to come in on what would have otherwise been her days off, including weekends, to get things done. Not even a year after I left she ended up leaving her position with nothing else lined up.

    Reply ↓
    1. Anon4This*

      Oh, and at that same job I had the opportunity to inform my grandboss (who was snide and quick to jump on someone for the smallest mistake) that the letter she had mailed to a major donor asking for a 7-figure gift had misspelled said donor’s name MULTIPLE times. I didn’t see the letter until the next morning (she had sent me a scan to put in the donor’s file) and I spent a solid five minutes wondering if I should point it out or not since I knew the letter had already been put in the mail.

      Reply ↓
    2. ferrina*

      Love this! I’ve almost never seen a role where they wanted the hourly person to work overtime, and it’s ridiculous when they complain that you are taking the shifts they don’t want.

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      1. Christmas Carol*

        No, they actually WANT you to work the overtime, they just don’t want you to claim it on your timesheet.

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  25. GirlieePop*

    In my last job, I helped salespeople with proposals, and a lot of them were for municipalities and 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.

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    2. Cordyceps*

      This letter warms my heart. I also write proposals for salespeople…and cannot wait to find another job where I don’t have to deal with salespeople….

      Reply ↓
      1. GirlieePop*

        There were some salespeople who I genuinely enjoyed and had a good relationship with, and some who just drove me up the wall!

        But I can confirm I am in a (mostly) salesperson-free job now and I absolutely love it : )

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      2. Elizabeth West*

        They always get away with it because revenuuuuuuue. The Coworker from Hell was unfortunately really good at sales. The only time I ever saw her not be nasty was to customers — she was horrible to everyone else. She drove two other sales guys off that job by being so awful to them they quit — one happened before I started, and the other I witnessed. She was also related to the owners, which didn’t help.

        This was the same job where I had to go do the front desk person’s work all the time instead of mine because she kept calling out. She claimed to have back problems, but I suspect she took advantage of the smallest twinge to get away from this woman.

        At the other job where I worked with inside and outside sales, everyone was pretty nice. They were cutthroat with each other (especially outside sales) but they were nice to us office peeps.

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        1. Kevin Sours*

          In too many sales organizations if you make quota you are untouchable and if you don’t make quota nothing is going to save you anyway. So there isn’t much incentive to behave well if you aren’t otherwise inclined.

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  26. Successful Birthday Rememberer*

    Jerk VP who recently worked here has been allowed to be rude and vicious to everyone for like 15 years. He throws people under the bus, curses them out, points fingers, and is an overall abusive bully when he isn’t doing any of those things.
    President has been letting Jerk VP get away with it because President can be a bit of an overgrown frat boy. Shockingly, President hasn’t been able to perform when things get tough and got moved over to a different part of this massive company. CEO decided to run our division himself, right about the time that I was assigned to manage one of the largest projects in the company’s history.
    Whelp. Jerk VP wanted his own internal project team and wasn’t allowed to have it, so he was really mad that I was there. Jerk VP was also mad that he had to be the responsible decision maker for Biggest Project Ever. And refused to do so, blaming me for when Biggest Project Ever never got any traction. His managers followed suit, and my own VP of project management believed him.
    Project Management VP beat me up (metaphorically) until I was throwing up every day before work, sobbing in conference rooms by myself regularly, and breaking out in stress hives. I literally gained 8 pounds in one week. Project Management VP finally saw that I wasn’t the problem but she quit anyway when her hair started falling out from stress.
    CEO stepped in and told Jerk VP that he had better do his job or he would be fired. Jerk VP pulled it together long enough for the Biggest Project Ever to finally complete, then CEO fired him. Stories of abuse came out of the woodwork about how bad he was.

    Jerk VP got a C-suite job at a small company (ugh, of course. He’s a con man) and I feel for anyone who has to work with him.
    Project Management VP has been job searching for months.
    Frat boy President has not been allowed near our division since then.
    CEO continues to take no prisoners and I am relieved.
    My career is going really well and on an upward trajectory.

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  27. Dana Lynne*

    I once had a VP for academic affairs who was truly toxic. He was the campus president’s golden boy and over the years he had been put in charge of things he knew nothing about and had made a mess of several departments and majors. His specialty was meaningless initiatives that he thought made him look good. He also lied about his teaching background and got away with it. Once he was promoted to VP he found pretexts to fire or force into retirement everyone who had ever crossed him. He was awful and everyone was afraid of him. He terrorized our campus for over a decade.

    He was passed over for promotion to campus president when his mentor retired and after a bit was hired as branch campus president at another, several hundred miles away. He lasted less than a year and was demoted to teaching. I was so glad when he left and I was also very glad that someone figured out he was, as we say, all hat and no cattle. But I feel bad for his current students.

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    1. Ally McBeal*

      “I feel bad for his current students” is exactly how I feel about a former VP at the university I used to work at. They were an absolute idiot at their job, only 6 years out of their master’s program and hired because they were young and dumb enough to be a yes-person for our new and deeply insecure president. They hired a crony who terrorized our department – every single one of us went to HR about the crony but were only given sympathy & platitudes, so most of us left our jobs for greener pastures – obviously a rare move in academia, and especially for our U, as our jobs were definitely of the golden-handcuffs variety. They and their crony were canned about two years in (the U’s finances were in rough shape and had to restructure a bit) and it was a huge relief, but they are now adjuncting at a different university across town – the embodiment of “those who can’t do, teach.”

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  28. One Duck In A Row*

    Many many years ago I worked a low paying retail job for a small independent business owned and run by a person who had a rightfully earned terrible reputation for being a really terrible person to work with/for. When I finally got an offer for a better job he made a huge to-do when I gave my notice, and berated me to the point of tears, throwing me out of the building. This happened in front of several co-workers, and while I was upset that I never got to say goodbye at work and get the normal amount of closure one would want with co-workers they were slightly trauma-bonded with, I did run into a couple of former co-workers around town in the weeks following that incident. Apparently it made quite the stir (more than his usual drama), and shortly after I left one of the few very long term employees he had, who had been the most direct witness to the entire interaction (others had mostly just seen the end/aftermath), also decided to leave.

    This was a business that was always short staffed – a combo of high turnover due to how terrible the owner was to work for, as well as the owner’s compulsion with pinching pennies by refusing to maintain more than the absolute minimum staffing to keep things from falling apart, without nearly enough redundancy/backup. The reason he was particularly mad at me for daring to give notice (I could have just done like some folks and ghost…) was that he had been dragging his feet on filling an open position in my department for the entirety of my time there, and knew that he was royally screwed. The long-time employee in a managerial position who left shortly after me surely left him even more screwed. I do feel bad knowing what kind of abuse he must have put his remaining employees through during those few weeks, and wish I’d been able to keep in touch with some of those folks. (This was back before smartphones and in the infancy of social media – I think FB had literally just opened up to folks not in college months earlier – so it wasn’t easy to keep in touch if you didn’t already have contact info. I don’t think I even knew most of my co-workers’ last names.) However, it’s a small enough town that I have since run into several folks who worked there, not overlapping with me, and we all have war stories to share. And immense schadenfreude that that store is no longer in business.

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  29. night cheese*

    My boss at a former workplace had started the company, a small, scrappy organization that is a beloved and popular local institution. He was an atrocious boss: screaming fits, angry memos plastering the workplace, being an absolute creep with the young women who worked and/or volunteered at the organization, etc. When I left to move back to my home state to be near aging parents, he tried to withhold my paycheck because he couldn’t be bothered to schedule my exit interview, which he claimed was mandatory, and I had to tell the (admittedly sympathetic) board member who called me to conduct the interview weeks later that the reason I left was because of the asshole boss.

    Anyway, it was an open secret that asshole boss routinely lied about his age. I remember one meeting when he casually mentioned “[famous celebrity] and I are the same age!” My coworker kicked me under the table, and we had to look away to keep from bursting out laughing. What we did NOT know at the time was that he had changed his birthdate on his official documents. Another coworker who had been forced into an HR role uncovered this when they were updating some info, and shit hit the fan. The board got involved, and after a protracted period, asshole boss was kicked out of the company he founded. The company he started has grown from small and scrappy to a local juggernaut without him, and his attempts to start similar companies have made about as much impact as a fart in a windstorm.

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    1. Grandma*

      My grandmother was always embarrassed that she was a year or two older than my grandfather, so she deducted those years when her age came up. She even left instructions that her gravestone show the false date. I wonder if her kids really did that? What was Terrible Boss’ excuse? I understand a lady in 1901 doing this, but The Boss?

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      1. night cheese*

        Well, the *reason* was because he wanted to appear younger (and by extension hipper?) than he really was. The *excuse* that he gave was so over-the-top batshit that I can’t reveal the exact details or I will totally blow whatever remnants of anonymity I possess…but it was something similar to “my parents did it to protect me from bounty hunters.”

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  30. Llama Trainer*

    Ten years ago, I was a trainer working for a very well-known organisation 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 ten years ago, you would recognise both the dispute and the company. Our part of the organisation 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 of CPD 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 me and my two other trainers 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, said that other Admin didn’t have time to do this, and that 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 of all 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.

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    1. SummitSkein*

      At some point, I sighed and said, “All I can say is that I’m very, very disappointed.”

      The secondhand glee I just got from this will carry me through the rest of the week.

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    2. Ama*

      I used to work for an org that offered accredited classes likely similar to what you describe and I am over here shaking at how horribly that could have turned out for your org. He deserved every bit of what you gave him and then some.

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    3. Silver Robin*

      As someone who works as a support to one such Highly Regulated Profession and is in charge of making sure that the courses and attendance credits for the continuing education said profession requires are correctly registered….my heart was in my throat reading through your experience!

      So glad you got some payback and that Lovely Manager was able to resolve it for you; what a barely averted nightmare!!

      Reply ↓
  31. Orange Cat Energy*

    This happened in 2020 when everyone was working remote and a lot of communication was via email, messaging, or other sort of writing. I’m a Web Developer. At a former employer, there was a restructuring so a lot of people were laid off and replaced. The new hires for this restructuring didn’t really hide how they were jerks.

    One day, I start working on a website update request from the new Web Operations Manager, who we’ll call Lisa. Lisa wasn’t my supervisor and we weren’t in the same department, but she was higher in the hierarchy than me. The instructions in her request didn’t make sense. If I did them as written, it would never get past all of our rounds of quality control. So I did my job: I messaged her, asked for clarification, and explained what the website looks like now and what her updates would create. Lisa replied about how this is a common business approach yada yada…and not addressing my question at all. So I did the request according to her instructions and just let whoever was doing review to bring it up. I wasn’t about to waste my time on someone who clearly thought I was less than her (there’s more backstory, so this wasn’t an isolated incident).

    My grandboss (C-suite exec, let’s call him Adam) happened to review my work. Adam asks Lisa if this is correct because it looks weird. Lisa stumbles so much. First, she “apologizes” because “she thought I was questioning the request” when I came to her for clarification. Then, she says I changed the wrong thing. Adam tells Lisa that “the thing Orange Cat Energy changed” has always looked like that. For a Web Operations Manager, Lisa sure didn’t know what the website looked like.

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  32. Irish Teacher.*

    Minor, but I was impressed by its simplicity. There was a teacher who worked with us who was, frankly, a snob. A lot of our students come from lower-income backgrounds and a fairly high number are immigrants or members of the Travelling Community. I don’t think she was racist or anti-immigrant but she made a lot of problematic comments, like coming in boasting about how she’s told a student with poor attendance that he might as well drop out as he wasn’t going to pass his exams anyway.

    Well, one day, she made a sneering comment about “how young they have children at” (I presume in relation to one of the student’s parents being young) to a colleague who had herself been a teenage mother (and who had repeated her exams as an adult and attended college as a mature student). Perfectly casually and without missing a beat, the colleague said, “well, I can hardly criticise anybody for that!” Snobby colleague got the message and quickly backtracked, saying she “hadn’t meant it that way,” though she clearly had.

    Reply ↓
    1. Irish Teacher.*

      I will add that snobby colleague later requested a transfer when our school was over-quota with teachers, got an offer and took it and…well, it was generally agreed that it was for the best.

      Reply ↓
  33. Alton Brown's Evil Twin*

    I may have told this story before…

    I was working for a DC consulting firm, we branched out from government contracting and started doing huge hardware/software/networking jobs for top-200 law firms. One client was notoriously wishy-washy about their requirements, and their non-lawyer IT manager was a complete pushover. We’d had the contract so long that we’d cycled through several project managers and it was my turn in the barrel when they fired the IT manager. I now had to report to the chairman of the IT committee – a youngish but relatively high-powered and very busy attorney.

    And then of course a month later they decided to cancel the contract. So I had the unenviable task of getting all the partial work put together – just planning and specification documents – and delivered to them. 3 copies on paper, 3 on CD. I set up a 9:30 appointment with the attorney’s secretary, got everything into a large box, and took the Metro downtown.

    I took the box into his office, went through the binders with him, and then handed him the transmittal letter, ie the receipt. “Here you go, just sign this indicating that you received the documents in accordance with the contract.” He looked at me aghast and said “I’m not going to sign that – how do I know that everything in here is what you say it is?”

    I was pretty dumbfounded and replied “Well you’ve been looking at these in draft form for the last year, don’t you know what the current version is?” And he shot back “I’d need to have all the internal staff look at these to verify. We can’t do that instantly.”

    My final counter was “Look, I’m on overhead today. I have nothing else to do. I can sit in your outer office next to your secretary all day while you call in whoever you want to look at these. But at the end of the day, I’m either leaving with a signed transmittal letter or a full box of documents. Your call.”

    This was the 90s, and even then he was probably charging $500 an hour. So the “I’m on overhead” statement was my way to call his bluff.

    So I sat in the outer office, there was a scurry of people running in and out of his office, and then thirty minutes later he came out and said “Fine, I’ll sign it.”

    Reply ↓
      1. Alton Brown's Evil Twin*

        My company wasn’t getting any revenue for my labore. My time that day was just coming out of a general cost fund (‘overhead’) that’s spread across all our business. We budgeted a certain amount of overhead to deal with contingencies like that.

        In other words, I could spend the day there without worrying where the money was coming from, but every minute the lawyer spent with me was a minute he couldn’t charge his clients $$$.

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        1. ferrina*

          This is very satisfying. I love that moment that they realize they are losing money by being stubborn. That battle between the desire to make money and the desire to be a jerk is delightful to watch.

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  34. Ex-Prof*

    The woman who asked what a circle jerk is, is my new hero. I want to be her when I grow up.

    Best supporting actor, the CEO, for having the grace to walk in at exactly the right moment.

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  36. Catgirl*

    Not comeuppance exactly but one day the heat in the building had failed and our manager came by to check on our work progress. We were all young women except for our manager and Paul, who were both middle-aged men. One of us made a reference to the cold (it was 15’C! in the room!) and Paul said “Just like a woman, always complaining” with a commiserative smirk at the manager. Instead of bro-bonding with Paul our manager snapped “That type of comment is totally unacceptable. We do not tolerate that sort of then here!”

    Reply ↓
    1. Strive to Excel*

      On one hand I’m sad that this is still something that’s having to be said. On the other hand, mad props to your manager!

      Reply ↓
    2. SummitSkein*

      This reminds me of how we spent YEARS in our office complaining about how it was cold, and got told any number of things: the entire building is on the same system, we can’t fix it, it’s because of the windows, someone must have touched the thermostats, you can’t run space heaters or it messes up the sensors, etc. All to have it finally turn out that there was legitimately an issue with the ducts that had been going on so long no one knew how it had gotten that way. Not really any sort of comeuppance, but I always did feel a little smirky toward our maintenance guy for the rest of his tenure for having ignored us for so long and actually being wrong the whole time.

      Reply ↓
      1. Ally McBeal*

        We had issues for more than a year with the toilets in the women’s bathroom at my job. We got frequent reminders to not flush sanitary items (or anything other than TP) so we all assumed the office manager – a very competent and no-nonsense woman – thought we were idiots… finally the office manager got fed up with calling the same plumber every week and hired a new plumber, who immediately identified the issue as being in the toilets themselves, not anything we were doing to the pipes. Got the toilets replaced, haven’t had a single issue since, and all of us (office manager included) are very glad we’re not idiots.

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  37. Panhandlerann*

    Back when I was a freshly minted faculty member, I was in a toxic, dysfunctional department. Our program assistant, Cathy, confided in me one day that one of the senior professors–I’ll call her Reba–regularly made Cathy count the words in Reba’s students’ essays. (Never mind that if a word count was really important to her, she could have had the students email her the essays, and she could have gotten a word count instantly using Word functions.) This of course took Cathy lots of time and was tedious work. Cathy was afraid to tell the then-department chair, a very lazy guy who was in a weirdly co-dependent relationship with Reba. A few years later, having gotten tenure, I found myself as the department chair and planned, as one of my first acts, to put an end to this. Cathy begged me, however, not to say anything to Reba; she was fearful Reba would make her life hell (and believe me, she was fully capable of that). I didn’t have that much power as chair as it was an elected peer position, so, feeling I couldn’t actually protect Cathy that much, I didn’t say anything to Reba. UNTIL: REBA HERSELF TOLD ME WHAT SHE WAS DOING!!!! One day, she stopped in my doorway and, as part of the conversation, mentioned to me that she was having Cathy count the words in the essays, “bless her heart.” So I was able to tell Reba that this wasn’t a good use of Cathy’s time and the same end could be achieved in a much quicker way…. So that was the end of that.

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  38. Upside down Question Mark*

    Had a male coworker, “Ken”, who a week or so after stating met my roommate in the street and promptly fell head over heels with her. He quickly moved in to our STUDIO (I slept behind a blanket wall myself) and began eating all my food. When I asked her about it she said he couldn’t get more hours at work. Readers, I went to the manager of our six person company to offer some of my hours and she was confused and confirmed that no, Ken had told her he was already overwhelmed working TWO HOURS per day. When I asked Ken, he said he just needed more time than most people to relax. I would have understood if he had a chronic illness but no, he was writing his memoirs at 21, believing he’d make it big and preparing (after one month of dating) to PROPOSE to my roommate. My roommate let me know privately she was letting him stay there because she felt sorry for him and had never known how to let guys down.

    Ken blew me off when I tried to warn him that my roommate wasn’t in love with him and that he needed to take on more hours pronto, telling me he had seen their marriage in a vision. She kind of kept dragging him along and he kept eating everything we had. (We were all so poor none of us had savings so it really was paycheck to paycheck, and I couldn’t say anything because I relied on my roommate to have that living space and keep my visa in that country). After six months of this man sleeping on my couch, doing a subpar job at work that I had to handle, and insisting he had no other options and that I wasnt a good person unless I shared food “with the needy”, he returned home for a weekend and came back to ask where his beloved, my roommate was. She had not told him that she was going to pick up and move to Cairo to work for the summer. She had however left him a note saying she hoped they could stay “forever friends”. After packing him off to his mom, about two months later I then got an email at 4am from him with a 40 page love letter I was supposed to forward to Egypt. I replied simply, “Ken, you might want to look at Facebook”. My roommate had met up with her childhood sweetheart at her summer assignment and had GOTTEN MARRIED.

    Ken then sent a follow up letter titled “Howling to the Moon” where he insisted he wrote it while standing in a field and begging God to give him “all he deserved, and even wolves have their mates” and that “He would die an old man never knowing again true love and would be a hungered the rest of his days”. Yes, I did unashamedly forward that email to absolutely every coworker and neighbor he had ever known.

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  39. Not Australian*

    Mentioned this here before, I think, but I was secretary to the senior partner in a law firm – a man who strongly believed he was A Deity’s Gift To The Legal Profession. It started to go wrong when I asked for additional training so that I could do a job (costing) that was currently contracted out, which would save the firm money. His response was that if he trained me I’d leave, and he’d lose money on the deal. Well, fair enough: that was the end of my loyalty. I resigned a short time later and he decided not to pay me my final month’s wages, upon which I promptly took him to court and won. The fact that my award was pretty much swallowed up by costs was made up for by the reputational damage he suffered in losing a court case to his own secretary. Nemo me impune lacessit.

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  40. Janeway, Her Coffee In Hand*

    I’m autistic and worked at my last job for nearly a decade. Being autistic has never really been much of an issue in my work but I’m very open about it with my colleagues because I find people are kinder about my quirks when they know why I’m quirky. When I got a new manager, I quickly looped her in on this fact. She was totally cool about it and told me her brother is also autistic. Great. We worked well together… until suddenly we didn’t.

    Out of nowhere, she and my director start getting really nasty towards me, overloading me with extra work outside of my area, overreacting to any normal delays, criticizing how I do everything, and most importantly, saying that it’s inappropriate that I don’t make eye contact with them.

    I’ve never been good with eye contact. I fake it by looking elsewhere on someone’s face or body. They know this because I explained it in depth to both of them before. Soon after they start attacking me, they formally reprimand me, specifically pointing out how my not making good eye contact is unprofessional.

    By this point, I’m a wreck from the stress and workload, crying constantly, worrying about everything. I know they’re trying to get me fired. I’ve gone through a deeply unhelpful HR to formally get accommodations saying I don’t need to make eye contact, which doesn’t do anything to stop them from continuing to give me a crazy workload and micromanaging my every move. Nightmare manager is on a warpath and for some reason, I’m her target.

    Eventually they fired me and pretended my work performance sucked. Not true, but alright. I’m a fighter. I’m in therapy for the PTSD they caused, but I’m not too broken to fire back. I kept records of everything they did, emails, assignments, all that, because I knew what they were trying to do. I got a lawyer and we duked it out. It took a few months but ultimately, they saw the light and made a settlement offer that I could agree to.

    After all was said and done, I found out that just after the settlement was finished, the manager who started this shit very suddenly “resigned” effective immediately and took the company off of her LinkedIn. A former coworker said that after they fired me, she burned every single bridge she had at that company and treated everyone else on the team horribly. Her other direct report quit after getting the same micromanaging, overworking treatment as me, the other managers didn’t want their people working with her, and she went around badmouthing everyone below her, which lead to them avoiding her.

    The department remains in shambles and more folks are looking to leave. Turns out, backing the shitty, discriminating manager wasn’t the best move for the company. I hope they learned their lesson.

    Reply ↓
  41. WillowSunstar*

    About 10 years ago, I worked in a small department. This was before COVID, so most days were in the office and we didn’t have much choice. One of the managers (not my direct boss) was a bully and yeller (actually raising voice in front of everyone). I put up with it for a while because I was still getting my MBA and couldn’t leave because of the tuition reimbursement. There was one really bad incident when most people were out of the office, and she yelled at me over something minor to the point I started crying. There were a couple of witnesses in the dept. and one outside the dept. When I tried talking to the boss later, the in-dept. witnesses lied about it and were gaslighting me. It was at that point I finally started looking for another job, but in the same company (because of the tuition reimbursement).

    After I had been at my new job in another dept. for less than a month, I learned that the bully manager wound up getting herself fired. Karma does sometimes actually work.

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  42. sometimeswhy*

    I’ve shared this before but never pass up an opportunity to tell this story. I used to work for a photomat and, on top of all of his other poor work practices, the owner was a yeller. There was a day that I was trying to repair a scanner, literally sitting on the floor, in a tiny closet, shoulder deep in this thing that I was trying to fix and he stood over me in the doorway yelling about how I was lazy and he was going to fire me for not scanning the negatives that I could not scan until I fixed the machine that he thought service contracts for were a waste of money. When he finished, I looked up at him and said, “I’m sorry, could you repeat that?” And I’m surprised he didn’t have a stroke right then and there.

    Another time, the comeuppance time, he was yelling at EVERYONE. He was standing in the doorway to the backroom, with his back to the customer floor while he went on and on and we continued to work in the back room. We had contracts with a lot of local professional photographers who would leave their negatives on site and just order prints over the phone. You can see where this is going. One of the pros walked in while he was yelling at us and the pro, very calmly, told him he wasn’t going to do business with someone who treated his staff like that and that he would take his business to [big-box competitor] before letting the owner make another cent off his work then told the owner to collect all of his material and take down all the advertising with him on it. The owner told us to jump to it and the pro stepped in again, telling the owner that HE had to do it and the owner had to ask us where a bunch of the things were because he didn’t know.

    It didn’t actually fix anything for our working conditions. He yelled at us for making him lose the business literally right after the guy left but it was so, so satisfying in the moment.

    Reply ↓
  43. Long, long ago*

    This happened long, long ago when I was a senior in college. I was working in a small health food store that I’d been working in since my first year of college, and it was my first shift back after returning from my five-year-old brother’s funeral in another state. My coworkers and my fantastic boss, Ed, were incredibly supportive.

    A couple hours into my shift, I was checking out a young man who was known to be a bit of an ass, but in a tolerable-enough way that we didn’t hate him, just rolled our eyes. He told me, as I was ringing him up with my co-worker bagging, “You know, it wouldn’t hurt for you to smile.” I stopped, stared at him for a few moments, then walked away to the staff room, which doubled as Ed’s office.

    Ed took one look at my face, went out front, and when he came back in five minutes later, told me that I was welcome to continue working or go home with full pay, but that I never had to check out that customer again.

    The next time that particular customer came in while I was working, he gave me a very sincere apology, and I handed off checkout duties to my co-worker and went to stock the bulk bins. That customer continued to be a bit of an ass, but I doubt he ever told anyone to smile ever again.

    Reply ↓
      1. Long, long ago*

        Thank you! I later heard from my co-worker that Ed ripped the guy a new one and almost banned him from the store. The only reason he didn’t was the guy wanted to apologize immediately, but Ed sent him away “to think about what he’d done.” Ed was the best boss I’ve ever had, and not just for this incident.

        Reply ↓
  44. Jester*

    Sadly, the jerk I had to deal with failed upward and is now a branch manager. He started a wild feud with me and every single person was on my side because A) I didn’t do anything and B) no one liked him even a little bit, which was at least some vindication.

    Reply ↓
    1. Throwaway Account*

      I’m betting “branch manager” means a library and not a bank.

      Sigh @ how toxic libraries can be.

      Reply ↓
  45. Cabbagepants*

    I’ve posted this one before but I had a colleague who would constantly flag his projects as “top priority,” which at my company meant they required 24/7 support. He then dumped these projects into my team with no advance notice, typically on a Friday afternoon. Any pushback was met with a lecture about how Very Important the project was.

    I finally met my limit after being called at 10 am on a Sunday to fix some busted thing in one of his projects. I couldn’t figure out what help was even needed, but instead of breaking my butt and my team’s butt to cobble SOMETHING together, like usual, I followed the official escalation procedure for Top Priority projects and… called him! He let the phone ring a while before answering and was very nonplussed about why I was “bothering” him. I told him that since his project was sooooooo important, I needed him to figure out what path to take. He got more and more grumpy and kept trying to throw it back to me, and I kept saying “oh but since it’s Top Priority, we need to figure this out properly!!!”

    Perhaps I should feel guilty about calling him at church — I could hear church music in the background — but I was Very Done with doing mental and emotional labor to fix this guy’s messes.

    Reply ↓
    1. Strive to Excel*

      People who don’t want to be interrupted at church shouldn’t leave messes for colleagues to fix on weekends.

      Reply ↓
  46. I'm just here for the cats!!*

    That last one with the lawyer, chef’s kiss!! I really hope his wife reamed him a new one. Then went and told his mother and she yelled at him too! And I hope he learned a huge lesson!

    Reply ↓
  47. 42.5 hours*

    Years ago, straight out of undergrad, I worked at a small publishing company. Pay was not great, but it was the recession, so we all mostly tolerated it. A new head of operations was hired, and he decided that people weren’t working enough hours. He was very much of the “you all should feel lucky to have a job” school of management.

    We were all salaried exempt (although, spoiler alert, many shouldn’t have been), all working hard, and meeting deliverables except when the goals were truly unrealistic. So he instituted a policy requiring staff in certain departments to track, to the minute, how much time they spent on each project, how much time they spent on meetings and other general admin, etc. The weekly time was required to add up, each week, to at least 42.5 hours. Some departments were required to work more hours during busy times – and again, none of this was paid overtime.

    Someone – I still don’t know who, but I have ideas – complained to the state labor department, which opened an investigation. The company was found to have misclassified many of its employees as salaried/exempt when they should have been nonexempt and thus eligible for overtime. The company had to pay out to current and former employees all of the unpaid overtime this individual had insisted we document in minute detail, going back several years. I received a check a couple years after I had left; people who were there longer received a lot more.

    The company was later acquired, and it didn’t take long for the operations director to be let go after that.

    Reply ↓
    1. Spreadsheet Hero*

      I’m honestly mystified he kept his job longer than five minutes after the labor department brought a suit.

      Reply ↓
    2. Abogado Avocado.*

      I dunno. Sounds like the operations director inadvertently did y’all a favor in instituting a system that resulted in you getting compensated for overtime a couple years after you left the job.

      Reply ↓
    3. MigraineMonth*

      I worked for a company that made all its salaried exempt staff track all time in 15 minute increments (even if you weren’t in a billable role). While I was working there, it lost a class-action lawsuit that resulted in one role being reclassified as non-exempt and the company having to pay out (probably massive) overtime owed. The company then spent a mandatory staff meeting telling us how mean this former employee had been to sue the billion-dollar company over “alleged” (by that time confirmed) labor violations.

      Fortunately, the company learned its lesson. It immediately required all us employees to waive the right to join class-action lawsuits. *rolls eyes*

      Reply ↓
      1. MigraineMonth*

        That company is locally infamous for hardly ever firing anyone, just applying increasing pressure until the employee quits and then challenging unemployment benefits. The unemployment office is so fed up with these shenanigans, it *automatically* rewards unemployment benefits to anyone who applies for them after quitting.

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  48. Anon for this*

    Once I worked at an AWFUL startup for about 6 months. The culture was terrible – it was every cringey cliche about startups in 2010 – and one day I got in trouble for not being “happy” enough and not trying to get people to like me enough. Essentially they put me on a PiP for this and I was constantly nitpicked for how I was wording things in emails, how I was (or more often, wasn’t) responding to off topic things in the group chat, how I didn’t go out and get drunk with everyone after work (I would prefer to do that with my actual friends, thanks). The ringleader of this wasn’t my actual manager, but he was friends with my manager. We’ll call him Bob.

    After a couple months of this I found a new job. The next day I got another nitpicky email about everything I’d done wrong that week and I replied, giving my notice. They were floored and that felt good. I went on my way and no longer work in that industry.

    15 years later I notice that there are a bunch of new files in my google drive – a shared drive I didn’t realize I had access to. It was created by Jim and had all kinds of confidential documents from that startup (now an established company). I remembered that they had asked us to use our personal google drives for a shared drive when I worked for that company, and I contacted them to ask to be removed from it. Their IT person emailed me back and asked for some screenshots and more information, which I sent to him, but he didn’t remove me from the drive. It was super annoying because it was messing up my own personal files and I couldn’t figure out how to remove myself. I emailed Bob to let him know what was going on but he never replied.

    After a week or two I googled Bob and saw that he had just left that company after 15 years to join a rival startup. I’m not exactly sure this is what happened, but I think he had taken all the confidential files he could via the google drive he created with his personal account when I worked there. I had full admin privileges to the drive, and finally one day I just got fed up and deleted everything in the drive, and then the drive itself.

    Reply ↓
  49. I don't work in this van*

    I had a colleague at my first real job out of college who was known for making her team’s lives (especially women) so miserable that they quit (we called her laser eyes because once she noticed you, it was basically game over). I was completely outside of her chain of command, and it drove her nuts that she couldn’t do the same to me. She’d regularly send passive aggressive or straight out aggressive emails to me, which I kept in a special folder in my inbox. One day, I replied to one of these with a snarkier-than-usual response, and she took it to her boss (also a known hot head), who came and yelled at me for the tone of the email. So (with my boss’s blessing), I opened up the folder and watched as he read some of the things she’d sent to me and he slunk away.
    Eventually laser eyes transferred within the company to a higher-level role on a less prestigious team, where I had to keep working with her, but also had some control over her getting things for her team. She was perfectly pleasant to me through all of that.

    Reply ↓
  50. Amber Rose*

    Oh I do have a story! Years ago I worked in land subdivisions. One of my tasks was getting signatures on use agreements and easements. So I get an easement drafted for this new neighborhood that’s being built in a rural area, and get a ton of signatures on it, and then send it to the rep from the rural municipality last, because that’s process.

    Dude completely re-writes my already signed agreement, and includes a bunch of stuff that makes no sense and deletes a bunch of clauses that make the whole thing nonsense. Dude. I emailed politely letting him know there was no way this was getting accepted. He told me to submit anyway so I did, and it got rejected, which I told him.

    He responded, “Don’t you know who I am? Tell the provincial government that they can shove their rejection up their nose!” I’m paraphrasing after all these years, but he did, word for word, ask if I knew who he was, which is a sparkling moment in my career I’ve never surpassed. I reveled in it for a little while.

    And then I emailed the provincial government official and told him that he’d been told to shove his rejection up his nose. Along with Mr. Don’t-You-Know’s email and phone number so they could hash it out.

    A week later I got my original document back, signed, with a sullen, “See attached.”

    Reply ↓
  51. Schadenfreude in Motion*

    I worked at Old Job and the two people in charge (Head of Llama Grooming Operations and Associate Head of Llama Grooming Operations) made 60% more than us Llama Groomers and were total jerks. Head told me that he “just didn’t like women with short hair” after I got a pixie cut. He also informed me that I was doomed to divorce because my husband and I have separate bank accounts. Associate Head told me that Catholicism was the only correct religion and women need to quit their jobs when they get pregnant to raise their children. Both of them were generally unpleasant to work with and I left because of a toxic work environment fostered by them. Years later, the Head’s boss finally found out about their shenanigans and other administrators started sniffing around the Llama Grooming Building. They discovered Head and Associate Head were rarely in office, when they were they were not directing Llama Grooming Operations (and in fact sometimes hindering it) and Head’s boss had to step in. Head and Associate Head were demoted to Llama Groomers and not allowed to supervise or manage anyone else. Their contracts were subsequently not renewed.

    Reply ↓
  52. Amber Rose*

    Oh I do have a story! Years ago I worked in land subdivisions. One of my tasks was getting signatures on use agreements and easements. So I get an easement drafted for this new neighborhood that’s being built in a rural area, and get a ton of signatures on it, and then send it to the rep from the rural municipality last, because that’s process.

    Dude completely re-writes my already signed agreement, and includes a bunch of stuff that makes no sense and deletes a bunch of clauses that make the whole thing nonsense. Dude. I emailed politely letting him know there was no way this was getting accepted. He told me to submit anyway so I did, and it got rejected, which I told him.

    He responded, “Don’t you know who I am? Tell the provincial government that they can shove their rejection up their nose!” I’m paraphrasing after all these years, but he did, word for word, ask if I knew who he was, which is a sparkling moment in my career I’ve never surpassed. I reveled in it for a little while.

    And then I emailed the provincial government official and told him that he’d been told to shove his rejection up his nose. Along with Mr. Don’t-You-Know’s email and phone number so they could hash it out.

    A week later I got my original document back, signed, with a sullen, “See attached.”

    (Apologies if this pops up twice, I can’t tell if I was filtered or my internet is that bad. Both could be true.)

    Reply ↓
  53. Anon For This*

    Early in my career I worked for a museum with about 10 -15 on staff, a mix of full an part time. We had one guy, JerkFace who duties included being the weekend manager (they had two days off in the middle of the week). This mean he had to manage the part time staff over the weekend (mostly teenagers) and he had keys to all the secured areas of the museum incase there was an emergency. JerkFace would constantly complain about the part time staff, talk loudly about how unprofessional almost everyone but he was and just be generally obnoxious. He didn’t get fired because finding someone to be a weekend manager can be pretty difficult and while he was obnoxious we didn’t think was doing anything that was actionable…until we hired a new part time staff members. After just two weeks she report him to HR for: 1) Leaving the teenage part time workers alone in the building for hours at a time 2) Brining his friends/family into secured areas of the museum 3) Smoking in a back room (yes, inside the building) and 4) Going through peoples personal files and sharing information like details from their performance review.

    But the worst thing was, when it became clear JerkFace was going to get fired he brought twins to the meeting with him. I guess he thought we wouldn’t fire him just because he had children (a fact we all knew already).

    Reply ↓
    1. cncx*

      The kids as props is a thing! I had a former coworker get fired for forgery and theft. She brought her baby to the meeting! We were like, you know we could have pressed charges but instead you’re only getting fired, right? Wild

      Reply ↓
      1. Ally McBeal*

        Boy is it a thing. You may have noticed that Elon Musk started carrying one of his young sons around with him (to places children have no business being, like government meetings) right after the United Health CEO was shot. Nothing like using your 4-year-old kid as a human shield.

        Reply ↓
    2. NothingIsLittle*

      Oh my gosh! At a previous job, the man who held the position before me was fired, but his wife still worked there. She brought their kids by a few times on the way home from school and one of them said, “You know [Boss] fired my Daddy.” 0-0 I suspect she was coached; Dad was a piece of work.

      Reply ↓
  54. Jane*

    At the first law firm I worked at, the head partner there was a huge jerk. Would bully everyone, absolutely attempted to make me cry my first week of work (I didn’t) by yelling at me over a typo, made a series of remarks that we would now call microaggressions (asking the non-white attorneys, when they had a small grammar error, if English was their first language) and all in all just a pig. Most people, including me, lasted only a year or two there. 10 years after I left, turns out head partner was trying to be appointed as a judge. The supervising judge somehow got the contact information for one of the former attorneys, who told him everything he saw while an employee and then gave the judge my contact info. I told the supervising judge everything I saw and gave him the contact info of three other people, who then gave him the contact info of more people… Anyway, that jerk partner never became a judge.

    Reply ↓
  55. A Simple Narwhal*

    This is a tiny story in comparison to the gold from the original post but here goes:

    I have a coworker who isn’t a jerk per se, but thinks no one has ever suffered more than her, and she wants you to know it. A lot of that suffering is inflated and/or self-inflicted. Think: “I worked sooo late on this issue, I’m so tired, I can’t believe I had to be up so late for it, it was sooo much work.”, except it wasn’t urgent, no one asked her to do it, and it was explicitly stated that it could be done the next day. Bonus points if it was actually a super quick task too.

    The Friday before a long weekend, our boss says we can all sign off early and enjoy the nice weather. He asked if anyone was around that afternoon, would they mind checking the team inbox once just to ensure we didn’t miss any last-minute urgent issues. If there was an issue they could contact him and he would handle it. Woe-Is-Me-Wendy volunteers to check the inbox. Great. At the end of the meeting, manager asks if anyone has any fun plans for the weekend, or if anyone was going to do anything with the couple extra hours from our early release. Wendy immediately says that she wishes she could do something fun, but since she has to check the inbox she couldn’t possibly do anything, she must be tethered to her computer the whole afternoon, what a shame it is, it’s going to be nice out but she has to stay inside and closely monitor the inbox. Our manager keeps trying to tell her that she doesn’t have to be glued to her computer, she only has to check it once, but she keeps talking over him and weaving her tale of woe.

    I had enough and when she finally paused to breathe I cut in, super sweetly: “Oh gosh Wendy, that sounds like checking the inbox will be a real imposition for you. I have no plans, I’ll gladly do it! You enjoy your afternoon.”

    And she’s stuck – either she accepts my kind offer and loses the ability to complain about the task, or she insists it’s not an imposition to do it, also losing the ability to complain about it because she just openly admitted it wasn’t a problem. The look on her face trying to decide what to do was delicious.

    Again, she’s not necessarily a jerk, but it was really satisfying to finally cut her complaining off at the knees.

    ——–

    TLDR: Coworker complains loudly and excessively about an easy task she volunteered for. I kindly offer to do it for her in front of our manager and she realizes she can’t complain about it anymore without looking bad.

    Reply ↓
    1. Zombeyonce*

      I had a coworker like that. Her main task (a task that rotated through our team) was hardest on the days she had to do it. All the requests that were complicated or confusing only came in on the days she was working on the task, and if you happened to get a complicated or confusing request on your day, it must be because you had switched days with her, so she should somehow get “credit” for the hard thing you had to do. In reality, nothing that different came on her days, she just enjoyed complaining about requests way more than anyone else.

      Reply ↓
  56. RedinSC*

    I had been working at a university for about a year when they hired in someone new and moved me to her team. I was the only person doing my non-technical job, and I was moved to a team of all technical people, so team meetings and such had very little information for me. THe new boss would take her team out for lunch, but not include me. She would purchase little treats for her team, but not bring me one (like a cookie on easter, things like that).

    She also brought a bullwhip into the office and was demonstrating it (WHAT?) so that the whip end of it cracked by my cubie entrance.

    Her tech team was all male, I was the only other female besides her and she just hated me.

    I went to the ombudsperson to ask how do I navigate this, and was told I could 1. make a formal complaint or 2. look for a new job. I got a new job, and a few months into the new job the Title 9 officer (the lead attorney for the university, especially with regards to sexual harassment) called to request my experience with this boss. THe boss was later fired, because all along she was sexually harassing some of the mean she managed. what a gem she was.

    Reply ↓
  57. StillAnon4This*

    I worked for a very small company as my first real job out of university. At the time, I was in a very bad headspace for several reasons, and was quite vulnerable to gaslighting – which the business owner was a certified expert in. In fact, he was a mental health professional by background. My personal take is that he was drummed out of the profession for pedophilia and/or causing too many patients to commit suicide. I am absolutely NOT joking about that.

    Anyway, he was very psychologically abusive, and what went from what I thought would be my dream job became sheer Hell in a few months – and I was unable to understand it or see that it was deliberate. I was unable to see what he was up to, until one day – about 1.5 years later, he started berating me for something while a business contact was on hold on the phone. Except – the person wasn’t on hold. The call was live.

    The individual told my boss off in no uncertain terms. I was so emmeshed in the situation that it was a real revelation to me – the first time I realized that it wasn’t me, it was my boss who was the problem.

    Took a few months (and therapy) for me to get my feet back under me, but it was the start of me seeing the forest rather than just the trees, and learning to stand up for myself. When that happened, the boss couldn’t figure out how he had lost his hold on me. He eventually fired me, when it became clear that I was now impervious to his manipulations. I ended up using a couple of his other suppliers as references, and they told me I had been the longest serving employee he had ever had (at 2 years), and they couldn’t figure out why I’d stayed as long as I did.

    Reply ↓
    1. Throwaway Account*

      Your story shows how important it is to speak up when you can. The person on the phone call really started something for you! And good for you for getting your feet back under you!

      Reply ↓
  58. Tim*

    My mom’s story:
    We went to a very elite school with really rich kids, in comparison to them we were poor. One of the richest ladies invited us to an event. We went it was fine. They were kind of mean and looked down on us for not having money, this was a pretty bare bones event for a stranger so kind of a weird thing to go to. My mom saw her at a school function & the lady asked my mom where her thank you note was and my mom said “Oh I’m so busy I don’t even have time to write the thank you notes I should write.”

    Reply ↓
    2. Ally McBeal*

      A thank you note for… an invite to a party? What an odd thing to demand. You say “thank you so much for having me” either right as you’re walking in the door or right as you’re leaving (both if you’re extra polite) and that’s it.

      Reply ↓
  59. BritSouthAfricanAmericanMutt*

    This did not happen at work but at high school. I had a history teacher who seemed to hate me. We had to write essays and submit them. I failed every single one, yet I was doing really well in all my other classes. I even had the ‘teacher’s pet’ read one of my essays, and she couldn’t find fault with it. He assigned an essay that he had also assigned the previous year, and I persuaded the top student from that year to let me copy her essay (for which she received an A). I handed in her essay with my name, and wouldn’t you know it – I failed. The teacher called me in and started going through everything that was wrong with my work. I waited patiently for his tirade to end, pulled out the original, and said, “Hmmm. But when Sansa submitted this essay last year, you loved it.” He tried to come at me for plagiarism, but his heart was not in it because he knew I could take this to the principal. Strangely enough, from that moment on, my grades magically improved. I studied history at university, and the professor went out of his way to comment on how well-written my essays were!

    Reply ↓
    1. krystle*

      I did the same thing (sort of). My best friend and I were in the same class (also History), and she would always get an A, and I would get a C or a D for everything, but (and being totally honest) I was much better at the subject and writing.
      Anyway, we caught on to this fact. Then, we submitted the exact same essay for an assignment but in different fonts. Surprise, surprise, my friend got an A+, and I got a D.
      Honestly, the essay was probably only worth a B, but it vindicated the rest of my grades!

      Reply ↓
      1. CeeDoo*

        My bad teacher story is: my senior year, I did the work program, so we had a class about work during 1st period every day. I was a national merit scholar finalist and #3 in my class, and the teacher gave me an 86 as my marking period grade. My mom called him about it. He admitted that his grades were arbitrary and he raised my 86 to some kind of A, I don’t remember. But we were damned if a work study class was going to bring me out of top 10 contention. I was calculus student of the year, with a 104 average and the only student in that “work” class to do the assignments. That was in 1993, and I get salty when I think of him endangering my academic scholarships because he pulled grades out of his hindquarters.

        Reply ↓
    2. Pixel*

      I have a vaguely related story about my HS AP Biology teacher, sadly there’s no comeuppance. We were graded in 6-week chunks. I worked my butt off the first 6 weeks, got a C. Did about half the work second 6 weeks, got a C. Said “screw it”, did no work at all the third 6 weeks, got a C. Met with my advisor and informed him I would stage a strike if he didn’t let me drop the class since I wasn’t learning anything anyway.

      It might be relevant to note that what I DID do, the entire semester, because that’s how I dressed at that point in my fashion journey, was to sometimes wear tight sweaters over some fairly generous assets. As it were. A friend of mine a year ahead opined that I might have gotten better grades if the sweaters were lower-cut, and she wasn’t kidding — her experience in her year was that the girls in his class who wore revealing clothing got higher grades. Gross.

      Reply ↓
      1. Ally McBeal*

        Yeah, I’ve come to understand over the years that school dress codes are much more for the teachers than students. Don’t tell me my 14-year-old peer is distracted from learning by a bra strap when the creepy science teacher is the one making low-key lewd comments.

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    3. Glad I'm Not In the Rat-Race Any More*

      Language Arts teacher was very cold and distant toward me from the start of the year although I was a social mouse and not a slacker, clown, or troublemaker, and put me in the remedial reading group when she passed out group assignments. Since I’d been asked to actually skip that grade but my parents, school’s counselor and I all decided it wouldn’t be the best thing socially / emotionally, this was a hella shock to me, and to my mother and counselor as well when I went home crying about it. Mom went up for a “grown-up” meeting held during LA Teacher’s paperwork hour, and lo and behold the next day I was moved to the advanced group.

      Still not as bad as the history teacher I had to take my birth certificate to in order to get him to call me by my given name, because he kept insisting it was a nickname even though it was listed appropriately on the class roster. I’d shown the certificate to my classmates beforehand for fear he’d try to gaslight the whole class that I was lying about what it said. Yes, he was just that much of a pompous ass.

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  60. HiddenT*

    Ooh, I have one!

    My first job out of grad school was incredibly toxic. The main office was in Europe, with my office in the US essentially acting as “second shift”. We did daily handovers between offices for ongoing projects (which were short-term projects usually, a matter of days, occasionally weeks), with Europe sending us one when they logged off around 11am EST, and us sending them one back before we left for the day around 6 EST.

    One of the most toxic aspects was that we weren’t allowed to *ever* tell clients “no, we can’t do that”, even if they had ridiculous requests (such as “we need this project by tomorrow morning” when the volume would normally take at least a week, or even two). So on an almost daily basis, the European office would hand over ridiculous projects where we were scrambling to get vendors assigned and get everything set up, and then handing it back over for delivery the next day. There were only four of us in the US office for most of the eighteen months I was there, and all the team leads were in Europe. Almost every day, without fail, the team leads would Skype us and berate us for dropping the ball, the vendors delivering sub-par work for the insane rush projects, telling us we should have done XYZ differently, etc. The European office obviously considered us all to be totally incompetent, based on how they treated us, despite the many times we tried to explain that we were doing our best and that many times we did what we did based on previous guidance from them, but they never apologized or believed us. This all culminated in the fateful day when the owners flew over to give us performance reviews, and three of us gave them our notice in person that day (the owners were a married couple and the wife berated me about how she hated flying to the US and if she’d known we’d all quit she wouldn’t have bothered, like that was my fault).

    I stayed in contact with the one person in the US who didn’t quit that day (she left several months later once she found another job). She told me that one of the worst (most condescending) of the team leads in Europe came over to work in the US office while they scrambled to find replacements and train them. Apparently, one day the stress of being given a ridiculous amount of rush projects and the treatment from her colleagues in Europe caused the team lead to break down sobbing in panic. My coworker just looked at her and said “now you know what it’s like here.”

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  61. The valeyard*

    Due to covid-related circumstances, my department at our company was slow for a while, and I loaned some people to another department that needed help with a project. However, circumstances then changed and my department got incredibly busy, so I asked for my people back. That department manager insisted that my loan had to be indefinite as his project had priority over my department’s “normal” workload. He was a 20 year company veteran and I was fairly new and he would talk in circles around everything I said and insist that’s how it worked. I wound up going to our mutual supervisor and asking very nicely for clarity on how priorities worked and let them know that if the project took priority, our normal workload would be falling behind. Our supervisor was like “WHAT” and immediately called the manager to ask where he’d gotten the idea that his special project took priority over normal work. Manager had no answer and my people were immediately returned.

    Another covid incident: I was sent a document to complete for a client. I looked at it, sent an email about it to its sender, then left the document on the corner of my dining room table desk and forgot about it. Suddenly several weeks later I got multiple displeased messages from several parts of our company, including one c-suite, asking why I was sitting on the document that was sent to me, since the person who’d sent it confirmed it was with me for execution and it was overdue, and the client was really upset. It was sort of terrifying- I was getting blown up by VIPs and all I remembered is that I did have the document and hadn’t completed it. And then I looked at the email I sent and remembered what it said- that under a state law, I couldn’t complete the document until the sender completed a form giving me authority to do so- I even attached the needed form for them. I had 100% sent that to the sender upon receipt, and THEY had dropped the ball and then told everyone it was me. I very politely let everyone, including the sender, know that I’d be glad to get the document done as soon as the sender completed the form, and attached my e-mail for details. About an hour later, the sender was at the front door of my house with the completed authorization form begging me to complete the document. I did. Never heard another word from any of them besides a thanks for my speed once I had the authority.

    The kicker? Both these stories are about the same person, and they happened within a few months. That person (the manager/sender who had worked at the company forever) didn’t speak to me from then until when he quit about six months later. I was asked to oversee the transfer of his department to a new manager who happened to be a friend of mine, and helping with that turned out to be one of the achievements that got me promoted.

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  62. Lorna*

    The VP of Sales and Marketing, an utterly despicable and exhausting human being, won a huge government contract by lying about our company having 50 SAP experts working for us. We didn’t!

    The client came in for an impromptu visit to talk to these 50 formidable SAP people and sh*t hit the fan so hard the walls had freckles. VP of Sales turned a shade of white/green I’ve never seen on a human before. He tried to do some damage control, pretending the 50 people were still onboarding, but to no avail. Within a week contract gone, VP of Sales gone. Work was a lot more pleasant afterwards.

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  63. Louisa*

    These are great! I’m going to share #3 with my mom, who worked as a secretary for a gaggle of entitled lawyers for years. They caused her so much stress, it was infuriating.
    About 10 years ago I took an 11-month contract position at a research university, doing administrative work for a small ORU (organized research unit) within the public policy department. The pay wasn’t great, and though I was tasked with fulltime duties they limited my hours to 30 per week, but I was hoping to get my foot in the door so I took it. One of my coworkers, who I shared an office with–let’s call her Sally–had a 40 hour per week job as a communications & events coordinator. She knew very little about either, but her mother was an academic in the same ORU (yes, they had nepotism policies at this university, but they weren’t enforced). Sally had three work-study students at her disposal, whom she farmed out 60% of her work to, while she worked at her other gig as a wedding planner at a country club. (I knew about her other gig from phone conversations she’d have during the day). Her style was to roll in late and leave early, but the work got done [by the students, mostly] so her grift was largely invisible. Anyway, things came to head eventually when she decided that having 60% of her job done by others wasn’t enough–she wanted *me* to pick up the rest of it. Now, we shared a supervisor–let’s call him Mark–an academic who was rarely in the office, but from my limited contact with him, he seemed like a no-nonsense kind of fellow. Sally, as part of her campaign to make me do her work, told me “it’s part of Mark’s vision” that I do tasks assigned to Sally. At this point, seeing the dysfunction all around me (and the chancellor had just announced an $8M structural deficit and a hiring freeze, so I knew my chances of finding a new position within the university where slim to none), I decided I had nothing to lose and called a meeting for Sally, Mark, and myself. I asked him point blank what his “vision” was, vis-a-vis taking on things that were in Sally’s job description, and also dropped mention that if Sally was feeling overburdened, perhaps one of her THREE work-study students could help her out. Mark blew a gasket–he’d only known about one work-study hire. And no, he’d had no “vision” of me taking on some of Sally’s duties. All I can say is, it was sweet! And luckily I landed a better job after that–outside of the university. Sally herself left around the time I did, and out of curiousity I looked at her LinkedIn to see where she landed. Turns out, at a nonprofit where her mother sits on the board! The grift continues…

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  64. Computer design guy*

    My company configures and sells business computer systems so we have sales reps who manage the business and social side and solution architects who handle the technical part of a sale. Fergus was high on his own supply, smartest guy in the room, etc. and never let you forget he was a USC grad. He even did his own configurations because ‘he was faster and better at it than an architect’. He also loved to promise our professional services at zero cost years in the future to sweeten a deal. The sale might be profitable but the project would eventually be a net loss long after he got his commission check.

    We got wind of a potential order that the customer wanted requoted on hardware we sold but was designed for a competitor, so the bid configuration needed to be converted. I started the analysis started to see issues but Fergus was adamant we had to duplicate the other vendor’s work. I forced the issue and got his direction in an email.

    We got the order but the configuration was missing a major piece of hardware we had to provide for free, a loss in the tens of thousands of dollars. Needless to say there were a bunch of review meetings after the fact to identify what went wrong and how to fix it. Fergus started throwing me under the bus so I pulled out his email telling me NOT to do my normal job and just parrot the old build.

    At the end of the internal review Fergus was told he would not be paid commissions on any order that wasn’t designed by a solutions architect, and that we had the final say on hardware. He left a week or so later.

    And there was much rejoicing by the architects and project managers.

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    1. Lexi*

      Mine is quite old and doubles as mild sexual harassment. Back in the 80s I worked for a small company with about 20 employees. The leaders were all men in their 40s while everyone else were wonen about mid 20s-maybe married, but most had not started the kids-house-need this job train yet.

      We had a CFO in his 40s who liked to “joke” about his age. Mostly we ignored his inappropriate comments, but one time he made his “I’m 40 and want to trade in for a couple of 20.” joke. Unfortunately for him, he made this joke while talking to 3 or 4 of the younger employees and everyone one of us just reacted by making a face and said eeeew. He quickly walked away and that was the last time he said anything like that.

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  65. Rocket Raccoon*

    Worked in a commercial kitchen, new drama-llama kitchen manager comes in. By the end of the year she’s fired or lost over half the staff (I was fired). Six months after I left, the general manager retires and the first thing the new GM does is march the KM out the door and replace her. Ha! Twenty years later I circled back around to that org and now I’m the KM.

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  66. Middle Aged Lady*

    Very minor, but satisfying. I had a boss who could be cold and demanding. Not the worst boss, but I didn’t like her. When I turned in my notice, to transfer to another department, she didn’t soeak to me for a week and spent the second week sighing loudly as I was going over job duties with her and the other staff. After she retired, she sent me a friend request on FB. I did not friend her, and she emailed me saying she wanted to keep in touch, and did I see her request? I sinply replied, “Yes, I saw it.”

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    1. 2 and a Possible*

      Interesting flex? My difficult boss (attempts) to keep in touch with former employees.

      A few have shared they don’t like it, but are afraid of my boss’s influence which I am not sure she has.

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  67. Tall Hobbit*

    I worked with a woman—Christine—who was a bully, but seemed to hold particular resentment for me because I outranked her and she had a daughter my age. She was friends with her manager, so a lot of bad behavior went unchecked. Some of her greatest hits included lying to my manager about my performance and marking up a final report that I wrote with snarky comments and leaving it in a common area. About a year before she quit, she planned a Teapot Design Competition, which ended up being a headache because she kept dropping work on other people and missing deadlines. My manager became so frustrated with her that she started calling it the Goddamned Teapot Design Competition.

    Shortly after I was promoted, Christine got another job. Her notice period was very fraught—at one point she told our director to go f himself and she generally made it clear that she did not like our organization and most of the staff. A lot of people were relieved when she left.

    She ended up getting fired from her next job. A couple years later, I had an open position on my team. Not only did Christine apply, but her cover letter talked extensively about her success planning and running the Teapot Design Competition and her positive working relationships with staff.

    I declined to interview her and felt vindicated.

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  68. FormerScrewdriverJockey*

    I had a really horrible boss in my first IT job at a large and prestigious law firm. We had a very nice GrandBoss, but he was a big wig at the firm so we didn’t see him much, nor was he involved in things on a day to day level. JerkBoss would order me around like a serf, and then be fake nice to me when he wanted something. This happened a lot when it came to ordering equipment – hardware and software. He would have me order many thousands of dollars of items and then approve my purchase orders. JerkBoss and his sidekick would also disappear for hours many days in a month. No idea where they were, I just had to carry on by myself.

    After a little while, I started to realize that the items being ordered were not things that the firm used. Think ordering $15,000 worth of iMacs at a place that only used Windows-based computers. And software that I knew the firm did not use. This went on for a while, and I tried to get to talk to GrandBoss about it, but JerkBoss made sure (I realized in hindsight) that I was never alone with GrandBoss. But one fateful day, JerkBoss and his sidekick were being escorted off the premises as I was coming back from lunch. In handcuffs! By actual NYPD cops! I was terrified that they were coming for me next, but I got a visit from GrandBoss (in my tiny cubicle) and he brought me up to speed. It seems that JerkBoss and his sidekick were running a computer consulting company on the side, using all the stuff he had me order as purchases for his private clients. His home was raided too, and they found thousands of dollars of equipment there. JerkBoss figured out that he could approve my purchase orders but GrandBoss had to approve anything he ordered. After I stopped hyperventilating, I realized that I still had a job and that none of this was splashing on me. And the look on JerkBoss’ face as he was being led away still cheers me to this day.

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      1. FormerScrewdriverJockey*

        Oddly enough, this was not the only time I was witness to something like this. A few years later I was working IT at another, very large law firm. There was a woman who ran the word processing pool and another woman who managed all of the legal secretaries. There was a big word processing center next to my office/equipment room with many desks. I would see the usual team of regular word processors working and then a bunch of temp people sitting around doing nothing in the back. One day – again coming back from lunch with my co-worker – we saw everyone in the WP room looking shocked. And we were introduced to a woman who we were told was the new manager of both the WP pool and the legal secretaries.

        Where were the other 2 women, you may ask? They had been escorted out of the office by the firm’s security team. It had been discovered that they had an under the table scheme going on, getting kickbacks from the temp agencies. They would hire extra secretaries and word processors everyday – way more than we needed – and then the temp firms would kick back part of the money the firm paid them to the WP manager and the legal secretarial manager. We always wondered how the WP manager could afford all of the real estate she boasted about owning. Now we knew.

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  69. Still Working at 64*

    A jerk at work made fun of the fact that I liked to maintain info about past projects in file folders. This was before the days of Google, so I held onto stuff that might be useful. He smirked in a condescending way, going on and on about how it was a waste of time for foolish people. Just a few days later, he asked me for one of my folders (!!!); it had info he needed for a project. I reminded him about his assertion that only fools kept folders, and I refused to give it to him. He had to come back with his boss to ask again. The look on the jerk’s face was priceless when I recapped the conversation to the boss before handing over my folder. I don’t often stand up for myself, or have the perfect retort, so it was a sweet victory.

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  70. CzechMate*

    I was an admin at a beauty school. What many people don’t realize is that beauty schools are almost always for-profit companies; the owner profits from the students performing services and selling product, but the students actually don’t get to earn any money outside of tips. In the US these institutions can also accept federal FAFSA dollars. It’s a pretty wild system.

    The owner of this school was…questionable, to say the least. Because this was a for-profit school, he would intentionally not repair equipment that the students needed to, you know, learn and work. He would intentionally call the school at 5:15 pm every day to see if anyone picked up because he believed we didn’t work hard enough. (We were only hourly employees, and he wouldn’t pay overtime, so he just expected us to work for free in order to demonstrate we deserved more money.) He would intentionally not pay his vendors (marketers, plumbers, etc.) and then expect us as admins to deal with the angry folks demanding their money. Once a month he would make us come to work on one of our days off, lock us in a room, and yell at us for not working harder. It was BAD bad.

    One day during one of these meetings, he decided (I guess?) that we weren’t humble enough and asked us all to go around and say our biggest weakness. I had just secured a new job and had been trying to play nice through my notice period, but something snapped inside me and I said, “To be honest, boss? My biggest weakness is that I’m not very well suited to work for you.” After the meeting his assistant told me I didn’t need to come back to finish my notice period.

    About nine months later, one of my old coworkers told me that corporate stormed into the school and, basically, made the owner relinquish all control. In addition to the complaints and lawsuits that had been pouring in, it was discovered that there had been some VERY questionable accounting and income reporting going on. I don’t believe charges were brought against the owner, who was related to some folks who were high-up in corporate, but the school was closed, the students were transferred to much better programs, and the owner was forced to go gently into that good night.

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  71. Mark This Confidential And Leave It Laying Around*

    Once upon a temped for the Wicked Witch of the West. She was the head of the department and a tyrant, a bully, and worst–a sneak. I finally had enough and called my agency to get me out of there. They were fine with that–I’d lasted longer than anyone they’d sent. About a year later I was walking down the street in midtown and I hear someone frantically calling my name. A middle-aged man in a suit is sprinting after me, yelling “Susan got demoted! Susan got demoted!” with wild glee. I don’t know why the company couldn’t fire her, but instead they’d made her chief of staff her boss and then the rest of the department exacted petty revenge until she quit.

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    1. TheGirlintheAfternoon*

      I hear someone frantically calling my name. A middle-aged man in a suit is sprinting after me, yelling “Susan got demoted! Susan got demoted!” with wild glee.

      This might be my favorite part of any of these stories, and there have been some GOOD ones.

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  72. DiWantsToTravel*

    Years and years ago as a new manager of a hospital department I had a small budget for equipment. The approved vendor came to call on me and I ordered the items I needed. I found out later that that a slightly different model was substituted that cost more and got the sales rep a bonus. The increase was about 2o% of my small budget allowance.

    I am a tall woman, and the sales rep was a vertically challenged man who was clearly uncomfortable standing next to me. For the next five years, whenever he came to call, I made sure I had on very high heels and that we needed to walk through the building to look at something.

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      1. DiWantsToTravel*

        No, we really didn’t have a process for that, and the sub was on our company’s approved product list. I avoided using that vendor as long as I was in that role though, so that sales rep lost out in thousands of dollars in commissions.

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  73. Arcane Librarian*

    I got a job at a grocery store deli at the start of the pandemic, and in spite of the circumstances I was friendly with all my coworkers except one.

    Daisy repeatedly declared that she didn’t cook (a good 60% of our job was cooking, since we were, you know, the deli? with the fried and roasted chickens and other sundry ready-made meal items?) which most of us largely ignored because she was diligent about cleaning our work spaces and we saw it as a fair trade-off. She’d already been there for months when I was new, but would get annoyed whenever I asked her questions (some shifts were small, and she was often the most experienced person available). She was always telling me to work out my own process and not bother her about it, only to turn around and tell me I was wiping the glass wrong, even asking me at one point if my house was filthy since I was so bad at cleaning.

    I tried to be cordial with her, but her moods were unpredictable. Sometimes she’d be friendly and chatty and recommending me music, other times she’d be irritated and snappish. I never knew which Daisy I was going to get, so I found myself bracing for Grumpy Daisy all the time, which just made her more annoyed with how on-edge I was around her. When talking about it to others I’d compare myself to those cats on Jackson Galaxy’s show that only act out because they’re picking up on how stressed their owners are.

    My troubles ended when I finally got a full-time job in my field, fully remote since it was still 2020. Daisy was happy and congratulatory when I initially told her about it, but when I left my last shift and tried to give her a friendly goodbye, she snapped at me and complained that I was leaving her with all the work.

    I don’t know how much to attribute to the stresses of working in a pandemic, but again, Daisy was the only person in that job I had a problem with, and I wasn’t the only one who did. And in the end, there was no big comeuppance, but I got to leave and work from home at a job I enjoyed and was passionate about, and she didn’t. Living well and all that.

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  74. dee*

    Early in my career I had to deal with Mr. Big Shot litigator. He had a reputation for bullying his colleagues and yelling as his primary means of communication. While working on a file together, he lambasted me in front of another senior colleague for wasting his time when a simple legislative fix would have resolved everything. Luckily, I came prepared and pulled out the legal file brad (before electronic files, lol) and read out every email I’d sent to him with dates and time where I had suggested that very solution and he had blown me off. It was extremely satisfying to see him turn red and go silent and finally grumble, well at least we got there now. Later, the other colleague apologized for not stopping Mr. BS’s rant at me, but I told him I didn’t feel he needed to step in. I was capable of handling it myself. Best feeling ever!

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  75. anonymous 5*

    Not at work, but in a German course: I was part of a large-ish C1 course one summer, in which the experience levels varied *greatly* but apparently not enough to justify splitting into more sub-levels. I was on the stronger side of the continuum; and there was a dude (from the US like me, but lived/worked in Germany) who was…not. But he sure was loud. And there were a few occasions on which it sure seemed like he was feeling a tad insecure, but I wasn’t willing to expend too much energy to care either way. Until his attempts to cut me down a peg became more overt.

    Fortunately, it seems I wasn’t the only one who noticed. We did a listening exercise with multiple choice questions, and discussed in the group what our rationale was for the answers we chose for each. For one question, I chimed in that I had chosen answer A because [xyz rationale]. I had barely finished my last syllable when he chimed in that the answer HAD to be B.

    Our instructor picked up on that immediately and started asking him more, uh, “leading” questions (e.g. “ahh, right, so you think it’s pdq because the speaker used this word/phrase…?”). Loud dude fell in hook, line, and sinker: with every question from our instructor, he seemed to puff out his chest a bit more.

    Until our instructor confirmed that, actually, the answer was A.

    Bonus, though I suppose this is more for the “let’s discuss petty revenge” posts: among this dude’s habits was to intersperse a LOT of English into his German. I *strenuously* avoid doing that in classes, so that particular habit grates on me a bit. A day or so after our instructor had knocked this dude down, dude tried during the break to mansplain to me (mostly in English) all the things I’m doing wrong in my career. I felt sufficiently emboldened by then to smile, bat my eyelashes a bit, and ask, “hmm. Und kannst du das bitte auf *Deutsch* erklären?” (basically, “speak German, dude…”)

    I transferred to the C2 group shortly after, so I don’t know for sure, but I didn’t see him around the Institut much for the remaining weeks…

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  76. Shinespark*

    CW: discussion of illness and weight

    Maybe not perfect comeuppance, but it felt like karma at the time.

    I worked at a teapot management company during the pandemic. In early 2020 I caught Covid and was seriously ill. Millimeters from being hospitalised kind of ill. Despite this, my company quibbled on sick leave and kept pressuring me to return to work as fast as possible.

    Over the next six months I declined to the point where I was too weak to walk down the two flights of stairs from my rented room to the front door. I worked from bed with my laptop, slept 14 hours a day and struggled to get up to feed myself to the point I’d lost 20% of my body weight by the end of the year. I was visibly gasping for breath when I had to speak during team meetings. I didn’t know what Long Covid was at that point, but I had it.

    My manager and HR did not care. And in 2021 when it came time for layoffs, my name was called up. They pulled out a lot of ‘metrics’ to justify why I was the weakest link on the team and the obvious choice to let go, and wouldn’t you know it, ‘high sickness absence’ was one of the reasons they gave. (Along with other gems like “colleague satisfaction – 3.8”. 3.8 out of what? Who knows? Where did my colleagues higher scores come from if I’ve never been asked to grade any of them? Don’t worry about it!)

    I lost my job and my landlord evicted me as a result. I was lucky that my partner’s parents let me couchsurf or I might have ended up on the street – lockdown bans meant no-one could rent anywhere or move. I eventually got a job in a much nicer teapot management place at higher pay and did my best to let it go.

    Last year my old company went under and my new company bought it out. I felt very smug about it at the time.

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  77. ferrina*

    This is minor, but it still makes me happy.
    A certain SVP was well known for being a jerk. His favorite way to mark his territory was to come up to a junior staffer and deluge them with words. He talked fast, used acronyms and jargon, and talked technical with no context. When his poor victim had no idea what he was saying, he would smirk and walk off. It was his way of showing off how ‘smart’ he was.

    In my first month, he tried to assert dominance with his word bomb. All he saw was poor little me, a 20-something woman doing non-tech work in a tech field.
    What he didn’t know:
    -I’d spent the last three years working for a boss who only spoke in jargon
    -Despite not technically working in his subject area, I’d been my department expert liaising with experts in that area and was very fluent in its terminology
    -I’m a linguistic prodigy who came from a long line of linguistic prodigies; words cannot intimidate me.
    -I’m ADHD. My brain is already moving a mile a minute along several trains of thought, and his mouth could not physically move fast enough to outpace my train of thought.

    He tries to do his usual routine of quick talking and jargon, then smirks and waits for my stunned silence. Instead, I answer at his exact same speed, responding each of his points, and even through a couple new jargon terms in there.
    He stares at me for a minute, crestfallen. He stammers “Huh, I’ll look into it” and wanders off with a shocked look on his face.
    He avoided me for over a year after that. My coworkers were jealous.

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  78. DEEngineer*

    When I was a young, female engineer I worked at a union manufacturing plant, and we had “Pat”, an operator who was hostile and abusive to anyone who hadn’t earned his respect, basically by being white, male and experienced (and not an engineer). Just two examples of many: he used to greet me with a loud, hostile “what the hell are you doing here?”, and would call some trainees “f***n’ idiots” with contempt. His supervisor wouldn’t do anything about it because Pat was good at his job and would work overtime. And of course all of us who were abused or bullied by him really had no recourse because we depended on him in some way or another to do our jobs or meet our goals.

    Pat met a rich lady at a motorcycle rally and quit his job to move to another state to live with her. He put in his two-week’s notice. Then on his last 3 days, he no-called, no-showed. When she dumped him and he wanted his job back, he was ineligible for rehire. It was such a relief!

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  79. Kron*

    Back in the early aughts I worked in a night club, and our AGM was an absolute tool. Among his many many terrible qualities, he shamelessly took credit for things that other people did. This came back to bite him hard.

    We had a weekly hip hop night that was frequented by a lot of the local rappers, one of whom had a warrant out for his arrest for murder. One of the security staff recognized him and reported him to the police, anonymously because he was a smart man. Our AGM however was not a smart man and loudly and frequently took credit for turning this guy in, even giving an interview to the local paper. He began to receive very credible death threats over it. He then attempted to throw the original guy under the bus but no one was having it.

    Less than a month later it was announced that he had accepted a transfer to a club across the county. And that’s how we were rid of that dumb jerk for good.

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  80. Hall or Billingham*

    Years back, I started a job in Title IX at a higher ed institution. The office suite I worked in housed not only Title IX/Compliance, but also Human Resources and some of the president’s office staff. In my first week, my boss spent what seemed like an outsize amount of time explaining to me that while we try to be very collaborative with other offices and colleagues, I was to remember that I reported to her and I should always prioritize her directives. Yeah, of course–doing what my boss told me to do was already my plan. I was puzzled but just agreed.

    Now, one of the president’s staffers whose office was in our suite was an older white man who, when he bothered to come in, sat with his heels kicked up on his desk as he read the newspaper. Not sure if he ever even opened his laptop.

    One day, he approached my cubicle and slapped a piece of legal paper with pencil notes scrawled all over it on my desk and asked, “Can you make me some photocopies of this?”

    I smiled brightly at him. “Oh, you need copies? I’m happy to show you how the copier works!”

    Startled, he hemmed and hawed for a minute. I doubled-down. “Seriously, it’s very easy to use– let me show you!”

    Now completely thrown, he said, “Well, this is written in pencil; I’m worried it won’t copy correctly.”

    In the most pleasant, enthusiastic tone, I responded, “Oh, great! So you already know a little bit about the photocopier. I can you how to adjust the settings so the machine picks it up.” I stood up and started to walk to the copier.

    “No, never mind,” he said. “I’ll just have one of the girls across the hall do it for me.”

    “Oh, okay, if you’re sure,” I said, sitting right back down and turning to my computer screen.

    He departed then, presumably to go make the president’s secretary’s life harder instead of mine, and as soon as he was in the hallway, one of my HR colleagues whose office door was open and who had heard the entire exchange called my name and told me to come into her office and shut the door.

    I did so, not certain what would come next. She waited a beat, then grinned at me and said, “that was PERFECT!”

    Incidentally, that staffer was the very first to be RIFed a month or so later by the interim president when the outgoing president retired. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

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  81. BW*

    New job in the early 1990s. I’m the only woman on the computer team. For cubicle assignment, my new boss sits me with one of the men who he thought would be the most friendly towards women. New boss was in the next cubicle, so he could hear our conversations.

    My cube-mate had an ex-wife, a girlfriend, a baby with the ex-wife, and a baby with the girlfriend. He spent a lot of time on the phone with his lawyer. When he’d get off the phone, he’d launch into a diatribe about how there’s this “Men’s Movement,” and how it was a backlash to the “Women’s Movement.” Everything was Men’s Movement this and Men’s Movement that.

    I finally said, “YES, it’s called a Bowel Movement.”

    My boss fell out of his chair laughing, and I rose considerably in his estimation that day.

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    1. MigraineMonth*

      When I was in grad school for computer science, there was this cramped office space all the TAs shared for office hours. I was there getting help for my homework while a guy went into a long rant to his guy friend about his Intro to Sign Language course. Apparently it was really hard, the grading was unfair, the teacher was prejudiced, and also he was the only man in the whole class.

      After about ten minutes of this, I (female CS grad student) finally turned to him and said, “You were the only person of your gender in the whole class? I can’t imagine what that would be like.”

      He spluttered. His friend fell out of his chair laughing. I was able to solve the last homework problem without further distractions.

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  82. Cat lady8*

    We had a terrible problem with food theft from the communal fridge until the infamous “yoghurt” incident. One day Jane brought a huge tub of plain yoghurt and instructed everyone that no one was to touch her yoghurt. Oddly she left a silicon brush (like you would use to spread melted butter over a turkey) in the tub. Sure enough, the food thief went at it and apparently began eating Jane’s yoghurt when no one was looking. Until Jane finally admitted that she was using it as alternative medicine to treat her yeast infection TOPICALLY (as a side note, while I am not a medical professional, I can’t imagine this would be a good idea). We never found out who the thief was but never had any food theft issues after that….

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    1. But Of Course*

      I mean, it would be worth it to me to pretend I was putting yogurt on my ladygarden to stop a food thief, no actual ladygardenning yogurt needed.

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    2. NowYouKnow*

      I actually asked my ob/gyn about this one time after I was stuck at home with a yeast infection during a snow storm and all the doctor offices were closed. Turns out yogurt (while suggested online) is a bad idea due to the sugars in dairy, but inserting a peeled clove of garlic will probably work (depends on the specific kind of yeast infection). Eating yogurt (and other priobiotic foods) should help with recurring UTIs though.

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    3. MigraineMonth*

      Amazing comeuppance, but how laidback/HR violation-y was your workplace that “Actually, I’m applying the yogurt in the break room to my vagina” would EVER come up in conversation??

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  83. Big Bird*

    I have posted this before on a different thread but it fits here—and there were actually two jerks punished! I work in a heavily-regulated field and we had just hired a new assistant director for my team to report to. I had been passed over for promotion for that position and had been very specific (with examples) about the many ways in which this particular person was unqualified, but they hired her anyway and I was walking on eggshells.

    I was working with outside counsel on a 500+-page regulatory submission and received a draft (sent only to me) for review. New hire was NOT ‘cc’d and I was worried that this would be interpreted as not being “supportive” and a “team player.” So I emailed the attorneys, who knew my situation, and asked them to re-send to include her. They did so, and included a few bosses a few levels up for good measure.

    New hire proceeded to “reply-all” saying that her eyes were glazing over from boredom after the first few paragraphs, the material was much too technical, and how on earth did we expect the public to understand it? Turns out she had absolutely no idea what the document was, why it was being submitted, and who the audience was. I had to explain that the reason the document was so technical was that it was being submitted not to the public, but to the government agency that wrote the regulations we were complying with. The boss who passed me over for promotion came into my office and asked me if there was anything I wanted to tell her, and of course I said no.

    This was just the first of several such gaffes and New Boss lasted less than three months before being let go during her probationary period. The woman who hired her was reassigned to “special projects,” moved to an interior office she shared with an accounting clerk, and stayed just exactly long enough to meet the requirements for a pension. I am still there.

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  84. nonbeenary*

    This is a very small comeuppance in the grand scheme of things, but one I’m still proud of. I’ve complained about this job before – I was working for a company where my dad was C-suite, being paid the bare minimum while a male coworker hired several years after me at the same level was making more (the only man in that role and the only one not being paid absolute peanuts, but even he wasn’t making anywhere close to the average for our work), and when I asked for a raise on account of my duties being doubled, I was told it would have to wait until my next annual review in 11 months because it “wasn’t a promotion” and they don’t give merit raises.
    So. I started job searching and started complaining heavily to my father about it. What good is a nepotism job if I can’t even get a livable wage from it? Dear dad would tell me to just get licensed so I’d be on commission, and then go back to talking about his vacation home. (And listen. I could have gotten licensed easily, but I deserved to be paid a good wage for the work I was already doing.)
    Eventually I got a better job with better pay. I’m now making just shy of double what I was back then. When I mentioned this to my dad one evening at dinner, he looked sad and said, “I wish I could have helped when you still worked for me, but I didn’t know your wage was so low…”
    I just met his eyes and said, “Yes, you did know,” and let him squirm in discomfort for a minute before changing the subject back to how much I enjoyed my new job.
    Like I said, it doesn’t really hold a candle to any of the other stories here, but I’m proud of myself for pushing back on a self-serving lie.

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  85. I'm just here for the cats!!*

    So this kind of fits in. I was in 7th grade (so 1999) and had a horrible English teacher. She was very old school and very strict, and just not a happy person. I had a document learning disability and had the appropriate paperwork (IEP).
    We had our first book report and I was super excited by it and thought I did a good job. I worked especially hard. (I was the kid who wanted to impress the teacher, thinking that would make her be nice to me). My mom even helped me type it up. Well I did not do very well, and parent teacher conferences came around.
    My mom sat down with the teacher and the first thing she did is started berating my mom, saying “How dare she turn this in.” and “If she thinks she can get away with this she can think again.” She just spewed hatred and yelled about how bad I did on the assignment. Well my mom WOULD NOT PUT UP WITH THIS! She cut her off mid rant and matched her energy. “CATS has an IEP did you explain this to her individually? Did you have the teachers aid assist her with the assignment.”
    I wish I could have seen this. The way my mom explains it she just shrunk down into her chair. And sputtered that she didn’t know that I had an IEP. (keep in mind this was a very small school, and there were only 50 of us in the entire grade. Our class was like 20 kids, with very few with IEPs. There was no excuse.) My mom berated her right back with “why don’t you know that she has an IEP? It’s your JOB to follow it, per the law.” I think she may have even threatened to go to the principle. I know she talked to the head of special ed about it. She was forced to let me redo the assignment. To this day, I still don’t know what I was expected to do.

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    1. CeeDoo*

      Unrelated, but my favorite “book report” was when I taught English and had a very large farmer kid in class. He needed to read a book, so I recommended Of Mice and Men. I thought because it was short and about farm laborers, he would vibe with it. He never wrote a written book report, but he told me in detail exactly what he thought of every moment. He was incensed about so many things, he got all hot under the collar. That was a 100 right there.

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  86. CSRoadWarrior*

    My boyfriend worked at a warehouse between February 2022 to February 2023. He was always on top of things at his job.

    However, suddenly between late 2022 and early 2023, this jerk manager (not his boss) started fabricating stories of things my boyfriend screwed up on, and made up stories to tarnish his image. Eventually it got too far; my boyfriend was fired in February 2022 because of the false stories.

    Mind you, my boyfriend was not the one who this manager made life miserable. He got others fired as well, deliberately messed with employees’ timecards, and made life hell for everyone working there. It was mainly because of this manager that this workplace was so toxic. I could not really say in too much details of what this manager did because I was not the one who worked there, but this manager was a straight up a**hole.

    Now for the comeuppance: Earlier this year, this ass of a manager finally went way too far. The higher ups finally saw what he was doing and when this manager crossed the line, he was promptly fired. They finally saw what he had been doing and what he was trying to do. And even better, they announced that he was fired. The entire warehouse erupted in cheer. I mean really cheering, like RAH RAH at a sporting event cheering. Everyone at the warehouse HATED this guy. And they were so happy he was gone. Since then, the environment has gotten better.

    So how did my boyfriend and I get the news? His sister, who still worked there (and still does), called him. My boyfriend jumped for joy. The manager who made him take the fall was gone. Gone! And even better, my boyfriend will be hired back at soon at an even higher salary since they saw how good of an employee he was and how everything that manager said was false.

    So two for two for my boyfriend, and zero for that jerk manager!

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    1. cncx*

      I am an old, and I have seen many people get the People’s Elbow of Karma. Still, when I read this one, *I* cheered. I love it and I am happy for your boyfriend!

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    2. MigraineMonth*

      Oh wow, I’m so glad your boyfriend is getting hired back! It’s far too frequent that a business will decide that the manager is *also* a problem, but not go back and fix the situation for their victims.

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  87. Harper*

    Years ago I worked for a very dysfunctional company and I was responsible for maintaining a certification that required compliance and cooperation from basically every department. We had an audit approaching and I was pretty stressed about the lack of support I was getting, so I wrote out my feelings on the back of a scrap sheet of paper which happened to be a copied page out of a training manual related to the certification. I then tore the paper into shreds and threw it in the trash, proud of myself for venting my frustration in a harmless and private way.

    Unfortunately, a hotheaded department manager (who we’ll call Kevin) had convinced the company to allow his wife to provide nightly cleaning services, and he often helped her after hours. While emptying my trash, he saw some of my notes and retrieved the shredded paper. A couple of days later, I was called into a meeting with him, the head of HR, and the General Manager. On the table in front of them was my shredded page of venting notes, reassembled so as to be legible. They told me they were “concerned” about my notes and feared I planned to sabotage the upcoming audit. I had no such intention, no history of doing anything vindictive or unhinged, and my notes said nothing of the kind. I had never been so humiliated in my entire life.

    I tried my best to defend myself during the meeting and at one point, I exclaimed to Kevin, “I can’t believe this is happening and I can’t believe you went through my trash!” This clearly pissed him off and he stammered out an embarrassed protest. So for the rest of the meeting, I used the phrase, “Kevin went through my trash” as often as humanly possible. The only satisfaction I got out of that entire debacle was watching Kevin’s face grow redder and redder every time I said it, and from observing the barely restrained rage on his face. The second I walked out of the building that day, I called a recruiter and started the process of quitting. Also, in an act of solidarity, my coworkers started leaving scrap paper in their trash cans with greetings and messages for Kevin.

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  88. Long, long ago*

    Long ago, shortly out of college, I worked for the local bar association – legal, not booze – and worked on the legal education team that put on in-person seminars for attorneys so they could get their continuing legal education (CLE) hours. (This was at the very beginning of online training, and the state supreme court – rightfully – was worried that lawyers would cheat and claim they had done an online course when they hadn’t, and so online training was prohibited.) Unsurprisingly, a huge number of attorneys put this off to until the last minute, so our December was back-to-back trainings, all day long, five days a week, and it was EXHAUSTING.

    One of the important things about this training was that attorneys had to acknowledge that they had attended ALL of the training. That meant they had to remain in the room the whole time, minus a quick bathroom break or coffee refill. We were required to keep notes if people were out of the room too long – and we gave them a generous 15-minute grace period. This was also a relatively small organization, and the association staff knew a lot of the attorneys, either because we collaborated with them on projects, by (bad) reputation, or we knew them personally (this last one is important later).

    Near the end of one December, we had one mid-career, new-partner, arrogant-type attorney who signed up for pretty much everything over the course of a couple days, regardless of the topic, indicating that he desperately needed CLE hours. Reader, it will not surprise you to know that he pretty much spent most of his time in the lobby, making phone calls, in full view of me and my coworker at the front desk. We took our notes and set aside every one of his acknowledgements as he handed them in. We sent them along to the state supreme court with our notes that he had not attended anything close to his full sessions.

    The next January, when he got the notice from the court that he wasn’t in compliance, he came to the bar association offices and threw a fit at me. We showed him our records and what we had submitted to the court and explained that we were required to do so. He did not care and threatened to speak to the bar association president and executive director and have me fired.

    I told him to please do that! My future father-in-law, who was bar association president at the time and best friends with the executive director, would be happy to speak to him about this! As he stood there, completely flabbergasted, my fiancé stepped off the elevator, greeted the guy who he knew as a fellow attorney, introduced me to him as his fiancé, and asked if I was ready to go to lunch.

    When the jerk attorney showed up in January for the make-up CLEs, he was much chastened and only left the room during the break between seminars.

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  89. Got Out, Got Better*

    I worked with a critical mass of jerks in a small university library*, and these folks distorted a lot of working norms for the non-jerks, who happened to be mostly early career. I didn’t realize how bad it was until I returned from maternity leave and absolutely no one communicated with me for two entire business days. No greetings/welcome-back, no scheduling check-ins, no low-stakes “how is the baby”, nothing. This may sound small, but being actively iced out like that after taking FML was disorienting, unsettling, and so much worse than any other work dysfunction I’ve experienced. Apparently the jerks assumed I was not going to return (none of their wives returned to work after maternity leave, after all) and had thrown me/my work under the bus for twelve weeks, everyone fell for it, and Silent Treatment was the result. I found a new job at a different library ASAP, taking a massive pay cut to do so. Six weeks into my new gig, I started getting a weird series of messages from the non-jerks about the jerks finding a new scapegoat and realizing they were all duped/things they didn’t notice I kept running smoothly were now spectacularly failing, etc. I accidentally started a mass exodus of non-jerks (oops?): within 18 months all those early career people were gone too.

    Two years later as I was up for a promotion that recouped my pay cut AND VERY MUCH THEN SOME, all but one of the jerks (who of course failed up) got laid off from that university due to budget shortfalls.

    *I thought about anonymizing this more, then realized this sort of story is way too plausible for SOOO many libraries. :(

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  90. It's Marie - Not Maria*

    I was working on a contract for a US Government Program that was largely blue collar. The person I was told was going to be my day to day Supervisor ended up not being my Supervisor, but another random, nepotism hire that probably hadn’t spoken with anyone below Director level in a decade. They quickly showed they were not the right person to be overseeing this blue collar program contract, and made a lot of very bad decisions which went against the mission of the program. I threw up red flags to some powers that be, but no one would listen. I finally submitted my resignation to the contract company’s overall Program Director, detailing why I was leaving and outlining EVERYTHING this person had done to make my job more difficult, and what they had done to harm the mission of the program. I made sure day to day Supervisor was copied on this email.

    Fast forward to two days before my last day with this contract company. In an “All Hands” Zoom Meeting for everyone who worked with this program, the contract company’s CEO said the overall National Director of the US Government Program to which this contract was assigned had specifically told him what a great job I had been doing with the program, and how glad they were to have me, mentioning me by NAME. Day to Day Manager had to sit on the Zoom Meeting and listen to me be praised by the CEO (and, by extension, the National Director of the US Government Program), knowing they were the reason I was leaving the program. I wish I could have been a fly on the wall to watch her squirm. I found out a few weeks later from a friend who was still part of the program at the contract company she had been transferred to another department within the contracting company. The friend did not know why, but apparently it was quite sudden.

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  91. MyStars*

    I didn’t think I had anything to add here, but another post gave me a trauma-response reminder. This will take a minute — you may need to go refill your popcorn.

    Many moons, midcareer, I came to work in a professional support role for a medical services organization (for-profit) used by many Medicare recipients. Organization was a family owned “franchise” with three local bases of operation. Ours was not the original but was the largest, and it was run by a fellow who was “like a son” to the owner, at least back to “son’s” days as an Accounting major, if not even longer. In short, I worked for a medical services organization in which all operating decisions were made by an accountant’s brain.

    This Boss, whom we could call the diminutive Richard, was arrogant, egotistic, demanding, mean, and unreasonable. He yelled at staff, including nurses, at all hours of the day and night, both verbally and by text, for any event which did not go the way he thought it should. Being a medical services organization, this happened a lot. Old, sick, and dying people are difficult to keep in predictable formulas. He had an especially vitriolic hatred for me, expressed early and often at in-person staff meetings, which I can attribute only to the equally offensive conditions of my femaleness and my propensity to ask inconvenient questions like, “How is this reasonable?” Even I had sense enough not to ask the questions that were truly on the table: How is this ethical? and How is this legal?

    A Power greater than myself did the Second Biggest Thing for me that I could not do for myself (in support of that First Biggest Thing, because I could not have stayed in that toxic environment sober for much longer) and I was laid off. I was not the most junior person in my role, well respected both by coworkers and clients, and my similarly-credentialed colleagues were prepared to protest in my favor. I begged them not to and considered the small severance and new freedom a gift.

    I remained in contact with one friend from within the company. She told me one day that Richard and the owner had come to a parting of the ways in spectacular fashion, and Richard created his own competing for-profit organization. Everybody in the new company had moved with him from the old company, which had set up shop in the next county over. Not long after, she too found herself blessedly separated from the new company, and she still wonders what altered mindset caused her to move with him in the first place.

    Not long after that, there was a raid and a series of indictments that encompassed Richard, his wife and office manager, all of the doctors, the Director of Nursing, and an assortment of others caught up in the nets. It turns out that the government frowns on large scale Medicare fraud. After many years of litigation, in which, among other things, the poor fellow whined at the court because he couldn’t even get an accounting job within the terms of his bond, he was sentenced to multiple million dollars of restitution and five or so years of incarceration. Last I heard, he was serving time in a federal prison somewhere in the Deep South. Really couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

    Thanks for letting me share.

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  92. ScroogeMcDunk*

    Straight out of grad school, I took a job running the local office of one of our provincial politicians. The work was interesting and satisfying, and she was an absolute dream to work for. I would’ve stayed there forever, but she decided it was time to retire after she straight up had a heart attack on the legislature floor (when you actually care about what you’re doing, that job is STRESSFUL, y’all).
    At my boss’ behest, I took a leave of absence to run the data team for the election campaign of the party’s new candidate. New candidate was a nightmare the entire campaign – even her friends and family almost quit. Yelling, insults, rude 5am phone calls, the whole shebang. She barely managed to squeak out a win even with my incredibly popular boss’ endorsement. In spite of that, I would have stayed in the job because I believed in the work. Instead I was offered an interview to stay on part time, which I found frankly insulting and turned down because I needed full time work in order to, you know, feed and clothe myself.
    I find it hard to tout my own accomplishments, but I can say that I was very very good at that job. So it gave me a great deal of schadenfreude to find out later that the party apparatchik was PISSED at new candidate/legislator for letting one of their best staffers get away. She also went through staff like toilet paper, didn’t get a single piece of legislation passed, and was bounced out by the voters after a single term. So even though it really sucked to lose a job I loved, I took some shameful pleasure in watching her crash and burn.

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    1. Young Business*

      This is a great story and I would LOVE to know what politician it was if this is about a province in Canada, haha.

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  93. Young Business*

    I wish I had a more epic story but in retrospect this one felt pretty good. I had a tyrannical direct manager that headed up our department and she ruled with an iron fist since she’d been there since the company’s inception.

    She was an absolute nightmare: micromanager, was ultra-demanding and was just a general bummer to be around. The turnover in our department was constant and basically every person who quit reported her as the reason they were leaving in their exit interviews with HR.

    Side note/reminder: the job was clearly her life, unfortunately, and I think being all-consumed with work was to all of our detriment, including hers.

    By some miracle, the company finally decided to do something and pushed her out, but because of her tenure, let her save face by saying it was her decision to leave.

    In a group call, she told our team she was leaving through tears (super awkward). Note that more than half of our team was remote, including her). The comeuppance: in the lead-up to her departure, there was no fanfare nor real outpouring for her. In fact, a senior-level peer who had similar tenure gave a little speech in a company-wide town hall that basically commended her on being scrappy with money in the company’s very early days. It was the least personal/most sterile send-off you could imagine. My boss had spent 10+ years with the company and basically no one cared/was relieved she was leaving.

    On her last day, boss had champagne sent to the headquarters (again, she was remote) so less than half the team could toast her departure? toast to her? I’m not really sure. I don’t like to delight in these things but it was honestly satisfying to see a person who mistreated so many people out the door.

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  94. Forrest Rhodes*

    A thousand thanks to all who’ve posted their stories here. I’m in your debt—particularly today, now, when we seem to have an exponentially increased number of jerks who publicly celebrate and weaponize their jerkitude and have not yet received their just desserts, I just needed to be reminded that It. Can. Happen.

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  95. The Bermuda Triangle*

    The worst coworker I ever had was a man who bullied women coworkers, farmed all his work out to AI, lied constantly, and was just generally the worst. One of those men who smirks while lying to your face because he knows you know what he is, but that you can’t do anything about it because he’s outmaneuvered everyone by cozying up to the boss.

    He couldn’t outmaneuver the law though, and he lost his position after going to jail for something unrelated. Not the best of comeuppances, but at least the trash got taken out.

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  96. ferrina*

    Waaaay back when I worked for a daycare. Now the director of this daycare was known to play favorites, and one of her favorite teachers was Gloria. Gloria wasn’t a bad teacher when she actually taught, but she was all about design and was allowed to prioritize this over the kids. Several days a week she would be decorating her classroom and doing the kids’ art projects for them, while her assistant teacher tried to watch 15 toddlers on her own.

    Gloria’s classroom gets worse and worse until it’s noticed by the supervising board. The director moves Gloria to a different classroom, and I get assigned to clean up her mess. This isn’t the only time the director covers for Gloria, and eventually I get sick of it and quit to go to a different center.

    A few months later, word comes through the grapevine that my old director was fired. Apparently she had been buddying up with the person that was supposed to be supervising her, and it was a big mess. In the aftermath, Gloria quit before she could be fired.

    Where did Gloria try to go? The new daycare I was working in. My boss knows I previously worked with Gloria, so she asks my opinion. I honestly tell her that Gloria has some issues and destroyed a classroom, but with hands-on supervision and mentorship, she could probably eventually be a good teacher.

    Gloria did not get the job. Apparently the director wanted us to spend our time supervising the kids, not the adults.

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  97. Box of Kittens*

    I used to work at a small community bank. I was a rotating teller, so I worked at all the branch locations periodically. There was one branch manager who was petty and tribal-minded. She was from a small town and looked down on anyone not from her own small town, and had a particular grudge against the CFO due to his being from a town she perceived as more uppity than hers. This branch was also really slow, so she would spend a lot of time complaining about her husband and daughter-in-law, and also looking up her old high school friends on the local crime watch website to see who got arrested recently. Based on what she said about our colleagues who weren’t there, I imagine she complained about everyone, including me. She didn’t like to learn new processes, so if anything changed she was full of complaints. I could give more example, but the gist is that she had just a really negative vibe overall.

    Well, a few years after I started at this job, one of the regulars at that bank branch took her mother off her bank account. They had previously had a routine of each coming in to make withdrawals from the account, but apparently had a falling out (or something). The bank manager of course tried to get all the gossip under the guise of concern. However, in her mind, the mother was in the right, so the next time the mother came in and tried to make a withdrawal from the account she was no longer on, the bank manager LET HER.

    In a surprise to no one, the daughter found out about this and was irate, and immediately contacted our CEO. The bank manager was promptly fired. I was not there that day, but I hear she pitched a screaming, crying fit in front of other customers.

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    1. Double A*

      I love how she wasn’t keeping up with acquaintances on social media or something, it was CRIME WEBSITES, what a poetic detail.

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      1. Box of Kittens*

        Definitely. I don’t think her relationship with her husband was very good, and potentially even abusive, but my theory is she was so miserable she just wanted to see others being miserable too. Sad story, but she did herself in on her own, so.

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  98. CreepyPaper*

    About twenty years ago now I worked in the fundraising department of a local charity as a volunteer coordinator – basically it involved cat herding people to help out at events, putting merch boxes together and counting the proceeds from each event. It was my first Grown Up Job and I enjoyed it.

    Enter my manager, who was a long term employee that had been sent on a management training course by her supervisor and had been assigned to manage me and only me. I worked at a satellite office of the main office, and it was just me and a few other peeps in fundraising but because I worked for the more volunteer-y side, apparently I was a separate entity and had to have a separate manager. Her managers were at the main office, so she would be managing me without anyone monitoring her.

    Oh boy. It was awful.

    She micromanaged literally everything I did. And I do mean everything. I followed instructions she gave me to the letter, and then she would berate me for doing so because apparently she meant something different and 21-year-old Creeps was apparently meant to be psychic. For example, I interpreted ‘count the money raised at X event’ as ‘count the money raised for X event’, but apparently I did it wrong because I did it manually instead of using the money sorter (I was a cashier in a previous life and could manually count money quickly and more accurately than one of those daft machines). I once backed my car right up to the stockroom so I could quickly load three heavy crates with merch for a weekend event, something I had done multiple times, but she suddenly decided that I was no longer allowed to back my car up to the stockroom. I had to carry the boxes to the car park. But this rule applied to me and only me.

    She seemed to have it in for me, and eventually I was told I hadn’t passed my probation period, which had been extended to a year from three months initially. Whatever. I had been planning to resign anyway and had been interviewing elsewhere.

    I wasn’t sorry to see the back of that place if I’m honest. The glorious comeuppance part is that the micromanager herself ‘moved on to other opportunities’ a few months later because she tried micromanaging my replacement and my replacement had a lot more work experience and bigger stones than me and complained to the higher ups, who suddenly started monitoring the micromanager VERY closely and saw that she was in fact giving instructions and then saying she meant something different and (and I didn’t know she had been doing this) skimming off charity funds – just a few quid here and there off each event but enough to be a Problem.

    Of couse, moved on to other opportunities is corporate code for being fired, and because of the money skimming she never worked in the charity sector ever again. I moved on to logistics and have been happily working in that industry for various companies ever since. And to think if she hadn’t been such a micromanager, I wouldn’t have moved jobs. So in a way, I guess I should thank her!

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  99. Lady Ann*

    This is a really small example but when I was in grad school I worked at a coffee shop. One of my fellow employees was a high school girl with a bad attitude. She was lazy and rude. She would basically spend her whole shift hiding in the back room finding nonsense tasks to do so she could avoid helping customers. When I’d ask her to come out to the front to help, she was nasty to me. I told my boss (the owner ) about it but she told me it was a personal problem between us and I needed to deal with it. So I started just being over the top nice to her. Just sweet as pie. Until eventually one day high school girl was in the back ignoring my pleas to come out front and help customers over the drive thru headset. But my boss was back there too. So I walked into the back and asked her so nicely to please come out and help customers, because I was busy at the drive through and there were customers at the counter, and hadn’t she heard me calling on the headset? The girl got angry at me and told me she was doing IMPORTANT things in the back as she always did, but luckily my boss was there to witness it this time and she got a talking to.

    It didn’t improve our relationship or make her less lazy, but it felt good in the moment. And I felt justified when the girl later quit…without notice…while my boss was on her honeymoon, AND threw a coffee at a customer on her last day. So probably they should have listened to me when I raised red flags about her.

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  100. Ama*

    When I worked at a university decades ago, I worked in a weird admin unit made up of tiny initiatives sponsored by the Dean’s Office. We had a terrible budget manager (we’ll go with the usual Jane) assigned to our unit — she would move funds around wherever she wanted and you couldn’t do anything about it. My department had regular run ins with Jane because one of the other schools within the college was paying us every semester to do specialized training for their faculty – Jane would routinely not actually put the funds in the account we asked her to put it in and would claim she hadn’t even received them until we emailed the other school’s accounting office and got a confirmation from them that they had sent it over. She was also incredibly rude and acted like people should read her mind and know whatever arbitrary rule she’d made up about why she hadn’t put funds where she was supposed to. ( I later found out from a colleague who was budget manager for another school at the university that Jane was way overstepping her authority by doing about 90% of the stuff she did.) But we were told she was some kind of “budget genius” and no one above her would say anything to her.

    Until… an admin in one of the other tiny departments in our unit went on medical leave and the Dean’s chief of staff was asked to cover any financial/budget oversight they might need (the temp they hired to cover the day -to-day admin in that department wouldn’t have been granted budget access, per university policy). The Dean’s Office had their own budget manager so assistant had never interacted with Jane before.

    Not two days after the first time chief of staff had to ask Jane to move funds and got Jane’s usual rude rigamarole (including, according to the gossip, that Jane told assistant she was “just a secretary so she shouldn’t try to tell [Jane] how to do [her] job”) Jane suddenly got reassigned to a part of the budget office that didn’t handle department budgets and we got a new (and functional) budget manager. Coworkers in our tiny unit were literally dancing in the hallways as the story made the rounds; we were all so happy Jane was not our problem any longer.

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  101. BootoBoors*

    A Client had reorganized on their end, and their new Director called for a big everyone-come-from-everywhere multi-day meeting. I was specifically not invited when the meeting was called, even though I was managing a large aspect of the project. The Client Director asked a subconsultant of mine to come instead. Why? the subconsultant was a gray-haired man with experience and know-how, and I was a young lady. (The subconsultant was also a nitwit who made my life difficult, but the client didn’t know that).

    I managed to squeeze onto the invite list, insisted I have a literal seat at the table once I was there and then CONTRIBUTED to that meeting. At the end of the first day, the Client Director turned to the subconsultant and said “[Name], you’re not contributing anything to this meeting, she has it covered, and you can leave.”

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  102. In Progress*

    I may be in a mid-comeuppance situation. People aren’t exactly jerks in this situation, but there has been a lot of extremely frustrating circumstance this year and there are definitely some jerks on top leadership that I just do my best to ignore.

    I’m being moved from one position inside my organization to another because I have a hard-to-find certification, and people with the hard-to-find certification keep quitting. We’ve had a lot of change this year and top management has been out to lunch. This new department seems particularly impacted by the poor leadership.

    It does come with a raise, but I am going to negotiate for more because I am highly qualified for this job and was underpaid for years. Also a bunch of very mediocre people above me make way more than they deserve and you know what, I don’t need more, but I can do good with more money. So I’m going to ask.

    I was planning to just meet with the people who would decide this and lay out my case. They apparently didn’t understand what I meant when I requested a meeting to “discuss the salary,” but now that they realize I mean to negotiate, they are asking me to send them my resume.

    Now, I have been happy with my job and even with current frustrations am not planning to leave, so I haven’t updated my resume since I got this job. It’s always in my back pocket that I could leave; however, updating a resume is a pain the butt that I only do when I’m actively looking.

    So, if they deny my request, they will not only make leaving look more appealing, they will have forced me to eliminate which would otherwise be a barrier to me leaving; i.e. having to update my resume.

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  103. LadyByTheLake*

    I worked at a company that was pretty toxic — backstabbing and undermining were encouraged. One of the things that drove me crazy was that my grandboss was an ineffectual dodo who interfered in things he knew nothing about all the time, including personnel issues. Anyway, after a year I had had it and I was just staying on to finish a critical project and then I was going to quit. I wasn’t subtle about this — every day I was packing a box of my stuff and moving it home etc. My boss clearly understood I was leaving, but grandboss never checked in with my boss on anything.

    The week I planned to give my notice, I was called in to a meeting with grandboss and the head of HR. I was being fired, with a very generous severance package (no wrongdoing, just not a good fit). Grandboss was making noises about how I might want to review the paperwork, but I said “No need” and signed it on the spot. He then asked me to let them know where I landed, and I was able to say, “Oh, I have a new position lined up, here’s my new business card.” The head of HR, who thought grandboss was an idiot, was staring daggers, because she realized that they had just committed to paying me this awesome severance, but if they’d just waited another day, I would have left voluntarily.

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  104. Yes And*

    Why does it feel like more than half of the stories on this thread are about nonprofits, academia, retail, or law firms?

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      1. CommanderBanana*

        Having just left a law firm, I can confirm – but what was craziest to me was that it wasn’t the lawyers or even the managing partner – it was the training director!

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    2. Analytical Tree Hugger*

      Mostly because we’ll highlight/notice those rather than “generic corporation”; see the comment below this one, which doesn’t specifically say “some random for profit corporate business” but likely falls in that category.

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  105. Anonthistime*

    Several years ago my former workplace hired a new employee for a C-suite job. Shortly after he started, I put together that I had heard about him from friends who had worked for him at this prior company. They had been telling me stories for years about how awful he was to work for, the financially questionable decisions he had made, etc. And now I had to work with him.

    I kept my distance from him and made sure to keep the limited work that we did have to do together in writing. He only lasted a few months at my company before being fired. (I also left that company years ago.)

    Just this week he was in the local news headlines because he was charged with felony financial fraud.

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  106. Crow O'Clock*

    I used to work in higher-ed. The entire place was unionized except for management. This is an unusual position for IT staff to be in. The contract laid out very clearly which roles were on-call and what the compensation for that was.

    No one in the department in charge of the website was on call. The team took pride in their work and went above and beyond all the time but it was always a bit of a store spot.

    For April 1st (“April fools day” used to be a common NA tradition) the web team transformed the homepage of the website into what it might have looked like in the 1960s: old logo, news stories from the library archives, monospace font.

    The IT Director some how got it in his head that the website had been hacked. (?!?!) It was 7am. No one who had anything to do with the website could be reached on their home phones or cell phones until they arrived for the scheduled start of their shift at 9am. They arrived to chaos. Managers had been called in, all the on-call staff had been called in, security incidents had been filed. But no one who could “fix” the “hack” could be found. The team confirmed it was an April Fools joke and were lectured and reprimanded for doing it. It was gone by 9:30.

    … at 11 the Director called down and asked the team to put it back up. Apparently the CMO **LOVED IT** and it got tonnes of positive press coverage.

    I want to say the Director was not really a jerk who got his comeuppance but he was marched out of the building by security a few months later. Speculation was that he was accepting kick backs for vendor contracts.

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  107. Jonaessa*

    I worked for the transportation department of a school district for a very long time. We took many calls over the years from parents who were mad their kid didn’t qualify for transportation. We explained that state funding only allowed us to transfer students who lived two miles or more from the assigned campus, you can file an appeal so we can re-measure, etc. Occasionally, we would have to go into more detail explaining the funding formula, how they could reach state representatives and so on and so forth. Sometimes those parents would come in demanding to speak to the director. Because I worked in the front office, I was the first person they would see, and they would have no problem throwing their anger at me without stopping to let me explain that I would go get someone for them if they would just sign in and have a seat. No, they just wanted to yell and they didn’t care who they had to yell at. I get it–people just want to be validated. But please, treat me like a human.

    It was a week or two into the new school year, and a parent came in with her three kids (who should have already been at school) and demanded to know why her kids couldn’t ride the bus. I would usually have them sign in and then go get that department. This woman did not want to hear it. She wanted to talk to someone right now. The director could hear the back and forth, and he came in to save the day, explaining to the woman that he would be happy to take her back and explain the process to her, but she needed to sign in first. Well, she didn’t like that, either. She proceeded to unleash all this anger she had inside, and the director was going to hear about everything from her mom laughing at her prom dress to her husband leaving the dirty dishes BESIDE the sink instead of IN the sink. (Well, maybe it wasn’t that specifically, but it sure did feel like it.)

    I mentioned it was the first or second week of school, right? Well, during that time, the superintendent likes to make his way around the campuses and departments just to say hello and check in. As soon as he opened the door, the very angry parent unleashed the words every service worker rolls his/her eyes at: “Well, I pay taxes, and I pay your salary, so I DEMAND my kid ride the bus! Today! Not tomorrow! Not next week! TODAY!” You could hear a pin drop. The superintendent staggered back for just a second, and then said, “Ma’am, if you pay their salaries, I’m going to have to ask for a raise for how they put up with people coming in here with no manners. I understand you’re frustrated, but you will not talk to any person on any of my campuses in that manner. Now, if you want to apologize, we can go in the director’s office and talk about it. Or you can come over to my office, the one that says ‘superintendent’ and we can discuss it even further. What would you like to do?” He didn’t raise his voice. He talked to her very casually, almost as if they were talking about the weather. My department partner and I communicated with each other silently that this was the best thing we had ever witnessed. The director was certainly good at putting someone in their place, and I have no doubt he would have done that here, but the supe beat him to it. It was glorious. And yes, she did calm down enough to apologize (weakly) and go talk to the director with the superintendent sitting in. And no, she still didn’t get transportation. She lived a mile from the school.

    Paying taxes doesn’t give you the right to treat public servants like crap. And trust me, what you pay in taxes here equals about one penny to me. My state is too big and those funds don’t go far.

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  108. Carole from Accounts*

    I once worked at a large multinational company, and the person in purchasing responsible for our department was an absolute nightmare. He would lie, accidentally forget to order things, and throw up unnecessary roadblocks in every process. Senior management thought he was amazing because he was a man of action to them, reserving his true colours for those of us lower down the food chain. Unfortunately my mortal enemy in purchasing was pretty smart, and I could never catch him in a lie or with documentation.

    I reported in to a manager with a hairline trigger. He would explode over the tiniest inconveniences, etc, and because he had never seen Purchasing’s true colours, he thought I was truly incompetent and causing all these delays and miscommunications. We needed to order a Special Teapot Manufacturing Machine, and purchasing was holding up the order because we didn’t get 5 quotes, but only 2 companies in the world could make the Special Machine, and we had the quotes from both of them. It was getting critical because not getting the machine ordered on time meant we might delay the factory and get penalized from the Teapot OEM. One day, Purchasing walked by my desk. My manager was within earshot in his office, and I knew I could catch Purchasing in his game verbally. So I innocently asked him to explain to me again why he wouldn’t order our machine even though we got quotes from all possible suppliers, and he just couldn’t stop himself from gloating to me to explain it. (His answer started with “well, little lady, you just don’t understand Teapot Manufacturing”) My manager heard the magic words about the machine, so his interest was already piqued, and when he heard that Purchasing was causing delays that could lead to hefty fines for no good reason, he flew out of his office and started screaming at Purchasing. Realizing he had an audience of Someone Important, he tried to backtrack but it was too little too late. The order went through that day, and we had a new contact in Purchasing a few weeks later.

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  109. Debby*

    This is kind of small, but it sure got a lot of cheers from my night-shift co-workers! I worked as an RN in a small hospital, on the nightshift (11pm-7:30am). On our shift, it would get so cold! Even the patients would complain about how cold it was-their heaters felt like they were putting out cold air. We used to take clean blankets down to the ER and put them in the blanket warmer for our patients.
    Well, we reported how cold it was during the night, every night. But Admin didn’t believe it; they came up with all kinds of reasons why we thought it was so cold: We didn’t work much (we each had 10 patients-day shift had three-who were awake ALL night), the lights were dimmer so maybe we just imagined it as colder, etc.
    Someone in Admin decided to put one of those thermometers that recorded 24 temperatures-it was on a spindle and a needle would chart the temperature. This was encased in plastic so no one could tamper with it-but it was only about 12 inches by 4 inches.
    On night shift we noticed that the needle hardly registered any change. One night I got disgusted with it, and put it in the refrigerator. I left it there, for admin to find in the morning.
    Even though the refrigerator was 40 degrees Fahrenheit, THE NEEDLE NEVER REGISTERED THE TEMPERATURE CHANGE.
    Because it was found in the fridge, Admin then had to admit it was rigged. No one on night shift ever told on me, but it didn’t matter. The only thing that came of it was Admin stopped telling everyone it was all in our heads. But Night shift felt fully vindicated!

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  110. Everything Bagel*

    I’ve mentioned this here before but it’s a great story so here it is again!

    About 17 years ago I was managing a small retail store and it was doing well enough that the owner decided he wanted to buy a (struggling, full of code violations) local bar as a “fun side business.” He was already dating one of the bartenders there, and they had the sort of relationship you see in teenagers where they’ll proudly proclaim “we haven’t spent more than fifteen minutes apart for the past six weeks!” like that’s a special accomplishment and not a sign of things moving too quickly when you don’t know each other well. (Yes, this is an exact quote he told me when I tried to let him know that his relationship was leading to him letting things fall through the cracks at the store.)

    I don’t know about the bar employees, but at the store I think all of us considered quitting multiple times that fall as things got more and more stressful; he eventually told the other manager and I to take care of things he’d been neglecting, but at that point I was forced to come in long after hours to get through the backlog and there was a lot of resentment on my part.

    Well, as you may imagine, the new romance exploded dramatically after only a few months. My boss didn’t want her working for him anymore, but he clearly couldn’t do the reasonable and mature thing and just fire her! He decided instead to just stop scheduling her for shifts, assuming she’d eventually quit. Technically, this did happen, but…

    He got a call from another bar employee at about 4pm on a Friday, saying “Do you want the bar to be open this weekend? You should probably get down here then, because all of us quit effective immediately.” He had to call in a friend to run the bar with him all weekend, and I think he paid one of the store employees to barback, too. It was a huge mess but honestly I was delighted. Did the mad scramble to get the bar staffed add even more stress to those of us at the store? Absolutely, but I couldn’t even be mad about it. I applaud the employees of Hell, the world’s most appropriately-named bar, for walking off the job in solidarity with their coworker.

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  111. MickeyT*

    I was in my mid-20s, working for a finance firm of about 20 employees. One of the douche-y male associates inserted himself into a conversation I was having with another woman about our hair while standing at the copiers (we were both looking for new stylists). He commented how we should keep our hair long because that’s how men like it. We gave him a “WTF” look and ignored him.

    A few months later, at the company Christmas party, he shows up with a new girlfriend (who was entirely too nice to be with a jerk like him). I was making small talk with her when he walked up, and I said to him “It’s good thing she has long hair. I know how you like women with long hair”.

    He was somewhere between pissed and embarrassed. We never saw her with him again.

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  112. Sunshine on My Shoulders*

    I was in a protracted, horrible work conflict with the resident narcissist, who had been permitted to treat everyone truly terribly until I showed up and put up the world’s strongest boundary about how she could treat me and everyone else. She was vicious, indefatigable, and had no hesitation making up a bunch of lies to try to ruin my career (didn’t work). One day in a very large meeting, she was talking about a new campaign in the university to highlight individual members of the faculty (never more than one per department), and what a great program it was, and how important it was that they do a profile of someone from our department. She, of course, would be happy to contact them and volunteer herself to be highlighted as our shining star. I raised my hand and said “Yes, that does seem like a great campaign. They just completed a profile of me for that program. It’s going to be posted next week.” She looked like she had just taken a shot of lemon juice.

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  113. Pepcid AC/DC*

    I have nothing to add, but I adore whoever or whatever decided that the related posts section at the bottom of this one chose one about “circle work.”

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  114. Casey*

    When I was a young engineer, I had to work with a supplier who was notoriously a bit creepy. Day one I show up to their facility to see if they are making the thing we paid them to make, and the owner of this company says “don’t mind if the guys on the floor stare, we don’t get many pretty women around here.” Day two he tells me that I’m silly for bringing my own lunch and why don’t I get lunch with him instead, just the two of us? At this point I am getting real red flags so I tell him, you know maybe we should do that next week but I’m such a silly forgetful person, can you send me an email ahead of time so I remember?

    Lo and behold the next week he sends me an email along the lines of “can’t wait for our lunch date next week! Just joking it’s not a date haha. But don’t ask me when the parts will be back from coatings or anything borriiing like that. And if you have a boyfriend I don’t wanna know. See you soon :)”. I immediately forward this to my director and our HR team and say hi I’m not comfortable working with this supplier, see attached email, please advise how I should proceed.

    My director shows up at my desk 10 minutes later apologizing profusely, says of course we’ll take you off the project and let our oldest grumpiest male engineer handle this instead, and we will put this supplier on our blacklist so they are never contracted on another project ever again. Moral of the story- don’t be creepy!

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  115. Regular Reader*

    Please Alison repeat the May 2010 “coworker won’t stop sulking after I turned down a date”. Its the update which is a joy to read. A comeuppance in the ladies toilets.

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      1. Somehow I Manage*

        Wow. I had never seen the letter or updates, and the comments on the update were both annoying and unsettling.

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  116. Any Given Fergus*

    I work for a global apparel manufacturer that owns several brands. The company is filled with great people and there is an overall respectful vibe. Several years ago, one of the brands got a new president, and the guy was just awful. Toxic and rude, and made everyone at that brand so miserable. They were located in a different state from the home office, so his behavior was probably flying under the radar of senior leadership.

    So this brand was trying to get their upcoming season ready, and I’m involved in their samples process. The brand president kept making changes to the styles, which delayed the entire process, resulting in extremely late samples. So he scheduled a meeting to discuss the late samples, which included quite a few people, including my director (bosses boss). We tried to explain that with every change he made, the factories basically had to start from the beginning, resetting the entire clock. He got angry and didn’t want to hear it, started screaming at all of us, said he was working with a bunch of kindergarteners and a lot of other stuff that I just tuned out because nothing he had to say was worth hearing.

    After the meeting, the director came to me and apologized that I had to be subjected to that and said he was going to report the president to HR (and it wouldn’t surprise me if he went all the way to the top and reported the guy to the CEO). A few weeks later, a company wide email went out announcing the departure of the brand president. I don’t know details, but I am certain my director reporting the guy had something to do with it. That was one of the greatest emails I’ve received in my career.

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  117. MaryContrary*

    I don’t like this topic. Is easier to hold on to a grudge instead of being appropriately vulnerable or confrontational in the moment. Yes, we’ve all worked with jerks, some of whom don’t even know they’re behaving poorly, but I bet some are also writing in about us.

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    1. TinkerTailorSolderDye*

      Then you need not read it. Telling the story is a way to heal, y’know, and not everything is about holding a grudge. It’s also important to remember what happened, because history will just keep repeating if we don’t. I’m sure at least one person when I was a manager has written about me; it’s a sign of growth that I hope they do.

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    2. WellRed*

      I disagree that most of these stories are about grudges. In fact, it sounds like most are free of that burden Because if the comeuppance.

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      1. Somehow I Manage*

        Agreed. I don’t hold a grudge against the GM I wrote about above. Not at all. He was an idiot, but I wouldn’t have even thought about him had it not been for the question/topic.

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    4. Fluffy Fish*

      I fear you do not understand the topic at hand.

      However, whether you do or don’t, you can simply…move along. You have absolute free will! No one will force you to read these comments. No one will ever know if you do or do not.

      You can simply skip the topic entirely and never think of it again. You do you.

      I however along with lots of other will enjoy reading tales of schadenfreude.

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  118. No Gross Tomatoes*

    When I was in college I worked at a deli that was family-run and stingy to a gross degree. Like, food that got tossed for going bad would be taken out of the garbage by the elderly owners and put back on the line gross. The manager was beloved and loyal and had been there for over a decade. One day she ended up in the hospital with an aneurysm and was told she had six months to live unless she had an operation, so they kicked her off of her health insurance. I quit shortly thereafter. A few months later, I ducked in to visit old coworkers, and the son who ran the place was there, showboating some people around. I greeted him happily and he magnanimously introduced me to his friends from church as one of his former employees. Still smiling, I told them what a great boss he was to work for, unless you got a life threatening illness, like the woman who ran his business for thirteen years did, in which case he’d cancel your insurance and leave you to die. I watched him go from smiling to slackjawed, told them cheerfully to have a great day, and left. Highlight of a string of bad jobs!

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  119. Salt and Vinegar Chip*

    I once had a job with all the bells and whistles of horrible bossery. I shared a work room with three other people and one of the owners would march in and just start yelling. The most mundane request for a file became an accusation. Complicating matters was that I replaced a beloved employee, so everything I did from day one would never be as good.

    I was there for three long years and was actively interviewing when they laid me off, right in the most complicated stage of my biggest project of the year. Tons of moving pieces, and it was my job to bring them together…until it wasn’t anymore. I had documented everything, but since the owner didn’t understand the scope of work necessary, she had an awful time figuring things out.

    It didn’t make up for the years of abuse, but it brought me a tiny bit of joy when I heard about it.

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  120. r..*

    I was senior technical lead on a development project my boss and I had recently taken responsibility for, under difficult circumstances. We quickly recognized that the project just wouldn’t find success with the staffing it had; either more staff would be needed, or the project would need to be stopped and replaced by something bought off the shelf and perhaps customized a bit.

    Neither option was particularly well liked by senior leadership, so they started to listen to an ambitious internal upstart (lets call him Amaris) from another department that promised he could do it with the team already in place; the grapevine also had it they promised they could replace some very expensive staff (that would have been me, amongst some others) with cheaper new hires. Proving what a lovely person they are they start out by saying that “‘s employment here is a mistake that needs to be corrected” within said person standing a couple meters away in the same room with them.

    I quickly decided to leave and tender my resignation. Amaris of course wants to quickly prove his mettle, not only by successfully having gotten rid of people they promised to get rid off, but by quickly improving on some technical issues. They feign that they’re sorry to see me go, but would I be interested to do for them on a contract basis after I’ve left. I make some vague promises that I’d be open to the opportunity, but ask for understanding that I really can only give concrete assurances once I see how the new job is like.

    Being the ambitious ursurper they are they, instead of smelling a fish, promise to have fixed by to a SVP, lets call them Bob. Bob also was a real price, to the point where the person who told me about the promise was from Bob’s own office …

    Two weeks into my new job we have a call, and I tell them that unfortunately due to the new work I could only really be available for the contract two months after . Very unfortunate. Terribly sorry.

    Amaris didn’t last long after ; they were last seen storming out of Bob’s office after a very loud shouting match.

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  121. TinkerTailorSolderDye*

    I only have one good one, but oh, it is lovely to remember. After a mire of depression and respiratory problems led to my resignation from my job working in the cabinet industry, I got a part time job at the local JoBankruptcy fabric store under an abusive boss who hid it well enough, but three years in…I was exhausted and relatively still fresh out of surgery, and she got LAMBASTED by the regulars for working me till I popped stitches. She’d also hired my replacement, and was having me train her…and oh, a more racist, sexist wench I’ve rarely seen. There is nothing more glorious than watching a Mennonite elderly lady and the local leader of the church quilters team up to soundly reprimand a boss who treated us all like idiots for being human, and allowed the new one to be so awful.
    Till I quit, they both got a discount and the best service (and I got baked goods). I still speak to them both when I see them around town.

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  122. Kelsi*

    Just a little late one…

    When I was in college, I worked as a sort of training receptionist–my agency does training on evenings and weekends, so my job was to get people signed in and direct them to the appropriate floor. Because our classes had state-mandated hour requirements, we had a hard cutoff that no one could enter more than fifteen minutes late.

    I had plenty of people grouse about the policy, but this was the first time I’d ever had someone actively yelling and cursing at me. She was up in my face across the desk, called me names, tried to go to the class around me (but was fortunately going the wrong way). I remained firm but polite (even though I was young and scared and shaking!) and finally convinced her to leave and call my supervisor during regular business hours.

    Now, it was a cloudy day but it hadn’t been raining. She was parked directly in front of the building—literally less than ten feet from the front doors. And the lobby was all glass, so I had a fantastic view of how, the second she stepped out of the door, the heavens opened and it started POURING. Less than ten feet to her car, but she got absolutely soaked, and it was SO satisfying.

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  123. Ruby Tuesday*

    This won’t compare to the stories being shared, but I was once told that I’d catch more flies with honey than vinegar, referring to me not playing nice with the person who offered such sage advice. I replied “yeah, but they’re just flies”.

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    1. HiddenT*

      Fun fact: that saying isn’t true anyway. Flies much prefer apple cider vinegar because it’s fermented and smells much more like the rotting food they enjoy.

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        1. HiddenT*

          You’re welcome!

          That’s why apple cider vinegar with a drop of dish soap in a bottle/jar/cup with a funnel on top is the best homemade fly trap. They fly down through the funnel but can’t get back out, and the dish soap breaks the surface tension of the vinegar so if they land on it, they sink and drown instead of being able to rest on the surface of the liquid.

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      1. Ruby Tuesday*

        Love it. I’d have a hard time keeping it in my head, though. My filter has very large pores these days lol

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        1. Fluffy Fish*

          You could totally say it slightly less aggressive by going off on a tangent about how flies actually prefer decomposing things like trash and dead things.

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  124. FaintlyMacabre*

    I’ve shared this before, but it still amuses me, sooo… here it goes again!

    Several years ago, I had a temp job in a ridiculously dysfunctional workplace. It was a large factory and I along with two other coworkers did office work there. In my head, I dubbed them Micromanager Mindy and Do-nothing Delores. (For this story, know that while she drove me insane as a coworker, as a human being I actually liked Micromanager Mindy.)

    Do-nothing Delores did not like me or Mindy, largely because we actually knew how to do our jobs, did our jobs, and didn’t cover for her when she frequently slacked off of her job. She was a giant suck up, and would bring in treats for everyone in the factory, but always mysteriously ran out before she got to me and Mindy. I could go on, but you get the idea.

    One day, Jim, the grand boss comes in. He’s holding three strips of ten raffle tickets in his hand. The office was having a raffle for charity and there were some really nice prizes- electronics and cash and gas station gift cards. Jim addresses the three of us, saying that while he wanted to support the raffle, as the grand boss it would be inappropriate for him to win anything and therefore had bought the tickets for us.

    Even as Mindy and I are getting out our thanks, Delores has already snatched a strip of tickets from Jim’s hand and walked away without saying anything. (In my memory, she goes off into a corner and hunches over them crooning, “Preciousss, my preciousss,” but that is probably not what happened?) Jim, Mindy and I exchange a three way eye roll and then Mindy and I make an elaborate dance out of choosing the two strips of raffle tickets left. “Please, Mindy, choose which tickets you’d like.” “No, no, I insist you choose.” “I couldn’t possibly take away your choice. You simply must have your pick.” This continued until Jim more or less threw the tickets at us and walked away, no doubt regretting all the life choices he had made that had led him to that point.

    All week, Delores natters on about the prizes she wants and complains that Jim *only* bought her ten tickets. Mindy and I get in some high intensity eye rolling excercises. Finally, the raffle occurs and the prizes are distributed. Mindy and I both win gas certificates. Mindy also wins one of the higher end electronics. Delores gets diddly-squat. And every time she complained, we reminded her that she had the first pick of tickets. It was beautiful! Never have I enjoyed putting gas in my car so much as when I was using that certificate…

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  125. I still think about this*

    Not a boss but a high school teacher. She was pretty mean and loved to “call out” both students and other teacher. She had to make sure everyone knew she was an expert in every subject, not just the one she taught, and loved “gotcha” moments where she could make someone look foolish. Once, a student asked if she ever wanted kids, and she said she wanted to adopt then went on a long and inaccurate explanation of the adoption process, where she said several things that were blatantly false. I was so done with her attitude I raised my hand and said “That’s not true.” She gave me the biggest glare and said “How would you know?” And I got the absolute pleasure of saying “I was adopted.” T She didn’t speak to me the rest of the year unless she absolutely had to. It was a blessing.

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  126. Nightengale*

    This was in medical school but we tend to count school here

    My medical school was generally a jerk about my disability related needs. They either tried to overaccommodate me in absurd ways or refused the accommodations I needed and said I wasn’t qualified if I couldn’t do things. At one point I was told if I couldn’t suture I couldn’t graduate. I’m in a mental health specialty now where suturing is never needed.

    Along the way I had to do a rotation in surgery. I had meetings upon meetings before the rotation about what I could and couldn’t do and what they could and couldn’t accommodate. I could stand for an hour or so. I could use some pieces of equipment but not a retractor. I had to do 3 weeks of one thing and then 3 weeks of another and we decided I would do colon and then endocrine.

    About halfway through my 3 weeks of colon, which were going fine, I got a frantic phone call from the coordinator. They had just learned from the student doing endocrine that the student was standing and holding a retractor for 5+ hour surgeries. The student apparently HAD to be the one to do that. We all knew I couldn’t do that. So they assigned me to trauma instead.

    Trauma ended up fine. There were things I couldn’t do but there was plenty I could do and they were happy to have a med student running all the non-surgical errands that the surgeons didn’t want to do. I was happy to run those errands.

    But the interesting thing is, they didn’t replace me with another medical student on endocrine. You know, where the student HAD to be the one standing there holding the thing. To this day I have no idea who held those retractors but it wasn’t a medical student.

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    1. Skeptic53*

      I held retractors for long hours in med school and residency. When I first started private practice as a family doc in 1987, we still were assisting in surgery if the patient was one of ours.
      Imagine my surprise and retroactive anger when I assisted at a surgery and met the “iron intern”, a gizmo that clamped to the table and retractors clamped to it. All those hours of boredom and fatigue holding retractors were for nothing…
      https://artisanmed.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/three-iron-intern-set-ups_rev-419×1024-2.png

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    2. Skeptic53*

      I replied but made the mistake of including a link to a photo.
      It was probably an “iron intern” device that clamped to the table that held the retractors in endocrine in the absence of a student.

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  127. Mean Girls*

    This was many years ago! Right out of grad school my first office job was as a technical writer. All the writers shared a large open “pen” & I became good friends with another woman my age. I eventually left that job, but my friend remained, in an atmosphere that was increasingly toxic. One afternoon she had occasion to use a colleague’s computer… on which she discovered an open message chat, savaging her. Pages & pages of it. Two of the other women in the room apparently spent all day, every day, in spiteful mean-girls style remarks about her appearance, speech, clothes, everything (for the record, this friend is gorgeous, lovely & went on to publish 2 novels). My friend printed it all out & took it right to the CEO & the company narrowly avoided a harassment lawsuit. ANYWAY! Fast-forward a few years, and my friend is teaching writing at a large university. She’s talking with a university colleague, who mentions a new adjunct they plan to hire. And guess what? It’s one of the mean girls. Of course my friend spilled the tea & the mean girl’s employment offer was quietly pulled. I found that SO SATISFYING (although I wish the mean girl could have learned it was my friend that torpedoed her). Isn’t karma great?

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  128. Skeptic53*

    In college I had a summer job in 1974 with city water department of a medium-size city. Two of us were tasked with painting all the fire hydrants in the city. We were given a very old (I think 1956) Dodge pickup with a three-on-the-tree column shift. The linkage from the shifter to the gear box was very worn and would frequently jam. Most of the time we could free it with a big screwdriver used as a lever, but sometimes we couldn’t and the truck would have to be towed back to the shop (it always jammed mid-shift, while out of gear). One of the full-time employees was an old guy who loved to get on our case, not just when the truck got towed, but any other time we had difficulty with something. He favorite line was “Ya buy ’em books, ya send ’em to school, and they still ain’t worth sh*t!”. His job was reading water meters. The department bought a brand new mini pickup (I think a Chevy LUV, = Light Utility Vehicle) for his use. He was over the moon about “his” new truck, and kept rubbing it in our faces, saying “This is what ya get when you know what you’re doing and don’t f*ck up all the time”. He had it a week, ran a red light, was t-boned and while he was not badly hurt, the truck was totaled. We innocently asked if he wanted to use the old Dodge, which cracked up the rest of the crew. We didn’t get any more ribbing from him the rest of the summer.

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  129. Maggie*

    It wasn’t in a work situation, or not mine anyhow, but I had to go to court over a traffic accident once. The lawyer for the driver who’d caused the accident was weirdly combative with (at the time) a 20 year old student. He seemed to think he was on Law and Order.

    At one point he said, ‘…you can easily replace a bumper. Why did you get the insurance to pursue my client instead of getting your father to just put one on the car for you?’ and I went, ‘Well, he’s dead.’ He was, for the record!

    A few minutes later he consulted his files and scoffed, “…is this right? You drive a Nissan Micra? I could replace the whole car for 25o pounds?” and the judge piped up and said, “My wife just bought the same year. I assure you that you can’t.”

    Then he made a big deal about how I was lying because I’d thought his client’s car had a tow bar and in fact, it didn’t! And the judge sighed and said, “When you asked if she remembered if it had a towbar, she said ‘no, it didn’t’. Please pay attention.”

    I, or rather the insurance company, won the case. It seemed like it was a really bad day for that guy though.

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  130. MigraineMonth*

    In 2008 when I couldn’t find any other work, I worked for a “technology startup” whose CEO was a big ideas guy who didn’t understand technology, the field he was trying to disrupt or how to run a business, but was certain he had a billion-dollar idea.

    He clearly thought that the technology was the least important part of his technology startup, because while he paid top dollar to his lawyers and offered equity to anyone he thought he could swindle into partnering with him, I was the *highest-paid* of the software developers with a $15/hr contract and no benefits or equity. He also didn’t pay any attention to us when we said things like “That would be an enormous security risk and not allowed in this field” or “It is literally impossible to display that information because we never collect it” and was constantly getting distracted by shiny things and requiring new features instead of letting us finish creating a working prototype.

    Which is all eye-roll worthy, but the problems began when I pointed out I was out of hours and would need a contract extension and he threatened to sue me for breach of contract unless I continued working for him for free until the product was “complete”, however he chose to define that. I discovered he’d pulled this crap on everyone on my team, and they’d let him. Not only was I the highest-paid developer, I was the only one still getting paid at all!

    The comeuppance: I insisted on getting paid until he caved, but notified him that I was leaving in a month for grad school. By the time I left, every person in his tiny “company” had quit. While the CEO still lists himself on LinkedIn as CEO of that company (and actually reached out to me once about working at his company again?!?) it has never actually created a product in the past 15 years.

    Also, that billion-dollar idea? Was a complete misunderstanding of where the field/market was headed. No one would spend a cent on it now.

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  131. HRneedsAdrink*

    I worked HR for a small university. The head of fundraising (crucial for universities), I’ll call Bob, lost his long time Admin and had me find him a temp while we searched for a more ‘permanent’ replacement. The University (like many others) had standard practices/ procedures for recruitment and hiring- list the position for a minimum of 7 business days, interview ALL qualified internal applicants, etc.
    I advertised the position (internally and externally), reviewed applications and sent him the qualified resumes (I would then phone screen the external candidates and set up interviews with the internal candidates he selected). This was considered a very prestigious dept with many perks, so we had quite a few internal applicants (not to mention Alumni that had applied).
    Bob decided that he didn’t have time to retrain another individual and he just wanted to hire his temp. However, 1- his temp did not even apply, and 2- his temp was not qualified according to his requirements and job description. I also pointed out that he was required to at least interview the internal applicants. I told him that I would whittle the internal candidates down to 2-3 and he’d only have to meet with them for 20 minutes each. He told me no, because Bob brought in a lot of money for the school, and he was used to saying no and getting his way.
    I also reminded Bob that once a year he asked all of us University employees to donate a portion of our earnings as part of the University mission to ‘help improve all of our lives.’ No dice, Bob went straight to the University President and demanded to hire his temp. (Which btw, took more time and energy than if he’d just interviewed the internal applicants). The President sided with Bob, and Bob got to hire his temp.
    The next ‘Day of Giving,’ employee donations were down about 40%. Oh, and the temp had to be fired 2 months later.

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  132. KLink*

    I teach high school and somehow ended up with a principal as my nemesis. He made everyone except his favorites absolutely miserable with absurd power trips. For example, when the dance coach requested that her dancers be released 10 minutes early so they could warm up before a pep assembly, he wouldn’t allow it. When she asked why he was making that decision, he said “Because I can.” He accused me of deliberately undermining his authority when I asked a question about a different knee jerk decision.
    Imagine our surprise when one day he called an impromptu meeting and announced that he was leaving in order to “serve his faith.” We were shocked, because we’d seen no evidence of the grace and mercy usually promoted by his faith. He was going to serve as a principal at a Catholic school, which seems noble (? notoriously even more underpaid than public) until you realize it’s a way to collect public retirement PLUS private salary. He lasted at that school for a few years, then moved to launch a new school as athletic director, where things did not go well. He was fired midyear (unheard of), had his keys taken away and was told he was no longer welcome on the property.
    Former students still loathe him.

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  133. Skeptic53*

    My first clinical rotation in 3rd year of medical school was internal medicine, the team I was on was consulting on a patient who had been in the Surgical ICU for months. He was a street alcoholic named Edward something who had been run over by a car and badly injured, among other things most of his ribs had been broken. They called him “Fast Eddy”. He was on a ventilator to help him breathe, on it so long they had cut a hole in the front of his throat called a tracheotomy to feed the breathing tube into his lower windpipe. He was in such bad shape that the upper windpipe had gotten very weak (tracheomalacia). When they tried to take the tube out and take him off the ventilator, the windpipe would collapse when he breathed in. A device called a Kistner button was installed in the tracheotomy. It had flaps that would allow air to come in when he inhaled, then close when he exhaled, allowing air to finally pass through his vocal cords. He was cared for by a male surgical nurse who had been a corpsman in the military, and had worked a long time in the SICU. He was very full of himself, very condescending, a know-it-all who loved to loudly point out mistakes made by other nurses, medical students, and residents. This nurse was of course universally disliked. Fast Eddy had been in the SICU so long that nearly all the residents had cared for him at some point. Word spread that they were taking off the dressing on the Kistner button, and a crowd of medical personnel gathered. His awful nurse said to him “Eddy! You can talk now! What do you want to say to me?” Eddy slowly rasped out “Eat… sh*t… and… die!”, prompting one of the loudest roars of laughter I’ve ever heard. Everyone took turns high-fiving Fast Eddy.

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  134. Mouse named Anon*

    Years ago I worked an accounting job. I hated it, along with my co-workers. Every morning I had to pull 2 reports from 2 separate systems. Report A had to match Report B. You had to plug both into excel sheets to get them to do so. If they didn’t match there was a big issue.

    Pause for a bit a back story. 2 months into this job I realized they undersold a “low level Accounting Job” as something probably required a bit more experience. I didn’t receive much training. They basically put me on PIP 2 months in. I was really upset. Thus if my sheets (from above) didn’t match I was in trouble.

    Ok back to the story. I spent nearly 6-7 hours trying to get my reports to match. I asked for help from Co-workers but none would help me. Citing “I had to figure it out for myself”. My boss was out of town. I was out of ideas on how to solve it. Pretty much thought I was going to get let go when my boss came back. I couldn’t help it and broke down at my desk crying. It didn’t help things that I was 5 months post partum with 2 little kids at home. Basically drowning in all aspects of my life. Finally my co-worker piped up and said she knew the issue (at around 3:30pm). I asked her when she discovered it. She said at about 8:30am. I was so angry. I yelled at her. I am not a yeller at all. I asked her how she could have kept it from me, knowing how I was struggling to find it. I fixed it and tried to furiously catch up on the rest of my work for the day.

    I emailed my boss, when my co-worker left for the day. I bcc’d my personal email in case I needed the paper trail. When my boss got back my co-worker got pulled in a room and written up for her behavior. I was grinning from ear to ear all day.

    I was laid off almost a year to the date of hire. I hated that place. I hated my co-workers, boss and company. When they told me I was laid off I laughed (LOL). Basically from happiness. Pretty sure I skipped out of the building.

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  135. nora*

    I moved cross-country in my early 20s and landed a job as an admin in a small business doing light industrial stuff. Less than three months later I was in a car accident that sadly included a fatality. Work knew I had been in an accident but I didn’t tell them anything else.

    The day before I was supposed to go court, the braindead hick of a VP (who nearly severed his thumb trying to use a power tool without the guard on, just to give you an idea of how smart he was) was bragging about his son who had wrecked his truck while doing something stupid and wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, but didn’t get ticketed because Reasons. He was so proud of that kid getting away with it. It was the end of the day, I was exhausted, I was in pain, and I was stressed because I didn’t know what the judge would do with my charge. Jail was a possibility.

    Me: Have a good night, I’m off tomorrow.
    VP: Oh, going partying with your boyfriend tonight huh?
    Me: Actually, no. I was in a car accident. Someone died. I’m going to court tomorrow to face charges. Glad to know your son is okay.

    I’ve never seen someone go so pale so quickly. I left before he could say one word to me. I ended up paying a fine and went back to work the next day. The VP went up to me and apologized profusely, and never talked about his idiot kid to me again.

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  136. NothingIsLittle*

    I had an awful coworker at Old Job who was campaigning to get me fired. Well, one of his attempts was to claim I had added serious errors when copying data from one of his documents. The power I felt when I was able to pull up the document’s edit history and prove he had entered the data wrong and corrected it before accusing me was glorious.

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  137. Jay (no, the other one)*

    I’m a doc and in my last full-time job I was working for a private company that employed a few docs and more PAs and CRNPs. Our medical director and the one PA were men. All the CRNPs and the other two docs were women. The PA was, as Carolyn Hax would say, a glassbowl, and he did not like me one tiny little bit. He was also buddy-buddy we’re-such-bros with the medical director, who was also pretty glassbowlish Among other things, the PA did a case presentation when he reviewed an on-call phone call and ripped my documentation to shreds (without identifying me) while not bothering to show any of the preceding or following notes. After I spoke up to explain, my boss called me on the carpet for speaking out of turn, being defensive, and not being able to accept feedback. My grandboss was in the meeting and shut him down. OK.

    Shortly thereafter I took a position as the coordinator of a patient care program focused on our sickest patients. The program included longer visit times so we could delve more deeply into the complex issues as well as joint visits with the social workers. This was about a year after lockdown ended and we had resumed regular in-home visits. At least most of us had. I quickly started to hear from the social workers that the PA was doing the visits over the phone and refused to meet them for in-person visits. I spoke with the PA who basically told me to pound sand. This program was developed by the national office and was an organizational priority; we (especially the medical director) had to document that we were following the protocol. So I spoke with my boss who said “I’ll talk to him.” I said “No, thanks. I think we need to establish that I actually have authority to manage this work. I’ll set up a meeting for the three of us.” Which I did, and I calmly explained that the visits had to happen as planned, including one-hour visits with social workers in person, and when the PA said “but, boss…” the boss had to shut him down.

    If that had been all, dayenu….but six months later a patient called to ask why the PA had done a visit by phone from his car in the patient’s driveway, and when boss pulled the chart it turned out the PA had documented the visit as in-person. Bye-bye, glassbowl.

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  138. Cookingcutie11*

    Not exactly comeuppance, but it still felt great. I worked under a manager for a few years who was not great at managing since she was about 15 years older than all the other women on my team, so she tried to treat us more like friends. I was stubborn so we butted heads. I was also really good at my job, but eventually, it was clear she didn’t like me. I got pregnant and wanted flexibility to WFH in the 2 weeks before I was due, but she said no, so I got a dr’s note since I had such a long commute. She couldn’t argue with that. Before my leave, she reluctantly organized a baby shower for me and asked one of my friends at work (who was in a different department) if she wouldn’t like to organize it instead. When I came back from maternity leave, I asked for flexibility to WFH one day a week and was denied. I was “allowed” to leave an hour early though if I skipped my lunchbreak, and she pointed out that I couldn’t browse the internet or do any online shopping (uh, like she did?!) if I skipped my lunch. I said ok.

    A month later, I gave 2 weeks notice and she was absolutely astounded and “didn’t realize that leaving was on the table” and was scrambling to discuss with management to see if they could come up with a WFH allowance like I had asked. They couldn’t, I already had a signed offer letter, and then 2 weeks later, took a job with barely a commute and a shorter workday and never looked back.

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  139. Jam on Toast*

    Oh, I’ve got a good comeuppance story.

    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 they were a GROUNDBREAKING ONLINE EDUCATION MIRACLE WORKER and that they were 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 after we meet, 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 and 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. Rumour 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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  140. AnonForThis*

    A guy with a fair amount of power at my workplace, who publicly made a lot of workplace decisions based on his own religious beliefs (which were not in line with the workplace’s religious affiliation), was as you might expect terrible to work with and also not very smart. For this and other reasons I politely hated him and it was mutual.

    One day he was fired so abruptly that it was obvious what had happened: either drugs, or financial dishonesty, or sex stuff. Turned out to be the third one. It had emerged after a few years of his employment, where he kept failing sideways into new upper-level jobs, that he – Mr. “Jesus is my heart” and “My family is everything” – was sending unwelcome intimate photographs of himself to female employees. It was not a one-off event.

    I was pleased.

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  141. Jake*

    We were on a very very large federal construction project (many billions of dollars, thousands of craftsmen working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week), and the project was divided into three divisions. The leader of my division (my boss’s boss) was a complete ass hole, but was very well liked by the executive team. He treated those under him very poorly, and he would routinely try to sabotage the other two divisions in the hopes that making them look bad would make him look better by comparison. It worked for the first 18 months I was there (which was a couple years into his tenure). He’d yell and scream behind closed doors then butter up the executives and highlight all the teams’ successes when it benefitted him.

    However, there had been a lot of complaints from his group about morale. A LOT. So many that they hired a consultant to go do interviews amongst the 100’s of people under him to anonymously gather data and ideas on how to fix it. To put it in perspective, on the management side, we turned over entire departments twice in the 2.5 years I was there.

    Well… I was working night shift, and my boss may have accidently left the interview results on the printer in his office that I had to use because our trailer’s general printer was out of ink. I peaked. Of the 100s of interviews, only 9 people were willing to speak because they didn’t believe it would be anonymous. 8 of the 9 absolutely tore him to shreds.

    We later found out that he was next in line to be the project executive of the job (his boss’s boss’s job) when he retired in the next 12 months. When the project executive retired, this jerkwad gave an ultimatum that he wanted the job, or he was going to leave. They showed him the interview results and said he was welcome to go.

    6 months later, he left and has worked either at or below that career level since.

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