Everyone has had an awful boss before. Normally, we grit our teeth and take it until we can go somewhere else. But occasionally, some of us are about to get some revenge on one of these monsters. These Redditors tell their stories of the time they got sweet revenge on an awful boss. Content has been edited for clarity.
Expired Food Being Sold?
“So, I was working at a 7-Eleven for just shy of a year. The store was a franchise, which means it was independently owned by a guy whose IQ was probably somewhere in the 80s. He treated us all like trash, and the only person who made more than minimum wage was the useless clerk he was cheating on his wife with (who, for some reason, made $15 an hour).
This guy never did anything by the book. If he thought it would make him more money, then the law didn’t apply to him. Nobody at the store ever got a lunch. We were barely afforded smoke breaks, and we weren’t allowed to eat while on the clock. In California, when you work more than 5 hours without a lunch, you’re supposed to get paid an extra hour’s wages, which counts toward overtime. We didn’t get that either. On top of that, when he did payroll, he wouldn’t actually go by when you clocked in and out, he went by the schedule he wrote. So if you stayed an extra hour or two to help out when it got busy, you’d be working for free because the hours wouldn’t show up. Also, your schedule was subject to change whenever he felt like it. There were several times he wrote me up for showing up late because he would change my shift without telling me.
So, here’s where the trouble starts. Whenever we would take expired food off the shelves, we’d come in the next day, and he had printed new expiration dates, pasted them on top of the old ones, and put the food back on the shelves. The happened consistently, the entire time I worked there.
Well, one day, I’d had enough of his garbage. I called up the health department and reported him. Then, I emailed corporate and filled them in on what was going on.
Well, word got back to him. When I went in the next day, I’d received a ‘complaint’ and was promptly fired. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never worked anywhere with a one-strike policy.
Here’s the thing though. Since the day I started there, I’d been keeping records. I had copies of every schedule posted, and every pay stub I’d ever received. I went to the labor board that day and picked up the paperwork I needed. See, when you don’t get lunches, and you don’t get paid the extra hour you’re supposed to, the labor board can force the employer to pay you the money he owes you in one lump sum. So, I filled out the paperwork and turned it in. My old boss wasn’t so smug when he had to make a check to me for $2600 right after receiving a hefty fine from the health department.
Now, I’m working to get the labor board to force him to hire me back under the whistleblower clause. If he has to re-hire me, he also has to pay me back lost wages for the past few months. Also, my old co-workers get lunches now.
Was the revenge sweet? It felt awesome! But that’s not why I did it. I did it because that sack of trash was going to keep on exploiting his employees and customers to make a buck and keep being a worthless human being. I felt like unless I did something, he was going to get away with it. I simply could not abide by the idea of him suffering no consequences for his actions.”
Never Mess With IT
“My office chair broke, so I requisitioned a new one at work. It was about $400 and ergonomic (same chair the general manager has). The guy who ordered the chair for me decided I didn’t need an expensive office chair and just got me the same chair that had been hurting my back for two years. He said it wasn’t in the budget.
A year or so later, this same guy decides he needs a laptop to do his job instead of a desktop, so I ordered him a Dell Mini netbook. I told him the MacBook Pro he wanted wasn’t in the budget.”
He Saw The Firing Coming
“First real job I had was at a huge toy franchise. I didn’t quit, but I knew they were going to fire me. They had been slowly getting rid of anyone over 18.
On the day they were going to can me, I changed all the extension numbers on the phones around the store during the day and on the way to the ‘meeting,’ I changed the combination to the vault.
As I was leaving/being casually led out, one of the guys on the floor asked me what was wrong with the vault, I responded, ‘My guess one of the people these guys fired probably changed it. Bye.'”
They Were Both Aggressive
“I was working for a marketing company as a graphic designer and was asked to digitally doctor some photos to make a client’s product (a head lice comb) look more effective than it really was on the ‘before and after’ results. I told my boss I refused to do it. He also installed software on his computer that displays everyone’s screen on his screen – and didn’t tell anyone about it or get them to sign a contract. That is highly illegal in Australia.
He is South African, I am a New Zealander– both of us have tempers. It almost literally came to blows between us; he shoved me, I shoved him back, I called him a bunch of names, etc. He sped off in his BMW, so I cleaned out my desk and then reported the whole company for pirated software use on 20 terminals. I win.
Everyone hated that place so much they all took me out for drinks the next weekend as a thank you for telling the boss how it really was.”
No Water Allowed?
“I was with Stop & Shop and after two months of being horridly abused by the higher ups, I’d had enough.
Well, one day I was doing cart retrieval. The demon of a deli manager would come out ever 10-15 minutes for a smoke break and if I stopped even for a moment to even get a drink of water, I would get reported to my supervisor. I was 90 degree day and we were incredibly busy. I was constantly moving and very thirsty.
Well, I stopped to take a drink of the water I have with me. She had a fit and I got reported for a fourth time. I get called in and, in front of customers, I get belittled by said supervisor and the deli manager has this wicked smile on her face. I’D HAD ENOUGH.
I was never properly trained on registers, and it got so bad a manager would follow me up to the time clock to make sure I didn’t ‘clock in early’ (I had a ‘bad habit’ of clocking in about 5 minutes early and was threatened with being written up for time card padding). The store manager was critical of wherever I parked, even if I was in employee parking, so I ended up parking at the furthest reaches of the customer parking lot to shut him up. My favorite one was how my brother, who I’d not seen for close to 10 months after being shipped off for the Navy, came in to surprise me during what was supposed to be my lunch break and the manager decide that was a good time bump my lunch up for an hour. I didn’t get to see my brother for another week after that…it was bad.
I looked at the supervisor screaming at about being insubordinate and how I needed to come inside if I had nothing better to do, so I told him, in front of the customers, that he and the deli manager needed to ‘get the sticks out of their uptight butts!’
I was fired, and rightfully so. I was happy to be fired in this case.
But now, THE REVENGE.
I ended up calling corporate and used my voice acting abilities to convince them I was an elderly woman named Roberta– and I filed a complaint against each one of the higher-ups I had issues with, claiming I’d shopped there for years and saw the stuff that would happen in front of the customers. It wasn’t far from the truth because people were reprimanded in front of the customers all the time. It was embarrassing.
Corporate bought it. Two people, I found out, got transferred, the deli manager got fired, and the store manager was replaced withing three months.”
Because They Were Friends?
“My wife worked for Starbucks and was fired because she became too good of friends with her shift supervisor. They were both girls with similar interests. The horror!
So, my wife put a very expensive coffeemaker outside the back door of the store on her last shift and I picked her up with it. We gave the coffeemaker to her parents as a Christmas present. They still use it 8 years later.”
That’s One Crazy Fight
“Oh man, this poor kid I used to work with at Wendy’s…Kevin. He was a juvenile delinquent. He was a few years older than me, so technically in charge of me. He was a bit bigger than me, had nasty tattoos on his neck, and supposedly was out of jail on work release. He tried to be a tough guy and bully me whenever we worked together– stuff like generally talking smack unprovoked, getting real close up in my face, and that stance where you puff out your chest and pull your arms back like you’re going to swing. The most irritating was when he would walk right up in my face then flinch like he was going to throw a punch at me, then just laugh and say some rude stuff.
I got along with just about everyone at work, and he did somewhat, but we just did not fit together.
One day, the exchanges between us were so apparent and obviously stressed. Everyone working was talking about me fighting him. I dispelled these rumors as I wanted to keep my job, but my destiny on this day said otherwise.
First, there was the backdoor incident. The store had a large back door with a peephole in it and it could only be opened from the inside. There was a buzzer outside that employees would push if they wanted back in. Well, Kevin was locked outside and his patience while awaiting his re-entry had run out. Instead of tapping the buzzer, this guy was mashing it and holding it down while everyone inside went nuts. We were all busy and I was running to the back to grab some heavy boxes. Holding these boxes, I was going to open the back door while I walked past. I tried to push on the door, but it wouldn’t open. I leaned into it, but couldn’t push much more because of the boxes I was holding. I was in a hurry, so I yelled ‘GET BACK I’M GONNA KICK THE DOOR!’
He did not hear me over the loud constant buzzing. I gave that door a swift ‘THIS IS SPARTA’ kick and it opened about 3 inches then bounced closed again. I kicked it again and it opened, revealing a bashed and angry Kevin.
He had been trying to look in the peephole when I kicked the door. I had just broken his nose. Like the tip was almost touching his cheek, bright red purple, swollen eyes, broken. He was furious. Immediately, I started apologizing and backing away from him, but he came at me like a rabid monkey. Quickly, we were surrounded by employees and separated. I was told to go up front and manage fries and to not come into the back part of the store until Kevin left to the hospital.
Then, the final event, less than 10 minutes later. I was working the fries, which entails grabbing a metal basket out of boiling hot oil and dumping the fresh fries into an adjacent tray. I was doing this and everyone around me was talking about how I just broke Kevin’s face. On his way out of the store for the hospital, he decided to come right up to me again and try to instigate a fight while I was dumping some fresh fries. Kevin pulled his signature move of flinching at me like he was going to throw a punch. I retaliated by returning my own flinch with the basket I was holding. I didn’t actually hit him with an incredibly hot fry basket…but I forgot about the boiling hot oil still clinging to the basket. When I flinched at him and shook the basket, tiny flaming hot drops of grease splattered his face and neck.
I had just broken his nose on accident, then threw boiling hot oil on his face on accident. Instant fight. On the ground. I’m a wrestler so his freshly broken and burned nose was just smashed and wiped across a dirty floor for a few seconds before it was broken up. He was an absolute mess.
He left for the hospital, I got sent home. That was it. No charges. No questions from my manager(s) after. Shockingly, no more being scheduled with Kevin. Not even any paperwork about two vicious assaults and fights in the same day. I felt awful, but simultaneously kinda justified. Both incidents were honest accidents, which could have easily been avoided if he weren’t such a prick. I still felt like the outcome was worse than reasonable.”
What An Awful Woman
“I worked at a fairly well-known restaurant in a small, northern New England city as an assistant manager. The owners were very successful restaurateurs with several successful (non-chain) establishments, and spent maybe a day or two a month in our location. The rest of the time there was a general manager in charge. We’ll call her ‘Jan.’
Jan was about as ‘Type A’ as they come. She was a middle-aged woman, but beautiful and petite. She always looked put together and primped. Jan had started with the owners a decade earlier in their first restaurant as a server and had worked her way up to general manager over the years. At first, I just thought she had extremely high standards, which I respected. I have high standards as well and take pride in my work. I had been impressed by how the kitchens were spotless, the staff was immaculate (like run a white-gloved hand under the back of the oven and it comes back white kind of clean), and the food was always top quality. I had frequently been a customer and was thrilled that I got the job there. I had been in the business for a decade and that restaurant was THE place in our area. I was so excited. Unfortunately, I quickly learned why everything is so shining and perfect.
Jan was a tyrant. She was the kind of boss who soured the mood of the entire staff like a storm cloud hovering over us that never went away. Nothing was ever good enough and the standards changed from day-to-day. On a good day, she would shut herself up in the office and then leave early. Good days were very rare and could turn into bad days at the drop of a dime. On bad days, you couldn’t be perfect enough, and she would come up with new rules and regulations just to punish people. If a host called out sick (they were literal children), she would berate them on the phone and make them cry. If a cook made a mistake on a plate, she would humiliate them in front of the staff, accuse them of doing it on purpose and then give us all the silent treatment for hours after (seriously). If someone’s cash out was off, even by a few cents, she would accuse them of theft and force me to cut down their hours.
As a fellow manager, I was mostly spared her awful behavior, though I had to hear about her treatment from my staff almost every day. All of this was just run-of-the-mill bad boss stuff until it came time for our yearly staff evaluation meetings. This is where ‘Raoul’ enters the story.
Raoul was a hard-working dishwasher who had moved to our state from Puerto Rico a few years earlier and spoke English with some difficulty. Whenever I had to go over anything official with him, we would have a coworker translate between us to be sure we were both communicating clearly. Jan refused this courtesy to Raoul. This made his evaluation pretty difficult. Raoul managed to communicate to us that due to recent cuts in his hours, he would be forced to get a second job to pay the bills. Something about this absolutely set Jan off. She told him she would fire him if he dared. I could see plainly on the intake paperwork in front of me that Raoul had been hired with the understanding that it would be a full time position, so I pointed that out. Jan was furious, but agreed through gritted teeth that if Raoul agreed not to get a second job, she would bump his hours up to ‘at least 35 hours a week.’ It was stated as clear as day and I documented it in my daily manager log book. Work went on as usual after that and I didn’t think much of this meeting again for a few months.
Another time a while later, while filing out information for tax returns, Jan called me into the office. I could tell she had pulled the tiny room apart looking for something. ‘All the information about our Puerto Rican employees is gone!’ she told me with a mixture of panic and suspicion. I looked at the files in question, and they all seemed to be in order, so I was confused and told her I couldn’t help. A few minutes later, I walked back in the office to find her arguing with ‘Rosa,’ our most talented chef and a Puerto Rican native. Rosa was perfectly fluent in English.
‘Noooo, Rooosaa.’ Jan was speaking to Rosa as though she were hard of hearing or mentally slow. ‘Where. Is. Your. Green. Card?’
‘What are you talking about?’ Rosa was confused.
‘Are you an illegal or something? Is that why one of you broke in here? To hide the proof?’ Jan wasn’t yelling, but her eyes were cold and flashing with rage.
‘WHAT?!?’ Rosa was starting to get angry now. It suddenly clicked for me, so I interrupted.
‘Jan… uh… You do realize that Puerto Rico is a United States territory, right?’
‘Of course I know that!’ Jan snapped back.
‘Okay, so you know that Rosa has a social security number like any other American native.’
‘Oh. Right. Never mind Rosa, you can go back to work.’ Jan did not apologize for accusing Rosa of theft. I was so done with this place after that. Then it got worse.
Jan did all kinds of little things like that and she never apologized. I had already gotten a job offer for a place closer to my house when the final straw came. I was the closing manager one day and got in just before the dinner rush to see Raoul storming out the back door. He didn’t speak much English, but his expletives were very clear. Jan had lied about raising his hours to 35 per week, so Raoul had gotten the second job he talked about. When Jan found out, she fired him, but not before saying something about how ‘all you illegals are the same.’ She was really fixated on these American citizens being ‘illegal’ for some reason.
By this point, I hated this woman too (She once told me my clothing made me look poor in front of the whole staff; I was wearing what she made me wear). Since I knew I would be leaving soon anyway, I told Raoul he should go after our boss for wrongful termination since I had documented proof (with Jan’s signature!) that he had been promised more hours and that Jan had broken the agreement, not Raoul.
The last time I saw Jan was on my way out of Raoul’s lawyer’s office after giving a deposition about several labor laws she had violated. At least the ones that I knew about. Apparently, there were many others she had broken in front of other employees. She couldn’t even look me in the eye. The best part? At my deposition, I learned that Jan was actually the one who was illegally in the country. Her green card had recently expired. She was Canadian. She ended up being sent back to Canada as a result of this case and no one has heard from her since.
Raoul was granted six months of unemployment pay, plus the restaurant had to pay his legal fees. They closed that location not long after. Maybe they should hire their managers more carefully next time?”
He Did It To Himself
“Background. I worked in an office for a large supermarket in the UK. We had a team leader who was a prick (he’ll be known as Dave from here on). He was never in the wrong and always had the ‘what I say goes’ attitude. He would ask really inappropriate questions if you had been ill– real probing questions that were unnecessary. He was a prick.
One day, he got promoted to the team leader of the team above us. They were involved in the data side of things. We thought we had seen the last of him, but he used his data team to run reports on who was doing what. He generally messed with his old team and was universally despised.
One day, we had an issue with pricing in our stores. Meat was going through the till at twice the normal price. No biggie, these things happen from time to time. In our stores, we have a policy if we overcharge you, you get double the overcharge back. So, say a leg of lamb was $28 and you got charged double $56. You’d get the $56 as double the overcharge and you got to keep the product. Now, Dave knowing this, went shopping after work. He put every meat he could think of in his shopping trolley. Once he got to the checkout and acted as if he was a genuine customer, they sent him to customer service. Now, the prick had always been so self-important failed to realize the girl behind the counter used to work in our office.
She saw him and made some excuses and spoke to her manager. She basically said to the manager, ‘this guys pulling a fast one.’ He agreed.
The Manager: ‘I understand you have been overcharged on some meat?’
Dave: ‘Yes, and I want the refund on double the difference!’
Manager: ‘Did the lady behind the till tell you about the overcharge before the items start scanning?’
Dave: ‘Yes she did, and I was told to come here.’
Manager: ‘If you were told before the items were scanned that we had this fault, all we can do is give you back what you have been overcharged (now 90% of people get double the difference we only pull out this policy if someone has clearly done it to scam cash, and we’re totally legally allowed to do this).
Dave: ‘This is ridiculous. I know the policy I manage the stores’ policies throughout the UK!’
Manager: ‘Excuse me, but how do YOU manage the policies?’
From what I’m told this was said in a condescending way to get a rise out of Dave. It worked.
Dave: ‘I work in head office and I’m not some little skivvy either.’
Manager: Acting like he was going to jump through hoops for this idiot, ‘Oh sorry sir, can I take your staff card?’
Dave: ‘Yeah here it is.’
Manager: ‘I’ve just got to go to petty cash and sort this for you.’
Dave: ‘No problem.’
The manager proceeded to phone us. Low and behold, it was his old team that picked up the call. The first thing he asked was did we have a manager who worked here by the name of Dave and could he speak to Dave’s boss. Dave’s boss took the call and said to the manager at the other store, ‘Can you ask Dave to come in to your office? I need to talk to him.’
He was fired on the spot due to fraud against the company. I heard he was working for Domino’s Pizza– a bit of a come down from a $40k a year job! The best part staff found out which Domino’s he worked in and would go in and order meat feast pizzas, making sure they got all the extra meat they ordered!”
We All Go Down Together
“A little over a year ago, I was working at a company and my manager and I didn’t see eye to eye at all. I work in IT and have been working with end user computing for over 20 years. My manager was new to end user computing and didn’t like the fact I would correct her and that most of the company came to me with questions and bypassed her. After about 6 months, I started to notice thing were going downhill fast. I went to her boss and raised my concerns to no avail. Toward the end, I had to travel and she wouldn’t approve my expense report when I got back.
We were not on speaking terms, so I emailed her several times. After a week and a half, I filed a complaint with HR and started looking for a new job. The day I met with HR, they went to her manager and within an hour my expense report was approved. She made up an excuse, saying the system was down, so that is why she didn’t approve it. On a side note, when I met with HR I told them I felt she was retaliating against me and I felt she was going to try to get me fired.
About a week later, I get an IM from her manager asking me to come talk about an issue with a contract. The odd thing was he asked me to meet him in an office by HR. I get there and HR is in there. They ask me all kinds of questions and after a while, they tell me they have to suspend me due to lies my manager had told them. I was being nice and not bad-mouthing my manager up to this point.
Then the gloves came off and I told them the truth about everything, which was easily verified if they interviewed my teammates. HR and the VP talked among themselves and decided both of us would be suspended pending investigation. When I handed in my phone and access card, I told the HR person, this was why I came to you as I knew she was going to try this.
The next day I get a call saying I was being terminated, but she was also. I said I had been interviewing and I had a job lined up. I started 3 days later. A year and a half, later my former manager still unemployed.”