Office Culture
The culture of an office largely determines the positive or negative feelings that employees associate with working. Every office has a mixture of personalities and how those personalities interact can have a massive impact on culture. For example, an office where the employees get along really well will likely lead to good company culture. On the other hand, an office where employees don’t get along and are extremely better towards each other will likely result in bad company culture. That’s where the trouble begins for our friend, “Sarah.”
Sarah worked as a receptionist in a medical office. There were two full-time receptionists as well as Sarah and five other part-time receptionists. The most important job for the receptionists was receiving paperwork and scanning it into their software system. That had to be done the same day of appointments for insurance and billing purposes. Sarah’s co-worker, “Mary,” did absolutely everything to avoiding scanning the paperwork aside from outwardly refusing to do it.
Mary refusing to scan the paperwork also meant that patients were delayed in the learning of their diagnoses. If a patient had a diagnosis that required them to seek medical attention immediately, that could lead to dire consequences. Thankfully in Sarah’s experience, the only consequence was that Mary really inconvenienced the other receptionists.
Sarah and five of the other receptionists confronted Mary about her poor job performance and informed her that they would be going to their manager if she didn’t start doing her part with the paperwork. For about two weeks, Mary scanned in all of the paperwork and did her part; however, that was short-lived. Mary was so entitled that she thought she could actually do her job for a couple of weeks then go back to contributing nothing, and Sarah would let it slide.
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Passive-Aggressive Co-Workers
After Mary began slacking on scanning the paperwork again, Sarah and two of the other receptionists went to their manager. They explained what Mary was doing, how it was nearly doubling their workloads every day, how it was unfair to the other receptionists, and how much additional stress it caused them as a result. The manager assured them that it would be handled and they left the meeting feeling good about it.
Unfortunately, the office door had been open while they were explaining everything to the manager. Normally that would be okay; however, the office that Sarah worked in was not full of very mature employees. There was a lot of gossiping about other employees and passive-aggressive behavior that took place in the office. For example, employees would purposely not ask someone they didn’t like if they wanted food when they were ordering out lunch for their whole department. As a result, the entire office had a very strange vibe when it came to how employees interacted with each other.
The manager’s office was located next to the billing department, which was the pettiest group of employees in the office. It wasn’t long before someone in the billing department told Mary every single detail that Sarah and the other receptionists had said about her. After being warned, Mary was called into the manager’s office later that day and returned to her desk looking absolutely furious.
It wasn’t long before Mary enacted her plan for revenge against Sarah and the other receptionists.
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Petty Revenge
Mary went straight to the administrative department of the office. She explained what had happened from her perspective and accused Sarah and the other part-time receptionists of having a personal vendetta against her. After that, Mary made it her personal mission to inconvenience Sarah and the other receptionists in any way possible while they were working.
Mary tried to encourage the rest of the staff not to speak to Sarah and the other receptionists. That didn’t work with the majority of the staff; however, it did with the administrative department, who believed Mary’s accusations. Mary also began taking thirty-minute bathroom breaks as well as disappearing without reason whenever the office would get a rush of patients.
To make things more inconvenient, Mary refused to audibly speak to Sarah and the other receptionists. If Mary had a request, she would email the other receptionist despite sitting right next to them. Mary also made sure that the administrative staff didn’t invite them to order lunch, go to happy hour, or attend any dinner parties after work.
Sarah didn’t mind not getting invited to anything because she and the other receptionists spent a lot of their free time outside of work with each other. They were really bonding over the entire debacle with Mary and the administrative staff.
The pettiest thing that Mary did was take down anything Sarah and the other receptionists had hung around the office and replace them with photos of her family. Mary also began doing a lot of things for her personal life instead of working; however, she would immediately report it to the administrative staff when she caught Sarah or another receptionist doing the same thing.
Those things were inconvenient by all accounts, but Mary really crossed the line when she convinced the administrative staff to cut the hours of Sarah and the other receptionists in half.
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New Schedule
Sarah and the other two receptionists that had reported Mary conveniently had their hours cut in half. Meanwhile, the other receptionists that were frustrated with Mary but had been unable to attend the meeting, had their hours doubled. Every receptionist that had their hours changed was upset.
When they spoke to the manager about why their hours had been changed, they were told that the administrative staff had approved the changes after a couple of weeks of monitoring their work performance. On top of that, Sarah also missed out on a yearly raise that she had been supposed to receive as a result of her sudden poor performance evaluation.
Sarah and the five other receptionists went straight to the administrative staff. They told them all about Mary’s behavior and how it had turned their department into a toxic work environment. The administrative department told them to either live with it and do their work or find somewhere else to work. Sarah and the other receptionists had absolutely no idea why the administrative department was so quick to take Mary’s side and dismiss their complaints.
Later that week, Sarah overheard someone in the billing department talking about how Mary had been giving free haircuts to the administrative staff on the weekends. No wonder Mary has been getting a pass from the administrative staff, Sarah thought.
That was when Sarah and the other receptionists began plotting their revenge.
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True Revenge
Not getting invited to happy hours or dinner parties gave Sarah and the other receptionists plenty of opportunities to discuss their plans for revenge. Every single receptionist had a plan to move on from their job and was just looking for the right time to quit and move from the disaster of an office they had been working in.
Sarah had been planning on starting graduate school soon so she had no issue with quitting. Two of the other receptionists were planning on going back to nursing school, one of them had already found another full-time job, and another was going back to school to get her MBA. Another receptionist was just over the office culture and had saved up enough money to quit while she was looking for a new job. That brought the number of receptionists employed in the office from eight down to two.
The true revenge came when Sarah and the other seven receptionists all walked into the administrative office and handed in their letters of resignation one after the other. That meant that in two weeks, Mary and one other receptionist would be the only ones working in the office.
Only two of the part-time receptionists could work after five o’clock in the evening and they both quit. That meant that no more appointments could be booked after five o’clock in the evening.
Sarah was the only receptionist that could work on Sunday. That meant that the office lost an entire day of potential appointments every week when she quit. By Sarah’s estimation, the office would lose around fifty thousand dollars in lost appointments by the time they would be able to hire and train six new receptionists.
Sarah couldn’t let Mary off that easy. It turned out that when Mary was working on personal stuff at her desk, she had been filling forms to get her children free lunch at school. That would have been fine; however, Sarah saw that she had lied on the forms and claimed that her husband was the only member of their household that had been employed. Unfortunately for Mary, Sarah decided to call the school and report that the form had been inaccurately completed. Sarah knew the kids weren’t receiving free lunch when the school called her back to confirm Mary’s work address and hours.
As for the office, the last that Sarah heard was that management realized how much Mary had been slacking off and cut her hours. The new receptionists would barely make it a month due to the poor office culture and they still hadn’t filled the positions for nights and weekends.
The office was losing the fifty thousand dollars that Sarah had estimated and counting all because they wouldn’t discipline one incompetent employee.
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Thoughts from the Author
After reading this story, my first thought was, how good were the haircuts that Mary was giving the administrative staff? They were willing to take Mary’s side regardless of how many of the other receptionists claimed she was bad at her job. Maybe Mary should go into cutting hair instead of being a receptionist because she clearly has a talent for it judging from the administrative staff’s response. Aside from cutting hair, Mary sucks. Sarah and the other receptionists gave her the chance to do her part before going to the manager but she still tried to turn the entire office against them when she got called out for continuing to not do her part.
On the other hand, Sarah’s petty response was incredible. Organizing all of the other receptionists to quit on the same day was absolutely genius. Clearly, the office had massive cultural issues and everyone was waiting for the right time to get out so it might as well have been the time that was the most inconvenient for upper management. The high turnover that Sarah heard about with the new receptionists solidified just how incompetent the management had been.
With that being said, Sarah getting Mary’s kids kicked out of the free lunch program is the pettiest thing I have ever heard. Mary truly rubbed Sarah the wrong way because it takes true hatred to ensure that someone’s kids have to pay full price for school lunches. Costing the office fifty thousand dollars and counting is fantastic revenge but reporting that Mary filled out the free lunch form inaccurately is by far the funniest aspect of her revenge. Now Mary has to think of Sarah every morning when she gives her kids three dollars to eat some lukewarm pizza and soggy french fries with a carton of two-percent milk in the school cafeteria that day.
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