Give credit where credit is due. Unfortunately, for these employees, not everyone they've worked with before chose to follow a moral code when climbing the corporate ladder. You shouldn't have to step on other people to get ahead, but these people didn't seem to care.
(Content has been edited for clarity.)
The Pre-Christmas Blow
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“My boss and co-founder of the company went out for lunch. About five minutes after he left, the other co-founder and his new business partner walked into the office with a lock smith and some IT guy. They changed all the locks and reset my boss’s passwords and made us sign documents acknowledging that boss no longer worked there.
Also, it was two weeks before Christmas.”
The Ultimate Backstab
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“I manage a team of five people. One person on my team (C) is ultra-ambitious. As her manager, I think this is great because there will never be enough projects for her to work on.
Last November, I was told the organization is changing and was asked to help restructure the department. We formed a Strategy Team to determine the vision and strategy for the department.
In February, my mother-in-law was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. She is in Peru. In March, my wife went there to spend a month with my daughters so they could say goodbye. I tried separating personal from professional but at times that was too hard.
I resigned from the strategy team and got the ok for C to replace me.
Two weeks later, the strategy is presented to the executives and approved. She eliminated my job from the future of the department.
Tonight, my mother-in-law passed away. Tomorrow, I have to continue looking for a new job.”
A Brother’s Betrayal
“This happened to my dad. My grandparents weren’t very well-off and barely managed to get my dad into college. My dad studied hard throughout college, though, and managed to start his own business coming out of it.
Now, my dad had a brother who was 10 years younger than him, and was barely out of school when my dad became ‘semi-successful.’ My dad (being the good brother that he is), paid for my uncle’s college, as well as made him a partner in the company once he graduated. Everything was working out well.
Fast forward 10 years later, the business wasn’t doing so well anymore, and they were at the stage of finalizing the closing down of it. The plan was to sell off the equipment they had onsite, split the money, and then they could each go on to pursue their own ventures. A week before everything was finalized, my uncle sold everything to another buyer, took all of the money, and disappeared, never to be seen or heard from again.
This happened 12 years ago, and my dad is still in debt. I’m helping with what I can when I can. It affected us pretty terribly as a family, but we’re slowly getting there. Such is life, I guess.”
Got What You Deserved
“My husband was the only employee for a 3-person business. The other two were the owners who were married.
He put in a ton of time, acquired new clients, and worked his tail off. Then, they told him that they couldn’t give him the raise which they had promised because of ‘financial reasons.’ He was very understanding about the money going ‘back into the business.’ They went and bought a convertible, and my husband quit with my full support.
They then hired two new people to replace him. One of the guys ended up creating his own company, stole all of their clients, and left the original bosses bankrupt.”
Family Business
“I was ‘hired’ at 12 to start working in the family business. I worked my way up from basically doing coffee runs to knowing more than all of the guys I worked with. I trained people who would then be paid double my salary because ‘someday’ all of this would be mine, and this is what they called ‘paying your dues’ according to my dad.
I worked every day after school. I worked on the weekends, and I never had a summer off or a full Christmas, or any other holidays for that matter. I was told to work hard and ‘someday’ I’d go to university. Although I was told it would be covered, somehow there ended up being no cash left for me, but my dad was able to go big-game hunting in Africa for the third time the next year and put a massive addition to his house. However, all of this was okay, I could still work full-time during the day after high school graduation. And work, I did.
Overtime was never given as that was for the ’employees’ and not the future owner. I improved systems, increased sales, handled the entire place when my dad was away hunting, fishing, traveling, or on one of those numerous business meetings that smelled of drinks and cigars, but it was still okay, I was earning my right to the business. ‘Work hard and soon…’ became my motto.
Twenty years go by, I had just turned 32 at the time, and it was pass the time for me to take over the business and he knew it, too. I was underpaid for 20 years, never had any real holidays, gave up on going to university, sacrificed pretty much everything, and it was time. My dad decided that weekend to talk with the competition and ended up selling the business to them.
Within two weeks, I was unemployed. He told me he put in a good word with the new owners and said that I would still have a job. Turns out the new owners never heard a word about hiring me as they already had enough people as it seems.”
Maternity Leave
“I was a middle manager at a furniture store.
One of our employees became pregnant, and since we were kind of a small store, she was concerned when her time came we’d be in a tight spot. We had enough people to cover easily, so our district manager told her to take all of the time that she needed. She had some complications which resulted in her needing to take another two months off.
She was ready to come back, called us up, and said that the district manager, who was my direct boss, told her ‘to come in with a doctor’s note’ and ‘to make sure she had filled out all of the paperwork required.’
On her first day back, the district manager pretended to be ‘in shock’ when she came back in and asked, ‘What are you doing here? You don’t work here anymore.’ He refused to answer her questions as to what had happened and told her to leave the store immediately. I was working at a different store when she called me in tears.
I was the de-facto IT guy since our manager was an idiot, so I got into his company email account. He had fired her two weeks into her maternity leave and had claimed ‘undue hardship’ since we were too small to fall under the ‘Family Leave Act’ rules.
It has a happy ending, though. I closed down the store I was at and drove to the direct manager to personally hand him my keys and to quit on the spot. The look on his face was priceless. I also helped the new mom get unemployment by writing to the review board for her case. I was, by far, their top salesman.
Three months after, the company folded and the direct manager was left jobless.”
Pay Stubbed
“In February, a new maintenance tech was hired for my properties. He was a good guy who showed up early and got everything done. I would frequently catch him skipping lunch to get more work done and told him to go take his full hour. I’d go fetch him a burrito, or if he wasn’t hungry, I’d tell him to take a nap in his truck. He had three kids and was always on call for maintenance emergencies.
He came in one day and asked me to show him his timesheet which I filled out and signed. I pulled it out (worried that I had made a mistake). We compared it to his pay stub. He was underpaid by over 16 hours in addition to the 7 hours of overtime he never got anything for. This overtime had been preapproved by corporate.
I called corporate. He called corporate. We all called everybody trying to get this fixed, but the people just kept on passing us off to the next guy and then the next. My maintenance guy came in early one morning and said nervously that he thought he knows why they weren’t paying him right. He’d let them know his green card was about to expire and that he would need sponsorship to renew it. He said after that they had just stopped paying him in full. They tried to make him sign a retroactive salary agreement as well.
I drove to corporate to get this sorted once and for all and spoke to the person who was supposedly in charge of maintenance’s paychecks. I laid out what was going on, and how this couldn’t be extended any longer and that she needed to call maintenance right away and get it fixed. She promised that she would.
Weeks later, maintenance had called her every day with no response. I met with my boss and brought up the issue still insisting that he get paid. My boss wasn’t the least bit interested in getting him paid but then had the nerve to say how it was my responsibility, the whole thing was my fault, and that if he took the company to court, then I would be the one to get in trouble. My boss declined to pay the maintenance tech and stated it was my problem now.
I had no ability to pay anyone. I wasn’t in charge of payroll, I didn’t even get petty cash. Apparently, I was going to be used as their liability sink after they refused to pay an employee. So, I quit. They said for my final month’s payment they would send me a check for $6.67.”
Wrong Person
“I used to work at a software company where two people had the same name. One of them was an elite level performer while the other was a known slacker.
After the organization had built up enough of a case to fire the slacker, they proceeded to get him on the phone (he worked remotely) so that they could let him go. Unfortunately, they ended up firing the elite level performer by accident.
The guy pleaded with HR suggesting that they meant to fire the other guy, but no dice. In fact, instead of feeling bad about it, they found it funny. It was overall just really shady.”
A Glitch In The System
“I put together an excel sheet for my manager to use during his morning conference call. It was nothing special, just multiple pages of formulas and importing from other files but it took a week to get it fully running. He forwarded it to his boss’ boss and took full credit for it while telling everyone that I was just playing ‘video games.’
I got my justice when a bug showed up, and he had no idea where to look for it. It took me less than 3 minutes, in front of his boss, to locate and change the code. I might’ve added a few other things to make his life a little bit more difficult.
Anyway, I left a week later for a better job with better pay.”
Coffee Break
“At my former company, I was in charge of this Android application that was going to be used to secure communication. I worked very hard on this for several months and it came time to give a demo to some very important people.
Well, being as it was a communications demo, my team and I had written a demo script to show off the features. The script involved two people, with one of them operating an Android device and a laptop, the other with one Android device casting to a tv who would also be talking.
Boss and I have several chances to practice this demo. He keeps pushing it off. He finally agrees to practice about an hour before the demo. We run into so many problems with Chromecast, the network in the room, etc – it doesn’t look we’re going to be successful. Boss looks at me and goes, ‘You know what, I think you can handle the demo by yourself, I’m going to grab some coffee.’
So I had to give the demo by myself, improvising the entire time, working around all the bugs, etc. Boss ends up taking all the credit for the demo.”
Getting Satisfying Justice
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“I had been working for a company for about 2 years and not taken any leave. About 12 months in a new guy started, he had more experience than me generally but in operations rather than supply chain. I had to train him and after 6 months he took our bosses job because of his past experience. I was OK with it but he turned into a real prick and started taking credit for my work without recognizing me.
So a new role in our team comes up and I said I wanted it. It was a promotion and I said I wanted at least $100k (was on $80k). I’d also been approached by another company and told him I would take the other job if he couldn’t get me $100k. He came back with a $98k offer.
I told him I would accept the new promotion and refuse the other companies offer. Once the paperwork was done, I quit the following week and took the other job essentially leaving him in a really tight bind and me getting my leave paid out at the higher salary. Eff him.”
‘Devil Wear’s Prada’ Moment
“I witnessed a legit ‘Stanley Tucci in Devil Wears Prada’ moment.
The woman I was assisting at a big corporate publishing company was crazy passionate, cared too much, worked 60 hours a week, and had a terrible personal life. She literally LIVED the job yet was incredibly underappreciated and undervalued. She realized this and was willingly poached for another (better) job at a direct competitor.
The executives convinced her to stay by promising her an amazing promotion after the end of the fiscal year. Well, the year came to an end and the announcement at the awards luncheon came and… the amazing promotion was handed to someone else, someone who we all thought was much less deserving who received it for purely political reasons.
I’ve never seen and will NEVER forget seeing a face react the way that her face did. There was shock, disappointment, sadness, shame, embarrassment, anger, resignation, pride, calm, and then a ‘congratulations ‘all in about 1.5 seconds.
Thankfully, she left just a few months later.”
Embezzlement
“I used to work in sales. At the time, a coworker and I noticed that this new guy, who had just started working with us, was doing extremely well, but we couldn’t really figure out how. We did some digging, and in summary, came to the conclusion that he was embezzling.
We went to our manager to get him to look into it some more and his response was, ‘You guys are just jealous because he’s doing better than you.’ We found more evidence later and finally convinced them to actually dig a little deeper. They found he had been stealing thousands of dollars from them.
When we went back to that same old manager, he took all of the credit and said, ‘We were already looking into it long before you two had even brought it to our attention.’ No, you weren’t, you liar. You just didn’t want to admit how wrong you were, and how you probably also cost the company thousands of dollars.”
End Result
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“Person A quit for bigger and better things, but they ended up losing their job because of some layoffs that were happening.
The company wasn’t going to rehire Person A because they had, originally, put us in a very weird position when they left. However, Person B used their influence to get them rehired. Six months later, Person A convinced the company that he could do both of their jobs and got Person B fired.
Person A is my boss.”
Covering Their Assets
“I was hired at a place to work as ‘Position A.’
About a week in, two people from another section got sick at the exact same time and their section was left completely unstaffed with tasks that urgently needed to get done. As a result, I was offered ‘Position B’ instead to help fill in as I also had a lot of experience in that area as well. I accepted.
So I was acting in ‘Position B’ for about a year, and during this time, the place was having a staffing review and staffing restructure which had been promised for some time now. They didn’t try to hire someone else for ‘Position B’ because it was all going to be restructured anyway. They finally had the restructure ready, which would’ve made Position B redundant and replaced it with some other position I wasn’t experienced in, and they told me there would be a position available like ‘Position A’ for me to go back to.
‘Position A’ was being covered by about five casuals, but in the restructure, they had to change this to permanent positions (only four of them), and they were going to to be offered to the people who had been regularly working them, which meant they would have to backtrack and say that ‘I, unfortunately, WOULDN’T be offered a position’ because, all along, I had been busy saving their assets covering ‘Position B’ instead.
So, now I no longer have a job.”
Stayed True To Himself
“Before I switched jobs, there was a lead sales position open at my work that would’ve meant higher sales goals but also a lot more money and better flexibility.
There were only two people in my branch that were qualified enough, myself and another guy who we’ll call ‘Frank.’ Frank and I were really good friends. It was to the point that he was like a little brother to me.
One day, the regional supervisor showed up. Everyone groaned when we saw her pull into the parking lot because this woman was terrible. She came in, made her rounds to ensure that we were all properly terrified of her presence, and then called me into the conference room.
‘You know there’s a sales lead position open, and Frank and you are the only two qualified employees. I wanted to talk to you because I wanted to know if you were interested in the position before we started looking for someone outside of the company.’
‘Um, what about Frank?’
‘Oh, I have no intention of even offering this job to Frank. I don’t care about him, and he probably wouldn’t do well in that position. It’s yours if you want it.’
I told her I would think about it. We chatted about some other unrelated work topics, and then I left. She followed me to the door and then called Frank in. They talked for a while, and then she left again. After she left, Frank and I stepped outside for a smoke break.
The first thing he asked me was, ‘What did that witch have to say?’
Turns out, she told Frank the exact same thing that she had told me, word for word, outside of switching our names. She didn’t even bother to change up the script. I called her the next morning and turned down the position. When she asked me the reason why, I told her it was because I felt like the job would require me to do some backstabby things to my friends, and I couldn’t be that kind of a person. She got the hint.”
Appearance Over Substance
“We had this amazing secretary, and she would do anything for anyone.
She would always bake cupcakes when it was someone’s birthday and bring them to their desk. She always had headache tablets on hand, chocolates, mints at her desk, and would take time out of her day to come talk to you if you had a grievance with someone (or something), and it would NEVER go any further than her.
She’d also leave these little notes with your paperwork with cute smiley faces and would go the extra mile when making friends with new employees. Every client of ours would say how amazing she was, and we would all just agree. She was truly a wonderful person.
Our head office fired her for a younger, prettier, thin-model type who he was also sleeping with.”