Restaurant Workers Share The Satisfying Ways They’ve Gotten Back At An Awful Boss

Revenge is a dish best served cold and the colder, the better when it comes to terrible bosses. These stories are the coldest of the cold!

(Content edited for clarity.)

Holding The Menus Hostage

“At the age of 15, I was doing humble freelance work designing a restaurant menu for a small business owned by family members. The owner insisted I would email the entire completed menu, ‘just to look at it.’ I was told a printed copy didn’t cut it. I had not yet received any payment, and they made it pretty clear they just wanted to start printing copies and not pay me.

So, I made the entire menu have a watermark superimposed on it. Not with my name, not with a logo. With the word ‘POOP.’ I explained that it would be removed when I got my money, which I did.”

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Christmas Day Revenge

“Had this one witch manager when I worked at a pizza place. She was an addict and a piece of crap that was obviously bipolar and blamed everyone else for her mess ups. She wasn’t fit to get herself out of rehab much less manage the store. She ran it into the ground.

Anyhow, the store is closed only on two days, Christmas and Thanksgiving, which means everything is put away in the walk-in cooler for the holiday. The power switch to the store was in the back of the building and unguarded. So after the store closed at 8 pm on Christmas Eve, I went and flipped the switch so the walk-in warmed up for that whole day and like $2k+ worth of food went bad. This comes out of their management bonuses so she didn’t get one for a few months.

Forget her.”

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Dropping A Huge Order On The Bad Boss

“I worked in a bakery/luncheon sandwich shop/coffee bar.

I worked in the back as a baker. Occasionally, we had catering orders to do which added a significant chunk of time onto my day. My jerk of a boss didn’t feel it was necessary to tell me about them until the last possible moment. There’s a lot of prep work that goes into making a thousand ham-and-cheese sandwiches, prep work that can be done days in advance, but he didn’t care if I stayed until 3 a.m. on a school night (I was in high school.)

Most of the time I didn’t care that he broke child-labor laws. I wanted the job, but finally, the straw that broke the camels back was the third catering order he didn’t tell me about a week in advance like he should have.

It was a huge, important luncheon for the company itself, feeding over 3,000 people. I had to make hundreds of baked goods and sandwiches, and about 30 quarts of three types of soups. He told me about all of this 18 hours before it had to be loaded into a truck and delivered to the event.

I sighed at him and said I’d take care of it, but I called him a moron for not telling me a week in advance as I had a test the next day and I wanted to study.

This was at 5 p.m. the day before. He left for the day. I was the only one capable of making all the food that was on staff. I told everyone else on staff what he did, and since there was a mutual hatred among my co-workers, they all agreed not to tell him the next thing I did.

I walked out without preparing an ounce of food. I left a note on the table in the back, calling him an inept moron incapable of managing a simple luncheon and incapable of being a social person. I suggested he be more considerate and kind to his employees, should he demand such respect from them.

I walked out and quit. Not even two-weeks notice. Forget that guy.

As far as I know, he got fired for letting 3,000 people go hungry at a huge corporate event.”

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The Humbling Milkshake

“Back in my early 20s, I worked as a delivery driver at a bar/pizza joint close to the main college drag. After about four months of working there (just enough time to get in good with the rest of the staff), the owner hired a friend of his to manage the joint as the current manager had just left.

This guy was the epitome of ‘power trip for no reason jerk’ boss. He would call you out for little mistakes, make you stay late to help do his job, throw you under the bus when talking to the owner, always bail early, AND was convinced everybody liked him – the real deal. We even caught him stealing from our tip jars a couple of times, but the owner never did anything about it.

Anyway, I had planned to go out one night with a girl I had just met and wanted to get off work a bit early, go home and wash the pizza smell off me. I asked Donnie (not his real name) if that was possible and he lost his mind. You would have thought I asked for a raise, bonus, and a six-month vacation. Despite the fact that three drivers from the next shift had shown up already, he started shouting ‘What, are you stupid? We have three deliveries up! You can stay until your shift is over.’

‘That’s cool,’ I thought. He was well within his, albeit crappy, right to make me stay until my shift was over. I sucked it up and started getting the last deliveries together. However, when he saw where I was taking one of the pizzas, he ordered (not asked) me to pick him up a chocolate shake from a drive-thru joint closeby. I flat out told him ‘No way. You expect me to do you a favor when you won’t do me one? Suck it.’ I grabbed the pizzas and stormed out, Donnie yelling from the kitchen something like ‘Haha – it’s starting getting all political. Awww – I think he’s mad.’

Granted his past behavior had factored into how angry I was over something pretty minor but, I was furious. The universe had reached its idiot quota and beckoned to me to teach this jerk a lesson. As I was driving away from the last delivery, I called the store, got the manager on the phone, apologized and said I would get him his milkshake, even pay for it. I went by the drive-thru of the fast food place to get a 32oz chocolate milkshake and then made a bee-line to the grocery store right down the street to pick up a family-size bottle of chocolate flavored Ex-Lax.

I poured half of the shake out (for me to enjoy later, of course) and mixed in 15 oz of Ex-Lax. Remember: two tablespoons will give you a healthy case of the runs. After giving it to him, he said something about it tasting funny but still managed to inhale that thing like a true fat boy. He didn’t even say thanks.

Fast forward three hours or so – date-lady and I are cruising the bars and head into the bar/pizza joint I worked. Instantly, the cook made eye contact with me and came rushing over, practically falling over patrons. Barely able to contain himself, he told me, in hysterics, ‘Donnie is having uncontrollable, violent, bowel movements. He’s been in the bathroom since you left, has pooped his pants already, and is making this place smell like an open sewer.’ I went back to the kitchen and Donnie was nowhere in sight. Right as I started to talk to a fellow pizza slave, though, he came rushing from the bathroom, pants half on/half off, one hand out in front and one hand holding his behind shut. He had exhausted the entire restaurant’s toilet paper supply and was heading to the bar next door.

Best part? He lived about 40 miles away and continued pooping himself periodically throughout the trip home.

Despite everybody knowing the true story, though, he never figured it out and blamed the fast food joint for his wild ride on the Hershey Highway. I think the whole ordeal humbled him a bit because he ended up turning into a decent guy.”

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Ramping It Up In A Big Way

“I worked at a Chick-fil-A in Georgia from the time I was 15 until I was 17. I got a better job at 17 and turned in my two-weeks notice. However, with one week left to go, the AC went out in the kitchen. I don’t know if you’ve worked in a kitchen in Georgia in August, but it’s ridiculously hot. I asked the owner when he would get it fixed and he told me that he wouldn’t get it fixed for another month. So I quit.

When I got my paycheck, I found that my pay rate had suddenly gone down to minimum wage for quitting before the two weeks was up.

So I went down to an Asian butcher and bought a cow head. It was skinned but still had its eyeballs. It was really, really gross. Since my parents were out of town, I left it on my back porch for a couple of days to get a good coat of maggots and insects.

Then, one Saturday, I snuck into the restaurant and put it on a toilet in the men’s room. The toilet’s pipes looked something like a cross, so I lit a couple of candles around the toilet and put up a sign that said ‘EET MOR CHIKIN.'”

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Sticking It To The Man

“When I was 15, I worked at a cafe in Sydney. The place had poor business practices and was very dirty and poorly managed. I was being paid below minimum wage, but I only realized this after I quit (because they treated all the young employees like slaves).

I sent an email to my old boss specifying a dollar amount that he owed me, to which he responded saying that he paid me correctly.

Long story short, I got the workplace ombudsman involved and not only did he have to pay me the money he owed me, along with the other employees and what they were owed – he had to sell the business because while the ombudsman was there, he noticed the uncleanliness and sent in a health inspector.”

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Unreasonable And Mean

“Ok I have two stories from the same place, but two different bosses. It was a pizza/bar place in my college town. I must have been either 18 or 19 at the time.

First story: This boss was the one that hired me. He seemed cool at first, but it went downhill quick. He was verbally abusive and would harass the female workers. He had two different cases open on him at the time for harassment. One day, I was talking to one of the older cooks that I worked with about how life can be rough. My boss decided to step into our conversation and said, ‘You’re 19 years old, what do you know about life?’ I replied with ‘All I know is that I’m not 35 making pizza for a living.’ I turned around and went back to work. He stood there for about five minutes and then went back to his office. He was fired about two weeks later.

Second story: Another boss was hired, and the whole store was fired except my old coworker buddy and me. We ran the place and trained everyone that started to work there. One day I found out that one of the people that I had trained and got hired after me was making more than me. I walked into my boss’s office one day after hearing this and asked if I could talk to him real quick about something. We sat down, and I asked him if I can get a raise. I had been working there for over a year and had never received one, and many more responsibilities were added to my job. He flat out told me no and said that I was replaceable. ‘OK,’ I said, ‘have fun replacing me then.’ I walked out in the middle of my shift and called it a day. He called me a bunch of times telling me I had to finish my shift and all this other fun stuff. I asked him if I got my raise yet and he said no so I hung up on him. The next day he called again telling me I need to come in for my shift. I asked again if I got my raise. NO. OK, I’m not going in. Less then a month later he got fired, and the owner of the stored called and asked if I wanted his job.”

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Maybe She Ruined Her Credit Too

“At my last job at a restaurant’s corporate office, I knew a few months beforehand that I was going to be losing my job. My manager’s manager wanted to have someone with marketing know-how or some nonsense. I wasn’t really worried about it, and I took getting laid off like a champ, but for about a three-week period, I had to train this person who was taking over for me. Which, again, I took it like a champ….until we had to work together on a double-shift New Year’s Day, which was supposed to be my last day of work.

I was around because it was going to be busy, so they got me in there to give her a hand on her first double-shift and to transition her into working alone. Until this point, she’d been a pretty decent person to be around, but for some reason over the course of that day, she became more and more unbearable, and just started acting like a total jerk. Also, I realized she was an idiot and whenever I talked to her, she was dripping with sarcasm. We were supposed to get some task done, and when I asked if she needed any help, she just kind of rolled her eyes at me and said something snobby. I don’t even remember what it was now, but I had to leave the room because it was enough that it made me want to punch her in the face.

I had to end the day by asking my boss if I could leave an hour early because I was shaking from rage, and I wasn’t sure if I could manage to remain calm for the remainder of the time around her.

I knew my manager for years before I had this job; she’s actually a very close personal friend of mine, and when I called her to ask her to leave work early that day, that was the first time she’d ever heard me that angry. So, already, I had the boss on my side that this person they were hired to replace me was an awful idiot.

I actually temporarily got my job back for about a month after that while they found another replacement, my manager’s boss even gave me like a dollar raise in the meantime as an ‘oh no, I’m so sorry you had to deal with her.’

The icing on the cake? In that month of time, we got a call from the apartment’s landlord where this lady was living. Apparently, she had an altercation with another tenant, and when they went to investigate the claims, she was really, really, fake nice about it. Like, she was covering her butt very well. So, they called her last job to get a character reference and my boss told the landlord all about how she had a well-mannered employee (me) have to leave work early because they couldn’t stand dealing with this person.

So, I got this horrible woman fired from a pretty nice job, AND, I might have gotten her evicted, or possibly just on her landlord’s blacklist. Total win.”

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Refusing The Nastiest Job Of Them All

“I worked at a restaurant similar to a Perkins/Denny’s as a dishwasher back when I was 16. I was fed up with the manager scheduling me all the time when I asked for fewer days. I looked for another job and got one (McDonald’s, and sadly, yes, the job was better). I put in my two-weeks notice and requested not to work Valentine’s Day. I wanted to ask a girl out, but she scheduled me anyways.

I was ticked off. I was working on a Saturday night, and the line cook ordered me to clean out the grease trap, which she had specifically left full the two previous nights (when it was her working and her job to clean it out). Cleaning this thing out was the most dreadful thing I had ever done for a job… the smells that ooze out of this thing would make me gag, and I had to scoop out the grease with a small cup into a bucket and lug it to the grease dumpster. Considering this chick left this for me, I said ‘forget it,’ and walked out.

She likely had to stay until 4 a.m., closing both the kitchen and dish area, plus had to clean that grease stuff out like she was supposed to. There were only two other dishwashers, and one was a stoner who showed up to only half of his shifts (and they fired him a few days before I put in my notice), so the next day they called me and told me they still wanted me to work. Nothing better than desperate bosses groveling at your feet.”

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Fighting Back

“A million years ago, I was waiting tables at my first job. Enter ye old standard jerk boss. I could easily talk about what a dumb prick he was, but I’ll skip to the straw that broke the camel’s back.

We were short-handed one day, and I was pulling double closing work for my shift (remember, as a waiter you make $2.63 hourly plus tips, so anything that doesn’t involve tips is essentially just slave labor that they can get away with pulling on you to keep your job).

After I finished up my work, I ordered and paid for lunch (something I would often do; half off is a decent deal). The jerk came charging into the side room that employees would use to eat/relax in before and after work and exploded at me (with an off-duty cook watching). Another employee had bailed on their work, and he was blaming me for not having done TRIPLE duty before punching out. He essentially told me that if I didn’t do the cleanup and restock before I went home that I would be fired.

I wanted to keep my job, so I did the job. But when it was done, I felt that it could be better. I opened up the ice bin and got another bucket of ice. Then another. And another. I filled the ice bin up to the ceiling, and then I went home.

I had a message from him waiting for me when I got home, but laughed and went about my day. When I went in to work the next day, I had been fired, then an investigation had taken place, and I was rehired. The jerk’s hiring and firing privileges had been revoked, and he had subsequently given his two-weeks notice.”

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Their Dirty Secret

“When I was younger, I worked in loss prevention for a supermarket. There were a few guys there that everyone called ‘The Blue Ribbons’ because they were in tight with the manager (essentially they kissed his butt). They had a habit of acting like your friend and then bashing you to the boss behind your back. And not just bashing your personality, but saying that you were lazy, never did any work or anything else that made you look bad, and kept them looking good.

I was good friends with my partner, Rick, that worked the store with me and we both loathed this group. But that’s the way things fall sometimes, so it was no big deal – they were just a few guys we knew not to trust and didn’t particularly care for.

Then we found out that one of the guys, Sean, was telling our boss that he thought we were both stealing time (saying we were working a certain number of hours, and then not showing or taking insanely long breaks), a pretty interesting accusation.

Rick and I worked in the same store that Sean’s girlfriend worked in. She was a customer service rep, and she and I took smoke breaks together and got along quite well. She was a nice person, but was a bit on the trashy side and flaunted her looks. Sean was a jealous boyfriend, and they fought constantly and broke up and got back together about once every two weeks.

I’m not a bad looking guy, but my friend Rick is quite the dashing fellow. I also knew, through some of the girls he’d been with, that although Rick wasn’t a big guy, he was large where it counted. I accidentally on purpose mentioned this to Erin during a smoke break and was kind of complaining that I was twice Rick’s size, but I guess he was just huge down there, and it didn’t seem fair and blah blah blah.

So the seed had been planted, and Rick worked in the store quite often, so things were brought up, flirting ensued, and to make an already very long story short, Rick ended up getting a hummer from Sean’s girlfriend right in our office.

I don’t think Sean found out, but every single time we saw him, we just smiled at each other knowingly.”

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Rock N Roller Doesn’t Care

“I used to work at a sandwich shop/bakery in Nashville, and my shift started at 6 a.m. The horrible, prissy manager would call at 6:01 if you weren’t there and flip her lid. I had taken a weekend off to travel to New York to play a show, and when she realized she forgot to take me off the schedule, she tried to get me to cancel my trip. When I said we had already booked a show, she told me my music sucked, and the girl singer of our band was ‘too ugly for country music.

Inside I raged, but I kept cool on the outside and told her I would work Saturday for her. I flew up to NYC, but on Friday night, changed my answering message on my cell phone to say ‘Hey, I’m so sorry…I’m on my way, I’ll be there in one second.’ I partied hard in NYC on Friday and turned my phone on silent when I went to bed. The next morning I had six new messages. The first three were her flipping out, the fourth was just silence, the fifth was my shift leader saying ‘I think it’s a message,’ and the sixth was two hours later from the owner laughing but saying I was fired.”

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