There's a difference between a leader and a boss, and these stories focus on the latter. Whether it was stealing from the company, abusing employees, or simply just being scum of the Earth, these folks in executive positions needed to be dealt with. Unfortunately for them, their employees were no longer just going to stand by and take the unwarranted heat, so they decided to seek revenge of the highest proportions! Content has been edited for clarity.
Sympathy Can Go A Long Way
“I called my boss to tell him I wouldn’t be at work for the rest of the week as my mum was terminally ill in the hospital.
The next day (about an hour after she passed away), he phoned and asked why I wasn’t at work. I just hung up on him so I wouldn’t say anything that would get me in trouble.
I was still fuming about it the next day, so I sent the area-manager a message explaining what my boss had done the previous day. For good measure, I attached a video of him breaking a freezer door while having a tantrum which cost the store nearly £5,000 in lost stock and the repair costs (when he’d told the Assistant Manager it broke on its own). He got fired that day and I got two weeks off with full pay.”
Ya Never Know Who’s Listening
“Our desks were separated by a five foot cubicle wall. He was under the mistaken impression that it totally blocked out sound. Thus I got to hear all his loud phone conversations, primarily his booty calls including those with his boss’ fiancé. I figured it was none of my business and tried to ignore it.
Well there was a position in another department that I was interested in and, per procedure, I handed in an application to my talkative boss. I didn’t hear anything further and followed up a couple of days later, only to be told that something must have happened to the application. I filled out another one and handed it in. As I returned to my desk, I heard the boss on the phone with a friend laughing about how he had just trashed my application again and how he was never going to let go of me.
I go to boss’ boss and angrily offer my resignation, telling him what I had just overheard, explaining that I was constantly hearing his phone calls like his booty calls with the boss’ fiancé and such. He got very quiet and told me to go back to my desk and he’ll take care of everything. The next day I come in and my boss is gone. The day after, I have an interview with the other department (got the position).
I tend to avoid office drama, but really, he should have stuck to messing with his boss’ fiancé, and not try to mess with me as well.”
He Tried To Warn Him
“I was a police officer for almost 10 years before changing careers and one night I was talking to the desk sergeant who was a real prick and everyone hated him.
In comes one of the patrol guys who has just arrested a couple for ‘open lewdness,’ a polite way of saying he caught them getting it on in a park.
So the couple is insisting they weren’t doing anything wrong, and the patrol guy says, ‘Ma’am, I saw your privates.’
She says, ‘I’m wearing underwear, you can’t have seen my privates,’ and they start arguing over whether the woman is wearing underwear or not.
Eventually the woman grabs her skirt like she’s about to pull it over her head and says, ‘DO YOU WANT TO SEE MY UNDERWEAR?’ and everyone in the room yells ‘NO!’ at her.
The thing is, as a cop it’s an almost 100% certainty that every person you arrest is going to make at least a half-baked effort at filing a complaint about the fact that they were ‘unjustly arrested while minding their own business,’ so ‘then they forced me to display my bare privates’ is a future sound bite that nobody wants to be a part of.
So the desk sergeant comes up with the idea that we will do a panty check, but have a female officer do it. The only problem is, there’s no female officers on duty. So then he comes up with the bright idea to request a random female civilian off the street perform the check…and at this point I stepped up to him and suggested that this was not a good idea. He appreciated my questioning his decision about as much as a dog likes lemons and put me in my place.
So I sat down to see how this unfolded, and realized that from where I’m sitting, I can clearly see up the woman’s skirt to her bright yellow panties.
Now I can shut this whole thing down. I stepped up to the desk sergeant and said, ‘I need to speak to you privately, and quickly.’
He said, ‘You need to get out of my station and out to your patrol area.’
…So I said, ‘I’m on my way,’ and went on my way.
The next day, I discovered the predictable outcome had come to pass. He had in fact gotten a random stranger to perform a panty check on the woman, she confirmed the panties, but she was also deeply morally offended at the indignity the poor woman had been subjected to and complaints were filed all around with every person present being named…except me, because I’d been ejected from the station house prior to the main event.
We had a new desk sergeant the next day, and I didn’t see the old one again for like two years. Eventually ran into him doing classroom training. He was super friendly, and missing a stripe of rank. I wondered what he was playing at until I realized he didn’t even remember I was there that night, and had no idea that I could have saved him from his misguided course of action, but that I let him burn his own career down because he was a prick.”
Be Careful What You Wish For
“The CEO publicly praised me for completing a task that my boss had struggled with, so my boss retaliated by forwarding all of his tasks to me in an effort to overwhelm me with work. I actually found his job pretty manageable, which the CEO also noticed and fired him, giving me his job and office.”
Anger Management Issues To The Max
“He grabbed the back of my neck and said, ‘If you ever say I’m wrong in front of a customer again, I will beat you like a dog.’
I went to the GM and told him and my supervisor was relieved of his duties about 5 minutes later.”
“One Of The Guys” Became One Of The Unemployed
“It was my supervisor. It got to the point that I had decided to quit. I had my resignation letter in my purse, but decided to let his boss know why I was quitting. My supervisor would talk about all the people on our team constantly, but only behind their backs. I got so sick of telling him to cut it out. My husband and I happened to work at the same place (different departments) and my supervisor would make crude and inappropriate comments about threesomes with him (ewww), what hotel we picked for our afternoon delight, stuff like that. It was so uncomfortable. Apart from this he spent most of his supervising time outside taking ‘smoke breaks.’ The problem was that my supervisor was ‘one of the guys’ and I was the only girl.
It turns out his boss was disgusted and told a higher up boss who lost his mind. They started an investigation which took three days. They interviewed staff – they corroborated what I said. They checked the security cameras, saw he was spending most of his work day outside, and was fired.
When he was told that he was fired, he guessed that I was the person who complained and tried to get to me to ‘apologize that I took it the wrong way.’ The best feeling was my coworkers surrounding me as he was walked out. That was a lovely ending to it all.”
The Inappropriate Assistant Manager
“My assistant manager was making inappropriate gestures and remarks towards young women who would come into the store. He’s morbidly obese and that’s not an exaggeration. He’s also very creepy. He would schedule himself off work often instead off putting in a vacation request. He was constantly scheduling people for impossible shifts and would leave it up to us to trade around and fix his mistakes. He would steal sales by sending away other sales people and do large returns on other people’s counter numbers in order to boost his reported sales numbers. He would give ridiculous deals and even free stuff to his friends. And he was an all around lazy turd.
One day I got tired of hearing about yet another scheduling error and that he was on vacation again, so I told my coworker that I was going to the office and if I couldn’t find a vacation request, I was going to call our district manager.
Lo and behold there isn’t a request So I start looking for the phone number when I found a neat little HR report form on the company website. Being an English major, I figured that now was my time to shine so I wrote out the most professional accusation of incompetence and ineptitude I could. I made sure to include his inappropriate comments about customers and staff as well.
Not even a week later HR and our district and regional managers were in our store conducting interviews. He was gone that day. Cried like a baby, too. This list of grievances doesn’t do it justice but, believe me, he deserved every bit of it.”
Do Not Touch
“In college, I worked at a takeout restaurant just off campus and we were all employed by the school. I was 17/18 years old and my boss, the manager, was a 40-something creeper. He was always hitting on me, touching me inappropriately (trying to massage my shoulders, tickling me, putting his hands on/around my waist) despite me asking him to stop. Then he friended me on Facebook, I declined, and suddenly my work schedule was changed. I was on shift during hours when I had class, and when I explained that problem, I got taken off the schedule altogether.
I told the Assistant Manager what was going on (I was explicitly told by my manager not to talk to the assistant) and he reported what was going on to upper management. Boom, manager was fired. I worried for a while if he was going to come after me for that, but thankfully nothing has happened.”
Never Commit Crimes In Front Of Witnesses
“I took a cell phone video of her taking money from the safe and putting it in her wallet. I knew she was doing it, and I also knew that the moment it came out that money was missing, she’d blame it on me.
She was so stupid that she didn’t realize she should stop doing that while I was standing ten feet away with my phone out and facing her. This was years ago, she was an older lady, and I don’t think she understood that you could take videos with a phone.”
Irony In Efficiency
“My manager wanted to prove that I was slacking off so he could write me up. So, he watched CCTV footage then wrote, printed out, and SIGNED a detailed document with 17 PAGES worth of what I did in the past two days. He included timestamps (like, 07:59 arriving, 08:01 speaking with co-worker A and B, 08:07 sitting down to my desk, etc.). He told me that he was not happy with my work ethic, and if I didn’t improve my efficiency, I would be fired. I took the papers and showed them to his boss and told her that I’m not happy with my manager’s work ethic and his efficiency might be better if he didn’t watch 17 hours of CCTV footage to spy on an employee. She was terrified (it would’ve been a rock solid lawsuit for me – but I love my job) so he was canned and we had to search for a new manager. Also, my salary raised.”
Never Date Coworkers
“I didn’t get my boss fired, but she blames me.
My boss and I didn’t get along, but she didn’t have the authority to fire me. But she’d promised her boyfriend my job. So she hired her boyfriend in another position with the plan they’ll drive me to quit, and then she could just promote him to my job.
This lasted for about a month. She fired him when they broke up. He confessed their scheme to me on his way out (we’d actually become friends at this point) and I told him he should really tell HR.
HR did their investigation, she’s fired because ‘sleep with me and I’ll give you a job’ is textbook harassment. She tells anyone who’ll listen that it’s all my fault because I didn’t quit like I was supposed to.”
Outside Help For An Inside Job
“I helped my friend get her boss fired. He was a general manager, and always grabbing her sides, purposely scheduling her to have shifts alone with him, asking her for pictures, asking her to sleep with him, etc. She reported it so many times to the owner (big boss) and they said they couldn’t do anything because they hadn’t seen it and had no other reports other than her account. So I called and complained as a customer about how I witnessed him being creepy to her and how it made me uncomfortable. He was fired.”
“He Was Fired The Next Day For Unprofessional Behavior”
“He was presenting a PowerPoint that I had put together to all the managers in the building. There was something he wanted to add at the last minute that he had never told me about, and when it wasn’t there, he verbally abused me for like five minutes straight. Yelling, name calling, telling me to prove to him that I had a college degree and wasn’t just making it up. I was a contractor so I was afraid to complain to HR because I assumed they’d just fire me, but a lot of other people in the room did voice their complaints.
After the meeting, I went into the share drive folder to find the presentation notes where the extra information was supposedly located. I watched the last changed time change from a day ago to the current time, then he immediately called and said it was right there in the notes file.
He was fired the next day for unprofessional behavior.”
Keep Comments To Yourself To Avoid Termination
“He’d show up every day and tell us a tale of his intimate exploits. Whether true or not, none of us wanted to hear it.
If an attractive looking female came in, he dropped what he’s doing and stared at her, drooling liking a dog in a treat factory. After she leaves, he had to make a comment about her appearance.
After talking on the phone with a certain manager, he always comments on how nice her rear end is.
He’d bully employees and other managers, calling us female dogs a lot despite us getting onto him for it.
My female coworker reported him. We all had a phone meeting with our district manager and HR. He was suspended until the investigation was over and they ruled to terminate him. Surprisingly HR worked for us that day.”
No Breaks Under Any Circumstances
“My boss tried to tell me I couldn’t take breaks. The company policy handbook, which I had signed and thus became a binding contract by state law, laid out lunch and/or breaks based on length of shift scheduled for. When I pointed this out, she switched to scheduling me by myself and then strolling by the store to check up on me occasionally, writing me up when she ‘caught me’ having closed the store in order to take breaks/eat lunch. I called her boss (regional director) and complained, which got the write-ups removed. I literally listened to the regional director tell my boss to chill out and let me take my breaks, but she still didn’t do it. Further (formal) complaints resulted in no changes.
I knew there was a quarterly conference call coming up so I developed the habit of walking into her office and saying, ‘It’s time for my break,’ and making her say, every time, that I wasn’t allowed to go. She got in the habit of doing it kind of absent-mindedly in an increasingly aggressive tone. So then I did it again in the middle of the conference call and she blew a gasket, ranting at me about how many times she’d told me that I was not allowed to take breaks, under any circumstances, etc. The call, which she always put on speakerphone, went dead silent. It took her about 5 seconds to realize what she’d just done, and then before she could try to begin damage-control, her boss politely cleared her throat and said, ‘I’ve told you before that that is incorrect.’ I grinned a big ole smile and went back to work, and there was a temporary manager from another store there the next day.
Turns out she had had my formal written complaints intercepted before they got to her boss, which I wasn’t aware was possible (apparently she had friends in high places), so I imagine that didn’t go well for her.”
Date Me Or Else
“I worked in a call center once with a female supervisor, and she was a particularly awful person. Long story short, she hated me because I would refuse to date her. She asked multiple times and multiple times I explained very nicely that I was not interested but would like to remain friends. After about the 3rd time, she started giving me negative marks for reviews, phone calls and such. One day she pulled me into the office with another manager and proceeded to write me up for talking on my personal phone during work hours. I had not done this. I looked at her and refused to do this and walked out of her office and into the department manger’s office. This was my first complaint after about 3 years with this company. I explained the situation and advised what had been transpiring for months now. Apparently someone else had seen this about a month ago and had already went to management about what she was doing to me. Within 10 minutes, she was pulled into the office and demoted back down to my position but in another department. The thing that sucked is that this department sat directly across from me.”
Contrary To Popular Belief, The Army Is More Important Than A Retail Job
“I worked retail and was also in the Army Reserves at the time. I was working in a town in the north end of my state and my Reserves unit was in a larger city to the south. The cost of living was expensive and the pay wasn’t great.
One day I had enough and called down to a store in the big city that I used to work at (same retail chain, different location). I asked about promotion opportunities down there. Now, when I lived down there previously, the store manager was a good friend of mine. But he moved on to better things and this new store manager was running the place. As luck would have it, he needed someone in a particular role. Pay would be double what I was making. He told me to move on down and start working there as soon as possible, and once I was down there he’d put in the paperwork for the promotion.
As part of the planning for the move, I told him that I had my Reserves annual training coming up (3 weeks full time orders). Now, military service is protected by federal law in the US, so I put in the time off request and he approved it. I worked my tail off for the first month down there, doing all the roles of the higher paying job, but still at my lower pay because ‘the paperwork is still pending.’
Well, on my last day before military orders, I hurt my knee pretty badly at work. I brought this to my manager’s attention, and he told me, ‘If your knee hurts so bad that you need to see a doctor, you will no longer work here.’ Very illegal and very cool. He then proceeded to tell me that I should lie to my sergeants and say I hurt it during my annual training, so that the Army would pay for it.
So, I leave work early and call HR while on my way to the doctor. I mention his comments, have them note the workplace injury, etc. I start my annual training, and explain to my sergeants that I had an injury at work and am a bit limited in what I can do (I did computer work, so it didn’t affect my work abilities at all, just couldn’t do much of anything physical).
Now, my military work is in what’s known as a SCIF – basically an office where top secret stuff goes on. No phones are allowed in the SCIF. At the end of the day, I leave the SCIF and check my phone. Tons of missed calls and texts from my boss about missing my shift. I explain to my sergeant what was going on, and they decide I should bring it to the commander. The whole company was forming up, so we go to the formation area and speak to the commander in front of the company.
Mid way through explaining, my phone starts ringing. It’s my boss. My sergeant grabs my phone and answers on speaker. Explains to my boss that I’m the Army’s property, and that I’ve been instructed to not speak with him until I’m off orders. After hanging up, my commander tells me to take off all day the next day, and deal with HR.
Flash forward to the end of my orders. I spoke with both our district and regional managers (my boss’s boss, and his boss). The district manager gave me his personal cell phone number, and said if I had any issues when I returned to work, to call him immediately.
I go in the store on my first day back. Say good morning to my boss. He glares at me and says, ‘You better learn to shut your mouth.’
I whip out my phone and call his boss. Explain exactly what my boss just said to me. District manager tells me I can take the day off, with full pay, and that they’d deal with boss.
There’s a little more to the story: They didn’t fire him immediately, but switched me to a different store to get me out of the situation. Even at the new store, old boss was constantly harassing me. Boss at new store was friends with boss at old store, so she decided to cut my hours to one day per week. And an hour before my shift, they’d call me and tell me to not come in. Eventually had to take them to court for lost wages and a knee injury, and won. By the time they settled, I was already comfortable at my new, much better, much higher paying office job.”
Portering Something Other Than Food
“I worked at a sports stadium in the UK as a kitchen porter. My first month there, the head chef offered to sell a few of us some herb and said to pay him when we got paid.
Payday comes and there was a fault with the payment system, so we tell him this. He got real sassy about it up to the point of getting physically violent with one of the porters. He says he wants his money next day regardless if we’ve been paid or not.
Next day comes and we’ve thankfully been paid. We were sitting in the break area waiting to start work and we see him and his whole chef team being led past the windows in handcuffs to waiting police vans.
Turns out one of the managers of the place had overheard him shouting for his money the day before and had contacted police who set up a sting for the next day. He and his team (5 or 6 guys) were all dealing and got fired and replaced. The manager wasn’t sure who he was shouting at and therefore didn’t know who had bought the stuff, so we all got off scot free.”
Why Dating In The Workplace Never Works
“My supervisor was a 31 year old who had just gotten married a year ago. He was known for hitting on any young girl at work he could. I was dating a girl at work who was 18. My girlfriend and supervisor became really good friends. I mean realllly good friends. He sold her his Mercedes at a verrrry steep ‘friend discount.’ She got promotion after promotion that she frankly didn’t deserve or have the experience or availability for. She very rarely had to even perform the responsibilities of these promotions.
It was obvious to everyone what was going on. There was something between my girlfriend and our supervisor, though to this day she still insists there wasn’t. I could TELL our supervisor was straight up trying to win her over. They would go on dates (not dates in her eyes) and when he found out her and I were dating he told her he would fire me. She was seeing him a lot more than she was seeing me. I tried to express my concerns to her about all this, like maybe this isn’t what it looks like and I just need to hear her side. She got defensive and huffy and said he’s just a ‘really really REALLY good friend.’ At that point there was nothing I could do because if I told her to stop seeing him, he’d know I was the cause and fire me. One night I was closing the store while they were together at midnight doing who knows what. She decided to stop by and hang with me for the rest of the night. Our supervisor dropped her off with the intention that a non-working employee would be let into the store after close – a security violation. That’s where I got him.
I went to the owners and exposed the supervisor. I told them about how he is fraternizing with an employee, which is against policy for a supervisor, and I told them about how he brought her to the store one night with the intention of violating security policy. The owners asked some other employees about the situation and they all agreed you could tell just by looking at them that something wrong was going on.
Supervisor was fired. My girlfriend became my ex-girlfriend. Supervisor wanted nothing to do with her anymore since he got fired because of her. I googled the supervisors name and found out where he lived. I had someone he wouldn’t recognize (in case HE answered the door) knock on his door and tell his wife exactly what he had been up to, about how he had been trying to get with an 18-year-old girl. They are now divorced.
That’s what you get for trying to steal my girlfriend and ruining our relationship. Both of them can rot. My ex-girlfriend still doesn’t think she did anything wrong.”