Best act of corporate revenge you’ve seen

In My Humble Opinion
1

Since the thread about dumb cost cutting corporate measures has run its course, let’s discuss some of the sweetest acts of revenge you’ve seen in a business setting.

A department of Company X, during some of the worst times during the Great Recession, calls a ‘hunker down’ meeting for all the staff in that department. They lay the hammer down and tell you how much things are going to suck and almost everything will be cut or eliminated. No bonuses for that year, no pizza for employee birthdays, etc.

A couple of days later, an administrative assistant ‘accidentally’ forwards an email to the entire department outlining the schedule of the upcoming executive meeting with so-called important people from other offfices around the country The host hotel isn’t too far away from the local office but is well known as luxurious and expensive. The schedule includes horseback riding, golf, and a wine and cheese reception. Oh, and a few meetings with the usual boring PowerPoint presentations.

I assume she knew her job was already on the chopping block as a lot of support staff was let go in the subsequent months. Still, it was nice seeing that, ‘Do as I say, not as I do’ is still in effect in corporate America.

2

I did this:

I worked in a Cube Farm, with a lazy, scum-bag supervisor who would sluff off all his work to a very nice lady who would unfortunately let him. One of the thing he had to do was sign off on all the vacation days his “team” would take and make sure HR accounted for it. (This was looong ago, so some details are hazy now)

Long story short, Supervisor Sleaze fucked me (and the rest of his “team” ) over on something, and I was working on a Sunday (one of 6 out of 400 who did that). So, I waltzed into his cube, saw the 3-month backlog of undone vacation paperwork…
… and shredded it.

End of year, all his “team” got those vacation days that he was too fucking lazy to sign-off on paid, as unused vacation. :smiley: They deserved it, too, since they had to cover for his lazy ass.

This guy was the Biggest Asshole I’ve Ever Worked For.

I’m not proud. Or tired.

:wink:

3

Gato, how did Supervisor Sleaze react, or did he notice?

4

Jeez, I can’t compare to Gatopescados story.

Worst I’ve seen personally is someone intentionally not buying more supplies that were needed, and then quitting. The company then had to spend several days trying to get supply chains worked out.

5

Not nearly as good, but after years of no raises for most people - even during good times - HR suddenly discovered that the parking lots were not nearly as full at 9 am as they used to be, and a lot emptier at 6 pm.
Wonder why.
But it was one way of everyone giving themselves a raise for their effective hourly rate.

6

I’m sure he never noticed. And I was gone before the end of that year (and saw the extra pay for vacation days undocumented on my final check).

I ran into Sally (Sleaze’s little slave) at the Kroger and asked her if she enjoyed her “little bonus” at the end of the year. She was surprised and asked me how I knew about it. I just told her, “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down”.

I heard Sleaze got fired not long after.

7

I’ve mentioned before on this board – I loves me some revenge.

In the eighties, I was a young engineer assigned to a newly hired “lead” to guide me in producing some complex software. This “lead” (let’s call him shit-for-brains or SFB for short) was skilled only at covering his incompetence and seizing credit for all progress. He also was a master at ordering his personal lackey around in front of any management or PTBs to show his superiority. To the programmers here, I found in my first week, SFB did even not know what a compiler was, yet preened in front of his betters as the expert in all things software.

I encouraged him to take this limelight. I played the obsequious little novice enthralled at the feet of his master, and allowed him to brag to all and sundry of his accomplishments during the design and implementation of this system, and how his little apprentice was “coming along nicely”.

After months of this, a grand demonstration of the system was scheduled, with all PTBs in attendance. This was a complex system, and very hard to set up and start – and SFB had never learned anything. After calls and memos encouraging everyone above him in the food chain to come and marvel at his ability…
… I became deathly ill an hour before the event, and left SFB to flame out in front of the crowd of suits. He had not the slightest idea of how to start the processes, nor any of the hardware. It was a thing of beauty (I was told later) and SFB eventually was sacked in a RIF.

8

I applaud you.

9

I worked for a boss who was a notorious micro-manager. He was also an avid kayaker and was constantly telling us of exploits all over the rivers. One of his favorite sayings was, “When I work, everyone works. When I play, everyone works. Because someone has to work while I’m playing”.

He requested and got an additional phone setup in his office. He would have people from all over that part of the US give him the local river reports and he updated the whole list every day and recorded it as the answering machine message. Fellow kayakers would call in to his phone and get all the water flow rate information without having to track it down.

One coworker got tired of this and narced him to internal affairs. It was as clear cut example of corporate abuse as you could have, with a full paper trail, his voice on the machine, etc.

We heard he got read the riot act but outwardly nothing happened. This was before email was popular and I heard he later migrated the service to email.

10

This is just a tiny little thing, but it’s one of my favorite stories from my days in radio.

One of the local radio stations employed a college student as the weekend newscaster. One day the boss told him that since he was only on the air for five minutes an hour, that he should clock in at 9:00 and clock out at 9:05, clock in at 10:00 out at 10:05, etc.

The kid has enough presence of mind to tell the boss that if he was only working five minutes per hour, he could only report on what was happening during that five minutes. His comeback had just the right level of smart-assedness to shut the boss up but not get fired.

11

Do you think that HR may have thought that your actions were actually done by Sleaze, i.e. destroying paperwork?

12

Even better.

13

HR would be more likely to think he simply hadn’t bothered to fill it out - except they clearly didn’t think that either, because they paid out for the ‘unused’ time. If they’d known the time had been used they wouldn’t have done so.

14

I thought you were going to say that he put on a record that skipped, and just let it keep skipping until he clocked back in again.

15

Here’s my story:

About 10 years ago, I had a horrible manager that made my life a living hell. In addition, he was always lording over everyone that he had a hot wife, a big house, etc.

Several years later, I moved over to another department - but was still at the same company. It was a great career decision - because not only was it a good job opportunity, but as an added bonus I wasn’t working for this manager anymore. Around this same time, I heard “through the grapevine” that this guy was having marital problems - but didn’t know to what extent and/or the details, etc.

So, recently he and I were in the same part of the building we both work in, and happened to be going down the same elevator that day to get to the bottom floor; we were the only two on the elevator. I thought about taking another one (since I hated the guy so much), but didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of thinking I didn’t want to get on because of him. Anyway, on the elevator he acted very condescending to me, and asked me if I was still single; I knew this was a “dig” to get at me - not that I have any issues with being single (I strongly prefer it to marriage), but because I knew that he thought the question would pi$$ me off - that’s just type of person he was.

So, I replied with a smile, “Yes, I’m single - but only because I’m screwing a married woman. Her husband is a little punk who can’t satisfy her in bed. So, she screws around behind his back, and he’s clueless about the whole situation.” The look on this P.O.S.'s face was PRICELESS - he became enraged, and his face turned beet-red. I just continued smirking at him, and then we both got off on the bottom floor. I then told him, “Have a nice day!” and walked off.

Later, I heard that this guy’s marriage broke up (still not sure of the reason), but I must have hit a nerve re: what I said for him to get so upset. I still see this P.O.S. around the building, but he actively avoids me whenever he sees me - and I always smirk when I see him. What a scum-bag :wink:

And, as it turns out - I was telling the truth to the guy…but it wasn’t his wife I was sleeping with - LOL.

16

My only story of corporate revenge was one I perpetrated myself.

Once upon a time I was a programmer (I have a computer science degree). My immediate boss was a woman who had started as a keypunch operator and worked her way up to IT manager eventually, learning how to program in one single language, and only in a kind of rule-of-thumb kind of way. And only up through a specific version of the 4GL our applications were written in, which was like two numbered versions back from the version our ERP system ran on. In other words, she wasn’t really very good at programming at all, and she felt threatened by me.

I didn’t know all this until fairly late in my tenure with that company. For the most part, I was left alone to do my thing and be responsible, but periodically when I’d have a solution or new development that I was unsure of, I’d ask her to take a look and do some testing- sort of a “second pair of eyes” kind of thing. At first, I think she thought it was because I was new and humored me, but after year or so, she started to resent it and treat it like I was asking me to do her job, and she was so busy, and what was my problem, etc… This sort of baffled me- peer review was always something I’d seen a lot of at the civil engineering firm I’d interned with in college, and was something the professors in college talked up as well.

So eventually, between this and other personality conflicts- she was a terrible communicator and was not good at setting expectations, etc… She mostly wanted me to go away and not bother her, instead of trying to involve her/communicate with her. But she wanted to reserve the right to nit-pick and bitch and criticize when she didn’t like the way I did something, even when I’d tried to unsuccessfully involve her in the decision making process much earlier. That and she was a detail nitpicker- she’d get completely snippy and bitchy about stuff like misspellings, or other stuff that was literally trivial to fix .

So eventually after a couple of years, I’d had enough. I decided to go back to graduate school about 7 months before I quit my job. So what did I do?

For the next seven months, I pulled out every advanced programming trick I’d ever learned about in school, pored through the manuals for the current version of the 4GL programming language that we were using, and proceeded to write beautiful, up-to-date, elegant code using all sorts of nifty programming techniques and the newest, most advanced constructs and syntax that the language had to offer.

Pretty much above reproach right? Yes, and the beauty was that since her handful of programming classes had stopped about 2 versions back, and she had no theoretical background to understand some of the stuff I’d done, she would be utterly lost in trying to modify or debug it and would have to have someone else double-check her work.

17

Awesome! I love it! I’m one of those people who go out their way to help co-workers if they don’t understand something (that I’m proficient in), so hate it when I have to work with people who are not team players. Fuck them. It sounds like this woman definitely got what was coming to her :wink:

18

I cooked in a classy restaurant for a year. During that time, John Warner was running for a Senate seat in Virginia. The restaurant offered to host some sort of fundraiser, and Elizabeth Taylor (Warner’s then-wife) was to be present.

The restaurant offered select employees a chance to work the event (without pay) and people were actually going to do it. I pulled a Norma Rae and convinced all the cooks to boycott the event. A signup sheet was posted, waitstaff flocked to signup, but not a single cook signed the sheet.

Things got very tense. The restaurant ended up cancelling their participation.
ETA: Warner won.

19

Ok, my Dad got in two digs as a senior NCO in the National Guard.
Later, after trying a stint as a teacher (back in the days when teachers were badly underpaid) he got a job as a FT National Gd employee. The battalion clerk, more or less.

My Dad was a WW2 vet with a chestful of ribbons, and hashmarks all the way down. Non-Military people when they saw my dad and one of the Captains- fresh out of NG OCS- would talk to my Dad as if he was in charge.

This annoyed the captain and he tried to make my dad’s life miserable. But the capt couldnt figure out why his pay and leave was always screwed up, why things were sent to Alaska, etc. :smiley:

Then, during the week, Dad was a GS9, a lead. Sure he wore a Sgts uniform at work, but he was a GS9.

So one of his GS4 clerks came back from CA OCS with shiny new 2nd Lt bars. Dad of course congratulated him, saluted (not required but a nice gesture), etc. But then while working the new Lt said “Sergeant, I am a Lieutenant, so address me as such.” Dad just looked at him and said “When we are not on drill, I am a GS9 supervisor and you as a GS4 clerk.”

20

Isn’t making employees work off the clock, like, massively illegal? Why were they demanding volunteers, in every sense of the word?