what’s the most Machiavellian thing you’ve seen or done at work?

by Alison Green on October 29, 2020

We need a distraction, preferably one full of intrigue and drama. So let’s talk about the most Machiavellian thing you’ve ever seen done at work — self-serving schemes or manipulation that you watched being carried out (or carried out yourself!). We’re looking for stories of underhanded machinations, double-dealing, and conniving.

Share in the comments!

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  1. Arjun*

    Not my story, but a favourite:
    “I was once on a US military ship, having breakfast in the wardroom (officers lounge) when the Operations Officer (OPS) walks in. This guy was the definition of NOT a morning person; he’s still half asleep, bleary eyed… basically a zombie with a bagel. He sits down across from me to eat his bagel and is just barely conscious. My back is to the outboard side of the ship, and the morning sun is blazing in one of the portholes putting a big bright-ass circle of light right on his barely conscious face. He’s squinting and chewing and basically just remembering how to be alive for today. It’s painful to watch.

    But then zombie-OPS stops chewing, slowly picks up the phone, and dials the bridge. In his well-known I’m-still-totally-asleep voice, he says ‘Heeeey. It’s OPS. Could you… shift our barpat… yeah, one six five. Thanks.’ And puts the phone down. And then he just sits there. Squinting. Waiting.

    And then, ever so slowly, I realize that that big blazing spot of sun has begun to slide off the zombie’s face and onto the wall behind him. After a moment it clears his face and he blinks slowly a few times and the brilliant beauty of what I’ve just witnessed begins to overwhelm me. By ordering the bridge to adjust the ship’s back-and-forth patrol by about 15 degrees, he’s changed our course just enough to reposition the sun off of his face. He’s literally just redirected thousands of tons of steel and hundreds of people so that he could get the sun out of his eyes while he eats his bagel. I am in awe.

    He slowly picks up his bagel and for a moment I’m terrified at the thought that his own genius may escape him, that he may never appreciate the epic brilliance of his laziness (since he’s not going to wake up for another hour). But between his next bites he pauses, looks at me, and gives me the faintest, sly grin, before returning to gnaw slowly on his zombie bagel.”

      1. Susan Kamppi*

        I work at an assisted living facility and at the time of this I was head of the housekeeping department. Coworker was so very angry about my promotion because she said she should have gotten it because she had been there longer bit she had previously held position but had been demoted before I started due to her being a horrible worker. Twice a year we get unannounced QE inspections that are very thorough and tough. Well, one day, in walks QE lady and Miss Disgruntled decides to tank us (which affects whole score for community and can mess with our bonus all employees get for high scores). She takes chemicals that are kept only in one locked location and sticks them in a cleaning closet that is only to have certain listed chemicals, unlocked another coworkers cart (keys were all the same) while she was at lunch (that is a corrective action incident because of accessible chemicals), took a very large SDS book from maintenance shop (over 100 entries for paints and chemicals) and threw away every damn page leaving an empty binder, and moved things around in cleaning closets so areas that are taped off not to be blocked (panels, eye wash stations ect) where blocked. It was so obvious sabotage because of the panic my boss had at each infraction when doing our part of inspection with corporate that we were given the chance to immediately correct (thankfully I had back up on computer for sds) but we could’ve failed horribly and she did take points off because we didn’t notice these things before she inspected. Because we couldn’t prove she did it nothing happened then but any and all trust or respect was gone. She did more sneaky crap after but we were onto her so she didn’t get too far in her plans.

    2. Guacamole Bob*

      The great thing about this story is that it may be a waste of resources (I don’t know anything about ship operations), but it wasn’t mean-spirited. When I saw the topic for the day I was a little worried it would make me despair at the depths to which humanity will stoop, but this one brought a smile to my face instead. Thanks for kicking things off on such a good note!

      2. Jules the 3rd*

        As long as he doesn’t head them into another ship or an island, it’s no big deal. They’re on patrol, they have a lot of ocean to cover and a lot of leeway in how they do it.

      1. JessaB*

        Yeh I love how he just came up with the right number out of his head, half zonked and eating a bagel.

    11. Bean Counter Extraordinaire*

      I’ve seen this a couple times, and I love it more each time.
      I also really want a bagel now.

            1. ThatGirl*

              Yes, but there’s barely any ghost pepper in the donut sprinkles – it’s the tiniest bit of spice.

            2. Aitch Arr*

              Google A Journey to the Center of a Spicy Dunkin’ Donut for a fun column about one man’s journey to Ghost Pepper Donut Heaven.

            4. The Cosmic Avenger*

              Nah, ghost peppers are #7 on the world’s hottest peppers list! Seriously, the Carolina Reaper has almost twice the Scoville rating.

        2. Zephy*

          What about a “party bagel” from Einstein Bros? (they’re…doughnuts, sliced and schmeared like bagels.)

    12. JM in England*

      He sounds like the same Officer of the Watch that repeatedly ordered a lighthouse to give way to a warship!

    16. Yoz*

      I’m pretty sure I saw this exact post on Reddit. You may want to cite or link the original post to give the Reddit poster recognition.

      3. Alice's Rabbit*

        I first heard this one 30 years ago on a naval base. It’s not new, and the reddit thread is not the first place it was posted.

    17. Donkey Hotey*

      Former Sailor here. I can testify that
      1- OPS-Os can be exactly that petty and
      2- This story has been in circulation for AT MINIMUM 30 years.
      I don’t know who this person was, but in Internet terms, he is one of the Elder Gods and should be respected as such.

        1. Matt*

          Ahhh, Skippy’s List, yes. As an aside, I’d seen various attempts to copy that format for other fields, all but one of which (that I’ve seen) were really just sad copies and imitations. But that one… I haven’t checked in a while, but it was “NNNN Things Mr. Welch is No Longer Allowed to Do in an RPG”. Same vein, and despite being up to maybe ~2000 when I last looked at the Livejournal pages years ago, it was amusing enough without being particularly repetitive of Skippy’s list or itself. No idea if this person really tried all these munchkin methods in real games, but I give ’em credit for at least being imaginative enough to come up with all the scenarios…

          1. PotatoEngineer*

            Skippy’s List explicitly says that the items on it were not all done by Skippy himself. I’m assuming Mr. Welch similarly hasn’t done everything himself. (And when I last read the list, I recall that you could easily bang out a dozen of those things in twenty minutes of planning. That said, 2000 is still a lot.)

      2. curly sue*

        I heard this one from a friend in the Canadian Navy about… fifteen years ago, so it’s definitely made the rounds!

    18. I Need That Pen*

      This really should be a short movie… because I could see it all in my head playing out.

    19. kiwidg1*

      My true military story:

      I worked in the command post on base. One of our jobs was to call the base commander in the middle of the night for emergencies and brief them about what was going on. In many cases, these emergencies were fairly routine, but the requirement still existed, especially if that emergency was required to be upchanneled to the next level of command.

      So, one night we made a 2am call to the commander informing them of one of these emergencies and reminding them we were going to upchannel the information to headquarters next. They didn’t have any additional input to the report, so we hung up and proceeded to send the written report up the chain.

      The next morning, the commander arrived for their daily briefing and when shown the written report, proceeded to yell about why we hadn’t notified them about this. When we showed them our log entry indicating we had called them, we were branded liars and all kinds of terrible people.

      Two nights later, the same thing happened. This time we were prepared and, after the notification was made, pulled down the audio recording of the conversation. (All communications were recorded, we just couldn’t get to it fast enough the first time.) The next morning, the commander once again tried to yell at us for being incompetent liars. We pointed to the cassette recorder sitting on the counter and recommended they play the recording in which they heard themselves responding to the notification call.

      I don’t think we even got an “I’m sorry about that” from that particular commander. But I do love telling the story.

        1. All the cats 4 me*

          Didn’t even wake up enough for ths conscious brain to register the call.

          I have done that while on 24/7 call, while sleep deprived.

          1. Donkey Hotey*

            Hell, that’s how I got a roommate in the Navy. I had just come home from a 7pm – 7am watch and was exhausted. Woke up that night and went back to work for another. I come home at 7am the next day and there’s a guy in my room.
            “What are you doing in here?”
            “We talked about it yesterday, I’m your new roommate.”
            “I have no recollection of this whatsoever.”
            “You were wearing (X) and asked me (Y & Z).”
            “Sounds legit. Hi, Roomie, I’m Donkey.”

          2. Emma*

            If you wake my partner up in the night, she doesn’t even start to form memories unless she’s awake for about half an hour.

            For years one of her exes would wake up regularly with night terrors. Partner would wake up, calm her down, and they’d both go back to sleep. One day ex thanked partner for looking after her when this happened – and partner had no idea what she was talking about, and just listened in amazement as ex explained that, no, she had been doing this at least once a week the whole time they’d lived together??

        2. Bluesboy*

          My Grandad died when I was 16 in the middle of the night. My parents woke me up, explained what had happened and that they were going over to the house to be with his widow, and I was in charge of my three younger siblings until they got back. I was talking, moving around, everything.

          When they got back I had precisely zero memory of it. Nada. My suspicion is that the Commander was similar, because otherwise, as you imply, why on earth would he do it?

        3. Oska*

          I’ve dealt with surprisingly coherent sleep-zombies before (and been accused of Not Doing A Thing), so this rings true.

          The husband of one of my mother’s friend swore up and down that he usually woke up mid-shaving in the morning. No memories of getting up, going to the bathroom, doing his business and lathering up with shaving foam. Every. Day.

          1. Chevette Girl*

            My husband is bad for answering questions without actually waking up, then denyingany memory of the conversation, so now if I need to know if he’s actually coherent or just running on auto pilot, I ask him to answer an arithmetic question… he talks just fine in his sleep but has to actually be awake to do math. Only took me fifteen years to figure it out.

    21. Bibliovore*

      Not my story, but my grandfather’s, as best I remember it:

      He was drafted into the army for WWII, went through officer’s training and came out an unseasoned second lieutenant with a troop of men under his command. When he heard that their general was going to be at their base on a particular day, he decided that that would be a particularly good day for his men to be _off_ the base; the only outdoor training still available for that day was on a particular type of gun his troop had already trained on, but he signed them up anyhow and worked out how to make it still a useful learning experience by explaining how to file down part of the gun to make it a semiautomatic. So when the general’s convoy came upon them at their outdoor training, he was teaching them how to deface military property. My grandfather’s commanding officer shot dagger glares at him, the general asked some training questions that my grandfather had the brightest people in his group answer shiningly well, the convoy left to look in on other troops, and my grandfather sank down on a rock and chewed his nails to the quick, sure that he was about to be demoted back to infantry. After the general left, my grandfather was called in by his commanding officer and raked over the coals… and then, not many days later, he was promoted to first lieutenant. He figured there must be some mistake, but he was deeply relieved and didn’t look that gift horse in the mouth.

      Years later, he encountered that general’s aide de camp in an officer’s mess. The conversation came around to that earlier training day, and the aide explained what happened: When the convoy approached, my grandfather was standing under a tree. The shade apparently made the general mistake his gold bar for silver, and he asked, “How long has that man been a first lieutenant?” The question went down the line, and the answer came back: “Not very long, sir.” And then a rush promotion — in wartime — was put in for my then-errant grandfather because nobody was willing to tell the general he was incorrect.

      2. mrs__peel*

        You might enjoy a series of books by Donald Jack about a character named Bartholomew Bandy, who’s in the Canadian air force during WWI and keeps getting promoted by accident and despite complete incompetence. (The first book in the series is called “Three Cheers for Me”). They’re the funniest things I’ve ever read, and sadly not very well-known these days.

        1. Arts Akimbo*

          I’ve got one of my dad’s books, “You’re Stepping On My Cloak And Dagger” by Roger Hall, a WWII memoir about OSS training, which is likewise one of the funniest things I’ve ever read and no one I know has heard of it.

        2. Bibliovore*

          I’ll look those up — thank you!

          I feel obliged to add that my grandfather had a lengthy and illustrious military career, probably against all expectations of that early commanding officer. :)

    22. Rainy*

      My dad served in Vietnam as an artillery officer. He was second in command of a couple of firebases in his time, and one of the duties of the second-in-command, on one of his bases, was to mandate when the soldiers took their malaria drugs. Now, in case you weren’t aware, malaria drugs are mostly only slightly better than actually having malaria. They cause gastro symptoms. Really, really bad ones. The soldiers took their meds on Monday and were miserable and lining up for the latrines all day Mondays and Tuesdays.

      Dad–the only person on the base beside his CO (who absentmindedly swallowed whatever his aide handed him, whenever) who wasn’t under orders to take their pills on Monday–took *his* malaria pills on Thursday at breakfast, and spent the morning in the latrine in solitary splendor.

    24. agnomen*

      I have one somewhat similar to that, except it’s mine. I was in the Navy on a Destroyer. We had picked up family members in Hawaii on our way back to San Diego for a Tiger’s Cruise. We were having a sunrise breakfast. Where they serve pre-packaged breakfast sandwiches and juice on the fantail (helicopter deck) as you get to watch the sunrise. Very pretty way to start the day and way better than normal breakfast.
      One of the chiefs daughters wanted a picture of her dad with the Captain. However, the ship was in the way of the sun. So the Captain did something similar to OPS here. He had the helm change direction to get a good picture. He also did the same when we had a kite flying contest off the back of the ship during deployment. He was a great captain for a horrible ship.

  2. Mitford*

    At one of my first jobs after college, the team I was on had a truly awful boss. One of my coworkers got a hold of his resume and submitted it to a bunch of recruiters. The bad boss was gone in about three months.

          2. Brusque*

            Not neccessarily. Could be the bad boss was a bad boss due to some factor he had to endure and the hapiness from a better fitting job eliminated the bad from boss.

    6. Putting Out Fires, Esq*

      And this has a lovely moral: sometimes we’re bad employees because we’re in jobs that aren’t great for us, for whatever reason.

          1. Alice's Rabbit*

            I’d put this closer to true neutral, with leanings toward evil. It’s outside the box thinking, which leans chaotic, but stays within the rules, lawful.
            It gets rid of your problem through devious means, evil. But does so in a way which benefits all concerned, good.
            Conclusion: Neutral across the board. And very clever!

    13. Dancing Otter*

      They did this to the choir director at a church I used to attend. But nobody else wanted him either.

    19. Sleepless*

      I remember reading this story so long ago, it predates the Internet…I think it was in Reader’s Digest. Anyway, guy starts a new job and meets a coworker who has risen through the company incredibly fast. He asks the guy about it. Guy had, years ago, gotten the name of an awesome recruiter. He sent the recruiter his boss’ name, and boss gets hired away. Guy applies for boss’s job. Over the years, he had done this with every boss.

    20. Applejack*

      I did something similar once where I got a temp version of a job at the same time as someone else who got the full-time permanent version. She was always unhappy so I convinced her to follow her bliss, get a new job, you’re right this guy is a jerk, etc etc. I was very conveniently available to take over when she left shortly after :)

      1. Zweisatz*

        Good for you! And truly, it’s better than having somebody complain for YEARS (we have one of those).

        1. Alice's Rabbit*

          I have a friend who keeps complaining about where we live. Not just the exact location, but everything about the entire region. She hates it here.
          She got a bit annoyed when I finally had it with her insulting everything I live about my home for the umpteenth time, and snapped that if she hates it so much, then leave! She’s divorced with no children, no local family, and no real career, just jobs. Except for a couple of pieces of cheap furniture she bought after her divorce, everything she owns could easily fit in her car. She could go anywhere. There is literally nothing holding her here. Most of our other friends have moved away over the years. Time to go somewhere else, if you hate it here so badly.

  3. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

    How about when someone else tried to be underhanded and jerky and it backfired on them? I used to work on, say, the painted crockery polishing team. One of the big big big rules for the PCPT was that if the crockery ain’t painted yet, they don’t TOUCH it. SERIOUS major no no. Then I was promoted and became a team lead for one of several crockery painting teams.

    About six months later, an unpainted sugar bowl somehow ended up in a work queue for the PCPT. The polisher who picked it up forwarded it to the PCPT manager, who forwarded it to my manager, who forwarded it to me and said “Can you paint this so they can polish it?” So I painted it all pretty with flowers and such, and replied to all of the above, “Sugar bowl is painted and ready for polishing!”

    The polisher, who was both bad at her job and also had a history of trying to get people in trouble unnecessarily, replied to me and CC’ed the PCPT team lead, manager, and director, “Really? Can I ask why you painted it? I was told that the PCPT was NEVER to touch unpainted crockery.”

    For a moment, I was taken aback, because not only had I not been a member of the PCPT team for six months at that point, but she had been party to the email chain in which I had specifically been asked to paint the damn thing. And she was STILL trying to get me in trouble with the powers that be for doing something she thought was wrong. So I replied all and said “Well, that’s true, the PCPT is never to touch unpainted crockery, but I’ve been a team lead on the coffee service painting team for six months now, and as you can see in the email chain, my manager Tangerina Wobbleworth asked me to paint this sugar bowl, which is well within the duties of my current position, so y’all could finish working with it.”

    She replied, just to me, “How was I supposed to know you left?” And that was it. (She announced her retirement about three weeks later. There’s *probably* not any correlation, but who knows. :P )

    1. Princess Trachea-Aurelia Belaroth*

      My sister works with someone like this. She thinks she is sneaky but she is totally incapable of seeing that everyone sees through her plans. She tries to get people in trouble via email callout all the time but my favorite story is the party planning committee one.

      She’s worked there for ten years, and everyone else in her department has worked there five years or less. She tried to re-institute the “Event Planning Committee” from back before anyone else worked there, and make all the people in only her department join it (all women, much younger than her). This is an office of less than ten people. She called meetings way more often than necessary and tried to make overly complex, bizarre party plans at her own whims, full of favoritism and self aggrandization.

      My sister refused to join because she has a huge workload (as this person offloads all her cases onto her) and doesn’t see the need for a committee. Tantrum. Then, when people other than her would have ideas in the committee, or disagree with her weird ideas, she quit the committee with tears and a mass email.

      So her plan was to avoid her actual work by making up these other duties and have a committee of people who enable her and enact her whims, and instead they were normal people and didn’t let her reign as Queen of Parties.

      1. Hey Karma, Over Here*

        I worked with her. Except she (AH) came into my established team.
        Restructuring resulted in eliminated one position, after AH was hired. This scared the shit out of the longest tenured person (LT) in my group who thought AH had coordinated it. LT was out when the announcement was made, missed how our boss and her boss both found out the DAY IT HAPPENED. AH let her think it was all her doing for the next five years until she pissed off the wrong people and had to transfer!

      2. LunaLena*

        I have a lot of office mates like this – thinks they are sneaky and completely incapable of seeing that they’re not getting away with it – but to be fair they are also cats, so it’s less evil and more adorable.

        2. Carpe Librarium*

          My brother had a pet cockatiel who would go into ‘stealth mode’ when up to mischief. Stealth mode involving hunching down low, spreading his wings out a bit on either side, and carefully creeping along the floor/couch/bench top.
          The combination of all of these actions resulted in a very obvious movement that drew more attention than simply wandering around like normal.
          It was the bird equivalent of a pantomime villain sneaking up behind someone.

          1. Bluesboy*

            Our dog would go into the kitchen, eat his food and come back via the shortest route.

            Unless he had eaten the cat’s food. In that case, he would take the long way around, presumably so we wouldn’t know that he had come from the kitchen. Since that way made no sense, every time we saw him come in via that door we knew he had been eating the cat’s food…

      1. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

        She’s lovely, except the exact opposite of Machiavellian — if anything, she’s TOO nice and lets people get away with all manner of nonsense. :)

    3. Dr Wizard, PhD*

      >She replied, just to me, “How was I supposed to know you left?”

      See, that’s the sort of thing I’d reply-all to with ‘No problem Rachel, we all make mistakes!’

      Just so all the people she’d initially looped in were wise to her and her tone.

      1. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

        I replied to her and to the PCPT team lead and manager, basically to that effect – didn’t see the need to clutter the director’s mailbox further – but I found out later that the manager had mentioned it to the director in person and that they were both entertained by the whiff.

    4. Anonymous271*

      In the vein of someone trying to be underhanded and it backfiring spectacularly…

      I used to work as an assistant. At one point, I was working with one of my boss’s clients and the client’s assistant. The assistant had forgotten to do something and it made what we were doing super complicated. Instead of coming clean, she decided to throw me under the bus (I’m sure it had nothing to do with the fact that I was a completely inexperienced 22 year old *sarcasm). She dropped me off the email chain and complained that I wasn’t doing what I was supposed to.

      Many emails go back and forth between my boss, the client and the assistant. My boss clarifies what is going on and adds me back to the email chain, assistant continues to blame me and pulls me off the email chain each time and the client is clearly just annoyed that we have to deal with this.

      Little does the assistant know, my boss and I keep a spreadsheet of every single contact with clients we have. We also include the work we’ve done on their behalf. Complete with date and time. (It’s a highly regulated field and my boss was both a micromanager and very firmly believed in CYA). So he knows with as much certainty as he can have that I’m not the one in the wrong.

      After a day or two of this nonsense, my boss decides he is done. He calls up the client, proceeds to very calmly ream out the guy about the professionalism of his staff. He listens for a moment and then tells the client that he should take his accounts elsewhere. This client was on the higher end of the spectrum and represented a decent loss of revenue. And there was absolutely no hesitation from my boss to let him go.

      The cherry on the top? My boss was the most inveterate gossip I have ever met. Almost immediately after the call with his client, he called up his 50 closest friends to tell them about what a jerk this client (and especially the assistant) had been to his assistant. All his friends are in the same field, and from what I heard, it took the client a long time to find someone willing to take his accounts.

      Still don’t know if the client ended up keeping his assistant.

    5. Stained Glass Cannon*

      Also in the vein of underhandedness backfiring spectacularly, although this is more like a long slow train wreck than a single incident.

      There was a guy in OldJob who was a real piece of work. Went around spreading vicious little (untrue) stories about anyone who had so much as a single job function in common with him – claims that they’d made some insulting remark, accusations that they’d shirked duty in small areas, the kind of unverifiable thing that subtly damages someone’s reputation. He was also the sort to suck up to the bosses, which eventually got him seconded to a manager who was stepping down and looking to train up a successor.

      Now here’s where the backfire started. This guy wasn’t up to a higher-responsibility position. Pretty much anyone who’d worked with him knew he couldn’t cut it. So when the transition period was coming to an end, and he had about a month before he’d be taking the full weight of the role, he tried to convince Manager to stay on and help him out – by offering her a subordinate position designed to shoulder the bulk of the work!

      Manager was the fire-breathing sort and this went down about as well as you might imagine. There were words exchanged. Manager left on schedule, but not before tipping off Department Boss that this guy might not be such a great fit for the role after all.

      At this point, Unsuitable Guy was in a very shaky position. Since Manager had departed, he decided to try and regain some lost ground by…wait for it…spreading stories about Manager to undermine her credibility and thereby her warning about him. Clearly Unsuitable Guy wasn’t as sneaky as he thought, because it took all of two weeks before Manager got wind of it.

      Now Manager might have left, but she still had the ear of Department Boss, who started asking questions. This opened a real can of worms. People started raising all the little incidents and allegations that they’d been dubious about before but didn’t really look into because they were so minor, and a pattern of backstabbing and undermining emerged. HR got involved and at some point so did Legal, because Unsuitable Guy had basically been defaming people on company time (although I’m not certain how much liability the company actually had for this).

      Unsuitable Guy had his promotion withdrawn shortly after that, and left the company. To put the cherry on the cake, Manager, who had/has a considerable number of industry connections, apparently took the story around the industry with her and got him blacklisted in several other places.

      When I think about this affair I feel rather sad, because Unsuitable Guy put a lot of people in very difficult positions who didn’t have the clout to defend themselves against him. It took a fairly senior person with connections to finally deal with him, and even that only happened because he grossly overestimated his influence over her. But yeah, good backfire is good backfire.

  4. Anon-for-Now*

    My former employer didn’t want to pay us for helping them plan for the company’s future, so they made meetings that would have a big impact on our jobs optional, scheduled them from 7am-9pm and the first hour was unpaid.

    It was a small company, so I emailed the owner and said, “Hey, I’m sure you don’t intend this, but it looks bad, like you’re trying to get us to work for free”

    He said, “Oh, well I guess I am :)”

      1. Anon-for-Now*

        I mean, aside from a general atmosphere of distrusting the leadership… no.

        I don’t think anyone else was as put out by it as I was, but the year I left I was one of 7 from an office of 30, so… I think it was a slow burn.

      2. Sally Forth*

        I worked in the office supplies business. I was only 25 ish and one of 3 female sales people on a team of 25. One of our older sales managers often passed off my ideas and new product info as his own. Part of this was because one of our biggest suppliers was my account so I often got to see stuff before it was released. No company secrets, just a nice little turn in their new products area from time to time.

        He was off the day before a big sales meeting. I got samples of a new product (think neon Post It’s instead of yellow) and made sure everyone had the sample and the product info in their mail slot. Then the day of the meeting, I verbally told him about the new product and gave him a sample. When our sales meeting started and he was highlighting new products, he gave us a real “hush hush” insider look at the new product. Everyone laughed and said they had theirs already. .

      2. The Starsong Princess*

        This one is one is small potatoes compared to some but it is manipulation that worked for me. I am a very pale person and usually wear make up including lipstick. Otherwise, I look like something that was ordered and didn’t come. So some years ago, I had this boss, a nice motherly woman. Whenever I wanted an afternoon off, I’d wear a beige shirt, which washed me out, and toned down the makeup, removing the lipstick entirely. She would exclaim that I was unwell and practically force me to take off sick (paid) for the afternoon. I would say I was fine but she would insist. Worked every time.

          1. Blue Eagle*

            I had a green turtleneck that did the same thing. I liked that turtleneck because it went well with one of my suits but had the effect of washing me out entirely. So many people said I looked sick. Finally I quit wearing it most of the time except for one or two days in the wintertime when I really needed to take a mental health day – – and was sent home for being sick.

        2. RB*

          Ha ha ha, I have used this tactic. Sometime just leaving off the mascara is enough to do the trick. And toning down the blush and lipstick.

        3. Turtlewings*

          This is brilliantly manipulative and also, “I look like something that was ordered and didn’t come” is amazing.

        5. Catty*

          I used to do something similar in high school. I was generally a good student but sometimes I didn’t get a paper done on time and needed an extra day. It wasn’t considered late if you had an excuse absence.

          I have very dark circles under my eyes even when I’m well-rested. It runs in my family. So on those days I wouldn’t wear concealer and I looked soooooo sickly. Then I’d tell some teacher in a morning class that I felt sick and would go to the nurse who would send me home. They never suspected me because I was otherwise a model student and I didn’t do it often enough to become a pattern.

    3. Friendly Comp Manager*

      That’s illegal in most cases, but it’s your former employer so — good riddance to them.

  5. Ben&Jerrys4Life*

    At my first office job, while I was also a poor broke college student, I may have started a rumor (or two) that I had heard we were having an ice cream party that day. The rumor would go around until someone in management would usually run out and get ice cream and toppings since they assumed someone else had forgot to. In retrospect I realize we were all a food motivated group, and that my attempts to be sneaky were probably a lot less subtle than I thought.

    1. Anon-for-Now*

      haha! People used to do this at my old office as well. It happened all summer, no one was really fooled. But we did eat a lot of ice cream.

    3. Belle of the Midwest*

      I love this so much. That kind of cleverness is an essential skill in many occupations.

    4. Lily C*

      My law firm had official Ice Cream Wednesdays for a few years because the senior partner wanted ice cream, but felt bad about sending a file clerk out to buy just it for him, so he’d give the clerk a stack of cash and have him clean out the freezer bin of ice cream bars and mini ice cream cups at the corner store. The year that April Fool’s was on a Wednesday, there was an announcement that the ice cream was canceled, and you could hear the ripple of disappointment through the office as the email hit everyone’s inboxes. We were all very sad when the store closed a year later and Ice Cream Wednesday really did end.

      1. sharpshooter*

        This reminds me of a place I worked that had some sort of breakfast pastry brought in every Friday. Bagels on the first week of the pay period and donuts on the second week, aka payday. One payday, bagels were delivered instead of donuts. An office wide email had to be sent out to clarify that yes, it was still payday, despite there being bagels in the office.

      2. General von Klinkerhoffen*

        That reminds me of my first senior partner, who was gently harmless (think: pootling to work in a Vantage, napping on his desk).

        Very occasionally the ice cream van (truck) would show up in our car park, whereupon he would spring into action, and send out his secretary with a fistful of cash, to treat everyone in the building.

        Best 99 I’ve ever tasted, paid for by the boss just because.

        1. Half-Caf Latte*

          pootling to work in a Vantage

          I have no idea what this means, and this post is the first thing when I google!

          1. Eleanor Shellstrop*

            (not the OP but British so can try to translate)
            Effectively ”driving along in a car”:
            pootling is a great word that sort of represents the image of someone driving somewhat slowly down a road, steady but sort of…slightly shaking rocking side to side but still driving! Like it’s getting there.
            a vantage is an Aston Martin (which is a classic luxury british car manufacturer) vantage (search for ‘vintage Aston Martin Vantage’) as I am fairly sure the OP means that one

            2. TechWorker*

              This might be the original meaning (I don’t know!) but it also gets used (at least by some people I know) to mean more generally ‘driving slowly’. One can also pootle on a bike :)

            3. peep*

              I love ‘pootling’! I’ve never seen it though, I must adopt it. I use ‘tootling’ a lot — in my mind, it’s like “industriously but slowly making your way somewhere” or alternately “going somewhere with intention but also making a few detours as you walk ooh what’s that in the window, shiny, oh must carry on”.

                2. RebelwithMouseyHair*

                  In my part of the world we say pottering, but it’s for pedestrians. Like, Where’s Dad? – oh he’ll be pottering about in the garden shed this time of day.
                  Pootling is like motorised pottering :-)

            4. Mongrel*

              I’ve always regarded Pootling as shambling but in a tweed jacket.
              It’s a phrase you associate with retired gentlemen who still get up at the crack of dawn and have a lovingly used office shirt and trousers that’s solely a gardening ‘uniform’, and they spend a lot of time in the garden& shed.

                1. IT Squirrel*

                  This is more pottering (about) to me, especially in the garden or house – pootling always brings to mind being in transport of some description like a car or a bicycle!

        2. fustian*

          Now you’ve made me crave a 99. In Canada in October the closest I’ll get is a slightly-stale flake bar.

      3. Elizabeth West*

        I used to work in a place where a donor who owned a food company gave us an ice cream machine. It dispensed drumsticks, ice cream sandwiches, etc. all for FREE.

    5. WFH with Cat*

      lolz

      I bet your colleagues loved your for it and never ratted you out because … ice cream!

      1. Hedwig*

        A Vantage is a type of Aston Martin, versions of which have around since the 1950s. Pootling is driving in a leisurely manner. A 99 is a classic type of ice cream cone in UK, with a chocolate bar called a Cadbury’s Flake stuck in it. I hope this helps!

          1. Mainly Lurking (UK)*

            No, originally, it only cost a few pence (maybe about 10p? Less than 20, anyway). I’m old enough to remember the days when it was an urban myth that ice cream sellers in popular tourist spots would rip off foreign tourists by charging them 99p for a 99 Flake.

    6. Tillamook*

      This reminds me of something I did at my old job. Every month they had a birthday/service anniversary celebration for the office. A few years ago, I had a manager with an annoying habit of scheduling meetings with no notice and always at the worst times. I’d already missed the celebration during my birthday month and sure enough, a meeting got scheduled at the same time as the celebration during my anniversary month. I had a coworker go to the celebration and text me a picture of the desserts (a huge assortment of ice cream). I picked out what I wanted and a few minutes later, he walked into the conference room, dropped off my ice cream, and walked back out like it was totally normal to deliver ice cream during a meeting.

    7. Michaela*

      I sort of did this at an old job – we were a satellite office and they’d given mints, a cookie, and swag after a new project at head office and we didn’t get anything.

      I replied to a yammer on our lack of inclusion, and I got a response that they were planning something special later. Next week there was a gelato truck, which was better than a cookie. Since we were in financial trouble, the gelato truck also caught a lot of commentary for being a waste of money later, but I was still proud I made it happen.

      1. LR*

        At my former workplace, goals were met one year and staff were rewarded with an “ice cream social” – a low productivity afternoon, with an ice cream sundae bar in a conference room, I think there was even some theme decor, at the home office. My satellite office had just as many staff (but no management) and we got zilch. We were told they were “working out the logistics”.

        A week later we got an email that there were ice cream sandwiches in the break room freezer. They were cheapo store brand and there weren’t nearly enough. Turns out mgmt had sent one staff a $10 check (the max allowed for incidental expenses) and told her to “do the best she could”… For about 40 people.

        But at least it was good for a few laughs!

        1. Admininja*

          You have a great attitude about that. I didn’t see so much humor when it was my office being underfunded in the holiday party department. 150-person company spread out nationally over 30ish offices with everything from 50 people (HQ) to 1-man shows. Mine was the largest on the east coast at about a dozen people, third largest in the company. The Big Wigs sent out a message that poor financial performance meant no fancy holiday parties- do your best with minimal budgets. Our office had a small, on-site celebration with sandwiches, soda, & cheap decor. Post-holiday, we found out all east coast offices had been given the same budget. We were the only office with more than 4 staff, so we were the only ones that couldn’t go out for a fancy dinner & drinks. We also found out that the second largest office in the country – with maybe 5 more people- & HQ had thrown nice parties. I. Was. Pissed. The next year, when the holiday party budgets were being set, I led the charge for determining a per-person budget & distributing the funds by headcount. It wasn’t popular at first, but a number of people hopped on board when I described how the third-largest office had celebrated the prior year.

  6. No Tribble At All*

    We work very closely with our hardware supplier, which is located in a different country. Most of the other company’s employees speak that country’s language (say, Klingon) natively and only rarely speak English. In meetings, they’ll debate among themselves in Klingon before giving a (usually shorter and vaguer) answer in English. One of my coworkers didn’t mention he spoke Klingon for FIVE YEARS so they’d speak freely around him. He’d go to meetings, sit there with a vague smile, and while they told us they hadn’t narrowed down the problem yet, he’d know that they were discussing which particular circuit.

    1. Not really a waitress*

      That you use Klingon as your language example makes this even better. Cause I am envisioning Klingons in a meeting

          1. Blue Eagle*

            Or what about the episode of Frasier where he promises to go to a Star Trek convention and buy something for one of his staff at the radio station in exchange for the staff person teaching him to say a piece for his son’s bar mitzvah in Hebrew. But then forgets to go to the convention so the staff person teaches him how to say the piece in Klingon. And the only person who knows what Frasier is saying at the Bar Mitzvah is a teenager – – – who then tells Frasier that what he said was beautiful!

    2. Captain Kirk*

      And if Klingons are involved, they’d better *hope* there are no Tribbles!

      Great synergy between comment and username!

    3. Chinook*

      I had a version of this happen to me. Leader of my choir was fluent in English and Klingon as was our Bishop but no one else in our group was until I cam along. My last name was very Terrian by marriage, but my mother is Klingon, so I grew up with it even though I rarely spoke.

      Anyway, there was a fancy ceremony we were doing with the bishop that required once a year songs that we needed to practice along with lots of solos which are usually split among choir members. When asked if we would have a final rehearsal the day of, she offered to ask the bishop, which she did in Klingon. He said yes and gave a time to be there. He walked away and she tuned to us and said, so he couldn’t hear, that we were good to go and we could meet right before the ceremony.

      I looked her straight in the eye and said loud enough for the bishop to hear that she must have misunderstood because the bishop clearly said we were to meet him 4 hours earlier. She did the fish mouth thing and asked how I knew that. I replied in perfect Klingon, just because I don’t look like it or have a Klingon name, doesn’t mean I haven’t learned it from my mother and grandmother from birth. She quietly backpedaled and we all got our practice and shared parts. :)

      The others later told me that they thought she had been doing the mistranslations in the past but had no proof because they only spoke English and didn’t have the courage to call her out because she was one mean Klingon.

      1. Portabella*

        I’m curious, why would the choir leader mistranslate though? Was she trying to look good to the bishop and and stay in power? Was the bishop ever annoyed with the rest of the choir because of the perceived problems, that were actually caused by the choir leader’s mistranslations?

        2. Chinook*

          She was power hungry and excellent at the kiss up, push down. Add to that the power imbalance in this community where English was the majority but Klingon considered more important as they were also bilingual.

          She so missed being able to call the shots and use her maneuvering that she actually pushed our church to go from having bilingual services to separate English and Klingon ones even though only 2 families ever attended the Klingon services.

          As for the leader, she only took charge for the flashy events and left the mundane, weekly stuff to me because who wants to do repetitive stuff and, after all, I was the one who started the choir. I let her have the flashy glory because that was not why I was doing it. But, after the incident with the bishop, she maneuvered me out by hiring a Klingon piano player to organize the music for both services without telling anyone. She had him start on a weekend I was out of the province and told everybody that I had been transferred. She was believed because a friend emailed me saying that she was sorry that she didn’t get a chance to say good bye. I showed up at the next service, announced to everyone that I didn’t move but I am obviously not welcome there, turned around and left. Yes, I was a overdramatic, but this move cut me to the core and I ended up not attending church again for over 5 years due to her backstabbing.

          As for the bishop. he was only there a couple of times a year and would have had no idea about how common her underhandedness was. I do know that she never pulled that type of mistranslating stunt with us again, so I can only assume he talked to her in private.

          2. Portabella*

            I’m so sorry! That is awful. Although I think your exit was perfectly calibrated to the situation and not overly dramatic at all.

            1. jcarnall*

              Many, many, many years ago I was working for a telecomms company in the technical writing department, and the new manager hated me.

              (She had been asked a question in a meeting in her first month on the job that she didn’t know the answer to, and so she blew the senior manager off with “well, we haven’t figured that out yet”, and foolish me pipes up with chapter and verse – We’ll do this, this, and this. As near as I can figure out, her hatred of me dated from that meeting.)

              I had been the unofficial team-lead (that is, doing the work without the pay or job title) on the project that senior manager had asked about for about two years before new manager arrived.

              Fast-forward a year, during which she had written me up , denied me a promotion – someone else got the official team-lead job – told me I was incompetent, moved me off work I had been doing for years on to new work I wasn’t nearly as experienced in, and also refused me training that all the rest of the team were getting.

              Naturally I was job-hunting, but not fast enough. I applied for a sideways transfer, which was easy enough to get – the company had high turnover and was constantly understaffed – and on the day I got notice from Personnel that as of Monday I would start in my new role at the completely-different department in another building, I also got a faux-sympathetic email from manager, saying, more or less:

              “How do you want to handle your departure – shall I tell them, or will you, or would you rather just slip away and I’ll let them know on Monday?”

              I emailed back to thank her and tell her I would rather be the one to tell them, and got another faux-sympathetic note to say I should handle it as I thought best.

              I’d booked Friday as PTO, and so on Thursday, I arrived with a bag full of pastries, which I put in the department kitchenette. About ten am I sent an all-team email to say I was starting in the Llama Department on Monday, Friday was my day off, so today was my last day, and I would miss them all and there were pastries in the kitchen, love from me.

              I think New Manager had convinced herself everyone in the department hated me as much as she did. Suddenly my desk was surrounded by people who hadn’t risked saying hello to me in months, saying how much they’d miss me, how great I’d been, what a contribution I’d made, all of us happily eating delicious pastries and chatting, while New Manager GLARED from her corner.

              That went on til lunchtime, and basically I spent the afternoon deleting old emails and cleaning up my desk. I knew I’d be going through a standard four week training process in the internal transfer, which would leave me lots of time for job hunting and phone interviews, and sure enough, before the four weeks were up, I had a much better job offer elsewhere and was gone.

      2. Elf*

        vImughlaH! (I can tranlsate!)

        tlhIngan vIrurbe’, ‘ej tlhIngan pong vIghajbe’, ‘ach reH jIyIntaHvIS tlhIngan Hol wIjatlh SoSwI’ SoSnI’wI’ jIH je
        just because I don’t look like it or have a Klingon name, doesn’t mean I haven’t learned it from my mother and grandmother from birth.

        1. Nynaeve*

          mughwI’pu’ DIlop! tlhIngan Hol DaquvmoH {{{:-)

          (We celebrate translators! You honor the Klingon language.)

      3. RebelwithMouseyHair*

        My partner is Klingon, I have picked up bits of it without ever properly learning it.
        He asked me what sort of car he should buy after crashing ours. I said something smaller, because it’s hard to find parking spots for the size we had. He came back with a car that was even bigger. I called him out on it but he maintained that it was the same size.
        Later on we went to dinner with a Klingon-English couple. The Klingon husband asked mine a question in Klingon. I understood the words big, new car and how much, so when my partner answered “20 centimetres” I immediately piped up with “I knew the car was bigger”. My partner looked at me in shock at being caught out in his lie, and we got a smaller car shortly afterwards.

    4. JMR*

      How did it eventually come to light? It must have been hilarious when they all realized what was going on.

      1. No Tribble At All*

        He has asked us to keep it quiet! I found out when I heard one of his post-meetings debriefing. Although we’ve since hired more Klingons on our team (guess we’re the Next Generation?) so there’s no point for them to have sidebar conversations anymore.

    6. SweetestCin*

      Ah. The faces made when I answered a question in a language that does not even come close to matching my red hair and blue eyes.

  7. Reality Check*

    I was once a reservationist for a limousine company. The drivers were all men, office staff nearly all women. Our office manager, Jane, had a crush on one of the drivers, Mario. She fired any woman that Mario showed interest in. When Mario asked me out for a date in the Big City, he had to check the driving schedules for everyone so that we would not be spotted together, which would have cost me my job. And there we were tip toeing around like teenagers instead of the adults we were. We got away with it. ;) Not Machiavellian, but definitely intrigue!

    1. Funfetti*

      That is a cute story- very classic romcom which makes it event more fun!
      Except for Jane – Jane sucks.

      1. Katrinka*

        Every good romcom needs a Jane, who gets outmaneuvered and then ends up with the guy who washes the limos and has been in love with her for over ten years.

    2. A Simple Narwhal*

      Woah that’s really messed up of Jane. How many women lost their jobs because some random dude maybe was interested in them?

      2. Reality Check*

        I just realized I never answered your question. At least 2 or 3 women were fired before me for this.

  8. Daughter of Ada and Grace*

    This is probably the closest I came.

    My boss sucked and wasn’t going to change. And according to my supervisor, things had been getting progressively worse. We decided we needed to get out of there. So, we made A Plan. Specifically, at my one year mark, I’d start interviewing. Once I had an offer on the table, supervisor would start interviewing.

    But interviewing requires dressing up, and Boss was the sort to make passive-aggressive comments about that. (It was a very casual office – jeans and T-shirts.) So supervisor and I planned for that, too. We decided that twice a week, starting immediately, we would dress up. Suits one day, blouse and skirt or button down and slacks the other day. General comments about how nice we looked would get a cheerful “Thank you!” in reply. Actual questions about why we were dressed up would be met with something about how looking our best would inspire us to do our best work. Sure enough, we got the expected comments and questions. And after about a month, we’d completely normalized the fact that sometimes, the two of us dressed up to come to the office.

    (We never got to implement the rest of the plan. We both got laid off after I’d worked there about nine months.)

    1. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

      I knew a programming team that used “Tuesday Tie Day” to similar effect. I never thought of it as Machiavellian, though!

      1. Daughter of Ada and Grace*

        The Machiavellian bit was really the misdirection around why we were dressing up, more so than the dressing up itself. (It helped that my then supervisor and I are both the sort of people for whom it’s entirely in character to dress up at a casual office.)

        1. JustaTech*

          I’ve done this as well, partly because I thought I would need to interview soon, and partly because I wanted to try and dress a little nicer (dress for the job you want, but not as Batman).
          On at least one occasion I called it “laundry day”, because in college anyone who was dressed up was assumed to be out of other clean clothing.

          Then again I had a VP ask me if I was interviewing because of my outfit. I was wearing fuchsia tights, a knee-length denim skirt, a matching fuchsia shirt (from H&M) and a blazer made of sweatshirt material. Basically my regular work clothes except a skirt and tights. I don’t know what kind of job one would interview for in a denim skirt, but not anything I’ve ever done!

          1. Atlantian*

            One year I dressed way up to attend my son’s end of year school program. The staff at the school doesn’t like me or my husband very much because we’re not the quiet, go along types, and have had cause to question their policies several times over the years, so I always try to look my best when I have to go up there and be seen by people. Kind of remind them that I’m actually a professional, respected person in my field with places to be and not their typical stay-at-home mom type who shows up to these things in athleisure and curlers (yes, I have seen this). Anyway, I requested the morning off, and then came in to work all done up like I had not been at the school play, but was at an interview all morning and my boss practically had a heart attack. Didn’t help at all when I had to send him one of those ‘Hey, we need to talk. Can you find some time in your calendar and send me a meeting maker for 30 minutes sometime this afternoon?” a couple of days later. You should have seen his face!

            1. TechWorker*

              Obviously a side point but your derision towards stay at home mums here is… a little harsh!

              3. Gumby*

                Yes, and I am not sure if I am more disturbed by the implication that stay-at-home parents are slobs, apparently have nothing scheduled and no where to be all day, and are not respected, OR the sense that any questioning of school policies should be taken more seriously because the questioner has a paid job and is willing to throw on a suit.

                1. Veruca*

                  I’m a stay-at-home mom, so I couldn’t understand the big words, but yes, there was a tinge of contempt.

                2. Bluesboy*

                  100% agree about the implication towards stay at home parents. Rightly or wrongly though, wearing a suit does make people take you more seriously in many contexts. So I can understand why you might want to dress up for some kind of occasion with people that you sometimes clash with.

                  But yes, the attitude towards stay at home parents is…unfortunate.

          2. mourning mammoths*

            I had my college advisor ask me once if I had been at a job interview that day. I was wearing a sweater and green corduroys. Confusion ensued. Looking back, maybe I was a sloppier dresser in college than I realised.

    2. Richard Hershberger*

      That is excellent! My church is downtown. I used to work about half a mile away from it. Once I had an interview with another firm downtown, so I dropped my suit off at my church that morning. Then when I went out for my vaguely specified appointment, I walked back to the church and changed in the bathroom, reversing the process after the interview.

      1. Katrinka*

        I once had an interview that was on the other side of the parking garage from my then employer. Dress code for my office was jeans and a nice shirt. So at my lunch time, I went to my car, changed from jeans into a skirt, threw on a blazer and went to the interview. Then I reversed it when the interview was over. Boss never knew.

        1. Just a person*

          I used the restroom of the fast food place across the parking lot from the office to change clothes for an interview.

    3. Ally McBeal*

      I also work in a casual-dress department; my excuse as a single woman was always “well, I have a doctor’s appointment today and you never know if the doc or other medical staff will be cute!” And then the one day I actually did have a doctor’s appt (i.e. not an interview) but decided not to dress up because it was too cold out… I had the hottest dental hygienist I’ve ever met. At least that bolstered the strength of my excuse when I came back to complain about my rotten luck!

    4. learnedthehardway*

      When I worked in a business casual office, and was interviewing, I would leave my suit at the dry cleaners, with instructions to press it, for retrieval later in the day. I’d then go to the cleaners, change in their change room, leave my other clothes to be pressed (if during the day) or take them with me in my oversize purse, and go to the interview.

      It cost me a few bucks to do this every time, but I always looked very sharp, and the dry cleaning staff got a kick out of helping me prepare.

      It worked, too – my employer had no idea I was thinking of leaving before I put my notice in.

    5. Fake Old Converse Shoes (not in the US)*

      I used to go to the opera back when I worked at Big City, since both my previous jobs there were at a walking distance. So, if I showed up dressing more formal than usual, I could just say “tonight is opera night” and no one would ask further questions.

    6. Kate H*

      This is genius. My boss and I should do this starting immediately.

      I’m working from home, and last week I had a video interview that was directly before a Very Important meeting. For context, our Head Boss is obsessive about us being on video during meetings, but no one else in the company cares if we do audio or video. I try to avoid it as much as possible because my workspace has a lot of weird lighting in the background and there’s nothing I can do to change it short of completely moving my entire workspace to the other side of the room.

      Anyway, I wore a dress to the interview that thankfully ended with enough time for me to quickly change into my sweatshirt (fully within the dress code whether I’m in the office or WFH). I didn’t turn on my camera right away but Head Boss immediately messaged me saying that I should turn it on. It was such a relief to know that no one was going to look at me and put 2 and 2 together.

      1. Katrinka*

        If this happens again, you can always say that you and your partner have decided to have a “date night” at home and dress up like you would in the before times. Or that you and friends are having a virtual happy hour and have agreed to dress up for it.

    7. Popcorn Burner*

      This is exactly why I started wearing blazers instead of sweaters to my old job. Makes it way easier to interview on your lunch break without raising any red flags.

    8. tex*

      I also started a Suit-up Wednesday at my old office, and my coworkers and I would occasionally take our staggered lunches 30 minutes apart, to normalize us being gone at different times and wearing suits, so that whenever someone would interview it wouldn’t be quite so glaring.

    9. SOUPervisor*

      I started a new office job when I was dead broke and I did my best but my clothes were pretty obviously cheap or a step down in casualness from most. A couple of months in a non-work friend hosted a clothing swap for a bunch of folks and someone my size brought in a bunch of business/business casual clothing so I walked home with six or seven new outfits and slowly started working them into my work wardrobe. A bit later I was telling my coworker about how great this clothing swap had been and my manager, walking past, says “oh thank god, I thought you were interviewing.” Hadn’t even occurred to me how it would have looked to him.

      (Five years later I’m still at that company)

  9. Iseult1980*

    Alan. Alan is a physics professor at Very Mediocre University, and one of the most unpleasant people I’ve come across. I don’t know if he’s Machiavellian as such, but would probably like to think that he is a strategic genius. He is not, which is why he’s at Mediocre university. Some of Alan’s greatest hits:
    – Borrowing his boss’s car on two separate occasions, and crashing it on both occasions (once by forgetting to put the handbrake on when parking it on a slope.)
    – Informing the parents of his female PhD student, at her graduation, that women are not really cut out for physics. She’s now a professor at a much, much better university.
    – Inviting (impoverished) PhD students out (as a group), ordering the most expensive things on the menu, announcing that the bill will be split equally.
    He was my ex-boss’s professor. Ex-boss also dreams of describing himself as Machiavellian, but his schemes are limited to measuring his and his rivals offices, and boasting about how he has the bigger, corner office for months. (It’s in the corner of a hallway. That’s not what corner office means. It was thirty centimeters bigger.) Ex-boss is also now at Mediocre university.

    1. KoiFeeder*

      Someone should’ve put him on the menu. The group probably would’ve gotten food poisoning, but who doesn’t love liver and chianti?

    2. kittymommy*

      Ex-boss also dreams of describing himself as Machiavellian, but his schemes are limited to measuring his and his rivals offices, and boasting about how he has the bigger, corner office for months. (It’s in the corner of a hallway. That’s not what corner office means. It was thirty centimeters bigger.)

      Snort. My 12 year old self is hysterically laughing…

    3. Artemesia*

      when I was a grad student there was a professor who did this at conferences – he would organize dinner of profs and grad students; we would order light because we were poor — he would grandly offer to buy the wine. The bill would come wine and all and be split evenly even his promise of paying for the wine forgotten. A fellow grad student and I were tired of it but we needed to be at these dinners so we decided to go ahead and order like they did. So we ordered appetizer, drinks, nice main, dessert — just as the profs always did. I remember the first time we did this, the jackass who organized these things actually said something like ‘Wow, this bill is much higher than usual’. Ya think?

      1. SallyJ*

        I am 36 years old. I have only one real hard and fast rule – never ever let anyone try to convince me to split even. Ever.

        Every other self-imposed “rule” I can be flexible. Not this.

        EVER

        1. FrenchCusser*

          Yeah. You either pay for your own or pick up the check.

          There are no other hospitable options.

          1. Jackalope*

            If it’s with a group of friends it can be an easier way to split the bill, but everyone has to be on the same page. I’ve done that at times with friends who have done this for a long time, and when we’re eating at a restaurant where all of the main entrees are, say, $13-$16, splitting it evenly is going to mean everyone is paying about the same amount, and if we go out often enough it means that we all over time pay more or less the right amount. Not something I’d recommend for uneven authority situations for the reasons mentioned earlier, but it’s faster and easier in situations like this. (It also helps that no one gets super expensive drinks and that if there’s an appetizer or something we all share it.)

            1. Christina*

              I did this once with a group of friends who are all foodies and 10 of us went to an amazing restaurant to order the incredible set menu for the table served family style, so it was presumed that we would split the check evenly. We each ordered a cocktail, and then a few bottles of wine for the table. When it came time to split the bill, one person paid and then said what we all owed (upwards of $50/person, which was an insane deal for the amount and quality of the meal). Two of the group said “well, we didn’t drink any wine, so don’t include that in our portion.” The guy who paid did the math and it was literally under $5 difference for each of them.

              We still laugh about that. They haven’t been invited to a big group dinner since.

              1. Zombeyonce*

                As someone that doesn’t drink but likes to go out with friends that do, I don’t know the difference between a bottle of wine that costs $10 and one that costs $50 just from looking, so I highly doubt the people that didn’t drink had any idea how much the alcohol amount came to. Since they weren’t drinking, they probably weren’t looking at the wine menu to see how much each bottle was as it was ordered. It seems perfectly reasonable that they ask for the wine not to be included in their part of the bill, as it could easily have been way more than $5. The fact that not only have they been excluded from all group dinners for this but also that you all laugh about them behind their back says a lot about you and your friends, and nothing positive.

                1. I never remember my username*

                  Plus it adds up to be a lot over time if they’re footing the bill for your alcohol every time you go out together.

                2. AntsOnMyTable*

                  And it makes me wonder – what if they had ordered a dessert or two for only them and then expected everyone else to pay because it was “under $5 difference” would the group feel the same?

                  As, essentially, a teetotaler it would frustrate me to expect to contribute. I can take one bite only of an appetizer and I won’t mind helping pay for it but please don’t make me pay for your wine.

                3. Alice's Rabbit*

                  I would agree. Excluding the designated driver because they don’t want to pay for your booze seems shortsighted, to me. Mocking them for it is just downright rude.

            2. Berkeleyfarm*

              Yeah, if things are pretty even in the long term, this is good. I have a long term friend group where it is pretty turnabout is fair play.

              But in this case where people use it to subsidize a nicer meal, it’s not good. I ended up dropping a social group because they liked going out and getting all the trimmings and I had less money and was ordering less. It was one way and I didn’t like them well enough to subsidize them.

              It’s 100% inappropriate for power-imbalance like grad students and profs.

          2. cat lady*

            Not wanting to do the more complicated math. I do split checks evenly when it’s with a very good friend, and it’s just the two of us. Also, it almost always favors the other person because I’m vegetarian so my meals are almost always cheaper than my omnivorous friends’ meals. (though I literally can’t remember the last time I went out to eat with a friend thanks to COVID)

            1. Elenna*

              This kind of thing makes me happy that where I live (Toronto) the default is that restaurants are able to give everyone separate bills.

          3. Tina Belcher's Less Cool Sister*

            I do it if I’m with a good friend or two and we get an appetizer for the table. But if like I get an expensive cocktail I’ll pay for that separately, or I’ll cover the app and she’ll cover the tip for both of us.

          4. Eisbaer*

            If there were a lot of shared items (appetizers, bottles of wine, etc.) and you can tell by eyeballing it that everyone’s bill would be similar within a few dollars, I’d rather not do the extra math and make the server do more work.

            1. Paulina*

              I’m familiar with it not being more work to split the check appropriately, though, or at least it looks that way to me as a customer. The restaurants I (normally) frequent have systems that are set up to remember orders for each guest, which is known when you order and also needed when you receive your food. These days they can easily split costs between subsets of the guests at the table, as well. Everyone gets their own bill and can pay by card, and there’s no excuse for stiffing the server on their tip. And if the server doesn’t know you expect to pay together until the end, all that information about who-had-what is already kept track of.

          5. LizM*

            I split it evenly with certain friends. We eat out together enough that we figure it all evens out in the end. If one of us were drinking and the other weren’t, the person who was drinking will usually offer to cover the tip.

          6. gbca*

            If you have conscientious friends with similar habits, it works out just fine. Back when I went out with friends frequently, we nearly always split the bill evenly, and it only was off by a few dollars here or there. And if someone ordered something particularly expensive or an extra item that the others didn’t, they pitched in their share. No complicated math and no one getting screwed.

          7. Me*

            I have a friend who I often go out to a tapas place with (or, well, we did in the before times), and we always split all the food items — we decide on them together and then each eat half. Sure, we order different drinks, but the meal is expensive enough that we’ll just split the bill and then figure out whose drink was more expensive — and that person will pay a bigger share of the tip, which always covers the difference. Makes it easier on the servers to just split 50/50.

          8. Middle Aged Lady*

            It worked well for a group of 10 of is dining out frequently on a trip to France. Wine was cheaper than soft drinks anyway, and we ate out often so it came out even. Whoever was low on cash would pay with a credit card, and the rest of us would give that person cash. I have never had friends or associates who used it to get a better meal cheap themselves. My profs were generous and my friends are honorable. A few people in the past have tried the ‘expense it to their company and us give them cash’ but I refused.

          9. c-*

            Depends on culture: mine tends towards going Dutch, because people usually order everything to share. If there’s a notable deviation (i.e. only 2 people out of 10 order dessert), it will be covered by those who ordered the expensive thing.

        4. Elizabeth West*

          This is a good rule, along with pick a restaurant the lowest-paid person in the group can afford. We actually walked out of a restaurant in a prominent London museum because several people in our group would have struggled with the bill. Splitting was out of the question.

      2. Bluesboy*

        Same. I would go out, order a salad and water because I was skint. Others would order steak and wine and then split the bill. I realised that if I started ordering steak and wine too, given that I was already subsidising everyone elses that it would only really cost me about an extra €2…so why not?

        I also remember a big meal out once in a Chinese/Japanese restaurant. Most of us were skint, so we ordered from the Chinese menu. At the end the bill arrived, say something like €30 each. Most of us didn’t have change, so we put in two 20s or a 50, expecting change.

        Except that a group who had arrived late ordered from the Japanese menu, insisted on splitting, and then when the bill arrived, announced they didn’t have cash so would put the meal on their card, picked up the cash, went and paid and left without coming back to the table with the change! So not only did they eat the most expensive food, but they actually made a profit on the meal!

    4. Esmeralda*

      I had a grandboss who was Very Mediocre. He deeply desired an office with windows = major status symbol. Alas, his office was in the basement and was never ever going to go any higher. Fortunately for him, he had a nice budget. Which he used to by very very very nice wall to wall, floor to ceiling drapes. Which of course were never open.

      Visitors would be confused. “Aren’t we in the basement?” “Yes [long pause], yes we are”

        1. PsyDuk*

          I worked in IT for a police department when GPS was first becoming available in police radios and was friendly with a gossipy officer. One day he was in my office and I mentioned to him that the new radios the department was ordering had GPS (they didn’t). I asked him not to mention our conversation to anyone because the officers weren’t supposed to know. In less than a day all of the officers were convinced that they were going to be secretly tracked using the new radios. Command’s denials and past actions reenforced the officers’ belief in the rumour. I denied all knowledge when the assistant chief asked me about it and the officer I told thought I did him a favor and never told anyone the information came from me.

      2. LunaLena*

        I have a fake window in my basement office. It’s basically a print of a window frame that opens out into space and a star destroyer. Before COVID hit, I was scheming to put an actual window frame around it to enhance the illusion.

        1. Bryce*

          I started getting mildly claustrophobic after moving to The City so as a gift my mom took a photo of the landscape where I grew up and had it made into a large poster. Unimpeded view across the desert and mesas for about 50 miles. I’ve got it on a well-lit wall as a backup window for when the local weather is more gloomy.

      3. Emma*

        I love that! My office is split over the ground floor and the basement. I work on the ground floor, but (pre-event) sometimes had to work downstairs for a couple of hours, where I would sit next to someone who was always saying she wished she had a view.

        I was very sympathetic, because I also hated working downstairs (in the hole, as I called it), largely because the artificial lights make my brain itch. So I spent a fair bit of time trying to persuade my colleague to buy a rectangular SAD light, paint a window on it and hang it on the wall by her desk.

        I genuinely think it would have been great, but I eventually dropped it because she was getting more and more miserable about the environment, and I didn’t want to contribute to that.

  10. rita*

    This will probably be quite mild, but I’m still salty about it to this day.

    I had been at a new job for about three weeks and was starting to do some basic tasks. One of them was to proofread text written by others and bring up any issues in a spreadsheet, where you wrote your name, where the issue is, and what the issue is. My colleagues seemed a bit competitive about who found more issues with the text, but it looked like it was in good nature.

    While proofreading, I found a term used in a way that I found weird, but I didn’t want to add it to the spreadsheet without being sure, so I brought it up to my “mentor” (the woman who was assigned to help me for the first few weeks). She said it was correct, and not to worry about it.

    Next thing I know, she added it to the spreadsheet under her own name. It turned out to be extremely wrong, extremely hard to catch, and she got tons of praise for it. I never trusted her again after that – over the next few years I learned that she was known for going behind everyone’s back and doing anything required to climb the ranks despite not being very good at her job. Infuriatingly enough, she left for a better job shortly after, and her reputation with the higher ups was undamaged.

    3. Fiona*

      Oof that would have driven me nuts!!! If you hadn’t been so new, I would have loved if you could write an email to her like “Hi Mentor – when I originally brought up X, you said it was fine. But now I see that you’ve entered it into the spreadsheet on your end and marked it as incorrect. I want to make sure I understand the process here, so can you explain that discrepancy to me? Thank you!” :) :) :) :) :)

      I know it wouldn’t change anything but I would want her to know that you know!!!!!

      1. Darcy Pennell*

        With someone that underhanded, I’d be worried that if I called her out she would hold it against me later. It sounds infuriating, sure, but better than her deciding she has a score to settle.

    4. Quill*

      You really learned a great lesson about her with this though, imagine if it had been something that could have harmed your career that she threw you under the bus for.

    5. SD*

      As a parent advocate for special education, I spent many, many, many hours researching and reconciling current federal and state special education laws to replace the outdated material being used by our Special Ed. consortium of school districts. It was accurate, thorough, and easy to read and use. The consortium liked it because they didn’t have to pay staff to do the same job. One of the consortium coordinators signed up to teach a special ed class at a local for-profit university and asked if she could refer to my material. Sure! That’s why I wrote it. I was fine with it until I found out that she was using my work as the framework for her class and passing it off as her own, as in literally using my pages. “Salty” doesn’t really describe how I felt about that. All she had to do was ask and credit me for my work, but no.

  11. Retail Not Retail*

    This is very small but it was satisfying anyway. My supervisor was trying to follow our boss’s instructions in breaking up a task fairly between the 3 of us to do after this other task that is not fun.

    I said hey this is confusing – one person should do the second task while the other 2 do the first one and then join them! He said okay you do it. The guy who hates the first task never said a word because he’s too lazy to volunteer even for a better task.

    Another day we were dividing something up and I was like okay I’ll do this half because I know that guy will dilly dally on making decisions.

    1. JustaTech*

      I have totally volunteered for a slightly difficult/unpleasant task because I knew that the other tasks being handed out, while individually less difficult, would be torturous to do repeat 50+ times, while I would have to do the harder thing only 25 times.
      My boss wasn’t paying attention and got stuck putting a tube in a machine and taking it out again for 5 solid hours. Another guy on the team, when he realized he’d gotten stuck with 3+ hours with his face in the microscope said “This is a stupid study design.” To the study designer’s face. In a meeting where we all had been assigned a boring and repetitive task.

      1. Liz*

        I did this once with working my PT retail job on Black Friday. Our previous manager had scheduled the same shifts forever, usually opening to late afternoon, and then late afternoon until closing, but our new manager scheduled differently, which actually made more sense and we had coverage when needed, pretty much all of the time.

        Knowing how she did things, I asked two questions: what time did we open on BF, and how long were the shifts going to be? She said 7am, so I knew openers would have to start at 6, and probably 5 or 6 hours. So I asked to be scheduled to open, knowing that not too many people would. And it paid off; i was scheduled 6-11:30am, and at 11:35 a co-worker came to tell me manager said to clock out and go home! So while I did end up having to work, i was done before noon.

        1. Retail Not Retail*

          Oh man we FOUGHT over working thanksgiving at the grocery store because it is so chill and everyone feels sorry for you so there’s free food at work and leftovers at home. It was like a reward for surviving the day before.

          1. Liz*

            We weren’t open on Thanksgiving, and the previous year, they mistakenly didn’t put me on the schedule for black friday, then called to say oops, we need you. Sorry, i have plans. i really didn’t but not my problem. hahahahah they had enough coverage

            1. hamburke*

              I took a seasonal retail job from the week of black Friday to, I was told, Jan 6. That’s fine – husband’s work holiday party is Jan 7. Turns out the interviewer told me the wrong date – job actually goes to Jan 8 for inventory and Jan 7 is an all hands until it’s done day. I tried to reason with the manager – that I needed to leave by 3 to get ready (I don’t need that much time to get ready but it was a buffer), that I was told this job ended 1/6 so I didn’t bring it up until I saw the schedule – but it was a no-go. I went to HR, told them what happened and asked to be dismissed on the day that originally was agreed to. That went fine and I remained eligible for rehire, but the manager was MAD. Sorry, not sorry.

  12. singularity*

    I was in a job where my direct supervisor had less experience than me doing the same job before he went back to school, got a degree and was promoted due only to the degree. He was very condescending and snide and whenever we interact he would constantly make digs at me for not having an advanced degree. Perhaps it’s not machiavellian, but he would nit-pick at me about small things that he would let skate by for others, so one day, I got this little noisemaker and stuck it to the back of a file cabinet in his office. It would randomly make squeaks and beeps at irregular intervals. It was rather amusing to watch him have a man-baby tantrum trying to find the source of the noise.

    1. The New Normal*

      As a prank my co-worker put one of those cricket chirp noisemakers in our boss’s office. It was awesome. LOL

      1. Wendy*

        My brother and his friend made one of those and hid it in my bedroom, except they made it so it only worked in the dark. I’d turn the light on to find the cricket and it would stop.

    5. Dragon_Dreamer*

      ThinkGeek had the wonderful Annoy-o-tron. A little device that could be hidden just about anywhere that would emit a random noise at random intervals. Some victims got SO VERY upset when they couldn’t find it. (And yes, one version even had the mosquito tone.)

      A former coworker stuck a security tag under the door sensor (turning it off as he did so) on his last day, where it couldn’t be seen. Then he left. Someone noticed the sensor was off, and turned it back on.. Took the managers quite a while to figure out what the heck happened.

        1. river*

          I read that. I don’t understand why they pranked him. “He was a great guy who would always go out of his way for everyone” … so they punish him? ?

          1. Randomity*

            I think because he pranked everyone himself. I do think they should have fessed up though, once you’ve got someone that angry and frustrated you’ve officially gone Too Far.

      2. MNdragonlady*

        We have a couple Annoy-a-trons. One of our kids hid one in a classroom as a senior prank (high school). It would meow every so often. The particular placement meant it sounded like a cat was stuck in the drop ceiling. The teacher spent a _very_ long time looking for this cat. There was a ladder in the classroom for searching the ceiling, and they even got a school administrator up on the school roof looking around. The device was retrieved surreptitiously by friends while teacher was out of the classroom and returned to us intact.

        Best part: the story grew with each telling around the school, and by the end of the day at least one student claimed to have *seen* said cat in a hallway. Ah, the power of suggestion.

    6. The Rural Juror*

      I wonder if someone has done that to us…there’s a random beep in our office and no one has been able figure out where it’s coming from. It sounds like a surge protector…but it’s not coming from the area where the surge protectors are… That or we have a ghost. Happy Halloween!

      1. Katrinka*

        If you have a smoke or CO detector, check that. Our CO detector started beeping at the three year mark, when it was time to replaced it. We checked all the smoke alarms and changed all the batteries. The random beep still kept going. It took us three days to figure out it was the CO detector.

  13. Karma Queen*

    back in his 20’s, husband worked in a very male dominated, unionized industry. As a supervisor, there were a lot of regulations about how they could and couldn’t interact with union employees. One day, a frustrated union employee came to my husband to say that he was being sexually harrassed by the lone female supervisor. He said that they’d had a secret affair, that it was over, but that now she wouldn’t leave him alone. She was calling him at all hours of night and sending nudes taken from the workplace bathroom while he was at work. Following the chain of command, my husband reported it to the site manager. The site manager laughed about a female sexually harrassing a male and went to talk to her. This talk included telling her that my husband was the person who had told him about the complaint. She then went up to my husband and told him that she was going to get him fired. It turns out that my husband had sent a NSFW joke to one of his buddies at work who had forwarded it on, and she ended up with it. She’d been saving it in case she needed it. She filed a complaint with the site manager. Since this was my husband’s first time getting in trouble for anything, the site manager and district manager agreed to suspend him for 3 days and send him to sensitivity training. This wasn’t good enough, so she then went to the corporate office. The corporate office fired him. I don’t 100% blame them, but when he mentioned the sexual harrassment complaint and that this was how it all started, they said that they could no longer do anything about it without it looking like retaliation.
    Husband found a much better job that paid much better at a competitor, but we had an uneasy 2 months while he was unemployed.
    Fast forward 7 years: I was now working at the corporate office of the company that had fired my husband. Weird, I know. I was doing very, very well and had been promoted several times. The female supervisor who had gotten my husband fired wanted to work at the corporate office. The role meant that she’d be reporting to someone who reported to me. I told my VP that I absolutely could not work with her as I didn’t feel that she could be trusted. He knew my history, my work ethic, and my judgement. They didn’t give her the job, and she ended up quitting. Since then (it’s a small industry), she’s bounced around from unsatisfying job to unsatisfying job.

    5. Hmmm*

      Don’t love this one… a woman goes through a bad breakup, raises concerns about a sexist joke in her male-dominated industry, and then YEARS later loses out on a promotion because of it?

      1. learnedthehardway*

        Well, considering that she was vindictive about the complaint against HER for sexual harassment after the bad breakup, and got the person who was responsible for reporting it to management FIRED for simply doing their job, I think it’s entirely reasonable that she live in the consequences of her decisions. Esp. when the consequences are really well deserved – I mean, she did get someone fired and presumably was harassing a direct report, and she didn’t seem to face any consequences at the time.

        2. Mongrel*

          And from the wording she’d received a forwarded copy of the joke (it wasn’t sent to her from husband), whether that was a complaint or just another appended name to a “LOL! funny” mail, and then sat on it.
          If it was a complaint from a subordinate it should have been acted on immediately and if it wasn’t then it was knowingly held as retribution\blackmail material.

        3. JSPA*

          Complaints should be taken seriously and investigated, regardless of gender(s) involved. Not presumed true in every detail. Nor laughed off.

          Sure, now, with social media, the manager would have been wise to insist that the investigation take place, to clear her name. But years ago, “It’s true, and I’m using attack as the best defense, so I’m getting you fired” and “It’s BS, I’m presuming you’re in on the harassment so I’m getting you fired” are fairly equally things someone female and accused in a managerial position could have done.

      2. Double A*

        No. Someone who was sexually harassing a coworker but blackmailed her way out of it didn’t get a promotion years later because of it.

        (I do not doubt this woman experienced a ton of sexism in her job, and that the husband’s joke was inappropriate and should have been dealt with. However, she did this in reaction to being accused of sexual harassment. Flip the genders, and it’s clear how not okay her behavior was.)

      3. NotAnotherManager!*

        That’s one read, but you left out the parts about harassing a subordinate for ending an affair that it sounds like it may have violated workplace rules in the first place, sending nudes to your ex-lover from the company bathroom, and not reporting the sexist joke until it’s useful as blackmail to keep yourself out of trouble – none of which demonstrate good judgment. I’d take a hard pass on having her in my reporting structure, too, even if I was unrelated to anyone involved. To say nothing of the challenge of having to coach or discipline this employee in the future, lest she claim that any negative feedback was a result of her getting the boss’s husband fired – too much risk all around.

      4. Willow*

        Did you miss the part where she was sexually harassing someone? And retaliated against the person who reported it?

      5. AnonForNow*

        Woman continued to harass her ex after a bad breakup, had saved a NSFW email “for later in case she needed it” and used it when she was called out for her own bad behavior, escalated her complaint until her reporter was fired, and not-that-many-years-later loses out on a promotion. I’m okay with it.

      6. SallyJ*

        I agree. I don’t like this one either. She was accused of dating and sexually harassing a subordinate. And when confronted with it, took her “revenge”. But that is a very one sided story coming from OPs husband’s perspective.

        Having worked in a male dominated environment in Toxic Masculinity Town, I know how this goes. Dude doesn’t like reporting to a woman – makes up some crap. Someone-dude then “takes it seriously”, except that someone-dude has been know to make the work place just as toxic as well. Corporate, in Bigger Less Toxic Town, is so tired of it this behavior by men, they make an example out of someone-dude to show the rest they have had enough.

        Again, this may not be the case, but in my experience I have only ever seen ONE woman harass a man and it was over a break up. Almost every man I have encountered has sexually harassed a woman. So I apologize if my assumptions here don’t match with what is portrayed. I mean, just IMAGINE what that lone lady supervisor had to experience in her life working in that environment. And IMAGINE if your husband bent that truth a little? And now IMAGINE how your husband, who was fired BTW for inappropriate emails being sent, found another job that paid him So Much More – where as she quit and can’t find one decent job.

        I am just not feeling good about this.

        1. anon73*

          You are assuming way too much here, and just because you’ve only seen a woman sexually harass a man once doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen more often. You’re biased based on your experience and it’s showing. Not believing that this story is true is no different than the numerous people who question a woman when she’s in the same situation.

        2. AntsOnMyTable*

          I am on the fence too just because it is all so third hand. It sounds like the OP’s husband didn’t see any evidence just was told and reported it (as he should). We all know how “crazy ex-girlfriend” is a thing that some guys like to say when it is isn’t true – remember that guy who felt his girlfriend was over the top by contacting his family to make sure he wasn’t dead when he ghosted on her even though they lived together. It does seem a little odd that she would keep an email on the off chance that she can go after people although not improbable. And if the complaints weren’t true I could see her thinking “you are reporting me for this baseless rumor than fine I will be by the book and report you too.”

          It does not sound like she made up things about the husband. And we have no idea how bad the joke was or how often she had experienced things like that or how often the husband was party to it. Not getting in trouble before is not the same as not being complicit.

          It sounds like she didn’t have other issues at the workplace since she was still there and the OP’s boss didn’t seem to have any qualms until this was brought up.

          I also don’t feel like we are “not believing the victim” since this is so far removed from the actual complaint. It could have gone down exactly as it is presented or, in a very macho business with only one female supervisor, lies or exaggerations were said about her, NSFW jokes were common and she finally got sick of it and reported it since it was the same people were saying stuff about her. Then one of the people causing the problems downplayed things to his wife since it cost him his job, and in the future this woman was penalized.

      7. PersistentCat*

        The retaliation for the good-faith sexual harassment report is the issue at hand, not a bad break up. Any one can break up with a co-worker and struggle with it. Doesn’t give you the right to cross the harassment line and send your co-worker inappropriate texts, then retaliate against the former-affair-co-worker’s supervisor for following their sexual harassment reporting policy in good faith…Now, even if the ex was making everything up, that still doesn’t negate the good faith aspect of KarmaQueen’s husband’s report, and he still doesn’t deserve that kind of retaliation.

      9. JerryTerryLarryGary*

        A supervisor dates someone below them, harasses them at work when it ends, and then goes after the person who reported it? Not a good look.

    6. Karma Duchess*

      I have one of these too. Doesn’t feel Machiavellian, it’s just standard karma, but it was very satisfying.

      I worked for Creative Company A for more than a decade. At one point, it hired a couple of young creatives, Cersei and Tommen, to handle one area of the business. Cersei was one of the smartest, most ambitious people I’ve ever worked with, but she was young and female in a company run by older men and a few swaggering bros, none of whom seemed to remotely actually understand the creative side of the business — they just knew it was a product they could sell. So they didn’t do much to support people like Cersei, who had a lot of good creative ideas for new initiatives, but just clearly wasn’t one of Them.

      We became friends, but I didn’t work with her much directly, so I didn’t realize how bad things had gotten for her until she left the company. At which point she told me the real deal with Ramsay, the new bro they’d hired to help promote her area. Ramsay belittled her in meetings, gaslit her in private, and encouraged her to come up with new ideas, which he presented to the higher-ups as his own, then left her to implement. He also schmoozed the bro side of the company until they put him in charge of her area — which they didn’t tell her about. She found out from him when she was bringing up suggestions in a meeting and he condescendingly told her he was in charge now and they wouldn’t be doing any of that stuff.

      Meanwhile, he dumped every aspect of his job that he considered “boring” or “beneath him” onto Tommen, doubling his workload. On the rare occasions I had to work with Ramsay, he struck me as a sleazeball salesman type, gladhanding and friendly and talking a good game, but always angling to get something useful out of you, and never actually contributing much.

      Cersei quit and went on to start her own successful creative business. I quit because similar stuff was going on in my area, with a different schmoozy bro, and I went to Creative Company B. Months later, it turned out Ramsay had been fired from Company A (I always wondered if it was because without Cersei to mine for ideas, it was clear he had none of his own) and applied to Company B, where he was their top pick for a similar high-level promotions job based on his resume and how well he interviewed. The CEO came to me asking what it had been like to work with Ramsay in the past, and it was my pleasure to give him an earful, and offer to put him in touch with Cersei and Tommen if he needed more specifics.

      He thanked me for my candor. Ramsay didn’t get the job. He did go on to get a ridiculous plum job in a tangentially related creative industry, presumably by leveraging the good name of Company A — but then we heard he’d gotten let go from that as well, maybe five months later (and after moving cross-country for that job). I always wondered if he eventually either grew up and started actually doing work himself, or found a set of underlings he could reliably steal from without consequence, or stopped being able to get jobs based on his work history, when it became clear that he never stayed anywhere long after eeling his way into a new gig.

  14. NW Mossy*

    Oh, a chance to share my favorite #sorrynotsorry moment at work, wherein I intentionally set bait for someone and they take it.

    Years ago, I interviewed for a management position at work. I had a first-round interview with the hiring director and a colleague of hers, but ultimately didn’t get moved forward to the second round with the senior director. It was disappointing to learn that I didn’t get the job, but not crushing by any means.

    A few days after the “it’s not you” meeting, I get a call from Lucinda. Lucinda works in another part of the division, and I know her slightly – enough to say hello in the elevator, but that’s about it. Wondering why she’d be calling me, I answer.

    She immediately asks, “I heard you interviewed for that management job – is that true?” I’m wary, since I’d not told anyone I was applying other than my own boss, so someone who shouldn’t have blabbed to her. Ultimately seeing no harm in admitting that I had but wasn’t selected, I answer truthfully.

    And then we get to the point of Lucinda’s call. She’d also been passed over, which she found unjust considering that she had prior management experience. She felt that the entire interview process was unfair and was clearly trying to see if I felt similarly and would join her in a campaign to protest the results. In particular, she felt like rounds of interviews and only some people moving on was offensive – why, I couldn’t say.

    At this point it’s clear that Lucinda’s a bit unhinged about a completely normal and inoffensive situation. I know I want no part of whatever it is she’s up to. I also spot the opportunity to lay a trap, and forgive me, but I couldn’t help but take it. In my calmest voice, I tell her, “Wow, it seems like you’re pretty upset about this. Maybe you should give some feedback to [hiring director] and [senior director] about the process.” Now, I know full well that this not a done thing in our org, so only someone who was really off the deep end would take this suggestion.

    And, dear reader, she did. I later learned that after our conversation, she wrote up a diatribe cc’ed to a significant percentage of upper leadership about how they’re terrible at hiring. If my memory’s right, the leader who told me the story said something like “we already thought she was nuts based on her original interview, and all she did was prove us right.” Needless to say, she’s not been thought of as management material since.

    1. Ali G*

      Hmm…so she had “previous” management experience, but currently wasn’t a manager and was passed over for a management position? Yes, definitely something nefarious going on here /s

      1. NW Mossy*

        I make no claim to the moral high ground in this story – I knew at the time that what I was doing wasn’t kind. After that call, we never spoke about this again, so I have no insight into what ultimately prompted her to decide to follow the suggestion.

        As to why, I think it was probably out of frustration and pettiness on my part. We’d barely spoken before, and it felt presumptuous to me that she was looking to me specifically for some combination of moral support, shared indignation, and pitchfork protest just because we’d both experienced the same outcome (not getting the job). I’ll own that one of my pet peeves is being told how to feel, and she hit that nerve pretty squarely.

        1. Threeve*

          It also sounds like her diatribe would have come out in some way sooner or later, and it wouldn’t have taken much for her to feel entitled to add your name to it. If someone’s going to make a scene, I want them to do it before they manage to make me an unwilling co-star.

      2. Where’s the Orchestra?*

        Just a thought (based on my thought): to save others from having to deal with crazy?

    3. Nonya*

      This feels…unnecessarily unkind. Was she extremely misguided? Yes. But no need to lay a trap for a woman who did nothing to you. This moment doesn’t appear to be some sort of justice, and I hope that no one intentionally lays a “trap”, or goads you in the future when they disagree with your position.

      1. Pennalynn Lott*

        Can we all agree not to try to shame any commenters when they tell a story about themselves that specifically answers Alison’s call for “stories of underhanded machinations, double-dealing, and conniving”?

        1. Public Sector Manager*

          I disagree. Machiavelli always had a point–whether it’s to stay in power or win a political argument. You’d undermine someone to get ahead. This post is nothing of the sort. It’s being unkind for the sake of being unkind. And both the OP and their management were mocking someone for what could be a mental health issue.

        2. anon73*

          I agree with Public Sector Manager. The OP admitted barely knowing this person so her trap laying was completely unnecessary and mean, and benefitted her in no way other than to be mildly entertained at someone else’s expense.

      2. Myrin*

        I mean, I get what you’re saying, but I also don’t find this story particularly heinous or even really trap-lay-y?
        One, because it seems like even if someone had just very off-handedly said “Ugh, I don’t know, Lucinda, just go contact the directors about it or something!” to get her off their back, she would’ve reacted the exact same way.
        And two, because Lucinda had every opportunity to… simply not take this “advice”. Or at least write a calm, professional, and rational email instead of a “diatrebe”.
        Like, I get that Mossy nudged her in that direction but also, this was really her own doing.

        1. Mongrel*

          Agreed, it seems like Lucinda has some boundry issues and that can make it hard to sort out correct behavior for a situation (especially on the fly). I wouldn’t blame anyone for a hasty “How do I get rid of the crazy person” plan that involves redirecting them to *anyone* else.

      3. JSPA*

        Being seen for who you are is only a problem if your career goals and “who you are” are in deep conflict.

        It’s arguably kind to anyone she might have ended up managing, and kind to her, in the sense that she doesn’t have the minimal human insight needed to be a functional manager.

        Sure, we’re on a site where being a manager seems like a default career progression, but plenty of people have posted explaining how badly management fits them, and how much better they are as an excellent independent contributor. If we assume that management is the only way to succeed, we set everyone up for either disappointment or we drive the Peter Principle in its relentless churning.

      4. Xena*

        This is a pretty mild ‘trap’. Her suggestions seem quite bonkers—how does she expect the interview process to go? Does she want the hiring manager to secretly stalk all the candidates and then offer the position to one at a time? Or offer high level positions to all the candidates? OP suggested a perfectly normal response to a grievance; talk to the person in charge about the grievance to see if there’s a good way to make it right. I wouldn’t have wanted to tell Lucinda to her face that she was suggesting something crazy either.

  15. Chris C.*

    I had an internship at a very large, very old engineering firm. They were going through their first layoffs, ever. A well-liked senior employee had already arranged their next job, but didn’t get laid off — so they attempted to be just annoying enough to get their valuable pink slip (with generous severance!).

    One day in the cafeteria they sat down with the interns, and tried to get them to form a union. There had been no previous talk of unionizing (and the engineering interns were all well paid and quite happy, and had zero interest in this) — but the paperwork workload any talk of unionizing puts on management was huge.

    1. BeenThere*

      HAhahA. I’m trying to picture how this conversation goes , “ Hello young folks, who would like to join a cool group I’m starting”

    2. JustaTech*

      That’s so weird! Anytime my company has had layoffs people are allowed to volunteer. I know several people who were on their way out anyway who volunteered for the layoff to both get themselves a sweet severance and to protect their coworkers.

      One time it happened by accident: a coworker was literally getting ready to send her resignation letter to her boss when she was called in to a meeting with HR to get laid off. I don’t know what the severance was, but it must have been pretty good because I could hear her giggling in sheer glee two floors up the stairwell.

      1. Budgieman*

        Similar story, though cutting it even more fine.
        When working for a corporate, I walked into my bosses’ office with my resignation letter in hand, and said “I need a word”.
        The boss took one look at me and said “Don’t tell me anything that can’t wait a couple of days”, so I turned around and walked out.
        The next day I was called back into his office and retrenched.
        Boss told me later that HO were demanding retrenchments to save costs, but if someone left voluntarily, that made no difference, and that someone else would have to go regardless. My resignation would have meant he lost two people, not one…and this way he didn’t have someone else unhappy as a result.
        He had done a mad scramble that night to change paperwork before it went out, as I wasn’t the one due to be on the chopping block.
        Needless to say, both we were both happy with the result :)

        1. Certaintroublemaker*

          Wow, that’s crazy they would have made him be down two people!

          I called my boss at home one night because I’d gotten an offer I really wanted to take, but I felt terrible because they wanted me to start in one week, not two. She just told me that if it was best for my future, I should go. At the moment I felt a little puzzled that she didn’t say any of the niceties about how she would be sorry to see me go, but I found out later she’d been told that day she would need to lay somebody off and my news had been a huge relief for her. No way would the company have made her lay off an additional person, though.

      2. Katrinka*

        It depends. Sometimes they’re getting rid of a specific division or a specific job title, so asking for volunteers wouldn’t really help with that goal.

      3. SusanIvanova*

        During one of the early tech booms – before they were called dot-com, because that didn’t exist yet – I worked at a company that was going down while the rest of Silicon Valley was going up.

        Upper Manglement decided that one project should be axed, two of the three engineers laid off with nice severance, and the third kept for maintenance engineering. (The mindset of a good maintenance engineer and a good development engineer are diametrically opposite. Neither would switch jobs willingly.)

        Sales freaked. They’d just started a major push for that project, the customers loved it, and it was being killed? Inconceivable!

        So the two engineers were hired back but kept their sweet severance package. The third asked if he could have any sort of bonus too, to make up for it. Gosh no, he should feel lucky to just have a job!

        Tech boom, remember. He had a new job lined up in a matter of days.

        1. JustaTech*

          Oh, we had that too at one point: we went bankrupt and got bought by Evil Corp. One of Evil Corp’s big things was to start by chopping out any department they didn’t think you needed. So things like HR, legal, finance, purchasing, all of those people were sacked. Then they decided that there was no way, in the 21st century, that any company needed a “scheduling” department, so they sacked all of those people too.

          Except that we make a medical treatment that has a terrifyingly short shelf life where often you have to coordinate upwards of 30 people over a week to get the treatment to the patient. Not quite organ donation, but close. It’s *incredibly* complicated. It is as automated as it can be, which isn’t very because you have to adjust, on the fly, for things like weather all over the country.

          So Evil Corp had to hire all of those people back and let them keep their severance. Several people walked away over the whole thing and then Evil Corp had to scramble to find people who could do the job. (This is just part of the reason I call them Evil Corp.)

          1. lb*

            The only way this could get better is if Evil Corp got hit with a bunch of breach of contract suits as a result of not delivering on the product, and they’d fired all the lawyers who’d negotiated the deals.

      4. Mike S.*

        At my last job, I had a coworker who had another job lined up, and management knew it. Half the department was laid off, but she kept her job.

    3. Swiper*

      I love this. Similarly, I was once using intermittent FMLA, and long story short, my employer was annoyed by it and retaliating against me whenever and however possible while I was dealing with my health issue. Eventually they used this as a reason to demote me from an exempt management position into an hourly individual contributor role. The first thing I did was share my salary with my coworkers, offered to set up a way for others to share theirs anonymously if they wanted tl and asked if anyone was interested in unionizing. I was quickly reinstated into my former position. I’m sure it was entirely unrelated.

      1. JSPA*

        love this (and it’s always nice to know there are people in management who are union-appreciative).

  16. emily*

    i am a UX designer, and was working on designing a new checkout flow for a large e-commerce site. I strongly wanted to implement a 1-page checkout, but the Product Manager thought we should go with a 3-step one. This was a very waterfall, backwards company. After I updated my designs and prototypes to compromise for what the Product person wanted, I presented them in a formal meeting with the VP of Product (her boss). After I went through the designs, he unabashedly criticized me, saying I wasn’t thinking big enough, and basically we needed to implement a 1-page checkout. The Product manager immediately took his side, acting as if what I presented was not her idea, and piled on with the criticism. I was shocked and livid. Typing up this story gives me the creeps.

    1. SeluciaMD*

      I would have had a very hard time keeping my tongue in that situation. “Oh wow Product Manager – I feel terrible. I thought you said your idea for the three-page process was more in line with our company culture. I must have misunderstood! Mr. VP, now that I understand the confusion I’d love to show you the original one-page design plan.”

      Talk about being thrown under the bus! So sorry this happened to you.

    2. Anon-for-Now*

      Ugh! That’s infuriating.

      I had a manager who would think I’d done my assignments wrong, tell me to make another option to present, then present that option to her manager. I found out later that if the manager rejected it, she would then pull out my first design and say, “I wondered if that was wrong, so I also had her design this.”

    3. Birdie*

      Oooof, yeah, I’ll be honest…I probably wouldn’t have been able to resist saying something like, “I would be happy to show you my original 1-page design. It is still rough, as I set it aside when the decision was made to focus on this version, but I was able to create a framework I was very satisfied with and can easily expand upon now, if you agree.” But I really dislike jerks who throw subordinates under the bus and would’ve been looking to get away from that supervisor anyway.

  17. RealPerson01*

    I’m not terribly proud of this, but it worked out in the long run for almost everyone.

    A company I had been at for about 2 years had promoted my previous (pretty awesome) manager and he moved to a different province. They hired a new manager to take his place, this guy was likable but had a terrible work ethic, would roll in at 10 am leave at 4, would spend the rest of the day browsing the web, this was a retail store/shop and we only had 4 employees (including him), we had a few large jobs going on that were a multi-week project, I spent somewhere around 15 days working 14-16 hours while the manager barely showed up for 5.

    At the same time, my fiance at the time was trying to find a teaching job and was looking in some cities a few hours away. We had been contemplating moving to a different city and since my job wasn’t going well it wouldn’t have been too terrible to quit. I really like the company and My grandboss and I got along extremely well.

    There was one day had I been texting with grandboss about the job we were working on just before I was taking off for the weekend to look at houses in the new city. I was exceptionally grumpy about my boss cutting out while I stayed late to complete all the work. I staged a “whoops wrong person text” to my grandboss that read as it should have went to my fiance along the lines of “I’m sick of *boss* cutting out early while I stay late to deal with his mess, lets pull the trigger on *city* and go look at houses this week” my grandboss replied with I’m guessing that wasn’t for me sounds like we need to talk.

    At this point, i wasn’t even concerned with whether I would get fired. Grandboss and I had a call and I told him the whole story of what was going on and he said ok can you give me the weekend to sort things out? I agreed, and still took the weekend and looked at houses.

    The following Monday, He offered me the manager job to keep me on, told me it would take a few weeks to get sorted but to hang tight.

    Everything turned out well except for the boss. I stayed with the company for another 5 years and received another promotion after that. I’m not proud of the way i handled it, but for how that company was ran it was far from the worst thing I’ve ever seen happen there.

    1. Anonym*

      Eh, the method may have been “sneaky” but your grandboss needed to know. Ultimately, you did right by the company, which they clearly appreciated!

    2. SeluciaMD*

      I think that is actually a pretty genius move! While actually a calculated move, the grand-boss seeing it that way made it appear as an unfiltered, uncalculated message sent to him by mistake which very likely gave your complaint more weight – and your note about looking to move gave the situation more urgency. You didn’t have to issue anything that looked like an ultimatum and you never formally complained about your boss in a way that might have looked like sour grapes. And yet! Seriously genius! KUDOS.

    3. 867-5309*

      Is there a reason you could not have talked to the grand boss directly about it, since obviously he seemed receptive to your feedback?

      1. RealPerson01*

        Looking back it with more maturity, I definitely could have just talked to him, It would have came to the same conclusion. I didn’t ask for the manager position, it wasn’t even a discussion when we chatted after the text, so he had obviously seen me as somewhat of a leader in that location before.

    4. Human Embodiment of the 100 Emoji*

      I’ve done something very similar recently. I had a coworker who would frequently spend hours almost every day sleeping in his office, with the door open for everyone to see because our boss worked elsewhere and no one in the office had authority over him. He would also frequently just not show up on days he thought the rest of us would be working in the field. Multiple former co-workers had made complaints to my boss about this guy, to no avail (boss even renewed his contract twice! The poor mgmt is a whole ‘ nother issue lol).

      So every time he didn’t show up to the office, I would text my boss “Is co-worker sick? I haven’t seen him all day and he didn’t mention being off today” This was especially effective when we came back into the office after quarantine, since you can’t just claim to be sick for a day anymore. Unfortunately, he never got fired >_< (I'm leaving this dept, can you tell why?) but he didn't get his contract renewed and told us when he left that he didn't have a job lined up, so I like to think he got at least some comeuppance.

  18. Definitely hiding my identity on this one*

    There was a secretary in the department where I was temping who had to know everything, and she was desperate to find out what I had in the one drawer I kept locked in my cubicle (spoiler alert – I kept my shoes there and changed into them when I had to dress for a bad weather commute).

    When I went on vacation, she manufactured an emergency – a missing document, and she’d looked everywhere – EVERYWHERE – except MY locked drawer. On the strength of that claim she got facilities to unlock it so she could search.

    I’d emptied it out and taken my shoes home before I left for the holiday. ;)

    She had to tell me about it when I returned because everyone had seen facilities come and unlock my desk. I asked her what had happened in the matter of her incredibly important missing document, and she mumbled something and walked away.

    3. GoryDetails*

      I love this one! Low stakes, nobody’s career gets ruined or anything, but a charming little comeuppance for the curious one.

    9. Beany*

      That’s great!

      If only you’d known beforehand, you could have left a very visible card for her, saying “: Well now you know what’s in this drawer. Hope you didn’t have to manufacture a crisis to find out!”

      1. RebelwithMouseyHair*

        Oh yeah!
        When I first came to Paris I worked as an au pair. The family had a flat on the fifth floor and I had a bedroom on the sixth floor. On a couple of occasions I got the impression that the mother would sneak up to my room and search for stuff, but I had no proof.
        Then one day she accused me of stealing. I had indeed taken a bottle of milk – but then again food and board were part of my salary. I was going to use the milk to make yoghurt for my breakfast, to eat in my room instead of eating with the family because I hated the woman so much. I just left a note in my room, to say that I was perfectly entitled to take a bottle of milk from her kitchen and that snooping in my bedroom was way out of line. She couldn’t complain about my note or “prove” that I had “stolen” the milk without revealing that she had been snooping, so it was all good. If ever she hadn’t been snooping, then she wouldn’t ever get accused of it.

        Similarly, our neighbour installed a camera in his garden, he says to be able to see if there are burglars. However it really looks like he can spy on us in our garden from the direction it’s pointing. So I stick my middle finger up as I walk down the path. If he can’t see me, there’s no harm done. And if he sees me, he can’t complain about me being rude without revealing that he’s spying on me.

  19. Girasol*

    Our department’s employee satisfaction survey was startlingly poorer than the company average. I was assigned on the employee committee that always follows one of those surveys to address the issues. The department head called me into his office for a one-on-one chat. He asked me if you could assess satisfaction objectively and answered his own question by assuring me that of course, you could not. Satisfaction is an emotional perspective, not a logical one. Therefore all the employees who thought that they were dissatisfied, well, they were acting on mere baseless opinions. In short, they were wrong. He was glad he could clear that up for me, he said, and patted my knee for good measure. (Resignation statistics are pretty objective, though. His team’s were also startlingly higher than every other department’s, and HR saw to it that he was fired within the year.)

    1. Elle Woods*

      Sounds like a place I used to work. They had five analysts, a manager, and a director; the director ultimately reported to the EVP of finance. In the two years I was there, they cycled through three full sets of analysts (including me). My manager was horribly inept–could barely use Excel but worked in finance–and was having an affair with the director. Shortly after I left for a different company, a new EVP was hired. Within her first two weeks on the job, she terminated my old manager and reassigned my old director to a different part of the company. From what former colleagues tell me, things are much more stable and less stressful now. (Still doesn’t make me want to go back there.)

      1. DJ*

        >and was having an affair with the director.

        Geez, I wonder if that would explain our head of accounts payables. She has the highest turnover in the company and doesn’t seem to understand online ordering. I wish I as joking but we had to explain to her that all our vendors work like Amazon. She was confused by that.

    2. Joanna*

      Our managers have to review the employee survey ratings with us. My old, toxic boss would spend the entire meeting telling us why the ratings we submitted were incorrect. He’d also explain that the scores were not valid because we were probably just in a bad mood when willed filled out the survey. I was extremely happy when he retired.

    3. Funk*

      How very NXVIM! “if you don’t like me doing something, you just need to work on your emotions until you are ok with it!”

      1. Zona the Great*

        lol! So Apt. When Alison Mack first visits him at the Volleyball game and she cries when he asks her why art is so important to her….that’s the point I would have cackle-laughed and walked away. “Because I’m rich, bitch!”

    4. Dragon_Dreamer*

      Reminds me of all the customer surveys I had to encourage folks to do. ONLY the highest score EVER actually counts. Even a 4.9999 average is BAD in customer service. I had HUNDREDS, if not a couple thousand “5” surveys over my 10.5 year stint. And the lie they used to “fire” me? That I had gotten a 1, with a customer supposedly claiming that they had overheard me being rude to another customer on the phone. On a day I didn’t even work! (But I was re-hireable! It was proven to be fabricated during the unemployment hearings. Real reason: I was a full time non-manager and thus was too expensive to keep. Despite being number 2 in sales nationwide. To say they regret firing me would be an understatement, as both stores I worked at are now shuttered. Sales plummeted.)

    5. K*

      Worked at an org with terrible manager who had 2+ full teams quit under them (myself included, 6 months into the position). When 360 reviews/surveys were coming up, a few of us went to upper management since there was no HR and voiced concerns about not being able to answer honestly about Manager for fear of retaliation. We asked for advice on how to best give honest feedback, came up with a game plan with upper management’s help, and went back to the team to share what we were told. We strategized as a group on how to word things more objectively and take emotion out of it and folks responded to the review/survey more candidly. Upon review, upper management decided that we all did it wrong and completely scrapped the feedback.

      That organization still employs Manager and still has a revolving door of staff.

    6. Pennalynn Lott*

      At the company I left at the beginning of this year, there were quarterly employee satisfaction surveys. Because I interned there before I started full-time, I got to witness my department head (a Sr VP) respond to four progressively-negative surveys. She had been hired on just 3-4 months before the start of my internship and she is a harsh, fault-finding, never-praise-anyone kind of a person.

      After each round of negative survey results, she would create yet another team of managers and staff who were supposed to sit down and come up with ways to counteract the bad results. Since *she* was the reason for the unhappiness, there was nothing we could actually do (so we created a bunch of buzzwordy PowerPoint decks).

      Finally, after the fourth quarterly results came out, she held a department-wide meeting. Her answer to the escalating negativity/unhappiness? “If you don’t want to be on this team then get out.”

      So I found another job and quit. As did a little over half the department.

    7. Fred*

      I had a big boss who told me, quite seriously, that he knew morale wasn’t bad (as an employee survey had shown) because he’d gone around and asked people and everyone he spoke to personally said morale was just! fine!

      Now he works in politics. Le sigh.

      1. Acronyms Are Life (AAL)*

        This one made me legit laugh out loud! I can only imagine how those conversations went.

    8. Katniss Evergreen*

      That’s effing disgusting. I made a face reading “He was glad he could clear that up for me, he said, and patted my knee for good measure.”

  20. Arya Parya*

    My very first job out of university was in the IT department of pretty large company. The department was a lot of fun, think the IT crowd.

    Our network admin had been there forever (and still works there 12 odd years later). He had been trying to get rid of all the fax machines for a couple of years already when I started working there, but there was still one left. A few people insisted they still needed it.

    After another meeting where this one fax machine came up and being told that the fax machine could not go, he had enough. Once everyone was gone, he unplugged it.

    About half a year later, he brought up the machine again. “No”, people said, “the machine cannot go. We use it quite often.” “How is it possible then”, our netwerk admin asked, “that none of you have plugged it back in?”

    And that was the day he was finally rid of the last fax machine.

    5. Thistle Whistle*

      An ex-boss was p*ssed at the Finance director and decided to turn off his access to the finance system for a day.

      And forgot about it.

      For 14 months. The director never noticed.

    6. Portabella*

      Love it! Sometimes “unplug it and see who screams” is the best approach to decommissioning something that should have been ditched a long time ago. I work in IT at a state university and we have soooo many things that people INSIST cannot be decommed, removed, or retired in any way.

      1. Jackalope*

        And it’s also helpful because conversely if everyone had noticed on Day 1, then it would have been a sign that they were right and still needed it. So either way it’s a win.

      2. Marzipan Dragon*

        Also at a state university with deeply inbred hoarding issues. I had a typewriter in my office that they wouldn’t let me throw out. It had been in my first office when I started to use for that one professor who wouldn’t use a computer. He’s been gone 15 years now and it hadn’t been used by anyone else but I had to move the darn thing from office to office with me “in case it’s needed.” I was finally able to get rid of it three years ago when I was able to point out that it was now unusable because it had sat so long that all the carbon had flaked off the ribbon and there was no way to purchase a new ribbon.

          1. Paulina*

            Oh yes. Home to many professors who amass a big collection of books in their office, hoarded for themselves alone until the moment they retire, when they suddenly expect that the library and current students will want all the books.

            1. Ponytail*

              Bonus points if the ‘donation’ includes many library books that the professor had insisted, at the time, he had returned, and which were taken off the system.

              Has happened to me more than once, in different institutes.

            2. LibStaff*

              As the gift liaison at a state university, I can confirm your story… with the fiery anger of 1,000 suns! The only positive to come from the virus situation was to say that we are no longer accepting physical donations!!

          2. My Dear Wormwood*

            Hooooooo boy. Let me tell you about the time in the 00s that we cleaned out all cupboards and freezers in our long running lab.

            There were magazines from the 80s. There were mercury themometers. There was a stack of DDT-impregnated papers – the safety officer looked like we’d asked him to dispose of a bomb when we asked what to do with them. We were more concerned about the biocontainment level 3 pathogen we found in one of the feezers that we were categorically NOT supposed to handle in level 2 lab. We must have acquired it back when it was a too-new-to-be-categorised emerging pathogen, but I guess before it was investigated as a potential biological weapon.

        2. Rainy*

          When I was in undergrad, I worked in my department office, doing filing, mail, book orders, answering the phone, that sort of thing. I also made syllabi (this was a million years ago). Mostly, making syllabi was just copying them, as my profs were generally a good sort and would create the document themselves with greater or lesser degrees of pain and then pass them off to me, and I’d check enrollment and put a stack of nice clean stapled syllabi in their mailbox.

          We had a professor who was too good (or something) to do his own syllabi, so he would hand me a yellowing copy of a prior year’s (or sometimes decade’s) syllabus with some chickenscratch emendations, and tell me to type it up for him. I checked with my boss, as nobody else made me do that, and she took one look at the name and said “oh god, just do it so he shuts up”. So I did: I typed it all up fresh, no misspellings or anything, in Microsoft Word, and printed out a copy for his approval and stuck it in his box.

          He then complained because I hadn’t typed it. Turns out there was a very old typewriter in one corner of the office and he wanted me to use it, because he didn’t trust technology.

          I checked the typewriter, changed the font to Courier, and printed it again.

      3. NotAnotherManager!*

        Sigh. I advocate for this approach a lot, but no one ever lets me have any fun with it.

        I did have an IT person do something like this to me once – cut my access to a restricted server during a late Friday night maintenance window because they were convinced that it was no longer needed and wanted to see how long it took for us to realize it was gone. (This was dumb – they could have easily looked at transaction logs or file modification dates and see that there was tons of recent usage.) Turns out, we had an urgent business need for the server over the weekend, and the IT person was the lucky on-call who had to come back into the office on a weekend to get my access restored.

        1. Portabella*

          I work on the database team, and we usually do check the logs/audit tables to see if anyone has accessed something before retiring it…but there’s always a few people who have some random task they only do like, once or twice a year (or every couple of years!) that they need access for, and they’ll come out of the woodwork even if you think you’ve check back far enough, or blasted enough emails out to campus to catch them.

      4. Liz*

        This reminds me of a series of books we used to pay for and get, which were nothing more than a federal agency’s orders. In the pre-electronic era, we needed them. But when you can bring them up in seconds online, no. I was responsible for our “library” and had asked my then director several times if we could cancel the subscription. He kept saying no that we “might” need them. We had no room on the shelves for them, and one day I was kind of bemoaning the fact to the EA to our VP. who also supported my director. SHE cancelled the subscription as she paid the bill, and no one was the wiser. Director never missed them.

      5. Cedrus Libani*

        On the flip side…as a former “pet techie” in a biology department, I can assure you that there’s equipment that is older than most of the grad students, is absolutely dependent on software / tech configurations that are older than most of the undergrads, and will break when you look at it funny. Bringing that up to modern IT standards is just not happening.

        For example, in my last job, IT insisted that all computers be connected to the network and have automatic push upgrades. When they started prowling around, looking for contraband computers…for our ultra-fiddly workhorse instrument, I hid the real computer in a cabinet, put a dummy computer next to it, and set the dummy up so its only job was to sync data from the real computer and put it on the network. My boss thought I was being paranoid. Not long after, IT pushed an upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10, which would have turned that instrument into a $500K paperweight. (Someone learned this the hard way, but it wasn’t us. We did get to buy some hard-to-find spare parts as a result…)

        Same workplace had an early 2000s Mac in a dusty corner, because it was the only working computer anyone could find with a browser that could still support the ancient EH&S website. The entire department took their yearly safety training on that computer. IT was eyeing that one as contraband too, but we pointed out why it was there, and they sheepishly let it stay…might still be there.

        1. Certaintroublemaker*

          Yeah, I work for central IT at a Tier 1 research institution. There’s a lot of very expensive equipment run by computers on XP or older. Every time Microsoft declares another OS sunsetted, we just ask anyone who can’t upgrade for critical infrastructure reasons to establish a mitigation—usually take it off the network and sneaker net your data over.

        2. SusanIvanova*

          Orly Airport had to ground all the planes for a few hours back in 2015 because a Windows 3.1 computer running a critical task had crashed.

        3. coldbrewraktajino*

          I worked IT in college in the early 2000s. One of the profs had a setup that relied on an Apple. Not a Mac. An Apple.

          My boss had worked there since he was a student in the early 90s, and was the only person who knew how to work on this machine. He was always after her to upgrade it, but since everything else would need to be replaced….she’s probably still running it today.

        4. Mike S.*

          I work for a hospital. Doing that sort of thing can void the warrantee on expensive medical equipment where the PC’s running XP. While central IT’s really gung ho on doing upgrades, if people have an issue, they’ll work things out.

      6. TiffIf*

        Earlier this week some of our automation started to fail unexpectedly; poking in the logs I found out it was an error connecting to a specific SMTP server. Found out that IT ops had decommissioned that servers and didn’t notice we still had active traffic on it. We had used it the day before. If they had actually informed us we would have switched to a different SMTP prior to decommissioning but nobody thought to tell anyone in our department.

    8. Dragon_Dreamer*

      Alternate (and more fun) solution: Deploy an etherkiller. Half ethernet cable, half power cable. Nothing that gets plugged in ever works again.

      Variations exist for pretty much every single device. Fax machine would probably be a phone line. Use a 220 volt outlet for even more fun!

      (I have never used mine on anything but my OWN devices that were already retired. I have had to refuse a few professor requests to use it on equipment at one of my previous schools.)

    9. Taura*

      This isn’t my story, but from one of my coworkers who retired a few years ago. Back in the beginning of our department, there was a certain database that served EVERYONE, 24/7, and needed regular updates so the info would be as up-to-the-minute as possible. Since everyone needed it, and needed the info, no one liked to be kicked off for maintenance. On the other hand, when the maintenance DIDN’T get done, the info wouldn’t be up to date, and people would complain about not having accurate info to use. They tried changing the update times first – first thing in the morning, last thing at night, even on the weekend – but people still complained about getting kicked off, no matter the time. The machine this database was on though, was kept in a fairly high-traffic and narrow hallway, so the solution they hit upon in the end was to “trip” over the cord to the machine and unplug it (happened completely by accident as well on occasion) and then since the database was down anyway, they’d go ahead and put the update online. The coworker that told me this story said he’d never been happier than when they’d gotten the tech upgrades that made all that mostly unnecessary.

      1. Rainy*

        I had a job when I was a kid doing data entry after a warehouse fire to make sure the company knew exactly what had been in it when it burned, for the insurance claim. I “found” a bunch of stuff that had been thought destroyed in the inventory control system but had to go through again and re-check because it turned out, one of the sales guys at the store I was working out of liked to come in at 7am, pull up one file at random on the computer in his office so it would look like he was working, and then, leaving it open, play solitaire until the owner came in around 10:30. This messed up the backups. The guy responsible for DOING the backups came in at 8, and he and the sales guy had been in a silent, passive-aggressive war for years during which the sales guy refused to stop and the backup guy refused to do the backup at any other time.

    14. ginger ale for all*

      I work in an academic library in the government documents department. We have in our collection beta tapes, vhs cassettes, floppy disks, etc and we have faculty who need to use them for their research. The information is often only on these resources. The hoops our IT department have to go through to get this information when we don’t have the machinery that can process these older forms on information storage are mind boggling. We do not pay them enough or give them enough staff and they still come through for us.

    15. Faxer*

      FWIW, the IRS only accepts certain documents via fax or snail mail. I am the only person at my job who still uses a fax machine — mostly for submitting 8233 forms. Granted it’s not on a regular basis, but it’s certainly more convenient and faster than going to the post office and having to wait in line to mail it certified return receipt.

      1. Me*

        Yeah, we have a fax machine at the library I work at and honestly most people would be surprised at the number of requests we get to use it.

    16. Anonymous Hippo*

      I do this with reports I don’t think anyone is still using anymore. I’ll go ahead and complete them just in case and then “forget” to send them out for a couple months. If no one hollers, they get cut.

  21. Salad Daisy*

    I once worked as the office manager for a company which had a call center of about a dozen employees. One day the VP came in and called everyone into the conference room and announced the company was moving from the East Coast to California and everyone except me and my admin were to leave immediately. He then produced some empty boxes that he had purchased at Walnut for people to pack their belongings in. This was their severance package. My admin and I were told we needed to stay for a few weeks to pack up the office and send everything to the new facility in California. But I was so upset, flustered, etc. that I inadvertently (or vertently, if there is such a word) sent everything, dozens of huge boxes, etc. to the VP’s condo instead! And he did not even own a truck or SUV, just a BMW convertible. Good luck to him moving all those boxes!

    3. Happy Pineapple*

      This reminds me of an old boss I used to have. He would ship lots of personal mail to the office because he said he didn’t want it getting stolen from his house (despite his wife working from home). One time he ordered six large, heavy bar stools for his house and they sat in our conference room for weeks because he couldn’t figure out how to get to home in his tiny convertible.

  22. Kowalski! Options!*

    Years ago, I told the story about working for a major media outlet in Canada, reporting to two bosses who were romantically involved with each other, but I don’t think I ever talked about how that story ended…

    After I managed to get packaged out of the place, I took a few months off to travel, then started work at another (better) company a few months after. In Canada, we used to have a satirical magazine that took great pleasure in revealing the foibles of the chattering classes in both the media and government worlds. Well, one day about six months after I left, I get a call at work from my Dad (who never phoned): “Buy the latest copy of [magazine], and turn to page X”. Got up, went down to the corner store near the office. Bought magazine.

    Cue image of someone with three huge exclamation marks over their hair, which is standing on end: The Dangerous Liaison Bosses had decided to have a getaway in Paris, and I don’t remember if they were doing it on the company’s dime, or if they had lied about sick leave, or what. (By the time I left the company, it was an open secret that they were an item, but She-Boss had already parted ways with the company.) He-Boss gets summoned to a high-level meeting back in Toronto. He-Boss panics, says that he can’t return right away. Something has happened to his father, who’s a politically active academic in his home country, and He-Boss had to go to Paris to find him. Cue C-suite editor, who think he’s got a hot story of political intrigue on his hands and starts things rolling to run with an exclusive.

    Long story short: no one had absconded with anyone, He-Boss got caught out in the lie, and ended up coming clean and leaving the company a few weeks after. He-Boss then worked some contacts and got a job in Paris, and stayed there for a few years while things cooled off. She-Boss took a job with another prestigious firm, but didn’t last more than six months. I have no idea where she is, but, in a weird turn of fate, He-Boss is now with an organization that is marginally involved with the organization that I work for.

    Life is weird.

    2. Scrooge McDunk*

      For the first paragraph or so I got really excited thinking you worked for Peter Mansbridge and Wendy Mesley. And now I’m wracking my brain trying to figure out who it is…

  23. Anon for this*

    A colleague and chair of a search committee approached me privately about concerns they had about a candidate. They persuaded me that these were valid concerns and asked me to bring it up at our meeting. I did so. After I said my piece, the search committee chair defended the candidate, minimized the arguments I had made about the candidate, and hung me out to dry.

    I knew this person was a narcissist. I just never realized how much of a narcissist. I decided they had given me a gift by showing me who they were and since then have stayed the hell away.

    1. Dreama*

      What a total s**t. Not you, the committee chair. Jeez. Hoe do people like that look at themselves in the mirror?

    2. Anonymath*

      Ah, I had one of those!

      Colleague and I are on a P&T committee. I noticed the candidate up for promotion lightly plagiarized a couple of his publications. The colleague also noticed and we discussed how to deal with bringing it to the committee, as the committee chair had strongly stated they would only write positive things about the candidate (which was against policy of writing a balanced letter). Colleague and I both agreed we would raise the issue at the next meeting anyways.

      Guess who doesn’t show up to the next meeting? Yup, that colleague. Meanwhile, I go on with our plan of bringing up the issue, only to get yelled at by the committee chair. Colleague who chickened out “had an emergency” but still managed to email the committee stating how wonderful the candidate’s research was, hanging me out to dry.

  24. Archie Goodwin*

    I’m not Machiavellian in the least, but I’m reminded of a Soviet joke my mother told me.

    This fellow – subject of the joke – is out and about one day, and finds he really needs to use the facilities. Fortunately, he’s downtown, so the public bathroom he has available to him is in pretty good shape, by local standards. He goes in, and there sits the attendant, Marivanna – he pays her, does his business, and goes on his merry way.

    Well, this place is pretty close to his office, so it becomes part of his regular route. And while he doesn’t get particularly friendly with Marivanna, he does get to know her a bit…until one day he walks in there and she’s nowhere to be found. He asks the new attendant: nothing. No news. No idea what happened to her. Oh, well – such is life, and he shrugs and moves on.

    A few months later, our hero finds himself out past the back of beyond, way at the back of the suburbs. Industrial wasteland, pollution everywhere, one step away from hell, that sort of thing. And wouldn’t you know it, he needs to find a place again. Nothing for it. So he finds a public facility, and this one is as horrible as the last was nice – doors off the hinges, dust and filth caked everywhere, a broken window. The light doesn’t even work. Alas…there is no other choice. So he makes his way into the dingy, dark vestibule and knocks on the table. The back door opens, and in shuffles – Marivanna!

    “Why, Marivanna!” says the customer. “I haven’t seen you in months! What happened – why are you here, now, and not in downtown Leningrad?”

    Marivanna starts to cry. “Oh, intrigue!” she wails. “Intrigue!”

    So.

    Whenever my mother tells me about the latest petty drama in the HOA, or something equally inconsequential, I just pull a face at her and wail, “Intrigue, intrigue!”

      1. Archie Goodwin*

        It’s Soviet humor. Not funny but true. :-)

        The joke is that there was intrigue in EVERYTHING, even in the way in which people got jobs as public bathroom attendants. So she lost her cushy, plum post because someone intrigued against her, not because of any mundane reason. Just a comment on the way society worked.

        2. Catherine*

          I didn’t know that meaning of intrigue, I guess! “Intrigued against her” means… reported her to Soviet authorities?

          1. Wintermute*

            Well for cushy aparatchik jobs it was all about who you knew and who they knew. The Party gave out these positions and many people in the politbureau had their own internal clients (in the roman patron/client sense). Many purges happened when one group gained ascendency over the other and promptly sent all the clients and beneficiaries of the ousted power figure to the gulags.

            So the joke here is that she had her “good” bathroom attendant job because she was allied with some faction of the communist party locally that was in turn allied to a more powerful figure. And when that powerful figure lost the high graces of the committee as a whole or the premier then she was dismissed from her “prestigious” post and relegated to a much less important one, just like a scientist, general or other elite would be.

            The humor is in the idea that even bathroom attendants are reliant on the patronage system, it’s not just military command officers, university chairs and other elites.

      3. Pepperbar*

        I think the joke is that under the Soviet regime, even lowly bathroom attendants were not exempt from drama, intrigue, and workplace politics. Soviet humour tended to be a couple standard deviations to the dark and ironic side of the bell curve.

        1. Archie Goodwin*

          Yep, that’s it, basically.

          When I use the punchline today it’s in similar circumstances – sort of as a comment on, “these people don’t have anything better to do than stir a very small, very useless pot.”

      4. SubjectAvocado*

        I think it’s about how even in occupations like bathroom attendant, there is a degree of intrigue and politicking.

    2. Book Badger, Attorney-at-Claw*

      Not exactly on-topic, but the bathroom attendant thing reminded me of this:

      My dad is Austrian, and my mom is American. When I was very little, my parents went on vacation to Vienna with my mom’s parents. My mom and grandma are out when they have to stop and use the public bathroom. My dad hands them some schillings and waits outside.

      They come back a minute later and ask for more money, because apparently the attendant said they weren’t paying the correct fee.

      My dad walks up to the attendant and starts to talk to him in High German (i.e. very properly with no dialect). The attendant repeats his claim that the fee is so many schillings and my mom and grandma need to pay more. Then my dad says, in extremely thick local dialect, the equivalent of, “Cut the bullshit, dude, we both know that’s not true,” and the guy literally picked up his little desk and took the toilet paper off the roller and bolted.

      1. Jay*

        My mother worked for the French Embassy in NYC after college. She was already fluent in French when she started, and after five years she was pretty much bilingual. That’s when my parents took their first trip to Europe. They got in a cab in Paris, gave the address, and the driver took off in the wrong direction. My mother proceeded to chew him out in very idiomatic and somewhat obscene French. He made a U-turn, took them immediately to their destination, and became their personal cab driver for the next week.

        1. Berkeleyfarm*

          My Canadian ex’s dad is from Paris and the whole family has stories about Parisians trying to take advantage of the Obviously-Not-Parisians.

          Spoiler: those trying to put one over on Ex’s family weren’t successful

          1. RebelwithMouseyHair*

            I actually have a story about a True Parisian who got ripped off by a taxi. He was coming to my place and I had told him there was a metro station not too far off that he could get to direct from his place, without having to change trains. It wasn’t the closest station but only a ten-minute walk. Well, he got majorly lost somehow and asked a taxi driver the way. The guy told him to hop in, and took him by way of the Eiffel Tower (right the other side of town to me). It cost him 50 francs (yes it’s an old story) whereas the distance he probably needed to go would barely have cost more than the minimum charge. We teased him mercilessly about that!

            Otherwise, taxi drivers are no worse in Paris than elsewhere. There are more stories of tourists getting ripped off in Paris simply because there are more tourists in Paris, pre-Covid it was the city attracting the most tourists worldwide.

      2. Riversong*

        Off topic (so feel free to ignore or delete)
        Are paid public restrooms with attendants a thing? How does that work? Where is it common?
        (I have not yet travelled much out of the US but I hope to at some point, so I would like to be aware!)

        2. The Prettiest Curse*

          They are pretty common in France (attendants there are usually intimidating old ladies) and other European countries. I’m from the UK and you will sometimes get this type of bathroom there too, usually in stations for some reason.

          1. RebelwithMouseyHair*

            My brother always used to moan about how expensive it was to “spend a penny” in railway loos :-)

        3. ginger ale for all*

          In the Before Times (precovid), I would go out to night clubs. The nicer ones in town have them and they sit in the bathroom and offer you nice lotion, make up retouches, soap, towels, whatever. I thought it was just a nice service until I found out that the nicer clubs really hire them to keep drug deals, furtive sex, overly drunk people getting out of control from happening in the bathrooms. So now when I go, I always tip twice as much as I did before that knowledge because I do not want to have that happening while I am there.

        4. TechWorker*

          I’ve encountered it in Italy, where the restroom attendant was frankly one of the most terrifying people I ever met. I made multiple mistakes – I stood too far forwards in the queue, misunderstood what she said when she wanted to clean the cubicle first and finally offended her by not using paper towel to dry my hands (you know the very rough towel that doesn’t do much?). Being gestured and shouted at in a language you don’t speak is always fun :)

          1. Carpe Librarium*

            Tell the people in your life that you love them, because life is short. Better yet, scream it at them in Finnish, because life is also confusing and terrifying.

        5. Paulina*

          At the last one I remember (in Germany I think), I paid a small amount (as posted) to the (male) attendant on entry, who then escorted me to a stall, ensured it was clean, and then left me to it. Sinks were ready for use as I left, which was an improvement over the first one I remember: that earlier one has separate charges for using the toilet and using the sink, which meant the second payment had to be made with unclean hands, and made me wonder how many people skipped the handwashing stage to save money and time.

        6. All the cats 4 me*

          Yes, and I prefer them over the alternative. Even when it is confusing, at least the bathroom is clean when there is an attendant.

        7. Zooey*

          They used to be fairly common in Europe but less so now. I think the last place I used one was in Greece. There tend to be two approaches- some have a set fee, others are staffed and you just basically tip. Sometimes the attendant has the toilet paper and you have to pay for them to hand it over.

          I don’t know of any country where they’re still the default now (others may know better) so it’s more just a thing you have to be generally prepared for. When travelling I still like to make sure I have some change ASAP on arrival for stuff like this.

      3. peep*

        Oh my gosh. Shades of memory of my family’s first trip to Europe in 2001… This was pre-euro currency by a few years, so we were in Munich and took a day trip to Salzburg. We got off the train (my mom didn’t want to use the train bathroom once we pulled into the station, I think it wasn’t allowed anyway) and went to find the station bathroom for my mom. The attendant must have been helping someone else, and we also had never seen an attended bathroom in our lives, so my mom just went straight to a stall and did her business. I was worried though because the way the bathrooms worked was that the attendant had to unlock it for you to let you in — if you went in yourself, then the door would lock itself with an inch open, and you couldn’t get out either! So my mom was locked in, the attendant came over and got mad at us (I was 15 and completely confused) and eventually I understood we needed to pay her…. but of course we had no schillings, we’d just arrived for the day! So I had to run out to find my dad, who got some money out of an ATM at the station. Then the attendant was mad because we only had large bills (like the equivalent of $20 for a $1 fee?) but like come on lady, I have no control over this! lol. So she yelled at my mom and let her out and gave us change and kept yelling at us. Then my dad freaked out thinking the ATM ate his card, so had to ask the newsstand person to open it for him, and it turned out he’d put it in his wallet and forgotten it. What a day…. I enjoyed Salzburg though. :P

  25. Dorothy*

    well this is a small thing but one I am kind of proud of…we were at a conference in another state and after a long day charter buses took us from the hotel to a restaurant. We had a large room to ourselves and after a several course dinner the drinks continued to flow. The buses were not supposed to take us back to the hotel until the event planner called them. I was tired and ready to leave. Four drinks in and I could tell the event planner was planning to stay a while as were most of the group and the restaurant was not closing anytime soon. So, I got the number of the charter buses and quietly called them and told them we were ready to go. The buses showed up and the event planner just said “well I guess it’s time to go”. Nobody ever knew any different.

      1. JustaTech*

        This is why these kinds of events need to have staggered buses back to the hotel. I’ve never experienced the divide between introverts and extroverts as strongly as at conferences. You’ve been in intense presentations all day (freezing your tail off) and then it’s time for the socializing part (an equally important part of any conference) and you’ve got to keep your game face on for another 5 hours. While drinking.
        It is exhausting. It’s exhausting for the extroverts, let alone for the introverts who need some re-change time.

        Smart event planners recognize that not everyone is up to hours of this stuff and have buses back to the hotel at staggered times.

        1. UKDancer*

          Definitely. I’m fairly extrovert but after a full day of conference and being sociable and lively I start to run out of energy and want a hot bath and my bed.

          The best conference dinners I’ve been to are either walking distance from the hotel (in which case you can get back easily) or have staggered buses back. The worst one has to have been in Rome a number of years ago. We got taken for a 6 course seafood banquet the other side of the city and it dragged on, and on. I don’t eat shellfish or crustaceans so had spent half the time pushing the food around my plate. By about 11pm I was barely awake and starving and we were still on course 4. I’m afraid I made my excuses pleading a headache, and got a taxi back. I asked him to drop me off outside McDonalds opposite my hotel. So I sat there late at night in a reasonably posh frock eating a Big Mac. Ah the glamour!

          1. JustaTech*

            I wish I’d been brave enough to call a Lyft, but it was my first conference for this company and I really wanted to make a good impression. Oh, and there had been crashers who may have threatened violence on the previous day, so it did feel safer staying with the group in case the crashers were waiting outside the hotel.
            I was so tired by the time the conference was over I just kind of cried the whole flight home. (Quietly, didn’t want to upset the people sitting around me.)

        2. M*

          I used to be quite active in a student-level competitive event, and good enough that I was regularly involved in running the big international events for it. Literally the first due-diligence question I used to ask when checking over the local committee’s plans was “are you staggering buses after night events?”. I used to be amazed at how many otherwise extremely competent people just hadn’t even *considered* the possibility that people would want them to do that, until I realised that the kind of people who take jobs (volunteer or otherwise) running social events tend to… really enjoy social events.

          Anyway, it’s a basic “am I competently organising this transport-dependent event?” question. If people are dependent on you for transport, you organise transport to meet their needs.

      2. Jackalope*

        Given that it had been a several course meal and multiple drinks had already happened, it was likely that hours had gone by already. It seems reasonable to want to leave a work event after a few hours. (That being said, as others pointed out staggered bus departures would probably have been the best idea here.)

      3. Insert Clever Name Here*

        Sounds like it! Go Dorothy — I’m one who would have cheered when the bus rolled up.

      4. CeeBee*

        exactly what I was thinking – so I guess very machiavellian – but I wouldn’t be “proud”

      5. Ally McBeal*

        I’m convinced that I’m a good event planner (used to do it for fun, then for a living, and then back to fun again before Covid hit) BECAUSE I’m an introvert. Any event needs to have a place for attendees to escape – I called it a “quiet room” – AND a way out of the venue altogether.

        Also, Dorothy didn’t have the venue kick them out – anyone who really wanted to keep the party going could have called a cab. But others are correct that a staggered bus system would have been best.

    5. Richard Hershberger*

      Hostage-taking at social events is the worst. Given the use of plural “buses,” the organizer could have arranged for two shifts: an early bus after dessert, and a late bus for the people who wanted to close the bar. I am an early riser. I would be asleep in my seat after the second round of drinks.

  26. Definitely Staying Anon*

    I worked for a NCAA Division I Athletics program in the business office from mid-90s to mid-2010s. What many people don’t realize is that while coaching staff are considered Faculty and administrators are University administrators as well, most staff (business office, equipment room, marketing, events, etc.) are not University employees. Many Universities set up an auxiliary corporation to cover those individuals. It’s a very standard case of a University claiming an employee when it benefits them and not when it can cause them liability.

    In the 2008 recession, both the University and the auxiliary corp were put on a furlough amounting to 8% of salary. For the 2009-2010 academic year, the University returned to normal pay. The auxiliary corp, led by the Athletic Director – a University employee, promptly instilled a 10% salary reduction. This was not to admin or coaching staff (including our head football coach, who was – quite literally – the highest paid public employee in the state). This was to guys in the equipment room washing jock straps and jerseys and socks… the sports information staff who keep track of all of the stats involved in a team and slip those numbers to the press box during an event… the event staff themselves, setting up the facilities for a game, including painting the field, cleaning stadiums, setting up turnstiles, etc. This 10% salary reduction was the saving the aux corp about $375,000 that fiscal year. The Athletic Director was adamant that the reduction be that much. He wasn’t willing to reduce it to 7% or 5%. It had to be 10%.

    And at the end of the year, per the terms of his contract, he earned a $250,000 bonus from the aux corp for having closed the fiscal year $100,000 under budget. When he came to pick up that check, he was giddy with excitement because he was going to pay off his house completely… after taking an extensive vacation. He bragged about this to employees he forced into a salary reduction so he could get a bonus. It came as no surprise that he was out of a job 2 years later.

      1. bleh*

        Yes, that whole calling the coaching staff “faculty” is one way Unis inflate faculty to student ratio. They also use it to claim that Faculty cost so much and hide the costs of athletics. It’s gross.

        1. Profe*

          Wow, I didn’t know that, and it’s so dirty! I did my masters at a big SEC football school and found the culture just ludicrous.

    2. JustaTech*

      Ugh, that’s horrible.
      I had a grad school classmate who was one of the football coaches at BigStateU, who was in grad school because you had to be a student to be an assistant coach, and was paid so little he lived in the head coach’s office. Like, in the stadium. The newly renovated, beautiful stadium.

    3. SeluciaMD*

      This is so gross. SO GROSS. It blows my mind that NO ONE bothered to ask how he came in so far under budget. Was there no audit?!? This is shameful.

      1. Helen J*

        Agreed. Some coaches get paid millions of dollars a year and I imagine Athletic Directors get paid pretty much the same but the ones doing the real work get a salary reduction so he can pay off his house early. I would have gone to jail because I would have used that check to give him a million papercuts.

    4. Insert Clever Name Here*

      My brother-in-law worked in athletics at a similar level as an athletic trainer (ie, the guy who runs out on the field to tape the quarter back’s ankle). He’d work from 5am to 11pm most of the year and was paid so little that his children qualified for free and reduced lunch at school. College sports are a very, very shady business.

    5. Riversong*

      Reminds me how glad I am that both my high school and college got rid of their football teams!

    6. Boof*

      GFC glad with covid salary reductions my uni did a top down approach; the tp took 20% reduction, then it was 10% for over 100k, and no one under 100k had a reduction

    7. Scarlett10is*

      This is one of the grossest things I have read about an abuse of power by a coach in while. Utterly digusting. Also thanks for the info; had no idea coaches were called faculty.

    8. Tiffany Hashish*

      Sounds like the same kind of rules for that Alabama sheriff years ago who converted the unspent annual jail budget to salary. Kept under the budget by overcrowding and underfeeding inmates.

      Classic.

  27. Tasha*

    “Jane” was new to the company (and the industry) in a new, important role. She wanted the analysts who worked under “Bob” to report to her. She lined up three other managers to support her idea of reorganization, then invited Bob to a meeting with all of them and told him “this is what’s going to happen.” So it did and all eight experienced analysts (including me) ending up leaving over the next six months.

    Jane wasn’t promoted to an officer position when she thought she should be so she threatened to quit unless the board promoted her off cycle, so they did.

    She was originally reporting to “Guy” whom she didn’t get along with so again she threatened to quit unless her reporting relationship was changed to “Sue.” Which it was.

    The kicker? Eighteen months after this drama and disruption she walked away for “a once in a lifetime” opportunity elsewhere.

    1. Sparrow*

      Wait, why did everyone just go along with these things? Was her position high enough that people had no choice but to listen to her demands or was there something else going on?

      1. Tasha*

        She brought a new skill set that the company thought they needed. Also she was charismatic (I used the word “seductive” once in reference to her, but I didn’t mean it in a sexual way.)

  28. DANGER: Gumption Ahead*

    I knew my horrible boss wanted to move on and exactly what types of jobs she was interested in, so whenever I would get a suitable job posting I’d send it out as a BCC to her, but write as if there were multiple recipients with a message like:
    “Hey all, my friend just forwarded me this. $Organization is looking for someone for this job. Can you pass it out to your networks? It sounds like a cool opportunity”

    She left for one of the jobs

    2. BlueCollar Schemer*

      About, oh, 30 years ago, I was on a manufacturing team that worked swing shift. We all knew that we were underpaid, but the industry did allow for an ok hourly wage (just not what we were worth), and we were all college students, so … we just agreed that this was a college job, and shrugged.

      But then Monica was hired. She was a full blown diva, always causing some kind of drama/trouble – one day, she had our entire department shut down for a three hour anti-harrassment meeting becuase “Manuel didn’t say hi to me at the start of the shift.”

      The next week, my wife pointed out that a new company in our area was hiring for my exact specialty, and at a wage that was significantly higher than what I was making. I knew that there was no way that a company doing the same things as my company could survive paying more than we got – the economics just didn’t work out.

      So I took the paper into work that afternoon, and told everyone about the ad – and then told everyone except Monica that the company couldn’t possibly last.

      Yep, she took the bait, interviewed over there, quit my company, and we all sighed a big sigh of relief. And the other company went bankrupt in 4 months.

      Heh.

  29. NotMonkeyNotMyCircus*

    I was the sole female in a high level meeting with all men. We were discussing a really important unprecedented case that was being prosecuted. The department that I worked for was promised a copy of the transcript of a confession, in order to complete a damage assessment. As the meeting was concluding the older gentleman chairing it was providing me a package of documents that he urgently needed my department to review, but absent the confession transcript my department needed. They were holding onto it really tight. But we needed it to do our jobs. He fluffed it off, saying that his boss wasn’t in yet and so wasn’t able to sign off on releasing it, and why don’t I just head out with these and he will let me know about the transcript. Very patronizing tone and all. I took out my blackberry and looked at him and said, he was in luck because I had no other meetings for the morning, and had no problem in waiting for his boss to come in that morning and sign it off. There was a pause, as he looked at me with these really tiny angry eyes. At that point, I suggested that perhaps, his paralegal could begin making a copy of the transcript and get it ready to go, so that when his boss came in and signed it off, I would be ready to leave and tackle review of those other documents I know were pressing to him. No worries about the delay I have emails I could respond to while I wait. The FBI guy at the table, does a face plant into his hands shaking his head while smirking. Basically the chair of the meeting got called out on the BS he was trying to dish out and I put him in a corner. After several seconds, he sighed and directed his paralegal to get the package ready that I needed and go find his boss to sign off on it. Miraculously, his boss was able to be found, and I got what I needed for my department.

      1. katie_jones*

        This was accidentally me, age 22, interviewing for my first non-internship job. It was a full-day interview/experience (teaching job at a private school), and I’d met with all various middle management, but the principal was busy. I didn’t know much about interviewing, but it was my last meeting of the day and I knew I wouldn’t get hired without meeting with the principal so I told his assistant that I would wait, no problem, and I sat down in a chair in the hall. After about ten minutes, the assistant came out to gently let me know he would be busy the rest of the day and NO REALLY YOU SHOULD GO NOW, but we’ll let you know when you can come back to meet him.

        Fun fact: I got the job, and little did I know that the secretary knew one of my references personally and had just called the reference to say “WTF is this kid doing”. Thank goodness that reference loved me and was able to put a super positive spin on my behavior!!

    3. kitryan*

      I pulled an ‘I’ll wait’ to get the management company of the condo building I’d moved out of to stop sending me the HOA bills. They had processed and approved the sale themselves for the building but they’d sent me the monthly bill for over 4 months, (I’d emailed them to correct it each time). Their offices were near my office so I parked myself in the waiting room until they prepared and signed a document stating that they were aware I had sold the unit in question and was no longer responsible for the payments as of [sale date].
      I had to do the same thing earlier to get my moving security deposit back.
      Later, I was viewing possible new places and one had a management notice on the front door, with this company’s logo. I turned right around and didn’t even bother looking at the apt.

      1. M*

        Unlikely, sounds like this was the law firm prosecuting a case, not a party to it.

        Reading between the lines, sounds like either a) handing over the document just wasn’t a priority for them, and they didn’t particularly care that it was holding up another team; or b) they were using it as internal-politics-leverage: you do the work we need from you before we give you the document you need from us.

  30. Jenny Islander*

    Let me set the scene: This was back when a 56k modem was Teh Awesome. I was the only employee in a home office. There was one computer. It…did not have a 56k modem.

    My boss was also Teh Awesome, at least in his own mind, because he had been in the military and in law enforcement before starting his then-current career in financial planning, while I had only, y’know, lived my life, so obvs. he knew all and I knew naught. Bless his heart.

    So I got to work one morning and saw him still at the workstation, which he normally vacated before my start time. He was squinting aggrievedly at the screen while repeatedly clicking something.

    “What’s up?” I asked.

    “Oh, I can’t get this attachment to open,” he grumbled. “I’ve been clicking it for 10 minutes.”

    I peered over his shoulder at the company Hotmail account. I didn’t recognize the name of the sender. “Who’s this from.”

    “I don’t know,” he said, “but it’s obviously something very important.” The name of the attachment was “Important Documents.”

    Folks, I could have calmly and gently explained what he had done to himself, and run our up-to-date copy of Norton (updated regularly via CD-ROM). But months of being little-ladied and you-don’t-know-about-real-lifed were bubbling behind my eyes. “Oh dear,” I said, fluttering in distress. “Oh dear. Oh, Mr. M—–, I think you’ve picked up a virus. Every time you clicked it it downloaded a copy. But don’t worry. I think we can catch it in time.”

    And I sat down at the workstation, and started Norton….the free online version that they used to offer, where they scanned your entire computer remotely for you.

    At 28k.

    And then I went home, because obvs. I couldn’t get anything done when the virus scan was running, which was going to take at least five hours. Did I mention that I was a salaried employee?

    To his credit, he never did that again.

    2. JustaTech*

      At least he never did it again!
      I have had to do so many “Internet safety” trainings because some bigwig was too busy to actually *look* at the attachment they were opening and we’d get yet another virus. Or ransomware’d. That happened twice.

      1. Elizabeth West*

        Ahhhhh flashbacks to when I had free college internet over my landline. Those were the days.

      2. All the cats 4 me*

        I took the trouble to learn how to shut off that bl**dy annoying sound. It was blissful!

    4. Rachel in NYC*

      Oh the dial up days…

      My father was the tech person in our house. When I was a little kid and the internet was still relatively new and shiny (think Netscape days), my dad got tired of my constant questions about whether to say yes or no to questions the computer ‘asked me.’ So he told me to ‘just answer yes.’

      You can imagine all of the crap I downloaded because I always said yes.

      After several years of this, my father got mad one day at some junk that had been downloaded and asked ‘why the h-ll I had said ‘yes’ to downloading it.

      I responded- he told me to always agree with the computer.

      [He did stop yelling after that. And I learned to read the computer prompts.]

    5. JanetM*

      Not Machiavellian, but one of my favorites, which this brought to mind. I will present it in dialog form.

      It was 5:30 pm on a Friday, 20-some years ago. The phone in our training lab rang. Like an idiot, I answered it.

      Me: [Group name], this is Janet.

      Caller: I have problem with my email.

      Me: Well, the Help Desk is closed, but I’m happy to see if I can help you.

      Caller: It won’t open the thing.

      Me: Your email program won’t open?

      Caller: No, it won’t open the thing.

      Me: So you can run the program but it won’t open email?

      Caller: NO! It won’t open the thing with the email!

      Me: Oh, it won’t open an attachment! Okay, what usually happens when you try to open a file that’s been attached to an email?

      Caller: I click on the thing, and the thing opens it.

      Me, thinking but not saying: Oh my ghod, your computer is a swamp.

      Me: Right. Okay, what kind of file is it?

      Caller: How should I know?

      Me: Does it have a name with a some letters, a period, and three more letters?

      Caller: How should I know?

      Me, grasping at straws here: What email program do you use?

      Caller: A MODEM, STUPID!

      Me, suddenly losing all interest in helping; I’m sorry, you’re right, I’m not able to help you. The Help Desk will re-open at 9am on Monday. Their number is [number]. Goodbye. [click]

      1. Katniss Evergreen*

        What a jerk! Glad you got off the call – nothing you can do for people who are like this to someone who’s just trying to help.

      2. The_artist_formerly_known_as_Anon-2*

        Very early on , in my career – as I stated in another post, I was a network operator – responsible for around 200 terminals in 120 offices.

        One morning I get a call “my computer isn’t running.” OK, I look at my network and see that her terminal’s had no activity for the day. So I attempt to restart it, it conks out.

        Me: “OK, can you flick the control unit off and on”
        Her: “my manager told me never to touch that”
        Me: “It’s OK, I’m trying to get you running. You’re not working as it is, so let’s try that.”

        (restart fails)

        Me: “OK what do the lights say on your modem?” (then dialog explaining what the modem is)
        Her : “no lights on it”.
        Me: “OK is there any electricity coming out of the outlet? Do you have something like a radio or pencil sharpener you can check???”
        Her : “I, uh, don’t know if we can do that.”
        Me: “OK, check to see if everything’s plugged in”
        Her “I can’t see back there”
        Me: “Why not?”
        Her = “Our electricity is out due to the storm…” (groan)

        I had another office where the manager had a metal-lined room built, put the modem and control unit in the “secret room”, with the computer terminal and keyboard outside of it. They called – I asked to reset the equipment – and she couldn’t do it. “All that’s in the secret room. And the manager has the key.”

        Me: “well get the key and call me back!”
        Her: “(boss) is on vacation. He won’t be back for two weeks, he took the key with him.”

        “There are six million cases in the naked city. You have just seen two of them.”

  31. Genius with Food Additives*

    I fully expect this to be eclipsed by others but here’s a few: at my first job, marketing was the gatekeeper of moving projects forward. Depending on who your lead was, this could be fine or painful as they would be finicky and need to feel like they were having input. So sometimes we’d have sample A and sample B out for approval that were actually both the same thing.
    -Used to work at a candy company and people would get very entranced by when we’d have melted chocolate liquor in the lab (this is just cocoa solids and cocoa fat, so extremely bitter, but looks gorgeous). They’d ask to try it and we would absolutely let them.
    -This might be the worst, but we interviewed someone once who worked for a pet food company and when new people from other depts came to see R&D, they would pretty much insist they needed to try the product “because everyone else had.” Just kibble, but still. :-D

    1. LPUK*

      I used to work at a pet food factory and at the daily QA huddle ( I was sent along to give a Sales debrief ), several of the factory hpguys got spoons out and tasted the canned pet food. Luckily they didn’t make me do it

      1. Elizabeth West*

        I attended a survivalist panel at a nerd con once where they put up a bunch of cans with no labels, as they might present themselves in a post-disaster foraging situation. Several people were asked to pick a can, open it, and then they had to taste the contents.
        One poor person who fortunately had an excellent sense of humor got the dog food can.

        The panelist informed us that pet food is perfectly edible for humans, if somewhat unpalatable. “In a post-apocalypse scenario, you eat what you can get, for energy” he declared. The dog food taster said it wasn’t bad, but wasn’t great either. The one who got Spaghettios said they felt bad, lol.

        1. Rebecca in Dallas*

          I mean, I wouldn’t give my pet anything that would be inedible to a human!

          When my husband was in high school, he worked at a pet store that kept dog treats at the register so they could give treats to dogs who came shopping with their owners. Whenever someone would start questioning him about the quality of the dog treats, he’d say, “Oh, they’re very high quality. And delicious! See?” and take a bite of one. It always threw them way off!

          1. Wintermute*

            There’s a reason that “eating your own dogfood” has become a term in the tech world. It comes from a pet food company where the owner would literally eat their own dog food to prove it was safe and healthful. In IT terms it means you use your own products you develop in-house. Nothing causes customers to get VERY worried than learning Microsoft uses Apache, not Microsoft IIS, to serve up their homepage…

  32. AvonLady Barksdale*

    I worked for a woman who was scattered, immature, unprofessional… it was a little weird. She got promoted over someone else in the department and there was a TON of tension, and she decided she was going to be the “OMG AWESOME BOSS” and totally loose and friendly with everyone. I liked her at first and then I realized that she was really inappropriate much of the time and had no idea how to be a good boss, she just liked being in charge.

    We got a new SVP of the department we supported. The relationship is a little confusing in my industry, but basically we all had a dotted line to this very important, revenue-generating department. If they didn’t like our work, we were in big trouble. The new SVP was a great guy, really nice, really great at his job, but very tough. In his first month, he told everyone on the floor that he expected them to be at their desks by 9:30 (we had a start time of 9am) unless they had client meetings or appointments. He started putting Post-It Notes on the doors of the worst offenders. This was before people teleworked regularly and right at the point when Blackberries were becoming popular.

    My boss was NEVER in the office before 10am. She moved 10 blocks away and still sauntered in late. New SVP didn’t like that. I’m pretty sure he spoke to her about it. She would come in “early” a few days and then back to 10am. So one day he came over looking for her, I said, “She’s not in yet, can I help you with something?” and he decided to give me– the most junior person– a very simple request, which I did for him. She reamed me out for sending him something without running it by her, I told her I had run it by someone else who had approved it and he wanted it within the hour, so I felt like my hands were tied.

    She made me feel terrible about it for months (I left at the first opportunity and stayed with my next team for 8 years), and I thought this guy HATED me and thought I was an idiot. I learned a few years later that no, he liked me well enough. Turns out that what I had done for him was perfectly fine, but he used it as a way to say that when he needed information from her, he expected to find her, and if her calendar said she was there he expected her to be there, and since she wasn’t, he was going to find a way to bust her. There was a lot of tension between them– besides that incident, she had a crush on his predecessor and was angry that guy hadn’t taken her with him to another team– and she eventually quit the business altogether.

    1. triplehiccup*

      Kinda crummy of him to use you like that. Surely he could’ve made his point without making you a target for her ire.

  33. Artemesia*

    I used this technique twice. I was a member of the decision making council for an organization and a couple of other leaders were planning to implement a policy that some of us deeply opposed. I got together with 3 other people on the 14 person council and we planned how to proceed. Basically we decided we would wait until someone in the group raised any objection or alternative or concern about the policy and then one of us would jump in an say in full concern troll seriousness ‘I think what ‘distinguished elder statesman’ just said really identifies a possible concern with ‘bad idea’ — I hadn’t thought of it before, but I think this is a great insight.’ Then another in the group would jump in an in all innocence build on that and the third person.

    We rolled that meeting and stopped the policy from going forward and the ‘distinguished elder statesman’ was self congratulating and being congratulated for his brilliance when it was done.

    2. JessicaTate*

      OMG, that totally reminds me of my own Machiavellian moment! I was on a small non-profit board at the same time as my then-boyfriend George [we were both qualified, strictly professional, and most people didn’t know we were together]. Anyway, there was this push from the board president to change the bylaws, one of which would bypass term limits and keep him president for a much longer period of time. It had no rationale and was a massive change to “solve” a non-problem. But much of the board were people who were extremely passive and just voted “yes” on whatever was presented.

      George and I were in agreement that this was at best unnecessary, and at worst a power grab by a poor leader. So, we plotted our arguments on the travel to the meeting (in another city), including what he was best suited to raise and what I was best suited to raise. We’d sit on opposite sides of the room, so the voices were literally coming from everywhere. Then, walking over to the Big Board Meeting, we casually sidled up to an elder board member and started chatting about the “big vote” that day and subtly noted how this proposal was going to mean Elder Guy was going to have to do a lot more work, etc. etc. By the time we got off the elevator at the meeting, he was like, “This is a terrible idea!” And our coalition of dissent was formed. Much like you, we chose our moment and the bylaw change did not pass.

  34. Cat in the Office*

    In my previous job, I made a request–the kind of thing that had to go above my supervisors approval, and was time sensitive in that I needed an answer within a month. It needed, in fact, my great-grand boss’s (GGB) approval. My supervisor signed off, and my grand boss (GB) said he supported my request and would be meeting with the GG boss in two days and would ask for his approval then. A week passes, no word. I check in with GB and he says that he brought it up but there wasn’t time to discuss it at that meeting, and he would bring it up later that week, don’t worry. Another week, no word, I message again, he says that he’s still working on GGB and trying to secure approval. Another week passes, no word. The deadline is now very close. I email my GB, and get a message saying he’s on leave for a week and won’t be checking email. I decide to email GGB myself–we’ve worked together for 10 years, and are on a first name basis, but I was trying to follow proper procedure. Before GGB emails me back, GB emails from on leave (a one line email!) to say that GGB denied my request, sorry. But then!! GGB emails himself, says that GB has NEVER MENTIONED THIS REQUEST TO HIM AND HE KNOWS NOTHING ABOUT IT. GGB was so annoyed at being thrown under the bus that he granted my request immediately and directed GB to do everything necessary to make it happen.

    I left that job a few months later, and just found out that GGB fired GB about a year later. Obviously not because of this, but I have to imagine there was some erosion of trust…

      1. Cat in the Office*

        He refused to engage with me on anything the rest of the time he was there! I got what I wanted, so I was able to avoid him. He was a truly awful boss–a clear case of someone being promoted beyond his capacity. Here’s my favorite example: In a quarterly meeting with our unit soon after he started he said ‘I welcome feedback! Please don’t hesitate!’ Well, someone apparently told him that the previous boss had usually talked a lot less in these big meetings, just sort of setting the stage and inviting discussion; GB instead used it like a briefing room to tell us stuff our supervisors had already relayed from their weekly meetings with him. He showed up to the next quarterly unit meeting alternatively fuming and pouting, saying things like ‘I’m only going to talk about this one thing because SOME OF YOU think I talk too much.’ Someone asked him a question about an initiative and he said ‘well that was item 2 on my agenda, but you guys don’t want to hear about my agenda, so I’ll probably just go back to my office and sit there while you all have your meeting’. This is a grown man in his 50s by the way. He threatened to go back to his office 4 times in 20 minutes, basically begging all of us to ask him to stay. None of us did, but he never actually left to go back to his office.

  35. Hummer on the Hill*

    Not too evil, just stupid. I was a team lead at a large technology company. Two testers: Bill and Ted. Bill decided he deserved a high-end car, so went shopping. The dealer said he could get a really good interest rate if he could validate a certain level of income. So he got his buddy Ted to write a letter on company stationery claiming to be Bill’s manager, and validating the high income. The car dealership did its due diligence, and discovered the fraud. Outcome: no car, two testers on the job market with no good answer to the question “Why did you leave your last job?” (I reported to their boss’s boss, so he told me.)

  36. Formerly Frustrated Optimist*

    I’m sure this will be low-stakes relative to others’ stories, but at the small non-profit where I used to work, we would get gifts around the holidays (candy, cookies, popcorn, etc.) from our various vendors.

    On more than one occasion, the executive director would commandeer these gifts before they ever got to the staff, and regift them for her own family members.

    1. NYWeasel*

      I worked for a large media company that had a rule that gift baskets were collected and then raffled off across the whole company. It made sense, bc for every VP getting 20-30 luxury gift baskets that they really didn’t need, there was a hardworking team that wasn’t getting recognized. But in practice it meant that we would “win” baskets with iPod-shaped holes in the middle (bc the VPs grabbed anything of value before sharing) or rotting fruit bc the basket arrived four weeks before the drawing!

      1. Happy Days*

        NYWeasel
        We had one VP keep a basket and then ‘donate’ it to the team after he had taken anything of value, i.e. movie tickets, pens, chocolates, etc. out of it. By the time we received it it was rotting fruit and stale popcorn and maybe a package of nuts and he acted like he had shelled out a bunch of money for it but we knew it came from the client. It sat in our area Thursday and Friday with no one going near it and then we shut down for end of year, came back to a pissed off VP. Apparently, one of the team members had returned the basket to him and left it in his office for 10 days. The smell was horrible and fruit flies had formed. No one ever claimed responsibility.

    2. Artemesia*

      I have never understood this. It is such an easy cost free way to curry good will in staff. My husband’s small law firm used to get lots of gift basket at holidays. The stuff was always broken down and laid out on a table in the file room and people took ‘their share’. Some clients sent things directly to our home, but everything that came into the office was shared. Stealing cookies in front of staff when you have the high salary is such a great way to make everyone hate you. And it costs you nothing to let them take these little treats home.

      1. Richard Hershberger*

        “I have never understood this. It is such an easy cost free way to curry good will in staff.”
        Yes, but this requires the ability to think beyond “Ooh! Shiny!”

        1. Berkeleyfarm*

          Or “me! me! me!”

          To those people the staff (peons) didn’t matter, so if it was regifted, they could look generous to someone they actually cared about.

      2. NotAnotherManager!*

        This is how my firm handled it, too. In November/December, the kitchens were flush with goodie basket items – a lot of it was consumed in the office as snacks during the day, but anything left on Friday was fair game for anyone to take home.

        1. TeapotNinja*

          I used to sit right next to a kitchen at a company who used to get a ton of gift baskets during the holiday season.

          I thought it was great. 20 pounds later I had a different opinion.

      3. Lily C*

        As we head into the holiday season, I’m already missing my access to the gift-basket bounty in the firm’s lunch room. Another in-office perk lost to mandatory work at home.

    3. JustaTech*

      At my company we had a vendor that two groups in the same over-arching department worked with to order a specialty item. The kind of thing that takes a lot of scheduling and so both my group and the other group talked to this vendor quite a bit.
      After a couple of years of working with these folks I get an email in January asking how we liked the box of chocolates? “What box of chocolates?” “We sent you a box of chocolates for the holiday, didn’t you get them?”
      So I checked with our shipping guy, who told me yes, there had been a box from the vendor addressed to the head of the *other* group, Carl. So I go ask one of my peer’s in Carl’s group about the chocolates. “What chocolates?”

      Turns out Carl took the whole box for himself and didn’t even share with his team! And it’s not like we weren’t on good terms with him and his team. He claimed that since they were addressed to him they must have been for him and not for everyone. And that the same thing had happened to the box of chocolates the previous two years as well!

    4. Director of Alpaca Exams*

      I worked for a company where the primary job of the administrative assistant was to use the company credit card to buy gifts for the CEO’s kids.

  37. SlightlySnarky*

    I worked as a compliance attorney for a heavily regulated teapot manufacturer. The teapots division head, Cersei, was known for her aggressive and scheming. She could be juvenile at times. I was in her division’s office one time and she hid under her desk when she saw me headed to her office to discuss a matter with her. Her team hated her and thought she was a joke, so they were always more than happy to fill me in on her shennanigans. (Including letting me know that she was under the desk for twenty minutes while I was looking for her. Really?)

    One time, the operations manager, Jamie, had given me a head’s up that certain required testing wasn’t being performed and that Cersei had put an end to the new process which would have implemented the testing properly. I spoke with her and she told me she didn’t think it was a priority. I gave my boss, the Chief Compliance Officer, a head’s up and she was going to address it with the President of the business unit, who was Cersei’s boss.

    Later that week, we had a meeting with our outside counsel to discuss a regulatory action against the company on a separate, but related, matter. At one point, the attorney said, “Well, this point should be good because you’re doing the required testing?” Cersei immediately chimed in with “We do ALL the testing ALL the time.” I discreetly wrote “Not True” on my notepad and passed it to the CCO. She nodded. During a break, the CCO and I pulled our attorney aside and explained that Cersei had misspoke.

    During the same break, Cersei made a beeline for Jamie, who wasn’t in the meeting with the attorney. She asked him, “Are we doing the required Teapot Testing?” He said, “No, we’re not. You told us not to proceed with the plan.” She said, “Oh, ok. I wanted to be sure because SlightlySnarky [me] just told us in the meeting with the attorney that we’re doing all the testing all the time.” (She came back to the meeting, but did not clarify her original statement, even though she literally just confirmed it was inaccurate.)

    Jamie called me after the meeting and was very confused why I would have said such a thing. He knew that I knew the testing wasn’t being done. Cersei was trying to set it up that I was the one who lied and she was the one who found the problem and fixed it. Fortunately, it was pretty clear what she was trying to do. But I lay awake many nights wondering what other manipulations she HAD gotten away with.

    1. Indy Dem*

      Just to clarify – was the operations manager and the teapots division head secretly sleeping together and had several children unbeknownst to the teapots division head’s husband?

      1. SlightlySnarky*

        Lol, no, but that was a rumor to that effect about her and the President. In reality, she hated him too. The operations manager was eventually laid off and she left the company for another opportunity.

  38. Cupid*

    Ill add my story to the mix. Not too long ago I had a miscarriage an as a result I had issues with depression. I informed my boss of all my issues through out the entire period of my short pregnancy (we knew from the beginning that a miscarriage was likely) and the complications due to the miscarriage. I made sure to explain that due to my depression I was having problems with my workload. I was told that I had the same workload as everyone else amd I needed to deal with it (thats a quote). Boss proceeds to document every mistake I made for weeks. After a couple weeks I get called into a surprise meeting with Boss, Big Boss and the Bigger Boss. Boss has a document roughly 10 pages long with every error I had made since my pregnancy started. Boss went on to explain that he/she didnt understand why I was having problems and it couldn’t continue. When Boss was done Big Boss and Bigver Boss asked me why I was having issues. So I explained the miscarriage, the complications. And that I had explained all of this to Boss and the dates I told Boss what was going on. I offered to show proof of my miscarriage. Boss’ face was red and very angry. Big Boss and Bigger Boss were shocked. They told me how sorry they were for my situation and told me to let them know if I needed anything. I was then dismissed from the meeting. Boss was not. My desk is across from Boss’s. I stayed at work for another 1.5 hours and Boss still had not come down when I left for the day.

      1. Cupid*

        They have not. Though it was the cause for me looking and finding another job. When I left I made sure to tell everyone who’d listen why I was leaving. Former Boss is not at all liked at that company. Why they are allowed to stay I dont know. Im not sure they realize that what they did was an ADA violation. And they are the ones that documented everything.

      2. Ally McBeal*

        Not only heartless, but looks to me like a fairly straightforward violation of the law – she was likely protected under both pregnancy-discrimination and disability laws! I would have screamed at Boss for hours too.

      1. Cupid*

        Tthe next day all of a sudden they were concerned for my mental and physical health and did I need anything???? None of my work was taken from me though when I asked. So I started looking for a new job.

  39. Lucy*

    I had a summer job in a doctor’s office during college, just filing and making copies and whatever needed to be done. The office manager wanted me to file invoices, and this was her system: She’d sit in her office chair, pick up an invoice, hand it to me and tell me what file it went into, and I would sit on the floor (because the file drawer was the bottom drawer) and file them. It was ridiculous, but it was impossible for me to file them myself because her system made no sense – things weren’t filed by vendor or date or doctor, but by some subject scheme that only made sense in her mind. I hated it, it made no sense, she could have done it 5 times faster by herself. So I started putting things in the wrong files on purpose. After about 2 weeks of this, she never asked me to help her file again.

    1. Elizabeth West*

      I had a boss who would pull invoices out of files and stick them back in haphazardly and then blame it on me when no one could find them. He sucked.

      1. Mongrel*

        I have a constant battle with my partner on this when tidying up.
        I try to have a, somewhat, logical place to put things and to make sure things go in or near the correct place. My partner tends to gather stuff up in a pile and cram it into the first place where it looks like it fits.

        1. spiralingsnails*

          Mongrel: You might enjoy exploring the Clutterbug organization system. It talks about the fact that there are different kinds of organizing styles that different people gravitate towards, and gives advice on how to compromise to create a system that works for both partners.

          1. Mongrel*

            I had a quick look at the website and, unfortunately, found it really annoying.
            When I want to answer the first five questions in their identification quiz with multiple answers, at least one was “all of the above, depending what room I’m in, what I’m doing and is it a new item or an old one?” (Old means it has a place, new means I have to find a place for it)

            1. NothingIsLittle*

              I find the website pretty clunky too, especially the quiz. It’s odd because she explains quite often in her videos that you can have multiple organization styles depending on the area or items you’re organizing, but that’s not really reflected in the website.

              Essentially, the idea is that you have a preference for visual or hidden (ie you feel anxious if you can’t see your things vs you feel anxious if you can see your things) and macro or micro (ie you’d rather dump things into big categories and spend more time finding them vs you’d rather sort things into small categories and spend more time putting them away). If you want the space to stay clean, you need to create systems that will accommodate the visual macro organizer (butterfly) without overburdening the hidden micro organizer (cricket).

              Big tip is to use clear bins without lids, since you can see what’s in them and dump stuff, but it’s still contained.

  40. WonderWoman*

    Not particularly Machiavellian, but here goes. . . I left a negative (but honest) review on a former employer’s Glassdoor page after signing a severance contract that stipulated I wouldn’t post anything negative about them on the internet.

  41. fposte*

    Oh, I just realized I have one (though it could equally be passive-aggressive, I suppose). At a prestigious university with some old (for the region) architecture, a senior professor retired, leaving vacant a beautiful, movie-worthy office of good size with a lovely view. And Professor Pushing very much wanted that office. However, Professor Pushing was a generally annoying person who was comparatively junior in status, and the school very much did not want to give over a highly desirable office for the rest of Professor Pushing’s doubtless very long academic life. Rather than outright say “Professor Pushing, you are not worthy,” the powers that be looked to Professor Content, an established scholar and nice person who was happily ensconced in a less elevated office. They told Professor Content that since he was worthy of the Office of Greatness he would, like it or not, have to move to it so that Professor Pushing’s ambitions would be thwarted without anyone having to tell him directly that he was not worthy.

    1. Scarlett10is*

      The politics of academia are something really something. Love how this particular it was a great result! :-D

  42. Jenny F. Scientist*

    I once baited an unpleasant co-worker into having a temper tantrum and kicking my desk in front of three other co-workers. Then I pretended to cry. (He had been, like, kicking my desk in private for weeks. I was pretty fed up.)

  43. overcaffeinatedandqueer*

    My mom is a retired teacher and tended to notice when her 14-18 year old students liked each other, even if they denied it.

    She would make up her seating chart and put such couples next to each other whenever possible.

    Two marriages have resulted.

    1. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

      That’s sweet; +1 to your mother. Hopefully they are and remain happy marriages!

    2. The New Normal*

      As a high school employee, I make sure to listen to the kids’ gossip. I have a few kids who specifically come keep me up to date. And then the teachers all gather and gossip some more. So yes, we ALL KNOW who has a crush on each other and you can totally tell a teacher’s stance based on seating charts and partner work. Some teachers intentionally separate the pairs because they don’t want to get involved in the drama while others hope to make a match.

      1. NeonFireworks*

        Oh geez, just realized my [foreign language] teacher in 10th grade probably knew exactly which classmate I had a crush on…though I was too much of a coward for that to make a difference! Oh well.

        2. Jay*

          My 11th grade French teacher disliked me because she hated my boyfriend. He almost got her fired at one point. His first language is French and he overheard her saying something very derogatory about another student and responded in French so she knew he’d heard. He’d graduated by the time I had to deal with her, but it was a small school and everyone knew we were dating. She gave me a very hard time. I got As anyway and that just pissed her off.

          One day I missed an exam because of a field trip. She told me to come to her office at 3:00 PM to take the makeup. I arrived. She was not there. She showed up at 3:45 and told me I had to finish by 4:00 PM because she had to leave, and it was my fault for not having my priorities straight. I finished the exam. I got a 98. She HATED me after that.

      2. curly sue*

        I have sudden clarity regarding an intriguing pattern in my 13-year-old’s recent partner assignments… Nice. (Yes, I will keep my mouth shut. 13 is a rough age without parental crush interrogation.)

      3. Ally McBeal*

        And then there’s Level 10 of this: At the K-12 school where I attended high school — a private, church-affiliated evangelical school in the South, so somewhat incestuous and chock full of passive-aggressive gossip hounds — the teachers occasionally took sides in breakups! I don’t think there was ever an instance where a student was treated *badly* because of a breakup, but we all knew which teachers supported Jane (the youth pastor’s daughter) vs John (the third grade teacher’s son) when their 7-month romance went south.

      4. nm*

        Is this why my high school physics teacher always sat me and my crush together…
        It’s been about 10 years so I wonder what that boy is up to these days!

    4. zebra*

      My high school Spanish teacher DEFINITELY did this and seated one of the hottest guys in school in between my friend and me. Sadly no marriages resulted, but it was such a fun year.

    5. KateM*

      When I was in middle school, teachers liked to make chatterboxes to change seats so boys were sitting with girls (we were at “ew, not going to talk with someone of opposite sex” phase). The ONE time the seat change would have caused me to sit with my crush, he was not at school this day.

      1. Paulina*

        Near the end of high school, our History teacher had the bright idea of seating everyone in alphabetical order, to break up chatting groups. (He knew us all well by this point, so it wasn’t to learn names.) However, this arrangement put some close friends next to each other, because back on the first day of our first year at that school, our English teacher had assigned seats the same way so that was who’d we’d first met.

    6. Elenna*

      Eight-year-old me really thought I was keeping my giant crush on a classmate secret, but I mentioned it to my parents a few months ago and they were like “yeah, we totally knew and so did your teachers” lol. This puts a whole new spin on that one time they asked my crush to go over the math problems with me – I thought it was just because we were the first two finished!
      (Unfortunately nothing came of it as eight year old me had no social skills whatsoever, but it was at least a fun memory.)

    7. triplehiccup*

      Sweet, and in keeping with Machiavelli’s time period! I taught high school for 5 years and that never would have occurred to me.

  44. Soprani*

    Early on in my career I took a job an office manager that required one to be alone in the office 90% of the work week. The role became available because the former office manager took advantage of little supervision – she was almost never available when someone called the office, was spotted several times escorting someone into a room of a nearby seedy motel, neighboring businesses complained that she entertained scketchy non-business looking personages at the office and they had loud arguments, she borrowed money from coworkers and never paid them back, she shipped a large package to family halfway around the world on the company account and refused to repay the hefty shipping fee, and was consistently 2 hours late to the office for a job that had receptionist duties. She managed to stay in that role for 3 years. She was fired in a blaze of glory which everyone referenced with raised brows, but specific details were never shared
    I was a golden angel of dependability in comparison which made it very easy for me to perform well beyond expectations the entire time I had that job.

    2. Bryce*

      Nothing that sordid, but one place I worked had a 9/80 schedule where you got every other Friday off. Ideally that was supposed to mean the whole place was running at half-staff each Friday, but the work different departments were doing was so mingled that if your co-workers weren’t there there was little you could do. We estimate only 25% of the people were there any given Friday.

      It eventually ended, and rumor goes that happened because some bigwig was visiting, walked into HR (or some similar always-needed department) and there was basically just a tumbleweed roaming the halls.

  45. Seal*

    I’ve posted this story here before, but it still makes me laugh. Early in my career, there was an administrative assistant in another department that drove everyone in our library nuts. She was not very good at her job, more than a little dense, and very nosy about what was going on in other departments, especially about things that had nothing whatsoever to do with her. My department had a large recycle bin that was regularly used by other departments. One day we saw this woman digging around in the recycle bin, but everyone assumed she had accidentally thrown something in that she didn’t mean to recycle. But then we saw her doing the same thing the next day, and the day after that, until she was coming around every single day to rummage around in the recycle bin. I finally asked her way she was looking for and she said, “nothing – I’m just looking”. By this point, my colleague and I were fed up with this woman’s weird new hobby and seeing her backside sticking up out of the bin for a good 10-15 minutes a day while she mined the depths. So my colleague wrote a note to me that said “I caught the administrative assistant digging through the recycle bin again – do you think we should tell her boss?”, crumpled it up, and stuck it a few layers down in the recycle bin. The recycle bin diving stopped a day or so later, but the administrative assistant gave us both dirty looks for at least a month afterwards. Totally worth it.

    2. SeluciaMD*

      I love this story! Pretty wholesome all things considered and a good reminder that if you are gonna dig you better be prepared for what you might find. :)

  46. HatRacks*

    I had a coworker who didn’t like that she didn’t report directly to our boss, but rather the second in command. Evil coworker went through three different bosses and treated them all terribly, but the worst was what she did to her second boss, while the boss was still very new in her job.

    I found out from a coworker in a different department that evil coworker was emailing her friends in the company and sending them samples of her new boss’s writing (part of new boss’s job was writing/editing) and then trashing the writing and asking them to share with their coworkers…etc. At that point, she had a LOT of friends at work. She was very charismatic and fun to work with, until she decided she didn’t like you.

    When I brought this up to our main boss and HR (I don’t know why I didn’t reach out the person she was maligning directly…) they were both like…”eh? shrug.” and never spoke to evil coworker.

    Unfortunately she ran her second boss off after a few months and I really regret not doing something more.

    In good news though, evil coworker eventually got found out for who she really was…an unstable, drama-manufacturing pain-in-the-ass. She didn’t get fired like she ought have (HR was scared of her), but towards the end of her tenure, people in other offices would come up to me and others in our office and exclaim “why does she still work for you guys?” Not great for our reputation as an office, but really validating after years of feeling like I was the crazy one who knew who she really was.

  47. Ali G*

    After working professionally for about 3 years, I finally had to give in and get a work phone. Since my previous phone number was out of state, I got a new one with a local area code.
    Almost immediately, I started getting calls at all hours of the day and night from people who didn’t speak English (I am in the US) trying to access the conference line. This went on for week.
    Finally I picked up and someone spoke English. Turns out someone made a typo in an email announcing a new conference service, for a large international company you have all heard of. I told this guy to fix it and he had the gall to be like, well it’s not my job etc. So I said I am done being nice.
    Once I was in the car with my BF driving and I got a call from some guy looking to be connected to the conference. Me: “Sure Hold.” BF: turns up death metal and we leave the phone on speaker.
    Next time I got a call and my response” “Change of plans we need you at HQ on Monday. If you aren’t here by 9 am (this person was in Asia) Monday morning, you are off the project.”
    A lot of times I would just tell them to hold and hang up on them. Sometimes, if they spoke English, I would just curse them out.
    Etc, etc.
    Calls stopped shortly thereafter.

    2. Mad Harry Crewe*

      Growing up, my friends down the street were one digit off of a local pizza joint. They found it was easier to just take the order and hang up; if they tried to explain it was a wrong number then people got argumentative.

      1. Elizabeth West*

        This happened to me when my landline was one digit off the local Child Support Enforcement office. I tried to tell people they had the wrong number, but some of them would insist no, they’d dialed it correctly. When I finally ditched it for cell only, I told the phone company about the situation and they retired my old number so it wouldn’t happen to anyone else.

        1. Emma*

          I was once working a public event doing outreach for a sexual health clinic, wearing a nice turquoise branded t-shirt that said “ask me about STIs!” on the back.

          A woman stopped me to say that she worked for an office of the university, and their phone number was one digit away from ours. She explained that they often got calls from people trying to reach the clinic, and many of them would immediately launch into a detailed description of their symptoms, without stopping long enough to be told that this is not the person they should be giving this information to.

          I started saying something sympathetic, because anyone who has worked reception in sexual health is very familiar with this phenomenon. But then she looked me in the eye and told me this was very disruptive and she expected us to put a stop to it.

          I just blinked at her and said “well, I’ll certainly pass that on” then went back to our tent where the manager and I cracked up laughing over it. To this day I have no idea what she thought we could do!

      2. Bryce*

        My home number growing up was one off from the local elementary school. On snow days we’d just start answering the phone with “[lastname] residence, this is [name], school’s delayed 2 hours today, what can I do for you?” It was a small town so all neighbors, nobody worth getting mad at.

    3. Seeking Second Childhood*

      My childhood home phone was typo’d on the promo material for a local restaurant’s second location. The Friday night we figured out what happened, she called and asked to talk with the manager. He told her to change our number! We’d been in the house for 30 years (with the clunky old AT&T phone in the kitchen if any proof were needed.) More specifics I could not get, just “He was very unpleasant.”
      I took several reservations that night.
      Next morning walking the dog, she stopped past the owner’s house, chitchatted about their families, asked about the new business, heard about chaos the night before…claimed that she had grounded me for what I had done and told him WHY I’d done it. He was mortified & had the marketing materials changed. No idea if the manager changed or not, because gift certificates were sent to us by the owner. Nice guy…

  48. Dr. KMnO4*

    My graduate advisor was (probably still is) an extreme micromanager. She was firmly against flexible schedules and working from home, even though our research didn’t generally require us to follow a 9-5 schedule, or even be in the office at all. In my 3rd year of grad school I was entering and analyzing a lot of data, while also stuck in a tiny office with two other people, on a hallway with many noisy research groups. We weren’t allowed to shut the door to block out the noise from the hall and one of my officemates received frequent social visits from her boyfriend. To avoid all the distractions I began spending more time in the library in the building next door. I always left a note on my desk letting people know where I was, and I frequently checked my email so if I needed to come back I could. In one of our weekly meetings my boss told me I needed to spend more time in the office. Not because I wasn’t getting enough work done (I asked), but because I wasn’t “present” enough. When I asked how much time I was allowed to spend in the library she said, “I don’t want to tell you my expectations because then you’ll just meet them, not exceed them”. I replied, “How can I exceed your expectations if I don’t know what they are?” She finally told me what she wanted, but that conversation irritated me so much that I decided to do everything I could to get around her expectations in ways she couldn’t push back on.

    Things I did:
    -Mentored a HS teacher in our discipline through a formal program. That meant I had to go to said teacher’s classroom quite often, which I interpreted as “once a week”. My boss couldn’t complain about the time away from the office because it was “Service to the Community”, which is very important in academia and a separate section on my CV. (I’d wanted to participate in this program anyways, but the conversation really motivated me to make it happen.)
    -Took classes in other disciplines related to my dissertation. It helped me come up with new theories for my dissertation as well as helped me foster interdisciplinary connections.
    -I had joined a therapy group for grad students. In previous semesters I’d indicated that I was only available after 4 pm. After the conversation I decided that I was available at any point in the workday. My boss didn’t want to risk an HR nightmare by trying to tell me not to take care of my mental health needs.

  49. LindenTree*

    I have never breathed a word about this before. But make no mistake I regret nothing.

    Years ago, I worked as an admin assistant at a very high-powered, stuffy firm in Manhattan. There was this guy – let’s call him Kavanaugh – who fancied himself the young genius in the office. He was young for a vice president, sure, and could be charming. But he also treated any admin who wasn’t a comely young woman like dirt, talked relentless shit about his “know-nothing” bosses, and never let an opportunity pass to drop the name of his ivy-league school and brand-new VIP father-in-law.

    Also, one night after work he cornered me, stuck his tongue down my throat and then had the temerity to be annoyed when I scrambled away from him and fled.

    (Pause to say: yeah, I know I should have reported him. But I know a lot of things I didn’t know when I was 25.)

    Kavanaugh was also a huge sports fan. Rabid, insane, fan. And every year one of his favorite sporting events is held in NYC, and one of the firm’s clients had made a habit of gifting Kavanaugh ultra-exclusive access to this event. This access was arranged daily – a messenger would arrive with a slim envelope containing that day’s passes. Kavanaugh had been out of the country for work trip and had missed most of the event, the envelopes piling up on his desk. (Because would he allow his assistant to folow common practice and give the tickets to anyone else to use? He would not.) But he returned in time for for the final day of the event, and had planned to use that day’s passes to take his father-in-law and two “young ladies” to the stadium. He was clearly only at his desk that morning to take delivery of that envelope.

    Which is why I intercepted it. And put in my purse. And then spent the rest of my day helping him try to track it down, calling the client, scouring the mailroom, visiting the building’s security office to (pretend to) review camera footage as Kavanaugh became angrier and sweatier. When I left work that night I dropped it in a trash can and bought myself a cocktail.

    5. SeluciaMD*

      That is a lovely bit of karma – and yet, not nearly horrible enough to compensate for what a terrible person that guy is. Still, I tip my hat to you! Hit ’em where it hurts!

    13. Rebecca in Dallas*

      Haha the only thing that could have made this better was if you used those VIP passes to take yourself to the sporting event. But really, brava!

      1. Lizzo*

        Even better, show up to the event, stand outside, and hand them out to the first deserving family of four you see as an “upgrade”.

  50. KH*

    Not really too bad, but…
    We had a bit of an Army-Navy rivalry where I worked. One of the directors would constantly try to hide “Go Army” stuff in plain sight on my cubicle. One time, I came in to find a small flag hanging off my cubicle. I took it and rolled it up. I then went into his office while he wasn’t there and dropped it behind one of his pictures on his bookshelf. He came back, and asked where it was. I cheerfully replied, “I put it back in your office.”
    The best part was he never found it in the next year that we worked together. Every so often he would ask for it back, and I would reply it was in his office. The last day I was in that department, I walked in while he was there, went to the bookshelf, and pulled the flag out from the exact place I had put it before. It was never moved. (Obviously, it had been dusted, but I think the cleaning crew just thought it was supposed to be there.) I handed it to him and said I told him it was in the office. He had to admit I was right.

    1. Meirai*

      Oh, I have something like this! Both I and the team I manage are allowed to decorate our work areas a bit (so long as it’s not NSFW or otherwise derogatory), and we’re also required to keep our own areas clean. So one day I joked that I would check on how thorough their efforts to clean were by leaving some of the trinkets on my desk in various out-of-the-way corners to see if they found them while they were cleaning. We all chuckled about the “test”, I admitted I probably wouldn’t actually do it, and we moved on with the day.

      Of course, the next morning I come in to discover that all of the trinkets on my desk were gone. I spent the next three days trying to find all of the hiding spots in my office that my subordinates had used (I did ultimately find all of them without help), and ruefully admitted to them that they had gotten the better of me this time.

      1. Lizzo*

        Did you look in the locked cabinet? (See comment above about the woman whose colleagued staged an emergency so that maintenance would open the woman’s locked cabinet where she kept…her shoes.)

  51. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

    I badly want to contribute, and I’m very subversive if you unpack everything I manage to slip past the radar, but I have a very hard time finding things that qualify as Machiavellian.

    Trust that I’m enjoying reading every other reply, though!

    1. AGD*

      Me too. I once spotted an opportunity and pulled a few strings to connect someone with something good that they deserved and otherwise weren’t going to get – then feigned total surprise and denied I’d had anything to do with it. That’s as close as I get.

  52. Derailer*

    I work project management at a llama farm. My group focuses on raising and caring for the animals. Every year we have a multiple day audit into all of our business processes and policies. The auditor, on the other hand, comes from llama breeding. He understands the basics of our work, but doesn’t always understand the details. We are a high performing team and we always do very well on the audit, which makes the auditor uncomfortable. He’s a bit over confident about how much his knowledge of llama breeding translates into animal care, and will pick up on small details that he thinks are wrong and spend a large amount of time trying to tell us why it’s wrong. However, we are the experts and end up spending a lot of time explaining to him why we are correct. It’s exhausting.

    After several years coordinating and leading our team, I realized that he’s actually just very extroverted and loves to talk about things he’s knowledgeable about. I mean, he really loves to talk. So now, any time I can tell he’s about to go down a rabbit hole, I just start talking about a non-work-related topic I know he’s interested in, and he goes down that rabbit hole instead, leaving my team free to do actual work instead of pulling them in to explain why he’s wrong. We get more work done and he gets to bloviate to his heart’s desire. Win/Win.

    I’ve moved on from this responsibility, and I’ve made sure to pass this knowledge on to my replacement.

    2. I Love Llamas*

      Many years ago, I was the admin for a firm that was audited each year on behalf of a publicly traded client. I quickly learned that since we were in a really “fun” city, the very young, inexperienced auditors were always interested in recommendations on where to go. I would send them out on the town each evening to some really great clubs and the next morning they would drag their sorry butts in later and later as the week wore on. My boss loved this.

    3. Quinalla*

      I have 100% deflected talkers from someone who needed to get their work done once I was done with mine at a site. And yes, get them talking about something unrelated so they don’t nitpick things that are good to go for sure!

  53. Text Crawler*

    I’ll see if I can tell this story in a way that does it justice.

    My grandparents started a local newspaper in the 70s and my dad grew up working for it- as a paper boy, then an errand boy, and then once he graduated college, as the man in charge of expanding the newspaper to neighboring cities. His first step was expanding to Metropolis. He borrowed money from his mom via her accountant and started organizing.

    The paper was almost breaking even when he got an angry call from her. “WHAT THE **** HAVE YOU BEEN DOING WITH ALL THIS MONEY?” He drove home to explain everything in person- his budget, his revenue, and his plan. But his mom insisted that he had borrowed millions more than he had. He had to return to Metropolis that week, but the calls kept coming. My grandma was certain that my dad was actively stealing money from her and lying about it. Large sums of her money kept disappearing.

    This lasted months. My mom almost got scared off- she wasn’t sure about marrying a man who got into regular screaming matches with his mother.

    Finally, my dad did some snooping and learned the truth. My grandma’s accountant was the thief and the liar. He got law enforcement involved, who figured out the whole story. The accountant had stolen millions of dollars, blaming the withdrawals on my dad, and spent it on fancy art with his boyfriend. He was certain that the art would be an investment, and he could sell it later and pay back the money plus extra for himself. Law enforcement held an auction to recoup some of the money. The art was not an investment. My dad got front row seats at the auction and watched as all the art sold for a tiny fraction of what the accountant paid for them.

    My dad’s relationship with his mom never recovered. When the newspaper industry fell apart in the mid 00s and my grandma went bankrupt, he tried to buy his hometown newspaper from her. She couldn’t stop him from bidding, but she telephoned every major newspaper in the country and invited them to bid in order to raise the price and stop my dad from winning.

    1. Artemesia*

      My husband prosecuted someone who stole the 401 Ks he ws supposed to invest from social workers, teachers etc and bought ‘art’ as an investment. They also were only able to recoup a fraction of what he had paid as they attempted to restore the funds to these hard working people who had been shafted. FWIW the theft was quite visible to the bank — he was diverting 401K funds from these 401K accounts to his personal account, but the bank was not held responsible — such is the weakening of laws that protect people from the predations of large corporations.

    2. I edit everything*

      What a sad story! Sounds like your grandmother put as much value on her grudge as the accountant did on his “art.”

    4. EPLawyer*

      That is so sad. Especially because it was your dad that found out and stopped your Grandma from losing even more money.

    6. Opal*

      Whoa! Am I the only one to whom “He borrowed money from his mom via her [thieving] accountant” sounds sketchy?

  54. Anon For This Because Ethics*

    Early in my working life I worked for a major hotel chain as a Front Desk Supervisor. Employees, including supervisors, were enrolled in the loyalty program, and could earn loyalty program points as a performance incentive. For example, be mentioned by name in a positive guest comment, earn 100 loyalty points. Loyalty points could be cashed in for the usual things (free nights) or for Visa gifts cards. Importantly, employees who stayed at a hotel could also earn loyalty points in the same method as a regular paying guest: check in, provide your loyalty number, earn points based on the dollars you spend at the hotel.

    I caught one of our employees (a direct peer and fellow supervisor) adding his loyalty card number to random reservations, then deleting it out of the system after the reservation had checked out – but this meant his loyalty card was accruing points and also nights towards reward tier status. He stacked up thousands upon thousands of points that he was then converting into Visa Gift Cards (aka cash).

    But the most Machiavellian part of this was that I discovered this because I was testing out if it was possible for ME to do the same thing. The answer was yes, but you had to delete the loyalty card number in TWO places, not just one, to actually wipe the card from the reports that we ran. I didn’t actually do this. Instead I reported my co-worker, who got fired.

    I regret it to this day. Instead I should have told him I caught him, and we should have agreed to cover for each other. What can I say? We were making shit money in a shit job, but I did learn a valuable lesson that defrauding your employer is NOT a good path to follow or a way to advance your career!

    2. Sales Geek*

      Back in the earlier part of my career I worked with a Very Large Customer in the (U.S.) financial sector. This customer had somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 locations and my employer was the chosen vendor to
      completely update the computer systems at each location. Part of this update was to train the army of service technicians that were assigned to some number of these locations around the country. These technicians would be brought into corporate HQ for a week-long training session on the new systems. It was “hundreds” of technicians and the customer decided to have them all visit our little town for the training. There wasn’t enough hotel space for all of them so they’d be brought in for training in small groups (fifty or sixty).

      One of my coworkers was given the job of setting up the logistics for the training. That included setting up the hotel arrangements for the technicians. For reasons I don’t understand this was contracted out to our company rather than being done by the customer’s corporate travel team.

      This was a juicy pieced of business for any of the small hotels. My colleague negotiated the prices with the largest of the bunch. One thing he negotiated was that all the room reservations for the service technicians would be made using my colleague’s award number with this hotel chain. So he got points for every room booked at this hotel for the several weeks’ of training. My rough guess is fifty to sixty rooms booked Monday through Friday for six weeks.

      After the training was over his boss gave him some extra time off for “all his hard work.” He used the points obtained from the training sessions to take his large family to a five-star hotel in Hawaii for two weeks.

      His rationale — for what it’s worth — was that A) he got a decent room rate for the customer and B) handling of the hotel loyalty points wasn’t explicitly mentioned in the contract or in any of the directives from our management.

      1. Mad Harry Crewe*

        See, I don’t have a problem with that at all. Presumably if any of those techs had loyalty numbers, they could have mentioned it at the desk and gotten it swapped out. Otherwise, nobody lost out on this deal (including the hotel chain – this is part of their business model), and your coworker gained quite a bit.

        I used to work in travel and we went on “familiarization” trips every few years. The air travel was purchased by my employer. Before the first one, my director was very clear that if I didn’t already have a frequent flyer number for the airline we were using, I should absolutely get one and add it to the reservation.

      2. Happy Pineapple*

        I used to work at a small firm where one of the owners (who was also the firm’s accountant) would do something like this. Just about all of the purchases made for the office, whether for computers, the Internet bill, catered lunches, client gifts, or stationary went through her personal credit card rather than our corporate card so that she could get reward point and frequent flyer miles.

  55. ThatGirl*

    In the early 2010s I was a contractor for a big company that hired a lot of content management contractors; if you were competent, you usually got to stay and be considered for FTE, but if you were crappy they could cut you loose quickly. We worked pretty standard schedules, though we had some flexibility, but it was expected to be a 40 hr/week job.

    There was one contractor, Bob, who was also a part-owner of a local coffee chain franchise. He’d bring in those coffee boxes occasionally as a little treat and sometimes other treats. We thought that was the extent of it. Then he started taking more Work From Home days — which were allowed, they weren’t super picky about it, but generally you needed a reason, like “the weather sucks” or “my car is in the shop” or something. Then I started hearing rumblings about people not being able to get ahold of him by phone, other things like that. Long story short, he was trying to run his coffee shop while ALSO getting his content work done and … it was not to be.

    2. NotAnotherManager!*

      I believe I raised an actual glass of wine to this OP and genuinely hope they are enjoying the sweetest revenge of a life well-lived. I am generally not a fan of no-notice walk outs, but I’m even less of a fan of demoting a longstanding employee and reducing their pay on a few hours notice in favor of a clearly incompetent nepotism hire. The former employer deserved exactly what they got and more.

  57. Not trying to be rude, just good at it*

    Windows 98 was the new hot operating system and most folks were still trying to figure out these new fangled computer thingies.

    I had an awful administrator who liked to bully his reports. He tried it on me and told me to fall in line or he would fire me. I did a lot of the IT tech work and smiled at him. He asked what was so funny. I replied, “When security is walking me out the door on my last day, the FBI will be coming to take you and your computer to a deep dark place. Your life will be ruined and I will be on to a new adventure.”

    He got fired. I didn’t.

    2. Mad Harry Crewe*

      Was it a setup, or was he actually doing something illegal? I’m guessing the second…

      1. Not trying to be rude, just good at it*

        It was a setup and it was a bluff. I would never do anything illegal. He didn’t know that and didn’t expect pushback.

    3. Wait, What?*

      Were… were you threatening to plant incriminating materials on his computer? That’s actually rather disturbing.

      1. Workerbee*

        My assumption was that the evil administrator was already incriminating himself and the OP knew it, or it was a lucky shot.

        1. Wintermute*

          Yup, it’s a high-percentage shot with a certain type of manager in a certain type of place if you just say “I know everything” they’ll assume you could put them in jail for a decade.

          I am very glad I don’t work any of those places and all of my managers and coworkers have been ethical and professional… but I have had friends other places where they had to have a semi-official “don’t tell me, I don’t want to know, if I find out I will have to tell someone because I am not going to go to jail for you and I am not making any money out of your schemes, just. don’t. tell. me.” policy

      2. Rob aka Mediancat*

        OP notes above that they were bluffing, but that the jerk administrator didn’t know that.

  58. Roz*

    I was working in a well-paying stable role at an established organization. I was stagnant though, and I wanted to develop skills in an adjacent area so when a job appeared I applied. It was an odd role and there were red flags, so I asked questions about funding and the team’s role with the organization, and was assured funding was annualized and it was a permanent position.

    Well, once I started in the role I knew something was off about what I was told. The Manager was unable to manage effectively and was cagey about some things. I dug around in the files and read the tea leaves and knew I had made a mistake. But my old role had been filled and I was stuck.

    Unfortunately, we got news 9 months in that our funding was cut and the team would be laid off. In that lay off meeting with HR I learned that these position were always intended to be contracts and that they didn’t consider us as part of the “Actual staff” the entire time. Yeah thanks for misleading me Manager! She was crying and made this scene, while I blankly stared at her with an “I know what you did” face.

    The part that hurt was I was 3 years into a Self funded leave plan where after 4 years I could take an unpaid year off. So I had to job search knowing I could only commit to a new job for 18months. Well… I’m beyond fortunate because not only did I find a comparable role at a similar organization, but my pay did not change and it was an 18month maternity leave contract (Canadian here), so my end date lined up perfectly with our original Self-Funded Leave start date.

    I have 6 months left on this contract, I love my manager, my team, and my role! I want to return, and they want me to return after the leave. And my manager is still without work. She got burned by her unscrupulous ways and tarnished reputation and I came out with extra skills, a marketable career progression and a nice story for explaining my layoff.

  59. Mrs. Vexil*

    In September 2017 I learned I’d need medical leave for 2 months starting November 1. In my absence the new-ish department director, who didn’t understand my job and didn’t like me, reorg-ed me to a department down the hall (from whence I’d come 8 years previously). I was told I’d be moving, the day after I got back from the leave. I think they did it while I was gone because there were a lot of valid questions and objections about workflow I would have raised. And the workflow has been rocky the past couple of years. The group left behind (6 of them) were given about 50% of my tasks, and it took about a year and a half for them to stop contacting me all day every day about how to do the tasks they took over.
    All this would have provoked a lot of feelings and rage in me say, 20 years ago but I am close enough to retirement now, and am so over the world of office politices, I can’t bother. That director left the company last summer…something about spending time with her family. I’ve outlasted so many managers there in 21 years, if it were a bracket I’d be in the Final Four. If not the championship.

    1. LurkNoMore*

      Love that analogy!! After a retirement next month, I’m down to three people in the company that have been there as long as I have. The Final Four!

      2. Corporate Survivor*

        We once realized corporate was using a very old “look at all our great employees” photo in current literature. We sat down and Xd out people who’d already been “voted off the island” and posted the photo in a corner to do the same every time someone left for greener pastures. Got down to 20% current employees before they changed the photo out.

  60. Birch*

    Jane was the leader of a small, new project team with zero real background in the field but a lot of resources. She was supervised by a more senior team leader, Jared, whose team specialized in a related topic. Jane hired several new people, one of whom, Tiffany, needed more guidance than the others. Jane started micromanaging Tiffany, forcing her to document more of her work than anyone else, screaming at her in meetings, humiliating her and gaslighting her in front of everyone else, calling her stupid and a waste of salary and refusing her legal breaks and vacation time while giving extra time to her favourites. Anyone who tried to help Tiffany got a target on their back and the same treatment. HR was consulted and did nothing. Tiffany was also working on a special project under Jared, who stood up for her against Jane. Jane threw a huge fit about this, complained about Jared and somehow managed to get him removed both as Tiffany’s supervisor and as her own supervisor, meaning that she had no one to answer to and Tiffany had no one on her side with any power. Well, the ultimate higher-ups decided that was not OK, so they ended up forcing Jane to choose another supervisor for Tiffany’s project. Jane chose Tom, who nobody seemed to have heard of and who didn’t seem to have any skin in the game at all but had seniority over Jane. Tom, it turns out, thinks Tiffany’s ideas are great and has zero qualms about flat-out saying “no” to Jane, who can now do nothing but sit and seethe! Jane has now been a project leader for several years and has not completed a single project she set out to do, so I can only imagine that her behaviour is going to catch up with her eventually.

  61. cleo*

    Many years ago, in my 20s, I worked at a large family owned home goods / craft supplies type store.

    There was a salesperson in one of the more specialized departments that wanted to go to a training that the store manager did not want to pay for. She proceeded to page the store manager to her department every time she had a customer ask about the product she wanted the training in (think high end sewing machine or high end vacuum cleaner) just to make sure that she didn’t give the customer wrong information. After like a week or two of this, he sent her to the training like it was his idea.

    1. Firecat*

      My boss at first job out of college did something similar. She called it “share the lain” method.

      In our case, we were the front line for people’s bonuses. And the wealth team always made mistakes attributing the account to our staff. It was a huge problem and I would have to listen to, justifiably, irate people who were looking to lose $1,000 or more in quarterly bonus income.

      So after months of attempting to fix it together behind the scenes I was instructed to start CCing the wealth VP on every. Single. Complaint. Regarding the bonuses. It was fixed within a week.

    2. NotAnotherManager!*

      My team did something like that, though in my head, I classed it as forced malicious compliance.

      My team was quasi-IT, and the CIO (a negative, micromanaging buffoon), decided my team no longer needed admin or install rights on our computers and that all the standard network blocks should be in place for us. This made it very hard to do our job, which I tried to explain from a business need perspective. In one week, we placed over 50 calls to tech support to perform an action we were no longer authorized to do, and all were urgent, client-facing needs. I’m sure the CIO thought we were being assholes, but, really, they choked off a lot of our ability to do our job and we were falling further and further behind because we had to wait around for tech support to get to us.

      When the CIO strode over to my desk to tell me that my team was monopolizing too much of the tech support team’s time with our requests, I just happened to have a VIP whose client projects were being held up by this new rule and was frustrated enough to have come by personally to discuss what was going on. I hadn’t even opened my mouth to explain when the CIO started on his diatribe, and the VIP immediately read the CIO the riot act re (1) whether or not they understood what a client deadline was and why they were important and (2) why my team had suddenly been barred for doing work that they did routinely and well, causing substantial inconvenience to him, his colleagues, and his client. His parting shot was, “Your job is to make sure we have the resources to serve our customers, not to engage in petty power plays that impede business!”

      We got our rights back by COB that day.

      The CIO left us about a year later and got fired from his next job because of a massive system failure that prevented anyone in the org from getting email for nearly a week, and then it took him years to find another job (out of state to get, because his reputation was toast in our area).

  62. totally anonymous*

    Not sure if this counts or not but I thought I would add it. This isn’t my story but my mom’s. So growing up my mom worked for various handicap agencies in different roles. When I was about 17 she ended up leaving the profession because she was just burnt out. A lot of that had to do with the last place she worked. Let’s call it Hospitality House. This was a new private agency (not owned by the state but still has the same regulations) and the big boss didn’t know what he was doing but had all of the right credentials and that nice degree that the state likes. My mom with her 25+ years of experience could do laps around this guy and the other managers. But because she didn’t have the degree she couldn’t do their job. In fact, a person from another agency who had a similar title as big boss said that Mom could do his job much better but the state won’t allow actual work experience to allow people to do Big Boss job.
    Big Boss and his cronies would always come to Mom about how to file certain paperwork, what to do when the state says to do X, stuff that they should know. At the same time treating her and her client like Sh*t. Didn’t have heat in the room where they worked, would isolate her client because another client was having behaviors and yelling (instead of taking the client who was misbehaving out), changing work schedule at last minute, and generally just being bad. Her last straw with the company was that they wouldn’t even allow her off work to take care of me when I had major medical issues (they said “can’t you just drop her off at the doctor?” when she needed to take me to a specialist over an hour away. Dad’s not in the picture so she was the only person who could take me and I WAS A MINOR! Granted I was 17 but I wasn’t allowed to be seen without her present. Plus it was a huge medical issue) just because Big Boss’s side chick crony didn’t want to change her weekend plans.
    Anyways she just put her head down and did as she was told. Then one day State comes to do some inspection. Totally normal type of inspection. They talk in private with all employees and make sure everything is up to snuff. Well, Big Boss gets worried. So does his cronies. They probably know that stuff isn’t right (having physical/mental handicapped people in dangerous situations and without heat or bathroom access is generally looked down upon). Well, she goes to the interview and she is completely honest. Talks about all the stuff that is wrong. Building issues, treatment of clients, all that. But is sweet as pie and doesn’t say it in a blaming way. just matter of fact. Like she doesn’t know what can happen. Well after her interview Big Boss kept asking her what she said, what state asked in the interview. Which is illegal. She said, I can’t tell you, but I answered truthfully.
    So basically she doesn’t do anything but tell the truth and lets Boss hang himself.
    Well she quit soon after and that company was gone within 6 months and Big Boss has not been seen in my town since.

  63. Anon For This Because Ethics*

    And another, not mine, but my sister:

    She was the Executive Assistant to partners at a Giant Law Firm (very famous one). She caught one of the partners she supported embezzling funds from the firm to pay for his mistress. She, being an extremely honest person with great integrity, reported this to the appropriate channels. Of course the partner was IMMEDIATELY fired. In the very same meeting where he was fired, he was immediately re-hired as an outside consultant.

    Another valuable life lesson – be more valuable to your employer than the money you “borrow.”

  64. Anon For This*

    My old company considered office politics to be a full-contact bloodsport, so do I have some stories for you!

    1) We were bringing on a massive new CRM suite that was going to revolutionize our global company’s entire infrastructure and business process. Two people were tasked to co-lead the implementation, and then one would be promoted to product manager with a two-step grade bump and a massive salary hike. During the last month of the implementation, something went horribly wrong and the a bunch of data was deleted from the system. It was catastrophic, the whole company came to a standstill, and the project looked like it was going to be derailed. And the magically, a week later, one of the co-leads needed to check out a loaner laptop from our IT department and JUST HAPPENED to find all the missing data on that laptop. And it JUST HAPPENED to look like the person who had sabotaged the project was his other co-lead. So he became the hero, saved the project, and got the promotion. His co-lead was fired and she was blackballed in our industry because my company had a scorched earth policy of destroying the reputation of anyone and everyone who left.

    Our IT department tried to defend her and repeatedly protested that, uh, no, that’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works. But the magical hero was part of the Good Old Boys Club: Millennial Edition, and he just kept getting promoted while people who worked with him kept quitting for mysterious reasons.

    2) A friend of mine got a new manager who openly said during his first week that he wanted to bring over his right hand from his old company and give him my friend’s job. My friend was a consistent star performer with 9 years of glowing performance reviews from a variety of managers to back him up. He was beloved by his department, his department was one of the top 5 performing departments in our entire company, and to top it all off my friend is a genuine sweetheart who just earnestly wants to do a good job. Basically a dream employee, and someone other managers had been trying to poach for years.

    My friend is also part of two different protected classes, so while we are an at-will employment state, between this guy’s performance history and minority status, if the new manager was going to fire him he needed to have at least some kind of a paper trail. So the new manager put my friend on a PIP. Which was blank. Yes, I saw it. Yes, our HR signed off on a blank PIP. Yes, my friend was told that he had a choice between signing a blank PIP right there in front of our HR Rep and his manager or being fired on the spot.

    Needless to say, my friend was fired in about 10 days. The good news is he got a FANTASTIC new job in an industry he loves, and he was able to hire on most of his old team at his new (better paying, better benefits, shorter commute) company. Living well really is the best revenge!

    3) This one is something I did. I was in charge of reviewing and approving expenses for several departments. One of the people whose expenses I had to review was, to be blunt, a racist, sexist, abusive nightmare. He routinely sabotaged the work of others, terrorized my team, and on occasion broke things in his boss’s office when he threw his daily temper tantrums. He was also one of our top sales people and part of the Good Old Boys Club: Generation X Edition, so his managers were not allowed to fire him.

    For everyone else, I was accommodating, understanding, and would go the extra mile to make sure they had everything they needed to be successful. For him? Malicious compliance. All day, every day.

    I refused to approve any expense, even a pack of gum or a cup of coffee, without a receipt. I refused to approve any expense past our 30 day window. I refused to approve any expense that did not adhere to our very specific and comprehensive reimbursement policy. If he asked for 100 brochures, even though he was traveling to a convention where our reps typically went through 1,000, he only got 100. At one point, he openly stole $5,000 in booth swag from my office, and I determined that that would be his allocation for swag for the next FIVE YEARS. Because that is precisely how long it would take to go through that much swag on a normal basis.

    You see, I was also untouchable, because I was very good at my job and I was our division VP’s personal problem solver and right hand. So it didn’t matter how much this guy screamed and cried and begged. If I said he couldn’t have something, then that was unfortunately the way it had to be.

    My favorite moment was the time he wanted a $1,500 Bluetooth headset to make calls. Our other sales reps all had very nice, top of the line $350 headsets. But this guy had met a tech CEO at Burning Man who had this headset, so it was the only one he could possibly use to do his job going forward. For some context, it was also the height of the Great Recession, we were hemorrhaging jobs, he hadn’t been making his quotas, and even our CEO didn’t have something like this because it was completely out of touch with our company norms.

    I let him know that I could not approve this expense. He threw a fit and brought in his boss. His boss told him that we couldn’t approve this expense, and to back off. He threw another fit. So I said that if he would put his request in writing, with his signature, that I would see what I could do.

    He did, while explaining to me that I was a good thing I was finally learning my place. (Which was, incidentally, above him in both title and pay grade.)

    So because I do keep my word, I set out to see what I could do. Specifically, I dropped it on our VP’s desk while he was out at an emergency budget meeting. With a note attached explaining the specs of our typical headsets. On top of the report of everyone’s sales numbers for the month.

    When I have a bad day, the memory of the HELL that rained down upon that horrible little man still keeps me warm at night. Did he lose his job? No, not over that incident. But he did avoid messing with me or a member of my team for a blissful six months. And I still made him bring a receipt in for every pack of gum.

    5. Blinx*

      This… is just beautiful!! Especially since you did nothing out of line — merely did your job to the nth degree.

  65. Annie Nonny Muss*

    This is a dangerous question! I’m sure I’ll look like a disgruntled employee, but I can’t help but mention the time my newish Department Head tried to fire me.

    I worked for my company for 3 years. Got perfectly nice reviews (usually 3s with a 4 thrown in there). Nothing outstanding, but I was a solid worker. We had a shady DH. I didn’t participate in the gossip of the shady DH, which apparently was mistaken for collusion of some kind. When he got fired, we got a new person and I was summarily put on the short list of people to get rid of. I was passed over for promotion, but given no feedback about how to improve my chances. I asked if there were things I needed to improve or issues and was told I did my job, but didn’t go above and beyond. (My boss wouldn’t share specifics, concerned at “outing” those who might have complained about me) At which point, I started looking for a job.

    But, in the meantime, I submitted a self-assessment and it took another 6 months for them to get their side done. At which point, I was I was given the worst review one could get. (Everything was rated the lowest score, except for team player, which got me a 2, because I would routinely agree to do the projects no one would do). I was then put on a PIP. I submitted a rebuttal, but went along with the PIP. Several times I asked my boss to approve a class or a workshop designed to improve areas they called out. I was approved to attend only one. I had a sit down with HR, where I was told getting passed over for a promotion is a signal there’s a problem. (which would have been fair, except I specifically asked if there was a problem at the time).

    I quit my job one week later, after I was offered a great gig somewhere else, one that was exceptional (in hindsight, it really couldn’t have been a better way out). I didn’t tell them about the new job I got. I was feeling salty. Several years later, my boss got fired (from what I heard, she faced a very similar scenario… the DH must have gotten tired of her as well).

  66. Barbara Eyiuche*

    My boss was the owner of a law firm. One of the lawyers was raking in the money – easily two million dollars a year. Of course, half goes to the firm. One reason he did so well was he was an immigrant and they advertised his services on the local radio station that broadcast in his language to the large immigrant population from the same country. The lawyer occasionally mentioned he could make more money elsewhere. My boss really didn’t want to lose him, so he made a deal with the radio station owner: the only law firm or lawyer they could run ads for was my boss’ firm. So if the lawyer ever left, he would be unable to run ads for himself on this radio station, the one that was generating all his leads. AFAIK, the lawyer does not know anything about this, and will only find out when he quits.

    1. LCH*

      i think he would be fine if he quit, attorneys get a lot of work via word of mouth. so if someone in this community is looking for an attorney that speaks their first language, they would hear about him and go looking.

    2. TiffIf*

      My boss really didn’t want to lose him, so he made a deal with the radio station owner: the only law firm or lawyer they could run ads for was my boss’ firm.

      If that isn’t already illegal under anti-trust laws or something, it should be. Did he give a kickback to the station? Otherwise I don’t see how this “deal” could be called such.

      1. Ally McBeal*

        Seriously. That’s some real Cellino-and-Barnes-level petty. What in the world did the station manager receive in order to make that kind of a deal?

  67. Virtual cheese*

    Once upon a time I was the admin for one location of twin offices. The company was going paperless and we were tasked digitizing an enormous amount of decades-old files. One day, to my surprise, SEVEN big boxes of files showed up in the mail for me. The other admin? Had gone paperless by shipping all her location’s files to me.

  68. Cobblestone*

    This is a rather silly story, but it’s about chocolate, so.

    I shared an office with two others in a backroom that used to be a storage space down the hallway away from most of my other coworkers. The building itself had several different teams, who would often walk down the hallway. We kept our office door open since the three of us would often get our coworkers coming to us to talk about work. Everyone else had cubicles, so it was often easier for them to come and talk to us in our office rather than having a discussion in the open office plan.

    I started bringing in candy for a treat since other than work, we would often miss out on the socialization. So this particular week, I brought in a bunch of individually wrapped Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups (no one was allergic to peanut butter in our team). Lacking an actual dish, I would just pile them on the filing cabinet close to the door. Due to the office set up of our computer screens, our backs were to the door, and we couldn’t see who came into the office unless we turned around. Most of my coworkers were glad to take a piece and say hello, which was my intention.

    However, one mysterious person would grab a piece and leave, and not say hello. I would hear the crinkle of the wrapper, but when I turned around, no one was there. This happened several times, and I began to suspect it was one of the other people in the building, and not one of our coworkers (all quite friendly). This person would have to deliberately step into our office and grab the candy and leave, so there’s no way they thought it was a free for all or provided by the company.

    Having mentioned my suspicions to my supervisor, a huge fan of peanut butter chocolate (less for him if mysterious people keep on eating it!), he proceeded to eat a Cup, and methodically taped it back together. He placed the empty wrapper, looking like it was full, nearest to the door with the other ‘real’ cups and left. I thought this was brilliant.

    Soon enough, as I was tapping away at my computer, I heard the wrinkle of a wrapper. I quickly turned around, but the mysterious person — and the empty wrapper — was gone. HOWEVER, what I did hear was the garbage can in the hallway being loudly (and I assume angrily) slammed closed, and footsteps stomping off. I darted into the hallway to see the culprit, but I didn’t see anyone (there were lots of corners the mysterious person could have disappeared down). I went back to my computer, and messaged my supervisor to thank him for the trap, all the while absolutely shaking with suppressed laughter.

    Mysterious person never stole my candy again.

  69. The Prettiest Curse*

    I once did something accidentally Machiavellian. Early in my career, I had a temp job working in HR at a university. I accidentally mis-placed a file with some important hiring paperwork for a professor, and it became A Big Thing.
    Just before I messed up, another temp (who was a bully and a very unpleasant person) joined the team. And I can’t remember how, but the file going missing got blamed on her instead of me, probably because she was new. She got in trouble but (alas) didn’t get fired. (Luckily, she never worked out that it was my mistake.)
    If my mistake had been blamed on someone else who wasn’t a bully, I would have absolutely spoken up and admitted it. But because she was such an awful person, I never said anything and nobody ever worked out it was me. Moral of this story: be nice to your colleagues.

    1. Sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss*

      Yes, be nice to your colleagues.

      Suzie Q was a hardworking, dedicated worker. Her direct supervisor was a bully with a lot of charm and related to the owners. Suzie Q’s job back then involved hole punching documents for filing in binders.

      Suzie Q saved the confetti in envelopes for MONTHS.

      We waited for Suzie Q’s boss to go on lunch one day, and it was generally quiet in the office and spread that confetti over every inch of her bullying boss’ desk, her shoes and her desk drawers.

      Then we returned to our desks and waited.

      And quietly smiled as the boss raged over the confetti. She was such a bully, and Suzie Q such a quiet, and mistaken for meek, person, boss never suspected it was her.

      Don’t be mean to those who do your grunt work and do it well.

      1. The Prettiest Curse*

        Oh, that sounds awesome. The use of the hole-punch confetti was a really nice touch!

  70. movie theater anon*

    In high school I worked at a movie theater. We had a special where you got a free candy with one popcorn and two drinks (which all had to be a specific size). My theater ran a contest to give prizes to the concession stand workers who sold the most specials.

    When someone would order just one popcorn or just one drink of right size. I would tell them their total and make change (this was when theaters were still cash only) without ringing them up, but I would track the sale. Then when I had the right combination of popcorn and drinks, I would ring it up as a special. This meant that not only did I get to log the special with my sales, but I also had to take the candy for myself or our inventory would come our wrong.

    I won every contest at the theater and brought home dozens of boxes of free candy. My coworkers had no idea how I was selling so many specials.

    1. Dragon_Dreamer*

      I’m sorry… this one just feels dishonest to me. What would have happened if your drawer had been audited or someone had seen the incorrect total on the register? Too much chance of things going wrong.

      1. movie theater anon*

        Yes, I agree. I wouldn’t do it again! (To be clear, my drawer was always right on cash. None of this involved charging customers anything different or paying the company anything different. It was still totally dishonest.)

      2. General von Klinkerhoffen*

        But the right amount of money would have gone into the till and the right amount of stock was turned over.

        eg popcorn and drinks are each $1 but in the deal you get popcorn plus two drinks plus candy for $3.

        Customer 1 buys popcorn and one drink. Anon puts those in the till and subtotals to $2; customer hands over $2 which Anon puts in the drawer; when customer leaves, Anon holds the transaction. Time passes, other customers are served. The next time a customer orders a single drink, Anon revives the saved transaction and charges $1. The system now reconciles the $3 in the drawer with the popcorn, two drinks, and candy which Anon helpfully eats.

        Anon would have to be careful to close off that hanging transaction at shift end, and it only works for cash only without receipts, but yeah it wouldn’t show up as a discrepancy.

        Er, still wrong, and not likely to work now that people use cards far more and tills are cleverer, but it rings true to me.

    2. The Engineer*

      Had there been a loss control person you would have been flagged. That same technique is used to steal from the register.

  71. Alex*

    I once had a new coworker who was weird in ways that could jeopardize our business (think, not washing their hands in a food service setting because it made their hands “feel weird”). They were also unreliable, leading to me pulling overtime to cover. So in one of our shift we shared, I talked some crap about our also-reliable assistant manager. The next time the manager asked this coworker to cover, the coworker went off, and I heard it from our general manager who didn’t know what I had done, and the coworker used one of the exact phrases I had used in talking crap. Coworker got fired, and we continued our string of unreliable coworkers and I pulled overtime until I finally left that toxic place. But at least I could trust the food!

  72. Kasia*

    At a temp job years ago, part of my job was to update a tracking system with the most up to date status of each site we were working on. Generally, coworker A would update an excel spreadsheet with the most up to date information and I would go into our system and make the same update. These sites updated very frequently so we just worked off the same excel spreadsheet. Coworker B decided it was better to print the excel spreadsheet out and give it to me to then put the information into our system. I tried to explain that this only captures one moment in time and if it took me more than an hour to input the information it would be out of date (it could take up to a day). She insisted I do it her way.

    So for days I purposefully input incorrect information into the system with a note saying “PER COWORKER B’S SPREADSHEET THAT SHE PRINTED….”. I would even over-write information that had been input by someone else after she printed her spreadsheet knowing it was wrong.

  73. Brett*

    Many years ago, right after dropping out of college, I worked at a McDonald’s. This McDonald’s was actually the third franchise ever issued and its building was the oldest McDonald’s building in the midwest.

    It had no drive thru, no holding bins, no microwaves. (The food, incidentally, tested fantastic since it was all fresh cooked.) It did have 6 registers, a huge expediting area (where you put the order together), and a massive lobby with brass and wood railings.

    Every year, there would be a midwest region drive thru competition covering two weeks. The metric for the competition is two-part, how low can you get your drive thru lunch time order time, and how much can you improve it. But since we had no drive thru (similar to airport McDonald’s) we had special rules where the throughput rate of our lunchroom was used in place of drive thru times.

    Our store GM came up with an ingenious plan to game the system and win the entire midwest region (which was a six figure shared bonus for the managers).

    Day 1, he runs all of lunch with one register and one expeditor. Since it is a tough hard day, he puts himself on register and one of his other managers on expediting. We run around 3 minutes per order, which is still very fast (lobby orders normally are much faster than drive thru).
    Day 2, he adds another register only when lines get long, keeping to one register as much as possible.
    Day 3, he goes up to full time two registers.
    Day 4, he adds another expeditor, and it goes on from there. At some point in there, he starts running specials as well to get customer volume up.

    Day 14, he is running a 2 for 1 special on quarter pounders with the quarter pounder grill doubled up an a fully staffed kitchen. He has all six registers running with his six faster register people and four managers running the expedite station. The expediters are assembling the orders of people in line before they order as well. We are losing money every second (with the owner’s approval) while running a massive volume.

    We end up breaking 30 seconds per order. That time is impossible for drive thru to match. We cut our time by over 80%, also impossible for a real drive thru to match. We win the entire midwest region and the managers get their huge bonus and throw a party for the employees.

    2. OkapiFeels*

      My favorite part is how the managers took on all the really grueling work involved in this! This is hilarious as well as heartwarming.

      1. Bryce*

        That’s what sells it as a story of excellence IMO, with (with the owner’s approval) as a close second.

  74. Hills to Die On.*

    Karl was trying to compete with me to lead my project, and when Karl didn’t do his job, he would tell our boss that I had done it – why don’t you ask Hills the status of it? My boss would send me scrambling for this while he and Karl did the high-level, fun work for the project.
    Okay, fine.
    Pulled the same thing on Karl – who wasn’t good at this piece of work and watched him struggle with it for 2 days while I did my regular job – the high-level, fun work Karl had been trying to take over.
    We also had to call Karl at home, who was drunk, caught not working from home as he said he was, and bizarrely rude and aggressive about having been caught not doing the work we urgently needed.
    Karl didn’t mess with me after that.

  75. ScienceLady*

    When I used to teach (middle school), we had a student who was incredibly mischievous (and funny, which is a hard combo to keep a straight face with). His homeroom teacher was a close colleague of mine, a truly wonderful person who was also very prim and extremely type A about neatness and cleanliness. An out-of-place pen could set her on a re-organization and cleaning spree. Like the rest of us, she vacillated between love and annoyance for this kid, who came from a really rough background.

    One day, that student had been out of class during his homeroom teacher’s class period. She was walking around checking on students when she noticed a smell and assumed someone has pooped their pants. She’s walking around, faintly sniffing to see who needed help, and then get’s to the student’s desk, which predictably has papers and messiness sticking out. Taking advantage of his absence to neaten his things, she goes to pull out the loose sheets of paper…and all of the contents slide out in one clump. The student had smuggled a milk carton out of the cafeteria, poked holes in it, stuff tissues in the holes, and let the milk slowly effervesce out and turn into a moldy, curdled mass in his desk.

    She cleans it all up, sanitizes his desk, and finally gets the room less evil-smelling by the end of the day. When the student came back in, he shouts, “Who touched my stuff?” [no indoor voice for that one]. When she said, “I did, student, I cleaned out your desk.” He said, “Oh!”, paused, and then said, “Did you get the milk I left ya?”

    Oh, middle schoolers. I miss and do not miss them every day.

    1. Mad Harry Crewe*

      In first or second grade, one of my classmates forgot a slice of cheese in his desk for weeks. When we finally located the source, he was “Stinky Stewart” for the rest of the year. In retrospect, I’m sure that really sucked and I feel bad for him.

  76. Maxie's Mommy*

    My lawyer husband and I were having lunch in a tearoom, not a typical “big shot lawyer” downtown restaurant. Behind us was an associate of another firm, who was chortling to his buddy about how he was going to leave his firm and steal its clients, his senior partner was useless, etc. Apparently all this was going to go down soon. We waited until the associate left the restaurant, then spouse called the senior partner on his cell phone (they had co-chaired an event). Husband explained what he had heard, and the “doddering senior partner” thanked him and leapt into action. By the time the associate returned to his office, the contents of his desk, his tennis clothes, and a final paycheck were in the glass conference room…..along with the partner and the managing partner. “Doddering” called us later that day to tell us how the color drained out of smug associate’s face when he was sacked.

    2. Richard Hershberger*

      Associate forgot one of the fundamental rules of the practice of law: It is a small town, with small town gossip.

      1. Alice's Rabbit*

        When concocting and enacting a nefarious plot, do not discuss said seem with anyone who is not vital to its implementation.
        Also, when chatting with those who do need to know, have those conversations in private. Like, really private, not a restaurant or walking down the street.

  77. Lora*

    Youse guys. I work for Big Pharma.

    It is not exactly evil the way the general public thinks. All the evil is boring human ways. Our Marketing departments pass a lot of bribes and hard-sell off-label uses for sure, but they are very walled-off from the rest of the company. Us nerds even have separate holiday parties which are definitely not the lavish affairs you’re imagining.

    So this is kind of a comeuppance thing: I was working at a company that had been acquired by the Little Blue Pill Factory. At the time the CEO of the Little Blue Pill Factory was a corporate lawyer type, and by all accounts he was a Personality. The COO had been in Operations for three decades for the LBPF, whereas the CEO was more of a Johnny-Come-Lately whose accomplishments consisted of working on mergers and acquisitions. In Town Hall Meetings, the COO would do a big fake smile to the CEO’s face, and literally as soon as the CEO turned away, the COO’s face would transform into the angriest scowl you ever saw. In Acquired Company, our CEO (who retired after the takeover) was often quite frank and open with us, allowing any question at the company-wide meetings, while LBPF CEO accepted only three of the most softball butt-licking questions you ever did hear. It was obvious there was something going on, but in the confusion of the acquisition it was hard to tell what.

    One Monday we came in to a company wide email that the CEO was gone. That’s it. There was no explanation of why, personal reasons or anything, it just said the CEO was gone effective Sunday night. There was no “and _____ will be the interim CEO” or anything like that.

    There were two gossip sites for employees online and one internal discussion board, and the rumor was that there was an affair with the HR lady as she appeared to have been covering up complaints and was getting a much more generous compensation package, including use of a company helicopter for regular commuting, than would normally be offered even to C-levels. It turned out to be a lot more than that. There was some reporting in business news outlets.

    Mr Personality had been driving everyone who worked in his general vicinity bonkers. He screamed, he threw tantrums, he micro managed, he insulted, he called people in the middle of the night to yell at them, he said inappropriate things to women. Fully half of the C-levels were ready to turn in their resignation and some already had. He had laid off and re-org’ed huge swaths of R&D and, predictably, R&D hadn’t come up with much in the past 7-10 years due to the disruption in programs that typically take 10 years to pay off.

    But back to the HR head for a moment: When other C-levels added up her compensation, it turned out she had been taking home so much money that it had to be reported publicly. To the point that it sorta looked like embezzling…and she had been fired for exactly that at her previous job. And CEO was sheltering her and giving her anything she wanted. For *ahem* unclear reasons, because she seemed broadly incompetent at, like, HR stuff: protecting the company from labor based lawsuits, administering benefits, heading off unionization campaigns etc. And she lied chronically, about everything, to everyone, in a way that drove the entire HR group bananas. This is problematic for a company having huge layoffs every three months to pay off their acquisition costs.

    One day the new corporate lawyer and the COO had HAD IT. I don’t know what set them off, there were sooooo many things going on with layoffs and re-orgs that it could have been any number of things. But they contacted the board of directors together, which included the previous CEO, and said “it’s him or me – if you don’t get rid of this clown, we will leave and you will have literally only this thieving HR idiot left to run the whole place.” Lawyer had a job offer from another company, COO was set to retire. That was a Friday.

    The board had an emergency meeting Saturday. Sunday they told CEO to get his butt on a plane and meet them at the airport and explain himself. Dude had apparently never been held accountable for anything in his whole life (oh, to have the privileges of race, gender and class!) and MELTED DOWN. Like, completely lost it, started with his yelling antics and drama and the board members just looked at each other and said, nope. You’re fired. Bye. They then called the COO and begged him not to retire and please would he be so good as to run the company.

    COO ended up doing an okay job, things calmed down a lot and although the next rounds of layoffs for a couple of years were still tumultuous it did finally become a sorta-OK place to work, though I moved on to another offer within a year that was a promotion.

    1. Lora*

      Now, for a thing *I* did:

      I have had a few Really Bad Bosses. Not unlike Clown CEO in personality, with the added bonus of harassing every woman in sight. Really Bad Bosses felt they were not hired to be friends with anyone, and tried to play games blaming other people for their mistakes etc.

      I, on the other hand, did not have rich parents, a name-brand diploma or a Good Ole Boys network to help me out at work, I had to get jobs on merit and build my own network that was not Big University Alumni Yacht Club. I am friendly and polite and try to be outgoing and charming at networking type events, and made a point of seeking out networking events frequently, taking people up on guest speaker offers (I did Toastmasters in college, I am a very good guest speaker), so I have quite a broad network. Very, very broad network. I know half the East Coast and a lot of the West Coast and a nonzero amount of Europe, in my field.

      When Bad Bosses inevitably apply for a job somewhere else, someone in my network calls me up: Hey, you worked with Bad Boss, he has applied for a position here, what are your thoughts? “I will be honest with you, he was bad. He did X, Y and Z, there was high turnover, it was a real problem. My understanding is he was let go with cause for A, B and C but there were plenty of reasons to get rid of him.” (All 100% true and verifiable.) They reply, do you think he might be alright in a role where does something completely different? “Does it involve contact with other humans in any way, especially anyone who might be female?” OK thanks for letting us know.

      They face long periods of unemployment, eventually get a lower-level job outside the field they spent many years getting advanced BigName University degrees in. If they are able to get another job in the field, it’s at a small startup, making a lot less money.

    2. JustaTech*

      Oh, the machinations of the business side of Pharma!

      This isn’t my story but the story of many of my coworkers. In my region there was a biotech that was working on novel treatments for very serious heart conditions. It was a very focused company, like, regularly met with patients focused. And then one of their drugs turns out to be a new little blue pill. The CEO (and everyone else) thinks, Great! We can sell this stuff to fund our heart research.

      But then *something* happened and that CEO is out, and a new guy is brought in. New CEO says “we’ve got to partner with a bigger company to actually make this stuff”, which, ok, sure. So new CEO sells the whole company to a Giant Pharma, lays off the entire research staff, dumps the rest of their IP (the heart stuff that they really cared about), takes his golden parachute and runs.
      Giant Pharma makes bank, heart patients get nothing, and the market is flooded with researchers who didn’t even get severance.

      While it’s not the worst implosion of a biotech in my region (that was the one that took everyone out to lunch and when they got back the doors were padlocked shut and their stuff had to be mailed to their homes) it made everyone in biotech in the region a whole lot more wary of “mergers” and a whole lot more likely to jump ship at the first sign of shenanigans.

      1. Richard Hershberger*

        This is a variant on the sad old story that many companies can be gutted for short term gain, often destroying decades’ work building up value. In this instance, assuming the company was publicly traded, I wonder if an “activist investor” got involved. Or if closely held, this is simply the owners cashing out.

        1. JustaTech*

          Yeah, it’s annoyingly common in biotech. Or maybe it’s more annoying *in* biotech because the work is about people’s health.
          The closest interaction I’ve had with this was when I was at my husband’s cousin’s wedding in Mexico. We’re staying at this resort with extremely limited wifi and one of the groomsmen will not stop hitting on my husband. And part of his hitting on my husband is talking up his amazing biotech company and how he’s this amazing CEO. I’m skeptical, but because there’s no wifi I can’t look him up. When we get back to the states I find out that 1) he’s married and 2) he completely tanked a company with a very promising artificial liver.

  78. Penny*

    Years ago, I was working for a company in a role that used a lot of paper and employees would have to go to an older inkjet printer to print out, at times several pages of documents. For the most part, the employees were all in our 20s and while we would chat during the day, there was never a problem getting our work done. Our co-worker, who was several years older, made no secret of hating us. She used to say very rude, inappropriate things to us. For example, on one woman’s 27th birthday, upon learning that she didn’t have any children, the coworker told the birthday girl that her eggs were going to shrivel up and die if she didn’t have any kids immediately. Another co-worker was in a long term relationship and very much wanted to get engaged, and every Monday, the evil co-worker would come in and say, “no ring yet?” while checking her hand. Well eventually, someone got fed up with her and threw out something she printed from the printer. Then another co-worker repeated that. We all took turns throwing out her printouts because she was just awful. She couldn’t prove who it was because it was a different person by the printer each time. She called IT screaming that her stuff wasn’t printing and eventually started to sprint from her desk to the printer several times a day in a cartoon-ish fashion. It was ridiculously immature of us and mean, but man it was funny.

  79. Oryx*

    I worked as a solo librarian at a very small career college. Often, due to physical classroom shortage and computers, classes would be held in the library. Which was also very small.

    There were these two teachers who co-taught and the location for their class was the library and one was very, very chatty. One night, the students had a final exam. So the students are on the computers taking their final exam and Chatty Teacher is just talking up a storm, maybe a yard away from where her students are taking their tests. She’s not just talking a lot, she’s talking at normal volume. As the librarian, I calmly and politely suggest the teachers take their conversation out of the library and into the hallway as I’m sure their students would appreciate a quiet atmosphere for their test.

    Glaring at me, she shut up.

    The next night, she asks to speak to me in private. We go out into the hallway where she just lays into me about how I should never disrespect her like that in front of her students ever again. I might be the librarian and we might be in the library but it’s her class and she’s in charge.

    So she’s very strongly telling me how wrong it was for me to talk to her like that in front of her students. I just stand there and let her go on and on. I’m nodding and smiling in agreement, yes, you are so right how dare I advocate for your students during a final exam. Because what she didn’t know was that it was my last day.

    When she’s done, she stands there waiting for a response. I give her a huge smile and say “I promise, I will never, ever speak to you like that again in front of your students.”

    She smugly walks off, convinced she’s won this argument.

    An hour later I send out my “it’s been great to work with you all, I’ll miss you” email to the entire staff and leave.

  80. Eether Eyether*

    I was in my mid-20s (early 60s now) and working at a family-owned (I didn’t know better at the time!!) advertising agency. My boss was one of the owners and I was his admin. He was in his 60s and VERY old-fashioned, but not in a good way. Think misogynist, still lives with Mummy, never married, women don’t wear slacks to work–only dresses…His office was carpeted and he had a thick Oriental carpet over the wall to wall. One of my duties was to fill his water pitcher every day-he drank lots for some medical condition. I worked there for a couple of years until I just couldn’t stand it, or him, any longer. On my last day, I wore the shortest skirt I had–trust me it was short. I filled the pitcher per usual, walked into his office with the Very Full Pitcher and proceeded to trip over the Oriental carpet, which flung the contents of the pitcher onto his desk and him like a fire hose. The outfit was intentional, the water…who knows. It was a beautiful moment.

      1. HBJ*

        I think it’s because he thinks women have to wear dresses at work. Malicious compliance, she’s wearing a skirt, not pants!

  81. AndersonDarling*

    Way back in the day, I worked for a commercial real estate company that was run so poorly that it could have been a dark humor sitcom. There was a leasing agent that was the owners pet and could do no wrong, and he was an absolute jerk to everyone. I’ll call him Mr. Pet. He never did his paperwork, or anything that didn’t directly lead to a check.
    One day we get a call from an individual that saw a “for rent” sign and wants to tour the property. The property was not on “the list” of leasable properties. Turns out, it wasn’t a random guy calling, it was that building owner testing us because there had been no sales and he was paying a big fee for us to market it. It was one of Mr. Pet’s properties and he was blistering furious and marched around to see who took the call. By absolute chance, the call had rolled-over to the owner’s personal assistant-> the only person the owner loved more than Mr. Pet. And she knew exactly what she was doing. Mr. Pet tried to blame her, but she went right into the owner’s office and said Mr. Pet hadn’t updated “the list” in months and none of his properties were on it. In fact, it looked like he may have been trying to take the full commissions for himself since he never filed any of the internal paperwork to have them listed with the company.
    Because Mr. Pet kept trying to blame her, but all he was doing was exposing his shoddy work.
    Mr. Pet was a stuttering mess because there was no one to blame, and he got so mad that he burst a blood vessel in his eye. He had to do tours with a creepy red eye for days.
    I never really liked the owner’s personal assistant, but she was may hero that day.

      1. AndersonDarling*

        He was a monster and wanted to but the blame on anyone else, and it’s easy to put the blame on an admin. If I ended up taking the call, I would’ve been reamed about how I should have magically known about the property.

  82. straws*

    We had 2 employees doing the same job, such as inspecting teapots. One of the teapot inspectors was either threatened by or just disliked the other. So inspector 1 starts complaining a LOT about mistakes he’s found with inspector 2’s work. All the time, to everyone, and especially to his boss and our director. Eventually he’s taken seriously and I’m asked to review inspector 2’s work for errors. I’ve known inspector 2 for a very long time and she predated inspector 1 at the company by years. I know she’s solid. So I said sure, and while I’m at it I’ll also review inspector 1’s work. I did it blind, so I didn’t know whose work was whose until after the review, for extra measure/impact. Inspector 2’s work was fine. Inspector 1’s work, however, was terrible. Inspector 1 was let go after a review of the findings by management. I didn’t actually know his work was bad, I was honestly just expecting to have a good baseline comparison. But I wasn’t crying over his departure by that point either…

  83. Myrin*

    This is still happening and kind of on the backburner right now with other, corona-related incidents more prevalent right now, so I don’t have a conclusion yet but expect to get it in the more-or-less near future.

    To set the scene for those who don’t already know: I work part-time as a shelf-stocker at a local drugstore. My little sister also works there but while (even though I really do enjoy the job a lot) I’m just hanging in there until my actual field will hopefully pick up again sometime next year, she’s a fulltime retail professional and plans to stay at the store for a looong time.

    I’ve talked before about the store’s horrible assistant manager, Danielle. She’s a bully, a know-it-all, a liar, a condescending rumour-spreader; you name it, she got it. Our boss is a wuss who hasn’t addressed this behaviour in 16 years despite a multitude of complaints and we basically just hope that once boss retires in the next two-ish years, someone external will get her job and whip Danielle into shape, preferrably right outside the store’s doors.

    In any case: When my sister started working there, I had already warned her about Danielle’s machinations and she was very apprehensive about even meeting her, let alone working with her. Well, turns out she needn’t have worried about that because Danielle absolutely adores my sister. Like, pays her compliments and opens up about her innermost feelings and everything. We actually seriously consider that she might have a crush on my sister. According to everyone there, this has literally never happened before in all these years since she started there as a wee trainee; it consistently leaves everyone with their mouths open in disbelief.

    Well, to no one’s surprise, though, my sister hates Danielle, just like everybody who’s ever worked with her hates her. (Honestly, it would be sad if she weren’t such an absolute through arsehole.) And since no one has ever done anything about the horribleness that is Danielle, my sister has started having deep conversations with her about how the stress of the assistant position is clearly getting to her and how she should be focussing on her health more than her job (she has freely talked to my sister about the mental toll her position is taking on her but she also likes the relative “prestige” of it. And the money, of course.) and really, she could be doing something much less all-encompassing and strenous. And Danielle has actually felt emboldened by that to work fewer hours! Like, my sister called me right after that conversation to tell me that Danielle literally a minute before that had gotten up and gone to our boss to request a reduction in hours and duty.

    We’re now at that weird stage where Danielle is actually working too few hours to still be the assistant manager (several other regular staffers work more than her and also now share some duties with her that are actually supposed to only be done by the boss and her second) but somehow grandboss is kinda lax at addressing that, which is why I said this is still in the process of happening. Right at the moment, this whole thing is only visible by the fact that Danielle is now there one day less than before (which has so far often been the days I’ve been there, too, which is Very Good) but my sister is playing the long game and consistently convincing her of how much better her life would be somewhere else.

    2. Ally McBeal*

      You and the rest of the staff should take your sister out for drinks or give her a coffee gift card or something! That’s just fantastic.

  84. Blackcat*

    Setting: 1980, legal deposition.
    My mom was the attorney on one side of the case. Opposing counsel seemed highly disorganized, entirely relying on his secretary, Jane, who was saving his butt. Opposing counsel kept saying things like “Thank you, doll” and other gross things to the secretary.
    My mom left the deposition and went straight to her office manager/head secretary since she knew her firm (big one) was understaffed. She confirmed they were hiring.
    Then my mom called Jane, complimented her work and handed over the phone to the office manager. 30 minutes later, Jane was offered a new job at my mom’s firm. Jane started less than a week later, expressing gratitude to get away from her lecherous boss.

    My mom won the case, in no small part because opposing counsel couldn’t function without Jane.

      1. Blackcat*

        My mom found the “old boys club” of law to be really, really tough. She built a lot of friendships with secretaries, both at her firm and others, and as a result, she got more work done in less time than a lot of her peers.
        Unfortunately she was pushed out of her firm after having kids :/

    3. Phony Genius*

      I can’t help but wonder whether her greater motivation was to help Jane, or to win the case. Either way, both were achieved.

      1. Blackcat*

        That’s exactly why I thought it fit here. In her telling, she wanted to help Jane. But I know my mom and she can be super cutthroat. I’m sure it was at least a bit of both.

        1. The Engineer*

          Always important to remember that the Judge isn’t determining right and right, but winner and looser.

    4. Slow Gin Lizz*

      Your mom is my hero. This is fantastic. [Unrelated: I have a black cat sleeping next to me right now and your username is also fantastic.]

  85. GrumpyLaydee*

    I have a lovely boss who is a great person but not a great manager. I’ve been trying to get goals set for over a year, and I’m due a promotion so she finally relented but with a twist: ‘write what you think they should be and we’ll discuss’.

    Okie dokie chief.

    So I pulled together a document where I explained what I saw the difference between my role and the more senior role. Boss is throughly impressed, saying nobody ever went to that extent to discuss goals with her.

    I then listed the responsibility differences between both roles and again she’s nodding enthusiastically saying that’s exactly right, brilliant, thank you for pulling this together. She asked me if I got the info from (non-existent) internal documents, I smiled and said ‘Oh no, this is from job listing and information from recruiting websites since I didn’t have a lot to go on’.

    Finally I then listed out, with examples, how I was already fulfilling those responsibilities. Her face was a picture of ‘ah fuck, I walked right into this’. I turned the meeting into her and basically said that from my end it looks like I was already working at a more senior capacity but I would love to understand what else she was looking for in order to progress me.

      1. GrumpyLaydee*

        I don’t know yet!

        She gave me one goal for the end of the year but it’s a little bit of a filler and I have examples of how I’ve achieved it. We put a meeting in for Dec and suggested a check-in in Nov to check progress but she said that wouldn’t be necessary.

        So it bodes well, and if it doesn’t happen it also gives me a lot of information about how she sees me in the company. It’ll be my queue to look for other opportunities and I know she’s keen to keep me.

  86. Nicki Name*

    Once upon a time, I worked at a place where my department had actual offices, but was getting so big that even doubling up in offices wasn’t enough. So our space was remodeled to cubicles. When the planned layout was finalized, we got to pick our new spots in order of seniority. After one person senior to me picked an interior spot, I calculated that I’d be able to snag the very last window space.

    I knew exactly which space I wanted. Our view across the parking lot used to end at a stand of majestic evergreens, but most of them were scheduled to be removed as part of a facility expansion. Along the strip between our windows and the lot, though, there was a bushy maple tree that I thought it would be nice to be able to look at. So I sketched the location of the tree in on the posted layout, and made a point of commenting around the people who were still making up their minds how that tree was going to be blocking the view from that one cubicle.

    It worked. From the end of the remodel to when I left that place, I had, in my opinion anyway, the nicest view in the whole department.

  87. Temperance*

    At my last job pre-law school, one of my coworkers was favored by our grandboss, but he sucked at our job. He couldn’t remember basic functions of our job. He wasn’t good at learning new things, either.

    Our grandboss disliked me, but couldn’t deny my work skills. So I had to do a bunch of things for her and the other sales managers, including daily Craigslist posting and creation of marketing materials. Her favorite couldn’t do any of those things. He was supposed to cover for me on vacation, and just never did. He wasn’t capable.

    There was a restructuring, and our grandboss was removed from any direct managerial duties. I was then given the opportunity to move to a different office, which had a better commute, and all of the sales support and extra stuff I did for grandboss was off my plate, since this was outside of her sales territory and it would have impeded my ability to do my job in the new office.

    Without me there to help, it became very clear that my colleague couldn’t handle most of the job, and my shitty grandboss had to do her own admin tasks. ;)

  88. Rebecca*

    In a satellite office with very little corporate overview, Pointy Haired Boss manager protected her friend from being fired for years. Terrible working environment, between her yelling and ranting, her friend skating by doing next to nothing, and everyone else held to a completely different standard. PHB was nearing retirement age, and decided to become a minister. Her plan was to “work” for 2 more years socking away money, complete minister classes, and have post retirement job that paid a small salary to preserve her savings. During that time, 6 people left. She blamed it on them being poached by a competitor, but the truth was, people did not want to work for her. She didn’t let any of us talk to management if they visited unless she was present.

    For months, when she had to go to in person classes, it was “a meeting off site”, written papers were proofread by her subordinates during the work day (we’re non exempt and this was not the work we were being paid for), and she would close her office door for hours and basically get paid for going to school, with corporate totally unaware. No one dared speak up for fear of being fired.

    The next person who quit gave an honest exit interview, and corporate was very interested to know that while she ranted and threatened to fire people, she was protecting her friend who did very little, the real reason people were leaving was because of the things that were going on in the office, and the whole going to school and assigning proofreading work to subordinates during work hours. At that point, her plan crashed and burned, as she was basically told to retire or be walked out the door. She retired. Protected friend was let go soon after. Corporate gave the edict to reach out privately, via personal phone if necessary, should any of this happen again, and they are now keeping closer tabs on things.

  89. Middle Aged Lady*

    At the university library where I worked, they liked to hire newbie faculty and make us underpaid staff train them in all the things they should have known before they were hired, but didn’t. I was usually sympathetic and helpful, until Cersei came, disguised as a sweet, innocent young thing. She tried to get me to do her work and planned to claim credit. She sent outrageous requests via email. For me to do her writing, to compile sources for you, to write lesson plans for her classes. I bcc’ed the boss on all my replies, which included her original messages. Boss was a hard worker who hated slackers. She was also quite subtle and never said a word about why I was sending her this stuff, and I don’t know if she confronted Cersei. At the end of the year, Cersei was not retained. I hope I had something to do with it.

  90. Youngin*

    I may or may not get alot of crap for this, but before you do that remember, I was 20! I also may not fully understand Machevillian, so forgive me if this doesnt fit the script. Also im impressed with that character limit for the comments, sorry for the long story!

    I used to work for an Italian Restaurant, decently known nationwide. Its not quite high end, but its above lets say an Olive Garden. Like most restaurants it was a toxic breeding ground of sexism, misogyny, sexual harrassment and just young people being take advantage of by older managers (asking us to clock out and work off the clock to save labor hours, withholding tips, extreme favortism etc). My time here was winding down because the toxic environment was really getting to me.

    I had requested 2 days off to travel to another state and attend my cousins college graduation. This cousin lost her parents young and put herself through an Ivy league university despite everything shes been through. She is also like a sister to me, and my parents are essentially her parents. It was very important that I supported her.

    I requested it off about 2 months in advanced and it was originally approved. I’d work my normal shifts during the week, and take off Saturday night (for the flight there), all day Sunday (for the graduation), and Monday morning (for flight back). 2 days before I was set to leave, I got a notification via the scheduling software that my trip had been denied and I was now scheduled Saturday night and Sunday morning. I immediatly called the restaurant ( I was off site at the time) and asked the manager that denied me what had changed. He said him and the other girls in my position were going to a music festival and I needed to cover them. I tried to plead but he stonewalled me, and at the time the GM was away on her honeymoon for a month (it was a staycation, she was unreachable to us but was coming on on mondays to fill out necessary paperwork, this is important) so she was unreachable.

    Well, I wanted to go, and I didnt want to lose my job. There was a small fridge on the cooking line that never worked, and this fridge was specifically for meats and fish. A former chef had left that job recently because that fridge was still being used despite it not working, meaning the meat was likely unsafe, and when he brought it up to our executive chef, he got blown off. Well, I made an anonymous complaint to the health department that I got sick from bad fish, and that I had heard froma reliable source that they were storing meats in an unsafe way. My intentions were that we would close until they got another fridge, I really didnt have any idea how that process worked though.

    The next day (day before im supposed to leave) I come in for my night shift and there is a LARGE sign on the door saying we were shut down by the health department. I walked in to find the executive chef being screamed at by the AGM (manager that denied me) for not fixing the fridge, the GM was also on her way in. Apparently the fridge wasnt the only problem though, they found alot of roaches all over the place among other awful things (didnt know about any of that, well roaches I knew about, but this was in south florida so roaches are expected and we bomb twice a week because of it). We all started cleaning up per the AGM’s instructions (we had to clean this crazy list of things before we could reopen). The GM came in, ordered pizza for those of us cleaning, and went to the office to start fixing things. Towards the end of that night I knock on the managers office door to see if she was ok (she had been crying, felt bad about that) and brought her a slice. I also mentioned my cousins graduation and she was like “oh yeah, have fun!” I told her AGM denied it the day before and why. She told me I could have the days off, and before I got back to work the following week, he was fired.

    Dont come down on me too hard! I feel badly for ruining the last 2 nights of GMs staycation honeymoon and I thought that because it was a kitchen thing, the executive chef would be the one to take the fall. After this, she left that store and was placed at a sister one but eventually left and started working at a high end restaurant. Shes making well over 6 figures and is actually expecting her first kid soon! We keep in touch periodically and she seems genuinely happy. The AGM I saw periodically because he never quite left our circle, but he deserved to be fired so that I do not feel badly about. I hear he is at a similar restaurant now, but as a server. The executive chef was there up until a few months ago, which surprised me cause everything wrong with the inspection came from the kitchen. As far as I could tell, he wasnt reprimanded. However, I heard that a server reported him for sexual assault recently, and there was an active investigation against him. I had plenty of my own stories so I called corporate and gave them more incidents. He has also been fired as of now.

    2. JustaTech*

      Dude, you filed a legitimate health and safety complaint. Like, slightly sneaky way to get the time off you had been promised, but hardly evil. And honestly, the GM should have been on top of it in the first place.

      1. Youngin*

        Yeah thats honestly how I’ve been framing it in my head since then. The GM shoudve been more on top of it, I agree.

        1. General von Klinkerhoffen*

          I’m with JustATech. You did fine.

          If you’d planted rotten meat or bugs yourself then that would be different, but you told on them for a health violation that was 100% their fault.

    3. BadWolf*

      You probably saved several people from actually getting food poisoning. For some people, that could be more than just a bad day or two. That could be a lost money or even a job from having to take a sick day. Triggering of other illnesses.

      1. Youngin*

        I have never thought of it this way, which is ironic because I am someone that this happens to! I appreciate your sentiment, I have honestly felt bad about it for a while.

        I still do in some sense because servers lost money, but this does change my perspective

        1. Zweisatz*

          No seriously everything in your story checks out. It’s a little sad for the crying lady, but she was management, so did indeed need to stay in top of this, and apparently she’s in a great place now.

          I don’t see any innocent people getting hurt, but probably some saved (either from food poisoning or harassment). Good job, don’t feel bad. It’s not like you did it because you wanted to go to a festival. You were put in a bad spot.

  91. That Girl from Quinn's House*

    I worked somewhere where, whenever someone was out, people from other departments would come in looking for ways to assert their authority over your department and make you look bad.

    One time my boss was at an all-day training at another office. Her boss came in and found our llama trainer standing in the wrong part of the barn. One of the llamas had gotten injured, and our llama trainer went to the first aid kit to get gauze, as was an expected part of his job, but she felt the first aid kit was mounted to the wall “too far” from the llamas and he had endangered the llama’s safety by leaving them unsupervised and unattended, so she closed the llama barn and sent the trainer home without pay.

    Another time my boss was on vacation and her boss used it as a chance to suspend one of our employees because a customer made up a fake complaint about her. (Customer claimed Lucinda had cursed out his wife somewhere about town, where Lucinda had never been, and rather than tell Customer to stuff it, he suspended Lucinda without pay.) I tipped my boss off as to what was happening and she tipped off HR, so her boss wrote her up for interfering.

    1. JustaTech*

      Nothing that evil, but I had a grandboss who would wait until my direct boss was on vacation to demand that my coworker and I do a deeply dumb experiment for him. Grandboss would wait until Boss was gone because everyone knew this was a dumb experiment, but while Boss could argue against it, my coworker and I couldn’t.

      (Among the dumb things Grandboss was asking us to do was to pressurize a rigid container with no way to know either how much pressure we were putting in, or how much pressure the container could hold. *That* I pushed back on, because I didn’t want the thing to explode and shards of plastic into my chest.)

      So coworker and I had to do the dumb experiment, but since we knew it was dumb and were against it in the first place we applied rigid malicious compliance to make sure that it failed. Grandboss had all these daydreams about how we could do a 100+ step process “faster”, and told us to implement all of them at once (that’s not how we science, but fine). So we did, where I did all of the new, more complicated things, and my coworker, who was one of the fastest processors in the company, did it the current way.
      The current way was still faster (because the ideas to make it faster were dumb) and we made sure to write up our results and get them into the record so that Grandboss couldn’t make us do it again in 2 years.

  92. WorkingFromCafeinCA(prePandemic)*

    @Alison – I would totally love a post like this, but the flip side: instances in the work world where people showed their best, went out of their way to be kind or do good. Maybe right before, on, or after US election day…

      1. Blackcat*

        One idea is to actually take a look at these and do a round up of the posts that, rather than Machiavellian, I’d describe as “chaotic-good.” An example is the early post about submitting their boss’s resume to recruiters.

        1. Mad Harry Crewe*

          The attorney who hired her opposing counsel’s secretary out from under him, and the secretary was the only thing holding the case together.

      3. Evan Þ.*

        Or more generally, maybe ask for people to share their stories of really great coworkers or bosses?

  93. Snapple Queen*

    While working in residence life at a university, I was asked to find an empty student room for a project manager to use during summer construction. I gave him a room that a particularly smelly student had lived in for several years. The odor was terrible even after the carpet was removed and the room painted.

  94. Miss Demeanor*

    A story that ends with some sweet justice:

    My org had the top position open. Poseidon, the second-in-command applied, but his candidacy was denied in part because he presented it as a packaged deal- his buddy Ares would have to be promoted into his old job. Athena, an external hire, was brought in to lead. Poseidon was upset and Ares decided to declare war. For years, Ares and (to a lesser degree Poseidon, who mostly just provided protection for Ares to be a dick) did everything they could to undermine Athena. Took credit when things went well, blamed Athena when it went poorly. Spread their staff too thin and blamed it on Athena’s guidance (malicious compliance). Were openly rude and insubordinate in meetings in an attempt to make Athena look weak. Athena has a very easygoing, gentle, and familiar manner, and so it looked like she couldn’t handle the org. Morale was LOW. Athena tried a reorg to give people more room to collaborate, but there was a revolt since Ares and Poseidon took hold of the narrative and made it seem like it was a secret punishment. We honestly wanted Athena gone and were almost all job hunting.

    Then Poseidon retired. Ares applied for his job… and was turned down. His entire department was disbanded. His duties were reduced. Other, more competent people were promoted, with public praise, and given raises. The fact that Poseidon covered for him as he abused the staff and spewed racist nonsense came to light, and the man is now in trouble with HR. The narrative he’d made up to make Athena look heartless and buffoonish? False. Athena is competent, professional, and warm.

    FYI, he is still trying to step into Poseidon’s position. He will never, ever get it. He is more likely to be fired.

    1. SR*

      Why did you all want Athena gone? I’m confused about that detail, unless you didn’t see through the others’ bs scheme at first?

      1. Miss Demeanor*

        Correct. We had been convinced of Athena’s ineptitude. It wasn’t until Poseidon left that we fully realized how much of the narrative he controlled. He was a huge stopgap between us and Athena, and once that was gone, Ares was toast and we all realized how wrong we were.

    2. wee beastie*

      Was it a fluke that Poseidon retired? Or did someone get him to leave? I wonder why he suddenly retired. He’s bad for a number of reasons, but I can’t imagine why he would want Ares in that important #2 role if he isn’t so terrible. He was foolish to want that package deal. His own loss.

  95. Ann*

    Outgoing INTERIM CEO restructured my department and let go of three people (30% of the team) during his final week in that role.

    It wreaked all kinds of havoc. We’re still dealing with the aftereffects of that decision.

    2. Wintermute*

      sounds like a classic “seagull boss”– fly in, make a lot of noise, crap all over everything and then fly away to leave others to clean up.

  96. SQL Coder Cat*

    Oh, I have one!

    Way back when, I was working in an administrative/quality analyst roll for a customer service center. The office was all open plan with the phone reps, so it was very noisy. Everyone in my role had permission to use headphones to listen to music and we all took full advantage of that.

    Then, we got a new boss who was a jerk. One of his favorite ‘jokes’ was to come up behind someone who was deep in their work, knowing they wouldn’t hear him coming between the noise and the headphones, and stomp on one of their chair legs to startle them. After a few weeks of this, we all hated him. So we formed a plan. The person seated closest to him kept an eye out for him getting up to prowl the line for a victim, and immediately IM’d us all that he was on the move. We turned our music off but kept the headphones on, and pretended to be still be engrossed in our work. The idea was that whoever he startled would kick their chair backwards in ‘surprise’ and ram into him.

    It worked better than we anticipated- he was in just the right spot that when the first person sent her chair flying back, the corner collided with his groin. He yelped, she earnestly apologized for being startled, and that was the end of that.

  97. chellieroo*

    I had a boss who “had” to approve written materials, and there was ALWAYS something (a lot!) wrong with whatever anyone else wrote. I am quite a good writer, and this was upsetting, until I realized that it literally did not matter what I sent, it was going to come back marked up with a red pen. One of my jobs was to draft was a recurring annual report that really didn’t change much. One year I worked hard and she rewrote it. The next year I worked a little less hard it but never heard anything back…I assumed that it had been rewritten but her inability to manage time had gotten ahead of her need to criticize. The third year I went to update the report and noticed that it was word for word what had been there 2 years ago: the boss hadn’t submitted a new report. So, I sent that report (that she had actually written) and it came back all marked up. From then on, whenever possible, I would send her own writing to her for redlining I mean approval. It was a challenging situation in a lot of ways but doing that helped me remember that I wasn’t the problem.

  98. NYWeasel*

    This isn’t Machiavellian per se, as it didn’t advance my interests in any way, but my coworkers and I were stuck working for a compulsive liar. Literally could be wearing a blue shirt and would insist that it was a special “Venusian Red” that only looks blue in certain light.

    So my shift partner and I started an informal competition to see if either of us could make a statement that he wouldn’t lie about. If my partner mentioned buying a new car, Boss Liar would tell us how he had personally influenced the design of that car, and how the only reason he wasn’t a car designer was because he decided to spend that year advising the Peace Corps on how to build orphanages. It was completely outrageous and highly entertaining to us.

    Finally one day I thought I could win. When it was just me, shift partner, and Boss Liar, I commented that I was having terrible menstrual cramps that day. (It was a complete lie on my part, but I judged the fiction well worth the potential lulz). Instead of scurrying away, Boss Liar launches into a tale of how he knows the most about menstrual cramps of any man because his wife has the worst cramps ever documented by the Mayo Clinic. I barely could look up from my work bc I was afraid my partner and I would laugh so loud, we’d reveal our game.

    Boss Liar only lasted at our office for maybe 6 months. You’d think he’d have gotten caught in some obvious falsifications, but what did him in was his other habit of sexually harassing the younger women on staff. He actually gave me a thank you gift on his way out, which I felt a twinge of guilt over, since I’d been questioned about his behavior too and had confirmed the stories of the victims. But hey, it was a $50 gift card to my favorite restaurant and he *was* fired, so I still took it and had a fabulous meal. Maybe there was a touch of Machiavelli in this story after all!

  99. Mindy St. Claire*

    This is a small story. Long (long) ago I worked as an EA/PA for a private equity firm president. It was a truly terrible job at a truly toxic company, but I was young and the pay was good, so I stuck it out for a year.

    In March, the firm was hosting a big party for their rich clients at some arcade-style venue. The party theme was March Madness, and the venue had lots of those basketball shooting arcade games, so there would be some sort of competition among the guests. The marketing department was managing the event, but due to my role, I had helped a lot with the plans and preparation as well.

    A week before the event, the firm announced that only the VPs would be allowed to attend. They didn’t want us support staff riff-raff mingling with their wealthy clients. Now, I was pretty annoyed by this, especially since I had helped plan the silly thing. But I knew my boss, so I sent him a quick email: “Too bad Marketing said I can’t come to the party. I was really looking forward to kicking your butt in the basketball tournament!”

    His reply came within the minute: “Plan on attending.”

    1. Doug Forcett*

      I’m just glad you were able to attend that party before you ended up in the medium place.

  100. SarahKay*

    A previous site leader was very prone to coming out to the main office mid-afternoon looking for sweets or a biscuit (cookie), from the different department’s stashes. We didn’t especially mind but he never contributed himself which was a little irritating.
    At the time the site was deep into 5S (Sort, Store, Standardise, Shine, Sustain) so every single drawer and cupboard drawer had to be labelled with contents. My department used to keep our stash of snacks in a drawer, and of course once it was labelled the site leader knew to head straight there.
    However, all the Sorting meant we had a lot less paperwork and managed to empty out a whole set of filing cabinets, sixteen drawers altogether. We printed up identical labels for all sixteen drawers “Finance sweets and snacks” and then – just to make sure it couldn’t be argued that the drawers were mis-labelled – put a single polo mint (I think they’re Lifesavers in the US) in each drawer.
    Then we waited, and sure enough the next day out came the site leader looking for snacks. He saw the drawers, started opening them one after another, and saw the single polo mints sitting in lonely state in the middle of each drawer. Then he looked up and saw us all trying very hard not to laugh.
    Credit where it’s due, he then laughed himself, and congratulated us on our excellent 5S!

  101. Sheni*

    At my girlfriend’s work, her co-worker John noticed that the company slogan, recently painted on a truck, had a major typo that somehow nobody had seen before. He mentioned it to the boss, Fergus. Fergus knew that tracking down the painter, telling him off for the mistake, arranging for a re-paint, and following up until it was done wasn’t worth it. He also knew that the painter was somewhere on-site that day. He told John to find the painter and tell him he’d seen the typo, but hadn’t yet told Fergus, so if he fixed it now he could still get away with it. John did so, and sure enough, the typo was fixed immediately without any further mention of it.

  102. overcaffeinatedandqueer*

    Two more come to mind:

    1. From age 76 to 84, my grandfather captained boats in the area of Lake Superior where family sailed (parents had a sailboat and grandparents often joined us, so he decided to go in for his license since he already could sail well). It paid very well and wasn’t hard, but he had to live on board with people with little to no idea about sailing or roughing it. Now, boats have fully functioning kitchens like in an RV, but cool with ice, not electricity. But these newbies ate a lot of freeze-dried and other “camping” food.

    He decided, “I’m not eating that, it’s shit,” and persuaded my family to follow his boat wherever they were staying at. Then he would get good meals!

    2. When I was young, my cousin joined the Coast Guard. After basic and etc., he was assigned to an ice cutter boat on Lake Superior, based out of Duluth and sometimes coming to my family’s “base” where they sailed from. By stopping in Duluth on the way, meeting the ship, or even leaving items on islands, he got many homemade treats, notes, and personal items much faster than through the mail. All his crew mates were jealous.

  103. Dasein9*

    I am from the US and went to grad school in the US. My cohort included several Canadians, who were deservedly well-regarded in the department. I was aware that one of the professors who would be key in grading the blind-reviewed comprehensive exams did not think I belonged in grad school. (Her reasons were non-academic and gross and I did not trust her to not try to figure out which essays were whose.)

    So I used UK spellings when I wrote my comps.
    I don’t think any Canadians were harmed by this, and I sure did get through!

    3. All the cats 4 me*

      Well, of course you were successful, you used the *correct* spelling!

      Signed, A Canadian

  104. Elfreda*

    I was employed as a part time personal assistant to an employee with a disability, under a government welfare scheme to provide support to keep disabled people in work. My job description was to type anything put in front of me or take dictation. The employee often did not have enough work for me to do, because the role wasn’t structured right for his work flow. Often, he would send me to the break room so that my sitting quietly having finished all the work was not so obvious to his managers.
    After a few months, he casually mentioned recalling that I had web design experience on my resumé. Would I be willing to create a website for one of his projects whenever I ran out of PA work. This seemed a better use of my time than sitting in the break room so I agreed. I produced a website from scratch, using a mixture of his copy and my own, but all the design and coding work were mine alone.
    On the day the site was done and ready to be published, he sat me down one to one to explain that because I was paid for by the welfare scheme to do PA work only, the website needed to clearly state that he was the designer and content creator. I was stunned into silence and said I would need to think about it overnight. Of course, before I left that day I encoded a design notice visible only in the web code that recorded my work, in case the dispute escalated. He knew nothing about code and would not have known how to remove the credits.
    Having had a night to think about it, the employee backed down, so I never had to hand him the letter that asserted my right not to have him claim copyright over my work. I later learned that he had prior form in claiming other people’s work as his own. Not long after, it turned out that he was no longer being diligent in submitting the welfare claims that that paid for my post and I decided to find a new job quickly.

    1. Zona the Great*

      There’s a not-so-subtle air of hostility here that I can’t put my finger on. The word Scheme. Keeping Disabled People in Work. I don’t know about this post.

      I’d be right on board with you if it didn’t feel like you were weaving together his disability, the ‘scheme’, and his lack of honesty.

      1. JustaTech*

        I think that “scheme” can have a more neutral connotation in the UK, where it can also mean “program”.

        The *scam* was the guy trying to present Elfreda’s work as his own, not about her working for him, or her being paid by a government program.

        1. CatCat*

          I’m in the US and “scheme” is used neutrally in my workplace (maybe its an industry thing) to describe an overarching system or plan typically in the context of government. I definitely wasn’t reading hostility into the use of that term.

      2. Elfreda*

        Zona, I want to assure you that you are not reading me right. “Scheme” is the normal word for an employment programme here, including this one. At times in my life – as a person with a disability myself – I have been the recipient of support from the same scheme and I am glad it exists. I only mention his disability and the scheme at the top of the story because that he gave that as his reason for claiming my work as his work alone.

      3. Forty Years in the Hole*

        Is it that much different than my fed government’s long-ago employment “scheme” wherein they “trained” unemployed/unemployable on a micky-mouse barely intro, entry-level computer course, so that they could jack their stats by claiming they “put X people back to work?“And continued to receive govt funding for same with no real proof or requirement these folks actually derived employment from this program (my mom was one of the trainees – take this course or you lose your benefits; couldn’t keyboard her way out of a paper bag, but hey! certificate of achievement).

        1. Emma*

          Oh, we have schemes like that too – but the one being referred to here is actually a good one, which genuinely supports people to do jobs they are good at when they need accommodations that the employer can’t arrange on their own.

      4. Berkeleyfarm*

        It’s been my experience that “scheme” is used like “program” a lot in UK English. It’s a neutral descriptive word in that context.

      5. sequined histories*

        I think it’s pretty normal to refer to government programs as “schemes” in some English-speaking countries. It doesn’t necessarily always have nefarious connotations, as it does in the United States.
        Also I think the idea “government welfare” has a more neutral or even positive connotation in places other than the USA.

      6. retail is detail*

        “Government Welfare Scheme” is a UK/Indian usage, as far as I know. “Scheme” has a very negative connotation in US English, so we would use “Program” or “Project” instead.

      7. wondHRland*

        I think the word scheme in this instance is a European or canadian usage – not in a nefarious way(like scheme is in the US), but more “Program”.

      8. Daniela*

        The scheme term may be a regional thing. For my British colleagues, that invariably means a program of some sort.

      10. Elf*

        I think that is an American English connotation. I think that in UK/Commonwealth English “scheme” is a standard word in that situation and is equivalent to an American saying “welfare program”

        Be careful analyzing tone on the internet, depending on where people are from words may not mean what you think they mean!

  105. Quill*

    My environmental science major at college was really small. It had two professors in it, and about six professors from other departments, including geology, adjacent to it, so we knew all of them very well. Geology also had a well known jerk as a professor in it, but he wasn’t one of ours, we only took his courses if it was unavoidable. He was known to be a condescending grouch and he once told a student that being in a car accident on the way to class wasn’t an excuse for an unexcused absence.

    My senior year, plans for another science building were announced, and new offices were going to be claimed in order of seniority within departments… by each professor writing their name on the room in the printed floor plan.

    The departmetnt grouch had seniority, but also no sense of strategy, and he claimed his very nice office in pencil, so the envisci/geology professor decided to teach him a lesson.

    At my senior dinner, the head of the geology department cornered my cohort over drinks.

    “Have you seen Professor Envisci/Geology?”
    “No?”
    “If you do, warn him. Department Grouch just discovered that he ‘stole’ his office and relocated him to the boiler room.”

  106. cmcinnyc*

    My team had an intern–let’s call him Bob because I’ve never had a Bob on my team. Great guy, good work, totally green. The company was going thru some reorgs/shifts orchestrated above our heads and was doing that “transparency” thing that is designed to be completely opaque but they can *say* they’ve been transparent. Bob’s super-power was revealed in this situation. When the higher ups would come around with “updates” Bob would innocently ask totally normal, very intelligent questions that anyone above an intern would know you just don’t ask. OH man the LOOKS! The fumbling and bumbling were priceless! And we even got a little actual information out of it. Of course, the brass all hated Bob. We made it our mission to get Bob a good job–not at our company–post internship. He is doing very well.

      1. BatManDan*

        Examples? I’ve been self-employed my whole life so I can’t imagine what it would look like.

        1. cmcinnyc*

          Imagine a meeting entirely in business poetry–optimizing mission-critical deployment of resources human and financial in an innovative, proactive way that utilizes your team’s core competencies in a newly-leveraged scenario for the foreseeable future:

          Bob: “Does that mean you’re reassigning us to X Department?”

          Managment: (very long pause) Yes.

  107. designbot*

    At a previous job, when I came on board the first couple of months after I came on board I was working really closely with the team lead only, and nobody else seemed to be working on the projects we were working on. I didn’t think too much about it, it just felt like he was taking me under his wing. Well, it turned out that right around the time I came on board, the rest of the team had gone to HR and told them they would not work with him anymore! I didn’t know about it because nobody knew me yet and they didn’t want to bring me into the drama. So for a time this sort of worked out because I got a mentor and I was able to act as a buffer that kept them from needing to work so closely with him, but that was really only a bandaid and not a permanent solution. Maybe 6 months after I got there, he got transferred to a different team. He billed it as his idea, but over my years with the organization I learned that this was part of their typical way of handling problem people, to transfer them and either it worked out with the new team or they at least had the warning to look for something new.
    The thing about this was, his transfer made NO DANG SENSE. Think if he was a llama dresser and he got transferred to a team that was genetically engineering new llama breeds. He just did not have the skills for that team, nobody thought he did, and they let him continue to dress llamas instead of breed llamas. Here comes the machiavellian part(s) though. First, he tried to get me to move with him to the new team… without telling me what was going on. Before his transfer became public knowledge, he told me he was moving desks to be closer with a big project team he was working with, to another building (we were spread across two buildings). He asked me to come with, and initially I was like sure, that makes sense, we’re working so closely together and in a previous job I was used to the office physically reorganizing around projects vs. specialties more often, so it didn’t set off any warning lights for me. When I mentioned to others on my team, they were like OMG no, and clued me in to everything that had been going on, the transfer in progress, etc. and I could see that I was being manipulated. I went back to him and said that actually when I mentioned it to my new team lead (just kind of tipping him off that I knew about the transfer without addressing the fact that he had hidden it), they weren’t on board with me moving. Well then he went over their head to the head of the office and convinced them that I needed to physically move, without transferring. OK. Yikes. THEN when I eventually moved back to my own team because the project was finished, he hired another llama dresser into the llama bioengineering department, but I guess during the interview gave her the impression that she’d be in the llama fashion department, and she was surprised and dismayed when she found herself in bioengineering. Then he started competing for projects with this new mini team he was building, against our own llama fashion department that he used to lead, with the help of this person who really just wanted to be on the main llama fashion team anyway and was hired into this messed-up situation.
    Eventually he moved on and started his own llama fashion house, but the whole time up until then was super awkward and dramatic all the time. We’re actually still on good terms amazingly, which everyone on the original team is surprised at. But I basically view it as, he’s a shark, I know he’s a shark, he knows he’s a shark, I’m just never going to expect him to not be a bit bitey and we’ll be fine.

    1. Bluesboy*

      “he’s a shark, I know he’s a shark, he knows he’s a shark, I’m just never going to expect him to not be a bit bitey and we’ll be fine.”

      This is wonderful, and I am totally going to steal it.

  108. JPVaina*

    At my old job, there was a team everyone universally hated. This team decided they wanted the table from our President’s office. Because our President only came to the office once per month (if that), they just took the table, knowing that she probably wouldn’t notice/they could order her a new one. The rest of us took photos of this team carrying the table to their office, and showed the Executive Assistant. We knew she would immediately call the President to let her know. The team got chewed out for moving the table, and all of us just laughed from the corner.

  109. irene adler*

    I work in a lab.
    We didn’t have enough chairs for every lab person to sit and do their work.
    We asked management for more chairs.

    Instead, lab personnel were instructed to share chairs. After all, not everyone is in the lab at the same time. Just share them. No one was happy about this as lab chairs are adjusted to individual preference. It’s a drag to always adjust them to one’s liking. But okay.

    As a result, there were times I had to do my lab work resting on my knees-on the floor- no chairs available.

    I complained.
    I got a lecture about how expensive chairs are. Too expensive, budget tight…

    We’re talking secretary chairs. Adjustable for height. With wheels. Arms optional. $150-$200 for a really good one. Need two or three at most.

    So I did two things.

    First, I went out and purchased my own lab chair. And a couple more. No more boo-boo knees for me!

    Second, I went to the manager’s offices and did a little dirty work.

    Managers all have fancy executive chairs-the ones with all the custom adjustments for height, lumbar support, etc. And all the same model and color. In fact, interchangeable.

    So, I interchanged them.

    Spent the next several hours observing a livid CFO screaming, “Who touched my chair? Who messed with the adjustments? This chair was just right until someone messed with it!”, as she repeatedly got up to re-adjust the chair to her liking.

    Meanwhile, the VP (my boss) sat quietly in his chair, his little legs dangling in the air. Didn’t seem to occur to him there was something amiss every time he hopped out of his chair to get to the floor.

    They never figured it out.

    Share chairs. I don’t think so.

    2. JustaTech*

      I remember being amazed at the price of lab chairs (the tall ones, so you could use them at the standing-height bench). So someone was like “why don’t you just grab the blue chair from [other department]?”
      So I go scope out the blue chair. It is a super fancy microscope chair, bar-height with armrests and a special backrest. And a pommel. Yup, there was this big-old lump in the middle of the front of the seat so that you would sit on the chair almost like you were riding a horse. (I guess it’s more ergonomic?)

      It looked fine to me and I was about to grab it when my coworker came in, wearing a knee-length pencil skirt. “What do you think of this chair?” I asked. She attempted to hop on, flashed me and nearly fell over trying to get back off. So the blue chair stayed in the empty room and I bought a new, normal chair.

      1. irene adler*

        Laughed so hard I snorted!

        Yeah, real lab chairs are pricey. I knew that was out of the question for us.
        All we needed was a simple rolling chair with adjustable height. Arms optional.

    3. Sydney Ellen Wade*

      “the VP (my boss) sat quietly in his chair, his little legs dangling in the air. Didn’t seem to occur to him there was something amiss every time he hopped out of his chair to get to the floor.”

      I can’t stop laughing at this image. Thank you for brightening an otherwise horrible day. :)

  110. Anya the Demon*

    Story
    I was a teacher and academic administrator at a small private school. It was the kind of school where we all wore many hats, we all deeply believed in the mission of the school, and our principal, let’s call him Chet, had the “we are all faaaamily” mentality, that I, as a 24-33 year-old woman, didn’t realize was dysfunctional at the time. Chet was an incredibly charismatic man, with a bit of a God complex. I could write a whole series of novels about him, but this one particular incident stands out as one of the more Machiavellian things he did.

    We had a cap on the number of students that could be at any given classroom, and that number was lower for kindergarten than it was for the other grades. One year, we had an especially strong admission season, and our kindergarten class was over enrolled by a couple of students for the next school year. It was still really early in the admissions season, and the administrators, the admissions directors, and teachers etc., knew that some of those students would drop out. They would get in to other schools off of waitlists etc. Chet, however was freaking out because he had to attend a welcome breakfast with the kindergarten parents, and he was convinced that they were going to notice that there were too many students currently accepted, and that they would be upset.

    He knew that the rest of the academic admin team and the admissions directors were not worried about the numbers, so he went behind our backs and concocted an elaborate plan, which he kept secret from all of us. He decided that we were going to knock down the wall between the kindergarten and first grade classrooms, giving kindergarten a giant classroom, in order to accommodate the additional students and provide a space for more art time. First grade would move to the third grade classroom, the third grade classroom would move upstairs, where the upper grades were located, into the upper school math classroom. The upper school math teacher would lose her math classroom, and instead she would go into the homeroom classrooms and teach there. That meant that the homeroom teachers would lose their prep time in their classrooms. Also, he wanted to split the kindergarten into two groups, so they never had to all be together at once (why then did we need the double size kindergarten classroom you might ask? No idea.) So, he wanted to hire an extra kindergarten teacher and take over the dance classroom, turning that into yet another kindergarten space.

    The rest of the admin team and the admissions team had no idea any of this was in the works. One of the other academic administrators and I found out about it one Saturday, when we were in school doing classroom prep work, and the male eighth grade teacher told us about it, since he assumed we knew. Chet was all about the boys’ club, so of course he told a male teacher about it and not any of the all-female academic administrators or admissions directors. We also learned that he planned to present his proposal to the board of trustees on Tuesday evening, presumably still without ever telling the rest of us. We talked to the business manager, and he confirmed the plan. He said it was the worst plan he had ever heard of a head of school making, ever & that it was going to cost the school in the neighborhood of $100,000.

    We attempted to schedule a meeting with our head of school on Monday, but his assistant told us that he had told her to tell us that he was unavailable all day; he had found out that we knew and he was avoiding us. It was pretty foolish of him to try to pretend he was booked all day, since we were in a TINY school. So, we all just showed up at his office when we could tell he was free. We expressed our concerns about the plans, and he assured us that he had spoken with all the teachers involved and that everyone was fine with the plan. (spoiler alert: he had not, and they were not.) We continued to question the wisdom of the plan, and then he quite literally stomped his foot and said, “This is why I didn’t tell any of you. I knew you’d disagree and I quite frankly just didn’t want to hear it. I’m the head of school and I can do whatever I want.”

    We talked to the teachers and discovered that half of them didn’t know about the plan, and the other half knew about it, hated it, but felt like they had no choice.

    Chet presented his plan to the board, who is the financial governing body of the school, as a fait accompli. The board was LIVID. They said he had overstepped his bounds, that they were the ones who got to make those kinds of decisions (which was true) and that it was a terrible idea. The business manager also spoke up at the meeting and said that he had warned Chet that it was a terrible and unnecessary plan.

    The board convened a special session to decide what to do about Chet, and he almost got fired. He gave a major mea culpa to the admin team, and promised to always listen to us in the future (another spoiler alert: he did not.). He had to give a public apology to the entire faculty and staff at a faculty meeting.

    Several kindergarteners ended up withdrawing soon after; the class was at its normal size, and no changes needed to be made.

    1. Quill*

      Ooooh, I think Chet is related to my mom’s old boss, also a principal, who would probably have done the same.

  111. Undine*

    This isn’t directly me, but over time I worked with two separate people who worked with Corvid Industries, and both mentioned how horrible Rook, the manager of their department, had been. A few years later, at a different company, we were interviewing for a contributor position, and before one interview I was reviewing the candidate’s resume, and suddenly thought, “Manager at Corvid Industries? Wait…” and emailed both those people asking about her. About half an hour before the interview (she looked good on paper), I got a reply from one of them, saying something like “She is a racist, manipulative creep. Run in the opposite direction.” As an example, my contact said that one time Rook had told her about being up for a promotion and deliberately encouraging the other candidate to get drunk at a party to make her look bad so Rook would get ahead. I immediately ran to my manager and told her. We agreed to go ahead with the interview because it was too late to cancel. So I sat there and interviewed her knowing there was no way we would ever hire her.

    It was interesting because she interviewed fine, which makes me wonder how much you really can find out from an interview. She really wanted to go down to an individual contributor role so she could eventually transition to contactor status. I hope she never did.

    1. Me*

      Some of the worse people I know, including my ex boss, are fantastic in interviews. They excel at tlaking about themselves because themselves is their favorite topic.

      1. Wintermute*

        Interviewing is a skill, like any other skill you get better at it the more you do it.

        Unfortunately this builds a bit of bias into hiring, because the people who looks really good in interviews are people that find it hard to keep a job! This and dishonest recruiters (“I’ll just add RESTful to your resume without telling you and hope they don’t ask about it in the interview!” and yes that was done to a developer friend of mine, fortunately he DID know the framework) are the reason that “rent to own” 6-month contract-to-hire is the norm in IT. It’s just too easy to BS.

  112. Firecat*

    Ohh I have many from my first job out of college!

    Big jerk, I’ll call him Dan, intensely disliked me. I had a big report due to the higher ups each month that he wanted to do but they wanted me to prep it.

    Well a day after I sent out the report Dan emails his boss, my boss, me, all our team mates and our bosses’ boss.

    “Firecat got this wrong! See this attached report she sent to executive leadership yesterday! It’s unacceptable to have a mistake like this in an executive deck!”

    I looked at it, thought that I didn’t recall making that mistake, and promptly went to a back-up copy I kept in an off server folder after a previous server “mishap” resulted in a lot of my work mysteriously disappearing. The version I had saved didn’t have this error.

    So I dug a little bit, confirmed the version I sent to leadership was accurate, and then went in to see who last editted the server version of the report. It was, surprise surprise, Dan!

    So I took screenshots of all these facts, attached my proof and replied all.

    “Hmm. Checking my back-up copy I see that the version I provided to leadership didn’t have that error. I also noticed that the version you attached is showing that it was lasted edited at [2 minutes before email was sent] and that the author is showing as you. Could you please explain why you were editting this file?

    I’m sure there is another explanation but I think it’s odd the only difference between my offline file and the server one seems to be the error you pointed out.”

    His response?
    “I didn’t know you kept offline back-ups.”

    He also tried to pretend like he had editted the file to be correct before sending out the email but I was able to prove him wrong since I had also copied the edited to be wrong file offline to retain the time lines.

    Dan was put on a PIP.

    2. Firecat*

      Another Dan story.

      This one he got away with and was before I knew anything about him or working in an office.

      Our team was assigned an asinine task. Literally log in every 15 minutes and write this stuff down just to prove you are looking at it.

      Our entire team opposed this, we had so much work to do. Most of us were already working 50+ hours a week. So Dan organized us all into meetings to discuss how we were going to push back and make a case for eliminating the task. We drafted an email as a team, and Dan asked if I would send it. We agreed on the wording, etc. And it mentioned that we all met to discuss this and agreed.

      So I sent the email with everyone cc:d to our bosses’ and Dan IMMEDIATELY replied all:

      “I completely disagree and you DO NOT speak for me. This task is important because of a, b, and c. I understand you are new to the working world but you need to grow out of your entitled attitude that work will never be dull.”

      Then leadership started replying all ripping me a new one and my other 3 teammates apologized to me in private but chickened out and never confessed to agreeing with the points, essentially they made it seem like they were present at the meeting but didn’t actually agree and felt obligated to indulge me.

      As a result of this debaucle I was watched closely and we were also no longer allowed to meet as a group alone and had to cc a boss on all workload discussions moving forward. That part really backfired on Dan at least because he was not taking nearly as much work as the rest of us.

    3. Firecat*

      And the last one from me – sadly this one also has not comeuppance:

      Different company, new jerk, I’ll call him Eric.

      Well Eric was my trainer. I was brand new at the company. He was showing me a task and I was diligently taking notes. He tells me to stop taking notes because it is slowing the process down and that there is a step by step guide.

      So I stopped taking notes and just watched the rest of the presentation.

      Well afterwards I asked for the guide. Nothing. A week went by I kept following up, nothing. Nearly a month and Eric isn’t answering me. So I started asking other team members.

      Well I went to one team member and I asked about the guide. She SLAMMED her notebook down, glared at me, and said:”None of us have instructions Firecat because their are none! Friendly word of advice. When someone is generous enough to take time from their schedule to train you it is customary to take notes!”

      That’s when I realized that after Eric had explicitly told me to not take notes he had then gone around and complained to my team that I wasn’t paying attention or taking notes during his trainings.

      Sadly Eric is now the manager of that team.

      1. Elizabeth West*

        Oh MAN.
        I insist on taking copious notes NO MATTER WHAT, even if it slows the Erics of the world down and annoys them, because this is my nightmare.

        1. Mongrel*

          Or asking for a copy of the guide so you can make notes on it.
          We explicitly tell people to follow along on processes when we show them and to make notes, then amend the SOP* to suit them. Someone will look at it to make sure it still does what it’s meant to but it’s their task so it makes sense to tailor the SOP th them.

          *Document management systems are awesome, even the mildly quirky ones, as it allows us to review what changed and still have access to the historical versions.

  113. TypityTypeType*

    Toughest place I ever worked was a (now-defunct, alas) music magazine. It was a super casual atmosphere — as in “please try to wear some sort of clothing to work” casual — but it was nonetheless a really demanding job. It was a smallish organization, about 80 people, and there was no room for people who couldn’t get the work done.

    But one day they hired … let’s call him Fred. Dr. Fred. He had a Ph.D. In our corner of media, many people had a high school education or less, and nobody thought anything of it — folks in and around the music/media business often don’t take conventional career paths. But to have a Ph.D. around the place — that was impressive! So Dr. Fred, who had no particular background in the industry, came on board to propose and create “special projects” involving deep research and expanded marketing data and in-depth internal reports, along with special reporting for the magazine.

    Dr. Fred settled in, then promptly dedicated himself to astonishing feats of procrastination, misdirection, lobbying for more/different resources (a better computer, subscriptions, events he absolutely had to attend to “stay current”), and deflection, responding to questions about work that never appeared with detailed explanations of why other imaginary projects (always for someone high up in the company, naturally) had to be his top priority for (his favorite phrase) “the foreseeable future.” But the PTB adored him, and always made sure people knew: “This is Dr. Fred. He has a Ph.D.!”

    They finally caught on after, as I recall, about two years. I don’t know if there was a particular incident, but someone looked into it and discovered that Dr. Fred had never produced one project, or indeed written even a single paragraph, on any subject, for anybody. When it all came out, the sheer work he’d put into not doing any work turned out to be … impressive, to be honest. For the last stretch, he even had an assistant.

    I don’t know what happened after Dr. Fred was finally escorted out, but somehow I feel certain he landed on his feet. The mightiest power of BS I ever saw.

    1. MissDisplaced*

      Are you sure though that the PTB weren’t influencing the outcomes of Dr. Fred?
      I’ve seen people hired by the Executives to basically “come in and be a change agent” only… they don’t really want any change. The person hired is often stalled and stymied to a point where nothing ever gets done until one day they’re fired.

      Not saying Dr. Fred also didn’t play into this. But it may not have been 100% entirely his fault either.

      We lost our CMO last year due to much the same thing. She did try. She really did, but then gave up and coasted for a few months.

  114. Hiring Mgr*

    A coworker played a minor prank on me once, where we were in a town hall sort of thing with the CEO and employees could ask questions.. (this was a pretty big company, so lots of people in attendance or on the phone)

    I told my friend a question i was going to ask the CEO, then went to the restroom. When I came back, my friend encouraged to me to ask, which I did. The prank was that while I was at the restroom, my friend had asked the exact same question, so when I asked it, everyone looked at me like “what’s wrong with you, that was just asked five minutes ago” :)

    1. Mary Connell*

      Curious about calling that a prank, complete with smiley; that sounds like an aggressive effort to undermine your career. Any other warning signs from this “friend”?

  115. Not trying to be rude, just good at it*

    We were very young and creatively evil. I was the leader of evilness. We worked for the local professional baseball team selling game day programs and other team items. We had a new member selling programs who was better looking, more popular, had more money, dated more girls and took more exotic vacations than the rest of “we peons”. This was a commission job that paid a dime for each program sold. It was a fun way to make $25.00 for beer money and hang out with the “usherettes” and some of the young ball players.

    The team had a promotion and paid us an extra $10 to run around the stadium and collect all-star ballots. During the 7th inning stretch one of the program sellers would pick a ballot and the winner would get free tickets to a future game. The whole event was broadcast on the centerfield screen so most of the stadium could watch.

    This particular night there were over 60,000 fans in the stadium and I told the camera man to keep an eye on Mr. Perfect. Just as the ballot was going to be picked, I whispered, “Your fly is open.” Mr. Perfect immediately went to fix his pants. 60,000+ people witnessed this and the laughter made the stadium shake. We never saw Mr. Perfect again.

      1. Not trying to be rude, just good at it*

        I’m guessing you have never dealt with a person who brags that he has more class, better upbringing, lives in a better and nicer house, drives a nicer car, wears nicer clothes, attends a better college, goes on better vacations, only dates perfect girls and treated you as a low class peon. If you did, you would understand the motivation to push back. I spoke with the other members of our team and we decided when the time was perfect, we would bring Mr. Wonderful back to earth. It worked.

  116. Zona the Great*

    I worked in a terrible environment as a bank teller. I had a boss who would schedule me for 2 and 3 hour lunches (I lived 40 minutes away in a rural area) and would tell me she didn’t understand my frustration as I was “still getting paid for 8 hours”. I put up with her for as long as I could before one day I just couldn’t take it. You know That Day? That Day that it all becomes too unbearable?

    I slowly began stacking up all my belongings in an area near the backdoor. I didn’t care that she was watching. She even made a comment about me preparing to bolt. And then I bolted. I said, “Merry Christmas. I quit” and ran out of there with her screaming after me.

    This was so counter to my upbringing and my values but to this day, I don’t regret it and think of it and laugh.

  117. Portland*

    I was laid off right before my 10-year anniversary – right when extra perks would kick in. I was also just over 50 years old. (I’m sure these are “coincidences”.)

    I ran a large online system that was very complex. They thought they could get a very Know-It-All 20-something to run the whole thing. She had been talking herself up and, let’s face it, you can’t tell if people really know what they say they know until the rubber meets the road.

    The rubber met the road. I was gone and Know-it-All was now “in charge”.

    The team with the most data on this system held weekly meetings. I wanted to know what they said…so I bought a burner phone and dialed into the call. (No one questioned the mystery phone number.)

    Here’s how the call went: “Does anyone know how Portland did ___?” (Silence)

    “Ummmm…does anyone know where Portland stored the Documentation on ____?” (Silence)

    This went on for a while (even though I’d created documentation on all of this AND had told several people, including “Know-it-All” how to find it.

    Thank God for the mute button. I laughed and laughed! (And before anyone jumps on me for this, I was legally their employee and on their payroll for 3 weeks after the layoff.)

    The kicker is that the system reports feature crashed and no one could figure out how to get them up and running for 4 weeks. That’s like a lifetime to these people. On my end, I found a much better job with a great company. Moral of the Story: Living well (with a burner phone) is the best revenge.

    2. Firecat*

      Ha!

      I once took screenshots of my old co.oanies stock value. The week after I left it plummeted. I did work that directly oacted our stock value. I was severely underpaid. Could help but be happy!

    3. J.B.*

      I dealt with someone who thought she knew everything, and was really insulting when I didn’t know some process detail. And what I am good at is the big picture, prioritizing and delegating (and have lots of experience). I guess she thought the place would fall apart without her. It’s been running much more smoothly since!

  118. Sam*

    I had something similar happen! I simply said, “oh, you wanted to revert to my ${idea}?” and broke out the documentation. If looks could kill, haha.

  119. AnotherLibrarian*

    I don’t know if this is Machiavellian or not and I still kind of regret it.

    So, I worked with this guy named Eddy. Eddy just didn’t have his stuff together and wasn’t in my department. I was constantly picking up his slack and lack of planning to complete projects. Most of which were public facing, so failure would be public. After speaking to both my supervisor, who tried to speak to Eddy’s supervisor with no avail. They were super conflict adverse. We went to our Grandboss and they weren’t willing to step in if the projects were still getting done.

    So, my colleague and I realized if we never stopped fixing Eddy’s problems, than our GrandBoss would keep thinking everything was fine. We kept up our sides of the projects, documented everything, and quietly stopped doing anything that was Eddy’s responsibility. We made sure to chose a period when we knew the projects were public, but not high pressure. Think things mostly meant for internal audiences, but might be seen by someone external. We also quietly scheduled to both leave early on Fridays, so when Eddy would inevitably show up in my office and try to make me do work he’d agreed to do, I was not available and neither were my student assistants.

    After the GrandBoss saw how badly two projects went, came to us, and we had carefully documented everything, Eddy was put on PIP. Eventually, he was let go, which I actually feel bad about. That wasn’t our intent. We were just tired of having to “drop everything” for manufactured panic caused by lack of proper planning and the assumption that we didn’t also have jobs to do.

    1. Anon-for-Now*

      Don’t feel too bad. If he had a PIP he had a chance to improve and keep his job. He just… didn’t.

      1. AnotherLibrarian*

        Intellectually, I know that. It’s hard though, because as a person, I thought Eddy was a nice guy. He just… wasn’t functional at work.

    2. Mad Harry Crewe*

      Seriously don’t feel bad. This is precisely in line with Allison’s advice about this kind of person and this kind of boss. Consider: if the bosses had handled it right away, maybe he could have developed better habits and not lost his job. Or, once he was on the PIP, he could have figured out how to change his behavior.

      You did not owe this mediocre dude a paycheck at the expense of your projects, workload, or stress level. If the company owed this mediocre dude a job with no responsibilities, then they should have worked it out so that “his” responsibilities were officially located elsewhere, not just on whoever was too nice to say no. And however nice he might have been outside of work, it is a really crappy thing to fob off all of your work on other people. You did the company a kindness to bring this out in the open on low-stakes projects, not where failure would be extremely visible and painful.

  120. VermiciousKnid*

    My husband and I met when we were waiting tables at a casual chain restaurant. People knew we were dating, but it wasn’t really a ~thing~ and we were very professional at work.
    There was one manager whose gross incompetence knew no bounds and who would often say wildly inappropriate things. He looked like a toe with a face. The general manager could not fire Toeboy, as the GM had stuck his neck out to get Toeboy into the management training program out of pity (remember, he looked like a toe with a face). Mistakes were made.
    So anyway, one day Toeboy referred to my then-BF as my “partner in zones (the tables we were covering) and fornication.” I didn’t bother reporting him; the anti-Semitic comment he made to a Jewish coworker didn’t get his ass canned, so I knew this wouldn’t (restaurants are the worst). Instead, I told the most gossipy manager what he said and that I recorded it in the notebook I’m keeping for my eventual harassment suit. Toeboy barely spoke to me again. He was eventually fired for reasons I can’t remember. From what I can gather on social media, he still looks like a toe with a face.

  121. merula*

    Let’s say that I work in Tea Service production; we make teapots, creamers and sugar bowls. Historically, these had been separated into three different teams, but they naturally go together and many of the skills are the same across.

    One member of the team, Doris, had only ever worked in sugar bowls, and vocally disliked any work to do with teapots and creamers. She would flat refuse to do work, too, and her management wouldn’t do anything about it.

    Part of our job is reviewing new regulations and case law around tea service to see what impact there is to our products. Some of these are specific to one product (teapot spouts?), while some apply across (glazing standards) and some of the things we’re sent are completely unrelated (dinnerplate diameter requirements). The current process was that one person each from the teapot, creamer and sugar bowl sub-teams would review each piece of regulation, but our VP wanted us to find a way to have only one person review each piece so we’re not wasting time.

    Doris volunteered for this project because she wanted to find a way to not have to think about teapots and creamers. She was obstructionist at every turn. She refused meeting invites and complained when we progressed without her. She started coming to meetings and refusing to consider any division of work that would lead to the goal the VP wanted.

    After a full month of this BS, the rest of the team met on a day she was on PTO and put together a plan. We sent it in an email to the full team requesting comment, knowing full well Doris skims her email, and then after a week sent it to the VP and team leads.

    Doris FLIPPED OUT when she saw the VP email, and replied-all that she did not agree and that there was too much “flying emails and fast talking going on in our calls”, and said “We specifically agrees that this work would not require looking at or reviewing [stuff outside of individual specialties].” She also spent an entire day making the rounds of the office she sat in (we’re split across two locations, I’m at the other one) to complain about it to anyone who would listen.

    The VP called me, as I was leading the project, and asked if we had ever agreed to that. We obviously hadn’t, that was the entire point of the effort. He said OK and ended the call.

    Two weeks later Doris announced that she was leaving the company.

  122. Campfire Raccoon*

    This was a long time ago.

    I worked in a large accounting department for an ancient, lumbering, old-fashioned, good-ol-boys firm. We desperately needed new computers, but mahogany row wouldn’t approve the purchases because we weren’t “revenue generating”. Anyway, old boat-anchor computers meant semi-tedious work was even more tedious. Billings took forever, expense reporting was done on paper, and budgets were prepared with sticks and rocks because an abacus might be too expensive. I might be exaggerating a little, but as a newbie I had to hand-write 1099s because they couldn’t find tape for typewriter they usually used.

    If one of our computers failed, we’d get dusty old bisque-colored hand-me-downs, unearthed from some ancient IT tomb.

    So one day, I stuck three Annoyotrons inside the fluorescent lights of various accounting cubicles. If you’ve never used an Annoyotron- it emits a high-pitched electronic sound in one of three pitches. Not everyone can hear them and they go off at random intervals. The metal from the cubicle cabinet made a great sound box, so even people walking by could hear them. (Or not, depending on their age.) It sounded like the computers were dying slow, painful deaths.

    Complaints began, but as IT couldn’t identify the problem they’d replace the computer with a hand-me-down. But of course, the sound didn’t go away. IT used the continued noise as an excuse to buy the user a new computer. Then I’d move the Annoyotron to a new location and the process would repeat.

    Eventually we all got new computers, which meant we were able to implement new software. Costs went down, efficiency went up, and I never told anyone what I had done.

    5. juneybug*

      Wow, you are my hero!! I would have never thought of using sound as a weapon, I mean motivation for improvement.

  123. Learning As I Go*

    I had a horrible manager at a prior job who had slacking down to an art. She had one pre-teen daughter, and she filled her calendar with fake appointments for the kid: “Sarah’s violin lesson”, “Sarah’s dentist appointment”, etc. One day she called off because Sarah’s school supposedly had a snow day, and when we checked it out, the school was actually in session that day. Her office was inside an office pod, and her desk was positioned in a way that if someone walked past the exterior window on the pod, they couldn’t see her desk. She worked full-time in the dark, so that when people glanced in, they couldn’t tell if she was out of the office, or just sitting in the dark. She parked her car in the factory employees’ parking lot because it was out of sight of the windows on the executive level of the building, where her boss sat. When she showed up at noon (which was frequent), she would call one of her direct reports to come let her in the back door so she didn’t have to swipe her badge, because it would record the time of her arrival in the security system. She was brilliant in her work avoidance, but was eventually found out and fired. It didn’t help that she was arrogant, rude, and the entire staff hated her.

  124. LemonLime*

    I had an ex-boss (EVIL BOSS) who thrived of making his employees miserable. He was an abuser in every sense of the word while keeping a veneer of professionalism to upper management. While he seemed to intentionally drive his employees to want to leave, he would sabotage any attempt to leave (if he caught wind you were looking for another job he made your life that much harder, tried to bad-mouth you in every way, denied any requested time off (incase you were going for interviews) and made sure you felt as worthless as possible to shake your confidence in yourself.
    I escaped to another department by covering my tracks while job hunting and those I interviewed with knew his terrible side and so kept the interview process on the down low.
    Fast forward to the new girl EVIL BOSS hired to replace me, Liz. He lost one employee by not keeping an eagle eye and thus he kept tabs on her whereabouts, made her tell him when she was using the restroom, kept time on that, took pictures of her car in the parking lot, instructed her team mates not to talk to her, would not allow her to leave her desk for any reason other than to pee, and demanded to hold on to her personal phone while she was at work. This went on for more than a year.
    Another colleague, Jane, and I tried to help Liz escape EVIL BOSS. Liz cried every day, had panic attacks, had to be put on anxiety meds and her anxiety just made her make mistakes that he verbally lashed her for. Like friends trying to help a woman out of an abusive relationship we had to be secret about it, could barely talk to her (he would quickly shoo us off) and we had to keep reminding her she wasn’t worthless and other people would hire her.
    Mustering what little nerve she had, Liz applied to an internal transfer. As it so happened I knew a manager on the interview committee and he confided to me that EVIL BOSS had called him and gave an enormous list of reasons not to hire Liz. Evil boss made up lies about her stealing from the company, unexplained absences, alluded to mental disorders and disclosed her anxiety medication saying she had an addiction to Xanax. Despite my best efforts, this manager could not believe someone could make up such lies, they must be true, right?
    Liz went back to EVIL BOSS whose abuse was bolder now that she didn’t get the transfer.
    Jane and I could not stand it! Jane told Liz what had happened. Liz was mortified but defeated. She wouldn’t pursue it with HR. Jane and I pushed Liz, who was close to quitting and becoming homeless rather than face one more day at work, that she really had nothing to lose at this point. She was not the first and would not be the last. Liz didn’t bite.
    Jane and I spent several evenings scouring HR rules, employment laws and the best ways to make a case (Facts, not feelings). We typed up a letter using key phrases that would force HR to act. We sent this letter to Liz via the internal mail system because we did not want EVIL BOSS suspecting anything. All Liz had to do was muster the courage to walk it into HR.
    She did! HR was forced to open an investigation, the committee member was called in to say what they knew. Then the investigation pulled in other team members, uncovering other violations he had committed. Years’ worth of Illegal practices, time denials, stalking behavior. The entire thing snowballed as all his dirty deeds were exposed. In just a few months he went from this untouchable tyrant to being escorted out of the building. Liz was sort of a hero to her team members who couldn’t believe he was gone. To this day I feel its one of my top accomplishments in life.

    1. TypityTypeType*

      Yay — so many bad bosses never get their comeuppance, and so many Lizzes never get any help or relief. This story makes me happy!

      1. LemonLime*

        Yes! That’s why I consider my part in it so satisfying! It was years of helplessness, watching him do it to so many and always getting away with it. Just wanted to help Liz out! And honestly if it had just been her complaint I think he might have gotten a reprimand- we had no idea the flood gates it would open, it was so wonderful that all those years of getting away with stuff became what sank him in the end!

  125. Megatron*

    The office manager in my first job was reasonably nice to me as an intern, but was very particular and generally abusive to the women who reported to her. I was responsible for ordering office supplies. She hated her stapler because she did not like the spring-action, so she asked me for a new one. I carefully selected a new, fancy stapler and ordered it, and she asked for it everyday until it arrived. We had just hired a new controller, a very dry, analytical man, so finally it came to his office, and I was able to tell this frightening woman that the stapler I had picked out for her had arrived. I was excited and anxious for this small opportunity to please her. However, she opened the box to find the same model of stapler that she had previously, and it had the same lousy spring-action. I thought she was going to flip on me and I had no idea how I had made the mistake, until I heard the controller chuckling on the corner. It turns out that our very dry, no-nonsense controller had swapped out the new stapler in the box with her old one.

  126. IndustriousLabRat*

    I’ve got one from my days as a bar manager.

    The restaurant was owned by a couple. Mrs. Owner was the brains and business of the operation, while Mr. Owner was quite literally a stumbling drunk, whose role seemed to be wandering in during the middle of service, barking orders for things to be done that should NEVER be done during service except in the case of dire emergency, such as cleaning the smelly grease traps under the Hobart (this happened more than once, invariably resulting in customers coming up to me to ask whether we were aware of a sewer backup… good times), and then toddling off to the bar to continue his drinking.

    Additionally, Mr. Owner had some Very Sexist Ideas about Men Being In Charge, and how ideas from ‘girls’ were just silly fluff. He had the final say in EVERYTHING, even if it was delivered with slurred speech. He was *never* wrong, even when he was (like drunkenly mis-measuring the bar height when it was replaced, insisting to the contractor who tried to suggest a standard height that he was right, and then when it turned out he wasn’t…. refusing to at least have the stools reupholstered so that the customers weren’t sitting with their chins in their rocks glasses… one of many examples). I would beg and plead for things to be changed and be waved off dismissively. Even changes that wouldn’t cost money, and would improve efficiency and profits, were in one ear and out the other.

    His weakness was how much he liked inviting the staff to a bar down the street after work on Sunday nights, and how sloppy-chatty he would get. I’d save up a mental list of all the stuff I wanted to fix, and when he was especially drunk and attentive, loudly start complimenting him on that WONDERFUL idea he had told me about earlier- within earshot of his brother-in-law, the kitchen manager. “Oh Mr. Boss that was BRILLIANT! It will make all the staff SO HAPPY, and increase profits SO MUCH!” And it worked. He couldn’t remember a thing one way or another, but BIL sure did; and, knowing exactly what I was up to, was more than happy to remind him of it the next day when Mr. Owner was sober(er). Things that I’d been begging him to change for years were suddenly a reality, and everyone was happy.

    As an aside, this is the same Mr. Owner who used to come back behind the bar during service, get in my way, and brush up against me far more than the admittedly tight quarters would necessitate, and against whom I used the pent-up Chemical Weapons of my mild gluten intolerance to discourage from visiting. That one backfired (*groan) in that he called the town DPW to pull the floor and check the sewer connection, which I learned that day was actually under the bar the whole time. Not Machiavellian… just another story of working for this odd duck.

    The stools never did get reupholstered, though. Their accountant is one of my dear friends and still, a decade later, this is a running joke between us.

  127. In my shell*

    I reported to the CEO of a non-profit as a manager and he had a strict zero tolerance no gifts policy (even from us as managers to our staff!) even at the holidays. One of our vendors offered employees from department A cash incentives for referrals and the CEO made us draw a name of all staff to receive the cash and later disallowed the incentives to be paid at all, which is fine except…

    Our primary vendor account manager started visiting more frequently and he suddenly had a leather jacket that was way out of character for him and we suspected it was a vendor gift. This was later confirmed in a casual conversation and the next thing we knew he had lunched with the vendor and came back and was making plane reservations for the Super Bowl. Again totally out of character. I had an opportunity in the cafeteria to have a casual conversation with a Board Director about how excited we were for CEO to be able to attend the Super Bowl and gosh, it must be sponsored by vender X as an implied question. It’s just so darn exciting! *2 hours later* CEO no longer going to the Super Bowl and we were suddenly allowed to gift staff small tokens of appreciation under $50. I am absolutely certain that he has no idea it was me and it still gives me sneaky feelings when I think of it. I would have been ‘eh it’s a CEO perk’ about it if he hadn’t been such an unreasonable ass about doing things for our staff!

  128. Anon because recognizable*

    I’m not if it is exactly ‘machiavellian’ but something close.

    Our company produced batches of different types of product X. Depending on the type, the customer would get a batch of Type 1 Xs monthly, 2 weeks after the end of the calendar month, or Type 2 Xs every 3 months, 6 weeks after the end of the calendar month (as in this case), etc.

    During a particular run of producing Type 2 Xs, we got the word from management that the delivery date had moved up significantly — 3 weeks to produce the Xs instead of 6.

    People’s vacations were canceled, large amounts of overtime (paid) incurred to the company, basically a “crunch time” no one had seen coming (because the delivery of Xs was always tracked quite closely by a production control type of department, and was comfortably on track to be completed in the usual 6 weeks).

    Well, after a lot of overtime, cancelation of vacations, cutting corners, ‘not noticing’ lapses in quality that would normally have caused some of the Xs to be rejected etc — the batch of Xs was miraculously completed in 3 weeks!

    Joy all round! – we pulled together to meet this seemingly impossible deadline, etc. Ship them! Woooo! Everyone was pretty tired having been at work until silly hours of the morning for the last 3 weeks on the trot, so it was a muted Wooo, but still.
    So the Xs were boxed up, delivery company arranged, etc (these Xs have the nature that they need special handling, you wouldn’t just hand them off to your local parcel depot).

    At the last minute – we get the order to Cancel the shipment!!

    What the what???

    Well, what had happened was that a Big Boss somewhere wanted to see if the creation of a batch of Type 2 Xs really did take the 6 weeks that it was planned for, and whether that time could be cut…

    I describe it as potentially Machiavellian due to the lie aspect: there was no actual change in the deadline, that was just fiction to make it believable, because I suppose being open with staff like “We want to do a pilot to see if we can streamline the production of Type 2 Xs into a shorter time” wouldn’t get the required result…

    I was mad on behalf of the people who had actual vacations canceled etc because of this.

    I wish I had a Machiavellian revenge story to tack on to this, but sorry, I don’t!

  129. Alex*

    When I was a teenager, I worked at an outdoor ice cream stand in the summer. The stand was owned by a married couple, who were usually both there.

    The wife was CRAZYPANTS. She always was trying to convince her husband that I liked her better than I liked him. One day, she even gave me a wad of cash to go buy her some gift items for herself while I was on my lunch break (there were some shops nearby). She said that I shouldn’t tell her husband. I thought it was weird, but I was 16 and not comfortable saying no. When I came back with the items, she took them and told her husband that I’d bought them for her, that I liked her best, wasn’t he jealous of her, etc. Stuff like, “Look what Alex bought me! She must love me! She didn’t buy you anything!” It was so weird!

  130. Pinapple air freshener*

    I worked somewhere that had a very strict no perfume/cologne policy. It was pretty heavily enforced. Meaning you would be sent home if you were caught wearing a scent of any kind (which to fair I understand, its awful to breathe in heavily scented air all dang day and can trigger allergies!)

    Well we learned it was due in part to one person, Jane. She eventually complained she could smell people’s deodorant, hair spray and other personal products. Jane would constantly complain she smell “deodorant” not body odor but deodorant. HR had to tell Jane they couldn’t police people’s personal hygiene product choices.

    Jane was also a huge germophobe. She had an air filter on her desk and constantly used hand sanitizer. She was moved next to someone who had terrible allergies and would sneeze and blow her nose constantly (this is another story, lol). Every time she sneezed or coughed, Jane would spritz a homemade concoction of essential oils (not sure how she could deal with Essential Oils and not scents) in her direction. This pissed the sneezer off and she and Jane got in a huge argument one day. Like yelling and screaming. Basically HR had to break up the argument.

    Fast forward several weeks, we all received a company branded air freshener as a gift (again please don’t ask me why they did this, with all the scent issues in my office!). It smelled like pineapple. Jane did not take said air freshener. A few days later, Jane complained she could smell one near her. She cleaned her whole desk, and still complained she smell it. Maintenance brought fans to air out the cabinets and bleached the whole thing. SHE STILL SMELLED SOMETHING. Come to find out, someone had shoved an air freshener in a little hole in her desk. It was hidden so well, that like 3 or 4 separate people couldn’t find it. Jane quit the next day.

    We all knew who it was, but no one ever confessed to it. It was the lady with the bad allergies…

  131. Red5*

    This is a story of how I underhandedly outmaneuvered a bad employee and his bad supervisor.

    The organization I work for is located worldwide, and there are places overseas where one can take a temporary job for a year or so and then go back to their original job state-side when they’re done. I took one of these temporary jobs where I was directly supervising about 8 people, and then had a handful of people from other supervisors who provided direct support to my shop on a scheduled rotation.

    When I first took over as supervisor, one of the employees providing direct support but was not assigned to me came to me and demanded a promotion. (Let’s call him Fergus.) I explained to him that, because I was not his supervisor, this was outside of my control. Fergus responded in a fit of pettiness by refusing to do his actual work, hiding out in unused conference rooms on our compound to pout and get out of doing his job.

    Fergus’ supervisor (Wakeen) refused to address these issues with him, so people kept calling ME instead of Wakeen to complain about Fergus and I got tired of it pretty quickly. But again, I couldn’t send Fergus home because he wasn’t my employee, so I had to get creative. I sat down with my admin staff and we re-worked the direct support schedule to remove all of Fergus’ shifts from the rotation. Then I called Wakeen, thanked him profusely for allowing us to take advantage of Fergus’ support to my shop, and then let him know that, due to changes in workload, we wouldn’t need Fergus to fill in rotation any longer.

    For about a week afterwards, I overheard Wakeen trying to pawn him off on other shops rather than deal with the problem directly. When no one else would take him (because they were all tired of him loafing around and not doing any work), Wakeen finally had to send Fergus home. Score one for the good guys.

  132. Crystal*

    This was ENTIRELY unintentional on my part, but it kinda fits and is certainly funny.

    I was sent to a conference in Miami, along with a male co-worker I did not know well. I volunteered to make the travel arrangements, then called the hotel and asked for two rooms “as far apart as physically possible on the property.” I don’t know what the hotel thought exactly, but I was a young woman, my co-worker was an older man… and I ended up in a room on the restricted-access concierge floor. It was literally the hotel where they filmed the cards-by-the-pool scene in Goldfinger and I had the enormous, snazzy room on an upper floor with a large balcony overlooking the ocean. My male co-worker got a room in the crappy ’70s annex next to the dumpster and complained his room smelled like mildew.

  133. Minocho*

    [This is from a former position]
    I am a woman in IT, so I’m used to being in a male dominated field. My team had about 10 people after a year and a half, and the manager decided he needed two team leads to manage some of the load. He didn’t inform the team or take applications, he directly asked team members to become team leads. The most senior developer didn’t want a leadership position. I was next, but wasn’t asked and was unaware these conversations were even happening. The next most senior developer was asked, and he accepted a team lead position. The next most senior developer was a woman of color with past management experience. She was also ignored, and the manager asked a junior team member instead – who accepted a leadership position.

    I ended up reporting to the first person who accepted. This team lead was a fresh college graduate, he’d been in the position for about 6 months when he was tapped to be a team lead. He was extremely overbearing and micromanaging – literally to the point of standing behind me and telling me what key to press next. As a professional with 10 years of experience at the time, this was incredibly frustrating. There was undoubtedly a little resentment on my end as well, as it was obvious the manager hadn’t even considered women as possible team leads, but the communication between us was terrible.

    I was due for my first review with him as my supervisor. Reviews are a horrible experience for me. They have generally been very positive, but they cause me a lot of stress even when (especially when?) they’re positive, and I have always ended up crying. Every time, no matter what I did. I knew the difficulties the new team lead was having with me would be a problem, and I also knew that my former manager, the one with some obvious problems in attitude with regard to women, would be there for the team lead’s first review season with his team, so I decided to use their sexism to my advantage. I figured if I couldn’t stop it from causing problems for me, I could at least use it to my advantage in the rare situations that I could.

    For the review, I dressed as feminine as I could. I had makeup and nail polish, I wore a skirt and pumps and a blouse instead of my usual sneakers, jeans and plaid button up shirt. And it worked. Even though I tried to control it, I ended up crying again as I explained that I” wanted to know what I needed to do in order to gain [[team leader’s]] trust in order to be allowed to work without close supervision again”. I explained that I would like to be allowed to speak in meetings I was invited to again (Team leader would wait until I began to speak in meetings, then immediately speak over me – I hadn’t been allowed to speak in meetings without being interrupted for months at this point). The manager, since I looked feminine and unthreatening, felt protective, and they sent me on my way with a promise to work with the team lead on how to fix any issues. I don’t know what happened between the team lead and manager after that, but the team lead backed off enough that the job became less horrible for a while.

    Ugh. I am so glad that is a former position!!!!

  134. Anon for this*

    Okay, finally came up with one. Is it the MOST Machiavellian story I have? Not sure, but here goes. I was working for a nonprofit organization that seemed to believe that they owned their employees (they literally gave us shirts that said “Property of Nonprofit Llama Breeders” on them). Some of our staff liked to volunteer occasionally for Alpaca Farms Are Us, and so when they had vacation they would go work on the Alpaca farm for a few days. My guess is that TPTB didn’t like them volunteering for another organization that did work similar to ours, but instead of saying anything to them they tried to undermine their vacation time. For example: once they were going to another country for an Alpaca conference; they had arranged the payments for the conference themselves, and were going primarily on their weekend (they had the 2 days beforehand off as well which they had arranged with the rest of their team). Their boss knew about the trip and had approved it weeks beforehand. Plus the things they were learning at the conference they were going to on their own time was stuff that would benefit Nonprofit Llama Breeders too. Part of this involved an international flight (say from Argentina to Columbia; a reasonable distance for a long weekend but still out of the country). 3 days before they were supposed to leave, one of the other supervisors decided that we had to have our monthly meeting THAT SATURDAY. This was a bit of a sore point with the staff because we had normal staff meetings every month but they would always be scheduled last-minute (there were some reasons for not making them, say, every 3rd Saturday of the month, but it was still frustrating). The two co-workers said they would be gone because of their trip. They were told to cancel their trip (with their nonrefundable international tickets) and stay around because of the (routine) staff meeting. When they pointed out that their supervisor had approved the trip weeks earlier (before they had purchased the tickets), the person trying to schedule the meeting said, “That’s too bad; you didn’t clear it with ME, so I didn’t know about it, so you have to cancel.” Ultimately there was enough of an uproar (from all of the staff, if I remember correctly) that they ended up going on their trip anyway. Spoiler alert: the staff meeting still went fine even without them.

    On another occasion (a year or two later?) one of them had a pre-approved trip for a week, again going from Argentina to Columbia, that they had gotten permission and plane tickets for (this time months in advance, and mentioning it to all the supervisors even though they didn’t all need this information). A few weeks beforehand they told her that she needed to cancel her trip because they needed her to be around for a work-related thing. The particularly annoying thing was that this work responsibility was something that at least half of the employees at Nonprofit Llama Breeders were certified to do, and every time it had come up in the past they’d just taken someone else off their regular job for a couple of days. But this time they swore up and down that NO ONE ELSE could possibly do it this week! NO ONE! She MUST cancel her vacation so this Terribly Important Thing could be done. My favorite excuse that was given: when she asked, “Well, what about Sally? She’s certified to do this, and she’s around that week,” they said that Sally had been working very hard and decided that she might go away for a couple of days that week, and because she had been working so hard she needed that break. As if the person with the pre-approved vacation had not also been working very hard and needing a break, you know, on the vacation she had purchased tickets for after getting permission. (Once again I think it ended up being a lot of bluster, and when she stuck to her guns they backed down and let her go. Spoiler alert: also fine.)

  135. Nora*

    I used to do casework at a tiny non-profit with a notoriously difficult population. I was the only caseworker for 1500 clients. I was horrendously underpaid and my husband had lost his job. A client sent me a fruit basket and a tub of brownies for something, I don’t remember what anymore. Me, specifically. My boss made me surrender the brownies to the office but I intercepted the fruit basket and said I’d donate it to a different non-profit. That non-profit was me. I kept it. We could barely afford groceries. I regret nothing.

  136. AnonFinance*

    I was working in the operations area of a finance company. In simple terms different teams processed transactions at different stages. I processed at the last stage which was also the most time sensitive and financially risky. So when I got the transaction it had to be done by a certain time. The team in the process right before me realized that if they didn’t do their validations (IE their job) and passed the transaction on to me I’d have to do it. This went on for months of them not doing their work and me having to clean it up. I knew it was happening, and to make matters worse as we had an open floor plan I could see their computers and that most of them were on facebook, watching youtube, etc anytime our director wasn’t around. We shared the same supervisor and he didn’t care that they weren’t doing the work – to the point that he told me to stop complaining and just do the work one day. That was the last straw. Director was a feisty lady and we got along really well. We were also both in the office before everyone else everyday. So I told her everything, they weren’t doing their jobs, I could see them slacking off, so could supervisor and he didn’t care. The director told me she’d handle it so it looked like she caught them and I never said anything. One afternoon she made a big show of leaving for the day – had her coat and bags and walked out waving bye to everyone. A minute or so later they were all on the internet, but what they didn’t know is director had come back in through a door that was never used behind everyone, no one saw her. She stood there in silence for a few minutes while she watched them all slacking off. Immediately pulled their entire team and supervisor into a meeting and said she needed proof of the work they had been doing the past few months because it looked like they did nothing. They all suddenly started doing their jobs again and supervisor never said a word to me about it.

  137. Kris*

    I had a tin of hot chocolate mix in my closed (locked after-hours) desk drawer – the cocoa powder started disappearing at a rate that I knew I wasn’t the only one using it. This was not in a public area, was tucked in the back of my bottom desk drawer so clearly not up for team use like the goodies in the kitchen. Talked with coworkers – everyone says they don’t touch other’s desks.

    Spoke to management who announced at the team meeting “hey just a reminder don’t take food from your coworkers’ desks because that’s theft” but it continued and I didn’t want to have to lock up my entire setup every time I stepped away from it. In frustration I put “stop stealing my f*cking food” in sharpie on the inside of the cocoa tin lid.

    Ended up being called into a meeting to discuss a coworker complaining about the cuss word – that she saw when she went into my personal belongings to steal my food. Pointed this out, boss blinks and told me to get back out into the lab and send the complainee to her in my place. No more cocoa thieving!

    1. Cranky Kate*

      Something like this happened at my first job. Someone was routinely stealing my dessert out of my lunch bag in the refrigerator, so one day I put a post-it note on top of my peanut butter cup: “I know who you are, and if this ever happens again everyone else is going to know who you are, too.”

      The problem stopped. To this day, I don’t know who the real culprit was.

    2. Lady Meyneth*

      Before the plague enforced WFH, my team had a tin of candy set out. We took turns restocking it weekly and it worked well since we had an area just for ourselves. Then the candy started disappearing after hours, at incredible rates. We honestly didn’t really mind because we always got too much candy and there was typically a lot left at the end of the week. But we also knew it was likely a project manager who had a massive sweet tooth and tended to stay late, and we thought it was rude to just take without a heads up when he could easily afford his own.

      So we wrote “God is watching you” on the tin the next time we restocked. The candy continued disappearing at the same rate, but every Monday a $20 note would appear below the tin. Since our weekly candy budget was about $10, this was way too much. But we never officially found out who our candy-thief-turned-candy-supplier was, so we just started getting a fancy cake once a month with the leftover money.

  138. Phyllis Steen*

    While enlisted I was temporarily assigned to department A that oversaw widgets for the entire region (maintenance, testing, training, auditing, operations). These guys were gods and wonderful to me as well. Always sharing knowledge and helpful.
    My next station, Dept B, was a 1/4 mile down the road, dealt only with maintenance, and was worlds apart in culture. Everything was done completely opposite what I’d learned, and I was yelled at if I questioned anything. Reports were produced with numbers that had no basis. They looked pretty, but you can spray paint a pile of shit gold and cover it with diamonds but it’s still shit.
    After sucking it up for a few months, I visited dept A to get advice. How could I bring B in compliance? How do I handle this? I was very inexperienced, and they were wonderful trying to help me. Nothing worked, and they were limited in what they could do because they’d found out through me.
    It eventually got so bad that my health suffered and I left. After a week, the head of dept A called and offered me a job, I’d work for dept A but dept B would answer to me. Tempting, but the fun would only last a few weeks so I regretfully declined. I really had no qualifications needed for the position.
    After another few weeks they asked if I’d come by to visit on a specific day and time. I went, and we could see from the deck massive amounts of activity at dept B. Turns out dept A had randomly decided to audit them and it had not gone well. They had a week to get in compliance, which was impossible. They were working round the clock, but they didn’t know that the paperwork was already being finalized to formally reprimand them, and several of the supervisors were going to be transferred to a dept fa, far away.

  139. Forty Years in the Hole*

    So-so Machiavellian but still makes me smile. Many years ago: Air Force, Senior Squadron Adjutant at big fighter base. Set up a big meeting with the Base Commander, all his Squadron COs, senior Aircraft Maintenance Officers, and VIP visitors from senior command HQ & industry-adjacent techs; lots of coordinating of schedules, logistics, etc. I asked the B Comd (the host)if he wanted coffee set up: “ nope, they can pick one up at the canteen down the hall.” Cool.
    Everyone rolls in, coffees in hand: Generals, Colonels, senior industry tech advisors… . I am the only female officer, and the most junior. The visiting General’s Staff O is a few minutes late/distracted (also my rank)and asks: “hey, Adj, how ‘bout some coffee?” (Cue serious side-eye… and I see the BComd sit back in his chair and wait for it).
    In front of 30+ senior officers, I go: “No, thanks, just had one” And the Commander loses it – never saw him laugh so hard. And we carried on – after the Staff O slunk out for his own coffee.

    3. juneybug*

      Oh, I have a coffee story as well.
      I was a newly promoted sergeant in the Air Force who was in the breakroom making some hot tea for myself. Someone comes in behind me and asks if I would make some coffee. First of all, I don’t drink coffee so I am probably the last person you want making it. And second, I thought it was the smart-a$$ male pig who was lower rank than me asking (he thought women were beneath him, shouldn’t be in the military, etc.). So I said in a very snarky voice, “I don’t make coffee for anyone except my parents who out-rank anyone in this military” and then turned around to see my new boss, Lt Col, who decided to arrive a day early to start his new job. For a few seconds there were no sounds (other than the sound of my heart stopping and my career going down in flames). Then Lt Col Nice Guy (he really was) started laughing his ass off. I mean tears were rolling down his face. Once he caught his breath, he replied, “Good to know” and smiled at me. From that day forward, he would have the other coffee drinkers in the office make coffee. He occasionally made coffee as well.
      It took months before I could look in the eye and say something other than, “Yes Sir”.
      The three years I worked for him, I worked my a$$ off in appreciate for allowing me to continue my career without holding my stupidity against me.

  140. LadyByTheLake*

    I worked with a guy, Machi. Machi and I both reported to Boss, but Machi and Boss had been friends forever. Machi was a jerk to everyone except Boss, although in the office that he and Boss both worked in, Machi kept it to being brusque — nothing really awful, so everyone there would just say “Oh Machi has some rough edges, but he’s okay.” Boss would routinely say, “Machi’s an asshole, but he’s MY asshole.” In other words, Boss thought he knew what Machi was doing. But he didn’t.

    Behind the scenes, Machi would actively undermine other managers — tell lies about them that would get back to Boss, schedule critical meetings when he knew that other people couldn’t attend and then tell Boss that they had “skipped” the meeting, withhold crucial information and let others made public mistakes that they wouldn’t have made if they had the right information — then he would go to Boss and point out the mistake. There were multiple people who complained and Boss would always tell them to work it out with Machi directly. I got on the phone once with Machi for one of those sessions and he flat out said, “I’m on the phone with you because Boss told me I had to be, but it doesn’t matter what you say or do because I’ll tell Boss whatever I want to and he’ll believe me and you’ll be out of here within a year. Do you want to pretend to stay on the phone and talk or do you want to update your resume?” He got rid of a lot of good people and to this day, Boss still doesn’t realize that he was played.

  141. Anonymous IMer*

    In my first job out of college, I had not yet learned the important lesson that work IMs do not always remain private. The way I found out was fairly diabolical and over a decade later I’m still a bit salty about it. A coworker (who had gotten me the job and was a friend outside of work) and I would sometimes IM each other to vent about a few of our more annoying or frustratingly incompetent colleagues, and what I didn’t know was that IM transcripts sometimes ended up in a shared folder in the department inbox (because Outlook automatically sent an email alerting you to any missed messages when you were away from your computer for a while, and when you deleted the email it didn’t go to your own trash folder but the group folder).

    Apparently, another coworker from a different office who I didn’t know very well, but who presented a very sweet, “I love Disney and puppies” face to the world, had a habit of searching out these deleted emails to collect gossip to spread to her work friends, and she showed one of my conversations to a bunch of people INCLUDING the person I was complaining about (who was truly one of the most frustrating to work with people I’ve ever encountered, but was very nice). I never got in trouble over it because she kept it to lower level employees but I side-eyed her from that day forward and was very satisfied when I got a promotion over her. And I moved all venting convos to Gchat.

  142. Dana Lynne*

    I once had a coworker who had a New Initiative in mind that would be a kind of an internal work group doing special projects. The idea was a good one in theory, and she cheerleaded it for it hard with our boss. We had several planning meetings about it. The coworker led the discussions and proceeded to eventually assign us all various tasks (she did not have the power to do this) and then informed us all that she would be busy on This Other Very Important Project for a while and that we were all to do our tasks associated with launching the New Initiative and get back to her. We all kind of looked at each other with a “yeah, no” expression, which went right past her. It became clear that she saw New Initiative as her chance to be in charge of something and make her look important, yet she clearly wasn’t going to do any of the work to launch it. A few days later, after the meeting where she tried to give us all tasks to do, someone in the group began asking very legitimate questions about how our New Initiative would actually overlap with some of the duties and functions of another department in the organization. Shouldn’t we bring them into the planning meetings too? Coworker got very flustered and told everyone she would be too busy to participate any further in New Initiative after all. It became clearer and clearer through the whole thing that she just wanted something to be in charge of while not doing any of the legwork. It was so silly to see all the endless email chains she kicked off, and useless meetings she called and roped us all into, and all for her self aggrandizement, and in the end, all for nothing. New Initiative was never launched and the other department with the partial overlap kept kind of plaintively asking us what had happened as they were kind of keen on the idea. Incredible waste of time by one person for no one else’s benefit.

  143. Jay*

    My husband was in academia for a while. After a few years at Small University, he was selected to lead a grant-funded institute. The grant covered salaries, supplies, and furniture. It did not cover renovation, so he was moved into a very large room because it was the only vacant one. He was given a catalog and told to order his furniture. He chose a conference table, some chairs, filing cabinets, and the largest desk he could find. For one thing, it was an enormous room. For another, he likes big desks (and he cannot lie). He filled out the relevant purchasing orders and sent them along.

    The next day he got a call from the woman in charge of purchasing. “You can’t have that desk.” He explained that he’d been told he could order anything from the catalog. “It’s too expensive.” He explained that he had grant funding and it wasn’t coming out of the University budget. “You’re not authorized to have that desk. Only deans and above can have that desk.” He checked the employee handbook and told her he couldn’t find that policy. He asked her to send him the policy. She said “It’s an unwritten policy.” He eventually had to get a letter from the provost saying he was authorized to order the desk. It all took six months, during which time he had no desk.

    Turned out that there was someone in the building (not his department) who believed that as the most senior person in the building, he should have the largest desk, and he policed everyone’s office.

  144. Save the drama for your llama*

    An employee I supervised who did not get along with me (or anyone else in the office for that matter) tried to get me in trouble by threatening to report me to HR for a scenario that never even happened.

    Long story short, I reported it to Boss and Grandboss, who were already well aware that this particular employee was a pot-stirrer. Said employee was gone by the end of the week.

  145. KayEss*

    I worked for a tiny, dysfunctional design studio where the owner was a flighty narcissist who made business decisions based on how much she the individual person proposing a solution at that moment. The employee who had been there the longest was the art director, who was very good at manipulating the owner’s moods but whose design sense was about 30 years out of date. Below him was a young designer who was champing at the bit to have his own, more elegant and modern designs recognized.

    One of the owner’s momentary obsessions while I was there was breaking into getting clients in a new, trendy industry. Think artisanal-brewed tea. The method the studio had always used to solicit clients was to just send them a custom, tailored promotional package out of the blue as kind of a demonstration of what we could do for their business-to-business end. AD ruled the roost on creating these packages, which he always did as a weird, cheesy, pun-based diorama. Think like… a mini frying pan with fake eggs and bacon, with a tagline like, “We’ll help you find your sizzle!” So just. Bad. I don’t know if these things EVER gained a single client, but its what AD (and therefore the owner, since AD was pretty much always in her good graces) kept doing.

    Hotshot designer saw this as his big chance so he went to the owner and suggested that–for this speculative round–we should play a little game and have everyone divide up into teams and each create a package, then everyone could vote on the best one. Owner thought this was a GREAT idea because, as a narcissist, she loved playing people off one another for her approval. I wound up on AD’s team, in which he utterly steamrolled any idea anyone else had and we wound up producing a cheesy nightmare based entirely on tea-drinker stereotypes that no modern tea-brewing establishment would look at twice. Hotshot’s team, meanwhile, produced an trendy, relevant package that IMO had a real (or at least MUCH better) shot at catching the eye of someone in the industry. It was far and away the best of the team offerings and the voting for it was near-unanimous.

    So AD was briefly forced to congratulate Hotshot over his design direction being better. And then everyone returned to the usual day-to-day office backstabbing of a truly toxic environment inhabited entirely by mean-spirited jerks. The owner also had the attention span of a amped-up squirrel, so I’m pretty sure the final packages never even got produced and sent.

  146. Anonymous for this one*

    Yes, this really happened:

    Around 20 years ago, I worked in an office with a bunch of really nice, smart, chill people. And then there was Cersei. Cersei was absolutely brilliant, but also fussy, persnickety, and stand-offish. Our admin, Olenna, sat right outside Cersei’s office, and Cersei used to complain all the time, and to everyone up to and including Olenna’s supervisor, that she could hear Olenna answering the phone, greeting visitors, and assisting other staff members, even though Olenna wasn’t unusually loud or talkative.

    So one day, when Cersei stepped out of the office, Olenna stopped in and concealed a Furby behind Cersei’s computer monitor. Cersei gets back: “HIYEEE! I LOVE YOU!” (or whatever Furbies were saying 20 years ago, I don’t remember.) Cersei goes ballistic! And she can’t find the thing anywhere. Everytime she moves: “HIYEE! I LOVE YOU!” She’s tearing up the office, looking for it: “HIYEEE!” etc. Finally, Olenna sticks her head in the door: “Excuse me, Cersei? Would you mind holding it down in here? We can hear you all the way out at the front desk.”

    Olenna and I are still friends. Not sure whatever happened to Cersei; she’s probably off being awesome someplace, hopefully from a soundproofed office.

  147. Corporate Goth*

    Several bosses ago, worked for a guy who was literally the pointy-haired boss.

    – His job had been eliminated and he’d been placed in an area he knew nothing about. After about five years, he’d essentially recreated his old office. Near 100% turnover and we’re still trying to fix what he did.

    – Rather than dealing with problems early on, he let them fester. We wound up with a modern-day Hatfield and McCoys-style feud situation. One guy involved had a heart attack from the stress and sued the organization.

    – My job is literally to put pieces of information together. If he wanted to do something he knew I wouldn’t like, he’d deliberately hide info from me so I would be publicly blindsided. Only worked the first time, but I couldn’t always stop it.

    – He’d weaponize bureaucracy against people. He loved tiny little details and processes, so he’d find a legal way to achieve his goal and claim it was the only way. Unless you also knew the regulations well enough to see the loophole, you were going to lose. It was beautiful, and evil.

    On the other hand, my plan to outlast everyone else through the crazy years succeeded. He’s gone, and I’m now wiping out his vision while implementing my own. Who’s more Machiavellian?

      1. Corporate Goth*

        Outwaiting everyone else resulted in three promotions, but it’s a long way back to good. In a weird way, I miss the guy – Stockholm syndrome style – but that’s mostly because I learned quickly. His ratings style was clear and well-articulated. If you paid enough attention to the rules and knew how to play his game, you could do very well for yourself. I have no idea how anyone *didn’t* get amazing annual ratings.

        For instance, every year, he sent out a guide saying what words he was looking for in our self assessment. I used the chart to identify the score I wanted, and the specific term used for that score by the level *above* me. Then even if he downgraded me, I still generally got the score I wanted.

  148. Arya Snark*

    I worked in operations for a large investment firm. It was my job to collect data on sales so that data could be used for reporting purposes both internal & external. The sales/marketing team would send out sales notices via email, using a template they came up with. It was all in the body of the email and couldn’t be cut & pasted into anything without having to retype all of the data. Sales liked this because they could see everything in one move and not have to stress out their precious fingers by having to click on an attachment but it was a pain for the rest of us who needed that data. I came up with an alternative approach that involved keying the same data into an Excel form that then fed a database. It would require one extra step (littlerally a cut & paste after filling in all the same data that they were before) on the part of the sales team and the most obnoxious/misogynistic/classist blowhard of a sales rep decided he wasn’t going to do that so it wasn’t used despite my explanations that it would make it easier on a lot of people and it would enable us to report in more detail than we were currently. I asked again and again but was told no. Classic Ops vs. Sales scenario at work.
    Fast forward 6 months and there is a crisis. We were now being required to report stats that weren’t previously required to various rating agencies. I am asked in a meeting with all the execs if we can do what we’re being asked to do and I told them we couldn’t because we didn’t have the data. I went on to explain that we asked to track that needed data months ago via a new sales form but Sales refused so we don’t have it. Mr Blowhard was told to begin using the form immediately and to assist Ops with supplying the information we asked him to earlier. Last I heard, they were still using the form I created 6 years later.

  149. Kay*

    Well, this is not a very intelligent Machiavellian plan, but here goes.

    Shortly after college I worked in a very small department, and my boss was…odd. This was academia-adjacent, so quite tolerant of strong personalities, but they stood out even among that group. They once threw an actual fit in a meeting because I asked a clarifying question that they felt was designed to call them out on their lack of knowledge in a particular area. (It was not.)

    Boss decided they wanted a week off to visit family out of state. Boss became convinced that their supervisors would not grant them this time off. Granted, I was right out of college so not quite as observant as I might have been, but there were zero indications that boss would not have been granted this time off. So, starting about six weeks out, boss started doing some research on WebMD to put together a constellation of symptoms that could be mild, or could be really concerning. They began dropping hints to these symptoms in meetings with higher-ups, and on two occasions called in sick with exacerbations of those “symptoms.”

    By the time the planned week off arrived, boss had half-convinced themselves that there really was something wrong, and executed the final piece of the plan: a health crisis over the weekend that then led to a week of hospitalization. There were detailed emails. There was hand-wringing. There was much back and forth about a possible return date and reassignment of duties.

    After the week, boss returned with a miraculous recovery and nothing further was ever said about it. It was 100% open knowledge in our small department what boss was doing – they bragged about it?! – and just so, SO weird that we never really knew how or what to say to anyone outside our department. I still think about it sometimes. There’s the occasional “not feeling great” mental health day, and then there was this long con…to get something that they probably could have gotten with a short email and a crumb’s worth of planning.

    1. Portabella*

      That is really odd, especially for just a week of vacation….but also something I can think of about 3 or 4 people, at least, trying to do. I also work in academia. We have a lot of people who put a lot of energy towards the wrong things.

  150. Alaska or bust*

    Years ago, I was overworked and underpaid And hardly ever got to take time off. At one point I got sent to Alaska to meet with an important stakeholder. When I was about to board the flight to Anchorage, I got an email from that person that they would not be available after all and would need to reschedule. I pretended not to get the email until after I got to Alaska and enjoyed a mini vacation paid for by the company, and used my per diem to ride a dogsled.

    Then we rescheduled that meeting, I went back to Alaska, it ended up taking 15 minutes and I got a second mini-vacation.

    1. Portabella*

      Good for you! I might have done the same thing. I mean, you received the email so late that it would have been a wasted trip anyway.

  151. Lifelong student*

    What an awesome series of events everyone has reported! I looked- annoyatrons are available on Amazon. I would so buy some if I ever expected to be employed again!

    1. Campfire Raccoon*

      The key is to put them where they won’t be found and the sound cannot be pin-pointed. Behind the light on the underside of a cubicle cabinet is a good space. It’s not some place you’d ever run your fingers, and it’s not part of the computer. Behind any edging is good too – provided it doesn’t dampen the sound.

      In non-cubicle spaces a little bit of velcro goes a long way.

  152. PeanutButter*

    I worked in a hospital where the nurses and maintenance engineers were union, but nobody else was. We ancillary staff were pushing a unionization effort, and every time management had an “info meeting” for all ancillary staff (ie, anti-union propaganda) a few days before photocopied fact sheets that debunked whatever they were planning on telling us would appear in the staff elevators and locker rooms, along with the most up-to-date public information about how much executives and managers were paid.

    Needless to say, our unionization effort was a resounding success! Most of the hospital ancillary departments joined our union.

    A few days after the results of the vote were announced, all the doctors in one of the departments announced that they were unionizing, and had already filed all the paperwork and voted, presenting *their* union to an already reeling executive team as fait accompli.

    Turns out the doctors were ones posting all the stuff in the elevators and staff rooms to keep management busy dealing with our union and trying to hunt out the “moles” in the ancillary departments while they organized completely under the radar. (One of the main organizers for the doctors had been accidentally added to an email list for the managers working on their anti-union meetings, which is how they knew what was going to be said ahead of time in order to make the fact sheets.)

  153. Jules the 4th*

    I also have a military story wherein a medical provider used her own medical knowledge to game the system to her advantage and to the detriment of her command, mission, and fellow soldiers.
    When I was in the military during the early 2000s, I served as a medical officer in an infantry division. This unit was preparing to deploy to Afghanistan. One of the Battalion Physician Assistants, a female, came up positive on the mandatory pre-deployment pregnancy test. This excused her from deployment and we’d been asked to find a replacement.
    Her unit complained that she had also missed the prior deployment due to pregnancy, but she “lost the baby” a few weeks after everyone left and she was allowed to remain in the rear and not deploy for this 1-year tour as they already had a medical replacement. They found the timing odd and so did I. There was subdued hostility toward this female (I think all females actually) because her pregnancies were affecting the unit and its ability to perform its mission. It’s a big deal when a unit’s medical provider drops out of a wartime deployment!
    Military commanders (or their representative) are allowed to know medical details about their soldiers. Before discussing the situation with the unit commander, I reviewed her medical records. I discovered that this PA had been visiting the medical center and enrolled into the in vitro fertility program. This process entails receiving injections of the pregnancy hormone bets-HCG before egg implant. She was keeping this process a secret from her command. (Soldiers are supposed to inform their command and receive permission before undergoing any elective medical process or procedure that could affect deployability. She had not done so. Also, the hospital is supposed to receive permission from the command as well, and they hadn’t informed the command either.) She timed the beta-HCG injection for the day before her scheduled deployment pregnancy test (the whole unit goes through medical processing at one time in a mass-patient environment, so everyone knows when this will be). This made her pre-deployment pregnancy test the next day return positive, and she was excused from the deployment. She never went through with the implantation and simply told her command that she “lost the baby.”
    Since this worked for her on the prior deployment, she went through the same process this time. Her medical records clearly showed she got a bets-HCG injection the day before unit medical processing. Her command thought, again, that she was actually pregnant and was searching for a replacement medical provider so she could remain in the rear again. I advised them to wait a month, and repeat the pregnancy test without any notice. This would be a few days before deployment. In that time frame, the beta-HCG would wear off. And, she again had not gone through with implantation. The commander did as advised, and when her surprise pregnancy test was negative, she was forced to deploy with her unit and they didn’t need a medical provider replacement after all.
    She tried several other desperate medical manipulations at the last minute (I have blood in my stool! I’m weak and dizzy!) but she was seen by the appropriate medical specialists the same day and was cleared for deployment (pre-deployment medical processing is set up for this as so many soldiers try to escape deployment with medical complaints).
    I thought she would find a way to medically get home, but amazingly she completed her one year deployment without incident.

    1. Forty Years in the Hole*

      Sidebar, but as a former 35-year service member – mostly in HR/Administrator/Pers Sup roles (not US) – I would be so side-eying her file/motives or calling for a career review…our “bona fides”are that all must be able to deploy (unless medically unfit at the time). But there’s always been a shortage of certain personnel with specific skill sets, so…
      Signed – one who really wanted to deploy but our PTB generally did not send our type.

  154. FormerProducer*

    This is possibly the funniest move my evil former boss ever pulled.

    She was hired as one of 5 department directors and immediately set her sights on getting rid of all the other powerful women in the office (and eventually succeeded). Her opening gambit was asking the facilities team to BUILD A WALL between her and one of her rival directors, Lucinda. A literal wall between the two teams.

    And then a year later, after my evil boss had managed to bully Lucinda out… she made the facilities team tear down the wall. And loudly said “I don’t even know why this is here, what a strange place for a wall. Lucinda made such strange decisions.” As if 75 people in an open office hadn’t watched her make the facilities team spend a whole day building it just a year ago!

  155. Not A Girl Boss*

    I used to supervise union employees. Disciplining union employees was…. interesting and often impossible. There were also a lot of guys who thought they were so clever but we referred to as “thinks he’s playing chess but he’s really playing checkers” (as in, we saw right through them). But there were a few moments of beauty in all of this that really stood out to me.

    1) We also had this fantastic worker, Jane. Jane worked two jobs, 1st shift at a different company next door, and 2nd shift for me. She was always *exactly* on time for her job because she was coming from the other job, which greatly bothered my sexist jerk of a boss. So boss found a loophole in the contract that said she has to be at her work station by clock-in time and tells me if she isn’t, I need to write her up. There really was no way for her to get from the time clock at the guard station in to her work station in time.
    So…. I moved her work station to the guard house for the first half hour of her shift, every shift and wrote up a special Job Code / SOP for making sure the guards had their coffee resupplied. She spent half an hour sipping coffee and chatting with the other guard, then came in and did 7x more work on her shift than any of my other employees. She was good people.

    2) We had a jerk supervisor on the shift after mine who loved to ride around on his little golf cart thing yelling at people. For a full month or two, about 5 minutes before the end of my shift, the golf carts would mysteriously disappear and be found later in the warehouse placed on top of piles of pallets. Then when my shift started, someone would cheerily drive up to me with a golf cart balanced on a fork truck’s prongs and set it down in front of me. “Hey Miss NAGB, you’ll never believe where I found the missing golf cart! Here you go!”

    3) 1) This guy flat out refused to wear hearing protection. I could get fired if he got caught not wearing his hearing protection under my supervision. So I set up a “sting” operation one night with another supervisor and shop steward to witness. But I was not prepared for his willingness to tell bold lies. So, we invite him into the office, sit him down, and the conversation goes like:
    Me: “Hey Joe, would you mind showing me your hearing protection?”
    Him: “I can’t, I threw it away when I walked in here.”
    Me: “What?? Why would you throw it away? How do you plan to get from the supervisors office back to your car?”
    Him: “I dunno, I guess that was pretty silly of me. Will you please go get me some?”
    Me: *walks over to the trash can* “Where are they? I don’t see any in the trash?”
    Him: “Oh, I saw Sal come empty the trash just now.”
    Me: “But there’s still trash in this can…?”
    Him: “I didn’t say he did a good job at emptying it, trash removal supervision isn’t in my job code.”
    So we go and get Sal…. and he BACKS JOE UP and that is the story of how I didn’t get to fire Joe.

    1. JP*

      This reminded me of my first job after graduating as an engineer. I worked in an aluminum die casting plant with unionized employees. I was young and the only female employee on the engineering team and had to interact daily with a team of male mechanics. They were great to me, always willing to help me out and explain things to me. One day I decided to bring a box of donuts to a meeting I was hosting with them, in order to thank them. Well, the other employees were upset that they didn’t get donuts and the union steward filed an official grievance on their behalf. However, when everyone subsequently found out that I paid for the donuts out my own money and it wasn’t the company that had purchased donuts for just the group of mechanics, the union steward felt really sheepish and actually came to me to apologize!

  156. Story Time*

    My friend has a great story that I’m sharing with her permission. Her whole team – except for her – had just been laid off from Company A. It was a really crappy situation, and handled very poorly. She had her hands in enough projects and departments that she told the teapot team she was going to be working for the saucer team and vice versa. She spent weeks applying for jobs while no one bothered her. She got an job offer at Company B that she was a little skeptical about but she was desperate. Shortly after got assigned a manager at her current job with Company A. She told her new manager at Company A she was leaving for a long, international vacation that was approved by her laid off boss…and she started the new job at Company B on the DL. (She really did have an international vacation that she was going on with me and she had asked for recos from coworkers months earlier about what to do while there so many ppl knew she was going, just not when.) She had a bad feeling about the manager of the new job at Company B and it ended up being super toxic. (Which is why she never quit Company A, it was a safety measure.) Luckily, she had sent out enough apps that she got a new interview for another job with Company C in the meantime. Hours before the flight of our actual international vacation, she interviewed for the new Company C. She received the offer while we were on vacation. She’s been happy at Company C for years now. Company B never asked for her starting bonus back when she quit/Company A just thinks she left for Company C the whole time. I don’t recommend anyone do this, but she was fairly junior, very pissed off, apparently had a great reputation, and all 3 jobs were in different industries.

    2. BeenThere*

      I have always wanted to start job B on the downlow, but I can’t because I’m a visa holder. I’m in epic admiration!

  157. WFH with Cat*

    My two-part story from waaaay back in the day. I worked a night shift for a major company with an 24-hour operation that required maybe 15-20 employees, but kept money rolling in day and night … I was one of a handful of operators who covered all three shifts.

    They starting scheduling mandatory early a.m. meetings to discuss QA, mistakes, and stuff like “don’t do drugs at work!” instead of firing the one guy who did. I rolled into every meeting on time, participated and was clearly involved. But I kept my sunglasses on the entire time. Don’t know if they were worried about my (nonexistent) drug habit or maybe afraid of me, but they never, ever asked me why or asked me not to.

    Then, they decided to move that operation to another state, invited a few higher-level employees to come along but it was looking like the rest of us — especially the operators like me — were gonna be left in the lurch. I started having convos around the workplace, pretty loudly, about severance, notice, maybe unionizing. And we were in an industry that would have been dreamy for unions to get a toe-hold … Next thing you know, big fat severance packages for everyone.

    Sunglasses and unionizing … It was magic, baby!

  158. Spice Must Flow*

    I couldn’t resist commenting.

    In a workplace two jobs ago, I had an awful boss. For example(s):
    * She told a co-worker who was very obviously sexually harrassed that she needed to smile more
    * She told the same co-worker that her (the co-worker’s) family had been the reason her (the boss’s) family had had to flee Europe in the Second World War. Incidentally, that co-worker’s grandfather had been a noted musician who had helped hundreds of people flee Europe during World War 2).
    * The phone system allowed you to see the number any line was calling if you held the button down while the line was in use. Then she would call you into her office to ask why you were on the phone with HR, etc.
    * I got a stress-induced health issue and she came into my office and with a smile (I kid you not) said, “I’m the reason you’re sick.”
    * Nevermind the time she showed up in the ER when I had to get my appendix removed

    Suffice it to say, we did not get on.

    Because I was otherwise a good employee, she decided to take the route of appropriate dress. It started with her printing out the dress policy and putting it prominently on my desk, no convo had. I was talked to when an airline lost my luggage for a conference and I had to get dress clothes at Target at 10pm for the next day (bless those employees who just wanted to go home and ran around the store finding things for me). I was sniped for my sweater having caught on a nail and ripping at the seam. I was brought into her office to discuss my lack of make-up, etc, etc.

    Having had enough of it, I bought a black suit. I wore the same suit coat and 2 pairs of pants for 365 days straight. Our custodian and my co-workers were tight and we had a dry-erase board where we noted the days. Everyone played dumb when she asked if I was wearing the same clothes everyday.

    It made my last year there so beautiful. (I stayed long enough to get vested and run with my employer matched funds).

  159. Not That Kind of Lawyer*

    An ex-boss had a terrible habit of making false accusations against people to ruin their reputations before firing them. Eventually, I became his target and noticed he would nitpick my work. Seeing the writing on the wall, I began applying for new jobs. He called me into a meeting to “Discuss my projects” and accused me of not doing my work, turning in incomplete work, or having others do my work and taking the credit. He clearly forgot I was an attorney. I demanded to know who was making the accusations, what projects he was referring to, and insisted I had proof that the accusations were incorrect and would file a formal grievance. He backed off super fast and sent me back to my office. I just know he had planned to fire me that day, but the word grievance scared him off.

    One week later, I was called to his office, and he gave me the speech about going in a new direction and that I would be let go. I said, “No.” and walked out of his office. I then walked into the office of a higher-up and laid out the whole story. She was agog since she never approved a restructuring of my role. I told her I would resign and laid out my terms. When I got back to my office, ex-boss was there telling me to clean out my desk. I reminded him that I am an attorney, and I know the proper procedure for laying me off included the notice he was required to give me. I then said I had spoken with a higher up and she expects me in my office the next day.

    The next day, I came into work dressed in full lawyer gear and went to battle. I sent an email to him and the higher-ups stating my disappointment in the position being eliminated and requested an official resignation in lieu of being laid off. Everyone agreed and offered truly humbling recommendation letters for my job hunt.

    One week later I was offered a new, better job. It was at a business ex-boss wanted to bring in as a partner (i.e. money source) on a particular project. Ultimately, New Job decided they did not need to partner with Old Job and could do the project on their own – I may have helped with that realization. I may have also recommended that any projects we take on with ex-boss require Old Job to put up 5% funding on their own up-front as a show of good faith investment. I don’t think ex-boss knows I’m the reason New Job walked away from his original proposal or that I’m the reason they cannot approach without 5% of the funds needed in place, but I do know he knows I work at New Job and go over all proposals with the finest-toothed comb the legal world has ever seen.

    2. juneybug*

      OMG, I died when you said no and walked out of the office straight to the grandboss’ office. I would have loved to see the face of your old boss at that moment.

  160. Serin*

    I think my boss thought of this as just solving a personnel problem with a win/win; the only Machiavellian thing about it is that she was moving two people into different jobs without consulting either of us.

    I had a part-time copyediting job; I had already been a reporter and I didn’t want to do that any more. Boss’s Favorite Boy (actually not a bad guy) had a part-time photographer job and wanted a part-time copyediting job. Boss’s Peer On Another Publication wanted to hire a full-time reporter to turn his one-person newspaper into a two-person newspaper.

    Boss’s brilliant idea was that she would give me to Peer as a full-time reporter, and move Favorite Boy into the copyediting job. She presented this to me with a great flourish: look what a terrific problem-solver I am!

    I went to talk to Peer, and discovered that he didn’t have a job description, he couldn’t give any goals, he couldn’t explain how he and I would divide up the work, he couldn’t describe what good performance would look like, and he couldn’t pin down a schedule, not even one as vague as “days” or “nights.” I talked to him for an hour, and the only solid thing I learned was that he would be a disaster as a boss.

    So I went back to Boss and said, “Is my current job still an option for me?”

    “No,” she said. “That’s Favorite Boy’s job starting on Monday.”

    “OK,” I said, “then Friday will be my last day.”

    She was shocked, SHOCKED, that her win/win solution hadn’t made me happy.

  161. Totally over it*

    At a few jobs ago, I was a manager at a medium-sized non-profit. I frequently worked with our very dysfunctional Board of Directors. Staff-board relations were so toxic (think: threats, constantly throwing staff under the bus, general nastiness), that I scheduled surgeries right before the last 2 board meetings prior to my departure, so I wouldn’t have to attend.

  162. Copier Company Admin Girl*

    Alison, could the most outrageous/outstanding of these possibly be compiled into a post of 10-20 or so? It would be awesome to read some standout examples without having to sort through the comments! :)

  163. Anonymoose*

    I worked for a long time at a llama care facility and was involved at the tail end of cleaning up this particular mess. I have to give it to the schemer, they went big (and then went home and the to jail).

    One of the llama care team assistants handled billing for one of the most successful head llama tamers in the organization. Each month, the finance department sent all the assistants a draft bill showing all the time and expenses for each account, which was then reviewed by the head llama tamer (who had the discretion to lower or remove certain charges within guidelines) and sent to the customer for payment. Each month, the llama care team assistant was also sending the invoice for an consulting services for a an outside llama whisperer, who, as it turned out, was actually their minor child. Turns out that, when the llama care team assistant got the bill, they were removing the bogus charge before the head llama tamer saw it, marking it as a discretionary discount requested by the llama tamer. It also turns out that their phantom llama whisperer was paid over $1M before things fell apart.

    Well. The llama care team assist takes a vacation, as we all should, though with our own hard-earned money and not embezzled funds. Unfortunately, they took it at billing time, and the substitute llama care team assistant did not know to remove the nonexistent llama whisperer consulting charge before the head llama tamer saw it. The head llama tamer sees it, call finance to give them a piece of his mind about putting charges on his bills that aren’t his, and finds out that he’s apparently been using his discretionary discount powers to take this off for a while now. The head llama tamer demands to see all these discounted consulting invoices, getting angrier and angrier with each discretionary dollar adding up. Finance pulls payment information and checks/wire info, which trace back to the llama care team assistant’s kid, who shares their last name and is on their HR benefits record. Shit gets real.

    Needless to say, the llama care team assistant is both fired and reported to the authorities. Criminal charges are filed as is a civil suit, though the money is long gone. Sadly, it was not a Robin Hood situation where the minor child was amassing a college fund but rather a slush fund for their parent’s lavish lifestyle and, unfortunately, addiction.

    But, dear readers, this story is not over. Llama Inc. is sued by a party with some relation to the embezzlement. Things are looking grim until someone on the case team realizes that the related party sounds familiar… and goes through the fired llama care assistant’s personnel record again to find that letter of recommendation, signed by the person who brought the suit. It turns out that the llama care team assistant had previously pulled this same stunt but was caught faster and ultimately let go without being reported to authorities or in their personnel file because they were having an affair with said recommender. Well, that changed the tenor of settlement negotiations, and the parties all agreed that the suit would be dropped and Llama Inc. was due some attorneys fees (and, ultimately, the plaintiff organization disbanded in the chaos that ensued).

    So, moral of the story, if you’re going to enrich yourself via billing fraud, make sure you’re there when the bills show up. Or maybe take that month off from your embezzlement scheme.

  164. Damn it, Hardison!*

    I was lead on a project that was a complete boondoggle – a half million dollar software project that didn’t need to be done, would bring no benefit to the company, and would make processes more complicated for the end user. And, as it would turn out, the software couldn’t do some things we needed it to do (I was not involved with the software selection). After several months of me bringing the issues to my manager’s attention, and the project behind schedule because of the issues (some of which could not be resolved because of the software limitations), my manager and I met with her manager because the project had basically ground to a halt. I once again raised all of my concerns and issues, and my manager proceeded to lay into me for not bringing any of this to her attention. I calmly pointed out that I had on several occasions, and would be happy to forward all of the emails where I had carefully documented everything, and all of the weekly project updates where the issues were noted. Which I then proceeded to do, cc’ing her manager of course.

    That manager was laid off about 5 months later, as part of company-wide layoffs. My new manager asked for a summary of the project, so I put together a slide deck that made it clear that the project was a spectacular failure, due to decisions outside of my control (I was not allowed to make any decision other than the most minor). My new manager rightly asked why I hadn’t shut the project down, and I was able to use the same emails to show her that I had tried, but was overruled on multiple occasions. In the end, the project was terminated, to the relief of everyone on the project (except the vendor), and my new manager realized that I had done my best with a terrible project and that she could trust my judgement.

  165. The Bill Murray Disagreement*

    So, I like to think I’m a good person. But sometimes my inner Machiavelli can come out. Here are 3 examples:

    1. I was a courier for a clinical laboratory which meant I got to drive all around the region picking up medical samples to take back to a lab for testing. On one of the drives, there was a person who was going about 5 miles below the speed limit until I tried to pass, and then they would speed up so I couldn’t make it around them. This happened a couple times until I started really gunning for it on this stretch of rarely-trafficked road near an exit I had to take. The other car sped up, I sped up more, they sped up more. Only I knew that there was a cop who liked to hang out up ahead and catch speeders, so I slammed on the brakes, got back behind the asshole in front of me, and then exited at my ramp. When I got onto the overpass, I saw the police officer pulled them over. 25 years later and I still do not feel bad.

    2. Same company but I had switched roles and was now working in the HR department in payroll but I really wanted to work in IT. I was on a smoke break with someone who was currently working in IT and they talked about how they really didn’t like their role and wanted to go back to graduate school. So I spent a couple months talking to them about how much more important it was to follow your goals (knowing that while I did want what might be right for the person, I wanted their job much much more). I felt pretty bad about that for about 10 years. I don’t any longer.

    3. Nearly 20 years later, I’m in my first supervisory role at a company and working for a bully boss. I had been documenting the boss’s behavior for several months when I left the company. I asked for an exit interview and gave detailed examples of the boss’s shenanigans, and whenever I had a choice between examples, I chose instances where they badmouthed/backstabbed their own boss or HR. Six months later that boss was fired too. Also do not feel bad about this.

  166. Stella70*

    I landed a job, but didn’t know the husband/wife owners disagreed on hiring me (husband wanted to, wife wanted to hire their daughter’s best friend). Wife decided to make my life a living hell, thereby forcing me to quit, but didn’t realize how badly I needed the job.
    (Example, I get terrible migraines and one of my triggers is scent, particularly cigarette smoke and air fresheners. Once she learned that, she started smoking in the office, right next to my desk, and then sprayed her hideous air freshener. It would smell like apple-cinnamon Marlboros all day long.)
    A bit after breaking up with my boyfriend, she said she knew the perfect man for me and he was a friend of the family. She acted kind to me and excited about the idea, so I told her she could give him my number. He called, seemed friendly enough, and we set a date.
    When he showed up and I opened the door, I knew Boss Lady had screwed me over again. I was about 24 years old then – my date was nearly 60. He and I both have dark hair and eyes, so he looked like he could be my dad. Worse yet, he looked like my actual father, David.
    I tried very hard to be polite and pleasant through dinner, but I bailed before the movie (he was taking me to see “Pocahontas”, no lie). For what it’s worth, he knew beforehand how young I was, and thought he would see what “Rod Stewart’s life was like”.
    When my boss (the husband in this duo) found out the following Monday what his wife did, he was aghast. (She asked me about the date in front of him.) They fought, she admitted she thought I would treat their friend so badly on the date it would be cause to fire me.
    I stayed on for nearly another year, trying to avoid her as best I could. Eventually her husband got tired of her “antics” (his word) and quit protecting me. When I finally found another job, I waited a day to give notice…..until they arrived at their vacation (Caribbean) hotel. (I faxed them “I quit.” and signed my name.) So satisfying…..

  167. UrbanGardener*

    At my first job, there were only three levels of positions in our department: worker bees, mid-level bee (1 position) and Manager Bee. Our manager decided she wanted to promote her office BFF from worker bee to mid-level, but that position was filled. Mid-level guy got some kind of parasitic/food based illness on vacation, one of those things where the doctors can never quite figure out what’s wrong, and he lost a ton of weight and took years to recover.

    So Manager Bee decided to lie to HR and tell them he had abandoned his job/taken sick leave without notice. We in the department all knew exactly where he was so I’m not sure how she thought she’d get away with it. He was fired, and sued, and won money. She was fired once they found out what happened.

    None of us knew until after she was gone what exactly had gone down. She told us she was quitting to follow her dreams of being an interior designer (not our industry at all). Mid-level bee called me to tell me what happened and of course I spilled the beans to everyone. We stayed friends and I went on to work for him once I’d had it at my first job.
    After she left, the security guards told me she’d once gotten caught on camera in a conference room getting intimate (if you know what I mean) with another employee at the Christmas party. Always make friends with security, they know everything.

  168. Smarter Now*

    My entire first job was a Machiavellian Masterpiece! I had just graduated college and was immediately hired as a Station Manager for a small radio station chain. (Is two stations considered a chain?) I was in charge of scheduling, bookkeeping, traffic (commercials) and overseeing the sales team (most of whom had been with the station longer than I’d been alive). The owners also had a ‘side business’ of a horse racing stable.
    About a year after I started the FCC came knocking and asked to see ‘the books’. I had NO experience with accounting, so innocently asked them which set of the books they’d like to see. I didn’t even know it was unusual to have two sets of books.
    In the end I had to testify against my bosses, found out that they’d framed me for things I didn’t even know how to do and ultimately lost my job when the new corporate owners took over.
    They went to prison.
    Now – 20 years later, I have a good story and they have about 5 more years to serve for fraud and embezzlement.

    2. Rainy*

      …was, uh, this in the Nevada/Utah/Arizona/Southern California area, and did they also have a tv station? Because my husband may have worked for them too.

  169. Lyudie*

    Oooh. Not sure if this is particularly Machiavellian, but…many years ago I had a short stint as a 1099 contractor doing work on documentation for an aerospace project, the sort of thing where you aren’t actually allowed to know what you’re working on. We got documents in pieces, cleaned them up, edited, etc. and sent them back. We were in an ITAR-controlled environment, shredder, server, trash and printer all in the same room as us, we had to badge in and out of the suite. There were supposedly mics and cameras in the vents and the mics would trigger an alarm if it picked up the sound of breaking glass. I don’t actually know if any of that was true. Anyway we were also not allowed to have anything personal on our desks so we couldn’t be identified. My actual manager was in a different state many hours away, so I only ever talked to her on the phone for the first several months. We got paid through some sort of go-between agency that was terrible, we never got paid on time, etc. That contract ended and we were all let go, but then my manager called me back to do a new project with a local-ish company, also aerospace-related but a bit less cloak and dagger. There was a new go-between guy who seemed to be a bit better than the first, but the hourly rate he quoted me was literally half what I had gotten less than two months before. He was quite shocked to hear this and said my hourly rate was what he was being paid for both my pay and his fees. In the end I did get same rate and the manager complained to my team lead that I’d “strongarmed” her. My manager flew in to meet with the new clients and close the deal, and that was the only time I met her in person. She pointed out all the ITAR stuff, then said we didn’t have USB ports at all in the computers so flash drives couldn’t be used to take out data. This was a lie. We used flash drives to pass files back and forth because we couldn’t be connected by network (or weren’t, anyway, I never learned all the ins and outs of the security stuff). I didn’t say anything because it was during the recession and it was just going to be me and my team lead doing the work at that point, and he was only going to be part time. So it didn’t seem like it mattered much one way or the other. There were, yet again, delays with the pay. I never got a good answer of what was going on. I worked on that contract for several weeks, then got an offer for a longer-term contract through an agency (buh-bye 1099) with a company I’d worked with before, people I knew and liked, an actual W2 contract, and more money, so I gleefully put in my notice. I don’t remember now if I gave one or two weeks, they wanted me to start ASAP but I did get things wrapped up and in decent shape and being 1099, technically I could have left the day I got the offer, I suppose. Pay delays continued, and I repeated emailed go-between guy and only got “sorry, it’ll be next week I promise” and eventually just radio silence. Eventually I decided they weren’t worth the hassle so I never did get paid for that month +. Now I would probably harass them over it, but I was (even more) conflict adverse then. So she got some revenge on me, I guess, but I got a better job that didn’t require me to go to an office two and half hours away every week.

    Also, I looked her up several years ago and she’s no longer at that company and no longer a manager, so maybe someone heard about her BS and canned her. I can only hope.

  170. Liz*

    I almost forgot about this; something I ALMOST did, but didn’t. At my first job, after a few years, my boss asked for, and got permission to work from home. This was back in the early 90’s, so WELL before WFH became common. At that time, I was still in the office, and i guess the powers that be thought that with her not being there, my workload would somehow vanish, and I’d have all this time on my hands! So I was told i’d be “helping” another department, which really meant I was doing the work of two full time people.

    One of my tasks was helping gather data for a weekly report for our sales group. Which was taking data from binders, and entering into the computer, and then taking the floppy disk, and giving it to someone else, to do their part, and then someone else who would finish it. Not the most efficient system, but this was pre-internet in the office etc. We had one disk, and no backups.
    I was miserable, hated my job, and always behind on everything. And one day I was told my job had been eliminated, due to us taking over another company, and there being two people, and one job, and they chose the other person. and i could pack my stuff up now, or come back next week. I opted for now, and as it happened, I had that floppy with the sales report info on it in my possession.

    I cam THIS close to taking it with me, but decided it was better to be the bigger person.

    Karma though as this was on a Friday, and the following MOnday, when the report was started, they kind of threw it at my “replacement” and told her to figure it out. She walked out the next day, never to return.

  171. Anon for this*

    I worked at an alt-weekly newspaper designing ads. The sales team sold an ad to a gay conversion therapy group, despite the fact that the paper was openly in support of LGBTQ+ rights. After a failed outcry to pull the ad (newspapers need all the dollars they can get these days) I was reluctantly directed to make it.

    So I set the headline in in Comic Sans and the body copy in Papyrus at a small enough size to read on a digital proof, but too small to print clearly on newsprint. I also used CMYK black (instead of pure black) ensuring that the entire print would be muddy.

    The ad was approved and ran, but they never booked another one.

  172. pony tailed wonder*

    I used to have a supervisor who I was friends with but we had different work personalities. He was a devoted rules follower and was set in his ways. I tend to jump in and I am not wedded to the rules. Sometimes this would work out on my favor because I could find a better way to do something, it wasn’t often but enough for me to rethink how things were done and see if it could be improved. So my Machiavellian move was to bring in a frozen cheesecake for the office to share and leave it on the treat table in full view of the open office. It was bosses favorite treat. He would get up every twenty minutes or so to examine the unopened Sara Lee box, to examine the ingredients, look over the nutrition, etc and then to ask if we could have the cheesecake now. I kept replying that we had to follow the directions and let it thaw x amount of time before we cut into it. It ended up more delicious to say that we had to follow the directions to Mr. Directions follower than it was to eat a piece of the cheese cake at the end of the day.

  173. Anon for this*

    The specialized college I attended had absurdly strict policies around a lot of things, one of them being attendance. 3 absences in a semester was an automatic failure. Each absence automatically lowered your grade by one letter (A to B, B to C etc). 2 latenesses equaled an absence (with on-time being defined as 15 minutes early. Meaning if class started at 9am, we were required to be there at 8:45am in order to be considered on-time).

    I got mono towards the end of my first semester and missed 2 weeks of all my classes. From that point on, the administration was all up in my grill. They advised me to take a medical withdrawal, which meant not only would I have to repeat the entire semester, but also attend summer semester to stay on track, and I was on scholarship which wouldn’t cover the cost of an additional semester. I had all A’s in all my classes before this; my grades were now being lowered to C’s due to the policy, and that as well was enough to endanger my scholarship. Either way I would lose, just for getting sick.

    I decided to fight this insane policy and got myself into an endless round of antagonistic meetings with the administration. It was extremely unpleasant and as my fight heated up they doubled down on their efforts. Constantly being called into the office. Pressing my professors for feedback every single week. Alleging that I got sick because I didn’t take proper care of myself! Wasn’t I present at a dorm party the week after I so-called “recovered?” (Why yes, I was. I had recovered!) In retrospect I should have gotten a lawyer. But the fates were with me…

    One day, leaving one of these meetings, the snooty receptionist for the dean of the school had my file (about an inch thick already in my first semester of college – this was well into the age of computerization but the administration still handled everything by old-school paper trail) and just absentmindedly handed it to me as she multi-tasked, like ‘here you go.’ I hesitated for a split second, then took it and got out of there as fast as I could without attracting attention!

    From that point on, the tides had turned. All the ‘documentation’ was in my hands and they were scrambling trying to find it! They didn’t even have records they could pull from professors (apparently they didn’t keep their own copies?). A friend of mine who was work-study in an adjacent office knew about the situation and regaled me with stories of all these asshats tearing the office apart trying to find it. And in all the meetings going forward, they would mention something like ‘documentation of my absences’ and I’d ask ‘could I see that please?’ And they’d stammer and deflect while their faces turned red.

    I got my A’s, kept my scholarship, graduated from that school into a good job and long and successful career, and have never once given to the alumni fund they are constantly emailing me about.

    1. That Girl from Quinn's House*

      Oooh, you’re lucky! My sister had a similar situation (mono, school with identical attendance policy) and ended up having to do the medical leave of absence/disciplinary hearing plan and then just decided to transfer to a public school that would be more accommodating, closer to home so she could go to her regular doctor instead of student health.

      1. Rachel in NYC*

        I don’t get the idea of an attendance policy in college if you are going to treat them like adults. All for it if you are going to treat them like kids- and let mom and dad call to complain about grades.

        If you can’t tell, I went to a college were it wasn’t uncommon for students to show up the first day of class, the day of midterm review (if there was a midterm) and the day of finals review. You were allegedly an adult and responsible for your success and your failure.

        1. Rainy*

          I had a student who showed up midway through term to ask why his mark was so low. I said “…sorry, who are you?” He told me his name, I paged through my roster, and said “…but you’ve never been to class!” He told me he had a job, and was much too busy and important to bother with silly things like my class. I said “Well, you won’t mind flunking it then, will you?”

          1. Rainy*

            For the record, he did flunk, but it was because he never turned in an assignment, never took a quiz, and skipped the midterm. He showed up for the final, but left it mostly blank. At that university, if you skipped the final you flunked automatically, so there were a lot of people you’d see only once, at the final. They’d mostly still flunk though.

            1. juneybug*

              On the last day of our college class, a very young female student walks in to talk to the Professor. I had never seen this student before (and this was a year long class). As all of us are leaving, my Professor quickly asks if I could stay behind and since I had time, I said sure. I am also female but much older (45). So I am surfing my phone, minding my own business on the other side of the classroom, when I hear this young gal start wailing and begging. My Professor looks like he rather be any other place than in front of her. She then screams, gets up, and leaves the room in a huff. I sit there wondering what just happen?!?!!
              My Professor, who looks like he been through the wringer, asks if I had ever seen that girl before. As the student with perfect attendance and who was friends with everyone in class, I replied nope, not in my life-time. He takes a deep breath and says thanks for the validation.
              Come to find out that this “student” had never showed up to class but yet thought if she turned in all of her work on the last day of class, she would receive her credits. But first she needed an extension to finish her work (she seriously asked for the extension).
              She had never replied to any of our class emails, never showed up for class or field trips, never turned in any of her work, etc. so the Professor told her she failed his class. No amount of begging would fix her issue. Her justification ran from I need this class for my scholarships, my parents will kill me if they have to pay for this failed class, you have ruined my life, etc.
              I asked the Professor if he wanted to go get a drink but he said no, I better go talk to the Dean and let him know what is going on incase she’s a trouble maker.
              This was my first year at college and I never saw her again (I went to the same college for my Bachelor’s and later on, my Master’s).

    3. BeenThere*

      Similar treatment by my school means I too do not give. I was poor, very poor and worked extremely hard to scrape the lowest honors then had to fight for them to calculate it correctly to the point it’s on my degree but not on the graduation program and so wasn’t read out.

      Over a decade later I make more than the leader of my home country.

  174. MasterOfBears*

    This is the story of a trick my team and I pulled that turned out to be more self serving than expected:
    My organization gives everyone a pool of reward points you can give to coworkers as recognition or a thank you. You can redeem any points given to you in a store, for things like gift cards, office supplies, and video games, all the way up to small kitchen appliances like espresso makers. )This will become relevant later.) It’s not a bad system, but small satellite teams like mine don’t interact with that many people outside our group, so we don’t tend to accumulate many points.

    Last year, we decided to pool our points by gifting them all to one person, and get an espresso machine for the office. One of my coworkers had already given some points to her new team lead Mike, so Mike became the official Recipient of Points and Conduit of the Espresso Maker. And we thought that was the end of it.

    A few weeks later, our manager got a call from an HR rep, who told her very seriously that there were concerns of bullying on her team. After much confusion, my boss realized what happened and explained that no, Mike wasn’t bullying, threatening, or otherwise coercing us for our reward points. To her credit, once the story came out the HR rep thought it was hilarious. To assuage worries, she asked us to write a little justification for why Mike deserved our points. So we all sent her a paragraph or two gushing about Mike (who is legitimately pretty great,) and once again we thought that was the end of it.

    Fast forward to the end of the year…and we learn that at the holiday banquet at our company’s HQ, the three “most thanked”/most rewarded people get recognized, and receive gift cards. We had no idea that was a thing. The recipients are almost always high up in the organization, managing multiple high stakes projects with lots of stakeholders. Last year, the recipients were two very senior people (one C-suite, one crisis management person)…and Mike, an entry level, remote site field ops lead who’d been with the company 6 months. Apparently there were some ruffled feathers at the banquet, but most people thought it was hilarious.

    Mike spent the gift card on a bunch of fancy espresso for our ill-gotten machine.

    3. Portabella*

      That’s awesome! And I feel ya, my department has one of those points recognition things, and my team pretty much never gets recognized just because of the nature of our service (database mgmt).

      1. Liz*

        That’s my company, with a now-defunct annual recognition award, in memory of a late, supposedly awesome employee. It was always certain groups that had someone win it; and those, like mine, that didn’t really DO anything that would benefit our members, etc. never won. I always thought it was a bit unfair that the way it was designed, etc., not everyone was eligible to win.

  175. yala*

    I don’t know how Machiavellian it is, but at my old university, my department was very much the unwanted stepchild, shoved in a small building clear across down, with a parking lot slightly larger than an area rug.

    The story was told of how one professor came to work to find that someone had parked in His Spot.

    He got his whole class students to go down and physically move the car to a different spot.

    Knowing the professor in question, I absolutely believe it. That department was generally a place of Wacky Shenanigans, as often coming from the professors as from the students.

  176. Casey*

    I work in defense contracting. All the engineers are salaried, but we have to record our hours on timecards anyway so that they know which contract to charge for our labor. There’s this weird dichotomy where hey, we all make good money and we should be cool with working long days during crunch time…. but also we should record EXACTLY 80 hours on each timesheet. Slimy PMs who want to lowball their hours charged will schedule all their major meetings/reviews on Friday afternoon at the end of the pay period, and hope people don’t charge their program because they’ve already hit 80.

  177. Sharrbe*

    Ok, this is nothing big in the grand scheme of things but at the time it gave me a moderate degree of satisfaction. I worked at a Burger King in my late teens. One night right before closing a group of about 20 frat guys walk in. They were drunk out of their minds and completely obnoxious. They started trashing the place – throwing napkins and straws all over the clean dining room, etc. Our manager promptly responded by disappearing to the back. His only help was to tell them that they had to get their food and leave before he ran away. As they line up to order, the first guy asks me “where are the hot cashiers?”, and they all laugh. He then takes a good looonnnggg time to decide what he wants. He kept changing his mind and then asking what other people were getting, etc. I was over it. Long story short, I ended up giving most of them sandwiches that they didn’t order and had them made weird – like without any condiments, with just extra mustard, with just pickles, just onions, etc. Also gave them the wrong drinks. I tacked on some extra charges here and there and made sure they actually didn’t get those extras in the end. One guy who could not make up his mind at all – I just ordered for him and asked him to pay. He said that he didn’t order yet. I told him that yes, he did. He eventually agreed and paid. When they got their food, some realized that it wasn’t what they ordered but I just acted like they were crazy and of course they ordered what I gave them. They then wandered around asking their friends if their food was right. They were not getting ANYWHERE with me so they eventually left. Did not feel bad one little bit that night. As an awkward, “non-hot” teenage girl, I learned an important life lesson that night – drunk college guys in groups were really really really gullible. And learned what gaslighting was I suppose. But I used it for good I think.

  178. halfmanhalfshark*

    This is someone else’s failed attempt to scheme against me over some petty nonsense. I was working in an extremely dysfunctional agency in an extremely dysfunctional state government (example: a seminar about workplace violence prevention organized in response to an incident of workplace violence ended in fresh incident of workplace violence).

    I was leading a meeting with two higher ups and a few coworkers. Now, think of every awful stereotype of a government worker that you can. Patronage hire? Woefully inept? Does very little actual work while on the clock? Foments discontent everywhere she can? That would almost be my coworker, Grizelda, except she was much worse.

    About ten minutes into the meeting, Grizelda busted into the room, interrupted whoever was talking, and started grilling the higher ups about an issue that was entirely unrelated to the meeting and very specific to just her. I asked if she could wait until after the meeting to discuss these issues, since we had limited time and a long agenda. And she. went. completely. ballistic. It was like the meme with the yelling Real Housewife and the cat, where she was the Real Housewife and I was the cat. There was lots of talk about disrespect and what happens to people who disrespect her. I let her yell herself out, and then went back to the agenda (I am not as cool as this story makes me sound – this was absolutely a high point for me).

    When the meeting ended, she immediately began what she thought would be her reign of terror. She told everybody who would listen about my disrespect. She told them what she planned to do in revenge (a beat down and getting fired were two notable examples). I think I was in year three of almost five at that job by then and the only way I could keep coming to work every day was to treat the job like a TV show (so basically dissociating but, you know, needs must) and I seriously didn’t care. I mean, I didn’t want to get beat up, obviously, but I assumed she was full of it on that front, and if she wanted to get me fired, she would probably be doing me a favor. So I just went about my business as per usual. If I saw her, I would say “Hi! Happy Monday!” or “Can you believe how cold it is?” or other innocuous office blather. And after about a week, she lost interest in her crusade against me.

    She was eventually fired for something that was considered beyond the pale for even that job (I think taking bribes when she was too low status to get away with it?) and left eight years ago so happy endings all around.

  179. Elizabeth West*

    BullyBoss at OldExjob (I’ll call him Draco) made it his life’s work to harass one of his inside sales reps (I’ll call him Neville). Neville took great care of his customers, would take care of other people’s customers—most notably those of a guy I privately called Phone Allergy since he seemed to have a problem answering his phone or returning calls—and was a decent guy.

    Listening to Draco pick at Neville all day was just exhausting. He would lecture him and berate him. Neville, worried about losing his job and insurance (he had some serious health issues), would just take it. As a peon, I couldn’t do a damn thing about it and reporting to the offsite HR would have made it worse.

    Then he started cutting Neville out of customer correspondence. It was my job to curate and ship product samples and literature to customers and outside sales reps employed by our parent company. Although Draco hated answering calls as much as Phone Allergy (he had a sixth sense as to when calls were for him and would get up and leave the room just as I transferred it), he would deal with emails, most of the time. I’d already cut off his tendency to sit on them until the samples went out late by declaring out loud, “Oh, I see you were busy and just now sent this to me; I’ll get it out today.”

    Draco started forwarding me the emails he got from potential and current clients in Neville’s territory, without cc’ing Neville. He copied the customer so they would think I was the contact person.

    I saw his game right away—to mess with me, and to cut Neville out so he could later accuse him of not handling his accounts (how could he, if he didn’t know about it, right?). I’m certain he counted on me not paying attention to the CC line and just filling the order. So every time he did that, I would ship the order and then send the customer a fresh email, directing them to Neville but leaving out Draco, like this:

    From: Me
    To: Mafalda Hopkirk
    CC: Neville

    “Hi Mafalda,
    Draco Malfoy forwarded me your transfiguration sample and catalog request. I’m sending it out today via FedEx. Your tracking number is XXXXXX. Please let me know if your shipment doesn’t arrive or if you have any other problems.
    Your representative is Neville Longbottom; you can call him at 888-555-HOGWARTS for estimates, product questions, and any other inquiries, or email him at nevillel@hogwarts.com. Thank you for your business!”

    >:)

    It didn’t stem the abuse much, but it sure made me feel better. After all, making sure the customer has everything they need is the first priority, right?

  180. Teacher or Keymaster?*

    A long time ago, in a state far, far away…one with no unions and in a very rural, one high school district….

    I worked as a teacher in a building and district that had been amazing until Principal Dumbass was hired. Principal Dumbass did everything he could to undermine the teachers, and even some of the parents. No one knew what his end game was, which made all of his actions all the more weird.

    One of my (unpaid) but expected duties was to manage the keys to the auditorium. I’m not sure how this became part of my job, as I don’t teach anything that would be held in a theater, but Principal Dumbass assigned this task to me.

    So, when a teacher needed to use the auditorium, or it was rented out by Principal Dumbass to some local community group, they would set up a time to come get the keys to place from me. Why a front office staff member was not a better choice, I do not, to this day, 15 years later, know…but Principal Dumbass rarely made any sense anyway.

    One lovely spring Friday, I received an email from Principal Dumbass to come to his office before I left for the day. He told me to leave him the keys to the auditorium, because he had plans to use it over the weekend. There was nothing on the calendar, but no worries, I handed over the keys to his secretary because he had already left. (Despite telling me to come to his office after the last class…)

    Saturday morning, I was out and away from any means of communication, when the alarm company called my husband’s cell phone while he was at work. He told the alarm company it must be real and rushed home to see what was going on. When he got there, Principal Dumbass was sitting in handcuffs in the back of the cruiser, after attempting to break into the house.

    Since my husband didn’t know Principal Dumbass too well. He told the cops that he knew the man by name, but had no idea what he was doing at the house. Principal Dumbass stated that he needed the auditorium keys for his daughter’s dance recital that was supposed to take place in three hours and that I had forgotten to give them to him and they weren’t in his office, so he had come to get them.

    Cops agreed to take Principal Dumbass into custody because he did actually break into the house, even though nothing was missing. On Monday, the superintendent came to my room with flowers and a check for the window that Principal Dumbass broke attempting to break into my house.

    I looked at the superintendent and said, “The keys he was looking for are with his secretary.”

    Superintendent replied, “He doesn’t need keys any more. I just took his. That was the final straw.”

    …and that’s how my principal got fired over a weekend.

      1. Teacher or Keymaster?*

        He was arrested, prosecuted, and found guilty, but fired before all of that. He ended up pleading out his case and doing some BS community service and a fine.

    4. Seeking Second Childhood*

      So beyond the off-premises insanity… he’d apparently left earlier than he was supposed to on Friday.
      And more importantly…if his daughter’s dance recital was in the auditorium without it being on the calendar…does that mean he was giving away the space for free that normally brings income to your school? That income is a big deal in a small rural school!

  181. Mimi Me*

    I was a stay at home mom for a few years while my kids were small and I would take a part time job every holiday season for holiday spending. One year I worked at a fast food place. I was always scheduled for the closing shift, despite my many requests to work on the more mid shift. I tried complaining, but was told that this was how it was take it or leave it. The night manager was a very nice woman who worked incredibly slow and she would ask everyone to clock out at their scheduled end time, but because she couldn’t be alone in the restaurant to close, she’d make us stay there with her unpaid. My background was in retail and I 100% knew that this was not legal. We needed to be paid. After the second time she asked me to clock out and sit in that damn restaurant unpaid, I decided to act. I printed off copies of the law indicating that we needed to be paid for our time and stuck them in everyone’s locker along with applications/flyers from a competing restaurant that was offering better shift times for their staff. Several people did quit for the competition, but those that stayed suddenly were getting better shifts and were being paid for their time waiting around.

  182. Mainah*

    Years ago I worked in an office for a very wealthy boss who had a complete suck up as an assistant. A week before the boss’s birthday the assistant told all of us to chip in $20 for the boss’s birthday gift, and that she had a pair of earrings picked out. None of us were happy to contribute to the assistant’s blatant attempt to extort money for her own credit, and we knew the boss had enough earrings.

    So we instead pooled our money and made a collective donation to a local charity we knew the boss liked in her name. During the office birthday celebration we got to watch the boss cry because she was so touched while the assistant fumed behind her.

  183. My name changed to protect the innocent*

    I had a manager who had a horrendous reputation at the company amongst lower-level employees — as in, when they switched departments, people preemptively jumped ship to other departments (100% of their reports moved away from their department within six months). When I came on, I was somewhat aware of their reputation, but they got to work IMMEDIATELY taking control of the narrative. It was always framed as, “Let me give you some background on this department” and then they’d go into why people left from their perspective. For some reason, it all made sense as just a giant mismatch of priorities and work ethic to me (plus, I really needed the job), so I pushed my qualms aside.

    They treated me like a superstar at first. They had to hire more people because obviously the department had been gutted, and I noticed they hired people from outside the company (so, they were naive to company norms) and who were new to the industry (so, they were completely dependent on our manager for training). I had a bit more experience and was actually close to someone in a different department, so I knew a bit more of what to expect, and I didn’t have to lean on them as much for industry knowledge.

    I learn quickly, and this job was no different. I was sent to meetings as my manager’s proxy, so I was also aware of the details of certain projects that they wasn’t interested in. This became a problem, because if I corrected their understanding of the situation (not rudely at all), they would become irritable — almost in an “I’m your elder; you can’t correct me.” sort of way.

    We had a one-on-one in which I was entirely blindsided. I was apparently gaining a reputation for being a know-it-all. I was correcting managers and supervisors in public. When I asked for examples (because I truly couldn’t think of one), they wouldn’t give me any. When I said I found the plural “managers and supervisors” odd because they were they only supervisor I really spoke with, they just kind of smirked and nodded. When they mentioned that I came across as a know-it-all in emails and I verbalized that I was racking my brain because I am SO VERY careful with my tone in emails (I’m aware I have a strong writing style and don’t ever want to come off as rude or condescending), they backtracked and said that it wasn’t so much emails, just in person. The only example I was finally able to pull out of them was the time I’d corrected them on the project they knew very little about.

    They stopped giving me projects. I started noticing how passive-aggressive they were. How they talked trash about nearly every person who came up in conversation. How they spun tales of others’ attempts of conspiracy and deception that made no sense. I started looking for ANY way out of that department because I was fully aware that most managers at that company are NOT like that.

    Anyway, they retired. I was cartwheeling on the inside while trying to remain neutral on the outside, especially since everyone in my group still saw our manager as a fantastic mentor who only wanted the best for them (they hadn’t learned enough to push back on anything yet and they had no idea how dysfunctionally our department was being run). There was a period of few weeks between my manager retiring and my new manager transition over to the position, so my group was left without someone to report to directly for a bit. I noticed that all but one of the people in my group were straight-up ignoring me. We usually all ate lunch together and I was “forgotten” multiple times. One of them that would stop in my office multiple times a week to chat in the morning started walking straight past my office without even glancing at me, much less saying hello. This went on for five weeks and I seriously felt like I was losing my mind. I cried at work. When I spoke with loved ones about it, they tried to assure me of the most rational explanation — I felt awkward because I’d started having issues with my manager while the rest of my team adored them, and maybe I was projecting my awkwardness onto my teammates. I tried to convince myself of this, but something felt off.

    I finally spoke with the one teammate who still treated me normally about how confused I was and they said, “I’ve been debating telling you this because I know it’s going to be hurtful, but I think you need to know.” Apparently, old manager had sat all of my teammates down in a meeting and told them that they needed to “be careful” around me. See, someone I was close to outside of work had previously had New Manager as a manager, so obviously that meant we were besties and I would…I don’t know, tattle on them? Lie about them? I seriously don’t know what the speculation was, but I do know that three people froze me out for over a MONTH.

    I thanked my coworker for telling me. I’d actually wondered if my old manager had said something to them to keep them from talking to me before they left but had dismissed the thought as crazy because WHO WOULD DO THAT?! I at least knew I was sane.

    Things did improve eventually, so the freezing out didn’t last forever. But, that entire experience was really hard to muddle through.

    1. My name changed to protect the innocent*

      (I feel the need to add that New Manager and I were NOT friends. We’d spoken twice at the time — and one of those times was an interview.)

  184. DollarStoreParty*

    I was in surgery – having a hysterectomy, due to be out for 4-6 weeks afterwards. I worked for a family owned business, and basically ran the entire thing for them – I was considered one of their family. One of my employees went to the owner. while, and I cannot stress this enough WHILE I was in surgery. She had an entire list of observations and opinions on the way I lived my life and how my parents had raised me that she thought would serve as proof I should be fired. I was still groggy when one of my other employees called me in the hospital to tell me about it. I immediately called my boss, the owner, to find out what was happening, and while she was not happy someone had told me so quickly what was happening, she laughed it off and told me not to worry.
    The employee got so angry when I returned and was not fired that she quit and stormed out.
    I own the company now.

  185. You Say You Want a Revolution*

    Once I worked for a small company with a convenient, one-holer bathroom in the office suite that the men, but not the women, could use. It was like any half-bath at home with a sink on a vanity and a plain toilet (no urinal). Meanwhile, we women had to leave the suite, troop down a long hall and around the corner to reach the “ladies’ room. We women would mention that it was a literal PITA to make us swipe out of the office, trek to the faraway bathroom, trek back, and swipe back in again, but our observations fell on deaf ears, perhaps because the managers were men. Even when sensitivity to LGBTQIA issues caused other businesses to turn their one-holer bathrooms into non-gendered spaces (you know, like the bathrooms at home), the higher ups at our office did nothing.

    Finally tired of the situation, I used our petty cash to order a new sign for the one-holer bathroom that looked like the “Men’s Restroom” sign, except it said “All Genders Restroom.” And, one night, when everyone was gone, I pried off the old sign and put up the new one. I left as the cleaning crew (which also cleaned the bathrooms) arrived. The next day, a female visitor to our office was in the waiting room and asked to use the restroom. I happened to be walking by and loudly said, “Why, come right this way” and led her to the All Genders restroom in our office suite. Which now everyone uses. And no one seems to have figured out — yet — that I (and not building management) changed the sign.

  186. I Wrote This in the Bathroom*

    Most of mine were told to me in confidence, and will go with me to my grave, but here’s one that’s okay to be told. In my early 30s, I had a teammate that was a guy my age and started at Company about the same time I did; both of us junior/mid-level. Casper decided to give his career a lil boost. He was an avid golfer, and, despite being a new hire and a junior to mid-level, somehow got into Company’s golf league that all the executives played on. Casper then proceeded to cheat at golf while playing with the executives, because Casper was obsessed with winning at everything, and couldn’t help himself. He did not last in the league, or in the Company.

      1. Sparkles McFadden*

        Mostly it’s just doing things when no one is looking, like dropping a ball on the fairway when yours really went into the rough and lying about your score.

        1. Seeking Second Childhood*

          Toeing the ball is another. Give yourself a better angle, fewer hazards in the way, no bushes blocking your swing, ball not in a depression…
          (Not a golfer but boy I’ve heard their stories.)

      3. I Wrote This in the Bathroom*

        I wouldn’t know personally. But my then-husband and I had that guy and his family over for dinner, and he suggested a game of euchre after dinner. Then proceeded to cheat at euchre; for no apparent reason at all. Husband and I both thought we were imagining it, because it made no sense. Then compared notes the next morning and realized that, yep, Casper had been cheating. (Again, cannot remember how he did it. It’s been close to 20 years.)

        1. Bryce*

          I’ve been bitten by that bug sometimes and it almost feels like a compulsion. Look back and wonder why I felt that was necessary in the moment. Sometimes I enjoy the game no matter what (I prefer these times), sometimes I get competitive, and sometimes I HAVE to win and I wish I could tell going in which it would be.

          I’ve found that being aware of it and, for example, joking when bad luck hits to turn it into part of the fun, helps me a lot. Just admitting it can happen has helped me keep an eye out.

  187. I'll never work retail again.*

    Okay, so years ago I worked as an assistant manager for a Blockbuster Video store. Ashley, the store manager, who hired me FYI, had it out for me as soon as the ink was dry on my new hire paperwork. Not sure what her issue was. Anyway, the store did inventory twice a month: once a month for the video titles in stock, the other for all of the other stuff – candy, chips, gift cards, etc. I usually worked one inventory, Ashley worked the other. I came in the morning after she’d done an inventory and was surprised to see her waiting for me and the sales associate outside the store. She was behaving strangely, being sarcastically sweet to me. She explains that the inventory the night before had some discrepancies and asks me about the whereabouts of $1000 worth of gift cards. I tell her that I don’t know what she’s talking about and she gets aggressive, accusing me of stealing, threatening to call the police, telling me (in front of customers and staff) that she will destroy me. I am near tears because I didn’t take a damn thing and she’s not even letting me ask questions about what is missing or try to figure out where it might be. Into this walks the regional manager (RM) doing her twice monthly, post inventory check up. Ashley tells her that I’ve stolen product, that the police need to be called, and that this is grand larceny. RM looks to me for an explanation and I explain that I walked into these accusations, that I don’t know what she was talking about, and can we at least look for the missing product. RM, pissed off at this point, goes over to the locked drawer where these cards are supposed to be and opens it with excessive force. The drawer comes fully out, spilling everything out, except for the two stacks of cards at the very back of the drawer where the elastic had sort of fused with the drawer itself and where they stuck. RM dramatically removes them, holds them up, and asks “Ashley, I have one question for you to answer after you apologize. Why are all of these cards already active? They should not be activated until purchased.” Ashley started stammering and they went in the back room together. By the end of the day, I was the acting store manager.

    Same place, but after I left: one of the girls who worked at the store was very socially awkward – the kind of girl that is easily manipulated by her “friends”. She got a boyfriend and apparently he was on her that they needed more money. So one day he came to pick her up after her shirt was over. She went into the back to change – she literally put a mask on (kept her work shirt with name badge on!) and came back out and she and her boyfriend robbed the store. Then they left like they weren’t going to get caught. According to the police and former coworkers, she actually took the mask off once outside the store and went into the adjoining supermarket to buy ingredients for dinner. They said she was surprised when the police arrived and caught her. I wonder about her from time to time.

  188. NotMyRealNameToday*

    I haven’t pulled off any major coups, but there are a few routine sneaky things that I do as a matter of course:
    1. If I work with someone awful or in a place with awful customers, I make sure to be THE nicest, funniest, most genuine, and most professional person in the workplace at all times, ESPECIALLY when it comes to owning my mistakes. That way, if I ever reach the end of my rope and end up snapping at an awful person, as long as there were no witnesses I will be able to look whoever they complain to dead in the eye, say “I have no idea what they are talking about. That simply isn’t true”, and they will believe me while the person I snapped at looks like a lunatic. So far it hasn’t come up, but I’m always laying the groundwork just in case.
    2. In the same vein, if I have an interaction with someone that doesn’t go well and feel like they might complain about me, I ALWAYS get in front of it. I write an nice, genuine, self deprecating email to my supervisor like “I just wanted to give you a heads up that I had a strange interaction with (client/coworker/whoever) today…” (give my version of events) “… I’m perfectly happy to let it go and move on, but I wanted to keep you in the loop in case (c/c/w) says anything.” This makes sure my supervisor will be skeptical of (c/c/w)’s story if it’s different from what they already heard.
    3. If I need to criticize or complain about someone, I ALWAYS “ask for clarification” rather than outright complaining. I introduce a narrative in which of COURSE everyone is doing their best and there must be a simple misunderstanding that will be easily cleared up. That way the person I’m at odds with has a chance to pull it together while saving face– which is fine, I don’t care about humiliating them as long as the nonsense stops– if there really IS a misunderstanding I don’t look like a fool, and if someone is indeed way out of line and needs to be reined in, that judgement comes from my boss, not me. This is probably just basic “managing up” but I’ve had such universally reliable success with it that it feels like an evil cheat code to me.

  189. Rex Jacobus*

    This was for a good cause but it was Machiavellian followed by a pile on.

    I used to drive a forklift for a Costco back in the 90s. They were holding a fundraiser for the American Cancer Society. The ACS built a jail cell near the check out and if you were locked in you had to raise a certain amount in pledges before you were allowed out (we had run a few phone lines into the cell).

    Well, Ron the head manager learned that he was being tricked into the cell to check the phones. He got with the department managers to double cross his 2IC (they pulled it off beautifully, basically bodily picking him up and carrying him to the cell where someone else grabbed his shirt through the bars. Then everyone else ran out and locked the door). Rich was fuming because he had lots of work to do and he was slightly aggrieved at the double cross.

    I was one of the first hourly employees to walk past the cell while Rich was locked in. He goes, “Hey, Rex, pledge $5, I need to get out of here.” I reply, “I’ll give you 4 or 6.” He was like, what the hell are you talking about. I explained that I wanted to at least make him do a little math while he was in there so I would give him $4 or $6 but not $5. He got really annoyed at me but took my pledge for $6.

    I then went into the break room and told everyone to pledge odd amounts and explained why. Stockers were pledging $3.27 and $7.19 and other odd amounts. Rich was really cheesed off.

    The added bonus was a lot of people who would have just ignored the cell pledged a few bucks just to poke the bear.

  190. Texas Ex*

    I once worked for a music department in a rather large university in Texas, where the biggest thing is marching band. The marching band director could basically do anything he wanted, because so many students chose that university just to study with him. He set up a trip for the band to march in a St. Patrick’s Day parade in Ireland. The students thought this was the trip of a lifetime. They mainly came from the impoverished areas near the southwestern border, so they took on additional hours in their crap-jobs or additional crap-jobs, let their grades slide, and in general only cared about this trip until they finally went.

    After they came back, the marching band director stayed overseas for another week… because his wait-list time came up at St. Andrews golf course in Scotland. He had set up the entire trip just to get himself free airfare to Scotland!

    1. Omqio*

      Genuinely confused about what’s so wrong with this. The business trip to Ireland was completely legitimate; it’s pretty routine (in consulting, at least) for people to take a few personal days after the end of a business trip. I’ve seen quite a bit of the world this way.

      1. D3*

        Dragging an entire marching band – of poor college students! – along is the problem. Creating a huge expensive trip and financial burden on those students for something with questionable educational value just so you don’t have to pay airfare…

  191. comityoferrors*

    Maybe more petty than Machiavellian, but I was doing this as a power struggle so *shrugs*.

    Context: I worked with a woman who disliked me as much as I disliked her. I think we had mutual BEC status with each other. One of the reasons I was so hostile towards her is that she had ATROCIOUS organization skills – she kept our daily revenue cycle packets in one big stack without stapling or rubber-banding them by day, so if you wanted January 16th you had to look through ~1000 pages of crap, most of which wasn’t even marked with the applicable date, just as one example. We split front-office and back-office duties, but since she had been there for 8 years longer than me, “her” desk was the big front-office desk and “my” desk was the tiny back-office desk that had about 1-ft of space to put all my documents, supplies, etc. I wasn’t able to leave papers or supplies for myself at the front desk, so I kept all my supplies on the desk and all my paperwork in the one desk drawer. It wasn’t organized super well, but it was my only option and I tried to keep up with it so it wasn’t a complete mess.

    One morning I got to my desk and she had dumped all my office supplies into one of those tall cup containers (including all my thumb tacks, which she helpfully put on top of my paperclips), and she had pulled out all my paperwork from my desk and left it on my keyboard to “fix” the drawer mess. This would be a minor annoyance from anyone else, maybe a brief conversation about respecting the only space I had, but since this was my BEC nemesis, I was l i v i d. I put things back the way I wanted them and bided my time until she went on lunch.

    When she left, I cleared out the 8 years of garbage that she had in her desk drawer. I threw away some pens that had gone dry and a bunch of Post-It notes that I knew weren’t relevant anymore, but kept everything else. And then I meticulously organized the drawer. It was beautiful by the time I was done with it, and much more functional IMO: business cards in a stack, alphabetized; Post-It notes and paper flags arranged by size and color; binder clips grouped by size. When she got back from lunch I just waved hello and went back to my desk without mentioning anything, and she never said anything to me but was clearly annoyed when she left that day. After she left, I checked the drawer and she had shifted the stacks of stuff around, trying to have the “last word” on our silent argument.

    So, every time she pissed me off after that, I would wait a day or two and put the drawer back the way I liked it. She would undo it the next day. Repeat ad nauseam. I think by the time I left that job, my work was fueled 50% by hatred of this lady. It was so petty but she seemed to respect my work and my boundaries a lot better, at least temporarily, every time I did this. Messing with “her” stuff helped more than multiple mediation meetings with our boss.

  192. CJM*

    I hope this qualifies. It sure felt self-serving…and awesome.

    I had a colleague who was brash and pushy. Let’s call her Susanna. Each project on the team included two roles; let’s call them planner and implementer. She was a planner, and I was an implementer, and we were assigned two projects to work on together. She was new to the the company, and she had a lot to learn about procedures and standards. I’d been there for years and knew my stuff. But she walked in with an abrasive, know-it-all attitude that annoyed almost everyone.

    One day, I learned later, she complained about me to our boss. How dare I question her plans?! She showed my boss an email I’d sent with my questions before I started implementing. They were the same kind of questions I always asked, politely worded, like “On page two of your plan, should Line 12 be calculated based on Form A? For the past five years, Line 12 was calculated based on Form B, so I want to double check.” Susanna was outraged. My boss told Susanna that I was doing exactly what I was supposed to do: ask questions to get clear on all plans before implementing.

    Susanna solidified her reputation as difficult, and eventually she went too far. She marched into the boss’s office one day and grabbed papers off the boss’s desk to try to prove she’d dropped off a plan that was over deadline. My boss wasn’t going to stand for having her space invaded, as everyone but Susanna knew. The whole team buzzed over Susanna’s impending firing for insubordination. Sure enough, she cleared out her cube just five feet away from me as her boss’s boss stood there, stony faced, before escorting her out. It was hard to watch but not a big surprise.

    Within a week, I received an email from Susanna. “I’ve given out your name as a reference,” she told me. She didn’t ask me; she told me.

    I can be blunt, and I do love justice. I didn’t make any grand plans, but I decided I’d be honest if I got a phone call from a prospective employer of Susanna’s. One day it came.

    “Susanna has applied for a job managing staff. What would you say is Susanna’s biggest weakness?” she asked me.

    I didn’t have to think hard. “Her people skills,” I answered. “For example, she *told* me she was using me as a reference. She didn’t even ask me. And she had complained about me to our boss, so I don’t know why she thought I’d have good things to say about her. She was difficult to work with, and I certainly don’t think she should be managing people.”

    There was stunned silence on the other end before the caller thanked me for being so honest.

    I’m not sure what happened to Susanna, but I stopped receiving calls to be her reference. I suspect word got back to her that one of her references was NOT positive. I don’t know if she figured out it was me. After all, understanding people and how they tick was not her strong suit!

    1. Sparkles McFadden*

      People amaze me.

      I once had a guy tell me he was using me as a reference. I said “Do not do that. It would not be a good reference.” He said that since company policy was to just confirm dates of employment I “wasn’t allowed” to say anything bad about him. When the person called I said “I told him not to use me as a reference because I have nothing good to say about him. He put me down anyway. That should tell you what you need to know. Would you like me to transfer you to HR, where they can confirm his dates of employment?” The reference checker said “Uhhhh…I don’t think that will be necessary.”

        1. Mongrel*

          I’d love to see a deep dive into the “You can’t give me a bad reference, LOLZ!”.
          I know it’s not true and I know some companies are guided by it , but it just seems so pervasive

  193. Euphony*

    Several years ago my department expanded and was split into two teams. Team 1 was going to be under the existing manager and a new manager position was created for Team 2. Manager level spots in this role in the company come up once in a blue moon so there was fierce competition for the role. As soon as I found out who got hired I went straight to Manager 1 to ask to be on her team as I knew Manager 2 would be dreadful to work with (having worked with her on previous projects). Unfortunately both teams still had to work side by side in a very small space due to building work in our usual location. Within 1 month none of us could stand to be in the same room with her alone due to the constant snide comments and bullying. It got so bad that the entire team would do the tea/coffee runs together or sit with the smokers on smoke breaks just to get away from her (and her constantly wanting to lift up her top to show off her new plastic “twins”). I was a particular target as I’d narrowly missed out on getting the manager role and she clearly saw me as a threat.

    In the meantime another department had taken over the creative part of our workload and another new manager was hired. Handing over creative control on projects to another team was never going to be easy, but it didn’t help that Manager 3 was even more dreadful and incompetent than Manager 2. Grand boss was off sick due to a heart attack and was clearly being pushed out so we had no senior support either.

    Fortunately Manager 2 and Manager 3 had a massive personality clash and couldn’t agree on anything , which quickly degenerated into shouting matches several times a day. We might have encouraged both sides – if they were busy shouting or moaning about each other, they didn’t have the time or energy to target the rest of us. Eventually both cracked and complained to HR and Manager 2 told us all about her complaint, giving us a crucial heads up.

    Here’s where it gets Machiavellian. Whoever HR decides is at fault gets put on a PIP (and will almost certainly be fired as the increased scrutiny will show up their incompetence), leaving us still with one bad manager. Now Manager 2 was noticeably better at hiding her incompetence and would take credit for other people’s work, whereas Manager 3 had no team to hide behind. Manager 2 was also more careful about the bullying – making sure it was all one on one, no witnesses and no paper trail. So we decided to all support Manager 3 when interviewed by HR even though she was worse, as we figured she was likely to get fired in future anyway, but this might be our best opportunity to get rid of Manager 2.

    Manager 2 went off “sick” soon after and never returned. Manager 3 got fired 6 months later and we got a new Grand Boss, who brought back the creative part of our work (and has been amazing). Manager 1 went on maternity leave and then transferred to another department and I got promoted!

  194. Big Bird*

    Several years ago, I was told by Evil Boss not to bother applying for a newly-created job which would have been a promotion for me but well within my experience and training. (I had a few run-ins with Evil Boss over her desire to hide compliance errors that would have called the wrath of the IRS upon us and this was my punishment for not being a team player.) My New Boss was totally unqualified, but when I said this at the interview stage, with specific supporting examples, I was told that this was mere sour grapes for not getting the position myself. So when New Boss asked me a question to which she should have known the answer, I admitted that I did not have much credibility in management’s eyes, and perhaps it would be better if she got the answer directly from the outside vendor.

    So….she called the vendor, could not really articulate her question due to her own ignorance, and threw a serious tantrum at the vendor for not being able to read her mind. The panicked vendor, fearful of losing the relationship with our world-renowned company, ran to her senior management, who then called my Great Grand-Boss to apologize for the misunderstanding and to ask how to make it right. I was asked what I knew about the situation and told the truth–she had asked this particular question and I had referred her to the vendor for response.

    New Boss never recovered from this and lasted less than three months. I was glad to see her go but I felt terrible–we totally derailed her life by hiring her into a job that she was manifestly unequipped for. She never again was employed in our field and died tragically earlier this year (unrelated). The debacle was not totally our fault–she should have realized that the job was not the right fit for her at all and should have declined it. But when a company with a worldwide reputation offers you a job it is hard to see reality with so many stars in your eyes.

    Evil Boss was eventually placed on “special projects” just long enough to meet the requirements to retire, and then she was gone. And no one EVER mentions her name. I am still there, keeping my head down but sticking to my principles. I never got the promotion and I am OK with it. But I am still haunted by this.

  195. Tickets*

    Completely done in good sport, because we like my boss a lot: a former coworker and I once started competing to see how many Taylor Swift song titles we could work into conversation in our normal weekly department meeting without Boss noticing. It started with just a ‘this week’s challenge is to use this title’ kind of thing, but after a couple of weeks he escalated it – printed out a complete list of her discography, which I was keeping under my notes all throughout the meeting and checking off as he went: “You’ll have to go Back to December to see sales numbers like these, but I think if people see these in our merch selection, they’re immediately going to think, ‘You Belong to Me’ – we need to make them feel like this is a Love Story and they’ll want to buy our product” and so on and so on – he got to 16 titles in one meeting, I accepted defeat, and we retired the game with him the undisputed champion. I don’t think Boss ever knew what we were doing but we certainly had a good laugh out of it!

    1. ginger ale for all*

      Judy Greer has a similar story in her autobiography. When she was starting out, Susan Sarandon gave her advice on how to handle press junkets. They would give each other a random odd word and the challenge to each other was to work that word into as many interviews as possible. So for example, a word given would be crocodile and if either one was asked how they got along with other actors, they would say something like, “we got along like two crocodiles swimming down the Nile’.

  196. SoAnon*

    I suggested to and encouraged my unbelievably annoying and disruptive senior team member to quarantine with her boyfriend several states away, and have been super supportive of her staying on there. Another win-win for everyone!

  197. Sparkles McFadden*

    For many years, I reported to someone who was rather unbalanced. I enjoyed the work and I didn’t have to interact much with her, so it was mostly fine. She appreciated me as a good worker but she didn’t like me personally and had hard time reconciling those two things. I had been with the company longer than she, and she was rather jealous of my corporate reputation. So, from time to time, she would try to set up something that might be publicly embarrassing. Fortunately for me, she had a number of tells, so I could usually figure out when to double check on something.

    One day, she sent me an email about a meeting that was to take place. This email outlined the date, time and subject matter. She asked if I would prepare a bullet point list to present. I did not receive an actual meeting invitation. I contacted a person I had worked with on the subject matter (let’s call it llama hoof polishing procedures). We had discussed suggestions for process improvement rather recently, so I wanted to double check with him. He said “I did get a meeting invitation from your boss, but it was for sheep shearing process improvement.” He asked me to come to his office to help him with what we should present. While we worked on this new presentation, he said my boss had also given him a different location, and he said the meeting was at 2:45, not 3:00. If my boss were normal, I’d assume this might be back to back meetings and maybe ask about it. She wasn’t normal so I didn’t ask anything and prepared two presentations, just in case. In the meantime, she kept sending detailed email reminders for what I assumed was a fictitious meeting.

    The person I was working with on the process improvement asked me to come early to help him set up. I did so and thus had been sitting in the correct meeting location for fifteen minutes when my boss arrived. She looked upset that I was there, but said nothing. When everyone else had arrived, she said, sweetly, “Why don’t you get us started, Sparkles.” I said “Fergus and I worked on this together, so we’ll both be doing the presentation” and launched right into the (correct) subject matter. My boss’ happy “Ha ha, you’re going to make a fool of yourself by talking about the wrong thing in front of everyone” smile faded, and she grew angrier by the minute. We had a very productive meeting. After the meeting ended and we all moved into the hallway, Boss blocked my path and proceeded to scream at me: “How did you know what that meeting was about? Who told you where it was?” I said “You did.” In front of everyone there she said “No! I gave you a different conference room at a different time and I told you it was about llama hoof polishing!” I said “Why would you give me the wrong information?” In front of several department heads, she said that she wanted me to be unprepared and embarrassed because I needed to be taught a lesson and “taken down a peg.” From that point on, I really didn’t need to say anything else as higher level folks took up the argument for me. I don’t know if there were repercussions from that but I will say I worked for that company far longer than she did.

      1. Sparkles McFadden*

        Working for her was sort of like watching a car wreck in slow motion. It was sad but fascinating.

        I honestly think she believed everyone felt the same way as she did about me. She was trying to explain those department heads how it would be helpful to me to learn how to “not be a know-it-all.” The guy who did the presentation with me said “That’s crazy. You’re crazy. Who does that?” I figured that was my cue to leave.

  198. Lolli*

    Sorry this is so long. I didn’t think I would ever get a chance to tell this odd story.
    In the early 90’s, My husband and I moved to small town so he could attend the Technical College in the area. Child rearing in this town was similar to child rearing in the 50’s. Actually, everything sort of mirrored the 50’s including Woman’s rights and Civil rights. I tried to get my kids into the daycare on campus, but the owner said it was full. Then she called me back that afternoon. One of her staff her other daycare had quit without notice. If I would work at the sister daycare; she would let my kids start at the daycare on campus. I hadn’t found a job, so I said yes. My new boss was the owner’s daughter (Janie). Janie hated me because I would point out that we shouldn’t bite children when they have bitten another child and other such nonsense. Where did I get the nerve telling them how to do their job? I also played and danced with the children rather than just sitting and watching them with the rest of the staff. I got close to one woman (Sophie) because we were both assigned to the nursery during nap time. She had a lot of the same, more progressive, ideas as me. We talked quietly during naptime while we took care of the babies. The place had low walls, so conversations were easily overheard. Don’t think Janie liked us getting chummy.
    One day, Janie comes in and tells us she got a call from CPS. It seems one of her staff had complained to CPS about the way Janie was running the daycare. They noted 3 things. On this staff member’s first day, Janie told her that she should bite the child back if the child bites someone. Janie also stated she can kick the children. And the third item was there was no training for new employees. Of course, the first 2 are ridiculous because no daycare manager would ever tell a new employee those directives. But the 3rd item of no training was plausible. Janie also told us the staff member who called CPS told them she was a new employee and had grown up in the daycare system because her Grandmother owned a daycare. That information described Sophie. All of Janie’s favorites turned against Sophie and Sophie quit.
    Janie hired a person to take Sophie’s place and began a three-week training of the new person. None of us had been trained by Janie. When CPS came by, it was obvious Janie was training a new employee. And over the 3 weeks, Janie made many comments that made me realize Sophie had been framed. I think Janie wanted me to know how much power she had. If she would go as far as getting one of her favorites to call CPS on her, then she was capable of doing a lot of damage to me. I never felt so vulnerable and practically had a mental breakdown. But I got therapy, enrolled in the college my husband was attending, and put in a generous notice. Student loans were necessary but that was better than being miserable in a job that paid me $4.25 an hour. I have been in my wonderful IT career for over 20 years now. Don’t know where Janie is these days, but I am sure Karma caught up with her.

  199. Ms Marple*

    Many years ago I had an absolutely horrific boss. Under her, hours were long and unnecessarily unpredictable. For example, she would cancel holiday office closures (e.g. Friday after Thanksgiving) at the last minute because we “had to much work.” This made if very difficult to plan any kind of trip because you never knew when she would demand you drop everything. The whole thing was very much a power trip and absurd. I was young and did not have the experience to realize how absurd. One time, my co-worker managed to take a few days off. Back at the office some minor crisis happened, I don’t remember what, but it did not warrant interrupting someone’s vacation. Boss demanded that I call co-worker even though we could handle the issue without him. So, I texted him from my personal cell, “I’m about to blow up your phone because boss. Do not answer.” I then called him. Told boss he did not answer. Boss told me to call him again and again. I called him over a dozen times in less than half an hour. Forty eight hours later when the issue had long since been solved, c0-worker emails our entire team, “Hey, is everything okay? I accidently left my phone at my friend’s house when I flew out.”

  200. Lyudie*

    OH I just remembered two other stories from the company I returned to in my previous story (these both happened during the first stint). My manager (let’s call him DB) seemed like a nice enough guy at first but if he decided he didn’t like you, he made it well known. I started at the same time as a few other contractors, and learned that there had been a mass exodus to another company. Shortly after I started, another person left to go to the same place. So immediately, I knew something was up. This manager had people fleeing the whole time I was there, around a year. There were two team leads who both left. To make things simpler, I’ll call this company CorpL.

    Team lead #1 got a job in a different state, but had also gotten an offer from a CorpB, which had sold a large piece of business to CorpL (and this was the organization we worked in). The spinoff wasn’t complete at that point and so we still had access to CorpB’s employee directory, but it had been long enough that CorpL employees could be rehired at CorpB. TL#1 accepted the CorpB offer so that he would show up in the directory and DB would see it and be furious (and this did happen) but actually took the out of state job. I guess he figured if he was moving to another state, burning bridges didn’t matter (tho CorpB is Very Large so this was dumb IMO).

    Team lead #2 was one of the people DB did not like, I never figured out why exactly. DB instructed TL#2 to order some hardware for his computer (RAM or something IIRC). We had IT. EAs existed. We had nothing to do with ordering or purchasing or anything else. There is zero reason TL#2 should have been asked to do this, but he did without complaint, while job searching. DB came by daily to grill him about the status of the hardware/approvals/etc.

    While all of this is going on, TL#2 and I were responsible for training the employees in another country who would be taking over the jobs of me and the other contractors (I was given a retention bonus to stay and do the training). DB wanted to take this training project away from TL#2 and tried to get me to take over (I had zero interest in this). DB also had some call into our training session that night to listen in. I told him about everything that was going on the next day and he was livid again, both at this subterfuge and on my behalf for them putting me in this position…I was an early-career contractor here so really had no standing for this, I had already been laid off and was staying to train my replacements. I didn’t sign up for any of this political nonsense, but that job was where I learned the truth of “people don’t leave jobs, they leave managers”.

    Last I heard of DB, he had moved into sales where he had a fancier title but no longer had anyone reporting to him and thus could hopefully do no further damage.

  201. People love to talk about themselves*

    We had a Quality Director who was brilliant and really very good. One day we had a 4-hour external quality audit for certification that we had to pass. The opening meeting was scheduled to be 30 minutes. She kept the auditor talking and telling us his whole life story for an hour and a half. I was angry that I had to sit there for an unplanned hour, but in the end, he never made it out of the meeting room and only got to spend about an hour on the audit. I stopped her later in the hallway to accuse her of drawing out the meeting and she winked at me and said, “Mama didn’t raise no fool.”

    1. Certaintroublemaker*

      This reminds me of my oral exams for my Masters. I got two of the professors on the panel going for a good 20 minutes on a pet subject while I nodded and my advisor just laughed.

  202. Sand Woman*

    The one time I ever used my talents for (subjective) evil instead of good…
    I worked at an association, and the head of the IT department, “Cari”, was a brass-plated b@#!%. She and the Accounting head were thick as theives and made everyones’ lives miserable in so many ways. Rumor had it that Cari was carrying on an affair with one of the married board members, and when he became President, she got so much worse. The Exec Director was not too bright, and he had no idea what was going on, despite several complaints. Anyway, although I was not in the IT dept., I had above-average IT skills. So, one day I discovered I could access any email account, even those that should have been secured. It bears mentioning that this was back in the early 90’s, we had a really basic CRT type system, and security was virtually nonexistent. Well, it turns out, Cari had been corresponding with her paramour using her staff email account. In those emails, she made snotty and disparaging comments about all the staff, including the Exec Dir. She also wrote disgusting stuff about their intimate sexy times and what-not. I walked into my boss’s office and explained what I’d found. I even brought her over to my computer to show her the evidence. She had been particularly targeted by this woman, so she lit up like Times Square and asked me to forward the offending emails to her. The next day, Cari was gone. It was rumored that someone had “found” the emails by the printer and gave them to the Exec Dir. There was literally singing and dancing in the hallways! Ding-dong, the witch is gone…..

  203. Anonymous Today*

    I’ve alluded to this before, so it may sound familiar:

    Some 20 years back, I was recruited to join a medium-sized but growing business in a small town for the position of marketing manager. I was qualified from my past experience, but this was a new industry for me. It was a bit stodgier than most businesses. Very conservative in many way, I found out in due time.

    My office was next to that of the HR director. From time to time, when a policy or procedure confused me, I would ask her. Eventually I stopped doing this when it seemed the information she was providing was faulty. We still had to interact a great deal at work. Within a few months, I developed a gut feeling that she was not on the level. But as someone who grew up in a very dysfunctional family, I didn’t recognize behavior that was “off.”

    The company opened a new branch office about a year after I joined, with a dynamic staff. But one by one, the staff members, especially those with exciting new ideas, left, either by resignation or firing. My suspicions were intensifying. Then when my boss hinted I was next, I resigned and fortunately was rehired at a previous job.

    Over the next few months, I began watching the steady exodus and kept in touch with some current staffers. When a superstar employee who was being mentored by the president resigned, I was naturally curious. I mean into her and all she would say was, “That HR director is a dangerous woman.”

    Eventually, when the HR director’s husband lost his job, she hired him for a staff position, even though his experience was not industry-related. Eventually, he got an offer for a “dream job” and they left town. But I know his wife somehow manipulated the departure of every decent and ambitious employee at that business.

  204. PsyDuk*

    I worked in IT for a police department when GPS was first becoming available in police radios and was friendly with a gossipy officer. One day he was in my office and I mentioned to him that the new radios the department was ordering had GPS (they didn’t). I asked him not to mention our conversation to anyone because the officers weren’t supposed to know. In less than a day all of the officers were convinced that they were going to be secretly tracked using the new radios. Command’s denials and past actions reenforced the officers’ belief in the rumour. I denied all knowledge when the assistant chief asked me about it and the officer I told thought I did him a favor and never told anyone the information came from me.

  205. Cafe au Lait*

    I work with a guy who believes in the importance of his own voice. Yet he never does the work he’s assigned. He’s also known for emailing his department (minus managers) to “suggest” potential topics when company wide emails are sent requesting presenters for one reason or another. It’s never “Oh! I’d love to share about Idea XYZ. Before I start planning I want to make sure no one else was going to volunteer.” It’s always “Someone should present about Idea XYZ. It’s important that we show up.”

    The last time he did that, I replied all to the email chain and said “Fergus, that’s a great idea! I can’t wait to watch your presentation at Big Company Event. I’m sure you’ll do a fantastic job.”

    I received several private emails from coworkers who were thrilled I’d put him on the spot.

  206. Fleezy*

    I worked at a dental office handling patient accounts and the owner dentist hated confrontation, so he would always agree to give patients anything so they’d leave him alone. My job was to set the fees and payment options but he would constantly undercut me and offer things to patients that I had previously explained we couldn’t do, and then leave me to deal with the fallout (for example, saying we could bill the following year’s FSA for treatment done this year). I had repeatedly asked him to just tell patients that it was my department and to discuss it with me, but he did this all the time. I had a patient who requested a huge discount on her work, and I offered her a smaller one if she paid in full. She counter-offered a midpoint discount and an interest free payment plan, I refused. She wanted to ask the owner, I explained that based on his policies that was the max we could offer. She went back for her first appointment and badgered the owner, who gave in to a bigger discount if she paid in full, then he came and complained to me later about losing money. I hit my breaking point at that point. She came back up front to pay, and wanted to still get the discount but do an interest free payment plan. Instead of refusing, I said, “Let’s go ask the doctor!” He got very flustered and agreed. She even pushed for and got a smaller down payment. Another time she asked to skip a few months of payments and I took her to the doctor to ask again, and he agreed because he had no spine. He chewed me out, but he also stopped undercutting me. And the patient gave me a lovely scarf that I still use almost 10 years later!

  207. EH*

    In my first professional job out of college, I found that my boss would randomly get upset over little things going wrong — like a vendor saying they’d be late with a delivery, a hotel not having the meeting room we wanted available on a certain date, etc. I would take these things in stride because, you know, things just happen, but when I’d tell him, he’d rant and complain and want me to fix it somehow, and it caused me a lot of stress for no real reason. One day I stumbled onto a solution: if I came to him with these situations and *I myself* acted very upset and frustrated, he would instinctively take the position that it was all no big deal and we could just roll with it. It was like magic! From then on, every time a little thing went wrong that I couldn’t fix, I would deliberately come to him with a “this is intolerable, you’ll never believe what just happened” kind of attitude, and before I knew it, he would be in the position of calming ME down with “it’s fine, don’t worry about it.” I always felt a little guilty for manipulating him this way, and I’m not sure it would’ve worked long-term (I only worked there about a year and a half), but it did make my work life a lot easier!

  208. The Rural Juror*

    Back in my younger years I had a job at a bar and grille. There were several managers there for different days/weekly events and whatnot. So there were several managers who did happy hour, weekend nights, weeknights when we had bingo or trivia, and Sunday brunch (our busiest time). They all had regular shifts as bartenders as well, so they were all burning the candle at both ends a bit.

    One manger, Cruella, never liked me. Her boyfriend, who managed on Friday/Saturday nights, had hired me and I guess she didn’t like that I was a relatively attractive 22-yr-old woman. She basically held me back from making good money by putting me on the less busy shifts, even though I was a strong server and could handle our busiest nights. The other managers were always asking me to pick up shifts to help them out, which she didn’t like at all. She insisted on doing my monthly reviews and always found something to be negative about, but they were always made-up things, such as telling me I don’t smile enough (anyone who knows me knows I smile…A LOT).

    Another manager, Anita, who worked like 6 days a week and managed the Sunday brunch, was getting really burnt out. I had put in my 2 weeks notice because I had gotten a regular M-5 8-5, but she asked me if I’d be willing to take every other brunch shift lead from her. She was exhausted and her health was starting to be affected. I agreed because I could use the extra money, and one shift every other week was just fine with me. Anita was ecstatic!

    Well, Cruella put a stop to that real quick. She went to the owner before Anita got a chance to talk to him to ask him to approve the arrangement. Cruella basically made it seem like Anita and I were making managing decisions without asking anyone else first. Anita got in trouble and I was told not to come to work anymore. I still had like 3 shifts on the schedule but they said I should just leave. In the end Anita ended up finding a different job with a better work/life balance and I never went back to the service industry. Cruella probably found another employee’s life to purposefully mess with that after that… she seemed very happy to abuse her teensie bit of power.

  209. raincoaster*

    Late to the party but…

    I worked in retail beverage service and our new manager took a hate to me. Previously I’d been the top performer in the store, but suddenly I could do nothing right. He would come up behind me and dump out drinks I was working on because they were “not to standard” although the customer had requested the drink that way. I made myself unpopular with him because he was new to the company and I was the “no, we do it this way” person which, lesson learned.

    I had two peers and friends in the shift supervisor program, and he took each of them aside and told them their promotion to assistant manager trainee depended on them finding and documenting reasons to fire me.

    This resulted in, for example, closes with 5 garbage bins pristine and one containing a paper cup that had fallen on the floor being written up as, “garbages were not changed at closing under raincoaster’s supervision.”

    I was suddenly scheduled for all closes and they for openings because opening is the one time of day you can blame any screwups on the night supervisor. I knew something hostile was up, so I stayed behind 30 minutes a night making sure there was nothing to write me up for. I had to do this for months.

    Eventually both my peers transferred, and were immediately promoted. I’d been putting in for a transfer for months, but the manager always refused. He eventually moved on (to a huge project which failed spectacularly, costing the company tens of millions). I eventually got my promotion, and increased my new store’s profitability by 33% in six months.

  210. Genius with Food Additives*

    I remembered two more that are actually my dad’s. He managed a dish room in his college’s cafeteria and the rule was if you came to work hungover (or still drunk) you did the big pots and pans. However, my favorite story is this one:
    So the cafeteria was only open on Sundays (I think) through lunch. The last thing that would happen is that the football team would come through after practice (fine) and then the coaches would all sit in the lunch room drinking coffee, which meant someone had to stay to wash their coffee cups. So one Sunday, dad’s friend makes them a special pot of coffee: brewing it once right away in the morning, putting in fresh grounds, and pouring the brewed coffee through again. Then leaving it to sit on the heater all. day. and concentrate. Any other pots of coffee were emptied before the coaches arrived so the extra sludge pot was their only option.

    I don’t think it changed anything, but I’m sure it made them feel better.

  211. Jen Erik*

    My husband is just naturally Machiavellian – basically a good sort, but does like to achieve his ends. I can’t remember the details of the story, but basically he at one point shared an office with someone who he regarded as a waste of space, who during an office reorganisation insisted he needed the office to himself. So my husband conceded the argument, but in subtle revenge casually suggested that as there would now be a spare desk in that office, it would make sense to keep the (illegal) coffee machine there. And w.o.s., delighted to have won the argument so easily, graciously conceded. Anyway, about two weeks later, the coffee machine reappeared outside his office, the w.o.s. having (surprise!) found it incredibly annoying to have people traipsing in and out for coffee all day. My husband immediately arranged for the person who was responsible for safety to just happen to come past and point out that the illegal coffeemaker was illegal and could not be there, leaving the w.o.s. to replace the coffee machine in his office, rather than face the wrath of a floor denied their decent coffee.

  212. Not in HR Anymore*

    At Old Company, a warehouse manager talked smack all the time. He was trouble, so fortunately I didn’t have to work closely with him. He had absolute respect for the owner and no respect for anyone else.

    Random drug test time. I have to hunt him down to pee in a cup and then follow him around until he finds the owner and absolutely, positively insists that the owner goes into the bathroom to witness him pee in the cup. I’m weirded out, but the owner eventually cooperates. Cup is sealed, returned to me and on we go. He insists the owner confirm to me that he witnessed the guy pee in the cup and it’s his pee. The cup was an instant yes/no and it turned up yes, for which he provided the proper paperwork for a prescription, etc. Off it went for further testing and I didn’t hear anything else about it.

    But the warehouse manager talks all kind of smack that he’s dirty, he used clean pee from a friend that he had in his car, and we’ll never catch him, blah blah blah. Clever, but whatever.

  213. Retail Not Retail*

    My one coworker drives me up the wall in a million ways. For a good while I told him the radio in the truck was broken. Someone (never found out who) told him the truth.

    I also just manipulate where I can by volunteering for a task or getting started first.

    Last summer I would lie or just mumble and say come on, get in the truck! when he would ask me if we had an unnecessary tool. (He’d use it to do extra work, delaying the real work we had a limited time to do.) When he figured it out, he went to our supervisor who was like nope, you’re only doing what you’re assigned. Naturally he then went to our manager who was like of course, always have it with you. So smug the next time!

    We’re a bit too transparent to be machiavellian. I get my way as much as possible by volunteering BUT that backfires on our work release rehab guys. Show interest in a task the boss doesn’t want you specifically doing and you’ll never get to do it. that seems needlessly petty.

  214. That Girl from Quinn's House*

    This isn’t Machiavellian but petty.

    I had a coworker who was a jerk. He left his Amazon account logged in on a communal computer, so I searched a bunch of weird stuff (like a Borat man thong) on his account so the Amazon algorithm would send him strange “Items you may like.”

  215. CoffeeOnMyMind*

    I have a few:

    – A new art professor made his students help him move in. He’d been living in his office in the art building for a semester, and had his students move his stuff from his office to his new house.

    – I worked for a non-profit for 5 years and had a good relationship with the Board. A new board member had it out for me for some reason, and she tried to get me fired several times by deliberately sabotaging my job: hiding critical legal documents, refusing to share donor contact information for events, not sharing board decisions with me about policy changes, etc.

    She even tried to set me up by claiming she’d left a new donor’s information on my desk that was supposed to be included in a huge thank you event for our top supporters. When the event happened, the donor was extremely upset that they were not on our list and threatened to withdraw their support.

    The board member immediately pointed fingers at me, but when pressed she admitted to 1) specifically promising the donor special recognition beyond what was planned for the event, 2) keeping said promise from the other board members, and 3) never giving me the donor information to begin with.

    Finally, when I quit working at the non-profit a few months later, I found out she’d been bad-mouthing me to the entire community and no one would hire me (small town, and she had a lot of influence in the industry). To this day I have no idea why she hated me so much.

  216. Whyblue*

    I used to work at a small owner-managed consulting firm. My project manager was probably the most manipulative person I’ve ever met and he absolutely loved power games with the owner and another project manager. Some of his gems include:

    – Telling me and the other guy on my team (Tim) to deviate from a new process the owner had mandated. “Yes” Evil PM said “I cleared it with the owner”. Months later, the owner comes in, furious, because we are not following his process. “Don’t worry”, Evil PM said, “I’ll sort it out, Owner just forgot or agreement”. Turns out he told Owner he’d been trying to get Tim and me to follow the process but we were just too stupid.

    – At my performance eval, he gave me the lowest score for team player and told me that Tim and our part-time help had complained that I’d tried to push off all my work onto them. I was seriously taken aback and confused, since Tim and I got along really well and he had never said anything. When I asked him about it, he started laughing and told me that Evil PM had spent most of his eval trying to convince him that I was taking advantage of him and he told Evil PM no. (Still friends with Tim years later – divide and conquer didn’t work…)

    – He was constantly gaslighting us, giving wrong instructions and then yelling at us for doing everything wrong. At one point, I would sum up all his instructions in an email and ask him to confirm or correct any misunderstandings.

    – At one point, he really wanted me to quit. We had a system where any email with an attachment had to be approved by your manager within a week or it would be automatically rejected and not sent. A customer asked for a copy of our invoice. I forwarded it with a standard two line email. Evil PM apparently did not approve it, because the customer kept calling, increasingly annoyed with me. After a week, I got the rejection notice, reason “unprofessional text” (system was implemented to prevent people from accidentally sending confidential data to the wrong person). I tried to track down Evil PM, who’s been avoiding our shared office for a good ten days (50 people in the company. Not a huge building. He must have been hiding in the storage room because I checked everywhere else.) Ended up sending the invoice by fax.

    I have literally twelve more of these, which I wrote down after he managed to fire me from his team (moved to a different team with a good PM). Years later, when someone called him out publicly on his bullshit, he said he did it for fun to test out the boundaries…

  217. JustaTech*

    It felt Machiavellian at the time: I got a tenured professor fired.

    I went to a small undergrad college, where all of the classes were taught by professors (no TAs). In the biology department there was on professor, Prof J, who was useless, both as a teacher and as a researcher. But, he was tenured so we were stuck with him. One semester I was taking his class (the subject he was hired for) and it was a nightmare because he basically refused to teach. Everyone (about 18 people, very small school) got really poor grades on the midterm and there was a lot of freaking out about how to improve for the next test. One of my friends came to me in near hysterics because she couldn’t get a meeting with the professor about the exam until after the next one because he was “too busy”. (This at a school where professors regularly held extra office hours on Saturday.)
    “What do you mean he’s too busy to meet with you?”
    “He said his schedule is completely booked.”
    At the time I was the student who opened the library in the morning, so I knew that Prof J came in every morning at 8 to read the newspaper, because he would give me a hard time if I hadn’t gotten it on the newspaper sticks yet. So I suggested that my friend ambush him in the library, where he immediately invented a meeting and ran away.

    But that bit of lying was the last straw for the class, and we went as a group to the Dean right then on Friday afternoon. Our school was very big on professor accessibility (why we paid the big bucks) and took our honor code very, very seriously. So lying to avoid talking to your students was kind of a big deal.
    Half of us hunted down the department chair while the others actually ended up pulling the Dean out of the lab he was teaching. Evidence was presented, concerns were voiced. But, it was the end of spring semester, and these things take time.
    Fast forward to the beginning of the next school year. I get pulled into the Chair’s office. “Now, I don’t want you to think this is because of anything you said or did, but professor J has left the school.”
    “Oh, oh thank you for telling me.”

    I got all the way back to my dorm before screaming in glee and frantically IM’ing my friend (who had graduated) to tell her that the worthless professor was gone!

  218. FreakInTheExcelSheets*

    I had one of these my first job out of college. I had been a college intern for the company at corporate and then was offered a full time role after graduating in a regional department that reported up to my former boss. My new role was a great fit but the management… not so much. Think clique-y high school girls who are all “bestie!!” to your face then turn around and slam you to someone else. I was one of three coordinators (I’ll call the other two Bess and Sue) and at one point Bess is pregnant and Sue is job hunting. Sue puts in her notice and they start looking for a replacement. Replacement (Sandra) is hired and she’s an incompetent nightmare who I’m pretty sure lied on her resume (should have had experience with a certain system given her previous role, but that’s not actually relevant here). Bess is senior to me and starts training Sandra, but goes on maternity leave 2 weeks later. My boss then takes over training and I’m doing the work of 3 people (with no overtime authorized). One of our tasks was highly manual and required memorizing about 50 different codes to know if a product is, say, llama vs alpaca wool and number of strands forming the yarn and each different factory had different codes. Normally we each took a couple factories, but this was now all on me and it took FOREVER so I figured there had to be a better way. So off the clock I started teaching myself better Excel tricks and figured out a method. At work, I started putting it together and got it up and running. I probably took a few hours over the course of a week to set it up (and throughout Bess’s entire maternity leave I’m proud to say I hit every deadline, though that was partially because I constantly pushed back and reminded people I was the only one doing things since Sandra never did get up to speed and was let go within 90 days). I hit go the first time on the macro in Excel and it takes 20 minutes to run, meanwhile I’m starting the manual process to verify it. I do this a couple more times to refine some errors I found, and then I presented it to my boss. I had taken the initiative to build something that was going to save AT LEAST 12 labor hours per week and have a lower margin of error.

    She. Was. Furious.

    Not that the thing worked, but that I hadn’t run it by her initially. I had to continue to do things manually for weeks to prove to her it worked (okay, I wouldn’t be so upset by that if the reaction had been “cool, let’s test it” instead of “there’s no way this works and I’m going to force you to prove it yourself”). In the meantime, she proceeds to have me written up for wasting company resources (aka the 4-5 hours on the clock I worked on this). So now I’m extra pissed (and expanding my search for another job, but at the same time I really liked Bess and didn’t want her to come back to a Charlie Foxtrot).

    Fast forward a couple months – Bess is back, Sandra has been let go, Sandra 2.0 is hired (and competent). My program is being used and we’re supposed to still spot check but only do it when my boss reminds us because it had a 98% success rate and the manual process was 87% (yes I actually calculated it at one point). We have a full department meeting, meaning the other regions, my region, and corporate. Lo and behold, boss is being congratulated for my program! However, my rage was soon abated because immediately her peers in other regions want this and start asking technical questions about setting it up… and she couldn’t answer a single question. Meanwhile my old boss from when I was an intern is looking suspiciously at me, knowing that one thing my nerdy heart loves is to learn to automate things in Excel and figure out new tricks. So later, she reaches out to me privately and I give her the full scoop. So I get my credit and teach the other regions how to set this thing up.

    Unfortunately, nothing happened with my boss (other than being pissed at me so she probably got a slap on the wrist and a warning about retaliation). I got the writeup removed from my record, but that was only important if I wanted an internal transfer (which I did at the time) and I ended up finding a better job 6 months later with another company so off I went. Bess got a promotion to corporate that the boss had wanted, and she fills me in occasionally. Our old boss no longer has any direct reports, but still sits in her same office and annoys the coordinators and the person they now report to.

  219. Casey*

    Ooh one more. I’ve been at my company for about three years and am now the lead Teapot Painter. We have a newish Teapot Sculptor, Ralph, who has the biggest ego I have EVER encountered. Won’t shut up about how he went to MITeapots, constantly suggests “improvements” to jobs he knows nothing about, told me that he could probably take over the teapot painting group and “do it faster too, because it’s not that hard”. (All of these things are false – Ralph is an okay sculptor and the one time he tried painting it was a disaster.)

    I tried shutting down his comments. I tried ignoring him. Neither of them were good for my sanity. So I’ve instead started encouraging him to start his own teapot company.

    Ralph: “I don’t get why the teacup people work so slow. If I was in charge I would do it way better.”
    Me: “Yeah, I’ve been wondering… have you started thinking about what kind of roles would let you be in charge?”

    Ralph: “Honestly I have more vision than anyone at this company, even corporate.”
    Me: “For sure dude… it’s a shame that it’s so hard to find positions where you can execute that vision… I mean, unless you started your own company or something.”

    Ralph: “That’s so smart! You’re not the first person to tell me I should go be an entrepreneur!”
    Me: “I guess people can just see that in you, Ralph.”

    1. Campfire Raccoon*

      HA! Now he has two people in his cheering squad!

      For all you know, you’re doing a great thing, that will work out in the end. Maybe he’ll become super-successful, remember the little guys, and hire you on at a much higher wage!

  220. Master Bean Counter*

    When I worked for the county there was this guy Greg. Greg was a great guy, but liked to play jokes. My revenge was both subtle and self-serving.
    Our boss, Brad, loved to walk around and talk. If you were busy, he was a bother. If you had things out of place, in his opinion, he’d rearrange them. He once rearranged my stacks of similar looking, yet different books into three stacks of the same height. The dangers of working with an engineer. sigh.
    Anyway the next time Brad came around I said, “Hey Brad, I think Greg was looking for you.” Brad went to the back, where Greg was, and bugged Greg for over an hour. This worked for the next 5 years I worked there.

  221. Not playing your game anymore*

    A few days after I started my job one of my new coworkers invited me to join her for lunch off campus. OK fine. “do you mind if we go to Big-Name-Chain?” Ok fine. We get to the restaurant and she orders two of the specials. “that OK with you? I have a coupon” uh, I guess. So we eat and then she hands me her bogo coupon and waltzes out the door.

    It’s was a sort of rite of passage. Every new employee got the bite put on them at least once. When she started trying it with work study students the boss finally put a stop to it.

  222. a*

    My husband and I met at work and worked together for 11 years. About halfway through that time, we moved from one work location to another. All locations had fairly terrible bosses, but the one at the new location was extra. He would make all kinds of inappropriate remarks, refused to give anyone credit for doing well, had unreasonable expectations because he had a high opinion of the work he did when he had our job, etc. He hated me because I wouldn’t play dumb and go along with his inappropriate remarks, and he hated my husband because he was a threat to the attention the boss got from (complicit) female coworkers. My husband was also in the Army Reserves, and the boss would mess with his annual training. Eventually, my husband couldn’t take it any more, so he found another job in our field, but he needed certification from a professional society to fully qualify. The certification requires society membership, 5 years experience, a skills/knowledge test, all of which my husband aced easily…and then they publish your name in their journal to see if there’s any information about trouble you may have gotten into that you didn’t disclose. Well, the boss (let’s call him D) took it upon himself to write a letter with vague accusations of “character” to the professional society. This held up the certification, because they didn’t know what to do with it – there was nothing concrete, but integrity is very important in our field. So, that was his Machiavellian move to continue to harass my husband.

    Around the same time, I was on family responsibility leave (an extension of our maternity leave), and was working 2 days/week for a different boss in the same office. Even though he was no longer my supervisor, D would monitor my time (which included pumping time), review my work looking for errors, and otherwise make a nuisance of himself. I was getting a little hot about that, but when I found out about the letter to the professional society, I completely lost my temper. I wrote a lengthy letter to my great-great-great-grandboss (the head of my state agency), notifying them that if this continued, I would be suing the state and D personally for harassment and defamation. (D had already been investigated by multiple parts of the organization, with the conclusion that sure, he’s an a-hole, but that doesn’t rise to an actionable level.) The next thing I know, I get to tell my boss, my grandboss, my great-grand-boss, and my great-great-grandboss that there was no point in going to them with this issue because I knew from past experience that they would not do anything about it. With their boss riding on them, they made D retract the letter, and basically avoid me for the next 13 years until he retired. He did try to come at me in a meeting, about 5 years ago, but I shut him down pretty quick (and then spent an entire day accumulating the data to debunk the point he was trying to make. Don’t mess with me – I’ll gather the information and make you pay me while I do it!) Fun times…

  223. C*

    My departure from my last job was…. interesting.

    1) In my performance review I detailed a few issues I was having with my supervisor’s management of my work (lack of clear expectations, for example) and suggestions on how the issues could be resolved. Rather than respond, my supervisor just didn’t complete my performance review and hoped I would just leave before HR got on her case about it. (I know this because HER supervisor told me) Luckily I was already interviewing for my current job so I was, in fact, on my way out.
    2) My last day was the Friday before Labor Day. She scheduled a going-away party (as was customary and very expected) at 9:30am. No one was there. It was scheduled to end at 10 and she left at 10 exactly.
    3) She scheduled a meeting for 3pm that day to close out my work and collect my badge and whatnot. She emailed me at 3:01 saying she had “completely forgotten” and had already left for the day. She told me to just leave my badge in the office manager’s office.

    Gosh, I miss her. She was finally fired recently but it was due to a huge restructuring and significant layoffs, but they kept the rest of her team so. *shrug*

  224. Gumby*

    I worked for a start up in pre-dot com bomb days. Many of our employees were recent grads of rival universities. During the week of the annual football game between the rival schools, the mouse-over text for something on our home page was mysteriously was changed to “Go [school]!” (It was not me. And I think it only lasted maybe a day before someone noticed and it was changed back. But I always thought it was an excellent yet mildly subversive prank.)

  225. TheReceptionist87*

    I was a receptionist at a salon that was owned by a very petty micromanager. One of the stylists was not very good at his job – didn’t have many return customers, always went over time and charged way more for his services than the others – and so he stayed in the owner’s good graces by being her eyes and ears and ‘tattling’ to the owner about any little thing that the rest of us did. I’d seriously get reprimanded by the owner for dusting the shelves during the designated sweeping time (even though everyone knows it makes more sense to dust first and then sweep) or whatever little thing.

    So whenever he had down time, he was being nosy with the rest of us. However, if a stylist didn’t have any appointments for the rest of the day, the owner would tell them to go home. So I started making sure his schedule was as wide-open as possible whenever I was working. I’d book the walk-ins with everyone else and sometimes I even told people we didn’t have any openings for the day even though that stylist was free, so he’d usually end up getting sent home when I was in the store and I’d be able to do my work in peace.

    On my last day, I told the other receptionist what I’d been doing and she thought it was hilarious. I’ve always wondered if she ever told him about it… (Some time later, the micromanager owner bought a closed-circuit camera that pointed straight at the receptionist’s desk so she stay at home and still be able to watch the employee’s every move… my old co-worker told me that the manager would call and be like, “I happened to notice that when you were counting the cash drawer you counted the pennies before the quarters, so just consider this a friendly reminder that you need to count the quarters first!”) That was the one job that I still have occasional nightmares abuot.

  226. Berkeleyfarm*

    This one doesn’t have a really happy ending, sorry.

    I worked for a local government agency in IT infrastructure. My group had mostly come in from private industry and were highly skilled. Other groups were highly skilled at kicking their work over to us.

    They brought in a young hotshot mid manager for the group who was classic Suck Up, Punch Down. Let’s call him PHB, although he wasn’t dumb, he was evil.

    This guy was constantly second-guessing, sabotaging, and publicly belittling his highly skilled staff. He was abusive. Turnover was through the roof, especially in the networking group.

    The famous $NetworkingCompany that these folks held certs and MadSkillz in was nearby and boy were they hiring. Most of the people in networking who left ended up working for $NetworkingCompany in some capacity.

    After one departure which really stung, $PHB’s boss called me and everyone else into his office to scream at us “DO YOU KNOW ANYONE ELSE WHO IS LEAVING?”. Not “what’s going on and how can we fix it”.

    They came up with a “great” solution to their problem.

    PHB, PHB Sr., and the Director had the lawyers send a demand letter to $NetworkingCompany claiming their intellectual property was being poached (reminder, this was local government and there was really no IP) and demanding that they stop hiring our employees.

    There was a big conference call with a lot of people including $NetworkingCompany’s CEO.

    Result? The “gentlemen’s” no-hire agreement.

    Some time later it came out that a lot of Silicon Valley stars had these “No-Hire” agreements with each other. I wasn’t surprised.

    PHB and his boss are still there and have advanced in their job titles. At least some time after this, the employees in that group got Civil Service protection (they did not have it when I was there and several people, including me, got pushed out. PHB had it all along.) I at least stayed long enough to be fully vested in the pension plan, although I now have way too high a tolerance for being abused on the job.

    I wish Ask A Manager had been around then! (I also wish I had known that someone I know socially was one of the best-regarded labor lawyers in my state. There were … shenanigans.)

  227. Gutenberg*

    Two male professors were vying for an upcoming department chairmanship. One professor created circumstances that caused several female students to innocently call the other professor’s home at times when he knew the only person at home would be the professor’s wife. The second professor had a reputation for being chummy with students in general and flirtatious with certain young women (although he was never accused nor was I ever aware of anything unethical on his part). This raised a ruckus between the professor and his wife, plus confusion, questions and confrontations between the wife and some student callers, and plenty of awkwardness that spilled over into higher levels in the academic bureaucracy. Ultimately, enough questions were raised about the second professor that he lost the chairmanship to the first professor who engineered the phone calls. He subsequently left the institution and also got a divorce. Karma eventually caught up to the first professor a few years later when he lost a promotion after another series of underhanded machinations!
    So many things I do not miss about academia.

  228. SL33*

    Many moons ago, my grandfather worked for our state’s department of transportation. When he started there, they somehow got his birthdate wrong and made him a year younger on his official paperwork. He tried to correct this many times, but government being what it is, he never succeeded and finally let it go.

    Fast forward 35 years. He catches an internal graft plot and blows the whistle on the (fairly high up) plotters who were lining their pockets with taxpayer money. This was before any whistleblower protection laws. They couldn’t fire him, but they made his life unpleasant – downsized his office, gave him crappy assignments, etc. Finallt he’s had enough and announces his retirement. Smug boss says “You can’t retire – you’re only 64.” Grandpa pulls out actual birth certificate and says, “Nope, I’m actually 65. I guess your record-keeping skills are on par with your ethics. Bye.”

  229. Lakeside Manner*

    I’ve worked in some pretty dysfunctional/Machiavellian places, but mostly the usual stuff like people taking credit for other’s accomplishments, spreading rumors/gossip, etc. This is one of the most bizarre stories from the last couple of years. It’s a long one, but the payoff is so good, I promise!

    I was working at a large llama farm, Lovely Llamas LLC. I had an opening on my team for two groomers, one a more junior entry level position, one a more senior position. I hired Junior first. A few months later I hired Senior; unfortunately, they took a pretty much immediate dislike to each other. Junior though that Senior was a snob and not really interested in doing the job; Senior mostly just thought of Junior as an annoying kid, when he did think of him at all. Neither were wrong.

    A couple of months after Senior started, a bunch of us got an email from a recruiter advertising a senior groomer position at Dashing Dromedaries, Inc., one of our leading competitors. The job description seemed eerily tailored to Senior’s qualifications and interests; he used to organize camel shows, and regularly bemoaned that this was not a larger part of his job (I was clear about this in the interviews). This job description said “experience with camels and event planning a plus.” There was a salary listed, and it was Senior’s pay + 10%.

    The whole thing was kinda weird, though. The dromedary industry is smallish, and none of us had ever heard of this recruiter before. We looked her up and while she worked in the farming sector, it was about as far from dromedaries as you can get. She was also in a different state. Our CEO, who was a bit of a hothead, called up the CEO of Dashing Dromedaries, and basically said, “how dare you try to poach our new groomer, your recruiter is being unethical.” DDI CEO responded that they didn’t have an engagement with that recruiter, though they did have a Senior Groomer position open. We figured that the recruiter’s business model must be to line up good candidates, then approach the company hiring and negotiate a finder’s fee. We basically shrugged it off as a weird blip and moved on.

    A couple of months later, my boss informed me that the CEO wanted to see Junior in their office at 4pm sharp. This was unusual, to say the least. Boss wouldn’t tell me why CEO wanted to see Junior. I didn’t find out until 5pm, when I was pulled into a meeting and given the whole story.

    After CEO spoke to the Dashing Dromedaries CEO, they grew suspicious. They instructed our IT team to look further into the emails. IT was able to trace the IP address, and the call was coming from inside the building, so to speak. The recruiter’s email was sent from the Lovely Llamas network. They were even able to trace it to the exact computer: Junior’s.

    The CEO confronted Junior and asked if there was anything he wanted to tell them. He immediately confessed to sending the email. He said that he didn’t think Senior had good intentions in the job and he was trying to get him to leave. He had found a real position description, added some info to make it more appealing to Senior, and impersonated a recruiter. CEO decided to take it easy on Junior because he was young and seemed genuinely remorseful. They said that if he hadn’t fessed up so quickly, they would have fired him.

    I gave Junior a very stern talking to, and there were many tears and promises to do better. In the end, however, Junior’s assessment of Senior proved correct, and he was eventually fired for pulling some sh*t that would take longer to type than I care to (plus, I’m saving it for my novel). There was one final twist in the tale, however: after Senior was fired, I got to go through his email inbox, and there, in his sent mail, was his response to the fake recruiter/Junior, expressing interest in the Dashing Dromedaries groomer position.

    1. Funk*

      We need a new version of “the office” that is actually episodes of aam true tales of drama, including this one right here! Maybe a few episodes. I so want to see ally mcbeal done with ungulates husbandry rather than lawyers.

  230. Love threads about intrigue!*

    Boss put his name on some work i did and claimed it as his own. I didn’t know about it until grandboss called me in and asked if i wrote the xyz memo. I said yes, he told me that Boss had passed it off as his own, and offered me a promotion to a much cooler job working directly under him (grandboss) instead of under Boss. I took it, and 40 years later it’s still the best job i ever had.

  231. Grrrrrrrr*

    This one still makes me really mad. When I was really young someone in the office left me a note that my board chair had called while I was at lunch, and needed me to call immediately. It was a little unusual but not out of the realm of possibility that she would call me, so I called her. It was bull, she hadn’t called, and I probably looked like an idiot. But I couldn’t prove who left the note, so there were no repercussions.

    1. Love intrigue Threads*

      I should add that though there were no immediate repercussions, the person who most likely did this, who was gunning for my job, was passed over for it a second time when I left. She finally got the message and ended up somewhere else.

  232. Lauren*

    Holding a cup of coffee and looking up at the gender-biased boss that was all writing notes and plans on a whiteboard. He really just wanted me to pretend everything was so wonderful and only voice positive sentiments about work vs. things that needed fixing. Once I realized that – I made it a game. I also “typed notes and wrote notes on paper” (really I was messaging friends not in my 3 hour meeting with him as I gave a blow-by-blow of my efforts).

    – Holding mug
    – Took a sip of coffee
    – Nodded
    – Verbalized ‘ha’ and tilted my head in fake thought.
    – Wrote a note on pad of paper
    – Uncrossed legs
    – Crossed legs other way
    – Circled previously written thought on pad of paper
    – Held mug again.
    – Quickly put mug down and then typed real fast to you …
    – Asked him to repeat his thought
    – Starred previously written thought on pad of paper
    – Nodded again as I typed to my friends of how I have indeed cracked the conceited boss code

  233. Onamonapia Syncedoche*

    Jane was the sales secretary where I used to work- very professional, older woman. She was nice but didn’t put up with nonsense. As the business expanded, it was decided to hire a 2nd sales secretary – one who would work eleven am to 7 pm – to provide support for a new segment that was 2 time zones away. This new secretary would also cover Jane’s lunch shift and provide a few other support tasks.
    They hired Stormy – a 20ish woman with not a lot of office experience but she seemed like a nice enough person.
    After a month or so, I heard that Jane was not very impressed with Stormy – Stormy was not very trainable, she often didn’t show up on time for relieving Jane at the desk and, the worst sin of all, she was using Jane’s desk after Jane left.
    A small point but a) Stormy had her own desk and b) the office was closed after 5 so she didn’t need to be at Jane’s desk and c) she wasn’t just using Jane’s desk – she was leaving it a mess, moving things and generally being annoying.
    Jane’s desk was relatively isolated from everyone else’s desks & offices but it was the only non-manager desk with access to the front door buzzer, Jane’s computer was the only one with a camera and it was the only desk with a window to the front parking lot.
    Stormy’s explanation was that she felt safer being alone in the office at that desk.
    Jane suspected it was something else so she got the IT guy to install something on her computer and several days later, Stormy was sent packing.
    Apparently the HR department didn’t do such a good job of vetting Stormy because she also worked as a cam girl/call girl, one of her specialties was “sexy secretary”. She didn’t limit her dates to just being on camera – she wanted access to the front door buzzer because she was entertaining clients in our office.
    About a month later, they replaced everything in that office and installed security cameras on all the doors.

  234. Pen Thwarter*

    We were getting told off by our admin office that our stationery order was getting out of hand – we were going through multiple boxes of pens in a week. I realised (because my desk was next to the cupboard where the stationery was) that my irritating co-worker was getting a new pen at least once every day.
    At the end of the day, or before lunch, she’d put them in her desk drawer, and because her drawer was filled with ‘With Compliments’ slips that she could have just recycled “But they are good scrap paper!”, the pens would filter to the bottom of her drawer. Come the next time she needed a pen, and back to the stationery cupboard.
    So when she was on the desk next, I opened her desk drawer, carefully pulled out the stack of papers, retrieved the 40 or so pens from her drawer, replaced the papers, and made everything look as it was.
    I would do this once a week, and re-stock the pen boxes, and we stopped ordering quite so many pens.
    When I left that job I also told about three other people how to magically restock the pen boxes without pissing off the annoying co-worker, or the administration people.
    It was small, but so very satisfying. Particularly as I left the job to go to university, the year after I had been to our firm Christmas Party and irritating co-worker received her thirty years of service medal. And she was in the same role as me! At that point I realised that the opportunities for promotion were even slimmer than I had perceived, and decided to upskill lest I end up in 27 years time with a thirty years of service medal and a new pen fetish myself.

  235. Director of Alpaca Exams*

    Many years ago, I worked in the medical writing field. In late 2008, I was hired by a medical news startup to be their first editor in chief.

    Everything about the company was incredibly sketchy from the get-go. To be frank, I didn’t have a fraction of the experience someone should have for such a role, and I was pretty sure they were looking for someone they could push around and blame their eventual failure on. (I had worked for startups before.) However, I’m not a very push-around-able person. Every time they pushed, I pushed back.

    It soon became clear that the people running the company had no interest in accuracy or good sourcing (which are particularly important when you’re pitching health information to consumers). They just wanted to generate content to sell ads against. The CEO got more and more annoyed every time I mentioned ethics or said things like “You need a much larger editorial staff to manage this volume of content.” He claimed that his assistant wanted to write for me; she laughed and said she had no interest in writing. He also treated any budget request as something to dicker over based on factors that only he had access to, while flagrantly making personal use of his company credit card. Meanwhile, there were payroll issues and personnel issues and no one would let me see the financials. We were being underwritten by an investment company that seemed to have some problems of its own.

    After six weeks of increasing tensions, the CEO asked me to write them a content plan for 2009, with a sort of implied “If you’re so smart” tacked onto the end of the request. I’d never written a content plan before, so I carefully researched how one goes about doing that, and then I wrote them a content plan detailing exactly how one would go about running a medical news company that was devoted to ensuring that readers only learned relevant, accurate information held to high editorial standards. I handed it in. The next day the CEO said we’d “go out to lunch to discuss the plan.” He took me to a hole-in-the-wall pizzeria, bought me a cup of soda, and fired me. I drank my soda and felt so pleased to have won the game of chicken with my standards intact that I didn’t even mind being fired in mid-December.

    To my amazement, the company still exists, sort of. It’s been reduced to a single WordPress blog to which one very bad article is posted per day. There aren’t even any ads on it. It may be entirely run by a series of algorithms. If only they’d listened to me…

  236. Jason*

    SoI was the second in command on the team but had little real authority.

    Introducing two of my coworkers:

    Wakeen was brilliantly intelligent – hyper vigilant, even – and good at reading the room. And a rock solid team member, though sometimes impulsive.

    Ferguson was one of the worst coworkers I’ve worked with – they required babysitting, basically, and were the bane of my existence. My strong preference was that this person stare into space, alone, somewhere, as that was the way they did the least damage. They were also subtly mean, and regularly took advantage of people’s kindness and unwillingness to say no.

    The two of them were forced to share space, and this resulted in Wakeen being Fergus’s main babysitter.

    The person who was actually in charge, who I supported, was not willing to address the problem with Ferguson.

    The supervisor went on vacation, leaving me to run the team.

    Wakeen suddenly and uncharacteristically dropped the ball and had somewhere else he had to be for two days.

    Which meant they was no longer covering for Ferguson

    It turns out Fergus was also blatantly exploiting another coworker (who was less well positioned for self defense against Fergus’s problematic behavior than either Wakeen or I) in addition to driving me and Wakeen up the wall, and I’d had no idea. The extent of the problem wasn’t apparent until there was no-one else babysitting them at all.

    When I realized how severely exploitative the situation was – and because everything went truly spectacularly south with Fergus the week I was in charge – I had them removed from the project. The supervisor felt undermined by my decision (and I think assumes it was I who was being Machiavellian) and still has not forgiven me.

    The thing is, Wakeen was really good at reading people, and would have known I was decisive, aware of group dynamics, protective of others, a bit impulsive, and insanely frustrated with Fergus.

    Nobody else has any idea that I was set up – but I totally was. And it achieved Wakeen’s goals quite nicely.

    It was an impressive piece of maneuvering, though I do wish I had not walked in to the trap. It wasn’t worth the cost, for me, even though in a healthy environment it would have been the right decision.

    I am certain It was totally worth it for Wakeen.

      1. Mad Harry Crewe*

        I just assumed it was Fergus’s rather distinguished (if equally useless) older brother.

  237. SMH*

    A company decided they needed to cut costs which included taking a look a salaries. It was decided there was one salary that couldn’t be supported anymore. They couldn’t eliminate the position because it was essential to their operation. They also couldn’t just fire the person because he was over forty and to replace him with someone who would accept significantly less pay would most likely mean hiring someone under forty with less experience. This would have set up the kind of discrimination case they’d be talking about in law schools for years to come. The solution was to cut his pay by so much that he couldn’t afford to work there anymore and resigned.

  238. moreanonthanusual*

    This thread inspired me to be totally Machiavellian today. Against my better judgement, and only because I need the money, I agreed to take on a project with my most problematic client. This client is disorganized, flighty, changes direction constantly, gives incomplete instructions, is impatient, jumps to conclusions, and blames first and asks questions later. Typical behaviour is to ask for a project report the night before they want it, then change direction the next morning and complain that the project is headed in the direction they’d previously requested, and that the project report needs to be redone. They also have impossible expectations in terms of deliverables and get upset that you won’t drop all your other clients to focus on their project, when they have every intention of taking the project away just as soon as you get them past their latest crisis.

    Which is exactly what happened. This time, though, I mostly anticipated their antics. I made friends with their beleaguered 2IC and got the straight information on the project from him. That enabled me to anticipate the changes the client would make, and I was able to produce a report that met the needs they hadn’t articulated yet. The client was TRYING SO HARD to complain, and all they could do was splutter, because I’d covered all their potential changes of direction. Also, I used some of the contacts I made during the project to do some of my own business development – normally, I would bring leads back to my client, but not this time.

  239. Eviltwin*

    I know I’m late, but I’m compelled to share.
    This isn’t really Machiavellian as much as incredibly mean and petty, but I’ll still want to share… maybe confess.
    My senior year of high-school, I was a cashier in the very large discount department store we all know and loathe. After I graduated, I pondered whether to stay on during college and work weekends for pocket money, but that changed over the summer when the cashiers got a new manager… let’s call her Danerys.
    Already not the nicest person at the best of times, during that summer, Dany went through a rather brutal, ugly breakup… by which I mean she got capital-D dumped… and since I was the only male employee on the registers and therefore her only male subordinate, she vented all of her post-breakup “Men are Garbage” anger on me. She’d give me all the worst assignments, cut into my breaks, and more than a few times, would lecture and berate me in full Dolores Umbridge mode like a child (even though she couldn’t be more than five years older than me) in front of as many of my coworkers and even customers as she could.
    While being her personal whipping boy helped guarantee I would not hang around during college, I decided to stay on just a little while longer… until Black Friday. Since that was our ultimate “all hands on deck” day, EVERYBODY was there. When I first walked in, they were having a little pre-opening prep meeting and she was sitting there planning the day’s schedule with the store manager (i.e. HER boss.) I just dropped my badge down on the table in front of her, said the magic words, and walked out.
    Looking back, I feel terrible because I’m sure my coworkers suffered far more than she did, but man did it feel good at the time. I had a friend do some Christmas shopping that day and said he saw her manning a register herself due to being short-staffed (which she hated to do and was NOT good at) and looking REALLY close to the end of her rope.

  240. Jenny Islander*

    Looking back, I know this was a big no-no, but at the time I considered it to be delicious and subtle revenge.

    I got a summer job at the age of 10 that no 10-year-old should ever have. With zero experience caring for young children, I was suddenly a nanny. What’s more, my charge wasn’t allowed to be in her room because she might mess it up. Couldn’t play in any other room of the house because she might mess them up. Couldn’t go outside because she would get dirty, and probably mess up her mother’s immaculate flower garden. What were we supposed to do all day? I still don’t know. But because I didn’t do whatever it was, but I did do things that a 10-year-old who had never had a job before would ignorantly do, I got yelled at, told how horrible and ungrateful I was, and fired.

    So I got up in the still hours of the night, put on dark clothing, walked to her house, and picked her flowers. Just the perennials, because I didn’t actually want to kill anything. And I just stuck the stems back into the earth, because I wasn’t a thief, and I left.

    She was a lawyer, who had clients over all the time, and she loved to show off her beautiful house and land. She was also, let’s say, wound a bit tightly–? I entertained myself thinking of their reaction to her uncontrolled shrieking when she discovered that the flowers were all ugly now.

    Like I said, big no-no. But man it felt good.

  241. WS*

    I was a temp at a small company that used to be all male apart from one secretary, but had rapidly changed to be 50:50 male:female over the last year. Unfortunately, there was still only one female bathroom (a single room cubicle) and 8 male bathroom stalls. And since a lot of the staff were in sales and travelled, the female staff often needed to use the bathroom before and after jobs, since they couldn’t pee by the side of the road like the male staff. There were always long, long waits for the female bathroom and the (male) boss and his manager son just considered this to be “whinging females”.

    So one day, the female head of sales brought in two large, fancy ceramic tiles, one saying “Boys” and one saying “Girls”, with blue and pink flowers accordingly, and nailed them to the doors – only she put “Girls” on the previously-male bathroom and “Boys” on the single, previously-female bathroom. Everyone immediately switched without question and the boss never said a word about it!

  242. Not Australian*

    In the late 1980s I had to make a major life change, moved a couple of hundred miles, and got a job working for a local authority in a small seaside town. The job was a new ‘assistant clerk’ post, basically just typing up reports, and in theory I was working under the ‘senior clerk’, an old bat generally called Mrs B. Mrs B had been with the authority for many years and considered herself a cut above; her husband also worked there, and was famous for falling asleep at his desk after lunch every day. Basically the pair of them were useless but connected (think ‘funny handshakes’) which meant they were invulnerable, and would just go on collecting their pay and doing b*gger all until they retired.

    Mrs B had idleness down to a fine art. She would do a certain amount of work, and would do it reasonably well, but she had a very low boredom threshold. When the rest of us were beavering away doing repetitive tasks – which, honestly, I’ve never minded – she would start her antics. She would, for example, call our local department store, get put through to women’s wear, and start interrogating the staff: “I saw a nice skirt in there last week, do you have it in plum? In a size 12? Will you put one aside for me? What other colours do you have?” etc. She was often seen by other staff during the day out and about in town; more than once she was observed under the dryer at the hair salon when she was supposed to be working. She left a coat hanging in the office so everyone would think she was still in the building, then sneaked down to the basement car park and got another coat from her car before leaving the building – simply reversing the process on her way back.

    One of her favourite tactics was ‘taking a file for a walk’, which she actually revealed to me in a burst of confidentiality – maybe she was hoping I’d emulate her example and be a partner in crime. Since our jobs sometimes involved tracking people down to ask questions, we would occasionally have to pick up a file and go looking for someone. Mrs B would do this for fun, wandering all over the building – we were in a new annexe adjoining a massive old rabbit-warren of Victorian offices – and through departments she had no business to be in, brandishing a buff file which meant nobody ever questioned her, just idling her time away and chatting with her friends.

    I think her finest hour, though, was showing me a hand-dryer in a distant bathroom and telling me point-blank that, if I had been sneaking out of the office at any time and got my hair wet, this was where I could dry it before going back to the office and that way I’d never get caught.

    On reflection, I reckon she was trying to encourage me to copy her tricks so that she could then blame me for any lapses in efficiency. (“Oh, I’ve caught Not Australian sneaking out of the office more than once!”) I didn’t take the bait, because I had no interest in not working, and I’d like to report that I vanquished her in a blaze of glory but I didn’t. Instead I had a nervous breakdown and was unable to work for a considerable time afterwards – a situation towards which Mrs B, in no small measure, contributed.

  243. SusanIvanova*

    Mom was a US Customs Inspector back in the 80s. One day they’re working a late flight and they’ve got a passenger who keeps trying to cut in front of the lines with “do you know who I am? I’m a kicker for the Cowboys!”
    He gets repeatedly booted back to the ends of the lines, and finally makes it up to my mom where there’s a little problem – he’s got paperwork that says he’s the one and only person who can do one particular job: kick for another team.
    Now, Mom’s got discretion in cases like this. Jobs change, paperwork lags. And really, if he hadn’t been so obnoxiously telling the whole world about his new job, she wouldn’t even have known.
    But he had, and so she goes 100% by the book – back he goes to Immigration to wait for the team lawyers to straighten things out. I’m sure they appreciated that early morning call.

  244. Cheesesticks*

    Late to the party but this is funny.
    Back in the mid-90’s, I worked in a tiny factory doing light assembly. We had this corporate folks come in who decided they could make us more efficient. One lady, L, was a real piece of work.

    My work station was by the door and I had a radio with a cassette player. I had an Elton John tape and had The Bitch is Back queued up. Every time L came in, I would play the song. My coworkers got a kick out of it. Not sure if L ever caught on that the Bitch is Back would play every time she walked in.

    1. Emma*

      This reminds me of that bar in Spain that got fined for playing the Peppa pig theme tune every time the cops walked in. Classic.

  245. NachoMama*

    I was an analyst at one company, but moved across the state with my partner, and the only job I could find was an administrative assistant for the finance department in a large local company. A month or so after I started, one of the analysts was chatting to me about my background, and he learned that I knew how to do his job. He began to badger me to help him with excel formulas, to write code for him, solve problems– all while claiming credit for my work and insinuating that I was stupid to others we worked with. When I began to work on larger projects for my boss and didn’t have time to help him anymore, he became more threatening and angry– so I took one of his projects, manipulated the code so that it produced enormously and obviously wrong results, and sent it back to him. He presented “his” work in a meeting as fact and was reamed out by the team VP. When he came over to yell at me, I pointed out that I was *just* an admin, and that I couldn’t possibly know how to do his big, difficult analyst work, could I?

    He was let go in a subsequent RIF. I’ve been promoted a handful of times and am still with the company.

  246. AndriKenna*

    My last job was awful in many ways, but the worst (and what got me fired) was the project manager (PM) they hired. He was a sneaky, self serving piece of human garbage.
    He got a lot of people fired. Anyone that disagreed with him, gone. It was a small company, less than 20 people and he got rid of 4 of them including me.
    But the weirdest thing he tried to do was get the director fired. The director who owned half the company. He basically schemed and plotted his way to create a senior manager team (that I should have been a part of because I managed a department but he excluded me because he couldn’t control me) and basically used that team to try to get the director pushed out from his active sales role and push him to early retirement so PM could run the company. Such a strange power play.
    I got a text from one of my previous employees on my team a few months after I was fired letting me know the joyous karma that befell him after I was gone. Not only did all of the rest of my team end up quitting due to their inept management (that they didn’t realise I was shielding them from) but the biggest client, the one that was basically paying everyone’s wages had terminated their contract. I don’t wanna say this was because of their loss of me, but I managed that contract for the whole 4 years I was there and they were always happy with us when I did…
    And the cherry on top was that with that loss of contract they had to do some lay offs, and guess who was the first person to get laid off? PM! And because he had only been there just short of 2 years he didn’t even get a nice payout with it!
    I love karma.

  247. o_gal*

    Years ago, I was part of a team of tea pot painters who were were on a new tea pot design. The design rework was going to be a huge thing, so we split it into 9 phases – think of the first three as 1. designing the new shape for the tea pot body, 2. designing the new shape for the lid, and 3. making sure that the body and lid worked well together, with further refinements after that. So phase 3 was vitally important – it would prove that out new tea pot design worked. There were multiple demos scheduled where we would show that you could successfully put the new lid on the new body. Many bigwigs were invited to these demos.
    The phase 3 demos were assigned to the main tea pot lid designer. The rest of us all offered to help him, knowing how important the demos were. But he shrugged off all offers of help, since he said that this needed to be a cohesive demo and so it was really a one person job, but thanks for the all the offers of help!
    Demo days come and go, he spends all his time doing the demos, and the rest of us anxiously await word that the bigwigs liked the new design. None of us get to attend the demos, because we are lowly tea pot painters and there isn’t room for us in these demos (according to our demo person.) We just have to trust that our demo person is doing well.
    About a month later, in the regularly scheduled quarterly meeting that bigwigs have to appear that they are interested in us and our work, they give out awards. A huge award goes to our demo person, who personally sacrificed all of his time and energy in putting together such a fantastic demo, all by himself, and spent all those hours demoing to all kinds of bigwigs, again, all by his lonesome, with no help or interest from the rest of the team. Isn’t he awesome?

  248. spek*

    Plugged a wireless mouse tiny receiver into the USB port on the back of my work enemy’s computer. Spent 4 months, just once every few days, taking the mouse out of my desk from in my office next door, turning it on, and making his mouse go haywire. Especially useful during end of month crunch time when reports were due.

    2. Quill*

      I reflexively checked the back of my computer after this even though 1) it’s covid and i’m practically the only one in the office 2) I don’t think I pissed anyone off?

  249. SW*

    It’s not *entirely* my fault that my boss’s boss is no longer managing people. But 3 years really is more than enough time to get my pronouns right and to make his direct reports also correctly use my pronouns, don’t you think?
    I mean, I’m sure the PowerPoint presentation my colleagues in another unit made about him and presented to the outside evaluating team didn’t hurt either.

  250. CowWhisperer*

    I have a coworker (an adult woman who has grown children) named “Backstabber” who has a highly restricted availability for days and times that she’s available to work in a retail setting where that matters a lot for the number of hours a part-time employee receives a week. Rather than shift her availability (which she can’t do) or train for multiple departments (which was an option at one point), she sets out to attack and get fired any new employees in the department.

    She nearly succeeded this time because we had a new manager combined with a very young full-time employee (younger than Ms. Backstabber’s kids) “Newbie” who was patently unaware of how much drama and straight up lying her coworker was doing about her behind her back. Because of the manager’s inexperience, Newbie was at risk of being put on a PIP for all of the problems that Backstabber was creating and reporting.

    Her plan has failed miserably because her availability is so restricted that there is always someone else working in the department – and this time it was me and another person that she’s tried this with before. When we saw what was happening, each of us independently notified the manager’s manager that something weird was afoot with Backstabber and Newbie. I pulled the manager aside and told her about Backstabby’s previous campaigns that had happened when I was here – and recommended asking Rock Solid (another very experienced, drama-free employee) about what happened before I was here.

    Last shift we shared Backstabby was complaining that she had finally asked about training for other departments in the store and was told that no other department manager was willing to have her in their department. I made suitable sad noises – but bad behavior often ends badly.

  251. Emmie*

    I pretended to be Canadian to get a day off of work.

    I worked the 5 am shift in college at a local business. I could not get a day off. I could not call off sick without finding coverage. The person had to be a keyholder who could open / close the business, and willing to work at 5 am. So, that means no sick days. I worked a customer-facing front desk with no one else there. I couldn’t leave to go to the bathroom. I didn’t get breaks. I know that’s illegal, but I stayed because the schedule worked for my college classes. I requested one day off four separate times throughout the year and each day was denied. The days were not at peak times. The business had no one to cover. Well, Canadian Thanksgiving is in October. In August, I started saying “about” with a Canadian twist (abooot) – especially when I talked about Canadian Thanksgiving. My coworkers asked me what kind of food we ate for the holiday. Do Canadians celebrate with different food traditions? I told them that I didn’t know, but we serve turkey and the fixins because my a lot of my family is from the states. When I requested Canadian Thanksgiving off, it was approved. My first day off in 1 1/2 years. I would not do that again. I was 18 at the time with no professional role models. I would handle that by discussing it with my manager.

    1. raincoaster*

      On behalf of my nation, I applaud you. We are a passive-aggressive country and you are clearly One Of Us, eh!

  252. Wanderer*

    Had a coworker who was that guy – smooth talking, made a good first impression, good with public, but didn’t do any work that required detail and organization (i.e. the bulk of his job), leaving it up to junior, mostly young female coworkers who then did not get the credit for doing most of the work. He realized his boss was on to him and was about to get fired, so he got in front of it, gave notice, and then *threw himself his own going away party.* I didn’t have much respect for this person but I did kind of respect the way he went out on his own terms.

  253. omega*

    I’m in IT.

    My boss is a very difficult person to work with. Everybody knows it. He will ask you to do sth and then attack you for doing it. He will find a reason to criticize you whatever you do unless you’re among his favorite employees. He has little grasp of what we are doing but will insist on deciding on technical details and bully you if you raise possible problems. A manipulative, unfriendly guy who tends to show reports he doesn’t like that he doesn’t respect them at all.

    And he fires people he doesn’t like whatever it takes (that’s not easy in the regulated country we reside in).

    For some reason he hated one of his direct reports (“Tom”) who was with the company for 10+ years before my boss took over. He knew the IT systems really well. Now, you have to know my boss hates documentation since he claims it doesn’t create value. Tom knew he was about to get fired.

    Tom was let go and on the next day the whole manufacturing systems stopped to work. And there’s no documentation – bummer! Recreating the process and making the system to work again took weeks.

  254. Recovering Non-Profit Slave*

    I was once applying to work at an organization where I had previously worked, with a gap of about 4 years. During the interview process, the manager specifically said, “you’re familiar with all our benefits, so there is no need to go over those!” I received an offer, and then just one week after my start date, I joined an all staff meeting in which we were informed of a dramatic reduction in benefits- PTO for personal and vacation reduced by half and sick time accrual reduced from 1 day/month to 3 hours/month. I absolutely would never have pursued the position had I known, and the board approval date on the policy change predated my interview.
    Unwisely, I stayed at the position (mostly because it would have been seen negatively to immediately quit, and it wasn’t a bridge I could afford to burn. About 18 months later, I decided to apply for a lateral-move position that would have given me more autonomy and a better team, because my grant-funded position was ending. After multiple interviews, I was offered the position, and the hiring manager gave me a start date that was specifically one week after the end of my other contract. She told me that they were happy to give me one week PTO to “start fresh” in my new role, and also that she herself had previously scheduled vacation that week. She then left for said vacation. At that point, the ED comes to me and says that no, they can’t “manifest PTO for you from thin air” and that this offer by the hiring manager was not valid. Fine, I say- I’ll skip the week off and begin the new position immediately after my grant-funded contract wraps. The ED then looks at me with exasperation, as though I’m being willfully obtuse. “No!” she says. “Your manager is on vacation, no one is available to orient or supervise you! You will have to take that week off, and we will just take it from your accrued sick time.”
    Right away I object, letting her know that I need to keep that time—already meager, this would take most of what I had—for true emergencies. Immediately she adopts this tone as though I’m trying to rip her off, telling me I can’t just demand vacation I haven’t “earned,” and not dissuaded when I repeatedly point out that I am happy to work instead, and this is not a situation I created. Eventually I lost, she took my sick time (saying “I’m sure we can work something out if you ever really get sick”). I felt totally powerless, confused, and really gaslit. I can’t believe I stayed there another two years— when I eventually got the courage to leave, it was for similar shenanigans.

  255. a nerd of unusual size*

    Right after high school, I took a summer job as a camp counselor. It was a STEM camp, organized by professors at the local university, who were mostly there to pad their grant applications with “broader impacts”. That year, a new professor joined the group. The other professors loved him. He kept volunteering for more and more work, meaning they didn’t have to do it.

    He was a predator. I don’t use that term lightly. He wasn’t there for the grant money, he was there for the compliant little girls who would do ANYTHING to get into college…

    By the end of the first day, I’m pretty sure every single one of the female students had approached a counselor (separately!) to complain about his behavior. I reported this to the adults on site, who told me this was nonsense and we were all imagining things.

    By lunch the next day, the students were ready to stage a walkout. They weren’t going back to class until something was done. Again, utterly docile, 15-year-old nerds. They don’t react like this. So I huddled with the other counselors. The others agreed to take over my duties. I spent the rest of camp on Creep Patrol.

    The students felt safe with me in the room, because I could have snapped the creep’s neck and openly wanted to. Creep knew what I was doing, and enjoyed messing with me. Think hands juuust far enough away, while smirking. But he never crossed the line in my presence.

    The counselors recommended that he not be invited back. Found out later that he’d gotten there first, making up stories of misbehavior that he’d supposedly chastised us for. Coupled with the reports from the professors, who loved the guy, we looked like a bunch of hooligans who were making it all up in retaliation.

    We weren’t invited back. Creep was. But the camp alumni were close knit, and the new counselors were also alumni, so they knew the game. There was a Creep Patrol, and apparently Creep was warned that I lived around the corner and could show up in minutes if needed. Never did work out for him; he gave up.

    1. Wren*

      Despite the success of Creep Patrol, as an alumna of a (different) summer STEM camp, I’m appalled that was as far as you were able to go, and that the girls and counsellors weren’t listened to.

      1. Jenny Islander*

        During my freshman year of college, the only way to identify known campus rapists was to write their names in a particular bathroom stall, because they all had family connections.

  256. Not at college any more*

    Way back, I worked for a department that provided support services at a university. Our director answered to a vice president, and among other things, was responsible for the department’s budget. The two men were great pals and schmoozed together regularly. But every year, when budget planning time rolled around — generally nine or ten months into the fiscal year — director would take his annual three-week vacation, leaving the assistant manager hung out to dry in marathon budget meetings.

    One year the assistant director was giddy with delight because director was grumbling that his wife (secretary to very important professor) was insisting on going on vacation two months earlier than usual. So we all waved bon voyage to director, who this time was disappearing for a month.

    Two days later, the vice president’s secretary calls with a reminder that the department’s budget projections were due at the end of the week, because the vp wanted to do an in-depth review off all the budget lines and possibly reorganize the entire division. Turns out director had known about the early deadline for weeks, if not months. The assistant director never uttered a curse word, but the flow of invective after she hung up the phone revealed an impressive command of the English language.

    1. Mad Harry Crewe*

      What an ass. I’ve definitely been pleased to be out on scheduled leave during one or another boring/stupid/short-staffed thing (generally by accident, where the leave was approved in advance of the problem being scheduled), but to purposefully conceal the deadline and create a crisis for your team?

  257. LemonLime*

    Right out of college I worked for a dysfunctional job that paid pitiful money. We had to clock in and out with ID cards and one day the company upgraded cards and we were specifically told we could only use the new cards and if we lost them then we would get docked money (since we couldnt clock in) and had to pay for a new card on top of it. Enter the fellow front desk girl, Nicole, who liked to do things just to make the other girl’s who did the same job harder. Hiding files, changing passwords, locking important documents in drawers etc. One day I come back from lunch and go to clock in and my ID card which I remembered had been on my desk is gone. I go through all of my drawers, purse, car… it’s nowhere. I’m sitting there dreading the lost money because I barely made enough as it was. I know Nicole stole my card but have no proof. I am just stunned and angry at myself for leaving such an easy way for her to target me. As it so happened I had never trashed my old card (which we had been told to) and in desperation I use it to clock in. It still worked!
    Nicole comes back from lunch with a gloating attitude but slowly sours when she realizes I don’t seem upset. She then surreptitiously tries to watch me clock out and I dawdle until I can clock out without her watching. The next day there is a handwritten note in her hand writing warning employees not to use the keypad to enter their card numbers manually, you have to swipe your card. No problem, I had a card. This went on for weeks, everytime I clocked in and out for the morning, lunch, leaving, I had to do it without Nicole seeing me. We were waging a silent war where she was trying to see how I was doing it and I pretended not to know. She even came out and asked to see my ID which I just feigned that it must be in my car, I’ll get it later. It drove her nuts. Then one day I came to work and my ID badge was sitting right on my desk where it had once been. When I asked about it, Nicole said she had found it in a drawer somewhere. I thanked her very kindly and that was that. I don’t know if she knew I knew or if I just confounded her. But I won.

  258. One is the loneliest number*

    Three of my young (in their 20’s) direct reports planned their resignations for the same week. I had four direct reports at that time.

    It was a toxic work environment, fostered by my boss, who hated me because her boss (the VP of the dept) had hired me to work for my boss. She was always changing directions, would suddenly assign a member of another team to work on a project she had assigned my team the day before, or vice versa, had told my team earlier that month that their annual reviews would be on hold indefinitely because we were going through a reorganization and she was on that committee. This was announced at a meeting she called with my group and I was taken by surprise because I was the one who would be doing the reviews. She told me not to do them, and stupid me should have challenged her right there. The three gave their notice a couple of weeks later. One a day for three days.

    She sent a voicemail to the entire department blaming me by name for the resignations and was giddy as she was making the call. 20/20 I should have forwarded the call to HR.

    She called me in to a meeting and told me she was putting me on a PIP, although except for the 3 resignations, she had never complained to me about my performance. She told me that “she was building an empire, and that I was in her way”.

    As we were going through a re-org, I was approached by the VP of Sales and another officer to recruit me for a management position for a new department. They asked me about the situation with my boss, and when I told them about the “empire building” they were taken aback. I got the new position, and was a shining star away from the toxic boss for the next few years.

  259. You Say You Want a Revolution*

    Back in the pre-WYSIWYG days of DOS, when newspaper newsrooms had front-end computer systems designed for writing and editing copy, our newsroom system had a hidden drive that you couldn’t see. Rather, you had to know the drive existed, know the login and password for the drive, and then, et viola, the files saved on that drive would appear, scrolling down your screen. Usually someone would tell the baby reporters that there was this hidden drive and that the features staff used it to stash long wire stories that would run on Sundays or holidays or whenever we had a large news hole. Unless you worked for features, you never really looked at the hidden drive and you likely didn’t know that anyone who had the login and password could freely add — and this is key, delete — files that had been stored there.

    Enter Bathsheba, a features staffer who was a really good writer, but who somehow pissed off the features editor. Alas, the editor advised Bathsheba that there would be a parting of the ways at the end of that day. Bathsheba took it well, the features editor thought, and signed out at the end of the day and left. No one realized until the Tuesday of the following week was that there were no saved files — at all — on the hidden drive. Somehow, someone had accessed the drive and deleted all the saved wire stories. And, of course, with only one login and password to access the file, no one could be sure whodunnit. Although, there was a suspect. . . .

  260. winger*

    Fortunately all the machiavellian nonsense in my experience has been attempted by complete idiots, so it never really goes anywhere.

  261. Manic Pixie HR Girl*

    I’m looking forward to going through this thread curled up on my couch with a cup of coffee this weekend, because I KNOW there is some good stuff in here!

    Here’s mine.

    My boss from first post-grad job (first job of my career, as it is, though not my first professional job) had been angling to take over a director role from HIS boss and really believed it was his for the taking. Whether or not this was actually what our director wanted to do or if this was something his ego had fabricated, I really don’t know. However *circumstances* occurred that meant not only did he not get the position, but neither did his so-called “competition” for the role. (Long story, and quite frankly, there are already enough details in here to out where this could be, but so be it.)

    Anyway, it’s hard to say if the person who ended up in the position did so because of *circumstances,* or other reasons (my guess is it was a combination of factors), but let’s just say *circumstances* made this particular appointment convenient and expedient for a role that absolutely could not be left vacant for any length of time. Regardless, Boss was NOT happy that he was not made the director.

    So, as a result, not only did he start looking for a new position, he started actively encouraging his staff to seek positions elsewhere. I can’t speak to what he specifically said to others, but I know he not so subtly implied that my position was in danger of being eliminated. In hindsight, I know this to be at best an exaggeration of the circumstances and at worst a flat out lie. But at the time I viewed this boss as a mentor and a friend and I trusted him.

    In under six months, all but one member of the team, as it looked when I was still there, including my boss, had left. The department wasn’t big and there was a hiring freeze in effect, so this left them down staff by 1/4. It was a huge blow to what is considered a very critical operational unit.

    As for those of us that left? I was the first to leave, and for a long time I really regretted it – ESPECIALLY when promotions were doled out for everyone at my level who HADN’T left just a few short months after that. However, fortunately, I had the good sense to continue developing good working relationships with a lot of other peers and managers and as a result landed my “dream job” a few years later – which was a dream job until it wasn’t, as all jobs are! BUT said dream job led to progressively Good Things for My Career and I am quite happy with how it all turned out in the end.

  262. LavaLamp*

    This is my dad’s story. He worked in construction. When he was young his boss went on vacation to Hawaii or somesuch unreachable location, but locked all the paychecks in his drawer. Dad and his coworkers couldn’t not get paid so they took a saw and cut a hole in his desk..he wasn’t amused when he came back.

    1. LemonLime*

      Good for them! He probably felt a real power trip until he came back and realized all the guys he had scre*** over knew how to use hand tools

  263. Krabby*

    This wasn’t me, but my old boss: Cynthia was a wonderful woman who started a tiny tech company with her husband in their basement back in the 90s. It was never huge, but they ended up on the front lines of a really exciting new market and got bought by DinoCorp, a giant company that was built around a very old, dying industry (think digital advertising company bought by a Newspaper Conglomerate).

    DinoCorp ostensibly bought them so they could help them pivot to digital, but they clearly had no idea what they had bought. They spent the next ten years grinding Cynthia’s company to dust. An example of the type of thing they would do: ask Cynthia to do something with AI that was literally impossible (Google didn’t even have that kind of technology) and when she said no, but then provided them with the next best thing, they’d get angry and hire her competitors to do the thing they wanted. Again, these were impossible requests.

    Over time, both Cynthia and MegaCorp were not doing so well. Cynthia was also very tired of dealing with this bullshit. She decided she was done and she and her husband handed in their notice, planning to work for a final year before retiring early.

    I was the only HR person, and in her last year Cynthia went nuts rolling out new benefits and perks, the biggest of which was a brand new, insanely generous allowance for employees on maternity leave. We were still independent at that time and didn’t have a lot of oversight, but we all knew that would end as soon as Cynthia was gone. In fact, the writing was on the wall that as soon as she left we’d be broken up and absorbed by DinoCorp.

    Now, the thing about tech is that the market is really tight for quality talent, especially where we were. And we had a reputation for hiring only the best of the best. Our team could get jobs anywhere based on their time with us (literally, I had to lay someone off and he had another job two days later). Everyone knew that. So when Cynthia finally said her goodbyes and DinoCorp rolled in to start taking over things, they found out that there were all these new expenses they needed to cover if they wanted to keep us happy. The beauty was, they couldn’t say no to it all, because they needed us. But they also couldn’t give our team all these perks and not give them to their pre-existing team. So that’s the story of how my old boss got about 500 employees paid maternity leave and mental health benefits.

  264. wee beastie*

    My story is about 20 yrs old. I was in my 20s, living in NYC. I went to a party where I knew the host, but no one else. I met a guy, mid to late 20s I think, who worked at a big, famous financial services co., think Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs. I am fairly risk averse, so I found his job shocking. His manager of, let’s call it Dept C, hated the existence of another department, Dept D, which he perceived as a threat. He had found a secretive way to install this young man in a role in Dept D where he was supposed to both gather information and perform acts of sabotage. The goal was to drive Dept D out of favor and out of the business. I asked what’s would happen to husband job if he was as successful—i’m risk averse and feared the idea of being jobless—he said he had no idea. There was no safety net. No one knew his secret ties to the manager of Dept C. And he wasn’t there’s to build anything, develop anything, or achieve any results that could be measured and approved of as a positive result worthy of promotion or retention. I was familiar conceptually with corporate espionage, but I associated it with companies attacking each other for dominion in an industry. It had never occurred to me that person might commit espionage against another part of their own company simply for their own personal dominion within their company, thereby harming a section of a company for their own personal benefit—and under the assumption the company could survive the onslaught from a damaging internal force. I was young. I didn’t quite know yet how awful humans are.

  265. NotACircus*

    Alright buckle up because this one is a wild ride that happened recently at my work. I work closely with a team of 4. We’re very close just based on the fact that we work in very close proximity all day with each other. That is to say, we know each other well. I am one of three women. We also have one man on the team as well. And we have others we work with from other teams that come into and out of our office a few times per week. But we are the core group of 4 that stays at that location.

    On a recent Monday we had two managers come in and pull the guy we work with, let’s call him Steve, into an office. Me and the other two women were like “well that can’t be good”. Sure enough, he comes back out awhile later, takes his stuff quietly, and leaves. Steve is pretty much our lead by default of being the most senior person on the team. So we’re rightfully freaking out. Management won’t tell us anything. Just that hes on leave until further notice and we need to rearrange our schedules to cover his shift since he opens the office. I texted Steve to see what information he could/would give. All he could tell me was that someone accused him of something he didn’t do and he’s worried about keeping his job. So we waited the whole week to see what was happening.

    Friday rolls around. No word. I texted Steve as a friend to see how he was holding up. I figured he’d tell us just as soon as he knew what was going on. We knew management wouldn’t. He told me he’d just gotten off the phone with HR and the investigation was finished. There was no proof of anything so he’d keep his job and would be back the following week but was being moved to a different department because the person who reported him was in our office. We were pretty bummed.

    At this point we’ve figured out that really the only thing that makes this make any sense would be an accusation of sexual harassment. Which is absolutely ludicrous. Steve is 100% not like that. Me and the other two women who work with him every single day would describe him as a gentleman in every way. It would be VERY out of character for him.

    So as I was texting him, I got a message from one of the women on one of the teams that circulates through our office every week (she was not at our office that day) telling me to stop texting Steve and telling me she forbids me from having contact with him. I should note that shes not my manager nor has any authority over me. But she is known as a bully among my teammates and has been known to be manipulative. You can say that those red flags shot up in my field of vision. Up until this point, I wasn’t aware that she was involved. I should also note that we were never told by anyone that we weren’t allowed to talk about it. Literally all anyone said to us was that he was on leave and to figure out our own coverage situation. That’s it.

    So as soon as she came swinging at me verbally that’s when I put 2 and 2 together and realized that she was the one who made the report. We we t round and round where she was rude to me trying to act like she had some authority over me and I would remind her that she doesn’t. I wasn’t about to let her bully me into silence.

    After work hours, I texted Steve and told him what I knew. He confirmed that this is exactly what happened. He wasn’t going to say anything but because I figured it out he felt it was pointless to refute it. Sadly I do not have a happy ending here. Steve went to a new department and his reputation is effectively ruined because of this woman’s lies. I should also note that they had a falling out just the week prior due to her poor behavior and manipulative habits because he calls her out when he sees it. Coincidence? Doubt it.

  266. Lockhart*

    I’m not sure this is machiavellian, but I had a sociopath for a boss who, in a 1:1 meeting with Jane said, hey, can you move your head? I just sent a nasty note to Jan and want to see the look on her face. :)

  267. Hydrangea McDuff*

    At tiny former worksite, a group of employees became unhappy with our leader. (Spoiler: they were always unhappy with whichever leader we had, sooooo….the common denominator was them not getting what they wanted.) One fall, I started to notice strange behavior. People huddling in hallways and meeting rooms; whispered conversations, people asking you “mysteriously” if you had “signed it?” And then if you said no it was just, “oh,” and a significant look.

    It turned out that this group had, instead of holding a process to openly share and discuss concerns, had decided to cherry-pick like-minded staff to sign a letter. But they weren’t brave enough to say they were calling for a vote of no confidence or for our leader’s resignation—that would be insubordination which could have resulted in their firing. So instead the letter threatened that they would all apply for transfers, which was ridiculous because a) there has to be a job to transfer into, and this was at the height of the Great Recession and b) they would have lost their status and cabal if they had left for other departments in our organization and c) this was autumn and the transfer process was done once a year starting in, like, March.

    Meanwhile trust was completely breaking down across our whole workplace because no one except this secret group knew what was going on.

    After they presented their toothless letter to upper management, we then had to have a meeting where many colleagues, myself included, expressed this was a not-very-effective way to build community and solve problems and they got huffy and defensive. It broke down trust for the next decade at least… Also: the leader stayed for at least six more years. And NO ONE actually applied for a transfer, to my knowledge.

    So it was Machiavellian in the manipulative sense, but I’m not sure whether anyone benefited or won, unless their goal was to make the working environment extremely untrusting.

  269. Not My Money*

    I do payroll for the movies and have had several terrible bosses but this one was the worst. Everything that happens in accounting on a movie is approved by at least 2 people: the accountant and production manager/production supervisor. We were on a feature and the accountant decided that the pm/ps needed to sign everything first and he would sign it second. Well, the pm/ps HATED approving the payroll and if he had anything else to sign he’d sign that first. After a few weeks of nearly missing the payroll deadline, the 2nd-in-command accountant decided that the accounts payable invoices couldn’t go to the pm/ps until after he’d sent back the payroll. It went ok for a couple of weeks but then the accountant decided that he didn’t like waiting for the invoices to come back – that not having them until end of the day on Wednesday was holding him up. So what did he do? He sat on them for most of Thursday and then about 4pm told the accounts payable office that they couldn’t leave until they had input everything. I felt terrible, even though it was in no way my fault and decided to help them out with one of the more menial tasks. We’re all working away, trying to get this mountain of bills into the system and the accountant came in, harped on how long everything was taking, admitted to sitting on the invoices to “teach them a lesson”, reminded us it all needed to be input that day, and walked out. About an hour later, he stuck his head in the office, said he’s leaving, and quipped “don’t stay too late!” If looks could kill…

  270. Prawns in the curtain rail*

    Many years ago my partner worked for an advertising agency that managed to land a massive contract providing … let’s say, services to vicuna managers, creating 8-10 detailed brochures a year. He knew an incredible amount about vicunas, while the rest of the agency knew a lot about sheep. Indeed, the only reason the agency got the contract was because of his knowledge. All proceeded well for a while, until the agency head became irritated that my spouse was spending so much time on this particular contract because he was the only decent copywriter in the place, although no one else could do it because specialised knowledge. My partner suggested they get me, not quite as knowledgeable but good enough, to write the brochure copy and he would oversee editing.

    This also worked for a while, until my partner, fed up with the erratic management of the agency (he literally never knew from one day to the next whether he would be working late, or coming home at all, and it was affecting our home life immensely), moved on to a job with another agency. I continued to freelance happily until the agency head started ghosting me. To the point where the agency receptionist, who was lovely, decided that because he wouldn’t tell me what was going on, she would. Which was that they’d taken the work in-house without telling me. This was a real WTFBBQ moment as I knew there was no one in there capable of doing it, because the agency was heavy on designers and low on writers. And I needed the work. And revenge.

    I had the bright idea of contacting the client directly to see if they had space for me to generate the reports that the agency turned into brochure copy, because this was a job I’d done in the past. I knew that the raw material went to the boss with the reporters’ names on it, and I liked the idea of him seeing my name on the reports, as a small f*ck you, boss every month. Petty, but there we are.

    And this is where things got interesting. The next thing I knew, I had the client on the phone, wanting to speak to my partner, because they did not know we had left the agency. The agency head had not told them that he had gone, or that they had also got rid of me. They only knew that the standard of the brochure copy had declined very badly in the last few months, and they hadn’t been able figure out why.

    In the end, the agency lost the contract, the client took the brochure work in-house, my partner freelanced for them sporadically, and I ended up with a regular freelance gig writing the reports. The agency, meanwhile, had lost its most lucrative client and went into a tailspin from which it did not recover. Thirty years later, I still work regularly with the client, having moved with them through a series of enterprises.

    In truth, this is not what I set out to achieve. I just wanted to put two fingers up to a man who had one way or another disrupted our lives for two years. This was beyond my wildest expectations.

  271. Tiger Snake*

    When I was in grade 3 – 8 years old – our teacher had a big jar of lolly snakes. If all the class was very good, she would occasionally let us all line up and have a snake as a reward.

    One day she did just that. All the students began to line up. I took note of the girls in front of the line (the popular cliché, while I was distinctly unpopular). I watched as the first two took their snakes and then went back to their seats.
    I lined up in 8th place, specifically because I KNEW that the girl in front of me would let three more girls stand behind her, knocking me back to 12th place. That was just enough time for our teacher to really take note of what I already had.

    When it was my turn, I took my snake, very sweetly said ‘thank you very much’; and took only half a step before my teacher called me back to give me an extra snake.
    You see, I was – as anticipated – the only one to have said ‘thank you’.

  272. The_artist_formerly_known_as_Anon-2*

    After 47 years in the computer industry I could write a book.

    I ran a computer network and sent a repairman into a facility. Long story short, the equipment was causing errors – and the clerk was told error rate be damned, keep working.

    I learned that she had sent the repairman off twice. So I called her. “What’s going on? That equipment’s broken and the vendor was there twice adn told me he was sent off – no problem. Lady DumDum says “let me call you back (from a phone NOT in an open area).”

    Five minutes later my phone rings, it’s her. “OK, so?” “Well, Carol (I actually forget her name) is a probationary employee. I want to fire her, but the only ammo I have is the error report. So after we get that next week, then I’ll have the equipment fixed, I’ll let him in.”

    DumDum was not aware that **I** issued the error report, and I told her. “well, you’re not going to do anything, are you?” YES. Three things…

    1) the report will have an asterisk in the slot for your office’s error rate AND a note that due to equipment failure no accurate error count is available for the month

    2) I am calling the vendor again, we’re already on the hook for two billable visits. He will be in , in the next two days.

    3) If you send him away again – I will escalate this debacle’s history to the division director. With a full report.

    DO NOT USE ME TO DO YOUR DIRTY WORK. AND – YOU ARE HURTING THE BUSINESS BY DOING THIS.

    I sent out the report with an asterisk and explanatory line. The clerk kept her job but two weeks later flipped off the boss (in essence) and walked out. She called me before she did but thanked me for clearing her name.

  273. Envy*

    I am in charge of writing the instruction for how to do my job step by step for co-workers to do when I am off. (company runs 24/7). I had trained a new employee and made sure to ask if the instructions make sense to them. Was told yes instructions are great, couldn’t be more clear. They were able to do the third day of training on their own while referring to the instructions.
    I come in after my days off and manager says new employee did such and such wrong. When asked why they told manager that I didn’t leave clear instructions. Manager asks my to write instructions clearer for next time.
    Next day I go to manager and say “here is what I have, do you think this is clear enough? Should I change anything?”
    She says no, can’t get any clearer then that.
    Then I told her I had not changed anything. These are the exact instructions given to new person.
    Manager goes into employee folder and gets out instructions that they have been using to verify the were the same. Yup. When the manager talked to employee again they admitted they were not using the instructions I gave them. Just trying to do everything from memory and didn’t remember what the instructions were and blamed me.
    They didn’t last long after that.

  274. AcadLibrarian*

    This was me. Worked retail in college. A few months before graduation, we got a new manager. Cut my hours down to one shift a week. He wanted sexual favors in exchange for shifts. Ha! I was a senior so I was busy anyway so didn’t much care I was working 4 hours a week. But in addition to getting BJs from the clerks, he was carrying on an affair with a woman who worked at the district office going around to the different stores setting up displays. Additionally, his wife worked for the District manager and was a favorite of his (how I don’t know, the DM was a soulless succubus). So I gathered up all the evidence of his affair (which the idiot kept in the office) and sent it through inter-office mail to his wife. Fired and divorced!

  275. Anansi*

    Once, I worked in an office where the head of the organization left and took most of the senior staff with him. This created a power vacuum where there were half a dozen senior openings and everyone wanted them. Unfortunately for most of us, the new head of the office decided to hire new people for all of the positions. We were disappointed, but moved on. However, there was one coworker, Pat, who simply refused this. Pat used the several days of no supervision to 1) fire everyone else in their department, including all the interns, 2) lock and/or destroy every single file in the department, and 3) reach out to pretty much every single potential candidate for the job and basically threaten them that if they took the job, Pat would make them regret it. The new office head tried to hire several people for the job and they all turned it down. Eventually, Pat got the job. It’s still amazing to me that this worked.

  276. Sled Dog Mama*

    Sooooo late to this party but I thought of one over the weekend.
    I was working for a company that provides a service to other companies (so say we handle quality assurance across all parts of teapot design and manufacture for very small manufacturers who can’t justify employing someone in house but still need the same level of QA). The particular company I was assigned to (primary site) had grown quite a bit and made the choice to hire a person for this position directly rather than continue with our contract. For the contract they had been getting 2.5 FTE of a Junior Teapot QA Engineer (in the process of taking the 3 tests and getting the 3 years required experience) and 0.5 FTE of a Senior/Certified Teapot QA Engineeer. For the last 6 months of the contract we had to bring a different senior because the original senior had to be out on medical leave. During this time I was also at another site 0.5 FTE (secondary site). Company had promised “we’ll find something to cover the rest of your time” but was not telling me or my boss what that might look like. New senior was making my life hell, he was only there for the last 6 months of contract, something he knew going in. During the first 3 months he repeatedly called my work by less than flattering names (after 3 years of fantastic annual reviews), called one specific project CR@P and made huge changes to our program including implementing a monthly QA meeting where we (the 4 people working at this facility) would put our monthly QA report form up on a screen and read through it line by line and he would nit pick different parts of the QA form. He was also blatantly sexist towards me and treated me as his personal assistant going so far as to hand me things he wanted typed up and to hand me edited versions of things to make the changes in the computer. (Nothing wrong with being an assistant, I did that for awhile and it was not what I had signed up for here).
    So I put out some feelers and had three interviews within 2 weeks and within 4 weeks had found a new position, I gave my notice (6 weeks is standard for this role) and set my last day (which never changed). During my notice period employer realized they were going to be in a bind for first two weeks after I left getting coverage for my secondary site and asked if I could continue to cover that site for them. I had to share an office with the Senior guy (it was supposed to be us alternating weeks but somehow no matter how many times that got told to him by our shared supervisor he was always there the same week I was) because our department was in the basement we could not use cell phones so when HR called he would sit and listen to my talking to them about covering this other site to help them. I had repeatedly brought up the problems to my supervisor and he had repeatedly told me that his hands were tied because of the pending termination of the contract.
    On my second to last day we had our monthly put the report up on the screen and read it to the group meeting (this was like a 15 page report with lots of tables and graphics). I had gotten about 2 pages in when Senior interrupts me and says “By the way when is your last day?” I replied that I didn’t think that had anything to do with my QA report which was up on the screen but I’d be happy to discuss that one on one after the meeting. He then yelled “That’s {male bovine excrement}, when I ask you a question I expect a direct answer.”
    I decided right then that this was a bridge I was totally ok with burning. I replied that my last date was and always had been tomorrow but that I was done right now, got up and left. When I got to the parking deck I called HR who listened to the whole thing and very politely asked if Senior guy was why I was leaving. I explained that he was part of it. Bless her, she told me to wait in the parking lot for a few minutes while she called my direct supervisor and verified everything (including that he hadn’t done anything when I reported the problems), then she called me back said go home for the rest of the day, come in tomorrow, we will handle him and director (grandboss) will be in touch.
    Next morning Director calls and apologizes and asks what he can do to get me to still cover the 2 weeks they needed. Now I had just learned two things a few days before, 1) my new employer’s health insurance didn’t kick in until I had been in the job 90 days (if I started May 1st I wouldn’t be eligible until Aug 1st) 2) this employer’s health insurance was set up so that I had insurance until the end of the month after I resigned (so my last day was April 16, I had insurance until May 31st). So what Machivellian thing did I do? “Sure I’ll cover the two weeks but my rate as a contractor will be $X for being available to the facility for anything that comes us during those 2 weeks.” $X was a quite high rate for two weeks of contract work but $X was also equal to two months of COBRA coverage. Director immediately agreed to this. I was able to buy 2 months of Health Insurance (which my accident prone family ended up using a couple of times) for about half of what the COBRA coverage would have been.

    How accident prone is my family? How many people out there joke that it’s a good vacation when it doesn’t include a trip to the ER, because the ER physician family member could patch the person up at the house or know where the closest children’s ER to Disney is (my kid required staples in her head while at Disney)?

  277. Jenny Islander*

    More about Mr. M. the Virus Clicker, who I posted about earlier: I finally left that job after four years I will never get back. People who knew him were astonished that I had stuck with him that long. Everything he did was legal and ethical, but he was, in short, an ass.

    I created an employee manual for the next person, partly because Mr. M. was terrible at training people, partly because he didn’t know more about word processors than it took to compose a business letter. I ornamented the tops and bottoms of the pages with cute little lines of Wingdings. For those who don’t know, Wingdings are teensy graphics that have been loaded into a font. If you use the Format–Font command to turn a line of text into Wingdings, each uppercase and lowercase character produces a different picture.

    If you are reading the employee manual right off the monitor (I didn’t print it–paperless, you know!), and you see that the Wingdings page borders don’t form a repeating pattern, and you get curious, and you highlight the Wingdings, and you format the font as (for example) Times New Roman instead…then each picture becomes a letter.

    I told the next chump exactly what they were in for. Hopefully they found my notes quickly.

  278. Judy Seagram*

    I just realized I have a story.

    Years ago I was working in residence hall management at a large university. My arch enemy was the fire marshall, who, in trying to completely eliminate any fire risks in the residence halls, would require us to do things that would vastly increase other risks. The issue in this story is that he required us to leave the main door to a residence tower unlocked in order to prevent the possibility of someone getting locked in the hallway outside of the tower in case of a fire. But, of course, leaving the main door unlocked meant that we now dealt with the 100% chance of thefts, solicitation, and random wandering drunken college students.

    At some point I’d said that I hoped that some of the residents’ wealthy parents would get mad and call the university president about the situation. I was overheard by a department administrator, who misunderstood me to have said that I was going to call the university president. I was annoyed enough by my staff having to chase down trespassing idiots every day that I didn’t correct the misunderstanding.

    A few weeks later, lo and behold, the department invested several hundred thousand dollars in the construction of a weirdly placed fire escape that would satisfy fire code and let us start locking the doors again. I consider that fire escape to be a personal victory, so I used a sharpie marker to sign it, in a hidden spot.

  279. Dandelion*

    This is my favorite, as it took little effort on my part and got me a lot of credit with my higher-ups right out of the gate. I was a new manager with a dozen staff. Two of the older staff, Kathy and Jo, had been feuding with each other for years. The work got done but the atmosphere in the unit was unpleasant. My first step was to announce that I was going to physically re-organize the unit and would be moving people’s desks. Kathy and Jo were quite fond of the little nests they had built up around their desks over the years, so this did not go over well with them. But I drew up plans and kept talking about who was moving where, our new workflow, etc. Every few days I’d walk around the unit with a tape measure measuring random spots and jotting down notes. After a few weeks of my making a big deal of my re-organization plans, Kathy quietly informed me that she was retiring, but would I please not let anyone know. I clued in my boss, who clued in HR, and her retirement was accepted within twenty-four hours. A few days later, Jo told me she would be retiring and would I please not let anyone know. HR also accepted her retirement very promptly. Perfect! Had Jo known Kathy was retiring, she would not have retired, and vice versa. But with both of them asking that the other not be informed, all I had to do was keep my mouth shut and keep letting them see me wield my tape measure. Once they were gone, I quietly dropped my re-organization plan.

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