This is part of Revenge Week, a series about how vengeance runs America, from the White House to cheating spouses to that bad boss who totally deserved it.
Few people are as knee-deep in our work-related anxieties and sticky office politics as Alison Green, who has been fielding workplace questions for a decade now on her website Ask a Manager. In Direct Report, she spotlights themes from her inbox that help explain the modern workplace and how we could be navigating it better.
The desire for revenge can play out in all sorts of interesting ways, but there are few places that vengeance is more delicious than at work. Work can be a breeding ground for resentment: Your manager talks down to you, the slacker down the hall gets the promotion you’ve been working hard for, a colleague steals credit for your idea, you have to stay late because someone else didn’t meet a deadline, and through it all, you’re stuck working far too closely with people you didn’t choose and might never spend time with if you weren’t getting paid. It’s not surprising that people sometimes turn to revenge as a way of taking back control and balancing the scales when they don’t have much real power. And I’ve got to say, it feels damn good when they do.
I’ve pulled together some of the most notable workplace revenge stories I’ve heard in 18 years of writing the work advice column Ask a Manager, from small, petty pleasures to employees who managed to dole out real justice.
The Secretary Who Exposed Her Boss’s Confidential Files
A legal secretary at the Big Law firm I worked at knew she was going to be fired, so the day before, she went into a bunch of partners’ emails and sent their wives evidence of infidelity, printed out confidential employee evaluations and communications about bonuses/pay and left them in everyone’s desk, then cleaned out the swag closet (company-branded shirts, hats, bags, etc.) and dropped several thousand dollars’ worth of merchandise with the firm’s name and logo off at a homeless encampment.
The Grant Writer Who Wrote Her Boss out of the Grant
The (many-multimillion-dollar) grant funding for my position was ending, so I started looking for a new position. It was a long, frustrating search, during which the funder decided to give us a one-year extension, after previously assuring us that there would be no extension. Now, in addition to my job search, I had to write a narrative and budget for the extension year. I had 20-plus principal investigators who were all clamoring for the last little boost to their individual budgets, and no one was willing to compromise so that the overall budget could be, you know, within budget. My boss was unwilling to assist me in finding a solution. So I gave all the other PIs what they wanted and cut my boss’s salary out of the proposed budget before submitting the application.
The Rage-Quitting Employee Who Couldn’t Be Hung Up On
The best rage-quit I ever witnessed: We had a weekly all-hands staff meeting with mandatory attendance. If you were on the road, you were required to dial in. “Mike” called in, and when it was his turn to speak, he delivered a scathing tirade that was the stuff of quitting fantasies—absolutely A-plus material. The big boss was so stunned he couldn’t respond at first … but then he pulled it together and hung up on Mike. But Mike was a step ahead—he’d dialed in on two lines, so he was still on the call and got another couple of killer lines in before he got disconnected for good! Mike was a company hero for months after that.
The Employee Who Glued All the Mugs to the Break Room Floor
A co-worker at a place I used to work at got fired shortly before Christmas. On the day of the holiday party, while all the remaining employees were at the restaurant, she snuck into the office and glued all the mugs in the break room to the floor.
The Co-Workers Who Organized a Gassy Revenge
Several of my co-workers are painfully lactose intolerant. I also work with an extremely diverse group of people, so anything cheese- or meat-related isn’t optimal for religious reasons. I compiled a list of catering places of a similar price range but with more nondairy options and asked the admin to please consider literally any options since pizza excludes 30 percent of the office.
She refused. It is always pizza for company lunches and catering, even with holidays.
The Fart Wars have begun. A coordinated crop-dusting attack of lactose-intolerant people with just enough Lactaid in them to not create a mess will walk past her desk in the tiny welcome area.
The Demoted Employee Who Got Sweet Justice
I was employed by a large foreign-based outsourcer who provided IT services to a large manufacturer. I was hired at an average market rate as a director of development, in charge of two teams totaling 15 people. I did a good job for them, with very positive reviews.
After seven months, one of my managers was replaced, with no notice, by a less competent and younger manager. I later found out that this man was the son of the best friend of North American Big Boss. After another six months, I received an email on a Friday at 3 p.m. telling me that I was being replaced as director (on the flimsiest of pretexts) by this manager and that my salary was being “adjusted” by several tens of thousands of dollars (lower) starting on Monday. Five minutes later, an announcement about this was sent to my team as well as the manufacturing company. Needless to say, this was embarrassing, and my protestations led nowhere; what Big Boss wanted, Big Boss got.
Fast-forward four months. I found my current job, which is better in all respects. So, one week before a big deliverable was due, on a Friday at 3 p.m., I sent an email to my boss and Big Boss telling them that I quit and giving two hours’ notice (the exact same as I was given for my demotion) and that I’d drop my laptop and badge off on the way out.
The Student Worker Who Left a Trail of Pickle Jar Destruction
When I worked at a grocery store, we had a worker who was still in high school get fired for
missing too many shifts. He seemed to take it well, but when he went to turn in his uniform, he passed through the condiment aisle and took every third jar of pickles and smashed them on the ground. That aisle smelled like pickles for at least a month afterward.
The Person Who Orchestrated a Cheating Colleague’s Comeuppance
A colleague kept stealing my work—copy-pasting stuff from documents I’d written and claiming PowerPoint decks as her own. So I embedded my name in everything I made, in the footer or the slide master, in tiny white font. Then, in a meeting, after she claimed that the work was hers, I asked for the mouse to “point to something” and “accidentally” highlighted where it said “documents created by [my name] on [date].”
The Employee Who Hid a Noisemaker in Her Horrible Boss’s File Cabinet
I had 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 interacted, he would constantly make digs at me for not having an advanced degree and nitpick 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.
The Glitter Goodbye
My co-worker had been in our department forever, and the company offered an early-retirement payout twice during their time at the company, which they applied for but that the department rejected both times. So they were bitter, and rightfully so. This co-worker had reached retirement age and quietly arranged it all with HR without telling a soul—didn’t announce it, didn’t give notice, and got HR to delay routing all the paperwork until the day they left.
I came in one morning to find a trail of glitter from the front door to their office and the room practically wallpapered with comic strips and memes about bad bosses/quitting/see ya never. It was amazing. Funniest thing I’d ever seen in my life.
The cherry on top? The department replaced the carpet in the hallway a few months later, and to this day I am convinced it is because they couldn’t get the glitter out of it.
