rSlash - r/Prorevenge I Destroyed My Bully Boss's Company

Episode Date: December 2, 2023

0:00 Intro 0:08 Spicy revenge 2:50 Comment story 4:23 Lawyer knows best Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to R-slash Pro Revenge, where a food thief learns a very spicy lesson. Our next Reddit post is from Nebraska Stig. I had taken a research and development internship for a food company over the summer in Kiyokuk. For those who are unfamiliar, Kiyokuk is the armpit of Iowa. For housing accommodations, the company had set me up in the local college dorm that was previously retirement home, so it basically had individual rooms in bathroom. But it still had one large commercial kitchen. It was summer and the school didn't have a summer program, but it allowed two fall students

to move in at the beginning of summer. One of them was rarely there, but the other was constantly in the building and oftentimes had multiple friends over. Given the kitchen setup, we all stored our food there, and it's pretty much a no-brainer that you shouldn't take others' foods. But immediately, I had various food items going missing are being consumed regularly.

So does empty boxes of cereal put back on the shelf, et cetera. I initially posted a sign on the fridge to not eat other people's food, and I also confronted both of my roommates about having food going missing after the sign went up. But it still didn't stop, whoever, from stealing my food. This was especially true whenever I went out of town for the weekends. After complaining about the situation to my manager during my job, they helped me form the perfect pro revenge.

Given that I was doing research and development work on food products, I was responsible for getting various ingredients samples to use for new recipes. My manager suggested that I get some capsaicin extracts for my research, even though we weren't doing anything in that realm for flavor profiles. Well, I found a company that had various scoval unit extracts and I asked for a variety to see what worked best for our applications. Well, they really delivered and gave me some bottles of 50k, 100k, and 250k Scoville extracts. I ended up putting the 250k Scoville extract into a travel-sized spray bottle. Then, after putting on gloves and a mask, I doctored the common food items being stolen with a liberal spring of my mixture.

I put it on cereal, chips, crackers, milk, and even on the lip of a couple of soda cans. For the snacks, I actually put some of the snacks into a separate bag and left them open to dry before mixing back in the original packaging. I did this right before a trip out of town, and when I returned, I found some of the chips, cereal, and milk was missing. Plus, two of the three cans of soda that I had tampered with. I never got to see the results, and no one ever said anything, but none of my food went missing for the remaining month of my stay. I hope the experience was enlightening for them, and they still remember this anytime they play with fire. Also, down in the comments, we have this story that isn't exactly revenge, but it's weird

enough to share. Rumids can be weird. One time I shared a house with two people, and each month we'd go through our phone bill. This was before mobile, and mark which long distance calls were ours, and then we'd each pay our proper share. Since the phones were in my name, my roommates gave me cash. This system worked well for many months, until one month it was a day

before the bill was due, and one roommate still hadn't paid their share, which wasn't wholly unusual. It happened sometimes. Anyhow, I wrote that roommate a note on the bill that said, hey name, just reminder the phone bill needs to be paid tomorrow, so please leave some money if you're not going to be around. Thanks. About 2 hours later I'm at work, and I see this roommate walk into the office, look around, locate me, and then walk over to my desk, where they proceed to tear the phone bill and the note into little pieces, drop it all on my desk, and practically yell, you don't tell me what to do! Then, the person walked out. My boss came over and asked, what was that all about?

And I said, I don't have a clue. I just left the menote saying the phone bill was due. That evening, I'm sitting watching TV and the person came home. That roommate went into the kitchen and made a pot of coffee. They would drink four or five strong pots of coffee every day, which did not help the situation. Then, they came into the TV room and sort of mumbled a kind of apology and said, oh, I might have come on a bit strong this morning. You don't say. Our next red post is from UOA. I was an in-house lawyer and a multinational company that sold software.

I specifically joined a smaller company because I wanted to learn more about legal compliance. This company was listed on the stock exchange, meaning more compliance work. I highlighted this specifically as one of the reasons I went into work here. I discovered the company was filled with senior citizens when I joined. I'm not saying that to be agist, I mean literally they were all senior citizens. Basically, it was a company full of old timers who were there purely because they were friends with the company's owners. As part of the onboarding experience, I had to sit through sermons about how they changed the industry and how they know so much about such and such.

Also, I had three different bosses. One senior guy, Bob, was the fixer. No one really knew what Bob did, but he had an office to himself. Another guy, Steve, negotiated all the tech contracts. I highlight this because when I got hired, Steve asked me, what's an EULA? Another guy, Carl, was my reporting manager, whom I was expected to work with on a day-to-day basis. One month after joining, I was told the company was going private through sale to another entity.

I was shocked, but I had loans to pay so I continued. They basically shoved all the work for this task over to me. This meant that I had to work overtime through nights to complete a task that normally an entire law firm would do. I also worked on the definitive agreement that was in use for the company to be sold. This will be important later. By my third month working there, I decided that this role wasn't what they advertised. And basically, I was just hired as cheap labor.

Once the buyers purchased the company, they were planning to move it to another city, and I wasn't keen on moving. So I read between the lines and started lining up interviews. Things went south quickly. The old timers were unhappy that I was looking for a job because that would mean that they were responsible for the contracts, or even worse, they had to do work themselves. Q. The harassment, which really solidified my resolve to leave. Whenever I complained to Carl about Bob and Steve, I was met with typical management talk. He sympathized with me and badmouthed them with me, but didn't actually do anything about it. Steve started criticizing all of my work

over email. Even minor irrelevant sentences that I wrote into the contract required a discussion. Whenever he made a mistake, we just had a chat about it over the phone. But when I made a mistake, he made sure to document every single one. Whenever I criticized some of his work, he said that I was being rigid. However, whenever Steve raised a point, suddenly it made commercial sense. This wasn't my first rodeo. I really didn't care about proving a point

because I went it out as soon as possible. Any pushback fights are gonna fall on deaf ears because where I live, labor laws are at best, recommendations unless you're unionized. My best option was to just leave. I was pissed and tired of being steamrolled, but I wasn't sure if I was really being bullied or if it was all in my head, so I found an opportunity to test my theory. So in one of the contracts that I was drafting with Steve, I made some comments and sent them to Steve.

As expected, he countered my comments with verbal suggestions on the phone, which didn't make sense, obviously. However, because he's this senior, I had to do the song and dance to explain the points. So I arranged the call. I explained everything to him, and I documented this on email, attributing each verbal recommendation, time of the call, and his suggestions. Then, I sent him this document back for approval. However, this time I cc'd my direct manager, Carl, and asked for his approval on the recommendations.

Surprisingly, this practice was entirely new to both of them. Both Steve and Carl were pissed at me. Steve was being questioned for the very first time on email, and Carl couldn't ignore my email because he was the head of the department. Unsurprisingly, I got a single line and non-answer from Carl basically telling me to discuss this with Steve, followed by a verbally heated instruction from Carl to just do whatever Steve wants and to not bother Carl. Now, I was certain that this wasn't going to work for me in the short term or

the long term, so I resigned and gave a one month notice. Q the one month of harassment that typically follows in any toxic work environment after you resign. On the last working day I walked up to Carl's office and gave him the obligatory thank you. He basically told me that I'm picking a huge fight and he'll see that I never get employed in the industry again. He also told me that he's not going to pay me my final paycheck and he's not going to give me a relieving letter. Not getting a relieving letter is a huge deal in India when it comes to getting your next

job. Employers typically withhold relieving letters for troublesome employees. His tone implied that there was very little I could do because they were all senior guys and they really knew the industry. That I wasn't the first disgruntled employee he had to deal with. However, I was pissed and wanted revenge. I called the revenge my one-two shot. Shot one.

Once I left, I spoke with my friend and decided to serve them a legal notice. Usually, a legal notice barely makes a difference because management is typically thick-skinned about this. However, I sent this legal notice to the company's owners. This wasn't really required, but I did it anyways. Turns out, many of the company's owners were pissed at Bob, Steve, and Carl, and they were just waiting it out to sell the company. Since I sent an official legal notice to the owners, that got the entire board involved. This turned into a festival of explanations by all three to the owners. From what I hear, they all had to personally take leave to meet the owners and explain

themselves like naughty children. Needless to say, everyone in the company was talking about it. After that, I got a letter from HR that basically implied that since I left without notice, they were evaluating all options, including considering me A-Wall. Originally, Steve threatened me that he wouldn't pay me my final paycheck or give me my relieving letters. But since I'm a petty person, I made plans to get both. Shot number 2 Since I was the one who wrote the contract that would be signed to sell the company, I remembered a lot of details about it. I was

one of the few people who knew who was going to get fired after the sale. So I made sure to reach out to every single one of those people and let them know that they were going to get fired. Q mass resignations and misdeed lines. I also knew what government regulatory bodies this transaction would have to go through. So I spoke to that government agency as a former disgruntled employee. This started an official inquiry and the owners got spooked. It definitely wasn't serious enough to scare them into thinking that the deal wouldn't go through. But the mere fact that a government authority was calling them meant that they now had to deal

with that authority, which would have never happened if it wasn't for me. Oh, man. Oh, P, the stereotype in America is that older management doesn't understand the first thing about technology. So when you said that your senior citizen manager negotiates tech contracts, but he doesn't know what a Yula is, that's just, how, how could he even do his job?

OP, I'm guessing a lot of your lawyer work also involved teaching these guys for the 50th time how to convert a document into a PDF. It's just kind of funny to me that the stereotype of incompetent older management in America is apparently the exact same thing in India as well. That was our Slash Pro Revenge, and if you like this content, be sure to follow my podcast because I put out new Reddit podcast episodes every single day.