rSlash - r/Prorevenge I Embarrassed My Lazy Boss In Front of the Entire Company!

Episode Date: January 16, 2022

r/Prorevenge In today's episode, OP works for a CTO who is one of the dumbest workers on the planet. The guy honestly thought that it was a good idea to give every single person in the company the exact same password. Anybody could literally log into the CEO's email whenever they wanted. OP pointed out that this was a bad idea, but the CTO refused to make any changes because he's a lazy douchebag. So, OP calls out the CTO in front of the entire company and embarrasses his boss so badly that the CEO fires him! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to our slash pro revenge where OP gets his boss fired in an incredibly embarrassing way. Our next reddit post is from rock expat. I just want to state that this IT issue is going to blow some effing people's minds. The security flaw that this presented was nothing sort of incredible and the fact that we never had a major security breach is astounding. It truly is. And what is that flaw you may ask? Everyone in the entire company had the same password. Yes, you read that correctly. Every single password to every single employee login was the same password. It was like this for years before I joined the company and for quite a few years after, until… well, enjoy the story.

Now what about the username? That must have been the trick, right? Oh yeah, that was a real trick. The username was the employee's email address. I did point out this flaw to my management and their response was, that's not our area to be concerned about. So whatever, it paid well, so I'll just do my job. And then one day we had a Windows update which caused a piece of software I used at work

to break. I submitted a help ticket, and after escalating this issue, I got to the chief technology officer. It wasn't a big company. The CTO said, I don't want to spend time fixing this, use this other workaround. I explained that his workaround slow things down, makes my job harder, and my Windows update has to affect more people than just me. He told me to suck it up.

Now at the time, the CEO was the son of the founder, and was a bit of a moron. I legit believe that at this point in time, the CEO was just collecting a paycheck and letting everything run on autopilot and just didn't pay attention. But I was mad at the CTO for brushing me off, so I wrote an email to the CEO. It was a short email, I simply said, I discovered a massive security flaw that could potentially expose us to huge liabilities. When would be a good time to discuss this? The CEO responded, what security flaw?

I decided to demonstrate the flaw. I picked two random salespeople, got their username, and I logged into their systems. From there, I pulled up the personal information of two random customers. This was the kind of information that would have easily allowed me to commit identity fraud, pull out credit in their names, all kinds of bad stuff. I emailed the CEO and explained, anyone who knows our URL can log into our system, can log into anyone's account, pull up customer's information,

and everyone has the same password. To prove this, I logged into two employees' random account and pulled two different customer profiles and I've attached them. One single disgruntled employee could screw us over. 25 minutes later, my phone rings. It's the CEO. He was nice and very interested in how I did this. This guy isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer. I explained the flaw in plain English and the liability that

it presents to him. I walked him through the process of hacking my own account as he called it. I hate to use the word hacking because it was so easy. Now, it dawned on the CEO that this was a huge liability. I pointed out again in our conversation that a single upset employee could destroy us. The fact that this hadn't happened already is nothing sort of a miracle. He tells me he wants me to present this to the executive team so they can discuss a solution. Honestly, the solution is effing obvious. So, a day later we have the conference call. It's the Chief Executive Officer, the Chief Technology Officer, the Chief Operations Officer, the Chief Financial Officer, the Company Lawyer, the Senior

VP, everyone. On the call, I demonstrate the flaw and I lay out how I as a layperson with very little IT background is able to figure this out. It's incredible that we have this flaw. Everyone is in agreement that this is a huge issue. Everyone except the CTO. The CTO gets very upset at me and he wants me fired for hacking the system. He says that per our employee handbook what I did is a fireable offense. I point out that I'm not abusing some loophole, I'm only doing it to expose the flaw because

I care about the company. And I think this is something that has to be brought forward. I could tell that our corporate attorney agreed with me and he was shocked at what I was demonstrating. The CTO pointed out that former employees' user names are disabled, to which I pointed out that every employee username is their email address. It would be trivial for a former disgruntled employee to use a different employee email address that they remember to log in. And since everyone's password is the same, they don't even have to guess.

The CTO pointed out that we would know who did this because of IP addresses and I pointed out that VPNs are indeed a thing. The corporate attorney wasn't actually familiar with what VPNs do, so I had to explain it. And what shocked me the whole time was the only person in the meeting who didn't agree this flaw needed to be changed was the Chief Technology Officer. The CEO made it clear that this issue would be fixed by end of business that day, and there was no ifs, ends, or buts about it. The meeting ended. After the meeting, the CTO called me privately, and he was pissed. I just exposed his incompetence because the system was his design. The decision for everyone to have the same password was his decision. I know why he did it, he did it because he's lazy. And I said to him,

here an awful CTO, you shouldn't be in the position you're in and you're lazy. You really should have found a better solution for my help tickets. He stops and asks. So this is about your stupid help tickets? Yes, yes it is. He laughs and says he's gonna have me fired and I laugh and say, I'm pretty sure someone's getting fired and I'm also super confident that it's not gonna be me. Well sure enough, later that day we got an email stating that everyone had to change their passwords to something unique. A week later the CEO announced that the old CTO stepped down to spend more time with this family. On the first day of the new CTO's job,

he sent me an email telling me that he wanted to personally work in my help ticket and find a solution around the Windows update. And I'm pleased to say that he did. And I later had conversations with that attorney from the meeting and we legit never had a security breach. Which is simply astounding.

The attorney admitted that this was just plain dumb luck on our part. And that if we did have a security breach, it would have been very bad for us. Oh, okay. When the CTO was arguing with you during that meeting, which you should have done was log into this guy's email address and then send everyone like at that meeting an email saying, hello, I'm the CTO and I'm a big dumb idiot. Like if that wouldn't have proved your point, then what would have? Alternatively, you could have sent an email from the CTO that said, dear everyone, I quit

because clearly I'm a moron. Our next Reddit post is from Pugsy. Some years ago I worked at a logistics facility and a leadership had a way of adding workload to middle management. Rarely did any of them last more than three years before they either got disillusioned or changed job somehow. After working the floor there for two years, I was promoted to a team leader and after three years as team leader I became shift leader, managing a shift of about 60 workers.

We did pretty well. No other shift at this facility or other facility could match our performance, and we did a lot of cross training and on-the-fly adapting to the ever-changing needs of the company. I found the work to be interesting and challenging, until I got a new manager who was hell-bent on micro managing. It didn't take long before he wanted me to write a detailed log of how I spent my days, hours, and minutes. I told him this was a really bad idea, but if he wanted this, then I would of course comply.

The first week, I accounted for every 30 minutes with a line or two, thanking this was already enough of a waste of time. But I was soon informed of my mistake. The new boss wanted more details and every 15 minutes accounted for. Again, I told him this wasn't smart, but I got overruled. The next week, I made sure to write 4 or 5 lines for every 15 minutes of the work day, like writing down the names of the workers who took the early lunch and who took the later lunch. I wrote the same lines for multiple entries, and if one task took longer than 15 minutes, then I would write the same thing on multiple lines.

To his credit, the new boss actually followed up on a few things the first few weeks, and if he had kept doing that, then I wouldn't have complained much. But of course, he gave up after a couple of weeks. I noticed this when I made a reference to one of the follow-ups and how we had failed that specific metric for good reason. But I never heard anything from him. So from then on, I suspected that he had stopped reading my logs. After keeping the logs honest for a few weeks more, I felt secure that he never read them.

I started adding a few tidbits of my own making. At first it was a line that said that, if he used a certain phrase when talking to me next week, I would buy a misota. He never used any of these phrases, and thus he never got free stuff. An example of a phrase could be, Pineapples are best served hot, or apples are sweeter than oranges. General statements, but unlikely to pop up randomly in conversation. My boss still claimed that he read every single one of my reports, and he ridiculed me for

claiming that it was a bad idea. As the weeks went on without having to pay up, my malicious compliance kept getting bigger and bigger. Eventually, I promised him $100 in cash if he would talk to me about a specific picking location in our facility during the next week. He didn't. But, of course, I also started writing many relevant things into the logs. Like, questions for him on how to solve potential problems, telling him he needs to start planning for vacations well in advance of the holidays and so forth. Still, I got no response

in any way shape or form. If he really did read them, why not use them to get questions and potential problems on the record? So, after a year of writing logs that were never read and hadn't been open since I saved them in the assigned folder, our great leader got himself into some trouble and tried to shift the blame onto his underlings. We did NOT appreciate that. Especially when the cause of that trouble was written in clear text in these logs from the very first moment we discovered there might be a problem. All the way up to where it was an ongoing hindrance that cost us more and more time and money every week.

Eventually, a big meeting was called with all the Foreman, Team Leads, Shift Leads, and Middle Managers, with several big brass observing our boss trying to fix the situation. Whenever my boss went from one of my people, I stood up for them, and I told them that I took responsibility for the entire shift. There was no need for him to call out my people, because I was there, and it was my responsibility. A gleam in his eye told me that he was about to make me the scapegoat, and I sat there calmly while he tore me a new one. He didn't hold back, and he really gave me his all to such an extent that several of the big brass started storing uncomfortably. They could probably sense that he was overplaying his hand.

After his tirade peedered out or he had run out of steam, I asked him if he was done. And if he was done, could I reply? He agreed and leaned back in his chair, confident in his character assassination of me. I took out my laptop, connected it to the big screen so that everyone could see and I opened the folder where my logs were saved. I pointed out that they hadn't been opened in a while and that track changes had been activated and no changes had been logged by his user. My user account was the only one who made the logs, edited them, and saved them.

I then pointed out the log entries where we discovered the problem and how we tracked its development until it became the big problem that it was today. One of the best moments was when I could show everyone that we had. In fact, suggested several solutions to the problems many times. I had also logged that we had several meetings discussing the problem. It's causes improbable solutions, and sometimes even directly asking my manager what he thought about them. These logs proved that we had told our boss about the problem many times in many ways, but there was never a log of any solution or response from him. I was

so focused on the presentation that I didn't really look at my boss, but when I was done, I glanced up at him and I can safely say that I have never seen a face more angry than his. He was furious, but of course, his boss and his boss was there right next to him, so he couldn't do much. His boss asked him if he had anything to say for himself, but he didn't. He claimed that I had edited the files later and filled in details not known at the time of writing,

but he was obviously reaching for anything to save himself. One of the big brass asked about a phrase that he had seen. What's so special about that picking location? I told them all about my little joke and how my boss had misgitting tens of free sodas, and probably 400 bucks if he had merely said the magic words each week. A mid-general laughter, I was told to leave the meeting, along with anybody at my pay greater lower. A mid-general laughter, I was told to leave the meeting, along with anybody at my pay-greater lower.

Three hours later, some security guard emptied the boss's office of his personal belongings, and two weeks later, a new boss arrived from another facility. It only took him three days to ask about pineapples and apples, and he made sure that there was nothing wrong with the aforementioned picking location. He also told me to keep the logs more general and only have a few lines for each day. But to also mention things of high importance directly to him. The new boss and me had a great relationship, where he left me and my shift mostly alone and we kept topping out our performance for the rest of my time at that company. The micromanaging boss that was fired eventually found a new job at a

lower level at another company, but he only lasted a year. Five years later, I saw him selling used cars in a neighboring town. Life has not treated him well. Down in the comments, Frankie Mint has this story. Oh, the things that don't get read. My boss removed his company ID at my station and left it there for a while after walking away.

As a joke, I used white tape and a typewriter to type the words, Tootsie, trimmed it for his badge, and covered up his first name with it. I thought he'd notice it immediately, but no. He wore that badge for a week in a dozen meetings before someone asked him if Tootsie was really his first name. Yeah, it's kinda funny, because literally my entire channel is built around the idea that people just don't like to read that much. I mean, there's lots of great content on Reddit. There's really amazing content, but like filtering through all the stories to find good stories,

and like when you open up a post and it's, you know, several thousand words long, you know, it's like, I don't want to read this. What if it sucks? So yeah, my entire career is built around the idea that, yeah, reading is kind of lame. That was our slash pro revenge. And if you like this content, be sure to follow my podcast because I put on new Reddit podcast episodes every single day.