rSlash - r/Prorevenge I Tricked My Scummy Boss into Paying Me $450/hour

Episode Date: March 16, 2022

r/Prorevenge In today's episode, OP has an incredibly stupid boss who thinks that OP is expendable, even though he very much isn't. OP gets fired and takes a healthy severance package. A few weeks later, OP gets a call from his boss BEGGING him to come back to work and save the company from bankruptcy. OP agrees, but only if the boss pays him $450 per hour. Who said revenge doesn't pay? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to our slash pro revenge, where OP completely steals his boss's company. Our next Reddit post is from Meltdown. I was building an online training module at work that was intended to teach existing users how to work a new process. It had interactive elements, quizzes, segments to work through, and a few sample scenarios. Now, we've recently gotten a new associate director, who, from what I could tell, advanced through the company by throwing other people under the bus. She gets promoted, not for her own merits, but because at the end of the day,

she has less mud sticking to her than other applicants. It's uncanny to the point that there simply had to be more to it than stupid office politics. I'll get to that in a bit. So after I have the first draft of the module done, it gets sent out for the usual round of testing. And of course, there are a couple of things that need to be corrected. I built the module off of notes that subject matter experts left me,

and a few things inevitably get lost in translation. But the new associate director just rips it to shreds, complaining that it's completely incomprehensible. It needs to go into much greater detail, and she's asking questions about nearly every individual mouse click in the sample scenarios. And overall, she just says that it's impossible to follow. The thing is, this module is intended for our finance department, for people who have a background in finance, and have already been trained on how to use our internal software. She is a training services associate director with a teaching background. The module isn't supposed to make sense to a former middle school social studies teacher.

It's supposed to make sense to people with finance degrees. I push back and try explaining this to her in a million different ways, but she's having none of it. So I have to go back to the subject matter experts with her 20-some pages worth of criticism. At first, they thought that I was joking. I had to forward them her email before they finally believed me. So for the next few weeks, I have to rewrite the module to explain every single tiny detail that people who know this program already know anyways.

How to set up their network drives, how to set up outlook, including things as nuanced as. If you don't know how to set up your email signature, click here. I mean, really basic, basic stuff that had nothing to do with what the module was even supposed to teach. But I now had to include all these details because our new associate director couldn't find the on switch if you stapled her finger to it. This was my time, the subject matter experts time, and time spent re-recording all the voice work. If you've done voice work in the past, you know that you never get it done in one take. After it's all done, I sent it back out for review and approval, and the Associate Director simply doesn't respond.

A week passes. The Finance Director takes an interest in why this module is almost a month overdue. I go to forward the Associate Director's email again, except now I can't find it. Odd, seeing as how I have a hoarding problem when it comes to email. I check with one of the subject matter experts I was working with, and he can't find it either. Turns out none of us can find it. It's gone. So I check with a friend of mine in IT, who, after a little detective work, discovers that a week ago someone did a compliance delete on the exchange server.

This is basically a seek and destroy command for messages that meet certain criteria. In this case, it was a specific phrase that she used in her email. I started digging through outlook trying to find particular emails related to this that might be used to defend my actions, and they're all gone. Inbox, scent items, deleted items, every last one of them. Any email containing that particular phrase anywhere in it were gone. This type of command is normally used by admins to mass-delete spam or phishing emails from all users at once. Except, in this case, someone apparently deleted emails that showed evidence of her

awful decisions. My friend and IT can smell a juicy story a mile away and was very interested in seeing where this went. She recovered the deleted emails and I promptly saved them to a flash drive. For the next few days, every time I had any email with the associate director's name on it, even if it was unrelated, I saved a copy to the flash drive. I informed the subject matter expert to do the same, and we started building our offline evidence locker. I didn't want to blow the lid on it just yet. I wanted to see if my suspicions were

correct. Maybe a lifetime of watching spy movies and cop dramas had corrupted my thinking. Maybe there was another explanation. Who knows, it could happen. I'm not God, I don't know everything, I'll just play defense. So after several weeks of trying to appease the associate director's unquenchable thirst for irrelevant details, and then getting ignored for a week, she finally publishes the module and sends it to the finance director to approve so it can go live. Except the module, which was supposed to be a 30 minute online course, now contained

three hours of content. And it went down several irrelevant rabbit holes that had nothing to do with the core material. As an analogy, imagine designing a training module to teach nurses how to enter some new codes into a system. And then being told that you also have to teach them how to read because the nurses might not know what words are. That's how much BS was rammed into this thing. And the finance director, of course, hated it.

He was surprised at such a rambling mess of a module would come from me of all people. So he calls a meeting with me in the associate director to get some answers, and sure enough, she immediately tried to distance herself from it. She tried to paint it as if she made a couple of suggestions, and I clearly went way overboard. She said that I must have sent her a different version that she approved and switched them afterwards, which isn't even possible because it would have been thrown back to the draft status. She kept trying to talk over me as I voiced my defense and to his credit, the finance director finally just muted her so

I could speak. And boy did I. I explained everything. I shared my screen, popped in my flash drive, and opened my copies of the emails that had supposedly been deleted. Every email exchange where she complained about the material I pushed back, and she flat out ordered me to build the module in the way that I did. Then she abruptly left the meeting and went offline. The finance director asked if I could send him a copy of all the relevant files, and as I did so, I warned him that

they might not be there later. I then explained to him what I had learned from my IT friend that someone had gone in and deleted all those emails. He assures me that he'll look into it. And the shit immediately hit the fan. The associate director never logged back on. There was a massive internal audit where people from her previous departments were asked to provide statements. Leadership tried to keep it hush hush, but you just can't keep something that big under wraps.

I don't know the specific details, but the associate director and one of the IT managers both left the company to pursue the next stage of their careers and we sincerely wish them the best. I don't really do the social media thing, but over the next few days, as the rumor mill churned, I heard that their shit absolutely blew up. And it came out that the associate director and that IT Manager were having an affair. Now, this all went down about a month ago, but as I write this post, I thought to check online court records, and both of them are now facing divorces filed by their respective spouses.

So yeah, there's a void in my direct leadership and IT's leadership, and the entire IT department is getting a shakedown by information security to determine if there were any other leaks. I spent some time reflecting on why this whole series of events happened and my best guess is that she wanted to make a grand entrance by spear hitting this masterwork training module that covered every possible scenario. Then as she started to realize how wasteful, rambling, and unnecessary it was, she realized that her grant entrance would be a grand faceplant.

So, she tried to erase all the evidence and pin all the nonsense on me to say face, but she inadvertently said in motion the events that would expose her little arrangement with the IT manager. Taking it up the bud in order to cover her own bud, I guess. Our next reddit post is from a non-conquit. I worked for a company just under five years.

That company had existed for an additional 10 years before I joined. While I worked at this company, it grew to be the number one provider in the region for its unique service with about 75% of the markets. It was a small business of about 15 employees. I loved my job and the skills I learned while working there were quite valuable. I loved my team and the clients that we provided services for. My twice yearly reviews with the owner were always 10 out of 10 with no recommendations for improvement. I was exceptional at my job in every way. I handled company operations, HR, payroll, customer service, marketing, employee management, schedules, employee and client

training, as well as many other things of that company. I was also able to step in and do any of my team-h jobs if they were out sick or on vacation. The owner of the company was giving out a bonus last year, and mine, while being more than previous years, was notably less than my teammates. I asked the owner, are the bonuses related to performance, and if so, what could I have done to earn more? The bonuses aren't performance related, you're just more replaceable than the others. Oh, okay, I replied, and I proceeded to process each of the individual bonuses than went to lunch. I called my spouse to gain wisdom and advice.

I was pretty lit, but I didn't want to make a rash decision. My spouse is very intelligent, and while they're not a fortune teller, they have the ability to foresee various responses and all potential outcomes. My spouse is very business wise, and has been on the executive team of a large company for the past 21 years, while also serving on several community boards and business advisory boards. We decided together to continue forward with our scheduled vacation, and use the time away to calm our minds, relax, have fun, and also

determine the best course of action for me. We were leaving after working one more days, so I worked like everything was normal the rest of the day and the following day, then we left on vacation. While away we discussed several scenarios, the potential outcomes consulted with a business advisor and a business attorney. With all the advice I received, I determined that upon my return from vacation, I would resign from my role with a two week notice. However, in a fit of rage, the owner immediately terminated me, which was one of the scenarios we thought would happen, so I was prepared for the owner's poor reaction.

During the next couple of weeks, I created an open to competing business offering similar services. However, I offered more customizable options with higher quality service and results. I knew that our clients wanted these options, and I had proposed these options several times at the old workplace. But I was never green lighted to implement the changes for no other reason than the owner didn't come up with the idea, so therefore it was a stupid idea. I also maintain communications with a few people for my old team. My old team didn't relay the day-to-day happenings at my previous workplace, and I never asked about the company.

However, they would vent to me on occasion. I would listen without comments. I knew that service, quality, and the work environment in general suffered since my departure. Moral went way down and clients were less satisfied. I also read the Google and Facebook reviews for the old company. Yikes! Additionally, two full-time and one part-time employee were hired to fill my role and a portion of my responsibilities. Meanwhile, HR and payroll were handled by outside companies. I quickly built up my business, and within three months, I was able to hire several of my old teammates. They were able to jump in on day one with minimal training

because they were the best employees at my old workplace. The quality of my previous workplaces offerings continued to fall, which sent additional business my way and quickly caused incoming work to be nonexistent at my old workplace. My old workplace went from being the number one provider of unique service in the region to nothing in a matter of months. My previous employer is now searching for gainful employment. I know this because over the weekend the owner applied for a position at my spouse's company. Side note, I think that my spouse's company should bring my previous employer in for an interview, but when they arrive, surprise, I'm the interviewer and all I say is, how replaceable am I now?

My spouse, rightfully so, has said, no. Moral of the story, don't tell your employees they're replaceable because they might create a competing business that's better than yours, while also taking your best employees and your clients which will leave you with no business to sell. And by the way, the owner's entire retirement plan was to sell his business. This left him to start all over by searching for employment under someone else. Looks like your company was replaceable. Not me.

Down in the comments, we have a similar story from Damon Seed. The company I worked for sold proprietary software to motion picture and music industries. I started there fresh out of university as support and then ultimately transitioned to professional services. I was out in the field 45 weeks of the year for about 6 years and became the number one Ask for a person to come out and fix things. Since I knew their product catalogs so well, I could fix it in real time and leave the site with a very happy client.

Only one other person in the company was as capable as I was. That colleague had recently quit and they replaced him with a green college kid and started to send the kid out in the field slowly replacing me. This poor kid was very, very unqualified and was universally despised by customers who had to pay him just south of 500 bucks an hour for his expertise. So anyhow, unrelated to this, the company started to suffer a bit and my boss took this as an opportunity to lay me off, which was a massive mistake, especially with how fragile the software has always been. At the time, I'd been there for about 15 years, so I took a pretty healthy severance package

when I left, and off I went on my merry way. I was set to retire from the industry because it had become very stale for me. So out of the blue, I got a call from my old boss, demanding that I help him with the problem, saying that I was on severance, so technically I was still being paid by the company. So it was on me to make sure the problems were solved. I said, sorry, that's not how it works. You made sure that I wasn't an employee, and therefore sealed the deal when you laid me off.

He then offered to pay my expenses to travel to the side, fix the issue, give me a healthy perdium, and all expenses paid trip. I countered with, if you give me 450 bucks an hour as an independent consultant on top of your offer, I'll go and fix all the issues they've reported. And he took me up on it. While I was there, the customer pulled me aside and said my boss was bad-mouthing the hell out of me. And they weren't happy with their services. And asked if I would continue on as a consultant and they dropped the other company like Hot

Stones. I took the offer and over the next year me and that other good consultant teamed up and we took over every contract that our previous employer had effectively shuddering my old company. Man, I don't know why companies do this. If your entire business revolves around one employee to function, why would you fire that employee? That was our slash per revenge, and if you liked this content, be sure to follow my podcast

because I put out new Reddit podcast episodes every single day. Cast episodes every single day.