rSlash - r/Prorevenge My Boss Stiffed Me, So I Ruined His Life

Episode Date: January 24, 2022

r/Prorevenge In today's episode, OP is a star earner at his business. His job is to find high-paying clients for the company. After he gets transferred to a new branch, OP discovers that his new boss is lazy, entitled, and a lying jerk. The boss constantly promises OP that he will give him raises and more help, but then never follows through. So, OP decides to enact some prorevenge and completely nukes the branch office, and making the boss look like the one responsible for the massive failure! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to our slash pro revenge, where OP gets screwed over by his boss, so he screws his boss even harder. Our next reddit post is from Switch to Ox. So back in the 90s, I was working for a European-based financial firm. US offices were managed by Europeans with a regional head office in New York. Younger employees were generally underpaid and overworked. If you were just a few years out of college, the promised reward was being promoted to a director position where the salary, perks, and bonus structure would really kick in. As junior associates, the only good news was that we received the same five weeks of vacation per year as our European counterparts, which for me meant a lot of camping and staycation

during the summer, since I didn't really make enough to travel to exotic and expensive locations. The offices were set up in a way where the business development directors each had a junior associate. The business development guys would generally network, shmuz, and travel around their territories to meet clients and new prospects. Once back in the office, the business development guys would dump their meeting notes on the desk of their junior associates to follow up and land the business. aka a Hunter slash Skinner model. As a junior associate, I was pretty busy assisting a business development guy, so I routinely rolled over at least two weeks of vacation every year. I had worked at the firm for three years and I was starting to get antsy for a promotion. Right after Thanksgiving, my boss in the West Coast office told me that I was being transferred and promoted to the Southeast office come the new year. I really had no

interest in working in and living in the Southeast, but I went into advance my career. I rolled over my usual two-week vacation into the next year, so I was eligible for seven-week vacation that next year. After celebrating new years with my family in California, I packed up my car and drove across the country. Once in the new office, I settled in and met my new boss, who promptly told me that he wasn't actually promoting me to director, even though I was given director responsibilities because he judged me to be too young. But he also told me that if I demonstrated that I could do the job, I would be promoted next year.

I was pissed, but I didn't have a choice other than moving back home and starting from scratch, so I agreed to it. I disliked my new boss instantly, and my co-workers told me that he was flaunting his management perks, which consisted of large allowances for housing and automobiles, which were paid for by the sales production from employees like myself. It turns out he was related to a serving member of the Board of Directors back in Europe, which is how he got the job as a regional manager. Everyone knew that he didn't have the skills to do our job, so he just collected fat checks, went to expensive restaurants with friends,

and built it to the company's client development. All the while, leasing a new Mercedes every two years on the company's dime, while generally being addicted to everyone who's client development. All the while, leasing a new Mercedes every two years on the company's dime, while generally being addicted to everyone who worked for them. During the first week, I also met my junior associate, Jeremy. We sat down to discuss some accounts that I had inherited that were in backwater locations that none of the other directors wanted to visit. Jeremy was professional, but I got the distinct impression that Jeremy hated me, though I didn't know why. I started traveling around to meet my clients and prospects over

the next few weeks. Usually spending at least 3-4 days on the road, then going back to the office on Friday to go over follow-ups on business leads with Jeremy and execute whatever paperwork needed to be taken care of. About a month later, I returned from one of my trips, and I learned that Jeremy had quit. It turns out, he was mad that he had been passed over for the position that I'd been given. I couldn't fault him, as I probably would have done the same thing. I asked my manager to hire someone else to back me up, but he was hesitant to do so, reasoning that my client portfolio was just starting out, so I could do both roles until

it made sense to staff up. I pointed out that it would be hard to be an effective business development officer if I had no support system to help grow my client portfolio. But he chose not to listen, knowing that I had little recours but to shut the hell up. I spent the rest of that year working my butt off. This was right before email and internet were common, so executing business on the road was hard. Facts machines were the bane of my existence. Even though laptops were reserved for directors, my boss was kind enough to let me use the company laptop.

I could use it to handle all the paperwork to process client business from hotel business centers late at night or early in the morning. So I learned to live on 5 hours of sleep or to sleep on planes whenever I could. After dealing with problems from some irate clients, I eventually paid for my own personal cell phone. Keep in mind that this was in the mid 90s when not everyone had their own cell phones. I just had to be able to contact customers on the road. I just started giving all my clients my personal cell phone number. I landed a few big clients by a combination of luck and hard work and got some solid referrals, which led to more referrals. So within a few months, I was gaining

some serious momentum. Since I didn't have an associate to help me, that meant that I spent the weekends and late nights back at the office handling paperwork, then back on the road during the week. I was so busy working both sides of the job that by December of that year, I hadn't taken my mandatory two weeks of vacation. I had some new clients that needed to be handled by year ends, so I was granted a vacation waiver, meaning that my seven weeks of vacation would roll over into the next year, adding up to 12 weeks of vacation, plus sick time for the coming year. It was a big hassle for HR to process the waiver, but since I had produced a lot of new

business, my manager was all too happy to order it be done. I wasn't upset about working through the year end, though I flew back and forth to California for Christmas on a 24 hour turnaround. I rationalized it, hoping that I would get paid the first big bonus in my career in a few months. At that time, European firms paid their bonuses in mid-April, while employees of US-based firms got their bonuses by the end of January. If you were planning on switching jobs early in the new year, switching at a European firm

meant that sometimes you left money on the table, aka golden handcuffs. So the timing of switching firms was very important. I continued to work at my frenetic pace through April, taking no vacations as I was bringing in more and more clients and then digging myself out of the paperwork when I wasn't on the road. At the new year, we had some meetings about scorecards and sales goals, and I led my office in some of the categories, and I was number one for overall production. Finally, in mid-April, my boss called me in and said that it was time to

discuss my bonus and annual review. I eagerly sat down, licking my chops, because I was assuming my bonus would be equal to my base salary at least, if not double. He handed me a piece of paper and it showed a number that was almost 90% less than I was expecting for my bonus. I literally laughed out loud and told him it was a little late for an April Fools joke, but he wasn't smiling. He told me how proud he was of me, but that since I wasn't a director, the bonus that I received was the maximum amount that he could give me because there just wasn't a director, the bonus that I received was the maximum amount that he could give me, because there just wasn't any more money in the budget. I sat there and shocked for a while, then I kept asking the same question in different

ways. Basically, why did you screw me on my bonus? It was like talking to a brick wall. Despite pointing to the scorecard that showed me as the best producer in the office, all the while having no junior associate, he just wasn't having it. I was crushed, but then I asked him if he was promoting me to director since I had demonstrated that I could produce, hoping that at least the title would be a gateway into a big payday the following year.

He shook his head and replied, maybe next year if you proved this year wasn't a fluke, it was a gut punch. He also rationalized that while my review was positive, I had some flaws that I had to work on, mainly that I didn't work well in a team atmosphere. I reminded him that I was a team of ones, so there wasn't anybody on my team to complain about me. A switch finally flipped in my brain

as I realized that I just got and majorly screwed and there was no changing the outcome. I told him that I was feeling ill so I would be taking some sick days so I got up and left his office. Co-worker said that I looked white as a ghost as I walked out of his office so they knew something was wrong. I forwarded my incoming calls to his extension, packed at my important papers in case I decided to never come back, then hit it to my apartment in a complete rage. I called my family and told them that I had to come home for some much-deserved vacation. So after drinking myself senseless for 48 hours and forwarding all calls to voicemail, I called in to work the following Monday and told my boss that I would be taking a vacation

week. He was pretty angry about the short notice because he'd been dealing with my irate clients contacting him about their problems since I couldn't be reached. And he didn't have a clue on how to handle their paperwork, so other associates were now being called in to help handle my workload. I flew home and made a few calls to people I'd worked with, hoping for some job leads. I managed to grab lunch with an old associate who had left the firm, and he gave me some ideas and contacts, so I spent the rest of my vacation looking for a job.

Eventually, I ran out of options, so I went back to my job the following week. On my first day back, I looked at my HR data and realized that I still had 11 weeks of vacation to use that year. Plus, a few more weeks of sick leave. Around that time, there was a company wide conference called to celebrate a big company milestone. I think the firm was 125 years old, but I didn't care anymore. To celebrate the big anniversary, we were told that we would be getting an extra week of vacation that year, meaning once again, I had three months of vacation in my account.

As a high performer, I was also selected to spend a few weeks in New York during the summer and fall for some management trainings, so that meant additional time out of the office. The next month was a blur of looking at different vacation options for me to take that year. I had accrued a lot of hotel points, rental car points, and frequent

flyer miles during the past year of traveling around so much. So, I spent my days in the office doing as little client work as I could get away with while spending the rest of my time on the phone with travel agents trying to squeeze as much vacation out of my miles and points as I could. By the end of May, I submitted my vacation requests, which detailed how I was going to take three months of vacation in this seven remaining months of the year. I submitted the forms to HR, and within a day my boss called me to discuss my schedule, as he realized I was basically going to be gone for almost two weeks out of every month for the rest of the year. He told me that he was rejecting my vacation schedule since there wasn't anybody to cover my clients and my absence.

I asked him to call the HR rep into his office to have his stance officially on record. He objected, but I said that I wouldn't discuss such matters without an HR rep present. HR was called in, and my boss told HR that he was rejecting my vacation schedule, but HR responded that I was legally entitled to take the vacation days, so he couldn't reject the request. I also told him that, henceforth, I wouldn't be handling any of my customers from my personal cell phone if I was out of the office, so I would be forwarding my work phone to his when I was on vacation or doing business development trips.

I also told him that I was going to Europe on two different trips and I would be unable to be contacted since I didn't have a company issued cell phone. He was pissed, but he knew that unless he promoted me to director and issued me a cell phone, he couldn't do anything about my new stance. After that, I only did business development in areas where I like to travel and more importantly, vacation. Up until that point, I had always said yes to any meeting in a backwater location if it meant to chance to land a new client. Having learned my lesson the hard way, I didn't want any new clients to begin with. And certainly none living in areas that I didn't like to visit.

Trips to Florida became common. If I was traveling, I would typically spend Monday to Wednesday making very infrequent sales calls. Then I would take off Thursday and Friday with vacation or sick days so I could hang out and have fun, using hotel points to extend my stays for free. Since I was underpaid, I ate cheaply and learned to squeeze as much out of my trips for the least amount of money I could manage while still having fun. My boss was now irate with all the customer calls coming to him, but he refused to hire an assistant for me. So I just kept forwarding my line to his when I was out of the office.

Whenever I was back in the office, which was pretty infrequent at this point, he would routinely lambast me with verbal warnings about poor performance reviews, but I would just shrug my shoulders and tell him that maybe he was right not to promote me to directors since I was such a disappointment. He was also pissed because he had been committed for having such a high producing office the year before, mostly courtesy of my efforts. And now he was getting a lot of heat from New York that his new client numbers were down. Since I had a lot of frequent flyer miles and hotel points but not a lot of money, I backpacked through Europe on

two different two-week trips that summer and also took a number of vacations back home, all while diligently following up on job leads on the west coast that I had cultivated whenever I was in the office. By October I started to firm up some conversations with a prospective employer back in California and finally received a concrete job offer in mid-November. I waited until December 15 to inform my boss that I was quitting the firm, and I told him that I'd be using my remaining weeks of vacation and sick leave so that my resignation was effective immediately. He was surprised that I didn't wait until April to leave, but I laughed, telling him that

I knew that he was going to screw me on my bonus anyways, so the money wasn't worth waiting around for. He then asked me to stay through the end of January to give him enough time to hire and train an assistant or a replacement to handle my clients. I refused, noting that Jeremy had quit 20 months before, so he had plenty of time to repair for this eventuality. As I was packing up my office and telling my co-workers about my departure, I got a knock on my office door from the HR rep. He wanted to conduct my exit interview.

He closed the door and I aired out all of my dirty laundry. I told HR the firm lost me when my boss had screwed me on my bonus, repeating the story that there wasn't any money in the budgets. The HR rep shook his head and laughed at my boss's stupidity, noting that since Jeremy had been an employee at the beginning of the year when I'd arrived, his salary and bonus was actually in the budget for the whole year. As such, my boss could have allocated the amount that he would have paid Jeremy to my bonus, which probably would have kept me reasonably happy.

Instead, he decided to screw me over. I moved back to California that week, and I started the new job the first week of January. Three months into my new job, I got a call from a coworker at my previous firm. He called to tell me that, after I left, HR from the head office in New York came down early in the New York interview my former coworkers. Apparently, my sudden departure had raised some eyebrows in New York because they viewed me as a rising star. And questions were asked about why I left so abruptly. Apparently, other employees in my office had also gotten screwed in various ways.

Lots of their client meal expenses were rejected for being too expensive by the guy who was routinely billing his meals with friends to the firm. Their client meal expenses were rejected for being too expensive, by the guy who was routinely billing his meals with friends to the firm. So after listening to all the complaints, New York management decided to make a change years before the boss was due to be rotated back to Europe. Since he was related to some guy on the board, they couldn't fire him, so they reassigned my boss to some backwater farm town. I couldn't even pronounce a town's name, but I was told that it was the kind of place that does

not provide perks, like housing allowances, accounts for expensive steaks, or numerous 80s. I started my own company five years back, and it's worked out pretty well. Even though I got screwed 25 years ago, I always think about that experience fondly, because I probably would have worked for a company like that for my entire life, had I not been showing how companies and bosses will generally screw you over if given half a chance. It was eye opening, and it put me on a path to eventually start my own firm, so for that I'm forever grateful. Around New Year's, I always think about this story to remind myself of how far I've

come and how not to treat my employees. Hopefully some of you can benefit from my experience without all the drama that I went through. Also Happy New Year! OP, I really feel this one. I know that a really common story on my channel is that before I became a YouTuber, I worked a sucky job and I got passed over for promotion year after year and then eventually they kind of fired me out of the blue. But like, I'll always remember one time I told my boss like, hey, it's about time I get

promoted. I've been here for a while and he said, yeah, don't worry, I've got a promotion lined up for you. And then the promotion time came around and someone else got promoted instead of me. And he called me into his office and he gave me a $100 gift card and I was like, thanks but this isn't really what I asked for. I wanted a promotion and he was like, yeah well I'm working on it and maybe next year things go well blah blah blah and the next year he fired me. So I feel for you OP the worst kinds of bosses are bosses who lie to your face and smile

and say, oh don't worry, things are totally fine, I got promotions lined up, I'll send you more money super super soon. But then when it comes time to put their money where their mouth is, nothing. That was our slash per revenge and if you like this content be sure to follow my podcast because I put out new Reddit podcast episodes every single day. per revenge and if you like this content be sure to follow my podcast because I put out new Reddit podcast episodes every single day.