A boss can either make a job fantastic, or a living nightmare for their employees. This all depends on how they treat them, which sometimes is not the nicest. As a result, the employees will take the ultimate form of revenge.
Employees on Reddit share how they got their awful boss fired. Content has been edited for clarity.
So Long, Jennifer
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“Worked register at a tour company.
I also had a manager who freaking hated me for some reason. She was probably the meanest person I’ve ever met. Constantly yelled at us for not reason, got on to me about answering questions a new hire had (when I was asked, not her), wrote down I was 30 minutes late for a shift when I was two minutes late, etc.
We had a sneaking suspicion that she was taking money from our tills, as she was always the one who counted down the till when someone got fired for stealing cash. I made it a habit to count down every bill when I gave it back to a customer, because we would get pay docked if we were even a dollar off. So if a customer had $23 in change, I’d count twenty, one two three in front of them, so I knew I’d given back the right amount. We also had cameras pouring at the registers.
Well, one day my general manager pulls me aside and says $20 was missing from my till and they were going to fire me. I straight up told my boss she could look at the cameras, because I counted out all my bills for customers.
Lo and behold, my manager was the one who counted down my till and got caught on tape pocketing the money. She was gone by my next shift.
Forget you, Jennifer, I won.”
Not A Healthy Work Environment
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“I had a job that required my supervisor to be doing evaluations of my cases and charts. She just hadn’t, in months. She and my director ordered me and my co-workers to do our own chart audits, fill out the forms, and they would sign off. I was so tired of not having adequate supervision, staff meetings weekly where she yelled at us and invariably someone cried due to the stress and lack of support, and not having been paid enough to do everything I was doing AND their job, so I refused. I was told to do it or I would be fired.
Nope. So I got fired.
On the way out to my car, I called my former director who had moved to another agency. She set up an interview for the next day and I had a new job within 24 hours. She asked me what had happened at that interview. I spilled all the tea. Her sister-in-law was on the board of the previous agency, so she called her and I told her everything, too. Director was fired and supervisor was reprimanded and put on close monitoring. She had killed any chance of promotion and left shortly afterwards, I heard. I was just happy to have jumped ship from that toxic mess. I should have left months earlier.”
He Didn’t Have A Choice
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“I worked in a horribly run department years ago. We had a super-old guy who was either asleep or playing Sudoku all day, a developer who was literally trashed at work most days, and who would often break down into sobbing fits about how his wife was cheating on him, a database administrator who was the least competent person I’ve ever worked with (but apparently had too many kids to be fired), another database administrator who realized that he was the only capable person in his department, and thus got paid an absurd amount, and did whatever the heck he wanted, and some guy called Daryl, whose only contribution seemed to be making popcorn in the galley for everyone on Fridays.
I left for a better job, and bore no animosity to the idiots that I’d worked with. I’d been paid fairly. On my way out, though, I got pulled in by the department manager and the HR rep, who wanted to do an exit interview.
The first question was something like ‘Do you consider this to be a professional working environment?’
I replied along the lines of ‘Hey, I enjoyed working here. Let’s just call everything good.’
The HR rep insisted that unless I did the exit interview, they’d withhold my last check. I sat through the interview and answered every question truthfully and full, noting every unprofessional, incompetent thing that I’d observed. Then I left.
I later heard that the department manager had been fired a few days after I left, and that most of the department had been split into other groups where they would have to be productive, or fail.
I felt a little bad about it, but I didn’t really have a choice.”
But They Did Have The Money
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“My mothers job was basically a professional fundraiser. People came to her for help raise money for nonprofits or other foundations that needed it. This was a long time ago, before social workers were more of a mandatory thing at high schools. My high school was very poor and did not have one. So my mother took it upon herself to set up a fundraiser to pay the salary of a social worker so my high school could have one.
After raising all the money, she went to talk to the principal who flat out refused to take any of it and said the position just wasn’t necessary. My mother was pretty upset and just decided she would donate the money to supplies or something like that.
After a few months, at a Christmas party the superintendent of all the public schools in the area was at the same party and he struck up a conversation with my mother. After some small talk, my mother said that it was such a shame that principal didn’t take the money for the social worker position. The superintendent was dumb struck, and then told her that he had ordered the principal to find funding for that position.
When the superintendent asked him about it, he replied with, ‘No one is interested in that and we just couldn’t get the money for it.’
Needless to say, he lost his position.”
His Employees Were Good, He Was Not
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“For a while, I was a project manager who got moved around from project to project as a ‘fixer.’ I was moved to a project where the customer just could not be satisfied, no matter how many people, how much attention, how we bent over for them. Our program’s director, who should have been our advocate, would not manage the customer. Instead, he just hammered his employees to do more work. People on our team were being let go due to ‘failure’ or quitting outright due to burnout, and he was complaining that he couldn’t get good people.
Because of my sort of special position as general dogsbody, I happened to have the ear of our VP, and this project came up in casual conversation. I mentioned that it seemed funny that if the director was doing his job, how so many employees that we knew by fact and reputation were good employees had ‘failed.’ A week later I heard that the director had been let go.
And nothing of value was lost.”
She Wasn’t The First, But Was The Last
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“I was an intern at a tech company. In a one-on-one/mentorship meeting, my boss asked me what skill set I wanted to pursue in the future. I said that I wanted to do backend work (this was a programming internship).
He replied and said ‘Girls aren’t smart enough for that type of work, how about we put you on the QA path, you’ll do better there.’
At the time, I was so stunned that I just repeated quietly that I wanted to do backend work, the meeting awkwardly ended after that. I always thought that I would be courageous in a situation like that if it ever happened to me but, instead, I was silent because I was a 23 year-old who really needed that internship to turn into a real job.
Fast-forward a couple of weeks, and I was out to lunch with a few co-workers who brought along a lady who had worked at the company for years. She’d been out on contract for a while, so I hadn’t met her yet. Everyone was talking about the boss and some stuff he had done or said to them, mostly just rude things, so I took a chance and mentioned what happened in that meeting. She said she’d take care of it.
Within a few days, he was fired by the big boss. I went on my first contract doing backend work about a month later and I loved it.
As I understand it I was not the first person to have serious complaints about him, just the last person.”
Flora’s Reign Came To An End
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“I was working in a garden center. I’d been there a long time, and was woefully overqualified for the job I’d been doing (and was therefore very valuable in that position – think Ops Manager skills at Admin Assistant position and pay).
We lost our Sales Manager one year, and corporate hired a new one. Let’s call her ‘Flora.’ She was… a real piece of work. I don’t know what her interview looked like but in person, she was instantly and constantly rude. She was that attention-seeking brand of lazy where she threw her weight around without cause, talked trash about anyone not in the room, and collected 75% of the credit for 5% of the work. She had some knowledge, I guess, but it’s way easier to teach a competent manager how to grow flowers than it is to teach an awful horticulturist how to be a human being.
For whatever reason, corporate loved her. So she stayed.
What with one thing and another, I got another job. This process was slightly accelerated by Flora, but only a little. I’d been looking for some time, mostly waiting for the right opportunity. When I gave my two weeks notice, I got an email the next day scheduling my exit interview with the head of HR.
My position didn’t get exit interviews. Only managers (and sometimes department supervisors) did. And everyone at my store knew why I was leaving, so there was literally no reason for the Store Manager to pull strings to get me one. And he never said anything about it. But I knew he set it up so I could tell the head of HR (a man I was very friendly with) I was leaving because of Flora.
And I did. I just laid into her. I said that Flora was the only reason I was leaving after almost 10 years with the company, during which time I wrote the company’s Health and Safety program, trained almost every other person who did my job at other stores, made spreadsheets that got used company-wide, as well as setting audit records that still stand to this day. And all for a few pennies over minimum wage. I said I was going because she was the worst and I couldn’t take it any more.
I found out later she was let go. I was thanked by most of my old workmates. My manager never said a word about it to me then, or since. He was a real one.”
There Was Something Much Worse Going On Here
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“I was working at a gas station. Now this gas station was a dump; it was a tiny place that was getting robbed, and occasionally a drive by would shoot it up, but I was broke and needed the money.
I worked my first two weeks there, payday comes no paycheck. Okay fine, sometimes because of how timelines work out it gets put on the next check. Next payday comes, still nothing. So I talk to the owner, who tells me he has not been able to add me to the payroll and to check back with him tomorrow, and my paychecks should be there.
Next day rolls around, and so does the boss man who tells me he still hasn’t added me to the system, but offers to pay me under the table. Counts out a stack of bills. Now here is the thing; I had been keeping track of my hours and he was trying to pay me less than half of what I had earned. So I tell him that he needs to put me into the system and pay me properly, and I ask him if the money he is offering has had the tax deducted and tracked. Boss is surprised that I actually want to pay my income taxes. I remind the boss that tax fraud is a thing, but he didn’t care.
I got a little heated and demanded he pay me properly or I would go to the labor board. My boss told me to go home, and that the labor board won’t do anything. So I did, and with a calm fury I proceeded to unleash heck on that guy.
I walk home and while I do so, I call the labor board who immediately email me the forms. These forms basically said he either paid me what I was owed or he would be forced to pay me and face some steep fines. Great. But then I have a thought and I make another call. This time to the Canada Revenue Agency, and I let the taxman know everything about him trying to pay me under the table and they were very interested to know.
A couple of weeks pass, I get finally get my paychecks, and I learn from several friends who had all worked there that they received a call asking if he had ever paid them under the table or offered to and assuring them they would not be in trouble if they had accepted. Well of course, all of them had been honest and said he had indeed tried to. And that was the last I heard about it until one day a few months down the road.
I stopped in after noticing a friend of mine was working there. They told me the rest of what happened as they had just been hired when it all went down. My call had started an investigation leading to tax fraud/evasion charges. But wait, there’s more. Turns out it was discovered that those robberies that kept happening were staged to get insurance money. More fraud. Suffice to say the owner was arrested.”
Her Friend Wasn’t The Disrespectful One Here
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“When I was 16, I had a Saturday job in a bakery (the place where food was sold, not the place where it was actually baked – it was all baked at the ‘head office’ and delivered to the three shops every morning).
There was the shop manager, another Saturday girl, and me. I became really close friends with the other Saturday girl, and we hung out when we weren’t working and stuff. Then another girl got hired who was a bit older than us and had worked there before. She was friendly with the manager.
The manager had always been a bit… not great. She’d pull faces at customers when they turned around, even if they’d just done something totally normal like ask for a sandwich. I told her we had a bug infestation (these little beetle things were all up in the office and I’d started finding them under the fridges), and she just told me not to tell anyone.
So this new/not really new girl started. Her and the manager would stand and drink tea all day whilst my friend and I worked our butts off. One day, the new girl asked my friend to sweep up. My friend told her to do it herself, because she hadn’t done anything all day. The manager fired my friend on the spot for being disrespectful.
That night I went home, wrote a letter to head office spanning two pages of A4, documenting everything the manager had done wrong in my time working there, explained the situation with my friend and gave my two weeks notice.
I got a phone call a few days later saying they were hiring my friend back, wanted me to withdraw my resignation and the manager was getting moved to the head office bakery so they could keep an eye on her.
It was 12 years ago, and it’s still one of my proudest moments.”
This Needed To Be Reported
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“Was working maintenance at an ice rink. The rule for anyone who knows how an ice rink works is if the Zamboni doors open, you get the heck off the ice. Some idiot decided to ignore the fact they were open and that I was standing in the doorway, and decided to rip off one last slap-shot. The puck bounced off the glass, and hit me in the head.
I was okay, but reported it to my boss, because we have to fill out an incident report for things like that.
The boss asked, ‘Are you okay?’
I said I feel okay, then he responded with ‘Well, we don’t really have to report it then do we?’
I reminded him of the protocol, but it was clear he didn’t want to do it. Since he wouldn’t do it, I sent a descriptive email of the incident up to the administration, because I felt there should be some sort of documentation/paper trail in case god-forbid I ended up having a brain hemorrhage or something a few days later.
The boss was fired by my next shift.”
She Should Have Accepted The Help
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“I had been working in retail for five years when upper management decided all managers needed to switch departments so they can learn all departments. I was a low end manager so I didn’t have to switch, but my boss did. So I ended up with one of the favorite managers in store and thought, How cool!
Yeah…
She had a lot of trouble adapting to our department. So I picked up a lot of her slack because we are a team, that’s how it should go when you have someone in training. So because I had been doing the work for four years in the department, I was much faster and efficient then she was. Instead of being happy with the help, she got resentful. Suddenly, nothing I did was correct. I was always in trouble, and always getting written up for things for the smallest errors.
One day, I noticed that a lot of my own department supplies were destroyed. When I asked around as to what happened, I was told my boss thew everything away in the compactor without doing the correct steps, which meant that my inventory was going to be way off. I was livid. I confronted her about it, and she denied it all.
During this time, I was taking some leadership classes which happened to also have my boss’s boss in them. So we got to know each other, and he quickly realized my boss was lying about me. So we made a deal to catch her in the act, because his boss was on my managers side and not his.
So one day I find some supplies in my supply closet that weren’t supposed to be there. I had spoken to my boss’s boss’s boss, and she denied my request but here they were with her signature on them. So I walked up and asked her if she changed her mind, and she said no. So they pulled the camera and sure enough my boss who was keen on getting me fired was the one who took the supplies off the floor and put them in my supply closet. Later that day, my boss went to her boss’s boss (the one that declined my supplies), saying that I signed her signature on said supplies. Later that day, I was doing my boss’s job, again, because I was told to and I hear her getting paged to the office. She was fired over it.
Everyone blamed me for her losing her job because she was the favorite manager. I was told I was a horrible person, and lied about everything. My old boss would hunt me down on Facebook randomly over the next five years just to cuss me out. One time she came into my new job, realized I worked there, and tried to say I stole money from her. Thankfully the second she left, I ran right into the office and explained who she was and what she was doing.
I haven’t seen her in the past five or so years. I hope she changed her ways but it’s doubtful.”
This Woman Clearly Was Not Thinking
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“My boss was flying out to my location, and wanted an upgrade on the car she was renting. Employees get 50% off discounts, so the policy is no upgraded cars unless we’re sitting on a lot of them. At the time of booking, we had enough so I said it was fine. She wasn’t even communicating with me through this, she had two other men in our company coordinating with me. That was weird, but whatever.
Long story short, she shows up so late (without texting any of us) that the system automatically cancelled her reservation. By the time she finally showed up, the car type she wanted was booked. She lost her cool. She’s cussing and yelling at my team, storms into our tiny office and says she’s ‘taking this nonsense over’ until we get it sorted, just being all around demanding. I told her we couldn’t get her into the car and gave her every single reason, and she just kept freaking out on me. It took everything in me not to yell back, but I’m trying to set a good example for my team, who were all the fighting type.
Eventually, she gets in another car, slams one of her doors into the car next to her (brand new $50k car), and drives off without letting us start her reservation.
I instantly called my boss, the VPO, and HR. They took this situation so seriously, it was amazing. By the time she got back from vacation, her job was gone.
Then when I went to HQ a few months later, I was jokingly referred to as the girl who got ‘that girl’ fired.
The craziest part is that she used to hold the same position as me, just in a different city. She knew what we could and couldn’t do. She has dealt with insanely rude people. She also knew how seriously that company takes any kind of complaint! Like did she think none of us were going to do anything about it?”