Jason Mustian
Working in an office already sounds a little bit like a stressful nightmare to me: you have people constantly able to “pop over” and “check on your work”. I don’t do well in that kind of environment personally, I need to have the trust of my employers that I will do my job and do it well, without having someone breathing down my neck.
I don’t think that’s terribly unusual, right?
To compound that feeling with having the company bring in some outside counsel to decide whether your job is necessary. I mean, AAARGGGHHH, right?
Redditor u/Frostytoes99 recently told the Reddit sub r/pettyrevenge about giving the company its comeuppance after it did just that. Here’s what they said:
About 5 years ago my company brought in an individual to see if my position was “no longer needed.” I passed with flying colors…
Not to give too much info away, I was hired at an organization as a job title of basically “helper.” Well for someone who is supposed to just be helping, I had a ridiculous amount of work.
Almost all of my coworkers were huge technologically illiterate boomers. So I actually sort of thrived as a very useful person. For example, one guy would spend half his day copying items and pasting them into another program we use. HE DIDN’T EVEN USE CTRL C CTRL V he would right click then copy then go into the files menu or something and “insert copied item from clipboard.” He was so proud of himself when he showed me because “don’t worry you won’t have to retype everything!”
OP was hired as a “helper” in a company full of tech-illiterate boomers. Suffice it to say: they did a ton of work.
I wrote a program to do this automatically but did not tell him. So I would just run it occasionally as part of my responsibilities.
Anyway, I did a lot of stuff like this, I’d estimate I saved about 15 hours of work every day, on top of the 8.5 hours I did too! but then insert sergeant f-ck face. (This wasn’t the military but I just like to call him that.)
We are having a team meeting when he shows up. White hair combed okayish, a scrunched face, glasses. He just sort of just showed up one day and took notes during our morning meeting.
So OP helps out, creates automated tasks to help clear out superfluous busy work, and thinks things are going well. Until a guy shows up and starts taking notes and treating OP like trash.
At one point someone brought up a name of one of our customers. I said, oh is that the 300 lb guy with a big beard? Sort of as a joke because I mostly do back end stuff. There was a guy like this I recently did some entrance stuff for. But I was wrong and my boss said no it’s blah blah some other person.. okay. Then we talked about that person a bit.
Fast forward about a week and this Sgt FF is a complete f-cking douchebag to me. I don’t know why, he will ignore me during group conversations and literally sometimes scoff at me. Who actually scoffs at people??
I was having a really rough week looking for some extremely important files. People were yelling all day. I was exasperated. Too much to do, I was having anxiety attacks at home in the middle of the night. But it was Friday so I was pulling through.
As I looked for this file I ended up deep on our file structure and the search returned a personal folder structure within one of the drives. I clicked out of curiosity and there it was “Sgt FF’s notes”.
One stressful day, OP stumbles on this guy’s notes. They opened it up and realized: the notes were about OP, about whether or not OP could be fired in an effort to save the company money.
I opened it and there was a whole section about me. This guy basically goes from location to location getting people fired to save the CEOs money.
And he was working on me now. I scrolled through his notes and at the very top I saw
“Frosty thought a 4’10 24 year old female patient was a 300 lb bearded man. Clearly atrocious attention to detail”
That’s just ONE example of how completely f-cked up his comments were.
So, in combination with my job (which I generally liked and enjoyed helping people) knowing I wasn’t getting paid enough for my effort. This horrible week I had. And Sgt F-ck Face’s comments, I said f-ck this.
So OP preemptively said f-this.
I set up 3 email configurations.
To my boss letting him know I will be taking 2 weeks of vacation time. To be sent at 10pm tonight.
To the company letting them know I will not be present for 2 weeks so whatever work they currently need me to do they will need to do themselves. To be sent Monday morning at 4 AM.
For any emails that came in, I set an auto response that said “I will be out for an unknown amount of time, for any routine, emergency, or even occasional items, it is imperative you reach out to Sgt F-ck Face at xxxxx for assistance”
OP set up three emails, letting their boss know they were out on vacation, to the company to let them know they were gone for 2 weeks, and for an auto-reply that directed all questions to the note-taker.
Then? I turned off every automated task I had ever set up.
And then OP shut off ALL those automated tasks.
Then I swung by FF’s temporary office and said “I think I found a way to make your job easier!” He didn’t even really turn his head to look at me but just raised one eyebrow. Then I left.
I actually got multiple calls on Monday morning I didn’t answer. It didn’t last long apparently. But I stayed strong and didn’t respond to anything.
On Wednesday I had a little anxiety about it but I stayed as strong as I could. I thought about the tasks that needed a 2 day turnaround… there’s no way some of the guys were keeping up with their normal duties. Guaranteed at least 2 people were no longer doing their normal jobs just to keep up with my automated tasks.
The next week was tough — no emails, no answered calls for OP.
I got a long email to my personal account (I guess from my resume or when I interviewed) from my boss on Thursday night of the first week!
It went something like this:
“Frosty, I know you’re a smart person and probably figured out what the company had us doing. I would say it’s very important you call me but that probably isn’t going to work I see.
I’ve talked with Sgt FF’s boss, and he will be leaving our location. I explained our progress meetings seemed to be going in the wrong direction and that you are one of our most valuable employees here.
I am sure you are probably looking at other jobs at this point, or maybe you have even started one. I hope not. If you could please reach back to me I would like to offer you a raise. It has become very apparent how useful you are around here. I hear about it every day, believe me.”
So I came back on Monday with a 10,000 dollar raise and Sgt F-ck Face out of my face. My boss apologized again in person and said he didn’t get a say in it. I think it’s a little weird he could have a say after I left, but not before… but I sort of get it.
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