If you’ve ever worked a day in your life, you’ve probably experienced having a no-good-terrible-very-bad boss at one point in your career. Whether they micromanage your every move or constantly gaslight you, they’re difficult to work with and make your job ten times harder.
Unfortunately, working with a horrible boss happens more times than we’d like to admit. While managers and superiors are human and are allowed to have off day every now and then, that doesn’t mean they can use that to their advantage and make life a living hell for their employees. But as often as this happens, employees are aware of their own self-worth, and while some of them might let this kind of behavior fall to the wayside, most of them have sought revenge.
So what kind of revenge did some of these employees do to their bad bosses? Well, you’ll just have to scroll below to find out how these employees got payback.
1. When an employee pulled an incredibly clever move.
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If someone has ever driven you absolutely mad, like this employee’s “incompetent micromanager” boss, you can relate to wanting to get back at them.
“I won’t go into the details of my Boss From Hell but, suffice to say, she was a nightmare…with an additional side-order of petty evil,” this user teased, before revealing he bought and installed a loud device and hid it in her monitor.
“It makes a random ‘BLEEP!’ at odd intervals, between a minute and ten minutes; you know, the sort of ‘battery is almost dead’ bleep. I hid it where I knew she wouldn’t find it and watched, over the course of a few weeks, as her sanity and temper both got frayed beyond belief,” one Reddit user wrote.
Eventually, the sound drove everyone’s boss crazy.
“She replaced her phone twice, her computer once, and never at any point stood a chance of finding the thing. Because I’d hidden it inside her monitor,” he added.
This is evil genius status…and feels like it should be a crime.
2. A nanny was let go, so she got stinky payback.
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“I worked as a nanny for a nightmare couple with out-of-control children [who] were allowed to get away with absolutely anything. After several nightmare months they told me to leave after I made one of the kids cry by sending him to the naughty step for hitting his sister,” this Reddit user revealed. “When I pointed out that they owed me money they laughed and told me to be gone when they returned.”
Not only did she leave, but this nanny left something special behind.
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“I bought some uncooked, unshelled shrimps, unscrewed the end of the curtain pole and stuffed as many in as I could and screwed the end back in — with a bit of glue to help it along. Within a week the room will have smelled, within a fortnight it will have been unbearable,” the former nanny revealed.
The family’s house went on the market 27 days later.
4. The time an employee sued the company and got paid…very well.
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“I worked as an installer in a remote office. I traveled a lot for work, often spending weekends on site. This was fine under my old boss, who gave me a lot of leeway by letting me work from home, gave me comp time etc,” this one Reddit user wrote.
“After four years, I got a new boss. Also, the company laid off everyone in my office, about 100 people. The new boss insisted I come in anyway (45 min drive) to sit in an empty office. But I still had to travel Sunday [through] Friday, with no overtime and no comp time,” they revealed.
This is against the law.
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“When I complained to HR, the HR manager told me that since I’m salaried, if they wanted me to work 80 hours a week, I would work 80 hours and I shouldn’t expect any compensation. Everyone I talked to seemed to think this was true. Salaried =/= get overtime. This didn’t make sense to me,” this employee shared.
“I called the local state [department] of labor office, told them what I did, what I’d been told. They told me to get a lawyer and if they didn’t rectify this, for every dollar they owed me, they would have to pay the state 50 cents in penalties,” this Reddit user revealed.
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“Which is what I did. In a matter of four months, I settled out of court, got a new job, got a severance and made my boss do an exit interview where I told her if she’d been halfway considerate and legally complaint, she wouldn’t have to scramble to cover for the next eight scheduled installs by flying people out from the East Coast and paying them overtime,” they continued.
The end result? Five years of overtime 40 grand,a severance package, letter of recommendation, and finally telling their boss off.
5. When an employee purposely left out important information for their replacement.
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This Reddit user got sweet revenge when he parted ways with his former employer.
“I resigned after getting a different job. They couldn’t function efficiently without me. When they asked me to write down how to do my job for the next guy, I didn’t write down the very important and very complicated [items.] And there was a lot of very complicated items,” theskipster wrote.
“I just wrote down 14 things that looked kind of complicated but wasn’t that important,” the writer revealed.
Sucks to be them.
“They closed down six months later. I ran into a coworker after [they] close and she told me things started falling apart after I left and it kept getting worse and worse until they were constantly hobbled because things kept failing that I used to maintain and fix. I feel sorry for the 200 or so employees that lost their jobs, but I was just a little pissed at the time,” theskipster added.
6. After an employee got fired, they released sensitive client information.
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“My first job out of college was in the diamond industry and my boss was a jerk, much like most other business men in the 550 building in Los Angeles. I was in charge of taking orders and sending out spam mail to our old customers,”one Reddit user said.
“I mainly worked off of an Excel file that was full of names and email addresses which my boss constantly said to never to let anybody else see,” they added.
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Well, that’s one way to get revenge.
“Needless to say, I secretly backed up a copy of it to my email address in case anything were to happen to me. I was ‘gently’ laid off immediately after x-mas/New Year’s break without any advance notice, and I just let that sh*t fly from a burner email account. I felt good,” he added.
7. An employee threatened their job until they got their raise.
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“I was a typesetter when it was still done on dedicated typesetting machines, not desktop. This is pretty specialized work and demanded pretty good pay,” this Reddit user began.
“I agreed to take one job at less than my usual hourly pay for six weeks while I learned their system, one I hadn’t used before. Well, six weeks came and went and I didn’t see my promised raise,” the user continued.
“In the meantime, the horrible shrew of a pasteup ‘artist’ went out sick and I was left doing both type and layout. A very important project came up, and there was only me to do it,” they wrote. “Without me, they’d be totally and royally [screwed] — even if they could find a typesetter who could do pasteup, there was just no time to run the ad, hire and train one.”
Don’t mess with someone’s money. Period.
“I reminded the owner and manager of the raise I’d been promised when I was hired, and how long ago that was,” they shared. “Then I put all my personal desk touches in a box, and told them they had until end of business to make a decision.”
And it worked. The writer revealed they got their raise by 5 p.m.
8. When a designer creatively came up with a solution to get paid.
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“At the age of 15, I was doing humble freelance work designing a restaurant menu for a small business owned by family members,” this Reddit user wrote.
“The owner insisted I would email the entire completed menu, ‘just to look at it.’ I was told a printed copy didn’t cut it,” they continued. “I had not yet received any payment, and they made it pretty clear they just wanted to start printing copies and not pay me.”
Yes, they indeed used this as a watermark.
They added a special watermark superimposed on the menu, not with their name or logo, but with the word POOP.’
Once they explained it would be removed upon payment, I explained that it would be removed when I got my money, which I did.
9. This employee eventually became a boss and fired their old superior.
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This employee, who worked for a logistics company, worked for a man named David. If you’ve ever been harassed about the way you talked, dressed, or any other mannerisms, you can relate to working this insensitive madman.
While working for “the boss from hell,” he says this particular company did not hire directly for dock workers, but would use a temp-to-hire service.
“This prick would ridicule new temps about the way they dressed (industrial temp workers usually are quite poor), talked, mannerisms, you name it, in front of everyone at shift meetings,” this Reddit user wrote. “When a new batch of temps would start, he would pick an unlucky one out and ride him or her until they quit or made some minor mistake that he would chalk up to the temp agency as the reason this person is not working out.”
David’s wife was a “big-shot at a hospital” and his family’s breadwinner, so it wasn’t too hard keeping his “low-level super job,” according to his former employee.
“To top it all off, David was also the only minority with a supervisory position so Logistics Company didn’t want to fire him,” he wrote. “David was simply a shift super for the dock, had no desires to be promoted because he had absolutely no responsibilities except to post a end-of-shift report, which he had one of the receivers do for him (that was my job). For two years, I typed this guy’s nightly reports, knowing full well he never witnessed any of it going on; he just sat in his office eating or riding the dock on a golf cart looking for reasons to fire new people.”
This situation came full circle.
“Anyway, I hired in as a temp, kept my head down through David’s horsesh*t and eventually got promoted to head of a different department away from him. Three years later, Logistics Company decided that receiving (David’s department) was lacking direction, and decided to hire a department head for them. I got the job. I was now David’s boss,” he said.
He became his boss’s boss.
“He turned pale when it was announced the next day at work. I thought he was gonna die on the spot. He knew that for years I witnessed every bit of the terrible things he had said and done to the temps,” he added. “I showed up nightly for three months on his shifts to ‘monitor’ how David ran his shifts, watching him make stupid mistakes one after another; any one of these things I could have easily terminated him for, but held out and documented everything.”
*Mic drop*
Oh, this ending is just as good as you can expect. He called David into his office, with years worth of reasons to fire him, yet simply said, “David, it’s just not working out.”
10. A staff member got their boss fired by showing evidence of them stealing from the company.
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“I used to have a boss who was a [jerk]. He was the manager of the clothing store I worked in. He tried to hire young girls under legal working age (here that age is 16), they were usually 13 or 14, so he could try and sleep with them. He sexually harassed every girl he worked with,” this Reddit user said. “We were a small retail store of six or so employees. I ended up having to phone our head office several times to stop him from hiring underage girls, and from harassing the employees. And by harassing, I mean groping, talking about all the dirty things he wanted to do to girls, etc.”
What do you do when your boss is a total creep? You get him fired.
“He used to take two hour breaks when we were short staffed/busy, paid himself overtime every week, and often would not show up for shifts, forcing the person who was already on staff to work over time (which we wouldn’t be paid for, because he would modify all our time cards on the computer) until he decided to show up,” the Reddit user added.
“I also knew while he was working during his shifts, he would put on merchandise to ‘try it on for size,’ and then would conveniently forget he had put it on, and would leave with it,” he said.
Thank goodness for technology.
“It took a long time of planning to get my story straight with how I was going to catch him, but eventually I got him to text me, admitting to having not paid for something he’d taken,” he said. “One week later, I used the texts as evidence to have him fired. Then I took him to court for all the threats/harassment he’d been doing over the last ten months of working with him.”
11. An employee got his boss’s job after quitting.
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This son stepped up to tell his father’s story.
“He was working hard in an early IT/computer company (back in the late sixties). This is back when IBM were still known as International Business Machines,” this Reddit user said.
“He was the only one who knew how to support and manage some of the large microcomputers that some of the customers had. His boss was giving him shit over my father wanting personal leave; my mother was just about to give birth to her first child, my eldest brother,” he said. “He didn’t even want to allow my father to leave when my mother went into labour. My father lost his temper, told him to get fucked, how incompetent he was, how he was riding on other people’s talent, quit right there and then and left for the hospital.”
Luckily, he got the call to come back.
“I still remember my mother telling me that my father came in, congratulated her on the birth and told her he had just quit his job,” he said. “She laughs about it now, but you can imagine how she felt! A day later, the owner of the company called my father and offered him his old boss’s job. The kicker? The old boss now had to report to my dad. That’s gotta hurt.”
12. An employee tried to quit, got harassed, and changed the system’s password.
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“I had worked for a family-owned computer reseller for five years when Greener Corporate Pastures called,” this Reddit user said. “I gave the required two weeks notice; owner of reseller called the CEO of the company for which I was going to work, got my departure delayed by two weeks. They got everyone in the company to take me aside and tell me how big of a mistake I was making, blah blah, generally making my life hell for those two weeks.”
This is clever.
“When I left, I changed the entire internal networks’ passwords to ‘i dont know.’ When they called to ask me what the passwords were, I told the truth,” the Reddit user said.
13. When the company wasn’t delivering checks and an employee ended getting paid twice.
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“I worked for a tire shop years ago that was in the midst of changing corporate owners. I was 17 at the time and since I was young and inexperienced, I was basically the shop b*tch. I didn’t mind much since everyone was the shop b*tch at one time….you gotta pay your dues,” he began.
“After waiting the month (you get paid every two weeks and they hold back your first paycheck, not to mention if you start working there in between pay periods) to get paid, I came to work excited to get my first pay check,” he explained. “The end of the day arrived and the supervisor couldn’t find my check in the stack. I was broke. I was told that there was a mistake in payroll and that they’d get it sorted out and I’d get a two pay period paycheck next week.”
“The next week rolled around and the same thing happened. I complained but wasn’t taken seriously because of being a 17-year-old kid I guess. The 3rd week came and no checks. This time I insisted they pay me what I was owed for that pay period from the cash register,” he said.
“This took some approval from corporate and some smooth talking. I also had to write my name down on paper, so I’d pay them back when I got my check,” he said. “The following two pay periods came and no checks still…they payed me from the register those two times. The last payday came and no checks. They paid me from the register and I told them I wouldn’t be back. I was told that my missing two checks would be mailed to me.”
“About two and a half weeks later, I opened my mailbox to find a paper clipped stack of seven paychecks. They had sent me all the checks I missed despite them paying me from the cash register! I cashed them that day,” he continued.
Cash money.
“A few days later I get a call from the district manager who says that he knows I got all the checks and that he’d like to be paid back,” he wrote. “Being a young prick that I was, I told him that I never got any checks and that I had no idea what he was talking about. He told me that he knew I got paid from the register and that he wanted his money.”
“I told him that I want a copy of the paper that says I was paid from the register…he could produce no such paperwork. I never heard from them again.
“Apparently, when the place went from being ‘Tire Shop A’ to ‘Tire Shop B,’ they remodeled the shop. They also threw away a bunch of old paperwork…the paperwork that proved I owed them money was tossed out too,” he said.
“We can’t imagine this teen’s frustration, especially since he added he was working eight hour shifts every day and ruining pair after pair of his jeans with oil and grease, in addition to having to pay for gas,” he said. “Not compensating employees in a timely manner is absolutely ridiculous, so we can understand what drove him to his revenge.”
14. When an employee got fired and got revenged by signing his boss up to receive dog pornography via email.
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“He was one of those types of bosses that if you are digging a hole and there was a spare shovel he wouldn’t touch it, but be constantly berating you on how badly you are digging it,” they began.
“This grated with me and during the 20-hour shift we were doing and being berated the whole time on how badly I was doing my job I politely told him to go and work somewhere else, that way I can do my work a lot faster,” this scorned employee said.
“The next Monday I had a lovely you’ll be finishing up in two weeks letter. Red rag to a bull I muttered you’ll get yours sunshine,” they wrote.
If you’re ever let go, this revenge is not for everyone, so be warned.
“So for the remainder of the week after work, I would go on the internet and use his work email and sign up to as many dodgy porn sites that I could muster. I continued to do this from home and various internet cafes for about three months. I had a mate who used to work there as well and we would catch up on the weekends and he would tell me about what was happening with the boss,” they continued.
The company didn’t understand what was happening.
“Now we used to work for a local government body and porn or any rude emails was a rather large NO, NO! So the IT department was sending him please explain emails as well as being hauled over the coals from upper management,” he added.
“Eventually he got fired from his department and was then transferred to a different section of the government body looking after a lot less staff and a lot less responsibility,” he revealed.
15. When an employee had enough and used ketchup as revenge.
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“One of my exes worked at a fast-food joint in high school. Manager was a typical dick, leaving early, never doing his job, letting the friends he hired go home early, leaving my ex to do four hours of clean up and prep for the next morning all by himself on weeknights, sometimes until four am. Keeping mind, he was still in school, and had a hour walk home from the place. Some times he barely had time to get home, shower, and get ready for the bus to pick him up for school,” she said.
The manager had to clean everything up.
“After several months of this, including pulling this late night thing the day of SATs, he had enough. He lined up ketchup packets from the front counter, through the kitchen and out the back door and ran, stomping all of them on the way out. He ran all the way home,” this man’s ex revealed.
“The night shift manager was in the office counting the money before he ditched out as usual and had let all of the other employees go. So, he had to clean it all up by himself,” the Reddit concluded.
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16. A couple of employees were really honest about their boss on a company survey.
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“My job does an internal survey every other year to check the pulse of the workers. Myself and a few more coworkers had an issue with our boss at the time, he is the biggest asshole I’ve ever worked for,” one Reddit user said.
At least he still had a job.
We severely blew him up on the survey one year, they mysteriously moved him to another city not long after that.
17. This boss got humiliated in the worst way
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A pizza delivery driver asked his boss if he could get off a little early, as he had a date later in the evening.
While no employer is required to do favors for their co-workers, this boss was “the epitome of power trip for no reason asshole boss.”
Instead of simply saying no, he went crazy.
“You would have thought I asked for a raise, bonus, and a 6 month vacation,” the Reddit user said. “Despite the fact that 3 drivers from the next shift had showed up already, he started shouting “What, are you stupid?? We have 3 deliveries up!! You can stay until your shift is over.”
After the uncomfortable exchange, his boss still had the nerve to ask him to do him a favor.
“He ordered (not asked) me to pick him up a chocolate shake from a drive-through joint close by,” he said. “I flat out told him ‘No f*cking way. You expect me to do you a favor when you won’t do me one? Suck it.”
The Redditor, then, left to finish his final delivery. While driving, he had a brilliant idea.
“As I was driving away from the last delivery, I called the store, got Donnie [the boss] on the phone, apologized and said I would get him his milk shake, even pay for it,” he said, before revealing his true intentions.
He, then, went to the drive-through, picked up a chocolate milk shake and went to the grocery store to buy a family-size bottle of chocolate flavored Ex-Lax.
The former pizza delivery driver said he poured in enough to give his boss “a healthy case of the runs.”
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Despite thinking it tasted funny, his boss downed the whole drink, “like a true frat boy.”
Three hours later, things got crazy.
As the writer went off to go out with his girl, the cook came rushing out in hysterics and says, “Donnie is having uncontrollable, violent, blow shits. He’s been in the bathroom since you left, has shit his pants already, and is making this place smell like an open sewer.”
Our stomachs are turning just thinking of this.
“I go back to the kitchen and Donnie is nowhere in sight,” he said. “Right as I start to talk to a fellow pizza slave, though, he comes rushing from the bathroom, pants half on/half off, one hand out in front and one hand holding his balloon knot shut. He had exhausted the entire restaurant’s toilet paper supply and was heading to the bar next door.”
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As if this man’s night couldn’t get worse, “he lived about 40 miles away and continued sh*tting himself periodically throughout the trip home.”
The humiliation seemed to make him a better person.
“Despite everybody knowing the true story, though, he never figured it out and blamed the fast food joint for his wild ride on the Hershey Highway,” the user concluded. “I think the whole ordeal humbled him a bit because he ended up turning into a decent guy.”