Employee gives selfish supervisor a parting gift that she will remember for her entire life

A disagreeable supervisor makes life a nightmare for employees. The unfairness takes out all the drive an individual has towards the job and festers negative feelings. It is what u/red23011 had to go through in their past workplace. Amidst the danger of getting laid off, the employee was delivered a gut punch in the form of nepotism. The employee was getting shadowed by the supervisor's nephew and was expected to give him the reins of the administration, which turned out to be their last straw.

The post started with the employee reminiscing how their past company fell into hard times. "I worked for a small medical supply company as the IT manager. Business was bad and eventually, the IT department had to downsize to just me," he wrote. The situation worsened when a new CFO arrived, "Let's call her Pam" and he was asked to report to her. He explained how Pam changed the functioning of the entire department, making his job more difficult. "Pam had zero knowledge of IT and how things worked. Her motto was if it ain't broke don't fix it. PC/server lifecycles didn't exist. We don't have to pay for licensing to keep our firewall updated it's working just fine now. I went from having an annual budget to a 'wish list,' in which she would deny everything I asked for," they shared.

Going to the owners was also of no use as they were not working in favor of employees. The employee noted an incident during their time, which showcased the company's attitude towards its workers. "One time, we had a quarterly meeting and people were asking about how secure their jobs were. The owners said that nobody was getting laid off and that our jobs were all secure. This was at 5:00 pm on a Wednesday. The very next morning at 9:00, they laid off 6 people," he wrote. Pam worked with the agenda of surrounding herself with close ones in the company. In just the first six months, she fired most of the staff that worked under the past CFO and replaced them with her acquaintances. Somehow, the employee was spared, but he knew it wouldn't be that way for long.

Later, she called the employee into the office and charged him with a ramped-up allegation. He had a witness, but the HR and supervisor refused to meet with him. At that moment, he knew "my days were numbered." Sure enough, the next day, "I get introduced to an IT expert who just happens to be Pam's 21-year-old nephew. He was to shadow me and evaluate everything that I did to see if we could streamline any processes. In other words, they wanted me to train him to do my job." The employee figured out that the nephew knew next to nothing about IT. Having this knowledge in his arsenal, he cooked up a delicious plan.

Their first step was to make the primary domain account seem like a big thing in front of Pam and her nephew. After being 'forced' to hand it over, he taught the nephew how to change the domain's password and drilled it as essential in his mind. "I really stressed the importance of changing the admin password and deleting his local account the second he is no longer 'consulting' with us to him," he added. The employee knew that this would shut down the whole system. The next day, they fired him and put the nephew in his position.

Right after they fired him, he gets a call from the CFO and owners, "Apparently, her nephew wasn't quite up to speed on everything we did there and she was graciously offering to pay me my regular salary to come in as a consultant and get her nephew up to speed on the IT infrastructure." He refused the offer and counter-offered with "$200 per hour with a 250-hour minimum," which irritated Pam and she threatened legal action. The employee told her in clear words, "Just so we're clear, you fired me, replaced me with a completely unqualified idiot and now you're threatening to call the cops on me if I don't come in and fix what he did? I'll hold, please call the police and let me know what they said." The worst was yet to come for her. The password trick put the entire company into shutdown for days. The mistake cost both her and her nephew their jobs.

The comment section loved the story. u/penkster was all praises about the plan and wrote, "This was brilliantly executed. You stayed in control, saw all the warning signs, covered your tracks - and in the end, got Pam fired." u/AmbivelentApoplectic was surprised that Pam lasted a month after the mishap, "Hubris, is always so satisfying when the predictable crash occurs. Surprised she lasted nearly a month after that."

Editor's note: This article was originally published on April 3, 2024. It has since been updated.