Woman explains how she dealt with boss's unfair attempt to fire her for 'mismanagement'

One encounters many kinds of bosses over their career. Some can be very sweet, while others can be insensitive and demanding. However, sometimes, they turn out to be so toxic that employees have to do something about it. This was the case for u/Present_Platypus_578, who got back at her toxic boss and eventually got her fired. The post has got 3.7K upvotes and 91 comments.

The 30-year-old woman shares that she has been working in marketing for more than a decade. Over her long career, she has encountered many kinds of bosses. However, there was one boss she mentioned that "stood out as awful." She refers to her boss as "Pamela," which was not her real name, throughout the story to keep her identity a secret. Pamela started off at her company a few years after she joined. She says, "And if rumors were true, she was the fourth pick for the position and was simply hired so the company could appease shareholders."

The woman was a manager under her and they were tasked with a lot of responsibilities for her and worked quite hard to keep their department functioning. Therefore, the woman also had access to Pamela's mail. While the woman did all this work, Pamela would show up late, go for "business lunches" and plan official parties. In fact, she would often spend a large amount of the department's funds on these events when they needed it for other expenses.

Pamela's spending resulted in the woman having to create an edited budget at the end of every month to make it seem like her boss was not spending too much. The woman began to overwork and soon became diagnosed with sepsis after getting an infection. She says, "The doctors and my husband said it was due to the stress of work and that I needed to take a break." While she was away from work, they soon came to realize how much of a toll this job was having on her.

After some time, the woman decided to check her and her boss's emails. She reveals, "What I found in her emails was Pamela emailing her personal friends griping on how I can't just shake off sepsis and 'get back to work'. She also complained that she couldn't find any of my notes, spreadsheets, or documents for any of the work she was technically in charge of (they were on our shared drive labeled very clearly)."

Interestingly, the woman also found an email sent by Pamela to one of her friends from another company, asking them for help in salvaging their job. Her former colleague suggested that she pin most of the problems in the department on the woman, as she was in charge of most of them and accused her of "mismanagement." They also mentioned that Pamela would need to find a way to prove that the woman was stealing or misusing company resources so that she could fire her.

The woman returned to the office and Pamela informed her that she would no longer need to manage the budget. In addition to that, in case the woman had any concerns, she should not go to HR, but instead approach her. She asked the woman to "drop a small stack of invoices to accounting." Her boss very strangely insisted that she did not talk about anything to do with the budget with the accounting department.

Fortunately, the woman had a rapport with the main accountant at their company, which Pamela was not aware of. She followed Pamela's advice but decided to expose how unprofessional she was. She writes, "I also added the email threads I read while I was in the hospital and the current unedited budget that Pamela hadn't touched yet for the month. I also found in my filing cabinet the hard copies of old budgets with Pamela's handwriting on what numbers to change to balance our budget."

When the accountant asked the woman about something with the budget, she quickly replied that Pamela would now be in charge of that. She says, "Within the week, Pamela was fired. From what I understand, she has been continually job-hopping for the past few years. The CEO (and HR) brought me in to personally apologize for everything I went through and gave me a paid 1-week vacation to take at my discretion."

The woman left after a year at the job and shared that she now worked under a wonderful boss who trusted her. She happened to be hiring for her new team and came across Pamela's application, which she quickly rejected. People on the site loved the way things turned out for the woman and shared their thoughts in the comments section. u/blacjak said, "Bravo! It would've been fun to see Pamela's reaction if you interviewed her for the job and asked her questions about her resume!"