the file poacher, the reluctant apology, and other stories of jerks getting their comeuppance

[ResidentialBusiness]

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

Last week we talked about jerks getting their comeuppance, and here are eight of the most satisfying stories you shared.

1. The thief

At an old job, I was continually denied raises by the bully finance director (who somehow was always able to find money for his own raises.) He oversaw all purchases for the business’s renovation, which included lots of furniture, TVs, tech stuff, etc. All expensive stuff. He was one of many jerks and I eventually moved on, but I heard from a coworker a couple years later that he was fired one day when an expensive TV that went missing from storage was suddenly discovered. In a picture his wife posted on Facebook of their new living room. This caused an audit and it turned out he was stealing A LOT of stuff and money from work, so he and his cronies all got fired and he had a very public trial. All I wanted was a raise when my job duties expanded, and instead his ass went to jail.

2. The coffee

When I was 30, I looked like a 15-year-old and many assumed I was an intern or perhaps a lowly admin they could disrespect. I had had enough of this when an old man leaned over to me before a commission meeting started (I was the staff liaison to this commission and basically led the meetings but he didn’t know that yet). He asked me to go get him coffee (!) without even looking at me. I said in a neutral tone, “No thank you” and then got up to start the meeting. I said, “Hey everyone, just a quick note, Bob here says he’d fetch (I really emphasized this word) coffee for anyone who needs it, so just tell him how you take it.” He got very flustered and muttered something like, “uh, uh” and I turned to him and said, “So are we good here?” and I paused for effect and let him memorize my shape, face, and tone until he said, “Yep, got it” and barely spoke up again for the rest of the year.

3. The file poacher

I did an external benchmarking project in Excel for my boss, sent it off, and forgot about it. 12+ months later, one of the “too cool to wear a suit” marketing team presented the exact same file to the executive team (I was there to present something else). It even still had my quirky choice of colors in the conditional formatting.

He stood there saying it had been a lot of research and work and just needed to be updated for the latest year’s data. Then he was asked to make some changes on the spot. He needed to get into the source sheet, which he couldn’t find. I meekly suggested it was a hidden sheet and told him how to unhide it. But then there was no data on the source sheet. I pointed out it the columns started at AW so there must be some hidden columns. He tried and tried to unhide them and nothing happened. He muttered the sheet must have corrupted. He also struggled to remove some colors on the output sheet. I said nothing else, but raised my eyebrow at my boss.

Finally my boss suggested I try, as I was known for being good with Excel. I walked down to his laptop and, without saying a word, took the page protection off the sheet using my password. Someone jokingly asked if I had an all powerful admin password. I shook my head and said no, that I remembered the password for the file. I was then asked why I knew the password to a marketing file, to which I replied that they hadn’t changed the password on the file since I created it 18 months ago, and that I’d had to hide and password protect the detail as some of the numbers were still confidential at that point. I also said the random colors on the front sheet which he couldn’t remove were due to conditional formatting based on criteria my boss had asked for the year before.

I took my seat again (back of the room) and watched as Mr. Marketing squirmed as he was asked why he was taking credit for another team’s work. My boss smirked and Mr. Marketing never poached another file off me again.

4. The building

I took a fundraising job at a nonprofit, and it didn’t take long to realize that the place was toxic. The CEO, who was also the founder, was an absolute terror, which was apparently known to everyone but me. I started looking for another job because I just couldn’t deal with the abuse, and somehow my boss found out and fired me before I had the chance to quit, despite the fact that I was absolutely destroying my fundraising goals. The board refused to manage the CEO in any way, shape, or form, despite these well-known issues.

About five years later, when the org was in its 30th year, the org finally had the funds and build a gorgeous new building for its operations, it was everything they’d all dreamed of, especially the toxic founder … who the board then promptly fired for his years of toxic behavior, and specifically cited my firing five years prior as one of the reasons. Knowing that he never got to enjoy his magnificent new space was just the best chef’s kiss ever.

5. The accreditation

Ten years ago, I was a trainer working for a very well-known organization which was in a highly visible dispute with the government, and was regularly in the headlines. If you were remotely engaged with current affairs in my country then, you would recognize both the dispute and the company. Our part of the organization ran credentialled training for a highly-trusted, highly-regulated profession — think legal, engineering, that kind of thing. Our training was accredited by the regulator, and our clients had to take 50 accredited hours every year as a condition of keeping their licenses. All the training courses had had the content approved, but for each individual session, the dates, times, venue, trainer, and bullet-pointed list of content had to be sent to the regulator.

My lovely manager was away for a year on maternity leave, and single most useless man I have ever met was employed in her stead, through the Old Boys network. He was unbelievably useless in every possible way, and chauvinist. Not actively toxic, just incompetent and a waste of space, and extremely condescending to us little ladies. So the two other trainers and I and the admin team who supported us just bypassed him and got on with things.

A few months in, the admin responsible for getting all our courses accredited left. Before she left, she informed Useless Manager about the process for getting courses accredited and said that the other admin didn’t have time to do this and he would need to figure something out. About five months after that, just before Lovely Manager returned, we found out that Useless Manager’s solution had been to ignore it. For nearly six months, we had been delivering “accredited” courses to our highly-regulated profession, which they needed to complete annually to keep their licenses, and not a single one of them was actually accredited.

My co-trainers and I (all women) scheduled a meeting with our manager to “understand the issue,” and we basically treated it like a Select Committee. First, we made him explain what had happened and how. Then we asked questions like, “But you were aware that this was a requirement, yes or no?” “Just so we are clear, do you understand that if any of the thousand or so clients we’ve seen in the last few months got audited, they could lose their licence because they’d claimed 50 accredited hours and these hours weren’t accredited? And that would be entirely on us?” “Could I just ask you to reflect on the impact of Company’s highly visible dispute with the government if this got into the media?”

Frankly, we shouldn’t have been allowed to do it and he shouldn’t have sat through it. But he was Useless, so he didn’t actually know how to shut us down. He squirmed. He stuttered. He blustered. We sat very and looked at him very, very disapprovingly. At some point, I sighed and said, “All I can say is that I’m very, very disappointed.” (Which was the point where one of my colleagues nearly lost it.)

After half an hour, we told him he could go, waited until he’d left the room, and then all cracked up laughing and repeating the highlights back to each other. He worked out the rest of the month without contacting or speaking to any of us again. He’s probably now CEO of something because useless, chauvinist men fail upwards.

The resolution was that Lovely Manager came back, worked with the regulator, and got them to agree to backdate approval and treat it as an admin issue. I still get chills thinking about how bad it could have been though.

6. The apology

In my last job, I helped salespeople with proposals, and a lot of them had very specific requirements that we would be thrown out for not following. On one proposal, we had to have a “wet signature” from the salesman handling the proposal (meaning, we couldn’t use his digital signature on file, he had to sign it with a pen himself). This salesman was notorious for putting things off until the last minute, and since this municipality was a few hours’ drive away and fairly rural (so there was no guarantee of overnight delivery), I told him I had to have the signature by X date in order to be able to guarantee it would get here. I was very, very clear with him, many times, in different formats, about this requirement and the timeline.

He kept putting it off, and finally came the afternoon before it had to be submitted to sign it. I told him, again, that I couldn’t guarantee it would get there, and he brushed me off, saying basically, “It’ll be fine.” Of course, it wasn’t, and as I guessed, it didn’t get delivered on time and was not considered.

He raised an absolute stink and was so mad. We had a conversation about it with my boss where I explained, again, why it happened and that he couldn’t keep putting things off until the last minute. He said he understood, apologized, asked me to be clearer about the timeline next time (????), and we parted ways. After that conversation, I thought we were on the same page until the next morning he sent an email to his boss, with me, my boss, and the entire senior leadership team CC’ed, where he said he had talked to me about the issue, explained why it couldn’t happen again, and had gotten my word that I wouldn’t let it happen again.

I was FUMING. I left the office to go on a walk because I was so angry I couldn’t think straight. When I got back, my boss had replied all to the email saying, “[Salesman], this email does not accurately represent what happened at all, and I think you know that.” She laid out the entire issue from beginning to end, and a few hours later, the salesman’s boss came by my desk with him to apologize and promise that he would follow my timelines in the future.

The organization was, in general, very salesperson-friendly (which mostly meant they let them run roughshod over everyone and never made them do anything they didn’t want to), so this forced apology was a very gratifying experience for me and, vicariously, for everyone else who had ever been burned by this salesman.

7. The ultimatum

I worked in an office that had the worst receptionist. She held grudges and did as little work as possible. She was so difficult in the seven years I was there that she was switched around to different managers. She did not like her last manager. She marched into the CEO’s office and said, “Get me a different manager or I quit.” The CEO responded, “Go pack up your desk.” She was stunned. You really shouldn’t give an ultimatum unless you are willing to suffer the consequences.

8. The course review

A number of years ago, I was hired as an instructional designer to help support a large group of faculty who were creating online asynchronous courses for a new degree program. A key part of my job was ensuring that all the courses fulfilled certain mission-critical standards like accessibility and learning outcomes. I had a checklist with these deliverables and I was required to regularly review all the courses throughout their development cycle.

One of the faculty assigned to this project was an absolute diva. Dr. Diva had convinced college leadership that he was a GROUNDBREAKING ONLINE EDUCATION MIRACLE WORKER and so far ahead of the curve that it was practically a circle. He was invited to conferences to talk about his magical methods and featured in college promotional materials and he was on a first-name basis with all of the muckety-mucks. In other words, he was a VERY. BIG. DEAL. around campus.

He was also very unhappy that his course was being included in the review process. Reviews were fine for other faculty but certainly not for him.

Nonetheless, I do my first review, and it’s a bloodbath. His course is a half-baked disaster. Cherry on top, it also had two very serious “doing it this way could open the institution to serious liability” concerns. I give my boss a heads-up on what I find, and he gives me the go-ahead to write my report and send an email outlining the shortcomings to the faculty.

Dr. Diva goes nuclear. He responds by sending me this huge, vitriolic email, a 9.8 on the email Richter scale. But berating me is not enough. He also calls my manager and demands that I be fired! Immediately!

When my manager refuses, he gets really angry. So he decides to cash in all his VIP IOUs and organizes a huge meeting about me and my review, ostensibly under the guise of urgent concerns about instructional designers impinging on academic freedom. He corrals a couple of senior VPs, the head of the faculty union, a bunch of senior managers, an associate dean or two, my boss, and my boss’s boss to attend. If there’d been a natural disaster on the day of the meeting, a third of the college leadership might have been wiped out.

Unfortunately for Dr. Diva, the meeting did not go as planned. The powers-that-be start by reviewing my report. They ask my boss questions about my review processes and the project’s goals, and they start to get a little confused. What they’re seeing and reading doesn’t seem to match up at all with the sky-is-falling academic freedoms are at risk disaster that their superstar had claimed. In fact, when they dig a little further, they begin to realize that my report is actually very fair and accurate and that all of the pedagogical superpowers he’s long claimed to have don’t actually exist.

Hmm … Would Dr. Diva like to speak about how he plans to address these deficits to ensure alignment with the program’s outcomes and college standards? And why did Dr. Diva think that receiving a routine review warranted both my firing and a meeting with such a large and busy group of people?

I’m pleased to report that Dr. Diva burned pretty much all of his chips that day, and his visibility in all things promotional went from very high to practically invisible. Rumor also had it that a number of his other courses suddenly found themselves being audited for program alignment. There was even a nice coda to all the stress and tumult. Months later, I found myself in an elevator with my boss and one of the VPs who’d attended the meeting with Dr. Diva. When my boss introduced me, the VP just looked at me, nodded, and said, “You do good work.”

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