Some people just don’t know when to call it quits…or stay out of things that don’t really pertain to them.

We all see that a heck of a lot in the workplace and a Reddit user shared a story on the website about how they got some wonderful revenge on a work colleague who just couldn’t get out of her own way.

Tried to throw me under the proverbial bus, ran herself over.

“I was building an online training module at work that is intended to teach existing users how to work a new process. It has interactive elements, quizzes, segments to work through a few sample scenarios, etc.

It seems like a new colleague was anything but helpful.

Now we’d recently got a new Associate Director who from what I can tell advanced through the company by throwing other people under the bus. She gets promoted not for her own merits, but because at the end of the day she has less mud sticking to her than other applicants. It’s uncanny to the point that there simply had to be more to it than stupid office politics. I’ll get to that in a bit.

So after I have the first draft of the module done it gets sent out for the usual round of testing, and there are of course a couple things that need to be corrected. (I build the module off the notes the subject matter experts leave me, and a few things inevitably get lost in translation).

This woman went above and beyond in criticizing this project.

But this new Associate Director just rips it to shreds, complaining that it’s completely incomprehensible, needs to go into much greater detail, asking questions about nearly every individual mouse click in the sample scenarios, and overall stating that it’s impossible to follow. The thing is, this module is intended for our finance department, for people who have a background in finance, and have already been trained on how to use our internal software.

She is a training services Associate Director, with a teaching background. The module isn’t supposed to make sense to a former middle school social studies teacher, it’s supposed to make sense to people with finance degrees.

They tried to reason with her but it just wasn’t computing in this woman’s brain.

I push back and try explaining this to her in a million different ways, but she’s having none of it. So I have to go back to the Subject Matter Experts with her ~20 pages worth of criticism. And at first they think I’m joking.

I had to forward her email before they finally believed me. So for the next two weeks we’re going over every nuance, including re-addressing everything that was covered during their three-week classroom training. How to set up their network drives, how to set up Outlook, including things as nuanced as “If you don’t know how to set up your email signature, click here…” I mean really basic, BASIC stuff that has nothing to do with what the module was originally supposed to teach.

So it was time to try again…

But I now had to include it all because our new Associate Director couldn’t find the on switch if you stapled her finger to it. This wastes my time, the Subject Matter Expert’s time, and time spent re-recording all the voice work. (If you’ve done voice work in the past, you know you NEVER get it in one take.) After it’s all done, I send it back out for review and approval, and the Associate Director simply doesn’t respond.

A week passes.

And then the story took a weird direction.

The finance director takes an interest in why this module is almost a month overdue. I go to forward the Associate Director’s email again…except now I can’t find it. Odd, seeing as how I have a hoarding problem when it comes to email. I check with one of the Subject Matter Experts I was working with, he can’t find it either.

Turns out, none of us can find it. It’s gone… So I check with a friend of mine in IT who–after a little detective work–discovers that a week ago someone did a compliance delete on the exchange server. This basically is a seek and destroy for messages meeting certain criteria. In this case, a specific phrase she used in her email. I start digging through Outlook trying to find particular emails related to this that might be used to defend my actions…and they’re all gone.

Where the heck did this thing go?

Inbox, Sent Items, Deleted Items. Every last one of them. Any email containing that particular phrase anywhere in it. This kind of thing is normally used by admins to mass-delete spam or phishing emails from all users at once. Except in this case someone apparently deleted emails that showed evidence of her awful decisions.

My friend in IT can smell a juicy story a mile away and was VERY interested in seeing where this went. She recovered the deleted emails and I promptly saved them to a flash drive. For the next few days, every time I had any email with this Associate Director’s name on it (even unrelated stuff, you never know how something might fit together), I saved a copy to the flash drive.

Then it was time to build the case, so to speak.

I informed the Subject Matter Experts to do the same, and we started building our offline evidence locker. I didn’t want to blow the lid on it just yet, I wanted to see if my suspicions were correct. Maybe a lifetime of watching spy movies and cop dramas had corrupted my thinking. Maybe there was another explanation. Who knows, it could happen, I’m not God, I don’t know everything. I’ll play defense.

So after several weeks in total trying to appease this Associate Director’s unquenchable thirst for irrelevant details, and then getting ignored for a week she finally publishes it and sends it to the finance director to approve so it can go live. Woo! Except the module, which was supposed to be a 30 minute online course, now contained THREE HOURS of content, and went down several irrelevant rabbit holes that had been deemed “critical supporting information”.

This whole situation had gone completely off the rails.

As an analogy, imagine designing a training module to teach a nurse how to enter some new CPT codes and being told you have to teach him how to read too, because he might not know what words are. That’s how much BS was rammed into this thing.

And the finance director of course didn’t like it, and was surprised that such a rambling mess of a module would come from me of all people. So he calls a meeting with me and the Associate Director on Tuesday to get some answers, and sure enough she immediately tried to distance herself from it. Tried to paint it as she made a couple suggestions and I clearly went way overboard.

So it was time for them to show the folks in the meeting what was really going on.

How I must have sent her a different version that she approved and switched them afterwards (that’s not even possible, it would get thrown back into a draft status). She kept trying to talk over me as I voiced my defense, and to his credit the finance director finally just muted her so I could speak. And boy did I. I explained EVERYTHING.

I shared my screen, popped in my flash drive, and opened my copies of the emails that had supposedly been deleted. Every email exchange where she complained about the material, I pushed back, and she flat-out ordered me to build the module in the way I did.

She abruptly left the meeting and went offline. The finance director asked if I could send him a copy of all relevant files, and as I did so I told him they might not be there later. And then explained what I had learned about someone in IT using the compliance delete. He assures me he’ll look into it, and the **** immediately hit the fan. The Associate Director never logged back on.

This woman clearly knew that she had done something very, very wrong.

There was a massive internal audit where people from her previous departments were asked to provide statements. Leadership tried to keep it hush hush but you just can’t keep something that big under wraps. I don’t know the specific whats and hows, but the Associate Director and one of the IT managers had both “left the company to pursue the next stage of their careers, and we sincerely wish them the best.”

But things got even weirder and more scandalous from there!

I don’t really do the social media thing, but over the next few days as the rumor mill did what rumor mills do I heard their **** absolutely blew up, and it came out that the Associate Director and that IT manager were having an affair. Now this all went down about a month ago but as I wrote this post I thought to check online court records. Both are now facing divorces, filed by their respective spouses.

They shared the reasons why they think this whole fiasco happened in the first place.

Jeez…

So yeah, there’s a void in my direct leadership, in IT’s leadership, and the entire IT department is getting a shakedown by information security to determine if there were any other leaks. I spent some time reflecting on why this whole series of events happened, and my best guess is she wanted to make a grand entrance by spearheading this masterwork training module that covered every possible scenario, and contained any and all information anyone could possibly want.

Then as she started to realize how wasteful, rambling, and unnecessary it was, she realized that her grand entrance would be a grand faceplant. So she tried to erase the evidence and pin all the nonsense on me to save face, but inadvertently set in motion the events that would expose her little “arrangement” with the IT manager. Taking it up the *** in order to cover her *** I guess.”

Check out how people responded.

This person likes things to be short and sweet when it comes to training.

Another individual made a pretty hilarious comment.

This individual knows what really happened here.

This reader asked a few good questions…

Some people just don’t realize that less is more from time to time.

Learn to read the room, folks!