Awful Supervisor Couldn’t Get Fired Because Of Union Rules, So Employee Planned A Years-Long Conspiracy To Get Her Fired

Matthew Gilligan

12 months ago

Source: Reddit/AITA/Pexels

This is a long story, but let me tell you that it’s a good one!

It comes to us from Reddit’s “Pro Revenge” page and you better believe that the person who wrote it played the long game in order to get revenge on a terrible supervisor.

Keep reading and find out what happened to this Grade-A Jerk!

I orchestrated a vast conspiracy to get a coworker fired.

“I used to work at a hospital data center in the network operations group.

We physically sat in a room 24/7 next to the servers to make sure things didn’t catch on fire, monitored for alerts, and did routine things like swap out tape backups, but it was pretty simple work.

This was ostensibly a tech job, but there were people who had been there for many years back when you had to change out printer paper and run a command from an IBM mainframe.

This job was going nowhere…

It was on really specialized hardware and software that was difficult to apply elsewhere, so it had become a ****-end job.

And because there were people who weren’t tech-savvy at all really, we weren’t given much responsibility.

You can’t tell some people they can log into a server and others not, so we were reduced to the lowest common denominator.

We were a network operations center where nobody was allowed to interact with any network equipment.

A new person came on the scene…

Lowest common denominator, you say. Meet my new supervisor, Karen (not her real name but definitely her real spirit), had been there for over 20 years and got the job solely based on seniority.

She was a sociopathic narcissist and one of the most unpleasant people I’ve ever encountered.

Shortly after I was hired, we were bought by another hospital and combined data centers. Karen was demoted to shift lead and had to work with us in the 24/7 rotation.

She was very bad at her job and our responsibilities diminished to very little.

Karen was NO GOOD.

We had no agency to fix any problems of our own because it had to be a problem that Karen could solve, and Karen was both lazy and stupid. After a couple of years, I was promoted. On my first day after they announced the promotion, she said “you will fail.” Just straight to my face.

But she had a powerful tool at her disposal: the hospital bureaucracy. Since the place was unionized, the hospital had a just cause firing policy instead of an at will policy, even for non-unionized employees. This is I think generally a good thing.

There wasn’t any firing going on at this place.

But on the edges, it set up ridiculous situations where it was impossible to lose your job unless you were really egregious about it with repeated violations or you showed up intoxicated or high. We had someone steal computer equipment and they kept their job. It was nuts. And Karen had been there for nearly 30 years. So she wasn’t getting fired without a lot of work.

That’s okay. She was terrible at her job. One of the most important things about the job was monitoring for an alert which would pop up and there was a procedure we had to go through in order for some data to go through. If we didn’t do this, then a nurse wouldn’t get their lab results back.

NOTHING could get Karen fired.

So in one case, an alert came in, Karen saw it, then decided to keep browsing the web. Because of this, a patient from the cardiac ICU was going into surgery and the doctors/nurses operating on the patient couldn’t get a white blood cell count I think?

I’m not a doctor, I just…work in a building with a lot of them. Something very dangerous for this patient, and the patient passed away.

THIS STILL DID NOT GET KAREN FIRED

(The reasoning from HR: well, it didn’t *directly* lead to harm…)

She didn’t even feel bad about it. Just a complete soulless sociopath. I’m real pro-worker in general, but some jobs you just absolutely have to do. I was so mad. She had to go.

I kept a paper trail of everything she messed up on. It wasn’t nitpicky. Literal life and ***** stuff here. Verbal warning, first written warning, second written warning, final written warning, termination. A slog and I’d rather spend my time doing anything else, but that’s the way it went.

It was the same thing over and over again.

Then she figured out she could work the system. As she approached work Armageddon (termination), she would tell HR she was being harassed (the person harassing her was different every time) which would trigger a mandatory investigation.

This investigation took about six months, they wouldn’t find anything, and we would carry on. Except these warnings? They had a six-month expiration. So she could always reset the clock when it got close.

Everyone was helpless. Even the CIO couldn’t do anything about it because of the bureaucracy. Karen was a menace and the entire IT department had to interact with the data center staff, and that meant interacting with her, and she was universally disliked. And she had 20 years until retirement and she would outlast the heat ***** of the universe.

They came up with a plan.

Then I had an idea: what if, under the guise of developing skills relevant to the 21st century, required everyone working in the network operations center to pass the Net+ exam? It’s not a difficult exam, but it’s not trivially easy. I felt pretty sure that everyone on the team fell above the line between “able to pass” and “not able to pass” except Karen.

We would give everyone better titles, a significant pay raise, and entrusted to do more with the equipment, which is something everyone desperately wanted. Then people could actually leave the hospital with transferable skills and do something else if they wanted and not feel trapped.

They were playing the long game.

I spent THREE. YEARS. in meetings with HR. With my director. With the CIO. With HR again. Job description meetings that took six hours to tweak small wording. Hundreds of hours in meetings. Red tape hell. Absolute red tape hell.

Do you have any idea what it takes to approve a *significant raise* in a bureucratic muckfactory like that? But the raises were crucial because it would absolutely not be fair to ask this of them. “Pass a test or lose your job” without a large carrot attached would lead to mutiny.

And then it got approved! I also wrote the exam requirement into my own job description. It was important to still be able to do the job and not let my skills lapse just because I was promoted — also this meant I could cover for people when they were on vacation or sick. (Plus, I also got that sweet, sweet pay bump.)

This was actually going to happen!

It went over well! I was nervous, but the plan made sense and I was able to communicate that. People would be more marketable. The job would be more interesting. And most importantly, they would be making 20% more than they were before. And I think it really helped that I also gave myself the same requirement when I absolutely could have chosen not to.

The hospital would pay for offsite training. They would still get paid their full hourly during the training, including shift differential for 2nd and 3rd shifts. We paid for all the materials. I scheduled 8 hours a week for people to go some place quiet and study.

The job itself had a ton of downtime so people could study, but this was formally carved out time anyway. We paid for the exam. And if they failed, we’d pay for the second attempt. We were given eight months to pass the test, so this is how it was for the eight months.

I did not want Karen to have any excuse whatsoever and somehow convince HR that this process was rushed or unfair.

And wouldn’t you know it…

Everyone passed on the first attempt except Karen. Karen did not pass her second, or her third attempt (a bonus attempt!)

Karen, being the classic narcissist, thought this was somehow all about her. That this was a vast conspiracy engineered over multiple years and hundreds of hours just to get rid of her, and she would tell everyone within earshot that’s what was going on.

Yeah okay Karen. You realize how insane that sounds, right? Not everything is about you, sheesh. Well, okay in this case it is but still. Only I (and two other people) know that.

I remember the exact time and date we told her. She was in such deep denial that it could ever happen. She thought she was bulletproof. I don’t think I will ever achieve anything more satisfying in my career.

They were sick and tired of YEARS of Karen…and then it finally happened!

I’m not usually one to take satisfaction in seeing someone’s livelihood go, but she was uniquely awful, she was a patient danger, and it had been nearly a decade of working with her by this point and I was just so sick and tired of her nonsense.

I was a hero the day after she was fired. I went to the main office for a meeting and people were congratulating me like I just had a kid or won a marathon or something. Even the CIO! They were just happy for me that I didn’t have to supervise Karen anymore. But in my headcanon, they were congratulating me for pulling off this elaborate plan.

Morale back at the data center was also high. We learned interesting things, a couple of my coworkers left for better gigs elsewhere :-), the ones who were content staying were able to stay, and we all had more money and job security.

Things were looking up at the office!

And because anything could set off a bogus Karen harassment complaint, people were stressed out working with her. Her being gone was like a breath of fresh air. Newcomers were told stories of Karen, and they seemed exaggerated. They were not.

In order to solve a very important and extremely difficult problem, I pulled off a vast workplace conspiracy that improved the lives of the people I worked with in addition to keeping our patients safe.

Getting Karen fired is my greatest and most difficult accomplishment and I can’t put it on a CV anywhere.”

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