In the workplace, managers should try to support employees and do what they can to help them to be successful.

What happens when your supervisor is constantly procrastinating and then trying to blame you when problems arise.

That is the issue the woman in this story was facing, but don’t worry. She handled it perfectly.

Check it out.

Supervisors Tried to Make Me Look Bad, So I Made Them Look Worse

I’m an attorney and used to work at a state government office, where I had two supervisors, one for my practice group and one for my section, who from the very beginning decided to make it their business to treat me poorly.

Ugg, that’s the worst.

Section Chief had a habit of sitting on client questions for days, then assigning them to me.

Then, when the client would inevitably ask why it was taking so long to do their stuff, she’d respond only that I was the one working on that stuff, making it look like the delay was my fault.

Similarly, Group Supervisor’s favorite was to try to get me in trouble with both clients AND higher-ups in our office for not doing things fast enough, despite the fact that she would procrastinate for weeks on reviewing/signing off on work I actually did very fast indeed.

Always document things to protect yourself.

But what they did not know!

Was that a) I was saving all the emails they sent me that would include information like dates they assigned me work, etc., and b) one of the aforementioned higher-ups was my Former Boss during an externship in law school–so he liked me and knew I wasn’t lazy or an idiot.

So one day Group Supervisor assigned me a question from our client agency involving a citizen’s public records request, and I prepared a draft response within an hour and sent it back to her.

I NEEDED her to sign off on it before I advised the client.

But despite my getting a read receipt for my email, she didn’t respond for the rest of the day.

Or the rest of the week.

I would complain too.

The client was supposed to answer the records request within a tight deadline under the law, and eventually emailed Group Supervisor to ask where their answer was.

Group Supervisor finally woke up and forwarded her original email assigning me the work to Section Chief to complain that I didn’t do it in good time.

And then Section Chief forwarded THAT to the client and told them it was my fault it wasn’t done yet.

So I, having finally had Enough™, rubbed my little hands together in delight and proceeded to:

1. Reply All to Section Chief’s email to Client, attaching my email to Group Supervisor containing the draft response. I innocently wrote, “Apologies for the inconvenience, Client. Our office rule is to wait for supervisory sign off before providing advice, but I’ve nevertheless attached draft advice prepared on [date]. Group Supervisor and Section Chief, do you agree with this advice? May Client act upon it?”
2. Forward that response to Former Boss and very politely ask him, “In instances where there is a tight time frame to respond to a client question, is it okay to provide the client with provisional draft advice like this within the deadline but let them know a supervisor needs a little more time to do their review and sign off?”

The client ended up praising me for my “efforts to get a response to him in a timely fashion.”

Nice! Well done.

And Former Boss thanked me for my question, but said it should never be an issue in the first place.

He then sent out an office-wide notice to remind supervisors that they must provide necessary sign offs on advice within deadlines and must never blame those under them for delays in front of clients because that affects the image of the whole office.

He attached the emails in my matter as an example of what supervisors should not do.

So literally everyone saw how incompetent they were.

She handled that very professionally, and got her petty revenge. Perfection.

Let’s see what the people in the comments have to say.

Yes, absolutely perfect.

It was a great story.

It is definitely toxic.

And for the government no less.

Yes, always CYA.

Come on bosses, be better!

Your employees shouldn’t be forced to embarass you first.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.