Imagine working for a boss who is so horrible that you think you’re having a heart attack at work.

That’s the situation in today’s story, but thankfully it was only an anxiety attack.

Still, it was enough to make the employee decide to get revenge.

Let’s see how the story plays out…

I thought I was done with my revenge… Till my former boss gave me a second chance years later.

Part I: Where I cause my old Boss to lose a lot of money due to software piracy

A little context: I’m a teacher, with a degree in advertising, and have been involved with I.T. for the past twenty something years, although I’ve found my love for teaching just some ten years ago.

I passed through a lot of schools in the meantime, from the big ones to the smallest ones, and accumulated a bunch of experience both in the classroom and behind the scenes, designing workbooks, video courses, learning platforms and such. So I started thinking it was past the time to migrate to a management position.

The opportunity came in a prestigious school of digital art, and I became its Teaching Manager, overseeing all the teachers and the intern learning routines. It was a hard but honest job… for a time.

His boss was horrible.

Soon it became obvious that my boss was not exactly what he tried to present to students and employees.

He would display bursts of anger and antagonize the team, demanding impossible results and asking about tasks that he never assigned (but somehow was our job to guess).

One time, during a meeting, he grabbed a big chair and pretended to throw it across the room. It was his idea of a joke.

Nobody even flinched, cause nobody doubted for a second he was capable of actually doing the deed. Needless to say, nobody laughed as well.

The boss didn’t treat the employees well.

In my country, employers may hold employee’s contracts up to three months, which means that for 90 days you have no job security, and may be fired at any moment without any consequence to the company.

Which my boss reminded everyone all the time, half joking, trying to keep everybody on their toes.

He actually excused me from this treatment (he had this bad habit as treating the managers differently) and gave me constant praise for a good job till the day my temp contract ended.

(meaning I was then an actual employee, with full benefits and couldn’t be fired without him paying me everything the law stated).

So it really surprised me when he started the hostile treatment not 24 hours after my temporary contract ended and the full employment began.

Gone were the praises and in their place came screams, bad reviews and more and more insane demands.

He introduced the boss to his friend.

We paid an outside company to do maintenance on the classroom PCs every week, but somehow bugs and crashes were now my fault.

One time he made me stay after hours, on a saturday, after all students and staff had left, and prohibited me from going home before I had all computers running smoothly.

He asked me to find him a new seller, and I introduced a friend, making it clear that by no means I was asking for him to be hired.

I was just making introductions and if he liked the guy after they talked, it was his own decision and responsibility to hire him or not.

A few weeks later he gave me an earful for going for drinks with this friend of mine, saying that managers should stick with managers, and that I should mingle with him, not the staff (cause they were “beneath” us, apparently).

I said this was absurd, reminded him that I knew this guy for years already and that if he wanted to, he could join us for drinks anytime. It was not the response he expected.

He thought he was having a heart attack.

The abuse continued and actually intensified.

One day I started to feel chest pains and my left arm went completely numb.

While my friend called for an ambulance, I retreated to my boss’s office, at the time being occupied by his fiancè, and calmly told her:

-“Don’t mind me. I think I’m having a heart attack, so I’ll just lay here for a few minutes so the students can’t see me”.

Of course, she went nuts after this.

He decided to quit.

The good news: it wasn’t a heart attack, but an anxiety attack, and wasn’t the last one.

I was 36 at the time, and it was the first time I saw my mom cry since my dad passed, more than 20 years prior (from, of course, a heart attack).

I decided enough was enough, so I gave my 30 days notice, citing health issues. I hadn’t yet completed 6 months working there.

I sat down with my boss, did not blamed him in any way but said the stress was making me worry about leaving my family too soon, and gave him every guarantee he needed that I would work through my entire notice period in order to complete every single project we started since my hiring.

So I finished updating the courses, finished the development of our brand new e-learning platform, finished hiring the teachers for the next semester, I even shoot videos to promote every single course on the school’s menu.

The boss didn’t have any respect for his health.

Less than a week left till my last day, he called me in his office to show the company’s new “career plans” (I don’t know the equivalent term in english, but it’s the path planned by the company for the growth of each position).

-“So you see… That’s what you’re going to earn in a few months. That is, if you stop being a sissy and just do your effing job”.

I could not believe it. After all the abuse, all the toxicity, I had tried to go the higher road and end everything on a good note, and he called my health issues “being a sissy”!????

I. was. done. I told him to just deduce the next few days from my final payment and left.

His friend also quit.

Now for the revenge.

Remember how I introduced him to a friend and he actually hired the guy?

On my final days I announced my boss I would open my own school after leaving, but failed to mention that this other employee was my business partner.

So when my friend asked himself for HIS 30 days notice, our boss went LIVID. He all but threw out my friend, telling him to never put his feet there again, and leave immediately.

According to the law, that means he had to pay for that whole month, plus every remaining day he worked before, plus commissions.

Adding to that my own last payment, which came with six months of benefits, he had more than enough to start our new venture.

But that’s not the revenge.

He reported his boss.

He actually made us sign a sort of NDA with a bunch of illegal clauses (which made the whole contract invalid) preventing us from revealing any company secrets during or after our time with them, at the risk of being fined $30.000 (around U$6000, at the time).

However, no contract in the world may prevent one (at least in my country) from reporting any illegal activities.

Which is why I did not worry one bit when I reported him and his school for having 50+ PCs running on pirate versions of Windows, Office, the whole Adobe Suite, Revit, Cinema4D, 3DSMax and lots of other very expensive software.

Not long before this, a big and traditional chain of stores had gone bankrupt in our state for having to pay retroactively fines upon fines on Windows alone, so its an understatement to say that the government was taking piracy pretty seriously at the time.

He explains the boss’s reaction.

It gets funnier when you realize that the reported person receives an e-mail with the whole complaint (apart from the author of the report) the minute it is filed, so he can prepare his defence.

His response wasn’t at all unexpected. Some five minutes after our report, a similar e-mail came into our inbox, reporting us for 30 unlicensed copies of Windows and many other programs.

My business partner still talked to the Finance Manager on our old job and, knowing that our ex-boss would probably be right beside him fuming and screaming, decided to send him a picture of our only classroom…

with no computer in sight (we decided to specialize in classes about comic book making, which dispensed computers, and whenever we would host a class that demanded it, we would ask our students to bring their own).

Almost everyone left the school.

A few weeks later I heard that the whole remaining staff abandoned ship, leaving him with only an intern and a few teachers without permanent contracts.

My former boss actually kept tabs on us and, learning that some of his teachers were contacting us to host special classes, started to blackmail them, threatening to terminate their contracts if they insisted on doing business with us (even though there was no exclusivity clause in their contracts).

Some of them called on the bluff, and he had to pay another ton of money on breach of contracts alone.

The boss’s school almost closed.

Time went by and I hear the guy is counting his pennies and struggling to keep afloat.

He used to open full classes each six months, occupying every date and time available.

Now he hardly can fill a turn, started holding only night classes and not even everyday – half the week he closes his doors, not having enough students nor the money to pay employees on these days.

Before I left he had paid $40.000 on the architectural project alone to expand the business within a year, but now I hear he was considering closing his door and offering only online courses… even before the pandemic.

HIs new school venture didn’t last.

And now for the part two: Where, years after my revenge, I made my ex boss again pay a bunch of money, this time on legal fees.

First of all, I need to say that my own school has closed its doors. Me and my friend were not a good fit, as business partners at least, and now we’re not even friends.

That’s life. We cashed out, sold what could be sold and each went with our lives.

I may eventually write about my /pettyrevenge against this guy (you can say I hold many grudges), but this tale is not about him.

The old boss tried to sue him..

Some months later I found out our ex-boss was SUING us. Our school, that is. Which, as I mentioned, didn’t even exist anymore.

My (ex)friend’s sister, who is also his lawyer, contacted me and told me about it. I couldn’t find anything on the public records, since the lawsuit was running on court ordered sigil.

I talked to my own lawyer and she said: “If they didn’t cite you directly, pretend you know nothing about the matter”.

And so I ignored the issue for a few years.

He found the old boss’s claims hilarious.

During lockdown, the appointed official finally found me at home and served me. That also gave me access to my boss’s claims, since I had 15 days to prepare my defense.

My wife found me laughing out loud in front of the computer.

His claims were absolutely ridiculous. He claimed I stole his courses, and used as proof a print from our (now offline) site, side by side with his own, saying something in the lines of “it becomes obvious that both schools have the same courses.”

However, he presented no explanation of the similarities besides the names, which weren’t even the same.

We had a SEGMENT of trainings under the umbrella “Graphic Design”, but no class with that specific name, for example, and no other class on any of his main subjects.

Also, most of our classes were in the topic of Comic Books, which he NEVER worked with.

He wrote his own defense.

He also called us “cynical” for daring to compete with him on the same market, even if it was my own previous experience on the learning sector that landed me the job on his firm in the first place.

At one point, the documents cited a statement from our site where we said that we took our previous experiences as a way to learn with our mistakes and do differently, and call it a “confession of plagiarism”.

I asked my lawyer to let me write my own defence, leaving to her the task to translate it to “lawyerism”.

She actually copy pasted my full statement, saying she couldn’t have argued better.

The judge threw out the case.

I put on paper all the repulse I felt, cited all my experience with teaching and rebuked every single one of his claims with facts and actual proofs, attaching printed conversations, saved emails and bringing attention to his own lacking of proof.

The judge tossed the case and made him pay all the legal fees, including my lawyer’s (he could have avoided it if he had entered the lawsuit on small claims court, but since he wanted the 30k from the NDA plus damages and sigil, he had it coming).

Just another shove of dirt on his coffin.

Wow, double revenge! Put him out of business and make him look like a fool in court!

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story…

This reader can relate to not having job security.

Another reader had a similar panic attack.

This reader has a similar boss.

Another reader wonders if the former boss’s company eventually closed.

The former boss’s company deserved to close with all those shady practices.

You reap what you sow and all that.

If you enjoyed that story, read this one about a mom who was forced to bring her three kids with her to apply for government benefits, but ended up getting the job of her dreams.