Helping a client succeed is one thing, but when that client crosses the line and treat your team like garbage, it can turn a partnership into a battleground.

So, what happens when the person you’re working with not only trashes your hard work but makes everything personal?

Do you put up with it for the sake of business?

Or do you find a way to get him fired?

In the following story, a marketing team finds themselves in this very situation.

Here’s how it went down.

The client is not always right

I work at a big ad agency with large companies as clients.

We expect to work in partnerships with our clients, so we fire those who treat us poorly.

We usually treat each other with respect.

Our biggest client has 5 different teams we work with, and one of them was led by Baseball Dad.

BD was the type of neckless marshmallow who gets wasted at his kid’s baseball game and starts heckling the other kids.

Just a boorish jerk.

He never approved any of our work, putting out awful stuff that his internal team made even though he is literally paying us millions of dollars to make ads for him.

His product was struggling to sell, and he blamed us, even though we were doing great with the other 4 teams.

He didn’t know this, which comes back to bite him later.

The client had crossed too many lines already.

However, none of this is why we needed revenge. I don’t care if a client wants to fail; I collect my paycheck regardless.

However, he crossed several lines:

He was extremely sexist.

He used to call my female coworkers “sweetheart” in the most condescending voice, comment on their clothes/bodies, and wink/smirk at me while they were talking because we are both men, I guess.

These women are highly accomplished, serious people and they are like family to me; huge misplay on his part.

BD was abusive to us.

He would constantly interrupt us, tell us to shut up, call us “vendors,” and remind us he could fire us at any time.

BD would lie.

He would tell his boss (actually a nice guy but too busy to check closely) that we missed deadlines or forgot deliverables because he never checked his email.

We would then have to awkwardly struggle to prove BD wrong without calling him a liar to keep the business.

He never owned up to anything he said to us on the phone.

The final straw occurred on a call between BD and one of my project managers.

I saw her run out of the room crying.

She told me BD told her, in a one-on-one call, that she should worry less about budgets and more about wearing “that nice top” she wore at our last presentation.

Gross.

Revenge time.

They decided to start recording all of their calls, but BD was always late, so he didn’t know.

I told my cool boss that our team had had enough of BD; we were at our wit’s end with his behavior.

Several of my coworkers were looking for new jobs.

It’s hard to hire good people, so my boss asked me to give her a day to figure this out; she wanted to lose BD without the entire business.

The next day, she showed up with our IT guy, who set up voice recording on our conference line.

It’s illegal to record people without consent in my state, but BD was late to every call.

Too bad, because if he ever had showed up on time, he would have heard the new message kicking off every call: “This call is being recorded.”

His team heard it, and had no problem with it. I suspect they hated him, too.

For the next two weeks, we recorded everything—every word of it.

One of my audio engineers made a supercut of every terrible thing BD said—every “sweetheart,” “shut up,” and “no one cares what you think.”

And it didn’t stop with the voice recordings – he was also outed to his wife.

My project manager even baited him into repeating what he said about her clothes on a budget call; this time, he literally said, “You’re much better at flirting than budgets, sweetheart. That’s why I like you.”

The supercut sounded insane when played all together; it was an incredible piece of evidence.

We sent it to his boss and vice president and threatened to walk away from the work two weeks before the product launch if BD wasn’t disciplined.

They immediately apologized and begged us not to leave; they said it would be handled by Monday.

My one sweet project manager who he had been so gross to got the best part of the revenge; she anonymously sent the supercut to his wife using the email address she had posted on LinkedIn.

I don’t know what became of that but I imagine it wasn’t good.

Unfortunately for BD, he already had other strikes.

On Monday, BD wasn’t on the call.

My boss snooped and found out that he had a few complaints prior and got immediately fired after we sent it through.

He didn’t see vendors as people, so he was shocked that his words toward us “counted” against his 3 strike policy.

Apparently, he melted down completely after being fired.

Of course, none of it was his fault.

He said it was all because we were incompetent, but the other 4 team leads had all put in their numbers and said that it wasn’t on our end; their products were slaying.

Wish I could have seen it.

I imagine he came home to a very angry wife as well.

We are all hitting the bar tonight in his honor you, Baseball Dad.

Lots of people were probably happy not to deal with him anymore.

Let’s see how the readers over at Reddit relate to this story.

You would think all large corporations recorded calls for quality assurance.

Agree! The guy was totally ripping his company off.

Here’s a woman who’s death with similar people.

Thoughts from a fellow marketer.

That guy sounds terrible.

Getting fired from his job was probably the least of his worries when he got home.

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.