Employee Found Out An Unruly Co-Worker Was Badmouthing Them, So They Made Sure They Never Had To Work With Him Again

Matthew Gilligan

2 months ago

Source: Shutterstock

I’ve never understood why some people make life at work more difficult than it needs to be.

It’s so pointless!

And all it does is create unnecessary headaches.

Take a look at how this worker got some petty revenge on a co-worker who just couldn’t get along…with anyone.

Make my life at work miserable? You’ll never work again with me.

“I used to work at a medium-sized IT services company and had recently been moved to a smaller branch office with a nice pay raise.

I was basically my own team and got to do interesting work on a large project. Since they were satisfied with the work but needed it done in a larger scale, the company hired another person to help me.

Meet “Fred”. I knew Fred from outside work through common relationships and I didn’t find him any weirder than other nerdy people in the business. Oh boy.

Fred had some issues…

Fred was good at technical work. Very good. When it came to human interactions, though, it was something else. Fred thought of me as his only friend in the workplace and would complain all day long about all other colleagues, who were all equally incompetent, weird, evil and generally deserving of his scorn.

Fred had a terrible tendency of telling other people we had to work with that they were doing things wrong and that their software was ****.

Which was often technically right, but completely forgetting the constraints in which other people had to work, and that there might have been reasons for things that now sounded awful (which is basically always the case in IT).

They were getting fed up.

People resented both of us as a team for things he said and some situations became entrenched. It was getting harder every day for me to get to work.

Eventually he made a lot of enemies and he got a meeting with the division director. It only lasted for a few minutes, during which he told the boss of 800 people that he was “an evildoer”. It was his last day in the company.

I worked alone from that time and managed to finish most of the project, soothing things over with other teams.

Uh oh…

A few months later I got an offer for the job of my dreams in a huge utility company. After starting the work, guess who I discover working right here as a contractor under my direct supervision? Fred.

Fred looked so happy to find a friend again. He spent most of my first day at work telling me how the company was awful, everyone was dumb and everything was insufferable.

I went home that night feeling horrible, wondering how much of what he told me was true and how bad it would be to work there.

Turns out, after a few hard starting days, it really was the job of my dreams.

Acting now with Fred as a client and not a colleague, I managed to keep him in check and to improve a lot the perceived quality of the team’s work.

This guy was nuts!

Prior to my hiring, Fred was basically telling people to **** off whenever they were asking him things he didn’t want to work on. Having someone who could see through his bull **** to manage him got the road map back on track.

Eventually I learned that my colleagues had been very wary about working with me at the beginning, because Fred had been badmouthing me from the day he learned I had been hired to manage him. This had made the first weeks difficult until they understood he had been lying about it all.

About two years later, I was now team manager and my boss comes in my office and asks me about a hiring issue. There’s a new position in the team, and the recruiter asked him about someone with excellent technical skills but who sounded “very arrogant”.

Guess who wanted to work as my colleague again? If you’ve followed the story, you’ve got it right.

Nope!

I did not let out to my boss the slightest bit of resentment. I explained him how he was a very competent person, but that he might just lack a bit of the skills required for our company’s teamwork. I knew exactly what I had to say for my boss to never want to hire him, ever, without making it about our personal history.

I only told what happened to a close coworker and he sounded very thankful to hear that he would not have to work with Fred as a colleague.

He eventually got what was coming to him.

A few months later, his company lost the contract and Fred was hired by the new contractor. However they were not as lenient with him as the previous company was, and another few months later I was finally Fred-free.

Last I heard of him, he was working at a Silicon valley giant, on a project that was in a worldwide media storm over technical issues.

I keep wondering whether he was telling everyone else in his team how bad at their job they were and how much he contributed to that massive failure.”

Let’s see what people had to say on Reddit.

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