Having a job you really enjoy is great, but unfortunately, it can be ruined by a bad boss who doesn’t like you.

What would you do if your boss lied about you in order to get you demoted?

That is what this computer technician experienced, but he ended up in a job that let them get some sweet revenge.

Get me fired? Say goodbye to your bonus and promotion

This happened a good long while ago.

I was in high school and got a job at one of the big box stores in the computer department.

This store chain had an in-house technician department, which was always where I wanted to go.

After busting my butt in sales for two years, putting up with rude customers, silly rules and all the other glorious trappings of retail job, I finally got a chance to be “promoted” to the technician department.

It was not as glamorous as I thought it would be.

I quickly found out that most of the “repairs” consisted of running the pre-packaged antivirus suite, updating Windows and doing data backups prior to wiping computers clean and reinstalling them.

I always liked tinkering with hardware more, but since 80% of customers had laptops and those repairs were deemed too complicated by corporate, we would just send the laptops out to get repaired by the third-party vendor.

It was still better than sales by a long shot, and we had a great team working in the technician area, except for one dude – let’s call him Mike.

There seems to be one like this in every company.

He always behaved like his crap smelled like roses.

He was technically a lead technician, and even though that just meant he had a little more authority (he had access to a corporate account to arrange shipments of computers to and from our store).

He was acting like he was the manager of the department.

Nevertheless, our actual manager was a splendid dude that took care of us and as such, Mike’s behavior did not bother any of us that much.

Fast forward a little and our awesome manager found a much better job – this opened up a spot for manager.

Since the whole store supervision was going through a shake-up (the general manager was fired for embezzlement and all the people he hired (90% of managers) were under review.

This lead to everybody trying their hardest not to mess up, and the new GM decided that since our department was one of the best in the district, he would not try to hire an outsider, but will promote from within.

Now Mike was working at this store for almost ten years at that point and a couple of people that started working with him as sales associates were by this point managers and assistant managers.

One of them, Brittney, was an assistant manager in charge of customer services and checkout.

One of the conditions for Mike’s official promotion to manager was to keep the #1 spot in the district performance-wise.

One of the key metrics was the rejection rate from our third-party vendor ( if we mistakenly sent them a software problem to fix, they would charge us extra).

Mike started obsessing about the numbers, especially when it came to the rejection rate – he insisted that we would spend extra time to confirm issues, even when there were recalls from manufacturers for these items.

I hated this bureaucracy, since it meant that people needed to wait almost the maximum allowed time to get their computers back.

So, a few times I skipped the extra diagnostics when I knew for sure the problem was hardware.

At least the GM stood up for him.

One day, Mike decided to do an audit on all outgoing machines and found out that I’ve sent four units skipping his “extra” checks.

He told me that he will write me up for it, but when he tried, GM told him that he is not a manager yet, and I have shown to the GM that I followed the corporate procedure in diagnosing these units.

I thought that was the end of this, but I was sorely mistaken.

Mike hated that I showed to GM that Mike’s procedure was inefficient and that he was denied power over me.

About a month later, I got a call from Mike asking if I could come to the store on my day off because there was an issue with a customer.

When I came in, I was greeted by Mike with an evil grin and he told me to wait in the back and not to work on any computers.

After about an hour, Mike and Brittney come in and ask me to head to the front office.

They started an official write-up process and claimed that I have made a mistake creating a backup of customer’s data and have placed a DVD with no data on it into the box that was returned to customer and then wiped his PC clean.

I knew that it was not true, since I always copy the data to an external hard drive, run antivirus to make sure that nothing bad got copied and then burn DVD’s.

Yet, when I asked to check the external hard drive, Mike said that due to my negligence I was not allowed back in the tech area.

He went to check the hard drive and said there was nothing on it.

At that point I knew he was lying, but him and Brittney were hell-bent on completing the write-up.

I have asked for a senior management to be present, and was shot down again – turns out GM was on vacation.

They completed the write-up and told me that due to the egregious error that cost the company tens of thousands of dollars I was not allowed to work in the tech room and I would be relegated back to the sales floor.

Good job standing up for yourself.

I told them to shove it and submitted my resignation on the spot.

I later found out that a week later they gave the customer the data that was on the hard drive all this time.

Mike simply erased the DVD’s (I grabbed a DVD-RW by mistake for that backup) and waited for the customer to come back and complain.

I have also called the corporate HR line and told them what happened.

They said that since I quit with a letter of resignation, they would not launch an investigation, but they have received and recorded my complaint.

Through luck and the fact that I was a good hardware tech, I landed a job at a shop that did hardware repairs a week later and started in another week.

Turns out, this depot was the service center that covered the entire district and they had the master contract with the big box chain where I worked.

Since I have worked as the tech in that store, I was more than familiar with their labeling and ticketing system.

For tracking purposes the label included the store and technician number.

After a couple of weeks, I gathered some goodwill at my new job and started trading the units with my colleagues to work on as many units from my old store as possible

Over the next three months, I made sure that every single unit sent in by Mike would come back with an extra charge.

Also, it turned out that Mike (since he was in charge of shipping) would sometimes steal other technician’s tickets to boost his personal performance numbers to secure that manager promotion.

Well, that bit him hard.

Oh, this is not going to go well for him.

There was one week in particular, when he sent in over 15 units out of 20 to get fixed and 15 units came back with extra software charge.

I have also kept detailed records that “proved” that the Mike did not follow his own policy of extra checks.

When the performance figures came out for that quarter, store crashed into fifth place from #1, Mike missed out on his promotion, and a BIG bonus that was promised to him.

A good buddy of mine from the store got the manager position a few months after that and I have explained to him how to reduce the number of “software” charges to almost zero – so he looked like a superstar.

Mike was first relocated to “lead technician”, then he was either let go or he quit – I’m not sure.

Last I heard he started his own mobile technician business that folded after a year.

What I didn’t know is that this whole incident with Mike messing up led the GM to review everything Mike did – including my write-up and dismissal.

Why am I not surprised?

As it turns out, they did not even register the write-up since I quit on the spot, and buried it.

The only way GM was able to find it is because of the HR complaint that was filed against both Mike and Brittney.

GM was not pleased that they went behind his back to get rid of someone and fired Brittney.

He was a very decent man who called me later that day and apologized and even offered me my old job back.

I thanked him but I was making more money at the new place and did not have to deal with customers, so I passed.

That guy really got himself, in the end.

Let’s see what the people in the comments think about this story.

He did everyone a favor.

Sadly, this type of thing is too common.

I hope he found out.

It is faster to reformat than to fix.

Yeah, the GM sounds like a good guy.

Karma almost always wins in the end.

You just have to give her some time.

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.