In the world of corporate ladder climbing, it’s not always the best and the brightest who rise to the top.

At one company, a clueless boss tried to micromanage a $5 million project, overstepping her bounds with an experienced employee.

The petty revenge that followed caused a $5 million project to crash and burn.

You’ll want to read on for this one.

Bad boss revenge

After 3 years with the same company, they hired my 7th department manager.

She had no experience, but she had a degree, so obviously (sarcasm here) she’s SO SMART.

I was honestly not too concerned about her as I had a winning record and several major projects.

For a while, they didn’t cross paths too often.

While she was technically my boss, she handled different types of things than I did and we handled two sides of the same coin and created a seemingly decent partnership.

After about a year, she started coming at me all wrong. Her ego was presenting itself and I was not super thrilled about it.

Still, the employee was able to keep busy enough with her own work.

But, I was very busy. I had 2 major projects slated for delivery by June 1, to the tune of 5 million dollars worth of cost savings to be contributed to the bottom line.

She only had projects lined up to add approximately 2 million…

This queued up an new interest in “specifically, what was I doing.”

Suddenly, their paths started to cross more often – and she wasn’t happy about it.

She wanted me to report out to her on a weekly basis and summarize what I had completed as well as what steps were left to be completed.

Mind you, I had a regional project manager that I already met with bi-weekly for this specific report out discussion.

She wasn’t involved in the category that I worked, so she legitimately had no reason to need to know this info, but since she was my boss, she had the right.

Although, it was clear the work went way over the boss’ head.

Now I’m no dummy (she was though), so I sent her spreadsheets of lots of raw data.

Not the ones that I had sorted, filtered, added pivot tables to, added formulas or added v-lookups to.

She did not understand excel very well. I had to teach her how to do simple stuff, but not any of the more complex formulas.

I knew she didn’t know what she was looking at, but I also knew she wouldn’t admit that she didn’t understand it.

The employee started to take steps to protect their work from their prying boss.

I also unlinked my account from the sky drive.

No auto backups to the server.

I had a hard drive that I backed up to that went into my purse every day.

All I had left to do was pretty easy for me because I knew the operating system, but no one else knew the specifics about how to do it.

There may have been someone else who would be able to manage the steps, but none of those people were in my loop.

No one but me had enough specific, apples to apples details to complete the project.

As time went on, the rift between her and her boss grew larger and larger.

So as we get closer to the deadline (June 1), she is ramping up her aggressive attitude, and she’s riding me every day and I finally had enough.

Obviously she was baiting me, and I didn’t care enough anymore to play her stupid game.

Finally, the employee decided to go off on her boss, no matter the consequences.

So I told her to shut up, and I took my stuff and went home.

She went to HR and technically I was fired (although… I told her to shut up… so…).

But she wasn’t about to leave before exacting some petty revenge.

Here’s the petty part.

Before the end of that day, she already took all of my raw data that I had sent her, and told my assistant to explain it to her.

She sent it to someone for 3 different departments and begged everyone to explain it to her.

I got calls from colleagues that were trying to help (not knowing of the full situation) and asked me about my projects, and I told them all no.

The boss grew more and more desperate.

She threatened my assistant with her job if she couldn’t help, and I didn’t want my assistant to get into trouble, but, I’m sorry, I cannot explain.

So on May 5, less than 30 days from the faucet to be turned on for a $5 million project, the project died.

Now the boss was in a real pickle.

She had to explain to the executive suite that the project that had been on track for a year – that had monthly updates for a year, with an experienced project manager that had completed every single project for 4 years, that had exceeded expected results every single time prior – dropped dead with $0 of $5 million profit to the bottom line.

She left the company within 30 days.

Ultimately, she played herself.

And I still laugh every single time I think about it.

Looks like the manager was cursed by her own hubris.

What did Reddit think?

This commenter can’t believe something like this could be allowed to happen.

Bosses who just leech off their employees for their own benefit are the worst kind of bosses.

Turns out, playing games with someone else’s expertise is a losing strategy.

The project crashed just as hard as her credibility.

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.