When a company you work for is starting up a whole new service, it can be a great opportunity to get into it right from the beginning.

What would you do if you were a part of a new service, but your new boss was incompetent and couldn’t make it work properly?

That is what happened to the designer in this story, so he found a way to leave multiple bad reviews for the manager, which eventually led him to getting fired.

Check it out.

Micromanager forced to step down after mismanaging a new retail service.

Relevant background info first:

Several years ago I was working at one of the big hardware stores in my area.

It’s a household name and had some upward mobility with decent pay for the area.

I never really found a niche there after my first year and a half.

People like this are very valuable.

I learn quickly though, so they kind of made me a Swiss army employee.

I could work hardware, plumbing, mix paint, make keys, prepare contracts for installs and knew all the features and flaws of the appliance models we sold.

I was happy to do this because I was building a reputation as someone who could do everything.

Two years in, a new program was implemented that I was uniquely qualified to assist with.

They created a new position for me.

It was marketed as an all in one renovation/remodel service for interiors.

I was to assist the designer with product selection, product information, contracts and local marketing for this service.

Everyone involved was super excited about it.

Note: I was still only making $10 an hour in 2015 for this.

The problem was that because this was brand new, no one knew how it should work.

The designer basically had to figure it out for herself while I tried to catch her up with all of the store and product knowledge I had accumulated during my unique experience with the company.

Issues with the program:

1. It was way too expensive.
2. Product to be used HAD to come from one of our stores, which was limiting.
3. No one knew about it.

It was a rocky start.

Starting a new program like this can be difficult.

Coworkers would call me over to talk to customers if they mentioned working on a big project, but that’s all we had.

No completed jobs to reference or anything provided by corporate to get us running.

We made our own stuff.

I put together a video advertising the service and got the nod from management to use company card to purchase a TV and media player to roll the video on repeat.

We built vignettes in the store to showcase our design ability (I had been picking up a lot from the designer, so it ended up being a partnership in effect).

The micromanager:

Enter Devin the assistant manager.

He had actually been involved in the project from the beginning, and had been pretty supportive and brought good energy at first.

But I think he got fed up with issues that we couldn’t control (sloppy contactors refusing to fix things that they messed up, slow design process as customers worked out what they wanted and people just backing out after taking a bunch of our time when they see the price).

This sounds expensive.

We were, on average, charging $3k more for a small bathroom remodel on labor alone.

Consulting and design fees were also worked into the final cost.

The product was discounted to basically being tax free, but as I mentioned, options were limited to products the company sold.

It was just too expensive to make many sales on the poorer side of town, where almost everyone knows some kind of contractor or tradesman with connections.

It wasn’t a good market for this program, but we did manage to start hitting (and exceeding) our numbers.

#7 in the region for the brand new program was not bad.

And just when we finally started getting some business and a rhythm around 8 months in, Devin decided that it was not working fast enough for him.

Obviously the designer was to blame since he had no authority over the contractors or setting prices.

She didn’t know what she was doing and he was “going to make some changes.”

He honestly didn’t do much besides hover, bring bad energy and make terrible suggestions.

He didn’t understand the scope of what we had to do to get a customer out the door and happy.

He forced us to cut corners and get the sale as quickly as possible without concern for liability (for basically destroying a room in someone’s home to remake it) or what was realistic in terms of timelines.

Customers felt rushed and got nervous.

They backed out.

We came to a standstill.

We would only have two or three designs in progress at a time, but suddenly after working our butts off building the program, we had no customers for the first time in 6 months.

Obviously Devin was not subjecting us to his authority hard enough.

So he went harder, and fired the designer.

I lost my patience.

Justice (or injustice idk)

I’m a chill dude, but I had been working my butt off for this company, making peanuts on the promise that I was working towards something.

I endured working for the incompetent managers that got their positions because they started working there at 18 and made it their life.

The toxic alpha male “I will lead, you will follow” attitude was too much.

Standing up for yourself is important.

So, I started bullying him back, making fun of him in a teasing way where he couldn’t really react without looking bad or losing control.

I did that for a while and he left me alone to run the program in the interim since I was the only option.

The designer and I had become friends though, so I was still mad about how it went down.

I wasn’t finished yet, but I didn’t know what to do.

Eventually they got another designer and Devin had me moved back to what I had been doing before.

Passed over for several promotions that I was more than qualified for (the market had been flooded with long time employees that were being moved around).

Bad luck, but I was done with the place.

One day we were sent an email link to an anonymous manager review survey.

The store computers were set up with an always on and logged in user profile, so I wrote down the link and verified with a coworker that they weren’t unique.

In every department I visited that day, I wrote a review for Devin.

All different ratings, some good, some bad, but I made the good ones so that they sounded bad, but as if I didn’t know it was bad.

I did that maybe 10 times.

It wasn’t character assassination or anything, just opinion based stuff with some vague examples so no one could figure out it was me.

I didn’t lie either, I just said what people don’t usually say out loud.

He would barely look at anyone after that.

A couple of weeks later he resigned his position as assistant manager and took an exterior design position at the other end of the store, as far away from the departments he had been over before.

Basically the same thing as what we had done with interiors, but he was in the designers shoes.

Good, about time.

I left a couple of months later to work tech support for DHS, but while I was still in training for that, my friends from the store told me he had gotten fired.

Maybe he learned something?

He should at least have learned how my designer friend felt.

They were both fired at Christmas.

Hopefully he learned his lesson, but I very much doubt it.

Read on to see what the people in the comments have to say.

That would have been too funny.

This would have been a great idea.

Good point, he got paid for this.

Micro-managers are the worst.

I’m wondering about her too.

It was a simple revenge, but effective.

And, I’m sure, satisfying.

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.