Looking for a job basically is a job except it’s a job that doesn’t pay. Obviously you don’t get paid for an interview, but if the hiring process involves hours or even days of actual work, you’d think you’d get paid for that even if the job doesn’t work out.

In today’s story, one job hunter is told he needs to work for the company for two days in order to know if he’s a good fit of the company or not. He’s told he’ll get paid for the work even if he’s not hired.

Let’s see how he gets revenge when the company refuses to pay him…

Revenge is dish served very very very very cold

In my young 20’s I moved to a new city to try start my career and life.

Money was VERY tight but I was confident I would get things up and running.

In my job search I came across a promising opportunity at a small firm (The Firm).

Instead of offering me the job the owner (The Owner) said he would like me to come in for two days and work. If it was fit they would hire me, and if not they would pay for the two days.

The job didn’t work out.

Money was so tight at the time that, I figured taking the bus to and from the job was a luxury I could not afford and walked an hour each way to get there.

Money was very tight!

I did good work both the days and worked very hard, but it was not a fit.

OP planned to get revenge…eventually.

The Owner then tells me “I know we said we would pay you, but it just too complicated to set you up for just two days, so you will just have to be happy you got the experience with us.”

The way he acted really rubbed me the wrong way.

I was mad as I really needed the money, but as I was trying to find a job and I figured it was not in my best interest to make waves as word may get around I was ‘difficult’.

I did however decide that some day, some way I would get my revenge on the owner.

OP’s career took off.

I did find a good job that lead to great career. But I always kept tabs on the owner looking for the time and place to get some revenge and even a few times considered some more juvenile methods.

Just short of twenty years passed….and now I was very senior in my chosen professional, but instead of working for a small firm, I was a leader in a very large national company that hired firms.

As it turns out we had a large contract come up that I was the lead executive on the procurement team in the area The Firm operated in.

The Owner of the company that didn’t hire OP put in a bid.

Things have changed a bit over the years but bidding on these contracts was at the firms expense at the time back in the early 2000’s.

However to safeguard them from wasting too much money, the bidding would be in stages.

Well sure enough The Owner and his firm put in an exploratory bid.

They were not perfect for the job, but they could actually do it, so I assisted in them moving to the next stage, and the next stage and then the final stage.

OP’s company went with another bid.

The easiest thing I could have done was shut them down right away and got a bit of revenge, but they were qualified so I did not do that.

There was some risk to letting them go through to the end though. Though I was the lead, it was a team decision and to be honest, if they had the best proposal despite my thirst for revenge I would vote for them.

The proposals and presentation came in and luckily the other firm was a bit better and we went with them.

Normally the executive lead didn’t deliver the bad news in the bid process, but I volunteered to take on the call and that was my little dose of revenge.

OP considered the extra work The Firm did to be good enough revenge.

It was fun to call The Owner (who had no idea we met 20 years ago) and tell him “we were impressed with your proposal, but it is just not the right fit. I know you must be disappointed to not get the contract, but at least you got great exposure to our process.”

(I know I should have used his own words from 20 years ago but I could not bring myself to do it).

The Firm must of done about 200 hours of work on their proposal, so I figured that was payback for my 16 hours with 20 years of interest.

It would’ve been better revenge if The Owner realized who OP was.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story…

Here’s the moral of the story…

This reader understands what the revenge cost The Firm.

This wouldn’t been a great thing to tell The Owner…

Maybe it wasn’t revenge at all.

If only the owner knew it was revenge!

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.