Being framed must send your heart rate skyrocketing.

How did it happen?

Who did it and why?

If it’s someone you worked with, you have some cards to play.

Keep reading to see how one particular card was played.

When someone tried to get you fired, but you have a ‘reverse’ card.

This incident blew up in March 2021, in the middle of lockdowns and stuff.

It would probably be recognizable to people I work with.

It’s a story about someone who’s ambition was bigger than their ethics (and the law) and it coming back to bite them.

At the time, I was working as a manager in a mid sized business.

While I was there, I was assigned a new member to my team.

I’ll call her Evil.

Evil was in her mid twenties, and was pretty fresh out of college.

Underneath all that chatter was something sinister.

She was the kind of person who could talk your ear off about all of her ideas and plans and what she was working on, but never really seemed to have anything to show for it.

When I talked to her about clients complaining that she wasn’t getting back to them, she would always have an excuse about how difficult they were.

How snowed under she was and how she had written an email but it must’ve gotten lost in spam….

So on and so forth. Basically never her fault.

It got to the point where after one of our monthly meetings I called her in and explained that if she couldn’t get her tasks done she needed to let us know so we could help delegate resources to make sure things weren’t slipping through the cracks.

I’ll admit, I was pretty direct.

Her performance was impacting the whole team, and my job was literally to keep the team on track.

I get that people can be under pressure, that there can be stuff going on at home which impacts work and that sometimes people need a bit of help – but if every time I ask about a project you say “Yep, yep, everything’s good.

I’ve got it under control,” and then it all falls apart and your only response is to blame the client, we have a problem.

I explained that I wasn’t going to start formal performance management or anything like that.

From now on I’d like her to check in with me on Monday mornings for 10 minutes to go over objectives for the week and to check if she needed support with any of her clients.

I know it isn’t fun to be micromanaged, so I tried to keep these check ins short and mostly just offer assistance on stuff.

She clearly hated my guts though, and apparently was hatching her own ProRevenge.

Part of my role included use of a purchasing card, which wasn’t in my name but I had access to.

I was given the card to basically make small purchases for the office or spend up to $500.00 on clients.

The card was kept in an office I shared with another team manager, where we both could access it when we needed it.

Things are about to turn criminal.

One day I get a call from accounts asking about a few abnormal purchases on the card.

A photoshop subscription, a couple of Uber Eats orders, an HBO subscription etc.

I say I don’t know anything about them and they should check with the other team manager.

Apparently the other team manager didn’t know anything about them either, because after the weekend I get called into the big boss’s office.

After my colleague and I had denied involvement, accounts had started calling Adobe and Uber Eats and stuff to find out where the transactions were coming from.

They said that not only were the accounts in my name, they were registered to an email address with my name in it too: e.g word.roll3@ domain .com or something.

I can’t describe what it felt like to be in that meeting.

I felt physically sick.

I couldn’t work out what was happening.

I was so shocked I didn’t know what to say.

I felt like I was about to get fired and I couldn’t understand how that was even possible.

The director was going on about how access to the card was a privilege and that I had signed an agreement about appropriate use and so on and so forth.

I denied that I had been using it inappropriately, and the boss listened but I could tell he wasn’t that convinced.

To be honest, in my head I was gaslighting myself and worrying that I had somehow saved the card in Google and maybe my wife had been accidentally using it or something.

It was terrible, and I found myself apologizing and saying “I don’t know how this happened, I assure you that I know that none of those expenses are appropriate uses of company funds – there must have been some kind of mistake, can I please have the details and look into it.”

When I finally got out of that office, job in still intact (barely), Evil was waiting for me at my office door.

She was grinning from ear to ear and sweetly explained she had been waiting for our morning meeting.

I told her something had come up and we’d do the meeting tomorrow, and she said: “Oh will you be in tomorrow?” confused.

I just replied, “Yes, why would I not be in tomorrow?” and she just sipped her tea and said “Oh, no reason,” turned around and went back to her desk.

Something felt off, but I was still worrying about what had happened with the boss so I spent the next couple of hours calling my wife, calling adobe and doing the same leg work that accounts had done.

It became very obvious that someone had been using my name and the company card to spend a bunch of money online.

Had I been hacked or something?

Personal info on the dark web and these hackers just really wanted photoshop and Wendy’s delivered?

It was the Uber Eats that was her undoing.

After getting on the phone and talking through what had gone on, and obviously giving my name for the account and everything – the fellow on the phone told me where the food had been delivered.

It was in our city, which made me rule out straight away any notion of my data being sold online or something.

Now I was suspicious, and ticked.

I don’t like to think the worst of people, but now I was.

Listening to my gut, I pulled up Evil’s employee information and checked her address.

I pulled it up on Google Maps, dropped a pin on her place and then looked for the address UberEats had given me.

It was the corner of her effing block.

I was furious.

When she left work for the day I got IT to give me access to her laptop.

Sure enough, when I opened up her ‘domain’.com account under her listed accounts was word.roll3@ ‘domain’ .com

There were somethings she had been smart about.

The IP address she had been using was the office, which would have tied back to me.

She had even had the food delivered to a different address.

She had even made a fake email address.

And it led to her undoing.

But saving her passwords on a work computer was a mistake.

I called the boss that night and explained what I had found, and kept the IT guy with me to support the fact that I hadn’t just logged into her computer and made it all up.

The next day the boss called her into the office and fired her so bad there were red trucks lining up outside the building.

When she left his office teary eyed, I made sure I was standing in the hall sipping a cup of tea. It had gotten cold while I waited for her, but still tasted sweet.

I hope she went home that night because if she did she would have received some nice ‘good bye’ Wendy’s delivered by Uber Eats. Paid for on my personal card of course.

Revenge and justice can be the same thing right?

In the end she was fired.

The boss apologized and we were on good terms when I left in October for a new gig.

She never apologized and I haven’t seen her since.

The boss decided not to get police involved and neither did I, just didn’t want the hassle.

Here is what folks are saying.

Great description!

Most criminals are pretty dense.

Haha no don’t sacrifice his ratings.

I agree. This needs to be on record.

The audacity!

I am relieved for him.

I could feel the dread through his post.

If you liked that post, check out this story about a customer who insists that their credit card works, and finds out that isn’t the case.