When you are at work there, will always be some people who you don’t get along with.

What would you do if one of those people was rude to you and called you lazy when you helped him with his job?

That’s what happened to the man in this story, so he adjusted his marketing strategy, which had serious consequences for his rude coworker.

Let’s see how the story plays out.

Call me lazy and question what I do at work all day? Enjoy the extra workload, buddy.

I work at a small company that primarily works in e-commerce as sort of a jack of all trades.

One of those roles includes me overseeing a lot of advertising budgets through a bunch of different mediums.

While I manage these passively on a daily basis, I dive into each of these platforms intensively on a month to month basis to see where we can be a little more effective.

That data along with sales also informs another aspect of my job, which is breaking down unit sales to give my boss a clearer picture when he places reorders.

Since we’re a company with only a handful of people and most have their own specialized roles, we work as a team in an environment that mostly leaves you mostly responsible for your own time.

If something lags behind, it is super obvious as to who is at fault.

The co-worker sounds irresponsible.

In my work with advertising and analytics, the situation is a little more opaque as there are ups and downs during weeks; and some of this is fulfilled through other parties. (Think FBA on Amazon)

My co-worker who works in logistics is, without a doubt, a solid gold twat.

He often drinks when he begins a shift – think a 40 or a tall boy (or two) – and it occasionally causes orders to be misplaced, wrong, or sent to the wrong address.

As a treat, sometimes the warehouse will smell faintly of stale beer.

I hate people like that.

On top of this, he’s entitled and confrontational because he’s the only one that does a “real man’s” job – i.e. not primarily computer based, and doesn’t like the fact that I have a flexible schedule wherein I can arrive/leave when I please – just so long as the work is done.

Because of this confluence of factors, we’ll go through phases where I don’t interact with him much – at all – over stretches of time that can go through months.

He’s kept around because it’s not easy to find someone who’s familiar with specific logistic platforms and can take over the job on day 1, and if it happened it would require me switching my job duties almost entirely to shipping to keep up with the demand.

Still, with the work required and in combination with the fact that a good chunk of this is third party fulfilled, he got to enjoy a decent amount of downtime, and there were days when an hour long phone call, or a two hour lunch, or coming in for a half-day wasn’t that uncommon.

He was not in the mood for the comments.

Earlier in the year, we had a semi-trailer full of product come in that I helped him unload along with the rest of the team – extra hands were welcome, but not entirely necessary.

But I came in on a day where I wasn’t in a great mood.

During the unloading, he chided me for being slow and told me to pick up the pace. “Put your back into it, bro.”

After years of snide comments like this and just being generally fed up with his attitude, I wasn’t having it today.

Me: “Sorry dude, I haven’t had my morning beers to give me that extra pep in my step.”

What a jerk.

Him: “What did you just say? You wanna go, bro?”

Me: “Just keep your comments to yourself or you can unload the trailer alone.”

Him: “You’re a disrespectful jerk, what the heck do you even do here all day locked up in your office? Lazy jerk.”

Lazy? Ohhhh boy.

At this point, my boss told us both to shut up and get back to work.

I threw on my headphones and quietly did the rest of the unload without incident.

It was time to make some changes.

But as I mulled over the exchange, I decided that this slight on me was going to be repaid, in full.

A few days later, I felt that it was time for a response, and decided to move up my reviewing processes for advertising.

As part of these duties, I can move a lot of money around.

And in fact, after a long review, I decided that we were just spending a little too much on third party fulfillment.

Maybe I can even scrape a few hundred extra dollars in sales and savings if I move a few more orders in house.

A new module I was working on that would drive sales to our website instead of focusing on other channels?

Let’s double the budget and finish that up a few weeks ahead of schedule!

This sounds like a great idea.

And, because I decided to let curiosity get the best of me, let’s move a few hundred dollars from an adequate but middling campaign that used 3P fulfillment and move that towards a different platform that would require us fulfilling the packages in-house.

I told my boss that I was going to be experimenting with the advertising budgets a little more than usual to see if I could get some extra business, and warned him sufficiently that it might result in losses or additional money burn to get the data I needed.

I have a stellar track record, so he was, of course, fine with it.

The experiment went into effect.

Over the next few weeks, this money was slowly moved over to ramp up the experiment.

At first, it resulted in a net of about 8 extra orders a day out of a typical day of 70 or 80.

A small profit margin was realized as while a few of these were new orders, some were simply moving the orders from 3P fulfillment to in-house.

Fast-forward to the present, months later, and the changes that I’ve made have been fully realized.

Wow, that’s a big jump.

There is now, on average, an additional 40 to 60 orders that my coworker now has to manually fulfill by himself due to the shift in advertising budgets.

On top of that, it has resulted in a not insignificant amount of money in both savings and profit due to the orders being fulfilled in-house.

My boss is pleased, and has signaled that a raise is possibly forthcoming.

Since the raise is currently unrealized, I’m enjoying my revenge in the meantime wholeheartedly.

That downtime I previously mentioned that he enjoyed?

That’s all gone, now.

One of the few metrics he has to deal with is getting orders out on time, or it will affect his pay.

He’s likely healthier now too.

As a result, beer time has all but disappeared because there just simply isn’t enough time in the day, and he now averages a 30 minute lunch break instead of the hour he was accustomed to.

Half-days are now a thing of the past.

He now complains fairly regularly to my other coworker that the work “just doesn’t stop”.

That’s a great way to enjoy revenge.

Far be it from me to gloat.

I haven’t said anything.

I’ll let the extra work gloat for me.

Don’t call me lazy.

Now that’s a win-win. The company makes more profit and this guy is too busy to cause trouble. Well played.

Let’s read what some of the people in the comments have to say.

He really deserves a raise.

This would be too funny.

This person likes how he didn’t mention it to his coworker.

The best revenge is when it benefits you too.

It was a great story.

Personal success plus revenge. Nice.

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.