When you do web stuff for clients, it can be a fun treat or it can be a chaotic, super stressful mess.

Guess which one applies to this story?

Imagine designing a website for a client, and they constantly want more and more changes. If they asked for something that would really mess up their website, would you do it as a form of revenge, or would you explain why that wouldn’t be a good idea?

Read on to find out what happens when you give the client what they ask for!

Changed the website back to the old default before quitting!

A few years back I was on my first Project Manager job.

I had a few bigger household name banks as my main accounts and then I was tasked with running the back-end of a website for a special client as I have some web design experience.

It was a total nightmare.

After about a year of working there, I had my bank accounts get signed on with another team and I was just left to work the website. I was tasked with taking everything from the old platform and to move it to a newer, more streamlined one but I would have to build everything manually as the two sites didn’t like to talk with each other.

After a few months of this I get it completed and set it off for review.

I get told by my manager that it looked great and set it live.

From then on my life became hell, I would get calls, texts and emails from the woman who runs the purchasing department and the one who used the site the most, as this website is just for internal purchasing for interior branding.

She has a list of thousands of things that are wrong, things that needed to be changed and things she wants taken down.

This was quite unexpected!

All this is news to us, all the descriptions, sizes, images, all came from the brand book and now she was personally rewriting everything so that it looked better for her on the site.

I did all of this with no issues. I had nothing else to do and this was busy work so i didn’t mind the work, it was the nonstop bothering by the purchasing woman.

If I didn’t answer my phone right away I would get a text, then if I did not respond to that right away I’d get another call and an email and maybe another text just saying, “Hello?”

I was getting these calls at all hours of the day, sometimes still up to 11:30 at night and I made it a point to never answer a single one after I left the office.

This was also stressing me out and building up anxiety every time my phone went off and my wife started to notice.

The drama continues…

I brought this up with my manager and she just said to keep doing what i was doing and respond while working but not after hours.

I eventually wrapped up all her updates and sent it off for review and got moved to a smaller project but it was at least not website work anymore.

After like a week of nothing from her, I get this massive list in all red emailed to me, my manager, my managers boss and the CEO of the company whose website I was working on.

I get told by big boss and CEO that I am to answer her calls no matter what time it is, her website is top priority and whatever she needs done is to be done ASAP.

Time to get out of there.

At this point I was already over the job, I found a better paying PM job that I am at now and was over the stress of just anticipating another call or text from her so I let them know that Friday was my last day, this was like Wednesday.

Instant panic, no one else knows how to work the site, two days is not enough time to train someone new and her updates need to go in now and she will have more over the weekend.

I just said not my issue, I can do what i can do in the two days, but Friday at lunch I was leaving for good.

They found some IT intern who said he had web development experience so I sat down with him on Thursday to go over the basics and he looked like I was speaking to him in binary.

I was able to dumb it down enough to show him the basics of how to edit the text, images and variants but that was about it.

Some time that night I got an email from the purchasing woman, another massive list of updates she demanded I change before I quit and then some digging about how I am screwing her over.

The dig rubbed me the wrong way, so I forwarded the email to my manager, her boss and the website CEO and then went to bed, hatching a plan for the morning.

Then finally a light at the end of the tunnel!

The very first sentence in her massive list of changes she wanted was to set the website to default so that she can edit things herself and not the IT guy I had just trained. Little did she know, setting it back to default sets literally everything back to default and will remove all my work.

Now I could have been nice and saved a copy of everything but I was done with her and was told already to do whatever she needed to be done so I did just that!

That was all I did that morning, I clicked “Are you sure?” like three times before the site went back to default and started cleaning out my laptop and desk.

I said my goodbyes to a few coworkers and left around 10:30 that morning.

It was maybe around 2:30-3 pm that I get a call on my cell from my now previous manager. She is freaking out that the site is completely empty and no one is able to get anything purchased.

Then the micromanaging did the opposite of paying off.

I let her know I was just following purchasing ladies orders to set it to default so she could edit it and also following big boss when he said to do whatever she needed done.

She let out a long sigh and said okay thanks and have a good one or something and hung up.

I heard from a friend who still worked there that purchasing lady blew up, demanded we fix the site and was going to sue me personally for making her do all this work now.

I guess they did not resign with that client this year and when I go to the site now, it still does not load properly so not sure how they are purchasing their interior branding!

She basically got revenge on herself by asking for something she didn’t really want to happen.

Here is what people are saying on Reddit.

Unfortunately clients like this are very common.

I freelance partly so I don’t get forced to work with bad clients, as I would in an agency.

She probably did, but didn’t think it would apply to her.

Maybe the default had fewer pages or something.

Still people don’t get this. No attention paid to cybersecurity or even SEO.

I can assure you clients like this person are real.

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.