Self-righteous coworkers can be the worst kind to deal with, especially when they think they’re above the rules.

What would you do if your manager’s close friend treated you like you were beneath him, mocked your education, and hid behind religion to justify his behavior, only to turn out to be the one breaking the rules behind everyone’s back?

Would you confront him directly?

Or would you wait for karma to do its job?

In the following story, a man’s clothing store employee deals with this exact predicament.

Here’s how it all went down.

God sees you stealing from the cash register

During college, I had a part-time job in a men’s clothing store.

I’ve always been a good salesman, and I was doing a really good job with sales numbers.

We didn’t work on commission, but we got credit in the manager’s eyes if we were responsible for the most sales.

The assistant manager was a friend of his.

A young guy who went to the same church.

And when I say church, I should use the capital C: They were serious Born Agains.

We weren’t allowed to play rock music in the store (except for the Christian Rap music the assistant manager would bring in) because it would cause “un-Christian feelings.”

The two of them would periodically listen to a religious talk radio show that was pre Rush Limbaugh, but was in the same vein.

And they would listen to it over the store speakers.

The work wasn’t nearly as bad as the manager’s attitude.

But that was the price of doing business, I figured. I put up with it.

What I couldn’t put up with was the emotional bullying from the assistant manager.

He was younger than me, and figured because he was an assistant and I was a part-timer, that he was more successful than I was.

Plus, he seemed to resent that I was going to college and he wasn’t.

He made sure to mention it in a snide way whenever he could, things like, “I would have thought a college boy like you would know how to do this [ menial task ].”

Then, they find out that the money didn’t balance properly.

At the end of every night, we had to close out the cash register.

This was in the early 90s, so the cash register had to be manually balanced with the receipt tape, and then the amounts had to be sent to corporate via a dial-up connection we had in the office.

If we were off by a penny, we had to account for it by tracking down each transaction and determining if the balance difference was because of one sale or another.

Sometimes, if the manager was closing out, he’d make up any difference out of his own pocket.

The difference was never more than a few dollars, sometimes a 5.

And then, after a year of doing this, the difference in the bank deposits came to an amount that caught corporate’s eye, as the manager wasn’t always on shift and able to cover the difference.

Over the period of 12 months, a few hundred dollars had gone missing, in all very small amounts.

They set up cameras to find the thief.

So, without telling anyone, the corporate manager installed a security camera above the cash register.

A few days later, they fired the assistant manager.

The tape clearly showed him grabbing a 5 out of the cash register.

Presumably to go grab some lunch at the place across the hallway in the mall. He sure loved those noodles.

He should’ve chosen his words more carefully.

On the day before he was fired, we’d gotten into an argument out on the floor, in front of customers.

I forget what it was, but he didn’t approve of the non-Biblical manner in which I was living my life.

It could have been anything — I mean, I’ve always been a sinner.

The end result of the argument was him loudly proclaiming that GOD was ALWAYS watching me, and that I’ll receive JUDGMENT.

Perhaps God was the petty one, here. I still enjoyed hearing how he was caught.

Yikes! Those tables turned around quickly!

Let’s see how the readers over at Reddit feel about this story.

This person has opinions about Catholics.

Here’s someone who worked in a church.

Wow, what a viewpoint.

Here’s someone who just loves the story.

Karma has a way of catching up.

The funniest part is how confident the guy was in himself.

Glad he got caught pretty quickly.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.