When it’s one person’s word against another person’s word, it’s really great if you can find any proof possible that the person who is lying is in fact lying.

In today’s story, one woman makes harassment claims against her manager.

The claims aren’t true, but it takes quite awhile to prove that she lied.

Let’s see how the story plays out.

Claim harassment against me? Get fired.

At one point, I was managing a small team of business development reps at a small software company.

These are the recent grads that would be phone monkeys, making cold calls trying to set-up appointments for the real sales people.

I had two reps at the time: Amy and Paul. They were young, but hungry. They listened to training, and were generally great employees.

At one point, Paul and I realized that we had some mutual friends, and that helped our relationship.

Amy made some crazy claims.

Fast forward a few months from their hiring, and my boss grabs me one morning for a meeting with HR.

Apparently, Amy had filed a harassment complaint against me, alleging some crazy things. She reported that my single goal was to ruin her career, and that I would make sure she was fired.

The HR meeting was a formality, as no one believed it, but they had to do the investigation.

Nothing came from it, but I would never be alone in a room with Amy again. If she came to talk to me with no one around, I would go to a common area of the office or invite someone into the discussion.

Paul was looking for another job.

A few more months, and Paul asked me to be a reference.

The company was a mess, and the CEO was running it into the ground.

I was more than happy to do it, as I was job hunting myself. I just asked that he keep me in the loop about interviews and offers, and I would cover his time out of the office.

Not surprisingly, he landed a job pretty quick and gave his notice to me.

He needed IT’s help.

Also at this time, IT was doing hardware upgrades to laptops adding more RAM, allowing us to run the latest version of our product for demos.

I coordinated with IT to have both their machines done one day, and told them to take a long lunch.

Well, a little over a year before this happened, one VP had been fired.

After he left, I learned it was common practice for IT to review all the Skype chat logs from the machine.

Luckily, it meant me getting a small bonus because the VP was trashing the company to me, but I wasn’t, and I was vaguely praising the CEO (I’m no dummy, and don’t have those conversations over channels that can be reviewed.)

With Paul out the door, and Amy being a liar, I asked IT to review their Skype logs during the upgrade, because “something seemed fishy”.

Amy really messed up by chatting with Paul.

I was right.

Even though Amy deleted her chat logs, Paul didn’t.

There were chats in there about how they were both job searching, and Amy had gotten an admin password for our CRM. She had been pulling customer lists to take with her.

Furthermore, she had been bragging about receiving a $1,500 bonus to drop the harassment complaint against me, as the CEO was worried that any complaints or lawsuits would scare away the investors needed to keep the company going.

Oh, and she chatted that “They made me sign a non-disclosure about it, but they won’t find out.”

Oh, she was toast.

Time to talk to HR.

Director of IT and I went straight to HR and the CEO with the print outs.

The decision was quick: both were to be terminated immediately. Amy for unauthorized access of data and breach of her non-disclosure, and Paul for some nonsense reason of not reporting her.

They got back from their lunch, and I immediately called them into HR.

The situation for Paul was very different than the situation for Amy.

Paul was given a 2-weeks severance, but Amy needed to pay back her $1,500 “hush” bonus.

Because of her gross misconduct, she wasn’t eligible for severance or unemployment, and the re-payment was deducted from her final check and quarterly bonus.

Her exit check was for less than $10.

Paul had two weeks off, with the severance. We remain connected, but I love seeing Amy changing jobs on LinkedIn every 6-9 months.

It was nice of him to help Paul out like that.

If he had quit, he wouldn’t have gotten any payout. As for Amy, she got what she deserved too!

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

This person likes how the story played out.

This person definitely thinks this story fits pro revenge.

Timing was perfect for this guy’s coworker.

Amy definitely got what she deserved.

This is a good question.

Lying will not work in your favor.

Most of the time.

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.