Sometimes people at work think that they have more authority than they really do.

What would you do if someone from a different department threatened to fire your employee if they didn’t do what he asked?

That is what happened to the IT manager in this story, so he manipulated him to getting himself fired so he got a severance and ensuring the other manager got let go so nobody else had to deal with him.

Details are below.

Don’t fire people who don’t work for you

I had taken over running a small development team of 9 for a relatively big company.

Seems like a simple enough job.

We were there for basic, quick little bits of software that wouldn’t make sense to outsource (webapps that quiz employees on policy, fancy interactive projects to show off at conferences or just an extra pretty PowerPoint etc.).

The guy I took over from ran the team like we lived in the 1980’s, so I brought us into the modern age and surprise surprise, within a few weeks our team was finishing projects left, right, and center.

(I won’t go into it here but if any tech nerds are interested on how bad it was I’ll reply to any comments).

It sounds like everyone is very happy.

Everything was going great, my coworkers could take smoke breaks and listen to music, our internal clients where kept up to date with their projects and my boss thought I was some kind of software prodigy as productivity had gone through the roof.

Honestly this was more indicative of how bad it was before rather than anything I did.

Then comes Richard. Now you know Richard, you probably have a Richard at your office.

They’ve been there too long to fire and delight in slapping people in the face with their seniority, regardless of whether or not they have anything to do with you.

Some people think everything they want is ‘critical.’

First he sends us a project and marks it Critical, as in “Everyone stop what your doing know this needs to be done yesterday.

I politely send him a message and ask him if I can move it down to medium priority as there was little to no time limit and we had other projects to deal with.

He replies “No, it needs to be done now. Get to it.”

I’d like to remind everyone that he is not my boss and has no authority over me or my team.

So I CC my boss and the other department heads who we had projects for at the time.

He’s just following policy and notifying everyone who will be impacted.

“Hi all, hope your enjoying you day. Richard has asked me to work on this project for his department, however he wants it to be done now which would delay your projects. Would that be ok with everyone.”

Turns out that’s a no and I downgrade his project.

Now Richard starts to live up to his namesake.

A week or two later I check our Trello (task management software) and notice Shia (fantastic programmer, great person) was falling a bit behind.

I go to ask her what’s up and she looks like she’s about to have a panic attack, I ask her what’s wrong and it turns out Richard had threatened TO FIRE HER if she didn’t start working on his project immediately.

She has nothing to worry about.

I calm her down, let her take a break, tell her to start working on her regular projects and to send Richard to me if he gets uppity.

I then fire off an email to Richard and my boss reminding him that:

1. Any threats of termination need to go through me and HR first
2. Who works on what projects and when is determined by our schedule and myself
3. If a projects deadline is moved up I should be informed directly not via my team

Threatening someone’s job is no joke.

Turns out Richard is infamous for making threats like this but because nobody took them seriously I was the first to remind him he had no authority over other departments.

I didn’t find out until later but apparently he had a melt down at the boss about how incredibly disrespectful I was.

He tried to file a formal complaint but it was rejected because doing my job properly isn’t actually a problem.

Who knew?

A new job is always exciting.

At this time I accepted a better job and was going to put in my notice.

But I wanted to wait until after our latest project (Let’s call it the ninja report) was done as it was a big deal for my team.

This ninja report was part of a presentation by a company big wig (bosses bosses boss), and was marked critical so all of us were working hard to make sure we did a good job and got it in on time.

Now finally we get to the revenge.

This guy is just not letting it go.

I’m plugging in a switch under the desk when someone taps me hard on the shoulder, “Just a minute mate.

I stand up and stare directly into the red face of Richard ready to release his rage all over the office.

“I’M NOT YOUR MATE, YOU NEED TO LEARN YOUR PLACE IN THIS COMPANY BLAH BLAH BLAH”.

As this grown man is screaming at me in full view of my team it suddenly dawns on me that I get severance, have another job lined up and really have no reason to deal with this.

“I WANT MY PROJECT DONE NOW!!!!!” he continues to yell.

He played him like a fiddle.

Now I could’ve told him about the ninja report, I could’ve said a lot of things but I just smiled, looked him in the eyes and said “As long as I’m working here the schedule isn’t changing.”

Predictably Richard responds “THEN YOU’RE FIRED”.

I grab my things and leave.

As I’m leaving one of my team comes up looking like a deer in the headlights and asks what they should do.

Easy, “First I want everyone except you to stop working on the ninja report, second at the end of the day send an email to the boss and the bigwig, let them know what happened at explain that that Ninja Report is going to be a week late, See you all for drinks Friday!”

This call will be fun.

I wake up bleary eyed the next day to a call.

Me: “Hello?”

Boss: “Hi look I’m sorry about what Richard said. He doesn’t actually have the authority to fire you and the ninja report can’t be late, we need to fix this!”

Sorry boss, he doesn’t work there anymore.

Me: “Ohh I’m sorry I’ve actually accepted another job, but don’t worry I figured this would happen. I asked one of my team to work on it privately. If they start working on the ninja report again should be able to get it done on time”.

My boss tries to get me to come back but I made it clear that wasn’t going to happen. Recommended one of my team take my job and thank him for the opportunity.

He’s pretty cool about it, confirms I’ll be getting severance and tells me he can use my as a reference.

Everyone is ready to celebrate.

Friday drinks roll around and we have a lot to celebrate.

The ninja report was done on time and given everything that happened it made my team look great.

I got a new job, team mate got a promotion and big wig was really eager to learn why his subordinates subordinates subordinate fired the lead of the team he picked himself and nearly tanked the project.

I’m proud to report that the office is now 100% Richard free.

Some people think that they are way more important than they really are, and they hate it when they are put in their place.

I’m sure the people in the comments will have a lot to say about this, let’s check it out.

It happens so often.

This is a good position to be in.

Do your job well and look out for yourself.

I didn’t really get that part either.

This is a good way to sum it up.

He thought he was untouchable, but he finally crossed a line.

Good for this guy for calling him on it.

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.