Bad behavior in the workplace is too often tolerated — that is, until one brave soul finally speaks up.

One warehouse employee tried to quietly finish a routine inventory task when a notoriously belligerent engineer exploded on him in front of coworkers.

That outburst turned into a career-ending trip to HR’s office.

Keep reading for the full story!

He told me if I had a problem with him, I should bring it up to HR….. So I did

I work for a warehouse that specializes in computer equipment. It’s generally very uneventful, and everyone is mostly nice to each other — save for one unsavory engineer.

He had a reputation for being very belligerent and almost impossible to work with.

Most people decided to just avoid the guy.

But with a couple of months left until his retirement, people tended to leave him alone.

I knew he would be gone by summer, so I decided not to engage with him until then.

But one day, the engineer became impossible to ignore.

Cue this morning, when I went to the warehouse to do some small inventory.

Up comes the engineer, huffing and puffing.

Without any evidence, he started accusing me of messing around with some pallets he was working on.

The warehouse employee tried to stay calm and explain his side of the story.

Calmly, I explained that I did not, and that he could check the camera he installed in the warehouse to see that I did no such thing.

He kept insisting that I did, growing increasingly angry, and started cussing me out in a warehouse full of people.

The engineer seemed to just get madder and madder.

I did not waver and calmly insisted that he could just check the security footage he has access to. The cursing, however, kept coming.

At this point, I calmly told him to breathe because he was getting out of control.

That’s when it went from bad to worse.

Then things got even worse.

He started screaming and cussing even louder, saying that he is “50 years older than me” and that I could “not ******* tell him to do ****.”

I said nothing and watched as the engineer got redder and redder in the face.

Eventually, he yelled, “If you have a problem with how I act, bring it up to HR or the boss,” and stomped away.

So this warehouse employee decided to call his bluff!

So… I did just that.

I made a quick note of who was in the warehouse, noted the time, and asked three people to be witnesses to what happened.

I then went up to HR and poured out every exhaustive detail I could remember.

The employee gave HR more than enough details to work with.

I explained that I’ve been in enough companies to know that kind of treatment and verbal mistreatment borders on harassment, if not outright threatening behavior.

I also explained, very calmly, that I was not comfortable working in that environment and did not wish to escalate the situation further.

The employee insisted on a paper trail, and HR seemed to agree.

I simply wanted the incident documented and on record in case the engineer tried to twist the story to management.

HR said they would take care of it.

And turns out, they really did!

Two hours later, I found out the engineer was told to go home.

Less than twenty minutes after that, he had been made “permanently working from home.”

Finally, it seemed like this engineer was facing a reckoning for his behavior.

And less than twenty minutes after that, I learned that all of the engineer’s credentials had been revoked, his remote access to the company network disabled, and his day-to-day duties divided among other people.

His final project is now to write up his tasks and document how to do them.

With seven months left until his retirement, it’s not looking very good that he’ll be around until then.

Sounds like this engineer finally faced the consequences of his actions.

What did Reddit make of this story?

Sometimes you just have to call an entitled person’s bluff.

There’s a glaring red flag here others don’t seem to be mentioning.

This commenter doubts this was the first report this guy had against him.

He asked for HR, and this time, HR delivered.

If you liked that post, check out this story about a customer who insists that their credit card works, and finds out that isn’t the case.