It’s funny how some people love to point out your mistakes, but when it’s theirs… that’s a whole other story.

So, what would you do if a coworker spent years emailing every tiny mistake you made to your supervisor and then suddenly, years later, you had the chance to turn the tables on the person?

Would you let it go because it’s in the past? Or would you capture the moment and bask in it?

In the following story, one woman finds herself in this exact situation and decides to see how it feels to turn it around.

Here’s what she did.

Thought we always cc’ed the boss on mistakes

I worked on a team with Rosie years ago. Rosie was the kind of person who wasn’t all that smart but had done the job for a long time.

She was happy to dodge any position that would give her responsibility and elated to be able to catch anyone making a mistake, no matter how small.

Every single mistake that came to Rosie’s attention generated an email to the person who made it, with the supervisor cc’d. Things like typos, spreadsheets that didn’t contain all the fields she thought should be given (even when there was no data for those fields). It was annoying, but the sup put up with it.

Then she got to turn it all around on Rosie.

I moved on to another team and was shocked to see Rosie’s name come up years later. The team she worked on was low on work, so she was assigned data entry for my current team when she finished her tasks. The work on the current team is a lot of manual input of names, dates, dollar amounts, etc.

Usually, when I see an error, I figure that everyone is human and just fix it and move on with my day.

Well, unless it’s Rosie’s error. Then I emailed Rosie a screenshot of the mistake and a detailed explanation of why it was wrong. I let her know that I’ll fix it and just wanted to bring it to her attention. I always make sure to cc her sup on it.

Is Rosie happy? Probably not, but hey, she’s the one who let me know years ago that we always cc the boss on mistakes.

Nice! That must’ve felt so good!

Let’s check out what the folks over at Reddit think about what happened.

Good point.

Some managers would’ve stopped it.

Here’s someone who dealt with something similar.

According to this comment, they have a Rosie.

It’s not every day that happens. After so many years, she probably never thought that day would come.

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.