As a boss, you have to try to hire the best people that you can, but sometimes those people just don’t work out.

What would you do if you had an employee who was always cutting corners and skipping work, but then when you fired him, he started using you as a reference for job applications?

That is what happened to the manager in this story, so he told the hiring managers that called the truth.

Let’s read all about it.

Revenge on ex-employee

This has been playing out for a little while, and the latest installment happened today.

The problem child:

Good pay for good work just makes sense for everyone.

I manage a retail store, one of many.

Our owners pay really, really well for the job that we have to do. They only ask that we do our jobs will while we are at work.

Easy. It takes a while to get up to speed with our systems, and that is all allowed for.

Some people always think they know a better way.

Then there’s Ezekiel. It isn’t his real name, but it kind of fits.

Ezekiel joined us a few months back, and after about 2 days, several of us started warning him not to take shortcuts on learning his job.

Ezekiel knew better, however.

He would skip steps with product warranties, and they would be rejected, which meant that someone else had to resubmit them correctly. He would neglect his allocated aisles, which brought focus on to me.

Why won’t he just do the job right?

So, I would read him the riot act, during which he would try to renegotiate his job.

He would lie to customers about product capability, in order to get a sale. We are not on commission at all, so we get paid whether we do $100 is sales, or $100,000.

We were done with him, and had planned to keep him on until mid January. Nobody likes to fire someone before Christmas, so we opted to hold off.

This is not going to go well for him.

Ezekiel decided that any small, tiny, minor setback was an excuse to not come in to work. He thought that he had hit on a magic secret to get paid for being absent.

However…

We had already decided that he would go. He had also run out of leave, but was now just coming in whenever he didn’t have an excuse to stay home.

So, we gave him one week’s notice of his dismissal. Unfortunately it was in early December, but we couldn’t clean up after this guy for another 5 weeks.

Well, I can’t blame him for working even less if he knew he would be fired.

His response was to do an even worse job than his usual low standard, and left us with even more time bombs in his paperwork than normal.

We have been finding this over the last couple of weeks.

Fortunately, the rest of my team is a solid and cohesive group, and we have understanding customers in our area.

Good, he shouldn’t get paid for not working.

On his last day, he left at 12pm via the loading dock, and didn’t have the decency to notify anyone that he was leaving early.

Fortunately we have cameras, and I manually clocked him out at the time he stepped through leading bay doors.

The revenge:

Wow, that is a bold move.

Without asking me, he had put me forward as a referee for all of the jobs he had been applying to.

I didn’t appreciate the mess he deliberately left, so I have been poisoning all of these opportunities, without directly defaming him.

I’ll give a lengthy pause… before explaining that it is difficult to answer a very simple yes/no question.

He has been telling these employers that he resigned. I explain that he was invited to leave.

Gee, I wonder why he won’t get the job.

Today, a recruiter rang me about a support worker traineeship he has applied for.

Unfortunately, it’s not looking good for him… Honestly, I think he struggles to support himself, let alone being responsible for the well-being of others!

For every question that these employers and recruiters ask, I give an answer that hopefully helps to save them the same grief that my team and I had to endure.

I can’t believe this guy thought it was a good idea to leave his old manager, who fired him, as a reference. It makes no sense.

Oh well, let’s take a look at what other people in the comments on Reddit think about this story.

This is just too funny.

The hiring manager would get the point.

LOL, here’s another great thing to say.

Yes, this is an important question to ask.

This seems about right.

He’ll never get a new job at this rate, and it is exactly what he deserves.

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.