Constant criticism from a bad boss tends to motivate a little creative mutiny.

When an employee couldn’t take another round of petty formatting feedback from his boss, he raided the network drive for his manager’s old templates and submitted them as his own.

Her reaction was well worth the wait.

Keep reading for the full story!

Boss always found an error with my monthly reports and cover letters, so I used her old ones and watched her rip them apart.

19 years ago, when I worked for State Street Bank, I had just started working for one of the worst human beings, Paula.

The team was a mini project team tackling complex financial operation problems with high SVP visibility — that’s how it was sold to me.

But the job was actually much different.

In reality it was a mushroom farm, with Paula keeping you in the dark and feeding you nonsense.

All I did was compile reports and gather data from people who were terrified of my team.

Needless to say, I was bait and switched and was looking to get out shortly after I got there.

The employee describes one of Paula’s worst habits.

She had a habit of always criticizing your work to heck with the stupidest things.

One of the reports I was responsible for was a weekly update on certain oil warrants out of Nigeria.

To those that do not know, a warrant is an agreement to buy a commodity at a specific price, regardless of what the current value is.

The reason being there was an option to buy at $30 per barrel when prices peaked at $90 per barrel.

We had no idea if the holder knew about this or not, but we had to monitor and report because the liability and loss would have been massive.

Paula would pick out the most minute details to criticize.

Any who, week after week after week after week Paula would review and rip me a new one over the format, verbiage and every stupid thing not related to the actual numbers being right. Total ticky tack stuff.

One day I was going through the network files and stumbled across an old folder for a similar project. It was Paula’s handiwork before they gave her a team to manage.

So the employee did their best to do what Paula said, but it still wasn’t enough.

So, I decided to use her format for everything, even changing the report structure to look just like hers and using her cover letter language.

I brought it to her office to review and sign off, and she absolutely lost it.

Turns out, this was the wrong move in Paula’s eyes.

She asked what happened to the old format. I told her since she didn’t seem to like what I had been doing I thought it best to change it around.

She said that this was worse than before, probably the worst I submitted to her. She went on and on for what seemed like forever.

I just looked at her and didn’t interrupt with a blank look.

Her last question to me was what I was thinking when I made these changes.

So the employee tries to explain themselves.

I told her that I used the formatting and language she used when she was doing a similar report a few years back.

That I found the folder online and used her past work verbatim, just with the numbers and relevant information changed.

I gave her printouts of her reports and letters to compare.

She just looked at me and had this dumbstruck look on her face. I asked if this was bad should I go back to my format then?

Of course, Paula wouldn’t give a straightforward answer.

She just signed off on the reports and said to send them as is.

I just wanted to confirm that they were fine to send because less than a minute ago she said it was basically unreadable.

She said they were fine as is and we didn’t have time to redo them. So, I sent them out.

I was smart enough to find and save all of her old work, for example, to use.

But Paula wouldn’t make it easy.

I noticed that she went through and deleted/moved the older folders after I encountered because I expected her to.

This cat and mouse game went on for the remainder of my time there.

I would use her templates/past work and wait for her to tear it apart.

After a few more times, she eventually figured out I grabbed all of them.

Luckily, the employee didn’t have to put up with Paula’s nonsense much longer.

She asked and I told her I created SOPs using all of her past work and had it saved locally. It seemed like a logical thing to do.

I was able to quit a few months later.

Forget you, Paula.

Talk about a micromanager!

What did Reddit have to say?

Some bad bosses are way too narcissistic for their own good.

A bad first impression is pretty much the worst thing that can happen when you work for a toxic boss.

Sometimes the only way to feel better is to out-succeed someone who always doubted you.

This user would have gone even more lethal with their revenge.

Turns out her standards only applied to other people’s work.

If you enjoyed this post, check out this story about a woman who had her manager fired after being forced to work for 24 hours straight.