Bad bosses have a way of making their problems everyone else’s.

So when one competent employee was pushed to the edge by a power hungry manager who insisted on making her life a nightmare, she finally called it quits.

But after she left, the boss soon realized she wasn’t near as replaceable as he thought.

Keep reading for the full story.

“Think About if you want to be employed here” Will do boss!

I worked for Target on their overnight team, 10PM to 6:30AM. Eventually, a “specialist” position came up, for which I applied and was granted.

This was the position of Receiver (scheduled to work 6AM to 2:30PM), which basically meant I was the person who would take in vendor orders — not things sent straight from corporate, but the Coca-Cola guy, the Lay’s potato chip guy, etc. — and specialty orders that came in at times other than the main truck.

The employee described their day-to-day assignments.

This was a job where instead of one major task, you dealt with about 20 minor ones throughout the day, and your day varied based on the whims of the people bringing things in to you.

The bosses were always willing to bend the rules when it suited them.

We had a delivery cutoff of 12PM, but management would always say to just take things no matter when they came.

This retail worker considered herself good at her job.

I was generally really good at managing my time, making sure that if I needed to stay late for something important I did, and if it was something minor (say, the Harlequin romance books that could wait overnight to process) I’d get it first thing in the morning.

I had a good rapport with my boss and got great reviews.

So when a new boss came along, the next one wasn’t nearly as good.

Then my boss got a promotion, and my new boss was a piece of work.

The new boss (we can call him John, because that was his name) was a tyrant of the pettiest type.

This boss didn’t seem to understand how the day-to-day operations worked.

He’d wonder why things were left overnight when he saw me not busy earlier in the day — because I’d completed all my tasks and couldn’t make UPS come faster than they do.

When Target’s corporate told my department it was busy enough for a 20-hour-a-week worker, he refused to let me get anyone for longer than my 30-minute lunch breaks.

But that wasn’t the worst of it.

The straw that broke my back was PFresh.

For those of you who didn’t work at Target in the early 2000s, PFresh was what they called their new initiative to have groceries in the stores. It was a big deal for them, and my store was one of the pilot stores in our area.

This was a big deal, and a lot of pressure soon fell to this employee.

I would be the first person to have to deal with it, and then I would have to teach receivers in the area how it worked by having them shadow me for a day at my store, and me at theirs when they got their fresh food.

The fresh food came in a separate truck that arrived at 4AM. I expected, like I was informed, that I would simply have to process it first thing in the morning when I got to work.

But then John had to go and ruin everything.

Instead, John decided my schedule was going to be changed to 4AM to 12:30PM. Getting up at 3AM to be at work at 4AM was not fun, but I dealt with it because I was a team player.

However, John still insisted I needed all of my work done by the time I left at 12:30PM — an impossibility when the cutoff for deliveries was 12PM.

Still, this retail worker tried to make the best of it.

I still prioritized things as best I could, and nothing urgent was left undone for more than 24 hours. Target was pretty good at making sure we had plenty of time to receive things before they had to hit the floor for street dates and such.

But when the store became even more short staffed, things got even worse.

The next straw was when the “specialist” position was terminated. Basically, Target wanted those special positions in the normal chain of command, which is fine.

However, when they did this, they also gave a lot of power to John.

Then HR got involved.

In my old position I had weekends off (because people don’t deliver on weekends) and was not required to work holidays, along with having a guaranteed 40-hour-a-week Monday through Friday position.

When this change came through, HR informed us that we had a week to decide whether we wanted the position, wanted to go to another position in the company, or wanted severance.

HR informed me that nothing would really be changing with my job, because it was still important — whereas other jobs like the jewelry counter weren’t considered as important and were being rolled in with other things.

But then John began meddling again.

I was going to stay with the position until John brought me into the office later that day.

He told me he was tired of my poor attitude involving getting things done, so he was changing my schedule to a split shift.

This new shift was just awful.

Basically, he wanted me to come in from 4 to 5AM, then go home for an hour, then come back at 6AM and work until 1:30PM.

He also told me that any overtime would no longer be allowed, and that I’d have to start working one weekend a month and holidays.

John seemed to seriously have it out for her at this point.

He also wrote me up for something that I did not do, but that the person who covered my lunches did, under the guise of me not training them properly.

His words were: “You need to think long and hard about how you are working, and think about whether you want to be employed here in a month.”

So if John wanted her to think, that’s exactly what she was going to do.

I told him he was absolutely right. I told him I would be right back — I had to run to the restroom.

Instead, I went to HR and told them I was taking the severance, and as it was 12:25PM, I was guessing this was my last day.

Then she let John know.

I then got to go back to John and tell him exactly that.

He told me I had to come back next week to train my replacement.

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I walked out of that building happier than I had been in the last three years working there.

After she left, the store fell into complete disarray.

I got texts over the next few months about the fallout. The receiving department was a nightmare for months, and since I was the only one who knew how to handle their refrigerated trucks, they lost an entire truck’s worth of merchandise that week.

That was not a good look for them.

Turns out, she wasn’t nearly as easy to replace as John thought.

Additionally, corporate had to send out people from out of the area to cover all of the training I was supposed to provide, which cost them a lot of money and made corporate even more upset with John.

John didn’t last much longer at that company.

Last I heard, he had been let go, and the next place he worked fired him for harassment.

I had a month’s vacation where I got totally prepared for WoW: Cataclysm, and then I took a new job.

I was happy as a clam.

Sounds like John got what he deserved in the end.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an employee who rejects a low contract offer and leaves the company instead.

What did Reddit think?

This user shares a familiar adage that sums up this story well.

This commenter also has beef with this popular retailer.

It’s possible John was straight up breaking the law.

John also didn’t seem to understand how severance worked.

The boss told her to think hard about her future at the company, so she decided she wanted to be nowhere near it!

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a mom who homeschooled during the day and worked at night, only to have her employer try to change her schedule.