When a job has multiple people working as equals without anyone truly in charge, it is not uncommon for one (or more) of them to try to exert dominance and take over.

What would you do if one of your coworkers was always criticizing the others and making their lives difficult?

That is what happened to the employee in this story, so she decided to expose her coworker for being a hypocrite. She found a sneaky way to make the coworker look like a fool in front of everyone. It was all too easy and too perfect.

Let’s read all about it.

Pedantic manager picks apart their own work

Backstory:

I worked for a high street retail chain that, in their infinite wisdom, ditched the store manager position and instead had 4 assistant managers running a store.

This led to intensive workplace politics as the more competitive staff kept trying to pull stuff to make out that they were the big dog despite the fact that we were all on the same level.

Spreading out the work so that nobody is overwhelmed seems to make sense.

Setting the scene:

Our area manager asked each of us to produce a weekly rotation, so that between us we would have a month’s worth of rotas prepared.

The most pedantic, least liked, and most determined to be the big dog assistant manager took this as their 9 billionth opportunity to try to pick apart our work to satisfy their superiority complex and criticise our work to make out like they were managing the managers.

Let’s see how she gets revenge.

Pretty sick of the constant unnecessary workplace politics I decided to bring them down a peg or two.

I found every excuse to delay producing my rotation schedule until I knew that everyone had finished doing theirs.

The pedantic assistant manager badgered me all week (again, trying to manage someone at the same level for extra superiority points).

This seems like a lot of work.

Cue the revenge:

On the last day before we were due to submit, all the assistant managers were in so I took the opportunity to make my own rotation from scratch.

Having finished it, I saved it then produced a second rotation to set a trap for my micromanaging colleague.

Why would this cause a problem?

Basically, I copy and pasted their rotation, so it was an exact replica of theirs. I then let the two other fed up assistant managers know what I’ve done so they can enjoy the imminent spectacle.

That lunch it came time for us all to compare rotations and with the usual predictability, have ours picked apart by our pettiest of colleagues.

They went first (to assert misplaced dominance). Everything seemed fine so we moved onto the next one. The next schedule came out and although it was perfectly fine, it was criticised left, right and centre by the usual culprit.

The next rotation came out and again, despite being a perfectly acceptable schedule, needed tweaking, critiquing and changing to meet our annoying colleague’s faux higher standards.

How is this not good enough? The bad manager’s stupidity is showing.

Finally, we come to “my” schedule. I open up the spreadsheet with the copied schedule, and lo and behold, it’s not good enough.

After a solid 5 minutes of them criticising their own schedule with my colleagues and I increasingly beaming as we feed off the pure Schadenfreude energy, I explain that I found it interesting that there are so many mistakes with mine when it is exactly the same as the first rota we all looked at.

This prompts our colleague to quickly flit back and forth between the two schedules going an increasingly obvious shade of beetroot before then feigning outrage that I just copied their work for which I’m going to get reported.

She can complain to herself because nobody else is going to listen.

At this point I highlight that won’t be necessary as I bring up my real rotation and then announce I’m going back to the shop floor.

My two grinning colleagues do the same, leaving the final petty assistant manager alone to fully soak in the petty revenge they have just been served with.

This would be too funny. It is so sad that some people, especially those new to management, feel the need to act like this. Why not just focus on doing a good job and not try to harm your coworkers? Sadly, this is unlikely to ever change.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an employee who figured out how to stop his manager from constantly stealing his phone charger.

Let’s see what the people in the comments on Reddit have to say about the story.

It would be funny to hear another manager complaining about the quality of training that he provided.

This management setup is a recipe for disaster.

This person went through something similar. It must have been very frustrating.

I bet the front-line workers really hated this way of making the schedules.

This commenter loved the story, and so did I.

If the work was done so badly, she only has herself to blame. I would have loved to be in that room to see how she reacted when she realized that she was criticizing her own work. It must have been priceless.