In this day and age, almost no one gets a job expecting to work there until the day they retire, pension in hand.

That said, most of us do expect to work a job where people respect you, they make hires that make sense for the company, and in general, you’re happy with your treatment.

OP’s friend was a solid IT professional who worked hard.

My friend we shall call Steve worked for a company for over ten years as there IT manager (in charge of the whole system) he had worked his way up from lowly desktop support right to the very top.

He was also very into doing everything by the book and within the law. No underhanded shenanigans!

He was passed over for a promotion in favor of an inexperienced family member.

The company had recently gone public and as such needed a director of IT.

Steve applied and was pretty much a shoo-in until he was told the New CEO had overruled HR and hired someone else (the nepotism).

He shrugged and said “well at least they will take away most of my paperwork allowing me to do more work” oh how wrong he was.

Not only that, but the new boss had no desire to learn and made OP’s friend’s job harder than necessary.

When the new IT Director arrived (let’s call him Tom) arrived he basically kicked Steve out of his office and into a desk in the main office and did nothing except moan about.

Steve found out it was the CEO’s nephew.

Fast forward 3 months and Steve is pretty much burned out. The nephew had fired his two very capable assistants and replaced them with buddies who did nothing.

Leaving Steve to look after around 400 PC’s plus associated servers and network equipment all by himself.

He was getting fed up.

All the while the Tom kept ordering him to do weird things like reinstall windows all on PC’s or order him a gaming rig for the office.

In one case go to his house to set up a home network. The final straw came when Tom had got the CEO to cancel Steve’s bonus for “not meeting all requests made of him”.

Meanwhile he buddies (Richard and Harry) got massive bonuses and rewards for their “hard work picking up the slack”

So, he decided to quit – but not without a plan for his revenge.

Steve decided at this point to start looking for a new role

It just so happened he had kept in touch with the old owner who had started a new business and after hearing of his woes had offered him a new job at his much smaller company of the same wage.it was also a much shorter commute and he got a whole new office and nice set of benefits. Steve of course took the offer up but also decided to plot his revenge.

Steve handed in his 3 month notice to the HR dept and began his leaving process sending emails to the Tom detailing all passwords and processes plus introducing him to suppliers and what not.

He also put on the exchange server a scheduled task to run a batch file 1 week after he left he also had one of these on the AD server and file storage servers and the backup storage servers.

What this batch file did was open power shell and run commands to delete anything he was the author of (if a file) or was last saved by him. And also to delete any emails send to him or by him.

He also told Microsoft he was leaving this company and moving on to a new company on the specified date. (More on this later)

By the time he left, he had to expect that he’d be getting a call.

Steve dutifully carried out his final tasks said goodbye and as he last act a week before he left he gave HR a typed up letter stating his with to invoke the GDPR RTBF regulations and he wants all paperwork he created deleted and the only information left for legal purposes and HR reasons.

On his final day he signed out handed his laptop in and left graciously. Even buying people drinks that evening at the local pub near the company.

He was told by HR his request was completed the following week but they had to retain certain info. HR docs and payslips for tax reasons which was fine.

Fast forward 2 months.

His old CEO rings him up in a panic as things are falling apart. Updates haven’t been happening, he can’t find any details for suppliers or how to do certain roles.

He also had a huge bill from finance as all their licensing costs have gone through the roof, new staff kit is all wrong.

Steve kindly explains that he was fed up with Tom doing nothing and hiring his buddies (Richard and Harry) who also did nothing, or worse made rookie mistakes he was left to fix.

He also explained how the cheap license costs were because as Steve had a lot of qualifications from Microsoft he got discounts on products.

Now he has left they can’t receive them as he is using that privilege at his new place.

He was ready to tell the CEO exactly why things were awful and also that no, he wouldn’t help.

He also explained the RTBF (right to be forgotten) request saying it director had 3 months to save the info he emailed. Before it was deleted.

CEO then begged him to allow access to the discounts but Steve said no, he doesn’t do stuff like that.

Perhaps he should get Tom, Richard and Harry trained up?

He also said maybe instead of hiring your nephew to do a directors role maybe he should have been hired at the bottom to work his way up not fail his way down.

Steve hung up and has asked kindly not to be contacted again via email through HR

Score one for the little guy.

The new job is going great and Steve is enjoying it a lot. From what I hear.

Lesson of the story, don’t commit nepotism or hire buddies and expect good results.

Reddit’s giving their feedback below!

The top commenter is feeling a bit skeptical that this is real.

This person agrees, at least about some of it.

They wouldn’t be giving 3 months notice, either.

It sounds a little too perfect and clean to be true.

No one feels any sympathy for the bad guys in this story, though.

That’s how you get revenge!

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.