Imagine working for a company you hate working for. You’d probably do as little as possible.

In this story, one employee was in that situation and really, really did as little as possible.

What’s amazing is how long they were able to get away with this without the CEO noticing or caring.

Let’s read all the details.

I snooped on the CEO’s email account and got myself unfired

A couple years out of college I worked as an analyst at a pretty small private equity firm.

The CEO was one of the biggest jerks I’ve ever met.

He was fairly young in his 40s, a multi millionare, and the type of guy driven solely by money with 0 business ethics.

He’d do anything to get the upper hand in a deal regardless of who it screws over…contractors, employees…I even saw him seriously mess over a long time family friend of his without any remorse.

This employee was given quite a few tasks to handle.

Anyway, aside from my analyst role, as it was a really small business (only about 20 people in the office, and then a bunch of people working remote), I also happened to be one of the only semi technology-literate people in the company.

So like many of my generation, I became the defacto “Millenial Office Computer Guy” too.

Despite my lack of qualifications I got put in charge of handling pretty much anything minor tech related. Setting up servers….fixing laptop issues…answering “How do I convert this to PDF” questions…even basic network security.

They thought I was some sort of computer genius…but really I was just mostly winging it, Googling pretty much everything.

You can learn a lot from hands on experience and Googling stuff.

But eventually I got legitimately pretty good at all the tech stuff.

They gave me bigger tasks like planning all of the computer systems for their owned businesses, and supervising installs.

I didn’t get paid extra for any of this mind you.

Eventually, this employee had had enough.

After a couple years of serious nonsense working there, I was pretty worn out. I wasn’t progressing.

I hated working for captain jerk…he treated everyone like garbage.

I was pulling 12-14+ hour days with no overtime or performance bonus. And they weren’t paying me nearly what they should have.

I also hated being “the tech guy” and was depressed as heck basically living in a cubicle.

He had a plan.

So I decided I full on had enough of the 9-8 life working for jerks….and I would start my own consulting business working for myself.

However, instead of quitting right away, I figured it would be smart to first build up my client base on the side while I was still getting a steady paycheck.

So thats what I did.

I launched my company, and landed my first clients.

It wasn’t too hard to get the new business going while still keeping the day job.

As the workload increased, I slowly started spending more and more time working on my side business while at my office job.

At first I was pretty low key about it. But eventually, it was blatant.

As it was a super small company….I was the only one who knew how to do a lot of important tasks and operate some key internal systems. It was easy for me to tell my boss a project was taking a whole week to complete, that I actually finished in 10 minutes.

This employee knew how to play the system!

Pretty soon I was spending 80% of my day working on my own stuff in the office.

I’d even take calls for my side business clients at my desk.

The rest of the time I was usually messing around on Reddit or something.

Of course, we had systems in place to monitor network activity. But I was the person in charge of monitoring it.

Then, this employee started slacking off in other ways.

This continued for a while.

As my own business ramped up, I cared less and less about the office job.

And since I hated waking up early, I began rolling into work late.

At first it was only 30 minutes or so. Then it progressed to an hour.

The boss didn’t seem to care.

When my boss didn’t reprimand me…it became clear how much they needed me there.

I took full advantage of this.

Before long I was arriving around Noon, working for a couple hours, then heading home.

My coworkers weren’t happy, but I helped them with all of their tech problems and they hated the company too, so they kept their mouths shut about it.

The boss did eventually notice.

My boss eventually said something to me about all it at one point, but I just came in on time the next few days and then went back to coming in whenever I wanted.

After more than 2 months of coming in 4-5 hours late, and working on my side business in full view of my jerk boss, I couldn’t believe I wasn’t fired yet.

I deserved it and felt it was inevitable.

He decided to do some digging.

On a hunch, I decided to do a little investigative work.

As I was the “tech guy”, I also had full access to the company email server. So I logged into the CEO’s personal email account, and searched for my name.

Lo and behold, there was a recent email thread between him, my direct boss, and some other team members with my name in the subject line.

Obviously I open it.

He was going to use what the email said to their advantage.

They’re discussing my recent performance issues…the last email in the chain basically said “If nobody has any objections, I will be terminating him at the end of the week.” 2 days from then.

I wasn’t surprised, but I decided there was no way I was going to let these jerks fire me.

Although I didn’t give a care about that job, I didn’t want to have a termination in my work history. I also wanted to keep getting paid for a while longer.

Of course, I couldn’t let him know I actually knew I was getting canned. So, I formulated a plan to perform a little inception reverse-psychology mind game on the CEO.

He decided to talk to the CEO.

The next day, one day before they planned to fire me, I requested a meeting with him to “discuss my current performance.”.

In that meeting I sat down, and he asked me what I wanted to talk about.

So I told him (paraphrased): “Look, I know I’ve been a bad employee lately. I’m sure you’ve noticed. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’ve been kind of getting the feeling you guys are planning to let me go soon.”

When I said that the shocked look on his face was priceless…he must have thought I was psychic to work that out on my own the day before it was going to happen.

He made it clear why they were valuable to the company.

I remember him just saying something like “uhh”.

I continued while he sat flabbergasted. “So I’ll be honest with you, My heart isn’t in this job anymore. As you know, I’m an entrepreneur at heart…which I’m sure you can relate to. I want to start my own company. However, as you’re aware, I have a lot of responsibilities here nobody else can do.”

I then proceeded to list all of the things I did and projects I was working on.

I could see it on his face when the realization sunk in of how screwed he’d be if I left suddenly.

This was a clever speech.

“So here’s what I propose. You don’t fire me. I don’t quit. I keep working here for a month, finish my current projects, and train whoever you want on everything I’m in charge of. After a month is up, I will continue to come in once per week until its complete. After that, if you still need me…you can pay me on an hourly project-by-project basis”.

I intentionally mentioned the possibility of me quitting so he could feel like he “won” the negotiation, even though I technically had him by the balls.

He paused to think for a minute, then said something along the lines of: “Okay. You have a deal”.

It worked out really well.

So, not only did I get myself unfired…I actually turned the company into a paying client.

During that month, I continued doing pretty much whatever I wanted since I had an expiration date (while training my replacement as promised).

After the month was up they hit me up regularly for remote task work .

I charged them triple what I was earning while working there, and barely had to deal with the CEO.

Now, he ignores the CEO.

My client base was big enough I dropped them for good.

…after all that, the CEO still calls me up for advice/questions nearly 3 years later.

These days I just blow him off saying “Sorry, I’m too busy”.

Wow! I’m surprised he was able to manage keeping that job for so long.

That was some clever planning.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

This person says, “thank you.”

The consulting fee wasn’t too high.

This sounds like a pro tip if you don’t want to end up being asked to do extra tasks.

This person is appalled that OP read company emails.

What a glorious way to negotiate quitting instead of getting fired!

If you thought that was an interesting story, check out what happened when a family gave their in-laws a free place to stay in exchange for babysitting, but things changed when they don’t hold up their end of the bargain.