Imagine having a boss who takes forever responding to important emails but flips the story and tells the client you’re the one who is taking too long. How would you handle that situation? Would you accept the blame so the boss can look good in front the client, or would you go above the boss to the boss’s boss to get this problem to stop?

In this story, one attorney is in this situation, and eventually has enough. All it took was two emails, one to the client and one to the supervisor’s boss, to get the situation resolved and to make the supervisors look like fools.

Let’s read all about it.

Supervisors Tried to Make Me Look Bad, So I Made Them Look Worse

I’m an attorney and used to work at a state government office, where I had two supervisors, one for my practice group and one for my section, who from the very beginning decided to make it their business to treat me like garbage.

Section Chief had a habit of sitting on client questions for days, then assigning them to me.

Then, when the client would inevitably ask why it was taking so long to do their stuff, she’d respond only that I was the one working on that stuff, making it look like the delay was my fault.

Similarly, Group Supervisor’s favorite thing to do was to try to get me in trouble with both clients AND higher-ups in our office for not doing things fast enough, despite the fact that she would procrastinate for weeks on reviewing/signing off on work I actually did very fast indeed.

But OP was smarter than they thought.

But what these jerks did not know! Was that a) I was saving all the emails they sent me that would include information like dates they assigned me work, etc., and b) one of the aforementioned higher-ups was my Former Boss during an externship in law school–so he liked me and knew I wasn’t lazy or an idiot.

So one day Group Supervisor assigned me a question from our client agency involving a citizen’s public records request, and I prepared a draft response within an hour and sent it back to her.

I NEEDED her to sign off on it before I advised the client. But despite my getting a read receipt for my email, she didn’t respond for the rest of the day. Or the rest of the week.

Of course they threw OP under the bus again.

The client was supposed to answer the records request within a tight deadline under the law, and eventually emailed Group Supervisor to ask where the hell their answer was.

Group Supervisor finally woke up and forwarded her original email assigning me the work to Section Chief to complain that I didn’t do it in good time.

And then Section Chief forwarded THAT to the client and told them it was my fault it wasn’t done yet.

Here’s how OP dealt with it.

So I, having finally had Enough™, rubbed my little hands together in delight and proceeded to:

1. Reply All to Section Chief’s email to Client, attaching my email to Group Supervisor containing the draft response. I innocently wrote, “Apologies for the inconvenience, Client. Our office rule is to wait for supervisory sign off before providing advice, but I’ve nevertheless attached draft advice prepared on [date]. Group Supervisor and Section Chief, do you agree with this advice? May Client act upon it?”

2. Forward that response to Former Boss and very politely ask him, “In instances where there is a tight time frame to respond to a client question, is it okay to provide the client with provisional draft advice like this within the deadline but let them know a supervisor needs a little more time to do their review and sign off?”

This is pretty awesome!

The client ended up praising me for my “efforts to get a response to him in a timely fashion.”

And Former Boss thanked me for my question but said it should never be an issue in the first place, then sent out an office-wide notice to remind supervisors that they must provide necessary sign offs on advice within deadlines and must never blame those under them for delays in front of clients because that affects the image of the whole office.

He attached the emails in my matter as an example of what supervisors should not do.

So literally everyone saw what incompetent clowns they were.

I love how the boss used OP’s supervisors as an example of what not to do! That’s hilarious!

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an employee who just let clients complain after her boss refused to approve overtime.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

It really is amazing!

This is a good question.

This is good advice.

I’d love to know how they responded too!

I can’t even imagine how embarrassed the supervisors must have been when they saw that email from the boss! They deserved to be embarrassed though. I’m glad OP finally called them out on being the problem. The boss handled that really, really well!

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an employee who wasn’t keen on contributing more to a coworker’s gift than originally planned.