I hope this is ok for this sub.
Recently caught up with a long time friend J and were reminiscing about crappy jobs we'd had. She retold the one of her first consulting job after getting her MBA. This was in the late 80's in Australia when many companies where using 'outplacement consultants' to identify who was getting made redundant.
She started with a large consultancy and first job was a small company in early financial trouble that needed to lose up to 10 people. Goes into the office and as warned, everyone knew what J was there for, so only nasty looks. Meet with the owner who did not want to lose people, gives her a spare office to work in.
First job was to analyse the structure and history. One section stands out with high turnover of staff, managed by the bloke in the office next door. She can hear this bloke through the wall often on private calls to friends organising the weekend. During her interview of this bloke he spent most of the time telling her how poor his reports are, particularly the women, then to finish off, hits on her hard, then gets shitty when she refuses all dates.
Subsequent interviews with all staff in his section clearly identify this bloke is a psychopath. Sexual harassment (this was the 80's when it was pretty normal though) but abusive if they rejected him, bullying, gaslighting, overriding any decisions, blaming everyone else, you name it. He was not popular with other managers either due to his tendency to blame other sections for his fuckups. He was very good at brownnosing the owner though.
J quickly wrote a recommendation that he goes asap, prepared the info and the owner approved it straight away. Then owner asks her to do the exit interview as he was going Interstate for work. J said it was the most satisfying job to pull this bloke in on the Friday morning, hand him his notice and tell him he had 1 hour to leave. Owners signature made it clear there was no option. His secretary came in shortly after to confirm he was going, then raced off to tell the office.
As the bloke was leaving, all the women lined up along the windows and gave him the finger to say goodbye. J was invited into afternoon tea where a cake appeared and a celebration held. Two other managers congratulated J on a good job. She jokingly said that there may be one more manager to go, cue the dead silence. Then the oldest manager bets her $50 there won't be, saying something like 'that prick was 95% of our problems'. Turns out he was right and she paid him the 50 later.
Monday she gets a request to meet all the remaining managers. They present 2 options to restructure the section that had lost the prick into other sections. They also identify a few other staff that need to go due to non delivery.
J reviews their restructure ideas and fully supports their preferred option, puts it through to owner as a negotiated option. All gets signed off by the owner, including the removal of the others. Job done, J gets a great review from the company and strangely a thanks morning tea with cake on the last day.
When J debriefed to her boss and team, nobody could believe her luck. His told her that was a once in a lifetime job. He was right cos she only stayed in that job another 2 years after the stress of having to plan out redundancies for a lot of good people and the abuse that came with it. J did get to get rid of a few other psychopaths at other jobs though.