I just had a thought that this sub might enjoy this story from when I was an enthusiastic 20 year old worker who got screwed by his employer and the comeuppance they got from it.
So for a bit of background, I was working at this company in Australia that does salary packaging. That means a few different things depending on the type of company you work for. But my team worked with Hospitals and Charities. The government has this allowance for people who work at Hospitals or Charities that meant that they could get a certain amount of their pay tax free, but it has to be paying for something (mortgage, rent or credit card were the most common). The service we offered was collecting the evidence (mortgage statements, rental agreements or credit card bills) and then advising the hospital or charities' payroll department how much money could be given tax free to each employee in their pay. This saves them from having to hire staff specifically just to deal with this tax free allowance, and we ensured that they were always compliant with the government's guidelines.
At first the culture seemed great, I had a bunch of great friends at the company. They didn't micromanage too much, and I was enjoying my job. Our job was a mixture of administration and call center work, you would set up packages for people and also take calls whenever they came in and answer questions.
This all started to fall apart when Rachel was hired. Rachel joined the company in the same position I was in, and she was awful at her job. Within the first 2 weeks, she had proclaimed loudly 'I can't do this, it's too hard' and walked out the office midway through the day on 3 separate occasions. I remember thinking to myself that she wouldn't last very long. So, imagine my surprise, when 1 month after Rachel's hiring, my team gets called in to a meeting and told that she would be our new team leader. I don't know if she was a friend or a relative of one of the higher ups, but I feel like she must have been.
Rachel was not any better as a team leader than she was in her previous role. She would – at least once a week – announce that she had a headache or a sore throat and go home before lunch. When people on the phone were angry and asking for a manager she would say 'I don't know, have someone else take it' which usually meant I would end up taking the escalations. I'm not actually convinced that she did anything work related the entire time she was my team leader.
Team morale took an absolute nosedive, and we were all noticeably more sad and grumpy at work, and everyone started making more mistakes. So our Operations Manager brought us all in to a meeting (minus Rachel) and said that it was a safe space where we could air our grievances without any consequences. I naively believed that and unloaded everything. I said that Rachel being promoted above us made no sense in the first place because she clearly wasn't competent enough to handle our job. That I felt that I was doing the bulk of her duties by taking all the escalations, and that I had never actually seen her do any work.
As you might have guessed, the safe space wasn't quite as safe as it had been made it out to be. Rather than addressing any of my complaints, or making Rachel start doing her job. I was suddenly targeted and micromanaged on everything. At one point Rachel asked me to go collect some mail from the other side of the office (probably personal mail). I said I would, and immediately got a phone call from a client. When my phone call ended about 2 minutes later, as I was standing up to go get the mail. She asked where it was and when I said I hadn't gotten it yet, and she gave me a written warning for disrespecting her.
So a couple of months after the 'no consequences meeting' I had accumulated 3 written warnings for various nonsense, and they told me that I was being fired. At the time I was miserable, felt like a failure and cried on the way home. Of course now I can see that it was a huge blessing being fired from that company, and the next job I got didn't have any of the same bullshit and I've now been there for 10 years.
Anyway, the comeuppance. One of the things that they didn't realise, is that, being someone who was very enthusiastic at their job and great at it too, I had a fantastic relationship with our clients. Two in particular had an agreement that they would only speak to me, because they knew I would get things done immediately. Those 2 clients in particular were our largest – one of the major hospitals in our city – and our most valuable – a palliative care facility that had the highest uptake rate, due to the payroll person visiting every new hire and explaining they could get tax free money and helping them fill out the form.
So whilst I never set out to get any petty revenge or anything. A week after I left, I did get a message from a friend that still worked there that both these companies had called and asked for me and were very upset when they were told I no longer worked there. Then 3 months later I got a call from the same friend letting me know that both companies had now cancelled their contracts, and gone to a competitor. Which made me feel a lot better about the whole thing.