tl,dr – made an asshole supervisor look even more like an asshole to his boss and got away practically scot-free.
Some backstory.
About a year ago. I switched jobs. The pay is the same but the current job is easier. And I decided that I won't try to hard. Because in this line of work there is no carrier path at all. Not that I believed in an honest carrier improvement from the very bottom.
What happened.
The senior employees finally gathered enough evidence to organize my performance review. I knew that I will be forced to listen to some abusive asshole berating for every little problem I ever made and some didn't.
So before the review I talked to HR, to my supervisor's boss. Figured what are my options and what they can use against me. Turns out it amounts to a month of mentoring with another guy from my department and idle threats of moving me to another department.
The asshole supervisor used all the aces in his stack. Yelled at me in girly voice, insulted me by saying that I purposefully being lazy, waved his arms around like a seagull, exaggerated the problems I caused etc. etc. Well I had planed my defense. I will be ass passive and as apologetic as I can and when the supervisor starts bullshiting me I'm going to make allow me to bullshit more and more until he looks ridiculous to the head of the department. Which let to this gem of the convo.
Sup.: What are you supposed to do in case of a problem X?
Me: I would do this and that. What would you do as a more experienced employee?
Sup.: WHAT?
Me: What would you do?
Sup.: WHAT?
Me: What would you do?
Sup.: WHAT?
Me: What would you do?
He was literally responding to the same question in the same manner using the same word for like 4 times in a row. When this part of the conversation was over. I felt so good. For a long time I suffered from anxiety and standing up for myself was always hard. But I managed to do it perfectly.
The only real problem that the head of the department found out was that exactly one time I left 20 minutes earlier because the guy who I'm supposed to handover my shift came about and hour early.
Standing up for myself feels so good. You must try it.