I worked in the tech support/ sales call center for a small company that sold equipment to make vinyl signage. The staff was pretty much all dudes in their mid-late twenties. I was about 32 at the time. I quickly became the go-to guy for questions and was the trainer for new employees. The two managers of the department were actually a couple of years younger than me and had been promoted from the floor.
I was made team lead in prep for the two managers to be promoted. It was expected that I would take over when they moved up. Upper management apparently had different ideas. They hired a guy in his late fifties who has no experience in the industry, just a background in call center sales. My team is pissed off on my behalf, and I'm none too happy myself.
An anonymous member of my team begins playing jokes on the new manager. He would lock his office door when he knew that we didn't have a key for it. He would hide random things from his desk. The big one was when he erased the guy's whiteboard that had all of the notes from a big meeting on it. The guy was getting pretty pissed off and had one-on-ones to talk about the shenanigans. It was pretty obvious he just wanted to know who was doing it. If anybody knew who it was, they weren't telling. The office environment was getting uncomfortable. The new guy wasn't learning the ropes at all. It was pretty obvious he was out of his depth. How do you manage technical support and escalations for an industry you know nothing about when you have no support from the team?
The next week I had a meeting with a manager of another department because things were not getting done properly. He basically asked me to make sure the job got done right, and he would talk to the CEO about me getting promoted.
A few days later I have a meeting with the CEO. It goes pretty well and he says he would like to promote me, but rather than being co-manager like the previous guys, I would still report to the new guy. Apparently Mr. CEO didn't want to look like he'd made a bad hire. I said that would be fine, but since we would be basically splitting the job equally, I would want equal pay. (I had seen the job posting and it would mean a $10/hr pay bump.) He said he would get back to me by the end of the week.
I never heard back. At the end of the second week, I started looking for a new job. The pranks on the new guy continued and he got angrier and angrier. I found a new job quite quickly and put in my notice. I wasn't there for most of my notice because I had vacation time to burn.
I came back after a long weekend to find that the new manager had been fired. Apparently, after another prank he completely lost his shit. He walked out onto the call center floor and started shouting. He told everyone to hang up the phones and proceeded to scream and cuss the entire team out. He ended up getting escorted off the premises.
It was the most satisfying feeling ever.
TL;DR I was passed over for a promotion and the new guy sucks, so the staff played pranks on him. He completely lost his shit and was fired before my 2 weeks notice was up.
Oh, and no, I wasn't the one pulling the pranks. The prankster admitted it to me before I left, not that I didn't know already. I thanked him for his service and left for greener pastures a couple of days later.