“Used to work at Comcast (boo hiss) and I had aspirations to move up into management.
I was pretty green to the corporate world so I thought that helping my supervisor with her job would help move me up. And by help, I mean my supervisor made me do her entire job. I ran her meetings, did scheduling, went through her paperwork, etc. all while she sat at her desk playing Candy Crush on her iPad. I did all this while working on the phone.
I did this for months until one day I snapped on a customer. Now, I take full responsibility for what I did but that wasn’t good enough for her. Nope, she had to sit me down and humiliate me in front of the upper management. For an hour and a half, she made me listen to a recording of my entire mess up while pausing it every few minutes to say something like ‘How could you?’. I was in tears at the end and she just used that to show how bad of an employee I am and how good a boss she is for ‘helping’ me learn from my mistakes.
She then pushed for me to receive a Final Notice. If I went out of line one more time for a year I’d lose my job. She wasn’t going to fire me, I was going to do that for her.
HR was predictably useless, as were my friends in management. Now that I had gone from being an up-and-coming star to a pariah people didn’t give a care about me. Except for my supervisor, who still expected me to do her entire job.
My next few days were filled with a considerable amount of crying. What followed was rage. Endless, white-hot rage
I didn’t quit. I didn’t give up. Instead, I decided the best revenge was going to be better than trying to gain her favor once more.
I went back to school to finish my degree. After a while, I was offered an internship, which I took. While I was fighting an uphill battle at Comcast 40 hours a week I was at an internship 20 hours a week while being a full-time student.
And I let my supervisor know this. ‘Sorry Boss’ I’d say ‘I can’t do this report for you. I have a final to study for.’
‘Want me to stay late? No can do. My Internship is working me hard so I want to spend my night off at home doing nothing.’
I basically ignored her whenever possible. If she emailed me a question relating to my job, I’d respond but if she sent out a group email about some incentive plan I would send it to the trash. At one point she pulled me into a meeting which was actually just me and her where she basically antagonized me and repeatedly told me ‘you don’t know me’- That was really awkward, by the way.
This went on for that year I was on probation. And during that time I always kept my sales numbers low. Not low enough to get fired but just at the point where people could see I wasn’t trying. This affected my commission but it was so worth it. Why?
Three months before my probation was over I had the option to switch to another supervisor, which I did with gusto. Those last three months upped my effort and my new supervisor saw my sales numbers skyrocket. I had intentionally undercut my commission to make my old boss look bad. The upper management saw how my new supervisor succeeded in one month whereas my older supervisor failed in nine and it pleased me to no end that I humiliated her like how she humiliated me.
On the one-year anniversary (to the day!) of my probation, I put in my two-week notice. In my exit interview, I let them know what I did with my life (I omitted the undercutting part) and that I spent the last year becoming a better person just to spite Comcast and that I waited to quit until after my probation was over.”
