25 Stories Of Toxic Bosses Who Got Exactly What They Deserved

Toxic bosses can make the workplace unbearable, but sometimes employees find clever ways to handle them without risking their jobs. Recently, a Reddit user posed the question, "What was the best/most satisfying way you dealt with a toxic superior at work that put them in their moral place and didn’t get you fired?" The community responded with a range of insightful and satisfying stories. Here are some of the most notable answers.

#1

Image source: iamacannibal, Shahbaz Ali My first job was at McDonald’s. One of the managers had worked for my mom a few years before and hated my mom. She was a dogshit employee and my mom fired her because of it. When she realized who I was she started treating me like s**t and making me do all the s****y stuff, cutting my hours when possible and giving me bad shifts like overnights on the weekend then lunch shifts during the week just to f**k with me. One day she yelled at me because my hair was too long. I literally shave my head to 1/4” every other week so it was at most 1/2” long maybe. My response was “my head is shaved you f*****g a*****e” and took my hat off to show her. The main store manager was there. Luckily I had been reporting all of the mistreatment and the store manager agreed that my hair has never been too long. I got talked to about cussing at her. She got fired. I am 100% sure she hates my entire family at this point.

#2

Image source: maatc, Sora Shimazaki Had a manager insist that I am reachable while on holiday. I said no. He kept insisting. I said ok, I will give you my wifes number. If you feel something comes up during my absence that can not wait or be done by someone else, you call her and explain why you absolutely need to talk to me. If she hands me the phone I will talk to you. Guess what, he never called.

#3

Image source: CaptainPeachfuzz, MART PRODUCTION I had been groomed for a management position for 6 months. At that point my boss announced his retirement and that I'd be stepping into his role. One of my colleagues took exception to this and accused my boss of playing favorites because we were friends. We had become friends over the course of him training me for his job. Anyway, she went to my bosses boss, and her boss, and got herself an interview. After that she threatened to make a discrimination complaint if they didn't give her the job. So they gave her the job and begged me not to quit. I said I wouldn't quit but I'm looking to advance my career and if I can't do it here I'd find somewhere I could. I worked for 3 months under her. She made my life hell and tanked the department. Meanwhile, the bosses created a whole new position for me, with more money, more autonomy, my own office, and I'd report directly to a VP. And a few months after that she(the one that took my job) was fired.

#4

Image source: streamstroller, Tima Miroshnichenko Had a boss who repeatedly stripped my name off reports and emails I'd written, then submitted them as her own to our VP. I started bcc'ing the VP, with whom I had a good relationship. He called her into his office to ask her questions about the work and to compliment 'her' efforts. She claimed all the credit and lied to his face. He called her on it. She was fired the next day.

#5

Image source: anon, Dom J Starbucks. Manager was talking to the DM, kissing a*s and lying about her performance and the store's performance. The phone rang. It was an irate customer whom she had just called the N word. I said "Hey, Michelle, that woman whom you referred to as a ghetto a*s N word is on the phone. She wants to talk to you. She has Corporate on the line." She turned so many different colors! She was gone by the end of my shift. Of course, it was all my fault in her eyes. ?.

#6

Image source: readingreddit4fun, Tima Miroshnichenko I had a manager who thought it was part of his job to manage people's personal lives too. I (female) was stuck with him and another manager (also female) in a car en route to an offsite meeting. He took this opportunity to ask me about my recent slew of "so-called" doctor appointments I had had. They had been legitimate appointments and I could have even provided doctors' notes if he had asked, but he didn't go that route. I simply asked him if he wanted to continue the conversation when we got back to the office and HR could be present or if I should arrange for a consultation with my attorney. He shut up really quickly.

#7

Image source: TrainerFun1442, fauxels One time, I confronted my toxic superior calmly and professionally about their behavior in a one-on-one meeting. I made sure to cite specific examples and how their actions were affecting the team. I also emphasized that I wanted to have a positive working relationship moving forward. Surprisingly, they were receptive to my feedback and actually apologized for their behavior. Since then, our dynamic has improved significantly. It just goes to show that sometimes addressing the issue head-on can lead to a positive outcome without putting your job at risk.

#8

Image source: flyguy42, Lukas Oh! I got one! The setup isn't all the special. He wasn't good at his job. He blamed me for mistakes. I just kind of stood my ground and didn't give in to any of his increasingly insane demands. Finally, he yells at me his last words on the subject, turns to stomp away his victory march and walks straight into a wall, having lost his sense of place in the room. Like, wasn't even close to making an exit. Full body, flat into the wall. I like to think he also still relives that moment regularly.

#9

Image source: ProperMagician7405, Chokniti Khongchum I was lab manager of an extremely small quality control lab in an industrial electro-plating company. The floor manager, let's call him Collin, was one of those men who likes to believe he knows everything. He'd take credit for other people's work, and push the blame for his mistakes onto anyone but himself. Technically we were equivalent grade, but I was younger, newer, and my team was 3 including myself, where his was 20+, also, I am female. So he acted like my superior. One day we needed to make up an acid bath, but because of the volumes involved, there was no safe way (from a manual handling perspective) to add the acid to the water, so we had to add the water to the acid. There's a rule in chemistry to always add acid to water when diluting concentrated acid, as it creates a *LOT* of heat, and can cause an explosion. Literally one of the first things you learn in high school chemistry lessons, it's *that* important. As we couldn't physically follow this rule, the lab staff and I were taking turns overseeing the *exceptionally* slow adding of water to the acid, constantly monitoring the temperature, stopping to let it cool whenever it got too high. Along comes Collin, complaining that we're taking too long. I explain that we're trying not to allow the temperature to get dangerously high. Didn't think I'd need to explain *why* the temperature was rising in the first place, as this was literally an industry based on chemistry, and he was manager of the shop floor! I move off to check something, I can't remember what, come back to find Colin instructing one of the floor lads to drag another water hose in to fill up the bath faster. Of course I stop them, and ask what he's doing. He says he's going to add more water using the second hose, so it'll go faster, and the "water will cool down the acid". I swear I stared at him for a full 10 seconds in shock, before I said "Well, if you're going to do that, can you wait until I'm back upstairs in the lab, with 2 closed doors between me and this acid bath." He asks why. I explain that adding water to acid creates an *extremely* exothermic reaction. He looks blank, and asks what that means. I tell him the faster he adds the water, the quicker the heat will build up, and at the volumes we were working with (hundreds of litres) that would create an explosion, and everyone in the room would be sprayed with boiling hot acid. Because this conversation took place in the middle of the shop floor, literally *all* of Collin's staff just watched him get schooled by a diminutive woman about basic chemistry, and a fundamental aspect of his own job. There was no way he could push the blame for that level of ignorance onto anyone else. The look on his face in that moment is still one of the highlights of my time in that job!

#10

Image source: showmeyourkitteeez, Karolina Kaboompics I sat calmly in a meeting with the top dawg and his little buddy, smiling and staying calm while they were yelling at me. I stayed calm as they continued to yell. I asked them to please calm down and stop yelling. The response was I'm NOT YELLING! At that point, I laughed. That was the end of their intimidation.

#11

Image source: Derp_State_Agent, Andrea Piacquadio I had a horrible team lead who tried to sabotage me when she found out I was being considered for a promotion that would have jumped over her. We both had our own offices so I called her into mine, moved my chair up so I sat higher and pretended like I was her boss and asked her things like "did you think that behavior was appropriate?" and "what would you have done differently if given the chance to try again?". I was nervous doing this because I'd literally never spoken to any adult like that ever before in my life. I found a new job shortly after that was a 30% pay bump and had a solid career trajectory but let management know why I was leaving and it was 80% because of that lead. Found out she was let go soon after I left because other people gave the same reason for leaving. I didn't exactly want her fired but I improved my situation and she got what was kinda coming to her I guess.

#12

Image source: Successful-Clock-224, ROMAN ODINTSOV I brought him homemade cookies every day until his clothes didnt fit right and he looked ridiculous.

#13

Image source: OstneyPiz, Expect Best Worked in a supermarket bakery for years and worked my way up to manager. Decided to leave my full time job and go to college. Was lucky enough to get a transfer of my job to the town/city I was going to college amd work a couple days a week in the same supermarket chain as a baker but no longer managing, which I was happy with. Within a few days the staff obviously realised I knew my job well given my experience but I was happy just doing my bit a couple days a week as one of the team. The assistant manager however seemed to take exception to staff asking me for any advice and would undermine any and every thing I said regardless if ot was correct. I advised the manager of this and he was silently watching as this continued. I then had enough and called him out big time and also advised the manager was aware and that I was sick of his childish behaviour. He never challenged me again and actually left the job shortly after. The rest of my time there was one of the most fun jobs I’ve had.

#14

Image source: TheePizzaGod, MART PRODUCTION Got tired of the managers, but not direct one, telling to do things for them. So I started carrying a sheet with my job description on it from when I was hired and every time after that if I was told by those managers to do an extra for them, I just pull out that paper and say " Sorry, it's not in my job description" and then walk away.

#15

Image source: Constant_Ad_8477, Tim Samuel One supervisor yelled at me for eating candy in front of her. I’m a T1D and needed the sugar or else I’d faint. She got strike 2 of 3 and was removed as my supervisor. A new one was assigned to my sector. I should’ve just fainted and got worker comp. and her a*s fired.

#16

Image source: DDMenace23, LinkedIn Sales Navigator Not an interaction with a superior, but with a colleague. I work in IT, I do tech support over the phone for a financial institution. User calls and asks about an issue he's having, so I remote into his computer and start asking questions to understand the nature of the problem. I eventually ask him if he can inquire with his colleagues, to see if they're experiencing the same problem. So he opens up our chat messaging app, asks someone to check, and follows it up with "I'm with tech support right now, not the brightest guy", which I can very clearly see because I'm still connected. So I immediately remind him that I can still see his screen and that I find what he just said very disrespectful. He gets defensive, tells me I'm asking too many questions and "shouldn't you know how to fix my problem", to which I tell him that's exactly what I'm in the process of doing. Didn't take long for him to realize he's being a douche for no reason. In almost 10 years of doing this job at different levels, this was the first time someone apologized to me for acting out of line, and didn't just ask to speak to a manager or hang up on me. I accepted his apology, and then proceeded to not only solve the issue, but end the call on a good note. This happened 2 weeks ago.

#17

Image source: SomeDrillingImplied, Cedric Fauntleroy Had an RN supervisor who had it out for me due to her insecurities (was about to graduate nursing school and I would often point out things she was doing egregiously wrong) and her ignorance regarding union rules (she used to think I was leaving 15 minutes early every day when in reality I wasn't taking my last break until the end of my shift so I could ensure my assignment was completed in full). She never spoke to me about these issues formally, but would make constant passive-aggressive remarks and try to find other ways to get me in trouble. One evening she entered a 4-bedded patient room in the middle of me getting all of the men into bed for the night with a write-up. She says one of the patients I put in bed before I left the night before ended up falling out of bed and that the bed wasn't left in the lowest position. The problems here were as follows: 1. I couldn't be held responsible for an event that transpired when I was off the clock and out of the building. Another aide had assumed responsibility for my patients when my shift was over. 2. She was trying to write me up without a union delegate present. Not allowed. 3. She was trying to write me up inside a room filled with alert patients who overheard everything and were able to attest to the fact that she tried to write me up without a delegate present. Extremely inappropriate. 4. The bed was an older model that didn't go all the way to the floor, and she couldn't prove that the bed was raised or that I was responsible for the bed being raised. So I refused to sign the write-up, to which she threatened further recourse for refusing. I told her I'd talk to the director about it in the morning and if she felt the write-up was warranted I'd sign it with a union delegate present. The next morning I went to the director of nursing and told her what transpired. By the end of the discussion she was seeing red. I wasn't there for it, but apparently she ripped that supervisor a new a*****e and shredded the write-up in front of her. The supervisor never messed with me ever again and quit as soon as I graduated from nursing school. I am now assistant director of nursing at this job.

#18

Image source: agent_x_75228, Pavel Danilyuk I had a manager that tried to steal credit for a excel spreadsheet I created that would make reviewing and submitting expense reports 100x easier. After I showed it to her, I overheard her telling her supervisor about it, but said, "I created", not "my employee created". So I immediately changed the spreadsheet with locked cells that were password protected, with a glaring and bolded "Created by: (My name)" and resaved a copy on my drive. Then it came time to present it at the managers meeting and I copied my file over the original and when she opened it, she couldn't do anything with it and of course my name was on it. She ended up calling me into the meeting, giving me credit and I unlocked the cells and then began to explain how it worked. She was red faced the rest of the meeting with her boss glaring daggers at her. *edit - I'm shocked this blew up and some people asked about the fallout afterwards. Well there was a closed office meeting in between my manager and the Controller who hired her. The CFO didn't really like this hire, so the Controller's rep was hurt here a little when the Accounting Manager (My manager) was forced to admit this wasn't actually her creation, but someone on her team (me). My manager afterwards pulled me into a small room and said, "I'm a little confused as to why you locked the spreadsheet and changed it, I had planned to present it at this meeting and got a little embarrassed in there when I couldn't access it. It didn't make me look good." I said to her, "Well you didn't tell me about this meeting, I would have been happy to tell you about the changes I made, I added the security to it so that sales guys couldn't change the formula's and since this file is the original, I wanted to make sure the integrity of it was maintained." She couldn't really say anything and I didn't let on that I knew she tried to steal credit for my work. She definitely took a big hit in reputation and anything I did after that I password protected and made sure to copy in the Controller.

#19

Image source: Lally_919_221, Tima Miroshnichenko I worked in IT consulting. I asked for a pay increase and my manager (one of three partner/owners) said I wasn't worth it. I said okay and thought challenge accepted. It took me 3 days to find a new job and put in my notice. One of the other partners called me up and asked what happened. I told him. Apparently the asshat partner was doing other crappy stuff and they bought him out a year later.

#20

Image source: Ok-Lavishness-7904, Vitaly Gariev We were in different cities, and he wasn’t answering his phone. So I began emailing things I needed, and copying in his supervisor. He responded back that he expected me to keep calling, as he didn’t always check emails during his shift, and his supervisor took great exception to that.

#21

While I worked for one of the big IT contractors, I got assigned to a customer project where the project management (our people) had the habit to organise "pizza nights", namely us developers would stay after hours to work and they would order pizza (under false pretenses the pizzas were never delivered before 10pm). When I got my first notice of such, I replied, copy my deployment manager (and, oops, everybody in the project?), that I would happily comply, but this making me work more than 11 hours in a single day, I was legally entitled to half a day of rest that I would take the next day. That pizza night was cancelled, and they never did it again. The same project manager wanted me to a have a professional phone so that she could call me. Of course the day I got it she called me during lunch. The re-enacting by a colleague of her discovering that my phone was ringing in my desk drawer became a staple of our after hours drinks. Being a grey beard with some hard-to-find skills has its perks ?. Image source: ofnuts

#22

Image source: Outrageous_Picture39, energepic.com Not me but a co-worker. She had worked for the company for years and made it to a middle management position in a division of the company that was known for its turnover. Almost immediately, the VP over the division starts giving her hell. She put up with this abusive behavior for several years because her husband had medical issues, and their younger children were still in school. Recently, she finally had enough, and took a job with a former co-worker that moved to another company. She scheduled what ended up being an epic exit interview. Apparently the VP had been doing some creative maneuvering within the company to hide her poor decision making in regard to product cost. It all came out. Firing people who were close to discovering what she had been doing, kickbacks to vendors via gifts, gifts to the VP including Super Bowl tickets (our company is VERY strict about gifts, and the Super Bowl is even used as an example of an impermissible gift), and just general fuckery and abuse of power. Less than a week after that exit interview, the VP and a couple of her cronies were out the door, which triggered a chain reaction of other people leaving their positions as they had apparently been abusing their lower-level power and didn’t have cover anymore. The entire division was re-formed over several months, and my old co-worker is doing fine.

#23

Image source: armaedes, Max Fischer Principal told me I would have a class of 45 students in a classroom that did not have proper air conditioning (one freestanding unit in the corner that kept the room at about 85 degrees). I told her she could not cram 45 kids into an 85-degree room, she told me she could do whatever she wanted because she was the principal. That night I called the parents of all 45 kids and explained the situation. The next morning a handful of them were waiting by the front door to meet with the principal, many of them had emailed the superintendent directly. By lunch time the class had been split into two groups of 22 and 23 and been relocated to a fully air conditioned room. That principal left before the first semester was over, not sure whose decision it was.

#24

Image source: expat_mel, Yan Krukau I told him in no uncertain terms that he could _not_ speak to me the way he was and that if he did it again I'd leave. I made it clear that I could walk into any restaurant on our block and get a job on the spot (true), but _he_ had no other options - there was no one who could take my 40 hrs/week and all my responsibilities (I was essentially running half the restaurant at that point) and it would take weeks to find and train somebody to do half of what I do. Betting my job on an ultimatum was terrifying, but it worked. He never spoke to me that way again.

#25

Image source: cutearmy, Shuki Harel Collective feedback from training on an IT job. When asked didn’t we learn this in training, we all said the instructor spend most of his time calling us stupid and how much better he was then the rest is. He demoted back to the same job we all had, tech support. There really wasn’t any spite or revenge in it. We were just giving honest feedback about what happened.