A bad boss can deeply affect a person’s quality of life in the workplace. Unfortunately, there’s often not much recourse to take against a toxic boss aside from removing yourself from the situation by finding a new job.
Yet one employee on Reddit explained how she got back at her boss by doing exactly what the boss asked her to do.
The worker got revenge on her boss, who created an ‘anonymous’ personality test to highlight low performers.
She described her boss as “An evil middle manager who eventually lost one-third of the team in under three months.”
“He was a really gross one, like psychological abuse,” she added.
Psychological abuse on the job can appear in various forms. You might have a boss who takes credit for your work, throwing you under the bus and denying you the accolades you deserve. You might have co-workers who team up against you in an attempt to push you out.
This particular employee shared that her boss “quickly assessed which employees he couldn’t bully and started trying to make our lives harder.”
“He started doing some ‘anonymous’ reviews and tests,” the worker said, noting that some of the feedback was “super negative” for the people he didn’t like, “even if we were high performing or project leads.”
When the worker tried to have direct discussions with her boss, “He always denied everything and even once actually asked me if I was on drugs.”
“This was a hugely famous tech company,” the worker added, highlighting how deeply ingrained workplace toxicity can be.
The boss decided to put his team through another round of anonymous testing, this time, in the form of a personality test.
The worker set the stage for her revenge by answering the questions to the quiz while “imagining I was him.”
Lee Charlie | Shutterstock
“To nobody’s surprise, he was like, ‘Surprise, we are going to all reveal and see which result we have on the screen,” she said, which is when phase two of her revenge plan went into action.
“I matched him perfectly,” she said. “He got the absolute psychopath result, but it also says, like, ‘entrepreneur and celebrity,’ so he would have been thrilled.”
Only the boss “knew we were very different, yet somehow we had the exact same result,” she wrote. “I watched him choke down his anger as he pretended to go down the list, now unprepared. Every other sentence out of his mouth suddenly was how unreliable these tests can be and that ‘you never know.’”
“I smiled with eye contact,” the worker said. “No words; everything was said there. I watched him die inside, and he still had to fill 25 minutes of his stupid meeting or call it off.”
“This is my fave quiet little moment where I ruined his total concept of self in one second by doing exactly what asked of me: Waste my time to take his stupid personality test,” she said.
The worker exacted a takedown of her boss by using malicious compliance, which in some ways, removed power from the boss’s hands and put it squarely into the worker’s.
By messing with the personality test, the employee took an actionable step to protect herself and her co-workers against her boss’s toxicity, even if only for a brief, fleeting moment.
It often seems like there’s no recourse against bad bosses, yet as this worker showed, sometimes, you just have to beat them at their own game.
Alexandra Blogier is a writer on YourTango’s news and entertainment team. She covers social issues, pop culture, and all things to do with the entertainment industry.
