rSlash - r/Prorevenge My Boss Paid Me $100,000 to Do NOTHING

Episode Date: June 17, 2024

0:00 Intro 0:09 Video creation 7:11 Landlord 10:54 Crazy ex Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Introducing TD Insurance for Business with customized coverage options for your business. Because at TD Insurance, we understand that your business is unique, so your business insurance should be too. Contact a licensed TD Insurance advisor to learn more. Welcome to r slash Pro Revenge, where OP tricks his boss into paying him a year's salary for free. Our next Reddit post is from Fluffy Supermarket. This happened in the early 2010s, before the advancement of technology in video editing
Starting point is 00:00:30 and content creation. I was hired as a content creator for a university that wanted to leverage YouTube to kickstart their branding campaign. The pay was low, roughly $2200, and in those days there weren't that many video content creators around and the process usually took a long time from start to finish. I was hired and on my second day, my manager gave me a goal of 85 videos between 3 to 10 minutes in 52 weeks. Which was impossible for a one man team in those days.
Starting point is 00:00:59 This meant that I had to do the scripting, producing, casting talents, shooting videos, composing music and editing. This meant that I had to do the scripting, producing, casting talents, shooting videos, composing music and editing. All of which I had to use my own equipment and software because their cameras and computers were so old. They simply couldn't handle the strain of even doing things in 720p. Much less 1080p. Let me do a quick aside here, speaking as r slash I understand a bit about video creation.
Starting point is 00:01:23 OP is right, this is an utterly impossible amount of work for one person. I tried to let my manager know, but she just smiled encouragingly, telling me to give it a try. Assuring me that if the videos were good, the quantity wouldn't be what she focused on. Hearing this, I agreed to give it a try. My manager treated me well during the first month.
Starting point is 00:01:45 However, one day when she found out that I was a smoker, her attitude changed overnight. A colleague actually did a facepalm when I told her that I was a smoker and she let me know that that manager hated smokers and often advocated for them to get fired. She started nitpicking me on everything, from smelling like cigarette smoke after my breaks, coming in 5-10 minutes late despite doing more than 4 hours of overtime daily, not being contactable during break times, the list goes on. But I soldiered on because I just wanted to do the work and do it well. 5 months in, I was called into the director's office where I saw my manager putting on her
Starting point is 00:02:25 best displeased but gleeful face and I felt my stomach drop. The director told me that she was disappointed because she had heard that I was falling behind on my work and it was already halfway through the year and I'd only completed 30 out of my 85 videos. I tried to explain that I'd been working my butt off on these videos. I literally worked 6 days out of the week, over 60 hours just to do what needed to be done and that being a one man army made things impossible. And also the fact that the videos I put up grossed the highest views ever on their YouTube
Starting point is 00:03:00 page. I also recounted how my manager said that she was looking for quality videos over quantity. The director dismissed this and said the job was 85 videos in a year and since it was almost half a year in with my numbers at less than half, she felt it prudent to cut the cord early. I asked them, how are you supposed to meet the goal of 85 videos if you fire me now? And my manager snorted, saying, "...we'll find a professional production house to finish your work." Yeah right, the director had given her an odd look, but not in her support nonetheless, telling me, "...you don't need to worry, manager will get the job done."
Starting point is 00:03:38 That was when a lightbulb went off in my head. You see, one of my jobs was to keep a database of production houses to use in the event that we needed to do a shoot that required more resources. And I was sure that they would be using the production houses in my database because my manager had no contacts in the production industry. So I changed the contact numbers and messed up all the emails on all the entries except for one. The one where my friend was working as a junior director.
Starting point is 00:04:06 I gave my friend a call, told him about my plan, and sure enough, two days later, my friend's company was called in to give a pitch. I told him I had a plan that was a win-win for us. It would instantly help him. It would help him out by bringing in a lot of business to his company, and it would also benefit me financially. I would teach my friend exactly how to make a pitch to win over the boss and the director and in turn, his company would pay me a standard finders fee of 15%. He agreed instantly and immediately put me online with his general manager who, upon realizing this was to be 6 months of work for a high
Starting point is 00:04:45 6-digit payout, instantly agreed and drew up a contract. As it turns out, after I gave my friend's company a step-by-step playbook on how to pitch to this university, they were found to be a perfect fit, somehow understanding the needs and the style of the university as well as the sort of themes the university wanted to feature. The director and my former boss were amazed that my friend's production house was so familiar with their content that they signed them up on the spot. Now even back then, using a production house was not cheap. Every video they produced cost double or triple my monthly salary given they had specialized people for each function,
Starting point is 00:05:25 producer, director, director of photography, gaffer, sound person, video editor, assistant director, production assistants, etc. However, this meant that they could complete one video every two to three days. So yes, they produced 50 videos in a span of 4 months for over 100 months worth of my salary. So wait, if OP was getting paid, what was it, about $2000? And it's times $100 that comes out to about $200,000 that the university paid out for this. And 15% of $200k is $30,000. So OP got paid a $30k finder's fee? Nice! Okay, back to the story. This allowed me
Starting point is 00:06:08 to put money aside for a holiday and the rest to further my studies with a respected film school overseas. I thought my plan ended there and that I had gotten back at my former bosses. But to my surprise, I received a call from my colleague while I was holidaying in Bali one day. This was the same colleague who had facepalmed when I told her that my manager had found out that I was a smoker. She told me that my former manager had been fired and my director had been given a massive blasting by the chancellor of the university. It turns out they had gone over budget by more than 10 times. My former manager was so desperate to ensure that
Starting point is 00:06:47 her content creation project would be completed that she had thrown caution to the wind, paying anything to get the job done so that she could show my director that she had completed the project. And she approved the massive spending without getting consent from the director. So that's how I got my friend a super fast promotion to a full director in his production house. And a year's worth of pay after getting unfairly fired from my job. I like to imagine that when OP was on vacation in Bali, every time he lit up a cigarette, he thought about his former boss and said a quiet thank you to her for paying for this awesome vacation.
Starting point is 00:07:25 Our next reddit post is from reddit save me again. I had a landlord who was pretty absent. I lived in this building a high rise of like 20 stories for 10 plus years. The landlord, despite living next door to me, was absent and personally cold but cool enough. The rent was good and our agreement was to never bother him about anything unless it's an absolute emergency. The landlord's philosophy was basically, showerhead wonky, just go buy a new one. Fridge breaks, get it fixed, or dude just buy a new one.
Starting point is 00:07:57 Just take it out of what you pay in rent. Lose the receipt? I don't care, I know more or less what a fridge costs, just take it out of the rent! Finally, his wife decides that she wants more rent and she wants to rent the place out as an office. Which is not legal by the way and she wants us out ASAP. I agree to move out a month early and get a month's rent back plus deposit. They do a complete 180. This place is ruined! We can't give you any money until you fix all this stuff! First, my cats did scratch out the leather legs of the dining table, and my pull-up bar made two dents in the doorframe of the kitchen, which was quite nice hardwood. They came to me with a list of tons of stuff, like, oh you hung a photo frame here, or this
Starting point is 00:08:41 tile is slightly chipped. This was the busiest work time of the year for me, but I was trying to be cooperative, so sure, I got the table leg re-lathered and I spackled the photo frame wall hole. I can't do anything about the door frame, so take it out of my deposit. I patched the tile. There were just dozens of little everyday wear and tear things, like you want me to change the window screens? Fine, I did everything. I trusted the landlord.
Starting point is 00:09:08 I gotta get my money back after all. At the end of it, my landlord should have given me 2,500 pounds, but instead he gave me five bucks. He said, I still need to use the rest of the money to fix all this stuff. If you can't accept the five5, I can't give you anything at all. I was super pissed off, but I took the $5. Now people in this building are gossipy. I don't participate in the gossip, but I did tell this one older lady about my frustration and she told everyone. The wife went from
Starting point is 00:09:39 being the star of the mommy's group in the building to nobody wanting to talk to her. People shunned the guy too. I ended up renting a smaller unit in the same building. So they thought they could just screw me over and not have to see me. But now they still saw me. Often. Five years later, I see that the light at my old place is still on at 3am. Huh, that's odd. I go to check and the door is open. The place is just trashed, ruined. Cabinets are broken and there's stuff on the walls. Oh and by the way, the dents on the kitchen door frame are still there.
Starting point is 00:10:15 So the guy never fixed anything, he just kept my money. By this time, smartphones were popular and we had a group chat for the whole building of about 500 people. I took pictures and posted everything. Apparently this landlord had stolen these people's deposit and there was a huge ruckus when they trashed the place and cops were called. Then everyone in the building chimed in with complaints and pictures. People smoking in the hallways, leaving leaky rubbish outside the front door, videos of people using foul language in front of kids and dirty footprints. My old landlord got fined for all of these complaints.
Starting point is 00:10:52 And on top of that, the building management wouldn't grant him permission to have workers in to fix the place, so it sat there empty for like 6 months. Those fines were pretty big too. So steal my deposit? Lose a year's rent? Suck it bro! Our next Reddit post is from KindlyGood. When our first child was born, my ex forced me to quit my job.
Starting point is 00:11:13 When our second child became two, I found out about his affair. By then, he was extremely verbally, emotionally, and sometimes physically abusive. When he abused our first born, I put him out. That was in 2012. I couldn't afford daycare so I could work, and I had no family support. He refused to give me any money to take care of the kids, saying, the courts haven't ordered me to give you a dime. He lied to the bank and had my accounts frozen, and even assaulted me when I filed for divorce. The judge finally ordered him to pay child and spousal support 6 months after I kicked
Starting point is 00:11:49 him out. This payment was $2500 a month. He refused to pay it until garnishment kicked in and by then he was $6k behind in support. I used that to get permission to move away. I remarried a year after the divorce. I checked the court documents and there was a little box that said Spousal Support Stops Upon Remarriage if that box was checked, but it wasn't checked so I figured I was good. Instead of filing
Starting point is 00:12:16 for his retirement, I took that year of Spousal Support, $12,000 and left it alone. In 2017, he filed for sole custody of the kids out of nowhere. This was when he found out that I had remarried and he had paid spousal support to me during the first year of my marriage. I told him that I took that money instead of filing for my share of his retirement. I said that if he lets me keep that $12,000, I wouldn't file to split up his 401k. He demanded that I repay the spousal support. The judge ordered me to repay it, but increased child support and deducted the repayment from
Starting point is 00:12:51 that. It ended up that I got an extra 20 bucks a month in child support and he repaid himself. He dropped his bid for custody in exchange for two extra weeks in summer. So, I pursued getting my half of his retirement account. He refused to cooperate and dragged it out for 4 years. It was so bad, they had to sanction him and he had to pay me $600 a month for a year in addition to child support. They also charged him with contempt. In 2021 he proposed to his girlfriend. In May that year, I finally got the disbursement from his 401k. I won't say how much it was, but it was about 4 times the amount of spousal support overpayment.
Starting point is 00:13:30 I had no idea that it would be that much. I had only thought that it was going to be like $12,000. Had he not tried to take the kids from me, I never would have filed to split the account. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. His fiance emailed me recently and told me that it's my fault that he won't marry her because I cleaned out his retirement account. She said that I shouldn't have stolen his money. I told her that I gave him the option to let me keep that year of spousal support or take
Starting point is 00:13:58 it back and I could file for his retirement. He chose to fight me on it, so I went after his retirement. I told her that if he really wanted to marry her and protect his assets, they could get a prenup so that he wouldn't have to worry about it. She said that she shouldn't have to sign a prenup because I robbed him. That was r slash pro revenge, and if you like this content, be sure to follow my podcast because I put out new reddit podcast episodes every single day.
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