rSlash - r/Prorevenge My Boss Stole from Me, So I Ruined His Business & Marriage!

Episode Date: September 1, 2021

r/Prorevenge In today's episode, OP works at Subway for an incredibly toxic, penny-pinching boss who breaks the law to save a few bucks. Unsurprisingly, the manager also tries to screw over OP by paying him less. OP isn't having any of that, so gets some prorevenge by reporting his boss's crimes to the local authorities. Say goodbye to your business, boss! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to R-Slash, a podcast where I read the best post from a cross-reddit. Today's subreddit is R-Slash Pro Revenge, where OP completely destroys our boss' business and gets enthroned in jail. Our next reddit post is from Warrior White. I've been away from my company long enough that I feel safe and secure enough to post about how I left my six-year-long career at a famous chain sub shop. I posted stories about entitled customers and parents from there, but this one is about my super entitled douchebag of a boss, and how I got my sweet revenge when I finally left the company. When I was 25, I was in a pretty weird situation where I needed a job, and I couldn't afford to be picky about which one I got. I just happened to be in a local sub shop

asking the manager if they were hiring. And as it just so happens, the owner was there that day. He hired me on the spot, and I started working the next day. Training went quickly, and I was working 40 hours a week and finally earning some money. My first red flag that something there wasn't exactly normal was the fact that the manager quit less than a month after I'd been hired. She had asked for weekends off to be with her kids and the owner told her no. She actually made a fully functional schedule that worked for everyone that gave her Saturday's off.

He switched her back to having Wednesday's off so she just walked out. I was promoted to manager with less than a month of training. However, I was determined to stay with that job because I wanted to enjoy the race that came along with it. So, I taught myself how to do inventory and food orders. I taught myself how to make schedules and do all the other things that shop managers do. I actually got pretty good at it. After a year of doing it, I had streamlined the inventory process and made it so functional that the owner had me teach other managers that he hired at his other franchise locations. he owned six shops total. They were scattered all over

the place, and two of them, including the one where I worked, were less than a mile from each other. He decided that he wanted to have a monopoly in the city and bought the last sub shop in the area. He made me the area manager and put me at the new location. Basically, my daily job was to show up at 11 a.m. and relieve the store opener and make sure that everything was functioning. Then I would work until 7 p.m. when I would be relieved by the closer. Then I would drive to the other two locations to make sure everything was okay. Some days, I would drive to location a. in the morning before my shift started and I would drive to location b after my shift started. On two days I did inventories, and on Wednesdays I did three stores worth of delivery orders.

The store I was working at was slow enough that it technically only needed one person working at a time with a little overlap during the lunch and dinner rush. It kinda sucked sometimes. If it got busy, you were doing everything all on your own. You also had to help customers during your lunch break, and you didn't technically get breaks. Going to the bathroom was a gamble. I still dread hearing that doorbell go off when I was midstream. At first, it was a perfectly reasonable job. I had this stores operating effectively. Everything was organized, inventory counts were accurate, and there was little shrinkage.

Customers were happy. That lasted about six months before things started getting illegal. I think my boss was having some kind of personal or marriage problems and he was taking it out on the staff. Both Hena's wife came from super rich families. They were millionaires. I had been to his mansion one time for a birthday party. He had an indoor and outdoor pool. He had a private movie theater complete with a bar and a popcorn maker, so clearly they had cash to burn. The first illegal thing happened when our store got broken into. A thief broke a window with a rock and tried to find the cashbox. The cashbox was locked in the save, so he didn't get anything. However, he did pry open the

till drawer to find it empty. The police called me since my number was on the whiteboard marked as emergency contact. I showed up, took inventory, and told the cops the thief had taken nothing. I even gave them video footage of the thief. A few days later, a cop came back and asked me to confirm how much had been stolen from the store. I told him $0. It turns out my boss had reported a loss of $500 from the cash box. I'm not sure if he got fine for filing a false police report, but

he showed up at work the next day to yell at me. He told me, you do not tell the cops anything unless I give you permission next time. Over the next couple of months, he also started becoming a penny venture at all of his locations. He would jack up the price of the subs to the maximum amount that he was allowed to by the franchise. He would skimp on vegetables, and he would yell at us if we put on the recommended amount. So like, if the recipe called for 8 slices of turkey, he told us to put on 6.

Basically, this pissed off all of my regulars and it killed our business. This meant that we were earning less, which made him more of a penny-penscher. Things started breaking in the store and he wouldn't hire professionals to fix it. He would bring in his friends and pay them in beer. I remember his mechanic friend coming in to fix our freezer over 10 times in one year. That freezer never properly kept the food at freezing temperatures, and it leaked water into the freezer. When health inspectors would come in, they would point it out, and my boss would say, yeah, I'm getting it fixed next week. I was so nervous getting frozen food out of the freezer that was basically 33 degrees all the time. Our frozen bread was floppy half the time. I dealt with this for multiple years. I know, I'm an idiot. I should have run away long ago. But I was literally living

hand-to-mouth, and me and my husband were trying to keep a roof over our head. We were both working over 60 hours a week. We just didn't have our lives together enough to be picky. If I was going to leave that store, I would have to find a job that paid 1.5 the minimum wage as starting paid to make the same amount that I was doing 60 hours a week as the area manager. When my boss started breaking labor laws, I began to seriously consider leaving. I handled faxing in the payroll at the end of every week. So our documents always have this little star next year clock in, clock out time when the time's been altered. I started noticing that everybody's hours had been adjusted multiple times on multiple days. My boss was cutting people's hours back by about half an hour. If they clocked in at six,

he would change it to 6.30. I pointed this out to him and he said, they just stand around and waste time every shift, so I take that time away. He also installed video cameras. He would literally watch his employees from home with a stopwatch, and send me a text at the end of the day telling how much time to subtract from each person's shift. I told him no. If he wanted this done, then he could do it himself. This was crazy illegal, and I want to know part of it. I also discovered something one year when he was showing me how to do the year-end reports for tax filing. Even though the stores were a franchise, they were all owned and operated

by him and his wife. He had registered each individual store under a different business name and a different bank. For example, if you worked at store A, you would get a paycheck from Waldo and son's LLC. And if you covered somebody's shift at store B the same week, you got a second paycheck from Waldo Incorporated, etc. I asked him why he did this, because it seemed incredibly unnecessary and complicated. He told me it was for tax purposes. He said that he paid less taxes if he registered each store as its own individual franchise.

I had pointed out that this was illegal. He said that he could get away with it by claiming that each store was owned by someone else in his family. For example, his wife owns store A, he owns store B, and one of his brother's own store C. It was super shady. He also had his do a bunch of other disgusting things. I had seen him rinse food off that had fallen

on the floor. When we got in lettuce that was turning brown, he would have us pick out the bad leaves, but keep the green leaves. He would dry food from one store to the other in an un-refrigerated car and take hours to get from point A to point B. Sometimes the meat was warm by the time it arrived. He also made issues of broken down bathroom as a storeroom for boxes of potato chips and cups. I had already been dealing with his garbage for 6 years. I was looking to leave very soon.

I had enough save to cover bills for at least 3 months to give me time to find a new job. I kept telling him that if he pushed me too far, I would leave him high and dry with no area manager, and he would have to come all the way out to man the stores himself. He would show up to the stores maybe once a week. He mostly went to the stores closest to his house because he hated having to drive the hour long drive from where he lived to my three stores way out in the boondocks. The day finally came when he pushed me to my breaking point. The franchise inspectors came monthly.

They were technically required to find three things wrong at every location because nobody could be perfect. There were minor, moderate, and major errors that they could find. Major errors got the owner find. In the six years that I had managed three stores, they had only found one major error. But one day, the boss called yelling at me because of a burnt out light bulb in the oven. It was a minor error, but he laid into me like I had just gotten the store shut down. It was so bad, my mother and father hurt him yelling at me through the phone speaker. My dad got so pissed listening to my boss yelling that he promised to cover my rent until I could get a new job if I just hung up on him. I just sat there silently and let him yell. When it was over, I said, okay, I'll do better tomorrow and hung up.

That night, I stayed up super late, finding all the phone numbers for labor and industries, OSHA, and all the legal resources I could find. The next day, I just didn't go into work. I stayed home making phone calls. I still had the text messages from my boss telling me to adjust people's hours. I had recordings from our security camera of him changing the dates on the prepared food

so that we didn't throw it away on time. I even had over 5 years of pasted up from 3 different business names owned by 3 different people, but all signed by him. Labor and industries was incredibly interested to hear about the time clock adjustments. They happily accepted email copies of all my text logs. They also accepted several dozen pages of faxed paystubs. I also learned that he should have been paying me over time for working 20 hours extra each week. He told me that I was salary, but he classified my pay as hourly. I ended up speaking to a couple of different people about his tax fraud.

Every single one of them wanted copies of my pay stubs and proof that they were owned by the same person. The best phone call I saved for last. A call to the local health inspector. I informed them about the leaky freezer, the changing of dates on prepped foods, the disgusting practice of keeping food far past its expiration date. The temperature log book where he literally just wrote down random numbers instead of actually taking the temperatures because it takes too long to do that every two hours. Or my personal favorite, the time of plumber was fixing the toilet and it literally exploded poopy water into our lobby. The boss made us keep the store open and mop it up quickly right in front of customers.

The health inspector was very interested to hear more. While making these calls, I was getting dozens of angry voicemails in text from my boss asking me where the hell I was. Because I was literally supposed to be working a shift and I just didn't show up. The poor opener had to stay late and the closer had to come in early. I felt a little bad about that. But I knew the next day the boss himself would have to come into cover the shifts unless he hired somebody and trained them overnight. I ignored every single one of his phone calls. I just never went back, not even for my last paycheck.

I never heard back about getting all that unpaid over time, but I did hear through the grapevine about the fallout of what happened over the next few months. Two of my boss' stores were completely shut down. As in, the health inspector has put a red warning label on the doors and gave him one month to fix all the problems before they would let him open again. He lost his franchise rights with the company. He had to sell all of his stores to other franchisees. Since he was still paying back loans on a couple of them. He had to sell all of his stores to other franchisees, since he was still paying back loans on a couple of them, he had to sell them at a loss. Almost every single one of his employees got huge payouts for the missing time that he had removed from their time clock. One former employee got a check for $5,000, and he'd only been there

for one year. I also learned that my boss got put on two-year probation and lieu of prison time. And apparently, he failed his first surprise drug test. So he ended up spending a couple of weeks behind bars anyway. I found out through social media that my boss's wife left him for a year to let him get his head screwed on right. And when they got back together, she made him be a stay-at-home dad while she went out and ran the stores that were still in her name. I know it's not as climactic as some other pro-roving stories on this website, but it felt so

good to basically flip him the bird and then let him sleep in the bed that he made. I've got another job now, and I get paid the same amount that I was earning from him, but I only work 40 hours a week. I also get actual lunch breaks now. I get breaks now. I get over time now. I didn't actually realize how illegal his practices had been until I started working a normal 9-5 job. To this day, the idea of taking a lunch break without having to help customers in the middle of it is just wonderful. Oh, P, this is an amazing story, but I can't believe that you didn't stick around

to get all that back paid that was owed to you. If one employee was owed $5,000 and he worked for one year, and you worked for five years, then logic would dictate that you were owed at least $25,000. Throw in all that overtime, 20 hours a week of overtime, we're talking probably somewhere between 50k to $100,000. Our next Reddit post is from mysterious teaching. Back story. Our company was moving a remote site to a new building. As the IT guy for the company, I was asked to look at the new building and get network ports marked out.

The landlord refused to put in any low-voltage lines and we got quotes, but they were in the thousands of dollars. So of course, that job fell on my shoulders instead. So on to the story. Day one. We get their Monday morning at the start of the month. It's actually a cool summer morning and we're in the south, so no one notices the AC not working for about an hour. Slowly the building begins heating up. It climbs to 80 degrees by noon and 85 by 3 pm. The rooms with Florida ceiling windows are like greenhouses. It is absolutely miserable.

We've been told by the workers still on the site that the leasing company was told there was no AC in our building three weeks ago. The other thing worth pointing out is that there are still workers on the site. The building isn't even completed so so much for the building being ready on day one. Day two, we are getting agitated. It is 80 degrees in the morning when we first walk in. It's sweltering. The other guy that came up with me is the facilities manager.

He is screaming at people over the phone to fix the F-ing AC. We're all exhausted from the heat by 3pm. I found a 4-foot hole in the ductwork when I opened the ceiling tile. The AC was blowing, but there was no cold air. We were told the compressor was broken. Day 3, more of the same. We are miserable in the morning. I'm finally getting the last lines punched in on the patch panel. The AC guys arrive at about 10 a.m. They finally fixed the unit at 2 p.m. We asked them what they did, and they said a lot of things.

We again said, what did you do? And the reply was, we can't tell the tenants. Red flag alert. We contacted our realtor, and she said that she would look into what was done. She sent us an email later that night that said, they changed the refrigerant from R22 to R410A. I tell the facilities guy, no way dude. That's like putting gas in a diesel motor.

They'd have to change out the entire system. They did not do that in 4 hours. They basically just duct tape the thing back together, and it'll run poorly for about a month and then give out out and will be stuck with a replacement. Day 4. There's still no running water to some areas. There's still workers on site and the AC can't keep up with the new day sun.

By the end of the day, it's close to 80 degrees. The AC is running continuously. We packed up all the stuff that we moved in and moved out. I noticed all the fire sprinklers look like they've moved, and the metal protection around the drop tile has fallen to the floor. The sprinklers are no longer protruding from the tile in places,

and in others, they are quite a bit lower than they were. Yep, the AC idiots stood on the fire sprinklers to fix their lousy ductwork. At this point, we're looking for a friendly way out. We contact the landlord and say, you haven't delivered a finished building, so we're moving out. The lease is broken. The landlord has a 36-page lease,

and he won't let us out of the lease. He says it's a five-year lease. This is not starting off well. We get in contact with our corporate lawyer and the realtor, and they both agree that we're kind of screwed. We are desperate for a way out. I start looking at the fire system.

There's no fire panel in our portion of the building. No smoke detectors are hooked up to anything. More red flags. One of the employees that was moving the heavy gear says, oh yeah, I forgot to mention, I never saw any building permits anywhere. Ding ding ding. They did this whole build out, demolition, running new plumbing, power lines, destroying the fire system, without a city permit.

Q a call to the city inspector's office. Day five. I wasn't here for this part, but the facility manager told me this. The city inspector pulled the permits for the building, and there weren't any. He found multiple violations of city code. He red-tagged off the area and removed the certificate of occupancy.

When I told him to check the fire system like you said, he just said, oh no, no, no, no, I have to make a call. And he called the Fire Marshall. Day eight, the Fire Marshalls arrive on scene. They find no active alarm system in our portion of the building. They found the sprinkler riser for the entire building in our area, and it had no water pressure, so the sprinklers weren't even functional. He condemned the entire building.

Basically, they wouldn't let us out of the building because we signed a lease, even though they never delivered a building in any semblance of working order. We call the building inspector who found tons of violations, who then call the fire marshal who condemned the entire building. They're still trying to fight us over it, but we're pushing for them not only refunding our deposit and the rent, which they've already done, but for all the time spent moving gear in and out and all the wiring, our lawyer says they don't have a leg to stand on and he's happy for them to pay his fees as well. So down in the comments, I see a bunch of people saying that when it comes to getting a building condemned, fire marshals are like gods. Absolutely nothing trumps a

fire marshal, so it doesn't matter how much fancy lawyer work they pull, if a fire marshal says the building is condemned it's condemned which yeah I guess makes sense from like a city planning perspective because if one building catches on fire then two buildings might catch on fire and then you have a massive fire across your city which is super dangerous so it makes sense they would have that much power. That was our slash per revenge and if you like this content then you can sponsor my podcast to unlock extra episodes. Also be sure to follow my podcast because I put

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