People Describe Their Wide-Eyed Revenge Stories

“I used to work at an upscale restaurant owned by a large corporate entity that owns several different restaurant brands. I worked there for about 3 1/2 years before they eventually fired me, but more about that later.

First, I want to give an idea of my role there.

My role at that job was a little of everything. Since the day I started working there, I took it upon myself to learn as much as possible. I was very persistent with management when I wanted to learn a new department. I had started as a server, but eventually had worked my way into different departments and job titles, like carry-out, hosting, bartending, bar backing, banquets, catering, and deliveries.

My singular goal while working there was to make myself available for as many hours as possible. I was being paid about $12 an hour, though that fluctuated if I was working as a bartender or server and making tips. Eventually, it was noticed by management how I fit best into one of the non-tipped positions. I was so good at it that they decided to try me out as an unofficial supervisor over the team that worked in carry-out, catering, and deliveries, as those were all one department.

I knew this was going to ultimately mean a few fewer hours since I would only be working one department, so I negotiated with management to increase my pay by about $1.50. Since I was taking on additional responsibilities, they were satisfied with the pay increase. I wasn’t trying to get as much bank out of them as I could, I just wanted to be able to pay my bills and still have a little amount left over for fun.

I was living in the highly taxed city of Chicago, which is in the already highly taxed state of Illinois, so it was pretty difficult to make ends meet and still have something left to enjoy my life. I am a person of simple pleasures and I can enjoy things for long periods of time, so it didn’t take much to be happy. A video game could hold my attention for several months, sometimes even years.

I had a family pet that I had brought with me to Chicago, so that counted as an extra expense. Not long after I started this position as the unofficial supervisor, I got a significant other so I was also going out more often and spending on her.

With my position and some smart budgeting, I was able to afford all of this. The money wasn’t an issue, but management had a high turnover rate, so the incoming managers often did not know what the department entailed or how important hours were to workers of these departments.

Eventually, it was noted that our current general manager was going to be fired and replaced. The incoming general manager was supposed to be some rockstar when it came to improving restaurants. We looked up his name and found him as the first search result on Google. But the entry wasn’t some glowing review of his work ethic or of his impeccable ability to improve the way a restaurant runs… It was actually a mugshot and a police report filed for repeated domestic abuse.

This is important later. We’ll call him Harvey.

Shortly after Harvey came in and started making changes, one of our best managers gave her resignation. She refused to work with him, and like an Oracle, told us to expect lots of harassment, misogynistic comments, and for him to eventually run this place into the ground. Not long after she left, our general manager began replacing our current managers with hand-picked people that he had worked with in the past. Eventually, all but one manager was replaced. That manager was the kitchen manager.

We will call him Fred.

Fred had been there since I had started working there. He seemed to be something of a chameleon, as his values and ethics seemed to change depending on who his boss was. Honestly, I sort of applaud his survival instincts, but ultimately see him as a suck-up and traitor.

Harvey never really replaced the manager for our department, so we ran without a lot of oversight.

Unless you count me as the supervisor, we didn’t constantly have someone breathing down our necks about how things should be done. Our department had some hiccups here and there, but it still ran really smoothly.

Since we did not have our own manager, we often had to radio for a manager to come to help us out on things that needed a manager card for approval. Fred would always be the one to answer these calls since the kitchen was closest to our department.

Over time the new team of managers started to see Fred as the manager of our department as well. However, the hourly team that worked there still saw me as their supervisor. This meant that any time Fred was trying to make changes that would ultimately hurt us, the team relied on me to mitigate those disasters or to negotiate with Fred to let us do our jobs the way we had already proven worked really well.

Over several months Fred and I would butt heads dozens of times. He and I were constantly arguing about how important hours were to the workers in this department. He had it in his head that we should be living off of tips like servers, but since most of our orders were carryout, they came in through Grubhub, and Grubhub doesn’t tip. We didn’t have a lot of deliveries in a day, and the tips we got from those were maybe $10 if we were lucky.

But splitting $10 four ways doesn’t add up to a lot. It just showed that Fred had no clue what he was talking about.

Eventually, we had a meeting with Harvey, Fred, and all the workers of this department. it was marketed as a chance to voice all our grievances and concerns with the changes they wanted to make with no chance of retaliation. So the workers did exactly that.

They talked about how Fred was trying to cut hours even though he isn’t our actual manager. When it was brought up that they were attempting to hire someone to be the manager, the team suggested that I take over since I had already been supervising them and running things smoothly for the last several months. I was also the one that management consulted with when writing schedules as I had an understanding of the days some workers could and couldn’t work depending on their school schedules or family life.

I could see at the moment it was suggested, that Harvey and Fred made the decision on the spot that I had to be rid of. Although they didn’t say it, I could see the look they gave each other, and instinctively knew that my days at this place were numbered and my job was going to be getting the ax one way or another.

They made a bunch of promises to us about not cutting hours. They told us that they would stop sending all but one person home early and only leaving one person to clean everything and close up by themselves, as this wasn’t a small department and it was simply too much for one person to do alone while still meeting health and safety standards. They promised that whatever hours we were scheduled for, we would work.

We weren’t trying to be unreasonable, so we told them that we usually have 3 or 4 people scheduled to work our department. They could cut two of them early, but we always needed at least 2 people here to help close properly. The promise was made that they would always have at least two closers.

However, only about a week later, they started sending all but one person home early again every night.

One night they tried to do it while I was scheduled as the closer, and we had just returned from a massive catering event and there was an unbelievable amount of cleanup left to do for one person. When Fred came in and tried to send everyone except me home I stepped up and told him that he was consistently breaking the promise he had made to us during the meeting.

He looked me square in the face and told me to stop complaining about it, and if I was going to keep trying to talk to him about him breaking his promises he could easily find someone who could work my shifts.

I quickly realized that this was an assassination attempt on my job. He wanted me to press it further. So I backed off and started cleaning.

I ended up having to stay way late, and that meant overtime pay anyway. I got a write-up for that since we aren’t allowed to work overtime without a manager’s approval. When I refused to sign the write-up, pointing out that I had tried to explain to Fred that I wouldn’t be able to clean up all that stuff alone before my scheduled shift ended, I was allowed to leave without signing the write-up, but only because the HR rep that was present at the time wasn’t one of Harvey’s cronies.

Skip ahead, to the day I was fired:

It is important to note at this point that I always came into work an hour early. Since we lived in Chicago, food was expensive. However, at our job, we were allowed to have as much free soup and bread as we liked. So I would come into work one hour early every day so I could have some soup and bread for lunch before my shift.

But on this day, when I walked into the kitchen to get myself some soup, one of the line cooks told me that he had a dish that had been canceled after he cooked it, and Fred had told him to give it to someone. He assured me Fred had already comped it and that it was free to take for whoever wanted it. It just so happened to be my favorite appetizer so I happily took the free food.

Not long after I got to my booth, both Harvey and Fred approached me and asked me if I had put in a ticket for that food. I told them that the line cook had given it to me and said it was the canceled order that Fred had already comped… Fred looked dumbfounded and said he had no idea what I was talking about.

So Harvey told me ‘I think you know that’s theft. Go ahead and finish the food and then grab your stuff and go. That’s the last meal you’ll be having here.’

I tried to explain to them that I had been given this food by the line cook, but they refused to listen, so I offered to take them to the kitchen to clear it up with the cook.

But by the time I had gone back to the kitchen with them to talk to the line cook, he had already gone home for the day. I had no choice but to gather my stuff, say my goodbyes, and head home.

On my way out, I told the people working my department that afternoon what had happened, exactly as it happened. They were shocked and angry, but mostly sad to see me go.

I decided that on my way out, I would stop by the accounting office and pick up any tips that may have been dropped for me that week, just to make sure I didn’t get screwed over.

Before heading down, I had the gut feeling to just set my phone to record, and I stuffed it into my pocket with the camera rolling. Although the video was entirely black since it was in my pocket, I did manage to get a pretty muffled recording of Harvey and Fred’s voices through the door, discussing how things had gone as planned, and that they had been trying to get rid of me ever since the meeting with my department.

I knocked on the door and they hushed up before opening it. They asked what I was still doing there, and I asked for my tips. They gathered what was in the safe for me and handed it over. Despite my anger rising at what I had just heard, I decided not to burn this bridge just yet… Because perhaps I could nuke it later.

I offered a handshake to both managers, thanked them for the opportunity to work there, and left, making sure to pull my phone out of my pocket and record the front of the restaurant, with the sign showing its name and logo. Working in a restaurant, you learn to ALWAYS COVER YOUR OWN BUTT. It’s true for most jobs, but something was just telling me I would need this all later.

If I was being accused of theft, I wanted to be able to prove it wasn’t true if it ever came up in future job interviews… This is exactly what happened and where this all started going nuclear.

On the train ride home, I sent some messages and made some posts on some local groups on social media saying that I had just been fired and that I was looking for a job as quickly as possible.

By the time I got off at my stop, I had already set up an interview for later that day.

I was offered the job about 5 minutes into the interview, but after going over the details, it didn’t sound like it was for me, so I turned it down. I interviewed at a few other places and found one that was a d****d good fit, with a hefty pay increase compared to my previous job, and I wouldn’t have to deal with customers.

It was an auditing job for a logistics company.

However, during the interview with the manager of this job, he mentioned he had already called my previous place of employment and spoken with the general manager, Harvey. Harvey had told him that I had even been fired for theft. Luckily for me, the manager I was interviewing with asked me to tell him more about that… and he was willing to let me pull out my phone and find the recording.

I asked if the voice in the video was the same as the one he spoke on the phone with. It was. That was confirmation enough for him that I hadn’t made a fake video. He listened to the two managers in the video admit that they had set me up, and watched to the end when I showed the front of the restaurant, complete with the logo and name.

The manager interviewing me, who we’ll start calling Dean, hired me immediately and asked me to send him the recording. I did.

I thought that was the end of it.

About 7 months later, after settling into this job quite nicely, HR sent out a ‘Welcome all our new team members’ email, which listed all the newest hires, some facts about them, and had pictures of them all.

They sent these out every time they hired a new round of people.

One of them, Thomas, was a former coworker who worked with me at the restaurant. We had worked at the host stand together, so I was pretty glad to see someone I knew and liked coming onto the team. I sought out his desk and went and said hi, and asked why he left the restaurant.

He hadn’t left willingly. He’d been laid off because the company was under investigation. It had started as a relatively small matter. The corporate entity that owned the restaurant chain had received an email with an attached video. MY video that had been filmed from inside my pocket. That caused enough for corporate to send someone to investigate internally.

Thomas was pretty surprised that I hadn’t heard anything about it, since there had been numerous attempts to get in touch with me.

As soon as he said that, I logged into the old email I had used when I first applied for the job at the restaurant. I had at least two dozen emails asking me to come in to discuss my employment and termination. I never replied. I just didn’t care enough anymore.

I’d also changed my number since then, so they hadn’t been able to contact me by phone.

Thomas continued explaining that before corporate had sent someone, Harvey and Fred had talked with my department and tried to offer them all a small pay increase to spin corporate a story about how I was incompetent at my job and failed to live up to my duties.

The day the corporate auditor showed up, there had been a small exodus of people from my old department.

They quit ON THE SPOT, in front of the lady from corporate (let’s call her Audrey), and made sure to rat out Harvey and Fred before leaving.

Strike one for both of them.

Strike two came a couple of days after Audrey showed Harvey and Fred the recording that had kicked all of this off. They denied it vehemently, but there was no mistaking Harvey’s voice.

It’s unique. Not only that, but the video also picked up their voice and mine when we shook hands and had a friendly parting of the ways, which was something they had already bragged about to Audrey, thinking it made them look better that we were able to part on good terms. This wasn’t the actual strike two. That came when it was clear they needed to be separated, so Audrey sent Fred to work at another restaurant owned by our parent company and temporarily demoted Harvey to manager.

This tore them apart. They had once been an inseparable evil team, but the pressure of the investigation must have pushed them over the edge. They ended up at each other’s throats… on social media, on a public post on the company page. The post had since been deleted, but Thomas explained it as the following.

Fred had been pictured in the social media post on the restaurant page, and Harvey made a passive-aggressive comment about how Fred shouldn’t even be in the picture since he had been moved to another restaurant due to misconduct.

Fred saw this comment and said something along the lines of ‘At least when people google my name, I don’t show up as the guy that punched his wife.’

To which Harvey responded, ‘Very funny from the guy who is two-timing his wife with Janet’s sister.’ (Not her real name, but Janet was the girl they appointed to officially supervise my old department after they fired me, the unofficial supervisor.)

Fred replies to that by saying ‘Like you haven’t tried with half the waitresses. They all have stories about you trying to hook up with them.’

The post was deleted, but not before it had been seen by Audrey the auditor. That officially struck two.

Strike three came the next day when Audrey started interviewing the female waitstaff and bartenders, seeing if any of them could confirm that Harvey had tried to make a move on them.

All of them were interviewed separately, several of them had similar stories. Every girl that confirmed Harvey had made a move on them all said he had offered to be their ‘Sugar Daddy’ if they would send inappropriate photos or stay after closing to fool around with him.

Harvey was fired. But that isn’t the worst of it. Audrey the Auditor wasn’t just some random woman from corporate.

She was the old regional manager for this area and had personally hired Harvey’s wife as the general manager of another restaurant in the city. So she called up the restaurant Harvey’s wife worked at and told Harvey’s wife everything she had learned from the female waitstaff.

We learned later that they had gotten a divorce over him trying to two-time her after she’d already given him a second chance to change after he had BEAT HER.

I don’t know what compelled her to give him a second chance after something like that, but she sure didn’t give him a third.

After firing Harvey, the line cook who had given me the food was interviewed by Audrey. I don’t know how it came up, but at some point, he had let it slip that he was an illegal immigrant. She had his file in her hand, with an Illinois ID and Social Security Number on file, so this confused her and she pressed him for more information

It turns out that Fred had some connections and had his own miniature black market going on where he would have fake social security cards and IDs made for the illegal immigrants he was hiring at reduced wages. It had been going on for at least 4 years.

Needless to say, this is a felony. With the potential PR nightmare that she was likely dealing with, she felt she had no choice but to alert the authorities.

Local PD enlisted the help of the FBI since some of the evidence led them beyond the jurisdiction of the local police.

Fred was arrested, and quickly gave up the names of the people working that he had sold Social Security Cards and IDs to. I’m not sure if he gave up ALL of them, but he did name drop about 14 people, and of those 14, at least half were deported by the time Thomas had been let go.

One of them was the line cook that had given me the food the day I was fired.

Thomas went on to explain that it had all started with me being fired, but I never sent that recording to corporate. I’d only sent it to Dean when he hired me.

I asked him about it, and he told me he had sent it to his wife since she was a lawyer.

He wanted to see if I had a case to maybe sue my old job since what they had done was wrong. But he also remembered that when we had the first talk about it, I had said I’m not the type of person who would try to make millions off an entire company because of the mistakes of two jerks.

But I’d also said that it would be pretty sweet to see them lose their jobs too.

So his wife had been the one that sent it to the legal team at the corporate HQ of my old restaurant job.

My boss showed it to his wife, who forwarded it to the real head honchos of my old job. They were both just trying to get two idiots fired for what they did to me but ended up pulling a thread so long that it didn’t end until there were harassment accusations, revelations about managers two-timing their wives with girls related to people they had placed in positions of authority, a divorce, mass layoffs pending investigations, a staff overhaul, an FBI investigation into what could be considered black market dealings of falsified government-issued documents, and at least a half dozen deportations and probably as many as 14.”