Conspiring Against A Crappy Coworker Creates Corporate Calm

I had a coworker who was absolutely awful to waitstaff because he believed it got him better service. I once asked him if he minded the fact that the waiters might spit in his food, and he went, “Heh, heh, heh, some places charge extra for that.”

Worse, I was usually seated next to [Coworker] at corporate functions because our last names were only a few letters apart, and seating was by last name.

It hurt my soul watching [Coworker] act the way he acted, and it hurt my happiness watching as the service at our table consistently went from “okay” to “the worst service in the house” due to his behavior. I started requesting specifically not to be seated at the same table as him.

Another corporate event was coming up, and when I checked the seating chart, to my dread, I saw that I was once more seated at the same table as [Coworker]. Fed up with it, I hatched a plan.

I found out who the catering company was and warned them about [Coworker] in advance. I advised that they record his outbursts, gave them the email addresses of some high-level executives, and told them that if [Coworker] gave them trouble, they should threaten to blacklist us. It took a while for the person I’d called to understand, but eventually, I got passed along to a manager in the catering company who had a brilliant evil cackle as we conspired together.

Next, on the day of the event, I made sure to rile the guy up. I knew what sorts of things would upset [Coworker]. A couple of his biggest triggers were praising young people and talking about the poor, so I made sure to say a few triggering phrases to him before the servers came around.

He had so many nasty outbursts with the waitstaff that day, and each time he started to calm himself down, I mentioned something else to piss him off, like talking about a homeless encampment or mentioning an article about a fast food worker getting a GoFundMe after the company stiffed him for his many-year anniversary.

My a**hole coworker barely knew which end was up by the end of the day. He was practically frothing, and his face was blotchy and red. I’m surprised he didn’t have a heart attack. He had to call off work the day after because his “voice was too hoarse”!

My plan did not take long at all to come to fruition. By the next week, [Coworker] had been let go.

I never told anyone else about it, though one woman seated at the table watched me do it and secretively congratulated me when [Coworker]’s “retirement” was announced.

A few years later, I saw [Coworker] manning a cash register at a retail store. I asked him why he was here, and he ranted that his “401k” in his mid-fifties wasn’t enough to retire off of and he had been disqualified from the company pension.