Boss who kept team awake at night gets fired for sleeping through emergency

Evil boss stories are fun to read only when they meet a deserving end. An incident, shared on the Reddit forum, r/MaliciousCompliance, turned into a tale of petty revenge at the end. Redditor u/backgroundnerd, who works as a database administrator, shared the story of his evil boss who kept his team awake at night but got fired for sleeping through an emergency.

This boss learned it the hard way

In the story, the Redditor explains that his company had three DBA (Data Base Admin) teams and he had been on one since he joined. They used to communicate through pagers for emergencies, which they rarely had. However, with developing technology, their company faced crunch times, and during its “death throes,” they conducted massive layoffs and combined three DBA teams into one. However, they did not offline any system, so the workload remained the same.

The Redditor said that he made the cut, but now he had a new toxic boss. He wrote that the new boss, Steve, always threw his team members under the bus for anything that happened and never supported anyone. While the change didn’t bother the worker at first, a significant problem surfaced soon.

“My first on-call rotation on this new combined team was utter hell! The pager went off every 10 to 15 minutes,” the user wrote.

He said that the team was getting pages for work that wasn’t related to them because of the new boss’ policies. He wrote that the pager kept going off all night and he had to keep a check just so he didn’t miss anything important. “So you get zero sleep and with the diminished staff they expect you there the next day,” the user wrote.

Thus, to come up with a solution, the Redditor reprogrammed the pager. Now, only the messages that were important for DBAs went through while the other generic information was forwarded to email instead. “Worked like a champ! We went from 50 pages a night to maybe one per night and often none,” the user wrote.

However, Steve soon found out about it after the Redditor failed to respond to a page related to a print job failure. When asked about it, the worker explained that the print job had nothing to do with DBAs, so he didn’t need to respond. This led to a shouting match between them and the worker was eventually ordered to program the pager back like it was.

“Our department must know everything that happens overnight so we can answer for it in the morning, make sure we get the pages!” he recalled the boss saying. The worker picked up on the word “WE” so he reworked the pager program in such a way that all messages went to the boss’ pager as well.  “Now WE and OUR DEPARTMENT know everything that happens overnight!” the user wrote.

While the worker was eager to see how the boss would respond, to his disappointment, he said nothing the next day. This went on for a few days and eventually, the worker learned that the boss was simply switching his pager off in the night instead of accepting his fault.

A few weeks later, the whole team was paged to come in on a Sunday night as there was a big emergency. All hands were on deck and even the CEO and CIO were there to work on the problem. Even though the DBAs had nothing to do with it, they stayed along with everyone else “just in case,” the user wrote. At 5 am, the CIO of the company came up to the Redditor asking about his boss.  

“Hey, I have paged your boss like a dozen times — he is not answering,” the worker recalled the CIO saying. The worker promptly replied that his boss “never replies” in the night. He wrote that the CIO’s face went cloudy upon hearing this.

The Redditor wrote that at about 7:45 am, his boss walked in with a fresh face and a full night’s sleep. However, when he saw all the “big hitters” in the room with all the staff present, his face fell to the ground. The CIO asked the boss, "Where have you been?" and he was soon taken out of the room. The Redditor explained that he didn’t know what went on after that but he never saw his boss again, which meant he was fired.

Readers of the post lauded the sheer karma that Steve got. “Steve always threw his team members under the bus. You returned the favor by throwing him to the sharks. Well played good sir!” wrote one user, u/Coolbeanschilly. 

For more such interesting stories, you can follow r/MaliciousCompliance on Reddit.