Rob the twat
After sitting the mandatory tests and interviews with management and directors, I was given the good news. I was hired! I was quite surprised when the customer service director introduced me to my new boss, Rob, whom I’d been to school with, some ten years before - small world and all that. I'd remembered him as a cocky, weasly little gobshite but I figured that time would have mellowed him as it did everyone else. How wrong I was.

I guess I should have objected to the custom of a 09:01am fag break, which invariably left me as the sole non-smoker in the department to field 20% of the day’s support calls. Fifteen minutes later, the smokers would return noisily while I struggled to placate a back log of exasperated clients unable to pay their staff for whatever reason. Did I mention our product was flaky? Well, it was flakier than the Singing Detective’s scrotum and half as user-friendly.

We had a problem on our hands, but I was assured that through teamwork we’d all pull through. Rob’s response to my personal and professional enquiries was generally silence which was only broken either by Rob’s phone as he was summoned to the customer service director’s office or by intermittent sniggers between Rob and the one of the other support guys on £5k less than me while they avoided my eye.

With a nicotine-stained leer, Rob insisted on micro-managing everything I did whilst berating me for every conceivable misdemeanour, imagined or not. Despite never using the office internet myself, I was apparently being watched and monitored, unlike my colleagues it seemed. The moment senior management appeared on the scene, bullying Rob would be replaced by simpering Rob, intent on arselicking favour as best he could. He proudly sported the badge of egotistical middle management - no, not the mid-spec BMW 3-series - but the carefully cultivated and completely non-ironic goatee beard.

I was due to get married in a few weeks time and had a fair few other things on my mind to concern me. I didn’t want to screw up so close to being hitched, I was careful to log each and every one of my actions on our creaking helpdesk database, after a couple of weeks of silence, save for the usual spiky remarks and sniggers from my colleagues, Rob asked me to step outside with him.

"I can't help noticing that you're bringing your wedding nerves to work with you. It's not professional, you must make sure they stay out of the office." he said sternly, commanding all the respect of something I might scrape off the sole of my shoe. However, anxious to avoid rocking the boat I nodded and apologized.

“It’s all right to be nervous” he added, before continuing with an entirely unwelcome and unnecessary monologue about the precarious state of his own marriage. His wife didn’t understand him; he was trying to keep her and his young son together, etc, etc. I indulged him and returned to my desk. However, two hours later I was gobsmacked by the following exchange between him and a client spending a not inconsiderable amount of money on a support contract:

"Well, we have been talking to Marriage Guidance and I'm doing what I can. I don't want to lose the boy..." said Rob, on the telephone in front of the whole office.

"...she wants more excitement in the bedroom..." he continued.
I nearly spat my coffee out in disbelief. Professional or what?

On the Friday before I was due to fly off on honeymoon, I went through my outstanding helpdesk calls I’d been assigned with Rob. A client had reported disappearing database records, an issue I’d thus far failed to replicate. I queried who to assign it to in my absence.

"Close it" barked Rob.

"You sure?" I asked

"Yeah, I'm sure it's the client. They’re a bunch of fuckwits and don’t know what they’re talking about" he replied. I duly completed the log and saved it while he went for another fag.

Two weeks later I came back to work and coffee scarcely poured I was duly summoned to a disciplinary meeting with Rob and the Customer Service Director.

"You closed a serious issue without due consultation and thus caused an embarrassing incident with the client, who are now refusing to pay their support fees" said Rob

My mouth fell open. I could not believe what I was hearing.

"You told me explicitly to close it!" I retorted.

"Trying to pin the blame for your actions on your line manager is a very serious disciplinary matter" brayed Rob solemnly, playing the part for the Customer Service director who sat behind his desk nodding. I was handed copies of reports from the customer service database, which seemed to bear no relation to the comments I’d saved myself.

“Database crashed on the Friday just after you left. We had to restore it. Seems convenient that your comments weren’t saved doesn’t it David?” Rob grinned.

Cunt.

Rob was about as trustworthy as the rhythm method and twice as slimy. The fucker had deleted my helpdesk log details. I sat there utterly bewildered as he launched straight into his bad cop routine.

"You have to buck your ideas up sunshine". I was given a verbal warning on the spot and sent back to my desk, tail between my legs.

I decided to try a different tack and wrote down the date, time and a brief summary of everything Rob said to me on a notepad, which I was careful not to leave lying around. This seemed to enrage him even more. The following Monday he beckoned me into the boardroom again.

"You're not pulling your weight sunshine. You spend too much time making unnecessary notes, about confidential matters"

Au contraire. I had access to the helpdesk statistics, without a word, I printed the stats proving I was resolving more issues than anyone else on the helpdesk including Rob, together with a few emails that clients had sent to me personally thanking me for my help and pinned them to the notice board, leaving copies on the Customer Service Director's desk.

Determined to prove a point, he started to take more calls himself and reduced my allocation of calls. At least three times a day he’d beckon the other two analysts outside for a fag break, while I was left with the toxic clients on the phone. My colleagues weren’t speaking to me openly, save for a couple who professed sympathy on the quiet. It was clear I was being lined up for the door.

I wasn’t leaving without a fight though. After buying the IT manager a couple of pints one lunchtime, I managed to “acquire” some of the emails Rob had sent to my colleagues (both technically my subordinates) about me. The I discovered that instead of being busy building a SQL database (his main justification for offloading work onto me), he was in fact playing Age of Empires and that I was a cunt for making him look bad and causing him to do some work. The timing of a job offer from another organisation was most fortuitous, the following week I stood up as Rob coughed and cursed his way back into the office.

"Rob, we need a meeting" I smiled.

"Yeah mate. Maybe later?" replied Rob over the top of the sound of ringing telephones as he wandered out for another cigarette break

I’d already placed my written resignation in his in tray, knowing he wouldn't read it. I put a copy on the Customer Service Director's desk and sat back in my chair waiting for it to kick off. Rob’s phone rang, his face registered momentary panic and he left his chair with uncharacteristic urgency and disappeared into the Customer Service Director’s office.

Fifteen minutes later he comes out looking like he’d been on the receiving end of a bollocking. The repeated denial of my requests for an appraisal meeting which I’d recorded in my resignation letter had not been well received, nor had my documented instances of blatant favouritism. I'm delighted to say that worse was to come.

"Don’t you ever go over my fucking head again..." he quietly snarled as he walked past me.

I worked my notice to rule and that was that….

…but not quite.

I arranged a drink with a colleague just before I left who filled me in on a few colourful details about Rob’s private life. Rob's missus was a very difficult woman, she'd been knocked up at sixteen, consigned to life on a council estate and had managed to seduce Rob three years later when she’d seen the obvious meal-ticket potential. She’d controlled his every move, phoning him every hour or so during his carefully orchestrated cigarette breaks. Just lately, she'd decided that life with Rob wasn't much cop since discovering the delights of MSN and was having second thoughts now she had a kid by him and was anxious to enjoy her youth before it passed her by. She’d managed to con the idiot into taking saucy pics of her so she could email them to potential online suitors…

Moral of the story? It pays to delete your emails. Especially if you're an arsehole.
(Bicycle Repairman "you're also a bit of a wanker", Mon 22 Jun 2009, 17:15, 9 replies)

Worthy of a decent length joke shirly?
clicks
( fuck shit up the best you never had, Mon 22 Jun 2009, 17:28, closed)

Jesus
That's a long one (I'm sure you've heard that before, mate).

Rob sounds like an utter spasticated cunt. You did well not to chin the wanker...

Click!!!
( SpankyHanky, Mon 22 Jun 2009, 17:28, closed)

I remember this from before I think...

If I have read this before, I know I would have clicked it.

Cos it'a ace. Excellent descriptions

Either way, I'm clicking now.

*clickety woo*
( Pooflake braces for an onslaught..., Mon 22 Jun 2009, 17:48, closed)

'flakier than the singing detective's scrotum'
lager only held in from spraying screen by most intense concentration and self control

*Clicks*
( Rotating Wobbly Hat That's not a banana. THIS is a banana., Mon 22 Jun 2009, 18:00, closed)

SQL what a load of cunt
(Anal Baby You Smell, Mon 22 Jun 2009, 23:26, closed)

Love it!
Brilliant story, so a firm click from me!
( Labia Majora You keep on talking but it makes no sense at all, Tue 23 Jun 2009, 11:56, closed)

This is the reason
I'm self-employed. I'd have killed him, no question. My fists were clenching just sat here reading this!!! Nice to hear you managed to get out with dignity intact. *clickety*
(Rsoles, Tue 23 Jun 2009, 14:18, closed)

^What they all said^
Fine work to be able to leave with your head held high, sir.

Haev a *click* for a tale well told.
( TheMagicDwarf is back like ballroom dancing, Tue 23 Jun 2009, 15:45, closed)

I too am sure I've seen this before
in the best of page of a previous qotw. And I'm sure we'll see it again in the best of page of this one. Because it's a excellent story of calculated revenge against an utter twat and deserves many, many clicks.
(Uncle Comrade, Tue 23 Jun 2009, 20:57, closed)