 Karen, you think we engineered a vast conspiracy against you for years? Shish, you really think it's all about you? Well, to be fair, you're right, but still. You found the best place for your vengeful needs. In this episode, we'll find that some people bring happiness wherever they go. Others, whenever they, go. A coworker wants to take another man's position, and isn't shy about it. But when his victim looks him in the eye and draws his finger across his throat, doubt fills his mind. Enter a uniquely awful Karen, who is a pain to work with while she recklessly puts patients' lives in danger. Being a classic narcissist, she thinks there's a vast conspiracy being orchestrated against her. Well to be fair. In this case, she was right. Lastly, an associate director seems to have a unquenchable thirst, for pushing others under the proverbial bus. Until she encounters a coworker, with an email hoarding problem. Before we start, get the like button emotionally invested into the game of thrones, without spilling the end. Naturally, viewer discretion is advised. These revenge stories, might be disturbing to bad co-workers. I'm a millwright, who specializes in rebuilding natural gas turbines. I run with a very top caliber crew where everyone has a role to fill. My role is overseeing anything that's lifted with a crane. My technical title is rigor. If a load falls, it's my fault. If someone gets hurt while I'm in control of a lift, it's my fault. If equipment is damaged while I'm in control of a lift, it's my fault. The incident in question happened about two years ago, but we'll need to go back a couple years farther to get the backstory. I was a fresh member of the crew and had demonstrated competency in rigging, so after roughly six months with this group, my superintendent put me in charge of all rigging. I wasn't the fastest rigger, but I was safety focused and insisted on doing it right every time even if it took a little longer. This meant that my superintendent didn't have to watch over every rigging task and could go relax because I had it under control. Another millwright joined the crew about the same time I did. We'll call him Larry. We didn't get along at first, but after a few months we became friends. Larry was the act now think later type. Much like the superintendent I travel under. Larry was prone to making mistakes because of that attitude, but he was very fast and worked like a mule at all times, and I respected that. He wasn't especially skilled in any one area, so he had no special position. That meant sometimes he'd get put on less glamorous work, and I soon learned he was very jealous of my position as the rigger. At times, he would make comments like, I'm gonna take your job. Not in getting me fired, but bumping me down a rung and him taking my spot as rigger. He come up behind me while I was looking over my checklists, to point out something I may not have checked yet. If your supervision was near, he'd make sure he was heard. At this point I should mention this. I stick out like a sore thumb on this crew. I was raised in a very strict Christian cult, but in my mid-20s I realized what was going on and left, at great cost. Losing my family and friends because of strict shunning rules the cult practices. Some of the stricter things stuck with me. Like I've never been intoxicated. I don't use tobacco. No recreational drugs. I speak professionally, without slang or colloquialisms for the most part. These traits stick out from a crew of men that travel the road and work in harsh environments, away from home for months on end. But Larry, he fits right in. Larry quickly became the superintendent's puppy. Bringing him gifts of his favorite alcohol, staying out late after work with him, even rooming with him on the road. I on the other hand, leave work, hit the gym, cook my food for the next day and make sure I get at least six hours of sleep so I can perform the next day. I realize that puts me at a disadvantage socially in the workplace, but I prefer to let my work speak for itself. Anyways. Fast forward about 18 months. We're starting a project just before COVID hits. About two weeks into the job, I have to attend a mandatory class through my union. It's a 40 hour class and in a different state, so I'll be gone for pretty much an entire week with travel time. I get permission from supervision and leave, with Larry rigging in my absence. A few days later, I'm lying in bed, stressing out about the final test I have to take the next morning. If the test isn't passed, the entire week is wasted. I always psych myself out before a test, but in reality, I don't have anything to worry about as I'm a good student and do well on tests. My phone goes off. It's a text from Larry. I love you bud, but I'm cutting your throat. I reply, what are you talking about? When you get back, I'll be the rigor you can do the shit work from now on. I'm not proud of the response I came back with, but it's how I truly felt in the moment. I said, be careful about cutting the throat of someone smarter than you. I'm far from the smartest person you'll ever meet, but I do enjoy reading, studying, and learning. And being smarter than Larry wasn't an accomplishment by any stretch of the imagination. The next morning, I passed the test and headed back to the job. Where Larry had in fact usurped my position as rigor, and was lording it over me as a one about doing the tasks he normally would do. To be completely honest, it was kind of like a vacation at first. Get paid nearly $40 an hour to clean parts or torque flanges with no stress? Sign me up. But I was upset. I was upset because I knew I did my job better than he would. I knew that he got along better with the superintendent because of their similar personalities, but I didn't feel that I should lose my position, simply because Larry had more in common with our superintendent than I did. Regardless of that, I was now dealt these cards, and I had to play them. Just three days after I got back from class though, the job was shut down. As the virus that hit the world entered everybody's lives, and was just now sweeping the country. Out of an abundance of caution, the plant shut the project down until further notice. We were sent home for about three days and then called out to an emergency shutdown, where a turbine had crashed. We roll out and are on the job 48 hours later, in the middle of nowhere, Alabama. We get right to work. On this particular unit, you pull the entire roof off in two sections with a crane to open the enclosure. Compared to many things we lift in a project like this, the roof weighs very little. The turbine rotor may weigh over 100,000 pounds, but the roof usually weighs around 7,000 pounds. Lightweight. But it is large and there are critical parts around the roof that can be damaged if not lifted carefully. Typical procedure is to be on top of the roof after it's unbolted, be in a full body harness and tied off to an approved anchor point, capable of holding at least 5,000 pounds per OSHA regulations. We then slowly take the weight of the roof with the crane, until it's floating, and then climb down off of it, and continue the lift until it's set on the ground or on a truck to be moved. The superintendent instructs me to go on the roof with Larry and assist him. Before I go, he instructs me. Do whatever Larry tells you to do. Okay boss. I put on my harness and climb to the top and begin to assess the situation. The rigging to lift the roof is 4, 5 ton chain falls. It's capable of safely holding 20 tons. Well over the weight of the roof. The crane is also well overrated for this lift, even with the boom extended all the way out in order to clear another building on the way to the ground. Larry has it all rigged up, but no tension on the wire rope slings. And then I notice his crucial mistake. He has forgot to account for boom deflection. When a crane takes the weight of a load, the boom flexes down. Depending on the crane set up and the weight of the load, it can mean that while your crane hook might be centered in your load with no weight on the hook, once you get the weight of the load on the crane, the crane hook could be anywhere from a few inches to a number of feet off center. Which means that when the load comes off the ground, it swings. Swinging is bad. Always. Enough weight swinging could tip the crane. Crash into equipment. Crash into a person. It's very dangerous. At this point, I start calculating. Is this weight enough, even swinging, to tip this crane? No. Not even close. Is it enough to break a chain fall? No, not even close. Are there any people working around us that could get hurt? Nope. It's just us. Is there any equipment that could be damaged if it swings? Yes. An electrical control panel, which is all power killed to it and has been disconnected. I decide to let Larry hang himself. He looks at me and asks what I think. I tell him, this is your show boss. He asks what I mean. I look him in the eye and draw my finger across my throat. He gets nervous, because he knows exactly what I mean. Starts double checking everything. He still doesn't notice the boom deflection. After a couple minutes, he decides I must be talking out of my ass and proceeds with the lift. I stop him, and remind him to tie off with his harness. He doesn't realize it, but we're about to go for a ride. Generally, when I'm rigging, I first find out what the thing I'm rigging to weighs. It's a vital piece of information. If I know what it weighs, I can have the crane operator track how much weight he is on the crane, and I'll be able to know when the object should start to pick up. If we get to over 10% more than the object should weigh, there may be something stopping it from moving and we need to stop and reassess the situation. Rigging could fail, the object you're lifting could jump into the sky, all kinds of mayhem may ensue if a hidden bolt holding something together breaks, because you use too much force to lift it. I ask Larry if he knows how much the roof weighs. He doesn't. I do, but don't tell him. He starts signaling the crane to slowly hoist up. The operator complies and starts lifting. I'm watching the boom get pulled more and more off-center. We're probably two feet from the center of the load at this point, meaning a swing that could travel nearly four feet. I stop Larry and ask him to see how much weight is on the crane. 11,000 pounds. 4,000 more than what it should weigh. This roof is in a bind because we're not picking it straight up, but at an angle. It's either not going to move, or we're about to fly. I brace myself. Hoist up, slowly Larry calls over the radio. Boom. The whole roof shoots a good two feet into the air, and swings wildly towards the control panel. Larry and I are riding it like pirates in the crow's nest in a hurricane. We crash into the control panel, bending it over at a 45-degree angle, destroying most of its components. People start pouring out of the nearby trailers to see what the commotion is all about. The crane operator is yelling over the radio, asking what the hell just happened. I'm smiling. Larry is shaking. He sees me smiling and knows that I knew. We get the roof set on the ground and are met by our superintendent. He's chewing Larry's ass hard. He gets to me and asks why I let it happen. I just say, I just did what Larry told me to do. The superintendent is no dummy. He's seen a thing or two and knows exactly what went down. Larry is demoted and I'm reinstalled as rigor immediately. And a few shifts later it's all smoothed over. Larry and I are actually good friends now. We've been through a lot together and have each other's backs these days. He's now the foreman on our crew, and lets me do my thing. Failing your way to the top is still a valid way of progressing in my field. But I'm happy for him. He's actually good at it. And I guess that's all there is to say about that. I used to work at a hospital data center in the network operations group. We physically sat in a room 24-7 next to the servers, to make sure things didn't catch on fire, monitored for alerts, and did routine things like swap out take backups, but it was pretty simple work. This was ostensibly a tech job, but there were people who had been there for many years, back when you had to change out printer paper and run a command from an IBM mainframe. It was on really specialized hardware and software that was difficult to apply elsewhere, so it had become a dead-end job. And because there were people who weren't tech savvy at all really, we weren't given much responsibility. You can't tell some people they can log into a server and others not, so we were reduced to the lowest common denominator. We were a network operations center, where nobody was allowed to interact with any network equipment. Lowest common denominator, you say. Meet my new supervisor, Karen, not her real name but definitely her real spirit. She had been there for over 20 years and got the job solely based on seniority. She was a sociopathic narcissist and one of the most unpleasant people I've ever encountered. Shortly after I was hired, we were bought by another hospital and combined data centers. Karen was demoted to shift lead and had to work with us in the 24-7 rotation. She was very bad at her job and our responsibilities diminished to very little. We had no agency to fix any problems of our own because it had to be a problem that Karen could solve, and Karen was both lazy and stupid. After a couple of years, I was promoted. On my first day after they announced the promotion, she said, You will fail. Just straight to my face. But she had a powerful tool at her disposal, the hospital bureaucracy. Since the place was unionized, the hospital had to just cause firing policy instead of an at-will policy, even for non-unionized employees. This is generally a good thing. But on the edges, it set up ridiculous situations where it was impossible to lose your job, unless you were really egregious about it with repeated violations, or you showed up drunk or high. We had someone steal computer equipment and they kept their job. It was nuts. And Karen had been there for nearly 30 years. So she wasn't getting fired without a lot of work. That's okay. She was terrible at her job. One of the most important things about the job, was monitoring for an alert which would pop up and there was a procedure we had to go through, in order for some data to go through. If we didn't do this, then a nurse wouldn't get their lab results back. So in one case, an alert came in, Karen saw it, then decided to keep browsing the web. Because of this, a patient from the cardiac ICU was going into surgery, and the doctors slash nurses operating on the patient couldn't get a white blood cell count or something like that. This was crucial for the procedure, so when these results weren't coming in, it created a dangerous situation for this patient. In the end, the patient passed away. Karen didn't get fired though, because HR concluded that what she did, or did not do, didn't directly led to harm. She didn't even feel bad about it. Just a complete soul as sociopath. I'm real pro worker in general, but some jobs you just absolutely have to do. I was so mad. She just had to go. I kept a paper trail of everything she messed up on. It wasn't nitpicky. Literal life and death stuff here. Verbal warning, first written warning, second written warning, final written warning, termination. I'd rather spend my time doing anything else, but that's the way it went. Then she figured out she could work the system. As she approached work Armageddon, termination, she would tell HR she was being harassed. The person harassing her was different every time, which would trigger a mandatory investigation. This investigation took about six months, they wouldn't find anything, and we would carry on. Except these warnings? They had a six month expiration. So she could always reset the clock whenever it got close. Everyone was helpless. Even the CIO couldn't do anything about it because of the bureaucracy. Karen was a menace and the entire IT department had to interact with the data center staff, and that meant interacting with her, and she was universally disliked. She had 20 years until retirement and surely would outlast the heat death of the universe. Then I had an vengeful brainwave, which sparked the following idea. What if, under the guise of developing skills relevant to the 21st century, required everyone working in the network operations center to pass the net plus exam? It's not a difficult exam, but it's not trivially easy. I felt pretty sure that everyone on the team fell above the line between able to pass and not able to pass, except Karen. We would give everyone better titles, a significant pay raise, and entrusted to do more with the equipment, which is something everyone desperately wanted. Then people could actually leave the hospital with transferable skills, and do something else if they wanted without feeling trapped. I spent three, years, in meetings with HR. With my director. With the CIO. With HR again. Job description meetings that took six hours to tweak small wording. Hundreds of hours in meetings. Red tape hell, absolute red tape hell. Do you have any idea what it takes to approve a significant raise, in a bureaucratic muck factory like that? But the raises were crucial, because it would absolutely not be fair to ask this of them. Pass a test or lose your job, without a large carrot attached would lead to mutiny. But nonetheless, after all these hurdles, it got approved. I also wrote the exam requirement into my own job description. It was important to still be able to do the job and not let my skills lapse just because I was promoted. This also meant I could cover for people when they were on vacation or sick. Plus, I also got that sweet, sweet pay bump. It went over well with the people. I must admit I was nervous, but the plan made sense and I was able to communicate it that way. People would be more marketable, the job would be more interesting. And most importantly, they would be making 20% more than they were before. And I think it really helped that I also gave myself the same requirement, when I absolutely could have chosen not to. The hospital would pay for offsite training. They would still get paid there full hourly during the training, including shift differential for second and third shifts. We paid for all the materials. I scheduled eight hours a week for people to go some place quiet and study. The job itself had a ton of downtime so people could study, but this was formally carved out time anyway. We paid for the exam. And if they failed, we'd pay for the second attempt. We were given eight months to pass the test. I did not want Karen to have any excuse whatsoever and somehow convince HR that this process was rushed or unfair. Everyone passed on the first attempt except Karen. Karen did not pass her second, or her third attempt, a bonus attempt. Karen, being the classic narcissist, thought this was somehow all about her. That this was a vast conspiracy engineered over multiple years and hundreds of hours just to get rid of her, and she would tell everyone within earshot, that's what was going on. Yeah okay Karen. You realize how insane that sounds, right? Not everything is about you, sheesh. Well, okay in this case it is, but still. Only I, and two other people, knew that. I remember the exact time and date we told her. She was in such deep denial that it could ever happen. She thought she was bulletproof. I don't think I will ever achieve anything more satisfying in my career. I'm not usually one to take satisfaction in seeing someone's livelihood go, but she was uniquely awful, she was a danger to patients, and it had been nearly a decade of working with her by this point, and I was just sick and tired of her bullshit. The day after she was fired, I was a hero. I went to the main office for a meeting and people were congratulating me like I just had a kid or won a marathon or something. Even the CIO. We rejoiced and they were happy for me particularly, because I didn't have to supervise Karen anymore. But in my head canon, they were congratulating me for pulling off this elaborate plan. Morale back at the data center was also high. We learned interesting things, a couple of my co-workers left for better gigs elsewhere, the ones who were content staying were able to stay, and we all had more money and job security. And because anything could set off a bullshit Karen harassment complaint, people were stressed out working with her. Her being gone was like a breath of fresh air. Newcomers were told stories of Karen, and they seemed exaggerated. I'll emphasize that they were not. In order to solve a very important and extremely difficult problem, I pulled off a vast workplace conspiracy that improved the lives of the people I worked with, in addition to keeping our patients safe. Getting Karen fired is my greatest and most difficult accomplishment, and I can't put it on a CV anywhere. I was building an online training module at work, that is intended to teach existing users how to work a new process. It has interactive elements, quizzes, segments to work through a few sample scenarios, etc. Now we'd recently got a new associate director, who from what I can tell, advanced through the company by throwing other people under the bus. She gets promoted not for her own merits, but because at the end of the day, she has less mud sticking to her than other applicants. It's uncanny to the point that there simply had to be more to it than stupid office politics. I'll get to that in a bit. So after I have the first draft of the module done it gets sent out for the usual round of testing, and there are of course a couple things that need to be corrected. I build the module off the notes the subject matter experts leave me, and a few things inevitably get lost in translation. But this new associate director just rips it to shreds. Complaining that it's completely incomprehensible, needs to go into much greater detail, asking questions about nearly every individual mouse click in the sample scenarios, and overall stating that it's impossible to follow. The thing is, this module is intended for our finance department, for people who have a background in finance, and have already been trained on how to use our internal software. She is a training services associate director, with a teaching background. The module isn't supposed to make sense to a former middle school social studies teacher, it's supposed to make sense to people with finance degrees. I push back and try explaining this to her in a million different ways, but she's having none of it. So I have to go back to the subject matter experts with her around 20 pages worth of criticism. And at first they think I'm joking. I had to forward her email before they finally believed me. So for the next two weeks we're going over every nuance, including readdressing everything that was covered during their three week classroom training. How to set up their network drives, how to set up outlook, including things as nuanced as, if you don't know how to set up your email signature, click here. I mean really basic, basic stuff that has nothing to do with what the module was originally supposed to teach. But I now had to include it all, because our new associate director couldn't find the on switch if you stapled her finger to it. This wastes my time, the subject matter experts' time, and time spent re-recording all the voice work. If you've done voice work in the past, you know you never get it in one take. After it's all done, I send it back out for review and approval, and the associate director simply doesn't respond. A week passes. The finance director takes an interest in why this module is almost a month overdue. I go to forward the associate director's email again. Except, now I can't find it. Odd, seeing as how I have a hoarding problem when it comes to email. I check with one of the subject matter experts I was working with, he can't find it either. Turns out, none of us can find it. It's gone. So I check with a friend of mine in IT who, after a little detective work, discovers that a week ago someone did a compliance delete on the exchange server. This basically is a seek and destroy for messages meeting certain criteria. In this case, a specific phrase she used in her email. I start digging through outlook, trying to find particular emails related to this that might be used to defend my actions. And they're all gone. Inbox, sent items, deleted items. Every last one of them. Any email containing that particular phrase anywhere in it. This kind of thing is normally used by admins to mass delete spam or phishing emails from all users at once. Except in this case someone apparently deleted emails that showed evidence of her awful decisions. My friend in IT can smell a juicy story a mile away, and was very interested in seeing where this went. She recovered the deleted emails and I promptly saved them to a flash drive. For the next few days, every time I had any email with this associate director's name on it, even unrelated stuff, you never know how something might fit together, I saved a copy to the flash drive. I informed the subject matter experts to do the same, and we started building our offline evidence locker. I didn't want to blow the lid on it just yet, I wanted to see if my suspicions were correct. Maybe a lifetime of watching spy movies and cop dramas had corrupted my thinking. Maybe there was another explanation. Who knows, it could happen, I'm not God, I don't know everything. So I'll play defense. So after several weeks in total trying to appease this associate director's unquenchable thirst for irrelevant details, and then getting ignored for a week, she finally publishes it and sends it to the finance director to approve so it can go life. The module, which was supposed to be a 30-minute online course, now contained three hours of content, and went down several irrelevant rabbit holes that had been deemed critical supporting information. As an analogy, imagine designing a training module to teach a nurse how to enter some new CPT codes, and being told you have to teach him how to read too, because he might not know what words are. That's how much BS was rammed into this thing. And the finance director of course hated it, and was surprised that such a rambling mess of a module would come from me, of all people. So he calls a meeting with me and the associate director on Tuesday to get some answers, and sure enough she immediately tried to distance herself from it. Tried to paint it as she made a couple suggestions and I clearly went way overboard. How I must have sent her a different version that she approved and switched them afterwards, that's not even possible, it would get thrown back into a draft status. She kept trying to talk over me as I voiced my defense, and to his credit, the finance director finally just muted her, so I could speak. And boy did I speak. I explained everything. I shared my screen, popped in my flash drive, and opened my copies of the emails that had supposedly been deleted. Every email exchange where she complained about the material, I pushed back, and she flat out ordered me to build the module in the way I did. She abruptly left the meeting and went offline. The finance director asked if I could send him a copy of all relevant files, and as I did, I also told him they might not be there later. And then explained what I had learned about someone in IT using the compliance delete. He assures me he'll look into it, and the shit immediately hit the fan. The associate director never logged back on. There was a massive internal audit, where people from her previous departments were asked to provide statements. Leadership tried to keep it hush-hush, but you just can't keep something that big under wraps. I don't know the specific what's in house, but the associate director and one of the IT managers had both left the company to pursue the next stage of their careers, and we sincerely wish them the best. I don't really do the social media thing, but over the next few days as the rumor mill did what rumor mills do, I heard their shit absolutely blew up, and it came out that the associate director and that IT manager were having an affair. Now this all went down about a month ago, but as I wrote this I thought to check online court records. Both are now facing divorces, filed by their respective spouses. So yeah, there's a void in my direct leadership, in IT's leadership, and the entire IT department is getting a shake down by information security to determine if there were any other leaks. I spent some time reflecting on why this whole series of events happened, and my best guess is that she wanted to make a grand entrance by spearheading this masterwork training module that covered every possible scenario and contained any and all information anyone could possibly want. Then as she started to realize how wasteful, rambling, and unnecessary it was, she realized that her grand entrance would be a grand faceplant. So she tried to erase the evidence and pin all the nonsense on me to save face, but inadvertently set in motion the events that would expose her little arrangement with the IT manager. Taking it up the booty, in order to cover her booty, I guess. You stay till the end, which means you're the one I make these episodes for. I wanna take this moment, to thank you, I really appreciate you, because you bring me a great amount of joy. Subscribe for future uploads and show your vengeful devotion, by tickling the like button, without mercy. Do you have any experiences surrounding the topic of this episode? Share yours below, I'll join the conversation. And I'll be seeing you, in the next one.