I guess it’s been long enough that I wouldn’t really need to go anonymous with this, but who knows…just to be safe.

I worked for a boss who was just a horrible, horrible person. She thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world, but her personality made her hideous. She was the kind of person who always looked for an excuse to talk about how “tiny” she was, especially when she was in the room with people who were noticeably larger or heavier. She couldn’t find shoes because her feet were just too delicate and tiny, her waist was so small she had to buy children’s clothes, you get the idea. If you want a really good snapshot of her personality issues, one day she came in bragging…bragging! that she refused to walk in the mall next to her daughter because her daughter was pudgy and embarrassed her.

I hated working for this woman. Hated it. To make things worse, she was an ineffectual management type who sat on her butt in an office all day, delegated all actual work to other people she came up with the most menial titles possible for (she had a slew of “my secretaries” and “my clerks” who answered to her), and was a master of making her nothing day of gossip and sitting around look like productivity to the bosses. Meanwhile, all of the actual work she was supposed to be doing was being done by me, while she sat with a coworker friend and gossiped about subordinates all day.

One day, she was showing a superior around the office and she was airily throwing out nonsense commands (“get me the blahblah report”) to make it look like she was extra important and that everyone was rushing to do her bidding. Almost none of these reports actually existed, and by the time she got finished with her show she usually forgot about them. But one time she actually did get pinned down and had to come up with some actual copies of reports she’d made up. Then she told me to “just throw something together, they don’t know” and I got stuck devoting huge chunks of my workday, chunks of time I should have been using to get actual work done, coming up with these nonsense reports that were nothing but fluff and numbers that had no bearing on anything. Just to make her look like she was getting something done.

After months of this, I sat at my desk and realized that all of these nonsense reports were going nowhere and accomplishing nothing. Dozens of employees, on a whim from this woman, were sending me statistics that didn’t matter for a report that went nowhere, wasting their time too. She never looked at the report, no one else needed the report for anything. They just got filed in a drawer, day after day, month after month. I think she only wanted them around in case she got caught doing nothing again. So I made the decision to start shredding them.

I only shredded the oldest couple of them at first, because I was afraid of being caught out. I thought that the minute I shredded them, someone would need them. But no one ever did. So I shredded more of them, big nonsense reports that clogged up my desk drawers and were so thick I had to pull them apart and shred them in shifts. It felt liberating. It was like being in Office Space. I started using the mantra, “If I shred it, it never happened.” And that was pretty much true. The stupid reports just went byebye, and no one ever asked.

I discreetly called the other departments and told them that the supervisor thanked them for their work but didn’t need the stats anymore. They were relieved to have time freed up for all of the other things they needed to do. When the boss brought someone through and asked me if I was working on the report, I told her yes. I was not. I was doing all of the other stuff I was supposed to be doing.

She got a promotion (of course) and her successor never asked about the reports, so I shredded the last of them and gladly dumped the pile of shreds in the trash cart. And even though she never found out, it was my one big act of rebellion against a really terrible boss.