I hate to go anonymous, but I still work for the same company (a large regional bank) I worked for when this happened.

After I had worked for the bank for about five years, I made the decision to transfer to our affiliated investment firm which had offices in the same building. The senior broker's reputation with her past assistants was poor at best, but I stupidly thought it would be different with me. The first 18 months were great. I earned my Series 7 license and became the broker's right hand.

One day I discovered that in my role in scheduling her appointments, which required that I have access to her Outlook calendar, I somehow also had access to her email. I had never asked for access and didn't need or want it. I reported the issue to her and to technology. When it was addressed, technology found that an entire group of assistants who had been hired within a specific time frame all had been mistakenly granted access to their brokers' email, so reporting my issue allowed them to correct it for everyone.

Somehow, though, in her mind, I had purposely snooped through her emails and she firmly believed that I routinely read them even after the issue was corrected. I think she had her email set up so that she had a reading pane in her inbox, and had set it so that every time a preview was visible, it marked the email as having been read. Tech-savvy she was not, so she concluded that I was the one reading them. Of course, I had no reason to do that, and every reason not to.

Things deteriorated rapidly after that. When she told me that I was being investigated for reading her emails, I simply told her that I didn't care because there was nothing to find. I immediately applied for a transfer back to the bank. She tried to block my transfer by claiming that I had disciplinary action in my personnel file which would have made me ineligible. The bank's HR manager made short work of that by talking to the HR manager of the investment affiliate and confirming that there was no record of disciplinary action at all. I got my transfer.

This broker never spoke to me again unless I called her on the phone to refer a customer, even though we ended up being officed directly across from each other. I, on the other hand, made every effort to speak to her just to watch her squirm. If we found ourselves in the same hallway, I made a conscious effort to make small talk. She would say nothing.

We met at an exit door one day when I was entering and she was leaving, so I pulled the door wide and gestured for her to go first while asking cheerfully, "How are you today? It's a hot one out there!" She said nothing. We met one day as we both rounded the same interior corner from opposite directions. "Oh my gosh!" I exclaimed. "Excuse me! That was close!" She said nothing.

My all time favorite encounter happened one morning as we both entered the building from opposite sides. She practically ran to the elevator and reached it before I did. These elevators were old and the doors began to close the second you pressed a floor button. She entered the car, whirled around and began repeatedly jabbing the floor button with her keys, trying to get the door to close before I got there. I had a great angle and a clear view of all of this, and was working hard not to laugh at her desperate attempt to avoid me. Unfortunately for her, I was too close and managed to stick my hand between the doors with just inches to spare, and succeeded in forcing them to open. I stepped on the elevator and said, "Whew! I barely made it in time!" and looked at her with a satisfied smile on my face. She said - you guessed it - nothing.

She eventually moved to another location and my fun ended. I never felt guilty about any of this after the way she treated me. I still don't. In fact I'm quite sure that I'll never regret any of it.