I don’t believe in Karma. Very bad people often end up becoming wildly successful, and honest, hard-working people often get left behind. Therefore, I make it a point to even the score when someone deliberately damages me or someone I care about. I do so for two reasons:
1) Consequences are the only way some people learn to be fair and honest.
2) Evening-up the score makes me feel empowered rather than helpless after being mistreated by someone and keeps my sense of fair play more or less intact.

Rewind to the dot-com boom. I was working at a startup company in the Silly Con Valley. Yes, so many startups back then were just silly cons, in my humble opinion. During the dot com boom, it was very difficult to find good people to hire and even more difficult to retain them, since there were a lot of very well-funded startups throwing tons of stock options at potential employees. In my first six months on the job, I filled all 40 open positions in my department, which was amazing when the labor market was so tight. Over the year that followed, my department’s attrition rate was zero. Not a single person left, despite the tempting outside offers, because I treated them with respect, made sure they were constantly enrolled in training courses to make them even better at their jobs, I only constructively criticized people in private, and I made a point of recognizing everyone’s accomplishments very publicly. My department was fiercely loyal to me and to the company and we shone brightly. Another department manager said it was well known throughout the company that my department was “the shining gem at the heart of the company.” Not bragging here, but the point is that my performance and the performance of my team were outstanding, which will be important in the next paragraph. Okay, maybe bragging a little, but we really did kick ass and there was no excuse for what the CEO did to me/us.

The company was run by a CEO who had no people skills and he tended to hire people into his inner circle who were narcissistic sociopaths, like him. One of these lovely and charming miscreants eyed my department with envy and immediately after being hired, he began to challenge me and attempt to embarrass me or insult me publicly, much to the delight of the CEO, who was uncomfortable with someone on his team managing differently than he did (treating people with respect, versus ruling through threats and intimidation) and being so successful. I think it also made him uncomfortable that although my department was very loyal to the company, they were even more loyal to me. So the CEO egged on this miscreant; let’s call him “Michael” (obviously not his real name).

Shortly before the company was set to IPO and my shares were likely to be valued at $1.8M, the CEO announced a reorganization which put Michael as my boss, between me and the CEO. It was an absurd move, the sole purpose of which was to make my life hell. I think the CEO was convinced that I’d have no choice but to stick around and be tortured if I wanted those stock options to be worth anything, but happiness is much more important to me than money, so I quit right on the spot. Everyone was shocked.

My team frantically begged me to stay so they wouldn’t have to deal with Michael, but I explained to them that whether I stayed or not, they were going to have to deal with Michael if they stayed at the company. Within a month, over half of the 40 people on my team defected to our largest competitor, whose IPO actually did make some folks rich. As for our company, after having lost so many good people and under the brilliant leadership of Michael and the CEO, our IPO was cancelled and the company died a long, slow death.

If that were the revenge part, that would be a boring story. Maybe it is anyway. But here’s where it gets kind of fun. Michael was a womanizer. A married womanizer. I knew a woman whose best friend started dating him, without her realizing who the guy really was. So I asked to speak with her. I asked her, “What did Michael tell you his marital status is?” She said, “He told me he’s divorced.” I corrected that notion, “Nope, he’s separated.” Next I asked, “How many children did Michael tell you he has?” She said, “Michael doesn’t have any children.” I corrected her again, “Nope, he’s got six kids.” Finally, I said, “How old did Michael tell you he is?” Aghast at what she’d heard already, she replied, “Michael told me he’s 40.” I replied, “Nope, he’s 50.” Then I told her what he’d done to me and to others at the company.

Well, my remaining spies in the company told me that Michael was moping around the office, looking like he was ready to cry for weeks after that incident. So I asked them why he was so forlorn? “Because this smart, kind, beautiful woman that he wanted to marry broke off their relationship without explanation.” Michael had no idea that anyone had spoken to his girlfriend and was truly baffled that she just ghosted him after that.

Now here’s the even more fun part. In a few weeks, that startup company is holding a 20 year reunion and guess who’s going to be there? Yep, Michael. I’m planning on waiting until he’s holding court in front of a lot of people, and I’m going to walk right up to him, interrupt him (as he loved to do to me), and let him know that it was me who told her the truth about him. I cannot wait to see the look on his face. It’s going to be hard to contain my glee.

Kind of hoping he takes a swing at me. I’d love for him to wake up in jail…