I suppose the best way to get revenge on a company is to do something that they THINK screws them over, but does no actual damage. A good 30 years ago, I worked as an Admin Asst for a large, now defunct biotech company. I worked in the Virology Department and most of what we did was monitor vaccine testing studies. This entailed inordinate amounts of paperwork — pulling apart forms, Xeroxing them, filing the various parts. I truly hated that part of the job. We also wrote FDA filings, which were usually at least 4″ thick. We used WordPerfect software and during my approximately 2.5 years there, I got really, really good at it. This was the part of the job that I absolutely loved. Word processing is still my calling.

Once a filing was done, it was Xeroxed 10 to 20 times and sent to the heads of all the various departments. Another part of the job I disliked.

Each person read the document and penciled in their edits and sent it back to us and… you guessed it… we started the process all over again. How we ever managed to get a filing in to the FDA, much less on time, is still beyond me. I’m not overly OCD, but when it came to the work product, I made back-ups of everything.

It became apparent early enough on that this job was a really bad fit for me. I’m the type that when asked to file something, I’m tempted to reply with “do it yourself, I’m busy” or when asked to make a phone call for someone, I’m tempted to retort, “what are you, crippled?” Let’s just say, I don’t do secretary and leave it at that.

All things being equal, I never actually SAID any of these things, and I really did my job to the best of my ability, but at some point, there developed a concerted effort to get rid of me.

Now, I was too good to be fired (at will State notwithstanding) and so they tried to make me miserable enough to quit (not falling for that one!), so I was moved around from cubicle to cubicle, supervisor to supervisor, and I was basically shunned by my peers, lest they get fired. One supervisor (my last one there) asked me to make a phone call for her early one morning, then proceeded to stand over me while I attempted it. It wouldn’t go through no matter how many times I tried, while she continued to berate me loudly and in front of the entire staff. It turned out later that she had given me the wrong number, so it wasn’t going through no matter what.

Anyway, we all knew I was going to be canned, it was merely a question of when. Meanwhile, I was quietly cleaning out my cubicle from the inside out, so that it wasn’t obvious what I was doing. Everything remained on the walls, etc., so that when the time came to make my exit, I’d have little left to pack.

So the day finally came. We all assembled in the conference room, and I was basically given my walking papers. Interestingly enough, I was offered the option of clearing out then, or coming back after 5:00 p.m. to spare me the embarrassment. I also was able to cash in whatever stock options I had available, plus my accrued vacation and my last paycheck. Not much of a “firing” and I left with just shy of $6,000, enough to hold me over until I found a job I liked.

So, anyway, if you’ve read this far, this is how I took revenge on these people:

Remember I said I made backups of everything I did? Well, I gathered all the backups of all the reports I’d done there into two or three zip files. Then I deleted the Unzip utility and left. Never looked back.

So what?, right? Well, about six months later, I came home to find a desperate message on my answering machine begging me to either tell them the password to unzip the files (or come in and unzip them myself) so they wouldn’t have to hire a temp to retype everything.

As you can imagine, I never called them back. I never actually damaged or destroyed any files that they needed or did anything actionable legally, but it felt so good to get back at these awful people.