There’s nothing that’ll make you suicidal more than being stuck with a minimum wage job that you hate. Not only are you making piss-poor money, but knowing that every eight hours you spend in that hell hole is another eight hours of your life completely wasted is enough to drive anyone mad – and while Redditor throwawayo23083 didn’t seem to hate working at McDonald’s, his co-worker, Lance, most definitely did. You see, Lance was constantly bullied by a few of his idiot co-workers, however as you’ll read in the story below he managed to be the one to get the last laugh:
Strictly speaking, I was not the one who undertook the revenge here. But I did play a small part, and it was one of the most rewarding things I have ever experienced in my entire life. It was seriously like something out of a movie.
Back in my college days, I slaved away flipping burgers under the good ol’ golden arches to help pay for my tuition. It wasn’t a terrible job, all of my co-workers were great people… well, almost all my co-workers. There were two, let’s call them Bryan Bully and Jerry Jerk, who were workplace bullies.
Both these goons had been at the same place for several years, and thus felt like they had the right to taunt and outright sabotage new crew members. The rest of us had been around long enough to push back and tell these guys to fuck off, so they left us alone. We did what we could to protect newbies that fell under Bryan and Jerry’s wrath, but we couldn’t always be there for them.
Things that the bullies did to new hires included, but is not limited to:
• walking over and clearing the order screen before newbies had time to see what needed to be made
• changing settings on the grills/fryers when newbies weren’t looking so that the food wouldn’t cook properly
• tampering with the condiment dispensers in various ways
• dirtying equipment at the end of the shift so the newbies would have to clean it again
• and of course all the usual name-calling, taunting, etcAs you can imagine, these antics greatly fucked up drive-thru times and genuinely hurt us as a store. This was all brought up to the managers time and again, nothing much was ever done. The goons would get a stern but spineless talking-to once in a while and that was it. Bryan and Jerry had worked there forever, considered themselves the head cooks or whatever, and management probably didn’t want to bother hiring a new set of staff, even though a well-trained monkey could do it.
A lot of new hires quit after a few days and blamed it on the bullying, and I can’t say I blame them.There was one new crew member in particular, though, who stuck around despite getting the worst of it from the bullies. We’ll call him Lance. Lance was a good guy, always very pleasant and good to work with even when Bryan and Jerry tormented him. There were times, though, that they got to him.
One night, I found Lance sitting on the hood of his car with his head in his hands after a particularly brutal round of sabotage. The bullies had cleared his order screen multiple times before he could read it and a lot of angry customers came back with messed up orders, on top of the stress of drive thru times being absolute garbage. Lance didn’t strike me as a crying man, but you could tell he was just barely holding it together. I asked if he was okay and we talked for a little bit. Lance said not to worry about it because he was going to get the last laugh against those two, but he wouldn’t elaborate further. We went back inside and I told the bullies to fuck right off, but they just snickered, as usual. They knew they were virtually immune to discipline unless they straight up murdered someone.
Lance stuck around for about six months, a pretty typical tour of duty for a college town, and then moved on to pursue “other career interests,” as he told me. I missed him and we stayed in touch for a bit. I ended up transferring to a university the next town over, which meant transferring to another McDonald’s as well. Ah well, at least I would be free of the goons. Little did I know, vengeance was coming…
Fast forward to my last day at that particular McDonald’s. I had just come in for my shift, along with Bryan and Jerry. Fuck, how I hated working with them, but at least it was my last day. I was a bit early, so I sat in the dining area and played on my phone for a bit before it was time to clock in. I felt a tap on my shoulder and looked up to see my old buddy Lance, who was, to my surprise, wearing a manager’s uniform. “Hey Lance, my main man!” cue enthusiastic bro hug “Moving up in the world I see!”
Lance smiled and said he had been promoted to assistant manager at another store in the franchise, but had come back to take care of some things. An older man was standing behind in a full suit, who Lance introduced me to as his uncle… and the franchise owner.Lance was the franchise owner’s newphew. The whole time he was doing grunt work and getting awful shit from the goons, he was the franchise owner’s fucking nephew. My justice-boner stiffened and my heart rate went up a few notches. I knew shit was about to go down.
Lance and the owner disappeared behind the counter. I was not privy to what happened back there with the goons, but of course I asked later what happened. When Lance told his all the shit that had been going down, he asked Lance to stick around and keep a log of everything. The goons, after getting an eyeful of Lance in a manager uniform and being informed of his relation to the franchise owner, shat their collective pants. Not only were they being terminated, they were facing the possibility of legal action for all the stunts they pulled. Something about affecting profits and staff turnover. Jerry couldn’t bear to even look Lance in the eye, he just kept his head bowed like a child. Bryan cried and begged for his job. Lance then proceeded to tell them, in front of the owner, that they were the two most worthless pieces of shit he had ever seen in his entire life, and as their superior, he was personally firing them and barring them from any further employment with the company.
When I learned this, my justice boner exploded in my pants.On top of that, Lance put in a good word for me with the owner, so that if I ever wanted a pay increase or promotion at my new location, it would most likely be mine.
I worked at the other McDonald’s for eight months with an extra dollar per hour before graduating and getting a college level job, but I never forgot about the bullies and Lance. Dude must have had incredible self-control to report for work and put up with them knowing that his uncle would be getting him a manager job anyway.
Sadly I did not keep up with Lance, so I never found out if the bullies were taken to court, but I like to think that they were. And I like to think that, as former fry-cooks at a fast food joint, they probably were unable to pay up, landing them in a place where they would undoubtedly fit in just fine: jail.
[Via Reddit]