TLDR:

My long time boss of 7 years screwed me over a year's worth of travel expenses and nearly 6 months of subsidized sick leave payments from the state, left me hanging when I needed him most, and so I turned in the dirt I had on him to the authorities. He had to pay 30 times the sum he owed me as a fine, which meant he had to sell his dream home and take his family back to his crowded apartment where he will now probably rot for the rest of his treacherous life.

Where to begin, huh? I suppose I should get back to when this whole sleigh ride began.

I am an educated computer tech that had the misfortune of graduating right on the cusp of the 2008 financial crisis. Before, it was considered to be a "vocation of the future". Various businesses came to our school, introducing themselves, offering scholarships for college if we signed an agreement to come work for them after we graduated that as well. After the crash? Those promises were the first thing they cut.

As a result of that, I couldn't afford college, which meant I had to find work. Which was easier said than done. My late and mid twenties were a roller coaster of dead-end jobs, where I worked, finally saved up some money, got fired as a redundancy and had to spend those savings for living expenses while looking for my next shitty job.

Years went by, tech went on, and I couldn't afford classes to keep up with it. So in my late 20's I snapped. I have had enough. I needed a career change. I decided to go in my late father's footsteps and become a welder. It's as if fate intervened, a week before I made the inquiry about changing careers, a state sponsored program came out that let me become one for free.

After completing the welding courses, I was quickly offered a job as a field welder. We're literally talking about a matter of days here, a refreshing change of pace from before where it took months or more. This is where the subject of our story comes in - I'll call him RAT BOSS, RB for short.

RB ran a small field welding business with half a dozen man crew, traveling all over Europe, doing field welding. He said he'd taking me in, show me the ropes, teach me real welding, none of that schoolyard horse shit.

And let me tell you, the first 6 years were amazing. Yes there was hard work, dawn till dusk, 7 days a week, sometimes gone from home for over a month, but the travels, the adventure, and the camaraderie! We were complete strangers to each other in the start, but we became like brothers, sticking together through thick and thin. Thinking back on it, I miss those days, even if they are behind me.

And RB was, back at that time, the kind of boss that puts all other bosses to shame. I remember that one time, where he took out a loan with a large interest just so that he could pay us our wages because he had an emergency expense that drained his bank account 2 weeks before a customer was due payment. He rather went into debt to pay us on time rather than to ask us if we could "hang in there" a couple of weeks.

But everything changed by year 7. At that time, most of the core crew had left, missing their families too much to keep doing. So did RB. He set me up as a foreman while he found himself work back home, and he sent people he interviewed over my way as I needed them.

It didn't start off so bad at first, several jobs done successfully, but the people that worked with me, it just wasn't the same. They were all short-term workers. There to make a quick buck, settle some debts or gain some xp to find better paid work back home.

But then the pandemic struck and I had to sit it out. It wasn't a big deal for me since I was used to having cash reserves for rainy days from my teen years. But what came after is where things started to seriously wrong.

Nobody decent wanted to work abroad anymore, so the people that came to work with me were those that RB might have proverbially fished out of the sewers - Drunkards, thieves, drug addicts, destitutes; the kinds with nothing to lose and no will to do a good job. It all went downhill rather quickly.

As the foreman, I made sure the job got done regardless, and that the work was signed off, so the bill would get sent and wages paid. But there were constant "incidents" outside of work, incidents unique to the "demographic" that worked with me. To top it all off, wages started coming late, travel costs weren't being refunded, and Rat Boss started doing some "creative accounting" when it came to the differences between everyone's net and gross wages.

It all came to a boiling point when I received a phone call in 3AM on the night I was supposed to drive the boys back home in the morning. The customer called, one of the boys has been arrested for drunken disorderly. He didn't have ID on him, only the workplace identity card, so they phoned our customer in the middle of the night to help identify the foreman of that animal, so yeah, I got called to pick him up. I "ate a lot of sh**t" that day.

When I came back home, I had a good, long sit-down with Rat Boss. Told him I was done with that bullshit and that it was time to settle accounts. He sort of halfheartedly apologized, he also admitted he was problems with his wife (which co-ran the business) and was fighting with him over how the money was being spent.

At that point, he owed me around a year's worth of travel expenses, and if you take into account that I traveled AT LEAST 2000 miles monthly, that is a substantial sum of money. He apologetically asked me to wait a bit on that money, because his wife is cockblocking him on any major expenditures. He also asked me to stay on with his for just a few months on minimum wage, just until he can put a decent crew together.

The idiot that I was accepted his proposal. There was no reason not to trust him, after all, we've known each other for almost 7 years at the time, I didn't think it unreasonable to give him time to fix this. But I did have one condition though - I needed half the money he owed me by the end of September because I'm having some work done on my house. He said that shouldn't be a problem this far in advance. I said okay, we have a deal, but I remained suspicious.

A couple months went by, I worked for RB locally, on minimum wage... except the problem is that even that wage came in late. My hackles were raised. I was concerned that I would have to postpone work on my house, work for which craftsmen are so hard to come by, you have to pay a deposit to prove you were serious about needing that work done.

In the beginning of September, on the month his partial debt repayment was due, I confronted him again. He assured me that paying half what he owed me for travel costs wouldn't be a problem and that he's got the cash ready.

As we parted way and I went for home, he gave me the fakest smiles I have ever seen in my life. I stared him down. I gave him this kind of look that even a dumbass would recognize as having "I'm not fooling around anymore" written all over it. RB lost that fake smile of his almost immediately. I said goodbye, got into my car and drove home.

That weekend, RB sent me a weigh message about how he's got a crew lined up and that he's going abroad to talk with a potential customer to get his "foot back into the fieldwork door".

Alarm bells started instantly ringing. "He's going to avoid me for the date he was due to pay half his debt. He's going to screw me over! He WAS going to screw me over. Bastard! After everything we've been through together!"

At that point I decided, if the money doesn't come in due date, a 30-day resignation notice is going wait for him when he gets back, filed on the exact day he was supposed to pay.

But the thing is, when something has you this riled up, such as RB's probable betrayal, you kind of have a hard time focusing at work. So I slipped on a ramp. I didn't just sprain my ankle or tore a ligament - I downright destroyed it; about a week before his debt payment was due. We're talking about emergency surgery here, 2 weeks minimum at the hospital, and being unable to put proper weight on that foot for 6 months.

What do you guys think happened to the money he promised to pay me? It didn't come! Big surprise. Not only that, even the wage didn't get wired that month.

It gets even worse. While I was in the hospital, heavily medicated, the work got done on my house. My mother, who had authorization to my accounts in cases of emergency, used my savings to pay for the work on my house instead of cancelling, which means I had very little money left. She told me not to worry, I will still get paid sick leave. I wasn't so sure.

The thing about sick leave in my country is, in case of a work-related injury, and a recovery period longer than a month, the employer is only required to pay the first month of sick leave, the rest is funded by the government, whereas the employer only pays for social security and taxes, then the government wires the sick leave money to him, for him to forward it to me.

... which of course didn't happen. Didn't receive a single cent from him since. So here I was, broken, crippled, bed ridden, and unable to work. It gets worse. I ran out of money just as I had the last installment of an outstanding debt to pay. Banks were calling me weekly. I had to cash in an investment to pay it off and to subsist while I recovered. An investment that would have yielded me a modest amount of passive income for the rest of my life.

So I was resigned for revenge! He lied to me, hid from me, failed to pay what was owed, stole from me and pocketed money that was meant for me by the government. He will cook in the fires of hell for what he's done!

THE REVENGE:

^{Before I tell you what I did to him, I wish a little background about Rat Boss. He lives in a small apartment in our capital city, along with his wife and 2 children. The apartment is extremely small. So small in fact, that they all practically climb over on top each other to pass each other by.}

^{But he did have a dream. He bought a plot of land where he was building a large house. So big in fact, that a single one of the rooms is going to be bigger than his whole previous apartment. Over the course of those 7 years, he slowly built it up, brick by brick. And he was almost done, when we still talked, he told me that he was at most 6 months away from moving in.}

The thing about me being his foreman is that it involves a lot of paperwork. Every decision, every purchase, every dirty little secret hidden away in the numbers. And I had it all, it was simply a matter forwarding it all to the appropriate authorities, and as soon as I was able to walk, well, I wouldn't really say walk, more like dragged my recovering foot behind the other one while under the influence of hard core painkillers, I went out to turn him in to every government agency that had a shot at getting to him.

The biggest hit came at the labor inspectorate. As the case worker rummaged through the evidence I presented her, she mumbled to herself, wide eyed; something in the lines of "My god, he broke half the labor laws in our country".

THE AFTERMATH:

I live in what could be considered a "second world" country. Our government is slow and inefficient, but it does act when prompted.

And when it did act on Rat Boss, his fall was like being hit in the face by the same meteor that killed the dinosaurs. His accounts were frozen, he was barred from traveling abroad, his business licenses were suspended and he was required to dismiss all his current employees with severance... money which he didn't have.

He filed for bankruptcy soon after. He was required to sell the house he dreamed about for his entire life to settle the fines.

He is stuck now, like I was, even worse. He is trapped in that sardine can of his for an apartment, unable to work, unable to support his family, unable to pay the bills until the legal proceedings from the governments finish... for what he did to me, I was able to stay afloat. But for what I did to him - he is done.

Broken. Reduced... to... utter... destitution.

He called me when the government's gavel hit his face. I will spare you the exact dialogue that took place because this post is long enough already, but to sum it up, he yelled over the phone, saying how could I do this to him and yelled curse words at me. In return I called him out for lying to me about money after 7 years, leaving me to rot in a hospital penniless, and I called him a rat that betrayed his friend, and to never call me again as we are now in a legal dispute and he should forward all communication through the case office of the labor inspectorate and hung up.

I made a claim on his bankruptcy proceedings. By the time he paid all the fines, all I was able claim from him was a single month's worth of sick leave. No travel costs, no nothing else. But it's okay. I can live with that, as long as he got 10 times over the grievance he inflicted on me.

No eye for an eye, no tooth for a tooth. The whole face for an eye! The whole head for a tooth! I stand, both literally and figuratively, but Rat Boss is deep in the dirt, that when he used to dream about his big house, now dreams about how he will someday, maybe, just maybe be able to crawl all the way up to rock bottom to start all over again.

ADDENDUM:

If you've read this far, thank you!

I found it unusually easy to spill out a significant part of my life's story to complete strangers, which took me all afternoon to put down into writing. Maybe because this story ended 2 years ago and my anger and resentment has long since subsided.

I do not claim any moral high ground here. And if you call my story a clash of two villains where I emerged on top, that's okay, as long as you acknowledge that the proverbial gutter is full of men that walked away as they said they were the better man.