Office life breeds strange rules, but one employee’s manager might have taken things a step too far. Imagine being told that every personal page you print at work costs $0.50 in black-and-white or a whole dollar if you dare go color. Sounds like something out of The Office, right?
For one worker, the rule wasn’t just annoying, it turned into the perfect setup for sweet, greasy revenge. After being forced to cough up $2 for printing her own resume, this Redditor later caught her boss printing hundreds of full-color flyers… for her daughter’s birthday.
That discovery snowballed into a confrontation, a district manager intervention, and, ultimately, ten piping hot pizzas. Want the deliciously petty details? Let’s dive in.
One Redditor shared how a manager’s rigid “printing tax” backfired spectacularly
The drama here isn’t just about office supplies—it’s about power dynamics and trust. When leaders impose arbitrary rules they don’t follow themselves, it undermines morale.
Dr. David Rock, director of the NeuroLeadership Institute, explained in Harvard Business Review that fairness is one of the brain’s most deeply wired motivators, and when employees sense inequity, “their engagement and productivity plummet”.
In this case, the manager demanded small fees under the guise of “the Christmas fund,” yet privately exploited the system. That hypocrisy is classic workplace favoritism, and research from the Society for Human Resource Management shows favoritism is one of the top three reasons employees lose trust in leadership.
What’s interesting here is how the employee chose petty revenge rather than outright confrontation. From a psychological perspective, this is a textbook example of “indirect resistance.”
A 2020 article in Psychology Today noted that people often resort to subtle sabotage when they feel powerless to challenge authority directly. Instead of risking her job, the employee waited for the perfect moment to expose the double standard.
What should OP have done? From an HR perspective, the ideal move would’ve been documenting the hypocrisy and raising it with HR or upper management sooner.
Still, the outcome achieved the same effect—policies were changed, funds were questioned, and accountability was forced. And while pizza doesn’t erase the betrayal, it symbolized a small but visible win for fairness.
The core lesson? Leaders need to model the standards they demand. When a manager preaches strict rules but breaks them in secret, they lose more than credibility, they risk turning their workplace into a comedy of errors. In this story, one manager’s “personal print job” turned into a professional embarrassment that even extra-large pizzas couldn’t fully cover.
Here’s how people reacted to the post:
These users hailed OP as a legend, praising the clever exposure and pizza party win, calling it a satisfying takedown of a likely thieving manager
These commenters suspected the manager was pocketing the fees, comparing it to their own experiences with shady coffee funds or printing policies, urging accountability
These users shared similar stories of catching managers misusing resources, from party flyers to school supplies, cheering the Redditor’s justice
What started as a petty $2 printing fee ended up costing the manager nearly $300 in pizza and a huge dose of embarrassment. For employees, it was proof that sometimes the best revenge is simply shining a light on hypocrisy.
Do you think OP was right to play it out the way they did, or should they have confronted the manager more directly? And what’s the pettiest yet most satisfying revenge you’ve ever seen at work? Share your thoughts!
