Telling the Boss to Stick It

One of the best things about someone leaving your workplace is when they bear a grudge or have a grievance, and choose to serve their revenge dish cold, on their last day. Or even just let themselves go, get pissed up and Tell The Truth all afternoon - or until escorted from the premises.

Plenty of people have left my current employer with a grievance, but they usually leave on the day it's mutually agreed they will leave, and they do not serve notice and get grossly drunk at the pub on their final day.

This is a shame, but it's the kind of place we work. People generally don't have any backbone, even when inebriated.

Back when I worked in the tax office, there were legendary stories about the things people had got up to on their final day. Vomiting into the filing racks, for example. There was a woman, let's call her Sue, who had too much personality for management's liking, and when she resigned to work elsewhere, they thought their troubles were over.

In the middle of the afternoon, one of the Tax Inspectors (the managers) was interviewing a taxpayer in his office. This was probably because said taxpayer was trying to weasel out of paying tax. Anyway, it was quite a serious interview, but in the midst of it, the taxpayer looked over the shoulder of the Inspector and saw two mackerel dangling outside the window.


Sue was upstairs in the office above, and she had brought the fish into work specifically to dangle them outside this Inspector's office. The jape worked especially well because it coincided with an attempt to intimidate a tax evader with threats of bailiffs and so on. As the old saying goes, very few people will take you seriously if you have a kipper in your window.