Man fired for wanting a raise deletes thousands of hours of work, leaving boss in a fix

Editor's note: This article was originally published on May 14, 2023. It has since been updated.

Workplaces can get toxic and unhealthy for employees pretty quickly. And in one such instance, an employee decided to ask for a raise in his wages after being given an immense amount of work on a daily basis. To his surprise, he was fired in a few hours. What he did next was unimaginable. A person on Reddit with the username u/This_Manner_ wrote that three years ago, he was working as a videographer doing social media content for a seven-figure company. He wrote, "I was paid roughly just better than minimum wage and was cranking out (at one point) 50 videos a day. I was freelancing and was on a loose contract. I was desperate for the money."

However, he did manage to work in the organization for six months but knew how less he was being paid. Talking about the company's work environment, he said, "The office was an incredibly bitter and snide place and it was clear that management would purposely stir shit to watch staff fight as a form of entertainment. I kept well away from it, but it was incredibly stressful on top of video work." He braved up and went and spoke to his "higher-ups" that his videos were making a positive difference in their sales and asked for a raise. He wrote, "I compared my ideal salary to others in the industry and made a big deal about how it would still be less than I should be paid. However, I still wanted to continue working for them."

A few hours later, he was fired and the reason they gave was that he was not pulling his weight and his videos were not having the desired effect they wanted on social media. He struggled for months to get another job. But years later, he found a way to get back at them. He said that "whilst browsing a very old Google Drive account, I found that said company was still using a folder I created and owned. They were most active in the files containing templates, adjustment layers, presets, and even videos that I created. Over 18 people were actively using it daily to continue with their social media campaigns." And the worst part was that this was a cloud service that he was paying for monthly as he wanted extra space for his work, he wrote.

So, he copied the files for himself and then deleted the online version. He concluded the post by saying, "Tomorrow, they will wake up with none of their video assets (including things they were working on)." The post gained more than 1,70,000 upvotes and it is captioned, "I just deleted thousands of hours of work from my old job." 

Many on Reddit wanted an update on what happened next and some gave him advice on what to do. u/TeoN72 wrote, "Oh God, now you need to update us, I can't wait to hear the follow-up." u/blg002 commented, "I would start looking for a lawyer now too. Imagine if they owe you for 3 years of using your IP." u/Jinsmag said, "company using people's personal google drives? wow, invasion of privacy."

About two months ago, the user posted an update that nothing came from what happened. He wrote, "The company obviously had no more access to my files so they no longer feature them in their promotion, which is about as good as I can ask for. I also noticed that since then all their video output is very very below par, and borderline amateur given their size."