I had a boss years ago in my first “big boy job”. I was manufacturing medical devices and over time, the job became stressful, fast paced, and highly demanding which manifested into a toxic work culture and my boss wasn’t immune.

She was fine in the beginning, but I became the bitch of the line, bending over and grabbing my ankles when need be, blinded by the pride in my job and my dependence on this pesky thing called “health insurance”, as well as my loyalty to my coworkers who I adored.

Anyways, Ms. Boss Lady started to grow angrier and angrier and she eventually became a bully. Some people tried to speak up, but they either quit from the abuse or weren’t willing to keep following up with HR’s Sisyphean demands to report management (or make any complaints, really).

Well, one day Ms. Boss Lady and I are talking and she asks me to do something. I forget what, but I know my response was “I’m feeling trepidatious about what you’re asking of me.” She barks out laughing and starts dressing me down in front of our production line.

“‘Trepedatious’?! You work in manufacturing, why do you speak like a college professor!? Act like you belong in this industry!”

I won’t lie, I was hurt, and frustrated. But no one holds a grudge like a gay man; hell knows no fury like a woman scorned, but you’d better step aside for a mildly inconvenienced gay man.

I did put it out of my mind, until a few weeks later I get a delicious little email that ultimately broils an appetite for revenge: mid-year reviews are coming up.

“Why is this good news?” I hear you all asking and points to those who know where this is going.

You see… our reviews are self reviews whereby we have to grade our performances, create our own goals, and write about our performances and areas of improvement, and I had two weeks to cook up a scheme.

What I did was I typed up a paragraph and I would find words, plug them into a thesaurus, get “big” words out of it, edit my contexts around it and repeat the cycle. I managed to stretch out words, phrases, connotations and contexts into 5 paragraphs that was more flowery and difficult to read than if you were to send James Joyce to Tudor England for a 2 week vacation.

The icing on the cake was my mother edited it for me. She studied and performed Shakespeare professionally in college and graduated with what amounted to an English degree. She helped seal and tighten everything into a neat parcel for me.

Then came the day I got to hand it in. Ms. Boss Lady immediately dives in, calls people over to her desk to discuss reviews and after a little while she gets to mine and I know she’s pissed via how I’m called over, but it wasn’t to discuss my review. “Here, what is this word!?!”

“Habiliment. It means clothing. It’s in reference to our uniforms.”

She glares and scans the document, has me define another word, and sends me away.

I would learn later on something I had not known then: Ms. Boss Lady is very dyslexic and sometimes needs help with technical terms and words she is unfamiliar with. My review was ultimately her own personal Somme, and what took up the rest of her day with her struggling with words like “glaciate”, “whilom”, “cromulent”, and yes, “trepidatious”.

My “stunt” as she called it landed me into a meeting with hire ups about professionalism and respect. But I explained curiously, how is my use of concise language unprofessional in a review, and surely they have read it and agree it’s a legitimate document? They ultimately agreed with me, but said I could tone it down (just a little) going forward. Ms. Boss Lady looked like she wanted to run daggers through my eyes and let me know as such when we got back to our production space. But I got to have the last laugh over another nasty and patronizing remark she had started to make at that point.

“You know, I’m shocked you’d have so much trouble reading my review considering you’re the one out of us both who ‘has graduated college.’”

I would quit a couple years later and eventual mismanagement of the company means they’re being sold to a firm in Mexico!