By skyforbes I am a supervisor and I had a wretched employee. She caused so many interpersonal problems that we lost people because of her. There was an incident that she was involved in and she felt like someone had insulted her and she didn't want to cover this persons shifts anymore in the very near future. I got my director involved because this person is very hard to deal with. We basically had to convince her to not burn this bridge because it was just going to cause more problems. My director at one point said "I know you feel slighted…." And this person stopped the conversation and asked her to repeat the word and said she didn't understand what she meant. The director kindly and patiently explained what she meant. Well, I tucked this bit of information away. I didn't think the word "slight" was that uncommon of a word. So it made me think, "what other intelligent sounding words can I use to get under this person's skin?" So I started to use words in my emails to her, to the group, anywhere I could think of that were above average reading level – high school level. Nothing crazy. Sometimes I would even Google synonyms of words to elevate the email a little bit.
One day, the wretched employee sent a department wide email – it was a daily email that everyone gets with daily safety notes. Usually someone else wrote the emails during the daily meeting, but that person was off that day. Anyway, she uses profanity in the email. Just one word, nothing to anyone. Just said "good job getting shit done." And I was like really? Everyone can read this! So I email her and ask her to not use profanity in an email as it sets an irreverent tone and I wouldn't want there to be anything misconstrued that this isn't a professional environment. Very polite but firm.
Her response of course was over the top. Said I was singling her out, other people have done it (they had not) blah blah blah. Another colleague and I were talking on the phone that evening and that the wretched employee had called her and complained about my email. And especially complained about the word "misconstrued." I think her words were "who even says that? I don't even know what that means?!" Cue Grinch shit eating grin. I told my colleague (this colleague is a friend and hates this wretched employee as much as me but they used to be friends) I did that on purpose and had been doing it for awhile. She laughed and thought that was amazing. I was like thank you, and internally took a bow.