21 People Reveal The Dirtiest, Slimiest Thing They’ve Done To Get Ahead In Their Lives
"I abandoned over 20+ of my friends in my life abruptly and without warning because I believed they were holding me back in many ways."
By 
Brian Gates
1. Paid to get my high school diploma without doing final exams. My country is very corrupted.
2. At the young budding age of around 9 or 10 there was an election to be class representative. In this election you could vote for yourself, so I approached several kids I didn’t know too well and told them that we should vote for each other. I explained that it would just be the same as voting for ourselves. So the 5 or 6 kids all voted for me thinking I’d vote for them back. I voted for myself. I won that election by one vote so it was my scummy self vote that won it, as well as tricking several kids. I felt really bad afterwards but I got over it eventually.
3. When I was 16 I posed in a bikini and let the president of the anime club sketch me for his “art portfolio” so I could assume his presidency when he graduated.
The boobs were really well done but the face looked blocky and rushed.
4. The company I was working for had been indicted by the government and people were fleeing like rats from a sinking ship. In an act of desperation, my boss calls me into his office and offers me this deal/contract:
1) I certify I will continue to work for the company
2) They will contractually guarantee my salary + bonus such that if the company is dismantled I will still get paid.I flat refuse this deal and tell my boss: “By placing this contract in front of me you’re basically saying you can’t afford to fire me, so what do I really get from bullet point #2? – I am signing away my right to quit for nothing.”
I start interviewing.
A week later I get called in by my boss’s boss. He asks me why I won’t take the deal, which I explain again. He asks what would make me take the deal. I tell him a bonus number 5 times the old one. He says he’ll check, but that he thinks he can manage that.
He confirms the number the next day as being good.
I get several external offers. They are ~50% higher total comp than my current role.
I leak to a loud-mouth colleague that I have the external offers for X amount, he goes straight to my boss.
I get a NEW contract from my boss(es) with a promotion, large salary bump and the renegotiated bonus increase I asked for.
I use these new internal numbers to up my external offers.
I wait until the end of the year, collect the large bonus and quit for one of my external offers (they were willing to wait because of the large bonus).
This is how I got a large bonus and ~100% increase in total compensation.
5. Not sure how slimy or how far ahead it got me, but I semi-blackmailed a boss after walking in on him banging an employee in his office.
To make a long story short, I hated this job and had just found a new job. I was going to be giving my 2 weeks notices the following day (this happened on a Thursday). I ended up walking in on my boss banging a female employee on the table in his office. Shortly after he pulled me into his office and offered me a promotion to stay quiet. I told him I was leaving the company already and planned to give two weeks notice, but what I really wanted was them to pay me for those two weeks and let me walk out of here the next day. He wasn’t sure “accounting” (which was code for his mom who was his boss) would go for it. I shrugged and told him it wasn’t really my problem and I could probably keep my mouth shut during my last two weeks wink wink.
The next morning they presented me with a check for two week’s pay and his mom made him apologize to me.
I got a two week paid vacation then started my new job.
– kane55
6. Blackmailed a former boss for a raise/promotion.
Back when camera phones were a ‘new’ thing and they didn’t have that shutter noise, I took photos of him getting handsy with not-his-wife. Threatened to show them to his kid, who worked for us, so I would get a raise.
This whole job was actually a severely fucked up situation.
I had just graduated HS and was picking up some more hours at a bakery I worked at. I had taken the photos in the wintertime (as evidence b/c he was handsy with a few of the female employees, I’m a girl, so I figured it was only a matter of time) but in the summer the boss cut my hours for no reason, so I used the photos to get a promotion to F/T and a couple extra bucks an hour. At the time I was seventeen and thought $15/hr was a big deal.
Boss man tried to accuse me of stealing a few months later by ‘framing’ me with a no-charge receipt I had supposedly written and “accidentally” leaving it on the counter (bullshit). Problem was, the timestamp on the photos was when I was on a flight to England. I went to the labour board and won a months’ severance and a one-time payout to keep me from going to the press. Boss man got fired over this whole sitch.
TL;DR: I blackmail boss for raise/promotion, boss tries to fire me for bogus reason and costs my former place of employment almost $10,000 and loses his job.
7. Many moons ago, I was a sales rep / account manager. We’re required to take our clients out to lunch, dinner, happy hour, etc all in the name of “building relationships”. We had weekly quotas for these out-of-office events and turning in a receipt was often proof enough. Plenty of times I’d ditch the client (well, never actually scheduled the client), but I’d purchase a $75 gift card & beverage so my receipt would total $77.29 (anything to avoid an even number charge). I hit up sushi restaurants, trendy martini bars, steak restaurants, and basically collect a shit ton of gift cards and handing in my receipts. This went on for 5 years. No one caught on.
8. Final project in senior year, our group of four designed and developed a web app for a charity. The charity told one girl after the presentation that we should send in resumes and that they would hire two of us. She only told her friend. When we met up the next week to receive our marks; her friend told us about the positions. The slimy girl looked at her friend and said; “Why would you tell them that?” in front of us.
– RzLa
9. I pitch a little woo to the husky girl at Subway to get extra cheese on my sandwich.
10. I fixed the draw to be Mary in my church’s Christmas pageant.
Now, this obviously doesn’t rank up there with bodily harm or ruining another person’s life, but there’s really nothing slimier than doing so much wrong for so little.
I was also 10 and I KNEW that I would be the ideal Mary. I knew this. The universe knew this. Fuck, I’m sure the old biddy that ran the Sunday school knew this, but no… we had to leave it to chance.
Fuck chance.I replaced all the names in the draw bowl with my own because I knew we wouldn’t be drawing for any other roles. That was the Mary bowl. I had a short name and was quite good at forging handwriting (for…. fun?)
It totally worked. After the draw, I replaced the original slips in the bowl and discarded the incriminating evidence off-site. I was never caught.
I was also the best Mary ever.
– felesroo
11. Staying quiet. Big companies don’t like whistleblowers.
– Anonymous
12. I told my current boss I was expecting a raise from my old job, and that I couldn’t do both because I had to change hours. I knew he would beat their raise and their hours to keep me.
I never got offered a raise and promotion from my old job, I am a liar.
13. Midnight release of the Nintendo Wii. The local Wal-Mart had extremely limited quantities, so they did a raffle. My dad and I both got our tickets and then just sat around and waited for a while. I suddenly did not like our odds, considering there were about 10 Wii’s available and well over 100 people waiting there. So I walked up to a different Wal-Mart worker and got a second raffle ticket.
We wound up winning with that second ticket. I have carried this guilt for a long time.
14. I manipulated my manager into implementing all these terrible ideas and did it without him realizing it wasn’t him coming up with these ideas. Later when everything went to shit I convinced my general manager to fire him and promote me. I don’t feel bad though, he was a terrible person and I like my new job as manager.
15. I was a low level salesman and wanted to be promoted to account executive and make the big bucks. To win a sales contest, I went around to all of my retail accounts and begged them to order in ridiculous amounts of products and not return them. I won the contest, a jet ski, got the promotion and the guy who took over my territory didn’t sell anything for 8 months as he worked through my overstock.
16. My Thesis is completely copy-paste. Knowing that the university is checking for plagiarism I replaced all the spaces between words with exclamation marks that were coloured white. So the whole 200 pages thing was essentially one word. Worked flawlessly !
17. Abandoned over 20+ of my friends in my life abruptly and without warning because I believed they were holding me back in many ways.
Some of you may say this is a smart decision overall, but I feel it’s a slimy thing to do because some of my friends found out that I was not around them anymore and were wondering why, and I had to break it to them straight. Some took it well; some did not.
18. I claimed (in a job interview) to have a somewhat intermediate proficiency level in Microsoft Excel… when in reality… I’m probably more of a higher end novice level Excel user.
It’s a dark and dirty road to the top, my friends, but I’m willing to walk it.
19. I pretend to be bad at lying when I don’t really need to lie. So when I actually do lie, people think I say the truth.
Not proud, but a good trick I have learned over the years.
20. I tricked a friend I met on runescape to lend me his red party hat. I sold it and never spoke to him again.
21. Daisy-chained 6 slip-n-slides down a huge hill as a kid. Covered self in ridiculous amounts of SPF 100 suntan lotion to gain unfair speedhack over friends. Was very slimy.
