How I turned a demotion into giving me power over management

Previously, on This One Job I Had:
Getting 98% of my day free
How I filled the hours
How my manager got her groove Fridays back
Magic and More Magic
How I accidentally overthrew the state
How I cracked national security and got away with it

Now read on...  

 
All good things must come to an end, and the replacement office manager was an enormous dick who had been exiled from the State office in order to live out his remaining career in charge of a region which was (a) large and prestigious enough so he couldn't complain or start pointing out the skeletons in their closet, but (b) so far away from HQ that it was obvious he'd been put out in the cold.

He did not like the situation at all, and pretty much handed the day-to-day running of the office over to a triumvirate of section managers, while he concentrated on being a dick to people. We clashed many times over many things, and eventually he exploited a loophole which enabled him to oust me from the tech support position into a bottom-rung gofer job.  

 
This is not the story of how he forgot to line up a replacement first.  

 
This is the story of the first couple of days afterwards, when I was happily acting as though I'd been dropped on my head and couldn't possibly give unofficial technical assistance or, indeed, remember how to do anything I hadn't been officially trained on. After all, the job level I'd been transferred to was supposed to only exist for trainees, not staff, so I couldn't be officially expected to actually know anything.

Heh heh heh.

On of the triumvirate was a manager I'd bumped heads with before over various things. Mainly her wanting special treatment and me telling her to get back in her box. I got assigned to her for the training that the employer red tape said had to be done for everyone entering the bottom-rung level.

She saw it as an opportunity to exercise power over me. I saw it as an opportunity to play so exceedingly dumb that she would have to waste hours and hours going over basic procedure while I grinned at her and fielded queries from people who would interrupt us to ask me extremely complex questions.

One of my favorite memories from this time was making her show me, over and over, how to record a corporate-TV transmission off the satellite onto a VCR tape. Considering that I'd set up the entire AV system during my time as the tech there, and written the complete instructions for doing everything on it (which had mysteriously gone missing the day before), it was so very sweet to make her have to keep getting up from her Desk Of Supervision and trot over to the other side of the building to push VCR buttons in front of me.

After a couple of weeks of this, she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and I got transferred to the audit division I'd helped out before, under the manager who'd overseen the IT position. I was about ten feet away from the Office Manager's new office, and it's amazing the things you can do which stop just short of outright harassment, or which never get reported because someone's on too much of a power trip to ever let it be known that a bottom-rung employee was getting to them.  

 
However, the story of the failed replacement for me, and the advent of the Guy in the Tie, are a story for another time.  

 
tl;dr: turned a manager into a Yo-yo. [INDEX EDIT]
Next story
All the stories and more