I’m a teller at a bank. It’s near closing, and I’m working with one coworker, who I don’t like because she’s an aggressive flirt, and one manager is in his office seeing to paperwork. I see a customer come in and my coworker sneers at him and walks off.

When he gets up to my counter, the customer tells me he hasn’t been able to access his account. I look it up and see that his account was recently locked on one of the days I wasn’t working and is now pending closure, with a note that it was for being aggressive and threatening to shoot the teller — the other coworker — which got him removed from the premises.

I inform him of this fact and tell him to leave before he sets off again or decides to act on his threat and I have to hit the panic button, only for him to react in shock and panic and actually start crying. He has no idea what I am talking about and seems terrified of being arrested for something he seems to not remember doing. I’m not sure what to do at this point, so I tell him gently to leave and I’ll review the case.

After he obliges and departs, I ping my manager to come up and my coworker walks back up to the counters.

Coworker: “Is he gone? Did you threaten to call the cops on him?”

Me: “I was about to, but he seemed to have no idea what he was talking about. The poor guy walked off crying and terrified.”

Coworker: *Smugly* “Good. That’s what he gets for snubbing me.”

Me: “What?”

The manager walks up just in time to hear that sentence and looks at my coworker. Something about that comment seems off to him, too, so he goes to his office to review the video footage of the day and time the note said he made the threat.

An hour later, he calls my coworker into the office with him and she pales. She leaves about half an hour later in tears.

Me: “What’s going on?”

With very visible annoyance, he grabs [Coworker]’s nameplate off the desk and chucks it into the garbage.

Manager: “[Coworker] tried flirting with [Customer], but he’s married so he turned her down. Apparently, she was so offended by this that she fabricated this story to ruin his life by getting his finances locked out! The police weren’t even called, and it all happened silently! [Manager #2] was working with her so I need to do some looking into this. You got things covered?”

I nodded and went back to work until closing. Over the next couple of days, I got to watch a domino effect; [Manager #2] was having “after-hours involvement” with my now-ex-coworker, so he corroborated her fake story and allowed her to make the note because she had him wrapped around her little finger.

When my manager called to set things straight with the customer, he was, rightfully, less than generous because his rent situation was uncertain and we could have gotten him and his family kicked out onto the street, and it resulted in us being sued for wrongful termination of a contract, among other charges of financial and emotional damage. Naturally, he also zeroed out his account with us and went to find another bank.

I do have to give credit where it’s due, though; when word of all of this reached the bank owner, he fired [Manager #2] on the spot, gave a huge payout to the customer as an apology for his hardships when he was approached by his lawyers — more than his lawsuit was asking for in damages, even — and set out to see if there was any legal retribution he could advise the customer to take on my ex-coworker and ex-manager for their petty revenge scheme.

At the time of writing this, that hasn’t borne any fruit just yet.