Bad acid flashback

I just got a call from a former coworker - a woman I got hired at the suburban news bureau where I used to work. She was on her way home, having received her annual performance review, and needed to vent.
Before I go on, let me say that in the past decade this newspaper has consistently made the stupidest possible decisions with regard to hiring and promotion. They consistently promote the dullards and the affirmative action hires, leaving the talented, perceptive reporters to toil in the trenches.
I'd been a professional journalist about 30 years when I was subjected to my first performance review in 1997. It was administered by the bureau chief, a guy more than 10 years my junior, who had been farmed out to the bureau because he was in the way at the main office downtown. He took me to lunch, so as to have a modicum of privacy that we would not have had at the bureau.
To say it was excruciating would be an understatement of epic proportion. It was particularly galling because I'd been running a bureau for the smaller sister paper for 10 years before our papers were merged and I got folded into a larger combined bureau. I was the one who drove this bozo around the suburbs, explained to him the players and the issues and kept him from making horribly embarrassing mistakes in print on a daily basis.
I astonished myself with my capacity for forbearance and aplomb that day.
So when my friend called this evening to screech her indigation at being upbraided by a bureau chief whose idea of management is making lists, I listened patiently and sympathetically.
And I remembered how delicious it was to tell the company that had mismanaged my paper into oblivion to stuff it.
I remember one evening when my bureau chief was agonizing over some idiotic order from his superiors, how shocked he looked when I said, "You know, (name), we don't have to do this. No one is holding a gun to our heads and making us work here." I'd just presented him with a thought he could not think and it terrified him. I found it liberating.
I think my departure in October 2000 helped him understand that we're only stuck if we think we are. In less than a year, he quit to take a public relations job arranged by one of his former employees.
Living well really is the best revenge.