My boss kept stealing my ideas and presentations – I added a hidden message to the slides and watched the drama unfold
OFFICE politics can seem impossible to navigate, and sometimes the only way to stop a workplace bully is to outsmart them.
After her manager allegedly used her work without credit, one woman deployed a smart tech trick that made it impossible for others to steal her research.
Cristina Sevcenco recounted the sneaky tactic in a video that left viewers demanding a tutorial.
“In corporations, especially in the ones I’ve worked in, it’s very toxic and it’s very common for people to steal your work,” Sevcenco claimed.
At a former workplace, she allegedly walked into the office one day and saw her manager giving a presentation using two weeks’ worth of market research Sevcenco had completed – without crediting her.
“Although my manager once told me that I would rarely be the one presenting my work for the higher management, she never told me that they wouldn’t even bother to change anything in the presentation but my name,” she told BuzzFeed.
“It broke my heart.”
So, Sevcenco took things into her own hands: she began adding a watermark to all of her work.
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The next time her boss tried to steal her presentation, the subterfuge was revealed by Sevcenco’s signature at the bottom of each slide.
Commenters on TikTok begged for a tutorial and the savvy ex-employee delivered.
In an example PowerPoint, Sevcenco separated out the document’s layers and opened the menu to format the slides.
Then, she added her watermark in the corner, and selected “lock aspect ratio.”
By locking the watermark in, Sevcenco explained, anyone who downloads the document won’t be able to remove the signature from the presentation.
Sevcenco also said the watermark trick works on any software in the Microsoft Office suite.
“You can do this to Word documents, you can do this to Excel documents,” Sevcenco said.
Though her TikTok viewers were outraged by the “toxic” office environment Sevcenco said she had experienced, she pointed out that her experience didn’t happen in a vacuum.
As Sevcenco explained to BuzzFeed, she didn’t think her ex-manager was a bad person but had learned to be dishonest from her own chain of command.
“She was made that way by her manager,” Sevcenco said.
Meanwhile, one woman ditched office drama entirely by switching careers, and now she works out of theme parks across the country.
And a father-to-be shared his good news with his employees, and one threw a fit about his boss “stealing” their chosen baby name.
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