Employee Karl takes over a shared office space because he got there first, regrets it when coworkers apply the same rule to his biggest meeting of the year: 'First come, first served'

Author image for Cata Holmes
Cata Holmes • Writer
Jul 18, 2026 2:30 PM EDT

Nothing frustrates a workplace more than someone who thinks the rules only apply to everyone else.

An entitled (and new) employee took over a shared meeting room and turned it into his personal office, brushing off complaints from his coworkers with his phrase: "first come, first served". The situation stayed like that for a while, and a little bit after, when he needed the main conference room for an important annual meeting, his coworkers beat him to it by following the same rule, leaving him with nowhere to host his guests.

I absolutely love these revenge stories, especially when they are about coworkers. We all have worked with one of those people who feel like they own the office and want to do whatever they want with it. They don't believe in sharing and claim shared spaces as their own private office, leaving the rest of the team with nowhere to go and where to work.

As a consequence, I love it even more when people get back at them and give them a taste of their own medicine. When they took over the big meeting room where Karl was supposed to have a meeting with important clients, they not only felt great at doing justice, but also when they responded to him with his famous phrase, making him full of anger. That should have been a wonderful workday, for sure.

However, and like I always like to say, I don't believe it is healthy or good to have a bad relationship with coworkers. Since we spend most of our day next to them, trying to have a respectful bond is important. In the case of this story, I'll also say that Karl deserved that act of revenge and to host his guest in another room, not as pretty as the one he was anticipating using. 

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  • Ambitious office worker occupying a dedicated workspace while managing projects and workplace responsibilities.
    via Unsplash+ (via Icons8 Team)

    Ambitious office worker occupying a dedicated workspace while managing projects and workplace responsibilities.

    Represented by models.

  • I worked on a floor with about a dozen others, all of us in cubicles. There was a small room on one of the outside walls, close to our cubicles, that we would use for group discussions occasionally. In the room was a small table that would seat four people, or six if they were friendly with each other.
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  • A new guy was hired, (I'll call him Karl) and he quickly became not liked. He was very aggressive, always bossing people around and trying to hand off assignments to others that he "didn't have time to do".
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  • The rotating chair in his cubicle was old, and he swapped it out with the chair in another cube, telling the owner that his bad back needed a better chair.
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  • He was constantly "borrowing" things from other people's desks, like staples (there was a supply cabinet on the floor above us).
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  • Karl started working in the small room, leaving papers on the table when he left at the end of the day, and then his coffee cup and then his laptop.
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  • One morning we noticed that his cube was cleaned out and everything in it moved to the small room, including his desk. The small room was now his office.
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  • We tried to talk to him about this, but his reply was, "First come first served", a phrase he used frequently. When a sign appeared outside the "office" door with his name on it, that was the last straw.
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  • At the other end of the floor was a nice conference room. It had a large table that could seat a dozen people, a big screen on one wall for teleconferencing, and table along a wall for coffee and snacks.
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  • There was a sign-up sheet for the conference room with the administrative assistant outside the conference room, although it was rarely used.
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  • We didn't normally entertain customers or have large meetings, so people would just pop in to meet there if the room was vacant, which it almost always was, not bothering to use the sign-up sheet.
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  • Private office space set up inside a room that was originally intended for shared workplace use and team collaboration.
    via Unsplash+ (via Chalo Garcia)

    Private office space set up inside a room that was originally intended for shared workplace use and team collaboration.

    This image is used only for illustrative purposes.

  • Once a year my location hosted a pow wow in the conference room. Most of the attendees came from out of town, and stayed in a hotel that was about a mile away. Karl appointed himself as the meeting coordinator, and was spending a fair amount of time talking to the external personnel, and driving our admin assistant crazy.
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  • None of us were invited; in fact, he was keeping the whole thing under wraps, because he wanted to be the only point of contact at our office for the important people.
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  • Once I learned the date of the big meeting, I reserved the conference room. The admin assistant mentioned that Karl's meeting was that day, although he hadn't reserved it yet. I used the first come first served phrase, one she had heard from Karl many times, and she put my name on the sign-up sheet for that date with a smirk on her face.
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  • It was a group effort. Five of us waited until Karl left the day before the big meeting, and used our office chairs to transfer lots of paper to the conference room. The table was full of file folders, boxes of files, and power cords for our laptops were all plugged in.
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  • Karl had arranged to meet the out of towners at the hotel for breakfast, before moving to the conference room for the 9:00 start of the day's meeting.
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  • Around 8:00 we gathered in the conference room, shut the door, put up a Powerpoint presentation on the big screen, and worked on our laptops. We heard voices coming down the hall, and one person stood up and started briefing us on the presentation on the big screen.
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  • The door opened a few minutes before 9:00, and Karl stopped in the doorway, with a surprised look on his face. We could see people standing behind him, peering into the room.
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  • Karl told us to get out, that he had important visitors, and needed the conference room. We answered that we had reserved the conference room weeks ago, and were in the middle of our own meetings. We mentioned that the smaller room (his "office"), was no longer available to us to use.
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  • As our briefer resumed his presentation, Karl walked over to the desk of the admin assistant. We could hear him arguing with her, that he needed the conference room. That went on for about a minute or so before he came back, again demanding that we vacate. "First come first served" was my answer, and he knew defeat when it was served up to him.
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  • Karl's group was able to use the conference room on the floor above, but our boss, who worked in a different location, received some pretty harsh emails from the visitors.
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  • Employees gathered in a conference room for an important business meeting involving planning, presentations, and workplace discussions.
    via Unsplash+ (via Toa Heftiba)

    Employees gathered in a conference room for an important business meeting involving planning, presentations, and workplace discussions.

    People shown are models.

  • The boss knew nothing about the meetings, although she should have been invited and participating, She also had no idea that Karl had appropriated the small meeting room as his office.
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  • When she went to talk to Karl about the emails detailing the train wreck of meetings, she saw that Karl had moved from the cubicle he was supposed to be using. Karl had to move back to his old cubicle. Revenge is sweet.
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  • Revenge can feel as good as a massage sometimes, and I think what they did was a great lesson for Karl, who needs to understand that an office is a shared space where people work together every day.

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bad coworkers coworkers meeting room entitled people
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