The Ultimate Revenge
My uncle is an Indian doctor. In the 90s, there was a massive doctor shortage in Australia, so the government gave him citizenship. Unfortunately, you still had to sit three expensive exams to work as a doctor in Australia.
These exams cost thousands of dollars, only happened twice a year, had limited sitting spots/times and had arbitrary pass/fail marks. So many Indian doctors ended up becoming taxi drivers/small businessmen, etc. My uncle decided instead he would reapply and go through Australian medical school.
Sure enough, being a doctor for 10+years makes medical school easy and my uncle was top of his class. He decided since he was already pushing 40 and had a family, he would apply to become family physician instead of applying to be a surgeon like most of his teachers had suggested.
At the time, many desperate foreign doctors where applying for general practitioner residency. They would essentially get treated like garbage. They would be forced to work unpaid overtime. They would not be given proper study time or leave to sit mandatory exams.
They would pocket the meals/accommodation/study/leave allowances that you were supposed to be paid by the training college. They would roster you to work every Saturday/Sunday shift and if you refused, they would give you a bad review and your training would be jeopardized.
This mostly happened to foreign doctors, as most of them would be in bad debt and highly desperate for any sort of work. When my uncle graduated, he applied for GP training in a practice that is located within an Indian ethnic enclave so that he would have access to religious food/schools for his kids.
Sure enough, this practice engaged in all of the above issues. My uncle would work every single Saturday shift. During his dedicated “study” time, he would have to come into work. He got reprimanded for not overcharging patients in line with their framework.
Worst of all, when my aunt was really sick and hospitalised, they wouldn’t give him any time off to look after her and the kids. The owner of the clinic was a white GP who was openly prejudiced against Indians, Asians and Aboriginal people (who were a large percentage of the clientele of this clinic).
My uncle bided his three years and as soon as his documentation came through, making him a GP, he quit that instant. He went down to the local bank and got a loan to open up his own practice.
All his old patients quickly moved with him to the new practice. The first year he struggled, but his practice quickly became known and word spread. Surprise, surprise, foreign trained doctors actually work well and care about their patients. More patients and more doctors looked to work with my uncle.
Within two years, my uncle had a GP practice that had four doctors, two nurses, two trainees and a manager. His practice easily rivaled his original teachers. He then started two more GP practices with the money he was pulling in. These practices trapped his old teacher’s clinic in a two km triangle.
He would advertise heavily and make sure he could take as much business from his old teacher as he could. Within five years, his old teacher’s practice went from hiring six doctors, four nurses and six trainees to just one doctor (his old teacher) and no one else.
His old teacher tried to sell up his practice to other doctors, but no one would purchase it given how successful my uncle’s three surrounding practices were. He then tried to sell it to my uncle, who refused to buy even at a ridiculously low sale price.
Instead, he waited for the bank to repossess his old teacher’s clinic…and then purchased it for a bit more money from the bank. My uncle then re-purposed the building into his main offices from where he runs his other three practices.
He made sure to redevelop his old boss’s room into a staff toilets just as one final tribute to the human trash that was his old boss.