People Discuss Their 'Pettiest Of The Petty' Revenge Story
15. Bully Gets Fed Dog Food
“I live in a flat with four other people: James, Alex, Bradley, and John. We are all in our early 20s. We have been good friends since we were in school, so it just seemed kind of natural that we’d move in with each other for uni.
Plus we’re kind of broke, and splitting bills is a lot easier on all of us.
John is a bit of a jerk when he wants to be. He thinks he’s the pinnacle of comedy when in actuality he just irritates everyone with his “pranks” which often revolve around spilling stuff on our good clothes and effectively ruining some of them, switching food around, hiding our things, etc. He’s always liked pranks, but they got unbearable once we moved into our flat together.
Before, he could be kind of funny as he only did innocent pranks every now and then, but now they are affecting everyone negatively, and to be quite honest, they’re so annoying.
He is very cruel towards Bradley in particular which has almost led to some physical fights between us on some occasions. Bradley is visually impaired, to the point where he has a guide dog to help him get around.
Her name is Trixie and she’s an adorable golden retriever. Not important, but she deserves recognition. John will often “prank” Bradley. He’ll jump out at him to scare him, hide Bradley’s things, move furniture to mess with him, and even went as far as hiding Trixie’s leash, which made Bradley miss an important lecture at uni. Before you guys say it, we are stuck with John until our lease is up, then we are moving to a smaller flat just myself, Bradley, and James as Alex is planning to move in with his partner.
We would not still be living with him now if we had a choice.
We think that he’s like this with Bradley because 1) he can’t see very well which makes him an “easy target,” and 2) Bradley has his own bedroom and doesn’t have to share with anyone. Our flat has three bedrooms. I share a room with James, and Alex shares with John.
Bradley has the smallest bedroom in the flat, as he prefers smaller rooms. He also checked with us to see if this was okay as he didn’t want us tripping over Trixie or having dog hair all over our stuff. We all agreed that this was fine, but John has always been a bit bitter about it.
The bullying had calmed down as we were always there to keep an eye on things, but some of us are back at work now, so there are times where John is alone with Bradley.
On one of these occasions, John decided to switch our tomato soup with chicken soup. Bradley always has soup when he gets up, but chicken soup makes him physically ill. He’s not allergic to anything in it, but he doesn’t react well to it. As a result, there is a part of the cupboard in the kitchen that is reserved for Bradley’s stuff, so there’s no mix-up and he knows where his food is.
As you can imagine, Bradley couldn’t see the label and ate the soup, making him throw up. It doesn’t help that Bradley gets very panicked when he’s sick. Again, John knew this.
I got back from class and found Bradley on the bathroom floor shaking and crying. I stayed with him till he felt better then helped him get into bed. He told me that he must’ve mixed up the tins.
I thought it was weird; we don’t even buy chicken soup, mostly because none of us eat a lot of soup. I questioned John about it and he admitted it, pretty smugly. He even made a joke that he should’ve switched it with Trixie’s food instead. He was not sorry, though, he did reluctantly apologize to Bradley.
The other night, I decided to make bolognese pasta for dinner (one of the very few things I know how to cook).
I was waiting for the pasta to boil, just looking around the kitchen when I spotted it. Trixie’s food bowl. Well, John pulls pranks all the time, I’m pretty sure he could cope with a little bit of petty revenge.
I grabbed a tin of dog food and decided to make John his own special bowl of pasta. I drained out most of the gravy from the dog meat and covered it in sauce, just to hide the color (nothing can disguise the taste of dog food, trust me).
This is genuinely one of my proudest moments (sad, I know), and I was genuinely tempted to do an evil villain laugh as I plated up everyone’s food and informed the rest of my flatmates that no one was to eat from John’s bowl. Needless to say, dinner was a lot more entertaining that night.
John rushed to the bathroom, claiming that I had “poisoned” him.
He wasn’t sick, but the thought of what he had just eaten made him feel rather queasy.
He actually called his mommy to yell at me. She claimed that we were “bullying” her son. Though she was not too keen to hear about how he’d been treating Bradley. It’s been kind of awkward in our flat for the past few days, but I wouldn’t change a thing.
Bradley gave me a hug the other night and said that he appreciated my little petty revenge in his honor. That’s all I need to know that I will never regret this.”
Another User Comments:
“Bullying someone who is visually impaired screams “I need to get my teeth kicked in.”” EdwardLennox
14. The Store Won't Accept Your Return, And That's Final
Get over it, princess.
“I was at Fry’s Electronics in the return line because of some bad RAM (never buy RAM from fry’s), and the lady in 2 positions in front of me got called up next.
She seemed normal at first; she was trying to return this vacuum cleaner because it wasn’t sucking anymore… the thing looked like it had been used outside to clean a construction site.
There was caked on white patches of dirt all over it, the cord had several knots in it, and the clear container for dust was packed full, with no room for shaking at all.
The person told her the problem looked to be that she just needed to empty it and it would work fine, and also mentioned that they could not make a return on it because the purchase was 7 months earlier.
She wasn’t having this. She took an exaggerated deep breath and started yelling obscenities and curses. Everyone in the line and working the section as well as a few people walking into the store froze and stared at the spectacle.
This was no small woman either, this woman was about 5’6″-5’7″ and looked like a rather large globe of cellulite. I’m guessing 400-500lbs.
Her voice had gone from sweet to rabid shrieking harpy instantaneously, no building no rising in volume, just straight screeching noise. It’s like someone threw a mic in front of its own speaker with the volume on 11.
Her face made a similar transformation from white to red. The poor little girl who was tending to her literally took a step back in recoil and fell into the chair behind her.
Then started looking side to side for further routes of escape.
The manager came sprinting out of the office hands in front of him pumping palm open towards her asking her to settle down.
This did not work, it made her angrier and she started hitting the counter with one of the vacuum cleaner’s brush attachments. She was calling the girl a ‘useless idiot,’ the manager a ‘dang toad’ and kept threatening to sue them.
This went on for about 2 minutes with nothing managing to calm her down.
There was a large crowd gathering now.
She proclaimed, ‘FINE! IF YOU DON’T WANNA GIVE ME MY GOD DANG CASH…’ raised the long brush attachment up as if she were gonna strike the girl ‘I’M GONNA..’
I’d had it; I wasn’t about to watch this woman get violent.
I yelled, ‘HEY!’
She stopped mid-sentence jerked her head at me and shot eye daggers in my face. All I could do was stare at the gobbler on her chin follow her jerky head movement and keep swinging around as if it were jello.
The words that came out were not the ones I’d intended: ‘PUT THE FORK DOWN!’ Her eyes went wider than they already were, eyes bulged, which seemed an odd reaction to what I thought I’d said in my mind.
The whole area burst into laughter, then I realized what I’d said.
I was about to correct myself, but she started stomping towards me vacuum rod attachment high overhead. So I decided to roll with it. I happened to be wearing a red jacket, so I dropped my bag, swung it off, and started acting like a bull-fighting matador. The woman saw me mocking her and just shrieked… she started literally galloping at me swinging the thing in circles above her head.
She never even made it close; I was running like crazy. I got about 20 feet away when security confronted her with tasers drawn.
They didn’t tase her, but the sound of one calling the cops on her calmed her down instantly. She immediately went into defensive mode. She ended up getting arrested and I had my hand shook by 4 or 5 people including the manager.
I even got a girl’s number out of the ordeal. The woman stepped on my RAM and crushed it, though, but the manager understood and took the return anyway.”
13. Can't Honor Your Own Contract? You Won't Keep Your Biggest Possession
“So, on December 7, 2002, I left an abusive spouse with nothing but my baby and the clothes on my back. (Yes, I remember the date exactly.) I and my then 18-month-old son moved in with my mother, and there was tons of tension in the house from too many people.
For example, my son and I had to share my old childhood bedroom with my brother’s then-partner. They had met in a mental institution, so… yeah.
I had a high school friend who we’ll call Entitled Friend, and she had 2 daughters by her awful partner. (One night, I had too much to drink and slept in her out of town friend’s mom’s bed and woke up to find him in bed with me, trying to “get things started.”)
Entitled Friend’s mom was staying with friends in a state 1,500 miles away from us in the rural south, and her car payments were so delinquent, the financing company was looking to repossess it. I told her that if she got no tickets, tows, or wrecks, they’d never be able to find her.
My entitled friend moved out of the house but continued to use her mother’s laundry facilities.
Friend’s Mom comes back to town to find that all her utilities had been used until they were disconnected, and she had to pay about $800 for the utilities and the deposits required to turn them back on.
She desperately wanted me to move into her side of the duplex, which her dad owned, so she lived rent-free. (A fair rent for this place in this area would be about $450/month.)
Turned out that Entitled Friend had done this to her many times, and she had no cable TV because Entitled Friend and her partner had watched so much adult content that she owed around $700 to every company that offers cable in the city.
She knew my living situation, and when she asked me to move in rent-free as long as I caught the utilities up and maintained them (and kept the house move-in ready, as it was expected that I would leave whenever my friend’s mom called to tell me she had decided to come back into town.), I readily agreed.
Because of Partner, I asked Friend’s Mom for a lease forbidding him from coming into the house. Friend’s Mom also wrote in the lease, without my prompting, that her daughter could visit with my permission. It was 1 page, handwritten, and the only input I had was that Partner couldn’t come inside. Friend’s Mom had complete control over what else to put in the lease.
It turned into a nightmare. Entitled Friend kept showing up to do laundry unannounced, frequently breaking into the house if I was gone. At least once, she let Partner into my house, and he stole my last $20.
One day, Entitled Friend saw a pair of Christmas mittens my then 2-year-old son loved. She saw them and said, “Oh, my 2-year-old would love those. Can I have them?”
And she was serious. I explained that they were my son’s and that he was still using them, and she was furious that I would be so “selfish.” The next day, my house had been broken into again for laundry day, and the mittens had disappeared.
I spent 2 months not knowing from day to day if my house was going to be broken into or which possessions of mine would be gone because she was stealing from me.
I repeatedly told her she could do laundry and even use my soap, but I wanted to be there.
Eventually, I resorted to just trying to get her to give me notice, so I hid things, but she never cooperated. Why didn’t I change the locks? It wasn’t really my place to change locks in this “rental” situation.
The final straw was when I came home after a long day at work, only to find the laundry going, but my Entitled Friend wasn’t there.
I had been in the middle of doing laundry myself, so I had a load in the dryer that dried before I got home and a load in the washer that should be ready for the dryer.
But not this time. Entitled Friend had thrown all my clean laundry, without drying the wet clothes, on top of a pile of lint on the floor (which was right next to the trash can that she couldn’t be bothered with.)
She had 2 loads going and 3 large bags sitting in the room. The kicker? She had left me a note that basically said, “Hey, I’m busy, can you finish this up for me?”
I called her to tell her that she had been crossing the line despite my repeated requests, but that THIS was ridiculous.
She went off on me about how it was her mom’s house, and she could do laundry there whenever she wanted to.
OK. The revenge I got on her was definitely petty. I stopped the washer and dryer and put loads of still-wet clothing into bags. Then I put all her laundry on the front porch in freezing temperatures.
I had decided to move because this was too much drama, but it would take 2 weeks. I called the police, so they could simply request that she honor the lease for at least 2 weeks.
I told them I didn’t want her arrested; I just wanted peace and quiet.
(People say I should have had her arrested. But her partner was in jail on domestic violence charges, and I didn’t want her children in foster care.)
They called her on a recorded line, and I could tell what she was saying based on the officer’s end of the conversation.
“But you moved out 6 months ago, right? Your mom doesn’t live there anymore, right? Another person with a lease lives there, right?”
He hung up the phone and said, “That was like talking to a 12-year-old on substances.”
My friend’s mom was unhappy that I had called the police on her daughter, so I told her the WHOLE story and that I wasn’t pressing charges; it was just a phone call, and she said (despite the lease, she, herself, had worded), “That’s my house and that’s my daughter, so she can come and go as she pleases, and if you don’t like it, you can move.”
OK. At the time, I was looking at a postcard her car financing company had left on her front door. I knew exactly what to do. It takes a lot to make me want to get revenge, but when I do, it’s always completely legal and VERY cruel.
I called the financing company and gave them her cell phone number, the address and names of the people she was staying with, their home number, and all the info I had to help them find the car.
Friend’s Mom called me again later, really angry, but it wasn’t MY fault she didn’t pay her bills!
She disconnected my electricity, which was in her name. So, I decided not to pay the last electric bill, which was almost $300 (! – for a 2 bedroom, really?) I moved out and never had anything to do with her again and let her daughter wreak havoc on her utilities if that’s what she wanted.
Story over.”
12. Lies Don't Help You Get Rent Money
You’ll regret your dishonesty. It could’ve saved your business.
“I am now and always have been very (some would say overly) trusting of other people. In general, I think people suck. But on an individual basis, I try to give the benefit of the doubt. This plays a big part in this story.
So, my then-girl, now spouse, and I wanted to buy a house a few years back when interest rates were low as we knew we would get married and wanted to lock in a low rate. However, as we were both newly out of college and had a fair amount of debt and entry-level jobs, we gambled on instead of renting for a year to improve our credit and save some cash.
We find a great apartment in a complex of what I think is called townhouses (?) (a bunch of 2 story buildings with 2 apartments on each floor, 4 per building). On our initial walkthrough, in the shared lobby of the 4 apartments, there was a “Do Not Occupy” order from the town. I asked the landlord/property manager about it, and she said they were being asked to increase the service of electricity to each building but that it was safe and already underway, and of the 30 or so buildings on the property, only a handful was awaiting this small upgrade.
Being the trusting person that I am, we signed a 1-year lease.
Things went smoothly for the duration of our lease term, and towards the end, we started looking for houses and signed with a real estate agent. Inventory was low at the time, and we couldn’t find a house we wanted to make an offer on. Around a month prior to the end of our lease, we received a letter from the property manager asking if we wanted to renew or if we were going to be moving out.
I called the PM and, as her office was in one of the buildings, she asked that I come by instead of chatting over the phone. So, I went to her office and explained that we wouldn’t want to sign another 1-year lease as we were actively looking for a home. I asked about a month-to-month lease or a shorter-term lease. The PM started talking about how she liked us as a couple and that we had been good tenants.
She explained that, normally, the month to month option is $200/month more expensive than a lease, and since she liked us so much, we should sign a year lease, and if we found a house before then, we would end up saving money every month, and she would, “work with us.” (With a literal wink, which I found odd, but as I said, I’m very trusting (read stupid)).
I took a copy of the lease, and my now-spouse and I sign it, and we are good to go.
About a month into the new lease, we noticed a strong fish-like smell. We looked forever for the source and ended up Googling it. Turns out, sometimes when an outlet goes bad, it can smell like rotting fish. We searched around and noticed a clicking sound behind our couch.
We pulled out the couch and found a sparking and smoking outlet. The PM was called, and the outlet was replaced.
A few months later, we finally found our home. We put in our offer, and it was accepted the same day. That next day, I called PM and left her a VM letting her know we found our home and that we would finish out the current month and then move out 2 months later.
At work the next day, I got a call from PM while at work, and she left a voicemail practically screaming that we signed a 1-year lease, and if we moved out early, we would be responsible for the remainder of the term (about 5 or 6 months after the move out date we provided). She also said that we could not use our 2-month security deposit as rent.
I called her up to chat and reminded her of our conversation, but she said, “That never happened…” and threatened to sue us and notify the credit bureaus that we defaulted on a lease. Mind you, this is all WELL before our move-out date.
I looked up my options after realizing she was sticking to her story and couldn’t be swayed. The only thing I could find online was showing the apartment myself and having someone take over the lease.
I told the PM that this was my intention, and she said she didn’t know if she could allow that. Preparing for a lawsuit, I figured it would make more sense for me to try to rent it myself, so I could show that I provided a way for the property to limit their losses. Unfortunately, nobody ended up renting the apartment.
Being upset that I was scammed and lied to, we moved out without paying the last month we lived there, essentially using 1 month of our security deposit to cover that and expecting not to get the rest back despite the fact that we left the apartment in great shape.
I got a few angry voicemails from the PM but ignored them the best I could. Finally, at my new home, I received a letter from the PM with very legal language putting in writing the threats she made about the lawsuit and credit bureau reporting.
Ever the optimist, I called her one last time and again reminded her of our discussion. I tried to work out a compromise where, on top of our security deposit, I would pay for half of the amount due to end the lease.
She wouldn’t budge and continued making threats in a very demeaning and angry tone.
So, finally, revenge.
I just happened to speak to my dad about this, and he let me know that he went to high school with the head lawyer (I forget the title) of the state housing authority. He gave me her number and said I should call her and ask if I had any options.
After having a long chat about my general predicament, the housing lawyer (HL) asked me to walk her step by step through the whole ordeal from the initial showing until our last conversation.
I started to tell her the story above and got to the “Do Not Occupy” sign and how the PM explained it away and said it was safe. She stopped me in my tracks and said, “Don’t talk to the PM or ANYONE from the complex until you hear from me.”
A few days later, I got a call from HL who said something along the lines of, “Don’t worry about it, and if they contact you, call me.”
After thanking her and ending the call, I didn’t give it a second thought.
A few weeks later, there was an accident on my way home, so I got off the highway to take back roads home.
This particular route took me right by my old apartment. Suddenly finding myself curious, I decided to be nosey and pull in. I drove up to my old building and noticed there were no curtains or blinds in any of the windows of any of the 4 apartments. There was also now a much bigger, “Do Not Occupy” sign on the front entrance to the building.
It seemed as though my call to my dad’s friend caused the “Do Not Occupy” order to be enforced, and all 4 apartments were now empty. Feeling a slight bit of satisfaction, I drove to the exit of the complex and noticed that my building wasn’t the only one with no window treatments and a big sign on the door. On my way out, I could see 7 or so buildings in the same condition, each with 4 apartments.
So, instead of sticking to her word and allowing us to move out peacefully, the PM lost out on monthly rent from about 30 apartments on top of any fines they may have incurred.”
11. Steal Our Food? You Won't Enjoy These Jelly Beans
“Back in 2016/2017, there was a kid who we’ll name Damian for privacy reasons. Depending on what schedule you have, there is Lunch 1 and Lunch 2.
I, my brothers, and my friends were scheduled for Lunch 1, and so was Damian.
While we would spend our time eating and playing SSBU on our Switches, Damian would spend his time walking around the cafeteria, examining other people’s lunch for something “good.”
You see, Damian had a major sweet tooth and would constantly examine other people’s lunches for any form of chocolate, M&M’s, Skittles, and pretty much any other type of candy. He would then ask that said person if he could have some.
Even if he/she would say no, Damian would lunge his arm across the table and take a handful of what he wanted.
The cafeteria staff and the person who was supposed to be watching him only gave him a slap on the wrist, so he got away with it every single time… which brings us to this story.
In 2016/2017, there was an online trend that had surfaced called the Bean Boozled Challenge.
In case you don’t know what it is, here’s a brief reminder!
Bean Boozled can come in one small pack or a large pack with a spinner. Upon first glance, these look like normal jelly beans… that is until you take a bite out of an unlucky one. You see, each jelly bean can either have one GOOD flavor or one BAD flavor.
Blue is either Berry or Toothpaste, Orange is either Peach or Barf, Black is either Licorice or Skunk-Spray (god I love that one!), etc.
With me being a curious one, I asked my mom if I could buy a large pack for myself and my brothers. Of course, she said yes. And as soon as we got back home, we had a lot of fun doing it!
Sure, most of it was actually pretty disgusting, but we all shared laughs at each other suffering whenever one of us got a bad bean!
We had talked about the entire Bean Boozled experience with our friend group, and one of my friends, Friend #1 asked my brothers and me if we could bring them to school the next day. I just figured that they wanted to try out Bean Boozled for themselves, so I of course said yes, wanting to get more laughs… but not in the way I thought, which I would find out later.
The very next day, I brought what was remaining of our Bean Boozled packet and sat down. But to my surprise, none of my friends wanted to take one of the beans. I even asked them why, but they said “just wait for it.”
After several minutes out of the corner of my eye, I saw Damian walk towards our table with a wide grin on his face.
Damian: “Hey, can I have some of those jelly beans?”
Me: “No Damian, you can’t have any. Besides, I don’t think you’ll like them very much. You see, these aren’t ac-!”
Suddenly, I had to cut myself off when Damian shot his arm across our table and grabbed a handful of the BB jelly beans. I was just about to stop him from eating, only for one of my friends to pull me back down and gave me an expression that basically said “wait for it.”
Damian then shoved the entire handful of jellybeans into his mouth, closed it, and almost immediately recoiled. His eyes widened like a gosh darn supernova as he placed his hands over his mouth, trying to prevent himself from puking.
Damian began to run across the cafeteria like a chicken with its head cut off, trying to find the nearest trash can, all the while still puking his guts out!
Eventually, he had run across the whole cafeteria where his vomit began to leak through the cracks of his fingers and had managed to slip on his own vomit he had left behind, causing him to fall, and the vomit that he was holding in his hands splashed all over his face.
While all of this was going on, every single one of our friend group was laughing our butts off at the scene, with everyone else joining in soon after!
And that is when I realized why they wanted me to bring those jelly beans.
Me: “…Is this why you wanted me to bring them to school?”
Friend #1: “Heck yeah.”
It turns out, when Friend #1 heard that I got Bean Boozled, he thought that this was the perfect opportunity to teach Damian a lesson in stealing people’s food.
Shortly after, the chaperone that was watching Damian escorted him to the nurse’s office with an ice pack on his head but not after pointing at us.
Turns out, Damian blamed us for the entire scenario, which was kind of true. What he didn’t mention was that he asked US if he could have some of those beans. That and the fact that I literally told him, no, and I had tried to explain to him that they weren’t normal jelly beans.
So, we all got away with a small slap on the wrist and a funny story to tell our parents when we got home.
But somehow, someone caught word of what we exactly did to Damian and bought Bean Boozled packs of their own.
After that, Damian NEVER stole other people’s food ever again. But I do feel bad for the janitor that had to clean the whole mess up, that and the fact that the whole cafeteria smelled like a puking skunk for an entire week.”
10. Don't Break My Friend's Heart
“I attended college between the years 2006 and 2010, and during that time, I met a guy who is still a good friend of mine to this day, though, we don’t talk as much now that we’ve long since graduated and moved along with our own lives.
Tim and I met sometime during my sophomore year through a mutual friend and hit it off immediately cause we’re both well-meaning jerks who show our love by picking relentlessly on our friends.
He and I had a very upbeat and fun friendship, the kind where you just understand a person from the start and never really have to work at it, and because of this, he and our friendship were very important to me.
I don’t fully remember the timeline on everything, but he was seeing a woman for about a year that I never really got the chance to spend any time with.
It was one of those relationships where they pretty much just spent time with each other and not as much with other friends, which was fine. I think it was his first real relationship, but given that it’s been over a decade since then, I don’t really remember.
At some point, Becky broke up with him, and while I don’t recall her exact words, the general gist of her reasoning was that she had grown bored/disinterested in the relationship.
It sucks, but breakups happen all the time, and I wasn’t going to fault her for doing the right thing and not leading him further along when she was no longer emotionally invested.
The next few months were rough, though. Tim was having a really difficult time getting over the breakup, and he was constantly in a slump. It took months for myself and a couple of other friends to help pull him out of it and get him back to feeling like his normal self again where he actually felt genuinely happy and content with moving forward and being single.
Since the breakup was not a hostile one, Tim and Becky remained friendly with one another after he’d had time to adjust his emotions, which none of us had any issues with.
About a year later, Tim comes to me and confides that Becky approached him and confessed that she felt like she had made a mistake in breaking up with him. She told him that she still loved him and wanted to get back together.
Tim came to me because he wasn’t sure what to do. He understandably still had feelings for her, as any of you who have been in a failed relationship probably understand — it’s never easy to just stop loving someone, no matter how hard they hurt you, and given that she certainly hadn’t been abusing him during their relationship, it wasn’t like there was any neon red flag screaming danger over the situation.
But he was afraid of being hurt again and didn’t really know how to react to her confession.
What I wound up telling him was that he was the only one who could make the decision on whether to see her again or not because that is not a decision that anyone else could ever make for him. However, I did make it clear that I did not like her or trust her because I believed that this was just her being nostalgic.
I wholly believed that she would wind up breaking up with him again over the same reason of essentially being bored with him and reminded him of how that had affected his mental and emotional state the last time. The choice was his to make, and as his friend, I would be there for him, but I was afraid that she was essentially not going to take his feelings seriously, that she cared more about making herself feel good.
The best way I can describe what bothered me was that I felt she wanted to get back together with him just to have the chance to clarify for herself that she had made the right decision in breaking up with him in the first place, which I did not feel would be fair to him or mindful of his feelings toward her.
I made my thoughts and feelings about it known to Tim in very honest detail, and he understood.
Ultimately, he wound up deciding to give her another chance. The relationship lasted less than two weeks before she decided that she really was bored by it and dumped him again. Still in love with him my butt. I was livid.
Some context on myself, I’m generally a very easy-going person. I don’t have the care or energy to get angry over most things because it’s exhausting, and frankly, I have more worthwhile things to do than waste time on people that annoy me and let them eat into my day.
However, I am fiercely protective of my friends, and I was pretty upset over her careless behavior towards him when she knew how he felt about her.
Thankfully, Tim did much better with the breakup this time around because I think he finally saw how little she actually cared about him, and he decided he was better off without her.
But, of course, this didn’t stop me from being angry and wanting to get some kind of retaliation.
Unfortunately, I went to a private Christian college that took hostile confrontations of any kind very seriously. Despite how much I wanted to put some sealant in the bed of her awful, little Toyota Tacoma and fill it with water to cause some damage to her suspension, I restrained myself from any vandalism cause she wasn’t worth risking my degree over. However, I still was angry, so I decided to start messing with her a bit.
As a reminder, I really didn’t know Becky at all. The first time they went out, I knew who she was, but Tim had never really introduced us cause when they were together, they were alone, so I never really hung out with him when she was around. The second time they went out, he did actually take a moment to introduce her to me, but I was on my way to choir rehearsal, and the whole interaction lasted like ten seconds.
So, I knew who she was, but as I came to discover later, she basically had no idea who I was, despite that introduction and despite me and Tim having been friends since long before they first started seeing each other (shows how seriously she took him and the people in his life).
Rather than actually confronting her, I wound up deciding to play a bit of a psychological game on her.
At the time I did this, I really didn’t think it was actually going to have any kind of impact or effect. It was just a petty response to me being angry with Becky for how she’d treated my friend, and I more or less accepted that it was only something that would at least make me feel better and nothing else.
What I started doing was basically just giving her the stink eye whenever we passed each other on campus, though it really was a little more than that.
If we walked by each other in the hallways, I would stop whatever I was doing (walking, talking… sometimes mid-word…) to just glare at her the moment I saw her, and I would continue to do so after she walked past me, even turning around and watching her until she eventually would disappear into her next classroom or around the corner.
I never said anything, and she never really even looked back at me, so as far as I was aware, Becky never really noticed it.
I also never actually followed her anywhere or did anything along the lines of stalking, only “striking” at times when I genuinely just happened to be passing her on campus. And as soon as she was gone, I would go back to what I was doing and continue on my own way. There were times I convinced myself that she moved more quickly to get past me.
I even did this when other friends were present that didn’t really know what was going on, though Tim was never around during any of these instances. He did, however, know what I was doing and found it highly amusing despite also agreeing that it wasn’t going to result in anything.
It made me feel better, and it made him feel better to know that I cared that much about how she had treated him.
Turns out, we were both wrong on it having no effect.
Cue to about a year and a half later, Tim has now been seeing Lisa for a few months, and things are going really well. Today, Tim and Lisa are married and have been happy together for close to ten years. Hilariously, Lisa used to be best friends with Becky, but their friendship fell apart shortly after the second time that Becky broke up with Tim because she also was not happy with Becky’s actions.
(I came to understand later that she had been trying to encourage Becky not to get back together with Tim because Lisa also recognized that Becky was just feeling wishy-washy about her supposed “love” for Tim.) Anyway, Lisa was the type of partner who actually wanted to have Tim’s friends involved in their lives, so she hung out with us all the time, even if Tim wasn’t there.
One day, Lisa and I were at the grocery store getting some goods for a barbecue, and the subject of Becky came up. It was mostly about what you’d expect, just us making some comments on Becky’s prior behavior and rolling our eyes a little… until Lisa made a comment about how, toward the end of their friendship, Becky had started to go a little “crazy.” I asked her what she meant by that, and she explained that Becky had been convinced there was “some girl” at the college that had it out for her, except that Becky didn’t know who she was or even her name.
She just kept insisting that there was some unknown woman that clearly hated her because she kept giving her death glares in the hallways, and Becky was terrified that this unknown girl was going to vandalize her truck (dodged a bullet not following through on that one!)
Apparently, she had been telling her circle of friends about this ever since she picked up on it, which at the time included Lisa… and all of them told her she was crazy.
The simple act of me staring daggers at her down a hallway was driving her to the edge, and every single one of her friends told her (for months) that she was just being paranoid and reading into things, and that there was no strange, unknown girl on campus that had it out for her.
Normally, I get that most people don’t take the idiom “falling over laughing” literally, but I genuinely started laughing so hard that I had to sit down in the middle of the aisle at the grocery store.
Lisa just stared at me for a moment while I collected myself, and the look on her face was priceless when I revealed that I was that woman, that I had been going out of my way to make Becky feel uncomfortable, and that I actually had been considering a number of things to do to Becky’s truck but had ultimately decided against it.
Lisa was baffled. She was extremely entertained by me validating the story and confessing to being the one who had done it but also horrified with herself for realizing that she and their other friends had been telling Becky for months that she was just being dramatic when she actually wasn’t.
When we got back to my apartment and shared our findings with Tim and my fiancee at the time, we all had a great laugh about it at Becky’s expense.
Tim and I were very satisfied with knowing that my stupid, petty action had been more effective than either of us ever thought it would be. And while it’s certainly not the most creative or intricate of revenge, it’s still one of my favorite personal stories to this day, if only because it had reaped a result where I never expected to actually get one.”
9. Just So You Know, You Stink
“About five years ago, I had to take a job at a boring, mind-numbing call center.
My ex went from promising to support me through college to dumping me within a week, which makes for a whole other petty revenge story for another day. I was lucky (in some ways) that he agreed to let me stay until our lease was up as long as I went from paying 25% of expenses to 50%. Okay, that’s fair. But I had to get a better job to do that and the only thing I could work around my classes was this call center job.
It was boring but easy but also micromanaged to death. Most supervisors treated people like both idiots and children constantly, down to giving us trouble if we took too many bathroom breaks. You could say they gave us trouble if we needed to poop.
One hugely annoying thing we all hated was we were not allowed to share our screen with the main software client and ANYTHING else at the same time.
Everything had to be minimized if we were actively in a call. Now stuff like YouTube or shopping I can kind of understand. But even company emails, Skype for business, news, the software that had our schedules on it, ALL had to be closed or a supervisor would swoop down on you and provide FAR more interruption to your job than a benign webpage ever would.
It was very annoying and it made it hard to impossible to do any kind of multitasking, including work-related multitasking.
Even weather was prohibited from being on your screen if you were actively on a call. Why do I mention this? Because this revenge story happened in a region where nasty summer storms are frequent.
It was a really hot day in July and I was driving to work just as a particularly bad summer storm rolled in.
There was minor hail damage to my car and it was only getting worse as I parked and ran into the building. I got up to my desk, clocked in, and got started on calls. About that time I suddenly realized I wasn’t sure if I had closed a window in my apartment, and my beloved dog was in there!
I already have anxiety pretty bad and I was freaking out thinking my baby was home, scared, with winds blowing in and knocking over God knows what inside.
I wouldn’t have a chance to phone the ex to check on things (he was in a much better position to leave work for a few minutes if need be) for a good half hour unless I wanted to get busted with my smartphone out at my desk – another high school-esque rule.
So I did what anyone would do and pulled up the radar to see how nasty things were on the end of town where I lived and tried to either a., calm myself down or b., say screw work and go take care of my dog and my apartment.
The weather site tells me we’re under a tornado warning and flash flood warning. Great.
I was on a call at the time and somehow through such great difficulty managed to look at the radar at the SAME TIME I was on the call without any ill effects of my job performance, GASP.
Then came this thunderous stomping and this whiny, shrill voice interrupting the person in my headset.
“Hey, HEY!”
I was so shocked and confused that I took off my headset to hear this jerk speaking to me because I thought there’s an emergency. We’re evacuating to the storm shelter because of the weather? The building is flooding? The poor person in my headset is going ignored, and at this point, I AM slacking on my job but only because this supervisor who definitely wasn’t mine is going to absurd lengths to get my attention like a catastrophe had happened.
I looked at her and just said “What?!” Motioning at my headset indicating I was in the middle of a call.
She got right in my face and said, “You need to minimize EVERYTHING when you’re on calls! You need to take that site off of your screen RIGHT NOW.”
I kind of shook my head at her incredulously, minimized the weather site, and gave her what I hope was a serious stink eye as I put my headset back on and tried to catch up with the conversation still happening in my headset.
Remember I mentioned I have anxiety? Yeah, this set me off even more and I was shaking with both rage and anxiety.
I messaged my supervisor and told her I would have to go home early because I had a migraine. You make up dumb nonsense when you’re about to have an anxiety attack. Luckily she was understanding and wouldn’t have handled that situation that way in a million years.
I stayed on the calls until the weather eased up a bit and then took off. I was so angry I could hardly see.
I went home and thought about that nonsense and how sick I was of being micromanaged by supervisors who weren’t even on my team. I thought about how she had been the disruption and not my monitoring of the potentially dangerous situation in a call center that didn’t even care about us enough to allow us to go to the storm shelter in a tornado warning.
And thought, I can’t just let this go by unpunished. That beastly woman and her power-tripping just had to be taken down a notch or two.
She was scheduled for almost every shift I was. And as luck would have it, I passed by her desk a lot on my way to the break room. And from that day forward, every time I walked by her or her desk I made a face like I had smelled the most atrocious, rank smell on Earth.
At first, she didn’t notice. Then she would glance at me like she thought she saw me making the face and I would immediately return to my normal face instead.
As time wore on I amped it up and would pretend I was stifling a cough. One time passing her in the bathroom I put my sleeve over my nose and mouth just when she had passed by, just at the perfect moment when she thought she saw me do it in her peripheral vision but had to do a double-take to be sure.
I saw her look over her shoulder in the mirror with a really confused look on her face and I went into a stall like normal.
The beauty of this revenge was that there was a strict no fragrance policy at work and she was always smelling like some kind of Bath and Bodyworks sun-drenched berry nonsense horror, clearly defying the same rule she would have jumped up anyone’s butt for.
My plan was, should I ever get called out on making a stink face at a supervisor, to point out she was wearing fragrance and it was bothering me.
By the time I left that company, she would see me and immediately look concerned and nervous. She was either fired or quit shortly before I left, I never found out. As horrible as her management skills were, the former wouldn’t surprise me one bit.
Oh, and I had remembered to close the window. The dog was fine.”
8. Won't Replace My Broken Window? Enjoy Your Soaked BMW
Whoopsies, did I do that?
“This happened over 20 years ago.
I was a student living in a rented house with 4 other people. It was an old draughty house that was owned by this absent-to-us owner, who let his son collect rent every month. They lived on the same street, a few houses away. I believe they had more property they were renting out, but I’m not sure.
Anyway, there were two incidents:
Firstly, there was some freak hailstorm at night where golfball-sized hailstones broke my window and destroyed the skylight portion of the kitchen. The entire neighborhood was full of slush and damaged cars that were parked outside. It was a pretty large-scale occurrence where you could see the house and car damage in that area a number of years after.
We approached the landlord to fix the windows and skylight, and all they did was nail wooden planks and cardboard on my window and did the same to the skylight.
They had service people come to replace their own windows of their house days after the hailstorm.
The house we were staying in just got colder and draftier as it was in the winter.
Secondly, my housemate kept two of his road bicycles in the garage, and one Friday he went in to prep them for the weekend. Thieves had pulled and loosened the old garage doors leading to the back alley and pulled these somewhat nice and expensive bikes through the gap.
He was really mad. So he took the owner to small claims court, saying that the garage doors were also in a neglected condition. He managed to get monetary compensation out of it after a few months of the process.
That’s when the owner’s son decided that he was not going to rent out the house to us. He said it had nothing to do with the outcome of the small claims court, yeah right.
We had a month to vacate.
Half of the garage was sectioned off by some metal sheets, and one day, I slipped through in-between and got to the other half to see what was in there, and was surprised at the BMW series 3 being stored in that side.
I felt a mixture of anarchy and apathy built up as I had been freezing all winter because of the state of the boarded-up window.
I used a wire coat hanger to get into the car, and then brought the garden hose and soaked the interior, including the trunk. I didn’t overflow it, but it would certainly squelch if you touched any of the fabric upholstery, including the headrests. I then left everything looking like I was never there.
I wish I could say there was any outcome I witnessed, but that didn’t happen.
We all moved out and got our deposits back. I dropped contact with the others, so they wouldn’t even have known how to reach me if there was a problem.
It just felt good at that time.”
7. Scam Your Way Into Getting A Brand New Computer Every Year? Keep Yours For 4 Years
“I work in IT, and when I was still in desktop support, I had one of our staff I’ll call Mr. Cunning – or Mr. C – pull some nonsense to get a new PC.
It was my first year in the role, and when we came through Mr. C’s area doing our annual replacement of our oldest gear (3-year replacement cycle), the next day, his PC failed spectacularly – Windows wouldn’t boot with some weird error.
It was only a year old, but in such a situation, it’s easier and faster to simply replace it with something we had ready to go – and being refresh time, new PCs are about all we have in stock.
I later test/reinstall the perfectly fine PC and redeploy it elsewhere where it ran out the rest of its life just fine. This failure stuck in my mind because the error was so unusual.
Jump forward a year to the next renewal. The exact same thing happened a day or two after we were on his floor, and his PC goes belly-up again. Alarm bells start going off in my head as his PC had been faultless all year long. Still, it’s difficult to prove anything and not a good look to accuse end-users of sabotage, so I swap it out with a new box again.
Two days later, I’m under a desk cabling for a different PC swap, different team, only a few desks away.
I hear Mr. C bragging to a workmate about how he’s wrangled a new PC for the past two years – suspicions confirmed. I slip away without being noticed.
Now comes the build-up for revenge, not so much planned at this stage, but it developed naturally – pro comes later.
At the end of the refresh program, I’ve impressed enough that I’m asked to take over the project the next year. I gladly take it on, and then in the planning phase, I start pushing for changes I’d been wanting to make: convince the bosses for some extra budget, so we can double the RAM (4GB to 8GB), and more importantly, move to Solid State Drives for improved speed and reliability.
(95% of our hardware failures are hard drives.) Finally, and the most difficult, was to convince the boss we should move to a four-year replacement cycle, but since we’re moving to Solid State Drives, I got my way.
Roll on the next year’s renewal. All the shiny new gear arrives, and during the setup, we find out just how much faster they are over the older gear – even the one-year-old PC that Mr. C is now running.
Collating the list of users due for replacement, and Mr. Cunning pops into my mind. I determine a plan in case he tries his little trick again.
New PCs start rolling out in Mr. C’s area, and because his PC is only a year old again, he’s not on my list. A lot of ohh’ing and ahh’ing as we move from standard business desktops to sick, new, mini PCs.
Tiny footprint and some worried faces when a few of the older guys think they’re getting thin clients.
A quick demo that it is in fact a full-fat PC and lightning-quick too sells everyone, including Mr. C who has joined the small group of curious cats. Seeing Mr. C arrive, I talk up the speed increase, even more, to really drive home how desirable these are… “It’s just a shame we can’t afford to replace all our existing PCs with these in one go.
They’re that good!” The hook is baited, and I see him having a go as I pack up and leave.
The next morning, I open my helpdesk queue to find a new ticket – Mr. C had taken the bait. His PC has mysteriously exploded yet again and won’t boot Windows. Color me shocked.
I swing a freshly installed PC under my arm and skip off out the door.
Imagine Mr. C’s face when I arrive at his desk with a standard-size clunker of identical vintage as his current PC. I perform a quick investigation on his dead PC to confirm Windows is, in fact, dead then start swapping in the “new” PC. He starts stammering and questioning why he’s not getting a fast, new mini.
Trying to stop the giant grin from spreading across my face, I state, “Sorry mate, due to the increase in costs of the new units, we don’t have any spare and only have enough for the actual replacement list.” This was a lie.
I continued: “… In fact, we’re a bit short on spares at the moment due to a flurry of recent hires. This is the fastest PC I have on hand, but it’s the exact same spec as your current PC, so you’re not going backward.” We had, in fact, hired several new staff on his floor and others in the past few weeks which helped my story.
I walked away, and two wonderful things happened in the aftermath that cements the pro into the revenge:
Instead of simply reinstalling the old PC, I was determined to discover how he destroyed his Windows, which shouldn’t really be possible. It turns out, he had a piece ‘o trash legacy application that needed admin permissions just to run. He would call up one of the older guys in the IT team that he’s known for years a day or two later who would give him admin permissions to run that application rather than trying to fix it properly.
With it, he could change or damage parts of Windows a normal user couldn’t. I found a way to fix the application, so it no longer needed admin rights and advised the entire team, so they wouldn’t give him admin permissions again. (He tried.)
The second thing is one you may remember from earlier. I had convinced the boss to move to a four-year replacement cycle.
What I didn’t mention was that it would take effect immediately to all our existing units too, to help offset the extra costs of the go-fast components in the new PCs. This meant that Mr. C was not only lumbered with the very last slow hard drive model we had purchased, but it was now a PC that he couldn’t sabotage and would be stuck with for another three years.
Fast-forward three years, his PC was finally due to be replaced after running perfectly the entire time, so as my last act (and just to add some pettiness), I leave his floor and his PC to the literal last PC in the replacement just to maximize the use he got from it.
I’m not completely heartless, though; I just don’t like people wasting my time and effort – we’re crazy-busy enough without jerks creating extra work.
His replacement PC after four years was the first year we moved to 16GB RAM as we began the move to Windows 10. He was soo happy!
Fun fact: our failures for the old PCs running an extra year were surprisingly low and well worth the gamble. We averaged only two hard drive failures per year for units outside the three-year warranty period (approximately 150 PCs per year).”
Another User Comments:
“I would have done exactly as he did 2 days before the new deployment wave rolls out, giving him a newer machine, but then effectively freezing him for the next 4 years instead, saying as you put the new one in, that this was the last machine available, and that after the new cycle, there was a moratorium on new machine purchases. So he was lucky it failed then, and not later, where he would have been stuck with whatever old machines still were available instead.” SeanBZA
6. I Changed The Mapping On My Jerk Coworker's Keyboard
“I was reminded of this incident talking with an old coworker of mine from when this happened. Back in the very early 2000s, I got hired by a local (but fairly large) software company to do tech support for one of their business software products.
At this time, the company was growing quickly, and they hired a lot of support engineers over a year to keep up with the workload. I was the 4th person to be hired on this product support team, but over the next year or so, we grew to 8 total.
Now, the first 7 of us got along great. Even though we were working our butts off because of the workload, we had a great time doing it and the company treated us well.
Then number 8 came along — let’s call him New Guy. New Guy had done software support before, and he had a very know-it-all attitude from the first day he moved into his cube. Normally a new person would do the product training, then sit with one of the veterans for a few weeks listening to their calls and learning how to troubleshoot and such. Not New Guy.
After the product training, he already knew everything and was ready to start taking calls right away, so our manager gave him the go-ahead (our manager at that time wasn’t bad, but he was fairly hands-off).
Sure enough, after a few days, he starts coming to those of us who had been there longer and asking questions related to the issues he was getting. And honestly, we are always happy to help someone learn, as long as they’re gracious about it.
Not New Guy. No thank yous, just an, “Oh yeah, that’s right. I knew that.” After a while, we wouldn’t stop helping him (because ultimately we want the customers to get their problems solved), but we started giving him the minimum information to help.
Now our company had a policy that you were supposed to lock your computer whenever you left your desk. We weren’t all that diligent about it and would regularly leave it unlocked if we were just running to the bathroom or going to talk to someone else down the cube row.
We’d usually only lock it for our lunches and after work. New Guy was even less concerned about it than the rest of us, and would often leave his computer unlocked when he went to lunch.
One day, I was on the phone with a customer I’d worked with repeatedly and knew their environment fairly well, and he came over and was casually listening to the call.
When I hung up with them after getting a description of their issue, he started trying to tell me what the problem was and how I was an idiot for not solving it right then on the phone. I calmly explained to him that what he thinks is not what the actual issue is, and I needed to do some testing to figure it out.
He gets all angry and tells me I’m going to feel like a moron when it turns out he’s right and walks away. I’m pretty frustrated right now and decide at this point I’m going to screw with him.
He leaves for lunch and as usual leaves his computer unlocked, so I go over to the window and watch him walk to his car (he would always eat out for lunch).
Once he drove away, I went to his computer, downloaded a little DLL I needed to make this work, went into his Windows settings, and remapped his keyboard to Dvorak. Then I locked his computer and went back to my cube.
For those of you who may not know. Dvorak is a keyboard mapping that is designed to put the most commonly-used letters near the home row, so it’s drastically different from the common QWERTY mapping, and I think the only letter that’s in the same place in both is A.
So hitting a T on the QWERTY keyboard would actually produce a Y with a Dvorak mapping.
The rest of my day was glorious as I listened to him fight with IT trying to figure out why his password wasn’t working and why the password resets weren’t working. They eventually just reimaged his computer, but I took great pleasure in listening to his frustration for a few hours.
Fortunately, he left a few months after that.”
5. Study Your Butt Off Like Your Life Depends On It
“So for a bit of information, I used to go to a private school meaning that people didn’t take education seriously (only student though). I was 15 at that time, and my friend, let’s call her Mayln, was 16.
It was almost the end of a day of school, and I had gotten out my sketchbook.
It was a small one that can be carried around anywhere. It took me a while to get it. I had this habit of skipping the first page of the sketchbook, so when I’m finally done with the book, it would look neat and nice.
So while I sat down at a table in the far back drawing in my sketchbook, the teacher ended up calling me for something.
I quickly wrote on a scrap paper, “DO NOT TOUCH” and put on my stuff, and headed forward to my teacher. Mayln was talking to a person near my stuff, and her friend decides to head off to the bathroom leaving Mayln behind. My friend has told me she saw it from a few tables across.
She looked around and saw my table. She headed there and took my small sketchbook and started to flip through it backward.
When she got to the first page, it was empty. She looked back at my table and grabbed a pen. The paper on my sketchbook is light, so if you look hard, you can see the drawing from the pages under it. Mayln started to scribble the same drawing I did underneath, but she used an orange pen, and her hand was shaking when holding a pen as she had a habit of pressing hard, so orange ink seeped into the page of my drawing, and on the first page is just a bunch of scribbles (she didn’t even try).
She closed the sketchbook and put it back on the table.
5 minutes later, I returned to my table and saw my stuff messed with. I checked; nothing was missing, then reopened my sketchbook to the first page and was horrified by what I saw. I got angry and asked in a loud voice:
“Who touched my sketchbook?”
“Uh, I think I did?” Mayln said.
I turned to her and showed her the first page and the ruined drawing and asked:
“Did you do this?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?!?!?”
“I don’t know. I was bored.”
“So you messed up my stuff because you were bored?!?!?”
“Yep.”
I was furious Mayln didn’t think she did anything wrong and left me at that. I got home, ripped out the pages she ruined, and put them somewhere, and started to plan out my revenge. Mayln hated school work and was at the bottom of the class.
She sat next to me in class, so I planned on making her study until she broke. Mayln was easy to manipulate, but people were nice, so they never did anything.
So for the rest of the year, I used up all my time forcing Mayln into studying in class, during lunchtime, breaktime, free classes, after school, before school; it wasn’t like any normal studying, nope.
We would do homework as soon as we got it, extra work, learning stuff the school doesn’t even teach, re-do her stuff if it doesn’t look neat, studying stuff we haven’t reached yet, asked our teacher for more work. I can tell you, Mayln hated every second of it. Teachers were surprised by her improvement because she has never done work in her life (and they knew her from kindergarten).
When the year ended, Mayln was so happy she got away from me. I heard from a friend she said she would never go near my stuff or sit down next to me again, but I wasn’t done with her yet. When we moved into the next year, we had 2 days to decide where to sit. Mayln used up the first day and skipped the second to pick her seat.
I used the second day and found out we were in the same class. She sat in a mid-corner of the classroom and there was an empty seat next to her, so I chose it and moved on with my day.
On the third day of school, I went to school late on purpose. I walked into class saw that Mayln has already sat down and got out gum, thinking she no longer needed to behave again, but since there was an empty seat a couple of rows behind her, she thought nothing of me walking near her and sat next to her.
She looked so confused about what I was doing. I just turned to face her and said, “Looks like we are going to be together for another year,” and I can tell you the colors from her face fell as she realized what was going to happen.
I did get people to tell me I was a jerk for doing that saying it was a mistake, but it was no mistake.
She did that in full confidence and has done it before too. Moral of the story: do not ruin people’s stuff because you were bored.”
4. Don't Make A Big Deal Over 50 Cents
“When I was a teenager, for about 8 months, I worked customer service at a shopping center type establishment.
One of the parts of my job was issuing refunds for when vending machines didn’t work. Basically, you put coins in the machine, and it doesn’t give you the product you paid for. We had a lot of vending machines, and you know those things don’t always work right.
All our machines were numbered, and the policy was to ask for the number of the machine and then issue whatever refund they claimed it was considering the majority of the refunds were for 50 cents to $1.
Management basically told us, “Look, just side with the customer; it’s not worth the hassle.”
Well, one day, I’m working when Karen comes up and says that the soda machine took her cash and didn’t give her the soda she paid for. I asked her how much cash the machine took, and she told me 50 cents. I then asked her what was the machine number.
Now, at this point, I fully expected her to not know; in fact, very rarely would a customer know. In cases like that, the normal practice would be to ask them where the machine was located, and we’d fill in the rest ourselves. We wanted to know which machine caused the issue, so we could send someone to fix it.
Well, instead of saying, “I don’t know,” she freaked out and started yelling.
She accused me of being a misogynist, a racist (I’m white; she was Hispanic), she accused me of calling her a liar, she told me I was a piece of trash for not listening to her. She made a huge scene… She said I was just an angry man because I was stuck in a dead-end job. (I actually was a customer service rep making $12 an hour…and this was back in 2007; it was one of the highest-paid, non-management jobs in the store, and I was still in high school.)
So, I calmly waited for her to finish her rant, and I said, “Miss, I’m sorry, but for every refund I do for a vending machine, I need the number of the machine to issue a refund. You’ll need to go back to the machine and get me the number. It’ll be on the front in the upper right-hand corner; you can’t miss it.”
She protested, “I’m tired, and it’s on the other side of the store. Can’t you just give me 50 cents?”
I said, “Sorry miss, my hands are tied.”
She then called me a jerk and stormed off.
10 minutes later, she returned with the machine number written on her hand. I smiled, pulled out the paper, and took my sweet time filling in the report.
Normally I would wait until after the customer left, but I really wanted to add in the solid minute it would take to fill in the paperwork before I gave her the 50 cents.
After everything was said and done, I asked her to read my report and sign where it says, “Customer signature,” which, for your information, we never did, but she was special. She took a second read the report, signed, and I gave her the 50 cent refund and wished her well.
I then proudly walked into the back office where my supervisor was and handed him the report, and he laughed his butt off and said, “That was the lady that was screaming, wasn’t it?” I said “Yes,” and he said, “And you made her walk to the machine, didn’t you?” I said “Yes,” he said “And then you made her sign the refund slip?” and I said “Yes,” and he said “Good man.””
Another User Comments:
“When I worked at a gas station, people would come in all the time over the air machine outside, and usually we’d just give them their $1.50 and let them go on their way because it was always an issue for us since homeless people would break it to take the coins. But if anyone gave me a problem or an attitude at all?
Sorry, the air machine actually isn’t our property. You’ll have to call the air company for that.” thatratchick
3. Use Someone Else's Work For Our Group Project? We'll Turn It In
“So, this story took place about 10 years ago when I was at university studying forensic anthropology.
One of the courses we had to complete was one that was designed to teach us how to properly write up a report that could be used for medical records and in court.
For the final, we were put in groups and given pieces of real skeletons and had to do a full report on them, all measurements, photographs, etc. that would normally be involved, as well as a self-written paper on how we would go about cleaning the bones if we received cadavers in various states of decomp.
(This was easy for me as I worked in the bone lab and had to do this very thing more often than I wanted to.)
I was in a group with three other people, and being the guy that was at the top of the class, this was a treat for my team because I could make their life a lot easier by helping them make sure all T’s were crossed and I’s dotted. I also had hands-on experience, something most of my classmates did not since because, as I said before, I was an overachiever who worked in the bone lab.
I was basically leading the group, setting up tasks for everyone to complete, trying to keep it balanced, and we worked together great. Well, 3 of us did. One of our team members thought she didn’t need to do anything.
The first weekend, we all wrote our papers on how to clean and prepare the bones, so we could get that out of the way, but what one of our teammates gave us was just a copy-paste from the text.
I mentioned this before class the next day, telling her it needed to be in her own words, not taken directly from the text, and she immediately went into tears and “you’re so mean” mode, calling me all kinds of names, and saying that it wasn’t fair because she was spending time with her partner, and they barely got to see each other, so we should just understand and cover for her.
Since one of the other team members was also a woman, I pulled her aside to talk privately with her just to be sure I wasn’t doing something unwittingly, and she confirmed that I was being professional and not at all condescending.
The tears and namecalling continued on everything I assigned her to do from taking measurements to writing conclusions, to the point where my teammates and I took it to our professor just to be sure nothing came back on us.
He told us to be sure to clearly label everyone’s individual contributions when we turn in the final report, so that is exactly what we did. Everyone signed their work, writing separate sections of the reports and sending them to me to compile.
We also started comparing notes and talking with each other via email just to have records of what was being said…by everyone.
And boy did she let me have it a few times for mentioning something was taken directly from the text or that her measurements and conclusions made no sense. She also reiterated the fact that she was spending time with her partner, and they had been going of town on the weekends and so we would just have to fix it if we wanted our “precious A’s.”
I still met with the other 2 in person. We would go have coffee and work on our reports, and they even came to spend a shift with me in the lab a few times to get a more visual glimpse and have a better understanding of what they were writing about. We got along excellently.
Here is our revenge.
We didn’t change a single word or number she gave us, and I submitted our full report as it was sent to me, and wouldn’t you know, everything she wrote and put her name on was immediately flagged for 100% plagiarism, and the bones she worked on did not match anything in the records for them.
Well, this, of course, was taken to the dept, and our group was called into a meeting with our professor and a few others from the dept and the university. The three of us told them exactly what had happened with our fourth. And boy did she put on a show, crying and wailing, accusing me of being cruel and threatening her, all of which was refuted by our other 2 team members.
Then she accused me of tampering with her work – wrong again; I had all the emails of our correspondences as well as the ones she sent me with her “work.”
That was all the dept. and the university needed to see, and they let myself and my 2 fellow students go home with an A since the work we had each done individually was all worth it.
My new friends thanked me for all my help, we laughed a bit about the situation, and they went home for the summer. (I had to stay because of my job in the lab.)
I never found out what happened to her; the professors I worked with would never give me a straight answer, but she didn’t return the next year, and I never saw her at the national anthro convention, which was held in our town that year and attended by all students in the dept.
Something I also attended with the 2 classmates that were part of the project.
So, I guess she got to spend more time with her man.”
2. Karens Deserve The Famous Karen Haircut
Every Karen needs that signature Karen haircut.
“So I remembered a story of petty revenge, as recounted to me by a good friend of mine. My friend is a hairdresser by trade and works at a very upscale salon. I go to her myself and can attest to her being amazing.
Anyway, this salon had one customer who had been passed around from hairdresser to hairdresser bullying every single one she saw.
This woman was an absolute holy terror. She made 3, count em’ THREE separate hairdressers cry. The only reason she was still a client of the salon was that her mom was friends with the owner.
She was a relatively young gal, maybe in her mid-twenties with very long bottle-blonde hair (past her waist) that she insisted to everyone who wasn’t her hairdresser was her natural color (it was very much not).
She went to the salon religiously, so no one would ever find out her secret shame. She blamed her hairdresser for all her hair problems (many of which were the results of heavy bleaching and how much heat she used on her hair and her refusal to follow care instructions) and was never satisfied with anything.
It’s 2020, there’s a stay-at-home order, and salons aren’t allowed to be open.
She screams at my friend to do her hair for her because she can’t have her partner finding out she’s not a natural blonde.
The conversation goes something like this…
Karen: I got your personal number from (salon manager). I need to come by your place and have you do my roots tomorrow. I’d have you come here, but my partner might see you.
Friend: Uh, that would be illegal, and I’m busy tomorrow anyway.
Karen: I don’t care, and I need my roots done!
Friend: …Listen, I am not going to break the law to touch up your roots. Even if it weren’t illegal my partner just had a baby, and I really don’t have time.
Karen: I’m going to get you fired!
Anyway, my friend hangs up, and despite Karen’s threats, she knows that the salon owner knows she’s too darn good at her job and has too loyal a customer base to fire her so she thinks no more of it until a few months later when restrictions ease a bit, and lo and behold, who should appear in the appointment book but Karen!
So the day arrives, and Karen shows up with her hair dyed JET BLACK (and not very well dyed either).
My friend is shocked because Karen’s always made such a big deal about being a blonde and how even though she gets her hair bleached, she really is a natural blonde and just “enhancing her color a little.”
My friend asks Karen what they were doing that day and Karen demands to be made blonde again.
My friend is like, “Uhhh, okay, that’s going to be a process…” because this jerk has used black box dye (which is really hard to get out).
For those of you who don’t know, getting dyed dark hair to blonde is usually something done in stages, so the hair has a chance to recover a bit between bleaching sessions to avoid breakage.
Karen is like “No!
I am going to be blonde when I leave here today, or I am telling your boss that you see clients at home sometimes and get you fired!” (My friend sometimes does friend’s hair at home for a lower price because she’s a sweetheart, which her boss is fine with) and “It’s your fault I had to dye my own hair this color because my partner would have SEEN MY ROOTS if I hadn’t done something!”
My friend is tired of Karen’s nonsense at this point, but it’s a slow day, and she has time. She explains to Karen that if she takes her blonde all in one go, her hair will be fried, and she’ll likely end up having to lose a lot of length. Karen scoffs and rolls her eyes and is like, “That’s never happened before, and my hair’s so healthy.
I’m sure it will be fine if you don’t screw it up.” Friend recommends at least using Olaplex (a product that helps prevent damage), and Karen says she thinks it’s a scam to overcharge customers and won’t pay for it.
So she decided to go ahead and do it.
Friend is like “okay” but makes several coworkers be witnesses that this is what Karen is asking for after Friend explained the risks.
After that, Friend goes through the whole process of bleaching Karen’s hair. She has to do it like four times or something, and she checks with Karen after each one that she’s absolutely sure she has to be all the way back to champagne blonde by the end of the day and recommends stopping at some of the nice auburn or strawberry blonde shades in between for now, but Karen insists her partner hates her hair anything but her “natural” blonde.
With each bleaching, there’s more breakage, and Karen’s hair feels worse.
My friend knows Karen’s hair won’t survive this, but Karen absolutely refuses to let her stop.
Eventually, at long last, my friend manages to get Karen’s hair to the required level and so she starts to rinse Karen’s hair. It… starts breaking off in her hand, the length of her hair is melted, fried, destroyed. My friend gets the bleach out and immediately conditions the ever-loving life out of it while explaining to Karen that exactly what my friend said would happen has happened. Karen says she must be exaggerating and insists it’s fine.
Friend wraps what’s left of Karen’s hair in a towel and takes her back over to her station where she shows Karen the problem, everything past a little beyond chin length is pretty much gone. Karen shrieks and accuses my friend of everything under the sun: incompetence, operating without a license (she most definitely has her license), discrimination against white people, etc etc. My friend eventually calms her down and tells her she’ll do her best to cut it so it looks decent for free.
She even has the perfect cut in mind. It’ll suit Karen perfectly.
My friend gives Karen the sharpest, most beautifully cut angled bob you’ve ever seen (I’ve seen it thanks to my friend showing me Karen’s Insta), that despite the incredible precision and skill showcased, is unequivocally and perfectly the Karen.
Blown out and styled to, “Can I speak to the manager?” perfection, Karen starts crying because the cut makes her look 40.
She… wants to speak to the manager.
My friend gets the manager and Karen throws a fit, threatening to sue, and how dare they, and how his employee did this to mock her and so on and so forth while my friend stands there looking completely innocent.
The boss then asks Friend her side of the story and the other hairdressers back her up. Even the boss by now is sick of Karen’s nonsense and Karen is forced to pay the huge sum owed for how much time was spent bleaching her hair (much of which is now gone) and leaves swearing never to come back.
Her partner (a cop) calls up later and threatens to mess with my friend for doing that to Karen’s hair “against his wishes” and my friend tells him if he tries anything, she’s going to tell his superiors and every news agency in the city. Nothing further happens, but he eventually dumps Karen because he “doesn’t like girls with short hair.””
1. Since You Want To Lie About Them Winning The Lottery...
“My partner and I like to play harmless pranks on each other, things like swapping all the photos in photo frames, or playing around with clocks, etc., etc. All mild stuff.
Once, I convinced her she had won the lottery with the old “record-last-week’s-lottery-and-play-it-back-having-bought-the-‘winning’-ticket” prank.
After the initial excitement, and before she tried to contact anyone, I revealed the prank, and she didn’t take it well. In fact, she got quite upset. It took a few hours before we both could have a good laugh about it. Or so I thought.
Anyway, a few years later, I was serving at sea as an officer onboard a warship. We were deployed and had been for several months at this point.
The routine was fairly dull, but the Ship’s Company were keeping themselves entertained for the most part.
The ship’s Chaplain (also known as “the Bish”) had commandeered the internal radio broadcast system and set up a schedule where members of the ship’s company could DJ for a bit or have a discussion, host quizzes, etc., etc. The Bish’s favorite bit was his “messages from home segment” where he would read messages sent to the ship from the families back home.
As you can imagine, the majority would be insipid stuff like, “Hey Smithy, me and the kids miss you so much. Can’t wait for you to get home, xxxxx”. Families would email the message, and the Bish would read it out, exactly as written.
Anyway, on this fateful day, I was on watch in the ops room. For those who don’t know, the operations room (CIC in US parlance) is quiet and busy, and everyone is focused, especially in an operational environment, which is what we were in.
After being in there for a few hours, I needed a leg stretch and a drink, so I let the team know that I was popping out for two minutes and headed into the wardroom to grab a cold can of diet soda and come straight back.
As I opened the door and stepped in, a massive cheer erupted! There were about 10 other officers in the wardroom, all cheering and looking at me.
“Ummm, what’s going on guys?”
“Didn’t you hear the Bish on the ship’s radio?”
“No, I was in the Ops Room on watch, like you lot should be.”
“Go see him, now, NOW!”
“What, why?”
“You have an important message; you’re going to want to hear it!”
So, I left the wardroom, aware that around half a dozen of the other officers were following me, and made my way to the compartment that the Bish did his broadcasts in.
As I walked through the ship, one sailor yelled out, “Nice one, sir!” and another, “How much, how much?!” I was very, very confused.
I stepped into the compartment, and the Bish was mid-flow reading someone’s message. As soon as he finished, he looked at me, and a huge smile breaking across his face.
“Here he is, the man of the moment! What have you got to say, OP?”
“About what, Bish? I have no idea what’s going on?”
“So, you didn’t hear your message? Shall I read it again, listeners?”
I realized that he was still broadcasting throughout the ship; a muffled “YEAH!!!” could be heard.
He did a little fake cough and proceeded to read the message:
“Dear OP, I’ll get straight to the point. We have won a life-changing amount of dough on the lottery.
Please call me as soon as possible! Lots of love, Snugglepuss, the Sausage Monkeys, Blockhead, and Pest-Cat.”
I was utterly confused. The message would’ve been sent to the Bish around a week ago, and my woman had made no mention of it in the daily emails/phone calls I’d had with her. It was also odd that she’d signed off using our silly little family nicknames (Snugglepuss = partner, Sausage Monkeys = kids, Blockhead = dog, Pest-Cat = well, the cat).
This was not normal for her on any level; something was off.
The excitement in the compartment was electric; everyone was slapping me on the back and shaking my hand.
I managed to leave, saying something like, “There’s a phone call I need to make” and retreated to my cabin.
On the way there, I bumped into the XO (second in command), who enthusiastically shook my hand.
“How much, how much? You lucky, lucky jerk!”
“I don’t know; I haven’t talked to her yet.”
“Call her! I need to know if we have to put ‘special measures’ in place.”
A little worried about what that would mean (turns out, the Navy has procedures for sailors who come into a lot of cash unexpectedly in order to protect them; who knew?), I dashed away.
“Ummm, ok. I’ll let you know.”
Finally, in my cabin, I check my watch for the time back home and called my partner.
“Hello?”
“Hey you, apparently we’ve won a life-changing amount of cash…”
A muffled giggle.
“It’s a prank, isn’t it?”
“YES! We won $12! Got you!!!”
“Not really, I knew the message was odd as soon as I heard it.”
More laughter.
“OP, you don’t understand, the prank is just beginning. You’ll see!”
And, at that moment, I understood the genius of what my woman had done. I was due to stay on board this ship for another 2 months. She had just told the entire ship’s company that I was a lottery winner. EVERYONE “knew” that I’d won a “life-changing” amount of cash.
It started reasonably enough. Pretty much everyone wanted to congratulate me, shake my hand, and talk about what I was going to do with the cash. I would try denying that I’d won anything, and then I’d get a, “of course you haven’t,” or in at least one case, getting outright hostile with me for “trying to lie.”
After a couple of days of congratulations came the beggars.
From slips of paper under my cabin door to people on board I barely knew taking me to one side, telling me their life story, and asking to either borrow or take cash from me. Any attempts to convince them I hadn’t won a lot of cash were met with either, “I understand; I wouldn’t hand out cash either” or were just plain nasty.
As much as I tried to tell everyone I hadn’t won the lottery, it took a lot to convince some people. Even two months later, in my last week on board, I was still being asked by some about what I was going to do with the cash and whether it was enough to leave the Navy and retire.
Even now, years later, I receive the odd text from someone who heard about my “win” asking for cash.”
