People Narrate Their Splendid Revenge Stories
20. Shady Landlord Loses Almost Everything He Had
“My ex-husband and I have always gotten along very well and we have, (at the time of this story 7 years old), a daughter. We have always lived near each other for convenience sake and have on occasion even lived in the same house after divorce.
So I was thrilled when the people across the street from him sold their place and apparently it was going to be for rent! I had known the folks across the street, nice people, and had even been in the house a time or two, so when I showed up with my other half to look the place over, I kinda knew what we would be getting.
The landlord was working on the house when we pulled up, (we had gone out to eat before this and so I know he was unaware he was talking to someone who knew the people who had lived there and been in the house.) His big ole dually was in the drive with his company name stenciled on it.
He meets us in the garage and immediately starts lying. He told me this was his family home and he was fixing it up, but there were a lot of memories there and his kids had grown up in that house. I realized he was ‘adding value.’ I kept my mouth shut because it was right across the street from my ex-husband and it was literally the bus stop for the school for my daughter.
He continued to lie and I kinda tuned him out. The place was a little worse for wear, dirty, gross carpet, chipped paint. I made a comment on a broken light switch and he told me he was having a cleaning crew come through and clean up the place and having everything painted and the carpet redone.
The price was a little high but once again I really wanted it and it wasn’t nightmare high, just 200 over what I was expecting. I had a small Australian shepherd, so first month’s rent, last month’s rent, and pet deposit. 1250 for each one. Ouch.
So about two weeks later it was move-in day.
I should have known something was up when the key was left in a combo box on the door. We had paid through a service so he had the deposit, and we had the key… And a mess. He had done literally nothing except replace a set of rotted outdoor steps that he probably had to for liability purposes.
We dragged out the digital camera and started taking pictures. It was a 3bdrm 2bath with a partially underground room. We took over 1100 pictures.
Here are some highlights.
- Ketchup smeared on the kitchen walls and floor, nothing in there had been cleaned. The fridge was awful
- Had what smelled like hair gel rubbed into it in the dining room and outside the front bathroom door
- The fireplace literally had soot covering all of it and up to the ceiling. (The reason for all the non-working lights became apparent at the point, he kept it dim for showings.)
- Garage full of trash
- The partial underground room which we hadn’t seen because that’s where he had a big saw set up and wasn’t really a selling point for us? Mold. All the mold.
So I called him up and basically said, ‘what in the world?’ And he replied that the deposit and keys had already exchanged hands and if I had a problem I needed to put in a maintenance request. He said, ‘I don’t remember it being that bad, sounds like you made a mess moving in.’ Ok, so now I knew exactly how trashy of a person I am dealing with.
Put in a maintenance request about the mold. Went out and bought ALL the bleach, other cleaning supplies, and a carpet cleaner. I am a military brat who lived in base housing. I know how to clean. And we got to work.
It took two days of 4 adults, my ex and a friend came over to help, to get the place passable.
We even changed out the blinds. (They were broken and dangerous.) During this, the landlord comes over to look at the mold, and I KID YOU NOT, grabs a roll of my paper towels and MY BLEACH SPRAY, and starts wiping the mold off the walls.
He had just walked into the garage, grabbed some cleaning stuff I had down in the garage and I found him about halfway through his ‘cleaning’ job. That’s all he did.
Fast forward 3 months. Time for an inspection! Ok, he tells me he will be there tomorrow at 8 am.
He shows up at 6:30 pm. Demands to be let in. I let him in and he starts taking pictures of dishes in the sink, dinner was still on the table, and lectures me about cleaning up when I cook. So in front of him, I pulled out my digital camera and took one of him taking a pic of dishes for dinner with dinner still on the table and a timestamp.
Jerk.
He wanted to go through drawers in my bedroom. I laughed at him. Didn’t hear from him again till move-out time. (If you thought I was staying there longer than a year then you are crazier than I was when I rented that place.)
He sent me a move-out checklist. Professional steam cleaning and white-glove clean of the entire house. New pine straw for landscaping. All rooms need to be repainted ‘wheat.’ (When we moved in the bathroom was literally TURQUOISE.)
So we got to work. Steam cleaned, white-glove clean, etc. Then took another 1000 pics.
He walks through and is annoyed. He even ran a white rag on the top of the ceiling fan. He snatched the keys out of my hand and told me to expect to hear from him in 10 days about the deposit. Hmmm. That doesn’t sound good.
2 weeks later I get a bill. For 3750.
For more professional steam cleaning.
HVAC cleanout.
Apparently, we didn’t use the RIGHT brand of ‘wheat’ (OH YES WE DID!).
Two things I haven’t disclosed. I have a bad habit of recording bad people, and my mom is a landlord in the next state.
(She is the good kind who never was able to make an income at it. If people told her they couldn’t afford to pay her because they needed the funds to feed their children, well my mom usually PAID them… So glad she got out.) But my mom was very familiar with the laws and had looked a few things up about my landlord.
So I grabbed my little recorder and called him. He owns a real estate business, his side is rental stuff, and his wife and grown daughters bought and sold houses.
His oldest daughter picks up and transfers me to him. It gets ugly fast and he tells me that I must have let my Australian Shepherd pee in the vent grates and that the way I take care of my daughter would be very interesting to CPS.
He can help me work out a payment plan but pretty soon we would be getting into collections territory. At one point he actually says that ‘all tenants are liars.’ Nice. About 20 mins of being threatened.
I call my mom back. To be honest, I am pretty shaken up.
CPS? For what? So my mom tells me to pretend like I am playing along and ask for an itemized receipt. Tell him your mom is going to cover it and tell him your mom needs it before turning over the funds. I had one 10 mins after I asked.
On my end.
The professional steam cleaner was a friend of mine who had a business and gave me a discount.
HVAC was a scam. The company he listed belonged to his brother-in-law, was defunct, and out of another state. Since I had before/after/AND HIS NEW LISTING pictures I knew he hadn’t hired anyone to do HVAC cleaning.
The vents were painted to the wall… In all the pics.
We saved our paint receipts and I actually had pics of our painting. You can see the right brand and color clear as day.
I called his business and told his daughter that I would be taking him to court.
She obviously was unaware of what a jerk her father was because when I told her, ‘no one threatens my little girl’ she didn’t know what I was talking about. So I put her on speakerphone and played a recording of her dad threatening to have CPS come visit if I didn’t pay up and she made it most of the way through before asking me to turn it off.
And then she put me on hold to get her mom, his wife. She tried to ‘reason’ with me, and I backed up the tape to the part where he talks about what happens to kids in the foster system and played it. She told me they would get back to me.
They actually did! The mom and eldest called me on speakerphone and apologized! They told me how the business was divided and how they normally don’t deal with rental stuff. I told them it was fine, but I was still taking him to court.
Time for court.
We ended up in arbitration. I showed up with two laptops, for before and after, proof of his fake HVAC stuff, a stack of literal receipts, him committing a crime by threatening to falsely call CPS, and a pretty good working knowledge of renter law in that state.
At one point the arbitrator asked me if I was a paralegal. Ha!
He had a picture of dirty dishes and stories about how I lived like a pig. I pulled up the pic of the same sink of dishes, with dinner in the foreground, time and date stamped. The arbitrator actually asked, ‘did you expect her to do the dishes before she ate her dinner?’
Even the woman taking notes for the arbitrator was grossed out when I showed them the ketchup and underground room mold pics.
Did you know you can get 3x what you ask for in a rental dispute, depending on your state? Yeah, you can. I did.
The arbitrator used the word ‘appalling’ when describing the landlord’s behavior.
When I went out in the hallway afterward there was a young couple there asking the clerk if the landlord was available yet. Apparently, they were waiting for their turn at arbitration. I asked them if their case was HVAC-related, sure enough, it was.
I pulled out all the paperwork I had about it and handed it to them with my number. Actually got several calls from his other tenants. He had been running that scam a while and these kids I had handed the paper to had looked up every house on the landlord’s website and went door to door warning them.
Smart! I hadn’t thought of that.
Meanwhile… My mother was filing a complaint with everyone she could think of because he had his business listed as a suite… which turned out to be a P.O. Box. Huge no-no. Your business must be a location that can be served by the courts.
A year later I saw a truck with his logo drive past. But it wasn’t the dually, it was an older F150. So I looked him up in the county clerk’s records.
Well first, it seems he got divorced. And cleaned out. The house, big truck, everything went to her.
Then she sued him for the business. He got to keep the name, and she took everything else. I looked up the realty website using her maiden name to search, she and the eldest daughter were using her maiden name and had a whole new web page and set up.
Also, my mom got notice that her complaint was being addressed and he had his license suspended and a huge fine to get reinstated. My mom kept an eye on the records for home deeds in the area and all but two of his properties were sold at auction.
So, let’s sum up. He had to pay me 3 times what I asked for. Lost his big illegal business. Lost his wife. Lost his house(s.) Lost his truck. Lost his license for a while.
No regrets.”
19. You'll Never Know Who Blew Up The Toilet
“My educational advisor used to be the model student, getting along with all the teachers and getting the best grades in her classroom, but there was that one teacher she could not get along with.
It was her chemistry teacher and she described her as ‘All teachers have that breaking point where they just start screaming, but hers was incredibly easy to find.’
Until the point of the start of the story, she was just an unliked teacher and someone my advisor just dealt with.
But one day, she reached her breaking point when her brother told her this teacher (which I’m gonna be calling her Rude Teacher) was calling him stupid and screaming at him for not knowing an answer she hadn’t even explained properly yet.
That was when she got involved in a plan: the famous toilet bomb.
Because of the shared gender with the teacher, she knew where and when Rude Teacher would use the restroom (she had a strange routine with the exact time and stall she used to use) and because she was a model student, she could come and go without being noticed since no one would assume she was up to no good.
The thing is: the whole class was in on it.
Before she got involved with the plan though, there was a single condition: no one would rat or blame someone else. No one was supposed to talk anything. She had a plan.
And to the toilet, the bomb went.
My advisor went to the stall, installed the toilet bomb, and went back to class at the exact time Rude Teacher had her restroom break. When she came back from doing the deed, she sits down at her desk and hears the explosion, followed by Rude Teacher screaming b****y murder and coming back to class to scream at them.
The only classroom that was on break for teacher transition was my advisor’s class, so Rude Teacher beelined straight to them and started demanding to know who did this. Of course, radio silence. She jumped in anger like a toddler, made all threats she could legally do, and made the biggest tantrum you could imagine while being absolutely soaked in toilet water.
Radio. Silence.
The next logical step for Rude Teacher was to call the principal, that arrived at class with a box filled with pieces of paper. She explained that everyone was to write the name of someone involved in the toilet bomb and put it there to be taken and read by her by the end of class.
That was when my advisor stepped in. The second the principal was out of the class, she told everyone to just write ‘It was me’ in capital letters and put the paperback in the box. Which everyone did.
When the principal came back and started looking at the papers (in front of the class) she slowly turned from a normal color to a deep, fiery red and started throwing her tantrum (guess they found out her breaking point) and did the only thing she could do at that point:
She suspended the whole class for 3 days.
In the end, my advisor did everything: blew up the toilet, led the class to not snitch on anyone, and earned 3 days at home without no one suspecting anything.”
18. Torture A Student? Lose Your Career
“I work in a healthcare facility with different disciplines and we have the main clinicians and assistants as well that do the treatment. For the longest time before 2020, clinicians would take students from schools because they need to have some hands-on experience before they graduate and get to take their state exams.
So I am the supervisor of the health clinic and am in charge of all clinicians, even though they’re fairly independent they have to report to me, and I in turn report for the whole clinic.
This starts with Dory. She has a lot of friends in one of the prominent universities here.
She’s very well connected with them, she graduated from there. She’s involved with their activities and just active in the school in general. I have known Dory for years and have worked with her before, but she was never directly under my management because her home clinic was at another location, so she would just help out.
I would hear things about her. The way she treated the assistants that worked under her, rudeness towards other clinicians, and some sketchy stuff about basic fraud of billing for services not rendered. This is a big NO in healthcare but it happens more than you think.
Anyway, I had no proof of this and all the patients at my clinic had not voiced any complaints.
Anyway…..Dory had started taking students in and she was moved to my clinic. When she came there she was still helping at another clinic not too far away.
Dory accepted a student from her university to follow her and learn from her and slowly integrate into clinical treatment. This is where Hannah enters into the picture. She’s a very shy girl, did everything you asked of her, but because she was shy and also being a new student she’s unsure if the treatment she is administering is the appropriate one.
That’s why you have people like Dory to be next to you and counsel and guide you.
After the first few weeks, I started noticing Hannah would be in the clinic and would be doing treatments without Dory being around for a few hours.
This isn’t allowed because the instructor should be around at all times to supervise their students. After a few times of noticing this, I brought Dory and Hannah into my office and said this cannot happen and is not allowed. If it happens again I would have to report it and this was not something I wanted to do.
If I did report it the student would lose their clinical placement and would have to wait 6 months until the next placement which pushes back the graduating date.
A few weeks go by and things had been fairly normal. The student would be in the clinic sooner but would not be performing the treatment.
She would however shadow other clinicians. But Dory was still coming in later than usual. One day as I’m walking by Hannah I see that she’s on the billing menu. In order to be on that screen, you would have to be clocked in otherwise the system won’t allow you to do it.
I call her to my office again and I sternly tell her that I had specifically said she couldn’t treat patients and she doesn’t have a ‘clock in’ username and password. Hannah proceeded to tell me that Dory had told her to clock in for her and start billing patients before services were rendered. Continues to state, this had been going on for the whole time she had been a student.
(Now I don’t see the billing until the next day but I don’t have a clock of when the billing was submitted). I tell Hannah that this was strictly not allowed but I need more information before I make a decision. I call Casey and the other clinicians into my office and she proceeds to tell me that Hannah goes home crying and bawling every single night due to Dory threatening to ‘fail’ her as a student if she didn’t do all these things for her.
Dory had used her leverage in her school to strong-arm Hannah into doing all her work while she wasn’t even there. I asked Hannah if this was true and she said yes it was. Hannah then goes on to tell me that after the first meeting with me on what they shouldn’t be doing, Dory brought Hannah to the side and told her, ‘he’s cool he knows what’s really going on but he has to say that as a manager so keep doing it.’
At this point, I ask the student if any of her evaluations or letters of progress had been submitted to her school so they know she has been making progress. Hannah says that Dory has never submitted the necessary paperwork to the school and has gotten away with it because of her connections to the school.
So if I fired Dory, she would in turn take revenge on the student and fail at her clinical. She would be 6 months to a year from being placed into another clinic meaning she would be either very late or just fail and not be able to graduate.
I called my regional manager Katie and reported everything to her, told her my fear for the student and the constant trauma she was going through every day, crying, being threatened, and retaliated against.
Katie was also fearful of this but also worried about the liability this put on the company, also how long it had been going on.
So she didn’t have an answer on how to handle the situation without harming the student.
So here was my revenge, I started watching everything Dory did, treatments, time and complaints, etc… One weekend Dory had to work without her student on a Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.
When I come in on Monday I notice a patient has been to the hospital since Friday but she had still been billed for services. I check the clinician… it was Dory. How was she able to treat a person that wasn’t even in the clinic and also is able to bill her… so I had my reasons to fire her.
I had the evidence I needed but I still wanted a bit more. I texted Dory and asked if she had seen said patient, she reported yes she had. But also asked if she had billed less than what she should have because she would be able to bill more if I wanted. I told her that wasn’t necessary and there was no way to bill more due to the patient being in the hospital the whole weekend she had billed. She knew from that moment what was going to happen.
The next day OP and Katie waited for Dory and she was fired on the spot, just for the fraud. The student thing never came up in conversation and she had no idea we had known for a while.
I had another clinician write up a whole letter on what the student was doing and that she was a good clinician and has completed the necessary work to be able to graduate.
Dory was unable to get any more work after that because the incident had been reported to the government and had that on her license wherever she went. Her new employers would look at the license and not want to hire someone with that on their record.
Last I heard she was working at an Amazon warehouse as a manager. From a doctorate to warehouse manager, after many years I’m sure of fraud and abuse…
The best part is that the student has graduated, gotten her degree, and is working in the field, she’s a great clinician, has done great work in her field, and I still keep in contact with her.
She is very thankful for being pulled out of that situation.”
17. Lock Me Out Of My Own System? I Have Three Ways To Get My Revenge
“I’ve worked as an independent contractor in the IT field for over 20 years, doing all manner of things from creating simple HTML sites to managing a big hotel’s complete IT infrastructure.
One of the many clients I had back in the day I was coding big-ish custom websites for was a rental company. Now I had heard a lot of warnings about not working with this guy that owned it. He had a reputation that he was sharp as a tack, backstabbing, and conniving.
He was a lawyer after all.
So, I went into the partnership with that in mind.
He wanted a new website for his renting gig, where people would list their home for rent, renters would sign up and pay a subscription to the site and he would get the whole lot.
Nothing out of the ordinary there.
So we make a pretty good deal on paper, we sign it and I get started on the project.
Coding everything in PHP goes well, but he demands suddenly that I show him progress only a week into the progress.
He wants to see the website front now. This is just the tip of the iceberg. I tried explaining to him that the front-end work isn’t scheduled to start until after 6 weeks of backend programming and that I only had pure code to show right now, the contract we signed clearly states this.
He then gets on his high horse and demands that I put everything on hold to do the frontend first, design, and then program. I, being really young at the time and fairly naive, agree to this without asking for it to be added to the contract as an addendum and start working on the design now.
Now, the contract stated that I was given free rein of the design decisions as long as I maintained the same color scheme and used the same logo on the site.
So I make a fast draft in Fireworks (this was back when it was a Macromedia product, before the Adobe acquisition) and within two days I show him.
He’s not impressed and demands a different direction and sets up a list of demands. I, as always, aim to please the customer and do just what he wants. I design a new layout, with his list of demands but he doesn‘t like that either.
That’s how the next 3 months go. A never-ending circle where he is never happy with anything.
Now close to 4 months into the project, he demands to see a working showcase of the backend, I point out that he changed the order in how the project was being done and had demanded that I do the frontend design first instead of the backend as stated in the contract, which he now turns on me and says: ‘Yes, the contract we both signed says you will have a working backend to show me at the end of the month!
If you don’t honor that I will have to take my business elsewhere and seek compensation for your lack of professionalism!’
Ok, I now have 12 days to do a backend for the site. So I get a friend to help me and we work tirelessly through the weekend and I have a good base to work from in 9 days.
Mind you, at this point, he has only paid the security on the contract (about 5% of the total price) and has shielded himself from paying by hiding behind: ‘Well if you can’t honor the contract, why should I? Finish XX work and then I’ll pay as per the contract!’
Remembering now, all the warnings I had heard about this guy, I decide to add a special function to the code just to be safe, more on that later.
So, now it’s the end of the month, we have a frontend design he is OK with, a backend that has been finished to about 85% of what is required according to the contract and I still have 1 month left to finish everything else.
Time for show and tell. Since I was working on this development I was running it on my dev server and showed him this in a browser on his computer. I mentioned to him that since I only had 512Kbit/s upstream from the server it might lag a little, but it wouldn’t when it would be put on the productional server he has his website on at his hosting company.
He says that’s OK and the demonstration goes on.
As I’m showing him the site, both frontend, and backend, I can see he’s immensely happy with it (although he would never say so out loud). He is trying to hide his smile that pops up regularly and his eyes gleam with all the added ways he can now start earning from.
Anyway, he now says that it’s way too slow, this is wrong, that is wrong.. blah blah blah.
Client: ‘I want you to put it up on my prod server and see how the speed is!’
Me: ‘OK, no problem, I can make that happen.
Please pay 50% of the contract and I’ll get right on it.’
OK, I wait a few days and then I get an email from him where he includes a forwarded message from the bank detailing a transaction from him to me to the amount of the 50% I asked for.
So I push the system to his prod server so he can take a look at it (under beta.his-domain.tld), I then send him an email stating that he can try the system with the supplied credentials.
What he doesn’t know is that I knew he had been fishing around for another programmer to do this project, to ‘pick up from a lazy deadbeat who couldn‘t do anything right.’ So I knew he would most likely try to screw me.
What I also suspected was that the email he sent me with the transaction proof was fake, which it ended up being.
Remember that small function I mentioned? Well, what it did was if user X (his user) tries to remove user Y (my admin) from the system without one setting being changed in the config first, the system will first delete and purge the database and then remove all the documents in the webroot.
Well, not 5 minutes after he reads the email from me, he does just that. He tries to delete my admin user from the system to lock me out.
Guess who has nothing of the project left? He does!
Since it is considered forgery to spoof an email, especially from a bank, I sent the information to the authorities and he goes under investigation by both the police and the bank lawyers.
I sold the system to a competitor of his for a better price than originally contracted to him and last I knew he was now blacklisted from owning a company as well as he lost his right to work as a lawyer.
I only got that 5% he paid at the beginning and for working for just over 5 months on this project that is hardly anything.
But the knowledge of his demise will keep my heart warm for the rest of my life.”
16. Lie To Me During Our Marriage? It Won't End Well For You
“I (27M) grew up like most guys under the assumption that the one is out there. That if you play your cards right your soulmate will magically appear and you’ll ride off in the sunset. When I was 19 I met a woman. Let’s call her Bri.
I met Bri through mutual friends while I was in the army. Bri was cute, quirky, seemed like an overall good girl. Her friend, let’s call her Sam, thought it would be a great idea to get us together as a couple. Not sure what her reasons were but I was into her and she was into me.
Bri was up for a few days visiting Sam and I had just gotten back from leave in my home state so the meetup was inevitable. We all had lunch. Myself, Bri, Sam, and Sam’s husband let’s call him Jim. This meetup was nothing spectacular but after Bri had flown home she messaged me on social media and we hit it off.
After roughly 3 weeks of talking to Bri, she hit me with a very strange question. ‘If I was pregnant what would you do?’ Now before I get to my answer let’s do the math here. She was in her party years and slept around frequently.
(I found that out way later in the relationship) She had a significant other a month before meeting me. I was adopted so accepting a kid as my own seemed like a no-brainer. My answer was what seemed like the ‘right thing’. ‘I will love that child as if it were my own’.
Well turns out she was showing a lot of signs of pregnancy. A week later she took the test and was positive. I stood by my word. I’ll take care of this kid. There was a 3-month gap between this revelation and when she decided to fly out to me.
During this gap, she was very flaky trying to see if she could get who she thought was the dad to commit and help her take care of the kid. He never budged. She chose me instead. Yes, I understand now why staying with her was a bad idea.
I was dumb, in love, and I believed she was the one and that she’d come around eventually. I married her so that the army would cover the birth and the rest should have been history. But we all know it wasn’t.
Year two.
Two years in I noticed something a bit strange. Some guy, we’ll call him Ron, was liking every post she put out and commenting on every photo that had the daughter in it. Hmmm, this seems odd. At this point in our marriage, I had gotten out of the military and was working job insecurity.
One night while working my lizard brain connected the dots and the gut feeling followed. Now I’m not one to act on just suspicion, I need proof. Given that I was working a nightclub that night I would get off at 4 in the morning.
She’ll be asleep. She leaves her laptop on the living room couch downstairs every night before bed. The plan is coming together. I get home, head to the couch… the laptop is there. I open it and take two guesses at the password. It’s the birth year of our daughter.
I go to her social media account. I look in messages. There it is. 6 months of conversation with a guy named Ron. Some of the conversations are flirty. Some are banter about how useless and less of a man I am. The worst part though was the revelation that this guy is who she feels is the biological father and she is trying to get him involved. I scroll and scroll until I can’t stomach it anymore.
I grab the laptop, take it upstairs, and set it on her with the screen shining in her face. As she slowly wakes up I say ‘we’re talking about this in the morning’ and walk back downstairs. She normally wakes up at 7 but didn’t come down until 9.
Probably hoping I would be asleep on the couch. She begins by saying it was only friendly talk and not technically having an affair. I knew it was a lie and told her that if I see this again I’m gone.
Now I said ‘if’ but I knew better.
It would be ‘when’. This is when I set my plan in motion. I dropped out of college to get a job in my field and made sure anything that was opened up under credit was under her name. I began stating that back, where I’m from, has a better economy and that we’d be better off there.
It took two years of convincing but it worked. Nothing was under my name and we were set to go to my hometown in 6 months. We got there in May and I sent her home to visit next month. I knew what she would do and who she would do it with.
There was a guy we met through Sam the day before we left and I knew immediately that she was interested in him. 3 weeks after going to visit she started acting strange again. Prioritizing other things over me, putting things off, and becoming distant. Now I spent two years setting the dominoes up, I just let her knock them over.
I made sure I was jobless, had nothing to my name, and was home where I could fall back on family. I pressured her into admitting that she betrayed me and the dominoes tumbled. I cut all funds that were being sent to the account, drained the account to file for divorce.
I had nothing so she couldn’t take half. I had no job so what lifestyle did we have that would require giving her alimony? Everything was in her name so even though I had financial responsibility for some of those bills the divorce lasted long enough to destroy her credit.
I gave her everything and sacrificed much to raise her child but in the end, she lost the most.
I am now extremely successful and valued in my career. I’m not interested in marriage but I have no shortage of women in my life.
Life is good. I still have contact with the daughter and Bri often flirts with me trying to get me back. I’m the only dad the kid has known and have no intentions of becoming an ex-dad. Even though getting back with her is emotionally tempting to be with the kid more I know better and I have better options.
The kid is supported above and beyond despite no legal requirement to do more than just the minimum. Clothes, shoes, bed, games, toys, hobbies. I pay for it all. The kid is very much involved in my life and she is provided for. I drop everything to talk to her and I get involved in what she loves.
I don’t get to see her much but there’s very little that she longs for except living with me. The kid is mine regardless of genetics. I made that investment in her life from the start and I’m sticking to it. I worked very very hard to keep her isolated from this revenge.
She is happy and loves her daddy very much. I don’t talk about her mom to her and she has a healthy relationship with both of us. Even though she wishes mommy and daddy were together she is understanding that it’s not going to happen and I’m working very hard to make sure that the impact of that is softened.”
15. I Ask Customers To Report Her
“I went to school with this girl and we used to be friends when we were younger but as we got older things got different.
I never bothered with her but she always made it a point to make sure that everyone knew how poor I was. We both came from single mothers but her father paid child support so I knew that’s how she got all her clothes and makeup.
I admit I was a bit jealous but then I realized she looked down on everyone for everything.
I forgot about her as I got older because I moved away but I moved back to my hometown a few years later and graduated with my GED. I didn’t see her until a few years later when we both ended up working at the same grocery store.
I always made it a point to be nice to her because I knew she had 4 kids to support and her man didn’t do anything. I guess it finally got to me how she was acting, she always commented on the customer’s clothes or social situation.
I really got annoyed when she commented on an old man’s grocery situation (he was on a fixed income and only bought the necessities). I ignored her and left my till to bring his groceries outside apologizing for her attitude towards him. He was nice about it but he had tears in his eyes.
After that, I reported her to the managers and pretty much made her life miserable. I always one-upped her on customer service and encouraged the customers to report her for the attitude. She didn’t last long and to be honest, I don’t feel bad about it.
I met her just last month and she was trying to be nice to me but I told her quite nicely to stuff it because she’s a horrible person. I haven’t seen her since but it still irks me how a person who has nothing can literally be a trashy sandwich still.
I guess it bothers me because soon after she did that to the old man he passed away from a heart attack.”
14. I Won't Take The Blame, You Will
“I was working for a then cable tv company.
The call center I was working at had been filled with guys poached from dialup support companies countrywide to support this new superfast broadband that was being trialed in-country for the 1st time. (500k connections… woohoo). I say this because that meant our call center at the time was full of some of the best support engineers anywhere in the country.
Some of the most intelligent people I have ever known.
Anyway, after about a year there, 4 of us we asked to look into complaints sent to the Managing Director (Hereafter known as Big Boss) about the service. Mostly, these were the original-brand Karens of the day, but occasionally, the customer complaining was someone rather important and they needed the special touch so to speak.
Turns out the 4 of us has quite different skills but complimented each other perfectly and before long, we were firm friends with the Big Boss’s personal assistant at head office and had very good reputations to boot after some devilishly difficult issues (oh yeah, this is before Google, so being good meant you knew your thing, not just how to look it up.) It was a great place to work.
Turnover was practically zero (the fact all our staff was experienced before getting to us meant we knew what we were getting into).
Then came the new director. Hereafter referred to as A. A had come from another call center in the company. A customer services call center.
He was also completely inept technically. Seriously, this guy once told me that directors don’t use excel and only word so I needed to copy all the spreadsheets into word so he could modify the content and pass off his nonsense figures showing all was well.
He didn’t understand how excel worked as it transpired.
Anyway, all was not well. In the short time he’d been there, he had alienated most of the best staff. He tried to turn the staff into script monkeys as he wanted every case fixed in x minutes.
We were rebuilding TCP/IP stacks, hacking registries, we even talked a few people through win98 rebuilds. You ever tried to talk your gran through changing a ring tone over the phone? Now try imagining getting gran to rebuild windows after maca-things and Symantec competed to see which could screw up her machine faster.
Now try doing it in 10 mins, or, get hauled into A’s office to be screamed at for ‘messing up his figures’. Morale was utterly obliterated and we started losing good people.
Head office knew something was wrong so sent word down the line the Big Boss was coming for a meet and greet.
That line went through A, so of course, on that day, some of the more vocal amongst us were told off. Those selected to meet the Big Boss were, I think the nice word is sycophants or people who were instructed what to say and followed out of fear.
The upshot, Big Boss went away thinking all was well, and there must be some other reason for the issues on site. My breakpoint came when my team was given an impossible task. By this point, I’d already handed in my 30 days. (Was about to become a dad so needed to get a proper career going).
He wanted a flow diagram of every possible fault we were dealing with and its solution. And he wanted it all on a single piece of A3 paper. We objected, he demanded, we failed. We got reamed. Our manager got reamed, and let me tell you, she defended the life out of us.
We tried in vain to explain the nature of the calls, to explain that the reason we paid these very clever people to do this job was that they were essentially playing tech support to a nation of people who had turned a computer on for the 1st time ever today, did something they didn’t know was stupid and broke their machine.
That means their internet didn’t work, hence… our problem.
His response, at a volume comparable with a tornado jet taking off at full burner: ‘I don’t care. Let me get this through your stupid heads. You are nothing and I am a director and when I tell you to do something, you do it or I will fire every single one of you.
I can replace any one of you anytime I want because you are nothing but cattle, now get out of my office.’
I went home livid. My significant other at the time (pregnant with our 1st) worked in the same office so while I was getting out, she would have to continually deal with A.
Knowing how he intended to treat my friends and family, I needed to do something. I didn’t have a clue what I could do. Friday, I go into work, ostensibly to say my goodbyes and do an exit interview, paperwork, and such. One of those goodbyes was a phone call to Big Boss’s PA.
Me saying goodbye was a shock because I’d been expressly forbidden to tell them over the previous month by… you guessed it, A. She wanted to know why I was leaving. I told her. She asked me if I minded her telling Big Boss what I had said.
I’ll be honest, I didn’t seriously believe anything would come of it, but, what the heck I thought. ‘Sure.’ ‘I’ll get back to you soon,’ and she’s gone.
20 mins later, she calls me and says Big Boss wants to talk to me so can he have my personal mobile number.
I give it, and sure enough, minutes later the big man himself calls. The next 30 mins are spent detailing why I was leaving. Why we had lost nearly 100 people already and had 18 resignations that week alone. ‘Why didn’t I hear about this when I was there the other week?’ So I related the little personnel shuffle and the threats.
This was my moment and I tell you, I carpe’d the life out of that diem…
Me: ‘Look Big Boss, I get all you have is my word and I could be just some disgruntled jerk but my friends and family are going to have to work here after I’ve gone.
And by family I mean my pregnant significant other so I have to do something. If you want to find out the truth, here is what you do…
- Turn up on site unannounced for a day.
- Send out your email to the site as soon as you arrive giving no time for A and his cronies to get to anyone.
Tell them to come to you if they have any concerns.
- Here is a list of people that should corroborate much of what I’ve said, the rest, it’s up to them if they want to do something. Then decide if I’m a jerk.’
After a bit more chatting, the call ended and I went back to say goodbye to everyone. I told a few people including my manager what I’d done, and told them if Big Boss did turn up, to get in there and tell him what’s going on.
Then I bid them all farewell and said I would see them all at the mass farewell party at the end of the month.
I’m at my new job the Tuesday after and I get a text. ‘Holy cow, Big Boss’s here unannounced!!!’ More texts from other ex-colleagues saying pretty much the same thing.
From what I gathered afterward, Big Boss did exactly what I suggested, and it played out pretty much as I thought it might. There was a queue. A long one. That night, A was summoned to Big Boss’s impromptu office and after that meeting, he went home.
He was never seen again. I did get a call from Big Boss. He can’t discuss details but, I’ll be very pleased to know I’m not a jerk. The farewell party was pretty cool too. I think. On entry, I was told I wouldn’t be paying for a single drink that night..
from there my memory goes from fuzzy to total blank.
The hangover the next 2 days was brutal but totally worth it.”
13. Make Fun Of Disabled Kids? Get Fired
“In middle school, (and even into high school) there was a jerk who picked on this disabled girl named Emily.
This jerk tormented everyone he felt he could pick on and no one liked him because of this, so most of us just tuned him out. But I knew that this girl, Emily, who was paralyzed and in a motorized wheelchair, really was hurt by Mr. Jerk.
A couple of people and I tried standing up for her, but he kept bullying her, and she moved schools freshman year because of him.
I felt bad, but eventually, I forgot about it and moved on.
Now, 7 years out of high school, I work as a sound engineer.
I run and design live sound systems freelance, but my constant source of employment comes from one venue. There, I run sound for anything from plays and musicals, to live concerts.
About twice a month, we have a local kids with disabilities group come and watch a matinee performance of a play or musical, and afterward, they meet the actors and stuff.
Well, about six months ago, I was anxiously pacing in the lobby waiting for my boss to come in because we had had something major break in our smaller theater.
It just so happened that in the larger theater, the disabled kids’ group was watching a performance of the little mermaid, and one of the staff members from the group was Mr. Jerk.
The irony.
I was shocked but recognized him immediately. He had put on weight and was covered in tattoos. I was shocked to see him working with these kids, given his history. I went up and talked to him, and he recognized me, probably because I don’t think I’ve changed since high school appearance-wise (sighs).
Anyway, I ask about what he does, after he asked about my profession. Needless to say, he hadn’t changed at all.
‘Man, I hate these kids, but I can’t find anything else to do.’ He said.
Anyway, I ended the conversation and immediately went back to my booth to work on the little mermaid show.
After the show, I wasted no time calling the person in charge of the disabilities group and telling them about Mr. Jerk’s history, and what he had said to me earlier in the day.
Mr. Jerk was fired. I don’t care if he couldn’t find other work, he deserved it, and those kids don’t do anything to have him care for them.
My significant other’s younger sister is autistic, and she’s great.
Mr. Jerk got what was coming to him. That was for Emily.”
12. I Don't Associate Myself With People Like You
“I grew up in a small town where the people you went to kindergarten with were the same people you graduated high school with.
If you were ‘in’ it was great, if you did something embarrassing you could never live it down. I was friends with basically everyone except one group of girls that really didn’t like me because they were just horrible human beings and I called them on it.
They used to make fun of one kid because his mom passed away of cancer, absolutely tormented another girl when she was assaulted and reported it, and of course the usual bullying of people who were fat or had acne…yeah, you get the picture.
So fast forward to college – all of the girls were accepted to one school (well-known for its parties, not academics) except for one girl I’ll call Kay. I stayed more local for my general ed because I had a free ride at the Junior College (one of the best in the nation) and wanted to save funds.
I ended up with one class with her and she was obviously trying to impress this guy who wouldn’t give her the time of day. I’m hanging out in the library with said guy and about 12 other people and Kay comes running up and says, ‘OMG!
Hey girl!’ (looks at guy) ‘Omg, OP and I went to school together our whole lives, we’re like best friends.’
I raised my eyebrows and said, ‘We’re not friends. We haven’t spoken since you told the exchange student to wash her dirty skin in the gym and I told you to go away.’
Honestly, if we were assigned to work together or I saw her in public I would have been civil, but I wasn’t about to play along and pretend like we were ever friends. I don’t associate with trash like that.”
11. You Want To Speak To The Manager? Look No Further
“This girl at college tried to get me kicked out for bullying her (my college was attached to the secondary school (UK) so we’d been at school together for 7 years) though I’d actively been staying out of her way as I knew she didn’t like me.
Fast forward a few months and I walk into our A-Level results day with an acceptance letter from my first choice university in my pocket, which this jerk had spent the last year telling me I was too stupid to get into. She missed both her first and second choices and sat crying on the phone trying to find a university to take her.
Four years later I have my degree and I moved back to a town near where my family lives to work as a manager in a busy and successful restaurant. She comes in with a work party and sneers when she sees me waiting tables… Her face when they asked me for the manager to complain about me (for no reason I might add) was priceless.
‘That would be me, how can I help?’
Turns out she works as a coffee slave in a cafe in the local (ugly) shopping center, and the last time I walked past I saw she’d stolen some of my business ideas and passed them off under her name.
She still comes to the restaurant occasionally but I let my second in command deal with her table as I can’t promise to be impartial, I even make sure I go nowhere near their food or drinks so there’s no room for her to complain.
It’s a small victory sure, but it makes me feel a bit vindicated!”
10. Some People Change, Some People Don't
“Growing up I was very athletic, but was one of only 3 kids on most of the sports teams in my town that was also in honors/advanced classes. Up until my sophomore year in high school, I was just a shade over 5 feet tall.
Middle school and freshman year of high school sports were misery for me because I was little. I loved to play and did more than hold my own, but was picked on relentlessly since I was a nerd who spent just as much time on schoolwork.
I got shoved facedown in the mud, thrown against lockers, verbally abused day in and day out, you name it. It didn’t help that I was a little streetwise who didn’t take their stunts, and my quick retorts and insults just resulted in more beatings where I couldn’t defend myself physically.
There were 2 major culprits behind my bullying, we can call them Tom and Jerry for the sake of anonymity. Tom and Jerry were best friends, both much larger than me at the time, and Jerry was the bigger jerk of the bunch on a daily basis.
It was lacrosse season my freshman year of high school and I was always a standout player in this sport despite my stature. During an internal scrimmage, Tom and Jerry decided to see who could get away with slashing me more. Slashing, for those of you who don’t know, is when you hack at somebody in unprotected areas with your stick or swing with the intent to hurt instead of the intent to defend.
Tom stopped after one or two after I slashed him back (lightly… I made my point, but our team couldn’t afford to lose him), but Jerry went to town as much as he could regardless of what I did.
I got hurt pretty badly that day but didn’t retaliate as I didn’t want to injure my teammates.
It was the last straw for me, and I had a discussion with my coach after practice and was told to stop being such a coward. After that, I went home, had a serious talk with my parents, and I begged them to let me go to the private high school that had been heavily recruiting me to go there on a full ride for athletics and academics.
My parents obliged me with a visit, I loved it, and I transferred away from public school at the end of my Freshman year. Tangentially, this was the best decision I ever made, by the way. Made lasting friendships and had an incredible high school experience after that.
The summer between freshman and sophomore year I grew over a foot and stood at 6’2. I had also begun working out and was really seeing results. I had the good fortune of playing lacrosse at a high level, and both Tom and Jerry were also good players in high school.
I was always a defenseman, and one of the highlights of my life was being told that we were playing their team in an exhibition match.
Long story short, the opposing team’s goaltender threw a ‘hospital pass’ to Jerry. A hospital pass is high up in the air, so you have to extend upwards and expose your torso completely if you want to wrangle the ball in.
I acted very quickly, and with perfect timing, I speared the living life out of Jerry with a vicious – but legal – body check as soon as his feet hit the ground. Vicious. I hit him perfectly with my right shoulder, lifted him off the ground, and quite literally drove him back about 8 feet from where he was standing when he landed. I heard the crowd react to the hit and heard the ref blow the whistle immediately to stop play, but my hit was so forceful that I separated my shoulder and got the wind knocked out of me.
I also caught my arm on his helmet going down. I was on the ground for about a minute before I could move. Jerry fared worse, however, as he was out cold from the force of it.
Separated shoulder and all, I pulled myself up, tore off my helmet, dropped it on the ground, and made my way over to where Jerry had come back to consciousness on the field.
My old coach was there and immediately recognized me – with shock in his eyes – but Jerry was too stupid to realize that I was the same 5-foot kid from 8 months ago.
My coach was also on the field at the time and he knew my background with this team and these two kids.
All of the memories – him picking fights with me, the name-calling, the physical pain, the embarrassment of being torn apart in front of girls, his parents telling my parents to screw off when they approached them to discuss Jerry’s bullying – it was a perfect moment.
Eyes smoldering, I made my way to the other side of my old coach. The ref probably thought I was checking on him in good sportsmanship, but no, not quite.
‘Remember me, jerk? Sometimes the little guys get bigger.’ I hocked the best loogie I could muster, spit in his face, and was promptly thrown out of the game.
He was howling in pain and I got to add insult to injury. He also missed the remainder of the season.
The entire time, Tom was about 15 feet away to witness the whole thing. He was on the same midfield line as Jerry, and I could see a mixture of shock, surprise, and fear in his face as he recognized me and saw that I was capable of delivering the physical punishment I just delivered to Jerry and that I remained stoic despite the obvious physical pain I had to be in.
I eyeballed him the entire time I was being escorted off the field.
Jerry was out of school for a few days and when he came back looking rough, word eventually spread around my hometown that I was the reason.
I haven’t seen Jerry since, but I do know from mutual friends he has been in and out of prison and is a deadbeat dad to 2 children.
For the rest of high school, though, I was told he stopped picking on other kids. So did Tom.
As chance would have it, Tom was in the city that I was living in on business 10 years later. He added me on social media and asked if he could meet me for a drink.
10 years later, why not. So I met him, we shook hands, he bought me a drink and told me that day on the lacrosse field changed his perspective about how to treat other people, and that he could tell the hit on Jerry was also meant for him.
He told me, verbatim, that he got the message loud and clear when I stared him down that day.
He apologized over and over for the years of misery, chalked it up to being young, stupid, and wanting to fit in with the cool crowd, and then told me he had his first kid on the way.
We had more than a few more drinks and continued to catch up. He turned into a respectable man with a good head on his shoulders, has a beautiful family, and by all accounts looks to be a model father to his children. He’s also a successful entrepreneur.
He hasn’t spoken to Jerry at all since high school.”
9. Abandon Me In High School? See Me Get My Life Together
“My ‘best friend’ growing up was named John. In hindsight, he was a terrible friend. He only spent time with me because we were the biggest losers in our class and the other kids didn’t want anything to do with us.
I was the fat, geeky kid who froze up around girls. John wasn’t nerdy or fat but he was incredibly awkward at times. He was the kind of person that laughed too loud at his jokes.
I was an only child who never had anyone to spend time with while I was growing up.
I think that is why I was so desperate to be friends with John. Unfortunately, John only really spent time with me when he wanted something from me. He visited my home when he wanted to ‘borrow’ my toys/basketball. I was so pathetic at the time that I would give him anything he wanted and he rarely ever gave anything back.
Our relationship was like that until we went to high school. John tried out for the basketball team our freshman year. He didn’t make it but the coach took pity on him and sort of made him an assistant manager for the sports department. So in one way or another, John became involved with every sports team our class had.
This led to him spending more time with the popular kids. He sort of figured out how to stop being so awkward and he eventually became one of the ‘cool’ kids.
I tried to stay friends with him but he made it painfully clear that he didn’t want anything to do with me anymore.
It was also around this time that I started going through some serious personal problems. (medical issues/family issues/financial issues). High school ended up being the worst period in my life. While I was going through misery, John was going to parties and living it up with his new friends.
At one point in my senior year, I was very depressed. I practically begged John to spend some time with me. He knew about some of the things I was going through and I sort of expected him to take pity on me. He just brushed me off though and ignored me.
Well, I decided I wanted to at least live through college. So after high school, I started working hard to turn my life around. I lost weight, improved my social skills, and took care of some family issues.
College helped me gain more confidence in myself and afterward, I decided to start a small online business I had been thinking about for a while.
I worked constantly to get things running and now my business makes me quite a bit. I’m not filthy rich or anything, but I’m doing better than I ever expected I would be.
I was so focused on improving my life that I had completely forgotten about John for a long time.
I ran into him last year though.
My significant other and I were out grocery shopping one morning. We turned the corner into an aisle and John was standing there stocking the shelf. He and I just stared at each other for what felt like an eternity.
The last time we had seen each other, I was the fat loser and he was the cool kid. Now I’m in great shape and I had a gorgeous girl clinging to my side. John had gained 50lbs and started going bald.
I tried to talk to him but he made some excuse about needing something in the back of the store and he ran away.
I decided to find out what happened to him by looking up his social media accounts.
From what I can tell, he started working at the grocery store to help pay for college. All the kids from high school stopped talking to him and each other when they all separated for college.
John went to school for some sort of sports administration degree. I’m not really sure what his major was but he talked about becoming a basketball coach on his social media account. Well, he couldn’t get another job after college so he has just been working at the grocery store ever since.
It sounds like he had student loans that took him a while to pay off, so he moved back into his mom’s house. His long-term significant other betrayed him. His only ‘friends’ are the kids he works with at the grocery store. Most of them seem like jerks who just like to make fun of him on social media.
He spends a lot on beer and lottery tickets. He also spends most of his free time playing league of legends. (I use this site to look up his account and he plays at least five games a day).
His whole life just seems like one massive train wreck ever since high school.
I have to admit that I was feeling pretty great about myself when I ran into John at the grocery store. It was nice to know that things had gone better for me than they had for John. However, I just feel terrible for him now.”
8. I Made Sure To Tell Him How Great I'm Doing
“In grades 11 and 12 I had physics with this piece of work. I did really well in those classes, often getting top marks. I love physics and love that type of math coinciding with experimentation. But, the class was in the morning and I was a provincial and national level competitive swimmer and would be at the pool at 5 am so I would fall asleep roughly 75% of the time.
My teacher didn’t care because I understood the material. This guy though. This guy considered my athletic, tall, blonde, outgoing female self to be unworthy of being good at math and physics. He made many many rude comments, called me dumb blonde instead of by my name, and would ridicule me if I dared ask a question.
Lucky it was all pathetic, and since I wasn’t a bully even the traditional nerdy kids bullied him pretty quickly.
The last time I saw him, he came into a bar I was working at while putting myself through school, and he made quite a few comments about how I ended up there in life, etc. I made sure to tell him I had a full scholarship ride because of swimming and grades, and work was just to pay rent.
Found out from his buddy he got kicked out of the same uni I went to because of academic performance and mistreatment of female professors.”
7. My Uncle Is Not Fun To Play Games With
“My uncle was the alpha tormentor. Both my Aunt and Uncle still lived with my grandparents, so there was no way to avoid them because I had to go to my grandparents’ house after school while my dad was still at work.
My uncle liked to play ‘games’ with me in order to turn me into a ‘fearless pit dog’, as he put it when I asked him one day why he was tormenting me so much.
When he said that, the fact he was being completely honest as well as smiling about it, I decided right then and there that this man was my enemy and would have to deal with him accordingly.
If he wanted a ‘Pit Dog’, he was going to get one. After overcoming my shock at his honest answer, I said ‘Screw You Uncle. Just screw you.’
One of the ‘games’ that he loved to play, was chasing me down the road to my grandparents’ house which felt like an honest attempt to literally run me over.
He’d always do this as I was walking home to my grandparents’ house after school. Luckily most times he ended up just chasing me off the road. The game started like this: he would stop his truck at the end of the road that my grandparent’s place was on and rev the engine of his truck three times.
That was the signal that the ‘game’ was about to begin. After the third rev, he would hit the gas and come screaming down the road toward me. I would have to leap off the road to avoid being run over. After at least a couple of months of dealing with this, I had enough.
I was tired of feeling afraid of walking down that street. I thought it over for a while before I decided I would get revenge.
On the days when I wasn’t being chased, I started to count how many steps it took to get to an old stump on the side of the road that was hidden by briars.
I’d walk backward just so I could eye the distance between the end of that road and the stump so I would know when to run. 17 steps. It would take 17 steps from the time he would start roaring down that road at me to get to that stump.
The day finally came about a couple of weeks later. When I heard his truck, I wasn’t afraid anymore, I was angry. As per normal, he revved his engine three times then gunned it around the corner. I waited until he was close enough before I ran as fast as I could up the side of the road and behind the stump, throwing my backpack into a deer trail I could jump into in case my plan failed, then quickly turned towards the stump and the oncoming truck bearing down on me.
As expected, he followed me up the side of the road, to fix on me to pay attention to where he was going.
The next few moments were beautiful. The briars parted like the Red Sea, and to my delight, I saw his eyes go wide as he realized what he was about to smash into.
He yanked the steering wheel to the left, his front right tire going over the stump which launched him into the air. As he flew past me, I could see the look of terror on his face, and grinning madly, I began to shout insults at him as his truck nearly flipped in midair.
Instead of flipping, the truck roughly came back down on four wheels and he continued down the road to my grandparent’s house and parked in the gravel driveway. I grabbed my backpack, ran up the trail, and hid. I didn’t come out until after dark when my dad came to get me.
I knew the sound of my dad’s car, a Datsun B210, so when I heard him coming up the road, I immediately came out, waved him down, and quickly jumped into the passenger seat. My dad asked me concerned as to why I was out there.
At first, I just kept telling him over and over that, we needed to just go straight home and under no circumstances go to my grandparents’ house. When my dad kept asking why I finally told him everything that happened. Without another word, he turned the car around, silently fuming, and drove us home.
I don’t know if my dad talked to my Uncle after what happened, but what I do know is that ‘game’ never happened again. That ‘game’ at least.”
6. He Got Labelled As The "Pee-Drinker"
“My father worked in a factory in Eastern Europe and the event occurred somewhere in the 1980s. I know how weird it looks now than in the 2020s, but at the time it was pretty common that workers in factories would come to work wasted or they would drink at work.
My father was not much different and he would occasionally bring a bottle of booze and keep it in his locker.
These lockers were pretty easy to access without a key, you would need just a screwdriver or some piece of metal and the door would be easily bent and returned to original afterward.
The factory was working in shifts and when you come the next day, you would just notice that someone opened your locker and something is missing that you left inside a day earlier. As my father was bringing quite good booze it would be missing the next day.
After who knows how many times his booze was stolen, he had enough of it and he decided to set a trap for the thief.
The brandy he usually brought was a color similar to whiskey (due to being matured in oak casks) and he took an empty bottle to the toilet and filled it with his urine and locked it back to his locker and went home after his shift was over.
As shifts were slightly overlapped (there was no break in the factory process), the next day when he would come to work, people from the previous shift were still there. He came to his locker and noticed that bottle was completely missing. He came to the workspace and loudly asked if anyone knows what has happened to the bottle with urine from his locker.
He said that he had to go to medical check as he might have some urinary infection and he had to bring morning urine, but he have forgotten it in his locker the day earlier.
One of the guys turned red and started yelling at my father how he dared to leave urine in a bottle labeled as brandy, that someone could mistakenly drink it and get seriously sick.
After that, his locker was not robbed ever and that guy has gotten a new nickname – a pee drinker.”
5. School Jerk Got Put In His Place
“During 6th grade, I was bullied a LOT by people. I’m talking scars that haunt me to this day, a lot of really depressing issues, but I hide them well and keep driving for success. But there was one in particular who picked on me constantly.
I was taught never to fight unless absolutely 100% necessary and even then, don’t even talk back to them. Obviously, you take years of holding it in, you lash out, luckily for me, I’m not dumb enough to end up on the 5 o clock news.
Moving on, he kept picking on me until one day I woke up on the wrong side of the bed. I just woke up annoyed, didn’t want to go to school for obvious reasons, but was ushered anyway.
He came up behind me and yanked my backpack. Mind you, I’m not a small guy. I’m currently 6’2 and pushing 300+. At the time I was about a head taller than most kids and wider, but I was always the gentle giant, quiet bookworm type in those days.
Well, the jerk decides to push my buttons for the last time, and I lose it. The second he pulls, I don’t relax, I let him pull it off and I turn, ready to rock. I call him out in front of the entire school, I believe the exact words after him yanking my backpack all the time I had enough.
I stormed toward him with every ounce of rage and hatred I had and the dude took off. I calmly keep walking after him, and eventually around the corner comes the whole bully crew. I’d say…. 6? 7? Including him. They all are pushing and laughing, figuring they were going to jump me.
They soon realized that numbers wouldn’t do in my mind. I kept marching forward, fists clenched, and all of what friends I had and have said I got a look in my eye. My best friend to this day told me that the look I get makes him shiver and feel horrible.
They all saw this look, and all 7 of them ran off. Not one stood up. The bell rang and I went to class, with a ton of people gossiping about me.
Fast forward a few days later, it’s school photo day, I’m doing my own thing as always, and while in line the poor sap gets to stand right next to me.
He bawls his eyes out (He’s two years older) and begs me not to kick his butt, that he’s so sorry for bullying me, and he won’t ever mess with me again. I agree, having time to cool my inner thoughts, and collect myself, we shake hands, never spoke again until a party earlier this year.
The dude avoided me the entire time, but from what I understand, a lot of people say he straightened out and became a lot better of a person.”
4. Steal $15K From Me? I'll Shut You Down
“I was scammed when I was trying to sell my timeshare (I know I should have been more careful ) and after paying them $15K I was trying to get back at least some of it.
The person I was talking to said I would receive a refund but never received anything. I contacted the Attorney General in the state they said they were in and was told they could not reach them. So the next time I talked to them I conference in the person from Consumer Complaints and she was able to talk with him, but he just had her double talk on why there were so many complaints.
So I started a plan.
I work in high tech and I went to their Website and copied every screen they had and made my own with the word SCAMMER in big red letters across the page. After I had all the pages created I created my site with the same name as this except mine had the word SCAM at the end.
I used a popular web hosting site to create my send website and publish it with my domain name. It cost me $90 for one year. I even had other people who were scammed by them contact me on my website. I tested my website using other computers to Google their name and my website name showed up right under theirs.
So anyone who googled their name would see the Scammer’s site and mine next to each other. It took about 3 months and their website was taken down.
Another 3 months and their phone number was disconnected. So I basically put them out of business because they would not refund me.
I would have been happy with the $5K refund and consider the $10K a lesson learned. Still do not know what happened to them but about 1 year later I got a call from another company somewhere else but it had the exact same setup. I just ignored them.
Lesson learned.”
3. I Had To Remind Him Who I Am
“I was a sophomore when one of my friends, Blake, died. He accidentally shot himself while handling a gun at home. It hit us all pretty hard when we heard the news the next day.
The worst part is, Blake wasn’t even the first of my friends to die that year.
I was enrolled in an art class, the kind where they pretty much let us choose our projects. So we had genuinely committed art students mixed in with lazy idiots who were in it for the easy A.
One such idiot was a senior named Zack. I was a lanky, awkward Drama kid, and therefore an ideal target for someone like Zack, being your typical popularity-driven jerk of larger, heavier build. He and I had words every few days or so. He really got off on making me miserable.
ANYWAY. Day after Blake’s passing away. I’m on edge, can’t concentrate on anything. The air in the room is heavy with silence as the students struggle to focus on their art projects. Zack figures hey, what better time to assert his dominance over OP than in the wake of his friend’s sudden and horrible death?
He starts prodding. Bumping into me as he crosses the room, sneaking in snide remarks, the works. I’m bottling it all up, cause I’m a good kid and whatnot, but it’s really starting to boil. Zack ups his game by kicking the legs out from under my chair.
I jump to my feet, red with anger, and a loud ‘what, man?!’ crashes through my teeth. Zack, having achieved his goal, belts out a hearty laugh. I come unglued, harsh words are exchanged. Before the teacher can get the situation under control, Zack spews out some loud, vitriolic remark like, ‘I’m not the one who got dumb friends that blow their faces off.’ I attack him, but Zack puts a beating on me before the teacher splits us up.
I’m absolutely shaking with frustration and defeat.
Fast forward five years. I’ve been in the Air Force a while. I’m on my way home on leave to visit old friends, waiting on a connecting flight. I’m killing time at a Starbucks near the TSA checkpoint, when who do I see slinking through the metal detector, but Zack.
My chest quakes in an instant huff of derision. Being empowered by my military status, I make my approach; as I close the distance, I start to see just how ugly Zack looks. Broken, miserable. The sight makes me glow a little bit.
I saunter up with a triumphant, ‘What’s up, Zack?’ He doesn’t even recognize me.
I have to remind him who I am. The conversation turns up a few interesting facts: Zack works at a dead-end job, still lives with his parents, and never went to college. Never accomplished anything, never escaped our trashy hometown, and I guessed that all his fair-weather friends abandoned him after high school.
This guy, this Old King of High School, had nothing, and it showed. I got to brag about all the cool stuff I’d been up to, all the places I’ve seen. ‘Oh nothing much, just catching some of the world’s most dangerous bad guys, preserving billions of dollars worth of airpower assets, saving lives.
Hardly worth talking about.’
I never did get to return the beating Zack gave me in school, at least in the physical sense. But I absolutely ADORED how defeated that jerk’s face looked once he realized that this skinny drama geek had conquered something he never even dreamed about.
I laugh every time I think about that chance encounter.”
2. Don't Believe He's Stealing People's Lunches? Get Yours Stolen
“Nobody likes a lunch thief, and I had one of the most aggressive at my office.
There were rumors for a few months leading up to the inciting incident of someone going around and taking peoples’ lunches. Just about every day someone different would complain that their lunch was missing.
It even happened to me once or twice, but I figured hey, it’s a big office, a few people are probably just careless and grab the wrong lunch and are too embarrassed to bring it back or someone else packs their lunch and they don’t know what’s in there so it’s not obvious they have the wrong one, or whatever.
Most people just brought brown bags with their names on them anyways or identical Rubbermaid Tupperware with a little piece of labeled tape on the side. It was easy enough to mix up.
I had accidentally grabbed a wrong lunch once or twice, but I’d noticed before I got it open.
I thought I was just more careful, or even just not as busy, as some other people in the building.
However, other people weren’t as forgiving, and a quorum made complaints to HR. They were blown off. Personally, at the time, I thought it was all much ado about nothing.
But then it began. My wife enrolled in a French cooking class online and just about every day I was bringing fancy gourmand leftovers in for lunch. You’d think I was picking up a to-go bag from a Michelin starred bistro on the way in each morning, she really threw herself into the coursework.
There were no problems for about two weeks, maybe three, until one day my lunch went missing. Considering what delicacies I had to look forward to I was pretty miffed, but I did a once over around the break room and didn’t see anyone eating my lunch so figured someone grabbed my bag by accident earlier, saw how good things looked, and—realizing it was their lucky day—didn’t bring it back to the fridge.
I wrote the mysterious stranger off as a jerk but accepted the loss and looked forward to dinner that night instead.
The next day I write my name on my lunch in extra bold lettering, jam the bag into the back of the fridge, and feel peace of mind.
I get there come break time, nope, it’s gone.
I was pretty upset, but I figured it was a stroke of bad luck and left it at that. What else could I do?
However, on the third day, out of an abundance of caution, I kept my lunch at my desk.
A pain, because I had to eat it fairly early in the day to avoid spoilage, but at least I’d know where it was.
I got up to take care of some business down the hall and when I came back… yep, my lunch was gone.
Unfortunately, that didn’t help me narrow it down much at all because my desk is centrally located so everyone’s constantly passing by.
At that point, there was no possibility of the theft being arbitrary, so I approached HR and filed a complaint. Their response, practically verbatim, was, ‘Employees’ lunches are their personal property and the company is not responsible for lost or stolen personal items.’
The following day my wife packed a cream-based soup that really had to be refrigerated. I was passing by the break room to check on my lunch practically every five minutes. Somehow it still managed to disappear.
I was irate at this point and returned to HR and really blew my top.
The best they could do was send a memo around about remembering to check the name on your lunch when you remove it from the fridge, but they made very clear that it was a routine memo and in no way related to my complaints, which were not their jurisdiction, so not an admission of responsibility, because my lunch was my own personal problem.
The only suitable alternative to packing a lunch available in the building are these wretched shrink-wrapped ham and cheese sandwiches from a vending machine.
They’ve been marinating in the heat for God knows how long and the bread is as stale as a corkboard and the meat is rancid and there’s gluey mayo smushed into the center.
It’s a relic of the old office tenants I’m pretty sure.
I vented daily to my wife but her only idea was to start bringing a regular sandwich and apple again to dissuade the thief and get him to move on to other lunches.
So, determined to prevent this low-life scum from downgrading the quality of my lunch, I hatched an elaborate plan… Then 2020 hit and I forgot all about this whole saga.
I worked remotely for months and months. Then we returned, and after all that had happened globally, this was the last thing on my mind.
But I got to the break room the first day back, frustrated from having to wear a button-up and tie after months of working in pajamas, sore from my desk chair, and exhausted from small talk, only to find… my lunch was gone.
This was a particularly sore point because my wife and I divorced between my last lunch and work and the present one.
So I did not appreciate being reminded of any past threads involving her.
I pretty much flew into a rage at that point. Especially seeing that stupid worthless memo about checking the lunch bag names posted in the break room, feeling so helpless and so hungry and so alone as it was me and my lunch against the world.
I stormed out and was determined to return the next day with a plan.
So, I came in the following day… with an empty lunch bag.
And I checked closely to be sure no one was watching and… I switched the contents of the HR person’s lunch bag into my bag.
So now their lunch appeared to be my lunch.
They’d packed a regular brown bag, so I just discarded that, and I left, and I waited. I knew this was a pretty big gamble because it was contingent on the theory that the thief was avoiding me while having lunch, but not wary of anyone else.
So would eat out in the open if there were no risk of bumping into me.
So I made a big show of going around the office announcing that I was headed out for a meeting and I wouldn’t be back until at least 3:00 pm.
I even went to the trouble of moving my car out of the lot to a space two streets over. Where I then sat in my car and worked remotely for several hours before sneaking into the building up the back stairway.
I then sat in the stairwell just outside the break room, where you can hear chatter can’t be seen, and after about 20-30 minutes of waiting, I heard it.
The sweetest sound I’ll ever hear in the office.
(HR) ‘What the heck Kyle, that’s my lunch.’
(Lunch thief!!) ‘Nah, it’s not your name on the bag.’
(HR) Give me that!
I’m assuming he grabs the bag and sees my name.
(HR) Yeah, let’s head to my office for a chat.
The HR rep later called me in as well and said they were ‘aware of my break room hijinks,’ but it was obvious that the point still came across loud and clear.
They warned me that it was a violation of policy to move another employee’s lunch—it took every ounce of self-control for me to keep from retorting ‘I thought our lunches were our personal property and the company was not responsible for them being lost or stolen?’
They informed me they’d located the thief and things would be handled accordingly.
But better than whatever write-up they might be able to issue Kyle, his reveal as the lunch thief occurred in front of the whole break room. So word quickly spread as to who had been stealing everyone’s lunches earlier last year and he is now the office pariah.
He was in line for a promotion. The promotion is indefinitely off the table.
And I also earned brownie points for exposing him, though more than I’m satisfied with are being attributed to HR.
At the end of the day though, I didn’t do this for this credit, or even the sweet sweet sweet revenge.
I did it to get my lunches back.”
1. I Became A Pro At Trash Talking
“As a kid, I was really sick with asthma and eczema, in and out of the hospital type stuff, parents tried everything and went to a laundry list of doctors to try and find something to help me.
Eventually, I was able to be put into a test group for a new topical ointment around probably ’99. I was still just a youngin’ at the time. But before that, we had tried some type of medical steroids or some nonsense and I came to find out later in childhood that one of the side effects was weight gain.
And I gained a lot. Towards the end of 4th grade. I was a big kid. So naturally being the fat kid, school was miserable, even my friends made fun of me, not a good experience.
The bullying continued throughout middle school, and on top of that, I had a stepdad who was verbally abusive.
Middle school was a really rough time for me, by 8th grade, my self-worth was a joke. Someone tells you how worthless/useless you are enough times you start to believe them. And I was still fat lol. The perfect storm for one big childhood.
And I was a Boy Scout, can’t forget to add that.
Fortunately, it wasn’t all terrible, by chance, there were a small handful of people who were nothing but supportive and really helped me get through this. Three of those people and probably the most important were my mother (I know, sounds silly, but my biological father wasn’t around much during that time so she was the only parent I had really and she really was a huge component of me wanting to keep moving forward and be successful, etc.) The other two people were my two best friends who unfortunately lived two towns north of me so as kids we couldn’t hang out all the time.
But thanks to Xbox Live we were able to communicate really often, and they really are the best friends I could’ve ever asked for. Genuinely great guys, we for a time were the epitome of a nerdy triforce. I’m the youngest of the three of us and we’re all either in college and working, I turn 21 in a couple of months and we’re still best friends.
We have been since I was in the 4th grade.
So thanks to them I made it through the misery that middle school was, and into high school. For some reason, and I’m thankful for this, the bullying stopped for the most part when I was a freshman.
Bullying really is an awful entity that exists, but looking back on it, it really helped me, instead of being bitter it made me accepting, and instead of anger it motivated me. So despite the depression and heartache of it all, it made me a stronger person and helped me come out of my shell.
Long story short, jokes on all of the people who brutally and mercilessly poked fun at the fat kid because; 1. Being fat and knowing people have a natural affinity to make fun of fat people I developed a wicked sense of humor and actually became pretty funny, 2.
Being a social outcast I spent a lot of time playing Halo 2 on XBL so naturally, I became a pro at talking trash. 3. High school came around and all of the ‘cool kids’ in middle school fell off and either became ‘not cool’ hah! and 4.
Myself on the other hand played a season of football my freshmen year, slimmed down enough to start running track until I was a junior, essentially went from zero to hero, went from knowing no one to knowing what I feel like was everyone by my junior year (including the seniors – woah super cool right?), started getting invited to parties all the stereotypical ‘cool kid’ activities I suppose, had my first kiss the beginning of my junior year with a super cutie, I gained a few inches (in height), lost a lot of weight, ‘talked’ to/went out with a few girls the beginning of junior year, then around December of 11th grade started going out with my crush since my freshman year.
I stopped partying the summer after my junior year so I could focus on school and my super awesome significant other, and by the time I graduated (with a 3.1 GPA, as a slacker I couldn’t have been more content), I still won the senior superlative ‘Life of the Party’, was nominated for homecoming king, came in second by half a point in the senior boy’s Talent Show/Beauty pageant, and I ended up having a really awesome high school experience.
So the joke is on the bullies, CAUSE LOOK AT ME NOW, LOOK AT ME NOW HATERZ. But on a serious note, I’d forgiven everyone a long time ago, I have no hard feelings, I understand those kids were going through just as much as I was and in a way, I hope I helped them get through their time of need. And I always was, and always will be, no matter how popular I got or how big my ego was, I will always befriend the little guy and the ‘outcasts’, and I’ll always do my best to help anyone who needs it.
So I really should thank everyone who made fun of me, they catapulted me to my greatness.
And in case anyone was curious, where I’m at now: Turning 21 soon, starting a regiment of picking up heavy objects and putting them down on a regular basis (I have a goal to get seriously ripped because I never have been and I don’t want to be fat again lol), I’m attending school pursuing a B.S.
and eventually a D.P.T. (Physical Therapy), and I’m still going out with (going on 4 years this December) the former captain of the cheerleaders who is a soon to be very, very hot nurse. I have no complaints.
Moral of the story: Don’t let people get you down.”
