People Tell Their Stories Of Brilliant Revenge
26. I Helped A Guest Get Back At Her Gold-Digging Ex
“I worked as a front desk agent in a large luxury hotel chain for some years. One particular hotel I worked at was located really close to the downtown area and so we got a large number of young, very wealthy, business people who loved to party.
I usually worked the 2nd & 3rd shifts which meant I got to see loads of wasted hookups, breakups, etc.
This particular one though… is one I will never forget.
I was working at the desk when a group of young, well-dressed men come walking in.
They’ve all clearly been drinking, but aren’t so wasted that they can’t walk right and hold a conversation.
One of them comes up to me and tells me that while he and his friends were at the bar, a woman was hitting on him, and even though he told her no multiple times she wouldn’t stop.
So he and his friends left and it wasn’t until they got in the Uber that he realized he didn’t have his room key anymore. He thinks she took it and he’s concerned that she may come up to his room, he asked that I deactivate his keys and if she does come up to the hotel to not let her in.
When he was telling me all of this, it didn’t sit right with me. He and his friends were all grinning about it and snickering amongst one another. Then he gave a clear description of her, without being asked. Told me height, body shape, hair color, and style, the kind of dress she was wearing.
All while saying it in a mocking tone.
Now, this could have easily been because he thought the whole thing was ridiculous or was too wasted to take it seriously, but it really didn’t sound right to me. Either way, I did as I was trained in that situation.
I pulled up his reservation, deactivated the keys as requested, made him a new set when he showed me his ID, and even offered to move him to a new room if that would make him feel more comfortable. He and his buddies all laughed a little at that and he declined, took the keys and they went to their room.
About an hour or so later, the woman he described showed up. Now, by this point, my relief for the night had also shown up and was sitting at the front desk while I was in the back office counting down my cash drawer.
I hadn’t had a chance to tell him about the woman. Just as I’m walking out of the back office with my bag and about to leave, I see my coworker buzz the doors open and the woman comes rushing in, cuts through the lobby, and down the hall to the elevators.
She was barefoot, holding her heels in her hands, and knew exactly where she was going.
I rushed up to him and told him what the man from before had told me about her. My coworker looked at me confused. He then pointed to the screen that had the reservation pulled up and told me that when the woman arrived, she went to use the room keys and they didn’t work.
So he asked for her room number and last name, she gave both and her name is on the reservation. I looked at the reservation and down in the notes, there was a woman’s name listed. The man from before was listed as the primary, but her name was listed as secondary with his consent to be in the room.
I was confused, I thought maybe she wasn’t the same woman he was talking about. But, to be on the safe side I called the man in his room and told him the situation and that we allowed a woman, fitting that description he gave, to enter the building because she confirmed her name was on the room.
He laughed, said he forgot her name was on the room and asked that I remove it. I was now super confused, I asked to make sure:
Me: ‘Sir… just to be clear, the woman you met at the bar tonight was with you at check-in hours ago and was allowed keys then, but now she is not?’
Him: (laughs to all his friends in the room) ‘Awww… guys I confused the poor girl.’ (gets back on the phone with me) ‘Yeah sweetheart, she’s banned from the room. Don’t worry about the other details, just take her name off.’
Me: ‘… I see. Then, if she isn’t going to be in the room anymore, would you like us to call the police and have her removed from the property?’
Him: ‘Hahaha… Woah! That’s too far there.
Don’t worry, she’ll get the hint soon enough.’
We ended the call there and I got really suspicious of this. I told my coworker to not do anything and that I was going to stick around for a bit to see if anything happened.
A short time later the woman came off the elevator, pouring tears, sobbing while on the phone with someone. She sat down in our lobby and my coworker and I tried to look busy while eavesdropping hard on her phone call.
She was sobbing on the phone with her mom and sister. From what she told them, she was invited out to spend the week with her significant other meeting all of his old college buddies. This being their first night they all met up for dinner and drinks.
After a bit, she went to the restroom and when she came back she caught her partner hitting on another woman. His friends all bet that he wouldn’t do it. When she confronted him annoyed, he called her a bunch of names and humiliated her in front of his friends and the entire bar.
All of his friends joined in on mocking her and he threw in her face that she was ‘nothing without him’ and dumped her right there. He and his friends then took an Uber back and left her stranded at the bar with no money and no way back.
She then had to use her phone’s GPS and walk back to the hotel from the bar, barefoot (she had heels, and walking 2 miles in those was not going to cut it). She was asking her mom and sister for help as he wouldn’t let her in the room to get her luggage or her wallet.
My heart broke. I felt horrible. I helped this guy treat this poor woman like crap and now he and all his friends were up there laughing at her while she was sitting in our lobby sobbing and with nothing.
I went over to our snacks area in the lobby, grabbed her a bottled water, and brought it to her. I told her that I couldn’t help but overhear the conversation and was very sorry for her situation and asked if she would like us to help.
I informed her that if he was keeping her from getting to her things, we could call the police and have them force him to hand over her things so she could leave if she’d like. Or if she wanted to let her mom or sister pay for a room we’d be happy to give her a very low rate in a room far from him.
She thanked me, took the water, and tried to calm down and talk to me about what was happening and what her options were. Eventually, we decided on her staying in the hotel for the night and figuring out the rest in the morning.
As we make it to the desk, she asks me to try and run her credit card to see if it has enough on it for another room. I ask her what she means by ‘another room’ and she tells me that she’s actually paying for the room he’s in.
That his name is on the room because he booked it, but it’s her card paying for everything.
This intrigued me. I asked why she was paying for the room if it was in his name. She told me that she’s the one with a job, not him.
That he hasn’t been able to find a job in his field since graduating from college and is essentially living off of his parents’ wealth. But just after they started going out, his parents cut him off, so he’s been living off of her riches.
That’s why she was so upset and confused by how he had been acting all night, he was sweet and doing everything for her back home, but since he met up with his friends he did a 180 and hasn’t been the same guy the entire time.
I wanted to tell her that it was obvious he was using her and that he would probably blame his friends for all of this and try to get back with her later on. But I doubted she would have listened to me or cared for a complete stranger to butt in on her personal life like that.
So instead, I offered up a sweet piece of revenge.
I informed her that, considering she’s the one paying for the room, if she can confirm that it is her card on file with some sort of photo ID and verify the last 4 digits of the card number (That’s honestly all this hotel company required) then she could, if she wanted to, kick him out of the room and keep it all to herself.
But, considering how poorly her night has been, if she were indeed able to prove she is the one paying for the room, then I’d be more than happy to provide for her the biggest luxury upgrade we offered at our property.
The largest suite we had, full hotel amenity access, I’d even have my coworker fish out a bottle of champagne and some fresh strawberries for her to have sent to her room. All free of charge.
She was taken aback by the offer and was very sincerely tempted, she looked like she was about to say no. Then I told her that since she would be upgrading her room, that would require moving her things from that room and into her new one.
This means the room that she is currently listed in would need to be vacated immediately, if anyone were to remain in the room after we have demanded it be vacated, we are required to have them escorted off the property or they pay for the room.
Their choice.
She then thought about it, pulled up her card’s banking app, and showed me the screen. It had a photo of her, her full name, the card’s full number, and the hold from our hotel for the room.
She asked if that worked. It was good enough for me.
I quickly upgraded her, moved everything over in the system, and before I could say a word to my coworker he was already grabbing a set of master keys, a bell cart and was asking her what her luggage looked like since he would be the one retrieving it for her to deliver to her room.
He didn’t want her to have to deal with her ex again. She smiled and told him which ones were hers and that she hadn’t unpacked yet.
My coworker runs down to the elevators and up to fetch her things while I make her a new set of keys and send her off to her new room.
Once she’s on the elevator, my phone at the desk starts ringing. It’s the ex and he’s very angry about why my coworker has entered the room and is taking her things. I calmly explain that I cannot give out the private information of any of our guests and that if he would like to remain in his room he will need to pay for it as there is no longer a method of payment for his room.
He. Blew. Up.
He’s making a ton of demands and at the same time yelling at my coworker to stop what he’s doing, but it’s obvious from the way he’s yelling at him that my coworker isn’t listening to him.
I can even hear the guy’s friends telling him to chill out and just pay for the room.
I then explain that we will give him the courtesy of 10 mins to make a decision. At which point, if he doesn’t have payment ready then he must vacate the building or we will be forced to call the authorities and have him evicted. He continues to yell at me.
He screams, swears, threatens, and yells for a solid minute before taking a breath. I then tell him he has 9 mins remaining and ask if he has come to a decision yet. He hangs up on me.
9 minutes later I call the room and he doesn’t answer.
I call again, no answer. I call a third time, he picks up, then immediately hangs up. I call the police and tell them what was going on and they said they were on their way.
The officers arrive, I tell them what’s going on, we go up to the room together and the man and his friends are all white as ghosts when they see the cops.
The cops explain to the ex and his friends that they’re being evicted. The ex starts trying to talk to me but the cops stop him and tell him to only talk to them (I told him about his attitude on the phone before).
The friends are all offering to pay for the room at this point and the cops look at me and ask if that would be acceptable. I smile very sweetly and say ‘no’ and the cops nod and start rushing all of the guys to grab their things and leave the room.
The ex is the last one out the door carrying his 2 bags and complaining that he isn’t even given a luggage cart and has to carry his own things. His friends all look angry at him.
I go with the officers to escort all of them out of the building and run into my coworker in the lobby.
He waits until they’re all outside in the parking lot to tell me that the woman is in her new room, loves it, and said no to the champagne, she just wanted to sleep.
I didn’t get to see her before she left town the next day, but the ex did try calling our hotel to complain a number of times and even tried leaving some bad reviews of us online and lied through all of it.
I hope she doesn’t have to ever deal with him again.”
25. Disturb Our Sleep? Let Me Get My Dad
“My dad works a carpentry job, and so is up quite early to leave for it. I’m a student, so I often get up early as well to get ready and walk to school. Up early and to bed late for both of us, in short.
That means (of course) that our few hours of sleep are absolutely sacred.
One summer, I ended up breaking up a party our neighbors were having. They were setting off fireworks, and my dad (veteran) was practically beside himself, and couldn’t relax.
He ended up leaving the house to drive further away, and I called the cops to ask them to break it up. I don’t know who told the kids that it was me and my dad who ruined their fun, but either way, they decided they needed revenge.
The next night was a Saturday, I’m in bed with the idea of sleeping in, as is my dad. At about 3 am, our doorbell goes off. We have a loud doorbell, and we’re both light sleepers. My dad jolts awake in panic (loud noises) and I almost fall out of bed. We go to the door..
and no one’s there. We got knock, knock, ginger. At 3 am.
The next night, it happened again, around the same time (AKA: the middle of the night). This time, my dad looks out the window in time, and we see the neighbors’ kids running back to their house.
Next night, same deal. The doorbell goes off repeatedly at 3 am, they run away as soon as we get out of bed. Both my dad and I have trouble falling asleep after it and are both incredibly sleep-deprived by that point.
The next day, we decide we have to do something. These kids are being absolute jerks. We ended up both skipping school/work to plan and catch up on sleep during the day. That night, we were ready.
My dad and I get up at around 1 am, and silently creep downstairs to wait by the door.
We’re both wearing the same outfit, which is: military cargo pants, no shirt, and red and black warpaint on our faces and chests. My dad has his grandfather’s rifle in hand (doesn’t fire, but they don’t need to know that) and I’m holding a hatchet.
Nearly fell asleep while waiting, but my dad ends up shaking me awake around 2 am. Footsteps from outside, and giggles. I could barely suppress my grin. My dad quietly unlocked the door and kept a hand on the doorknob. The second the kids rang the doorbell, he threw it open and started screaming b****y murder.
The kids nearly pooped themselves, screamed loud enough to wake the whole neighborhood, and took off running. My dad and I followed, both waving our weapons and hollering at the top of our lungs. One of the kids ended up crying and yelling for us not to hurt him, and the other screamed so loud I thought he might tear a vocal cord.
Never seen two kids so utterly terrified. My dad and I chased them all the way back to their house, where they ended up waking up their parents and banging at the front door. They were both crying at the end of it, probably out of fear of the fifty-something-year-old veteran with a gun, wearing warpaint and screaming at them.
They never tried waking us up again.”
24. Chill, It's Just Meat
“I do not eat pork due to being religious once and have never gotten around to trying it nor have I really cared to try it. My housemate consistently makes fun of me for it because he knows I’m not religious yet still won’t try it.
He’s tried tricking me into taking pork when we go out, and I’ve told him several times not to do that, it got to the point that we argued about it a lot and he always took it as a joke, he’s told me, ‘It’s just meat, don’t be such a wuss about it.’ I agree with him but told him it’s my choice and not to overstep my boundaries, he laughs this off and of course, keeps making fun of me.
He eventually got me to take a pork dumpling when out with friends at a restaurant, and told me right after that it was pork and was happy he finally got me into trying it. I was angry at him and we got into an argument and he refused to apologize and told me ‘It’s not a big deal, see you ate it, and you didn’t die?
So what’s the big deal?’ At this point, I’m fed up so I planned my revenge.
We live in an area that has a lot of ant colonies, I took some of my leftover food and put it in a container and left it outside my room window, next morning the container was full of them, I then went outside and looked for more bugs.
I found grasshoppers and some other insects I have no name for. I made a chocolate milkshake for myself and asked him if he wanted one too. He accepts the offer, so I took all the insects I had collected and added them to the blender with a lot of chocolate, ice cream, and thoroughly made sure it was all blended up.
I then added a few unblended insects to the bottom of the glass, put a little whipped cream to cover the insects so they don’t float to the top, and then poured the rest of the milkshake on top.
I then topped it with more whipped cream and chocolate sprinkles and it was ready to be served.
When he was ¾ way through, he spat out in horror as some of the insects at the bottom had escaped the whipped cream at the bottom and gotten into his mouth and he got a crunchy unpleasant surprise.
He looked down to see the insect he just spat out and was horrified to see what he had just chugged, he looked at me shocked and hurt. He would have probably have hit me if I wasn’t slightly larger than him.
I told him ‘it’s just meat don’t worry, won’t die or anything.’
He was enraged I did that to him, we’ve not been talking for a while, but I’m glad he doesn’t bring up pork anymore.”
23. Try To Take Advantage Of His Wealth? Pay Your Own Bills
“Sam does not make friends easily. He’s not good at small talk and, to make things worse, he’s suspicious of people who are too friendly for the reasons below.
Sam earned a lot at a young age. I’m not going to say exactly what he did, because I don’t want him tracked down, but he made something that made him rich.
Being a smart guy, Sam invested a lot in long-term investments that will pay out a reasonable amount each month until he passes away. So he doesn’t live a rich life, but he never has to work again.
A few years after his windfall he got bored and decided to go back to college.
There he met some people who enthusiastically pursued a friendship with him. Making friends with them was so easy that, for a while, he was happy. He didn’t find out until later that they had learned about his wealth by searching for his name online.
It started small. Occasionally one of them would be short and ask Sam for a loan, then blow it off when he asked for it back. Sam started to get concerned, but he didn’t want to lose his new friends.
Then they all decided to go on a vacation together to a well-known amusement park. They pressured him into paying for the tickets, flight, and hotel rooms. Sam tried to explain that month-to-month he wasn’t getting enough to pay for all of this stuff, but they swore to him that he would be repaid and ramped up the social pressure on him.
He eventually caved and took an advance on his next month’s payment to pay for the vacation.
Then, as if all of that wasn’t bad enough, they ditched him for most of the vacation. Whenever he’d try to hang out with them, they told him ‘We made some plans to meet these other guys,’ or ‘We already ate.’
By the end of the vacation, Sam was forced to face the fact that they weren’t really his friends.
Sam was angry, and he had an idea while reading the local news. A local restaurant had created a dish that cost a thousand dollars.
It was mostly a publicity stunt (copying another restaurant that had gained a lot of publicity by doing the same thing), but Sam understood that his friends saw him as their ticket to the rich life.
Sam started making sure that friends saw mentions of this overpriced dish several times a day.
Eventually, it worked. They started suggesting to him that they should all go and try this dish. Sam made it clear to them that he was still paying off the vacation, and, although he could get together enough funds to buy it for himself, he could not pay for their meals.
They all said they understood, although they looked a little worried. He never overheard them saying it, but he knew they confused ‘being a millionaire’ with ‘having a million dollars sitting in your checking account.’
The day of the meal came and they all ordered this thousand-dollar dish.
The restaurant’s manager came out and asked them if they were certain they had the funds to purchase this meal. Each of them confirmed that they had the money and were ready to pay.
Sam can’t remember what was in the meal, but he says it tasted salty and slimy, like french fries soaked in water.
As the end of the meal grew near, the friends seemed to be more and more nervous.
At the end of the meal, everyone handed over their debit cards. Sam’s cleared and every other card was declined. They turned to Sam, saying things like ‘I don’t know why it was declined. Can you help us out?’ One of them just slid her bill over to Sam with a smug grin.
Sam replied honestly, ‘I don’t have enough in my checking account to cover your bills.’
He stood up and started to walk out.
One of them called out ‘You can’t just leave us like this.’
He replied, ‘I made some plans to meet up with other guys.’
Sam left because he didn’t want anyone else to try to make him pay for their meals. He only found out afterward that the cops were called by the manager. The friends weren’t arrested, but a police report was filed and they had to go to court.
They had to pay both the restaurant bill and a large fine. Because they were in legal trouble, the university put them on probation.
The best part, however, is that Sam told as many people as possible that they had tried to run out on a bill, which is the crime that they were going to court and on probation for.
Sam figured that most people wouldn’t want to hear the whole story, and he was embarrassed that he had been taken in, so he simplified it and implied that they had simply tried to sneak out of a restaurant.
To their fellow college students, this was enough to turn the friends into pariahs.”
22. Retract Your Job Offer? It'll Cost You A Lot
“Several months ago I found myself looking for a job. I brushed up my resume and began sending it out like crazy to companies as well as recruiters. By the end of the first week, I had already scored my first interview, with Financial Startup.
The first interview with Financial Startup went well, and I got a call back asking to schedule a meeting with the CEO for the end of the week. At the end of the second interview, the CEO made me an offer.
Being entirely honest with him, I told him that while I was really interested in the position, a) the offer was less than I was expecting, as I had been told by headhunters that I could be making more, and b) I had been to and had scheduled several other interviews and would like to at least play all my cards out before deciding.
I was entirely upfront with him, didn’t string him along, and it’s important that you remember this fact.
At about 8:30 that night, the CEO called me and said they really wanted me, and that if I signed with them, I’d receive a raise as soon as they finished a funding round, nearly doubling my old salary.
I agreed to this offer and asked him to send me the contract.
The contract was sent over on Monday, at which point the CEO told me he’d be flying overseas for some meetings and would be unavailable, we’d discuss any questions I had and sign when he got back.
I had one or two questions about the contract, but nothing serious, and as soon as he got back to the country, he sent me the latest version of the contract and I signed it. The next day I went to an office store to get it scanned and emailed to him, as my printer/scanner had died not long before.
Not 30 minutes later, I got a call from the CEO, he told me that even though I had already sent him the signed contract, he was choosing not to sign it, and he didn’t want to hire me. He had a ‘bad feeling’ about me, he thought I wasn’t being serious about the position, and that was that.
I’m not ashamed to say that I almost begged him to reconsider. I spent 15 minutes or so trying to convince him that he was wrong and that I was most definitely interested in the position, but he ended up sticking to his decision.
What really annoyed me was that he and I were already discussing contracts, so I had stopped looking elsewhere, as I was sure I had something lined up.
I spent the next 3-4 days just bummed out on the couch, I was seriously depressed. Eventually, I got back into the groove and ended up signing at my current position, which was not only an improvement over my old place and Financial Startup, the salary blew them both out of the water.
Just being able to bounce back and find something decent after the way he treated me could be considered ‘feel-good revenge’, but things inadvertently got so much better.
The company I work for now is a cross-industry provider. Basically, if you use computers or servers at your company, you can use our product.
Because of this, we have contacts at most Fortune 500 companies.
Two weeks ago, I bought my sales and the customer success teams lunch, something I do every other week because I want to keep my boys happy. I told them my story and said that I’d love to stick it to the CEO somehow, but I didn’t really have any way to.
They saw me as a big step up from the previous manager (who was a jerk), so when they asked me for Financial Startup’s name, I gave it to them.
What I just found out at lunch today blew me out of the water.
They approached every single financial customer we had and mentioned that we’d had a ‘bad experience’ with Financial Startup and were extremely unsatisfied with their behavior. Since we’ve had some of these customers for years, the relations were strong, and they took the sales/customer success guys at their word.
In the past two weeks, Financial Startup lost three major multi-year deals with large Fortune 500 companies, each in the seven-figure range. Next time, I’m taking them out to dinner instead of lunch, and dinner is going to include an open bar tab.
I may not have planned this revenge, but they carried it out for me, and I owe them.”
21. If I Can't Have Ice Cream, Then Nobody Else Can
“I went to two different middle schools, and the first one I went to is the one we’re talking about.
Surprisingly ritzy place, it was the only Private School I had ever had the privilege of being in, and all in all, it was one of the better experiences in my education. Let’s call it Mason’s Academy due to anonymity reasons or whatever (They closed that year, lucky me.) It was an everything school that had been converted from a really really old college once upon a time.
They had all three levels from Elementary to High school (With college credits yaaay) (Also it’s American if you can’t tell). Big huge rather lovely campus in the middle of Ft. Worth Texas (Yes we had Farmers Ed).
Anway this school had some of the best lunches I have ever eaten.
We had real vegetables, meat that didn’t look like a processed byproduct. WE HAD OSCAR MAYER HOT DOGS Y’ALL. And as a brat, I was reaaaaaly hungry cause Bio-Father wasn’t big on cooking or buying food or a lot of other important things but ANYWAY.
Our cafeteria was a simple setup. You came in, got in line right at the door, scootched down the line and got the food, then found a spot in the big dining hall and ate, then brought your tray to the return area.
There was always a real nice dude there who would take our trays (And remind people to throw the leftovers into the garbage can). Rinse repeat every day.
So about halfway through the school year the Dean (Yes we had a real Dean) held a school assembly and was like ‘Grades are at an all-time high so we gave y’all an ICE CREAM MACHINE.’
and as 13-year-old ginger in Texas, I was about to lose my mind because heck yea ice cream! The only catch was we had to eat all our food at lunch. A price I would gladly pay. Sadly, there was always one thing I could not (too full) or would not eat and thus I would grudgingly bring my tray to the return, scrape off the one piece of broccoli or whatever and stare longingly at the two-flavored soft serve machine and think ‘next time.’
Then comes one blisteringly hot day, when the luck gods smiled upon me. I finished all my work, went to lunch and y’all I had the best lunch ever. It was chicken fried steak and mashed red potatoes with butter and little fried veggie balls.
And I about wept tears of joy because finally, FINALLY, I could eat all my food and have ROOM for ice cream y’all! I cleared my tray and readied to receive the frozen blessing. However…
My progress did not go unnoticed by my peers (I had not been especially close with anyone as they always went out of their way to ignore me during lunch.
Ew gingers amirite?) And they took it upon themselves to ‘initiate’ me in the way of things. Roped in by the attention and piled on compliments (butt kiss much?) They explained to me that everyone in the class took turns being the ‘food mule’ and would take all the food everyone else ate so they could get ice cream.
The promise of repayment was made and before I could realize what had happened all of their food they didn’t feel like eating was on my plate. I kid you not I had a foot-tall mush pile of red potatoes, bits of chicken, veggie bits.
And I was livid because this meant I was not getting ice cream, and they were under no obligation to repay me as we weren’t actually friends. I also did not realize I could simply dump the food onto their table and be done with it so as I grouchily walked to the return I realized their fatal flaw.
I had ALL their food. More food than is served to one individual ever so it was clear I was ferrying food for other people. I bet they thought I’d make up some excuse but whooooooo boy did I get a humdinger of an idea.
I still grin at the thought to this day.
So I went to the tray return and waited for the nice man in the tray cleaning area to come out and he did and saw my mountain of food and got the most gobsmacked look on his face.
I set the tray in front of him and said, in the most innocent tone. ‘This isn’t my food, all the other kids gave it to me so they could get ice cream.’ I also said it loudly, then I turned around, grabbed my backpack, and left. Needless to say, this had repercussions but I dealt with it.
It’s not like I was popular anyhow.
So the next day the ice cream machine was gone, and two days later we had another assembly where the Dean recounted what had come to his attention and he went on about how disappointed he was in everyone for taking advantage of their goodwill and how he expected us to act more appropriately and blah blah blah.
No one ever had anymore treats (until the end of school, this place is getting shut down, screw everything and party bash) and I was less popular but they never crossed me again.”
20. Karen Translator Gets Fired
“I was working a job that had me operating in one of our offices overseas. We would have business expenses, and those receipts would be in the language of the country we were in obviously.
Those expenses were for things like printer ink, office equipment, cleaning services, marketing costs, all pretty standard stuff.
Well around this time we got a new VP over our region who worked out of head office in LA. This VP came up with this brilliant idea to hire a translator to translate all of the receipts to make sure we weren’t sneaking in nonsense.
Fair enough, however, the issue that arose was that we had to send our expenses to the translator who would translate the receipt then submit it for reimbursement. The problem was this translator was a real Karen type.
She would demand better scans of the receipts, oftentimes after we had already thrown it away.
She would argue if we really got the best deal on whatever we bought.
I remember in one transaction on about $200 of ink cartridges she asked me why I didn’t order online from this common website. To which I said they were out of stock at the time, and we needed the ink so we bought from a local store.
To which she said I was spending too much
To which I said it’s none of your concern, your job is to translate the receipt.
To which she said if I want her to submit my expenses I need to be nice to her.
To which I said she needs to learn her place, she’s a translator, not a VP that gets to instruct me what to do.
After this encounter she started being extra strict with my expenses, so one day I came in the office early to call her and try and work things out.
She basically told me that I screwed up by annoying her, and she expected my expense reports to be perfect or she wouldn’t submit them unless they were. I told her if she keeps this up she won’t have a job much longer.
She laughed and wished me well and hung up.
A few months later we had our annual meeting in LA and after the meeting, we were at a bar and I walked up to our VP and started up a conversation.
I steered the conversation to expenses and I asked him how much in monthly expenses did he typically reimburse us for in the country we worked out of. He said about $3,000 to $4,000. I acted surprised and asked ‘is that all?’ He goes ‘Yea.’
To clarify that $3,000 to $4,000 is the typical spend, and he says yea it rarely gets above $4,000.
So I ask him about how Karen our translator is doing, he says she’s doing a good job and I nod my head and I go ‘how much fraudulent expenses has she caught?’
It’s important to note, every employee that was submitting expenses was well paid, they’d be awfully stupid trying to skim some extra dollars via fraudulent expense reports.
He goes ‘What do you mean?’
I said ‘Well you hired her to ensure all the expenses you were reimbursing us for are legitimate right?
Her job is to translate them for you correct?’ he says it is, and I ask ‘So is it safe to presume you’ve done that to ensure people aren’t submitting BS expenses?’ he says ‘You could say that’.
I smile and ask
‘So how much in fraudulent expenses has she caught?’
He thinks for a moment and goes ‘I don’t think she has caught any.’
So I ask ‘And how much do we pay her?’
He says it depends on her workload but between $2,500-$3,00 a month. I smile and ask ‘Does it make sense to pay someone $3,000 a month to translate $3,000 in receipts?’
‘Well she ensures we aren’t getting fraudulent expenses,’ and I counter ‘Well you said she hasn’t counted any in the last 9 months, and the expenses are always between $3,000-$4,000 so as long as the expenses stay in that range wouldn’t it be safe to assume that the expenses are legitimate?
And couldn’t you bring on a translator on a contract basis if they get out of hand?’
He sees my point.
‘And imagine the cost savings, we would probably save over $40,000 a year that’s a good chunk of change isn’t it?’
The VP tries to defend his position ‘but she does a good job,’ and I counter ‘but you could frame this as you’ve saved us $40,000 a year and created a baseline to judge expenses by, cutting costs is always good for the bottom line and the end of the year bonuses isn’t it?’
FYI I knew that a major % of a VP comp package with the company had to do with the company’s margin at the end of the year, the bigger the margin, the bigger the bonus.
You can see the twinkle in his eye.
We carry on the rest of the night, a few weeks later we get an email from the VP saying that we are submitting all our expenses directly to the admin for reimbursement and that we have let go of Karen.”
19. Call Me A Thief? I'll Ruin Your Business
“Many years ago I worked at an electronics repair store that will not be named. It was the only one in our smallish town so everyone came there.
I worked my way up from lowly tech to store manager in roughly six months. A few months after I made store manager, one of the owners who we will call Dennis, insisted on bringing his nephew in as a part-time employee.
I initially didn’t have any issues with the kid, he had come to the store on multiple occasions and we would all sit around in the back and talk. So again, I had no issues with bringing him on part-time.
For a good month or two, the kid who we will call Kevin busted his behind, did everything right, he could solder an HDMI port on a PS4 in minutes (one less thing for me to do). Profits for the store were skyrocketing and things seemed rather fine from where I was standing, I was due to make a fairly large bonus that year as long as the store kept turning the amount it was turning.
I figured at this time, we could make Kevin our assistant manager, and I could go back to doing paperwork, inventory orders, and such and leave the running of things to him. Well, mistakes were definitely made. I had a bad habit of writing down my login pin because Dennis and his business partner Jay were idiots and wanted the pin to be 9347893247349 digits long.
These pins were required to access everything from sales data to the cash register and more. Anyway, around the time that I was turning over the majority of stuff to Kevin to do, I also started taking classes at the local university, so again, me being the idiot that I was would leave to go to class before coming back and finishing my shift. Dennis and Jay were fine with this as long as I left someone competent in charge.
Fast forward to the end of the month when accounts receivable numbers were run. And wouldn’t you know it, we were short. By thousands that month. I discussed everything with Dennis and Jay and we assumed it was a computer glitch.
There was no way after almost a year of working there that the numbers were off. I had never had this happen before. The next month we were once again off. It was around this time that Dennis and Jay came to me and started accusing me of stealing from them.
They pointed out all of the days that the numbers didn’t match up and saw that I was always closing that night.
When I tried to explain to them that I was in class on those days when the funds came up missing and suggested that they look at Kevin, Dennis blew his top.
He said how dare I accuse his nephew of anything, that it was my pin used to access the register, etc. Needless to say, I was fired, luckily they didn’t call the cops because, in Jay’s words, I had made them a boatload of income.
A couple of years had passed since I was working there, I graduated college with a degree in Business and had moved on with my life or so I thought. One night while I was out at the store, I heard from behind me ‘Yo thief!’ As I turn around I see Kevin and Dennis with grins on their faces.
I shrug it off and walk away continuing to hear their childish taunts. While in my car, I began to formulate a plan. I was going to crush these idiots no matter how long it took.
It took me two months of planning but finally, I figured that I would use my social engineering skills and my business savvy to completely crash their business.
I broke the HDMI port on my PS4 on purpose and took it in to have it fixed. Kevin and a girl that had started there a few weeks earlier were the only two workings.
Kevin: Hey welcome to such and such, oh, it’s you, thief, what can I help you with?
Me: First off you can stop calling me that, you and I both know it’s nonsense.
Kevin: Sorry dude, Dennis told me to call you that. I’m sorry how everything went down. What can I help you with?
Me: My HDMI port broke, do you guys still repair them?
Kevin: Yeah we still repair them, it’s $115.
Me: You guys went up in price? Good on you, so, how’s everything been since I left?
Kevin: You mean since you were fired for stealing?
Me: Yeah, whatever, we both know that’s nonsense.
I knew Kevin was trying to impress the girl, but, didn’t care at that minute. We’ll come back to her.
As I glanced around I saw that they had added some new things to the store, including Otterbox cases and such.
Me: Whoa, that’s new! How did you guys manage to get in with Otterbox?
Kevin: Oh we didn’t, they kept turning us down, so I found a Chinese distro. We get them for $5 and sell them for $30.
Me thinking to myself (This dude loves to blab, I need him to keep it up.)
Me: So, how much have the prices gone up on other things?
Kevin: Oh? quite a bit actually, you thought you were turning this store a profit, let me show you something.
He showed me their new price list which was insane on the pricing and also a BIG MISTAKE!!!!
REVENGE IS MINE!
I never believed in ripping anyone off, so I always convinced Dennis and Jay our pricing was fair. And that they didn’t need to charge a lot for repairs. Since they were the only game in town they had everyone by their throats.
After the work was finished I said goodbye and made sure to wave to the girl as I walked out. This is when my plan really went into motion, I had everything I needed to crush these idiots. All except a building, the next day I looked around for a location to begin to dismantle their monopolistic hold on the town.
As luck would have it a location right across the street from their store was coming up for rent. I quickly signed the lease and began to distribute flyers letting the town know about our coming grand opening. On the flyer I was offering 90% off the first repair, basically, I was doing the work for free just all they had to do was pay the part price.
Opening day comes and I have 60 people there to get repairs. Ranging from iPhone screen repairs to simple pc tune-ups. This went on like this for months, sure I was taking a loss on the building rent, but this being a smallish town, the rent was easily manageable.
After things started to settle down and business became steady, Dennis and Jay started losing massive business due to the new guy in town. (They still hadn’t realized it was me), Jane walked in as I was closing up shop, Jane if you recall was the girl who worked for Dennis that Kevin was trying to hit on, apparently, she had been let go that night and was looking for another job.
I immediately gave her the job, because she knew her stuff. I asked her what all happened over there, and she said everything has gone to trash and that the store has been losing tens of thousands since this place opened, and that she would have left sooner if she didn’t need the job.
Kevin apparently really liked her and couldn’t keep his hands to himself.
A month after Jane came in, Dennis and Jay came in to see who their new comp was. As they walked in I greeted them as I do any customer.
Me: Welcome to new guy electronic repair, how can I help you?
Dennis: Does the owner know he hired a thief?
Me: Oh, I’m sure he knows you’re full of nonsense on that one.
Dennis: Get me your manager you piece of work thief.
Me: Sir, I am the manager, how can I help you?
Dennis: Well is the owner here?
Me: Yes sir he is.
Dennis: Good then go get him, so that I can tell him what a thief you are.
Me: Sure, one minute.
I walk into the back and start talking to Jane, we both enjoy a laugh because she overheard this dude.
I walk out of the back and look at Dennis.
Me: How can I help you?
Dennis: You can stop playing games and get me your owner.
Me: Pointing to the sign behind me, yeah that’s me, how can I help you?
Dennis: You’re the one that has been taking all of our business!?!!?
Me: Yep, you called me a thief, when you knew all along it was your piece of work nephew that was stealing from you.
I made it my life’s mission to destroy you, the day you and Kevin called me a thief in the store. You couldn’t leave well enough alone.
Jay: You mean to tell me that this is HIS FAULT?
(Looking at Dennis.)
Me: Yep, and yours as well, you had a chance to stick up for me and didn’t. If I can’t assist you, gentlemen, with a repair or anything, I kindly ask that you leave my store.
Dennis: Screw you, you haven’t heard the end of us.
This quite literally cracked me up, the dude trying to talk tough. I laughed as they stormed out of my store. About this time, Jane came from out of the back area and dropped her phone.
I bent down to pick it up and noticed that it was the fake Otterboxes that the other store was selling.
I made an anonymous tip to Otterbox regarding them selling counterfeits. Boy, let me tell you, Otterbox doesn’t play.
Within a week the other store was raided, Kevin, Dennis, and Jay were all arrested for selling counterfeit items and were sued into bankruptcy.
As for Jane and I, well, we just welcomed our first child into the world and have been married for a year and a half.
If you’re reading this Kevin – Little thief, not only did I cost you and your uncle everything, but, I also took your woman.”
18. I Enjoyed Nurses' Week
“It was nurses’ week and I’d been on mandatory overtime for the past 13 weeks. I was burned out and completely over EVERYTHING when I was written up for ‘having a bad attitude’ and complaining about the food a rep brought in for us (who brings fish?!
It stinks up the entire break room!) I was so annoyed I was either going to quit on the spot or plot something magnificent. And so I plotted.
My hospital offers ‘parking tokens’ if you park off-site and ride a shuttle, thereby opening more spots for visitors and patients in the parking garages.
These tokens are worth $2 each and I’d been saving them for a while. I had near $300 worth of these things that could only be used at the gift shop, cafeteria, or employee store. I grabbed my satchel of tokens and headed to the gift shop to begin my master plan of revenge.
A half-hour later I was paged to the front desk. There was a big balloon bouquet there with a gift tag thanking me for always having the BEST ATTITUDE! I feigned surprise and snapped a selfie with my mystery gifts!
‘Who are they from?’ I was asked. ‘It doesn’t say!’ I replied. Lololol.
An hour later, more balloons and another ‘winning attitude’ thank you tag show up. And again an hour later, more! Every hour for the duration of my shift!
Imagine my surprise! All with beautiful little thank you tags proclaiming my amazing attitude during nurses’ week!”
17. Zipper Beat The Bullies
“When I was 5, this kid Jeff and his friends would bully and tease me while I walked home from kindergarten (it was the 80s).
One day they were posted up next to a drainage ditch next to the walking path, and as I walked up, they started talking loudly about throwing me in the ditch. Luckily there was another path that I could take, so I turned and started to walk away, but Jeff followed me and picked up a little rock and told me he had ‘rock power’ while looking like he was going to throw it at me.
I said ‘oh yeah?’ and threw my little windbreaker at him as hard as I could. This was very out of character for me, but I’d seriously had enough.
The zipper hit him in the eye.
He started crying, his friends started yelling at me, and I picked up my jacket and ran all the way home.
I felt bad about it for a long time that I’d hurt him, but as an adult, I feel pretty vindicated. I was a kindergarten girl up against four or five 1st and 2nd-grade boys who were threatening to throw me in a ditch and throw rocks at me and wouldn’t let me leave the situation.
They mostly left me alone after that.”
16. I Finally Stood Up To My Jerk Squad Leader
“I was working as an MP with great leadership when my squad leader (an SSG in charge of 12) got promoted to take over the entire platoon.
I was Private First Class at the time and coming up on my own promotion.
SGT Mike showed up. He had about 9 (this is important) years in, which was average at the time and he was working to obtain the points needed to get the promotion to the next rank of SSG.
My problems with him began when he would belittle and emasculate me to impress Genny.
We worked patrol duty on a little base. Just three on each shift. An SGT, and two soldiers.
For several weeks I worked the same shift with SGT Mike and Private Genny.
Genny was a friend and fellow squad member. Genny was her first name. I say Genny here because Mike really liked talking to Genny. So much so that despite her junior status SGT Mike called her Genny, and all of us males by rank, last name, or something derogatory.
The informal rule was the junior patrol cleaned the MP station. This was thrown out when Genny worked. SGT Mike would belittle me and have me do it while he and Genny drank coffee and gossiped.
This stung a bit because Genny and I were friends and I’d trained her when she arrived.
She confessed that she felt bad for me and the other guys. She thought it was messed up, but if all she had to do was flirt a bit to never clean she didn’t see the harm.
We had a big inspection coming up.
My former boss, the new platoon sergeant made it very clear to the lowest level soldier that any weapons not cleaned by the Friday before the inspection will be cleaned by the squad leaders alone the weekend before. Each squad had been given days assigned to clean, oddly Mike kept disappearing on our days.
A week away from the inspection I was promoted to Specialist. In rare circumstances with approval, a Specialist can serve as the patrol supervisor. Mike immediately tells me he’s taking away my three-day pass and I’m to work his night shift in his place Friday night.
He tells me to keep my mouth shut, embrace the opportunity and he will ensure everything is approved.
So I do. I cancel my Friday night plans. Spend an extra amount of time pressing my uniform and shining my boots and show up Friday evening 15 minutes early.
Genny and our other squad member Adam show up right on time. I’m excited to make the best of it.
We spend 20 minutes signing for gear and receiving briefs. The desk sergeant gives me the keys for the Arms room and we are about to make the five-minute walk to draw weapons when Mike roars into the parking lot in his sporty car.
He tells us there is no approval for me to work as the shift supervisor. He offers no apology or explanation. My weekend is ruined. My Friday night is ruined. It’s almost 10:00 there is nothing to salvage.
He begins screaming at me that some of my weapons are dirty.
He says all of us are going to spend the entire night shift in the arms room cleaning weapons.
He looks me in the eye as he snatches the keys from my hands and says ‘I know I was told I can’t make you, but you’re here now and you’re gonna stay and you’re gonna clean.’
He begins walking with Genny toward the arms room. I begin glumly walking behind Adam.
Mike is laughing with Genny about how he screwed up my night. I hear him say again ‘yeah, that Platoon Sergeant said I couldn’t make you guys clean on off days, but screw ’em.
He’ll keep his mouth shut.’
I stopped walking. I looked at Adam, ‘sorry bro, screw this guy’ and walked over to my car. Mike didn’t notice until he heard my engine start.
This was before cell phones.
I spent the weekend at a girl’s house off the post.
It felt good. My petty revenge.
But it caused an avalanche after I left.
The three of them, without my help, did spend the entire shift in the arms room.
This annoyed the desk sergeant who told our platoon sergeant.
It also annoyed Genny. She’d never had to clean so much. She couldn’t flirt her way out either, it was too much work and Mike was desperate.
When the platoon sergeant looked into why we weren’t cleaning on the days assigned we said Mike was always sneaking away.
Genny, with her unfamiliar calloused hands, angrily offered up Mike was actually sneaking off to sleep with Genny’s roommate, another private.
Mike was demoted from Sergeant to Specialist. The retention control point for a specialist is 8 years.
Mike had 9 years in service.
Specialist Mike was chaptered out of the Army.”
15. I May Have Just Bullied The Bully
“There was a junior on my bus when I was a freshman who was a stereotypical jock. He made fun of pretty much everybody smaller and younger than him on the bus. Now I was pretty quiet and he didn’t say much to me because I did not sit near him.
However, I was still close enough to hear him talk. So for about the first six months, I sat there, just listening, and waiting. I waited till I learned enough about this kid that I could easily dig into him.
So one day I decided to sit in the seat next to him. He doesn’t say anything at first but after a short while, he attempts to make fun of me. That’s when I just sort of snapped. I dug into him with everything I learned about him and I really cut him deep.
I won’t go into too many details but basically, he had an abusive dad and it was clear he was insecure about certain things so I held all that against him. He didn’t say a word to me the rest of the year.
(2-3 months) When he returned the next year he was a bit nicer but if he tried to seriously insult people I would shut him down. As satisfying as it was I think I got a little too personal and I feel bad I may have just bullied the bully.”
14. So You Love Honking, Huh? Meet Tiny
“My grandparents used to live on a small Island in NJ called Brigantine. They lived there but commuted to Philadelphia for work. One time after an afternoon in the city with some friends they were driving back home.
Since it was a 2 lane it wasn’t uncommon for there to be some traffic and they found themselves in bumper to bumper and at a complete standstill. No big deal, they’re with friends, my grandmother and her sister are in the back seat, and my grandfather and his sister-in-law’s husband ‘Tiny’.
Now, ‘Tiny’ was anything but. He was 6ft-5 and just shy of 300 lbs. This will come into play in a minute.
Anyway sitting in traffic, radio playing, wives talking, etc and the guy behind them starts laying on the horn.
WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA He said they both spun their heads around thinking something was happening like an ambulance needing to get through or something. Nope just Jerk behind them getting bent because traffic wasn’t moving.
He said they both just lifted their hands in a ‘where do you want us to go gesture’ and ignored Jerk.
Jerk was having none of this. He was important and had places to go and just lays on the horn again. WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Now he said they both just looked behind and my grandfather yelled back ‘enough there’s nowhere to go.’ This lasted about 30 seconds and there goes the horn and with extra anger WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.
WAAAAAA WAAAAAA WAAAAA WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Now Tiny got upset and said ‘ENOUGH’ and gets out of the car. The second Tiny got out of the car the horn stopped and the guy started just rolling his windows up. This didn’t deter Tiny.
He slowly walks back to Jerk’s car and proceeds to open the hood, You can’t do this anymore but back in the day, all the cars had external door handles. Tiny reached in the engine compartment and yanked the distributor cap and all the spark plug wires off the engine.
Yes, it shocked the crap out of him but he pulled it all off. Jerk’s car stalls and he closed the hood and tossed the distributor cap and wires onto Jerk’s windshield, closed the hood, and yelled ‘ENOUGH.’
He walked back to the car and sat down.
My grandfather said his wife and sister were speechless but Tiny just wiped his hands on a handkerchief he had and continued the conversation where they left off. About 10 minutes later Traffic clears up leaving Jerk still sitting in his car.”
13. High School Friend Used His Knowledge In Programming To Get Revenge
“In high school in the mid-’90s when pagers were still a thing, I had a genius buddy who was sort of a mad scientist. We both did a lot of programming and he and I had a lot of fun with computers.
He wrote a program called a War Dialer (yes, like in the movie ‘War Games’). His version would not only dial around town looking for modems to talk to, but it would also find strings of pager numbers to use for a nasty prank called a Pager Bomb.
He would take random pager numbers out of the want ads, and use the war dialer to find out how many numbers in that same exchange were part of the block leased by the pager company. He would find these large blocks of hundreds, even thousands of pagers.
Then whenever someone annoys him, he would set his War Dialer to dial every number in that block of pagers, and page every user in that block of numbers to the phone number of the house where the kid that annoyed him lived. Each of the pager users would get one random ‘wrong number’, while the target would get hundreds of random ‘I just got paged to this number’ phone calls.
Basically a human-powered DDoS attack on the target’s home phone.
One guy that picked on him in school got bombed so bad, his mom unplugged the phone from the wall because it wouldn’t stop ringing overnight. She plugged it back in the next day – still ringing.
Shut down their phone for three days.
They called the phone company, but my friend had set up a wireless transmitter tapped into a payphone nearby. He used the electronics to send the pulse codes that activate the payphone so that he could make free untraceable calls, so the phone company never figured out who it was (Did I mention the guy is a genius?)”
12. He Got Fired So He Tried To Ruin A School Trip
“I used to work at an old gold mine that had been designated a historic site. I taught people how to pan for gold, took people on tours through old mine tunnels, and ran the register at our little trashy gift shop (the job sucks, but that’s another story).
Because the place was historically significant and relatively close to a bunch of elementary schools, we had many, many field trips come in, but since we had a small staff and limited things to actually do, we had to limit the number of groups that could book on any particular day (the general rule was no more than 200 a day, but my manager liked to go over that because of money).
We also require groups to arrive at least an hour apart so we can set up a rotation through all 4 of the things we have to offer.
On this particular day, it was peak field trip season and we were pretty much booked above capacity.
Two schools were bringing their entire 4th grades, about 125-150 kids each, plus teachers and chaperones. One of the groups had actually booked relatively late but had been able to reserve a spot because another slightly larger group had canceled (this is important).
The first group was scheduled to show up at 10:00, so it was pretty typical when buses started rolling in at 9:50. What we didn’t expect was another set of buses showing up at 10:15, because the other group was booked for 11:00.
At first, we thought it was the 11:00 group showing up early (that happened depressingly often.
Teachers wouldn’t be able to book the time they wanted, so they would book for another time that day and show up when they’d originally wanted anyway, then pitch a fit when we told them they couldn’t do anything until the time they’d booked).
But no, the 11:00 group was a private school, and those were county buses. Then a teacher came in to register, saying she was from a school that wasn’t even on our schedule. A small amount of research (all the reservations were kept in a physical book, with canceled ones crossed out) revealed that they were the group that had canceled about a month ago.
It turned out that the teacher from that school who originally booked the trip had been fired around that time, and he had responded by calling to ‘cancel’ the field trip. Of course, he didn’t tell anybody that he’d done that, so they all showed up, all ready to learn about mining.
I can’t imagine what sort of bad b***d must have existed for this guy to decide that screwing over 100-something kids was his best course of revenge, but the joke’s on him because I gave those kids the best field trip they ever had.”
11. Humiliate Me In High School? Here, Have A Smoke
“One time a kid punched me in the face at my first 8th-grade dance because I said hello to his girl, then a few months later he tried to fight me out front of the school to show off to his other loser friends.
He ended up shoving me into the side of a truck, which caused me to fall onto the side-view mirror, and snap it off. I never once talked to this kid and barely knew his name, but he humiliated me twice now.
Fast forward a few years, we’re all at a house party, he comes up to me out of nowhere and asks me for a smoke. I think ‘Is this guy really asking ME for ANYTHING?’
So I told him no problem, but I had to run to my car to grab them, be right back.
I walked outside to the side of the house, stuck the filter tip of the smoke on my b******e, came back in, and watched him smoke the whole thing. About an hour later he’s throwing up all over this stupid muscle-headed preppy kid’s bathroom.
I thought it was my fault he was throwing up so bad so I honestly felt just a very small amount of bad, only to find out that he drank the water out of a goldfish bowl after being dared by his ex in a bid to do whatever she said and win her back.
At that point, I thought about offering her a smoke as well, but I think that couple has suffered enough. Nowadays they have no teeth, still live at home, unemployed, in a toxic ‘I’ll do anything for you’ kind of relationship.”
10. Bully's Group Ditched Him For Exam Answers
“So in my early teens, since my parents moved around a lot and my grades were suffering, I was sent to study at this boys boarding school. I was a short and skinny kid who talked too much and was kinda nerdy, naturally, I got picked on a lot.
A year later, things got really severe, guys would gang up on me to beat me, I couldn’t snitch cuz then the few people who talked to me would stop too. Things moved on to psychological bullying. Whenever I lost my mind and retaliated, I got beat up.
After going through a year of this, I slowly started picking up a few skills like talking your way out of things or manipulating people to deflect such things.
All through school, somehow I was always good at studies. There was this one guy who I blamed in particular for everything, let’s call him Prat, and he and most of my bullies had roll numbers close to mine so we sat close by.
When the final middle school exams came, I told all the guys in Prat’s group that I’d let them copy from me if nobody shows anything to Prat. Surprisingly, everybody agreed. He came to me one day before the exams asking me not to do this.
I walked away. He failed the exams.
I regret nothing.”
9. Force Us To Re-Hire You? No Can Do
“I was hired in a smartphone manufacturing plant as a mechanical engineer, this was my first job as an engineer, so I was kind of excited… until I met a technician.
We’ll call him Z-man. Z-man was a technician that was very angry that they ‘hired a b****y engineer’ instead of paying him more.
I want to make clear that the more I knew him, I found out that not only was he very lazy, but he had only two tricks that kept him here: he had one of the few laptops with the files to program the assembly robots and knew how to speak English well.
Addressing both points, he did not know how to program really, just to change some parameters.
Also, we are in Mexico, and there are different levels of English among technicians and engineers, and he obviously had the upper hand on most when speaking English, but he was downright terrible at writing in English and Spanish.
Most people struggled with his fluidity of speaking English, even against other engineers and educated people (he was deported from the US). He used it to intimidate other technicians who weren’t fluent in English and behaved like their supervisor (spoiler alert: he wasn’t).
He soon found out, however, that he couldn’t do the same with me because not only was I as fluent as him (if having a more ‘Mexicanized’ accent), but I also knew how to write better than him (not joking, he made awful mistakes in any language).
He was manipulative and lazy, but I could not do much about him because I was not his supervisor, even if I was above his rank and in the same department.
Also, his direct supervisor was not allowed to fire him.
There was even a legend about the previous manager firing him before the manager quit. ‘Mysteriously,’ all the data from the robots disappeared, and Z-man had a copy by ‘coincidence’ and was re-hired by the new manager. Even the previous manager told the new one he was making a ‘big mistake.’
Another thing I would like to add is that I’m not making justice on how much of a jerk he was.
He would call other departments to fix problems that were our own department issues, making enemies with these people.
Anyway, two years after dealing with this jerk, but not directly, his direct supervisor quit to move to another company, and by the same time he left, I put my two weeks notice for a better paying job. My direct manager said, “Hey OP, could you please be the supervisor of both teams for the next two weeks?’ I said, ‘Sure’ and hauled butt.
While my department was well behaved and needed little to no supervision (no joke, there would be times they would even pressure me because I taught them most technical stuff to make them independent), the department Z-man was in, was in complete anarchy.
But ironically with Z-man at the top, sending ‘weaklings’ to do his job. I even told him he should leave the lab if he wasn’t writing a report, complaining while complying (he spent too much time in there watching YouTube and delegating his own tasks).
Weirdly enough, my boss was tired of him and told Z-man to get a job in two weeks. He panicked and went to the department he made enemies with to plead them to hire him. They told him to do a test and submit the CV.
This is where we found out how much of a fraud he was: He made a CV with not only tons of grammar mistakes, but also he claimed he graduated from the University of Florida as an engineer, a HUGE lie that was easily testable.
Also, the test was leaked and in very simple engineering questions that probably middle schoolers could solve half of it. He failed with a 0.3%, not a 30%, A 0.3%!!!
The ‘enemy’ department still told our own, ‘Yeah, we’re going to hire him… Don’t worry about it.’ Little did we know, it was a setup for Z-man.
They exploited him to do any and every job. Ironically, even some that were related to our own department! He was exhausted, this was their way to exploit him to force him to quit.
Now, this is a part where I cannot prove anything, but the situation was pretty obvious: One of our machines stopped working, I was the only on-site engineer left at this point, and the technicians were struggling to make it work.
Since most of their experience was with mechanical issues, they were limited on what they could do.
We saw from a window Z-man laughing at the technicians not being able to make the machine work. Desperate, the technicians asked for my help.
Little did they know, I was a mechatronics engineer, meaning I had some electronics background. So I ask them to ask the electric engineering department for a multimeter for basic checks since they tested all of the mechanical issues and most of the electronics were not only sealed but also the machine was not the property of the company, so only basic repairs and diagnostics could be done.
That’s where I found out a presence inductive sensor was not ‘working.’ I will not go into a lot of detail, but these are very basic with most of the signal handled by a basic bipolar junction transistor, of which there are two types: NPN and PNP.
Today I cannot remember which type was which in this case, but for the sake of the story, let’s say the non-working machine had a PNP sensor.
I asked them to check another machine that was working to see what label the sensor had, and sure enough, it was an NPN sensor.
We swapped it, and it worked perfectly. Just as we were testing it, Z-man walked by the window to see the machine working, and his face was of panic and sadness. That’s when I knew that was his last-ditch effort to return to the department.
It seems that he was going to extort the department into rehiring him once again by sabotaging the machine. Just in case, I did a crash course training for the technicians to do basic electronic diagnostics, so they could handle the situation better.
That Friday was my last day, and two weeks after, I was contacted by a technician that I still am friends with after so many years: ‘Hey, dude! Z-man resigned! He couldn’t handle it anymore!’ ‘What? Did he have something wrong with him?!’ ‘Nah!
He just found out what working really meant.’
I can’t feel pity for him. He tried to make a living nightmare of his colleagues and my technicians. I did my best not only to protect them but to take a stand against him, and I would like to believe it worked.
It has been one of the highlights of my professional life, even if I cannot add it to my CV.”
8. I Have Proof That I Can Have Days Off
“I used to work at insert large retail chain here. I worked there for a year, and, had my schedules adjusted accordingly for my college classes.
The job was alright, and I was good at it.
One of my coworkers hated my guts but that’s another story for another time.
However, summer came along, and I needed to catch up in uni, so I enrolled in two courses.
MONTHS beforehand, I warned my manager that I needed the schedule changed AND I submitted the proper paperwork to HR for the adjustments.
All he needed to do was to log in to the computer and change the schedule for only 25 days. At most would take 5 or 6 minutes with their system.
It was the last week in May and the courses start in 7 days.
My schedule was supposed to be fixed two weeks ago.
His excuse? None. No explanation as to why. When I asked, he said, ‘It will be fixed.’
Three days before my summer courses start, (note these are 5-week classes, as in 15 hours a week or so of studying to make a decent grade) I go to HR and ask what can be done.
HR: ‘Wait for the schedule to be adjusted.’
Me: ‘It’s way too late for that now, the schedule is concrete. It was supposed to be done a long time ago and I submitted the paperwork in early April.
He’s had a month and two weeks to change it. And I incessantly reminded him to, ask my coworkers.’
HR: ‘There is nothing we can do, you can just call in, but you can only do that a certain amount of times before we terminate you.’ (In my case, it was 5 times for the next three months.)
Me: ‘Alright, I’ll figure something out.’
Here is where the revenge begins. We were understaffed in my department, only having 3 cashiers. I closed, and we stayed open pretty late. To top it off, 90% of the time, I closed by myself.
This did not affect the opening cashier, who was a great dude, but it DID spite the coworker who hated my guts for literally no reason. (Maybe because she wanted me to be her servant and I wouldn’t bow down to her.)
I made a few phone calls and did some digging through company policies that I had printed out, and I filed for an emergency leave of absence, citing education as the reason. HR immediately called me after I put the paperwork on their desk while the entire department was at lunch.
They told me I would have to call in every day before the paperwork was approved, but because I filed a leave of absence they couldn’t fire me. The best part? It got denied due to some error (that I may or may not have caused by filling my employee number incorrectly on the form somehow), and I had to resubmit it.
I called in every day (for the whole day), 10 minutes before my shift started for fifteen straight days. While my manager struggled to pull employees from other departments (AND give them a 30-minute crash course on how to run our specialized register every day), which annoyed his fellow managers and his boss.
Oh, by the way, to my knowledge, I’m still on leave. I have yet to be fired. Two years and counting.”
7. Friendly Boss Got Caught Up In Water Gun Fight
“When I was in high school in the late 1990s, I worked at a pretty nice golf course on the edge of town.
All of the staffers (myself included) were a very rowdy group of kids, all age 14-20, overseen by maybe a 28-year-old who we all loved as a boss. It was Caddy Shack times Van Wilder, and the shenanigans were real. We would set fire to boxes out in the cart shed to trigger the sprinklers, or hose down the garage floor so we could see who could do the most three sixties parking golf carts (you had to slide them in sideways to win).
There was a wall out of sight from the customers that we just threw things through to be destructive; rebar, tire irons, knives. We would over shock the pool to see if we could bleach our hair, or drive golf carts across greens to scare the geese away.
So anyway, for some reason one year we got into water gunfights. My friend Carter squirted me or hit me with a water balloon or something while I was wearing my nice golf clothes that we had to work in.
I wasn’t mad but I guess I was just a little too excitable at that age, maybe 16.
I ran out on the back porch and got the high-volume water hose we used to fill the horse troughs with beer and water for the nightly meal events.
I turned it on full blast, pinched the end over, then walked into the clubhouse and literally fire-hosed Carter and more or less the entire snack bar all at once. I then chased him down the hallway toward the golf shop, hosing him, the walls, the couches, the ugly paintings, the carpet, the ceiling, everything.
My boss, who was like 6’8″ tall and built like a drive-in movie screen, came running out of his office just in time to get a few splashes himself as Carter streaked by. I got fired on the spot. I walked out, turned the water off, walked back into my boss’s office, and said, ‘C’mon Bull, you don’t want to fire me.
I’ll be in tomorrow.’
The next day I walked in, clocked in, and got to work. Worked there another three or four years.”
6. Steal My Groceries? I'll Give You Some More
“So, several years ago when I was in university I lived in a shared house with 6 other girls. The kitchen was a shared space and we all had little colored stickers to mark our stuff with so that we wouldn’t use each other’s things by mistake.
I always made sure to have fresh fruit, cheese, and other things in my section and spent a little extra for those luxuries. I had hoped that everyone would respect each other’s things, but without fail, all of my stuff would slowly disappear without me eating/using it.
At first, I figured, whatever it’s just a bit of cheese I’ll let it go, but it got to the point where my stuff would be gone by the end of the week after just buying it. I did talk to all of them and asked politely to not eat my stuff without asking unless they wanted to go half/half on the cost. It didn’t stop, so I decided that if they were going to eat my stuff and not care, then I’d get payback in my own way.
It started out pretty vanilla, the usual licking stuff/dropping it in the garbage, and when that didn’t do it for me I started getting creative.
I did some messed up stuff but the worst of it is was putting a bunch of dried and dead bugs into a chip dip and mixing it in, and the one I feel the most guilty about was having my partner at the time put some of his bodily fluids into my bottle of ranch.
Sure enough, within 4-5 days the bottle was nearly gone. They never found out about any of it. I felt justified in my actions at the time but when I look back it was definitely wrong, and I could have gotten someone sick.
Definitely not something I’m proud of and would handle my frustration differently if I could go back and do things over.”
5. Fiancee Betrayed Me With Our Mutual Friend...And I Didn't Take It Well
“About eight years ago now, I had a fiancée who had moved from Wales to Scotland to be with me.
She wasn’t very happy at first, but I thought it was just nerves about being away from home, first time living with a partner, etc.
Well, she goes back to Wales about once a month, staying for a weekend at a time.
I trust her, nothing suspicious about that.
Cut to a few months later. We’ve been living together for about six months, few teething problems – a couple of arguments here and there – but on the whole, I thought we were very happy together.
Well.
One night we go out and get blazing wasted (as first-year uni students are want to do). Come back to the flat, she passes out. I’m eating my takeaway when my phone buzzes.
I check the text, and see some random guy saying ‘Babe, did you get home alright?
Have you told him yet?’
‘Haha!’ thinks wasted me, ‘Some jerk has texted the wrong number!’
And then I notice the case on the phone. I never had a pink case. Fiancée did though…
It took a few minutes for the realization to penetrate my wasted stupor, but when it did… Hoo boy.
I read through all the messages. She’d been sleeping with a mutual friend of ours back in Wales, every time she went down there. A full-blown affair, and that night, she was supposed to tell me everything, and end things with me so she could move back to Wales and be with him.
Have you ever been so angry a cold haze descends on you? I’ve heard of the red mist, but those texts took me to another, altogether more terrifying level of anger.
I considered my options and decided that texting him was the best option going forward.
Which would have been bad enough, except…
Except this mutual friend of ours had recently been undergoing treatment for cancer. And in the cold fury that possessed me, I knew exactly what I had to say.
I can’t remember the exact body of the texts now.
But it essentially boiled down to ‘You’re a jerk. You used your condition to emotionally blackmail her into being with you, and if anyone deserves to have cancer, it’s you.’
Needless to say, the next morning, those texts triggered what is perhaps the most volatile breakup I have ever endured. Full-on screaming matches, her alternating between calling me despicable for what I said, and apologizing profusely for betraying me.
It… was a strange time.
The ‘other guy’ took it real hard. He spiraled into a depression, became real controlling of her (she moved back to Wales and moved straight in with him). I heard from other mutual friends that their relationship was really strained by the whole thing, because he couldn’t shake the thought that what I’d said in a wasted rage was, even in some way, true.
Anyway. He survived, and they have three kids together, and they seem happy.”
4. My Revenge Made Him Think He Was Crazy
“My friend was being a jerk to me one night. So I grab a dry erase marker from the hostess and go out to his white creeper van (no windows, beat up, work van) and write on the passenger side in big block letters ‘FREE CANDY’.
He drove around for a week because I knew his passenger side door didn’t work so he never even looked at that side.
He got me back by putting a for-sale sign on my boat at the marina with my number and a super low price.
Finally convinced someone to take the sign-off.
Another funny story about that van…We also later found out that he left the key in the ignition because it was different than the door key, so he’d lock the doors and leave the key.
We also found out my neighbor’s Ford key would open his doors… so I’d be out drinking with him and text my neighbor, and he’d come to move his van. Not completely obvious moved, but enough that he’d have to stop and look and walk around a bit.
He swore I was messing with him but one day I wasn’t out of his sight and it happened. We let him think he was losing his mind for a couple of months before telling him. Wasn’t even mad, just relieved he wasn’t crazy.”
3. Refuse Late Delivery? You'll Get Your Egg Roll Anyway
“I used to deliver Chinese food for this sketchy place back home, they didn’t give a crap what you did.
Either way, this lady placed an order and it was one of my first free deliveries of the day. When she ordered she specified that she wanted exactly 1 egg roll, not a whole order. Pretty unusual, and she was being a jerk about it, getting angry with the waitress on the phone and whatnot.
So either way, her food is ready and I drive straight to her place, which happens to be a duplex.
I knock on the door and nobody answers, knock a few more times and her neighbor comes out. She opens with ‘What do you want?’ And I explain I have food for her neighbor, so she just straight up opens her door, and walks up the stairs, I hear a little bit of arguing and she comes back down and says ‘she won’t pay because you took too long.’ I drove there first thing from the restaurant on a slow day I probably got there within 20 mins of ordering, it wasn’t late.
After more arguing, she simply refused to talk to me.
So I got in my car and started to drive away, but before I left I got out, grabbed that witch’s egg roll, and threw it as hard as I could.
Made a big juicy splat of cabbage and oil on her door, super nasty. She peeked out the door as I sped off and I flipped her off. Definitely a bad move on my part but I never got caught so screw it.”
2. I Rebelled Against My Dad As Revenge
“My dad was a real control freak and was obsessed with us kids being disciplined, undistracted, and obedient so we could have good lives. He felt strongly enough about all this that he’d fly into a rage every few days when I inevitably let the ball drop on any which certain issue.
So I took my petty revenge by purposely messing up, and in ways that would really grind his gears. This would make him even more strained which would make my petty revenge even more driven. Over time it began to be very ugly.
This might seem like an odd way of dealing with things, but when you’re a shy kid who doesn’t have a voice or power in your life then you’ll tend to find other ways of making yourself heard.
The revenge began to get out of hand though.
It started to appear in more ways, more often. My dad cared about me and I loved him, but I also found myself vehemently hating him. In the moments immediately after his more unreasonable or violent outbursts, in quiet cold rage and hurt of my own, I’d make my move.
I remember slightly opening a tap to drip overnight onto a large pile of papers placed underneath he’d printed for his business. I killed his best plants he’d grown in our garden, and a hundred more things. I began to take my cold silent rage out on two other poor kids at school, and also in many other ways.
And of course on myself. And skipping forwards a good few horrible years is the biggest act of revenge of the lot.
What I chose to do with my life, once I became free of my dad’s control. I chose to go against everything that he had taught me and wanted for me.
I abandoned my childhood dreams and passions and gave up my education, my opportunities, and my health. I de-railed my own train hard and left it de-railed, a statement to the man who so wanted to see that train flourish and prosper.
Why? Because that’s how I found I could speak. That’s how I could have some kind of control over my life. Because that’s how I felt.
Writing this out made me quite emotional. I don’t hate my dad now, I recognize that his flaws and mistakes are remnants of a childhood that was much more of a struggle than mine.
But, now I’m just a stranded, lost soul. Just don’t be a mess-up to your kids.”
1. I Got My Revenge On The Bees
“When I was young, there was always (for years) a hole in the back wall of our garage where bees were always flying in and out.
I’d been stung several times over the years and I guess I got fed up with it. One day I decided it was a good idea to start throwing rocks at the hole, purely from anger at the bees(?).
Well, as you can guess, the bees weren’t too happy about my activity and decided to put an end to it and came after me.
An hour later I was in the ER in anaphylactic shock from the stings (I am now allergic to bee venom).
To set the stage a bit more, our garage wasn’t attached to the house and was no longer used for cars.
My dad had converted it to a lounge, complete with rotating mirrored multi-level booze shelf/bar, pool table, shuffleboard table, couches, fully carpeted, nice sound system, nice pine paneling – full-on 70s (yes, this was in the 70s) look.
Anyway, after coming home from the hospital 2 days later, I got it in my head that I wanted revenge on the bees.
What could possibly go wrong? This was towards the end of summer/early fall, and we had an 80+ foot eucalyptus tree that grew next to the garage near the hole, and as was typical for the time of year, the ground was covered with eucalyptus leaves.
I apparently decided it would be a good idea to pile leaves against the garage wall and smoke them out. It took me several hours to gather up the leaves, but eventually, I got the pile up to the hole (which was about 5 feet from the ground) and started throwing lit matches at it.
The resulting fire not only could be seen for miles as it engulfed the 80+ foot tree but the garage was decimated. The external siding of the rear wall was nearly completely ashed, and the roof was pretty messed up as well, but the interior was completely trashed by smoke damage and then by the firefighting efforts.
HUNDREDS of bottles of booze, pool table, shuffleboard, couches, carpet, paneling – everything. And worse than just normal smoke, this was burnt honey. The smell lingered for years.
When the firefighters ripped open the wall to ensure no embers were still burning, they found the remnants of the hive.
It was floor to ceiling, 7 studs wide. Thousands of dead bees.
The overall damage wasn’t covered by my parents’ insurance because the fire was intentionally set. Needless to say, I didn’t see too much daylight after that for quite some time…”
