People Spill Their Calamitous Revenge Stories
20. Here's A List Of All The Nicknames You Used To Call Me
“I use to get bullied in high school quite often.
But the worst was when a group of grade 9 guys started picking on me (I was in grade 11). I was super skinny, flat-chested, and had glasses, braces, acne, and all the wrong clothes. They would constantly corner me in the halls and call me names, throw food at me in the cafeteria and basically make my life miserable on a daily basis.
Fast forward to me at 23.
I’m at a bar in my hometown (I had moved away) and I had since lost the braces, grew some b***s, my skin cleared up, I had generally blossomed! One of my former bullies approaches and starts chatting me up, telling me I’m looking real good and all that. At first, I figure he’s being nice to make up for the trouble he put me through in high school.
Then I realize he has no idea who I am. Doesn’t recognize me at all.
So he asks me my name and I run off a list of all the names he and his cronies used to call me. He looks puzzled and stunned and I say ‘guess it’s been a while since high school huh Jason?’ He just stammers and laughs and says ‘d**n, you’ve really changed since then.’ I look him up and down disapprovingly and say ‘you sure haven’t’ and walk away.”
19. He Didn't Know I Have Connections With Other Companies He'll Apply To
“I’ve spent a good portion of my life in game dev. I graduated high school a year early and went straight to work for one of the major local arcade/console developers.
About 7 years go by I joined the military for some reason, and I returned to my hometown after getting out.
All of my old co-workers/friends still worked for the main game dev company in the area, and I’m back in the industry.
As a senior dev, I’m one of the big interviewers on my team. We get one guy coming in for an interview who was a bully to me from about… 4th grade? Up through high school. I was beaten up, made fun of for being a nerd, etc. I’d like to say I didn’t realize it was going to be him, but I’ll never forget the name, the face, etc.
Anyways, the interview is for a junior dev position, and I’d already discussed with the other guys his personality and what I remembered. If he seemed the same way, then we wouldn’t hire him: a bad personality fit on a coding team is worse than someone who doesn’t know how to program.
So he shows up and what are the first words out of his mouth when he sees me (in front of everyone else)?
‘OP? What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be doing some stupid stuff with NASA or something.’ I’m pretty sure he thought I was interviewing for the same job because he was acting like I was competition throughout the interview.
I was even asking questions like ‘this is the problem, how would you go about handling it?’ He still wasn’t getting it.
His answer was, ‘Well I don’t know how you said you’d do it, but I’d _______.’
So the interview is ending early. He didn’t even do well enough for us to take him to lunch and see how he did during the ‘Let’s hang out and talk about the things we like to do.’ All the other guys/girls in the room looked at me and I said, ‘Alright.
Thanks for coming up for an interview GuyWhoWasABullyToNerds, but I just don’t think you’re the kind of material we want on this dev team. Go out, get some experience, and we’ll see if we can work something out in the future.’
His eyes get wide and he goes slack-jawed. ‘Wait wait wait’ and suddenly the lightbulb turns on.
He goes into a defensive, ‘You’ve got to hire me.
I spent 6 years in college for this,’ (for a 4-year degree, by the way, not anything beyond). It went on like that for a few moments, and then he started getting aggressive. ‘Well, what are you doing here? What experience do you have?’
I simply said, ‘Remember when I got out of high school early? Well, I’ve been doing this, oh, and a brief stint in crypto/intel for the military.
That was some good stuff, but my guys here missed me. So I had to come back for my homies.’
Then he went through a stage of entitlement. Blah blah, You have to hire me I have a degree in blah and you can’t do this to me, blah blah.
I ask him to leave, and we’re walking him out. As he’s leaving he tells me to go away, to which I say ‘Well best of luck to you.
You’d be surprised who knows me, by the way.’
Well, in the time I was in the Navy some former co-workers relocated and started working at other companies. When he applied to them, they noticed he was from my hometown and my age, so I was asked if I knew anything about him.
To the best of my knowledge, he was rejected as not being good enough at Midway, High Voltage, EA (LA and Montreal), Ubisoft, A2M, Blizzard, and Sony Online Entertainment.
I recently heard through a friend of a friend via social media that he’s teaching at an Inuit school somewhere in northern Canada.
Telling this story fills me with jollies. He was one of the few people that really made me wish I had a doomsday device when I was younger.”
18. Mixed Martial Arts Became My Channel
“Growing up I was always in sports. Football and baseball like the majority of young boys but my favorites were boxing and wrestling. When MMA became available to me I jumped at the opportunity. By high school, I had been training for about 3 years. We had a linebacker named Nathan. Typical jock jerk to everyone smaller, would try to bro it up with people he thought were his equal and was a total jerk to every girl he would go out with.
His favorite pastime, as far as I could tell, was punching the underclassmen and creepily hitting on the freshman girls when we became seniors. He was kicked off the football team by the coaches for a laundry list of reasons. Thus giving him more free time to torment the physically weaker guys. That is until one day he walked into our MMA gym to learn ‘UFC’.
After a few weeks, his athletic ability was enough to where our trainer put him in against some of the vets. Mostly just combos against focus mitts and Thai pads. He wasn’t bad but very sloppy and tried to make every punch a knockout shot. He tried to talk to me a few times but I feigned exhaustion so I wouldn’t have to speak much.
A month goes by and we get paired up as sparring partners. Full MMA rules, full contact, and 3 rounds of 3 minutes each. Time to make him feel what it’s like being the frail one. I toyed with him at first. Landing crisp jabs to his eyes while following up with round kicks to his leg. He would later walk out of the gym hobbling on his only good leg left to him.
Round two starts and I decide to take him down. He spends the next three minutes off his back with me making him eat leather.
By this time he is done. All the fight is out of him and he just spits out his mouthpiece in defeat. MMA/muay Thai session is over and he leaves before the jujitsu session can begin. My trainer yells at me for going too rough on him until I tell him why.
He still chews me out after Nathan quit the gym for the amount he could’ve made off of another potential long-term student. Like Aldo Raine, I’ve been chewed out before. It was worth it. My roommate a few years later was one of his many victims and while what I did wouldn’t make a difference, we both felt like at least some sort of justice/karma got him back.”
17. I'll Use Your Obsession With Golf To Get Revenge
“I was a young regional sales manager for a major branded consumer product.
I covered the grocery class of trade in 11 Western States. My division worked out of Chicago, and I had a home office on the West coast. I had made my reputation by typically making my quota and keeping costs within budget. I would get re-assigned to struggling markets and more often than not, I would usually make my sales number. Nothing too fancy, I just figured where the best opportunities were and concentrated on them.
In those days, we had something called ‘Market Development Funds’ MDF or as we called it ‘Making Days Fun’ in the time before such things were deemed illegal, it was funds we could literally use for almost anything you could imagine: wining and dining, sending buyers to the Super Bowl, taking them on ‘market research trips’ (I once took 6 honcho’s for a weekend of fishing in Mexico).
As long as you had the receipts and your boss knew (except in cases where they specifically asked not to know) we were free to spend as we saw fit. This was old-school Mad Men-style slush funds. All tax-deductible!
Typically the MDF fund was 2% of your total annual gross sales and was ‘use-it-or-lose-it’, meaning it had to be spent because it wouldn’t roll over. I always had some leftovers.
As a team player I would let my boss, Sasquatch know, so he could use it. No big deal.
Towards the end of the year, my weekly FedEx pack from the company started including sign-offs for payments to a supplier I had never heard of before, what was weird is they were for a demo company that wasn’t one of my regional suppliers (if you have ever been offered a sample or a coupon in a grocery store, that was a demo company).
I called the broker/agent in that market and learned that they had never used the company (or even heard of them).
I finally figured out that they were from Sasquatch and that he had thrown them in with my other sign-offs. I called him and asked if he knew what they were. He said that they should be assigned to my MDF and not to worry about them.
This was a little unusual because demos would normally be taken out of other monies or come down from marketing. Whatever, I signed off on them.
About 3 months later I was called into HQ for a meeting where I was told I was being transferred to a market that I had never worked before and would be required to relocate. At the time, my wife was pregnant and we just started an extensive remodel on our newly purchased house.
The company had some relocation benefits, but it was just too hectic to pull up roots and move to the Southeast. I declined the offer and was told that I could look for another job within the company or receive a severance package. I wound up taking the severance.
The truth comes to light.
Several months later, one of my ex co-workers told me that my region had been taken over by one of Sasquatch’s past work associates who he managed to get hired in my spot and that the region was tanking.
Badly. Nothing made sense. Why was I terminated and then replaced by someone who lived in another city and who couldn’t do the job?
I started to think in my naivety that I may have put a target on my back. After some research and digging (which was much harder before the internet) I learned that the ‘demo company’ billing the MDF, was based in my ex-boss’s previous city and was just a PO Box, a telephone, and a DBA registered by… THE NEW PERSON IN MY JOB (I later found out it was his significant other/mistress).
I was livid. Like most people, I tend to plan revenge in my head, but never really go through with it. Most of the time, it’s a coping mechanism and not very useful in moving on past being wronged. But, this was so egregious, so uncalled for, and so disruptive to my life that I felt I HAD to get even.
My plan evolved to take this guy down.
Whatever the time it took. Whatever the cost. I was going to get this idiot. I may have been able to rat him out to the company, but they might have dismissed my complaint as coming from a disgruntled ex-employee with an ax to grind.
I decided that I was going to approach the guy as a phony recruiter, not just a guy collecting resumes, but as a RETAINED CORPORATE HEADHUNTER, someone paid to onboard people for big jobs.
I had spent a year early in my career working for a super exclusive headhunting firm and knew exactly what transpired in the process. My subterfuge required international telexes, phony letterhead, faking English accents, and overseas friends to do my bidding.
Sasquatch was obsessed with expensive watches and golf (he played regularly and watched pro golf both on TV and live). He would incessantly chatter on about both subjects.
To bait him, I arranged for him to be approached for an executive position with a major Swiss watch company for a position tied to pro golf (and other swanky sports) sponsorships and included a shopping list of benefits and perquisites. The job would require hobnobbing with major sports organizers and flying around the world (1st Class, natch). It was a job he could only dream of.
In the slow and methodical long con, I strung him along until the time was right to ‘close’ with an offer. The only catch was that he had to report to Switzerland for the final offer and onboarding. I deliberately scheduled it for the week of the old job’s division meetings and reporting. They were mandatory and impossible to miss without raising red flags. Sasquatch was worried that his absence would be impossible to cover (especially if he was out of the country).
The ‘headhunting’ firm said they could move the appointment up a few days so that he would be able to attend his meeting, but that he would need to purchase an unrestricted Business Class seat and make his hotel reservations. ‘Save your receipts!’ and the ‘watch company’ will reimburse you he was told.
Sasquatch showed up at his swanky hotel suite (using his credit card for the $$$$ room) and promptly received a note from the watch company that his appointment had to be rescheduled for the following Monday because of a major corporate crisis.
Sasquatch called the phony recruiter in a panic about missing the corporate meetings back in the States, it was agreed that he would call in sick and that whatever happened with the old job, he was heading to much greener fairways (hehehehe). Enjoy your weekend in Europe, by Monday you’ll be in your dream job…
While Sasquatch was cooling his jets in Europe, I nonchalantly called his boss, the President of the division, and casually asked for a reference on Sasquatch’s work ethic and dates of employment.
You’d be surprised how often this ‘mistake’ happens. The President, to his credit, didn’t tip his hand or act very surprised by the call, but like a good corporate wonk, he referred me to human resources. I let it slip that he was in Europe finalizing his new job and that he’d already given the company notice. My bad.
Eventually, I was able to put together the aftermath from old co-workers and other people in the trade (who did not know I was the revenge ninja).
When Monday came and went, Sasquatch must have been apoplectic (this is to be assumed since we had cut all communications to let him twist in the wind) because we received at least 20 calls to the exchange and multiple faxes. Sasquatch hung around the hotel for a day or two and then finally decided to leave for home. I assume at some point he may have contacted the watch company, but I never confirmed it.
When he finally got home he found his office had been packed up and left with his wife. An HR person met him off-site to give him his severance and retrieve the car and other company property.
I heard his wife left him sometime later and his mistress was fired for theft.
I figure he spent at least 10K on travel and hotel.
I wish I could say I tipped my hand and told Sasquatch that I was the author of his demise, but it really served no purpose and in theory, may have exposed me to some retribution of my own.
By my moral lodestar, I got even with a thief who was content to steal and take my livelihood.”
16. I Created My Own Version Of The Brochure
“Many years ago, my (now ex) wife and I decided to upgrade from the small single-story home we were in, and find something with more space for us to spread out.
We had her late teen son living with us, our three Rottweilers, plus I needed a dedicated study for my work (I’m in technology, and often worked from home).
After months of searching, we found our dream home. Beautiful, two-story, four-bedroom plus study, with huge amounts of space everywhere. Seriously huge. The laundry was bigger than my bedroom growing up.
The quality of everything was amazing – square-set walls (no cornices), polished Tassie oak flooring, floor to (high) ceiling windows in the living areas, and two walls comprising commercial-grade bistro doors that opened up an entire corner of the house onto the covered, outdoor entertaining area.
The standard of the build was no surprise – this was a display home up until it landed on the market. We were to be the first people to live in it.
I’m going to gloss over months of details and pain, but we had problems with the place from day two. Literally.
On night two, the plumbing under the en-suite shower gave out and leaked through the kitchen ceiling underneath it.
A couple of weeks later during a monster storm, three of the light fixtures upstairs started leaking water. A month later, we noticed rust starting to show through the rendering on the corners of the house. There were heaps of smallish, easy-to-fix problems, but the kicker was that the balcony adjoining the master bedroom, at the front of the house, actually started to sag down.
To the point that it was unsafe to go out there, due to the risk of collapse.
We were most amenable and nice through most of this. The vendor (also the builder, of course) was a small business, and we had no interest in making his life any more difficult than it already was for a small business owner. But, conversely, we were pouring a lot of our hard-earned income into the mortgage, and we wanted what we paid for.
But, for his reasons, the builder just kept making it difficult to get things fixed. There was a seemingly endless list of excuses for not turning up at agreed times; a non-stop torrent of blame directed at his sub-contractors; and just plain jerk behavior, like dodging our calls and not responding to our emails.
Of course, we started proceedings with our state’s consumer affairs department.
After all, we were entitled to a statutory seven-year warranty on a new home. But that process takes time, Time throughout which we were forced to endure issues like water leaks, a dangerous balcony we couldn’t use, and a whole host of other issues that meant we weren’t enjoying our home.
There shouldn’t have been any dispute about his responsibility to fix these problems – he just chose to be a jerk about it, and make us go through the government process, presumably thinking we would give up before he was forced to do anything.
At around the same time, we started getting the occasional knock at the door, only to open it and find a couple standing there with a brochure in their hands, and our house pictured on the front. The first few of these conversations ended with us politely explaining that this was no longer a display house – it was our home. Without exception, they all apologized profusely and went away.
After a month or so of this, I started to wonder: how was it that people still thought our house was a display home? I went looking, and discovered that the builder’s website STILL had our address listed for display!
Despite repeated calls and emails, they steadfastly refused to remove our address from their website. This irritated me – these people would often come knocking on weekends, because that’s when people go house shopping, right?
But our pleas for the builder to update his site were simply ignored.
Enough was enough. An idea had formed. Did I mention I was in technology?
The first thing I did was wash out their website, and set about the task of creating my version of it, using their exact look and feel. I highlighted every single problem we’d found with the place. Every glamour shot was replaced with shots of the same feature, but showing the problems we had (rust showing through the rendering, water leaking from the light fixtures, close-ups of the sagging balcony, etc).
You get the idea.
By the time I was done, I had what I felt was the perfect alternate version of their site. One that highlighted every single defect in the home, as well as calling out all the problems we had in dealing with the builder.
I even included ‘testimonials’ that were simply copies of the nonsense emails and texts we received from the builder, avoiding his responsibilities and making lame excuses for not fixing our problems. The headline ‘testimonial’ was the one where he responded with ‘So just don’t go out onto the balcony’ when I pointed out the clear safety risk it represented.
After getting a lawyer friend to check through each page to make sure I wasn’t opening myself up to some form of legal action (he helped me change a few sections, chuckling the whole time), I put the site up for hosting on some cheap and cheerful hosting provider Google told me about (off-shore, of course). I also registered a close-but-not-close-enough-to-be-sued domain name to reach it.
The next step was to create some actual collateral for the execution of my plan. After all, there was no point going to all this effort unless I was actually able to direct people to the ‘builder’s website’. So, I took a copy of the brochure for our house (that the builder had conveniently left a few of behind in one of the kitchen drawers) and set about creating my version of it.
Similar principles as the website – no contact information, except the website address. My website address.
By this time, I’d made good friends with a few of my neighbors, and we’d taken to sharing a beer or two most nights on our front lawns. And wouldn’t you know it? One of them was a manager for a local print shop! Given they already knew what we’d been through with the builder, he took very little convincing to print off a run of my brochure for me, on beautiful paper stock, nice and glossy.
Professional. I think it cost me half a dozen drinks.
Then came the final step in my plan. I waited. I waited for eager couples to turn up on my doorstep, eyes wide open in wonder at the beauty of the home they were going to pay the builder for their very own copy of.
For the next six months or so, whenever one of these couples would turn up and knock on my door and explain their purpose, I’d let them know that this model home was selling so quickly, that the builder had asked if I could hand out his updated brochure, so potential buyers could go online and look up whatever the current display home address was.
I don’t know how many brochures I handed out – of the 100 my neighbor printed for me, I probably only had two or three dozen left, but I know I also handed a bunch out to mates so they could have a laugh. I’d estimate close to 40 prospective buyers got a copy of my brochure. And I reckon at least 15-20 of those came back to thank me for warning them.
A few of them had already signed conditional contracts and managed to get out of them one way or another.
I don’t know what happened to that builder in the end. I split up with the missus not too long after and, she sold the place not too long after that.
At the time of writing this, the builder’s website is gone. The domain still appears to be registered in the company’s name, and their state business registration still appears to be active.
As best I can tell, he’s no longer at the last known address for the company, and I can’t find any mention of the company online that isn’t at least six years old.
Hopefully, the idiot is out of business now, and hopefully the few dozen people I helped sidestep the pain of dealing with him were the beginning of the end of his trashy little enterprise.”
15. The Keys Are In The Box
“My father was a welder at a pulp and paper mill on maintenance with a union.
There were around 500 people who worked here at the time. (mid to late ’80s) On my dad’s crew, there was a man they called ‘squirrel’ because he would take anything small enough to carry and take it home. Some of the things were specialized tools made for a certain machine and they would have to be ordered in again at the company’s expense.
I guess there wasn’t much the mill could do because somehow the union backed him.
It wasn’t long before my father’s tools started going missing. He knew where to look and found them in Squirrel’s toolbox and some scattered on his workbench. Squirrel was an average-sized man. Around 5’9 to 5’10 but my father was a huge man standing at 6’5 and around 250 pounds so Squirrel didn’t say a word. He was too scared to.
My father reported this to the union rep and the main office and was told they will investigate.
Squirrel gave a one-week paid suspension while the investigation went on. They found many of the missing things in his locker, lunch box, toolbox, etc. Somehow he got the union to back him again and was allowed to come back to work at the end of his suspension.
My father grabbed his mobile welder and went into Squirrel’s area and welded together a giant metal box.
He took everything he could identify as Squirrels and put it in the box and welded a top on it. He said he used 5/8 stainless to make it out. He then got the help of one of his work buddies to lift the box and dad welded it to the bottom of the I-beam on the ceiling. About 20 feet in the air.
The day Squirrel came back he was looking for all his things but couldn’t find them at all.
He asked everyone he could but no one said a word except, ‘I take care of my tools. Maybe you should take better care of yours.’ This went on for a couple of hours until Squirrel went into the main office to complain saying someone stole everything of his. The shop steward and Squirrel walked into the maintenance shop to ask the people in there where his things were.
Dad stood up and walked up close, and knowing him he was towering over Squirrel and said something along the lines of ‘Squirrels like to climb to store their stuff. Are you sure you didn’t climb the I-beam and put your stuff up there?’
I guess the look of ‘oh no’ on the shop steward’s face was almost too good but the look of pure horror on Squirrel’s face was my dad’s favorite part of this story.
He would laugh just as hard at every telling when he got to this part. Squirrel went into his work area and looked up. He saw the box up there. He tried to get anyone’s help to get it down but everyone seemed to have ‘important’ things to do and can’t at the moment. Squirrel took a day and a half working alone to get his things from the box and to remove the box from where it was welded.
My father said not a thing ever went missing again and Squirrel worked there another 10 years or more until the mill was shut down. I can say I believe him because one night staying at his place I got wasted and was thinking about going home. He went to the underground room and made a little box and welded my keys in it. I got them back the next day.
I miss my father and his stories.”
14. He Tried To Lie About His Car
“I ran into my bully at a small gas station by my parents’ house when I went to visit.
I live about 100 miles away. Still the jerk I remember from high school. He asked me how I was and what I was doing and I told him what I did for a living which I know he didn’t understand. He was talking about how ‘great’ he was doing and how things were better for him than for me.
There were 4 cars in the parking lot and he pointed to an SUV and said that it was his and how nice it was and how he likes driving it.
The only problem was that he was pointing to my car. So I decided to have fun with this.
I ask him if I can see it as I walk over to it. I can tell he is nervous now and he says maybe in a few minutes. We talk about it for a minute and I ask him again to open the door so I can see it.
He said he must have left the keys in the gas station and he would be right back. I told him how he didn’t leave the keys there and that I don’t think that this was his car. He accused me of calling him a liar. I said that he was one as I got into my SUV and drove away.”
13. Don't You Like My Music Taste?
“My wife and I found this gorgeous house, not yet on the market. The realtor had told us we owned all this nice forested land surrounding it. We were sold. Once we were dealing with the logistics of buying, we found out we actually didn’t own all this land and that someone would be building a huge house right next to us. For context, our driveway runs up the side of our house and the side is really like the front.
We decide whatever can’t be that bad. So the guy takes 2 years to build the massive house that dwarfs ours and kills our view. But whatever, we play nice the whole time. Letting him use our power and water. We have to get along after all. I bite my tongue over all the inconveniences and him screwing me over and living through construction. Kept things on really good terms. When we were talking this guy would tell me stories of times he had to move because of fights with neighbors (trying to look tough I guess.
I didn’t think much of it).
It all started one day in the winter. The way my driveway is and how close his house is, he told me I could blow the snow on the small section on his side in-between. I was very mindful not to hit the house with the snow and everything. One day out of nowhere he shows up at my door telling me to keep my snow on my side.
Okay, whatever. Fine. Be a mean jerk. I’m not going to get into it with you.
From there it’s him telling me he owns half my driveway cause it’s on his property and he’s going to rip it up and put up a fence and all this other stuff. So I try and work with him. He ended up not doing anything but held that over our heads to get his way on everything.
Makes me move my shed (and it’s like a mini house), makes me install 180ft of French drain over a bit of water runoff from my driveway, meanwhile, he’s putting 100s of gal of water on my property from his 2 downspouts on my side and doesn’t do anything.
One day he decides to put up cameras and points them at our house. From multiple angles.
This bothers us but we don’t show it. Until a couple of months later he’s out there moving them and adjusting angles to get better views of our main hang-out areas in my yard driveway where I and my friends and family hang out. So my wife asks him if he can just not point them directly at us. He brushes her off so I go and have a word with him.
This turned into a huge yelling match about all the things. At this point, it is clear that we both hate each other.
The only reason I can figure is that they are super religious. Like have 8 kids and just super religious. I am covered in tattoos, piercings, ride motorcycles, and listen to all sorts of metal music. Though I’m no idiot, I am respectful and keep my noise to a minimum.
So I’m assuming he just didn’t like my style. Anyway, after the camera fight, I decided I would start blasting my music in my garage with my garage doors open day in and day out any time I got the chance. And I played some of the most morbid death metal and other offensive things to mess with him (cannibal corpse, cattle decapitation, infant annihilator, acacia strain, Lorna shore – anything demonic or that had a lot of swearing lol) on top of that I got a drone and started flying around his house.
Started doing hooligan stuff on my bike in the driveway. Just being noisy. After a couple of months (near Christmas) we see a for-sale sign go up.
Couple more months down the road and it’s my birthday. They are loading trucks and leaving. Best birthday present I could ask for. Though it annoyed me that he brought a Christmas gift basket and my wife accepted it, I took this as my pro revenge win.
The gift basket thing just shows how crazy he was. We would do things like that. Gift baskets, waving at us, saying hi, then turn around and do something to start a problem. I’ll never understand it but I’m glad it’s over. New neighbors are quiet and never home (workaholics 6 am-9 pm) life is good.”
12. Waited A Long Time To Call My Bully "Superficial"
“When I was a freshman in high school I was a chubby nerd and a complete idiot. I fell for a cold-hearted jerk. She would use me for things like paying for her booze, taking the fall for something she did, and me giving her As in her classes by letting her copy off of me.
So eventually I confess my feelings for her and she just scoffed and walked away.
I didn’t see her sophomore year (she was part of an exchange program or something) and I still had feelings for her at the time. So I decided to fix my acne, get contacts, grow my hair out (I had previously had it shaved for a friend during her cancer treatment), and get in shape. Sophomore year passes and I work extra hard during the summer to get in shape.
In junior year I had to admit I looked like I should’ve been on Baywatch. I had long hair, a toned body, tan, and didn’t lose my intelligence in the process. So in the first week of school, she grabs me aside and pulls me into a closet.
Her: ‘You know you’ve gotten really hot.’ She started to lean in for a kiss.
‘And you’re still a superficial jerk with fake breasts.’
And then I scoffed and walked out of the room leaving her speechless.”
11. Former Boss Gave Me Another Chance To Get Revenge Years Later
“I’m a teacher, with a degree in advertising, and have been involved with I.T.
for the past twenty-something years, although I’ve found my love for teaching just some ten years ago. I passed through a lot of schools in the meantime, from the big ones to the smallest ones, and accumulated a bunch of experience both in the classroom and behind the scenes, designing workbooks, video courses, learning platforms, and such. So I started thinking it was past the time to migrate to a management position.
The opportunity came in a prestigious school of digital art, and I became its Teaching Manager, overseeing all the teachers and the intern learning routines. It was a hard but honest job…for a time.
Soon it became obvious that my boss was not exactly what he tried to present to students and employees. He would display bursts of anger and antagonize the team, demanding impossible results and asking about tasks that he never assigned (but somehow was our job to guess).
One time, during a meeting, he grabbed a big chair and pretended to throw it across the room. It was his idea of a joke. Nobody even flinched, cause nobody doubted for a second he was capable of actually doing the deed. Needless to say, nobody laughed as well.
In my country, employers may hold employees’ contracts for up to three months, which means that for 90 days you have no job security, and may be fired at any moment without any consequence to the company.
Which my boss reminded everyone all the time, half-joking, trying to keep everybody on their toes. He actually excused me from this treatment (he had this bad habit of treating the managers differently) and gave me constant praise for a good job till the day my temp contract ended (meaning I was then an actual employee, with full benefits and couldn’t be fired without him paying me everything the law stated).
So it really surprised me when he started the hostile treatment not 24 hours after my temporary contract ended and the full employment began. Gone were the praises and in their place came screams, bad reviews, and more and more insane demands. We paid an outside company to do maintenance on the classroom PCs every week, but somehow bugs and crashes were now my fault. One time he made me stay after hours, on a Saturday, after all students and staff had left, and prohibited me from going home before I had all computers running smoothly.
He asked me to find him a new seller, and I introduced a friend, making it clear that by no means I was asking for him to be hired, I was just making introductions and if he liked the guy after they talked, it was his own decision and responsibility to hire him or not. A few weeks later he gave me an earful for going for drinks with this friend of mine, saying that managers should stick with managers and that I should mingle with him, not the staff (cause they were ‘beneath’ us, apparently).
I said this was absurd, reminded him that I knew this guy for years already and that if he wanted to, he could join us for drinks anytime. It was not the response he expected.
The abuse continued and actually intensified. One day I started to feel chest pains and my left arm went completely numb. While my friend called for an ambulance, I retreated to my boss’s office, at the time being occupied by his fiance, and calmly told her, ‘Don’t mind me.
I think I’m having a heart attack, so I’ll just lay here for a few minutes so the students can’t see me.’
Of course, she went nuts after this. The good news: it wasn’t a heart attack, but an anxiety attack, and wasn’t the last one. I was 36 at the time, and it was the first time I saw my mom cry since my dad passed, more than 20 years prior (from, of course, a heart attack).
I decided enough was enough, so I gave my 30 days notice, citing health issues. I hadn’t yet completed 6 months working there. I sat down with my boss, did not blame him in any way but said the stress was making me worry about leaving my family too soon, and gave him every guarantee he needed that I would work through my entire notice period in order to complete every single project we started since my hiring.
So I finished editing the courses, finished the development of our brand new e-learning platform, finished hiring the teachers for the next semester, I even shot videos to promote every single course on the school’s menu. Less than a week left till my last day, he called me in his office to show the company’s new ‘career plans’ (I don’t know the equivalent term in English, but it’s the path planned by the company for the growth of each position).
‘So you see… That’s what you’re going to earn in a few months. That is if you stop being a coward and just do your job’.
I could not believe it. After all the abuse, all the toxicity, I had tried to go the higher road and end everything on a good note, and he called my health issues ‘being a coward!????’ I. was.
done. I told him to just deduce the next few days from my final payment and left.
Now for the revenge.
Remember how I introduced him to a friend and he actually hired the guy? On my final days, I announced to my boss I would open my school after leaving but failed to mention that this other employee was my business partner. So when my friend asked for HIS 30 days notice, our boss went LIVID.
He all but threw out my friend, telling him to never put his feet there again, and leave immediately. According to the law, that means he had to pay for that whole month, plus every remaining day he worked before, plus commissions. Adding to that my last payment, which came with six months of benefits, he had more than enough to start our new venture.
But that’s not the revenge.
He actually made us sign a sort of NDA with a bunch of illegal clauses (which made the whole contract invalid) preventing us from revealing any company secrets during or after our time with them, at the risk of being fined $30.000 (around U$6000, at the time). However, no contract in the world may prevent one (at least in my country) from reporting any illegal activities.
This is why I did not worry one bit when I reported him and his school for having 50+ PCs running on pirate versions of Windows, Office, the whole Adobe Suite, Revit, Cinema4D, 3DSMax, and lots of other very expensive software. Not long before this, a big and traditional chain of stores had gone bankrupt in our state for having to pay retroactively fines upon fines on Windows alone, so it’s an understatement to say that the government was taking piracy pretty seriously at the time.
It gets funnier when you realize that the reported person receives an e-mail with the whole complaint (apart from the author of the report) the minute it is filed, so he can prepare his defense. His response wasn’t at all unexpected. Some five minutes after our report, a similar e-mail came into our inbox, reporting us for 30 unlicensed copies of Windows and many other programs. My business partner still talked to the Finance Manager on our old job and, knowing that our ex-boss would probably be right beside him fuming and screaming, decided to send him a picture of our only classroom… with no computer in sight (we decided to specialize in classes about comic bookmaking, which dispensed computers, and whenever we would host a class that demanded it, we would ask our students to bring their own).
A few weeks later I heard that the whole remaining staff abandoned ship, leaving him with only an intern and a few teachers without permanent contracts. My former boss actually kept tabs on us and, learning that some of his teachers were contacting us to host special classes, started to blackmail them, threatening to terminate their contracts if they insisted on doing business with us (even though there was no exclusivity clause in their contracts).
Some of them called on the bluff, and he had to pay another huge amount on breach of contracts alone.
Time went by and I hear the guy is counting his pennies and struggling to keep afloat. He used to open full classes every six months, occupying every date and time available. Now he hardly can fill a turn, started holding only night classes and not even every day – half the week he closes his doors, not having enough students nor the funds to pay employees on these days.
Before I left he had paid $40.000 on the architectural project alone to expand the business within a year, but now I hear he was considering closing his door and offering only online courses.
And now for part two: Where, years after my revenge, I made my ex-boss again pay a bunch, this time on legal fees
First of all, I need to say that my school has closed its doors.
I and my friend were not a good fit, as business partners at least, and now we’re not even friends. That’s life. We sold out, sold what could be sold and each went with our lives.
Some months later I found out our ex-boss was SUING us. Our school, that is. Which, as I mentioned, didn’t even exist anymore. My (ex) friend’s sister, who is also his lawyer, contacted me and told me about it.
I couldn’t find anything on the public records, since the lawsuit was running on a court-ordered sigil. I talked to my lawyer and she said: ‘If they didn’t cite you directly, pretend you know nothing about the matter.’
And so I ignored the issue for a few years. In 2020, the appointed official finally found me at home and served me. That also gave me access to my boss’s claims, since I had 15 days to prepare my defense.
My wife found me laughing out loud in front of the computer. His claims were absolutely ridiculous. He claimed I stole his courses, and used as proof a print from our (now offline) site, side by side with his own, saying something in the lines of ‘it becomes obvious that both schools have the same courses’. However, he presented no explanation of the similarities besides the names, which weren’t even the same.
We had a SEGMENT of pieces of training under the umbrella ‘Graphic Design’, but no class with that specific name, for example, and no other class on any of his main subjects.
Also, most of our classes were on the topic of Comic Books, which he NEVER worked with. He also called us ‘cynical’ for daring to compete with him on the same market, even if it was my own previous experience in the learning sector that landed me the job in his firm in the first place.
At one point, the documents cited a statement from our site where we said that we took our previous experiences as a way to learn from our mistakes and do differently, and call it a ‘confession of plagiarism’. I asked my lawyer to let me write my defense, leaving to her the task to translate it to ‘lawyers’. She actually copy-pasted my full statement, saying she couldn’t have argued better.
I put on paper all the repulse I felt, cited all my experience with teaching, and rebuked every single one of his claims with facts and actual proofs, attaching printed conversations, saved emails, and bringing attention to his lack of proof.
The judge tossed the case and made him pay all the legal fees, including my lawyer’s (he could have avoided it if he had entered the lawsuit on small claims court, but since he wanted the 30k from the NDA plus damages and sigil, he had it coming).
Just another shove of dirt on his coffin.”
10. Secretly Trained My Roommate Not To Respond To His Alarms
“I was in college, senior. My roommate was a sophomore but it was his first time living in a dorm. He’d been a pretty lousy roommate, constantly left the room a mess, left his stuff on my side of the room and my bed, stole my booze, used my things without permission, never cleaned up my dishes after he used them, and a bunch of other stuff.
I confronted him about all these issues on several occasions and got the Resident Advisor involved with the booze stealing issue because, at the time, he was under 21. Things continued anyways.
He asked me once if it was okay if his girl spent the night, to which I said no. We were in the middle of a health crisis, plus that’s especially weird if I was there.
I also had to wake up every day at 8 for work, which he knew, and he would stay up until 2 am playing video games some nights.
Not to mention, he would set like 10 alarms in the morning with a bunch of different alarm tones.
I hit a breaking point and decided to do something cruel. Every morning when I woke up, I’d observe his alarm pattern and how he’d respond.
He had several alarms that he’d ignore, all with the same sound. He had a couple of half-hour alarms that had a unique sound (also ignored), and then the final alarm had its sound too. All of them were default iPhone sounds.
So his brain had been trained to this alarming pattern for a while, I’d assumed. So I started step one of the punishment: set up a sequence of alarms on my phone, identical to his sequence, but an hour early.
He responded to my alarms the same way he’d respond to his own. I kept this up for a week, and his brain was eventually re-trained to sleep through double the number of alarms as before.
Then, phase two kicked in: random inconsistencies in my alarm pattern. Some days I’d play all the alarms, while other days I’d only play one that his brain was trained to ignore.
That way, his brain expects to sleep through like 20 alarms and only ever hears 11. He slept through his alarm at least 4 times in two weeks.
Eventually, he finally changed his alarm pattern so he’d only have one alarm and he no longer had the energy to stay up until 2 am.”
9. I Will Never Want To Spend Time With Them Ever Again
“I had two bullies since kindergarten class and until I was 13 and switched schools.
Every single day they would find some way to bully me. If I was dumb enough to bring something I liked with me to school, they would break it. They would do everything in their power to make my life miserable, including a few memorable times in which they managed to get my entire class involved in bullying me. Beat me up, steal stuff from me (Especially funny after PE, hiding my clothes while I was in the shower), all sorts of stuff.
I was bullied to a point where I honestly considered waiting for the main bully somewhere out of school with my baseball bat and ambushing him.
One of the bullies I kinda got payback on the two years before I switched schools (this would be the main bully). I started playing basketball on the same team my bully was on. At that point, we were about the same height… but he was a fat idiot, and I was regular-sized. The coach would put us on opposing teams, and make sure that we were guarding each other (not sure if that’s the correct term in English).
I’d run circles around the jerk, and the few times he tried to bully me at basketball training, the coach would punish him, bad. ‘What kind of way is that to treat your teammate?’
That was gold.
A few years later, I met him again…This time, I was with my significant other (by now we’re close to our 11th anniversary). Let’s just say I scored above my stand… Hot summer day, we met him (still a fatty) wearing short shorts, and generally looking like a hick.
Didn’t say anything to him, just gave him a smug smile, with my girl on my arm.
There were two main bullies; I’ve sworn to pee on their graves, and that’s something I intend to do. They’re hateful people, and thanks to them, I’ve had problems with depression, low self-worth, and just in general hating many things about myself.
For some reason (God knows why), my old class decided to invite me to their reunion 5 years back.
Telling them on social media that I would rather skin myself and jump in a pit of salt than voluntarily spend time with them ever again may have been one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever done for myself.”
8. Drove To Her To Tell Her I'm Living A Long Life
“I can’t say that I have dealt with this from a student, yet. But I had a really trashy second-grade year because of my English teacher, Ms. Wilson.
This teacher was a real witch, she was 59 years old, really mean, and on her last year of teaching before she retired. She wanted to make some kid her slave.
Consequently, I was that kid. She did things to me that stuck with me in the academic sense for 6 years.
Back when I was in the second grade I had a speech impediment, it was severe stuttering that was the result of an allergic reaction to a decongestant I had to take. You would think it was bad enough trying to go through school being made fun of by the students because of this, but she made it even worse.
She off the bat did not like me. The first day called me out for not being a fast enough reader (I was faster than most kids) and ridiculed me for it. Throughout the year whenever I didn’t do well on something she would make an example of me and tell the other kids to not do as (my name) did. After only a few weeks into school, she decided to give me the nickname ‘Stutter’.
I was very self-conscious of my speech impediment but after she started calling me that the entire class and eventually the entire school called me that.
The day before we left for Christmas break she decided to call me out that my desk was somewhat messy. But instead of telling me to organize it, she decided it would be great to throw my desk on the ground and say to me, ‘Pick it up you little idiot’, all the while the entire class laughed at me.
Finally, to put the icing on the cake, at the end of the year to screw me over academically she filled out a report that any elementary school teacher can fill out which states that the teacher thinks the student is learning disabled. It is amazing how much power the teacher has in deciding whether a student should be placed into a special needs class.
Whenever the principal would question something on the report he would always disregard what my parents said and would always go off of what the teacher said. For the year after 2nd, I was put into a special education course which I was not allowed to test out of. I got out of it from 4th grade and on but the label still followed me until high school.
Fast forward 11 years from second grade. I graduated from my high school in the top 5% and will be attending a university that is in the top 3% in the nation.
This person never really left my mind because of how much she negatively affected me in a social, mental, and academic way, which is why I decided to find out where she currently was. She is in a home for the elderly only 20 min away.
I decided to pay her a visit.
Turns out she had some sort of cancer and only had a couple of months to live. I told her that because of what she did to me that year, it affected me so negatively that I was feeling the repercussions of it until high school. I told her where I was going to college and that I had actually made something of myself.
She didn’t say anything to me, not because she couldn’t but because she was ashamed of herself. I told her to have a great rest of her short life and that I will be enjoying mine.
It made me feel good to know that I had risen above what she got me into.”
7. We Ditched Him Before He Recognized Us
“When I was in elementary school I was picked on a lot. I was nerdy, wore out-of-style hand-me-downs, and had teeth that stuck out. In addition, my dad was a heavy drinker, and kids knew that I had NO backup. No matter what they did I was on my own. There was one little boy I had a crush on.
It was my first crush, and I’m sure I wasn’t terribly subtle. So imagine my delight when he handed me a note on the bus. The note said that he liked me, asked if I liked him, and asked for a reply. When I handed it back to him (Yes! I liked him!), he stood up and read it in front of the whole bus.
All the kids on the bus cracked up, and he carried on bullying and teasing me about it for the rest of the year. He never missed an opportunity to tell me that he could never like a girl as ugly as me, in front of as many people as possible. On the last day of school, he finished up by getting his brother to hold my arms down while he beat me up.
So I was quite happy to learn that sometime over the summer he moved, but I never forgot the humiliation of my first crush.
Flash forward to 14 years later. The puberty fairy had been kind to me and a judicious set of braces had straightened up my teeth. I was in college and waiting tables at a popular club that was well known for its hot waitresses in skimpy outfits.
One night this rather unattractive guy comes to my section along with his friend. They spend the evening flirting with me and trying to pick up women with little success. I keep looking at the guy and thinking he looks familiar for some reason, but I can’t place him. Then his friend says his name and it dawns on me that he is my first crush.
I continue to serve them all night and deliver drinks to girls around the bar for them. Neither one of them is successful, and by the end of the night, they are looking discouraged. So he looks at me and says, ‘We are going to an after-hours bar when we leave here, would you like to come with us?’ I flash him my biggest smile and agree to go after I close out for the night.
They are left sitting there as the bar starts to empty. As we were selling out, I tell several of the waitresses what he had done to me all those years ago, so they all gather around when I announce that I changed my mind about going to the after-hours bar with them; I would never be seen with someone as ugly as him. They all cracked up, especially when I stuck my teeth out and told him my name.
The look on his face when he realized who I was was priceless. And to top it all off, we did wind up at the same after-hours bar, but I was there with my group of hot coworkers and a really cute guy I was seeing at the time. He and his friend left shortly after we arrived.”
6. Escalating Feud Leads To Dad Orchestrating His Brother's Arrest
“My uncle has always been a self-righteous, petty slime ball, with a foul temper and grandiose idea of his importance but little to no brains.
My dad always just took it and tried to keep the peace because family is so important to him. This is the story of how my uncle finally pushed my dad too far and ended up getting arrested for his trouble. It is pretty long since it covers several months of a feud between them.
As background, my dad and my uncle are neighbors in a rural community of 600ish people.
My dad built the house my uncle lives in and sold it along with a small plot, so my dad’s remaining land is about 6 acres and runs along the side and the back of my uncle’s smaller property. My uncle is a dealer for HVAC units. My dad is in the HVAC business and would buy some things from his brother, even though his brother’s prices were higher and he had a more limited inventory than other dealers, in order to help his brother out.
My dad also rented a building his brother owned and used it as his shop/office. He only rented the building and parking lot, but in the field out behind the shop my uncle and my dad both would collect old HVAC units. These things are rusty and all-around ugly, but when they didn’t have anything else to do they could go get one of these old units to break down for scrap.
This story starts when one day my dad went to his brother and said he needed a certain unit, but his brother quoted him a really high price and also couldn’t deliver in the time frame my dad needed. So my dad called up another dealer he works with and that guy had a unit on hand to give him for a much lower price.
A no-brainer. My uncle found out about this somehow (dudes in the HVAC business are apparently like gossipy teenaged girls) and confronted my dad, basically giving him an ultimatum that if my dad wouldn’t commit to buying 100% of his units from my uncle then my uncle wouldn’t sell him anything.
I already told you my uncle is an idiot…
So my dad didn’t say anything to his brother, but he took him at his word and stopped buying anything from him.
A month or so later my uncle showed up at my dad’s shop and confronted him again wanting to know why my dad hadn’t ordered anything from him that month. When my dad told him why my uncle exploded. They apparently had a screaming match, and in the end, my uncle announced that my dad was no longer his brother, they were no longer doing business together, and my dad was evicted from the shop.
I will note that legally my dad was not evicted because evicting him would have required legal notice, a certain period of time, etc. But my dad was over it, so he said fine and began converting the barn at his house into his new shop. So my uncle, who apparently had thought my dad would not call his bluff, showed back up at the shop a few days later and informed my dad that he also has to move all of the old HVAC units scattered around in the field behind the property or he would sue my dad for the cost of removal. Now, this too probably had no legal power, since my dad’s lease was only on the building, not the field, and my uncle contributed to and used the old units as communal property…
But when my dad is angry he is really angry. So he agreed to move the old units. He took his tractor over and loaded each one onto his flatbed trailer, drove out behind his barn, and painstakingly arranged hundreds of rust-bucket ugly old HVAC units an inch or two off the property line at the back of my uncle’s house. Note that my dad could not see these things from his house due to the way his property is set up, but my uncle had an HD view of them in his backyard.
My uncle started being even more of a creep than usual and was always spying on my dad’s house, so my dad decided to build a privacy fence down the side of his property that runs along with my uncle’s property (but not the back of the property where the HVAC units are). The fence guys arrived and worked for a few hours before my uncle came screeching into his driveway and exploded out of his truck already screaming because these poor fence guys had laid posts or tools or whatever temporarily on his side of the property line as they were building the fence.
My uncle called the police, who basically told the fence guys, okay dudes just don’t put anything on this crazy man’s property, and left.
The next day apparently someone left a hammer across the property line so here comes my uncle screaming at them again. He called the police again but by the time they got there, the guy had already moved his hammer so the police were just annoyed by this point but could only warn them not to do it again.
Later that afternoon, my uncle called the police a third time, I kid you not. This time he wanted to report that my dad had stolen a backhoe from him. Like one that attaches to the back of a tractor. One that, again I kid you not, my uncle had given to my dad two whole years prior because my uncle didn’t even have a tractor big enough to attach the thing to.
The cop was not amused when this story came to light, and since it was the same cop who’d been there earlier that day she was beyond annoyed at that point.
My dad helpfully said ‘Come get the backhoe if you want it,’ knowing full well my uncle had no way to pick the thing up or haul it even the few feet to his yard.
My uncle replied that my dad was just trying to trap him and would say he was trespassing if my uncle came onto his land (even though the cop was standing right there when my dad offered and, by the way, this conversation was taking place in my dad’s driveway). He then said that he wanted to file a complaint with the police that basically amounts to a restraining order against my dad (it isn’t a restraining order because it isn’t issued by a judge but the cops treat it that way–it’s for habitual trespassers).
Annoyed Cop helpfully informed my dad that this would mean that even if my uncle texted or emailed him and invited him to come over to his house to discuss things, even if my dad had that written proof he’d been invited if my uncle called the cops or even took a picture of my dad on his property he could potentially get arrested for trespassing.
My dad said he wanted to file one against his brother too.
My dad knew full well that his brother had no real clue where the property lines were and was not going to dig up his survey to check. He only ‘knew’ where the lines were because my dad knows exactly where they are and maintains wooden stobs in the ground periodically along his property lines.
So when his brother was away for a few days my dad moved all of the old HVAC units along the property line over further onto his property by a few feet and moved the stobs back the same distance. So basically it looked the same as it had before, except it looked like the property line was a few feet further back than it actually is.
He then placed some random piece of scrap across the fake property line (still on his property but it looked like it was across the property line if all you had to go by were the incorrectly placed stobs), set up a few game cameras aimed at the line, and waited.
Sure enough, his dumb brother came storming out of his house as soon as he noticed this scrap on ‘his’ side of the ‘property line,’ crossed the real property line to get a good look at the scrap, and called the police.
My dad was waiting for them with his survey showing where the actual property line is, a copy of the report Annoyed Cop had given him, and game camera footage of his brother clearly trespassing on his land, and it was my uncle who got arrested. The only way his revenge for all the trouble and heartache his brother caused could possibly have been any sweeter would have been if it were Annoyed Cop who showed up at the scene and arrested my uncle, but alas he had to make do with someone he and his brother had both gone to high school with, which worked out since it was especially embarrassing for my uncle to be arrested by someone he knew well.
And who could make sure everyone else in town knew.
Nothing really came of my uncle’s arrest, or at least not that my dad has heard about (and he’d hear about it since this is a town of like 600ish people). But it was probably enough for my uncle just to have to get put into handcuffs, spend a night in jail, and have people know about it because my uncle hasn’t caused any more trouble for my dad other than generally existing where my dad occasionally has to see his truck drive by.
My uncle is also now in a business dispute with his wife’s sister and his brother-in-law, so presumably, he is trying to take his anger out on another target who hasn’t already beaten him (and also who isn’t his older and much larger brother who has been perfectly willing to beat his butt all their lives whenever it’s devolved into physical disputes–yes my family are rednecks).
My uncle, aunt, cousin, and my cousin’s wife all unfriended me on social media so I only know what’s going on with them via small-town gossip nowadays. My sister was driving down the road recently, saw my uncle in his yard, and waved at him. He turned away like he didn’t know her. None of us got an announcement when my cousin’s wife had her baby recently.
So I think the end of the story is just that we are all dead to my uncle and his family, but he is too afraid to do anything besides pretend we all don’t exist!”
5. I Don't Think You Can Get Away With All Your Dirty Work
“I left college with a business degree in one hand and no job in the other.
And like so many colleges, the promises of alumni willing to give jobs to graduates could not have been further from the truth. So I had to seek out my start from the bottom. I found a good job in Operations at a company (I can’t say who without giving it away). Had a great boss, who taught me pretty much everything I needed to know.
Work was great and the payment was good.
I need to explain how the business worked so you can understand how the plan worked. The corporate office was in California and we were… not… There are a lot of things that went on at this company, and I can’t get into all of them because it would just take away from the story but let’s just say they had a very Stratton Oakmont vibe when it came to sales.
I started working in Operations with some of the smaller clients, but with some help from my boss, was able to ‘climb the ladder’ rather quickly to the point of being overall the Operations and order processing for the firm. We had a VERY LARGE CLIENT (90% of the company’s business). The way it worked was we had two sets of sales reps, TSRs and CSRs – TSRs were the heavy hitters who reached out to the other big businesses and tech firms to extend their warranties on a product.
They made a good profit. The CSRs were more of the ‘mom and pop’ crowd and the inbound sales call for those that wanted to extend their warranties. The reps were all given codes that associate the client’s files with theirs, so if someone did a renewal automatically, they would get paid as it was their client. Pretty sweet gig. The client hired the firm to be the middleman for their B2B as they handled all of their everyday clients.
For every $100 that came into our firm, 18% or $18 would be for the company and the rest would be sent to the clients with the warranties activated. Most of the clients paid by CC or PO with a wire transfer but there would also be a good amount of checks each week that would need to be processed.
A little while after I started, the client check portion was now going to be ‘overseen’ by one of the sales managers.
Didn’t really phase me because I was working on the smaller accounts. Since we were a publicly-traded company, all the sales reps’ orders had to go to Operations to be fulfilled. They weren’t allowed to process them on their own.
This is when things started going downhill. My boss at the time was given temporary access to the financials as they were hiring a new CFO and he had a background with it.
We went to lunch like we had done plenty of times before but he seemed different. When I asked him if something was wrong, he told me that something looked off with our biggest client for one of the accounts. He wanted to make sure before he said anything to the higher-ups. While this was going on, I had been offered the chance to be our new compliance officer, which means I would need to make sure everything was on the up and up.
Soon after, I come in to find out that my boss was just terminated for a multitude of reasons all of which HAD to be untrue because he was a pretty well-liked guy not just with the company but with our client as well. As I log into my terminal I see that before he left, he had given me admin access to his files.
Here’s where things started to pop off. Remember those checks that clients were sending in to renew their warranties? Well, we were selling them all right. Apparently, we just weren’t adding those renewals to their products in the system. That would have triggered a payout to our Client who as you remember would be getting 82% of that earnings. Instead, they were redeeming the checks, keeping the funds, and using the interest in the accounts (Yes, in the mid-2000’s banks actually paid interest) to cover losses in their collections department.
It was wild to see that this was happening, and something had to be done. So I hatched a plan.
First things first, secure a new job cuz it won’t be a fun place to work after this! Done. My previous boss knew of other companies that would scoop me up. Put in my notice, and stated in my exit interview that I just couldn’t be a part of what was happening, even though HR was in on this.
I wanted it on the record. Next, get approval for overtime for all the operations crew to come in on a Saturday (and double pay them). They arrive early Saturday, obviously not too thrilled as to why they are there. But when I explain that if they complete the task, not only so they get their overtime, but they get nice bonuses, they were much happier.
They spent the entire day applying all of those checks dated back years to the client accounts, We are talking millions of dollars. When all the sales reps arrived Monday they were really shocked. Not only did they meet their weekly goals before picking up the phones, but they also made their monthly and quarterly goals too… 2 weeks into the new quarter…
Cheers! Partying! Yelling!
Screaming! Celebrating! Except for sales management. They went from being really excited, to skeptical, to confused, to ‘oh my god’ in about 2 hours. They realized where it must have come from. Because not only did the company hit all these sales, since it had been over a day, the client came into work Monday to see a very nice payday in their system as well.
And like anyone, would have questions, and says they are coming out to congratulate the team on such great numbers. So management starts scrambling because they can’t figure out how this happened and all under my boss’s old log in.
On my last day I arrive and in the lobby. I’ve got my box for the last of my things, etc. A guy walks up and is waiting for the elevator with me and we strike up a conversation.
He notices my box and jokes about getting fired, and I just tell him I had a great opportunity come up so I decided to leave ‘before things go down’, we laughed. Really nice down-to-earth guy. He realizes we are getting off on the same floor. He asks if I work for X, I say yes. He asks where, I tell him Operations and he reveals that he is the CEO of our client (Gulp!).
We go our separate ways.
The client shows up and there is a big party. Afterward, the client says that they would love to get a breakdown of where most of the sales came from so they can allocate more funds to that department. Management says sure, but it made up a lie about how they can’t share client payment info due to regulations, blah blah blah.
Cue my exit from the company. Two weeks go by and I get a phone call from a number I don’t recognize, so I let it go to VM. When I get off work I checked it, to find out it was the CEO of the client where I used to work. He ‘has had something come up’ and would like to talk to me.
Of course, I’m really nervous, but I call him back and he picks up on the first ring and we get to chat for a bit and he finally just asks me ‘Why did you leave?’ I tell him I had a great opportunity come up. He doesn’t buy it and says that apparently my comment about ‘things going down’ really stuck with him and he thinks something more is going on.
So after a little more prodding from him, I tell him ‘Just look at Collections and that’s all I can say.’ He thanks me and I hang up. Two days later, he pulled the plug on the account. Apparently, my old company tried to threaten him with a lawsuit for pulling the account three years early. He replied, ‘That’s fine, because when I show the courts that I have the evidence that you committed fraud’.
Corporate came in and cleaned the house. All of management was fired within the day.
One month later, my friends and I had a very memorable trip in Vegas all courtesy of our old client.
My old boss was an adopted kid, treated his adopted parents great, while their real kids didn’t, and when they passed, they left him all their money. ALL. OF.
IT.
This was about 2008… He was in a weird place because he loved his parents and was really close to them. He went to his church to pray for his parents and for what to do with this new landfall of coins. He loved working but didn’t need to anymore. He left the church and went to a bar (because I mean, who doesn’t).
He sits next to a guy who (and this is almost out of a movie) is a developer and has run out of funds to finish his development because it’s 2008 and NO ONE is loaning anything. They get to talking and he thinks ‘maybe this is a sign’.
But he invests in the guy’s development by buying all the houses (dirt cheap at the time) and now lives off the residual income from all of them being rentals…
Life sucks because so many people do stupid things and get away with it that it’s great when good things happen to good people…”
4. Project Skunk: An Engineer's Tale
“Decades ago I worked the worst job of my life as a software engineer, writing code for an OBD II car code scanner at a completely dysfunctional business I’m not going to name, but I’ll drop a hint and say all their products are all orange.
It was right after 9/11, I was laid off, and jobs were nearly impossible to find. But I managed to land one there and out of desperation, I took the job. And there I met probably the best friend I ever made at work, I’ll call him AgentS. AgentS was a coder’s coder, a real laid-back guy, and an all-around good egg. Imagine if ‘The Dude’ could code, you’d pretty much have AgentS.
We had many wonderful overlong lunches working there.
And I needed the calm he taught me because that place was NUTS. All the departments poisonously hated each other, the head of engineering was as paranoid as a Russian Czar, rampant abuse, theft, the works. A total madhouse. But eventually, everyone has their limit, and AgentS had put in his two-week notice. Just to let you know how nice he was, he was the only person that quit that wasn’t escorted to his car immediately by an armed guard, which was standard procedure.
He was permitted to put in his last two weeks. So imagine my surprise when AgentS said ‘I want some payback before I go!’
Maybe a few days earlier, the paranoid Czar of engineering gave us this odd missive. ‘When you leave your desk for any reason, you are to take your papers on your desk and lock them in your desk. You are to lock your computer.
You are to put a password in your BIOS and shut down your machine when you leave for the night. You are to erase your marker boards. Leave no scrap of paper out or any hint of what you are working on.’ And no explanation why, which was standard for him. Just do it.
Of course, we all wanted to know why. So our ‘man in the field’ – I’ll call him Bond – went about finding out.
Bond was social and likable and had friends in every department in the increasingly Balkanized organizational structure. ‘I’ll ask around, and don’t tell anybody.’
He found out. Engineering Czar got word somehow that people in the Sales department were working late and waiting for Engineering to leave. Once we left, they were going through our desks and computers looking for clues as to what we were working on.
They would then copy this stuff down, claim it as ‘a project I’m heading up’, and present the material to their superiors so they could look valuable and get raises and all that fun sales staff. Yes I know – Sales is supposed to query their customers for features they’d like, then make proposals to Engineering. I did say this place is dysfunctional, right?
Engineers drove the product design since Sales couldn’t be bothered. And why should they, when they could just steal it instead. Right?
So AgentS had had enough. We made ‘Project Skunk’. All projects in this place were named after an animal. We decided to leave a hint in the name that all was not as it should be. And we dreamed up the most amazing OBD II scanner in the world.
Here are some of the specs:
- Since everyone knows 32-bit processors are more expensive than 8-bit processors, we would save up by using a 2-bit processor.
- The EEPROMs that held the automotive database were expensive as well. So to save space, we would use ZIP to compress the database 12 times and store it on a single 4k EEPROM.
- Predictive analysis. If you enter in the last few codes your car threw, it would extrapolate and tell you the next part on your car that was going to break.
(I thought of this one, I’m especially proud of it)
… and so on.
We spent a happy afternoon drawing up box diagrams (with flux capacitors and n-dimensional grommets and Yoyodyne compensators), lots of specs and analyses, and other assorted bits of utter nonsense.
We scattered them all over AgentS’s desk, then went home.
The very next day, our ‘man in the field’ Bond gives us the news.
‘Project Skunk is a HIT. The entire building is buzzing over it. Salespeople are tripping over each other taking credit.’
It took about a week before the stolen goods were finally passed upstream to the six-figure guys before someone with half a clue noticed that everything in the project was absolutely impossible.
AgentS had left by then, but I tracked him down and we had lunch, and I told him the results of the ill harvest he had left behind.
Sales had been seriously embarrassed in front of their superiors, and the ones over them as well. I don’t know if anything came of it. It was an old boy’s network there, and I’m sure they covered for each other somehow. But they were embarrassed and they were hurt. How do I know? Every day from that day on, any time a person from Sales passed me in a hallway or something, they would physically turn their face from me to shun me.
It was hilarious. Like somehow I’m the jerk for making fake stuff for them to steal.
They went under not too long after that. The building is now a medical company supplying face masks.”
3. 10 Dollars And A Pencil
“A few years ago, after changing jobs, I found myself in a new office, with a new phone number.
After some orientation, training, and other new-hire stuff, I finally get to sit down and do the things.
I get my voice-mail and answering machine set up, set up the email, and the phone rings.
‘Good morning, (railroad) engineering.’
‘Yeah, when can I take the GED test?’
‘Sorry, wrong number.’ (click)
Rings again
‘Seriously, when can I take the GED test?’
‘As I said, the wrong number. Bye.’
This went on for weeks. 15-20 calls a day. People screaming at me for not being The Adult Learning Center. One day, an epiphany:
‘This isn’t the Adult Learning Center?’
‘Nope.’
‘Do you know the number?’
‘Check Google.’
‘I did, this is the number on their website.’
Oh really?
A little Google of my own, and I dig up a few numbers and give them a call.
They tell me that they don’t maintain their website, and there’s nothing they can do about it, and it’s not their problem. I’m just going to have to ‘deal with it’.
My favorite line of that conversation was ‘What are you going to do about it? I work for the State. You can’t do anything. Bye-bye.’ And you can imagine that ‘bye-bye’ just dripped with the condescension that only hubris and decades of Karenhood can muster.
Oh. God. No. Let’s dance.
The next day.
‘Good morning (railroad)’
‘When can I take the GED test?’
‘We give that on request, it takes about an hour and a half. Come on down.’
‘Oh, awesome. How much is it?’
’10 dollars. Bring a pencil. We’ll sharpen yours, but we can’t supply them. Budget cuts, you know.’
‘Naw, I get it. See you in a bit.’
‘Take your time. They don’t like me telling you this, but if you get here before we close, they HAVE TO give you the test. See you when you get here.’
‘Thanks, man. See you later.’
Now for those of you who don’t know, the GED test takes a WHOLE DAY. It also usually costs upward of $100, depending on the state. In the state I was living and working at the time, it was around $200. As such, it was only offered at certain intervals.
So, as I was telling dozens of people PER DAY that it was $10, took 90 minutes, and offered on request, I’m sure that they were absolutely inundated with angry people with freshly sharpened #2 pencils, waving their $10 bills, and demanding the test that the guy on the phone told them they could come and take.
Every morning, I checked the website, to see if my phone number was still on there. I also took the liberty of crawling around and getting the phone numbers for some managers. I was happy to hand these out when people called back to complain that they hadn’t been allowed to take the test. ‘Head back down there, and ask to speak to (random director) and tell them that they called the number on the website and this is what they were told.’
It took them about 6 more weeks to change the website. For some reason, all of the manager’s numbers disappeared from the website as well.”
2. Insult Me For Not Going To College? I'll Embarrass You
“So about a year ago, I started college (I was in the Marines from 06-11, so once I got out I decided to go back and get my degree). During my first winter break, I decide to head back home and crash there for 2 weeks.
I grew up in a really small town, and everybody there is family friends and they still hang out, and everybody knows each other, etc. So a lot of people went to a really big house for a ‘happy holidays’ type party, and how big parties usually go everybody hangs out with people their age.
I’m drinking (so is everybody else) so I’m being a little more social than usual. Instead of being off by myself like normal, I’m in a big group of guys I knew from high school.
There was a guy in the group who was a huge jerk to everybody always, and of course, he asks me ‘we’re the same age right?’
I reply, ‘yeah…?’
‘Oh, so you never went to college?’ And he starts bursting out into laughter along with his squad of jerk-nozzles. At this point, I’m a little buzzed, and quite honestly way more annoyed than I should have been (great combo).
So screw him, right? ‘Yeah, you’re right. I don’t have a degree. Instead of sleeping with girls and drinking every night while my rich parents pay for it, I spent 5 years and one 6 month deployment in the Marines. But, you know, if you have a problem with me being dumb we can take this outside.’ I hate playing the ‘cool guy Rambo soldier’ card but he was asking for it.
And it was really funny. Like he almost pooped his pants. Does the whole thing ‘no, thanks for your service’ thing civvies do. I laugh and ignore him the rest of the night.
Fast forward to now, I’m one year into a Nuclear Engineering degree and he’s probably a gym teacher somewhere.”
1. I Don't Hate The Police As Much Now
“I went to college in my hometown, but lived in my own house and my housemates were party animals. I was too but was also determined to get great grades (I was the first person in my family to even consider college an option). I was at Denny’s really late one night studying hard for a huge exam because my housemates were having people over and the late-night server was a friend from high school.
The place was dead, so my server friend was sitting with me quizzing me when my significant other at the time showed up just to say hi and encourage me to take a break. While we were sitting there, this group of guys walked in, obviously had enough to drink, and sat close to us so the server went to service them. One of the guys was my significant other’s ex from something like, five years ago, and he also went to high school with us and tortured me.
Told everyone I was gay so gym class sucked for me. Broke some of my sculptures in art class. Typical jerkhead stuff.
So my significant other and I are sitting there and it’s awkward for both of us, so we decide to jet. We’re barely out the door when someone from behind pushes me and as I stand up, there’s a GUN in my face, and on the other end is this bully.
I do everything to keep my cool, but in this situation, it’s hard to think. I start asking the guy why he’s such a jerk and we talk for a while, more argue but whatever, when out of nowhere this cop tackles the bully and just starts stomping him on the ground while another officer covers him and keeps the rest of the wasted friends inside.
I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t really enjoy watching this cop stomp on this guy so hard he’s a mess. It’s important to note that I hate the Police. I never saw the bully again, left town for grad school, but sometimes when I’m lying in bed I think about that moment and can’t help but smile a little.”
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