People Let The Cat Out Of The Bag About Their Revenge
19. Manager Makes Our Jobs Miserable, So We Found Out How To Get The Printer To Insult Him
“This happened a few years ago.
And by few, I mean a lot. I was a student in the mid 80s, and I got a job for the summer working for a major electronics company; it was low-skill, boring grunt work, but it was a foot in the door and paid a good salary.
I worked in the IT department next to a very noisy room filled with very wide dot matrix printers that buzzed and chattered all day long.
It was the central printer room for the VAX system that we used back then. One of my jobs was to take the huge fan-fold printout (each stack was about 2×1 feet and about a foot high) and separate it into individual print jobs, lay them out on a table for people to pick up and also to refill the printer with new paper. The noise drove me nuts, so I closed the door.
The IT manager found out and insisted that the door stay open so that I could hear when a printer was out of paper as the printer would give out a series of beeps when the paper had run out. His name was Richard, a real petty tyrant.
In a nearby room was Bob. Bob was an odd guy; he was an absolute hippy, a relic from the 60s.
Bob was a slacker, he appeared to do the minimum work necessary to stay employed, but he was also a genius, a hobby electronics experimenter, proper old-school coder (COBOL and FORTRAN), radio amateur, he wrote for electronics magazines, designed and built his own computers, radios and hifi gear, he would happily fix any electronics you brought him and refused payment, and he was the go-to person for almost anyone in the company with a technical problem.
The odder the problem, the better he liked it. Senior engineers would come down to Bob with a question and go away with an answer. Sometimes he was seconded to a project to consult and on more than one occasion co-authored a technical paper and was named on a patent or two. Most of the time, Bob didn’t want any recognition or fuss, but usually, you got to hear through the g*******e that it was his work.
He liked his little room and liked to be his own boss.
I liked Bob, he was a genuinely nice guy. He had a lot of power in the company through a lot of favors, but he never wielded it. He was always helpful to anyone who asked from MD to summer students like me. In fact, he really liked students and often mentored us when we had a problem or just taught us how to work the system.
I told Bob about the noise in passing. Bob went away and designed a remote Out Of Paper system that would indicate a paper outage on a light-board where I sat. He didn’t have to, but Bob liked a problem to work on. Richard rejected it out of hand. I resigned myself to a summer of noise, but Bob just quietly turned to a new solution.
Bob proposed an improvement to the printing system to Richard. The print header was a line of hash symbols, the print job name, the user name of the person who printed it, and another line of hash symbols. Sometimes you could pick up on the Hash symbols sometimes not. It was hit or miss.
Bob had experimented with a mix of text and ASCII block characters and came up with a distinctive ‘song’ that the printers could make by printing apparent gibberish.
Based on his amateur radio experience, he theorized that even someone untutored in Morse can recognize a Morse code phrase very quickly, and the ear picks up on the phrase even when not actively listening and so someone could pick up on a distinctive tune or rhythm. He ran a test, and it worked. Richard could see the benefits and so authorized Bob to code it into the standard print footer.
In production, I could hear the end of every print job as the printer changed its random screeching buzz to the distinctive sounds and I pulled them off the printer as they finished instead of the finished paper stack speeding up the print job process and reducing the wait time for those waiting on the job. Richard was nominated for an innovation award (about $275 bonus) and accepted without acknowledging Bob.
Bob didn’t care and neither did I, after my ear had tuned in Bob gave me a Morse alphabet and just smiled at me. He had coded symbols for 2 lines at the end of the print that sounded like “F-RICH” in morse code. It didn’t reduce the noise, but it made it bearable that every print job was an insult. It also made me happy that there were a few radio amateurs in the company who all know Morse, they all knew Bob, so I guess he told them.
When they came to the print pickup point, you could see some of them catch the phrase and smile. Sometimes it’s the petty revenge that mean the most.
I rejoined the company after I graduated 3 years later. Bob had medically retired after a massive heart attack and died shortly after. Richard had moved on, and we were beginning to move to the massive computing power of desktop 386 pcs with local printers instead of the VAX system, but I went down to the print room one day to hear “F-RICH” over and over.
It made me so, so happy. I may have shed a little tear at that moment in memory of Bob.”
18. I'm A "Loser Who Will Never Amount To Anything?" Just Wait Until I Run Into You 20 Years Later
“I went to high school in a small southeastern US town. During my Junior year (11th grade), I had a U.S. History teacher who always acted like she was better than anyone else.
She was the type that would always say things semi-jokingly about students, which she thought were funny, but came off as pretty mean and hurtful. Unfortunately, she was really popular with parents and the administration, because to be fair, she was a good teacher, and her students did well year after year on the A.P. exams (taken to earn college credits if you got a high enough score), so she got away with insulting whomever she wanted to insult.
Also, she was the type who bragged about being married to a professor (she actually had an affair with him when she was his student and he was married to his first partner, but I digress…).
At the time, I was seeing a guy, also a Junior, who happened to be the friendly neighborhood school dealer – this was the 80s, so nothing too hard, and looking back, I think it was a far more innocent time.
Our school was a notorious party school and sat adjacent to the university’s dorms. The university was a notorious party school as well, so the town was known around the region as a party place. Most parents took it in stride because many of them were university employees or local business owners. Our teachers were pretty cool too for the most part. Many of them went to the same university, so they knew the town and the local vibe.
However, this teacher liked to talk smack about the party-type kids – saying they would not amount to anything, end up in jail, die of addiction, etc. She was always picking on us – saying we were bad eggs and losers.
One day, grocery shopping with my mom, we saw her in the parking lot, and she came over to speak to us. She started off by saying that I was doing poorly in her class (I was not; I had an A at the time) and that my grades were declining because I was with “that boy” (in the most dramatic, snarky Southern accent you can imagine).
Then she proceeds to tell my mom she was raising a junkie and an inappropriate girl, and I would not amount to anything. My mom shot something equally snarky back (I can’t remember exactly what, but she came to my defense swiftly), and my teacher scurried off with a shocked look as my mom embarrassed her pretty severely. My parents were the type of parents that were pretty laid back; they knew I was not doing anything worse than what they did in college.
I just started partying in high school (looking back, maybe there were a bit too laid back, lol).
The rest of the school year was uncomfortable, to say the least. I dreaded going to her class. She seemed to make my life miserable at every chance and now worked in insults about my mom too. I was really hurt and never forgot how mean she was.
I did graduate the next year, went to college, worked for many years in government, then went back to school and got my Ph.D. I became a professor at the university in my H.S. town. I never ended up being a junkie or inappropriate girl, however.
Riding the elevator one morning to my office, guess who gets on with me? Yup. She was going to visit her man who was a professor in another department in the same building.
I was not going to say a thing… just stand there biting my tongue. She recognized me, but can’t remember my name, so I reintroduce myself, and she exclaims, “Oh! Afaaisa! I can’t believe it is you? How are you?” I gave a polite but cool response, and she said in her same snarky tone, “What are YOU doing here?” I looked her dead in her eye, and said “going to my office.” “Your office?!” She replied, “Oh, aren’t you the funny one.” I did not say anything, but when I got off the elevator, I turned around, pointed down the hall to my office.
“Down the hall on the left, X Department, if you want to drop by. Ask for Dr. Afaaisa.” And I smiled the fakest smile, flipped her off, and said, “Good to see you,” (returning the snarky attitude).
Additional mildly amusing information: I worked with her man a few times on various committees – he used to try to get me to go to dinner or out with him.
I think just her knowing I was a professor was petty enough for me to feel gratified.”
17. Have Nothing But Complaints? Everyone Will Get To Fly First Class
“This happened when I (F, 20 at the time) was a junior in college. Here’s some context. I had taken a long weekend trip to Florida with a friend of mine to visit her brother and go to the Universal Studios Fright Night Halloween event (which was awesome, by the way).
We had an amazing trip, and we were on the plane about to head home. This was only my second ever time with air travel. We didn’t have much when I was growing up, so vacations were not a regular thing, and the ones we took were lowkey.
So, there I was, just excited to be flying in my coach seat, waiting to take off.
And we kept waiting. It became clear that there was a problem with the plane when the flight attendants started calling various passengers to exit to be placed on different flights, so they’d make their necessary connections. Eventually, after around 40 minutes, it was just my friend and I plus around 6 other people. And then it was our turn to leave the plane. We were sort of near the end of the group tromping back out into the waiting area.
One couple, probably in their mid-fifties, had stormed up ahead of us; and by the time my friend and I emerged from the gate entrance, the rude man was already berating the pair of attendants, who, to their credit, remained poised and calm.
They tried to reassure him, but he was talking over them. “This is unacceptable. You better get me the same seats we had on that flight.” (He had the first row in coach, the one with no seats in front of it and therefore with extra legroom.)
By then, the rest of us had gathered around, and the attendants began addressing the whole group, offering reassurances, filling us in that there was a critical problem with the plane (which made me very glad for the change, despite the inconvenience). The rude man was going off through all of this, and when the attendants left to make arrangements for us all, he and his lady sat there, and he continued his commentary to his poor woman.
“… unacceptable … how dare they … better have same seats …” and so on.
Shortly, the attendants returned, and the man practically rushed them. “I demand you make this right.”
The attendant smiled and said. “You guys are all set. Sir,” and she smiled at him specifically. “I’m very happy to tell you that we have a flight leaving shortly, and we were able to give you and your lady the exact same seats as you had booked on the previous flight.”
Rude man: “I should hope so. That’s the least you can do.” And he huffily returns to his seat.
Meanwhile, the rest of us are just waiting. The attendant then turns to us, and she says, “And I’m happy to let everyone else know that you’ll all be flying first class with us today.”
The rude man was furious and immediately jumped up to demand why they weren’t flying first class while the rest of us just sat there in a state of stunned glee.
The attendant just informed the man that she’d given him his request and didn’t stick around for more abuse. The wait wasn’t long, and soon my friend and I were boarded into the unicorn, fabled place that is First Class. As a poor, air travel newbie, it was like some fantasy land: huge seats, real hot washcloths, and though we were underage and couldn’t partake of the free drink, we did get to choose from a basked of “Distinctive Pepperidge Farm” cookies.
And the food! We got a whole meal, which was truly delicious, with real crystal salt and pepper shakers at each place setting and actual metal cutlery.
Meanwhile, the rude man is irate. My friend and I were in the last row of first class, which only had around 8 seats, and we could hear him heaping abuse on the coach attendants, going off on how those “kids don’t deserve” first class and how they “should have gotten them; they’re older, they should be respected, not some kids.” Someone else who was in first, not from our original plane, caught on and was quite tickled with the man’s ire.
Then, the best part of all happened: the flight attendant in our section overheard the rude man’s tirade, with language specifically directed at my friend and me, “Who do those kids think they are?!” as unworthy of the honor he should have been granted. The attendant shook his head and addressed me and my friend: “I’m sorry about that. Let me take care of this for you.” And he closed the curtain to the coach cabin.
The rude man realized what was happening, which makes it even madder. I got one last look at his red, irate face before he was gone forever. It was glorious!”
16. Steal My Parking Spot? I'll Steal Your Air
“About 15 years ago, I was in college in a fairly upper-middle-class city in South Florida. I say upper middle class because every other car on the road is a Lexus, BMW, Mercedes Benz, Porsche, etc., and a lot of the drivers had the entitlement to go along with their car brand. Then there is me in my little $4,500 Mazda sedan beater to get me to school and around town.
I was driving from my college dorm to the nearby shopping center to meet some friends for lunch and hang out. It’s roughly a 5-mile drive on roads with a max speed limit of 45 MPH. During my drive, I notice a blurry, green object going from one side of the road to the other behind me. As the object gets closer, I notice it’s a green Porsche 911.
It had the fast and furious treatment (spoiler, exhaust, etc.), and the driver was driving super aggressively cutting everyone off and weaving in and out of traffic. Eventually, he gets behind me and starts tailgating me.
Around this point, the roads went from 3 lanes to 2, and the guy in the car next to me and myself both ended up doing some telepathic mind-meld because we came up with the same idea.
I glanced over, and we both made the, “Can you believe this jerk?” faces to each other. He smirked and started to slow down, so I started to slow down, and we were both going around 35 MPH, and now the jerk in the Porsche was honking his horn and cutting from the left lane to the right front to pressure one of us to move out of his way.
Me and my new convoy companion did this for about 2.5 miles, never going above 40 MPH.
Eventually, the other driver had to turn, and once he turned off, the Porsche slammed on the gas, blew past me, and made a turn at the next traffic light, into the same shopping center I was headed to. Well, we both ended up at the red light waiting to turn into the parking lot.
The light turns green, and we both turn in and start scouring the rows for a spot. (This was a Saturday, so it was fairly busy.) Well, I lost sight of the Porsche and eventually found someone leaving a spot fairly close to the entrance. JACKPOT, I thought. I put my turn signal on to let a truck across from me know I called dibs on the spot.
The guy in the spot leaves, the truck driver drives past my spot, and I start to turn into the spot, when guess who shows back up, and cuts me off and pulls right into my spot: PORSCHE GUY. NOW I’M ANGRY. We have a small verbal exchange of name-calling, and it ends with him (I estimate a 40ish-year-old male) calling me (19) a poor kid with a crappy car and to park far away, so no one has to look at my car.
What this guy didn’t know was that I was also working for an automotive shop at the time, and I happened to be the tire guy. Being the tire guy, I sometimes took tools home because I forgot them in my shirt or pants pocket. One of these tools is a valve stem core remover tool. I use this to remove the Schrader valves on the old wheels to let the air out faster when it’s time to change the tire.
You CANNOT air up your tires without this crucial part. Well, guess who had that tool in their car? So I follow the Porsche guy’s instructions and park somewhere else. I then walk to his car, tool in hand, and proceed to remove all 4 valves out of the stems, and his tires went completely flat. I placed the valves in the trash can as I walk into the shopping center and had a great lunch with my friends.
As I leave the shopping center, a huge smile forms as I see a tow truck in the approximate location of where ole Jerk McGee parked. I went back to my car and enjoyed the rest of my day. I should have driven past the tow truck to see if it was actually him, but I’m pretty sure it was.”
15. A Phone On The Street? Um, No, I Didn't See It...
“Moved here a few months ago. On one side, my neighbor is a cool, little old man on the corner of the block. On the other side is a family with at least one kid in their late teens, maybe early 20’s. At least past high school, because school is back in session, and I see them around on weekdays.
Could be more than one, but there are quite a few that age who come and go, and I don’t know them. They live in a massive McMansion and have several cars between them. The rest of the block are houses built in the 1950’s or so – not bad homes at all but nothing huge. It’s not a busy street, zero traffic, and the houses are spaced pretty far apart.
The neighbor’s teens were walking through my backyard and the old man’s back yard to get to the street around the corner. Sometimes at night. We have two young kids who go to bed at around 8:30, and the youngest has issues that severely affect her sleep, causing her to be up all night at times. Sometimes they were woken up by the neighbor’s teens walking through at like 11 pm, talking, laughing, or playing music on their phones.
Part of the reason we chose this house is how quiet and spacey the neighborhood is.
After a couple of weeks of this (happened 4-5 times), I went to talk to the neighbors. The dad answered the door. I say something like hey, how you doing, I’m Svirfnil, I live over here. He just says “Uh, what do you need?” So I told him I have two kids who go to bed early, and his kids wake them up when they walk through the yard.
He said he would tell them to quiet down. I said “No, they’re coming through in the middle of the night. They should stay out of my yard.” He said, “Only at night?” just smug. His expression and tone really made me mad. So I said, “I mean freaking ever.” He made a “huh” noise and shut the door. So I walked back home.
A few days go by, and I hear the teens one evening around dusk, four of them, heading to their house.
So I go outside and ask, “Is this your yard?” They didn’t say anything, kept walking, and started laughing.
A couple of hours, later my lady was in the kitchen and sees a couple of them in the old man’s yard, close to our yard, with a flashlight pointed at the ground. We watch them for a few minutes, and when they come into our yard, I go out back with my flashlight, shine it at them, and said, “I’m about to call the freaking cops.” They ran back to their house.
The next morning, I was mowing and find what they were looking for. An iPhone. Looked new. No power. I pocket it and keep moving. Around noon, my bell rings. It’s the mom. The dad was standing at the end of my driveway. I guess he didn’t want to talk to me.
-“Hey, my daughter lost her phone while she was out walking last night.
Have you seen it around? Like in the street or anything?”
“Nope, haven’t seen any phones in the street.”
-“Have you seen one anywhere else?”
“Can’t say I have, but if I find one in the street I’ll let you know.”
I can see the gears in her brain working. She doesn’t look happy.
“By the way, I talked to your partner a few days ago about your kids in my yard.
They didn’t listen, so if it happens again, I’ll call the police.”
-“Are you serious?”
“They’re waking up my kids, and this is private property. I am very serious.”
She makes the same “huh” noise her partner did, walks off the porch and back to him. I guess she told him what I said because he made angry noises that I couldn’t understand from that porch.
They walk away, and I go back inside.
I know some newer phones have tracking, so a little later when I was running errands, I dropped it in a trashcan in a gas station bathroom. If they tracked it, maybe they went and dug it out. Good luck to them; it was one of those 50-gallon cans and full of who knows what, and I dropped it down the side, so it would slide to the bottom.
They haven’t been back in my yard since.”
Another Users Comments:
“”Man I thought I hit something with my mower, and now I think I know what it was.”” MrSnrlub
14. Complain About My Relatively Quiet Music? Oh, What About Your Yappy Mutt?
“In my junior year of college, I lived in a 24-hour quiet hour on-campus apartment. The rules meant any noise at all could be complained about and three complaints and you’re evicted.
Realistically, it meant if you stopped the party by midnight nobody cared.
My roommates and I lived in the last apartment, so I only had the one apartment upstairs as neighbors and I was next to the road.
We didn’t complain about their noise and they didn’t complain about us (me since my roommates were never there).
Until finals week.
After the first day of finals, I turned on some music to chill. About twenty minutes later I heard a knock on the door.
It was the resident assistant (RA) whose job it is to enforce the rules.
He told me there was a complaint about loud music.
We went back and forth for a bit because I was the only one there and he couldn’t even hear my music at the door. The RA did say he could hear it a bit as he walked up because my window was open and we walked outside to find that yes, you could hear it outside and it looked like the upstairs neighbor’s window was open too.
After that, he left to talk to the complainer (upstairs) and then came back saying she held to the complaint and that if I get two more I’ll be evicted.
After he left I went upstairs to talk, but my neighbor wouldn’t open the door. She just yelled through it that I should know better in 24-hour quiet hour housing and to follow the rules and make no noise or she’ll complain again.
Fine. I turned off my music and waited for her to leave.
Around dinner time I heard her leave. Within 10 minutes I heard what I was waiting for, so I call the RA to complain about “an intermittent loud noise from upstairs that’s making it hard to study.”
The RA asked if I’m just complaining in retaliation and that we should work it out without his involvement.
I told him I tried but that she told me it’s 24-hour quiet hours. I offered that if he came and felt my complaint was not legitimate I wouldn’t say anything for the rest of finals week.
He came and knocked on her door. I could tell when he did so because her dog went crazy. The RA came down and told me it was a legitimate complaint and dogs are not allowed. He then asked when the dog got there saying it was stupid of her to bring one over right after she complained about her neighbor’s noise.
My response: October.
He just looked at me for about 20 seconds like I had two heads.
Finally, I continued that yes, he heard me right that she’d been keeping the dog there for two months and I hadn’t complained even though it barked like crazy when she wasn’t there.
He had to go to the campus housing authority and they ultimately told her she could finish out her finals on campus if she immediately removed the dog but she would need to find alternative housing next semester for violating rules regarding animals on campus.
Two mornings later a dog’s barking woke me up, so I called the RA to complain.
That night the RAs helped her pack up her stuff and she had to stay in a hotel for the rest of finals.”
Another User Comments:
“This is why you should avoid being petty with people you don’t know but you’re probably going to see semi-regularly. You never know when someone will be more petty and has more free time than you.” imperial_scum
13. Think Bounced Checks Is Okay? You'll Be Forced To Pay
“In the late 2000s right out of college, I worked for the shadiest person I’ve ever known. It was my first job after college graduation and it paid pretty well, so I was willing to put up with a lot and ignore a ton of red flags including my paychecks occasionally bouncing.
It was always made right within a week, but it was super frustrating. I could tell a lot of stories about him being incredibly shady like when he used his chick’s cash from the sale of her house in another state to fund his failing business and then broke off the engagement as soon as he got the cash. Or the time he subleased his office space (illegally) and then screwed over the renters and tried to keep all their equipment after changing the locks, but this is my revenge from when I quit.
I was hired as a video editor for a small tv show that was syndicated nationally on small stations. I never saw actual numbers for our viewers, but I assume we maybe had 10 people that actually watched it. It was not good but the best I could do at the time and with the equipment we had. The owner was a classic narcissist and a big addict.
He’d come into the office grumbling and barely vocal with huge bags under his eyes then go into his office and 15 minutes later would come out wired and super excited about everything. His trash can was always filled with sticky notes rolled up into tubes. He also shared with anyone in the office who would listen that he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and thus we had to forgive his mood swings because he was better now that he was on medication.
But he was never better as it was just an excuse. For example, he would walk by and see the project I was working on and love it only for a few hours later to come by and complain about how it looks and that I wasn’t trying hard enough to see his vision. Anything he liked in the morning, he would hate in the evening and vice versa.
Knowing full well that this was designed with his input 100% as I wasn’t creating anything so much as making changes based on his whims. Like when he told me to make a graphic blue; I made it blue and then he would shout and complain about how blue looks terrible against the text and, “Do you really know anything about graphic design?”
I worked there through 3 years of struggle and chaos and whenever the owner had financial woes, he would do 2 things.
For one, he would stop coming into the office. When he was flush and everything was paid, he was there every single day. When he was behind, it could be weeks before I’d see him again. And two, he would start micromanaging everything in the office but in a weird passive-aggressive way. It was a 4 person operation including the boss doing this entire tv show, so it wasn’t like he could hide in a large building.
Anyway, shortly after my 3 year anniversary with the company, my paycheck bounced again. I brought it up and was told I’d be made whole next week, but the owner goes into his hiding mode. 2 weeks go by, and I was due another paycheck which because it would have also bounced, they wouldn’t even give me the check. So now I’m 2 paychecks down, and I’ve got bills to pay.
Finally get in touch with the owner, and he tells me he’s just about to close a deal (he was always just about to close some deal), and he was going to have all kinds of cash to give me the raise I’d been asking for as well as all the back pay I’m owed. I told him that’s great, but if I don’t get my next paycheck, I’ll have to start looking for another job.
He takes that along with his insecurity at being unable to pay any of his employees and turns it into a reason to micromanage the crap out of me but from a distance. He wouldn’t come into the office but would call several times a day asking for updates. I was working 12-14 hour days at this point Monday through Friday, but he wanted me to stay at the office until he “felt that I was done for the day.” That meant staying late or even coming back to the office after I delivered the tape to our distributors just to do essentially busywork.
Yes, I was also the courier for our finished product.
In our entire office, there was just the on-camera talent, myself as the editor and the office manager who was a lifelong friend of the owner. He did nothing for the show. What about all the other roles that are needed for a tv show? Yep, I had to do all of that. I was the editor but also the cameraman (multiple robotic cameras), sound guy, executive producer, IT support for the whole office, and satellite tech for our satellite dish downlinks.
The on-camera talent would write the scripts and do the on-camera work. If we needed extra voice work I did that as well as literally everything else. It was hectic but without me, there was literally no show and we were contracted to do 13 shows a week; Early Show, Late show Monday to Friday along with 3 special edition shows that could air whenever the stations wanted to.
I took 2 sick days in 3 years because of this insanity.
So we get to week 6 of no paychecks and I’m again told that they don’t have the cash, but they will in 2 days. I’m furious but with the promise of getting paid, I start my work week as payday was Monday. Tuesday it’s late about 10 pm, and I had finished both of the daily shows and 2 of the weekly specials so I was way ahead of the game and I was on one of my 14 hour days.
Hence I went home as I had to be in the office at 8 am the next morning to start all over again. I drive home and as soon as I walk in my door I get an angry call from the owner.
Owner: “Why aren’t you at work?
Me: “I’d finished the work for the day, and I had to be back at the office in 10 hours, so I had to come home and get some rest.”
Owner: “Who told you were done for the day?”
Me: “I’d finished the shows and even 2 of the specials. I’ve got till Friday to finish the 3rd.”
Owner: “But I never told you that you were finished. I need you to go always call me before you leave each day. If I don’t think you’ve done enough work, you won’t get paid for the day.”
Me: “I’m not getting paid at this point anyway as it’s been almost a month since I got a dollar from you.”
Owner: “I need you to be a team player while we work through some tough times. Now I need you to go back into the office and call me from the office phone. I’ll figure out something for you to work on tonight to make up for the time you’ve left ‘early.'”
Me: “I’m not driving back 30+ minutes this late at night, and I didn’t leave early; I left late. I’m ahead of the weekly schedule, so what could I possibly work on?”
Owner: “Work on the new graphics for the shows.”
Me confused: “But I delivered the new graphics last week, and you approved them?”
Owner: “I know and now I want you to work on new ones.
You should take pride in your work and always be improving.”
I finally lost my temper and said, “And you should hang up and go take your medication because you are freaking crazy. Consider this my 2-week notice. I quit.”
I hung up and ignored the shrill screaming calls he aimed at me all night. The next morning, he was in the office waiting for me.
He expected me to apologize for my “outburst” the night before. I told him he WAS crazy and that I indeed was quitting, so he’d better hire a new editor/everything, so I could train them up. I also wanted all of the paychecks I was owed even if they weren’t cashable at that time. As he wrote out all the checks, and he smugly told me, “You can cash these just as soon as you get me those new graphics I want.”
I just ignored him and took my paper checks. Trained the girl he hired fresh out of college over the next 2 weeks, and after getting my final check, left never to return.
The new girl I trained was nice, so I did answer the occasional call about editing issues and some of the stranger tech problems we got, but I ignored the owner’s repeated requests to come back with the promise that if I came back, he would make sure I could cash all those paychecks I had.
What I figured out though was that since I had the physical checks, I could call the bank they were drawn on and give them the check number, account number, and amount, and they would tell me if the account had sufficient funds to cover. I called almost every day for a few weeks until finally I got lucky. He got some cash infusion from somewhere and there was cash in the account to cover all 4 paychecks.
I drove up immediately and cashed all 4 and left the happiest I’d been in years. Each paycheck was $2,000, so my account was suddenly flush with $8,000 of that jerk’s cash.
That night, I got another angry call from the owner telling me what I did was illegal (it wasn’t) and that I had screwed up a major opportunity for him and that he needed that cash for a side business he was running.
Deal? No idea what that was about because I let all his calls go to voicemail and never returned them. I had my cash, so screw him. They managed to hang on for another 2 years or so before the shows were canceled and his whole business went belly up.”
12. A Decade Later, An Abuser Finally Gets His Payback
It took a long time, but it was all worth it.
“When I was a young lass, I was abused by an adult male who volunteered at the school I went to. It went on that entire year, and the next year I had the good fortune to change schools for totally unrelated reasons.
Due to the standard-issue threats and manipulation that come with these scenarios (‘I’ll kill your family if you ever tell them and take you to live with me once they’re dead,’ ‘What we do is a special secret that nobody else can ever know,’ etc.), I never told anyone. I pushed it down and just tried not to think about it.
Many years later, I had a friend confide in me that something similar had happened to her, and we swapped stories.
She had done things the proper, tidy way: she told a trusted adult, the perpetrator was tried in a court of law, he was convicted, and he was jailed for a long time.
Everything wrapped up nice and neat with a little bow on top.
She was mad at me for not telling anyone about what had happened to me, even if it hadn’t been until years later (because what if it had happened to someone else?), but I pointed out that once it was past the statute of limitations, I couldn’t really tell anyone.
Doing so when he wasn’t tried and convicted would come back on me as slander. So it felt like there wasn’t anything I could do. For a while, I left it at that. But it started to nag at me.
Was there really nothing I could do?
I started by looking him up online. A basic Google and social media search were all I needed to find him (living far away from where I was, and I wasn’t sure if that meant good or bad things for my revenge, whatever it turned out to be as I had no definite plan then).
On his very public profile, I got some news that rattled me: he had terminal cancer.
It didn’t seem like he was going to drop dead the next day, but still, it was now or never if I wanted to get some kind of closure from him.
So I requested him on social media, and he accepted. I sent him the first message: ‘Hey, I’m (OP) from (school).
Do you remember me?’ He answered yes, and that was it. I asked for his phone number. ‘I just want to talk to you.’
He said he didn’t think that was a good idea. I said, ‘It’s been so long, there’s nothing that could happen. I’m not mad, just sad more than anything, and I just want to talk. Now that I’m older, I want to understand.’
He believed me, and I got his number. I tried calling him immediately, straight to voicemail.
He said he would set up a time for us to talk. Okay, fine. I can be patient. It only gave me more time to think about what I would do.
About a week or so later, I called him, and he picked up. I barely remember this conversation, and went through a lot of it on adrenaline, shaking like a leaf.
He sounded… sick. Old and sick. Not intimidating, like he used to be. Not scary, not anymore. He asked me what I wanted, and why I was talking to him after so long. I said, ‘I just need to hear from you what you did to me so I know I’m not crazy.’
He said he couldn’t do that.
I told him he owed it to me, and that it had been so long ago, the statute of limitations was expired so there was nothing that could be done about it.
I said that I knew he was dying, and it would clear his conscience to talk about it and answer all of my questions, win-win, right? He still said no.
So I told him that was a shame, and that I’d hoped to get closure from him, but I guess asking his wife and son that I’d seen on social media would have to be enough.
This was a bluff on my part–I knew that by telling him that, he could do preemptive damage control.
If this didn’t work, I’d be out of luck.
He said fine. He first said in a very bland sort of way, ‘I was inappropriate with you back then.’
Not good enough.
I pushed and pushed and pushed until I almost thought he was going to hang up, and he finally admitted it, in detail.
I thanked him and asked if his conscience felt better. He said yes. I said good, that was all I wanted for both of us. I hung up. Now the actual revenge part: I had recorded the whole thing. (Not illegal, I was in a 1-party consent area, and although he lived in a different area, he did too.) I uploaded it to cloud storage and sent a link to his wife and his (adult) son.
I explained that I had found them as a mutual contact on social media, and since he was nearing the end, I thought they might appreciate knowing some of the memories he shared with me about the time he volunteered at that school.
I never got a reply from his wife. I didn’t expect one, but still, I was a little disappointed. It took about three months, but then I finally got a message from his son.
It was glorious.
He wasn’t the guy’s son, he was his step-son, and he’d never liked the guy from day 1. He’d told his mom this repeatedly, but she insisted he was just bitter about his bio dad leaving and told him to get over it.
Something just felt off about him, and now he knew what it was. He apologized to me for how the guy had hurt me, not that it was any of his fault, they didn’t even know him back then yet.
He told me that he knew his mom hadn’t replied to me, but she had listened to it. Afterward, she had left him. While he was dying of cancer. The step-son said this guy didn’t have a family of his own, and that he and his mom and his own kids were all he had left. They severed ties with him.
The best part: the wife never actually married him, and even if she had, when she left, it wasn’t exactly like there was time for the guy to contest anything in court.
He was fading fast, and that stuff can take a year or more to get settled. He didn’t have that kind of time. When she left, she took all the cash (it was all hers, he hadn’t worked in a long time due to cancer), she took the closest thing he had to family, and the best part: without her, he no longer had the cash to pay for his private health insurance.
I thanked the step-son for contacting me and asked if he could do me one more favor: tell me when it was over and he was dead. He happily agreed.
A few more months later, I got the news: he died alone in a state hospital. They weren’t going to publish an obituary, although the step-son had decided to have him cremated so that he could just scatter the ashes.
No plot, no lasting proof that this man ever existed.
Apparently, he had spent the last few months writing constant letters to his now-ex and step-son, calling them, texting them, everything. Neither one had responded, and he died alone, knowing that what he had done had eventually ruined his life and taken away what mattered to him. I thought it was a pretty fitting ending, although in the end vengeance just felt meh.
I always wish that I hadn’t believed him back then and had just told someone.”
11. Try To Can Our Favorite Colleague? Not On Our Watch
“This tale was told to me as a warning when I started on my first post-college job. I am relating it exactly as it was told to me. This occurred in the early ‘80s, so those of you who’ve grown up with the Internet may not understand how we did things in the olden days. There were no smart-phone apps to show Q-codes for airline tickets.
They were paper. With red carbon mess. Reservations were done by phone. It was primitive by today’s standards.
Players (names have been changed of course) – Sandra – super-sweet secretary loved by all (true – I worked with her. She was amazing). Fred – Sandra’s boss. Tom – local VP. Bigshot – incoming senior manager from back East. Al – lead engineer on the team.
This occurred in Salt Lake City, which if you don’t know, family was a HUGE part of culture.
Even at work, family matters took precedence, and local management knew this and allowed for it. Well, Bigshot’s office minions noticed some slight irregularities in timecards, like days off without pre-approved vacation requests. So he got himself transferred to the Salt Lake City office to ‘straighten things out.’ Naturally, he was quickly hated.
One morning, Sandra got a call from her daughter who was unexpectedly in town and wanted to have lunch.
Naturally, Fred and Tom said okay. But then Bigshot stuck his nose in. Rather than just say ‘no’, he dropped a travel request on Sandra’s desk, and it had to be done because he expected to fly out that afternoon. Sandra was heartbroken that she wouldn’t get to see her daughter, but she had her work responsibilities.
Stopping by to drop off some paperwork, Al noticed that Sandra looked a little down – a huge change from her normal chipper mood.
He naturally asked why, and Sandra explained. Al told her (he had no authority, btw) to go have lunch and “we’ll take care of it.”
Bigshot got his travel packet, got on the plane that afternoon, and flew off to his meeting. That’s when things started to go wrong. The rental car reservation was invalid, and there were no cars available at any of the agencies – all had a ‘hold’ on them pending confirmation from some big clients.
So Bigshot ended up getting a Rent-a-Wreck. (for those too young or not in the US, there really was a discount auto rental agency by that name! Quality was not job 1.) When Bigshot got to the hotel, he found that his reservation was no good. He had to wait around until after the ‘tentative’ reservations expired – which was after 6 pm. Getting suspicious, Bigshot looked at his tickets – and found they were one-way.
He had no flight home.
The next morning, Tom flew in to join him, and to say Bigshot was incensed was probably an understatement. He gave Bigshot a packet that was marked “extremely urgent” that had been left on his desk with a note to take it to Bigshot; it was Bigshot’s return ticket.
On the way back, Bigshot stopped by the corporate office and got a very senior exec to come with him because of some ‘very serious personnel problems’.
The next morning, Bigshot led the senior exec and Tom into a meeting with all of Fred’s department and began publicly berating Sandra for incompetence and so on. When he got to the part about the tickets, Fred interrupted and told the senior exec that Sandra couldn’t have done that – she was on approved time off having lunch with her daughter. This raised the senior exec’s eyebrows and got Bigshot even angrier.
The senior exec said if Sandra didn’t mess up the tickets, who did? Fred stepped forward. Then Al. And one by one, every single member of Fred’s team stepped forward to take responsibility to protect Sandra from Bigshot’s wrath.
Tom and the senior exec knew instantly what had happened. Everyone on Fred’s team had burned up the phones making ‘tentative’ reservations for rental cars and hotel rooms – leaving Bigshot stuck with worthless reservations and no alternates.
Within the hour, Bigshot’s desk was empty and his badge had been turned in. The senior exec stuck around to get to know the team; he was very impressed with how the whole team stuck together and protected their own.
After he finished the tale, the engineer said bluntly, “Don’t mess with Sandra. We love her, and we WILL make you pay if you upset her.” Message received loud and clear.
As I worked with Fred’s team, I got to understand why everyone loved Sandra. She was an absolute gem in the organization – efficient, super-friendly, just an all-around wonderful person.”
10. Ok, Fine I Know I'm Good At What I Do, So I'll Just Start My Own Business
I am a teacher, and when I was younger, I would take summer jobs to supplement my income. One summer, I worked for a bricklayer named Jerry and heard an amazing story! I worked for Jerry in the mid 90’s, so the story either happened in the early 90’s or in the 80’s.
Here goes:
The setting for the story was a community of small rural towns which had only only one brick contractor. Jerry began his career as a bricklayer working for this contractor, a real jerk. Jerk and Jerk’s son (adult working the business with his father) would harass, belittle, and humiliate all their employees on a regular basis. No work was ever good enough and employees were told they weren’t worth what they were paid.
Not only did Jerk mistreat his employees; but, he was equally rude to other subcontractors and to the general contractors who hired him. Since he was the only bricklayer in the community, there was nothing anyone could do about it.
Needless to say, the turnover rate for the brick business was very high. The only person that stuck with Jerk and Company was Jerry. Jerry told me that his father had instilled a self-confidence in him that Jerry could do anything he set his mind to do and that he should not evaluate himself according to what others said; but, rather by the facts.
Although Jerry was belittled by Jerk and Son as were all other employees; Jerry was becoming a very good bricklayer. Jerry knew he was good; Jerk knew Jerry was good; but, Jerk didn’t know that Jerry knew he was good. Not only was Jerry a good bricklayer; he was very respectful to the boss who disrespected him. Jerk thought that Jerry was a naive pushover who was buying his head games.
That would prove to be a HUGE mistake on his part.
One day, Jerry was doing an exceptionally good job of laying brick. Not only was his craftsmanship amazing, he was laying brick at a high rate of speed so that he was making his boss lots of money. Of course, Jerk and Son were belittling his work as though he was doing the very opposite.
This scenario was being observed by the general contractor of the project. After work that day, the general contractor asked Jerry to stay behind so he could talk to him. As did every other construction worker in the community, General Contractor hated working with Jerk. General Contractor told Jerry that he had heard Jerk and Son belittling him; and told him that he disagreed with everything Jerk was saying.
He asked Jerry if he had ever considered going into business for himself. Jerry said that he would like to do that some day. General Contractor then said that he would loan Jerry the to buy a mixer (the most expensive piece of equipment needed to start a brick business) if Jerry would indeed start said business. The only hitch was that Jerry would need to pay for the mixer whenever he could and that he would subcontract under General Contractor.
Jerry agreed to those terms and prepared to begin his new venture.
Jerry respectfully told Jerk and Son his plans and gave his notice. The two mocked Jerry ruthlessly and laughed him to scorn. Jerk told Jerry, “You’ll be back in two months begging to return to your job—you’ll never make it as a subcontractor!” Two months later, rather than collapsing as Jerk predicted, Jerry was still in business and going strong.
One year later, Jerry’s business was booming and a Jerk showed up at Jerry’s house and begged him to come back to work with Jerk and Son. “Jerry, you’re the best employee I ever had.” Jerry replied, “Why didn’t you ever tell me that when I was working for you?” Jerk couldn’t answer the question; and, Jerry obviously didn’t accept the offer for employment.
Two years after beginning his entrepreneurial adventure, Jerry heard that Jerk and Son went out of business.
Jerry said that he never intended to harm Jerk and Son when he accepted General Contractor’s offer. He said that looking back on things he realized that he had become Jerk’s greatest nightmare. I can’t say that General Contractor intended no harm!
I thought the most amazing thing about the story was how that Jerry maintained his self-esteem in spite of all the ridicule.
I also gained a respect for Jerry’s father who instilled an unshakable self-confidence in Jerry!
9. Injure My Teammate? I'll Stop Your Ship From Sailing
“One of the most annoying things about being in the navy and joining later than most is still being expected to join in the team sports, even though joints are creaking and the stamina isn’t as good as an 18-year-old.
On one of these occasions, I was with a team from my department facing a ships team made up fully of guys, despite the fact that teams were supposed to be mixed when playing bucketball.
Watching the other games, I realized that this lot was really rough and I gave the PT the heads up that the rough stuff really wasn’t on.
Two minutes into our game with them, one of the roughest players slammed hard into Joy (not her real name), who had just recovered from a sprained ankle, and I winced as I saw her knee go the wrong way (learning later that she had snapped cartilage).
She’s on the ground, clutching her knee and screaming the place down and my first reaction was to first look at the PT, waving my arm at my teammate and mouthing what the heck was that. The PT said it was an unfortunate accident, so I checked back at the player and made a note of his bib number. 15. Okay, I’ve literally got your number, pal.
The game goes on, the ship intent on staying rough, and I’m shielding my team as best I can from the roughest play, which involves taking a few whacks. Then my opportunity opens up, and I spot 15 in the clear, waiting to receive the ball. I charge, as hard and as fast as I can. I have absolutely no intention of getting the ball, I’m getting the man and, as he gets ready to catch it, he hears his own teammates shout in warning, and I see his eyes open in alarm just as I’m inches away, and I slam hard into him.
Using him as a cushion as we both crash into a brick way.
The collective gasp of so violent a slam brought the watching teams to silence as I pick myself from the floor and face his teammates, daring them to come. His shrieks of pain broke the silence, and I never heard anything quite like it. His team dated to come and my actions started a punch up between the ship and the other teams, whilst the PT frantically tried to get things to settle back down.
In the aftermath, the sport was canceled whilst 15 was treated, and I was hauled over the coals for my overly rough treatment. Especially as I had ended up shattering his shoulder and he was later discharged as being unfit for further service. What made it worse was that he was an officer in the warfare department, and his position meant that if his ship had sailed, then the other two who shared his duties were 1 in 2 – which was dangerous – so sailing had to be delayed by 24 hours before the ship could deploy.
My punishment? Two days loss of pay and stoppage of leave. I still had to be punished for my actions, but they weren’t too severe as witnesses came forward to state that the PT hadn’t properly controlled the evolution.”
8. Don't Pass Any Moving Cars? Fine By Me
“So my high school sits back away from a highway, and the parking lot stays open for about 1.5 hours before and after school. There’s an administrator at the school whose job is to stay in the parking lot and walk the cars to make sure nobody’s doing anything wrong since it’s a large school with a huge parking lot. Many people I know have complained about him, but he’s never given me a hard time.
When you turn off of the highway, there is a 1/8 mile straight road driving up to where the parking lot entrance is, so people typically go relatively fast through it; however, some people go crawling slow.
Now the road is two lanes, with the left lane going to the “bottom” of the parking lot and the right to the “top.”
One day, I was coming in like I always do, about 15 mph.
Of course, there’s a sophomore who fresh got their license going 5 in the right lane, but I go to the “bottom” anyway, so I just drive past them and park, just fine.
But as I get my backpack out of my trunk, Administrator walks up to me and starts talking.
A: You running late this morning?
Me: I guess so? Did the parking lot start closing earlier?
A: Well, I just saw you passing cars on the way in.
Me: No, I di…
A: I just watched you pass a car!
Me: (finally understanding what he’s talking about) oh, we’re not allowed to pass cars coming in? Sorry, won’t do…
A: You’ll get a warning this time, but next time, I’ll take your plate and get your (parking) tag taken.
Now this really ticked me off, because I’ve been driving to school for 3 years and never had a problem with my speed, much less for “passing.”
Me: So we can’t pass cars in here? Even if they are going slow?
A: You shouldn’t be passing any moving vehicles.
Bad wording.
For the next few days, I started going slow into the lot and taking footage of people passing me to A to ask him what he’d do about it, when he eventually admitted he didn’t care. I asked him why not now; he didn’t have an answer.
On Friday of that week, one of my friends was broken down in the road to the lot. So I told him my plan and got him on board with what I wanted to do.
Typically when broken down here, you roll your car to the lot in neutral and leave it in the lot till it’s fixed, but I wasn’t allowed to pass.
I parked behind him and waited for friend number 2 to show up.
They started pushing the car while I idled and rode right next to them. After about 5 minutes, the VP came up. He asked me what I was doing, and I told him I was following the rules that A made and he should go get him. VP tells me to just go, but I insist on following the “parking managers” rules.
At this point, 10 cars were lined up in either lane getting more angry by the minute.
A comes up with VP, and A immediately looks like he ate a poop sandwich.
He tells me to just pass people as long as I drive safe.
Other than odd looks, he never gave me a hard time again, but he still leaves extra warning notes on my car for petty things such as parking too far over in my space or for not having headlights on instead of running lights.”
Another User Comments:
“This reminds me of the time my mom first had me drive on the highway. Cars kept tailgating and then zipping past me, and my mom told me not to let them intimidate me and that I could go faster. Cue to the next car coming up next to me and me accelerating every time that they tried to pass me. My mom started to frown and then asked me if I was trying to race.
I just shrugged and said, “I’m not letting them intimidate me.” I got yelled at and had to slow down.” theamazingkarmazin
7. Affairs Aren't Tolerated Around Here
“This happened years ago when I was around 18 and a girl I had gone to high school with.
We had been together for about a year and towards the last month of our relationship things started to die out, we wouldn’t talk as much and she never had time for me.
She claimed she was always working at her family’s grocery store. Her family had their own business for years. It was a small grocery store that at one point while I was in between jobs I even worked at for a short time. Her family was lovely, and her father and I got along great and still chat every now and then because I was always working or studying, didn’t party and had set goals for myself early in life which her father thought was awesome.
So anyway, back to our relationship. Because we both worked we only had the weekends free so usually, we would do our best to spend time with each other, but she had grown distant and I hadn’t thought anything of it. But one weekend I receive a call from a friend of mine who tells me she had seen me with another guy. I didn’t want to believe it, I was devastated. But I thought before I throw any accusations I would get my own proof first. It took me almost 3 weeks to convince her to spend time with me.
When she agreed and came over for a night after work, I had planned on confronting her to find out for myself.
She arrived shortly after dark and told me she was going to have a shower. She went into the bathroom but had left her phone with her bag and keys on the table. So I did what anyone who has been told they were being unfaithful towards would do, I went through to see for myself.
And what do you know, she was having an affair with her ex-boy who was a dirtbag.
You see he was one of the kids at school that messed around, never came to school. Was out smoking and drinking instead. I never really interacted with him outside of being asked for a lighter.
But he was also selling at school. I’ve always thought people who sell to kids are dirtbags.
Not cool at all bro.
I found out she had been going to see him on the weekends to do and drink as well as sleeping with him. There were messages talking about how I was “too nice” or focused on work too much. How she’s only with me because her family loves me and I can handle that if you tell me that, not on me because of it I would rather leave a relationship freely.
This hit me really hard and messed with my perception of women afterward.
I had never had an unfaithful partner before and didn’t know how to handle the feeling.
But I wasn’t going to let her do me like that. Here comes the sweet revenge. You see in those messages they had been talking about needing cash for or and not having enough, this conversation led to him convincing her to steal it from her family business.
She had been getting away with almost 800 dollars or so every weekend as well as stealing items from their shop. So I thought fast, screenshot all the messages, and sent them to her father from her phone.
I told him it was me, and that this is what I had found on his daughter’s phone.
Shortly after she had finished up in the shower.
I told her we were finished and I knew everything. I told her to leave and I had a surprise for her when she got home to which she was confused. She left after that and I received a call from her dad who was apologized to me for his daughter’s actions and sounded almost as devastated as I was. He told me he had already called the police and they were waiting for her to get back home as well as collecting her ex-boy as an accomplice.
I was shocked but thankful that I had cut the dead weight from my life in a just fashion considering she was two-timing me.
She got to spend the night in a cell with her ex and was ordered to pay back the amount by a judge and given community service. He on the other had happened to have previous warrants out and I don’t know what happened to him after.
I wiped my hands clean of her and moved forward. But man, that felt so much better that she at least got some punishment as a result.”
6. Force Your Son To Take A $2,000 Paternity Test? You'll Be Paying For It One Way Or Another
If you can’t keep your word, he’ll make sure you do.
“This story is about my grandma, my father’s mother. Let’s call her Ellen. Ellen has always hated my mother. I think one reason is because my father and his family are very pale (they aren’t racist, but I think deep down she is a bit), but the other reason is that my mother doesn’t take crap from anyone.
Examples of things Ellen did, and my mother didn’t like:
- Going inside the home of my parents and start opening their letters.
- Getting mad about the tiniest piece of dirt in their home; even she isn’t Mr. Clean.-
- Trying to pin everything that goes wrong on my mother, even things my dad or I choose to do (“Oh, I bet that was the idea of your stupid mother!”)
- Trying and succeeding to take the first children of my mother away (That’s another long story…)
- Then trying to take me away but backing out because I’m pretty sure my mom would’ve ended her this time (I don’t blame her; I would too.)
- Telling my whole family I was lying when her internet partner tried to do things to me as a 7-year-old that you just shouldn’t do.
So anyway, you get the idea. A horrible person. No one was good enough for her son (my dad). When my mom and dad had their first child together, my brother “Jude” looked a lot more like my mother. My mother’s biological father was/is black; her biological mother was white – I always like to call her skin tone “cappuccino with a tiny bit of milk,” haha.
She also has tiny gorgeous curls I’m a bit jealous of. My dad on the other hand is just white, straight-brown hair, brown eyes. Jude is a lot darker than my mother but has her curls and looks overall not very much white like my dad.
So Ellen was CONVINCED that my mother must have had an affair, and Jude couldn’t possibly be the child of my father and her grandchild.
She didn’t let the topic go, and back at the time, my dad was still very attached to his family (he was only 18, and my mother was 21). So when Ellen wouldn’t stop bothering my father to do a paternity test, he finally said he would do it, but only if she paid for it if Jude turned out to be his son. So she agreed. He did the test which cost about $2,000 dollars today?
(It was another currency back then but still very expensive) The only reason my parents had the cash was because they were saving for a wedding. My mother originally didn’t want to get hitched, but my father was very good at changing her mind. (He fell in love with her when he was only 14 and wouldn’t stop confessing his love and singing cringy love songs until she finally gave in 4 years later – still together to this day!)
So the test came back, and surprise, surprise, he was the father. So he wanted the cash back because it was a huge chunk of cash, not only for the wedding, but they just had a baby! If she did give him the moola, we wouldn’t be here today. So she didn’t, even though she had the cash (my grandparents were pretty wealthy back then).
My mother was super hurt, and a “real” wedding with a dress and in a church like my father wanted was totally canceled. The only reason my mother married my dad 12 years later (and not in a church but in like the town hall?) was because I was really annoying as a child; I always wanted my parents to be legally bounded, and it got them some benefits, like with taxes and for medical emergencies and so on.
So of course my Dad was bitter about it, really bitter. But the revenge part would take more then 20 years.
Last year my whole family got into e-bikes. Literally everyone got one. First, my dad used Ellen’s, but he wanted his own. Due to a really bad credit score, he couldn’t get one under his name or my mother, and because he is her favorite son, he talked Ellen into getting him one.
Of course, he would pay her every month back… I think you can see where this is going.
So she buys him an expensive e-bike, almost the price of the paternity test, and my dad paid the first month, maybe even the second. But then stops. Ellen starts complaining, even before he stops paying to everyone in the family. “He isn’t paying!” “That stupid woman of his is robbing me of my cash!” It’s not like she even needed the moola.
Her pension is very generous, and she’s in another country for vacation almost every 3 months for weeks. Of course, my father knows why he stopped paying, but because she wouldn’t stop complaining to EVERYBODY, he had to remind her.
So the next time she brought it up, he straight up reminded her of the time, over 20 years ago where she forced him to take that stupid test, didn’t pay him back like she said she would, and destroyed not only the wedding but also their savings and a part of their relationship.
I don’t know if she thought somehow my dad would forget something like this (or the other stuff she pulled, just to somehow break them off). She started tearing up and got really quiet. I really wish I was there to take a photo of that shiny little tear of regret and realization, but oh well.
So she paid for the bike in silence, and not one of us has heard her talking about my father or mother who wouldn’t pay her for the bike anymore!”
Another User Comments:
“My cousin is very dark, to the point that people often think he might be South Indian or something like that. His parents are also white and light coffee-colored, except in his case, his mom is the 100% white one.
His sister’s skin looks like the average light-skinned Latina. She technically is, and their brother is somewhere in between. Genetics can be weird.” curiosityLynx
5. Shady Apartment Complex Loses Huge Bucks
“When I first moved to the region, I had to abruptly end my home search due to a sudden death in the family.
As a result, I signed on the first place that had the amenities I wanted and fit within my budget. I didn’t have time to do any real background checking on the neighborhood or management association, so yeah, my bad.
To say it was mismanaged is an understatement, but the place was taken over by a far more professional firm shortly before my lease expired, and since this place was walking distance from a soon to complete metro extension, I decided to stick it out.
The new firm did a significantly better job (at first), but that didn’t last long. Soon, they were underpaying for waste management, so garbage stations became festering piles of loose garbage, construction made the Overflow parking situation infinitely worse, emergency maintenance orders took up to two weeks to be answered, billing went haywire and people (me) were being charged twice for rent, then had to fight for weeks to at least get that payment credited towards the next month.
They tried more than once to keep it claiming I owed non-existent back rent.
I finally had enough.
So this neighborhood had insufficient street parking, and due to construction associated with metro expansion, residents were no longer allowed to park on the main street.
The neighborhood had always told people to park in an unpaved gravel lot, even included it on the map for new tenant orientation.
Thing is though, they didn’t own that lot; the city did. As a result, the neighborhood took zero responsibility for security, maintenance, and upkeep of that lot, and it started being used to dump construction garbage and hide stolen cars. My breaking point came when there was a gunfight in the lot, and a stray bullet went through my neighbor’s window (neighborhood charged him to replace the window, by the way).
Figured I’d kill a few birds with one stone so to speak.
I reported the illegal dumping to code enforcement, the criminal activity to state and local police, and the illegal land use to the city/county that owned the property. For a week, nothing happened. Then I started seeing code enforcement, surveyors, police, etc. all over the lot taking notes and photos. Within a few weeks, the garbage was gone, the abandoned and stolen cars were towed, and a fence was put up to prevent anyone from accessing the lot.
I moved soon after, and apparently so did a lot of other tenants. Last I checked, rent was decreased by around 30%, there are a ton of vacancies, and the shady office staff has all been replaced. I know that there were some fines levied because of the garbage situation, the illegal use of government property, and some other fines. There were also lawsuits regarding their shady billing practices.
Oh and that metro expansion? I moved out five years ago and it’s still not done.”
4. Keep Making Me Come In On My Time Off? Lose Out On Your Two Week Caribbean Vacation
“I used to work at the post office as an RCA, which is a Rural Carrier Associate.
It was a part-time driver job. It paid well, and I wanted to get a full-time job with benefits, so you have to start somewhere.
The full-time driver on my route was Bill.
Bill was his own man. He did what he wanted, and the Postmaster allowed it. When I was trained, I rode one day with Bill. The next day, Bill called out. I then had to sort the mail and drive the route all alone. It was horrible. The PM should have told him to come in, but he was a spineless man.
I didn’t finish until around 8 pm. It should have been around 3 pm given the time of year and how long it would eventually take me.
My schedule was every Saturday, and any vacation days Bill would take. I also covered every time he called out. Now, as this was supposed to be a one-day-a-week job, I had a full-time job as well at my local hospital. My post office job was in the next county over, about 45 minutes away from each way.
I would get calls at 6 am from Bill with some bs excuse for him not wanting to come to work. He would say he had to see an orthodontist ‘today.’ I worked with these doctors, and I know that there was no way he would be able to get an appointment that early.
If he needed an appointment, he should have called me the day before, so I could get my second shift job covered. Again, the spineless PM would allow it to happen without any recourse.
On my anniversary, I had told him I was going to take my lady out to a nice lunch before we both went to our job at the hospital. At 6 am, the phone rang, and it was the same lie as always, and I had to go in. I reminded him it was my anniversary, and he said ‘too bad.’ I went in, totally angry.
The same thing on my birthday, and then on my lady’s birthday, he called out, and I had to work both jobs.
A few months later, and nothing had changed. I applied to nursing school and was accepted for the fall program. I had several months, so I kept it to myself. My plan was to work the same way I had, and if I was offered a full-time post office job, I’d take it.
If not, I’d go to nursing school. Both were great careers.
Bill called out whenever the workload was heavy, like with Sears catalogs. They were the worst. The postmaster would do things like remove all the toilet paper from the bathrooms, thinking we were wasting time pooping, I guess.
He’d also turn up the heat in the summer, so we’d be miserable and leave on our route faster, which was physically impossible because no matter how hot you got, you had to sort everything before leaving on your route.
Sorting was by hand, and I was trying to be very accurate.
Now Bill had gotten remarried shortly before I started with the post office. They never had a chance for a honeymoon, so they put it off. They scheduled a two-week trip to the Caribbean. When he told me, there was a month to go before they left, which was plenty of notice.
He told me the tickets were non-refundable, ‘so don’t mess me over!’
I had had enough of Bill and the PM messing me over all the time, so 10 days before he left, I put in my two-week notice. The PM assumed I’d work through Bill’s vacation. Nope. Just the first four days. Bill called me at home. ‘Man, I’ve been good to you. You’ve got to cover my time off. The vacation is non-refundable.’ I remind him of all the times he’s lied to force me to cover, and the days I had to work for him like my anniversary, my birthday, my woman’s birthday, etc.
Also, how he fudged me over in orientation, making my first several weeks miserable.
I left the day I said I would, the PM refused to cover, and Bill had to cancel the trip and come in and work.
I loved nursing, so I made the best choice.”
Another User Comments:
“The way I see it, Bill deserved your revenge on him, for screwing you over that often.
I just want to throw in that it is possible that he was trying to screw over his employer and just didn’t care how much of the crap he was pulling you had to make up for. Which makes him a jerk – but I really think with oldtimers like him, we don’t know how crappy his bosses have been treating him for years. I mean, the thing you wrote about: “The postmaster would do things like removing all the toilet paper from the bathrooms, thinking we were wasting time pooping I guess.
He’d also turn up the heat in the summer, so we’d be miserable and leave on our route faster, which was physically impossible because no matter how hot you got, you had to sort everything before leaving on your route.” – That does not sound like a cushy job to me. If I had had to work for a jerk like that postmaster for decades, I would also call in sick whenever.
I just think you weren’t Bill’s actual target, but as he screwed you over anyways, good on you for taking revenge!” Bored2340
3. Just So You Know, Your Daughter's A Lazy Sack Of Poop
“When I was in my early twenties, I took a job in a call center doing tech support and warranty stuff for some big brand TVs/DVD players. Like most jobs that I hated but needed at the time, I got this one because I’m billingual.
It was a relatively small operation, we were contracted; the call center staffed half a dozen people, and downstairs was a refurbishing line for the products we supported. I was, at varying intervals, one of one to two bilingual agents on staff.
Enter “Stacy.” Stacy was the “assistant manager” of the call center. She was also the company owner’s daughter. Let’s call him Rick. Like I said, small operation.
Stacy was a thorn in my freaking side from day one. She was the archetypal boss’ kid. She did sweet nothing all day, every day. We were all supposed to take calls. She did not. She had no management responsibilities and basically refused to touch her phone unless we were all on calls, and even then, she’d usually let them stew for 5-10 minutes in the hopes that someone else would end their call and pick it up.
She even had the gall to hound us to grab the next call while she sat there goldbricking.
I would eventually learn from the actual manager, “Max,” who, by the way, took three times as many calls as Stacy despite having actual responsibilities, that her “promotion” was an attempt to get her to do some god d**n work that backfired spectacularly. She did less work than ever once she got her new title.
I tried talking to Max about it, as I’d developed quite a rapport with him and the other agents, and I knew they were all struggling with her behavior. He said he’d tried to encourage her to pick up the slack, but he couldn’t really do anything about it. He was hamstrung. We were all basically powerless to do anything.
At a certain point, I found myself as the only bilingual agent there (side note: the only other bilingual agent at the time was useless, all she did was confuse and anger customers.
And literally punched Max in the face when he fired her. Freaking wild…). After a particularly harrowing week of getting slammed while Stacy figuratively and literally kicked her feet up all day, one Monday, I had enough; I turned my cell off and screwed off for the day. Frankly, I hoped that would be the end of my career there.
The next day, I decided to pick up when they call.
It was Max. I told Max I was done and why. He commiserated but pleaded with me to reconsider. Eventually, he got Rick on the line, and they managed to convince me to at least sit down and talk about it. Clearly, having literally no one to pick up the non-English queue was proving a challenge.
The next day, I strolled in nice and late in the morning and went to speak to Rick.
This will always be one of my favorite memories and a great personal victory.
I sat down, and I let him have it with both barrels. I told him his daughter was lazy and irresponsible, her promotion was a joke, and that she was tanking the morale of everyone she worked with.
I basically sat there for ten minutes ranting at this man about what a piece of crap his daughter is, and when I was done, the only thing he wanted to know was what it would take to get me back.
I told him I wanted a raise, from $12 an hour to $14 an hour, which was plenty decent at the time, and I wanted her to pick up the freaking phone when it rings, same as the rest of us. He agreed. I told him I’d come back after lunch so he would have time to talk to her.
When I returned, I looked over at Stacy in her little corner, phone to her ear.
Satisfied, I went to my desk and got to work.
I would later learn from Max that while I was gone, Rick had attempted to man the non-English queue himself, which apparently was pretty funny because he only spoke English. I’m not sure how he expected to just “wing” an entire gosh darn language, but I was happy he’d made the attempt. Knowing he’d been forced to debase himself like that was the cherry on top.
Stacy was far from perfect after that, but I’d successfully turned the tables on her. When she’d start to slack, I’d either ignore the calls until she picked up (the other agents knew what I was doing and would let it go too) or just straight up tell her something like, “We all just got off calls; you can take this one.” It was heavenly.
I was the only one who could speak to her like that, so I became a bit of a hero to the other agents, who were happy to have some relief from the phones and a less soul-crushing power dynamic at work.
To me, the revenge was that Stacy not only had to accept that some random pleb could effectively order her around in her daddy’s company, and she had to actually work for possibly the first time in her life, and she had to live with the fact that her daddy, rather than defending her in the face of my verbal onslaught, basically gave me a bonus for crapping all over her.
After about a year, I decided I was didn’t want to live like this and went off to enroll in and drop out of college again, but man, I’ll never forget that feeling.”
Another Users Comments:
‘”At least he did something, but Daddy should have made daughter go work for another company where she had no benefit from his influence. That would prepare her to survive independently far more than this did.” latents
2. Angrily Tell Her To Roll Burritos? She Will... 140 Of Them
She did what she was told, so is she really in the wrong?
“I work at a Corporate McDonald’s in Michigan, and I won’t get into too much detail because it will definitely give away where I live.
The most important part of this backstory is that it is a corporate store, and it is infinitely harder to get rid of a problem manager because they have company protection. This means that issues keep getting brought up with no resolution, and we lose employees as a result. Our store fluctuates heavily between being overstaffed and being so understaffed that we can’t function.
Most of the reasons for quitting at my store are the result of one manager.
The manager in question, let’s, call her Jane, pretty regularly won’t let employees clock in if they had an altercation on Jane’s last shift. Jane is a Department Manager, in charge of the Kitchen with two other Department Managers taking over Guest Service and People Management. Now a fellow crew member, Terry, had recently changed her schedule because of class and was mistakenly scheduled four shifts outside her new availability.
No problem, right? Wrong. All four of these wrongly scheduled shifts were Jane’s shifts.
They had a three-hour-long fight about clocking in on Terry’s fifth shift for the week because our scheduling manager and general manager both weren’t answering their phones.
Terry and I are both cross-trained in grill and in service, and most of the time I am stuck back in the grill with maybe two or three more people, and Terry being scheduled outside her availability did screw me, but I didn’t blame Terry for leaving me a ‘man’ down.
It is safe to say that these two hate each other. Very much.
Something to understand about McDonald’s in the US is that most of the stores don’t roll their own breakfast burritos. We are given the sausage-pepper-egg mix, tortillas, and cheese. We place the tortilla on a wrap, place one slice of the cheese (torn in half) on the tortilla, use a 3oz scoop to put the mix on the cheese, pile the mix in a line, and roll the burrito, then roll the burrito into the wrap.
Get the process? Good. This is something that the afternoon shifts are supposed to be doing to fill 7ish large trays for the next morning. No big deal, until they don’t get done.
A few shifts after the clocking-in debacle, maybe a week or two later (the concept of time passing is a real struggle for me), Terry and I are working in the grill together.
We run out of burritos and find out when Terry goes to roll them that we are out of the mix, and that we just weren’t told that because communication across even two shifts breaks down pretty fast.
No problem, right?
Well, Jane thought that Terry was just being lazy and didn’t want to roll any burritos and told her such, and then to “Stop being so [dang] lazy and just do what I tell you.
Now, GO ROLL BURRITOS!”
So Terry did.
Without the mix.
It took probably 40 only cheese burritos handed out to customers and four phone calls before Jane realized that she made a mistake. Terry had made about 140 or so. Seven whole trays worth.
Terry knew what she was doing wasn’t going to end well, but she was told to roll the burritos, so she did.
If anyone has worked fast-food, you’ll know about something called food costs. It is how much waste food is produced on one shift, and has a significant impact on if a manager is considered for promotions and raises and is a factor in overall effectiveness as a manager. Jane is responsible for not only all of the waste from this shift but as the Department Manager for the kitchen, also overall store waste.
140 tortillas is a lot of waste for one shift to produce, as is 3/4s of a block of cheese. What we didn’t know at the time, is that it was the last day of accounting for food costs to receive a bonus check. That little spike of extra food waste lost us our bonus check. It lost us the extra cash for the store (aside from the bonus check, for things like renovations, uniforms, whatever corporate deems it budgeted for at the time of disbursement) that corporate will give us for meeting certain criteria, like food costs.
Amazingly, Terry didn’t get sent home, and we all got to watch the fallout. Jane is currently on probation because of this mistake, and if something else major happens, she could lose her job. She also isn’t allowed to run any shifts on her own during probation, because another manager has to be there if something else happens. I have since left for college, but I’m sure that Jane isn’t going to be there when I get back.
It is hard to change eight years of anger in one day.
All because she didn’t believe Terry that we really didn’t have the burrito mix.”
1. Okay, From Now On, All E-Mails Will Enter Your Inbox
That’s just a disaster waiting to happen.
“Just happened, my bosses and I are still laughing.
We are a small IT company. We manage quite a few clients, though. This one gentleman and one of our busier client sites say that he’s tired of being told his emails never arrived to him.
We look it up and yes, a couple of legit emails got tangled up in the spam filter. No big deal, we whitelist the sender and release the message.
No, not good enough for this guy. He calls back screaming. “I ORDER YOU TO LET ANY EMAIL ADDRESSED TO ME COME TO MY INBOX.” I advise him that I’m going to have to transfer him to IT security and he’s going to have to, on a recorded line, said he understands and accepts responsibility for yadda yadda yadda.
See, I did that because these guys get thousands of spam emails a day. A while back, several folks (this guy included) decided to give their email address and password to some unsavory website. Then did it again. And again. And again. So now they get easily 15-20+ messages an hour to the entire organization.
So he accepts, saying he just wants all his emails to go to him.
We allow all messages to him to bypass the spam filter.
Three hours later, he has over 100 new emails. And they keep coming in.
He calls back, furious, asking why his spam filter isn’t working.
“Sir, you asked that all emails addressed to you arrive at your inbox.”
UPDATE: So right around 4:45 pm today, he’s calling our office and the call gets routed to me since I own the ticket.
He’s livid. Shouting so loud my co-workers on the opposite side of the room can hear him. “WHATEVER YOU DID TO MY EMAIL I WANT IT PUT BACK TO THE WAY IT WAS! YOU MESSED UP MY EMAIL AND NOW I CAN’T GET ANY WORK DONE BECAUSE MY STUPID NOTIFICATIONS ARE GOING OFF EVERY SECOND!”
I calmly reply “Absolutely. I’ll go ahead and turn your spam filtering back on and all these emails will stop.”
“GOOD! ITS WHAT YOU SHOULD HAVE DONE IN THE FIRST PLACE!”
At the end of it all, nothing changed, and he’s happy. God, I love IT work.
I’m lucky enough to be at a place that values its employees enough to know that we do not deserve the kind of verbal abuse this guy slings out.
A lot of jobs I’ve been at would have handed me my walking papers the moment I didn’t immediately suck this dude off to climax before finding out what his name was.
Between me and the security team, we told him at least four times that this exact thing would happen, and he said (on a recorded line) “I don’t care”. I take care of my customers and my bosses enable me to do a darn good job.
I believe that’s why our company is experiencing very good growth right now. Relax.
FINAL EDIT: I had to.
I logged into our system this morning from home and listened to the recording. It’s glorious. Here are the highlights:
Security: So [OP] tells me you’re looking to turn off the spam filter?
Client: I don’t even get spam. I’m paying you people for something I don’t need.
Security: It’s not an added cost, but you’re not getting spam because you have a spam filter.
If you turn that off, you’re going to get flooded with spam emails.
Client: I don’t care. I’ve given you guys an order, and I expect it to be done.
Security: I just need you to be aware that without the spam filter, you’re open to getting every spam email that comes to you, some of which may be malicious and could open you up to malware and all sorts of software that could compromise your entire network.
By going against our suggestions, you understand that [Our Company] cannot be held liable for any malicious software that makes it on to your network, infect any of your systems, or causes any system downtime and that you are claiming sole responsibility for that. Do you understand this?
Client: ‘Yeah, whatever. Just get it done so I can get off this call.’
Security: ‘Sir, I really need to reiterate how much we cannot recommend this action, you’re going to get–‘
Client: ‘I DON’T CARE, DO WHAT I TELL YOU.’
Security: ‘Ok, I’ll have [OP] remove you from the default spam rule, and you’ll start receiving any email sent to you.
Again, it’s going to be a lot. The spam filter actually does catch a lot of spam.’
Client: ‘I. DON’T. CARE. JUST DO IT.’
Security: ‘Ok then. Thank you. Have a good day.’
Click.”
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