People Come Clean With Their Disastrous Revenge Stories
20. Bring My Kid Into This? It's On
“So, about 8 years ago I’m selling a used car. The engine light was on, the AC needed recharging, and the fuel pump or something was out. So I go to my local, trusted, sales site.
The ad goes up with a few pictures and the words: ‘I work weird hours so I may not be able to accept a phone call. Please only text me.’ Yay to working Swings and Midnights, right? It’s actually college classes, but the same thing for me.
So a few days in, I get a pretty standard text, ‘Hi, I’m Matt. Is your car still for sale?’ Matt isn’t his real name, but you get the idea. So I text back that it is. A few standard texts about price, why is the engine light on, who did you get the quote from (I listed an approximate price on the repairs as quoted from my trusted mechanic), and whatnot, and we go back and forth.
The next day I get a text from him saying ‘Are you gonna take all your stuff out of the car before you sell it to me or is that my job?’ Unwarranted hostility? Really? Oh my god, MAN!
He’s not the only interested party, so I text him back, ‘I’m not selling the car to you, so don’t worry about it.’ I never said I would sell it to him, he never asked if he was the only interested party, and others were arranging test drives already.
I didn’t need him and his less than full price, partial-commitment. And the stuff he was complaining about is three textbooks and a bag I keep clothes in. FOUR THINGS!
This guy didn’t like to take no for an answer and starts calling, and texting about how my car’s paint is peeling (true, but the pics and description said so), and how dare I ask so much ($1000) for a piece of trash car.
I started replying for a time, telling him he wasn’t going to get the car, that I had other interested buyers, so he didn’t need to worry about it, etc. Then things got PERSONAL.
This site gave you the option to link to social media so you could post at both places at the same time.
So I had. I didn’t have my privacy settings turned down as it was still early into social media’s absolute reign, and I actually trusted the site at the time. Silly me, I know. I hadn’t anticipated that he would be able to find my info through the website’s post and find my name, my location, pictures of my kid, my mother-in-law’s obit, etc. Surprise me, he did.
He starts texting me about how I should be ashamed of myself for saying no to him, a muscular dude, and me being a quite round female. He included a picture in one text, and he wasn’t the ‘muscular, built’ man he claimed to be.
He looked like a bean pole with 2 ab muscles, so… what, dude? He asked me if I even knew everything about cars or if I made the post while on my period so I didn’t know what I was talking about. He texted that I should be lucky I was already married or else he would come to my house and ‘show me how a real man handles a little jerk’ (he got close but didn’t have an address and the way my address pulls up on GPS, he never would find my apartment — thankfully!)
Since I was in college at the time and needed a more flexible schedule, I worked as a school crossing guard. Every 2 weeks or so, we’d go in to sign our time cards in order to get paid. This crossing guard gig was hired through my local PD.
Not all crossing guard gigs are the same, but this one was.
During one of these visits into the office, I was using my phone while I was waiting for my boss to get to me, my name being low in the alphabet. I hadn’t yet blocked the dude as it hadn’t been long since this started and I was hoping it would fizzle on its own.
I didn’t check my phone in class, choosing to turn it off to avoid being on it the entire day, and I was often flooded with several hours of texts all at once. What I saw on my phone drove me over the cliff! He started texting about pictures I had posted on social media about my 8 (or 7) year old son!
He had just majorly crossed the line!!!
The cleanest version of his texts included things like ‘Your kid is just as ugly as you are. I hope you don’t plan on him leaving home to get a wife anytime soon.’ And how a smudge of dirt on his face from a day at the zoo looked like I beat him.
I didn’t sell you a car and you’re taking out your rage by threatening to harass me and accusing me of beating my kid?!?
‘OH HECK NO!’
Apparently, I was loud when I said what I did because my boss stepped right over to me next and asked what was wrong.
Great person. 10/10. Would boss again. I told her that I was getting these abusive texts from a rando that tried to buy my car. I told her I was about to erase the texts and block him, but she’s like, ‘No, wait don’t do that.
Let me see your phone.’ So happy I didn’t delete them because this next part still makes my heart soar!
I offer and she takes my phone, reading all the sick and vile things he texted to me. She tells me to wait until she’s cleared the lobby of the other crossing guards, so I do.
She then tells me to follow her behind the security doors at the PD Station, still having my phone. I don’t know what’s happening, but I liked and trusted her, so I do. I follow her back to her office where she works on her computer, referring to my phone on occasion.
She asks if all I have is the phone number or if I got his name too? I tell her I only got the first name, and scroll to the text where he introduced himself. A semi-uncomfortable amount of time later, she hands back my phone.
Something to mention, my boss isn’t just administrative. I didn’t know it at the time, but she’s a full-on Lieutenant in the local PD. She came up the ranks from patrol, moving to a position where she exclusively investigated child/elder/disabled abuse complaints before moving into her current desk position.
Needless to say, she didn’t take people threatening harm to kids lightly. Because I hadn’t blocked the number, I still had the text messages with the dude’s name, and she had used it to cross-search him and the phone number. Long story short, she knew exactly who he was.
She says not to worry, but don’t delete or respond to his texts anymore; she had it. If it got worse, I should call her or 911 as appropriate right away. Unconcerned and happy she had the situation in hand, I leave and go to class.
When I’m back to the office to sign my next timecard 2 weeks later, I had several unread texts from the guy. I had filtered them so I didn’t see them pop up and hadn’t read them. I had sold the car (for full asking price), and had all but forgotten the entire situation.
My boss tells me to wait for her again as she had something else for me to sign, and I again return to her office. She briefly explains what she had for me was an actionable complaint that she needed me to sign from my issue 2 weeks ago.
I remember everything all over again. She must see my face because she tells me not to worry and that she can tell me what’s going on more after I actually sign the form. So I do. This is the best situation anyone could have asked for.
The phone number was tied to many people as the provider was known for cheap cell service for those that were desperate for a way to contact people/services/employment. But with the name Matt (again, fake name), she was able to find out who was messing with me.
She then got a Driver’s License, which led to an address, which led to a police report for possible domestic violence. Fall the rabbit hole some more, and you find out that this dude had 5 kids by 4 women, and he was in arrears on his child support to them all.
Hadn’t been paying for 10+ years, and it was in the neighborhood of 30-50k if memory serves. But he somehow, just 2 weeks ago, requested a title transfer for a new-to-him, quite fancy old car. I don’t remember the kind, but think ‘high-end car show and massive insurance premiums.’
Being so far in arrears meant that my boss was able to place a seizure order on the car so it could be sold to pay back the child support. One of the baby mamas lives in a state where fleeing child support meant you could have a warrant issued for your arrest. When she called the interested parties in that state to see if they wanted her to execute the arrest warrant, they said ‘Yes, with much haste!’ (That that was a funny turn of phrase, so I always remembered it).
One conversation later, and my boss was able to determine that he was using the brother’s social security number on his employment forms to avoid child support garnishments. This is all sorts of illegal, so she notified the guy’s HR department so it could be corrected. They informed her he would be fired for fraudulently submitting false documents.
She then told me that about 4 days ago, she had executed the warrant on the dude for Felony Child Abandonment and that the state he was to be held for was already on route to pick him up! It carried an 8-12 year sentence, and he still had to pay his child support!
I could have dealt with the comment, I could have dealt with the not taking no for an answer, even dealt with the cyberstalking… a little. BUT, when your twisted mind okays you to bring my kid into the picture, you did cross the line!
If you would have stopped at no, you wouldn’t be in jail right now!”
19. This Is What Happens When You Ask Engineering Students To Truck-Proof A Mailbox
“Years ago, back when Uncle Dale and Dad were university students, their engineering professor came to their class with a problem that needed solving. His mailbox was getting broken by someone driving by every night. He and his wife had put up something like four or five mailboxes and all four or five times, the mailbox had been knocked over by someone driving a red truck.
This professor offered extra credit to any group of students who could come up with a truck-proof mailbox that not only fit with city regulations but within a budget of $20 (which back then was a good size chunk of change).
Well, if anyone here knows anything about engineers (as Dad puts it), they love solving problems. And if it’s engineering students, they’ll make it an experience to remember.
Dad and Uncle Dale got together and got to work. They found a steel bar that fits within mailbox regulations (posts have to be a specific height, width, and depth) and filled the inside with a mixture of concrete and steel rebars. Once the concrete had cured, they welded 8 rebars to the sides of the bar, bent them in half, and stuck it inside a bucket.
To add extra weight, they filled the bucket with the heaviest rocks they could find.
As a finishing touch, they painted it brown and black (to look like wood) and put ‘the ugliest mailbox we could find on sale’ on top, welding it down for good measure.
They brought this monstrosity into class (more dragged it because it was so heavy) and told the professor to bury the bucket where the mailbox stood. Since they were the first to turn in their project, the professor agreed to give it a try.
That night… the professor and his wife were awoken by a metallic BOOM!!!!!
followed by a lot of cursing. They went outside and wouldn’t you know it, there was that red truck speeding away, the mailbox still standing. At the base was a broken wooden baseball bat.
Two days later, the professor gets a bill in the mail for a hospital visit.
Turns out when the passenger hit the mailbox, he did some serious damage to his arm and shoulder. They were planning on suing the professor but the professor hired a lawyer who basically told the plaintiffs ‘You’re just going to admit that you were vandalizing the mailbox multiple times?’ That shut them up.
To the best of my Dad’s knowledge, the mailbox is still standing. The other students who still brought in mailboxes had theirs gifted to different professors throughout the town and are also still standing.”
18. Verbally Abuse Me? I'll Get My Revenge After 4 Years
“There was a freakishly large guy who walked the same way home as me in high school and used to mercilessly push me and say degrading things.
My older brother was a monster and would stop him if he was ever there, but that rarely happened.
Fast forward 4 years after graduation. I am a successful casino supervisor and he is working at Big 5 in the sporting goods department. I of course held no hard feelings, understanding he had a bad life and he was just acting out.
Apparently, he did not feel the same way. While at his store, he told a customer as he handed him a rifle it was not ok to point it at anybody in the store, except for me. He doubled down and told him the rifle was 10% off if the rifle was pointed at me.
I looked at him and asked him if he understood what he was doing, he just smiled threateningly at me.
At this point, I was beside myself and couldn’t believe he would make such a massive and illegal mistake. I went to the front and called the manager.
I explained the situation and told him that I was calling the police immediately and contacting a lawyer unless the employee was fired on the spot and escorted from the store. When the manager looked into it, the guy wasn’t even smart enough to lie, he just said it had been a joke and I was ‘being a jerk’.
The customer backed me up too. I told him we could avoid lawsuits and cops, just fire him and I would drop it. I got to watch with immense satisfaction as they escorted him from the premises about 20 minutes after the manager agreed and the look of glee on my face just pushed his anger further.
I had been willing to drop it, but that win was one of the best feelings of my whole life.”
17. Thought You Had Me Fooled? Fall Into My Trap
“So, I am a cancer researcher and a guest professor at a university’s school of medicine, teaching my specialty: Imaging. Besides the usual acquisitions of medical images using MRI, CT, etc…
Imaging has a lot to do with image processing. Some days I am just a glorified programmer/IT guy. And as anyone who has ever programmed anything will tell you, coding is a very personal activity. With enough experience, you can tell who wrote what just by looking at the lines.
I am also in my late 20’s and I am not native to this country and it’s my first year as a guest professor. So, some students look at me as this inexperienced, gullible, foreign guy.
As part of my module’s grading, the students have to submit 2 reports that weigh 10% each, of their final grades.
These reports are about image processing and they have to code a fair bit.
As usual, some students make an effort, some do minimal work, and then some copy. As I was grading the reports I notice a small group of students who found reports from previous years online and literally copy+paste those reports, changing only their names.
It was a facepalm moment, because those reports were not even good, and had a lot of errors. (You see, in order to establish a baseline for my grading, I browsed previous years’ reports so I knew what to expect from the students of this module.) Naturally, I graded them all with 0 and kept working my way through grading the reports I had left.
Meanwhile, the students ‘casually’ asked me in the halls how were the reports. Of course, I can’t comment on that until I release the grades. One time, this dude, who had copied from another report (98% match on plagiarism checker), asks me when will I release the grades and comes with this story that he worked really hard on his reports.
That his exam hadn’t gone so well and he is hoping that the grade on his reports is enough to get a pass.
I mean, submitting another person’s work as your own is very wrong, but it was an online submission and impersonal. Right now he was just lying through his teeth and to my FACE.
I could feel my b***d boiling, but I didn’t lose my composure and decided to come up with a plan:
I knew that my exam was the last exam of the semester and that after that the students usually go home or have family vacations while they wait for their grades to be posted online.
So I graded the exams and input their grades into my excel with their report grades. 4 students had zero due to manipulating their reports and if I graded their reports with 50% of the max grade they would BARELY FAIL the module. But they would fail nonetheless.
So, It. Was. On!
(In order to be fair I bumped everyone else’s grades, a bunch of people with miserable reports ended up barely passing because of my grade bump. But, even though their reports were bad, it was their own work and not copied from anywhere.)
You see, students are entitled to make an appointment to review their grades after publishing and before the grades are locked for the year. Basically, they sit with me, we go through their exam and reports and their goal is to convince me to ‘give’ them extra points in hopes that they pass the module.
I knew the liars would come, after all, they think they fooled me once already, and they still have half the report’s points to bargain for. So I just waited for their emails.
Lo and behold, they write me the same day the grades go online, saying how hard they had worked on their reports and that they don’t understand how they only got 50%.
And that they wanted an appointment. I was ecstatic! Sure, let’s review your grades!!
Do you remember that my exam was the last one? Well, they were already on vacation… some very far away… and begged me for an online appointment. No can do… university policy.
Moreover, you have 3 days to show for your appointment, otherwise, the grades are locked, also university policy.
So here they come, cutting their vacations short and catching planes, some spent hours in buses and trains to make it on time.
I know what many of you are thinking: they come, I show them the plagiarism checker results and reveal that I know that is not their work and send them on their way… well, I considered it but I had something better in mind.
Those appointments usually take 10 min, I show them their work with my notes on what’s wrong/right and they try to find some inconsistencies in my grading and bargain for more points. I ain’t giving you the opportunity. Muahahaha!!
So, one by one they sit with me individually.
And I go through their exam and reports…remember that they copied the reports? And copied bad ones, with a lot of errors… I ask questions, lots of them: ‘why did you do this?’, ‘What is your reasoning for this?’ – they don’t know… it’s not their work… they mumble random stuff because they don’t know what to answer…
Point by point, mistake by mistake, I explain why it was wrong, how it should be done, lecturing the same material that they had already been lectured on during class… I make it long, I make it boring… I make it painful… I spent hours with each one of them throughout those 3 days.
They always came with the same, ‘I worked sooooo hard on this’… and a little smirk on their face because they thought that it should be really easy to fool me, the gullible foreign again… as the hours go by and I am walking through the errors one by one I could see their expression change… little by little, their hopes of passing being slowly crushed…
and when they realized that I KNEW they lied and I wasn’t going to give up any extra points. At this point, they tried to cut short their appointment and leave but I wouldn’t let them. ‘We need to finish the review of your grades, it’s university policy’… And I just kept going, extending their misery for one more hour or two… it was legal to torture, plain and simple!
IT WAS GLORIOUS!!
In the end, every single one of them left with a ‘crushed soul’ look in their eyes and a FAIL in my class… they knew that I caught them, that I baited them and they fell for it… they ruined their vacation and their family vacations, spent a lot to travel back and forth, wasted precious summertime, got bored to death and have nothing to show for it.
And… next year they will have to repeat the module…WITH ME!!
‘I hope you enjoy your summer!! See you next year!!’
I took the matter to my boss, who is their course director and he told me to not report them because the university wants to avoid any kind of legal action at any cost. I couldn’t even accuse them of manipulating the results.
Also, for those worried about my ‘bumped the grades thing’. I made a judgment call to bump some grades of some students who had a good exam and their report grade was pulling them down. They clearly knew the topics and studied, their report was just not very good.
So I decided that given that if it wasn’t for the report they would pass, to bump it a bit to allow them to pass. Most of them went from failing at 49% to passing at 50% on their overall final grade.”
16. Beat Him Up Right On The Freshly Turned Dirt
“Kendal was the little jerk bully, his older brother Adrian was my friend.
Kendal made my life in high school miserable, with lots of teasing, and stuff. He would constantly beat me in the gym lockers, and one winter he took my clothes and left me to walk home without them. But Adrian and I joined the Army together.
Years later, Adrian was in my unit, a different platoon, and passed away in Iraq. I volunteered to fly with his body back home for his family. Kendal never showed up, not even to the funeral. I heard that he was shacked up with some substance user downtown.
So I went over there, kicked in the door, dragged Kendal out by his hair, and pushed and kicked and dragged him the two and a half miles to the cemetery where I had buried his brother that morning, berating him on how horrible of a person he was.
Kendal was a mess by the time we got to his brother’s grave. I beat him with all that I can, right on the freshly turned dirt, then I left him there.
A year later on the anniversary of Adrian’s death, I returned to his grave.
Kendal was waiting on me. He was cleaned up and sober and apologized to me incessantly. After lunch, he asked me to take him down to the recruiter’s office to join up and make his brother proud.”
15. Make My Life Miserable In High School? I'll Become Your Son's Boss
“I had a teacher in Grade 12 for Modern Western History. The class was incredibly boring as a result of her teaching style and I didn’t pay much attention during the year.
I was sporting a solid D in the class and Mrs. (censored) would make reference to me being a dullard continuously. On many occasions over the year, people would laugh at me as a result of a comment she made. At the time I didn’t think she was trying to be vindictive just trying to jeer me into doing better in the class.
Nonetheless, I’m sure it did have some impact on my self-esteem.
Fast-forward 8 years I am running a College Pro Painting franchise, standing in a customer’s driveway getting supplies out of the back of my wicked awesome Chevy Lumina minivan. Mrs. (censored) walks by, recognizes me, and says ‘Oh I’m so glad you got a job, you know I could have told you were going to go into a manual labor trade… you were never really focused.’ In as flat a tone as I could, I got to tell her that not only am I running this franchise that employed 12 people that summer but that I’m doing it while still a full-time student getting my Bcomm.
The best satisfaction I have ever had because it didn’t have to be confrontational but I definitely got to set her straight.
Fast forward another 7 years and I am running an internet advertising business. Her son applies for the job. He was qualified but during the interview, we started talking about his mom (not in a bad way).
Turns out she is way harder on him than she ever was to me. Constantly berating him because he wasn’t very studious and dropped out of university. I gave him the job and he is now our best employee. I see Mrs. (censored) from time to time, never spoken about how she made my life miserable in my last year of high school, but I now have the satisfaction of defying expectations of me and her son while being his biggest benefactor.”
14. Party Every Night For A Year? I'll Honk When I Pass By
“I bought a house 4 years ago in a quiet neighborhood. I had wanted to get into that neighborhood for years. My best friend lives there. It was a couple of blocks from my kid’s school. It was a good neighborhood.
My neighbors across the street were forced to move at the beginning of 2020 before the eviction moratorium was in place.
They were really good neighbors. We were friendly with each other and we were sad to see them go. So when the property owner rented to a new family we were hoping we could cultivate a friendly relationship. Unfortunately, that was not the case.
About a month after they moved in the isolation started. And that’s when things went from 0-100 real quick.
For the next year every night, there was a huge party. Cars down the street music so loud you could hear it over regular house noise in every room in my house. My friend in the next cul-de-sac would text me regularly if the music he was hearing was my neighbors.
We tried to be civil. I asked politely. I even brought them booze. Eventually, they threatened me and my wife so we started calling the police. Almost every night for 4 months. We organized with the neighbors. And they started calling the police as well.
Eventually, the others gave up and started selling their houses because the renters were just that bad.
We were still upside down on our place so it wasn’t an option for us. Eventually, the police told me that I needed to stop calling and that it wasn’t their issue to deal with. That I was a bigger nuisance than the renter’s music.
It was at that time the housing market was taking off. Houses were selling in my area for 40-50k over appraisal value. My wife and I looked at what we needed to make so we could move and listed our home for that.
In three days we had a handful of offers to choose from.
But it was the lowest offer that stood out to us the most. Their offer was a good 20k under the next lowest but they sent a letter. I’m a sucker for a letter especially one with a picture of a young pregnant couple and a dog… and a patrol car?
Turns out the young man is a police officer newly appointed at the local PD. And he takes his patrol car home. I knew at that point that this was the family to sell my house to. I moved out as the neighbors were throwing a huge party.
The next day the police moved in and they haven’t had another since.
I drive by regularly on my way to my buddy’s place. They just sit quietly in their garage looking bored. I make sure I honk and wave every time.”
13. High School Jerk Cries Alone In A Corner During Reunion
“I went to boarding prep school and there was this one girl, we’ll call her D, who was always a rude jerk. My first interaction with her was when I came back to my room in the second week of school my freshman year and found her ranting about my clothes with my roommate.
I overheard them before I walked in to find her cutting up a sweater of mine. She said she was doing my roommate a favor so she wouldn’t have to look at that sweater again. At this point, I had never even seen her before.
I was shocked and confused and didn’t say anything.
Over the course of high school, I had a lot of interactions with D, all of which sucked. They ranged from her cornering me because she was under the impression I was going out with a new hot junior (I was going out with his roommate X and he and I were just friends.
He had a girl back home with the same name as me) and told me I should dump him because I wasn’t good enough for him and he should be with someone hotter. She would always have something mean to say whenever we passed each other in the hallway.
She was very proud of her Italian heritage and screamed at me in front of a group of 10 or so people because I had the audacity to say that I was half Italian (more than her). She didn’t believe me because my last name wasn’t Italian like hers?
Hi, it’s on my mother’s side? Whatever. She said I wasn’t good enough to be Italian. While I was good at hockey, she was on the varsity team and made sure I didn’t join by making me feel very unwelcome even though the coach asked me each year to please try out because he liked what he saw of me on JV.
The list of stupid stuff goes on and on. I was pretty shy at this time and already had fairly low self-esteem, so her attempts to make me feel like trash worked more often than not.
Fast forward 5 years and I’m gearing up for our big reunion.
It’s a weekend-long event full of lobster and an open bar and something you look forward to from your freshman year of high school. Leading up to reunion weekend, I was nervous. My mom gave me the advice to think of the people I went to high school with as new people, as they will have grown up, and it’s not fair to judge people by who they were in high school.
A small group got together a few weeks before reunion weekend and D happened to be there as well. I remembered what my mom had told me, so when D came up to say hi, I was pleasantly surprised and optimistic about where the conversation would go.
She started nice enough but then said, ‘I heard you live with X, but I know that can’t be true because you are not cool enough to even be friends with X and you didn’t even know him at school.’ As you remember, X and I were together back in high school, which was pretty common knowledge.
X and I had remained friends and even became roommates post-college. I reminded her of such and she just walked away.
When reunion came around, I warned my significant other to stay away from D. I just wanted to have a good time and if we avoided her, we would have a blast. My significant other didn’t believe that someone could be so awful, so the first thing he does when I point her out to him is walk right up to her.
She’s having a conversation with another girl and he waits politely to join in. D turns her back to him and continues talking. After a few minutes, he says excuse me and introduces himself as Ben. She looks at him with disgust and says, ‘you’re OP’s significant other, right?’ and he replies in the affirmative.
She then responds with, ‘that’s all I need to know,’ and turns her back once again to him. He comes back laughing and telling me I was right.
The reunion was fun despite her presence. I managed to avoid her. I have to admit that my confidence has soared post-high school and that a lot of guys find that attractive.
As the second night was winding down, I found myself in a circle of guys from my class who were all very curious about my life and very flirtatious. Among these guys was D’s ex whom she had stayed with all through college and had recently broken up and the guy she had declared as ‘hers’ for the weekend.
Even though I had a man, they were all much more interested in talking to me than her. At one point I saw her literally crying, wasted in a corner by herself.
On the final day of the reunion, my significant other and I came to the dining hall for breakfast. We sat down at the table for our class and D was there looking worse for wear.
We ignored her and he had the whole table laughing at his jokes and stories. I looked up to see that she was the only one not laughing.
Felt good to see her so miserable from her own doing and to watch the misery increase as she saw how happy I was and how awesome my man was and how the guys would have rather hung out with me than her.
Our 10-year reunion is coming up next year and I can’t wait!”
12. Murder My Favorite Pet? I'll Ruin Your Sermon
“Growing up, my wife had a cat that would go everywhere with her. It would ride on the handlebars of her bike and in her backpack. The two were inseparable. Then one day the cat disappeared. A couple of days later in school, a kid came up to her and told my wife he’d shot the cat with his bow.
The cat screamed and screamed, he said. And he laughed. Broke my wife’s heart. She still doesn’t know where/if the cat is buried.
Fast forward a couple of years later, the bully has ‘found God’ and is a preacher. My wife shows up to one of his services, stands up in the middle of his sermon, and asks if he remembers how he tortured her cat when she was a little girl.
Everyone is speechless. The bully stammers. My wife tells everyone that the man standing before them, preaching about love and kindness, murdered her favorite pet and made her childhood miserable.
From what she describes, he looked mortified and stammered and started tearing up. He may have just been embarrassed or truly apologetic, we don’t know.
But my wife isn’t one to forgive and forget so easily, believe me, especially when it comes to an event that still haunts her. She waited for him to respond, but he remained silent and just sort of helplessly shook his head, mouth agape. My wife kind of nodded and left it at that.
She walked out but is fairly certain he didn’t finish his sermon that day. I don’t know if she’s run across him since, but she says that from the look of terror in his eyes she’d gotten her point across. She feels a little better, but not knowing exactly what happened to that cat still tears at her.”
11. My Fighting Skills Put A Bully In His Place
“Had a group of guys torment me all through junior and senior high school.
I was a nerd but a weird nerd in the sense that I was very academic and it was my main pursuit but I was fairly athletic. I played football and wrestled at school. Outside of school, I was studying martial arts. I had been training for years in kung **, Kempo, boxing, kickboxing a little aikido, etc but never made a big deal of it because one si** told me that it’s something for me to improve myself and take care of myself should I need to.
I should only let other people know as the last case scenario and even then only at the blunt end of my fist.
These guys would try to push people around at parties, etc. They tried to fight me several times and I usually got out of it.
Once I floored 2 of them at a party in front of a lot of people. One shot KO’d one and threw the other on his head and they got the heck out of there. I wasn’t gonna fight 10 guys.
As an adult years later, I’m getting changed for class and one of the guys walked into the change room.
It was the one I flipped. He was a new student for his first class. I remember the feeling creeping up my spine. What was this jerk doing here? But it had been a long time. We were both in our early 20s. I tried to make it like I didn’t see him on the way to the mat.
Doing a little light warming up on the mat he comes out, uncomfortable, looking for where he should go and what he should do as many new students do. He sees me and comes over. ‘Hi, OP. I thought that was you. How have you been?’ We chatted for a bit.
He lost track of everyone after high school. Said he’d grown up a lot and was acting like a pretty chill guy. Was always interested in training., etc etc etc. Said he was glad he was getting his life together bc he was a ‘giant jerk’ until about 2 years after high school.
I laughed. The first class went well.
In the locker room, he asked how long I’d been ‘doing this’ for and commented on the darker belt around my waist. I told him about my time in that style and others. He said, ‘so that night at the party at X’s house, you could have beat me worse than you did?’ Told him that the training wasn’t really about that and why I trained. I didn’t like fighting but could defend myself if needed. He said that was the first wake-up call he had.
He and his friends thought they were awesome untouchable jerks in high school and had no idea about real life. He didn’t exactly apologize but I could tell he knew what he was and what he did back then. He trained there for about 2 years more until he moved. Was a much better guy.”
10. Don't Pay For The Website I Built? Say Goodbye To Your Business
This happened early 2000’s. I used to be a freelance front-end dev and a search engine optimization guru.
Back then, getting on the front page of Google was pretty simple. Link exchanging was popular but risky. I never did that, but I did have a single website that had serious page rank clout due to it being linked as a trusted source, directly from one of the top and most trusted websites in the world.
I would use this website for the best clients to get their page rank and search engine position leapfrogging other older and more trusted websites.
One day, I was approached by someone I’ll call Bob. Now Bob sold travel packages. He needed to revamp his basic, existing website, with a complex website built with pretty tricky backend coding.
I could do the front end, but I had to hire a backend dev to build the functionality.
Bob had a major launch in a month’s time, and it had to be ready. I usually ask for a 25% deposit upfront, but Bob said no; he was stung by the last dev and wasn’t going to lose any more.
Now from the moment I met Bob, my gut was telling me this was going to end badly. The problem was I needed the money, and it was worth quite a lot for me and the dev. I skipped the deposit on the promise he paid in full before it went on his server.
Bob agreed.
For an entire month, we worked day and sometimes all night to get this done in his timeframe. With a day to spare, we had done it, and I’d never been so proud of what we had achieved. I was honestly excited to show Bob.
The next day, I sent the link to my test server and he phoned me to discuss it. Bob said everything looked good, but he was worried his server’s PHP version may be too old to run it. I assured him it would, but he said he was too scared it won’t, and we would scrub our hands of it.
We went backward and forwards, but he was insistent the site has been uploaded and tested on his server before he parts with a penny. I chatted to my Dev. He didn’t like it either but agreed we would upload our work onto his server.
Bob gave me the FTP details and server login, and I uploaded the site. I told him it was live and then… nothing.
I sent several emails and then phone calls. The emails went unanswered, and the phone went to voicemail.
Sensing a major problem, I rushed to my computer, fired up my FTP program to delete our work on his server and… ACCESS DENIED.
He had locked us out, and the following day, he went live with our work.
For several days, I tried phoning until one morning, he answered the phone and said, ‘Listen, I’m not ever going to pay you, and there is nothing you can do about it,’ then Bob hung up.
Rage was a good word for my feelings. I was shaking while I still held the phone in my hand.
For the next hour, my range of expletives was growing in complexity. As I sat there figuring out what to do, it hit me. Revenge will be mine!
I registered a new domain name, which was Bob’s travel domain name, plus ‘sucks’ at the end. If Bob’s website was called bobstravel.com, I had purchased bobstravelsucks.com.
I uploaded our work, basically an exact mirror of his live website, onto my new domain.
I used my all-powerful mega page rank domain to link to my new sucks domain.
Within a month, my website jumped above his website in Google for every conceivable search phrase you would use for the packages he sold. No matter what you typed in, my site was the first result, and his was always below mine.
During that month, I created a second website, which was Bob’s full name with ‘sucks’ at the end. On this second website, I posted what happened, screenshots of his emails, and warning everyone what a conman he is.
Bob had a somewhat unusual first and last time.
Again within a month, my website was above his own personal website.
I then forgot all about it.
About 4 months later, I get a cease and desist email from a solicitors firm. A quick Google showed the solicitors firm was made up and didn’t exist. I reply back with, ‘I’m not ever going to take them down, and there is nothing you can do about it!’
Every now and then, I’d get emails from people he had conned for a travel package but never booked their package.
I’d put those on both of my websites, making sure those juicy important keywords, his full name, and company name were spread across each negative review.
A few more months pass, and I get an anonymous email linking to a new domain called mynameSUCKS. I’m told to remove my two websites, and he will remove this new one.
A quick search, and what do you know? It isn’t even on Google.
No one could find it. I reply back for a second time with his comment to me.
As each month passes, I’m getting more and more people emailing me saying they’ve been ripped off. I keep adding them to my website.
Turns out, the travel agency world is well regulated, and they started an investigation into Bob’s company, using my website as their main tool.
I get a call from Bob. Bob is not a happy Bob. In fact, Bob is more of a desperate Bob. Looking at this text now, I know you can almost hear the despair and resentment in Bob’s voice.
Bob pleads and literally begs me to pull the sites down.
Not only is he being investigated by the travel agency association, but he had some very important friends that didn’t appreciate the bad press he was causing in their circles.
He offers to pay me what he owed. Nothing more, just what he owed.
For the third time, and with a massive smile on my face, I say, ‘Listen, I’m not ever taking them down, and there is nothing you can do about it.’
Roll on a few months, and I discover his travel company has been removed from all travel associations.
No matter what you typed into Google, my website outranked his and all the bad reviews on my site were the first thing his potential customers would see. I crippled his business so badly… It went bust.
During the collapse, one of his ex-employees contacted me and told me how hard he had worked to get my websites off the first page.
He had registered dozens and dozens of other domains in the hopes some would jump ahead. Little did he know, only the top dozen websites in the world could jump it.
Apparently, his property was tied into loans on the failing business, and he lost his house too.
It took me just about a year to turn his business from a cash cow to a dead cow.
The motto of the story: if you ever think to mess with a Dev… don’t!”
9. The Story Of The Trashy Warehouse
“So my life has been miserable for a while now, but a tiny bit of revenge can feel good.
It does not end what I’m going through and is only a small chapter but still.
I was working some small jobs just to stay working. Namely, I was working at a Walmart and also at Lowes. Job opportunities opened up and I interviewed for Warehouse Manager at a company I will call Awful Co to protect the identity of those involved. I was immediately offered the job, though at a pay rate I thought was a joke for a manager.
Still, it was much better than Walmart. They put me on an hourly rate of pay and gave me a 50hr week schedule to meet my minimum income expectations. The pay was insulting in some ways because of the range of things the owners wanted me to be able to do, including welding, plumbing, electrical, and carpentry all on top of managing.
The warehouse had gone through a short shutdown and was ramping back up slowly. I managed a day crew of 2 that had been there forever, a night crew that at the moment had 1 person and 4 drivers that had been there a while. My hours aligned mostly with the night crew as they needed the most help and the daytime guys could handle it well enough.
So I managed at this warehouse for 8 months, that was all I could take. In that time the owner slowly eroded my power. I watched him tell countless lies, change his mind on things at random and change our working hours at the drop of a hat.
He was a jerk. Also, the whole place was covered in cameras and he would come in to talk to us about very specific things he had watched us do on camera while he was sitting at home. It was disturbing.
Turnover was huge as the owner would simply annoy people and they would leave.
It made my job impossible. But the other managers would tell me to hang in there, he will be gone soon. Eventually, I had a crew that was loyal and worked for me. The only problem was if I was not in, they would call out to avoid working with the owner.
Then finally it came, the owner was supposed to move to Florida to be near his grandson. His wife was making him. I think he wanted to stick around and just run the business into the ground.
A couple of days before he left the owner took me aside and gave me a huge write up for all sorts of dumb things that were untrue and then yelled at me for an hour saying things like ‘I bet you are sitting there thinking how can this place make anything without me, well I was successful before you all by myself.’ And so forth.
This of course was a lie, he had been given the company by his father and it survived largely on loyalty from the customer base and a single product they were the exclusive distributor for in the region. As he left for Florida he sent an e-mail naming out the management team and excluding me.
So I told the other managers I felt like I was being treated like a supervisor rather than a manager and I would therefore act as a supervisor rather than a manager. I started looking for a new job. I planned to give a normal 2 weeks’ notice and leave peacefully.
Then one night I had a funny feeling and it made me take most of my stuff home for whatever reason (Had a lot of my tools on my desk and such). The next morning the stated management team took me into the office and fired me.
The notice they gave me simply said you are terminated for insubordination and they refused to cite an incident. To this day I am convinced that the owner watched me take my tools home on camera from Florida and then called them and said fire him first thing.
Then the revenge. On my drive home from being fired (My shift started 2hrs before my night workers), I called my workers one at a time and told them what happened, said I had enjoyed working with them and if they ever needed a reference I would be happy to help.
I had a fantastic crew at this point, all good people. A few hours later the calls started coming in. The entire crew had called out for the night. I had a good giggle about it. But 2 days later I started to get more calls.
To the man, the entire warehouse night crew had quit in loyalty to me. I was told they had been offered $4/hr raises to stay and all refused them. After the warehouse workers quit I got a call from my favorite driver (I had mixed feelings about my drivers as a whole).
He told me that none of the drivers had certifications for driving the trucks we had (air breaks) and suggested I report it to the DOT.
Let’s just say that from what I heard, the owner had to come back from Florida at his wife’s protest to take back over.
The only people they could get for the night shift are a guy who they fired previously when he took off his clothes in the warehouse while on substances and a guy who they previously fired for making far too many mistakes. Deliveries were truncated for some time because they could only use the van instead of the 30’ box trucks they have while the drivers got certified. Oh, and as I understand it, there was a hefty fine.”
8. Can I File My Complaint Now?
“In my country, if your package gets sent through the national post service, you’re basically screwed. It takes 200 years and they never actually deliver it. I don’t know how it is in other countries, but here they are supposed to ring the doorbell if the package doesn’t fit the mailbox and if you don’t answer they leave a notice and you have to go and pick it up all the way at the post office.
The problem is that my mailman doesn’t even try to deliver them, he just leaves the notice without even ringing the doorbell and leaves. I’ve had to pick up nearly every package I’ve ordered because of that.
Well, the last time was my last straw.
I was home and suddenly I received a call that immediately hung up, it was so fast that my phone didn’t even ring, just showed up as a missed call. No doorbell, nothing. I suspected it was the mailman and ran to the door only to find him inside the truck, looking straight at me before driving off.
Well, I was annoyed and called the post office to file a complaint. I explained the situation and the lady told me that I couldn’t file a complaint because they are only instructed to ring the doorbell and calling is optional and I couldn’t prove that he didn’t ring it.
At first, I just avoided using them again at all costs, but the other day I ordered something and chose a delivery company from the ones listed on the website. Apparently, that company hires the national post service to deliver for them here. When I found out, I basically stalked the tracking info for days (it was about 2 weeks late lol) until one day late at night it said it had arrived in my country, which usually means that the next day it’s going to be delivered.
The next day, I woke up at 7 am to check. My suspicions were correct, it said: ‘out for delivery.’ I quickly grabbed something to eat, got in my car, and parked right outside my house. Then I waited… and waited… and waited… 6 hours in total until I finally see the post truck pulling over.
I grabbed my phone to record and watched as the mailman opened the door already either the notice in hand, slid it inside my mailbox, and turned around. I got out of the car and said ‘excuse me, what are you doing?’ He didn’t even look at me and said, ‘just delivering packages, miss’.
Then I stood there as that JERK grabbed his phone to call me and quickly hung up. I smiled as I took my phone out of my pocket and sarcastically stated ‘oh bummer, you didn’t even give me time to reach for the phone!’ He literally turned white lol, couldn’t even speak, I continued ‘now can you give me my package please?’ He quickly opened the truck, almost tripped, and took out my package ‘see, wasn’t that easier than your whole scheme?’ He finally manages to say ‘sorry miss’.
I turned around and left. He probably thought he got lucky I didn’t say anything else, but little did he know that I sent the video to the post office via email attached to my complaint. Well… let’s just say I have a new mailman, this one tries to leave 1 second after ringing the doorbell, but at least he rings.”
7. I Think I'll Make A Good Private Investigator
“My mom has been best friends with Eileen (not her real name) since they were both kids, and Eileen has kind of been like an aunt to me. About 5 years ago, Eileen’s husband of more than 25 years surprised her by asking for a divorce.
Eileen lived about 6 hrs away from my mom at the time, and I lived out of state, so I didn’t find out how everything went down until a few months after their divorce was finalized.
Unfortunately Eileen’s life kind of spiraled out of control after the separation/divorce.
She developed depression and a drinking problem. But my mom and some other childhood friends were able to convince her to move back to her hometown, and then they convinced her to go to rehab.
I moved back home shortly before Eileen went to rehab and, because my school/work schedule was pretty flexible, I was able to house sit and take care of some stuff while she was in rehab.
The first time I visited her in rehab, I got the whole divorce story, and it was bad. Eileen’s ex, Jeff (also not his real name), hadn’t talked to Eileen about any problems before asking for a divorce, so she just assumed he fell out of love with her.
But I was immediately skeptical about the things Eileen told me.
First, Jeff, who was an executive at a pharmaceutical company earning mid-six figures, was fired from his job a year before they split up and decided to take a break before looking for another job.
It was weird to me that Jeff decided to take a break from work because he’d always been such a workaholic.
Eileen hasn’t worked in years because of a disability, but she has some property and a trust her parents left her that lets her live a comfortable life without working.
Jeff and Eileen lived off funds from the trust while he was unemployed.
Then, after Jeff said he wanted a divorce, he refused to go to couple’s therapy or talk about why he wanted the divorce. The only thing he would say was that they had grown apart and that he was sick of being with a woman like Eileen.
He said Eileen’s mother was right about her. Eileen’s mother was a classic narcissist, and she bullied Eileen horribly about her attractiveness, weight, intelligence, etc., which caused a lot of psychological problems that Jeff knows about.
Finally, right after the divorce was finalized, Jeff moved out of state, but to a state where he didn’t have any family or connections.
Jeff’s parents are still alive and in their 80s/90s, and Jeff is pretty close to them, so it didn’t make any sense to me why Jeff wouldn’t move to be closer to them if he wanted to move after the divorce.
I didn’t say anything to Eileen because I didn’t want to upset her, but I thought Jeff might have been having an affair, had orchestrated his unemployment to avoid paying alimony, and then moved out of state to be with his mistress. I just didn’t have a way to confirm it at the time.
Then Eileen asked me to look for a box of Jeff’s stuff he had asked her to hold for him until he moved into his new apartment. She told me all the info on the box, contents, and his new address was in an email he sent her, and she gave me the password to her computer so I could access the email.
This is where I lucked out. It turns out Jeff had used her computer and set up his email on the computer. I accidentally clicked on the app for his email when I was searching for Eileen’s email.
I decided to take a peek at his email.
The first thing I noticed was that he had mostly stopped using that email address 3 years before, which was about 1 year before he was fired. In a folder for digital receipts I found a confirmation email for a mingling site (either plenty of fish or match, I can’t remember which), which I think he saved there accidentally.
I also found a verification email for a new email address.
I started to put together a speculative timeline of what happened. I guessed that about 3 years before, Jeff started an affair, and shortly after, he decided to get a new email address to help keep the affair secret.
I wanted to access his profile to get more information, so I tried to use the ‘forgot password’ feature to see if I could generate an email that would allow me to reset the password and log in that way. Unfortunately, the site didn’t recognize Jeff’s old email address.
I thought I might be able to get into Jeff’s new email using his old email to reset the password, and then, maybe, I could use the new email to get into the website. But I didn’t want to risk locking Jeff out of his new email and alerting him until I knew more about what he’d done.
And here’s where I lucked out — the email app Jeff downloaded to Eileen’s MacBook had a note feature, and super genius Jeff saved some passwords on notes. Most of the passwords weren’t helpful, but I did get the password to the site and his Twitter and Netflix accounts.
I logged into the site using his new email address and the password. I was able to read messages Jeff sent to another woman before he broke up with Eileen. The new mistress sent Jeff her email address in one of the messages.
I searched social media for the mistress’s email address and found her profile.
I couldn’t read the mistress’s posts, but she left her photos public. She had recent photos of her and Jeff, so I knew they were still together. She also posted a photo of a construction crew breaking ground on a new home for her and Jeff, which was interesting because I got the impression from Eileen that Jeff didn’t have a lot of money after the divorce.
Here’s where my background is important. At the time, I was attending law school (I moved back to my hometown for one semester for a legal residency), and I had access to Lexis’ database, specifically, their public records database. I had spent a good portion of one of my summer internships tracking down property records and other assets to help recover judgments for clients, so I knew how to search for public records.
The mistress had purchased several acres in a wealthy suburb several months before Jeff filed for divorce, and there was no mortgage listed on the record. I’d already found the mistress’s LinkedIn page, so I knew she worked as an executive assistant before she moved out of state with Jeff.
She didn’t advertise her salary, but I doubted she could have afforded the property with her salary alone. It’s possible she had savings outside her salary, but I suspected Jeff gave her something to purchase the land before he filed for divorce.
I also found an updated record in Lexis showing Jeff and the mistress as joint owners of the property.
I called the county recorder office to confirm ownership of the property, timelines, etc. The mistress had filed a quitclaim just 5 weeks after Jeff’s divorce was finalized.
I was still hesitant to try to log into Jeff’s new email, so I decided to check his old email again to see if there was anything else I should investigate before moving to the new email.
I didn’t find anything, but I noticed that several passwords in his notes were the same. I decided to try to log into his new email using the same password he used for the site. I figured the two accounts were created around the same time, so if he had recycled a password, that was the most likely candidate.
It worked.
His new email was a gold mine. Because this story is already getting ridiculously long, I’ll list some of the relevant stuff I found:
- Jeff hadn’t been fired from his old job. He quit and lied to Eileen. I found an email from his admin asking where to have payroll send his last check and details about a goodbye party for him.
- Some emails between Jeff and a boat repair person mentioned a leak somewhere on one side of the sailboat near the engine compartment. The repair guy couldn’t find the source of the leak but he talked about current and future problems with mold and the engine on that side.
- Emails between Jeff and a boat broker, which included the email address of buyers farther down in the string.
- An emailed report from the boat inspector which didn’t include the leak or any mold damage or potential damage to the engine.
- Emails between Jeff and his contractor about changes made to the new house’s sunroom (something about a 3 season sunroom vs a 4 season sunroom and the construction needing to be modified to deal with the weight of snow).
- Emails between Jeff and the mistress. They had married.
- The mistress/Jeff shared a calendar.
- Some flirty emails between Jeff and another woman.
- Emails with info on Jeff’s new employer.
I downloaded all the important emails and their attachments and started thinking about a revenge plan.
To my mind, everything was fair game. He lied about being fired, so I wanted him fired from his new job. I suspected he hid his fortune before his separation from Eileen to help pay for his new house, so I wanted him to lose his house.
He was unfaithful, so I wanted to destroy his new relationship. Anything I could do about the boat was a bonus.
The easiest place to start was the boat. I had no idea if the source of the leak was found & repaired or if the leak was verbally disclosed to the buyer, but I figured Jeff was a lying jerk so odds were fair he hid the info from the new buyer.
I sent the emails between Jeff and the repairman and another copy of the inspection to the buyer. I searched Jeff’s county court website 5/6 months later and found out the buyers filed a suit against Jeff (and the broker and inspector). Ha!
I couldn’t figure out how to take or destroy Jeff’s house, so I settled for contacting the county inspector’s office to complain about the sunroom not being up to code.
This is actually what prompted me to write this post because I just found out some details about what happened with the county inspectors. (Keep in mind, I heard about this from a 3rd party years after the fact, so I don’t know all the details).
It turns out the sunroom was code compliant, but the inspector did find a workshop/workroom attached to the detached garage that wasn’t on the original permit/plans.
The workshop had a bathroom that the contractor attached to the property’s septic system after the initial inspection.
A mutual friend of Eileen & Jeff told Eileen and me, and he guessed this was a big deal because the size of the septic system they installed wasn’t sized to handle the additional… input, but I don’t know for sure. Jeff had to pay a fine and the workshop had to be removed. This ended up causing construction delays, which will become relevant below.
As for destroying Jeff’s marriage, my first impulse was to send the new wife the flirty emails between Jeff and the other woman, but when I searched for that woman on social media, I couldn’t find anything. I had no way of knowing if the new wife knew the other woman and would think that the emails weren’t important or evidence of an affair.
Then, I played around with the idea of editing Jeff’s profile and sending stuff to his wife. But it would take too long to manufacture a fake relationship with real days and times, and I was worried that Jeff might get an email alert from the site that would clue him in.
I ended up just risking that the new wife wouldn’t know the other woman. I pretended to be someone concerned about an affair between Jeff and the new woman. Overall, I kept the accusation vague, but I did say Jeff and the new girl went out to eat and to the movies, on a few days Jeff’s shared calendar said the new wife was out of town.
I couldn’t come up with a way to get Jeff fired. I rechecked his email and calendar over several weeks looking for something I could use to get him fired. Eventually, my legal residency got too busy to devote much time to revenge, so I decided to just let it go.
Eileen recently reconnected with a friend she shared with Jeff, and that friend gave Eileen an update on Jeff. Eileen shared the details with me, and that’s what reminded me of what I did and prompted this story.
It turned out that I didn’t need to worry about sabotaging Jeff’s career.
By luck, the woman Jeff had been emailing was actually his assistant at his new job, and Jeff’s new boss was his brother-in-law. Jeff and his new wife actually moved to her hometown so she could be close to her family and so Jeff could go to work for his new brother-in-law.
I have no idea if Jeff actually was having an affair. He told the mutual friend that passed this story onto Eileen that they hadn’t been having an affair. It didn’t matter to the new wife, though. Because she and Jeff got together when Jeff was already married, she didn’t have a lot of trust in Jeff.
She didn’t believe Jeff’s denials when I sent the email about him having an affair. She filed for divorce. And Jeff’s brother-in-law boss fired him.
And since the construction was delayed the new house wasn’t finished when Jeff and their new wife divorced. They had to sell an unfinished home, and Jeff took a big financial hit.
Finally, these weren’t part of my larger revenge plan, but I am pretty petty, so I:
- took the box of Jeff’s stuff (mostly photographs) and threw them away. I told Eileen they must have been lost in the move.
- signed both of Jeff’s email addresses for a bunch of spam, newsletters, mailing lists, etc.
- deleted his Netflix watchlist
- posted, retweeted, and liked a bunch of adult videos on his Twitter account and deleted all the accounts he was following
I never told Eileen what I did because I wanted her to have plausible deniability and I didn’t want to interfere with her recovery.
She doesn’t know about the boat lawsuit or the Netflix/Twitter stuff, but she did take satisfaction from his divorce and job loss.
I probably would have let it all go if Jeff had only just been having an affair because I had always really liked Jeff.
I always thought he was nice, but I was obviously wrong about him. Nice people don’t weaponize childhood abuse to mentally torture their wives. As far as I’m concerned, Jeff deserved everything I did to him.”
6. Suing The School That Didn't Want Me
“So I have a really bad leg, (I’ve had 13 surgeries, long story) and had just started at a new school. After the first 3 weeks, I had to go in for another procedure on my leg. Not that big a deal to me, I’ve been here before.
Upon my return, I had documentation of my restrictions, as well as special amenities that were required. The big three were that I needed extra time to get from class to class, must have someone to escort me, and needed unrestricted access to the elevator.
All of these got me recurring problems such as constant harassment by teachers and security about my being in the halls during class time, and why was my cousin out too (he was filling the role as my escort, as I have anxiety problems and we had the same classes).
These first two were annoying but easy enough to deal with.
The real issue was the elevator, as I was told multiple times that for security issues I couldn’t have a personal key due to it sharing the same functionality with the interior door keys.
I would never have had any issues with this, as I was told there would always be someone on the same floor as my classes to open the elevator for me. This, of course, was untrue about 75% of the time. The lack of elevator access meant that I was always stuck in the halls when other students were going from class to class, and was consistently late due to having to wait for someone to come by and open the door for the elevator.
This also meant that I would sometimes be stuck waiting through the entire lunch period, and due to my absences couldn’t afford to simply go to lunch after the fact. After about 3 weeks of this, I was tired of not getting to eat lunch. So I did one of the stupidest things I could have attempted and tried to use the stairs.
For context, I was not on crutches, I was on a full-blown walker. About halfway down to the landing, I fell. Hard. As lunch was letting out one of my friends found me, got someone to help pick me up, and carried me to the office.
Another of my friends went to find my other cousin (the one who normally escorted me wasn’t there due to being sick, so I was without an escort because I couldn’t bear the thought of, gasp a stranger escorting me), who when getting to the office managed to get me to calm down enough to give them my mother’s number.
Now, my mother is quite hot-tempered but can keep a level head normally. When she heard I fell, she was there in record time. When she got there, she immediately asked what happened. I told her I didn’t want to miss lunch again, so I tried to use the stairs.
Big mistake, as that set off a Tsar Bomba-sized explosive. She immediately turned around and DEMANDED the Principal and VP to get their butts in here ASAP. As soon as the principal and VP walked in, she started berating them in a fashion not suitable for most adults to hear, let alone kids.
When the VP made an off-hand remark about my condition, my mother was swarmed by local sheriffs that provided security for the school’s entrances and office as she physically went after the VP. We were escorted out, and after looking at the file and realizing my cousin and I had the same address they figured out that I didn’t actually live there.
Now, my grandmother’s address was listed as she looked after me after I left school up until around 8 pm. She also was raising my cousin after an issue between her and my aunt. They used this as grounds to expel me, and told her ‘I can be some other school’s problem now.’ I was then enrolled at the school near my house and had to have yet another surgery to repair the damage that was done as a result of my fall and redo the work of the previous procedure.
I had gotten multiple statements from teachers as well as my doctors, and my parents were moving forward with a lawsuit naming the VP, Principal, and the county school board. We were contacted by a lawyer who had won multiple cases against our school board, some of which went to the State Supreme Court, and he told us he would take our case Pro-bono. He was getting tired of going against the Board and thought a case like this would be what it took to try and fix their problem.
Fast forward 9 months, and I was walking out of court with a settlement to cover all my procedures, as well as a written confirmation that the school would be going through a complete administrative overhaul, and that the Principal and VP would be let go, and have their administrative credentials revoked in our state.
My new school was informed day 1 of my medical requirements and my need for a personal elevator key by the Superintendent and the head of the State Board of education.”
5. High School Jerk Served Me My Fast Food Order
“My Dad was in the RAF when I was growing up which resulted in a lot of moving around and changing schools as we went.
I was always the new kid. I moved schools from Wales to England when I was about 13 and ended up being put into an absolutely awful social group who made it their personal mission to ruin my life on a daily basis.
As a result of this, I became a hardcore geek and began teaching myself 3D art in the evenings after school as a bit of an ‘escape.’ As school progressed and the bullying got worse, my 3D art skills became better and better and that became my passion.
I left school at 16 after failing my GCSEs due to spending too much time doing 3D art and not enough time revising. This ended up being a fantastic ‘choice’ as I ended up going almost immediately into a junior artist role at a games company using the skills I’d gained in my evenings.
When I turned 17, I bought my first car and began driving into and from work. On my first ever journey home by myself in my car, I decided to stop at Burger King.
I walked in and the person behind the counter serving me was the ‘ring leader’ of this bunch of jerks who’d been making my life miserable throughout high school.
It was a beautiful moment. I made my order and he started asking me what I’d been doing. I didn’t even have to be a jerk about it, the reality of the situation was so amazing that all I had to do was tell the plain truth.
I’d been working at 17 on a AAA ps3 game and had just bought my first car, had 0 qualifications, and more importantly no student loan.
Seeing his face as he then had to process my order was like the universe giving me a big nudge and a wink.
Like it was going ‘See, I told you it’d all be worth it.'”
4. Make Fun Of Me For Liking Wrestling? Suck It, Everyone
“In middle school, I was bullied for liking pro-wrestling and ‘alternative’ music (I’m female, by the way.) Strange thing was, my main bully liked pro-wrestling as well, he had a WWE back-pack for god sake! I guess I just rooted for the wrong guys? I don’t even know.
ANYWAY. They would sit next to me and whisper awful things to me in one class in particular until I just ended up in the nurse’s office every day in order to avoid them. My parents were splitting up at this time and neither of them seemed to notice that I was failing classes or getting notes sent home.
The kids would yell at me as I walked down the hallway, make fun of my clothes (I was fairly poor in a fairly upper-class small town), and generally just make my life miserable until I changed schools.
Now I’m in my late 20’s. I’ve certainly come out of my ugly duckling phase, thank god.
I have a job managing a fairly successful band, I travel the world 9 months out of the year, and the last time I ran into my main bully was on tour. He was a busboy at a restaurant in the same town we happen to have a show in.
He didn’t look bad, maybe a little larger, but I had heard from mutual friends that he knocked some girl up and ended up stuck in this trashy town, never really did much of anything after high school. He definitely recognized me, and I made sure he knew I recognized him.
But the real kicker? Eating dinner with me was a famous (as in cross-over to mainstream media famous) WWE World Champion, who I happen to know through mutual friends. I’ve never felt more like I’ve ‘made it’ than in that moment.”
3. I Had To Remind The Immature Girl From High School That We're Adults Now
“I was bullied a lot in middle school, and (for unrelated reasons) ended up going to a different high school from most of my classmates, and obviously didn’t keep in touch.
I was back home from college for Christmas a year or two ago and was at the mall with my little sister and my fiance. I recognized a girl from my middle school across the food court, but we had never been friends, so I simply made a mental note that she was there and went back to eating.
A few moments later my fiance and sister both got up to use the restroom and I was by myself. The girl gets up, comes over, makes nice for half a second (Oh hi, how are you, haven’t seen you in forever, blah blah,) and then immediately transitions into how I look pathetic and desperate sitting by myself, and how it’s no wonder the people I was with left. I am completely taken aback and it takes me a moment to form words.
I hadn’t seen this girl in 6 or 7 years and hadn’t said more than 5 words to her.
I picked up my purse, stood up from my table, and said ‘We’re grown-ups now,’ in the most condescending tone I could manage through my surprise. I wanted to say something about how she needed to stop acting like a child, or how there were no teachers around to stop me from leaving, but at that moment I had too many thoughts and couldn’t express them all at once eloquently, so I just left. I think, or at least hope, she got the message.”
2. Proxy Blew Up A Dumpster With Bread Dough
“I’m a Professional Baker and have worked for various companies developing recipes and the like. I found a job at a local grocery store, working super early mornings on their pastries for the day. There were usually a few other people there, one of whom was a Mixer.
Mixers typically follow a spec sheet with the weights of all the ingredients they need to batch mix. It’s kind of mindless work and doesn’t require much thought. He was a young guy, fresh out of his teens. We became fast coworker friends and enjoyed chatting it up about baking, and I’d help him put our supply order away.
Good times.
One day, a woman with a thick Russian accent came in and handed us business cards. She told us whatever we’re getting paid, her company would double it if we came to work for them. I scheduled an interview, thinking this would be a great opportunity for me.
It was a ‘new’ grocery store concept, like a glitzy-glammy European-style Costco, whatever that means. When I went in for the interview, the place was literally still under construction. I met their Lead Baker and we hit it off right away. He warned me that the Big Boss had ‘interesting tastes’ and we’d need to work with that.
No biggie. More income, let’s go.
They hired us both and, over the next several months, it was a really interesting and fun experience. The Big Boss (thick, burly Russian man, to the point and perpetually angry) wanted this place to be like Costco — mass production of quality pastries.
They were bringing in crazy amounts of new equipment, including folders, shapers, and injectors that were easily worth millions. We didn’t have much equipment to start, and we were doing a lot of mixing in trash cans. Remember my Mixer buddy? Well, he was working on the bread dough, using spec sheets provided by our Lead Baker.
Over time they were bringing on more staff, and it was a lot of fun developing new recipes, experimenting with ratios, and figuring out how to get over constraints for the types of products that Boss wanted. Did I mention he was a jerk? Oh yeah.
When he was reviewing some cheesecake I had made, he said ‘Good job, sweetie.’ I came back with ‘Miss, ma’am, or my name is fine.’ He scowled at me, and from that point on he treated me like garbage. We brought other women on staff.
I watched him hit on them. Some of the others were cool with being harassed, I guess. This place was paying top dollar and had to get in good with the Big Boss, right?
So, the stage is set here. Boss quickly turned his business into a game of Survivor.
He’d fire people on the spot for whatever reason. One day, one of the people he sacked was our Lead Baker. It came as a surprise since he was developing all the recipes we’d be using. I inherited a lot of his notes, and his development work was divided between me and the Mixer.
So, this whole time Mixer was kissing Big Boss’ butt pretty hard. He was seeing an open position with the Lead Baker gone and quickly became invested in the idea of him running the Bakery show and making some serious bank. At the same time, my relationship with Big Boss was quickly declining.
For example, I had him sample some cinnamon rolls I had made, and he came back with ‘I hate these, they’re terrible.’ ‘What do you not like? We can change anything about them. The dough? The filling? The icing?’ ‘I don’t know, I just don’t like them.’ On a hunch, I gave some cinnamon rolls from the same batch to another lady there he had eyes for and asked her if she’d present them to him as her own.
She offered him the same product I had given him minutes before, and he loved it.
Uhuh.
Anyway, I noticed that my notes were out of place one day, and a coworker informed me my Mixer buddy was stealing my work and presenting it as his own.
He was also approaching me and asking a lot of baking questions, which was fine, but I knew that his knowledge of industrial ratio baking was mediocre at best. He was a Mixer. Following a recipe is all he knew how to do. Knowing this, I made a decoy copy of my notes, but this time I put awful recipes, with huge amounts of salt or yeast. Anyone who knew how to build a recipe could probably look at it and go ‘whoa, that’s a lot.’ Not Mixer buddy.
My original plan was to leave this in an obvious spot as bait and let him steal the awful recipes, but Big Boss had other plans. We sat down for a pre-launch meeting and he informed me I wasn’t going to be working in the Bakery anymore, and being relegated to store setup.
The mixer was going to be taking over as the Lead Baker (guess all that b**********g really paid off) and I was to give him all my notes so far.
NO PROBLEM BOSS.
A day later was when the fun really began. Mixer mixed up a huge batch of super-salty cake batter, and I heard Big Boss screaming at him about ‘way too much salt.’ That’s not even where the fun begins.
As we were setting up an industrial quantity of baking equipment, we had to test the larger quantity mixing machines, and did a test run for some bread dough… with my decoy recipe that had triple the yeast and sugar. As it didn’t come out right, Mixer had to throw it away.
His choice? The dumpster is out back in the dead heat of summer. Hundreds of pounds of dough. The fun thing about massive amounts of bread dough is that it doesn’t magically stop rising if you throw it away, especially in a hot dumpster.
A few hours later, I spied out back to see Mixer buddy shoveling this massive blob of dough into trash bags that had exploded from the dumpster like an uncovered blender spewing out a yeast-laden smoothie.
Sweet revenge. Now, about the Mafia thing… this store was really strange. They had been ordering doubles of all the crazy industrial baking equipment and storing them in the back. We had nowhere to put any of this. I also looked up the company they were subcontracted under, and it was to a dead address in Russia.
Big Boss also had armed security guards everywhere. This was a grocery store, mind you. I had a feeling that this company was more of a front for laundering funds. I eventually was fired by Big Boss, which was great because I had been job hunting, full-well knowing this business was a sinking ship.
I had a new job lined up already. They had their grand opening, did business for three months, then closed. RIP Mixer.”
1. Oh How The Tables Turned
“I was a huge tomboy in grade school – a teacher’s pet, nerd/geek, giant-glasses tomboy.
I didn’t get along with any of the girls in my grade, but I did alright hanging with the guys… except for one guy.
We’ll call him Lopez. Lopez was the alpha of fourth grade, and it bothered him to have a girl sit at the guys’ table.
I tried ignoring him, but it didn’t work. One day, while I was playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with the guys, he came up and took over the game.
‘OP… this is a guys’ game.’
‘SHUT UP. I’m Leonardo. I’ve got two swords, and I’m the leader!’
He laughed and sneered a little. ‘You’re not Leonardo. You’re… You’re Irma.’
For the record, I still hate Irma. Passionately.
Needless to say, the nickname stuck.
The next time I tried to eat lunch with the guys, Lopez told me in no uncertain terms that there were no girls allowed at the guys’ table… he told me I was a girl, an ugly girl but still a girl, and that girls were only good for growing up and having babies… not that it mattered, because I was so nasty nobody would want to marry me anyway.
In retrospect, he must have been parroting things he heard from his dad, because where the heck would a 9-year-old boy get that from, anyway?
Slowly but surely, he turned the tide of the other guys against me… but by that point, I’d burned my bridges hanging out with the girls… So that’s why I spent the next two years of lunchtimes by myself at a corner table eating as fast as I could so I could go play by myself on the swings and not look so pathetic or break down crying in front of everyone.
It was not very much fun.
Fast forward a couple of years, and I saw him at the beginning of high school – and he’d turned into a young Brad Pitt. It was so unfair. He was…. just… drop-dead gorgeous. I hated him so much – had hated him for years… but as soon as I saw him my heart twisted inside me, and I fell hopelessly in lust for the first time in my young life.
Unfortunately, I was still a tomboy geek – I got heavy into grunge fashion in junior high and just kept wearing it because it was comfortable. Also, I wore patchouli oil, because I actually liked the way it smelled, and nobody had the decency to tell me that it smells like rat pee to the general populace.
He wasn’t mean to me…. he just didn’t know I existed. That was almost worse. I could have stood right in front of him, doing jumping jacks, and he would have just long-gazed past me. Besides, hotter girls than me were flinging themselves at him with reckless abandon, so I knew I didn’t have a chance.
Fast forward a couple of years – it was the end of sophomore year in college. I’d grown up, learned what a hairbrush was, and stopped hiding in GIANT flannel shirts.
He, on the other hand… had gone a bit downhill. Not much, but he was no longer ripped (turns out he did steroids in high school), his skin looked old (he did some illegal substances, too.), and he’d put on some weight (he was studying to be a computer programmer, and, well..
yeah. It’s hard to stay in shape doing that.)
I had put on weight, too, but at that point, it was a good thing, since I was too thin growing up. I’ll just be blunt – I used to be hot.
I saw him in the hallway, on a day I was wearing a brand new outfit I’d just splurged on, on a great hair day, where my makeup turned out just right.
He stopped dead, and his mouth dropped open.
‘OP? Is that… is that you?’
‘Heya, Lopez.’
‘Wow. You, uh…. you…. you look amazing.’
We proceeded to chat for a while, just about nothing, but I was late for class and had to go.
Right before I left, he shook his head. ‘Who would have thought, all those years ago…’ He gestured at himself, and at me. ‘That I’d grow up to be the nerd, and you’d grow up to be… well, you look great.’
It’s been over 10 years since that meeting, and it STILL makes me smile every time I think of it.”
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