People Confess Their Eyebrow Raising Revenge Stories
12. Pranking The Prankster
“My dad has always been the joker in the family. He would set up huge evil pranks then if he succeeded he would make fun of you for the longest time.
Two days ago he told me to take the trash out he hid and scared the life out of me, as much as I hate to admit it I jumped like a little girl. He was just laughing and it made me incredibly mad. Later on, I was in my room thinking of a way to get revenge and again he scared the soul out of me.
At that point, I was completely done, and then I came up with the funniest revenge ever.
He usually keeps water by his nightstand so I started by taking that while he was sleeping, then I put pure cinnamon in his mouth, sprayed ketchup on his face, and then doused him with fart spray.
I was on the floor dying at that point and then he ran to his bathroom. Little did he know I put saran wrap in the doorway. He ran into it and fell. I was starting to get cramps in my sides and running out of breath.
He jumped in the shower and was fine. Currently, I can’t look at him without laughing and he still won’t talk to me. I’m secretly afraid that he might be planning something huge but for now, I’m basking in my glory.”
11. Frame And Fire Me? Enjoy Divorce, Prison, And Deportation
“I used to work at an upscale restaurant owned by a large corporate entity that owns several different restaurant brands. I worked there for about 3 1/2 years before they eventually fired me, but more about that later. First, I want to give an idea of my role there.
My role at that job was a little of everything. Since the day I started working there, I took it upon myself to learn as much as possible. I was very persistent with management when I wanted to learn a new department. I had started as a server, but eventually had worked my way into different departments and job titles, like carry-out, hosting, bartending, bar backing, banquets, catering, and deliveries.
My singular goal while working there was to make myself available for as many hours as possible. I was being paid about $12 an hour, though that fluctuated if I was working as a bartender or server and making tips. Eventually, it was noticed by management how I fit best into one of the non-tipped positions.
I was so good at it that they decided to try me out as an unofficial supervisor over the team that worked in carry-out, catering, and deliveries, as those were all one department.
I knew this was going to ultimately mean a few fewer hours since I would only be working one department, so I negotiated with management to increase my pay by about $1.50.
Since I was taking on additional responsibilities, they were satisfied with the pay increase. I wasn’t trying to get as much bank out of them as I could, I just wanted to be able to pay my bills and still have a little amount left over for fun.
I was living in the highly taxed city of Chicago, which is in the already highly taxed state of Illinois, so it was pretty difficult to make ends meet and still have something left to enjoy my life. I am a person of simple pleasures and I can enjoy things for long periods of time, so it didn’t take much to be happy.
A video game could hold my attention for several months, sometimes even years. I had a family pet that I had brought with me to Chicago, so that counted as an extra expense. Not long after I started this position as the unofficial supervisor, I got a significant other so I was also going out more often and spending on her.
With my position and some smart budgeting, I was able to afford all of this. The money wasn’t an issue, but management had a high turnover rate, so the incoming managers often did not know what the department entailed or how important hours were to workers of these departments.
Eventually, it was noted that our current general manager was going to be fired and replaced. The incoming general manager was supposed to be some rockstar when it came to improving restaurants. We looked up his name and found him as the first search result on Google.
But the entry wasn’t some glowing review of his work ethic or of his impeccable ability to improve the way a restaurant runs… It was actually a mugshot and a police report filed for repeated domestic abuse. This is important later. We’ll call him Harvey.
Shortly after Harvey came in and started making changes, one of our best managers gave her resignation. She refused to work with him, and like an Oracle, told us to expect lots of harassment, misogynistic comments, and for him to eventually run this place into the ground.
Not long after she left, our general manager began replacing our current managers with hand-picked people that he had worked with in the past. Eventually, all but one manager was replaced. That manager was the kitchen manager. We will call him Fred.
Fred had been there since I had started working there.
He seemed to be something of a chameleon, as his values and ethics seemed to change depending on who his boss was. Honestly, I sort of applaud his survival instincts, but ultimately see him as a suck-up and traitor.
Harvey never really replaced the manager for our department, so we ran without a lot of oversight.
Unless you count me as the supervisor, we didn’t constantly have someone breathing down our necks about how things should be done. Our department had some hiccups here and there, but it still ran really smoothly.
Since we did not have our own manager, we often had to radio for a manager to come to help us out on things that needed a manager card for approval. Fred would always be the one to answer these calls since the kitchen was closest to our department.
Over time the new team of managers started to see Fred as the manager of our department as well. However, the hourly team that worked there still saw me as their supervisor. This meant that any time Fred was trying to make changes that would ultimately hurt us, the team relied on me to mitigate those disasters or to negotiate with Fred to let us do our jobs the way we had already proven worked really well.
Over several months Fred and I would butt heads dozens of times. He and I were constantly arguing about how important hours were to the workers in this department. He had it in his head that we should be living off of tips like servers, but since most of our orders were carryout, they came in through Grubhub, and Grubhub doesn’t tip.
We didn’t have a lot of deliveries in a day, and the tips we got from those were maybe $10 if we were lucky. But splitting $10 four ways doesn’t add up to a lot. It just showed that Fred had no clue what he was talking about.
Eventually, we had a meeting with Harvey, Fred, and all the workers of this department. it was marketed as a chance to voice all our grievances and concerns with the changes they wanted to make with no chance of retaliation. So the workers did exactly that.
They talked about how Fred was trying to cut hours even though he isn’t our actual manager. When it was brought up that they were attempting to hire someone to be the manager, the team suggested that I take over since I had already been supervising them and running things smoothly for the last several months.
I was also the one that management consulted with when writing schedules as I had an understanding of the days some workers could and couldn’t work depending on their school schedules or family life.
I could see at the moment it was suggested, that Harvey and Fred made the decision on the spot that I had to be rid of.
Although they didn’t say it, I could see the look they gave each other, and instinctively knew that my days at this place were numbered and my job was going to be getting the ax one way or another.
They made a bunch of promises to us about not cutting hours.
They told us that they would stop sending all but one person home early and only leaving one person to clean everything and close up by themselves, as this wasn’t a small department and it was simply too much for one person to do alone while still meeting health and safety standards.
They promised that whatever hours we were scheduled for, we would work. We weren’t trying to be unreasonable, so we told them that we usually have 3 or 4 people scheduled to work our department. They could cut two of them early, but we always needed at least 2 people here to help close properly.
The promise was made that they would always have at least two closers.
However, only about a week later, they started sending all but one person home early again every night. One night they tried to do it while I was scheduled as the closer, and we had just returned from a massive catering event and there was an unbelievable amount of cleanup left to do for one person.
When Fred came in and tried to send everyone except me home I stepped up and told him that he was consistently breaking the promise he had made to us during the meeting. He looked me square in the face and told me to stop complaining about it, and if I was going to keep trying to talk to him about him breaking his promises he could easily find someone who could work my shifts.
I quickly realized that this was an assassination attempt on my job. He wanted me to press it further. So I backed off and started cleaning. I ended up having to stay way late, and that meant overtime pay anyway. I got a write-up for that since we aren’t allowed to work overtime without a manager’s approval. When I refused to sign the write-up, pointing out that I had tried to explain to Fred that I wouldn’t be able to clean up all that stuff alone before my scheduled shift ended, I was allowed to leave without signing the write-up, but only because the HR rep that was present at the time wasn’t one of Harvey’s cronies.
Skip ahead, to the day I was fired:
It is important to note at this point that I always came into work an hour early. Since we lived in Chicago, food was expensive. However, at our job, we were allowed to have as much free soup and bread as we liked. So I would come into work one hour early every day so I could have some soup and bread for lunch before my shift.
But on this day, when I walked into the kitchen to get myself some soup, one of the line cooks told me that he had a dish that had been canceled after he cooked it, and Fred had told him to give it to someone.
He assured me Fred had already comped it and that it was free to take for whoever wanted it. It just so happened to be my favorite appetizer so I happily took the free food.
Not long after I got to my booth, both Harvey and Fred approached me and asked me if I had put in a ticket for that food.
I told them that the line cook had given it to me and said it was the canceled order that Fred had already comped… Fred looked dumbfounded and said he had no idea what I was talking about. So Harvey told me ‘I think you know that’s theft. Go ahead and finish the food and then grab your stuff and go.
That’s the last meal you’ll be having here.’
I tried to explain to them that I had been given this food by the line cook, but they refused to listen, so I offered to take them to the kitchen to clear it up with the cook.
But by the time I had gone back to the kitchen with them to talk to the line cook, he had already gone home for the day. I had no choice but to gather my stuff, say my goodbyes, and head home.
On my way out, I told the people working my department that afternoon what had happened, exactly as it happened. They were shocked and angry, but mostly sad to see me go.
I decided that on my way out, I would stop by the accounting office and pick up any tips that may have been dropped for me that week, just to make sure I didn’t get screwed over.
Before heading down, I had the gut feeling to just set my phone to record, and I stuffed it into my pocket with the camera rolling.
Although the video was entirely black since it was in my pocket, I did manage to get a pretty muffled recording of Harvey and Fred’s voices through the door, discussing how things had gone as planned, and that they had been trying to get rid of me ever since the meeting with my department.
I knocked on the door and they hushed up before opening it. They asked what I was still doing there, and I asked for my tips. They gathered what was in the safe for me and handed it over. Despite my anger rising at what I had just heard, I decided not to burn this bridge just yet… Because perhaps I could nuke it later.
I offered a handshake to both managers, thanked them for the opportunity to work there, and left, making sure to pull my phone out of my pocket and record the front of the restaurant, with the sign showing its name and logo. Working in a restaurant, you learn to ALWAYS COVER YOUR OWN BUTT.
It’s true for most jobs, but something was just telling me I would need this all later. If I was being accused of theft, I wanted to be able to prove it wasn’t true if it ever came up in future job interviews… This is exactly what happened and where this all started going nuclear.
On the train ride home, I sent some messages and made some posts on some local groups on social media saying that I had just been fired and that I was looking for a job as quickly as possible. By the time I got off at my stop, I had already set up an interview for later that day.
I was offered the job about 5 minutes into the interview, but after going over the details, it didn’t sound like it was for me, so I turned it down. I interviewed at a few other places and found one that was a darned good fit, with a hefty pay increase compared to my previous job, and I wouldn’t have to deal with customers.
It was an auditing job for a logistics company.
However, during the interview with the manager of this job, he mentioned he had already called my previous place of employment and spoken with the general manager, Harvey. Harvey had told him that I had even been fired for theft. Luckily for me, the manager I was interviewing with asked me to tell him more about that… and he was willing to let me pull out my phone and find the recording.
I asked if the voice in the video was the same as the one he spoke on the phone with. It was. That was confirmation enough for him that I hadn’t made a fake video. He listened to the two managers in the video admit that they had set me up, and watched to the end when I showed the front of the restaurant, complete with the logo and name.
The manager interviewing me, who we’ll start calling Dean, hired me immediately and asked me to send him the recording. I did.
I thought that was the end of it.
About 7 months later, after settling into this job quite nicely, HR sent out a ‘Welcome all our new team members’ email, which listed all the newest hires, some facts about them, and had pictures of them all.
They sent these out every time they hired a new round of people.
One of them, Thomas, was a former coworker who worked with me at the restaurant. We had worked at the host stand together, so I was pretty glad to see someone I knew and liked coming onto the team.
I sought out his desk and went and said hi, and asked why he left the restaurant.
He hadn’t left willingly. He’d been laid off because the company was under investigation. It had started as a relatively small matter. The corporate entity that owned the restaurant chain had received an email with an attached video.
MY video that had been filmed from inside my pocket. That caused enough for corporate to send someone to investigate internally.
Thomas was pretty surprised that I hadn’t heard anything about it, since there had been numerous attempts to get in touch with me.
As soon as he said that, I logged into the old email I had used when I first applied for the job at the restaurant. I had at least two dozen emails asking me to come in to discuss my employment and termination. I never replied. I just didn’t care enough anymore.
I’d also changed my number since then, so they hadn’t been able to contact me by phone.
Thomas continued explaining that before corporate had sent someone, Harvey and Fred had talked with my department and tried to offer them all a small pay increase to spin corporate a story about how I was incompetent at my job and failed to live up to my duties.
The day the corporate auditor showed up, there had been a small exodus of people from my old department. They quit ON THE SPOT, in front of the lady from corporate (let’s call her Audrey), and made sure to rat out Harvey and Fred before leaving.
Strike one for both of them.
Strike two came a couple of days after Audrey showed Harvey and Fred the recording that had kicked all of this off. They denied it vehemently, but there was no mistaking Harvey’s voice. It’s unique. Not only that, but the video also picked up their voice and mine when we shook hands and had a friendly parting of the ways, which was something they had already bragged about to Audrey, thinking it made them look better that we were able to part on good terms. This wasn’t the actual strike two.
That came when it was clear they needed to be separated, so Audrey sent Fred to work at another restaurant owned by our parent company and temporarily demoted Harvey to manager.
This tore them apart. They had once been an inseparable evil team, but the pressure of the investigation must have pushed them over the edge.
They ended up at each other’s throats… on social media, on a public post on the company page. The post had since been deleted, but Thomas explained it as the following.
Fred had been pictured in the social media post on the restaurant page, and Harvey made a passive-aggressive comment about how Fred shouldn’t even be in the picture since he had been moved to another restaurant due to misconduct.
Fred saw this comment and said something along the lines of ‘At least when people google my name, I don’t show up as the guy that punched his wife.’
To which Harvey responded, ‘Very funny from the guy who is two-timing his wife with Janet’s sister.’ (Not her real name, but Janet was the girl they appointed to officially supervise my old department after they fired me, the unofficial supervisor.)
Fred replies to that by saying ‘Like you haven’t tried with half the waitresses. They all have stories about you trying to hook up with them.’
The post was deleted, but not before it had been seen by Audrey the auditor. That officially struck two.
Strike three came the next day when Audrey started interviewing the female waitstaff and bartenders, seeing if any of them could confirm that Harvey had tried to make a move on them.
All of them were interviewed separately, several of them had similar stories. Every girl that confirmed Harvey had made a move on them all said he had offered to be their ‘Sugar Daddy’ if they would send inappropriate photos or stay after closing to fool around with him.
Harvey was fired. But that isn’t the worst of it. Audrey the Auditor wasn’t just some random woman from corporate. She was the old regional manager for this area and had personally hired Harvey’s wife as the general manager of another restaurant in the city.
So she called up the restaurant Harvey’s wife worked at and told Harvey’s wife everything she had learned from the female waitstaff.
We learned later that they had gotten a divorce over him trying to two-time her after she’d already given him a second chance to change after he had BEAT HER.
I don’t know what compelled her to give him a second chance after something like that, but she sure didn’t give him a third.
After firing Harvey, the line cook who had given me the food was interviewed by Audrey. I don’t know how it came up, but at some point, he had let it slip that he was an illegal immigrant.
She had his file in her hand, with an Illinois ID and Social Security Number on file, so this confused her and she pressed him for more information
It turns out that Fred had some connections and had his own miniature black market going on where he would have fake social security cards and IDs made for the illegal immigrants he was hiring at reduced wages.
It had been going on for at least 4 years.
Needless to say, this is a felony. With the potential PR nightmare that she was likely dealing with, she felt she had no choice but to alert the authorities. Local PD enlisted the help of the FBI since some of the evidence led them beyond the jurisdiction of the local police.
Fred was arrested, and quickly gave up the names of the people working that he had sold Social Security Cards and IDs to. I’m not sure if he gave up ALL of them, but he did name drop about 14 people, and of those 14, at least half were deported by the time Thomas had been let go.
One of them was the line cook that had given me the food the day I was fired.
Thomas went on to explain that it had all started with me being fired, but I never sent that recording to corporate. I’d only sent it to Dean when he hired me.
I asked him about it, and he told me he had sent it to his wife since she was a lawyer. He wanted to see if I had a case to maybe sue my old job since what they had done was wrong. But he also remembered that when we had the first talk about it, I had said I’m not the type of person who would try to make millions off an entire company because of the mistakes of two jerks.
But I’d also said that it would be pretty sweet to see them lose their jobs too.
So his wife had been the one that sent it to the legal team at the corporate HQ of my old restaurant job.
My boss showed it to his wife, who forwarded it to the real head honchos of my old job.
They were both just trying to get two idiots fired for what they did to me but ended up pulling a thread so long that it didn’t end until there were harassment accusations, revelations about managers two-timing their wives with girls related to people they had placed in positions of authority, a divorce, mass layoffs pending investigations, a staff overhaul, an FBI investigation into what could be considered black market dealings of falsified government-issued documents, and at least a half dozen deportations and probably as many as 14.”
10. Pretentious HOA Got Disbanded
“After years of hearing stories of problems with HOAs (and having no tolerance for busybodies ourselves) my wife and I were both solidly in agreement that we would never purchase a home in an HOA.
When we finally did find a house and purchased it, we knew for a fact that we were NOT in an HOA. However, just behind us, we learned there was a (not really) HOA.
About a week after we moved in, there was a knock on the door.
One of the neighbors behind us announced that she was President of the HOA, and welcomed us to the neighborhood. Seems civil enough, but we asked, ‘what HOA’.
‘Oh, we’re behind you, the home behind yours is where the HOA starts.’
‘Ok, that’s nice, nice to meet you…’ Just general pleasantries.
We were hopeful. We were shocked, even. Someone associated with the management of an HOA that wasn’t a complete busybody psychopath!
How wrong we were.
The way our lot was, there was a sliver of green space between our property line and the sidewalk, in a somewhat triangular shape (the street ran west southwest, our property line ran due east-west).
So there was a wedge of land there. We’d always been told that this belonged to the HOA, yadda yadda – no big deal, just meant we didn’t have to deal with the upkeep of this land.
Now that this setup is all in place, it’s time to start the story of how we got the (not really an) HOA dissolved.
We had a couple of trees in our yard. Literally on the property line, so we took responsibility for taking care of these things. They’re ‘MASSIVE’. They’re also a pain in the butt, incredibly dense/heavy, and because of the way the limbs grow, they’re prone to splitting and dropping limbs.
There was a huge limb that extended way out into the street adjacent to the green space owned by the HOA. This thing was a major risk of dropping and severely injuring/killing someone. We didn’t want that on our conscience (or our insurance!) and so we decided to take that limb down entirely, as well as clean out a lot of the deadwood in the two trees.
Hired an arborist, they came out, did their thing. $1400 later, we were left with some decent-sized rounds that we were going to move over the next weekend (I was out of town the first weekend after we removed the limb). I should note that the wood was neatly stacked in the green space on the bark dust, out of everyone’s way, and in no way a hazard or eyesore.
Enter the shrieking harpy… er… President of the ‘HOA’. My wife had stepped out the door the day I had left on my trip and she pulls up into our driveway, rolls down the window, and starts yelling at my wife:
‘YOU NEED TO MOVE THAT WOOD NOW!!!!!
THAT’S THE PRIVATE PROPERTY OF THE HOA!!! MOVE IT NOW!!!!’
My wife is not a confrontational type. She’s also somewhat petite and tried to explain to the harpy that I was out of town and that we would be moving it as soon as I got back in town the next weekend.
Nope, not good enough. She shrieks at my wife some more, and my wife ends up grabbing the wheelbarrow and somehow moves this stack of rounds (some of them weighed close to 100 lbs) around the fence, up to our driveway, and into the backyard. She was angry.
So was I. We knew where the harpy lived, so when I got back I went over to talk to her, and explain that I was rather displeased in how she treated my wife. Didn’t pound on the door, wasn’t aggressive or anything.
They wouldn’t answer the door.
Cowards (we knew they were home).
This left us with a bit of a displeased taste in our mouths. The next spring, the hedge that is planted outside of our fence line, well, wasn’t maintained very well and pushed over two sections of our wooden fence.
So I emailed the harpy and explained that their hedge had damaged our fence.
‘It’s not our hedge!’
‘Um… it’s growing in your green space.’
‘That’s not our green space!’
Waitwut?
‘Then why the (censored) did you decide to screech at my wife last summer when we had the wood stacked there?’
Silence.
Well, at that point I fixed the fence so our dog wouldn’t escape, after pruning the laurel back sufficiently that it wouldn’t damage the fence again. And started making some phone calls. I contacted the county and ended up speaking to about seven different departments in order to figure out who actually owned that strip of land.
After probably two weeks of trying to find the right people to talk to, I got to the roads division. The green space was marked as part of the right of way for the road, and therefore no one actually ‘owned’ that space.
‘So I can chop down that ugly overgrown hedge that’s encroaching on the sidewalk and knocking down my fence?’
‘Yep,’ says the kind gentleman from the roads division.
‘As an aside,’ he asked, ‘you mentioned something about there being an HOA associated with the plots to the east of your property?’
‘Yeah?’
‘well, part of what took me so long to get an answer for you is that it turns out there is no HOA registered with the county there, so we were looking in the wrong place entirely…’
‘Wait, there’s no HOA there?’
‘No, hasn’t ever been one since that subdivision was built…’
‘Huh… Interesting…’
And a plot was hatched.
We had befriended a couple of people within the neighborhood behind us, and they were rather fed up with Ms. ‘President of the HOA’ and her antics.
She was the typical busybody, bullying anyone she didn’t like, and apparently for the last 10 years or so had been collecting HOA ‘dues’ from everyone in the neighborhood to the tune of $300/year. There were 36 homes in the ‘HOA’. Right around $100,000 in dues. For a non-existent HOA.
With no real maintenance. Oh, they hosted an annual block party – potluck style… They pulled grass from the green space – on a volunteer basis.
So I did what any red-blooded American would do. I got 36 envelopes. 36 stamps. And printed off 36 copies of a letter with my findings from the county that there was not now, nor ever had been for the recorded history of the subdivision, any HOA, neighborhood association, or any similar organization.
And that they, collectively, had paid in excess of $100,000 in dues over that time to a non-existent entity, plus any fines the non-existent HOA had decided to levy.
The neighbors, in turn, did exactly what any red-blooded American would do.
They sued her for every penny they’d paid over the last 10 years.
Won, too.
And there’s no longer an ‘HOA’ behind us.
In all the digging into this mess, we learned she’s a real estate agent. I figure I’ll wait until she annoys me again and report this whole mess to the state’s real estate licensing board.
(evil grin)
Obviously, this needs to be reported to the licensing board. Will look into that process… I have sent an initial e-mail to my state’s Real Estate licensing board (Real Estate Agency). I did look her up in the licensing system, apparently, she’s licensed as a principal broker for her agency.
This should get interesting.
Eventually, her license is up for renewal at the end of this month. This should put one great speed bump in that process. (evil grin)
Regarding the criminal charges, since I wasn’t a victim of the fraud, that’s not something I can pursue.
However, I spoke with my friend who was one of her victims and he and his wife are talking to other people they trust about coming together and seeking criminal charges.
One day, my wife and I had dinner with our friends who were among the victims of this psycho.
And I learned a lot. Probably definitely more than I should have. I learned a lot about the lawsuit that was filed when I sent out the letters revealing that there was no HOA. There was, in fact, a settlement to make the lawsuit go away.
I will say this, the Harpy got a good lawyer. A ‘really’ good lawyer. One of the terms of the settlement was that the total amount remain undisclosed, but our friends confirmed that they were made whole. Another part of the settlement was a pretty stringent non-disclosure agreement.
I’m gonna have to start pretty far back in this mess, because it explains a lot about how this all went down. The subdivision that Harpy lives in was built back in 2000. And it turns out that at the time the subdivision was built, she was the first one to buy in this brand new neighborhood.
The developer had actually planned to set up an HOA (the correct way) but because of delays in construction and selling the homes, they never actually set it up. (Based on one of the comments below and a glance at the relevant state law, this is apparently bad information that was passed on to me.) That didn’t stop Ms. Harpy though, not at all.
So as soon as the next owners moved in, she reached out to them. ‘Hi, welcome to the neighborhood. We are setting up a neighborhood association, a voluntary HOA if you will. That way we can take care of the common areas, and keep property values up.’ The usual excuses behind an HOA.
Well, after the first 5-6 houses were bought and the owners moved in, and agreed to this voluntary ‘HOA”, well… The pitch changed. It went from a ‘neighborhood association’ to just a straight, ‘Hey, welcome to the neighborhood. I’m the president of the HOA, nice to meet you!’ Most people went along with it.
They figured they had missed something in the disclosures, or the listing, or something. But this was a brand spanking new subdivision. And at the time, you couldn’t find a brand new subdivision that (didn’t) have an HOA. There were a few people that (did) in fact pay attention.
When called on it, she would change her pitch back to the ‘Well, it’s not (really) an HOA… It’s more a voluntary neighborhood association… But we do have some rules we’ve all agreed to (that it turns out she wrote all on her own), and we do collect a small amount, just $25 a month, that’s not unreasonable, is it?
Just to keep up the common areas, and the rules help keep everyone’s property values up!’
All of that came to light during the depositions and testimony in this lawsuit.
And she sold them on it. Everyone signed the ‘rules’ (She even called them CC&R’s – with the argument that this gave them a certain legal weight to be able to enforce the rules), either under the guise of the ‘HOA’, or the ‘Neighborhood Association’.
By the time all the properties were initially sold, it was roughly 2:1, those that thought it was an HOA, and those that thought it was just a voluntary association. And as people sold, and new owners moved in, well, the HOA pitch just got easier to sell.
To the point that at the time of the lawsuit, it was somewhere between 3:1 and 4:1.
As testimony was wrapping up, her attorney put forward a proposed settlement. I was able to find out from my neighbor that in this proposed settlement the only people that would be, in the legal jargon, ‘made whole’ were the ones that signed on under the impression that it was a legitimate HOA.
Her attorney successfully argued to the judge that the people who signed up under the ‘voluntary neighborhood association’ were not actually defrauded, and therefore couldn’t be a part of the settlement. That really angered those people.
Because of the timing of the whole house of cards tumbling down around her, she had sufficient equity in her house that she was able to refinance her mortgage and pay the settlement amount.
So she had to pay a lot of people back out of her own pocket, losing that equity that she had built up over the last ten years. I’m guessing that her husband was not in on the plan, as he was not one of the named parties in the suit, and he filed for divorce in the middle of the lawsuit.
As for how he didn’t know? No clue. Maybe she just had him convinced that her commissions from real estate sales were just that good. I have no idea what the terms of the divorce were, but it was apparently rather acrimonious. Our friends more than once heard shouting matches from the Harpy’s house as they were out walking the neighborhood.
So hopefully that clarifies how she was able to sucker people in. Our friends were some of those that were convinced that it was a legitimate HOA, and they told us that she was so smooth, so convincing, that they didn’t doubt it for a minute.
At least that meant that they were ‘made whole’ even though they couldn’t legally disclose how much they got back.
Now, for more recent happenings. One of the things we talked about tonight was our neighbors going to the district attorney and pursuing criminal charges.
Well, they talked to the DA’s office this morning, and apparently, the statute of limitations has passed. For a crime like this, even though it would be a felony-level charge, the statute of limitations is only 3 years for that type of crime. BUT I passed on to them the idea of reporting her to the IRS.
Since they were among those who lost funds, I figure it’s only fair that they get the reward if there is one. They both got a rather gleeful look at that idea. So yeah, that should be interesting.
One of the reasons that I said Harpy got a good lawyer was that one of the terms of the non-disclosure agreement was that if they signed on to the settlement, they agreed not to report her to any professional board or any licensing agency.
So she obviously had concerns that something like this might possibly, just maybe, perhaps have an impact on her license as a real estate agent.
Too bad for her that I wasn’t part of that settlement. Because after my initial email to the state Real Estate Agency, I got a response back this morning, and after a couple of more e-mails back and forth, I was interviewed over the phone by the head of the professional standards division.
They appeared to be (very) interested to hear what I had to say. I gave a recorded statement on the grounds that it would remain confidential (don’t want her trying to make my life miserable). And at dinner tonight, I learned that our friends have a pretty good friendship with several of the people that were NOT paid off in the settlement agreement since they signed up under the ‘voluntary neighborhood association’.
The ones her lawyer insisted were not defrauded and therefore couldn’t be part of the settlement. Which means they also are not covered under that pesky little non-disclosure agreement.
Before I started writing this update, I e-mailed the names and contact information for three of those owners who still live in the neighborhood to the head of the professional standards division.
Because while I had to deal with her craziness and general pain-in-the-buttitude, I didn’t actually lose anything. But her actual victims? I imagine their testimony will carry quite a bit more weight with professional standards. I also (solely for their convenience) included the state court case number for the lawsuit.
Who knows, maybe they can see the records of the lawsuit and the terms of the settlement since they are a state agency.
And now, a couple of new characters have been introduced. Government agencies have gotten involved.
My friend and neighbor texted me this afternoon, saying only, ‘CALL ME!!!’
As soon as I was able to, I gave him a call. And he could barely stop chuckling.
He caught me up a bit. After we’d talked the other evening, he’d started talking to some of the people in the neighborhood. And it turns out that Ms. Harpy of the Not-Really-an-HOA is apparently kind of a slow learner.
Because in the last couple-three years, while she hasn’t tried to bilk anyone else out of their riches, some of the newer owners in the neighborhood were being told that there was still a ‘neighborhood association’ and she kept trying to enforce arbitrary rules on people.
Except everyone had heard about her antics. And promptly told her to get bent. So if anything, her nonsense has actually created a more cohesive neighborhood. Everyone is united in hating her!
But that’s not the reason he was chuckling. He was chuckling because he’d just gotten off the phone with an IRS agent.
Now normally, that’s not your expected reaction when speaking to anyone from the government with the word ‘Agent’ attached to their title in any way. But no. He was chuckling after he spent over an hour on the phone detailing everything he knew about her dealings as ‘president of the HOA’.
As well as providing contact info for quite a few others in the neighborhood who knew what had happened over the years. I really hope I get to hear more about what happens with the IRS.
As if that wasn’t enough good news, I popped over to the state real estate licensing board website (I’ve been checking it every day since I spoke to the head of professional standards) and saw a document that has a section titled ‘License Information’ the column titled ‘Status.’
Additionally, if in the ‘Disciplinary Action’ section, specifically the columns titled ‘Resolution’ and ‘Found Issues’.
From a little cursory reading of state law and associated regulations, this decision is temporary until the full investigation is completed. Once that happens, the professional standards board will decide if there is to be permanent action against her license.
If there is, then there will be a date in the ‘order signed day’ column, and a really entertaining link in the ‘documents’ column in the disciplinary action section that lays out the entire case, from start to finish. (I’ve read a couple of documents in other cases I found where there was a final order – and wow, they lay EVERYTHING out).
When last we left Ms. Harpy, she was being investigated by the state Real Estate Licensing board, as well as the IRS.
Well, I learned something interesting in this whole saga. Apparently, while the statute for limitations for criminal tax evasion is only three years (or possibly 6 years, depending on the situation), there is apparently no statute of limitations on how far back they can go in civil court.
So while she may dodge any federal charges of tax evasion, the IRS will be crawling up in her business however the heck far they want. I suspect that will end… poorly (and expensively) for her.
Additionally, the state department of revenue has also caught wind of this.
Can’t imagine how that may have happened. Similar to the feds, while they can’t charge her criminally on the tax evasion, I’m sure they also will be digging through all of her tax records for the last, oh, FOREVER…
I’ve already had an interview with a rather pleasant IRS agent and was able to go through everything that I knew, the timeline for what happened, and how it was that I discovered there was not an actual HOA there.
When I explained how this all started because she decided to be a jerk about a couple of relatively small issues, and it has since snowballed into, well, THIS, she (the agent) laughed so hard it took us several minutes to get back on track.
And she continued to chuckle and giggle throughout the rest of the interview.
And the state department of revenue has contacted me as well, wanting to set up a time for an in-person meeting. So that will be fun.
I’ve considered going to the local news media about this as some suggested but decided against it for a couple of reasons.
The story isn’t really as fresh as it was 7 or so years ago when it was all going down, and I doubt the news media’s ability to keep my name out of it… Maybe not on the air, but somehow it would slip. And that would add needless complications to my life.
If somehow she avoids getting her real estate license revoked, maybe that will change the equation enough to where it might be worth letting the media know. Plus it gives them a recent hook to tie the story into. ‘State Real Estate board refuses to revoke the license of a crooked agent!
News at 11!’ You get the gist.
I’ve heard through my friend who lives in the subdivision that there have been several people contacted by the state Real Estate board, as well as the state department of revenue and the IRS to set up interviews (and some have already been completed).
And just out of curiosity, I checked the website for the local branch of the national real estate company she works for. And lo and behold, she’s no longer listed on there as either the principal broker or an agent, and someone else is listed as principal broker.
I’m going to take this development as a cautious agency making sure they don’t get caught up in any legal messes. But I think someone just learned the lesson, ‘you are merely a cog in this machine. you are easily replaced.’
In a final bit of entertainment for this saga, I was shown several screenshots by my friend of a post on the subdivision’s social media page that was quite, well, I guess entertaining would be a great word.
She’s since deleted the post, but essentially she was on there shrieking about how they were ‘all’ under a non-disclosure agreement, and she was apparently threatening to sue any of them that talked to anyone for violation of the NDA. This was met by cricket chirps from anyone who knew what was going on, but there were several ‘what is she talking about’ type of posts by a few of the newer owners who weren’t in the know.
But my favorite response was by someone who apparently is an attorney (based on how they phrased things) who wasn’t here when the not-an-HOA was in effect (she’s only lived in the neighborhood for about a year) but apparently caught a quick heads up from somebody.
The short version of her post was that while she wasn’t aware of the particulars of what was going on, she stated that NDA’s don’t cover someone answering questions from a regulatory or investigatory agency, either state or federal, as well as not covering any testimony being given under oath.
And trying to bully someone into not speaking to such an agency by means of an NDA or otherwise might even be considered witness tampering or intimidation. And a few hours later the Harpy’s post (and all the associated replies) mysteriously disappeared… But you know, social media will gladly hand over the whole conversation with a subpoena.
And the IRS does not mess around with the possibility of witness tampering. So maybe she might end up facing criminal charges after all. Depends on how stupid she gets, I guess. If past performance is any kind of indicator, she may very well get to spend some time in the gray bar hotel.
MAJOR UPDATE!!! The state Real Estate Agency has finalized their orders on her license. I wish I could share the text of the final orders associated with this action. But because it is a public record, it is also searchable, and would all too easily reveal her identity and open the doors to headaches for me and my family.
So I’ll summarize. The first revocation for Fraud or Dishonest Conduct and Failure to Disclose is of her Principal Broker license. The second revocation, for Incompetence or Untrustworthiness and Records, that’s for her regular real estate agent license. There are some bombshells in the final orders.
Apparently, there was a lot more happening than just what was happening in her neighborhood. I was shocked at how quickly the final order was released (from what I was seeing in other cases of revocations, the investigation usually lasts anywhere from three to six months).
But reading the final orders, the Principal Broker revocation was based mostly on the information in the lawsuit that was filed by the neighbors back in 2012 and the ensuing settlement. However, their investigation apparently turned up quite a bit of other STUFF. Including lying to clients, falsifying records, not disclosing relationships between herself and sellers or buyers, and other instances of outright fraud.
I will quote one line nearly verbatim from both final orders… Because it’s just so delicious to read:
‘While this Board has taken the strongest action granted by the (APPLICABLE STATE STATUTES), much of the information that was discovered during the course of this Board’s investigation is beyond the purview of this Board.
Therefore we are turning over all records and witness testimony to the (REDACTED) County District Attorney and the (STATE REDACTED) Department of Justice, Criminal Justice Division for further action.’
The world of legal hurt his woman has brought onto herself just continues to avalanche.
This morning, I had walked my daughter to her school bus stop (right on the corner where the not-an-HOA starts) and an unmarked SUV with government plates comes around the corner. Picture every unmarked law enforcement SUV you’ve seen in a movie. That stereotypical. And they park a couple of doors down from the Harpy’s house.
I risked being a couple of minutes late to work to watch what was about to unfold. And was not in the least bit disappointed. Because out of the vehicle step two individuals wearing dark blue jackets with bright yellow letters. Some very specific letters.
BIG letters that may or may not have spelled out ‘IRS’ and underneath in smaller letters the words ‘Special Agent’.
I may have giggled when I got to my truck. I may have laughed uproariously on my drive in to work. Because the first thing I did was look up just how big of a p*******e she may have landed in.
Apparently, a really deep one. Because from what I could find, the only people authorized to wear the ‘Special Agent’ jacket are in the IRS’s Criminal Investigation Division.
I texted my friend who lived in the neighborhood this as I was leaving for work around 7:15 this morning.
He texted me back around 10ish… He’s been watching all of this unfold out his front window since I texted him. In addition to the original SUV (which is now right in front of her house), there’s another SUV there as well. Apparently, some other people wearing IRS jackets (just without the ‘Special Agent’) got out of the second SUV, and he just saw them carrying out some ‘banker’s boxes’ sealed with red-tape, and a couple of computers.
And because this p******e is not yet deep enough, apparently they were checking something (assuming VIN) on the Mercedes SUV she started driving a few months ago.”
9. Read Your Contracts And Pay Up Or Else Face The Legal Consequences
“I work in music production.
I charge $125/hr to edit/mix/master recordings from bands (which is about 1/2 the average rate). I had a band come to me, I mixed their album, it took me 10 hours. 10×125=$1,250. Well, in the end, they said, (and I’m not even joking, but this is SOOOOO ridiculous) ‘well, an hour only has 60 minutes in it, not 100, so your math is wrong and unfair.’ (I was stunned because how can people in their 30s be THIS uneducated?!?)
I said, ‘it doesn’t matter how many minutes are in an hour, I charge BY THE HOUR, and you agreed to it.’ (They had signed a contract.)
Well, they left and refused to pay. This was their ‘debut’ album/EP, and little did they know because they didn’t read the darn contract, that I saved backups of allllll the work I did, and there was a clause that says my studio retains ownership of 100% of the music that I work on until I am paid and sign the rights back off to the band (again, this is very boilerplate contract stuff in the music industry.)
They had planned on selling their CD at concerts for $20 each.
I released their music free online, every site I could find, and I also knew the venues they were playing at, so I made 1,500 CDs (it cost me like $200, but worth it for spite lol), and every gig they had, I would set up a booth with their CDs juuuust outside of the property line of the venue, and give their CDs away for free, acting as an agent of the band.
One thing they also never planned on – I made the vocals on the CDs off-pitch with autotune.
The band broke up about 6 months later after people stopped going to see them.”
8. High Turnover Rate? I'll Take Your Job From The Grave
“I had just graduated from college, did not do an internship (shame on me), and had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I was on indeed.com (job posting site), just throwing up my resume to see what stuck. I was not having much luck finding anything.
That was until I received a call from a security company. You know, the company that advertises itself as the largest security company in the world? Anyways, they brought me in for an interview, which was actually disguised as a job offer. Experience now would have seen that as a red flag, but I was green and didn’t know any better.
For those that don’t know, security works like this. Client: ‘I need security.’ Security company: ‘We can provide guards to you at X + $25, and pay our guards x.’ Client: ‘Great!’ It’s a horrible business model, but again, I was young and ignorant.
In order to protect my anonymity, the client will hereafter be referred to as ‘Center.’ Who Center was is irrelevant to this story.
After several HR hiccups (more red flags), I finally made it to Center, to start guarding their facility. I cannot emphasize how good of a job this could have been.
I was paid well for the work I was providing (not like the security company, but still well), the job itself was cake, my coworkers were awesome (more on that in a bit), and there was such comradery among the other guards. Well, all except one person.
The site supervisor. We’ll call her Ursula because that’s what that witch looked like.
Unfortunately, because this happened so many years ago, I can’t provide as many juicy details for a good suspenseful buildup, but I’ll try my best to fill in as many things as I can.
I worked with the greatest group of men and women I will probably ever work with. I worked with former marines, law enforcement, naval ship captains, high-ranking military, pretty much an elite group of boys and girls. I was clearly a boy in their world, but for some reason, they really liked me and motivated me to reach for more.
The reality was, they had their careers in service, and just wanted something to get them out of the house. Don’t get me wrong, they weren’t old and decrepit. Most of them were from the north, and had already retired out, and were receiving a good pension.
They kept reiterating it to anyone who would talk to them.
The thing was, Ursula was just like me in that she had a trashy resume, had no experience, much less be qualified to supervise this elite group. Once she realized that, that’s when the paranoia began to set in.
She had a list. Everyone that was on it; their workplace became miserable. Not only did this frankenwitch chase you off, but if she caught wind of where you were going, she’d actively call your next employer, to drag your name through the mud. It was sick.
Not only was she toxic as a boss, but she was woefully incompetent. Let me give you a summary of SOME of the things Ursula did. Ursula constantly threatened termination, openly admitting to targeting employees and minority employees especially, continuously revised the schedule throughout the week (causing multiple guards to arrive, or sometimes posts uncovered), wielded the schedule as a weapon to punish guards she didn’t like, degraded our staff as well as Center’s staff on a routine basis, intimidated guards requesting leave, falsified time sheets, illegally initiated traffic stops on Center’s employees, illegally detaining Center’s employees, illegally searched Center’s employees’ possessions, disgusting amount of harassment, warned us guards not to speak with Center’s employees, was lying more than congress, and went through several mood swings a shift. Yeah, she was a real piece of work.
Being located in a southern state, there was no union for us. The best we could do was keep firing emails up the chain of command. When I say we, I meant them. At the time, I didn’t have the confidence I do now, and I lurked in the shadows.
My thought process was if these people, who are way smarter than me, aren’t able to affect change, what chance did I have? Ursula’s actions I listed above were quite routine, and were displayed on a daily basis. Slowly but surely, the great men and women I came to know and love would come to my shack and say, ‘OP, I just can’t do it anymore!’ It was so sad.
I respected these people so much, but they were just cannon fodder in Ursula’s insane war. When the new employees showed up to replace the ones that left, they would all say ‘deuces’ as soon as they arrived.
One night, I was talking with one of Center’s employees, because screw anything Ursula had to say, and they were laughing, because a report had just come out about how my company had a turnover rate of 97.5%.
Even though it could’ve been easy to figure out, I had never thought about it, and that left me shaken. By that point, all the original staff was gone, and I was now a supervisor. I knew I was a passenger on the Titanic. How we didn’t lose that contract just blows my mind.
Not only did my company hate her, but everyone in Center did as well because she made their lives miserable by being Karen Blart – a wannabe cop. I figured if we didn’t lose the contract, I would end up on the list eventually, and get chased out.
However, for all the misery she caused people I respected (and Center), I wasn’t about to go into the night quietly. And that’s where the revenge begins.
Remember that college degree I mentioned earlier? Yeah, it’s in communications. It’s a stupid degree, that I don’t recommend anyone getting one unless you like barely above minimum wage.
BUT, what that degree entailed was lots of research, papers, interviewing, etc. I really didn’t know how good I was at it, until after this plan concluded and used it several times later (different stories for a different day). Now, I understand a lot of people might be judging the way I write this post. There’s a huge difference, though.
Right now, I’m chilling while I casually type this. The difference is I wrote a formal piece for a professional setting, not dissimilar to lawyer jargon.
I knew what would happen if I went up the chain of command. There’s no amount of technical allegations I could throw at the security company because they are siding with the very likely option, I’m a jerk, that won’t go beyond HR.
I had already secured a new job, in a different field, notice already in, so I had nothing to lose at this point. I interviewed all current staff, the former staff I trusted, and gathered every single grievance they had against Ursula. I still have that list on my desktop, and you read some of the highlights above.
They had no idea what I was doing, except ‘OP has an idea.’
I don’t recommend anyone doing what I did, but as I said, I was out the door and moving on to a different field, so I didn’t give a darn anymore.
I’m honestly not entirely sure of the ranking structure that Center had. There were so many chiefs and different departments within. I had to trust somebody though. One boss, who I’ll refer to as Bossman from now on hated Ursula with a passion because her nonsense made his life a nightmare.
I had to test his loyalty though. One morning, while Bossman and I were alone, I began a little light interrogation, while feeding him intel about the guards’ situation being under Ursula’s thumb. He agreed that the turnover was unacceptable, but he wasn’t high enough up the chain to affect any change unless he had some sort of proof.
I didn’t go into details, but I informed him I had a list, and I’d be happy to give it to him. He said absolutely. The problem was that Ursula was really paranoid, would know if I showed up when I wasn’t scheduled, and rightfully suspect mutiny was afoot.
I told him I’d meet him at 6 AM the next day. I went home that night and put the finishing touches on the list.
There was one final thing I had to do. This was a guarded facility, and I’d have to get past the guard without raising suspicion or alert Ursula I was there.
When I got to the gate, I don’t know what came over me, I lifted the envelope my letter was in, and said, ‘Mark (obvious fake name), I was never here.’ He just looked at me, nodded, and let me through. Why I’ll never know.
Didn’t ask. He had no idea about the list. He hated Ursula too, but he did a lot of talking, so I never shared it with him. I met Bossman, handed him the envelope, we shook hands, and that was that. I was already on the schedule to start the next job that overnight, so I went home to sleep.
I never expected anything to come of this, because nothing had happened after so many good-faith attempts with proof. I just did it, so I could walk away with a clean conscience. I went to work that night, turned off my phone, and when I came back to the car to have a smoke, I turned on my phone.
My phone began flooding with text messages.
I really don’t have the full story of what happened. This is what I collected from my ex-co-workers. Apparently, Bossman with several of the other chiefs had forced my security company to have an onsite meeting, told them what a piece of work Ursula was, how much of a liability she was, and to remove her from the site permanently.
I also heard she was wailing, while she was being escorted to her car. Ah, yes, salty tears. From what I heard, she wasn’t fired, but just rehomed in a site by herself, stripped of all of her ‘power’.”
7. Opened A Can Of Worms After I Left The Company
“I was with my previous company (retail) for just over 8.5 years.
I was at the first location for just over 7 years before we moved in together and I transferred to the second location in a different province. The first location was pretty decent, the staff had a pretty good level of professionalism, quick to lend a hand for the most part and the assistant managers and manager were pretty good to work for.
I wasn’t able to keep my current title when I transferred (I was an account supervisor) because they were a much smaller store and the office manager did those duties along with the rest of her official duties. Honestly, I didn’t think it was that big of a deal and while I missed being a supervisor (I was really good at my job) it was nice doing something a little different.
I started there as an office assistant but between having to do my duties and cover on the floor half the day, I got bored. I got a call for a surgery I was waiting for and I left for 6 weeks just as the assistant manager left for another job.
They have a thing for that company where if you want a certain position that’s come up, you ‘raise your hand’ so to speak. Before I left I was raising both hands, I wanted that position, I knew I would excel at that position. After having several departments under my belt and having experience as a supervisor, I was a very good candidate for it.
Cue 1st reason why I left – I wasn’t exactly told yes but it also wasn’t a flat-out no about having that job. It was ‘focus on getting better and we’ll talk when you get back.’ I was happy about that response because it meant I had a chance to snatch the position I really wanted. I got back after 6 weeks and they hired someone else from outside the company who knew nothing about our industry.
That stung.
2nd reason – I asked for a raise 3 times that year and he laughed every single time. Almost a decade and still only at minimum wage (my old location was just above minimum wage, different province different minimum wages). I deserved the increase.
Several other reasons included two employees goofing off every single day, the manager knew and did nothing. Understaffed and way underpaid. The yard guys were on their phones their entire shift and not helping customers. I was told they were very team-oriented. Not in the least. You work your department by yourself don’t expect help unless they were expecting a visit from head office.
There were also way more write-offs than there should have been and some sketchy stuff I’ve heard of him doing for quite some time. Sure he was a ‘nice guy’, however, he couldn’t manage things, in that one year we had 7 people leave for better jobs.
There were only about 32 people in that place to start. He was only nice because he couldn’t afford to lose any more people.
Ok on to the revenge and hopefully that was enough back story lol. When I left I received an exit survey. When you’re full-time like I was and you’re at a company for so long, it’s expected to explain your reasons for leaving.
I left that company a month ago to the day. The following week I received my survey and I was actually looking forward to giving my opinion. I filled the three boxes at the end until it wouldn’t let me write anymore and I ended that survey stating that I still didn’t have enough room to keep going with my reasons for leaving.
I told them about my time at the first location and described how the second location was vastly different. I told them everything and let the cat out of the bag of how poorly managed the place was.
Turns out I really did open a can of worms, I had a quick visit last week to pick up an item we needed and heard from the assistant manager that the manager was fired 3 days prior.
Come to find out (we were picking up something again just two days ago) there was a huge meeting that morning and he was let go. They had the head of security there as well, and apparently, a lot of people coming and going. Two days ago when we were there my spouse witnessed a police officer leaving the building with a massive armload of files.
This was much bigger than I expected.
Did I get him fired? I doubt it was all me, but they might have taken a closer look at why there were so many people leaving in so little time and I like to think my exit survey probably did push them to look a little closer at why a loyal full-time employee who was with them for close to a decade was leaving.”
6. Stop Paying Me? Get Evicted By The Landlord
“Sometime last decade I moved to a new state after several years of being a hobo vagrant hippie with the intent to start a new chapter built on responsibility and normality.
I found a cheap apartment, but a week after moving there at a ripoff rate, the ceiling exploded with water because of an upstairs leak.
I’d found a job on Craigslist working for a construction contractor, and when I told him about my housing issues, he said his landlord has a place I can rent.
The place was a one-room shack with a majorly unfinished bathroom (I showered with a water hose through the window) for $500 a month.
Not great, but an upgrade from a tent. It was right behind the landlord’s house, and right beside my boss’s small, 2 bedroom kind of tiny house in much better condition.
I happily lived there and slowly worked on improving the place over the course of the next few months.
I got to know the landlord well and helped her out a lot with various things and it was overall pretty nice.
But then one week, bossman said he couldn’t pay me because an investment he’d made had gone way downhill, but he’ll pay me everything when we finish our current job next week.
Nothing I hadn’t been through before.
Then the next week comes and he still can’t pay me for another 60 hour week. I tell him I’ve gotta buy some food. He gives me cans of corn and beans from his cabinet. Ok.
Another week and he still can’t pay me.
Now, I’m angry and I tell him as much. Tell him I gotta pay rent now and he still hasn’t paid me any of the thousands he owes me.
He comes back with ‘You’re being super ungrateful. I got you this place to live and I’ve been a good boss.
You’re a jerk and you know what jerk, if you come at me like this again you can pack your things and leave. But for now, I’ll pay your rent for you. So don’t worry about that and I’ll pay you when I pay you.’
Well, since I had gotten to be on good terms with the landlord, I thought I’d just ask her for an extension on rent this month while I look for another job. If she said yes I’d ask my boss for the rent he was gonna pay her.
So when she gets home from work, I tell her ‘Hey, I hate to ask, but could I have an extension on my rent this month? Boss hasn’t been able to pay me the last few weeks, and so I need to get a new gig, and I’d also like to keep something to buy food.’
She got so angry, it was awesome. Her response was almost verbatim, ‘WHAT? THAT JERK HE’S ALWAYS BEEN A SELFISH IDIOT. YOU GO TELL HIM TO GET HIS STUFF OUT AND MOVE BECAUSE YOU’RE MOVING INTO HIS PLACE AND HE CAN SLEEP ON THE STREET FOR ALL I CARE.’
I told her that wasn’t necessary and all but she marched over and argued with him for an hour. In the end, he came to my place, gave me $600, and then left. A few days later he came back, packed up, and moved out. I got a new better job and rented his furnished, nice little place at a reduced rate.’
5. Bully Teacher's Face Got Slammed Into The Mud
“I (24m) recently came back from working 6 months at sea. I visited family, and my cousin (12m) has my middle school teacher, Mr. Wilson. Wilson was a stupid jerk. He would call me stupid, make fun of my surname, call me a stupid french redneck (we’re from Québec but this happened in Ontario), mock my accent, give me detentions for stupid reasons, blame me for stuff I didn’t do, etc. I wasn’t a class clown or anything, I was really quiet and shy and rarely spoke unless I was spoken to, he just had something out for me.
I guess my cousin is having the same problem. This is the only school in the area and my family can’t switch and this teacher has been complained about for years and nothing happens.
I got sick of this so I went over to this Tim Hortons he apparently always goes to after school ends.
I waited for him, he leaves and I follow him through a park and nobody is around. I call him out and he asks who I am. I explain and he asks me how I am, I tell him I’m sick of his bullying and I sock him in the face.
He falls to the ground and as he tries to get up and I push his face in the mud. I tell him I’ll be back if he ever messes with any of his students again including my cousin.
Well, word spread around town about what happened. People are talking about it on social media.
Apparently, some people saw what happened however Wilson is trying to pretend like it didn’t happen so he’s not pressing charges obviously.
My cousin said he is a lot nicer now and has stopped picking on people so that’s good.”
4. Justice Is Finally Served On Toxic Former Employers
“Over ten years ago I worked for a company owned by a married couple whom we will refer to as the McGrifties. Mrs. told her first lie to me during the job interview (not the last, though). She mentioned an employee who would be going on maternity leave and said that ‘we knew she was pregnant when we hired her.’ I later heard from the pregnant employee herself, just in passing, that she didn’t know she was pregnant when she started working there.
Just a stupid lie so they could look like nicer people than they were.
The employee turnover was insane. They were micromanagers who treated their employees horribly. One guy submitted his two-week notice the week before we had a two-day holiday and they made it effective immediately, thus screwing him out of pay for those days.
Going to the bathroom? Be sure to log that in time since they need to know you spent every minute. Their employee reviews mention words like ‘toxic’, ‘terrible’, and ‘wish I could forget I worked there.’ We once had some overflow work and they had me find someone to handle it.
Literally the first person I called turned me down flat. She had already done work for them and had to take them to court to get paid and still didn’t recover all she was owed.
I had complained to a few coworkers regarding an ongoing issue with our 401k contributions to our accounts along with a few other issues, it got back to management and I was fired. I was a darn good employee but was tired of being treated not just poorly but with great suspicion.
They assumed everyone was out to screw them which will tell you something about their own approach to other people. At that point I didn’t care but when they got my unemployment denied BECAUSE SOMEONE SENT ME AN EMAIL that really annoyed me. Yeah, it was a trashy decision by the commission but they bought that nonsense anyway.
The woman at the commission actually asked me in the snottiest voice just how did that person (a former employee) know my email. Yeah, lady, he used to work there, he knew everyones’.
Not terribly long after that one of my former coworkers sent me a copy of Mrs.’ mug shot.
Apparently, she had been pulled over for a traffic violation, things went sideways and she was arrested. I wasn’t a bit surprised because she was always an entitled witch who thought rules didn’t apply to her. Over the next few days, I went to several different places with fax services and sent her mug shot to the company’s fax number.
I also went by at night to tape some up around their office building.
So here we are many years later, and about a year ago, I am reading some gossip column about celebrities and see a familiar name. One of the McGrifties’ offspring has become engaged to a celebrity worth double-digit millions (MoneyBags-MB).
Of course, my curiosity was sparked so I thought I would see if they were even in business any longer. I turned to my friend Google and find they are, defying all logic and justice, indeed still in business. However, I also discovered the delightful news that Mr. was in the middle of an active bankruptcy.
I could only see docket entries, which include a motion for emergency sale of their homestead.
Wondering if they had managed to sell their million-dollar-plus home, I popped over the County Assessor’s website and looked up their address. They still showed as owners, but when I checked ownership history I saw that title had been transferred a few months before.
Okay, so they did sell the house to an LLC. Hmmm, interesting. I am on alert. I decided to look a little closer at MB and find their social media account. Well, well, whaddya know, the social media name is almost the same name that took title to the McGrifties’ house.
Now, I am very interested and I really need to know what the house is sold for. I am suspicious by nature and I know these people. Besides smelling a rat, I also smell an opportunity to drop some karma on their butt. I do a little more digging and finally hit gold with a 72-page document that includes every lien and judgment against them (and there are LOTS).
They have judgments against them from two different banks, one for around two million and another over half a million. Their house went into foreclosure some months back and they owed 400k more than the property was worth. I also found a notice from the state commission that they owe an employee 3k.
The sweetest though is that they have close to two million dollars in IRS tax liens against them. All told, they were close to four million in debt. I was overjoyed.
The best part, however, was the much desired and lovely copy of the sales contract(!!!) which shows the sales price is more than 500k BELOW the appraised value.
The Motion also states that Mr. says this is a good sales price. Yeah, for the buyer, HIS FUTURE XXX IN LAW! Mr. doesn’t care since he isn’t getting a nickel, it’s all going to the mortgage company who agreed to settle for the sales price.
Now, I’m no bankruptcy attorney but this looks really shady to me and as a tax-paying US citizen I feel compelled to report what I believe might be a fraud. I copied the tax rolls showing properties in that area rarely sell for under a million, and their property was valued at over $1.3 million.
I also included a screenshot of MB’s social media page announcing the engagement and showing the social media name was pretty much the same as the purchaser. One last thing I found was a little blurb along with their picture in the rich neighborhood ‘happenings’ publication mentioning the McGrifties hosted an ‘intimate’ get together for 30 at some nightclub around the holidays; after Mr. filed for bankruptcy, and all while asking the court to discharge MILLIONS UPON MILLIONS in debt.
Just for fun, I took a screenshot of that, too. I sent copies of all to the bankruptcy judge, bankruptcy trustee, and lawyers for the mortgage company along with a nice cover letter pointing out a few other inconsistencies. Then I sit back and wait.
After a bit of thought, I decide the information I have is too special not to be shared with others. Now, Mrs. considers herself a mover and a shaker in the higher echelons of the business world when in truth she’s just a pretentious wanna-be, and a broke one at that.
I must give her credit though, she has a large internet presence and had promoted herself quite effectively. A lot of that is based on something she did a while back that brought her a lot of attention at the time and she played it up to the hilt.
Funny thing though, I believe that very same accomplishment is what started the downward financial spiral since it was a very expensive endeavor that doesn’t seem to have paid off as they had hoped. Several websites list the company’s revenue at 5-10M a year but it’s a lie.
Less than two years ago the company had a total of $391.37 in the only corporate bank account (gotta love those bankruptcy records). That kind of blatant lie really cheeses me off so I sent copies of all the judgments (and highlighted the part where Mrs. said they were broke and drowning in debt) to the chair of some ivy league college women’s board that she belongs to (and pays 20k a year to be a member).
I also sent copies to someone in politics with whom Mrs. had curried a suck-up relationship for years. I’ll eventually get around to sending something to D & B so they can make a correction.
After about a week, I check the docket sheet and just about fell out of my chair laughing.
There, on the bankruptcy court docket sheet, was ‘Response to Order’ filed by Avenging Witch (not really but you get the picture). Although I was highly amused, I was also a bit freaked out because I really didn’t expect it to become part of the public record.
However, I did expect there to be some sort of blowback. By now you can guess what happened. Nada, nothing. Bankruptcy proceeded as usual and the debts were eventually discharged. My bomb failed to launch. I am left with disappointment and future regret (not really, I just love that line from the coin commercial).
The saga is not entirely over, though. They are currently being sued for non-payment of rent by a past landlord (their second time for this sort of thing). The first time they stopped paying rent they were locked out of the premises but according to court docs ‘picked the lock’ and moved their possessions out in the middle of the night.
Landlord sued and was granted a 45k judgment against them that they actually paid. They eventually quit paying rent to the new landlords and that is the case still in court. Since they broke their lease they could be on the hook for around 400k.
Concerned for their current landlord, I made sure to send them evidence of their tenant’s propensity for stiffing their landlords and warned them not to let them get too fast past due.
While looking over the filings of their current court case, I discovered a few inconsistencies.
For example, Mrs. wrote in an email to the landlord that she was working to settle her debt with the IRS, and that had to be a priority. Hmmm, the debt that was dismissed in bankruptcy? She also claimed that they had employees that had been there since the company started, which is true: Mr. and Mrs. McGrifties.
I am 99% sure they are the only ones. I shared that information with the plaintiff’s attorney and suggested they were being rather disingenuous (such a lovely word for liar). Oh, and that document, too, became part of the public record. I do take great satisfaction in knowing that they are now aware that someone is keeping track of their misfortunes and actively seeking to make them worse.
Oh goodness, that reminds me. Shortly after I discovered all this information, I sent them a condolence card telling them I had heard of their tax liens and judgments, and it couldn’t have happened to two more deserving people, signed it KARMA.
As for me, great things happened after I left the McGrifties.
I did get my unemployment. Took a job that ended when my new boss resigned but it was just long enough to qualify. Pretty sure the McGrifties ended up being on the hook for most of it after all. I then went to work for a wonderful guy who paid for me to go back to college, finish my bachelor’s, and get a master’s degree.
As an undergrad, I co-wrote two papers with an awesome professor that were published in peer-reviewed journals. I’ve saved a nice amount, own a lake house, and look forward to retiring in a few years and enjoying myself, all while the McGrifties basically have nothing.
The offspring did marry MB recently so I guess they’ll have the hope that some of that money will migrate over to them, or they can get MB to invest in their failure of a company. Let’s hope there’s a prenup.”
3. Gossiping Karen Gets Betrayed By Her Husband With Me
“We’ll call her Karen because she is the supreme galactic empress of all Karens.
HOA board member Karen has been complaining about my visitors to her group of gossipy friends ever since I moved in. She has a major problem with ‘strangers’ visiting me at odd hours of the day, and especially at night. She fears they could be vandals or robbers and has openly tried to change visitor rules so that guys can’t visit me in the middle of the night (her effort failed spectacularly).
Back in December, I found out she roped the building concierge, who is friendly with her, into her petty schemes directed at me. She asked our concierge to write down the number of visitors I have per week, so she can gossip/complain about the volume of visitors I’m inviting through the lobby.
Who does that?!
Admittedly, I was livid beyond logic when I found out. While there was nothing I could do about her arrangement with the concierge, there was something I could do about her.
I started some innocent flirting with her husband. It started with some run-ins at the gym and mailroom, with giggles and such.
Then texting. Then naughty texting. This morning, while HOA Karen was away, I gave him the sloppiest, nastiest fun time he has ever had. And he loved it.
He just texted me an hour ago, asking for a second one. Boom, success.”
2. Thieving Manager Tried To Frame Me For Their Theft
“This story happened around 6 years ago when I worked for a retail company I will call no-op.
Jay was well known to be a thief by the base staff and some of the lower levels of management. Unfortunately, she was a golden girl to Mo and Travis, and we never had any solid proof; we also didn’t get pay docked, etc. unless it was over a certain amount (which it never was,) so staff never had a real incentive to try and find proof.
One of Jay’s favorite things to steal were vouchers for shopping because you were just supposed to rip them up and put them in the safe; there was no official way of counting these to return them to the company, so she could use them again in a different store and get away with it.
This particular day was Halloween, and I was on ’till 4′ – the only till with no cameras on it. Mo came up and paid for her shopping with some gift vouchers she had received at a store manager’s meeting because the store was doing really well.
I served her and no one else touched my till all day because I was the main person on the tills for this shift. We closed up for the night and Jay took the registers to be cashed up, I went out to the pub with friends and had a good night not knowing what was coming.
The next shift I’m on, Mo calls me into the office and tells me that the vouchers she used were not in the safe and she knew that it was my till. She wanted me to return the vouchers and would not press charges or put anything on my file if I just returned them immediately, I of course did not have them and testified as such, but she didn’t believe me.
I went looking everywhere, the bin under till 4 and the bins outside, under the tills, and on the floors around the tills – just in case I had dropped them or put them somewhere dumb while trying to sort out cash. etc. Roughly an hour later, Jay comes in, hears what’s going on, and offers to look as well.
She ‘finds’ them in 30 seconds flat, somewhere I had already looked. I essentially hissed out, “What a coincidence that as soon as Jay looks there, she finds it immediately, how coincidental,” seething with white fury as I knew she was now framing me for her own theft. She could have ‘found’ them in the office and made it a simple mistake but no, she made me the fall guy for her own idiocy.
I tried to plead my case to Mo and Travis, stating that I wouldn’t be dumb enough to steal vouchers that I knew were Mo’s because I was the one who served her; one of the other Team Leaders (Paul) knew fine and well it was Jay and tried to tell Mo and Travis that I was being set up, but… She was the golden girl and could do no wrong while my name was mud as far as they were concerned – heck, they thought Jay had caught me in the act.
This meant war.
Over the next few months, I got really friendly with Jay, flirting outrageously with her and basically pretending like I really respected her and that we were good buddies. It took me a while to work my way into her trust, but once I was there, I knew I could catch her stealing and prove it.
We wasted off a load of Christmas chocolate products that hadn’t sold, and I put them in a bag to be put in the bin. Jay said we should take them home (against company policy and seen as stealing) because they were just going to waste otherwise.
We were stood underneath a camera, just outside of its range, so I said, “I don’t want any, but if you want them, you can have them” and put them on a trolley just inside of the camera’s range (I had studied the camera angles in great detail preparing for a moment exactly like this), I saw her look at the camera, down at the trolley and back to the camera before walking off to get her stuff.
I warned my colleagues not to take any of the chocolate even if offered and had an evil grin on my face which my colleagues commented on. When Jay came down she nonchalantly picked up the bag as if it was her shopping, offered chocolate to everyone, and walked out the door with it.
Gotcha.
The next morning I arrived for my shift and put on the most somber face possible as I approached Travis, “You should check the cameras on the back door at approximately 22:21; I think you’ll find what you see very interesting.” He asked me to explain further and I looked over towards where Jay was (not even 5 meters away) and looked back, “I can’t go into further detail right now, but I would strongly suggest you go and look at the cameras for that time now.”
Travis begrudgingly walked off to do just that, and within 10 minutes, Jay was called into the office and her bag was searched, within the hour she was suspended pending investigation and within the week she was fired and barred from the store.
I got a full apology from the managers who didn’t believe me, who explained they genuinely believed it was me and had no idea Jay could have possibly been a thief.
Their jaws hit the floor after I explained that every member of staff knew she was a thief but that we didn’t feel like we could do anything about it. After going around asking people if this was true, I got another apology. Six months later, I was offered training to become a Team Leader myself.
I took it but ended up quitting for a white-collar role in a different company before I finished my training.”
1. Former Supervisor Becomes Unemployed
“Bob was a back-of-store Lead Hand for a retail store. Along with his colleague Larry, he made sure that shipments and deliveries were scheduled and handled correctly, that the crew out back were doing their jobs, and that the restocks for front-of-store were picked correctly.
His Assistant Manager (AM), Frank, had resigned, and Bob had applied for the job. Bob had been handling many of Frank’s duties, particularly those that involved computers since Frank was older and not very adept with a keyboard and mouse.
Bob didn’t get the job.
Instead, they brought in Richard, an AM from another store, and Bob had worked with him in the past. He was a jerk and had once thrown Bob under the bus for one of his own mistakes, causing Bob to get yelled at on the floor in front of his colleagues, then hauled into the Manager’s office to get written up.
Bob was thinking of quitting anyway, but getting turned down for the AM position, and then seeing Richard roll in, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
One pertinent thing is that Larry, his colleague, was a Harley-riding biker type. He wasn’t a member of a club, but enjoyed riding, and did charity rides and stuff like that.
He also, every year for a decade, went to Sturgis, South Dakota, for the annual rally in August.
So Bob decided to submit his resignation… effective the day after Larry left for his trip. He did this by attaching a PDF of his resignation to a bunch of reports… and requesting a ‘read receipt’.
Bingo. Richard clicked ‘read’ and Bob printed it out.
The schedule for the warehouse crew was posted online, on a web-based scheduling app, with the Admin account under ‘assistant manager(at)store.com’, this was store policy. All emails were created as ‘job title(at)’, and when a person left the position, the password was changed. This way, nobody had to change their contact information, they were communicating with the job title and not the individual. IT had a list of logins for every position, and changed passwords with every transition, so the outgoing person couldn’t sabotage things.
Bob had asked Richard repeatedly for his password to the scheduling site and never got an answer.
So, Larry worked a Thursday and headed out. Bob worked Friday, his last day, and before he left, he told his crew to make certain they checked the scheduling app and worked their scheduled hours.
Then he went home and shut off his work phone.
On Monday, before opening, he showed up to turn in his phone and his keys, to be greeted by Richard losing his mind. The Store Manager corralled both of them and took them to his office.
Richard went on a tear, describing the things that happened over the weekend, how Bob was incommunicado, Richard had to come in and pee on fires, and demanded that Bob be written up. Bob let him go on and on.
The Store Manager said, ‘Bob, what have you got to say about this?’
‘Well, a writeup is a disciplinary action for an employee, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s going to be hard to make that stick since I’m not an employee.’
Bob had a folder, and pulled out a printed copy of his resignation, showing that the previous Friday was his last day.
The Store Manager read it, then handed it to Richard.
Richard said, ‘You never sent this to me!’
‘Yes, I did, three weeks ago. Here’s a copy of the email, and here’s a copy of the read receipt.’
The Store Manager gave Richard a wilting stare.
‘So who have you got lined up to replace Bob? Have you been interviewing?’
‘I didn’t get this email. This is fake. No, I haven’t been interviewing anyone. I guess Larry will have to cover until I can fill that position.’
Bob: ‘Yeah, good luck with that, Larry isn’t even in this time zone.
He’s in Sturgis. And no, it’s not fake. If you want, IT can verify that by checking your email history.’
Richard turned white. He realized he had no supervisors for the dock… at all.
The Store Manager asked Bob, ‘Is there any way we can get you to stick around?’
‘No, thanks. I’ve already lined up a new job, sorry. But you’ve got bigger problems than this.’
SM, ‘Like what?’
Bob pulled out more copies of emails and handed them over. ‘I asked Richard repeatedly for his password to the scheduling app. Several times.
Can I jump on your computer for a second?’ SM turned his laptop to face Bob, and Bob logged in to the scheduling app.
‘Okay, so the Admin account is under Richard’s job title. This is where we post the schedule for the crew.
I used to do it for Frank because he wasn’t a computer guy, but technically, this falls under the Assistant Manager role… the login is assistant manager(at). I’m logged in under my own account, but I can still see who’s scheduled, across the board.
I just can’t edit it. I don’t have the permissions.’
‘Here’s the schedule for the warehouse crew for the next two weeks.’ He turned the laptop back around. ‘It’s blank. There isn’t anyone scheduled to work… at all.’
Bob turned to Richard.
‘Here are my keys, and here’s my company phone. I’m done. By the way, in accordance with this email from IT, I’ve ‘factory reset’ the phone. Good luck.’
Bob left the office and all the way out of the store he could hear the Manager yelling at Richard.
Apparently, Richard had to go into the personnel file and burn up the phone lines calling warehouse guys to come in at the last minute… and company policy was that if you were called in with less than 24 hours’ notice, it was time-and-a-half. Many of the records were outdated, so if he reached a worker he had to ask them if he had any of their co-worker’s numbers.
Once he got things straightened out a bit he was shown the door, they brought a Lead Hand and an Assistant Manager in from another store. Richard was ‘fired for cause’, denying him Unemployment, and tagged with a ‘Do Not Rehire’.”
