People Distribute Their "Gone Bananas" Revenge Story
11. Ask For Permission To Schedule Patients? Fine
“This is not my own revenge, but if I were in the right department, I totally would have jumped on the bandwagon, and I have mad respect for the schedulers who I work with.
So I work for a medical imaging facility. We have a scheduling department that has been under a lot of pressure in the past month or so to fill our schedules and get our numbers up so that we look better to corporate.
In the midst of this happening, the hospitals in our area have put a pause on all elective surgeries as a result of the last couple of years, but the management at my company has refused to acknowledge how that might affect us, and instead opted to put even more pressure on our schedulers and blame them when our schedules are not full.
Also, I’d like to add that the metrics that they are using to grade the schedulers are dumb.
Instead of requiring them to make a certain number of calls per hour, they are requiring them to schedule a minimum of 25 patients per day. You can make 60 calls a day but if the patients you call don’t pick up their phones, then too freaking bad.
They have also been on a tear about noting in the chart if a patient can’t come in earlier than their scheduled appointment.
For example, if a patient requests an appointment a week out, they are supposed to offer weekend and evening appointments, and if the patient still says no, it needs to be noted.
One of our schedulers is literally referred to as a saint by everyone in the company. She is the sweetest woman I have ever met, and although I’m not a religious person, she is the ideal form of Christian.
She is nonjudgmental, thoughtful, genuine with everyone, and she really cares about all of our patients. We threw her a little birthday party a couple of weeks ago and she hand wrote a thank you note and brought it in the next day–most people just send an email but she went the extra mile to express her gratitude.
This saint has been under even more pressure than the rest of our schedulers because her numbers are consistently low.
Never mind that the woman has worked for the company for 18 years and never makes a mistake; they are constantly publicly announcing that she scheduled fewer patients than anyone else the previous day.
So this week, management sent out an “urgent” IM to all the schedulers basically saying “Instead of noting in the chart that a patient can’t come in, please ask permission from your manager before scheduling a patient further than 4 days out.
We need to fill the schedules and hope this will help us reach our goals.”
Immediately, they get about 15 responses from every single scheduler (except the saint of course) saying that this is stupid and what does management think they are going to do that the scheduler can’t? But management ignores it.
So our saint continues doing her job and almost immediately gets a patient who can’t come in for a week.
She sends an IM to that group chat so every single scheduler and manager on it can see. “John Doe, MRN#12345, patient states he cannot come in because he will be out of the state for his job, is it okay to schedule him for Oct 9th, the day after he returns?”
The first time, management just says sure, whatever. But then Saint does it two more times.
“Jane Smith, #, she has children in school and the first date she isn’t tied up with their school activities is Oct 14, can I schedule her?”
“Janice Cho, #, she can’t drive anymore and her children aren’t available to bring her in until Oct 8, can I schedule her?”
One of the other schedulers comes out from behind her cubicle and says “You know we can see those messages you are sending, right?” Saint just grins.
Finally, she sends her last message, the 4th patient within about an hour and a half, to which a manager finally responds, “You don’t need to message this chat with that information.”
The chat goes completely dead for a little bit. About an hour later the manager of the entire state sends out a message saying, “After reevaluating, we have decided this is not effective.
Please resume noting in the chart when patients cannot come in for 4 or more days.”
Saint came up to me near the end of the day, happier than I have seen her in weeks. “They think I was doing that cause I didn’t know better…but I was doing it on purpose.””
10. Call The Police? Okay, But You Might End Up With An Arrest Warrant
“I (29) F lived with my mom and her new partner (we’ll call him Jerk) when I was a child.
They met when I was 10 years old. From the moment I met this man I never liked him. He gave off the most terrifying vibes and even as a child I could instantly tell that there was something wrong with this man.
Fast forward 6 years and my mom and Jerk are getting married on my birthday no-less, I have 3 new siblings in that time from their marriage and this man for the past 6 years has made my life a living nightmare.
He was physically and verbally aggressive almost every single day to me, my mom, and my siblings. However, he did (and still does) have a particular dislike towards me (to this day I am still not sure why). He would exclude me from family events, force family members to not give me presents at Christmas and birthdays, then humiliate me at those events and make a scene of me not receiving gifts.
He would body shame me (I was 11 years old when he did this mind you) and call me degrading names for wearing a skirt. He spent approximately $50,000 of my inheritance, would hide my phone for no reason so I could not contact my father or friends or extended family, would not let me eat the ‘yummy food’ but would sit there and eat it in front of me and that’s just a snippet of the charms of this literal awful human being.
I moved out of home very shortly after the wedding and at 16 was living on my own juggling two part-time jobs, full-time school in a brand new state, and a brand new city. But it was a ton better than living at home.
Fast forward again another 10 years (I am 26-years-old) and my mom has finally had the courage to separate from Jerk with my 3 siblings after years of further abuse from Jerk.
He still tries and terrorizes their lives and controls them and demonstrates very threatening behaviour but at least they’re out. My 3 siblings choose to stay with my mom (for obvious reasons) but still had to have visitation with their father due to custody arrangements. Jerk always had a lot of resentment towards the children for this, but can you blame them.
Fast forward now to present day.
I have full care of the oldest of my 3 younger siblings as she wanted to escape Jerk and moved states to live with me. I fully supported this because I have always tried to help where I can. The youngest of the 3 stays with mom. The middle child, my brother was very traumatized by Jerk’s behaviour and consequently has a lot of untreated trauma and behaviour to go with it.
I tried to take care of him be he also was too violent for me to handle. Brother moves back to my mother and youngest sister. He is also too violent for them to handle.
Last week (Sunday) brother assaulted a family member when at my mom’s house. Brother was escorted off the property by police and taken to Jerk’s house to live now. I get a message from Jerk on Wednesday for the first time in years saying “your brother is missing.
the police have been called. If you know anything call me or the police.” Instant panic sets in. I feel like a scared child again from a very benign message from this man. I sat looking at this message all night wondering what to do about it.
That’s when it came to me. Jerk asked me to call the police if I knew anything. Jerk did not specify what I had to know and tell the police.
Just that if I knew anything to call them. So I did. I called the police and told them that I felt I had some very important information to tell them regarding my missing brother. I told them EVERYTHING. All the abuse that had happened to me and my family at great lengths. I told them that if they return my brother when they find him to Jerk’s house that they will be putting him in direct danger.
I told them A B S O L U T E L Y everything.
The police were very interested to hear this about Jerk and put me on hold while the police officer I was speaking to went to discuss something with her superior. When I get taken off hold I am talking to a more senior officer now. He wants me to re-iterate the story which I do.
He says someone will call me back. Okay, I think. I get a call back and they ask if needed, would I sign a statement to what I had said. Of course, I agree.
I go down to my local police station to sign said statement re what I have told police. There is now an arrest warrant out for Jerk for a multitude of reasons (seems there was more on his police file that I wasn’t aware of) and I was told that under no circumstances would Jerk be getting my brother (when he is found) or any of the other children back in his care.
Not the juiciest of Malicious Compliance on here, but I did comply with my jerk ex-step father’s request of ‘calling the police if I knew anything and now he won’t be able to hurt my family anymore so that’s worth smiling over.”
9. And They Thought They Couldn't Get Sued
“So after a year-long battle, this finally came to a close.
Maybe not my revenge, but revenge on my behalf. A little backstory, I bought a house about 5 years ago and in 3 years, flooded 3 times.
It never flooded in the 40 years before. Thanks, climate change! Finally, after the 3rd flood, my wife and I were financially able to move out and sell the house for a loss. We search around and find our dream house.
Or so we thought.
After living in the new house for about 6 months we noticed something very peculiar. Whenever it would rain hard, the bathtub would backfill with sewage and the toilets wouldn’t flush.
So we called a plumber. The plumbers were awesome and told us that our sewer lines had broken between the house and the city sewer line and while we could try and spot fix, we would probably need to replace the entire line.
Ouch. Having just spent a lot on a new house and taking a loss on the old house, we said to try and keep it as cheap as possible.
They dug up where the line was broken. Broken is an understatement. The line had all but dissolved. We were going to have to replace the whole line. About $5k. Not the best time but okay, let’s do it.
Once they exposed the line the best they could, I got a call from the plumbers. The line has broken up so badly, they cannot find where the residential line ties into the city line or “tap”.
Now the home-owner is responsible for the residential line, but the city is responsible for the tap and the mainline. I ask the plumber what is needed. He says we need to get the city plans and dig to uncover the tap. More digging = more expenses. At this point, it’s been 2 weeks and I just want to poop in my own house and take a shower.
Okay, dig the hole. They dig a 4’x4’x10′ hole and find nothing. We double-check the city plans and they are right on where the plans say the tap is.
Now we have to deal with the city. We call 311 as directed and after sitting on hold for 3 hrs, a city official sends us the same plans with the location where we dug.
We call back and say we already dug there and there is no tap.
Getting nowhere with the city, my wife finally goes down to city hall and after spending a vacation day, hanging around waiting for someone, she finally gets in to meet with an official, let’s call him Richard. Richard prints off the same plans we have already been given and says we need to dig where it’s marked.
My wife takes out her phone and says, ‘look, it’s not there.’
At this point he mutters to himself and takes out a pen and draws on the plans, marking the “actual” location. It shows the residential line doglegging from the original drawings and is about 10′ west of the initial location. It was apparent that he doesn’t want to waste his valuable cushy government job time on my wife. It was pretty obvious he just made something up to get her out of his office.
Plumbers come out, dig a 2nd 4’x4’x10′ hole, and surprise surprise, the tap isn’t there either! Fun. Back to city hall and another vacation day wasted waiting for Richard.
At this point, we don’t want another hand-drawn map, someone from the city needs to come out and mark where this darn tap is.
They come out and I burn a vacation day to wait around for them.
To their credit, they got down in the sewer, did some digging around, and mark a new spot between the 2 big holes. Finally! A real location! Plumbers come out and dig the 3rd hole. And if you think they actually found the tap, then you would be mistaken. At this point, the entire backyard is destroyed. Piles of dirt everywhere, the lawn is dead, the trees are dead, it’s ruined. Our beautiful new house’s backyard is literally trash.
Back down to Richard’s office, another vacation day burned, and we are livid. We remain calm but insist that we must have not been tied into the city’s mainline. There was no tap! Now you might be thinking, how did we not know? 6 months of sewage just piled up in your backyard? In the backyard, there is a large dirt mound that had been turned into a nicely landscaped “forest”.
There were lots of room to absorb the sewage that only 2 people would produce. But if it rained hard, the dirt was saturated and would backfill the bathtub and the toilets wouldn’t flush. Richard doesn’t accept responsibility but does send out the contractor who did all the work for taps in my area.
The contractor comes out and I get the full story.
2 years prior, while the previous owner was doing improvements and not living in the house, the mainline of the sewer was replaced. Basically, they slide the new tubing into the old tubing underground and then go in and install new taps for each house. Since no one was living in the house, they couldn’t get into the backyard and told the city they did not service our house.
I am FURIOUS. It’s been 3 months, >$20k, and all the wasted time and vacation just because Richard was too lazy to do his job and make one call to the contractor to sort it out.
Now, remember how my first house flooded 3 times? I learned my lesson dealing with people and once we knew we had to talk to the city, we recorded everything.
Every phone call, every email, I videoed the contractor and his explanation, everything and all obtained legally (in my state you have to have both people’s consent to be recorded).
He installs a tap and I take the first shower at my house in 3 months. I am ready to act.
I go down once again to Richard’s office. I show him everything and want to file a claim.
I agree to cover the cost of the residential line as that is my responsibility, however, I want the city to reimburse the cost to dig the unnecessary holes.
I think I have a good case! Pursuant to our city, we had to file a claim before starting any work and provide 3 estimates in writing to file a claim. Since none of that was done and could not be done after the fact, Richard denied the claim right there.
Left without words, I walk away completely defeated. I perk up on the way home after calling my wife and being reminded that I have some lawyer friends.
Surely one of them could help or knows someone who can. Unbeknownst to me, my state has something called “sovereign immunity”. Basically, you can try and sue the city or state but it will be thrown out immediately, and Richard knows this.
No credible lawyer will help me pursue this case because they know I would just be wasting my time. I am pretty much SOL.
After months of calling around to try and find anyone to help I have resigned myself to defeat. Almost a year goes by.
The loans I took out are about to start coming due and I have no idea how I am going to pay for them.
All communication with Richard and his office is blocked. I have also tried his boss and crickets. I tried going back down there, but Richard refused to meet with me.
I finally reach out to my council member in a last-ditch effort. I include a synopsis along with all the evidence I have. I don’t expect much. One hour after hitting send, my phone rings.
It is my council member and she is LIVID about how we were treated. She has a meeting scheduled with the head of public works for later that week. She doesn’t promise anything but says she is going to fight for me until they kick her out of the building.
After the meeting, she calls me on her way back to the office. The head of public works has accepted full responsibility.
She wants receipts for everything. The plumber, pay stubs showing the vacation we took, phone logs from the time we spent on hold, the quote from the landscaper to fix the backyard, all of it. She has them all in her inbox by the time she makes it back to her office.
That was about 3 weeks ago. Yesterday I met with my council member at her office.
Me – “Thank you so much. My wife and I cannot repay you for all you have done!”
Her – “It was my pleasure!”
We chit chat for a bit
Her – “Here is a check for what you are owed!”
Me – “This is so great! We can pay off the loan and finally get someone to fix our y…. Wait, this is much more than we need.”
Her – “You forgot to include emotional distress. I added it in for you.” She winks. “Oh, and if you ever have any issues, you won’t have to worry about dealing with Richard, he no longer works there. Just come to me, I have become good friends with the head of public works.”
Me – “Oh my god, you are literally the best person I know, if there is anything I can do..”
Her – “Elections are in the fall, maybe you could turn out and vote?”
So I went home, paid off everything and the landscapers are coming out next week.
Oh, and I am volunteering on her re-election campaign! Since Richard didn’t go for that, I got him fired and almost 30k for the extra work, my wife and my’s time and effort, plus emotional distress.”
8. Act Like A Rookie? Watch Me Take Your Job
“I was an observer in this whole affair but to say I didn’t enjoy it would be a lie.
Company A did fencing/walls/barriers etc. Company A was run by Bob.
Bob was a real upstanding guy, took over the business from his father, and really grew it into something big.
Bob had an employee, Jake. Jake had been with Company A for quite a few years but Bob and Jake always rubbed off on each other in the wrong ways. Bob always felt like Jake was the king of shortcuts and shoddy workmanship.
When Bob took over the company from his dad, Bob applied more pressure on Jake to bring up the quality of his work or be let go.
Eventually, Jake got tired of the increased pressure and quit and formed his own fencing company called Company B.
Here is where I come in, I started a job in a company providing business services to small to medium-sized businesses in the area and both Company A and Company B became my clients. This was several years after Company B had formed.
From my outside viewpoint, Company A was that local company that’s been around forever that does good quality work that you can trust…but they aren’t going cheap, they never try to be cheap, but you can trust them.
Company B was the young start-up that was cutting corners and being competitive in every way possible, often by lying, or misleading its customers.
That’s when company C comes in, Company C was building a production facility in the area and wanted a wall with gates around its new production facility. This was going to be a BIG contract and really the only two players in the area that could possibly do this job were Company A or company B.
This contract was worth a lot, if my memory serves me correctly the job was somewhere near 7 figures.
Company A and Company B went to go bid. Company B came in at like a 30% lower price point and Bob tried to explain it wasn’t possible for Company B to do the work that was promised at the price point that was given. Of course, money talks, and Company B got the contract.
I remember Bob was furious, in his eyes he felt what Jake was doing was wrong, he didn’t mind fair competition but Jake’s MO has always been way underbid, over-promise, rely on cost overruns to make a profit. Bob’s opinion on business was a price is a price and if he says he’s going X for Y he’s going to do X for Y.
It’s how he was raised.
Some time goes by, and Bob gets a call from company C, they’ve apparently fired Jake and his company due to not being able to do the work required and ask Bob if he can come in and fix the mistakes. Bob agrees and gets the job done. At this point Bob starts thinking, he’s gotta take Jake out.
Jake is taking too much out of his pocket.
Bob comes up with the idea of buying Jake out. But Bob knows if he approaches Jake regardless of what he offers to pay Jake is going to say no. So Bob has got to be smart. Bob is talking to me about this during one of our meetings, we had become quite close. And I tell Bob “I bet there are lawyers out there who specialize in helping other companies acquire other companies.
Bob asks me if I know of any…I don’t but I did have a client who specialized in business law who would be more familiar with this whole thing. I give Bob his contact info and Bob thanks me.
Bob contacts the lawyer and tells the lawyer what he would like to do. The lawyer tells Bob a lawyer who used to work for him now works for a firm that specializes in mergers and acquisitions and if Bob wanted to buy out Jakes’s company he’s confident this firm could get it done.
Also, this firm was in the big city far away from their small community so it’s unlikely Jake would know what’s truly going on. Bob contacts the firm and says he wants to buy out his competitor and would like to enlist their services.
Now, this is already getting a bit long so I’ll get to the point. This firm ended up buying Jake’s company, lock, stock, and barrel and gave the company to Bob.
All the while Jake was completely oblivious to the fact that his arch-enemy has just acquired his very own company.
I recall Bob describing to me the day he walked into Jake’s company with such delight. Bob was told he owned the company, Jake had been paid and was expecting to meet the new owner of the company that pleasant Monday morning. Jake was given the title of General Manager.
And was considered 2nd in command now.
So Bob walked into the building that once belonged to Jake with his documents and the lawyer that had helped him acquire the firm (Who Jake was familiar with). Bob walked into Jake’s office to Jake’s surprise.
Jake: Hi Bob.
Bob: Hi Jake, how are you?
Jake: I’m good, what are you doing here?
Bob: Oh nothing much, just thought I’d come to check out my newly acquired business.
Jake: Uh?
Bob: Jake, you sold your company to me.
Jake: I did what? No, I didn’t! I sold it to XYZ.
Bob: XYZ is the law firm I hired to organize the transaction. I am now the owner.
Jake: That’s nonsense.
Bob: Here’s the documents. (lawyer who Jake was familiar with confirmed this was all true)
Jake: So you’re now my boss?
Bob: Yes, now get up, that’s my chair and I’m tired I wanna sit down for a minute.
Jake: This is my office.
Bob: This is my company, and I have decided that this office is now my office so I’m going to need you to get out of my chair.
Jake gets out of the chair.
Bob: Great, well, have a seat, Jake.
Jake: Thanks.
Bob: Jake I think the first order of business today is getting rid of redundancies.
Jake: What do you mean?
Bob: Well you see Jake whenever a company acquires another company you get overlap, redundancies. Two HR departments, two sectaries, two accountants, etc. But now it’s all one company, so now you got redundancies, overlaps, which is quite frankly a waste.
Jake: Yea…
Bob: And I don’t need two owners working for one company. (and he laughs and tells me he had the biggest grin on his face) Jake, it’s become apparent that your services are no longer required and effective immediately you are terminated.
Jake protests.
Bob: The decision is final, you may collect your personal belongings and leave the premises, what time did you get to work this morning?
Jake: 7 AM.
Bob: Great, so you’ve been here for 2 hours, I’ll make sure payroll pays you out for 2 hours on the agreed-upon rate in the buy-out agreement, have a nice day.
Jake: So you’re just firing me? Just like that?
Bob: Yup, should have done this long ago.
Jake: What about my family?
Bob: Jake, I just bought your company from you and paid you a lot, you’ll be fine.
Now get out of my office and out of my building.
And that is how Bob acquired and fired an employee he should have fired long before.
I remember the day vividly when Bob scheduled an appointment with me to go over Company B’s services and negotiate a new service contract with us. It was the day Bob had fired Jake. Bob was in a great mood, one of the best moods ever.
We did the business we needed to handle and Bob and said: “PJ you helped me a lot to get this all done so I’d like to invite you out to dinner and drinks and let’s watch Monday night football together.” (I really hadn’t).
I said, “Bob I really didn’t do much.”
He said, “Oh yes you did, you pointed me in the right direction.”
I go, “Well that’s the least I could do.”
He said, “Very well, still like to take you out to dinner and drinks if that’s alright with you?”
Now I’m not one to turn down free beer and food so I agreed.
And that night Bob and I went to a local hang out and watched Monday night football and ate and drank beer as Bob recounted this whole experience with such joy.
Bob later rebranded Jake’s company as a commercial-only enterprise and refocused his main company on residential and both companies still exist today and are run by Bob and Son now.”
7. Anger Your Crew? Good Luck Getting Home When You're 250 Miles Away
See you, loser.
“Some years ago, I got a gig working a weekend music festival. Fairly simple too: ten bands per day and all pretty standard rock ‘n’ roll fare.
Bossman puts four of us out on the gig: me, Dreadful Boris, Big Chris, and Hammer.
He also said we’d be taking out an apprentice, a young lad who was the son of a local promoter.
Well, always nice to have an extra pair of hands, and it’s good to help train the next generation-after all, that’s how we learned in the past.
As it turned out this lad was about as much use as an aqualung to a trout and had an entitled attitude the size of a mid-ranged African country.
On the journey down in the truck, he was boasting as to how he was “a really good sound engineer” already and that “he could probably show us a few tricks.”
Oh, really?
We get to the venue and get busy unloading the truck: we’ve got a 16-tonner stuffed to the gills with two sounds desks and about 16KW of sound gear for front-of-house and about 6KW of monitors.
As you might imagine, this is pretty heavy stuff and it takes all of us to safely unload it and get it stacked up in place-except that, after unloading the first amp rack (all on wheels but still around 80 kilos), the Entitled Brat snottily announces that “I’m a sound engineer, not a humper…”, and promptly strolls off.
Err….okaaayy…
Well, we don’t really need him gumming up the works-we’re all well used to slinging boxes around, so about an hour later we’ve got the rig stacked up and strapped down, run out the multicore to the FOH desk, and are ready to start cabling up and tying power into the on-site generator.
Out of nowhere, the Spotty Oik emerges from whatever hole he had buried himself in and asks what he can do.
I say, “I’m going to plug up front-of-house, perhaps you could help Hammer cable up the speakers.”
“I don’t take orders from girlies!”
(Quick side note here: Hammer was 5′ 9″, drop-dead gorgeous, and as hard as nails-hence her nickname. She was also a darn fine FOH engineer and a b****y good mate.)
Boris, Chris, and I collectively groaned inwardly and winced in anticipation of a full 16″ broadside from Hammer (seriously, folks-you do NOT mess with her unless you want the family jewels dangling from the nearest tree!)
Instead, she smiles sweetly (NEVER a good sign) and says, “well I’m sure you’ll learn something useful.” I then go off to play with cables FOH, while Boris and Chris busy themselves with the monitors.
A while later I’m back on stage: Spotty Oik has wandered off again. Hammer has this resigned look on her face: “what happened?” I ask.
Turns out that, despite cables and connector ports being well labeled, The Oik had managed to make a complete pig’s ear of plugging up the amp racks.
Trust me, it’s very hard to make this kind of mistake.
I found The Oik some moments later and told him that it was not the proper way of doing things and that if he wasn’t sure what to do then he should always ask one of us beforehand.
What then came out of his mouth absolutely floored me: “I don’t need to know all that stuff.
I’m a sound engineer!”
Hammer, who was standing a few feet away, snorted derisively and rolled her eyes heavenwards. It took me a few seconds to process this particular nugget of stupid: “Well, you HAVE to know how all this works; it’s part and parcel of the job and as you’re here to learn, I suggest you pay attention.”
“Well, you’re just a bunch of roadies; what do you know?”
Upon delivering this charming bon mot, he ambles off (again) leaving me to retrieve my jaw from off the deck and Hammer barely able to restrain a fit of laughter that would have incapacitated a rhino.
At a guess, this idiot thought he was going to be white-gloving front-of-house for the whole gig.
An hour or so later, we’re all set up, and we now have a fair idea of the acts that are going to be performing.
In situations like this, you rarely get the opportunity of a full-blown soundcheck so you have to rely on experience to set the desk up from cold.
Luckily we got the first act onstage a half hour before the kick-off so I could quickly get a rough sense of the overall set-up.
A bit of exposition: it’s convenient to reuse channels across acts, so I generally keep the first twenty or so channels for drums, bass, and guitars, and the last half dozen or so channels for vocals.
If a band comes in with anything else-percussion, brass, Tibetan nose flutes, etc., we whack them on channels in the middle.
Keeps things nice, simple, and consistent across the board, and becomes important in a moment.
The working procedure in-show is also simple: Dreadful Boris and Big Chris run the monitor desk, and Hammer and I run front-of-house. We’ll do two acts each before handing over to the other (saves wear and tear on the ears) and when we’re not running the desk, we’ll handle setting up the stage for each act and troubleshooting where necessary, as well as doing runs for food and coffee in between.
We also tasked the Spotty Oik with helping with the stage setups, which rapidly proved problematic. We finished the first act and aimed to do the turnover within fifteen minutes. Generally, the incoming act will tell us their mic requirements and we’ll write up a mic plot which then gets sent up to the front-of-house desk. Up comes Spotty Oik with the mic plot and he goes back to help with the stage setup.
As I’m checking each mic, I notice that I cannot hear the vocal channels. No sooner had I spotted this than Dreadful Boris comes on the intercom and asks me if I can hear the vocal channels (he can’t hear them either). He then goes off to check the stage box where all the mics are plugged into. From all the way out front, I hear him shout, “Screw me!”
Seconds later he’s back on the cans: “Do you know what that idiot has done? Only repatched ALL the vocal channels so that all the plugs on the stage box are ‘lined up neatly one after the other!’-his words!!”
Ye Gods!
Boris rapidly repatches the mics and we’re good to go again. A few hours later and I’m starting my second shift out front (I won’t bore you with my experiences of riding herd on Spotty Oik on the stage shift which-shall we say- was interesting.)
Currently on stage is a rather nice jazz septet (I love doing jazz-give me a nice 20-piece big band and I’m a happy bunny). Up strolls He Who Shall Not Be Mentioned and asks, “When can I have a go at mixing. I’m really good, you know.” Seeing as he’s here to learn I tell him he can take the next act under my supervision.
This happened to be an acoustic duo-two guitars and two vocals.
Even the most tyro engineer should be able to handle something so simple, right?
Wrong!!
I’ve already set what I regarded as a sensible baseline on the faders for him to work with. The first thing he does, he reaches for the master faders and cranks in another 15dB-NOOOOO!!! Immediately the rig teeters on the edge of feedback and I rapidly pull the mains back.
“Look and listen: balance out the two vocals, then the guitars, leave the mains alone!”
He then starts making wildly inappropriate changes to the channels’ EQ-again the rig starts to squeak.
Ok, enough! I shove him out of the way and bring it back under control.
I won’t fatigue you further with the endless catalog of foul-ups and attitude that he managed to affect over the rest of the weekend, suffice it to say that despite the best efforts of myself and Hammer to try and teach this guy, they all went to naught.
Couple this with the constant drip-drip-drip of snide commentary about how he was “really a better engineer” than the rest of us, and by the end of the weekend, we’re all pretty mad.
Come to the end of the event and it’s now the fun part of striking the rig and loading out (I’m being sarcastic about the fun part, by the way). Two solid days and we’re all knackered and the last thing we want to be doing is the get-out but, of course, it has to be done.
It’s always an all-hands-on-deck situation… except the Spotty Oik has, once again, vanished into the woodwork.
Two back-breaking hours later and we’re all done, and the truck loaded to go home. So where is the Spotty Oik? Nowhere!
We give it a good fifteen minutes-but no joy. We then decide to go look for him, so we spent another twenty minutes trolling around the site trying to find him.
Again, he’s done a disappearing act. We get back to the truck-it’s now close to 3 am-and almost simultaneously we say, “Screw him!” We climb back aboard and drive the 250 miles back to the warehouse to unload.
Next afternoon, Bossman calls me to find out why we’d left the Spotty Oik behind. I gave him the Cliff Notes and was then told that The Oik had had to call his dad at three in the morning to come and get him-a 500-mile round trip.
He then said, “I never liked that promoter anyway. He was always late paying the bill on previous gigs. Next time he calls wanting a rig and crew, I think I’ll tell him to screw off!”
Another User Comments:
“I used to run concert sound and work as a general stagehand at a mid-size (12k) indoor venue when I was in college. Really enjoyed the story.
I remember dealing with a lot of brats like that who would never last long.” bigpolar70
6. Treat Me Terribly At Work? Get A Case Of Head Lice
“I worked at my previous job for over 3 years.
It was there that I met the worst boss on the face of the earth, who we’ll call Ariel.
Ariel wasn’t that bad the first year and a half I worked there. She was very narcissistic, could not stand being wrong or anyone doing better than her, and could be very belittling, but overall once you got to know her and her ways you could kind of deal with it.
It wasn’t great, but I loved the work I was doing so I put up with it. At the year and a half mark, I got promoted! Ariel was still my boss, but I had more responsibility and authority over the coworkers I had previously been working alongside.
All of them were very happy for me! Everyone except Ariel. It’s like a switch turned inside of her, and her crazy, micromanaging, narcissistic behavior increased tenfold, basically only directed at me.
She would straight up lie to me, steal (impressive!) ideas that I had floated to her and take credit for them, and look for any excuse whatsoever to reprimand me or talk down to me in front of her boss (“big boss”) to make me look bad.
Reflecting back on it, I don’t really know what her problem with me was. The best guess I could come up with was that she felt her job was threatened by me moving up in the company?
I was very good at what I did, and do know how to do a lot of the things her job involves, but it also comes with several responsibilities I had no interest in and she knew all of this.
Aside from that, she’s been with the company for nearly a decade, all the higher-ups loved her (and were not wise to how she treated her subordinates since she put the fear of God in all of us and since no one wanted to be on her bad side, no one spoke up) so she really had no reason to feel so threatened.
Since the promotion, I had been dealing with her unprofessional and outright terrible behavior of me and taking it all in stride.
I really liked my job, I could handle things. Then, things got worse.
First, remember how I said she lied? Well, I had a very important client coming in for a meeting with me. It was absolutely imperative client was informed of XYZ before they came in.
This was part of Ariel’s job. The day of the meeting comes along, and I am reading through an email correspondence between the client and Ariel which Ariel forwarded to me (literally the morning of an afternoon meeting, as late as she could possibly send me the information).
I notice that XYZ is not mentioned. We do often have phone conversations with our clients, so figuring this is what happened and wanting to verify that, I call up Ariel.
I ask her if she is absolutely sure the client knows about XYZ?
In a snotty ‘are you a moron’ voice she tells me “Of course I did. Did you not read the email I forwarded?”
I explain that yes, I did, and the lack of it mentioned in there is what prompted my call.
She practically cuts me off to say “Oh, yeah. Client called. I told them over the phone.”
I was super skeptical but I trusted her. She knew how incredibly important it was and surely she couldn’t be this much of a b******e. (Spoiler alert: she could!)
I went into the meeting thinking client knew about XYZ. He did not, and him having to find out at what was essentially the last minute made him (understandably) very angry. He also had lost trust in us, because here I am, talking to him like he knows about it and is just as surprised as him when he doesn’t.
We lost their account. This reflected badly on me because I was the one meeting with him. Unless I personally spoke to the big boss, and then their boss, and accused Ariel of lying, it would just be assumed I screwed up as there was no way Ariel would defend me or admit her lie. We had spoken about it over the phone too so there was no concrete proof she lied.
Another one of her shining moments came a few months later.
A meeting was scheduled with an important potential client, which would be handled by the big boss, Ariel, and myself. I don’t want to be too specific but the company had created a new product, and it was Ariel’s responsibility to explain to me the functions and limitations of it, as was usual protocol.
The big boss was essentially sitting into the meeting so her seniority made the client feel important, Ariel and I are running the show. Meetings run by Ariel and I were pretty usual, big boss being a part of them was uncommon.
I go to explain to the client how this new product cannot do this one specific thing, which Ariel specifically told me it could not, when she swoops in and corrects me that it does, in fact, do that thing, as long as you turn this knob first!
I was livid. She made me look as if I had no idea what I’m talking about, like I’m an utter idiot, in front of not only the client but the big boss! It was such an incredibly simple thing too, and the big boss loves Ariel, so it wouldn’t have even crossed her mind that Ariel didn’t properly explain it to me, let alone straight-up lie about it!
And even then, if I called her out on it, it would again just come to a he-said-she-said thing.
That was my breaking point. This was ridiculous and I had to get as far away from Ariel as I could. She was sabotaging my career. Thankfully about a month and a half later I accepted an offer from a great job with better pay and even a better commute!
I gleefully put in my two weeks notice.
On the morning of my second to last day at the company, my brother calls. My niece has lice, and both he and his wife have it too. Knowing I spend a lot of time with her they called to tell me to check myself out. Lucky me, I also have lice.
It’s like an hour before I have to start work, I do not have time to go get a lice treatment and deal with this right now, so I Google and find the best way to prevent spreading it is to pull your hair up into a neat, tight bun and spray with a barrier of hairspray to decrease the chances of stray hairs flying around.
I do so, and head into work to deal with getting rid of the lice when I get home. I wanted to prevent the chances of anyone else contracting lice because if you’ve ever been unlucky enough to have it, you’ll know that it is a pain to deal with. Pain in the butt treatments that have to be done a few times (which are extremely harsh on your hair), lots of washing clothes, and spraying down furniture, because even just one tiny little nit could reignite the infestation.
One thing you should know about Ariel is that she absolutely loves her hair. It’s this beautiful shade of auburn, long, and perpetually has the most perfect relaxed wave to it. As much as I hate her and hate to admit it, she really does have gorgeous hair most women dream about. Honestly, she looks like Disney’s Princess Ariel. She is obsessed with it and does everything she possibly can to maintain its beauty.
She even goes so far as to keep some dry shampoo, hairspray, and a brush in her desk. I know, because I’ve seen her pull them out and use these things many times.
Well, that morning she was extra sour and in supreme witch mode, probably because my leaving caused a lot of work to fall on her shoulders until they found someone qualified to replace me.
I was already leaving for a much better and more peaceful job, but I was and still am astounded at how she treated me. So, when she left to go to lunch, I quietly made my way into her office, took out my bun, shook my hair out, and ran her brush through my lice-infested hair.
I hope she enjoyed constantly itching her head and lice treatments causing damage to all that beautiful auburn hair.”
5. Call Me Names For Putting My Health Before Work? I'll Be The Reason You Lose Big Bucks
Health definitely is first before work. Just saying.
“I’m a teacher, with a degree in advertising, and have been involved with I.T. for the past twenty-something years, although I’ve found my love for teaching just some ten years ago. I passed through a lot of schools in the meantime, from the big ones to the smallest ones, and accumulated a bunch of experience both in the classroom and behind the scenes, designing workbooks, video courses, learning platforms, and such.
So I started thinking it was past the time to migrate to a management position. The opportunity came in a prestigious school of digital art, and I became its Teaching Manager, overseeing all the teachers and the intern learning routines. It was a hard but honest job…for a time.
Soon it became obvious that my boss was not exactly what he tried to present to students and employees.
He would display bursts of anger and antagonize the team, demanding impossible results and asking about tasks that he never assigned (but somehow was our job to guess). One time, during a meeting, he grabbed a big chair and pretended to throw it across the room. It was his idea of a joke. Nobody even flinched, cause nobody doubted for a second he was capable of actually doing the deed. Needless to say, nobody laughed as well.
In my country, employers may hold employees’ contracts for up to three months, which means that for 90 days you have no job security, and may be fired at any moment without any consequence to the company. Which my boss reminded everyone all the time, half-joking, trying to keep everybody on their toes. He actually excused me from this treatment (he had this bad habit of treating the managers differently) and gave me constant praise for a good job till the day my temp contract ended (meaning I was then an actual employee, with full benefits and couldn’t be fired without him paying me everything the law stated).
So it really surprised me when he started the hostile treatment not 24 hours after my temporary contract ended and the full employment began. Gone were the praises and in their place came screams, bad reviews, and more and more insane demands. We paid an outside company to do maintenance on the classroom PCs every week, but somehow bugs and crashes were now my fault. One time he made me stay after hours, on a Saturday, after all students and staff had left, and prohibited me from going home before I had all computers running smoothly.
He asked me to find him a new seller, and I introduced a friend, making it clear that by no means I was asking for him to be hired, I was just making introductions and if he liked the guy after they talked, it was his own decision and responsibility to hire him or not. A few weeks later he gave me an earful for going for drinks with this friend of mine, saying that managers should stick with managers and that I should mingle with him, not the staff (cause they were ‘beneath’ us, apparently).
I said this was absurd, reminded him that I knew this guy for years already and that if he wanted to, he could join us for drinks anytime. It was not the response he expected.
The abuse continued and actually intensified. One day I started to feel chest pains and my left arm went completely numb. While my friend called for an ambulance, I retreated to my boss’s office, at the time being occupied by his fiance, and calmly told her, ‘Don’t mind me.
I think I’m having a heart attack, so I’ll just lay here for a few minutes so the students can’t see me.’
Of course, she went nuts after this. The good news: it wasn’t a heart attack, but an anxiety attack, and wasn’t the last one. I was 36 at the time, and it was the first time I saw my mom cry since my dad passed, more than 20 years prior (from, of course, a heart attack).
I decided enough was enough, so I gave my 30 days notice, citing health issues. I hadn’t yet completed 6 months working there. I sat down with my boss, did not blame him in any way but said the stress was making me worry about leaving my family too soon, and gave him every guarantee he needed that I would work through my entire notice period in order to complete every single project we started since my hiring.
So I finished editing the courses, finished the development of our brand new e-learning platform, finished hiring the teachers for the next semester, I even shot videos to promote every single course on the school’s menu. Less than a week left till my last day, he called me in his office to show the company’s new ‘career plans’ (I don’t know the equivalent term in English, but it’s the path planned by the company for the growth of each position).
‘So you see… That’s what you’re going to earn in a few months. That is if you stop being a coward and just do your job’.
I could not believe it. After all the abuse, all the toxicity, I had tried to go the higher road and end everything on a good note, and he called my health issues ‘being a coward!????’ I.
was. done. I told him to just deduce the next few days from my final payment and left.
Now for the revenge.
Remember how I introduced him to a friend and he actually hired the guy? On my final days, I announced to my boss I would open my school after leaving but failed to mention that this other employee was my business partner. So when my friend asked for HIS 30 days notice, our boss went LIVID.
He all but threw out my friend, telling him to never put his feet there again, and leave immediately. According to the law, that means he had to pay for that whole month, plus every remaining day he worked before, plus commissions. Adding to that my last payment, which came with six months of benefits, he had more than enough to start our new venture.
But that’s not the revenge.
He actually made us sign a sort of NDA with a bunch of illegal clauses (which made the whole contract invalid) preventing us from revealing any company secrets during or after our time with them, at the risk of being fined $30.000 (around U$6000, at the time). However, no contract in the world may prevent one (at least in my country) from reporting any illegal activities.
This is why I did not worry one bit when I reported him and his school for having 50+ PCs running on pirate versions of Windows, Office, the whole Adobe Suite, Revit, Cinema4D, 3DSMax, and lots of other very expensive software. Not long before this, a big and traditional chain of stores had gone bankrupt in our state for having to pay retroactively fines upon fines on Windows alone, so it’s an understatement to say that the government was taking piracy pretty seriously at the time.
It gets funnier when you realize that the reported person receives an e-mail with the whole complaint (apart from the author of the report) the minute it is filed, so he can prepare his defense. His response wasn’t at all unexpected. Some five minutes after our report, a similar e-mail came into our inbox, reporting us for 30 unlicensed copies of Windows and many other programs. My business partner still talked to the Finance Manager on our old job and, knowing that our ex-boss would probably be right beside him fuming and screaming, decided to send him a picture of our only classroom… with no computer in sight (we decided to specialize in classes about comic bookmaking, which dispensed computers, and whenever we would host a class that demanded it, we would ask our students to bring their own).
A few weeks later I heard that the whole remaining staff abandoned ship, leaving him with only an intern and a few teachers without permanent contracts. My former boss actually kept tabs on us and, learning that some of his teachers were contacting us to host special classes, started to blackmail them, threatening to terminate their contracts if they insisted on doing business with us (even though there was no exclusivity clause in their contracts).
Some of them called on the bluff, and he had to pay another huge amount on breach of contracts alone.
Time went by and I hear the guy is counting his pennies and struggling to keep afloat. He used to open full classes every six months, occupying every date and time available. Now he hardly can fill a turn, started holding only night classes and not even every day – half the week he closes his doors, not having enough students nor the funds to pay employees on these days.
Before I left he had paid $40.000 on the architectural project alone to expand the business within a year, but now I hear he was considering closing his door and offering only online courses.
And now for part two: Where, years after my revenge, I made my ex-boss again pay a bunch, this time on legal fees
First of all, I need to say that my school has closed its doors.
I and my friend were not a good fit, as business partners at least, and now we’re not even friends. That’s life. We sold out, sold what could be sold and each went with our lives.
Some months later I found out our ex-boss was SUING us. Our school, that is. Which, as I mentioned, didn’t even exist anymore. My (ex) friend’s sister, who is also his lawyer, contacted me and told me about it.
I couldn’t find anything on the public records, since the lawsuit was running on a court-ordered sigil. I talked to my lawyer and she said: ‘If they didn’t cite you directly, pretend you know nothing about the matter.’
And so I ignored the issue for a few years. In 2020, the appointed official finally found me at home and served me. That also gave me access to my boss’s claims, since I had 15 days to prepare my defense.
My wife found me laughing out loud in front of the computer. His claims were absolutely ridiculous. He claimed I stole his courses, and used as proof a print from our (now offline) site, side by side with his own, saying something in the lines of ‘it becomes obvious that both schools have the same courses’. However, he presented no explanation of the similarities besides the names, which weren’t even the same.
We had a SEGMENT of pieces of training under the umbrella ‘Graphic Design’, but no class with that specific name, for example, and no other class on any of his main subjects.
Also, most of our classes were on the topic of Comic Books, which he NEVER worked with. He also called us ‘cynical’ for daring to compete with him on the same market, even if it was my own previous experience in the learning sector that landed me the job in his firm in the first place.
At one point, the documents cited a statement from our site where we said that we took our previous experiences as a way to learn from our mistakes and do differently, and call it a ‘confession of plagiarism’. I asked my lawyer to let me write my defense, leaving to her the task to translate it to ‘lawyers’. She actually copy-pasted my full statement, saying she couldn’t have argued better.
I put on paper all the repulse I felt, cited all my experience with teaching, and rebuked every single one of his claims with facts and actual proofs, attaching printed conversations, saved emails, and bringing attention to his lack of proof.
The judge tossed the case and made him pay all the legal fees, including my lawyer’s (he could have avoided it if he had entered the lawsuit on small claims court, but since he wanted the 30k from the NDA plus damages and sigil, he had it coming).
Just another shove of dirt on his coffin.”
4. Teaching An Entitled Witch How To Park Correctly
“I used to live in an apartment when I was 20 where we had assigned parking spaces. I worked two jobs – one in the day and then one at night. My hours were from 7 AM–3 PM and then from 4 PM to 12 AM. As you can imagine, when I would come home, I would be DEAD TIRED!
As I mentioned, we had assigned spaces at this particular apartment complex. There was one girl who would ALWAYS park her car over the line and partially in my space, which would block me from parking in my assigned space. When this would happen, I would have to park in the visitor spaces, which were a long distance away from my apartment unit, and then walk back to the building late at night/early in the morning.
That community was VERY dark at night, and I felt VERY on edge walking alone in the wee hours of the morning back to my apartment from the visitor spots!
I was respectful, so even though this went on for almost a month, I didn’t go knock on the girl’s door when I got home because it was such a late hour, and I knew she would be sleeping.
I knew the girl. She and I were kind of frenemies, and I knew her before she moved into the complex. Her best friend liked a guy but had been afraid to tell him. I met the guy and went out with him. Her friend held a grudge, so she did too. Initially, she didn’t realize I lived in that apartment community, but we saw each other after she moved in, and we realized that our spaces happened to be side by side.
We weren’t cozy with each other, but I didn’t have any issues with her directly.
I finally had enough of her parking over the line and blocking me from parking in the spot I was paying for, and I decided to talk to her one weekend when I was well-rested and calm. I went to her apartment and asked her REALLY kindly to please park her car only in her space.
She already knew I worked multiple jobs and got home late, and I explained that the way she parked was causing me to have to walk in the dark from the visitor spots. She laughed me off but then apologized and agreed to park ONLY in her spot. I stayed completely calm when I talked to her and, after that talk, I thought we had an understanding.
I was WRONG!
After that talk, she parked over the line MORE than she had ever done before! I couldn’t believe it! I came home that Monday evening and found that she had parked DIRECTLY in the middle of the two spaces so that she had room on the right AND left side of her car for nothing bigger than a bicycle. I was LIVID!
It was 1 AM. I couldn’t believe she did that AFTER I was nice to her, AFTER I explained that I got off late and it was dangerous for me to be walking alone from the visitor spots, and AFTER she knew I worked two jobs and would be TOTALLY TIRED when I got home! This was INTENTIONAL on her part! So, this meant WAR!
On that particular night/morning, I had enough! It was action time! After walking from the visitor spot where I parked my car, I went into my apartment and put my stuff down.
I grabbed some gloves and a hat and put on different clothes – all black. I stuffed my hair into the hat and went out of my building, down the side of the building, and then around it, so I could come back into the parking lot without anyone looking out of their windows and seeing me.
It was about 3 AM at this point, and I was DEAD TIRED, but I was on a mission!
I walked all the way around the back of the buildings, stealthily went over to her car, and let the air out of ALL her tires! I know! I know! Somebody forgive me! I let the air out of each tire and then I put the caps in the same place right in the center of each tire all the way around the car.
I wanted it to be CLEAR that it was no mistake! I walked around the building, came back up the side, and went into my unit.
In the morning, I came out to go to work. She usually left for work before I did. Her car was still there! LOL… When I came home that night, guess what? She was COMPLETELY parked in her own spot and NOT EVEN the slightest bit over the line.
She NEVER parked over into my spot again! EVER!
When I originally wrote this here, I forgot to mention what my friends told me about her end of the ordeal. Weeks later, I was out with some friends, and some of our mutual friends ended up talking about someone doing something to her car and how she had to miss work because of the issue.
I piped up and said that I hoped the person didn’t damage the tires, and they filled me in on what SHE had to go through! LOL!
As it turns out, she thought her tires had been SLASHED and ended up CATCHING THE BUS TO GO BUY NEW TIRES! Just to put that into perspective, we lived in a nice community that was NOT in an easy place to get to for non-drivers.
There was a “professional’s bus” that ran Monday through Friday from the community straight into the downtown area and another bus that ran every HOUR AND A HALF, AND you had to walk quite a distance to even get to that bus stop! It was NOT a very bus-friendly area at all!
The place she purchased the tires from had a tow truck.
After purchasing the new tires, she had to ride BACK to the apartment complex with the tow guy, so they could get her car and then go BACK to the shop.
Then, they started taking off the tires and checking them and discovered that they weren’t punctured! They ended up refunding the tires, and she had to pay for the tow. My friends told me she had been SUPER mad! She missed work, she missed a day’s pay from her job because she had used up all of her vacation and sick time (she had gone on a trip earlier in the year and used up her yearly vacation, and she had been sick a lot, so she only had a few HOURS of vacation and sick time left!), she had to catch a bus – which she hated, she had to pay for tires (even though that they got refunded, and she ended up paying for the tow), and she went through all of that only to find that the tires JUST needed air!
She HAD a jump box WITH an air pump on it too! They said she just didn’t think to try using that before going through all of that trouble!
I should add that she didn’t even think it was me initially! SHE ACTUALLY THOUGHT HER EX BOY’S NEW GIRL DID IT BECAUSE THEY HAD AN ARGUMENT OVER THE PHONE, AND SHE THOUGHT THE NEW GIRL WAS JEALOUS OF HER!
LOL! I remember sitting there feeling pretty smug about the whole thing! This is one of the few times in my life where I didn’t have ONE SECOND of remorse for doing what I did! NOT EVEN A DROP! I never had a problem out of that girl after that.
Honestly, if I had known that doing that would stop her from parking partially in my spot, I would have done it before!
Even though she wasn’t sure who did it, I was told she went through a range of emotions trying to figure out who did it! At one point, she thought it was me, then she thought it was her downstairs neighbor (because of some loud music she had been playing), then she thought it was her ex-boy, then she thought it was her ex-boy’s new girl.
When she presented the idea that I did it to our mutual friends, they ALL said that I was WAY too nice to do something like that (LOL)! They also suggested that I’m entirely too sensible to have come to her and ask her to park in her space and then damage her tires (LOLOLOLOLOL)! One of my friends even SAID, “She just isn’t a petty person like that!” when talking about me to her (QUADRUPLE LOL)!
They told her that she should be ashamed of herself for continuing to park in two spaces after I had asked her not to.
She settled on the ex-boy’s girl because the ex-boy was at work overnight. LOL… It is a sad thing when you have so much negativity around you that you can’t even pinpoint who might have a grudge against you!
I found out later that the community had a remedy for people who did what she did. I just had to call a special number, give them my unit number, tell them a car was in my spot, and they would have come and towed her. I didn’t know that. Had I known that, I would have done that, but my method was JUST as effective!
I got away with it because this was a time when cameras were not as prevalent. Today, I would likely have ended up on YouTube and in jail for doing that! Or maybe NOT jail! I didn’t actually DAMAGE the tires… I would just have ended up embarrassed on some social media site! So, there you have it – my old, sweetest revenge story!”
3. Watch Me Become More Successful Than You
Looks like everyone got what they deserved in the end, so it worked out.
“I was working as an electronics maintenance technician for the Globe and Mail Newspaper in Toronto, Canada.
My married boss was an absolute bully. He started having an affair with his married secretary. After 6 months, a young and very good-looking girl came to be interviewed for a job. She was sent around to be interviewed in several departments.
At the same time, the married secretary and her husband had a conversation and they decided not to mess around anymore. So she stopped sleeping with the boss (somehow she seemed to feel she could confide in me).
Well after seeing the new girl being interviewed, I knew he was going to dismiss the present secretary and hire the new girl. She was very young and very beautiful and probably was single.
So perhaps he was hoping.
The next morning I came in and saw the secretary cleaning the dust off a line up of about 100 monitors that had been sitting out in the open collecting dust. This, of course, was not her job. She had a bucket of water and a sponge.
She was on to her third monitor, feeling thoroughly humiliated and in tears. I asked her what was happening and she told me that the boss ordered her to do it.
I took the sponge she was using, filled it with water, and squeezed it into the monitor. Then I went into the office and said “What the heck is she doing to the monitors?” She is soaking them with water. Bossman jumped out of his office and asked me to call her back. Well, that was the end of the bullying for her.
Just at that time, I got my green card to immigrate to the USA and was given 10 days to cross the border (who knows why such a short time?) All over Canada companies bought electronic equipment from the USA, the same with the Newspaper.
We bought all the electronics equipment from the USA. The most complicated and exciting and advanced system was sold by a company from Santa Monica, California.
Every tech there wanted to get hired by that company to work on the equipment. Bully boss found some excuse to fire me. So he is sitting there with the lead person as a witness and said he was firing me.
Well, I was just about to leave anyway. So I said, “That’s ok. I will go to Santa Monica and work for XYZ company.” He was speechless. He was a control freak and if he had thought of that he would not have let me go but would have tried his best to make my life miserable.
I was an engineer and he viewed me as a threat because he was a boss and I knew more about electronics than he did.
Well, I had to prepare to leave for the USA. That night it was snowing heavily. I painted For Sale on a piece of plywood, nailed two sticks to it, and went outside to plant it in the snow facing the traffic. Just as I was bending down to plant the sign, a car stopped with his headlights on me.
The driver gets out and wants to see the house..
hahaha… OooKKK. Well, he looks around and asks the price. I had already determined that the price was 5K more than what a broker told me he could get for it. He does a tour of the house and says I am bringing my uncle to see it. Well, Uncle comes over and asks the price. I told him and he makes a move to walk away.
That’s the Italian method of negotiating. It is a good approach. Hey, hey wait a minute. I want the house, I agree to your price. Ok, start the paperwork tomorrow. OK. He leaves and picks up my For Sale sign to put it in his car. I laughed and said not until the contracts are signed.
Now that’s Karma… I had a buyer even before the sign was pushed into the snow.
Needless to say, I packed my bags and went and left my wife to close on the sale of our house, etc.
Coming to the USA was a wonderful thing for me. I was an electronics engineer and there were very few jobs for people with my skills in Toronto. My house was paid for by the grace of my wife’s aunt and my mother-in-law.
The income I was making was insufficient to pay for our expenses even without rent or mortgage. I had two little toddlers and a wife to take care of. If I lost my job I did not know where our next meal was going to come from. We had 30K in the bank and yet I was living in constant fear and insecurity. I did not consider my savings as something that we should live on.
I had to be earning a living.
I arrived in Los Angeles on Friday. Spent the better part of Saturday at the movies downtown Los Angeles. 4 movies for the price of one at the Roxy theater. By the time I walked out my brains were buzzing and I could barely see straight.
I bought a car on Sunday morning. Went with a broker house hunting on Monday and put an offer on a house on Wednesday.
On Tuesday I went to visit a friend of mine. He calls his brother. Hey Ed, Jack is here. Oh WoW, we are looking for engineers, bring him over. The Director of Engineering interviewed me and hired me on the spot. When can you start? I said I need a few days to get settled, I just arrived here on Friday. “Oh, Ed told me you were new here but I did not realize that you were that new.”
A few days later the boss bully called my wife and said he wanted to speak with me. She told him that I was not in the country and had a job in the USA. The jealous miserable jerk was shocked speechless because he did not imagine that this would happen. So he lost control of me and I already had a job here that paid better than the one I left.
Within 3 months I went into partnership with 2 other guys from work and we bought 2 apartment buildings. Before we collected the first rent the broker we used to buy the properties, brought us an offer on both the buildings. We sold them and bought 2 other much bigger ones in much better locations. Each building gave us a great net income right off the bat.
Karma is really GREAT when it is on your side.”
Another User Comments:
“I was working for a company that came into your new or being renovated home (a long time away) to design the lighting in the house. After the agreement was signed, another part of the company would go into the home and install it all. The boss and owner of the company was married but sleeping with a real Bimbo of a secretary who didn’t know a 5 from a 6.
When I proved how stupid she was a number of times, she went crying to the boss man that I was being mean to her. Boss then started being cold to me and not paying me my bonus for jobs and I knew my days were numbered. Meanwhile, Bimbo showed up with diamonds and a new car to make her feel better.
I got my own revenge by writing contracts with fixtures less than half of what they cost. Bimbo had no idea because she couldn’t do any math and her fake nails wouldn’t let her hold a pen anyway!
She just pushed the contracts through and took a 2-hour break with the boss man down the street at the no-tell motel. I said something one day that upset Bimbo and she went running to the boss man. He came out and fired me. Fine.
As I was collecting my stuff to leave, one of my customers came in to change something and the boss man hit the roof when he saw the numbers.
He couldn’t change the amount on the contract or be sued. I smiled and waved as I left. I couldn’t be blamed because the signature on it was Bimbo’s. She would copy my contracts and my numbers and sign her name to look good. I couldn’t be traced to any of them! The business was bankrupt and gone in a year.” Shari Hummel
2. Make Me Work Without Pay? I'll Make You Do My Job
“This happened two years ago.
I was twenty and a recent university dropout. I needed a year to empty my head, recover from imminent burnout, and earn a bit to help support my single mom and my younger sister (who’d just given birth with no father in the picture).
I was a very insecure person at the time. I really wanted to work, but without a degree, life sucks… until I got contacted by Mr. B.
Mr. B found me on a federal website for job applicants, where I was registered.
He was looking for a manager to help manage his small hotel: a beautiful establishment with six lofts located in the heart of a medieval city (my city).
I answered him immediately, saying that I had no prior experience with management and that my qualifications didn’t exactly lie in that area, but thank you very much for the consideration. He answered back, saying ‘just come take a look and we’ll talk about it.’
The first thing I did was Google Mr. B. He had an architectural firm and was coaching a professional football (soccer) club, which is kind of a big deal in my little country.
Secondly, I Googled the hotel. It was indeed really small and fairly new; an old underground mill transformed into six luxury lofts, but with the medieval style and feel kept intact. I decided I had nothing to lose by simply visiting and hearing him out. I was extremely curious, too. Why me? Well, you can probably guess, but I couldn’t.
I was naïeve, terribly insecure, and in desperate need of a job, to prove to myself and to the world that I hadn’t taken a gap year for anything.
Long story short, I met with Mr. B that same week. He was a short, business-like, fairly handsome man, friendly enough, didn’t sweat the little things, showed me around, and explained to me what he expected. It was a slow season so I’d have some time to learn the ropes.
Before I knew it I was employed. Mr. B made me three promises:
- a salary between €1400 and €3000 that would increase depending on the hotel’s (my) performance
- a job as a manager + receptionist, since the place was small enough to combine the two
- my own room in the hotel, so I wouldn’t have to commute daily
The work started immediately. I was designing stickers to put on the doors, translating letters in German, French, and English, working with the booking software, making schedules for weeks to come… it was a rush, like nothing I’d ever done and I was loving the experience.
Finally Adult Life, Responsibility, a way to prove my worth!!! As business started to pick up and all lofts were opened for rent, I was soon working from six in the morning ‘till ten in the evening, doing administration until it was time for check-in, then checking people in, communicating with clients and suppliers, checking people out again, preparing rooms for the next visit, grocery shopping at the market nearby and preparing breakfast for clients, etc, etc..
I also had an old work phone that I couldn’t turn off under any circumstance. If clients called, I had to be accessible.
PHASE 1. REALIZATION
Soon inconsistencies started to rear their ugly heads:
1. There was only one cleaning lady for the whole hotel. She had a second job at another, bigger hotel, so I could never be certain if she’d be available. I realized I’d have to jump in to help with the cleaning.
I hadn’t been informed of that. I pressed my boss about this and he gave me the name of some girl who ‘cleaned his house sometimes’. Off the books.
2. Only then did I realize that I hadn’t signed a single piece of paper. He said he’d fix that as soon as possible. I didn’t push my luck since I was a new recruit and very eager to please.
3. The room he promised me (where I would be living) turned out to function as an office/supply room/washing room. In other words, the cleaning supplies were stashed there, as well as the washing machine, the keys, and documents for all the lofts, etc.. I would be living at work, literally. Also, there was no bed. I was to sleep on the floor.
4. Mr. B had disappeared from the face of the earth.
Or, well, he acted as he had. He lived in a luxury apartment only 5 minutes from the hotel, but he didn’t like to be contacted about ‘all the little things’.
5. I soon figured out there had been a reason some of the lofts only became accessible once I moved in as a manager. They weren’t finished. Some bathrooms needed extra insulation, one of the faucets made a horrible noise, locks needed fixing, cables and insulation were visible in some spots, wood clippings were raining down from some of the beams (I would later discover there were WOOD BUGS in the beams, something he hadn’t informed me about and that he’d left untreated for months!
Guess how I found out…)
6. Mr. B started to ask little favors. Like could my mom fix some curtains for his daughter’s bedroom, or couldn’t my uncle help with the repairs in lofts 2, 3, and 4… all of it for a little price, if you catch my drift. I was the manager after all. I was supposed to fix that stuff. And if my family could do it for cheap…
7. At the same time, he managed my budget. This is understandable of course, but let me elaborate: managing a hotel costs quite a bit. The only funds he gave me were on a credit card that was constantly empty. Be that as it may, I did the best I could, saving by doing most of the washing and ironing myself (the laundry service he’d hired was extremely unreliable, but he didn’t want to change because it was cheap), being frugal with the food (every room had luxury coffee machines they were free to use and the coffee cost me a fortune), not making expensive phone calls, etc..
I handled huge amounts of funds coming in (most of the guests were rich people) but wasn’t allowed to go to the bank and put more on the hotel’s credit card.
Once we needed an extra mattress because more clients would be coming in than anticipated and they all wanted to stay in our biggest loft. I had already begged him for an extra foldable bed (the one he told me to use was so cheap it bent sideways if you put weight on it, so he reluctantly, after much begging, supplied me with a new one).
I drove all over the province on my day off, hunting for the best, cheapest mattress. I found an incredible one, bought it out of my own pocket, and informed my boss of the cost. I received a very angry e-mail, basically telling me I better watch what I spend…
8. As I became a more capable manager, Mr. B became more demanding. I have a friend with severe schizophrenia that I visit in prison from time to time.
You might know how harrowing a process it is to visit someone in prison. I had planned my visit meticulously to make sure I’d be back in time to relieve my sister who, with her little baby of a few months, was holding the fort for me, managing check-ins and phone calls. When I entered the waiting room, I had to turn off my work phone.
This was no big deal, seeing as the fixed phone at work would always ring first and my sister was there to pick it up.
When I exited the prison and jumped into my car to rush back to work, I had a few missed calls from my boss. I rang back, only to be cussed out for not picking up my phone. I hadn’t been at the hotel, either.
I told him my sis was there in my stead. He said he didn’t want to talk to my sis, he wanted to talk to me – insert berating tone, short, angry sentences, and a whole lot of guilt-tripping.
9. Furthermore, since the card was so often empty but rooms needed to be cleaned every day (by a group of off-the-books cleaning ladies that I’d rounded up left and right since I had no other choice) I was forced to pay these ladies out of my own pocket, which left me broke half the time.
10. Aside from hotel-related phone calls, Mr. B had started to connect some of his personal calls to my phone as well, namely, the ones he didn’t want to deal with himself, aka disgruntled companies asking for undue payments, creditors asking for his phone number and address, etc.. As he was my boss, I didn’t give these people his information. Occasionally, I got a call from a fancy pansy company in France, telling me it was time for Mr. B’s bi-annual ordering of luxury wines.
11. The money didn’t come. My salary. My bread and butter.
12. Lots. More. Nonsense.
PHASE 2. DETERMINATION
Finally, I realized I needed to get out of this situation. Or rather, I’d known for a long time, but I had hoped things would settle, he’d give me my contract and I could start making demands. Pssssht, naw.
So I made plans:
1) The Turkish cleaning lady.
Since this woman had been at the hotel from the very beginning and was way more experienced than I was, she didn’t like me at first (understandable: I was a stupid youngling but still technically her boss). However, all it took was a few questions about her kids and a whole lot of admiration (not fake) for her cleaning skills, and she opened up to me like a floodgate.
I paid her more than Mr. B had told me to pay her (out of my own pocket) because she really was the most reliable person I worked with and she could clean a loft like nothing I’d ever seen. She taught me a lot. Soon she was loyal to ME instead of him. And once that happened, the little secrets started coming…
2) My Turkish cleaning lady told me about the girls who’d worked at the hotel before me (all young, non-white and inexperienced, just like me).
They’d all quit within the span of a month (there were six of them). I was the only one who had stuck around (probably because I lived with my mom so I wasn’t dependent on my salary to survive). I soon got hold of one of them. I visited her and did a cross-examination. She told me about Mr. B’s treatment, his refusal to make the job official, and how he still owed her quite a bit of income.
This was useful information because I now knew for sure that this guy wouldn’t give me my contract, ever. I still had hope because he’d found me through a federal channel, which at the time I took to mean that he wanted to do things the right way. FALLACY.
3) I had my family behind me. At this point, my uncle had done lots of big repairs (insulation, plumbing, fixing furniture, etc), my mom had worked on most of the curtains and some of the floorings, my sister was pulling FREE SHIFTS to help me carry the enormous workload that no person in their right mind would give to a single employee…Thing is, my family had only been keeping their mouths shut because they love me and want to support me.
I was a bookish, introverted, insecure, eager-to-please, little girl. My mom is a criminologist who works with very scary people on a daily basis. She knows a crook when she sees one. My uncle is the most brutally honest, short-tempered, intimidating repairman you’ve ever seen. He loves me, but he hates entitled little jerks who call themselves businessmen. My mom’s calm and collected powers of logic combined with my uncle’s brash ruthlessness was a death trap waiting to happen.
But that wasn’t all.
Let me tell you a little something about my sis. She’s fierce. In high school, she was a super popular bombshell who got thrown out of two different schools for bad behavior and whom I witnessed cussing out a police officer on more than one occasion. Uhuh, that kind of delinquent. All of that changed when she got pregnant.
She cleaned up her act in a spectacular way and is now working as a human rights advocate. She’s also one of the best mothers I’ve ever seen. In any case, back then, when the mother things had only just started, she redirected her efforts towards her family. I guess she felt guilty for messing up my life for so long (I developed OCD because she used to stress me out so much – I’m fully cured now, though).
She was helping me at the hotel because she knew I needed her in case things got bad.
4) Lastly, there was the thing that made ME angry. I’d been experiencing some difficulty with the administration of the hotel, mostly booking-related. When I went digging through emails and online payments, I noticed inconsistencies and eventually concluded that Mr. B was messing with my stuff. He was canceling services and contacting people behind my back, without telling me anything, leaving me to desperately search for bugs and fix last-minute bookings.
That’s when I snapped.
PHASE 3: REVENGE, FINALLY
I convinced the Turkish cleaning lady, as well as all the other cleaning ladies, to stop working at the hotel. The Turkish lady had better prospects anyway, but she hadn’t been sure about leaving. I asked her to keep it a secret. I would inform Mr. B.
I contacted the creditors who’d been bugging me for months, as well as the companies who were still waiting to be paid, and gave them Mr. B’s phone number and home address.
Because, you know… business is business
I wrote a very honest review of the hotel on one of the major booking sites, telling everyone all about those giant bugs in the ceiling…
I basically told my family they could be themselves now, I was quitting the hotel anyway.
So my mom sent the bill, my uncle made his phone calls and my sister, well…
I made sure the hotel was fully booked for the upcoming month (every year my city holds this huge street festival that people from all over Europe flock to, so that wasn’t too difficult.
I sent Mr. B an email saying I was quitting on Sunday. I was valiant enough to finish my work for the week. Oh, and the cleaning ladies would be quitting, too.
I gave the work phone to my sis, reclined in my seat, and listened to the beautiful conversation that unfolded when Mr. B called. My sister didn’t disappoint. She spared no expense.
I thought about reporting his shady antics to the police but decided against it (for my own sake, as well as the cleaning ladies). I did report him to the federal service for employment and told them he was using their site to lure people into undeclared work against their will. The person I spoke to made sure our conversation was confidential. So no further legal action for me.
I was satisfied with the knowledge that on Monday morning, Mr. B would have to drop everything and rush to the hotel to serve his snotty guests, prepare breakfast, struggle with his faulty administration, receive complaints from cuckoo clients, write emails to his angry suppliers, do the washing, the ironing, the cooking, and the cleaning, and all the other stuff I had been doing for months, unpaid and underappreciated.
Thanks for making me a thousand times stronger, jerk.
I regret nothing.
PS: The hotel is no longer in business. Whoops.”
Another User Comments:
“Quite worth the read but even I’m frustrated that you didn’t get paid. Is there a way you still can be? At least you have the experience but man… I feel like you deserved more.” MoarPewPewPlz
1. I Got Her To Reveal Her Own Deep, Dark Secret
“I was teaching in a small rural school when the harassment started from a coworker.
She was a support person in the building. Her child was one of my students. On my first day of school, I would always send home a small pamphlet of expectations for classwork and class behavior; it was to be signed by parents and students, then returned. This procedure would save drama later on in the school year, when a child or parent would claim that, Johnny or Suzie “Didn’t know better” or “Understand.” This coworker came to me and told me that their child would not be following several of my rules in the pamphlet after school on the first day.
My first question was, “Why?” I was then told the reason their child would not be following the rules, “They don’t like the rules.” Like it or not, my rules stand without a valid reason why they shouldn’t. I explained to the mother, citing several examples where I would be willing to make adjustments, for valid reasons. The mother got mad and said, “You’ll be sorry,” then stormed off.
I thought, “What is this junior high?”
The first quarter was moving along, this coworker’s child had a “B+” in my class. I am suddenly called to the office for a meeting after school with my principal, with the coworker, and her husband about picking on their child. That is their claim of why their child’s grade is suffering. Wait, a “B+” is a good grade.
I grade with a rubrics allowing students to see what area they lost their points in on assignments. These parents bring in an assignment I downgrade a section on capitalization. This is the same mistake that this child has repeatedly made the same error, has been spoken to about, been warned to make the corrections, and chooses not to fix the capitalization issue. I explain that their child told me, they were not going to correct their capitalization.
These parents wanted me to let their child have a pass on capitalization. I told them I couldn’t do that because of state guidelines.
The coworker, mom, changed subjects, digressing into a rant about having the children write journal entries every day. The meeting spirals where both parents are calling me names, my principal does nothing about it; I walk out of the meeting.
They didn’t want to help their child’s education. They just wanted to be able to bully an “A” out of me.
The coworker pulled her child from my class, hiring a private teacher for her child.
I would think that would be the end of this nightmare parent, nope. She programmed spyware on my computer, leaking all of my confidential student files. This coworker then began a phone campaign in the community to get me fired, telling everyone I leaked confidential student information.
She physically shoved me from behind in the hall one day, when my hands were full, then laughed. If that wasn’t enough she called the cops on me while I was at work, telling them I was intoxicated in front of my students. The police came and did a sobriety test in front of my students. This was the final straw of her bullying me.
I had already turned in my resignation. Not because of her nonsense, I had health reasons. I decided to have a little fun.
I had figured out months before, she was a substance abuser. This was going to be to my advantage in my revenge plot against this wretch. She was also very predictable in her schedule; she did the same routines like clockwork every day.
She had an office at the back of the library. My classroom had a backdoor into the library; if the library was locked I could still get in there. The plan for revenge was writing itself.
I have always maintained connections to people, that know people, that know…well, the idea is drawn out; one of the connections was to the one thing she wanted and needed, illegal substances.
I didn’t want her cut off; I wanted the price raised, the dealer to act as if there was a shortage for some bogus reason. If the dealer’s profit margin was getting affected, they wouldn’t be game but raising the price solved that problem. The idea was to keep her on edge, never satisfied, ever.
Once I had that accomplished, I moved to the next step.
I went to the pet shop, bought two dozen feeder crickets; released them into her office. I sprinkled itching powder on all her books and papers; knowing she would move them looking for the little noisemakers.
I picked the thermostat lockbox in her office, then turned it up to 95 degrees. She was always wearing long sleeves to cover her track marks. She shed her sleeves in the sweltering heat until someone could adjust her thermostat.
Somehow, it kept getting turned back up to 95 degrees.
The next thing I did is diabolical, but it tipped the scale for people in the community to realize, she was an addict. I put “Buck Lure”, female concentrated deer urine, on pantyliners. Why pantyliners? Pantyliners have an absorbent side and an adhesive side both of which served my devious purpose. On the underside of her desk, I placed a liner, inside the file cabinet on the topmost underside, a liner.
I placed half a dozen liners in her office. In the final act, I painted the keyboard with a Q-tip with the deer urine.
She had looked all over, couldn’t figure out where the odor was coming from in her office. She had to get her work done in her sweaty oven of an office. This made her fingertips moist, picking up the deer urine off the keyboard when she typed. The more she looked for the scent and the crickets, the more itching powder she came into contact with on her hands.
The hotter she became, the more reactive the powder. The more she scratched her skin, the more she spread the powder. All of these things had her walking around the school and town like a frazzled ball of nerves. She began walking around school with her track marks showing, itching, complaining about bugs, and compulsively smelling her fingers.
After two weeks, the whole town knew she was a strung-out mess.
I just revealed to everyone who she was under her fake facade.”
Another User Comments:
“The poor child has it worse of all.
I’m surprised no criminal proceedings were made against her accessing and leaking those files.” Matthew Wong
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