People Tell Their Hard-Hearted Revenge Stories
12. Falsely Told My Partner I Was Unfaithful? I'll Do The Same To You
“My brother (23M, we’re twins) is so mean. He’s constantly doing messed-up stuff to me (23F), but the worst thing happened five years ago.
I got my first significant other when I was 18 and a senior in high school. I know we were young, but I really, really, really loved him.
We’d been seeing each other for ten months when my brother randomly decided—for literally no reason at all—to make up a story about how he ‘caught me being unfaithful’ and told my partner. He planned it all out, he came up with details—he made it sound real. And because he’s such a scarily good liar and a master manipulator, my partner believed him.
No matter what I said or did to prove it wasn’t true, he believed my brother over me. My brother kept up with his act the entire time and refused to admit he was lying.
At one point I thought I’d finally gotten my partner to believe me, but then he broke up with me a few months later and confessed it was because he was still convinced I’d been unfaithful and he couldn’t move past it.
He said, ‘The worst part is that you won’t just tell me the truth’ and not to sound dramatic but that still haunts me. I want to cry every time I think about it. And I still miss him to this day. (Also, I think it’s important to note that my brother has never once apologized! He’s so insanely mean that he just thinks it’s funny.
I even asked him once if he’d consider hitting my ex up and telling him the truth for my peace of mind and he just laughed at me).
I never got over what my brother did, and I always told myself I was gonna do the exact same thing to him one day. He’s seen several girls since high school, but he’d never been serious enough about any of them for me to consider tricking them.
I knew it wouldn’t hurt him like he hurt me if I just tricked one of his flings or something. But he finally got his first serious partner last year, and after thinking about it for a long time I decided I was going to do it.
We live in different places now so I had to do it all online.
I used a different method than he did. I contacted his partner pretending to be ‘the girl he’d been unfaithful with’. I made up an elaborately detailed story like he did to me and even photoshopped ‘proof’ and stuff. I made my story even more believable than he made his. And exactly like he did to me, I went as far as denying it even to him because I knew he might use my texts/calls to prove to his partner that it isn’t true.
He knew I was behind it, though, solely because the girl I made up doesn’t exist and there’s no one else that would do this. But I kept denying it.
His partner wholeheartedly believed me, and my brother kept calling and texting me and begging me to ‘give it up’ (even though I still wouldn’t admit it was me). He was manipulating me and arguing that it’s ‘different’ because I was younger when he did it to me and my relationship ‘wasn’t serious’.
But my relationship was serious, and like I said, I still miss my ex. My brother really, really messed me up. I have empathy though (he doesn’t) and I was starting to feel bad for his partner because she’s innocent. I was kind of regretting everything and thinking that maybe I should tell his partner the truth (for her sake, not his).
But then, his partner asked me a question which led to her admitting that she’s ‘been suspicious of him for a long time,’ so I pried a little bit and encouraged her to look through his phone. She told me she couldn’t because she didn’t know the passcode and he wouldn’t give her access to it. I guessed a few passcodes I thought it could be and gave them to her under the guise of ‘seeing it once but not being sure which one I’d seen.’ (That was kind of dumb but I couldn’t think of anything else to say and she didn’t question it).
She got in because it ended up being the same one he’s had since 2012 when our dad got us iPhones and made us use the same passcode. Idiot.
Anyway, lo and behold… it turns out my brother actually was unfaithful to her and my setup was the reason she found out. He’s been talking to and hooking up with multiple girls for pretty much the entirety of their relationship.
I’m not surprised, because he’s a terrible person and unfaithfulness seems right up his alley, but I’m shocked at the same time. I literally can’t believe things worked out this perfectly, it feels like a dream or something. The universe loves me.
I hate to revel in his partner’s misery, but I was feeling guilty about her being collateral damage, so I feel like this is the best possible outcome.
My lie ended up being the truth— well not exactly but you know what I mean—so I didn’t scar his partner or leave her with permanent damage for no reason. All my interference did was speed up the process of the truth coming to light. In fact, my brother may have been able to hide his unfaithfulness forever if not for me.
He probably would’ve just manipulated his partner and/or refused to give her phone access forever. She hasn’t broken up with him and I’m honestly not sure if she will. I don’t know how relevant that is but it attests to how manipulative he is. He screws people over all the time but somehow always gets his way anyway. It’s honestly infuriating and scary.
Anyway, I’m still not going to admit to my brother that I’m behind it all, because there’s no point. That would just get me in deeper trouble. I saw something once that said ‘Deny ’til you die, baby,’ and that’s exactly what I’m planning on doing.
Life’s crazy.”
11. Want To Be A Petty Slime Ball? You'll End Up Getting Arrested
“My uncle has always been a self-righteous, petty slime ball, with a foul temper and grandiose idea of his own importance but little to no brains. My dad always just took it and tried to keep the peace because family is so important to him.
This is the story of how my uncle finally pushed my dad too far and ended up getting arrested for his trouble. It is pretty long since it covers several months of a feud between them.
As background, my dad and my uncle are neighbors in a rural community of 600ish people. My dad built the house my uncle lives in and sold it along with a small plot, so my dad’s remaining land is about 6 acres and runs along the side and the back of my uncle’s smaller property.
My uncle is a dealer for HVAC units. My dad is in the HVAC business and would buy some things from his brother, even though his brother’s prices were higher and he had a more limited inventory than other dealers, in order to help his brother out. My dad also rented a building his brother owned and used it as his shop/office.
He only rented the building and parking lot, but in the field out behind the shop my uncle and my dad both would collect old HVAC units. These things are rusty and all-around ugly, but when they didn’t have anything else to do they could go get one of these old units to break down for scrap.
This story starts when one day my dad went to his brother and said he needed a certain unit, but his brother quoted him a really high price and also couldn’t deliver in the time frame my dad needed. So my dad called up another dealer he works with and that guy had a unit on hand to give him for a much lower price.
A no-brainer. My uncle found out about this somehow (dudes in the HVAC business are apparently like gossipy teenage girls) and confronted my dad, basically giving him an ultimatum that if my dad wouldn’t commit to buying 100% of his units from my uncle then my uncle wouldn’t sell him anything.
I already told you my uncle is an idiot.
So my dad didn’t say anything to his brother, but he took him at his word and stopped buying anything from him.
A month or so later my uncle showed up at my dad’s shop and confronted him again wanting to know why my dad hadn’t ordered anything from him that month. When my dad told him why, my uncle exploded. They apparently had a screaming match, and in the end, my uncle announced that my dad was no longer his brother, they were no longer doing business together, and my dad was evicted from the shop.
I will note that legally my dad was not evicted because evicting him would have required legal notice, a certain period of time, etc. But my dad was over it, so he said fine and began converting the barn at his house into his new shop. So my uncle, who apparently had thought my dad would not call his bluff, showed back up at the shop a few days later and informed my dad that he also has to move all of the old HVAC units scattered around in the field behind the property or he would sue my dad for the cost of removal. Now, this too probably had no legal power, since my dad’s lease was only on the building, not the field, and my uncle contributed to and used the old units as communal property.
But when my dad is ticked off he is really ticked off. So he agreed to move the old units. He took his tractor over and loaded each one onto his flatbed trailer, drove out behind his barn, and painstakingly arranged hundreds of rust-bucket ugly old HVAC units an inch or two off the property line at the back of my uncle’s house.
Note that my dad could not see these things from his house due to the way his property is set up, but my uncle had an HD view of them in his backyard.
My uncle started being even more of a creep than usual and was always spying on my dad’s house, so my dad decided to build a privacy fence down the side of his property that runs along my uncle’s property (but not the back of the property where the HVAC units are).
The fence guys arrived and worked for a few hours before my uncle came screeching into his driveway and exploded out of his truck already screaming because these poor fence guys had laid posts or tools or whatever temporarily on his side of the property line as they were building the fence. My uncle called the police, who basically told the fence guys, ‘Okay dudes, just don’t put anything on this crazy man’s property,’ and left.
The next day apparently someone left a hammer across the property line so here comes my uncle screaming at them again. He called the police again but by the time they got there, the guy had already moved his hammer so the police were just annoyed by this point but could only warn them not to do it again.
Later that afternoon, my uncle called the police a third time, I kid you not.
This time he wanted to report that my dad had stolen a backhoe from him. Like one that attaches to the back of a tractor. One that, again I kid you not, my uncle had given to my dad two whole years prior because my uncle didn’t even have a tractor big enough to attach the thing to. The cop was not amused when this story came to light, and since it was the same cop who’d been there earlier that day she was beyond annoyed at that point.
My dad helpfully said, ‘Come get the backhoe if you want it,’ knowing full well my uncle had no way to pick the thing up or haul it even the few feet to his own yard.
My uncle replied that my dad was just trying to trap him and would say he was trespassing if my uncle came onto his land (even though the cop was standing right there when my dad offered and, by the way, this conversation was taking place in my dad’s driveway).
He then said that he wanted to file a complaint with the police that basically amounts to a restraining order against my dad (it isn’t a restraining order because it isn’t issued by a judge but the cops treat it that way—it’s for habitual trespassers). Annoyed Cop helpfully informed my dad that this would mean that even if my uncle texted or emailed him and invited him to come over to his house to discuss things, even if my dad had that written proof he’d been invited, if my uncle called the cops or even took a picture of my dad on his property he could potentially get arrested for trespassing.
My dad said he wanted to file one against his brother too.
The revenge part of the story is now upon us.
My dad knew full well that his brother had no real clue where the property lines were and was not going to dig up his survey to check. He only ‘knew’ where the lines were because my dad knows exactly where they are and maintains wooden stobs in the ground periodically along his property lines.
So when his brother was away for a few days my dad moved all of the old HVAC units along the property line over further onto his own property by a few feet and moved the stobs back the same distance. So basically it looked the same as it had before, except it looked like the property line was a few feet further back than it actually is.
He then placed some random piece of scrap across the fake property line (still on his own property but it looked like it was across the property line if all you had to go by were the incorrectly placed stobs), set up a few game cameras aimed at the line, and waited.
Sure enough, his dumb brother came storming out of his house as soon as he noticed this scrap on ‘his’ side of the ‘property line,’ crossed the real property line to get a good look at the scrap, and called the police.
My dad was waiting for them with his survey showing where the actual property line is, a copy of the report Annoyed Cop had given him, and game camera footage of his brother clearly trespassing on his land, and it was my uncle who got arrested. The only way his revenge for all the trouble and heartache his brother caused could possibly have been any sweeter would have been if it were Annoyed Cop who showed up at the scene and arrested my uncle, but alas he had to make do with someone he and his brother had both gone to high school with, which worked out since it was especially embarrassing for my uncle to be arrested by someone he knew well.
And who could make sure everyone else in town knew.”
10. Knock Down Our Mailbox? I'll Teach You A Lesson
“This is my dad’s revenge, not mine, and this happened last summer.
My parents live out on a lake just outside of town. Their property extends to both sides of the road, and their mailbox is on the opposite side of the lake and the house.
Over the 4 years they had lived at the property, a black SUV has knocked down their mailbox 6 times (they catch the vehicle on the security camera on the gate but get no identifying info).
My dad would report it every time, but not much could be done. It was knocked over by an intoxicated driver once as well, but he crashed a bit further down the road so that was the only time that my dad got reimbursed for the damage.
Well, after the seventh time it was knocked down, he had had enough.
The land on the opposite side of the road dropped off steeply immediately after the shoulder, so my dad contracted some guys to build out a small gravel pad (15 feet long and 3 feet deep or so) so he could set his mailbox back from the road. My dad told me that if someone tried to knock it down now, they would regret it.
Well, about 4 months after the work was complete, my parents were awoken by a loud crash in the middle of the night. They called the police and went out to investigate. They found the black SUV off the road, having crashed into a very large tree.
The guy was taken to the hospital and was charged with a DUI from the crash as well as possession of illegal substances they found in the vehicle.
By building out the gravel pad and moving the mailbox back by just a few feet, it still appeared that the mailbox was on the shoulder, and still seemed like an easy target. In reality, those 3 feet made all the difference. Because the pad was so short, the vandal left the roadway before the pad started, and when the right side of his vehicle went off the shoulder, his car went veering down the steep incline.
The dude was pretty badly injured, and I know my dad felt bad about this. I think this was much more effective than he had in his mind. My dad isn’t the kind of person to intentionally injure someone, so I am sure he was hoping to just cause damage to a vehicle and teach a lesson that way.”
9. Our Neighbor Complained About The Noise, So We Installed Hardwood Floors
“Sometime around 2002, my wife and I moved into an 1100 square foot condominium with 3 bedrooms and 2 baths. We were very fortunate to get this condominium as a second owner and we paid only $114,000 (6 grand more than the original price). Our condo was on the third floor and ALL rooms were carpeted throughout the condo with only one small 4’X4′ square of linoleum inside the front door to the outside breezeway (This will become important later.
And yes, even the bathrooms, kitchen, and dining room were carpeted.) The front door opened to a large open space with vaulted ceilings with the great room to the left and the dining room and kitchen to the right. The Kitchen area was separated from the great room with a wall that had a cutout over the kitchen sink and we had a long hallway directly going out of the great room to all the bedrooms and straight in front of the front door.
We got to know some of the neighbors and got along well with most of them. The neighbors directly below us were a young couple that was attending University and was nice and cordial with us. Shortly after they graduated, they rented out their condo to her brother and his college friends. The brother was a decent guy and we mostly had no problems except for one of his birthdays where their music and boisterous conversations and happy birthdays!!!
etc. kept us up until 4:30 am. My wife and I returned the favor by blasting our music the very next morning at 8:00. But we talked a couple of weeks later and all had a laugh about it and never had any real problems after that.
Between 2004 and 2006 we changed all the flooring in the kitchen and dining room to ceramic tile (Including the area in front of the front door) to avoid having to pay for carpet cleaning in the dining or kitchen area due to spills or our young daughter throwing food on the floor from her high chair.
In 2007 our cordial neighbors sold their condo to an older newlywed couple (late 20s to early 30s). Now if anyone has lived in between a first and a third-floor condo or apartment you will know that it is the WORST place to be if you expect silence. With kids or music, you will always have some noise that filters through the floor or ceiling.
I don’t know WHAT they were thinking or expecting when they moved in there. I was blissfully unaware that the condo had been sold until one day about a month later I brought home a powered subwoofer and hooked it up to my home theater sound system (around 6 PM). I promptly put on an action flick with some big explosions and sat down to enjoy the new and improved immersive sound.
After a little bit of gunfire and 2 explosions, I hear the doorbell. I get up and immediately hear the doorbell again. I walk the 5 ft to my front door and open it to see my entitled neighbor (I’ll call her Karen) standing on my doorstep.
Me: ‘Hi. Can I help you?’
Very agitated Karen: ‘My Husband and I are TRYING to enjoy a QUIET and peaceful dinner.
Can you PLEASE turn down whatever show you are watching? We can hear everything that’s going on!’
Me: ‘Oh, uh… sure. Sorry about that!’
She turned around and walked away. I closed the door, turned the subwoofer down a ways and the main volume down a bit, and thought nothing of it. Shortly after the next round of gunfire and explosions, I hear the doorbell and then some rapid-fire knocking at my door.
I paused my movie and then I opened the door to see Karen again.
Me: ‘Uh. Hi. What can I do for you?’
Karen: ‘We can STILL hear everything from your show! You need to turn it down now!’
At this point, I was a little fed up with her crap and decided to call her on it.
Me: ‘You say you can hear everything. Can you give me some of the last dialogue you heard?’
Karen: ‘I DON’T KNOW! I just know you are watching that show called (insert show name here).’ (She was TOTALLY wrong).
Me: ‘No. I am actually watching (insert movie name here) and here are the last 3 lines of dialogue.’ I gave her those lines.
Me: ‘It seems you can’t hear my movie as well as you are claiming.’
Karen (with blazing eyes and red in the face): ‘I DON’T CARE! It’s TOO LOUD! You need to turn it down!’
Me: ‘Actually noise ordinance says I DON’T have to turn it down until 10 PM.’
Karen: (getting huffy) ‘FINE! I guess my husband and I will have to go OUT to eat to get some peace and quiet!’
Me: (In my most cheerful voice and waving) ‘Have a good night!’
I then turned my subwoofer up a little and the main volume back up to its previous level and enjoyed the rest of my movie. (The neighbors did end up going out that night for dinner or whatever).
At our next HOA meeting, Karen stands up and complains long and loud about the noise.
How she can hear kids jumping on the carpeted floor (we had a 4-year-old) and crying (we had a new baby), and hear us walking up and down our hallway and hear our music and movies and tv shows and how the Hispanic neighbors on the first floor play their music on Saturday morning so loud they can’t sleep in and argue so loud they can hear every word, etc. This went on for 6 months.
EVERY TIME she complained the HOA told her ‘If it’s between the hours of 8 am-10 PM, we can do nothing. If it’s after 10 pm and before 8 am, you can call the police.’
Then the HOA would send out a letter by U.S. mail asking everyone to be cognizant of their neighbors and laying out the local city noise ordinance.
I finally stopped attending the HOA meetings after month 3 of the same bull crap. She never failed to visit at least once or twice in the week after these notices and twice she taped them to my door. I also learned during this time that they were members of our church and had actually been assigned to visit us each month (they never did).
Cue the revenge.
Around the 6-7 month mark of her constant complaints and harassment and even a couple of visits from some VERY apologetic police officers after 11 PM at night (they said they could hear NOTHING outside of my condo door), we decided to upgrade our flooring. We knew this would inflame our entitled neighbor, but we didn’t care as we were tired of the constant stream of complaints from them.
We chose to extend the entry tile all the way from the front door, down the long hallway to the master bedroom door and we wanted to tile the bathrooms as well. We also went with a light coffee-colored bamboo hardwood in our great room.
So, demolition first. We tore out the carpet and tack strips and pried the base-molding trim off the walls.
As I’m removing the last of the nails from the walls and subfloor (about noon on a Saturday), wouldn’t you know it? BAM! BAM! BAM! From the front door.
Me: ‘Yes?’
Karen: ‘Can you keep it down? I’m trying to have a Pampered Chef party!’
Me: ‘Sure.’
I promptly finished pulling or driving in nails and then proceeded to smash my hammer all over the subflooring like I was driving LOADS of new nails for the next hour and made sure to turn on my stereo to the local hard rock station and turn it up for the next 4 hours.
(FYI the 1st-floor neighbors were already blaring some GREAT Mariachi music. They did this every Saturday and Sunday as they cleaned their condo from top to bottom.)
We then rented a hardwood floor nailer that, in addition to compressor noise and to LOUDLY driving a nail into the flooring and subfloor, also had to be struck with a large dead blow hammer.
BAM! BAM! BAM!
It took us 2-3 days to install the coffee-colored bamboo hardwood flooring in the great room and we were SURE it was driving Karen absolutely BATTY. We ended up installing an AWESOME tile inlay down the hall, had tile running from the front door to the master bedroom door along the great room side of the divider wall, tile in the dining room, kitchen, and both bathrooms. We got the base molding on (more nail gun and compressor fun) and caulked. The new floors looked amazing and the bonus was, every time a hard shoe (like my daughter’s favorite Sunday shoes she wore EVERYWHERE, EVERY DAY) or high heel (My wife chose to learn how to do everything in 4-6 inch stilettos during this time) struck the floor it was like the impact echoed through our perfect floors.
All this was due to our neighbor complaining. It was also in preparation to sell our condo as we had grown out of it by this time. We sold it within 1 month of listing at $160,000. During closing, the real estate agent for the new owners told us that the floors absolutely sold this place. We also sold at the very top of the real estate boom right before the real estate market crashed.
We later learned from some of our neighbors that within 9 months of our selling our condo the 2nd floor entitled neighbors moved out and sold their condo for $30,000 less than we had (and took about an $8,000 LOSS) and sent a letter of complaint to the HOA stating their condo was unlivable because of the noise from our incredible floors.”
8. You Think We're Paying For That Bill? Not On My Parents' Watch
“This didn’t start out as a quest for vengeance.
We just wanted mail delivery to our house. Vengeance came as a by-product, but it was truly delightful nonetheless. This happened back in 1982, for the record.
My folks moved to a very rural area on a gravel road. No one had previously lived here, so it was a battle just getting mail delivery in the first place. My folks went several rounds with the local postmaster.
He was… somewhat enamored with his power and very much a ‘rules to the letter’ kind of guy. Every I must be dotted, every T crossed, and if there’s so much as a semicolon out of place you’ll have to start all over again. He seemed to have made it his mission to make getting mail delivery to a new address as difficult as humanly possible.
Ultimately, my folks managed to fill out the paperwork to his satisfaction and he begrudgingly allowed us to put up a box and receive mail delivery at our new home.
Dad was extremely careful in the placement of our box and making absolutely certain it was the exact height, precise placement from the road, etc. to avoid annoying our local postmaster any more than we already had.
There are (or at least were) very specific rules about rural mailboxes. Dad followed every single one. That first mailbox was perfect.
The man who drove the road grader was as annoyed as the local postmaster, as he now had a new driveway to accommodate. We suspect that’s why he had it out for our mailbox.
After the road grader had demolished three of our mailboxes, Dad got angry.
Previously, he’d used the most basic design, just a post in the ground with a box on top. Now, he was motivated.
Dad got ahold of a nine-foot-long section of metal pipe. It’s four inches in diameter (outer measurement) and has three-quarter-inch thick walls. I have no idea what this was originally intended for. But I know how Dad used it.
He dug a hole five and a half feet deep. He welded an upside-down tripod shape (think open umbrella) to the bottom of the pile and dropped it into the six-foot-wide hole. Each welded on ‘leg’ was about three feet of some kind of rebar and there were five such spokes. He then dropped some huge rocks on top of the tripod shape to hold it in place.
The empty spaces around the huge rocks were filled in with gravel and he dumped sand to fill in the air gaps. Then he filled the rest of the hole with dirt and mounted the mailbox on top of the post.
Three days after Dad installed the new mailbox, we heard the road grader coming down the road. Our house is a quarter-mile from the road, but we heard the loud clang from inside.
We also heard the cursing and swearing from inside. No one went down to look until they heard the road grader drive away. When they did, the box itself was slightly dented on one side, but it was still firmly upright and functional.
Three weeks later, we received a bill from the township for a bent grader blade. It was accompanied by a letter informing us that we had caused damage to city property because our mailbox was installed incorrectly.
It would need to be moved and we were liable for a bill of a couple of thousand dollars worth of repairs.
Here’s where it becomes pro-revenge instead of petty. Recall the fact that the local postmaster was annoyed with us over our battle to get mail delivery? Mom had made a point of each time we re-installed the mailbox, taking photographs down to the post office and having the local postmaster sign off approval of the height, placement, etc. She’d done the same with dad’s super-post and had documented, signed approval of the box the day before the road grader had bent his blade trying to demolish the box.
She submitted copies of the invoice for the grader blade (and the letter stating that the damage was our fault because our mailbox was incorrectly placed) to the post office. She also submitted copies of the official post office approval of the box to the township.
The jerk of a postmaster was also quite prideful and became furious that his authority was being called into question by some podunk township.
As far as he was concerned, the township wasn’t questioning my parents, they were stating that his judgment was wrong.
I don’t know what went down between the postmaster and the township, but we received a second letter from the post office, reiterating their approval of our mailbox. We also got a formal apology from the township and notice that the road grader’s contract had been terminated because he’d lied about damage to city property.
It was worded with a tone that said ‘please don’t sue us because a contracted employee damaged your property.’
For the record, that post Dad installed nearly forty years ago is still standing. We’ve replaced the box on top many times. That post, however, has now wrecked two cars and a truck in addition to that long-ago road grader.”
7. Treat Men Like Garbage? Good Luck Making All Those Sandwiches
“In my high school years, I had a typical high school job as a fast-food worker at Arby’s. Most of the job was very easy and surprisingly fun unless there was a real crappy manager that happened to be working that day.
Well, this is a story about revenge on a manager. Our store had a real gem female manager that was very out and open about hating men.
She was a lesbian (nothing wrong with that) and made it very clear to all males that they absolutely did not matter to her. She would give females extra breaks, allow them to be late, give them free food, etc. The males on the other hand were treated like actual piles of dog doo-doo. The manager would leave us alone during busy times and sit in her car.
She would take insane amounts of smoke breaks and whine and complain at us when she’d come back and things would be all backed up.
Eventually, several months of her garbage attitude and clear hatred got the best of me and one day I had enough and I hatched a plan. Arby’s, at that time, used to take ‘call ahead’ orders on large workplace or party orders.
People would call in and say they needed a certain amount of sandwiches for a luncheon. These call-in orders didn’t need to be verified in any way. Anyone could call these in. I heard a different manager one time explain to someone that if someone were to call in a $300 order and ditch the order, he’d probably get fired for allowing that much beef to get wasted (the roast beef product at Arby’s is treated like gold).
One day I knew this manager was working with me and I executed my plan. About halfway through the shift I used the bathroom and texted a friend that was willing to help me. I simply texted him, ‘IT’S GO TIME!’
My buddy then calls our store and puts in an order for 200 roast beef sandwiches. Which at that time would be about $300-350.
This didn’t affect me whatsoever because I was on drive-thru that day and didn’t need to make food. My manager immediately gets annoyed that she had to make all this food and starts the process. After about an hour she gets finished and goes on a tirade about how stupid everyone at that store is. Over the next 2 hours, it was next to impossible for me to hold in my laughter as I could tell she was growing very angry and worried that the order was never getting picked up.
I started noticing her making phone calls to other managers and upper management people about what the heck to do with 200 roast beef sandwiches. Eventually, it was time for me to clock out and go home… so I did.
Over the next several times I worked, I noticed I was not with this idiot manager anymore. In fact, I never saw her ever again.
She either quit… or was fired. I guess I’ll never know.”
6. My Ex Was Unfaithful, So I Made Sure She Failed All Her Classes
“So, I (19M) and my (now ex) partner (18F) have been together for more than a year. We were in the same class during middle school and high school now, a 2-year friendship eventually evolved into a relationship – y’all know how it is. We were happily together (at least so I thought) since December 2019. I thought everything was great between us the whole time.
Although recently (about March), I noticed her becoming very distant and barely writing first, dry texting, etc… I asked her multiple times if everything is ok and gave her some space, but it continued for the next few months. I was naturally very upset as I’ve been through tough times with her when she was going through depression and was having a really hard time at the end of 2020.
It suddenly felt like all this time was wasted and worth nothing. I, as a naive high schooler, truly believed that she was the one; it was serious after all. We matched perfectly together, and we spent about 3 full months crying together at night when she was going through a rough time. We had similar plans for the future, similar interests, and it seemed we were meant for each other.
My partner (let’s call her Caroline) was studying to become a lawyer, so she was mostly into humanities subjects. I on the other hand am studying bio-chem for medical school (I apologize if this is all confusing/different; we live in Europe). She was required to attend at least one science subject to graduate (physics/biology/chemistry/psychology). She always hated these subjects and just took them because they were necessary to graduate.
She ended up picking Chemistry as I was a natural and tutored 9th and 10th graders’ chemistry in my free time, and I always helped her with assignments, etc. It started as helping her before exams and assignments, so she could get a good pass grade, and after her rough time, warped into me writing half of the assignments for her.
In February, she started to do everything with me again though.
Anyways, enough backstory.
After noticing Caroline started to get distant, and she never properly answered my questions regarding her behavior, I wanted to see how far it would go. For one week, I didn’t invite her/call her/text her first, and in a total of one week, she called me three times… twice to ask me about her assignment, and once to tell me how she felt insecure and bad.
I’m not a jerk; I helped her out with her school stuff and comforted her when she felt down. Me being the naive ‘love is perfect’ lovebird I am, I chalked it up to her feeling depressed again but feeling embarrassed about it. I continued helping and comforting her for the next month until nothing changed, and she never opened up.
I was honestly doubting everything by then, ‘Is it me,’ ‘What am I doing wrong,’ etc…
I tried everything I could, eventually, I asked her friends if something happened, but they said she was the same as always towards them. I knew something was up, but I didn’t know what it was yet.
One day when she came over to my place (it was only the second time she did that in March; usually she came at least twice a week), we were sitting in my room and talking.
After she went to my kitchen to make herself something, I hear a notification from her phone. I’m usually not a snooper, but I had a quick look at her screen that lit up; I wouldn’t be able to read the message or who it was anyway. It was a Discord notification. I was very surprised. I knew for a fact that she didn’t have it a month ago.
Plus, she only plays Minecraft once in a while; she never uses Discord or anything. So the next morning, I did some snooping, and sure enough, I found a whole other Instagram account of hers where she branded herself to be an aesthetic gamer girl (not that there is anything wrong with that). She had never told me anything about this; I couldn’t find any of her friends following her on that account either.
Sure enough, she had her Discord username in her bio, and curious me decided it would be a good idea to create a throwaway account and try to text her to see what she was all about (before you complain to me, I know I was a b******e here).
After texting her on my new account, we talked for a bit until she became flirty (we played a few bedwars games together, once again on a throwaway account I bought for $1, haha), I kinda broke down and started questioning my sanity.
I had been with her all this time and through so many hard times, I couldn’t believe she would do this to me. After the sadness, came the anger, I wanted to know how far she’d betray me. I found it hard to believe that she would just casually flirt with guys like this. After setting up my first recon mission plan, I found out more about her until I found out about her supposed man.
At that point, I had a huge emotional breakdown, and I felt I’ve wasted so much time helping someone who would betray me like this. And from her stories, I would later find out they were sleeping with each other for a whole month by now (about when her behavior started to change). At this point, I started hatching my revenge plan.
I knew I would not let her off the hook this easily.
I spend two weeks pulling all-nighters making sure I had all my work done till the end of the year (until graduation).
I spend all my remaining time creating fake chemistry textbook pages, so I could make my revenge more believable. All of the information was wrong; I knew I had to give her a taste of her own medicine and betray her like she had me.
For the remaining 2 months of the school year, I fed her all this fake information and made sure she got all of her assignments wrong.
I knew she wouldn’t be able to tell anyone she was copying off me as our high school had a very, very, very strict rule for plagiarism; as much as three small attempts on small exams could get you expelled. So after letting the pot stew for those 2 painful, awful months I let the poop hit the fan.
As our teacher had to handle an outrageous amount of classes, she always checked our assignments late often by 2 or 3 months all at once.
I knew I could use this fact to my advantage. After she submitted her final assignments that were worth a huge percentage of our final graduation grade, I told her I knew that her shenanigans had been still ongoing for 3 ENTIRE months by now.
I told her how she hurt me and how it will come back to haunt her; I made sure of that.
She mostly brushed me off and acted as if I were the villain as I couldn’t just leave her and that she ‘was only friends with that guy.’ Although I told her something was going to happen, I never told her what it would be.
Trust me, she never saw it coming.
One week later, the end-of-year results rolled around. When we received our final grades, I was over the moon as I passed with flying colors, and on the other hand, her, not so much.
Due to her final assignments and all quarter 4 work equalling an F, she called me crying and asked for help.
She told me she wouldn’t be able to graduate if she wouldn’t receive at least a passing grade for this year. She told me our teacher gave her a final chance after telling her how disappointed she was. Caroline has two more months at school with one online lesson with our saint teacher.
Honestly, props go out to her.
To be honest, I felt really bad for her and her situation, knowing very well if she didn’t work her butt off in these two months, in a subject she hated, she would have to repeat the last year, without someone constantly helping her with her chem.
That compassion quickly went away, and I told her I would help her, but only if she apologized and paid me my regular tutoring fees. Caroline went full-on ballistic after that and screamed at me, how I could do this to her.
I hung up, and she called me a few seconds after, apologizing and agreeing to pay me for my help.
She now has two months of intense memorizing with her ex if she wants to graduate.”
5. Hide Millions Of Dollars From Your Client? Yeah, I Don't Think So
“This happened a while ago, but it’s still so fresh in my mind.
I left college with a business degree in one hand and no job in the other. And like so many colleges, the promises of alumni willing to give jobs to graduates could not have been further from the truth. So I had to seek out my start from the bottom. I found a good job in Operations at a company (I can’t say who without giving it away).
Had a great boss, who taught me pretty much everything I needed to know. Work was great and the money was good.
I need to explain how the business worked so you can understand how the plan worked. The corporate office was in California and we were… not. There are a lot of things that went on at this company, and I can’t get into all of them because it would just take away from the story but let’s just say they had a very Stratton Oakmont vibe when it came to sales.
I started out working in Operations with some of the smaller clients, but with some help from my boss, was able to ‘climb the ladder’ rather quickly to the point of being over all the Operations and order processing for the firm. We had a VERY LARGE CLIENT (90% of the company’s business). The way it worked was we had two sets of sales reps, TSRs and CSRs.
The TSRs were the heavy hitters who reached out to the other big businesses and tech firms to extend their warranties on a product. They made real good money. The CSRs were more of the ‘mom and pop’ crowd and the inbound sales call for those that wanted to extend their warranties. The reps were all given codes that associate the clients’ files with theirs, so if someone did a renewal automatically, they would get paid as it was their client.
Pretty sweet gig.
The client hired the firm to be the middleman for their B2B as they handled all of their everyday clients. For every $100 that came into our firm, 18% or $18 would be for the company and the rest would be sent to the clients with the warranties activated. Most of the clients paid by CC or PO with a wire transfer but there would also be a good amount of checks each week that would need to be processed.
A little while after I started, the client check portion was now going to be ‘overseen’ by one of the sales managers. Didn’t really phase me because I was working on the smaller accounts. Since we were a publicly-traded company, all the sales reps’ orders had to go to Operations to be fulfilled. They weren’t allowed to process them on their own.
This is when things started going downhill. My boss at the time was given temporary access to the financials as they were hiring a new CFO and he had a background in it. We went to lunch like we had done plenty of times before but he seemed different. When I asked him if something was wrong, he told me that something looked off with our biggest client for one of the accounts.
He wanted to make sure before he said anything to the higher-ups. While this was going on, I had been offered the chance to be our new compliance officer, which means I would need to make sure everything was on the up and up.
Soon after, I come in to find out that my boss was just terminated for a multitude of reasons all of which HAD to be untrue because he was a pretty well-liked guy not just with the company but with our client as well.
As I log into my terminal I see that before he left, he had given me admin access to his files. Here’s where things started to pop off.
Remember those checks that clients were sending in to renew their warranties? Well, we were cashing them, all right. Apparently, we just weren’t adding those renewals to their products in the system.
That would have triggered a payout to our Client who as you remember would be getting 82% of those funds. Instead, they were cashing the checks, keeping the funds, and using the interest in the accounts (Yes, in the mid-2000’s banks actually paid interest) to cover losses in their collections department. It was wild to see that this was happening, and something had to be done.
So I hatched a plan.
First things first—secure a new job because it won’t be a fun place to work after this. Done. My previous boss knew of other companies that would scoop me up. Put in my notice, and stated in my exit interview that I just couldn’t be a part of what was happening, even though HR was in on this.
I wanted it on the record. Next, get approval for overtime for all the operations crew to come in on a Saturday (and double pay them). They arrive early Saturday, obviously not too thrilled as to why they are there. But when I explain that if they complete the task, not only do they get their overtime, but they get nice bonuses, they were much happier.
They spent the entire day applying all of those checks, back years to the client accounts. We are talking millions of dollars. When all the sales reps arrived Monday they were very shocked. Not only did they meet their weekly goals before picking up the phones, but they also made their monthly and quarterly goals, too… 2 weeks into the new quarter.
Cheers! Partying! Yelling! Screaming! Celebrating! Except for sales management. They went from being really excited, to skeptical, to confused, to ‘oh shoot’ in about 2 hours. They realized where it must have come from. Because not only did the company hit all these sales, since it had been over a day, the client came into work Monday to see a very nice payday in their system as well.
And like anyone, would have questions, and say they are coming out to congratulate the team on such great numbers. So management starts scrambling because they can’t figure out how this happened and all under my boss’ old log in.
On my last day, I arrive in the lobby. I’ve got my box for the last of my things, etc. Guy walks up and is waiting for the elevator with me and we strike up a conversation.
He notices my box and jokes about getting fired, and I just tell him I had a great opportunity come up so I decided to leave ‘before things hit the fan’, and we laughed. Really nice, down-to-earth guy. He realizes we are getting off on the same floor. He asks if I work for X, and I say yes. He asks where, I tell him Operations and he reveals that he is the CEO of our client (Gulp!).
We go our separate ways.
Client shows up and there is a big party. Afterward, the client says that they would love to get a breakdown of where most of the sales came from so they can allocate more funds to that department. Management says sure, but it made up a lie about how they can’t share client payment info due to regulations, blah blah blah.
Cue my exit from the company. Two weeks go by and I get a phone call from a number I don’t recognize, so I let it go to VM. When I get off work I check it, to find out it was the CEO of the client where I used to work. He ‘has had something come up’ and would like to talk to me.
Of course, I’m nervous as heck, but I call him back and he picks up on the first ring and we get to chatting for a bit and he finally just asks me ‘Why did you leave?’
I tell him I had a great opportunity come up. He doesn’t buy it and says that apparently my comment about ‘things hitting the fan’ really stuck with him and he thinks something more is going on.
So after a little more prodding from him, I tell him, ‘Just look at Collections and that’s all I can say.’ He thanks me and I hang up.
Two days later, he pulled the plug on the account. Apparently, my old company tried to threaten him with a lawsuit for pulling the account three years early. He replied, ‘That’s fine because I’ll show the courts that I have the evidence that you committed fraud.’
Corporate came in and cleaned house. All of management was fired within the day. One month later, my friends and I had a very memorable trip to Vegas all courtesy of our old client.
And here is the best part. My old boss was an adopted kid, treated his adopted parents great, while their real kids didn’t, and when they passed, they left him all their money.
ALL. OF. IT.
This was about 2008. He was in a weird place because he loved his parents and was really close to them. He went to his church to pray for his parents and about what to do with this new landfall of riches. He loved working but didn’t need to anymore. He left the church and went to a bar (because I mean, who doesn’t).
He sits next to a guy who (and this is almost out of a movie) is a developer and has run out of money to finish his development because it’s 2008 and NO ONE is loaning funds. They get to talking and he thinks ‘Maybe this is a sign.’
I’ll speed this up here. He invests in the guy’s development by buying all the houses (dirt cheap at the time) and now lives off the residual income from all of them being rentals.
Life sucks because so many people do crappy things and get away with it that it’s great when good things happen to good people.”
4. My Employer Stole My Stuff So I Made Him Pay For It Big Time
“Some background first: Since I was a kid, I was fascinated by computers and electronics. During school, I had no social life. I just stayed at home and was learning stuff. I was going to a generic high school that should prepare you for University without any specialization, but there were few people with the same interests as me, and our IT teacher was really supportive of us.
When I finished high school, I already had a job as a programmer and had a few years of experience in the field. I also was experienced with electronics and even worked on a few contracts for the factory in town, involving creating machines for them (other engineers came up with an idea how the machine will work, my job was to put their motors, sensor, wire it up and write the program for the PLC to control it).
I moved to a big city and started university, so I lost my programming job in my city. I was going looking for a part-time job while living off my parents’ support. Things changed when my friend got an escape game voucher for 5 people for his birthday and took me with him. The escape game had cool ‘magic’ stuff, like you placed objects on a shelf and all pictures in the room fall off the walls, etc. While we were there to solve puzzles, I was mostly interested in these ‘magic’ things, making theories about how they made them and thinking about how I would do it.
When the game was over, I saw for a moment their technical room, and at this point, I was like ‘I want to work here.’
I sent them my CV and as I was overqualified for this job, I was accepted after the first interview. I was young, naïve, and stupid, so they just used me. My hourly rate was the after-tax equivalent of $8.50 (to put it in comparison, a cashier at a big store here makes roughly $6.50 + benefits).
The first few months were awesome. I was paid for doing my hobby and the owner loved me, as his previous tech guy (referred to as Tech Jerk from now on) was, compared to me, just dumb (I’m not bragging. I swear!) He did not come up with almost any original design, he just found something on the internet and was skilled enough to read the schematics and somewhat copy it.
But he had big gaps in his knowledge (like once he told me that I can’t build a battery-operated circuit that will be powered while the battery is charging, as this would cause the battery to explode. When I told them about charging regulators and how it’s not an issue with his phone or laptop, he just told me I was hired to help him and to screw off).
Over time, Tech Jerk started to realize that I’m just smarter than him and his ego could not handle it, so he decided his only mission from now on is to make my life horrible. For example, the owner tasked me with replicating a device that they already have in one game, as he wanted to put it into another one.
I spent weeks just messaging Tech Jerk asking him for the schematics and source code, calling him, and he just never replied. Then I decided to mess with him. I came up with an improved design and built it. When I was showing it at the next meeting to the owner (who was very happy with it), Tech Jerk just yelled at me for not using his design and wasting time on reinventing the wheel.
After some time, the owner realized what was going on and hired another tech guy (Tech Senior from now on), but he cannot fire Tech Jerk, as he had the all-important source codes and designs on his laptop, and because of a bad contract, it was not the property of the escape game company. (Little did we know, that in the future, he would not hand over most of the designs and codes and we would end up rewriting that from scratch).
The company was also franchising. We just took a game we already had running, made an exact copy, and installed it in another location. We then provided support, while they were paying us license fees, usually a small percentage of their profits. The owner was a typical manager, who thought a woman can deliver a baby in a month. And it showed as the company grew.
Eventually, Tech Senior was made my boss as he had much more experience in electronics, while I was more oriented on programming and on-site support for game masters if something broke. We didn’t give a crap about Tech Jerk, as at this point, he just showed up once a month, did almost no work, criticized all everything we did and had worked on, and went home.
Things were going really well, so we hired a few electronics students to help us. The building department, which was making props (like special wooden tables that we could hide our magic into) also grew.
Things were looking really good, until one meeting about a new franchise client. The owner told us what he needs, we (tech guys) talked to props guys, went over all the requirements, and told him we need 10 weeks for it (well, 8, but we always accounted for things going sideways, as this date will be on the contract).
Usual stuff in a healthy company. Next week, next meeting. He told us that the client does not want to wait and he put 5 weeks in the contract. His reasoning was we are doing the same stuff as before and now have more people, so it will go faster.
We worked hard. Like really hard. There were weeks when I just went home for 8 hours to take a shower and sleep for a bit, then went back to the workshop to work on stuff.
It was hard, but we managed to finish in time, and I got some sweet overtime pay. But this was a mistake. Now we showed him that what he wants is possible. So the next contract went over the exact same deadline crap. More overtime. I remember having almost no social life, just working the whole week, sometimes sleeping at the workshop, and being stressed as heck.
Then, every Friday I just went to a pub with a few friends, totally got myself wasted to relieve the stress, and slept through the whole weekend. Then comes Monday and we start over. Eventually, I went from ‘I love this job’ to ‘I don’t give a crap,’ and I wasn’t the only one. Our performance dropped and we started missing deadlines.
Did the owner account for it in the contracts? No!
‘Repetition makes perfection, this time you can do it faster’ was his reasoning. And he just kept signing more and more contracts, dumping the stuff on us.
I remember the one meeting when he asked us about the status of project D, as the deadline was next week. Well, we did not even start working on this, as we had our hands full with project C, which was started later because we did not finish projects A and B in time.
This is how far it went. Deposits from new contracts were used to pay fines for old contracts. At this meeting, I realized I just had enough.
Of course, our job was not only franchising. We had our own games that needed to be maintained and we were doing that all the time alongside that franchising nightmare. What was the biggest issue with all games was the control software.
It was a crapload of simple-purpose scripts driving all the Raspberry Pi’s and Arduino’s in the game, but it had one UI presented to the game master so he could control all the props in-game, override them, etc. At least in theory. But oh boy, it was extremely buggy! Sometimes not working at all, sometimes you wanted to shine a light on an object to give the players a hint but instead, it opened doors to the next level, etc. It was not universal, simple requests required massive changes, and lots of overrides were not implemented correctly.
One day, the owner finally agreed to my demands and allowed me to rewrite all of that. It took me a few months, but I created a universal engine that could handle all the crap game designers were asking us to do, was easy to expand, had error protection and recovery tasks (If one prop stopped responding, you just opened the debug page and clicked restart.
This was a game-changer, as previously the game master had to switch off the power, and sometimes that was not possible during the game). My biggest achievement was I created an easy scripting language that was used to describe the game workflow. The game master now had a crapload of (working) controls and an option to interrupt predefined tasks and change the flow, but that barely happened, as the game was now almost automatic and he was there just to give hints.
I was not comfortable running this software on the Raspberry Pi that was there for the previous control, and I wanted better hardware for that. My request was always denied by the owner, but the games manager wanted the new software working as soon as possible (to this point, we were always just testing it from my laptop), so I decided to lend them a few PCs.
(Some time ago, friend from a big corporate pulled a crapload of Dell OptiPlex workstations from e-scrap. They were working fine, had Intel i5 CPU, 8 gigs of RAM, decent onboard graphics, DisplayPort, USB 3.0, fully working computer. You could buy them refurbished for about $200. The company just had no use for them and nobody wanted to go over selling them, so they just dumped them.
I had a stack of 20 of them at home, just collecting dust). I took a few of them to my work, and the boss agreed we will settle it later, so I just emailed him a list of all of my HW that was used in the games (5 PCs, some Wi-Fi routers, old tables, some monitors and other stuff I had collected mostly from e-waste, fixed it, and had no use for it).
Of course, I did not tell them I got that for free and was expecting them to pay me for it.
Fast forward, I was fed up with the franchising deadlines and got a few job offers that made me realize my real price and that I was a young kid in his 20s who had a bad childhood, working for almost nothing.
But I was waiting. In the next month, my software was deployed in the remaining games. Tech Jerk was out of the picture for a few months now, while Tech Senior had some programming knowledge and was able to use my scripting language, but had very little understanding about the insides of the complex engine I wrote, which was now being developed for over a year.
I had results, I was important and I had demands. I scheduled a meeting with the owner, where I wanted to present the list of all the wrong things and what I want to do about it.
It all came to a single argument: I’m not happy here but you need me, so you will fix these issues and give me a raise, or I’m leaving.
And I will stand my ground. Recruiter from a big IT company I wanted to work for messaged me on LinkedIn a few weeks prior and I had already gone on the interview, so I had an escape plan prepared. The future looked bright and I was ready to make it happen.
The day of the meeting came up. I was in a good mood until there was a nasty accident in the workshop (I don’t want to post any details, as this would identify me in a second, but this event is important).
I, being the youngest one here, not even responsible for the mess, was tasked with cleaning it up. I had an argument with the workshop manager about me being a programmer and not a radioactive waste cleaning lady, but in the end, I just broke and started cleaning. Halfway through it, almost vomiting from the smell, I just snapped. None of this would happen in a decent IT company.
I went to my office, packed my stuff, and just sat there just playing games, waiting for the owner. When he showed up, I told him about all the issues, and he argued at some, but when we got to the end, I just told him that today was the last straw and that I’m leaving right now. I was employed as an independent contractor so they could save some funds on taxes and my contract had nothing about my time there.
I just told him that I will send him a download link for all the files I have (as the contract stated that they are owned by the company). He begged me to stay for one more month, as they were behind on many deadlines. I just said I will think about it and left. On my way home, I called the recruiter and told him I accept the job and can start next month.
Next day, I just made a big archive of about 150GB of files, backups, etc. that I had, uploaded it to my server, and emailed the link to the owner and tech senior. I then spent the next two weeks in bed, watching Netflix and ignoring calls. For the last week, I showed up to help clear up some things, handed over my projects, asked about the computers and other stuff I lent them (he told me they will pay for it), and then left. I was lucky as heck.
A month later due to recent events, they were forced to close all games by the government, making their income go almost zero overnight. This I believe was the reason they never paid me for my stuff, even though I repeatedly asked until I got tired of it.
Time went by, until a few weeks ago when I saw the tech senior was looking for a new job.
I messaged him and we talked. He told me that they survived by doing private events for companies until they could open again a month ago. All the other tech guys except him were let go, but he managed. Until he got into an argument with the owner. He did not tell me many details, be it the owner wanted something either impossible or expensive as heck.
When he presented a cheap alternative, the owner just snapped and fired him on the spot. He tried to reason with him about not firing him until he can teach his successor (and find a new job in the meantime), but he was fired on the spot.
A week later, I got a call from the owner. He hired the younger tech guys he fired in 2020 and wanted ME to come and answer their questions, mostly about the engine I wrote.
I agreed but as we were planning the meeting, I was suspecting he just wants me to do it for free. When I brought up the hourly rate, he just told me we will solve that later, hung up, and never called again. The day of the meeting came, I was waiting in my car outside the workshop, waiting if he will call, where am I, but he did not.
A few days later, I parked next to the warehouse where all the games were held, with a Yagi antenna in my car. Surprise surprise, the Wi-Fi routers I lent them were still there, with the password unchanged. I connected to the Wi-Fi and poked around the network. All the PCs that I lent them to run the software on were still there, still running the Linux server I installed there, and looking at the logs, they were still used to control the games.
I wrote a script that runs on boot, rolls a dice, and then deleted the whole drive. I was connected to MY Wi-Fi router, making changes to MY computer, formatting MY drives. Then I drove away.
A few days ago, I got a call. Apparently, when the Monday shift came in, the control system for one of the games was not responding, the browser was showing a timeout.
They decided to reset power for the whole rack where all the PCs were multiple times, hoping it would start up because turning it off and on again always works. When they decided to stop trying, they found out that all 8 games were dead. The ‘new’ old tech guys figured out that the drives probably died, but had no knowledge about my system, so they could not set it up.
When I asked about Tech Senior, the owner made some excuse about him quitting and not wanting to work for them anymore.
I told him I was happy to help. In the end, this used to be my dream job. But I now work for a big company, I don’t have much time and it’s expensive. I can come over to set it up, but my hourly rate now is $150.
He talked me down to $100 (which was still about twice as much as I make now).
When I arrived, I checked the PCs, pulled out the email I sent him a year ago, and told him that these serial numbers match these on the labels, and told him I’m happy to find my lost stuff, took the first PC and took it to my car.
We had an argument, I told him that I’m either taking all that stuff, or he is paying me something over $2400. He wanted to call the police, but I had the proof this equipment was mine. He eventually agreed, and I got to work. All my software was still in the Bitbucket, even with the few modifications tech senior managed to make, alongside all the config files and scripts with the game workflow that tech senior was periodically modifying and backing up, so it was a pretty easy job.
I got it all working and then stayed for a few more hours, explaining some stuff to the tech guys. I printed the invoice and left. Tired, but satisfied.
Yesterday, a nice sum of about $3600 landed in my bank account. From what they told me, all 8 games were dead for 3 days. Each game costs between $80 and $120, takes one hour to finish and half an hour is needed for preparation, so there are 12 slots every day, averaging $9600 income per day when fully booked (this is of course just the income, profit after paying all the rent, wages, electricity, consumables used in games, etc. is much lower, but I don’t know how much).
Before 2020, about 80% of slots were booked during the week and 100% during weekends.
I just like to think I made him lose 23 thousand (not counting the angry customers who were forced to reschedule) dollars just because he was a jerk. If he paid me for my stuff or did not fire his only tech guy, none of this would have happened.”
3. We're Just Cattle To You? I'll Prove You Wrong
“This story goes back pretty much 20 years now.
To set the scene, I was working for a then cable tv company. The call center I was working at had been filled with guys poached from dialup support companies countrywide to support this new superfast broadband that was being trialed in-country for the 1st time (500k connections). I say this because that meant our call center at the time was full of some of the best support engineers anywhere in the country.
Some of the most intelligent people I have ever known.
Anyway, after about a year there, 4 of us were asked to look into complaints sent to the Managing Director (Hereafter known as Big Boss) about the service. Mostly, these were the original-brand Karens of the day, but occasionally, the customer complaining was someone rather important and they needed the special touch so to speak.
Turns out the 4 of us had quite different skills but complimented each other perfectly and before long, we were firm friends with Big Boss’s personal assistant at head office and had very good reputations to boot after some devilishly difficult issues (oh yeah, this is before Google, so being good meant you knew your stuff, not just how to look it up.) It was a great place to work.
Turnover was practically zero (the fact all our staff was experienced before getting to us meant we knew what we were getting into).
Then came the new director. Hereafter referred to as Jerk. Jerk had come from another call center in the company. A customer services call center. He was also completely inept technically. Seriously, this guy once told me that directors don’t use Excel and only Word so I needed to copy all the spreadsheets into Word so he could modify the content and pass off his bull crap figures showing all was well.
He didn’t understand how Excel worked as it transpired.
Anyway, all was not well. In the short time he’d been there, he had alienated most of the best staff. He tried to turn the staff into script monkeys as he wanted every case fixed in x minutes. We were rebuilding TCP/IP stacks, hacking registries, and we even talked a few people through win98 rebuilds.
You ever tried to talk your grandma through changing a ring tone over the phone? Now try imagining getting grandma to rebuild windows after Macintosh and Symantec competed to see which could screw up her machine faster. Now try doing it in 10 minutes, or get hauled into Jerk’s office to be screamed at for ‘messing up his figures’. Morale was utterly obliterated and we started losing good people.
Head office knew something was wrong so sent word down the line Big Boss who was coming for a meet and greet. That line went through Jerk, so of course, on that day, some of the more vocal amongst us were rota’d off. Those selected to meet the Big Boss were—I think the nice word is sycophants—or people who were instructed what to say and followed out of fear.
Upshot, Big Boss went away thinking all was well, and there must be some other reason for the issues on site. My breakpoint came when my team was given an impossible task. By this point, I’d already handed in my 30 days (Was about to become a dad so needed to get a proper career going). He wanted a flow diagram of every possible fault we were dealing with and its solution.
And he wanted it all on a single piece of A3 paper. We objected, he demanded, we failed. We got reamed. Our manager got reamed, and let me tell you, she defended the heck out of us. We tried in vain to explain the nature of the calls, to explain that the reason we paid these very clever people to do this job was because they were essentially playing tech support to a nation of people who had turned a computer on for the 1st time ever today, did something they didn’t know was stupid and broke their machine.
That means their internet didn’t work, and hence… our problem.
His response, at a volume comparable with a tornado jet taking off at full burner, ‘I don’t give a crap. Let me get this through your stupid heads. You are nothing and I am a director and when I tell you to do something, you do it or I will fire every single one of you.
I can replace any one of you any time I want because you are nothing but cattle, now get the heck out of my office.’
I went home livid. My significant other at the time (pregnant with our 1st) worked in the same office so while I was getting out, she would have to continue to deal with Jerk.
Knowing how he intended to treat my friends and family, I needed to do something. I didn’t have a clue what I could do. Friday, I go into work, ostensibly to say my goodbyes and do an exit interview, paperwork, and such. One of those goodbyes was a phone call to Big Boss’s PA. Me saying goodbye was a shock because I’d been expressly forbidden to tell them over the previous month by… you guessed it, Jerk.
She wanted to know why I was leaving. I told her.
She asked me if I minded her telling Big Boss what I had said. I’ll be honest, I didn’t seriously believe anything would come of it, but I thought what the heck. I said sure.
She replied, ‘I’ll get back to you soon’ and she’s gone.
20 minutes later, she calls me and says Big Boss wants to talk to me so can he have my personal mobile number. I give it, and sure enough, minutes later the big man himself calls. The next 30 minutes are spent detailing why I was leaving. Why we had lost nearly 100 people already and had 18 resignations that week alone.
‘Why didn’t I hear about this when I was there the other week?’ So I related the little personnel shuffle and the threats.
This was my moment.
Me: ‘Look Big Boss, I get all you have is my word and I could be just some disgruntled idiot but my friends and family are going to have to work here after I’ve gone. And by family I mean my pregnant partner so I have to do something. If you want to find out the truth, here is what you do: Turn up on-site unannounced for a day.
Send out your own email to the site as soon as you arrive giving no time for Jerk and his cronies to get to anyone. Tell them to come to you if they have any concerns. Here is a list of people that should corroborate much of what I’ve said, the rest, it’s up to them if they want to do something.
Then decide if I’m a moron.’
After a bit more chatting, the call ended and I went back to say goodbye to everyone. I told a few people including my manager what I’d done, and told them if Big Boss did turn up, to get in there and tell him what’s going on. Then I bid them all farewell and said I would see them all at the mass leaving-do at the end of the month.
I’m at my new job the Tuesday after and I get a text from my girl. ‘Holy crap, Big Boss’s here unannounced!’
More texts from other ex-colleagues saying pretty much the same thing. From what I gathered afterward, Big Boss did exactly what I suggested, and it played out pretty much as I thought it might. There was a queue.
A long one. That night, Jerk was summoned to Big Boss’s impromptu office and after that meeting, he went home. He was never seen again. I did get a call from Big Boss. He can’t discuss details but, I’ll be very pleased to know I’m not a moron. Leaving-do was pretty cool too. I think. On entry, I was told I wouldn’t be paying for a single drink that night.
From there my memory goes from fuzzy to total blank.
The hangover the next 2 days was brutal, but totally worth it.”
2. Our Builder Refused To Comply, So I Made My Own Version Of His Website
“Many years ago, my (now ex) wife and I decided to upgrade from the small single-story home we were in, and find something with more space for us to spread out. We had her late teen son living with us, our three Rottweilers, plus I needed a dedicated study for my work (I’m in technology, and often worked from home).
After months of searching, we found our dream home. Beautiful, two-story, four-bedroom plus study, with huge amounts of space everywhere. Seriously huge. The laundry was bigger than my bedroom growing up.
The quality of everything was amazing – square-set walls (no cornices), polished Tassie oak flooring, floor to (high) ceiling windows in the living areas, and two walls comprising commercial-grade bistro doors that opened up an entire corner of the house onto the covered, outdoor entertaining area.
The standard of the build was no surprise – this was a display home up until it landed on the market. We were to be the first people to live in it.
I’m going to gloss over months of details and pain, but we had problems with the place from day two. Literally.
On night two, the plumbing under the en-suite shower gave out and leaked through the kitchen ceiling underneath it.
A couple of weeks later during a monster storm, three of the light fixtures upstairs started leaking water. A month later, we noticed rust starting to show through the rendering on the corners of the house. There were heaps of smallish, easy-to-fix problems, but the kicker was that the balcony adjoining the master bedroom, at the front of the house, actually started to sag down.
To the point that it was unsafe to go out there, due to the risk of collapse.
We were most amenable and nice through most of this. The vendor (also the builder, of course) was a small business, and we had no interest in making his life any more difficult than it already was for a small business owner. But, conversely, we were pouring a lot of our hard-earned income into the mortgage, and we wanted what we paid for.
But, for his reasons, the builder just kept making it difficult to get things fixed. There was a seemingly endless list of excuses for not turning up at agreed times; a non-stop torrent of blame directed at his sub-contractors; and just plain jerk behavior, like dodging our calls and not responding to our emails.
Of course, we started proceedings with our state’s consumer affairs department.
After all, we were entitled to a statutory seven-year warranty on a new home. But that process takes time, Time throughout which we were forced to endure issues like water leaks, a dangerous balcony we couldn’t use, and a whole host of other issues that meant we weren’t enjoying our home.
There shouldn’t have been any dispute about his responsibility to fix these problems – he just chose to be a jerk about it, and make us go through the government process, presumably thinking we would give up before he was forced to do anything.
At around the same time, we started getting the occasional knock at the door, only to open it and find a couple standing there with a brochure in their hands, and our house pictured on the front. The first few of these conversations ended with us politely explaining that this was no longer a display house – it was our home.
Without exception, they all apologized profusely and went away.
After a month or so of this, I started to wonder: how was it that people still thought our house was a display home? I went looking, and discovered that the builder’s website STILL had our address listed for display!
Despite repeated calls and emails, they steadfastly refused to remove our address from their website.
This irritated me – these people would often come knocking on weekends, because that’s when people go house shopping, right? But our pleas for the builder to update his site were simply ignored.
Enough was enough. An idea had formed. Did I mention I was in technology?
The first thing I did was wash out their website, and set about the task of creating my version of it, using their exact look and feel.
I highlighted every single problem we’d found with the place. Every glamour shot was replaced with shots of the same feature but showed the problems we had (rust showing through the rendering, water leaking from the light fixtures, close-ups of the sagging balcony, etc). You get the idea.
By the time I was done, I had what I felt was the perfect alternate version of their site.
One that highlighted every single defect in the home, as well as calling out all the problems we had in dealing with the builder.
I even included ‘testimonials’ that were simply copies of the nonsense emails and texts we received from the builder, avoiding his responsibilities and making lame excuses for not fixing our problems. The headline ‘testimonial’ was the one where he responded with ‘So just don’t go out onto the balcony’ when I pointed out the clear safety risk it represented.
After getting a lawyer friend to check through each page to make sure I wasn’t opening myself up to some form of legal action (he helped me change a few sections, chuckling the whole time), I put the site up for hosting on some cheap and cheerful hosting provider Google told me about (off-shore, of course). I also registered a close-but-not-close-enough-to-be-sued domain name to reach it.
The next step was to create some actual collateral for the execution of my plan. After all, there was no point going to all this effort unless I was actually able to direct people to the ‘builder’s website’. So, I took a copy of the brochure for our house (that the builder had conveniently left a few of behind in one of the kitchen drawers) and set about creating my version of it.
Similar principles as the website – no contact information, except the website address. My website address.
By this time, I’d made good friends with a few of my neighbors, and we’d taken to sharing a beer or two most nights on our front lawns. And wouldn’t you know it? One of them was a man***r for a local print shop!
Given they already knew what we’d been through with the builder, he took very little convincing to print off a run of my brochure for me, on beautiful paper stock, nice and glossy. Professional. I think it cost me half a dozen drinks.
Then came the final step in my plan. I waited. I waited for eager couples to turn up on my doorstep, eyes wide open in wonder at the beauty of the home they were going to pay the builder for their very own copy of.
For the next six months or so, whenever one of these couples would turn up and knock on my door and explain their purpose, I’d let them know that this model home was selling so quickly, that the builder had asked if I could hand out his updated brochure, so potential buyers could go online and look up whatever the current display home address was.
I don’t know how many brochures I handed out – of the 100 my neighbor printed for me, I probably only had two or three dozen left, but I know I also handed a bunch out to mates so they could have a laugh. I’d estimate close to 40 prospective buyers got a copy of my brochure. And I reckon at least 15-20 of those came back to thank me for warning them.
A few of them had already signed conditional contracts and managed to get out of them one way or another.
I don’t know what happened to that builder in the end. I split up with the missus not too long after and, she sold the place not too long after that.
At the time of writing this, the builder’s website is gone.
The domain still appears to be registered in the company’s name, and their state business registration still appears to be active. As best I can tell, he’s no longer at the last known address for the company, and I can’t find any mention of the company online that isn’t at least six years old.
Hopefully, the idiot is out of business now, and hopefully the few dozen people I helped sidestep the pain of dealing with him were the beginning of the end of his trashy little enterprise.”
1. Steal My Gourmet Lunches? I'll Sneak A Ploy To Get You Caught
“Nobody likes a lunch thief, and I had one of the most aggressive at my office.
There were rumors for a few months leading up to the inciting incident of someone going around and taking peoples’ lunches. Just about every day someone different would complain that their lunch was missing.
It even happened to me once or twice, but I figured hey, it’s a big office, a few people are probably just careless and grab the wrong lunch and are too embarrassed to bring it back or someone else packs their lunch and they don’t know what’s in there so it’s not obvious they have the wrong one, or whatever.
Most people just brought brown bags with their names on them anyways or identical Rubbermaid Tupperware with a little piece of labeled tape on the side. It was easy enough to mix up.
I had accidentally grabbed a wrong lunch once or twice, but I’d noticed before I got it open. I thought I was just more careful, or even just not as busy, as some other people in the building.
However, other people weren’t as forgiving, and a quorum made complaints to HR. They were blown off. Personally, at the time, I thought it was all much ado about nothing.
But then it began. My wife enrolled in a French cooking class online and just about every day I was bringing fancy gourmand leftovers in for lunch. You’d think I was picking up a to-go bag from a Michelin starred bistro on the way in each morning, she really threw herself into the coursework.
There were no problems for about two weeks, maybe three, until one day my lunch went missing. Considering what delicacies I had to look forward to I was pretty miffed, but I did a once over around the break room and didn’t see anyone eating my lunch so figured someone grabbed my bag by accident earlier, saw how good things looked, and—realizing it was their lucky day—didn’t bring it back to the fridge.
I wrote the mysterious stranger off as a jerk but accepted the loss and looked forward to dinner that night instead.
The next day I write my name on my lunch in extra bold lettering, jam the bag into the back of the fridge, and feel peace of mind. I get there come break time, nope, it’s gone.
I was pretty upset, but I figured it was a stroke of bad luck and left it at that.
What else could I do?
However, on the third day, out of an abundance of caution, I kept my lunch at my desk. A pain, because I had to eat it fairly early in the day to avoid spoilage, but at least I’d know where it was.
I got up to take care of some business down the hall and when I came back… yep, my lunch was gone.
Unfortunately, that didn’t help me narrow it down much at all because my desk is centrally located so everyone’s constantly passing by.
At that point, there was no possibility of the theft being arbitrary, so I approached HR and filed a complaint. Their response, practically verbatim, was, ‘Employees’ lunches are their personal property and the company is not responsible for lost or stolen personal items.’
The following day my wife packed a cream-based soup that really had to be refrigerated. I was passing by the break room to check on my lunch practically every five minutes. Somehow it still managed to disappear.
I was irate at this point and returned to HR and really blew my top. The best they could do was send a memo around about remembering to check the name on your lunch when you remove it from the fridge, but they made very clear that it was a routine memo and in no way related to my complaints, which were not their jurisdiction, so not an admission of responsibility, because my lunch was my own personal problem.
The only suitable alternative to packing a lunch available in the building are these wretched shrink-wrapped ham and cheese sandwiches from a vending machine.
They’ve been marinating in the heat for God knows how long and the bread is as stale as a corkboard and the meat is rancid and there’s gluey mayo smushed into the center. It’s a relic of the old office tenants I’m pretty sure.
I vented daily to my wife but her only idea was to start bringing a regular sandwich and apple again to dissuade the thief and get him to move on to other lunches.
So, determined to prevent this low-life scum from downgrading the quality of my lunch, I hatched an elaborate plan… Then 2020 hit and I forgot all about this whole saga.
I worked remotely for months and months. Then we returned, and after all that had happened globally, this was the last thing on my mind.
But I got to the break room the first day back, frustrated from having to wear a button-up and tie after months of working in pajamas, sore from my desk chair, and exhausted from small talk, only to find… my lunch was gone.
This was a particularly sore point because my wife and I divorced between my last lunch and work and the present one. So I did not appreciate being reminded of any past threads involving her.
I pretty much flew into a rage at that point. Especially seeing that stupid worthless memo about checking the lunch bag names posted in the break room, feeling so helpless and so hungry and so alone as it was me and my lunch against the world.
I stormed out and was determined to return the next day with a plan.
So, I came in the following day… with an empty lunch bag.
And I checked closely to be sure no one was watching and… I switched the contents of the HR person’s lunch bag into my bag. So now their lunch appeared to be my lunch.
They’d packed a regular brown bag, so I just discarded that, and I left, and I waited. I knew this was a pretty big gamble because it was contingent on the theory that the thief was avoiding me while having lunch, but not wary of anyone else. So would eat out in the open if there were no risk of bumping into me.
So I made a big show of going around the office announcing that I was headed out for a meeting and I wouldn’t be back until at least 3:00 pm.
I even went to the trouble of moving my car out of the lot to a space two streets over. Where I then sat in my car and worked remotely for several hours before sneaking into the building up the back stairway.
I then sat in the stairwell just outside the break room, where you can hear chatter can’t be seen, and after about 20-30 minutes of waiting, I heard it.
The sweetest sound I’ll ever hear in the office.
(HR) ‘What the heck Kyle, that’s my lunch.’
(Lunch thief!!) ‘Nah, it’s not your name on the bag.’
(HR) Give me that!
I’m assuming he grabs the bag and sees my name.
(HR) Yeah, let’s head to my office for a chat.
The HR rep later called me in as well and said they were ‘aware of my break room hijinks,’ but it was obvious that the point still came across loud and clear.
They warned me that it was a violation of policy to move another employee’s lunch—it took every ounce of self-control for me to keep from retorting ‘I thought our lunches were our personal property and the company was not responsible for them being lost or stolen?’
They informed me they’d located the thief and things would be handled accordingly.
But better than whatever write-up they might be able to issue Kyle, his reveal as the lunch thief occurred in front of the whole break room. So word quickly spread as to who had been stealing everyone’s lunches earlier last year and he is now the office pariah.
He was in line for a promotion. The promotion is indefinitely off the table.
And I also earned brownie points for exposing him, though more than I’m satisfied with are being attributed to HR.
At the end of the day though, I didn’t do this for this credit, or even the sweet sweet sweet revenge. I did it to get my lunches back.”
