People Tell Us About Their Nutty Revenge Stories
12. Refuse To Pay Me? I'll Start A Company Just To Put You Out Of Business
“The year was 2008, and I was 9 years into operating a landscape company. I had done moderately well for myself being able to purchase a home, pay off student loans, and start a family. I employed 4 people during the what I call work season, which for us is March through November.
December through February, we lay off our workers and go on hiatus for the most part. Side note, our company focused mainly on maintenance, and in the Pacific North West once all the leaves are picked up from the autumn, there really isn’t much maintenance to be done.
I had that year developed a relationship with a home builder who hired me to care for his personal home and very much liked our work. He asked us to start bidding on installing the landscapes to the homes he built. Sounds easy right? Well remember, we focused mainly on maintenance, so my crew didn’t have a ton of experience in the install detail of landscape, and the homes this guy built were not “track homes” or your cookie-cutter type neighbors you find in the suburbs.
No, a small home for him was 3,500 sq ft on a 25k sq ft lot, and an average size he developed was 8,500 to 10k sq ft home with all the bells and whistles. He was more generous in his landscape budgets than many of the contractors I’d met, and we were off to what I had hoped would be a great partnership.
We finished the first 4 projects he handed us, and it was now the beginning of December when my maintenance side of things drops off. This home builder came to me and asked if I would like to keep my maintenance crew working for the winter working for him.
I knew his next home project wasn’t set to break ground till late January, so I asked what he had in mind. He told me that he and his son had been experimenting with spray foam insulation in their homes and had decided to invest in purchasing equipment to start their own company.
To purchase the equipment on this level was about 100k. I said I would talk to the crew and get back to him.
The next week, we signed a contract to work with him for three months at a specified pay rate for the five of us.
He was confident he had enough work to keep us busy for the next three months. First job was insulating this incredible house for this plastic surgeon who spared no expense for the gadgets and materials that he put into his home. Next was Government buildings on Fort Lewis.
Next was new apartment complexes. Etc., etc.
Now, this builder who I was friends with was not my day-to-day boss while insulating; it was his son, who is younger than me and a bit of a jerk. But we got along fine, and all seemed well.
The father owned the insulation company but had very little to do with it on a day-to-day basis. Hardly saw him for three months. Now, being a contractor myself, I was used to not getting paychecks every two weeks like most working folks. I would get paid once a month from my maintenance accounts for the previous month of service, and it didn’t all come in at once.
“Sometimes people forget to pay on time.” My crew, though, was used to getting paid in a timely manner. And after the first month of work and receiving no check from my new boss, I inquired when to expect a check. He assured me that once the checks started rolling in, we would see our earnings – I totally get how that works, especially for a new company trying to get off the ground.
So I paid my guys to keep the peace on my end, and my boss and I worked out an agreement that I would keep track of everything paid and that he would cut me a check once he was able to. I also had an outstanding landscape invoice out with the father of over 10k that I wasn’t really worried about because he was not always super quick about payment- not that I had to hound him about it, but you understand.
Now we are at the end of February of 2009, and it was time to gear up for the new season of landscape maintenance and put my crew back to work outside. Still no payment from insulation or the last landscape project. Things got ugly real fast as I started daily phone calls to the son now that we didn’t see each other as often.
I called the father who more or less ignored me. The son stopped answering my calls/texts, etc. The father never had a straight answer for me.
Now mid-April of 2009. Most communication has stopped on their end. I filed a contractor’s lien on the landscape project to be paid out before the house sold.
Which prompted a call from the father to invite me to his home for lunch and talk. I accepted thinking he was going to offer me a deal of some kind, based on my past history with him. He basically told me that he had been over the years screwed out of profit by different people and that it was something that I was going to have to learn to live with.
My response was, “I’ve been screwed out of profit that people owe me as well, just not by anyone I considered a friend.” I left his house determined to stick it to him.
May 5, 2009, I started a spray foam insulation company with the same level of equipment that he had but about a year less experience than he had.
May 7th, I get a call from the father asking a landscape question (acting as if we were on normal terms). My response was, “Oh, I don’t landscape anymore; I spray foam.” What are you talking about? He asked. When I explained to him that I was operating a spray foam insulation company, he ended the phone call rather quickly.
I then receive a phone call from his son 5 minutes later (who had ignored my calls for the last many weeks), threatening me that he would destroy my hopes of making it as an insulator and that no “little landscaper” could/would make it in this community.
Side note, with my newly formed company there were now approximately 4-5 companies in the Pacific North West performing this kind of service.
It is a small circle of people in the insulation world and word gets around pretty quick who does what etc. Our very first job was handed to us by our material supplier which happened to be “his” supplier and that job was a “fix.” Apparently, that very first job we had worked on (that plastic surgeon’s house) was insulated incorrectly and had poor workmanship.
Luckily my only involvement in that house was prep work and clean-up. We ended up removing all of the insulation and re-installing it. About a 65k job which the owner of the house turned around and sued my old boss for and won.
We then acquired the government contract at Fort Lewis that he had because of poor communication on his part.
Anyway, we systematically took apart his company by being better and honest with people. The story spread (in the spray foam insulation world), and we became somewhat hero-like in this region because they had screwed so many people over. Oh, and at that time if you might remember, the housing market took a giant dump, and guess who had 4 very large houses sitting out there that couldn’t sell?
Yep, the father, who ended up going bankrupt by mid 09. The son on the other hand kept his head above water somehow a bit longer. But in October of 09, I got a call from a Repo man asking if I knew the “son” and where to find his spray foam equipment.
My father-in-law happens to be a retired cop and PI, and I put him on the case to find said equipment. Two days later he called with the address and specific location of the equipment which was behind a barn on an island with the tires aired down.
I made the call to the repo man, and two hours later, he called me from his lot as he was pulling in with a very large trailer behind his truck asking where he could send the bounty check.
I kept the insulation business for about 3 years before being bought out by another company.
I also kept the Landscape company and still run it to this day. The moral of the story, landscapers may work in the dirt and seem simple, but make one of them mad, and they will ruin you.”
11. Steal From Your Dying Husband's Cancer Fundraiser? Your Rental Is Going To Smell Like Absolute Garbage
“So, a few years back my brother-in-law (bil) (young guy in his early 30s) was diagnosed with cancer. Our family is (was) pretty close, and everyone took it fairly hard. At the time, I also happened to be looking for a new place to live.
Well, my bil and sister have a few rental properties and were looking at buying another one. They asked if I would be willing to rent it if they did. Being a single female in my early 20s, I stressed to them I probably couldn’t afford it, but if it was in my price range, of course I would, but I also asked them if they should really be focusing on that right now.
(Maybe you should take care of bil’s cancer and worry about your real estate when he’s better…) Anyways, you can’t tell them what to do at all, and they bought a house anyways. Well, they told me I could rent the basement suite for less than my max price because they know I’ll take care of it.
I agree, and we go about things.
Well, as I’m moving in, they bring me a lease contract to sign, but the rent is over $200 MORE than what I had told them my max price was. I question them about it (with my crap half moved in, naturally), and they kind of bull crapped me by saying things like, ‘Oh, we thought it would be okay’ and ‘I guess we forgot to factor in a, b, and c.’ “Okayyyyy,” I think to myself, but arguing with your bil that has cancer is extremely difficult, so I reluctantly sign (and accept my lack of social life due to my inflated rent).
Fast forward to last year; my bil is getting significantly worse and given under 3 months to live. I made the trip to the hospital 1.5 hours away several times (as much as I could afford and often caught rides up there as well), and he looked bad.
As in, I didn’t think he’d make it another month bad.
In Canada (where we live), health care only does so much, and they basically told him there was nothing left they could do for him. Well, I did some research and found a specialized cancer treatment center in the states that gave him a shot at beating it.
I asked my sister to make a few calls (knowing more than I did about his specific situation) and see if they could take him. She told me they would, but it was far too expensive. I asked how much and she said ‘about 75,000.’
I immediately got together with friends and family about starting to raise some funds (I had also found out that they didn’t have life insurance with 2 small children, and they would lose everything when bil died, so essentially, they were right SCREWED).
Now, I’m not the type of person to hold events or generally just be social at all.
I actually have mild social anxiety and dropped out of college because of it, but I somehow managed to rally together the entire community. A friend started a Go Fund Me page and gave my sister control (my sister also started a second one on YouCaring).
I found a place that would give us 200 seats (free) in a bar for a fundraiser in which we could sell tickets to. Unfortunately, it was around Christmas time, and the only date they had available was a last-minute cancellation…. about a week and a half away.
Now I don’t know if any of you have thrown any type of event, but that’s not enough time to organize crap like that.
Somehow (and don’t ask me how because it was such a blur, and I don’t think I slept at all) I managed to organize hundreds of people, find a band, sell all of our tickets, collect auction donations, create games/raffles/etc. to bring in more funds, get several large corporations to donate funds/time/advertising, find decorations, create a slideshow, and get a ton of personal donations (over 5,000 dollars) to be presented to the family because they were going through a tough time… all while working a full-time job.
While planning, I became extremely concerned with the legalities and expressed that in depth to my team. All auction items must be watched at all times, all funds must be tracked, all paperwork copied and account for, etc. I also told my sister to not worry about a thing; just worry about taking care of bil.
While she not only ‘helped’ by completely ‘forgetting’ to do everything she insisted on doing but talking down to me and ignoring all of the important things I was trying to express (she was actually a huge witch the entire time). I tried to shake it off assuming she was just stressed.
A few days before the fundraiser, I tried to get the treatment center info from my sister for my speech, but she kept blowing me off, so I called the center myself. The totals that my sister was asking were completely different than what the girl on the phone told me.
At the end of the conversation, the girl says “so you’re (bil’s) sister? That’s so weird! His wife called the other day and didn’t seem nearly as interested in the payment options as you are!” Around the same time, I noticed my sister has changed to fundraising goals from 75,000 to 175,000.
I was far too busy to give it much thought at this point though.
So the day of the fundraiser, my sister walks in and I say (genuinely pleased to see her), “Oh, awesome! You made it! Have you decided if you want to be involved at all?” She scowls and says, “I don’t even want to freaking be here.” I’m a pretty ballsy person, and any other day, I would have promptly punched her in the face and walked out, but this was for my bil, so I smiled and said, “Oh, I’m really sorry to hear that.
Why don’t you have a seat and just relax, put all your food and drink on my bill, and I’ll take care of it. We’ve got you a ride home if you want to drink, and I’ll take care of everything else for you. I love ya, sis.”
As Mc, host, and the main organizer of everything, I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off the whole night. The only times I saw my sister she was sitting on other guys’ laps, complaining about her husband, bidding on auction items (how freaking inappropriate), or telling her friends I’m a jerk (she also was a jerk to my friends, and had I known that at the time, I would have called it off right then and there – you do NOT screw with my friends who have supported not only me but you through this!)
About halfway through the event, one of my team members approached me telling me a gift card had gone missing. Great. That’s all on me. I quickly rallied everyone to help, but my sister had quickly come over and told everyone it was taken care of.
I forgot about it until my friend (that donated that gift certificate) showed up and asked about it. I had no answer, and my sister was effectively evading me all night.
The next day (since the fundraiser ended up running until after 2 am), I called around (to everyone except my sister) looking for the gift card.
I put about 9 people’s stories together to figure out what happened.
My sister stole the freaking gift card. For herself. From her dying husband’s fundraiser.
Then she blamed everything on me and made a bunch of wild, false accusations.
Basically, I got numerous phone calls, texts, e-mails, and social media messages (to the point I had to shut my phone off and deactivate my account) telling me what an awful person I am and how could I steal something from bil’s fundraiser and blame it on my poor sister.
Ummmmmm, what?!
WHAT?!
That’s good for my depression and anxiety. So I called my mom, bawling, telling her I wanted to die and I don’t understand. She yelled at me and told me to apologize to my sister. (Screw that – I didn’t speak to anyone in my family for over 9 months.)
I had concrete evidence proving she did it. I could have got her charged. I spent my entire vacation fund on them and didn’t even get a freaking thank you.
My theory, which I pieced together a few weeks after, is that my sister expected bil to die before we could raise the funds to send him for treatment, leaving her with a nice little chunk of money to take care of her stupidly expensive lifestyle (3 very expensive vehicles, 4 houses, property on a lake, a holiday trailer, quad, boat, etc.).
Well crap, I don’t do anything halfway. Within a few days, we had raised half the funds, and by the end, he had enough to go (before she changed the total). Out of the 75,000 or so raised, I single-handedly raised over 50,000. Also, who leaves their dying husband at home to look after their 2 small children under 5 to go to Mexico?!
A week after the fundraiser!
I decided to let herself shoot herself in the foot and just move out of the house they owned asap. This happened to coincide with their cross-Canada trip, and they tried to sue me! (They had no grounds to do so, and I actually ended up with 50 bucks from them – HA!), but now I’m getting a little revenge.
I couldn’t bring myself to tell the entire world what they did (though I easily could have), but I did decide to screw with them. While I lived in the rental, I did a bunch of work on it for them for free, so there was plenty of extra paint, drywall, etc. around.
I looked up the most common and troubling pests in our area and how to attract them. Then I went shopping. The list included fish heads, shrimp, pest attractants, clearance meat, etc.
I left the place immaculate. Except for the rotting food in the walls.
Yup. I punched a hole in the wall, filled it up in several places, dry-walled, mudded/tapped, and painted over it.
I hear the place is unrentable now and going through renovations.”
Another User Comments:
“Reading this makes me very upset on so many levels.
My wife is currently battling an advanced form of stage 4 breast cancer. We also have a one-year-old baby. There is no cure for what she has, but the positives that we are firmly latching onto are that she seems to be responding to treatment and improving.
We remain hopeful every day.
I’m upset because the ungrateful attitude that you’ve been shown by your sister and your extended family is completely beyond to me and inappropriate on a ridiculous level. Many people have donated supplies for our son, a good friend started one of those Go Fund Me pages, a fundraiser was organized by members of her high school sports team… And every single time even a small shirt is given for the baby or a prayer card with well-wishes is left for me, I have to hold back tears from the sheer gratitude I feel towards all these wonderful people who donate their time, thoughts, and sometimes precious finances to my little family.
And to hear that someone could be ungrateful for the incredible amount of funds you raised and the effort you put out in a short time is astounding to me and it makes me very angry.
You’re an amazing person OP. Never change for anyone.” bigtimeguard6887
10. Treat A Good Employee Badly? I'll Make This Company Take A Massive Hit
“I’ve had some dumb luck the past 5 years of my work history.
I am an administrator/office type. So I applied for a job (I had been out of work for 3 years prior due to a hormone condition and depression) at Company A and got a job as a call handler in a telephone answering service.
Over a few years, I kept that same crappy job title and pay but was actually more the office manager due to the workload and how much of a distance there was between what my daily work was compared to anyone else. So, long story short, I lost a baby, the company owner made a comment in front of me to a client that I should have not conceived, so I walked out without notice, and because I was the only one running admin in the place, it all stopped, and she lost her biggest client.
I landed another job at Company B as an admin assistant. It should have been easy, something lowkey to keep me financially until I could recover from losing the baby. Also at this time, I had moved house and was saving for my wedding which was made known to the owner of the company.
That is why I applied for the lower-ranked and paid position.
Within the year, I was running an entire central production unit for a chain of cafes and delis. Still on low pay and crappy admin assistant job title. You see a reoccurring theme here?
As I was about to demand a pay rise and a proper job title for the work I did, the owner puts the whole company into administration and cuts everyone’s hours. I sucked it up to keep the place going.
I worked hard and got the CPU into profit.
Owner says everyone needs to slash their hours more because other departments are losing profit. I refuse to cut mine. I’m already down to the bone financially. He agrees to have a meeting about it but instead jets off on holiday.
I hear back from Company C about a role I applied for as an admin, learn I have a new job to go to, so walk out the very next day.
The place is STILL in administration many years later with massive job losses and they closed half their locations. Turns out my work was the only thing keeping the CPU open, and when I left, they had to close it down because no one else knew how to run it and they failed a hygiene inspection too!
Company C takes us to the true pro-revenge. At first, things are amazing. Great hours, pay, and I’m treated really well. I start to put the past behind me thinking the way things went at the last two companies must be a fluke. Company C rewards my hard work with a pay rise and better job title after 3 months!
But then they start to take me for granted…
After 4 months of being there, I am moved to the sister company which is the installation branch (fitting insulation under Government grants to residential homes). I am to run the installation and warehouse operations with a small admin team and it will be temporary with my reward being a move to Office Manager when the current manager Angela goes on maternity leave.
On this basis, I accept. (The idea was when Angela comes back, she will be moved to oversee another department.)
So while I am running Installations, I have a nervous Angela to accommodate as she is still my manager in theory and wants me to use her crappy basic spreadsheets so she can feel like she is still in control, BUT I also have 3 Director/Owners (Swishy, Stupid, and Sly) constantly coming in and contradicting each other over what they want and targets, etc.
I juggle making everyone happy, meeting the targets, and getting processes and procedures in place – oh and I am still doing tasks from my old role as they don’t have anyone else to take care of that!
I have issues with the team they hired to do admin under me.
Lazy, Sleazy, and Shy. Lazy plays on social media all day, Sleazy flirts and chats all day, and Shy is quietly handling way too much but too afraid to speak up. So I report the team issues, and they get pulled into a meeting. Remember, I am a Senior Administrator NOT a Manager.
I get brought in afterward, and Director Stupid decides that they are all perfectly fine and competent and it’s my fault they aren’t doing their jobs. I******* up, thinking he may be right, and try to work on my management style. Nothing changes. In fact, it takes Director Sly coming in on a day when all 3 are off and I am doing all of their jobs by myself for the bosses to notice how little my team actually has to do.
But again, why do anything about it when OP can take it on and cover it all as well? Nothing is done about the 3 Stooges and my workload continues as is.
Shortly thereafter it is announced the new Office Manager will be Claire… I am livid but think maybe I am going to be made the official Installations Manager as this is hinted at by other managers.
I have at this point only been in the new role for 2 months.
Then the stress got to me, and I was off ill for a week. While I was off, everything fell apart, my admin staff stopped doing any work at all and some installs were reported as complete when they hadn’t been.
So Director Swishy swoops in and orders the whole place to be audited. He suspends me and warns me to look for another job. He tasks the audit to Claire. (Claire is 24 years old and this is her second job ever.) Claire looks and acts much older than she actually is, so you get fooled into thinking she is better than she is.
She is also the type to blame others for her mistakes or is great at hiding them. She gets to the root of those installs being declared complete when they weren’t as one installer pre-signing his paperwork. He would have brought that in and given it to Sleazy who should have then rebooked the job and put the paperwork back out.
But of course, she didn’t because she wasn’t doing any work while I was off.
So the bosses can’t pin the blame on me (before I went off sick, I was supposed to be off for 1 day and had left a detailed list of everyone’s daily job and tasks so other managers would know who does what) and decide to pull me back into my old role and put Lazy, Sleazy, and Shy into lesser admin roles.
This means no promotion for me. They then hire a new admin team and make one of them the freaking Manager (she has no experience and sleeps with the installers).
But wait, it gets better! 2-3 months later, I am now working directly under Director Sly and the Operations Manager; Lizard King.
In fact, I am doing ALL OF Lizard King’s work and taking abuse and bullying from him as no one else can stand working near him. I am doing jobs well out with my remit like tendering for work and running the entire QMS. I am in effect, the assistant Ops Manager.
NO pay rise or job title though.
Now we get to the end. I effectively hold the keys to the kingdom. There is no part of the business I don’t know and haven’t run or had a part in getting up and running. I am relied upon for almost everything.
They call me the cornerstone of the office. At this point, I’ve been with Company C for less than 2 years. Claire is still called the Office Manager, but all she does is oversee a small team who submits completed installs to the funder for payment.
She doesn’t know anything actually office manager related.
I have a run-in with Director Stupid. He allowed Lizard King to bully his assistant so she quit. I am forced, despite protests, to also take on her work which is wiping his dumb butt. He calls me after hours with stupid comments like did you photocopy X and call Y (after I emailed him to say I had before I left work and verbally told him I had emailed him).
I arrange a really important compliance audit to allow time to get it done right and he calls them behind my back and rearranges cutting the time I have to do the work in half. This compliance audit costs us thousands and is really important to get more work.
It’s all too much and I get sicker and sicker.
Finally, I decide I will quit. I tell the office yep I am thinking of quitting knowing word will spread and it does. Director Swishy takes me aside and begs me not to leave, he gives me a paid week off and says to come in the Monday after for a talk.
I think things are finally changing so agree. Except that I noticed on Sunday that Director Swishy posts on social media that he is hungover and taking Monday off.
So I don’t go back. I get a phone call late on Tuesday and Director Swishy is literally begging me to come in.
I tell him everything and that he doesn’t even pay me enough for what I do. He starts to cry.
His tears are like freaking bliss to me! Cry, jerkwad!
I tell him no way; I am done, and he won’t see me again.
I then call up Company D – who is their BIGGEST rival and most hated nemesis.
Company D is owned by two former staff of Company C who were treated like crap, walked out, and started up their own version of Company C.
They give me a job. I then remember I never signed a non-compete, so I call up Company C’s best sales staff and offer them jobs.
I get their top man to come join us, and he brings a handful of install leads with him (customers he was screwed out of commission on).
Company C panicked when they realize and try to set the lawyers on us. There is no case.
They then call us and harass us, visit the office, etc. We don’t back down. They actually think we have their entire lead database (we don’t) and are crapping bricks.
Finally, I get a phone call from Director Swishy. Again, he is crying.
“Please don’t ruin us!
I know you are behind this. Please just destroy the database and this will all be over.” Blah blah.
I let him think I am thinking about it. Eventually, Company C is forced to buy a new database, and only then do I call him back and tell him that we only ever had 5 or 6 leads he could describe as being on his database, but those leads came to us through a third party and we hadn’t gotten any sales so scrapped them.
Company C has since closed the sister installations company down (most of the staff were made redundant for unrelated reasons, not my doing) and is now a company of 3 directors, 3 managers, and 1 admin from 80+ staff. Claire has been given all of my work and complains constantly as well as a demotion.
Angela got fired for being useless, Lizard King has had his hours and pay cut, and Claire is going to be forced out soon as the owners are talking about selling up. I get all the updates from the company accountant whom they bullied so bad, she lost her hair and is now working for me part-time.
Revenge: making your former bosses pay thousands for something they don’t need, lose another $11,000 on compliance audits they failed when you walked out, and make at least one of them cry. TWICE.
Company D so far is treating me like a queen. If crap turns sour here, it won’t matter.
I have the keys to the kingdom again…”
9. Keep Stealing Everyone's Stuff? Here's A Taste Of Your Own Medicine
“I used to have a friend who was a bit of a klepto. He bought a weapon, sold it to a friend, stole it back, and sold it to another friend. He broke into people’s houses, shoplifted, and lifted stuff at parties.
We met in high school, became friends, and even though I knew him, I trusted him.
He was two-timing these two girls. One of them had a new roomie named Bruiser (names have been altered to protect the guilty.) One day, Bruiser’s duffel bag disappears.
Bruiser was relatively new to town. He had some kids he’d lost when he split with his ex.
In his duffel bag, he had all of his pictures of his children, his wallet, his clothes, and his weapon. He was enraged and hurt at the theft. Bruiser and his friends suspected everyone. He did everything he could think of to have his property returned. He accused and threatened his roommate, Hope.
Chased kids out of parties. It was a huge deal for him. Hope moved back East. Some innocent kids lost all of their friends. Bruiser never caught on that my friend, Mason, had stolen his bag.
Mason didn’t get along with his father, a convicted criminal, who was married to a McDonald’s manager.
He was getting kicked out all of the time.
One weekend, my parents were out of town. They told me not to have anyone over, and I invited Mason. In the months that followed that weekend, it became clear that things were missing from my house.
My headphones were gone, as well as my dad’s cellphone, etc. It took longer than it should have for me to put 2 and 2 together. While my parents suspected that I had stolen from them, I started to realize the extent of the missing items, their size… hmmm.
Mason was kicked out again and found refuge at a friend’s house, the brothers, Mick and D. We had all been close friends for a long time, but they jumped immediately to the correct conclusion when their savings for rent vanished. Mason was kicked out.
They were so mad. He was denying it. I didn’t believe it could be him. We still hung out, but tensions ran high.
One night, following this recent theft, a party was happening, and we were all going to go. We were all at Mick and D’s house (Mason too) waiting for them to finally break free of crowd inertia and begin to move in the direction of this party.
We had too many people for one car, so I brought Mason on my bike. He requested we stop by the parking lot where his car was parked, so he could change.
In the parking lot, Mick gets into an argument with one of the passengers of his car.
It was taking a while, so I drove off for the party with Mason after he changed. That night, Mason’s car was broken into. Everything he owned was taken from that car. He blamed Mick and D. They denied it.
A few months later, one of my friends confessed to me that they had stolen Mason’s stuff.
They realized they had made the right call when they found some of their missing things with his possessions. That is when I realized that Mason had no boundaries. He had done the same thing to my family.
Friendships ended over these events, and Mason disappeared from our lives.
Mick and D did not find their savings for rent, but they had no doubt who had taken it. They had their revenge. I had not had mine.
After much thought, I decided what to do. Bruiser had been in town for years now. He had developed into a fine, upstanding thug, whom nobody in their right mind would cross.
He was in a gang. Not the high school type. He had job-stopper ink all over and was well known. One day, I ran into Bruiser. I had called Hope back East and let her know that Mason had stolen Bruiser’s bag. She was grateful for the closure but forgave him.
Bruiser was grateful for the closure as well, remorseful for innocents he’d hurt, and curious what Mason’s last name was. I was as helpful as I could be.
Little by little, the stories started to come to me. They had chased him out of a couple of eateries he worked at.
He lost those jobs because he was too scared to return. I don’t know what all happened to Mason. But I do know, payback’s a witch.”
8. Driving Recklessly On The Freeway? We'll Trick You Into Getting Caught
“My significant other is 23 with an open license but currently no car. He grew up working on cars with his dad and has had more car-related jobs from rentals to detailing to mechanics than I can count.
He LOVES cars and knows more about them than anyone I’ve ever met. He has owned many cars and is a skilled but (mostly) responsible driver.
He has a friend who is young and does not yet have a license but had recently gotten a supposedly great deal on a kinda junky looking BMW (no idea what kind; I’m a chick, and I don’t know jack about cars) which he lent to my significant other for a few days to run errands since without a license, he can’t drive it anyway.
So my partner comes over with the car one day after offering to take me to an appointment. When we go downstairs, we both laugh at it. It has a terrible, patchy paint job, a huge crappy wing hanging off it, and those stupid rear window decals from car accessory manufacturers that losers think will make them go faster.
It screams ‘bogan street cred.’ It’s quite nice on the inside though: tan leather interior and everything, and my significant other tells me that his friend did in fact get a good deal as the car has low mileage and is in great working condition.
I was also surprised to learn that it’s zippy as heck.
On the way back from my appointment, we’re cruising down the highway. There are about 6 lanes going in each direction, and every few hundred meters or so, there’s a steel arch that goes over the road with digital LED speed signs hanging down.
If I remember correctly, the speed limit was set to like 65 MPH, which is normal considering it was a quiet afternoon with not a whole lot of cars on the road, and the only one near us was a dark blue sedan just ahead in the lane left of us.
We’re just chilling, listening to the radio with the windows down, when a white mid-to-late 90’s Holden Commodore (Aussies will see where this is going) passes us on the right. We don’t notice them at this point, but when they get about two car lengths ahead of us, we see arms protruding from the left side of the vehicle and motioning at the blue sedan.
The blue car’s windows are rolled down, but nothing seems to be happening so the Commodore moves into our lane to drive alongside them. An arm comes out of the Holden’s passenger side window waving an unopened can of booze. Now, for non-Aussies, XXXX Gold and Commodores are both huge bogan identifiers and go together like colored mohawks and tartan pants go with punk kids.
You see the two things together and can usually conclude with about 95% accuracy that the owner of those things is a bogan.
Anyway, at this point, it has become clear that the blue sedan is carrying a number of women, and the guy in the Holden’s passenger seat is offering the lady driver an adult beverage.
Thankfully, it’s not working. The women merge into the lane to their left and hang back to escape. The Holden dangerously follows but not before chucking an empty tinny out the window. At this point, my partner decides to intervene. We also move to the left with the Holden in front of us and the sedan to our left. The women look a bit scared and again change lanes to their left, so we take their spot and speed up til we’re alongside the Holden again.
They realize what they’ve gotten into and now move to the right to escape us. We follow. At this point, almost all of the traffic is in the left lanes, and we’re in the right lanes. We look over at them, and the passenger assesses our swag-mobile and flips us off right as the driver plants his foot on the accelerator.
There’s no one ahead of us, and my partner looks at me and says, ‘Watch this.’
This little Beema knew how to go, and go it did. We sped right up past them and made sure to be only just ahead of them. They seemed surprised by our swift acceleration and would get faster and faster to try and catch up, but we made sure to always stay juuuust in front.
At just over 125 MPH, we pull back slightly and quickly move into the clear left lane. As I previously mentioned, it was a quiet afternoon and so there was a fair distance between cars in the busier lanes. We pull back some more and duck to the left again, then again, and then one last time as we resume cruising at the speed limit, assimilated with all the other cars.
As this is happening, we see the Holden continuing to hurtle along at top speed, apparently unaware that we were no longer trying to tail them.
Now, my partner is quite competitive, and I KNOW he would never give up that easily, especially where cars are concerned. I ask him why he let the guy go, and he replies,
‘Babe, you know I’ve been driving around here a long time. I know this road like the back of my hand. I also know exactly which of those LED speed signs hanging overhead have hidden speed cameras behind them. I just gave them a little coaxing, and now they’ll be receiving a nice little present in the mail.’ Sure enough, we had leveled out just before the camera, while the jerks had shot straight through it.”
7. Pick On A Student For Years? Enjoy The Smell Of Rotting Meat
“Back when I was around 16 years old, I had this friend, Tom, who had major issues with his physical education professor. He’d been going to the same middle school (non-US) since he was 12 years old, and through some odd cosmic joke every year, he’d been assigned to the same professor, one that clearly had it out for him personally.
You see, Tommy wasn’t particularly athletic or fit. I’m not saying he was lazy or in poor physical condition; he just wasn’t the type for gymnastics or sports. This teacher on the other hand had this R. Lee Ermey-type of “I WILL motivate you, Private Pyle!” kind of mentality that, well, “just didn’t work” with the likes of Tommy.
Hence, for Tom, the last four years comprised a veritable litany of verbal maltreatment, poor grades (yes, gymnastics classes are graded in Holland), and assorted petty crap directed at him by this jerky, gunnery-sergeant wannabe.
Tommy was always able to deal with the crap he was dished out by being a stone-cold vindictive loser.
I’m not even kidding – all this happened 20 years ago, and I’m somewhat afraid of him finding out I typed out and posted this story. They say an elephant never forgets anything? Well, my childhood friend Tommy would make the average elephant look like an ill Alzheimer’s patient.
This cute, little boy had the power to HATE!
I went to another school than him, so I was never fully aware of the tensions between him and 1st. Sgt. JerkFace other than the occasional fuming recap of the crap the jerk had put Tommy through recently and the subsequent “My vengeance shall be terrible!” speech.
But nothing ever seemed to happen. I chalked this up to him taking the “High Road,” forgiving the jerk of his transgressions and continuing with his life.
Oh, how mistaken I was.
Tommy was now in his final year of middle school, and it seemed that Staff Sergeant Loser was showing signs of relenting.
The prof’s unholy crusade showed signs of petering out, and a semblance of normalcy had been established. Tom’s grades were OK, nothing fancy, but he WAS going to graduate, and as such; he applied to join the committee organizing the graduation party. Looking back, this should’ve surprised everyone as he was in no way, shape, or form the kind of kid to join any committee, group, or organization that involved doing anything else than smoking or listening to music.
But hey, to be really honest, his other friends and I didn’t really think anything of it. We chalked it up to him liking a particular girl in said committee or some other juvenile crap like that and left him to it. We were wrong.
You see, the graduation party was to take place in the school’s auditorium, so all tables, desks, and chairs normally placed there had to be moved into the gymnasium for storage. And that was Tom’s angle: to sabotage, subvert and defile his arch-nemesis’s lair – the gymnasium.
Six weeks prior to the party, Tommy started saving up his allowance. No more smoking – just a steadily increasing amount of savings. On the day of the party, this had reached the equivalent of around $60, burning a hole in his pockets.
On graduation day, Tom had spent most of his after-school day hauling furniture from the auditorium to the gymnasium, stacking desk upon desk and chair upon chair.
And he had been tremendously enthusiastic about it, too. So much so that the principal had given him the keys to the gymnasium, ordering him to lock it once done and make sure nobody would get locked in, as the school would be closed for summer recess after the party was finished. So now Tom had everything he needed for his plot of vengeance: access to the gym, a stack of desks to use as makeshift scaffolding, and $60.
During a small break, Tom went to the local butcher’s shop and spent $60 on as many assorted meat stuff as he could get his hands on. He came back to school with something like 20 pounds of meat – ranging from chicken and turkey to steak and pork.
He then spent the ENTIRE NIGHT stashing this meat in every place he could think of: over the ceiling tiles, inside of the lockers, he even crammed minced meat into the tubing of the wall-mounted climbing racks. And then he left, handing over the keys to the principal and going home.
Over summer, Tom and I had a bit of a falling out, and as I didn’t have any other friends going to that school, I never heard about the implications of Tom’s actions. That is until my kid brother started going to that same school some 7 years onwards.
It turned out that the day after summer recess, the teacher that inspired the whole action had also been the one to open the gymnasium post-summer recess. The gymnasium remained closed for two more weeks while the cleanup crews had to rip out the ceiling, most of the walls and bin the majority of the implements of sports usually found in a high-school gymnasium.
As for the legacy of Tom’s actions: The horrors he brought upon the (now retired) professor have been spoken about in hushed tones ever since, finding their way into middle-school lore: “I heard that one day, Mr. so-and-so opened the gymnasium after a vacation and was assaulted by myriads of stinging insects.” “I heard that once he opened the doors, he was assailed by a stench so putrid that his hairs went white, and he never could smell again!” Ah, to be so young again… Legal action was attempted but failed due to lack of proof or so I was told.”
6. Refuse To Play Fair? It's On
“I usually am not the one to take revenge since I’m risk-averse. However, in this case, I found it was the most logical thing to do since I knew ahead of time that the other guy was going to try and screw me.
There was this fellow in my high school.
His name was David. He was one grade above me, and he was a complete jerk, a compulsive liar, and a compulsive trickster.
Often times during lunch hour, students would get together at the tables to play card games and such. I usually got involved in these games as well.
David did too but not as often.
When he did, I watched him. Honestly, this kid fascinated me since he was completely blatant about his lying. I remember distinctly watching him play a game of Magic: The Gathering with another student, and I would watch him take 2, 3, even 4 cards at a time when he should have only been drawing 1.
His opponent was completely oblivious to this and was so concerned about her own cards to really pay attention to what David was doing. I just kept my mouth shut. Pretty soon, he had something like 20 cards in his hand while his opponent had 4-5.
It was very ridiculous.
I usually avoided playing with him, but I must have played with him at least once. He would continue to break the rules in the open until you called him on it. Of course, he would try to lawyer himself out of it or tell me I got it wrong.
He would try to change the rules of the game to benefit him at the moment for his specific situation. He would throw a fit if you tried to argue and would only back down if you got the whole audience to agree unanimously that he was wrong.
Playing him was an exhausting experience since you spend more time arguing and watching him than playing the game.
It was 1995 at the time, and I had played some Magic: The Gathering (MTG). I was nearly finished with this game since all the great expansions came out before I even got involved, and people with money held all the power cards.
I had dropped my own wallet on the new expansion “Fallen Empires,” which turned out to be one of the worst expansions ever made in the game’s history. Therefore, I was pretty sour and was basically giving up the game since I didn’t see how I could ever catch up.
A guy I knew, Alex, decided to organize a starter pack tournament, where the players had to compete with only the cards they got with the starter pack. This sounded like an interesting variation on the game, and I thought I might join to try and squeeze some fun out of this game I was quickly losing interest in.
Incidentally, David joined this tournament. Now, his reputation was well known by Alex, but he let David join anyway, the logic being that he needed people, even if those people were jerks. There was only something like 5 people in the tournament, so it was hard to argue with that.
Can you guess whom my first match was against? That’s right. It was jerkface himself: David. Now, I didn’t want to lawyer and argue with David the whole game since that was no fun at all. If I was going to play him, I wanted to completely royally screw him over and embarrass him in front of the whole player tournament.
A sort of preemptive revenge for the crap I know he was going to pull on me.
Knowing that he was going to break the rules ahead of time gave me some unique opportunities. I felt it relieved me of any ethical obligation to play a fair game.
I needed to stack the deck in my favor, so to speak. Let me explain what I did.
So, each player was given a starter pack and one booster pack (MTG Revised Edition for those who care). This gave you an assortment of cards that made overall fairly weak decks.
Most games resulted in waiting for the person to get enough land to play a monster and start doing damage against their opponent. Any sizeable monster in play usually results in that player winning since our decks were so weak.
In order to give yourself a chance of getting the right cards, you need to strip out all the fluff that was going to do you no good.
So your cards were divided into your active playing deck and your reject pile. You only played with your active deck. At the end of the game, the winner gets to draw at random a card to keep from the loser’s active deck or your reject pile.
It’s the winner’s choice. This is important later.
My deck had an unusually useful card for this sort of tournament called a Demonic Tutor. It essentially lets you go through your own deck and pick out the exact card you want. If I ever got this card, it would be my key to winning since I could pick out the only monster I have that actually does damage.
So now I have two chances of winning. If I draw my monster or draw the Demonic Tutor.
David also had an unusually useful card in his deck as well. I think it was some kind of rare card and he cherished it so much.
I don’t remember what card it was, but I remember it did him no good against me. My goal was to completely win the match and then pilfer his Precious Rare “at random.”
To prepare, I took my uber-powerful Demonic Tutor card and oh so gently, put a tiny fold in the top right corner of the card.
This way, if you put it in a deck, you can see it stand out from all the other cards. You only see this if you know what to look for.
When we met for our match, we get to browse each other’s cards, so we know what to expect.
I browsed through his deck and took out his precious rare to admire. While David was too busy looking through my cards, I put the same tiny fold in his rare card and put it back in his deck. I didn’t have time to check if it stood out, so I crossed my fingers.
Next, we shuffled our cards. Since I could see where my Demonic Tutor was, I shuffled it carefully so that it was below the 75% mark in my deck. So when he cut my deck, there was a good chance that the Demonic Tutor would end up near the top.
If I didn’t end up getting this card, I have a second chance of getting the monster instead.
Luckily, when he cut my deck, he cut it above my Demonic Tutor’s location, so I was good to go in that department. Next, I cut his deck, but since I could see where his Precious Rare was located, I made sure to cut the deck so that his card was as close to the bottom as possible and wouldn’t show up during the match.
David was too self-absorbed to suspect that anyone other than himself might have evil intentions.
Things are going well so far, and I’m starting to feel bad for David. I’m starting to question whether what I’m doing is the right thing. These doubts are quickly erased by subsequent events.
We start to play. My job here at this point was to watch him like a hawk and call him out every time he tries to play dirty. And try he did. He tried to do the whole multiple-card draw on me. I called him out on it.
David tried to act like it was an accident. This got the tournament organizer’s attention and David a verbal tongue-lashing from Alex.
Alex basically told David to stop acting like a jerk and play the game. This had the effect of crucially destroying David’s credibility and getting everyone in the room on my side.
I shined a spotlight on his jerky ways, so to speak.
Next thing he did was try to lawyer his way to do something that was clearly against the rules. Of course, I made a calm but loud enough scene for everyone to notice and eventually called Alex over again to adjudicate.
Alex told him he was full of crap and ruled in my favor.
Soon enough, I had the Demonic Tutor in my hand after several turns since it was near the top. By this time, I had all that I needed but the monster. I pretended to act joyful and surprised when I threw down my Demonic Tutor and went rifling through my deck to get that monster.
David’s face started to go red and his body was very agitated.
The next round, I threw that monster on the table with gusto! I celebrated with “Yes!” and “I can’t believe it!” The other people in the room were starting to admire my skill and good luck.
They were really watching my game now and clearly wanted to see me win.
The best David can do at this point is pull out a monster to block me or somehow get rid of my monster. Knowing that the only card that has a hope of achieving that is his Precious Rare safely at the bottom of his deck, I was inwardly confident, but acted nervous to lead him on that he actually had a chance of pulling one out.
Every subsequent round, I would attack him with the monster, pinging his life down. Of course, during this time, nothing good came out of his deck. Slowly, his chances of winning dwindled, and his fury grew. Then it was over. I celebrated and other people in the room marveled at my amazing play style.
David was so mad he was shaking. Whenever he spoke, he was petulant and angry.
While I was making a big show of celebrating my good fortune, David had already planned and executed his next move. He took both his active pile and his reject pile and mixed them together as soon as the game ended. If you recall, these piles are supposed to be separate so that I could choose which pile to pilfer from.
By mixing them up, he reduces the chance that I’ll randomly take any of his good cards, including his Precious Rare.
I immediately called him out on it as he was mixing them together. He starts arguing about the tournament rules and his interpretation of them.
I make a big show of arguing and acting like I was fooled. Honestly, it didn’t matter that he did this since I could still see where his precious rare was. This final act showed his petulance and completely ruined any reputation he had in the room.
I called over Alex the organizer to adjudicate and demand restitution. Clearly, there was no way to unmix the decks unless you have an entropy reversal device, so the damage was done. Alex called David a jerk for what he did, and Alex tried to placate my hurt feelings.
Acting hurt and angry, I told him, “Fine! Let’s get this over with.” David had a smirk under his face, thinking he’d finally pulled one over on me. Oh, how wrong he was.
While making a show of concentration and trepidation, I spread his deck out and made a show of going after a card, but changing my mind a couple of times.
Finally, “at random,” I pulled out the card with the tiny folded corner and with drama turned it around to show everyone at the same time that it was the precious rare. Immediately, David let out a scream of anger that made the whole room silent.
He quickly packed up all his crap and stomped out of the room. But I had his precious rare.
Everyone was overjoyed that I had completely and totally demolished David and dealt a slice of righteous karmic justice at the same time. We all agreed on how much of a jerk he was and that he got what he deserved. Honestly, it was the highlight of the tournament.
David dropped out of the tournament after that, and no one was sad to see him go. I never told anyone about my deception. I think people are happier thinking the universe conspired against David to deliver justice.”
Another User Comments:
“I remember playing cards almost every day at lunch back in elementary school.
The game of choice was Egyptian Rat Screw (we used Snatch instead) which I had learned during rainy days at camp the summer before. No betting, nothing to win, just the game which is based on chance and reaction time. I feel kinda bad about it looking back, but we used my deck of cards, and every day after school, I’d go through the deck and put a jack (one of the best cards in the game) at the top of the deck.
No one ever asked me to shuffle before the first game, and I always made sure I got the top card. Eventually, the teachers got paranoid and made us stop playing, but I was never caught.
I’m still good friends with a couple of the guys I used to play with.
At my last birthday party (almost two decades later), I finally told them what I had done. Their reaction was not unexpected and kinda worth it considering just how long I kept my secret.” RabbitsRuse
5. Dishonestly Sell Me A Car With Bad Brakes? I'll Take You Out Of Business
The vehicle industry is notorious for taking advantage of young folks.
“Roughly 14 years ago, I was a naïve kid and went to a car dealership to buy my first used Honda. I had enough saved up for a down payment, but the stereotypical used car salesman upgraded me to another, more expensive car. It had just been traded in earlier that day, so it was still in the service shop.
I got the service check-off sheet claiming all the work that was done and the main one being “brakes replaced.”
I take it home, and after a few days of adjusting to the new car, I notice that my brakes are squeaking. I call the dealership, and they tell me over the phone that Hondas do that (made a record of time/date/name of rep).
I ask around, and sure enough, they confirmed what the dealership had told me. Over the course of the next 4 months, the brake noise upgraded from a squeak to a squeal, and by the end of the 4th month, a grinding was heard.
I bring it into the dealership, and they tell me, “Your brakes are completely worn to the nub!
You have maybe 5% left at best. That will be $490 to repair the issue.”
I speak to the Service Manager (SM) who was no help. I find the salesman and anyone else involved with my sale, and none of them can help me as the checklist states that the “brakes were replaced.” I’ve never heard of brakes going out in less than 5,000 miles.
I finally get a hold of the General Manager (GM) who flat out tells me, “Son, you’re a kid; guys like you race fast and brake hard. I’ve replaced brakes at 2,000 miles before.” He won’t do a thing for me. They replace the brakes, but one of them isn’t tightened on well, and on my way home, the brake pad falls off its housing (it’s still attached by tangling), and I call a tow truck at the dealership’s expense.
I have the guy take the ULTRA LONG way back as they bill by the mile. I pick it up the next day, and nothing is said about it.
I sulk for 6 months telling my story to all that care to hear me. Finally, a friend of a friend hears me out and is familiar with what to do.
He helps me to write a letter to the Better Business Bureau and notify news agencies. I’m to write “help me” articles for newspapers, even call up talk radio stations for advice. It takes several weeks, and nearly 60 envelopes later, I had stacks upon stacks of letters going out to various agencies and companies.
Two months go by, and I had gotten a few news agencies that were interested, but the big one was the BBB (Better Business Bureau). My case worker (Chad) says they will do an investigation and informs me that this isn’t the first time said dealership has done this before.
Mine was the first where detailed records were kept. (I had additional maintenance records going into the same dealership as well as secondary opinions.)
Over a year had gone by since I bought my car, and I take it back to this dealership for the last of my scheduled warranty maintenance.
Before I do so, I go to a BBB-trusted mechanic and have him confirm my brakes are good. 9,500 miles and nearly brand new still. At the dealership, I avoid everyone that might recognize me, and I speak directly to the mechanic. He does the last of the warranty maintenance, and I ask him to check my brakes knowing full well that the Service Manager and GM had written notes about me for future reference (Chad warned me of this).
He confirms what Chad had told me would happen. “Your brakes are almost worn out. You must ride them hard as they were replaced about 8 months ago. You should probably get them replaced again.” I ask the guy to write all this down, and he refuses to make it on the official paperwork.
But caves on dealership letterhead instead. Name/Date/Time/the works.
I fax this information to Chad, and sometime later, I get a phone call from the GM of the dealership. I don’t remember all of the half-hour-long conversation, but he was attempting to bribe me with free service, vehicle upgrade (with a pay-the-difference catch), blah blah blah if I would retract the “unfair accusation” I made against him and his store.
I was milking him for all it was worth, and I finally said, “You know, being that I drive my car like a typical kid, I would be thrilled if the dealership replaced my nearly new tires, brakes, and oil and transmission fluid. I am hard on cars after all.” He was verbally angry at my attempt to rub what he said in his face.
He hung up claiming I was being unreasonable. I never did get my refund for the brake job I never should have paid for.
It took 3 years and several more complaints from other customers, but the dealership was forced to close down and sell. Chad tells me it was mostly because of my detailed recordkeeping and persistence that led to that dealership going under.”
4. Open A Noisy Karaoke Bar Near Our House? Get Blasted Out Of Business
“Our family home is right in the smack of open grassland on the outskirts of a mid-sized city somewhere in the Philippines. Although our neighborhood is sparsely populated, small businesses have sprouted all over since it is situated along the main thoroughfare heading to and fro the city center.
Among these is a craphole karaoke bar (or “videoke” in the local parlance).
This karaoke bar was located right beside the driveway leading to our main gate. (Our house is surrounded by tall concrete walls and adorned with iron spikes on top which is typical in our country.) It first started out as a small daytime cafeteria usually catering to truck and utility drivers and personnel.
Things were pretty vanilla since it opened, and its existence never really bothered us, save for the occasional 16-wheeler blocking our driveway (a honk or two and they would be moving along). Later, however, the management decided to reorganize the place into a cheap, open-air bar (putting out tables beside the road) and extended its operating hours deep into the night.
Along with the revamp came this machine from the underworld.
This is when things began to go bonkers. With just a few drops in the coin slot, customers can now belt out standards from Engelbert Humperdinck, ABBA, Bee Gees, and Frank Sinatra. Adult beverages would later up the ante at nighttime.
A boozer’s rendition of “My Way” is not exactly my idea for a lullaby.
This drove my family nuts. Although most of the time the karaoke’s decibel level is somewhat bearable inside the house, it’s the murder-inducing singing by William Hung-wannabes that really got into us.
And adding insult to injury, the bar would sometimes put the karaoke on full blast when they feel like it, mostly at nighttime!
My parents first went for the diplomatic approach to address the situation. They politely asked the owner, a potbellied police officer, to at least bring the sound volume down to bearable levels, especially at nighttime.
He initially agreed, and things went without a hitch for the next few weeks. We later noticed, however, that the bar had gradually increased the volume until it was back again to pre-agreement levels, even louder than ever. When confronted by my mom, the b******e owner just dissed her and said that she is being an “elitist” who is trying to put him out of business (the words he used in our local language are harsher but basically the same idea).
A few nights after the confrontation, the bar was hosting a gathering of a local truck driver’s association with adult drinks flowing on the side of the road. That darn karaoke is blaring louder than ever. This, coupled with singing and shouting intoxicated individuals, created an atmosphere similar to a cornucopia of hyenas and banshees having a get-together.
This was the last straw for my dad, who suddenly flipped from a relatively nice guy into a jerk-coated jerk with jerk filling.
(Dad later told me he had been plotting this revenge from the time the owner insulted my mom. He was just waiting for the right opportunity and motivation to do it.)
He began dismantling our home sound system (a component hi-fi stereo system) and told me to set it up on our patio by the garden. He went to the storeroom and brought out two very big speakers (the type which you often see at parties and other special events), wired them into the sound system, put on their stands, and placed them at our gate.
As if that was not enough, he opened all the doors of our three cars. He then told me to come up with the perfect song to use and save it in 4 USBs: one for the stereo system and three for all the cars.
With the USBs in hand, he then ordered two of my siblings and me to each get into the cars and, upon his signal, to simultaneously press play and turn the volume to max.
Hironobu Kageyama’s Cha La Head Cha La began blasting them out of their wits.
(I used the original, live, English, and 2005 versions of the song. The ’05 version was the best of them all, chilling effect-wise. It took us four tries before all sound systems became synchronized.)
After our noise barrage started, I slowly skedaddled to our gate and saw the same intoxicated truck drivers who were gleefully singing moments ago now turned sour-faced and constantly making dastardly looks in our direction.
The karaoke bar owner later approached our gate and angrily demanded that we cease whatever we are doing.
The bumpkin even brandished the fact that he is a police officer and can make our lives horrible (which, in a hindsight, might have caused real trouble for us). Out of spite, he attempted to topple one of the big speakers from its stand but was a tad too short to reach over our gate.
My dad, the big ol’ hot and tasty, just wryly smirked and went inside the house.
In less than an hour after our sound cannons blasted, the party ended in a puff, and some of the customers begrudgingly walked out while hurling invectives (my sister insists she even saw two guys pelting stones) toward our house.
Much later, the karaoke was silenced, and the bar closed for the night, hours earlier than usual.
The karaoke bar still continued with its shenanigans after that night albeit never going full blast with karaoke’s volume again, at least during the evening. One of the female workers (the owner’s mistress, I was told later) verbally slandered me a few days later while I was driving out of the house.
I was a law student when it happened, so I used some legal gobbledygook to intimidate the jerk instead (or so I think). We were already planning to commence legal action when it suddenly boarded up about two months later. One of its waitresses, who used to work for my mom, told us that the bar got a bad rap among its regulars (remember, this place was frequented by truck drivers) because of that night, word spread, and caused business to slow down.
That, and some internal strife within the management eventually led to the bar’s ultimate demise.”
Another User Comments:
“This is great. I was really hoping the song you’d use to blast them with would be “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley, though.” Reddit user
3. Bully Your Own Students? Lose Your Teaching Job
Some teachers like to believe they’re untouchable.
“I was incredibly boring in high school. Honors, AP, lead in orchestra, journalist in school paper… you know the type. My parents raised me not to question authority; just shut up and do what you’re told. Then I suffered for two years with my French teacher and totally lost it.
I took French because I loved the language and genuinely wanted to learn it. Most of the students in my class were that way since Spanish and German were said to be easier and more fun. There were a few class clowns but no worse than in any other classes.
This woman. Jesus, this woman. She had no business being a teacher. It was no secret that she hated males, especially non-white males. The class believes this was, at least in part, due to the fact that her daughter got knocked up by a black guy.
We knew this because she frequently babysat her granddaughter and would take her to school, forcing us to entertain her. She’d forego the lesson and instead do something that her granddaughter would like to do, like play games. This wasn’t really a problem, because who wouldn’t prefer to goof off?
The issue was that we’d still be tested on the material she failed to cover that day as if it were our problem that she had to babysit that day. Ridiculous. On days she wasn’t babysitting, she’d also answer her phone in the middle of class and talk to her daughter and make plans for the weekend.
At one point, the study guides were being ripped out of the French 2 books, presumably for copying purposes. She outright accused our class of doing it. When one student chimed in and asked why it couldn’t be one of her other 3 classes, she told us we were the only class that would do something like this.
Wow. Way to falsely accuse a class of vandalism.
She was quite a bully and verbally maltreated students in front of the entire class. Her biggest pet peeves included coughing and yawning. Should a student yawn or cough, she’d become irate and tell them how rude it is, even if they covered their mouth.
After a good 5 minutes of public trashing, she’d send them out of the classroom to “deal with them later” and would subsequently either leave the door open while yelling at them outside or simply forget about them. She left one student outside in the rain for nearly the entire 50-minute class period and then, when reminded, couldn’t recall why she sent him out there in the first place.
One time, she sent the two class clowns outside together for disrupting the class. Apparently, one of them let out a fart so rancid that the other puked on the asphalt. When the teacher went outside to talk to them, she got angry at this for some bizarre reason and forced the one that puked to clean it up.
With a Dixie cup. The bell rang and class let out in the middle of this, and she forced him to stay and continue cleaning it up, much to his humiliation. When the class clown keeps his blushed head down and doesn’t have any jokes to throw back at the people teasing him, you know the punishment went too far.
Anyways, this lady was a waste of teaching space. So I decided to type up an anonymous letter saying so. I bullet-pointed everything she does that is more disruptive to the class than the class clowns ever could be. I told her that she is depriving us of an education.
I requested that the class environment change and that she stop publicly berating students and discipline them privately. I was firm, yet polite, in telling her that if nothing changes I will be going to the principal. This is still my teacher, and she deserves a chance.
However, I stopped caring about respect when she spent the entire class period the next day yelling at the whole class, insulting me to everyone without even knowing it was me. I was a coward, rude, disrespectful, I should teach the class myself, I don’t know what I’m talking about, no one agrees with me, she’s a fantastic teacher, she’s not racist or sexist, etc etc. She shared my private letter with the class and said some pretty humiliating things about this ghostwriter.
Screw this woman. I gave her two months to change things around. They got exponentially worse. So I did what I threatened to do – wrote another anonymous letter to the principal. I explained everything and pleaded for help.
She wasn’t in class the next day, and I guess there wasn’t even time for a sub to be called because a security guard sat in on the class.
I was the only one that knew why. We had a sub for the rest of the week, and everyone was making speculation as to why she’s been gone for so long. Some even happily joked that she died or has cancer. I sat quietly just waiting for the outcome.
The next week, she returns to class with a somewhat different attitude and announces to the class that she has been offered early retirement and she is going to take it.
HOLY CRAP. I JUST GOT MY FRENCH TEACHER FIRED. WITCH TOTALLY DESERVED IT.
Last day of class, party period.
Teacher couldn’t care less about the class or the school since she’s gotten the can. One of my classmates sitting near me brought up the letter, wondering if that’s what got her fired. YEP. IT DID. “How are you so sure,” they asked. BECAUSE I WROTE IT, STUPID.
OHHHHHHHHHH CRAP. The quiet girl got the teacher fired! The next year, in French 3, everybody freaking loved me. I was suddenly Ms. Popular in one class, the one that saved us and got a new teacher. The teacher hired for the next year was the sub we had for that week the teacher was getting fired…
AND SHE KNEW. She told me, “I hope I can do better than Ms. Teacher because I don’t want the same thing to happen to me!””
2. Blame Me For A Tech Outage? Enjoy Thousands Of Phone Calls A Day
Talk about an entitled jerk.
“All this happened back in the late ’90s/early ’00s. I was a cocky little sysadmin, contracted out to a large Dutch TV production company whose excrement… sorry, “products” are sold, produced, and broadcasted worldwide.
I was stationed at their main facility, a large studio and office complex where the majority of their Dutch-language TV shows were recorded. And to be honest, it was actually great fun to run into TV personalities all day, every day. Most of them were really quite nice, in particular to the pimply-faced youth who was trying to fix their MacBooks.
Of course, every now and then you’d run into someone who was a bit arrogant, but I’d usually manage to get them to drop their attitude by just talking to them like a normal human being. Dealing with celebs is all in a day’s work under such circumstances.
And besides, you’d usually deal with them indirectly, through their production teams.
I seldom had to deal with the production teams anyway, as I primarily dealt with Mac-based workstations and servers, which never gave me any real troubles: sometimes the odd Macintosh Performa would pop a PSU capacitor, or I’d have to zap the PRAM on a mail server.
Piece of cake. But supporting Macs wasn’t WHY I had been contracted out to begin with – I was a Windows NT guy, and the company had decided they were going to switch to Windows. Now, to phase out 900+ servers and workstations at once was a bit more expensive than the executives were willing to accept, so a compromise had been agreed upon.
Until the last of the (recently acquired) iMacs reached end-of-life, they’d use Citrix to load a Windows Terminal Server desktop on each of the non-windows clients. Seemed like a good idea, I guess… I was contracted to manage the transition from macOS to Windows.
As it turned out, there were some troubles with the chosen combination of Apple-Citrix-Windows Terminal Server.
Troubles that ended up causing serious troubles on the entire network – the Citrix client crapping itself the moment someone pressed a wrong button (1st gen iMacs were notorious for this), printers not working properly and connections dropping due to Ethernet broadcast storms. There were days when the ENTIRE company ground down to a screeching halt.
Needless to say, the employees were less than impressed with all this. But I managed to keep their spirits up with my comforting voice when they called the IT department:
“Information Department, this is OP. How may I be of service?”
So, it was a Wednesday morning in September, and all heck was breaking loose.
Somebody pressed key “a” instead of “b,” or maybe Citrix had just crapped itself once more; maybe the moon had risen in Virgo with Saggitarius ascending, or maybe the gods were just in a particularly foul mood that day – whatever the reason might’ve been, the entire network had crapped itself and my co-workers were in the middle of rebooting the ENTIRE network.
Servers, routers, switches, everything. In the meanwhile, I was manning the phone lines and explaining the situation to our (irate) user base. People were upset, of course, but I calmed them down, took their names and numbers, and promised I’d be in touch the moment their department could resume working.
I also spoke to a girl from a particular production team, telling her the outage was global and I’d be in touch the moment we had a resolution. Her boss (“Jerk” from here) wasn’t having any of it, so he decided he’d call us himself.
The conversation went something like this:
Me: “Information Department, this is OP. How may I help you?”
Jerk: “Are you a freaking idiot?”
Me: “Excuse me?”
Jerk: “I asked you a simple question. Are you a freaking idiot? Are you aware that my entire team is currently unable to work?”
Me: “Ehm, well… We are aware of the problems. They seem to be global, however. All production teams, as well as HRM and financials, are unable to work right now. We’re doing the best we can, actually, but it may take about half an hour for the network to become available again.”
Jerk: “THAT IS UNACCEPTABLE! YOU SON OF A WITCH! All of you IT losers are incompetent jerks who should be taken out and shot in the back of the neck!”
Now, I am familiar with vulgarities and insults, but I had NEVER been spoken to in such a manner by a co-worker (of sorts).
So, I began losing my cool somewhat.
Me: “Sir, please refrain from using insults. We’re all in this together, and this isn’t helping. If you….”
Jerk, interrupting me: “WHAT?! WHAT?! ARE YOU TRYING TO TELL ME WHAT TO DO, YOU LITTLE IDIOT? I’LL SCREW YOUR NASTY MOTHER!
CLUELESS IMBECILE!”
At this point, I REALLY felt like returning the favor and laying it into him. However, being an external contractor I felt this would’ve constituted a clear CLA (Career Limiting Action), so instead, I responded by saying: “Sir, I am no longer willing to continue this conversation in this manner.
Please give me your telephone number, and I’ll get my manager to call you.”
The jerk proceeded to give me his telephone number, an “06” number. In the NL, this indicates a mobile phone, still a relatively new thing at the time. But I still had to have a name:
Me: “Thank you. So, who can I tell her she should call?”
Jerk: “(X), of course!”
Indeed “Of course.” Like I said, most celebs were nice people. But as always, there must be ONE exception to the rule. Jerk turned out to be a B-list TV personality: a middle-aged man widely known for being an obnoxious jerk.
This man started out as a paparazzo, got a celebrity gossip show on TV, and at the time my story takes place, he was foraying into investigative journalism – small-time crime mostly. He was given a production team, a camera crew and sent out to produce his own take on crime stories, frequently getting his facts wrong and accusing completely innocent people of crimes they couldn’t have committed. Other times, he’d get his butt kicked due to him being insufferable to suspects, which is never a good idea.
But hey, the ratings were good (to this day, I think because everyone liked seeing him getting beaten up by the “criminals” he confronted on a daily basis). He was known to be an intoxicated, a philanderer, and, in general, one of the most hated people on Dutch TV.
And now it turned out it wasn’t an act at all: this was just the type of person he was! It all made sense to me now…
Me, saying: “OK, I will leave a notification on my manager’s desk. She will be contacting you shortly,” but meaning: “I am sure she’ll get round to contacting your sorry, obnoxious, insulting butt and addressing your trivial crap the moment she’s done overseeing the people who are trying to get the ENTIRE GOSHDARN FREAKING company back up and running” and hanging up.
My co-worker (a Bulgarian guy called Stoyan) was looking at me funny. “What the heck just happened, Seb?” “Trust me Sto, you don’t wanna know. I think I am taking the rest of the day off.”. And with that, I pulled the call logs and forwarded these to my manager together with a report of what had happened & a request for a call-back and went home.
The next day, business as usual. The day after that, my manager took me ASIDE. She had listened to the call, contacted the executives, and indicated that they should offer apologies for his behavior. The executives had responded by saying that, while his behavior was unacceptable, he couldn’t be forced to offer apologies.
Instead, he had promised he wouldn’t contact our department again – sending his requests through an intermediary from now on. So, tough crap. Just deal with it.
Forget that. No freaking WAY this jerk is getting away with this kind of bullcrap. So, I went online.
well-known-free-email-provider.com -> Register new address -> new message -> to two or three guys I knew who also had a lot of friends.
“Hey guys… You know who I am. I’ve got a fun message for ya. See this telephone number: 06-XXXXXXXX?
Dial it RIGHT NOW from a non-display caller telephone line and see who answers.
See? That’s X, who is well known for being an immoral jerk, frequently bothering people for no good reason whatsoever. Remember the show where he rang the doorbell for 30 minutes, at night, at a house where three young kids were sleeping?
Do you remember the show where he spent an entire afternoon following and harassing a young mother because her (ex)-partner supposedly screwed someone out of a few hundred bucks? Well, let’s see how HE likes it!
Feel free to forward this message to as many people as possible.”
Click “Send.” Log on to the proxy server, delete the logs. Delete the browser cache. Log on to the router, drop the offending records from the logs. That’s it. I’d erased my trails to the best of my abilities, and let’s see what happens next.
Three days later, I receive a request in my inbox. It turns out that somehow, the jerk’s mobile number has been made public, and he’s being called 2,500 times a day. Could we PLEASE arrange for him to receive a new number? Of course, I was forced to update my mass email and re-send it the moment a new number was assigned, making sure to leave a grace period of about a week each time.
They never found out it was me.”
1. Use Me For A Meal Ticket? Let's Take This To Court
“I, being in the U.S. Army, become attracted to a woman whom I end up marrying. At first, she’s all I could ever ask for in a woman. Sweet, caring, and one heck of a cuddler. Doesn’t really like video games like I do but makes an effort to get into them so we can spend time together doing something we both enjoy.
Let’s call her Thundercrap, or TC for short, for reasons you will soon know.
I met TC through one of the other soldiers I worked with, who we will call BB (Battle Buddy) since he was not at fault in this. It was in the middle of the week, and I had just gotten a work order finished up and was taking a quick break for a drink of water.
I heard BB asking a few other soldiers if they were open to going out this coming weekend. Now, I knew from a few other friends that BB was straight, so I was curious as to why he was asking.
Long story short, BB had a female friend who was looking for someone to go to a movie that coming weekend.
I offered to go with his friend (BIG mistake), and she and I hit it off rather well and continued to see each other. Months pass, and it hasn’t been enough time for me to consider marriage yet, but she has some spontaneous ailments (seizures and they were legit) that spring up out of nowhere.
Since these only seemed to happen in her sleep, and my command wouldn’t let me stay off-post with her without being married…
We got a courtroom wedding 2 weeks later. The added bonus? Not only could I stay with her while she slept to be ready in case of another episode, but my Tricare would fully cover her medical costs.
I was happy, she was happy, I got to tell my command “Now you can’t stop me from staying with her,” and we all lived happily ever after.
Except we didn’t. Things went well for a while, as I described at the beginning of the post, but after a bit, I started noticing things.
Things like her needing to take her mother to the doctor’s office quite frequently (her mother was sickly, so I didn’t think much of it at first) or needing to head to the Walmart 1 town over because the one in our town didn’t have what she needed in stock.
Things like the car I bought and let her use seen parked in a lot next to several different trailer parks in a month.
Well, as luck would have it, right as I started to get suspicious, I came down on orders to PCS to Korea.
So, sidelining the investigation until I was able to continue, I packed, kissed my wife goodbye, and let the Army send me where they wanted me. I spent a year in Korea, then came down on orders for Texas. I went there. It was there that I found out exactly what was going on, courtesy of her mom, brother, and her aunt and uncle.
This woman was sleeping with 60 (not even kidding in the slightest) different men, most of them soldiers. Her excuse to her family was “OP is gay and doesn’t want to come out. So, he’s pointing out the men I can sleep with since he knows that they’re clean.”
So, basically, this woman is using me as a paycheck and meal ticket and screwing everything with a pulse that happens to be male. The icing on the cake is that 2 weeks after I get the good news, she calls me and confesses to being unfaithful to me… once.
The only reason she confessed? She was pregnant, and there was no way I could be the father, given that I was in a different state at the time… and the father was African American.
I am very much not African American, having been called “neon white” on more than one occasion due to my Irish ancestry.
So, there was no possible way this child would look like me, at all. So, my wife felt the need to break the news to me before she had the baby because she could no longer hide it.
Well, things happened. I went back home (without her knowing) and removed my belongings from the house I bought, to keep her from selling them once she realized what I was about to do, and started divorce proceedings.
This is revenge #1. I saw her man (not the baby’s father, new guy entirely) driving my car. So, I enlisted the help of her aunt and uncle to get my car back. They pulled up behind him in a parking lot, got out, and talked to him normally, at which time I walked up from the other side of the parking lot.
Her uncle asked to see the keys, and upon receiving them, began taking the car key off of the ring, and waved me forward.
I walked up, took the car key from him, looked at the guy, and said “Hi, my name is OP, and this is my car.
I’m taking it now.” I waved him over to the sidewalk, removed everything from the car that didn’t have my name on it, left the items with him, then got in my car and drove off.
I found out later that day that he had packed everything and left her.
Apparently, he had been living in my house, eating my food, sleeping in my bed, and WEARING MY CLOTHES. Plus, she had been using the funds I sent her every month to pay for his court costs and child support costs.
Well, months went by, our court date came up, and my lawyer recommended that I file for sole use of the vehicle and the property, since it was obvious that she had committed adultery and didn’t have a leg to stand on.
We go to court, she counter-files for the exact same, and since she refused to release the results of a paternity test, I get stonewalled. The exact words used by the judge were “I’m sorry, but without proof of paternity of the child, I cannot, in good conscience, approve either of these motions.”
So, we set a new date for a private hearing with the judge, and we wait. Nearly 3 months go by, and the court date was finally near. I walked into the courthouse, met up with my lawyer (who had a demonic glint in his eye at the time, and I was about to find out why), went into the courtroom, and waited. 20 minutes later, she walked in, shot me a dirty look (which I did my best to ignore), and sat down.
The judge came in 5 minutes later, the court was called to order, and the divorce trial commenced. Here, I found out just what had given my lawyer the twinkle in his eye earlier on. He proceeded to ask TC a series of questions, including:
“Is my client the father of your child?”
When was the child conceived?”
“Where was my client during the time at which your child was conceived?”
“Do you know who the father of your child is?”
“Have you received child support from the father of your child?”
Basically, he questioned her into a legal corner in which she either had to answer truthfully or lie and suffer the legal ramifications of perjury in the face of easily provable evidence.
She answered truthfully (lucky for her), and the court case continued. She presented her argument, littered with dirt she was trying to throw on me, insults to my person, questions about my s****l orientation, and claims that I was having a relationship with her 18-year-old cousin.
I, falling back on my military training, simply sat up straight, folded my hands in front of me on the table, and stared at a spot on the wall slightly above the judge’s left shoulder. I answered every question asked of me, offered no personal opinions, threw no dirt, and refused to sink to her level and question her s****lity.
Subsequently, she had a more and more confused look on her face as I refrained from bad-mouthing her like she was doing me, and the divorce trial went by rather fast.
At the conclusion of the trial, the judge looked over the paperwork submitted one last time, then looked at the both of us.
“Are there any closing remarks or claims that need to be made?” TC made one last parting swipe about me currently living with her aunt and uncle (I had rented my own apartment months ago, after finishing my military time and going back home), and I merely shook my head and resumed staring at the wall.
The judge took one last look over the papers, set them down, and spoke the greatest words I have ever heard in my life.
“Well, looking over the evidence and testimonies presented, there really is only one decision I can come to. Mr. OP, I am approving your motions for the exclusive use of the vehicle and property, upon undeniable evidence of adultery.
Mrs. OP, the only one of your motions I am granting today is your request for a no-contact order, and that is more for Mr. OP’s benefit than your own. You seemed very combative and willing to cause him legal damage that he was not due, and your repeated attempts to over-talk me while I was reviewing the paperwork did not speak well of you.
You no longer have a claim to either the property or the vehicle, and will not contact Mr. OP unless it is to have him clarify which items do not belong to you.”
TC had the audacity to work up a sniffle and ask the judge “B…b…but where do I go?
What do I do for a place to live?”
The judge looked back at her and replied “Well, Mrs. OP, you have 30 days to figure that out, after which you will not set foot on that property again, or else you will be held in contempt of court.””
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