People Reveal Their Smashing Revenge Stories
39. Former Company Gave Me A Bonus Check To Do An Easy Job
“I worked in data processing, and the Friday before a major change in computer systems, I was laid off… My changes affected the way information was accessed and updated. Over the weekend I was offered a position with a nice pay raise.
Well that Monday when the computer systems were brought up, nothing worked correctly because computer programs that I changed were not brought into the computer per the instructions that I had written. In addition, they had not backed up critical data, to back things out, so they were between a rock and a hard place.
My previous employer called me up and wanted me to come back and get the computer systems up and running. I explained that I had accepted employment elsewhere and would not change my decision. My previous employer then offered me a bonus of 1/4 my annual salary if I would come in, correct the issues.
I was scheduled to start my new job a week later, so I said to draw up a contract, and I will be in.
It took me approximately 16 hours to straighten things out and laugh my way to the bank in order to withdraw that check.”
38. My Client Stood Up For Me
“My first job as an attorney I worked for a prominent Environmental Attorney in a big firm.
I started before I finished law school and I got one of the top scores on the Michigan Bar Exam that year (175 out of 200).
As I noted, I worked for a prominent environmental attorney. Her clients loved me — many were in the metal finishing industry, an industry I had worked in for 10 years as a chemical engineer.
I was able to save them a lot by using my background as a chemical engineer and being their lawyer. I was able to resolve issues that other environmental attorneys could not because of my chemical and engineering background. However, she was a bad boss… always berating me in front of the clients to make herself look good and apologizing for it after in private.
I believe she berated me to prevent her clients from trusting me as their primary attorney — after all, they were her clients.
Nine months after she hired me, she fired me. She hired two experienced environmental attorneys and allegedly did not have the work to keep me.
One of those new attorneys lasted 1 month.. the other about a year. So she was not able to keep them or expand her department.
Her stated reason for firing me was that my writing was terrible. I admit it was not great at the time.
So I began a self-improvement project to improve my writing.
Several years later, I had a mutual client with her firm. The client came to me with an environmental issue and he used that firm for almost every other legal situation he was involved with.
The client related to me that he had mentioned to the managing partner at the firm in a social situation that he had hired me as an environmental attorney. The managing attorney mentioned that he knew me and that I was fired for being a poor writer.
The client shot back (to the managing attorney’s dismay) that I was the best legal writer that he knew.
So my revenge was to see her fail in her ambition of expanding her practice AND to improve my skills to address the perceived weakness that she identified in my skills.”
37. I Resigned And Made It Intolerable For The Employees To Stay
“I actually quit because the owner had made it intolerable to continue to work for him. I was his controller and after his brother-in-law retired became the CFO. His brother-in-law and I kept him pretty much in check for four years.
We got rid of his long-time secretary/lover with whom he would get into yelling matches in the office. We watched him try and hook up with anyone in a skirt. Put up with dumb drawings above the men’s urinal and other stupid childish actions.
The final straw was when he interrupted a meeting with vendors to scream at me about nothing serious.
So I found a better-paying job and quit.
I had championed and put in place a bonus program for the salespeople. It worked great: in the four years I was there, the company quadrupled sales and took the bottom line from a loss to a substantial profit.
Within 60 days after I left he killed the bonus program. Ninety days later the sales manager and half the sales force went to a direct competitor taking all their clients. Sixty days later the company was in bankruptcy.
Could not, and would not, have happened to a better man.
I only feel sorry for the employees still there when it went under.”
36. They Fired Me Because I Found Out About Their Lies
“A consultant firm I worked for wanted to fire me, my friend gave me a heads up so I began searching for another job. When the day arrived, I was called into the conference room with the owner and manager staring at me. They said they were letting me go.
They accused me of stealing, which was completely incorrect. We discussed the subject and then I walked out.
As I was driving away, I called the top-ranking person at a state government agency I had previously worked at for several years and, since leaving, as a consultant with this firm and another firm.
I asked if I could meet with him right away.
When we met, I told him that I had recently discovered the firm I just left was falsifying their work hours when submitting invoices to his agency for payment. I firmly believe to this day that was the reason they fired me.
I also told him, since I had just helped the governor gather info and helped him with the media presentations he gave each evening while the area was recovering from a hurricane (which directly affected all counties covered by this agency’s district) the firm refused to pay for any extra time I spent working for the governor so, it was all on my own time.
A few weeks later, I found out this firm had lost 4 gov’t contracts (specifically in the district covered by the agency I met with after I walked away) they had submitted bids for, and another contract covering work being done for the state gov’t and the governor’s office they were expecting to get renewed, was not renewed.
This firm went out of business a few years later.”
35. They Didn't Give Me A Raise So I Left
“I worked for a large manufacturing unit of a UK-based conglomerate. I had recently applied for the job of Software Manager, a role that I reported to. Another team leader in the department was the successful candidate. As I had been a candidate for his job, he viewed me as a threat and started a series of nasty tricks, undermining me.
Then it came to pay review time and I didn’t get a raise, first time. I knew I had to leave. I joined a small software house in the South-East. One of the things they did was hire out their engineers to other companies (body shopping).
After a few months there, they hired me out to another business unit of the same conglomerate I had left.
I smiled smugly to myself every time I walked through the gates, knowing they were paying three times as much for my time as when I worked for them before.
And all over a 2.5% pay rise.”
34. He Deleted The File That Could Have Boosted The Ungrateful Employee's Career
“I was a hiring manager for a Fortune 500 company. I will add that our circle is very small in this area for the type of work we do and also because of security clearances and certifications.
There was a sub-contractor on a 6-month hire gig. As she was being shifted to the ‘hire’ position, our company was doing their due diligence and it turned out she lied about having a degree. Rather than firing her, they put her back on as a sub for another six (6) months, no loss of pay.
I would have let her go if I was the Operations Manager, but that was not my choice.
Six (6) months pass and she is then brought on to the company, we worked with her for about 30 days prior to getting everything straight even giving her a good pay raise and benefits.
But they put me as her direct manager. Okay, I was not happy, but I do practice that the worker is more important than the work, and hoped that she would be redeemed and I could grow her as an employee. It wasn’t even the end of the first week when she was made a ‘hire’, that she lays down a 7-day notice (rather than standard 14 in her contract), then 2 days later she tells me she is leaving THAT day.
Nothing I could do other than think good riddance. I have her sign the out-processing papers, which have non-disclosures and other limitations, take her badges and escort her off the premises. I put her name/resume in the RED folder. She will never get a job for that company again.
No more than a couple of weeks later, I find out she is calling all my staff, trying to recruit them to the company that she is now working at. This was a violation of the papers she signed, not to try and “poach” employees for the period of 12 months.
These folks are very much in demand in the area for their skill set and high clearance.
Fast forward a year or so later, I made a MAJOR career move to a very prestigious international military alliance. I elected not to take a manager’s position, but the position I took was right up my alley and had a major pay increase.
I have loved the challenge of the type of work, it is the best working environment and experience by far in my 40 years of work. About 3 months into my job, I get a PM on LinkedIn from her, asking about a job opening we had where I now worked. I ignored the message.
The next morning, I tell my director, that he might get a resume from someone looking for a particular type of position, and the story behind her. I did not want to violate any policies, so I didn’t say her name but said look for my old company in her resume.
Lo-and-behold, not even a week later, my director calls me over, he has his smartphone in his hand, and he turns it towards me and I can see a PDF file that is magnified on a name. I look at it, I look at him, and nod ‘yes’ once.
He nods to me once, turns and walks away, and then out loud as he walks away… ‘Ooops, I deleted that file… Oh well.’
So she lost out on what could have been a very lucrative and enjoyable career position. But she burned her bridge.
All she had to do was honor her notice, and not poach.
That was my revenge on an ungrateful former employee.”
33. Parents Interfere With Their Children's Friendship
“I had a downstairs neighbor who at first was wonderful. Our daughters were the same age and went to the same school. All was good until the girls had a petty argument and the mom got involved. After that it was war.
She called the landlord saying we were too loud, the noise from my shower kept her son awake, I parked too close to her car. My response was always unfailingly polite (kill ’em with kindness). The landlord finally told her to stop bugging him and work it out between us.
She didn’t and decided to step up the harassment.
Her downfall came the day the police and CYS showed up at my door one day. My neighbor made a report that my daughter threw a rock at her daughter and it took 10 stitches to close the cut on her scalp.
The police wanted to question my kids and CYS was there to take them away as my neighbor also told them we lived in squalor. I politely invited them into my very clean apartment and asked if anyone wanted coffee. They all said no and asked me to produce my kids.
I told them ‘Well that’s going to take a while since for the past month they have been in Florida with their dad. He has visitation with them for 2 months every summer. They’ll be back in the middle of August if you want to wait.’
She was charged with making false reports to the police and CYS. They moved a few months later. Funny thing, the girls ended being friends again all on their own; the way it would have been without parental interference.”
32. Irritating Landlord Gets Bugged By Filed Cases And Unpaid Taxes
“I live in rural Florida. A slum lord owned the property across the road from me.
He rents it to other scum and does nothing to upkeep it or force his tenants to upkeep it. A while back his tenants built an addition out of plywood and plastic and had what I counted to be 22 people living in a 2 bedroom home.
They threw their trash all over, their septic backed up and flowed into the yard. They then made makeshift toilets by digging holes and burying their waste. Their trash piled up and constantly blew into the street and onto my property. Their lawn grew to over a foot tall and I could sit on my porch and watch rats run around their house.
The stench was disgusting and unbearable. Doors were off the hinges, windows broken, constant noise, and they parked vehicles everywhere sometimes blocking the road. You need to give your name to be on file here if you make a code violation complaint, so, I got a permit to install a pool knowing that an inspector had to check it and the electricity.
When he came out he immediately commented on the property. I said none of my business but you have eyes. Next thing 2 more building inspectors, then 4 code enforcement officers, then the Sheriff’s Department followed by immigration. Two days later the property is condemned and a case is filed against the landlord.
I bide my time until he stops paying property tax and it goes up for tax auction. It has thousands in fines against it plus back taxes. No one bids on it so I get the property for $1.00. A nice family is living there now in a fully remodeled and landscaped home.
Sometimes Karma can be a nice guy.”
31. Sister Got Blamed For The Burned Restaurant
“My sister managed a burger joint in a Colorado resort town, I had actually been in there when she managed it while on vacation once.
She had major problems with corporate since most of the restaurants of this brand were in Denver or the Springs they had larger buildings and could accommodate the new menu they tried every couple of weeks. But my sister’s building was a part of a strip mall and very small, had nowhere near enough space for what corporate wanted but since her store was the first in this brand they weren’t too keen on closing it.
Finally, after months of having no employees and corporate being a jerk, they fired her and moved in a new direction with a new manager they hired from Denver.
About a month or 2 after she got fired she got a call from the hood cleaning service that cleans the hoods above the stove.
She told them she doesn’t work there, gave the store’s number, and thought that was it. A month later she gets another call asking to confirm the appointment, again she informs them she doesn’t work there, you might want to try calling the store.
A couple of weeks later and she’s getting calls almost every day and just says screw it and blocks the number. The new manager has been there for 3 months now and was informed of the hood cleaning requirements so he should’ve been taking care of it.
Nope, he never called, the only call he made regarding the hoods was to the fire department after they caught on fire and burned the building down. They tried to blame it on the hood cleaning company, but they had appointments that weren’t kept by the restaurant and had actually tried to contact the store but were always ignored, next step of blame was my sister but with the proper documentation that she informed the new manager of the cleaning she was let off the hook.
Every time she goes past the burned-out building (which still hasn’t been repaired more than a year later) she just shakes her head and laughs at how stupid that company was.”
30. I Did My Research And Caused Problems To The Company
“Some years back I was working as a service engineer for a large electronic lock company near London. After a couple of years there, the company was looking to start building a network of field-based engineers around the country, and the General Manager was looking for any volunteers to relocate.
I had friends who had moved North and thought, well, why not.
Unfortunately, the old service manager (my direct boss) had recently left, and the guy who was the longest-serving engineer was taking his place, and we just really didn’t get along. Not sure why — he was a fairly reserved type and I was not — and maybe being new to the promotion, he wasn’t too keen on having engineers he couldn’t just call in to his office when he wanted. That had been the custom under the previous manager.
He told me that he didn’t want me to make the move and so I said fine, I won’t, but when the GM got wind of this, he persuaded me that it would all be okay, and so I went ahead and moved.
Big, big mistake!
From that day on, my new service manager tried his hardest to make this new based-from-home project unworkable. There were only two of us, me and another chap who had been taken on, both working the north of the country, and we found time after time we were being given jobs at locations much nearer to the other, resulting in hundreds of extra miles having to be covered daily.
We would often talk to each other on the company mobile phones, over the many unnecessary hours of driving, and made a joking point of chatting as we passed each other going in opposite directions on the motorways. The company eventually had to provide us with a second car each for some years, because the mileage we were clocking up, was way too much for one single lease vehicle.
I could list many other petty incidents that occurred over this time, but suffice to say this manager made it clear to me on many occasions, that he wanted me gone.
Time rolled by, and despite the run-ins and occasional threats from this manager, I actually stay for a further eight years with this firm, during which time three other engineers quit, and one had a nervous breakdown after a run-in with this man.
One day, however, the inevitable happened. There was then a turn down in the economy, and I got a phone call from him, telling me that the company was going to be making some redundancies and that my name was on the list. In fact, as it turned out, mine was the only name on the list from his department, and was made pretty obvious he put it there.
Now thankfully in the UK, it is not that easy to ‘just’ make someone redundant. There are processes to go through, and the company has to show that it has been fair in selecting those to be laid off, reasons, and they have to provide this as part of the redundancy meetings, and as it happened I had been a fairly good employee.
I had better qualifications than most of the other engineers, had a better sickness record, did more over time (due to the aforementioned manager making me spend many extra hours on the road), and had had no complaints or disciplinary action against me. With all the points this scored I was actually in the second most secure place on the chart I was shown, so how had they selected me?
Well, there was an odd sixth category… ERIC… ? Ever heard of it? — well neither had I. Asking further, it turns out it stood for ‘Electronic Recorded Internal Complaint’, and I pushed even further and said ‘huh?’ What he had done was go back through his records, and find three E-Mails to me asking for paperwork to be returned, no mention of being disciplinary in nature, just ‘can you have your paperwork sent in for Friday’ sort of thing.
Each had been given a -4 points rating (-12 in total), meaning that my score on the redundancy chart had now nose-dived from second top to a clear bottom! Not bad, considering my three years of day release college for a City & Guilds in Electronics, had only rated a +3!
I did go to the redundancy meetings, but it was clear from the attitude shown at them that I was not going to be staying. Even the once-helpful GM was obviously set upon the outcome. He was older and weaker by then, and I think just looking forward to retirement.
He seemed more concerned now about covering the manager he had to work with daily, than an engineer he saw maybe twice a year.
After the redundancy period finished, I handed the company car back and accepted the redundancy money offered, which was just the minimum they had to pay under the law.
I then did a little research and posted off all the paperwork I’d gathered to ACAS, which is the body in the UK that decides if we have a case for an industrial tribunal, and looks at whether we have been treated fairly. They decided there was a case for my former firm to answer, as the firm had not in any way done ‘their’ paperwork correctly, and I eventually accepted an offer of £7,500 in extra compensation for what they had done to me.
I heard much later from one of the engineers still working there, who was also a personal friend, that the threat of a court case had caused the firm no end of problems. Managerial meetings, company solicitors, new staff Human Resources, new paperwork, and appraisals having to be set up, with even their international parent company having to become involved, much to their embarrassment.
For me though, much as I liked the top-level pain I put them through, I still think making them pay for my poor treatment, was by far my best revenge.”
29. They Tried To Threaten My Friend But They Had No Evidence
“This guy’s name is Al and I worked with him for a year on a project.
He told me he had been a mechanical supervisor on a gas plant upgrade a few years prior and had some issues with his former employer. If you are a supervisor or project manager in the petroleum industry on projects there is some paperwork that you have to do on your own time after work that you don’t get paid for, usually next day’s permits, etc. Usually 1–2 hrs a night overtime on a longer project that time adds up.
Usually, on the last day of the shift, the contractor and or customer will let you go home at noon with a full day’s pay and everyone is happy. Well, Al’s boss would have none of that for time constraints but promised at the completion of the project he would receive a bonus equivalent to those extra hrs.
So on the last day of the project, Al goes into the field office to drop off the final QC binder with the cost control lady so she can hand it over to the customers’ auditors. He then asks this woman about his bonus and she says there is no mention of it in his file and he should contact his boss, which he does.
His employer thanks him for his service and basically tells him to get lost.
Al is angry but he has no recourse so he grabs his hard hat, coat, and assorted stuff, hops in his truck, and heads for home which is 5 hrs away. He’s about halfway home when he looks over his console to his passenger seat and he sees the QC binders under his coat and hard hat.
When he grabbed his armful of stuff he completely by accident grabbed the binder.
These binders can be huge but once I lost my reading glasses for a day when they were actually on my head so I guess if you’re deep in thought you could inadvertently grab something this big subconsciously.
He pulled in to Red deer (AB) at a McDonald’s and placed the binders in a dumpster, bought a McFlurry, and continued his journey.
So if you know anything about construction projects if you do not have a QC binder to hand over to your customer’s commissioners and auditors it means the project never happened, you were never there and you can not get paid.
The next day Al’s former employer frantically phoned him and asked him where the QC binder was and Al truthfully answered that he handed it to the cost control lady which she corroborated but she could not find it now.
If Al’s former employer had honored his bonus they would have paid him about 36k but instead, they lost 11 million dollars.
I have to add a postscript to this, most or all projects are divided into quarters. As you progress through the project the auditors and inspector will sign off on completed work, if all is satisfactory and the client is satisfied partial funds are released to the contractor.
I actually contacted my friend AL just to satisfy some armchair inspectors and engineers and the contractor received approximately 28–29 million$ of the funds of the project but couldn’t collect the last payout of approx 11 million.
Al did say that he was contacted by the police and did receive threatening letters from his former employer’s law firm but there was no actual evidence that he removed the QC files from the office.
Now the supervisor does have personal copies of most of the files that go into the QC binders but they are in their personal laptops and basically their property or can be erased very quickly if you get my drift.
This company has since been bought out and this event took place in 2011 so I think my friend is safe.”
28. I Stopped Working Before They Fired Me
“I worked as a video editor for a production house that did a lot of local commercials and such.
The owner, an illegal substance aficionado, would actually show up at the business every two weeks or so and within 10 minutes engage in a screaming match with his on/off partner studio manager. A little toxicity in that workplace. One day I am working on some graphics for a client and I overhear the two of them (paper-thin walls) in the next room discussing firing me… but they are both off on a business trip the following week so they’ll fire me as soon as they return.
The next week I am at work with an intern or two helping me schedule time for the clients.
When the job is complete, the editor (me), fills out a form for time and consumables used during their session to be used for billing. I probably worked with 25 clients that week.
On Friday I’m packing up my belongings because I have no intention of ever showing up there again and I just happen to stuff all those invoices in my bag. Mid-Monday morning I have some coffee and a nice warm fire in the fireplace.
I get a screaming phone call from the owner asking why I am not at work, so I tell him I overheard their intention to fire me. I sit on my sofa listening to him berate, insult, and demean me, and there isn’t any evidence that I did any work during the week they were gone… me chuckling all the time which got him insanely furious.
You see, with every insult, one of those invoices gets wadded up and tossed in the fire. With each one tossed into the flames, there is a client who can’t be billed for the work. The invoice amounts were anywhere from $25 to $1200. Altogether, I think I burned up about $8800 worth of invoices.
And no… I do not feel one scintilla of shame or grief over it.”
27. He Spent The Day Retrieving His Lawn Mower
“This was Central Florida, the lawns were St Augustine grass that with a lot of water, mulching and fertilizer, they grew a couple of inches a week, and the leaves are wide and tough unlike the soft lawns up north.
My neighbor disliked me because I built a 2 story house and that blocked the view of the lake.
We worked for the same company and he was upset that I was hired at a management level although he didn’t work for me.
Our lawns were about a 1/3 acre, so a Saturday cut and trim would easily take 3 hours with a normal lawnmower.
He bought a basic riding lawnmower, and he would drive his mower on my property, up to 5′ before making a U-Turn. That was OK, except he would make the hard turn on top of my sprinklers. Almost every week, I had to replace the broken PVC pipe, digging up my lawn.
I tried several things to dissuade him, but in the end on a Friday night, I brought home about 20′ of a high-strength braided steel cabling. It was the smallest diameter I could find. I uncoiled it surrounding the sprinkler heads pushing down into the tall grass so you would never see it.
But you would hear it, and I was in my garage when I knew he ran over it. The racket it made was frightening.
Even a 25″ blade on a 10 HP motor couldn’t cut it. But it did wrap it around the shaft and stalled the motor.
All 20 feet of the cable was gone from my yard.
He had to push his mower to the garage and spend the rest of the day disassembling his mower to untangle the mess.
That was the last time he went on my lawn.”
26. Roses In Exchange Of The Neighbor's Cat
“A guy I used to work with told me about this in the ‘80s…
He had no children, just a cat he was extremely fond of. His neighbor also had no kids or pets but had a few expensive rosebushes that he spent all of his spare time nurturing and fawning over.
One day his cat was missing. He put up signs and scoured the neighborhood but was unable to find it. A few weeks later, the neighbor said, ‘I reported your cat to animal control because I saw it in my yard and they picked it up a few weeks ago.’
The cat owner bought a few gallons of weed killer. The kind they used to sell back then, that’s supposed to be diluted. One night he went to the neighbor’s house and poured all of it, undiluted, under those precious roses.
When they started to die off, he would watch the frustrated neighbor fertilizing and watering the roses, trying to figure out why they were dying.
Finally, he stopped by and asked about them. After listening to the old man whine for a few minutes, he said, ‘You shouldn’t have gotten my cat killed.’ He watched realization appear on the man’s face before he walked away.”
25. The Cops Believed It Was Mistaken Identity
“Story 1: I moved to a new town in the UK and was living in a decent enough suburb of a large town in West Sussex.
At the time I owned a VW Passat estate (station wagon) it was pewter or metallic grey color. Very nice car.
One morning I come out to find it had been scratched from one end to the other, in some places down to the metal, I was livid.
A neighbor saw me examining the damage and told me it was done by the two kids who lived at the end of the close, their mother couldn’t bear anyone having a better car than them, they owned a ten-year-old red Ford Sierra, and she would tell her boys to scratch the car.
I couldn’t believe my ears but some other neighbors came out and confirmed the story.
Well, every Sunday at 10:00 AM sharp this family would all wash and polish the family car, have lunch and then go for a drive, dressed up as if they were going to a wedding.
So the following week I bought two bottles of clutch fluid and very early on a Sunday morning poured it all over the bonnet, roof, and boot. For those who have never seen the effects of clutch fluid on car paint, it’s very effective.
The paint very quickly swells up and blisters and then bursts revealing the bare metalwork. Believe me, I’ve seen the results.
09:45 I start to “work” on my car, 10:00 the family comes out with buckets of foaming water to clean their car. Well, the shrieks and screams could be heard a mile off, the sleepy Sunday morning was rent with the noise.
Concerned (haha) I approached the distraught family and enquired what had happened. I was shown the damage, it was impressive, the blister on the bonnet had already burst and the one on the boot was due any minute.
I looked the woman in the eye and exclaimed ‘Little Idiots, I wonder if it’s the same ones who scratched my car?’ She looked back at me and knew it was me who had vandalized her car but there was nothing she could say or do.
Several of the neighbors bought me pints in the local that Sunday lunchtime.
Story 2: I moved across town having bought my own house. It was a small house halfway down a cul-de-sac with private parking at the back. For reasons I never understood my house came with 4 allocated parking spaces, it was only a 2-bed room house, but whatever?
I had only lived there a few days when a lady approached me and told me I couldn’t park my car where it was (in my own allocated spot) as it was her husband’s space and he would be annoyed. Not wanting to get off on the wrong foot with the new neighbors I asked her to come round when her husband got home to discuss it.
Two hours later an angry husband and wife batter down my front door (almost). I stepped outside with a copy of the house plans provided by my solicitor when the search had been carried out and explained, politely that the space was mine, as were the three adjacent to it so my parking there was legal and theirs wasn’t.
They exploded, ‘I’ll park where I darn well like and there’s nothing you can do about it, try anything and you’ll see’ was the friendly parting shot. So they both would make sure either his or her car was parked in my favorite spot.
Well, I was working in the photo industry then and mentioned this ‘parking space war’ to some colleagues and was advised that photo paper when well soaked in water and placed face down on a surface and allowed to dry sticks like poop to a blanket.
So I got a four feet long piece of 18-inch wide paper, soaked it for a couple of hours, and then placed it emulsion side down on his windshield, his car is parked at the foot of my garden making access very easy.
The next morning I left early for work.
When I came home, both of their cars were parked in their own allocated parking spots, his car had a shiny brand new windshield. You see when photo paper is stuck emulsion side down and allowed to dry when you try to remove it all that happens is the paper comes away leaving the emulsion on the surface.
Nothing known to man is getting that off. I explained all that to the nice police officer who visited me that evening, I also pointed out that it was probably meant for my car but the rascal who did it must have thought that as the car was parked in the space marked ’13’ it was mine.
The police officer arched one eyebrow very impressively and remarked ‘Very likely’ and reported the incident as ‘Mistaken Identity’.
The neighbors were not happy, threatened violence and death (all reported to the authorities) but never parked in my space again.”
24. I Had Little Sleep But Her Car Is Now Covered With Ice
“Many years back I was in primary school, I was nine. Our neighbor was one of my teachers and as luck would have it her son was in my class and a nasty piece of work.
His idea of fun was to run up behind someone and if it was a boy hit them hard on the back of the head, if it was a girl he would put his hand up their skirt and try to grab their knickers. He never got into trouble as his mother protected him.
One day I saw him running up behind me so I turned and hit him, ‘tapped his claret’ good and proper, after that his mother did everything she could to punish me, up to and including the slipper.
That winter (1963) was very cold, so one night I spent the night getting up and every quarter-hour I sprayed her car with water.
In the morning I was exhausted but her car had a huge layer of ice over the top, frozen solid about two inches thick. I do wonder if my parents ever realized why I was in such a rush to get to school the next day when normally it took a bomb to get me out of bed.”
23. I Caught The Newspaper Thief With A Bucket Of Water
“I once lived two blocks from a commuter rail station on the outskirts of Philadelphia. It was a row home, situated three feet from the sidewalk where commuters walked on their way to the train station.
My job was an evening job, so I usually slept until nine in the morning. I had the Philadelphia Inquirer delivered every morning. All of a sudden, the delivery service became unreliable. I called the circulation office and found out that I still had the same carrier I had for years.
I began to suspect the commuters. I had a second-story window directly above my front door. I started getting up early and watching out that window to see what was really happening with my newspaper. Sure enough, someone grabbed my paper. I had a bucket of water handy and threw the water at just the right moment.
I yelled, ‘Sorry, did my newspaper get wet?’ That was the last time my paper disappeared. I forgot to mention, the temperature that day was 12 degrees Fahrenheit. Did I get caught? No, the thief did.”
22. Don't Pay For Your Own Garbage? You'll Find It On Your Front Lawn
“I used to have a small business and by the strip, mall rules had to have a dumpster.
Well, it seems the neighbors saw this as a place to dump their garbage for free. We paid by the load, not weekly or monthly. When it was full, call and they pick it up, weighed it and we got a bill so… their garbage cost me.
I left notes on the dumpster, everything I could think of and then that was it — one day had enough. So instead of going home I dragged the bags out and went through it piece by piece: eggshells, coffee grounds, putrid this and that, and then I found what I was looking for – an envelope with a name and address.
Made sure I found more than one. Packed it all back up and went and found the address. It was late and being the nice guy I am I didn’t want to disturb the people so I put the garbage on their front lawn, making sure every bag broke and spread around a little.
No issue ever again.”
21. Ex-Company Said I Was A Thief
“I arrived at my new job and to my surprise, they had already decided to double my asking salary… good start but anyways. After 6 months of hard work and increasing sales, I asked the boss for a working visa as the one I was on had almost expired to which he agreed. I was given all the documentation and $2000 for expenses and flew to England.
My visa was ready and stamped into my passport so I headed back. After my second day back I was informed my services were no longer needed and to please pack up and wait for the driver to escort me from the premises. This I did and was bundled into the car and headed home, I was bundled out of the car without stopping!!!!
The following day, covered in bruises I went to speak to a friend of mine about my situation so I agreed to meet his lawyer to evaluate my position, she agreed, I had a strong case of ‘unfair dismissal’ and ‘physical abuse’… the fight was ON!
My lawyer drew up the documentation and delivered them to my ex-company; in return they had their lawyer draw up documents accusing me of ‘being an illegal alien in the country!’ Sure enough, the visa issued to me in London by the embassy was false, it belonged to a Brazilian worker based in the Amazon.
The following day, fortunately, I wasn’t home when the police and Head of Immigration appeared at my door with an ‘arrest and deportation warrant’! Upon receiving this information I went into hiding for 10 days until a short-term visa was issued.
Knowing I had avoided arrest my ex-company stated that I had never worked for them but when I produced a copy of my paycheque that was thrown out.
Next (lawyer #2) stated I had abused a member of staff — no one came forward — dismissed. Next (lawyer #3) stated that I had caused a fight in the office — no one came forward — dismissed.
At this point, I had informed a Daily newspaper about my situation and they sent over a reporter to record my story.
He was shocked that an embassy in London was issuing fake visas to Brits in a British passport but with an ongoing case there was nothing they could do; I promised to keep in touch and if something bad was to happen then the passport would be delivered to him.
Anyways, to cut an already long story short after 18 months of battle and having to move various times often going into hiding the final straw was bribery. My ex-company knew I had all the evidence I needed to be decided (lawyer #4) to bribe the judge; what they didn’t know was my lawyer’s father was the senior judge of the district so upon being told this ended the case and ruled in my favor.
Now the revenge.
The judge asked both parties to agree to a settlement in his chambers but I requested it be done in the company office. They had a very open plan, glassed, 3 story building with the accounts dept. very central on the second floor.
So mid-morning around the conference table the judge asked me to write down what I wanted in compensation, my ex-company was asked the same question and he was given 2 pieces of paper. He calculated a mid-point and asked if that was acceptable. I asked one question ‘would that be cash?’ The judge agreed, they had to pay me in full, that day!
So an hour later a large brown envelope was handed to my lawyer and we counted the $100s, it took us 45 minutes in total. During the counting process, I glanced upwards and saw my ex-colleagues at the ‘walls’ smiling and giving me the thumbs up; they had been told I was a thief and had returned to England!!!
With the dollars in my account, I opened a bar in the city just to say ‘I’m staying here!’
I was approached by a writer a few years ago if I would like to sell my story but as I had signed a 20-year silence agreement, I refused, but if anyone is interested then please get in touch.
There are many more details but that would take too long and I wouldn’t want to bore you!”
20. Friend Deleted All Of The Card Slogans She Created
“A friend worked for a company that was doing various kinds of advertising. Her job was to come up with greeting card slogans. She had hundreds of slogans with drawings.
She was the only one working on it and it was two years of work. The company decided that they would not go into the greeting card business so my friend decided to quit. So she went to her boss and asked for the greeting card slogans as she had created all of them.
She asked, ‘Is the company going to use these?’ No, never. So she asked if she could have them. The answer she got was that they belonged to the company… not to her. The company was abusing its employees so she packed up all her stuff and before she walked out the door she brought up the greeting card file and with one click of a button deleted the whole thing!
It was her revenge moment before she walked out the door forever.”
19. They Terminated Me For Not Being A Team Player
“I was Manager of Contracts for a construction company once when we were losing tens of millions of dollars on a major project. The original estimate was much too low, and management agreed to an even lower price, and we were experiencing overruns. It was a nightmare.
Top management hired a Consultant whose business was assisting government contractors in filing claims against the Federal Government. He was retired military, and he actually had a good track record.
Well, after reviewing all of our records and spending an hour or so with me, he made a presentation to management, recommending that we file what is referred to as a ‘Total Cost’ claim.
This is an extremely risky strategy where you demand more because certain unquantifiable factors had caused a great overrun, and you are entitled to more… just BECAUSE.
Since I was the Contract Manager, I was asked what I thought of this recommendation – with the entire management team looking on.
I very calmly told the assembled group that while such a claim might be successful against the Federal Government, it would do nothing but enrage this private sector company, with totally unpredictable results. It could backfire and make things worse.
Two days later, I was terminated for ‘not being a team player.’
Well…
A couple of months later, the claim was filed (three large binders with many pictures, graphs, and charts) by the President of the company (to ensure that it was taken seriously). As was related to me by my successor, the client left the room and came back a half-hour or so later.
He said that this claim was considered to be a repudiation of the contract and a breach. He said that unless the claim was immediately withdrawn, the contract would be terminated immediately for default. Furthermore, he demanded a full and unconditional release from ANY claims from the beginning of the contract up until that day, and without this additional waiver, they would stop all payments immediately.
At the time, we had about 400 craft and labor workers on site, all working 12-hour days to keep the project on schedule, and all requiring WEEKLY payments by union contract. The company did not have the resources to carry the project for even a week at that burn rate, so we had to withdraw the claim in writing and give the customer the waiver that he demanded, thus giving up a couple million in LEGITIMATE claims that could now not be pursued.
The company went bankrupt within another six months, due to the losses on that contract.
Revenge? Maybe not. But I certainly felt vindicated. I’ve always wondered if anyone on the management team ever reflected on what I said and acknowledged that I was absolutely correct.”
18. Friend Cuts The Heads Off The Small Pins
“It was a brokerage firm in Seattle (long gone now). My friend was their computer operator, which at this time was a big mainframe in-house system with cables that ran under the floor out to the various terminals.
Management, in their infinite wisdom, decided to fire him, and THEN decided that he was going to work the night shift on his last day.
Work all night, be gone in the morning.
When we got in that next morning, he was gone, all right. And nothing worked.
He had spent part of the night cutting the heads off of dozens of boxes of small pins. And the rest of the night lifting the floor tiles and pounding those headless pins into the main cable that tied the whole system together, shorting out everything.
They spent days trying to find and pull out all those fine pins before finally giving up and replacing the entire cable.”
17. I Spent The Whole Weekend Deleting My Notes
“It was 2009, I had worked at my local hospital for 42 years since I was 17. I was a senior manager in charge of 19 people responsible for implementing a new clinical computer system.
We had been working at mapping existing processes within the hospital, logging all forms, and recording all paper trails. The team included clinical, nursing, and admin staff, so we knew what we were doing.
Thursday morning we were all called into a meeting room and told the team was to be disbanded, there were 11 jobs we could apply for but they were hiring contractors to do the “important” work.
Total disrespect to me as the manager that I hadn’t even been given a heads up.
I had contacts in HR, the idea was that you could apply for any of the posts and if unsuccessful you would be offered jobs within the organization, if you turned down three you would have been deemed to resigned, with no redundancy payment.
There were no suitable jobs in the new set up so I would be offered senior manager jobs in areas in which I had no experience. I was also told in confidence that with 42 years of service and senior manager pay there was no way they would give me redundancy pay.
One of the first tasks I got involved in in the IT job was to help install a radiology and PACS (digital imaging) system. Radiology had recently contacted me and asked if I was interested in a 3 day a week job looking after the systems, the previous manager had just retired. I had been umming and ahhing, I said I would have to give 3 months notice and had been told that was OK.
Because my job was now at risk I didn’t need to give notice. Friday morning I attended the interview that 48 hours earlier I wasn’t sure I was going to and was offered the job at lunchtime. I agreed to start on Monday.
I was eligible to draw my pension, so that afternoon I contacted the payroll dept, told them what was happening, that I would need to start drawing my pension on Monday.
I also told most of my team what was happening, but not the 3 toadies.
I spent the weekend at work destroying all my notes and info I had gathered, deleting anything relevant from my hard disk, and leaving a clean desk.
I learned from my new boss, that my old boss thought I had been ‘disrespectful’ for not telling her I was looking at other jobs.
Disrespectful was not the word I used for ‘sacking’ me with no notice after 42 years.
She ignored me from then on but had to request something about interfacing our systems with the new one. I had great pleasure in telling her what she was asking was not possible but I knew how it could be done.
My new part-time (3 days/week) job plus my pension was £21 less per year than my previous job. It was the best move I ever made.”
16. I Took People Away From The Trashy Company
“I was employee number 7 for a software as a service company. I put my b***d sweat and tears into building their business.
When things were small, I worked in the basement of my boss’s home. When things got bigger, I trained other employees (in QA, in support, in project management) in how our stuff worked. I’m not a water-walker, but I was generally well-thought-of by those I trained.
Fast forward a couple of years: after training and building out my department including supervising and managing those I trained because there was no one else to do that, they hired a guy to manage the department I had been de facto managing for years.
Fine. I simply refused to train him. I was always too busy. Not my finest hour, but my avenues for advancement in this company were now firmly entrenched.
My passive-aggressive routine eventually led to me being laid off. The founders were petty about it, and wouldn’t call out what the real dynamic was.
I didn’t care. I left.
When I got laid off, 2 other people (in a company with barely over 10 employees) I had trained quit immediately (without input from me) because of the message that my firing signified to other employees. Later, in my new job, I recruited away several employees from this company just because I knew they were great.
My motivations were not necessarily revenged, I put good opportunities in front of good people I knew. I got them better pay and better benefits because they deserved that. That this inconvenienced people I didn’t like was just delicious icing on the professional cake.
I did the right thing all the way around in my pro experience with these jokers.
They experienced it as vengeful because that’s the only idiom they had for people who were no longer friends to them. I hired people away from them as they didn’t care about their employees. What I did wasn’t vengeful or difficult. I provided objective evidence that you suck, and why those I took from you should objectively evaluate you that way.
Cheers.
If you read this, you’re probably all ‘so?’ I get it. This particular company had industry and application-specific knowledge that one had to internalize to be effective. It generally took 6 months for people to find their feet. When I took several senior people, it was a purposeful shot across their bow.”
15. I Changed All The Passwords In The Company's Computers
“I worked at an international haulage company and loved it there. Best job ever. But the day I caught a new manager going through someone else’s emails was the day I knew the end was nigh. I was now a liability.
That manager made my life miserable for a few weeks in the hopes I’d leave and take his little secret with me, but I was afraid I’d be framed for theft or something, so I looked for a new job.
I found a new job very quickly, so I handed in my notice and worked my usual shifts until my last day. However, I spent my notice period having fun with the computers. I am a trained typist – old school – and know a lot of typing tricks that can be used on computers, like… how to hide reams of information in full view on a page.
Nothing illegal – I didn’t change or alter the text, I just had a little fun with it. Then just for giggles, I changed all the passwords.
Five weeks later I had a letter from them asking me for the new passwords. I ignored the letter.
Many months later I heard they’d had to call in a data retrieval specialist, who managed to break the passwords I’d set (they were easy). However, when they opened the manuals all the pages were blank. The manager had to throw away an entire operating system because I had hidden it in full view.
They might be computer experts, but they weren’t thinking like a typist.”
14. I Repaid My Professor For The Things He's Done For Me
“When in college I worked for the Computing Services Department at my university. They provided computer services to the general student population, but not services for classes.
This was completely separate from the Computer Science Department. (How could you not tell from the titles!) Computer Science ran programming classes for students in the engineering school.
There was a class that my thesis professor wanted to teach, which was an Introduction to Programming for non-engineering students. Which was a great idea, and a pretty novel concept for 1990. However, he was hamstrung because:
- Being 1990, computer resources were seriously expensive.
- The Computer Science Department didn’t want to spend its budget on non-engineering students.
- The Computing Services Department didn’t want to spend its budget on classes.
Back then the only language you could really teach to non-programmers was Basic. So both groups avoided supporting this class by not installing Basic on any of their machines. This went on for several years.
Then one day the university had a budget crisis. In the clever way that universities have, they solved this by mandating that every department lay off its two most junior people. I was one of those two and I was given two weeks to ‘wrap up whatever I needed to.’
My professor had done a LOT for me over the past few years. He was an amazing man. So I decided to pay it back, at least a little. I took that two weeks to get Basic up and running on a Computing Services Department machine.
I probably spent 100 hours in those two weeks getting this done. (I only got paid for 40 since I was a half-time employee.)
After being officially let go I went to my prof’s office and told him what I did. He truly loved fighting through bureaucracy so appreciated it even more.
The joy on that man’s face! Worth all the extra time I put in.
His new class, with hundreds of students each semester, ran on that department’s machines for the next decade.”
13. People In Glass Houses Should Never Throw Stones
“Many years ago we were living in Florida and had a neighbor that was clearly mentally ill.
He was paranoid and also extremely aggressive. It started with our pets being poisoned and escalated from there. We had the main electric feed to the property cut, the water turned off and padlocked, damage to plants and landscaping on the property line, etc. I installed an extensive security system (45 cameras with night vision and sound) after which things calmed down for a while.
The next thing was a handicapped parking zone installed for him (he was allegedly handicapped) not in front of his house but in front of ours! That was the last straw. I hired a private investigator and had him followed 24/7 for months. Yes, it was expensive but it was worth it.
Finally, his next move was to take us to court for code violations and the use of his (personal?) parking space. During the court proceedings, we presented all the blueprints and permits, and sign-offs that showed everything we did was within the law. However, he made a huge pain of himself especially when it was clear he was losing.
Finally, he claimed we blocked his view of the ocean which while untrue required the entire courtroom to pay a visit to his home to see his alleged lack of a view. Unbeknownst to him, we had done a full investigation of the history of his property including permits, construction, and violations.
Once on his property which was 2 stories he could not make his case for the lack of view since ours was 3 stories. However, he made it very clear he had built fully from lot line to lot line and installed windows overlooking his neighbors on both sides (a clear violation).
In the end, he managed to prove to the court that his entire renovation of 1/3 of his building was completely illegal and the original property was built 4 feet too close to the lot line. The court ruled he would have to apply for a variance and no matter what the result was he had to eliminate all windows on the lot lines.
If the variance was denied he would be required to demolish the addition done without permits. He would also have to apply for a hardship variance for the original property as he purchased it.
In the end, he got his hardship variance but lost the battle for the new construction which he had to remove at great expense.
We also got the handicapped parking removed since we had him on camera clearly not handicapped.”
12. The CEO Got Fired
“I was working my notice period before leaving of my own choice (after just 6 painful months). The CEO was so annoyed, that he didn’t speak to me. Anything he wanted, was given 2nd hand by the accountant. Apparently, I had to stick around and not say anything about leaving, in front of the overseas senior management who were coming for a visit.
I later found out that staff retention was one of his KPIs, and I would be the one to cause him to fail that KPI.
Another KPI of his was profit margin, and he’d done some underhanded things to claw that back, like getting an IT consultant to rewrite code in the quoting program, so quotes would automatically generate a higher sell price at our location compared to others.
We quickly found this, as many of the reps kept old emails, and old quotes printed out in folders, and they were able to compare them. They got clever and asked an interstate buddy to quote the same thing, and sure enough, 2 different sell prices.
This was the tip of the iceberg.
We also found out he lied about a major contract. He caused the loss of that business by getting greedy. We knew our international guests would be asking about it, because they were the #2 customer, and they dropped off the radar real quick.
He falsified sales reports in Excel to show they were still at #2 with an improved margin year on year.
I had to sit through 3 days of this rubbish, and not utter a word. But he was hopeless with computers, so the accountant asked me to use my laptop to run the projector in the board room, and he gave me each of the CEO’s reports and slide shows to present on the projector.
At the end of each one, if I wasn’t involved in the conversation about updating signage or other crap, I’d just sit there & do emails & the like, with the projector switched off.
One of my emails was from the purchasing manager (PM) of that #2 company.
They were hit with a 15% price increase 2 months prior and argued back & forth for a week about not accepting it. The CEO basically told them to put up or shut up, so they stopped purchasing from us because of this. The dodgy reports he showed HQ had fake numbers in it to hide this loss.
The PM must have had some supply issues from their other vendor, as he emailed me asking me to go into bat for them against my boss (the CEO) and see if I could get that 15% increase reviewed to a reasonable level.
I wrote back to him apologizing, saying whilst I agreed that 15% was a large increase, I wouldn’t go up against the CEO as I was leaving the company, and had given my 4 weeks notice some 2 weeks back.
The afternoon session that followed was every state’s top 3 customers, and how they were doing. He made a huge fuss about how they asked for a cost down, and he told them they would be copping a 15% price increase, or they could walk. He then claimed they came crawling back, begging us to take them back, and they would pay the increase.
Now, this was the opposite of what I’d read earlier, so I just happened to ‘accidentally’ flick to the email to ‘check’ what that PM had written – all of it mirrored on the projector screen.
Yes, they saw both things I wanted them to see – that I was leaving, and that he was a liar.
They started to question him, but half of us (including me) were told to leave the room and close the door. I never heard a peep from that CEO for the rest of the 2 weeks I had left there.
But that was really just a petty thing, and I never heard if there was anything that came of it or not, so I never got any closure on that topic.
However, my real revenge came when I got them busted for illegal accounting practices, and we all got a bit of a bonus in our superannuation accounts that had been ‘overlooked’ by devious management who was fiddling with the books to increase their bonuses.
That CEO eventually got fired over a whole raft of things, and has never been able to get a job in management since, because nobody is willing to give him a reference.”
11. Annoy Your Clients And They'll Seek Other Options
“I was working in an office where I was pretty much the only person in my department that knew how everything worked. I also had quite close ties to several of our clients.
Having worked with them for several years, I had gotten quite friendly with them. Anyway, the company I was working with treated most of its employees as disposable assets. I had had enough of the work environment, and the attitude of HR so I handed in my notice.
I was immediately pulled into a meeting with some of the high-ups. Expecting some sort of ‘please don’t go’, I was not really surprised when instead I got handed a document to sign that pretty much said I was not allowed to let any of the clients know that I was leaving.
I signed it and worked my notice period. On my last day, it became very apparent that the clients I had worked with had no idea that the only person that they really spoke to was leaving. Nothing I could do about it though, I had signed the paper, and the company’s clients weren’t going to be my responsibility, even though I felt a little bad about leaving them in the lurch.
Time passed after I had left the company and started at a new one, and I got a phone call out of the blue. From one of the clients, I used to deal with at my old company. They had tracked me down through LinkedIn and wanted to know if I was interested in working with them again.
I said yes, but wasn’t really in a position to do so at present. The same day, I got another call from another of my old contacts, again they had tracked me down. Turns out no one was replying to them from my old company and they were annoyed. So I thought ‘darn’ and started working freelance with the 2 companies that had contacted me.
By the end of the first month, I was working with 6 of the clients that had decided they couldn’t work with my old company and wanted to work with me directly. Since I hadn’t sorted them out, they came after me. I couldn’t see any problem.
That old company has closed the division where I used to work as they didn’t have enough work to justify keeping it open, and I worked freelance with my new clients for several years.”
10. Dad Could Only Have 6 Cars On His Land
“My father works from home as a car dealer and always made a point of keeping his gates closed and only having two maybe three cars parked on the road.
Just past his house was land that was sold and a small estate was built for upmarket properties about 18 years later. On the first week of moving in one of the new neighbors started complaining then got the local council and other neighbors involved because of the cars in the garden.
After years of council investigations etc, it was deemed that my father could only have 6 cars on his land so his answer was ‘if they didn’t like my cars in my garden I’ll park them outside their houses‘ and parked a 25-year-old camper that was rotten and a 1950s land rover outside the main protagonist’s house for about three years, making sure to put another vehicle in place while one was getting its yearly MOT then putting it back.
That man had a for sale sign up on his house for years and couldn’t sell it.”
9. Delinquent Neighbors Got Busted
“My parents scraped every little bit they had together to buy a two-family house on a small quiet dead-end road to have a safe place to raise their children. We had 14 houses of great neighbors, and one house of very nasty neighbors. A whole family of dirtbags rented an apartment in the house just before ours.
Their 16-year-old son, Junior, was friends with the overgrown child of a tenant we had when we bought our house. The tenant was in his 40s and hung out with the teenagers next door. One of the first interactions we had with anyone in that family was when my mother caught Junior rummaging through our things in our private basement.
My father tried getting them to quiet down, but they got louder. He tried talking to the father to control his son, but his son was ‘a man now’, so the father had and desired no control in the house. They would have loud drinking parties with his son’s teenage friends clearly not old enough to drink and clear substance use of what kind we wouldn’t know until after the raid…
The police came several times, but it seemed the family lived with a police scanner in every room, so things got eerily quiet when a call came over the radio with their address. The father would claim not to know anything about the problem and would talk to ‘the boys’.
The police were bothered by this, but couldn’t force their way into the apartment without a warrant or probable cause and nothing incriminating was ever left out in the open.
A neighbor’s child once called 911 accidentally and the police had to check the house for possible victims. Apparently, a 911 call is a probable cause for entry even if you answer the door and say everyone is ok.
The police also didn’t dispatch cars to 911 calls or domestic abuse calls over the radio. The dispatcher would contact the officer with their Nextel phones or you’d hear the dispatcher telling the officer to call into the station. The public would not hear the person’s address for privacy purposes or possibly to not alert an aggressor.
This gave me the perfect opportunity as a nerdy 14-year-old. I knew all about phone systems and with the tips about the ‘privacy’ policy the police had in place for 911 calls, I got to work. My mother and I took a bunch of pictures of the morons in the yard with kids drinking beer, and some glass pipes clearly not used for legal purposes, and got them developed.
The next Thursday night I went to work, like some super agent spy or something. I had it all planned out for a while beforehand. One night I connected two long thin wires to their phone box and left the ends in a bush where our yards met…
The wire ends were left in the bush until Friday night came along. I walked over, threw the envelope of pictures on the front stairs, twisted the wire connections to a cheap phone we had, and dialed 911. Now the 911 operator would see the call as coming from the family’s phone line.
I remember making it sound like I was crying and saying something stupid about a little girl, to which there were no girls at any of these parties. Then I twisted the wires together which is the equivalent of leaving the phone off the hook.
Soon thereafter the police showed up. Not one or two cars, but six local cars (which might have been all of them), two cars from the next town over, two staties, a fire truck, an ambulance, and then a couple unmarked or off-duty showed up.
Nothing happened on the scanner until after they were already all on the scene. Both parents were arrested, the house was ransacked trying to find the girl, but instead finding strung out kids hiding in closets, a larger amount of illegal stuff than any of us expected, and satisfaction.
Junior was arrested for resisting and assaulting police officers. The street was completely impassible for anyone including the police trying to leave while for the next hour or two as the parents of the other kids came to claim their little delinquents. A couple of them had warrants and were also arrested on sight.
I was scared out of my mind for what felt like weeks afterward.
My uncle had helped me with some of the planning including the tip about twisting the wires together afterward so 911 wouldn’t be able to call back. My father realized what I did rather quickly and I confessed as soon as he gave me that ‘What did you do’ look.
He told me how horrible it was what I did, but that they deserved it and he hoped I would talk to him before trying anything like that again. When the police finally left around 4 hours later, he went and plucked out the phone wires.
He was laughing like a mad scientist telling my mother what happened when she came home from work. After several criminal charges and a nice article in the newspaper, the landlord finally kicked out his ‘perfect’ tenants. We had almost 20 years of peaceful neighbors after that.”
8. Neighbors Turned The Pool Pink
“There were five or six guys, foreign Univ. students, living below me in a condo complex. They took all the parking including mine with new Porches, Lambos, etc. These cars would last maybe two weeks.
First, you’d see a dent, then a bigger dent, then the car would disappear and be replaced by another new one in a different color.
I didn’t really care, but they hung out on the stairs every day and would not let me pass to get to and from my vehicle.
They’d pinch my arms and grab at me, saying stuff I can only assume wasn’t nice. The landlord didn’t care, he was getting well paid. These guys had diplomatic immunity, so normal or official reactions were a moot point. The final straw was over laundry… There were maybe 8 washers in the laundry room, one Sat.
morning I took my stuff and put it in two of them, then returned to my place. I waited 30 mins then returned to put everything in the dryer.
When I got there, I saw all of my clothes strewn all over the floor, wet, and they’d been walked on.
I opened the washers I’d used to see that my neighbors below had put their stuff in there instead, it was all light-colored… All the washers were now taken. They were laughing and joking on the stoop when I returned with my armload of soaking wet and soiled clothes.
One of them pinched my arm, another pulled my hair. That’s it, I was done. So… off to the store. I bought ten bottles of neon pink Rit dye…
The next Sat. I left my condo before they got up with my neon pink dye in hand and hid my vehicle on the other side of the complex.
I checked the laundry room, (nobody was using it). Then I waited in ambush, reading in the rec. center where I had full view. Sure enough, here they all came with their laundry. After they left the laundry room, I put 2-3 bottles of the dye in each of their washers.
The display that followed was pretty epic. One was screaming and ripping/rending the pink garments, another was insanely throwing them in the pool. Another ran to the manager’s office, I could hear him screaming in a foreign language. Someone called the police. I’m not sure at all what followed that day, but they moved out before noon.
Would I choose that same response or path today? No…”
7. They Beg Me For The Password
“A good 30 years ago, I worked as an Admin Asst for a large, now-defunct biotech company.
I worked in the Virology Department and most of what we did was monitor testing studies. This entailed inordinate amounts of paperwork — pulling apart forms, Xeroxing them, filing the various parts. I truly hated that part of the job. We also wrote FDA filings, which were usually at least 4″ thick.
We used WordPerfect software and during my approximately 2.5 years there, I got really, really good at it. This was the part of the job that I absolutely loved. Word processing is still my calling.
Once a filing was done, it was Xeroxed 10 to 20 times and sent to the heads of all the various departments.
Another part of the job I disliked.
Each person read the document and penciled in their edits and sent it back to us and… you guessed it… we started the process all over again. How we ever managed to get a filing into the FDA, much less on time, is still beyond me.
When it came to the work product, I made back-ups of everything.
It became apparent early enough that this job was a really bad fit for me. I’m the type that when asked to file something, I’m tempted to reply with ‘do it yourself, I’m busy’ or when asked to make a phone call for someone, I’m tempted to retort, ‘what are you, crippled?’ Let’s just say, I don’t do secretary and leave it at that.
All things being equal, I never actually SAID any of these things, and I really did my job to the best of my ability, but at some point, there developed a concerted effort to get rid of me.
Now, I was too good to be fired (at will State notwithstanding) and so they tried to make me miserable enough to quit (not falling for that one!), so I have moved around from cubicle to cubicle, supervisor to supervisor, and I was basically shunned by my peers, lest they get fired. One supervisor (my last one there) asked me to make a phone call for her early one morning, then proceeded to stand over me while I attempted it.
It wouldn’t go through no matter how many times I tried, while she continued to berate me loudly and in front of the entire staff. It turned out later that she had given me the wrong number, so it wasn’t going through no matter what.
Anyway, we all knew I was going to be canned, it was merely a question of when. Meanwhile, I was quietly cleaning out my cubicle from the inside out, so that it wasn’t obvious what I was doing. Everything remained on the walls, etc., so that when the time came to make my exit, I’d have little left to pack.
So the day finally came. We all assembled in the conference room, and I was basically given my walking papers. Interestingly enough, I was offered the option of clearing out then or coming back after 5:00 p.m. to spare me the embarrassment. I also was able to cash in whatever stock options I had available, plus my accrued vacation and my last paycheck.
Not much of a ‘firing’ and I left with just shy of $6,000, enough to hold me over until I found a job I liked.
So, anyway, if you’ve read this far, this is how I took revenge on these people:
Remember I said I made backups of everything I did?
Well, I gathered all the backups of all the reports I’d done there into two or three zip files. Then I deleted the Unzip utility and left. Never looked back.
So what? Right? Well, about six months later, I came home to find a desperate message on my answering machine begging me to either tell them the password to unzip the files (or come in and unzip them myself) so they wouldn’t have to hire a temp to retype everything.
As you can imagine, I never called them back. I never actually damaged or destroyed any files that they needed or did anything actionable legally, but it felt so good to get back at these awful people.”
6. New Boss Gave Me A Day Off To Testify Against My Former Boss
“I have only been fired once. I was very active in my college radio station and earned a degree in classical music, and was hoping to work in this niche.
The plan was to go back to the urban market where I had grown up, but the day before graduation I got a call from a local radio station that was offering ‘beautiful music’ with four hours of classical a day. It seemed a good way to launch a career, and I scrambled to find a place to live.
Three of us ran the station for 18 hours a day, seven days a week. Had to wear ties. We got paid every two weeks, but the owner’s wife was the bookkeeper and would hold our Friday checks until the following Monday because we were low-life DJs and would drink it all up over the weekend.
We were not allowed to speak, playtime, and station IDs from tape cartridges. Spun discs from approved piles. On Sundays I would play a classical show from the local library, they provided LPs and an open reel tape of comments, with a script. One morning the tape was completely clean, except for ‘zap spokes’ – it had been bulk erased somehow.
I read the script over the microphone, fearful that I would lose the job. I should mention that in addition to hosting classical shows on the college radio station for years I had a work-study job narrating educational slide shows. I could speak well. And had worked weekends at another local station my final year.
Letting out-breath, I did not get fired but was actually allowed to read the weather report once an hour!
Meanwhile, on my minimum wage, I found a $17k house to buy (it was 1978) and thought I was doing OK.
Sunday afternoons in the fall we would air Redskins football games.
I listened for cues and plugged in the local commercials; there were 20 breaks scheduled, and I dutifully logged them down when aired. Except for one time we were only given 19 breaks – it was the ‘Skins, perfection not expected…’ I reported this on Monday to the billing manager (the owner’s daughter).
They told me to falsify the log so they could bill the customers, and I would not. (This was in the days of having to have an FCC license to operate on the air).
So, two days before Christmas I was fired. Note that I had graduated in June…
I had multiple offers from other stations in the area and did OK, learning a lot and even becoming an engineer and operations manager, so with the shackles off, I could thrive.
But here it gets interesting… It turns out that there was a government program called ‘CETA’, the Comprehensive Education and Training Act, which encouraged something like apprenticeships.
Employers who took on unskilled workers and gave them training would be reimbursed 50% of the salary for six months. So these guys would hire folks but instead of training them drew from folks with some skill, largely from the local colleges, but some that had been professional broadcasters for many years, and then fabricate a reason to lay us off after six months.
It’s a few years later and I am working for a competitor down the road and some federal investigators looked me up. One of them actually blew out his coffee when he heard of my background. Turns out there were 18 counts of fraud for my old boss and his cronies…
My new boss HATED my old boss and gave me the day off WITH PAY to go testify at the regional Federal Courthouse. Still think of him every time I go to vote! So that was my ‘Revenge’.
BTW the assistant manager was featured on ‘America’s Most Wanted’ a few years later for crawling out a bathroom window in another courthouse while in for bigamy charges.
Addendum… forgot to mention that after a few months the daily classical blocks got dropped. Owner’s wife’s bridge club found that the dynamic music interfered with their conversation…”
5. We Want The Traditional Training
“A few years ago I was running the commercial cookery section of a small hospitality team at a govt run training facility that mainly trained front-line staff for our tourism-based town.
A new front-of-house teacher arrived, very adept at the govt system and lots of credentials but couldn’t carry 3 plates. She decided that we would refocus to hospitality management training for line managers (more her bag) and the employers could train their own staff as training waiters was frankly, a little beneath her.
She starts to build ‘strategic partnerships’ with the big hotels & resorts in town and gets lots of smiles from head office for the new approach of ‘nobody comes to the campus, do your own training’ because the college is still keeping all the govt funding for the training… just not doing it.
Instead, we will send assessors out to your workplace (ie criticize what you’ve taught instead of doing it ourselves) and sign them off.
Meanwhile, much to her ire, I kept on with bringing my apprentices on to campus for traditional training. Not all apprentices work in the same level of establishment or get the same amount of training, some restaurants don’t have the same range of activities to learn, so college provides facilities, equipment, and a constant baseline for learning according to the National Training Package.
There is also a prevailing attitude amongst chefs that you come to work to work, and you go to trade school to learn. I tried the ‘new way’ with three hotels, (including her favorite), that I thought would do a good job of the training and it failed miserably.
They didn’t train them and the apprentices fell behind in their learning which then became my fault.
As I mentioned, the lady was a skilled player in the public service and I am but a simple chef. She did a great job of painting me as someone who was stuck in the past, unwilling to accept change.
Head Office believed that my cookery section was dying thru lack of numbers even though they had figures that said otherwise; I was sent on a change management course.
A previous maneuver of hers had been to get them to offer me early retirement, which in effect means retiring the position I held as it was no longer required. There was a substantial payout being a govt job and much to her delight I later decided to ask for it, I was sick of the game and was overworking for a training organization where the students were unimportant; I learned that all govt departments that bring in revenue work to a budget, including the cops with their tickets!
They couldn’t replace my position for 2 years once it was retired.
On my last day, the boss came down from head office, partially to find out what was going on with commercial cookery and to transfer the few remaining apprentices to other campuses. ‘Tell me about cookery,’ he says to the office manager.
‘Well, there are 98 active apprentices in the filing cabinet upstairs, and another 35 new ones on the chef’s desk waiting for someone to go out to the workplace and sign them up.’ Not bad for a one-man team! Everything she spent 18 months selling him was a total lie – he visibly collapsed onto his desk and put his head in his hands.
Then the calls started coming in from the industry… what’s going on there?… where’s the chef gone?… what are you doing about training my apprentices? They had 2 years of having to bring chefs in from other campuses, provide them with transport, accommodation, living away from home allowances to cover the training.
It cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars.
That was the schadenfreude… my pleasure in someone else’s misfortune.
The revenge? As I mentioned, she ingratiated herself into some of the big local players, and that ultimately led to her downfall. Our hero’s husband set up a contract housekeeping business supplying maids to properties around town, and in due course, a miracle happened. The 5-star hotel that the college partnered with decided to sack all their live-on housekeeping staff (it was an island resort) and change to contract staff that would commute early to the island every day on the staff boat.
Guess whose business got the contract? Uh-huh!!
‘Someone’ made a call to the State Crime & Misconduct Commission about the possible corrupt use of a government position in influencing the award of a contract to her husband. She literally flew away in the middle of the night, house packed up and gone within 24hrs over the weekend.
Last I heard she and her husband were living across state lines in a small remote town on the far coast of Western Australia, no doubt trying to be a big fish in a small pond once again.
The college, and cookery? It survived and flourished. Not only did our hero get her comeuppance but her boss Mr. Head-in-Hands also retired early due to stress some months later.
Change of govt, change of priorities and senior staff and twenty years later the place is as busy as ever, refurbished restaurant, new kitchen equipment ~ I dined in the training restaurant last week, it was great!”
4. Neighbor's Cat Got Trapped In Duct Tape
“Many years ago I lived in a condo complex.
My next-door neighbor was an angry old woman who lived alone. She had a cat that was frequently outdoors. When I got home from work, her cat would jump up on the hood of my car because it liked the warmth. Normally this wouldn’t bother me, but the cat was scratching up the paint on my car with its claws.
I decided to nicely ask her if she could keep her cat indoors, as it was damaging my car. She became belligerent and yelled at me ‘I can’t control what my cat does. You’re just going to have to accept that my cat will go on your car whenever it wants and if your paint gets scratched then that’s just too bad and that’s YOUR problem!
How DARE you ask me to control my cat!’
The next day, I got home from work and laid strips of duct tape on the hood of my car sticky side up. Sure enough, a few minutes later, her cat jumped up on the hood of my car, laid down on the sticky duct tape, and rolled around.
The cat had duct tape stuck all over it and wasn’t happy. The old lady came out and started screaming at me. She also called the police and tried to get me arrested for animal cruelty. I explained to the Police Officer that I put duct tape on my car, and there are no laws forbidding that.
The Police Officer agreed and told her I hadn’t broken any laws. The old lady lost her mind and started yelling at me and the Police Officer. The cop warned her that she was now on the verge of being arrested. She went back into the house and a week later she moved out.
Hey, I tried to be civil and asked nicely. She probably should’ve tried to work with me instead of against me. I would have loved to have seen her untape her angry cat.”
3. I Used Psychology To Make The Neighbor Get His Dog
“My wife and I were newly married (1970) and rented our first place, a garage apartment.
It overlooked the landlord’s house and a fence surrounded his backyard. All was well until the landlord brought home a dog for his son. The dog was an ‘inside’ dog but the landlord would let the dog out the back door at night to relieve itself.
The landlord forgot to let the dog back in a few times and the dog would yelp endlessly (sometimes all night long).
Naturally, we couldn’t sleep with all this barking going on. And we didn’t want to find another place because rental properties at that time were very scarce.
After another night of barking, I rolled over in the bed, picked up the phone, and called the landlord’s number. When he picked up, I hung up. As the dog kept barking, I kept calling the landlord’s phone and hanging up. Finally, the landlord put two and two together, came outside, and brought the dog back inside.
We never saw or heard the dog again. Problem solved. Psychology 101 paid off that night!”
2. Neighbors Have Been Wondering Why They Kept Getting Flat Tires
“25 years ago my husband and I rented a house for a year until we could save a down payment to buy a home. Our neighbor’s driveway and ours were side by side and rather long, but required a little car jockey at times.
The neighbor suggested we stagger our vehicles and they could get in our driveway and back out and vice versa. That worked out really well until our neighbor passed away.
When our new neighbors moved in it was an older couple and their adult son and they didn’t like that suggestion at all.
Within a week there was a chain-link fence from the road to the rear of the property and no trespassing signs every 10 feet or so. Ooookay. No fencing anywhere else so they weren’t trying to keep a pet safe or anything, just making sure we didn’t use a smidge of their property.
There was street parking also and you could only back in one direction because the fence was literally to the road. I left one day to get groceries and when I got home there was a police car in their driveway. I carried bags in and went back out to get the rest and walked right into a pair of cops and the adult (using that term loosely) son.
He began ranting the moment I walked out and the officers had to literally step between us. Apparently, I had demolished his fence with my reckless driving.
So we walk over and they ask him to point out this demolition and he had one of the little metal rods with the reflector that my bumper was supposed to have mangled and a scratch that he kept pointing at that I nor the officers could see.
Then he said I left the scene of the accident and he wanted me arrested immediately. One officer picked up the reflector and poked it back in the ground and this guy went berzerk. He took his little cordless phone and called the cops on the cops and was screaming that I wanted to act like a snob and pretend I didn’t know him when I did and that I used my feminine wiles to get the first set of cops to destroy the evidence.
During all this hullabaloo my husband and younger brother pulled in as my brother was working my job at our business and I thought my husband was going to come for this fruitcake. Turns out he was one of my little brother’s school friends and he was mad that I didn’t recognize him.
I moved out long before my brother graduated and never paid a bit of attention to his friends. Hi, I was with my friends. My brother finally got him calmed but he insisted I be arrested and he wanted a report and planned to sue me.
I’m in the yard crying over my spoiled groceries and the prospect of possibly having to give birth to my son in jail. Yes, I was 38 weeks PREGNANT and YES my husband was livid. We were told by the officers no report was happening and gave us their cards if anything happened and to try to not even let my shadow fall across his darned fence.
Our job was installing kitchens and bathrooms and every chance he got my hubby would toss a handful of nails or screws through the fence. I wonder to this day if they ever figured out why they kept getting flat tires.”
1. Neighbor From The Underworld Sold His House And Moved
“I had a friend who got back at a Neighbor From The Underworld. The awful neighbor would harass people on the block constantly – calling the code compliance officers to cite them for having their grass one inch too high, calling the cops for ‘loud music’ which was not that loud – all kinds of trivial stuff.
My friend called in ads to the paper for huge ‘moving sales’ at that house. Husband just passed away, everything must go – many guns, five-year-old Harley Davidson, many tools – come early, knock on the door.
So, all these rough bikers would come roaring to the house at 6:00 a.m. Saturday morning.
My friend also arranged for the Mormons, Moonies, and Jehovah’s Witnesses to come at late hours. My friend also arranged for lots of goods and services to come to the house of the Neighbor From The Underworld. Finally, my friend arranged for HORRIBLE adult magazines to come to the neighbor – only he put the address of the jerk’s next-door neighbor on the adult magazine (you don’t want to know the nature of this magazine).
After a few months of harassment, the Neighbor From The Underworld sold his house and moved. My friend innocently asked, ‘Why are you moving?’ The bully answered ‘Ah, this neighborhood is going to pot.'”
