People Crack Us Up With Their Stirring Stories Of Revenge
13. Can't Be A Professional CEO? Let Me Get An Attorney
“I have worked as an engineer for a very small business for around three years. We’ll call it Syntech. It has been nothing short of miserable every day.
However, the compensation is up to scratch enough to make it tolerable up until this point.
When I first started every day on my lunch break, the secretary/bookkeeper (we’ll call her Tina) would come out of her office to ask me if “my food was kosher” for about three weeks straight.
Tina blatantly did this because the CEO offered an employee lunch that was all pork-based, and I politely asked if there was a kosher option because I am Jewish.
Tina did this daily just to mess with me I suppose because I’m Jewish or whatever trivial justification she had.
I never complained to management about it, because frankly, I have thick skin, and she’s rude to everyone anyway.
Fast forward to a few months in. I’m talking to a fellow employee about my car (brand new BMW 8 series), and I say, “It’s a total chick magnet.” Now, Tina, for whatever reason, somehow overheard this from her office (over 100 feet away) and decided that what I said is somehow “harassment” towards her.
So, she and the sales guy decided that “I need to be put in my place” and file a formal harassment claim against me with the CEO.
Obviously, after investigating the claim, it was deemed completely false. Yet, no admin actions were taken against Tina or the sales guy.
I ask the CEO how he could condone the behavior of these two employees ganging up on me, making a false claim about something that serious.
You know what the CEO says? “I can’t really do anything about it, and I’d really appreciate it if we could just sweep it under the rug.” At this point, I’m fuming, but I give it a few weeks and decide to say screw it, be the bigger person, and let it go.
Karma will come for Tina and the sales guy eventually.
Fast forward a year later, and we have an employee we’ll call Tim. He just starts making extremely racist and insensitive comments about African-Americans and Jewish people daily. This piece of scum Tim is like 65 years old and white and is everything that’s wrong with America.
He was saying things so evil, I can’t even repeat them. Using racial slurs, making jokes about how awesome some dictators are, etc.
At this point, I report this to the CEO, to which I’m told, “Just ignore Tim, and let it be water under the bridge.” I’m shocked at this point.
Apparently, racism is cool and tolerated in this company? That’s so trashy… but we don’t have an HR department; there are like 11 employees, so I can’t really escalate it any higher than the CEO, so screw it.
I guess this place is what it is.
Fast forward to now, year 3. I’ve tolerated racism on a weekly basis for years. I have an awful stigma attached to my character by the false harassment claim. It’s not like the other employees know it was dismissed because it was never discussed at length and “just swept under the rug.” You might be thinking at this point, well, this isn’t that terrible of a place; it doesn’t sound that bad.
Yet, here comes the catalyst that was the tipping point for me.
I was given a key to the building on the anniversary of my 2nd year because I work my butt off and earned the ability to make my own schedule.
Provided I work 40 hours a week, I could come and go as I please.
I used this flexibility as an opportunity to go back to college to finish my degree and got a part-time job to gain experience in my field of study. Here it comes, the tipping point.
A few months ago, Tim decides to go on a tirade about how a co-worker we’ll call Rory should be allowed to bring his dog to work, even though Rory’s dog has been literally peeing and pooping on products on the production floor.
A co-worker we’ll call Mike chimed in like a rational adult and told him his behavior was inappropriate and says, “Tim, if you feel that way, maybe you shouldn’t be here like the dog shouldn’t be here.” Well, that really sets Tim off, and Tim decides he should throw a tape measure at Mike’s head.
This almost turns into a fistfight but was quickly broken up by who I like to call Ratty Danny.
Ratty Danny is, as you can guess, the office rat who tells on anyone to inflate his sense of superiority and self-righteousness. Ratty Danny loves to kiss up to management because he’s “making his mark,” even though management never does anything, ever, to address or correct any problem that ever arises.
Ratty Danny is that delusional guy with no natural leadership ability who thinks one day he’ll be the CEO if he keeps DHV (Displaying His Value) by telling on everyone, so he looks like Captain Freaking America. So, of course, he does what Ratty Danny does and snitches to the CEO about the fight that went down.
The rest of us kept our mouths shut because, hey, it’s just another day of hostility and racism at Synatech!
As a result of Ratty Danny and his tattle-tale ways, the CEO calls a company meeting the next morning to say that violence will not be tolerated and to “immediately rectify the situation; now everyone is required to come in at 7 am.” Because, “if the CEO is there, no one will fight.” Yes, he referred to himself in the third person.
My reaction in my head was: What? You mean to tell me Tim assaulted Mike and the course of action is to screw everyone’s hours over? On what freaking planet does that even make sense? Also, you think if two grown men get so heated that they want to fistfight, your freaking CEO title authority is going to magically stop them from throwing punches?
In what scenario does that apply? Is Ratty Danny going to yell your name when it happens, and you’re going to somehow run to the rescue? You have a racist employee with a behavioral problem. It gets better, or worse, depending on your perspective.
So, neither of them gets a write-up, suspension, reprimand, verbal counseling, nothing — no actual course of action for the underlying issue. Yet, now my school schedule and other job get derailed because of the actions of these two jerks? Ok, well, let’s see if being a grown-up prevails.
So, I try being an adult and broach the subject of my school hours and second job with the CEO. I mention how the punishment doesn’t really fit the crime and that his approach seems not only soft-handed but oddly inefficient. The CEO gets angry and tells me, “If you would like to continue school and your other job, that’s fine.
I guess you’ll just need to cut your hours to part-time. We’ll also be needing your key back.”
Ok, screw it… Well, now you just barked up the wrong tree. Because normally I am not a paltry kind of guy, but this kind of nonsense is and was the last straw for me.
Not only are you messing with my income, but my time and education escape plan from this poop hole too? Ok, I got something for ya buddy. Enjoy this 5-course meal of revenge best served cold, jerk.
I decided to start my plan by contacting OSHA and informing them of all of the health and safety violations going on.
They responded so quickly. They came in and did an inspection of all the stuff I noted almost immediately, and the company is getting fined around $5,000 a month due to all of the hazardous stuff in the workplace.
Due to the fact, the roof leaks profusely, and all of our machinery has open exposed gears and chains that could, in fact, suck you in and maim or kill you at any second in a variety of ways.
They are being asked to install laser-activated kill switches that cost tens of thousands and will be difficult to retrofit on the antiquated 1970s equipment. This is forcing us to work on trivial safety updating tasks and seriously slowing down production and turn-times, which is really affecting the CEO’s pockets.
I contacted the state labor board and informed them that no one takes meal breaks or state-mandated 10-minute breaks and that there’s workplace racism. I also sent them audio of the CEO bragging about the bookkeeper Tina altering the time cards to make things look like they were on the up-and-up.
I have yet to see them show up, but they are planning an inspection within the next week.
I decided to contact the IRS’s tax fraud and evasion reporting. I let the IRS know that the company is in the CEO’s mom’s name as a “woman-owned business” for illegal tax deductions because she is actually legally retired. I also let them know they set up a shell company in Florida to avoid paying state taxes on items they sell and ship from our actual location (not in FL).
Oh, and I don’t know why, but the CEO’s father has the business registered as a “veterinary clinic” for tax purposes, but we’re a manufacturing facility. All of this information was easily found on their business registration on the SOS’s website so it wasn’t hard to authenticate any of the claims to the IRS.
They took a while to respond to the situation but I am happy to report an auditor contacted them and an investigation is pending and the auditor will be showing up at some point to hang out with Tina to scrutinize the books. Ha!
By the way, I’m sure most of you know, but for the younger crowd that doesn’t, if you actually whistleblow for real issues/illegal activity with OSHA, the Labor Board, and the IRS, you get updated on the case if an investigation is launched, which I did.
Also, the company can’t fire you because it’s considered “retaliation” and grounds for a lawsuit. I put my name all over each of those reports.
I want them to know it’s me. I want them to have to come in and look me in the eyes every day knowing they can’t do anything about the maelstrom of trouble I’m causing them.
I’ve never been written up because they document nothing, ever, not even the false harassment claim. So, if I was ever fired for “performance,” they would have a very hard time with their “burden of proof” and not looking like it was retaliation. So, I’d like to think I covered my butt pretty well.
I have also hired an attorney who is taking my case for a hostile work environment on contingency and expects a pre-trial settlement of around 75k after he takes his fees, which the company will have to pay for once I win. I sue you; you pay me to sue you.
We are waiting to drop the lawsuit on them in October because that is when I graduate, and we’re both sure something else will happen in the meantime that will add to the pervasiveness of the case. So, now I’m just sitting back watching all heck break loose on the owner and his awful entitled family, knowing they can’t do a darn thing about it.
The end game is to finish my classes (had to drop the other job). I will re-lock down that job (full time) in my new career field. I have coordinated with my attorney. The same day, I drop my resignation / 2-week notice like a baddie.
My lawyer will be showing up to serve them the lawsuit.
Last but not least, I am paying a “private investigator” who’s a friend of mine to follow the CEO around for the next week and take lots of pictures because we’re all pretty sure he’s hooking up with Tina on the side.
I intend to have said friend send the photos to his wife just for the sole purpose of destroying his marriage if he can catch him in the act. I advised my friend to wear gloves and use a damp sponge to seal the envelope just for extra security.
I honestly intend on making the CEO’s life as miserable as humanly possible from now until the day I present a LOR with my lawsuit.”
12. Wrongfully Accuse Me For Something I Didn't Do? Pay Me Forever
“This story took place in 2007 but still pays off (quite literally).
I’m from Brazil, meaning: Different legislation.
I worked as an IT assistant in the education area. It was a good job, had excellent work hours, and the team was great.
The school was a very small one, owned and directed by a husband, wife, and some other family.
My job was initially as an IT assistant, which means hardware and software stuff, but since there was no senior IT, I was the IT. Not really a problem, since the demands for me were basically editing documents and maintaining the website. This was 2003 and things were good.
Fast forward four years I’m still an IT assistant but in charge of two interns, systems maintenance, IT security, user support, and all the publicity.
Again, all good since I had the time to study and work in another place repairing hardware.
One day the owner’s wife called me in her office.
I noticed rage on her face, she was red as a tomato and when I entered the room, she closed the door and started screaming: “OP you are stealing from the school! Look at these reports from accounting! You are not billing these students! You are stealing from my family!” Her face red and the angry expression completed a very disturbing scene from the 50yo small and fat woman.
She gave me the reports and I murmured: “Ok, I’ll have to look into that.” She started to scream again: “You don’t even realize what I’m talking about. This is what happens when you don’t pay attention to your work! Go on and get me some answers on how much you cost us!” I said: “Ok, I’ll have to look into that” and left her office.
With the report in hand, I started to calculate and found some inconsistencies.
The process was very simple: I generated the invoices and the accounting director (her brother) had to authorize the batch to send to the bank. If the bank finds any inconsistency they return to the system and the director has to authorize or not (sometimes we would edit the values for discount, calculation errors or typos, things like that).
Since I didn’t have access to this part of the system I took the blame since I couldn’t explain how that happened. Life goes on.
One day, months later, the computer gods smiled at me. The accounting director asked me to help him: “OP, I’m getting this stupid red flag on these names.
I don’t know what it is. Solve it so I can confirm and send the invoice to the bank. Normally I click on the names and then click ‘YES’ and the flags go away, it’s not working.”
I clicked and the message was: “Do you confirm canceling this invoice?” I stared at him and asked, “You really click ‘YES’ every month?” he confirms. I explained that he should choose not to send the invoice back to me.
He thanked me and I began my evil plan.
You know… when you are the only IT from somewhere, there are three things the owners should keep in mind:
1 – The control of all the passwords;
2 – The control of the processes from IT;
3 – The patience that IT requires.
We are problem solvers on caffeine and hate. We don’t sleep, we are fed by light. We are legion. (LOL).
The plan was simple: Make the business more and more automated and IT dependant. Which on a normal business would be very good news. But it was not.
Since no one knows at this school how important IT is (remember that I was still an assistant, even while doing all the work), I made sure that all the processes were automated.
For an entire year, I busted my butt working in methods to put all the processes on automatic pilot.
I created some cool bots (python, for the interested) to integrate the systems and almost no human interaction.
In 2008 I ended the automatization process and QUIT!
The school was kinda happy functioning without an IT person and for an entire year, all was good.
One day, in 2009 I get a call from the other owner (the husband): “OP we are having a problem in the system.
Could you fix it?”
You know…I hold grudges. And this was my time to glow.
“Hey Mr. Owner, I can fix it. I will charge you $100,00, is that good for you?”
“Yes, OP.”
After fixing what was wrong I advised: “You should hire an IT person or outsource IT.”
He said ok.
One month later, again, he calls: “There’s another problem with the new printer, can you fix it?”
“Yep, it’s $200,000.”
“Ok.”
Since they didn’t do anything about it I offered a malicious contract to help the school for $100,000 a month and $150,00 extra for any visit.
They agreed.
Fast forward: It’s 2021. They still don’t have an IT department, they still pay me $2000,00 a month + $ 250,00 extra per visit) and the computer system works like a charm.
The accounting director knows that I know he did wrong in the past. They don’t talk about it.
The owner’s wife knows that I know that her brother is a stupid account director and if I open my mouth he has to be fired. They don’t talk about it.
The owner tried to change the automation system, the cost is prohibitive. The system that I made is free for them to use but if they want a manual there’s a cost since I was an IT assistant, not a programmer.
The manual is in the program font, to know this they have to contract an IT person (which they won’t). We don’t talk about it.
Now I have a contract, don’t do practically anything and they are obligated to pay me since they don’t have the knowledge and are afraid of…ME!
If they want to change anything “I’ll have to look into that.””
11. I Have To Prove That I Can't Work? Check Out My Gauzed-Up Behind
“Backstory: this is 2008. I had been working for a local fast-food chain for a few years and had been a really dependable employee.
I always came in early and filled in for other employees when they were sick or had vacation, mostly when they were sick, though.
This is important because a lot of employees were abusing the policy, causing Head Manager to require physical proof that you were sick. But since it’s a small town, you could get a doctor’s note pretty easily. So, if she didn’t believe you, she would ask for additional proof.
Of course, I was young and stupid. And I really didn’t know the law at the time.
For a while, I had been suffering from a cyst that had been growing on top of my butt for a few months, and this was starting to really affect my work since it would make it harder to walk as the day went on.
Nice Manager had noticed this and confronted me about it. I told her what was going on. I was waiting for my vacation in a few weeks to check it out. This didn’t go over too well with her. So, she confronted my mother about it when she came by for her evening sweet tea.
Like I said, small town.
Everyone knows everyone.
I was admitted for surgery the following day. That just so happened to be one of two days off I had. Doctors ended up removing a golf ball-sized cyst from me. I was also released later that day and was given very strict orders not to do any lifting for the entire time I had the stitches in, and I was to be out of work for three weeks.
The next day, I needed to go to work and hand in my doctor’s note and collect my paycheck since it was payday. My mother had to take me since I was on painkillers and unable to sit much less drive. I hobbled into the building, in a pretty good amount of pain since any movement from the waist down hurt, and then asked to see Head Manager.
She yelled from the back for me to come to her office. I could tell she was not in a good mood from her tone. I slowly make my way to her office. Once I get there, she hands me my check, and I hand her my doctor’s excuse.
She reads it and flips.
Head Manager: What do you mean you are out for three weeks?
Me: It was a really big cyst, and the doctor said I had to take it easy. (I’m getting kinda irritated and light-headed at this point due to the pain and the meds.)
Head Manager: Well, you look like you can move around pretty well right now. I even have you on the schedule to work tomorrow.
Me: I’m sorry, but I really can’t do that.
Head Manager: Prove to me that you can’t!
Me: Trust me, you don’t want to….
Head Manager: I said prove it!
Me: Ok. (I then proceed to turn around, bend over, and pull my shorts down, revealing a large blood-stained gauze.)
I hear Head Manager gasp in shock.
Head Manager: Oh my God, okay. I believe you. Go home! (She said that as I was pulling my shorts up.)
I turned and looked at her before leaving, and she was white as a ghost.
Later that night, I got a knock at my door. It was Nice Manager. She had come by to check on me and tell me about how Head Manager ran to the bathroom after I left and threw up.
We both shared a good laugh after that.
Head Manager was replaced by Nice Manager two months later after the district manager fired her for some reason I never learned.
Also, yes, I know it was irresponsible of me to let something like that go for months.
As I said, I was young and stupid at the time.”
Another User Comments:
“Reminds me of a story from when I was in JROTC.
It was a uniform day, which is when all the ROTC cadets wear their uniforms to school for inspection. Unfortunately, I had been bitten by a spider right on my belt line and had a really bad reaction to it.
There’s no way I would have been able to wear a belt, much less a uniform. So, I wore my regular jeans with an ROTC tee shirt.
This did not go over well with the cadet who was in charge of uniform inspections, who just so happened to have a huge chip on his shoulder, and also didn’t like me one bit.
“Why aren’t you in uniform?” he smirked.
I explained the situation. He ridiculed me for it. I asked him if he wanted to see it. He chuckled and said, “Sure, why not?”
I pulled up my shirt and pulled back the gauze, revealing a huge red mark with a pus-filled center and a string of pus stretching out to the gauze pad, just for good measure.
He barely managed to get out a, “You’re excused!” before turning away and retching.” RallyX26
10. Don't Respect My Sleep? I'll Make You
When you lose sleep several nights after a while, it catches up to you.
“About fifteen years ago, I was in the army and I had what we’ll call a very unique skill set.
There were several people in my unit with that specific skill set, but for some odd reason all of the hot, 20-26 females got Monday-Thursday shifts and had Friday, Saturday, and Sunday off, while guys like me got Thursday-Monday night shifts (despite having seniority over some of the ladies in both rank and time on mission).
To make things worse, administrative staff like our commanding officer and platoon sergeant (bosses) worked Monday-Friday and weren’t willing to budge on us being active during their work hours. This meant that quarterly training like powerpoints we had to watch on harassment typically occurred both on my day off AND in the middle of my sleep time.
Given that I worked 16-hour shifts and the round trip to base was an hour, I was perpetually sleep-deprived. Even if I got off of work on time and went straight home, I could get optimistically six hours of sleep per day between driving, eating, and showering.
This went on for years over my objections.
I literally went nearly 2 years without a day off concurrently with my wife, a day worker. Interestingly, the army did a study demonstrating that after ~18 hours of consciousness, you make the same number of stupid and careless mistakes as if you were legally intoxicated. Sadly, no one told my PSG (platoon sergeant aka the boss).
He decided that sleep deprivation didn’t matter. In fact, one day when I was transitioning from a junior enlisted (technically a specialist, but if you’re not familiar with army ranks, think “private”) to an NCO (sergeant), my PSG decided I needed some NCO responsibilities.
Reasonable. We were having a range day (we had to qualify annually with the m-16 rifle), and we needed a duty driver to shuttle soldiers back and forth from the barracks. I was voluntold. Suffice it to say that I was “on loan” to a certain agency, and I needed to put in an ops release to miss work.
It was rejected due to staffing issues; at the time, there was no one else available who could do a certain thing that I could do. I told my PSG… and he informed me that the ops release was a courtesy. I was going, and it would only take 8-10 hours.
“But sergeant,” I tried to explain, “I work 16 straight hours leading up to the start of this driving, and I’d have to work another 14 straight hours at the end of it. On top of that, as a driver I’d be driving soldiers down winding roads I’m not familiar with in a van bigger than anything I’ve ever driven before while half asleep.
Then, at the end of what would be a 40-hour shift, I’d need to drive 30 minutes to get home. Does that seem safe?”
“Safe? Specialist (redacted), do you think the soldiers in Iraq right now are safe?” As I said, about 15 years ago.
“Well no, but at least they’re getting hazard pay-”
“You’re dismissed, specialist.”
So… I mean what could I do? I only fell asleep twice while driving, and both times were at stoplights. I also made every single passenger aware of my sleep situation (keep in mind I was already sleep-deprived coming into this), so they made sure to chat with me, bring me coffee, and do other things that decreased their chances of dying in that van.
Around hour 38 of this ~40-hour shift, (redacted), an Important Person, swung by my place of duty to check on something. I was literally standing up leaning against a cubicle, eyes closed, basically asleep – with four empty quad coffees (if Starbucks had a size above venti, it would be quad) sitting on my desk.
Per tradition, there was an NCO with the officer.
I got chewed out backwards, forwards, sideways, upside down, and in dimensions, I was not hitherto aware of. By military protocol, the NCO beside the angry officer did the chewing out. He threatened me with actual dereliction of duty charges as well.
This ended with, “Now explain to me Specialist why on God’s green earth you think it’s okay to sleep on duty?”
So I explained to him that I was literally semiconscious on my feet, I’d so much coffee I started having heart palpitations and decided to stop, and that it was hour 38 on duty and I was simply at my limits.
I cannot stress enough that Important People cared about what I was doing. A lot. Really. Important. People.
At this point, the officer stepped in. “You’ve been doing this for 38 straight hours?” So I explained to her how I’d had to drive a van around during my sleep time and this Important Mission had informed my unit that I was irreplaceable, but my unit decided it was critical that I – specifically the guy with the irreplaceable skill set who was working shift – be the duty driver that day.
I further explained how this wasn’t that uncommon – I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d had a week where I was allowed to sleep during my sleep time for the entire week uninterrupted. The number of silly things I had to do instead of sleeping was mind-boggling.
“Who is your commanding officer?”
I tried not to smile and told her.
“Carry on, specialist.”
Needless to say, by lunchtime (aka the equivalent of maybe 1 am for me), I got a phone call. Report to the PSG’s office Right Now. I sighed – to say that I was sleepy was something of an understatement, and keep in mind I got home around 8 am and had to work again around 4 pm.
The round trip to base alone would take an hour, plus I had to get dressed, be presentable, and deal with their nonsense, then get out of those clothes again afterwards, then dressed again and drive back….
“Please explain to me why the Command Sergeant Major of (redacted) just chewed me out over our in-house scheduling decisions.”
So I told him what happened.
“You told the (redacted) of (redacted) that…”
“Should I have lied to my mission commander about my level of readiness, sergeant?”
He turned… red. Like Santa’s cheeks, not a Norse berserker. No berserker-like traits at all. Nope. I took a totally professional step backwards.
He was about 6’2” and 250lbs of NCO, and uhhh I felt like I was hogging all of his oxygen. “Get. Out.”
So I did. It came down from on high that our unit was to have two quarterly training days henceforth. No more waking us shift workers up 1-2 times per week every freaking week for administrative nonsense, period.
All missions were informed that our soldiers would be doing one of the two training days – pick one.
Happy ending, right? Yeah, that’s never how it works in the military when you get someone above you in trouble. What’s the nastiest, stupidest duty you can imagine giving someone that was stateside in a strategic unit?
The urinalysis guy!
For those of you that don’t know, it’s his duty to plan and execute urinalyses. This requires literally looking at your fellow soldiers’ junk because there are a variety of products that can fool a urinalysis and the only way to … you know what, just trust me.
It’s nasty.
Fortunately, there was a loophole. You see, the powers that be are aware of the “good old boys” system that develops sometimes in the army… and it’s really, really important that the guy with the grenade launcher isn’t also on substances.
As a result, per regs as they existed at that time (and maybe even now), if the urinalysis guy calls a urinalysis, it takes a full bird colonel to cancel it. That’s one step down from a general. That’s right – when the urinalysis guy decides it’s time for the monthly urinalysis, wake up, get in uniform, drive to where he says it’s happening, and God Help You if you’ve got something in your system.
To make matters worse (for them), a friend of mine (let’s call him Kroger) had been punished for having booze in his system during one of their urinalyses. It was on his day off because he was a shift worker, and it was during hours that were duty hours to the day workers but off-duty for us.
I had about a year left, no intention of reenlisting, and my unit had already been slapped down by Angry People for mucking with me. Let’s do this. Malicious compliance time.
Imagine this – it’s 11 pm on a Friday on a long weekend.
Long for them – not me. You see, shift workers didn’t get holidays off unless we took leave, and I needed mine for family time like Thanksgiving and Christmas (because without it, I’d have been working every single holiday). The mission must go on, after all.
Now, anyone that’s ever seen an army movie knows that Joes like booze and anyone that’s ever had to do a urinalysis knows that they can detect booze. Mind you, being a urinalysis guy is a Big Deal – you’re on legal orders and everything is entered into Big Army’s database.
Between the time I began the formal process of calling a urinalysis and the time I would’ve had them coming in (~3 am on their days off, since they’d established the precedent that “soldiers don’t get days off” whenever we complained about losing sleep to stuff like this)… my orders vanished. To this day, I don’t know how they did it.
I suspect that our CO or some other bigwigs were at a party or something and realized that they were about to have to explain to a full bird colonel how 1/2 of the unit peed hot in a urinalysis which would’ve required (legally required) that colonel having a one on one chat with me about why I chose that time, and perhaps a discussion about how the unit was being run….
Yeah. They never gave me another duty the entire time I had left in the army. I never had an issue with another leave request, and they generally just left me alone. At the time, I thought it was because I’d made my point that I was sick of their nonsense, but looking back, I wonder who would’ve come up positive for what specific substances during that surprise urinalysis such that they were able to rescind my Big Army orders in less than one day, and in the middle of the night at that.”
9. Managers Aren't Allowed To Tell Me To Use Their Parking Space When They're Off? Alright Then
“So this happened a good 6 years ago now. I was just starting my IT career so I was a basic level 1 desktop engineer for a large financial company. My team consisted of me, a level 2 engineer, and 3 managers – one for data, one for people, and one overall manager.
Parking in town was either expensive or impossible and while management and supervisors got parking spaces in the huge multi-story next to the office, other staff members didn’t get one and either had to pay the very expensive parking fees or park far away and walk.
Being on a low entry-level salary, I opted to walk the 30 minutes into town (and often got sick due to bad weather). The level 2 guy lived a 5-minute walk from the office and didn’t own a car.
When any of the managers were off, they offered their parking space to me so that I wouldn’t have to walk which was very nice of them and greatly appreciated as it was saving me too.
One day, I got called into HR because somebody saw me coming out of the multi-story and got jealous and asked why I get a space and they don’t. This HR manager was INCREDIBLY condescending and talked to me like I was a literal child with lines like “Back when I was your age, I thought the world owed me everything too” which is absolutely not my attitude but sure, go off on one like you know me.
She said it wasn’t fair on the level 2 guy because he might want the space too, she wouldn’t listen when I said he didn’t drive and even said to me he didn’t want it after I asked if he was okay with me using the space.
At the end of the day, I went into the management office and we were chatting about the day as we usually did and I told them about the HR meeting and said they weren’t allowed to let me use their space anymore. The data manager then had a genius MC suggestion.
She was a very selfless soul who sacrificed much of her time to help other people and this situation rubbed her the wrong way so she wanted to do something out of spite. She said that whenever any of them were on holiday, they’d just tell me that their parking space will be empty for the duration, NOT specifically that I can use it which is what we were told not to do from HR.
So the next time they were on holiday, I parked in their space and after a few days, somebody else got jealous and tattled to HR again. I was dragged into a meeting and asked why I was still using their space. I said that I just took a chance on an empty space I found in the multi-story (they were rented, not pay and display).
She went and asked the data manager when she was back in if she said I could use the space, to which she said “No, I just said goodbye before I went on holiday for 2 weeks.” HR then told her I was in her space in her absence and asked her if she wanted to raise a complaint against me.
She said, “No thanks, I wasn’t using it anyway.” Their hands were tied and there was nothing they could do to prevent me from using the spaces as they’re allocated privately to the individuals for use even outside of office hours and only reclaimed when they leave.”
Another User Comments:
“Is HR just really bored? Do they need a puzzle or a crossword to do? Perhaps they can find Waldo and give him a written warning.” Aetherpirate
8. Don't Take This Woman's Canine Away
“Many years ago now, I gave my mother a Chihuahua puppy for Mother’s Day after her 18-year-old Akita passed away. This little dog (who I only spent $400 on – this is relevant later), let’s call him Mickey, was my mother’s baby, and they did EVERYTHING together.
When he was about three years old, while my mom was at work, a workman accidentally let him run out the door & he disappeared. We searched for months for him. I spent several hundred dollars for a pet finder. We put up posters at all the vets and ads in the paper.
Basically, we did everything we possibly could to find him, but with no luck.
Seven months after he went missing, I went to pick up my two dogs from a groomer/doggy daycare. As I was writing the check to pay them, my son and his friend were watching the dogs in the play area, and I heard my son exclaim, ‘Mama, there’s grandma Susie’s dog!’ Mickey had a very unique marking on his back that looked like a silhouette of a Mickey Mouse head, so I absolutely knew it was him, & when I said his name, he ran to the gate and jumped up trying to get to me.
I got so excited because I THOUGHT my mom’s long nightmare was over, and through happy tears told the owner he was my mother’s dog who had gone missing, and I was so happy to find him because mom was grieving herself to death: she even slept with the bedtime toy that he loved so much.
Well, imagine my heartache, anger & frustration when one of the groomers, let’s call her Jerk, said it was HER dog. Then the owner of the place & Jerk proceeded to scream at me and tell me I was wrong, but if it actually was my mother’s dog, that we should just be ‘glad that he wasn’t dead,’ and Jerk said she would NOT give him back.
They were so nasty to me, they literally forced me out of the shop and threatened to call the police if I didn’t leave. I was heartbroken, frustrated, but more importantly, I was determined to get my mother’s fur baby back no matter what I had to do!
After I told mom I’d seen him, she raced over to the shop, but they had removed Mickey from the daycare area, and wouldn’t allow her to see him, then they called the police on her (even though she’d only asked to see him, not take him).
After this, I was a woman on a righteous mission, so this is the beginning of my revenge. Jerk wouldn’t give me her name, so I hired a private detective to find out who she was, and once I got her name and address, I hired a lawyer & filed a lawsuit.
Now keep in mind, my mother didn’t see him that day, so she went from being afraid to hoping it was him, to knowing her baby was alive but with someone else, & it all was driving her to distraction. Grief was overwhelming her every day, to the point where she couldn’t work and she cried constantly, so I was sincerely worried for my mother’s health.
Deciding I wanted to try to drum up some support for our situation & to encourage my mother to fight, we even went to the local press and they did a story about us in the paper. (It can probably still be found on the web if you had our real names.)
At any rate, it took a few months, but we finally got our first court schedule. Jerk showed up, but without the dog, & because of this, our case was the talk of the courthouse, because the judge actually had to SUBPOENA THE DOG to get Jerk to bring him!
A few days later, I was sitting next to my mother in the courtroom when Jerk walked in holding Mickey. Now keep in mind, until that moment, my mother hadn’t laid eyes on him for nearly a year, and no matter how much I insisted it was definitely Mickey, I saw, until that moment, she was too afraid of hoping it was.
When she saw him, she grabbed my hand & gasped his name… it was almost like she had been jolted with electricity & her heart started to beat truly for the first time since Mickey went missing. This just made me more determined to do whatever I had to do to get him back.
When our case was called, we provided a TON of evidence that Mickey belonged to us, including his registration papers, vet records & photos. When my mother took the stand, she quietly but forcefully spoke of how deeply she loved him, how much he enriched her life & gave her purpose, and how she understood why Jerk wouldn’t want to give him back because he was such a loving dog, but she explained he was that way because she (my mom) had poured her heart and soul into loving him.
When it was Jerk’s turn, she took the stand holding the dog & had put a T-shirt on him to try & hide the Mickey Mouse silhouette marking on his back. Well, the judge wasn’t stupid, & when he asked to hold Mickey, he simply lifted the shirt to reveal the marking that was clearly shown in the 50+photos we had brought with us (she had none!)
After Jerk talked a bit about how she’d grown attached to Mickey, the judge sent her back to her seat & addressed the courtroom. My mom & I held our breath, truly afraid of what he might say, and he started by saying he understood this was a difficult situation & it was obvious both parties loved the dog (mom had a death grip on my hand at this point), but it was his job to make difficult decisions.
He then said, in his smooth old country judge southern accent, that it was obvious to him the dog in our photos was the same dog he was currently holding, & that he was (in these exact words) ‘Giving the dog back to the plaintiff (my mom).’ When Jerk’s lawyer heard this, she immediately popped up & stated: ‘We will be appealing this decision & request that the dog remains with Jerk until after the appeal process.’ To this, the judge replied (again, in his wonderful slow southern way, & his exact words are forever burned into my heart & brain), ‘Well you can appeal if you want to, but I’m givin’ the dog back to the plaintiff.’ My mom & I broke down in relieved & grateful tears as Jerk glared daggers at us.
The judge then removed the T-shirt and collar from Mickey & handed them back to Jerk, gave Mickey to the bailiff, and said: ‘I want to see if the dog remembers the plaintiff.’ All eyes were on my mother as she made her way from the bench seats into the aisle, where she stood quietly about 35 feet away, while Jerk stood much closer, about 5 feet from where the bailiff held Mickey.
At this point, the bailiff leaned down, gently put Mickey on the floor, & as soon as his little feet hit the ground, without so much as even glancing at Jerk, ran as fast his little legs could carry him straight to my mother & literally jumped into her arms, immediately bathing her face in precious doggy kisses.
I don’t think I have ever seen my mother so happy, & even the judge & bailiff were grinning for all they were worth. I also saw quite a few people in the gallery wiping away happy tears.
You would think this joyous show of affection at their reunion would prove to even Jerk herself that this dog belonged with my mother… But alas, she did indeed appeal & even tried to say, with absolutely NO evidence (or truth) whatsoever, that Mickey had been abused by us.
Also, during the trial, Jerk admitted to finding him THE SAME DAY he went missing, & even though he had a collar with tags, & even though she admitted to seeing our ‘lost dog’ ad in the paper, she had chosen to keep him because ‘he was so adorable & she wanted a dog.’ After Jerk said how attached she’d become to the dog & how much she missed him now that he was back with us, the judge told her it was her own fault she’d gotten attached, because she ‘could’ve returned him the same day she found him!’
Anyway, after several months of litigation, two trials, a lot of hard work & $17,000 in lawyers fees to get back our precious $400 dog, the chancery court judge also ruled in our favor, so Mickey was home to stay & that horrible Jerk has been taught not to mess with someone who’s willing to go to the mat (& go broke) for those she loves!
My Revenge was complete.
Several years later, my mother became very ill, so she & Mickey moved in with me & my family, & they remained inseparable for many years until my mother’s death. After that he was MY baby, until last year when he got cancer, so we had to let him go just one month shy of his 19th birthday.
Suffice to say he was loved throughout all of his life & is greatly missed.
Had Jerk been nice & and returned Mickey to us, we would have happily allowed her to see him & maybe even have let him spend the night with her sometimes (also rewarded her for finding him), but since she was unreasonable, she wound up with nothing in the end.
I also found out that after the last trial Jerk lost her job because she lied to the groomer about how she got Mickey, the owner of the business then realized Jerk had ripped her off for thousands of dollars of grooming equipment. Last I heard, Jerk was actually in police custody for that theft.”
Another User Comments:
“How was she not charged with theft and stuck with your lawyer fees when she readily admitted to stealing your dog?” Floreos
Reply:
“I asked my lawyer the same thing. He said that since the dog had gone missing and was “found” and not actually stolen that she couldn’t be charged. Honestly, the laws in regard to pets are still rather archaic in the USA.
They are only considered property in most states, instead of loving sentient beings who should be, in my mind, more aligned with children than property. As I understand it, I believe in Australia they take these kinds of situations very seriously and would treat animals in a situation like this as if they’ve been kidnapped & would charge the perpetrator.
America needs to get with the program and treat laws about pets more seriously.” ladydragyn
7. Only Make Jokes When Customers Aren't Around? Gotcha
“We have two sections in the warehouse. “Peter” runs the top end and “Greg” runs my end.
Both have a 2IC. “Dean” is the manager of the whole warehouse.
We communicate with handheld radios across the warehouse. Occasionally I would make funny noises over the radio or play little jokes. For example, if someone was asking to borrow a forklift, I would get on the radio and respond with “no leave me alone” or when someone was asking “who has X/Y forklift?” I would respond with “yo mama.” Relatively harmless stuff.
This apparently made Peter’s b***d boil. He warned me that he would go to Dean if it continued, so I stopped and had intended for that to be the end of it. The following morning, Dean tracked me down and had a chat with me about it anyway.
I found out from somebody else that Peter had already gone to Dean before I was even warned. This annoyed me a bit so I decided to maliciously comply with the instructions I was given from Dean.
Dean’s exact words were “I don’t mind if you have a bit of a joke every now and then towards the end of the day if there are no customers around.” So although I had intended to stop entirely, I now had an exact set of rules to follow if I wished to continue.
So past 5 o’clock, if no customers are around, I have been telling awful dad jokes and making fart noises over the radio. Peter tried to reprimand me on the first few instances, to which I reiterated what Dean had told me. For the past week and a bit, I have been happily joking away, knowing that Peter can do nothing about it and it makes him very angry.
Sorry Peter, you dug your own grave!”
Another User Comments:
“Had a coworker play the local college football team’s fight song over the warehouse intercom once – or at least that’s what he thought; turns out it was over the entire building and there was a VIP in a meeting with Operations and Control.
Fortunately, the VIP was a fan of the team so he only got a verbal reprimand.” Serenity_B
6. Can't Run A Restaurant Or Treat Your Employees Right? Pay Up, Buddy
“In 2018, I worked for a very small business owned by a wealthy couple from a Western European country. They had three employees total, including me, at the time I started. The job was easy and straightforward at first, but there were some red flags early on.
The position started off with two weeks as a “training period,” during which I would work with another person. After that two weeks, I’d work shifts on my own on weekdays and with one other person on weekends. This meant that employees couldn’t have normal lunches or breaks, which goes against our state’s labor laws.
I never signed a waiver for this, and it wasn’t clear that I couldn’t take my lunch breaks when I started.
They had gluten-free options and heavily advertised this on social media. Any other establishment in our state would have adhered to strict sanitation requirements to avoid cross-contamination, but these people were shockingly relaxed. They never asked me for a copy of my food handler’s license before training me to cook, and they instructed me to “clean” the entire shop with rags and plain water: no separate cooking surface or utensils for gluten-free menu items.
A few weeks into my hiring, they purchased jugs of sanitizer and explained that they were expecting an inspector from the health department. They instructed me to not use the sanitizer because using it regularly was too expensive but to keep it visible and lie to the health inspector about our sanitation practices.
From there, things only got shadier. I received a flat $40-80 in “tips” with each paycheck. However, the rounded-to-the-nearest-$5 increments of tips seemed suspiciously low. When I worked the register, I saw hundreds of dollars in card tips and knew they could have only been split by myself and two other people.
We should have been making that bi-weekly figure per person in one day (if it was busy). The owner got abnormally upset if my coworker and I split our tips at the end of each shift.
The owner knew about things like that because he installed surveillance cameras shortly after I was hired. He watched it at all hours of the day, often monitoring the shop from his car in the nearby parking lot.
Soon, I started getting reprimanded regularly for going against the early red flags.
If he saw me eating lunch, he told me that he didn’t care if I ate, but I’d better look ready to cook if a customer walked by. I’d have to stay at the register but not let anyone see me eat.
I’d often go days without eating more than one meal because my hours were so long, and I never got more than a minute to put anything in my face.
If he saw me using the sanitizer, he’d insist that I was wasting his funds.
I told him that I felt concerned about using the same cooking utensils for gluten-free dishes as I did for dishes that contained gluten. I felt that since so many of our customers had gluten sensitivities/allergies, it was only a matter of time until someone got sick.
He told me that he had been operating this way for over a year, and nobody ever got sick, so there’s no point in worrying about it. I noticed my tips were about $10 less than usual that pay period.
Additionally, the owner expected us to cook for customers if we were still physically present in the shop, no matter where we were in our closing procedures.
We were never to turn anyone down, but we wouldn’t be paid overtime if closing took longer as a result. We also weren’t allowed to start any of the closing procedures early because he didn’t want customers to think we were closed, even if we were.
Eventually, one of the other employees announced she was pregnant. As her pregnancy progressed, her ability to carry out a lot of her responsibilities diminished. It was medically necessary for her to cease heavy lifting, to be able to sit down, and to have access to her breaks and lunches to get her proper nutrition.
The owner reprimanded her for these things and told her that he expected her to operate at her pre-pregnancy capacity. He added that she shouldn’t let pregnancy “make her lazy” and that if she didn’t remain active, and she “let herself eat all the time,” her baby would “come out fat,” like her.
She tried to call out sick once, too. She had to rush to the hospital because she was experiencing abnormalities in her pregnancy and thought she might have been miscarrying. She and the baby turned out to be fine, but the owner yelled at her for missing her shift and told her that he didn’t care if she miscarried. Her responsibility was to him first. She ended up quitting but remained friends with them.
(I don’t know why.)
The owner’s wife wrote passive-aggressive notes explaining that they were always watching us during our shifts and that they would start deducting our tips if we made any mistakes. If we made a mistake from cooking resulting in us wasting ingredients, it would come from our tips.
If we broke an item in the inventory, it would come out of our tips. If we took too long to finish closing duties, still no overtime, and it would come out of our tips.
It became more and more obvious that the owners included themselves in the tip pool, which is also illegal in our state.
I was the only employee at the time who didn’t feel threatened by these people. My other coworker was from the same country as the owners. They treated her like garbage, and she didn’t feel like she could do or say anything about it because they repeatedly (and falsely) told her that she had no rights.
They gaslighted her into thinking that they were “so nice” to hire her when no one else would. She felt like she had to work for them, and she had to do whatever they told her to do because if she didn’t, she’d lose her only source of income with no guarantee of another one.
If anyone confronted the owners about any of their violations, they’d act shocked and insist that they were so new to the country that they don’t know any of the laws yet. Any of their general b********y was a “cultural difference.” They relied on these two defenses so much that they never bothered to actually protect themselves from a legal standpoint.
I already knew I wanted to quit and that I wanted to alert local authorities to all their violations, but the final straw for me was when they cut my pay for making mistakes while I was exhausted and processing personal trauma. They made me sign a contract agreeing to the cut but applied it retroactively to the pay period before the contract was signed.
While it sucked not getting that extra salary, I laughed for 20 minutes straight when I put together my paystub and my copy of the contract. They basically offered themselves up on a silver platter because of their own incompetence.
I documented everything I could. Because everything was so hilariously illegal, I had compiled a thick portfolio of evidence in no time and filed a wage complaint at the same time I handed in my two weeks notice.
Once they knew about the wage complaint, they started a campaign of slander against me, which made me lose my next job. I didn’t have hard evidence of that, so I let it go and applied somewhere else. The stolen tips really screwed up my taxes.
My former bosses reported my actual tips to the IRS, but kept me in the dark about the figure and gave me so much less that I ended up owing the IRS $400 more than what I expected. I spent the time between my employment with them and the hearing with the labor commissioner at the department of labor working alone on my case.
On the day of the hearing, my former bosses brought their lawyer (and a stranger they paid off to act like they were my coworker) who had no idea why I filed a complaint against them in the first place. All the “evidence” he presented against me had nothing to do with my claims of not getting paid overtime, not getting my meal breaks, and having my tips stolen.
It was all just fake “letters” from fake people with awful Mary Sue OC-type names. All the documents he presented could have been typed up the night before. It was so bad. Their defense relied heavily on slander, too. “Who would you trust: me, a straight-A university student at a prestigious school???
Or her, an uneducated low-life with an entry-level job???”
Every time I presented hard evidence to the labor commissioner, the lawyer scrambled to come up with an explanation for why I was lying but failed miserably. When I showed the labor commissioner my contract informing me of the pay cut with the paystub reflecting a retroactive cut, the lawyer still didn’t understand what was happening.
Their defense absolutely crumbled and the labor commissioner poked several holes in their stories.
Fast-forward to about a year later. I received a $2,300 check in the mail, which meant that I was awarded every penny due to me. What made this even sweeter for me was the date on the check.
It was the same as the start of our city’s stay-at-home order due to current world events. Not only are they losing funds due to decreased business as a result of all this going on, but they were legally required to pay me out at the same time.
I won’t be surprised if they don’t survive the economic impact, but unlike the vast majority of small businesses in my area, they actually deserve it. Revenge is sweet, and karma’s a jerk.”
5. Make Him Think He's Dying When He's Not? He's Getting Payback On Ya
What an unprofessional experience all around for this poor man.
“This didn’t happen to me but to my dad.
My dad passed away several years ago, but before he did, he told me about why one summer in 1985 growing up had been particularly stressful. All I knew at the time was that there was a lot of yelling between him and my step-mother and that my step-mother used to break a lot of things around the house.
Us kids would mostly just stay out of the way or go outside and spend time with friends to sort of be away from it. After a few months, and around the time school started, things had gone back to normal, and there were no more fights between the two of them.
I was 14 at the time.
For a little background, my dad was a rather large person. 6’4″, 275 pounds, and had been fairly athletic most of his life but was very heavyset in his later years. He was also an attorney – who handled both family law and criminal law.
(He was a defense attorney in those situations.) Being a family law attorney is very stressful, or at least it was for him. My dad was an avid smoker, and at one time, he was up to three packs a day. To be perfectly fair, he was unhealthy, and his smoking and profession lent themselves to heart issues.
The drinking he did (a couple of shots of Crown Royal after each day at work) didn’t help any either.
So, when talking about this particularly bad summer with him when I was about 23 or so. He told me what had happened. He had had a doctor’s visit that spring, and the doctor told my dad he had terminal lung cancer – and had three months to live.
My dad knew the doctor personally. (I think he handled his divorce, and they became friends or something similar.) Obviously being told you have lung cancer and have three months to live hit him pretty hard. Like I said above, I was 14, and I had a younger brother who was 10.
I also had two older step-siblings, but all four of us lived at home. So, my dad is distressed. He has kids, a wife, and very little time left. My dad also knows what lung cancer does to someone and was not looking forward to wasting away, being in a lot of pain, and going through chemo-therapy, etc.
So, my dad tells his wife, and they decide not to tell the kids. Dad is just going to pretend everything is normal and pass on when the time comes. Don’t ask me why he thought this or decided this was the best thing to do, and I think it’s a terrible decision, but it’s what he did.
So, my dad, who is normally under a lot of stress anyway, is now 10 times more stressed out and not looking forward to dying. He and his wife start fighting a lot.
After a couple of months, my dad heads back to the doctor to get an update.
(I believe he had also been a few times during this couple of months, but I don’t know the exact detail.) It’s at this point, the doctor confides in my dad that he really didn’t have lung cancer. The doctor had just told him that to try to get him to stop smoking, an incredibly screwed up way to try to scare someone to stop smoking in my opinion (probably illegal and unethical as well), but as I said, they knew each other personally, and I think the doctor was just trying to scare my dad straight.
So, my dad leaves the doctor’s office pretty livid. I mean he had been depressed for the last couple of months, and his home life had been in tatters because of all of this.
So, this is when my dad decides to get his revenge.
Having been a criminal defense attorney, Dad knew some of the local police and local police detectives. My dad called a couple of the detectives, asked them to do him a favor, and had them go to the doctor’s office one day. The detectives ask to see the doctor, and when they are let in, they ask the doctor to come with them.
They say there’s been a pretty bad accident involving the doctor’s daughter. The detectives lead the doctor to the hospital basement and ask him to wait as they sit him down on a bench outside of the morgue.
They said they needed to get something ready for him.
Then the detectives just… left…and left the doctor to sit there worrying about what was going on, and what had happened. The detectives never gave their names, and I’m assuming the doctor was too shocked and worried about what was going on to have asked for them.
The doctor never found out what happened or why someone would do this to him. This was all before cell phones were a thing and would have had an easy way to call and see what was going on.
My dad never spoke to the doctor again.
He had heard that the doctor sat on that bench outside of the morgue for an hour crying.
But he never let on that he was responsible for it. My dad and I, as we sit and discuss all of this, discuss how it’s wrong to screw with people’s kids…but at the same time, it’s wrong to make someone think they are dying as well.
Even if you are trying to trick them into being healthier.”
4. Increase My Workload? It'll Cost You Big Bucks
“So a while back my school switched to an online platform for giving students assignments and tracking their progress.
It made our lives miserable. Teachers would abuse the platform by giving us a lot of assignments, even during holidays. The worst part was that they could see when we opened the assignment page and if we were even a minute late, the platform would flag it as late.
The worst part was that my school would give these assignments a 50% weightage for the final grade (with the rest of the 50% going towards exams). After the introduction of this platform, all students’ grades started to fall hard. Most people lost at least one letter grade.
I know doing work is important and all, but if all of your subject teachers are giving assignments every day with submission at 9 PM the same day it is an impossible task for anyone. Our school also expected us to log our extra-curricular activities on the platform and put regular reflections and pieces of evidence for the same or else they would fail us!
(This part comes in later). We tried to reason with the school management, but they said that ‘students should do as told by their teachers’ and ‘back when we were students, we also had to do hard work’.
After having ruined my sweet sweet winter vacation with over 40 assignments in a period of two weeks, I decided that we needed revenge.
I did some digging and found out that our school used an online platform that had decent documentation available. All they had done was host a version of that on their own servers. The platform they used allowed for integration with a file hosting service.
If enabled, it allowed students to upload files to the platform. My school had enabled it for assignment submission and putting pieces of evidence for the extra-curricular activities. After a little more googling, I found out that the file hosting service does not offer any Unlimited plan.
The file-hosting service even charged for every time the file was downloaded or uploaded. The prices were very low, so I think that the school admin team was ok with it.
(I had found my opportunity for revenge!)
I asked a few of my friends to help me execute it.
The core team was formed. My friends and I started to make a database of thousands of reflections and pieces of evidence. We asked our seniors, who were more than happy to help. We asked students from other schools who had the same platform, once they found out about our plan, they asked me to do the same to their school’s server.
Also, we drafted tons of them ourselves. At the end of this, we had a database of over 5 thousand activities and 50 thousand reflections and pieces of evidence. This took the 12 of us about 2 months to make.
I, being familiar with programming, made a program that would look at the database and then put it on the school’s platform.
Here is the fun part. In the pieces of evidence section, I made the program upload a 500 MB file (The maximum file size we were allowed to upload was 500 MB), download it, and remove it. My program would do this over 50 times after which it would upload the real file that was supposed to be there.
I also made sure to check the ‘terms of service’ and ‘privacy policy’ of the platform which stated that no record of deleted files will be stored. Just to be sure, I made the bot only go all out from 3 PM to 8 AM, since no teacher or admin ever went online during that time.
The bot would still be going in the gap, but it would not be uploading the fake files, since we could not risk the school finding out about this.
Of course, I could not do this from my home computer, since I did not have the bandwidth to make any significant impact.
Here is where my genius takes this to a whole new level. My friends and I had .edu email IDs, which we used to get credits on some service providers. One .edu Email ID would give about $100 in credits, which would allow us to buy a basic and cheap server for one month.
This server had about a 14 TB bandwidth limit. 8 of my friends from the core team got the credits (I and three more friends of mine had already exhausted them with other projects) amounting to a total of $800 or a little over 56 TB! Before going all out, I needed to make sure that this was safe.
I deployed the program with the ID of a student who had left the school (somehow it was not deactivated) and the school did not notice anything.
After two weeks of testing, we decided to roll out the entire operation. We decided to start slow.
Using the core team’s IDs, we unleashed the bot on the platform. After only one week, we had uploaded and downloaded a total of 1.2 TB! Weirdly our teachers were very happy that we were maintaining our extracurricular portfolios on the platform. It was time to scale up.
I got the platform IDs from 42 more students (juniors and seniors, all of whom were annoyed). We made the bot go all out and deployed additional servers to speed up the platform’s death! Two days go by and I was just browsing the file hosting services pricing, I realized that I was costing the school $90 per TB.
By this time, my stats page showed a little over 8 TB had been downloaded and uploaded. (I cost the school $720.)
But wait there’s more. I put the bot down thinking that what I was doing was a little too much. The core team was not very happy with my decision, but they honored it.
It was a Thursday, and Friday and Monday were a holiday because of a festival. After school, we found out that the maths teacher decided to give over 200 questions for practice with a note saying ‘This assignment will be given an extra 20 percent weightage in your grade since we won’t be having any formative exam this term’.
Followed by another assignment by our English teacher for writing 3 Essays and Peer Reviewing 1 from three friends. Then came my breaking point with the Physics assignment, the teacher wanted us to write a 30-page investigation task about Young’s double-slit experiment! We didn’t even do that experiment; He wanted us to use an online simulator to collect the data!
Screw it! I am taking this thing down! I put bot back on. The core team was very happy with this. By this time, we had received a few more student IDs for the platform. I put all my servers so that the maximum possible damage would be dealt.
Within those four days, I downloaded and uploaded about 45 TB. This should have cost the school a good $4000 or so. The school would later get a bill for the month for approximately $5000. I wish I could see the admin’s face when this happened.
Needless to say, the platform was shut down within 3 days.
They could have turned off the file hosting service, however, the platform would be very useless without it. The assignment workload automatically decreased (still not to a normal level) because we as students did our best to send assignments in multiple parts and our super lazy teachers would have a cluttered inbox which they would have to sort through.
The final bit is my favorite. Despite having had many arguments with the school management about our workload, they do acknowledge my IT skills. I go to the principal and start talking about how we should be given a little grace period as submitting assignments via emails may cause a small delay.
I then casually bring up the platform and asked if we can have it back (I knew what I was doing). She said that the school had to pay a ridiculous amount for unknown reasons and the infrastructure was not worth it. I chuckled and said ‘Well, I bet it was the abuse by teachers who gave so many assignments which caused this.
Maybe you should make sure the same does not happen to the school’s email if we keep getting so many assignments.’ This was all nonsense, but my technologically challenged principal does not know this. Three days later, a new rule was put in place about how much work can be given to students by each subject teacher.
I was hailed as the savior of the school since at this point everyone know of my scheme. Some people may think that telling everyone was not a good idea, but well even the toppers and teacher’s pets were suffering so no one did anything.
Some sophomore (who was forced to take eight subjects) threw a party for everyone that week in celebration of the platform going away. Also, karma awarded me. My crush asked me out as I was the hero of the school and she is now my significant other.
I should also note that this was a private school. Also, I am not located in the US, and private school is common in my country. I have specified the amount in USD as it’s just convenient.”
Another User Comments:
“The fact that you got together with your crush at the end made this wayyyyyyy more satisfying than it would’ve been otherwise.” coltonreddit
3. That Someone Getting Fired Is YOU, Not Me
This client got it all wrong.
“I work as a Product Designer/Technical Architect for a company that builds software products that are well in demand for data analysis and sorts. There is this application I was fortunate enough to design and develop for my company.
Recently, like everyone, I am working remotely but also have cut down lots of responsibilities as I don’t feel 100 percent after my chemo, and sometimes my meds make me cranky.
Coming to the story:
I receive a WhatsApp message on my personal number from an unknown number asking that they need urgent help regarding Product X.
Definitely responding to that. Decided to message them back and ask them what was wrong.
The first response was: Why did I not pick up their calls.
I don’t pick up calls on my personal number unless they are saved in my contacts (even then, selectively) as most calls are to ask how I am doing.
Also, here is an (unpopular?) opinion: Just because we live in an era where communication is possible 24/7 doesn’t mean I am supposed to be available 24/7.
I did not want to dwell on that, so I asked what was wrong with the product.
That’s when the number calls me on WhatsApp, and I had to pick up as I had engaged in a conversation.
Instead of getting directly to the topic, she tells me she’s been trying to reach me on my personal cell for some time now and that I should behave more professionally and should try and solve client issues fast especially during these trying times.
Except for her tone, what she said was correct. So, I had no issues there. Every service provider should try their best to help their client to the best of their abilities, agreed, Madam.
Then she goes on to explain the issue, which is mostly a time reset or a configuration level issue that you have to do from the product dashboard.
Easy-peasy but still not something that I need to be involved in. This requires them to raise a support ticket, and one of our support engineers should take this up.
But the audacity in her voice made me feel that she was someone really important and maybe going above and beyond to help her would be good for our company!
Boy, oh boy!
In the next 15 minutes of the conversation, I realized that I was talking to an idiot who can’t differentiate between a pen and a pencil. She kept entering the wrong stuff everywhere and messed it up even further. Well, I have encountered higher officials who suck at some tech but are brilliant in some other scope, so I gave her the benefit of the doubt, and I guess I really wanted to be in the good books of such a high-ranking official.
Therefore, I asked her to have a call via Zoom that would let me connect to her PC via screen sharing. I would also be able to access her system remotely and fix her machine.
Her response was, “Sorry, I don’t want to get in a video call with you!”
(Me in my head: Pfft! What again? You called me on my personal number to fix your configuration issue and this? But sure, her choice.)
Me: “Okay Madam, in that case, you can call up our support desk at the toll-free number, raise a ticket, and they’d solve this for you.” (They mostly have Remote Desktop access.)
Client: “That’s very unprofessional of you. I’ll have you reported and fired. I’ll also make sure that we use a better product going forward.”
So, I go again, ask her to get me the Remote Desktop ID, which she gives me.
I access her session, and now I realize that she’s an associate (as shown in her user group for our product), which means she’s the leaf node, and pleasing her gives me nothing.
Now, I get cranky. I have no intention of helping this woman.
While I was explaining the fix earlier on, this idiot had made random changes and made things a little tricky for the configurations as we have no idea what exactly it was before.
(We do but not really straightforward from the UI.) So, I told her everything is lost, and she’ll have to raise a support ticket. Now she starts hurling abuses at me. She says she’ll fire me today and asked for my name. (Woman has my personal number but doesn’t have my name.
What the heck, man?)
I love clients, so I always record every call with them. I hang up saying that she’s an idiot and should learn how to read and follow instructions properly.
A while later, I get a call from someone in my team saying that Company A priority 1 ticket has come saying one of their major reports isn’t getting generated. Well, guess what?
One of the config changes she made deleted a major report of the company. (Who trusts idiots with major stuff, man?) And today is Friday, so my support staff is only going to find the root cause of the error and then notify them of what happened. They’d only be fixing it the next business day.
Apparently, the employee had messed up majorly and then called me seeking help. (I am guessing, based on the timelines from the log), and you know what? I did. I just sent in a mail stating what happened and how I was expecting a little more professional behavior from the employees of a respected firm like theirs and how unprofessional it is to call a personal number and expect stuff to be done on the fly when certain protocols exist with voice recording and WhatsApp chat.
I made sure that I did not mention her name anywhere in the email, but I did not bother to black out her number in the WhatsApp chat screenshot.
Someone is now looking for a new job.
Minor update to this:
My personal number was given away by someone from my own company.
The guy who gave it away was a friend/shadow of this particular person. That will be dealt with separately. Apparently, the guy was trying to help the client out as she had deleted something important, and when the client asked who could discretely help her to fix it, he said my name and gave out my number.
But very clever of my guy though.
“Hey, do you know someone who can fix this?”
“Yes, I do.” And brings in the guy who built it. Nice move.
He’ll deal with the HR separately.
Also, the client did not mention any of this, had she actually been completely truthful, I am sure we would have dealt it differently and helped her fix it as it stills falls as our responsibility at the end of the day.”
2. Don't Want Us To Have A Fence Anymore? No More Pool For You
“Alright, this occurred years ago and is somewhat of a long one.
I grew up in a bit of a strict state and the town I lived in was pretty into everyone’s business. Please remember this detail a bit later since it’s going to play a very vital role in my story.
When I moved to the house I grew up in, we had neighbors who lived in a house right next to our backyard but technically on a different street. This fact will also play a vital role. For this story, we’re going to call the neighbors the Murrays.
The Murrays seemed nice when we first met. I played with their daughter as she was close to a year younger than me and their son who was five years older than me. Their dad became friendly with my dad since it was an extra hand to help with major construction projects.
We were friendly enough that when we wouldn’t play in my backyard, we’d let the children and their friends or family play there.
However, as the years went on, we started to see their true colors. Anytime I would get a major item like a guitar or a dune buggy, even getting a major role in the school play, their daughter would try to copy me such as getting a dirt bike or a guitar and join the drama club only to then quit when seeing how much work was involved. The dad would borrow my dad’s woodworking tools and never return them, the mother had a few screws loose and I remember bringing an art kit over only for it to be banned since ‘it made a mess.’ The brother probably was the only decent one in the family but had some of his own issues (that’s a different story) and they developed a hatred for my mother when they discovered her religious heritage.
Now here’s where the revenge story comes in: I was in my backyard driving my dune buggy and just refreshing some dirt tracks for the spring, I was about twelve at the time and as I was driving my dune buggy, I noticed a party going on at my neighbor’s house.
It turned out it was their daughter’s 12th birthday party. I remember we gave her a gift to celebrate it but I wasn’t invited. I told my parents and they were annoyed.
Mainly because we bought her a nice gift for her birthday and the fact that her family didn’t have the decency to invite me made my family livid, especially my dad.
My parents confronted The Murrays who apologized and bought me a birthday gift to make up for it since my birthday was in the same month as their daughter’s. A few weeks after that occurred, Mrs. Murray had trees put up around the border of our properties so they could have their privacy but still use our land.
My dad was furious. One thing about my dad needs to be made clear here everyone: he’s a 2 tour combat war veteran with SEVERE PTSD. And when you anger my father to a certain extent, that anger will stay for DECADES! Since both my parents were sick of their treatment of us, my parents hired a local contractor and had them create a fence to completely fence off our properties.
Not even a single door to allow them in our backyard.
The Murray’s were enraged we did this since it wasn’t on Mrs. Murray’s terms of privacy and cut their ‘friendship’ with us. Well, remember when I said I grew up in a town that had its nose in everyone’s business?
A few days after this, an official from my town paid us a visit and told us they had a report of an illegal fence being made onto our property without ‘proper documentation.’ My dad knew immediately who called and in the fashion of my dad, showed the official paperwork which was not only ten years old; but had one major loophole: it never had an expiration date.
Because of this, the town official couldn’t argue with this and approved there wasn’t an issue with the fence. However, right before he left, dad gave the official a ‘tip’ on the Murrays since it was them who called on us (Mr. Murray even confirmed he called the town on us weeks later).
The tip? The Murrays have a small above-ground pool. One of those trashy ‘build your own above grounds’ you can buy at your local warehouse store or wherever.
Now as heavily stated, my town had a lot of regulations in order to live there and if you didn’t follow them, they’d be all over you like a bee on sugar until it met the town’s standards.
My dad always found a way to get what he wanted and it turns out The Murrays had hedges surrounding the area where their pool was and dad tipped the official off that it was actually against town regulations. Lo and behold, dad was right.
The town was all over the Murrays afterward and told them to either cough up the expenses to get a proper fence in within a month or tear the pool down. The Murrays were forced to tear their pool down, their only source of outdoor entertainment.
Since then, Mr. Murray ‘made up’ with my dad but it didn’t last long at all. We moved away from that neighborhood three years ago and mainly get along with our current neighbors.
After I told my dad about this story, he openly admitted he forced The Murrays to have the trees they planted be dug up and moved farther back since the fence was going on the property line.
One of the subjects my dad studied in college was horticulture and since the trees couldn’t get direct sunlight, the trees died. Basically, this is my dad for you!
My dad also recently revealed to me that those trees they placed were technically on our end of the property line.
I wasn’t aware of this at the time and he told me years later. If I recall correctly, since they technically built on our property without our permission, the trees were illegal. My dad wanted the fence on that spot and it was technically our land right there so that’s why he made the Murrays move their trees.”
1. Tons Of Nachos It Is!
“This story comes as a result of a combination of me trying to get promoted, my social anxiety, me being clever, with just a hint of trying to spite another supervisor.
I was a supervisor at a movie theater a few years back. I took over a regular non-supervisor shift in concessions, so there was already another supervisor working with me.
This supervisor and I (we’ll call him Adam) were on pretty good terms. We get told by a senior manager (we’ll call him Kevin) to fill two rolling racks with premade trays that we put nachos in.
Filling them is simple enough: unfold trays, place them on aluminum baking sheets, so they’re ready to be filled, and leave one slot empty between sheets.
This part is really important because when we put nachos in the trays, we need the space, so the chips don’t break after we fill them.
So Adam and I fill the racks as we normally would and call it good.
After this, we roll them in back because we don’t need them right now.
Adam gets sent home around 2 that day (we were slow as heck), and I take over the stand as a supervisor. About fifteen minutes later, Kevin calls me in the back. Before I continue, let’s be clear that with so many managers, two senior managers, several supervisors, and about 60 employees, there is definitely some favoritism going on.
Adam was on excellent terms with Kevin, and they talked regularly like they were friends. On a good day, I was on okay terms with Kevin. He didn’t hate me, and he was pretty fair with me for the most part, but he wasn’t necessarily fond of me either.
Our overall professional relationship was pretty rocky. Overall, though, I still think he was a good guy.
Anyway, not the point. The point is, he calls me in back to tell me (just me, he made no mention of Adam) that he distinctly told me that he wanted those racks full, apparently more full than we normally make them.
I would have loved to tell him that that’s what we normally do and that Adam said it was good. But, I was trying to get promoted at the time, so I didn’t want to challenge my senior manager. Plus, my anxiety wouldn’t allow it.
So, the first thing I did after getting done with Kevin was to consolidate all the nacho trays as best as I could.
After that, we had one full rack and one basically empty rack. So, then I started assembling more trays and filling more sheets.
This is interspersed with me trying to get daily jobs done, hopping on register to help out customers, and giving people breaks.
So, about an hour and a half after this, I used up all the clean trays we had. However, the rack still wasn’t completely filled per Kevin’s instructions.
I didn’t want to bug Kevin with it because he had other stuff to do. I also didn’t know if he wouldn’t accept this as being done.
Something important to note before moving on: we used the baking sheets for a lot of things.
We used them to dump out batches of popcorn that we had accidentally burnt. We used them for the first batch of the day, so people didn’t get sick off of the cleaning chemicals, and the last batch of the night, so we could close out more quickly.
We also used them to place and pre-count frozen items, so we didn’t use the counters. There were other things I’m forgetting about, but you get the idea.
Then in my desire to show motivation, relieve my anxiety, and just be clever all provided me with an epiphany, almost as though it were a sign from God Himself: I had used all of the clean sheets.
There were still some dirty ones that I had not used but could easily be cleaned. Very easily in fact!
I then proceed to clean all of our dirty trays so as to fill the rest of this rack.
During this time, the closing supervisor (Katie) comes in.
Katie and I used to have a very good working relationship. But in some months prior to this point, we had a falling out. We were still polite to each other, but the damage had been done.
So, after briefing her on what she needs to know (who on mid-shift has had breaks, which movies are busy, etc.) I tell her about Kevin’s directive regarding the nachos, and she vehemently disagrees.
She makes the argument that if I use all of the baking sheets, we won’t have any for the rest of the week for all the other stuff we needed them for. After going back and forth with her a bit, consulting a third supervisor, and bringing up the fact that Kevin outranks both of us, she says the magic words:
“Fine, do what you want. I don’t care.”
What I wanted was to not get chewed out by Kevin again. So, I use the rest of the baking sheets for the nacho trays. At this point, we now have none left for anything. About an hour later, I see Kevin and tell him that I finished the nacho trays.
He just says thanks and continues about his day.
So, of course, given the relative importance of having trays, this creates problems for the next few days. Concessions struggle to come up with baking sheets for when we need them, usually only having two free at any given point that they have to be washed immediately after use.
It also took until Friday (this all happened on a Monday) to sell out of the number of nachos we needed to have more than two useable baking sheets.
Oh, you’re wondering why we didn’t just remove the empty trays from the racks; it was because the managers only brought us the rack with full nacho trays.
At the supervisor meeting with senior managers two weeks later, Katie mentioned that using every single baking sheet was a bad idea and that it ought not to be done again. It didn’t take her urging by any means, but it was never done again.”
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