People Explain The Tasty Revenge They Dished Out
13. Torture A Student? Lose Your Entire Career
“I work in a healthcare facility with different disciplines and we have the main clinicians and assistants as well that do treatments. For the longest time, clinicians would take students from schools because they need to have some hands-on experience before they graduate and get to take their state exams.
The players of this are
OP-me, Dory-clinician teacher, Hannah-student, Casey-another clinician, Katie – my regional manager
So I am the supervisor of the health clinic and am in charge of all clinicians, even though they’re fairly independent they have to report to me and I in turn report for the whole clinic.
This starts with Dory, she has a lot of friends in one of the prominent universities here.
She’s very well connected with them, she graduated from there. She is involved with their activities and just active in the school in general. I have known Dory for years and have worked with her before, but she was never directly under my management because her home clinic was another location, so she would just help out. I would hear things about her. The way she treated the assistants that worked under her, a rudeness towards other clinicians and some sketchy stuff about basically fraud of billing for services not rendered. This is a big No in healthcare but it happens more than you think.
Anyway, I had no proof of this and all the patients at my clinic had not voiced any complaints. Anyway…..Dory had started taking students in and she was moved to my clinic. When she came there she was still helping at another clinic not too far away. Dory accepted a student from her university to follow her and learn from her and slowly integrate into clinical treatment.
This is where Hannah enter into the picture, a very shy girl, did everything you asked of her But because she was shy and also being a new student she’s unsure if the treatment she is administering is the appropriate one. That’s why you have people like Dory to be next to you and counsel and guide you.
After the first few weeks, I started noticing Hannah would be in the clinic and would be doing treatments without Dory being around for a few hrs.
This isn’t allowed because the instructor should be around at all times to supervise their students. After a few times of noticing this, I brought Dory and Hannah into my office and said this cannot happen and is not allowed. If it happens again I would have to report it and this was not something I wanted to do. If I did report it the student would lose their clinical placement and would have to wait 6 months until the next placement which pushes back the graduating date.
A few weeks go by and things had been fairly normal. The student would be in the clinic sooner but would not be performing the treatment. She would however shadow other clinicians. But Dory was still coming in later than usual. One day as I’m walking by Hannah I see that she’s on the billing menu. In order to be on that screen, you would have to be clocked in otherwise the system won’t allow you to do it.
I call her to my office again and I sternly tell her that I had specifically said she couldn’t treat patients and she doesn’t have a “clock In” with her username and password. Hannah proceeded to tell me that Dory had told her to clock in for her and start billing patients before services were rendered. Continues to state this had been going on for the whole time she had been a student.
(Now I don’t see the billing until the next day but I don’t have a clock of when the billing was submitted). I tell Hannah that this was strictly not allowed but I need more information before I make a decision. I call Casey the other clinicians into my office and she proceeds to tell me that Hannah goes home crying and bawling every single night due to Dory threatening to “fail” her as a student if she didn’t do all these things for her.
Dory had used her leverage in her school to strong-arm Hannah into doing all her work while she wasn’t even there. I asked H if this was true and she said yes it was. H then goes to tell me that after the first meeting with Dory, Hannah, and me on what they shouldn’t be doing, Dory brought Hannah to the side and told her “he’s cool he knows what’s really going on but he has to say that as a manager so keep doing it.”
At this point, I ask the student if any of her evaluations or letters of progress had been submitted to her school so they know she has been making progress. Hannah says that Dory has never submitted the necessary paperwork to the school and has gotten away with it because of her connections to the school.
So if I fired Dory, she would in turn take revenge on the student and fail her at her clinical. She would be 6 months to a year from being placed into another clinic meaning she would be either very late or just fail and not be able to graduate.
I called Katie and reported everything to her, told her my fear for the student and the constant trauma she was going through every day, crying, being threatened, and retaliated against.
Katie was also fearful of this but also worried about the liability this put on the company, also how long it had been going on. So she didn’t have an answer on how to handle the situation without harming the student.
So here was my revenge, I started watching everything Dory did, treatments, time and complaints etc… One weekend Dory had to work without her student on a Saturday, Sunday and Monday. When I come in on Monday I notice a patient has been to the hospital since Friday but she had still been billed for services. I check the clinician…..it was Dory. How was she able to treat a person that wasn’t even in the clinic and also be able to bill her… so I had my reasons to fire her.
I had the evidence I needed but I still wanted a bit more. I texted Dory and asked if she had seen said patient, she reported yes she had. But also asked if she had billed less than what she should have because she would be able to bill more if I wanted. I told her that wasn’t necessary and there was no way to bill more due to the patient being in the hospital the whole weekend she had billed. She knew from that moment what was going to happen.
The next day OP and Katie waited for Dory and she was fired on the spot, just for the fraud. The student thing never came up in conversation and she had no idea we had known for a while.
I had another clinician write up a whole letter on what the student was doing at and that she was a good clinician and has completed the necessary work to be able to graduate.
Dory was unable to get any more work after that because the incident had been reported to the government and had that on her license wherever she went. Her new employers would look at the license and not want to hire someone with that on their record.
Last I heard she was working at an Amazon warehouse as a manager. From a doctorate degree to warehouse manager, after many years I’m sure of fraud and abuse…
The best part is that student has graduated gotten her degree, and is working in the field, she’s a great clinician, has done great work in her field, and I still keep in contact with her. She is very thankful for being pulled out of that situation.”
12. We Can't Build A Freaking Carport? Better Hope Your Home Doesn't Get Taken Down
“This played out some 3-4 years ago when my parents-in-law bought a new car.
Because my father-in-law (FIL) wanted to protect his investment a little better and have it protected against the elements just a bit better, he decided he wanted a carport built over on his driveway. Added bonus, he was always able to get in dry. It rains quite a lot where we’re from.
As one does when wanting to build an addition to your house/property, he applied for a permit.
I don’t know if this is how it goes everywhere, but here they request lands in the local paper and in the city office for neighbors to look into and are able to object to this if they have a valid reason. You guessed it, one neighbor did object to this.
The reason? It’s blocking sunlight to his house.
Worth mentioning that the only sunlight it could possibly block was that of the teeny tiny window in his front door.
Through that window was his hallway of about 3 square meters, and it is where they hang their coats, and their staircase to the 2nd floor is there. Then there’s a door to his living room that is always, obviously closed.
Petty as can be.
Thankfully, the city council found this to be petty too and granted the permit to my FIL, so not long after we start to build, and in 2-3 days’ time, a very nice carport was built.
For the sake of the neighbors, FIL even had this sort of skylight inserted, so some sun came through. He tried to do the neighborly thing, so he still had his sunlight.
Everybody is happy. Well, not so much.
The first thing that happens is when a friend of FIL is installing a gutter pipe to it, and he puts in 2 screws to fasten it against a wall.
This is the neighbor’s wall, you see, that is a brick wall of his garage. He goes berserk to my FIL’s friend how he could do this and that it is a crime committed to his property, and he will get the proper authority alerted to this, yadda, yadda, yadda.
The offer to take them out and fill them up again with some plaster or whatever is too little too late.
The guy does it anyway and finds another way to fix the gutter in place.
Second thing, a day later, my kids were playing there with a few friends, and they come in a bit frightened because Mr. Neighbor is on his side of the driveway looking angry with a measuring tape and a large poster (property plans).
They brush it off as just another crazy act of his (he was known for some crazy antics in the street anyway) and think nothing of it.
That is until a week or 2 later, a letter arrives from some city authority that an audit is taking place in a few days because the carport we built exceeded a whopping 2.5 cm onto the neighbor’s property/ground.
Yes, he actually objected to this and fronted the to have this audited. The audit takes place, and turns out, the jerk was right, and as petty as the auditor found it, there was nothing he could do but order my FIL to take the thing down and start again.
(Simply putting the pillars a little more back onto their own ground wouldn’t do it because the roof of it fell a little over the pillars to the outside making it 1 cm extra exceeding property lines).
Now I have never seen my FIL angry, ever, and I know the man for a good 16 years now.
So he called around to my brothers-in-law to tell them what happened and if they could help take it down; it had to be within an X amount of time too because he had to pay Y amount for every day it was up after.
BIL came over right away to check it all out and starts searching for the property plans online. He has my FIL search for all the paperwork he has that came with the house which as it so happens included enlarged property plans because when they bought the house, we had also extended a piece of the house to have a larger kitchen.
(Now I have to note here that my BIL is an engineer in infrastructure as his job, but he knows a lot in other areas as well and also has a very keen eye.)
He starts measuring for himself with some special equipment he uses in his job too.
I don’t know what it is all called or what it does exactly, but at first, it must conclude the jerk next door, and the auditor was right. No real surprise. But then he notices something when he opened up the gates adjacent to the carport which is the entrance to their backyard and starts laughing.
He then asks me to go all the way to the back of the yard and hold some yellow block thingy (that catches a laser beam) as far as I could to the very right through the bushes.
I push it through some thick bushes/plants (my FIL will kill me for not knowing, but I don’t know what all that green was), but then it reached bricks, the townhouse of mean neighbor.
He calibrates the thing, and it beeps and again started laughing. “Well, (FIL’s name), we’re not taking anything down.”
Turns out, the townhouse of lovely Mr. Neighbor, his very beloved townhouse I might add, exceeded property lines into my FIL’s side.
Not by 2,5cm, no, a whopping +18cm to be exact. You wouldn’t see it because there are all these bushes/plants/trees in front of it, but it is definitely exceeding it big time.
Now, it wasn’t a simple case as in telling neighbor it did and trade keeping the carport for keeping the townhouse because, first, they had to check if they had grounds to do so. Don’t know how it works exactly, but first, they had to find out if there had been a prior written/notarized agreement between former owners of both houses that the townhouse was built on that ground with permission, and when that wasn’t the case, they had to find out if somehow over the years it had become perfectly legal for it being there.
(The law here can be weird about that.) But they did ask the auditor if the carport could stay up for at least as long as it took to find that all out and he agreed. Of course, it ended up that it wasn’t in any way legal or a prior agreement, nothing. So then it became the standoff we hoped for. I’ve never seen anyone so bitter by agreeing to something, but the carport still stands and so does the townhouse.
For unrelated very sad reasons (which I won’t disclose, but we ended up feeling very sorry for them), they moved 3 years later and we now have the nicest of neighbors with a kid mine plays with to this day.
While talking to BIL about this, he told me that the neighbor after all of this had tried to claim a certain amount from the friend/contractor that had placed the gutters and drilled two holes in the wall of his garage.
The ones he had plastered after the screaming match of it being illegal. He claimed that water was now seeping through them effectively being a leakage. The contractor friend even tried to be friendly, still, offering he’d take a look and if true repair it immediately. Neighbor refused. Shocker!
Also learned they (neighbors) had moved to an apartment complex. I feel for his current neighbors.”
11. Be A Terrible Friend? I'm Not Giving You The Key Back To Your Place
“Let me tell you about Sharon (changed the name).
Sharon (then 22F) used to be my (then 22F) best friend in the whole world! We became friends at uni and basically did everything together. What I didn’t realize, was that Sharon over the years became controlling.
The thing about being in an abusive relationship is that it doesn’t start that way. The line for what is acceptable is slowly being pushed further and further.
It just started with her choosing where we ate. Innocent enough, yeah? I didn’t care so I just followed her lead and did everything she wanted.
Soon I began to feel drained. She slowly wanted more and more of my attention to the point I had no free time. I did hard physical work for her like helping her move into an apartment and construct furniture without thanks or even a sip of water.
I was expected to be ready to talk over discord and play with her the second I got home. If not, she would guilt-trip me and make me feel like a terrible friend. It’s not like she was lonely. We had tons of friends we hung out with and played video games with every day.
I believe I was a good friend. I helped her with her school work and we had fun together and I supported her when she needed it.
When her father got sent to the hospital for smoking lungs I was there for her. When he died a year later (bless his heart) I was there for her. I still to this day keep secrets for her that I swore to never tell. Not because I respect her. I respect myself! When I make a promise, it doesn’t expire just because we’re not friends anymore.
One day she attacked me.
When our friend group did projects we didn’t care if you were on social media or slacking as long as you had your part done when a deadline arrived. It was a good rule that we all respected. But one morning I get a message from her telling our group that she had a bad morning and we better be prepared. All agreed that I replied: ‘Okay, but remember it’s no excuse to lash out or anything.’
She arrives and starts to work at her part.
I, though used to wake up extra early to catch the train. So as usual I only started to ‘wake up’ after arriving. I sat back and relaxed with some coffee and browsed the internet. She got mad and snarled: ‘Could you actually DO some work?’ I put down my coffee and closed social media, but was obviously offended.
Me: ‘Okay! MOM.’
Her: ‘Don’t you DARE call me mom!’
Me: ‘Well, I wouldn’t call you that if you didn’t act like one.’
Her: ‘I told you I had a bad morning!’
Me: ‘That is no excuse to act like such a jerk!’
She then GRABS me by my collar and yells in my face, as she SLAMS me into the wall: ‘I TOLD YOU I HAD A BAD MORNING!!!!’
Frozen, my brain quickly thinks of ways to survive.
This girl is two heads taller than me and she has one of the higher ranks in karate. NO WAY I’m gonna fight back! I play the pity card, which is not hard because I’m TERRIFIED! I sink to my knees and start crying. I book it to the nearest toilet and hide. She finds me and apologies through the door, but I’m too scared to move or talk.
I’m shaking. I’m scared! She leaves the school and I put up a brave face for the day.
I should have seen the sign right there. I should have reported her to her local dojo. Not forgiven her! But I did.
It should have stopped back then, but I kept making excuses for her. I felt like I would LOSE something if I cut ties with her.
She made me feel like I was NOTHING without her! Like I should be grateful she would even put up with me!
She tried to isolate me.
I first found out about this AFTER I cut ties with her. One of my friends told me that Sharon had WARNED her about me! Told her that I was insensitive and mean and to keep a distance when she would meet me for the first time at the new years eve party we were holding.
She told me she had tried to keep Sharon’s words in mind, but over the night found that I didn’t seem like a bad person at all.
Sharon controlled me. She attacked me. She tried to isolate me.
In the end, it was a small argument that finally made me snap. She tried to drive a wedge between my mom and me. Sharon wanted me to escalate a conflict that had already been settled and forgiven.
She wanted me to just leave and go to her place late at night. She would not stop pushing me about it no matter what.
She had a bad argument with her own mother a week prior so I believe she projected her own feelings onto me.
In a last-ditch effort to control me, she freaks and tells me I’m PATHETIC and always whining! (I used to rant about my problems 3 times a year or something.) She blocks me from every group chat.
Effectively shutting me away from my friends.
The original group had sorta drifted apart and been replaced by new ones at this point.
All who were better friends with her or in a relationship with her friends. So I was the expendable one. That chat had several years of memories I will never see again! It meant SO much to me, they were basically the best years of my life.
She believed that cutting me off for a while would make me submissive. It almost worked. She just waited too long.
I spent months feeling sorry for myself and crying all the time. Until I realized… I was okay. I didn’t realize how much stress I had been under and how much better I felt now. No more drama. No more strings!
She tried to take me back.
I simply ignored her. We had graduated so I had no reason to be in her town anymore! No more 30 min train ride, yay!
After some time, I guess she moved because she wanted my key to her place back.
No problem, except she wanted me to come to her! After what she put me through? She wanted me to spend my time and resources JUST to deliver a key?
I wasn’t gonna pay to ride the train for 30 min just to give her a key, so I could wait an hour for the next train and then spend more on another 30 min train ride home.
Also gas for the trip to and from my home to the train station.
Nope! Come get it! Or send the ca-ching ching so I can ship it to you.
I don’t owe you anything after what you did to me! She was plainly lazy or she just wanted one more thing she could control me about.
Then came the threats. She made some of our male ‘friends’ send threatening messages to me about the ‘dire consequences’ if I didn’t hand over the key.
I ignored it and nothing ever came of it. I never gave them my mom’s address so I wasn’t worried.
Threatening me? THAT’S where I became SUPER petty. Now, you’re not getting it back at all!
I framed that darn thing! I now have a small picture frame with a green key and the words: ‘Proof that (my name) is a salty witch.’
I admit it. I AM salty. I am petty. And I DO hope she had to pay for that darn key when she moved out and I don’t feel bad about it.
She should have treated me as a person.”
Another User Comments:
“That girl sounds like a complete narcissistic. I’m glad you got out of that situation! It takes a lot to realize the control they have over you.
Plus that small-town drama, l**o! I completely understand that whole situation. It’s interesting watching the clichés.” TheHouseOfCats
10. I Found A Way To Get My Garbage Roommate To Not Respond To His Alarms
“I was in college, senior. My roommate was a sophomore, but it was his first time living in a dorm. He’d been a pretty lousy roommate, constantly left the room a mess, left his stuff on my side of the room and on my bed, stole my drinks, used my crap without permission, never clean up my dishes after he used them, and a bunch of other stuff.
I confronted him about all these issues on several occasions and got the Resident Advisor involved with the adult drink stealing issue because, at the time, he was under 21. Things still continued anyways.
He asked me once if it was okay if his girl spent the night, to which I said no. That’s especially weird if I was there.
I also had to wake up every day at 8 for work, which he knew, and he would stay up until 2 am playing video games some nights.
Not to mention, he would set like 10 alarms in the morning with a bunch of different alarm tones.
I hit a breaking point and decided to do something cruel. Every morning when I woke up, I’d observe his alarm pattern and how he’d respond. He had several alarms that he’d ignore, all with the same sound. He had a couple of half-hour alarms that had a unique sound (also ignored) and then the final alarm had its own sound too.
All of them were default iPhone sounds.
So his brain had been trained to this alarm pattern for a while, I’d assumed. So I started step one of the punishment: set up a sequence of alarms on my phone, identical to his sequence, but an hour early.
He responded to my alarms the exact same way he’d respond to his own. I kept this up for a week, and his brain was eventually re-trained to sleep through double the number of alarms as before.
Then, phase two kicked in: random inconsistencies in my alarm pattern. Some days I’d play all the alarms, while other days I’d only play one that his brain was trained to ignore. That way, his brain expects to sleep through like 20 alarms and only ever hears 11. He slept through his alarm at least 4 times in two weeks.
Eventually, he finally changed his alarm pattern so he’d only have one alarm and he no longer had the energy to stay up until 2 am.”
9. I Ditched My Interviewer On Public Transport
There’s really no point in continuing with an interview for a job you’re not interested in, anyway.
Better to leave now than later.
“A few years back I was working retail in the South of England. I had just dropped out of University and was having something of a crisis of what I was doing with my life. I saw a position for a marketing assistant in London and went for it.
I turned up for the interview and the waiting room was FULL of people leaving me thinking ‘darn, a lot of people are gunning for this role.’ It was a bit strange sometimes large groups of them would be whisked out the door at a time and I didn’t know what to make of it at that moment.
I was pulled in for my interview and this guy was nice enough, starts painting the company as a paradise. He showed me a bunch of charts indicating all the progression opportunities and it started sounding a bit too good to be true. I was a bit concerned so I stressed that I was looking for an office job and he assured me that most of my time would be in the office.
He didn’t even really ask me anything, just what I was doing at the time and sent me on my way.
Two hours later I received an email inviting me for my second interview which was the next day. I would have to try and take another day out of my current job but I was keen.
I traveled back to London the next day for the interview first thing in the morning and got back to their HQ to find the waiting room was once again FULL.
I get introduced to a gentleman, bit of a slimy character, who tells me he’ll be my assessor for the day. I haven’t been given any indication what I’ll be assessed on so I’m a bit on edge. He turns to me and tells me that we’ll be out until 8pm, maybe a bit later.
“Out? Out where?”
Assessor: “Oh don’t worry too much. We’re just going to take to the streets and go over the fundamentals of marketing a bit together.
You have a notepad with you? Good.”
He leads me at the same time as many other assessors lead many other candidates from the waiting room out to the streets. We all kind of split off and he leads me to the tube station telling me I need to buy a ticket to another station a considerable distance away. I’m a bit angry at this point because I’m wondering why I’m expected to spend 10 hours with this guy AND pay for this ticket to join him.
We sit on the tube and he starts asking me to jot down the ‘marketing fundamentals’ as he’s speaking. I’m getting increasingly agitated and begin to pause him and question him on what we’re doing.
Assessor: “Well, I will be marketing in the streets, and then I’ll be assessing your ability to do the same, you know.. to see if you’re a good fit.”
Me: “I was told this was an office job?”
Assessor: “We have an office yes, but we work on the streets marketing our partner’s products.”
It now fully hit me why they were carrying out these mass interviews, I had a suspicion but I didn’t want to believe it for a while. It really just seemed like free labor on quite a large scale. Every hour masses of employees partnered with interviewees were being sent out as pairs to sell their products.
I was so furious in that moment having been lied to about the job, having lost out on income made at work and gotten my hopes up.
Meanwhile, this guy was barking at me on the tube to pay attention and note down his top 5 marketing buzzwords of the day and telling me the story of his colleague who quit studying medicine at Imperial College just because this job was so great.
With each passing stop, the temptation grew greater and greater to abandon him on the tube. As we were approaching about the fifth or sixth stop without really thinking I just started pretending I had seen someone outside the train that I hadn’t seen for years.
Me: “Is.. is that..”
Assessor: “What? What is it? I need your attention.”
Me: “I think I just saw..
no way.. I just have to… I’ll be right back.”
Assessor: “But the train!…”
Then I jumped up and hopped off the train. I was so mad that I didn’t even turn back to see him. And then I was so mad that I didn’t actually speak my mind to him. I spent the rest of the day walking around London before catching the train home.
I’m actually glad nothing came of the job else I wouldn’t have moved North and met my wife.”
Another User Comments:
“My daughter did the same thing, she jumped on another train and went home, she had been told off because she complained about having sore feet from the day before and was told not to complain in front of new staff.” Greyhoundowner
8. Let's Just Say His Life Is Now In Shambles
“This all happened about 11 years ago right around the height of the Great Recession. I had recently been laid off from my teaching position, a month after purchasing my first home, and was struggling desperately to find a new job. My (now ex) wife was still in college and we were a one-income household.
(I know, not the smartest of me, but I was young and ambitious and failed to foresee the school districts laying us all off.
Who knew government jobs weren’t secure?)
Act 1: The Jerk Puckers
After about six months of struggling to even get interviews, I happened upon a position as a body shop estimator about 40 miles from my home. I say it happened, but more it was a practice in nepotism as the Manager of the shop was a friend of my fathers and, after having been on food stamps for months, I wasn’t going to be picky.
Anyways, so the first day rolls around and the Manager is giving me the tour when, lo and behold, Bob the Jerk walks in. As a bit of context, Bob the Jerk is one of the grandchildren of the company founder and the only child from the father’s second marriage. Apparently, he was conceived on an airplane when his father was two-timing his mother with a stewardess.
This is relevant later, I swear. Well, Bob, being a right ornery git with a rather serious inferiority complex lays right in on me.
‘Who is this?’
My Manager, already taken aback, introduces me and lays out the whole spiel. I shake his hand and we converse a bit. He’s fairly amenable until he finds out I used to be a teacher. Now, I’m not sure what happened to this poor boy at his private school, but darn if he didn’t switch moods faster than a redneck at Red Lobster.
‘So, boy. I want you to understand something. I may be part of the family that owns these dealerships, but that doesn’t mean I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth. And I want you to understand something: I don’t like liars, and if I ever catch you doing either, I’ll make sure you never work in this town again.’
Well, darn. That near defined our working career for the next 16 months.
Bit ironic, since the town was kind of podunk and I was driving there from one of the largest cities in Texas, but I digress.
So, why is this all relevant? Well, you need to have a good idea of the level of nonsense I was dealing with Bob. Now comes the revenge.
This is a revenge plot in two acts. One is a premeditated act of maliciousness, and the other is an annoying act of opportunity.
Act 2: The OSHAning
At this point in my personal Texas Tragedy, it’s been six months and I’ve learned that Bob’s temper isn’t a temporary thing. The man has repeatedly threatened me and my boss over the past six months.
If we didn’t meet the repair quota, he was going to fire us. The process would repeat each month. As the end of the month neared, the harassing phone calls would start, then the yelling, then the screaming, then when we failed to meet quota, the in-person tirade.
The Manager had also hit the stage where he disappeared for the whole day to avoid the Wrath of Bob and let me take the brunt of it.
Considering I was making less than $400 a week and working 60 hour weeks, which was calculating below minimum wage and an FLSA violation, my level of give-a-darn was starting to hit its antapex.
To compound my ‘Bless Your Heart’ level of annoyance, by this time I was in charge of all documentation, billing, and payroll for the shop guys.
I’d become acquainted with the payroll department, with those lovely people enjoying my help, since I was a bit of a number cruncher myself, and you got a position where I’m doing everything the Manager is supposed to be doing, and then some, but getting none of the pay.
Now comes the first day of reckoning. Our men’s restroom had been broken for two months (The only men’s restroom in the building), we had a dead rat in the wall that’d been stinking up the shop, and our steel pylons for the bay area had been eaten through by decades of neglect.
Unbeknownst to Bob, I’d been documenting and cataloging these issues and keeping copies of every email I sent regarding the issues with our shop.
Also, every time he’d berated us, I documented the outburst, what was said, and any written correspondence that backed up his behavior.
After taking some lunch breaks to study up on OSHA violations, I compiled all my findings and sent them over to OSHA with pictures, emails, et cetera.
At the same time, I took all my documentation of every nasty thing our boss had said to us, including emails and whatnot, and forwarded that over to the head of HR.
Well, bad things soon followed for poor ol’ Bob.
The documentation of verbal abuse and labor violations hit HR’s plate and Bob’s poor world blew up. He was forced to raise my pay to at least minimum wage equivalent, or forfeit working me 60 hours a week.
He also was forced into anger management classes where, and this was my favorite, every time he got annoyed, he had to chant the mantra ‘Kittens and bunnies.’
OSHA soon followed and sent out an inspector. After confirming all the issues with the shop, the dealership was given an ultimatum, bring the shop up to code or close the dealership. $50,000 later, we had a functioning bathroom, a breezy customer lounge, and supporting steel pylons that didn’t groan every time a stiff wind hit.
Bob stayed away for a time, but it didn’t last. Being the grandson of the owner, he wasn’t getting kicked, no matter how much his siblings in the business disliked him.
Thus on to Act 2.
Act 2: The Witch-Slapping
Fast-forward a year and Bob, being the jerk he is, had gotten way more malicious and far more underhanded with his punishments.
In the interim between Act 1 and now, he’d introduced ever more stringent red tape between our shop and Payroll/Billing, Parts, and Sales, effectively tripling the required paperwork per vehicle repair.
A particular example required that we print out the email from the parts department, hand-write in all parts numbers on top of the automated numbers from the estimate, then fax that back to the parts department while ALSO emailing them the same-said items, but in type form.
If anything didn’t match exactly, then he’d try to throw a write-up at me. One time he did and I refused to sign it.
Guess it never occurred to him that I would refuse, as he didn’t know what to do after and never wrote me up again.
By now, I had a new boss, as the old BodyShop Manager had done right and skipped out and this new guy was pretty much the same.
I’d warned him about the tirades, but he scoffed. He learned real quick after we missed quota the first month.
Anyways, I had been feeling really under the weather for the past two weeks: sweating, fevered, abdominal pain stretching to my back, the whole standard ‘this isn’t a cold’ feel. I went to the doctor and they found I had some nasty kidney stones that had developed as a side-effect from my ADHD medication.
Took me out for my whole week. Considering I only got one week of vacation a year, I wasn’t happy.
Well, I show back up a week later and Bob decides he needs to put his foot down and calls up the Manager. The manager and I had gotten used to his nonsense and so he threw him on speaker phone while I listened in.
‘Is jerky back? Boy better have a doctor’s note.’
‘Yeah, he just got here. He left the note at home, but he’ll bring it tomorrow.’
‘Not good enough. You tell him to get himself back home and bring back the note. He ain’t working until you have it in hand. And don’t pay him for the missed time.’
‘We got cars backing up.
If I send him home, you’re not gonna have some delivered on time.’
‘I don’t give a darn. He doesn’t work until I have that note unless he’s lying.’
Yeah, we saw where this was going.
Considering it’s a 40-mile drive one way, I wasn’t too pleased, but I made the trek on back. Along the way, I saw a sign at a body shop looking for estimators, stopped on in, and applied.
I make it back to my business around 1 pm, losing about 5 hours of the day to travel at this point. My Manager lets Bob know and I immediately get a phone call.
‘Took you long enough. Now, I want you to get out there and give me an update on every project we got in the shop. You got one hour.’ He hangs up before I can acknowledge.
I shrug. It’s about 30 vehicles. Nothing overly tough, so I head on out and get an update from all the techs. I call him an hour later and get no answer.
I go ahead and email him a list of each project and where they are at so he can’t pull his usual bull.
The day progresses as usual when I get a call at 5 pm, keeping in mind we close at 6 pm, which is when I leave.
‘I want you to close out all the projects tonight. I don’t care how long it takes you.’
‘I am not legally allowed to process the payment on vehicles we have not begun work on.’
‘Stop being lazy. Close them all out.’
The average time it took to close each vehicle with our current 90’s podunk system was around 30 minutes a car. With 30 cars, we were talking about an all-nighter.
Considering he’d also made our body shop repair ‘dealer’ cars he had driven and wrecked, then sold them as brand new with clean records… I just wasn’t having it and had no plans to break the law for a jerk I didn’t like, so I closed the 10 that were ready to close and left at 8 pm.
The next day, oh well. The next day was rough.
I walk in per usual and get to work when I get a phone call from Bob.
‘Who do you think you are? I told you to close out all the vehicles! Why in the world didn’t you?!’
‘I told you. I’m not breaking the law. I closed out the ten that were done, stayed over my hours, which I am not supposed to do, and completed as many as possible.’
He rambled on and ranted for a bit and I took it in stride.
I’d written his ire off until he took it too far.
‘No. You’re just lazy. See, this is why you’re at where you are and I’m at where I am. I know how to work for a darn living.’
I saw red and got quiet.
‘What did you just say?’
Bob knew he’d stepped in it, but being the ornery guy he was, he wasn’t going to back down now.
‘I said what I said, boy. You’re lazy, entitled, don’t work for anyone, and incompetent. And you should be thanking me for where you’re at.’
I lost it.
‘Listen, water boy. The only reason you’re at where you are is that your daddy got wasted, slept with a stewardess to join the mile club, and got stuck with you.’
I slammed the phone down and immediately sent his sister, the President of the company, a list of all the things he’d pulled and how he’d try to make us break the law, as well as his shady dealings with fixing dealer cars under the table and then selling them as brand new.
Considering Bob’s sister despised him, you can imagine her delight at having solid evidence against her littlest brother.
As fortune would have it, I got a call on my cell ten minutes later saying I had the job at the other location, looked at my Manager, and quit.
The next day, after having never felt freer, I received a call from my now ex-Manager. Bob and his sister were at the shop and were shutting it down.
Bob had been planning to shut the shop down but didn’t want to give up the profit.
He had tried to have me close the vehicles out so he could claim the profits for his shop and pocket the percentage commission, force the other dealerships in his family’s business to eat the cost of repairs, then was going to use the added profits as leverage to pitch to his daddy, the owner, over his sister’s head, and move himself to a new dealership that made more coin.
My emails didn’t stop the body shop from getting closed, but since his sister got wind, she shut his dreams down, side-lined him at the low performing dealership for another five years, and got him sent back to anger management, all while moving the rest of the employees to other dealerships within the company, and at a higher pay rate.
Last I heard, he was still practicing ‘kittens and bunnies’ every time he gets all heated.”
7. I'll Get This Company Permanently Shut Down
“I got a job with a direct sales company in sunny Scotland that ran on a commission-only basis. Clients would hire us to sell for them and we did everything from credit cards to the internet. We normally had portable pods we’d take into shopping centers but sometimes we’d just be in the middle of busy streets.
Some people often worked for the day and made zero income which meant folks were getting hired and quitting every week.
I actually did pretty well though and usually made more than I would be working similar hours in an unskilled labor position. Boss took note of this and started mentioning an expansion into Australia, describing it as an untapped market for what we did.
It would be a gold mine, he said. He told me he was planning to leave in a few months and wanted to bring decent salesmen along to hit the ground running while they looked for more local staff to build the team.
If I proved my worth, I’d be invited.
I worked harder than ever. Coming in early, staying late, and helped to train the noobs that came in without pay as time went by.
Best efforts weren’t fruitful though and I still didn’t have enough savings to get by for long by myself on the other side of the world. I told the boss what I had and he said that would barely even be enough to pay for your flight let alone the hotel and other living costs while we get established.
I was actually under the impression getting invited meant they’d at least move me over there so now I felt like this plan just didn’t seem feasible anymore.
I’ve learned to ask these questions well in advance now. Months of sweat down the drain.
Boss said I couldn’t give up and I had to do what was necessary to achieve my goals. I ate that thing up and he suggested I take out payday loans and bump phone/tablet contacts for the extra ca-ching.
Obviously, that would put me in massive debt but my boss, who I considered a friend at this point, reassured me that I’d be making 10X what I owed per month when we got to Oz. I trusted him enough to believe it but still asked him if he would pay for my plane ticket if I couldn’t afford to fly back after 6 months to be present for the birth of my daughter in Scotland.
He said of course but it was silly to think I’d be so poor I couldn’t get home. I went through with the idea.
The time came and we were ready to leave. Boss asked the regional manager to pay for my plane ride upfront and dock my wages later because the ticket would have still eaten a third of my savings. Turned out I was the only one from Scotland besides boss and the RM going over.
I was told it was because no one put the effort in I did and RM couldn’t pay for everyone’s ticket. Normally I’d have been really concerned but the boss was a pal now so I just felt really special. On the way, it was revealed to me that we wouldn’t actually be selling anything this time around. The only clients were a few global and local charities.
What we’d be doing now was going door to door and convincing people to subscribe. I would have to get someone to sign up to donate a minimum of 40 dollars a month for two years to get my comish… WHAT?!? Again I was reassured that, unlike Scotland, in the land down under everyone has loads of disposable income and they love charities. It would be a saunter for us.
I managed to convince myself it wasn’t so bad and I actually got quite excited about doing something for charity like that.
Things didn’t take off as we’d hoped and just two months in I was completely relying on income from the job to support myself. To my surprise, I’d been sharing a bunk bed with my boss in hostels the whole time. He said it was just to save some coin, but I already knew he had no more than me because of our constant proximity.
I worked 13 hours a day 6 days a week in the field and even on my day off boss would always have something planned for the ever-changing team. I was a good sport and ended up being pretty well-liked by anyone we brought on. Part of my job now was to participate in training everyone new except still for no pay. I wasn’t in a position to argue and since we were in this together I complied.
I ended up doing most of the training but at least I was making new friends.
The next four months were awful. Boss and I eventually separated when we hired two other lads from the UK with who I became close. We stayed together and the boss somehow had enough to stay in Airbnbs now meanwhile, I was living off noodles and sleeping in up to 24-bed rooms in hostels with the boys just to get by.
We ironed our shirts on the floor and couldn’t afford shoes to replace the ones soles were coming off of from the constant door knocking. Boss had become a bit of a pariah among the team because of his ugly attitude. I actually found his temper funny a lot of the time because it was never directed at me until it was and the benefit of the doubt I’d given him no longer existed when it came time for me to go home for my daughter.
I couldn’t afford a bus never mind a flight and when I asked the boss for the emergency handout he essentially said tough cookies, I can’t afford it. I missed the birth of my daughter and cried for days over how much of an idiot I was for trusting my boss. I couldn’t even risk leaving and not finding another job. I just had to save for as long as it took and go home.
Shortly after this boss declares he’s now got the resources he needs to start planning a move to a different state where he can open his own office away from the RM. Of course, the team would have to follow and at the boss’s request, I played a part in convincing most of them to go. I’d started living in robot mode and just became a yes man to get through the day.
I also figured maybe the new location would reap more rewards. Boss invested in a town office and spent what he had to set it up along with getting the clients sorted.
(Cue the karmic revenge)
It took three weeks for everyone to see boss’ true colors and I was particularly worn down. Part of the recruitment process involved the applicant shadowing me or another member of the team for the day to show them sales but when anyone came out with me I basically said listen you DO NOT want this job so, needless to say, we didn’t hire many locals.
I had stayed in touch with a girl from the previous office who I had gotten close to and she was more than happy to help me vent. She offered me a place to stay in her flat should I want to risk quitting and finding another job to get home. I’d just have to get back to the other side of the country with no coin.
We were so skint the lads and I hacked a hungry Jack’s reward app to give us unlimited free value meals lol. FYI we were paid two weeks in lieu so I hatched a plan to wait until the wage from my first week in the new office came through before quitting. I had the strong feeling boss would withhold the remaining two weeks because he knew I couldn’t fight it.
I was right in the end. I also sat the team down in private one night and told them I was planning to quit for all these reasons. They were sad to hear I was leaving but completely understood. I quit the next day and used the wage I just got to pay for the way back to the other side of Oz. I did find another job in a coffee shop and had enough to fly home three months later.
Then I completely rebuilt my life.
I learned through the g*******e that every single member of staff quit within days of me leaving the boss’s office meaning he had to shut down and hightail it back to the old one because of how much he lost. I saw him running around a few times trying to catch busses with a clipboard and iPad like we did when we’d knock doors so I’m assuming he couldn’t hire any more staff either and had to do the groundwork all by himself.
He never recovered from what I hear.
At the time this happened I didn’t know what a pyramid scheme company was but thankfully I’m wiser now. I discovered that boss made money, not from the client directly but rather he got a percentage of every sale the team and I made as did every superior he had. I never saw a dime for all the people I hired and trained. That explained why he could afford better lodging and ultimately an office.
I’m now certain he could’ve afforded to send me on the flight back when I asked.”
Another User Comments:
“For what it’s worth, something could have been done, and depending on how long ago it was, something still could be done. Fair Work Australia and the Australian Tax Office would both be very interested in an “organization” (for want of a better word) scamming people in Australia, regardless of where they were from.
They would also be interested in work being done with no pay.” asmit1241
6. Lose Your Job And Your Lady
Now you’re without the two things that meant the most to you.
“I ruined someone’s career and their relationship over the course of a week.
So around 2006 I worked for an awful supervisor. The kind of supervisory figure that treats his underlings like trash, intimidates and harasses them into completing unreasonable deadlines, etc. He had a tendency to throw people under the bus, take accomplishments, and go so far as to appear ‘compassionate’ and ‘Counsel’ us whenever higher management was in eyeshot.
Complete nonsense aside he once got in my face over a minor correction to something he had wrong. Gave the ‘My word over yours, if I say you’re bad, you’re done.’ Leading into lecturing me over why he was successful and I would not be.
I dealt with this living incarnation of a hostile working environment each and every day. After one of my colleagues got fired because of him I vowed to put a stop to him however I could.
My chance came that spring during a company picnic when I met my supervisor’s fiancée. A lovely girl by the name of Catherine. Friendly and decent looking, and after some natural small talk, I discovered she worked at the nearby coffee shop. It was when I found out who she was there with that the plan was hatched.
I wasn’t much of a coffee drinker, but I figured what better a time to start.
Slowly I started visiting this shop about every other morning, making sure to ‘catch’ and make small talk with Catherine. Nothing overt, just learning little bits of things she liked. The things I didn’t know much about I took the time to ‘research’ until I could really smile, hum along to her favorite band’s music whenever it came on with a smile, talk to her about what crazy mundane thing her cat had done.
Slowly I gained rapport and as I did I began visiting on lunch breaks too. She would sigh and I’d try to figure out what’s on her mind, being careful never to seem too overt or pressing. Soon, the cracks were revealed in the relationship with my supervisor. I was subtle about siding with her and promoting an agreeable image of myself.
Meanwhile, at the workplace, my similarly plagued colleagues started working together to take down this scumbag.
We began filling a secret directory with his mistakes. The things he did to wrong people, things he said, anything, all collecting into one big ‘Screw this guy’ folder. It felt like a coup and despite the nightmare we continued to work in, the glimmer of hope shone through to give me the strength to persevere.
All of this work culminated into the late summer.
Lollapalooza was coming in August to Chicago only a short drive away, and it was there that things really started coming together.
I came into the coffee shop as usual at lunch and talked to Catherine. Over the course of the conversation, I appeared ‘Bummed.’ When she asked, I brought up that I had two tickets to Lollapalooza (which some of her favorite bands were playing at) and my ‘friend’ had to back out.
She took the bait.
So come the first weekend of August and I pick her up.
Much to my delight, I found out that she had lied to him about who she was going with. She thought that he predictably ‘wouldn’t understand’ if it was with a guy rather than the ‘girl friends’ she made up for the trip. I was elated at the realization of how well this was going.
Of course, we were going as ‘just friends’, and I had no intention of doing anything to screw up the plan.
It felt too early to make a move.
Late that Sunday night we had returned. I dropped her off at the house she lived at with my supervisor. As I pulled in the door opened, and guess who was there to see none other than myself letting her out of my car.
I made very sure to ‘accidentally’ have the lights on in the interior and give him a good, long look at who was in the driver’s seat.
The reaction, the look on his face when he recognized me was priceless.
That morning I came into work, practically giddy at the small victory in my head. Predictably he was waiting for me, and he wanted me in his office immediately.
Adrenaline rush.
I played innocent up to that point, and when he closed the door his voice lowered. He gave me the most venomous stare I had ever seen and approached until he was inches from my face.
He was already red in the face and looked as though he had little sleep. ‘Throwaway_Bus1ness. I don’t know what was going on this weekend but I never want to see or hear you talking to my fiancée again.
I will end you if you so much as breathe in her direction-‘ He shoved me against the wall.
Up until that point, I was up dancing in my head in elation.
Outside I had struggled to keep my composure. But the moment he touched me, the switch flipped into pure rage, and I snapped. Without even thinking, I put on the most contemptuous of grins, and things began to get surreal.
‘I’m going to hook up with Catherine.’
I hardly had the words out of my mouth when he got physical with me. I heard the shout of ‘You mother-‘ Pain and adrenaline rushed and as soon as I felt the hand grab the collar of my shirt I knew I had opened the floodgates to unwavering rage.
Everything from that point is a blur that I can’t recall the exact details.
My boss was a fair bit bigger than me, and he was hurling his fists and body at me. Somehow I managed to get him off of me and started putting the nearest desk – anything I could get between him and me. The door opened from outside and shouting began as people heard the chaos and moved to try to intervene.
The next thing I recall from that point on was one of my coworkers handed me a wad of paper towels.
My boss was shouting from down the hall as people tried to get him to calm down. The cops showed up and questioned everyone.
I maintained innocence the entire time as they took statements. I claimed that he overreacted and denied the talk about his fiancée being unfaithful to him with me (Which technically was true).
During this time my colleagues sided with me and decided to make this the moment where the ‘Screw this guy’ Folder came out.
My supervisor was fired the same day. I was put on unpaid vacation for a few days while everything got sorted out. In the end, I got to keep my job.
Later that day I got a call from Catherine. After the arguments and accusations, he made the night before, upon finding out what he had done, she decided that was the last straw and broke off the wedding/relationship.
I maintained my side of the story and she believed it.
Everything went so much better than I had hoped. Over the course of a day, I completely destroyed a guy. His career, his relationship. And I don’t feel the slightest bit of regret over it.
I ended up going out with Catherine within a few weeks of the breakup. Didn’t quite pan out in the long run and we split up a couple of months later.
Heard that the ex-supervisor lost his home later and had to move into an awful apartment alone. I was promoted a year and a half ago at my job and transferred to a new office since, and am currently loving life.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m some level of a sociopath… But gosh darn was that worth it for the nightmare I went through.
Considering some of the contacts who may know me and the fact that nobody knows about what really went down, I figured to be on the safe side and make a throwaway.”
5. Mess With Me? All I Have For You Is Fish
“So this happened a few years ago when I was just finishing my second year of university. I had an international student for a housemate who was a member of a load of different societies, we both worked to help pay for things. The way the bills worked was they sent me every month and I’d pay the bills.
For about 3 or 4 months before the end of term, HM (housemate) was trying to save up for a field trip to Tanzania, so he was working all sorts of overtime, he went there for like 2 months and didn’t actually pay me any at all from April – July.
I was working overtime whenever I could get it, but I was also going out a lot, in hindsight, I probably could have been more careful with my but If I wasn’t being screwed left, right and center I would have been okay. He kept promising to pay his bills but every time I asked for them he didn’t have it. It was annoying as the bills had to be paid, so I just paid them, he promised to give me the later on.
In total, he owed me about £300-400.
Around this time our previous landlord sold the house to LL (the new landlord), who was foreign and had very little idea of how UK tenancy law works, he would show up at the house at random times throughout the day to organize viewings, often showing up at 10 pm or later without any notice. When he tried to get the tenancy agreement switched over he required another deposit, that I didn’t have as I hadn’t received my deposit back from the old landlord yet (I got the full amount) as well as having to pay my housemates bills on top of my own, and basically going out too much.
I didn’t feel bad about spending so much on nights out, I worked a lot on top of studying so I earned the right.
I tried to explain to the landlord that I couldn’t just come up with that kind of on top of everything else, the academic year was winding down so all of my colleagues who were also students had lots of free time, and it was difficult to get a lot of overtime, I explained that I would have to wait to get my old deposit back before signing the new agreement (apparently you had to pay when you signed), which he agreed to.
During this time he started letting the spare rooms out to his employees, and lo and behold he decided he wanted me out, giving me 10 days to vacate the property (Illegal, but whatever). My HM was friendly with the landlord (thanks to having enough thanks to having rich parents to pay the deposit straight away, they would pay for anything directly related to housing like rent and deposits and I think a little bit to live on, but he had to work for anything else)
On a side note, the house was a state, we had an archaic heating system that pumped heated air through vents in the house and you had to punch the boiler to get it to actually turn on, the bathroom door handle was broken so you would often get locked in (The same thing happened in my bedroom early on in my tenancy when everyone else was out and I had to kick the door down to get out, which I reluctantly paid for) really dangerous like that.
I asked my housemate to give me the final bill as I was moving out, and he hit the roof, he called me and my fat, told us we were dirty etc, told me he was never going to give me the money. He went ballistic.
On top of this I had the utility companies breathing down my neck, as I said at this point in the year overtime was hard to get and I was only contracted to work 8 hours a week, On top of this most students went home during the summer break but I didn’t have contact with my parents so had no choice but to stay in the house over summer, meaning things were pretty tight to say the least (I worked in a cheap clothing store, in a town with several universities, so when 95% of students went home over summer the overtime would really dry up.
The atmosphere inside the house was extremely frosty for the last week or so of my tenancy, with HM and LL both acting like a pair of entitled bees with itches I decided I wanted to get some revenge.
On my way home from work I bought 3 whole fish from the reduced section at the local supermarket, as well as a couple of tins of sardines (in spring water for extra rot), and decided to get to work.
I think I spent about £2 in total. I put fish in all sorts of places:
-Outside HMs bedroom window
-In the loft hatch
-Underneath the fridge
-Hidden in the back of a cupboard, inside an old disused bread bin.
-On top of a kitchen cupboard
-Screwed the grill off the heating vent in my room and chucked one in there.
I tried to get them spread fairly evenly throughout the house so as to create a nice even stench.
And to top it off I unscrewed the dryer door switch, HM broke it because he used to kick the door closed and I ordered a new one from amazon months ago, I had no use for it but him, it was mine. I still have it somewhere.
The day I vacated the house I was gathering up my stuff from the kitchen when I decided to see how the fish was getting on, so I simply opened the cupboard door.
OMG, how it stank! It was eye wateringly bad, I could feel it in my throat.
I quickly closed the cupboard door and opened the back door and windows to get rid of the smell so I wouldn’t be prematurely rumbled, finished packing, and got the out.
I never found out what happened or whether they even found all of the fish, I would assume that within another couple of days the house would have been absolutely stinking, but without any sort of formal tenancy agreement or contact details LL couldn’t chase me up for it, his bad.
I hope it was expensive to fix.
I like to think that every time they found a fish they would think they had solved the problem of the awful smell, only to have it remain and slowly get worse. HM only ever contacted me in relation to the dryer door, I told him to go himself.
I had to pay some of the leftover bills myself, but the electric company were the only ones willing to chase him for, so he had to pay that too!”
4. Jerk Boss Gets A Huge Wakeup Call
“About five or six years ago, I was relatively new to the workforce, having worked one minimum wage job at Mickey D’s. I had been there almost two years but had little experience elsewhere. Well, this one lady always came through early every morning to order a large soda and would take a few minutes to talk to me. I mentioned to her that I was displeased with my bosses and the working conditions, and she invited me to come to apply for a job at Not FedEx because they were always running low on employees!
That should have been my first red flag.
The second red flag went completely over my head because at this point, I was 17 with no previous job experience. When I walked in for an interview, the boss, Jeph, told me it would take five minutes. I wasn’t asked about my relevant experience, my goals within the company, or even told what position I was applying for.
I assumed all interviews were different and went along with it and started the next week with training.
Everything went well for the first month. I basically just packed boxes, took down customer information, and sorted mail into the mailboxes we managed. The real trouble started after I was given my one-month performance review.
I was deemed to be a valuable asset to Jeph’s franchise and rightfully so.
At 17, I was able to lift more and work better than the 20 and 30 something employees, and due to the work ethic, my parents drilled into me I was never slacking off while at work. I was then informed that I would be swapping between Jeph’s two franchises, roughly 30 miles apart. (For context, the franchise I APPLIED TO WORK AT was roughly a mile from my house, so I could walk if I couldn’t get a ride.) Every other day, I had to drive out to the location and somehow justify this with my slightly above minimum wage job ($7.50 for those not in Texas).
Overall, my boss was a massive jerk.
His physical appearance could best be described as “troll-like” with a shirt almost bursting with the top always undone to showcase his aging chest hair and a face not unlike that of A&F owner Mike Jeffries. He openly two-timed his woman, bragging to coworkers about it constantly. He charged people one dollar for any amount of extra tape they needed on their package, despite the fact that we got roughly two rolls for that price in bulk.
He had a special price calculator installed on the computers that charged people roughly 10% more than the package would be elsewhere. He would push employees (who he insisted didn’t work in customer service but sales) to never offer anything less than three-day shipping even though we offered standard 7+ days and even cheaper options. I watched him actively lie to customers, claiming it was the price they had to pay blah blah blah and almost yell at them to go to another store if they didn’t like it.
But I digress.
Now here was the first jerk-ish thing that my boss did to me specifically. Until this point, I was only working around 20 hours. After I graduated to working at both stores, Jeph had me sign a brand new W-2 for his second store, which was under a different company. (He owned both, naming one Blue, name for a .44 caliber bullet, and Blue, proper name for visible light).
Again, I had very little idea that this was wrong because I had never had to deal with this before. He proceeded to add another 20 or so hours to my schedule, bringing me up to 40 hours or more. But since I worked for two separate companies, I never earned a dime of overtime or benefits of any kind.
At this point, I started accruing more and more duties, as my boss and coworkers started to trust me more and more.
By my fourth month of employment (out of a total of eight), I was performing managerial duties such as: opening the store, counting the registers, closing the store, ordering products such as boxes and tape, and preparing shipments for transport. The work alone justified a raise, not to mention the hours I was being asked to work. However, when I floated this idea to my boss, he very rudely insisted that since he had a manager for each store already, I was just doing my job and couldn’t earn a cent more.
Then came the second jerk-ish move.
We had a large company contract come drop-off stuff with us, a telecom company we will say rhymes with Hey Tea and Tea. Customers would bring in their old cable boxes, wires, remotes, and the like, and we would scan them and ship them back to Hey Tea and Tea, the company THAT LEGALLY OWNED ALL OF THIS HARDWARE.
The customers would not pay us a nickel, but the telecom company would pay almost double what it actually cost to ship the package.
There is no way Jeph could look that gift horse in the mouth and decide he was still owed the stable and all the horse’s tack as well, right? Surprise, surprise, Jeph had to take it one step further. ANY and ALL parts/cables/WiFi adapters/USB drives the customer returned to us that didn’t have a scan tag on them, Jeph would pull aside and either strip for copper or sell on eBay.
And he would force us, the employees to package his eBay sales or copper wiring into boxes and ship them for him. He even popped batteries out of remotes and recycled them somewhere to get a tax credit. None of his employees ever saw a penny (not that I would have accepted it). We estimated he raked in roughly three to four thousand a month just from stealing alone.
For those of you bad at math, that is the price of TWO brand new 2018 Honda Civics.
The third (and fourth) final jerk moves are what solidified my hatred for this boss and my desire to strike back. They both came in the same week, roughly the same time, and both were viscerally repulsive. My favorite coworker had recently gotten pregnant, and although the father got out of dodge when he found out, she was doing very well for herself.
She and I frequently closed together, and she promised she would bring the baby to sit in the back for the dull hours we had to kill from 6-10. We also had an annual store review from corporate that week, so our boss called a late-night meeting after we closed one day. Our boss started out by saying that he was proud of our pregnant coworker for working so hard even with her “disability.” (Yes, even his sense of humor was slimy.) Then, in front of all fifteen employees, HE FIRED HER.
He told her that because the Christmas season was coming up, and she would only slow down the store being pregnant and all; he had to let her go.
After she left, hatred seething in her eyes, he turned back to the fourteen of us who were left stunned and continued on like nothing had happened. He proceeded to tell each of us our jobs for this weekend, leaving mine for last.
My job, because I used to drive a decently sized minivan, was to ferry the corporate required supplies, for the safe, and OUR ONE WORKING FIRE EXTINGUISHER between the two stores while he kept corporate distracted between visits.
At this point, I had taken enough nonsense from this guy, and I formulated my plan. I started by calling the Hey Tea and Tea fraud department and telling them everything I knew.
I took pictures and emailed them directly to the rep I was talking to, who seemed a little too excited about fraud being committed. I then scheduled a visit from a Hey Tea and Tea rep at the same time corporate was supposed to show up. My next step was to call Not FedEx and explain exactly what I just told y’all, with a few extra things thrown in that I couldn’t share for privacy reasons.
They promised to send a rep as well, to the same store, at the same time.
The final step was put into action that Saturday. I dutifully loaded up my van with the supplies, (upwards of $4,000 if I remember correctly), and fire extinguisher, and headed out. Except I did the exact OPPOSITE of what Jeph wanted. I took the stuff to the first store he owned, which was the second one to receive a visit.
After he texted the team saying they were moving on, I packed up all the stuff and drove it to the other store they just left. Now I am unsure exactly what happened at the other store, but from some coworkers, I pieced together that the Not FedEx rep showed up right after I left, but didn’t stay long, and the Hey Tea and Tea rep showed up just before Jeph had arrived and had time to hide his ill-gotten gains in his office.
The one coworker who was close enough to the office during the corporate meeting said there were lots of angry words being thrown and threats being made towards Jeph and his position as a franchisee. He also lost his franchise and the ability to ship for Hey Tea and Tea, at least for a period of time.
The sad epilogue to this whole story is that he is currently still in business and still running the same scams he was before.
He WAS however fined for not having proper supplies in his stores, as well as forced to use corporate’s package rates rather than his own. So in some small way my revenge worked. He currently has a two-star review on Yelp for both of his businesses, and I hope to have a party outside his store one day when it goes belly up.”
3. Throw A Fit Over Candy? I'll Ruin Your Marriage
Karen really needs to reevaluate where she directs her anger.
“The kids in my neighborhood keep coming to my door on Halloween for candy. Every year I tell them that no, I am not giving it out and to go somewhere else. I’ve gone so far as to put out signs telling them to shove off and leave me alone every October. But the little jerks just seem to take it as a challenge.
They’ll repeatedly ring the doorbell until I come out or get bored (once they went five whole minutes before they went away), or keep coming back to my place after I tell them, no, hoping I’ll change my mind (I never do).
This year, one particularly persistent little brat from the next cul de sac over, whose made it her mission to wear me down for candy every year, rings the doorbell and I tell her nicely (or as nicely as you can tell someone who repeatedly ignores the big red sign saying that my house is not for trick or treating) that I don’t have any candy.
She looks at me with what she probably thought were adorable puppy dog eyes and asks me if I would mind checking.
I tell her there is absolutely no candy in my house nor will there ever be (that was a lie but she didn’t know that). Then the little monster gets it into her head that I’m lying and keeps asking me if I’m sure.
I tell her that I’m diabetic (I’m not) but she apparently doesn’t know what that means.
One Google search on my phone later and she accuses me of lying about having it. I am but that’s not the point. I suppose I could have just given her a Hershey bar, but I really didn’t want her spreading the triumphant news to all the other little monsters of how she finally got the mean lady to succumb to her will at the risk of any of them following in her example.
So I just tell her that I don’t have to give candy to anybody whose going to be so rude as to deny my very serious medical condition and close the door.
About an hour later, I’m hate-watching the Francis Ford Coppola Dracula movie (it’s a train wreck but I can’t help watching it) when I get another ring on the doorbell.
I come down to find the little abomination peeking out from behind the legs of a very angry-looking EM (entitled mother).
The following exchange goes down.
Me: How can I help you, ma’am?
EM: My daughter says you repeatedly refused to give her candy.
Me: I’m sorry, I don’t have any.
EM: This callous attitude towards the festivities is unacceptable! It’s Halloween, you should have prepared for it!
Me: I didn’t think any kids would be trick or treating this year.
EM: Well after everything they’ve been through, we as a community owe it to them to make up for all the fun they’ve missed out on this year!
Me: Look, I get where you’re coming from, but it’s 10 pm. I’m not going to get up and go pick up a bag of tootsie rolls at this ungodly hour just so that your kid can have the full Halloween experience.
It’s here that mommy dearest takes it upon herself to give me a lecture on the importance of ‘participating in the community.’ I told her that maybe if she wasn’t such an entitled Karen, her husband would be more eager to participate in the bedroom with her instead of me.
This is where I may have been kind of a jerk.
What I said was nothing more than a heat-of-the-moment remark, but the woman went absolutely ballistic upon hearing it.
She freaked out and started screaming about whether or not her husband was sleeping with me. Apparently, the guy actually did go on some kind of a business trip recently, and my little quip set off all the red flags in her head.
She starts demanding to know if her hubby was in my house, trying to crane her neck around me to see inside, and shrieking at him to come out.
At this point, I’m tired, I’m on the verge of a food coma from all the grocery store goodies I’ve binged on, and I’m 100% done with all of this. So I tell her to come back with a warrant and shut the door on her in spite of her attempts to wedge her way in.
I can still hear her meltdown on my way up the stairs, now joined in disharmony with her daughter demanding to know what’s going on.
I look out the window of my bedroom to see her angrily punching in a number on her phone and dialing up who I think was her husband. The poor man got an earful (I didn’t catch everything she said but at one point she mentioned something about how he has no business being unfaithful when she could have taken advantage of his absence with her brother in law after he came onto her at their anniversary party but she ‘spared his feelings’ by not doing anything about it).
She’s being so loud that she draws the attention of other trick-or-treating families in the neighborhood. Anybody unfortunate enough to ask what’s going on gets treated to a firsthand soundbite of her marital problems. One neighbor goes so far as to come out of his house and asks her to take this someplace where she isn’t ‘disrupting the ambiance.’ This prompts her to turn her wrath on him and shrieks at him to ‘mind his own beeswax.’ The poor man barely gets away with his life.
It was like watching an episode of Maury unfolding if Maury Povich was an elderly Asian man.
At this point, I was seriously scared that she was going to try and break into my house, looking for proof hubby was there. I considered just coming out and admitting to her that I was yanking her chain. But the ball was already in motion and I doubted whether my confession would save her marriage at this point.
Fortunately, after she ended the call, she stormed off with her now hysterical goblin in tears. I felt a little bad for turning what should have been a fun night for the kid into such a traumatic experience, but maybe now she’ll know not to knock on my door next year.”
Another User Comments:
“We normally have hundreds of trick or treaters, but this year, none.
We have an unwritten rule on our street that if they have a pumpkin outside, they’re ok for a knock, and if not, they leave it alone. British, though, we’re not quite as fierce about Halloween. Have to say it, though, I do love hearing about someone getting their comeuppance!” daftsquirrel
Reply:
“This is really atypical. Have lived in neighborhoods and handed out candy. No one does this.
Maybe the woman is mentally ill. Could be a bad neighborhood. In our area in the Midwest, the kids know they can trick or treat if the porch light is on. If the light is off, then the people aren’t participating. Also, maybe a little kid might make a mistake and do the doorbell, but most kids aren’t going to waste their time at a dark house.
They all sort of follow each other and tell each other while passing which house has what candy. It’s great fun.” BlackSeranna
2. Think You Can Be Unfaithful And Not Get Caught? Oh, Just Wait What's Coming For You
“Gonna preface this by stating that this happened 3 years ago.
Let’s start with the frame of this story. I (27M) grew up like most guys under the assumption that the one is out there. That if you play your cards right, your soulmate will magically appear and you’ll ride off in the sunset. When I was 19 I met a woman. Let’s call her Bri.
I met Bri through mutual friends while I was in the army. Bri was cute, quirky, seemed like an overall good girl. Her friend, let’s call her Sam, thought it would be a great idea to get us together as a couple. Not sure what her reasons were but I was into her and she was into me. Bri was up for a few days visiting Sam and I had just gotten back from leave in my home state so the meetup was inevitable.
We all had lunch. Myself, Bri, Sam, and Sam’s partner let’s call him Jim. This meetup was nothing spectacular but after Bri had flown home she messaged me on social media, and we hit it off.
After roughly 3 weeks of talking to Bri, she hit me with a very strange question. “If I was pregnant, what would you do?” Now before I get to my answer, let’s do the math here.
She was in her party years and slept around frequently. (I found that out way later in the relationship.) She had a partner a month before meeting me. I was adopted so accepting a kid as my own seemed like a no brainer. My answer was what seemed like the “right thing.” “I will love that child as if it were my own.”
Well, turns out, she was showing a lot of signs of pregnancy.
A week later, she took the test and was positive. I stood by my word. I’ll take care of this kid. There was a 3 month gap between this revelation and when she decided to fly out to me. During this gap, she was very flaky trying to see if she could get who she thought was the dad to commit and help her take care of the kid.
He never budged. She chose me instead. Yes, I understand now why staying with her was a bad idea. I was dumb, in love, and I believed she was the one and that she’d come around eventually. I married her so that the army would cover the birth and the rest should have been history. But we all know it wasn’t.
Year two.
Two years in I noticed something a bit strange. Some guy, we’ll call him Ron, was liking every post she put out and commenting on every photo that had the daughter in it. Hmmmm, this seems odd. At this point in our marriage, I had gotten out of the military and was working a job in security. One night while working, my lizard brain connected the dots and the gut feeling followed. Now I’m not one to act on just suspicion, I need proof.
Given that I was working a nightclub that night I would get off at 4 in the morning. She’ll be asleep. She leaves her laptop on the living room couch downstairs every night before bed. The plan is coming together. I get home, head to the couch…the laptop is there. I open it and take two guesses at the password. It’s the birth year of our daughter.
I go to her social media. I look in messages. There it is. 6 months of conversation with a guy named Ron. Some of the conversation is flirty. Some is banter about how useless and less of a man I am. The worst part though was the revelation that this guy is who she feels is the biological father and she is trying to get him involved. I scroll and scroll until I can’t stomach it anymore.
I grab the laptop, take it upstairs, and set it on her with the screen shining in her face. As she slowly wakes up I say, “We’re talking about this in the morning” and walked back downstairs. She normally wakes up at 7 but didn’t come down until 9. Probably hoping I would be asleep on the couch. She begins by saying it was only friendly talk and not technically being unfaithful.
I called bullcrap and told her that if I see this again, I’m gone.
Now I said “if,” but I knew better. It would be “when.” This is when I set my plan in motion. I dropped out of college to get a job in my field and made sure anything that was opened up under credit was under her name. I began stating that back where I’m from has a better economy and that we’d be better off there.
It took two years of convincing but it worked. Nothing was under my name and we were set to go to my hometown in 6 months. We got there in May and I sent her home to visit the next month. I knew what she would do and who she would do it with. There was a guy we met through Sam the day before we left and I knew immediately that she was interested in him.
3 weeks after going to visit she started acting strange again. Prioritizing other things over me, putting things off, and becoming distant. Now I spent two years setting the dominoes up, I just let her knock them over. I made sure I was jobless, had nothing to my name, and was home where I could fall back on family. I pressured her into admitting that she was unfaithful, and the dominoes tumbled. I cut all funds that were being sent to the account, drained the account to file for divorce.
I had nothing so she couldn’t take half. I had no job so what lifestyle did we have that would require giving her alimony? Everything was in her name so even though I had financial responsibility over some of those bills the divorce lasted long enough to destroy her credit. I gave her everything and sacrificed much to raise her child but in the end, she lost the most.
I am now extremely successful and valued in my career. I’m not interested in marriage but I have no shortage of women in my life. Life is good. I still have contact with the daughter and Bri often flirts with me trying to get me back. I’m the only dad the kid has known and have no intentions of becoming an ex-dad. Even though getting back with her is emotionally tempting , I know better and I have better options.”
Another User Comments:
“I’ve always felt there was a correlation between being in the military and finding “the one” at 19 and getting married at 20.” Flex36
1. Break My Heart In The Past? I'll Destroy Your Chances In The Present
“So let me start off by saying this was totally unplanned revenge, and the stars just happened to align in a way that gave me a golden opportunity for a bit of payback and a good laugh.
This happened not too long ago.
I am a new, fresh-out-of-college teacher. The district I work at is in a well-off area and the school I was hired at is the flagship trophy of the district. New area with a lot of ca-ching ching. I grew up middle class and worked hard to get where I am. Anyways that’s enough about me. On to the story.
Our school has some open positions at it and for my subject matter there is an open position. Currently it’s just me and one other guy, let’s call him Jack. Jack is helping with the hiring process and is narrowing down the list of applicants for people applying for the same subject we teach. There was a job fair over the weekend and when we returned Jack had made a list of names for all the applicants to take notes on.
During my conference, Jack calls me into his room and asks me to look at the list and see if any names ring a bell. He was hoping maybe I met some of these people at my university and could let him know if anyone would mesh well with us.
Jack hands me the list and walks to the room next door to get something from the printer.
I begin reading the list and nothing is popping up as familiar. I’m getting rather bored rather quickly but then, like a camera flash going off, something makes me immediately hop up. I see the name of my high school senior year sweetheart at the bottom of the page.
This can’t be right. There is no way. She has an uncommon name, but let’s call her Barb.
I walk to the room next door with the list, approach Jack, point at her name, and ask “did you meet this girl at the job fair?”
Jack: “I don’t know. I met a lot of people.”
Me: “2-tone pixie cut hair, shades, asked for your manager?” (Not really what I said but I don’t want to describe her on here)
Jack: “Yeah I think so.”
We walk to Jack’s computer and look at her application/resume. Sure enough, she graduated from the same high school, the same year I did.
No. Freakin’. Way!
I begin bursting into laughter. Jack seems confused at this point, so I explain to him.
Barb is my ex from my senior year of high school. We dated over a year and I had strong feelings for her at the time.
She two-timed me, then dumped me to be with the other guy. She also proceeded to tell all her friends and mine that she was leaving me because I was an idiot who was going nowhere. Ironically she left me for a guy who had been held back a year and was, at the time, failing 2 or 3 classes. I aced every test I took throughout high school and my teachers all gave me extra privileges because I caused no issue.
The day she dumped me, her own friends, who I only knew through her, came up to me, apologized for her behavior, and said she was a mean person.
Apparently, all her friends except for a small handful told her she was wrong and cut ties with her. These people weren’t really my friends so I was surprised by this and it helped me cope a little.
I was heartbroken for a while.
Anyways, Jack is smiling from ear to ear as I tell him all this. Now that he knows why I was laughing so hard he joins in and we feel on top of the world.
Jack: “Well this sounds like drama,” and he crosses off Barb’s name from the list.
We spent the next 10 minutes ranting about the odds of this encounter.”
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