Sometimes it's better to take the high road, but these Redditors chose the other popular route—sweet revenge. From getting back at horrible bosses or tricking terrible roommates, these stories are beyond satisfying.
1. In Need Of Some Training Wheels
My brother had just turned 16, got his license, and got a car from my parents. Then trashed his bicycle—just because he said he didn't need it anymore. I was 13 and my bike was what got me around.
My brother is a jerk (in case you can’t tell) who gets grounded a lot, and grounded from the car too. At that point, he would then just help himself to my bike. After many warnings, I took matters into my own hands. I loosened the handlebars on my bike.
Seeing the handlebars pop off the bike and him eating street was a glorious day in my revenge book.
2. Special Order Up
I used to work in a family-run store with my sister. I'm her half-sister, and I'm a lot darker than her. This guy and his friends kept coming in and throwing prejudiced comments at me. It was a rural area and a place where we sold farm-made cider in the store from local farmers.
The guys were total trashy idiots ad always came in to buy this cider because it was the cheapest stuff we sold.
Now for those of you who don't know, farm-made cider is literally just thrown in any, random, pre-opened container—whatever bottles, whatever. My revenge was brutal. Myself and my sister peed in some bottles and switched them with the normal cider that they came in to buy.
I know they drank my pee and I'm glad.
3. Don’t Forgive, Don’t Forget
I think I can safely confess this now. It has been probably 8 years. I got hired by a law firm to do their IT and to do training. It was a 50/50 split of IT and training. Soon it became all training, and the IT was handled by a few people.
After a while, someone else wanted to do training, so they asked me if I could take someone on to teach them. I did. This was the beginning of the nightmare. It turns out that person really just wanted an easier job. They soon learned that training wasn't EASY.
They wanted to go back to not training. However, I had planned so many different training lessons with this person that I couldn't have that person just leave without finding a replacement. Anyway, the firm was starting to feel the effects of some financial shifts and was starting to let people go.
When this little problem showed up, my whole world changed. The company took it upon themselves to decide to cut training altogether. I no longer had an IT spot and I was no longer needed for training, so they brought me in and fired me because of some trumped-up charge.
They said I had logged in from home and clocked out. Which I had done, but I always did because I worked on training packets from home and had permission to from the IT Director. Anyway, I got a job at a different place and started to work and forgot about the firm for a while.
One day I am working for the new place and they are about to buy a huge piece of land. They need to build a new office downtown. It is going to be a huge, multi-million dollar building and purchase. It is going to be our home office for over 10,000 members.
As it turned out, the firm that I left was going to be the lawyers to handle the sale, looking to make the firm a nice hefty fee on the sale AND purchase. Enter: my revenge. I convinced our president that the firm was not secure.
To prove it, I hacked into their server using some inside information I had from when I worked there and showed my President how EASY it was to access personal information. He dropped them that morning and went to another firm.
What is even better is he talked to other places and convinced them not to use them, too. I don't feel great about that because it ended up costing a few people in IT their jobs once word of WHY people weren't using them got out.
But still, one of the people to be fired was the director who lied and said he never gave me permission to work from home.
4. A Mechanical Solution
This kid I had known for years had constantly tormented my little brother and as a "joke", threatened us on the bus, made fun of us, mocked our parents, and because he was my classmate, he mocked me and made inappropriate comments towards me in class. In fifth grade, he was sitting next to me and picking on me quite a bit more than usual. I told him to leave me alone.
He didn't. So that’s when I got my revenge. I picked up my pencil and jabbed him in the arm as hard as I could. Now, I wasn't very strong, and it was a tiny mechanical pencil through his hoodie, so I didn't do any massive damage. But it was enough to bruise and leave a mark. It hurt badly, from what I could tell. He asked me what the heck I was doing, and I told him I'd do it again.
He only picked on me very, very occasionally from then on, and he only did it when he wasn't in close distance. I guess the lack of hesitation on my part spooked him—he was all tough until I took a step towards him from then on.
5. Waste My Time, I’ll Waste Yours
My jerk manager put me exclusively on night shift when he knew I had a very pregnant wife at home. He then gave me a poor review despite an inch-thick stack of printed e-mails from customers saying I was awesome.
Fast forward 10 years and my wife (who works in HR) hears a familiar voice next door in a job interview. After the interview, my wife pokes her head in and asks: "Was that [my manager’s name]?"...It was indeed my old manager.
"Let's have a chat about him," she says to the interviewer.
He didn't get the job. When she told me, I was happy for a month...mainly because he'd never know it was my wife that completely screwed him over.
6. Hot And Heavy
I have been working in kitchens for several years now and only once have I ever manipulated a customer’s food. I'm not proud of it, but the poor chap got what was coming to him. I used to work at a pretty well-known sports bar chain with a menu mostly consisting of a variety of wing sauces and other fryer-friendly items.
Being situated in an upper-middle class neighborhood, we would always get the little 15-year-olds with Ed Hardy shirts and mommy's money acting like little children in our fine establishment. Being a line cook, I never really had interactions with these little brats, but one day I’d just had enough.
It started with a group of four 15-year-olds strutting through the front door and immediately berating one of the waitresses I liked, Sarah. She promptly got their drinks but apparently it wasn't fast enough. They called her slow and stupid and asked how she ever got a job waitressing.
Sarah came back to the kitchen almost in tears. I comforted her and sent her out to take the table's food order. That's when the leader of the bunch made a very grave mistake. Just like a few other wing-centric restaurants, we had a "challenge". Eat 12 of our hottest wings in six minutes and you got a T-shirt and your photo on a hall of fame.
This jerk decided to show off to his friends and attempt this seemingly easy challenge. Sarah came back to the kitchen with a grin and gave us a simple order: "Make him suffer". We proceeded to throw every possible molten thing we could onto these wings.
The hot sauce, vinegar, jalapeno juice, jalapeno seeds, habanero seeds, and a few shots of Tabasco would assault his palate like a freight train. But that wasn’t all. Being somewhat of a showman, I found a doctor’s mask and put it on. With the mask on, I proceeded to take a sauce bottle, and in full view of Mr Macho, inject every flat wing with sauce until it blew up like a balloon.
Satisfied with my work, I sent out the wings. As told by Sarah, he made it through one wing. If he had chosen a drumstick, he mostly likely could have had the satisfaction of two wings. But egged on by his friends, he chose a hot sauce injected flat.
When the stopwatch started, he took the biggest bite he could. The wing exploded like a poultry Pompeii, leaving behind the shallow husk of a man. He quit after that one and was quiet the whole night as his "friends" called him out for being a wimp.
Sarah got a nice 25% tip off the table, and I got a small bit of satisfaction in a business that can seem so dark. Of course, no ill will to Wild Wings at all. I cooked there for three-ish years and have many fond memories of the place. It was a small stepping stone in this culinary career I've chosen.
7. A Chain Reaction
This was the last of a series of revenge pranks. The first prank I tried to do, I did because every day this guy came into my office (I do a lot of work for him) he would see a picture of my mom on my desktop (I was homesick) and he always commented on how hot my mom was.
So I decided to ask my mom to call him at work and call him a bad influence and whatnot, which she thought was funny. This backfired on me so badly. It turned out they ended up chatting for an hour after he realized it was a joke and he told everyone in the office my mom was trying to pick him up.
Then every single day for two years he asked me "How my mom was doing and when she was gonna call next". He even copied down her number and called her to wish her a happy new year both years just to get at me.
At my five-year pinning at my work (weird eh?) he told the story to a room full of "higher-ups" and of course, I turned red. This is when I decided how to get him back. I had recently become single and he was giving me advice all the time about how I needed to go out and play the field.
I ended up finding out his daughter's name and looked her up on Facebook. I asked if she would help me prank her dad and she agreed so we went out for dinner and I took a picture of us drinking out of the same drink with two straws.
I got it developed and put it in a heart-shaped frame on my desk. Then I got my boss to let it slip to him that I have a new beau and that I have a picture of her on my desk already. He came straight in and stood in silence for a bit and muttered "but that's my daughter".
Since I did that prank, he has stopped asking me how my mom is doing. Also last Christmas, I got a mug made with that picture on it with "World's Greatest Dad" written on it.
8. Here’s Your Fight!
For some reason, this kid had it in his head that he could beat me up. I’ve no idea why, or where his assumption came from but he wanted a fight with me to prove he could. I couldn’t care less if he could or couldn’t. It simply didn’t interest me. For a week or more, he would goad me on the school bus with things like “who do you think would win in a fight”?
I was having none of it, I wasn’t interested in fighting anyone and I didn’t care what he or anyone else thought on the matter. He squared up to me several times off the bus trying to get me to fight with him and I just kept telling him to leave me alone and kept walking away.
After several days of this and him getting nowhere, as I was walking away chatting with my friend, he ran up behind me and hit me on the back of my head. That was when I snapped.
I very calmly asked my friend to hold my bag for me. I walked up to the kid, grabbed hold of him, threw him to the ground, boxed him in the eye, then stood up and walked away. I said nothing. Walked back to my friend, collected my bag, and continued walking. I didn’t see this kid for a few days, and unsurprisingly, he left me alone after that.
9. One For You, One For Me
I worked in IT at this company. The IT department has its own budget, and one particular line item is for chairs. My chair had just broken, so I looked around for one that wouldn't ruin my back like the last one did.
It was a $400 chair and the budget was already allotted for it. I told the finance guy who took care of ordering from vendors the chair I wanted and sent him a link. He said he would order it right away. Two weeks pass and my new chair comes. When I saw it, I also saw red. It's the exact same model as my last horrible chair.
Needless to say, I was unhappy. A couple of months go by and the finance guy wants his computer upgraded. Not only does he want an upgrade, but he wants a laptop as well so he can take it home. I then denied his upgrade for two years, and when he did finally get a "new" computer, it was a hand-me-down from another department.
10. Ending It Myself
We were playing tackle the carrier in the schoolyard. I was a fourth grader and I tackled a sixth grader, who got mad and started to kick me. I let it happen a few times, and a teacher was literally looking right at me. After about the fourth time, I grabbed his leg and lifted it.
He fell backward, then I punched him in the face twice. He only got a bloody nose and shattered pride. We each got suspended for three days. My mom was furious at the school after they told the story to her. Then when she watched the footage, she said something that put the principal in his place.
She asked me in front of him if there was a new video game I wanted. The principal was mad but my mom said "I never teach my boys to start anything. But when the teacher refused to end it, he did by defending himself". It was the best three-day weekend ever.
11. He Had His Number
I was driving to drop someone off when my internal detector went off. I saw an officer sitting in a parking lot. I dropped off my friend and headed back. As I was driving, I noticed some jerk tailgating me. The speed limit was 40, and I was doing 45. He was so close to me that I couldn't even see his headlights. He thought he was smart, but he had no idea what I had in mind.
We came up to a traffic circle and he tried to pass me on the right. I sped up, but he kept trying. We hit about 80-90 with him on the shoulder. At some point, we came up to the crest of a hill and I knew the officer was right on the other side. I hit the brakes and he flew up over the hill...he had to be doing at least 90 in a 40. I even stopped to let the officer out of the parking lot. MOST. SATISFYING. THING. EVER.
12. The Smell Of Trash
A former man-child neighbor had issues understanding that it wasn't okay to throw his garbage in my yard or let his friends dump trash at my house. When the authorities didn't do anything about numerous calls, I started bagging the garbage and throwing it on his porch. What he did next was seriously unhinged.
He escalated to putting rat poison in hot dogs and throwing them to my German Shepherd mix. I saw her convulsing, and found three packages worth of hot dogs studded with pellets right along the fence. She pulled through, no worse for wear, but the authorities said I couldn't prove who did it.
The next time he threw garbage in my yard, which usually contained the guts and waste from his hunting and fishing, I gathered fish guts into a bag and waited until he left. I put the guts in the rafters of his porch, under the hedges in his yard, and finally inside his air conditioner unit.
About three days later, he had all the doors and windows open. The following week he was having the carpet replaced throughout the house. Eventually, the guts rotted away and the smell faded, but I think he knew I did it because I never found trash in my yard again.
Do not mess with my dogs.
13. Acing The Serve
My first "real" boyfriend kissed another girl and dumped me for her when I was a freshman in high school. She had actively pursued him although she knew he had a girlfriend, so I blamed her rather than him. (I know, I know).
Fast forward four years: I was a volleyball player throughout college. In the off-season, I played in a city women's league and a co-ed league as an outside hitter. My team played a new team–when I walked in, I nearly gasped. Well, well, well, there was her familiar face. She didn't recognize me, but I immediately recognized her.
My team's setter kept giving me amazing sets and I kept slamming the ball over the net, just waiting for my shot. Finally, she was in the back row and my setter set me up. I hit the ball and the boyfriend stealer stepped into the hit. It bounced off her foot and went straight up into her face... and broke her nose.
14. Maid For Revenge
I was roommates with a guy who had his dad living with us. His dad treated me like his personal maid, making me do his washing, ironing, and cooking for him. Every time I refused, he would threaten to have me kicked out. Well, I wasn't having any of that, and I knew I had to put him in his place. So I used his toothbrush as a toilet brush and I scrubbed his clean shirts under my armpits after a long day of sweating.
I also added his bedroom floor crumbs to his bowl of dinner. When I left, I took his favorite AC/DC CD (he played almost every day on max volume) and scratched it up.
15. A Boy Only A Mother Could Love
When I was in 7th grade, there was a boy who started spreading rumors that he and I hooked up. My revenge may have been a bit too cruel, but I mean, that was a big deal in middle school:
I told his mother.
I even teared up a little bit for effect when I told her the story. She went home, tore him a new one, and I got a phone call apology. Screw you, Evan.
16. What’s Yours Is Mine
I was skiing a while back at a local mountain. I didn't have nice skis, but they got it done. At the end of the day, I set my skis in the last slot on the very full rack and turn to go inside. I hear a crash and I turn around.
Some idiot had knocked my skis out of the rack and was placing his own very nice expensive skis in the rack. I turn and confront him:
"Hey, those are my skis that you just knocked over, what's the deal?"
"Sorry man I just got these skis, they need to be set in the rack, can't have them getting ruined ya know? Plus your skis are really bad, so I'm sure you won't mind putting them on the ground”.
Stunned, All I could do was agree with him.
"Yeah you're right man, My skis are pretty rough aren't they? I'll just store my skis over here on the floor”.
"Thanks bro, I appreciate it”.
I was fuming. I saw the guy head for the lodge. My next move made perfect sense to me. Me and this gentleman had just agreed that it was time to upgrade my skis, so I did just that. I gathered my things, minus my own skis, and I scooped his skis off the rack, then hopped on the bus back to school.
He was right, they really are nice skis.
17. Don’t Bite The Hand That Helps You
When I was in middle school and high school, there was this guy in my friendship group who always teased me about being overweight, like maliciously. It didn't stop there. As we grew up, he started having gatherings purposefully not to invite me.
He also tried to take my stuff when I'd have him around with my friends, not to mention threatening to beat me up when we were alone together. The guy was a horrible person, but at the time I felt I had to stay civil and be “friends” with him because I was afraid of losing friends I actually cared about.
Anyway, skip forward to when we are 16. By then we've all realized how much of a monster this guy was being and decided not to hang with him anymore. I'd also lost a LOT of weight so he couldn't taunt me about that anymore.
He found other people, but my revenge wasn’t typical. See, he also developed epilepsy. We weren't sure if it was genuine or not because at the time there were a lot of people faking illnesses by “fainting” and having “fits,” so we thought he was jumping on board this trend. Also, he was not a good person.
One day after school he pops up on messenger to me typing things like “hlfp meegy”. Initially, I thought he was just fishing for attention, but after about five minutes I figured something serious was happening.
So I ran to his house (it was about a 10-minute walk from mine), looked through the window, and saw he was home alone and on the floor sort of twitching. I eventually got in through his back door, which was unlocked.
I put a pillow down to rest his head and moved what furniture I could out of the way so he wouldn't hurt himself. I called emergency services and then his parents, who were out shopping at the time, rushed home.
Once he came to, his parents explained what had happened and he looked at me. That look man, it was like he knew what he did to me through school and to see what I did for him brought him right to his senses. That was pure guilt.
I left without speaking to him but that look was good enough for me, that he truly felt bad for what he did. It's not your conventional revenge story I guess but the fact I made him feel so bad and regret those years, it was worth it.
18. You Get What You Give
An older lady at one of my tables had cold pasta. She wanted me to feel it. I said I believed her, but she took my wrist and rammed my hand into the food. I was angry. I never, ever spit in anyone's food at my restaurant. However....
The lady continued to be a jerk long after her food was fixed and the manager told her it was on the house, along with a free dessert. Check time came and the lady whips out a gift card to pay for everyone's food. She was with three of her friends, it was something like a $55 bill.
I take it, pretend like I'm off to cash her out, but I switch her $50 gift card with an identical card that was never activated. I tell her there isn't any money on her card. The manager has to double-check. He confirms the card was never activated. Now, she is angry.
To be fair, I did give her back the original card. I said she could ask the person who got it for her about it. Maybe they had a receipt. The point is, people treat me like garbage at work enough as it is, but touching me?
Demeaning me by taking my wrist and putting it into cold pasta? I wanted to make her look bad in front of her friends, and I think I succeeded.
19. Don’t Bite The Hand That Feeds You
A few years back, my 15-year-old cousin was staying over at my place, which I shared with my boyfriend at the time. Her parents were on vacation in Cuba for a few weeks. While she was with us, we had to make ALL of her food. She couldn't cook and waited for me or my boyfriend to come home, otherwise, she would only eat chips or popcorn. She wouldn't even make a sandwich.
One day, she updated her Facebook status to a whiny complaint about how bored she was (she had free rein to go out) and how weird I was. I guess she forgot I had her as a friend on Facebook. It really ticked me off since I made all of her meals and tried my best to keep her company.
That night, when I was making her a turkey sandwich, I took my sweet revenge. I used the end slices of the bread loaf to build the sandwich and the bitter white part of a romaine lettuce leaf. I also put too much mayo on it. She ate that sandwich. And she had a look of annoyance on her face. But there was nothing she could do.
20. Eau De Toilet
Back in college, I lived in the fraternity house and shared a bathroom with several other guys. I noticed my bottle of cologne went dry much faster than it normally did, and I started to take my toiletries back to my room since then.
Before I did though, I peed in the empty bottle. Throughout the semester, I'd take note of the fill line and how it got lower and lower. I finally told my suitemates they'd been spraying themselves with my pee after I moved out.
21. The Hair Harrier
When I was about seven years old, there was a girl on the bus who would pull my hair and pick on me to and from school. I would come home crying. My parents asked the driver to move our assigned seating but they refused. My dad asked me how I could fix the problem. I responded: "How can I do anything if I'm not allowed to hit"?
Dad said: “You're not allowed to hit, but you're allowed to not get hit”. He explained what I should do and I did it. When the girl sat next to me, I should put my back against the wall, my feet on her thigh, and slide her off the seat. She fell, cried, I got in trouble and the assigned seating was moved. Problem solved.
22. The Past Is Present
This lady at my last job was a real witch. Not just to me, but to everyone. She constantly interjected her opinions into conversations that she was not a part of. Would constantly try and throw people under the bus.
Try to get you to tell her personal information about yourself, then turn right around and spread gossip to others about you. Straight-faced during all this and she knew people did not like her....she just simply did not care.
People would try and pretend that they were friends with her just so she would not torment them or back-stab them. But the part that ticked me right off was that she was a horrible driver, and we took the same route home every day.
She would tailgate me, then when she got bored with that, she would cut me off. I am talking like swerve in front of me with maybe inches to spare before hitting me. On a street route with a speed limit of 55mph, she would be going around 80 mph.
Almost every day…and she would even bring it up at work the next day. Something like "So, you need to speed up and stop causing a traffic jam". In comes my revenge. I got sick of her antics and one day decided to look up her driving records to see if she had gotten tickets before.
This stuff is of public record where I live. What I found was so much more than I could hope for. She had been detained before, for walking the streets if you see what I mean. At first, I was going to go viral with the information and let all my co-workers know, but that felt too wrong.
So eventually I printed out the court docket and laid it on her desk...only where she would see it. She found it. From my desk, I could see her face turn from shock to horror as she glanced around the office. I felt good.
23. Cruising For A Bruising
I am a car enthusiast and work on my Jeep quite often. One jerk in my high school continually messed with my car, so one day I took four jack stands and a floor jack to school. During a study hall, I put his car on blocks and hid the wheels and tires all over campus.
The best part was I never got in any trouble.
24. Locker Room Row
in high school freshman year, I had PE. I was the tall skinny kid, so of course I was targeted regularly. The way the lockers were situated was a top row of lockers and a bottom row of lockers in the locker room. My locker was on the bottom row. A kid near my locker would constantly kick my locker closed. It was a combo locker, so you’d have to input the combo again if it closed all the way to reopen it. It was very annoying.
After weeks of it, and telling him to knock it off multiple times, I had had enough. I went into the class that day with the mindset that if he does it again then I’ll hit him. I was in for a surprise. We dressed for PE and surprisingly nothing. I was tense the whole time because I was expecting something to happen.
It wasn’t until after class when we were changing back into regular clothes that he did it again. I opened my locker again, grabbed my backpack, and swung it as hard as I could. I hit him on the side of the head with about three classes worth of textbooks in my backpack. He landed on the floor and put his hands up in front of his face. I remember being so heated in the moment that I almost started crying. The whole class started yelling “fight”! Which of course caused the teacher to show up. We both ended up in the office.
We both were suspended for three days. My dad asked me why I did it, so I explained to him the whole situation and he didn’t punish me. He said as long as I wasn’t the instigator, I was fine. Never had any problems with him once I came back. They did move us apart in the locker room though.
25. Should Have Just Been Nice
I used to work in a Safeway Deli. Horrid job. Anyways, one day, a guy that looks like he is trying his best to be a Mexican tough guy, but failing horribly, comes in. I think nothing of it. This is Portland, I see stranger things every day.
A buddy of mine, Dario, is helping this guy. Now, Dario used to be majorly depressed. He is an immigrant from eastern Europe, and has had a hard life. As a result, he used to be in some dark places, so he has scars up and down his arms.
Well, it is hot in the deli, so his sleeves are rolled up and the scars are visible. This wannabe tough guy, completely unprovoked, starts ridiculing Dario about the scars, calling him insane, loco, etc. Now, Dario used to be a Thai boxer, and has a bit of a temper, so I tell him to go into the back, cook some food, and I'll handle this.
The dude is a complete jerk. Like 11/10 on my rage scale. So, he orders 1 1/2 lbs of Mac n' Cheese. I knew just what to do. I "trip" and spill it all over the floor. It was the last of the Mac n’ Cheese, and he was out of luck that day.
So now this guy is screaming at me, looking like he is going to jump over the counter at me. I call my manager. Manager comes over, tells the guy to leave. Guy won't leave. My manager calls the authorities, and the guy gets dragged out of the building. That’s when it got even better. Turns out, he had stuffed a bottle of $75 red in his jacket.
Busted. Also, he “attacked” an officer by thrashing around and pretty much head-butting her. It was nice to see him get slammed into the wall. A few weeks later, I got subpoenaed to be a witness against him in court, as my manager filed charges. The guy got put away for a while. True story.
26. Do Unto Other As You Would Have Them Do Unto You
This was the most satisfying thing I have ever done. When I was in the seventh grade, I sat behind a jerk who hated me and enjoyed being annoying. Every single day, he would lean back in his chair and hit the front of my desk, over and over again. If I was trying to write something, he would do it even harder. One day, I decided enough was enough—and in the middle of a lesson, he started again.
I waited, and right as he was leaning his chair back fast, trying to knock my desk hard, I pulled it back. Without my desk behind him, his chair tipped right over and he hit the ground hard. I can still clearly remember him whispering "You witch” beneath the laughter of the whole class and the teacher yelling at him to get up. The look on his face was a mixture of shock, embarrassment, and pure rage as he looked up at me from the floor. He never messed with me again.
27. More Than A Little Inconvenience
My old neighbor is a horribly, crusty man who will fly off the handle at any chance he can get. One night he lost it because I parked in front of his house for an hour. We exchanged choice words. A couple of times he threatened to kill me. But I knew exactly how to get at him.
Knowing full well that he's a small business owner, I went home and signed his personal and business email up for thousands of mailing lists. The process was fairly slow at first, until I found the FDA mailing list site that will let you sign up to 2000+ mailing lists.
I added his business address to computer security lists, retail lists, you name it. I was furious when I started the whole process but after two hours of this, I had worked myself into a calm, trance-like state.
Does the punishment fit the bill? I don't know, but if you are going to be a curmudgeon, you deserve to have unfavorable things happen to you.
28. A Taste Of Their Own Medicine
In high school, I had an issue with someone taking my gum out of my backpack. I ended up painting the top piece in each row with the nail polish used to stop nail biting. Hilarious.
29. Big Brother Is Always Watching
One of the kids in my brother's special ed area informed me that some kids had been picking on some of the more severely disabled kids. That part of the school had a huge range of kids and disabilities—this one was neurotypical but had some serious learning problems.
So, I just went there and followed my brother. I watched as some little sophomore pushed him down and called him names and spat on him. So I sucker-punched the guy and kicked his ribs in. It worked well.
He wore the black eye for a good two weeks and it was still visible after that. His ribs had to be wrapped for a while too I believe. I got suspended for a week. The principal asked me to apologize, and it offended my dad and I both.
It was a school in a really nice neighborhood and fights were extremely uncommon, so a lot of people wanted me expelled, but the principal has a disabled kid and he was kind of on my side. Meanwhile, my dad bought me a new video game and gave me $100 to enjoy my week off school.
I knew that this was my duty and he was happy that I did it.
30. It’s All Breaking Down
A bad repair shop in Utah messed up our car, which left us stranded in a nearby National Park. We called and demanded they tow the vehicle in, and while they said they'd come to get us, they never did. When we talked with park rangers, they made a chilling revelation. They were quite familiar with the shop. It was the biggest in town and had a terrible reputation.
We were on our honeymoon and had more time on our hands than I imagine most travelers do. We went to the shop, demanded a full refund, and when they refused, we sat out front on the curb in our camp chairs for two days with homemade protest signs. I was overwhelmed by the support we got from locals, who honked and waved, stopped and chatted with us, and shared their own stories of horror.
The owner called the authorities on us, but the joke was on him! We'd already notified them that we’d be protesting, and were well within our rights in doing so. In the end, the shop owner refunded all our money and left visibly distressed when we told him that even with the refund, we weren't sure we were ready to leave town. Eventually, we did, but not before filing complaints with the Better Business Bureau and every review site we could find. They'd already been booted from the Chamber of Commerce.
We ended up becoming friends with an awesome local mechanic and having a great story to tell. Justice was served! And without a tinge of guilt.
31. My Breaking Point
In high school I was harassed for a few years, mainly by calling names, making “jokes” and messing with my stuff. I used to never do anything back. Then at some point, I got angry, turned around, and punched him in the face, giving him a bloody nose. That was also the last day it happened. In hindsight, I think I mostly got picked on by him because I never did anything back and he did not want to risk any pushback.
32. Revenge Of The Nerd
Years back I was a manager of a tech support department for an ISP. The company had two call centers plus a data center. I had to manage all personnel, so we used AIM (I know, I'm old) to communicate between buildings.
This new CEO comes in and decides he needs to eliminate all chat clients because "people can use them for non-work purposes”. In case you didn’t already know, he had no IT background whatsoever. When I heard his “solution,” I nearly burst out laughing. His idea? Just use the phone!
Never mind that when I'm being messaged by a subordinate, they are already ON the phone with the client. Can we just create work-only handles? No. He says he'll have our developers build an internal chat client "at some point". This never happens.
So, since I'm also admin on the mail server, I start reading this fool’s email. And wouldn't you know, he has been spending the vast majority of his time emailing back and forth with his girlfriend in Colorado.
Even sending, er, “pictures,” back and forth, quite a few taken in his office. I printed the whole load of them out (it took about a ream of paper) and handed them to the company owner. Dude was fired the next day.
The moral of the story is, if you're going to mess with the admins, you better make sure you’ve got a clean bill of health.
33. Delayed Revenge
This is my father’s story. We owned a restaurant years ago in a mall next to a bar. Parking was assigned by business, but people would constantly park in our spots. One day, a man in a newer Corvette convertible parked right in front of our store and walked toward the bar.
Dad stopped him and asked him to move his car, as there were plenty of other spaces available. He laughed, and said "Try and tow me”. My dad shrugged, waited for about 20 minutes, and then poked his two front tires with sharpened wire, right in the sidewall. The tires didn't deflate right away because the hole was small. I'm sure they did over the next day or two though.
34. Calling Names
I saw a guy my age being mean to a younger kid, so I got the entire bus to point at him at say "meanie, meanie" over and over. I ended up stopping him, and he ended up crying. There was just one problem. My mom and his mom were good friends, so my mom took me over to his house and made me apologize to him, so it wouldn't be awkward between her and his mom...
35. That’s A Stretch
I had the evilest teacher in 2nd grade. She hated me more than anything. So one day I raised my hand and for about 30 minutes she didn't call on me, but I was persistent. My hand got so tired but reluctantly she called on me. The joke was on her. I already knew what I was going say: "I was stretching"
She looked at me for two seconds, then started to shake in anger. You could truly see veins on her temple. She put me on read that day, but I know it ruined her day.
36. Standing Up
My brother was a massive monster to me growing up. We moved to a new town and I made friends while he fell into addiction. He also tried to keep doing the awful older brother thing. Finally, one night at dinner when he was laughing at me because of something nerdy I said, I just replied "I don't care what you think of me. I have friends”.
The snide look on his face just dropped. I know it sounds like a small thing, but it was a turning point in our relationship, and was extremely satisfying.
37. Lay Back And Watch It Happen
My ex-wife left me for another guy. This guy was average looking but made good money. Six years later, she has five kids, got fat, is broke and calls me complaining about how much she can't stand him or her new life.
The best thing about this "revenge"...I didn't have to do a thing.
38. Round And Around
I was in 4th grade and had been harassed by a kid named Rocky, who was in 6th grade. Anyway, he would trip me, knock books out of my hands, punch me, etc. One day out on the playground, he pushed me into the merry-go-round while it was spinning, I was rolled around inside it while people were trying to stop it. The whole time he's laughing at me.
I get pulled out and I'm scraped up pretty good, so I get taken to the office to get patched up. The teachers ask what happened, I told them I fell. I went back outside and saw him standing there with his buddies. I ran as fast as I could toward him and punched him as hard as I could in the face, broke his nose, and just stood there looking at him ready to fight. His buddies told him to leave me alone and I never got picked on again at school.
39. Oh, Baby
In 2004, I worked at a Blockbuster for the summer. I was working late one Friday night and the rush had essentially calmed down. A woman in her late 20s entered the store, and she was at least eight months pregnant.
She approached me, wondering if I could suggest a horror movie to her, as she was "in the mood to be scared”. I can’t believe what I did. Rosemary's Baby. God forgive me, I successfully recommended and rented Rosemary's Baby to a pregnant woman.
40. Sticking Up
This one jerk kept trying to trip me. I finally called him out and he hit me—which set me off. I body-slammed him and jumped on him. I beat the heck out of him and he had to be carried to the nurse. I got called to the office with my parents and they wanted to suspend me, but every other student that witnessed it stuck up for me and said it was self-defense. I got off with in-school suspension. The dude avoided me for the rest of our time in school.
41. I’ll Have My Day In Court
When I used to be a cheerleader, we were organizing a trip to Florida (from the UK) to do some training and to have an awesome holiday. I took charge of organizing the flights and asked everyone if they were OK paying me back if I bought all the flights together. As you might guess, this turned into a horrific idea. One girl changed her mind about going because she was starting a new job, and just before we were due to go I got a handwritten note in the post from her mother (we were in our twenties).
It said that she never agreed to me booking a flight on her behalf and that she wasn't liable to pay me because she had decided not to go. I was in a bit of a panic because I didn't have her home address, and she just ignored all my calls and emails. I wanted to take her to court, but to do that, I had to have her address in order to serve the papers. Little did she know I wouldn't stop until I got it.
After spending ages trying to ask around if people knew her address, and even trying to get her friends to give it to me without success, I stayed up all night figuring out a way to see where she lived. It literally took me all night, but I managed to hack into her Hotmail account and then her PayPal account, which lead me to her home address.
I could have just taken the money from her account, but I did want to do this as by-the-book as possible. She turned up in court accompanied by her mother, and they tried to use Facebook photos to prove that I had used her ticket to take someone else in her place. I came armed with a printout of the airline terms, which clearly stated that the tickets were non-transferable.
The judgment was swift. The victory was mine.
42. Don’t Treat On Me
Long story short, a kid I was friends with hit me in the junk three times in one night. He then called me a "wee baby" and got in my face. He tried to make me flinch by half-swinging at me. I didn't flinch—I got him back big time. Instead, I headbutted him with everything I had. Crushed his nose, blood pouring out of his face. I had a tiny cut in the center of my forehead, with one line of blood running down my face. I looked psychotic but tough as heck.
43. I’ve Got Your Back, Bro
I used to live with a buddy who was dating this girl none of our guy friends got along with. She was insecure, super prissy, and clingy all at the same time. The final straw was when she started “inviting” herself to guys’ night and then complaining that all we did was drink and play video games.
So fast forward to them getting engaged. She practically lived at the house now and it was high time I got a different abode. So, as my parting shot, I gifted my buddy four years of a bunch girlie mags. I think it cost me a grand total of $54, I got some deal.
Worth every penny. My buddy gets to see beautiful women and she gets volcanically mad every time they arrive. And since the bill comes to me, all I have to do is renew it. Sweet, sweet justice.
44. Monster-In-Laws Get Monster Punishments
My mother-in-law is the worst person in the world. When my wife was pregnant, all three of us had to share a house; her mom because she's worthless and got kicked out of her last place, and my wife and I because we were trying to save some money.
The things this old woman did, oh my God. She tried splitting my wife and I up on numerous occasions. She would tell everyone that I was mistreating the both of them. She would stomp around late at night on the main floor to wake us up; we lived in the basement. Then it got much worse.
Once our son was born, she seemed to reach her final form/ Often, when we would have dinner, we would leave the plates in the sink for an hour or two and do them when our boy went to bed. She would stack our dirty dishes and take them downstairs and leave them in front of the door.
Play her horrible Ukrainian polka music late at night. Loudly. Constantly make fun of us, and me in particular, about how we were raising our son. She would usually get home before me, so she would hide my mail.
She’d also send threatening letters to my parents. I didn't find out about this until a couple months ago. I found a handwritten note from her to my wife recently and it's the same as the letters. We moved out of there before my boy turned one, so I doubt he remembers this, but my wife told me that she caught her mom telling him that his dad is an idiot.
Of all the things she's done, that was the worst, and I can't forgive her for it. Being new parents and all, the first year of my child's life should have been a wonderful experience. He'll only be a baby once, and we should have been able to enjoy the wonderful world with him.
But with my mother-in-law, we constantly had to worry about what craziness she would do, and she ruined that first year for us. I look back at those times, and I can't really remember witnessing my boy growing. I can just recall her garbage and I hate her for it. However, I had just the plan for payback.
When we moved out, I took a couple days off work to deal with it. At the end of it all, we had left a few small things behind that I could pick up in my car. My mother-in-law had also left a box of things for my wife to take that I was supposed to get.
So early afternoon of the last day, I go over there and notice she's at work. I can go freely throughout the house. I check all the rooms to make sure I had grabbed everything, and then I come to her bathroom.
I see her toothbrush sitting on the counter. I had an idea. I had been working hard all day moving, and was pretty sweaty. So I figured I'd clean myself with her toothbrush. I scrub every inch. Everywhere. It felt amazing.
I leave it in the same spot that I found it and go home. I never told a soul and she never said anything about it. But I know she used it afterward.
45. We Are Never Getting Back Together
My girlfriend and I moved to her hometown with my then two-year-old son, and we were staying with her parents while we saved up to get a place. Well, the week before Christmas she decided she didn’t want to be with me anymore.
She called me at work saying, "Come get your son, I've already packed your stuff”. I arrived there to a heartbreaking sight. I find my son in his PJs on the porch with no coat, standing next to our things while she was inside with her family and new boyfriend.
We took a bus back home and stayed with my parents. As I was unpacking my stuff, I found a customized T-shirt of hers that she mistakenly packed with my stuff. It was a screened T-shirt with a picture of her little sister who had passed at eight years old the previous year, and it was the last Christmas present she had gotten from her.
When I saw it, I took my laptop outside, set it on a stool in front of the burn barrel in the back yard, and proceeded to Skype call my ex. She answered with, "Before you say anything, I am so sorry for wh...HEY HOW DID YOU GET THAT!" as I started to douse lighter fluid on the shirt, and then proceeded to light it and throw it in the burn barrel before her horrified eyes.
46. Not Just A Tattletale
This group of guys kept picking on me for weeks and were always semi-physical; knocking things out of my hands and shoving me into lockers. I tried to get teachers to stop it—their reaction was brutal. They just told me to stop being a "tattletale". I went home crying as I had a bad day on top of all that harassment and my dad asked what was wrong.
I told him and he said, "son I don't believe in aggression being the first resort but I believe it has gotten to your last resort, tell them you'll hit back if they do it again. I won't be upset". So, the next day the same thing happened again and I simply said "do it again and I'll kick your butt". They all just laughed and the biggest one in the group hit me across the head so hard my ear was ringing. They continued to laugh.
So, I turned around and gave him an uppercut right to the jaw. The kid had zero time to react since he thought I was bluffing and I knocked some of his braces loose. Of course, a teacher saw the whole thing and decided to intervene as soon as the kid was bawling on the ground. I got suspended for a month but my dad just told me he was proud of me for sticking up for myself. Didn't have to put up with that for the rest of high school after that.
47. Taking Out The Trash
I was a janitor in a small suburban office building that had, among its tenants, a claims office for a fairly well-known insurance company. The manager of said company was a complete and utter jerk, and most of his employees were jerks as well.
They'd mistreat us janitors, and scream at us if the bathroom (shared by the rest of the building, I might add) had anything remotely wrong with it. One day, I went to take out the industrial-sized garbage can near their office, and it was obscenely heavy.
I opened it to find out why, and found the entire thing filled with boxes of files. The files were old paperwork for thousands of customers, and contained tons of personal information—I’m talking SSNs, addresses, bank information, the works.
On one of the papers I randomly looked at, I even saw information on what jewelry a woman kept in her home. This garbage can was headed for the dumpster in the back of the building, in a parking lot shared with two other businesses, very open and inviting for identity thieves.
So I contacted the main office of the company and informed them that I had just found thousands of confidential documents in my building's trash can, originating from the claims branch. I never saw that manager again—I’m not sure if he was fired or just transferred to Alaska, but whatever it was, he deserved it.
48. Stopping The Grossness
There was a kid named Matt in my school who, in eighth grade, had developed a rating system for the girls based on the size of their chests and kept getting away with saying gross things to them. He had been reported to the guidance counselor and faculty repeatedly, but they kept saying "We can't do anything about it if we don't personally see it happening", which is like—do you think he's stupid enough to do it in front of you?
He also kept calling me Mimi, after The Drew Carey Show character. I was getting sick of it after a few months and fruitlessly talking to the guidance counselor about that, as well. I finally realized that none of the adults were going to do anything about it. One day at lunch, he called me Mimi, and I turned around and told him, "If you call me that again, you're not going to like my reaction. I don't know what I'm going to do, but you're not going to like it".
Which was true, I just figured I'd react in the moment. Thirty minutes later he called me Mimi in the hallway and I turned around and gave him a big, open-palm roundhouse bash across his face. He was completely taken aback. All I had to say was, "I told you that you weren't going to like it". I got suspended for a week. My parents were furious at me.
However, Matt never harassed anyone again. He was totally polite from that day forward. I don't generally advocate for fighting back, but I still feel like it was a proportional response to months and months of gross behavior on his part, especially in the absence of adults who were willing to hold him accountable. I told the administration and my parents as much when I received my suspension.
49. Double Trouble
When I was a kid, probably five years old, I was watching Dumbo with my neighbor. The "elephants on parade part" were scary as all heck to me back then, and the worst happened: I peed my pants. My neighbor told everyone in my Pre-K class and would not stop calling me the "pants peer" for weeks. Finally, one day I slept over at her house, and I executed my petty plan—I took a pair of her pants out of her closet, put them on, and peed in them. I woke her up to show her, and that's the story of how I became the two-time pants-peer.
50. Blood Isn’t Always Thicker Than Water
I have two older brothers. The eldest is a good person. The middle is a monster. He has tormented my family for 20 years and I have taken the brunt of the assault as the only person willing to openly challenge him. He took my mother's wedding rings, my grandmother's car, and my television, just to name a few things. My family decided to try again to welcome him back into their lives, so I followed suit.
It's Christmas 201, the best holiday celebration I could ever imagine. All is well. Then it all goes wrong. My middle brother walks in the door to collect presents two days after celebrations—strike one. This brother then drops a baggie of substances when he walks in the door—that was strike two. My middle brother criticizes my eldest brother's renovations and tells my grandmother she spent money for nothing—strike three.
So now we’re in the car on the way home. We had decided it’s best to go back into town together so it saves someone a trip. My middle brother asks me for my passport. I say, "No I can't do that". My middle brother concocts a magical story where I borrowed his ID to get into clubs when I was a teenager. Lies. I did not and would not. He says he needs it to get into a party. He's 300 lbs and 35 and would never be carded under any circumstances.
Middle brother now goes to his standard method of persuasion and starts yelling and is getting increasingly loud and argumentative. There's a line somewhere between asking and demanding something of someone. He crosses it. My heart races like it used to when I was a boy when he used to follow my friends and me and beat the heck out of us with his friends. Much earlier in my life, I remember him pulling me out of a lake where I almost drowned. But it's not him anymore. The brother I knew is gone and there's a total stranger directly behind me demanding my passport.
I tell him that if he mentions my passport again on the ride home, I will crane the steering wheel into a snowbank and beat him to within an inch of his life. I hear “Give me your passport” in the voice of a man I don't know, from a face I don't recognize. Blood and adrenaline surge from my heart faster and more rapidly than I have ever felt. We pull into a parking lot, I open my door and wait patiently until that jerk works up the courage to fight me.
He steps out and yells something I don't hear. I tell him that I'll give him one more chance to get back in the car without saying a word about my passport ever again. He says “passport” with a wily grin and expects me to be the same cowering boy that I used to be. The same kid who loved him and adored him and wanted nothing else but to be just like him. He had made a grave mistake.
I connect the quickest and hardest fist I've ever thrown against another person directly onto his chin. Blood spurts out of his mouth with the second hit. He hits me twice, above and below my right eye. I completely lose it and wail on the left side of his face until it is a broken and bloody ruin. If you're reading this, middle brother: screw you.
51. A Kentucky Showdown
This happened 20 years ago. My girlfriend is Japanese and had moved back home. I went to visit her in Japan, my first time there. We were doing the long-distance thing.
She had taken a job as a translator working for the city where she lived. She was new at work and the tradition in Japan is to take new employees out to drink, usually within a month or two of their starting the job.
I was staying in her parents’ house, so one day she explains that she will have to go to this new employee drinking event and will be home quite late, don't wait up, have dinner with the folks etc.
I'm eating with her parents, knocking back drinks with pops when my girlfriend appears at the table, kind of swaying. She says her bosses heard about her “friend” and they want to meet me. Whatever. We get in a cab, and on the way to this thing everything begins to change for the worse. She explains to me that I am going to see something of Japan that foreigners don't see, but to stay cool and no matter what happens she can handle it, just stay cool. Cue the foreboding music
We arrive at a sleazy karaoke bar and it turns out that she works for the local city council. The mayor and the city council are all there for this party. My girlfriend is the only woman, and there are maybe ten or twelve men much older than either of us.
The city council and the mayor are totally gone at this point and treating my girlfriend like a piece of meat. They would make her sit in their laps, or make her get on stage and sing a duet while drooling on her.
Needless to say I am very unhappy, but I promised to stay cool and well, it's the city council. I sit there all steamed, trying to decide who to hit first. There is a council member a bit younger and more clear-headed who looks over and with my girlfriend translating asks me what is my problem? Revenge enters my mind, a clear glowing pathway to revenge.
With my girlfriend translating, I explain that I'm from Kentucky, and in Kentucky we drink bottles of Jack, and there’s none in sight here. All these dorks immediately hear the word “Jack” and start kind of chanting this, they want to act so cool.
The mayor says something to somebody, and a bottle of Jack shows up with 12 or so glasses. The waiter pours one, and before anybody can move or say anything I grab it and slam the glass back on the tray. Then I just look around the room.
Every guy, in every country, everywhere in the world knows this challenge. This needs no translation. I made all those guys take drink after drink. No toasts, no clinking glasses, just, you think you are cool, well, let’s go boys.
I realized really quick that half of them were faking drinking it pouring the shot in potted plants or wherever. Probably they’d been faking all night to “excuse” their behavior. At that point I realized, I broke that party up in five minutes straight.
I saw the whole crew several days later at a festival. They spotted me in a crowd, but they didn't wave, and neither did I. And yeah, I married her, best thing I ever did.
52. Spotlight On Revenge
This was my revenge on my wife's behalf. I worked for the BBC. I controlled the lighting on a music program "Top of The Pops". One day, they replaced a dance troop with a new lot.
One of them went to school with my girlfriend, now wife, and she told me of her bullying and arrogance and how she made my wife’s life miserable.
Now, quite a few performers can be a bit diva-ish, so this tracked. I also went to the same school and never noticed it, but being a studious kid I never hung with the in-crowd. I basically thought it would go fine. When I got to the studio, that changed.
The dancer recognized me and, thinking I was an audience member, said something along the lines of, "Hi there, fancy seeing you here. I'm a performing here you know, I might get you into the green room later, you can collect autographs".
I know that doesn’t sound so bad, but she said it with a certain tone of voice and twist of her lip that irritated me deeply. So when their spot came along, I dimmed the spotlight on her to make sure the camera never paused on her.
I did it the week later too. There wasn't another chance, as that dancer was let go. The camera didn't like her. I feel bad about occasionally, but there it is. I've done many acts of kindness since.
53. Don’t Fake It, You Won’t Make It
A guy had hutzpah to apply for a job using completely made-up credentials. He even listed himself as the CEO of a completely fictional company with offices in London, Berlin, Sydney, New York and Rio de Janeiro. But that wasn’t the worst part. His portfolio included projects he had ripped off my own portfolio website. Not sure he knew I worked at the company, but extremely stupid either way.
Our HR person noticed and sent me his link. He didn’t get the job. When friends in other companies asked me if I knew him, I decided to get even. See, the one thing he forgot was to register the URL he listed in his email signature.
So I did it for him and set up a redirect to the Wikipedia entry for "impostor”. Last I checked, that domain had 2,000 hits. He found out someone registered "his" domain, but he still has no clue who it was. I love domain privacy.
54. The Mean Girl
I grew up in a small town. We had one girl everyone thought was "the prettiest girl in the whole wide school"—but she had a serious dark side. She was a mean, petty girl. Truly awful. For example, my cat passed when I was in 5th grade. She sat behind me muttering about how funny it was that my cat was gone, that he was a stupid cat, that he wasn’t here anymore because my mom was too poor to take him to the vet, and urging me to cry.
"Are you gonna cry? Are you gonna cry about it? Like a big baby? Big baby cry over your stupid cat? Everyone's gonna see you cry. You're about to cry aren't you". And so on. This wasn't even the meanest thing she did. And she was mean to everyone. One day in 6th grade, I'd had enough. She didn't even do anything truly awful I just decided to do something about her.
I took one of my mom's little index cards and meticulously wrote "I STUFF MY BRA" in big bold letters. I stuffed that and a little gold safety pin in my jacket pocket. The next day I carefully affixed this to the back of her pink Members Only jacket just before the first bell rang. She walked around with this note on all day, confused as to why people were laughing at her.
She screamed and screamed when she found it. And she cried. Everyone saw her cry.
55. Annoying Little Kid...
There was a kid five years or so younger than me who insisted, out of the blue, on trying to trip me, humiliate me, and so on. I was a lot bigger than him. This had gone on for months, and I never responded beyond telling him to stop. And then one day he and I were alone in the locker room when he started picking on me. I grabbed him, lifted him off his feet, and slammed him into the wall behind him.
I told him that unless he stopped immediately, he wasn't going to like what happened next time. He said OK and never bothered me again.
56. Oh, Lord Help Me
After a long day at cash, I asked a male customer if he had a membership with the store, and he responded: "No, it goes against my religion". I realize that the guy is an idiot looking for attention, so I ignore it, but he presses on with a smug, victorious look on his face.
He says, "You know, whenever I say that, people never ask me what my religion is". I had the perfect reply. Instead of biting and asking what his religion was, I just said: "Maybe it's because no one cares". He didn't say anything for the rest of the transaction.
57. Don’t Touch
I ground up laxatives and tainted all my kitchen fridge food to figure out which of my seven roommates was eating all my food. Meanwhile, I survived off a secret stash in my mini-fridge. I found out who did it. Very, very quickly.
58. Managing At Its Best
My very kindly-seeming fast-food boss was a really nice man who did charity work with immigrant children on the side, was endlessly cheerful, and so on. I'm working drive-thru one day. A customer orders his food in heavily accented English, and gets irate when I ask him (politely) to repeat his order.
I'm trying to stay calm and not respond in kind, and mostly succeeding. The manager can hear both sides of the conversation over the headset, so when the guy reaches the window and continues being a raging jerk, he comes over to do the usual manager thing.
That is, apologize, make sure the customer got what he ordered, and so forth. He even goes so far as to pre-place a straw in the man's drink. This isn't enough to placate the customer, who yells us both out in two languages as he peels out of the drive-thru.
I turn to start to complain to the boss. But I don’t know the best part. Before I can speak, he's patting me on the back saying, "Don't worry about it. I poked a hole in the bottom of his drink with the straw".
He then left it there, so that the drink wouldn't start flowing out until the straw gets pulled up to a normal height to drink from...
59. Spelling It Out For Her
When I was nine (I'm 26 now) my parents went through a really rough divorce. Long story short, my dad had a very public and long-term affair with a prominent public figure in our area, we'll call her Debbie. Naturally, my mother was humiliated, but back then she was quite meek, unassuming, and not at all vindictive. She only did one thing to the woman that broke up my family…
My mom is a nurse and about six months after the divorce she was attending a medical conference in our area. As she walks into the room, she saw that one of the panelists was the woman who slept with her husband. Shocked, but always in control, my mother calmly walked to the very front of the room and sat down silently in front of Debbie.
Now, Debbie had been a family friend for over a decade, so my mom was intimately familiar with her upbringing and unfortunate issues. Remembering that she was an English Lit major in undergrad, my mom took out a red sharpie and drew a very large “A” (like in The Scarlet Letter) on the notebook that she brought to the conference. She turned it around and faced it directly at Debbie, never saying a word.
Debbie was visibly agitated. When it came time for her to speak, something amazing happened. She started ticking. You see, my mother also knew that Debbie had a condition that when under immense stress, despite significant speech therapy and experience in public speaking, she began to twitch and stutter. She twitched so much it impaired her speech, and she had to rush through her portion.
When she ended, my mother calmly shut her notebook, smiled at the woman, and walked out of the room. She never spoke a word. That was the last they saw of each other.
60. Childhood: Ruined
When I was about 14 years old, my friend and I were really into the anime show Yu Gi Oh and would get pumped after every episode we saw. This one time after we finished watching an episode, we decide to play the Yu Gi Oh card game for keeps.
After a heated one-hour game, I manage to squeeze out the W. My friend is obviously upset and grabs my rarest cards and chucks them into his turtle tank. He had a Snapper, and that turtle messed up my cards.
At this point, I storm out of his house and devise a way of getting back at him. It’s then that I remember he liked chocolate. I proceed to poop onto a napkin and cut it into several small bite-size pieces. I then roll them up into small, milk-dud-shaped balls and pack them in a Ziploc bag.
The following day I meet up with him and offer him some chocolate…He ate an entire nugget before he realized what I’d done. I don’t think I’m a bad person, but when you mess with a 14-year-old’s Yu Gi Oh, you’ve messed up his childhood.
61. Peaked In High School
There was a girl in middle school who was a holy terror. She tormented a friend of mine who had Tourette’s and a bad stutter. She would threaten us and write untrue stuff about us in the bathroom stalls.
She would make fun of our clothes, our hair, everything. We would meekly take it because she was really scary, and had a little posse of girls who hung on her every word—but were probably just as scared of her as we were.
Fast-forward ten years. My awkward friend is engaged and a teacher in a ritzy private school. I just got a great job in an office, and I had moved out and bought my own car. I went to the local gas station, walked in, and who should be working there but the holy terror!
She actually tried making small talk with me. She was still living at home and I could barely hold back my glee as I told her how well my friend was doing, how hot her fiancé is (he really is) and how I just bought a new car and moved into my own place.
I could almost see her ego shrink. Living well really is the best revenge.
62. Direct And To The Point
When I was in first grade, there was a girl in my class who was always mean to me. I don't rightly remember how, only how much I despised her. One day she got snotty with me on the playground…and I kneed her right in the chest.
Five-year-old me was not to be messed with, apparently.
63. She Doesn’t Mess Around
In elementary and middle school, I would sometimes get fed up and grapple with people who messed with me. I never threw a punch, but I’d just wrestle and pin them down to make a point. By the time I entered high school, I had developed a piercing glare that kept people from getting close. My older sister, on the other hand...
One time she caught the class ruffian from my grade harassing my best friend after school, so she slugged him in the face and broke his nose before dragging his bleeding butt into the principal's office. Obviously, they weren't happy with her methods, so she was suspended for a day or two, but that kid was a known troublemaker and that was the last straw to getting him expelled.
64. How You’re Supposed To Do It
My friend was teased constantly by this kid at school. And even though we told teachers and the principal about it, it was just blown off as "oh he was just playing" or at worst the kid had to give some insincere apology. One day my friend had enough and punched the kid, and all the adults wanted to step in going "Why did you do that", "you're not supposed to solve your problems with aggression", and "you should have come to us first".
In the end, they both got a week's suspension because of it.
65. The Writing’s On The Wall
Back in the old-old days, I worked tech support for a company. Among many things, customers could dial into our computers and download activity reports for their account. This particular customer weekly would have a 100-page report when printed.
She had phone line problems frequently, and more so, just didn't want to bother dealing with pulling the reports, so she'd call and complain she couldn't get the report and expect us to fax it to her.
Once, we pulled the report for her, but came up with the perfect twist. We didn't separate the sheets when we sent it through the fax. These were the old faxes that printed off rolls of paper. It would cut the paper when it sensed a page break from the other end. Since we fed her a 100-page report with no page breaks, it just sent her one giant page.
When that didn't teach her a lesson about pulling her own reports, we faxed her the first few pages of a report, and then fed a loop of black paper into the fax machine. It faxed her about 50 pages of complete black.
After that, she never called us again to have us pull her reports for her.
66. Be Careful What You Wish For
I managed a computer repair shop. It was sort of like the Geek Squad, but cheaper and with some excellent techs. We had off-site laptop repair, so when a customer brought in a laptop that needed major internal hardware work, we'd pack it off to be fixed.
One day, a gentleman rolled in with his family and a broken laptop. He said it was just over a year old (out of our warranty) and that it was no longer working properly. He further claimed that it had not worked properly since we last worked on it (over a year ago...?) and that he was just now bringing it in.
Right. Well, to avoid conflict, I offered to waive the diagnostic fee and just ship it off so the laptop guys could have a look. The customer was happy enough with this, so we shipped. Fast forward a week, and the laptop returns. The motherboard is fried according to our repair center.
They had called the client, and per his instructions, put his Hard Drive in an external enclosure. The enclosure itself was the only charge: $0 for labor, $0 for diagnostics, $25 for the enclosure plus tax. They explained the pricing to him. Pretty darn cheap, considering that he's outside the warranty, right?
I call the customer to let him know it's ready. He hears the price tag (again). Then he flips the heck out. I was a bit stunned. I reminded him that although he was not in the warranty, we weren't charging him for the diagnostic OR the labor, such as it was, only for the enclosure.
This was an outrage, to hear him tell it.
We were obviously trying to take all he holds dear, and he would come to our store and take his machine. Uhh, ok guy. "After all, it hadn't worked since the last time you worked on it!"
I didn't ask why he then brought it back to us, but I decided to check that a bit. I told him I'd ask my boss, and instead, we hooked his HDD to the data transfer kit and had a look. Sure enough, there were some timestamped cookies right up until two days before he brought it to us. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
Without getting too detailed, let’s just say these were NOT kids’ sites he was visiting. A lot. I called the customer back. This time, both he and his wife were on the line. Both didn't let me get five words out before starting in with the screaming.
They threatened to sue me, have me fired, find out where I lived, and burn down the store. Comprehensive! I let them get it out, then interjected something along the lines of the following: "I'm really sorry that you're so upset! I have good news for you, though. The computer worked better than you think for that year”.
"What do you mean?"
"Well, someone was using it. For example, on [date,] the computer went to the following sites “…”. And I named a few.
Stunned silence.
"Don't worry, I have literally hundreds more entries to read to you. On [date] someone was apparently interested in..." and then the screaming started. Not them at me....them at each other. Oh, glorious. It was a symphony of hate. Eventually, the wife hung up.
The husband, who sounded like a broken man, mumbled something like "Now my wife is going to leave me”. I told him that wasn't my business, but if he'd like the hard drive enclosure, it would be $25 plus tax. He never showed up to buy it. Imagine that!
67. Money Matters
My college roommate had a sketchy friend he would invite over. My textbook was taken the weekend before my final. I went to the bookstore and found the book. I had notecards that I used as bookmarks still in the book. I texted my roommate's friend and made up a story that the bookstore was going to press charges unless he gave the money back. He confessed over the phone and told me to meet him at his place to get the money.
After taking the money, I poured a drink over his head and told him to never come to my place ever again.
68. Only One Thing To Do
Back in the summer of 2009, my girlfriend and I were going pretty strong when I found out she was sleeping with this guy on the side. She admitted it and said she was sorry, then I dumped her. I didn't know the guy but I remembered his name. Then, one night at a party a few months later, I got introduced to a guy I thought was him. Throughout the course of the night, I slyly worked out it was him.
I'm not a guy to hold a grudge generally, but this was something else. I didn't want to do anything to him, but then I walked into a bedroom to take a phone call and there he was passed out on the bed. I didn't know what to do, but I knew I had too good an opportunity to pass it up. So...I had the brilliant idea to take a dump on him.
I left the party just after and I haven't seen or heard from him since. Not a day goes by I don't think about it. Needless to say, I haven't told anyone about this in real life.
69. A Prank Gone Right?
My girlfriend and I are in a very fun relationship, and we always like to joke around and prank each other. One time when we were passing by a toddler’s section in a department store, she told me she was pregnant.
She thought I wasn't ready yet and would freak out, thus giving her a good laugh. It turned out she was wrong. I was pretty ecstatic about it and she was surprised. She started crying real hard and I thought there was something wrong.
Things started coming into my brain like I'm not the father of the child and such. Only, she was crying because she was so happy that I was ready to commit to her and to a family. But she also felt guilty—after all, she did it in good fun and now had to crush my dreams.
To make amends, she was extra nice to me and pampered me that week. I think that's a pretty great revenge. Also, I’m engaged to her now.
70. Down And Brown
I have this friend who is a bit of a legend. He was out with a few friends at the pub one night and he noticed that his pint of Guinness went missing when he went to the toilet. He just assumed someone took it mistakenly and ordered another one.
My friend goes to the bathroom again, comes back, and what do you know his pint is missing again!! So he says to the guys, I’ll be back in a few. He comes back acting really distracted, scanning the room all the time.
His friends are like what are you up to!?!?...."Oh, you'll see". After a few minutes, he starts bursting out laughing as this guy across the room starts puking all over the place while simultaneously throwing a pint of Guinness to the floor.
Well, my friend had bought another Guinness, went to the bathroom, and pooped in it. He then left it on the bar for the thief to enjoy. As I said, a legend.
71. Didn’t Have To Lift A Finger
I was in my early 20s, living in NYC, and my then-boyfriend blew off date night to go out with co-workers and drink. This was fine, except I had left some work-related stuff I needed for the next day on his desk, so I let myself into his place. The next events sealed his sorry fate.
I was in his office when he came home bamboozled with a woman who was definitely not me, and was equally blotto. Unquestionable infidelity ensued. I was too shocked to react and let myself out after they had gone to sleep.
I knew I needed to end it but felt too ashamed to admit I knew he had cheated. So I showed up at his door early the next morning with no warning and proceeded to end it for infuriatingly vague "this isn't working for me" reasons.
He proceeded to go a bit nutty. There was a lot of begging and crying over the next two months on his part. He suspected I knew and proceeded to accuse all of his co-workers and friends who had been out that night of telling me. This only revealed to them that he was quite the prize.
His accusations and volatile behavior in the workplace apparently escalated and made people uncomfortable, and him a liability, so he was let go. I was told all of this by a former friend and roommate of my ex. The roommate also thought his behavior was despicable and slowly began to cut ties.
They also signed a new lease without him. With no job and no roommates, he had to move back to his hometown and in with his parents.
72. Claws Like A Cat
A new kid moved to town, started stuff with everyone, then he got to me. We were fighting and I easily knocked him down and was like “ok, this is enough” and started to walk only for him to get me from behind and then claw my neck. Needless to say, I lost it and beat the heck out of him. He and his mom tried to get me in trouble, but I had a trick up my sleeve. As soon as I showed my neck, I walked scot-free while he got suspended for a week.
He didn't learn his lesson and tried to go after one of my friends after.
73. Out Of The Fry Pan
I was working at my university in the Division of Student Life as a GA, and had worked myself into a great position where people trusted me and relied on my advice. One night at a big party at a local university bar, I had the craving for a smoke. I asked this group of girls if they had one, and being one to not bum straight up, I offered a coupon I had for free McDonald's fries if someone would give me one.
One of the cuter girls there with a pink stripe in her hair said yes, pulled out her cigs, and I gave her the coupon. She then put her cigs back in her pocket and told me to "get out" after taking my fry coupon. I was furious at this point and tried reasoning with her. She then called over a couple of guy friends and said that I was falsely accusing her of taking from me, and her friends all backed her up.
She looked me in the eyes and said "you shouldn't be so trusting". Fast forward to Monday—we had job interviews for the division and I happened to be passing through replacing a computer. I also happened to see the same pink-stripe-in-hair individual that had taken the McDonald's coupon from me the week before in line.
I went to the person conducting the interviews and told him that she was a thief and a liar. On my way out, I smiled and waved. She didn't recognize me. She didn't get the job, and the interviewer thanked me for my contribution to the interview process.
74. Too Good At Revenge
I was the jerk customer once by complete accident. I was 22 and took my girlfriend and her parents to some classy restaurant for their anniversary. Anyway, the dinner was amazing and pretty expensive ($40 for a plate of lamb) but I had worked at the same company for four years making fairly good money, so I whipped out my bank card to pay the bill.
That’s when the waiter says "Someone made good money on their paper route" with a cheeky smile. Without missing a beat, I blurt out "Well, we can’t all be waiters". He immediately turns bright red and looks horribly offended and my girlfriend’s parents are staring at me in disbelief.
I tipped him big and tip every other waiter big to this day as penance for my big mouth.
75. The Revenger’s Book Club
There was a guy in high school who was a complete jerk to me for a couple of years. I decided to exact revenge in a rather unique way—via magazine. I went to the school library and pulled subscription cards out of every women’s magazine I could get my hands on, and a few strange ones like Psychology Today and Architectural Digest, and filled out cards in his name, with his address, and checked "bill me later".
I overheard him complaining a few months later about how he kept getting all these magazines he never ordered and it was getting irritating. Score.
76. My Super Sad Sixteen
In high school, one of my best friends started dating my ex-boyfriend the day after we broke up...which happened to be my 16th birthday. So then and there I decided to ruin her sweet sixteen. I just wasn't sure how at first. Fast forward three months. She planned an extravagant birthday party and played hooky from school the Friday before the big party to prepare. This was my opportunity.
I told everyone at school that she had gotten the flu and was postponing the party (hence why she wasn't in school). We were neighbors so everyone bought it. The next day she got all dolled up, and arrived at her sweet 16 in a large rented ballroom, only to spend the entire party with her mom and little sister. Not one person showed up.
Looking back it was terrible and mean, but to a 16-year-old girl I felt she broke the sacred girl code, and that's never okay.
77. Getting Away With It
I’m not proud of this one. This was back when I was delivering pizzas. We got a call right before we closed, and someone wanted a delivery well out of our delivery area. They said they would tip the driver well to make it worth his while.
Greedy guy that I am, I took the order, and delivered the pizza. Turns out, it was teenagers having a party while their parents were gone. They gave me a 65-cent tip and had a good laugh about it. So when I left, I did multiple donuts in the yard, tearing it up pretty good.
On the drive back, I realized how much of an idiot I was. I fully expected authorities to be called or at the least a complaint to the manager. Never heard anything about it.
78. Stormy Weather
This all started in my freshman year of high school. As many of us know, this is a time of insecurity and apprehension for boys at this age. Well, what was I insecure about, you might ask? I was very insecure about my height.
In my freshman year of high school, I stood at 6 foot 11 inches, making me the tallest kid in the school by a solid five inches. And keep in mind that I was a freshman. Well, I didn't like being tall. It made me stick out, and everyone wanted me to play basketball.
I wanted neither of these things. I just wanted to be a normal kid, not some tall freak (my thoughts at the time). So naturally, when I started getting harassed and called names by a kid two grades below me, I wasn't very happy.
I knew that I was getting singled out because of my size, and ultimately my size made it impossible for me to physically retaliate unless he hit first. So anyway, one day I was just in a bad mood. I'd been fighting with my mom earlier that day about grades, and everyone just seemed to be particularly awful.
The fourth bell rolls around and this kid starts getting up in my face wherever I went, calling me all sorts of foul names. I was shaking with anger, but all I could do was clench my fists at my side and take it. I was in a truly awful situation.
But then this kid who loved tormenting other people made a very unwise decision. I anticipated that he would say it one day, he just happened to do it on a day when I was REALLY not taking anything. This kid looks up at me and says, "Hey freak, how's the weather up there?"
Without a second thought, I proceeded to inhale hard through my nose, bringing every bit of mucus down into my mouth. I then proceeded to bend down to his level, spat on his head, and said "It's raining”. Every person in that hallway saw me do it, and every person was laughing at my tormentor's misfortune.
Ironically, he told on me and wound up getting me into trouble. My punishment? A 20-minute detention, administered by the chuckling assistant principal. Because I stood up to this kid, I gained school-wide fame. Oh, and he also stopped bothering me.
79. Paying For It
I don't know what will come of it, but I got a letter from the IRS saying I owed $10,000 in unpaid taxes plus penalties yesterday. I found this confusing since I had no income in the year they specified, so I called the number the letter provided.
An hour on hold later, I cleared up the issue. The letter was actually for my father, who has the same name as me. They had him still at my address. I pulled off my revenge flawlessly. I VERY quickly gave them his current one. After the years of mistreatment and what he put my mother through since the divorce, I slept like a baby knowing the IRS hate train was heading at him thanks in part to me re-directing it at him.
80. Fuel To The Fire
In college I worked for a laboratory that farmed student researchers out to local businesses. We were supposed to direct the research and produce publishable results. I was farmed out to this biofuels plant.
The man in charge of me was one of those people who oozes incompetence. I was supposed to spearhead a new research project where we used an alternative method to process lower-quality oil into biodiesel. In addition to me, the guy I worked for also hired a "biodiesel guru" at the last minute.
This was a celebrity in the biodiesel world, Maria Alovert (who for some reason calls herself "Girl Mark"). Now, this woman’s claim to fame is inventing the "Appleseed" home biodiesel production method—innovative and useful, but not really relevant to what we were doing.
I was immediately put to work sweeping floors and washing dishes, and she was put in charge of the actual research. This continued even after the lab complained that they were paying me to create publishable results, not clean up the lab.
It also quickly became apparent to me that Girl Mark was not doing anything. She had no idea what she was doing, did not understand the method we were working on, and got extremely rude and defensive when I asked her questions. But it took a bigger turn. Then lab equipment started going missing.
I tried to bring this to the attention of our boss, and he fired me...in an email. He wrote a diatribe about how Girl Mark is an icon in the biofuels world and how dare I accuse her of this kind of thing, and she is doing a really great job and I'm not doing anything.
No big deal, my boss at the lab put me on a different project and cut off his relationship with the biofuels plant. I also wrote the director of the biofuels plant an email about what happened.
Two months later I get a call. It's the director. He asked me to come back to work for the plant, paid by them this time. Girl Mark had disappeared with thousands of dollars worth of equipment, there was a warrant out for her, and the guy in charge of the project had "resigned" and they needed someone to take it over. I had the perfect reply locked up.
No thanks. My old boss went to work repairing home furnaces. Years later, my landlord brought him over to give a quote on a pretty big job. I approached him later and said, "I used to work with that guy”. He asked what he was like and I said, "He's full of hot air”. The job went to someone else.
81. Not The Beard!
I had a dude in school that was a real jerk to everyone except his "crew”, which consisted of people with intelligence rivaling wet rocks. I started growing a beard in high school, and he happened to be in front of me in line for food. He turned to me and said "I'm gonna touch your beard". and he reached for it. I responded with, "no, you won't". He didn't listen.
I smacked him the moment he touched me, and he started crying in front of a bunch of people. I didn't hear about him messing with anyone since.
82. The Biggest Loser
I was working at a coffee shop within the skyway downtown. It was two minutes after closing everything down. So the register drawers are all pulled, and there is physically no way that I could help a customer. Even if I wanted to work something out, it is still against the store's policy.
I'm cleaning up, getting everything else shut down, and some guy in a suit from the Marriott next over comes up, accosts me for being closed, and says that he NEEDS something to eat and coffee. Blah blah blah, you're just a loser working at a coffee shop, I work for a hedge fund, blah blah blah. you have to give me something because I want it and you're still in the store.
DIRECT QUOTE: "That's how customer service works, you idiot". I explain to him that it's not possible and that I would be penalized or could lose my job. He huffs and puffs and walks away a bit, shouting about how he deserves respect and this city sucks.
I turn my back to continue dumping the coffee and get the keys to pack up the bakery. I’m still reeling over what happened next. My back is turned for probably 30 seconds, and when I return, the guy has his hand down into the bakery case and has grabbed a bunch of muffins, biscotti, and even managed to pilfer a bottle of Coke.
He leaves no money, he just leaves the case open as I yell at him and gives me the middle finger as he strides off, going on about how I need to change my attitude. Initially, I'm really angry. I call security to get on the guy, tell them what happened.
While I'm on the walkie with the security desk, I notice something crucial. I see the guy left his set of room keys for the Marriott and a set of car keys with the rental tag/company fob attached as well. The guy's from out of town with a rental car.
So while I'm talking to security, I palm his things in a towel as I "wipe down the counter" for anyone that might have seen me. As I leave, I see some security guards and the jerk yelling and arguing about things. The man is unable to get back into the Marriott from the skyway.
I punch out and start walking home. As I round the corner and begin walking over the nearby bridge, I throw his rental keys and hotel cards into the water below. Screw that guy.
83. The Principal’s Pet
The jerk was a family friend of the principal. My parents complained, but the principal said they weren't responsible if it didn't happen on school grounds. It continued until one day he wanted to make a spectacle of it. He thought he'd win but I had enough and broke his nose in the fight and left him bleeding everywhere. My parents got a call that night from the furious principal.
My mom’s answer was legendary. She explained it wasn't on school property, so politely do not disturb her at home for matters she wasn't involved with. Things went cool until late grade 6, and the same kid had been getting mouthier and pushier with me, even at school. The principal even smugly made sure we knew she wouldn't interfere. I was walking home the one day and the kid didn't take the usual turn to his house, so I knew something was up.
He tried to roll up on me, tackled me, and started punching. I grabbed his shirt, ripped the collar down the front, and then blasted him hard in the nose again when he was stunned. When the principal called, my mom just said to leave her kids alone and she'd call the authorities if the jerk came near us again. I found out later the kid was having trouble at home, so I empathize a bit, but kids like this need to find another outlet.
84. I Did What I Had To
I was the new kid at my middle school. I knew a handful of kids there but not everyone. The first month or so, I mainly talked to my friends and was pretty quiet otherwise. This one annoying kid, Andrew, took that as his cue to try to start tormenting me. He would do and say super disrespectful stuff about me out of nowhere and shoulder-check me in the hallways.
After like a week of that, I asked him if he wanted to play basketball after school, and he agreed. He had no idea what was coming. We went to the court behind the school, and I basically just beat the heck out of him when no one was looking. I never even told anyone.
I'm not saying that was cool or anything, but I wasn't going to spend my next two years hating my life because of this guy. And the harassment immediately stopped after that.
85. Honesty Is The Best Policy
My ex and I were engaged to be married and the wedding had been paid for by my parents. It was big, fancy, and all his idea. Then one day, I got a call from a Russian girl claiming to be pregnant by him.
He was in the Army and was stationed in Alaska for some time and I was still home. When I confronted him, he of course denied it, swore it was a lie and a desperate attempt at her getting to stay in America by being knocked up by a soldier.
I was young, dumb, and believed him. The girl called me over and over. To this day I don't know how she got my number, but whatever...about three months prior to the wedding, his best friend called me telling me that it was in fact true and that he had been unfaithful for months leading up to him coming home.
I finally talked to her, and she told me she'd even be willing to do a paternity test. She claimed not to have known about me until recently before she started calling. Angry and confused, I gave my ex a chance to explain himself and come clean.
I hoped he'd just be honest and we could somehow work through it, but no. He lied to me, straight in the eye. He told me I was crazy to believe some "dumb Russian princess”. So, I told him that I wanted him to consent to a paternity test.
He refused. But there was something he hadn’t kept in mind. What he failed to realize was that his CO was really good friends with my father, along with HIS father. My dad got hold of this information (because I knew what he'd do, I told him) and gave his two buddies a call and they got the Grandpa to do it.
Turns out, he was in fact the father of this soon-to-be beautiful little girl. He now has to pay child support to a woman who doesn't let him see his daughter, lost an incredible amount of respect from his officers, and had to pay my father back for the wedding that never took place, downgrade in apartments, and sell a lot of his musical equipment.
In the process he had to sell his beloved car that he loved more than anyone/thing, and I took the engagement ring and sold it, got $10,000, and went on the honeymoon but took my friends. We spent the 10 grand like it was nothing.
86. A Hate Follow
One of my college girlfriends decided it was a great idea to sleep with of my good friends in my bed while she was housesitting when my family and I were out of town. Once we got back to school, his dorm room was right across the hall from mine, and she basically moved in, which, as you might imagine, compounded the problem.
They finally got an apartment about midway through the semester and moved out, and a couple of months later she calls me and says he's a jerk and can she come over. I said sure, she comes over, we get it on.
This happened a few times, and the last night she says: "I was going to ask if we could get back together, but I figure your family probably hates me," to which I replied, "They're not the only ones. Get out”.
87. It’s Getting Hot In Here
My first wife told me to grab my stuff and get out before she walked to the store and back (about 10 minutes)., She also said that she was in love with one of my friends...some would have packed, but not me. I grabbed her box of “toys” and rubbed them all down with my ghost pepper sauce...revenge is sweet and ouchie.
88. Call My Bluff
It was 1995 when I was in high school. I was outside with my friends. We were a big gang, but we were potheads and punks, not known to cause trouble. I apparently annoyed someone, and he went to get the big guy of the school with all his followers. The ruffian came up to me with about six or seven other guys looking for a fight.
I stood in front of them alone while my friends were sitting in the corner, not even noticing the interaction. I knew I'd get my butt kicked big time and my friends would be pretty much useless. Half were girls and only one or two would have the heart to fight. So I decided to bluff it out. I gave my best psychotic smile and told them: "This is going to be fun". and assumed a fighting stance.
Anyway, the leader found a stupid excuse to back out of it and they all left and nobody ever messed with me or my friends. These guys are not used to someone fighting back, especially when outnumbered. I got lucky he was a coward.
89. I Have A Black Belt!
It was probably 5th grade; his name was Tyler W. Tyler was a master black belt and all-around nasty. I was a goofy awkward giant that definitely didn't fit into the cool Christian kid club. The pastor’s kid Cameron and Tyler were especially cruel when paired up against me. Usual stuff happened, like telling the parents and telling the staff. The church is not believing their saintly boys could be mean.
Well, one of my friends, Steve, was having a birthday party and Tyler called me out to fight at the party. I can still remember the anticipation all week, building and building into something wonderful. When Steve got his presents and the candles were blown out, we all disappeared outside for the main event. I remember Tyler still had some pretty cocky words saying he was going to beat my fat butt or something like that.
Well, there was something I didn’t know. It turns out Tyler wasn't a black belt. I got on top of that kid and beat the holy heck out of him until his face started turning blue. It was a very important life lesson for me that these people should be dealt with severely. So, then the aftermath is Tyler's parents want to sue me and my parents for beating their little angel. The church/school wants to suspend me for something that didn't even happen at school.
However, these people taught me how to stand up for myself and that's it because no one else was going to.
90. Oops Is Right
I had a summer job pushing carts for a hardware store, and we had to push carts in through entrance of the store. It was a routine trip, pushing in about eight carts, when one of my supervisors got my attention.
I became distracted, only to look up to see an 85-year-old woman getting smashed into one of the sliding glass doors by one of my carts that had slipped off the end of the line. Needless to say, she was rushed to the ER and it cost the company $45,000.
The last thing she said to me as she laid there in pain was "Why would you do that to me"... Oops.
91. Say Hello To My Bigger Friend
I once had a terrible job cleaning the toilets in a nightclub. One night a woozy idiot brings some girl into one of the stalls. I knock on the door and he tells me to screw off. I was young and non-intimidating, and he'd seen me on the way in. But I knew just what to do.
I tell the gigantic bouncer nearby, who I was friendly with, that some cheeky man was up to something in the stall. When the bouncer pounded on the door he got told to screw off as well, which, sadly, was a big mistake.
The guy got hauled out by the scruff of his neck and dragged out the back door. I know, I know. I'm a real tough guy.
92. Worth It
There was the kid in Junior High who was always in my face. Not exactly a bully, just two parts jerk and one part idiot. Constantly following me around. I tried turning the other cheek, being nice, and stuff like that, but it just was not working.
Fast forward to high school, and we are both on the wrestling team. I'm like one weight class above him, so we have lots and lots of close contact and he was still being a jerk. When we faced each other, I took my chance to show him who was boss. In a split second, boom—double leg takedown. I scooped that idiot up in the air and dented the mat with him. The coach got angry and made me do extra cardio after practice. It felt really good anyway.
93. In The Deep End
I was living in a Middle Eastern country a few years back. Nice place, but because 50% of the population in the region is under the age of 20, the roads are simply overrun by teenage and early-20s jerks. The culture's fatalism makes young guys even more reckless and irresponsible than their hormones already program them to be.
So, after a rare rain shower, the highway is flooded up ahead. 18 inches deep. Traffic is backed up for at least a mile, and it takes us 15 minutes to get to the flooded patch. Everyone is annoyed...and then it happens. I see two cars full of teenage jerks passing people on the shoulder on the right from way behind me. Now, there's just no excuse for that.
Eventually, they get to where I am, and they pass me just as we're reaching the 50-yard stretch where the flooding is crossing the road. And wouldn't you know it? One of them crosses into the far left lane, and one stays in the right lane to avoid the deep water...in the middle lane...
And wouldn't you know it? Their windows are rolled down...
I'm in a Toyota Land Cruiser, a nice big four-wheel drive. So while they're crawling through a foot of water in their little action-boy Hondas, I decide “screw it” and rush up between them through the deep stuff in the middle lane.
The wave from my front wheels was about six feet high, and it had to have put 20 gallons of water through the windows of both cars. Completely drenched. All of them...with nasty urban stormwater runoff. Bwahaha!
Of course, they chased up after me once they cleared the water, screaming and cursing, but I just pretended to be on my phone and ignored them. Eventually, they gave up and (I hope) figured I had just been as impatient and selfish as them and had hosed them by accident.
Most satisfying revenge of my life.
94. Words Have Weight
When I was in grade school, I was chubby. I wouldn't even say fat. My small private school needed five players to have a basketball team and fell short at four, since no other boys in my grade wanted to play. This was partially because the coaches were mean, and partially because they didn't like sports.
I hated basketball quite a bit but I knew how much the four who signed up loved it and looked forward to the season. Anyway, once I joined up, one of the coaches decided to start calling me names. It started when I couldn't keep up with my other teammates since I was fatigued from recovering from the flu.
Then he started calling me names on a more frequent basis, and I became the source of all blame for our poor record. Oh, we aren't making free throws. That was my fault. Oh, we lost by 20 points? My fault. He continued to belittle my weight and thus the other players and people I thought were my friends thought it was okay to do so as well (even during games, in front of the girls in our grade).
It shattered my self-esteem and left me with permanent damage. Among other things, I still have very severe anxiety, which I am working on overcoming but mainly rely on medicine. Anyway, I saw that same coach last year at a fancy restaurant. I am all grown up now (mid-20s).
I was out to dinner with a gorgeous blonde I was dating at the time, so I decided to completely embarrass him, as he had done to me for three years. Since I was now in perfect shape, looked great, and had a hottie by my side, I knew it was my turn to strike back.
I sat with my girlfriend at the bar and waved to him. He waved back and looked confused until I approached his table where he was sitting with another man (who had a bunch of papers out on the table).
I started it by disarming him of any alarm in his brain that might be saying. I walked over and said, "Are you Coach K?" in an excited tone of voice. He responded, "Yes I am," then I said, "Oh yeah, you used to be my basketball coach! Remember me?"
He must have thought I had forgotten all about how mean he was, and he said, "Oh yeah, how are you?" with fake excitement. That’s when I dropped the hammer. I responded, "I am doing really, really well after years of not doing so well. You probably know me better as ‘fat boy,’ since that is what you called me for three years".
He began to say "What uhh, I didn't, what are you talking about" and then I continued, "Yeah, because of you I developed very bad social anxiety, which troubled me for years and on top of that I was depressed from when you started coaching me until a few years ago”.
“Unlike you, I lost weight. I saw your family at church the other day and something occurred to me. You're fat, your wife is fat and ugly, as are your children. That must really, really suck. I am now very successful and own my own company, drive my dream car, and date women I never thought would talk to me. Also, screw you”.
I then promptly left with my girlfriend. He looked absolutely dazed and dumbfounded. The look on his face was that of "Did that just happen?" It gets even better. He was at that restaurant to interview to take on a coaching position at a private high school (upgrading from middle school to high school).
The athletic director heard what I said and didn't hire him. I found this out when his wife called my parents and said that I had threatened him and he takes that very serious and I need to call and apologize and because of me he lost a great opportunity to be the head coach of a big high school basketball team.
I was beyond happy. It still makes me smile. I saved many youngsters from having to be tormented by that guy. I never called to apologize, and I never threatened him...not quite sure where that part comes from.
95. Scientifically Proven Revenge
My high school physics teacher once told me I was too stupid for a career in science, ending my dreams of being an astronaut. I now direct a STEM education project and am a second-year PhD student in Science Education.
Revenge is a dish best served with NHS funding.
96. Perfect Aim
This dude used to pick on me relentlessly in gym class, as these guys tend to do to nerds. I was catching some usual garbage this one particular day, but only as we were walking out to go back to class did I snap.
He grabbed my hat (just a baseball hat, nothing particularly special about it) and I decided that was the last straw. I started chasing him around the gym, but me being a nerd and him being a jock, I realized this plan was futile.
He was making his way toward the two exit doors and if he escaped, I knew I'd never see that hat again. All I had was my book bag on my back. So I stopped, sized him up, and slid the book bag across the freshly waxed basketball court.
Just as his hand is about to push the door open, the bag slides perfectly underneath his foot and he wipes out, smashing his face into the door at top speed. He crumpled to the floor in a bloody heap and cried like a baby.
I walked by, put my bag back on my shoulder, took my hat out of his hands, and stepped calmly over his twitching body. I never got in trouble (the teachers knew he had it coming) and he never said another word to me.
97. Hats Off To You
We had assigned seats on the bus and I was next to this awful kid, unfortunately. He threw my hat out the window on the highway. Before we got on the bus at the end of the day, he was bragging to everyone about how funny it was when he tossed my hat. I lost it and beat him down. Kind of like Ralphie in A Christmas Story. He was a bit bloodied. He wouldn’t look me in the eye after that all the way through high school.
98. One Hit Too Many
I was harassed by this group of girls, and I would call their leader Karen. This girl would do all kinds of things from pulling my hair to tripping me or verbally teasing me. I tolerated all of it until the day Karen hit me hard across the face. Something came over me I don't know what happened to my timid self but I pounced on her, scratching, and punching her, I could feel my blood boil like literally and my vision was covered with black spots.
Well at the end of the day, she started crying and was covered with scratches and I had a panic attack immediately afterward. Nobody got punished but she never crossed my path again. All this happened in second grade.
99. A Grave Miscalculation
This one comes to mind because I thoroughly enjoyed it. I was out snow-blowing the driveway one day. Some dude who is a friend of my sister's walks up to me and throws a snowball at me. He then gave that look like "What are you gonna do about it, man?" He then laughed, putting his hands up as if to go "Ohhh!!"
Dude? Do you not see this sizeable snow-moving device I am pushing around? It only took several seconds to completely coat him in snow, and the look of defeat on his face was glorious.
100. What A Girl Wants
In fourth grade gym, I discovered heartbreak, revenge, and victory all in one class period. Moments before class had started, my "boyfriend" dumped me because I was too weird. There I sat in disbelief and sadness, and he just ran around as if nothing had happened. We were put on opposite teams, only making the chasm between us greater.
Now, I am possibly the worst person at sports, wiffleball being no exception, which we were playing at the time. I stepped up to the orange rubber plate, the bat heavy in my hands. The Ex was pitching and called out to everyone in the outfield "Don't worry about this one, she can't hit anything”. That's when I got angry.
I said nothing, watching as he casually cocked back his arm. His eyes gleamed as the ball flew from his grip, careening towards me. I raised my bat and swung with all of my measly strength. The Wiffle ball met my bat with a dull, plastic WHACK. Next, the Wiffle ball met The Ex's balls, square on. I watched as he crumpled to the floor, a wailing heap. My team cheered for me as I ran around the bases, greeting me with high fives as I cleared home.
It was beautiful.
101. If You Build It, He Won’t Come
I had a jerk of a class teammate for an entire semester. He would sit in the corner of the room the entire semester saying he's working, but he was often just watching Glee. But whenever the professor rolled into the classroom, he would pop right up, and proceed to tell the professor about all the progress we have made.
But of course, when midterm comes around, he had absolutely nothing to show for it. He then goes around to everyone—the poor TA, the rest of the team, members of other team—for help. Of course, it's really hard to conjure up a midterm project overnight when all you've been doing all semester is watching Glee over and over again.
But alas, this was a team project in architecture and having a big blank where the classroom buildings are supposed to be in our piazza would have been bad. So the rest of the team and the poor TA all jump in and have an all-nighter to basically do his project.
It's around this time that everybody in the program realizes what an idiot he was. He hadn’t the slightest clue how buildings work or how to design them. This one instance he and the rest of the team had an argument about where walls and floors meet.
We were all designing a traditional Italian masonry house, and he swears that every floor should be two to three feet larger than the perimeter of the walls, resulting in all floors sticking out of the walls, and that that's how we should build his model.
This kid, an architecture student in his third year into the program, doesn't know how walls and floors work! Despite his ignorance and his lack of effort, he would still shake his tail in front of the professor and make snide comments about his one and only friend and how much his work was better than his friend's.
They no longer talked by the end of the semester. The professor wasn't an idiot, either, and caught onto this pretty quick. So while the rest of the team got a perfect mark, he got a C—a grade too high for him, in my opinion. But everything changed when finals came around.
By the season of finals, the rest of the team realized that if we want to have a good project, we should do his work for him. If you know any Architecture students, you know we are known for our ability to stay up and hammer away at a project day and night.
But not this kid. Every night at around 11 pm, he would stop watching Glee, tell the rest of the team how much of a headache he has and that he needs to go to sleep. At first we tried to tell him that he can't go to sleep without having anything done a week before the final, but soon we noticed how the project flowed more enjoyably when he was gone, and didn't care to stop him.
So every day the two weeks before finals, we worked on our individual projects. Come 11 pm, we would do his project for another 2-3 hours. He caused several scenes in the studio, which often ended with him making a girl cry or ticking everyone in the program off.
Next year, I got a job in the department. I managed the Facebook page and other social media groups for the department. It didn't take me long to find out about the option to delete people from the page. So every now and then, every time he ticked me off in fact, I would delete him from the page.
It wasn't a big deal; he missed some announcements about guest lectures that he never even went to and missed out on some fun comments on the page at most. But it made my week to delete him, and another week when I would see that he "liked" the page again.
This would happen two three times until I perma-banned him as I left the position. For all the idiotic theories he tried to shove down my throat and all the hours I spent working on his project, the revenge was petty, but I was trembling with power and excitement when I first deleted him from the page.
He then switched majors and is now working to get a structural engineering license to design buildings near you.
102. An Expensive Mistake
My girlfriend cheated on me when I was 22. My best friend took all of her cosmetics out of my bathroom, threw them into an empty garbage can, and lit it all on fire. When she showed up to pick up her stuff, he just pointed at the still-burning container. Then she left.
It was probably several hundred dollars’ worth of stuff. She was super angry.
103. You Get What You Don’t Pay For
I used to get paid to write essays for people. I wrote all of this girl's applications essays (to eight schools), but she made all sorts of excuses and ended up only paying a fraction of what she owed me.
This girl comes from a rich family and spends about $10,000 a month on her shopping. She could afford to pay me. But she decided to be cheap and not bother paying me, even though my essays helped her get into a much better school than she expected.
I got my revenge, though. The school was waayy beyond her academic capabilities, so she ended up flunking most of her classes and getting kicked out. Hah.
104. Not Fun And Games
In first grade, a kid kept making fun of me every day at recess, despite me telling him to stop. One day I was in the sandbox and he mocked me. I'd had enough. I grabbed a handful of sand and shoved it down his pants. He didn't call me names after that.
105. So What’s Ok?
I wouldn't say I took revenge, I just finally snapped and started repeatedly punching him. In the middle of math class. The teacher took me out of the class and I figured that I was doomed and on my way to see the headmaster. The teacher said she knew he was mean, but hitting people in her class was not OK and never to do it again. Then she placed him in detention.
The kid gave some kind of begrudging apology the next day and said he respected me for finally standing up for myself. Well, thanks, I guess? He never bothered me again anyway.
106. Giving Her A Hand
I had a friend who had a bully. He had a locker above my friend and would intentionally drop books on her head, push her around, insult her throughout the year, and we all had a class together where he was generally a jerk to anyone that he could. Before class started and anyone else was in class yet, the teacher had to step out for a bit, and it was just us three in the room.
My friend was and still is very tiny but that day, it didn't matter. She snapped and had enough of his teasing and went on the attack. I don't think she could have done much damage on her own, but I stepped in. Puberty was swift for me and I was one of the largest kids in school; by 5th grade, I was already the size of an adult woman.
I pinned him to the wall and let my friend beat on him. He didn't speak to either of us after that, and we never got into any trouble. I don't think he wanted to tell anyone that he got beat up by a couple of girls.
107. Hands Off
When I was in the service, this one guy would always come into our room and randomly open our fridge without asking and just take stuff and eat it. I took a lemon-flavored Gatorade (the yellow kind), dumped half of it out, and filled it up with my pee.
I then screwed the lid on tight and put it back in the fridge. I made sure it was the only thing left in the fridge as well. As sure as clockwork, he comes in and he takes it and drinks it. My roommate knew about it and felt bad, so he told him what happened.
In turn, the guy threatened to turn me in to the higher-ups for it. My response: "You're telling me that you are going to tell a room full of grown men that you drank my pee?” He never came into the room and ate anything ever again.
108. Family Feud
When I was a kid, I got the Sabrina the Teenage Witch "Handbook”. It was full of kiddie experiments and stuff and was pretty fun. My older sister had upset or annoyed me about something, so I tried out one of the “tricks” from the book.
You fill a cup with water and some corn kernels, put some tinfoil on top of the cup, and the kernels eventually pop and it makes noise against the tinfoil. I put it under her bed. It takes a few days to "work" so I completely forgot about it…until one night I woke up to my two sisters whispering.
It had popped in the middle of the night and she thought there was a rat under her bed.
109. Wrestling Revenge
I was teased heavily in middle school. I wrestled in high school. At a competition, I found I had to wrestle Josh. He was one of those guys from middle school, and I knew I could pin him. Told my coach about him, and my goal wasn't to pin him, but to hurt him as long as possible. When the wrestling match starts, I do every move I can think of that could hurt.
I didn't try to get him on his back, just kept "trying" to jack up his arms and shoulders. Took a couple of shots and checked his crotch with my shoulder since he wasn't wearing a cup. I did the full six minutes and won twelve-to-one on points. He cried. The reaction was unforgettable. My entire team went ballistic with cheers. The coach had told them what he used to do to me and they were rooting for me so hard. I felt like the king of the world.
I walked off to my team. He limped off to the athletic trainer.
110. The Crowd Goes Wild!
My friend was the only Asian-looking girl in the area. This one little idiot had learned some vile names and delighted in calling her them until she cried. He always did it at the bus stop because we couldn't walk away. I got angry, but she always told me not to do anything because she was worried about it escalating. I promised not to do anything that would make it worse.
I like loopholes. I'm also from what some would call an aggressive family. We've play-fought with each other for as long as I can remember, so the desire to beat the heck out of him was strong. One time, he was singing a song that basically was just the P word to a tune with a few uninventive insults thrown in that didn't scan. He was playing this up particularly because there was a crowd of largely disinterested older kids also waiting for the bus.
I figured a way to ensure it wouldn't get worse. I punched him hard in the nose. No warning, just turned round and lamped him. Now I was a big girl even at 7, so when I put my full force behind the punch, it was nasty. I even hurt my hand because I was a dumb kid who didn't know how to punch properly. He staggered back and started crying as his nose began to bleed.
The disinterested crowd noted that he'd been made to cry by a girl, who ripped into him. He ran away, they continued laughing, me and my mate eventually caught our bus, and he left us alone forever more. I didn't get into trouble because he had no idea where I lived and rumor had it his dad was angrier that he'd not fought back.
111. Kids Can Smell Fear
When I was in grade 9 or 10, we had a substitute teacher for 2 or 3 weeks. She gave me detention (the very first I had received, I might add) not only for something I didn't do, but for something that was not even worthy of a detention if I HAD done it.
I can't remember exactly what it was, but it was something stupid like coughing while she was speaking. She had no idea who she was messing with. I systematically turned my entire class against her, and subtlety undermined her whenever I could.
We did stuff like the entire class coughing together on cue, every single person making a paper plane out of their worksheet and trying to throw it out of the window (we were on the 3rd story of the school), asking incredibly stupid questions about the simplest of tasks, passive-aggressively correcting her when she made minor mistakes while speaking…the list goes on.
We ended up pushing her to tears. In hindsight, it was pretty cruel. Anyway, I'm now working at my old primary school, at a childcare program. I (think) I saw her once, and she gave me this look like she simultaneously remembered and despised me...I just smiled and continued about my business.
112. Best Buds No More
This guy at work started at the same time I did and we become buds. We hang out, play some Xbox, the whole nine yards. We worked together for two and a half years at this store and eventually were the two most senior associates.
A promotion comes up to become a Director's Assistant and basically get an automatic pay-rate bump plus full-time. We are both interviewed, and we agreed that we would put our best foot forward and not hold any regrets.
The dude beat me out in the end, and I congratulated him on his victory. He acts a little off but tells me it was a close run, and he knew I was a good candidate. Then I discovered his brutal betrayal. A week after the promotion, the store director calls me in for a serious sit-down.
He says, "I hear you have been cheating the time clock, possibly stealing, and giving discounts to friends". I deny, deny, deny that and ask for proof, or I was going to sue. I’m given a "forced three days off" while it is investigated by corporate.
I’m called in a week after suspension for a sit-down with the big shot. They apologized and promoted me to the DA position. They tell me that my buddy was caught on tape several times stealing, his electronic journal showed consistent unwarranted discounts, and other activities—even though he had “tipped” them off to my supposed activities.
When they confronted him, he broke down, apologized, and returned some stuff he planned to swipe after his shift. This jerk tried to frame me to get ahead.
113. The First Win
I used to have a horrible little nasty jerk that would sit behind me on the bus home from school every day. He would constantly hit my head from behind and generally just get off from whacking me. One day I broke as he was getting off the bus and continued to hit me on his way out for fun. I started wailing on him and drove my foot with all my strength at his balls. Happy to say I really hurt him and he was in major, major pain.
He gave me a bit of mouth afterward but never bothered me again. One of the most satisfying moments of my life. He's a huge loser now, so I won twice!!
114. So Deserved
When I was in 5th grade, a kid decided that he was going to violently tousle my hair every chance he got, all day. It got old very quickly, and I repeatedly told him to stop. He didn’t, of course. At recess, I was sitting on the ground talking to my friends, when I saw him running up behind me from the corner of my eye. I spun around, grapevined his leg, and sank my teeth into his calf.
I didn’t draw blood, but definitely left tooth impressions and there was a lot of high-pitched screaming. He tried to report me for attacking him, but the recess supervisor told him that he’d been watching him torment me for an hour so he couldn’t complain. Don’t ask me why an adult observed active bullying for an hour and just allowed it to play out.
115. Pulling The Puppet Strings
I once had a colleague I hated because he was very condescending and really arrogant. As revenge, I put an extra Bluetooth receiver in his computer for a computer mouse and kept the mouse in my drawer.
I would just open my drawer and it would mess his computer right up. I kept it going for like two months. He was about to scream at the whole world when I thought I better stop.
116. Avengers, Take Notes
I had a guy in school who would always skip class and then ask for my notes. We had a group project worth almost 40% of our grade and he did zero work, and the professor told me tough luck.
Instead of just saying no the next time he asked for notes, I took the low road and got beautiful revenge. I began giving him edited versions. I would leave items out of lists, incorrectly define things, or just straight-up write stuff that makes no sense.
An example of the garbage I would put in: “To calculate return on investment, subtract your yearly earnings from your current bank balance, then multiply by Escher's factorial”. If he had even once bothered to crack the text he would have figured it out, but that apparently would have been too much effort for him.
He retook that class.
117. This Teddy Bear Has Claws
I did think my father had it in him but, boy, did he ever snap. My father had two sisters and one brother. Father was always looking after them despite being the youngest of them. His brothers-in-law were spoiled and overspent everything, ending in debt. My father cleared them every time, trying to preserve the good name of my grandfather. My father's brother cheated my father out of his inheritance by taking money from his wallet while he was in the hospital taking care of my grandparents—he was there all on his own.
One day, the siblings tried to kick my mother out of my grandfather’s home because she didn't share her inheritance with them. My dad, who was usually a teddy bear, went livid. He canceled all cheques for payments he'd made for them the day prior. He took away the cars he gave them, blocked them from all properties, and disowned them in the newspaper. After a couple of weeks, the three of them left town with their families, hiding from people they owed money to.
Eventually, they fled the country. The sisters are somewhere in Canada, while the brother is a taxi driver in Australia.
118. The Magic Formula
I used to have to report website usage, ROI, and all sort of statistics for a bunch of different sites. I built a cool mother of a spreadsheet in which you only input a few numbers and it would calculate just about everything the company would need. It was a bit too complicated for my boss to understand, yet he would take it to clients and brag that he made it.
That ticked me off. Then, after a while, he realized that the spreadsheet was all he needed, and he could use my paycheck to buy a new house. He laid me off. I told him he might need help with the spreadsheet, but he said he was smart enough. So before I left, I made sure to make him eat his words—I changed a single formula in the spreadsheet and had a good laugh about the reports it spat out. They made no sense at all anymore.
119. Hitting Back Where It Hurts
I had two freshman roommates that kept eating all of my food. Within the first week, when classes hadn't even started yet, I went to make myself a peanut butter sandwich. My first peanut butter sandwich in this dorm. A special moment. But when I arrived at the kitchen to prepare it, the entire tub of peanut butter was completely gone. They also left the empty tub in my cupboard.
Anyway, I flipped the heck out, because who on earth eats a whole tub of someone else’s peanut butter by themselves, without even bothering to introduce themselves first? These girls would literally scarf down all my food, yet complain if they thought anyone was touching theirs. So I came up with a plan for revenge.
I started buying really fattening food, lots of chips and doughnuts, etc. I was trying to teach them self-restraint, but these idiots would go through these bags and boxes within two days. So I kept buying doughnuts. And then, one day, they started complaining about how they couldn't fit into their jeans anymore. Success.
I also put laxatives in my peanut butter. That’ll teach ‘em to mess with me and my food!
120. The Mother Of All Pettiness
I had my graduation from engineering on the same day as my mother's birthday. I, of course, had nothing to do with choosing the date. But you couldn’t convince my mom of that. My mother said I "ruined her birthday"—and then she got a cruel revenge. She scheduled her birthday party to be on my actual birthday. Her birthday is in March, mine is in August.
121. Credit Where Credit’s Due
I had a co-worker who kept taking my work, taking credit for things he didn't do, and was a general jerk towards me. I knew he was going to take something I was working on, so I made sure he got his karma by purposely messing up...hard. I mean very, very hard. As in, I indirectly bad-mouthed the CEO and higher-ups in a report going to a customer and sat back and waited.
He got fired without severance pay, he lost his house, and his wife left him. He lived on the street for three months before he was given a tiny government home. I send him a Christmas card every year.
122. It’s A Nice Day For A White Wedding
When I was 13, so eight years ago, my dad remarried after divorcing my mom four years before. Before the divorce, his fiancée had been his mistress. My mom is completely better off without him, and ignoring the fact that I wouldn’t exist, I don’t think she should have married him in the first place. Even if I think my parents weren’t a good match, that’s no excuse to cheat on your wife.
Even worse, this new woman was horrifically vile in all sorts of ways. She constantly belittled me, made fun of the fact I needed to take pills for my mental illness—despite her being a freaking pharmacist—and was generally awful to my siblings and me. But she was a decade younger than my dad and reasonably hot, so he didn’t care at all how she treated us.
The one time he actually listened to us about her is when they were thinking of having a baby, and my brother said he’d ask our mom to sue for full custody of us if they did. So anyway, they got married. I was a bridesmaid, cause that witch had no real friends. The other two bridesmaids were her sister and my sister. My brother was the best man because she didn’t like my dad’s best friend.
He and my dad still don’t talk to this day, even though the guy was like an uncle to me as a little kid. It was a wedding, though, and everything went normally at first. But at the beginning of the reception, before the first dance, we were taking pictures in front of a chocolate fountain, looking like the happy family we never were and would never be.
I’m on the autism spectrum and have a problem maintaining eye contact. This extends to looking at a camera. So when we had to retake a photo because I wasn’t looking, she leans down and whispers something in my ear. I’m not going to repeat it, but it involved the r-word. I don’t like saying it. I snapped and decided she was going to pay for this.
No one noticed—or at least no one called me out—when I started slowly moving the chocolate fountain towards the edge of the table. When it got to the edge, it makes contact with the back of that pure white wedding dress and slowly drips down. By the time she notices, it looks like she’s pooped herself. But for all anyone else knows, this was an accident.
She has no spare dress, and that stain is not coming out. So first dance, cutting the cake, speeches, everything, this woman has what looks like a poop stain on the back of her dress. It was a small revenge, but it was so worth it. What’s supposed to be the happiest day of this stupid woman’s life, and she’s going to remember that stain every time she thinks about it.
They never did get the stain out. And nobody knew it was me. Until now, I guess. Hi family, if you’re reading this. Suzie, you’re a witch and you deserved that chocolate stain.
123. The Art Of Fighting
I taught high school art. I had a student become furious with me and eventually threaten to hit me. I tried to give the kid an easy out because I knew he wouldn't do it, and nothing good could come of embarrassing him. However, he wouldn't have it and continued to threaten me. Finally, I gave him an ultimatum—I told him to just go ahead and either take a swing at me or get out of my room.
He was now even more furious that I called his bluff. So in retaliation, he threw a jar of paint at the wall as he stormed out of the room. It made a huge splatter, which he assumed I would have to clean up. Instead, I created a silhouette of Ryu and the paint became the Hadouken. When he came back from suspension he had this look of defeat. Other students thought it was badass.
124. A Taste Of Your Own Medicine
When I was in my early 20s, I worked at a supermarket. I should note that I was a pretty reliable employee. I was never late, in fact I often got in early, and I rarely called in sick. At the time this happened, I had not called in sick for nine months, and even then, the manager had sent me home. Anyway this next time, I had been up all night, swinging between burning hot and freezing cold so I was obviously feverish, and I had been throwing up “at both ends” shall we say.
At one point at about 2 am I was on the toilet, with my head in the sink, utterly miserable. I must have passed out because the next thing I knew I was lifting my head off the sink and it was 7 am. I was due to start work at 12 that day but that obviously wasn't going to happen. So I called up the manager. Let's call the manager Steve. Steve was known for being a real jerk.
He never believed anyone who called in sick except his best buds (usually other managers, never lowly staff), but often called in sick himself (a lot of the time we knew it was because he was hungover and not actually sick). The conversation went as follows: Me: Hey Steve, sorry, I can't come in. I'm sick. Steve: With what? Me: I don't know. I think it might be the flu. I've been up all night being sick, and I have a fever.
Steve: Don't be stupid. If you had the flu you'd be completely knocked out. I need you in. Come in or you're fired. Me: I can't. I just told you I can't stop vomiting. I passed out. Steve: (growling angrily) Either come in or bring a doctor’s note, or you're fired! In the UK, you are allowed to self-certify for 5 days. This means you can tell your employer you are sick and you do not need a doctor’s note.
If you're sick for more than 5 days, you then need a note. It is also totally against the law to demand a doctor’s note during the self-certify period. There was just one problem. I knew this, but I was terrified. This was during the recession, and I couldn't afford to lose my job. So I got myself dressed. Almost passed out trying to do so. Then trudged to the doctor’s some 25 minutes’ walk away.
I end up sitting in the doctor's office for a little over an hour, which for walk-in was pretty good. I get in to see the doctor and she is furious at me for coming in. You're not supposed to come to the doctors when you have a cold or flu, and of course I knew I should be able to self-certify. She told me as such, saying I shouldn't be here and should have stayed at home.
I then explained what had happened with Steve and how he had threatened to fire me over this and I couldn't afford to lose my job since I was struggling as it was. My doctor’s anger transformed into something beautiful. She shifted it to my manager, then asked if I got sick pay from the company. I said yes. "He wants a sick note does he," the doctor says. "Okay. I'll give him a sick note".
Now, my manager just wanted a note confirming I was sick, but instead my doctor wrote something along the lines of this: “[My Name] has come to the surgery because Steve has insisted she come in, in spite of the fact that this against the law and all employees are allowed to self-certify. Due to being forced to make this unnecessary and highly dangerous trip when the patient is ill, has a fever of 39°C, and almost passed out in the waiting room, I am signing [my name] off for two full weeks to recover.
Had [my name] been allowed to self-certify as is the law, they might only have needed a few days, but due to straining themselves, they now require two full weeks. They are not to be permitted to work until [date 2 weeks later]". The doctor said she would have signed me off for longer but this was the longest she could do without requiring further evidence.
So basically, instead of just being off for a few days, I was now signed off for a full two weeks, and I'd be paid for it. I went to my place of work, at which point one of the duty managers saw me and asked me what the heck I was doing here, go home, I was obviously very unwell. I explained what happened. They agreed to help me downstairs to Steve's office and went with me inside.
I handed Steve the note. He looked worried and tried to say “I wasn't being serious about firing you". Well gee, when you angrily growled it down the phone it sure sounded like it. The duty manager then declared that they were going to drive me home. It was clear Steve wanted to argue but had the sense to know he shouldn't. The duty manager then drove me home, made sure I was okay, then went back to work. Then came the best part.
The duty manager then informed our union rep of what had happened. Steve had a disciplinary hearing where he was given a severe reprimand and a warning. Steve tried to argue he never said I'd be fired and I was lying and just decided to go to the doctor's, but the duty manager said they heard him admit to it when he said to me that he really didn't mean it.
I felt better after a few days and enjoyed my two weeks off, fully paid, and enjoyed the nice weather we had. Meanwhile, Steve was forced to work overtime because we were short-staffed. So thanks to the doctor, instead of being off for a few days, I ended up getting a nice two-week paid vacation, and Steve was given a final warning, all because he insisted I get a doctor’s note, and I did.