The Pettiest Workplace Revenges Ever
While many people bite their tongues and keep their heads down at their place of work, some folks are lucky enough to find a way to get some payback on their tormenters.
If you’ve ever wanted to stick it to a petty boss or troublesome co-worker, you’ll love these stories of workplace revenge!
1. Special Delivery
Back in my early 20s, I worked as a delivery driver at a pizza joint close to the main college. After about four months of working there, the owner hired a friend of his to manage the joint since our current manager had just left.
We’ll call the new guy “Donnie”. Donnie was the epitome of the "power trip for no reason" boss.
He would call you out for little mistakes, make you stay late to help do his job, throw you under the bus when talking to the owner, and always bail early. To top it all off, he was convinced everybody liked him.
We even caught him taking from our tip jars a couple of times, but the owner never did anything about it.
Anyway, I had planned to go out one night with a girl I had just met and wanted to get off work a bit early so I could go home and wash the pizza smell off me. I asked Donnie if that was possible—and he absolutely lost it. You would have thought I’d asked for a raise, bonus, and a six-month vacation. Despite the fact that three drivers from the next shift had shown up already, he started shouting, "What, are you stupid?? We have three deliveries up!! You can stay until your shift is over”.
"That's cool", I thought. He was a jerk, but he was well within his right to make me stay until my shift was over. I sucked it up and started getting the last deliveries together.
However, when he saw where I was taking one of the pizzas, he ordered—not asked—me to pick him up a chocolate shake from a drive-through joint close by.
I flat out told him, "No freakin’ way. You expect me to do you a favor when you won’t do me one? Suck it". I grabbed the pizzas and stormed out. Donnie started yelling from the kitchen, something like, "Haha, look at him getting all political.
Awww, I think he's mad". Granted his past behavior had factored into how angry I was over something pretty minor, but I was furious.
The universe had reached its jerk quota and beckoned to me to teach this moron a lesson. As I was driving away from the last delivery, I called the store and got Donnie on the phone.
I apologized and said I would get him his milkshake, and even pay for it. I went by the drive-through of the fast-food place to get a 32oz chocolate milkshake.
Then, I made a beeline to the grocery store right down the street to pick up a family-size bottle of chocolate-flavored Ex-Lax. I poured half of the shake out—for me to enjoy later, of course—and mixed in about 15oz of Ex-Lax. Keep in mind: it only takes like two tablespoons of this stuff to give you a healthy case of the runs. It was on now.
After giving it to him, he said something about it tasting funny but still managed to inhale that sucker like a true fat boy. He didn't even say “thanks”.
Fast forward three hours or so, my date and I were cruising the bars and we headed into the pizza joint I worked at. Instantly, the cook made eye contact with me and came rushing over, practically falling over patrons.
Barely able to contain himself, he told me, "Donnie is having uncontrollable, violent diarrhea. He's been in the bathroom since you left, has messed his pants already, and is making this place smell like an open sewer".
I went back to the kitchen and Donnie was nowhere in sight. But right as I started to talk to a fellow pizza slave, he came rushing from the bathroom.
His pants were half on-half off, one hand was out in front, and the other hand was holding his balloon knot shut. He had exhausted the entire restaurant's toilet paper supply and was heading to the bar next door. The best part?
He lived about 65 km (40 miles) away and continued pooping himself periodically throughout the trip home.
Despite everybody knowing the true story, though, he never figured it out and blamed the fast-food joint for his wild ride on the Hershey Highway. I think the whole ordeal humbled him a bit because he ended up turning into a decent guy.
2. Hide And Seek
I won’t go into the details of my boss but, suffice it to say, she was a total nightmare—an incompetent micromanager with an additional side-order of petty evil. So, I got myself a PCB prank device. If you’ve not seen it before, it makes a random “BLEEP!” at odd intervals, between a minute and ten minutes. It sounds like the “battery is almost out” bleep.
I hid it where I knew she wouldn’t find it and watched, over the course of a few weeks, as her sanity and temper both got frayed beyond belief.
She replaced her phone twice and her computer once, and never at any point did she stand a chance of finding the thing. My secret? I’d hidden it inside her monitor.
3. Overtime Pay
I worked as an installer in a remote office. I traveled a lot for work, often spending weekends on site. This was fine under my old boss, who gave me a lot of leeway by letting me work from home, giving me comp time, etc.
After four years, I got a new boss. At the same time, the company laid off everyone in my office, which was about 100 people.
The new boss insisted I come in anyway to sit in an empty office. It was a 45-minute drive, but I still had to travel Sunday through Friday with no overtime and no comp time.
When I complained to HR, the HR manager told me that since I was salaried, if they wanted me to work 80 hours a week, I would work 80 hours and I shouldn't expect any compensation.
Everyone I talked to seemed to think it was true, and that being salaried meant one didn’t get overtime. That didn't make sense to me. I called the local state Department of Labor office and told them what I did, and what I'd been told by HR. Their response made my blood boil—they told me to get a lawyer and said that if my work didn't rectify this by giving me every dollar they owed me, the company would have to pay the state 50 cents in penalties.
So, I got a lawyer. In a matter of four months, I settled out of court, got a new job, and got a severance.
I also made my boss do an exit interview where I told her that if she'd been halfway considerate, she wouldn't have to scramble to cover for the next eight scheduled installs by flying people out from the East Coast and paying them overtime.
4. Know Your Worth
I was a typesetter when it was still done on dedicated typesetting machines, not desktops. This was specialized work and demanded pretty good pay. I agreed to take one job at less than my usual hourly pay for six weeks while I learned their system, which was one I hadn't used before. Well, six weeks came and went...and I didn't see my promised raise. But it gets worse.
In the meantime, the horrible shrew of a paste-up "artist" went out sick and I was left doing both type and layout. A very important project came up, and there was only me to do it. Without me, they'd be totally and royally screwed.
Even if they could find a typesetter who could do paste-up, there was just no time to run the ad, hire, and train one.
I reminded the owner and manager of the raise I'd been promised when I was hired, and how long ago that was. Then I put all my personal desk trinkets in a box and told them they had until the end of the business day to make a decision.
I got my raise—retroactive to my hire date—by 5 pm.
