If you've ever been wronged before, you've most likely been advised by someone you trust to just take the high road and let it go. But sometimes, people need to be taught a lesson, and the only way to do that is to get your hands a little bit dirty. The following people took the phrase "Don't get mad, get even" to a whole other level—and we're all for it.
1. World’s Best Coffee
One of my best friends, "Alex," was a staffer in a legislative office. His boss was head of a key Senate budget committee, so there were always people coming to solicit the senator’s support for a particular project or grant or whatever. Someone representing an arts program that was looking for a $250K grant is waiting. I'll call her "LobbyAnn.”
She comes up to the reception desk and asks for a pen. The Senator keeps giveaway pens with her name on them in stock—reasonably nice ones—so Alex reaches over to the can where the pens are. LobbyAnn says something along the lines of "Well, then the Senator will know that I showed up without a pen." (So what?) She looks across the desk.
Alex has some work spread out with his own favorite pen, an expensive one with lapis inlay and engraved with his name and term of office of a campus organization. LobbyAnn reaches over, snatches it up, and drops it in her purse. Alex, who is a very polite person, is completely gobsmacked and then tells LobbyAnn that's his personal pen and it’s not up for grabs.
In a few minutes, the senator comes out to get LobbyAnn. As they're walking past Alex's desk, he stands up and says in a very clear voice, "I'm going to need my pen back." LobbyAnn stops in her tracks, as does the senator, and Alex says, calmly, "That pen is precious to me, you took it right off this desk, and I want it back."
The senator kind of gasps and says "She took your lapis pen?” and then she turns to LobbyAnn, who is frantically fishing around in her purse and stammering something about just borrowing it, and says, "Give it back." Once the pen is back in Alex's hands, the Senator says to Alex, "Come on back, I need you," and turns and walks back into her office, leaving LobbyAnn standing there as the Senator shuts the inner office door in her face.
Then the senator picks up her purse, smiles a big bright smile, and says, "Want Starbucks?" So she and Alex go out the side door and across the street. They could see the front door of the office from the Starbucks. It apparently took LobbyAnn about five minutes to realize how bad she'd messed up, and that she was not going to see the senator that day or any day.
Indeed, the project that she was going to ask for money toward was probably doomed as well. She'd lined up strong support in the House, so it might have made it through, though it was not the kind of project the senator favored. When she came slinking out, she almost certainly saw Alex and the senator sitting there drinking their drinks. Alex always ends this story with, "That was the best coffee I've ever had."
2. No Such Thing As A Free Ride
I work the night shift as a receptionist at a hotel in Norway, and most nights are spent watching Netflix and playing games. Last summer was really slow and I also worked a lot extra, so I ran out of stuff to watch and games to play. One night, I got an email from "Scooter." He wanted to book a room for almost 20 days. I just had to send him the price and confirmation that we had rooms available, and he would then send me his credit card info for me to pre-charge.
Normally we just delete these kinds of mail, but I was bored out of my mind, so I responded with an offer for around $2k for the entire stay. I also made sure to inform him that he could cancel for free up until the day of arrival. For your information, this is probably the most common fraud attempt in the Hotel/travel industry.
Unlike most businesses, we are able to charge credit and debit cards with only the card number and expiry date. No need for a pin code or other authorizations methods. Our software also allows us deposit money directly to local and international bank accounts by using the card number. Because of this, people like Scooter will try to prepay with stolen cards, but then cancel the booking and ask us to refund the amount to a different card.
A couple of hours after sending him the offer, he responded with a Visa number and told me to charge him as soon as possible. I checked the card with our validation software, and to my big surprise it did not belong to Scooter. If validation succeeds, it will return with the card owner’s name 90% of the time. I sent him a new mail stating that the card was declined because of insufficient funds.
He quickly replied and gave me a new card to try. Guess what, this one didn't belong to Scooter either. It wasn't even the same person as the first card. By checking the Bin codes, (6 first digits) I found which banks had issued the cards. Not even issued in the same country...My plan was to just call the banks and inform them of the attempted scam, but there were still several hours before I could go home, so I decided to screw with Scooter a bit more.
I sent him a reply that the second card went through, and also the "reference number" for his stay at our hotel. As expected, a couple of hours later, Scooter sent an email cancelling the order and asked if we could refund the money to a different card, as he had lost his wallet and deactivated the card he paid with. This card was issued from a Polish bank.
Not sure why, but Polish bank accounts are often used by people who want to launder money from bitcoins and drugs. You can buy a legit card for around $500 that is registered to some guy or girl in Poland from darknet. At this point, Scooter was probably pretty happy about the $2k he soon would receive. I replied that it was no problem for me to transfer the money to a different card, as long as it was valid.
How fun would it be to also cancel his "own" card, so that he had to spend $500 for a new one? Not. Fun. Enough. In the last mail I wrote that he could send me the card number, but that our e-mail server would go down for maintenance in a few minutes, so my boss would do it on Monday. It was now Saturday morning, so enough time for the "charged" bank to call us and reverse the transfer.
If he needed the money right away, I told him to call the hotel before I ended my shift at 7 am. He called almost immediately, and I wrote down the card number and his phone number. I told him I transferred the money, and that it would be in his account by noon. My shift ended, and I went home with all the information Scooter had provided.
I wanted to see if I could find out who he was, and of course this idiot had an open Facebook profile that I found using his phone number. He even listed his address and employer. He lived somewhere outside of London, in an area I would describe as a British trailer park. Houses that where nice at some point, but where the owners had spent no money on maintenance since it was built.
Trash everywhere, and broken windows that were boarded up or "fixed" by sealing holes with garbage. Now to the fun part. According to his FB profile, Scooter worked at a hotel! This meant that he would have access to card information from guests that booked through sites like Booking.com. I called the manager of the hotel and told him there was reason to believe that one of his employees was trying to commit credit card fraud, and that the card numbers could belong to their guests.
I gave him the name of the people who owned the cards Scooter tried to pay with, and to no surprise both had stayed at the hotel. I told him it was Scooter, and the manager just exploded in anger. Not 100% sure what he said because he was screaming so loud, but I think Scooter wasn't a normal employee. He worked there through some kind of government training program or something.
After talking to the manager, I called both Visa and MasterCard international and told them about Scooter’s little business venture. Apparently it's pretty easy to check if there are more cards that have been involved. The authorities also called me later to get a statement regarding the whole situation, so I know that the manager reported it. Not sure what happened to Scooter, but according to his Facebook profile, he no longer works at the hotel.
3. The One-Upper
A woman I work with literally copied this great story that I tell about me being in the same hospital at the same time that my niece was born. She tells it as if it was her husband and she was in the hospital giving birth. She’s a known one-upper; everything you do she did it better, faster, it was worse for her, etc.—so it didn’t surprise me when a coworker told me she regularly tells clients that story. She likes to play games—but I do too.
Every single day as I get in, I pour a tiny bit of my water bottle out on her desk, chair, or on the carpet somewhere in her office. In my mind, mold is slowly growing in her office, her skirt gets wet when she sits down, and any fresh documents she sits on her desk get sat right in a small puddle of water.
4. More Than Just A Drive
I used to drive for Lyft while I was in grad school. Once, I picked up an undergraduate college kid. The following conversation ensued. Me, “What're you studying? Him, “Computer science.” Me, “Oh awesome! What kind of projects are you doing now?” Him, “It's pretty complicated, but I do some pretty amazing things. You wouldn't get it.”
Me, “Like what? I'd love to hear about your projects.” Him, “Super intense database stuff and web app stuff like HTML. I just learned about the NodeJS framework. This is probably all over your head. What about you? Have you ever gone to college?” Me, “I am currently a computer science graduate student, with a dual bachelor's in computer science and computer systems engineering.”
He was awkwardly silent after that, but I still asked him about his projects and he was more than happy to share his experiences knowing that this conversation was definitely not over my head.
5. A Taste Of Her Own Medicine
I was out to a movie with my friends last night. We come and sit down, and I realize pretty soon that this girl in the row behind us has her feet up on my friend David's seat. She's there with one of her friends. So David turns around and he says something like, "Uh, do you think you could put your feet down?" And I think they say something in response but I didn't hear it.
The feet didn't go down. A few minutes later, David says, "Hey, will you get your feet off my chair? It's extremely rude." And they still don't budge. So I tell David that he should go find an employee and get them to talk to this girl. He does exactly that, and after a couple of minutes, an employee comes and talks to this girl.
She is obviously pretty peeved but begrudgingly agrees to put her feet down. After the employee leaves, she puts her feet right back up. At this point, I'm teed off. Why is it so important to you that you have your feet up on someone's chair? You're just being a brat. So I get out of my seat, walk up two rows, sit down in the seat directly behind this girl, and stick my foot on the back of her chair and push it forward.
They both turn around and try to say something to me, but I can't really hear them since the movie had started by this point, so I just say "just watch the movie." I kept my feet up there the entire movie. It felt like I had done wall sits for two hours but I'm glad I did it.
6. Restaurant Playground
This was about 15 years ago, in college, while I was a host at a crummy Mexican restaurant. It’s a normal, busy Saturday night, and this guy walks in, right past me. He circles through the whole restaurant, comes back, and points out the table he wants to sit at. I do exactly as he asks. I knew what he was doing. He did not want to sit by any kids. Now, what happened next was completely avoidable, but he had angered me by acting like a smug jerk.
I proceeded to surround him with every party including kids. Loud kids, messy kids, small kids, birthday parties, I’ve got the perfect seat for you! I could see that he was ready to erupt, but it was too dang funny. He came up and yelled at me in front of the entire restaurant for the slights. I played dumb and then went in the back and laughed my butt off with everyone else.
7. Make Like A Tree
We live in an old and big manor that has been split into three attached houses. The houses are about 150 years old and were built around five huge giant sequoias, which were about 200 years old. In the UK, giant sequoias are very rare and the two in our garden upped the house price by about £60,000. We lived next to two really nice neighbors, one young couple and one old couple.
The story: unfortunately, our old neighbors passed, so their child and her family moved in (let’s call her Joe). Joe was instantly a pain in the butt. We had been sharing chickens with the previous neighbors and Joe agreed to keep sharing them, however, on her nights she would constantly forget to put them away so we would have to check them every night anyway.
One night, her little brats thought it would be funny to open our personal duck pen in the night, which leads to a mass slaughter. Later, the chickens went the same way. About two years ago, there was a storm and one of her sequoias somehow fell over. They were distraught (understandably) but from then on, the jealousy started. She would constantly complain about how lucky we were to have two sequoias in our garden, but also how our sequoia was making too much shade in their garden.
Anyway, we just thought it was Joe being a pain. There were a few dry threats like they will chop it down or maybe the next storm will blow it down. Until we came back from a holiday to France to find a huge six-meter stump and nothing else! I mean how the heck do you get rid of a 100ft tree in like two weeks? Two of our old British oak trees had been crushed as well.
My mom and sisters where crying, my dad was red in the face, and we had no evidence Joe had done it. She claimed that there had been a storm and she had to get rid of it. We had a security camera at the front of the house, but you can get in the back undetected if you go through a few fields. We then were given an £8000 bill for damages to her property and to have the tree chopped up and removed.
The wood alone would have been worth a small fortune. We had lost all hope, and two weeks had passed when my dad came running in from the garden. See, we had put up a wildlife camera a few months ago. It had caught everything. We got a lawyer on the phone and started our revenge. We got a tree surgeon out who said it was an original specimen brought into the UK in 1860.
He also told us to call out an engineer because the roots might be in the foundation, so when they rot it could damage the house and it turns out we would need to redo the foundations. Then we took Joe to court and sued them for damage to property, trespassing, and lots of other smaller claims. It went to about £500,000 ($700,000). They had to move out.
And we have now paid off the mortgage, done a lovely loft and kitchen conversion, and have basically done up the house and garden. We have also planted a 60-year-old sequoia tree in the back garden, and had our kitchen counter and table made from the old sequoia. We now have a new lovely family living next to us who we share chickens, ducks, and pygmy goats with. They are very nice and I make a fortune babysitting their kids.
8. Little Light Lie
Some years ago, we had some new neighbors move in next door. Nice enough people, but we had a problem with them. The husband traveled a lot and his wife was afraid of just about everything—the dark, thunderstorms, you name it. The problem was the floodlights over their garage doors. She would leave them on all night, every night, even though you couldn't see them from inside of their house.
They were positioned such that they would shine into our bedroom at night. We were not able to block them effectively with our curtains. We asked them politely several times if they could turn them off at night since they served no effective purpose. They adamantly refused. I offered to pay for a timer that would control them.
No way they would consider it. I thought about taking the bulbs out, hitting them with my pellet gun, etc. The solution that I arrived at was to simply loosen them up enough that they wouldn't come on. Since they couldn't see them from inside the house, it was about five-six months before they realized that they were not working. They screwed them back in. I waited a couple of weeks and unscrewed them again.
Another few months went by. Finally, one day, my neighbor asked me if I ever had any trouble with my outdoor lights. I told him yes, as a matter of fact, I did. I said that they would loosen up occasionally and I would have to retighten them. I blamed it on vibration from the traffic on our street. He said that he had the same problem.
I told him that I finally just gave up and left them off. He eventually did the same. We were happy with the final outcome and we were able to keep pace in the neighborhood.
9. Truth Prevails
Last year when I was working at Chipotle, one of the assistant managers got on my last nerve. He would just sit in the office on his phone gossiping or screaming in Spanish all day, and if something needed to be done, he’d always make one of us do it, no matter how long the line was. He’d take breaks for over an hour when we were allowed 30 minutes, and he would blame other people for things that went wrong.
One night AFTER I left for work, disaster apparently struck and we got lots of bad reviews. I came back to work the next day and my manager sat me down to discuss all of the things I did wrong. The assistant manager told me, “I don’t want you to lose your job, but you need to do better” and that was a wrap.
I find out he somehow blamed me for everything HE did wrong. At that point, I was done taking his nonsense. So instead of making a scene, since I’m the quiet one who just listens instead of causing drama, I took my assistant manager aside and told her how it really happened, getting other coworkers that hated him to back me up. They reviewed the security cameras and he got fired the next day. I saw him about a week later at the neighborhood grocery store and it was mad awkward because I don’t think he realized quiet little me was the one that got him fired.
10. Homecoming King
As a background, I grew up in a conservative little town in a conservative rural area heavily dominated by religion. This makes people put great stock on moral purity and appearances. Keeping up the facade is the most important thing. Everyone must go to church weekly, and people are heavily judged for appearing sinful. This was a bad thing for me as the cards were heavily stacked against me from birth.
You see, I'm a rape baby. My mother lost her parents when she was young and was taken in by her uncle and aunt. The uncle had an important position in the local religious hierarchy. So when he and a couple of his friends started mistreating my mom, it was ignored by everyone. When she got pregnant, it was painted as showing that she's a harlot running around seducing married men. She was cast out.
Why she didn't move out of town, I don't know, but yeah. Then I came into the picture, born out of wedlock and with no father, branded as a sinful outcast. My childhood was horrible. I won't go into details, but enough to say that by the time I started going to school, I was quite damaged. School made it worse. I was teased relentlessly.
Teachers were part of it, since they were all part of the religious community, which saw me as stained. So yeah, in school I became that “trench coat kid” or its local cultural equivalent. I became weird and hostile on purpose to turn people off. People were casting me into the mold of being damaged and stained, so yeah, I took it and turned it into something to protect myself with.
Despite all this opposition, I managed to graduate with decent grades. A distant aunt, my only decent relative, helped me get into a college in an actual city. She was the black sheep of the family and saw herself in me, maybe? Around this time, my mother drank herself silly and soon passed. Can't blame her for it. She had a life insurance policy that helped me study, and city life liberated me.
I went into therapy and managed to treat the wounds that town had sliced into me. I thought I got rid of that town, but I guess some part of it never left me. Years went by. I became a kind of analytical consultant. I work for an international company that does out-of-the-box analysis for other companies. I won't go into details to protect my identity, but we assist in solving all kinds of situations.
Well, in my line of work, I'm sometimes called in to help downsizing operations. This sucks, I feel for the people who get fired, but if I wouldn't do it, someone else would. A couple of years ago, I got an assignment to go into three different factories and assess them wholesale, then come with a suggestion on which of them to move abroad. When I saw the list, a mix of emotions hit me.
My hometown was among those three factories. You see, the town I grew up in was one of those "one smoke-stack towns" like we say in my country. There was one factory and some agriculture. Everyone worked in those jobs, like 60% of people in the factory. The rest of the economy revolved around supporting the factory and the people working there.
Most of the people were looking forward at nothing but a job at the factory after getting out of school. The religious community running the town ran the factory as well, and the big shots in the community tended to be bosses in the factory. This meant that the factory wasn't run that well; promotions were based on "holiness," not on merit or skill.
The trip back to the hometown was glorious. Most people didn't recognize me at first. The chubby outcast had become outwardly just another corporate drone. I inspected all the paperwork, listened to all their speeches and lies, and audited the processes. In the process, I dropped hints and finally they got who I was. The factory people threw a party for me then for the old time’s sake.
Many of my old school "buddies" were there. We remembered fake good times together. I threw shadow on every party by pulling up some certain event of teasing I had endured, just to see the atmosphere turn awkward. Then I laughed at it like it was always a joke and I had grown out of it. Inside, I was seething with hatred and enjoying this all.
I really loved seeing their faces, seeing what they had become, because I was going to take it all away from them. In the end they seemed relieved, believing that they were lucky it was me doing the audit, that the hometown boy would protect them. After my visit—lasting a couple of days—was over, I cruised around the town in my rented car, just to see how the people lived and to remember what it was like.
My state of mind was something close to arousal. I had never understood why people pursue positions of power, but yeah, now I understood. The rest is, as they say, history. I wrote a really scathing report, documenting every little flaw and mistake ever done in the town plant. I didn't need to lie or fabricate. I simply took things that existed and polished them until they looked even worse than they were.
The factory was shut down and in the following three years, the town dried up. No business venture ever came to replace it. Drug use spiked, as did crime. Lives fell apart, families fell apart. They still haven't recovered, save for a few brighter souls who moved away. I still stalk them on social media sometimes, enjoying how bad their lives are, and how they all finally got to pay for what they did to me and my mom.
I don't feel a slight bit of remorse. If I could do it all again, I would—only I'd first make it so I could be present to watch when they received the news about the factory being shut down. Heck, in my fantasy version of the events, I'd stay in town for a year just to see everyone fall apart. In reality, I will only go there back once: When my uncle finally passes, I'm going to go and pee on his grave.
11. Words Are Hard
I was working as a receptionist on my summer break from college. One day, a woman with a tired, midwestern, middle-aged voice called from a potential vendor's office and asked for our mailing address. I rattled off, "60 West 26th Street, Suite 400,” before she stopped me and asked me to repeat what I just said, so I did.
She stopped me again and asked in this faux-puzzled way, "So that's S-W-E-E-T 400?” Spelling out sweet. I replied with innocent earnestness, because I think somehow I had not been clear that it is suite, as in S-U-I-T-E. She responded with this incredulous, yet delighted laugh that goes on for what seemed like five minutes.
"Dear, you don't pronounce that, "sweet!”, she said, like she was talking to a five-year-old that just failed kindergarten. "It's pronounced ‘suit’." I think she must be joking or I still hadn't made myself clear, so I actually laughed and said, “no, sorry I wasn't clear, it's suite, you know, like a suite of offices?"
Then she sighs wearily like she just can't believe what she has to deal with, and levels with me, so she thinks. "Look, I feel bad telling you this, but you are making a complete fool of yourself every time you say your office address. I know you are going to be embarrassed, but when you get off the phone with me, go find a dictionary and have someone else explain to you how to pronounce suit.”
“It's probably not your fault, your parents probably had no schooling and you were badly educated so you don't know any better, but if you don't want to be fired, you'll do what I say for your own good." She then proceeded to make me say the address again, insisting I pronounce suite as suit, and not allowing me to continue unless I said it correctly.
So I muttered my way through it and she finally got off the phone after telling me that I would thank her one day. I just kept wishing she had inadvertently put the phone down wrong so it didn't disconnect, because I was pretty sure the next sentence out of her mouth to anyone within ears reach in her office would be, "My God you wouldn't believe the fool I just spoke to.”
“She kept telling me her office "sweet" number! I didn't know what she was talking about, so I made her spell it for me because I wasn't previously aware a human being could be so stupid as to pronounce S-U-I-T-E as sweet, when anyone with half a brain cell knows it's pronounced SUIT! Why oh why do they give morons jobs?"
Only to have everyone go, "uhhhhhh" wondering if they should be the one to break the news.
12. The Gift Of Pettiness
I gave my jerk sister-in-law a beautifully wrapped (like, tight wrapping paper with so much perfectly curled ribbon) copy of Toxic In-Laws at her bridal shower. I obviously did not attend said shower, so she likely opened the gift in front of the crowd, for maximum embarrassment. Yes, yes, it made me look ridiculous, no doubt, but I know the irony probably shook her good, which was my goal.
13. The Power Of Caterers
One time, I was working a small event at the convention center as a banquet server. After we had loaded in and set up, I was one of three servers working the event of about 100 people. There was a buffet. The local weatherman was there, but he demanded I bring him a plate. Pretty rude, but I went and got one for him anyway. Then he demanded that I fill his coffee. There was one on the table—it was a self-serve event—but I poured his coffee anyway. He was still being very rude.
Then this weirdo demanded that I cut his chicken for him. That was the final straw. So I asked how old he was, exactly who he thought he was, and who he thought I must be to take his mistreatment. I then took his plate and announced to the entire room that if I see this man-child eating or drinking ANYTHING, I would take all the coffee, and all the food back, and end the event. He left hungry. Don’t mess with catering.
14. Solar Opposites
I was asked by my brother and girlfriend which planet is first starting from the Sun. I was then belittled for 20 minutes after answering Mercury, because they were adamant it was Venus. I was just disappointed because we were in our 20s.
15. Treat Others As You Want To Be Treated
One of my biggest pet peeves is when somebody buys something, but instead of handing me the money, they plop it down on the counter. So one guy came up and was being… undesirable. Grown man. When it comes time to pay, he grabs a bunch of crumpled cash and throws it on the counter in front of me. I stare at it for a few moments and eventually the guy says something along the lines of, “The money’s right there, you can count it!”
So being the petty little guy I am, I pick it up, thumb through it incredibly slowly (about 30-45 seconds without exaggeration), and this guy is giving me the ANGRIEST look. I open the register to grab his change and I go to set it on the counter. He tries to dip his hand beneath mine to grab it so I slide my hand to the side and drop it on the counter. I slide the item he bought across the counter and look up and smile with a, “Have a very nice day sir".
He storms off and I ask if he’d like his receipt. When comes back and tries to snatch it out of my hand, he instead rips it in half and it took all of my energy not to bust out into tears. I will go to any lengths to anger people if they treat me like I’m subhuman.
16. Neighborly Behavior
I lived across the street from a very bored stay-at-home mom whose excess idle time turned her into an insufferable busybody. One day, her husband backed out of the driveway and slammed into my roommate's car parked on the curb. He apologized, gave us his insurance info, and took care of it. He was never a problem, because he accepted responsibility for what he did.
His wife, however, demanded that we never ever park any cars at the curb again, because "we can't get out of our driveway otherwise." The street was very wide, she was just completely unable to accept that the accident was her husband's fault, and figured we were somehow responsible for it, ergo we were responsible for preventing it in the future.
We told her that we would avoid parking there whenever possible, but that we still had the right to park on the street, and that if necessary we would still do so, and that it was her and her husband's responsibility to avoid hitting other people's parked cars when backing out of the driveway. She wasn't happy with that answer, but just told us we better stay out of her family's way, and stormed off.
One day, she came storming over, banging on the front door, cussing us out. We got her on our security camera saying, "If you don't move that car in the next 10 minutes, I am going to total it with my truck. It'll be your fault, and you'll have to pay for the damage to my vehicle." To this, I simply responded: "I don't know whose car that is, but I didn't park it there. I have you on camera, so if you do anything to that car, I'll have to call the authorities and hand over this tape."
She then threatened to sue me for invasion of privacy for recording her, and still insisted that we move the car, even though it wasn't our property. We just ignored her, and she did not do anything to the car. We did keep the recording, though. A few weeks later, I had a friend visit from out of town. He parked his car on the curb, and then started unloading some stuff from his trunk.
She came storming out, screaming and cussing at him. "I have told you repeatedly never park your car on this curb. If you don't move it, I am going to total it, and you can pay for a new car, as well as the damage you do to mine!" He tried to calm her down, and asked if there was somewhere else he could park, and she replied "You can park it in Hell, because that's where you'll be after I ruin you!" But there was something crucial she didn’t know.
Unfortunately for her, he had his dash cam running the whole time, and it captured everything. He called the authorities and she was detained for threatening to commit vandalism. A few days later, she left a long-winded hate-letter in our mailbox. It was written as if it were an open letter from the entire neighborhood, and it basically said that "Nobody knows who you are," and "Everyone wishes you would move away," and "Nobody wants you living in our neighborhood."
Thing is, she forgot about the security cameras. I took the video of her opening my mailbox, which included her taking all our letters out of the mailbox and rifling through them, and I gave them to the post office. This led to her getting detained a second time that week. After that, we used her two arrests, our collection of security and dash cam footage, and her letter to get a restraining order against her that actually prohibited her from entering her own home. But we didn’t stop there.
We called the authorities every time we saw her because she was in violation of the order. She ended up having to live in a hotel room, and her husband came over, apologized to us, and asked if we would drop the restraining order so his wife could come home. I told him I would do it, but only if she wrote me, my wife, our roommates, and the friend of mine she threatened a one-page apology for her harassment, and that she would promise to never, ever contact us again for any reason whatsoever moving forward.
I received no apology, and the house went on the market a week later. Some people…
17. Stacy, not STACEY
My first name is Stacy with no E. One of my biggest pet peeves is having people spell it wrong. I worked with a woman named Lesa. Not the normal Lisa, but Lesa. We worked on a project together and she had to email me several times a day. Each time she spelled my name STACEY.
It didn’t seem to matter that my signature was spelled without an E or that Outlook had it spelled without an E. She ALWAYS put the E in it and it drove me nuts. I finally admitted to her that it bothered me. She apologized. I figured with an oddly spelled name, she’d be extra sensitive to it. Nope. The very next email she sent, less than an hour later, she spelled it wrong again. So, I gave her the exact same courtesy —from that moment on, any time I wrote her an email or referred to her in a group email, I typed Lisa. It still gives me great satisfaction that I did that.
18. Revenge Clap
I think one of the most satisfactory ones for me was when I got back at my childhood tormentors. I got into fights because I’d physically defend friends weaker, smaller, and younger than me. Eventually, the jerks had had enough. The main girl literally recruited two years worth of bad kids. My friends sat at our usual table. The hall was weirdly empty, then came in ALL the jerks and sat at two (eight-person each) tables.
Three of them came up to me. They started insulting us. One grabbed my fork and started eating my pasta. She then picked up my cardboard juice box, stuck the straw in it, and started drinking. I clapped my hands together and all the juice flooded into her mouth where she was forced to splutter it all down herself. The rest of the jerks found this hilarious, and, not having a nice fun fight to get involved in, left.
The main jerk with the juice all over her started yelling at me. I said, “Oh yeah? You and what army?” She panicked and fled. I ate my pasta and one of my friends shared their drink with me.
19. Tricked
I made vegetarian nachos with fake mince in front of a bunch of friends for a party. Another friend showed up late and, unprompted, started trash talking vegetarian food because the nachos were so good he could never give up meat. Boy, was he in for a rude awakening. Finally, one of the other guests eventually corrected him.
20. Holier Than Thou
My parents were both killed a hit and run car accident when I was 10. My dad was only 39 and my mom 35, and neither of them had relatives who could take me in. We lived in a really small, church-going town where everyone knew one another. My dad had been the heir to a small fortune and so didn't really have to work. He didn't like the big city, so him and my mom decided to move to a small town where he could have an antique store.
My mom was into collecting antiques. I would have had to go the orphanage route when they passed, but this couple from the church, who I will call Mr. and Mrs. Banks, made this big to-do in church about how "a little girl needs a loving home, and God has given us this joyous task of bringing her up in our home and hearts." It's been a long time and I don't remember if those were Mrs. Banks' exact words, but they were something cringe-worthy like that.
The Banks had their own daughter "Kitty" who was a year older than me. That should have meant we would be super good friends, but Kitty had her own thing going and practically ignored me. She was a holier than thou type. The Banks received a stipend from the state to take care of me, but they also received checks every month from my dad's estate, which was supposed to take care of me until I was 18. When I did turn 18, I would receive full control of my inheritance.
The Banks weren't exactly cruel to me, but in private it was clear they were just using me to build up their reputation in town. In front of other people, they'd fawn over me in a sick, cotton candy fashion that made me uncomfortable. They'd also make Kitty be nice to me in public, which she resented. The Banks would also put on a big show whenever social workers came to check up on me.
They'd coach me before the lady would come, and tell me to praise how godly and wonderful they were. After the social worker left, they'd go right back to ignoring me and spending my dad's money on the Internet or on trips. It was clear to me even as a tween and teen that the Banks were only using some of my endowment, both from the state and from my trust, to take care of me.
The rest they spent on themselves. As I grew older, I could see that my foster parents would pretend as though they had great business acumen and that's why they had more money and could buy a new Volvo (where I'm from, a new Volvo is an event) and take a trip to New York and buy fancy clothes for Kitty. When I was 17, I noticed that my foster parents were stockpiling away my trust fund money to pay for Kitty's tuition to college.
Throughout this time, the Banks would never outright say so, but would heavily imply that I "owed them" and that once I got control of my inheritance, that I should be Godly and generous and give them some material compensation for "all the work" they did to raise me. I think they already got lots of material, especially since Mrs. Banks practically took all of my mom's antiques from her store and kept them for herself, gave them to Kitty, or to her other relatives.
One thing my mom never kept at her store, however, was an extremely expensive, Baroque-era fine china set, absolutely complete and worth tens of thousands of dollars. Not a replica, but the real deal. So real, Napoleon Bonaparte himself might well have eaten a steak off those plates. Probably not, but you get the point. It was my china set of course, but Mrs. Banks thought I was an idiot and didn't know that.
She would always talk about how "this china set will go to Kitty on her wedding day." Mrs. Banks assumed that since I always dressed like a tomboy and didn't care about all my mom's antiques that Mrs. Banks gave away, that I just didn't care about the china set. When I was a kid, my mom told me that things were things, and not to obsess over them.
So, having the frou frou china set for myself wasn't an issue. What WAS an issue was Mrs. Banks acting like it was hers to give away. Wrong, lady. So, once Kitty went off to college thanks to MY biological mom and dad's money, I had to make my own plans. I had always done well in school and had actually gotten a partial scholarship to attend school out of state.
The rest I could easily pay for with my inheritance, which I would very soon have control of. Per usual, Mr. and Mrs. Banks were haranguing me about how I owed them compensation and since I was going to be rich soon, I ought to share the wealth. I figured that over the past seven years they probably misappropriated more than two hundred thousand dollars of my parents' money, to say nothing of the state money they misused.
I think they more than shared the wealth. I never promised anything, I just smiled and kept a tally of every single bank statement (I got them quarterly) that my trust issued over the years. The Banks family never shared them with me, of course, but when I asked the actual bank for a rundown, they were more than happy to oblige. I also wrote down every single major purchase my foster parents clearly made over the past seven years with money that was clearly beyond their means as a housewife and an insurance salesman.
Things such as a $40,000 car for cash, a used $20,000 car for cash that they gave to Kitty, trips to Hawaii, New York, cash gifts to the church that made them look super generous at my deceased parents' expense. I kept it all in a nice, three-ring binder. I already arranged my travel to my new campus. I didn't have much stuff at the Banks' house anyway, and had zero intention of coming back, at least to their home.
The Banks knew I was leaving but didn't bother seeing me off, because they assumed I'd come back to "give them their due." I waited for our church's yearly antique sale extravaganza, set to begin in three days. Per usual, the Banks donated all sorts of random stuff, many of it knick knacks that used to belong to my mom and technically belonged to me.
They weren't shy about giving away my stuff and taking credit for it. While Mr. and Mrs. Banks were on one of their shopping sprees with my parents' money and away from their house, I boxed up the china set and brought it to church. I told the rummage sale committee that Mrs. Banks wanted to donate the priceless antiques for sale, all benefits to go to the church.
"This donation is made in the name of Mr. and Mrs. Banks." I was being fair. If Mrs. Banks was really so godly, she would be delighted that such a wonderful donation be made in her name. Sadly, I knew she'd go the other way. The ladies were flabbergasted, especially when I told them the appraisal of the set's value. I also told them that if they needed proof of ownership and right to sell, to contact the number of a certain attorney in New York.
They thanked me profusely and praised the Lord Jesus for Mrs. Banks' generosity. This would be the most expensive item in their sale’s history. Everyone knew no one could afford to buy the set outright, but everyone would love to buy the pieces piecemeal. Like, "I got a cup and saucer," or "I got one of the chargers," "I got an egg cup..."
The Banks were supposed to work the sale the second day and I wasn't there. What I did hear was that my foster mom went ballistic when she saw "her" china set for sale, and that it was a huge hit, and ladies from all over the county had bought pieces of it, and it raised SO much money for the church! My foster mom threw a tantrum, and said that I had taken the set from her house.
The ladies at the church explained that I had made the donation in HER name, and she was getting credit for the donation to the church. My foster mom was practically yanking her hair out, according to what I heard later. She was trying to track down who had bought pieces, and trying to get them back. Of course, she was unsuccessful.
What she WAS successful in was looking like a Grade-A douchebag. The entire church thought she was selfish and materialistic and acting very ungodly, especially the way she cursed her foster daughter. A week later, my foster parents received a package by registered mail from me and my attorney. It contained my binder where I showed my bank statements and also a list of all their spending extravagances.
It also contained a warning from my attorney that should they ever try to contact me again for money, that they will receive a BILL and a court date. That was that. 10 years later, I work as a third-grade teacher. I'm married to an accountant, and we have a three-year-old son and one-year-old daughter. Kitty ended up working through college, and as we've gotten older, we've reconnected.
She apologized for the way she acted when we were kids. We're friends now, and see each other multiple times a year, often just for lunch. She's an elementary school teacher, too, and married to an engineer. She has a four-year-old daughter. Both of our older kids play together when our families meet. We both have our OWN wedding china.
She has gone to a lot of therapy due to her toxic parents, she tells me. As for her parents? They still live in their small town because they're too broke to move. Their reputation is of being "that couple who drove both their children away and took money from that poor little girl.” I sure hope that your brand-new Volvo was worth it, you jerks.
21. Mysterious Moving Filing Cabinet
I was a work-study student in my college’s IT department for four years, including summers. I did just about everything in the department, and I had a great relationship with my coworkers. But in my last year, they hired a full-time basic support guy, who immediately started acting like he knew everything. He also acted like was in charge of me, when I spent literally all of my time training him and doing damage control on his attempts to help.
We shared a desk, which infuriated me because even outside of work, I would not have liked this guy. He was a Grade-A misogynist, a complete loser...basically, every bad IT stereotype rolled into one annoying package. I wanted him to feel pain, and pain he felt indeed. Under our desk, we shared a filing cabinet. Every time he did something to bother me, which was pretty much every day, I’d inch the filing cabinet over so when he’d sit down and roll his chair forward, he’d bang his left knee off the sharp corner. He never figured it out. He’d just swear and slide it over a little. Dumb as a post, that one.
Pxfuel
22. More Than One Meaning
I was talking about binary star systems at a party, when suddenly, my ex says, "That's not what binary is, are you dumb?" Then another friend looked up the word binary and read it out loud to him, and his eyes bugged out. I told him, "Stop pretending to be an expert on things you don't understand. It makes you look like an idiot."
My ex was thinking of binary computer code. He didn't consider that other things could be binary too.
23. Drying Up After Him
My roommate in college used to get out of the shower dripping wet and leave water all over the bathroom floor. I asked him several times to dry himself off in the shower but he refused. Rather than get angry about it, I just started drying off the bathroom floor every morning with his bath towel.
24. Finding A Loophole
First, you have to appreciate the kind of guy Nathan is. Brilliant engineer/crazy person. Because Nathan likes rules and Nathan doesn't give up when he knows how things should work. I like to get him to tell the story whenever we're together because he doesn't even see why it's funny—it's just how he deals with all problems. Nathan was like if you saw Sisyphus and you thought, maybe I should try to stop him.
But then one day, the boulder was on top of the hill. And you go and ask Sisyphus how he did it and he replies, "It was simple...I just kept pushing it forever and ever, and eventually...the mountain gave up." A real Grade 19 Bureaucrat. He just works systems through problems no matter how daunting they should seem. Until one day, when Nathan's unstoppable force met an immovable object.
I came into work and saw checks and envelopes spread all over his desk. And Nathan filling them out with the kind of grin Steve Buscemi might have crossing names off a list with a tube of lipstick. I ask him about it and he calmly starts explaining that he's "having trouble with the IRS." I probe a little deeper since that in no way explains more than one check or envelope, and he starts telling me about how last year during tax season he was about to be in China for work so he started filling his taxes out early while at his parents' house.
He owed a little but left before he could mail it in. But he remembered while in China and (after breaking through the firewall) paid it online. But then his parents, thinking he forgot, also wrote a check for him and mailed his taxes in too. So now his taxes would be paid twice. So they said don't worry about it, we'll cancel the check. Well, it turns out that IRS has a cancelled check fee of something like $40.
And they sent Nathan a bill and penalty for the $40...That was it. That was the whole story. A $40 fee. Nathan, why do you have 20 checks on your desk? "Oh, well after I explained to them what was wrong with the fee, they didn't get it." So Nathan spent the next four weeks escalating the issue to the point that he got a case officer—a real, live human agent on the phone with a case number.
Nathan started by asking for the agent to spell his name and politely to demonstrate that he was where he said he was by asking how the weather was and how the "drive in" had been that day. He then asked for his agent's manager. He got their name and exchanged some pleasantries. He explained that his parents wrote the check but that he was the one being charged the fee.
The agent explained that this was the policy of the IRS: "All cancelled checks will result in a $40 fee." The agent and Nathan went in rigorously compliant circles for hours exploring the rules. Nathan then calmly confirmed that: It is the policy of the IRS to allow just anyone to write a check on behalf of anyone else: "Yes sir, that is fine. You just need to indicate the name and zip code of the account."
Second: It is the policy of the IRS to charge a $40 cancellation fee to the person whose account is indicated on the check: "Yes sir, that is the policy.” This means that—and I swear to God he actually asked the agent this hypothetical on the phone—"I (Nathan) could write a $10 check and indicate it's for you (Mr. "Agent" at 1234567 Schenectady, NY) and cancel it, resulting in a $40 fee for you with absolutely no penalty or recourse to me?"
The equally compliant and rule-minded agent replied, "Yes sir, I guess you could." So, that's what Nathan did. And that's what he was doing with 20 checks on his desk and what he meant by "IRS trouble." He was following through... sending checks to the IRS addressed to pay the taxes of the agent and the agent's manager, all so Nathan could cancel them, causing the agent and his manager to owe the IRS a fee for each cancelled check.
He was exploiting the same flaw in the system in which he was caught to essentially extort the IRS agents. I laughed about this for weeks after. But then came the best part. Three or so weeks later, I'll be darned if he didn't receive a letter from the IRS: "Sir, we understand the point you've made. Please consider your fee waived and I hope we can put this behind us."
25. Can I, Or May I?
This happened in the early 90s and at the time this teacher had been teaching for 30-plus years. It was a rural area, so many of my friends' parents had also suffered through at least one year of primary school with this awful woman. I've seen a grown woman cry recounting memories of her experiences—this teacher really was really that bad.
My second-grade teacher took pride in being a mean old witch to her students. Wielding control over our tiny little bladders was something that gave her particular satisfaction. One day during cursive lessons, this kid named Joseph asked to use the bathroom. She told him he should've used the bathroom during morning recess and would have to wait until lunch.
A little while later, he started squirming in his seat and again asked to use the bathroom, this time with more urgency. At this point, our teacher starts berating the kid by telling him he is a little baby for not holding his bladder like a big boy and suggesting that he should wear diapers. Joseph gets tired of her, stands up from his seat, stares her directly in the eye, and proceeds to unleash the most epic man-sized pee he could muster.
As fate would have it, he was wearing those mesh material basketball shorts, so the pee just flowed unobstructed down his legs and pooled on the carpet beneath him. A wave of giggling quickly spread through the classroom, which was basically the second grade equivalent of a slow clap. Our teacher just stood there dumbfounded for a moment before grabbing Joseph by the arm and dragging him off to the principal's office.
As they exited the room, Joseph glanced over his shoulder with a big grin on his face. A legend was born that day and we all enjoyed our newfound bathroom privileges for the remainder of the school year. The teacher retired the following year.
26. He Needed His Caffeine
When I was working as a barista, we had a regular who would come in a couple of times a week and act like an entitled jerk to all the employees. His sense of entitlement was really something else—would always order a double espresso with his meal, claiming he was “very busy and needed his caffeine” and insist we serve it to him after his meal. Normally that wouldn’t be a problem, but he would never tell us when he was finished eating; he would expect us to keep an eye on him and bring it as soon as he was finished (this was not a café with table service, by the way). He would obnoxiously clear his throat and make snide comments at us until we noticed and brought it to him, where he would complain about the terrible service and not tip.
I always gave him decaf.
27. Doesn’t Take An Expert To Know
The day after graduating from high school, my brother, who had just learned to drive stick, took me to go look at cars. The very first one he drove—an old Ford Explorer—wouldn't shift into fifth gear, at which point I said to him, "I don't think you should buy this one, something's seriously wrong with it." He told me to shut up, asked me what I knew about cars, then immediately bought it.
A week later, the transmission dropped. Me, the day the transmission dropped, "Hmmm, what do I know about cars? Not much, but obviously, more than you!" It's been almost 20 years, and whenever he gets too full of himself, I remind him of that. I still know almost nothing about cars, except they go "vroom" and get me places.
I've never had a major repair like a bad transmission, in a little over 15 years of driving and owning cars.
28. Concrete Pumpkin
I have a friend whose pumpkin/fall display at the end of his driveway would be run over by the neighborhood jerk. It happened every year. So my friend decided to put a stop to it. He withdrew money from his savings account so he would have enough to buy the largest pumpkin he could find, along with several large bags of Quikcrete. He filled that puppy up and made a real pretty display.
The jerk broke the axle of his bad car when he hit that pumpkin. He could not drive away. My friend had his car towed.
Flickr
29. Peace At Last
I was waiting for my flight to board at a major east coast airport. In walks this young, slick, LOUD business kid on a conference call, shouting into his Apple earbuds. Drops his bag on the one free seat and starts pacing the floor, up and down the aisle, oblivious to dozens of folks eating lunches, working quietly, and babies sleeping.
He continues pacing and shouting, “Yup, yup, we’ll upload that into the system…blah blah jargon jargon acronyms and business,” annoying everybody around and making everyone else get out of his way. Folks start giving him the stink eye, but his shouting and pacing continue, his circuit widening until he’s walking out of sight, then circling back, still shouting into the air.
After 20 minutes of this, I’m over it. The kid stalks off in a hurried pace, abandoning his backpack for the three or so minutes it takes him to pace the terminal. So I walk up to a TSA guard and point to the bag, “Sir, there’s an unclaimed backpack on that seat!” Then I walk away. TSA starts making announcements, trying to find the owner of the bag, but business kid is too oblivious, pacing and shouting.
TSA is already removing the bag when he realizes and chases after them. Too late, he’s a suspect and he has to follow them out of the terminal for a bag check. And now it’s quiet again.
30. Not Their Lucky Day
My first car was a 1984 Jeep CJ7, a pretty sweet ride for a dirt-poor teenager in the 90s. I was working midnights at a gas station and loaned it to my brother, who was taking a date to a party. I got a call around 1 am from my brother, who told me he left the keys in the Jeep and it was taken. I was devastated…but I was still on the phone with my brother when the thieves pulled my Jeep into my gas station to fill up on gas.
As luck would have it, the gas gauge on my Jeep was broken and always read "empty," and I worked at the only 24-hour gas station in the area. I pressed the silent alarm and...proceeded to fill up my Jeep (it was a full-serve station). When the thieves were out of the Jeep, I saw an opportunity to slip the key out of the ignition and into my pocket.
They paid for the gas and argued amongst each other about who had the keys last. The delay was enough for the authorities to arrive. I had to explain the story to the officer half a dozen times before he understood. The thieves had this stunned look of disbelief on their faces I'll never forget. The officers were belly-laughing telling the story to dispatch, all the while the thieves sat in cuffs in the back of the squad car.
The story made most of the major newspapers the following day.
31. The Deli Worker’s Trick
I work in the deli and when we weigh food on the scale, it usually takes a bit off because of cup weight (usually .04lbs). Anyway, if you put the lid on, it won’t take the weight of it off, so it adds .01lbs to it. If people are being rude to me, I use this to my advantage—I just put the lid on and then print the price tag out so they have to pay a slightly extra amount of money. A very small screw you.
32. That Came Full Circle
When I was in the sixth grade, our science teacher asked us what the shape of a rainbow is. I instantly answered, saying it's a circle, then the so called "topper" of our class looked at me, laughed, and did some trash talking afterwards. Then, the teacher said circle is the correct answer, and the whole class laughed at her.
33. Long-Term And Expensive
Back in 2001, I was cheated on by a guy I dated for a few years. After we broke up, I went to Walmart’s book aisle. I grabbed about 40 subscription postcards out of the magazines and filled them all out with his name and address. I marked the ‘bill me later option’ and mailed them slowly over a few weeks.
Five years later, we hung out via mutual friends, and in the garage, there were so many magazines that the two-car garage was a one car garage. Three years after this, we were talking and he mentioned how his credit was screwed up because he didn’t pay for some magazine subscriptions and they turned him in to the collection agency.
Flickr
34. Nepotism Doesn’t Always Work
This happened several years ago. I was working for a small medical supply company as the IT manager. Business was bad, and eventually the IT department had to downsize to just me. During this time, they brought in a new CFO that I had to report directly to. Let’s call her Pam. Pam had zero knowledge of IT and how things worked. Her motto was if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
PC/server lifecycles didn’t exist. We don’t have to pay for licensing to keep our firewall updated, it’s working just fine now. I went from having an annual budget to a “wish list” where she would deny everything I asked for. The couple that owned the company were real pieces of garbage too. One time we had a quarterly meeting and people were asking about how secure their jobs were.
The owners said that nobody was getting laid off and that our jobs were all secure. This was at 5:00 pm on a Wednesday. The very next morning at 9:00 am, they laid off six people. At noon, one of the owners showed up to show off the Escalade that he had just purchased that morning. During the first six months that Pam was there, she started firing everyone that worked for the old CFO and replaced them with her friends and family.
Honestly, three of her bridesmaids from her wedding a few years prior got hired to replace those that she fired. I knew I was on borrowed time. After she had been there for nine months, I was the only one left out of what was about a dozen people that worked for the old CFO. I knew my time was running out. I had been looking for work, but the 2008 crash just happened and the job market in my area went south quickly.
Sure enough, she called me into HR and blindsided me with an entirely trumped up charge that she claimed happened the day before. I was working with the VP of sales on a project that entire day, so I had a witness. I asked to bring him in since my boss was lying and was told, “this is not about him, this is about you.” Remember kids: HR is there to protect the business, not do what is right.
The next morning, I get introduced to an IT “expert” who just so happens to be Pam’s 21-year-old nephew. He was to shadow me and evaluate everything that I did to see if we could streamline any processes. In other words, they wanted me to train him to do my job. I quickly learned that this kid had absolutely no knowledge of IT. He’s the kid people think is an IT expert because he can hook up a Playstation to a TV.
He didn’t even know how to join a PC to a domain. So I knew what had to be done. The inventory, billing, and shipping and receiving were all run by scripts that I created on the server. They were all run using the domain admin account. I raised quite a fuss about giving him the domain admin account in front of Pam. I then loudly proclaimed that I was going to change the password to it since you can’t have people who don’t work for the company to have admin access to our network.
I was overruled and was told to give it to him. I complied, but I also showed him multiple times how to change passwords on the domain. I even had him write it down to make sure that he could do it. I really stressed the importance of changing the admin password and deleting his local account the second he is no longer “consulting” with us to him. I showed him a few things (but nothing in regards to what really made the company run) that day.
There wasn’t enough time in a year to bring this kid up to speed on how to run that place due to his complete ignorance of IT. I come into work the next day and sure enough I was let go because her nephew had found “my skills lacking in many areas.” I collect my last pay check and head home. The next morning, I get a call from the CFO and owners.
Apparently, her nephew wasn’t quite up to speed on everything we did there and she was graciously offering to pay me my regular salary to come in as a consultant and get her nephew up to speed on the IT infrastructure. I told her that I was now an independent contractor, and if she wanted my services I was going to charge her $200 per hour with a 250 hour minimum.
At that point, she told me that she was going to call the authorities for what I did if I didn’t come in and fix everything. My response was “Just so we’re clear, you fired me, replaced me with a completely unqualified idiot, and now you’re threatening to call the authorities on me if I don’t come in and fix what he did? I’ll hold, please call them and let me know what they said.”
She started cursing at me and hung up the phone. Turns out, her nephew did actually learn something from me: He changed the admin password after I had left. The one that ran all the scripts for inventory, billing, shipping, and ordering. According to some of my co-workers, the place was dead in the water for several days until they could get a real consultant in to go through the documentation that I had created and fix the issue.
The nephew was immediately fired and Pam was gone within a month.
35. Accidental Victory
I quit a job in a place I liked because of disgust for the new management (they were dishonest, judged people by brown-nosing instead of competence, etc.). I resigned seven days after my first child was born—that should show you how desperate I was. By total coincidence, my new employer was in the same building, one floor above. Within four years, a total of eight people have moved from the old to the new company—basically bleeding them dry of talent. The dumb boss of the old place gets very nervous when he sees us talking to any of his remaining employees in the elevator. But the best part of it all, karma-wise—I didn’t do this on purpose/out of spite—it just happened.
36. That Backfired
Our school's schedule got revamped which meant that one of our classes that was two periods long was cut in half to accommodate all the changes. When I brought this up to the teacher I was co-teaching with, she called me an idiot and told everyone sitting in our table group that I wasn't very good at math as everyone laughed.
A few minutes later, the principal cleared up the new schedule, only for her to realize that she was wrong in the first place. It felt so good to see the look on her face when she realized she was the idiot and not me.
37. Didn’t See That One Coming
Once at a game night, someone made a comment about an aspect of languages. The comment isn't really important. The point is, they were vaguely wondering about a thing, and I answered the question. They had just met me, and so they tried to rib me by laughing and saying I was wrong. I said, no, I’m pretty sure that's right, and this is why.
He scoffed and said, "It's not like you have a degree in languages or something." Everyone else immediately dissolved into giggles as I informed him that actually I had just moved back from grad school after getting my second linguistics degree. The bright pink look on his face was wonderful.
38. Burning In The Bathroom
Several coworkers and I noticed that our lunches and drinks would constantly go missing, even when clearly marked. One of my coworkers was a diabetic and it ended up causing him to have a hypoglycaemic incident due to having his food taken. So after that, things got serious. He brought in a lunch that was laced with laxatives and a Carolina reaper extract oil. The previous diabetic incident was well documented and HR at this point was now aware of the food bandit. Luckily, that day, he hit the jackpot.
Turns out it was someone from HR who was taking people’s food. We heard a blood-curdling scream when the guy took his first bite and he was caught red-handed. It only got better from there. He stayed in the office the remainder of the day as things were sorted out. However, he ended up in the bathroom suffering even more. So not only did he get his mouth burned, he was pooping his brains out at the same time.
39. Not Passive-Aggressive, Aggressive-Aggressive
I'm a senior at a large state university. This happened in the first semester of my freshman year. I was selected for an honors-type program that placed me in a co-ed dorm building with every other student in the program. As a dumb freshman, I rushed into a relationship with a freshman girl who lived right above me. We'll call her Megan.
It was convenient for me to date someone who lived so close, but everyone else in our building hated Megan because she talked a lot, and almost exclusively about herself. She bragged often about being a "fairly aggressive" person, but somehow I overlooked that mile-wide red flag. Right after Thanksgiving break, at the end of an evening class, I got a call from my mom, who noticed some unusual activity on my checking account.
Back then I had no credit card, so this account/debit card was my only access to my savings while I lived on campus. I rarely needed to buy anything during the semester, so I was puzzled to find that $104.29 had left my bank account over two weeks—in the form of six Grubhub food orders. At this point, I trusted Megan, but I decided to ask her about the money right away.
She denied any involvement and suggested that I cancel my debit card. After a really long phone call to the bank, I did just that. Next, I reached out to Grubhub customer service on Twitter: "Hey, my card was stolen and used for food orders on these dates. Can I have the receipts?" They sent me the first and last receipts, but they had to "redact" the personal info of the account holder.
I say "redact" in quotes because they just used the Snapchat draw tool, and Megan's name was still clearly visible on both receipts. What's more: The most recent receipt was only two hours old. She was probably still eating when I chopped up my debit card! It's worth noting that she and I both had unlimited dining plans—paid for by our respective parents—and we lived 500 feet from the nearest dining hall.
She didn't need to order food, and she definitely didn't need my money to do it. So I texted her again: "I have the receipts from Grubhub. Are you sure you didn't make those orders?" Her reply: “SCREW YOU FOR SUSPECTING ME!" ("Fairly aggressive," wouldn't you say?) I hatched a plan. I was going to collect security camera footage of her picking up the order from that evening.
However, by midnight, Megan arrived at my door in tears and confessed to everything, plus she admitted to being a serial shoplifter. Exhausted, I sent her away and decided to deal with everything in the morning. By the next day, everyone in our building seemed to know what was going down, probably because Megan had already begun broadcasting her version of the story.
I sent Megan a breakup text and decided that the $104.29 was a loss. At least I escaped unscathed, right? Well, less than two days later, she entered my room when I wasn't looking. I was sitting at my desk when I noticed her standing silently behind me. Megan: "Give me my stuff. Where's my stuff?" Me: "What stuff?" Megan: "YOU KNOW."
I did not know. She tore through the room, looking for something that she refused to identify. Just as quick as she came, she was gone, and I locked the door because obviously this wasn't over yet. Within a minute, she was back. She stood outside my door, knocking and demanding I let her back inside.
The knocking quickly got more violent. She started shouting "I KNOW YOU'RE IN THERE!" and "OPEN THE DOOR!" Mind that we lived in this building with students in our program who all know each other, and all of them could hear her. Pretty quickly, Megan was rattling the handle of my door. Next, she began throwing herself at it, shoulder-first, trying to break it down.
I lived next door to my RA, but judging by the lack of any intervention, he was elsewhere. So I whipped out my phone and texted him to send backup. Meanwhile, I saw my heavy wooden door bending and buckling. I even heard it crack a bit. My RA was on duty in another building, so he sent three of his colleagues to de-escalate the situation. They brought Megan downstairs, where she revealed that the "stuff" she wanted was just the T-shirt and keychain that she gave me for my birthday.
Whatever; I let her have those. I still just wanted this to be over. However, once I shared my story with the resident life staff, they filed university paperwork to place a no-contact order between me and Megan. They also recommended I contact the campus authorities, who then told me I should get my money back in small-claims court. Um, I couldn't even get there without a car or money to pay for an Uber. Sorry, Judge Judy.
At the request of the campus officers, I also contacted the Title IX office at my school, sending them the story of everything you've read so far. They were interested—to say the least—although I didn't want any trouble. I just wanted a clean breakup and a fresh start, but a Title IX representative informed me that they were bringing three misconduct charges against Megan: Theft, threatening/violent behavior, and inciting an intervention by university staff.
The representative asked me to serve as a witness in Megan's disciplinary hearing the next semester. I tentatively agreed, right before the representative set the hearing date for February 14th. Valentine's Day. I thought it was a joke, but they really did that. When the day of the hearing finally arrived, the no-contact order was still in effect, but a few of my friends had kept tabs on Megan.
For starters, she failed all of her classes in the fall. Someone in my math course confessed that Megan had tried to sleep with him while she was dating me, and he had to repeatedly tell her no. Even worse, Megan kept telling a twisted version of the whole story to try and turn my friends against me. So when I found out that she had found a new boyfriend, it felt good to know that the V-Day disciplinary hearing ruined whatever evening plans they might've made.
I arrived alone at the disciplinary board office, unsure what to expect. The board consisted of grad students, and the hearing was expected to run into the night. Unlike me, Megan did not come alone. She brought both of her parents as "character witnesses" (that wasn't even a thing here; this wasn't a real courtroom, as you'll soon see). And that's not all. Megan's parents also paid a lawyer to defend her against the charges.
The board knew that was unnecessary, but Megan's parents believed so strongly in their daughter's innocence that they had already paid this three-piece suit make her case. In the name of fairness, the board members offered me pro-bono representation: A junior economics major, who we'll call Jimmy. Jimmy had already read my account of the events from the fall, and thanks to my screenshots of Grubhub receipts, he said there was an okay shot of the charges sticking. Then I told him something I'd kept secret for months.
When Megan tried to break down my door and I whipped out my phone to text my RA, I also filmed the whole thing. Jimmy couldn't get enough of the video. There was Megan, kicking and screaming and clearly trying to break into my dorm room. It was all the evidence I needed, and no one saw it coming. In the hearing, when the time came for me to make the case against Megan, Jimmy played the video on a big screen in front of everyone.
The room went insane. In that instant, I realized that Megan really had convinced everyone I was the liar. In her version of the story, I gave her permission to buy food using my account. She told her parents that she'd asked me politely for her belongings, which I'd rudely hidden from her in my dorm room. In Megan's story, I was the sociopath trying to ruin her reputation.
Before I unveiled the video, it was her word against mine. I still didn't want revenge...Even after finding out that Megan tried to cheat on me. But when I saw her parents flipping out at the video: "WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL US YOU DID THIS?!" and her lawyer yelling, "THIS EVIDENCE WAS NOT PROVIDED IN PRE-TRIAL DISCLOSURE!" and a board member standing over him: "SIR, THIS IS NOT A COURT OF LAW. PLEASE RETURN TO YOUR SEAT" and him shouting "OBJECTION!" and her replying: "WE DON'T HAVE OBJECTIONS, THIS ISN'T A COURT OF LAW" and Jimmy, my new best friend, just trying not to laugh out loud... That's when I realized how good revenge can feel when it's fair and deserved.
The board found Megan responsible on all three charges. My side of the bench recommended the university terminate her housing contract and force her to pay restitution. Her side recommended only restitution and a reprimand. The board compromised. Her family paid back most of the money she took ("most" because two of the six orders had the same price and the lawyer convinced the board I had duplicated an order), and Megan was forced to move into a different dorm building.
This probably would've helped her anyway because every student in our program's building knew everything she'd done and lied about. They wouldn't speak to her, and no one wanted to be her roommate. By the time she had to move buildings, she'd already failed all of her courses again. Having paid for her tuition, her unused dining plan, her lawyer, and her restitution, Megan's parents finally pulled her out of school.
Where are they now? Last I heard, Megan returned as a part-time student, but I never saw her again because the no-contact order still stands. I'm now Facebook friends with the guy Megan tried to seduce. Oh, and Jimmy and I connected on LinkedIn. As for me, well...I no longer date "fairly aggressive" people. It’s better that way.
40. A Different Kind Of Windows Start-Up Noise
I once channeled my inner 12-year-old and set a coworker’s (good friend) Windows start-up sound to a sound file of the juiciest flatulence I could find then cranked his speaker up before he got to work. The results were oh-so-satisfying. Once he got in, the dead silence in the office was abruptly broken with a giant PFFFFFFFTTTT, which was quickly followed by fellow officemates yelling at him for being nasty. I was crying from laughing so hard.
41. Not So Handy Work
I got in a car accident and had mostly cosmetic front end damage. I took my car to a car shop the insurance recommended. I then got in another car accident involving the front end again, about a year later. I took it to the same car shop. The guy fixing the car says, "Well, whoever fixed your car the first time didn't do a really good job of it."
I looked at him and said, "You guys did it the first time." No one said anything after that. Suffice to say, I did not go back to that car shop for future car issues.
42. Micro-Managed Alarms
I was at my mom’s for Christmas Eve one year with my husband. I was pregnant and she had been getting on my nerves because she micromanages the holidays and my siblings and I just wanted to relax. She also had a brand-new iPhone and I knew her password. So I set her alarm to come on every hour on the hour starting at midnight and stopping at 7 am I also changed the alarm tone every hour.
One was a dog barking, which set off her two Shih Tzu-poodle mix dogs for almost 45 minutes before the next alarm went off 15 minutes later. It was the best feeling in the world to hand over her phone after setting up those alarms, knowing what was going to happen. It’s one of my most cherished memories.
43. The Bill Comes Due
If revenge is best served cold, then my revenge was many years in the freezer, and, this week, it was finally pulled out and had whipped cream and a cherry put on top put before finally served. So I worked for Company A for almost a decade. We had a small team consisting of 10 people doing commissioned work for businesses in my city.
The owner treated us like family, knowing that we worked long and hard days, sometimes up to 60 hours in a week. He paid us better than expected, bonuses and perks he negotiated with businesses that commissioned our work, and even gave the whole company a week off paid when his son was getting married so we could attend it. We had our squabbles like any other family, and things weren't always bright and perfect, but this is to show how nice the owner treated his employees. And didn't screw me over.
After working there for years, the manager position came open. Since by then I was one of the most senior workers with Company A, I thought I would apply. I didn't get the position, mainly because, despite my experience at Company A, I didn't have a Business Administration degree. Someone who worked for Owner did, so he got it. Realizing the education I would have to get, and the demand of this job, I thought long and hard and concluded that, if I wanted to go anywhere in life, I would have to get that degree.
Coming right out of high school to work for Company A was great, but if I wanted to do something more, I would have to go to university. I talked to the Owner and gave my two weeks’ notice. When I explained what I wanted to do and why, he understood that I was trying to make something of myself. This all becomes relevant later, I promise.
Going to university, I found that I had tuition covered through government grants but not things like food, rent, etc. So I looked around and eventually found work at Company B. Company B was a retail store, with a bigger staff than I had been used to, somewhere around 50 employees, but had such a huge employee turnaround that it was scary at times.
They dealt with a wide arrange of goods from groceries to very expensive items. They had a certain niche clientele that they could order items for and catered to. I ended up working part-time in their warehouse and answered to the Warehouse Supervisor, who answered to the Manager. There were other supervisors for other parts of the store, but for this only the Sales Supervisor is relevant.
Skip forward seven years. In that time, I got my BA degree and worked at Company B the whole time, going from part time to full, and I eventually applied for the Warehouse Supervisor position. I was interviewed, got the job, and had been supervisor for months when the Manager and I hired K as a warehouse clerk. K isn't the one to get the revenge, but she played a crucial part in the revenge. Then Witch gets hired.
With started out as a cashier, working quickly up the chain and brown-nosing as many co-workers as possible, including the Manager. When a sales rep went on maternity leave, Witch jumped at the chance to work in sales and ended up permanently being a part of that team, then the Sales Supervisor soon after. Me and Witch got along like oil and water.
We butted heads over things constantly; she would tell the Manager all the small things that I did, but called me a snitch when I reported the issues she was causing. She would badmouth me and my warehouse staff, talk over me at meetings, and try to take credit for my ideas. She openly told co-workers that I was the cause of many issues and couldn't wait for me to leave. ‘
Oh, and she was NEVER at fault. It would be the customers fault, my fault, the delivery driver’s fault, another co-worker’s fault, etc. There were times when we got together well, but far and few between. So one day, a very, and I mean VERY, expensive ring set (over $5,000 I found out later), ordered by one of our customers, comes in.
Years ago, I set up a procedure for any type of jewelry so that it will not get lost. The last step is, once we have done everything with it in the warehouse, we take it to the office and have someone put it in the safe immediately. This particular time, I was the one who received the rings so, once going through the procedure, I told K that I was taking it to the office.
The only one available who had the combination to the safe was Witch. I asked her if she could open the safe. She looked at me, looked at the jewelry box in my hand, then said, “Put it down here on my desk, I'll put it away once I'm done this email.” Keep in mind that me and Witch had just had a serious spat over something earlier that day, and I generally didn't feel like being close to her if I could help it.
So I never saw her put it in the safe myself. The next day, I get a call from the Manager to come to the office. I head there to find Manager, Witch, and the HR consultant they pull in when some real stuff hits the fan. Manager tells me that the ring set has disappeared. I tell them the procedure I followed and last I saw them was with Witch.
Manager tells me that Witch checked the box and said that the box was empty. Manager then pulls the box out. Sure enough, the box the rings were in was indeed empty. I swear to Manager that the rings were inside when I checked them before giving them to Witch. At this point, it's my word against hers; by a stroke of bad luck, the in-store video recorder had broken down days before the incident so there was no way to verify what happened.
We all know someone has to take the blame for this, and that's when Witch strikes. She’s saying that it was my fault, since it was last seen in my hands. Manager asks if this is true, then I realize that, yes, I was indeed the last person to touch the thing, and I never actually saw Witch pick up the box. Witch gives me a look that screamed “Gotcha!”
Manager and the HR consultant ask us both to leave. After what seemed like forever, I get called in. Manager tells me that, since I was responsible for the rings at the time and now they are lost, they would be firing me. But, since they had no proof as to whether I took the rings or not, they wouldn't press charges (this scared the heck out of me as this was the first time I heard of them thinking this).
I go back to the warehouse, tell K and the other warehouse clerks just what happened, grabbed my personal belongings, and left that day. After a couple weeks of trying to get my head around what happened and weighing my options, I decide my first priority is to try to get some sort of job, and consider it lucky if I get a job flipping burgers with the bad reputation I have when they ask Company B.
So I call the Owner of Company A to get a good reference from them and explain what happened and why I was calling, only to get the shock of a lifetime. The manager position was about to be open; the guy who I lost the position to was retiring soon, due to complicated health reasons. Owner had kept tabs on me while at university and understood when I didn't immediately come back to him, but with a golden opportunity like this, he wanted me back and I wasn't going to say no.
I dive into my new job I originally wanted with an Owner I enjoyed working for. I thought, then and there, everything would be behind me, not knowing it would come back, not to bite me, but to pay dividends. See, after I was fired, K knew she had to do something about Witch. K knew that I wouldn't lose something like the rings. But also knew that, without proof, Witch would deny that she did it and have K in her cross-hairs to attack next.
So, after talking with her husband, she hatched a plan. She started hanging out with Witch, telling her things like “I'm SO glad he's gone!” or “Wish he had been fired MUCH earlier!” Witch, feeling high from getting rid of one of her thorns in her side, soaked it all in, and after a couple weeks, she invited K and K's Husband (from now on KH) for drinks at her place.
Months pass, K and KH do things regularly together with Witch and her husband, including drinking on weekends and couple-related events. When together, K would occasionally bad-mouth me, and Witch would agree. Finally, after over a year of playing nice, when K and KH were over at Witch’s for one of their drinking parties, K randomly bad-mouthed me, mentioning the rings in passing. Then Witch says something that K was waiting for.
“I wanted those rings, so I stole time.” K, hearing this, asks for more details. KH looks at her and tries to wave her off with one hand, then gives up when Witch keeps talking. That day so long ago, Witch had stopped writing her email and was going to put the rings in the safe. The safe was open and she was about to put the rings away when she had an idea.
See, as mentioned above, Witch wanted me gone from Company B. She also wanted those rings. She also knew that the cameras weren't working. She figured that she could pocket the rings, tell the Manager they were missing, and spin it so I would take the blame. K then asks where are the rings now, and Witch, being tipsy and not seeing a reason not to brag, not only tells her, but shows her where they are in her room.
All while KH had been RECORDING THE WHOLE CONVERSATION on his phone. See, the hand waving was him saying he started recording. K gives a copy of the recording to Manager the very next work day. The authorities are called immediately. They find the rings, and K and KH give the recording and testimonies the authorities. The reckoning has begun.
I then get a call from the prosecutor's office after Witch is charged with theft over $5,000, among other things. He wants me to testify about what she did to me. I didn't skip a beat in saying yes. Fast track to the trial, prosecutor has me, K, and KH testify and plays the recording of Witch admitting that she took them. Her attorney tries to throw out the case, saying that K got Witch deliberately tipsy, but judge didn't buy it, since there was proof she drank all the time.
Judge was lenient and gave her five years, which she yelled was unfair, but I personally thought she got off easy. Meanwhile, as the trial was happening, I was talking with a lawyer to sue Witch for setting me up like she did. We were also going to sue Company B for wrongful termination, but they settled the day they got notice of the lawsuit and knew they would lose. Witch wasn’t so lucky.
They tried some trickery by having her husband divorce her and he received everything in the divorce, but my lawyer added him into the lawsuit as well. My lawyer asked over all for $3,500 for emotional distress, back pay from when I was fired until I started up with Company A again, and lawyer fees. And now, you are wondering where the metaphoric cherry is on this story?
Well, recently we had someone leave Company A, so we were hiring someone to replace them. Owner was going over the resumes and set up interviews for the job this week. Lo and behold, Witch was one of the people to apply, but he didn't know that. I looked at the resume, was about to trash it, but then smiled. Owner set up the interview. She came in at her slotted time, looking to brown-nose her way through. Then she saw me.
I smiled an evil smile, and she went white. All I said was, “Ah, Witch, how are you? Remember me?' A deer in the headlight look from her. I look at her resume and say, “I'm sorry, I don’t think you will be a good fit for our company. Thank you for applying.” She said not one word and left.
44. Mr. Sci-Fi
I used to work at a video store in the '80s, and there was a guy who worked with us who was the biggest leech. He was so lazy—he couldn’t do anything, he ignored the customers, etc. He was into sci-fi, so he’d show up for his shift, pop in Star Trek or Star Wars, and then literally just lean against the counter and watch TV the whole time and not do one bit of work.
Finally, the assistant manager and I devised an ingenious scheme. When we saw that he was scheduled with one (or both) of us, we’d grab either The Sound of Music (running time: 2 hours, 54 minutes) or Gone With The Wind (running time: 3 hours, 58 minutes), depending on how long his shift was. Five minutes before he’d arrive and clock in, we’d pop in one of those movies, and boom—three to four hours of uninterrupted work from Mr. Sci-Fi. He’d finally pull his weight out of sheer boredom.
45. Just One Of The Guys
I used to be really into Warhammer. At some point, I went into the store to get something and some young guys were painting models. I walked over to see their work and they kind of sneered at me, a woman, in a male-dominated hobby. When I wanted to lift a model, one of them said, “Don't, you'll break it if you don't know how to hold it properly.”
After that, the owner of the store walked in, greeted me as an old friend and we got into a conversation about how the new paints hold up to the old ones. You should have seen their faces.
46. Hiding Rolls
My little sister NEVER changes the toilet paper roll. Like totally empty, roll under the counter, doesn’t bother to change it. So I collected the empty rolls for about four months, and the next time she did it I took all of them, pulled up her sheets, and hid them all under the form-fitting sheet on the bed. It took her a long time to find all of them.
47. Don’t Stop Believing
My dad is out of state on business driving through some no-name town when he goes through an intersection. Suddenly, a cop pulls him over and tickets him—stating that he ran a stop sign. My dad insisted that there was not any stop sign, but the cop did not listen. Furious, he went back to the intersection and saw that there was indeed a stop sign hidden behind a tree and twisted in the wrong direction!
Even angrier, he went into a convenience store and bought a disposable camera. The clerk laughed because he saw what happened and knew what was up. Luckily, my dad had to be back there in a few weeks for work. The cop assumed that someone with out-of-state plates would just pay the ticket, and was shocked when my dad turned up in court, calmly presented his evidence to the judge, and strolled out in five minutes scot-free.
48. Who’s Your Daddy?
10 years ago, a friend of mine prank called me several times in my office over the course of a day. I decided in that moment that 1) this would not stand and 2) rather than entering into a long, protracted quagmire of a prank battle, I would use the nuclear option and end it immediately. My friend, “Mike,” was a well-known local bartender (I worked at the same bar as a bouncer) and he was very much enjoying single life at the time, facts that I knew I could take advantage of.
Soon a plan began to form: I would have him served with a fake paternity suit while he was working at the bar. So, I compiled a ton of free online legal documents—not just for the "paternity suit" but also income disclosure forms, statements of parental rights, and suggested visitation schedules pending "demonstrable proof of sobriety."
I filled out all the forms, then smeared what looked like date-received stamps as proof they had been filed and ran copies to make those stamps even more illegible. From there, I crafted a backstory to be included in a cover letter from the fictional mother's fake law firm on letterhead and all. The mother was an Irish exchange student visiting the area the previous summer.
She had only been with Mike so she knew the baby ("Eliza") was his. The cover letter encouraged Mike to call during regular office hours to discuss arranging a DNA test to affirm paternity. I set up a generic voicemail for the number listed as the office on the letterhead. By the end, the paperwork was somewhere between 20-25 pages.
I enlisted another friend not known by Mike to serve the documents and instructed him to do so around 10 pm on a Saturday evening. I told him to keep the interaction very simple. I wasn't able to be by the back bar because I knew I would be laughing too hard, but based on eyewitness reports it played out like this: FRIEND: Are you Mike [last name]? MIKE: Yes
FRIEND: Michael [middle name, last name]? MIKE: Yes FRIEND: [drops folder on bar] MIKE: What's that? FRIEND: Paternity suit. You've been served [turns around and immediately walks out of the bar] MIKE: Yeah, that sounds about right. Mike read through the packet, shakily poured himself several drinks, and then ran over to the bar owner (who was aware of the prank), to ask what to do.
He also called the number on the letterhead but sadly did not leave a voicemail. After a solid 10 minutes of intense psychological revenge, the owner finally told Mike he should closely read the last page of the packet. On it, in size 2 font, it read: "Go screw yourself, Mike." At which point, Mike ran to the front door and punched me in the chest. And there was a cherry on top.
Several months later, Mike was on a trip across the country. He had left his car at home with his mom, who generously had it washed for him. Mike for some reason kept the paternity suit paperwork in his driver's side door. During the course of the car wash, his mother found it and read the entire thing, then called him sobbing in the middle of the night asking why he hadn't told her about her illegitimate Irish granddaughter.
49. Restricted Cheez-Its
I was the coworker who had his revenge upon me. I had played a few pranks on a couple of friendly coworkers over the past month or so. They really got me good—I came to work one day to find they had convinced the vending machine guy to put my favorite coffee cup on top of my favorite snack in the machine. Thus, I couldn’t have my favorite snack (Cheez-Its) for two weeks and had to keep an eye on the machine constantly to make sure no one else got them, for fear of breaking my favorite mug.
It was well played.
50. Safety First
While still enlisted in the army, I worked in the maintenance field. Basically, if it had moving parts, I knew a little bit about it. Now every year, my unit goes on annual training, and this particular year, we got six brand new generators. Now the section they belonged to was headed by a sergeant who had over 15 years of service and knew his job inside and out, backwards and forwards.
He then decided that I didn't know how to do my job. In his wisdom, he decided that the fuel cans for his new generators would be set next to said machines. All well and good until I told him they needed to be placed on a secondary containment to prevent fuel spilling on the ground, because we can get in huge trouble for that.
He disregarded what I said with some idiotic excuse, I don't rightly remember what, and went on his way. So naturally, I reported the violation of orders to my superior. Within five minutes, there was a butt chewing and the fuel cans were put on a secondary containment.
51. Following The Rules
I had a paper returned to me this morning because I didn't write out all the names of the authors in the manuscript. I took a screenshot of their submission guidelines detailing that author names must be formatted with the first initial followed by the last name, and sent it back. I got an apology email and a "submission received" notification a few minutes later.
Academia, I swear to God.
52. Don’t Touch My Peanut Butter
My roommate kept on grabbing my peanut butter without asking, so I bought a bottle of laxative and made sure all of it went into the jar. I locked the bathroom door when I left in the morning. He pooped on himself and all over his bed — it was so bad he had to buy a new one.
53. Get Rich Quick
About 6 or 7 years ago, I was trying to enlist in the armed forces. I ended up not joining, but that's a story for another time. At this point, I was led to believe I was about four months away from leaving for Boot Camp. I was running out of savings, and needing a part time job for some spending cash while I waited around. So I did what any enterprising 20-something would do and searched Craigslist for jobs.
I normally hate sales jobs, especially those based on commissions, but figured it would be a great way to earn some extra cash short term. Found a few job listings that looked promising, and put out some applications. A few days later I received a call from David. He was opening up a new store and needed associates. He liked my resume and asked if I'd be available for an interview on Friday morning.
I was very up front with him, and let him know that the distance was a bit more than I'd normally drive for a retail job, and asked what he was offering for an hourly rate, to see if it was worth the drive. He told me that they were planning on offering an hourly rate in the mid teens, along with commission. Seemed like an ok deal, so I agreed to be there Friday at 8 am.
Friday arrives as a cold rainy day. I wear a nice shirt and tie, and drive in heavy traffic to the address David provided. I knew the area from a previous job, and eventually found the strip mall I was looking for. However, I'm not seeing any signage for the company name that was listed. There is, however, one empty space with no signage and two people inside.
Ok, maybe they haven’t gotten the store set up yet. No big deal. I had arrived early, knowing how bad traffic can be in that area. While in my car, I witnessed a young lady in business casual dress remove a sign from the window stating "Retail Space for Rent! Call 1800-Blah-blah." Ok, a little weird but maybe it's the first day in the space. I walk in about five minutes early, and immediately my BS meter goes from Yellow to the highest level, "Black Watch Plaid."
The tables are all simple plastic folding tables. The kind college kids would buy while on a shopping trip to target. The walls are plastered with laminated charts featuring tons of dollar signs, smiling faces from stock photos, and an organizational chart showing an all to familiar shape: A Pyramid. Darn. Alright, might as well have fun for a while to wait out traffic going home.
The young lady in the dress approaches me, introducing herself as Cindy. She welcomed me to Company Name, and asked me to have a seat. She sat at her "desk" (another plastic table), and pretended to go through paperwork. However, she was really just shuffling papers around. We get to chatting, and I ask her how long she's worked for David. She says she's been his secretary for about six months and that I'm going to love it here.
Eventually, a guy walks out of the back office. Early 30s, clean cut, wearing an ill-fitting suit from JCPenney. As he is walking over, all smiles, Cindy says, "Oh, Dennis! Our newest recruit is here!" The guy stops in his tracks and gives her a cold stare. "It's David, Cindy. We've been over this." He turns back to me and gives me his brightest "Hard to find good help these days" smile.
David sits me down and welcomes me, saying they are going to start with a group interview and has me sit down in a circle of chairs. Eventually, more people come in and sit down. David gets up and begins to thank us all for coming. He tells us about an exciting new opportunity from Cutco! He pulls out a set of knives, and explains how with his company we can make as much money as we want, all while setting our own hours.
He even pulls out a textbook, saying about how this company’s "revolutionary tactics" have even been featured in college textbooks! He opened to a page, his hand covering parts of it, making sure we can all clearly see the words "CUTCO!" in large letters on the page. Sad to say, a lot of the other interviewees were very impressed by this. One pregnant girl seemed very excited that she could work around her pregnancy and upcoming birth.
David was going on and on about how much money he's made and how "hard workers will rise to the top quickly." At this point, David said he needed to take a quick phone call, and gave us five minutes to have some coffee, chit chat, whatever. As he stepped away, he left his college textbook behind. Oops. So I pick it up, find the earmarked page, and read. What I found made me almost burst out laughing.
As I thought, it was all about pyramid schemes, and it had Cutco as one of the largest examples. It goes on to talk about how these are schemesja, not economically viable, etc., etc. So I decide to share this all with the group. I explain how pyramid schemes work, and how he's just scamming us. They seemed incredulous, so I said when David gets back, to ask them about what we need to pay to get started.
That finally got everyone to realize what was going on. David walks in a few minutes later, and one of the girls in the group asked David what we need to get started. "Well, all you need is your first set of knives to demonstrate! You can sell that on directly or have them order one and keep that as your demo kit. Doesn't matter. Just have to pay the start up fees for it." And that's when utter chaos broke loose.
One kid started to get up and tell him to go screw himself, saying he's wasting our time and he's a jerk for trying to pull this. The pregnant girl is crying because she thought she found a place that would allow her to work despite being pregnant. David is clearly confused and flustered, and asking who told them all this. When it becomes apparent I'm the wrench in the machine, David gets upset and starts telling me to leave.
People are yelling at David, David is yelling at me, Cindy is trying to tell everyone she never met David before today and didn't know what this was. Eventually we all walk out, leaving David behind. As I'm walking to the door, I see, leaning against the wall, the sign that was in the window before "Retail Space for Rent! Call 1800-Blah-Blah." As I get into my car, I dial the number.
Eventually I get through to a person, and ask about the property for rent at the location of David's company. The nice lady on the phone apologized, saying they had just leased that property out. I asked if she knew how long the lease was for, as I was really interested in the property. She said she wasn’t sure, they hadn't done the official paperwork yet. They were on their way to the space to sign everything with the lease holder in a few hours.
I told her everything that had just happened to me, and about David using the space for a pyramid scheme. She got extremely upset, saying that this stuff happens all the time in the industry. They will go to sign and last minute the lease holder will decide to opt out, after using it for some fly-by-night operation. She thanked me for the info, and I thought that was the end of that. Or so I thought.
A few weeks later, I received an email from David telling me how I ruined his life. About how the property management found out what was going on, and weren't refunding his down payment on the space. Saying he violated a clause in the paperwork he signed to hold the property. How he knew I was the one who called because I'm a terrible human being.
Now he was out thousands for the space and supplies, how he only wanted to give us jobs and help us. It was a long, very angry email, with several things said about me and my mother. So I called 1800-blah-blah again, spoke with the same lady I did before, and she was VERY interested in an email from David where he essentially admitted to what he was trying to do. Said it would help them all in the proceedings. And don't you know, I was more than happy to send that email along to her.
Her lawyer said it should be an open and shut case at that point. I like to think I'm a helper.
54. Don’t Mess With My Friends
Ooh boy, do I have a story for you guys. I'm still proud of this to this day. A few years ago, I was working in a job I really enjoyed with a team I really gelled well with. There were about five of us working on the same portfolio of projects in different roles, and every single team member was just cream-of-the-crop, incredibly good at what they do.
I can't overemphasize how satisfying it was to work with such an incredibly competent, likable group of people. In this job, instead of getting the Sunday night blues, I would get excited thinking about the work I would be doing the next day and planning how we would solve the complex problems together. It was like a series of logic puzzles.
Yes, I realize I'm a huge nerd. I promise I also had a life outside of work. The one downside (there's always a downside) to this job was Steve. Steve was not in the supervisory line for me or any of my team members, but he was about three levels above us and very senior. He'd been there for years and was tight with senior leadership.
Steve was also a mega-creep. He said extremely inappropriate things to young women in the office, and he apparently wasn't averse to being handsy, though as far as anyone knew, that was as bad as it had gotten. The women in the office all knew to steer clear of him. My first week on the job, the whisper network made sure I knew: never be alone with Steve.
Harassment is difficult to document, and no one wanted to risk their career and put a target on their back going after a big guy like Steve, so he just got away with it for years. So for a couple of years, I followed this advice. There were a few instances of Steve saying incredibly uncomfortable things to me in passing, but for the most part, I managed to avoid him. Then I found out that my teammate Rob had gotten on Steve's radar.
For context, Rob is non-neurotypical and has some minor tic-ish behavior. He's also shy and easily spirals into social anxiety when put in uncomfortable situations. So one evening at our team's informal weekly happy hour after work, Rob lets it slip that Steve's been giving him a hard time. The rest of us are like, "whoa, wait, what?" because Steve never interacts with staff at our level, except to creep on women, and we make Rob tell us everything.
Basically for the last few weeks, Steve has been teasing Rob, making fun of his tics, and mimicking his way of speaking back to him. He's also been asking Rob how he can possibly be competent to do his job and implying he's a pity hire. It's clear Steve is seeking out Rob for this, because, again, there's really no reason for him to interact with our team.
Rob has been having horrible anxiety over this situation, and has had bad insomnia and stomach issues since Steve started targeting him. And not that it bears repeating, but just to reiterate, Rob is a freaking beast at his job. And a genuinely good guy. At this point, I'm seeing red. (We all were.) We tell Rob to go to HR, that his neurological issues put him in a protected ADA class, and that he could get Steve in big trouble.
Rob panics and says he can't do that, begs us not to tell anyone at work, and says he wishes he hadn't said anything. We assure him we won't say anything if that's what he wants, but we're all very distressed. I leave the bar fuming just thinking, OK, that's it. Screw you, Steve. You're going down. I can't tell anyone about what's happening to Rob, because I promised him as much, so I start my own paper trail.
I start baiting Steve. And I don't mean I behave in any suggestive manner or lead him on: I just stop avoiding him, and I even initiate contact myself. I IM him through the company's IM system very professionally/politely, asking if a big client will be staying on through the next project cycle…and the floodgates open. He starts sending me outrageously dirty IMs.
I mostly don't respond, but I occasionally keep him going by sending extremely literal responses to his innuendo-laden questions or pretending not to understand something suggestive he's saying. Sometimes when he clarifies, I'll outright say, "This isn't appropriate" or "This is making me uncomfortable," or "Please don't say things like that, Steve," but he steamrolls right over me.
During this time, I've also been seeing him more in person around the office, and he often says gross stuff to me in person as well, a lot of it not just inappropriate, but bizarre and nonsensical. Every time this happens, I immediately go back to my desk and write down what he said, the date and time, and the names of any witnesses. After about a month and change of this, I compile my creep journal with printouts of the IM conversations and take them to my HR rep.
I ask to file a harassment complaint against Steve. As soon as the words “harassment” leave my mouth, my rep instantly gets the head of HR and two other reps, and they go through my evidence with me, and ask me a ton of questions. The head of HR assures me they'll take my complaints very seriously, and asks if I know of any women around the office who have had similar issues with Steve.
I'm able to give them several names. They send me on my way, and two weeks later, my rep formally reaches out to me and lets me know Steve has been let go. Much jubilation is had around the office! It took a couple of months for me to piece together the whole story, but basically after my complaint, HR started following up with the names I gave them, both the witnesses to my in-person encounters with Steve, and the other women he'd harassed.
They corroborated what I'd told HR, and then through them, word started spreading around the office that HR was conducting a harassment investigation against Steve. This emboldened at least 15 different women who'd been biting their tongues about Steve for ages to come forward and tell their own Steve stories. The worst story was from a junior staff member who Steve had come onto at a company party the year prior.
During all of this, IT had been asked to go through Steve's emails and IMs, and this had not only been used to validate my print outs as legitimate, but IT had found a ton of additional incriminating stuff in Steve's correspondences. Somewhat frustrating: Steve received an extremely generous severance package as part of his termination.
But on the bright side, word got around the industry quickly, and Steve was poison at that point. No company would touch him with a 10-foot pole. The last time I thought to snoop on his public social media pages, he was listing himself as an "independent consultant" in our industry, which I seriously doubt he's actually doing, and based on his public Facebook page, he's doing a couple of MLMs, so that should deplete whatever savings he has in short order.
I don't work with Rob anymore, but I did recently attend his wedding! He's extremely happy with his new wife (who is a sweet and lovely woman) and he's doing really well in his career.
55. Computer Crashing
I worked at a company that did phone surveys. Probably 250 employees worked there at any given time. During one shift, my prick boss pushed and then tripped me—a practical joke gone awry. I was frustrated, but I collected myself and came up with the sweetest revenge. I had worked there for many years and ran system backups on the weekend. Nothing fancy, just babysit the computers after typing in a few lines of Unix commands. Thanks in part to this, I had just enough access to the system to crash the entire dialing floor for three hours. 250 employees just sitting, doing nothing, being paid on crunch day.
I didn’t get in trouble. Felt good, man.
56. All By Myself
I am an application developer in the public sector. I have made many of the computer programs where I work, such as the Human Resources, incident reporting, and some of the case management systems. Several times, I have had people try to tell me, wrongly, how to use an application that I made. I especially like it when they tell me I should “ask the people at the company.”
Now, what company would that be? I tell them that it is very flattering that they think that the software was made by an entire company instead of by me, alone in my office.
57. Collective Coffee Revenge
I worked at a coffee shop in high school and this businessman came in every morning. He was always extremely rude and treated all the baristas like we were garbage. This guy truly talked to us like we were worthless servants. Buddy would order a quad shot americano, so we collectively started pouring him only decaf. He would sometimes come in on his lunch break and would muse out loud about how coffee just didn’t get him going like it used to.
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58. The Sins Of The Father
When I was 15, my mom started dating a man she met on a dating website. I didn't like him the first time I met him, and two months later he moved into the house. About three weeks after he moved in, he took my skateboards, self-built half pipe, ramps, BMX bike, ice hockey gear, and many other things to the dump one day while I was at school.
He said he did this because he didn't want all of my stuff cluttering up "his" garage. Maybe two months later, he punched me in the stomach for the first time because I got up from the dinner table without asking to be excused. From there, it escalated into full-fledged beat-downs for the smallest perceived slight to his authority.
One day, he decided to take my extensive Pokémon card collection, even more extensive comic book collection, My Game Boy, and PS2 with all the assorted games, and my fantasy and sci-fi book collection and got rid of it all because "15 year old boys should be playing football and baseball, not being a nerd playing with Pokémon cards and reading comics and books."
I would like to add that he was a middle school teacher, and in his off time refereed and umpired local middle and high school sports games. My mom never intervened, and in fact acquiesced when he demanded that she stop giving me lunch money, because "the little jerk will just spend it on comics and other gay stuff.” One day, I took maybe $3 and change out of his change jar so that I could buy a slice of pizza and some fruit punch during lunch at school, because I was tired of being hungry.
My twin sister was always a bit of a jerk, and frequently blackmailed me into doing her chores from a young age. I was fed up and refused to do something, so she told him what I had done. His retaliation was breathtaking. This man actually called the authorities and pressed a larceny charge against me, and once the officers had left, he proceeded to beat me senseless.
At that point, I ran away. When officers found me and returned me to my home, I found out that he had been trying to talk my mom into sending me away to military school or something of that nature. I ran away again, and between having run away several times and the larceny charge, I ended up turning 16 in juvenile detention. I spent the next couple years miserable and afraid, frequently contemplating taking my own life.
Once I was out on my own, I didn't speak to my mom for several years. We eventually reconciled, and by that point they had married. I was a lot bigger than I had been as a young teenager, and had gotten into weightlifting, so he no longer acted like he was going to punch me to make me flinch, much less actually hit me. We basically avoided each other for the most part.
Then my mother found out that she had stage 4 cancer, and no longer wanted to waste any of the time she had left with him. She had a lawyer draft up a separation agreement whereby he would receive a set amount of money upon separation, and would have 45 days to retrieve his belongings from the house. A while ago, he had spent his entire inheritance in six months and then had to sell his mother's house that he grew up in in order to settle his debts shortly before they started dating.
My mother bought the house back from the bank before they married. She allowed him to keep the house and he moved back into his mother's house. My mother passed about nine months after their separation, and despite the agreement she had been allowing him to come and get his stuff piecemeal. I put an immediate end to that. He was past the deadline to remove his personal effects and they were now mine to dispose of as I saw fit. So I got sweet, sweet justice.
I sold his baseball card collection (around $14k) and his autographed sports memorabilia (roughly $11k) and also sold all of his woodworking equipment, along with several finished pieces of furniture that he had made ($6,500 I think). I kept his mother's engagement ring (platinum band, three diamonds, roughly two carats), wedding band, his coin collection (I also collect coins) and some tools and other odds and ends. Now comes the real fun.
Around a month ago, I finally saw him at the grocery store. As he was leaving, I approached him. I told him I had sold his collections as he was pushing his cart out towards his car. He reacted exactly as I expected. He took a swing at me multiple times. I already had my phone ready to dial 9-1-1. Several of these punches missed and the ones that did connect didn't have much effect because he's nowhere near as strong as he was 20 years ago in his forties, and I am no longer a skinny little 15 year old.
He continued to try to punch me as I spoke to the 9-1-1 operator, and was actively ramming his grocery cart into my new Toyota as the officers pulled into the parking lot. He was charged with assault, communicating threats, and destruction of property. As a result he lost his job (and pension) at the local middle school, and because he had never learned how to save money while married to my somewhat wealthy mother, he ended up having to sell his mother's house.
My nephew, who was on the football team, made it well known to his friends that he not only had just been convicted of assault as well as other charges, but that he had also beat me as a child, causing several parents to call for him to resign from refereeing and umpiring for local sports games. My niece and my girlfriend's much younger sister are enrolled at the middle school where he worked, and say that he was not only universally disliked, but when he came up to the school to get his belongings, he made a big scene and ended up crying as he was leaving.
At least that's what they've heard from the kids who were attending summer school at the time. His son, who he was equally abusive towards as a child, refused to take him in or help him out, so he ended up having to take a job as a cashier at Wal-Mart so that he could afford the rent on his little trailer in an absolutely awful neighborhood.
Even though that Wal-Mart is not the closest Wal-Mart to my house, that is now the only place where I go grocery shopping or to purchase anything that I need. I purposely stand in line longer than I need to just so that he can be the one who has the pleasure of ringing up my purchases. The first time I went through his line, he attempted to ring up multiple items more than one time to overcharge me.
When I called him on it, he said that I was mistaken. I asked for a manager, and the manager believed him that it was an accident, but he learned that he can't get away with that. The second time, I made sure to be as nice as possible and had to ask for a manager because he was overwhelmingly rude. The people in line behind me backed me up and he got in some trouble for that.
Every time I go there and step into line, I see him die a little bit inside, and it gives me such satisfaction. Sometimes I'll say that I'm paying with exact change, and as I'm about to hand him the money I'll say "Oh! I didn't realize I had (rare coin from his collection) in my pocket! I guess I'll use my credit card." I just sold his expensive ratcheting wrench set, and so on Monday when he works again I'm going to go buy my daughter one of their better above ground pools, and as he's ringing it out tell him, "I know that (daughter) is just going to love this pool. It's not like I would have ever used those expensive ratcheting wrenches anyway."
59. Throwing The Book At Him
I ruined an entire tow company with one phone call. Several years back, I went to work for a towing company. It’s about all I know how to do other than paint cars, which is drastically affecting my health. The pay was pretty decent, but we had to share trucks and the boss felt that he knew where we needed to sit in order to get the best calls. This is important for later.
Several months in, I realized that I was not making the type of money that I should be making. So I took the opportunity while I was sitting in a parking lot one evening to start researching the laws pertaining to employees in similar positions. He was kind of a jerk and the trucks had transponders so that he could see if we had them idling with the air conditioner on and a hot day, or idling with the heat on on a cold day.
He was always calling complaining about something if the wheels were not turning. During my research, I discovered that if he was requiring us to sit in a certain parking lot, street, or any location of his choosing, then we were entitled to be paid an hourly wage, not just our commission. The technical term was “engaged to wait.” However, if he allowed us to freely roam about while we waited for calls, we were not entitled to hourly wages and we were therefore be considered “waiting to be engaged.”
I never mentioned this to him, but I did start taking note of my time. Another month or so goes by and he decided to start coming down on me for tiny little things, things that ordinarily wouldn’t even matter, such as I forgot a pop can in the cup holder. He actually had a screaming fit about that. At this point, I was tired of working there and had already found another job, so I decided it was time to put my plan into motion.
I called him up, told him that we needed to have a conversation about my final wages and that we could meet at his convenience. Upon entering the office, I laid out my argument, explained the state law, and told him I expected to be paid for the hours that I was on the clock but not freely allowed to roam looking for work or able to do things of my choosing.
He told me in no uncertain terms that I would not be paid for that time, as that was agreed to upon my employment. I did not bother to argue, as I already had my next step planned, so I took my final check and I left. The following Monday, I made a phone call to the state labor board, where I laid out my case to them. Needless to say, they were very interested in what was going on.
In the end, they came to review his employment records and speak to the drivers still working. When he got the bill of what he had to pay us al , it was too much for him to afford, so he sold the trucks, his boat, and lot, and went out of business. I never got the money owed to me in full, only a fraction . But the satisfaction of knowing the law just a little bit better than he did and watching it all burn was pure bliss....
60. Using Their Words Against Them
Our company was giving us employees an appreciation lunch and had requested a small group of employees to plan and execute the event. On the day of the event, upper management got a stick up their behinds and decided that the planning committee was using up too much company time. They told us that any of us who worked during the luncheon (serving and cleaning up) would have to do it on our lunch breaks or stay late to make up the time. We, of course, found this unacceptable.
Prior to the luncheon, we had a huge meeting where all the managers and bigwigs praised all the workers for a job well done, etc.—and at the end, asked if anyone had any questions or comments. That's when I took my shot. I stood up and in a very friendly manner said that we needed managers to volunteer to serve the luncheon. All you heard were crickets for about ten seconds and then a lot of whispering and scrambling as upper management made lowermanagement raise their hands. It was so awesome to see them all using their lunch hour to serve us!
61. How The Tables Have Turned
I work at Starbucks, and I am a bilingual native Spanish speaker. Even though my English is not as good as my Spanish, it’s pretty good, but some people think I have a speech impairment. One time, I was talking with my coworkers and forgot a word in English. I just stuttered and honestly seemed pretty dumb at the moment.
One of my coworkers laughed and started making fun of me. She was a transfer and didn’t know I am a native Spanish speaker. A few minutes passed, and she was taking a drive-thru order which had a Spanish speaker that didn’t know much of English. She had a lot of trouble taking the order, and no one knew what she was saying.
I immediately took over the order, talking in fluent Spanish. Since that day, she’s been hesitant to look me in the eyes.
62. Rude Misunderstanding
It didn’t necessarily make anyone look dumb, but certainly made some people feel bad. I lived in Germany for a year after high school as part of an exchange program, and there were several times where I had to make phone calls. I had to call doctors, employers, program coordinators, etc. so I got fairly used to the whole telephone garb in German.
I could speak pretty fluently on the phone, but since it’s not my native language, I would of course make small grammatical errors and stuff like that. This led to the unfortunate situation where people would assume I was German when on the phone because I spoke well enough, but since I kept making mistakes, I was also stupid.
People were quite rude to me over the phone, assuming that was due to the assumed stupidity. After revealing I was actually a foreigner, they always sounded so surprised and complimentary of my German and were much more helpful and polite afterwards.
63. Sweet And Sticky
My ex cheated. There was a dollar store near her work that I liked. So I went in and spent a dollar on a giant bag of gummy bears. I opened the and ate one. It was sweet! I had another! So good! These were my favorite gummy bears by far! I felt bad for wasting them by throwing them on her windshield on a hot day… but it was totally worth it.
64. Mi Casa, Tu Casa
We bought a house a couple of months ago, and the sellers insisted that we pay several small fees that are customarily covered by the seller. The total was $187 and in comparison to the house price, we weren’t going to walk away over something so small. We renovated the house and there was a table/credenza thing that had been built into the entryway.
After demolition, we were planning on throwing it out. When one of the neighbors noticed we had put it outside to be thrown out, they texted the old owners to see if they wanted it, as it was something they said they had loved about the house. The old owners text me, since we were getting rid of it anyway, that surely we wouldn’t mind if they came by and picked it up instead?
I told them interestingly we had recently gotten an offer from someone else to buy it...for $187. Since it was theirs originally, I told them we’d be happy to part with it...for $188. They dropped the check off and picked it up a week later.
65. Cruising For Revenge
This happened shortly after college. My mom is a retired, disabled woman who now owns her house on a quiet residential cul-de-sac. She has lived there longer than anyone else. Her neighborhood has designated parking spaces at the end of the cul-de-sac, all with the addresses of each house painted in the parking space. My mom doesn't get out much, so I use her designated parking space.
At the time, we lived in the same city and I visited her weekly to bring groceries, fix broken things, cook for her, etc. My mom parked her car in the backyard of her house, since she went out so little. Mom kept busy by gardening or baking/buying cookies for the children on the street. Mom's neighbor, Ivy, never parked well. Whenever I stopped by, her car was always parked so close to my car that I had to park on the curb.
I wouldn't have cared about Ivy’s poor parking but for two things: 1) She had four or five kids and had parties almost every weekend, leaving trash in Mom's yards; 2) I loved my car, a 2016 metallic ice blue Dodge Challenger Hellcat, the first car I had ever purchased brand new. I washed that car once a week, detailed the interior, and had rules against eating, drinking, or even leaving trash in my car.
It was my pride and joy. Mom had called the authorities throughout Ivy's residence because of the parties. Ivy's guests would fill up the cul-de-sac with their cars, obstructing traffic, and get into loud fights at and after midnight. I often found empty bottles, etc. on the fence between the properties, mostly on Ivy's side of the fence. This is all important information.
One Saturday while having dinner at Mom's house, I heard a loud crash and my car alarm went off. I ran outside to see Ivy's older model Honda Accord back out of her parking space and speed down the street. Ivy's Accord had a dent from the front bumper to the door and the headlight had popped out. I approached my Challenger with trepidation and screamed in anguish at what I saw.
My car, my beautiful three-week old car with less than 500 miles on it, had a dent stretching from the passenger's door to the front bumper, and the right front wheel was tilted at a 30-degree angle. I was livid and in anguish as I called the authorities, filed an online claim with my insurance, and arranged for a tow truck to take my damaged car to the dealership.
The estimated cost of repairs came out to 3400 USD (total cost of repairs was eventually 6,500 USD). I had a low insurance deductible but my car was parked and Ivy owed for the damages. For two weeks, I knocked on Ivy's door or waited for her to come home. She stopped driving her damaged Accord and either rented or borrowed a Ford Fusion.
When she was home, she didn't answer the door. When she wasn't, she stayed away until my rental car left Mom's parking space. I left a note on Ivy's door for her to call me, but only received harassing calls from restricted phone numbers or people blaring air horns in my ear when I answered. Then came my revenge. About two weeks after the accident, Ivy's children came to Mom's house for some cookies.
I noticed that two of them had bruises around their eyes. So if Ivy hadn't hit my car, I still would have done what I did but maybe not as underhandedly. I had Mom take pictures with and of the children but waited until the next party to strike. Ivy had a party that night or the night after. Mom called me to let me know and I installed an app onto my phone that gave me a fake phone number.
I called 9-1-1 reported the party. "There's a loud party at 1007 Mountain Drive, and I'm worried because the children are around all these adults. Please, hurry!" Mom called to let me know officers had arrived. I drove to her house (stopping by the grocery store first so that appeared to be the reason), and saw Ivy and her boyfriend Bane already sitting in the back of a squad car.
From a news broadcast that night, I found out that Bane had warrants out for his arrest. Initially, the charges were disorderly conduct and disturbing the peace. However, Mom turned over the photos of the children (anonymously mailing them through the post office with Ivy's address and name as the return address). Less than a week later, Ivy and Bane were charged with child endangerment charges.
66. Only A Small Adjustment
I used to have to report website usage, ROI, and all sorts of statistics for a bunch of different sites. I built an elaborate beast of a spreadsheet in which you only put a few numbers and it would calculate just about everything the company would need. It was a bit too complicated for my idiot boss to understand, yet he would take it to clients and brag he made it, which infuriated me.
Then, after a while, he realized that the spreadsheet was all he needed and that could use my paycheck to buy a new house. So he laid me off. I told him he might need help with the spreadsheet, but he said he was smart enough. Before I took off, I made sure his life without me would be a nightmare...by changing a single formula in the spreadsheet and had a good laugh about the reports it spat out, which made no sense at all anymore.
67. Caught Red-Handed
A director at work did this recently. We work with various agencies, and he tried to rat me out in front of the other directors and our boss by saying I wasn't providing services to two places. I told everyone why the one site didn't get any services; the site wasn't eligible for the services he was talking about. It was a zoom meeting, so I asked to share my screen. I showed them the proof that this site wasn't eligible. I then asked why he thought they were, why he felt it upon himself to check in on my office's sites, and why he felt the need to make sure I was doing my job, seeing as he wasn't my supervisor or director, and didn't work in my office.
As it happened, he decided to check to see if they were getting their needs met because he had learned I also wasn't providing services at another site I claimed was getting services. I was easily able to prove that they indeed did get the services and he was talking to the wrong person. In the end, he looked like a jerk who was overstepping.
He also looked like he was possibly trying to get me fired or take our funding, and I looked competent and professional. People are still mad at him for this and no longer believe anything he says.
68. Bed Time, Not Game Time
When my husband and I got our first apartment together, we lived with someone who didn’t have much going on schedule-wise and would stay up until 3 or 4 am playing video games online with friends and shouting. We asked him to be quieter after midnight because both my husband and I had early mornings, but he would always do that thing where he was quiet for about 10 minutes and then got even louder than before.
So my husband started unplugging/replugging the internet box after midnight and then when he knocked on our door and asked if we knew why the internet was out, we’d play dumb and promise to call Comcast in the morning.
69. An Eye For An Eye
I had a picture of my mom and me on my desktop (I know, corny). This guy, Pat, kept commenting on how attractive my mom was (he was about the same age). After about a month of this, I asked my mom to jokingly call him and tell him he was sexist and a bad influence and whatnot. She did this, but they ended up talking for 30 minutes, and after that, Pat told everyone at the office that my mom was trying to pick him up. For the next year, every time he saw me he asked how my mom was. At my five-year pinning ceremony, he told the story to a bunch of strangers and my bosses.
Fast forward a year later—I had just gone through a bad breakup with my long-time girlfriend and this Pat guy kept coming into my office and telling me that I need to get out and start playing the field. He did this for about a month, so then I asked a guy at work what his daughter’s name was (she was around the same age as me). I found her on Facebook and asked her if she would help play a prank on her dad. When she agreed, I set my devious plan into motion.
I went out on a “date” with his daughter and took a picture of the two of us drinking out of the same drink with two straws then proceeded to put it in a heart-shaped frame on my desk. Then I got another manager to tell Pat that I got a new girl and that I was head over heels for her. He came straight to my office and I didn’t say a word—all I heard from behind me was, “What are you doing with my daughter”? To this day, he hasn’t asked when my mom is calling next!
70. 60 Days
The company I worked at for many years fired me without warning. My boss was a strange guy, and I had seen him fire other people without warning as well. He always offered to let people stay on for 60 days until they could find new work. But they would have to sign a document stating that they were “voluntarily” walking off the job and waiving all rights to unemployment.
When he fired me, he also gave me the option. I did not accept, as it seemed a lot better of a deal to have unemployment in case I could not find work within the 60 days. The company tried to appeal my unemployment, but my case was foolproof—after several years of loyal service, the only black marks on my record were being less than 15 minutes late to work three times. I let the judge in the unemployment hearing know that they offered to keep me on if I had signed away my right to unemployment. She let me know that it was against the law to do so, and ruled in my favor.
Every weekly unemployment deposit was like a tiny victory until I found a new job.
71. Proof!
Senior kindergarten, I had an activity for Mother’s Day to color some pre-printed cards with three tulips. The teacher told us to color them red, yellow and orange. Well, six-year-old me colored one tulip purple because I didn't like orange. My teacher told me I was wrong, and to redo it because "purple tulips don't exist".
I told my mom when I got home. She then cut the purple tulip out of our garden and I took it to class the next day to prove my teacher wrong.
72. Foreign Language
I interrupted a group of Chinese girls on the subway in Beijing when they were saying some rude things about foreigners. A 6 foot tall, ginger haired, white girl speaking Mandarin was clearly unexpected.
73. Crushed Tacos
I was working at a taco place in the drive-thru, and this one customer was being so rude. He ordered some things, I repeated back his order, and he said I was completely wrong and wasn’t listening. Then he kept yelling at me through the speaker. When he got to the window, he didn’t even look at me when he handed over his money.
Of course, I was angry. One of the things he ordered was ten crunchy tacos with mild sauce. Before I gave him his tacos, I “checked” his ten tacos and crushed seven of them. Then I threw in twelve packets of Diablo sauce and only two packets of mild sauce.
74. Domestic Bliss
Blockhead and Sarah have been like family to my wife and I for several years, practically ever since we moved in across the street from them. The four of us were extremely tight. Our kids are the same age as theirs and are all good friends. We were one big family unit. We did dinner together a few times a week. We went on vacations together. I truly saw Blockhead as a brother, and my wife and Sarah were very close too.
Five months ago, I was completely blindsided by the discovery of an affair between my wife and Blockhead. My wife had left her email open on our computer, and I saw an email from her to her long-time therapist saying that Blockhead would be joining her at an upcoming session "again." Uh, WHAT?? My mind started racing. Why in the world would Blockhead be going to her therapy sessions without my knowledge?
I did a search and found some other emails to and from the therapist, proving that Blockhead had been going to sessions together with her for about six weeks. I checked our mobile phone account and discovered that, since late summer, they had been exchanging hundreds of texts every day, peaking at nearly 500/day by the holidays.
Speaking of the holidays, my wife and I hosted both of our families (parents, siblings, etc.) for both Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner, and Blockhead and Sarah joined us either for dinner or after dinner on both holidays. Text records showed that the entire time that they were at our house celebrating with our families, my wife and Blockhead were texting each other across the room.
They were doing that pretty much every time the four of us hung out, for months. And, you know, all day, every day just in general. But what bothers me the most is that they were doing it with Sarah and I right there. I confronted my wife with the evidence and she admitted that yes, she and Blockhead had fallen in love. "It just happened! I don't know how! But I love him and I just don't feel anything for you anymore, I'm sorry!"
They had gone on a school district trip together, something had happened in her hotel room, and things had moved quickly from there. She explained, as I lay face-down on the couch, unable to look at her, that they had already made plans to move out and divorce me and Sarah, and while they didn't plan to move in together immediately because of the kids, they'd probably do so eventually.
The meetings with the therapist were supposedly mostly for the purpose of finding a way to break this to me and Sarah as gently as possible, because they were so very concerned for our well-being. Sarah and I are fairly certain that they weren't planning on telling us about the affair at all, and were simply going to "discover" their feelings for one another several months down the line, after they'd come up with some other reason to divorce the two of us.
My wife moved out two months ago. I was, and still am, utterly destroyed. I cry every day. I cried writing the first few paragraphs of this story just now. I worry non-stop about the impact on our kids. But I am also not exactly a shrinking violet when I feel that I've been wronged. And in this case I was, objectively, very very wronged. So, a couple of years ago, Blockhead ran for a Board of Education seat as a pretty extreme underdog.
I helped him with his campaign materials and debate prep, and my wife, a well-known school district employee (this becomes important later), got the word out as best she could. Much to our surprise, he actually won in a squeaker, by just a few dozen votes. Being on the Board became the center of Blockhead's world. He joined every committee that he could.
This turned into the foundation of his affair with my wife, as they were constantly going to school events and meetings together on evenings and weekends. Once I discovered the affair, my thoughts turned pretty quickly to revenge, and it occurred to me that an extramarital affair between a member of the Board of Education and an employee of the school district was at least bad politics and possibly violated district policy.
Making things far worse for them was that my wife was in the running for an open administrative position, and everyone knew that she was more or less guaranteed the job and the major pay raise that came with it. She had just finished her master's degree in school administration, at the urging of her principal and the superintendent, so that she could be promoted to this specific position.
I had plenty of evidence of the affair. Texts from both of them admitting to it, text records showing that they were texting hundreds of times a day, emails to and from the therapist, etc. I considered simply emailing all of the evidence to the Board and the superintendent, but felt like I, as the grieving, betrayed spouse, might not be seen as a credible source.
So instead, I invented a fictitious "furious friend" who was planning on showing up to the next Board meeting and publicly shaming the two of them for their affair. I told my wife that I'd tried to talk this person down but couldn't guarantee that they wouldn't show up and humiliate them publicly. As I expected, this led Blockhead to conclude that the only option was for him to pre-emptively admit the affair to the Board.
The superintendent subsequently recommended that Blockhead resign, which he did. Sarah said that he was utterly humiliated and crushed, and barely got out of bed for a few days afterward. Once word of the affair and Blockhead’s resignation started getting around, the superintendent (a long-time friend of both my wife and Blockhead) contacted my wife and tearfully informed her that it was no longer politically appropriate for her to be promoted to an administrative position within the district.
The position that had been lined up for her was later filled by an outside candidate. This sent waves of confusion and rumor throughout the district, as it was pretty well-known that my wife was getting the job. The day after she was informed that she wasn't getting the promotion, my wife and I, despite our crumbling marriage, took our son out to breakfast together on his birthday, and a parent stopped by our table to congratulate her on her new role.
She said thanks, then excused herself to go cry in the bathroom for a while. I let the dust settle for a couple of weeks, and then, right before my wife moved out, let them in on my little secret. There was never a "furious friend" threatening to expose them in the first place. Just me. Word of all of this has gotten around our fairly small town, which Blockhead grew up in and my wife has worked in for nearly 20 years.
My wife refuses to talk to me about how things are at work now, but I've heard from some people I know in the district that her formerly spotless reputation has taken a major hit. Blockhead, formerly a gregarious social presence in our neighborhood and at events and pubs in town, has completely gone underground and barely emerges to mow his lawn.
He's moving out soon, to a ugly little townhouse which is all he can afford due to all the child support he's going to have to pay his wife. My wife and Blockhead claim that they plan on trying to make things work together, despite all the public humiliation. I wish them lots of luck with that. I'm sure it will be a lot of fun to show their faces together in town.
Sarah and I are still friends. We've been incredibly important to each other since this all started and have certainly gotten a lot closer, but not in the way some think. This would all be so much harder to deal with if I didn't have her to lean on, and she says she feels the same way about me; we're going through basically the exact same situation with the same players, after all.
Blockhead hasn't moved out yet; once he does, we plan to go back to getting the kids together more often like they used to. It'll never be the same, of course. She already does come over with the kids from time to time, but it's just tough with Blockhead’s constant presence across the street.
75. Not Smart Enough
I took the final for an engineering class this morning. Usually, one or two people will go to the bathroom during class, however for totally unknown reasons, about half of the class needed to use the restroom during the exam. Obviously, a vast majority of them were looking up the answers on their phones. This irritated me, but I just stayed focused and barely finished since it was a hard exam.
I remembered that there was one particular problem that was only barely related to the stuff we went over in class where part A was fairly easy but I had no idea how to do part B. I didn't fret over it too much though, since that part was only 5 points out of 100. Well, our professor, who is on the older side and I would have thought was somewhat ignorant of technology, sent us an email just now explaining his diabolical plan to catch cheaters.
Many of the students in this class use Chegg (a website that has answers to lots of homework questions if you're not familiar). To be fair, I have an account, too, though I only used it for studying and checking homework solutions. Anyway, he explained that he was tired of people going to the bathroom and looking up answers on their phones, so he made the question I mentioned earlier as a trap.
He purposely made part B impossible to solve and about a month before the final, he got a TA with a Chegg account to ask the exact question, which was distinctly worded to be unique. He then created his own Chegg account and answered the question with a wrong solution that seems right at first glance but is actually fundamentally flawed and very unlikely that someone would make the same assumptions and mistakes independently.
He said that out of 99 exams, 14 of them fell for the trap and that everyone who had his wrong solution on their exam was given a 0 and reported to the university for violating the academic honor pledge they signed on the front. He also sent an email to all the other professors in our department giving them the list of cheaters. Meanwhile, he gave full credit on part B of the question to everyone else.
76. Computer Company In The '60s
This is not my story, but my father’s. He was working hard in an early IT company (back in the late-'60s). This was back when IBM was still known as International Business Machines. He was the only one who knew how to support and manage some of the large microcomputers that some of the customers had. His boss was giving him grief over him wanting personal leave; but my mother was just about to give birth to her first child, my eldest brother.
He didn’t even want to allow my father to leave when my mother went into labor. So naturally, my father lost his temper. He told him how incompetent he was, how he was riding on other people’s talent, and then he quit right there and then and left for the hospital. I still remember my mother telling me that my father came in, congratulated her on the birth, and told her he had just quit his job. She laughs about it now, but you can imagine how she felt!
A day later, the owner of the company called my father and offered him his old boss’s job. The kicker? The old boss now had to report to my dad. That’s got to hurt.
77. Second Hand Information
When I was working as a pharmacist assistant, people would always ask for the pharmacist because I was young and they assumed an assistant is an idiot—not like I studied or anything. One day in particular, an older lady was rude to me, saying she had to see only the pharmacist. So I called him and he heard her story out.
All she wanted was some cold medicine and a Vitamin B injection. He told her, “I'm a bit busy, but my assistant will gladly help you,” and then he walked away. I got her the medicine, explained how to use it and gave her the shot, being as friendly as I would be with any other customer. She was so disgusted and kept muttering about me being disrespectful.
I think the embarrassment was too much because I never saw her again. I hope she never treated someone like that again.
78. Your Music, Then My Music
Neighbors had a party with karaoke (pretty bad karaoke) that lasted until about 4 am, blasting the speakers with Rancheritas, Corridos, bad oldies Spanish pop. I decided to wash my car with speakers blasting at 6 am when they had just gone to sleep. The next time they had a party, they came over beforehand and said it was going to be over by midnight. It was.
79. Thrown Under The Bus
I was at a subway station a couple of days ago getting back from Uni. As I got off the subway to line up and go up the escalators, this middle-aged lady nudged me out of the way just as I got on to the steps, and made me trip over and fumble my bag. She stared at me and went on her way. I was right behind her going up, and she probably saved like 0.01 seconds getting on the escalator before me.
As we made our way to the exit and I got up to the door frame, she went out of her way to nudge past me again. She gave me another stare as she went through the exit and stood there looking at me like she couldn’t believe I tried to go first or something. There’s a bus terminal that connects to the subway on the street level, and we ended up waiting at the same stop. She was the first in line, and I was right behind her.
When the bus finally arrived, she really took her time fumbling through her purse, talking on her phone, and looking for her bus card. As she was searching for her card, she ended up dropping it right at the tip of my boot. She was still busy talking on the phone while searching through her wallet. I thought about it for a second and decided to lightly slide her card underneath the bus with my foot.
Eventually, she realized that she might have dropped her card, so she packed her wallet back in her purse, hung up the phone and looked around for her card. As she looked, she began getting increasingly worried, scanning everywhere for where she could have dropped it. I nudged her out of the way, gave her a stare, and made my way on to the bus.
I sat happily on one of the seats. I saw her flustered and panicked, as the next bus was coming in half an hour. The bus started to depart, and I opened the window and told her with glee, “Maybe you should check under the bus!” I watched her for as long as I could until she was out of sight, and enjoyed the rest of my commute home.
80. Family Feud
This happened about five years ago. My Grandma was getting old, late 80s/early 90s. She had one wish, to not pass in a senior home. Easily done as my Grandpa sold some assets way back when, then invested the money and let it ride for 30+ years; he never touched it and collected a pension. Way back when my Grandpa passed (about 10 years before this), my Grandma appointed my dad, this awful aunt and my uncle as the Trustees of the trust.
Basically the trusted advisors for her and her care for the foreseeable future. All was well in the beginning, then my dad (Willy) moved further away and couldn't take care of the day-to-day upkeep as the Trustee and to see that my grandma was ok. My aunt (Rebecca) told her that she and my uncle (Fred, who lived in Arizona) could take over and all would be fine. It was fine for a while.
A few times my dad went back to visit and noticed my Grandma didn’t always have overnight care, or that her mail wasn’t picked up and the driveway wasn’t plowed. She also lost her cable TV and newspaper subscription. My dad figured it just lapsed, so he had the services put back on. My dad also noticed my Grandma was eating moldy food at times because her truck was sold and she had no transportation.
She basically just chilled at the house alone and did crossword puzzles. The craziest part of this is that my aunt only lived two miles from my Grandma, but my Grandma told my dad she saw Aunt Rebecca once a week on Saturday for about one hour. As with the elderly and age, my Grandma eventually passed. She did get her wish and was able to go in her own home.
Upon her passing, things started to get real interesting. Once the probate lawyer got her children (my dad, aunt, uncle and another estranged aunt, Becky) around the table, some shady business started to come out. My Aunt Rebecca asked that everyone just forgo any audit or paperwork and they just sell the house (for around $400K), and divide up the remaining account balance of roughly $400K.
So just signing on the line, each sibling was to get a check for $200K, not too bad of an inheritance. My dad, however, thought that was somewhat a little rushed. He said at the time that he wanted to wait because my Grandma’s house was easily in the $600K range based on size and location. My aunt exploded in his face, cursing at him and calling him all kinds of names because he was unwilling to sign the assets then and there.
She basically wanted a quick close while everyone looked the other way. My dad ended up leaving the room after the screaming and the deal wasn’t signed that day. It took nearly six months before another appointment and they were all back at the table. The thing is though, when you are a Trustee and the person passes, the funds and access to financial accounts are all under heavy scrutiny until all beneficiaries are made aware and sign the final papers.
At the next meeting, my dad went in there with no intention to sign the deal. He got his brother (my uncle Fred) to agree that they audit the entire account(s) going back five years. When they demanded this again at the meeting with the lawyer, my aunt ended up arguing that a forensic audit would cost $5K and it’s a waste, like what difference does it make?
Two beneficiaries requested it, though, so it was what was going to happen. The audit report showed up about three months later. Here is where it gets really good. My dad began looking over the audit report and saw it was full of holes, like excessive monthly food costs for a 90-year-old lady. Payments made for car services for a car my grandma no longer had.
Many different things in there that just didn’t add up. My dad asked me to give the audit a second look, so I spent a Saturday night going over it, and here is some crazy stuff I found (and alerted my dad about): Costco monthly food costs of $1,100-$2,000 for the last four years. Telephone bills for six cell phones (Grandma had a home phone only).
Gasoline for a truck my grandma didn’t have for like four years, and easily $400/month. House repairs paid to my aunt’s husband who owned a construction business. Some of the house repairs were like $16K for a new roof, new garage doors, home security system which she didn’t have, etc., and all a inflated prices. Grandma paid for my aunt to go to Europe twice on vacation.
My grandma was paying my estranged Aunt Becky a stipend of $2K a month for the last five years, as well as her deadbeat son for $2,500. Every month they were paid. All grandkids were to be paid a lump sum of $10K upon their 30th birthday as that is when the $50 check from Grandma stopped for all grandkids. Guess who was paid out? Rebecca’s kids and my estranged aunt’s kids, but not me or my siblings.
My grandma gave loans to my Aunt Rebecca for her husband’s construction business in return for equity in the company, which amounted to nothing. These loans totaled about $200K over three years, right around when the housing bust happened. They also sold her assets like jewelry and what not for cash, because some big ticket items simply vanished from her house.
Armed with all this, the next probate meeting was interesting. In the time between my Grandma’s passing and the third probate meeting, my aunt’s construction business filed for bankruptcy so that $200K in equity grandma had simply vanished. The probate lawyer was also somewhat concerned and makes it obvious that this was a breach of fiduciary duty, where my aunt could actually get real prison time.
After this, the negotiations were much more favorable. My aunt got nothing, literally zero, my other aunt only received $25K after all the stipend payments. My father and uncle shared the rest after all grandkids received the $10K payout. The house sold to the first offer for $520K. That was the regular revenge for the treacherous witch who ripped off Grandma and had her eating moldy food. Here is the professional revenge.
My aunt probably felt pretty bad that she couldn’t supplement her lifestyle with Grandma’s money anymore, but that was the least of her worries. Since she tried to rip me off for $10K, I took it personally. I don’t care how tough you are, the IRS is the scariest thing that can happen to a person. Nobody wants to have their money forcibly removed.
I did a little research, photocopied my documents, had them notarized and sent off the info to the IRS. I felt like it went nowhere, then maybe 18 months later I was notified and asked to come to the IRS building for an appointment in my city. The agent went over all the details. Basically, what they found in their research, and then they asked for a sworn statement.
It turns out my aunt didn’t declare something like $1.2M in additional income over five years, and as such she owed the IRS around $420K plus penalties. There was no way she was going to pay that on a teachers’ pension and after her husband bankrupted his business. Her house was sold, her vehicles sold, and they left the state. Now my aunt and uncle live in a depressing desert town.
The IRS then paid me around $60K about three months after the appointment. She should have paid that $10K.
81. A Sandwich You’ll Regret Eating
Someone kept taking my lunch at work, and me being the pacifist that I am, I decided to just mention it casually to my wife. I didn’t think it was a big deal, but these were the sandwiches that SHE made for me every day. So, she decided to make a very special sandwich for me...which consisted of bread and toothpaste. I put it in the fridge and after lunch, it was gone. I don’t know if the sandwich was actually consumed, but I told HR about it and they thought it was so awesome, they gave me a $20 gift card to Outback Steakhouse.
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82. Trouble Spot
Back when I was little, we lived across from a popular public pool on a tiny street, so parking was premium. We had issues with people parking across our driveway, but we were close with the pool owner and would get him to ask over the loudspeakers, and whoever parked the car would come over, apologize to us, and move.
But one day after coming home from school, I saw somebody had the audacity to not park in our driveway but inside our garage. My dad was dumbfounded. We went over to make the usual announcement. Then this woman in her 30s came stomping over in a huff and said she would fix it when she had finished her exercise routine. So, my dad just parked behind her, and we went out for dinner for a few hours.
She was mad, but she didn't learn her lesson and kept doing it two to four times a month! Eventually, my dad stopped caring about parking her in and let her out at his leisure. It wasn't our problem just hers. She even called officers on us. They just told her not to park on private property and then wrote her a citation. Then one morning, she had the gall to park us in our own driveway. Dad had had enough.
He made sure she was doing her laps, grabbed a coat hanger, jimmied the door open, dismantled the passenger seat, and left it on the curb by the pool exit. He then waited on our front deck, sipping his tea as she came out of the pool to get her car. She walked by the passenger seat without a second glance. Scowling at him as she got in her car, she did a double-take as she went to put her bag down.
She freaked out, realizing that my dad had had access to her car the whole time. She ran over, grabbed her seat, put it in the trunk, and drove off. We never heard from her again.
83. Fool Me Once...
I used to work at a Courtyard Marriott hotel, which is a hotel oriented for business people who have to get up early and work late. You know, real workhorses and road warriors. The hotel was a sprawling five stories tall with around 200 or so rooms. It was also right next to LAX so we always got a lot of businesspeople flying in thinking they were hot stuff.
Their company flew them out to do business in LA—big deal. Then one day, I’m working at the front desk and it’s kind of late, around midnight maybe, and one of our guests comes in kind of intoxicated and asks for me to reset his room key before he heads to his room because, “We always do them wrong.” So I’m like, “Yeah sure thing, not a problem, have a good night!”
He comes back down five minutes later, visibly agitated, and says, “What the heck man? I thought I told you to remake my keys. Can you do your job right?“ In the hospitality industry, you’re not allowed to talk back, raise your voice, or really stand up for yourself. Your one and only goal is to make the guest feel welcomed.
So, I apologize, take the blame and say it won’t happen again, and make him an extra key. He snatches them from my hand and storms off to his room. Five minutes later, he comes back down, again! “What is wrong with you? Are you stupid? Are you wasting my time on purpose? I’m heading to my room and you better come up with working room keys!”
He then throws his keys at me. My manager sees this all happen and is like, “You know what, let me handle this. You deserve a break.” I’m fuming, of course, so I go to the break room and just pace around, wondering what gives people the audacity to act like that. My manager eventually comes back, and enters the break room with a smile.
He clearly has something to report. He says, “He was going to the wrong floor. His room was actually one floor up. He said he’s sorry.” I wish I could have seen his face!
84. Keep Your Friends Close…
I suspected that my wife was cheating on me with a co-worker. I confronted both who responded by calling me a jealous husband. They were just best friends and I needed to understand that. So, I befriended him, became his workout partner, and learned everything I could about him. I’d even invited him to my dinner table.
Physical revenge was often considered, but neither he nor she was worth me spending a life sentence in prison for. I played dumb. He was a bodybuilder and taking steroids. He wasn't incredibly smart and had just barely gotten through college. And he was working minimum pay jobs while he worked towards his true desire.
He was applying for the firefighter school in our major metro city. If accepted, it would be a lifetime job for him and a career he’d wanted since he was young. He talked often during our workout sessions about how much it meant to him. I have had countless EMS and fire department contacts through my healthcare career.
He also knew I was knowledgeable about medicine. After he started to ask questions about steroids, I made sure to give him just enough info to have him want to ask me more. I then made sure he started emailing me his steroid questions. Ironically, he used an account that even had his full name in the address.
After a private investigator confirmed the affair, I moved my plan into action. So, when I was ready to leave my wife, I contacted several of the FD officers who sat on the review board. I gave them the emails from one of their candidates admitting he was using substances and lied about it during the interview process. He was slated to be a part of the incoming class as he’d done quite well. But he was rejected.
I used my contacts in the EMS community to make sure that he’d never be accepted to a major fire department within a 200-mile radius. He and my wife took my dream marriage, so I took something that had just a profound effect.
85. Tiny Book Ruiner
Whenever I fought with or got mad at my parents when I was very young (five to seven years old), instead of giving them attitude, I’d just bite my tongue… then later sneak into their bedroom and rip out the following five to ten pages of whatever book they were reading at the time. I was a tiny little passive-aggressive psycho.
86. The Party Pooper
While walking to my gate at LAX, I noticed a woman whose dog was in the middle of the waiting area doing its business. The woman was loudly face-timing with her back to the dog, so I assumed she didn’t notice. That was likely the thought shared by the gentleman who tried to get her attention. “Excuse me, miss?” he said, in a polite tone.
The woman glared at him. “Your dog,” he sheepishly continued, pointing to the mid-poop pup. The woman rolled her eyes and went back to face time as the man slinked away, seemingly embarrassed. “Some people,” she bellowed to her face-time companion with no hint of irony, “are just so rude.” When her dog finished, the woman started walking away, leaving everything right on the airport floor. Another woman tried to stop her.
“You’re not going to clean that up?” she asked, as shocked as the rest of us were. “They have people for that,” the offender replied, disappearing into the crowd, as much as someone yelling into their phone can disappear into a crowd. I stood near the pile and warned people to walk around it while someone else got a maintenance worker’s attention.
No one said anything—we were so shocked that anyone could be that horrible. When I got to my gate, the woman was there, too. Great, we were both going to Tokyo. When I travel abroad, I get embarrassed by other Americans doing things one hundred times less embarrassing than leaving animal poop on the floor of an airport. To make it worse, her dog was now barking at everyone who walked by.
I have nothing against people flying with their dogs. I do it often. But it is a privilege I take seriously. My dog is well-trained and behaves better than most people. He certainly behaves better than that jerk. Speaking of jerks, there is a pet relief area inside LAX, past security, just two gates away from where The Party Pooper let her dog go to town.
It didn’t matter. She was the type of person to litter three feet from an empty garbage can. While her dog barked at the world, the woman had moved from face-timing with no headphones to listening to music with no headphones. I don’t like to throw around the word “sociopath,” but I don’t know how else I could explain just how selfish and terrible of a person she was.
I’d bet her car was somewhere in long-term parking, parked across three spots with paint on the bumper from the child's bike she hit without leaving a note. Everyone else tried to ignore her, sitting as far away from her as they could. I am not everyone else. I sat down right next to the horrible woman. “Are you going to London on business?” I said.
“I’m going to Tokyo,” she responded gruffly, annoyed that I interrupted her DJing. “Oh, I said. Then you better hurry. That flight got moved to gate 53C. This is the flight to London.” I figured I could give her a little moment of panic as payback for how terribly she was treating everyone. I didn’t predict what would happen next. She grabbed her bags and her dog in a huff, and stormed out of the gate without even checking.
She was so self-involved, she didn’t notice that the monitor at our gate still said Tokyo and almost everyone at the gate was Japanese. Based on her actions, she believed me that the fight had been moved, so she’s also a jerk for not thanking me. “Some people,” I thought as I watched her rush away from the gate without stopping her, “are just so rude.”
The flight to Tokyo was at gate 69A, so the 53 gates were on the other side of the next terminal. And I felt guilty knowing she probably berated some poor clerk who had to explain to her that there was no gate 53C. I don’t know if she made it back to this flight before we took off or not, but I didn’t see her board and I didn’t hear her dog.
Her missing her flight was not my original intention, but it would be a fine punishment for her being so rude to everyone and making a low-paid stranger clean poop off the floor. What makes me wonder if I went too far is the knowledge that Delta only has one flight to Tokyo each day. Whoops. Maybe she can re-book on another airline. I hear they have people for that.
87. You Were Warned
A coworker chewed on everything from pens and pencils to safety goggles. I warned him to stop, but he just made a joke out of it by chewing even more. Little did he know that I'd soon have the last laugh. Everyone except him watched as I rubbed the pen all over a particular area of my rear end and then handed it to him and said “DO NOT CHEW ON THIS PEN”. Straight into his mouth, it went. The whole shop erupted in laughter and he began spitting like crazy. Notice was served and the chewing immediately stopped. If you mess with the bull, you may get the horns...
88. Playing With Fire
It’s been about four years since this happened. I was about 18 at the time, working for a security company. There were constant call offs and no shows, have no idea why. But being so young and naive, I was constantly working 16 hour shifts and not coming home until 8 am. Also, I lived with my father at the time. The time frame of this was around the 4th of July.
I finally had a day off and my best friend was back in town for vacation. We decided to get together and chip in on some good ol’ American fireworks. To be fair, I have had nothing but bad experiences with fireworks so I had no idea how I thought this would be any different. We got home with the fireworks and we laid them all out on the floor.
There were Sparklers, Bottle Rockets, Cakes, and Roman Candles. I say, “Why don’t we mess around with some sparklers since it’s still not dark yet?” Great idea! We go into my backyard, where it hasn’t rained in well over two months and it is extremely dry. You see the problem here? One of the little sparkies from mine and my friend’s sparkler made contact with the ground and made two small fires that quickly spread to a large area.
I ran as fast as I could to grab the garden hose and quickly started spraying down the fire. It was no use, it was spreading faster than I could spray it. I handed my friend the hose and called 9-1-1. What felt like hours was only four minutes and the fire was spreading to the neighbor’s fence. The neighbor came outside to grab their hose and spray down the fence, along with the burning grass in her yard.
The fire department shows up finally and I tell my friend “Only one of us needs to get in trouble, you should leave.” He was reluctant to leave because he felt equally responsible, but I convinced him. I didn’t want him to get in trouble. My neighbor was super chill about the entire situation at first. I told her that we could talk about replacing the fence and get some quotes to repair it.
She was just super grateful that everyone was okay. About two hours after the fire, the fire investigator came to question me about the fire. I told him the “truth.” I said I was in the backyard by myself playing with fireworks and accidentally lit the ground on fire. I had gotten off that day without being hit by any charges and was commended for being honest. Here is where it goes down hill very fast.
About a week later, I get a knock on the door from the neighbor. I opened the door and she handed me two pieces of paper for me to look at. There was a quote for the fence valued at around $4,000 and an estimate for lawn-care valued around $6,000. These were really shady and just typed out on a Microsoft word document with no logo or company name.
She then adds, “I will also be having you pay my water bill for three months because the new yard will need lots of water.” Now, the fence this woman had before was raggedy, and falling apart. Her yard? Weeds everywhere, and she never mowed it. Now looking at this paper, she wants a mahogany fence, and a brand new back yard with flowers and trimmed hedges?
I said “I need to get an estimate myself, this doesn’t feel right.” She says “Remember, you agreed to replace my fence, and a real man keeps promises.” I shut the door and called my dad to tell him about what just happened. He flipped out and told me “Son, don’t you give that woman single dime.” He gives me the number to his handyman and tells me to take care of it.
The next day, I had the guy come out for an estimate and the neighbor ran outside flailing her arms. “I did not give you permission to get an estimate on my fence.” Technically, it separates the property line, so it’s both of our fences. She calls the authorities on me for having a contractor, and they ultimately can’t do a single thing because I’m on my property.
He quickly finishes the estimate off at $1,200. I also knew a guy who did lawn care from my time working at the grocery store. He estimated the lawn re-seeding while she was away from the house to be about $800. After I get these estimates, I give copies to the woman and she is having none of it. “I don’t know these people. I don’t want them near my house, they’re probably really bad contractors.”
I said, “No, I know them personally. They are really nice people and do great work.” She shut the door in my face and I went on my way. I ended up working a 16 hour shift that night and got home at 8 am, and this woman comes knocking on my door at 9 am and demanded I speak to her. I explained, “I would really love to do this, but I just got home and I have to be back at work in less than 5 hours. I need to sleep.”
She goes, “What kind of lazy idiot sleeps in until 2 pm?” At this point, I had about lost it, and told her, “You can either accept my $2,000 for my quotes or kiss my butt and get nothing.” She stood there for a while with her mouth gaped open, but she accepted my offer and planned to meet down at the notary the next morning. I spent that night after I got off work writing a contract and gathering the $2,000 in cash.
The next morning I wake up and grab this contract to meet down at the notary. I was thrilled to finally be done with this broad, and never speak to her again. But it wasn’t over yet. I waited for her for over three hours and she didn’t show up. I get a call from her saying “I’m sorry the 2,000 isn’t enough, I’m having my guys start work on this project, and you will be paying me full price.”
Oh really? After that I did not say a single word to her, and I watched for a few months as these guys turned her backyard into an oasis, complete with a small pond, brand new sod and flowers, the whole nine yards. Come to find out she had plans to remodel these things for a long time, and was just waiting for the opportunity to go through with it.
Also in this time, she used her remodel funds to go on a trip to Hawaii. You know how I found out about this? She was bragging about it on the neighborhood Facebook group, and didn’t know I was in it. I have a different Facebook name than my real name. Are you ready for the revenge? Now four months after the fire and all the remodels, I get served papers to go to court for $10,300.
At 18 years old, I’m having to hire a lawyer to work my case. When we finally do get into court, I lay everything out. The quotes, being harassed multiple times, not showing up after agreeing to a deal, not wanting me to get my own quotes (required by law by the way), and her bragging about screwing me out of money—and I have proof of all of this.
The judge looked at her and said, “Ma’am with all due respect ,you’re out of your dagum mind. Not only did this young man tell the truth of what happened, he offered to pay you more than he was supposed to. Your lawn was already gone before the fire occurred, therefore he is only responsible for the fence of $1,200. I will also deduct from this his lawyer fees” So I burned this woman’s fence down and all I’m having to give her is $400? Cool.
She took a huge financial loss from this. I’m not sure how much the Hawaii trip cost her, but she was in serious debt. She ended up having to sell the house because of it and moved into a smaller house. Haven’t heard anything from her since. Now, I am not saying that I do not feel bad for burning down my neighbor’s fence. I felt really bad about it and wish we could've handled it more civilly.
I would've been happy to meet in the middle or get multiple quotes. To this day, I still do not use fireworks, because we could've really hurt someone.
89. That’s On You
I film and edit promotional videos, then post them on my company’s YouTube channel. The day after I uploaded a particular run-of-the-mill video, my manager called me into his office because one of our directors, who hates our department and loves undermining me in particular, sent an email to my manager and a few higher-ups. That's when it got cringey.
In the email, he stated that I had messed up the promo video, because there were “all of these other disgusting videos attached to it.” As proof, he included a screenshot of the end of the video, where all of the recommended videos appeared to star scantily-clad Asian women in suggestive poses. Neither he nor my manager knew how YouTube algorithms worked.
He didn’t realize that the videos were suggested because he, or someone on his account, viewed that kind of content before. I have no idea how my manager explained this to him.
90. A Deserved Loss
My former roommate/best friend out of the blue started spreading completely fabricated rumors about me. When I heard about them, I didn’t confront her or call her out. Instead, I blocked her in every way, took all my stuff out of our shared storage unit and never reminded her about paying her half. Months later, she showed up on my doorstep to tell me that they had repoed everything in the unit.
She had every childhood photo, family heirlooms, expensive furniture, and a small jewelry collection in there. Got what she deserved as far as I’m concerned.
91. It’s Just Not Working Out
I had a boss from the underworld back when I worked for a logistics company (we will call him ”David”). This particular company did not hire directly for dock workers—you had to go through a temp-to-hire service—and it had a 90-day window in which the dock super (who in this case was David) could call your temp agency and tell them your stint at the company was over. The temp would be called into the office where David would look at him or her and say with a large, smug grin: “IT’S JUST NOT WORKING OUT”.
This prick would ridicule new temps about the way they dressed, the way they talked, and their mannerisms in front of everyone at shift meetings. When a new batch of temps would start, he would pick an unlucky one out and ride him or her until they quit or made some minor mistake. Then, he would tell the temp agency that person was just not working out for the company.
David was married to some big shot at a hospital in town. She was the breadwinner, so he had no problems with keeping some low-level super job. To top it all off, David was also the only minority with a supervisory position, so the Logistics Company didn’t want to fire him. David was simply a shift super for the dock and he had no desire to be promoted because he had absolutely no responsibilities except to post an end-of-shift report, which he had one of the receivers do for him (that was my job). For two years, I typed this jerk’s nightly reports, knowing full well he never witnessed any of it going on—he just sat in his office eating or riding the dock on a golf cart looking for reasons to fire new people. I knew something had to change.
Anyway, I was hired in as a temp, kept my head down through David’s nonsense, and eventually, I got promoted to head of a different department away from him. Three years later, the company decided that receiving (David’s department) was lacking direction, and decided to hire a department head for them. I got the job. I was now David’s boss.
He turned pale when it was announced the next day at work. I thought he was going to expire on the spot. He knew that for years I witnessed every bit of the terrible things he had said and done to the temps. I showed up nightly for three months on his shifts to “monitor” how David ran his shifts, watching him make stupid mistakes one after another; any one of these things I could have easily terminated him, but I held out and documented everything.
When it finally came time, I called him into my office, armed with months (years, really) of reasons to fire him, but I simply looked at him and told him, “David, it’s just not working out”.
92. Getting Off The Roof
I was about 18 and working doing residential roofing for a summer job. I had never installed clay or tile shingles before, so my boss told me to watch one of the other guys for a few minutes to get the hang of it. No less than two minutes later, he started screaming (literally screaming; the guy had anger issues) asking why I was standing around and not working. So I grabbed some tiles and started shooting them down.
Since I still had really no idea of what I was doing, I, of course, shattered the first two tiles I tried to shoot down. My boss came over and started screaming at me again for breaking tiles. But that's not even the worst thing he did— he then proceeded to PUSH ME OFF THE ROOF! Granted the fall was only about 10 feet, but it still could’ve finished me. At that point, I was fuming mad and decided I was done with that jerk. As I was packing up my gear, I could hear him cursing me at the other guys on the roof.
As I was walking off of the job, I noticed this moron standing on one of the air hoses running from his nail gun to the air compressor on the ground. In one swift movement, I grabbed the air hose and yanked it hard toward the ground. He came tumbling down off of the roof and landed in a pile. As I was getting into my Jeep, I heard him threatening to call the cops on me. The foreman came up to him and pointed out how foolish he would look when all of the guys on the crew clearly saw him stumble and fall off on his own. It was glorious to hear that freak ranting and screaming at all of us as I rode off. I realize that I probably committed assault, but turnabout is fair play as far as I am concerned.
93. Wait For It
I was working as a teller at the bank years ago, and a Karen was complaining about how slow and terrible my computer was. She claimed that if I had been using an IBM she'd have been out of there already. She works at IBM, and they only make the best, fastest bank equipment. Blah, blah, blah. I slowly, deliberately, turned my terrible IBM computer for her to look at. Not another word.
94. 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.
95. The Bride Wore Blue
Last summer I was at a cousin's wedding. His bride and her family had been close with ours since before I was born, and the couple had known each other since they were toddlers, so it was a particularly exciting event for both sides of the family. However, after the ceremony was over and the party had only just started, one of the bridesmaids decided to announce her own engagement.
The attention was immediately taken away from the newlyweds and brought to the bridesmaid (who I'll call Sarah) and her equally-smug fiancé. My cousin's wife (I'll call her Emma) didn't make a scene or utter a single negative word about Sarah. She looked like she was on the verge of tears, but she kept grinning and acted very happy for the other couple.
This was unusual, as Emma is typically quite confrontational and speaks her mind no matter the consequences. This was a warning sign. Sarah later picked Emma to be the maid of honor at her own wedding, which took place last weekend. I wasn't there for it, but my cousin sent me some of the best bits on snapchat and explained the whole situation. This is where the fun begins.
Emma's two much-younger sisters were the flower girls at Sarah's wedding. At the very last moment, Emma switched out the white petals in their baskets to blue ones she had secretly brought with her. She told her sisters not to say anything about it or let the bride see them until it was time to scatter them down the aisle. Sarah looked very confused upon seeing the blue petals (which didn't coordinate whatsoever with her theme), but of course she didn't say anything about it in the moment.
Most of Sarah's other bridesmaids were also Emma's friends, had attended Emma's wedding, and were in on Emma's scheme. At the reception, Emma's sisters and the other bridesmaids were tight-lipped when Sarah began demanding to know why there were blue petals. The wedding planner ended up getting a lot of flack for not checking the flower girls' baskets before they walked down the aisle.
Finally, it was time for the speeches. The speeches took place in front of a massive screen, displaying a loop of photos with Sarah and her husband, which had been compiled by Emma. Emma took the remote that controlled the presentation screen and at first she showed some pre-approved humorous photos of Sarah with Emma and other friends to facilitate a couple of light-hearted jokes.
Then, at the very end, Emma said to Sarah that she must be wondering why there were blue petals instead of the white ones originally planned. That was when Emma displayed the last slide from her presentation, and jaws dropped. Emma announced in front of everyone that she was five months pregnant, and that she'd just discovered the baby was a boy, hence the blue petals. The last slide? Her ultrasound picture.
There were shocked yells and gasps, Sarah had a fit, but those involved in the scheme cheered so loudly that I sincerely regret watching the snapchat recordings with headphones. Apparently Sarah had been very nasty to her bridesmaids before, driving several of them away and forcing the others to pay ridiculous amounts of money for dresses.
Emma and my cousin were eventually thrown out of the party, but they were all smiles. Sarah's fuming mother went to confront her outside, and Emma retorted with, "Gentle, gentle! I'm pregnant!" I reckon Sarah doesn't speak to the majority of those bridesmaids anymore.
96. Sign Your Work
My ex cheated on me while I was deployed. She wound up getting engaged to the guy. Before I changed duty stations, she reached out to say goodbye. We hooked up. While she was asleep, I found his underwear drawer and left a note that said, “Cheaters cheat. By the way, I didn’t use protection". I signed it. Hard not to think fondly on that memory…
97. Takes One To Know One
I went to get a haircut this one time and the hairdresser made a big show of how terrible my faded highlights were, how the previous hairdresser did a lousy job and how I got ripped off. Then he asked me where I got it done from. "Here."
98. The Cost Of Cheating
We dated for four years and had what I thought was a great relationship. We were both well-established professionals who both owned homes in the same neighborhood and both had daughters in the home. Her daughter was 11, and mine was 16 when we met. We had actually planned to get married, build a house, and raise the two together.
We planned the house build because she had recently been diagnosed with a neurological illness that would eventually put her in a wheelchair, and needed something disability-friendly. During the planning stages, I began doing landscape and construction projects on her home to increase the resale value. All in, I invested roughly $30K into the home, running everything through my side construction business for tax, permitting, and resale purposes.
We had a contract that "payment" would be made upon the sale of the home. I produced invoices for each and every project, but never pushed for payment because of the prior agreement. Fast forward six months, we're looking at property to develop and finalizing drawings on the home when I began feeling ill. I couldn't eat, constantly vomiting and passing blood.
I began noticing that my abdomen looked swollen, which was odd because we were both very clean eaters and were in the gym every day. So I went to the doctor and began having tests done. During this time, she began having small cognitive issues, and the stress of her current position was exacerbating her condition, so she took a $20K per anum cut in pay along with a lesser position inside the company.
After a month or so of different tests, and a biopsy, it came back that I had a golf ball-sized cancerous tumor in my stomach, and would need to begin chemotherapy. So I began chemo and radiation treatments, which made me, expectedly so, extremely ill. She was spending time helping around my place on the weekends and staying over more, to the point that both her and her daughter were at my home more than theirs.
At this point, I suggested that we go ahead and put one of our houses on the market, and move in together until the new house was built. I have great supplemental insurance as well as a long-term health plan, so using that coupled with the sale of one of our houses would push us through comfortably, and help ease the financial stress on her. This backfired on me horribly.
Shortly after this discussion, she became extremely distant. Her daughter wasn't coming down and hanging out with mine anymore, and she had excuses for not getting together. She quit driving me to treatments and stopped staying over. She then dropped the truth. A sentence that will forever be burned into my psyche: "I love you, but I can't see myself taking care of someone this sick in the long-term, and I don't think we should see each other any longer."
A. TEXT. It broke me. I won't lie. This was the first woman I had ever opened up to and planned a life with since my wife passed when my children were 1 and 3. However, I tried to be mature about it. I forced myself to understand her position and to accept what I could not change. I calmly, the next day, gathered all of her things, packed them neatly, loaded them in my truck, and took them to her house to leave on the back porch while she was at work, in order to avoid any awkward exchanges.
Walking around the back and under the porch cover, I sat down on a box, and saw her in her back living room. I wish I could unsee what came next. She was there getting it on with a man that she had introduced to me as a life-long friend. I had once had dinner and drinks with this man and his girlfriend. We had gone on vacation with them as well.
I never spoke of the incident with her, and simply sent her a text later, explaining that I would leave her things on my side porch to pick up at her convenience. I discovered eight or nine months later from his now ex-girlfriend that they had broken up due to him confessing that he had been sleeping with my partner, dating back to about the time we were finishing drawings on the new home.
Now I’m angry. Revenge time. At this point, I had finished chemo and radiation for the time being and was feeling healthier. I was going through some much-neglected paperwork when I ran across the file that contained $32,680.00 in unpaid, long overdue invoices, which were promptly sent to my attorney to begin lien proceedings on the home.
It turns out that I couldn't have done this a moment too soon because she was set to put her house on the market. Coupled with interest over the course of, what was then, 19 months overdue, the invoices were hefty. That, along with the agreement of settling them when the house was sold and attorney fees, left her with roughly $10K after the sale of the home and settling her current mortgage.
She promptly had to back out of the purchase of another home and moved in with her oldest daughter and two grandchildren. She also had to leave her job and begin receiving disability. I ran into her a little over a year ago, and she looked as if she had aged 20 years, and was in the wheelchair we had talked about. We chatted cordially but briefly and I excused myself and went on with my day.
A few days later, her younger daughter called me and spoke of my running into her mom, and could we hang out sometime. I gave a vague answer, thanked her for calling and again, went on with my day. The ex then called me a week or so later, and began apologizing for leaving me as she did. Again, cordial but short, I thanked her for calling and hung up.
She began texting, and this went on for several weeks until once she asked if I could ever see us rekindling what we had, to which I replied: "I can't see myself taking care of someone so sick in the long-term. Remember the box on your back porch? Did you think that (life-long friend) brought that over to you from my house? Good luck to you. Goodbye."
99. Oh Snap
I started work in a new IT role on the same team as another guy who instantly decided he wanted to make me out to be a pathetic, worthless excuse for a man. This was despite the fact that, while we were both in our mid-20s, I had outranked him in the profession and was happily married while he was single and living with his parents.
He used to try to bait me into arguments, so he could rattle off his well-rehearsed right-wing cliches and boast about how I wasn’t a “real man” because I didn’t drink $80 scotch or have a knife collection or whatever. I just ignored it since I already figured I was winning the game of life. One day, he sent me one of his emails to the whole team saying, “If you don’t drink this, you can kiss your manhood goodbye” with a picture of some expensive scotch or something. At that point, I knew exactly how to make him eat his words.
So I replied to all, saying: “You know what else kisses my manhood goodbye? Your mom”. “Oh snap” replies all around. Six months later, I was promoted to head of the team and he was fired.
100. Overseas Exit Plan
I had a bunch of jerk-face bosses who were looking all school year for reasons to fire me. It got to the point where I was turning in three times the number of lesson plans despite already having less freedom to do my job than any other teacher at that school. It was all personal too. Very unprofessional stuff like “my son is in this guy’s class and he does it this way, so you should do it that way also”. Meanwhile, I'd walk by that same teacher’s class and he'd be showing the Peanuts Christmas Special.
They said my lesson plans weren’t detailed enough, so I asked for their best lesson plan from any other teacher to compare, and mine were clearly more detailed, a fact that shocked even me. They spent so much time telling me I was a bad teacher that I actually began to believe it. Now, this school had a free year’s license to Rosetta Stone, so I switched my language to Korean and learned Hangul. Almost weekly, there would be someone who would say, “Korean!? Who the hell knows Korean!? What would you ever do with that”?
At the end of the year, they told me not to come back, but all I could do was smile. I said, “Thank you, but I just got a job in Korea”. They had the dean in there to make sure I didn’t make a scene, and I think even he was surprised that I was almost laughing as I walked out of the office and shook hands with everyone with a big sly grin on my face. Right now, I am sitting here at my desk in Korea, the only native English teacher at my school, and they love me. To tell you the truth, I might have stayed at that job another five or 10 years. Getting asked to not come back was the best thing that ever happened to me.
Sources: Reddit, , , , , ,
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