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Have you ever received advice to take the high road and let go of a wrongdoing? While this may seem like the noble thing to do, sometimes it’s necessary to take matters into your own hands and show the wrongdoer a lesson. In the following examples, these individuals took the popular phrase “Don’t get mad, get even” to a whole new level, and we can’t help but applaud their efforts.

1. No Such Thing As A Free Ride

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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.

2. World’s Best Coffee

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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.”

3. More Than Just A Drive

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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.

4. The One-Upper

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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.

5. Restaurant Playground

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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.

6. A Taste Of Her Own Medicine

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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.

7. Little Light Lie

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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.

8. Make Like A Tree

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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.

9. Homecoming King

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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.

10. Truth Prevails

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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.

11. The Gift Of Pettiness

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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.

12. Words Are Hard

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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.

13. Solar Opposites

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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.

14. The Power Of Caterers

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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.

15. Neighborly Behavior

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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…

16. Treat Others As You Want To Be Treated

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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.

17. Revenge Clap

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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.

18. Stacy, not STACEY

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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.

19. Holier Than Thou

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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.

20. Tricked

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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.

21. More Than One Meaning

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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.

22. Mysterious Moving Filing Cabinet

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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.

23. Finding A Loophole

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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.”

24. Drying Up After Him

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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.

25. He Needed His Caffeine

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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.

26. Can I, Or May I?

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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.

27. Concrete Pumpkin

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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.

28. Doesn’t Take An Expert To Know

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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.

29. Not Their Lucky Day

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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.

30. Peace At Last

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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.

31. That Came Full Circle

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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.

32. The Deli Worker’s Trick

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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.

33. Nepotism Doesn’t Always Work

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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.

34. Long-Term And Expensive

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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.

35. That Backfired

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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.

36. Accidental Victory

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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.

37. Burning In The Bathroom

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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.

38. Didn’t See That One Coming

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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.

39. A Different Kind Of Windows Start-Up Noise

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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.

40. Not Passive-Aggressive, Aggressive-Aggressive

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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.

41. Micro-Managed Alarms

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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.

42. Not So Handy Work

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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.

43. Mr. Sci-Fi

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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.

44. The Bill Comes Due

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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.

45. Hiding Rolls

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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.

46. Just One Of The Guys

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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.

47. Who’s Your Daddy?

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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.

48. Don’t Stop Believing

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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.

49. Safety First

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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.

50. Restricted Cheez-Its

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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.