People Broadcast Their Praiseworthy Revenge Stories
12. Decline Me Bereavement Pay? It's Over For You
“This occurred about 10 years ago but still is my favorite revenge.
My first job out of college was for a local government agency in the small town where I grew up. I had moved back to my hometown after college because of family considerations (my grandmother was sick) and because I didn’t want to take a job in a cubicle.
As it turned out, this job involved a cubicle, but there was also fieldwork involved, which was what I had been wanting.
Right off, my boss was a little off-putting. He butchered the English language in some ways but was quick to correct someone who might use an incorrect word or phrase.
If someone in the community had an issue with our work (the agency involved in the calculation of local taxes) he would first look up their account to determine if they were “worth the time” to talk to personally or if they should be delegated.
Anyone who was “worth the time” got to visit with him personally and would invariably get additional considerations. Anyone that he delegated had to be denied in almost all requests for relief, even if the request was identical to the issue that had been presented by those deemed to be “worth the time.”
Part of our year was spent arbitrating these disputes, and we would have hearings that were conducted at our office for those who we could not come to an agreement with on an informal basis.
Boss would sit in the back of the room and, if he heard me or one of my colleagues give an answer that would provide an opening for the arbitration panel to justify a reduction, he would pull us from the room.
On one such occasion, I pointed out to him the fact that, in arbitration hearings, I was under oath and had been asked a direct question. I told him I would not perjure myself and that he was the one who told me about the change for the other person.
I said the next time I was asked a similar question, I could refer the question to him so that he could lie. That didn’t go over well, but he stopped asking me to lie.
The final straw for me working there was when I had to take off three days unexpectedly because my best friend’s father, who was like a second father to me, ended his life, and it fell to me to have to go tell my best friend that his father was no longer alive and bring him back home to deal with the ensuing grief that we all went through that week.
Boss called me the evening before the funeral to ask when I would be back and reminded me that I had a deadline coming up. Once back at work, he pulled me aside and said that my request for bereavement pay would be declined since the person who died was “not an immediate family member.” I pointed out the fact that he had granted bereavement pay to a coworker in a similar situation but was told that “they had to travel” to that funeral, and the pay was to help pay for those expenses.
When I started to parse the logic, he simply held up a hand, said the matter was closed, and that I needed to make sure that all my work was done by the deadline. It was.
After almost three years, I had had enough and decided to leave.
I had accrued some sick days and vacation days. HR rules allowed for the collection of vacation days when someone quit, but sick days were lost. I had bout 15 days still in the bank. People had used sick days as vacation days in the past, which had been approved by Boss, but in this circumstance, since I was leaving, they would be lost.
Okay, no problem, cya.
I stayed in touch with a couple of colleagues and learned that about a year after I left that Boss had decided to take another job in another town. I happened to hear that, as part of his departure package, he had asked to be paid his unused sick days.
HR, using the precedent set at my departure, said no, so Boss decided to go over HR and take it to the board of directors. Having heard about this, and knowing the date and time of the next board meeting, I made a point of speaking with a board member prior to the meeting.
A bit to know about the board is that they were all hand-picked by Boss, and Boss had grown accustomed to any item he put before them being rubber-stamped. What I knew was that many of those same board members had longstanding ties to the community, and liked to protect their own, whenever possible.
I ended up seeing the board chairman a couple of days before the meeting. It was a casual meeting. I had seen his vehicle parked at a local business and decided that I had a few minutes and could do a little shopping that day.
This gentleman is an old family friend. By that, I mean that he was very good friends with my parents when they were young; to the point of being a groomsman at their wedding.
We said our hellos and caught up a bit, as we had not spoken much since I had taken my new job.
I mentioned that I had heard that Boss was moving along and wished them luck in finding a replacement. I also mentioned that it was good that the board had decided to fix the HR issue. “What HR issue?” Well, when I left, I couldn’t collect my sick days because HR said it was against policy.
I went on to say that I had hoped that they would take the opportunity to change bereavement policy, as it seemed to be a gray area as well. I gave him a general outline of what had happened after the funeral but was careful not to throw Boss too far under the bus.
He didn’t quiz me on the last, but from his look, I could tell he was disappointed that Boss had not given the days to me for the funeral. I made sure to let him know that, as far as I was concerned, it was water under the bridge, I had enjoyed my experience working at the agency but I understood that as a governmental agency, there are sometimes private individuals who might not look favorably on a policy change, especially when it has to do with compensation packages.
I said my goodbyes and went about my day.
The following week, after the board meeting and after Boss had completed his last day, I heard from a colleague who also worked as the HR person in the office. She wanted to know what I had said to the board chair.
Apparently, after he spoke with me, he had gone to the agency office and asked her about the HR policy regarding sick days and bereavement pay. This had gotten back to Boss prior to the board hearing, and he apparently was asking HR “what exactly did he ask for” over and over.
HR is required to be at board meetings and gave me a good recap of the events. When the agenda item regarding Boss and his departure package finally came up, the chair spoke up, and slowly and directly made his case to the other board members that he had reservations about approving the changes to the HR policy, as it might look inappropriate to give such a generous package to Boss when sick days had not previously been granted to other departing employees.
He said it might set a bad precedent, and that he would rather err on the side of being consistent with prior decisions that the office had made. He also had spoken with board chairs of similar agencies and none of their policies allowed for employees to collect sick pay when they ended their employment.
Another board member spoke up at this point saying that Boss had told him other agencies did allow for the payments. This ended up being the final nail in the coffin for Boss. You don’t want to get caught in a lie with these folks.
Boss stammered and tried to salvage the situation, but there was a motion to table, and a second and a vote taken, and that was the end of it for Boss.
In the end, Boss lost 30 days (max you could carry over) of sick day compensation and had been caught in a lie with a board that he had hand-picked over the years. This equated to about $9,800 in additional compensation that Boss saw slip through his fingers.”
11. Send A Nasty E-mail? Let's Get HR Involved
It doesn’t matter how high of a position you have; there’s always someone who can get you fired.
“So I work for a company that contracts out to a larger fortune 500 company. I got the job as a follow-on to a deployment engineering contract inspecting and installing equipment for the larger company about a year and a half ago.
I first encountered my nemesis towards the end of my contract when I was asked to deliver a shipment of equipment to her parts cage. “Hey, OP, go deliver this pallet of spare parts to Dolores,” said my boss, the project manager.
“You got it, boss-man!” said our hero. And lo, spare parts were delivered to Dolores’ parts cage. Dolores herself was out screwing off somewhere. I took the Bill-of-Lading from the trucking company that dropped it off, put it on her desk, asked the guy behind the fence if he knew when Dolores would be back, and he said “Nope, but I’ll let her know you stopped by!” “Thanks, man! My name’s OP by the way.
I’ll send her an email to let her know I dropped by!” True to my word, I sent off the confirmation email to Dolores’ work inbox and went back to work.
About 2 days later, Dolores finally noticed that I had dropped off the shipment because she starts asking if I had a parts list for her.
“I left the BoL on your desk… that’s the only list anyone gave me for you. But I can look up the part numbers that usually come in a spare-parts shipment for you if you think anything’s missing…” “Oh, no need! I’m sure everything’s here! Thanks for your help.” Click.
Huh. Guess Dolores doesn’t really care if anything’s missing. Oh well. I’ll never have to deal with her again.
Then I got the job offer. It was for more than I was making as a contract employee and came with benefits, so heck yeah, I took the job.
I would soon be made to regret it.
Part (if not all) of Dolores’ job requirements is managing our billable assets – be they material, tools, equipment, and, sadly, our work-order system that determines whether we have earned our salt. As the subject-matter expert for this particular system, she has basically had carte blanch for the better part of a year to do what she pleases, and woe be it unto any who stand in her path.
For my part, I was content to let her run her little fiefdom, uninhibited. Sister doin’ it for herself? More power to you, Dolores. Then the problems started.
“Since nobody reads my emails OBVIOUSLY, I’m going to have to explain to you all again the proper way to…
blah, blah, blah…” I don’t remember what specific issue she first started complaining about, but I did notice that everyone had a hard time hearing the signal for all the noise of her general jerkiness. This was a pattern that would follow for several months.
Something would not jibe with what she felt her numbers should say, and it was everyone else’s fault for filling out our work orders wrong. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I made mistakes when filling out work orders.
I have used many different work order and asset management systems in my time, but the in-house one this company uses is VERY experimental and extremely temperamental. It was made clear to me by her erratic (read: jerky) behavior that any perception of competence from anyone else in HER sphere is seen as a major threat.
When this disturbing behavior has been brought up as a source of concern by my immediate supervisor to our senior lead at our location, his answer has been a chuckle and a shrug and, “Well… that’s just how Dolores is…” Now, these guys had been working together for a good 4 months before I transferred over full-time, so they had more experience with Dolores than I did.
It turns out that Dolores has a nasty habit of accusing people of “Bald-faced Lies!” whenever they provide evidence of wrongdoing or even honest mistakes on her end. Dolores knows all and sees all and is not to be challenged by anyone! Dolores is Law.
No one is willing to stand up to Dolores because honestly? It’s never really been worth it. The closest anyone has come is when my supervisor, Steve (none of these names are real. Dolores is named after the evilest literary character of all time, obviously) brought up an inconsistency in one of Dolores’s tirades, and she screamed, “Lies! Lies! LIES!” Steve is old-school.
Steve doesn’t play that. Steve went straight to HR. Dolores claimed sexism and that Steve was disrespectful to her. Steve got smacked down.
Dolores got cocky. Dolores has never met anyone like me.
Management starts to take notice. Dolores starts to feel the heat.
As the months go on, I hear more stories about the early days of Dolores’s tenure. Dolores would say things like “Oh, COMPANY X doesn’t REALLY care if our billable hours are right. We’re kind of expected to fudge the numbers…” Arnie would take issue with this and bring it up to Steve.
“LIES LIES LIES!!!” and besides. Arnie just doesn’t like Dolores because Dolores has woman parts, obvs. Everyone not in Dolores’s little clique is stupid. Ok. I’ll play your silly little game. Our shift starts putting up big numbers. Management takes notice.
Dolores didn’t authorize our success. That can’t be right. Steve and Arnie are stupid. Let’s see how they like THIS! Work Orders come down. Preventive maintenance that “Oops! Didn’t make it into the usual rotation!” suddenly starts to hit. New requirements come down to how to fill out work orders.
They contradict themselves and are replaced two weeks later.
We meet the challenge. We persevere. We Rise.
Dolores balks. I start asking questions. Dolores doesn’t like questions. I make very respectful requests for assistance or requisitions of assets to prove that Dolores spends more time screwing off than actually doing her job.
I devise our own work order system. Dolores doesn’t like that techs can close their own work orders but is very lazy, so she insists that we create our own. “It’s not my job to enter data for you.” I find documentation that spells out her job.
That’s literally one of the first three bullet points. I say nothing because Dolores needs more rope. I offer more assistance. Dolores starts to get angry. Management watching closer, now. Harder and harder to do our job. Dolores “loses” a shipment.
New guys start. Dolores gives them training. Repeats “As long as my reporting matrix is green, COMPANY X doesn’t REALLY care what the numbers say.” Dolores starts leaving doors open and shares passwords with our shift, hoping someone will take the bait, and compromise her system.
Dolores is stupid and believes that willfully exposing our system to penetration will give her a handy way out. “It’s not MY fault! I was hacked!” is the obvious way this will end up. All the guys on our shift agree “Trap? …Trap.” I continue asking for/offering help.
Asking for data. Being real nice and sympathetic. Basically forcing her to either acknowledge my existence or continue to appear unprofessional by ignoring my email. I reply-all to lots of her passive-aggressive emails to our team with actual solutions. I publically ask stupid questions, since we never got the correct training (still haven’t).
She finally snaps, and responds to me directly, when I point out that deviating from a specific workflow will cause certain data to be omitted from a certain data field. Dolores is livid. Dolores has been drinking. Dolores writes an absolutely scathing and threatening email, telling me that a lowly tech could not POSSIBLY understand the complexities of her system and that the loophole that I found (and was encouraging my coworkers to close) was evidence of a conspiracy against her.
Besides, I had already obviously mastered that portion, so WHY THEN would I bring it up, except to discredit her! HA! This new system will be VERY big this year, and she will be VERY important, and she has first-hand knowledge that people have been falsifying data, and she has taken steps to hide this fact, and I had better watch out because only she is the one who has been keeping our facility off the radar with management!
So, she admits to being aware of falsified data (very possible) and admits to hiding it from our employer and admits that she intends to continue to falsify data, and strongly suggests that she can make it appear that I’m the one who has been behind it all.
I blow the whistle. I email HR. I use all the right buzzwords to ensure an immediate response. HR assures me that my employment is secure. Dolores has been under observation for some time. Funds have gone missing. Supplies have been “misplaced.” An ethics probe was launched today.
This evening, Steve smiled at me, shook my hand, and wished me a safe trip. I’m going on vacation with my family.
I love my job.”
10. Make My School Life A Living Heck? Your Parents Won't Let You Go To College Now
Shouldn’t have been a wicked witch.
“I’ll start off by saying that high school was not an easy time for me. Because my family was going through some financial instability, I was forced to move from a small town with zero job opportunities, to one of the largest cities in the US at the beginning of my junior year.
Being bullied throughout most of middle school, I developed a tough exterior. People who I grew close to would often admit that they thought I was a huge witch until they got to really know me. Just as I finally felt I had put down my guard and made meaningful connections with friends in my small town, there I was, starting from scratch in a big pond.
To be honest, I’m not exactly sure what it was about me that irked people. It might have been my chronic resting witch face, maybe my faux don’t give a crap attitude, or it might have been that I was brilliant at school and had no problem making others feel dumb.
Think Hermione Granger on steroids.
I crap you not, 2 days into my time at big city HS, I had already conjured a mortal enemy. I couldn’t tell you which of my many faults angered this girl who we’ll call S because I don’t recall ever crossing her personally, but she quickly made it apparent that she hated my freaking guts.
She had grown up with pretty much everyone in our year so because of that, combined with my inability to make a good impression, it wasn’t long before I found myself as a total outcast. I soon became the subject of ridicule, from my appearance to my personality.
I was nothing more than a big joke to these people. Friendless, lonely, and bordering on clinical depression, I distracted myself with my studies.
Halfway into junior year, our English teacher assigns an autobiography project. She gave us a list of generic prompts she wanted answered from “who’s your childhood hero” to “if you could trade places with one person, who would it be” kind of crap.
Well, one of the prompts asked to talk about something that really annoys you. Guess who was in 99% of my classmates’ responses? Literally, aside from myself, only one other person did not write about me, and it was the creepy dude who had failed 7th grade twice and was trying to take advantage of my social exile to get with me.
I was absolutely devastated. I knew I wasn’t an easy-going, beautiful, popular girl, but finding out just how much everyone hated me took me very close to the brink of ending my life. I ended junior year with my tail between my legs, begging my parents for a school transfer.
Flash forward to senior year, and after some very careful introspection, I decided I was going to take responsibility for how I presented myself and change for the better. I was gonna do my best to avoid all confrontation, make myself invisible, and hopefully make at least one friend before going off to college.
School started and surprisingly no one cared to bother me anymore. People acted like I didn’t exist, and nothing made me happier. I was glad to be old news. I spent most of my time with my nose in a book and slowly befriended the other nerds that regularly hung out at the library.
Things got better, way better actually. I had a good group of friends I hung out with, and junior year was simply a distant memory of the past. That is until one of the guys in my group of friends started seeing this girl we’ll call B.
B was one of S’s closest friends, but given my friendship with her partner, she begrudgingly spent more and more time around me and realized I wasn’t as bad as everyone had made me out to be. One late night bonding over a couple of drinks, she divulged that in junior year, S somehow pressured everyone to write about me in their autobiographies.
She admitted that when she had started writing about her annoying little sister, S gave her the ultimatum to either write about me or end their 10-year friendship. This was around the same time B started to realize just how much of a mean girl S was, having to constantly deal with typical HS drama between them that thankfully had nothing to do with me.
After asking around, the rumor was confirmed: S had demanded from everyone to either write about me or face the same fate I had endured during junior year. Given that no one wanted to be on her bad side or considered an outcast, nobody gave the defamation of my character a second thought.
All this new information brought back so many negative feelings to the surface. I was furious and determined to teach this scum of the Earth a lesson! I bid my time and patiently waited for the opportunity to enact revenge to present itself.
Word got back to S about me asking around about the autobiographies, and she had her own retribution in mind. She got a hold of my yearbook one day when B was signing it and snatched it out of her hands.
She proceeded to draw over my picture and wrote terrible comments next to all of my friends’ pictures, including B. She then crossed out the signatures and dedications in my yearbook from other people and wrote a sarcastic remark about how great it had been to be friends the past two years.
Given how expensive my yearbook was and how much I worked on getting people to like me, all those signatures really meant a lot to me and her vandalizing my property really angered me. I went home crying, and naturally, my mom asked me what was wrong.
I explained everything and momma bear mode was engaged!! She marched her way down to the administration the next day and demanded that my yearbook be replaced. It wasn’t very hard to match the penmanship of the mean comments scattered throughout my yearbook, to her dedication and signature on the last page.
The witch crossed out every signature but her own!
S’s parents were called and were not too happy about having to fork over $120 to replace my yearbook. I guess she must have taken a lot of crap at home because the next day, she personally handed me a new book but not before humiliating me in front of others for being a snitch when really she had snitched on herself.
That was it; that was the last straw and I knew that my moment had come.
I let some time pass to think of how I wanted to make her pay and had almost forgotten all about it ’til right before prom when she went dress shopping with B and made her give up the dress B had chosen because S wanted it for herself.
B came to me crying saying she had had enough of her and wanted to make her pay too. I officially had an accomplice.
That night, B spilled all of S’s secrets. Some of the highlights were that S’s parents were strict Jehovah’s witnesses and did not permit S to see boys, drink, or go to dances.
Well, S had been seeing this guy who she was completely over the moon for and was planning on taking to prom. B agreed to pretend like nothing was wrong and allowed S to get ready for prom at her place so that S’s parents wouldn’t find out.
Unbeknownst to her, B slipped me S’s mom’s cell phone number. They of course took plenty of prom selfies and B sent me every single one of them as evidence, including pictures of S making out with her partner, taking shots in the limo, and dancing up against her Prince Charming.
Well, needless to say, I sent her mom all of the photos, including the address to the afterparty. Seeing her mom show up so furious she was literally tripping on her long skirt, grabbing S by the hair, and dragging her intoxicated butt out of the party for all to see was definitely the highlight of my high school career.
She showed up the next day with puffy eyes, crying about how her parents weren’t allowing her to go away for college and instead keeping her in a church home to rid her of all her sins.”
9. Screw Me Over In Our Marriage? Get The Worst Divorce Possible
Always read the paperwork before you sign it.
“”This may seem shady, but all is fair in love and divorce” – my lawyer.
My ex was unfaithful to me numerous times, kept saying he was divorcing me (he was in Europe with the military and deployed from there to Afghanistan) and accused me of being unfaithful all the time because I stayed in the US.
I stayed because they were going to extend his tour in Europe if I joined him, and he argued that he didn’t want to stay there. He came back from his deployment and back to the US. We hadn’t talked in about 6 months at this time.
So he shows up and wants to work things out. Ok… I didn’t know about the affair yet.
A month later, I go to a routine OB appointment (postnatal) and find out that I have an infection. Knowing I hadn’t slept with anyone but him, I knew exactly where I got it.
He, of course, denies it and says I caught it from someone else. Whatever he has it too, and suddenly, he’s messaging all these girls on social media to “go get checked.” So I’m 2,000 miles from my family at this point and am considering how to get the heck out of this mess.
My ex becomes an addict and starts heavily mistreating me. The military did nothing about it, even after the MPs arrested him 3 separate times for domestic issues – they put me in the position to have him come back home because they wouldn’t keep him in the barracks and made him pay to stay somewhere else.
Unfortunately, that meant he took everything out of our bank account to pay for his housing and didn’t care if the baby ate or had diapers.
I’m stuck in this crap situation; I don’t have the funds to go home and start over.
So I start planning on how to escape it the easiest way possible. He looks at re-enlisting – so I suggest the military base that is closest to my family. He goes for it, and within a short period of time, we’re packed up and moving.
I let my parents know what’s going on, so they’re in the loop if I struggle and need to come home.
We no sooner get moved, and he has this massive episode with the drinking. This is the opportunity that I was waiting for.
He threatens to end his life. I call a hotline, and they send the MPs over – they collect him up and take him to the psych ward.
He says he’s changed and all of this and wants to come home. I keep pushing it off, and the military sends him to a rehab facility (at this point, he’s a 2x loser while he’s enrolled in the program).
I packed up while he was gone. At some point, while he’s gone, it dawns on him that I pushed for him to go to that particular base because it was close to home, and it was an escape plan – DING DING DING, we have a winner!
So, duped him on that one.
At this point, he should have learned that I’m in the planning phase of leaving him permanently and should have been a bit on guard.
I hire a lawyer to draft my divorce paperwork – I filed it myself but learned quickly that if you plan on being shady, professional help makes it easier.
In the state I live in (TX), you can waive your rights to divorce and let the other party go uncontested – the waiver pretty much waives your rights to anything to do with the divorce and to any notice from the court about proceedings.
I get the lawyer to draft up a waiver, took basically what I wanted, and gave it to my ex to read. He signs the waiver without reading it or any of the divorce paperwork after he held onto it for a week “so he could have his lawyer look over it.” I knew when he gave it back to me signed, there was no way in heck he read it or had any lawyer or paralegal read it, as nobody would be stupid enough to sign it if they had actually read and understood it.
It was pretty straightforward.
I don’t say a word about it, play it off like it’s just part of the process, and immediately cautiously drove down yet hauled butt to the clerk to file it.
Final date comes up, and of course, my ex has no idea it’s even happening because the schmuck signed off his rights.
I appear for court, talk to the judge for about 5 minutes, he signs it off and I go down to file it.
I drop off a copy at my ex’s work as a courtesy (his choice, I called and told him I had some paperwork for him).
He completely flips his crap at work because he can’t believe that it’s finalized without him getting any say in it. Just last week he was talking about working it out, and I hadn’t argued about it. Yeah because I knew the final court date already, why argue?
Basically, the last thing he ever said pertaining to the divorce was that he couldn’t believe what a sneaky witch I am.”
8. Make My Girl Cry? Deal With My Wrath
“Okay, so this was a good few years ago back when I was in high school.
I am happily and openly gay, and I came out at about 14, around year 9 in high school (I’m British). And from that second on, I was even more of a target.
I was already the preferred bullying target. The school was aware of it. They were also aware that my family didn’t take kindly to this (in my previous school, my mom had brought the police into school on the day when the younger kids were coming to see if they wanted to go there because they weren’t doing anything about me being bullied), so pulled a big huff and puff smoke screen to try and make it seem like they were fixing the issue, though they never did anything.
I had plenty of small ‘regular’ or ‘petty’ revenge throughout my years. Getting people kicked out of classes, forced into counseling, etc., etc. But this is the big one.
When I was nearly 16, I got my first partner, we’ll call her S.
I was mad, head over heels in love with S, basically from the second I met her, even though I didn’t think I’d get anywhere because she was a straight girl from a good Christian family. So when we started seeing each other romantically, I was, naturally, over the moon.
She was in the year ahead of me, so the bulk of our relationship was with her in Sixth Form and me in my final year of high school. Because of this, she didn’t get touched by really any homophobia, other than hearing it secondhand from me, and seeing how much it affected me.
Until the day of the incident.
We used to hang out in the library over lunch because the librarian was one of the few people who actually really tried to keep people in order. But then it was closed one day during lunch, so we were stuck drifting around the school grounds.
So we found ourselves a bench and sat, ate our lunch, and chatted like normal. No real physical business because neither of us was into that PDA. We were just sat together and once we’d stopped eating. We were holding hands as we chatted.
And then one of my biggest tormentors, let’s call her O, spotted me. Unprotected, in the open, and with my girl. She called over her group of lackeys, and they sat on the next bench and started their usual attempts of psychological warfare.
At first, it was just overly loud comments about how disgusting gay people were, how I clearly never washed (lies, let me assure you), about how my girl was fat (she was a little bigger, but it only made her more attractive to me), so on and so forth.
So, after about five minutes of just trying to ignore them, I encourage her to stand, and we plan to move to sit outside the library since the librarian was still at school that day, so she could hopefully watch over us through the window.
We stand and start walking, no longer holding hands, and they follow us. (Side note here: I have some slight muscle problems in my legs, mostly around my knees. These girls were aware of this, since they were in my PE class.)
The comments continued, along with attempting to stand on the back of my girl’s shoes and knee/kick me in the back of the legs so I’d go down.
We reach the library, and at this point, my girl is clearly very shaken, so I pay no mind to the posters telling us the library is shut and hurry her in there. The librarian takes over then, looks after us straight away, calls the headmistress, etc., etc.
You’d think the problem there would be over, right? You’d be wrong.
We’re writing up what happened in an incident report (standard procedure for the school) when the headmistress arrived. And so the victim blaming began. We shouldn’t have been so affectionate at school.
Maybe if we hadn’t been holding hands, this wouldn’t have happened. We need to be more careful. And then told me that I shouldn’t tell my mom that this happened since she’d just make a big deal out of it.
The only reason this isn’t an ‘I got expelled because I punched the headmistress’ story is because all of this, coupled with what had just happened, had my girl distraught and in tears, and despite my anger, she was my first priority at the time.
So I began to plan.
I followed her instructions, and I didn’t tell my mom. Not yet. I wanted to do this myself now. They’d upset my girl; that was a death sentence, as far as I was concerned.
So first I started with the girls themselves.
O had an older sister, in S’s year, so I befriended the older sister, and we got on well. This took about a month or so. And then I wore a t-shirt around her for the first time. At the time, I was suffering quite heavily with self-harm (we’ve now discovered, I’ve got BPD, which is what was the trigger for my SH).
Naturally, my new friend was horrified, asked what happened, why I’d do that. I told her that people liked to pick on me, mostly because I was gay, and told her about her sister.
Next thing I know, O’s been pulled out of school.
Find out a little while later, her mother does charity work with LGBT youth, and upon finding out that she was bullying someone to the point of SH with homophobia, she yanked her out of school and sent her to the other side of the country to live with her grandparents and attend a different school.
I also got a letter of apology from her mother, along with an offer of counseling, if needed. I turned her down, but it was a nice gesture.
With their head cut off, the lackeys drifted apart, and I went back to small revenge with them, getting them kicked out of classes, etc., etc.
Nothing too interesting to report there.
Then came the headmistress. This one took a LONG time to get around to because I didn’t want it to lead back to me while I was still under her power.
So the day after I got my exam results, I anonymously phoned OFSTED, the school inspectors.
I informed them that they were allowing students to be bullied to the point of self-harm. And that the headmistress had, on at least one occasion, if not more, told a student who’d been bullied due to their sexuality, that it was their fault, and refused to handle the issue.
And then I waited.
A friend of mine was still at the school, a year younger, and she became my source of information. They went back in September, and the headmistress was no longer there. Apparently, she’d ‘stepped down,’ despite having had no feasible reason to, as the school had been doing well.
We have basically come to the conclusion that she was gently coerced out of her job and simply said ‘stepped down’ to save face.
And the reason I’m posting this now is because I saw my old headmistress the other day, while I was with a friend.
She was working at Next, a clothing store, stacking shelves, etc. I asked her how she was doing, and she was giving the very fake, “Yeah, things have been okay” nonsense. My friend, who is an absolute genius, instantly pretended to be my girl and, while in her eyesight, but not talking to her, kissed my cheek and took my hand.
I like to think of that as being the icing on the cake.
(Sadly, S and I broke up when I was 17. First relationships rarely last, but we’re still good friends. And the friend who acted like my girl for that moment has a man of her own but had always been appalled by how little the school had done and wanted her own moment to rub in the face of our once headmistress.)”
7. Think You Can Keep Stealing People's Deposits? End Up Paying More
“Had a great job, boss was fired, they scammed me, fell on hard times, nobody’s fault but my own. Had to rent an apartment for a very long, ugly year.
Got a huge, pretty new apartment for about $1,000, but had to meet income requirements, which sadly, I did.
Right before move-in, find out the garage and water aren’t included and will cost extra and that my 1-year lease is actually 5-months. Too late now, fine. Then find out I’m not allowed to use my own washer and drier but have to pay $100/month for theirs.
$100 A MONTH??? Okay, fine, whatever. Turns out, this was all to plan. This is how they get you.
From move-in on, things are bad. Roaches in the kitchen, everything falling apart, and despite being a very new building, the walls are paper thin.
Turns out, he’s an unabashed new-era slumlord. He gets massive tax credits for renting to low-income people, but there’s no requirement to actually rent to them (us) for cheap, just that we’re there.
Fifth month ends, and I get my lease renewal.
That $1,000 jumps to $1,450, which is WAY above market for this place or ANY place in the area.
I sign for another 6-months but start planning to move out. I start hearing from all the neighbors that I’ll “never get the deposit back,” and it makes sense, considering what scummy dirtbags these people are.
I make friends with everyone in the office, keep my place clean, and stay out of trouble.
Moveout time comes. Everything is left perfect, and I not only take pictures but a 10-minute room-by-room walkthrough on video. Literally, nothing is out of place.
No damage, no mess, nothing. Move-in ready.
Get the letter and my $500 deposit is gone, PLUS I need to pay them another $275 for the damages… here we go.
I tell him I documented everything; there’s nothing to bill me for anything and demand a receipt.
He sends over a hand-written, illegible invoice for a company with a name (that can’t be found on Google) and no contact information.
I was prepared for this.
I launched a website about the apartment complex and pre-stocked it with about 50 articles detailing in 100% truthful ways how they are dishonest and unscrupulous.
I used screengrabs from their website where it said you could use the cabana, even though you couldn’t. That there was a media room for parties but no signup and no way to use it. I showed tenant reviews on websites dating back years even before I was there…
and I kept negotiating.
First, he waived the $275 premium, but no way man; I wanted my $500 back, and I was just bitter enough to get it.
Meanwhile, because of my new job (SEO at the time), I was able to out-rank him in searches for his own apartment building.
If you Googled it during your apartment search, you found my site about how evil it is at #1, not his official site at about #4.
We talked on the phone, and while he was still unaware of the site (rolling out a new article every day), he set the final offer at keeping $300.
I told him I need all of it, and that was that. Anything less would be cause for “continued action,” and I knew he didn’t know what I was inferring by that.
He mailed the $200 check but still didn’t know about my site…
well, have to fix that.
Called a former neighbor and told them the dish. She was a busybody, and sure enough, two days later, I got a FURIOUS call, not from the manager, but from the owner. This guy owns a dozen properties like this, each with 300-500 units, and now I’m wasting his time personally.
This was getting tasty.
I explained what happened, but he already knew, and at this point, 30-articles had run, some of which were picked up by other websites (which I may or may not have been a contributing editor to at the time.) I never lied, I never exaggerated, I just reported the honest truth.
No legally actionable problems on the horizon.
He said, “Look, I’ll give you the $300, just take this down!” I explained I couldn’t do that. They had the opportunity to do the right thing before the site went up, but to take it down now would be tantamount to extortion, and that would be illegal.
Over the next week (with another 7 articles dropping like clockwork), he tried ten different ways to goad me into extorting him, but I just wasn’t interested. No, he drew the line in the sand; I was just staying on my side of it, legally, if not morally.
Ultimately, he decided that since I was “so good at web stuff,” he should hire me for $1,000 to do some promotion for him. I said, “Okay, but you know this is TOTALLY separate from my site and our disagreement.” And he agreed.
I met him at his office, we worked up a plan, I did about thirty minutes of work, and he cut me a check for $1,000.
So what did I do with the website? Well, I certainly didn’t take it down… What? We agreed that was separate!
But I didn’t add any new content and turned off the auto-renewal. so 10ish months later, it faded away.
Fair is fair, right?
I could list for you dozens of ways they were shady as heck, but this is already too long.”
6. Push Me Out Of A Job Since It's An "Unnecessary" Position? I'll Cost You Millions
“A few years ago, I got hired at a big company; let’s call it company X. Up until then, I had only been a research scientist working in microbiology, but I needed a bigger salary, so I took a job as a technical sales rep.
I was hired to do sales and technical support for scientific research reagents. Thing is, I was hired to do sales for government and governmental institutions. The job was ok. I interacted with a lot of the country’s leading scientists and built a reasonable network and some cool friendships.
The county had been in crisis for a long time and getting worse every year, and my sales were becoming more difficult because the government wasn’t providing public universities with adequate (or any) financial allocations to keep science programs and faculties stocked, and as the economy crumbled further, the government’s institutional labs from various sectors also started having serious problems and almost everybody switched to Indian or Chinese chemicals which were a lot cheaper than mine.
As the months passed, I was only able to get a few big contracts and sales (even though I managed to pull a few feats, that got me commended as no other sales reps had been able to do what I pulled off).
And yet I got yelled at a lot for not meeting my objectives. My manager was a complete tool 100% of the time.
I did a very comprehensive national market study to show my assigned markets were crap and that I needed to be reassigned to a different segment but was repeatedly told that there was an extremely high potential in the public sector, so I should be a lion and go hunt and blah blah blah.
I don’t think I was a particularly excellent salesman given my lack of experience, but I think I did ok where I could. Having also the country’s most expensive reagents without much flexibility also didn’t help.
In time my manager became increasingly aggressive and demanded more and more ridiculous sales targets from me in the public sector month after month.
This eventually turned into yelling and threats of physical violence.
So yeah, screw that. I looked for another job, and surprise, I quit.
I immediately got a job at, let’s call it company Q, a distribution outfit that also had some production of some chemical intermediaries.
Q bought some products from X, I knew them already somewhat. It was a nice quiet private lab situation, very comfortable, and a reasonable increase in pay included. So yay me.
A week or so after I started at Q, the colleague from X who was also getting pushed hard also had enough and quit, and another sales rep was fired a few days after for some nonsense reason I can’t remember anymore.
Sketchy, but ok. I could only feel bad for them.
A few days later, I was told by a friend that still worked at X that this had all been part of a company-wide coordinated effort from the management to get rid of various sales reps from several departments because they saw that the markets were slowly decaying and would rather just have distributors do sales rather than keep paying us to try.
So they used us for a few years only to update the customer database and then got rid of us.
I was quite angry and had been looking for a way to screw over my old manager somehow for treating me like crap for about a year and a half.
MUAHAHA! I had used the private employee misbehavior reporting system to report that my ex-manager had been doing the deed with a product manager who got the job only because she was hooking up with him (a big no-no in the employee conduct code).
But the complaint got routed to the local compliance officer and exactly nothing came of that because my manager and the officer were buddies.
Bummer. But where was still hope!
When I joined company Q, I learned that they had rights of distribution of a certain industrial chemical from another company, call it company E (pretty much the only product this company produced in any significant amount), 5 years before or so.
Then came company X at an international level and signed a global deal with E and took the distribution rights.
Company E tried their best to stay with Q for local distribution in our country because Q had know-how in that market that X did not, but the contract forced the transfer to X anyway.
To appease company E, the contract stipulated that X gained control of importing but had to continue to sell the chemical to Q for distribution (hence avoiding the lack of know-how of company X). And so it was, X imports and sells at a particular small margin to Q, and Q sells to the final customer.
Not a great deal but Q management was happy they were not cut out completely and thought they only lost some of the margins. But over 5 years they saw growing hostility from X and not much they could do about it.
Seeking an alternate supplier also proved problematic because the only suppliers at that price level were only much lower quality suppliers and high quality was important for this product.
From my time at X, I knew that they were also selling the chemical directly and at sometimes lower prices than what was sold to Q, which meant the margins set were also not being honored.
And to any customer that came asking for it!
After my complaint at the old company went nowhere (there was a website to check on the status of the complaint), I told my manager from Q all of it, and that X wanted to cut them out completely.
All with the best intentions of course.
That same morning that conversation triggered a call from my manager from Q to the guy from E and told him what was up because that was not part of the deal they had agreed to when transferring distribution rights from Q to X.
The guy from Company E (who had been in business for a long time with Q in the past) seemed quite happy with this problem and asked us to get proof of this so they could trigger a noncompliance clause in the global contract.
Of course, this evidence could not come from me because I could get into trouble. Manager Q sent his sales reps digging and they came up with all sorts of copies of sales receipts, delivery notes, and quotes of the chemical from company X (something that technically shouldn’t have happened because Q retained exclusivity of final sales!) and the prices each paid.
There was a complaint, high-level meetings, and some lawyer action. Yadda yadda yadda, after 4 months or so, this eventually led to distribution rights going back to Q exclusively.
The kicker, with the transfer, X lost about 1 million US in profit from the sales of this commodity alone.
Q in return gained most of it. And as a result, I got a big thank you and a lot of budget to equip and reequip my new lab.
I moved to a different lab a few years ago, but I’m still in contact with my old staff. They’re still kicking butt and loving one of the best-equipped labs in the country.
The end.”
5. Keep Trying To Pick A Fight As My New Neighbor? You Better Lawyer Up
I mean, what did you think would happen when you constantly inconvenience your neighbor?
“I recently bought a rowhouse. Next to my house is a servitude. This is a path (1.5m) where other neighbors have the right of passage. But the path itself is my property and I have to maintain it.
But recently there’s another passage (3m) next to my left neighbor, so my path is never used. I know this because the shutter is electric. But I shut off my electricity when I stop working so the shutter can’t be opened.
So my plan was to get rid of the fence between my yard and the servitude, both my property. I checked with the correct instance if I was allowed to, and there’s no reason why I won’t be allowed, just have to make sure there’s still a 1.5m passageway.
When I was getting rid of my fence, my right-side neighbor says hi for the first time. Not saying hi but asking what I’m doing. After I explain I’m getting rid of the fence, he somewhat says it’s only half my property, need to place another fence.
And asks if I could keep the shutter closed most of the time, or else his cat runs towards the street. I ignored part one and said ‘no problem’ for the cat issue. I wanted to keep the shutter closed anyway.
A few weeks go by and I have a container coming. I get the call at 7:30 AM that the truck driver is there but can’t place the container. Three cars are parked in the temporary no-parking zone. One was on vacation, the other was a neighbor from across the street, and the other was obviously the right-door neighbor.
I had to call the police to figure out which car was from who, so I wasn’t waking up people at 7:30 AM.
Then the container was getting placed in front of their house because that was how it was drawn up by the city.
I just asked for a license, and the city decides on the exact spot. They complained and whined to the police officer that they were moving that weekend etc. I wish now that I placed it in front of their house.
But it would’ve been a bit more convenient on the other side and the police officer replaced the signs and the container was moved.
Then they came outside and asked the officer if the container could be placed on the other side of the street which would mean that I had to walk across a street every time I needed to dump something in my container.
It was 20m³, so a lot was going in there. Officer said that there’s no way in heck that would happen. Then the guy asked me not to throw anything from my first floor into the container and that I did it before from the back.
Newsflash, that was the previous inhabitants, not me. But whatever dude. Keep in mind that until the container is placed, I have to pay the driver. So them being parked illegally costs me big bucks.
All said and done. The day after I had done a lot already and it was time for a break.
My dad, my best friend, and I had just eaten outside and were chatting when the mother of one of the neighbors addressed us. ‘Man, that doesn’t look great.’ Not even a hi, just that line, talking about my grass that was growing really high because I wasn’t living there yet and had been working inside all the time.
My dad replies it will be easy work, just one pass and it’ll be fine. Then she asks what I am planning to do about the fence if I’m placing a new one. I inform her that I’m not placing any fence.
You’d think I’d killed their firstborn by the way she reacted. I couldn’t do that, that path isn’t mine, yadda yadda. I inform her that it is my property. She says it’s in their certificate (that’s the word right?) that it’s not.
I ask her to show me given I don’t have mine at this house yet. She says they will and asks her daughter (I assume) to fetch it. She keeps yapping on and I tell her I won’t discuss this and I’ll continue when she shows me the documents.
She keeps talking, but I just resume talking with my dad.
Five minutes later, she’s there with the certificate. I go over and ask if there’s a ground plan with it; there’s one with mine. There isn’t, but there’s a clause referring to servitude.
It clearly says I have to make sure the other 4 neighbors have a passage and then a bunch of details about the passage. But it says it’s mine.
At that point, the guy is there again and seems rather aggressive. There’s a fence between us, so I don’t care.
I state once more it’s my property and I can do this. He then raises his voice ‘Don’t act like you’re a big shot, the man with “my property.”‘ And then, in almost the same breath asks if I can close the shutter from the servitude after I’m done working.
I had opened it to get through with a wheelbarrow. I found that pretty ironic, given they can’t open it. And if I had to abide by the certificate they just showed me I would have to keep it open. I angrily replied that if he’ll keep on yapping on, I’ll keep the shutter open.
He walked away. Now I’m not a petty man, so I closed the shutter. Wouldn’t want an innocent cat getting hurt or lost. I guess this is when the war started though and they saw me as the devil neighbor who has it in for them.
So the day after I’m working again, breaking out a floor. There’s no easy way to do that. I have a jackhammer, some normal hammers and chisels, and three people working with me on it.
A few hours after working, the doorbell rings, the police.
So they called the police for noise pollution. I explained I had to break out the floor. I’ll try to not be too noisy when I dump things in my container, but there’s no way I can break out a floor with silence.
On top of that, the servitude is between my house and theirs, doubt a lot of noise is coming through. Police ask how much time I think I need, and I say I estimate a few hours. Two to three. They leave, likely informing the neighbors of what I said, and that they advise going somewhere for a few hours.
So I’m working as hard as I can and my jackhammer breaks. It’s broken, no way I get it working. We try with just hammers and chisels, but it’s way slower. Given I don’t want to make noise all day long anyway (I do have other neighbors as well), I actually go to the store and buy a new jackhammer.
But it’s not easy finding an open store on a Sunday.
So find one, get back to work. My front door is open because else I have to reopen it every time I pass with the wheelbarrow with stone. The woman is standing there with the kid and probably yelling something but I can’t hear her, there’s someone using a jackhammer between us.
Eventually, it dies down and she’s yelling. How can I be so selfish I said it would only be a few hours and I had all day yesterday to do my work (as if I didn’t do anything the day before.
Besides, I’m allowed to work on MY schedule, not theirs.). My stepdad is bored with it and just starts using the jackhammer again. She can’t be heard. Her husband takes her away, but within a second, she’s back, yells, “At least close your dang door” and slams my door shut.
I wanted to go outside and floor this witch. Who the heck does she think she is? But I didn’t because I, compared to others, can control and channel my anger.
I spend the rest of the day that I was working figuring out how I would get what I would perceive as justice.
Given that we have a shared border at our property, I took photographs of everything. First I went to a lawyer to ask about certain things that I figure was an infraction. So they have a tarp on my side off the fence at the servitude, probably to stop the wind from gusting in their backyard.
That one has to go. Right next to it there’s a straw one on their veranda, probably to stop me from looking in. That one has to go. Their bin for compost is bending the wire fence onto the servitude, has to be moved.
I didn’t do anything yet with this information. I asked a surveyor to measure my ground. Mainly the backside. Because they have a shed and after that shed their fence suddenly jumps in. I was pretty sure it was on the servitude and therefore on my property.
The same would be true about the attached gate at my side. Turns out, I was right; it was on my property and in violation of the servitude clause. If that fence remained, I could not provide 1.5m because of my garage.
I glanced over and noticed they have some nice concrete on the other side. I’d enjoy watching them break out and move the fence.
But still, I looked for more. I didn’t want to annoy them. I wanted to make sure they understood I don’t play games; I win wars.
So while I was looking at the certificate of my house, there’s another clause. Because the neighbors get right off passage, they have to pay 1/5th of all costs for the servitude. I had placed an electric shutter, new tiles, the works.
I contacted my lawyer with all I had and all documents necessary and got him to send an official letter with all the issues found and that they should comply. They didn’t. I sued them. And as we know these cases, drag on.
In the meanwhile, they were planning to move, and their house was for sale. But you’re having a hard time selling when you are being sued over an issue with the property. I won the case, but they didn’t do anything.
I sued them again for not complying, and they finally did. They had to pay me quite a lot in legal costs for the work done on my servitude and for some of the work to do on their end. I also assume they had to get a bridge credit (to pay for the new house while the old one is for sale).
They eventually did manage to sell and move. They spoke to me with arrogance and aggression. I showed them not to taunt me when I try to be friendly the first two times.”
4. Accuse Me Of Having A Poor Attitude? I'll Make Sure You Lose Your Jobs
“Small amount of prefacing first. The area that we live in now is actually our second stint here. We lived here 2 years ago before being PCS’d (military move) to another location before being PCS’d back a few months ago. When we lived here the first time, I became very very good friends with many of the employees at the commissary, including the general manager (who is the sweetest man on the planet who we’ll call Freddie) and the handful of workers in the Deli/Bakery and Fish/Meat areas.
So when we moved back, the first thing I did was go to see them and happily, and all but one of them in the Deli still worked there! I was also friendly with some of the stocking and cashier staff, but since those roles have a high turnover rate at our commissary, none of the former ones were there when we came back.
Also, let me just say now that I will be the first to admit that I have a TERRIBLE mouth. A curse word is probably in 90% of my sentences, IN PRIVATE. When out with the general public, especially in places where children are guaranteed to be around, I control my mouth because I am a polite and civil human being.
I am also a very genial and docile woman. I love to smile and chit-chat with people while out and about. My one big “thing” (which I’m sure many people have) is being accused of something I didn’t do.
That’s exactly what happened the other day.
My husband and I went to do our weekly shopping at the commissary, and I’m in a good mood as usual, honestly surprising as I’m 30 weeks pregnant and haven’t been feeling my best. Once we finished up we went to check out and while checking out, the bagger noticed one of our eggs had busted, so my husband tells me to finish up while he grabbed a new carton of eggs since they’d already been rung up.
Ok, will do. Cashier then apparently has a TANTRUM that I am the one checking out and that my husband walked away. On military bases, you much present a military ID to use their benefits; I already knew this and had already gotten my card from my purse when she DEMANDED to see it.
My exact words were, “Gotcha covered!” and proceeded to extend the card to her for her to take my ID.
She reels back and has this completely aghast look on her face and proceeds to hit the little switch that causes the aisle sign to blink, which means a manager/supervisor is needed.
I’m now thoroughly confused and I can tell by looking at the bagger this is nothing new as she has a look of complete exasperation painted on her face as the manager arrives. She then proceeds to tell the manager that I had an “attitude” and that when she asked for my card, I became irate and said a swear word.
Now it’s my turn to be shocked as I said no such thing. The manager immediately takes the side of the cashier and asks for my card, and I again extend it to her. She hesitates as if I’m going to snap at her, before taking it and looking it over.
I go to pull my bank card out to pay since I have a valid military ID, and the cashier had already seen my husband’s (you must present it before they even begin ringing your purchase up), and his name is on both of our IDs since he is my sponsor.
They tell me I cannot pay for it; my husband has to. I inquire as to why, baffled and a little angry, but I keep myself in check. I get no answer; they simply stare at me before the manager suddenly tells me to calm down.
At this point, my husband arrives and is clearly confused at the scene before him. His pregnant wife nearly in tears of frustration, two people behind the register, and a bagger who is literally shaking her head. The manager then proceeds to tell my husband that she needs to “have a talk with him” and pulls him to the side and says I may not join them.
She then tells my husband that I acted unruly, cursed at the cashier, and in general had an attitude and that I should be following the code of conduct (this is a somewhat unwritten rule for military dependents to behave accordingly while on a military base and that their actions are seen as their spouse’s actions) and that he should “control” my behavior.
This of course angers my husband as he knows that this is not how I act, ever, and that they are talking out of their behinds.
After several frustrating minutes, we are FINALLY able to finish the transaction. As we walk out I stop, I CAN’T leave, not like this because I am now in full-on witch mode, and the seed for revenge is already sprouting.
I tell my husband to take the groceries to the car and meet me at the commissary office located literally right next to where we checked out. I know I will get nowhere if I ask those two for the general manager who will likely say he is not available.
So I turn and walk to the fish counter where the leader there (we’ll call him Bob) is a very good friend of mine. I proceed to let a small tear fall and ask for him to fetch Freddie for me (general manager).
He hurriedly obliges while telling one of his ladies, who I’m also friends with, to stay with me.
Within what I swear was seconds, Bob comes back with Freddie. I explain the situation to Freddie. I don’t exaggerate, but I do go ahead and let my overly hormonal self finally let all the frustration tears drop so that I’ll cry a few good tears.
Freddie is LIVID, and I can hear him muttering something that sounds suspiciously like “not that witch again.” He gives me a few minutes to calm down, dry my tears, and we make our way back to the front where my husband is standing at the office door glaring daggers at the cashier.
He takes us both in the office, and we fill out a complaint against the cashier and the manager. We then discuss the incident, and he makes a quick phone call and calls security in to go over the surveillance tapes that clearly show me smiling and handing her my ID the first time, clearly not agitated and clearly not giving “attitude” and then the manager pulling my husband to the side and not allowing me to follow.
Freddie then gets over the intercom to call both of them to his office.
When they arrive, they are clearly a bit uneasy, but since I am supposedly just some random customer, they don’t seem to think it’ll go anywhere. At first, Freddie remains the picture of professionalism and even asks for them to basically tell their side, which is now even more embellished than before, and my husband is trying very very hard to remain quiet.
Freddie thanks them and tells them to wait outside while he calls in the bagger. Now the bagger is a sweet girl; I’ve seen her several times, and she is never anything but pleasant. She tells them the truth, that I did no such thing, and that they are lying, and then proceeds to tell him that this is far from the first time this has happened and that they do it seemingly just because “they can.” It is now that Freddie tells us that he is aware of how they act due to several complaints already on file, but since they are rather short-staffed with cashiers, he had hoped it wouldn’t come to this (I can’t say I blame him honestly; the poor cashiers often have lines of 15+ with FULL carts behind the “sorting” ropes as this base gets a VERY high volume of shoppers).
It’s now that he calls them back in and tells them that things have been handled and settled. They are free to go… permanently. Cue the outraged gasps, stutters, and shouts plus the accusations. Freddie immediately shuts them down saying he has taken everyone’s stories into account, watched the security footage, and gone over the other complaints, all of them eerily similar, and has come to his decision, and that it is final.
After several minutes, my husband and I leave Freddie’s office after the cashier and manager had taken their leave. I can see them on the other side of the exit, clearly waiting. Freddie sees them too and asks if I would like an escort to the car with my husband, and I tell him thanks but no thanks.
I’m excited to walk by them; I have plans.
As we leave, they expectedly come towards us and I smile, both to myself and to them. They berate me, scream, get angry, and accuse me of lying to get them in trouble.
I let them continue on for a few minutes before holding out my hand, as if for a handshake. They of course just give me a look of utter confusion, so I lean forward, still with my hand extended and still smiling as I say, “Screw you!” and flip them the bird in the cheeriest, most excited, and happiest voice I can muster.
They just stand there, I presume so shocked that they’re speechless. Freddie has seen and heard what happened, and he’s laughing. They suddenly seem to have an epiphany and look to the outdoor camera, only to notice it’s DIRECTLY behind my back, and due to my positioning, nothing was going to be on video except for me stopping in front of them only to have them yell at me some more.
On our next shopping trip, I had several of my friends on the staff tell me what I did was possibly the best thing they’d seen while working there cause for the 3 and 4 months those two had worked there, it had apparently been brutal for ANYONE to deal with them.
So I hope it taught them a lesson to not screw around with people for entertainment because it will come back to screw you over.”
Another User Comments:
“When I was stationed in Germany, most of the commissary employees were really great. When I transitioned to Kansas, I finally saw crap like this.
I got yelled at by someone who was a dependent of someone with a much higher rank than mine because I didn’t put everything in the best order on the belt.
Her big issue was that I had set the bread in the middle, on top of some things when I realized I forgot it.
Everything else was sorted, cans with cans and such. After she screamed for a bit about how important her husband was, she let me leave with an apology.
Edit: Yes, I apologized. No happy ending here; sometimes people have to ignore pride and move on.” metalheadgcxl
3. Fire Me And My Co-Workers? You'll Lose Your 20-Year Career
“So this story is a few years old now from my first year of varsity. I had started varsity and was doing a pretty hectic course in the medical field. As a child to a single parent who had not worked since I was 15, I obviously needed a job to cover my living expenses and what little my scholarship didn’t.
So I started working part-time at a book store in my local mall as it suited my personality, and I love books in general. (The book store is one of those large-scale corporate chain types.) The pay was as close to minimum wage as humanly possible, though.
So six months in, I am doing well, and I get promoted to night manager. Duties involved managing the night staff, most of which are students like myself, and then two late 20 girls both of which have kids. A week into my being night manager, a directive comes from the head office saying that we are not making enough book sales and that we are obviously not trying.
(Now to put it in perspective, this is around the time where Kindles and all the other types of e-readers were becoming popular, so naturally, physical book sales had dropped radically.) To remedy this fact, they were sending down a new store manager to take over, and our current store manager would take a minor managerial role.
Three days later in walks the new manager (a short, lesbian woman who hates men and has bipolar disorder – henceforth referred to as BB). Needless to say, I walk through to the back for our daily shift change meeting where they introduce her.
She greets us all and then asks all the managers to stay behind so everyone filters out leaving the 4 managers, myself as the night manager, the day manager, the stock manager, and our previous store manager. So next thing BB does is turns to me and ask me what the heck am I still doing here.
I calmly explain that I am the night manager. She hears this and looks at everyone else to confirm this. Once they confirm the truth of my words, she looks at me directly and gives us the whole throw down of how things around here are going to change nada, nada, nada.
Six months down the line, nothing much has changed. BB has been nothing but passive-aggressive to me and some others and everyone has noticed, to the point where everyone in our store has a burning dislike for her. The managers get called in for a meeting where we get told the store is going to be closing in a week for 2 months for a revamp.
I immediately ask why the short notice, the night staff all earn on a shift-to-shift basis; a week’s notice isn’t enough time to make alternative arrangements. BB flips out at me saying that they don’t matter and are easily replaceable. I point out that 2 of them rely on this job to feed their families, and they can’t live without this job.
All the other managers stand with me on this point.
BB then falls back and says we will pay them a base wage for 1 month and then hire them as painters. Now my neighbor is a painter by trade, and I know they earn at least twice what we are paid per hour.
So I point this out, as well as ask if she is also going to pay for them to be trained. She then flips out at me further for being a smart aleck (okay, maybe I deserved that). Eventually, she says that we will meet tomorrow to discuss her final decision.
The time that she chooses though is an hour and a half before my shift starts and right in the time frame where I have one of my final exams. I point this out, and an evil grin crosses BB’s face as she says to me if you don’t make it in tomorrow, don’t bother coming in ever again.
A week later, I find out three of my co-workers on night shift were let go with no pay and told to reapply once the store opens. All those who had openly been friendly with me were told not to come back (this included both of the young mothers).
This sends me into a fit of absolute rage. It’s one thing to screw with me, but to mess with my co-workers as well, that’s too far.
I immediately phoned the head office to complain and was completely ignored, kept on the line, switched from department to department.
Eventually, I had enough and sent in a detailed report to my country’s business control council, reporting the corporation rather than the store for bad business practice and unfair dismissal of multiple staff members. I then emailed the corporation’s HR explaining what I had done and why.
I informed them that I would change my complaint to the name of the store manager (instead of the corporation in general) if they found a way to rectify what they had done.
It took 3 days before I received a response, They rented a smaller store for everyone to work at while the renovations were done at great expense due to the small timing window, and they had rehired everyone while suspending BB without pay until further notice.
I immediately kept my promise and edited my complaint. Investigation was done, and BB lost her job permanently with no chance of a reference (had worked for said company for 20 years).
With a 20-year gap in her CV, it has been very hard for her to find a decent job.
I saw her the other day working as a packer in my local supermarket, I realized I had forgotten to get sweet chili sauce and asked her please to get me a bottle off the shelf. Could not think of anything better to do as I had the flu and really was not my sharpest, just wanted to get back to bed. She went off scowling but cannot guarantee she recognized me. This is what brought the story to mind.”
2. Steal My Belongings? I'll Remove Your Furniture From The Apartment
“For my last year and a half of college, I moved in with three other girls, none of which I knew prior (1-year lease). This would be my third set of roommates in the same apartment, as every year I roomed with seniors who would graduate.
In general, I’m pretty relaxed, and it takes a lot to bother me. I have two rules: 1) Don’t be passive-aggressive. I can’t fix a problem if I don’t know what it is, and if you’re not going to say anything about it, I will assume it’s not a big deal.
2) Don’t steal my stuff. Enough said.
Well, fall semester starts. My roommates are fine at first. One of them is involved in a lot of extra-curricular activities, so I never really saw her. The other two – we’ll call them Brat1 and Brat2 – slowly become closer to each other.
They’d go out and party a lot, stay in and party a lot – you get the idea. It was cool though; we had different interests and different personalities, and I don’t expect to be friends with everyone I meet. Plus, if I needed a quiet place to study, I could just go over to my partner’s apartment or find a place on campus.
No big deal.
I was very involved in student organizations. I was president of a small women’s engineering org that was respected in our department, and I sat on two department advisory councils. During really busy weeks, I would leave my dirty dishes next to the sink so that I could wash them later without impeding other people’s ability to use the sink.
I also tried to minimize the number of dishes I used during these times. I’d usually get to them after a day or two. After two consecutively terrible weeks, I came home to find a meme above the sink about “everyone” cleaning their dishes.
I roll my eyes and do my dishes. I walk over to Brat1 and say, “Hey, I know you probably didn’t mean to be passive-aggressive, but the note you left above the sink makes it appear that way. If I do something that bothers you, let me know, and I’ll see what I can do to make everyone happy.” She denied that the note was directed at me, claiming that she just thought it was “funny.” Whatever, maybe she did just think it was funny.
The benefit of the doubt.
As the semester progressed, I found more and more notes of a similar fashion.
I had a really difficult semester. A week before my birthday, we had to put my dog down, because she had stopped eating and was essentially starving to death.
Then about halfway through the semester, I passed out, hit my head, and got a concussion. I had to take the rest of the semester off, so I was pretty much sitting around the apartment all day. I was really out of it and having trouble remembering to do some things that I would normally do implicitly.
At one point, I took a shower and forgot to clean the hair out of the tub (girls shed like crazy) before laying down to take a nap. I woke up a couple of hours later to three notes telling me to clean my hair out of the tub.
I was used to the passive aggressiveness by now and had previously just done what the notes said because Brat1 and Brat2 made it clear that they weren’t going to be adults about anything. But for whatever reason, I reacted strongly to this.
I cleaned up the tub and confronted Brat1 who was in the living room doing homework. I told her that if there was an issue, she needed to say something because from now on, I wasn’t going to listen to any notes that she posted around the apartment.
I took down the notes and threw them in the trash. The next day, I found one of the notes pinned to the wall in the common area. This is where they posted things that related to inside jokes between them.
It was juvenile humor, but again, it usually wasn’t hurting me, so I didn’t bother reacting. This time I was livid. I shouldn’t have reacted to the note. That’s what made them want to post it.
One of the things that was posted to the wall was an exam that Brat1 had scored a 100% on that semester.
I had a friend who was in the same class come over who recognized the exam and said that she saw Brat1 with a copy of the exam before the actual exam. In other words, she was dishonest, proudly. (Actually, most of the students in her major knew that she was dishonest about everything.
It’s what she was known for.)
One of the other things that was posted to the wall was a shirt, which looked awfully like one I had in my closet. I went through my clothes and couldn’t find it. The one pinned to the wall was my shirt.
Brat1 and Brat2 had gone through my stuff.
I started to worry that they had stolen other things, so I looked through their things. I found three of my dresses and a blazer that I use for interviews hanging in Brat1’s closet.
In addition, a coat that my mom had gotten me for my birthday, which I hadn’t worn yet, was nowhere to be found.
At this point, I am livid, concussed, and verging on tears from sheer frustration at my situation. I take my things and put them back in my closet.
Eventually, I calmed down. From then on, I started regularly checking to make sure none of my stuff was missing. I just had to get through another semester.
After that initial incident, Brat1 and Brat2 began completely ignoring me. They would exchange glances whenever I walked into a room.
Even though I knew it didn’t matter that they didn’t like me, it started to get to me.
The next semester, I was doing twice the coursework to catch up and still maintaining my extracurricular activities. It was really hard, and I was so stressed out.
I ended up resigning as president of my club halfway through the semester because it was just too much work. I was miserable, and my man of six years started stopping by the apartment more to check up on me.
I never asked my roommates if it was okay for him to come over.
After all, Brat1 and Brat2 would throw parties without telling me or invite strangers over for hookups (no judgment, do whatcha wanna do). I didn’t think it would matter. Oh, how wrong I was.
Apparently, the only thing that a couple does is hook up.
I wish I would have known that because during his visits, my man sat around and listened to me complain about my workload and the roommates who kept stealing my crap (he is the most patient, wonderful person I know).
The day after Brat1 and Brat2 threw a party, I came home (I had spent the night at my man’s) to find a nasty note that contained a phrase similar to, “OP, hop off your man and clean your hair out of the tub.”
I left the note where I found it.
I didn’t want them to know that I had read it. I got a few things and headed to campus to do some work. When I returned later, there was a note on my door that was much longer than anything Brat1 and Brat2 had ever written before.
It was an apology from Brat2’s friend, saying that she wrote it while she was intoxicated and that she understands that I am probably a decent person; she just got caught up in Brat2’s angry rant at the party. I actually cried a little because this was the first time that anyone had apologized to me for the crappy behavior of Brat2 or Brat1, or even acknowledged that they might be crappy people.
(Of course, my friends knew they were crappy because I complained a lot. They are also wonderful.)
Later, Brat2’s friend found me and apologized in person. She was very sincere. Then Brat2 herself came in and apologized, by which I mean she stated that even though all of what she told her friends was true (what the heck does “all” mean?); she should have had the foresight to throw the note out before I saw it.
Also, if my man could not come over, that would be great. That’s. Not. An. Apology. Witch.
At some point, I threw a party for one of my friends who was turning 21 at our apartment. I let all of my roommates know because I didn’t want any of them to be surprised if they came home to a bunch of strangers.
At one point during the party, one of my friends and I left the crowd to have a serious conversation. We went into my room (shared room with Brat2) and locked the door so we wouldn’t be disturbed. Five minutes into the conversation, Brat2 is pounding on the door yelling that her room should never be locked.
(I would like to take a moment to say that there were many times that she had locked me out of our room for various reasons, though not for the reason of having a “gentleman” caller, for which I wish she would have locked the door.) I get up, open the door, and she starts yelling at me about whatever her rationale for being angry at a locked door was.
I let her finish, then she stormed off.
I started staying over at my partner’s place from then on. I didn’t feel comfortable in my own apartment that I had lived in for three years. I was so angry, but I knew what I was going to do.
The thing about living in an apartment for three years is that you accumulate a lot of stuff. My previous roommates had left me a lot of things. For example, all of the silverware, bowls, dishes, cups, pots, pans, Tupperware, printer, floor lamps, television, television stand, Apple tv (we didn’t have cable), trash cans, chairs, the kitchen table, the couch – pretty much all of the furniture and tools that they used on a regular basis belonged to me.
It was my turn to be passive-aggressive.
I waited for a weekend when Brat1 and Brat2 were out of the apartment. Then, with the help of my partner, my mom, and a couple of friends, I loaded everything in the apartment into a UHaul and left.
This happened about halfway through the semester. I felt kind of bad for inconveniencing the third roommate (not Brat1 or Brat2), but she was hardly around anyway. The best part of it was that Brat1 and Brat2 didn’t have internships and had to live there over the summer.
I also had one of my friends report Brat1 for breach of academic integrity policy. I don’t think anything came of it, but just the fact that she was under higher scrutiny for the rest of her time at university thanks to my awesome advisor to whom she was reported, makes me very happy.
I did not return to the apartment for my last semester and instead moved in with my partner.
Fun extra: Brat1 was also my vice president in the student org for a semester. A quick summary: She was both incompetent and ignorant of her incompetence to the point where it was causing problems for the organization.
Using the rules in our constitution, I held elections in what would have been her second semester as vice president in order to replace her. Then she threw a temper tantrum in front of the new officer board. But that’s a story for another day.”
Another User Comments:
“You should one day come to the apartment and throw a party if you still officially have a lease and call it “the boardwalk party,” and everyone dresses in whatever color your floors were and pat sticky notes all over the place. Oh, and make sure you mess up the apartment making both of the girls clean and somehow hope it’s a day before an inspection.” adilthedestroyer
1. Let Your Dog Poop Inside The Airport? I'll Make Sure You Miss Your Flight
People who don’t clean up after their own pets are the worst types of people. And the NERVE of her to say that it’s somebody else’s job to pick it up for her.
“While walking to my gate at LAX, I noticed a woman whose dog was in the middle of doing its business.
The woman was loudly face-timing with her back to the dog, so I assumed she didn’t notice. That was likely the thought shared by the gentleman who tried to get her attention.
“Excuse me, miss?” he said, in a polite tone. The woman glared at him.
“Your dog,” he sheepishly continued, pointing to the mid-poop pup.
The woman rolled her eyes and went back to facetime as the man slinked away, seemingly embarrassed.
“Some people,” she bellowed to her face-time companion with no hint of irony, “are just so darn rude.”
When her dog finished, the woman started walking away, leaving everything right on the airport floor.
Another woman tried to stop her.
“You’re not going to clean that up?” she asked, as shocked as the rest of us were.
“They have people for that,” the offender replied, disappearing into the crowd, as much as someone yelling into their phone can disappear into a crowd.
I stood near the pile and warned people to walk around it while someone else got a maintenance worker’s attention. No one said anything – we were so shocked that anyone could be that horrible.
When I got to my gate, the woman was there, too.
Great – we were both going to Tokyo. When I travel abroad, I get embarrassed by other Americans doing things one hundred times less embarrassing than leaving animal feces on the floor of an airport. To make it worse, her dog was now barking at everyone who walked by.
I have nothing against people flying with their dogs; I do it often. But it is a privilege I take seriously. My dog is well-trained and behaves better than most people. He certainly behaves better than that jerk.
Speaking of jerks, there is a pet relief area inside LAX, past security, just two gates away from where The Party Pooper let her dog go to town.
It didn’t matter – she was the type of person to litter three feet from an empty garbage can.
While her dog barked at the world, the woman had moved from face-timing with no headphones to listening to music with no headphones.
I don’t like to throw around the word “sociopath,” but I don’t know how else I could explain just how selfish and terrible of a person she was. I’d bet her car was somewhere in long-term parking, parked across three spots with paint on the bumper from the child’s bike she hit without leaving a note.
Everyone else tried to ignore her, sitting as far away from her as they could. I am not everyone else.
I sat down right next to the horrible woman. “Are you going to London on business?” I said.
“I’m going to Tokyo,” she responded gruffly, annoyed that I interrupted her DJing.
“Oh, I said. Then you better hurry. That flight got moved to gate 53C. This is the flight to London.”
I figured I could give her a little moment of panic as payback for how terribly she was treating everyone. I didn’t predict what would happen next.
She grabbed her bags and her dog in a huff and stormed out of the gate without even checking. She was so self-involved that she didn’t notice that the monitor at our gate still said Tokyo and that almost everyone at the gate was Japanese.
Based on her actions, she believed me that the flight had been moved, so she’s also a jerk for not thanking me. “Some people,” I thought as I watched her rush away from the gate without stopping her, “are just so darn rude.”
The flight to Tokyo was at gate 69A, so the 53 gates were on the other side of the next terminal.
And I felt guilty knowing she probably berated some poor clerk who had to explain to her that there was no gate 53C.
I don’t know if she made it back to this flight before we took off or not, but I didn’t see her board, and I don’t hear her dog.
Her missing her flight was not my original intention, but it would be a fine punishment for her being so rude to everyone and making a low-paid stranger clean feces off the floor. What makes me wonder if I went too far is the knowledge that Delta only has one flight to Tokyo each day.
Whoops.
Maybe she can re-book on another airline. I hear they have people for that.”
Another User Comments:
“I hope they confirm she was not told by an employee and that she did not double check, and they refuse to comp her anything…” mariethegreat
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