Most people try to be good and turn the other cheek. But sometimes, someone does something so annoying or inappropriate, it’s impossible not to clap back. After all, there’s nothing like the satisfying feeling of a jerk getting exactly what they deserve—just ask these Redditors who doled out perfectly petty revenges.
1. Vengeance With a Bow on Top
While crossing at a busy downtown intersection, a very impatient driver waiting to make a turn honked at a lady pushing a stroller. Despite his jerk move, she actually had the right of way. I slowed down as I was walking, but the guy next to me took it one step further. He straight-up went ahead, stopped in front of the car, then bent down to re-tie his shoelaces. The look on the driver's face was priceless.
2. Soda Surprise
Back in the early 90s, supermarket cashiers had to type every price in by hand. I was at a Vons in San Diego, walking toward the only open check stand with a single bottle of soda in my hand. Suddenly this hoity-toity lady with a cart stacked to the top flew out of one of the aisles like a freight train and cut me off".
I'm in a hurry," she said, then looked away like she was annoyed that I'd been born. I looked at the cashier. He rolled his eyes and got to work. Five minutes later, she's walking out the door and it's my turn. "You're good," says the cashier. "I put your soda on her tag". Darn, that felt really good. Never forgot it.
3. Pennies From Heaven
I used to deliver pizza for Dominoes. It was my last shift and there was this house that was always rude. For example, I called to ask what the house looked like and they said, "I gave you the address" and hung up. They never tipped, etc. I got to their house and they gave me a check for 1 cent less than what the total was.
I said, "I am going to need the extra penny". They grumbled off and took their time, hoping I would give up, but I just sat there holding the pizza. They finally came back all angry and gave me the penny. So then I really enacted my revenge. They gave me the penny and I chucked it out into the street and left. They saw me do it. It was SATISFYING.
4. Cheaters Never Prosper
I knew a crazy kid in elementary school. Kid jumped across the table and tried to choke me out. I instigated it by saying he was "cuckoo for cocoa puffs" since that was the only thing that kid ever talked about and he was wearing a cocoa puffs shirt that day. Senior year of high school, turns out that kid was in my Design class.
I needed to get a C or better on the final. Over the year, I found out the kid was taking my work off my share drive and copying it. For the final, I purposely screwed up the drawing in my folder, but the kid didn't double-check it. He turned it in and failed and had to go back and be a super senior.
5. A Game of Telephone
When me and my ex-fiancée were having a bunch of arguments after we broke up, I got tired of her constantly texting me about nonsense, so I called the phone carrier to have them cut off service—to her phone that I paid for—right in the middle of an argument.
6. Cash and Carry
I occasionally deliver pizza as a part-time job. There is a customer who tends to pay with a big bag of change. I don't mean a bag full of quarters, I mean a bag full of dimes, nickels, and pennies. Since his meal typically costs about $20, the bag usually weighs several pounds. It is a total pain to count out all of the change, so typically drivers will just assume that he has the correct amount and leave.
Usually, he has just enough or maybe a few cents over. I don't think this is an innocent thing either, as he usually gives the bag of change with a big grin. It is such a pain that most of the drivers know his address by heart, and avoid going to his house if at all possible. So, I was having a bad night, and by the luck of the draw got this dude's house.
I remembered reading something involving someone paying in a checkout line with a bag of change, and I knew I could use a similar method to take my frustration out on this guy in the pettiest way possible. I pulled up to his house and left the pizza in the car. I rang the doorbell, and when he answered I saw the large bag of change in his hand that I knew would be there.
He asked where his pizza was, and I said, "New policy, sir. Gotta count it out before we can give out the pizza". So I sat down on his doorstep and started to count out all of the change. At one point, I even asked if he could turn on his porch light, because I was having a hard time seeing. He did end up sitting there while I counted out the entire bag of change, even though it took about ten minutes.
He ended up being about a dollar over, so I started picking up pennies to give him his change back, when he said that I could keep the rest as a tip. When I gave him his pizza, he sheepishly told me sorry and then shut the door. The whole situation was incredibly awkward, and to my knowledge he hasn't ordered pizza from us in a while.
7. The Missing Piece
My roommate and her significant other loved doing elaborate jigsaw puzzles. After I found out she canceled our lease, leaving me one week to find a new place to live, I threw away 1 piece of two different puzzles they were working on. Before you ask, she was able to do this because I was 17, and not able to legally sign a lease.
8. Keep Your Friends Close…
A girl on my softball team antagonized me and spread rumors about me to the team and coaches. We were competing for the same position. She was in my geometry class and tried to buddy up to me because I was good at geometry, and she wasn't. So for a while, I let her copy my homework, then one day I gave her all the wrong answers and turned in the right answers for myself.
9. Surprise Ending
My neighbor's dog poops in our yard all of the time. It wouldn't be a big deal, except he never cleans up after her. I finally had enough, so I decided to go with a classic. I put a flaming bag of his dog's poop on his porch, rang the bell, and hid in the bushes. When he answered the door, I finally got my revenge by having an affair with his wife for the last three and a half years.
10. Falling for You
I used to deliver pizza, and one time I had a delivery to a brownstone house with a small stoop. It was either Christmas or Thanksgiving week and we had snow/ice a couple of days beforehand. Well, I pull up, and there must have been some sort of family gathering at the house because there were a handful of people outside talking.
When I get out of the car, one of the people on the porch opened the door and yelled into whoever was supposed to come out and pay for the food. The woman came to the door as I was walking up the sidewalk. I was carrying a cut pie with a couple of bags filled with wings or whatever inside. I had a decent amount of food in my hands.
But as I was walking, I slipped on ice and fell onto the sidewalk while everyone was watching. The massive pizza fell facedown, box open, onto the icy sidewalk to the horror of the hungry onlookers. I remember being on the ground, in the process of getting up, picking the pizza up off the ground, and hearing this woman screaming at me.
She was so mad that I dropped her food. She didn't offer to help me up, she didn't ask if I was ok, she didn't apologize for having ice on her sidewalk, she just flipped out on me. So now I'm standing there with a mutilated pizza hearing this old woman ream me out in front of her family. I apologized as soon as I fell, but she didn't care. For at least 20-30 seconds she went in on me for dropping the pizza.
So I threw the pizza at her feet onto her porch and got into my car and left. I took her chicken wings with me so I had some sort of proof that I didn't deliver the food and I didn't get paid for it. I have a lot of stories from delivering, for some reason, this stuck with me for like ten years now.
11. They Say TV Doesn’t Teach You Things
My sister said some pretty mean things to me in front of my friends when I was younger. So I put a slice of bologna in her walkman CD player. I got the idea from Cory in the show That's So Raven.
12. Paging Dr. Prankster
Boss paged me on my wedding night. He did it as a joke, but it came at an...inappropriate...moment. We had a "page only if something's on fire" policy, so I had to call in even though I had just gotten married and was about to go on two weeks' vacation. When he answered, he laughed so hard I just HAD to do something about it.
So when I got back, I programmed the mail servers to call out on their phone lines and hit his pager with dial-back numbers for phone, er "services". At 4 AM. Every day. His wife got this pager before he did one time and saw a text message with something like, "I loved how you described how you would screw me, Jerry. Call back when your wife's gone for the day".
Wife was NOT amused. She thought he'd been calling these "services" and tore him a new one. He knew it was me, but he was too stubborn to ask me to call it off. So it kept up for weeks until he finally figured out where the script was running from and used it to page me instead. We had a back-and-forth pager war for a while, but then it all messed up when an actual data center emergency happened and one of us ignored the page, thinking it was the other pranking him.
That ended the fun.
13. Special Delivery
My little brother and his girlfriend came to stay at my house for the weekend, and the girlfriend was super self-centered and obnoxious. When they left, she forgot her clothes and toiletries because she left them sprawled all over my bathroom. About a week later, she and my brother moved into an apartment together.
After he paid for the moving truck, deposit, and utilities, she cheated on him with her ex and kicked him out of the apartment. This left him broke, homeless, and heartbroken. In the days after the breakup, she kept calling and emailing him several times per day, demanding that he ask me to ship her clothes and toiletries back to her. "It’s really important, it’s my North Face".
My brother called and pleaded with me to ship them to her so she would stop having a reason to contact him. Being the loving sister that I am, I gathered up the Really Important sweatshirt, shorts, underwear, shampoo, conditioner, soap, and razor. I folded everything nicely. I then wrote a nice note apologizing for taking so long to mail them to her, and let her know that I hope all is well.
The note was written in permanent marker, and the paper happened to be resting on the Really Important Northface when I wrote it. Unfortunately, the ink bled straight through the paper and onto the shirt. Also unfortunately, the shampoo, soap and conditioner caps were not tightly secured on their bottles, and the contents leaked out all over the clothes, further spreading the ink.
The most unfortunate result, though, was that her razor didn't have any sort of protective cap or container and left little slashes all over the front of the Really Important Northface. She received the package, and my brother never heard from her again.
14. Revenge Is Sweet
My wife used to keep these little Godiva chocolates that she likes in her desk at work, but started noticing some of them missing and figured it must be someone from the overnight cleaning staff taking them. Fed up with losing her not-inexpensive treats, she decided to get revenge on the choco-thief in question by replacing the good chocolate with little squares of chocolate laxatives that look just like real candies.
The next morning, she saw several of the laxatives gone, and then from that day forward, she was never missing another one of her good chocolates ever again.
15. Horrible Bosses
I used to work shifts many years ago, including regular night shifts. My boss was an unpleasant person, to say the least. He would leave his keys on top of his locker. One night I took a small file to work and filed down one or two teeth of his front door key. The next day, he was telling everyone about how he got home and his door lock was broken and he had to get a locksmith out.
Happened again a couple of months later. Then his car key got some treatment. I stopped after that, as I heard him mention it was getting suspicious that all these locks stopped working. But that’s not the best part. Unknown to me, other colleagues also disliked him. One night his locker disappeared entirely. Rumor has it that it's part of the foundations of an office block in London now.
16. Paying the Price
I started in a new job two years ago and hated a guy who kept joking about me, so I got his phone number and announced his PS4 was for sale for like 50$. Same day during lunch, he was already nuts because of the calls.
17. Butterfly Kisses
When I was in 7th grade, the startup my dad was a part of was failing miserably in no small part due to a crazy CEO. While at his house, my dad observed the CEO's toddler daughter picking up a piece of dog poop and licking it. He picked her up and told her to give her dad a kiss. Oh, don’t worry, she totally did it.
18. Technical Victory
A horrible former co-worker always claimed she worked way more hours than she actually did, and when she was at work she just browsed Facebook all day. The doctor/owner was very hands-off and just let her do whatever she wanted, despite me going to him with proof, so I decided to take revenge.
She was not computer-savvy at all, so I removed Internet Explorer from her desktop and installed an identical icon that, when clicked, would instantly restart the computer. It was so satisfying when she would forget and click it, losing anything that she was working on. She would always grumble and complain about the issues with her computer.
19. Hello Goodbye
This happened when I was in my late twenties. My mom and I were in the car. My dad called and they started bickering with each other. My mom got irritated and hung up on him. He called her right back, and when she answered he hung up on HER! Didn’t even say a word, just waited for her to pick and then hung up.
It was so petty and hilarious to see my parents acting like children. I couldn’t stop laughing. They’ve been married for over 35 years. I still get tickled when I think about that.
20. A Sharp Lesson
In grade school, I kept a bag of chips in the same pocket, every day, in my backpack. This kid I knew would punch that pocket any chance he could for five days in a row. One day, I replaced the chips with a bag of sewing pins. He never did it again. Sweet sweet justice.
21. Call on Me
When I was a kid, I attempted to call my aunt. For whatever reason, I accidentally dialed a 6 instead of a 3 and this man cursed me out for being a telemarketer. I was so stunned, I didn't even hang up initially. My petty revenge was giving the number to all my friends, and for about two weeks we called him every day at all hours.
22. A Classic Move
This was my best revenge. I went through an awful divorce. My ex-wife cheated on me, told lies about me, and all throughout the divorce I took the high road and was there for my kids while she disappeared off the face of the Earth. Her birthday was only a couple of weeks after the divorce was final. As the kids were young, I was a good guy and purchased several presents from the kids to her. But I got one special "gift" just from me.
Among the gifts, I bought a necklace with a big red "A" at the end. Her first name is Ann. I had the kids give that to her and she wore her scarlet letter all around town. Most people in our town knew what she had done, and some were even aware of the necklace. Yup, I made my adulterous ex-wife wear the scarlet letter.
23. Parental Intervention
My sister and I once applied for a summer job. I was in charge of dropping the applications off to the company one day. I got there after a 40-minute commute. It was closed, so I just drove back home. My sister was mad at me for not dropping them off regardless of the circumstances. She told me she was going to go there herself and drop her application and not mine, since I didn't do it right the first time.
My parents found out about this and made her drive a second trip to drop off my application as well, since she was being petty and wouldn't take it the first time.
24. If the Shoe Fits
Being the youngest brother, I would only get hand-me-downs. My older brother rubbed it in my face that he got a brand new pair of PF Flyer shoes after The Sandlot came out. Every day, I would stuff the toe of the shoes with tissue paper, adding a little more each day, until he thought he outgrew them. Got slightly worn, PF Flyers, after about a month.
25. Cut From the Same Cloth
Went to a restaurant for brunch. Upon receiving my bill, I noticed a $3 charge for table linen. As I was leaving, I folded up the tablecloth. The waiter said, "What are you doing?" I said, "I paid for it I’m taking it home". And I did.
26. Fly by Night
My wife stayed up late binge watching Narcos the other night and woke me up by being really loud when she came to bed. I couldn't get back to sleep and I was super irritated about it. I mean, just be quiet when you come to bed. You don't have to "THIS IS SPARTA!!" kick the door open, turn on both lamps and the overhead, and then come to bed.
Anyway, I'm a commercial helicopter pilot, and I had a 6 AM flight that morning. So I decided to take a short detour and flew a few laps right over our bedroom to wake her up. When I landed, I had a text from her calling me a huge jerk. Vindication feels pretty sweet y'all. Though I’d like to say, sorry neighbors.
27. If You Could Care, That’d Be Great
This hasn't happened yet, it should commence in roughly three hours. My current job is not all that great, small company cronies and all that. But what makes it truly bad is the management and ownership attitude. We are treated like throwaway items, not people. We've had a fair amount of people let go recently, most of them for cost-cutting reasons.
When some of these terminated employees pointed out that the holiday season is a mean time for planned reductions, they literally got told "Not my problem, that's your problem". When we are forced to perform jobs without adequate equipment, funds, parts, etc. "Not my problem, make it work". "Lie to the customer if you need to, it’s your issue, not mine".
I'm the last surviving member of my department. I'm doing the jobs of three people, just to keep operations running. I'm by no means vital to company survival, but there will be pain if my workshop sits idle. I'm turning in my final timesheet today, without notice. My new job starts next week. I think its petty revenge, but that's ok. Not my problem, right?
28. Let’s Go to the Tape
I wear hearing aids, and a girl in my math class when I was in high school used to make fun of me. I hadn’t said two words to her, I gave her no reason to do it, she was just being evil. So I recorded her mocking my hearing loss on my phone and then played it for her parents. They took the new car they just bought her back to the dealership.
29. Don’t Plant Stand Me
This was petty revenge executed on me by a friend. Executed flawlessly. At some point back in the late 90s, early 00s, my friends and I started pranking each other by sending each other links to what were supposed to be legit pictures but were actually pictures of plant stands. It got so bad that we started refusing to click links sent around, and coined the phrase "don't plant stand me".
Flares up and down for several years as my friends move away from NYC and around the country, but continue to share pictures/funny links/etc. We would also keep track of who had gotten who most recently, and I don't even remember what I'd done, but I'd plant standed one of them particularly badly. Fast forward about a year, I'm getting married.
Everyone is invited, including this friend who is going to stay at my place during the wedding. She drives up in a rental and asks me to help bring her bags in. I'm so excited to see her, I rush out and grab a couple and carry them into the guest room and get her all set up. It's a great wedding and my wife and I head off to our honeymoon for a week, saying goodbye to everyone before we go.
When I get back to my house, another week or so goes by before I have to get something from the closet in the guest room. And that's when I find it. A huge, wrought-iron plant stand, smack in the middle of the room. This friend of mine found, bought, disassembled, flew to another country, reassembled and left a plant stand in my guest room. And I helped carry it into my own darn house! Needless to say, she won. We don't plant stand anymore. There's no point.
30. Tears on My Guitar
I was at a guitar store once. I'm not a very good guitar player, but I was shopping for an amp and decided to try a few out. I pulled a guitar down from the wall, plugged into an amp, and started tweaking the settings to my liking. A guy in a wheelchair came up, plugged into the amp next to me and pumped the volume, then proceeded to play some metal licks right next to me.
I gave him the benefit of the doubt, powered off the amp that I was testing, and walked across the room to another amp, plugged in and started fiddling with settings again. Again, he rolled himself over, plugged into the amp directly adjacent to mine, turned up to 11 and proceeded to go to town on the guitar.
A second time, I gave him the benefit of the doubt, walked away and tried a third amp without saying a word to him. He rolled over, plugged in, turned up and started playing as loud as he could. I asked him if he'd mind giving me a few moments, as I was considering buying one of the amps, and he responded with, "I don't know why you bother, you're a bad guitarist and I can do anything you can do ten times better".
I looked him in the eye, said, "Not quite anything," and reached up to hang the guitar from the top rack, all while maintaining eye contact.
31. Lose My Address
I was dating this girl. Thought she was the one, so I gave her the keys to my apartment. I worked late for my job, and I was just happy there was someone in my bed when I got home at 2 in the morning. Came home one night, and she was awake. She then suddenly confessed to using my apartment to cheat on me with 7 different people. So I packed her stuff up, since she was still living with her mom anyways.
Then I lied to her and said I moved to Seattle. I moved to Hawaii instead. Three months after being in Hawaii, I get a phone call from her. I answer, and to my surprise, she's called me from the Seattle airport. She flew out there to try and fix things between us. The dialog goes as follows Me: So you're in Seattle? Her: Yeah! Weren't you listening? I came here to fix us.
Me: Oh...well, that's bad. Her: What's bad? Me: I'm in Hawaii! I then hung up the phone. She calls back immediately, and I answer. Her: YOU LIED TO ME!! Me: Huh, how does it feel? I hang up again. To me, that was a good revenge.
32. Golden Boy
When I was 7, I was mad at my younger sister about something, so when she went to bed, I peed on her to get her in trouble for wetting the bed. Guys, it made sense at the time.
33. A Little Put-Down on Your Pick-Me-Up
I currently work as a barista at Starbucks, and overall it's a good job but the pay is just ok. One thing I really dislike, though, is when a group of young junior high kids will come in and order what feels like a million Frappuccinos. So my buddy who frequents Reddit sent me this post about a guy who puts the name sticker for the order over the Starbucks logo to ruin their Snapchat and Instagram pictures.
Last shift, I tried it out for myself, and it was IMMEDIATELY satisfying. The look on this one kid’s face when they saw their drink, knew they couldn't take a good photo of it, but also knew that the only real problem was the sticker placement? Priceless.
34. Hat’s off to You
The Poo Hat. Found a hat in the car that I share with my ex. It wasn’t mine—it belonged to the girl who he had been banging for the last two years of our marriage. I dipped a q-tip in my dog's freshly laid poo and delicately lined the inside rim of her hat with it, then gently placed the hat back on the seat of the car where I found it.
Returned car to ex the following day. Next time I borrowed the car, the Poo Hat was not there. Only regret is that I don't have a picture of her wearing it.
35. And I Quote
After my ex told me she knows she’s better than me by a mile while breaking up with me, I took a screenshot of it. I now send her said screenshot whenever she tries to talk to me.
36. Squash That Idea
I have a friend whose pumpkin display at the end of his driveway would be run over by the neighborhood jerk. Happened every year. 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.
Filled that puppy up and made a real pretty display. The jerk broke the axle of his car when he hit that pumpkin. Could not drive away. My friend had his car towed away, too.
37. I Love the Smell of Ketchup in the Morning
My co-worker sometimes throws out her lunch in the garbage can at my desk instead of her own, because she claims she can't stand the smell of old ketchup that's been sitting out for a couple of hours. I've asked her several times to stop, but she will then just wait until I get up to go to the bathroom and do it, and hide my garbage can under my desk so she thinks I won't see it.
Every time she does it, I wait until she goes to the bathroom, take out the little plastic container that she had ketchup in, and put it way in the back of her bottom desk drawer. There are 6 in there now, and the oldest is over a month old. So far, she hasn't noticed the smell. Going to keep doing it and see how long it takes her to notice.
38. For the Birds
I caught my roommate telling lies about me to some mutual friends. I made plans to move out the next month. In the meantime, she went out of town for a week, and left her car parked in its usual spot in the parking lot. I threw birdseed on it every morning and evening, so when she came home, the birds wouldn't leave her car alone.
39. By Any Other Name
I used to manage a Starbucks , and one of my baristas asked a guy his name. For some reason, he just flipped out, belittling her, calling her stupid, etc. and didn’t give a name. So I take over to hand-off drinks and place his drink just on the hand-off, with no words. I’ll add that it was a busy store with a lot of people waiting.
I just keep putting drinks out for about 10-15 minutes until the jerk walks up and picks up his drink that’s now lukewarm. He then goes, "Is this mine?" I just respond with, "I don’t know, it doesn’t have a name on it".
40. Caught Red-Handed
Not me, but for my wife. When we were younger and kind of on hard times, she took a pretty shady job at a local factory. The first two weeks she was there, she had her lunch stolen at least 5 or 6 times. Even open drinks. I was pretty angry, as a lot of times I would grill for her or make her lunch, and she was going hungry. So one night I bought a big Gatorade and a box of those women's laxatives, both red in color.
Couldn't tell the two were mixed, but we sure found out who the thief was.
41. A Line in the Sand
We were kids staying at the seaside on holiday with our family. My little sister would always make a pretty sandcastle, and the next day it would have been kicked down and she'd cry. We wanted to find out who was doing it, so one day we stayed behind to spy. We watched as a bunch of jerk older boys came by and kicked her castle down, laughing smugly.
So the next night, we covered a big beach rock in sand and decorated it. Like clockwork, the jerk kids came with their smug faces and this time kicked a solid rock with all of their might. The yowl and the look on their faces was the best revenge ever.
42. Pretty Sneaky
When I was about 8, I convinced my 4-year-old sister to brush her teeth with mascara by saying that it was a special type of toothpaste, all because she had broken a toy of mine.
43. Playing Dirty
I moved to America to be with this guy, let's call him Rick. Rick happened to work at the same big box store as my friend Jason, and one day when I came to meet Jason from work, a co-worker innocently said, "Are you looking for Rick? He's staying with his girlfriend". Me, totally stunned: "I'M HIS GIRLFRIEND".
Now another thing you should know about Rick is he bought his toothbrushes wholesale and lived in the grungiest apartment ever. I cleaned every inch of that bathroom, toilet included, with each and every one of those remaining toothbrushes, documenting every step with photographs. Then I rinsed them in the toilet and put them back in the box. And I packed my stuff and left. But then I sweetened the deal.
Ten years later, when I'd calculated he was on the last brush, I sent him the pictures.
44. Performance Revenge
I got reviewed at work by a manager I had never met before. I had done everything I was always told to do and more, but he still marked me low. I know it's because they wanted to avoid giving me a raise, but at least say you don't want to or can't afford to. I'll at least respect your honesty. Anything else, and you can go screw yourself.
Anyway, he told me I didn't go the extra mile. I pointed out that I always do. His response? "Well, I never see you do it". I said, "Well, maybe if management didn't always hang out at guest services and went around to the other floors, where I am doing my job, you'd have seen me".
That got him to yell at me and mark me poorly for attitude, but I don’t care. Later on, he came up to me and asked me if I could stay late. Given that I'd previously told him I didn't have anything else to do the next day, he probably thought I'd say yes. I looked him in the eyes and said, "Sorry, but I don't see that you guys need my help".
45. You’re Out of Order
My wife’s brother did something to irritate her back in the day when they were in high school. So my wife turned off the TV, wrote "broken" on a piece of paper taped to the TV, shut off the power strip, and flipped the batteries around in the remote. It took her brother several days to figure it out and get the TV "working" again.
46. Pay It Backward
My friend, we'll call her Susie, finds out that she has herpes. The only guy she has ever been with is Brad. Naturally, she is devastated to find out he's been cheating. We find out that she is not the only one he infected. There are in fact at least five other women we find out about. What's more, we find out Brad has known that he is positive and is still going around hooking up with people and saying that he is healthy.
Susie is just devastated and can't get out of her funk and what she now has to deal with health wise. Now, there is an urban legend where as revenge a woman hid, I think, shrimp in her cheating SO's curtain rods when she was forced to move out of their apartment. This story has been featured on many shows about urban legends. It just so happened to come on late one night when me and Susie were watching TV.
It gave us a truly devious idea—Brad would regret ever meeting her. The only problem was, Brad had five roommates. So no way that was going to work. But wait, Brad has a car. And Brad is too broke to afford a new car any time soon. She knows the door code to unlock the vehicle and I just so happen to know how to remove certain vehicle panels to access holes in other panels that it would be impossible to get shrimp out of.
Plus, he worked the early shift on Wednesday. Lucky us, it's Tuesday night. So off we go to the store to buy the clearance section of meat and seafood out. We're talking ground beef, shrimp, imitation crab meat, various kinds of fish and deviled eggs. Oh, and during this lovely time of September, our little town was experiencing a triple digit heat wave. So off we go in the middle of the night, when it’s still 90 degrees out, and get to work.
Luckily for us, Brad lives in an apartment with no security cameras and other tenants who don't care about two women working on a vehicle at 1 AM. Sure enough, the door key code still works. So we pop out these little covers on the door’s panels that access the interior of the door. In go the tiny little shrimps. Then we remove the plastic panels from the wheel wells, and in goes some ground beef and deviled eggs. Next was his lift gate. Anyway, you get the idea.
We put his car back together and off we go. Over the next few days, the smell just got worse and worse. The apartment complex manager asked him to move the car off the grounds because of the smell. Our town also has some mean feral cats that roam around, they just loved hanging around his car. So not only did it stink, but he risked being chased by some mean feral cats. He would have to always have the windows cracked open at least a little.
Best part is, Brad and I have the same major. So over the next three years, I saw him a lot. He became notorious for his horrible smelling car. He couldn't afford to replace it, no one would buy it, no matter how many times he had it cleaned, the smell remained, and no one could figure out where the odor was coming from. Even if they had figured it out, most of the panels would need to be completely replaced because the only access is tiny holes.
To this day, people still ask him about his car on Facebook. Like, if he says he will pick people up, they ask him if he has a new car. Nope. Still the stink-mobile. He currently works at Starbucks, so that thing isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Kind of like his herpes. I like to think of this as my ultimate Sherlock Holmes-level petty revenge/prank. I will never top the awesomeness of this one, it was my masterpiece.
47. To the Letter
I used to work at a pizzeria. There was this one customer who everyone hated. She was rude as heck, complained about everything. And she wasn’t a normal customer, no, she would order essentially groceries from us by ordering disassembled sandwiches. For example, she’d order a chicken sandwich but with all of the ingredients separate.
It all had to be in particular amounts, with cutlery, butter, a side of grated cheese, 3 plates, oil and vinegar on the side, "medium rare" toasted bread, extra packets of ranch, you get the idea. But because it was all technically part of a "sandwich," she didn’t expect to be charged for any of the extras and would complain if she was.
She also refused to answer the door when the delivery drivers got there and instead would leave the money in an envelope (exact change, no tip) under the doormat and wanted the driver to leave the food on her doorstep. She also had weird specifications about where the driver could park: Never in her driveway, only on the street, even when it was raining.
Also, she didn’t want them to announce their arrival in any way. No knocking, no ringing the bell, no beeping their car horns. They needed to be silent, or she’d complain. She was a nightmare, this woman. And every time she complained, she’d try to weasel some free stuff out of us for next time. Because of course she would!
So one day she says she needs the driver to make change and she wants him to just leave the change in the envelope and not take a tip because "he gets paid already". So I tell my driver this and he says, "Ohhh I get paid, do I? No problem, I’ll take care of it". He goes on the delivery and comes back pleased as punch, doesn’t say a word about how he "took care of it".
I get distracted, keep working. Minutes later, I get a phone call that makes everything clear. It’s the crazy lady and she’s FURIOUS because apparently my driver left her the correct change of $5.85, in the envelope like she asked.....IN PENNIES. Genius. I had to put her on hold so I could laugh. I get back on the phone with her and I said, "Ma’am, I think you’ll find that pennies are legal tender. There’s nothing I can do".
After explaining that I am, indeed, the manager and the highest authority present, she got fed up and hung up on me. That driver is still a king to me.
48. Weeding out the Competition
Once upon a time, I was a newly married lad. We purchased my grandparents’ house from their estate as our first home. We didn’t have kids yet, so we both had full-time jobs and hectic schedules. Incident The First: One day, I came home from work to find my dog out, going nuts. She rarely barked, so I paused for a second, trying to find out was going on…
I then watched as a bright yellow sprinkler came flying over the fence. There was a bunch of stuff lying around my back yard, where the neighbor kid, let’s call him Evil Son, had been throwing it at my poor dog. I walked next door and banged on the neighbor’s door. The boy’s mother, let’s call her Witch, came to the upstairs window (not even to the door) and yelled, "What are you doing on my property?" at me.
By the way, this is my very first interaction with this woman. I introduced myself, and tried to explain what was going on. She immediately jumped to "Do you have video of my son throwing stuff?" Then, inexplicably, Witch started blaming my wife and I. "If you weren’t such hermits, everyone wouldn’t hate you so much".
Odd, all of my other neighbors waved when we went by…but we didn’t interact more than that. She was the only one I didn’t know. Anyhow, she went on, and it turned out that she was upset that I didn’t tell her that my grandmother had passed. Yeah…I hadn’t told someone I didn’t know about a family matter. Fine, whatever. I dropped the matter and left. But that was just the beginning of the nightmare.
Incident The Second: Shortly after, I stopped working a regular 9-5 and started my own business, working out of my home. I noticed some mail went missing. One day, I see the mail truck go by, and put on shoes to go pick it up from the mailbox. When I get down there, I find the box empty, and Witch walking away from it with my stuff in hand.
I yell at her, and she drops it in a pile on her driveway. Proceeds to yell at me that it was blowing around her driveway, and that I should be more careful. Yeah, so I call the authorities. They are reluctant to do anything since I didn’t actually see her take the mail from my mailbox, but they still go over to talk to her. I can hear her yelling at them from inside my house. The next day, she runs out and stands in front of my car, trying to confront me as I am leaving. I tell her in no uncertain terms that I am OK with running her over.
Incident the Third: A neighbor’s pet bunny went missing from its outdoor hutch. Another neighbor spots Evil Son down at the end of our cul-de-sac, looking suspicious. Bunny is found, strangled and mutilated, where Evil Son was seen. Officers are called, denials, the works. Incident the Fourth: We were getting our house ready to sell. Part of that included stripping and repainting our attached deck. I come home from work, and find a can of paint has been opened and thrown across the deck, some furniture, and the side of the house.
There are a few child-sized footprints through the paint. Officers come, but don’t care once more. Then Evil Son is expelled from his elementary school. He was found with a "Harm List" containing most of his classmates. Then the Witch has an "extinction burst," as they call it, blaming everyone for everything bad in her life.
She puts fliers in everyone’s mailboxes, talking about a conspiracy against her. Did you know that that’s actually punishable by fine? She does now…so then Witch takes a different neighbor to task out in the street. Turns out, she doesn’t have any friends anymore. Other neighbors join the fracas, ganging up on her.
Turns out her kid taking the life of their rabbit, or her kid throwing rocks at their cars, and various other events, made her no friends. Witch then gets kicked out of a city alderman meeting where she tried to have the entire neighborhood condemned for various imagined slights. Results: So, after years of dealing with this woman, we prepared to move to a new house. We threw one last blowout party, as one does.
I get a little inebriated and went on a rant about how little I was going to miss having that neighbor. That’s when we came up with an amazing revenge. A friend decided that payback was in order, so we went down into the cellar and looked over my grandfather’s shelves of Stuff He Never Threw Away. Among it all was a bottle of weed killer. Great Depression era, block letters. I have no idea what was in that stuff. Now, this is where the story gets a little hazy.
My friend disappeared for about an hour, and then came back as if nothing ever happened. I never saw the bottle leave the shelf. But, a few days later, parts of Witch’s lawn started to turn brown and die. Big block letters spelled out "I am a Witch," but meaner. I ran into her a week later, as I was getting my mail. Contractors were tearing up her lawn, laying down rolls of sod.
She stomped over to me and complained about my other neighbor’s kids. She clearly saw them apply lighter fluid to her lawn, and light it on fire to burn the awful message into it. Funny thing, whatever was done to her lawn, within a week sections of the new sod died, and the message reappeared. Honestly, screw that woman.
49. Happy Wife, Happy Life
My uncle was a prominent, busy doctor. My aunt, a stay-at-home mother of two. My uncle was very rigid and authoritative, and had to have things just so: a certain breakfast at a specific time every morning, his clothes folded or hung in a particular way, a specific drink waiting for him upon his return home, and a specific dinner at a given time every night, based on a rotating menu.
This went on for decades until he eventually passed. Regardless, one night was meatloaf night, and after years of no complaints, my uncle erupts, screaming at my aunt that her meatloaf is simply garbage, how could she not be able to cook something so simple, all of this, and literally fires his full dinner plate across the room.
My aunt, his submissive, quiet, loyal servant over their then twenty or so years of marriage, simply apologizes and cleans up, promising to improve her recipe. It was only after my uncle died—they were married for 52 years—that she admitted to my mother that she’d fed him meatloaf made solely of Alpo (wet, canned dog food) for the past 30 years with nary a complaint.
50. It’s Payback Time
My roommate in college had only child syndrome and taped a piece of paper over her clock because she didn’t want to "share it with me". Never mind that she couldn’t see the clock herself, but she would rather no one see the clock than share the clock with my eyes. So, from then on, I would take one sock from a set once a week.
It was slow enough that she didn’t realize it was me sabotaging her socks, but fast enough for her to be really annoyed and wondering that the heck was happening to all of her matching socks.
Sources: Reddit,
.jpg){kind=link}