Work sucks. Whether it's an annoying co-worker, rude customer, or tyrant of a boss, there's always someone there just trying to drain the joy out of the day. But every once in a while, the opportunity for vengeance presents itself. And one thing is for sure: whether it's simply petty or absolutely brutal, either way...it's satisfying, just like these stories.
1. The Devil’s In The Details
I worked for an architect who never attended to detail and had a load of failures as a result. On the day I refused to give the go-ahead on a design that I knew would fail—because of "unimportant" details—I was fired. The last thing I had to do was supervise the printing of company letterheads, business cards, and A0 drawing sheets. They were supposed to say, "McDonald, Sweet and Partners, Chartered Architects". At the last minute, I chose vengeance.
I altered the proofs to say, "McDonald, Sweet and Partners, Chartered Artichokes". Of course, not being a "detail" person he approved the proofs, and thousands got printed.
2. Clean Up In Aisle Five
I previously worked at a pet store for a few years. One pet peeve (ha) I always had was that customers who brought their dogs in would almost always leave any of their dog's poop and not bother to pick it up.
However, worse than that were the customers who saw their dogs take a dump and then run to get me and ask me to clean it up. Once a customer was walking (pulling) his dog over by our fish wall. The dog at one point starts taking a dump and the customer sees this and continues to pull his dog down the entire side of the fish wall.
I approached him and said "You need to clean that up sir. I have some paper towels and cleanup spray in my podium that you can use". The customer looks at me, then down at his dog, and "My dog didn't do that, I was watching him the whole time".
The guy had the audacity to walk away. So now I am super angry at this point and my co-worker and I clean up the line of poop by the fish wall and then stuff it into a plastic bag. My next move was brilliant. We handed the bag over to our cashier and told him to make sure to put it in the customer’s bag when the time came.
I watched as he did so later, and I'll admit that gave me some sick sense of satisfaction.
3. The Magic Formula
I used to have to report website usage, ROI, and all sort of statistics for a bunch of different sites. I built a cool mother of a spreadsheet in which you only input a few numbers and it would calculate just about everything the company would need. It was a bit too complicated for my boss to understand, yet he would take it to clients and brag that he made it.
That ticked me off. Then, after a while, he realized that the spreadsheet was all he needed, and he could use my paycheck to buy a new house. He laid me off. I told him he might need help with the spreadsheet, but he said he was smart enough. So before I left, I made sure to make him eat his words—I changed a single formula in the spreadsheet and had a good laugh about the reports it spat out. They made no sense at all anymore.
4. Getting Off The Roof
I was about 18 and working doing residential roofing for a summer job. I had never installed clay or tile shingles before, so my boss told me to watch one of the other guys for a few minutes to get the hang of it. No less than two minutes later, he started screaming (literally screaming; the guy had anger issues) asking why I was standing around and not working. So I grabbed some tiles and started putting them down.
Since I still had really no idea of what I was doing, I, of course, shattered the first two tiles I tried to shoot down. My boss came over and started screaming at me again for breaking tiles. But that's not even the worst thing he did— he then proceeded to PUSH ME OFF THE ROOF! Granted the fall was only about 10 feet, but it still could’ve finished me. At that point, I was seething with anger and decided I was finished with that individual. As I was packing up my gear, I could hear him cursing me at the other guys on the roof.
As I was leaving work, I noticed this fool standing on one of the air hoses connecting his nail device to the air compressor on the ground. In one swift movement, I grabbed the air hose and yanked it hard toward the ground. He came tumbling down off of the roof and landed in a pile. As I was getting into my Jeep, I heard him warning to notify the authorities about me. The foreman came up to him and pointed out how foolish he would look when all of the guys on the crew clearly saw him stumble and fall off on his own. It was glorious to hear that freak ranting and screaming at all of us as I rode off. I realize that I probably committed assault, but turnabout is fair play as far as I am concerned.
5. A Dish Best Served…Greasy?
While going to college, my sister worked in a NYC greasy spoon that was mobbed every day. One day, one of the cooks in the kitchen threw a dish at her simply for asking if the right cheese had been put on a customer’s burger. My sister left the kitchen and told the manager what had happened, but he didn’t want to hear it and sided with the cook. That was the last straw. My sister then told the other waitresses there who happened to be her friends what had happened.
They all then proceeded to take all the orders from a now packed restaurant, (this was before point of sales computer systems), with no table numbers on the checks, then put all the orders in at once. Then they got their bags and walked out the door as one. The manager came running out to the street screaming at them to get back in there and finish serving the customers and my sister told him, “You and the cook can do it”.
That restaurant had to shut down for a week while they scrambled to find new servers. It must have cost them tens of thousands.
6. A Hot Tip
I was delivering pizza in college. Two guys came in for a pizza and were being loud, obnoxious, and general all-around jerks. They were also spitting on the floor that I was going to have to clean at closing time.
When I went out for a delivery, I called the authorities and gave them the description of their car and the license plate number. It turned out so, so sweet. When I came back from the delivery, they were pulled over and being led through the standard sobriety tests on the side of the road. I have no doubt they failed.
7. Credit Where Credit’s Due
I had a co-worker who persistently appropriated my work, claimed credit for tasks he didn't execute, and generally displayed an unwelcoming attitude towards me. I knew he was going to take something I was working on, so I made sure he got his karma by purposely messing up...hard. I mean very, very hard. As in, I indirectly bad-mouthed the CEO and higher-ups in a report going to a customer and sat back and waited.
He got fired without severance pay, he lost his house, and his wife left him. He lived on the street for three months before he was given a tiny government home. I send him a Christmas card every year.
8. You Were Warned
A coworker chewed on everything from pens and pencils to safety goggles. I warned him to stop, but he just made a joke out of it by chewing even more. Little did he know that I'd soon have the last laugh. Everyone except him watched as I rubbed the pen all over a particular area of my rear end and then handed it to him and said “DO NOT CHEW ON THIS PEN”. Straight into his mouth, it went. The whole shop erupted in laughter and he began spitting like crazy. Notice was served and the chewing immediately stopped. If you mess with the bull, you may get the horns...
9. Up in Flames
I had just gotten out of the army. I went to work for a guy who was a real creep. He had been married four times and had inappropriate photographs of all his ex-wives, which he was always trying to show me to prove what a stud he was. I knew where he kept the envelope he stashed them in. When I quit, I got the perfect revenge. I burned all the pictures and put the ashes back into the envelope with a goodbye note from me. I thought that if he was stupid, crooked, and a creep, he deserved it. Have had my own business with 60+ employees for 40+ years. I owe it to him for getting me started.
10. Switching Sides
I work at a family firm, and we had a potential client call to inquire about our services. She wouldn't speak to my enrollment specialist because "he sounded like a gay" and asked to speak with his supervisor, me.
He told me what she said to him, so I got on the phone and started asking her questions regarding her case. She described herself as a "good Christian" who wanted to take away her ex-husband’s paternal rights because he is moving in with his "god-hating sinner of a boyfriend”.
She would not allow her child to be subjected to such "blasphemy”. I told her that I'd need his information for the documentation, politely finished the conversation, threw away her information, and called the ex-husband and offered free representation.
11. Special Delivery
Back in my early 20s, I worked as a delivery driver at a pizza joint close to the main college. After about four months of working there, the owner hired a friend of his to manage the joint since our current manager had just left. We’ll call the new guy “Donnie”. Donnie was the epitome of the "power trip for no reason" boss.
He would call you out for little mistakes, make you stay late to help do his job, throw you under the bus when talking to the owner, and always bail early. To top it all off, he was convinced everybody liked him. We even caught him taking from our tip jars a couple of times, but the owner never did anything about it.
Anyway, I had planned to go out one night with a girl I had just met and wanted to get off work a bit early so I could go home and wash the pizza smell off me. I asked Donnie if that was possible—and he absolutely lost it. You would have thought I’d asked for a raise, bonus, and a six-month vacation. Despite the fact that three drivers from the next shift had shown up already, he started shouting, "What, are you stupid?? We have three deliveries up!! You can stay until your shift is over”.
"That's cool", I thought. Although he wasn't the most pleasant, he was well within his right to make me stay until my shift was over. I sucked it up and started getting the last deliveries together. However, when he saw where I was taking one of the pizzas, he ordered—not asked—me to pick him up a chocolate shake from a drive-through joint close by.
I flat out told him, "No freakin’ way. You expect me to do you a favor when you won’t do me one? Suck it". I grabbed the pizzas and stormed out. Donnie started yelling from the kitchen, something like, "Haha, look at him getting all political. Awww, I think he's mad". Granted his past behavior had factored into how angry I was over something pretty minor, but I was furious.
The universe had reached its limit of inconsiderate behavior and called upon me to educate this fool. As I was driving away from the last delivery, I called the store and got Donnie on the phone. I apologized and said I would get him his milkshake, and even pay for it. I went by the drive-through of the fast-food place to get a 32oz chocolate milkshake.
Then, I made a beeline to the grocery store right down the street to pick up a family-size bottle of chocolate-flavored Ex-Lax. I poured half of the shake out—for me to enjoy later, of course—and mixed in about 15oz of Ex-Lax. Keep in mind: it only takes like two tablespoons of this stuff to give you a healthy case of the runs. It was on now.
After giving it to him, he said something about it tasting funny but still managed to inhale that sucker like a true fat boy. He didn't even say “thanks”. Fast forward three hours or so, my date and I were cruising the bars and we headed into the pizza joint I worked at. Instantly, the cook made eye contact with me and came rushing over, practically falling over patrons.
Barely able to contain himself, he told me, "Donnie is having uncontrollable, violent diarrhea. He's been in the bathroom since you left, has messed his pants already, and is making this place smell like an open sewer". I went back to the kitchen and Donnie was nowhere in sight. But right as I started to talk to a fellow pizza slave, he came rushing from the bathroom.
His pants were half on-half off, one hand was out in front, and the other hand was holding his balloon knot shut. He had exhausted the entire restaurant's toilet paper supply and was heading to the bar next door. The best part? He lived about 65 km (40 miles) away and continued pooping himself periodically throughout the trip home.
Despite everybody knowing the true story, though, he never figured it out and blamed the fast-food joint for his wild ride on the Hershey Highway. I think the whole ordeal humbled him a bit because he ended up turning into a decent guy.
12. Hide And Seek
I won’t go into the details of my boss but, suffice it to say, she was a total nightmare—an incompetent micromanager with an additional side-order of petty evil. So, I got myself a PCB prank device. If you’ve not seen it before, it makes a random “BLEEP”! at odd intervals, between a minute and ten minutes. It sounds like the “battery is almost out” bleep.
I hid it where I knew she wouldn’t find it and watched, over the course of a few weeks, as her sanity and temper both got frayed beyond belief. She replaced her phone twice and her computer once, and never at any point did she stand a chance of finding the thing. My secret? I’d hidden it inside her monitor.
13. A Sandwich You’ll Regret Eating
Someone kept taking my lunch at work, and me being the pacifist that I am, I decided to just mention it casually to my wife. I didn’t think it was a big deal, but these were the sandwiches that SHE made for me every day. So, she decided to make a very special sandwich for me...which consisted of bread and toothpaste. I put it in the fridge and after lunch, it was gone. I don’t know if the sandwich was actually consumed, but I told HR about it and they thought it was so awesome, they gave me a $20 gift card to Outback Steakhouse.
Shutterstock
14. An Eye For An Eye
I had a picture of my mom and me on my desktop (I know, corny). This guy, Pat, kept commenting on how attractive my mom was (he was about the same age). After about a month of this, I requested my mom to playfully call him and inform him that he was a negative influence and the like. She did this, but they ended up talking for 30 minutes, and after that, Pat told everyone at the office that my mom was trying to pick him up. For the next year, every time he saw me he asked how my mom was. At my five-year pinning ceremony, he told the story to a bunch of strangers and my bosses.
Fast forward a year later—I had just gone through a bad breakup with my long-time girlfriend and this Pat guy kept coming into my office and telling me that I need to get out and start playing the field. He did this for about a month, so then I asked a guy at work what his daughter’s name was (she was around the same age as me). I found her on Facebook and asked her if she would help play a prank on her dad. When she agreed, I set my devious plan into motion.
I went out on a “date” with his daughter and took a picture of the two of us drinking out of the same drink with two straws then proceeded to put it in a heart-shaped frame on my desk. Then I got another manager to tell Pat that I got a new girl and that I was head over heels for her. He came straight to my office and I didn’t say a word—all I heard from behind me was, “What are you doing with my daughter”? To this day, he hasn’t asked when my mom is calling next!
15. Called In The Cavalry
When I was fired at a large financial services organization, the head of HR essentially told me to clean out my desk and leave. I was a participant in a number of executive compensation programs, and no provision was being made to give me some/any of that money. I knew others had been treated differently when they were terminated. I called my former boss (the ex-company president) who had been fired two weeks earlier and asked him what he thought I should do.
He said, “Call the guys in the field. The field loves you”. This was at around 10:00 am. So I called every senior salesperson I knew—and asked them to call the CEO on my behalf. All I asked was that I be treated fairly. At 2:00 pm, the head of HR called me to say that the CEO had gotten the message and my “little campaign” worked—I could “call off my dogs”. I negotiated an equitable severance package and a transition job within the organization. I get by with a little help from my friends.
16. The Puppet Master
We had a realtor that came into our local computer store a lot that we had dubbed “’Roid rage”. He is all cool one minute and the next minute he is screaming and throwing around insults, using his size to intimidate people.
On more than one occasion he had made our female sales staff cry. My boss had finally told him not to come back, but I was not there for it and missed out on his final rant. About two years later, I was buying groceries in a Safeway and I hear some guy yelling at the checker over an expired coupon for Muscle Milk.
I walk up to see what’s going on, and lo and behold, it’s ‘roid rage guy. No longer in danger of getting fired, I tell him he doesn't have the right to yell at her and he can stuff the coupon where the sun don't shine.
He challenges me to have a confrontation outside where he believes he could defeat me, to which I coolly respond, "Why don't I instead call your wife and enlighten her about those emails you've been sending to casual encounters on Craigslist"? He freezes in his tracks and suddenly realizes who I am.
He just walks off without saying anything and pushes over a stand of chips on his way out. The cute checker thanks me and we ended up dating for three months.
17. Sound Familiar?
I was fired from a sporting goods company for not fitting in. I was fired by the VP of Technology and my manager was the one who brought me to his office (she didn’t say a word to me). Anyway, a few years later, the jellyfish manager I had was at a conference where I was the keynote speaker.
I was actually in the middle of telling the story of how I was fired and that got me the right to call myself ‘seasoned’ on my resume. I am explaining the whole experience minus names and I look out into the audience and there she is, sliding down in her chair. It was classic!
Wikimedia Commons,Women Deliver
18. Freedom Fries
I was working the counter at a ski resort's cafe. This teenager strolled up with French fries and declared that he had no money, asking if he could just have them without charge. I said nope, he said: "But I'm a good customer”.
I said okay but fries are for paying customers, and proceeded to take them away from him and pop one in my mouth right in front of him. He had nothing to say to that, but his friend cracked up and apologized for him.
When I turned around, all of my co-workers were in awe of how perfect the moment was.
Flickr, Marco Verch Professional Photographer
19. Overtime Pay
I worked as an installer in a remote office. I traveled a lot for work, often spending weekends on site. This was fine under my old boss, who gave me a lot of leeway by letting me work from home, giving me comp time, etc. After four years, I got a new boss. At the same time, the company laid off everyone in my office, which was about 100 people.
The new boss insisted I come in anyway to sit in an empty office. It was a 45-minute drive, but I still had to travel Sunday through Friday with no overtime and no comp time. When I complained to HR, the HR manager told me that since I was salaried, if they wanted me to work 80 hours a week, I would work 80 hours and I shouldn't expect any compensation.
Everyone I talked to seemed to think it was true, and that being salaried meant one didn’t get overtime. That didn't make sense to me. I called the local state Department of Labor office and told them what I did, and what I'd been told by HR. Their response made my blood boil—they told me to get a lawyer and said that if my work didn't rectify this by giving me every dollar they owed me, the company would have to pay the state 50 cents in penalties.
So, I got a lawyer. In a matter of four months, I settled out of court, got a new job, and got a severance. I also made my boss do an exit interview where I told her that if she'd been halfway considerate, she wouldn't have to scramble to cover for the next eight scheduled installs by flying people out from the East Coast and paying them overtime.
20. Short-Staffed
I had an abusive boss who would make physically impossible demands. She thought she was the queen of the workplace because her supervisors let her do whatever she wanted, but I would soon put her in her place. So, during one of her tantrums in which about 12 hours of work was being laid on me at 4 pm but was due the next morning, I told her, “Fine, I quit”.
She screamed, “YOU CAN'T QUIT! YOU HAVE TO GIVE TWO WEEKS' NOTICE”. I said, “What? No, I don't. Goodbye, and good luck with all that work that needs to be done before tomorrow”. It was very satisfying.
21. Throwing Wrenches
I had a female co-worker who falsely accused me and two other guys of plotting to take from our job. Despite the combined seven years on the job between the three of us—compared to her two months—our man-hating boss believed our co-worker. She gave us this ridiculous, patronizing speech about "security concerns" and made us all turn in our keys.
She didn't fire us though, because our seven years of experience made us absolutely indispensable. The place would have ground to a halt without us, and everyone knew it. We were, naturally, incensed at this series of events. Our direct supervisor was pretty cool, so we warned him that we weren't coming in the next day.
Then, the hot mess began. In one of the biggest "Are you kidding"? moments of my life, at 9 am, the co-worker who accused us called our direct supervisor and demanded to know why we weren't at work yet. Needless to say, everything shut down for a while. Clients were upset about a complete lack of services, troubleshooting was out the window, and the three of us laughed like Nero fiddling while Rome burned.
It took a few days for any semblance of order to come back. Even then, the place limped along, hamstrung because nobody else knew how to do our jobs, much less how to do them as smoothly and efficiently as we did. We never received an apology from anyone in the company, and when we went in to confront our accuser, she ducked us for a day and a half before we could get a meeting with her and the bosses.
The bosses took a "we can't really know what happened, but if she accused you, you must have done something" attitude, and our man-hating boss spent a good hour trying to get us to confess to something we never did. We proceeded to spill all the dirty laundry we held on our co-worker, including some examples of outright theft, and walked out of the meeting.
As we left the office, we apologized to the co-workers who got extra work because of our departure. Their reactions caught us totally off-guard—not a single one held it against us. As our direct supervisor later said, "I don't blame you. I wouldn't have been able to work there after that. Heck, you guys have been working here longer than me, I'm more likely to have stolen something".
A year later, the company's clients had dropped by about 50% and, right now, I think they're about to go out of business. The company had barely scraped by with people who knew how to put out every fire, and nobody else had been there more than a few months. So, when they drove out all their experienced employees, everything fell apart.
22. Who Called The Fire Brigade?
I used to work as a developer for a company that makes EDI software. My boss was a paranoid, penny-pinching, micromanaging knob. For example, he'd say things like: “I know your contract says you can take an hour for lunch, but most people take just 15 minutes and I think you should too”, or “I don’t see any reason why you should not make a habit of coming in 30 minutes early and leaving 30 minutes later”.
My main beef with him was that he refused to give me time off to be with my wife when her mother had only a few days left to live. Our office was in a converted factory that was split into several units. My boss’s brother owned the building. Within that building, there was our company, a karate studio, and a creche. I noticed that the fire alarm panel at the main door to the building never had any lights lit on it. It looked like there was no power going into it.
So I called the fire brigade. The surprise inspection came 30 minutes later due to the fact that there was a creche in the building. The building owner got himself a conviction and a $10K fine (I had hoped it would be bigger). He had to pay a load to get a new fire alarm system installed. A few months later, when I was made redundant under questionable circumstances, I told my boss who called the fire brigade. The color drained from his face. I then launched a claim in court against him for unfair dismissal and my case. I have enjoyed punishing him for the unfair way he treated me.
I should point out just how beautiful it was to watch the inspection. The fire brigade sent around two young ladies, who looked more like salespeople and nothing like fire safety inspectors. They came into our office and asked to speak to the building manager. My boss came out of his room with a big Terry-Thomas grin on his face to greet them. “Hi, I manage the building for my brother”. “Great, we’re from the fire brigade and we are here to have a look at your fire safety systems”. His jaw dropped.
23. What Goes Around…
I was fired from a small firm. The separation was nasty. The owner had the lock changed and had building security walk me out. I opened my own office and within a few months, the affairs manager for my former employer's biggest client was on the phone with me sputtering with rage. He had finally had enough of the overbilling and poor service. The client shifted its business to me. Whenever I encountered my former boss in the courthouse or on the street his enraged expression was a pleasure to behold. Payback is such a guilty pleasure.
24. Special Order Up
I used to work in a family-run store with my sister. I'm her half-sister, and I'm a lot darker than her. This guy and his friends kept coming in and throwing prejudiced comments at me. It was a rural area and a place where we sold farm-made cider in the store from local farmers.
The guys were total trashy idiots ad always came in to buy this cider because it was the cheapest stuff we sold.
Now for those of you who don't know, farm-made cider is literally just thrown in any, random, pre-opened container—whatever bottles, whatever. My revenge was brutal. Myself and my sister peed in some bottles and switched them with the normal cider that they came in to buy.
I know they drank my pee and I'm glad.
25. Call The Caterer
Our company was giving us employees an appreciation lunch and had requested a small group of employees to plan and execute the event. On the day of the event, upper management got a stick up their butts and decided that the planning committee was using up too much company time. They told us that any of us who worked the luncheon would have to do it on our lunch breaks or stay late to make up the time.
We, of course, found that unacceptable. Prior to the luncheon, we had a huge meeting where all the managers and bigwigs praised all the workers for a job well done, etc. In the end, they asked if anyone had any questions or comments. That's when I took my chance to get even. I stood up and in a very friendly manner said that we needed managers to volunteer to serve the luncheon.
All you heard were crickets for about ten seconds and then a lot of whispering and scrambling as upper management made lower management raise their hands. It was so awesome to see them all using their lunch hour to serve us!
26. Hacked
I worked at a company that did phone surveys. There were probably 250 people working there at any given time. In a practical joke gone awry, my ill-mannered boss pushed and then tripped me. I had worked there for many years and ran system backups on the weekend. Nothing fancy, just babysat the computers after typing in a few lines of Unix commands.
Thanks in part to this, I had just enough access to the system to crash the entire dialing floor for three hours. 250 people sitting there, doing nothing, and being paid on crunch day. And I didn't get caught. It felt good, man.
27. NYC Comes First
I used to work at a sandwich shop and bakery in Nashville, and my shift started at 6 am. The horrible, uptight manager would call at 6:01 if I wasn't there and he'd flip out. I had taken a weekend off to travel to New York to play a show, and when she realized she forgot to take me off the schedule, she tried to get me to cancel my trip. When I said we had already booked a show, she told me my music sucked and that the girl singer of our band was “too ugly for country”. Firstly, she’s hot and secondly, we didn't even play country music. Inside I raged, but I kept cool on the outside. I eventually decided that enough was enough.
I told her I would cancel my plans so I could work that Saturday for her. Little did she know that while I sent her that message, I was already on my way to New York, and I put my phone on silent mode when I went to bed. The next morning, I had six new messages. The first three were her freaking out, the fourth was just silent, the fifth was my shift leader saying, “I think he's trying to tell you to take a hint”, and the sixth was my boss telling me I was fired. I just shrugged and carried on with my life.
28. Fight For Your Rights
A relative of mine came to Canada, he started working in a restaurant that paid him $8/hour when the minimum wage was $14/hour. He worked there for two years before they fired him for no reason. When they dismissed him from the work, they still owed him nearly two months of pay. The restaurant owner started toying with him for months and wouldn't pay his money. When I heard about it, I knew just what to do.
I filed a case with the Labour Board and got him his payment for two years at the lawful minimum wage, which was around $10k. A few months later the restaurant closed down. I heard the restaurant partners had a bad fight over that money since no one wanted to take responsibility for the loss. Also, two other workers filed labor disputes against the restaurant as well, so they all got their money. They very much deserved that fate.
29. Hot And Heavy
I have been working in kitchens for several years now and only once have I ever manipulated a customer’s food. I'm not proud of it, but the poor chap got what was coming to him. I used to work at a pretty well-known sports bar chain with a menu mostly consisting of a variety of wing sauces and other fryer-friendly items.
Being situated in an upper-middle class neighborhood, we would always get the little 15-year-olds with Ed Hardy shirts and mommy's money acting like little children in our fine establishment. Being a line cook, I never really had interactions with these little brats, but one day I’d just had enough.
It started with a group of four 15-year-olds strutting through the front door and immediately berating one of the waitresses I liked, Sarah. She promptly got their drinks but apparently it wasn't fast enough. They called her slow and stupid and asked how she ever got a job waitressing.
Sarah came back to the kitchen almost in tears. I comforted her and sent her out to take the table's food order. That's when the leader of the bunch made a very grave mistake. Just like a few other wing-centric restaurants, we had a "challenge". Eat 12 of our hottest wings in six minutes and you got a T-shirt and your photo on a hall of fame.
This individual decided to show off to his friends and attempt this seemingly easy challenge. Sarah came back to the kitchen with a grin and gave us a simple order: "Make him suffer". We proceeded to throw every possible molten thing we could onto these wings.
The hot sauce, vinegar, jalapeno juice, jalapeno seeds, habanero seeds, and a few shots of Tabasco would assault his palate like a freight train. But that wasn’t all. Being somewhat of a showman, I found a doctor’s mask and put it on. With the mask on, I proceeded to take a sauce bottle, and in full view of Mr Macho, inject every flat wing with sauce until it blew up like a balloon.
Satisfied with my work, I sent out the wings. As told by Sarah, he made it through one wing. If he had chosen a drumstick, he mostly likely could have had the satisfaction of two wings. But egged on by his friends, he chose a hot sauce injected flat.
When the stopwatch started, he took the biggest bite he could. The wing exploded like a poultry Pompeii, leaving behind the shallow husk of a man. He quit after that one and was quiet the whole night as his "friends" called him out for being a wimp.
Sarah got a nice 25% tip off the table, and I got a small bit of satisfaction in a business that can seem so dark. Of course, no ill will to Wild Wings at all. I cooked there for three-ish years and have many fond memories of the place. It was a small stepping stone in this culinary career I've chosen.
30. Screwy Louie
Our boss was some random guy who had a problem with making unwanted advances. He even asked me if I knew where he could find a "good woman" who would do whatever he was into. One evening, he made the mistake of leaving his email open after he'd thrown me and my supervisor under the bus over something we had nothing to do with. I had a chance to get back at him big time—and I took it.
Turns out, this guy was cheating on his wife. We found the emails, forwarded them to the wife, and he went nuts trying to fix it all. Screw that guy. He got fired a few weeks later.
31. Heart-Shaped Box Of Chocolates
I had a manager at a clothing store who just went on a power trip anytime the boss was around. On Valentine’s Day came, I bought one of those huge boxes of chocolate shaped like a heart and put it in the backroom with a note from the boss (who was married), telling her how much he cared for her and how he wished they could spend more time together. I ended the note with his number, and a prompt to call him if she felt the same.
And you know what happened? She did call him. Turns out they had an affair, and the wife found out and left the boss, who in turn fired the manager. I don't know what happened after that since I quit shortly after Valentine's Day, but it still made my day.
32. Desktop Shortcut For Solitaire
A lady on our team never did any work. Instead, she would whine her way out of stuff or go on endless lunch breaks where she just played solitaire. Eventually, it got to the point where we were uninstalling the games from her computer accounts via the local admin accounts. One day, I noticed she STILL had one game on her PC, even after we removed the default ones.
That same day, she left the office and left her PC logged in—a rookie mistake that I planned on exploiting. I got on her PC and found the game linked on the desktop. I went to the shortcut properties and changed everything so that when she clicked on the game, it would open the Wikipedia page on work ethic instead of the game. She doesn’t play games in the office anymore.
33. An Expensive Deworming
I once worked at a large defense contractor. One of the programmers was given two weeks' notice. Well, he decided to go out with a bang. He spent his last two weeks programming a worm into the system that tied up two years' worth of work on one of the projects. No one could access any of it. If I recall correctly, they ended up paying him to remove the worm.
34. You Get What You Give
An older lady at one of my tables had cold pasta. She wanted me to feel it. I said I believed her, but she took my wrist and rammed my hand into the food. I was upset. I never, under any circumstances, contaminate anyone's food at my restaurant. However...
The lady continued to behave poorly long after her food was corrected and the manager informed her that it was complimentary, along with a free dessert. Check time came and the lady whips out a gift card to pay for everyone's food. She was with three of her friends, it was something like a $55 bill.
I take it, pretend like I'm off to cash her out, but I switch her $50 gift card with an identical card that was never activated. I tell her there isn't any money on her card. The manager has to double-check. He confirms the card was never activated. Now, she is angry.
To be fair, I did give her back the original card. I said she could ask the person who got it for her about it. Maybe they had a receipt. The point is, people treat me like garbage at work enough as it is, but touching me?
Demeaning me by taking my wrist and putting it into cold pasta? I wanted to make her look bad in front of her friends, and I think I succeeded.
35. Nuclear Revenge
When I was getting ‘made redundant’ from one job, one of the last things I did was put my expensive IBM laptop in the microwave for a minute or so. Apparently, according to my old colleagues, it never worked again. The woman from HR tried to ‘get me’ but as she had seen me using my laptop five minutes before I handed it over, there was nothing she could do. They never worked out it had been zapped in the microwave.
36. Should Have Just Been Nice
I used to work in a Safeway Deli. Horrid job. Anyways, one day, a guy that looks like he is trying his best to be a Mexican tough guy, but failing horribly, comes in. I think nothing of it. This is Portland, I see stranger things every day.
A buddy of mine, Dario, is helping this guy. Now, Dario used to be majorly depressed. He is an immigrant from eastern Europe, and has had a hard life. As a result, he used to be in some dark places, so he has scars up and down his arms.
Well, it is hot in the deli, so his sleeves are rolled up and the scars are visible. This wannabe tough guy, completely unprovoked, starts ridiculing Dario about the scars, calling him insane, loco, etc. Now, Dario used to be a Thai boxer, and has a bit of a temper, so I tell him to go into the back, cook some food, and I'll handle this.
The guy is completely inconsiderate. Like 11/10 on my rage scale. So, he orders 1 1/2 lbs of Mac n' Cheese. I knew just what to do. I "trip" and spill it all over the floor. It was the last of the Mac n’ Cheese, and he was out of luck that day.
So now this guy is screaming at me, looking like he is going to jump over the counter at me. I call my manager. Manager comes over, tells the guy to leave. Guy won't leave. My manager calls the authorities, and the guy gets pulled out of the building. That’s when it got even better. Turns out, he had hidden a bottle of $75 red beverage in his jacket.
Busted. Moreover, he demonstrated aggression towards an officer by wildly flailing about, which resulted in him effectively head-butting her. It was satisfying to witness him being abruptly pushed against the wall. A few weeks later, I got subpoenaed to be a witness against him in court, as my manager filed charges. The guy got put away for a while. True story.
37. The Critter Cam
I had been working for about six months as a second-tier support technician for a fairly large corporation, supporting both Mac and PC users. The support team I was part of included a hillbilly simpleton—you can refer to him as Keith—and a snappish, middle-aged grump—you can call him Bill. I sat in a cube and Bill’s cube was opposite the wall I faced.
Across the aisle was Keith, who always spoke as if he was at a rock concert. In other words, I could hear him through concrete walls. Bill hated me with a passion because I took half of his responsibilities as well as the role of "Mac Technician" to help the creative team stay productive. He had argued that we didn't need the creative team in the first place.
Keith hated me because he spouted socio-political hate speech all the time and I called him out on it every...single...time. The guy could not STAND to be wrong, even when presented with mountains of evidence proving it. This is where it gets good. For about three weeks, someone had been moving stuff around on my desk.
At first, I thought it was one of the interns playing a prank. But I figured out it couldn't have been them because we would go to lunch together and my stuff would be moved. So, that means it was either Keith, Bill, or a ghost. One day, I went to lunch and came up with a brilliant idea: I could turn on the photo booth on my MacBook!
I stuffed my laptop in the corner facing the doorway of my cube and off I went. It took a couple of days, but I finally caught BOTH Keith and Bill rifling through my stuff, moving stuff around on my desk. AND I caught them talking about me behind my back to each other while they did it.
Now, I'm not a violent person, nor am I someone that would react irresponsibly toward this event—but this made me FURIOUS! I compiled the data into a single movie on my MacBook, slapped it on a DVD, and then walked on over to HR. The human resources guy was taken aback by the footage I was able to get. He had never seen someone come in with actual video evidence of their complaint regarding another co-worker.
Fast forward a few months: Keith left the company because he got denied a managerial position and Bill was still working the same cruddy position he had before, except now he had a strike on his record for harassing a fellow employee. I left the company shortly after Keith to finish my bachelor's. Now, I have a cushy engineer position with a small, yet awesome software company.
38. Delayed Revenge
This is my father’s story. We owned a restaurant years ago in a mall next to a bar. Parking was assigned by business, but people would constantly park in our spots. One day, a man in a newer Corvette convertible parked right in front of our store and walked toward the bar.
Dad stopped him and asked him to move his car, as there were plenty of other spaces available. He laughed, and said "Try and tow me”. My dad shrugged, waited for about 20 minutes, and then poked his two front tires with sharpened wire, right in the sidewall. The tires didn't deflate right away because the hole was small. I'm sure they did over the next day or two though.
39. Don’t Overstay Your Welcome
I was working as one of two laundry people in a hotel. The other laundry person had just quit, and I was training a new guy who was not capable of working the job, let alone holding an intelligent conversation. I had just received another job offer and asked for the hotel to match the salary of the new job to keep me on.
The manager not only refused my raise but then asked me to work on my only day off so she wouldn't have to come in and train. I put in my two weeks' notice and grudgingly told her I would work the extra shift. Worst decision ever. At this specific hotel, there was a guest who lodged there every month, known as "the food man" due to his unusual practice of solely utilizing the room's sheets and towels to clean up any mess from his backside.
So, every night he stayed there, he covered two sheets, four towels, and two to four hand towels and washcloths in his mess. I have no idea why the hotel management let him stay there but they were always the worst days of work. The day before the shift I had covered, the manager came and told me, “Prepare yourself for tomorrow, the food man is staying here tonight”.
That was pretty much the last straw. I finished the day, and then just didn't set my alarm. The manager got called in and ended up working a nearly 11-hour shift with the most annoying trainee ever. I feel a bit bad for sticking it to the trainee, but there is always collateral damage.
40. Small Changes Lead To Big Problems
My father is a project manager working on financial programs for banks and financial companies. A lot of the stuff he does is projects for programs that basically do the accounting and back-end management of money for large companies. We're talking about programs that manage and account for hundreds of millions of dollars.
Basically, as is standard in the financial industry, his bosses were complete idiots with no understanding of coding and the amount of effort it takes. My dad found out his job was getting outsourced as he was finishing up a huge project; from what he told me, it was something like $100K+ lines of code. He saw the perfect opportunity to exact his revenge—he went in and added three lines of code that messed up the whole program, and told them that they could figure out what was wrong with it themselves. I hope to one day live up to such awesomeness.
41. I Don’t Know
I had worked for a family-owned computer reseller for five years when greener corporate pastures called. I gave the required two weeks’ notice and the owner of the reseller called the CEO of the company for which I was going to work and got my departure delayed by two weeks. They got everyone in the company to take me aside and tell me how big of a mistake I was making, blah blah blah, generally making my life miserable for those two weeks. When I left, I got even with them, making sure they got a taste of their own medicine. changed the entire internal networks’ passwords to “I don't know”. When they called to ask me what the passwords were, I told them the truth.
42. Taking Out The Trash
I was a janitor in a small suburban office building that had, among its tenants, a claims office for a fairly well-known insurance company. The manager of the mentioned company was entirely disagreeable, and most of his employees were similarly unpleasant.
They'd mistreat us janitors, and scream at us if the bathroom (shared by the rest of the building, I might add) had anything remotely wrong with it. One day, I went to take out the industrial-sized garbage can near their office, and it was obscenely heavy.
I opened it to find out why, and found the entire thing filled with boxes of files. The files were old paperwork for thousands of customers, and contained tons of personal information—I’m talking SSNs, addresses, bank information, the works.
On one of the papers I randomly looked at, I even saw information on what jewelry a woman kept in her home. This garbage can was headed for the dumpster in the back of the building, in a parking lot shared with two other businesses, very open and inviting for identity thieves.
So I contacted the main office of the company and informed them that I had just found thousands of confidential documents in my building's trash can, originating from the claims branch. I never saw that manager again—I’m not sure if he was fired or just transferred to Alaska, but whatever it was, he deserved it.
43. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
I was a lobbyist for an industry. During a legislative session, I learned about a regulatory change that would impact my industry. The next morning, I was called into the boss’s office and fired. Apparently, the Association president didn’t like the way I did things and got the Board to fire me, but the vote was very close. Six months later, I learned that the President’s personal company had lost $12 million because they didn’t know about the change. When asked why I didn’t tell them, I calmly explained that, once fired, I didn’t work for them anymore. The business went bankrupt.
44. Oh, Lord Help Me
After a long day at cash, I asked a male customer if he had a membership with the store, and he responded: "No, it goes against my religion". I realize that the guy is an idiot looking for attention, so I ignore it, but he presses on with a smug, victorious look on his face.
He says, "You know, whenever I say that, people never ask me what my religion is". I had the perfect reply. Instead of biting and asking what his religion was, I just said: "Maybe it's because no one cares". He didn't say anything for the rest of the transaction.
45. You Messed With The Wrong Guy
I got cut from an old age home after four years because they confused me with the person I was covering for one shift (who didn’t take care of a resident). I fought it, tooth and nail, but they didn’t budge. But there was something they didn't know. I had a record of every case of misconduct and neglect from the CNA’s and Board, so I promptly turned over all info to the State and every other advocacy group that would listen. They did, and the entire staff quit or was removed within a month. Wrong guy.
46. Managing At Its Best
My very kindly-seeming fast-food boss was a really nice man who did charity work with immigrant children on the side, was endlessly cheerful, and so on. I'm working drive-thru one day. A customer orders his food in heavily accented English, and gets irate when I ask him (politely) to repeat his order.
I'm trying to stay calm and not respond in kind, and mostly succeeding. The manager can hear both sides of the conversation over the headset, so when the guy reaches the window and continues his rude behavior, he steps in to perform his usual managerial duties.
That is, apologize, make sure the customer got what he ordered, and so forth. He even goes so far as to pre-place a straw in the man's drink. This isn't enough to placate the customer, who yells us both out in two languages as he peels out of the drive-thru.
I turn to start to complain to the boss. But I don’t know the best part. Before I can speak, he's patting me on the back saying, "Don't worry about it. I poked a hole in the bottom of his drink with the straw".
He then left it there, so that the drink wouldn't start flowing out until the straw gets pulled up to a normal height to drink from...
47. Going Postal
I had a friend who got fired because the boss's stupid son wanted to start over for the 30th time in the family business. My friend got no severance or payment for sick days he hadn't used or leftover vacation. On his way out, he decided to run one last letter through the old passage meter. He posted $10,000 and change on the letter and walked out with it in his box. It's now framed. The boss' son embezzled several hundred thousand over the next two years. The building is now the site of a nice parking lot.
48. The Writing’s On The Wall
Back in the old-old days, I worked tech support for a company. Among many things, customers could dial into our computers and download activity reports for their account. This particular customer weekly would have a 100-page report when printed.
She had phone line problems frequently, and more so, just didn't want to bother dealing with pulling the reports, so she'd call and complain she couldn't get the report and expect us to fax it to her.
Once, we pulled the report for her, but came up with the perfect twist. We didn't separate the sheets when we sent it through the fax. These were the old faxes that printed off rolls of paper. It would cut the paper when it sensed a page break from the other end. Since we fed her a 100-page report with no page breaks, it just sent her one giant page.
When that didn't teach her a lesson about pulling her own reports, we faxed her the first few pages of a report, and then fed a loop of black paper into the fax machine. It faxed her about 50 pages of complete black.
After that, she never called us again to have us pull her reports for her.
49. Cheaters Never Win
I worked for a government agency and everyone in my division knew this guy was cheating on his wife with someone else in the division. Well, he was a micromanaging idiot of the highest order. One day he yelled about me talking to a coworker when we were on our breaks, so that day, I called his wife's work number and left a message giving all the dates and times he was with his side piece. Shortly after that, she kicked him out. I have zero regrets. His wife and kids were better off without him—their words not mine.
50. Be Careful What You Wish For
I managed a computer repair shop. It was sort of like the Geek Squad, but cheaper and with some excellent techs. We had off-site laptop repair, so when a customer brought in a laptop that needed major internal hardware work, we'd pack it off to be fixed.
One day, a gentleman rolled in with his family and a broken laptop. He said it was just over a year old (out of our warranty) and that it was no longer working properly. He further claimed that it had not worked properly since we last worked on it (over a year ago...?) and that he was just now bringing it in.
Right. Well, to avoid conflict, I offered to waive the diagnostic fee and just ship it off so the laptop guys could have a look. The customer was happy enough with this, so we shipped. Fast forward a week, and the laptop returns. The motherboard is fried according to our repair center.
They had called the client, and per his instructions, put his Hard Drive in an external enclosure. The enclosure itself was the only charge: $0 for labor, $0 for diagnostics, $25 for the enclosure plus tax. They explained the pricing to him. Pretty darn cheap, considering that he's outside the warranty, right?
I call the customer to let him know it's ready. He hears the price tag (again). Then he flips the heck out. I was a bit stunned. I reminded him that although he was not in the warranty, we weren't charging him for the diagnostic OR the labor, such as it was, only for the enclosure.
This was an outrage, to hear him tell it.
We were obviously trying to take all he holds dear, and he would come to our store and take his machine. Uhh, ok guy. "After all, it hadn't worked since the last time you worked on it"!
I didn't ask why he then brought it back to us, but I decided to check that a bit. I told him I'd ask my boss, and instead, we hooked his HDD to the data transfer kit and had a look. Sure enough, there were some timestamped cookies right up until two days before he brought it to us. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
Without getting too detailed, let’s just say these were NOT kids’ sites he was visiting. A lot. I called the customer back. This time, both he and his wife were on the line. Both didn't let me get five words out before starting in with the screaming.
They threatened to sue me, have me fired, find out where I lived, and burn down the store. Comprehensive! I let them get it out, then interjected something along the lines of the following: "I'm really sorry that you're so upset! I have good news for you, though. The computer worked better than you think for that year”.
"What do you mean"?
"Well, someone was using it. For example, on [date,] the computer went to the following sites “…”. And I named a few.
Stunned silence.
"Don't worry, I have literally hundreds more entries to read to you. On [date] someone was apparently interested in"... and then the screaming started. Not them at me....them at each other. Oh, glorious. It was a symphony of hate. Eventually, the wife hung up.
The husband, who sounded like a broken man, mumbled something like "Now my wife is going to leave me”. I told him that wasn't my business, but if he'd like the hard drive enclosure, it would be $25 plus tax. He never showed up to buy it. Imagine that!
51. A Taste Of Your Own Medicine
I worked at a cruddy hostel for an abusive boss in a place infested with bed bugs. He asked me to do an overnight shift on Christmas eve the day before. So, I agreed and never showed up to work again. His reaction was epic—he left me like 50 angry voicemails telling me how badly I’d screwed him over and that he had to do it himself and missed Christmas. It was funny.
52. Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner
I worked at Chick-fil-A in Georgia from the time I was 15 until I was 17. I got a better job at 17 and turned in my two-week notice. However, with one week left to go, the AC went out in the kitchen. I don't know if you've worked in a kitchen in Georgia in August, but it's ridiculously hot. I asked the owner when he would get it fixed.
He told me that he wouldn't get it fixed for another month. So, I quit. When I got my paycheck, I found that my pay rate had suddenly gone down to minimum wage for quitting before the two weeks were up. So, I decided to get petty—I went down to a butcher and bought a cow head. It was skinned but still had its eyeballs. It was really, really gross.
Since my parents were out of town, I left it on my back porch for a couple of days to get a good coat of maggots and insects. Then, one Saturday, I snuck into the restaurant and put it on a toilet in the men's room. The toilet's pipes looked something like a cross, so I lit a couple of candles around the toilet and put up a sign that said "EAT MORE CHICKEN".
53. Taxes Not Reported
I was the manager of a nightclub. One morning, I got a phone call from the assistant manager saying my services were no longer required and that he was taking over my position at the request of the owner. So, I rang repeatedly to ask why I’d lost my job and I couldn’t get through. The owner was always unavailable. I rang every hour for 2 days. In the end, after coming to the realization that I’d been screwed over, I rang the inland revenue and asked if I was due a rebate.
They had no knowledge of me working in the place despite the owners telling me I was paying tax and national insurance that was taken from my wages each week. I was also issued a wage slip each week. So I reported him—and he got exactly what he deserved. I told the inland revenue his name, how many bars he owned including the names, what car he drove, how many staff he had working for him, and a description. Two months later, he had to sell up and move on. A few of his other bars closed down not long after that.
54. A Series Of Small Pranks
I worked in a coffee shop and my manager was difficult to get along with. He had two open cases against him for harassing my coworkers, constantly making people work 10- to 12-hour shifts, making me close at 11 pm and open the next day at 3:30 am, giving us no breaks, serving spoiled food to customers, changing our temperature logs so we wouldn’t get in trouble with corporate, serving burnt hours-old coffee, and so on.
I started doing all sorts of pranks to feel like a little bit of vengeance was taken. They were little victories, but they were oh-so-good. When he would go into the office, I would put salt in his coffee, wipe jelly, and sometimes put jelly donuts under his car door handles. I asked friends who stopped in to park extremely close to his driver-side door if I knew he was leaving soon so he’d have to crawl in the back, I changed the password on the office computer so he couldn’t play solitaire when he was supposed to be helping us during rushes.
We were forced to fill out receipt surveys pretending we were customers, so I would put really negative ones about him specifically. In my last month, I stopped caring and I would yell at him to stop screwing around. He was from India and wasn’t used to women, especially a 19-year-old girl, being so aggressive and not taking his nonsense.
55. Ghost In The Machine?
I still have access to some of my company's social accounts even after I told my boss how to prevent the account from being "hacked" after a password change. Every so often, I post things on their page that make them look like they shared it by accident, change their links, or run ads designed to fail that get no traction and eat up their marketing budget. It's been months and they still haven't fixed it.
56. Not The Brightest Decision
I was laid off from an Internet Marketing job. It took me by surprise because I was definitely a source of profit for the company. I had a new job about a week later. Two-thirds of my clients followed me to my new company, losing my old company about six times my salary in gross profit on billing. Every one of those clients is still a client today.
57. Clock’s Ticking
The day after I left my job, I started getting calls from that office, asking about various things. I told them that I would get back to them, and sent an email to corporate and to the management in our area. I let them know that from that time forward I would be happy to help but my fee was $150 per hour with a minimum four-hour charge and that the clock started ticking the minute that I answered a call or opened an email. So the next day, I got a call and helped the caller with their issues. I then sent an electronic invoice to corporate. They called and said it was only a ten-minute call and they were willing to pay me twenty dollars. I reminded them of the e-mail and told them if I didn’t receive payment in full ($600) within thirty days I would notify the credit-reporting agencies and start proceedings. Three days later, a check arrived, FedEx next-day delivery, signature required, and strangely enough, I have yet to receive another call or email from any of their employees. I can’t imagine why…lol.
58. Just Following Orders
I worked at a radio station selling airtime in a town of 30,000. When I took over my route, a retired Army major was occasionally hitting $6,000. I took billings over $8,000. Three months later, I was fired (I was the only man), and a young cutsie 22-year-old girl was hired. She had zero experience. My sales manager/station owner’s wife told me to “clean out my desk”. I did just that, trashing everything including sales invoices for the month. She made a big point of letting me know I wouldn't be getting my commissions. I waited patiently for my salary check ($1,500 at the time) at my desk, then walked to the bank and cashed it. Two days later I got the call. I was expecting it, but it was still so, so sweet. “Where are all the sales invoices for August"? “In the trash”. “What"!? “You said to clean out my desk. I did”. Then I hung up. I heard later the young girl didn’t work out, and the station went bankrupt. Sad, isn’t it?
59. Getting Away With It
I’m not proud of this one. This was back when I was delivering pizzas. We got a call right before we closed, and someone wanted a delivery well out of our delivery area. They said they would tip the driver well to make it worth his while.
Greedy guy that I am, I took the order, and delivered the pizza. Turns out, it was teenagers having a party while their parents were gone. They gave me a 65-cent tip and had a good laugh about it. So when I left, I did multiple donuts in the yard, tearing it up pretty good.
On the drive back, I realized how much of an idiot I was. I fully expected authorities to be called or at the least a complaint to the manager. Never heard anything about it.
60. The Biggest Loser
I was working at a coffee shop within the skyway downtown. It was two minutes after closing everything down. So the register drawers are all pulled, and there is physically no way that I could help a customer. Even if I wanted to work something out, it is still against the store's policy.
I'm cleaning up, getting everything else shut down, and some guy in a suit from the Marriott next over comes up, accosts me for being closed, and says that he NEEDS something to eat and coffee. Blah blah blah, you're just a loser working at a coffee shop, I work for a hedge fund, blah blah blah. you have to give me something because I want it and you're still in the store.
DIRECT QUOTE: "That's how customer service works, you idiot". I explain to him that it's not possible and that I would be penalized or could lose my job. He huffs and puffs and walks away a bit, shouting about how he deserves respect and this city sucks.
I turn my back to continue dumping the coffee and get the keys to pack up the bakery. I’m still reeling over what happened next. My back is turned for probably 30 seconds, and when I return, the guy has his hand down into the bakery case and has grabbed a bunch of muffins, biscotti, and even managed to pilfer a bottle of Coke.
He leaves no money, he just leaves the case open as I yell at him and gives me the middle finger as he strides off, going on about how I need to change my attitude. Initially, I'm really angry. I call security to get on the guy, tell them what happened.
While I'm on the walkie with the security desk, I notice something crucial. I see the guy left his set of room keys for the Marriott and a set of car keys with the rental tag/company fob attached as well. The guy's from out of town with a rental car.
So while I'm talking to security, I palm his things in a towel as I "wipe down the counter" for anyone that might have seen me. As I depart, I spot some security guards and the unpleasant individual having a heated dispute about things. The man is unable to get back into the Marriott from the skyway.
I punch out and start walking home. As I round the corner and begin walking over the nearby bridge, I throw his rental keys and hotel cards into the water below. Screw that guy.
61. Not Lying In Court
I had a six-month school internship at a mobile phone store. The boss was utterly unreasonable, treating his school interns as though they were full-paid workers, even delegating some questionable financial responsibilities to me. A while after the internship, he called to tell me I would have to give a statement in court. He had a problem with some customer and a shipment and he planned to tell the court that he explained everything to me concerning shipping precisely.
Of course, he didn’t. And of course, I didn’t lie in front of the judge. My boss’s attorney gave me a look I will never forget when he realized his stupid plans didn’t work out. A few weeks later, my now ex-boss tried to call me again. I didn’t pick up. Screw this guy.
62. Crushed Lunches
Someone in my office would always crush lunches with his gigantic lunch box. Either he ate bricks or lead, I don’t know, but I always came to the office fridge and found that my lunch was in pieces. So, after three bouts of this, and numerous notes from myself and other colleagues, I decided to teach him a lesson—I carefully removed his lunch box, emptied the contents (a gigantic sandwich, a Twinkie, chips, some vegetable pieces, and a few other bits), and ran over them with my car. I carefully packed it back in and put it back.
He kept his lunch in a cooler by his cube from then on.
63. Can’t Take Credit For That Work
My coworker was always complaining and always lazy with his work, yet he got recognition for the simplest things he would actually do. He also took credit for a full day’s work that was pretty much all me. I always got ignored. So one day, I came in early and exacted my revenge— I unplugged his ethernet jack just barely to the point it looked like it was still plugged into his computer.
For four hours, he couldn’t do any work. Meanwhile, I got my work done, and he couldn’t take any credit for it since everyone knew he didn’t have internet access. Halfway through the day, he left on the break. I plugged his internet back in and bam, just like that, it was working. By then, he couldn’t claim my work, and I began to get noticed more.
64. Rigging The Toilet
I worked as a mechanic at Pep Boys several years ago. The service manager was a complete menace that regularly cost me money because he would give all of the good jobs to mechanics that he liked better. While I worked there, some of us discovered that if the drainage pipes in the shop were pressurized, the toilet would shoot water out of the bowl. That's when I had my eureka moment.
The day that I quit, I waited until he went into the bathroom to take a dump. I filled up a Cheetah (a device used to seat a tire onto a wheel) and released about 200psi all at once into the drainage pipe. The toilet spewed water and poop everywhere, the manager screamed and then comes storming out of the bathroom COVERED in excrement.
65. Say Hello To My Bigger Friend
I once had a terrible job cleaning the toilets in a nightclub. One night an inebriated idiot brings some girl into one of the stalls. I knock on the door and he tells me to screw off. I was young and non-intimidating, and he'd seen me on the way in. But I knew just what to do.
I tell the gigantic bouncer nearby, who I was friendly with, that some cheeky man was up to something in the stall. When the bouncer pounded on the door he got told to screw off as well, which, sadly, was a big mistake.
The guy got hauled out by the scruff of his neck and pulled out the back door. I know, I know. I'm a real tough guy.
66. Locked Out
I had been working with someone for almost a year as a temporary employee and was told that when the job officially came open, it would be mine. This was mostly data type entry, but some of it was sensitive material so it had to be password protected. I interviewed for the job, but they brought in someone from out of state. My supervisor was furious when she found out that they hired someone else. So, when I tried to give her my password, she refused to take it and I didn't bother to give it to anyone else.
They had to bring in someone to hack their own computer, and to top it off, the company then had a hiring freeze, and the person they wanted couldn't be hired. My supervisor told me they were now without someone working the position, and they had spent quite a bit of money to have someone come in to bypass my password. Funny, they never even bothered to call to ask what the password was. In the end, after all of that, they asked me to take the position. I did, but only with a pay raise and additional hours.
67. A Screw Loose
About a year or so ago, a guy came in very angry that we didn't put all the screws back in his laptop after we worked on it. He also had other problems with this unit. I tried to look him and his laptop up in our customer database and couldn't find him.
I didn't remember him either, so I think either he was pulling some kind of scam or just didn't remember who worked on his laptop last. I didn't tell anyone about the missing screws because it's really not an important detail. I have a bucket of laptop screws and added the three missing screws in just a couple of minutes.
He comes back to pick up the unit. After approving a price to have the other problem repaired, he throws a tantrum and demands a discount because of the missing screws. My boss turns the laptop over and asks him to show him the missing screws.
Unable to point out the missing screws, he blames me and says I replaced them. My boss doesn't understand what problem is. The guy is getting more and more upset. I just keep saying I can't remember if there were any missing or not.
The guy gets so upset he pays and slams the screen of the laptop down before he walks out. Two days later, a woman brings in the same laptop with a broken screen and asks us to repair it.
68. A “Miner” Inconvenience
I worked security at a gold mine. In the normal performance of my duties, I got stuck in a wash on the outskirts and had to have a tow truck pull me out. The patrol vehicle suffered minor damage. My boss accused me of lying and fired me. The day after my firing, I was called to the Imperial County Sheriff’s Department to talk to the FBI about a theft that had occurred at the mine a few months earlier. Because I had worked security at the mine longer than anyone (including my supervisor), they (who I had shown how the theft could have occurred) had some loose ends to tie up to wrap up the investigation.
Through questioning, it became abundantly clear that the person they had charged with the theft had to have help stationed nearby. I suggested that the alleged thief was a good friend of my supervisor, and to look in my supervisor's general direction. They were able to piece together that the supervisor had been involved.
One arrest later, and he accepted a plea deal in return for full cooperation. I lost my job. He lost his freedom for five years. I’d say I came out the winner in this case.
69. Seeing Black
I used to work at a Kosher pizza shop when this demanding customer walked in. Long story short, after she was done complaining, she ordered a pizza with green olives and swore to high heaven she would tear the place apart if she found any black olives.
My buddy who was spinning pizza that day mumbles to himself and starts making the pizza. I was halfway into making a sandwich when I noticed him doing something. His plan was ingenious. He was hiding a black olive under each green olive with such care that not even CSI could zoom in on that.
I confronted him and told him "We need to respect the customers". We subsequently broke out into laughter and tossed the pizza in the oven. She never noticed.
70. Snack Attack
I once threw a bunch of 13-year-old girls out of the coffee shop I was working at. When they came in, they politely asked me if it was okay for them to eat some snacks they bought somewhere else.
I guess I must have been in a good mood that day because I told them "Okay, but only if you keep it somewhat out of sight" even though it was against our policy.
Not even 15 minutes later, these girls were throwing their snacks around and being incredibly loud. I went down to ask them to lower their voices, which they said they would but of course didn't.
So I went to their table again and told them to leave and not come back until they learned to behave.
71. What’s Mine Is Yours
My family used to own a couple of rental properties before we developed the land. It wasn't the greatest part of town at the time and some of our tenants were less than stellar members of society.
As such, there were several occasions where they simply weren’t paying rent. Now, the way that rental agreements work in Canada, all you can really do is serve an eviction notice and if they choose not to leave, there isn't much you can do immediately.
It can be a very long and drawn-out process, and the landlord has no real authority to physically remove them from the property. Well, our loophole was to start dismantling the home. In a bad part of town, we'd make sure the tenants were out and remove all the doors, which is technically still not against the law since we never actually entered the home.
They usually leave pretty quick after that happens.
72. An Extra Special Order
I worked at Roy Roger's. It was a summer job and I hated being a cashier, but since I spoke English (at least better than the rest of the staff) they put me up front. So one day two girls I knew came in trying to buy some fried chicken meals.
However, together they only had enough for one meal. I knew one of them well and her parents have always managed to fall on hard times, even both working two jobs each. I knew she did not have money and was probably hungry.
So, I charged them for one meal, but gave them two and threw in some fries. Before they could correct me, I signaled that they should just move along and they did. All was well…except the old lady behind them (who was a known troublemaker) now tells me that unless I give her something extra she will tell the manager.
I really don't think she had a case but didn't want trouble, so I took a small bucket, went in the back, took the chicken out of the garbage can that fell on the floor that day, and gave it to her as an extra she demanded.
73. You Catch More Flies With Honey
My company repaired a very specific $42,000 piece of equipment used in a certain auto dealership service bay. It was used heavily, and many repairs could not be attempted without it.
One day, one of my tele-support girls got a call from a Service Manager and had to endure his rants and horrible language, to the point where she was almost in tears. She got really mad and came to me with the details of the call.
I called the guy back and told him we would no longer do business with his dealership, until the Dealer Principal (the Actual OWNER) called us back to apologize to her for his boorish behavior. It turns out that the individual who called in for help was not actually the Service Manager, but a Master Tech filling in for his boss, while his boss (the real Service Manager) was on vacation.
The real Service Manager called us and begged us not to make him go to his dealer owner to make the call. We said "nope". The owner returned our call, attempting to guilt us for drawing him into the situation and implying that he would contact "corporate" if we didn't repair his tool.
I told him that he no longer had to worry because we were removing his dealership from our customer list, and I'd save him the trouble of calling corporate by calling my contact (a big-wig name drop) to let him know the specific reason why. NO SOUP FOR YOU!
Did I mention that we were the ONLY company with parts and expertise to fix this tool? He was forced to turn away certain types of repairs, which surely hurt his business...
74. The Gardener
When I was younger, I worked in loss prevention for a supermarket company. There were a few guys there that everyone called "The Blue Ribbons" because they were in tight with the manager. They had a habit of acting like your friend and then bashing you to the boss behind your back. And not just bashing your personality.
They’d say that you were lazy, never did any work or anything that made you look bad, and kept them looking good. I was really good friends with my partner, Rick, who worked in the store with me. We both completely loathed this group but that's the way things fall sometimes, so it was no big deal. They were just a few guys we knew not to trust and didn't particularly care for.
Then we found out that one of the guys, Sean, was up to no good. He was telling our boss an outrageous lie—he said we were both taking time by saying we were working a certain number of hours, and then not showing or taking insanely long breaks. It was a pretty interesting accusation considering we were catching more than our fair share of thieves and associates.
Rick and I actually worked in the same store that Sean's girlfriend worked in. She was a customer service rep, and she and I took breaks together and got along quite well. She was a nice person but was definitely a bit on the trashy side and flaunted her looks. Sean was a really jealous boyfriend and they fought constantly.
They broke up and got back together about once every two weeks. I'm not a bad-looking guy, but Rick was quite the dashing fellow. I also knew, through some of the girls he'd been with, that although Rick wasn't a big guy, he was very large where it counts. I accidentally on purpose mentioned this to Erin during a smoke break.
I was kind of complaining that I was twice Rick's size, but I guess he was just huge, and it didn't seem fair, and blah, blah blah. The seed had been planted. Rick worked in the store quite often, so things were brought up, flirting ensued, and to make an already very long story short, Rick ended up getting some action from Sean's girlfriend right in our office.
I don't think Sean ever found out, but every single time we saw him we just smiled at each other. We knew that he believed he did a good job bothering us and causing inconvenience. But it was worth it knowing that I planted the seed, and Rick got down with his girlfriend.
75. The One-Upper
A woman I work with literally copied this great story that I tell about me being in the same hospital at the same time that my niece was born. She tells it as if it was her husband and she was in the hospital giving birth. She’s a known one-upper; everything you do she did it better, faster, it was worse for her, etc.—so it didn’t surprise me when a coworker told me she regularly tells clients that story. She likes to play games—but I do too.
Every single day as I get in, I pour a tiny bit of my water bottle out on her desk, chair, or on the carpet somewhere in her office. In my mind, mold is slowly growing in her office, her skirt gets wet when she sits down, and any fresh documents she sits on her desk get sat right in a small puddle of water.
76. Truth Prevails
Last year when I was working at Chipotle, one of the assistant managers got on my last nerve. He would just sit in the office on his phone gossiping or screaming in Spanish all day, and if something needed to be done, he’d always make one of us do it, no matter how long the line was. He’d take breaks for over an hour when we were allowed 30 minutes, and he would blame other people for things that went wrong.
One night AFTER I left for work, disaster apparently struck and we got lots of bad reviews. I came back to work the next day and my manager sat me down to discuss all of the things I did wrong. The assistant manager told me, “I don’t want you to lose your job, but you need to do better” and that was a wrap.
I find out he somehow blamed me for everything HE did wrong. At that point, I was done taking his nonsense. So instead of making a scene, since I’m the quiet one who just listens instead of causing drama, I took my assistant manager aside and told her how it really happened, getting other coworkers that hated him to back me up. They reviewed the security cameras and he got fired the next day. I saw him about a week later at the neighborhood grocery store and it was mad awkward because I don’t think he realized quiet little me was the one that got him fired.
77. The Power Of Caterers
One time, I was working a small event at the convention center as a banquet server. After we had loaded in and set up, I was one of three servers working the event of about 100 people. There was a buffet. The local weatherman was there, but he demanded I bring him a plate. Pretty rude, but I went and got one for him anyway. Then he demanded that I fill his coffee. There was one on the table—it was a self-serve event—but I poured his coffee anyway. He was still being very rude.
Then this weirdo demanded that I cut his chicken for him. That was the final straw. So I asked how old he was, exactly who he thought he was, and who he thought I must be to take his mistreatment. I then took his plate and announced to the entire room that if I see this man-child eating or drinking ANYTHING, I would take all the coffee, and all the food back, and end the event. He left hungry. Don’t mess with catering.
78. Some People Don’t Care About Fame
My buddy managed a movie theater in Edmonton. Hilary Duff and her bodyguard came in one day and blocked off the bar section for her own private use, without permission.
He goes up to talk to them, and the bodyguard says, "You can't come in here, this space is reserved for Hilary Duff". He responds with "Screw you, I'm the manager. I'll go where I want" and kicks them out.
79. Safety First!
I was an automotive tech for a few years. My manager was the nephew of the owner. His favorite line was “if you don’t do (xyz), you can take it to the house (fired)”. I guess he could tell that every employee was turning against him, as we were all one day pulled one by one into the office to have a “talk about morale”. Two of us were already talking about starting our own small shop, taking our loyal customers with us. I guess the nephew found out and was none-too-happy about it. The next day, we both received a call informing us that we were suspended for two weeks due to the smell of "drink" on our breath (which there wasn’t).
Immediately, I went into defense mode. I got on the horn with the EPA, informing them that the manager instructed us to dump oil and oil filters, antifreeze, differential fluid, and transmission fluid into the dumpster. A day later, I found out that the EPA had hit him with a huuuuge fine. Two months later all locations were sold off.
80. Happy Birthday To Me
I worked in a nightclub for a few months when I was at university. I was working in the indie room one night when a very tipsy birthday girl comes up to the bar. It’s against the local rules to serve people who have drank that much, so I keep an eye on her while I serve other customers.
Turns out she wasn’t as bad as I thought. I thought maybe her heels were causing her some trouble (this happens a lot in clubs). So I serve her. She goes away and comes back about ten minutes later.
She slips on the bar and falls on the floor, so I tell her I'm not serving her and if she tries to get more drinks she'll be thrown out. So she goes and sits down and her friends come up to the bar. I tell them that by law I can't let this girl have any more. I make them promise not to pass her anything. They order sambucas and take them away. At this point the bar is pretty quiet and the girls just blatantly pass the drink to their friend, who is half asleep on the seats.
I got so angry I just hopped the bar and started screaming at these girls. Clearly, they consider me an idiot at this point, so I have them all removed.
81. Don’t Know Her
My boss made my life at work miserable. Then I was transferred to another department where I had a great boss, and we uncovered all of the old boss’s screwups. Politics arrived and my new boss was bought out of his contract and the department went back to the old boss who violated the law and company policies. I complained to HR and got a nice buyout. A few years later, the old boss was looking for work and I was contacted for a reference by the recruiting agency. I didn’t say much and that spoke volumes. She never got the job.
82. Too Hot To Handle
Until last month, I worked at a small pizza shop in Houston. I was a cook, but there was no wall separating the kitchen from the front of the restaurant, so I was able to see and hear all of the customers. We had overpriced food that catered to yuppies, and the majority of our customers were rather unpleasant.
One guy, however, was extremely unpleasant. Like, he wanted to use his Discover card to pay for his order, and when the extremely polite and shy 17-year-old cashier girl informed him we don't take Discover, he started yelling, saying things like she was stupid and incompetent, she was lying, etc.
He started yelling about how he owned a restaurant and it was an outrage we didn't take Discover, like that would somehow change the situation. The cashier was almost in tears by the time the guy cooled down. I knew I had to do something.
One of the items on his order was our "hot wings," which we used Frank's hot sauce on. On his, I decided to substitute it with a quarter bottle of 1.5 million Scoville "Da Ground Zero" hot sauce we had for our own use. Fifteen dollars a bottle and three drops will make a large bowl of chili almost inedible.
The spiciness filled the air and burned our sinuses as the wings slowly worked their way through the conveyor oven. He seated himself at a table in the front and took a massive bite of a wing. His face wore a blank expression for a few seconds, then he ejected it from his mouth followed by a loud "Aaagh!" as he shook his hands back and forth blowing air into his mouth.
In doing so, he managed to splatter some of the sauce in his eye, and within 10 seconds, he was on his knees on the floor yelling for tissues and crying. After that, the guy was almost polite, and my manager found the whole thing hilarious.
83. A Costly Mistake
The boss came in and had a massive rant about something that someone else had done. He fired me, I went home and started another job almost immediately. Two weeks later, I got a phone call: “I need the password for the office server”. “It's in an envelope in the backup safe”. Turns out, he had thrown out all my paperwork including the server password. I felt I had been unfairly dismissed, said I was going to go to a tribunal, and had been advised to say nothing to them until it was resolved. Two years of medical research was locked away until my dispute was settled.
84. Probably Still Sleeping…
I work at a coffee shop. We offer a blanket discount on refills, slightly less expensive than the small if the container meets certain size requirements. I once had a guy come in with a very large thermos, probably about a half-gallon and insist on the refill price. After arguing for several minutes about the size limit I get him to agree on a price and ring him through . He then insists that not only does his thermos need the typical hot water rinse before we fill it, but it should be rinsed with coffee so that the water wouldn't dilute the coffee. The thermos takes more than one urn of coffee to fill up and the guy is very rude about the wait, and seems not to care about the long line of people forming behind him. The next day he got a cup of old decaf. Haven't seen him since.
85. Dial Tone
I once worked at an environmental testing lab for seven years and was terminated for accidentally not doing a duplicate test on a sample that the EPA wanted tested. Turns out, no one else in the lab knew how to do the tests I did. So a couple of days later, my lab manager calls me up on the phone at home and tries to act all sweet and telling me that I got a raw deal (even though he was the one that reported me and put all the blame on me so that he wouldn’t get in any trouble). He then asks me really nicely if I could please tell him how the test was done. I’ve never hung up a phone so hard in all my life.
86. You Don’t Get To Choose Your Nickname
I was bartending. We had a semi-regular who was always obnoxious, insulting to staff and other customers, and all that jazz. However, she was also a relative of an executive at the resort I was at, so we couldn't do much except cut her off and then worry about our job.
Finally, one Saturday night, we had enough. She ordered a California cooler about the same time that we just used the last olive out of a jar. I told her, "I'll bring it to your table”—but I had a far more sinister plan. She went to the table, and out went 4/5 of the cooler into the sink.
Into the cooler bottle went all the olive juice from the empty olive jar. I served it to her. The best part? She drank the whole thing and never noticed. We gave her the nickname “Olive” and when she would come back into the bar, we would greet her, "What's up, Olive”?
She liked the nickname, but never knew how she got it.
87. A Snow-Brainer
My boss eliminated my position as a cost-saving measure, and as I was clearing out my stuff, I mentioned to her that she’d need to contract snow removal, as I was the guy that did the shoveling, scraping, and salting. “Oh," she said, “I never thought of that”. I was laid off right before the winter snow arrived, and this is the sort of contract that one needs to arrange several months in advance, and the cost to have sidewalks cleared promptly and preferably before business hours was likely greater than my monthly salary. Everyone else in the office were petite women who had to be absolutely immaculately groomed, and sweat and scent-free, and shoveling snow was well below their pay grade and skill set anyway.
88. An Ear For An Ear
I worked at a night club as a bartender. It had only been open about two weeks and we had those solid glass ash trays on the bar for some reason. This guy got really in his cups one night and I cut him off.
He picks up one of those ash trays and throws it at me. I dodge it, but the bartender working behind me was not so lucky. The ashtray hit him in the ear, nearly cutting off half of it. When I turned back around to the dude, I instantly hit him with the two bottles I had in my hands.
One was a Jack bottle and it busted over his head. By the time his head hit the floor, the bouncers were already pulling him out the door. This was probably the meanest thing I have ever done, but he really deserved it.
89. Double Or Nothing
I got hired to rebuild an electric system for a municipality. I was a year into it and almost done when raise time came around and everyone got $1-an-hour raise but me. I went to the next board meeting and requested an equivalent % raise. They laughed and said nope! Then one board person said I was temporary so they wouldn’t give me a raise. I stated I didn’t know I was temporary and would have to look for another job. Made a phone call the next morning, had a new job paying much better starting the next Monday. I called the Mayor and told him I quit. He told me to come to the office at 2:00. The board members were there and the woman that told me I was temporary started giving me a hard time about two weeks' notice.
I waited until she was done ranting and told her that because I was temporary, notice wasn’t necessary. I then negotiated to work weekends for time-and-a-half of my new pay rate to finish the substation controls. When they called me for an outage on the 4th of July because none of their workers would answer the phones, they paid me double my rate. Minimum for holiday pay. They never called after that!
90. Pre-Teen Power Trip
I worked as an usher at a movie theater. It was common for a person to buy a ticket and let their friends in an out-of-the-way exit door for free. This was back in 1977, before cameras and alarms.
So I would note where the group was sitting. Being an usher, you would see the same movie over and over, so right when the good part was coming up I would bust the whole group and kick them out.
I was young and had an incredible sense of power shining my flashlight in their eyes and escorting them out. Over time, the same group of guys got the idea of giving me a drink before the movie to look the other way.
91. Say It With Flowers
I knew someone who was working in a garden center who got fired, through no fault of their own. Apparently, the manager was disliked by most of the staff. The employee got the most epic revenge. Opposite the garden center, there was a muddy bank and the dismissed person returned after dark and planted a load of daffodils in the banking. This was in the Autumn. Come spring, they obviously bloomed—and they spelled out “(manager’s name) is a moron”.
92. The Queen’s English
When I did tech support for a major computer company, we were encouraged to keep our calls as short as possible, and we were ranked by call length, among other metrics.
A lot of the support was already outsourced to India, so frequently the first thing a customer would say after hearing my voice was "Oh, good, you're an American"! That's how I learned that about half of our customers would hang up immediately if they heard an Indian accent and keep trying back until they got an American.
So I came up with a clever trick to make my job easier and push my call length stats down: Answer the phone in a heavy fake Indian accent. Many, many people would hang up immediately. I would let the accent fade if they did stay on the line; nobody seemed to notice. I'm a bad person.
93. Show Me The Money
I work at a bar/restaurant and have pretty strict morals against doing anything bad, even towards the worst customers. However, last night I got pushed way too far. Someone left their debit card in the check presenter after leaving me $4 on $103. So today, when she returned to pick up her card, I made sure she had to ask me personally for it.
I also had her duplicate receipt wrapped around it with the tip and total facing out. I thanked her with a big smile, and could tell she was uncomfortable...Still, I don't think there is anything wrong with what I did, really.
If you have the audacity to tip so poorly for adequate service, and the stupidity to leave your card, you definitely deserve to feel uncomfortable.
94. 60 Days
The company I worked at for many years fired me without warning. My boss was a strange guy, and I had seen him fire other people without warning as well. He always offered to let people stay on for 60 days until they could find new work. But they would have to sign a document stating that they were “voluntarily” walking off the job and waiving all rights to unemployment.
When he fired me, he also gave me the option. I did not accept, as it seemed a lot better of a deal to have unemployment in case I could not find work within the 60 days. The company tried to appeal my unemployment, but my case was foolproof—after several years of loyal service, the only black marks on my record were being less than 15 minutes late to work three times. I let the judge in the unemployment hearing know that they offered to keep me on if I had signed away my right to unemployment. She let me know that it was against the law to do so, and ruled in my favor.
Every weekly unemployment deposit was like a tiny victory until I found a new job.
95. Watching The Clock
In my last job when I started, I would log in as soon as I got there, and if I had anything to finish up I would do it before I left. I didn't mind as I'm a team player. This resulted in me doing 20-30 minutes a day unpaid, but I liked the company and liked a clear desk. Fast forward two years and my father-in-law was terminally ill. We got a call from the hospital telling us we had to get there ASAP as he didn't have long left.
I told my manager and left at 3:45 (core hours were 10-4). The next month my pay was docked for a whole half a day. I had already made two hours extra unpaid that week but they told me they couldn't make exceptions and the extra I did was my own decision. Allllrighty then! I knew exactly what I had to do. After that, I came in on the dot and left in the dot.
I did this for five years, I worked to the letter of my contracted hours. My manager was talking to a new starter and in my earshot she told him she hated “clockwatchers” who left on the dot as this doesn't show company loyalty. I leaned over and replied that loyalty works both ways, and being docked half a day’s pay for attending the passing of a beloved family member when I'd already done more than my weekly hours was cruel and unfeeling.
So I show the company the same level of compassion they showed me during the roughest time in my life so far. After all, rules are rules and exceptions cannot be made. The new starter started on the dot and left on the dot, as did the whole staff. I dread to think how many extra hours they lost over the whole department over the next few years.
96. Going Out with a Bang
I did not like the overly condescending boss that I had at my last job. One day, while looking over my shoulder at my work as usual, he said: "Can I ask a stupid question"? Since it was my last week at that job anyway, I immediately came back and responded with: "You seem qualified"! I have to say I was pretty proud of myself!
97. That’s On You
I film and edit promotional videos, then post them on my company’s YouTube channel. The day after I uploaded a particular run-of-the-mill video, my manager called me into his office because one of our directors, who hates our department and loves undermining me in particular, sent an email to my manager and a few higher-ups. That's when it got cringey.
In the email, he stated that I had messed up the promo video, because there were “all of these other disgusting videos attached to it”. As proof, he included a screenshot of the end of the video, where all of the recommended videos appeared to star scantily-clad Asian women in suggestive poses. Neither he nor my manager knew how YouTube algorithms worked.
He didn’t realize that the videos were suggested because he, or someone on his account, viewed that kind of content before. I have no idea how my manager explained this to him.
98. The Long Walk
I knew someone whose boss fired him, out in the field, while on a service call. The boss had ridden with him. He dumped everything that belonged to the company out of his pickup and drove off. Yep, HIS pickup. 30 miles from anywhere, nobody else around, and NO cell phone reception. He did stop by where he used to work, to clear his locker, collect his check, and tell them to think about sending somebody to retrieve the idiot.
99. The Domino Effect
I was once the manager of a corporate Domino's store and was fired for giving a thief too much money. I filed a discrimination case and during depositions, it was found out that the area manager was taking supplies from the stores he overlooked and was afraid that I would discover him as I went over my bills with a fine-tooth comb. The day before we went to trial they wrote me a big six-figure check and paid my court fees. That's sweet revenge.
100. A Happy Coincidence
My friend transferred from the IT department to a small marketing team which she felt was a better match for her skills and talents. After a while, it became downright unpleasant. The other team member (I did say it was a small team) did not pull her weight and was hostile. But there was no use complaining to the boss because he was having an affair with the other team member! Anyway, my friend quietly looked around for another job and was offered a post elsewhere at a much higher salary. She wrote out her resignation letter and took it to work the next day. She delayed handing it in, perhaps not wanting a confrontation. During the morning, the boss called her into the office and told her she was being made redundant! She took her remaining holiday time and left with a hefty redundancy payment, straight into her new job!
101. Farewell, see you later!
After recovering from cancer I went back to work and was called to a meeting with my boss. The first thing she said to me was not hello or any other suitable greeting but, “At your age and with your sickness you should retire”. I still had six years of service before my retirement date. I stuck it out for about one year and then went to HR and asked them to make me an offer to leave. HR knew of the awful relationship with my boss, who had managed to get rid of all the men in the department. They made me a very generous offer to leave provided I didn’t take them to court for harassment. I left with a six-digit sum.
A short while later, she was moved to another department. Then she went to another company where she lasted less than six months, then to another company, and yet another company. I think she has changed companies five times in four years. She's such a nasty person who can’t hold a job down without upsetting all her staff. However, daddy is a famous politician, so she will always get a job because of her connections. Her inability to maintain steady employment was, in my view, the perfect kind of karma for her.
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