We've all been there before... someone harmed us, made us look like a fool, or simply got on our nerves, and we decided it was best to get revenge. However, sometimes it's best to just leave things alone and get through the day with nothing worse than a bruised ego. The people in the following stories didn't listen to that advice and had to pay with their conscience.
(Content has been edited for clarity.)
No Escape For This “Man Of God”
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“Let’s call him J.
He held a daily ‘youth group’ at his house which I joined against my will (thanks Mom and Dad). All I had to do was go to the bathroom. I used a product called Rain-x which stops glass from fogging up as my revenge medium. I used it to write on his bathroom mirror, ‘I know what you did.’ When he went into the bathroom, he locked the door and the mirror was normal. Once it fogged up from the shower, it looked as if someone had written, ‘I know what you did,’ on his mirror while he was alone in a locked bathroom.
J was very religious. He believed the devil or some kind of demon was after him. He decided it was the house that was haunted. It couldn’t possibly be because he was a predator, so he moved somewhere else in town.
‘You can’t hide from me,’ said his new mirror. ‘I will always find you. Your soul will be mine.’
J spent some time in a psychiatric ward after that. While he was there, he told some other patients that a demon was after him and why. Eventually, word of his confessions got to the police, and they finally investigated. He’s in jail now and will be for a long time.
So that’s good, but he never quite recovered from his mental breakdown. That part always makes me wonder if I could have done it a better way.”
It Just Keep Getting Worse And Worse For Kevin
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“When I was in high school, I worked with this poor kid named Kevin at Wendy’s. He was a juvenile delinquent, was a few years older than me, little bit bigger than me, had nasty tattoos on his neck, and supposedly was out of jail on work release. He tried to be a tough guy and bully me whenever we worked together. Stuff like generally talking smack unprovoked, getting real close up in my face, and that stance where you puff out your chest and pull your arms back like you’re going to swing. The most irritating was when he would walk right up in my face then flinch like he was going to throw a punch at me, then just laugh and say some rude crap.
I got along with just about everyone at work, and he did somewhat, but we just did not fit together. One day, the exchanges between us were so apparent and obviously stressed, everyone working was talking about me fighting him. I dispelled these rumors as I wanted to keep my job, but my destiny on this day said otherwise.
First was the backdoor incident. The store had a large back door with a peephole in it, and it could only be opened from the inside. There was a buzzer outside that employees would push if they wanted back in. Well, Kevin was locked outside and his patience while awaiting his re-entry had run out. Instead of tapping the buzzer, this guy was mashing it and holding it down while everyone inside went nuts. We were all busy, and I was running to the back to grab some heavy boxes. While holding these boxes I was going to open the back door while I walked past. I tried to push on the door, but it wouldn’t open. I leaned into it, but couldn’t push much more because of the boxes. I was in a hurry, so I yelled ‘GET BACK, I’M GOING TO KICK THE DOOR!’ He didn’t hear me over the loud, constant buzzing. I gave that door a swift ‘THIS IS SPARTA’ kick and it opened about three inches then bounced closed again. I kicked it again and it opened, revealing a bashed up and somewhat upset Kevin.
He was trying to look in the peephole when I kicked the door. I broke the crap out of his nose; the tip was almost touching his cheek, bright red-purple, swollen eyes, broken. He was ticked off. I immediately started apologizing and backing away from him, but he came at me like a rabid monkey. We were quickly surrounded by employees and separated. I was told to go up front and manage fries and to not come into the back part of the store until Kevin left to the hospital.
Then the final event. Less than 10 minutes later, I was working the fries, which entailed grabbing a metal basket out of boiling hot oil and dumping the fresh fries into an adjacent tray. I was doing this, and everyone around me was talking about how I just broke Kevin’s face. On his way leaving our store for the hospital, he decided to come right up to me again and try to instigate a fight while I was dumping some fresh fries. Kevin pulled his signature move of flinching at me like he was going to throw a punch. I retaliated by returning my own flinch with the basket I was holding. I didn’t actually hit him with the hot fry basket, but I forgot about the boiling hot oil still clinging to the basket. When I flinched at him and shook the basket, tiny boiling drops of grease splattered his face and neck.
I had just broken his nose on accident, then threw boiling hot oil on his face on accident. He instantly threw me to the ground. I was a wrestler, so his freshly broken and burned nose was just smashed and wiped across a dirty floor for a few seconds before we were broken up. He was an absolute mess. He left for the hospital and I got sent home. That was it. No charges. No questions from my manager after. No more being scheduled with Kevin. Not even any paperwork. I felt really bad but simultaneously justified. Both incidents were honest accidents which could have easily been avoided if he weren’t such a jerk. I still felt like the outcome was worse than reasonable.”
He Thought He Was So Smart, Until…
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“When I was a teenager, my friend and I went to one of those day camps that picked us up in yellow school buses. One of the other kids on our bus was a younger boy I’ll refer to as Eli.
Eli was a terror. He would scream and spit and hump things, make a mess, and be as annoying and insufferable as possible. Riding the bus with him was a nightmare for everyone involved most of the time.
So I came up with this idea. I found his family in the phonebook and called up pretending to be a camp counselor. I told his mom that he was misbehaving on the bus and that he would either be disciplined or kicked out of the camp if he didn’t stop.
She bought it and said she would talk to him about it. I felt so incredibly smart. Until the next day, when a quiet, sullen Eli showed up with a black eye.”
He Thought It Would Just Create A Lot Of Annoying Noise
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“When I first became an electrician, an older journeyman decided to teach me not to leave my stuff laying around by taking 50+ small zip ties and encased my lineman’s pliers. He was also trying to tell me I needed to buy some diagonal cutters. A tin knocker saw all of this go down and quietly gave me a very long, heavy duty zip tie and suggested I put it on his truck’s drive shaft so he’d spend time looking for the noise.
The older journeyman didn’t show up for two days after I put the zip tie on because his truck broke down on the way home. Apparently, the zip tie got hung up and his drive shaft, transmission yoke, pillow block, differential yoke all got destroyed, which also took out the exhaust system just after the headers, and it managed to crack the fiberglass dually fender on the passenger side. He ended up buying a new truck shortly after that and I never told him about the zip tie.”
He Had To Have Known This Would Happen
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“There was a girl on the bus. We’ll call her ZB. She was not a nice person. She played truant all the time, but her dad was friends with the head of our school, so she got off scot-free. She made fun of other kids and kept one guy on the ropes. She was just a dumb mean witch in general.
One day, I was talking to my friends and made a silly joke about something sensual, and she just chimed in with an awful comment about me being ‘out of my depth’ and cackled at my then teenage lack of a girlfriend. Just standard rude stuff. She did this twice more over the week. I was going through a depressive phase at the time, so I just felt down about it.
Then a few months later, a friend told me that she had got an abortion over the summer. At first, I was just bemused, then I realized what this meant. So I added her on Myspace as a generic hot guy and commented how cute she was. She instantly added me, naturally.
After a few days of playing charmer, I then proceeded to send her random gross pictures for about a week.
She quit school at the end of that term and left for good.”
Don’t Mess With This Chef
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“I was a chef for a famous all-inclusive hotel chain.
One day I was approached in the kitchen and told I needed to pack my bags and move 3000 miles away to fix a labor issue at another hotel. I happily obliged but negotiated a deal where I would have my choice of any hotel location after I successfully fixed the labor issue.
I arrived at the new hotel and proceeded to diligently address the labor problem, while also taking over dinner service for 750 people.
After a few months, the labor issue had been fixed and settled, and the kitchen was running as smoothly as I like. I asked my manager about when I could make the move to another hotel per our arrangement, and I was told since I had done such a good job they were going to make me stay where I was for an indeterminate amount of time – ie forever.
I let my management know this was unacceptable, and I demanded I be transferred in accordance with the original agreement that got me on a plan in the first place. I was told they would work on it.
I gave them a 3-week window to address the issue to give them time to discuss it with the head office etc. I told them if they did not come through in 3 weeks I would walk off the job and never look back.
After 3 quiet weeks, I politely asked my manager if my transfer had come through or at least was still in the works. It was not.
The next morning I gave the entire dinner staff the day off and told them not to answer any work calls. I set up the kitchen as if I were prepping dinner – onions and herbs in hotel pans full of water with foil covers, garlic sizzling in pans, etc.
I kept the charade up until around 4:30 pm at which time I left the kitchen, went to my room, picked up my bags and went to the lobby to wait for my ride. The manager came out freaked (there were 750 pre-paid dinner reservations that night and NO food) and told me if I walked out I would never work for the company again. I laughed, shook his hand and said goodbye.
I never looked back and never talked to anyone there ever again.”
“Why Don’t You Join Your Mom”
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“In middle school, my good friend’s mom died. We lived in a very religious town, but her family was not particularly religious.
A few weeks after the funeral, my friend started acting strangely towards me. She would call me a witch when she walked past me in the hallway at school. She’d give me the finger and she started turning everyone against me. I had no clue why.
One day, my best friend and I were walking home after school and this friend almost hit me with her bike, started calling me names and swore at me. Before I could even think, I blurted out, ‘Why don’t you go join your mom… IN THE AFTER LIFE!’ As soon as I said it, I regretted it. I got beat up at school the next day. Years later in high school, I had the opportunity to apologize to her and she accepted. I really shouldn’t have said that… I still feel bad more than 20 years later.”
In Hindsight, It Wasn’t Such A Great Idea
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“I had a girlfriend cheat on me, lie about it when I confronted her and gave her the chance to come clean and work through it, and stalk me after I broke up with her. We were quite young, so it was all very overdramatic, but I did love her a lot and was hurt by what she did. At the same time, I was very done and not interested in reconciling. She didn’t get the hint.
I asked her nicely many times, then not so nicely, then demanded she get lost. She would, for a while, but then she’d show up, try to pick fights, insult me, and be hurtful. I eventually had enough. I told a couple of choice people in her school (different to mine) what she’d done, with gory details (she’d sucked off her ex in his car). I thought she’d get dragged for it, and that would be that.
It turns out she was awful in all other aspects of her life, too. Apparently, she was loathed at school, and people jumped on this news like starving beasts on fresh meat. I had texts and IMs from people I didn’t even know asking to confirm the news, which I ignored because I was really done with the whole situation by that point. I eventually heard from other friends at that school that people had not let it drop and had even stuck posters around the school with pictures of her, announcing what she’d done, offering her services with her phone number and photoshopping bananas into her mouth. It was brutal, and she had to change schools in her final year.
I did feel a bit bad. If I’d known it would go that far, I might have rethought telling those people. At the same time, she hurt me badly, she refused to leave me alone despite months of chances, and the other students reacted so viciously because apparently, she was a total jerk to everyone in the school. I sure didn’t expect that, though.”
It’s All Fun And Games Until There’s Property Damage
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“A coworker and I had a friendly prank war spanning two years. Close to the end of our war, he ‘iced’ my car.
Icing involves taking the hose to the parking lot every half hour and spraying a light mist over your victim’s car when it’s below zero out. I finished my 12-hour shift to find a car encased in two inches of ice.
I thought my revenge was both more inconvenient for him and less freezing my butt off for me. I decided to take a bed sheet, drape it over his car, and only took four or five trips out with the hose the next night.
The next morning he found his car with a quarter inch of ice freezing a sheet to his car. When he started peeling off the sheet, he pulled his windshield wipers, arms and all, off of his ratty Jeep.
I received a very angry phone call. I felt bad, the unwritten rule was ’embarrassing or inconvenient, but no damage.’ I paid for repairs and he got his revenge. He planted a dozen pieces of smoked herring throughout my car. It took me six months to find the last piece hidden under the carpet in the back window of my car. I can still smell it.”