Sometimes, nothing sounds better than revenge. To be able to turn the tables on sworn enemies, giving them a taste of their own medicine, make them feel the same pain they are infamous for inflicting on the innocent. Oh, imagine the satisfaction!
Of course, it is easy to get wrapped up in the thrill of vengeance and forget that two wrongs do not make a right. The storytellers of these revenge tales learned that the hard way and took to Reddit to reveal why they regret attempting to get back at people out. Take notes for the next time pettiness rears its ugly head before pushing "justice" too far.
Happily Ever After?
“I was dating this girl and my friend saw her around town a few times, and would always try to humiliate her in an effort to embarrass me. He would see her around town and shout, ‘You’re banging (my name)!’ or ‘When are you going to be doing (my name) again?’ Stuff like that, making a scene, and embarrassing her in front of her friends or just strangers nearby. We were, like, 25. I know, right? I told him to stop bothering her, but he did it again.
That night, I got him wasted and convinced him, at 4 am, to try getting back together with his wildly insane and manipulative ex, thinking that he would just humiliate himself by trying. They hadn’t talked in like three years and hated each other. I thought they would just get in a fight when he called her. But then, craziness happened.
They banged and got back together for a while. And had a baby. Now they’re terrible single parents. Against all odds, the kid has a seemingly pretty normal life being raised by her extended family. As normal as it can be with two absentee parents.”
“The Kid Made The Mistake Of Telling My Brother His Facebook Password”
“When my brother and I were in middle school, he had a friend who lived across the street from us who started being really mean to him for no reason all of a sudden, so they stopped being friends. Well, while they were friends the kid made the mistake of telling my brother his Facebook password. It turns out it was also his password for everything else, including email which was rather helpful and, eventually, my brother wanted to get some revenge for how mean the kid had been.
So we ‘hacked’ his Facebook and started posting a lot of embarrassing things and messaging all the ‘popular’ girls in their school saying weird stuff. We then also made a fake account and friended him. Through messaging him with the fake account, we became his ‘friend’ and got him to tell us all of his deepest secrets which we would then expose to the world by going into his account and posting about them or messaging them to random people.
Eventually he made the connection and blamed our fake account for doing the ‘hacking’ and we went along with it and started blackmailing him with that account and calling him from private numbers pretending to be that guy from the fake account. At the same time all this was going on, we were ordering a ton of food to his house on a daily basis and would watch out our window as the delivery people would show up and his dad would come outside all confused and get visibly more and more frustrated each day. Eventually they started leaving their house everyday around the time we would order food. We kept this up for a while and did some other stuff but then it died down and we thought we’d never hear about it again.
Fast forward a couple months and my parents get a call asking for them to take my brother down to the police station. The family had gone to the cops and they had been able to trace it back to my brother and when he went down there, the cop managed to scare him and him and I got grounded from using the internet or having any fun at all for a good six months and we had to pay for a lot of the food we ordered.”
Things Get Buggy
“Back in my early 20s, I was working a terrible job in the mall. I had only been working there for about a month when I was promoted to keyholder over a guy who started before me. The dude had been a real flake as long as I’d known him, so I wasn’t surprised. Apparently, he’d been promised the position and was really upset at me.
For the next month, he was a huge loser to me. Swiping sales, complaining to the manager about me, ‘slyly’ messing up cleaning projects or displays I had done and informing the manager that I’d failed to do something. After a full month of his nonsense, I eventually snapped.
At a few of the local plant nurseries, you can buy jars of ladybugs for ten bucks. I bought three, which was somewhere between two and five thousand ladybugs. I swiped his keys from the break room while I was on lunch, found his cute new Saturn, and dumped all three containers on the floor of his back seat.
We closed together that night, so we ended up waking out to the parking lot together after dropping the cash off at the deposit box. I was parked further out, so he got to his car before I did, and I was able to get a peek at my handiwork. It looked like something from a horror film. The ladybugs had swarmed the entire inside of his car, and in the dim light you couldn’t really tell what they were – only that the car was full on infested with bugs.
The dude had a freaking breakdown right there in the parking lot, just absolutely lost his mind. I enjoyed the scene at first, but the longer it went on, the worse I felt. After he calmed down enough to start making sense, he barreled into this monologue about how he was sure it was the girl from the pretzel stand because he’d been such a huge monster to her, and he started crying. He went on about how he deserved this for being so awful, and then apologized to me for being such a loser, and kept going on about how he brought this on himself. It was pretty bad.
I offered him a ride home, feeling really guilty, and when I dropped him off, he thanked me for being so nice to him, despite all the awful stuff he’d done. He said his mother was undergoing cancer treatment and it wasn’t going well. Oof. He apologized again and I didn’t see him for a few days.
Stuff between us at work improved a lot, but I still felt guilty as heck. He had to sell the car a few months later because the Texas heat had killed all the ladybugs and he couldn’t get the smell of them out of the vehicle. His mom died a little while after that and he ghosted the job.
I still think about that dude even now. The revenge felt so righteous when I did it, but afterwards it was nothing but guilt.”
Old Habits Die Hard
“A former friend wronged me and I decided to exact revenge. I felt the need for the revenge to be harsh, because we were pretty close as friends and felt that the revenge should match the heinousness of his offense.
In order to set the scene for my revenge, I must explain one of our mutual hobbies. He and I shared a common enjoyment for ‘working girls.’ Occasionally, I would finance said adventures for the both of us. This entailed getting a hotel suite with separate bedrooms, and two providers.
My revenge proceeded as follows: I created a web page referring to his wife as ‘Bessy’, with accompanying pictures of a cow labeled with said moniker. I created a link on that web page, titled ‘Click here to see Michael engaging in extramarital relations with a lady of the night.’ Clicking on this link led to a page with an email link saying that one should email with any request to see what I described.
I then emailed the object of my revenge with the link to this website. I described to him how I snuck in the room during our last adventure and took several revealing photos of him and the young lady he was getting sweaty with (I had not). I also included in this email the email addresses of numerous people, such as his wife, executives of his employer, board members of his church, etc, and said I had sent the link to them (I had not).
I thought that would be the end of it. Some ball busting, a few nonsensical insults traded, and done. But, he took me at my word. He decided that the best thing to do would be to confess to his wife before she found out. So that’s what he did and it resulted in him and his wife getting divorced. That wasn’t my intent.”
Pushing Him Off The Wagon
“I work at a dealership and our reconditioning (car detailers) crew was two guys who I’ll refer to as ‘Arthur’ and ‘Manny.’ Arthur had worked for the dealership for about three years and was a decent guy, but was really hard on new hires. Despite not being their manager, he would order them around, insult them, just generally act like a loser. It got to the point where he would refer to his co-workers as numbers, since so many quit.
So, along came Manny. Super nice guy in his mid 30s. Really good at his job. Would do pretty much anything you asked of him. So, Arthur treated him the same way – hard but not completely unprofessionally. Until he figured out Manny was going to stick around. Then, he really laid into him to the point of threatening him, saying things like, ‘If you try to buff that scratch, I’ll punch you in your freaking face.’
Right around that same time, Arthur started to have issues with his wife. Super long story I won’t get into. And he was also a recovering addict. Hadn’t drank in over a year. So, after a couple of months of abuse, Manny formed a plan.
Every day, Manny would buy a pint of the hard stuff for Arthur. Now, because of his personal issues, it only took a little nudge. But, he fell off the wagon hard. In the span of maybe a month, Arthur split up with his wife, moved to Florida with an old flame, and quit his job.
Needless to say, Manny feels a tiny bit responsible.”
“I Was Shaking Realizing I Narrowly Killed My Friend”
“Way back in elementary school, a friend threw a piece of chalk that hit me square in the forehead. It was the most humiliating moment for younger me as everyone who saw that started laughing their butts off. Kids suck. I plotted and planned my revenge to get back in the exact same fashion over the next couple of days. One fine day, weapon in hand, I found him perfectly placed, a chalk-throw away from me.
I yelled out his name and quickly launched the projectile as he spun around. For some reason, he had his mouth open as he looked at me and the piece of chalk flew directly into his throat. His eyes widened and he started choking. I stood frozen in shock as he fell on his knees coughing. Luckily, somebody grabbed him from behind and thumped his back, so he swallowed the piece.
An adult walked in (cannot remember who it was at the time), looked at me and asked what happened. At that point, I was shaking realizing that I narrowly killed my friend. I said it was a mint. I just said the first thing that popped in my head. Now, that I think back, younger me was pretty smart.
My friend, also shaken at this point, laughed it off saying it went straight into his throat and he didn’t taste it. The adult shook her head and said, ‘Next time, just hand it like a normal person,’ and walked away.
Years later when we were moving away to another country, I reminded him about the incident and came clean about the whole thing. He snapped and yelled, ‘I knew it!'”
“I’d Been Stung Several Times And Got Fed Up”
“When I was young, there was always (for years) a hole in the back wall of our garage where bees were always flying in and out. I’d been stung several times over the years and I guess I got fed up with it. One day, I decided it was a good idea to start throwing rocks at the hole, purely from anger at the bees(?). Well, as you can guess, the bees weren’t too happy about my activity and decided to put an end to it and came after me. An hour later, I was in the ER in anaphylactic shock from the stings. I am now allergic to bee venom.
To set the stage a bit more, our garage wasn’t attached to the house and was no longer used for cars. My dad had converted it to a lounge, complete with rotating mirrored multi-level bottle shelf/bar, pool table, shuffleboard table, couches, fully carpeted, nice sound system, nice pine panelling – full on 70s (yes, this was in the 70s) look.
Anyway, after coming home from the hospital two days later, I got it in my head that I wanted revenge on the bees. What could go wrong? This was toward the end of summer/early fall, and we had an 80′ eucalyptus tree that grew next to the garage near the hole and, as was typical for the time of year, the ground was covered with eucalyptus leaves.
I apparently decided it would be a good idea to pile leaves against the garage wall and smoke them out. It took me several hours to gather up the leaves but, eventually, I got the pile up to the hole (which was about 5 feet from the ground) and started throwing lit matches at it.
The resulting fire not only could be seen for miles as it engulfed the 80-plus foot tree, but the garage was decimated. The external siding of the rear wall was nearly completely ash, and the roof was pretty messed up as well, but the interior was completely trashed by smoke damage and then by the firefighting efforts. HUNDREDS of bottles, the pool table, shuffleboard, couches, carpet, paneling – everything. And worse than just normal smoke, this was burnt honey. The smell lingered for years. When the firefighters ripped open the wall to ensure no embers were still burning, they found the remnants of the hive. It was floor to ceiling, 7 studs wide.
Thousands of dead bees. The overall damage wasn’t covered by my parents’ insurance because the fire was intentionally set. Needless to say, I didn’t see too much daylight after that for quite some time.”
“I Was Still Emotionally Scarred From What This Girl Put Me Through”
“I dated a girl from Vietnam who made it clear that she was in a fake marriage for a green card with a guy and sometimes had to hang out with him to keep him happy and playing along. She was very degrading and treated me horribly almost all of our relationship. I was in a bad point in my life and decided to just take it. I caught her staying over his place one night and realized she had been sleeping with this guy the whole time. I also realized her phone was on airplane mode every single time we hung out.
She always hung out one on one with one of her friends’ boyfriends. I always thought it was weird, but never said anything. My intuition was screaming at me that something was up, but I ignored it. After we broke up and I got out of my depression, I realized how much of an idiot I was and how I let this girl take advantage of me financially and emotionally. Months after we broke up, I met an amazing girl who I’m still with today and probably will be forever. Despite this, I was still emotionally scarred from what this girl put me through and I needed revenge to be at peace. I made an anonymous Facebook account and messaged the friend and said, ‘Your boyfriend is sleeping with [insert ex’s name].’
This friend of hers was the one who set her up with the fake marriage, took care of all the paper work, and set her up with the immigration lawyer. Whatever transpired the following months after that, I’m not entirely sure. All I know is that she, her brother, and his girlfriend moved out of the house they were in and left the country. They were all currently in college and had big dreams of making a living in America.”
“I Will Never Forget The Sound Of His Scream”
“I was 11. My older brother was 16. We would fight and argue, but one time I was running up the stairs away from him and he whipped the back of my legs with a long rubber chew toy. It left a pretty big, figure-8-shaped welt on my legs. I knew he was faster and stronger than me and I knew if I tried to attack him, he’d stop me.
So, I grabbed a flathead screwdriver and held it over the stove until it was red hot. I ran up to him and very openly went to stab him, knowing he’d stop me. He grabbed my wrist to stop my thrust (as anticipated) and I pushed the red hot head of it into his forearm as hard as I could.
He had a scar for years, I will never forget the sound of his scream, I felt terrible. Good news, we are now super close, I was the best man at his wedding and am godfather to one of his kids. Everything’s great between us now.
Man, I was crazy as a kid. Sorry, Mike.”
“This Teacher Prided Herself That Nobody Made An A On Her Exam”
“Ninth grade Honors English class. The teacher didn’t like me. Only teacher I ever had that didn’t like me. Others would get frustrated with my lack of effort at times, but still liked me as a person. She just flat out didn’t like me. One of the reasons was that she didn’t like athletes because they would miss her class regularly for travel for games. And I played three sports, so I was missing a good bit. Now, I was also missing for academic stuff like math and science competitions and quiz bowl tournaments, but she was particularly bothered about missing for sports.
Case-in-point: she would intentionally double the amount of homework due the day after long away games knowing that the players wouldn’t have the time to finish it all. Shocker: she didn’t check homework every single day, but always checked after away games.
She also would give me 70s and low 80s on papers without any red marks on them, but people around me would have red marks all over their paper and would have 90s. After one particularly low grade on an assignment that I knew I had actually done really well on, I inquired about it. Her exact response was that I was only doing 70% of my ultimate capability and the others were doing 90% of theirs. So I specifically asked, ‘Does that mean my paper can be better than someone else’s but be 20-plus points lower?’ She said yes. To show this wasn’t just me misunderstanding things, she recommended me for an advanced writing class a year earlier than students were supposed to be able to take it.
So if those two things weren’t bad enough, she gave us an opportunity for extra credit toward the end of the year. We had to go to a local college’s rendition of Antigone, write a 2,500 word paper on it and tie it into what we discussed in class on the play, and also turn in our ticket and playbill. It was due on a Monday and the play was only going on Friday-Sunday, so there was no way to turn it in ahead of time. But I was going to miss class that Monday all day for an academic competition, representing the school. And it was the biggest one of the year (like, you had to place Top 10 in a previous competition to qualify). So, it was obviously an excused absence.
I told her for an entire week prior to the play that I was going to miss on Monday, and she told me multiple times to turn it in first thing Tuesday morning. So, I went to the play, wrote the paper, went to the academic competition Monday, and placed first in one category and second in another, and then Tuesday morning before basketball workouts at 7 am, I went to her room to turn in the assignment. She refused to take it because it was late, and she ‘didn’t recall’ ever suggesting that I could turn it in on Tuesday. She told me four times.
Her reasoning: 1. – another student that missed for the competition was able to turn it in, but that student lived across the street from the school. I lived 20 minutes away and couldn’t drive. 2. – My mom was a teacher at the school, so I could have just sent it with her, except I had been told to turn it in Tuesday, so there was no reason for me to think to have my mom turn in my assignment for me, plus she has her own students and classes to worry about. 3. – I could have done the work Monday evening, which wouldn’t be fair to the other students. So, I went into the metadata for the paper that showed the last time it had been saved was Saturday afternoon. She still refused to grant me any credit for it. So, I was out the $25 for the ticket and the time that it took. Plus it really inconvenienced my mom who had to pick me up Friday from practice, rush me home to shower and change, then rush me back downtown for the play, and then come pick me up again two hours later. So, my mom was pretty peeved about it, too.
This teacher also prided herself on the fact that nobody had ever made an A on her final exam. She thought she was the toughest teacher ever. Really, she just loaded students up with a bunch of busy work. So, the last day of class, she gave a few minutes at the end of class and asked, ‘What’s your biggest wish?’ to the class as a whole. I piped up, ‘I wish for an A on the exam,’ and she laughed and said, ‘Yeah, and I wish for a million dollars and not to have to deal with you anymore.’
So, all of that sets up the final exam. It was 100 questions and then a 5-point bonus question that asked those generic ‘What was your favorite part of the class? What did you learn?’ etc questions. We got two hours to take the exam and students that finished early had to wait until one hour was up so that there was just one point of people getting up and leaving rather than being distracting throughout. So, I finished the 100 questions in about 20 minutes. So I spent the remaining part of the hour just blasting her in the bonus question.
I said that I was not sure I learned anything and pointed to her never making any comments on how to improve my writing. I said my favorite part of the class was it finally being over and not having to deal with her nonsenseanymore and brought up a number of other little things that happened on top of that mentioned above. I said that she was by far the worst teacher I had ever had and that the school is worse off with her teaching the entire ninth grade.
The bell rang for the hour and I was the only person of the entire 110 students to leave at the hour mark. Now, on exam days the teacher doesn’t proctor their own exam so that they are available to answer questions or if the classes are split among different rooms. I had to wait for my mom to finish proctoring a different exam, so I just sat out in breezeway. The teacher found me, holding my exam, with tears in her eyes and told me to meet her in the principal’s office. She then stormed off, so I headed over. As I was waiting there, I recounted what happened to the soccer coach who was sitting there cause he made some comment that he was ‘surprised to see you sent in here.’
Eventually, she came back in with my mom, who she pulled out of proctoring an exam, and we all went in to see the principal. She was crying, screaming, literally choking every minute or so. After about 45 minutes of me spilling everything I’d gone through that year (all things I’d already vented to my mom about plenty of times), the principal finally looked at her and said, ‘How much was the question worth?’ She said 5 bonus points, and he said, ‘Then just don’t give him the bonus points.’
So I made a 98 on the final instead of a 103. Missed two questions. Every other student got the bonus points and the next highest grade was an 81.
Thinking she would get the last laugh, I noticed a few days before grades were due that one of my assignments from the second week of class all the way back in August had been dropped 10 points. My final grade ended up being a 94.4 which was a B at the time. But I couldn’t prove that she had altered my grade, I just had them in all in a spreadsheet to determine my grade ahead of time (should have been a 95.2) but nothing that would prove anything, since I could have just typed it wrong. I didn’t.
The summer after, the school decided to change to a 10 point scale and so 90-plus was an A, so my B became an A. She also had to have her homework assignments each week signed off by the department chair and she had to start accepting assignments via email. Two years later, she was fired after other students started having real issues with her. Prior to me, the administration just thought it was a case of ‘students complaining about the hard teacher.’
I still think she deserved every bit of it, but I certainly didn’t think it would set in motion her getting fired.”
“If I’m Creepin’, You Ain’t Sleepin'”
“My friends and I used to pull a lot of pranks on each other growing up and about 10 years ago, I was helping my buddy set up a new business. He was ordering business cards and the company he was going through was offering, I think, 500 or so free with a large order, so we decided to prank our other friend. We made business cards with his name, phone number, home address, and had his job title as ‘Professional Creep’ with the slogan, ‘If I’m creepin’, you ain’t sleepin’.’ We passed these cards out all over town.
He was getting really harassing phone calls for a while and couldn’t figure out why. After about two years, he found one of the cards on a random fridge at a party and put two and two together. He was peeved and is still getting random calls 10 years later. He wasn’t getting calls frequently enough to make him want to change his number. There were a lot of calls in the beginning. Now, it’s like every 6-9 months he’ll randomly get a call.
I feel really bad about that one. But yes, he is an idiot.”