Don’t you just love petty revenge?!?!
It’s better than savage revenge that could lead to legal problems and you’ll feel a lot better about yourself if you go this route.
And if you’re looking for some ideas, maybe the stories below will get you in the mood.
What’s your best petty revenge story?
Here’s how people responded on AskReddit.
1. Good one!
“Speeding up a coworker’s double click speed and watch him squirm when his normal double clicking speed isn’t working.”
2. Sweet revenge.
“My ex cheated with a married man. He now lives with her.
I still have the login for her DVR. I logged in, erased all her shows, then only recorded the show “Cheaters.”
Petty, but it makes me laugh.”
3. Won’t do that again.
“In seventh grade I used to take home-made lunch to school. We prepared our own salad dressing (lemon juice, salt, oil, etc), and one kid decided it would be good to steal it, and drink it before lunch time.
I asked him not to, but he continued to drink it, but started doing so in one gulp so I couldn’t stop him. So instead of making a huge deal, I prepared two salad dressings. One that I would actually use on my salad, and another that had all the liquid condiments I could find in my mom’s kitchen. It was really fun to see his face as he drank it.
He never stole my salad dressing again.”
4. Wow.
“So I was an AP kid, and had a bunch of AP friends, and also was in sports and theater. I had a large bunch of friends in nearly every cliche.
Anyway. One day, one of my friends gets sucker punched in the halls by some dickwad. Because of the school’s zero tolerance policy, getting sucker punched carries the same punishment as sucker punching. So my friend and the dickwad both got in school suspension, but only one of them was punched on the face.
I thought that was a litte bit unfair.
So I got my friends together, and they got their friends together, and every week, one of us would sucker punch d**kwad. Every week, one of us would have ISS, and so would d**kwad, but since we are many, none of us went to ISS twice.
Dickwad on the other hand missed so much class, that he had to retake the grade.”
5. The router.
“I signed a lease on a townhouse while in college that “included high speed internet” … the setup was basically one sh**ty router for 14x townhouses (so like 28 people). Needless to say it was s**t, and the location of our unit vs. the router made it worse. We made some calls to try and get them to add a router or hardwire us in so we could add our own. No dice.
Eventually I paid to get my own service and added 2x routers in our unit. I changed the SSID to match what the “free” router was, and kept the passwords the same… so to the residents it looked like there was better coverage.
After about two weeks I changed one router’s password and just disconnected the other. So some residents could use the “free” router, some had a bad password, and some could connect but couldn’t reach the outside world. They must have been flooded with calls because within 24 hours they had someone out and added 3x new routers to help with coverage.”
6. After the storm.
“After a huge snowfall (~24” in 24 hours) …. the property management company hadn’t touched the snow in our parking lot for days .
After day 3 I called to mention we were sort of trapped and they needed to send trucks / snow blowers / etc to take care of things… the response I got was basically “Sorry, we’ll get to it sooner or later”. Side note – years ago if you opened a yahoo email, you could add a second email for recovery without confirming it.
I created a new @yahoo email address and used their general @Xpropertymanagement as the alternate email. I had it copy every email to both. I then signed up for alerts for every time there was an eBay listing for “snow plow” “snow blower” “snow shovel” or there was a “sale on X snow removal” gear…. it took a matter of hours before thousands of emails were sent. Ended up crashing their email server.
They responded to all residents with a very nice email explaining they get the frustration, and they’re working on it…. so I paused the alerts. 24 hours later, still nothing, alerts back on. Another email, another pause, another day of nothing, repeat. Eventually we got the driveway plowed and life was good.”
7. Oh, Mom!
“My mom had a fantastic one. She was a language teacher at my high school and years after I had graduated, she called me kind of upset because a group of guys was trying to make her look dumb.
The class was supposed to write one of those team dialogues in Spanish, and had a week or so to prepare it, then had to perform it in front of the class. When she called for them to do theirs, they said, “But we already did ours, we’re not doing it again.” She said, “You definitely didn’t do it, I don’t have any record of it here and I would remember it if you had.”
They refused to do it, insisting they already performed it and that it was her fault she didn’t take notes/scores down. She was feeling puzzled and questioning herself, when one of the good kids came and said, “They didn’t do it – they were bragging about making you look stupid and threatened the whole class if they told you anything. But please don’t tell them I told you this, I don’t want any problems with them.” (These were those stereotypical dumb jock types who everyone was scared of for whatever reason).
My mom was really into yoga at the time and got a great idea while meditating. She went in the next day and said, “Boys, I owe you an apology. I found my notes on your presentation and I do remember it, I don’t know how I forgot!”
She went on to describe all the grammatical mistakes they made, that their dialogue hadn’t been as long as required, that they didn’t include the necessary vocabulary, etc. All made up. She failed them all on the project and they couldn’t do a thing about it.”
8. Ouch.
“For a while, I worked as a web designer in a small ad agency serving a very niche industry. Previously, the design team had no creative lead, and were all sort of operating independently across varying clients.
We decided to hire a creative director to fill that gap, and I was given the task of sorting through and giving first round interviews to find the person who would later become my supervisor. Two candidates in particular stood out from the rest for very different reasons.
One was exceptionally talented, an all around nice guy, and somebody who generally would have been great for the role. The other, let’s call him John, had mediocre talent, came across as an insufferable, arrogant prick, but had previous experience working within the niche industry that we serviced.
He also had contacts within that industry that could lead to new business. Despite my strong recommendation to not hire John, his relationships in the industry were too compelling to our agency’s leadership to pass up, and they hired him.
It didn’t take long before the entire company started to realize John was a huge burden. He had virtually zero experience in anything related to digital design. Design for apps, websites, mobile, etc., were all completely and utterly beyond his grasp, but he used his position of relative power to make decisions on those projects that the entire design team refused to support, most of which came back to bite the company in the a** later.
The design team h**ed him, because fixing and working around his screw-ups became part of our daily routine. The sales team h**ed him, because he’d claim it took him unbelievably exaggerated amounts of time to complete even the most trivial of tasks (ex: 4 days to design a business card template), so they wouldn’t even assign him projects anymore.
Work that was clearly his responsibility started to rapidly trickle down to the rest of the design team. We’d be working late nights 4 out of 5 days a week, because all of his projects that were in danger of missing deadlines would be re-assigned to us. Meanwhile he’d be the first to walk out the door every day, right at 5PM, without fail.
On top of all that, the guy was absolutely, without a doubt, the biggest tool I’ve ever met. Always right about everything, completely unbending on his idiotic opinions, and completely clueless that literally every person in the building wished he would get hit by a truck.
I genuinely tried to work with him for about a year, until I decided that the job had become intolerable because of him, and wasn’t going to change any time soon, so I turned in my two week notice. About a month after I left, I heard that he had been let go from the job.
Shortly after that, I noticed that he had changed his LinkedIn status to show that he was working for a new agency I had never heard of, also servicing that same niche industry. I looked them up, and quickly figured out that he had started his own agency… a primarily digital agency… when he had NO experience in digital or interactive design, and had literally f**ked up every digital/interactive project he’d ever been on (I know, because most of them were reassigned to me when he proved incapable of doing them himself).
I looked at the portfolio on his website, and found literally project after project of my work. He was using my work from the ad agency as examples of the work his agency could produce.
I briefly considered contacting him and requesting he remove my work from his portfolio for ethical reasons. But I could already hear his reply in my head. “As creative lead, all work done by my team is an extension of my creative direction.” He’d used similar lines in the past to insert himself into receiving credit on successful projects he’d had zero involvement on.
So instead I sent an email to one of the partners of the agency we both had worked for, saying something along the lines of “hey, not sure if you’ve noticed this, but it looks like John is using your company’s intellectual property to directly compete against you… if I had to guess, I’d assume his next step would be to make a move at your client list.”
The reply was short and sweet: “Thanks for bringing this to my attention. He’ll be hearing from our attorney in the morning.” John’s website was brought down less than 24 hours later.”
9. A while back…
“This happened a while back, study hall in 8th grade actually. I always brought two small sandwiches to school so I could have one at lunch and one in study hall since our teacher let us eat in that class.
One day as I was about to eat my Sandwich, I get up to use the bathroom. As I walk back in the classroom, I see the kid in front of me eating my sandwich. I was pretty annoyed but nothing serious at this point, so I confront him politely and he denies it completely. I left my sandwich on my desk the next day just to make sure it was him, and what do you know, it is.
So on the third day, I hatched a plan. I put habanero cheese on my sandwich, and then doused it all in ghost pepper sauce. That s**t was everywhere, but it luckily didn’t smell spicy. I get to study hall and my plan works flawlessly. I leave my trap sandwich on my desk and get up to use the restroom. This time I take as long as I can, and end up wandering the halls of the school.
I did this because my study hall teacher was anal about the hall pass, and only one guy was allowed to leave the class at a time, even for water. After about ten minutes I come back into the class to be greeted by the sandwich thief crying hysterically with a bright red face waiting for the hall pass. He was in the bathroom for the rest of the day.”
10. Not bad!
“A guy at work pi**ed me off.
I placed this Craigslist ad with his phone number. 2 free goats. Hablas espanol.
He spent the rest of the day getting calls every 15 minutes or so.”
11. Framed.
“When I was a kid I had a bed wetting problem.
I am not ashamed of this now, as thousands of other kids have had the same problems… at the time however, this was humiliating. My younger brother started telling other kids around school how extensive the issue was. I was mortified.
Even after our mother told him to knock it off, he continued. So I decided to level the playing field. The whole “hand in cup of warm water” deal didn’t work. I stood over him as he slept one night and pi**ed on him. The next morning, my mom was horrified and wound up taking a call from my grandmother.
“I don’t know what to do, now BOTH of them are pi**ing the bed,” she explained, clearly frustrated.
After a few more times of “framing” my brother as a bed wetter he completely stopped using my embarrassing problem as entertainment.”
12. Not sorry.
“Had a Chief Warrant Officer in Iraq throw a bottle of petroleum jelly at my after I got done ranting about something I’ve long since forgotten. Told me to go “take care of it, and come back when I feel better.”
During his afternoon siesta I spent an hour covering everything on his desk with it in the most inconspicuous spots (e.g. inside the handle of a coffee mug, underneath the handle of the Keurig pod loader, behind the canister holding Keurig coffee pods, anywhere he could grab something and not see it without first inspecting it).
He came back and proceeded to curse at a rate never witnessed before as he had to continuously wipe all the jelly off his hands every 3 minutes. He caught the jelly on the inside rims of his over-the-ear headphones before he rimmed his ears with it, but the best came after I let him calm down and get back to work.
Everyone else in the office watched me do it, no one said a thing, but they all had their eyes on me as I waited five minutes before picking up my phone on my desk and slowly dialed the number at his desk.
It rings, everyone turns to look at him, he’s on the computer, picks up the phone, slaps it to his ear, “Radio Battalion SIMOSONOFAB**CH!!!” Turns his head, ear was caked full of petroleum jelly I had dumped all over the ear piece of the phone.
Major told me these antics and pranks made that deployment. CWO Ryan, if you’re reading this: Sorry, not sorry.”
13. Okay, that’s enough.
“I once had a colleague I h**ed (he was very condescending and really arrogant), so I put an extra Bluetooth receiver in his computer for a computer mouse and kept the mouse in my drawer.
I would just open my drawer and it would mess his s**t right up. Kept it going for like 2 months.
He was about to m**der the world when I thought I better stop.”
14. Care to explain, Michael?
“Back when I was studying engineering, it occurred to me to try and find an app on my iPhone for those Panasonic projectors in lecture rooms.
So I get the app and it just let me connect to the one in the class without a password or anything. I have a friend who is one of those perpetual pranksters, you can’t leave your pc or bag or food/drink unattended when he’s around.
So i beam a picture of him onto the projector, so the lecturer is just talking away and this goofy picture of my mate is on the screen. Lecturer doesn’t realize yet, people in the lecture start waking up and giggling a bit.
Now I use the pen function and draw a penis on the picture too. Mate was red in the face and trying to hide. Lecturer finally noticed and says “Michael why is there a picture of you on the screen?”.
Finally for a fleeting moment I actually wrecked that f**ker.”
15. Put a spell on you.
“When I was a kid I got the Sabrina the Teenage Witch “Handbook” – it was full of kiddie experiments and stuff and was pretty fun.
My older sister had upset or annoyed me about something, so I tried out one of the ‘tricks’ from the book, you fill a cup with water and some corn kernels, put some tinfoil on top of the cup, the kernels eventually pop and it makes noise against the tinfoil.
I put it under her bed, it takes a few days to “work”, so I completely forgot about it, until one night I woke up to my two sisters whispering – it had popped in the middle of the night and she thought there was a rat under her bed.”
16. Lunch wars.
“Someone in my office would always crush lunches with his gigantic lunch box. 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 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.”
17. I’ll take that.
“We were sitting by a pool once, and a woman stood over my wife and started spraying sunscreen all over herself – and my wife.
We asked her nicely to please move and she ignored us and kept spraying.
When we left, I took one of her flip flops with me.”
18. Got him!
“When I was about 13, I was snooping around my older brother’s room and found a stack of 20 dollar bills stashed away.
He was saving up from his high school job to buy a car. Hundreds of dollars. To 13-year old me it was a fortune, and I figured he wouldn’t notice if I stole just one 20 — still a lot of money to me. So I did.
For years I would remember it every once in a while and feel guilty. The worst part was, when I took the 20, he was also a teenage kid and probably knew exactly how much money was there. He probably knew I took one but let me get away with it because he figured I needed it. That made me feel much worse.
15 years later, I’m hanging around with him on the holidays. I see that he left his wallet on the counter, and he’s upstairs. I sneak into his wallet, see there’s a few 20s, and I slide an extra one in there. Got him!”
19. Lazy co-worker.
“My co-worker was always complaining and always lazy with his work, yet he got recognition for the simplest thing he would actually do.
He also took credit for a full days work that was pretty much all me. I always got ignored. So one day, I came in early and I unplugged his Ethernet jack just barley to the point it looked like it was still plugged into his computer. For 4 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. Half way through the day, he left on break, I plugged it back in and bam, just like this it was working. By then, he couldn’t claim my work, and I begun to get noticed more.”
20. Pay up.
“A guy owed me money, but I wasn’t immediately worried because we had done transactions before. This was a transaction via USPS. He started dodging me, ignoring calls and messages and all, but stayed active on Facebook (just ignoring me and deleting my comments and posts).
After three months, getting progressively more impatient, I had had enough. I got the notification to approve him as a member of a Facebook group I’m in.
I approved him, then made a big post in the group putting him on blast for it, tag and everything. I then added his mom and sister on Facebook and sent them messages. Mind you, the guy is in his thirties.
He messaged me about it, and things are getting resolved. If it slips again, however, I’m calling his work. Working for Amazon and committing mail fraud probably don’t go well together.”
21. Don’t touch my cookies.
“I used to buy small treat bags of gourmet cookies from a local bakery a few years ago. I would eat maybe one a day, but they were a treat for me.
Back then my husband and I had a retail store and a few friends that would hang out at the store (it was kind of a lounge too). Well, my husband and our friends (most were guys) would just help themselves. But they had no self control nor would they even ask for some. I would buy the bag of cookies for me, and they’d be gone. I would try to hide them but couldn’t.
So I bagged up a bunch of dog treats that the local pet food store had that looked very very close to cookies for people. And were all about the same size as the ones I bought from the bakery.
I placed them where all the guys could see them, and waited.
Yep, they tried them… asked if they were a bad batch or maybe the bakery missed an ingredient or two in the dough.
I waited til they tried to eat more than 3 each… then told them they were dog treats.
They never touched my cookies again.”
22. Showed him.
“I had a guy in school who would always skip class and then ask for my notes.
We had a group project worth almost 40% of our grade and he did zero work, and the prof told me tough luck. Instead of just saying no the next time he asked for notes, I took the low road and began giving him edited versions.
I would leave items out of lists, incorrectly define things or just straight up write stuff that makes no sense.
An example of the c**p I would put in: To calculate return on investment, subtract your yearly earnings from your current bank balance, then multiply by Echer’s factorial (4.22).
If he had even once bothered to crack the text he would have figured it out, but that apparently would have been too much effort for him.
He retook that class.”
23. Ouch.
“We used to have a dog door in the basement and when we were little, we could climb through it.
It was against the rules but one day my little sister got her dress stuck and broke the frame getting out.
She pinned it on me and I got in trouble for it, so I cut all the bristles off her toothbrush.”
24. Get that refund.
“My 3rd year of school myself and 5 other guys rented a 6 bedroom house from this awesome couple. Lady was the D.A. in town, husband managed the houses they had … super cool, very responsive, and just great landlords.
Year 4 we stay at the house (all 6 of us), but Cool Owners sub the management duties out to XYZ Property Management – who control like 95% of the rentals in this town. No major changes other than everything now takes forever to get taken care of, but whatever, we deal with it. Move out time comes and we get a call from XYZ saying they don’t have a damage report for the house … so every piece of damage they find will be charged to us.
We’re all pi**ed since the house had its share of damage prior to our move in. I called the owner (D.A. Lady) and asked how damages are fixed if it is outside of the security deposit amount for us, and fill her in on what they’re doing. She said that in the management agreement they are responsible for all damage as of the date they’ve taken over (unless it requires and insurance claim). She advised me to go ahead and stick them with the bill since she knew we filled out a damage sheet on move-in and we kept it in good shape.
I found the original damage slip from two years prior, updated it accordingly with any new items, copied, crumpled it up a bit, a coffee stain or two for aging …. and upon walk-through when they mentioned we would be stuck with all repairs, I presented a copy of the damage report from out move in two years prior.
They then asked to have that copy and they would send us a new copy when they got back to the office; which we declined. Then they said they couldn’t honor it because it wasn’t their letterhead and from a prior owner …. who still owned it.
We called the D.A. and she took our side citing that they should have taken care of then when they took over and she might have to re-think her contract with them …. 100% security refund for all of us.”
What’s YOUR best petty revenge story?
Sound off in the comments and let us know.
Thanks a lot!
