As much as we want to be liked by everyone at work, there's always going to be one or two folks who act like jerks toward us. A 2022 survey found that 90% of people have a colleague that annoys them. What's more interesting is that 57% of the respondents said they thought about quitting because of an annoying coworker.
Some people wait for karma to get their jerk colleagues, others take matters into their own hands. Like these people, who served some cold-blooded revenge to their coworkers and bosses and then shared their genius plans with folks online, prompted by one netizen's question: "What is the most satisfying revenge you got at work?"
#1
Image credits: Ms Waid 2u
#2
Here's something that didn't happen to me, but to my brother (I'll call him Jake).
Ever since junior high Jake wanted to be a policeman, so he did everything he could in high school to get to know the police dept, prep for a criminal science degree, went on ride-alongs, etc. So after high school, he's accepted to a police academy in a nearby city.
He's driving to the academy, and gets pulled over by a highway patrolman for going four mph over the limit. My brother is very apologetic and embarrassed, and completely polite but the patrolman is a complete jerk to him, condescending, insulting and power-tripping hard. When Jake gets to the academy, he's telling his friends what happened and a couple of the other policeman there go "Oh, we know who you're talking about: Officer Bacon. Nobody on the force likes him because he thinks he's better than everybody else in the department; he's always ticketing people for stupid violations, and he's got a huge authority complex. He's the type of guy that gives policemen a bad rep."
So my brother Jake eventually graduates from the academy, and gets hired on as a city police officer in a town an hour away from the academy. About six months into his job he's out on patrol, and gets a call from one his police buddies at the academy: "Jake, you remember Officer Bacon? He left here in his highway patrol car about ten minutes ago, and he was saying he was going to be late for a meeting in your town." So my brother Jake strategically parks his patrol car on the off-ramp of the highway, and waits while running radar.
Sure enough after sitting there for a while, he sees a highway patrol car take the exit ramp and it blows right by him, no lights or sirens. Jake pulls out behind the highway patrol, and throws on his lights and pulls the patrol man over. Jake gets out and walks up to the car, and he can tell the driver is already pissed. He gets to the window (which is already down) and the driver goes "I'm Officer Bacon--why the f**k did you pull me over?!"
"Sir, do you know how fast you were going?" "I'm already late for a meeting at headquarters. I don't have time for this--show me some professional courtesy." "I clocked you going 80 in a 55 mph zone. I'm going to have to write you a citation. I need to see your license and registration, sir."
At this point Officer Bacon flips his s**t, and virtually throws his license and papers at my brother. He's cussing and talking about how they're both law enforcement officers, and what Jake is doing is bulls**t. My brother keeps it completely cool and treats it like just another traffic stop. As near as my brother can tell, Officer Bacon doesn't recognize him.
He goes through the whole process, then hands Bacon the citation and says "Have a good day sir." The highway patrolman speeds off, totally red-faced with rage. My brother goes back to his HQ and tells his co-workers what happened and they're all pretty much just high-fiving him. Later, he heard through the grapevine that Officer Bacon went and complained to his commanding officer, and instead of siding with Officer Bacon, Bacon ended up getting reprimanded.
My brother said he wanted so badly to go up to Officer Bacon and say "Remember me? Karma sucks, don't it." but he never did. tldr: brother gets ticketed by dick highway patrolman, becomes a policeman, ends up ticketing highway patrolman while both are on duty a couple years later, and gets patrolman in trouble.
Image credits: LostSoulsAlliance
#3
Image credits: Thomas Cameron
#4
Image credits: Ed Fuller, Sr.
#5
Image credits: Glenda L. King
#6
Image credits: [deleted]
#7
After the dotcom crash I got hired by a small software company. They didn’t really have a good product and it was obvious they were on the way down. One day the owner called in with instructions to fire all the sales people as they weren’t making any sales anyway. OK so at the end of the month he calls to ask how sales were going. I said about as good as can be expected with no sales people.
A week later the hammer comes down and we’re all let go and given our severance checks. I immediately go to the bank branch that check was drawn on to cash it and it bounced!
So since I still had the keys to the office, I went back and grabbed a bunch of high-end laptops and took them home. Another week goes by and he calls to ask about these laptops that have gone missing. I said they’re not missing, I’m holding on to them until you make good on the bounced check. I was told that was theft and they would be pressing charges. I said great, I’ll be contacting the Labour Relations Board about your s***ty practices and also the Police about knowing passing a bad check for thousands of dollars.
Needless to say I was asked to stop by his office to exchange the laptops for another check. It was like the scene out of Scarface where Tony Montana goes to buy the coke. Owner: Do you have the laptops? Me: They’re close by. Do you have my check? He gave me the check and I went and cashed it and then went back and gave him his laptops.
Image credits: Bimal Parmar
#8
Image credits: William Lockwood
#9
Image credits: Cathi Richardson
#10
#11
Image credits: dameon5
#12
I was the Customer Contact Manager for a small manufacturing company, so my department entered the orders and did the following up with dealers.
We had several salespeople, most of whom were very nice and supportive of our efforts.
And then there was Jill.
What a witch.
Always rude, always back-stabbing, always with a chip on her shoulder, Jill seemed to delight in making the staff miserable. My department, accounting, production, shipping, didn’t matter. Nothing was good enough and if you did something different from the way she would have or made a mistake, she would write a page-long email to her boss, detailing how this grievous situation caused her great personal injury and embarrassment.
A real drama queen.
One day, she brought me a box from production. She told me she told the dealer that since UPS had already picked up, she would make sure it got to UPS that evening so it would move and deliver the next day.
She wanted me to take it to UPS. Like a moron, I agreed, and I drove through town in a cold, pouring rain in the dark to drop this box off. It made me an hour late getting home, and I was soaked to the bone.
“Never again,” I said to myself.
A couple of days later, she brought me another box, same deal. “I told the customer I would get it out tonight.” I told her that she would have to take it herself because the UPS store was inconveniently located, it was raining again, and I don’t see worth a crap in the dark.
She said, “No, I can’t. We’re all going out to dinner tonight.” “We all” meant sales and the Real Managers of the company, not the lowly peon managers like me who did most of the work.
“Nope. I did it once as a favor. Now it’s becoming a habit. Not doing it.”
“You have to.”
“No. You have a choice to make: Do you keep the promise you made to your customer, or do you go to your fancy-pants, expensive, company-paid dinner?”
She took the damn box.
#13
I work retail. This woman comes in to return a cellphone. She says she's been to the news, they did a show on her, and she was told by head office that she can come in for a complete refund. She is months past our 14 day return period. I let her know I'm sorry, but because we are a franchise location, we provide cannot warranty support. The return period is 14 days. The closest warranty is on this card I'm handing you.
She FREAKS THE F**K OUT, calling me every 4 letter word she can think of. I tell her I'm sorry and I move on to the next customer. She is honking and flapping at the customers in my store, going on about how her kid is in the hospital with cancer, etc. She finally leaves.
10 minutes later her daughter comes in, I repeat the 14 day/warranty centre speech. She calles me a f**kwad and leaves. Fast forward a month, my boss calls me and says a woman will be in this afternoon by the name of XXXXXXX. Return it and give her full refund. I say ok. ,
4 days later she comes in and throws the phone on the counter with the receipt and says nothing at all. I do the refund. and I make the call to customer care to cancel the line. Whelp. She decided it was time to leave because she has her money and I'm an inferior sack of skin wasting her time. Customer care finally picks up and asks to verify the account and ask the customer a few questions. Because the customer has left, and cannot verify the account, the phone line cannot be cancelled. I say thank you and hang up. She's gonna receive a letter in a couple month from collections because we cannot contact her any more :)
Image credits: boostedjoose
#14
#15
Image credits: Gina Creedon
#16
#17
Image credits: Carrie
#18
I had an a**hole of a boss. He was demoralizing and condescending. I worked in inventory control and my boss would hide discrepancies in a bogus location. I knew all about it and he would have me use it to adjust inventory. Our client owned the inventory and one month they had corporate auditors grilling us. I stepped into the office they were working in and closed the door behind me. I then proceeded to tell them everything. I have them the bin location name and where it should physically exist.
They continued the audit for a couple days and then nonchalantly asked my boss to verify that location. He turned to me and asked me to go verify. They interrupted and insisted he do the verification. A month later he left the company to pursue other opportunities and I was promoted into his position. It was later said to me that the auditors were so impressed with my integrity that they insisted I manage the inventory.
#19
Image credits: Lyra Yeretzian
#20
#21
I didn't experience it personally, but it was at my behest, and it was satisfying as hell.
I worked for a very small company(about 20 employees) right out of college. When the owners of the company went out of town, about 2 or 3 times a year, the managers would frequently throw all-day parties for the workers, we'd grill, drink, play games, etc. There was one older lady at the company that, I guess, for whatever reason, did not like me. I could be a bit outspoken about social issues being in my early 20's, so that may have been it, but I really to this day don't know why she disliked me so much. Anyway, she waited until about a week after one of these parties, went straight to the owners of the company, and told them that the week before, she was watching me and noticed I didn't do any work all day(duh, none of us had, including her). She was banking on the fact that the owner would only pull my logs for that day and no one else's and she was right. My managers fought for me(truthfully, they were probably a bit worried I'd rat them and the whole office out) but it was to no avail. I got fired.
The revenge bit of the story is that since it was such a small company, everyone quickly got wind of what this woman did, and she was given stone-cold silent treatment by everyone, including the managers. She even went to the owner and complained that she was being treated unfairly, but there wasn't really a lot he could do about people not wanting to socialize with her. She ended up quitting about 3 weeks after I got fired. Apparently she had trouble finding a job and came back a few months later begging for her job back, but my managers were in charge of all hiring and basically laughed in her face. She went above them again to the owner, but at that point he was sick of her drama and told her he wasn't interested in having her back.
tl;dr Former co-worker gets me fired behind a bunch of bulls**t, ends up quitting because I was well-liked at the office and she couldn't handle the backlash from the managers and my co-workers.
#22
Many years ago when I was Production Control & Warehouse Manager for a large manufacturing plant, we had a satellite warehouse about 30 miles from the main plant. We staffed it by rotating 4 warehouse workers there each week without a supervisor. One warehouseman, Gene, had recently become a body builder and really bulked up. His self-confidence grew exponentially and one result was that he began stealing lunches from the break room refrigerator when he was assigned to the satellite warehouse. The other workers identified him as the thief and plotted revenged. They carefully doctored a pack of chocolate Hostess cupcakes with ex-lax and planted them in the fridge. Gene took the bait and about 20 minutes after his break and illicit snack, he was working on the loading dock. The ex-lax kicked in and Gene rushed for the men’s room, but his co-workers waylaid him with questions and salutations to finish his work before leaving. Gene s**t his pants. He also never stole anyone’s food again.
Image credits: Bill Pearce
#23
Yes, he ended up doing not only my job full time position, 50–60 hours a week), but his full time job as well, was overwhelmed by more work than one person could possibly handle, and ended up being fired for not keeping his job duties in accordance to the policy of the workplace.
He was my supervisor, he made my life miserable because he was a miserable little selfish and arrogant s**t who took great pleasure in other people’s misfortunes. I was dealing with stressful family issues,and this little f**ker failed to notify me when it was important that a message got to me from my wife concerning a relative’s life-threatening surgery. I told the owner of the company to fix the problem with my supervisor.
After 30 days, nothing changed, so I quit the job after notifying the owner that I couldn’t put up with the supervisor’s s**t anymore. And the little f**ker got what he deserved, I often think back about how hard his life must’ve been to do not only my job, but his as well, and it makes me happy to realize that the best way to get revenge on him was to give him all the work he could stand (and then some).
#24
I was the Maintenance supervisor of a Irrigation District, which manages and delivers water to farmers. I didn’t do toilets and lightbulbs, my department fixed and maintained roads, pipelines, and canals.
We had that one guy. The guy that is a pain in everybody’s arse. And he lived to be a problem. He wanted the supervisor position when it was open, but they hired me from the outside. That really pissed him off. He would find every minute issue and try to blow it up into a major complaint, then try to upset his coworkers about the “injustice of the week”.
One morning he walks up to me and said he wanted to file a complaint. I said about what, now? He said there is no hot water in the mens room. I said so? What do you need hot water for? He said to sanitize his hands, of course. I said thats what the soap is for. It’s antibacterial. He tells me OSHA requires the employer to provide hot water for sanitation. I said BS, were not even required to provide a bathroom, but we do so you don’t spend all day driving into town to pee. He tells me if i dont fix it, he would complain to the GM. (GM didn’t like him either).
I told him i would handle it
The next morning, bright and early I get summoned to the GM’s office. He’s holding a laminated piece of paper, rubbing his eyes. “Is this your handywork?” Yes sir. “You can’t do that. You just can’t! And…I’m taking this home to show my wife, because she won’t believe me. Try to figure out a way to get him hot water, and don’t post anymore signs, PLEASE”. Yes sir.
The laminated sign said : “WE DON’T HAVE HOT WATER, DON’T PEE ON YOUR HANDS.”
Image credits: Jim Brost
#25
#26
My girlfriend, at the time, had a boss who was always hitting on her. He would buy her things, flirt with her, etc. We hit a rough patch in our relationship, and he did everything in his power to win her from me. He was a VP at the company, so he had the money, and probably the smooth talking skills. She would bring him up in fights as a comparison. I got sick of it. Me and her ended our 3 year relationship and sure enough, they're dating about a month later. However...
He knew that the company was making her work overtime and not paying her, (and said "there's nothing I could do about it" when she asked him), and he knew that she was having to take work home (which was a no-no since she was a lingerie designer), AND was helping her start her own line, which was a conflict of interest to his company.
Flashback to a few months earlier. Her company has a Christmas party, and I meet the CEO. I won't say his name, but it was a name that I remembered for some reason. Now, I was pissed. This scumbag basically took my girlfriend from me. I know it was probably for the best because any girl that would fall for that shouldn't be with me anyway. But I'm not thinking that way at the time. I have no ethical hangups about revenge, and it was time to get some.
I realized that her company e-mail address had a template. [First name].[last name]@[company].com. So I figured that the CEO's e-mail address probably had the same format. With all the knowledge I had, it would be a shame not to blindly e-mail the CEO of his company with detailed information about how his VP was putting his company at risk by dating his employees, knowingly breaking employment laws, allowing sensitive materials out into the public, and start a rival company. So that's what I did.
I never got a response from the CEO, however, a couple years later I ran into my ex and had a couple of drinks with her. She told me about how s**tty of a boyfriend he was, how they fought all the time, and how she went off and hit him one night. (She got really close to hitting me a couple of times, but I calmly told her that if she laid a hand on me, I would hit her back harder than she could ever imagine, and would be happy to go to jail for it).
She also told me that the problems really started when he lost his job. I asked how that happened, and she told me that it was abrupt, but even he didn't really know the reason. It was one of those HR-driven "we're letting you go" type firings. I told her what I did. She was shocked and angry and left the bar without saying another word, but I didn't give a s**t. Even the remote possibility that I was the reason why that scumbag got fired, AND he got my s**tty girlfriend who hit him, made me feel like a million bucks. And I would do it again in a heartbeat.
Image credits: CalvinDehaze
#27
Image credits: Verneita Boonlom
#28
#29
#30
My boss had a falling out with her boss and he (boss' boss) decided he would destroy her and everything she cared about. This meant he was going to destroy me too, since my boss had done a lot to get me where I was.
I didn't get fired or officially demoted, but I was moved a few layers deeper on an organization chart and put into a job I used to do four years earlier. I got angry for two days, then polished my resume and cast it across my large company. A month after it happened, I was flying to across the country to interview for the most prestigious R&D organization in my industry and three months after that I was watching someone load my s**t into a moving van. The evil-doer was fired two weeks after I started my new job (in the same company, very different division).
I never had to file a grievance, my silent determination to get out from under him was the loudest scream, and losing a very promising person made the company really look into him.
#31
I had a coworker who had a position similar to mine, we each managed about 7 employees. She didn’t work very hard, and to be honest, wasn’t very knowledgeable, but she was connected (her husband was a high-ranking navy officer, but not at our command). Her people would wait until she was out of the office to come to me for assistance, and she was out a lot. They’d wait because I was better at the job. If she found out about it, she’d blow up on them and me. I’d have them go to our superiors and get written approval to come to me. Management knew what the game was, they also knew she was connected. I’d then help her employee. If/when she found out about it, she come shrieking (literally) into my office to b***h. I always printed out the written approval and I would say a word, I’d just hand it to her and she’d steam off. Had I spoken to her like she spoke to me, I’d have been disciplined. I never called her out on it as I’m not a fan of drama, my superiors didn’t want it either so I just rode it out. I’m not so sure if that’s revenge if malicious compliance, but it was very satisfying. She eventually retired and her replacement was excellent. I didn’t shed a tear.
#32
#33
Worked in an office with this a**hole that used to make noises on conference calls with his headset mike. Extremely annoying. So one day I borrowed it and used the mike to clean the bottom of the urinal in the mens room. From then on when he sucked on it to make his annoying sounds, several of us on the call were amused rather than annoyed.
Image credits: UBERELLIOTT
#34
#35
I was working at a pizza joint. My mom's former boss came in and ordered. I spat in the pizza because she was such a c**t to my mom.
Image credits: heiberdee
