“I'm Not Sorry I Did It”: 35 Ways People Took Revenge At Work

This happened to my husband when we were first married. He was working (salary) 60–70 hrs a week. He worked for a company that was a family business, except my husband and the skilled field employees. The familly office staff didn’t do as much as my husband, so he asked a raise, since he was doing a higher level position than he was working. He also asked for an assistant, because he was doing that much work. My husband knew they would probably not honor his requests, so he went prepared. He had gotten a license to form his own company, and and went in with a resignation letter. When he asked for the raise and an assistant, his boss literally laughed in his face. My husband gave his notice and walked out. He had a couple of jobs lined up from other contractors whom he know from his connections other than his job, so he didn’t skip a beat in getting work.

A week went by, and his boss called him begging him to come back. My husband rightfully declined. They had to hire 3 people to fill his position there, and within 2 years, they went out of business. I’m proud that my husband did all of this with class, dignity and integrity!

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.

I was a government employee for 28 years and worked overtime whenever she asked me. I also took no sick leave and cut my vacation time when there was an overload of work. An opening for a promotion came up and I passed the tests with flying colors. However, my supervisor wanted a woman in the position and called in favors to have a female employee from another department transferred to her section. I then went to HR and asked when I could take early retirement with the best employee pension possible given my number of years as an employee. I bided my time and when the time came, I gave exactly 2 weeks notice. How did it hurt her? I had accumulated 2 years and six weeks of vacation, sick leave, and overtime, so for that time, I was paid full salary on early retirement. The best part, she could not have another employee fill my position because I was officially still occupying that position.

I was laid off, specifically because of age. They admitted it. However, the two people that took over my job both quit. I had a year’s pay, not for severance, but to agree not to sue based on age discrimination. In five months I was back at work, collecting a pension, retaining the payout, and earning about forty percent more. I stayed for a total of eight years more, which were the best years at the company. At least for me. The boss that could not stand me was livid I was doing so well, and SO HAPPY! The best vengeance is living well.

Actually I wasn’t fired, but my direct supervisor made working there impossible unless one were in her circle of friends. The day after I left I started getting calls from that office, asking about various things. I told them that I would get back to them, and sent an e-mail to corporate and to the management in our area. I let them know that from that time forward that I would be happy to help but my fee was $150.00 per hour with a minimum four hours charge and that the clock started ticking the minute that I answered a call or opened an e-mail.

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 ($600.00) within thirty days I would notify the credit reporting agencies and start legal proceedings. Three days later a check arrived, FedEx next-day delivery, signature required, and strangely enough I have yet to receive another call or e-mail from any of their employees. I can’t imagine why…lol.

A few months out of college I got a job working in the courts. Not long after I started, I was perusing the docket and saw the name of a kid who made my life a living hell in middle school - turns out he'd been caught selling coke out of his basement.

In my job I only deal with victim oriented crimes, but I didn't have any hearings for the next hour, so I decided to sit in. I was standing at the prosecution table chatting when he came in to be sentenced. I turned around, caught him eyeing me and simply said "hey Mike, how've you been?" He didn't say anything - just lowered his gaze to the table looking dejected. As the judge took his place on the bench I walked back to the gallery and watched my former tormentor get sentenced to two years in the state pen.

There's a saying that the greatest revenge is to live well. I came to truly appreciate its wisdom that day.

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.

I was an automotive tech for a few years. The last position I held with that title was at a crappy little locally owned oil and lube shop. Now after a few years in the industry I had accumulated quite the knowledge of OSHA AND EPA standards that the automotive industry has in place.

The owner of this business is not a good man. We’re talking big game hunting trips to Africa, only gave charity for tax-breaks, and somehow ZERO empathy for people as a whole. His holiday bonuses were 25$ gift cards…. to his own store.

Now the manager of this particular location happened to be the nephew of the owner. This guys 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 mechanics were already talking about starting our own small shop, taking our loyal customers with us (they would tell us that whenever we left they would stay with us)

I guess nephew found out and was none-too-happy about it. The talks were really him just trying to weasel out of anyone if we (myself and mechanic #2) were stealing business from the company (not yet!). The next day we both received a call informing us that we were suspended for two weeks due to the smell of “whiskey” on our breath (which there wasn’t). This was their way of not having to pay unemployment.

Immediately I got on the horn with the EPA, informing them that this s.o.b instructed us to dump oil and oil filters, antifreeze, differential fluid, and transmission fluid into the dumpster. Then a call to OSHA to let them know about all the standing oil in the bays, exposed electrical components, and shoddy additions to the building.

I got a text from my friend that still worked there two days ago to let me know OSHA showed up and they had to degrease the entire garage, fix the awnings, and electricians were wrapping up the wires.

A day later found out that the EPA had hit this bastard with a huuuuge fine.

Two months later all locations were sold off.

My boss was a woman. She didn’t like the fact that I had told her I was pregnant the day she told me she was divorcing. From that day on, I was persona non grata.

My job was highly sophisticated. Have you ever called an 800 number for software support and expected the person to know the answer no matter what? That was the kind of job I did. For 16 years. I enjoyed it and my customers. They liked me as well, and trusted me.

Well, things started going south with my boss. It took an hour (without traffic) to get to work. The problem? My son and daughter’s day care didn’t open until 7:00. Which meant that if I got to work by 8:00 it would be a miracle.

There WERE people on special schedules. One person worked 7–4 simply due to traffic issues. One person worked 9–6, simply because he did not like to get up early (I swear to God, that was the reason). So, I thought it was quite logical to ask for an 8:30–5:30 shift.

Guess what? I was told NO. The reason? “We don’t do special schedules anymore.”

Okay, fine. My review comes up. I’m marked down because I’m 15 minutes late every day. This goes on for a year and a half, 2 years. One year she dings me badly for the 15 minutes. I talk to HR. They take my side, knowing I have asked for a special schedule and could have been given one.

Paid lay-offs are offered while I am on vacation, yet I don’t get the paperwork. One of my friends gives me the papers, I fill it out, and submit it. Her first question was, “where did you get these papers? I didn’t leave any for you!” Another trip to HR.

She finally submits the papers for the paid lay-off, after 4 months of waiting, and isn’t happy about it. I told her it was her fault for giving me bad reviews instead of agreeing to a special schedule.

My last day comes. I have a buddy in the mail room. All the big bosses work in the same building. I have been working on a letter about ALL her transgression with a copy of all our memos back and forth as supporting documentation. I wrote to her bosses boss and up the chain all the way to the Regional President. I also wrote HR and asked that a copy of the letter be put in her file.

I took the letters, gave them to my guy, gave him a huge hug and said, “Elvis is leaving the building.” Only at that time did he put it in the inter office mail. Every big boss got a letter about her antics, her favoritism, her lack of professionalism, etc.

I found out that she was demoted 6 months later and ultimately fired a year later. Yeah, I smiled when I heard that.

My former employers owe me $1,300 USD. (Their business failed due to their own incompetence)

Afterwards they had to get jobs of their own. They just dissolved their business and decided not to pay anyone for their final two weeks.

So I reported them to the department of labor and industries. Their paychecks are being garnished by 25% until all of us are paid.

It will take a while, but it feels good.

Got my degree and wasn't able to get a promotion at my current company. Let my boss know I was looking for a new job and handled the move professionally. Left on good terms.

Started my new job, at a significant bump in pay, and quickly discovered it was nothing like the DBA job I had interviewed for. Instead of managing databases I was expected to learn a proprietary coding language created by my new boss. There was no documentation and he treated everyone like an idiot if they asked questions while trying to learn. After 3 months I had a review. I was told I was doing great and given a raise.

I continued learning and persevering through my bosses abuse. 3 months later I was pulled into another meeting with my boss and his boss. I was told I wasn't meeting expectations, although they wouldn't explain how, and told to sign a document putting me into a lesser position at a significant cut in pay. If I didn't sign I was told I would be fired. I signed and immediately started looking for another job.

I called up my old boss and asked for a reference. She told me she would do so happily, but I should know she had just submitted a job requisition for a new position that I would be perfect for. We discussed it and I agreed it would be a fit.

I went through the interview process and got the job at a higher salary than my new company had started me at. The only problem was that they couldn't bring me on until January 1st (it was Oct). I said that was fine.

For the next three months I made sure to use all my vacation and did next to nothing while at work.

I scheduled vacation for the last week of the year. On the last business day of the year I came into the office handed in my laptop and a letter of resignation that was effective immediately. They were actually surprised that I was quitting.

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.

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 :)

Not me but my father. He was working for an IT company developing software, but ended up being asked to help out in sales for a few weeks as their department was short staffed for some reason. He turned up and found that his new colleagues really didn't like him, for no apparent reason (though he suspected it might be racism).

Within the first few days, he'd scored a few sales and his manager had actually offered him a job in sales, but he turned it down as he preferred having a set salary, rather than commission. The reason for his relative success was down to two factors:

Networking;

Several subscriptions to professional IT journals and magazines.

He had started by calling people he knew and then he started calling people he'd read about in magazines, while the rest of the department were apparently relying on cold calling. Furthermore, having helped write the software he was selling, he could actually explain what it did, while the rest of the department ... well ... they couldn't.

At the beginning of his second week in the department, he took a long lunch break as he had to visit a dentist and got back to find a woman was being congratulated on her success making a big sale to a company he had planned on calling that very day. When he got to his desk, he noticed things weren't as he'd left them and noticed a list of people and phone numbers he'd planned on calling had vanished. It doesn't take a genius to figure out what had happened while he was away. Rather than let it slide, he decided to get his revenge ...

The next day, he made up an excuse to be out of the office in the late morning and early afternoon, spending his time back in the software department. When he returned this time, however, things were a lot more sour.

As before, he had left a list of potential customers on his desk and, as before, the woman had taken it off his desk while he was away and started making calls. The problem is that one of the phone numbers wasn't for a company, but for the wife of her boss, who her boss was currently in the process of divorcing. And the name he had listed next to the number was the mistress of said boss, the reason they were getting divorced.

The boss wasn't happy at all to get a phone call from his soon to be ex-wife's lawyer, accusing him of getting his staff to harass her. She got fired, didn't get any commission for the big sale she'd made the previous day and my dad ended up finalizing that sale in the end as he explained that, by shear coincidence, he had gone to university with the guy the woman was dealing with.

A few weeks later, she accused my dad of plotting and setting up the whole thing, but, by this time, he was back in his old position and the guy in charge of the sales department had no power over him.

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.

I left him dangling in the wind with no recourse.

I was a contractor for a large IT company. After we wrapped our 18-month project, the original manager moved to a different job, and it was a good move on his part.

His replacement was, however, a real piece of work. He was dismissive of the progress we had made before he took the helm. Moreover, he consistently pushed back and then cancelled meetings. And, without ever meeting with anyone, he declined to hire us back for the next phase of the project.

Instead, he just wanted us to fill him in. So I wrote up the math and statistical analyses I had done. It was only 25 pages, and he never even read it. Instead, he had me stop by to explain it. Ten minutes into a one-hour meeting, he said he didn’t like the approach and dismissed me.

That’s when I found a new job and left ahead of schedule.

A month later, his managers were asking him to explain the math and statistics from phase 1. It was all in my document, which he’d received via email and hard copy from me. For whatever reason, he’d lost all his copies and needed my help.

I declined since he’d already gotten four copies from me. Besides, he had said he didn’t like it anyway. Apparently, his managers weren’t too impressed with that answer.

I once worked (NO laughing!) as a night watchman in a mattress factory… It was a pretty good third job, because all i had to do was punch some key boxes once every 2 hours, to demonstrate that someone had been there to make sure that foam rubber was not spontaneously combusting (burning foam rubber is very toxic, and hard to extinguish).

The business was in a low lying industrial area on a river, and the bus ride was long, the stop in a pretty scary place. My husband would ride with me there in the evenings, but in the early morning I would take the bus on my own to the YWCA for a shower, and on to my day job.

The business was not doing as well as they needed it to, partially because they had lost a delivery driver willing to go to all the tiny rural towns down through the Catskills where small family shops bought foam rubber for furniture manufacture.

Long story shortened significantly: I ended up driving to these towns on my days off from my other day job, now tallying up to *4* jobs. The pay schedule was every 2 weeks, 3 days behind. I get to work on payday and discover that I will not be paid for 2 1/2 weeks of night mattress supervision, or the 2 weekends of some of the most terrifying mountain driving I have ever done, in a heavy truck, with lousy tires, on narrow, winding, roads, some in very poor condition.

I quit, and let my employer know that although I was just a little person, and there was nothing I could do to make him pay me, but God saw that he was cheating me of my wages, and that it was wrong… and I called my husband to come meet me early for the bus, and left.

By the time I got to the overpass to meet my husband, a flash flood had wiped out the factory, and the huge blocks of foam that mattresses are cut from were floating down stream like giant bars of soap! The bus did not come, so we bought a bottle of wine and spent much of the night watching them float away. They done got smote.

The final chapter of this adventure did not come for over 3 years. The place hadn’t come to mind in a very long time, when I got mail containing a check for the wages for my last 2 1/2 weeks at the foam factory, and letter that stated they had been trying to find me for some time, and finally hired someone to find out where I had gone, with a plea that I let God know that we were square!

I worked in a unit with a supervisor who treated the women like s##t. He was always cordial to the senior guy and disrespectful of our senior woman who was studying to become an attorney. He picked on another woman in our unit who was quiet but she was a good worker. Our supervisor was Bob, his real name. So ..one morning I left an anonymous letter accusing him of treating women badly and favoring men in the unit. Needless to say it created a furor and embarrassed Bob a lot. The claims manager went on the hunt for the letter writer but never found me. I'm not sorry I did it because it put a big spotlight on Bob's crap behavior, which was my intent. Being in the spotlight made good old Bob tone it down a LOT. He was a jerk.

I was hired at an Internet/Cable company to build their business intelligence program from the ground up. From the beginning, the data team didn’t want to give me access to their data, the sales team didn’t want to see my fact-based reporting, the service team didn’t want to know what customer surveys said and my boss, while supportive in the big picture, didn’t understand why any of this was a problem.

I was working 60–80 hours per week, fighting an uphill battle, and getting little recognition for it.

Over time, I fought for, and got the data, and started showing results. I showed the people who doubted me how accurate reporting and timely information was useful to improve their performance - not to make them look bad, and earned their respect.

Then that boss left.

His replacement treated me like crap. He didn’t listen to anything I said. When I say didn’t listen, I don’t mean “didn’t do what I wanted.” I mean, he would ask a question, I would answer him. In the next meeting, he would ask the question again, get the same answer (from a man, invariably) and only THEN would he believe it. I don’t mean he didn’t like or implement my suggestions - I literally mean he wouldn’t hear them if they came from a woman. He had the same behavior toward the director of IT, who was a woman. He would re-check anything she said with one of her male subordinates.

It was 100% toxic.

So, I quit. No job lined up. No solid prospects - I just left.

My old boss recommended me for a job at his new company with better pay, better benefits and a much more positive work environment.

I’ve been there for five years now, and I love it. I make twice as much as I did at that old job, and not only do I almost never have to work overtime, I have half a day blocked off every week just to spend time improving my skills, getting to know my coworkers, or preparing for the next week.

That company is still limping along. They didn’t go under without me, and I don’t care. The bad boss got fired from first that job, and then from a couple of others. I don’t know what he’s doing now, and I don’t really care. I’m fine and as long as I never have to work with him again, it’s all good.

Company hired me as a contractor, then refused to pay. The next company I worked for, did some business with them, for quite a lot of money. A few weeks in, I went to have drinks with the COO and talked about how that company had stiffed me.

Turns out to be the last straw for the company to switch suppliers. The company that refused to pay me took a very big hit, got in trouble and had to sell itself to a competitor 2 years later.

All I did was tell the COO exactly what happened, so it wasn't actually revenge. But man it felt good!