Nobody likes to be petty, but what’s wrong with a little harmless revenge?
Many thanks to the Redditors who responded. You can check out more answers from the source at the end of this article.
1. Kid stole my water bottle. I opened it up and left it inside his backpack.
spartan-44
2. My sister posted a very anti-LGBT article on Facebook when the North Carolina bathroom bill was passed. She claimed she “no longer felt safe” shopping at Target if she might “be forced to use a bathroom” with a trans person. (The horror!)
So for her wedding the following month, I got her a Target gift card.
XOXO,
Your very gay brother
MusicOfTheAinur
3. Someone in my office would always crush lunches with his gigantic lunch box. Either he ate bricks or lead, I don’t know, but 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.
AR3Leatherworks
4. My Ex cheated with a married man. He now lives with her. He is a POS.. but anyway, I still have login for her DVR. I logged in, erased all her shows, then recorded only the show “Cheaters.” Petty, but it makes me laugh.
redman2532
5. 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…
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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.
caca_milis_
6. My wife is very picky about the mugs she has for different hot drinks: Tall mugs for coffee, wide mugs for tea, dainty cups for fruit teas.
When she’s being irritating and asks for a cuppa she gets very plain, boring builders mugs and I delight at the mild irritation it brings.
SailingOnFishlessSea
7. Speeding up a coworker’s double click speed and watch him squirm when his normal double clicking speed isn’t working.
reloadingnow
8. I once had a colleague I didn’t appreciate, 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 curser right up. Kept it going for like 2 months. He was about to murder the world when I thought I better stop.
WhereTheFatRolls
9. 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.
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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 crap 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.
failing_forwards
10. Listing a Playstation 4 as brand new on multiple second hand goods websites, for $50. I used my old landlord’s phone number as the contact number, ‘cos that guy was malicious.
He had to change numbers.
coffeeislife_SA
11. I have two with a previous landlord / property management company.
I signed a lease on a townhouse while in college that “included high speed internet” … the setup was basically one awful router for 14x townhouses (so like 28 people). Needless to say it was crap, 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.
The other was 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”.
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… 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.
Sidekicknicholas
12. We had a guy in our office take a crap in the bathroom every day after lunch and it would stink up the whole office. The manager asked everyone who needed to vacate their bowels to please use the lobby bathroom since our office was small and we only had the one bathroom. He didn’t listen. Fortunately, he was like clockwork so 5 minutes before he went in I took all the toilet paper…. that’s right. I forced the man to live with a dirty bottom.
Link-to-the-Pastiche
13. I used to work as a sound tech part-time at a nearby bar when studying for my computer science degree. It was great fun and even kinda relevant to my degree (and gave me a great excuse to binge on audiophile equipment).
So basically every Friday night we would give a slot to a band from the college to perform for an hour or so, and this rich guy’s son would always turn up in some band or another. He had all the fanciest gear (Fender Strat, distortion pedals, etc.) but his technique sucked. But to anyone who would listen, he was the next Jimi Hendrix blah blah.
One thing about this guy was that he loved to pump his volume through the roof and play these crunchy chords with the distortion amped to the max, in the process drowning out the rest of his band members.
So instead of hooking up to the mixer and then through to the PA system, I just routed his signal through to his in-ear monitors, and every time he performed his “solo” he would gyrate around the stage for no apparent reason.
Really the most petty thing I’ve ever done, but revenge is sweet. (I heard he still plays amateur guitar through the grapevine)
jskyejet
14. My boyfriend’s uncle and 7 year old cousin live upstairs from us. His cousin has a tendency to be a little brat. I was holding her yorkie when she came over and yanked her from my arms.
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No more than 20 minutes later I went out and bought some dog treats. Everyday when I come home I give the dog a treat. Now the dog waits by our door instead of her’s.
Dween_Deedles
15. This dude in my accounting class in high school used to ask me for answers to questions, only to spout them to the teacher like he’d worked them out, thereby looking like a genius and getting credit for my work.
One day our teacher comes into class with a pierced tongue and is talking sort of funny. Terry, as his name is, proceeds to use it as a point of conversation. “Hey miss, do you have any other piercings, like your ear?” “No,”, she responds, thinking he’s making inane conversation. “Would you get your nose pierced?” He keeps asking, just to prolong the time before class starts.
As usual, he leans over asking for help. “What are some other good things to ask her?” I was annoyed that he always asked for my help to benefit him, so I thought I’d have some fun. “Labia, ask if she’s going to get her labia pierced.” “What is a labia?” he says. “Oh, sorry, it means eyebrow, that’s like the piercing name for it. Like how a tragus is that nose piercing, yeah?” “Oh cool! Hey miss, are you going to get your labia pierced next?”
Every girl, and especially the teacher, in the class looked at him like he was trash, and he tried blaming me, but I brushed it off gracefully.
aidyfarman
16. 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 realise 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 dude.
bladesman393
17. I had a 6 month school internship at a mobile phone store. The boss was a total jerk that treated his school-interns like full paid workers (even gave me some concerning money-responsibilities).
A while after the internship he called to tell me I would have to give a statement at court.
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He had a problem with some customer and a shipment and he planned to tell the court that he explained me everything concerning shippings precisely. Of course he didn’t. And of course I didn’t lie in front of the judge. My boss’ attorney gave me a look I will never forget when he realized his stupid plans didn’t work out. Few weeks later my now ex-boss tried to call me again. I didn’t pick up.
overbread
18. 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 pissed 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 pissing 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.
hardybe
19. Work related- 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.
sippistar
BONUS:
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 and 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!
Orange_Kid
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