When we were young, we didn't really see the gravity of our actions until it was far too late. What might seem like a harmless prank or act of revenge can have serious ramifications on all involved parties. The people in the following stories can attest to that.
(Content has been edited for clarity.)
He Thought He Was So Smart, Until…
Veja/Shutterstock
“When I was a teenager, my friend and I went to one of those day camps that picked us up in yellow school buses. One of the other kids on our bus was a younger boy I’ll refer to as Eli.
Eli was a terror. He would scream and spit and hump things, make a mess, and be as annoying and insufferable as possible. Riding the bus with him was a nightmare for everyone involved most of the time.
So I came up with this idea. I found his family in the phonebook and called up pretending to be a camp counselor. I told his mom that he was misbehaving on the bus and that he would either be disciplined or kicked out of the camp if he didn’t stop.
She bought it and said she would talk to him about it. I felt so incredibly smart. Until the next day, when a quiet, sullen Eli showed up with a black eye.”
The “Axe-cident”
“This one kid was constantly bullied by a group of rednecks. One day when he was at McDonald’s they showed up and started taunting him and berating him and so he left and went to the tractor supply store next door. So he’s walking around and they followed him and started taunting him again and just being pricks. Next thing you know the bullied kid picks up an axe from the aisle and hits the leader of the bullies in the face. Everyone called it the ‘axe-cident.’
The bully didn’t die, but he’s got a pretty gnarly scar to show for it. They left him alone after that.”
What She Did Was Terrible, But What He Did Made Her Leave School
antoniodiaz/Shutterstock
“I had a girlfriend cheat on me, lie about it when I confronted her and gave her the chance to come clean and work through it, then stalk me after I broke up with her. We were quite young, so it was all very overdramatic, but I did love her a lot, and was hurt by what she did. At the same time, I was very done and not interested in reconciling. She didn’t get the hint.
I asked her nicely many times, then not so nicely, then demanded she go away. She would, for a while, but then she’d show up, wasted, and try and pick fights, insult me, and be sincerely hurtful. I eventually had enough. I told a couple of people in her school (different from mine) what she’d done, with gory details (she’d sucked off her ex in his car). I thought she’d get dragged for it and that would be that.
Well, it turns out she was a terrible person in all other aspects of her life, too. Apparently, she was loathed at school, and people jumped on this news like starving beasts on fresh meat. I had texts and IMs from people I didn’t even know asking to confirm the news, which I ignored because I was really done with the whole situation by now. I eventually heard from other friends at that school that people had not let it drop and had even stuck posters around the school with pictures of her, announcing what she’d done. The posters offered her um…services, along with her phone number, and photoshopping bananas into her mouth. It was brutal, and she had to change schools her senior year.
I did feel a bit bad. If I’d known it would go that far, I might have rethought telling those people. At the same time, she hurt me badly, she refused to leave me alone despite months of chances, and the other students reacted so viciously because apparently, she was a total jerk to everyone in the school. I didn’t expect that, though.”
They Literally Caused Their Teacher To Have A Nervous Meltdown
Ollyy/Shutterstock
“In high school, I had this shrew of a biology teacher. She’d explode in anger for no apparent reason and gave out detention like it was nothing; we hated her. Part of the biology curriculum focussed on the ‘birds and bees.’
Suddenly she went on sick leave for a couple of weeks, but eventually came back. After some time, we learned that she had a miscarriage. We immediately knew this was our way of prepubescent payback. Every day in biology, the whole class asked if she could explain ‘the birds and the bees’ again.
After a couple of times, she snapped, started crying, and stormed out of the classroom, never to be seen again. Immediately, we realized we went way too far. I eventually heard she quit teaching altogether, and was even institutionalized for some time. It makes me feel bad 25 years later.”
How Snitching Can Have A Serious Snowball Effect
sunabesyou/Shutterstock
“I was jealous of a kid in my senior-year creative writing class. We had to submit weekly fiction pieces and everyone in class would read each others’ stories and discuss in class. This guy never wrote his own pieces; he actually had the balls to submit short stories he found online. Our teacher was not technologically savvy and way too trusting of his students, so it was never obvious to him. The kid received glowing praise every week in class and it infuriated a lot of people to sit there and watch the teacher gush over this fraud.
I finally decided to do something and snitched. He was nailed for cheating and failed the class, resulting in a failing grade for his English requirement.
This was problematic for him because he had applied early decision to one school and it was now late into our senior year and he could no longer apply to schools. Because of a failing grade, this crushed his GPA and somehow the university was also made aware of the cheating. They reversed their admittance and he had to spend a year at home.
During that year at home, when he otherwise would have been at school, he was hit by a car and is now paralyzed from the neck down.”
This Is Messed Up On So Many Levels
Aleshyn_Andrei/Shutterstock
“In 7th grade, I had a female classmate who was dating with an older dude (he was also a student of the same school, just older, maybe 10th grade). Eventually they broke up after a few weeks, and it was pretty ugly. I don’t know the details, but I know that after the break up, the guy posted nudes of this girl on Facebook and some other sites. This CRUSHED the girl.
The same day the pictures got out to the internet, she tried to commit suicide by jumping off the roof of the school (it was a tall building). She climbed out to the ledge and tried to jump off to the inner courtyard of the school (so there were no outsider witnesses). Only reason she couldn’t do it was that her best friend pulled her back at the last second and probably saved her life or saved her from being crippled for the rest of her life.
The dude didn’t even get suspended, just got a warning note from the headmaster. The girl? She had a rough time. After she tried to commit suicide, her mother sent her away to another city for a few weeks into a mental hospital. Eventually, she managed to come back from and could finish that year but after this incident, she started sleeping around like crazy.”
He Had To Have Known This Would Happen
PKpix/Shutterstock
“There was a girl on the bus. We’ll call her ZB. She was not a nice person. She played truant all the time, but her dad was friends with the head of our school, so she got off scot-free. She made fun of other kids, kept one guy on the ropes and then webcammed herself getting intimate with her boyfriend to him. She was just a dumb mean witch in general.
One day, I was talking to my friends and made a silly joke about something sensual, and she just chimed in with an awful comment about me being ‘out of my depth’ and cackled at my then teenage lack of a girlfriend. Just standard rude stuff. She did this twice more over the week. I was going through a depressive phase at the time, so I just felt down about it.
Then a few months later, a friend told me that ZB had got an abortion over the summer. At first, I was just bemused, then I realized what this meant. So I added ZB on Myspace posed as a generic hot guy and commented how cute she was. She instantly added me, naturally.
After a few days of playing charmer, I then proceeded to send her random pictures of aborted fetuses and damaged uteruses for about a week.
She quit school at the end of that term and left for good.”
That’s One Way To Stop A Bully
“A school bully repeatedly knocked a binder from my best friend’s hands every single day while we walked down the hall. Now we were in high school back in the pre-Columbine era, so people didn’t freak out as often when kids did messed up stuff.
I convinced my friend to stick tacks through an entire side of his binder, turning it into an extremely dangerous spiked weapon and just hold on extra tight while waiting for the bully to come do his thing. The kid lacerated his hand pretty badly. After he slammed his hand down into it my friend held on and yanked back.
Bully didn’t try that crap again.”
The Long Con
FGC/Shutterstock
“Back in high school, I dated a girl for 6 months before she decided it wasn’t working out anymore and she cheated on me with about 6 guys and stole my iPhone and wallet to buy coke. I wanted to report her to the police like my parents encouraged me to and to prevent me from doing such, her brother jumped me while I was walking home with his friends and busted open my lip pretty badly and threatened to kill me if I reported him or his sister (this is South Florida, so I believed he would do it).
My dad got a new job and we moved to a new city, but I was still pissed about this whole situation, so I plotted my revenge. I created two fake Facebook accounts of a random hot girl and guy, spent some time making it look legit with friends and such, and added her brother with the girl’s account and my ex with the guy’s.
It wasn’t too long before he started with flirting ‘me’ and tried his best to get in this ‘girl’s’ pants. On the other hand, having already courted my now ex, I knew exactly what to say to charm her to the point that she was in love with me. This is where it all begins to get fun.
I started conversations between the brother and sister with dirty talk and pics with me as the intermediate thanks to google voice. Both of them had fairly typical south Florida bodies, so nothing really gave anything away, and I did a fair amount of photoshopping to remove identifiers in the room that may give away anything.
This went on for about a month and a half, totaling about 200 or so nudes between the two of them when I decided to reveal the curtain and send a group of unedited pictures that included key identifiers (face and rooms).
Oh holy Jesus, how crap went down. I only wish I had some way to see how they reacted. Friends who still lived there told me her brother moved in with his dad that week and that they no longer spoke.”
He Waited All Year For This Moment
Lydia Vero/Shutterstock
“My ninth-grade Honors English teacher didn’t like me. One of the reasons was that she didn’t like athletes because they would miss her class regularly to travel for away games. I played three sports, so I was missing a good bit of class. I was also missing class for academic stuff like math/science competitions and quiz bowl tournaments, but she was particularly bothered about me 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. And shocker, she didn’t check homework every single day, but always checked after away games.
She 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 response was that I was only doing 70% of my ultimate capability and the others were doing 90% of theirs. So I asked, ‘Does that mean my paper can be better than someone else’s but be 20+ points lower?’ She said yes.
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 for an academic competition, representing the school. And it was the biggest one of the year, 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 went to turn in the assignment before basketball workouts early Tuesday morning. She refused to take it because it was late, and she ‘didn’t recall’ ever suggesting that I could turn it in on Tuesday.
Her reasoning: 1) Another student that missed class 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 and 2) 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, the time that it took, plus it 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 ticked off about it, too.
This teacher prided herself on the fact that nobody had ever made an A on her final exam. She thought she was the toughest teacher. The last day of class she gave a few minutes at the end of class and asked ‘What’s your biggest wish?’ 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 five-point bonus question that asked those generic, ‘What was your favorite part of the class? What did you learn?’ We got two hours to take the exam, and students that finished early had to wait until the first hour was up so that there was just one point of people getting up and leaving rather than being distracting throughout. I finished the 100 questions in about 20 minutes and spent the remaining part of the hour just blasting her in the bonus question.
I said that I wasn’t 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 crap anymore and brought up a number of other little things that happened on top of that mentioned above. And I said that she was by far the worst teacher I had ever had and that the school was worse off with her teaching the entire freshman class.
The bell rang for the hour, and I was the only person of the entire 110 students to leave at the hour mark. I was just sitting out in the breezeway when the teacher found me, holding my exam, with tears in her eyes and told me to meet her in the principal’s office.
She was crying, screaming, and choking every minute or so there. After about 45 minutes of me spilling everything I’d gone through that year, the principal finally looked at her and said, ‘How much was the question worth?’ She said five bonus points, and he said, ‘Then just don’t give him the bonus points.’
I made a 98 on the final instead of a 103. 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. I couldn’t prove that she had altered my grade; I just had them 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).
That summer, the school decided to change to a 10 point scale and so a 90 was an A, making my B 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. Before I came along, the administration just thought it was a case of ‘students complaining about the hard teacher.’
Still, I think she deserved every bit of it, but I certainly didn’t think it would set in motion her getting fired. Though, again, she deserved it.”
Her Old-Fashioned View Didn’t Make Her Many Friends
wavebreakmedia/Shutterstock
“I had a homophobic teachers’ assistant in high school. One day, my friend and I were fooling around (we had been close, not love each other close, but calling each other ‘love’ and ‘darling’ was a normal greeting). When messing around, she sneered at us and said, ‘That’s not right; men shouldn’t be like that to each other. God doesn’t condone it.’
Well, my friend happened to be gay and offended. I wanted to make a joke out of it to try and defuse the situation. Only this treatment continued and we got treated like dog crap by this TA. We did the logical thing – we made posters and created a Homo Club, handed out leaflets, and put the posters everywhere. When we handed her our leaflet, she was in front of a lot of people, and simply refused to come.
Then the principal came around because he was interested in the club and the leaflet, and because there was a clause written in small writing that said, ‘We reserve the right to tell homophobic people to get lost.’
We explained the situation to him and he told us that he would look into it. By the end of the week, we found out that this TA had not only been fired but barred from working in any school again. My teacher, as it turns out, was batting for the other side, and had already reported this behavior to the principal in the past. They just needed more proof.
I felt really bad over the weekend because I made a woman lose her job and her profession. Then on Monday, I came in and EVERY SINGLE TEACHER had a copy of my leaflet and was laughing their butts off, so the regret slowly wore off.”
What’s Worse Than A Teacher’s Pet? Two Teacher’s Pets
Ronnachai Palas/Shutterstock
“When my friends and I were young (elementary age), there was this pair of sisters in our class. They were the epitome of a teacher’s pet. They only helped because their mother was the assistant teacher. Whenever the teachers would leave, they would snitch on everyone. Sometimes if they didn’t like you, they would make stuff up and you would still get in trouble.
My friends and I were quite annoying so we obviously got blamed for crap that we didn’t do. No matter what we did we were never believed in our innocence.
So we did the logical thing. We talked to every other student in the class and they shared our opinion of how much we all didn’t like these girls. EVERYBODY was fed up with them. So we wrote a paper stating all the crappy things these girls where doing, how everyone didn’t like them, and so on. We got about 90% of our classmates to sign this paper. Then we gave it to the principal.
I’m not 100% sure what happened next, but I do remember the principal coming into our class after recess and she began to ask if this paper was true and everyone who signed it agreed. A few days later, these girls were kicked out of school. Their mother was still the assistant teacher and she was crying about the whole thing. She would say we are horrible and how could we lie about her ‘angels.'”
“He Turned To Us With A Look Of Absolute Horror On His Face”
Sabphoto/Shutterstock
“During my junior year in high school, a group of us had gathered at a friend’s house to hang out. Someone had brought a two-liter Coke bottle that had been filled with some Patron. All but one of us had kept our drinking reasonable.
One guy had decided to get completely sloshed. He was stumbling around, being obnoxious, and making lots of noise before he started puking. We took him outside, but he kept coming back in the house and throwing up on the carpet.
We had finally had enough of his crap and decided to take him home. We loaded him into the back of my friend’s pickup and took him to his house. It was late and his parents were asleep. We opened the door and pushed him in. We could see him stumbling across the living room, through the front window. One of my friends was like, ‘You know what? Forget him’ and started ringing the doorbell and pounding on the front door. Our wasted friend stopped and faced us, with a look of absolute horror on his face.
We all hopped in the pickup bed and sped off. As we were driving away, we could see lights coming on all over his house.
There he stood, 16 years old, wasted and wearing vomit covered clothes. His parents were less than happy. We didn’t see him for a long time.
We probably should’ve just went outside with him, locked the door, and stayed with him until he had settled down and sobered up a little. I felt sorry for him after his parents had gotten through with him.”