There is an old expression that revenge is sweet, and revenge is often expressed in a way that makes people feel better. It should be because most people who are seeking revenge are doing so because they have been slighted in some way or another.
If revenge is sweet and it is something to be savored, then most people should tryto get revenge anytime they have been wronged. That being said, there is always a possibility of issues occurring, which is why people often avoid seeking revenge rather than going forward with it.
If you are one of those individuals, then you will appreciate the stories of revenge we have for you below. You can live vicariously through them in amazing ways.
1. Want Things Done Your Way, Mr. Architect? You’re Wrong, But Okay
So this dates back to 1998. I had been working construction for a year as a drywall finisher “spreading mud” when I was offered a job on a big crew. The only reason they wanted me was to be a translator between English and French, I was good but not fast or great at this point, but, hey, $18 an hour was good pay.
We were working on a 5 story building, it was the first time I really had seen just the bones of a building. For those who are unfamiliar with this era of construction, I’m going to give a little background on how it worked on sites this big.
Each company had its own construction trailer, no one really had email so each trailer had a couple of phone lines and a secretary.
This building was for a real estate company, it was to be their headquarters. It was designed by an architect in New York as a favor to the owner of the building.
So here’s where the problem goes. My boss Aland (Al) had all the framing, hanging the drywall, finish the seams and acoustic ceiling. “Ceiling tiles with metal grid.”
Al goes to the general contractor with an issue on the 3rd-floor training room.
Al: we got a height problem with the 3rd-floor ceiling.
General contractor: what’s wrong now?
Al: he’s got it at 4ft off the floor.
General contractor: wait, what???
Al: yeah, the ceiling’s reflected plan and elevation show 4ft off the finish floor.
If I scale, it would be 12 ft…
General contractor: yeah that doesn’t sound right, go ahead and send a request for information.
Back then request for information was different than today, usually meant someone was going to have to pay.
So Al faxes over the request for information and marks it urgent. When the request for information comes back they were sent to both the General contractor and the subcontractor.
So I’m sitting with Al and the General contractor just chatting around and both secretaries come out to the site almost running with high heels through the debris, and both with a crap-eating grin on their faces.
I’m thinking oh crap this should be good.
Al and General contractor: slow down ladies. Where’s the fire?
General contractor’s secretary: you got an urgent fax
Al’s secretary: we got the request for information back. (Looking at the other secretary giggling)
They look at their paper then look at me and the general contractor reads it out loud.
request for information #xxx from the office of Jerk architect inc
Urgent request information of discrepancy on ceiling height from Aland office about training room xxxx
Answer: How hard is it for you construction workers to understand never scale anything? I DON’T MAKE MISTAKES. Refer to page A804 for detailed height instructions.
Cue malicious compliance.
General contractor: well Al what does A804 say about ceiling heights?
Al: 4 ft bud.
General contractor: hey Frenchie do you think you can translate that to the ceiling guys, and tell them it’s a hot priority I want it done by Sunday.
Al: you heard him. Tell him to drop what he’s doing and go to it.
Me: 10-4.
I go to the guy and they greet me with a, are you nuts kid? I tell them what had transpired and told them that Al said to make it 4ft. They grumbled saying they would charge to do it again.
Now, this training room wasn’t your typical space, it was 300 feet long by 40 feet wide that could be separated to make multiple training rooms or one giant one with a folding partition.
Monday come General contractor instructs the electrician to install all the lights as per prints.
“Yes even his prints had 4 ft notation,” typically we would wait for electrical inspection but we didn’t.
By Wednesday the Crew is putting tiles in.
Saturday comes and there’s an owner meeting where he walks the job site with the general contractor and talks about progress.
Everything is going good till he gets to the 3rd-floor training room door and sees a bar 4ft from the ground and all the wires for the ceiling are in plain sight.
Owner: what in the heck is this, don’t you know how to read blueprints?
General contractor: Yes sir we do and we did. We also sent an RFI. (Shows him the fax.)
Owner: (grins) Yeah he definitely has an ego from heck. Do you have everything documented pictures and all…
General contractor: you know it.
Owner: ok smart guy, now do it at 12 feet. 4 feet from the deck. You’re making 20% on this *******, aren’t you?
General contractor: 20% to the billed invoice. We’re going to have a demo crew come in, then all new material plus the crew already said it’s going to be a 50% upcharge since we’re preventing them from going to their next site.
Yeah, just be happy it’s not coming out of your pocket.
Because the architect gave wrong information and it was built as per his guidelines he had to fork out a few thousand out of his pocket to us dumb construction workers to fix his mistake.
2. Only Want To Pay For Shipping And Not Handling? If You Insist
This story is from close to 20 years ago, but it’s stuck with me from how bizarre it was at the time.
It was the early 2000s. I worked in a very small company (three employees, including the owner) that operated entirely online.
We created custom graphic items for personal and professional use based on designs provided to us by the customer (similar to laser-cut stickers). Most of our orders were submitted online through a website, but we also took orders over the phone.
We often had crafters who would order from us who would incorporate our product into their crafts to then be sold at craft fairs or in craft shops. For example, they’d buy sheets of the alphabet in different fonts to customize plaques and the like.
This story involves one such customer, who placed her order over the phone. This was 20 years ago so I’ve paraphrased the conversation for the most part since I can’t remember specifics, but it was pretty close.
I was the customer service associate, so I took all the orders.
I picked up the phone with my usual cheery, “Thank you for calling (Company), this is (OP), how may I help you?”
IMMEDIATELY, without a hello or anything, she launches into her order. “I want six Alphabet in (Font A) at size 1, 2, 3, 4.
Seven Alphabet in (Font B) at size 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. Seven Alphabet in (Font Q) at size 4, 5, 6, 7…” (again, not the actual order, but an approximation of how rapid fire she was ordering).
She went on and on, in the fastest voice imaginable.
I couldn’t get a word in edgewise to ask her to wait so I could grab a sheet of paper to actually write down what the heck she was ordering. I was trying desperately to keep track of what she was saying while searching for a working pen and a notepad.
She had a voice like a rusty lemon if that makes sense. Her voice instantly made me envision Aunt Spiker from “James and the Giant Peach,” with all the warmth and friendliness that entails.
Anyway, she reels off a laundry list of separate things she wants to order in a myriad of sizes and fonts, and also some stock images we offered. It was going to be a pricey order.
When she finally stopped talking (the only way I knew she was done ordering), I read everything back to her, updating the earlier stuff in the order that I hadn’t been able to catch because of my desperate search for a pen.
As I’m reading it back I’m typing the order into our financial software to get a grand total for her.
“Okay, ma’am, that comes to $100 plus shipping and handling, which is $30.” Yeah, shipping’s expensive.
“I don’t want to pay for that.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I don’t want to pay for handling.”
This was new to me. I’d had people argue about paying for shipping in the past but never explicitly argue about paying for the HANDLING.
“Um… I’m sorry, ma’am, we can’t ship you the items without handling them.”
“I don’t want to pay for handling. Shipping’s fine, but not handling.”
“Sorry, ma’am, I don’t know what to tell you. We can’t ship an item without handling it.”
She argued with me about this for five minutes before I finally said, “Let me see what I can do, ma’am.
May I put you on hold?”
My boss was not in and the only other person in the office was at lunch so I just made the executive decision to do what she wanted. I took a moment to get my thoughts in order then got back on the phone.
“Okay, ma’am, we’ll only charge the shipping and waive the handling costs.”
She sounded as happy as a rusty lemon can sound. I told her I’d email her the invoice along with the proofs of her order for her to approve before we actually cut the material, then hung up.
I put together the digital proofs for her order and her invoice. We charged a flat S&H rate for orders based on the total cost of the order, and I couldn’t change it to take off the amount for “handling”.
It was what it was. So on the invoice I manually removed “& Handling” from the line item that reads “Shipping & Handling,” and just left “Shipping – $30.” Then I created an additional row that read “Handling – $0.” I attached it all to an email and sent it to the customer and half expected her to call me back and complain that the shipping cost alone came to as much as the shipping and handling combined and that she wanted to cancel the order and I was a terrible person blah blah blah.
Well, that didn’t happen, and we shipped her order out the next day. I told my boss about my solution to the weird problem and he was fine with it. It came back to bite me, though, because that same woman called back regularly from that point on to order more products and I had to manually edit her invoice EACH TIME.
It was a hassle and a half. I left that job a few months later, but my first order from Aunt Spiker the Fast-Talking Anti-Handler has stuck with me in the years since.
3. You Would Rather Lose Thousands Than Pay Me A Few Bucks? Fine By Me
I used to work for a company about 15 years ago that involved constant travel every month, both domestic and international. We were based in New York but a lot of people lived all around the US, which worked out since we rarely had to travel to New York if we played our cards right.
There were two main ways of making this work. You could volunteer for an assignment before your normal rotation started and they would fly you from your home to the work location, or if there was work at/near your home location at the start of your rotation, you could just start at home.
If you did the second option, they would pay you (at a reduced rate) for the time it would have taken to fly you from New York to your home city where you’re now starting your rotation. The travel pay was minimal, it was paid 1 hour for every 3 hours of travel but it was a win/win.
The company saved funds on airfare and you got to start close to home.
I was living in Hawaii at the time. There was a lot of work in Hawaii so I was fully taking advantage of the option to start in Honolulu.
Since it was a roughly 10-hour flight from the east coast to Hawaii, I got paid about 3 hours and the company didn’t have to buy someone airfare to get there – win/win.
This company could be very petty and aggressive towards its employees at times.
It was a really strange company culture. They would fire or suspend people on a whim along with other questionable practices. For example, I witnessed 2 employees get fired for being in minor fender-benders with minimal damage and no injuries. The kicker was they even fired their immediate supervisors over it.
It was totally random when they would go off the rails with someone so everyone walked on eggshells. It was a terrible place to work and I was trying my best to find another job but the job market wasn’t that great at the time.
I was able to avoid the petty drama for the first year and a half that I worked there but it finally caught up to me. One day, I noticed they weren’t crediting me with the 1:3 travel pay for starting in my home city.
Sometimes that happens and you just need to call in for them to fix it. Up until now, it hasn’t been an issue. So, I call in to inquire about it and I’m told that they don’t pay travel pay.
I remind them of the policy and that I’ve been using it lately without issue. They transfer me to a manager who tells me that it has never been a policy. I tell this manager that as recently as two months ago I spoke to someone in their department to arrange it and it wasn’t a problem.
The manager tells me they are going to research it and find out who it was and counsel them. At that point, I remembered the person I spoke with two months ago was this manager. So I informed them that they were the ones that fixed it last time.
Their response was “oh, well we don’t do that anymore”. I said “ok” and ended the call. Apparently, I made them mad somehow. I have my suspicions of what happened but whatever. Malicious compliance activated!
The next month, and just about every month after that, I volunteer to start early for an assignment in Germany.
Now, instead of paying me 3 hours of pay for the flight I don’t have to take, they are now paying the pay and airfare to fly someone else to Hawaii while also paying for my business class airfare from Honolulu to Germany (along with the pay for the travel).
They’re paying several thousands of dollars in airfare to save paying me a hundred dollars. I kept this up until I was finally able to quit about 6 months later. I got a lot of airline miles out of it as well.
They also had a policy where if you were working in a place where they knew you lived or had friends/relatives that you’d stay with, they wouldn’t pay you the per diem if you canceled the hotel reservation they had for you.
So everyone would just check in to the hotel and then go stay at home or with friends/relatives. Now, instead of saving finances on the hotel, the company was paying for the hotel AND the per diem.
This kind of thinking was common at this company.
If they thought you were getting something too good, they would spend all kinds of funds to make sure you didn’t get anything, even if it didn’t cost them anything or if they were saving some bucks in the process.
A few years after I left the company ended up going out of business. No doubt thanks to their shortsightedness and mismanagement.
