We can't choose our coworkers, and sometimes, it's a real pain to interact with them day after day. But every once in a while...someone gets their sweet, sweet revenge.
If you wanna hear how people got back at their terrible coworkers, here are 15 stories from the BuzzFeed Community (and r/pettyrevenge) about people getting justice when it comes to someone they work with.
1. "This happened in 2019, when the infamous last season of Game of Thrones came out. Back then I was working a shitty customer service job, and because I was a student at the time, had to work late afternoon/night shifts. The company being permanently understaffed, there were usually two people on these types of shifts — in this case, yours truly and the person we will call Shitty McShit, who also worked mostly graveyard shifts."
"This dude barely ever showed up to work, and when he did show up, he would call his friends from the company phones to keep the line busy or just spend all his time eating and watching movies. Besides refusing to work, this guy was also incredibly rude and entitled (what I know is he came from money, but his parents made him work and he was not amused. He was 20-ish if I remember correctly, but threw tantrums like a three-year-old).
Now, night shifts were usually quiet and both me and Shitty minded our own business, but it wasn't the case that week. Some service was down somewhere and calls were flooding in, to the point where I barely had time to breathe between calls.
At some point, I notice Shitty's phone has been disconnected. He's logged off, and opened HBO to watch the Game of Thrones season premiere. While hundreds of calls and emails keep coming in. I go over to him and ask him to please do his damn job, and his response is 'Jeez, chill. It won't take long, I just really wanna know what happens on this episode,'
I didn't have time to yell at this idiot, and even if I had, it would've been useless. What I did instead is I went back to my workstation and messaged him what happened throughout the course of the entire episode, scene by scene. On Slack and email, with our team leader cc'd in. He slammed the keyboard and went back to taking calls. It made me feel better...but not good enough.
I knew his university schedule wouldn't allow him to watch the episodes right as they came out, so every week, I would religiously email and slack him a message containing all the spoilers, titled 'GoT summary — I hope this helps you concentrate on work!' Was it petty and childish? Yes. Was it delicious and beautiful? Also yes. Do I regret it? No."
2. "I quit smoking to get even with a coworker. She and I shared an office, but she wanted my job (which was higher), so she began complaining vociferously to management that her health was being affected by sharing the office with me. (This was back in the '80s, when you could smoke in your office.) Since I knew that she lived with a boyfriend who smoked, I knew her complaint was bogus. So one weekend, I quit smoking. When I entered the office on Monday, I had not been smoking for three days. I continued for the week, waiting to see when she would notice. She never did, and she continued complaining to management. After two weeks, my boss sat her down and told her that despite her statements, our office had been smoke-free for two weeks, and she never saw it. He suggested that perhaps she needed to find a job with a different office-mate since she had pretty well poisoned her relationship with us.
"I still don't smoke, and it's 40 years this year. So I thank her for her deviousness!"
—Anonymous
3. "Among the many egregious sins my former boss committed (including gaslighting me into returning to the office in mid-2020 when literally no one in said office wore masks or believed the pandemic was real), the worst was when he attempted to deny my bereavement leave request after my grandfather, who helped raise me and whom I was close to, passed away. He could see I was clearly not okay, then had the gall to say, 'It's just a grandparent. So what? I lost mine, too, over the weekend.'
"I saw red and nearly snapped, but somehow managed to stay mostly calm with only some sobbing. I had been struggling not to cry all day at this point. Fast forward about five months later as I'm approaching my final days with the company and I had accepted a new job closer to home and a far better fit. In a fit of pure fuck around and find out, I changed the lock screen image and desktop wallpaper on my work laptop to the most terrifying image of Gritty I could possibly find. Now my ex-boss, despite being a young Gen X person, is not good with technology. So now he wound up trapped with cursed Gritty staring at him with those cold, dead eyes."
—Anonymous
Gritty, for reference:
4. "A co-worker that has consistently been lazy and tries to sabotage my workstation while the manager is working (to show that someone is worse at their job than her) is routinely bringing in her dirty dishes for us to wash thinking we wouldn't care or notice. She got in trouble for leaving half-filled mugs of coffee in the storeroom until they had curdled so now she's dumping them for us to wash. I'm not paid to do her dishes, so I've taken to the habit of if I see them, I trash them. Surprisingly, she's not bringing in her dirty dishes anymore."
5. "Coworkers constantly misspell my name, so I have just started misspelling or completely making up new names for people in return. I don't do this when first meeting someone if they get my name wrong, but if it's someone I've worked with for years, I will call you Carla even though your name is Carrie. No regrets."
6. "One of my coworkers is a huge choosing beggar. Like, aggressively choosy to the point he will bully people who are buying him free things to get exactly what he wants. ... Unfortunately, the person who does all the food ordering and general paperwork stuff in our office is a super sweet older lady that isn't comfortable telling people no. One day we had pizza for a lunch meeting, and we all realized that the favorite pizza of everyone in the office...was obviously different. ... She straight up told me that [my coworker] had stood by her desk and basically berated her until she changed half the pizza to be what he wanted. ... The straw that broke the camel's back was when I noticed that he hadn't even touched the pizza. He was eating a different one.
"I decided to casually ask why he wasn't touching it. Come to find out he didn't actually want any during that lunch. ... He figured he might want some leftovers later in the week, so he had her change the order. So basically, this motherfucker bullied a sweet old lady...on the off chance he might want leftovers later.
"So you want to guess what I did. I ate it. All of it. I didn't want more than one piece, but I ate all six pieces...just so he couldn't have any. You can bet your ass he complained about it, too. I just looked back and was like, 'Oh sorry, did you want some during this meeting? 'Cause if I had known you wanted it today, I would've saved you some.' He glared at me for about a week and I felt like I just ate Thanksgiving dinner, but [it was] worth it."
7. "Three months ago, I decided to quit my job — as a parting gift, I worked extra hard to raise our targets. Long story short, I was transferred to a team with bad statistics, bad workflow, attitude...bad everything. It came to the point that when I said to a colleague, 'Please get back to work, there’s backlog,' it blew into a fight about how I’m a princess who thinks I'm better than the rest. ... After a year and half of arguments, attempts to tell HR how I ruined the team (for making them work), I left my notice at my manager’s desk. For the last three months of my notice, I’ve been working extremely hard, giving my 150%. Our higher-ups raised monthly targets three times already and will do it once again. But this time, they will not achieve them. They have never achieved them before I came. Petty? Very much. Do I care? No."
8. "They told me that if I were to leave tomorrow, no one would notice. Well, I quit last week, took all my stuff in the middle of the night, including the microwave, all cutlery, all spices, and all the pots and pans from the break room. I think they WILL notice."
—Anonymous
9. "The second I clocked in, my boss (let's call her K) pulled me aside for a serious talk. She handed me a write-up for discussing salary with other employees. I am paid a good bit more than others, being cross-trained and having relevant experience and education to back it up. The issue is, I'm paid more than the assistant manager, and she's pissed that I make two more dollars than her and has eight years with the company while I've been here only two months.
"My boss says it's a final notice — next time is termination as per company rules. I pointed out this is in violation of not one, but two federal laws, and she retorted, 'This is a right-to-work state. I'll fire you for chewing gum; don't press it!'
"I got home, did a little research, and found the exact place to help me: The National Labor Relations Bored. I talk to an agent who helped me through the process of filing a claim and helped me upload both the pieces of incriminating evidence, both with corporate approval, and my manager's signed confession of retaliation and corporate policy in clear violation of federal law. They can't really defend themselves when they drafted the incriminating paperwork to intimidate me. The real kicker is the penalty — on top of restitution to employees affected (me), they also lose government contracts. ... This hurts my job extra hard as a pharmacy. As a pharmacy tech, I know for a fact that 50% plus of our money is from Medicare and Medicaid programs that we will lose permanently. I've already got a job lined up, and I was planning on jumping ship the day my new one started, but I couldn't be happier to burn the ship down on the way out."
10. "I work with a guy, we'll call him Bob, who is a bit of a prick. ... The quick rundown is he's very abrasive, he talks down to people, he's creepy about women who visit the office, and he looks down on people who do manual labor for a living. ... He doesn't really know how to do data analysis, so I find myself more often than not crunching numbers for the guy. It's not something I mind doing, I actually like data analysis; I just don't really like doing it for him because I don't like dealing with him.
"I have, however, found a way to entertain myself with the way in which I present the data to him. You see, Bob is a die-hard Ohio State University fan. He grew up around there, he went to college there, and he will sing the praises of the only FBS Team not to score a point in a bowl game last season.
"My revenge: All charts and graphs I create for him are in the University of Michigan's color scheme of blue and yellow, and every chance I get, I try and slip a quote related to Michigan, wolverines, or media that references wolverines in any form. I'm not sure if he's noticed it yet, but it's getting harder and harder to subtly insert Red Dawn/X-Men quotes into my emails these days. Either way, I am entertaining myself, and that's all that matters."
11. "A group of us would go to lunch every week, and one of the guys always figured the check. After a while, it was obvious that he was overcharging the rest of us for his own benefit. One time, I insisted on figuring out the check, and I overcharged him. After stuttering around for a few minutes, obviously uncomfortable but unwilling to point out my math error, he pulled out his wallet and paid. He never cheated us again."
—Anonymous
12. "I used to work in a warehouse where one other girl and I worked in one area together, except I did all the work while she played on her phone all day in between occasionally yelling at me for stuff I didn't do. I'd hustle to get the job done, and I cleaned up on recognition from supervisors who saw me hustling. She tried to blow it off when she got busted for slacking but never did clean up her act. She even occasionally had the nerve to tell me to 'calm down' because I work fast and she looked bad in comparison just standing there. Eventually, I found another job, but I made a point of not bothering to mention it to this girl when my last day was.
"I knew she was going to be unpleasantly surprised by suddenly having to take over my job the next day, so I set her up to have the worst first day ever. I used up all the good packing tape and left out only the identical looking stuff that tore easily, I hid the good tape gun and left out the identical looking but broken one, and I unhooked the UPS scale. (When you unplug the scale, you have to restart the computer.) And I changed the password. Resetting the password was a massive headache because IT was terrible and inevitably took a couple of hours to do anything. The whole thing took less than 30 seconds, and I sabotaged at least half a day for her. I later learned she got fired for not doing her job. :)"
13. "For lunch, a group of my coworkers, our foreman, and myself would sit and each lunch in the foreman’s little hut every day. My seat was an empty-lidded five-gallon bucket and every day as I was getting ready to sit one coworker would kick it across the room before I had a chance to sit down. Everyone found it hilarious. It was funny the first couple of times but it got old. So one day I thought it would be hilarious to cut the bottom of the bucket off and then fill it with nuts and bolts and put the lid back on. That day at lunch we go in he tries to kick the bucket, of course, it goes nowhere and he angrily picks it up and tosses the bucket across the room. And of course, as he picks the bucket up all the nuts and bolts go spilling out of the bottom. It was hilarious and everyone in the hut was laughing. I had brought in a camping chair pulled it out and sat down and said, 'Damn man, looks like you have a mess clean up!'”
14. "I use my Deliveroo Plus account at work to get me and my colleagues lunch, who then transfer the money to me. ... This week, I realized that one colleague hadn't sent money for his lunch in four months. I told him he hadn't, and he replied saying I should have reminded him. He again ordered lunch with the rest of the group. I told him his total; he said he'd pay later, but didn't. I reminded him two days later, and he still didn't send the money for that week's lunch.
"I realized not only is he not going to pay for previous lunches; he also doesn't care enough to start paying for his lunches either. I created a spreadsheet with everyone on the lunch run's name on It, and all the different amounts people owed me. Obviously, everyone else was on zero, or a small amount. And this coworker was owing me just under £150. I then shared that spreadsheet with my coworkers. ... My colleague freaked out, and I told him that until he pays his outstanding balance, he won't be allowed to use my account for his orders and will need to pay his own delivery charge each and every time. He has since said that I'm mistaken on how much he owes, and I've told him I'm quite happy to give him a full cost breakdown."
15. And finally..."I worked in a kitchen briefly — summer job. The sous chef kept saying I was throwing away her cooking chopsticks even though I most definitely wasn't. She would go on to berate me and call me names. ... I had left a bracelet at work, and when I went to go get it, she said she didn't know anything about it. I ended up going through bags of trash before finding it at the bottom — she was the only one working that morning. I'd had enough of the treatment, and on my last day, I went in and took all her cooking chopsticks and left. I walked to a trashcan in town and threw them out."
Submissions have been edited for length/clarity.