Chris Wahl
Revenge might be a dish best-served cold, but let’s be real—sometimes the pettiest acts bring the most satisfaction. You know, those small, perfectly calculated moves that make you feel like an absolute genius. When someone on Reddit posed the question, “What’s a petty revenge you’re gladly proud of?”, the responses were nothing short of legendary.
From brilliantly creative paybacks to the most subtle acts of defiance, these stories show just how sweet the smallest victories can be. So check out some of the most hilariously petty tales shared by our fellow internet users.
# 1
I stained my wife’s brand new white tennis shoes one time. When I woke up, I found she had taken one shoe lace from every pair of shoes I own and frozen them in a block of ice.
# 2
When I was 19 my then girlfriend sent a tape of her cheating on me with an acquaintance. I was devestated so I sent that video to her parents. She wasn’t allowed to leave the house after that lol.
# 3
When my ex boyfriend and I broke up, he moved out and packed everything that was his. I later realised that he had taken all of my Tupperware lids and just left the containers. As annoying as it was to be left with lidless containers, I was in awe.
# 4
Built a FB page for my job since they desperately needed one. However, I did it under my personal FB account. Several years later I quit following a long history of abuse and toxicity. I still owned their (very active) FB page so I deleted it.
# 5
I worked Comcast technical support. I had a customer that was so rude and nasty to me over the phone I spent the next 8 hours of my 10 hour shift constantly resetting his modem and cable boxes. It felt so good.
# 6
A former employer (a small cafe) fired me for something that never happened and since their business broke so many health and safety rules (no hot water, dirty conditions etc) I decided to anonymously report the business to the council and got them closed down for weeks so that they could resolve the issues before reopening.
I didn’t get them closed down entirely sadly, but I love that I cost them so much money.
# 7
My boss kept leaving his favorite coffee mug in the break room sink, despite a sign asking staff not to do so, for the housekeeping staff to wash. I was friends with the housekeepers and resented this. So I hid his coffee mug in the back of a cabinet in the mail room and then pretended to help him look for it. It stayed there for years.
# 8
Not mine, but happened to a family member’s coworker. He apparently ghosted some girl he went out on a few dates with, and in revenge, she posted some sort of online ad of his car (something like Acura/Lexus level, I don’t fully recall the brand) for ~$1k on fire sale with some excuse that he was getting deported.
She posted his real cell number, so he kept getting inquiries for a few weeks before he ended up changing phone numbers.
# 9
Went to give a guy a 10% raise. He said that’s what you give a janitor. I told him great idea, so I rescinded the raise and walked over to the janitor and gave him the $ increase the other employee was set to receive ($10,000) annually.
# 10
I signed an a*****e neighbor up for Scientology literature. Then, I ordered a gay magazine under her husband’s name to her neighbor’s house.
# 11
Comcast wouldn’t let me out of My home internet with a $10/mo ETF when I moved out of their service area. I was pissed enough that I reached out to a few national ISP that could provide service to our 20 data centers. Negotiate a new lower contract that saved the company a million over 10 years. Not a lot in the grand scheme but enough to justify the migration effort.
I took great pleasure in telling our Comcast corporate rep exactly why I was dumping their million dollar a year contract.
# 12
Stayed in an AirBnB in Lausanne for 3 months and when I got there it was absolutely filthy. Rotting bananas in the fridge, bins not emptied, layer of dust all over the place.
The agreement I had signed beforehand said to “leave the apartment as clean as it was when you arrived” so I went out of my way to stop cleaning the place two weeks before I departed, I made sure to fill up the bins and I even bought bananas to leave behind in the fridge.
When the guy gave me a bad rating I replied with before and after pics and wrote that I had merely fulfilled the agreement.
# 13
Back in high school, I was around 14 and sat very close to the classroom door.
One day, someone knocked, and I opened it without thinking. The art teacher got mad and told me not to do it again because she didn’t give me permission to open the door, asking if I thought I was the doorman.
I was shocked because I didn’t think it was a big deal.
Thirty minutes later, there was some knocking again. I waited for the teacher to tell me something, and she did—she told me to open the door. I simply replied, “I’m not a doorman; come and open the door yourself.”
She sent me to the principal to get a reprimand, but I didn’t get any.
# 14
Playing the long game. I was “the weird kid” in high school. Bullied, threatened and pretty much a social outcast.
Fast forward to getting sent pictures of my 30th high school reunion. I did not attend. Everyone was hugely overweight. I am still very fit. Most of them were balding, and I still have all my hair. Still happily married. Not rich, but doing alright.
Living well is the best revenge.
# 15
Was staying in a shared dorm at a hostel in my mid 20’s. My roommates were a group of really inconsiderate people who’d talk at full volume at all odd hours even when it was very visible that I was sleeping. The morning I had to leave was immediately after a night on which they’d been partying and went to bed late. I set an alarm on my phone for 6am, with the most annoying tone I could find, locked it inside my locker in our room and went to an external bathroom for a nice long shower at 5:55am.
45 mins that thing rang at full volume in my locker before I returned, woke everyone up. I just had to apologize for “forgetting” to turn it off.
# 16
A girl screamed at me in a public transport, truly for nothing – like some minor inconvenience. I was pregnant at a time, so it bothered me more than it would otherwise.
We took a few stops in the same train, after which I had to change the line, so I exit but continue waiting on that stop.
As it happens, the girl sits right next to the window that I am very close to from the outside, so I decide to play a game, just for the shits and giggles: I take out my phone and pretend to take a close-up of her face while she is staring at me. I was always told that I have this face of a mob wife or a resting b***h / evil queen face, so it didn’t surprise me to see this pure horror on her face while I was “taking her photo”. She starts to scream at me and stands up to either leave the train and beat me up, or to go sit somewhere else, but the veichle starts moving and I just smile and wave at her casually ?Of course I didn’t take a photo, nor would I ever take a serious revenge on someone, but the fact that she was probably worried for a day pleased me.
Never make a pregnant lady mad.
# 17
I secretly leased an apartment, hired movers, and then packed everything I owned in about an hour and moved out of my emotionally and physically abusive b***h of a girlfriend’s house while she was at work without her having any clue that I had been planning it for months. Let her come home to a house with half the stuff gone and no trace of me having ever lived there.
# 18
I was arguing with my boyfriend and he started blasting music. He wouldn’t turn it down when I asked so I turned off the breaker and he didn’t know how to turn it back on. This was like 13-14 years ago and it still makes me giggle when I think about it.
# 19
I was a teller at a credit union years ago. A customer came in and started barking orders, acting as though I was her assistant rather than just someone to take deposits. The whole time she name-dropped the credit union board members, the CEO in particular. I just kept my head down and took care of her transaction. As I finished, I told her I could tell the CEO she said hi if she wanted.
She smirked and said, “Oh, you know him, do you?”
I smiled and said, “Yes, I’ll see him at dinner tonight. I’m dating his son.”
She blanched, grabbed her stuff, and darted out the door. As I suspected, the CEO didn’t even know who she was until I explained who the deposits were for.
# 20
My ex (who cheated on me) loved a show on Amazon Prime that I never watched; after we broke up, I saw him post about having watched the penultimate episode and being excited for the finale, and I realized he was still secretly using my account… I promptly cancelled it, because I never really used it anyway. Sorry, a-hole.
# 21
I was fired from a job when I exposed the new boss’s ineptitude. I asked for a reinstatement but was denied. So went to a group of attorneys that handled litigation for software companies. Told them how this company would buy a new copy of an application and install it on 400 workstations. And copy the manual, and train employees on these and acknowledge in class that everything was pirated. The owner is using company funds to pay for his mistress’s Lexus lease and her rent. He also was so cheap he tried to ration consumption of pencils. With my evidence, the attorneys sued and won $250k from the owner. That hurt him bad. My regret is he survived writing the check.
# 22
Guy at my job tried to get me fired via manager and owner because he wanted my position(I had better shifts and made easily twice what he did) and got caught stealing and fired. I saw him out and about a year or so later and he lost his house and wife over it.
I guess it wasn’t really revenge because I let it play out… But it still brings a smile to my face a decade later.
# 23
Mayor of the town was my neighbor, I had backyard chickens not hurting anyone… He got a law passed to make it illegal. So I bought wild turkeys (protected wild life in my area) raised them then at night would put feed on top of his car and teach them it was there…. Used to crap all over it.
Also buried a barrel of rotting fish at the property line with a small vent covered by a plant…
And lately put a motion sensor sprinkler where some random guy from up the street walks his dog on my property to let it crap first time it went off I died laughing.
# 24
Years ago I lived in a six plex with my ex. There were three people (one man and two women) who recently moved in above us who all worked in the restaurant industry. Almost every weeknight they’d come home at 2:00am and proceed to BLAST their TV which was located above our bedroom. One night I finally had enough and went upstairs to knock on their door. The man answers and I proceed to ask him why his TV is so loud. He then informs me that it’s probably the SUBWOOFER. I ask him if he could turn it down and he responds with something along the lines of,
“Well, after a long shift we all like to wind down and watch a movie. Turning off the subwoofer would decrease the quality of the experience.”
I asked if he was serious and he just stared at me blankly. So I went back downstairs and informed my then gf of what happened and we devised a plan. All she had to do was take my dog to the office with her the next day. Little did the neighbours know that I had a full DJ setup ready to go with two KRK Rockit 5 monitors.
I woke up at 5:00am to take my dog out for his walk and get ready for work. I then proceeded to make a playlist full of the most annoying songs I knew and put them on a constant loop. Songs like Hamsterdance, Friday by Rebecca Black, Cotton Eyed Joe, Crazy Frog etc. I set everything up so all my gf had to do was hit play on her way out at 8:00am, which she did.
Never had to deal with the subwoofer again.
# 25
When I was 7, my brother tried to play that age old prank on me where he offered me a soda that he had previously shaken up. Somehow, I felt that something was off and instantly guessed the real reason he was offering me that soda. Ah, intuition.
I accepted the soda and, when he wasn’t looking, did the ole switcharoo with his soda and mine. I drank from my new soda and watched him open the tampered one.
Mwahahahaha.
# 26
When I worked in retail I hated this one staff member, she would act like the manager and was just absolutely awful to be around, one day I was serving this angry a** customer who was just absolutely rude and when I asked her if she wanted a bag she said yes so I scanned the bag (it was 10c) and she started going off at me that she has never paid for a bag and that she always gets the bags for free so I asked her who gives her free bags and she said it was the co worker I didn’t like… so in a moment of pure pettiness I called my manager over and when he asked what was happening I told him the co worker has been letting customers steal items from the shop and the look of pure horror on the customers face when she realised what she has done was absolutely fantastic, the manager then called the co worker over and Infront of the customer told her she will be charged for stealing if she ever does that again. I will forever be proud of little 17 year old me for being this level of petty, it was amazing.
# 27
Not something I did but something I witnessed. Good friend of mine divorced her husband, after she kicked him out of the house, he came back one random night and dug up the all plants in her garden and took them with him. It was so labor intensive and petty that she wasn’t even mad. She just laughed and said she was so impressed she’d almost take him back if he’d put THAT amount of work into the marriage in the first place.
# 28
Had a bully roommate at summer camp some 30 years ago that made my life a living hell. The day before I left I took his toothbrush and scrubbed one of the toilets spotless with it.
# 29
I work as a postman, and when I’ve finished delivering I have to take packages for people who weren’t home to the post office to hand in for collection. They’re small, local post office shops so I have to go in and take it to the counter with the public.
I went in once and went to the side of the counter to wait until they’d finished serving someone and then they get the machine I can scan to drop things off. It takes about ten seconds, and they can then go back to serving customers while I check them in.
This one woman was incensed that I’d ‘pushed in’ and even as the staff member was trying to explain it would just take a second and she’d be right with her, she loudly made a scene and insisted that she be served first, and that I had no right to push into the line in front of her. Also mentioned she was double parked and would get a ticket if she took too long. (Also f**k you if you do this. Park somewhere else and walk). The staff member shrugged at me and apologised and went to serve the woman.
The thing is, as it turned out the woman was coming to collect a package that I was dropping off. I heard her give the name and address and realised that I was holding it in my hands, but I allowed the staff member to go searching for it. She couldn’t find it of course, and it was actually earlier than the time I’d written for collection anyway, but the woman insisted she needed it today.
I let this go on for a good ten minutes before saying ‘oh, what was that name again, I think I have it here’. The staff member and I knew each other, she knew exactly what I’d done, and she was FINE with it.
Woman stormed out after that, then a minute or so later stuck her head back in and said she had a ticket and that we were going to have to pay it for it because it was our fault.
Yeah, we didn’t pay for that ticket.
# 30
I had a supervisor once who repeatedly made comments towards me that made me feel uncomfortable. DMing me saying I’m beautiful and wanting to take pictures of me all the while in work meetings.
Eventually I told a colleague and found out I wasn’t the only one, he’d been saying the same thing to multiple women at the company. We did more digging and found out that he had a history of this behaviour even at previous companies. We went to HR and he got let go.
Then I joined a new company and a month later he joined too. I found out that in between those jobs he’d harassed a receptionist to the point she openly cried and quit her job. So when I saw his name pop up I went straight to my current HR and told her what I’d experienced. He was immediately let go before he could repeat that behaviour.
From then on I’ve made it a personal mission to tell every woman in my industry about this guy. F**k him.
# 31
Hotel I used to work at had a room that permanently smelled weird because a previous long-term occupant had simultaneously operated both a candle business and a puppy mill. General policy was not to put anyone in that room unless it was the only room available (and that time of the year, it wasn’t). People who were jerks when I checked them in and only there for a night or two… got put in that room.
# 32
I pissed on a dudes man door to his garage for over a year. It started to stink so bad he had to replace the door. The same guys garage had its electric coming through my garage. Me being an electrician put a switch on his circuit. Id wait until he was doing something then turn him off so he thought he tripped the breaker. My buddy had the garage with the breaker panel in it so id let him know it was me just fuckin with the guy. My buddy would just walk over and id turn it back on then wait for the pissy door guy to start doing shit and turn him off again. At that point he would usually just get frustrated and leave. One day i forgot to turn him back on so he called the landlord and again me being an electrician who do you think the landlord called to investigate the issue? That’s right he called me. I straight told the landlord it was me turning his shit off because he always leaves his stereo and air compressor on. He just laugh and shook his head and left… He never told me to stop. Lmfao
