My friend and I were fishing at the local creek when his brother pulled up. He was thirteen and a total jerk, the kind who thought tormenting us was hilarious. Without a word, he started chucking rocks into the water to scare off the fish, and then he grabbed my friend’s bike and hurled it into the creek. My friend burst into tears.
I felt so bad for him that I jumped straight into the water, fished the bike out, and told him we’d get his brother back someday. About a month later, in the dead of summer, we were fishing again. I told my friend that today was the day. We caught a big carp, maybe two or three pounds, and I slung it up on the bank where it baked in the sun all afternoon.
At the end of the night, we went back to my friend’s place. His brother’s car sat parked on the street. We took the rotting fish, sliced it open, shoved it under the driver’s seat, and rolled the windows three-quarters of the way up. The next morning, I rode past the car and noticed the window looked black.
Curious, I took a closer look. It was coated in flies. I honestly got scared for a second because I hadn’t expected to see a window completely caked with them. By the time I got home, I was laughing so hard I had tears in my eyes.
Three days later at baseball practice, my friend showed up with a black eye. He caught my eye and smiled. Turns out his brother had flipped out, run into the house, and punched him right in the face. Their mom lost it and grounded the brother for the rest of the summer.
She swore my friend would never do such a thing, and he played dumb, acting like he had no idea what she was talking about. The smell never really left that car. We nicknamed his brother Lord of the Flies after that. When I worked as an assistant manager at a small video store, there was this customer who made everyone’s life miserable.
He harassed every employee, including our boss, so I finally got fed up and threw him out. The guy was just a mouthy, nasty piece of work. Later, I spotted him in a nearby strip mall, bragging to a couple of buddies about how he was cheating on his workers’ comp. He waved a wad of cash under their noses and told them he was getting all this free money from lying about an injured hand.
Now, if you looked in the blue pages of the phone book, you’d find a listing for a Workers’ Compensation Fraud Hotline. And guess what the video store had on file for every customer? Full name, home address, and phone number. I turned him in and gave them every detail about exactly how he was faking his injury, since I’d heard him explain it all himself.
I used to live in a very small town, maybe 250 people. We had no stores or gas stations. Then this local guy opened a little shop selling basic groceries and renting movies. He hired a few of us high school kids to work for him for the summer, promising fifty bucks a week, paid at the end of the season.
We stocked shelves, cleaned the bathroom, did lawn care, whatever he needed. On the last day, he handed us our paychecks. It was fifty dollars total, for the whole summer. We weren’t happy, but when we complained, he just said, “What are you going to do about it?
Drop the key off at my house since you won’t need it anymore. ”
So we made a plan. Before locking up for good, we left a window unlocked. Then we dropped off the key at his house.
Around midnight, we came back, climbed in, and grabbed everything we could carry: cigarettes, cash from the register, candy, probably a thousand dollars’ worth of stuff. We locked the window and slipped out through an emergency exit with no alarm. There were no cameras either. The next day, the cops showed up, and he accused all of us, but he had no proof.
A few months later, he had to shut the store down because the whole town heard how he’d cheated us, and nobody would do business with him anymore. I don’t feel bad. The guy deserved it. During the last year of my marriage, I was spending a lot of time out of town, commuting three or four days a week for work.
One night, I was working remotely and decided to do some upgrades on our home computers. I remoted in and noticed the connection was dragging. I ran some network traces and found that my wife’s computer was doing a video chat with someone in another state, a state where she had no family that I knew of. My curiosity got the better of me, so I started paying closer attention.
Her instant messages weren’t encrypted, so I watched those too. Over the next few weeks, I kept my mouth shut and collected evidence, mostly Yahoo and AIM conversations. I’d also installed security cameras around the house because we’d had trouble with neighborhood kids, and eventually I caught footage of some guy coming and going, at one point even driving my car. I still said nothing.
If I confronted her, she’d just lie and find a way to make me look like the bad guy. I figured out who he was and gathered more data on him. Then he made a huge mistake: he plugged his laptop into my network. I’m a network engineer and security admin by trade.
I know how to monitor networks and fiddle with data. My wife knew that, and the guy she was messing around with knew it too, but he was still dumb enough to play around in my domain. I started grabbing usernames and passwords, email accounts, AIM accounts. I rerouted all their web traffic through a proxy so I could watch everywhere they went and how they logged in.
Eventually I hit the jackpot. The idiot ran a well-known gaming forum that was a major source of revenue for him, and he logged in without SSL. He thought it was secure because vBulletin hashed the password before sending it, but if you know the hash, you can use it just as well as the password itself. I used his admin credentials to create a few hidden admin accounts for myself, giving them inconspicuous names and backdating the creation dates to make them look old.
At that point, I could have wiped his whole site, but that would have been too easy to fix. A simple backup restore would undo everything. Instead, I came up with a better plan. Every day for three weeks, I logged in and deleted random posts older than six months, until I’d purged everything older than that.
He finally caught on and killed one of my admin accounts. So I quickly assigned admin privileges to my wife’s account and deleted all my other ones. She called me in a panic because her new boyfriend was flipping out, convinced she was the one who’d hacked the forums and deleted everything. Thousands of posts were gone, and a full restore would have wiped out three weeks of new posts, so there was no clean way back.
As the only other admin, she was the obvious suspect. I played innocent. I told her I didn’t even know he had a forum until she called. There was no reason I would have known.
They never connected his use of my home network to the site getting destroyed. To this day, the forum only allows new members through referrals from existing ones. They never figured out what happened. That incident wrecked whatever he had going on with my wife, and she was left stranded when I told her a month later that I was divorcing her.
I’d kept enough evidence from their messages to get my closure. She still has no idea how much I knew about her second life. When my brother and I were kids, we played baseball in our front yard all the time. One time the ball rolled down the hill into the neighbor’s backyard.
We went inside to grab another ball, and in those five minutes, the neighbor marched up the hill and pounded on our door. Our mom answered, and he flew into a rage, screaming about those goddamn kids ruining his lawn. She tried to calm him down, but he pulled back his fist like he was going to hit her, and when she flinched, he laughed and spit on our doorstep. My brother and I saw everything.
We declared war. We were smart about it. We waited until it wouldn’t look suspicious, and we spread our moves out over years so everything seemed natural. We were never caught.
I remember pouring female deer lure into his car’s and his house’s AC intake vents. We saved up shards of glass and nails and scattered them at the end of his driveway. We bought concentrated weed killer and doused his prized shrubs and flowers. When they went on vacation, we put sugar all over their doors and windowsills, hoping bugs would get in and nest.
I still don’t feel guilty. The guy was a huge jerk then, and he’s still a jerk now. During college, I worked at a sandwich and coffee shop. It was a cool place, and I got along with everyone there, except my boss, who was the biggest jerk in the world.
On payday one week, he gathered all the employees and told us we wouldn’t be paid until the next week. Fine. But when the next payday rolled around, he still didn’t have the money. This went on for a month.
We were all working under the table, and he warned us that if we quit, we’d never see a cent. We later found out he’d never planned to pay us. He was spending everything on cocaine and gambling. Then he stopped showing up for about three weeks, leaving us to run the store ourselves.
So we gave away everything in the place. Literally emptied it out. Anyone who walked in got their order free. We even threw a party one night with an open mic and everything.
When he finally showed up, he looked like he hadn’t slept in a week. He came in screaming, threatening to beat us up, throwing things around. I was in the back and noticed his truck was double-parked outside, so I called the campus towing company a block away. While he was losing his mind at us, one of the employees said, “Hey, your truck is getting towed.
” He ran outside and watched his Escalade get hauled away. We all slipped out the back door and never looked back. I worked as a server in a fine dining restaurant in a touristy Florida town. The owners, a husband and wife, were known for being cruel and petty, but it was 2008 and I’d just been laid off, so I had to take anything.
On top of that, I was engaged, paying for the wedding myself, and planning a move to New York City. A few examples of their cruelty: the dyslexic server who trained me was fired a week after I started because he took too long writing the specials on a chalkboard, even though they knew he was dyslexic. His replacement was fired for selling the wrong bottle of wine. She sold a $125 bottle for $35, and the owner made a point of telling the customers at the table, “I hope you’re enjoying that wine.
It’s actually $125, but don’t worry, you don’t have to pay for it. Your server will have to. ” The table was furious at being trapped in that position and gave her an awesome secret tip to cover the cost. She finished out her shift, paid the full $125, and was fired on Christmas Eve by text message.
Then there was me. I kept my head down as much as possible. I noticed that any bit of personal information you shared with these people, they used it against you. The wife owner would follow me around the front of the house, berating me in increasingly strange ways to try to humiliate me.
Once she met my fiancee, she’d make little jabs like, “She doesn’t seem too thrilled to get married” or “She probably expects better,” then laugh it off as a joke. My strategy was to put up with it, keep saving money, and not let it bother me. She figured that out quickly and got downright sadistic, pushing to see how far they could go before I broke. I sucked it up for two years thanks to alcohol, no backbone, and financial desperation.
My breaking point came when she asked me to take away the chair our hostess was sitting in, even though no customers were around. Sitting on the job might be unprofessional, but the hostess was an elderly, sick woman working outside. She was here illegally from Hungary and never dared call in sick because she had to put up with everything they threw at her. Rather than talk to her or take over, the owner wanted me to snatch the chair without explanation.
And I did it. I actually did it. The hostess understood, though. What could she say?
She gave me a look of understanding that I’ll never forget. I got a few feet away, turned, looked straight at that awful woman who’d asked me to be cruel for her amusement, and put the chair back. She didn’t say a word. She just gave me the cold shoulder for the rest of the night.
Two weeks later, I was closing out my tips and receipts with the husband owner. I’d counted my bank beforehand like I always did, and everything added up. But he’d secretly added a cash ticket to my till for $150, and it showed on the report he printed one minute before running the cash out. I questioned it and told him I’d double-checked my math, so he must have made a mistake.
His response was, “If you don’t like it, there’s the door. ”
That sealed it. I knew what was happening. My brain kicked into disaster mode.
I refused to pay him and said I’d be back for my next scheduled shift and we could sort it out then. He said, “Screw you. Get out. ”
I was fired, which was important, because I didn’t quit.
I was a month away from moving to New York with my fiancee to start a career in my field. I just needed one more month of saving every penny, and I was out. This pretty much destroyed me. So I filed for unemployment, citing the reasons I was fired.
The office contacted my former employer for verification, and he claimed I was fired for stealing wine and that there were witnesses. My claim was denied. I disputed it, and it went to adjudication, basically a phone hearing between him, me, a case worker, and any witnesses. And that’s where I got my revenge.
The employer was notified by mail of the hearing date. The letter explained the process and told him to line up witnesses and materials, and that he had a window of time to reschedule if needed. An unemployment worker had explained all this to me over the phone before the letters were sent. So I paid an anarchist punk guy with beer to steal my former employer’s mail from the unemployment office and bring it to me.
He never got the letter. Before the hearing, I also reported them to ASCAP for playing copyrighted music without paying dues, which came with a hefty fine. Then I reported their crooked payroll practices to the IRS, specifically how the wife owner listed herself as an employee to cover for several illegal workers and underreport earnings. I even dropped a dead fish into the gutters above their patio, waited a week for the rats to appear, and called the health department.
At the hearing, the owner was caught completely off guard and tried to reschedule. He wasn’t allowed to. Per the letter he never received, failure to attend automatically resulted in a ruling for the other party. So he stayed, and we held the hearing without his fake witness.
I stayed calm while he got angrier and angrier, but I answered my questions in a way that really worked his temper up. The key question put to him was: “Had he not stolen any property, would you still have fired him? ”
He slipped and said yes. The ruling came in my favor.
A few weeks later, I got a check for all the months of back pay—enough to get me to New York. They struggled to keep their doors open after that and were drowning in financial problems. Years ago, my dad lived in an apartment building with assigned parking, one designated spot per tenant. He kept coming home to find some guy parked in his space.
He’d asked politely several times, and even the landlords wouldn’t do anything. One day, dad came home, found the guy in his spot again, and decided that was it. He’d worked on cars since he was thirteen, so he kept a jack in his trunk. He jacked the guy’s rear-wheel-drive car up off its back tires, which gave him full control.
He pulled it across the lot and left it hidden behind a dumpster. Then he let it down, packed up his jack, parked in his own spot, and went upstairs. Later that day, there was a knock at the door. It was a police officer with the inconsiderate neighbor behind him.
The officer asked my dad what he’d done with the neighbor’s car. My dad looked him right in the eye and said, “He parked in my spot, and I’ve asked him several times not to. So I lifted his car up and set it by the dumpster. ”
Now, my dad is six-foot-five, was really well-built back then, and has only one eye.
The fake one never fit right, so he has a permanent madman look. When he told the officer he’d physically lifted the car and pointed to where it was through the window, the officer’s eyes went wide as dinner plates. He turned to the neighbor and said, “Sir, I recommend you never park in this man’s spot again. ”
The guy never parked there again.
In 2009, I deployed for six months to Helmand Province in Afghanistan, running weekly missions from Leatherneck to Now Zad. We were the only unit that ran that route in the entire AO. It was that bad. A month into the deployment, I’d been in my first real relationship for six months.
It was long distance, since I was stationed in North Carolina and she lived in New York. We were planning to get married, but my staff sergeant gave me a speech, and I decided it was best to wait until after the deployment. She was already cheating on me four months into the relationship. I took it hard.
That was all I thought about for the entire six months while I waited to get home. We had some of each other’s stuff, and I never got mine back, but she’d given me this tiny dancer trinket to wear on my dog tags. Her mother had given it to her before she ran off, so it meant something to her. Five months into my deployment, her new boyfriend, a level three sex offender who she’d left me for, went back to prison for a probation violation.
Then I got a Facebook message saying she’d just found out she was six months pregnant and it was mine. There’s no way you just discover you’re six months pregnant when you weigh one hundred ten pounds soaking wet. It was a sham to get me back. There was no pregnancy.
Six months later, I arrived home. I went into the Subway where she worked, and sure enough, she was behind the counter. She started to say, “Welcome to Subway,” then cut off mid-sentence when she saw me, horror on her face. I walked up to the counter, looked her dead in the eyes, set the dancer trinket down, shook my head, turned, and walked out.
I could hear her start crying before I reached the door. I’ve done much better since leaving the military. I have a great job, an amazing girlfriend, and a nice townhome. I’m about to get a dog.
I’ve never blocked her on Facebook, but her updates don’t show up in my feed anymore. It’s nice knowing she can watch me succeed without her while I know her life is falling apart. About once a year, she messages me to ask how I’m doing, and it always ends with a depressing rant about how she messed up and wishes she’d never cheated on me and left me.