'I had to keep a straight face': Employee gets back at petty coworker who keeps stealing their pens

When your coworkers keep stealing all your good pens, you start to wonder what can be done to stop them. It's kind of a small problem — maybe too insignificant to involve HR or your boss. Plus, you may not even be able to figure out which coworker keeps stealing your pens. Maybe you have a coworker who keeps stealing all your "good" paperclips, or continually borrows your stapler until it basically lives on their desk.

These things seem small, right? But in a workplace, you're in this microcosm of the world where it's just you and your coworkers with little outside influence. All of these small actions, when done 40 hours per week, can quickly brew resentment. When your coworkers take all the good gel pens, leaving you with the inferior ballpoint pens, it's going to annoy you. But what are you going to do? Sit down and write a strongly worded Slack message or something? Send one of those passive-aggressive group messages that's like, "Just as a general note, let's not do X and Y," when really everyone knows that the message is just directed at one person? No, no. You should get creative, which is exactly what this person below did in their beautiful tale of petty revenge on the pen thief coworker. 

Next, read about what happened when a 27-year-old man got called out by a 34-year-old woman for his interesting style of texting: "Is he using ChatGPT to talk to me?" 

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Author image for Remy Millisky Remy Millisky
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