Employee gets the chance to perform a petty revenge on ex-coworke and takes it: ‘Things fell apart when our office manager flipped a switch and suddenly hated some of us and split half the team onto her side’

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Olivia Arocena • Writer and Editor
Aug 7, 2026 4:00 PM EDT

The art of pettiness

I'm going to throw my most superstitious take out there: Life always presents you with an opportunity to perform some degree of petty revenge on someone who wronged you in the past. It works like this: you have a fall out with somebody; at first you're very angry, and as time goes by, you begin to let it go and focus on yourself until one day, out of the blue, life puts you in a position to interfere with that person's life without you actually searching for it.

If you decide to take the petty route and cause an inconvenience in that person's life, as long as said inconvenience is relatively minor, I think it's fair. As I always say: revenge is a dish best served petty; or whatever. The only one who will enjoy this will be you; the other person will never know about it and will think of it as bad luck, and the balance of justice will return to equilibrium.

I'm definitely a petty revenge advocate; I can't see anything wrong with it, and I especially love it when it's anonymous. The only one who needs to know who did the harm is yourself; it's done for your own pleasure. To try to claim your authorship is callous.

This employee not only was presented with the chance to be vindictive, but he also took it, and it was done elegantly:

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  • man in suit celebrating success at office desk
    via Vitaly Gariev

    The employee after his petty revenge

    Representation

  • I loved my first job until I didn't. We were a small agency that started out as a well-oiled machine and got along great. Things fell apart when our office manager flipped a switch
    via Jiggy_With_it74
  • and suddenly hated some of us and split half the team onto her side. It got real toxic real fast. I'm not gonna go into too much detail, but suffice it to say one by one our side resigned.
    via Jiggy_With_it74
  • At my second job, I handled incoming online concerns for a large bank's social media page. (This was before chatbots were widely implemented) Most of it were inquiries for
    via Jiggy_With_it74
  • services i.e. applying for loans and credit cards. Lo and behold someone from team a h le popped up with a message. I don't remember their specific concern, but we did have a
    via Jiggy_With_it74
  • system for issues like stolen credit cards and fraudulent transactions. Her problem wasn't that urgent, but it *could* have qualified going through a special process where I
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  • can send it directly to a bank agent to address it in a timely manner. Instead, I sent the equivalent of "we are a social media page and cannot handle your
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  • concern" and suggested they go call the notoriously bad bank hotline, where it could take up to an hour to be connected to an agent. It may even take multiple call attempts over several days to address a problem.
    via Jiggy_With_it74
  • a smiling woman wearing a headset at a computer desk
    via BaljkanN 4

    The call centre he had to call to

    Subject is a model

     

  • It wasn't the most satisfying revenge, but at least I f ed with them a little bit. Lol
    via Jiggy_With_it74
  • Hungry-Young 739 Honestly, making them suffer through the bank hotline is way more evil than anything you could've done in-office.
    via Hungry-Young739
  • Coder Joe1 Revenge you can bank on.
    via CoderJoe1
  • ransom0374 Hope that hold music is chill and good (lol. Right..)
    via ransom0374
  • pink pig coin bank
    via Andre Taissin

    'Revenge you can bank on'

    Illustrative image

  • I have the feeling that bots will not solve banks' customer service problems: they will make them worse. Now not only will the bots fail to solve your issue, but you will also spend hours trying to find the right set of words just to reach a real life customer service representative who will most likely fail to solve them as well (just like they did up until now).

    In this case, this Kafkaesque chaos works in the employee’s favour , so he can finally let go of his bitterness and forget his coworker completely. The tables have successfully turned.

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workplace-stories toxic-workplace work workplace toxic-work-environment
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