Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Drygioni]

Revenge can be positively altruistic if it means some jerk'll think twice in future before being a twat.

Those guys I acided won't be messing with anyone who has a rudimentary knowledge of dangerous chemicals anytime soon.

[side_show]

Oh Teatime.  So kind.  And possibly missing out on fun.

Revenge story number one:  Call centre edition

Side_show sits in a call centre for an ISP.  The call centre is the size of two football fields and everyone is in tiny booths.  She knows she is only doing this job between university and when she begins the new job she's already been hired for, and will never be in a cubical again.  She has a peace about her because of this.  She goes in every day and never ceases to be amazed that people on the other end of the line are warmed up to treat her like garbage even though they are calling her for help, and even though she is friendly and will do all she can to help.  She doesn't let this bother her because she knows this is all temporary.  Side_show takes another call, and she makes sure to smile with her voice "How can I help you?"  The customer doesn't actually want help.  The customer is calling because he wants someone powerless to yell at.  This is why he has called customer service.  Side_show asks again and again what the problem is and offers again to help.  The customer screams and screams.  She gently prompts him until he finally screams - after about 15 minutes of nonsensical screaming - that he is calling to cancell his account.  She explains that she will be happy to do so for him if he will answer some simple questions to identify himself.  The customer screams some more he seems to think she should magically know this and doesn't want to give any personal information.  As he screams she gently draws out the information she needs to find and then close his account.  She politely informs the screaming man that his account is closed, and "is there anything else I can help you with?"  He hangs up.  She checks her watch.  The customer was yelling at her for nearly 25 minutes, strait through her break.  Side_show reminds herself that she is two weeks away from quitting.  She neatly jots the customer's number in her note book.  Two weeks pass.  On her final day, as her final action at this job, she goes back into this man's account.  She reopens the account.  She bumps it up to the highest monthly price charge, and places a block on his account that allows only a manager to alter the account.  She makes notes in the account noting that the customer called back to apologize for his previous outburst, and stated that the account was closed in error and that he absolutely did not want the account to be closed under any circumstance.

[linnea]

Jobs where you have to deal w/ customer service are the worst. An unfortunate byproduct of our dollar-worshiping culture is that people have this attitude of entitlement when it comes to something they've paid for, i.e. the worst types of people expect that they can do as they like and suffer no consequences. Some jagoff has a bad day and decides to take it out on someone that is "safe" to shit upon, which ends up being a customer service person on the telephone who is compelled to remain civil and cannot, under any circumstances, treat Mr. Asshole with the same measure of civility that he's dishing out. They physical separation makes it easier for someone to shit all over a customer service rep on the phone, because it takes a SPECIAL kind of asshole to unleash on someone face-to-face.

The promise of anonymity can cause some folks to unleash their "id", as Freud termed it.

[KeithHernandez]

because it takes a SPECIAL kind of asshole to unleash on someone face-to-face. 

I can at least respect (and sometimes am) that party person.  I mean, at least this person is accomplishing something.  Although, if we are talking about like someone going off at a person who works at a store then that is different.  If we are talking like personal relations (not even sexual, like roommates, friends, family), yelling ain't cool but it sometimes happens.  I mean, I am like a laid back person who doesn't let things bother me until they really bother me, if that makes sense (this is a very bad thing, I need to work on it, but I don't like having minor conflicts if they may be altogether avoidable).  For instance, I have done the dishes or taken out the trash the last 5 times it needs to be done, and each time the trash is full of beer that I didn't drink by the next day.  Then, I just put my trash next to it, hoping my roommate will take it out, but it never happens.  I hate living like that, so I will clean it, but after it happens for like 10 straight times, I will get crazy mad.  Especially when he just sits there and drinks while I do all the cleaning.  To be fair though, it is mainly our mutual friends who cause most of the mess, so I can't get that pissed I guess.  See, we live right next to the bar district, which is cool, but means you get a lot of drunk friend visitors.

I have worked a couple customer service jobs and they ain't so hot.

[Lister]

Side_show's story is another reason why I am glad that I am angry to people in relation to how much at fault they are (which means in nearly all cases, none at all).  One of the big other people is if you explain calmly what is happening and are nice and tell them you know it isn't their fault, sometimes they are nice in return and do you favors.

Anyway, I've never been one to have explosive revenge, but I've often planned it just in case.

I used to work IT for a law firm.  We were understaffed but over-gadgeted, and we had an ancient Nortel switch to administer.  When I was taught how to record the default outgoing messages for the firm, I made careful notes of how to do so, with special interest paid to the fact that one did not need to be in the building to accomplish this operation.  Oh, and you could change the password remotely.  And we'd stopped paying for Nortel support.  On many late nights I'd amuse myself by imagining recording an air horn and/or profanity as their message and setting the system to "away mode" where incoming calls went directly to it, or redirecting every incoming call to the senior partner's direct line.  Luckily I ended up leaving instead of getting fired, so I never had to put my plan into action.

Revenge plan number two for that job was tipping someone off about the enormous amounts of software piracy that they allowed as a "cost saving" measure.  The really fun part would have been that at least one of the pirated companies was a client.

I guess what I am saying here is that you shouldn't piss off the IT people, ever.  They can screw with your day in almost every way.

[AugustWest]

I guess what I am saying here is that you shouldn't piss off the IT people, ever.  They can screw with your day in almost every way.

Absolutely, positively agreed.  However, neither is it a good idea to piss off a bunch of lawyers. 

[theinevitable]

and never, ever piss off an undecided college student, leaning towards a psychology or anthropology major.

Wait, no, it is perfectly safe to piss me off. Piss me off all you want. I have no history of revenge-taking, or even revenge-seeking. I am very unlikely to ever get back at you, or even attempt to. Unless bitching about you to my message board friends counts as revenge.

[KeithHernandez]

Dude go anthropology.  I am a history major and have taken hell of anthropology classes, they are awesome.

(Oh yeah, only do this if you want to be really bored your senior year and have absolutely no idea what you can do except grad school or teacher.)

[theinevitable]

(for the record, I couldn't get into either intro to anthro class (intro to human evolution, intro to cultural anthropology) this year... so this is entirely theoretical.)

One time this woman bitched at me for a solid couple minutes for not knowing how to process a traveler's check, then further bitched when even my manager couldn't figure out how to do it. She thought she was threatening us by telling us she was going to sell her stock in our parent company. Then she left her keys sitting on the register when she left in a huff.

I didn't run out to give them to her, which is what I should have done, and then a guy I worked with saw them and brought them out to her. So I guess basically that would have been a better situation to "kill her with kindness" as it were.

[pmcd9]

I'm all about killing with kindness.  Sadly most people oblivious to their egregious behavior so they don't realize what is taking place.

[side_show]

Revenge story 2) friendly revenge on contemporary:

A friend (we'll call her Jane) and I have a sort of friendly prank relationship, which started to escalate into the sublime.  We pranked a lot of people in the theatre dept. in silly, non-hurtful ways for a while, and most receprocated with laughs and friendly jibes.  For some reason it developed that this friend was said to smell like eggs.  People would always simply say "Jane smells like eggs."  At the same time I was known as sMels and another friend was known as Diaper Baby.  It wasn't true, it was part of an intricate web of chides and good times.  Anyway, Jane and I went to the costume room to get her a costume for a play I was directing her in, and there I discovered one of those pregnancy bellies you can wear under your clothes.  So I put it on, and followed Jane around university loudly talking about how she shouldn't have gotten me so drunk and high last night.  People were watching in horror, especially in the cafeteria.  To get me back she called several businesses after hours pretending to be me and asking them to call me back in regard to certain services... the only one I remember was the women who was confused as to why I no longer wanted to take tango lessons, but there were nearly a dozen calls like this that came to me... So to get her back, I had a friend who she didn't know from school call her an impersonate an employee at an important local theatre.  The friend called her and told her they were looking to cast her in a roll, and started asking her some questions.  Aparently she got pretty excited as he was offering her the role of a life time.  Then he said "but there's just a few more questions I need to ask you.."  "Sure!"  "would you be willing to cut your hair?"  "Definitely"  "Would you be willing to work with puppets"  "I'd love to work with puppets!"  "Oh, there's just one more thing..."  "Yes?"  "The person we cast should smell like eggs."  "Who is this!"  "I'm sorry?"  "WHO IS THIS?"  "Are you not interested in this role?"  *click*

She was pretty pissed.  But later on in my career I got a job at the very theatre my friend had pretended to call her from, and shortly after that I help her out with getting work at the theatre too.  I recently filled her coat pocket with buttons, and mailed her a Michael Bolten CD, so it's still going on.