Many years ago (early 1980's) I worked for a company that did what I called "mall pestering", AKA they did market research surveys in a mall and were always stopping people to ask questions.

The company was run by three older women who had started it in their kitchen. They were opinionated, and had no care about anything but money. Part of this included paying employees not by the hour but by the survey. Which was against labor rules as it never matched the basic hourly wage.

Christmas came, and we were planning our employee party when one of the owners called and told us that in order to avoid paying bonuses, we were to fire everyone at the party and then hire back the ones that we liked after the new year.

We (the other managers and I) talked about it, and then I called the Federal Bureau of Labor, who had been trying to get the information for the employee pay for several years but had always been turned away. I had them come to the back door and let them into the file room, and showed them the boxes. I then said I had things to do in the front and would be back later and went to the front desk to finish the paperwork I needed.

Said paperwork? A blow up of Santa going down the chimney with "Merry Christmas" typed across it, all of the management resignations and the Fed-Ex envelope that would hold our keys and said paperwork.

Labor guy finished what he needed to do, we locked up, sent the package which was timed to arrive at their Christmas party, and walked away. The company ended up spending about 250k in reimbursements and fines for the labor problem.

So, my daughter, who was about 8 at the time, was REALLY into Minecraft (as most kids are these days). I had also installed some screen recording software that would let her make videos of the games she was playing so she could later upload them to YouTube.

Anyways, one day I'm minding my own business when I hear her quietly sniffling over on the computer. I asked her what was wrong. Someone was harassing not only her, but also all the other kids playing on whatever server she was on. This kid (we'll call him LS) was saying stuff about how he was going to assault my 8-year-old daughter, how he was going to hack into her IP and steal all her info, swearing profusely all the while. We realized that our daughter had been recording the entire incident, and a plan began to form.

I started by googling LS's username. There were several hits immediately, the most interesting of which involved a page where he was publicly applying to be a mod for a server on Minecraft. I was able to learn a lot about this little POS: he claimed to be 15, used to live in Toronto but now lives in Florida. But the bombshell was his Skype ; it was literally firstname.lastname.

So I head over to Facebook and search for the name. Nothing. Hmmmm. On a hunch I searched for just the last name, while narrowing my results to only the state of Florida. Several dozen hits. Hmmm. So I have to start combing through each one, until I find what I was looking for: a middle aged man with the same last name, whose profile indicates he was born in Toronto and now lives in Florida. I FOUND YOUR DAD.

So I sent him a message, and ultimately the recording of his son threatening my daughter as proof. Radio silence for a few days.

Then we got the message back: LS had his computer taken away from him. His parents were livid with him, and he surely hated the next few months of his life.

No one messes with my daughter.

While walking to my gate at LAX, I noticed a woman whose dog was in the middle of doing its business. The woman was loudly face-timing with her back to the dog, so I assumed she didn’t notice. That was likely the thought shared by the gentleman who tried to get her attention.

“Excuse me, miss?” he said, in a polite tone. The woman glared at him. “Your dog,” he sheepishly continued, pointing to the mid-poop pup.

The woman rolled her eyes and went back to face time as the man slinked away, seemingly embarrassed.

“Some people,” she bellowed to her face-time companion with no hint of irony, “are just so rude.”

When her dog finished, the woman started walking away, leaving everything right on the airport floor. Another woman tried to stop her.

“You’re not going to clean that up?” she asked, as shocked as the rest of us were.

“They have people for that,” the offender replied, disappearing into the crowd.

I stood near the pile and warned people to walk around it while someone else got a maintenance worker’s attention. No one said anything – we were so shocked that anyone could be that horrible.

When I got to my gate, the woman was there, too. Great – we were both going to Tokyo. When I travel abroad, I get embarrassed by other Americans doing things one hundred times less embarrassing than leaving animal dumps on the floor of an airport. To make it worse, her dog was barking at everyone who walked by.

Everyone else tried to ignore her, sitting as far away from her as they could. I am not everyone else.

I sat down right next to the horrible woman. “Are you going to London on business?” I said.

“I’m going to Tokyo,” she responded gruffly.

“Oh," I said. "Then you better hurry. That flight got moved to gate 53C. This is the flight to London.”

I figured I could give her a little moment of panic as payback for how terribly she was treating everyone. I didn’t predict what would happen next. She grabbed her bags and her dog in a huff, and stormed out of the gate without even checking. She was so self-involved, she didn’t notice that the monitor at our gate still said Tokyo and almost everyone at the gate was Japanese.

I don’t know if she made it back to this flight before we took off or not, but I didn’t see her board and I didn’t hear her dog. Whoops.

Maybe she can re-book on another airline. I hear they have people for that.

I was a senior in high school at the time and I had never been the brightest student. I was a solid C student and I had never received a detention or had any kind of bad student record.

Mrs. Franks taught algebra, which is my worst subject, so naturally I had issues understanding the lessons and would ask questions frequently. To some these questions are easily answered but to me it was rocket science.

In Mrs. Franks' case, she would belittle me in front of everyone by saying things such as: "And here comes the slow boy again"; "Wow, surprise, surprise, you don't understand it again"; "Really? We have to go extra slow for you today don't we?"

I tried going to the administration about it, but they would just send someone in to examine her during class; she would act respectful and normal for one day, and go back to being a monster the next.

This goes on for about half the year until I had enough. I went to the local Radio Shack, bought a recorder, and secretly recorded every insult she would throw at me. I would sometimes instigate to make up for the lost time. Go ahead, feed the fire.

At the end of the year, I compiled all of the brutal tapes into one glorious masterpiece. I sat down with the principal and we listened to a couple of the insults before he stopped me. He wanted more witnesses present as well as Mrs. Franks.

The next day, when we met, I watched as the administrators went from bored to furious as I played my tape. I also watched Mrs. Franks go from confident and stuck up, to realizing that she had messed up beyond repair.

When the tape ended, the principal turned to me and said, "I think we have heard everything we need to. Thank you." And i was quietly dismissed from the room.

I returned to class the next week and Mrs. Franks was nowhere to be found. The story spread quickly throughout the school and I was seen as a saint. I had successfully gotten her fired and made it almost impossible for Mrs. Franks to return to her teaching career as well as cut off most of her connections she had with other teachers in the school. I had ruined her financially because no school district in the area would hire this walking piece of garbage.

Don't regret it for a second.

When I got divorced, my party animal wife of 18 years had started another affair, this time with her therapist. So my lawyer and I laid a trap for them. Just in case you don't know, intimate relations between a therapist and patient are very frowned upon by the regulatory bodies. And I was more than a little annoyed after putting her through rehab ($25k which I didn't have to do) only to have her fall back into her old behavior.

Shortly before the divorce was finalized I filed a complaint with the state body licensing health professions. Knowing they were in some peril because of their unprofessional relationship (I had already gotten him fired from a major teaching hospital), she had backed off her exorbitant demands. I paid her a very modest settlement, kept the house, got custody of the three tweenage kids, plus got child support.

Her lawyer naturally included a clause in the divorce where I had to agree to not say anything negative about her lover and their relationship. But the lawyer messed up and never asked if I had already filed charges and thus didn't require me to rescind them. Her lawyer had assumed I was just bad mouthing them to neighbors and friends, and it never occurred to the lawyer that we were doing much more.

When the Board of Health Professions responded to my complaint shortly after the divorce was finalized I told them that it would take a subpoena to get me to testify (a subpoena trumps an agreement in a divorce settlement). They were happy to oblige.

They stripped his license, and placed him on a register of sanctioned health professionals. He never worked again. They were broke for a handful of years and she divorced him when the money ran out (in the interim his mother had died leaving a fair sized estate, so it took longer than I expected). Oh, and the frosting on the cake was that his wife and I traded notes (notably hotel receipts from the time of their affair) that helped each of us in our respective divorces.

Justice was served.

About three years ago, I was working in a pretty big factory. They hired through 5 different temp services, so the place was pretty much like a revolving door. People came and left without any warning, sometimes it was hard just to find a familiar face. So when someone started stealing my lunches everyone became a suspect.

After falling victim to the Lunch Box Bandit for a week straight -- I'm talking about six 12-hour days with no lunch -- I was fed up. The frustration spawned several evil plans, but I felt the Carolina reaper would give me the fastest and most effective results.

I spent all night making the best steak fajitas for lunch the next day. I finally minced the reaper peppers into a nice pico de gallo, and topped my devil fajitas off. I carefully placed my fajitas into a Tupperware bowl, garnished them with cilantro and limes, then covered them with a clear lid to display their beauty.

The next morning, about an hour after I placed them in the fridge, a woman started screaming for help. I ran to the lunchroom to find the Lunch Box Bandit laying on the floor gasping for air. The reaper peppers triggered an asthma attack, and he had to be rushed to the hospital.

He never said anything, and neither did I.

My sister was bullied relentlessly in high school for something she had literally zero control over; a certain part of her anatomy. Without going into details, she felt terrible about it and it more or less ruined her life as an insecure fifteen-year-old girl. The girl responsible for most of the cruel bullying and the one who gave her a particularly cruel nickname related to her physical issue, was called Nadia. Nadia was a foreign exchange student at our school.

Nadia was beautiful. She was mean. And she didn’t care at all about what anyone but herself. I wasn’t Miss Popularity myself but I had to protect my sister from having her life ruined and I felt a very strong urge to get back at her tormentors.

I learned that the father of Nadia was very conservative. Her whole family back home was. So, I started spreading rumors about her being very promiscuous and ensured these rumors reached the family she was staying with. This apparently caused her some trouble, but I wasn’t done…

I threw a party one night when my parents were gone. I invited Nadia, who gladly came as I was a “cooler older girl” somehow and she never said no to a chance to get hammered. Because yes, there were a LOT of drinks. I made sure of that. Took pictures of everyone drinking and having fun. That same night when everyone left, I put it on my Facebook. Tagged Nadia on it… so a picture of her drinking and very skimpily dressed made its way to her page.

Her parents saw it before she could take it down. I wasn’t there to see the fallout, obviously, but she was gone the next week from school and flown back to her home country. Apparently, her parents had to “save her from being corrupted” or something. So, she was gone.

And my sister was safe from ridicule as word of my involvement spread and lets just say people didn’t really want to mess with her after seeing how far I was willing to go to protect my little sister.

Was hit by a car while riding my bicycle. My backpack exploded and stuff was thrown everywhere.

Witnesses helped me gather everything and police showed up. Someone took a bunch of pictures of the scene on their phone while EMS and police did their thing. Not a bad accident, only bumps and scrapes. Bike was totalled though.

When they asked for my phone number so they could text the pics to me, I realized I didn't have my phone. In fact it was nowhere.

I call my wife (using a witness's phone) and she is hysterical.

Someone stole my phone and was texting her saying: "I found this guy's phone at a car accident and he has a lot of calls and texts to you so I'm trying to get his phone back to him, but I need $50. Looks like he buys a lot of stuff on amazon so he can afford $50. YOLO."

Now I was at the accident site for over an hour and these texts were all sent during this time.

So after calming my wife down, we play along and find that the girl who is extorting me for my phone works at some burger place downtown. She gave us the address and said I can come in to make the exchange.

Yeah, I showed up with the police who responded to the accident.

The girl was furious, yelling about how she deserves a reward for finding my phone, etc.

I pressed charges, but eventually dropped them when I found out that she was fired for her conduct. Also I now lock my phone.

Several years ago, I lived on the northwest coast of Puerto Rico. It’s a very relaxed area, with tons of good restaurants and lots of green space. My apartment was on a cliff, not far from the water. The electric infrastructure was a bit old, so when it was rainy season, we’d lose power for a few hours at a time. Not a big deal – I had a gasoline generator.

Enter a new neighbor. He lived two doors down from me, and drove an amazing custom Chevy van from the 70’s. All it needed was an epic airbrushed Wizard on the side. Sadly though, that’s where anything good about him ended.

I caught him taking the gas out of an orange jug I’d leave outside in case the generator ran out. Although I saw him do it, and called him out on it, he denied it and played stupid.

So after the second time, I took all of the gas in the jug, filled the generator with it, and put the rest in my car. I then went to the nearest gas station that had diesel and filled it up with diesel.

A few days later, I am woken up by a tow truck backing up to pick up his now disabled van. I looked out the window and you could see the anger on his face. He moved out the next month, and from what I gathered from talking to people in the community, he was a general piece of crap human and what happened to him was deserved.

I was working for an advertising agency, a pretty big one.

When I started out, I had a manager who was one of the most unethical managers I've ever dealt with. He'd order his sales reps to do things that would increase his bonuses (which are based on margins).

I was the guy that refused his demands. He would tell me to cheat my clients and I would refuse. He would get mad. I wouldn't care. This went on for quite awhile.

Now, I live in a one party consent state which means so long as I'm aware a conversation is being recorded I can record it without informing the other party.

I had just upsold my largest client making him even larger...but I didn't sell the products my boss wanted me to sell. He demanded I switch things around. I refused. I told him I sold the client XYZ thats what we agreed to, I'm not going change that without the customer permission. His exact words were:

"[Bleep] the customer, this is your largest client I need him on ABC or I'm not going make my number."

"I'm sorry, but you and I both know ABC isn't right for this client and that's why he didn't buy it."

"You're fired. If you can't follow instructions, you're fired."

After confirming he was dead serious, I said, "If you do that, I'll have your job by the end of the month."

Sure enough, next morning I'm locked out of all our systems. I call tech support and they tell me I've been fired. So who do I call?

I call our Regional Vice President and tell him I have several recordings I think he should listen to. Remember my boss ordering me to do unethical things wasn't uncommon. So I meet up with my RVP and play six different recordings that I had saved showing my manager was pushing his agents to break the law.

The RVP leaned back in his chair, and let out a sigh knowing he had to fire my manager. At which point I asked for my job back.

He agreed that I would get my job back and asked me to take the week off and call him on Monday.

That Monday I come into our morning meeting. The RVP was there, and he informed the entire team that my boss had been fired and why. He also mentioned that if anyone wanted to apply for his job there was now an opening.

So I applied for and after 3 rounds of interviews I got my promotion! I was right; I did have my bosses job by the end of the month.

This one is my favorite of all the multi-lingual escapades I've had.

Years ago, I was running a kitchen for one of those typical Lebanese American style diners. Seriously, more often than not, it was just me back there. It sucked. But I needed the job.

The owners thought I was going to be easy to screw over. And they'd talk all kinds of crap to each other, apparently not remembering that I had explicitly said I'm proficient in Arabic when they hired me. So I recorded these conversations (my state is single-party consent) that often bled into them trying to make me cover for them on major health-code violations.

Seriously. They expected me to cover for them while they talked crap about me, with me right in front of them.

So. I quickly began searching for a new job, and continued to document everything. Every single thing. I had pictures, timestamps, temp logs. All of it.

And then they messed with my pay. Everything that I had been gathering as my "just in case" plan became the weapon I needed it to be.

I confronted them about the very obvious wage-theft. They denied it. Even in the face of the major discrepancies in hours-worked, set wage, and amount withheld in taxes.

That night, I got a call from another place I'd applied to asking if I was still interested in the position. Obviously, I was. Told them I could start in about 3 days.

I walked in for my next shift with prints of everything in a file. Put everything on the table and told him, "You've been stealing from me. I have proof of that, and all of this ready to go to the Health Department, Labor Department, and IRS. Pay me what you owe, and this doesn't see the light of day. "

He was very quick to pay me, in cash, the amount that I had recorded missing from my checks, and took the files and started shredding them. As I turned to leave his office, I turned back around and told him (in Arabic), "I could understand you the whole time, you [bleep]." And I walked out.

Of course, he didn't have the only copies of those files. When I got home, I sent everything off to the relevant departments. He was shut down about a month later.

I work as a train driver. I drive smaller trains mostly out on the countryside and people are generally nice and well behaved. But of course there are also the general weirdos who use public transport, and some people that just live to be a pain in the butt.

This was a few years ago. We were traveling in the late afternoon and my conductor (let's say C) storms into the driver's cabin, angry and annoyed, and tells me:

C: We have two rude good-for-nothing guys onboard!

Me: What did they do?

C: They have no tickets, refuse to pay. They just laughed in my face when I said they had to. 'What are you gonna do about it?' they said.

Me: Should I help you throw them off at the next stop?

C: We can't because they're just traveling one station, so they're getting off at the next stop!

We're both angry so I let the conductor rant and let off some steam. Next stop comes and the guys get of. We continue the short remaining journey and have a break at the end station. Some hours later, the train then heads back the way we came.

Since it's the countryside and it's a late weekend evening, the train is almost empty on the way back. The conductor knows where every passenger on board is getting off and she's up at front with me, chatting.

Until...

...we approach the station where we let those guys off. We see two people standing there. It.is.them. The conductor says, with the biggest smile on her face: "Do not stop." When we pass them my conductor opens the window, waves and says loud and happily: "THIS IS WHAT I'M GONNA DO ABOUT IT!"

My first car was a 1984 Jeep CJ7, a pretty sweet ride for a dirt poor teenager in the 90s. I was working midnights at a gas station and loaned it to my brother who was taking a date to a party.

I got a call around 1am from my brother who told me he had left the keys in the Jeep and it was stolen. I was devastated. I was still on the phone with my brother when the thieves pulled my Jeep into my gas station to fill up. As luck would have it, the gas gauge on my Jeep was broken and always read "empty", and I worked at the only 24-hour gas station in the area. I pressed the silent alarm and... proceeded to fill up my Jeep (it was a full serve station).

When the thieves were out of the truck, I saw an opportunity to slip the key out of this ignition and into my pocket. They paid for the gas, and argued amongst each other who had the keys last. The delay was enough for the police to arrive.

I had to explain the story to the officer half a dozen times before he understood. The thieves had this stunned look of disbelief on their faces I'll never forget. The cops were belly-laughing, telling the story to dispatch, all the while the thieves sat in cuffs in the back of the squad car. The story made most of the major newspapers the following day.

This story starts off with a slightly less humours fact...a few days ago I was on the unfortunate end of credit card fraud. The fraudsters decided to take my CC info and purchase $1000 worth of car parts from Philly and have it sent across the border to the city I currently live in, Vancouver, Canada.

I got a call this morning about a DHL shipment entering the country that required customs to be paid. Knowing I haven't shipped anything with DHL in forever. I quickly come to the realization that it must be the fraudsters shipping their goods here.

"It can't be!" I thought. Who in their right mind would use a stolen credit card to order something to their own house in the city the owner of the card lives.

After a brief chat with DHL about the customs fees I will not be paying, I manage to obtain the address the package was being sent to. I hummed and hawed about it but eventually decided the best thing to do was call the local police department and let them know what was up.

I told the officer all about the situation. That unfortunately I did not know what car the parts were for and that I hope this info helps them somehow in the future. He tells me that the chances are slim but he will swing by the house (it's literally 15 minutes from my own) just to see if anything weird is going on and follow up with me if he needs to. I thank him and go on with my work day.

About an hour later I get a call from the same officer, obviously excited.

"Hi, it's Officer X. You will never guess what just happened. I was following up on the report and drove by the house. I decided to go knock on the door just to see if anyone was home and ask them a couple questions. A man opened the door and as we were talking, DHL drove up to deliver the package. Yes that's right, the exact package we had been discussing.

"The delivery driver walks up to the door and says 'Hi, is [my name] there?' to which the man replies 'Oh yeah, he's just downstairs.' You can imagine my surprise! 'That's pretty funny, because I just got off the phone with him and I know for a fact he doesn't live here' I said. The guy, no joke, looks me dead in the face and goes, 'Oh whatever, the package is paid for.'

"I chuckled and turned to the DHL driver to tell him should leave because I need to make an arrest. I'm calling you while I drive back to the precinct, thought it might brighten your day!"

I still cannot believe that they caught the guy, but thought it was a story that was too good not to share.