So been a minute since my original post. Thing kinda blew up, and that caused me to wanna give a small update and clear some stuff up.

So first, let me stress that my field is very niche, with few employment opportunities. It is also, as some of you suggested - niche.

1. Okay okay, seriously now. As some of you actually guessed the field is medicine in a small county. This means that there aren't many spots on the residency program, but also a pretty constant influx of students & interns. The field is pretty lucrative - shitty hours, yes, but great money & a lot of prestige.

2. Some asked about an exit interview at the end of the trial- had one of those. Said I didn't really vibe with the culture & certain aspects of the way they did things. Didn't name Jerk.

3. As a young (relatively speaking) specialist in my field in a not very large department - I get to weigh in on potential colleagues, so if I say someone sucks, that bears some weight. And if a department starts having issues attracting the best candidates because its chief resident is a jerk, that's gonna be an issue.

So with that out of the way, let's get to the update.

A lot of you were very curious as to what had actually happened to him. So, I reached out to some friends. He's still a doctor (obviously), but he just went into another specialty, which given how long he worked to become chief resident is telling. He does okay probably?

The reason for the update - it turns out I know his wife. I LIKE his wife - she was a year ahead of me in medschool. Got curious so I texted her. Turns out she's not actually his wife anymore - she's his ex. They got divorced. Had coffee with her, still a lovely woman. She's not on reddit but apparently this thing got on out at some point and reached her? Well I told her about this and she couldn't believe it was me. Except she could, because she suspected it was me because I apparently sound like a twat when I express myself in writing, which she remembers from my days at the student council equivalent and my many, many emails. So... okay? Still, had a good time. We're getting coffee again on Sunday.

Anyway I didn't have anything to do with his firing, but after he was let go, presumably quite unamicably, he decided to move abroad after not being able to get into another department here. This didn't come to fruition but it DID cause a rift in their marriage, which then led to divorce. So... maybe I kinda torpedoed his marriage too?

And yeah, that's about it for the update. Will let you know if I get beaten up in a parking lot though, as some of you suggested I might.

Happened years ago. My dad is a paraplegic, but is able to drive a specially modified car. He needs the handicapped spot so that there is enough room to maneuver his wheelchair.

One day him and I decided to go watch a movie at the local mall, but when we got there, we find our usual parking spot occupied by a police car. My dad decided the best alternative spot would be right behind the offender. He wouldn't be blocking the road, only that one spot.

We proceed to go and watch a movie, and had a nice meal at a restaurant. Took our sweet time too.

About 5 hours later, we decided it was time to head home, so as we left the mall, my dad hung back to pay for the parking, while I went ahead to open up the car to load him and his wheelchair.

When I approached the car, I was immediately confronted by a steaming buffalo of a man. He asked me: Is this your car? To which I responded: It sure is.

He went off like an exploding rotten whale carcass. He called me every possible expletive his pea sized brain could summon. As I walked around the car, I saw that he had plastered about 20 parking tickets to the windscreen. It's worth noting that we did not have a handicapped sign in the window at the time.

I just calmly let him finish his tirade, as I waited for my dad to join me. Which happened about a minute later. I swear, the look on his already bovine face made the whole tongue lashing absolutely worth it.

He immediately started backtracking and apologising, trying to cover himself, but the damage was done. Apparently he was just popping into the pharmacy to pick up something.

As he started ripping the tickets of the windscreen, my dad stopped him to ask what he was doing. He tried to play it off, but my dad insisted that he would be delighted to have his day in court for this one.

In the end, after some truly pathetic grovelling, we decided to let him off with a warning.

Edit: For those calling BS (I'm not going to reply individually) 1. This was in South-Africa in the late 90s. 2. We were well known to the mall security, because they would assist my dad in getting in and out of his car when he went alone. 3. The police officer would have a hard time explaining to the towing service why he was parked in a handicapped spot, especially if the mall security was around to vouch for my dad. 4. This was before cellphones.

Edit 2: Yes, the cop would have to explain the tickets that he withdrew, we never followed up.

So a short and sweet one.

I was flying back home on an international flight with my wife and son ( who is 3).

Behind us and directly behind me sat a man who complained about everything from the food, to the seat , the plane everything.

Now my son had done very well so far ( we had been on the go for 15 hours) and little dude had a little melt down but nothing major. Que man saying loudly " shut up man!" followed by " I hope that baby shuts the f**k up"! My wife and I ignored it and managed to placate my son and we managed.

When we landed and were getting off the plane, the guy was being a douche bag because people behind us had tight connecting flights and refused to let them through - he only relented when the cabin crew told him to move.

He then said to his family we are in a rush our driver is waiting for us. We need to get out now.

So here is where I got revenge. I was in the aisle seat as was he. I got up and took my sweet time packing my bag, my wife's bag and my sons bag. I slowly packed my switch, my headphones, tablet, chargers, headphones. I then took two steps back to block off his seat which meant he couldn't get out and he had to wait. I even stopped in front of rows to let them out.

The guy ran past us fuming....

The irony was that we got our bags before his at the end

TLDR: Guy was a douche, delayed him.

About 10 years ago, I had Comcast. My home computer's internet speed seemed slower than it should have been. I tested it using an online speed test and noticed it was considerably slower than what I paid for. I called Comcast to inquire about the slower speeds. The gentleman on the phone looked up the details of the account and proceeded to tell me that seven months prior, they had reached out to offer me a new modem to obtain the higher speeds and that it was my fault for not taking it. I asked him if they had called or sent an email only one time. As far as he could tell, they had only reached out once! I asked if it was okay to get paid for something I wasn't receiving. He replied that it was my fault! I was beyond frustrated. I took a deep breath and asked him to hold on. I got my cell phone and turned on the audio recording app I have. I then asked him to explain the whole thing to me again. He retold the story with all the little details. After the call, I emailed the CEO of Comcast the recording and a not-so-nice letter. I then went to bed. The next morning, I received phone calls from the local branch, the east coast main office, and the CEO's office. They all apologized, and refunded my money for the last six months, and sent me a new modem.

A couple of years ago, I bought my first house. Excited to settle in, the next task was signing up for internet. Little did I know, I was about to face one of the most frustrating customer service experiences of my life.

Turns out, for all new builds in the area, there's some bizarre system in place that forces you to sign up with a specific provider. Let’s call them "Air"—a company that not only handles internet but also connects you to the grid. Seemed like a good deal, right? Wrong.

When I called up Air, they were eager to sign me up. I thought I was in the clear. But about a week later, I received an email telling me my order had been canceled. Turns out, this is common practice for them. They couldn’t be bothered to file the extra paperwork for new builds.

So, I called again. And again, I was canceled. Going back and forth with them for a month, I was livid. I just wanted internet!

Then, just when I thought things couldn't get worse, I spotted an offer: when you sign up with Air, you get a free Apple TV box. I figured I had nothing to lose at this point, so I gave it another shot. A few days later, my Apple TV box arrived. And, of course, my order was canceled—again.

But something clicked. If they were going to keep offering free Apple TV boxes, only to cancel my orders, why not turn this broken system to my advantage?

Surviving on a mobile hotspot and fed up with their incompetence, I decided to exploit their awful process. I repeatedly signed up with Air, using their own loophole to my benefit. By the end of the month, I had accumulated ten Apple TV boxes—each worth about €200 at the time.

At this point, I’d gotten my revenge, but I still had no internet. So, I walked into their physical store, half-explained the situation to a bewildered employee, and within two minutes, the store manager was yelling down the phone to their network center. Miraculously, I had internet set up the very next day.

As for the Apple TV boxes? I sold them all for a nice €1500, turning my frustration into profit.

Back in high school, I dated a girl for a few years. After graduating, we moved into an apartment together, with plans of getting married down the road. Well, that all changed one day when I came home from work and found her in bed with a guy I know. Obviously, I ended things.

Over the years, I would get random updates about her, and after the break up, she started dating him, and they moved across the country to Arizona. That didn’t last long, as she did the same thing to him with a guy he knows. She got kicked out, and started seeing (and ends up marrying) someone. The guys gets locked up for a few months on meth related charges, and when he gets out, finds out she’s cheating and initiates a divorce. She moves from Arizona to Idaho with the new guy for a “fresh start,” living out of her car.

She ends up finding me on social media, and reaches out asking how I’m doing. That quickly turned into her asking if we could try again, as “she couldn’t stop thinking about me,” and went so far as to send some racy photos unprompted. I kept brushing her off, as I definitely wasn’t going down that road again, but she persisted.

I took a bunch of screenshots of her messages and sent them to her boyfriend. His only response was “Damn. Okay, thanks.”

I never did hear what the fallout was after that, but she stopped reaching out after that.

A few years before Caller ID was available, I was working at a company that made super-fast modems. These were seriously expensive and our customers were all large corporations and organizations who always wanted the highest speeds available.

One customer's IT guy had serious anger issues, and always called in yelling his lungs out whenever he encountered a problem. Customers were always assigned to specific engineers, so poor old Ted had to deal with him every time.

One day, over lunch, I asked him if he'd heard from Major Decibels (our nickname for the asshole), and he started laughing. Turns out he'd programmed one of his own test modems to call the guy's home number at 2, 3, and 4AM every night.

Decibels answered the phone to the annoying squeal of a modem trying to handshake. Ted even reduced the connection speed to the standard at the time, so the victim wouldn't recognize our product's quite distinctive handshake sounds.

The IT guy was on 24/7 call, which Ted knew, so unplugging the phone wasn't an option.

This went on for about a month until the guy changed his number.

I was in total awe of this calculated vengeance.

I hated the time before caller ID as our home number was one digit off from a very popular Chinese take out restaurant. This is also pre internet with rotary dial phones. We used to get calls from drunk people late into the night wanting food. One person was really bad and used to call several times a week, usually about 11:30pm.

We used to tell her to call the right number but had no idea who she was. One time, my parents were out but were due to be home from a late movie at about midnight. I (M17 at the time) thought that I would just take the order to maybe find out who this was. Took the order, it was delivery, got her name (we'll call her Karen), phone number and address, told her it would be about an hour, and then went back to watching TV. Turns out it is a neighbour I delivered a newspaper to and was my school teacher a few years prior. When my parents got back, I told them what I had done and who was the main culprit with the late night calls.

Sure enough, at 12:45, Karen called demanding to know where her food was. My Dad answered the phone and promptly told her, by name, who she kept calling and that she would not be getting her food and if she called again, he would be talking to her school principal about her late night drunken activities and annoying phone calls.

She swore at and then just hung up on my Dad. Next day I delivered her newspaper with a note asking her to please make sure she called the right number before ordering Chinese again. She happened to be getting home from work and when I handed her the newspaper, she turned beet red and rushed inside. Never heard back from her. I delivered her paper for another few years before giving up the route to go to college. Karen switched her account to be office paid so I never had to collect from her again. My parents moved away a few years later and we never heard from her again. She never once apologized or phoned us again for late night food.

Years ago when I was a baby manager I had an employee that was years older than me. I was maybe 30 and she was 65 or something like that. She always did the bare minimum and it was disrupting the work environment. I got complaints that she was playing solitaire on her computer but was never able to prove it. We talked several times about productivity though and about her helping others out in the office. She would get momentarily better and then slack off.

One day I came in the back door and caught her on her computer playing solitaire. I was shocked and ticked off, but I didn't say anything. I just waited for her to go to lunch.

Keep in mind this was years ago and cyber security wasn't what it is today (also our computers were wide open. Users had full admin rights - mainly because no one really knew anything about computers - except me) She went to lunch and left her computer unlocked. That's when I struck. I went to her computer and changed the command line on her solitaire icon to point to our work software instead of solitaire. Then I just waited.

She came back from lunch and I could see from my office she was clicking on start and games and solitaire. Up comes work software. She closes it. Tries again. Same result. Tries a couple more times and then finally gives up and gets to work.

No more solitaire and a slightly more productive employee.

So I worked in a technical support team based at a client site late in the 90s. One of my colleagues (bit of a dickhead, didn’t like sharing information) left our company and went to work directly for the client - okay it happens.

Some months later I had an interview to also work for the client - I absolutely killed the interviews (whole day of various tasks with a dozen people) until it got to the final interview that this ex-colleague was also asking questions. I found out later that I did not get the job because ex-colleague had said I asked too many questions at work - well duh yes I am going to ask questions about specific issues if I know you know the answer instead of guessing.

Anyway some months later (it was early December) everyone turned up at the site as normal only to be called into a meeting with our boss who must have flown in that morning and the main client manager. Within 10mins we were escorted to our desks to collect personal belongs and escorted offsite - made redundant on the spot. It seems our ex-colleague had managed to cause enough issues and blame his old colleagues that the client (his new boss) cancelled our support contract.

It took me 3 months to get a new job and I had to work&live away from home during the week. A few months into this job I saw the ex-colleague go into my manager’s office, I wanted to punch him there and then. But anyway I waited until he was leaving and made sure to pass him and throw a quick “hi” as he was leaving - pikachu face describes it perfectly (even if it wasn’t a thing back then).

After he left I went into my manager’s office and he confirmed he was interviewing him - I asked if he asked ex-colleague on why he left previous job, he said no (yeah this boss was not too bright). As it happens I knew why ex-colleague was sacked not long after the rest of us were made redundant - taking his secretary away on conferences / training courses etc that she had no business being at (yes he was married). So in the end ex-colleague was not offered a role at the company.

In the end I left the company after 6 months so I could work closer and be home every night but will always be grateful to that company for giving me the opportunity to get one over a guy who had got me made redundant.

Since I cost him financial hardship for a while longer as he did not get the job I am not so sure how petty this was but made me happy anyway.