TL;DR: I worked at a bank call center, the bank was super shady, and I went on an overdraft fee refund spree my last week.

In college, I worked at a call center for one of the worst Bank of America (oops, meant banks in America 😉). That bank, which will remain unnamed, was doing all kinds of shady stuff (probably still is). For brevity, I’m going to focus only on one specific shady thing they did: processing payments out of order in order to maximize overdraft fees (OD fees from here on). Each OD fee was $34 ($51.50 adjusted for inflation).

There were guidelines for refunding OD fees, and they all had to be the bank’s fault. That said, you weren’t expected to give out many, if any, per month.

After about 7 or 8 months of dealing with customers that the bank was kicking while they were down, I couldn’t take it anymore. I went in on a Monday just knowing it was my last week.

First call of the day was this lady who overdrafted her card 6 times at a fast food place. All of the offending transactions were all $1-4. I didn’t really ask why (irrelevant), but looking at the transaction history, yep, they were processed out of order. She had a big payment go through later the same day which overdrew the account. Had the transactions been processed in order, only the big payment would have overdrawn (1 fee instead of 6).

However, according to policy, none of those were technically the bank’s fault because in the super fine print somewhere it said that the bank processed transactions largest to smallest and it was her fault.

That’s when “this is my last week” went from a “probably” to a “definitely”.

I said I could only refund one as a courtesy (the bank did let us do that occasionally), but just made up something about her being my 1,000,000th caller and I was gonna refund all of them. And I did. She was fucking ecstatic.

From Monday to Thursday mid-morning (more on that below), every caller that wanted an OD fee waived got it. Some guy even called in with a question, didn’t even mention the OD fee, and I was like “Oh, I see you have an overdraft fee last week. Lemme take care of that for you”. Bam, refunded.

My goal was to Robin Hood until Friday and quit, but some lady’s arrogance and entitlement on Thursday morning absolutely broke me. She had like $175K in checking and was complaining about three tiny, $3 yearly fees. I was all set to refund them (not that she needed them, but hey, I’m sticking it to the man here). The system wouldn’t let me touch one of them since it was over 2 years old. So I let her know I knocked off 2 out of 3. That wasn’t good enough, and she went on a tirade.

So I undid the refunds, apologized, and said I’d check with my manager. I put her on hold, left my badge on my desk, and just left.

I wonder if she’s still holding trying to claw back that last $3.

I once made a music video for Sony Universal.

They paid me £4k.

They liked it a lot and asked if I would do another. I asked if the fee was the same and they said I’d be doing it for exposure.

I told them I’m capable of exposing myself.

I stuck it to them.

I’m still poor, but at least I’m not working for it.

Young me went to a strict, highly academic school where we had a lot of rules written in the back of a pocket diary we had to carry around (to log homework, sports training and fixtures, etc).

I was also a little rebellious and I hated being told what I could or couldn’t do.

One day, our Art teacher is off sick and an English teacher who hated my insubordinate guts sat in on the class and made us do sketchbook work in silence.

I’d just got my hands on the first MP3 player to hit the market (by doing a lot of gardening work for family members). So I popped in my ear buds and started sketching.

A minute or so later, the buds are yanked out of my ears and the English teacher confiscates the MP3 player, saying it’s against school rules to have one. I, naturally, object rather passionately and get myself written up for having a banned item in school.

Later that day, I’m pulled into one of the disciplinary staff member’s office to be given an ear full. After they finished chastising me, I pulled out my little pocket diary, flicked to the back, and read:

“Students are not permitted to possess nor use CD or cassette players on school grounds”.

Me: “This is an MP3 player. It’s neither of those things.”

After a long silence, I’m handed back my MP3 player and told to not bring it back again.

The next term, the new diary has a mysterious little amendment to the rules, now mentioning “audio” players instead.

But that very term I also spotted that “All students must have a school tie” with no specification that one must actually wear it…

I got pulled over a few years ago only a week after installing a dashcam system and the cop claimed I didn’t have my belt on and only put it on as I was pulling over for him.

I had it on the whole time. I had proof that I had it on the whole time with my dash cam system. The cop wanted to swing his dick around though and not listen or watch the footage which I could have easily gotten on my phone and instead insisted on calling me a liar and giving me a ticket.

I was so ready to provide the evidence and prove my innocence in court but unfortunately, the bastard pig never showed up to court so I didn’t have to do anything and the ticket was dropped. I was ready, willing and able to stick it to the man; but I was denied my opportunity. 😮‍💨

I was the unofficial “security” guy where I worked as a software engineer. (Web apps, mostly.) We had a scanning tool (Burp Suite Pro, for those who want to know) that we ran against our apps on a regular basis to find any security issues. I was almost always the guy who did triage and remediation of any issues that came up. And when I had fixed a hole, I’d put a summary of the issue and the fix on the internal wiki page where we tracked such things.

For one particularly interesting vulnerability, I had to create my own implementation of a subset of the Java serialization API in order to remediate the vulnerability in a way that maintained backwards compatibility and didn’t inconvenience users. In the summary I wrote that the fix was “a hack” but it closed the vulnerability, which is all the PCI auditors would care about anyway. (If you don’t know what a PCI auditor is, don’t worry too much. They’re a regulatory thing that’s required if you’re a big enough business that process credit cards. They have to audit your security practices annually.)

My boss pulled me into his office to tell me to change the wording. He was worried the auditors would see the word “hack” and think that… I dunno… I committed some kind of financial fraud in the process of making the code change or something? Or maybe that we’d failed to disclose a security breach?

It didn’t sit right with me. For one thing, I’m the sort of person who wants to reclaim the positive connotations of the word “hack.” (And, honestly, using the word “hack” in a positive light never died.) But more importantly, if I were a PCI auditor and I heard that the boss had pressured a developer to alter their wording of the description of a remediation to make it sound better to PCI auditors, I’d probably pitch a shit fit at said boss.

(And, honestly, the boss and the development team weren’t on great terms at the time for reasons. So it sat worse still than it would have otherwise.)

But also, it wasn’t a hill worth dying on right then. I agreed to change my wording without raising a fuss. I decided if I ever got called to testify in court because there was a massive breach or something (I’m being hyperbolic here, but you get my point), I knew who to point the finger at.

But it still stuck in my craw. And when I resigned a few months later, I went and edited my comment back to say “hack” on my last day and didn’t tell anyone.

Actually, when I gave my resignation, my boss didn’t handle the process correctly with HR and they didn’t find out until way later into my notice period than they should have. As a result, they didn’t schedule an exit interview with me until way late. So I contacted HR about it and stayed late on my last day to voice how terrible the management was. (I was hoping to be the first of several to send such a message to HR.)

When I returned to the same company/position 5 years later, the page was still present and had the word “hack.” One of the first things I did once I had access to the corporate wiki again was to check that page. I still work there today and it’s still in the pristine state it should be in.

The boss in question also left and came back, but he’s been promoted up high enough in the ranks that he doesn’t concern himself with little old me and my security remediation reports. I imagine he’s probably forgotten about the whole thing.

Plus, his boss was way worse, and it’s very likely it was that guy who demanded I change it and delivered the message through his underling. And the worse guy isn’t at the company any more, but that’s a story for another day.

It’s small. And petty. But I feel satisfied with myself every time I think about it.

Successfully ran from the cops.

I was on a bike and they were in a car so I kept off the road system as much as possible. I went through a school (the kids saw the start so knew what was up - they cheered me on), through a swamp out the back and then a long bumpy ride down a railway line.

There is no rush quite like it.

Got to work only 15 minutes late.

I got a ticket, jaywalking in LA. The ticket was $35.

Decided it was dumb, and I wasn’t going to pay it.

Became a $400 bench warrant. That’ll teach ‘em!

TL;DR I worked for a department store as someone who fetched large/heavy objects for customers. Coworkers smoked together outside multiple times on shift. I did not smoke. I took “smoke breaks” in the back break room whenever this happened and a newer middle manager tried to make me work while they smoked. This same manager would later get flustered when I offered to buy an old unsellable item for 10 cents USD and he agreed. I was serious, he was not!

In 2004, I worked for the moderately sized department store, K’s Merchandise, before they went under. A few months before I quit, we got a new mid-level manager. He was a young guy with clear aspirations to move higher in the near future.

I worked as what they called a 600. I don’t remember why it was called that, but my job, along with a couple other 600s per shift, were to bring up large couches, non-assembled furniture, and anything that was too heavy or bulky to exist on the floor. These items were stored in the back warehouse. I got a lot of daily steps in with this job for all the walking we did. When a customer bought one of the large warehouse items, we would grab an appropriate cart and bring it to the front to load for the customer. We would carry walkie-talkies and floor salespeople would call for us to come get a ticket with the item(s) to be pulled.

All of my coworkers at the time smoked and were permitted to take smoke breaks periodically. I didn’t smoke, so any time they took smoke breaks, and they’d do it as a group with some others in the store, I’d be the only 600 available.

One day, my coworkers went to smoke with others, leaving me alone again. So, with my walkie still with me, I sat in the back and drank a small drink item from a vending machine in the staff break room. As I sat there drinking my…chocolate milk, I think, the newer middle management comes in from the back warehouse and asks me why I’m sitting down when I should be in the back sweeping the warehouse and other such stuff while business is slow.

I told him I was on a smoke break while the others were also on a smoke break. When he brought up how I was not smoking and needed to get back to work, I refused on principal as I felt I was being punished for not smoking. He wasn’t pleased but just told me to keep the walkie close. I got to take little breaks like this whenever I was working with those other guys that smoked.

This was also the same manager that casually complained about some large mirror, with corkboard, set in a wooden frame that wasn’t selling. I offered to buy it for $0.10. He laughed it off like I was joking and said sure. So I brought the item up front a little while later to ring it up. Told the cashier that the manager said I could get it for 10 cents. She congratulated me on my purchase.

As I was coming back inside after loading it into my FORD AEROSTAR van, the manager asked me if I had really purchased that thing for 10 cents and when I confirmed he said he never said that I could. I corrected him and brought up how others were there when he said I could. He had no choice but to let me keep it.

That mirror still has a place in my house, 20-years later!

Years upon years of malicious compliance. Recent example: making sure that my former idiot boss had absolutely loads of his time wasted by the fucking moron he forced us all to hire.

Does ditching school or cheating on finals count?

I canceled the TV cable and streaming services and got an OTA antenna. Bite that you stupid machine!

It’s so crazy that Jewish religious leaders know that it’s a flood myth and not at all historical. This isn’t a new realization either. This is a long standing view.