I’ve been enrolled in a cooking school for over a year and my mom has never been supportive. She’s always making snide comments about how I should’ve been a nurse or a lawyer. When I do make something, she always criticizes it. I’ve cooked 3-course dinners for the family and they always get positive reviews, except for from her. She had a party for her work friends, I made a whole tray of my specialty take on homemade meatballs. Everyone kept going back and getting more, so much so that they ran out.

I figured if I wanted to get her to compliment my cooking, I’d have to trick her. I cooked her a meal, one of her favorites from scratch, dressed it up to look professional, and put it in a generic to-go box. As I cooked, I had my boyfriend take a video of me preparing it, start to finish. I called her and told her that we were eating at this diner (that doesn’t exist), that they had her favorite meal, and asked if she wanted us to bring her one. Of course, she said yes. I brought the dish and she started eating it and complimented how good it was. After she was almost through with the meal, I asked her for her honest opinion, so we could write a review on Yelp. She went on for 10 minutes about how great it was and then I sprung on her that I had cooked it.

Her tone changed. She put the fork down and said she was lying. My boyfriend showed her the video, she googled the restaurant, and it didn’t show up. She started pointing out flaws with the meal, like how there was too much sauce and it was really spicy and burned her mouth. I asked her why she almost finished the whole thing if it was so spicy. She didn’t say anything, so I just asked her if she was ready to admit it. She said no, so we left but I spotted her eating it from the other room. I asked her again and she laughed and finally told me that I’m a good chef. © ThrowRA-Barber / Reddit

In my last year getting my degree, I scored a paid contract at a scientific organization where I was shown into a large empty office and told I could base myself there. I was the only student on this project, so I had the whole office to myself, with about 6 desks. All of the desks were the same and mine had no better view than anyone else’s.

All went well for a couple of weeks until a few other students moved into the room. 2 of them were perfectly reasonable and set themselves up at other desks. The third decided he liked my desk. Mine had my stationary on it, my posters on the wall around it, a clock, a telephone...

So one day I come in and this guy is sitting at my desk. My stuff was packed up and pushed to one side to make room for his stuff. I made some comment about it being my desk and his response was yeah, I won’t be here for long. I set myself up at another desk that day, although over the next few days I could tell my stuff had been moved around and unless I got to the building by a certain time, he would steal my desk again.

Unfortunately for that guy, one of the things I brought from home was a “Talking Wizard” talking calculator clock. Basically a black plastic box with a button. When you pressed the button, it would say “It is nine oh five A M.” The clock also had an alarm. When you set it, it would say “BEEP BEEP BEEP It is nine oh five A M BEEP BEEP BEEP It is nine oh five A M” and would keep repeating this for 30 seconds very loudly. I set the alarm to go off mid-morning, put it in my desk drawer, and locked it. For extra pettiness, I also changed it to the wrong time.

They were sturdy desks. It was not possible to dismantle them or open them with a different key. I then took the key home and didn’t come back for another 3 working days. When I returned I sat at my desk, opened the drawer, and turned the clock off before it could go off. When this guy came in he saw me and said, “Can you turn that clock off? There’s something locked in the desk and it scares me every day.” I said something snarky like “Sorry, it does sometimes go off when other people sit at my desk.” He never stole my desk again. © valiantfreak / Reddit

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