Even if it wasn’t so much “manipulative”.
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I used to be an IT consultant.
Oof.
A friend of mine broke up with their partner, and was having a hard time not feeling like a terrible person bc their now ex was expressing a lot of sadness and fear, practically grovelling. To make it easier on my friend, I manipulated the ex into feeling angry instead; this allowed my friend to feel justified in going no-contact and not feeling guilty anymore.
I was in a shitty relationship with the brother of my shityy ex best friend. We all lived together for several years and the short version is
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she made most of the money
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I contributed what I could while working more hours at a worse job for the first couple years then working while in school for the rest. My parents were also contributing funds.
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he was completely jobless pretty much the entire time
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they both constantly complained at me for not doing most or all of the housework and when I would breakdown from it they would mock my mental illness
When things finally all went south I picked a fight with her as she moved out over a small sentimental item I knew she would be too stubborn to not fight back over and got him to fight with her over it until they blew up at each other then cheated on him with a guy who honestly just kinda moved in and steadily started taking care of me (did I mention I was working in a hospital while in nursing school all through 2020 while supporting my leech of an ex?)
This other guy started doing my laundry and cooking for me while my ex just …kept playing video games. Later my ex was like “I did notice that you stopped fighting with me about chores” yeah that was you getting replaced by an upgrade dipshit. He says I traumatized him. I hope so. I hope he never does any of that to anyone else ever again.
Still with the other guy. He’s a mess too but not nearly as much and in a lot of the same ways as me and he’s never not had a job and oh also I’ve never had to threaten to bathe him by force.
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Two stories:
I work in IT. Most people are nice and reasonable, but every now and then, there are jerks.
For the most part, everybody gets equal treatment from me, but if you are a super polite and friendly person, I’ll bend the rules for you. I’ve given a few people unauthorized hardware upgrades, boosted their ticket priority, helped them bypass company restrictions, etc. Little favors for being so chill and easy to work with.
But in the other side, a handful of folks have gotten my evil side. One guy in particular, a real douchebag. Super angry all the time, a jerk to me and other employees, was always spamming us angrily to fix his stuff. He would constantly lock himself out of his account because he would angrily type the wrong password over and over and then call us all pissed because he was locked out and couldn’t get any work done.
One morning he did it again, called the help desk and I was the lucky one who picked up. He ranted at me about how he had an important meeting in less than an hour and his account was locked out again, (because he kept typing his password wrong like an idiot.) He swore at me and yelled about how the password policy was bullshit, blah blah.
I had enough and told him that, while I could reset his password, unfortunately we recently updated our servers and it would take roughly half an hour for the change to take place. He yelled about how he was going to miss his important meeting and all that, but I just kept gently apologizing and reminding him that I didn’t come up with the password policy and all of it was above my pay grade.
He hung up furious and I smiled, made a mental note to reset his password in half an hour, and marked the ticket as resolved. Still don’t feel bad about that.
Second story: In college, whenever there was paper due that I had procrastinated on, if it could be submitted to an online portal, I would create a fake Word document, fill it with random characters, and save it with the proper name.
Then, I would use a hex editor to corrupt the document, just enough so it would still get recognized as a legit Word doc, but if you tried to open it, Word would throw an error and not be able to open it.
Then I would submit that the night it was due, so it would look like I had submitted my paper on time. Even with small classes, it would usually be at least 2-3 days before the professor or TA would get to my paper, sometimes up to a week, and that whole time, I would be working on my real paper.
I would get a message or email from the professor a few days later letting me know that for some reason, my paper wouldn’t open, and requesting that I resend it.
I would then respond with something like, “oh hmmm, that’s weird, not sure what happened. Sure thing, I just uploaded it again, please let me know if that worked.”
Of course, the second time I actually uploaded my real paper. Did that trick a half dozen times or so, never got caught lol.
It constantly amazes me how many people haven’t caught on to the fact that just always preemptively being nice to people makes your life so much better because people tend to treat you decently in return.
For sure. I always try to be extra kind to service folks, first, because it’s good to treat people well. But also because you never know what strings they can pull for you in a pinch.
Years ago, my connecting flight got canceled a few minutes before it was supposed to depart, obviously a ton of people were screwed trying to get where they were going.
I was in line for the service desk to get rerouted and saw the main service desk gal getting chewed out over and over by different pissy passengers, as if she had personally canceled their flight just because she was bored.
She kept telling everybody that all the flights were booked and it would be at least 10 hours before anything would be available.
When it was my turn, I could tell she was exhausted dealing with all the angry people ranting in her face. I just apologized to her about how sucky the whole situation was and said very nicely, “I’ll take whatever flight you can get me, but I understand things are crazy right now.” she thanked me and started to give me the same speech, then paused and told me to wait outside of the line while she, “checked something real quick.”
A minute or two later, she came back out and motioned me quietly back over. She leaned in and said she had, “found me a seat on a red-eye leaving in a few hours to my destination if that worked.”
I thanked her a bunch and was home early the next morning while all the other people were still crashed out in the airport waiting for all the other flights.
Same Word document trick! I usually use zero-byte files instead as that corruption is more common, but sometimes corrupted files are useful.
I imagine these online portals would cotton on quite quick and start rejecting zero byte files. But good idea while it works
The most manipulative thing I’ve ever done is getting small children to eat their food.
For example, when I babysit my niece and she gets bored of her food, I yoink it and make-pretend that I’m stuffing my face with it. She always gets upset and demands her food back within two gulps.
