I will admit that sometimes I can be a bad, bad girl…

Story time:

Nicolas wasn’t a pain in my ass until he went and poked the bear.

Yeah, you guessed right.

I was the bear.

At a large firm I used to work for, Nicolas was the classic office gossiper who enjoyed stirring the pot. He sat in the cubicle next to me and listened to EVERY SINGLE WORD I said, especially when I took personal calls on my breaks. I knew that he was eavesdropping because his cubicle would go totally silent each and every time I would take a call or talk to a colleague. Even though I didn’t care for his “vibe”, I was always civil but not overly-friendly.

I’m always very selective with whom I engage with in work environments and I never participate in any gossip. I also never give anyone anything gossip-worthy about myself. I was a closed book, especially with Nicolas. But he was the type of fool who needed to fill all the time that he wasn’t working with drama.

To give you a little context, Nicolas was the same weak ass colleague whose files I had been asked to take over, little by little, because he felt “overwhelmed”. I couldn’t understand because he spent most of his time having breakfast at a colleague’s desk every morning, logging more personal calls than with his clients and he gossiping the day away with anyone who would listen.

But things shifted for me when I found out that Nicolas had been making up stories about me.

When I heard that, the only thing I wanted to do was tell him what he could do to himself but then it occurred to me that I could have a little fun with the situation.

The first thing I did was go to my manager and hand back all the files that I had taken on for him. I told my manager that Nicolas did nothing all day and that if he felt “overwhelmed”, he should take a leave of absence or distract himself by actually working.

Oh yeah, I went there.

Then, I hit Nicolas where it would hurt the most – with some easy breezy free-flowing gossip created, produced and edited by me. It was an experiment to see how fast the gossip he spread would ripple and bounce back to me.

I could fill a small notebook with the ludicrous crap I made up on “pretend” phone calls in my little cubicle knowing that Nicolas was eavesdropping. Like lies about how I used to live in different parts of the world, how I was only working for “fun”, claims of having done Botox and plastic surgery, how I was dating a popular local athlete whose name everyone knew…

Oh yeah, I did. It was my turn to stir the pot and it went on for months…

It was hilarious to see how quickly he spread my gossip. It was even more hilarious when eventually someone curious would approach me with questions related to what Nicolas had “overheard” me say.

And oh, how hilarious it was for me to give that someone a seriously confused look and say, “Huh? That’s not true. Who told you that?”, a question to which that someone could never respond to without outing Nicolas as the gossiper.

It didn’t take long to break Nicolas.

This is what broke him…

I called up a friend (who was in on the joke) on my lunch hour and “reminisced” about the time I was at the altar ready to marry the man who I had settled for when the man that I really loved stopped the wedding, whisked me away on the back of a motorcycle and that we had secretly gotten married.

Does that storyline sound familiar to anyone out there?

Remember when Bo kidnapped Hope from her wedding to that loser Larry on “Days of Our Lives”?

Yeah, I had regurgitated that scene.

My friend was howling with laughter on the other end of the line.

Seriously stupid sh*t that Nicolas should have been able to smell a mile away but he didn’t. He was like a hungry fish ready and willing to bite on any smelly bait.

A few days later, two co-workers approached me for their typical “fake” conversation. Somehow, co-worker #1 asked me if I had ever been married. Of course, I said no.

When co-worker #2 said that “someone” had said that I was once married, I responded with a poker face. Again, I said no, I had never been married.

Nicolas popped up like a bolt of lightening from his cubicle and scurried out of his cubicle to try to redeem himself and not look like a liar.

Nicolas (confused look): “But you said that you got married!”
Me (serious face): “What are you talking about? When did I ever tell you that?”
Nicolas (dazed, confused and caught in a corner): “Uh…uh…You didn’t. I…uh…heard you on the phone.”
Me (poker face but laughing my ass off on the inside): “I don’t know what you heard me say but you must have misunderstood.”
Nicolas (opens his mouth to say something but realizes that he can’t go further with the conversation without looking like an liar and ass): —-

Co-workers # 1 and #2 glare at Nicolas in disgust and then quickly walk away.

Nicolas was left standing there like loser that he was. Poor guy, I think that he almost believed that he had misinterpreted what he had heard.

Over the next few months, it was quite noticeable that his group of gossipers A few months later, poor Nicolas left for another company.

What’s the moral of this story?

Don’t waste your time getting mad or being bitter. Just have a little fun getting even.

©2015 Marquessa Matthews. All Rights Reserved.