If you’re in a position where you need to live with roommates, the ideal is that you get to choose who you live with. Whether it’s friends or people you’ve interviewed and immediately bonded with, it really helps to already have an understanding with your roommates as to how you’re going to live your lives around one another in a way that is as harmonious as possible.

But more often than not, you might find yourself thrown together with a bunch of strangers and expected to get on. Whether that means that you’re two (or more) college students randomly assigned the same dorm, whether you’re strangers in a city vetted by an external landlord for the same home, or whether your workplace has staff apartments that you’re living in – these situations could be wonderful. Or, given the absolute luck of the draw with the people involved, it could be a nightmare.

For the guy in this story, the staff housing he’s living in isn’t so bad. He’s sharing an apartment with two fellow nurses, so at least they have that in common. But there is one key problem with their living situation – and it involves the third of the three roommates, who lacks any kind of respect or decorum. So he hatched a genius plan to get revenge – subtly, of course.

Read on to find out what happened.

How to Train your Roommate

This is the story of how I used Pavlovian Conditioning to train my formerly obnoxious roommate to behave like a responsible adult.

So, the three of us are nurses and we all live in this company provided apartment. Each of us has his own room which is joined by this common area that doubles as the kitchen and dining area, but the walls are paper thin and don’t provide enough sound-proofing.

So, if one were to say, have loud conversations in the common area during the late hours of the night, it would resonate through all the rooms adjacent. But if you were in your own room talking to somebody, it wouldn’t be heard outside.

Basically, any sound that you make on the common room could be heard on all the rooms.

Let’s see how this was causing problems between the roommates.

Now, this is not a problem during the day, but at night when everyone is asleep our one obnoxious roommate always decides to have his Facebook video calls on the common room using his phone, waking everyone up with his loud conversations.

And since we are nurses, we have to work in shifts. The second roommate and I work on 12-hour day shifts (8 am to 8 pm), while the third obnoxious one works on 12-hour night shifts (8 pm to 8 am). So, the third roommate tends to be awake at night.

We get to sleep soundly when our third roommate is at work, but every time he doesn’t have to go to work the two of us tend to be disturbed by his late-night blabbering on his phone.

We tried to handle it the adult way by talking to him about it and suggesting he do his antics inside his own room, since while in there we wouldn’t hear his loud conversations and he wouldn’t wake us up at night, especially if we have to go to work in the morning.

But their attempts to handle this the grown-up way didn’t have any effect in the long-run.

This worked for a while, but he eventually went back to his old habits of waking us up at nights. We were getting so tired of the situation because all we wanted after a long 12-hour shift was to be able to sleep soundly, especially if we still had to go to work the next day.

Our Hallelujah came from an episode of The Office that I had just watched, wherein Jim trained Dwight to crave a breath mint every time he restarted his computer. A lightbulb suddenly switched on in my head to use our WIFI to train my noisy roommate.

Nobody else knew that I had admin privileges, I just happened to be there when the guys installed it and they gave me the key. I realized that I had access to our WIFI network wirelessly on my phone and could turn it on and off on a whim like a god.

My objective was simple: every time I get woken up by noisy roommate taking his internet calls in the common room, I would turn off the WIFI in the whole house and wait until he went back to his room before turning it on again.

Let’s see how this incredible plan panned out.

The training took months and countless late nights. After getting woken up at night by said roommate I would wait for an opportune time, usually while he was in deep, loud conversation with someone, to turn off the WIFI, then wait to him to get annoyed and curse our service provider until he finally gave up and went to his room, cue for me to turn it back on.

The loud late-night calls in the common room became less and less until he no longer took them in the common room at all. This translated to silent nights for me and the second roommate who had to work in the mornings.

My method was so effective that he actually thought that there was a problem with his phone. Sometime later, he wanted to show me a video of something on his phone but said that I had to come to his room for him to show me since there was a problem with it and it wouldn’t work in the common room.

I was grinning like the devil the whole time.

Wow. While this guy’s roommate wasn’t doing anything truly horrendous, he really was disrespecting his roommates.

Because sure, his schedule means he’s awake all night, and keeping in touch with friends and family is probably a big priority of his during this time.

But when you live with roommates, the decent thing to do is to at least be respectful of them when they’re sleeping. And he refused to even do that.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about parents who want their young adult son to pay more toward household expenses.

Let’s see what folks on Reddit made of this.

This person had a similar experience, but with his own father.

While others keenly used the tactic on their kids.

Meanwhile, this Redditor pondered what this said about the intelligence of humans.

Of all the pro revenge stories, this has to be one of the best. Not only did the revenge not really harm anyone – instead just making the two day shift roommates’ lives better, while covertly training the night shift roommate to take calls in his room, it also was mostly untraceable to him. Really, the other roommate would have had to call out the WiFi company to get anywhere with it, and even then they wouldn’t have a clue that this roommate was responsible for the convenient outages.

It’s a shame that he had to lose so much sleep in order for the plan to work, but it definitely paid off in the long-run. After all, now the two day shift roommates can sleep soundly at night, giving them the same opportunity to rest and recover as the night shift nurse gets while his two roommates are at work during the day.

Really, does revenge get any sweeter than knowing you’re conditioning your roommate for the better, and he has no clue?