Everyone has little quirks that are slightly annoying to others. Like fidgeting with a pen in your hands, shaking it, clacking incessantly… Until someone really exasperated finally gathers up the courage and asks you to stop. Buzzkill.

Sometimes that’s the only way you can figure out that the thing you’re doing is actually annoying to people around you. 

After talking didn’t work, a sly Reddittor decided to simply mimic his friend’s annoying behavior to teach her a lesson.

More info: Reddit

Sometimes there’s no better way to show a person that their actions may be annoying others than to annoy them with the same actions

Image credits: Roman Pohorecki (not the actual photo)

A guy took it to the petty revenge community to share how he schooled his friend who frequently deleted messages before he could even get to see them

Image credits: Boring-Importance-86

Image credits: Dương Nhân (not the actual photo) 

Fed up with her removing loads of messages, he started doing the same – sending a string of messages and deleting them before she finished reading

Image credits: Boring-Importance-86

Image credits: Mental Health America (MHA) (not the actual photo) 

The poster and his friend talked about the whole thing on a call, where he explained why he did it and she finally saw how her behavior could be upsetting others

Image credits: Boring-Importance-86

They ended up agreeing that she wouldn’t delete the messages in such amounts, but all would be okay if she deleted sensitive ones because of her trust issues

Let’s get one thing cleared up – different messaging platforms have different ways they handle deleted messages. Your traditional SMS apps will store the messages on your device, meaning people likely won’t be able to delete them after sending, although iPhones may allow unsending them. Programs like Discord or WhatsApp store their conversations on a server, allowing them to be deleted at the whim of their senders.

So, as all of these disappearing message shenanigans are happening on Discord, it’s all too easy to delete messages – a couple of clicks, poof, and the message is gone forever.

The original poster’s (OP) friend has trouble trusting people, being especially paranoid about keeping messages up after chatting. I’m not sure about you, but if you’ve ever experienced behavior like this, it really is annoying, especially on Discord. It doesn’t even leave behind a “message deleted” indicator, it’s just gone. 

So it’s understandable why the woman’s friends had been somewhat fed up by this behavior. Especially as she would text something, delete it a while later, and then be upset, thinking the recipient had seen it and chosen to ignore her. 

So OP hammed it up and started doing pretty much the same to her. Writing up a message, sending it out, and deleting it while the friend was reading it. After several takes of this, the friend got fed up herself and started ignoring the OP. So the poster did the same thing she would do – went to another friend and asked them to relay to the message-deleter the question of whether she was ignoring him.

After hopping on a call with the friend a couple days later and explaining what was up, OP seems to have been the wake-up call that she needed. She finally understood how much that irritated her friends and has stopped doing it, according to the end of OP’s story.

Image credits: Julia Volk (not the actual photo)

All in all, unsending messages is a pretty handy feature. If you’ve been around phones for a good portion of your adult life, you’ve probably had a couple of blunders related to texting. Whether it’s a message to a different recipient, an accidental jumble of letters or a simple correction you’d like to make, you must agree that it has its uses. 

You may even have woken up in the morning to several unsent messages in a row, wondering just what the hell happened while you were asleep.

Sean Burn from the talkafeels website provides a detailed psychological analysis about the act of deleting old messages.

He breaks down all of the reasons why people may delete their messages seemingly at random, from protecting their privacy to letting go of painful conversations or trying to remove someone from their life.

Doing so is a double-edged sword for people as there is a certain feeling of loss when you delete texts – those are real memories just being lost to the void. After all, people keep letters for years and years after receiving them, so saving messages is not so far off.

On the other hand, there may be a lot of hurt contained in these chats, so it’s another way of letting go and becoming just a bit more free, similarly to how people burn old diaries and memoirs to let go of their painful years. 

Ultimately, it’s up to you to decide what you’ll do with your messages and text records. And whether you’ll choose to keep them or let go of them for good, you may want to consider informing your friends or family about doing it, so you don’t accidentally start confusion or conflict.

The post collected about 4k upvotes with a 95% upvote ratio and nearly 200 comments in less than a day. The comments speculated why the friend might be so paranoid about the messages and cheered OP on for finally dealing with the issue. The funniest comment thread by far was when someone would start saying something and just replacing the rest with [deleted] at the most intriguing part.

Share your own thoughts below!

Commenters compared this story to their own experiences, where their acquaintances with OCD exhibited similar behavior

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