A couple ways I used to neg the tech bros

I'm in my salty, mad-about-it era of being a woman in tech, so I have been taking delight in some of the ways my youthful, ignorant self used to push back on sexist people in the office. I had never experienced such horrible treatment and it took a few years to realize they were being genuine. Anyway, here are a couple things I used to do before my confidence was ground into dust:

• I had a coworker who CONSTANTLY interrupted me. One day I grabbed the entire ball of rubber bands from the supply cabinet on my way to a meeting. Every time he interrupted me, I shot him with rubber bands. I later sent him a skit from children's television about not interrupting, and for the next few weeks I would hum the song at my desk (he sat right behind me). One day he finally snapped at me about 'singing like a child'. So I built a catapult out of office supplies and pelted him every time he started singing at his desk, which was frequently.
• I had another coworker lament that his parents removed his trophies and awards from the mantle when he moved out for college. This seemed to genuinely distress him as he felt that he was not getting the recognition he deserved for his talents and contributions. My department used to hand out cheap trophies for internal rewards and someone who was getting laid off left a couple in the recycling dumpster. I grabbed a trophy out of the trash, sharpied on the appropriate hairstyle, and crossed out the name and added "Good job, Bob7" (we had a lot of Bobs so corporate email started adding numbers). Bob7 actually kept that trophy displayed on his desk.
• I became a gym rat for a few years and there was a gym across the street that our employer gave us vouchers for. One time I was doing overhead presses with a kettlebell. Some dweeb from my floor came up to me and said I was using the wrong weight and I needed something lighter because this was cardio. I set the kettlebell down, grabbed another that was double the weight, and finished all my reps without breaking eye contact (my exercise of choice was power-lifting, so I had more upper body strength than one might expect).
• One time we had a self-defense class that was inexplicably sponsored by HR. Bob7, myself, and some other teammates all went together. Bob7 was using too much strength and shoved a small coworker of mine to the floor. I swapped partners so I was paired with Bob7 and proceeded to show Bob7 how hip tosses work. Bob7 is less skilled at breakfalls than he claimed to be.
• I was supposed to have some lab space for my work since I was doing a lot of visual stuff at the time and I needed space to lay it all out. Someone put their damned treadmill desk in my spot in the lab. So instead I taped all my work to a wall near my cubicle and had several meetings right there in the hallway.
• I got asked to do admin stuff a lot. I always said yes (per my corporate coaching) but I did it badly. For every presentation and poster I was asked to create for someone else, I hid Nic Cage faces and other stupid memes in the graphics.
• There was a manager 'George' who was the most miserable, surly man I have ever met in my life. Just a super negative asshole to everyone around him for no reason. Part of my job was interviewing people and later anonymizing their data, including giving them a new name. I always renamed the worst interviewee "George".
• Some gross tech bro told me that I was an attractive woman because I reminded him of his mother (BARF!!!). I started calling him Eddy after that, short for Oedipus. He never caught the reference.
• I once sat in a meeting where someone declared that he liked diversity because he supported the technology females. I belly laughed in his face because I thought he was making some kind of weird, ironic joke. He was not.
• One time someone set out a bowl of candy for a holiday. One of my gym compatriots loudly declared that candy is for children and he doesn't put trash like that in his body. I took double fists of those candies and hid them all over his cubicle. He was finding candies for the next 9 months.
• When a coworker of mine refused to acknowledge my emails or IMs, I started communicating with him via stickynotes stuck to the middle of his monitor screen.
• At some point management discovered SMART goals and required us to spend a bunch of extra hours writing, analyzing, and discussing goals for every quarter. I used a corporate lorum ipsum generator to write mine. It worked swimmingly.

I can neither confirm nor deny the efficacy of any of these tactics, and I think I only got away with it because I was a bright eyed, bubbly people pleaser who no one took seriously. For all my silly tales, all of those men wore me down and nearly broke my spirit. I'm recovering now, and it brings me great comfort to recall how I used to parry the imposter syndrome energy. If anyone else has similar tails of corporate shenanigans I would love to hear them!