My favorite revenge tales are ones that don’t involve infidelity and where the protagonist gets revenge by coming up with petty ways to ruin the antagonist’s day.
In this case, Redditor tamufoiler not only came up with an extended revenge plot to get back at his neighbors for inadvertently killing his dog, but managed to probably ruin the interior of the majority of the family cars. Fun fun fun!
Background Information:
My family is a family of three, middle class, and we grew up in a nice area. Nothing too fancy, nothing terrible. Just your typical suburbia with neighborhood parks, churches, & schools all within walking distance. We were nice to our neighbors and all knew each other. My parents had a outdoor fire pit that they like to sit outside on the back patio and drink, listen to music, grill, and relax outside. My family is very respectful of rules so the music was almost never loud, we don’t throw parties, and we kept mainly to ourselves but invited people over occasionally.
When I was in eighth grade we had some new next door neighbors move in. They were a family of four; Mom, Dad, Son, Daughter. The Son was a year older than me and the Daughter was a year younger than me. The Daughter and I hit it off immediately as friends but I noticed something was off when I would go over. For the purpose of secrecy I will change their names; let’s call them the Smith’s.
The Smith’s had a weird idea of how to interact with people. I get it, everyone is different. They were very blunt and open about everything, never would say thank you, didn’t think about others. They just turned out to be scum of the earth when it came to treating other people with dignity and respect. Just weird people, but I guess it takes all kinds.
The Dogs:
My family had a medium sized basenji that my dad had trained very well.
When I was a junior in High School Daughter Smith really wanted to have a new dog. Daughter Smith basically got whatever she wanted, being the younger sibling and could do no wrong. So Mother Smith got her a beautiful German Shepard. I’ll call the dog Asshole.
Now Asshole really isn’t the one to blame. The Smith’s never corrected the dog so it’s honestly no surprise that Asshole never behaved. The dog grew up doing whatever he wanted. He was constantly off the leash in the front yard, tried to pick fights with my dog, in the back yard he was always trying to dig under the fence or in some places tried to knock the fence down. Asshole was obsessed with running the fence line with my Basenji and just trying to get to him whenever we saw him. They got into a few dog fights when Asshole got loose but I promise it was never my dog’s fault that this 80 pound sack of fur ran into our yard and picked a fight.
The Pre-Story:
A few years of this behavior go by and the Smith’s and my family aren’t friendly anymore. We would express to them that their dog was trying to get to our dog, that the fence was in bad shape, that my dad and I were constantly filling the holes under the fence that their dog had dug. They just didn’t care. My family went into their own pockets to replace 3 sections of fence and just doing that pissed them off.
By the time we are absolutely fed up with it, I had gone off to University and was a sophomore.
The Story:
A few days before Thanksgiving Asshole dug yet another hole under the fence. Since I wasn’t at home playing with the dog as much and my parents were fixated on getting Thanksgiving plans ready, no one noticed the hole.
The Friday after Thanksgiving my parents were out relaxing in the back yard, the dogs were running the fence line and I was about to leave to go hangout with some old high school friends. I went outside to tell my parents that I was leaving when we hear the most horrid yelp by any animal that I have ever heard.
Asshole had dug far enough to put his head under the fence and bit the shit out of my dog. Half of his paw was torn almost completely off as well as some other things that I won’t describe. Long story short, we had to put my dog down because of it.
Now, the Smith’s refused to acknowledge what had happened. They never once said sorry, never once offered to pay any part of the medical bills, nothing. As far as they were concerned, we were the dead ones, not my dog.
The Revenge:
By this point my family is pissed, and we have nothing but time on our hands. We devise our revenge over the course of a few months. It had to be gradual and cost them time, effort, money, and most importantly: Make them feel like shit.
First step: Collect dog shit. I’ll come back to that later.
Second step: take them to court and get their dog classified as a “Dangerous Dog.” If you ever have the chance to look at the hoops you have to go through to keep a dangerous dog, you would know it’s horrible. The requirements change depending on where you live but in our area, the dog had to be muzzled while outside, never could be off a leash, pay fines, has to have a special crate in their back yard (which was hard for them because they had a pool, random surprise inspections, and if the dog has another incident the dog has to be put down. To be clear, the goal wasn’t to hurt the dog. Just make their life difficult for as long as the animal was alive.
What was important for us us that it set up a record with the city and police department. We slowly convinced our neighbors to call them in on every violation that they did for months. Park more than 18 inches off the curb? Ticket. Loud music past quiet hours? Ticket. Now, I know you’re thinking that calling the cops and making them pay tickets isn’t revenge and you’re right…it was our cover. We started to play our music loud right up till quiet hours ever single night for three months. When they got fed up with it and tried to call the cops, there was nothing they could do. We’d politely explain that they have had a record of doing the same thing and then they would get reprimanded instead.
Third Step: Summer rolls around and now I’m home and working a 9-5 job so all of my nights are free. The Smith’s Son was working second shift at some restaurant so he never got home until after midnight. During the summer in Texas, your car could reach 120F to the touch in midday. Point being, even at midnight the car was hot. The best part was that all of the Smith’s cars were parked outside.
My mom got this idea after one of her friends got pranked by putting glitter in the air vents that defog your windows. We decided to step it up a notch. If you take frozen shrimp or fish, let it thaw for a day, get it nice and smelly, put it in a blender with a crap ton of water, then freeze it into ice cubes, you can imagine what that smells like when it thaws. One smelly freezer vs what we did…worth it.
Over the course of June when anyone would check the mailbox (which was perfectly placed on the other side of the Smith’s house) we would drop one of those nasty ice cubes into the defogger vent of the Son’s car. Then halfway through June we started moving on to the Mom’s car. Like clockwork we would see them on weekends trying to air out their cars all day making it even easier to throw in ice cubes all summer.
Remember that dog shit I told you about? Here’s the fourth part.
The Daughter was a big swimmer all the time. Her parents never made her have a job so all she would do is swim all day and night if she wasn’t hanging out with friends. My dad came up with the idea of “Shit Bombs” when he bought a slingshot to shoot down hornets nests. After doing some yard work while still having gloves, he would load up that slingshot with dog shit, shoot it over the fence and into their pool. At first it was only a couple of pieces, then it grew to a few more (by that point we had gotten another dog), and right before their big party we unloaded the rest of the shit we had. The Daughter and her friends were swimming for about 2 hours before they noticed the shit floating in the pool.
The Fifth step took a lot longer to accomplish: Their air conditioner was right on the other side of our fence. You could get on your tip toes and see the unit less than five feet away. Remember those nasty ice cubes? We started throwing them on top of their unit and they would melt and eventually made the house smell. Then, instead of fish in the cubes we slowly replaced them with gravel and sand. The sand and gravel would rattle around at night causing them to no be able to sleep between the smell and the sound. Finally, they called out an AC repair man who tried to fix it. The AC guy basically told them he had no idea how sand and gravel was in the unit but that it would eventually need to be replaced. The Smith’s got suspicious and eventually put up cameras around their house. So we had to back off some.
Final part: We wanted to move to a different city by the time I was almost graduated from college so we were model citizens and just didn’t talk to them. When our house did sell and we were moving out, I waited to check the mailbox until they were out in their front yard. I checked the mail and began my walk back home when they said something along the lines of “Glad to see you move” or “Good riddance.” I stopped to turn at them, made a show of smelling the air and said, “Do you smell fish?” then smiled before walking back home. Their faces as they figured it out was priceless.
Don’t kill my dog. I’ll fuck your shit up.
[Via Reddit]