2 Hours of VIRAL Reddit Stories to Sleep to (FUNNY COZY REDDIT STORIES)

Welcome to today's Ripestories Podcast! My Name is Ripe and I am bringing you the best Reddit Stories and commentary! We have funny reddit stories from r/ProRevenge, r/MaliciousCompliance and HOA KAREN stories about homeowner associations in America! We also read subreddits such as rslash justnohoa and stories about insane funny entitled Karens! We also have the best top rated Reddit Stories to fall asleep to. Our funny Reddit videos are perfect to sleep to!

Ripestories is available on all major Podcasting Platforms and on YouTube under the @Ripestories handle. We cover stories from popular Reddit Subreddits like Entitled Parents, Pro Revenge and Malicious Compliance. You can find new uploads here every single day of the week! We also cover content about HOA stories and HOA Karens.

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Speaker 1: Hey guys, welcome back to more Reddit Stories. In this

Ripe Stories podcast episode we will read some of the

best Reddit stories of all time. If you enjoy my

content please don't forget to rate the podcast, that would

help me so much. And now let's dive right into

the episode. So I was part of an HOA and

I had no idea that I was being scammed by

them for a decade. Not only me but every single

member was being told to pay for things that turned

out to be much cheaper than the HOA was telling us.

Starting from the beginning, before I get too ahead of myself,

I want to explain how they managed to do this.

Instead of a monthly or yearly fee like most HOAs have,

the system changed here about a decade ago. So we

live in a gated community mainly comprised of retired people

that just want to enjoy the rest of their life

without many worries. So no kids or anything are allowed

in the neighbourhood, and the HOA helps to enforce all

of that. They decided to build a facility in the

neighborhood that is akin to a pool club, I guess.

There's a pool, a gym center, tennis courts, etc. While

most places like this would require a membership fee, our

payment for it would be what we were giving the HOA.

For building it, we would all need to pay more

than usual, and our fees would be increased every year

for it. They did everything above board with having a vote,

and everybody, including myself, seemed to think it was a

good idea. We had to pay more, but now we

had this great place to go in walking distance for

most of us. You might be thinking this means we

had a good HOA that actually cared about people and

wanted to help us. Well, that was the mask they

put on and everybody was fooled by it for many years.

So last year, I got a phone call asking if

I wanted to be involved in a class action lawsuit

against the HOA. I did not understand why they were

being sued at first, but the more the person explained

it to me, the more I realized I had been

taken advantage of. They fed on the ignorance and good

nature of the older generation in order to line their pockets.

This is what happened when I got the call.

Speaker 2: Me, hello?

Speaker 1: Man, we are calling to inform you that you are

eligible to join a class action lawsuit against your HOA.

I thought this was a scam or something and was

going to hang up, but before I could, I heard

them saying something else. Man, it turns out that the

facility you've been helping pay for is much cheaper than

they led you to believe. They have pocketed $ 35 million

over the last 10 years and we want to get

that money back in the pockets of homeowners where it belongs. Me,

in that case, yes, I am interested in joining. What

do I need to do? I was given instructions of

who to write to in order to make sure my

name was down for the lawsuit. I could have sat

around and just waited but I'm a nosy person and

had nothing better to do so I was keeping a

close eye on the lawsuit and what was happening. as

well as finding out more details of what happened since

the phone call was so short. Well, what I found

out was that on all the paperwork they were showing

us about the cost of building and maintaining the facilities

of the HOA, they were lying about the total costs

of everything. And not just by a small amount either.

In total, they really had taken 35 million extra from

us all over a 10-year period. I stopped paying my dues,

as did everybody else involved in the lawsuit, they were

not going to get more money from me that was

just going to be put towards their defense. The only

reason anybody was hinted onto the corruption was an old

HOA member feeling bad and doing the right thing by

coming forward, admitting that not all the money was going

towards the place and instead they were taking it for themselves.

Always in ways that could try and keep the money

hidden by spending it on things labeled a business expense. Vacations,

nice meals, etc. Even though I don't think the HOA

is a business, so the government really.

Speaker 2: Should have caught them before.

Speaker 1: Unless it just wasn't something that gets looked for normally.

This guy was just as guilty as the rest of them,

but made a ton of statements and claims of where

the money went that did help our side. I wish

that the man grew a conscience before it had gotten

to this point. It was not going to be the

most exciting case because the HOA was not going to

have as much of a defense for themselves. That does

not mean that they didn't try and drag out the

lawsuit for so long some people even forgot about it. Literally,

this was an 18-month process of them doing whatever they

could to keep it going, and avoid paying out the money.

They did have an argument claiming they never said all

the money we gave was for the facilities and instead

they needed more for other types of upkeep. Going directly

against the contracts we signed stating what their HOA money

would be for. Also, they tried to give the fake

paperwork to the courts claiming the cost was that high.

It didn't take long for that to be disproven and

the real estimate quotes and what was being paid came

to light. They knew they were going to be in

deep trouble and finally they ran out of excuses. It

was time for the ruling, the court found in favor

of the people and demanded that the $ 35 million of

overpaid money be distributed back to everybody. It was not

life-changing amounts of money because of how many people it

had to be split between, but it was not anything

to sneeze at either. Getting money back felt really good,

even though it was my money to start with. It

always felt like I'm winning something when I get a

rebate type of check. The money was not everything because

the HOA members were also being sued criminally for embezzlement

or money laundering. I'm sorry, I don't know the exact

terminology here. basically for stealing from people and lying about

where the money was going and pocketing it instead. Whatever

the legal term for that crime is, they were found guilty.

The guy that was in charge of the whole thing

went to prison with the others under him, having to

pay fines and I think getting home arrest and the like.

The whole thing was just too interesting to not share,

and when I told my son, he pointed me in

the direction of this website, where I could tell everybody.

I couldn't stop reading either, and I cannot believe how

bad some HOAs are. I'm now a big fan of

this website and I hope that people enjoy reading what

happened to me with them. Please be careful out there

with HOAs trying to scam you and make sure you

know exactly where your money is going in the future.

The next one is a revenge story. So my 18

female mother 50 something female kicked me out today because

I would not let her financially take advantage of me.

She told me to get out and take nothing with me.

Then she left. I'm really fortunate that one of my

friends lives in the same building as me. so we

were able to take everything I owned in about three hours.

I've been seeing this coming for a while, so most

of my things were already packed away. Now, a little

context for my friend. She, bless her heart, has the

worst body odor I've ever smelled.

Speaker 2: It's bad.

Speaker 1: Like, never completely come out of fabric bad. And for

the past three hours, we've been running up and down

two flights of stairs carrying heavy boxes, so as we

sit on the couch resting and taking the place in,

Before we never return, I allow myself one petty thought.

I grab my mom's pillow and I hand it to

my friend. She understands the assignment. That pillow goes under

her armpits, her back, her chest, anywhere. It can soak

up three hours worth of sweat. That pillow sees hell.

We put the pillow back in its place and then leave. Now,

I don't know if she actually meant for me to

leave or not, but when she gets home and sees

my room empty... I hope she regrets chasing away the

last person who cared for her. And when she gets

in bed and lays her head down on her pillow,

I hope she cries. Edit, I'm not sure why it

won't let me post the update separately, so I'll just

put it here. Hi, so this was kind of my

first time posting here, and I'm surprised at how much

attention this got. I was really shaken when I made

the first post, and I left out a lot of

details because I just wanted to share a funny moment.

But I've been getting a lot of questions, and I

cannot sleep, so I wanted to answer a few of them.

The most asked one is, one of course, what do

you mean by taking advantage of you financially? First of all, no,

she did not ask me to pay rent. I would

kill just to pay rent and know my living situation

will be secure. I'm not sure where to start that

would give enough context, but I'll start by saying that

my mother is a narcissist. She's a miserable woman that

everyone who has ever known her has hated. She is

a leech that has only ever known how to take

from others. She's been addicted to gambling since before I

was born, and she certainly has not stopped now. Anyways,

I will get into the main story. Please keep in

mind that my knowledge is very limited. Most of it

came from her, and she is the least honest person

I know. I don't understand much of this to begin with. So,

about a year or two ago, my grandma passed away

and left her house to my mom. The house is

in a gated community slash trailer park with a horrible

board slash HOA, something like that. I'm not sure exactly

what it is. My mother explained it to me as

a club and to live there you need to qualify

to join. And yeah, sounds like an HOA. To qualify,

you need to own a trailer, a truck to pull it,

and go on a few camping trips with them. My

great-grandparents promised that we wouldn't have to do anything, but

the club demands that we go through the process to

qualify to live there. Our living situation is not awful,

but it's stressful to maintain. My mom found some guy

to drain off his money, and they've been fighting over

rent every month. I'm not told much, but I saw

a paper that said we owe a lot. I truly

don't know why we didn't move down to the house

to live basically rent-free. She said it was so I

could finish high school with my friends, but I don't

believe her. She didn't want to move there, but she

didn't want to sell it either. She claimed that it

was both because of sentimentality and because she knew she

would gamble all the money away the moment it hit

her bank account. I know my great-grandma's death was hard

on her, and her grief made her spend more nights

at the casino. I would almost feel sorry for her

if she didn't make her 16-year-old daughter comfort her at

her grandma's deathbed. So once she burned any money she inherited,

she pawned off the trailer and I assumed the truck too,

but I never heard much of it. She pawned anything

valuable she could find. She would often ask me for

money to keep from losing them forever. She would often

just ask me for money for any reason. Once she

realized that she couldn't just win back enough money to

get the trailer back, she started begging me for the money.

Not me, me, begging me to ask my dad for money.

They've been separated since I was about 11 and have

not spoken a word to each other since. The night

before my 18th birthday, she told me that I needed

to get money from him or she would lose the

trailer and then we would lose the house. I already

felt bad enough receiving any money from him, but asking

him for thousands of dollars for my mom? He would

literally never give her anything. And apparently it would just

be all my fault that we lost the house. I

barely made it 20 minutes before breaking down and leaving

school early the next morning. Walking two hours uphill home,

that was about eight months ago. It has just been

a constant stress with her demanding things of me that

I just cannot do every month or so. Recently, she

finally decided to sell the house because she couldn't qualify

to live there. She found someone to sell it to,

even if it is for a lot less than what

it is worth. Five days ago, I'm just sitting at

my desk when she comes into my room and just

tells me that she gave my number to her agent

and that she's gonna call me. She does not elaborate

until I ask why and she just tells me that

she's gonna put the house in my name and that

I'm gonna sell it. I'm 18. I barely understand half

of the things she has told me about what's going

on with the house. I really don't care whatever advantage

I might get from it. It's too much stress and

I have no idea what I'd be doing. No one

is going to tell me what the consequences of this

could be. I would not even understand half of what

I would find online if I tried to look it up.

I don't even know what to ask. This is an

absurd thing to ask of anyone so inexperienced. Why is

she doing this, you ask? Well, she said that because

of the taxes she owes, if the money went into

her account, it would be used to pay them all

off and she wouldn't get to keep most of the money.

You see, I don't really understand it completely, but I've

been told that this is tax evasion. My own mom

wants to use me for tax evasion. Whatever her reasons

and intentions, I don't trust her, I may be missing

out on a lot of money, but my loss is

none of her business. The consequences of her actions are

finally catching up to her, and she is upset that

I won't sacrifice myself for her. I've got my whole

life ahead of me, and I don't want to start

it off any worse than I already am. Anyways, I

know that if I have that money, she will never

stop asking for it. Basically, she will just do what

she already does, but on a larger scale. Ask to

borrow money, never pay it back or pay half it

months later and then she said she will, then beg

for forgiveness while asking for more. She will do it

for the rest of my life if she can, so

I immediately called my dad and and we made a

plan to talk to the agent together once he gets

back to my state from his vacation.

Speaker 2: Horrible timing, I know.

Speaker 1: But things happened way too fast. Today, I was still

in bed when my mom comes into my room and

again just tells me that she's gonna put the house

in my name and have me sell it. Then she

tells me there are fees, $ 1, 200- ish for doing this stuff,

and she needs me to get the money from my dad.

I have not even put on my glasses yet, much

less think about what I'm gonna say, so I just

tell her what I always tell her, that he won't

give her anything and she just loses it. I don't

say anything else, what I'm realizing now was a trauma

response and it just makes her even angrier. She screams

at me that I'm stupid and a B-I-T-C-H over and

over until she just tells me to get out and

go live with my dad. So yeah, I wish she'd

just ask me for rent. Sorry if taking advantage of

me financially was not the right way to put it,

I'm just not sure what else to call it. Second

most asked question is, are you okay? Well, I will be.

My dad is going to pick me up from my

friend's apartment tomorrow. He's going to help me get my

life together and make sure that I'm successful. It feels

weird for once to be thought of without anyone else

gaining anything from it. My parents separated when I was

about 11 to 12. We tried to make split custody work,

but my mom would not stop trying to turn me

against him. She made me tell him that I didn't

want to see him anymore and I never saw him

again until I was 15 to 16. I've been steadily

spending more time with him since then. I've also been

talking to a therapist for about a year. I'm not

alone in this. Has your friend tried X? Your friend

might have Y. She, 18 female, I forgot in the

first post, said that she just has bad genetics and

that a lot of her family has the same problem.

Her hygiene is fine and most of the time I

don't smell anything. It's just that when I texted her

for help, she was also in bed and did not

have the chance to shower or put on deodorant. With

the constant labor and stares for such a long time,

it was literally the worst case scenario. In regards to the,

did you get all your important documents question from you? Well,

sadly no. My mother is a mess and so are

her things. I would not know where to find anything

nor what they even look like. It's just something I'm

gonna have to deal with later. Also, I don't have

a credit card. I didn't have my own bank account

until about three months ago when I got my first job.

So much has been going on that I never got

around to it. I don't have any kind of shared

account with my mom, as there would literally be no point.

She would just gamble anything I would put in there, Before,

I had a shared one with my dad that he

would put money in every once in a while. I'm

very fortunate that he's been doing well. And the next

Reddit story starts like this.

Speaker 2: For a while, I.

Speaker 1: Thought that the world was a wonderful place, that you

could do anything and that people would generally care.

Speaker 2: Well, it turns out that I was wrong.

Speaker 1: After a huge mishap and debacle that left me in chains,

so to speak, I finally turned and realized that you

better check yourself before you let naivety get in the way.

This all happened one summer when I recently bought a

new mountain cabin in Peru. Everything was going fine and

dandy until I get this call one day. But before

I jump right in, let me back up. For the

longest time, I was frustrated with my way of life

over in the United States. I had dreamed of living

in a rural mountain town somewhere in the States, but

the prices just did not seem to work out for me.

given the fact that my job was remote, I could

travel anywhere and get by with living expenses. I visited

South America on a sabbatical one year and absolutely loved it.

The people were nice, the environment was clean, and best yet,

there was a mountain cabin up for sale near the

town that I often frequented while on my sabbatical. Fast

forward to today, and I almost wished I had waited

to scope the area out beforehand. Because it's not every

day that you run into a bunch of shady people,

that might want to do harm to you at your expense.

Let me just say, I generally care about most people

and hold no regard over where you come from. But

if I could go back in time before all this began,

I assure you that I would think twice before ever

buying this cabin in the woods. The cabin was everything

I ever wanted It was the people in the area

that wanted it even more, it turns out. Don't get

me wrong, the local Peruvians were amazing, but this one

character just did me in the wrong way. And as

you will see, he got what was coming to him.

I guess karma really is a thing. Like I said,

the cabin was everything I wanted. New flooring, a hot

tub on the patio, views of the mountains and best

of all, a bridge that connected the driveway to a

secluded drive with a creek running under it. A perfect

mountain getaway like something out of a fantasy movie. I

guess one of the locals took a liking to it though.

And even though I had admired this cabin for so

long and had grown fond of it, I was not

prepared to lose it and deal with shady criminals who

would stop at nothing to take away my dream. I'd

bought the cabin with some crypto money I'd earned and

cashed out on this property. I furnished it, took care

of it and generally made it an awesome place to live.

I guess one of the locals had heard of everything

I was doing to soup this place up. When I

got a phone call from a client saying that I

need to fly out to China to do some work,

I ended up leaving for a little over a month.

I work in finance and often travel globally, one of

the locals ended up annexing the property and listing it

on Airbnb.

Speaker 2: What the hell?

Speaker 1: This guy even claimed that I was dead and that

the property deeds were all in his name by forging

them that there was no verifiable owner who could make

the claim to the property. This all happened so quickly,

it was hard for me to wrap my head around.

What the hell? It turns out that there was some

shady stuff going on in this town. The man who

forged the documents ended up working for some corrupt officials

in the courthouse in the town. They even went as

far as planning to redevelop the land and turn it

into some sort of Airbnb getaway full of alpaca riding experiences.

What the hell? I was shocked and just plain angry

at all of this. So when I get back, it

all went down like this. I end up pulling up

to my driveway and I find a sign that says,

no trespassing, violators will be prosecuted. It was written in Spanish,

so I had to whip out my translator on my phone.

I go and pull the sign out of the ground

and toss it down. The next minute I see a

bunch of vehicles pull up alongside the road not too

far from where I was parked. Two men get out

of each car. The last car pulls up next to

mine and it's a woman and her kids. And then

this big burly dude gets out wearing jeans and an

Abercrombie polo. He looks like a total idiot and I

just stare at him wondering what the hell is going on.

He then approaches me and starts yelling in Spanish. I

get my translator out and he's cursing at me a

mile a minute saying, what the hell do you think

you're doing? You're on my property, friend. I was thinking

to myself that this guy is a total moron for

coming up to me on my own property, calling me friend.

F no, I'm not your friend, dude. He then proceeds

to walk around me, trying to intimidate me and then

his wife or girlfriend or whatever gets back in the

car because their baby starts to cry. He then gets

a little more irritated and I tell him, this is

my house, dude. What the hell are you doing on

my property? This is all done on my iPhone using Translate,

by the way, with speakerphone. He looks back at his

homies and laughs and then pulls something out of his pocket.

It's a copy of the deed to the property. He

then goes on to say, Well, homie, this is my

property now. And now get the F out. Who are

you anyway? The owner died years ago. I start laughing

and getting angry at the same time. He then gets

back in his car and picks up his phone. I'm

gonna call the cops on you if you don't leave, gringo.

Speaker 2: He yelled.

Speaker 1: The next thing I know is that I see a

couple of people come outside the cabin. I walk quickly

towards them and start yelling, get off my property, what

in the hell do you think you're doing? Good thing

that they spoke English because I don't think they would

have understood a damn thing if not. The group of

people got out of the cabin and said, this is

our Airbnb, we.

Speaker 2: Are staying here for the week. What the hell?

Speaker 1: I started to get furious. After yelling at them, Get

off my damn property! They all left and got in

their cars all scared and wondering what the hell is

going on. It turns out it was not the cops

he was calling, but it was some guests that got

a call from him saying there was someone on the

property that did not belong. The guests end up leaving

and he waves them on and tells them on the

phone to go to the nearest town and.

Speaker 2: He will take care of it.

Speaker 1: I guess he thought I was a crazy madman who

did not belong here, but I had a feeling that

the people who he pulled up with him were in

on his little scheme. After going back and forth, I

ended up calling the police myself and tried to wait

it out. There was no way I was gonna leave

my own property after all this went down. So I

cannot get a hold of the police, go figure. After

constantly calling them, I drive myself into town, hoping to

get someone to remove these a-holes off my property. Once

I get into town, I talk with one of the

chief inspectors. He was very gracious and kind. I told him,

why don't you guys pick up the phone? I'm nearly

out here alone with these jerks who claim to steal

my property and hold the deed. I have not sold anything.

They are the ones trespassing. The inspector looked at me

in bewilderment. I'm sorry for your mishap, sir. We need

to make sure they don't come back. And do you

have any evidence with you? I grunted and nodded my head. Yeah,

the evidence is that they are right there right now.

Speaker 2: And then I thought to.

Speaker 1: Myself, I need to make sure that my CCTV surveillance

is turned on. I usually keep it on when I'm

gone for extended travel, but this time I could not

remember if I had left it running or not. The

inspector looked at me surprised. Okay, well, we need to

make sure we go up there. I will bring an

officer with you to hold the peace. Do you have

anyone else in the town that could be a witness

or aid in your case? I started to get frazzled. Well, no,

but I may have my CCTV turned on that might

have recorded some stuff. So I go up there with

an officer in his patrol car, It takes a long

time going up the mountain because it's basically a one-lane

road and very rocky. We finally get there and I

find the most bizarre thing ever. These idiots are chopping

down trees and worst of all, the bridge leading up

to the cabin is completely destroyed. They nuke that thing

to pieces.

Speaker 2: What the hell?

Speaker 1: We get out of the car and as soon as

they spot us, the idiots who claim to own the

property have their cars all parked up the road further

away from the bridge. And Disney is pooping in the background,

so sorry for the noise. Anyway, they start running through

the creek and making a mad dash for the hills.

The next thing I know is that the officer is

pointing a gun right at them and planning on shooting

their sorry asses. He did not pull the trigger but

got in his car and started chasing after them down

the mountain. I go back inside the cabin and find

that it's completely trashed. After a short period of time

and the officer now gone, I go to my closet

to find the CCTV downloads that had been running. As

I watched each video play, I finally got to the

one that showed these guys breaking into my cabin and

searching it while I was gone.

Speaker 2: And then I.

Speaker 1: Fast forwarded to the part where they chopped down trees

and destroyed my bridge. After putting it on a hard drive,

I raced back down the mountain and handed the evidence

back to the chief inspector. He examined it with me

and I pressed charges on them. That very day, the

officer ended up catching one of the criminals and he

admitted to all the wrongdoings. The other ones involved were

eventually found and brought to justice. After a lengthy battle

of getting my deed back and getting all my documents

back in order, I think it's fair to say that

the peaceful dream of living up in the mountain proved

to be a big headache after all. Maybe next time

I will just go live on a boat or something.

And yes, certainly ripe stars even in a secluded mountain cabin.

Sometimes you might be confronted with entitled people even there. Anyway,

the next one is a malicious compliance story. Little bit

of backstory. I worked at the time in an oil

change place. They had recently moved managers from salary to

hourly because some managers in different cities were just lying

and not going to work while getting the same check

every payday. And I warned them that if anything, my

pay was going to go way up because I'm here

a lot more than 40 hours a week.

Speaker 2: They were good with that, they said.

Speaker 1: Well, one night, I get a call at 7pm, two

hours after closing, from one of my guys who was

in the shop after hours without permission and crashed into

a bay door, like a garage door. All auto shops

have at least a few of them. He got fired,

but that's not the MC at all, just a setup.

So I came in and investigated. The most relevant fact

here was that he bent the door, so there was

maybe a 4 inch by 4 inch gap.

Speaker 2: A house cat could have squeezed through.

Speaker 1: I called our door repair guys immediately, and they said

their folks were on an emergency after-hours call already to

somewhere five hours away, and they could be there in

the morning. I said okay, since this was not a danger.

The door was in a place not visible from the street.

You would have to be behind our building looking for

this kind of thing to find it. Alarm still set,

motion detectors still work. Anyone that broke in through this

metal door with a 4-inch gap would have needed tools

and was gonna get in even without the gap. We

don't even keep more than a hundred bucks cash around

and anything expensive to steal was equipment.

Speaker 2: Bolted to the floor. Deal with it tomorrow, right? Obviously, no.

Speaker 1: So I called my boss to fill him in and

he said to call the door guys. I told him

I did already and tried to explain their situation. He

interrupted and told me in a super rude and loud words,

this dickhead didn't like being called after work or having

to do any work ever, just to call them and

not bother him again about it. Then texted me to

rudely say that I better be damned well stay there

until they arrive and finish the repair. So since I

was single, I had no plans and was now paid hourly,

I clocked in the instant I arrived initially, I decided

this sounded like easy money. I pulled up two comfy

office chairs to make a bed slash couch, watched YouTube

and did assorted internet scrolling. Slept at normal times pretty

comfortably all the way to 8am. They showed up around

9 and fixed the problem pretty quickly. I was already

on my regular scheduled 8-5 shift that day which I finished,

so now let's do the math. That overnight waiting, 7pm

to 8am, 13 hours all over time at time and

a half and then my normal shift 9 hours all

at time and a half. So 22 hours multiplied by 1.5

means 33 hours of pay for doing my normal shift

plus internet scrolling and napping that was barely even an inconvenience.

My boss sees it come payday and tries to give

me a yelling over email for trying to rip off

the company, CCing all the big bosses, HR, payroll, etc.

Speaker 2: I reply to all.

Speaker 1: Explain the situation, include the text screenshot as well. Suddenly,

I'm not the one getting yelled at anymore and I

got every bit of that overtime pay. And now we

have a petty revenge story next. So in this story,

I was young, maybe 15 years old or so, and

would pick up the odd babysitting gig for extra money.

I took a night for a household that was on

my paper route. They asked me to be there on

a Saturday for 8.30 and I arrived a few minutes early.

The parents were still getting ready and they asked me

to watch the kids while they prepared to head out.

They left the house at about 9.15 and before they

headed out, the wife gave me some very specific instructions.

I could have a snack, two Oreos on the counter.

Nothing else, she said she poured a glass of milk

for me and left it in the fridge. It was

right next to the plastic milk jug, with a piece

of tape on it showing the level. She told me

she would check it when she got back and if

I took any extra milk I would have to answer

for it. The kids were okay, went to bed without

a fuss and the parents returned home at 12.20. Mommy

paid me for 3 hours about 10 minutes after they arrived.

And I said, excuse me, but this is not right.

I got here before 8.30 and it's now almost 12.30.

That's 4 hours, not 3. We did not leave until 9.15

and we got home at 12.15. I'm only paying you

for 3 hours. But I was watching the kids from 8.30.

That doesn't matter. We were home and you were not

in charge.

Speaker 2: We were. I took the money and rode my bike home.

A couple of weeks.

Speaker 1: Later they did pretty much the same thing. Two things

are important though. First, the wife was a neat freak.

I'm guessing now she had OCD, everything was lined up perfectly,

one of the kids spilled his drink and I was

looking for some paper towels. The cleaning supplies under the

sink were perfectly lined up, same with the pantry. Every

jar and can was in a row, with the label

facing directly to the front. Second, this was in the mid-1970s,

and all canned food had paper labels.

Speaker 2: So, the third time they called me in to.

Speaker 1: Babysit, they were late leaving again, and I knew that

I was going to get short-charged for the time I

was there. I was steaming, so I went into the

pantry and tore the labels off each and every can.

Speaker 2: All of them.

Speaker 1: She had a shelf for canned pulled soup, another one

for canned veggies, another one for canned fruits, and I

scrambled the unlabeled cans. When they got home, sure enough,

the wifey tried to short me again.

Speaker 2: You know what? Keep your money.

Speaker 1: I don't want it, and I'm never babysitting for you again.

And as of today, I'm stopping delivering your newspapers as well.

So if you want to read the paper, you're going

to have to buy it at the corner store. I

stormed out. I wish I could have seen the expression

on her face when she opened the pantry door and

saw shelf after shelf of bare metal cans. And yeah,

ripe stars, that was absolutely deliciously petty and that is

what petty revenge is all about in my opinion. I

just love these stories. Let me know in the comments

what you think about petty revenge stories compared to others

like nuclear or pro-revenge. And the next Reddit story starts

like this. So I live in an HOA and was

glad to find a place where I can tell a

story of how awful mine was to me. So before

I get into the HOA aspect, I want to tell

everybody a little bit about me. My grandparents raised me

and they used to live in Germany. From a young age,

I became fascinated with the culture and immersed myself whenever

I could, going to events and festivals to learn about

my heritage and where I came from. I own several

authentic Bavarian Trachten, which are otherwise known as the traditional clothing.

I wear these in my everyday life as I just

enjoy them, and they make me feel rooted. Yes, that

means I'm the guy in his yard wearing lederhosen with

a button-checkered shirt, long socks, and traditional shoes. In fact,

this exact day, I was raking up my leaves for

the sole purpose to avoid an HOA fine. I could

care less about my lawn and how nice it looks,

but I will follow the rules. Especially when an HOA

board member shares a back fence with me. Now, for

the HOA, they as a whole can be harmless if

it wasn't for a few members that just take things

way too far. The one that lives behind me, for example,

who I will name Karen because, well, if the haircut fits. Anyway,

she and a few others seem to think that the

perfect neighborhood means looking like we all came out of

some real estate magazine. When she saw me in my

traditional clothing, she was not happy and went as far

as to make some horrible accusations. Karen, you need to

change out of that. Halloween is long past and you're

gonna offend people, including me.

Speaker 2: Me?

Speaker 1: I'm just wearing traditional German clothing. There's nothing offensive or

wrong about it and it's not a costume. Karen, you're

wearing Nazi clothing. That means you're a Nazi and a

threat to the people in this neighborhood. Just a note,

I'm not wearing anything to signify that I have any

Nazi affiliation, political or otherwise. No shaved head, no armbands

with the recognizable hate symbol, nothing. Me, not every German

is a Nazi. It's pretty messed up to assume that

and think an entire heritage is evil. Karen, I never

said that. In fact, I am German and Jewish. And

I know what you're wearing is offensive. Some cities you

would be shot for wearing that. I'm just trying to

keep the neighborhood safe. So you need to go and change. Me,

I don't need to do anything. I have the right

to wear the clothing I want. Hell, it would be

legal even if I was wearing offensive items, which I'm not.

She did not understand my comments, but I didn't expect

her to. People like Karen don't realize that the Nazi

party was a political group. She got pissed when I

refused to take off my clothing and change. She started

screaming and threatening to cite me as going against HOA.

She then jumped over my fence to be on the

same side as me. I figured she wanted to yell more,

but instead she went one step too far. She attacked

me and started ripping off my clothing, tearing pieces and

ruining them. I could not get her off of me,

she was like some wild savage animal. Complete with scratching

me as she tried to destroy the clothing and tear

them off my body. I have no shame in saying

that I started screaming for help until other neighbors showed up.

They got in between us and finally pried Karen off

of me. I looked like crap and she was just

still yelling that I was a Nazi and need to

be removed from this country. The police showed up and

despite what she was trying to argue, they could tell

that I was on the bad end of this fight.

With my clothing half on the ground and open scratches

on my body, she shifted her yelling onto the police

demanding that I be arrested for being a Nazi and

dressing in that kind of clothing. Instead though, I was

the one that pressed charges against her for assault and

a hate crime. I lucked out at my other neighbor

had security cameras on one of his trees that managed

to catch the entire thing. He was more than happy

to supply them for me. The trial should have been

a very open and shut case, but Karen just kept

pulling out more surprises. All ones that hurt her, so

I had no issue letting it drag on and watching

the drama unfold itself. She was questioned about how my

clothing hurt her, as she claimed to be German and Jewish.

She was using these points to claim that she knew

about the current Nazi issues more than other people. Well,

they looked into that and it turns out that she

was lying on both accounts. She was Irish Catholic and

just pretending. We also found out this was not her

first complaint and she had done similar things before to

a lesser degree. Telling people of certain backgrounds that they

were offensive to her because she was enter fake nationality.

Just as an excuse to try and fine other neighbors

and stir the pot because she did not care for them.

Then two other people came forward with claims of Karen

harassing them based on their heritage and one of them

was so ironic even her own lawyer looked embarrassed. This

neighbor was Jewish and apparently had an issue with Karen

during the last holiday season. Karen claiming her not putting

up anything for Christmas made her uncomfortable and she should

do the right thing for everybody, and put things up anyway.

She was just beyond screwed. The judge wanted to make

an example out of Karen and give her a harsh

sentence to show that they would not tolerate this kind

of hate towards anybody, even using those past incidents against

her to show that she was fully aware of what

she was doing and it could not be some accident

or small misunderstanding. She was going to prison for a

good long time and actually spending most of her sentence there.

Who even knows how somebody like her will last in

prison for that long. A lot of minorities she can

easily piss off that will see through her in an instant.

The neighborhood as a whole was ecstatic that she was

gone and could not harass anybody now anymore. The HOA

meanwhile was flailing and trying to save their reputation by

claiming no association with Karen and what she did. I

had an idea and went to them with a suggestion

of having a little heritage celebration day for the neighborhood.

Everybody could come out with their flags and traditional clothing

and food. Let everybody be out there and free with it.

The few others that were just as bad as Karen

did not seem to want to do it, but they

really were not left with a choice. Funds they probably

wanted for themselves got spent on this event and it

actually went great. I wore my traditional clothing again with

nobody having issues with it now that Karen was gone.

It was a great win against this HOA Karen. And yeah,

Ripe Stars, honestly, I cannot understand why some people get

so upset with others that are wearing some kind of

clothing that these people don't like. Just let others wear

what they want. Why do you even care? I just

cannot fathom how people have the time to even care

about something as trivial as this. Let's continue with the

next revenge story. So one day, many years ago, I

got an email addressed to someone who had the same

first initial and last name as I do. For the

purpose of this story, I will call him G-Man. As

with anyone who uses a common email address, think first

initial plus last name, you sometimes get an email that

is not meant for you. It was mostly incidental things

like receipts and the occasional personal email. I was chalking

them up to being a data entry error. Perhaps they

misheard the email address and instead of typing in gclastname

at gmail.com, they typed in glastname at gmail.com.

Speaker 2: No big deal.

Speaker 1: In the cases where I could, I would politely reply

to the sender and let them know that I was

not the intended recipient and to please let G-Man know

that he is giving out the wrong email address going forward.

It was never successful. I would still get emails for

G-Man and it was for things that I would think

you would want to receive like order receipts or something

that had a confirmation number attached to it. I tried

to track down G-Man but to no avail. There were

multiple G-Man last name on social media so I could

never 100% confirm which one it might have been. And

so this went on and on for years until finally

one day I got a personal email addressed to G-Man

that referenced the company he worked for. Now I had something.

Speaker 2: I looked him up.

Speaker 1: It turns out that G-Man is the systems manager at

said company. His LinkedIn bio says that he is an

IT professional. That's interesting. I find his company email and

forward him the email, also advising him that the other

address he is using is attached to another person and

it would be great if he could be more mindful

of what he is typing in or giving out. Again,

I was polite in my request to him. He replied

and apologized. I thought, it's finally over. But it wasn't over.

Oh no, far from it. The emails I received that

were addressed to Gman actually began to increase in volume.

Now I'm getting emails for mailing lists and account signups

and all sorts of other crap. This guy, this so-called

IT professional, is clearly using my email address as his

spam dump knowing that it went to an actual person.

I would have to sort through dozens upon dozens upon

dozens of emails daily as a result of this, and

as we all know, once you're on one mailing list,

you tend to end on a lot more mailing lists.

By now, I've decided that clearly this clown is deliberately

being a jackass, so it is gloves off and game on.

I decide to extract revenge at any opportunity. It started

out simple enough. If I got an account sign up,

I would click the link to verify it and then

promptly log in and deactivate the account. It worked for

a bit, but then there would be another sign up,

so I got more creative. I would log into the account,

change all the information and, most importantly, the password, usually

to something like, I'm a gigantic a-hole. Which would leave

the account active but totally inaccessible since any attempt at

password recovery sent the email to my account which was

then promptly ignored and deleted. Hotel booking? I would log

on and cancel it the day before he was due

to arrive. I'm guessing he never got noticed though since

it was all coming to my email. Basically, anything I

could do that would inconvenience G-Man, I would do it.

This back and forth continued on for years. In fact,

I still occasionally get emails for the guy. But then

one day, it happened. I got an email receipt for

an order that G-Man had placed. It had the recipient's

name and address, but more importantly... it had G-Man's address

on it. Cue up, I've got a golden ticket. I

finally had the means of the ultimate revenge. I took

his address and I signed him up for everything I

could find. Free samples, in other words, adult diapers, feminine

products and lube, catalogs, normal not-so-normal and raunchy, and I

spent an entire day finding anything I could enter his

address into and dutifully filled it out.

Speaker 2: But the coup de grace, the cherry.

Speaker 1: On top, when I was finding things to sign up for...

I stumbled onto a website that allowed you to order

free flooring samples. They would be various sizes, but somewhere

12 by 12 squares. Carpet, tile, wood, linoleum, whatever. I

signed Gman up for every sample I could find. Then

I found another site offering the same thing, and I

did it again and again and again, until the point

where I literally lost track of how many free flooring

samples I signed him up for. My guess, it was

easily in the hundreds, if not thousands, I literally carpet-bombed G-Man. Coincidentally,

the email volume certainly decreased. I never heard from G-Man either.

Maybe he deleted my initial email and forgot, or maybe

he was buried under all those flooring samples. Either I'm

sure once they started to arrive, he realized his mistake...

I bet that to this day, he still gets items

delivered to that address. And the next one is titled

Malicious Compliance. The company I worked for at the time

no longer exists, so I don't feel too bad about

sharing this story. This takes place in the mid-1990s, and

I am the sysadmin for a small tech company. We

basically did all sorts of things for clients, large and small,

but one of the more profitable areas was technical education.

Think room after room of PCs for classes and training,

companies send us their people, we teach them databases or

email serving, mainframe access using terminal emulators, that sort of thing.

My immediate manager was an okay sort of guy but

was always looking for ways to cut money from the

budget to look better for his superiors. Things like saying,

why do you need four megs of RAM in the

classroom PCs? You can get by with two. You get

the idea. Well, there was a new version of a

well-known server operating system out of a company in the

Pacific Northwest that was rapidly replacing the older novel installations

and there was great demand for training on this new OS.

Speaker 2: Let's call it MT.

Speaker 1: Boss wants us to gear up to teach MT to

the companies replacing their older systems. I say great. Here

are the costs involved with purchasing X copies of the

new OS for the classroom PCs. This email went over

like a lead balloon. Email back from boss says essentially, no,

just use one copy for all the systems. I have

the CD-ROM in my office, come get it. I reply

that we will be in violation of the license agreement

for the OS and we could face penalties. Boss emails

back a little testy too, just do what.

Speaker 2: I'm telling you to do.

Speaker 1: So I wander over to his office and he hands

me a hand-burned CD-ROM copy of the OS and the

license code on a piece of paper.

Speaker 2: Not good.

Speaker 1: Once I'm back in my office, I email him again,

reiterating that this is not a great idea and could

get the company in serious legal trouble. He says do

it or lose my job. Alrighty then, CYA time. I

archive the email chain and print off hard copies for safekeeping.

Some months go by and classes are rolling in and

out of the building every week. All seems quiet and then,

due to a totally unrelated issue, the company gets audited.

Auditors are everywhere looking for who knows what but they

eventually get to the training area. They quickly see that

we do not have license keys for the 30 plus

systems running the new MT operating system. All hell breaks loose,

VPs and CIOs start coming out of the woodwork like roaches.

I am called into a meeting with my boss and

every boss up the food chain to the CEO of

the company. Rarefied atmosphere to be sure, the witch hunt begins,

I am raked over the coals for putting the company

in legal jeopardy, And what do I have to say

for myself before I am terminated for cause? Well, I

was doing what I was ordered to do over my objections, etc.

I look over to my boss who was as suddenly

developed a bad case of Clintonian memory syndrome saying, I

have no memory of that. My boss said, I would

never authorize breaking the law. Exactly what I was expecting.

So I pull out the file folder with the email

hard copies and show the boardroom full of executives the conversation.

My boss gets red in the face and accuses me

of forging the emails to deflect responsibility for this massive violation.

Never in his life has he seen something so underhanded

and surely the board can see that he is not

responsible for me going off and pirating software for profit.

Silence for a moment as everyone in the room stares

holes into me. I reach back into my bag and

pull out the CD-ROM and license code and ask if

he wants it back. Some points to consider, there was

only one CD burner in the building, attached to the

boss's computer, they were still fairly expensive at the time.

Only one real copy of the MT operating system had

been purchased by the company.

Speaker 2: By the boss.

Speaker 1: Lastly, the sharpie label on the disc and the license

key were written in the boss's very distinctive handwriting. On

his stationery with his letterhead on it. CIO looks irritated,

says I can leave. I go directly back to my

office and post my resume on the job boards. Got

a new job offer in two days. The company was

hit with massive fines. They never really recovered and went

bankrupt the following year.

Speaker 2: My old boss though?

Speaker 1: Well, I went back to the area a few years

later and he was selling PCs at Best Buy. No

dishonor there, but a rather dramatic drop in pay.

Speaker 2: I presume. And now we got an M.I.V.A. whole story.

Speaker 1: So I need some input on this one. My wife

is upset with me about always correcting her grammar. Example,

we are watching The Office and my wife says, I

bet they will be making money off of this show

for the rest of their life.

Speaker 2: Me, lives.

Speaker 1: She got angry and then cried and said that I

correct her grammar a lot and she finds it condescending

and rude and that I'm treating her like a child.

I did not see it that way and feel that

it's not really out of the norm to correct someone

you're close with, especially when it's such a basic mistake. Also,

she is a fourth grade teacher, so it's kind of

her job to teach others proper grammar. So, am I

the a-hole for being a grammar Nazi? Should I just

keep my mouth shut? And yeah, ripe stars, let me

know what you think about this one. Do you think

OP is the grammar Nazi here or not? Comment number

one said, I'm an English language teacher and I'm telling

you right now that you're the a-hole. Do I hear

other native English speakers making grammatical mistakes all the time?

Speaker 2: Yes. Do I correct them?

Speaker 1: No, because even though it's my job to teach English grammar,

that would make me an a-hole. Do I make grammatical

errors when I speak? Yes, because speaking is an in-the-moment

task and mistakes occur. Your poor wife. Comment number two,

you're the a-hole. Learn to swallow the need to always

be right and always telling people they are wrong. No

one likes that. Least of all, the person you're supposed

to love and respect more than everyone else. Completely understandable

why she is not happy with you. Update to the story.

So the consensus is that I'm the a-hole. I did

apologize yesterday and apologized again this morning, and I will

try to stop doing this in the future, thanks to

those who gave constructive feedback. And the next Reddit story

starts like this. So I got married when I was

30 years old to the best woman in the entire world.

The one thing I could never understand was how she

was so much better than her parents. I know that

it's not uncommon for people to not get along with

their in-laws.

Speaker 2: These people, though, were.

Speaker 1: Just bad in every sense of the word. They always

wanted to borrow money or try to convince me to

invest by just handing it over. I knew they would

just waste it anyway. They did not need the money

for anything like bills. They just wanted a lavish lifestyle

and expected it to come from their daughter. Once they

started talking about her divorcing me and giving them a

portion of the money, she was just done. She went

no contact with them and I followed my wife on that.

I was glad for them to be gone and we

spent most of our marriage happy and not even thinking

about them. About 18 years after we got married, my

wife got sick with breast cancer. It went from a

prognosis of looking good to very bad quickly. Then she

was just gone and I was devastated. I wanted to

grow old with her and now she was just memories

in my mind. I remember that I was sitting in

a funeral home trying to work out some details when

I got a phone call from her parents. They were

just shy of being in their 70s but the fact

that they were still alive when my wife was dead

made me angry. I don't even know how they got

my number or heard of her passing, but they did.

The phone call was eerie with them, acting like the

entire thing was some business deal and not a tragedy.

They got very defensive about questions regarding the funeral and

just wanted to talk about the house. For reference, my

wife and I succeeded financially and lived in a house

worth 1.25 million dollars. I would call it more of

a mansion than a house considering how big it was.

I was just listening on the phone to them saying

that the mansion now belonged to them because they are

in my wife's will. And yes, the house was in

her name and not mine at the moment of her

death for some unrelated reason regarding credit scores. The thing

was that while she did have a will, they were

not in it at all. Then they dropped the bombshell

that they were at the mansion at that moment and

getting the locks changed. More questioned on my end led

to them just hanging up on me. They were stealing

my home and dumb enough to warn me about it.

I had to stop my meeting and rush home to

try and get there before the locks were changed. It

was not far and I got there and saw them

standing at the front door while another guy was changing

the locks.

Speaker 2: I ran over. Me. Hey, stop!

Speaker 1: The guy was driving a generic white van and knowing

her parents he was probably not licensed to be doing this.

He got scared and sprinted away. Upon looking later, The

guy was driving a generic white van and knowing her parents,

he was probably not licensed to be doing this. He

got scared and sprinted away. Upon looking later, he did

not remove my old locks yet, so I was safe.

They were a little damaged, so I ended up getting

them changed anyway later on. For now, I had to

deal with my in-laws that I had not seen in

about 15 years. Me, what the hell do you think

you're doing? This is not your house and you have

no right to try and lock me out of it.

If you want a reading of the will, I will

gladly give you that just so you can see that

you are nowhere in it. She hated you and the

best thing she ever did was cut you out of

her life. Father-in-law, this mansion belongs to me. I'm her father,

and getting married does not change any of that. Everybody

knows that ownership moves onto the father when a woman dies.

She was my property first, so that means I get

everything she owned. I almost threw up in my mouth

from how disgusting of a comment that was. It kept

going back and forth and hit a boiling point with

my mother-in-law slapping me. This seemed to be a signal

for father-in-law to shove me to the concrete. Mother-in-law, now

get out of here before I call the cops and

have you removed for trespassing. I wanted so badly to

stand up and hit them back. The only thing stopping

me was the voice of my wife in my head

telling me that violence is not an answer. Instead, I

backed off the property, got into my car and called

the police. I told them that I caught an estranged

family trying to change the locks of my house in

order to get in my home and then attacked me

when I confronted them. Now they are refusing to let

me enter. They sent some police and I told the

officers on the scene the same thing as the lady

on the phone. They asked for my ID and told

me it would be best to stay in my car

since I was already attacked. Then asked if I wanted

to press assault charges, which I did. After checking the

IDs on my in-laws and only me having this as

my legal address, they were forced to leave. Not in

their car, but in the back of a cop car

because of the assault. I called my lawyer right after

to tell him that we might have a problem regarding

my wife's will since I knew they would not be done.

The situation with the will didn't go to court, but

we did have a reading of the will where a

lot came out. As stated before, everything was being left

to me and she even had a note in her

will mentioning that if her parents were alive to not

let him take anything. That was when their motives came

out full blast. It turns out that they had taken

out a large life insurance policy on my wife without

telling either of us about this, which also meant they

forged documents and signatures so they were now in trouble

for fraud as well. Since the life insurance was in

her name and everything was being left to me, I

was the only one entitled to any money. Note, due

to the legal issues regarding the insurance, the company under

some clause was able to revoke the money. I don't

really care since it just meant they wasted money paying

into it. They got sent to jail between the assault

and fraud and I gained a restraining order for when

they get released. I want them nowhere near me or

my house ever again. The mansion was being put in

my name as the sole owner and if they tried

to take it again, I would make sure they end

up in jail once again. I had people asking me

if they took out the insurance because they found out

she was sick, or if they had planned to do

something crazy for the money like have her killed. I

don't think that's something I will ever know for sure,

but feel free to tell me your own theories on it.

And yeah, ripe stars, I'm glad that these entitled people

went to jail, and I hope OP never has to

deal with them again. Either way, the next one is

titled Mind Your Own Business. A few years ago, while

I was a student, I would work part-time at a

local supermarket, let's call it Salesbury's. Typically, I would be

working on the checkouts, however, when things were quiet, often

during closing shifts, I would have other duties like restocking

shelves or collecting up the shopping carts. This particular malicious

compliance occurred while I was out in the car park

collecting cards. Around 9pm the store is not particularly busy, however,

the car park is around 30% full. Plenty of spaces,

even once right next to the entrance to the building.

Despite this, a youngish guy in a brand new white

BMW decided to park in a disabled bay despite having

no obvious disability or a blue badge, a permit which

lets you park in disabled bays. The guy gets out

of his car and heads into the store. Me, you

know that you have parked in a disabled bay, right? Him,

mind your own business. You're just jealous because you cannot

afford a car like mine on a supermarket worker's salary.

At this point, I remembered a key piece of information,

so I did not reply and left him to walk

into the building. About 10 minutes later, a police car

pulls into the car park. Around the time of this

malicious compliance, there were a few boy racers going around

town and driving dangerously late at night. Especially in car parks,

so the police were patrolling each car park in town

on a few nights of the week to scare off

the delinquents. Anyway, as I'm pushing carts nearby, the police

officer asked me how long this car has been parked there.

I told him and he said he would wait for

the owner. About five minutes later, I'm called back inside

to go back onto my checkout. There's a huge set

of glass windows through which we can see the car

park from the checkout, so I glance out there to

see the guy from earlier being fined by the police officer.

And yeah, ripe stars, there's just nothing more satisfying than

malicious compliance and petty revenge. Let me know if you've

ever gotten petty revenge on someone in your life. Either way,

the next one is a revenge story. This happened about

a year ago to my friend, we will call her Jen,

and her little brother, Sam, 12 years old. Sam's baffling

clairvoyance led to some great pro-revenge on intruders. One morning,

Jen and Sam's mom went outside to see that her

car window had been smashed. While nothing of value was

in the car to be stolen, she noticed that they

had taken her garage door opener. The burglars clearly meant

to come back another time to ransack the garage and

home when they thought nobody was home or the family

was asleep. Unfortunately for them, Sam lived there and was

obsessed with the idea of catching them in the act.

A week and a half pass and their whole family

is a little on edge. Dave had police cruisers by

most nights to check on them, but the criminals had

not turned up. There was a reason they didn't get

the garage doors changed, I don't remember what it was though. Anyway,

that morning, Sam wakes up and simply knows. He tells

his family, it's tonight, they're coming back tonight. The family

kind of raises their eyebrows, obviously sceptical. He asks if

he can stand guard. The parents are like, yeah, whatever,

don't expect anything though. Sam plants a stakeout with an

airsoft gun, walkie-talkies the whole nine yards. He even tried

to booby trap some expensive tools in the garage, but

I think gave up after realizing it's much more difficult

than the kid in Home Alone made it look. Sam

goes outside at 11pm and waits, hiding across the street

in a neighbor's bush. After an hour, his family tells

him to come inside via walkie-talkie and that the criminals

are not coming back tonight. Sam refuses, he has a feeling. 12.30am

rolls around and two cars coming from opposite directions approach

Sam's house, slow down and then keep driving. Super suspicious.

The cars come by again and his garage door opens.

Speaker 2: It is them.

Speaker 1: Sam takes pictures of the cars and license plates as

they pass the second time. About 15 minutes later, three

people creep up the driveway into the open garage. Sam

radios inside to tell Jen and calls the cops. A

few minutes later, police arrive and arrest all three of

them who claim to have seen an open garage and

went to investigate. This might have let them off with

a warning or just trespassing charge as they had no

stolen items on their person yet and no garage door

opener for proof. They had wisely left it in one

of their cars. Unfortunately for them, Sam comes forward with

his observation and photographs of their cars. Takes the police

five minutes to search the neighborhood and find the cars

parked about a mile away from the house. They find

like 20 garage openers in the car along with hundreds

of dollars of stolen items. They are arrested on multiple counts.

And the next one is an M.I.D.A.

Speaker 2: Whole story.

Speaker 1: The past couple of months, my wife has been complaining

about our cats. She's been claiming that the cats wake

her up constantly and that she is frustrated every night

that she has to get up and open the door

for the cats. Or the cats keep making noises or

the cats keep jumping on her. It got to the

point where she started saying that she wants me to

get rid of them. I told her I've never seen

or heard any of this, but she claims I sleep

through it all. She kept telling me that she was

getting less and less sleep and kept acting aggressive, blaming

lack of sleep from the cats and that if I

did not get rid of them, she would leave me.

I legitimately started considering giving the cats to my sister

until I noticed something. One morning, she claimed she had

gotten up multiple times throughout the night to help the

cats she listed a bunch of times. I thought it

was weird because I'd been up until 4am and she

claimed that she got up at 1am to open the

door for them and a few times around 3am because

they were meowing and jumping on her. I was in

the bedroom the entire time while she slept and I

know none of that happened. Things were not adding up

so I decided to run a test. I waited until

she said she was gonna go to bed and then

I let the cats out of our bedroom, lowered my

phone brightness and faked going to sleep. I just laid

there in bed for the entire night, bored, but I

definitely didn't fall asleep. I made sure to make timestamps

every 30 minutes on my phone through Discord just to

make sure. I marked down every noise my cats made.

One cat had jumped down from something and made a

little sound at 3.18am and one ate food relatively quietly

by the bedroom door at 4.57am. Other than that, nothing happened.

And sure enough, my wife slept from 11pm until 9am.

And that morning, she claimed she had woken up at

least seven times to open doors and from cat noises

and cats jumping on her. At this point, I was

pissed because she was clearly lying to me. I was

exhausted and fed up with the lies, so I just

bluntly called her out on it. I told her, that's funny.

I stayed up all night to monitor the cats and

they were not even in the room at all last night.

I have timestamps and everything. So you've been lying to

me and trying to convince me to get rid of

my cats?

Speaker 2: Why?

Speaker 1: She just sat there quietly shaking and looking pissed and

then got up and left without answering. She came back

hours later and ignored me whenever I talked and when

I asked her how I am the bad guy in

this situation, she finally said that I was treating her

like a child by lying about sleeping and staying up

all night just to see if she was lying or

not and that making timestamps and everything as if I

was an investigator was going too far and makes me

an obsessive a-hole. I did it because she was threatening

to make me get rid of my cats or she

would leave and her claims did not add up. So,

am I an obsessive a-hole? Someone on Reddit said, not

the a-hole, but I cannot help but wonder if your

wife has some type of sleep disorder. I suffer from

insomnia and fall asleep for just a few minutes at

a time some nights and have very vivid, realistic dreams.

When I get up in the morning, I struggle sometimes

to figure out what was real and what was just

a dream. Comment number two, not the a-hole, your wife

was making claims that didn't match the known facts and

you did what you needed to do to get to

the truth. I find it interesting that she didn't try

to argue that you made a mistake or that you

really had not been up all night. That just tells

me that she knows she is full of it. Get

a lawyer because you're about to need one.

Speaker 2: And now an.

Speaker 1: Update to the story, my wife has been baker acted.

She didn't hurt herself, just said something concerning in public.

And by the way, ripe stars, I had to look

up this one what it means and apparently... Being BACAC,

that means being involuntarily confined for a mental health exam

in Florida. and it's commonly called being Baker-acted. I got

a call from the hospital this morning asking me to

head over for some family therapy. Apparently, she finally wanted

to talk. I'll be honest, I'm pretty pissed at the

reason why she's been so hateful towards my cats. It's

completely asinine. It's nothing that anyone had suggested. She's not cheating,

she's not sick physically or mentally, she's not bored of

the relationship and looking for an out or something. According

to her, one of the cats stepped on her laptop

and ruined a story she was writing. She has hated

both cats ever since. I mean, that sucks, but it's

not worth trying to emotionally blackmail me into getting rid

of them. I asked her why she didn't just tell

me the truth and why she had been lying and

refused to talk about it when I had asked. Her

answer was, because you wouldn't have gotten rid of them otherwise.

And then explained that when she saw that I wasn't

willing to abandon them for her, she took offense and

made it a goal to have me pick her over them.

Absolutely sickening. Don't know why she actually admitted to it all.

The woman with us asked me how I felt about

all of it and I just told the truth. I

told her it was a nice run, but I'm probably

going to want a divorce. I was asked why, and

I told them, I've seen a new hateful malicious side

of her that I want nothing to do with. She

was so set on getting rid of the cats over

a fanfiction being ruined that she manipulated her husband. My

wife started shouting at me that I've betrayed her and

that I am scum for choosing animals over her. And

by the way, ripe stars, I would say, OP is

not scum for choosing animals over a manipulative Karen, but

instead he is more like a king because that is

exactly what I would do too in this situation. Either way,

OP further says, at least cats don't give ultimatums like

she gave. It sucks that she's been baker-acted and all,

I guess, but it's for the best right now. She

will have time to process it all in a safe

environment and hopefully come to terms with it. Bad husband,

I know. I'm almost sure I'm going for a divorce.

I'm very worried about her in the same house as

my cats. I want my cats safe. I don't want

to worry about them being harmed or disappearing.

Speaker 2: Screw that.

Speaker 1: I guess I will do what almost all of you suggested.

Keep the cats and rehome the wife. Not how I

wanted it to end, but life is not always nice.

If I may, I want to clear up some things

from the original post. I didn't stare at her all night.

We have a mute TV with subtitles playing every night.

I subtly watch TV while paying attention to the cat sounds.

I'm not allowed to install cat doors and she won't

let me keep the doors open. Apartment rules. So why

did I instantly assume she was lying? I'm unfamiliar with

mental health and diseases. I know about some diseases, but

ones that make you think your dreams happened. Tumors that

make you see, hear, remember nonexistent things. Sorry that I

wasn't aware of these possibilities. So when someone tells me

events happened when they literally didn't, I generally assume they

are just lying. Shame on me, I guess. And yeah,

ripe stars, I totally agree with OP here. I would

also always choose cats or any dear, loyal pet over

any manipulative person. And the next Reddit story starts like this.

My family has owned a lakeside property for three generations.

It all began with my grandparents who worked hard to

buy this land with the thought that in the future,

a location like this might be quite expensive owing to

just how lush the greenery was there. And they were right,

our property is now worth a lot but my parents

never sold it despite going through some rough financial times.

Now it is with me and thanks to my remote

work I am able to live nicely in this place

and take care of it while my parents moved in

with my grandparents in a property a little deeper in

the woods. The best part of this place is enjoying

simple pleasures of life. And yes, it's located very far

from a bustling city and does not always have all

the amenities nearby, but the absolute peacefulness makes up for it. Anyway,

this year I decided to take a break from the

routine and traveled overseas to visit some relatives. They live

in a nice penthouse, which was a good change of scenery,

though I quickly realized that I was not meant for

the city life. I got back after half a year. Remember,

I work remotely, so I can work pretty much anywhere

I want.

Speaker 2: God bless.

Speaker 1: Planning to make some changes to the exterior after talking

to my grandparents, but as I got closer, that happiness

turned into surprise and frustration. Surprise because in the distance,

towering over was my neighbor's brand new vacation home. Which,

good for them, this location was perfect for vacation houses. Hell,

many people have offered very generous amounts of money to

rent out my property as a vacation home. So basically,

I was pretty happy for them. But it did not

take me long to see that there was a huge

glaring problem with their house. And that was where the

frustration came. Their newest shiny vacation house went over the

property line and onto my property. Honestly speaking, this was

not the first time my neighbor had stepped onto my

property Over the years there were small signs, a fence

post out of place here, a boundary marker mysteriously moved there.

Basically little problems that I chose to ignore, thinking they

were just misunderstandings. But this was different, very very different.

So I knew I had to confront my neighbor, which

I was not looking forward to because I was already

very tired from my trip and she can be a

very annoying person at times. But I didn't want to

delay it, so I took a shower, changed into some

nice and comfortable clothes and knocked at her door. A

few moments passed before the door creaked open, revealing my neighbor,

a woman who was in her early 30s.

Speaker 2: Hello there.

Speaker 1: She did not sound welcoming at all, but I could

care less. It was clear she knew why I was there,

so I decided to get straight to the point. I

noticed your new place seems to have crossed into my property.

She gasped a little, and god, that sounded so fake,

I almost rolled my eyes. I knew she was not

going to settle this matter easily.

Speaker 2: Oh, did it?

Speaker 1: I hadn't noticed. But I'm quite busy right now. Can

we discuss this later? Yeah, no, there was no way

I was delaying this, not when it was pretty clear

that her actions were deliberate, or at least she knew

that she was in the wrong with this.

Speaker 2: No, we can't.

Speaker 1: This is important. We need to talk about the property lines.

She tried to wave me off condescendingly, and it irritated

me to no end. Oh, those lines are just suggestions,

aren't they? Besides, I have the right to expand my

property for a better view. Of course she was going

to talk about rights. When these people want to do

things their own way, they love talking about rights. But

when it is about respecting others, everything is flexible for them. Honestly,

at that point, I knew I would be writing about

this incident on Reddit very soon. It was a very

classic annoying neighbor trope that this was falling into. The

property lines are very clear, Karen, and you have crossed them.

So no, you don't have any rights that justify that.

And when their rights line don't work, you know what

these people do? They shift the blame. You're making this up.

I've been here for years and no one ever complained. Well,

that makes the two of us then. Or many of us,

because my entire three generations have lived here. Listen, you

know you've built on my land. Just admit it and

fix it. And of course, then the classic enrage. You're

just trying to ruin things for me. I bet you're

making this up. Literally, give me one reason that I

could be lying. The only thing I want to make

right now is a good dinner and sleep. But you're

stretching it out more than it should. This is my

family's land. You've encroached on it.

Speaker 2: End of story. And now fix it.

Speaker 1: But of course, things can never be easy with these people.

And I hate it. Well, I'm not moving anything. You

cannot prove anything. And I won't be bothered by your lie.

It was clear this conversation was going nowhere, this entitled

woman refused to acknowledge the facts and I could feel

my patience running very very thin. So I simply turned

around and went home and decided to talk to my

parents later. Though that later never came because my parents

got busy looking after one of my relatives who was sick.

I also got busy because some of my friends were

visiting and I was having too good of a time

to think about this annoying neighbor. It was clear she

had no intentions of rectifying the encroachment. Instead, she doubled

down on her defiance. She started to harass me in

a way only bored people like her could. Fake noise complaints.

It started subtly with a knock on the door from

local authorities claiming that our laughter and conversations were disturbing

the peace. So we promised we would adjust our activities,

opting for a quieter enjoyment at night. However, the harassment persisted. Soon,

every step we took, every word we spoke near the

lake seemed to trigger another noise complaint. This entitled neighbor

took advantage of local ordinances and started ruining all our

fun moments. I tried reasoning with her, but she ignored

me as if I was the one causing her problems.

So I hired a professional surveyor to accurately outline the

property lines, leaving no room for dispute. I then sought

legal counsel and engaged a lawyer to draft a cease

and desist letter. In the letter, my lawyer articulated the

facts of the encroachment, emphasizing the legal ramifications of trespassing

onto our property. The message was clear, stop the encroachment immediately,

or face legal consequences. It was a last-ditch effort to

resolve the matter cordially before escalating the dispute further. I

had hoped that it wouldn't come to this point that

a simple conversation would have sufficed. As was expected, the

surveyor's report confirmed the encroachment onto our property. Again, I

approached the neighbor, hoping that she would be smart enough

to understand what problem she was getting herself into. However,

she chose to escalate the situation further. Not at all surprising, though.

Not only did she dismiss the surveyor's findings, but went

so far as to threaten.

Speaker 2: The surveyor with legal action.

Speaker 1: This was enough of a ground for me to get

police and district attorney involved. As the police and the

district attorney became involved, a thorough investigation was launched, building

a case against Karen for harassment and attempting to obstruct

the resolution of a property dispute. I thought it was

going to be an open and shut case, but turned

out this neighbor of mine had fraudulently obtained permits for

the construction by bribing local officials. Which, again, not a shocker,

but it was a pretty damning discovery in this case.

Further investigation revealed more and more officials which turned this

case bigger than I had ever anticipated. It eventually led

to many officials losing their and some even facing charges.

For my neighbor, the legal ramifications extended beyond the property

dispute leading to her arrest and subsequent imprisonment for her

role in the scandals. The court said she also had

to take down the part of her house on our land.

She tried to offer money to settle things, but I

did not take it. Both because I did not care

for her money and because this case was in many

ways out of my own hands now. I was just

happy to see her getting jailed with many more charges

than I had initially thought. The next one is a

malicious compliance story. Many years ago, I worked for a

company that hired an incredibly obtuse financial department who took

over when they first organized. It used to be a

loose collection of managers, but the year after I started,

they went for a more organized and separate structure. To

be fair, this is more about my boss than myself.

We had a travel team, a group of volunteers from

sales and IT who would go en masse with equipment

and techs to do setup, displays and network at trade shows.

We had a booth, some sales guys would be there,

networking would commence. There was always a set of volunteers

from the IT department because some of the shows would

be in big cities. And you would get to attend

vendor events, parties and hang out with the sales guys

who were mostly gay alcoholics for some reason and super fun.

There was a kind of seniority to who got to volunteer,

but nobody really complained and everyone got rotated who got

to go. You got to go to DEF CON last year.

Speaker 2: It's my turn now.

Speaker 1: Okay, to be fair, the travel team lead was also

a volunteer position, but commonly someone high up like a manager.

Their job was to orchestrate equipment, rentals, expenses, travel plans,

convention center fees, and even shipping. They also ended up

getting a lot of free stuff too, from sales and

our partners, which they would pass along to the travel team.

It was all kind of a perk, to be fair,

for everyone involved. But when the new director of finance started,

she put in some new and strict policies. Some of

their policies started with 1. Travel team is not allowed

to get reimbursed without explicit approval and nobody was approved post-event. 2.

Travel team doesn't get credit card of their own or

even a company card. 3. Travel team gets gift cards

for a set amount like $ 150, 000. which was to be

used for all expenses. Sadly, places we needed it for

like airlines, rental agencies, hotel rooms, gas pumps and toll

booths don't accept gift cards. Finance denied these were gift

cards and even specifically disallowed people in meetings to refer

to them as such. Pre-approved credit balances, I think we

had to say, but to the rest of the world,

they were 100% exactly the same as gift cards with

gift card restrictions. Number four, no matter how early you

asked for it, often finance waited until the very, very

last minute, and usually after half a dozen reminders, to

get anything approved, which incurred a lot of unnecessary costs

like expedited shipping, same-day rental penalties or inflated airfares. Number five,

if they forgot it was your fault or your manager's

fault for not reminding them enough. Okay, you reminded them

four times to buy the team airline tickets and it

wasn't done? Should have reminded them five times, so it's

your fault. This was all in response to the director

of finances' claim that it would reduce fraud, an issue that,

as far as anyone could tell, had never happened. The

director had this Dolores Umbridge approach that somebody somewhere might

get away with something. She was a patronizing git with

a smug grin and this annoying head waggle when she

downsplained something to you. So we will call her Dolores.

Before her, the travel team would just submit receipts and

get reimbursed. Dolores put an end to that, specifically saying

the previous lead of the travel team was just going

to spend all the money on steaks and wine. He

understandably told her to go F herself and quit the

company when the dust finally settled. In his wake, Dolores

used his free stuff from vendors as a shining example

of stolen opulence and schwag hoarding that she put an

end to. Oh, behold the mighty on his throne of

airborne express stress squishies and free Uline catalogs. That left

my manager to take over his duties, and he had

never done travel team, so he really wasn't sure how

it all worked and didn't push back on Dolores at

first until he was forced to travel with the team.

He was surprised that he didn't have an expensive account

or corporate card, and when he asked for one, he

got the gift card. When he tried to use it,

it was rejected pretty much everywhere he needed it, except

various restaurants. He paid for everything else on his personal

American Express card, including stuff for the rest of the team,

and was rejected for reimbursements because he didn't ask for

it beforehand. He was on the hook for 40 plus

thousand dollars in various things from two week long trips.

Of course, he complained to the top management, Dolores threatened

to quit if she wasn't allowed to do her job

and the top managers never had to deal with her before,

And we're kind of wishy-washy about being the bad guy here. Like, well,

she says she lets you use gift cards, so... And

when my manager said they were rejected, Dolores said, he's

not trying hard enough. He is afraid of confrontation. He

needs to be a big boy and fight back. But

in the end, the top management reimbursed him under pressure

from the legal department. After that happened, Dolores settled on

having certain things prepaid for, like hotel travel, truck rentals

and shipping. However, they waited so long to do them

that often they tried to get hotel rooms or truck

rental the day of a popular event, sold out, or

got the wrong hotel, Washington DC is not the same

as Washington State, or waited so long for shipping, it

cost 250 bucks to send something overnight that would have

cost 40 bucks to send it a few weeks prior.

They also didn't understand how much anything actually cost and

how we saved money by doing things ourselves. And in

some cases, finance did everything wrong so the team would

arrive at the right hotel and found out that finance

did not submit an authorized approval for a card for, say, incidentals,

a requirement for most hotels for trade shows, and then

nobody could reach them. So again, people got dinked on

their personal cards and again, Dolores said, Ever fought with

a Jersey Turnpike toll booth collector? Yeah, neither had she.

After two of these disasters, my manager said, Just stop.

Stop volunteering for these events. I will not approve time

off for it. He declined being travel lead for future

trips because he just couldn't afford it. This was an

unpopular move at best, but he told us, just wait,

let her do things her way. He was a master

at malicious compliance and with no resistance, Dolores went into

fifth gear with a smug grin, saying, now we are

going to act like a real company. That leads to

the next issue. Some of these travels were in major

cities like Chicago, New York City, Washington DC, etc. And

Dolores again said that people were just going to these

events to get the company to pay for a drinking vacation.

Management was like.

Speaker 2: Um, yeah?

Speaker 1: We would not get volunteers otherwise. Well, Dolores did not

like that idea, so she decided that she would hold

a staff lottery, and you could enter your name, and

she would have a drawing on who got to go

to be fair to everyone. This fairness seems awfully slanted

on her own staff, by the way, which we'll get

to shortly. The point of these trade shows was not

to take a vacation, something Dolores made absolutely sure to

point out. But she did not grasp the entire reason

we went, which was to increase our business. It had

to be IT folk for setup and sales folk for

the schmoozing, but that concept never got past her ears

into her cognitive understanding. Well, since those IT and tech

folk who already couldn't go didn't want to pay for it,

we didn't volunteer. So the travel team ended up being

another contractor. staff who had no idea how to work,

act or deal with trade shows, which was a horrific,

expensive disaster. Imagine the administrative assistant for marketing on the

fifth floor winning a ticket only to find out that

she had to pay for everything. Plus, Dolores always sent

one of her own to keep an eye on everyone,

but none of them knew how trade shows worked either.

They only knew how to kowtow to Dolores and her

control issues. What's a union fee, what is corkage, and no,

we didn't approve some union to give us power, you

plug your booth stuff into an outlet or something. They

won't let you?

Speaker 2: Who is they?

Speaker 1: Well, then stop using TV screens in the booth. You

don't need them. We don't sell TVs anyway. Did you

know that if you have a conflict with an event

center union and declined their help, they charge you anyway

at max rate? Yeah, Dolores and her team didn't know

that either. And let me tell you, paying those guys

a few thousand bucks ahead of time is a lot

cheaper than just letting them charge you fines afterwards. Oh,

she tried to fight back because she was not afraid

of a little conflict but then lost heavily. Ironically, despite

Dolores stating otherwise at great length, the non-IT or salespeople

who went actually thought it was company-paid vacation-ish, just like

Dolores warned about, making it a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.

The fact they had to work was surprising at first,

and then after that word got out, nobody would enter

into the lottery, so now they had no volunteers. So

Dolores assigned them to interns.

Speaker 2: Interns?

Speaker 1: I could write an entire novel from that disaster alone.

Imagine sending a bunch of college kids to Vegas, telling

them they had to pay for things and putting them

in a job conflict situation where they were guaranteed to lose.

I'm sure many laws were broken. Dolores then had to

send along chaperones to manage it, who were more of

her finance department flunkies, and our company ended up with

massive fines for various issues, including paying bail for the interns.

Because the interns got into so much trouble, Dolores started

hiring room monitors for the hotels, and fully legal adults

had to go to the show, work the entire day

at the show on their feet, and then check back

into their room. She also put four to six people

to a room as well. Like they were a high

school band or something. She even had breathalyzers bought for

it to make sure nobody was drinking.

Speaker 2: Adults.

Speaker 1: She treated adults like this. This was brought up by

the sales team as a PR nightmare, and my boss said,

just wait, okay? Let her hang herself. The first year

of this, the travel team's expenses increased by over 4,000%.

You heard me right there, 4,000%. Trips that used to

cost $ 3, 600 were now costing 144K or more, often because

of late-minute fees and penalties. The travel team expenses went

from 110k annual on average to over 2 point something million.

Because crap was handled so badly, we lost a lot

of our booth slots and booth renewals, so we lost

half our trade shows and looked like idiots to our clients.

The main reason we went to those trade shows in

the first place was for networking, so there was literally

no reason to go anymore. This was pointed out to

Dolores multiple times by the sales team, so she doubled

down and cancelled the travel team after just one year. Finally,

top management got involved who actually fought with Dolores for

a year until she retired for personal reasons and to

dedicate herself to her family. Then it took nearly two

years to rebuild the travel team from scratch. People got

corporate cards, travel team lead became an actual job, and

when we hired one, she handled all the financial stuff

for us, so it was much better and saved the

company a ton of money in her first year, and

there was much rejoicing.

Speaker 2: Edit. Question.

Speaker 1: You're really talking about some name, aren't you? OP answered,

there are a lot of Dolores Umbridge's out there apparently,

only three people, former co-workers got it right. Question number two,

why was she not fired when the spending went from

110k to 2.1 million? Answer, several reasons, the biggest being

that she was director of finance, so I'm sure when

she gave her fiscal report she downplayed the mistakes. We

also had some really good years in the early 2000s,

so if we made 2 million in profit the previous year,

and 3 million the next, that loss would have gone

unnoticed until someone realized we should have made 6 million instead.

That's my theory, at any rate, based on the aftermath.

Dolores was friends of two of the top managers and

supposedly had a come-to-Jesus meeting with them about the state

of our company's financial standings. So that's why they hired

her in the first place. By the second year, several

directors had quit, including friends of top management who took

them for drinks later and got the entire scoop.

Speaker 2: Dolores has got to go.

Speaker 1: The trade show thing was only one of the cases

she effed things up. She also completely hosed one of

our major supply chains by lowballing them and making a

few enemies that nearly destroyed the company and gave away

some of our more lucrative contracts with vendors to competitors

because that broke their anti-competitive clauses. There were more issues,

but that comes closer to identifying some people, which is

a huge no-no here. Another question, what happened to the

Christmas party? The Christmas party was not nearly as interesting,

she just did not have one, this was near the

tail end of the whole, now we're gonna run this

like a real company, fiasco, but once the budget for

events was 2.1 million from 110k, the Christmas party was

probably far down her.

Speaker 2: List of worries.

Speaker 1: I don't even think she knew she was supposed to

have one. Some people think she was funneling that money

to cover up the massive expense increase for the trade

show fiascos, but I cannot imagine that those budgets were

from the same pool. I think around November, people started asking,

don't they have a holiday party every year? But nobody

knew who was doing it. Usually, it's the three people

who were a huge part of it in previous years

were no longer with the company. They had quit mostly

because of Dolores. But even they did not run it

per se. They hired and catered it out at some

fancy hotel locally. Our fiscal year was January to December.

So December was huge for tying things up. And this

was her first year running fiscal year and stuff. She

came on board late in the previous year and so

the finance would have been normally very occupied anyway. How

was she let go? Well, she just gained too many

enemies in the company. It took a while but after

she had been with us for a year and a

half she accumulated too much negative drag on her inertia

to get things done because there started to be a

very strong passive resistance. This caused her to spiral out

of control and try to start a coup which gained

no traction and singled her out as being mildly unhinged,

to say the least. By the time her second anniversary

came and went, she started taking sabbaticals until one of

them became permanent. Her assistant took over, but then was

let go, and they brought in some consultant group who

started a new financial team. They were the ones that

suggested someone have the table team lead as an actual

separate paid job. The woman who got hired and ran

that was amazing. Question, is it true that she tried

to sell keychains and pens? Answer, no one asked this,

but a former co-worker reminded me that she was appalled

that we were just giving away some of our normal

booth freebies like stickers, pens, shirts and keychain flashlights. She

demanded we charge at least a nominal fee for them,

but from what I remember, nobody followed that mandate. I

personally know that she sent out a memo admonishing employees

that a lot of the keychains were missing and she

was seeing them on people's desks. Those cost the company

money and wanted to charge employees $ 3 for them. But

apparently she wanted to charge people at the booth as well.

And yeah, ripe stars. Honestly, reading these stories, it makes

me wonder how many incompetent people work at such companies. Seriously,

the people in charge for hiring those kinds of people

should be fired as well. If I would run that company,

I would give myself a massive facepalm. And the next

Reddit story starts like this. All things considered, I don't

think I'm an angry person, but in fairness to me,

it's been a hell of a week. I thought needing

to book a last-minute flight to visit a dying relative

was bad enough. I was not expecting the trip, though,

to be awful as well. So, in this case, another passenger,

who I will only identify here as Karen, treated me

like crap for no reason to boot. I... But all

such people are quick to find that karma is ready

to bite them in the rear, just as in this case. So,

my morning started with the frantic rushing between computer screen

and wardrobe. I had been told via text message half

an hour earlier that a close elderly relative was in

the hospital and that things looked bad. While I liked

my independence and lifestyle, I was cursing my decision to

move and work abroad right now, with most of my

family many thousands of miles away. I arrived at the

closest airport nearly two hours later, half a suitcase in

one hand and a failing mobile phone in the other.

I was sure I had properly booked the flight, but

I was still waiting on confirmation. I impatiently passed through

every check-in procedure in queue and with relief found myself

at the flight gate just as they were preparing to board.

I couldn't complain though, I must be the only person

in the world to book something so last minute. Not

that I felt I had much choice not when it's

for family, nothing worried me more than missing this flight

which nearly pushed me over the edge when a rowdy

customer ahead of me in the check-in queue was having

an argument with a young lady at the desk. The

aggressor was an older woman with short-cut grey hair, standing

at around 5 feet tall. Despite her tiny frame, she

had quite the bark on her. When I saw her,

I immediately thought she was the type of Karen people

gossip about online. I did not catch much of the conversation.

The airport was busy and noisy pretty much everywhere, but

her voice cut above the rest on occasion. Didn't you

hear me, you little tramp? The Karen cried. I wanted

a seat in business class. Peering around the queue, I

could see the younger woman standing sheepish and defensive, shaking

her head and talking softly, but Karen was having none

of it. I own your damn airline, lady. That makes

me an honored VIP, you hear? Where's your manager?

Speaker 2: She replied.

Speaker 1: A few minutes of talking continued before she moved on.

I'm unsure how it was resolved in the end. The

process ran smoothly after that. Karen was lost in the

crowd and everyone behind her was all the happier for it.

I was now stood in the last queue for boarding

the plane when a familiar shrill voice cut up my eardrums.

The figure walked past me, cutting the queue entirely as

she intercepted the front desk and began to confront another

staff member. After showing her passport and ticket, Karen was

trying to explain how the check-in desk lady had moved

her to a business class seat, which she didn't. Karen

tried her luck again and failed miserably. She gave up

when airport staff opened a new queue to work around

her and she sulked away. Unsurprisingly, the rest of the

passengers shuffled onto the plane without complaint and I could

see that we collectively shared the same dread. Not looking

forward to being stuck in the same metal box with

this Karen for the next few hours. I thanked the

stewards as I entered the cabin, stowed my bags and

sunk into my plush seat in business class. Looking around

I was relieved to see no sign of Karen as

we prepared to embark. I breathed a final sigh of

relief as I put my headphones in and closed my eyes.

Speaker 2: I then heard.

Speaker 1: Which jolted me out of my rest. Karen, red-faced, was

storming up and down the aisle in business class, closely

followed by the stewards. Taking out the headphones to listen in,

I could hear Karen yelling, demanding to find.

Speaker 2: A seat here.

Speaker 1: When the stewardess refused to accommodate her demands, she turned

her attention instead to the passengers. One by one, she asked,

then ordered, each person to swap seats with her. I

kept my head down, but that did not stop her

looming over me all the same. She must have sensed

that she had a chance with me, as she did

not move on after a few seconds. I need you

to swap with me, young man. The airline made a

mistake with your seat, you see. I'm meant to be

in business class, she said in a mock-kindness-through-gritted-teeth way. My

eyes darted to the stewards behind me in a quiet

plea for intervention. Admittedly, they were useless in stopping her. Sorry, ma'am,

I cannot do that, I replied weakly, struggling to meet

her expectant stare. She took offense to my refusal and

began to chew me out like a drill sergeant at

boot camp. All the while this was happening, more and

more passengers were being drawn into the drama. Seas of

heads were turned with mobile phones set on record. You

move right now, you little punk, or you will never

fly with my airline again, she spat at me. Her

breath reeked of cheap booze, making me immediately assume her

aggressive confidence was due to a problem with alcoholism. Her

attitude was also starting to annoy me a little. I

was working up quite an anger myself. Just hold on

a minute. Why do you need my seat?

Speaker 2: I added.

Speaker 1: Before she could reply, an announcement from the pilot reminded

everyone to be seated, and the stewards tried to usher

her away. When it looked like she was gonna listen,

I stood up one last time, stretching out a bad back. Suddenly,

I felt hands on me, and then I fell into

the aisle, hitting my head on a nearby armrest. My

head spun for a second, but I was luckily in

one piece. Slowly getting back to my feet, I realized

Karen was smugly sat in my seat. She was the

one who pushed me out. I chuckled, trying to make

light of the situation. All right, very funny lady, can

you get up now? I asked as I gestured for

her to leave. She shook her head and then began

reading from the safety leaflet, refusing to budge. Like the

world around her had stopped or moved on, she ignored

simply everything. After a few more minutes of arguing, I

was ready to throw her back out of the seat

myself while the stewards were facing just as much difficulty

by the looks of it. I asked them for help,

quietly letting them know that she was very drunk too,

and after a few minutes they returned with a very

annoyed and reluctant pilot. He spoke in a calm but

firm manner, saying, Ma'am, If you cannot return to your

assigned seat, you will be removed from the plane for

causing a disturbance. As he spoke, she began angry again,

shouting back her protests. She attempted to argue her case,

but the pilot left and Karen had evidently made her decision.

Ten minutes later, two burly airport staff marched through the aisle,

surrounded Karen and hauled her to her feet. She put

up a fight, trashing and cursing, but was unsuccessful. She

was led away while passengers around us cheered and hollered

at her departure. She yelled back that she would have

everyone fired when they realized their mistake. Despite lifting off

nearly half an hour behind schedule, the plane reached its

destination with little trouble. Due to a miraculous tailwind, we

found ourselves making up for lost time, meaning the bus

ticket I booked to get me out of the airport

the other side would not be wasted. I ended up

staying for a few days and I am happy to

report my relative pulled through after the surgery. In regards

to Karen, the nightly news did mention the disturbance briefly,

but her fate was still being decided. The next one

is a revenge story and it starts like this. So

this happened many, many years ago when I used to

work for a very well-known hotel chain. We were coming

up to a very busy event weekend and were already

completely sold out for Saturday night. We could accommodate walk-ins

Friday night, but for only one night. This was expressed

to all walk-ins who came to check in they could

not stay both Friday and Saturday. One set of folks

checked in Friday night and were laughing as they went

to their room, already with the mindset that they were

not checking out and were gonna stay both nights. These

rooms were booked a year in advance for this event

and prepaid. We were certainly not gonna try to send

someone who prepaid away because of these jerks. The next morning,

they left to go out for the day and left

all their stuff in their room. They were reminded that

checkout was noon. Again, they laughed and said that they

were not leaving. We had housekeeping pack up all their

stuff and bring it down to the front desk area

and waited for their return. Imagine their surprise when they

wasted the whole day and came back to find out

that we had already rekeyed the room and other people

were already in it. We gave them their stuff and they.

Speaker 2: Were in shock.

Speaker 1: They thought that their little trick was going to get

them to stay during this event, but nope, the entire

city was sold out, so good luck with that. They

took the corporate's number so they could complain. It still

makes me laugh, and that was over 30 years ago.

And the next one is a story of someone complying

with Karen and then her getting what she deserves. So

at my job, they offer fundraising cards, which have 20

coupons that give free items. And on the card, it

says that you can only use one at a time. However,

the franchise owner allows us to accept two coupons at

once based on that he's a nice guy. I had

just gotten to work and within five minutes, a lady

drives up and steps.

Speaker 2: Out of a $ 100, 000 Audi. She had ordered over.

Speaker 1: The phone and my co-worker was new, so he told

her to bring in her coupons and we would adjust

the price, but he told her that she could only

use two coupons at a time. She comes to the

counter and says that she's here to pick up for,

let's say, Mandy. I pull her food out of the

hot box oven and she then even hands me three

fundraiser coupons for a free medium pizza when you purchase

a large pizza, a free garlic bread and a free

cinnamon bread. I then explain that we can only take

two at a time and if she wanted it, she

would have to pay full price or I could remove

it from her order and then trash it. She immediately

becomes defensive, blaming it on the 15-year-old coworker that took

her order, that he needs to be punished. I then

again explain that I can just take the bread off

and it would be no problem. She starts examining the coupons,

which are very little, and tears off from the larger

fundraiser card, which explains the coupon policy even more conservatively

than what I was willing to allow. She starts to

proclaim that because of the individual taps don't say the

coupon policy, that it is ridiculous that I am making

this up. I ask her if she has the larger

card and of course she says no. After seeing that

I'm not gonna back down, I cannot as the owner

can see my price adjustments and will see that I

took three, she tells me to void the order and

I oblige with no sarcasm or rudeness, I never take

any of these crazy people and their insults personal. I

tell her, have a good day, and she then starts

yelling that she did not mean that I should void

the whole order. Yes, she did, as she thought I

wouldn't throw away her food. She starts insulting me, but

by then I explain that she won't be getting any

food from this location. She asks me if I'm the

manager and that she wants my personal cell phone number

to send to corporate. Wanting to be done with the

situation and knowing corporate is even more conservative, I write

down my name and phone number and tell her to

have a good day. She refused to leave, but then

started calling my phone, which was in my pocket. I

have an Apple Watch, so I can see that she

is calling as my wrist is vibrating. After about five calls,

I respectfully remind her that she asked for my phone

number and showed her my watch ringing with her cell

phone number across the screen. She gives me a sarcastic

smile and ignores what I say. Knowing that she's being

a dumb Karen, I just go back to sweeping the

front half of the restaurant and she just continues to

call my phone, leaving me messages.

Speaker 2: About how rude I am being.

Speaker 1: I go to the bathroom and she somehow had gotten

my co-worker's attention, the 15-year-old guy, and starts interrogating him

about why he would lie to her on the phone

and that we are the rudest people she has ever

dealt with. I come up to the front and tell

him to stop answering her questions and that she needs

to leave. She then starts screaming at the top of

her lungs that you're lying and dishonest, but then tells

me to shut up and that she is talking after

continually telling her to leave in a respectful tone. She

keeps repeating that I'm a liar and that she is

going to get me fired. I finally have to tell

her that I'm gonna call the cops if she doesn't leave,

and she then screams, do.

Speaker 2: It, over and over.

Speaker 1: By this time, about 20 minutes have passed, and other

customers are asking her to just leave. She then threatens

my job again and walks out and drives to the

other location that just happens to have the owner working.

She obviously lied to him and he calls me to

see what happened with her in the background as I

can see her dumb Karen voice. I explain everything and

he then turns to her and says... Actually, ma'am, I'm

only going to be able to let you use one

of those coupons per the fundraiser card and I have

one right here to show you the policy. Still on

the phone at the time, I hear a loud shriek

from her that sounds like someone was being devoured by

the swamp monster, followed by the owner telling her to

get the F out.

Speaker 2: Of his store. And the next one is an M.I.D.A.

whole story.

Speaker 1: So I, 33 female, am the breadwinner of our household.

I have multiple highly specialized degrees for a niche industry.

I make 200k plus with potential to get in the

600 to 1 million range. My company has not been

hit that badly by COVID, so most of us have

kept our jobs, but we are held to strict standards.

My husband, 36 male, has a broad degree and work experience.

He quit his job right before the pandemic hit, hoping

for a better job in the meantime, and I was supportive.

He spent a ton of time applying to various jobs

and finally landed an interview at Organization X. This is

basically his dream job in almost every imaginable way. I

cannot be too detailed though. However, it's paying about 65k

a year, which would be fine except this job directly

puts my job stability at risk. My company and this

organization are adversarial at best. My field is extremely secretive

and if clients discovered my spouse was working for a competitor,

I would be permanently tainted. I would not be able

to get a job in the industry forever. I know

this sounds like an exaggeration, but I promise you, it

absolutely is not. It would be like if I worked

in protecting the privacy of celebrities and he worked for TMZ.

If he tapped my car, got into my work devices,

he could use that to advance his career and any

trust I have in this field will be gone. Even

if I trusted my husband not to do that, my

clients and company don't. Worse, because my background is so specialized,

this is the only field I can work in. I

asked him to drop from consideration for this job since

if he got it, we would lose my income and

65k a year cannot support us in this city. Plus,

he does not have to work for this organization, even

if the job market is awful right now, his background

gives him access to a wide range of jobs. However,

I only have this one niche field. He was extremely

angry and said that I was selfish and only cared

about the money. I told him that if he wanted

to go back to school for an advanced degree or

just be employed for a while, I would support him

but taking this job is not possible. He continued the

process behind my back and got the offer. He wants

to accept it because he says his career needs to

take priority and that I was not being a supportive wife.

I feel so betrayed and I've contacted all relevant higher-ups

in my company to inform them. I notified them as

soon as he got the interview because it's better coming

from my email than from a background check. I told

him he could decline the offer with me watching him

physically decline it or he could accept the offer and

move out immediately. I would pay for him to stay

two weeks at a hotel, and we would begin the

divorce proceedings. My company is willing to take care of

all my legal fees. I feel awful, but I still

love him. I moved decisively because this was the best

way to cut my losses, but it still hurts. He

called me heartless and cold. It's true that I was

prioritizing my career over his, but it felt like the only.

Speaker 2: Option at the time.

Speaker 1: Comment number one not the a-hole you told him from

the beginning that if he took this job it would

end your specialized career he went ahead with the application

behind your back regrettably he put you in the position

of choosing between him and your career I think you

made the right choice, you clearly resent what he has

done and I cannot see that getting better if you

lose everything you worked for. Comment number two, he knew

the reasons why he should not pursue this job and

yet he went for it anyway. If that's not selfish,

I don't know what is. His new career needs to

take priority? Why? If it's possible for you two to

just separate for a while, maybe that's something you can

do before actually filing for divorce. Or you can file

and drag it out until he realizes that he cannot

support himself on that income, let alone the both of you,

since you won't be able to find another job in

your field. Either way, if he's refusing to compromise, you

two cannot live together anymore. And yeah, ripe stars. I

would also say OP is not the a-hole here. Actually,

the husband is kind of selfish. Also, you kind of

have to look at it pragmatically. No matter who makes

more money in the relationship, doesn't matter if it's the

husband or the wife, if you cannot survive on the

salary of that one person alone, especially if that person

is making less money, then you simply either have to compromise,

in this case the husband searching for another job, or,

as OP suggested, simply break up for some time. And

if that doesn't work, then maybe divorce is the right decision,

because clearly there's some type of selfishness involved here. And

the next Reddit story starts like this. Let me tell

you about my country. It's the land of the free

and the home of the brave. It's where you can

be anything you want. It is where no one should

ever stomp you down to get ahead. But let me

tell you something that happened to me last year. It

was terrible. It was nonsense. And by far, it really

ruffled my feathers more than I could ever imagine. I

have been a farmer for the past 50 years.

Speaker 2: It was my profession.

Speaker 1: It was what I loved to do, and I was

not going to let any crook or two-timing son of

a gun get in the way of my livelihood and

my dream. I had been a widower for quite some time,

so I've learned to tough it out here in the

great woods of rural Nebraska. I'm from the Midwest and

as the saying goes, for crying out loud, I would

rather put a handful of hay in my oats in

the morning than be snookered by some crazy con artists

and crooks. However, that is exactly what happened. I ended

up toughening it out though and came back with some

heavy duty fighting gloves to rightfully keep what was mine.

So like I said, I'd been a farmer all my life.

My parents and their parents were in the business as well,

and I had bought this land many years ago from

an auction when the economy was not that great. I

had built up all kinds of crops and even harvested

pumpkins in the autumn. I had cows, horses, and lots

of hay to sell. My property sat next to a

state highway and you could hear the cars go by.

Some nights I would go out back and listen to them.

I often wondered why would anyone want to be next

to the highway? And as for me, I love being

around all the action. So when some idiots built a

new development next to my property line near the highway,

I got a little nervous. I had heard stories of

evil HOAs building right next to farm property and the

owners then having to sell it because it imposed on

their land or something. In these cases it turned out

that the owners could not pay the legal fees when

the HOA took them to court. Honestly, These HOAs are ruthless,

let me tell you. When they built up a new

development with single-family homes right next to my property, I

felt like the saying, he's schnookered, couldn't have been more real.

I'm 70 years old for crying out loud, and I

know a thing or two about people taking advantage of others,

and I didn't like it, not one bit. I had

worked hard to pay off my debts and own my

land free and clear. When I got a letter in

the mail one day saying that the housing development they

built is on their land, that's when I got fed up.

They claimed there was an error in the deed and

that the property lines were drawn wrong. They demanded that

I sell a portion of my land to them at

a fraction of the value and this thing was worth

over 1.5 million dollars. I yelled so loud when I

opened that letter, what a darnation. I went outside that

day when I got the letter and sat on my porch.

I could hear the cars go by on the highway

and then I got to thinking. I need to have

proof in case they show up and try to sue me,

so I go down to the county seat here near Lincoln,

Nebraska and get the deed and title for my property examined.

The judge looks at everything and gives me the okay.

A few weeks go by and I'm sitting on my

porch again. I hear the cars go by and I

doze off in a little nap. Suddenly, though, this giant

pickup truck with four other vehicles shows up behind it,

trailblazing through my property, causing the dust to go up.

I start to cough when they pull up to my driveway.

The dust flies in my face and I just stare

at them, not knowing what to do. John Bettner, is

this you? A man in sunglasses asks me.

Speaker 2: Yes, sir, that's me.

Speaker 1: Can I ask what this is all about? The man

looks at me and puts a toothpick in his mouth.

This is about your land, sir. It belongs to the HOA.

Did you not receive our letter? He looks at me

with a smile on his face, but I could see

right through him. These people were up to no good.

I could smell crooks all over them.

Speaker 2: Yes, I got it.

Speaker 1: I also have this letter right here, straight from the

county courthouse. It's my title and land deed. You are

dead wrong about this, buddy. Can I ask you to

get off my property now? I wave the deed at

him and give him a smirk. Sure, sir, but just

one thing. We are taking you to court if you

refuse to hand over your property in a quit-claim deed.

We have already started legal proceedings in the county. You

will receive a letter shortly. The man flicks his toothpick

from his mouth and it lands right near my feet.

Speaker 2: Excuse me? I ask him.

Speaker 1: And they all drive away. I look down at the

toothpick and pick it up. I squeezed it so hard

that it cut into my palms and started bleeding.

Speaker 2: But let me tell you... That's not the end of it.

Speaker 1: A few weeks go by and I get this letter

from the HOA in the mail along with the documents

that I am being sued. They claim that my property

has lowered the land value and they are due compensation.

What the hell? This is where I really start to

get fed up. Now granted, I was a little prepared.

I got even more prepared and started researching property rights

and HOA laws. The case dragged on for weeks and

they took me to court. I showed up but the

man who confronted me that day was not there.

Speaker 2: It was a woman.

Speaker 1: I guess they were trying to get me to suck

up to her or be nice or something. I did

not fall for it, though. While standing in court, too

and talking to the judge, I pointed out that they

came rolling up on my property, trying to intimidate me

and get me to sign over my land so they

can build more and rack up their profits. I told

the judge too that I was disabled. I had a

bad leg and I could barely walk on it. I

got in a tractor accident once and fell and I've

had limited mobility ever since. The judge frowned and said...

I'm so sorry to hear that. That day after court

when I got back to the farm, I noticed that

something seemed a bit off. All my grass was burned

on one side of my property, and there was spray

paint on the side of my barn. It was some

kind of graffiti, I could not make out what it meant.

And then when I go inside the barn, that's when

things got really messed up. One of my tractors got

vandalized and the tires were all bent out of shape.

Someone must have come in with some heavy-duty equipment and

messed it all up. I had a feeling it was

the HOA's fault, maybe it was the guy with the toothpick.

I don't know, any other way I was sure that

they were not gonna take my farm out from under me.

I went back in the house when I got home

after looking around and sorted through the mail. There were

not any new letters, but when I walked out to

the mailbox, I see a handwritten letter from a guy

named Dylan. In the letter, it states that they are

going to start fining me for infractions of any sort

on my property. At this point, I get even more

fired up.

Speaker 2: Infractions?

Speaker 1: I walk back to the house and open up a

can of soup to eat. I sit and watch the

evening news and stare out my window, listening to the

cars go by. Sometimes I wonder if the American dream

is everything it's cracked up to be. It turns out, though,

it still is. The next day, I go into town

and go to the local library. I research HOA some

more on their computers and pull up old incidents of

farm owners getting their land sold and taken away. I

researched lawyers in the area and realized that it's going

to take a chunk of change to get me out

of this mess. So I decided to represent myself. The

HOA and property laws were pretty strict in my area

and it seemed that the HOA got away with just

about anything. I was flipping through old news articles so

I had an idea. I needed to go back to

the courthouse to see the surrounding property deeds. I needed

to check up and make sure that everything was in

tip-top shape or else it would be my goose that

would be cooked. I went and researched the titles and

deeds to my property and did a reverse search of

the land and when it was bought and sold. I

also did some research on the properties adjacent to my

land and what I found was startling. The deed had

been changed since the last time I checked it. the

property lines had been changed so that the HOA would

profit from the sale of the land. I immediately went

and talked with the judge who was in charge of

the case and asked if his secretary could pull up

a physical copy of the deed they had on file.

They kept them for so many years back. When they

compared the two to the one I saw online and

the one I pulled up earlier, it was sure enough

a bunch of crooks trying to swindle their way in.

I pressed charges and the judge ruled in my favor.

It was a multi-million dollar judgment that was going to

take these suckers down. It turns out that the HOA

president had been living an extravagant lifestyle. This Dylan guy

was in over his little head. When the judge ordered

that he arrive in court and he missed a court

date because he was sunbathing in the Bahamas, that is

when the tables started to turn for them. The court

found that Mr. HOA President Dylan was using the Homeowner

Association's fees to fund his lifestyle. The court got a

hold of his money and the HOA ended up going bankrupt.

They could not pay for their court fees, let alone

the bills that kept coming from their other properties. No

more sitting at the beach for him. That HOA was

going down big time. In the meantime, the property they

were gonna build took a lot longer than expected. They

needed more money to develop it and it ended up

sitting idle.

Speaker 2: For a while.

Speaker 1: The last time I checked, some other developers are now

taking it over and are not as shady as this one.

I'm just grateful for what I have and for the

ability to defend myself when these tyrants started coming knocking.

With all my legal knowledge and the research I had done,

it was well worth the fight to keep my property

and continue to live a peaceful life where I'm sure

it will last until the day I die. And for

those wondering, Mr. President Douchebag Dylan ended up in a

nice cozy little jail cell for the scam that he

was running. I'm not sure he will ever set foot

on the Bahamas again. Good riddance, idiot. And yeah, ripe stars,

I am happy that this entitled douchebag HOA president got

what he deserved, and I hope he will never terrorize

any neighborhood community again, and especially no farmers. And the

next one is a co-worker revenge story. So back when

I first started in my industry, a friend of mine

from university landed a job at my company too. The

place was four levels with an atrium in the middle.

I was in the third floor and he was on

the first, but I could see him from my desk.

He didn't know this yet and he didn't know where

I was seated. Anyway, so I let him get settled

in for the morning and then I anonymously message him,

you could do this in our internal messaging system. Carl,

fake name, meet me at my office immediately. I watched

as he looked slightly panicked, looking around the office and

then he replies with.

Speaker 2: Sorry, who is this?

Speaker 1: And can I ask where your office is? Me, now Carl,

I don't really have time for this. He started to

look really panicked and then got up and walked into

the atrium, turning around in circles, looking at the offices.

I felt bad about it now and waved down to

him saying, now Carl, being the good-hearted guy, he was,

he laughed and mouthed, idiot. And I went back to

work giggling. A few days later, I started hearing a

very occasional and very high-pitched eee, like beep in the office,

I shared with two others. It was very subtle, almost

out of our hearing spectrum to the point where you

were not sure if you were hearing it. But once

I did accept I really was hearing it, it became

more and more noticeable with each beep and more and

more irritating. The timing was unpredictable, think 10 minutes between beeps,

30 minutes between, 2 minutes, 1 hour etc. So I

let it go for quite a while before I started

to accept that I might be going mad and asked

the others if they heard it too. They both looked

almost relieved and said that they had and it was

driving them mad too. So we started looking around the office,

pulling shelves apart, emptying drawers, pulling pictures down etc. I

even sat outside the office for a few hours to

make sure it was not coming from outside.

Speaker 2: It wasn't.

Speaker 1: We also timed the beeps all day to see if

we could find a pattern, but there was no pattern.

It seemed completely random. The following day, we got serious

and started pulling apart our PCs one at a time.

We were all looking a bit wild-eyed by this point. Eventually,

as I'm sure you have guessed, Carl arrived at the

office laughing at us sitting on the floor with our

PCs in pieces and told us that he had taped

this small evil noise device under a shelf. He said

he would have left it longer, but our boss thought

it had gone on long enough.

Speaker 2: Touche, Carl.

Speaker 1: And yeah, ripe stars, that's exactly why I love petty revenge.

That was a brilliant, innocent way to get revenge on

your co-workers. Either way, the next one is an M.I.D.A.

whole story and it is titled I went no contact

with stepdaughter after she accused me of spending $ 30, 000 on myself.

Posted by user TXRDHD on r slash ripe stories, our

own subreddit. So I, 55 female, and my dear husband,

65 plus male, have been together for 26 years and

married for 24. He has a daughter by a previous

marriage and I have two sons and a daughter, no

kids together. His daughter, 37 female, is the issue. She

was nine when her dad and I got together and

her mother was a POS to her. We lived three

houses down from her and she was at my house

more than at her mom's place. I've been accused by

her of some truly heinous stuff, none of it true.

The entire family on her mother's side has an anger issue,

and she has made the most of it. She always

blows up, calls whomever she is mad at, every name

in the book, never apologizes, and everything is supposed to

be okay the next day or whenever she decides to

get over it. I've helped this kid out of Skazolt

after Scape ever since I've been in her life, both

legal and not so legal. The list is endless. My

son sold a house out of state that I helped

him buy. Because I helped him, he put my name

on the deed so I would know if anything was done.

and would be guaranteed my investment back. It took months

to get the paperwork sorted because out of state and

everything had to be overnighted back and forth. His daughter

decided that because it was taking so long, I had

taken the money and spent it on myself or my

kids or both and blew up on me. Again, she

got into my husband's head about this money. He made

me show him every message and email from the buyer

and the bank handling his loan. As a result, I've

been in no contact with her since August. My husband

did not get off Scots Free either. I refused to

go over there for Thanksgiving. I'm now dividing our family

and making him choose, supposedly. I have not tried to

stop him from seeing, talking, visiting her and the kids.

I miss the kids, but she's never let them go

anywhere without her, so them staying overnight is not an

option either. All I want is an apology and for

her to get help. So, Reddit, am I the a-hole?

And yeah, ripe stars, let me know in the comments

what you think about this. Is OP the a-hole here

or not? Comment number one on our subreddit said, I'm

going under the assumption that it was your money that

you used to help your son, right?

Speaker 2: If so.

Speaker 1: please tell your husband that your money is none of

his daughter's business. Now, if it was shared money, then

the husband should have been told that goings-on throughout the

whole process, regardless though, still none of her business. So please,

as kindly as you can, ask your husband why your

money decisions are her concern and why she should feel

like she has the right to yell at you for anything.

Then OP answered, yes, it was our money and he

was well aware of what was going on. We are

both involved in all matters regarding finances, etc.

Speaker 2: We have no secrets.

Speaker 1: They have a really close relationship as he was her

only parent. The older she gets, the more she thinks

she can be involved in our relationship. Also told him

that I am done being her whipping post. Whatever she

would do is tied to me. Classic confession through projection.

It has gotten so bad that I am in counseling

and the counselor wants him to join us. I am

at my wits end but want to save our relationship.

He says he is open to going but has yet

to attend. We have had this discussion countless times about

her trying to butt in and be the parent in

the relationship. It has gotten to the point that he

talks to her about something before he talks to me

and then swears that we talked about it. I'm almost

60 and don't want to finish my life alone. Plus

I love the jerk. I just want an apology and

her to get help. It's not healthy the way she

is so dependent on him. and controlling in his life

and mine by extension. Comment number two, not the a-hole

at all. Your husband should have corrected his adult brat

immediately and insisted that she apologize to you. However, he

sounds weak. She sounds like the type who uses anger

to avoid accountability. Common step stuff, unfortunately. You might consider

taking a different tact. Are you familiar with Carpman's Drama Triangle?

It's a theory that breaks down conflict into three roles. Victim,

persecutor and rescuer. Step-parents often find themselves assigned the role

of bad cop or persecutor with the poor little children

of divorce the perpetual victims. My situation improved when I

softened my stance and started showing my pain. My husband

finally started protecting me. And yeah, ripe stars, let me

know in the comments what you would have done in

this situation. Maybe we can give OP some advice. And

the next Reddit story starts like this. So one thing

I love about my home is the fresh smell of

the morning dew hitting my face as I have my

first sip of coffee in the morning, sitting on my

porch and from there I can see almost all the

land that surrounds me. The big trees and the leaves

falling off. My family has owned this land for decades

and it has many hidden treasures inside. One of those

treasures is Earl, one of the trees sitting at the

end of the property. Earl is a great basin bristlecone

pine tree that has been sitting on this land for

as long as I can remember and for as long

as my father and grandfather could remember as well. Its

value was hundreds of thousands of dollars because of how

old this ancestral tree was. It was named Earl because

of my great-grandpa who lived a long healthy life just

like the tree which still remained. We had theories of

it being older than the house or the entire county

around it. But the thing is, Big Earl was here

long before us and was gonna be long after we

all left as well, or that's at least what I thought,

because apparently, no matter how strong and big it was,

how many storms and heatwaves it had endured, Earl had

never met something like a carrot. So Karen did not

seem that nice already when she moved to the house

next to us. She was polite but had a bit

of a fake smile and a scrunched nose every time

you tried to say something to her. As if something

just smelled bad but she didn't do anything to bother

us at least at first. That was until Karen got

the brilliant idea of putting a fence around her property.

She walked around the place between the grass and the

trees with a contractor following her. as he tried to

take notes of her quick gibberish. According to her, the

area boundaries were not clear, and she wanted to fix that,

so she got the property plans and thought of a

big fence to solve that. Until she reached Earl. According

to Karen and her friends, Earl's branches were on her property,

and she asked, well, not exactly, she demanded that I

cut them that same afternoon when she came knocking on

my door under the pouring rain. I tried to talk

to her and I told her that we would review

it when the rain had stopped and her face contorted

in a way I had not seen before, but she

dropped the subject and just left. My husband and I

thought about checking whatever issues Karen had with the property

boarders that afternoon, but the rain did not stop and apparently,

Karen's plan for the fence did not stop either, Because

imagine my surprise when I heard a weird sound in

the distance at night. A weird metallic sound followed by

a clashing noise. I did not think much of it,

but in the morning, as I sat on the porch

as I usually do, the view in front of my

eyes had something different that day, and unfortunately I saw...

Earl was gone. I almost jumped in my spot when

I realized this and immediately called my husband as if

I feared that I've gone mad and I was just

imagining things. He was as shocked as me when he

noticed the branches of the big old tree missing from

the landscape. Good old Earl laid on the floor, now

a felled tree, after all of those decades of standing

proudly in our property and I just felt a mix

of rage and sadness that ate me alive inside like

nothing had done before. My husband tried to call my name,

but it was too late. I was already on my

way to Karen's door, with rage running through my veins.

She opened the door as if nothing had happened with

her scrunched nose when I asked about a tree. Well,

I told you it was in my property and you

did not even do anything about it, she tried to

reply to me. Even when I told her the value

of the tree she had just cut off, she just

shrugged and tried to brush the issue off, saying it

was some old rotten tree anyway and that she, yes

you heard me right, she was gonna sue me because

the tree fell on her car since apparently they sucked

at physics in school and her idiot husband and his

friends cut down the tree in a stupid way. I

was not gonna drop the issue, of course. She had

trespassed on my property in the middle of the night

to cut off a piece of history that was worth

thousands of dollars as if it was just a minor thing.

We had to get the property line surveilled to prevent

anything else from escalating further. And by the way, RipeStars, unfortunately,

I had to censor a lot of personal information there

because OP was, in my opinion, sharing too much and

he might have gotten doxxed if I would have read

that in a YouTube video. And really, I don't want

to expose anyone's privacy, so that's why I tend to

censor things like that. Either way, a few days later,

I got a lawsuit notice from Karen for the damages that,

according to her, I had inflicted on her car. I

could not believe my own eyes when I saw that paper,

but I was confident, though, that we were not in

the wrong here. She was the one that had illegally

come into our property to destroy a piece of it,

and nature had done the rest of the job. Luckily

for us, so showed the evidence. The surveillance proved that

our ancestral tree was always on our property, and there

was not even a centimeter of it passing onto Karen's land.

She had no right to cut it in the first place,

let alone, without our permission, and by her own means,

and let's not even talk.

Speaker 2: About her car.

Speaker 1: We had absolutely nothing to do with that. You should

have seen her face when she was ordered to not

only pay the legal costs, but also the $ 185, 000 for

the worth of the tree that she had taken from us,

and also, we have to add to that the fact

that she lost her brand new car too. Her face

was so red that it seemed as if it was

going to explode with rage. She did not say a

word as her face slowly contorted, and her nose lifted

in its usual manner, a little vein in her forehead

appeared to be about to pop off at any given second.

I think she wanted to say and do so many

things to us, but she didn't do so because we

were in front of a judge, and you wouldn't believe

the other things we found out about our dear neighbor Karen.

She seemed to have a big record of harassing past

neighbors through legal threats, she did this from one house

to another, to any place she landed on, but I'm

guessing neither of her previous feuds had cost her so

greatly as this one did. Because Karen not only had

to pay the amount that I mentioned before, she also

ended up facing criminal charges for trespassing our property and

for destroying our tree and for abuse of litigation. She

ended up behind bars for a significant amount of time.

Karen had a history of harassment and threatening her neighbors

in the past using legal tools to back up her

insane claims and complaints. However, this frivolous lawsuit together with

her impulsive actions crossed criminal territory on this occasion, resulting

in felony charges for her. As for me, I still

sit on my porch in the mornings feeling the morning

dew hit my face, with my view having one tree

missing unfortunately from its usual splendor, but with justice definitely

being served. And yeah, ripe stars, I am happy that

OP got all this money, but sometimes when there are

so many memories attached to something, even if it's just

a tree, money cannot.

Speaker 2: Heal all the wounds.

Speaker 1: Either way, I hope OP will never see that Karen

neighbor again. Either way, the next one is a revenge story.

This one was posted by user commercial at 6690 on

r slash ripe stories which is our own subreddit. So

way back in 1972 my dad and I were on

our way to a lake to do some base fishing

at a resort lake town in East Texas. As you

entered the city limits was a posted speed sign of

30 miles per hour. My dad was driving 30 miles

per hour on the money as we entered the lower

speed zone. We were pulled over less than 100 feet

upon passing the sign. The cop came back and asked

if we knew how fast we were going and if

we saw the sign as we entered. Dad said, yes

officer I did and I was doing exactly 30. The

officer said, no sir you were speeding and showed my

dad the radar gun and the speed indicated that we

were going 30.17 miles per hour. My dad was rather

pissed at this and said, well I don't have a

speedometer that registers in. mph, so how was I supposed

to know that I was. 17 over the limit? The

cops simply fold that, you could have just as easy gone.

17 miles under as over. We had to go to

the courthouse and go before a judge to pay a

stupid speeding ticket.

Speaker 2: As my dad.

Speaker 1: pleaded not guilty, dad started some talk with the judge.

Asking if he did much fishing in the local lake,

it was the one thing the judge loved to do.

So they chatted about 15 minutes before my dad told

him that he was sent to this town to review

the resort for one of the biggest fishing magazines of

the time. My dad then paid the fine and said

goodbye and have a good day. So then we did

our tour of several lakeside resorts, fishing guides and the

town in general and the reviews for the most part

was very positive but it blasted the local law enforcement

for the speed traps to catch the non-resident people coming

through town. stating how he was ticketed for not even

being a full one mile per hour over the speed

limit and how the court system upheld such minor infractions

with inflated fines and by the way ripe stars i'm

curious is that still a thing nowadays that you can

get fined even if you are just one mile per

hour over the speed limit where i'm from there's always

a sort of tolerance i'm not sure how exactly how

much it is in miles per hour since where i'm

from it's kilometers per hour But in general, there's like

a tolerance of maybe plus minus four or five kilometers

per hour, which I suppose might be three miles per hour. Anyway,

let me know how it is for you, where you

are from. Anyway, and his overall recommendation was to avoid

this town and stay on the main highway until they

reached the next town over. That had almost as good

fishing accommodations. There was a bit of a fallout after

the article was published. The mayor of the town contacted

the magazine, asking for them to publish a retraction of

the article, because a week after it came out tourism

and fishing had dropped substantially for being peak season. The

magazine referred them to contact the author of the article

to see he would be willing to make a retraction

on his review. Dad simply told him, if they were

not able to make enough from all the business generated

by sportsmen, then they deserved what they got for being

so greedy and corrupt. My dad did give him a

way out though. He said, you can retrain the law

officer and ask the judge to put in writing that

he will retire at the next election. Then I will

give the town the good rating it deserves. He only

got half of what he asked for. They fired the cop,

but the judge was scared enough to start doing his job.

My dad kept his word and told the readers the

issue of the speed traps had been resolved by the mayor.

and to please enjoy all the amenities the town had

to offer. And the next one is an entitled people story.

This story about an entitled train Karen was posted by

user aggravatingbench41 on r slash ripe stories. So this happened

a year ago and sharing it would be interesting. So,

for some background in a previous post, I stated how

I work with coyotes, which is true, but when I

am not working with wild animals, I lend my services

out of state for a Pennsylvania regional railroad known as

the Reading Blue Mountain and northern as a brakeman slash fireman. Now,

how was I able to do this? I was 18

at the time. Well, I have connections there with the

president and founder of the railroad, so I spent most

of 2022 working part-time for the Iron Horse Rambles with

reading 2102 and the most notable, the Iron Horse Rambles

double heater with reading 425, locally known as the Blue Beauty. Also,

just for common knowledge, steam locomotives run with four crew members,

the engineer, the fireman, the brakeman and the conductor. The

brakeman often works as a secondary fireman to let the

main fireman rest, but the brakeman and conductor work as

seekers to help let the engineer know what is ahead.

With all of that out of the way, let me

wind the clock back to September 20, 2022. For the

most part, the doubleheader went smoothly. I was assigned to

work on the 425 steam engine and the run itself

is about a 2.5 hour round trip each way. However,

it's anything but relaxing but the joy you get as

you roar through towns and get the attention of railfans

is indescribable. So the ride up to the terminating station

was smooth sailing and I go through the safety procedures

to get the train turned around so both engines could

reverse into the stations. Note that the train consisted of

20 passenger cars, so it took a good while, but

eventually the train stops at the station, so the 2102

and 425 could uncouple and be on temporary display and

open for cab tours. I was in charge of giving

the tours on the 425, and for the most part,

every rail fan was super happy to see me, and

I allowed them to ring the bell and blow the

whistle until Karen and her demon-spawned child climb up into

the cab. As usual, I was being my polite self

and giving details and stats about the engine. I then

told them the top speed of the engine, when it

was built, how it came into ownership of the Reading

and Northern, and how this engine was due for a

boiler inspection. I was about to allow her kid to

blow the whistle until I looked at the pressure gauge

and it read 200 psi. It needed to be around 240.

So I grabbed the shovel and politely asked the mother

to give me a second so I could shovel the

coal and just as I step on the lever that

opens the firebox door and as I shovel away, I

noticed the kid reaching his hand out towards the open firebox. Instantly,

my protective sibling side came out. Me, what on earth

do you think you're doing? Do you know how dangerous

that can be?

Speaker 2: Child.

Speaker 1: Mommy, that man won't let me touch the boiler. Karen,

excuse me, sir. Why won't you let my angel touch?

The Karen stopped shocked to see me covered in soot. Me,

is there a problem? Karen, you're just a teenager. How

the hell did a filthy n-word teen like you get

to drive this engine? I don't think you're old enough

to operate it. Me, ma'am, I'm of the legal age

to work in the cab, but I'm also obligated to

ensure the safety of those who tour it. Your son

could have received third-degree burns from touching the metal on

the boiler. So for that reason, please leave before you

are charged with trespassing on railroad property. The Karen shrieked, No,

you're the one who's trespassing.

Speaker 2: Now get off.

Speaker 1: The Karen grabbed me by my overall and tries to

throw me out of the cab. Now I gripped the

railing on the outside because if she had succeeded I

would have fallen 15 feet on my back onto a

railroad track rail which would cause serious injury to me.

Luckily my saving grace would be that the local tourist

train was just returning and police were called onto the

scene and the Karen was arrested and charged with battery

and assault. All the while the kid was crying but

he eventually calmed down and apologized for causing a whole

problem and that he should have known better. After that,

I asked the kid if he had someone else besides

his mom and he said that his dad was waiting

for him and his mom back in the place the

trip started. So after speaking with the crew members who

collectively agreed to forgive the kid, we wanted to cheer

him up so we called the dad and filled him

in on the situation. And he said that he would

be on his way but we assured him that he

can stay there and that his son did not know

any better so for the return trip he was allowed

to ride in the cab of 2102. The kids screamed

out in excitement and for the return trip he was

laughing out of joy. And once we got to the

shops to uncouple the engine the kid met up with

his dad and both of them had to drive up

to the town where the kid's mom was arrested. I

did not press charges since technically I was a volunteer,

so I let the company.

Speaker 2: Deal with the whole situation.

Speaker 1: And yeah, RipeStars, I gotta say, props to OP, I

could not have handled this situation as gracefully and calm

as he did. And the next Reddit story starts like this.

So I had been married to my husband for 20

years when the worst thing imaginable happened. He did not

have any prior health issues but one night he had

chest pain and went to the hospital. Three hours later

he was declared dead. As you can try to imagine

I was in a serious state of shock and had

no idea what to do. To make matters even more complicated,

I was having the hospital contact his family because I

had no real contact with them. Actually, my husband was

also no contact with them after year 6 or 7

of our marriage. They were toxic and especially his parents

would do and say anything they could to put me down.

Telling him right in front of me how he could

have gotten a better looking wife or asking if he

had come to his senses yet and was gonna file.

Speaker 2: For divorce soon.

Speaker 1: Just horrible people that I did not need for my

mental health. I decided to no longer be in contact

with them and after seeing how hurt I was, my

husband joined me with that too. So only minutes after

he died, my phone rang and I recognized the number

of having my in-laws area code. I answered thinking they

wanted to get more information or mourn. I was not

gonna deny them that by acting petty. So I answered

and tried my best to speak through my crying.

Speaker 2: Me, hello?

Speaker 1: Mother-in-law, hi, the hospital just called and told us. When

are you gonna send us a copy of the will

and send us the money? I was shocked that she

did not even seem to care that her son had

just died.

Speaker 2: A son that was.

Speaker 1: Not sick and only 45 years old. After years in

my current state, I did not care about being nice anymore. Me,

are you kidding me right now? You just heard he

died and you called to talk about money? Do you

not even care? Mother-in-law, he stopped being my son as

you brainwashed him into siding with you. Now, are you

gonna send me the will or will I need to

get a lawyer involved? Me, you don't need to see

the damn will. He left everything to me. And unless

you decide to grow a heart, don't bother showing up

to the funeral. I was yelling in public, but I

gave no damn as people passing by watched me. This

was not the only conversation I had with them over

the next week or so regarding the will and money.

My husband had a $ 2 million inheritance that was in

his name since he was an adult. His parents demanded

that they should get the money because they are his

real family. The entire time claiming that I'm some gold

digger and trying to screw them over. They did not

end up coming to the funeral but instead decided to

have their lawyer send me the paperwork about being sued

on the same day. They got some real shady lawyer

that was willing to take them on as clients. As

for the reason of the lawsuit, they are claiming that

the will is invalid despite not even seeing it. Claiming

that he was under my abusive influence when he wrote

it and it should be thrown away. They want me

to get nothing and for them to get everything that

was in his name. Money, car and even the house.

I then found a lawyer of my own and showed

him the will. I also showed him past text conversations

with the in-laws showing... that they are the threatening and

abusive ones. Even some messages saved from my husband telling

them off and to stop contacting him. Now my lawyer

tried his best to stop this whole mess from going

to court, but they were hell-bent on the lawsuit. I

knew I was in the right, but that did not

mean that I wasn't just so mentally exhausted that I

wanted it all to just go away. This crappy lawyer

of theirs did everything he could to drag things out

as long as possible. We are talking over a year

of going to court, having dates.

Speaker 2: Moved, etc.

Speaker 1: I did not realize why until later, but we will

get to that. In court, I was showing everything I

could to prove that the will was valid and that

their claim was bogus, including the fact that the will

was drafted and notarized at a law office. People could

see that I was not forcing him to sign anything,

plus the abusive texts and testimony from other people claiming

that he wanted nothing to do with his parents before

his death. They were toxic and it was clear to

everybody in the court that they had no claim to

protest the will. The judge found just that and ruled

that there was absolutely nothing wrong.

Speaker 2: With the will.

Speaker 1: It was a very basic will too. Law officers have

these pretty generic ones that you can add names and

items if they apply. We both signed ones that said

in the result of one spouse's death, all assets will

be transferred to the living one. It took a year

of this before it was finally shut down and I

was able to keep that money he left me. What

I did not know until later was that my in-laws

lawyer knew from the start that he was not gonna

win this case. He did not take it because he

wanted to help them or think he could help them

win a huge amount of money. He took it because

he knew he could drag it out and charge my

in-laws hourly for his services. They owned him a metric

ton of money for a case that he knew was

going to end in a loss for them. I assumed

they were banking on the money in order to pay him.

They tried to make a point that I should be

the one to pay him, since the entire thing was

supposedly my fault. Going so far as to blame me

for my husband's death as one last shot to hurt me.

Before I blocked them out of my life completely, I

heard that they were gonna try and fight the lawyer

to not have to pay. Because one pointless lawsuit was

not enough for them.

Speaker 2: I guess.

Speaker 1: I imagine a world of them getting more shady lawyers

to sue their past lawyers just forever. Obviously not reality,

but after all this dark stuff, maybe something a little light.

One thing I forgot to mention is that they were

also forced to pay for my legal fees, which they

did in order to avoid even further trouble. Waiting on

that was the reason I was waiting to block them again.

I had to make sure it got sorted. I hope

now I can just have peace with everything and get

some closure. I have not been able to even grieve

properly during the whole ordeal, so hopefully now I can

do that. I'm kind of impressed that my husband seemed

to have screwed over his parents one last time, even

if it was in the afterlife. Edit number one, I

just found out a few days after posting this from

a good cousin on my husband's site that my in-laws

might be in even more trouble. They were served with

papers about legal action being taken against them by the

state and for filing a lawsuit with the intent to

deceive and profit from it. Essentially a scam but since

it is 2 million dollars they could get in big trouble.

Karma is really gunning for them and hopefully they will

learn a lesson. The next one is another revenge story.

I run across sovereign citizens now and again, the kind

that likes to file bogus legal documents filled with Latin

phrases and notarized with a red seal to make everything

seem official. These guys think that legal terms are like

incantations or spells. If you just say the right thing

in a document, your legal problem magically disappears. Lawyers and

judges hate these guys. They are super annoying. Years ago,

I broke one of my rules and took on a

case for a friend. It was a family estate squabble

and my client's brother owed him money. The Sofsit brother

got his greedy hands on his father's money outside of

the estate process by getting himself made joint with his

elderly father on some bank accounts. Pulling that stunt is

a no-no in Canada, definitely frowned upon.

Speaker 2: By the courts.

Speaker 1: But so far as Sofsit man was concerned, it was

finders keepers all the way and his father's will be damned.

So I sent Sofsit man a letter demanding that he

pay and he stuck to the Sofsit playbook aka he

paid my client with a check. The check was not

your normal check, Drawn on an actual bank account, instead

it was some weird bullcrap thing that he got off

the web. The bank the check was drawn on did

not exist and the check had all kinds of strange

wording in fine print on the back. The thing about

these SoftSid guys is that they have no notion of

the consequences of the bogus documents and bad advice that

they get off the internet. SoftSid man made a huge

mistake by sending me the bogus check. Can I cash this?

My client said when I showed him the check. Go

for it, but tell the bank in advance that you

know it won't clear so that they won't think that

you're pulling a scam. So my client cashes the check

and of course it bounces with extreme prejudice. After the

check bounced, we sued the brother for the money he

stole from the estate. It was a short, simple lawsuit,

just a few pages long. We served the brother at

the house he owned, free and clear thanks to the

money he stole from the estate. The guy had 30

days to defend, and on day 30, I got his defense,

filled with the usual soft-set nonsense. The defense also had

a huge mistake in it, one of the biggest I've

ever seen, and I've been doing this a long time.

Soft-sit man started arresting me and my staff. He sent emails,

he sent letters, he left voicemail messages, he came by

the office uninvited demanding to see me and making threats.

He kept it up until the cops said that they

would arrest him if he came by again, but by

then it was time for his court date. So then

I am in court asking for judgment and the soft-sit

genius is there talking his legal babble, saying words that

he does not understand. The judge shut him down after

about 10 seconds and gave my client judgment. Softset Man

has a meltdown and is escorted out of the courthouse.

Of course he appeals, but I don't care because of

the mistake the guy had made right out of the gate.

His mistake was serious and fatal. I don't know about

other countries, but in Canada, if someone gives you a

check and it fails to clear, you can sue for that.

All you have to do is prove that a check

written to you bounced and that's all you need. The

court will give you judgment, so when Softset Man sent

my client the bogus check, he handed my client an

airtight cause of action, an easy win of a lawsuit,

and of course I pounced on it. When Softset Man's

check bounced, my client sued him for that, too, in

a separate legal proceeding that we started on the same

day as the estate case. The two claims looked almost identical,

at least on the front page. My client's name was

the same, the defendant's name was the same, and the

court file number was identical, but for the final digit

when we served Softset Man with Claim 1, the estate claim,

we also sued him on Claim 2, the bad check claim.

I think he thought that the second claim was just

a copy of the first one, because he only defended

the estate actions. On the bad check case, he did

not defend and I had default judgment after 30 days. So,

a few months later, Softset Man wants to negotiate with us.

He is feeling magnanimous and he says even though the

estate case is under appeal, an appeal he said he

was sure to win, he was willing to throw his

brother a bone. He would pay, but nowhere near the

amount of the judgment. It was then that I let

him know that we had sued twice and that I

had a judgment in the second action, as well as

the first one, and that now the man's home was

totally tied up with the writs I filed. You better

hope you win that appeal, I said to him, because

you're literally betting your house on it. Soft-sit man did

his usual meltdown thing, but once he was finished with

the screaming and the threats, he had a bit of

a come-to-Jesus moment. We settled with him, sort of. He

paid back all the money he stole from the estate,

plus all my client's legal fees, plus some more, just

for being a bit of a dick and a sovereign

citizen to boot. Later that year, he was at my

client's house for Christmas dinner. Go figure, families can be

pretty weird. And the next one is titled, Revenge on

Government Officials. In 2013, my boyfriend moved to PH in

order to study nursing. He ended up going to the

university in my province. We met, became friends, and started dating.

By 2K15, I was a recent graduate, but he failed

one course, which prompted him to move back to the US.

It was heartbreaking, but we knew it was for the best.

His mom had booked a ticket for him three months

prior to his birthday for a cheaper flight. The day

rolled in, and I told him to contact me if

he gets into any sort of trouble. Or I suppose

let's just call her Lee because that's easier to say. Anyway,

I asked if she took all of his documents and

he responded that she did exactly that. His passport, his

school documents, etc. I told him to explain that he

has dual citizenship so she cannot say that he overstayed

in the country. Lee said that he doesn't know any better.

I asked him what she wanted and my blood boiled

when I heard, she wants me to pay a fee

of 5,000 Philippine pesos, which was around $ 100 at the time.

If I wanted my paper back, but I won't be

able to leave the country. Lee wanted to swindle my boyfriend.

This was very common, I hope it doesn't happen anymore though,

but I don't know, and my boyfriend had to be

the poor victim in her scheme. I was legit stressing

out because his flight was in three hours and she

was making things extremely difficult. One fun fact about my

boyfriend is that his dad used to work for that airport.

He worked there for a long time and is really

good friends with the staff. There were also my boyfriend's

godparents in his baptism. I called his mom, who I'd

met months after we started dating. I love his mom

to bits. She is cool and told her on what happened.

Of course, she was as livid as I was and

told her husband about their son's predicament. His dad called

one of the aforementioned buddies and requested on assisting my boyfriend.

While this transpired, Lee was still trying to persuade my

boyfriend to pay the fine rather than facing jail time.

Boyfriend already knew about our plans on helping him, so

he refused and said he is fine. A few minutes later,

the head of the immigration office came out and instructed

her to bring my boyfriend to their office. She was

surprised but complied. Boyfriend, I swear he's a lost puppy,

sat on one of their seats and just read stuff

on his phone. Lee looked smug, probably thinking that boyfriend

was some sort of criminal, that she probably won the

jackpot or something. Suddenly, the door opened and a stream

of managers, supervisors or the head of different departments in

the airport entered the room and greeted my boyfriend warmly,

remarked on how grown up he was and asked if

he remembers them, etc. The head honcho of immigration, aka

Lee's boss, entered the room and told a story on

how he would babysit my boyfriend when he was a

little boy. At this point, you can imagine Lee freaking

the hell out. Boyfriend missed his original flight, but was

able to take back his papers and documents and go

back to California because his mom booked a later flight

on the same day, but it was pricey. A week

passed and his dad told me that Lee was fired

immediately for extortion and Lee is no longer viable to

apply for any government jobs. And to your ripe stars,

I gotta say that the Philippines, at least judging by

this story, reminds me a lot of Thailand. There's also

a lot of corruption here, especially when it comes to immigration,

And there was one, I would say funny story, but

I guess if I was a Thai citizen, I would

not find it so funny because it's just embarrassing. Anyway,

so there was this Chinese woman and she was on

one of these elite visas. And basically in Thailand, you

can buy an elite visa that will give you a

lot of privileges and stuff. And this woman was coming

back to the country after the pandemic was over. And

apparently she booked some kind of special service that I've

never heard about before, which was not really officially offered,

but I guess she had some government contacts or maybe

at the police or something and essentially the police picked

her up at the airport and then she got a

police escort to her hotel. Obviously that sort of thing

usually you should not be able to buy but in

Thailand as some people say Everything is possible.

Speaker 2: For a price.

Speaker 1: This case went through the local news and some of

the people I talk with, daily Thai people, when they

heard it, they almost couldn't believe it. Also the fact

that this Chinese woman had the audacity to record everything

and then post it on TikTok and kind of brag

about what happened, made it even worse for her, I guess.

As far as I remember, she got deported from the

country and maybe got a ban or something. And considering

that her visa is so expensive, she basically just wasted

around 15 or 20 thousand dollars just for bragging on TikTok.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. And the next Reddit

story starts like this. So listen up, I know that

America believes in the right to carry and the right

to bear arms and all that good stuff. But let

me tell you, there's a reason for that. In today's world,

you gotta make sure that you're on your toes for

when some unsuspecting person wants to take your freedom away.

This just happened to me a while back after I

had a great day at my private shooting range here

in good old Eminence, Missouri. Boy, do I love my town.

I was born and raised here and there's no way

in hell I would ever step foot in some other

anti-gun totem state. Here in Missouri, we get it done.

I can pack and never have to worry about some

peckerwood asking for my license when I'm shopping down at

a local Piggly Wiggly or Dollar General. However, I never

thought in a million years that someone would have the

audacity to show up at my property and raise hell.

Speaker 2: Nope.

Speaker 1: Honestly, these people are ruthless and that's why I always carry.

Given the state of mind most people are in these days,

you bet your britches that those Clint Eastwood movies are

the real deal. These guys don't play around, so when

I get an unsuspecting Karen at my front door of

my shooting range one day, I almost wasted her for

trespassing on private property. I've heard of stories about that before. Basically,

some people just show up and all hell breaks loose

because they thought it was okay to walk around someone's

yard with special access to the main road or some

BS like that. What I come to find out is

that these people just want to ruffle your feathers a little.

This all went down on a Saturday afternoon. I had

just put away my AR-15 rifle, but realized that I

had not finished cleaning it. So I go back to

my porch out front and sit in my favorite easy

chair with my special cleaning cloth. As I am minding

my own business, I hear this car pull up in

the distance. Now, my home is situated on private land

and I have a shooting range out back. It's all

built up with concrete and wood so that it helps

to block out the noise from my neighbors. They don't

like it at all that much, but I told them

it was safe and that it was okay. But for

some reason, when I heard this car pull up, I

did not know what to expect. I thought to myself,

maybe my neighbors must have told some people in town

that my shooting range was public. I do know that

there was a billboard as you come into town, all

advertising for a gun range just a few miles up

the road. However, I had no idea that any person

would just show up on my property thinking that this

was it. Besides, there was nothing showcasing that I had

a gun range. The range was hidden out back and

my house was pretty secluded, but I did have a

gun replica the size of Mount Rushmore. Sitting outside on

my lawn nestled nicely under my mailbox. And then there

was the Molon Labe and Got Ammo sign that I

painted and placed nicely near my eastern red cedar tree

near the driveway. So why the hell would some Karen

show up on my property and think that this was

some free carnival ride for would-be gun enthusiasts? And to

top it all off, she brought her kit as well.

I almost fell out of my seat when they pulled

up in their shiny black SUV. The small kid runs

out and starts playing cops and robbers, pointing a fake

finger gun at the car and my house. The mom

was all decked out in fancy boots and she looked

like June Cleaver on a bad day. I mumbled to

myself and put away my AR-15. I was not done

cleaning it, so I got a little mad. But worse,

this dumbo just trespassed on my property. I was about

to call the cops, but she starts talking all nice

and polite to me in this nice southeastern Missouri accent.

And boy, do I got a thing for southeast Missouri chicks.

I hesitated when she comes up to me and starts

sweet-talking me, making comments about my gun sign I made

and how nice my property looked. Is this gun range advertised?

Speaker 2: She asked.

Speaker 1: No, this is my property. The gun range is down

the road about five miles. I start to get a

little nervous, honestly. She then takes off her pink vest

and pulls her hair back. Well, what is that in

your hand?

Speaker 2: Is that an AR-15?

Speaker 1: I love those. I just stared at her, wondering what

she was up to.

Speaker 2: Yes, it is.

Speaker 1: I just got it recently, matter of fact. I like

to shoot it out back. She pointed to the house.

You got yourself a nice big house here.

Speaker 2: You all alone?

Speaker 1: She reached into her pockets and pulled out a piece

of paper. It was a flyer for the gun range

down the road.

Speaker 2: Yep, just me. I like it out here.

Speaker 1: Suits me well. Now, can I ask you to... But

before I could even finish the sentence, she starts walking

on my porch and picking up my lawn ornaments. I

like these, she said, and then she proceeds to get

a little closer to me. and starts flirting with me

a little bit. I like a man who can take

care of himself. And yeah, I'm sorry for coming up

on your property. Little Aiden over there just wanted to

tag along today. He likes to play with guns. Toy guns,

that is. But I like mine big.

Speaker 2: Guns, that is.

Speaker 1: I was thinking maybe she was getting a little too

close for comfort, but in a way, I kind.

Speaker 2: Of liked it.

Speaker 1: She started chasing her kid around and pretending to hold

a small gun in her hand. I just wish I

had more space to shoot myself. I come from a

smaller town, but the folks up there don't like the noise,

she added.

Speaker 2: What about you?

Speaker 1: You said you like to shoot it out back. You

mind showing me how you handle that AR-15? I hesitated

and just looked at her. Well, here's the thing. What

was your name, by the way?

Speaker 2: I asked. It's Colleen. I started again.

Speaker 1: Well, Colleen, I get that you like guns and all,

and seeing here that this is my property and you

are nice, I would not mind showing you my shooting range.

And then, as if a kid came down on Christmas

to see Santa, she starts getting all excited and jumps

up in the air.

Speaker 2: No way!

Speaker 1: You got a gun range back there? I hesitated again. Well, yeah,

it's my property, you know. I can do anything I

pretty much want on it. She starts running Aiden around again,

and he points a fake finger gun at me and yells.

Speaker 2: Bang, bang!

Speaker 1: I laugh a little under my breath, but I nod

to her. I tell you what, I got a squirt

gun out back I can give to little Aiden here.

He can keep it if he likes it. She then

points a fake finger gun at me. bang, bang, and

starts laughing. I like your big gun, though. She smiled

and winks. All right, let's go around back, I said.

This is where it kind of gets crazy. And believe me,

to all the parents out there in the world today,

please keep your kids safe. There should not be any

shenanigans when it comes to firearms. But this chick really

wanted to play rough. So we go back behind my

house and I show her my gun range. She loved it,

but she also loved some other things and that was

my gun. I lay down my AR-15 and she has

the audacity to go over and start handling it. Now

I was thinking I wish she would have handled something

else instead of my gun if you know what I mean. However,

she picks that sucker up and starts pointing it all around,

pretending to be Bonnie from Bonnie and Clyde. I'm thinking,

this chick is nuts. I put my hands up and say, whoa, whoa,

hold on there. And then she proceeds to say, can

Aiden hold it? Now, I know that some moms can

be crazy, but this one here was a little too

far gone.

Speaker 2: Come again? I ask.

Speaker 1: Can Aiden have it? You know, to play with it.

She starts raising her voice. I say, hell no, that's

an AR-15 rifle. Your boy could get himself killed. And

then she proceeds to start walking around me like I'm

some sort of criminal for not letting her son handle

a loaded weapon. Let alone an AR-15 rifle for crying

out loud. I quip back, Colleen, you need to get

the hell off my property now. I was gonna be

nice to you and maybe let you handle my AR-15

and shoot it a little, but now you have pissed

me off. What the hell do you think this is?

Letting a kid handle a loaded weapon? I don't know

where you come from, but you need to leave ASAP.

She looks at me with dead eyes and flat out says, no.

She then keeps prancing around me, shaking her booty and

pointing a fake finger gun at me. I thought she

might be on something. That's when I pull out my

cell phone and snatch the AR-15 in case she decided

to get loco. Get out now, I yelled. Before I

call the cops. She then stops in her tracks and

picks up Aiden. He starts bawling his eyes out. I

thought it was all a show until he did that.

Can you believe this chick was serious? Wow, some people.

When I thought she was gonna walk away, just then

she starts comforting her little son and then turns her

back on me. I told you to leave and now

look what you have done. And then she turns around

and slaps me on the face. What the hell are

you doing?

Speaker 2: I yelled.

Speaker 1: I then stepped back and held the gun tight. I

did not want her doing anything crazier. I called the

cops and start telling them the story. She starts coming

up to me pretending to point a fake gun at

me again and all and acts like she's gonna hit

me again. I keep stepping back not wanting to lose

my cool. This chick was crazy I tell you. She

would not even leave my property. I go around the

side of my house to make sure my arsenal is

all locked up. I did not want her stealing anything.

She then goes to her SUV, but by the time

she pulls out, the cops block her in on the driveway.

They tell her to put her hands up like it's

some sort of heist or something. I start laughing under

my breath. For a minute, I thought this chick was

gonna start doing something even more crazy, but she ended

up in the slammer for assault and trespassing on private property.

A few months later, I read in the local news

that she was up to no good again. It turns

out that Colleen is not even her real name. After

that incident, I locked away my guns and did not

shoot anything for a while. The range sat there collecting

dust for a while, and I then got back the

nerve to start shooting again. This time, though, I was prepared.

I built a heavy-duty fence around my property and took

away all the gun signs in my yard. I was

not gonna let some crazy-ass chick ruin my life again.

Then I cut out the mugshot that I found of

her on the internet and used it as target practice.

Don't tread on me. And the next one is a

revenge story. I've written before about the good grocery store

where I worked in high school. So we had a

couple of bad customers and a lot of senile seniors,

but it was well run with a great manager. The

one I worked at for one summer in college was

the bad place. It was 1994 in a chain grocery

store with a truly awful manager who was straight out

of business school. He was also the regional office director's son,

so he was Teflon. Which I suppose means that any

criticism he just reflects. Anything that went wrong got pinned

on an assistant manager and or hushed up at the

regional level. Awful had managed to install his mistress as

one of the assistant managers. I only saw her in

the store twice and both times she was shopping. One

of the times she did not even pay. Awful manager

paid no attention to people's time constraints. We had a

bunch of teenagers there who were attending summer school. but

he did not care, he scheduled however he wanted and

left us to swap shifts among ourselves. I also personally

saw him tell one girl that she would have to

miss school because he needed her on shift and she

could not find coverage. Crazy illegal. He did not care

about legalities though, Awful's belief was that if the computer

would accept it, then it was fine. It was the

early days of computerized payroll, so the system would take

literally anything with no checks whatsoever. He made the teenagers

work hours they legally couldn't. I'm talking too late, too

early and lots of overtime. If they complained, he threatened

to fire them. That was his answer to everything. And

work was not easy to come by in that area.

There were teenagers in tears because he wouldn't let them

take time for family vacations or they were being forced

to miss tests at school. One guy was fired because

he went to his sister's wedding. He had warned Awful

Manager about it months in advance and it was a

holiday weekend, so nobody could swap. Awful Manager was very rarely,

if ever, in the store his entire shift. He would

clock in, get the few really important things done and

then he would leave. He would come back in the

middle of his shift to do the bank deposits and

then be gone again until it was time to clock out.

He assigned all his work to the latest Fall Guy

assistant manager, or other random employees. If he was the

only manager on duty, he would leave his badge for

overrides on the desk in the office so we could

grab it when needed to override register errors.

Speaker 2: All of this was.

Speaker 1: Massively against company policy. I mentioned in a previous post

how National was pretty obsessed with mystery shopper reports and

got them directly from the company that did that stuff.

We would get all kind of conflicting instructions because National

addicts based on those and our regional director's policies would differ.

Always fun, what I didn't mention was mystery shoppers were

trivial to spot. They would go straight to the bakery

to price out a special order cake and then not

buy it, complain about the price or ask any of

the normal questions. They also went to the bathroom, the

fish counter, asked for a price check and made us

unring something they decided they didn't want during checkout. There

were other things on the list, but those are the

obvious ones I will remember all these years later. My

last week at this crap show before I headed back

to college, I spotted a blatant mystery shopper, complete with notepad.

Awful had bugged out shortly after open, the mistress was

probably busy screwing him, the other assistant manager had been

fired for the last colossal screw-up, and the only other

cashier on shift was at lunch. It was pretty dead

as it was late morning, so no big deal, except

that I decided it was time for this crap show

to get reported for what it was. So when Mystery

came up with her price check item, I forgot to

hit the price check button and rang it up for real. Whoops,

time to get the manager's override badge. I overrode it,

and then I tossed that bad boy so hard it

went all the way across the manager's desk and down

into the sea of cables behind it in the corner. Whoops,

I'm quite sure that if you went to the tapes,

this looked incredibly intentional. It was my last week, you

could count the Fs I gave on no hands. Somewhere

around this time, the other cashier, we will call her Jenny,

got back from her lunch break and I informed her

that crap was about to get real. She might want

to go home sick if she wanted some cover, but nah,

Jenny giggled and wanted a front row seat. Besides, the

lunch rush was coming, we had a construction area nearby

and a lot of the guys came for the prepared

foods for a cheap hot lunch. We started to get

the lunch rush and more of a crowd by the

time Mystery made it up to my register to check out.

Of course, she needed me to unring something for her checklist,

so I flipped on the Help Me Obi-Wan light.

Speaker 2: Nothing happened.

Speaker 1: I called for awful manager over the intercom by manager

first name, last name. Jenny caught on real fast and

told me to just go get the badge from the office.

Awful first name, last name must be doing the money

drop or something. I pointed out to Jenny that was

against company policy. She rolled her eyes and told me

that's what awful first name, last name had said to do. Now,

where was that override badge? I headed up to the

office and made a good show of looking for it.

Called down to Jenny, asking if she had it, but nope.

Jenny abandoned the big order she was ringing up and

came up to the little office to give a.

Speaker 2: Cursory look around.

Speaker 1: This is where the whole story took a turn that

I had not gamed out yet. See, I was just

gonna give Mystery a very bad visit with many violations

to report. There would have been an embarrassing reaming from

National and possibly even an investigation. Jenny had other plans though.

Jenny was going nuclear. Jenny apologized to the Mystery shopper,

but she was going to have to get in Jenny's

line now. I could not void the transaction or log

in to two registers at once, so I was going

to help her pack it up and Jenny would get

to Mystery as soon as she could. Now this is

somewhat BS, while true as stated we all knew how

to unplug the registers to get them to reset and

lock us out. It was a dumb hack but it worked.

The thing was there was almost zero chance Awful or

Mystery knew that. Mystery must have loved her Mystery shopping

gig because she was the most cheerful screwed over customer

you ever did see. She smiled, assured us everything was fine,

and scribbled in her notebook the whole time. Literally, while

I am loading up Mystery's card at my register, Jenny

accidentally rang up a gallon of milk about six times. Whoops,

no override card, no manager, no head cashier with any

power either. Cost-saving cuts there, the awful manager made early

in his days before I arrived. We apologized profusely to

the customers, but explained that we had no idea where

awful manager was. Offered to check in the back. Sent

a beggar out to check the lot in case awful

manager was on a smoke break, but no joy. As

this fiasco rolled on, we had a lot of very

unhappy customers on our hands and the downright giddy mystery

who stayed to the bitter end. We were demanded to

call a manager. We had tried all of Awful Manager's

known numbers. Who's above him? Oh, that's Regionals. We were

not allowed to call them. Very strict instructions. True and

very against company policy from manager first name last name.

But we can give you their number. Phone's right over there.

Many took advantage. We also got yelled at a lot,

but in spite of some sympathy for the customers, we

were loving every second of it. Regional took about two

hours to get somebody down to the store who could

clear the registers. Nobody else in the store had permission

on their system, Awful still hadn't shown up. Regional Dude

overrode the registers, but by then the damage was done.

We had missed the whole lunch rush, no hot food

was sold, our metrics for the day were gonna be

unbelievably crappy. Regional Dude was on the phone frantically trying

to figure out how to cover this mess up for

his boss, Awful's father, and decided to blame it on

a computer outage. I think they intentionally broke some equipment

to help sell that story, Awful wrote in after I

clocked out, but I'm told Regional Dude was still there,

doing Awful Manager's job. Awful was unbearable for the next

couple days, but I had a foot out the door already. Jenny,

it turned out, simply did not care because she had

been doing the work of.

Speaker 2: A head cashier without the pay.

Speaker 1: It took a few weeks for the fallout to happen,

and you bet I kept in touch with Jenny to

find that out. From this point, I only know what

Jenny told me as I was back in college a

few states away. A few weeks later, an audit team

from National came down to investigate. The mystery shopper story

had not lined up with the computer outage story and

something was obviously hinky. They dug into the books and

found all the labor violations for minors working overtime and

too early or too late. Interviewed the employees and found

out about the scheduling during school time problems. Also manager absenteeism,

no vacation being allowed and also that the store was

constantly short-staffed.

Speaker 2: No crap.

Speaker 1: People ran for the hills as soon as they got

anything else. Finally, that an assistant manager was on payroll

full time, but nobody had ever seen her work. She

clocked in and out within seconds of AM every shift

he worked, but was never there. Them dots ain't hard

to connect. I don't know if they covered up all

the labor violations or not. Probably that would have caused

massive fines. I was too young to know to report them.

Speaker 2: However, awful.

Speaker 1: His father and his mistress all got fired or resigned quietly.

The store reportedly went back to being pretty functional after that.

Jenny got a better job and left within the year.

I never worked retail again. And here, ripe stars, honestly,

I can very much understand OP here. After a workplace

situation like this I would have gotten PTSD or something.

In general I have a lot of respect for people

that work in retail because you simply already have to

work with so many entitled customers and then on top

of that if you have to deal with entitled awful

managers and bosses that makes the situation even worse. So

props for OP that he survived this and let's hope

that his next job will be much better and without

any entitled douchebags of course. And yeah, guys, thank you

so much for listening to this episode. If you enjoyed

my content, please don't forget to rate the podcast positively.

That would help me so much.

Speaker 2: Thanks a lot. And I will talk to you again soon.