“What is the sneakiest thing you did to get back at an awful neighbor? Did you get caught?”

It was when I was in university and the awful neighbours were the guys on the floor above ours in residence.

The guys on the third floor had been a problem for the whole first semester, frequently coming down randomly to the second floor with buckets and throwing water all over the second floor, getting our beds, clothes and of course books and notes wet, then running upstairs and locking their door to us before we could react.

This had happened every few weeks for months and we were getting sick of it. But we could never get them back.

Just before Christmas one of our guys was eating Limburger cheese when he had an idea.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Limburger, it tastes quite good but it smells horrible. I won’t describe the smell in case somebody reading might want to try the cheese because it really does taste good - a LOT better than it smells.

Anyway, his idea was to wrap the cheese in cellulose and then, just before Christmas break, put the wrapped cheese on the coils at the back of the fridge in our small kitchenette.

We were away for Christmas for at least two weeks, maybe three. When we got back the Limburger lover went to check on his ‘babies’. He said it was ripe - REALLY RIPE!

So that night around 2 AM about a half dozen of us each put on some gloves (provided by me from the biology labs) and grabbed a block of cheese before heading up to the third floor. There we quickly proceeded to grate the cheese into the electric baseboard heaters in the hallways of the third floor.

Then we calmly went back to our floor and to bed.

The story that we heard the next day was that when the students on the third floor got up in the morning the air outside their rooms was so thick you could cut it with a (cheese?) knife. What I did see though was that in the following week (mid-January, very cold) theirs was the only floor in the residence that had all their windows open in the middle of a three-day blizzard.

No, none of us got caught in the act and although they couldn’t prove it of course they know who was responsible.

They learned their lesson well though and never again did they raid us in any way, shape or form.