Not my proudest moment…. But in my 20’s:

There were five or six guys, foreign Univ. students, living below me in a condo complex. They took all the parking including mine with new Porches, Lambos, etc. These cars would last maybe two weeks. First you’d see a dent, then a bigger dent, then the car would disappear and be replaced by another new one in a different color.

I didn’t really care, but they hung out on the stairs every day and would not let me pass to get to and from my vehicle. They’d pinch my arms and grab at me, saying stuff I can only assume wasn’t nice. The landlord didn’t care, he was getting well paid. These guys had diplomatic immunity, so normal or official reactions were a moot point. The final straw was over laundry… There were maybe 8 washers in the laundry room, one Sat. morning I took my stuff and put it in two of them, then returned to my place. I waited 30 min’s then returned to put everything in the dryer.

When I got there, I saw all of my clothes strewn all over the floor, wet, and they’d been walked on. I opened the washers I’d used to see that my neighbors below had put their stuff in there instead, it was all light colored…. All the washers were now taken. They were laughing and joking on the stoop when I returned with my armload of soaking wet and soiled clothes. One of them pinched my arm, another pulled my hair. That’s it, I was done. So… off to the store. I bought ten bottles of neon pink Rit dye…

The next Sat. I left my condo before they got up with my neon pink dye in hand and hid my vehicle on the other side of the complex. I checked the laundry room, (nobody was using it). Then I waited in ambush, reading in the rec. center where I had full view. Sure enough, here they all came with their laundry. After they left the laundry room, I put 2 -3 bottles of the dye in each of their washers.

The display that followed was pretty epic. One was screaming and ripping / rending the pink garments, another was insanely throwing them in the pool. Another ran to the manager’s office, I could hear him screaming in a foreign language. Someone called the police. I’m not sure at all what followed that day, but they moved out before noon.

Would I choose that same response or path today? No…