I am not proud of this. Not at all, but it was a low moment and I took the chance I had.

I used to live in a mildly sketchy pretty isolated part of town, and had one of the most irksome neighbours life could offer. He was constantly drunk, enjoyed stealing groceries out of peoples deliveries, spent his free time harassing and trying to grope all the women who lived in our small building, and he constantly smoked like a steam engine, usually in the street right under my window because he didn’t want to lose the deposit on his room by stinking it up. Our building manager was very firm about that kind of thing, but a little more lax on all his other unsavoury behaviours.

Now I didn’t know this at the time, but I had a small tracheal ulcer that had developed during an earlier surgery, so I was constantly coughing all day and feeling generally unwell. His smoke filtering into my room didn’t help matters at all, especially since he seemed to enjoy chain smoking late at night when I was lying down and trying to sleep - something which would set off another round of violent hacking coughs that would last for ages.

Repeated attempts to ask him to please go elsewhere to smoke had failed, and my building manager had even put up a no smoking sign on the wall below, but he’d simply disregarded it, and the manager couldn’t do anything about it because once he was off the property, he was effectively free to do as he chose.

One day I decided I’d had enough. I stopped by the shops on my way back from work and bought a cheap water gun and an air horn before heading back to camp out by my window behind a closed curtain.

It didn’t take long before he stepped out and began puffing, so I decided to give him a few minutes of peace before making a move. Slowly, I reached the air horn out of the window and positioned the nozzle of the water gun to face him, and gently pressed on the trigger. A light spray of water hit him on the face, and he looked up to see where it was coming from.

Immediately, I jammed on the trigger of the water gun with full force and started waving it around, while slamming my thumb down on the air horn. He yelled in shock at the double assault on his senses and stumbled backwards, tripping over his feet in his haste to scuttle back indoors. I yanked my weapons back into my room and hid, heart pounding and wondering if I had just made a terrible mistake in pissing off that scuzzy man.

Eventually, it transpired that he had been too drunk to really understand what had happened, because he hadn’t put two and two together and didn’t seem to have been able to figure out that I was the one behind it. A while later he was kicked out of the building anyway. It seems like so many people had complained about his terrible behaviour that the management had decided to just cut their losses and send him packing.