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Vengeance is a dish best served ice cold I suppose it is not very noble of me to share this wee story with you, but the sun is shining and I am still feeling a warm glow after hearing this from my brother:
Brother: “Hey, you know that guy Mark who used to bully you at school a bit, you know, the one that went off to run a music shop?”
Me: “Er, yes, but it is a long time ago”.
Brother: “I bankrupted him this morning.”
My brother is a civil litigator.
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Put a song on the radio;”He Ain’t Heavy..”.Dedicate it to Mark.
Sound…I love to hear about the ill fortunes of those who bullied me.
Nice to see Karma at work.
About 10 years ago I had one of the guys who made my life hell at school come up to me in the pub one night and tell me not to pay for any drinks as they were on him. His way of apologising for being such a prick to me at school he said. Needless to say I got riotously drunk on his generosity, and a good time was had by all.
I’ve met the bullies from my school a few times since leaving. Unfortunately, it’s always been when I’ve been stacking shelves during the university holidays, so they leave with the impression that I, despite risking my neck by being male and visibly trying to learn in an inner-city state-school, I still ended up below them.
Not that I’m bothered by that…=(
NB. The low quality of the written English in that post is entirely due to me being distracted by bullies during my education.
Sounds more like schadenfreude to me.
Don’t you actually have to inflict the punishment youself for it to be vengeance?
Sounds like he got off much better than my 6th grade bully. A couple years after leaving that school I read in the paper that he had died in a car accident. He was a passenger and his mother’s foot slipped off the brake and on to the gas. They hit a chain-link fence and he got a metal fence pole embedded in his skull.
I was a bit saddend by the news as he had been a completely different person in grades 4 and 5. He was the complete opposite of a bully to the point that he was a quiet loner, doing odd things like wearing a thick parka indoors on a warm day. In 6th grade he apparently became aquainted with this new student (some fat Hawaiian whose name I can’t recall) who was a real asshole of a bully. After that they decided to become some sort of bullying tag-team since they were the two biggest kids in school (the deceased by virture of his 6+ foot height and the Hawaiian by virtue of his massive girth).
It was a little sad to see such a quite guy with some real potential go from one extreme to the other. I never really felt alot of hatred for him since I sort of understood why he chose the path of the bully (acceptance, even if just from one person). What happened to him may have been karma, but it certainly wouldn’t have been my chioce of a suitable punishment.
I was bullied by a bloke called Burke Shelley (Well for a couple of weeks, before my mate Neil beat lumps off him and he left me alone).
He ended up being bass guitarist in one of the worst rock bands ever. Budgie.
In the spirit of the article, I just googled him up, hoping to find that he’d OD’d , choked on his own vomit or become a carpet fitter.
But no, according to Wiki, the poor bugger is still out there being spectacularly mediocre and touring chicken in a basket venues.
Not as good as the OD but not too bad as far as I can see.
Doomed to play toilets for peanuts for all eternity is just punishment for the gormless little worm!
You know, on any other blog, we would have had someone try to encourage sympathy for all these bullies.
Sound…I love to hear about the ill fortunes of those who bullied me.
Indeed. A boy who used to bully me at school got struck down with leukaemia in his late teens. Tough shit!, I thought.
I have a real evil streak in me when it comes to people who do harm to others for no reason.
Bullying is horrible, and I saw it in my working life (not as either the victim or the perpetrator), but the characteristics of bullies seem to be to be summed up in two words – they are inadequate cowards. However I must have gone to very unusual schools because I have no recollection of bullying at any that I attended; a bit of teasing, yes, (of which I was occasionally the object), but when it concerned me I usually laughed it off and the people doing it soon got bored and stopped; I suppose my basic attitude was that they were ‘thick’ and not worth my concern. I believe there was some attempt at mocking me at one school because I was thought to be useless at sport (true), but the tactics didn’t work because I simply didn’t care. However I never had to cope with, or indeed ever knew of in schools I attended, physical bullying either of the minor sort or of the beating-up kind – that must be truly awful, but I suspect results from the wilful inaction of the adults supposedly in control.
As for the title of this post I’m afraid schadenfeude always strikes me as a sentiment whose ostensible ‘pleasure’ carries its own antidote; those who get a kick out of the misfortunes of others (even those who have been damaged in the past by the persons suffering now) are themselves damaged by their reaction to the misfortune.
Up yer kilt my Celtic brother!
You must enjoy the ups
That’s what they’re there for!!!
Let’s see : a few cigarette burns (being used as an ashtray is not Fun). A few broken ribs. A crushed sinus from when a kid used a small crowbar to smash my face. Nose broken in 2 places. All before age 9.
But apart from a few things now only visible on X-rays of my skull, no permanent harm.
Yes, people like me get bullied. If I hadn’t have been so big for my age, maybe I would have had the sense to hide.
Yet I regret one thing: that I caught one of the gang alone, not the worst one either, and broke his collarbone, just to stop him for a few months, and as deterrence to others. He was only 10. 10 year old kids don’t deserve that. Now, 41 years later, at 49 not 8, I wish I could apologise to him.
One guy at HS thought I was faking for hobbling around for over a week after I’d hurt my ankle – so gave it a mild kick. I passed out.
Well, the next day, after I’d *finally* had it X-rayed, and came in with a plaster cast (It had been broken all along), he was utterly devastated. In tears. He felt so Guilty – lower than a snake’s belly. I had to give him a lot of reassurance, he’d not made it any worse, and instead of being someone I’d always feared as being agro, he quieted down and was a lot more thoughtful of others after that.
Now there are evil scrotes who would have laughed. But there are fewer genuinely, irretrievably vile people in the world than you might think. The most dangerous are those a bit careless in their thinking, and do things “for your own good”. They get jollies from the power, and the knowledge that they are “doing good” stifles any thought that they might be in a power-trip.
Some of the best people I know are Social workers. But all of the worst ones are too. They like lording it over others. It’s where the Nanny State becomes the Bully State.
I once took great pleasure if the pain and suffering of someone who made my life hell. Someone who knew us both said: “that isn’t very Christian of you.”
I responded: “good thing I am not a Christian then isn’t it?”
I especially enjoy reunions and watching the moron jocks limping around for all the abuse they gave their body during their school/university years. They are generally bald as well.
schadenfeude is one of the best words in the German language and a wonderful concept.
PS: Yeah Budgie are pretty lame but they still manage loyal fans. What nitwit calls their metal band Budgie?
Being a very generous person, if I ever meet those who have put me down in the past, I always wish them a long life…in which to enjoy every form of pain and misery known to humankind.
I will never know whether my blessing works for them, as I prefer to put my efforts into keeping up with my friends, so I have no idea where my enemies are now. Given this post, I may now go away and google a few enemies for curiosity, although I suspect they are so obscure as to not appear.
The guy who gave me grief in high school only met me once thereafter:
That was when I rode my Harley back to visit.
Wearing my Colours
With the rest of the Club.
Just the look on his face as he recognised me made all the crap from him worthwhile.
Most bankruptcies are instigated by the tax authorities, and a music shop would be a pretty typical case. I hope your brother wasn’t working for the Man. If he was, he’s the one with the loaded karma pointing at him.
He might have been put under by the tax burden, which is a bad thing obviously, but I am not sure.
Trust someone to spoil my pleasure!
Johnathan,
Forget about it. Who cares who put the stake into him — as long as it was painful.
Payback in any form is to be welcomed.
and
Yup. Hope someone drops a piano on JP’s brother
Settle your own accounts. Don’t have the state do it for you, and through the tax system, yet. You people are supposed to be libertarians, for Christ sakes.
It’s bad enough when you get bullied but I’m a mum and when you see your kids get bullied and the school principal denies it, it pisses you right off. But now, the more I think about it, with schools still virtually doing nothing about it, the more I want vengeance. I’d love to see bully vigilantes infiltrating schools, pulling out the bully in front of everyone, humiliating him and his cronies and giving them a taste of his own freaking medicine.
Many years ago I was on the business end of gang bullying, helped to sickbay by 14 thugs…the ring leaders fronted the CO and were severely admonished…sadly, the worst offender had an accident in the South China Sea one evening…but now, I guess I feel like that folk singer….”Smithy’s to be pitied now, ’cause he used to bully me in school…” There’s always people out there who try wind us up; I’ve trained my sons to laugh at the fools and ignore the bullies, but NEVER allow themselves to be intimidated. The law is the best way to achieve vengeance; a well prepared and researched complaint, with water-tight evidence and a good prosecution team serves ice cold vengeance in a big glass.