Sometimes They Get What They Had Coming

My damn smoke alarm is chirping. I bought a new 9 volt battery, actually a jumbo pack of 9 volt batteries at Costco and installed it, but it is still chirping. This is very annoying. I love it when someone who has it coming get theirs just rewards. This may strike you as odd coming from a guy who only days ago said that he is against capital punishment. But I not talking about society punishing criminals, I'm talking about their victims getting back at them. Here in our fair city there has been a rash of "home invasions" on the southwest side lately. I don't know if every town has home invasion robberies, but we get plenty are here, particularly on the southwest side of town. The politically correct thing to say is that home invasion robberies can happen in any neighborhood, and that is technically true because every neighborhood has houses with door, but the reality is that they happen more in poorer parts of our fair city. The southwest side fits that description. Usually the robberies are just drug thugs robbing one another, but lately it has been a random deal involving innocent citizens. In case you are unfamiliar with the home invasion technique, it works like this. A group of miscreants kick in the door of a house and terrorize the occupants. Generally, it is about drugs, but sometimes it is just plain robbery. Many of the drug invasions occur at the wrong address because drug gangs have stupid guys to do the heavy lifting. It is not uncommon for these dumb asses to shot someone in the process. Once in awhile, the victims strike back, which makes for good reading. So in the past week or so a band of guys have been kicking in the doors of homes and robbing the occupants. These criminals haven't been looking for drugs. It looks like plain old-fashioned robbery. It seems to me that if your motive is money, it would be to your benefit to work the rich neighborhoods, not the working-calss ones, but this never seems to be how it works. Last night this bunch struck again. They burst in and told a terrified family to get on the floor. One victim bolted to his room, locked the door and loaded his shotgun. A robber, thinking he should probably roundup the stray before he called the cops, kicked in the bedroom door and was greeted by a shotgun blast to the torso, which unfortunately wasn't immediately fatal, although there is still hope for that. Robber number two, proving that criminals are often very stupid, decided that a shotgun blast was a signal to run through the door too. The victim unloaded the second barrel on him and he was not as fortunate, his wounds proved quite fatal. This unexpected set of developments caused the remaining geniuses to gather up the wounded man and flee. A few minutes later someone called 9-1-1 to report that there was a wounded guy at their home. Two dopes were arrested, two are still at-large, one is dead and one is in critical condition. They came away empty-handed, although one guy did leave with some lead. I love these stories. Speaking of getting even, I am reminded of an incident a long time ago when I was on the board of our homeowners association. We lived in a subdivision of 192 homes. It was a middle-class neighborhood of young families for the most part. We were supposed to pay association dues of about $50 per quarter to pay for the maintenance of the Olympic-sized pool that the association owned. When I joined the board, there were several homeowners in serious arrears on their dues, including one guy who hadn't paid in eight years. He owed about $1600 dollars, plus late fees. The previous board had written this fellow letters but took no action beyond that. When we contacted him by phone he said in no uncertain terms that he wasn't paying. The board hired a lawyer to dun him and the other's that owed big money. The lawyer sent Mr. No Pay a threatening letter and he in turn sent us a check for the full amount, which promptly bounced. When we contacted him about the bad check, he told us to screw ourselves. He went on to say that he had been told by a lawyer that all we could do is put a lien on the house and that we couldn't collect until he sold the house, which he said he was never going to do. He said the lawyer told him that even if we sued and got a judgement, he had nothing that we could attach. We were discussing this at a board meeting and the President asked his wife, who happened to work at the bank where the fellow had his checking account, if there was anything we could do about the bad check. She said that if we gave her the check, she would check the account every day until there was enough money in the account to clear it. On a Friday, soon after that, she discovered that he had sufficent fund and put it through. The idiot was furious because this caused havoc to his account and caused several checks to bounce. He threatened to sue us, although I am not sure what his grounds would be. Of course, he immediately quit paying his dues again and we had to put a lien on the house anyway. I have to tell you, the satisfaction of getting back at him was very sweet. Merle. Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgemental and cranky Tag: Daily Life Personal Finance Humor