The shared refrigerator is the ultimate test of a flatmate relationship. It’s a delicate ecosystem of trust, boundaries, and the unspoken sanctity of leftovers. We all know the rage of discovering someone has finished your milk, but what happens when a flatmate doesn’t just eat your food, but throws it in the bin out of a misguided sense of “cleanliness”? For one reader, this culinary crime was a declaration of war, and the only acceptable response was a perfectly calculated act of petty revenge.
There’s a special place in hell for people who throw away food that isn’t theirs. My flatmate, Jessica, a self-described “clean freak,” appointed herself the dictator of our fridge. When my prized, slow-cooked bolognese sauce became a casualty of her latest “purge,” she told me to “get over it.” So, I decided to help her get over something of hers.
The Fridge Dictator
When I first moved in with Jessica, I thought her obsession with cleaning was a good thing. I was wrong. It wasn’t about being clean; it was about being in control. Her main fixation was our shared refrigerator. Nothing could be left out of place, and anything she deemed “clutter” or “old” was immediately thrown out, regardless of who it belonged to.
Last Sunday, I spent four blissful hours making a massive batch of my grandmother’s bolognese sauce. I used expensive ingredients and let it simmer for ages. It was heavenly. I put it in a large, clearly labeled container in the fridge, dreaming of the delicious pasta I’d have all week.
I came home from work on Monday, starving and excited. I opened the fridge. It was gone. I asked Jessica if she’d seen it. “Oh, that dark red stuff in the big container?” she said, not even looking up from her phone. “It looked a few days old, so I binned it during my weekly fridge cleanse. It’s much tidier in there now.”
I was speechless. “Jessica, I just made that yesterday! It was a huge batch!” I told her how much time and money I had put into it. Her response? A shrug. “Well, you should have eaten it sooner. Honestly, Chloe, it’s just some old sauce. Get over it.”
An Eye for an Eye, a Shampoo for a Sauce
“Get over it.” Those three words echoed in my head. I wasn’t going to get over it. I was going to get even. I knew I couldn’t get my sauce back, but I could teach her what it feels like to have something you value casually destroyed.
I thought about what she truly cherished. The answer was in the bathroom: her ridiculously expensive, salon-brand hair products. She had a whole collection of shampoos, conditioners, and hair masks that she bragged about constantly. That was my target.
I didn’t want to just throw them out; that was too simple. The revenge had to be more elegant, more… petty. That night, I took her $50 bottle of keratin-infused shampoo (which was about three-quarters full) and the matching conditioner. I went into the bathroom, locked the door, and carefully squeezed about half of each bottle down the sink drain. Then, I filled both bottles back to the top with water and gave them a good shake. They looked full, but I knew they were now just useless, watery garbage. I placed them back in the shower exactly where I found them.
A Watered-Down Apology
The next morning, I was woken by a shriek from the bathroom. Jessica stormed into the living room, her hair dripping and stringy, holding the shampoo bottle like it was evidence in a murder trial. “What happened to my shampoo?! It’s ruined! It’s like water!” she yelled.
I looked up from my laptop, feigning a look of mild confusion. “Oh, that?” I said calmly. “It looked like it was getting a bit low, so I just added some water to help you get the last of it out. Helps declutter the almost-empty bottles, you know.” I took a sip of my coffee and delivered the final blow. “It’s just shampoo. Get over it.”
The look on her face was priceless. The rage melted away into stunned comprehension. She knew. She knew exactly what I did and why. For the first time, she was speechless. We had a very tense talk later, where I laid out exactly why her actions were disrespectful. And for the first time, she actually apologized. The new house rule is simple: if you didn’t buy it, you don’t touch it.
Things are better now, but I told my best friend what I did, and she thinks I went too far by damaging her property. She says two wrongs don’t make a right. I think I delivered a perfectly proportional and educational piece of petty justice. AITA for getting revenge?
This is a textbook case of “an eye for an eye.” The narrator’s flatmate showed a stunning lack of respect for her property and time, and then dismissed her feelings entirely. The revenge, while certainly petty, wasn’t just destructive; it was poetic. It was designed to make her flatmate feel the exact same sense of loss and violation. It was a risky move that could have escalated the war, but in this case, it seems to have resulted in a hard-won peace treaty.
What do you think, readers? Was this a brilliant and justified act of petty revenge, or did the narrator sink to her flatmate’s level by destroying her property? Let us know your verdict in the comments!
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