This isn’t really instant - it took a few weeks. In college, there was this “Julia” girl that I was crazy about. We dated a few months, she spent the night a few times, we were clearly into each other, etc.
Then one night, we go to a bar. She meets this other guy and falls for him pretty much instantly. And goes home with him. That one stung - in fact, I’d probably rather relive the night I was arrested for public intoxication and spent the night in the drunk tank than that night.
Anyway, I find out later from a mutual friend that her and the other guy fooled around for maybe a week and then he got bored with her. Which left her pretty brokenhearted. Not only that - she shows up, totally trashed, a few weeks later at my place after a night at the bars. We talk for a bit and then her friend comes by and takes her home. The next day, Julia tells me that she hit her head when she got back home, fell over, and puked. Then the next day, her parents came by to visit and she still had puke in her hair.
My favorite instant karma story happened in a nearby town: a man was beating his wife and chased her across the street. She made it across, but he was hit and killed by a passing car.
I do feel sorry for the driver of the car, however. He or she was cleared of any wrongdoing (of course,) but still has to live with the fact of having killed someone, however unavoidable it was.
I saw an abusive man yelling at his wife in the grocery store. The last thing he yelled at her was to call her an idiot. Then he swung around and smashed his face into the support column behind him. Hard.
I once made a joke to my friend about “Well, you are what you eat” only to look down (along with everyone else) at the shrimp I was about to put into my mouth. It’s especially funny because I’m only 5’5".
Someone called a phone number that I’d written down. When he didn’t get the person who called, he slammed the phone down, yelled at me for “always taking the numbers wrong,” and then called them back and it put on speaker for the whole office to hear.
“Hello, is so-and-so there?”
“Didn’t you just call here, and didn’t I tell you it’s a wrong number.”
“So I’m calling XXX-XXXX. And so-and-so isn’t here.”
“No, he isn’t it.”
“I called XXX-XXXX.”
Long pause. “Wait a minute. That’s not my number.”
The office roared. The guy dialed wrong not once, but twice. And he blamed it on me.
Once, after I had bought a new car (new for me, I’ve never had a new, new car) and was just getting used to it, I was at a stop light waiting to make a left turn. There were a few opportunities to make the turn, but I wasn’t entirely sure the new car had the pick-up power to make it, so I let them go. The car behind me was honking, flashing their lights and cussing up a storm at me. Never one to give a flying rat’s ass, I waited until the light turned green and then casually made my turn. The car behind me flew around me in the intersection, hit the gas and began to speed away – only to be pulled over less than a mile from the intersection by the po-po Of course, we all pointed, waved and laughed as we passed him being put in the back of the cop car.
When I was a teenager, we lived next door to an older couple. We would always hear him yelling at her in their yard, just screaming obscenities at her at the top of his lungs. If you drove past him when he was out for a walk, he’d try to hit your car with his cane, screaming at you at the same time. Just a miserable jackass.
One day the city workers were doing some road work directly in front of his driveway. This just sent him over the edge of rage and into a complete meltdown. He had been yelling at them off and on all day. I guess he decided to really let them have it and went out to scream at them again, waving his cane at them.
He had a heart attack right there on the road and died.
