That’s very Seinfeldian.
Many years ago, when I lived in LA, I had a girlfriend in San Francisco. I made many weekend trips to visit her; she was serious about me, I was ambivalent about her but too lazy to break up with her. One weekend when I was with her, I promised I would return the following weekend and take her to Lake Tahoe. During the following week, I quit my job, packed my car, and left for Florida. Never called her, never wrote her, never saw her again.
Oh, honey, he knows it was me. He was sitting right there when it happened! 
I’ve had a an 18-year grace where I’ve apologized to everyone I knew in his universe, but not to him directly. It’s frickin’ time to be a grown up and just call him and make amends to him. Sigh. How come all the people involved in my minor malfeasances have disappeared but this guy, no! He has to go an re-appear in my life almost 20 years later!!!
I’m pretty good about not repeating my mistakes a second time. I’m extraordinarily good at finding new mistakes to make.
Nah, like niblet head, I’m not going to post the very worst thing.
My older brother had a BIL that was a total nimrod. Despite having a wife (who did not drive) and 5 children, he traded in the family station wagon for a Jeep CJ5. If the whole family had to go anywhere, all the kids (ages 3 to about 11 at the time) had to cram into the back jumpseat, it could barely hold 2 people. I wrote down the license plate number and VIN of the Jeep and waited about a month then called the police from a pay phone and reported the Jeep as stolen. He was pulled over driving the Jeep a few hours later and ended up getting busted for possession of marijuana.
In seventh grade, I was friends with a girl who was just as unpopular as I was. It was a match made in heaven because we could share in our misery (and our mocking of the oh-so-popular-for-no-other-reason cheerleaders).
Anyway…
I was in my homeroom class in the middle of the day when everyone was in between class periods when I overheard a couple of the popular boys hatching a dastardly plan to pull a prank on my friend.
See, it was well known that she had a major crush on one of the boys. The guys devised a plan for my friend’s crush to pretend to ask her out (by “out” I mean “to be his girlfriend”). When my friend came into the room, the guy approached her and began telling her that he was sorry for ever being mean, and he wanted to make it up to her by letting her know that he had always thought she was so pretty. Then he asked her if she would like to be his girlfriend. She was practically in tears when she said “yes.”
Then, with all of his friends around, and all of the “popular” girls, who had crowded around to witness the spectacle, he pretended that he had had a momentary lapse of sanity when one of the other guys said, “Dude, are you sure you wanna go out with someone this ugly?” The object of my friend’s affection looked at her from head to toe with a disgusted expression on his face and said, “Oh my God! Thank you. I nearly made the most horrible decision of my life!”
My friend ran out of the room and to one of the bathrooms. I followed her and let her cry on my shoulder. I don’t think I ever told her that I knew it was going to happen. I have always regretted not warning her, but I was so meek and shy back then. My desire to “fit in” completely trumped any loyalty to my friend.
I’m sorry, Rachel.
When I confirmed that my (ex) wife was cheating on me, I waited until I was home alone… and gathered up all of her lingerie (you know, the stuff she wore when she was at HIS place!) and sat in front of the fireplace.
One by one… I burned them all.
When she later went to her lingerie drawer and found it empty, she naively asked if I had put them in the wash.
HAH!
With no remorse, I admitted to her what I’d done.
Given what I know now…I’d not have done a thing differently.
Cool.
Not to sound too new-agey, but maybe he reappeared so you could close this chapter in your life and finally feel at peace about it…
SUmmer camp. I was the only friend to a hard-of-hearing girl in my bunk. I ended up joining the “cool” kids in picking on her. Turned on her in an instant. I can’t imagine what she must have felt. Well, yeah I can. The “cool” kids turned onme, later.
I felt really crummy about it. Still do. 
Do you really mean that? 
No, I was being facetious. 
Diabolical! ::shakes fist Jerry Seinfeld-style
I was a shy kid who got picked on (not a lot–mostly people ignored me, which was fine with me–but enough that I knew how it felt). Around 4th grade, there was a boy in my class who seemed to have “victim” tattooed on his forehead. I swear he encouraged people to pick on him, by his demeanor and his failure to do anything like fighting back. He would do things like eat dog poop on a dare. I’m not proud to admit that I picked on him as well, once even kicking him because I knew he wouldn’t fight back.
I saw him at a high-school reunion a few years back. He’s successful now, though he has that oily “car salesman” vibe that still put me off even after all those years. It was a weird situation. I do feel very sorry for picking on him (I’ve always had an overabundance of empathy and don’t enjoy making others feel bad unless they truly deserve it–he didn’t) but that didn’t mean I felt any more kindly toward him as an adult than I did as a child.
You disabled somebody before I learned to talk and you haven’t apologized?
Don’t mean to be harsh, but that’s an awful long time.
Hmm, this one goes in the “worse than I meant it to be” category, though it’s a pretty assholish thing to do in any case. I doubt it’s exactly the worst thing I’ve done, but it makes for a reasonable contender. It happens back when I was a punk-ass nineteen-year-old kid, full of arrogance and tougher-than-thou.
I went out to a late movie and came out of the theater around midnight, and there was the usual throng of people waiting to cross the street. It’s a busy intersection and we just missed the light; it’ll be a while. Someone came up to me, begging for money, and I pretended like I didn’t hear him. So he reached out and gave my jacket-sleeve a tug, trying to get my attention.
And I think, okay, that’s offensive. He broke the code. He asks for money, I ignore him, it means he’s supposed to move on to someone else. He is not, under any circumstances, supposed to touch me. I don’t like being touched by people I don’t know, even under the best of circumstances. So this makes me rather angry.
I turn and look at him. He’s dressed in your standard-issue homeless-guy clothes; he hasn’t bathed in a couple days. He’s not someone who was just in there enjoying the movie and realized he doesn’t have bus fare home; he’s standing out here because movies cost money, and therefore people who go have money. Movies are also a luxury, so, faced with someone who (theoretically) doesn’t even have the necessities, most people get a little guilt trip.
Of course, my annoyance is stronger than my guilt.
I have about two bucks in shrapnel (coins smaller than quarters). Time to be an asshole.
I take it out, look at it for a moment, look at him, and reach out to give it to him. He reaches out for it. I spill it out onto the concrete, and it goes scattering around the sidewalk. “Oops.” I don’t mean it, and he knows it.
He looks at me, looks down at the change. He probably wants to hit me. He outweighs me by probably twenty pounds, but I’m half his age and almost definitely in better fighting shape. He could walk away, but you could buy a slice of pizza with the money on the ground. Pride loses, and he bends down and picks it up. I watch him go. That feels good for a moment, Yeah, that’s what you get. Don’t touch me. It lasts up until he stops by a store window a little ways away, and a little girl takes his hand to go with him, looking back at me wide-eyed.
Oh, man.
I don’t want to go into details on this, at least, not in-depth ones. Not only is it something I don’t like to talk about, but … Well … There’s nothing I can do about it now. Let me say that there are times I think I feared reprisal from the incident. There are times I feel that I was just too afraid and spooked by the crime to do anything. There are self-depreciating times when I call myself a coward for having done nothing. In the end… I don’t know why I didn’t do anything. It could have been any or all of those things. It was not, I will hasten to add, out of sadism or an ‘approval’ for the crime itself. I just froze, and finally walked away. I can’t explain why it happened. I wish I could; being able to do so would make me feel a lot better.
OK, I’ll post here the most evil thing I’ve ever done, then in another post I’ll put the meanest thing I’ve* seen* done, which is actually less mean and more deserved and funny.
Age 15, sophomore in high school. At a party with a couple of friends at the house of some girl who goes to the neighboring high school. None of us really know the girl; the invite was a friend-of-a-friend grapevine type thing. Frustrated at the long lines at the single downstairs bathroom (there must have been 250 people at this party), three of us snuck upstairs for a piss. In an act of pure assholeness (I wiash I could say I was drunk, but I was just a little bastard), I threw back the shower curtain. I took a two-thirds full bottle of hair conditioner, dumped half the contents into the toilet, filled it back to its former level from the bottle of Nair sitting right next to it, shook well and replaced it on the edge of the tub. How big an asshole was I?
- I purposely chose the conditioner rather than the shampoo for my fuckery, because I knew that you were supposed to leave conditioner in for a few minutes.
- I purposely chose the conditioner that obviously belonged to a female. A guy can live that kind of shit down; a girl, not so easily.
Girl, wherever you are, I hope my prank didn’t work. If it did, I have been sorry for 17 years and counting.
This is mean only in the way of a richly deserved comeuppance. I post if because it still makes me smile and cringe. It’s a story that those of you who run live sound might find amusing, or even just those of you musicians who are used to playing venues with sound systems.
My old band’s drummer, John, was also a sound guy; for several years before we hooked up musically, he had been doing sound for other bands I was in, as well as for touring acts I booked shows for. He’s very good at what he does, and has an expensive, well-designed system. Anyway, he’s the nicest guy in the world at band practice, at Burger King, or at a gig we’re playing, but when he’s running sound for other bands, he can be pretty crabby. Very little patience for bands who start late or end late. Even less patience for bands who take an encore when they’re the second band playing out of five. Very little patience for singers who ask for more vocals in the monitor while cupping the microphone ball in both hands (feedback, anyone?) In general, just an altogether grouchy sound man. For example, he ran sound once for this seven- or eight piece ska band. One of the trombone players said he needed two mics: one for his horn and one for his backup vocals. Normally at this venue (a 120-seater), John didn’t bother to mic horns at all. Rolling his eyes, John put up a Shure Beta 58 and some AKG condenser mic. “This Shure is for your vocals, and this AKG is for your horn, OK?” he said. “Don’t blow your horn into the vocal mic, because your horn is about 30db louder than your voice and I’m going to have everything mixed properly.” Horn player nods his head. During the second song of the set, apparently this trombonist was set to get a solo. Right before his solo starts, he grabs both mics and pushes them close together, so that the capsules are actually touching. He then blows this fortissimo opening note into BOTH mics. I was sitting at a table in back, by the sound board, at the time. John’s limiters caught most of it, and I STILL had ringing in my ears for two days. At the end of the song, John mutes both of the guy’s mics (and leaves them mute), and basically threatens to ream out the guy’s plumbing with his own horn if he ever pulls that shit again. John does this through his talkback mic, which is clearly audible over the monitors. The crowd bursts into laughter, and the horn player goes bright red in the face.
At any rate, for years I had heard John threaten bands with the “suck button.” Bands who were taking too long to set up, or whose members repeatedly refused to follow reasonable directions (please keep that vocal mic away from the monitors!), would be threatened. “Pull that shit again, and I’m gonna hit the suck button on you guys!” I took it to mean that he would intentionally make them sound bad, but he never followed through on the threat, so I took it as a vague general warning.
So anyway, a little while back he was running sound on a four band show. The second band, a Matchbox 20/Train kind of band, has him running 20 minutes behind before they even play a note because their lead guitarist was late. Their allotted set time is 40 minutes, but their last song runs over and by the time it’s done, they’ve played for almost 45 minutes. John says quietly over the talkback mic, “Hey guys, you’re done.” The lead singer says loudly over the vocal mic “Sound man says we gotta get off the stage. We got one more song for you!” as they kick into another soupy jangle-rock tune. John shakes his head at me. Then, the most amazing thing happened. After their “encore,” this band kicks straight into ANOTHER song without announcing it, apparently in the hope that John wouldn’t notice it was a different song.
Sitting at the back of the room at the mixing desk, John leans over to me to be heard over the PA and asks, “Hey, wanna see the suck button?”
“Sure,” I replied. I figured he was going to muck with the levels or just turn them off or something. Instead, he reaches to one of his racks and starts scrolling through patches on his trusty DigiTech unit. Sure enough, he gets to a patch titled SUCK BUTTON. He engages it, and all hell breaks loose onstage. The lead singer and the lead guitarist (who was singing backup), immediately start to sing WAY off key. They try to get back in tune, fail, trail off in mid-line, try again, and start glaring at each other. The guitarist is so distracted by this that he starts muffing the chord progression. If not for the drummer, I think the whole song would have derailed. For the entire four minute duration of the song, I was treated to this asshole band sounding like crap and getting madder and madder at each other. John explained the patch to me; basically it pitch shifts all tracks from the vocal submix up one step, BUT ONLY IN THE MONITORS. So the audience, out in front of the mains, was treated to the sound of two guys trying to sing in tune, only to be utterly confused. If they got it sounding right in the monitors, they could tell that something was grossly wrong in the mains. And each of the singers thought it was the other guy who was singing out of tune. I just about died laughing.
Anyway, that’s it. Funny, huh?
Rule #4 in “this kind of thing”: Never admit to ANYTHING!
Nothing else to add to this thread.