It’s always a special thing when family can help each other out.

But when one Redditor’s aunt takes advantage of a good situation, she lands in trouble with the law.

You gotta do what you gotta do, right?

Check out the details and decide whether or not you think they overreacted!

Dispute over an alarm clock ends a career

A recent Petty Revenge story made me remember this experience from my teenage years, but this one definitely went all the way to pro.

Strap in, it’s going to be long. tl;dr at end.

So just before my senior year in high school, I turned 18 and bought a car with my saved-up years of babysitting money.

I’d have liked one sooner, but my mother absolutely refused.

At 18, in my big act of teenage rebellion, I went out and bought one.

This is the most responsible teenage rebellion I’ve heard of yet.

A couple months later, Auntie suddenly left her job from several states away and moved in with us.

Without her car.

It cost less if she waited six months until spring to get it shipped. Something about snowbird travel patterns.

She was cheap and a user as well.

As I result, I was expected to share my recently acquired car with Auntie until her’s arrived.

This seemed deeply unfair but, nonetheless, it was agreed upon that she could use it for appointments and job interviews since I could take the school bus.

Um, what?! Didn’t you pay for this car with your hard-earned money??

I needed to be warned in advance because my bus stop was the second one of the route.

It left a lot earlier than I needed to if driving direct, and I liked sleep.

You may be wondering about now what this has to do with an alarm clock.

Auntie is one of those people who likes to rile people up [and] then mock them for getting mad.

She’s always got a complaint, harsh word, and is feuding with somebody over something.

Once she moved in with us, her complaint was my alarm clock.

My room shared a wall with her’s.

The alarm was waking her mooching, unemployed, broke rear up every morning, and that made her mad.

Couldn’t I just go to bed earlier so I didn’t need an alarm clock?

This keeps getting crazier. How does anyone wake up on time without an alarm clock??

The morning schedule at our house went something in the ballpark of this:

5:30 A.M. my workaholic mother leaves for the office.

5:45 A.M. my alarm goes off if taking the bus to school

6:15 A.M. my alarm goes off if driving to school

6:15 A.M. I leave if taking the bus to school

6:45 A.M. I leave if driving to school

Half-past never: Auntie’s unemployed tushie needs to be anywhere

Auntie approached my workaholic mother about the horrific inconvenience of my using an alarm clock.

Her solution was that my mother should wake me up every day at 5:30 before leaving.

My mother told her to try earplugs or work it out between us.

Workaholic Mother was massively non-confrontational and wanted no part of an Auntie dispute.

Auntie started sneaking into my room to unplug the clock after I fell asleep.

Whoa, this is violating some major boundaries.

I’m a hard sleeper, so she pulled this off a few times.

I had a good number of tardies before I figured out it wasn’t the new cat who initially got blamed.

[I] woke up to see her standing over my bed one night. (CREEPY!) [And] I screamed like a banshee waking the whole house.

She claimed sleepwalking, and my mother let her get away with that lame excuse.

I endeavored to solve the problem myself with some super glue.

Not the brightest move I made.

OMG, I can only imagine that alarm clock never left the wall.

That house got sold with a bonus electric blue alarm clock, and Auntie started turning the alarm off instead of unplugging it.

So I started sleeping with my alarm clock tucked behind my pillow.

No way Auntie could do anything to it without waking me now.

She was mad at having not gotten her way and never let anything go ever.

Auntie’s next move was to get up when the alarm went off and race into the only bathroom with a shower.

It was closer to her room than mine, so she always beat me there.

She’d stash magazines in there to sit on the commode reading until right around 6:20.

This is after the school bus has left, but still before I need to leave, driving direct.

Now, this just seems like sabotage.

Once I was taking a very rushed shower, she’d steal my keys and take my car…wherever the hell the unemployed go to drive around all day.

She claimed that I just wasn’t paying attention when she said she needed the car.

She wasn’t telling me.

When my mother wasn’t around, she made snide remarks that if she was woken up she had just as much right to the bathroom as I did.

I could solve this problem by not waking her up.

In addition to this, she would take my car evenings and weekends always right before I had babysitting gigs.

It [was] never returned with more than fumes in the gas tank.

She had to call roadside assistance twice for running out of gas because she’d guessed wrong on how far she could get on fumes.

This feels so unfair for a student to pay for all this.

Needless to say, I was mad, also massively inconvenienced, and a lot poorer.

I had beg friends for last-minute rides or take a cab.

She continued to blame me, and my mother stayed out of it.

We got into a cat-and-mouse game with my keys where I eventually kept them on me at all times — even in the shower (this was an old car some years back; no electronic keys were harmed).

The keys came in the shower with me because the counter wasn’t enough to stop her from pulling the bathroom lock (pocket door; trivial) and coming in while I was showering to take them.

Again, CREEPY!

This, eventually, resulted in her asking in advance to borrow my car for a “job interview” that probably wasn’t.

She went to the key shop and got my car keys copied.

The next day, my keys safely back in my possession, she pulls the shower stunt again.

She did it a lot, even when she wouldn’t take my car. Auntie was a jerk.

I head out to the driveway, keys in hand, and my car’s not there.

Legit thought she’d hot-wired it until I got home, and it showed no signs of tampering. I’m not much for poking the bear, but it was time to have this out.

Auntie quite smugly admitted to copying the key, called me a selfish brat who didn’t know how to share, and many other unfortunate things I don’t remember exactly.

She wasn’t giving it back. What was I going to do?

Whoa. Ok, sounds like she’s breaking the law now.

I warned her that car was mine, and she did not have permission to use it ever again.

This was a bridge too far for me. There would be consequences.

She laughed in my face.

The next morning, my car was not in the driveway.

I’d expected this.

My best friend’s dad was a cop.

I was practically a fixture in his house for a decade, and he was the closest thing I had to a father figure due to my own deadbeat dad.

So I gave him a call utterly distraught that the car I’ve worked so hard to get has been stolen from my driveway.

Finally! It sounds like we have someone in your corner!!

He’s very sympathetic.

Did I mention my car had LoJack?

It was actually a very nice car…back when it was new, anyway.

We do all the reporting and whatever it takes for the cops to find it with LoJack.

By mid-afternoon, they’d found it in the parking lot of an outlet mall.

I don’t know what the full details of the encounter were, as I’ve heard multiple versions of this part of the story over the years.

She had some kind of tizzy on them upon being accused of theft including a tussle with an officer.

It ended in charges of grand theft auto, resisting arrest, assaulting an officer, and some kind of license-related thing because she’d never switched it to her new state of residence.

Don’t throw a tizzy at a cop. They don’t like it much.

As this all took some time, she didn’t get arraigned that day.

As her unemployed broke rear had horrid credit and little money, she couldn’t make bail.

I deleted her answering machine message begging my mother to come bail her out, my workaholic mother didn’t even notice, she was gone for almost a week.

Wow, I’m so disappointed in the mother, too.

Once workaholic mommy did notice, I explained that my car had been stolen, and I called the cops.

I was handling the situation myself like she suggested.

The look of dawning horror was amazing, then she shrugged and went back to avoiding all confrontation.

Auntie served two weeks in county lockup until she took a plea deal.

I suspect they slow-walked her paperwork a bit.

What happened after was glorious revenge.

Auntie’s remaining savings were used up on all the fines and court fees, so she finally got around to shipping her car and engaging in a job hunt.

One problem, she was previously a teacher.

She’d yet to get her certification in her new state.

Now, she had a rap sheet and was unable to pass the background check.

Whoops! Time for a new career as a telemarketer.

WHOA! This is some glorious revenge.

Auntie didn’t bother me much after that.

I learned, years later, she only went after kids hard, and I had proved enough of an adult [that] she realized there were consequences for her actions.

We spent the next few months ignoring each other before I headed to college.

And that’s how a dispute over an alarm clock ended Auntie’s teaching career.

Wow. This whole situation seemed so unfair.

Let’s see what Reddit thinks.

First up, people pointed out the irony in this Aunt’s career trajectory.

Next, people call out the mother in this situation.

Another Redditor mentioned that “friendly cop” really came in handy.

Finally, another reader relished in this epic revenge.

This aunt sounds like a terror!

She got the revenge she deserved.

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.