Ready for this throwback tale of petty revenge?

In this story, a couple of 90’s kids decide to get back at an enemy with a subscription to a magazine… and then another and then another.

Let’s check the mail.

Bill Me Later

When I was in my mid-teens in the early 1990’s I was into the BBS scene in my city.

BBSes, for our younger readers, were bulletin board systems. A person would connect a computer to a phone line with a modem and other people could use their computer to dial into it and read messages and leave messages in return.

Sounds like ancient history. How does this work, sir?

But, it could only be one person at a time.

So if someone was connected to the BBS you wanted to use you would get a busy signal and have to keep re-dialing until they finished.

Around 1993 the first multiple-line BBS appeared in my area code (long distance was still a thing then) and my friends and I were very excited.

With this BBS we could all connect at once and send messages back and forth in what came to be known later as chat format.

Chat has entered the chat… but what’s about to go wrong?

Keep in mind this is almost a decade before AOL chatrooms became popular so it was a very new concept to pretty much everyone.

But, this BBS wasn’t free. You had to mail a check to the owner at his residence to buy credits which then translated to minutes you were allowed to be logged on.

It wasn’t particularly expensive at first so lawn mowing money, etc, was enough to keep us on there a few hours a day. It became the norm for us to gather after school on the BBS and talk about whatever teens talked about back then.

Seems so wholesome… but how is it going to pivot to a vengeful tale?

Then an issue arose.

I can’t remember the exact details and they probably wouldn’t make much sense out of context of the time and place but the owner of the site deactivated my account along with the account of a friend of mine.

We had just renewed our credits and the owner refused to refund our money.

What a stiff. These two techie teens aren’t going to take it sitting down, I bet.

Being two adolescent boys who had just lost something like $20 each (seemed like a lot at the time) we were mad.

So we hatched a plot to get back at the owner using the one thing we knew about him: his name and address.

Neither of us was old enough to drive so I asked my mother if she would take us to the library one afternoon and then pick us up a couple of hours later at the food court of the shopping mall nearby.

OK, so maybe there is going to be some sitting. What kinda trouble are they going to get up to in the library?

She agreed, happy that her son was engaging in a positive intellectual activity.

Once we were at the library we made a beeline to the magazine section where there must have been over 100 different recent publications available to look through.

We started at opposite ends and took each magazine down, located the subscription card and any other “special offer” cards and removed them. Once we had a stack of them about 4 inches thick we left and went to the food court.

What’s more vintage, the magazines or the food court outing after?

We got some sodas and sat down at a table and for the next hour we went through the cards and filled out every one in the owners name that had an option for Bill Me Later.

This included not just subscriptions but items you could order, like little angel figurines, or a pewter chess set that came on piece at a time. We took care to throw out any that required a signature since that felt a little mail-fraudy to us.

One the way out to the car to meet my mother we dropped them into a mail drop box.

Diabolical. Will the bill me later scheme pay off?

About a month later we got the news that the owner was getting so much mail that it couldn’t all fit in his mailbox so the mail carrier had to take it up to his door.

He was able to cancel each subscription and return each ordered item without having to pay anything but he had to do each one at a time which must have taken hours and hours.

What we didn’t count on was the fact that the people who put those cards into magazines sold their mailing lists to other companies.

The gift that keeps on taking. Wonder how many magazines that guy actually got?

Given how many we filled out his name and address must have ended up on every mass mailing list in the US, meaning the amount of mail he got actually increased over the next year despite his efforts.

Moral of the story: Teens may not have much actual power or authority but they do have a lot of free time and that can sometimes be enough so treat them, like everyone else, fairly and with respect.

What a fable for the ages.

Let’s investigate the comments.

One person wants to know who else has pulled this.

Another person says, ah, magazines.

Another person loved this time capsule.

Another poster says this can be digital too.

Another person has butterflies.

Lifetime subscription to revenge? Sign me up.

If you liked that story, check out this post about a group of employees who got together and why working from home was a good financial decision.