If you’re going to be a grumpy neighbor and mess with the neighborhood kids, you shouldn’t be surprised when they start taking revenge.

Imagine the guy down the street kept calling the cops on local kids for simply playing football, and then the kids got the chance to get him back by using his garage-door remote.

Would you tell them to stop? Or would you encourage them to mess with the guy?

In the following story, one mother finds herself in this same scenario and sides with the kids.

Here’s how it played out.

The Door on the Garage Goes Up and Down, Up and Down. The Door on the Garage Goes Up and Down All Through the Town (well, night)

Back when my kids were in middle school, we had a really horrible neighbor whose complaints would fill volumes.

First on his list was the noise the neighborhood kids made while playing football in the muddy vacant lot across from his house. Which I suppose was annoying, but was also none of his business.

We mostly endured his daily tirades, but things came to a head when he started calling the cops on the kids and got them informally trespassed from the property. It was traumatic enough for them to lose their (admittedly not “their” but still) only free-play area, but getting yelled at by cops just made it awful.

Her child became the keeper of the remote.

Not long after, one of the neighborhood kids found a garage door remote. I use the word “found” judiciously. One of them figured out that it was for Nasty Neighbor’s garage. I assume by riding his bike down the street while clicking the remote. Or maybe he just knew somehow? Plausible deniability abounds.

Somehow, my oldest kid ended up being the keeper of the remote. Bad news for the neighbor- my kid should be the poster child for this subreddit. For the next few weeks, he’d open the neighbor’s garage around 2 AM every night.

That alone would qualify as “petty revenge,” but what I haven’t mentioned yet is that our neighborhood had a raccoon problem. And the neighbor kept his garbage in the garage.

Not long after the nightly garage door opening, one of the more intelligent raccoons figured out that they had been given tickets to a veritable smorgasbord.

The guy was so bad that she didn’t even try to stop the behavior.

So for a while, we would get daily updates about how much and what type of trash the kids on the school bus saw strewn across the neighbor’s driveway. Complete with Nasty Neighbor shaking his fist at them as they rode past.

Nasty Neighbor tried to sic the cops on us, but I refused to let them speak to my kid (not that he’d have admitted anything- the kid’s a stone-cold criminal who’s never broken under pressure).

Eventually, Nasty Neighbor either got a new garage door opener or reprogrammed the remotes on the one he had. The remote stopped working, and the fun was over. I’m sure the raccoons were as disappointed as we are.

And yes, I encouraged my kids’ misbehavior. Because **** nasty neighbors who won’t let kids just be kids.

Wow! Now, that’s some funny revenge.

Let’s see how the folks over at Reddit feel about neighborhood kids playing with garage remotes.

This person got caught changing channels on the neighbor’s TVs.

According to this reader, they drove around town until they found the door that went to the opener.

Leaving the default code will get you every time.

Kids will amaze you sometimes.

She did the right thing.

Better to let the kids have fun than to let the guy get away with his bad behavior.

If you liked that post, check this one about a guy who got revenge on his condo by making his own Christmas light rules.