It’s always weird when rude people suddenly start asking for help.

What would you do if a guy who’s spent years treating everyone like garbage suddenly came begging for help after a phone prank left him with a massive data bill?

Would you feel bad and offer to help him? Or would you let him deal with the fallout himself?

In the following story, one RadioShack employee finds himself in this situation with a guy he knows.

Here’s what happened.

The Lord of the Ringer

This goes back to the wayway before times. When RadioShack was the king of cellphone sales, and still actually sold component-level electronics. I was your typical sales agent: 18, perpetually ******, and quite helpful for the average customer. My job becomes relevant later.

Enter “Dave.” Dave was a regular party crasher in my friends’ group. I say “in” with sarcasm. He was that person everyone has known forever and just kind of tolerated, but tried to avoid. The kind of guy who was constantly showing up already plastered and picking a fight with someone smaller.

Thankfully, once we were all past school age, everyone cut him out of their lives like a cancer. What happens in this story was just before graduation.

Unfortunately for Dave, he had a little too much to drink.

We were having a little get-together. Just 9 or 10 friends getting drunk together, not a crazy party or anything. Dave shows up and lets himself in as usual.

Within 20 minutes, he’s picking a fight. Tries to sucker punch someone and ends up face-planting in the kitchen.

As he’s going down, his new cellphone comes flying out of his pocket. He was way too drunk to even notice, so we proceeded to pass the phone around, messing with settings.

Each person took their turn with Dave’s phone.

This was one of those phones that was technically an early smartphone but still looked closer to a flip phone (mechanical keyboard and all). I changed his ringer to the iconic “YOU SHALL NOT PASS” quote and handed the phone off to the next person.

I didn’t think about it again until two weeks later, when Dave stormed into RadioShack screaming about how someone at Bell had messed up and owed him an apology.

Keep in mind, this was the very early days of smartphones, and the cost of data was still extremely high.

He didn’t see this bill coming.

I guess the next person saw what I had changed his ringer to and decided to one-up me big time. They had found a way to download the high definition LOTR trilogy. Not only had it completely filled the phone’s memory, but a few weeks later, Dave got a bill for 3500$ of data usage.

The truth is, I could have called Bell and gotten the charges removed from the account. It would not have been the first time I had helped someone with an “accidental download.”

Knowing what a perpetual *** Dave had been to pretty much everyone in his life over the last 18 years, I declined to assist him and just gave him Bells’ customer service number. I hope he had to pay every penny. **** Dave.

Wow! That sounds like a pretty crazy party.

Let’s check out how the folks over at Reddit feel about what happened here.

This person used to get headphones at RadioShack.

It pretty much was.

What a funny way to say it.

Here’s someone who has fond memories of RadioShack.

Let’s hope Dave learned a lesson, because that was an expensive prank.

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.