As a child and a teen, you most likely made a whole lot of mistakes. Many of these mistakes are long forgotten, but there are undoubtedly mistakes that still leave you cringing when you’re trying to fall asleep. People you know you hurt and never really made things right with. Words you said without really understanding them and wish you could take back. Outfits you wore and people you were friends with – or even dated – that you’d never touch again. It’s all a part of learning, and it’s all a part of growing up.

And the truth is, the fact that you have these regrets? It shows how much you’ve grown. Because feeling regret or remorse after you’ve hurt someone is a sign of your essential goodness. The really unacceptable people are those that hurt people and never look back, the ones who make the mistakes but don’t have a care in the work about who they’ve affected. Those who don’t learn from their mistakes, because they don’t accept that they’ve done anything wrong at all.

Unfortunately for all the folk in this story, it seems that the instigator in all of this is one of the latter kind of people. Because even eighteen years after he launched this plot to get an ex-friend back after a low-key disagreement, he still stands by his actions, and still doesn’t seem to acknowledge the hurt and harm he caused his ex-friend, and the innocent girlfriend who became collateral in his plan.

Read on to find out why.

Screw with my best friend and lose your relationship

Around eighteen years ago, I was swimming at a local pool with a couple of my friends.

One friend all of a sudden got mad at me because apparently I wasn’t hanging out with him enough and was hanging out with my other friend too much. He also wouldn’t go in the deep end, which my other friend and I swam to every now and then.

We did try being inclusive. He stood up on the deck, hurled a flutterboard at us, and it hit my other friend in the back.

We snapped and got out of the pool to confront him, but he ran off and left.

But that wasn’t the end of the story.

I emailed him (back in the days of Hotmail) and made fun of his girlfriend as payback for what he did.

Next thing you know, at school, I was pulled into the office, and a police officer was there, investigating “cyberbullying,” which happened to be the email I sent.

I explained what he had done to my friend, but neither the vice principal nor the police officer cared. I mouthed off to them for not caring about my side and received a three-day suspension.

Seeing red, I asked another friend for help with my revenge against this spineless *****.

Let’s see how they tried to get revenge.

My friend and I created a new Hotmail, pretending to be an attractive, young girl. We emailed my ex-friend, saying that we liked him and wanted to be with him.

No matter how hard we tried, he wasn’t taking the bait. So we upped the game.

My friend hacked into his email account and blocked his access to it. One day during our computer class, my friend and I emailed each other back and forth from the fake girl account to my ex-friend’s account, making it seem like he was going to leave his girlfriend for this girl.

We screenshotted the pages and dumped them in her locker.

Yikes. Read on to find out how this situation turned out.

About a month goes by. My friend comes up to me, laughing, and tells me I have to come outside. We both went outside, where a group of kids were in a circle.

My ex-friend was there, and his girlfriend was holding the screenshots in her hand, yelling at him about how he cheated and how she cared about him.

He kept saying over and over that his account was hacked, but she didn’t believe it, and she told him they were through.

He dropped to the ground and started bawling his eyes out in front of everyone as she walked away and the kids laughed as they dispersed.

Wow. This is mean. In fact, mean isn’t a strong enough word.

The guy got in trouble for cyberbullying to he reacted with… more cyberbullying?

This is truly unbelievable behaviour.

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Let’s see what folks on Reddit made of this.

This person agreed that his choices were really unfair.

While others pointed out that the girlfriend was the innocent party in this, and still got hurt.

Meanwhile, others hoped he’d learned from his actions.

Sure, he might have been a little frustrated that about the way the guy behaved at the pool. But instead of trying to understand (maybe his ex-friend was even a little scared and felt abandoned by his friends?) he just took things out in a truly vindictive way. Not only did he bully his friend via email, he also hatched an abhorrent plan to frame his ex-friend for something he never did? That is horrible.

And okay, he was a kid at the time. But there is a certain person who would hatch – and then carry out – this kind of plan, and regardless of age, that is not the kind of person that makes for a good friend. You bet the ex-friend rued the day he ever became friends with this nasty guy, since he directly caused him a lot of pain, as well as the loss of his good reputation and the girlfriend he clearly cared about.

All that, and to get humiliated at school in front of everyone too? It’s heartbreaking. But this guy clearly has no heart to still be bragging about things almost two decades later, so it’s unlikely he felt anything about it at all.