My friend Louie is a commercial plumber and quite an asshole to be around, which is why he works commercial projects instead of residential; his bosses don’t want him anywhere near the customers that pay the bills. He was working on a large hotel project last year where there were many different tradesmen working on many different stages in the building process. There was alot of pissing off others on the jobsite. The plumbers pissed off the painters and the carpenters when they had to cut holes in finished walls to install sinks; the painters pissed off the plumbers with their stinky fumes, the dry-wallers pissed off the other trades with all the dust. The framers pissed off the other trades if the walls weren’t up on time, and that held up the rest of the crews... The list goes on and on and on.
There was usually a storeroom where all the supplies for all the tradesmen were kept. The plumbers had their fixtures and pipe bundles and supplies kept there. The painters had their pallets of paint, and the drywallers had their lifts of sheetrock. The framers had the lifts of wood and buckets of nails, and everyone kept their Greenlee boxes with tools there. Etc, etc, etc.
Most of the trades started work at five or six AM. The painters tended to start at nine AM or later due to the fact that they needed the natural daylight to do a better job. They started later and ended later than the rest of the crews.
Well, Louie was a real dick with a smart mouth and not very good at making friends. He didn’t tell me exactly what he did to anger one of the painters, but I’m sure it had something to do with making holes in finished walls so the painter had to come back and redo his work. Louie told the guy off and made another enemy on the jobsite. The painter in person started checking in on him for a couple days and made comments and such that led Louie to believe he was responsible for the act of turd terrorism he was about to encounter.
Louie was getting to the point of installing toilets and sinks and went to grab the materials from the storeroom. Upon opening the packaging on the toilets he was to install, he found that someone had already used them in the previous days. There were five toilets that already contained shit in various stages of decay and dampness...
The culprit removed the cardboard packaging and dropped his deposit into the brand new bowls and then, he put the packaging back together. He knew it was the painter that had been making hints and comments for the past few days, and the painters were on the job later than everyone else, so they had the opportunity to perform such trickery. This gave Louie plenty of time while pressure washing the new fixtures before installation to think up an act of revenge. Louie was going to just punch the shit out of the guy, but he has been fired for such an act in the past; his wife would not have no more of his getting fired for fighting.
Louie went home that night and bought himself a big can of peanuts and began to eat. He didn’t chew them into a paste because his act of turd terrorism revenge would require small chunks... Louie doesn’t even like peanuts. His wife and I asked him why he was eating so many and he just smiled and say he would tell us later.
He ate handfuls of peanuts everyday. Then he took the time to pop into where said painter was working and offered him some peanuts with a smile. The painter never accepted his gifts, but Louie kept on going in and offering up his peanuts, savoring his sweet revenge in the making at every coffee break.
He went into work for the next few days a little early to give himself some time to take a morning steamer into the painters’ five gallon pails before the rest of the guys got into work and started populating the storeroom. Louie’s shit logs dropped in the buckets and sank to the bottom, chock full of little peanut particles, where they disappeared under gallons of different colors of paint. Then, he pounded the lid back on just like a new pail. Louie told me he avoided white paint so that his revenge would go un-noticed for as long as possible. His revenge was taken out; he went back to finishing his job at hand knowing that he made much more work for the painter and his co-workers. Louie didn’t have to beat anyone up and was going to be able to keep his job while getting the payback he needed.
In case you didn’t know, painters on large jobs use a drill with a mixer wand on it to stir up the pails before use; this also busts apart the shit logs in the bottom of the pails and fills the paint with little chunks of peanut that don’t like to pass though the paint gun’s tip. I’m sure the painter figured out who was to blame for his equipment malfunction when he kept finding little chunks in the sprayer outlets, or when the finish on walls that were roller-painted seemed to be a little 'spackled', not semi gloss... I haven’t mentioned all the paint that they would have to throw out after the gag was discovered, and all the explaining that would have to be done to the people who pay the bills.
To top it off, Louie left a few empty peanut tins on top of the painters’ tool chest with a note that just said "Enjoy".
