Cooperative Blogging time, children...

I know most of my friends don't usually comment "in blog" on my blog... I usually get the "oh, I'm sorry"'s and the "Ha! that was funny"s in Aims or Irc...

But help me out a little here...

About ten years ago or so, I started noticing the "Random acts of kindness" bumper stickers everywhere... the novel and utterly unrealistic idea of doing something nice for someone that you'll never know who they are... I did it for a while - dropping an extra dime in the snack machine or something equally trivial. It later occurred to me that if I saved up those dimes, I could do one charity or one person a lot of good, instead of doing a bunch of people next to no good.

I think the same thought occurred to most of the rest of the universe as well, since I have neither run into the bumper sticker, nor a "random" kindness in a long time.

That is, however, almost exactly not what I wanted to tell you about...

Have you ever done something completely unkind to someone you didn't know?

I mean, we're all familiar with the Tylenol Murders, right? I've always found that to be oddly terrifying and fascinating at the same time. Why in god's name kill people that you know nothing about? I mean, I can sort of vaguely understand killing someone who's wronged you - I often feel this urge to strangle people. We don't indulge it, under normal circumstances, and that's called "society." But they're always specific people. That stupid bitch who ran me off the road the other day because she was talking on her cell-phone... the cashier at the grocery store who rang up the same TV dinner three times and then got all in my face when I protested paying for the same item three times... you know, specific people.

My freshman year of college, I actually spent a lot of time in Richmond with my boyfriend and some of our "friends" from high school. (Well, my friends from high school and his friends from... whatever. My boyfriend at the time was a good four years older than I was and I'm not sure why all our friends were the same peer group.)

Anyway, one weekend when I was up there, M called and said he'd gotten two flat tires and could we come pick him up and give him a hand. Sure, why not? Me and the boyfriend drove out to the Shockoe Bottom area of Richmond... M had already put the spare on the car, but the other tire was still flat. And he had very limited funding. So did I. So did the boyfriend. And M really needed his car, otherwise he couldn't get to work and therefore earn any money to do anything...

So we decided to... well, to appropriate someone else's tire. We drove around until we found another car of the same make and model and jacked it up, stole a tire off it and replaced it with M's flat. I insisted on that much, since M wanted to just put the other car down, sans tire at all.

That's the meanest thing I ever did to someone I've never seen... So... confess... what's the meanest thing you ever did to someone you don't know?