About 13 years ago now I was serving in my final year of youth minstry at Scarborough Baptist Church and some of the young guys in the church decided to play a rather inappropriate practical joke on Danelle and I. It’s a long story and would sound pretty lame if I tried to describe it on here, but at the time it was scary and disturbing… enough to warrant revenge… and so began one of my favourite scams of all time.

One of the guys who was responsible, Toddy, was also going out with Danelle’s sister, so I had very ready access to his car keys. This meant that strange things kep on happening to Todd’s car, because I borrowed them and created my own set… giving me ready acces to Todd’s car at all times.

It started off that every time he came round I would grab the set of keys I had copied and go out and turn everything on full bore – windscreen wipers, radio volume, fans, anything I could find. Which was always a hoot when he drove out of the driveway. Poor bloke was goig crazy trying to figure out why these things kept on arcing up on him. Meanwhile ‘the family’ are busting themselves laughing.

Then there was the dead fish I hid under the drivers seat – took him two weeks to find it – very stinky…

One night he parked in my in-laws driveway and blocked another car in, so I used my keys and moved it. Later we told him that Pete (Danelle’s dad) and I lifted it across the other side of the road. ‘It was heavy but we did it…’ Did I mention this guy was a tad naive?

After disconnecting his flasher unit for his indicators, a prank which wasn’t so funny because he spent ages trying to fix it I backed off for a while until one night I was driving down Scarborough Beach Road with Danelle and I saw his car parked outside Dominos where he worked as a delivery driver.

I thought, how funny would it be to just move it back a few parking bays while he is in the shop waiting for his next job?… So… I snuck up, moved it back 3 bays from its position right at the front of the store and hid in the bushes waiting for him to come out. Funniest thing I have seen!! Its not that someone stole the car… they just moved it! You could see his brain going crazy wondering what the hell was going on. We did that a few times before the end of the year always hiding in the bushes across the road and cacking ourselves with laughter at Todd’s increasingly puzzled looks.

On the night we finished at the church we made a small presentation to Toddy – his keys…

Suddenly the bits fell into place for this poor disturbed guy. He wasn’t going mad. There weren’t demons in his car from his heavy metal music habits as he had suspected.

It was just revenge… and you know what? It was a lot of fun!