A great Empire is most easily diminished at the Edges

Although few and far between, I love stories like this one. Because they are massive, uncaring and largely inept, Bank of America in Florida tried to foreclose on a house that didn't even have a mortgage payment. After a lengthy and costly battle in Court, the homeowners won and BoA had to pay up the costs. So what did they do? Admit their mistake and pay all the costs? Not really, they ignored the couple and their attorney for 5 months, forced them to foreclose on the bank and seize all of it's assets for a few hours to get their money bank.

http://www.digtriad.com/news/waterc...orida-Homeowner-Forecloses-On-Bank-Of-America

FOCUS: Discuss the ridiculousness of this story and tell other stories of being screwed over by a "too big to fail" type bank. This can be done without discussing politics to avoid the punishing and merciless Hand of our mods.

 

I actually thought Billy up there was just illiterate because his post is borderline nonsensical, but if you read the article it appears he's correct: a homeowner was wrongly foreclosed upon, then didn't get compensated, so the homeowner foreclosed on the bank itself - got it padlocked and everything. That's fucking hilarious if you ask me.

ALT FOCUS: Turnabout is fair play - when have you seen a well-laid plan backfire?

 

I'm sure most men would agree: dating. You can plan a long sequence of venues and activities for you and a girl that ends with a bang (pun intended), only for it fall apart because she flakes ahead of time or because she makes a goal line stand and denies you at the end. But then again, sometimes you go out with the boys on a meaningless Tuesday and end up with a one night stand after talking to a chick for half an hour. Life's random and strange like that.

 

I would like to reiterate this, but from the other side. This is my specific experience with having a plan backfire. Sometimes, you set out to meet a nice guy, have a good time, and end the night by getting laid. The problem is that this date is a guy your friend set you up with because she thinks you will get along with him. Next thing you know, you are sitting in the a car outside of Burger King and getting yelled at by the guy with a crustache and pit stains because you are getting grease on the seats of his 92 LeBaron.

The moral of the story is, do not let someone of the same sex set you up on a date. They will only set you up with people they are not attracted to. Either because they are single and going after all the attractive ones or because they are in a relationship and "saving" the attractive people for themselves. That is the end of my rant and I apologize if this is completely off focus.

 

I love this kind of thing, because I'm a stickler for playing by the rules and playing fair... but not in the normal sense. Rather, if someone is going to start shit then that's them laying down the rules. Playing fair is then using those rules back against them. With that comes the caveat of being sensible and making sure you're not doing something dumb.

I use this principle extensively at work, because I'm sick of various parties getting away with what amounts to bullshit and them not being called on it. I just can't go into detail about them without flying too close to the no politics rule (or boring you all stupid).

Instead, what I can offer is something that's giving me a small amount of amusement in a combined effort of comeuppance and shit stirring. I've been playing a Facebook game that's essentially a build armies and invade other people type one. It had gotten to the point where I was pretty bored with it as I didn't want to spend time hunting down and taking people out, waiting on timers and the like - I just built my castle up, saw what the game was like and was satisfied. I wasn't a member of an alliance, just kept to myself and didn't cause any problems.

Then a guy attacked me. He got my interest so I attacked him back. The next thing I know I have a barrage of attacks from his alliance and sister alliances, messages taunting me out and an offer to "join us or it won't stop". All up there's about 200 people against me. Basically, this is the way they got big - by armbarring people into joining. I respond to their leader, telling them the situation and told them I was just defending myself. That just makes matter worse.

Fuck them. I decide to have some fun with it now. So now I run guerilla tactics against them, completely within the rules of the game. I take every opportunity to fuck with every single one of them: send phantom attacks, wipe them out when they're offline, aggravate them when they try and taunt me out, report them breaching the terms of play, provide screenshots as proof against them when they tell lies, burn my excess resources so they can't loot them, ambush their attacks on me when they think I'm offline and so on. They fucking hate me. I've wiped out their leader, and she was pissed. I've given them the opportunity to give up and walk away, and they won't take it.

I'm making a complete mockery out of their serious game playing, refusing to play the game the way they want me to. Sure, I could just walk away. But they've made the game interesting for me again, and it's fun watching them froth at the mouth that 200 people can't do shit against 1 who's sitting there laughing at them.

 

ALT FOCUS: Turnabout is fair play - when have you seen a well-laid plan backfire?

I saw this guy try and run through this bullshit song and dance, acting as if he was looking for dating and a relationship when all he wanted was to get laid. It was hillarious when he eventually realized that he would have been better off all along, if he'd just skipped the faux relationship activities and stuck with communicating honestly with other people who were looking for sex instead of acting like he wanted dating and relationships.

 

I used to be on a forum that also had a chat room that I would frequent and would sometimes get booted off for bad language etc.

At one stage, they were upgradinng and testing the software and the administrators were giving admin rights to other chatters and then they would swap back again within a few minutes.
I innocently asked one of the chatters that had been made a temporary admin to make me one and she duly complied.

I then went about, booting off the other few chatters that were admins at the same time and I was then the "Lord" of the chatroom, as lame as it may sound it was actaully damn funny (to me) at the time and I enjoyed toying with the other chatters that were begging me to stop as they was going to be trouble with the guy that ran the website.
When he came into the room, I booted him off and banned him and it took him about 10 minutes to get to a different computer and quickly sneak on and boot me off.