They had it coming

I went to high school with a girl (let's call her 'Jane') whose mother was a very prominent politician. Jane and I both played basketball, though on different teams. One Wednesday night after my game had finished, I was bullied into refereeing Jane's game. I'd never refereed before and I tried desperately to beg off, because although I had been playing for four seasons, I didn't exactly understand the rules of basketball. Also, I'm afraid of whistles.

My pleas were ignored and I was practically shoved onto the court. It was a disaster from start to finish, and my bumbling and total incompetence as a referee wasn't helped by the abuse being hurled at me from the sidelines by the coaches and players' parents, with Jane's mother being the ringleader.

By the time second quarter rolled around, someone had located a more capable ref and I was thankfully demoted to scoreboard operator. Unfortunately, the verbal abuse didn't abate there and shrill Mrs Jane continued to repeatedly heckle and berate me at volume for not getting the scores up on the board quickly enough.

I spent the remainder of my high school career loathing the vile woman for her role in my public humiliation. It was something I expressed in my own passive aggressive way -- I would often scowl enthusiastically at her portrait which hung amongst pictures of other notable alumni in the school hallway. And that seemed satisfying enough, because I had no idea that something else was out there exacting my revenge for me.

About a year after I graduated high school, I was in my car listening to the radio when I heard on the news that Mrs Jane had been very abruptly ousted from her political position in an embarrassing landslide defeat.
I'm not proud of it now, but I may have yelled, "Yes! In your face!" at the radio. I also may have clasped my hands together and pumped them above my head in a primal display of victory. Justice truly had been served.

In the (admittedly small) portion of my brain that is rational, I knew that my short lived stint as a referee and her political downfall were two completely separate, unrelated events. In the larger, more fanciful portion of my brain, the latter was a direct result of the former and I for one was delighted that the universe had my back and karma was out there kicking ass for me.

Although my sense of justice is definitely disproportionate, I'm not a complete asshole. My schadenfreude for Mrs Jane fizzled out during her messy public divorce some years later. When I recently read in the newspaper that she had lost a bit of money in something resembling a Nigerian scam, I just felt pity. But how do you tell karma, "It's cool, I'm not mad anymore, find someone else to pick on,"?

* * *

This morning, I was walking to work on a narrow footpath. I sped up and drifted to the right to overtake the person walking in front of me, when a jogger came up behind me and barked "MOVE!" before elbowing me out of the way.

He's going down.