When our sons were teens, they didn’t get along. One time, Timmy offended Rick and I could tell that Rick was plotting revenge.

I pulled Rick aside and we talked about why revenge wasn’t the way to go and that he should calmly walk away from the whole mess and enjoy the peace of a revenge-free life.

Rick nodded and agreed that he wasn’t going to do anything. I gotta admit that I was kinda surprised that he was so willing to let it go – it didn’t really seem like him.

I wasn’t going to argue about it though and just chalked it up to my superior parenting skills.

A short while later Timmy was complaining that his homework on the computer was gone and was blaming Rick.

My first thought was “How bad could that be. I’ll just use the undelete utility to get the homework back.”

However, Rick had already thought of that and instead had edited the files to fill them with spaces. He knew that I could recover files if they’d been deleted but not files that had been edited.

He also knew that he could agree to not go get revenge because he’d already gotten it.

The little sh1t.

btw, I take much better backups now.