Spiking food in a student communual fridge

[barakta]

Biohazard stickers with "I just made friends with a biologist/chemist/biochemist - test this at your own risk".

Food colouring of obscene colours.

Actual spiking with aforementioned ideas.

I'd report him for smoking anyway, air freshener doesn't actually work and it's downright unpleasant.  I lived with housemates that smoked despite the contract AND their neighbour being an asthmatic who got quite ill from it

[Martin]

Phenylpthalene;

instant and severe diahorrhea  

Didn't some famous US author spike his milk with LSD to find out who kept stealing it?

(the old lady two floors up apparently)

[Julian]

There's nothing he can do about it apart from writing passive-aggressive notes and sticking them to his food, which his flatmate will ignore.

I wouldn't try to get him evicted though - wouldn't that leave your son liable for excess rent?  It certainly did us when one of our housemates just upped and left.

[teethgrinder]

Revenge Plan Part I

Spike the food with laxatives.



Revenge Plan Part II

Hide the bog roll.


Either that, or buy lots of tinned food and a few tins of dog food.
Remove all the labels from the tins and arrange the tins so that you know which is which, or you could just re-arrange the labels so that they are all coded, eg beans = peas. Get some spare labels for the dog food tins, something like steak stew and discard the labels from the dog food.

[Feline]

When I was in halls of residence in first year at uni the fridge was useless as whatever you put in there was instantly plundered. In fact some guys I know actually had their roast chicken stolen from the oven just before it was ready to take out and eat!

I resorted to keeping a bit of milk in a sink of cold water in my room, and I kept my butter outside on the window ledge. One day the person in the room on the floor below me came up and said there was melted butter running down his window in the sun 

[ScumOfTheRoad]

My story on this subject...

My friend  now works in IT at a big Scottish financial institution.
When he was a college student in Edinburgh, he stayed in a shared student flat. One flatmate was extremely irritating, and a miser to boot. Said flatmate would buy foodstuffs in bulk at the start of term, and eat his way through them during term.
One thing he did was to buy catering sized plastic tubs of margarine. One term, having finally annoyed friend beyond reason, said flatmate left an ice cream tub sized margarine pack in the fridge. In the dead of night, margarine block was removed and a poo deposited in the bottom. Margarine replaced, and job done till the end of term and an awful realisation on the part of flatmate.

[spesh]

 

I was lucky in halls, my room mate less so... we soon had our own fridge in our room, which may, or may not, have been mainly full of beer!   

The only bone of contention in off-campus housing was whose turn it was to do the washing-up, which led to the occasional passive-aggressive note.

[gordon taylor]

Some fat bastard steals food from our fridge late at night.

 


Sausage roll with cheese anyone?

[HTFB]

It's amazing how the "it wasn't me!" reflex of schooldays leads grown adults to lie to one's face. (Beloved Stoker's cousin in her thirties, after deliberately bending the kitchen tongs for some reason, offered "it wasn't me" when I asked her not to damage the tools---and then, when I let the lie hang in the air, had a great go at Beloved Stoker saying I should have "given her a chance". Pathetic!)

If he's smoking cannabis, I suppose he may be getting a combination of the munchies and short-term memory loss meaning he steals your food and then doesn't remember doing so.

Surely the answer is a discrete webcam?

[Jaded]

When he was a college student in Edinburgh, he stayed in a shared student flat. One flatmate was extremely irritating, and a miser to boot. Said flatmate would buy foodstuffs in bulk at the start of term, and eat his way through them during term.

Sounds like an old, traditional Edinburgh student - sent up to Uni each term with a barrel of herrings, a barrel of oatmeal and a barrel of whisky!

[Charlotte]

Fun though it is to discuss it in the abstract, administering poisons probably isn't the way forward 

The thing is, people who steal food from communal fridges are the same people who can't be arsed to do the household accounts when it comes to splitting up the utility bills...

I'll bet your son ends up being the sensible one who does all that.  In fact, even if he's not; he ought to be.  Julian's old university friend has such a wonderful phrase for the surcharge applied under such circumstances:

Twat tax 

[Rhys W]

Now, back to the revenge fantasy: pure capsaicin?

[andygates]

I dealt with our first-year fridge thief by making a double-bastard* pot of chilli.  The "yarargh"s were almost as satisfying as hearing that he'd been charged a taxi barf fine.




* My chilli habits at the time would set babies on fire in Patagonia, just by etheric backlash. A kind of bow-wave shock in the ether; similar to a supernova remnant igniting baby stars in its nebula. If you could curse while eating them, they were too mild: a good one reduced you to tears and desperate breathy hooting.  That was single bastard. 

[tiermat]

Rhys's solution, but in liquid form (pun intended )

Pure Cap: Hot sauce and chili sauce specialists

OR, if he is feeling REALLY evil....

Makan's Pharmacy
    - Picolax

 

[greenmeansgo]

That was single bastard

Don't forget that the fridge isn't the only area of the house to administer retribution though. I'm sure some of this distilled chilli stuff could find its way into e.g. toothpaste...you can use your imagination.

Is the son being victimised in this, or is the food thief stealing other people's food? A coordinated attack might be one way to go?

[DrMekon]

As a kid, I ate a bar of ex lax. It is not an error you repeat. Would be very easy to use as an ingredient in cooking. Maybe in a roulade for comedic effect.

[mrcharly-YHT]

It can be a nightmare. My eldest stepson would use anything and deny it - even when the evidence was so in your face that he knew I knew he was lying. If I pushed it, he would fly into a rage. Very very difficult to cope with, as he was 19 and to him I was just Mum's boyfriend. He's grown out of it and is a very fine young man now.

It happens in the workplace - people don't always grow out of it.

[Kathy]

I used to have a problem neighbour when in Halls of residence. She declared that she was vegan, and no-one was allowed to use any of her crockery, cutlery, cooking utensils etc, because this would contaminate it with Non-Veganness. Which would have been fine, had she not then proceeded to nick all our crockery, cutlery, cooking utensils etc and either (if we were lucky) leave it in the kitchen encrusted in congealed vegan nourishment, or (if we were unlucky) leave it under her bed to be discovered at the end of term. 

Oddly enough, I seemed to be the only one irritated by this, so I let it be.

[Si_Co]

Phenylpthalene;

instant and severe diahorrhea  

Didn't some famous US author spike his milk with LSD to find out who kept stealing it?

(the old lady two floors up apparently)

Yep, this is definetly the way to go any chemistry student will be able to supply phenolphthalein and  the results will be spectacular (seen this done).

As to the legalities, can it really be illegal to doctor you own food?

[Russell]

Some more good stuff here, thanks.  My son does like his spicy food so I think that might be way to go.

As for bills and so on - the rent is inclusive per person so there are no additional costs so no way to default on payments.

The villain certainly isn't smoking B+H (if they are still going) hence the posibility of an eviction.  He has set off the fire alarms on several occasion already.  and yes Master Russell does have mild asthma.

[The Seldom Killer]

Perhaps with the smoking some surreptitous use of a camera phone might suffice to convince the landlord to kick him to the kerb.

[hellymedic]

I dealt with our first-year fridge thief by making a double-bastard* pot of chilli.  The "yarargh"s were almost as satisfying as hearing that he'd been charged a taxi barf fine.




* My chilli habits at the time would set babies on fire in Patagonia, just by etheric backlash. A kind of bow-wave shock in the ether; similar to a supernova remnant igniting baby stars in its nebula. If you could curse while eating them, they were too mild: a good one reduced you to tears and desperate breathy hooting.  That was single bastard. 

POTD!

[interzen]

Perhaps with the smoking some surreptitous use of a camera phone might suffice to convince the landlord to kick him to the kerb.

Or perhaps the time-honoured 'anonymous tipoff' to the local plod that there's some drug (ab)use going down?

As far as chilli abuse goes, the high-point of my student cuisine days was when I was cooking up a batch of what came to be known as 'Bengal Bastard' (despite being chilli, not curry) with accompanying chilli soup and someone from the next block over asked us to shut the windows because they couldn't stand the smell Those were the days - everyone chipped in, we cooked a BFO chilli and then proceeded down town to get completely plastered.

Perhaps I was fortunate that the other guys in the flat were chilli-heads too, so anyone stupid enough to raid our fridge would likely be getting a little more than they bargained for 

[Kim]

The thing is, people who steal food from communal fridges are the same people who can't be arsed to do the household accounts when it comes to splitting up the utility bills...

I'll bet your son ends up being the sensible one who does all that.

Oh god.  Flashbacks.

My final year at university was notable for, amongst other things, developing altogether too much familiarity with Microsoft Excel than is optimal for one's mental health.  The products of this were twofold:

a) A time-domain modelling of a cognitive neural network^[1] on a scale that struck fear into the heart of Clippy and excessive heat into the woefully inadequate cooling system of my AMD Thunderbird.

b) The Grand Unified Spreadsheet of Doom.  In which I decided that while all housemates had contributed by paying some utility bill or other, they weren't going to cancel out, and the only way to work out who owed what was to go through the entire archive for the house mailing list (we were geeky like that) for the last three years and spreadsheetify all bill payments.  This worked surprisingly well once we persuaded the resident hobbit to tell us how much he'd secretly spent on water bills and council tax.


Needless to say, b) was much trickier, but sadly didn't earn any credits towards my dissertation.  A discrepancy of several thousand of your earth pounds eventually changed hands, and while I was tempted to levy a hobbit tax^[2] in the murky depths of some calculation that nobody would ever be arsed to check, I decided to take the moral high ground and be glad that I'd had the foresight to pay the ludicrously expensive ADSL bill, and was therefore on the receiving end of some of the payments.

Which, with hindsight, was bloody stupid.  Especially as I did most of the cleaning, to the point of ending up on steroids.  I'm sick of being the sensible one.



_{[1] My advice to anyone ever contemplating modelling neural networks in Excel:  Don't.
[2] I figured I was probably entitled to compensation for having to deal with the effect on the drains of the insoluble residue formed when the hobbit's vegan soap mixed with the Canterbury carbonate in the water.}

[interzen]

_{[1] My advice to anyone ever contemplating modelling neural networks in Excel:  Don't.}

Fixed that for ya