The Battle of the Batteries
The year was 2003. I was visiting my brother, and on the train to the city where he lived, my top notch DiscMan died on me - batteries depleted. The way from the main station to my brother‘s went past a store, so I bought a set of fresh ones and exchanged them at my brother’s place and asked if I could leave the old ones with him1. He agreed.
Suddenly, my brother started to claim that I came visiting and upon my departure left a bunch of old batteries on his table without asking. That would have not been nice, and I ought to have apologized, had it happened, which it didn’t, so I didn’t.
So next time my brother visited me he brought the batteries and left them on my table. What a dick, why couldn’t he just get over it? Anyway, next time I visited him I hid the batteries in one of his coats.
This went on for much longer than we both care to admit. Once I brought some cake which I claimed was a leftover- in reality I had baked it just for this purpose, even eating parts of it to support the cover story, but parts of it was hollow and filled with the batteries2 inside. Another time he bought a box of a hygiene product he knew I was owning but rarely using. He put the batteries inside and switched out the boxes in my bathroom.
It ended in 2006 when my girlfriend, with damp hair and the skin color of Dr. Zoidberg, told me that this had to stop this instant. Turns out my brother had wrapped the batteries in plastic and pushed it into a random body wash bottle in our bathroom. Despite his best efforts, the batteries leaked a bit of acid into the body wash, leading to a quite irritated girlfriend3. I called my brother immediately and told him what happened, and he was very distraught and apologised a lot to both of us. Then I ended the phone call, telling him: “You won.”
not sure if that’s a universal thing, but both him and I had a place where we would store depleted batteries before we would dispose of all of them in bulk↩
securely wrapped in plastic, I did not wish to poison him↩
Sorry for the pun. There was no lasting damage though, she looked her normal self again after a couple of hours.↩