Harmless Revenge

I've mentioned in previous posts that my in-laws are not the cleanest people. Don't get me wrong, they dress very nicely and present themselves very well. When they are in my home, however, they are very careless and do not clean up after themselves. For example, when they use the bathroom they splash water all around when they wash their hands but don't wipe up their spills. Then they just either bunch up the hand towels when they are finished with them or throw them on the floor so that nobody else would want to use them.

Well, one other thing that really gets on my nerves is when my in-laws come for a meal. In the past, I would set the table and have napkins set in the middle of the table for everyone in addition to a napkin at each place setting. I wanted to stop placing the extra napkins on the table because my in-laws like to take their greasy hands and wipe them on the entire stack of napkins rather than just using the one at their place setting or pulling just one or two napkins from the pile.

Not only did this disgust me, but it was causing us to waste money. We had to throw away about 40 to 50 napkins every time my mother-in-law and/or sister-in-law would visit. This was crazy, and since my husband denied this ever happened and insisted that I not make an issue of it by asking his family to be more careful with the napkins, I found a solution of my own.

One time, my in-laws came over for pizza. My mother-in-law, as always, picked up the entire stack of napkins, wiped her hands on them and set them back in the center of the table. After they left and I was cleaning up, I showed the napkins to my husband. I said, "See? This is what happens every time your family eats here. They dirty the entire stack of napkins and then just leave them for others to use." My husband looked at the stack of greasy napkins, which even had smudges of pizza sauce on the side, and actually said, "I don't see anything. These are perfectly clean. You're just trying to find fault with my family."

So, given that, by my husband's and my in-law's standards, these napkins were "clean," I set the pile aside in a cupboard and put out fresh napkins. THEN, the next time his family came over, I swapped the napkins. I put the clean napkins away and set out the greasy and dirty ones that my husband declared had nothing wrong with them, and those were the ones his family got to use.

Did I do anything wrong? I simply set out the same napkins that his family had left behind for US to use. If it was wrong for me to make them use them, then wasn't it wrong for them to have left them like that for US to use?

Nothing was said to me about the napkins, but I did notice my husband examining the napkins carefully while we sat down to eat. He must have finally noticed the grease that he couldn't see before. But he never said anything, and his family had no choice but to use the dirty napkins. Either that, or they would have had to admit that they were dirty and, of course, I would have said, "But how can that be?"

Now I don't mind so much when my in-laws make a big mess. Since it doesn't qualify as a mess in their eyes, I simply serve it back to them!