Anyone else ever experience a personal bout of schadenfreude?
I'm having one right now.
I don't want to give too many personal details...but the jist is this:
My sister-in-law organized a family outing designed to hurt me very deeply and personally. It also excluded me.
While her parents (my mother & father in law) were away on this trip, the hose to their dishwasher broke and flooded the house.
Hence, my schadenfreude.
It would have been better had it been my sister-in-law's house that was flooded and damaged.
After all, my MIL & FIL are the ones caught in the middle.
That's the "shame" part of the "shameful-joy".
Anyone else feel like confessing their schadenfreude episodes?
= new reply since forum marked as read
I like that pun (hosiery, run)
When other relatives mention it, I shrug. Karma bites hard.
But inside, I am doing the dance of joy.
I'm sorry the family is being that cruel.
Thanks for the kind words.
It is a really nasty situation.
mostly surrounding work, involving those that have all the answers, yet seem to not know the questions.
I call my methodology: "sit back and watch the show". 
works wonders. 
particularly when what they tell you to do, is not what they really want you to do (which generally means do the work of 3 people at the same exact moment while we find a way to cut labor even more) and they then constantly change your instructions and criticize you for not getting finished. 
which should be followed by "watch the show....."
My brother had invited me along to an event. Then, later, he decided that he'd rather take his kids and since he couldn't get more tickets, I was suddenly uninvited. Well, now it turns out the kids don't want to go and are refusing to do so. I'm trying not to gloat too much .. 
Also, I just found out that this painfully arrogant guy at work who has been in line for a promotion for manager just had that offer revoked because he has failed to step up. His idea of managing was to prance around declaring himself one of the "big guys now" and pushing work off on everybody else, even those not on his "team", so ... it's pretty sweet.
They jerked us around a tad too much. They discovered that even with their convoluted "fired for quality" program they still had to pay unemployment. People started throwing quality in order to get fired. 
Some people couldn't hack all the 1-on-1s or 2-on-1s or 3-on-1s to beat them up for quality, so just up and quit. Co-worker who sat next to me got up and walked out without saying a word. Another just never bothered to come back from her vacation.
So many, that now my night team is extremely short-staffed, from the 7 or 8 that we had a year ago down to just 2. So now, suddenly, they're kind of kowtowing to us. My former evil boss is back on the phones on the busy nights.
I do what the fuck I want. They can fire me any time. I just don't give a fuck. I stop short of hanging up on rude callers, but just barely.
I take more breaks (not so many as to put out the other half of my team), and just don't give a fuck. We dress the way we want now; every day is jeans day. Go ahead. Send me home to change.
I'm just waiting for somebody, anybody, to look at me the wrong way and I'll pack up and walk. It's a good feeling.
Is in my sig line. 
Because the manager had unilaterally yanked the working software without telling anyone, and installed some unsatisfactory software in its place. The XYZZY manager took his complaint directly to the CIO (although the managers between him and the CIO supported him) and the CIO called a meeting that afternoon.
At the meeting, my boss lied repeatedly, and was caught in his lies. If he had said, "I was pissed off and did something stupid", he might have gotten away with it. But his refusal to accept responsibility, his attempts to put the blame on a subordinate (me), his acting out of personal pique and above all, his lies, really ticked off the CIO. She refused to put up with his behavior. She had the power to sack him, and did.
I, too, have come across co-workers who were pure evil. I remember one who tried to grab the credit for some work that had been done by someone else, who wasn't there at the time. Fortunately, everyone else in the group knew the facts, and we were able to put the credit where it belonged. Our boss was most certainly not amused, and the young man did not get good marks on his performance review.
I once worked with a young man who apparently thought he could get by on good looks (he looked like Pierce Brosnan's younger brother) and charm alone. In four months, he had produced a screen for data entry into a program, and a program that crashed when the project manager tried to use it. The project manager, who was a database guru, not a programmer, asked me and another programmer to find out why the program did not work for her. (The programmer was off at a class on that day.) Zach and I looked through the source code, and we discovered this:
if ((fp = fopen(filename, "w" ) == 0) {
(sprintf(stderr, "%s cannot be opened\n", filename);}
fprintf(fp, whatever);
Assuming that you may have difficulty reading C language code (can such a thing be possible), what this does is open a file called "filename" for writing, and checks to see if it is actually open. If it is not opened, it puts out an error message and then writes to the file.
Both Zach and I had taught C programming, and we agreed that if one of our students had presented this code to us, we would have shown it to the class as an example of how not to do it. There are at least three errors (actually four, and arguably even a fifth) here.
I shall mention the fourth error first, because that is the underlying cause of the crash. The programmer had set up the file to be written to under his own ID (the default), and used the default permissions. The default file permissions say that only the owner of a file can write to it. Thus, it had worked when he ran it, because he had permission to write to it, but the project manager did not have permission to write to it, so it crashed when she tried to write to it.
The error in the first line is that if the file does not open, it returns a value called "NULL" (if it does open, it returns the location of the file). The exact value of NULL is compiler dependent, all that the definition requires is that it be an invalid file location. In the case of this compiler, NULL had a value of -1, not zero. So he was checking against the incorrect value.
The real error was in the last two lines: He just spat out an error message, and then tried to write to the file anyway. That is where it crashed. If he had done the correct check, and NULL was the return value, he should have closed the program gracefully, not just let it crash.
The fifth error was that when he put out the error message, he should have included a special variable called "ERRNO", which indicates why the file could not be opened. Bad permissions would have been easily indicated.
Zach and I showed the problem code to the project manager, and then the three of us showed it to our group manager. We all agreed that the young man was not a competent programmer, and he was let go shortly afterward. (He once came to me, asking how he could possibly satisfy the project manager. I replied, "Well, I give her working software in a timely manner." This did not make him happy. I had got roped into that project because it was way behind; I wrote a menu driven user interface in six weeks, and was beloved by the project manager. I got it done because I first wrote a generalized string input routine, an then I wrote a generalized menu program. The great part about the menu program was that it read the menu from a text file, so if you wanted to change the menu, you just had to edit the appropriate text file, you did not have to recompile anything.)
an unqualified someone who schemed and connived and thus got the position that should have been mine - got fired. I heard it was something about suspicion of thievery...
