Have I ever written about the time I slapped a kid with a ping pong paddle?  Don't worry, it wasn't like a child abuse situation.  I was around 17 at the time and the kid in question was probably 13.  And he totally deserved it.

So I was playing a game of ping pong with a friend, which is why I had the ping pong paddle in the first place.  It was at like a party or something, I can't totally remember.  But anyway this kid who I've never met before walks up and starts reaching his hand in and batting the ball away in the middle of while we're playing.  Look, I know it's just a game and there are much more important things in life, but this is an extremely dick thing to do.  If he just did it one time, okay whatever, I'd laugh it off and go on, but this little punk-ass kept doing it. 

 I asked him nicely to stop, basically something along the lines of "Please don't do that."  And he immediately did it again.  

So, yeah, I was getting pissed off.  This time I said "If you do that again, I'm going to slap you in the face with this ping-pong paddle."   

And, of course, he immediately did it again.

So I slapped him in the face with the ping-pong paddle.  Not hard enough to break his jaw or anything, but enough to leave a red mark.  

I honestly don't like violence and prefer to avoid it, but this kid didn't give me many options.  I tried talking rationally with him and appealing to his common decency, and that clearly didn't work.  Sometimes you've just gotta smack somebody.  

I didn't feel bad afterwards at the time and I don't feel bad about it now.  He could have avoided the fate.  I gave him ample warning of what would happen to him if he chose to continue down that path and he chose to do it.  

The best part was, it worked.  He sat down, shut up, and didn't mess with our game at all after that.  I've never seen that kid again, but I truly hope he learned a life lesson from that.  It's totally possible that I did him a favor and saved him from getting himself on the receiving end of a much worse beating somewhere down the road.