All our hero wanted was reliable transportation. What he got instead was “a car that turned out to be a lemon.” And that left him more than a little sour. It felt like a full Macbeth-level betrayal. “I asked the seller to make it right,” he wrote on Reddit. But the seller brushed him off with the disdain of a knave. So OP summoned the Bard. Literally. Thou shady used car dealer, prepare thy inbox.

My kingdom for a horse: a used car deal gone sour

After driving “three hours to pick up a very specific car,” a Redditor barely made it an hour back before their new chariot croaked.

“It died on the side of the road,” he said. A mechanic diagnosed the cause: bodged piston rings. That’s British for “the repair will cost more than your car’s worth.”

What of the seller? “A guy who flipped cars out of his driveway.” He stopped answering. No refund. No reply. Not even a how now, good sir?

At first, OP tried reason. “I asked the seller to make it right,” he wrote. But when that failed, revenge brewed. And like Othello staring down Iago, he started plotting.

Much ado about texting: when the Bard becomes your weapon

Here’s what OP remembered: “The guy had an old flip phone that couldn’t handle long messages.” That little detail would be the dagger before him.

So OP hit “copy” and pasted the entire works of William Shakespeare into his iPhone’s messaging app. Quick and easy for him. But a real pain for this fishmonger of a used car salesman.

“Apparently it took a week before he could use his phone again without a text message interrupting him.” In case you slept through English class, that’s 884,647 words of Elizabethan poetic justice. What fools these mortals be.

The seller’s phone erupted with pings from Macbeth, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the rest of the Bard’s greatest hits. “I think he got through Hamlet before he turned the phone off,” for good.

Each message dropped like a soliloquy from hell. “All that glisters is not gold,” buzzed one alert. “I do bite my thumb at you, sir,” buzzed another. A flurry of jabs in iambic pentameter.

And it worked. “Eventually he picked up the car and gave me a full refund.” OP didn’t even need to pay for a tow. It was the seller who returned like an unmasked usurper, forced to face the consequences of his misdeeds. A rare win, crafted from equal parts petty revenge, divine justice, and the finest words of the English literary canon.

So ends our tale of woe, filled with “sound and fury,” and ultimately, poetic justice. The seller paid the tow fee. OP got their refund. And somewhere in the distance, the ghost of Shakespeare whispered, “Exit, pursued by remorse.”