Working in customer facing jobs is tough for a lot of reasons. The biggest one is, of course, the fact that some customers are pretty awful. Rude and unappreciative is putting it lightly.
So when you hear a story where somebody’s attempt to be extra petty toward service workers ends up backfiring on them, you can’t help but laugh and cheer.
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And for one woman, revenge wasn’t all it was cut out to be.
Reddit user PracticalDadAdvice posted his story to the r/MaliciousCompliance sub, detailing how a rude woman ended up biting off more than she could chew when trying to get revenge for “poor service.”
“I run a repair shop where I employ a bunch of local kids (ages 16+) to learn skills and make some money while we generally sit around and talk about the world while we fix things.”
“We had a client come in with a busted electronic; we fixed it up for her and gave her a decent discount on the work; her final bill for parts and four hours of labor was a hundred dollars even, discounted down from two-hundred and twenty.”
“She didn’t like the bill. She didn’t like the work. She claimed that we’d broken something else.”
“She claimed that the kid who did the work didn’t know what she was doing (she did, and I had supervised her) and that the kid who helped her in the front room was rude to her (he wasn’t, but she didn’t like the little pride flag pin he was wearing).”
“She demanded to see the manager, so I popped out, listened to her tear into my kids, validated how she was feeling…”
“…but pointed out that the work she had asked for was done, done correctly, and her bill was due on pick-up of the piece.”
“The last straw for her came when she pulled out a credit card and I had to inform her that we don’t accept that particular card.”
“…I told her we’d take a personal check. She wrote out a check, problem solved.
I deposited the day’s checks, and got a note from my bank that one had bounced. Her check, of course.”
“I called her the next day to inform her that her check had been returned for insufficient funds, and that she’d need to come in and pay her bill, plus the extra fee for a returned check.”
“She rolls up into the office carrying a bag, and I knew exactly what was going on. She drops — of course — a bag of pennies on the front desk.”
“She’s breathing heavily – we’re on the second floor and she’d taken the stairs – and she announces triumphantly that she’s here to pay her bill.”
“She just needs to go get the rest of our ‘hard-earned money’ (said with a sneer, of course). The kid at the front desk looks like he’s about to cry, so I stop working on the thing I’m working on and take over.”
“I told her that… we’d wait for her to bring them all up and then settle up her bill.”
“She was expecting a bigger reaction, I think – either that or she hadn’t thought this through.
Ten thousand pennies, plus the extra twenty-five dollars, weighs a lot.”
“And she’d just committed to carrying them through a parking lot and up a flight of stairs.”
“Finally, shaking and sweaty, she deposited the last of the bags on the countertop. The pennies were loose, not in coin-rolls. She’d done some work to prove her point.”
“What she hadn’t counted on was that we’d need to count the pennies.”
“She started to realize that this was going to take a while, and tried to leave; I told her that she couldn’t leave until we’d signed off on her bill… and I would inform our local constabulary if she left without paying.”
“After a while, she said ‘Just forget it,’ and took out a hundred and twenty-five dollars in bills. We signed off on her agreement and she started to leave.”
“Another one of my kids, bless his heart, asked her if she wanted help carrying the pennies back to her car. She looked at all of us with a face of sheer panic, mumbled ‘no, thank you, just keep them,’ and bolted.”
“The whole shop was silent for a moment. Then one of the kids started giggling, and nobody could stop.”
“We loaded the bags into my vehicle — we used the elevator she’d walked by a few times — took them to the bank and used the coin machine to deposit them, then wrote out a donation to our local shelter for the amount she’d dropped off.”
“Please don’t pay your bills in pennies, folks. Especially if you’re just doing it to be a [jerk].”
Now there’s a lesson that I didn’t expect anyone to have to learn today.
