Customer service workers take the brunt of the human race’s anger, and usually its for something they have absolutely no control over!

In all seriousness, do you really think your 16 year old waiter was the one who decided to axe your favorite dish off the menu?

So when this clerk was accosted by a grouchy man who came in to pay an overdue fee with pennies, she made sure to waste as much of his time as possible.

Check it out for yourself!

Want revenge by paying in pennies? Here, let me count those for you.

Ages ago, I worked a front-line job at city hall, registering cars and dogs and collecting money for parking tickets, property taxes and the like.

So, a basic entry-level municipal finance grunt, bottom of the food chain, nowhere close to being the one making the ordinances or rules, etc. Grunt.

This was before the days of taking credit cards and debit cards for such payments, before smartphones, before the online banking world really began.

Ages ago.

Paper paper paper.

And so most of the city’s law abiding citizens chose to pay their overdue taxes in cash…

The city’s ordinance on tax interest stated that interest would accrue daily against any past-due tax bill at a rate of blah blah %per annum.

Property taxes were due quarterly.

Many people would come in to pay cash on the tax due date.

Many, many more would remit their payment by checks through the mail.

We kept extremely thorough paper records of all payments received through the mail, retaining their remittance stub, the envelope bearing the postmark.

The postmark was the date we would use to calculate any interest if it arrived past the due date.

If the postmark was before or on the due date, no interest was charged.

These were batched daily by each clerk, filed by date in our vault so anyone who needed to could find any receipt/remittance fairly quickly. We needed to, often, as did the city auditor.

So every years after taxes were due, OP watched the slackers file in to pay their overdue fees!

Anyway, business as usual and the few days following the tax due we would always get a few stragglers through the mail, and the daily interest would have started adding up.

Not by a lot – for most homeowners this would amount to just a few cents a day.

We would send them a receipt in the mail with a note that they have a small balance now due to accrued interest, but we would hold it at the amount for 10 days.

Most people would just send another check, some would ignore it, and others would come in to pay in person.

But there was one slacker in particular who gave OP the perfect opportunity for some malicious compliance…

Finally, the stars aligned and I got one, a real peach of a gentleman who was extremely disgruntled that he got a bill in the mail for this “interest crap”.

He slapped this bill down on the counter inches from my face. He then slammed a repurposed melatonin bottle full of pennies down on top of the paper and said:

“I hope whoever sent me this ******* bill has to count these ******* pennies!” at top volume for all of city hall to hear.

I could tell already that it was mine, I saw my initials on the receipt when he slapped it down.

Luckily for this perfect gentlemen, OP was perfectly happen to assist him!

I smiled as big as I could, said I would find out who had processed it and took his receipt to the vault.

I didn’t even give him enough time to react, I just got up and went to the vault while cheerfully saying “it’ll just be a minute!” before disappearing from his sight.

I found the paperwork, including his two days late postmarked envelope.

In fact, OP was actually excited to count the pennies, much to the man’s shock!

Then I sat down at my desk, took the melatonin bottle, looked him in the eye and said:

“You’re in luck today, sir! I’m the one who sent this balance due to you so I will be able to count these pennies for you!”

And I did.

I counted all thirty-nine of those pennies, and I counted them one by one, very very thoroughly.

So what could have been a quick errand for the man soon turned into a huge waste of his time!

It took him about 20 minutes to pay his $0.39 from the minute that bottle hit the counter to the end of it.

I was extremely pleasant and cordial and smiling at him the entire time.

It was just fun at that point so I kept pouring it on, just so sweet.

His face was practically purple by the end without the smug satisfaction he was expecting when he slammed that melatonin bottle on my counter.

As he slunk out the door, I said “Have a great rest of your day! Weather’s beautiful!”

And it was.

Serves this guy right! It’s not OP’s fault you couldn’t be bothered to pay what you owe on time! In fact, if he had paid on time, he wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place.

Reddit rushed to the comments with their own stories of malicious penny-counting.

And this cashier said that it was part of their DUTY to count every cent, just to be sure they were being paid correctly.

Other users gave OP advice on how to make their penny-counting even more satisfying.

This user said this guy had a serious case of misplaced anger.

Finally, this user said this case qualified as some serious “malicious-compliance-ception”.

Paying in pennies? You better take a seat sir, it will be a WHILE.

If you thought that was an interesting story, check this one out about a man who created a points system for his inheritance, and a family friend ends up getting almost all of it.