If you do something that causes your neighbor’s property to get dirty, is it your responsibility to clean it up? That would be the nice thing to do, but if your neighbor isn’t nice, you might want to get malicious compliance instead.

In today’s story, a Redditor agrees to clean a rude neighbor’s property, but the neighbor probably isn’t happy with the result.

Find out all the details…

You want me to clean your side path? No problem.

So a few years ago, I was helping to lay a new concrete driveway at my mother’s house.

Some of the runoff water ran into the neighbour’s side pathway leaving a slight discolouration.

A simple wash would have removed this, but the neighbour complained and told us we had to clean it up.

Now this is fair enough, but they weren’t very polite in asking us about it, especially when we had no idea it had happened.

Anyway, I agreed to clean the path for them.

Uh oh, I feel some malicious compliance coming on…

So I got out the power washer and started at the front of the house.

This path has not been cleaned in a LONG time, so the power washer was making a noticeable difference.

Up the path I went doing a very thorough job of getting all the years of grime off, including the slight concrete slurry from our work.

This Redditor made a big and obvious difference in the path.

I continued up to the point where the runoff started, and then I stopped.

I left a perfectly etched line that really made it obvious just how filthy the path was before I washed it. Up it went, all the way up the side of the house, plain to see.

I’d cleaned up every last bit of concrete runoff and made that pathway shine, until it didn’t.

The neighbor couldn’t even complain!

They couldn’t really complain, as it wasn’t my job to clean the entire path, and I had cleaned up all the concrete runoff as agreed.

My mother doesn’t get along with them at all, so she was happy with the result even though she didn’t originally want me to clean it for them.

That was a clever way at getting back at the neighbor without doing anything wrong.

What does Reddit think? Petty or fair?

One reader congratulated this Redditor for their restraint.

Another user poached a quote of the Redditor’s for future use.

Some users had a hard time imagining walking away from the unfinished job.

One Redditor chastised the neighbor for choosing a power washer to prove a point.

A good lesson for all: be nice to your neighbors in hopes they’ll be nice to you!

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.