January 15, 2025 at 9:22 pm

Homeowner Was Allowing His Grumpy Neighbor To Use Parts Of His Property, But When She Called Yelling At Him He Decided To Burn Some Bridges

by Mila Cardozo

Source: Reddit/MaliciousCompliance/Pexels/Kwami HeudeIzawaki

It’s hard to understand why some people mistreat people who are serving them or doing them a favor.

But this story is a clear example of how this kind of behavior can backfire, since a kind man decided to comply and stop helping a rude neighbor, and now she will have to deal with the consequences.

Let’s read the story.

Sure, we’ll take that aluminum panel off of your fence…

This story doesn’t actually involve me, but my father.

My parents bought a property on the beach because it’s their happy place and they didn’t want to stay at hotels anymore.

The place is an older property that needed a lot of love, so we’ve been renovating it for a good year in our spare time.

Our neighbor is an older lady who runs the small motel next door. From the very beginning, she’s been quite an annoyance.

Things were already tense between them for a while.

She is constantly doing and saying manipulative things as “favors” to make us feel like we owe her something, which usually ends in her being allowed to use parts of our property.

(Fun fact: an inspector that was checking on the renovations once saw her coming towards him and quipped “here comes trouble”).

And she was about to cause more trouble.

So the main story involves the side of our property that we share with her.

There’s a fence that she built and a small alleyway between the fence and our house which is ours and has a hose/shower area for when you come back from the beach and want to get the sand off of you.

As part of the renovations, my dad had some small aluminum panels put in on our side of the fence so that the users of the shower could have privacy.

The panels are not visible from the neighbor’s property and are completely unobtrusive.

Neighbor sees them while passing by and FREAKS.

She took it for granted and didn’t behave civilly.

She frantically calls and texts my dad begging for a call back and saying it’s an emergency.

My dad makes time to call, assuming the hose might have broken or something. Nope. Just the neighbor throwing a hissy fit over the panels.

“Take them down!!!” She insists.

My dad is a very busy man and has already had enough of my neighbor’s constant annoyances. Her claiming an emergency just for these panels finally made him snap.

She was about to learn a lesson the hard way.

The malicious compliance:

My dad, the amicable man he is, agrees to take the panels down. As part of the renovations, he also has a gate put in front of that small alleyway area.

This is NOT good for my neighbor, because she had made an agreement with my father to use our hose so that her guests could rinse themselves off when coming back from the beach.

This precious hose is now behind a locked gate, the key for which, my neighbor will NOT be seeing.

And the lesson wasn’t over yet.

On top of that, my father put a chain in front of the parking area of our house, which she was using as extra space for her guests, and where our trash cans are kept.

Trash cans which said neighbor was using to throw away her extra trash.

Now, our neighbor will have to pay extra for a better water plan for her motel.

This is something she was well aware of and trying to avoid as she had previously told my dad about the numbers for water plans on her property vs ours, AND possibly pay for extra trash cans for her trash.

My dad is a very patient man and very hard to get angry, but once you do, you’re gonna regret it.

Hopefully next time she will know better than to mistreat kind people.

Let’s see what Reddit has to say about this.

A reader shares their thoughts.

Source: Reddit/AITA

Crying wolf is never a good thing.

Source: Reddit/AITA

A commenter makes a suggestion.

Source: Reddit/AITA

Another reader chimes in.

Source: Reddit/AITA

This person has a different take.

Source: Reddit/AITA

This commenter offers another perspective.

Source: Reddit/AITA

That backfired.

She learned not to bite the hand that was helping her.

If you thought that was an interesting story, check out what happened when a family gave their in-laws a free place to stay in exchange for babysitting, but things changed when they don’t hold up their end of the bargain.