Language sure can be tricky, huh…?

And that’s why it’s a good thing to read over official documents with an eagle eye so you know exactly what you’re getting yourself into.

Check out this funny story from Reddit’s “Malicious Compliance” page.

We think you’ll get a kick out of it!

Landlord wanted us to mow the lawn.

“In college, I rented a house with a couple of roommates.

We probably should have looked into the landlord a bit further before renting.

But it was a bit of a small college town where the college had outgrown the available housing, so we were desperate for whatever we could get.

Yikes…

Shortly after signing the lease, a family member sent me an article about what a slumlord the landlord was. But there wasn’t much to do about it at that point.

In the end, they were slow and cheap about fixing things, but they pretty much left us alone, unlike some of the other college town landlords. So it wasn’t too bad.

The house had a small back yard. I believe that the yard had once contained a lawn.

But one of the consequences of the landlords refusing to put any time or money into the place was that, when we moved in, the whole backyard was just a sea of tall weeds.

This didn’t really bother us, so we just left it.

But there was a problem…

But apparently it bothered one of our neighbors, because they went to our landlord, who sent us a letter telling us that, according to the lease, it was our responsibility to take care of it.

I feel a bit bad for the neighbor here, because they did have to live near this eyesore. But we didn’t create the problem.

And we didn’t feel like it was our job to do something about it.

So we took a look at the lease and found that it said (I’m paraphrasing here; this was a while ago), “It is the tenant’s responsibility to mow the lawn.”

After spending some time thinking about this, we came to the conclusion that what we had couldn’t rightly be called a lawn.

LOL.

And the lease only specified that we were responsible for mowing the lawn.

So we sent back a letter saying, “We would be happy to mow the lawn, if you would provide us with one”.

We really didn’t want to have to mow a lawn.

We didn’t have a mower, and I’m sure that the landlord would not have provided us with one.

But, by that point, we had become familiar with how cheap and lazy they were, and we bet that they would rather ignore our neighbor than either argue with us about it or replace the weeds with a lawn.

And we appear to have been correct, because we lived there for probably another 3 and a half years and we never heard another word about it.”

Reddit users shared their thoughts.

This person chimed in.

Another Reddit user shared a story.

This individual spoke up.

Another reader shared their thoughts.

And this reader had a lot to say.

That was some pretty great malicious compliance!

Everyone on Reddit loves to see it.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a rude customer who got exactly what they wanted in their pizza.