Imagine being a business owner and coming up with a great workaround to make it easier to keep the windows of your store clean. If a neighboring business owner wanted you to help them by cleaning their windows, would you do it, refuse, or find a way to make them regret ever asking you to clean their windows?

In this story, one woman chooses the last option, and it’s an annoying, time consuming and expensive fix for the entitled neighboring business.

Let’s read the whole story.

Insulting me won’t get your windows cleaned

This happened last week. My client (C, 25F) is a store owner of a fancy boutique store in an awesome off main street in one of the larger European cities.

It might be off main street, their street has been consistently voted the most fancied streets of the city. Due to the original middle age building, the overhanging plants and the general good, relaxing vibes that hang there.

One of the downsides of the overhanging plants in the street is that during the seasons the windows of the stores tend to get really dirty real fast. Plant seeds tend to stick to the windows, leaving stains.

That means you have to clean your windows by daily.

This business owner found a very smart way to avoid cleaning her windows every day.

Now onto the story:

C is a smart woman. When she mops the windows of her store, she adds a chemical to her soap. Some coat that makes the seeds not stick to the windows.

This means she only has to clean her windows once per week. Sometimes even less.

Her neighbouring store owner Karen (K, 40F) noticed and one day when C is doing her cleaning routine, K comes storming out.

K wanted to know C’s secret.

This is the convo that follows:

K: How do you keep your windows so clean? I demand to know.

C: I add some expensive coating to the water.

K: *thinking about this* So, in your current water is that coating?

C; Yes

K has quite some nerve to expect C to help her.

K: Great, let me know when your done with my windows.

C: Why would I clean your windows?

K: Because, as the senior storeowner of this street, I deserve it.

C: Will you reimburse my time?

K: Don’t be silly, my store attracts so many consumers to the street, I pay to with that clientele.

C was NOT going to clean K’s windows.

C: *realising their stores sell VERY different products* So, you want me to do it for free?

K: So you youngsters do manage to understand (insert local non-english language). Good, off you go. Let me know when it’s done.

At this point C is shocked at the entitlement and decides there and then to take revenge for the disrespect.

She cleans and dries her own windows. And when she’s done, she throws the remaining water against the windows of K’s store. She even goes out of her way to make another bucket of water to throw to the remaining windows of K’s store and goes back to business. Sounds innocent enough right?

C knew that she was creating a BIG problem for K.

Wrong, C knows that if you don’t dry the windows after washing them you’ll get stains. However, the chemical that C adds to coat her windows hardens those stains.

Meaning: you can hose them down, but once the windows dries. The stains returns. This continues to happens, until the coating to completely removed from the windows. Which takes about 6 months.

K didn’t dried her windows and she threatened legal action against C.

That never happend. What did happen was that K got a professional window cleaner to get rid of the coating. It took them three cleaning sessions to do it. Setting K back several hundred euro’s.

Moral of the story: insulting C will make you windows look dirty for a long time.

I can’t believe K would actually expect C to clean her windows for her for free. That’s insane! Good for C for humoring her while getting revenge.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

This person loves the revenge.

Another person rants about “idiots.”

It doesn’t pay to be lazy.

But this person thought what C did was wrong.

Expecting someone to work for free often backfires.

If you liked that post, check out this story about a guy who was forced to sleep on the couch at his wife’s family’s house, so he went to a hotel instead.