December 15, 2025 at 11:35 am

A Business Owner’s Customer Paid Off A Bill $1 At A Time To Be Petty, But He Paid Extra Money One Time And It Cost Him $35 To Stop Payment With His Bank

by Matthew Gilligan

Shutterstock/Reddit

Some people just can’t help their pettiness!

It’s ingrained in their DNA and it just comes pouring out if they feel that they’ve been wrong in any way.

Take a look at what this Reddit user had to say about a customer who can only be described as P-E-T-T-Y.

My New Favorite Customer.

“I own and run a residential / light commercial HVAC contracting company.

We have a customer, we’ll call him Tom, that contacted us for a residential breakdown.

Tom told us that he had a home warranty and we informed him that their repayment policy is often different than our billing rates and that, regardless of their payment, he would be individually responsible for the full amount of the bill.

The repair was a smallish fix for just $228. Bear in mind that home warranty companies are notoriously stingy with payments, if they pay at all. We won’t work directly with them for this reason.

Tom still owed some money…

Sure enough, the home warranty company paid only $153 of the invoice, leaving a balance due of $75.

Tom wasn’t happy about having to pay this bill, so he began paying us $1 per week automatically by check through his online banking platform.

Neither I nor my bookkeeper were exactly excited by this (because it takes the same amount of her time to process a $1 check as it does a $1,000 check), but we decided to take our lumps.

LOL.

Here we are now exactly 76 weeks later, and Mr. Tom has accidentally paid us $1 too much — so he put a stop payment on the final $1 check.

I actually made it a point to look up the stop check payment policy from his bank and saw that he would have had to pay $35 to do this.

I honestly have nothing but respect for this amount of spite.”

Check out what people had to say on Reddit.

This person had a lot to say.