There is something delightful about kids getting the best of their parents, even once you’ve long passed the age where you’ve officially switched teams.

You gotta give those teens the high-fives when they earn them, right?

This young teenager often helped his dad around the house.

This happened back when the earth was young and MTV still played music videos in the ancient age known as 1997.

I was 13 and spending yet another weekend helping my dad with yard work and home improvement projects.

He liked it, but that didn’t mean he was always going to have a good attitude.

(Not complaining, I learned a lot about home repair and rather than get a regular teen job in retail my dad paid me to assist him up until I left for college).

Now just because I didn’t hate it doesn’t mean I was a little 13 year old git however.

One day, he was digging holes for posts.

On this day we were putting up a trellis in the garden for plants to grow up.

Simple job, sink two posts, cement them in place and fit the trellis between them.

My dad gave me a post hole digger, which if you’re not familiar with looks like someone glued chopsticks to a pistachio shell so you could open and close it with a hinge .

He showed me the spot for the first post and said dig it as deep as you can.

His dad told him his first attempt wasn’t deep enough, and to keep digging.

So I went and made a foot deep hole thinking that was enough to sink the 6 foot posts we had.

He comes back and tells me not to be lazy and dig deeper, in fact “keep digging until I tell you it’s deep enough”.

So, this kid really went to town.

So that’s where my malicious compliance came in, I knew he would be back from the garage in about half an hour so I went to town on this hole.

I didn’t stop for a break and just kept digging until the post hole digger fit in the hole completely and I couldn’t open it to lift dirt out.

At that point I taped a spade to a branch and made the hole even deeper.

When he came back he said something along the lines of “let’s see if you did it properly this time” and he drops the 6 foot post into the hole where it promptly disappears.

The dad, thankfully, has a sense of humor.

There was a momentary look of shock on his face then he started laughing, like bent over, can’t catch your breath laughing.

To this day I have never seen the man laugh as hard as that. When he was done he told me that I guess I did what he told me but now I would have to figure out how to fish the post out of the hole.

Luckily it was only a foot or so below the surface and we got it out easily enough.

To this day my dad still tells this story as a warning about giving vague instructions.

I bet this story delights Reddit, too!

The top commenter loves this story.

This person complimented the poster on their writing style.

The mental image really is pretty great.

Everyone loves a little wholesome compliance.

Imagine that!

Kids like this are not a dime a dozen.

I’m happy the dad seems to know he got a good egg.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a daughter who invited herself to her parents’ 40th anniversary vacation for all the wrong reasons.