Imagine living in a house with a driveway, but the street parking is such that you can’t park there during certain times of day. What would you do if your landlord’s father parked in your driveway, forcing you to find somewhere else to park?

In this story, several friends are in this situation, and they aren’t sure what to do at first. Then they have an idea, and with a little retro research, they’re able to pull it off.

Let’s read all about it.

Screwing over landlord’s stupid father who parks on our driveway.

The story starts four years ago. I was living with two friends in London within a two minute walk from a popular underground station.

We all were and still are teachers, but not at the same school. This will all be relevant later.

We were renting from a friend of a friend who was abroad for the year.

Here’s the parking situation.

Our house had a drive with two parking spaces, which was convenient as we had two cars between the three of us and parking on the road was somewhat restricted.

To prevent people from driving to a road near the station, parking and then taking the train to commute to work, all the surrounding area including our road had non restricted parking except for in two time slots. Between 12 and 1 and 5 and 6.

So you could park most of the time, but you could never leave the car on the road for more than a few hours or you’d get a ticket.

Here’s where we get to the problem.

Our problems arose early on, not with our landlord as you might expect, but with landlord’s stupid father, henceforth known as LSF.

LSF lived in the same area, but a twenty minute walk away from the station as opposed to our two minutes.

We quickly found that he was driving to the station and parking on what used to be his son’s but what was now our drive. Either because he didn’t want to walk the 20 minutes or because he wanted to avoid the expensive official station car park.

It went something like this.

The timing is important.

7am. We leave the house to get to school, leaving both drive ways empty.

8am. LSF leaves for work, finds our driveway devoid of cars, and parks on our drive.

5pm. We come home from school and find LSF’s car on our drive.

One of us parks in the other space, the other cannot park on the road for another hour without getting ticketed. So we’d have to go and try and find another road to park in without the restricted parking (not likely), circle for the hour, or just cross our fingers and risk getting a ticket.

None of the options were ideal and it varied which one we went for.

The landlord wasn’t much help.

7.30pm LSF returns, takes his car off the drive and we can then fetch our car and put it back on the drive.

We went through all the usual channels first. Leaving a polite note on the windscreen, leaving less than polite notes on the windscreen.

Soon, we called our landlord and asked him to speak to his father.

Whilst he took our side though, our landlord clearly didn’t have much of a spine and this failed to get LSF off our drive either.

The landlord’s dad was completely unreasonable.

Eventually, we lie in wait one evening for him to come and collect his car so that we can speak to him in person ourselves. The conversation goes something like this.

Us: Excuse me, LSF, but it’s very inconvenient for you to keep parking here. And our tenancy clearly includes use of the double driveway.

LSF: I helped pay for the deposit on this house. I’ll park here if I bloody well like.

Us: So what do you expect us to do then?

LSF: Not my problem. Find somewhere else. I don’t care where.

They come up with a plan.

This is where the malicious compliance comes in.

We know full well that LSF lives somewhere in the neighbourhood. What if we park on his drive and give him a taste of his own medicine.

We can just imagine it now. LSF leaving our drive, driving home, only to find his own drive occupied.

We think it’s a genius plan. The only problem is that we don’t know where the jerk lives, but we shrug those concerns off. Nothing a bit of old internet digging won’t fix.

Sometimes it can be helpful to have parents who never throw anything away.

So we start our research.

We search for this guys last name in conjunction with our local area and whilst we find several old newspaper articles with our landlord in as he used to be part of the neighbourhood watch, we find nothing on his father, except dodgy looking websites which want us to pay a fee for his telephone number and address.

We’re on the verge of giving up when it hits me. If the internet can’t help us, we’re going to have to get a bit old school.

I call up my parents who live a few miles away, but in the same borough. And at the back of their dusty cupboard, they find the answer to my hopes and prayers. Obsolete and untouched for ten years or more, it’s the phone book.

They got the information they needed.

And as luck would have it, LSF is in it. Telephone number, and most importantly address.

We put our plan into action that next evening.

We come home from work, and as usual LSF’s car is on our drive.

Tonight, we don’t circle for an hour. Tonight we drive to his address and park it squarely on his empty driveway.

I love their note!

And on the windscreen, we leave a note. “As suggested, we parked somewhere else”.

He never parked on our driveway again.

We later found out from the landlord that he got a ticket from parking on his road, which had permit-only parking for the people without driveways.

That’s karma for you.

That was a great and easy revenge strategy. Who knew an old phone book would save the day!

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

This person would’ve handled it differently.

They could’ve done some heavy lifting.

Or perhaps accomplish the same thing about the workout.

I’m assuming because if they followed him he might be suspicious that they were up to something.

Giving someone a taste of their own medicine can be quite effective.

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