I like a company more when they have a good sense of humor, and the person telling this story certainly seems likable.

He works at an HVAC company, and he tells a story about how a customer was upset with the home warranty company but kind of took it out on his own company.

Instead of being resentful, he actually likes what the customer did.

Let’s read all the details.

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 home warranty company didn’t pay the entire 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.

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

Tom got petty.

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.

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.

OP respects Tom’s pettiness.

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.

That’s funny and clever revenge.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

Here’s the perspective of a small business owner.

Tom isn’t a great customer.

This business owner wouldn’t do business with Tom.

He’s getting revenge on the wrong company.

This person would get revenge on Tom.

He’s annoying the wrong company.

If you liked that story, check out this post about a group of employees who got together and why working from home was a good financial decision.