rSlash - r/Pettyrevenge Payback on Karen Neighbor

Episode Date: September 18, 2026

0:00 Intro 0:08 Rental 6:26 Doctorate 7:51 Stood up 10:54 BF 13:16 Mint seeds 14:31 Chest Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Follow Funny You Ask with Ike Barrenholtz on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to R-Slaughty Revenge, where OP gets revenge against her, Karen, neighbor. Our next Reddit post is from Pepper Steak Headshot. Years ago, I rented a duplex from a very nice owner. He was honest and reasonable. I put a healthy security deposit down and moved in. Unfortunately, he was not my day-to-day contact. That was the delightful and charming, Giselle. She was the on-site landlord. I found out later that she was a tenant whom the owner made an arrangement with. In return for cutting her rent in half, a sweet gig. She collected and deposited the rental checks, arranged repairs, and handled any other day-to-day things.

The neighborhood had about five duplexes owned by this man. Giselle hated me from day one. And what's more, she lived in the other half of the duplex. You know all the nightmare, petty landlord stuff you see in this subreddit? Giselle ticked off all the boxes. HOA-style Karen obsessed with the rules, yelled at my friend for parking an inch over on her side of the duplex. My phone or doorbell rang if my place wasn't stone quiet a minute after quiet time.

Rental checks I dropped in the same mail slot I always did somehow got lost. Appliances and things not fixed in anything resembling a timely manner. It was more annoying than awful. I told myself I could live with it as I was going to be moving closer to my job after my lease ran out. Later, I found out why she hates me. She wanted a friend of hers to move into the duplex that, got. But the owner said no because her credit check was awful and mine was sparkling. So she just wanted to make my life miserable out of pure spite. As the end of my lease grew closer, I noticed my

water heater was leaking. I dried the floor around it and then put some tiles down. Then I emailed Giselle. I'd wised up and started a digital trail by then. No response. A week later, I re-forwarded the email with the friendly, you may have missed the but this could be a real problem. No response. I sent another email with, I had a friend who's a plumber look at it, and he recommended immediately, blah, blah, blah.

Finally, she responded with, I'll look into it, and nothing else. She was just trying to run out the clock on me. It had been about a month now, and I was just a few weeks away from moving out. I saw Giselle watering her flowers and approached her and mentioned it. She blew me off, but finished the conversation with a threat.

I hope you're keeping it clean around there. I'm a stickler when it comes to final inspection. If you want to get any of your deposit back, you better be ready to pass a white glove inspection. Okay, then, that's how we're going to play it. Fine. I was trying to figure out how I would get petty revenge. About a week later, right before my last rent check was due,

I happened to see the owner in the neighborhood. Giselle was nowhere to be found. And that's when it struck me how I could all make this work. I went out to say hello and tell him thanks for renting to me that I appreciated that. He was very friendly, said he was sorry I was leaving, and if I needed anything to let him know. Checkmate. I asked him if he had a few minutes to come in and do the security deposit inspection. He said, sure, and we went into my place together. As we were walking around looking at things, he was all positive. Yep, looks great. Yep, no issues there.

Then we came to the water heater. I paused dramatically and great. Gravely said, I hope we can come to some kind of understanding about the floor around the water heater. I opened the closet doors and showed him. I told him what I'd been doing to fight the leak. I pulled up the sopping wet towels that I'd put down the night before, and I told him that I have experience with mold and that it was nasty stuff. He got quiet and said, have you told Giselle about this? Why, yes, I did, and here are copies of the emails I sent to her. He read them, and then noticed I kept them in a file folder. He looked at me and said, are there other things that haven't been fixed? I showed him a few other emails I'd collected. He got beat red in the face and said,

okay. I think with what I've seen, I'm fine with releasing your full security deposit. In that moment, it struck me. I had one more rent check due, 750 bucks. I said, how about instead of me writing you a check for 750 and you writing me a check for $500 security deposit, I just write you a check for $250 and we call it even. He shrugged, said sure, he signed the paperwork and then left. A few days later, I dropped my check for $250 in the mail slot. Later that evening, Giselle pounded on my door, foaming at the mouth about how I didn't write a full check. She can get me evicted if I don't write a check for the full amount right effing now. I explained, conveniently omitting that the owner had done the inspection, that 750 bucks minus my security deposit of $500 was $250. Jazelle's eyes widened as her brain

tried to comprehend what I'd said. She nearly exploded yelling about me about how that's not how things are done. You have to obey the rules like everyone else. I have the final say, because I do the inspections. Friends, she literally had spittle flying out of her mouth. She was so enraged. I calmly told her that the owner had done the inspection and signed off on the payment arrangement and I told her to talk to him, and to get off my porch and quit bothering me. And I very slowly closed the door on her. Again, her brain froze, and she went into lockdown trying to process what I just said. That was an image I'll remember forever. Before I moved out, the owner came by to ask if he could come in and fix the water heater for the next tenant. I said, sure. As he was working, we talked a little, and he mentioned

that his daughter was moving into my place, and that she was going to take over the on-site landlord duties. I asked about Giselle. The owner simply said that she's going to be moving out. She decided she couldn't afford to pay the full rent anymore. Ah, that double stings. Not only do you lose your job, but you lose your apartment along with it. Our next Reddit post is from Just Fives. My stepdad has a much larger age gap with his siblings, which makes my aunt about the same age as me. She went on to earn her PhD in veterinary medicine,

and good for her. I earned a master's of social work because that was all I needed at the time of my career, and I had a lot going on in my life. Fast forward several years. My grandfather, who was a veteran, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and needed all the help he could get. I was helping him navigate veteran affairs,

Medicare, home health services, and other aspects of his care. As a veteran myself, I was already familiar with the VA, and as a master's level social worker, I knew a thing or two about coordinating these services. In the middle of all this, my aunt started arguing with me.

She insisted that someone with a doctor title should really be in charge. Even though she was fighting against her own father's wishes and making the situation much more difficult. I finally said, you know what, I'm getting my doctorate just to spite her. My grandfather was so proud that he bragged about it to the whole family. My greatest achievement wasn't just earning my doctor of social work.

It was that my grandfather was able to see me graduate and that I was able to help care for him at the end of his life. To the top comments, you should have told her that you'd let her know if your grandfather needed deworming. Our next Reddit post is from I Don't Want to Sign In. I have worked in an office where they promoted a very new, unexperienced, unqualified suck-up from an entry-level guy to team lead. One of three under the manager.

There were roughly 30 people on the team. HR rules stated that he wasn't allowed to apply due to having been at the company for less than a year, had zero leadership experience, etc. Grievances were filed with HR and dropped despite multiple, fully qualified individuals with spotless records being in the running. He was known to be a suck-up and wasn't really liked prior to his promotion. After the promotion, he was wildly hated,

apart from a couple of sycophants. Quite entertaining in retrospect, how people will degrade themselves for the barest scraps of power. Anyways, middle management knew that he was reviled and told him he had to find a way to get people to like him. His solution was, not required, but you should think of them as required.

Happy hours every month. For the first one, most people felt like they had to go and started figuring out how to fit it into their schedule. Some of these people had an hour drive each way and were finding babysitters for their kids. These people were terrified they would lose their jobs if they missed drinking a few beers with the boss. I knew my rights and declined the invite. He came to my cube a few times the day of to try to pressure me into being there. Dude, there's no way I'm spending my free time with work people. You can either keep me on the clock or you can't ask me to be there. I know my rights. I liked my team members well enough.

I'd been to parties at their house, etc. But I'm not going out with the team lead under any circumstances. The team lead did not like that and walked away in a huff. Next day, everyone comes in and is pretending like they had fun when it's very clear they're just trying to get away from team leads attempts at chumming with them. Around 10, we have a stand-up, and he talks about how great it was to have everyone at this thing. Then he singles me out, talks about how antisocial I am, and how management notices when people aren't team players. Don't skip required events, etc.

Loll, okay, dude. About 20 minutes later, I email the entire team. Hey everyone. Team lead asked me about required after-work events that are unpaid, so I figured I'd share with everyone. State statute such and such says that hourly employees like us cannot be required to go to these sorts of things without being on the clock. So if you can't find a sitter and can't make it, you don't need to worry at all. Totally friendly, totally non-confrontational, totally effective. The team lead sat by himself at the bar for the next two. Required but not required happy hours,

and he had to find another way to force people to like him. Hey, here's a crazy way to get people to like you. Stop being a douchebag. Ever tried that on for size? Our next Reddit post is from Great Value Pacemaker. Ever since I, a woman, was about 16, any guy I brought home to the family would instantly get judged and questioned into oblivion. They'd grill the poor guy about it.

his job, college, outfit, haircut, build, etc. Obviously, this ruined any relationship I had. Eventually, I just started informing any guy things got serious with, if they didn't fit my family's mold, that he would never be introduced to my family, and they can never know he exists. Obviously, I provided more context than that, but that tended to slowly ruin things as well, cut to about two months ago. I was doing my thing, living my life, spending time with a guy who was pretty nice. Except I made a deadly mistake. I posted him on my story and someone saw. At the dinner table, not even 24 hours later, the family starts grilling me about him. Why I chose that one, their words and the like. An idea popped into my head. I realized there were about eight people in

the room. I realized some of those eight people need to sober up, but, before they can drive home. When my aunt asked me why I'm going out with one of those types again, I blurted out, Oh, his dick is huge! Q dropped forks, Q horrified stairs, Q calling Ubers,

Q swiftly chugged glasses of wine, it was almost a full 30 seconds of silence. They don't ask me who I'm dating anymore. I feel like I should mention this did have some consequences, the family group chat was blowing up for like a week. I could have gotten kicked out, and they tried to ground me, an adult. But before that day, I never knew that someone could be so desperate to leave an awkward family dinner that they would call a cab.

Still worth it. Down in the comments, we have this story from uneffed the world. Whenever I would bring a boyfriend around family functions, my grandma would start nagging me about when I was going to have a baby. I've been pretty dead set on being child-free since I was in my early 20s. At my college grad celebration, I finally hit her with, You know, Grams, I don't know when I'm going to have a baby, but we sure spend a lot of time practicing making one.

My mother was quite displeased with me, but Grams never asked again. Our next Reddit post is from the Brontosaurus. There's a dangerous driver in my neighborhood. He absolutely flies down my street. There are frequently children playing on the sidewalks and running across the street between houses. I'm frequently worried one of them is going to be.

be hit. He also, twice this year, has blown through a stop sign nearly hitting my car. In April, while walking my dog, I saw the same car fly through a stop sign and pull into his garage. He may be a terrible driver, but he had a beautiful lawn. So, twice a day, I walk my dog past his house. This has always been the routine, but now, on the shelf next to the poop bags, I have a package of peppermint seeds. As I walk past his house, I subtly sprinkle or flick these tiny seeds into his lawn. For those who don't know, mint is a very prolific grower and an aggressive spreader. Even a tiny fragment of root can grow into a new plant. Once roots are in the soil, it'll continue to multiply until every last bit of root is removed. His once

perfect grass has been covered in little plants all summer. It looks like he's spraying and mowing, but not pulling it up by the root, so next year he'll have twice as much. Our next Reddit post is from the Red Queen Theory. I was at a bar waiting for my husband, wearing a somewhat low-cut blouse for him because it was our anniversary and we were going out for dinner after. This was about a year after my double mastectomy for hereditary breast cancer, and my new breast didn't quite look natural yet as they were still just settling in and looking buoyant. I heard a group of grown women and men sitting beside me, drunk, not caring about how loud they were, commenting on my breasts and saying how they hated women who had fake breasts,

and how the women who had them themselves were fake, and on and on. I finally turned to them and said, You know what I hate more than fake breasts? They were silent. Breast cancer, I said. They mumbled amongst themselves, and someone said, Oh, sorry, and they left shortly after. My husband arrived, and we had a good laugh.

Don't judge, you might not know the whole story. This top comment, Nice, a friend of mine has a T-shirt that says, Yes, they're fake. The real ones tried to kill me. That was our slash Petty Revenge. And if you like this content, be sure to follow my podcast

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