Assistant Goes Full-Petty While Packing Boss’s Divorce Items – and His Ex Still Emails Complaints Years Later

When her boss handed her a clipboard and told her she had been assigned a strange new task, she never expected it would turn into the most memorable act of workplace pettiness she had ever carried out.

The year was 2018, the middle of a long and ugly divorce between her boss and his soon to be ex-wife, who had left him after an affair and had spent months slipping in and out of the house to quietly take things that were not hers.

Eventually, the court stepped in and required the ex-wife to create a detailed list of belongings she wanted returned. Instead of choosing a reasonable selection of items, she created a list so hilariously petty that even her own lawyer commented on it.

And somewhere between the mismatched dish towels, the lonely paper plate holders, and the single saucepan, the narrator decided that if the game was going to be petty, she was going to play it better.

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Everything began when the court required the ex-wife to walk through the house and identify which items were hers. Instead of listing things like furniture or meaningful personal belongings, she declared she wanted half of nearly everything in sight.

Half of the dish towels. Half of the storage containers. Half the pots and pans. Even the curtains in the lounge. Her list looked less like a legal document and more like someone angrily dividing a grocery store.

Because she had spent the previous months sneaking items out of the house, her boss refused to let her come inside to pack the items herself. He did not trust her not to take more than she claimed.

So the task fell to his assistant. The narrator did what any loyal employee with too much free time and a strong sense of justice would do. She followed the list exactly, but she followed it in the pettiest way possible.

The ex-wife requested one saucepan. The narrator picked up both, shook them, and handed over the one with the loose handle. She wanted the curtains, but she did not ask for the hooks, so the narrator removed every single one.

She asked for half of the dish towels, so she received the ugly, stained, mismatched pile while the nice coordinated set stayed exactly where it was. She wanted half of the storage containers, but she never specified anything about the contents, so she received empty containers and nothing else.

Item by item, line by line, the narrator matched every request with absolute precision and maximum annoyance. If the ex-wife did not specify quality, condition, or accessories, she did not receive them.

By the time everything was boxed up, even the narrator’s boss could only shake his head and smile at how perfectly the pettiness matched the situation.

The aftermath was just as entertaining. Once the ex-wife collected her belongings, she immediately sent a long, furious letter through her lawyer insisting that the items she received were not what she had listed.

She complained that things were missing, incomplete, or not the version she expected.

The narrator and her boss went through the entire list slowly and methodically, confirming that they had given her exactly what she wrote down and nothing more. If she wanted better items, she should have been clearer.

Their divorce finalized in 2019, but the entertainment did not stop there. Even years later, stray emails still show up demanding items she believes were withheld back in 2018.

The narrator described it as a warm, glowing kind of satisfaction, the kind that comforts the soul on a cold morning. She did not act alone, she says, nor did she sabotage a kind stranger.

She simply mirrored the ex-wife’s own behavior and made sure that every ounce of pettiness was returned in equal measure.

Take a look at the comments from fellow users:

Many users shared their own experiences with messy divorces, petty exes, and delightfully inconvenient item division. 

Others asked whether the boss knew how petty she had actually been.

More than a few praised her for sticking to the exact wording of the list, something many commenters considered a loophole masterpiece.

Divorce can bring out the worst in people, and item division often reveals exactly how far someone is willing to go to feel like they have “won.”

In this case, the ex-wife’s attempt to nickel-and-dime her way through the house backfired when someone with a better eye for small details took control of the packing.

Sometimes the fairest solution is simply to give someone precisely what they asked for, even if what they asked for was poorly thought out. It might not fix a broken marriage, but it can certainly deliver a satisfying sense of closure.