You'd be surprised.

Sure, I can't be too blunt about it, but if my manager makes my life difficult, then I'm not going to do the thousand little things I usually do to ease their path.

One example not too long ago was that a task wasn't communicated to me by my manager so my manager skipped about 3 levels of authority to tell a high-level manager that I wasn't doing my job and that was why her projects were doing poorly.

So I just...stopped smoothing over her breaches in policy and picking up her slack. I didn't do anything, I just stopped doing things she'd never asked me to do, and never knew I did. It ended with her losing major points with the people she'd talked to about me, having another resource allocated to her projects (because I was already 100% booked), and her having to take on all the blame for the stuff she screwed up on.

Tit for tat isn't always as straightforward as it sounds.