It is a truth universally acknowledged that the people doing the work on a daily basis are the people best equipped to know how to do the work.

In the same way that everyone know you don’t step into a new position and start changing things without talking to anyone first – or at least, they should.

OP was wearing a bunch of hats working for an audio-visual company. They had been added slowly, and like the frog that didn’t know it was being boiled, OP was soon running too many things for not enough pay.

I worked at a small AV company, we dealt with thousands of NEC displays every year and management had absolutely no idea how to deal with the waste from each job mainly polystyrene. We use to throw it in the skip job done gets taken away.

The company hired a new general manager, Martin his name was who worked with me for 2 months, at this job I ran many roles as it was a small company.

I was busy all day every day with warehouse management, PC configuration/IT support and also working in accounts with purchasing and ordering stock etc (My pay didn’t even cover warehouse management let alone any of the other jobs)

When a new manager was assigned, they took a look at things and decided the priority needed to be saving space in the waste bin.

Martin decided to e-mail me with a request on how I should manage the job that I had been working at for 5+ years and knew like the back of my hand. Martin’s top priority on the email was cutting the polystyrene into small squares to save space in the bins…..yep

I emailed Martin back to explain that if I’m standing there cutting Polystyrene cubes into small squares then most of my work time would be spent doing that and leaving no time for anything else.

He replied by saying that it should still be the top priority on my things to do, so yeah I took that literally.

OP complied, and everything fell apart while he spent all of his hours cutting trash into smaller pieces of trash to save on bin space.

Nothing got done, no stock orders, no kit preparation, no deliveries, no PC builds, I couldn’t fetch anything down from the racks on the forklift (I was the only one trained to do so) absolutely nothing was done apart from cutting polystyrene into small cubes.

Martin even brought in his own saw from home to help me save time cutting the polystyrene up.

Of course, the manager was freaking out when nothing got done and tried to blame OP. They were called into a disciplinary meeting.

2 days went by, I had cut over 100+ blocks of polystyrene into small squares to save room in the bin, everything in the company was falling to crap and Martin came down in a panic.

Nothing had been done like I said as I didn’t have the time if I cut the polystyrene into small squares, so I ended up having an argument with Martin in the warehouse asking about am I cutting polystyrene into small squares.

Martin said it was to save money on buying skips, then I pointed out that they have paid me more than an extra collection over 2 days of cutting the polystyrene up…he walked off

A day later I receive an email from my other manager who was higher up than Martin which basically said I have a disciplinary meeting at lunch time that day….my reply was obviously no, I needed time to prepare what I was going to say and made them push it back a week.

So, OP came prepared and absolutely hung them all out to dry.

I collected statements on my work from all my colleagues that were willing, some even confronted Martin and called him an idiot which quite rightly, he was.

I collected my years work, every job, every PC configuration, every order, every delivery, every kit prep etc everything was piled into 6 folders of crap to throw at them.

So I had my disciplinary meeting and threw everything at them and they were absolutely speechless with all the stuff I was doing and that I had been told to prioritize cutting polystyrene into small cubes to save on bin space.

When asked if I had any questions I asked one that shut them up instantly “What risk assessment was carried out before asking an employee to cut up bonded polystyrene and what PPE was provided?”

I have a recording of the meeting and every single manager sat there in silence, my question went unanswered and one said “We’ll answer that in our report” which I never received.

Eventually he moved on and the manager was replaced by a computer.

Anyway, Martin was made redundant soon after, he was asked to drop his work equipment to me at the office…….he sent it with a courier instead.

They have hired 3 people to run the warehouse alone. I’ve been gone for 18 months and their profits are down a stupid amount, not sure why they have so many working only the warehouse but oh well.

I wonder if people on Reddit can relate.

The top commenter can’t get over the saw.

People are just not going to tolerate things the way they used to.

You have to keep the eye on the prize.

It’s a tale as old as time.

But we all need to learn when to say no.

This is a pretty common tale, I’m afraid.

At least OP stood up for himself when it counted.

If you liked that post, check out this story about a customer who insists that their credit card works, and finds out that isn’t the case.