Everyone’s an expert, huh?

It sure seems like it these days!

But then there are always stories like this one that remind us that nobody really knows what the hell they’re doing, even if they pretend they do.

Read on and get a healthy dose of malicious compliance.

Gravel compliance.

“I used to work in a small gravel pit as a loader operator, most of the time it was loading dumptrucks with 10 yd3 of gravel.

At least once a week though some hillbilly would come in with his old beat up pickup and ask to have me load it up with gravel. This is a terrible idea. Pit run gravel weighs about 3000 lbs per yd3.

Not a good idea!

A small pickup bed can fit as much as 2yds of gravel but this will crush the truck under that weight. I always explain this and invariably I get a response of “just do it gently and I’ll tell you when to stop filling.”

I’m pretty handy with the loader but there really isn’t a way to be gentle with gravel because it doesn’t pour like water, as I tilt the buck down nothing will happen until a huge chunk sluffs off all at once.

I can jiggle the bucket a little to knock small amounts loose at a time but it’s still a huge amount of weight dropping from 3 or 4 feet above the truck.

As soon as the first pile of gravel drops into the truck the truck driver’s eyes go budlgy as they see their tires bulging out and the bed squat down nearly to the ground. I’ve never seen these guys come back for a second trip.

Presumably they get wherever they are going and then realize moving 800 lbs of gravel out of the pickup bed by hand sucks a lot lol. That or they break down under the strain.

But the piece de resistance was the day a garbage truck pulled in. This was the kind of garbage truck that hauls a large trash box on the back of a flatbed.

Not the little boxes you see behind Wendy’s these are big trash bins for commercial sites. The truck normally drops the boxes off then come back when it’s full and winch the box back up on to the truck and haul it off.

I hop down from the loader and ask what I can do for them.

“We’re gonna drop this box down by the gravel there, we want you to put 12 yds of gravel in it.”

Are you sure about that?

Doing the math real quick, they want 36,000 lbs of gravel… there is no way in hell that trash truck can winch that much weight back up on the truck. It’s a single axle truck, that much weight is normally hauled by a truck with four axles.

“Sir, are you SURE you can pick it back up with that much weight?”

This is where he crossed my personal line of respect. He snaps his fingers to cut me off, “I know what I’m doing, I’ve filled that box up with concrete before and lifted it no problem. just do it.”

“Well, if your wrong there is nothing I can do to pull the gravel back out…”

“I don’t have time to waste discussing it with a gravel boy, let’s go.”

It’s no wonder he’s so full of ****, what else would a giant jerk be filled with? I nearly knocked my self unconscious with the power of my salute and jumped up into the loader.

I loaded him the same way I’d have loaded any other truck, one scoop toward the back of the box, one towards the front, and finish with one in the middle.

Things were looking good, I hopped down with invoice in hand to watch the show. The guy hadn’t even acknowledged me, as soon as I pulled the loader away he was already backing his truck up to the box.

This wasn’t gonna be good.

With total confidence he hooks up his truck winch to the trash box full of rock and sand. Winds the winch tight… then for a moment you could hear the winch struggle, then woooooop the front of his truck sprang up off the ground about 6 feet!

The guy shut it down and lowered his truck back to the ground, the box had not budged an inch. I was struggling so hard to keep a flat face.

Immediately he came rushing over to me “You overloaded it! You idiot! There is no way that is 12 yds. You need to fix it!”

“Sir, the bucket on the loader is 4yds, 3 scoops for a total of 12 yds. There is no way I overloaded you. As I said before, there is no way for me to get the gravel back out once it’s in there, the box isn’t deep enough for me to scoop from.”

“Well, what am I supposed to do now?”

“I recommend a shovel.”

Yikes!

And that’s just what he did.

He left and came back with a couple more guys and shovels, and for three days I got to watch them shovel their mistake by hand while all the truck drivers who came in to buy materials would stop to take pictures.

When they had finally moved enough material out of one end they opened other end up and I lifted the light end with the loader to pour the remaining gravel out.

They promptly packed up and peeled out. Never saw them again but I do get a warm feeling every time I see one of those trash trucks now.”

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Another Reddit user was impressed.

And this reader had a different take on things.

This is what happens when you don’t listen…

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.