Do yourself and everyone else a favor by letting experts do their jobs!

If you hire someone to do a job, don’t assume you know more than they do.

This guy shares how his clients didn’t trust him and ended up ruining everything!

Check it out!

Dump Truck Delivery

20+ years ago now, I worked at a landscaping supply business driving a dump truck.

I’ve been a software engineer for most of the time since, but at that time, well, mistakes were made and I spent a few years driving a truck.

These were single axle trucks, 26,000Lbs gross.

We often overloaded them by about a ton.

Mascoutah was on the edge of the area we often delivered to and we occasionally took rock or mulch to the Highschool there.

This is where it gets bad.

I arrived one day with probably four or five tons of top-soil.

If I recall correctly I had to drive around the school and find someone. I suspect I had been instructed on where to meet people and those people weren’t there.

I asked after the name I had on the delivery ticket — it was written on there like I should know who they were — when I found someone behind the school and was informed that it was a math or physics (I don’t recall but something STEM related) teacher I was looking for.

He wanted to get in touch with someone in charge.

I think I asked that person if they could find the teacher for me.

Eventually I met the teacher and three or four students in front of the school.

I didn’t know any of them.

I might have still been 19 or 20 at the time and I looked young.

He hesitated before following their instructions.

It wasn’t rare to be forced to find people for a delivery and everything was normal so far.

I got out of the truck and was told that the dirt was to be dumped into a planter they had been assembling with decorative blocks around the sign for the high school.

It was out, maybe 50′ into the grass between the road and the parking lot in front of the school.

I hesitated, and might have managed to say “um” before being interrupted.

He knew they didn’t understand what they were asking.

I was going to say that “the truck would leave marks in the grass.”

The truck, at 12,000lbs empty, was heavy enough that it would compress the dirt and even though the grass would only be flattened, it would leave a trail anywhere the truck went, likely an inch or two deep that wouldn’t go away anytime soon.

The tracks would be conspicuous.

I don’t recall if I got more than one syllable out before I was interrupted with a condescending tone, initially from the teacher, and then from one or two of the students.

I tried to speak again, and again I was met with a mix of disbelief that I didn’t understand the instructions, and further attempts to explain what they wanted me to do as though I was five years old or didn’t speak English.

He really wanted to explain the issue.

I believe I attempted to speak two or three times before giving up.

I acquiesced, got back in the truck, and proceeded to drive out into the grass leaving ruts that the grounds keepers would regret for years to come — the grass will be cut off level above these ruts but you’ll still feel them when you drive over them with a mower — I backed the truck up to one side of the planter and dumped dirt in until it was piled above the small semi-oval retaining wall and I was signaled to stop.

The sign was in the middle of the planter which meant that the pile was only on one side. The other side was pretty much empty.

He was simply trying to do them a favor!

I expected that we would want to drive to the other side of planter — when you dump enough piles of something you get a feel for what it’s going to take to fill a space — but after being told to stop, I got out to suggest that they would want more dirt here to fill the entire planter.

Again I was not able to finish a sentence.

I attempted to tell them that when they spread the dirt out in the planter it wasn’t going to be anywhere near the brim.

I also would have been willing to stay while they moved some dirt over to the bare area so we could dump more in without spilling out onto the grass.

It was clear they had no use for anything I might have to say.

He knew he wasn’t going to let this go!

The disrespect was clearly intentional. I’m not sure if there was some perceived slight or if this was just a wolf pack who did this to everyone.

I was told to go dump the remaining soil — there was probably two or three tons left in the truck, it could have been put to good use in the planter still — out in a row-crop field back behind the school.

Here’s another intricacy of working with a dump truck you might not intuit: dirt doesn’t spread evenly out of a dump bed.

Most trucks have chains for the gate that allow you to meter how quickly the material comes out of the truck. These work great with small rock and gravel.

He knew his work like the back of his hand!

With material that’s more prone to clumping, you set the chains such that the gate can open wider and be less prone to clogging but, for dirt and mulch, it effectively just doesn’t work.

It hits the gate, compacts a bit, and is clogged.

Then you can’t release the chains because there are thousands of pounds of material pressed against it… you have to dig it out which is a lot of work even with gravity helping and of course the whole exercise was futile from the start.

Thankfully these people didn’t know to ask or I’m sure they would have directed me how to do my job and then I would have been faced with either arguing with people who didn’t care what I thought or setting the chains and then spending 10 minutes unclogging the gate of the truck.

UH OH!

You might guess there’s too much nuance in that to convey in a scenario where I’ve yet to be allowed to finish a sentence. We weren’t having a conversation, and these people were enjoying this for some reason.

This was a long time ago and I don’t remember much of what was said to me but I do clearly remember one kid slowly explaining “Just take the truck over there and drive while you dump it out.”– Or something to that effect — With hand gestures, like you would explain something to a child.

By this point, I wouldn’t get on them if they were on fire, so I wasn’t inclined to expose myself to any more of this noise.

I had them sign for the delivery, and then drove around the school and into the field. I felt a little bad for whoever farmed this field so I actually did try to make it work as well as possible.

I also doubted they had permission.

He did his job and drove by later to see what, if anything, had changed.

I drove about as fast as I was willing to drive in a recently tilled field, and started raising the bed. As topsoil is wont to do, nothing happened until the entire mass started sliding and essentially landed in the field in a large pile.

You could tell that — if you knew what you were looking at — the truck had been moving when it was dumped but it was still a pile that someone was going to have to deal with.

I drove past the school a week or so later on another delivery.

I was curious to see if they had gone out to the field to get some of the nice sifted top soil when they realized the planter was barely half filled, or to maybe use it to patch the ruts in the grass.

There were still obvious tracks leading to the newly constructed planter.

Finally the cherry on top!

The planter was half filled with dirt leaving the back of multiple courses of block exposed. And the large pile of dirt was still standing out in the field.

The planter stayed that way for years, I don’t know if anyone ever fixed it.

The entire complex was apparently demolished and has been replaced with a new building now, I moved out of the area a long time ago.

I’m not entirely certain that this was “malicious” compliance. I wasn’t trying to be malicious, but I wasn’t going to argue with people who were being both insulting and borderline-hostile.

I held that job way too long, maybe 6 years, so I certainly had more bad or weird encounters with customers (like the time I guess I disappointed a couple trying to have a deliveryman three-way?) but this one was one of the worst.

YIKES! That sounds like a rough day!

Why didn’t the clients just listen to him?

Let’s find out what folks on Reddit think about this one.

This user thinks that letting people do their job is good for everyone!

This user wanted another twist in the story!

This engineer respects this guy’s work and the effort he put in!

That’s right! This user knows that everyone in this story except the guy was stupid!

Exactly! This user knows it is always experience over theory.

All they had to do was let him explain.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.