What would you do if you witnessed a manager being mean to an employee?

Would you stay out of the situation, or would you find a creative way to shut down the manager and give the employee a break?

In today’s story, one person has the perfect opportunity to defend a grocery store employee, and he takes it!

Let’s read all the details.

I used the power of electrical safety to scare a shifty manager and give a burnt out employee a long paid break

In my line of work, I encounter many employees and deal with the managers they report to.

I was at a popular grocery store (which I won’t name outright, but the “way” they conduct their business is “safe” according to their name) and at one of their stores, I was repairing the countertop Turbochef oven toaster/microwave units, the ones the deli staff use to heat up sandwiches and burritos.

All that being said, this Turbochef oven was in an area rendering more than half of the hotcase being inaccessible, so I informed the staff to halve the amount of product they cook and put out, because if they got in my way, it could lead to a dangerous situation for me and for them.

These ovens are very powerful.

Now, for a quick lesson in electrical safety:

These NGC Turbochef ovens use convection fans, heater elements, transformers, capacitors, and magnetrons to cook as fast as possible.

This is accomplished by healthy voltage (240vAC for the curious) and at robust amperage of 30.

For reference, 1 amp can be enough to stop a human heart. 30 amps will easily kill a person.

The manager was pretty rude.

Now on to the petty revenge.

While I was working, the deli was pretty slow, so the person working the deli was trying to relax a bit.

Unfortunately, that was the time that the manager showed up, and he got into manager mode and started giving the employee a hard time about this and that, and in a pretty rude and aggressive way.

He stopped the manager from picking on the employee.

I stopped my work and interrupted the manager mid-tirade:

“The employee cannot do any work right now, my company’s policy requires that employees stay out of our work area and wait until we say it’s safe to resume work. I told her to wait until I’m done because if she came over here and anything happened, the electricity I’m handling is lethal. If she resumes her work while this is a live circuit, both of our lives would be in jeopardy and we could easily be killed in seconds.”

I delivered that spiel with intensity halfway between a cop and a disappointed parent, and the manager said “ok just be safe” and sheepishly sulked away.

The employee said thanks and went to sit behind the cold case and be on her phone, and I spent and extra hour and a half on the call, even though I didn’t need to.

What a nice thing to do to stand up for the employee.

He really put the manager in his place!

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

This person knows to stay away from electricity.

There’s a correction and a joke here.

This person applauds what he did for the employee.

He really was a hero.

Managers need to back off.

This could have seriously ended badly!

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.