Some bosses don’t realize what they’ve asked for until it’s too late.

What would you do if your supervisor barked vague orders in front of everyone, then doubled down when you asked for clarification? Would you do what they meant? Or would you do what they said?

In today’s story, one young man finds himself in this exact scenario and decides to give the line chief what he asked for. Here’s how it all happened.

Painted the latrine…the WHOLE latrine.

When I was at Da Nang in Vietnam, the line chief and I didn’t get along very well. He was annoyed with me most of the time for a variety of reasons, including being late sometimes.

One night, I was late to work (not by much) and he blew a gasket over it. As punishment, he ordered me to go paint the latrine at the end of the runway.

To clarify my orders, I asked him what exactly he wanted me to paint, and he replied, “The whole thing!”

Just to be sure, he asked for clarification.

I asked him if he was sure about that in front of witnesses.

He got madder and told me, “Yes, the whole thing!”

So for the third time, I told him I wanted to be sure of what he wanted and asked him again if he was absolutely sure he wanted me to paint EVERYTHING in the latrine.

At that point, he blew up and told me to just get my *** to the latrine and don’t come back until everything was painted.

So I told him, okay, I just wanted to be certain what he wanted me to do.

He got to work.

So I went to the latrine and fulfilled my orders.

I proceeded to paint everything. Walls, floors, ceiling, doors, toilets, sinks, mirrors, light bulbs, light bulb strings, toilet paper, trash, trash cans…I even floated paint on the surface of the toilet water (not an easy task).

Absolutely every surface that could be painted received a coat of paint.

Apparently, that’s not what he had in mind.

He was beyond furious when he inspected it, but there was nothing he could do since I followed his orders to the letter, and had asked him to clarify them several times in front of witnesses.

He tried to get me in trouble with the maintenance officer, but the officer just laughed when he heard the whole story, verified by witnesses, and gave the line chief a lecture on the importance of clear communication.

Privately, he told me he understood why I did it and cautioned me not to pull stuff like that again.

Nobody much cared for the line chief, a self-important power-tripper type, while most of the officers respected me because I was a good scrounger for the squadron, and could get them dates with the donut dollies.

Yikes! He took that a little too far.

Let’s see how the folks over at Reddit feel about it.

Too bad he didn’t think of this!

Let’s hope it did.

This person’s dad had the same type of stories.

What a task.

Let’s hope the line chief learned from this.

Thought that was satisfying? Check out what this employee did when their manager refused to pay for their time while they were traveling for business.