In the world of construction work, there are many tasks that require the skill of a true expert in order to ensure it will be done right, and that can be expensive.

What would you do if your company was hired to complete a job because you were the best in the area, but then the place that hired you treated you like you didn’t know what you were doing?

That is what happened to the concrete cutter in this story, so his team followed the directions of the company that hired them perfectly, resulting in the job going much slower and paying more than three times what it should have.

Here are the details.

We are working too fast? Okay, we will slow down for you.

This happened about 2 years ago. I work in construction but more specifically I cut concrete.

Interesting, I wasn’t aware of this.

A lot of people aren’t familiar with my job but all you really need to know is that I don’t pour any concrete. I use big diesel and hydraulic powered saws to cut and remove it.

I work at a relatively small company (15 employees) and we are THE company to use for concrete cutting and removal in our area.

He must be very loyal to the company.

I was the first employee hired at this company and my bosses are amazing, they have been in the industry for 25 and 30 years respectively. We will call them Brad and Cody.

They know what they are doing and they still get out and work in the field and will out work any of our employees.

We were awarded a no-bid contract at a very large facility to cut and remove a very large section of their outdoor slab because it had cracked.

This was routine for us, we could do it in our sleep, but it was still a large project.

Doing it right and fast usually means it will be expensive.

The reason we were given the contract but not held to a number was because they wanted it done right and fast and they knew that we were they guys to do this even though we aren’t always the cheapest.

The customer requested us to bring extra equipment and specialized saws “just in case”. Important later.

The day comes that we are supposed to start and they wanted us on site at 6:30am for a safety meeting.

Brad and Cody went out while I stayed back to get my crews ready for the day before heading out to meet them. when I arrived at 8 am, they were still standing by their trucks just talking.

Why didn’t they show up? They were the ones who set the time.

I asked them how the safety meeting went and they said that no one had shown up yet. Finally they got there at around 9 am and didn’t even acknowledge that they were late.

We met the guy that was in charge of the project, his name was John. John said during the safety meeting that there would always be a few people around from his company to watch us while we worked. we figured it was weird but no big deal.

I guess it is better to start late then never.

We ran a routine safety meeting after and it was time to work.

We got about a third of the project completed in 1 day. The entire time we were working there were no less than 25 people standing around watching us work.

I don’t understand why so many people are watching this activity.

We kept joking with them to just set up bleachers, it would be easier to watch that way. They made us call it quits at 4pm so they could go home.

Right about this time we started to figure there was something up with these guys, they didn’t care that we didn’t get started until late and wanted us to end early, yet a big part of us being there was to get it done fast?

Something weird is going on here.

Either way we figured we would still be able to get done in about 3 days and make record time for a project of this size, all while making a fair amount of money for ourselves.

The next morning as we were getting ready to head out for they day, Brad received an email.

What does this even mean?

It said “While we can tell that x company are master operators with their machines, we feel as if they are operating in an unsafe manner by running multiple machines at once and request that they slow down to maintain safe working conditions.

They also didn’t try to make sure our supervisors felt that they were safe throughout the day.”

Brad was mad.

Its almost like these people wanted the job to get delayed.

We were called in to get things done fast and not once had we done a single thing that could be considered unsafe.

When we got to the job that day for the safety meeting, Brad had changed from “screw these guys they don’t know anything about what we are doing” to “okay we are too fast? We will slow it right down for them”.

At the safety meeting John (same guy who sent us the email) looked at us and said “okay everyone knows what we are doing, lets get it done.”

The boss here really knows how to play the game.

He tried to end the safety meeting with that, but that’s when my boss spoke up. he said, “hold on, since no one is man enough to tell us in person and just want to hide behind their emails, lets get this straight. We are too fast and unsafe for you?”

John became visibly uncomfortable and stammered out, “well, there was a lot of people standing around and watching you yesterday and I just felt that someone would get hurt if they decided to get closer to watch”.

They obviously take safety very seriously.

I had set up safety cones with red danger tape strung between it and told no one to cross. We had taken proper safety precautions.

If they didn’t feel comfortable to have that many people watch, then DONT HAVE THAT MANY PEOPLE STANDING, WATCHING, AND DOING NOTHING!

All Brad said was, “Okay we will be real slow and if someone crosses our line, we shut the site down for an hour for another safety meeting.”

I’m sure they had very high-end equipment.

Time for the malicious compliance, we started up for the day.

Something to note about our saws, tractors, and other heavy equipment is that we have the ability to turn up the idle, or in other words we can turn up or down the speed of the motors, so instead of everything moving normally and how it should, which is fast, everything is moving at turtle speed.

Brad told us all that if we ever sped up our machines that he would kick us off the job, even Cody, his business partner.

I was cutting with our saw while Cody was in the excavator to remove the pieces that I cut. Brad was in the skid steer to haul the pieces to the dump truck.

At this rate, things are going to take all day.

I would cut the concrete into a 6′ x 6′ piece, which would normally take me about 20-30 minutes. It was taking upwards of 3 hours for one piece.

After I would cut, Cody in the excavator would turn his machine on, slowly turn and stop.

Extend his bucket. Stop. Lower the bucket. stop. Tilt the bucket. Stop. Pick up the piece. Stop. Turn. Stop. Drop the piece. Stop. Shut off his machine.

All without idling up.

I bet it was frustrating to work this slowly.

Then Brad would start his machine and repeat the same process to load into the dump truck. You get the point, it was PAINFULLY slow.

After the first piece was ready to be pulled out and Cody started the process John, who was just sitting on the sideline pale faced crossed my line to ask if we were really serious, at that point Brad screamed “SHUTDOWN!”

John is going to make it so this job never gets done.

And we all stepped away for an hour for a safety meeting. John crossed the line 3 times in the first day and 8 times total throughout the project.

His employees never once crossed the danger line. Effectively, John was the only one he should have been worried about in his email about “getting too close and being in danger.”

Oh, they are being very serious.

John kept saying, “no way you guys are being serious, what happened to what you were doing yesterday? You were so much more efficient.”

Brad just said, “I have in writing that you felt unsafe, so for the remainder of this project we will be operating at a safe pace.”

Wow, this is going to be a very costly project.

It ended up taking us 3 weeks to finish at that horribly slow pace instead of 3 or 4 days at full speed. The best part? The head of the facility came out to see what was taking us so long, we showed him the email and he agreed with what we were doing.

He told us he hates John and that he’s insufferable to work around.

Oh, John is going to regret his actions big time.

He said that the success of this project is directly tied to Johns yearly bonus. He asked how much we were charging them, and we told him that per piece of equipment and truck and saw that is one the site is being billed to them by the hour and that John had requested that we have nearly double the amount of equipment than we actually needed or used.

The facility head just laughed and said, “fantastic, I will make sure you are paid in full, don’t go easy on us with the bill.”

Well, this is definitely working out well!

That’s how we maliciously complied our way into charging about $200,000 for a job that should have realistically only been worth about $45,000. I even got a solid $20,000 bonus because Brad and Cody are fantastic bosses and knew we made a killing on that job.

I can’t imagine getting a $20,000 bonus for a month of work, great job! These bosses really are the best.

Let’s see what the people in the comments have to say about it.

Absolutely, I’m glad this worked out so well.

This was too funny.

This would have been brilliant.

I guess he isn’t technically wasting time.

It was great that he was supportive.

It is always best to let experts do their job.

When you can.

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