In many industries, employees have to keep up on specific types of training in order to ensure they can do their jobs properly and safely.

What would you do if your job was keeping everyone’s training up to date, but one guy refused to go to the training classes when they were free and nearby?

That is what happened to the safety manager in this story, so after the guy skipped his assigned training, his boss made him go to a different one 5 hours away, on his own dime.

Too busy to attend the training course? Good luck finding your own.

I am the Quality Assurance Manager and Workplace Health & Safety Officer on a large farm down here in Australia. Part of my role includes making sure people are trained for their respective roles, jobs and tasks as well as arranging formal, accredited training.

As part of the ongoing drought, the government was nice enough to arrange a one off opportunity for all farmers in our corner of the country to take advantage of. They provided a bunch of different training courses to be held here in our little farming town that could be attended by anyone who can prove they work for a drought affected farm, all completely free.

This is a great opportunity!

Once I found out about this I jumped onto it and signed a heap of our employees, as well as myself, up for various courses. The boss was ecstatic as this was saving him tens of thousands of dollars in training as well as travel and accommodation costs.

Plus it came at a really great time as the training for several of our employees was set to expire soon and needed to be refreshed anyway. One of these people was John (fake name).

Every company has someone like this.

John is a serial whiner and know-it-all. He’s the type of guy to complain about hot weather while wearing jeans, a long sleeve shirt and a thick vest. Or complain about how he has no time in the day, but spend literally over an hour leaning against his car chatting to a workmate and then another hour betting on horses on his phone.

He also loves to enlighten people with all his supposed knowledge of farming and agriculture, including my boss and his father who are third and fourth generation farmers, have decades of experience and expertise and have been in the business since their teen years.

Oh, these people are the worst.

Plus, his worst habit of all, he refuses to speak on his phone into the microphone and instead will use the loudspeaker. Plus his ringtone is the most annoying and stupid jingle you can imagine. He has zero phone etiquette and it drives everyone mad.

John needs several qualifications to fulfil his role. One of these is the qualification to safely handle, use and dispose of chemicals for use in agriculture, herbicides, pesticides, etc. His certificate actually did already expire, but our season hasn’t fully begun yet so it hasn’t been a problem.

So, this training is very important for John’s role.

He was signed up to attend this free course, but he came to me on the Friday afternoon before the course which was set to begin the following Monday, where we had the following conversation (not verbatim, just the gist of it)

John: “I can’t go on Monday as I’m too busy here”

Me: “Is that so?”

Umm, what is so important that he can’t go?

John: “Yeah there’s just too much going on here that needs my attention. I’m going to have to do a different one”

Me: “There are no different ones. Not free ones anyway, plus I don’t think you’ll find one that’s…” I tried to say that he won’t find one that’s both in our town and that can be done before our season begins.

John: “Yeah that just doesn’t matter. I’ve heard there are ones that only go for one day, this one goes for two days which is just ridiculous. I can’t take two days off.”

This guy thinks he is too important for training.

Me: “Maybe you should talk to [boss] about this. The course is on Monday, you’ve known about it for ages. You couldn’t have figured it out sooner?”

John: “Mate I’ve just been too busy.”

All I’m think at this point is that this conversation so far has taken less than 60 secs, but apparently he’s too busy to spend one whole minute telling me he’s too busy…

Let the boss handle this guy.

Me: “Well you better go and talk to [boss] about it, not much I can do about it now”

John: *Random apathetic grunt

I guess he shouldn’t have let his training expire.

He left at this point before I had the chance to correct him and say that the two day course is for people who have had their training expire (like him) and the one day course are for people just doing a refresher.

Fast forward to Monday and the Boss calls me.

But of course he didn’t tell the boss.

Long story short, John didn’t tell him anything about it until just then. Boss was not happy with him. His exact words were, “I’m filthy with him and told him as such too.” But his main reason for calling was to ask more about the course and the other options available to John.

Having already done all my research months ago in the initial planning stage, I told him that the only other available courses before our expected season kick-off date are a good 5 hour drive away and they cost around $3,000, not including travel expenses.

These are both terrible options for John.

Boss: “Yeah I thought as much. Well that will learn him. I told him that his options now are to either go and pay for the training himself and claim it on his tax or skip it and cop a pay cut seeing as he can no longer do any chemical handling.”

Me: *Internally laughing* “I see. Fair enough.”

He was always just pretending to be busy.

Boss: “Stupid guy isn’t even doing anything that important, that’s why I swung past his area today as I thought he wasn’t going to be there so I figured I better check on things. He was off doing some time wasting in the shed while everyone else was out in the paddock, they didn’t even need him!”

Me: “Yeah right. So shall I put some of these options for him in an email to him or something?”

This way he won’t have any excuses.

Boss: “Yeah mate go ahead and do that. Save the busy man some time and do his research for him”

Me: “Haha, no worries”

So not only did he get himself in some deep trouble, but now he’s out of pocket a lot of money.

This must have been a very satisfying email to send.

Plus I got to be the one to let him know exactly how much by in a nice little email where I also let him know that he does need to attend a two day course.

Some people spend more time trying to avoid work than it would take to just do it, and that is exactly how John sounds.

I’m sure the people in the comments loved the story, let’s see what they had to say about it.

I think he just means he was too busy for it.

Yup, this commenter is right.

Here is someone else from Australia who loved the story.

I think this person might be right.

This commenter has a good question.

Sometimes being lazy ends up causing more work.

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.