Folks, let this story be a warning to you: when old-timers at work tell you not to do something, listen to them!

It comes to us from Reddit and all I can say is OUCH.

Check out what went down…

How my new boss lost his fingers.

“Back in the early 2000s I was a management trainee for a manufacturing company in the UK, and I was responsible for quality control and production management. I was 22 years old, keen as punch and ready to change the world.

About 11 months into the role, I got a new boss, let’s call him “Fred”.

This guy…

Fred was also the company owner’s son, and was basically a 45 year old screw up who had only ever been a drug dealer/DJ and now stood to inherit the entire company.

His management style was, let’s say, ‘interesting’ and he would deviate from “screaming at you for the most benign thing ever” to “I can’t deal with the pressure so I’ll go home for the day” in a matter of hours.

He also thought he was a manufacturing GENIUS. His ideas were crazy, but he would scream at anyone who questioned him.

Roy actually knew what he was doing.

There was a 52 year old machine operative, let’s call him “Roy”, who has worked on the same machine for over 30 years. Roy could tell when his machine was 2 weeks away from a breakdown, just because it sounded different. He was truly at one with his machine.

Fred decided that we would modify Roy’s machine so that we could extend the range of products we could manufacture. In order to do this, he decided that we would add an additional spindle to the machine.

The problem was that each product would finish at a different time and you would need to remove a product from the machine while the other one was still spinning.

Roy protested and said he’d never use it, but Fred went ahead and modified it over the weekend with a subcontractor.

Roy wasn’t having it.

On Monday, Roy said “you must be joking, I’m not using that”.

Fred said “you will use it, or you’ll be looking for a new job tomorrow.”

Roy said “it’s not safe and I won’t use it. If you try to make me I will report you to the HSE.”

And then Fred said “if you report me, I’ll make sure you don’t find work ever again”.

So Roy smiled and said, “ok, fine, I’ll load the next job but you can run it first.”

Roy loaded on his next job, and took two steps back…he also looked at me and said “stand back”.

Fred started the machine and all went well…. for about 30 seconds.

The first job had reached the diameter required and Fred pressed ‘stop’, however he now had to lean over the other job that was still running at 2,000 RPM.

OMG.

I didn’t see it happen but I heard an awful scream and then saw blood squirting everywhere.

Fred fainted onto the machine, narrowly missing the spindle with his face and greasy long black hair.

We pressed the emergency stop and picked him up, and it was then I spotted his fingers in the machine. I picked up two middle fingers and gave them to a colleague to put into a freezer bag, which was a waste of time because they couldn’t reattach them, they were too mangled.

Fred never came back to work. Apparently he told his father he wasn’t cut out for running the company and I also left about 6 months later.

I saw recently that it was bought out in a management buy out and good old Roy was the operations director. Good for him!”

Check out what folks had to say about this on Reddit.

This person chimed in.

Another individual shared their thoughts.

Another reader didn’t hold back.

Well, that was certainly a painful lesson…

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.