Imagine working as a river rafting guide. If you were paired up with a trainer who was more experienced on this particular river, would you follow his commands exactly, or would you use your best judgement?

In this story, one person is in this situation and decides to do exactly as he was told. Keep reading to see how that works out on the river.

I can only call a forward? Ok, enjoy the extra work, then.

Kind of a silly one but I have worked on and off as a raft guide at various points in my life and was recently retraining on a new river.

Day one and I ended up with a trainer who I’d been warned was a bit of a tough guy.

Start of the day, and he says, “OK, for the first half of the day, you can only call the forward command. No turns. No back paddling. You don’t get any other commands. Just forward.”

Fair enough.

This is funny!

So, we get on the river and I’m in the guide seat. I tell everyone to forward paddle. But the rest of the trip isn’t ready to go yet, so I spin us so we’re facing upstream and everyone continues to paddle forward. After a while we get too far upstream, so I spin us around again.

The trainer finally turns to me and says, “You know, you don’t want to tire people out so much. You should pull over in the eddy and let people rest.”

I simply responded, “Oh? Does that mean I am now allowed to use a command other than ‘forward’?”

He just smiled and said, “You can also have the stop command.” He and I ended up getting along great the whole rest of the training.

The trainer seemed to realize this mistake. I’m glad they got along well after that.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

One person shares a story about river rafting.

Here’s another story about trainers.

Another person references a TLC song.

Sometimes, one command is not enough.

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