His Coworkers Refused To Clean Tools After Using Them, So He Threw A Tool To Send A Message
by Ashley Ashbee
When you take pride in your work and appreciate why things are done a certain way, you have certain expectations of the people you work with it.
When those expectations aren’t met, we all have our ways of dealing with it, like the construction worker in this story.
Read below to see what happened.
Clean the quick mixer? You got it, boss!
Years ago I worked for a high end contracting company. Part of my shop duties every day included cleaning up their tools and putting them away, and I can’t leave until it’s done.
OP felt the work didn’t need to be so difficult.
The brothers I worked with had a bad habit of never washing off the mixing stick for cement. Every day it would come back caked in dried concrete that I’d have to spend up to an hour breaking off.
I’d asked them several times to just wash it down with a hose after they used it, but was always met with “Oh, yeah. We’ll remember next time”. After a few months of this I was getting pretty frustrated.
He got serious to see if it would change things.
One extremely hot summer day they pull up and we start unloading.
Lo and behold they hadn’t cleaned the stick again. The base of it was practically a complete ball.
Me: Seriously? What the ****?!
B1: Oh yeah, sorry.
Me: How hard is it to wash it off? I’ve asked for months?
B2: It’s your job to clean it, just clean it.
That was the last straw. He took aggressive action to get his point across.
I lifted it up, brought my arm back, and swung it as hard as I could at the side door of the cargo van. The sound of denting metal was huge. Most of the concrete blasted off of it. I handed the stick to the flabbergasted brother and said “There, I cleaned it.” before walking back into the shop.
Both brothers wanted to fire me but couldn’t, the third guy was my boss and refused. He told me a month later that every time he saw the dent he laughed. They always brought it back clean afterwards.
Let’s see if how the commenters felt about this story.
I’m not surprised that it’s a standard, not a diva request.
Several people made jokes, like this pun.
Laziness costs money!
It seems like something out of a movie, doesn’t it?
Some people are okay with losing money, I guess.
His legend status has been cemented.
Sorry, I had to.
If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.
Categories: STORIES
Tags: · angry, bad coworkers, cement, contractor, lazy, malicious compliance, picture, productivity, reddit, top, work
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