Imagine working at a retail store where your job is to repair damaged computers. If you saw a big problem unrelated to actually fixing the computers, would you try to fix it or let your supervisor handle it?

In this story, one man was in this situation, and he tried to fix the problem. His supervisor got really upset about that and insisted he would handle it himself.

That didn’t work out very well!

Keep reading for all the details.

The time my supervisor told me that they weren’t paying me to fix shelves, they were paying me to work on computers

So, I worked retail for a long time while getting my degree. After a few years, I was moved onto the recently-created geek-squad knockoff that paid $2/hr more.

When they created the department, they hired a new tech supervisor who had owned his own shop, but it had failed. He’d never worked retail, but seemed like he at least knew repairs.

That was good, because I was completely new to it. Zero experience whatsoever (outside of my own computer).

Naturally, I was the new main tech.

The service was really popular.

Well, part of the department creation was to convert a section of the store (previously just used for general office/store supply storage) into a workbench.

Unfortunately, there was only enough space for 2-3 computers at a time, and the rest were all to be placed elsewhere until they could be repaired.

When the first official day of this service kicked off, there was a surprising amount of demand for it (our location was right next to a retirement community). I think 20 or so laptops came in, several of them extremely nice, as well as 10+ desktops.

We quickly ran out of space. The intake guys were setting them all on various shelves behind the bench.

They were promising a 3 day turnaround on them, per corporate – they really wanted us to be churning these things out.

This sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.

Now, part of my old job was to set up and take down displays. I knew how much the shelves held, I knew how to tell if they were overloaded, and I knew how to fix them.

It wasn’t hard.

These shelves were overloaded.

They still had the supplies, and now they had a bunch of computers on them. To top it off, several of the supports were broken or missing – they’d probably been scavenged to repair product shelves in the store.

The supervisor got really upset.

I had started unloading them and was searching for any extra supports to repair the shelves when my new supervisor, completely freaked out, yells at me – “you’re not paid to fix shelves, you’re paid to fix computers. Get back on them. I’ll fix these.”

Seriously. He yelled.

One rush was enough to send him into a panic – that’s how new he was to retail.

However, I was pretty jaded already, and I figured that if he wanted me reparing computers that badly, so be it. I left him to it, and started running the “repairs” (seriously, it was just plugging in a flash drive and running a program that ran a bunch of utilities).

Oh no!

About 20 minutes later, I heard a crash.

Then, a second later, I heard a second crash.

The top shelf had given way, then taken the middle shelf with it… along with all of the customer’s computers.

This dude had tried to duct tape the shelves. Duct tape. Instead of 3 undamaged supports, they had damaged supports and some freaking tape.

It was a lot of damage.

I don’t know what the final tally was – probably a few thousand dollars in damages. I didn’t care.

He asked me to make the calls, but I fought hard on that one – I had tried to prevent it.

He caved and did it himself, though I still caught a lot of the fallout from the customers.

He didn’t get revenge.

The GM came calling to find out what happened, but I chose not to sell him out. Told him the shelving unit failed, that’s all.

No one got in trouble.

Supervisor got more used to a retail environment, chilled out a lot. Eventually got hired at another place making way better pay and actually brought me over with him.

So yeah. No epic revenge in this one, just probably a few grand worth of damages and some ticked off customers.

It was nice of him not to get revenge on the clueless supervisor. It sounds like they kind of became friends since the supervisor got him a job at the other company when he left this company.

I’m sure the customers were furious though.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

It sure does!

Seriously, duct tape doesn’t fix everything.

This story checks all the boxes!

I really feel bad for the customers.

There’s more than one way for a computer to crash!

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.