Imagine being told to remove something from an upper floor, but it’s too big to take down the narrow staircase. What would you do? Would you leave it or find another way to remove it?

In this story, one man was in this situation when a grocery store manager wanted him to remove vending machines from the break room. They wouldn’t fit down the stairs.

Keep reading to see how the story plays out.

How my dad got a super market shut down for a day.

My dad owns a small vending machine company and for years one of his accounts was the local grocery store. He had a couple machines in the back in the employee areas that were there for years.

It was a weird little break room, it was on the 2nd floor up a narrow staircase in the stockroom. To get the machines in originally they’d used the forklift and put them through a cargo door on the 2nd floor.

Years later the store had been bought by Generic Regional Grocery Chain and they decided to redo the whole back area.

The new manager asked my dad to remove his machines as they were going to tear down the break room.

This manager sounds crazy!

We went down on the weekend to remove them and asked if they could lower them from the cargo door for us.

The manager flipped out and flatly refused telling us it wasn’t her problem and to take them down the stairs.

We measured everything and figured out that they were simply too wide to go down the narrow staircase and tried to explain the problem to the manager.

Her reply was “Cut the damn things in half or I’ll get a sawzall and do it myself”.

But they actually liked her idea.

This was her critical mistake.

The machines were very old and destined for the junkyard anyway and she had just graciously offered to cut the machines in half for us!

We went upstairs and took the stock plus the valuable electronic parts from the machine and left the useless shells there for her to sawzall at her pleasure.

Things didn’t go the way the manager had anticipated.

At the time I had a friend who worked at the store who I had explained the situation to. She told me that the manager was awful and roundly disliked and some not so nice names that they referred to her by.

A few days later she called me up laughing. Apparently they had planned to do the demolition overnight and open in the morning, but on the night of the demolition there had been a major problem. Two vending machines were still up in the break room and they’d deemed it unsafe to destroy the structure with them up there.

Also they’d removed the forklifts due to the construction so there was no way to get them down.

Here’s where the delay comes in.

Eventually they had to attempt to cut the machines in half but they’re pretty tough so it took way longer than expected.

The end result was they ran far over time and had to keep the store closed a day to finish the teardown.

The manager was still in charge there for a couple years and used to glare at me anytime I was in shopping.

I’m sure the manager never expected them to leave the machines there. She got what she asked for even though she didn’t mean to ask for it.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

One person thinks they worked in this exact store.

Another person hoped for a different ending.

Here’s another story about vending machines.

Apparently, it is possible for kids to have too much candy.

It was no longer their problem!

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.