This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/Mohr_Khowbell on 2025-08-26 03:58:04+00:00.
I used to work on the loading dock of a fruit packing plant. The plant would get orders of a certain amount of heavy boxes of kinds and sizes of fruit, usually apples, and we’d use forklifts to bring our pallet-fulls of boxes from cold storage, reload those boxes by hand onto different pallets to fit the order, and then load the order into semi trucks to be shipped.
The apples were clean…ish, but the boxes and pallets were not, so it was dusty, physical labor for sometimes more than 8 hours a day, but we all pulled our weight.
One co-worker was not always that bright, but had somehow convinced himself he was smarter than the rest of us. Think of constant “Assistant to the Regional Manager” vibes, but without the funny.
We were in the middle of loading an order, and it happened to fall to him to do most of the hand-stacking—as it sometimes does—while the rest of us were finishing other, necessary jobs. The previous order I had done most of the hand-stacking, which was fine, while he had been somehow nowhere to be found till the very end. It’s okay, stuff happens… but it was a pattern with him, and the supervisor never seemed to hound him about it.
So now he’s doing the heavy lifting, and I have the option to immediately join him and help, or let my own muscles “rest” for a minute by doing a different, necessary job of tying off the tops of fully loaded pallets before jumping in.
I chose the latter—still physical, but not as. By the time I was done, he was still stacking. I knew there was only room for two to stack at a time, and I looked to the other guys to see if they might help instead, but they were still finishing up their own jobs. Since I was earliest done, I figured I should just help him and get it over with.
I walk over, grab a box, break the “glue” that holds it to the other boxes so the entire stack doesn’t fall apart, and get ready to lift. That’s when he said it.
“You might as well let me finish it myself!”
For whatever reason, this had been a thing my supervisor had been saying the last few days when coworkers had been slow—kind of teasing them, but also trying to light a fire too.
So here’s him, borrowing my supervisor’s line, directing it at me. I could see he was angry and felt justified. I froze, box in hand, glue half-broken, and looked up at him.
“Okay.”
I let the box fall, and walked across the dock to where I now see the rest of my coworkers, and my supervisor, watching us. Their work was done, and they were all standing there, waiting for Shane to finally be done with his. I just realized they’d seen and heard everything, and I expected my supe to chew me out because he’d always been adamant about not letting stupid arguments get in the way of work.
He didn’t say a word. None of them did. I maintained my calm pace until I joined them. Then I turned and watched—we’ll call him Shane because it’s actually his name—finish his job.
It was just a couple more minutes, but it was glorious. It was like we were all just taking a second before our next job, but no one else joined him. We just watched, and I could almost see his brain actively try to figure out what had just happened—like gears spinning, but not engaging.
I’ve worked a lot of crappy jobs with not always the best of people, but this is a moment that always makes me smile.