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My boss made me dump 40 gallons of paint down the drain
Last month at the hardware store in Portland, my manager told me to pour out old paint that was still good because we didn't have shelf space. I said no, that's bad for the pipes and the environment. He said do it or get written up. So I did it, but I also took a video of him giving the order. The pipes clogged two days later and cost the store $600 to fix. When the owner asked who did it, I showed the video. My manager got fired, and I got a $200 bonus for stopping a worse situation. Has anyone else had to deal with a boss who ignores basic common sense?
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william_jackson651mo ago
The whole parking lot turned into a rainbow slick" is hilarious in hindsight but I bet it wasn't funny at the time. Pro tip: always document a bad order on your phone, saves your hide every time.
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terry_thomas1mo ago
Funny thing about Portland and paint disposal. I used to work at this little hardware store off Burnside back in the day and we had a guy who would just dump old latex paint into the parking lot drain. Thought he was being clever because he did it at night. The whole parking lot turned into a rainbow slick for weeks and the city fined the store like eight hundred bucks. Boss tried to blame it on me but I had clocked out twenty minutes before he did it. Some people just have zero common sense about what happens after stuff goes down the drain. Good on you for recording it though, that's actually pretty smart thinking. Managers like that give the rest of us a bad name.
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Seventy percent of household hazardous waste like paint can be recycled or reused, but bosses never think that far ahead. I had a manager at a auto shop tell me to dump old brake cleaner into the storm drain once, and I just flat out refused until he threatened to fire me. The trick is to always get the order in writing or on video like you did, because people get real stupid when they have to explain themselves to the owner. The city would have hit the store with a $5000 fine MINIMUM if that paint made it to the river, so your $200 bonus was a steal for them.
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