My first job out of high school was doing the landscaping for a posh hotel near my hometown. I loved the job and the work was often demanding but rewarding nonetheless. After working there a few years, the hotel was sold to a businessman as the owner wanted to retire to Florida.
The new owner had a gambling addiction and a drinking problem. He constantly drained funds from his businesses to support his vices, which showed in how quickly the hotel went from posh to the literal definition of a roach motel. I continued doing my job faithfully despite the rapid downturn in overall appearance. My paychecks were still nice and I didn’t feel as many effects of the downtown as other departments.
About six months into the new ownership, the owner introduces me to his nephew and says that he wants me to train him to do my job so that I don’t have to spend all day doing the landscaping for the property. The nephew seemed more concerned with playing Pokemon on his game boy than working and even when I set him to simple tasks like raking leaves or watering flowers, I would often find him playing his Gameboy somewhere or sitting in the lounge drinking with his uncle.
I constantly complained about him to the owner and told him that I had enough seniority in my position to search for and train a more suitable person to do the job. That’s when the owner dropped the bombshell. His nephew was going to replace me in six months. He was only paying his nephew minimum wage, whereas I was getting nearly three times as much because of my seniority and how much the original owner loved me.
At this point, I realized that I was too expensive for him and he wanted to have more money available for his habits. I immediately started looking for a new job. I continued working at the hotel, but I didn’t put as much effort into it. I showed the lazy nephew some basic stuff, but I pretty much left him to his own devices for the rest of the day. By the time I was asked to leave, the amount of neglect was overwhelmingly apparent. Poison ivy was growing around entrances, the normally well manicured lawns looked like overgrown meadows.
Six months after I left, there was a massive fire in the middle garden because the nephew somehow thought the most effective way to get rid of the poison ivy and weeds in the mulch was to dowse it in gasoline and light it aflame. He was stood nearby with a garden hose to put it out, but was swiftly overwhelmed as dry leaves and other material quickly spread the flames into the hotel itself. The fire department was called, the hotel evacuated. The nephew was arrested for arson despite trying to convince everyone that he fully intended to put the fire out with the garden hose after he got the desired effect.
The owner was forced to sell the hotel and restaurant on the property to a franchise. He was eventually audited by the IRS and arrested for tax fraud. Today the property is bustling again, the restaurant was bought by a Mexican restaurant franchise and does decent business. The two side blocks of rooms that were damaged in the fire were torn down and turned into an outdoor banquet area for the Mexican restaurant. The main hotel has bounced back after the dickhead owner was replaced. The entire property barely resembles what it looked like when I worked there.
Edit because of outrage. I have edited out the Pakistani descriptor since everyone thinks I’m being racist or xenophobic. There’s only two things I remember about him. A. He was from Pakistan. B. He was a complete dick. So now you’ll see dickhead owner instead. Sorry, it was not my intention to offend people.
Comments
Play with fire and the thing burns down.
Fuck Around and Flame Out.
[removed]
If you can find either the owner or his nephew on social media, post a link to this discussion all over their pages.
Doesn’t poison ivy spread if it goes airborne?
Some people are just build to lay waste around them…
[deleted]
This is how it played out in my mind: Nephew gets yelled at by Uncle to fix the landscaping. Nephew comes up with a plan to perform 12 months of landscaping in one day. The plan goes as well as any plan the nephew comes up with. Nephew goes to jail, Uncle saved money by not having fire insurance, but that wouldn’t matter due to arson, loses hotel, you (and now us) have schadenfreude.
Well played.
Unless it really was arson and the Uncle set up the Nephew to take the fall…but that calls for some real ingenuity on the Uncles part…well the uncle is a risk taker, gambler…hmmm.
So you pulled a Wimp Lo, very nice
Burning and breathing in poison ivy is never a good idea. Not to mention it can get you arrested.
Rave didn’t have to be mentioned. Many Pakistani individuals are successful and poorly run hotels are not solely owned or ran by Pakistani people.
Check your uncontrolled biases
Forced you to train your replacement?? This happened to me. I gave 2 weeks notice and the response was you can’t leave until you train your replacement. I left 2 weeks early.
It’s better to burn out than fade away.
I once had a roommate who was surprised that the fire alarm in his room went off when he went after flies with a deodorant can and a lighter. So when I first read this, I thought: OP has to be shitting me! Then I remembered. Yeah. Some people are this stupid.
I am not the slightest bit offended.
Hope the next job was good.
Nephew, you suck.
Uncle, nothing left to gamble with now.
OP, excellent. 😉
Karma – 1 , Uncle – 0
For those who don’t know – never burn poison ivy!
The irritant that causes rashes won’t be fully destroyed by the flames and instead will be carried into the smoke. This makes the smoke an irritant and rash cause rashes in your lungs.
I knew three brothers who said when they were kids, they wanted to get rid of gophers so they poured gasoline into the holes and lit a match. Their backyard exploded.
You totally fucked up saying Pakistani. You should have said Boomer, no offense taken then.
The Nephew started the fire! It was bound to happen, mixing gas and fire, nephew started the fire, he was going to douse it but ended up with arson.
Gasoline burns, sure, but it really kinda explodes.
>People didn’t like me pointing out that he was Pakistani, so I will stop pointing it out there and point it out here instead. I will now add that the Pakistani man was a dickhead because I don’t want to be racist.
Lol.
If people are getting upset because you’re making the observation that the idiot owner was Pakistani then I wonder how they go about their daily lives. People are so fucking soft, dear lord.
O00o0o look the consequences of his actions! Sucks to suck. And you don’t mess with the IRS, they don’t play…at least they didn’t used to, hard to say currently.
Nicer ending!
And never apologize to evil.
great job!
He deserved all of it
Burning poison ivy is a terrible idea.
Had a colleague who told me his brother was hospitalized after doing that. He got a whiff of the smoke and had blisters inside his lungs.
“You’re racist for calling him Pakistani!”
“But he was from Pakistan…”
Honestly, if they were telling you to train your replacement, I wouldn’t have trained shit. It isn’t your job to train people. Your job is to do your landscape and go home. If your previous boss wanted someone to replace you, that’s his own job to train that person because he hired his own nephew. It sounds like his problem and not yours.
Doesn’t matter what nationality you are, you can still be a dick!
Well played! Nepotism rarely ends well.
Tax to GDP ratio in Pakistan is 9%
idk why you had to edit the Pakistan part of it, because Pakistan is corrupt as fuck.
Same with the Mexico part. There are decent businesspeople in Mexico, but again, it’s corrupt as fuck.
Just as a matter of cultural attitude, respect for tax laws in Pakistan is not high.
So when you look at the fact that barely 10% of the revenue in Pakistan is taxed, it’s very relevant to the story.
this is about 70% likely to be ai generated.
I was a lab assistant and the office manager of a multi doctor veterinary clinic.
I gave my boss 1 month notice because I wanted to make sure my replacement was trained in daily, weekly and monthly tasks.
The boss decides to hire a woman I know is going to be trouble.
After a week she tells me that I need to leave so she can build the practice her way. She hires a staffer who I have turned down numerous times because she’s bat shit crazy. Boss says I’m leaving so he has to trust her instincts.
New hire tells clients that fleas are caused by Satan and everyone needs to pray together.
I am cackling maniacally as I walked out.
I later heard he was upset that I walked out and was forced to figure out how to do the monthly billing. New hire was fired that day. New manager was fired the next month.
Don’t believe this happened
Never burn poison ivy, dangerous.
> the nephew somehow thought the most effective way to get rid of the poison ivy and weeds in the mulch was to dowse it in gasoline and light it aflame.
Damned he really went the pokemon route for his job too.
YEESH 😵💫😓
The nephew lighting bush fires to get rid of the poison ivy is beautiful😂🤣
>the nephew somehow thought the most effective way to get rid of the poison ivy and weeds in the mulch was to dowse it in gasoline and light it aflame.
I mean it is effective just has a whole boat load of unintended consequences.
We had a guy in our set of condos who bought a “flame thrower” he found on the Internet, and used it to melt snow. First, it rarely snows down here, like once every few years we get a dusting maybe. Two, a neighbor reported him to the police as he was just sweeping back and forth with this thing. He severely burned the edges of his lawn before the cops stopped him. The police didn’t arrest him, just told him “stop that, dumbass.” This incident came up on the next condo meeting, which is how I heard about it.
Jeez. Some people just don’t even do the bare minimum & want max effects.
My husband was outside Maint for a condo association. He was also the only certified pool guy on site. Every summer the owners would come down & want him to teach their teenagers & adult teen kids how to do the pool stuff. ( against the law here) but he’d have them empty trash, spray the decks & clean the pool chairs & tables.
They didn’t want to do it, they wanted to lay around the pool or the beach & drink all day. Owners get pissed at him bc their spawn was on the beach instead of working. Drove him nuts. What the owners want, the owners get.
Or when they did the bare minimum. My husband said he’d give them pieces of rope & say hey, braid this for me.
So that got to be our saying btwn us if one of us were being lazy or stupid. Hey, braid this rope for me, please.