Disclaimer

I was still in my early twenties and had only been working at CAT for about five years when this happened. There was a machine operator who constantly complained some part of his machine was not working right and would have his foreman call in repair tickets. When the repair guys showed up they could rarely ever find anything wrong.

It was widely presumed the operator was just looking for ways to goldbrick and the repair guys really didn’t care too much about that until he started blaming them for all these imaginary problems he continued to report.

Eventually the maintenance foreman got involved and had to referee because it was creating a problem for his department as well as the production department that needed this machine running. So he started putting heat on the repair guys about all these problems.

I was on third shift at the time so it was pitch black at the time. We all went outside and across an alleyway to a different building for our meal break. As we were coming back a couple of the guys started holding everybody back to let the troublemaker get to the door first. Just as he got to the door a guy who was on the roof (since it was dark you couldn’t see anything above) dumped a five gallon bucket of liquid floor wax on him. It hit him with such force it almost knocked him to his knees.

As you can imagine it was almost impossible for him to get that out of his clothes and hair and ended up getting all over his car when he went home. His machine problems seemed to have all been taken care of from that day forward.