When I was a student, I had a summer job back home with a mate of my Dad’s uPVC window firm.
First summer I worked with a fitter who turned out to be a real nice bloke. I got the idea quick, we ended up working real well as a team, got on really well. Summer flew by in a happy haze of hard work.
Second summer my fitter mate had moved on, so I got lumped with the Glazier who was really up himself. It was all ‘students are spongers’, ‘don’t pay no tax, shouldn’t be allowed’, ‘I’m not teaching you nowt, you’ll be gone in 3 months’. When it transpired I was wise to all the usual ruses regarding long weights etc. he just turned nasty. Nasty nasty piece of work. Sexist, homophobic, racist odious little man. Chuck your lunch in a bin when you’re not looking, salt in your tea, nasty.
So on my last day I told him how I’d got back at him: every job we’d done for the past few weeks, I’d sabotaged the job. We fitted a lot of double-glazed units with Pilkington K glass in them, the K glass has to face the inside of the room to work, so I had deliberately put some of the units in the wrong way round if I was working on my own, or had swapped the K glass stickers onto the wrong face of some units if he was fitting them.
It worked because K had got really good, such that you could not really tell which pane was K and which normal unless you were really really closely scruitinising the job.
So I told him what I’d done, and that I expected him to go round putting all the work right again in his own time. I said if he did it in my Dad’s mate’s firm’s time I’d drop him in it with the boss, and if he ignored me I’d phone FENSA to report it.
Apparently he took a week off work ‘ill’ and chased around the place redoing a load of work.
I wouldn’t want to run into him again mind!