Manager faces blowback after demanding hotel landscaper train employee to replace him: 'I realized that I was too expensive for him'

Author image for Ally Perry
Ally Perry • Writer and Editor
Apr 4, 2025 9:00 PM EDT

Many factors make up how bearable a job is, but by far one of the biggest is what the management is like. In the average business, it is the people above you that make the rules and set the tone, and no matter what the role entails or what your other coworkers are like, it is this that could make or break the experience of working there.

Pretty much anybody who has been employed has experienced the misery that is bad management, and it can be particularly bad when the person you are dealing with also happens to own the company. It feels like an extra level of powerlessness if the job isn't going well, which means that any opportunity to push back against that feels extra sweet. One of the few benefits of having insufferable higher-ups is that they can make mistakes that are easy to exploit for your own satisfaction.

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    Cheezburger Image 10489895424
    via Getty Images (Unsplash+)

    The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.

  • This is something that one man enjoyed after he realized that the owner of the business he was employed at intended to replace him with his nephew to cut costs. A landscaper at a hotel, the manager told him to train his relative without revealing his ulterior motive. 

    The employee did as he was told, but the effort that he put in left something to be desired. To his amusement, this came back to bite his former boss.

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    Cheezburger Image 10489896192
    via Getty Images (Unsplash+)
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    Work forces me to train my own replacement. So I do, with the same effort they put into hiring him.

    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 roa
    via DrD3adpool
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    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.
    via DrD3adpool
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    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.
    via DrD3adpool
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    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 mani
    via DrD3adpool
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    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 c
    via DrD3adpool
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    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 I owner was replaced. The entire property
    via DrD3adpool
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    Commenters were satisfied with this case of malicious compliance.

    centstwo 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 call
    via centstwo
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    farie_princess Play with fire and the thing burns down.
    via farie_princess
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    IWontCommentAtAll Fire Around and Flame Out?
    via IWontCommentAtAll
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    Talmaska Better to burn out, than to fade away!
    via Talmaska
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    Stunning-979 Doesn't poison ivy spread if it goes airborne?
    via Stunning-979
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    maroongrad yup. You don't burn it. People who breathe it in can get reactions in their throat and lungs.
    via maroongrad
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    jeffthetrucker69 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.
    via jeffthetrucker69
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    DrD3adpool OP He was giving me six months and it was six months of amazing pay, so I drained as much money as I could from him until he finally fired me. I had even considered taking an unlawful termination lawsuit against him but decided not to because I figured I would never see the money. I did find another job, but it was seasonal and only really needed me during the summer. The hotel was still paying me to shovel snow and salt sidewalks during the winter as well as replanting flower beds in
    via DrD3adpool
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    DynkoFrom The North 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 Then I remembered. Yeah. Some people are this stupid. me!
    via DynkoFromTheNorth
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    Auntienursey 000000 look the consequences of his actions! S ks to s k. And you don't mess with the IRS, they don't play...at least they didn't used to, hard to say currently.
    via Auntienursey
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    delulu4drama Nephew, you s k. Uncle, nothing left to gamble with now. OP, excellent. Karma 1, Uncle - 0 -
    via delulu4drama
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    blacklotusY Honestly, if they were telling you to train your replacement, I wouldn't have trained sh. 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.
    via blacklotusY
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    DrD3adpool OP When the nephew was first introduced to me, he was a new employee and not my replacement. He only became my replacement after I threatened to fire him and help hire someone more competent. It was my first red flag that something was off with the owner. I wasn't aware of his gambling and drinking problems until after I stopped working there.
    via DrD3adpool
  • 22
    Interesting Wing_461 He deserved all of it
    via Interesting_Wing_461
  • 23
    justaman_097 Well played! Nepotism rarely ends well.
    via justaman_097
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    Frogsama86 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.
    via Frogsama86

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