Hi ho, everybody. I’m a little late blogging today. I’ve been watching Call the Midwife and hanging out with the dogs. As you can see by today’s title, the letter for the day is, once again, “P”. But it doesn’t stand for prance, and pad, and punch, and puss.

I did decide to come check on my computer this afternoon, and I happened to read a news article on The New York Times about a guy from Peachtree City, Georgia, who got sued by the Department of Labor for a tacky little stunt he played with a former employee’s final paycheck.

Last March, Miles Walker, owner of A OK Walker Autoworks in Peachtree City, was apparently upset that his former employee, Andreas Flaten, expected to be paid the $915 Walker owed him for his final paycheck. Flaten called the Department of Labor to complain that he hadn’t been paid, so the agency contacted Mr. Walker, who initially claimed that the check hadn’t made it to the mail. Later, he outright refused to pay, but then changed his mind, and paid Mr. Flaten by dumping over five hundred pounds of sticky, oily pennies on Flaten’s driveway.

It took Flaten and his girlfriend, Olivia Oxley, several hours to clean up the mess. A wheelbarrow was a casualty, as the heavy weight of the pennies caused the wheelbarrow’s tires to go flat. You can see a video of the pennies on Oxley’s Instagram.

Walker, ever the belligerent jerk, also left a copy of Flaten’s paycheck with an expletive scrawled across it– according to the above video, he wrote “Fuck you” (confirmed in the screen shot above). Charming.

Oxley wrote the following unedited comment on her Instagram post about this cute little stunt:

ox_isms

My boyfriends last paycheck delivered at the end of the driveway in pennies….at 8pm on a Friday. His last day was in November. 
. 
First things first, when he quit he gave a written resignation letter complete with a two weeks notice. After Miles Walker of AOK Walker auto works continued to be the asshole he is and make a normal workday hell, making unnecessary comments about my boyfriends daughter and just be an all around dick, that 2 weeks turned into 5 days. My boyfriend respectfully delivered his uniforms washed and in a box comeplete with another letter as to why he was leaving early. Fast forward 3 months and he was refusing to send out the last paycheck claiming damages to the shop. Once the word “lawyer” was introduced, this is what he did. 
. 
1. We can’t even get all the pennies up because they’re covered in some type of oil. 
2. Who the hell knows how were going to get them out of the driveway, up into the car, out of the car again, and into a bank or coin star. And that’s if we can even do that because they’re covered in oil. 
.
I’m not sure what’s worse…the fact that this man is so miserable he can’t accept an employee leaving because he’s the biggest asshole I’ve seriously ever met, or the fact that he went through THAT much effort to get $915 worth of HEAVYYY pennies just to say ‘fuck you’. I mean….couldn’t he have just pissed on the check or something?…..
. 
MILES WALKER @ AOK WALKER AUTOWORKS in peachtree city. 
PLEASE SHARE WITH ANYONE. Bring him down. No one like that deserves to have successful business. ☺️

Walker later claimed that Flaten was a “bad employee”. I guess he needed to prove to everyone that he’s also a “bad boss”, with an abusive temper and spiteful nature. He wrote on his shop’s Web site:

“What started out as a gotcha to a subpar ex-employee, sure got a lot of press,” the message said. “Let us just say that maybe he stole? Maybe he killed a dog? Maybe he killed a cat? Maybe he was lazy? Maybe he was a butcher?”

Well, Mr. Walker has now gotten his, as the Department of Labor is now suing him, for the defamatory comment about Mr. Flaten, for retaliating against Flaten for calling the Department of Labor, for failing to pay overtime wages, and for failing to keep adequate and accurate records of employees’ pay rates and work hours. The suit seeks $36,971 in back wages and damages for at least eight employees, besides Mr. Flaten.

When he was contacted by the press for his comments about the lawsuit, Flaten called it a “pleasant surprise”, and said “I am happy to see justice is being served. At first, I thought he pretty much got away with it.”

As for the pennies, they were eventually picked up by Coinstar, cleaned off, and counted. Coinstar presented Mr. Flaten with paper currency in an amount close to the $915 he was owed by his petty prick of a former boss. As an added note, we have Coinstar in Germany; our former local Real store had one. But we haven’t found one up here, and we sure could use one. We have so many coins in Germany!

I remember reading about this incident when it happened, and it made me recall the jerks I have encountered in my lifetime. Most of my bosses treated me with basic professionalism, with a couple of exceptions. I do love to read stories about petty jerks getting paid back for being shitty to other people, though. I would have been pissed if I were in Andreas Flaten’s shoes.

Incidentally, I know Peachtree City. Bill and I briefly lived in Fayetteville, Georgia, which is near there, after our first stint in Germany. I liked the area, but I can also see how something like this was liable to happen. What a shame. Given the way this guy treated his former employee, I think I would be avoiding giving A OK Walker Autoworks my business. I think Miles Walker is about to get exactly what he deserves, delivered by the long arm of the law. Hopefully, so will the unfortunate people who used to work for him.

Karma can be quite the bitch, so think twice about being petty by paying with pennies if you’re a boss… And as for Mr. Walker, I think his ex employees are giving him a hearty “fuck you right back!”