A red-faced B&Q employee was mercilessly mocked by customers when he appeared to try to fix a rookie DIY fail right in front of his own store. Daniel Bates was outside the home improvement store when he says he spotted a staff member trying to clean up paint running from three posts using paper towels in the pouring rain.
The 35-year-old believes the bloke had painted the three barriers at the front of the store with white paint - but appeared to either forget non-drip stain or anticipate the forecast downpour. The dad-of-two was queuing for a bacon sandwich for around five minutes as he watched the 'quirky' scene unfold, admitting it 'wasn't the best advertisement' for the DIY chain.
Daniel said: "It was a belter. He'd obviously painted the post not expecting it to rain and then it had rained and the paint dripped.
"When I saw him running around wiping the posts with the paint dripping, with signs saying 'wet paint' and the heavens had opened, I thought 'well, what a day to paint'. It'd been freshly painted that morning.
"Then my brain started ticking and I thought it was quite funny that we have all this advertising about non-drip paint and there it was running down all the posts with him running around with the blue towel trying to wipe it up.
"It just tickled me. It's a bit quirky."
Sales account manager Daniel had been shopping for some bathroom supplies when he noticed the 'absolute belter' unfolding. Daniel said: "I was doing a bit of home DIY and getting some bits for the bathroom.
"I was queuing at the butty van facing ordering a bacon butty and a coffee.
"He was doing this repeatedly and going from one post back to the other. By the time he'd sorted the two posts up the first one was [dripping]. I was there for at least five minutes. It was a bit of a bad day in the office. He found the funny side of it luckily enough."
After hearing the man's colleague laughing to herself as she joined him in the queue for her breakfast, Daniel then shouted over joking about him 'going viral'. Daniel said: "I was shouting over to the fella. I said to him 'mate, that's an absolute belter that'. You're going to end up going viral'.
"He was just laughing it off. It's not the best advertising for B&Q when their staff can't do it properly. I'm guessing it was just improvement work - maybe the post had had a few knocks or something. People obviously thought it was quite ironic.
"It's not necessarily that he'd not used non-drip paint - it might have been that the rain had made it run. Everyone found it quite amusing.
"I think he'd painted it and then it had started raining. It was raining while I was at the bacon stand. Have they not used the right paint or was it the weather? It's not the best choice to paint in the rain."
B&Q declined to comment.
