Started at a factory back in early March, I feel like I've learned the ropes well enough and can do my job adequately. We are a compounding factory, we make the plastics that go into things that other companies make, like weather seals on your car, or your air bag, and sometimes the clear plastic on your microwave meals. Each line takes 2 people to operate: One to operate, and make sure that all materials are feeding properly, get more material as needed, get rid of empty boxes and barrels, documentation, and sometimes clean if necessary. And the other to fold new boxes, take full ones to the warehouse, check the cut of the material, and take material to the lab for our technicians to test, and sometimes clean if necessary. Now that you have a vague idea of how the job goes I'll tell of my problem. Let's call him J (not his real name) J started a few months before me, around October, so when I initially worked with him, he did know more than I did about the job. By the time I was moved to the graveyard shift with J I knew enough to operate the line, packaging was of course easier, but I wanted to learn as much as I could about the tough part of the job, because the easier part would be simpler to learn. So for about 3 months straight, I operated, whenever is all if J would operate he'd ask if I was sick or something, I should have seen it then, but I didn't, not yet. About 2 months in we did get another new guy and he learned on a smaller one man line, we'll call him C (also not his real name), he's pretty cool and he wanted to learn the big line. I taught him what I could (J might have taught him some too), and after about a month C and I had started a rotation so that we could learn each other's line. J started doing less and less. He began to refuse whenever we'd ask for help, or when we'd ask him to keep an eye on things to take a break. "Nah, I don't play like that!" Is generally what he'd say. The one time I did force him to operate was for a material that takes almost no effort to operate for and he was smug as hell about it when he said he'd do it. He eventually said it was a bad play on my part because that material is the easiest to run. He's so bad now, that even before I ever said anything about it, the entire factory knows how lazy he is, and from what I can gather he is entirely unfazed by this. Fast forward to last night, me and C are totally fed up with him, and decided that he IS going to operate the big line, and we called him out on it in front of another Co-worker. He seemed pretty pissed, told me not to -blam!-in talk to him any more, and as I stared at him walking past me to leave he said "-blam!- what you staring at!?" With an aggressive stance. (He's not black, I'll just say that he's vaguely Hispanic, this is verbatim) after he passed I shook my head and said " a sad mother -blam!-er" I know he's just pissed, whether he's pissed about being called out, or being given a hard time, I couldn't give a flying -blam!-, but I'm not gonna put up with that. I don't know him well enough to know if he's willing to take that outside, but I didn't see him hanging around at work waiting for me. I'm sort of torn about what I should do, I certainly didn't back down, but it would be stupid to provoke an entirely avoidable fight. I don't want him fired, but if he refuses to run the line, I'll probably just go home tomorrow, and just be honest when the bosses ask why I did it. Tldr: being lazy and prideful at the same time makes you look stupid. Edit: you guys got any workplace stories you want to get off your chest? Dump them here if you feel like it.