What was "the incident" at your work place?
What was "the incident" at your work place?
Inspired by the very similar thread about school incidents.
My company called all lab staff "pandemic heroes" for coming in every day during the pandemic and taking on extra work to compensate for management and office staff who stayed home for years.
Then shortly after return to office, they closed the lab and laid off all lab staff.
Sounds like your company took the Veterans Affairs approach to "hero response".
Worst part is that they did it mostly to boost the IPI right before we went public by driving down operating costs.
We weren't even able to buy in u til 6 months after going public and the price leveled off at 6 months
Guy found a gun in the customer’s stuff
Guy starting waving it around and playing with it, pulled the fuckin trigger, almost shot one of his coworkers
Cops came, guy said he was moving a cabinet and it went off which obviously no one believed, somehow he wasn’t arrested, idk
Guy was fired over the phone before he left the customer’s house
Another:
Big awful dude starts working, among other issues he was SUPER upset that the girls at the gym are allowed to have their own separate area to work out where he can’t ogle them, he felt this was grossly unfair and was angry about it
So anyway my boss goes back to the truck to get something, at like 9 in the morning on the job site, opens up the back, the ENTIRE truck is filled with weed smoke which billows out because big awful dude is in there getting high. Boss is upset, obviously, but big awful dude is just laughing
I think they had to finish out the day with him but the boss was definitely irritated about it
Oh shit! I forgot one from another job.
One of the busboys walked into the office, found no people and a satchel with about $30,000 in cash, picked it up and walked out, clocked out like normal, went home.
Guy SHOWED UP TO WORK THE NEXT DAY. Just assuming I guess, they won’t have cameras or anything, if I just don’t say anything there’s no way they can know who it was and they’ll probably just move on if I play it cool.
I guess the management was pretty aware of his level of planning skills because they had cops waiting at the restaurant at the time of his scheduled starting time and he was taken away in cuffs, presumably not to return for quite a long time.
Was this one on the news? This is very very familiar
One day a coworker of mine was walking into our huge office building and thought he saw a mitten on the ground of the lobby. When he picked it up it was actually a pair of lacy women's underwear. Ostensibly it fell out of someone's gym bag or got caught in their pant leg in the laundry and dislodged there. He drops it immediately and comes into the office. He doesn't mention this to anyone.
Two hours later the main receptionist comes in with the underwear in front of our whole group and says she saw him drop these this morning and she wants to return them. He's denying the whole thing and at this point none of us have the previous context and all locked in to the conversation and silent laughing. She says, "We just want to give these back in case they have sentimental value!" and the the whole group is dying laughing now. He eventually convinces her he isn't interested in a stranger's underwear (which she bare handing) to which she says she'll keep them in case he changes his mind (???).
It's been 5 years and it gets brought up nearly daily
Funny if they were her panties all along. Turned the embarrassment from "Guess who dropped her panties in the lobby" to " Guess who was playing with panties in the lobby."
This adds a whole new dimension to the lore.
Someone must've summoned Shenron the day before he found them and got underwhelmed by the wish fulfillment.
Oolong back on his shit
Sounds like the receptionist did this on purpose lol
Does he still work there and does he laugh with you? Otherwise this sounds like bullying
Worked at a place where our CIO was completely unqualified to be a leader, much less a leader in IT. She was a micromanager who took the position of "telling stakeholders" instead of "working with stakeholders" so any project she was on was really her pushing through whatever agenda she had at the time. Meanwhile her deputy CIO was stealing computer equipment from the server room but I digress....
April fools one year and I decide to prank it up. I moved the hinges (not the door handles) of the freezer/fridge in the breakroom so that the handle and hinges were on the same side. It's a fifteen minute job to move everything so I did it the night before the 1st.
The next morning our hungover CIO stumbles into the breakroom and cannot get the fridge to open. After a few seconds of futile tugging on the handle, she gave up and took her lunch to her office.
Others in the office figured it out pretty quickly and had a good chuckle.
Later on that day CIO sends out a nastygram about pranks being unprofessional, property damage, someone was going to be in huge trouble, yadda yadda....
But she's not the director. The director tells her to basically fuck off, it was a funny prank, and perhaps she needed to lighten up.
She never found out it was me.
Ha!! As an appliance repair guy i learned about reversing the door hinges+handles a long time ago. It never occurred to me to use it for a prank until i was living in my apartment for a few years, and realized it really would make more sense to reverse the hinges to open the door the other way. I moved the hinges, but then it occurred to me that i can leave the handles where they were and prank all my friends when they came over. Unsurprisingly, it works! People usually would figure it out eventually but sometimes we had to intervene if they were getting too rough with it.
I got so used to having it set up that way that once in a blue moon I'd go to open other people's refrigerators the wrong way (not the best look for a repair tech, LOL)
Software company before git. The source server corrupted and the product code was lost. 5 guys had to get together and figure out the latest version between them (everybody had different changesets) and produce a new "current" version. At the end we lost all history prior and ever since all changes prior to 2008 have been attributed to 1 guy.
I used to work at an accounting/consulting firm who were dead set on writing business applications in VBA within Excel. The code was embedded in the notebook, and to distribute the software was sending the latest version of the Excel file. This made version control virtually impossible, and we would instead combine our work manually.
I cannot recommend having tech-illiterate people lead software projects.
Gotta respect that save. Reminds me of the Toy Story 2 assets being lost from a server failure and they were saved by one employee having a copy on their personal computer at home.
More impressive than the fact that you saved a repo once is that the same repo still exists today with the complete git history. At the rate companies abandon products for new ones, old repos are rare.
Our repo is old as time. Carried through from SourceSafe to TFS to Git
Subversion has existed probably for longer than your company, the fucking managers couldn't be arsed to read a damn book?
They were using SourceSafe back then. But any source control that isnt decentralised has the same problem. If the central server gets deleted so does all history
I had a worse experience. My first internship was doing web development in ColdFusion. Why that language? Because when the company was first starting, none of the funders wanted to learn Linux/Apache administration and CF ran on Windows.
Also, the front end development team did not have version control but shared code via a file server.
The overnight IT guy was caught watching porn while working (this was over a decade ago, he was in the office every night and not a remote worker). How was he caught? He was saving the pornographic photos on a shared network drive...
When confronted, he didn't try to deny anything, his explanation was simply, "That's just my thing."
Boss: "Were you looking at porn in the office?"
IT guy:
One of my very first tech jobs, there was a guy who watched porn in his office, as far as I could tell just continuously. I saw the DNS logs so I was aware. I didn’t care as long as it wasn’t interfering with my ability to get things done.
One day I had to go in his office and talk to him about some of his code that was breaking, and he went OH and tried to hide all the blatant porn on his screen. Like dude I know. I don’t care. I am here to talk with you about your shitty code not your personal failings and issues; those are purely your own problem IMO.
The ceo of a client viewed porn pretty much all day every day during the pan when everyone was wfh. Our screen sharing tool showed a stamp-sized preview of the client device before connecting. One of the interns said after over a week of trying to engage him with the chat feature and closing the connection due to porn before sending a chat, he gave up and accepted that there was no time when porn wasn’t on-screen.
We should be able to look at a liiittle porn at work.
Aside from the obvious don’t watch prom at work, I don’t see how anyone does it with company property. Doesn’t pretty much everyone have a phone or computer these days? Shouldn’t it be common sense to use your phone rather than the work computers need by your employer?
As a treat.
I respect his owning it shamelessly.
I was working at an assembly plant for plane motors (the big kind) and one of them literally blew up in the test bed. There was chunks literally embedded in the safety glass, it was a huge mess.
Turns out someone left an orange rubber mallet inside of it. Over the course of a year, they reassembled the shredded mallet and traced it back to the toolbox that used it. The guy lost it and instead of reporting it and disassembling his last job, he just stole one from an other toolbox.
Not mine but my buddy used to build kayaks. One of the employees took a dump in one of the kayaks and it only got caught because of a random QC test. I always giggle thinking of the client who would have received it.
TRUSTY-COOK
Girl did dabs on break with her gf came back zonked out since she'd never smoked weed before.
Ended up slapping manager and getting taken away by ems
Cook got arrested at work one time when cops came to pick her up at her job. She was 4 feet tall so we joked they picked her up and carried her away. She had to use a step stool to make the soup and someone would hide the stool from her so she'd be pissed the next morning.
Same place had a cook drinking lean and offering it to people.
Retirement home btw
Any workplace sitcoms about retirement home you know of? I would be all over that since South Park did the rap-heavy retirement home drug episode
There is absolutely room for it. Have so many stories. From the bpd woman who mentally and verbally harassed the boy with fetal alcohol syndrome.
To finding absinthe in the chefs office.
Then there would need to be an arc about the time there was a chef who couldn't read. His wife did his emails and we couldn't get avocados because he was spelling them wrong I'm the hardies order system
What's lean?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_(drug)
It's essentially cough syrup mixed with a soda. Think his specifically was with sprite. Remember my co worker being especially fucked off of it and he was routinely baked.
I was a square.
I was supervising filling in a pit we had dug on the edge of a forest. We had dump trucks coming in dumping gravel. One particular driver wasn't great at his job and there had been issues with him in the past.
That driver came in and dumped his gravel, but then he drove off with his bed still raised and almost immediately smashed into electric lines that ran off into the forest. One telephone pole even snapped at the base and fell over.
Within 30 seconds multiple cops came speeding onto the job site. It turns out those electric lines ran to a radio tower in the woods that ran the police radio. The idiot in the dump truck had taken out the police comms for the whole town.
Note: if you're planning a crime in that town, you only have to cut one wire to disable all police communication.
That's some lacking infrastructure
I knew some people who would in a small jurisdiction have a friend go far from where they were doing crimes and light off a bunch of pop-pop-pop fireworks to draw police attention away from the less attention grabbing thing they were doing
Allegedly
Couldn’t they sell a few of their spare MRAPs to buy a backup generator and a redundant microwave link? Sheesh.
Previous HR was well beyond retirement age essentially working to have something to do and one day emailed all of management a spreadsheet asking us to verify our information. That sheet contained each of our full names, addresses, phone numbers, birth dates, social security number, etc.
To my knowledge nothing of significance happened. I have my credit frozen.
I worked for a company that handled a ton of personal data. Pretty much every person in Germany, including addresses, bank account details, etc.
On my first day there (fresh from university) I was given literally full read access to the entire database. And as I later found out by accident: they did not track any data exfiltration at all. I copied several gigabytes of data without anyone noticing.
Your data is only as secure as the least motivated data broker sees fit. And that's not very fit.
A few years ago I asked a customer for a list of employees, so I could verify who could purchase on their account. They replied with their personnel files. Luckily it didn't have social security numbers, but it had a LOT of personal information. Medical records, drug test results, stuff like that.
The whole workplace drug testing thing is so wild to me. An employer can actually lay claim to your bodily fluids? Absolutely mental.
In the Netherlands, it’s very simple:
- if there are performance problems, then you address your employee’s performance problems.
- if there are no performance problems, then there is no problem and what your employee does in their free time is none of your business.
HR coordinator sharing around her Onlyfans on the dl with people and was found to be giving preferential treatment to her fans. She got fired. But a lot of people got to see her naked, so I guess that's fun.
INC-224, never forget.
I am an infra engineer at a fairly large scale (not like Amazon, but we have some BIG customers) SaaS company; despite our scale, we are only like 250 people and of them only about 90 engineers. We store a bunch of data in MySQL.
15:30:00, I get a page “MySQL table is full.” I immediately know my day is ruined, since I’ve never heard of this error before, but know it ain’t great.
15:30:10, every Pagerduty escalation policy in the entire company gets bombarded with pages.
I look at the database instance. The table size is “only” 16TiB, so it’s a bit confusing.
We are hard down for several hours as we scramble to delete data or somehow free up space. Turns out, google backs ClpudSQL MySQL instances with ext4 disks instead of zfs, and the max file size on ext4 is… you guessed it, 16TiB.
We learned a LOT of lessons from this, and are now offloading a shitload of json into either MongoDB or gcs, depending on the requirements. The largest table is down to 3TiB now :D
I love it.
All the other comments had guns sex and drugs.
Your story had mySQL.
Mad lad.
I understood almost none of that.
Database (thing that holds and retrieves bunch of data) broke when it reached a size of 16 Terabytes because the underlying filesystem (Thing that lets you store data on a physical disk like a hard drive or SSD) has a maximum possible size of 16 Terabytes by default (ext4)
16 TiB is roughly 16,000 Gigabytes which is roughly 16,000,000 Megabytes
Had an executive assistant at my company who did very little if anything. Nobody knew why she was kept around and paid so much. Everyone pressured the CEO to fire her, but he strongly resisted. Eventually she was fired, but immediately threatened to sue for sexual harassment. CEO threw her a lovely settlement check despite claiming that nothing ever happened. Mmhmm.
Not technically AT the work place, but a couple employees decided it would be a good idea to sneak off to a side room during the company Christmas party to fool around. They got caught and nothing happened for a couple weeks. Then, for the first and last time in the company history to my knowledge, both employees were asked to provide proof of gym attendance to justify the stipend they were collecting, then fired when they failed to do so.
What's fun is the couple were married (to each other) and it didn't happen on company property or during business hours, so this was totally just a "We're icked out by this" move by HR. Gotta love working in the South.
Hold it... proof of gym attendance or gym membership?
Because I thought standard practice was to pay for the gym but not go, whether out of your own pocket or on the company... 😏
I think thats what they are saying. They were getting the company to pay for their gym membership but as a stipend. So into their bank accounts as part of their salary as a reimbursement for the gym membership they were supposedly paying for. But they weren't going to or paying for the gym. They were just claiming the money.
Why is your company paying for personal gym memberships
Likely some sort of health insurance initiative. Lots of health insurance companies will give discounts to companies that can prove they have taken steps to improve their employees' health. So things like mandatory smoking cessation classes, drug tests, gym memberships, etc are all encouraged by insurance companies.
My former company actually did things backwards; They offered a $20 weekly stipend to anyone who committed to stop smoking via a monthly smoking cessation course. It was basically just a monthly 30 minute video you watched, then answered some questions about... You could do it on company time, so it was an easy $80 per month that you were leaving on the table if you refused. The backwards part is that they didn't offer the same stipend to people who never smoked in the first place. So all of the non-smokers suddenly signed on as smokers, signed up for the smoking cessation program, and immediately "quit" smoking so they could get that easy extra cash. I even used to keep a pack of menthols in my desk drawer, in case I was ever questioned about whether or not I really smoked. The first month they introduced the program, the company's insurance must have been screaming, because every single employee suddenly reported as smokers.
Good benefit packages, keeping employees on.
Working at McDonald's at the time. The HR manager went on bereavement leave and a replacement was brought in. The day the HR manager came back she was told she was demoted and was put as the DriveThru order taker for a couple months before finally being fired and given severance.
A month or 2 later the old restaurant manager who was now the "Systems Manager" and in charge of all the admin tasks stopped doing unpaid overtime, so all of his duties were taken away and he was put as DriveThru order taker.
For 3 months he came in for exactly 8 hours every day, only did order taking in DT, and left. He was still being paid his restaurant manager's salary during this time, the new restaurant manager was in over his head and would not ask the old restaurant manager for help. Eventually the old RM left to work for a competitor working with the old HR manager.
Apparently the owner called the competitor to scream at them for stealing his staffHR finds out the leg is not grateful for the boot
Yeah, stole them; that's what happened here. They obviously didn't drive them away. /s
This sounds like a really easy case for a labor lawyer
Hmmm I guess we have two of different types
1: late into pandemic when inflation was really bad a bunch of the workers were super upset by their wages, management got together to get a solution. The plant supervisor called a meeting and told everyone there would be a "substantial raise", it was $0.20. Less than 1%
The second, more recent, a fire broke out after a maintenance repair went awry. Someone pulled the fire alarm and it failed to work. Someone pulled a second fire alarm, it failed to fully initiate the system. Then on the last attempt it finally went off but the fire suppression system and sprinkler system did go off but not over the actually burning area. This lead to a whole region of the building getting smelted and a big investigation on the fire suppression system. After it was resolved they asked employees to continue working their shift, even in the smoked out areas. The stench was horrible and probably carcinogenic lol
A similar thing to the first point happened at my old company.
When it became clear that working from home won't go away, management came up with some new and actually reasonable rules, that basically allowed 100% wfh, if the team was okay with it.
Now, here in Germany east/west differences are still pretty stark. So someone asked "sooo, I'm in the East, get a low wage, but work with a team from the West. If my neighbor would start working for the same team, formally at an office in the West, but 100% from home, he'd get West wages". Management didn't address that at all, so a bunch of people (including myself) just said fuck it, quit and now earn way better wages working from home.
That's wild! In the states there's a similar issue with cost of living being vastly different in different areas of the country. I have a family member who does financial stuff for business but works from home. They ended up having to get a postal mailing address in a higher cost of living area so they could get fair wages since their normal address would make business offer only real low wages. It's asinine
Holy shit do you not have any fire inspectors? Would you describe your local and state governments as “Republican”, or “very Republican”?
I'd actually describe them as Blue/non-designated, it feels red-leaning recently with some of the stuff they are passing though
The fire department comes and checks stuff out really only when there's an issue. We do have test fire alarms though they never use the fire suppression system, mostly only the noise alarm. I'm unsure if they pull the same one or random ones for the test but either way, it wasn't good enough apparently.
And this is why we need unions.
I'm definitely pro union, my work did almost go union actually! But we just follow a union contract that another workplace has from their union. For the most part I think its the best of both worlds, but if they keep aggravating people we aren't too far away.
I've been following what's been going on unionwise all very the USA and I'm kinda pumped about it
Guy on the team rage quits one day. Few days pass and HR goes to clean out his desk. Finds a paper bag full of syringes and a very graphic instruction manually on how to inject something into your dick.
Whatever it was, I guess it can't wait until you're at home to inject into your dong. It has to be at work.
Cherry on top was that HR policy was to box up all personal belongings left behind and have the ex-employee come pick them up. So, if he had forgotten these things were in his desk, he certainly remembered after he came back and they handed him the bag.
All I can say is: holy fuck.
An IT contractor at my government job was one of the people that tried to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer.
big gretch! she's so cool. looks like she could command a battlestar.
Years ago I worked for a large-ish post production company. They had recently moved into a swanky new location and everything there was tailored to spec, including the server room. In norwegian we sometimes call a server room a ‘machine room’, this is relevant.
As a part of the server room spec, a dry fire suppression system was among the requirements.
The summer of the incident was particularly hot, and we experienced some trouble with our cooling, so a cooling technician was called to have a look. While he was working on the unit inside the server room, he made a mistake that caused all the cooling gas to dump into the room, triggering the fire extinguishers.
A dry fire system works by releasing an inert gas into a space to displace any oxygen, effectively choking any fire. I imagine this is usually done by some solenoids opening some canisters of gas and the room quickly, but gradually becomes oxygen free. Luckily, my boss at the time was present and he quickly got both himself and the tech to safety.
All good right? No. The contractor who constructed the new location had ordered and installed a system meant for maritime machine rooms, not the computer ‘machine room’ we had. In an environment filled with fuel and grease, you optimize towards filling the room with an inert gas as quickly as possible, and it turns out they use explosives to complete the task. In this room there were three canisters in the ceiling with fire shooting out of them, burning pellets to generate the inert gas. The gas and smoke from the canisters combined with the leaked cooling gas, and started condensing.
Into hydrochloric acid.
While all this was going on, all of the servers and workstations were happily humming along, sucking the now extremely corrosive atmosphere into themselves, making sure that every nook and cranny inside and outside got covered in a thin greasy film of acid.
The aftermath: Mine and two colleagues’s summer break was cut short, as we were called in to do damage control. Ripping out and wiping hard drives clean was what we did all summer. With external help we managed to recover all of the data. One feature film was delayed a few weeks. The insurance payout actually made the company a bit ahead financially. As far as I know there’s still burn marks in the floor of the server room, from when flames shot out of the fire extinguishers. Everyone involved now knows what a proper dry fire suppression system for a server room looks like.
The kicker is, the cooling was messed up because a fabric awning on the building had fallen down and was covering the air intake. If anyone had thought to check the roof this whole thing would have been avoided, and that server room would probably still have bombs attached to its ceiling.
I'm in awe about this. I work in compressed gasses and it's pretty common knowledge in our industry that the environment dictates usage. I cannot believe they never consulted a gas specialist or used a completely inert gas that could have done the same thing.
Sounds perfectly normal for a construction/install team to me. "Maritime...doesn't that mean like ocean or something?" "Hey the drawing says install it so I'm installing it." "...yeah fair enough."
Great story! Very well told. I can tell you must enjoy retelling it to newbies when they join the company :)
But wow, other than 2 summer breaks being cut short, it sounds like a good outcome. Especially considering no one was seriously hurt
I’m not with that company anymore, but given the right audience, ‘that time the server room blew up’ is a big hit.
It could have gone way worse. A stressful lesson and a good story is best case scenario outcome when stuff hits the fan.
I remember working at a restaurant once that was open on Christmas. We were expected to be working for at least 12 hours, but we had two 30 minute breaks and a 1 hour lunch.
One dude brought in a 6 pack of Red bulls, but he was clearly high AF as well. Not sure on what (we suspected speed or something as he was flying), but he chugged those RBs throughout the shift.
By noon he was in an ambulance on the way to the ER.
You were in the restaurant industry... in my neck of the woods drugs and restaurants go hand in hand well that and all restaurant staff banging each other but namely drugs
A coworker set the break room on fire by microwaving her lunch for 30 minutes instead of three. No idea how you forget your lunch is in the microwave, let alone for half an hour, but hey I got to go home early.
The microwaves we have at work are big commercial ones with just a single nob, they only go up to 6 minutes, probably for this exact reason.
30 minutes? Those are rookie numbers. You want a shorter time? Go for something truly vintage. I have a 1977 Amana Radarange that can achieve the same in 5-8 minutes. Those fuckers are powerful.
I once microwaved a bowl of cereal by mistake instead of a bowl of stew.
Cereal goes on fire and smells like burning horse hair when microwaved
ADHD, that's why I'd forget...lol
Ryan?
Fire guy!
Nope sorry, haha!
I did 30 instead of 3 and forgot about it once. Granted, I was about eight or nine at the time...
Guy was up on a mezzanine installing rubber roofing (I work in an RV factory), suddenly either seized or fainted or had a stroke, nobody's really sure, fell off the catwalk and landed on his head 19ft below on concrete. Died immediately. It happened maybe 50ft from my workstation.
The company suits came by to sing kumbaya and tell us how we're all a "family", took a single day of production off (so they could clean the blood up, presumably) and production started back up as normal. He had been working there for 25 years.
That's rough. He should have definitely been clipped onto the railing with a safty harness on.
At an old employer: delivery driver for a fuel truck company parked his truck one day and robbed a bank. Got arrested, we had to go get the truck back from where he parked it a few blocks away.
At my current employer: literally last weekend the freezer in our storage area failed and a boar, some elk, and fish went rotten over the weekend. The smell in my office the last 3 days has almost killed people, this will not be forgotten
One of the owners was at a conference with a number of other employees and showed his dick to one of the women. I think she got $100k to resign.
One of the owners came back to the office after a summer party and did coke off of someone else’s desk and left it there. Didn’t hear if they had to do anything for that.
One of the married older owners paid one of the married younger assistants for some in-office sex during the day. Got caught.
One of the married owners got his married assistant pregnant. She left town for about a year.
Do you work at Pornhub or Wall Street?
Porn Street
Couple of HR people had sex on a desk, not realising they could be seen from the upmarket hotel across the street. Oops!
There were quite a few other incidents - it was quite a lively workplace - but this was the funniest.
I guess we should really tell the HR about it. Wait.
Anticlimactic but back when I was working for an ISP we had a couple portable Honda generators that we used to power gear when the power went out.
We never tested the generators because we were using them every 2 months because Australian power problems.
One time I get to a radio tower and the genny doesn't start, add a splash more fuel in the tank, still no start. Drive back to the office and grab the second one, and return to the radio tower. Second genny doesn't start, but power comes back after a bit.
We took them to a place to be serviced and they each and a different problem, but the third one I didn't grab was perfectly fine.
From then on I did a monthly test on all 3 gennys and they never had a problem.
This has been the most ordinary day post I've seen so far, I envy you. Meanwhile our company has refused to sign off on funds for the e-generators that have been down for 5 months. So next big storm we're SoL.
On a Saturday evening, a couple of guys were out mudding in their personal trucks. One truck got stuck badly in some mud with the consistency of Elmer's glue. The second truck tried to pull it out and ended up equally mired.
Someone had keys to the work truck which had a winch on the front. They brought the work truck out to the stuck trucks, now in the middle of the night, and freed them using the winch. The trucks were so stuck that even the winch struggled, and blew out. When told to rewind, it limped back to a position approximating being rewound but the cable was a mess and clearly the winch was toast.
The work truck was taken to a self-service truck wash and everyone present hosed all of the mud off it, leaving it immaculately clean. The truck and keys were returned to their proper spots.
On Monday morning, everyone went to work and was shocked (shocked!) to find out that somehow, mysteriously, the winch on the truck was in bad shape and needed to be replaced. The boss was suspicious but decided not to ask questions he didn't want answered.
That must’ve been life before cheap security cameras.
Company moves into a new building, threw a big Christmas party with booze. Most of the management fucked someone not their wife/husband, lots of condoms as well as heroin needles and smudges of coke left in the bathrooms. Drugs and booze all over the damn place.
We got cards and little bits of candy after that, never another Xmas party
Who on earth does heroin at a Christmas party? :p
Chick-fil-A, Hobby Lobby, a mega-church
I'd put good money on a company doing something marketing/ad related. My first summer internship was at a company that did digital ads, and the amount of alcohol that was consumed on literally a daily basis was insane. I'm talking the majority of the office being having a minimum of 2-4 drinks after about 2pm rolled around, and probably triple that on Friday.
The only party I was there for was the CTO's birthday, in which at lunch he received a piñata filled to bursting with those little alcohol shots, and by the end of the day basically everyone had to Uber home. For 19 year old me, it was pretty unreal seeing my bosses and coworkers that drunk in the middle of the week.
Knowing how fucked up everyone was during a normal workweek in the office, it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if a Christmas party there was an absolute drug-filled rager.
Coworker in sales got mad at one of the shipping guys thinking his packing of the pallet was insufficient. They get into a verbal spat until the sales guy walks to his car and pulls his gun on the shipping guy, the shipping guy, who also happened to be a retired marine and allowed by the owner to open carry in the office. Sales guy was lucky the only thing he lost that day was his job.
No shots were fired since the sales guy was stupid but not that stupid. We kind of had a collective "that's not terribly surprising" moment later when the cop was over for the police report and brought up sales guy's past mugshots like "was this the guy".
Most average day in the American workplace? That's just bonkers.
No, this is very, very far from normal here.
It happens but not as often as our public image would make you think. Most people who own guns/carry are responsible.
I was one of the assistant managers at a restaurant and we hired a new head general manager. I guess the owners didn't vet her very well because she worked for them before and they were happy to have her back.
The shenanigans started with her asking to take a loan out of the petty cash to help cover her move to the area. Then she starts buying us new equipment with her own checks and reimbursing herself with the cash from the safe.
Soon after, we start getting calls from home Depot and everywhere else she bought the equipment from. Turns out her out of state checks were for an account that was closed. The district manager came and told her about the situation and that she needed to pay out ALL back ASAP. After he left, she said she needed to run an errand and we still don't know what happened to her after that, besides hearing some rumors about a meth habit.
We had another manager at a different location that was supposed to take a $2 or $3,000 deposit to the bank. We probably should have specified which account to put it in, because it never made it there. We never saw that person at work again.
A productive team member was heard giving their daily stand-up report during their team's daily stand-up...
To another company. Oops! Don't forget to mute your mic if you're working two jobs at the same time!
Hahhahhahahahahaha
Was it good?
Double dipping~~
We had a manager get fired because he slept with two of our waitresses and gave them both chlamydia.
The worst part was they weren't gonna fire him for that but only because one of the girls was only 17 💀
As a software engineer, I really thought an EM had found a way to fuck an EC2 instance before I read your second sentence. But yeah what a scumbag.
That's hilarious.
I've edited for clarification now lol
Dude, you should already know the the service industry is the most debauched, depraved environment you can imagine. 99% of the people who work there are raging alcoholics and coke/meth addicts. There's no way in hell I'd ever let any 17 year old female relative work at any restaurant. Period.
FBI seized the website and shut the company down.
For some reason I envisioned FBI dudes in body armor bursting in and pointing their rifles at a poor server rack in the closet.
Gambling?
Rare Pepe archive
megaupload
An experimental energy storage device exploded down the street, and a couple big chunks of shrapnel came down through the ceiling, smashed the shit out of an empty cube. We were lucky no one sat there.
Donnie Darko sequel shit
Production operator with IBS pooped on the floor in a clean room. Kinda ick, and they had to call the spill team to clean up the hazard, but not really the employees fault and no one is really upset. Later, IBS employee is elsewhere, more poop is found on the floor. No one comes forward. No one is identified. Management puts out a "Please use the bathrooms" email and calls it a day.
Owner shot himself after bankrupting the company through embezzlement and we had to vacate all residential patients within a week knowing we wouldn't get paid and would be losing our jobs, haha!
There are two that come to mind for me. I work at a big box retailer that sells a lotta different stuff.
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One of our front end managers' car caught fire randomly one night. I don't actually know what caused it though but it was kind of a big deal. Thankfully no one was hurt.
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Years ago, we had a frozen stocker who was pretty bad at his job, and was also a racist little shit. He worked with another guy who was a light skinned black dude (who was a very good stocker), and while they were normally fine, one day our terrible stocker got upset over something one day and called him a slur. It wasn't received well, and some shit went down, but nothing serious at this point.
Now I mentioned that terrible stocker was terrible. Management had reprimanded him a few times already, so on this particular night where he was doing very badly, there was no more room for conversation, so he was fired. The firing manager was this super cool African fella. The firing was not received well, and caused terrible stocker to lose his shit. He stormed out of the office, shouting racial slurs at everyone he saw, and ended up cutting his hand with his box cutter. He then proceeded to smear his blood all over the frozen doors and then ran outside and smeared his blood all over the firing manager's car. The police were called and he was arrested. No idea what happened to him afterwards. It was pretty wild.
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Our department sometimes had a few interns, most of them young and female. Usually one of them got her workplace in the boss's room in the office and he had plenty of time to show them how things are done etc.
One day the boss invited all staff to his house for a nice little summer barbecue. Later in the evening we recognized him being absent from the party for nearly 2 hours, and one of the interns was missing for exactly the same time.
a guy mixed the wrong chemicals and work shut down for a week. of course that happened before i was hired and hasnt happened since. everyday i pray someone did that and shuts down work for a week so i get a free week off
Worked on a military base that had a small lake. Against policy, a civilian employee went out fishing during his lunch break, somehow capsized his rowboat and had to be rescued by the on-base fire department. Unsurprisingly, he didn't lose his job over it.
Please tell me you're talking about lake bandini (pretty sure thats what we called the lagoon in 29 palms)
No, sorry. This was on the east coast. I bet the same story applies to a few different bases though lol.
Can't fire him; you have to keep the best and the brightest on your team! /s
We had a 2 drinks limit at company after hours gigs. Not that bad, but it was apparently because someone drank a bunch and then walked onto a highway. There was also the time the FBI came into the building to ask about a sales guy who took part in 1/6.
One of the two bosses didn't turn up for work one Friday. On the weekend, we all received a call that he had died.
Monday was horrible. We had new starters that came into an office full of people crying, and people from our HQ joining to set people up with any counselling.
The worst part? We had deadlines to meet, and clients didn't give a fuck that the person responsible had died. One large client outright said to me on the phone on that first Monday "that's sad and all, but I don't really give a fuck, have it done by end of day". To HQ's credit, after I had told them they asked me to stop what I was doing (had already delivered the work) and our CEO called them and told them we were to terminate our contract with them. One woman I worked with, a Project Manager, was repeatedly brought to tears by clients checking on work or trying to sort out meetings with a guy that was in a morgue. I was able to power through, up until the day of his funeral when we all went to the pub after and saw his children playing without a care in the world.
Initially, it brought us all closer together, but within three months people started to leave - and by the end of the year the HQ decided to just close the office entirely, firing everyone that was still there.
I hate to say it, looking back, but this gave me without question one of the best answers for behavioural interviews in tech, since I ultimately ended up having to help deliver everything and onboard people in a stressful scenario. Knowing the guy, it's what he would have wanted.
Years ago when I worked at Taco Bell someone got fired because the manager walked in on him snorting coke off the bags of strawberry they used to put on top of the fruitista freezes in the walk-in.
Also some asshole pulled a gun in drive thru during my shift because he ordered extra cheese on his 7 layer nachos and apparently did not get adequate cheese.
I can relate with the second one. No matter what taco bell I order at asking for extra anything is like pressing the 'close doors' button on an elevator in the US, it's pointless.
Pulling a gun on someone for that is unhinged, but feeling irked or disappointed is understandable. I just order from the app now and buy the sauce bottles at the grocery store, and order a nacho cheese cup separately if I want extra.
I can relate with the second one. No matter what taco bell I order at asking for extra anything is like pressing the ‘close doors’ button on an elevator in the US, it’s pointless.
From a recent trip. They weren't even extra ones I ordered, they were just supposed to come with the order. IDK if they're taken out of the employee's paychecks or what because damn.
A guy at a place I worked at got fired for smoking weed in the bathroom. I overheard him getting fired. This was a small business, (but "under 100 employees" small, not 3 people small) so the owner fired him personally. He said something like, "I don't care if you smoke weed. I don't even care if you smoke weed in your car on your lunch break if you do your job. But you really smoked weed in the bathroom?"
Used to work at a local resort. One time, Kid Rock rented out the whole top floor of the hotel, and requested no staff go up there during his stay. Of course, it's a hotel full of minimum wage teenagers, so intra-staff communication is abysmal. A maid ended up running into a naked Kid Rock holding a bag of cocaine lol
A coworker aggressively made out with my face at a work event out of town and they stopped letting us put alcohol on our expense reports. I was universally blamed for the policy change and HR tried to send ME to sexual harassment training because it was my fault for socializing with her, apparently!
Direct quote from the HR director: "If you knew she was a sloppy drunk, why did you go out with her?"
Wow that's fucked man. What happened to you?
My idiot friend told his boss about it and she reported it on my behalf. I told them I didn't want anything done about it but they sent me through the HR grinder anyway and I quit like 6 months later for a shit job. Good times, kinda ruined my life for 8 years
Probably one of our male executives 'gracefully' stepping down after being caught having sex on security camera at the construction of a new location with the overseer of the construction that was the husband of the security director that found the footage.
We had to close our sky several times during those last 4 years (meaning no aircrafts allowed above the country). Several times for technical failures, the last one this summer wasn’t our fault but was cool.
I arrived at work for a night shift in the ACC (area control center), heavy rain above the city, I see a small lake forming up against the building underground.
When I reached the elevator, I took off my EarPods and heard a shower like sound coming from the elevator. Eh let’s take the stairs… Curious, I venture to the underground where I’m greeted by a bunch of laughing air traffic controllers and the ACC supervisor for the night. There is something like 40cm of water everywhere, blocking access to the -1 floor and our smoking corner. We joke about doing the "clear the sky" procedure because we can’t use the smoking corner.
A few minutes later we are all back in the ACC, I wasn’t seated yet when the crisis phone rang: We mobilize the board of crisis, reason is the flooding reached some electrical supply rooms, like UPS and batteries rooms.
30 minutes later the AC is down. AC for us humans in the building but mostly for the data center with all the ATC systems needed for our work. Some systems start to overheat and fail.
Less than one hour into my shift, the board of crisis that quickly assembled comes to us in the ops room and says: "We clear the sky, it’s too dangerous".
For us in air traffic control, clearing the sky is easy, you just tell aircrafts a heading to quickly get the fuck out of our airspace and then you stay in front of an empty radar screen. Capacity management people have a little bit more work to do, announcing Europe and Eurocontrol that our ‘capacity = 0 please don’t send traffic’. It’s the tech people that have a lot of work in those situations, personally I just sat on my ass making jokes and scrolling lemmy.
We ended up switching off all the unused screens, systems etc to avoid heat. Opened all the electronics hatches, all doors, everything we could do to have some fresh air inside as it was getting hot. Airport fire squad quickly came and pumped out the water from the basement. They did that all night until morning.
At the end of my shift at 6, temperature inside the ACC was 29 degrees C (instead of 23) and humidity % unknown but it felt "sticky". Sky was still closed. Apparently during the day it felt like a sauna.
The tech guys managed to restore some AC only for the data center and the ACC but not the rest of the buildings so it was mandatory work from home for non ops people. When I came back the evening for my second night shift, everything was back to normal for us and it was a sad normal night with no fun events.
It turned out that the flooding reached 40 cm on the -1 floor and 1m40 on the -2 floor. There is a small underground river below that with a pool that is used as natural cold water for AC. That cold pool was filled with hotter (and unclean) rain water, killing the cold production loop.
Close the sky is an amazing phrase to be able to use
Worked in a small Unix team under a broader IT department at a university. The manager of our team was awesome in part because his attitude was “I deal with all the university politics so you can focus on your work”. Anybody who has worked at a large university knows what the politics can be like.
The VP of IT retired and the replacement was hired from an IT department at another university. The new VP’s overall policy was “We will do things this way because that’s how we did it at my old university”. Within about 6 weeks we had a round of “layoffs” that targeted our manager and one other manager that was also known to push back against the university politics. They were the only two people let go out of a department of roughly 100.
Within about a year of that happening every last member of our tight knit Unix team left for greener pastures.
Shorts got banned because ceo saw someone's balls.
Real question was why they were looking so closely at that workers crotch while we were in chairs
Wow and if your balls are low enough to be visible you know it's got to be hot, thus proving the necessity of shorts!
But yeah, some humans have balls and sometimes you'll see them, get over it. I hope no one tells this ceo about breasts.
Wasn't that they were low, more the angle he was at let him see up the crotch
cursed Chubbies, they look so good but they hold so little
Blame the idiots who are buying short shorts again. Probably the same idiots who buy skinny jeans.
This was actually after I left, although I have a million crazy stories about this place- but the guy who I used to work directly under was an alcoholic, and one day Monday he didn't show up for work, wasn't answering his phone, etc. This was pre-social media, so they couldn't ask around or anything.
He comes in a week later and it turned out that over the previous weekend, he had gotten drunk, driven from where we lived in Indiana down to Georgia for some reason (he had no connections in Georgia), went into a bar in some small town, got into a fight, and wound up in the slammer for a week.
He was no longer employed after that. And this is a small business where every employee was so vital to the owner that I once got mad at him, screamed, "GO FUCK YOURSELF, [his name]!" and stormed out and went home and he called me up the next day, apologized and begged me to come back in with various compensation promises which I can't remember. It took a lot to get fired from there, but that was enough.
Not current workplace but previous ones.
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Used to work with a guy who had no filter whatsoever and would openly brag about how efficiently and quickly he'd work and multitask, and about the 9/10 models he used to shag back when he lived in South East Asia. He was fired from my workplace after a string of incidents where he growled at a female colleague, bullied several other colleagues over bad quality monitors and openly used racial slurs in the office.
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That same guy went to work for an energy company that I had other friends work at. I learned he was fired and escorted out by security within minutes after being reprimanded by a team leader. He went into a company-wide Slack channel and openly called her a "fucking bitch."
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Two people got fired for taking dick pics in the office whilst on an evening shift and posting them on their socials.
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Manager was stealing money.
They usually are.
Been there.
So my team lead ordered a bottle of a particularly nasty chemical (don't remember what, this was long ago) Thing is, he went on holiday immediately after and didn't tell anyone about it. The bottle had to be shipped and kept at -20℃ otherwise it would decompose into a deadly gas; one of those lovely CMR types. So next thing that happens is, I get called on my day off by the boss saying that there is a scary box in the lab and if I could check it out. I was reluctant but I figure I'll check it out. I though to myself that it was a little unusual that they would ship it in a styrofoam box without any dry ice (it had evaporated) so I take out a slightly bloated bottle which seems to be filled with some liquid. I then tear of the package label and read the MSDS. At this point I read all the scary labels and realize that this thing has been out here for a while, all the dry ice has evaporated, the bottle is bloated and filled with gas which I am sitting right next to. So I turn on ventilation and GTFO. I inform the boss who immeditally got his home freezer to cool it down. I meanwhile started to notice a stinging in my eyes (which was one of the effects) We wash out my eyes, stinging goes away, lungs are fine and everything ends without injury.
TLDR
Coworker orders deadly chemicals, goes on holiday, doesn't tell anyone, almost kills me.
Well that's rude.
I work in a family owned grocery store. Living inside or around the store right now is:
- Opossum
- Skunk
- Feral cat
- Mice
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Feral cat
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Mice
More like feral Garfield.
I suspect some cats know that if they eat only some of the mice, there will be more mouse babies before too long.
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stressed out researcher tried to get a temp to ship out biological specimens by fedex.
Like standard mail fedex? No special packaging or anything?
yup on standard fedex. I mean packaged up well on our end but still something that is a crime.
I hurt my back working today. That was an incident.
Boss tried to shoot himself, missed because he was really drunk, hit the radiator and flooded the whole shop.
Creepy guy got fired. Showed up the next day and confronted HR. Idk what went down but they had to call the cops.
The CEO sent out the email that COVID vaccination was required for all employees or the people that refused would be terminated, like most workplaces. It was fully expected seeing as it is a hospital, and all but a handful of employees compiled. This moron decided to reply all (the reply all to CEO emails has thus been disabled since) with a lecture full of antivax nonsense about how COVID vaccines were experimental and contain fetal cells, and the revelation that they had been reading patient charts that they had no business reading for COVID test results and the consultation or ER notes, and wrote about the "proof" that they had that nobody had died or gotten really sick from COVID, and how the CEO was extremely misinformed on the subject of COVID. That resulted in immediate termination and it was pretty hilarious to read their nonsense and the fact they admitted to every employee they had been violating patient confidentiality. You want to be that dumb, have at it.
We used to go out for drinks after work once or twice a week
Then a guy got so drunk he puked at the bar, got in a fight with another guy and bit his ear off
The guy was immediately fired obviously but we don't socialize like we used to for some reason
You ever have alcohol just hit harder than expected? I was out at a work party. I can't remember what it was for. It was a small office. Less than 10 total people including the three owners.
I only had two drinks but I must not have eaten anything that day because I was fucking wasted. The office manager had to drive me home in the middle of it. So we fucked at my place. Nothing was ever said after. I worked there another few years. Eventually had a 3-way with the office manager and my future wife.
10/10 would do again.
A male staff member was yelling at and berating a female for god knows what. She was trying to get away from him, and he'd followed her around the office down the stairs and into the washroom.
She was the manager's fiancee, and there were three witnesses. We were honestly worried for her safety and the receptionist was about to call 911.
Consequences for the abusive minidicked coworker? NONE.
Depends. Had a client pull a knife on me once, and another dragged me around the facility for an hour while he tried to break down a door to "kill" another client because he had stolen the change from a $5 Taco Bell gift card.
The other incident being was a coworker harboring one of the fugitive kids at her house with her like....6 children while her husband was away in Nebraska for work. Randomly saw her in family court a year later while I was working another job, hopefully while her husband fights her for custody of the kids...
The big incident at my previous job was the (extremely incompetent) HR person accidentally sharing a spreadsheet of every employee's salary. I was an hourly worker at the time and thought it was funny, but some of the senior engineers were pissed to find out how much more other engineers made. HR was not fired, instead she was put on a temporary paid leave.
Other incidents include:
- One of the owners' vape exploded, forcing everyone to evacuate.
- VP of the company got caught buying escort services on the company credit card.
- Aforementioned owner (who was no longer an owner after the company was bought out) got fired shortly after a town hall zoom meeting, where he used a Trump/Pence background.
- The head of the NOC team had a stroke at work.
- COO "accidentally" revealed in front of everyone that one of the Project Managers had cancer. She sued, and they settled.
- COO verbally abused one of the senior managers over the phone during a big meeting. He sued, and they settled.
It was a pretty shitty company.
That time the food cart pod exploded:
https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2017/10/food_cart_pod_on_fire_in_downt.html
Them including that pic of Audrey Donovan is hilarious
Not a fun story but new CEO comes in, pricing structure heavily modified to be more aggressive towards bringing clients into our ecosystem of products, we lose a whale of a client, 7 percent of the company is laid off including the newest guy on my team,and then magically acquire new responsibilities for the same pay. Capitalism baby.
That's complicated to answer in my case, as nobody gets along (I'm one of the few people with a relatively stable work relation), so there's an incident everyday, though there are also occasional ones that stand out a lot. I for some reason have a lot of bad rep without any actual cause for it and remember people storming into our operations more than once and demanding I be exiled from the place. There are two types of people in this situation whenever it has happened: those who are almost about to oblige and fulfill their wish, and me who calls authorities and ends up dealing with the situation before they can do so before everyone just forgets all that happened.
I bet you have done good stories about that
It depends on what you mean by good, as they aren't things I like to think happen to me often, though one consistent theme reveals itself out of it, even when merely talking about it.
Incoming manager was supposed to come in for a walkaround with the outgoing manager. No show no contact. Saw his name in the news a week later. Think Chris Hanson type news.
He took a seat over there?
Jason spilled a barrel a barrel of ink and fell in it. 🤣
Why do people constantly ask this question in this community? I swear this gets asked at least weekly. 🤦🏻♂️
Karma farming isn't a thing here. Yet people seem happy to groundhog day the hell out of it...
Maybe people just enjoy reading the kinds of replies that these kinds of questions tend to garner?
No doubt you're right, as everyone seems to be replying in good faith.
I don't want to yuck anyone's yum, so to speak, but if this kind of thing is popular, maybe the mods could create a weekly thread for it?
I'll be honest with you chief, I've been on Lemmy pretty chronically for the last year and a half and this is the first one of these I'm seeing
I mean I could be going mad... uh, chief... but I could have sworn it was this community. My mistake, apparently.
Perhaps I got the community wrong, but not about this question appearing repeatedly on Lemmy. 🤷♂️
