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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".
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.
I guess in his defense, he knew damn well if he stopped coming to work the day after $30k went missing, they'd know it was him.
I mean obviously the smart thing to do is not to fucking touch the money, but I'll give the guy showing up to work the next day. It's not like $30k is flee-to-Argentina-and-start-a-new-life money.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Traded guns for booze in Baghdad. Every NCO and officer involved got removed mid-deployment
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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 staff
An IT contractor at my government job was one of the people that tried to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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".
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!
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 💀
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
