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.
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.
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He got free food and a bed? Jealous.
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.
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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.
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Excel is a whole OS unto itself. Like Emacs except you can get out of it.
Good software starts in Excel honestly. But oh god should you not stay there… Its not designed as a database indeed.
Access is the worst of both worlds.
There’s nothing more permanent than a temporary solution
Excel is a single-assignment dynamically-typed functional programming language with a really obtuse editor.
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Close enough when your actual database system is written in fucking COBOL.
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.
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It wasn’t a server failure. Someone rm -rf on the root of the server. The server did what it was told.
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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.
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I saw this so often when I was client facing. CEOs, doctors, and sales people were the biggest offenders.
We had a gyno who had a huge pile of porn on his file server. It was all from the waist up. Seriously, he had half a terabyte of titty pics.
Separately, there was a sales guy who was juggling like 5 women (poorly) at any given time. He was fucking gross and would try to show them off to anyone who came to work on his continuous computer problems that were all caused by him.
Separately from that, we had a “troubled boys ranch” as one of our clients. One of the C Suite was caught with porn and we had to go over it with a fine toothed comb to make sure none of it was of any of the kids. There wasn’t (thankfully) but there was a whole lawsuit about it and he was charged with showing it to some of the kids.
A gyno with just tit pics either feels like he went 50/50 in career path and made a bad choice, or has become so desensitised (or put off) by his work that he just cant bear to look below the belt
When your hobby becomes your job!
We should be able to look at a liiittle porn at work.
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As a former overnight IT worker, I always just assumed my browsing history would be reviewed by other IT people. Maybe they wondered why I spent so much time on horror game forums, maybe they already knew I was a disturbed mind.
WoW
EvE Online until he perfecta his spreadsheets
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.
You’re a rock star!
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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
Traded guns for booze in Baghdad. Every NCO and officer involved got removed mid-deployment
Where R they now?
Prolly cops
Not with a dishonorable discharge.
Dude cops get fired for assault in one town and hired in the next town over.
Very, very different from a dishonorable discharge from the military.
Not Baghdad
No clue.
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
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They were both tragic figures.
Whats ur job?
This was working as a server/cook/bistro at an independent living retirement community. During covid which added to the fuckery. Over the course of about 3 years.
Do they eat well? Like good shit?
Sometimes.
Food like bistro I made it right in front of you and did whatever you wanted. Sandwiches, breakfast, tacos, burgers etc. We tried our best with what we had.
This setup was different from the main dining room which was lunch line batch cooking. Dinners were kinda sucky occasionally.
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Where?
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Spanks!
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’ve tried almost everything but I’ve never tried lean. I want to sooooo badly.
So buy some cough syrup and sprite. Also most cough syrup has acetaminophen in it so I hope you didn’t need that liver.
Most cough syrup sold as codeine/promethazine cough syrup nowadays is actually just fent.
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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.
Even if you’re forklift certified? Or other heavy equipment operator (crane, excavator, front loader, big truck)?
In the US, can each of these occupations get shitfaced the second they’re off work?
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Umm, I don’t know, probably. I’m just curious about jobs like that in another country
Why would that matter?
I don’t know, I guess so? Most drug tests are severely flawed, because many don’t test if someone is under the influence right now, they can test positive even when it’s longer ago and outside of worktime.
So in essence, you can get fired for being under influence at work, even though you’re not, because these tests are not good enough. And I think that’s nuts, aside from the massive invasion of privacy of giving an employer a claim to you bodily fluids.
Sure, you’re not supposed to use drugs. But is it your employer’s task to enforce the law? No, they’re not the police, and it’s none of their business what people do at home.
What are you suggesting? That they should run a urine test for magic mushrooms on every pilot before every flight? Obviously this was a very bad situation. But what scenario would have prevented this?
That drug testing for machinery which can cause serious harm isn’t such an out there concept.
Right, but the practicality? It would still be hard and expensive to catch every outlier case such as this one with drug testing.
[edit] I’ve looked it up and in the Netherlands, drug testing is only legal for some very specific professions where there is a risk of serious, large-scale harm such aa for instance pilots, like you mentioned. Other than that, it’s illegal because it’s medical information, and considered too invasive.
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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
This is why we shld bury our lines, much more effort to dig down six feet than get a ladder and snip
A wild backhoe appears!
It used Dig! It’s Super Effective!
What does a network engineer bring on a hiking trip in the woods? Water, snacks, extra sunscreen, a first aid kit, bug repellent, bear spray … and a folding shovel and a piece of fiber-optic cable.
(What’s the fiber for?)
Well, if you get lost in the woods or need to be rescued, you take the shovel, dig a trench, put the fiber in it, bury it … and within an hour, someone with a backhoe will show up to tear it up. Then you can just follow the backhoe tracks back to civilization.
And this is how a micro quake severed our T1 line from LA to Phoenix and shut the network down in our office for a week.
Honestly never thought of that, sounds like there would need to be some sort of protective channeling, with space to allow some shifting
Or use mobile phone networks.
Buried lines of all kinds are frequently severed by excavators because their position isn’t properly or fully documented.
The best set up I ever saw was a sewer tunnel, almost 12 feet tall, that handled all the services. From sewage to water to electricity to data; it held everything and was trivial to maintain and run new lines in.
line sounds like a really interesting idea, although I feel like documenting where you put things should be a basic task. Probably why it’s not done properly
You’d be surprised, how fragile critical infrastructure often is. There was an incident in Europe a few years ago, where a single miscalculation in a planned power line shutdown almost caused the entire European grid to split.
It slowed down a bit, and then we quickly learned that maintaining the perfect 50hz wasn’t actually necessary anymore. Few people still have clocks that depend on it
I’m not talking about the incident in Romania, but in Germany.
A shipyard needed some wires over a river deactivated and that caused an overload cascade, because the river was the border between two providers who had different assumptions about the capacity of the power lines connecting them.
oh damn, ain’t something. I will be looking into that, thank you!
Clocks, true.
Computer systems in general, however, will start acting very squirrelly outside of an approved MHz range. Wall warts and power supplies can handle only so much deviation from the norm. It’s why high-end UPS systems do power conditioning to provide a pure sine wave.
No worries we’re talking like 49.9995 hz
That’s some lacking infrastructure
They probably had plenty of infrastructure for normal operations.
What they were lacking was a BCDR plan.
…which includes having backup lines or a more robust installation. Police officers aren’t engineers or system administrators for public infrastructure.
You’re right tho, a backup alone would not be sufficient
Couldn’t they sell a few of their spare MRAPs to buy a backup generator and a redundant microwave link? Sheesh.
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.
Giving “human resources” a whole new meaning, or maybe just its oldest meaning.
I must admit, I never saw it, but she DID have vast “resources”.
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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
I love it.
All the other comments had guns sex and drugs.
Your story had mySQL.
Mad lad.
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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
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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.
Yeah, the policy was not only that you had to use the stipend on the gym membership, you had to actually GO at least a couples times per month and show proof of attendance “if asked”.
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.
