I think this takes the biscuit for bad first days at work.
Friend of mine’s 1st day. keep in mind he is hired as the IT head of a county.
The sheriff comes into his office. My friend figured he was going to ask about the depts computers, network or somesuch.
Tuens out the Sheriff got a fancy side scanning sonar rig. My friend gets it to work.
Sheriff isn’t very comfortable with technology and asks my friend to run it.
So they head out on a cold day scanning the nearby lake looking for (the body of) recently missing teenager who is presumed drowned.
Brian
I thought I had a bad “first day of work” story. Mine is that I was hauled out of the building on a stretcher & spent the next 3 days in the cardiac ward of the hospital. (It turned out to be my gall bladder). People sure remembered me when I came back!
Okay, it was my first day of work at a manufacturing firm. Throughout the day, various people from the president to a couple production supervisors stop by my office and introduce themselves. Just after 5:00, a balding guy in a light blue workshirt comes in. I jump up and say “How ya doin’? I’m saoirse.” He shakes my hand and says, “Yeah, great, hand me your wastebasket, would you?” Not a horror story or anything, but embarassing.
Hanford, 1979. First day on the job, they sent me to the car pool to pick up a brand new 4x4 Chevy Suburban. Brought it back to the office and we loaded tens of thousands of dollars worth of surveying gear in it and headed out to the desert for work.
To my surprise, it was customary to clear surveying lines through sagebrush with the brush guards on vehicles. Put in a decent day’s work and headed back to the office to enter data.
20 minutes later one of the engineers from next door comes running through our office with a fire extinguisher, hollering for everyone to grab more, there was a rig on fire in the parking lot. My brand new rig and all of the expensive equipment weren’t much more than a molten blob.
Catalytic converters must have been a new thing in those days. No one even thought of the possibility of dry sagebrush packing itself around a catalytic converter.