[QUOTE=Ruffian]
Education is, in some ways, bound by the privacy meant to protect the children. A lot of people, and a lot of people’s shit, gets to hide behind that.
One of the school board members in the district where I teach was just arrested for punching out windows at 2am, shirtless, sweaty, and high on meth and pot. He charged officers and had to be tazed. Is he stepping down? Nooooooo, of course not. :rolleyes:
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You teach a few miles from where I work, apparently. I seem to have read about this incident in the local paper not long ago.
As for a tell-all book about my workplace, yeah, nothing interesting goes on at the welfare office. :rolleyes:
Many, many years ago I used to work in a Video Arcade (back when such things existed as standalone entities and not as afterthoughts at RSLs and Movie Theatres)
I did actually write a few short stories Inspired By Various Events, and they were thoroughly fictionalised and surreal in nature; in one (entitled The Democratic People’s Republic of Arcadia), the Arcade declared itself a separate country for a couple of days before Energex cut the power and put an end to that, and in another (Viva La Dance Dance Revolucion!) the staff decide to stage a coup and oust the managers so they can run the Arcade “their way”- which involves getting drunk, not doing any work, and providing offshore bank accounts for the dictators of 3rd World Banana Republics…
Actually, now I think about it, I should probably dust off the manuscripts and write a few more of the stories.
I also had a brief foray into comic-strips at the same job; I developed a superhero and sidekick who would deal with the bizarre and improbable situations the customers would cause, in 3 panels or less. The strip was very popular amongst my friends, but it was definitive proof that I can’t draw for shit and should stick to writing.
I used to work in an OLD hotel. They main kitchen was in the basement.
We had major cockroach infestations, and management didn’t do anything about it until the health department found out about it.
We had frequent sewer back-ups. The worst that I knew about filled the kitchen with about 1-3 inches of smelly water. The restaurant’s cooks were preparing food in a puddle of sewage, and management decided to keep the restaurant open.
Our Maintenance staff was under staffed and over worked. They had to use the bandage approach to fixing old equipment because they lacked the resources (labor and money) to do the job the right way. They were led by an ineffective boss, who was fired just before I left. The last straw was a round of refrigeration failures that cost us thousands of dollars in spoiled food.
The main dish washing area was so un-level from decades of plumbing problems and backups, that the floor slopped away from the drains in many places. The stewards usually worked in standing water. Some of the drains didn’t even work, but managment never did anything about it. (I gave up on reporting maintenence issues outside my department because the higher-ups never followed through on the work orders).
We payed for outside services that we didn’t use. In the pot-scrubbing area, we had these big black tubs for overnight soaking of hard-to-clean pots. In three years, I never saw anyone using them, but every month, a service-man arrived to replace the cleaning fluid and clean the bins. And we payed for it. We also payed for a hood-cleaning service that never did a good job. When I tried to tell management about the problems, they didn’t even know what company did the cleaning. 6 months later, they still hadn’t found out, but they kept coming, so someone was paying their bill for poor service.
I could probably post pages of other things that happened, but these were all constant problems. I just couldn’t put up with it anymore!
I suppose I could (but wouldn’t) write a scathing expose of American health care, including chapters such as:
I. “What’s in Your Rectum?”
II. “Common Things That Are Not Cancer but Still Look Scary”
III. “No, That Will Not Make Your Penis Larger”
IV. “Piercings Gone Wrong”
V. “Logical-Sounding Reasons Not to Quit Smoking/Drinking/Shooting Meth”
I think QtM’s version of Chapter I would be more interesting, though.
I’ve worked at the local university and the public schools and there’s never any shortage of scandal in those places. No plans to write about it, though.
In my last job I worked for an insurance company which rhymes with Hugh Ross. Alas, while there were the usual office politics, backbiting, lies, and brown nosing, I didn’t come across anything scandalous.
I’ve often fantasized about writing a work of fiction based on my time as the executive director of an expatriate business association in Indonesia.
The book would dwell on the pomposity, incompetence, sexism, petty cheating, and other human weaknesses paraded by me on a daily basis by the membership. First-rate comic material in the hands of a deft writer (probably not me).
When I was leaving the position, I had a goodbye lunch with the administrative assistant to one of the self-important poobahs I had to deal with. I told her my book idea, and explained that one reason I’d probably never write it is because I wouldn’t want to hurt the feelings of anyone at the Chamber - not everyone was a jerk, and even the jerks had their good sides.
She had the perfect response: “Just make sure there is one decent character in your book, and every single member who reads your book will be sure that you based the good guy on him.”
[QUOTE=Biotop]
I am sure many restaurant workers could tell stories that would curdle the blood of their patrons.
I saw food dropped, picked up and served. I saw the smell test: (Do you think this is still good, it’s been in that refrigerator a long time. Sniff Sniff. Oh Why not?). I know of supposedly fresh lasagna that actually came from a cube that had been in the freezer for months (who has time for rotation?) and meals prepared by chefs so drunk they (the chefs) had to be propped up to work. And this was just my first teenage dishwasher job.
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So True. Been cooking at restaurants for 6+ years and I’ve seen all this and more at one point or another. These weren’t bad restaurants either.
The one’s that scare me in general are the chinese restaurants. If I can’t see their kitchen as a customer, I can’t eat there. Heard way too many horror stories about their kitchens from former co-workers. I’ve read some of their food inspection violations posted in the paper as well. :eek:
But back to main topic:
Chapter 1: How to smoke pot at any workplace and get away with it.
Chapter 2: Kitchen secrets Revealed!
Chapter 3: How to run a bar/restaurant and pay as little taxes as possible
Chapter 4: Yet to be completed…
Oh for sure. OSHA would have a field day. Non-veterinary type people might not get a lot of these.
Yay! Fresh out of school!
Yay! New job at a veterinary office!
Uh…you’ve never tested your anesthesia machine for leaks?
Uhh…you’ve patched what leaks you found with duct tape?
Uhhh…You wrap your instrument packages for autoclaving like a burrito…?
Uhhhh is that a cake stored in the same fridge as the fecal samples??
Wait…you want me to PRY open the lid of the sharps disposal and empty out all the old needled into a big utility bucket?
Lead gloves are optional for taking x-rays and don’t freak if you xray your hand???
Your idea of keeping an animal on fluids while under anesthesia is doing a bolus SQ before putting them under??
Oh and you don’t believe in premeds and we have to physically restrain the animals while we hold the mask to their face and wait for the gas to kick in?
Wow. I’m fired because I pointed out this was not cool and we should see about changing some things?
Many years ago I worked as an Assistant Manager at a pizza delivery place. You know the one that offered to get the pizza to you in less than 30 minutes? When I worked for this place, the 30 minutes or free had been replaced by 30 minutes or $3 off. Didn’t matter, all the change did was make more money for this pizza giant. We couldn’t charge the drivers the difference. We could fire those that had more than 3 lates in a month.
Anyway, I had actually outlined a book called, “In less than 30 minutes,” after a young mother of two was killed when she ran a stop sign in order to get the pizzas delivered on time. I had drivers who would smoke out before they clocked in and nothing could be done to them. I had managers banging the pizza makers, and I lost pay whenever a pizza was late.
But I quit that job and lost my reasons to write that book.
