Best I have to offer is the time the boss sent the team an email about a team meeting to be held the next week, and he said the topic would be “Emu Farming.” The company designs and builds flight trainers and maintenance trainers for the military, so we rarely have anything to do with emus. But at the end of our team meeting, he did go over some slides about emu farming.
At one company I worked for, the boss three layers up was an EST-hole who would periodically hold department meetings. They had to be held in the lunch room so when one came up, I and a new guy who had not yet attended one walked in together. I picked a chair that was in front of a column, carefully adjusted its distance from the column, sat in it, then leaned back against the column.
“What are you doing?”
“What does it look like?”
“Looks like you’re getting ready for a nap.”
“Got it in one.”
Twenty minutes of actual meeting content and forty-five minutes on the Joy of EST™ later when we were leaving, he said, “Now I see why.”
I got a text at work, “hey, we’ve been kind of slow, can I leave 30 minutes early?” The sender was 20 yards away, but my door was shut (I rarely close my door).
I replied, “sure! I’m not busy, and I’ll cover for you if anything happens”.
My phone chimed 3 minutes later. I assumed it would be a “thanks” text, but no; it was a long narrative about plans for the upcoming weekend, including some pretty personal TMI stuff.
I opened my door and she was standing there, very red faced.
I was in a meeting, once, with one of the designers in another wing of our company, and that was apparently enough to get me added to his mailing list.
Every month, a message shows up in my inbox titled “Tonight is a full moon…” What follows is completely random.
Last month, it was a breathless account of how trees are tapped for syrup.
Two months ago, it was about hot water bottles.
Last November, it was the art of John Wayne Gacy.
The month before that was about ping-pong.
…And what the OP didn’t mention is that Avva is his company’s director of HR.
The worst I ever got was a rambling paranoid screed that must have been close to a hundred pages long. Just for a sampling, the writer recounts how he had said something like “and they’re using chemicals absorbed through the mouth, the nose, and the vagina”, and then only two days later, he saw some celebrity using the word “vagina”, which was proof that THEY were monitoring everything he said and were taunting him.
Folks in my department also often got things from crackpots who figured they could revolutionize physics, ranging from Timecube-level incoherency to “might fool the rubes” to beautiful mathematics that has no connection to anything.
About 15 years ago a FOIA request was emailed to everyone in our little corner of the federal government. The email/FOIA request was for real, but it was at the behest of a conspiracy-theory nut named Barbara Schwarz. I don’t have the original FOIA request anymore, but here’s a reference I found to a similar FOIA request she sent to another federal agency:
The only other crazy emails we get are when someone in a single office spams our entire federal organization about some event that is only of interest to their local office, resulting in a flurry of people elsewhere in the country using reply-to-all to tell everyone else to stop using reply-to-all; I’ve seen those skirmishes go on for days.
The beauty of it is that when the Department replies saying no, we have no records for any of that, you crazy person, dear old Barbara concludes ‘Ha! Your denial PROVES there’s something fishy going on!’
