Stupidest thing you ever saw co-worker do?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

Mine wasn’t a coworker, but a very high boss. Like 5 levels above me…

We have those yogurt parfait things, and the fruit starts out frozen. It takes about an hour and a half to thaw. If you need one immediatwly, there’s this whole system of pouring cold water over the fruit, and mixing it, and draining it, and it’s a pain in the butt. So the supervisor needed one right away, and all the ones in the back were still frozen. Rather than doing the whole thawing thing, she decides to stick an already made parfait, yogurt and all, into the microwave. It wasn’t a pretty sight…yogurt and heat don’t mix. Kids, don’t try this at home…
It’s reasons like this that show me why all the really high bosses don’t work in the stores…they’re way too stupid for the public.

22

I once saw someone do the same basic trick except they used heated sulfuric acid. I don’t know if they recovered use of that arm.

23

Well, these weren’t technically AT work, but they’re too good not to share.

I used to work with someone who was an absolute walking disaster. She was always good for multiple stupid actions in a day. The two that stand out most are the time that she crashed and totalled her car on the way in to work. After having her car towed to the body shop and missing the day of work, she crashed on the way in the very next day and totalled the loaner car. I don’t think anyone was really even surprised.

Another time, she called and said she wouldn’t be in for a few days because she had fractured her skull. The supervisor who took the call said something to the effect of “Jesus! How did you do that?!”. She replied that she really wasn’t too sure, because she’d fallen on her head TWICE the day before.

I could go on. I could probably devote a whole board to stupid things this woman did. I seriously don’t know how she lived through a day.

24

Mine doesn’t involve physical injury, just bone-headedness. I used to work for a web design, development and hosting company. We were a small and informal bunch of about 17 altogether.

My friend and coworker had a habit of getting really negative about everything, and at one point we were all in a staff meeting talking about how to better build websites to display well on new technology (like phones, pagers, etc.). Someone mentioned that technology was being developed to allow blind people to surf the net (there was a lawsuit about it in the news at the time). So my friend blurts out exasperatedly, “Yeah, right. We’re going to develop a whole new technology just for you! Whatever! That’s so stupid.” And shakes his head. There was a stunned silence around the room. He remained a bit of a black sheep for a while after that.

25

That would be me.

Back in the days when I was young, dumb, and would willingly risk the threat of bodily harm for cheap thrills, me and my friends would think of new and unusual ways to cheat death after hours at the amusement park where we all worked. We would have all been fired if we would have been caught.

One of our favorite stunts was to wait until everyone, especially supervisors, had left the park after closing. We would then park all of the bumper cars, save one for each of us at one end of the gate (between 5 and 10 employees), increase the voltage from 50 to 160 (I am pulling these number from my butt because I don’t remember the exact amounts other than it was many times more powerful than when customers were there), then turn off all the lights except for the headlights of the cars. We would each get into a car and strap ourselves in very tight. The object wasn’t to crash into one another but to FLY around the track like Mario Andretti. The only problem was when we accidentally hit into another car or the side of the track, slamming the car so hard that we would become airborne and tip over and skid across the floor halfway hanging out.

Another favorite was to stand on the hood of the motor-cars (the little cars that run on a pretend road) with another employee driving as fast as possible then letting off the gas. These cars worked like golf carts so letting off the gas quickly would make the car skid to a stop, thus throwing us through the air. We would think it was especially funny when someone would land head first in the bushes or be forced to jump off the little, pretend overpass, damn near breaking their neck.

If I didn’t come home bruised or bloody, it just wasn’t a good night.

26

In 1969 I worked as a clerk in the post office in Manhattan Beach, CA. (This was before the Postal Reorganization Act.)
I was “facing” mail–sliding it into the cancelling machine so all the stamps would face the same way and be cancelled by the machine. Anyway, one of the items I picked up was a piece of mail from the postmaster’s office in the building. Whoever put the enclosures in the envelope–which had the PO return address printed on it–inserted them the wrong way into the envelope, so the destination address didn’t show through the little cellophane window! I showed it to my supervisor; he sighed and said, “Our Post Office!” :smiley:
It wasn’t so much that anything was damaged or delayed, but that someone like the Postmaster’s secretary would make such a goof.
On the guard job, I got an idea of how one of my employers abused the notion of affirmative action. This happened on a Saturday afternoon, when I was on duty in the main building. I got a call from the guard at the annex, two blocks away. I could hear the alarm sounding over the phone–and this guy was Vietnamese, and understood hardly any English. I tried to tell him how to shut off the alarm–it requires pushing two buttons–but he couldn’t understand me. I had to lock the main building and drive over to the annex. By the time I got there, a supervisor who works in the annex had shut the alarm off; I knew him.
As with the post office, no harm was done–but what if this non-English speaker were to face a real emergency? (Apparently he had opened an alarmed door by mistake; I’ve done that myself.) And there is a fire station right across the street. What was the company thinking when they hired him? :eek: :mad:

27

Wow, I don’t have any stories to compare to any of these. Stupidest thing I’ve seen anybody at work do involved the management team’s inability to keep a dot-com startup afloat for more than seven months. :rolleyes:

However, I did watch a temporary receptionist hang up on every single one of a very busy twenty minutes of calls because she couldn’t remember the difference between the “release” and “transfer” buttons.

28

In high school chemistry class, we were doing some experiment where we heated ceramic crucibles with a blowtorch. The crucibles were held in some kind of rickety wire holder-contraptions (not a chemist, sorry :)) which had been kicking around the school for years and didn’t actually hold the crucible too well. Anyway, one of my three lab partners was a guy who was as well-known for his klutziness as he was for his arrogance about his scientific knowledge. He was in the process of yelling at me for not having my lab apron correctly adjusted, and at my friend for not holding the blowtorch “correctly” (?), when, in his impatience, he jostled the holder with his elbow and the crucible fell out. It was headed toward the floor when he reached out and caught it in the palm of his hand.

He wasn’t burned that badly, but he did walk around the rest of the day with a paper cup full of cold water that he kept dipping his hand in. :smiley:

There was also a girl I worked with during college (she was also in college) who had to be told repeatedly how to address envelopes. She seemingly couldn’t remember where to put the recipient’s address and would put it in all kinds of unusual locations on the envelope. I corrected her on this at least a dozen times before I made a mock-up for her to look at. She still messed it up about one out of four times. This girl was in the honors program at our school and had held numerous part-time journalism-type jobs. I was totally mystified by this gaping hole in her knowledge.

29

No physical injury, but I thought it was a pretty good display of cluelessness…

A secretary in our office once got all bent out of shape because an attorney had addressed a letter to the European Patent Office in Germany. “What do you mean, Germany? Isn’t the European Patent Office in Europe?!”

The same secretary was assigned to another attorney who had the same first name as the secretary. A phone call came in for the attorney one time, and the secretary properly answered it with “Jane Doe’s office.” The speaker said, “Hi, Jane, this is your aunt Alice.” The secretary said “I don’t have an aunt Alice” and hung up.

30

I was working in an office where there were some telemarketers and I heard a guy on the phone ask “Hello. May I speak with Anus please?”

The person he was calling was named Aeneas.

Idiot.

31

Just happened today…

Me and my friend Cathy were standing at my friend Denise’s cube gossiping. Every 20 feet or so on our floor are these HUGE support posts that are about two feet square,blindingly white and labeled with signs with a number/letter combo. We use them as location markers-when you call tech support you tell them the closest pole by your cube so they can find you.

There’s one of these posts about two feet by Denise’s cube. When Cathy and I leave,Cathy walks full speed into the post and bounces off like Wile E Coyote. She hit it so hard it echoed.

Good thing I hadn’t drank too much Diet Coke because I almost peed my pants laughing-after I checked to see if she was ok. She was a little dazed-gee wonder why?

And then there’s the time during my retail days…I was chasing a shoplifter at full speed,hit a puddle of water and slid across the front end of the store…but I digress. :slight_smile:

32

It sounds like she simply didn’t want to do the work and this was her way of getting out of it.

33

Before anyone thinks i’m disparaging temps, i’m not, just a specific one ;).

This temp who frequently works at my university was filing one day. She was bitching and complaining about how no one knew how to file anything. The next day i’m at work, and i overhear the staff saying that all of the files were messed up and we’d need to go through them and put them back in order.

Turns out the temp didnt know a damn thing about filing. For instance, she put Leonard BEFORE Leon. I remember trying to find a file one day, and thinking it was in one of the other sections, remembered that that temp had been working there. Sure enough, the file was 10 files out of place.

34

I thought so too, but this job was one that paid almost nothing and was intended as a resume-builder and a way to get good letters of recommendation for other, real jobs. If she was just trying to be lazy, she really shot herself in the foot because she did NOT get a good rec from us! :smiley:

35

I had a coworker call me for some tech support on her scanner. She tried to scan and her software would come up and then lock her PC up, forcing her to reboot. I turned on the scanner and proceeded to scan just fine. Yes, the scanner was turned off. The whole company kept reminding her to make sure her scanner was on the rest of the day.

Funny thing is, the next day, she accidentally locked her keys in her car. She had one of our automotive guys get a slim-jim to open it and it took about 3 hours to get into her car. Shortly afterwards, she realized that she had the remote for her car that had broken off from her keychain in her purse the whole time. She could have used that to open her car. Again we reminded her the rest of the day on this.

36

LOL! For a minute I thought you were going to tell this story:

A co-worker bought a new scanner and hooked it up to her computer at home.
Everytime she brought up the software, her PC would freeze up.
So a friend and I went over to her house, she fed us and we took a look at the scanner. She had only one scsi port, so she had the scanner daisy-chained off the printer.

As my friend was checking over the machine, I rifled through the box looking for the manual. And what did I run across?

A scsi terminator.

I asked her if she’d taken it off the printer when she hooked up the scanner, and she said no, it was just an extra part that had come with the scanner.
I took a look at the scanner, and sure enough, as soon as I put on the scsi terminator, everything was A-ok.

Extra part? It’s a scsi terminator!

The funniest thing is that she had known enough to check and change all the scsi addresses for her devices, just in case they were in conflict, but she didn’t know what a scsi terminator was.

37

Not a lot of dumb things happen at a pizza place. There was one incident however that was just plain stupid on the co-worker’s and my behalf.

It was a slow night in the store, and before she left, the owner ordered us that whenever business is slow, we have to start cleaning stuff around the store, like the walls or floors or dough pans. The manager decided that we should clean the floors in the bathrooms. I saw her take 2 bottles of bleach with her to the bathrooms. She came out with the bottles empty. She poured a whole bottle of bleach in each of the bathrooms floors. :eek: On top of that, the only ventilation in the room was the fartfan going at a low speed and the doors shut automatically. The manager handed me the mop and told me to clean it up. Now I had 2 choices to make here : I could reject, but she would lecture me for 10 minutes about how I’m suppose to work while in the workplace :rolleyes: or I can go in and mop it up. It was almost closing time, so I decided to clean it up.

When I finished I almost passed out with my eyes totally bloodshot. After coming to the back and telling her about the incident, she said something similar to “no pain, no gain” :mad:

38

I’ve got a good one. And I’ll name names. Well, the company name at least, because that’s all I can remember, and because they deserve to be named.

Long ago in the earliest days of real typesetting from Mac DTP, probably around 1985, I worked at Graphics Plus in Culver City CA, one of the first Mac DTP service bureaus around. I was a computer tech and programmer, and I hired as a tech, but once I got into the company, there was a turf war with the owner and the Chief Tech, and I got shuffled off to sales, dammit!
We had two of the brand new, extremely expensive Linotronic imagesetters (costing something like $150k each), the first ones on the market. And the chief tech was so paranoid of anyone else that had technical skills that he’d never let me go near them. What an asshole.
So anyway, one day Chief Tech is encountering massive output problems. Pages don’t print, output is screwed up with garbage all over them or misplaced graphics and text, it was infuriating. Chief Tech was absolutely baffled, and spent several days trying to figure it out, to no avail. I offered to help debug it, but was rebuffed. And things were coming to a crisis because just before the problems set in, we had contracted with a local golf tournament to typeset their daily results, the jobs would come in at 5PM and we guaranteed delivery by midnight (with stiff nonperformance penalties). The job was coming in only a few days, and we were not even able to get more than about 10% of our current work out the door.
So in the midst of this, I’m sitting in my office, reading MacWeek, and fuming that my sales commissions are screwed because we’re not doing any work and we’re losing customers, when I come across a news article buried in the back. It described this new thing someone had discovered on their Mac, a computer virus. Nobody had ever heard of this before, and the article said that service bureaus on the east coast had encountered this and it wreaked havoc until they figured out what it was, and it described the symptoms which were PRECISELY what we were having trouble with. I immediately took the article to the owner, who didn’t understand it and told me to show it to the Chief Tech. I showed it to him, and with a harumph, he said it couldn’t possibly be our problem, it was a hardware problem. Ah well, screw em. I went home.
The next morning I came into work, and to my horror, there was Chief Tech sitting on the floor, amidst the wreckage of two entirely dissasembled imagesetters!! This was something you NEVER do, we had full service contracts, but the tech decided he could solve the problem on his own. He had attempted to create one working linotronic out of the parts of two linos, he thought it was a hardware problem. And in the process, he completely fucked both machines, they could not be reassembled. He turned $300k of fancy hardware into rubble, and we had no working equipment at all. The owner was having a fit. Now the super-ultra-rush jobs were about to come in that very evening, and we were completely offline. He had to call his business rival and offer them triple-danger-money to do the work for him, then deliver it back to our shop, and we’d pretend WE did the work and hand it to the client. He ended up paying tens of thousands of dollars out of pocket to fulfil his contractual obligation.
So as the shit hits the fan, I am absolutely fed up. While the tech is in the office with the owner, I snuck over to the macs (which Chief Tech had forbidden me to ever touch) and checked them for signs of viruses. And there it is, the little file in the system folder called “scores” which is the sure sign of the infamous “scores virus,” the very first mac virus. So I wait until the tech is out of his meeting, and go in to see the owner. I told him what I’d found. I yelled and yelled at him, how could he have allowed this idiot tech to cause this disaster when I’d already given him the solution several days ago and was completely ignored? I demanded that Chief Tech be fired immediately and replaced by ME. And he agreed with me. But then he dropped the bomb on me, the one fact that made the whole disaster clear in one flash. He said, “I’d like to fire him, but I can’t, he’s my biggest investor’s son!” Grrr…
Well anyway, the business losses were massive. Linotronic was not happy to see their machines dissasembled by Chief Ignorant Tech and it cost a LOT of money to get them reassembled and working properly. The losses kept mounting, we lost customers, didn’t have enough money to pay for supplies, and after a few weeks, the losses were so massive that the company had to lay off almost everyone, including me. Oh, but Chief Tech got to keep his job, even though he caused it all.
So I’m claiming to be the first person to lose their job on account of a computer virus. Well, mostly because of Chief Tech. And you know, once I’d found the cure, the problem could have been solved in 30 seconds.

39

dude… I would’ve completely yelled at the Chief Tech and chewed him out, instead of the owner.

but I see where you are coming from. but man… Holy Shit… that’s gotta seriously suck…

40

Yeah, I woulda, and I did on many occasions, but he always ignored me. I could scream at him until I was blue in the face and he’d just sit there and ignore me. I think he was stoned all the time. Boy I could tell you stories about this moron…

Anyway, I guess I got a little wound up, just thinking about that incident. Sorry to go off on such a long rant.