To Hardy girl: When I was in high school, one of the drafting teachers put a sign on an upright steel girder serving as a support pillar in the classroom. The sign read, “Caution–Post–do not run into.” 
To Louie: That’s awful! For one thing, bleach is not a cleanser (ask Don Aslett!); for another, what if you got sick or passed out? You could have sued this jerk and the company!! :mad: (I worked at a W. T. Grant store in Torrance, CA, in 1972; I was told to strip the floor with a powerful wax-stripper called Tadoo, and came close to passing out…)
To Chas.E: Let me get this straight. Your company has two full-service contracts and this Chief Ignorant Tech insists on doing the repair work himself? Talk about breach of contract…Besides, investor or no, your company is pennywise and poundfoolish keeping this self-absorbed jerk on the payroll!
(I would have used quotes here, but the browser on this computer won’t operate the copy-and-paste commands.) 
–dougie_monty
We have this over-excitable 18-year-old kid working for us. He mostly does tech stuff; he’s good at it, he’s just sort of a knob when it comes to common sense. This is his first real adult job, and he’s a little overwhelmed with the amount of money he’s making. Practically every week he comes in and brags about some new expensive purchase he’s made (brand new computer, brand new television, etc. etc ad nauseam).
So anyway, about three weeks ago Excitable Boy comes in bragging about his new car. And sure enough he’s bought a nice shiny '97 Camaro. (He identified it as a Corvette at first; I was like, “I saw you drive in; wasn’t that a Camaro?” He said, “Oh, yeah”. However, this is not the stupid part.)
The Camaro has a T-top. Over the weekend, Excitable Boy decided to take it for a spin on the highway. Without latching the T-top. Yes, the predictable happened: the T-top flew off the car at highway speeds and smashed into bits on the road behind him. To his credit, Excitable Boy did stop the car to collect the pieces.
The most annoying part about all of this is that the told the story as though it were this hilarious thing that happened to him over the weekend. I was like, “Why are you laughing? That’s not funny. If there had been anyone behind you, that T-top would have smashed into their car and probably caused a nasty accident! Have some responsibility, already!” Ergh.
I also had a boss once who was convinced that Microsoft Word’s inability to correctly handle automatic bullets and numbering was the result of a virus. I must have reformatted the computers there dozens of times, at his express command. I kept trying to tell him that it was just a bug in Word, even going so far as to print out reports of this bug from the net, but he refused to believe me and insisted that it was a virus, and “reinstalling just one more time” should get rid of it. :rolleyes:
Amazing, isn’t it? The normal service contracts covered everything, the Lino techs did all routine maintenance and repair, this was the first time our idiot Chief Tech actually ripped into the guts of the machines on anything more than a superficial level.
Linotronic came in for a service call when the problem just started happening, and their techs tested everything and gave the imagesetters a 100% operational rating. And they were right, the linos absolutely were working perfectly. It was the CPUs sending data that were broken. Then the idiot tech decided to prove that he knew more than the Lino service techs did.
Boy I could tell you stories about this company. Back in those days, leasing a Lino was the closest you could come to printing your own money, and they still couldn’t make a profit. They eventually found another sucker^H^H^H^H^H^H investor, they dragged him down into bankruptcy too.
um…well…while reading this thread, i was also plugged into my cd player and tapping my feet in time with the music.
tap…tap…tap…<fizzle>
i stepped on the power strip and disconnected everything in the office. oops.
I’m a fairly junior member of a software development team that has a less than idllyic record with standards and coordination and doing things right the first time. This means that 75% of my job is trying to figure out the stupidity of co-workers (need to figure out what things are supposed to do so I can then figure out why they don’t do it). Unfortunately they don’t make for interesting stories.
On some terminals, CTRL-H is used to backspace. Chas.E’s usage is meant to indicate that the word sucker should be backspaced over and replaced with the word investor.
Either that, or he’s spelling HA HA repeatedly using 733T speak…
Oh! I always thought that was the sound of someone coughing the offending word. Or clearing their throat before substituting the tactful word.
Is it okay if I still hear it that way?
You can hear it that way if you wish, but actually I lied.
Chas was actually visually representing the intro to the Black Sabbath song entitled Sweet Leaf. Hope this helps.
Not Dave speaking here…
I was in the Army at one time and witnessed some pretty bizarre things, as you might imagine, but I have one that takes the cake.
In the process of being commissioned my squad members and I were being individaully graded on our leadership abilities and proficency in infantry tactics. Well one particuarly nervous bloke, we’ll call him Cadet Snuffy, was chosen to act as the leader of the next ‘Stick Lane’ (a mini war game).
He recieved our orders from the commander and adequetly relayed them to us. Soon we moved out, weapons at the ready, set on attacking an enemy position 800m distant. We had been moving along at a steady pace for a few minutes when we spotted two men walking towards us. Of course we all got down and prepared to shoot if it was the ‘enemy.’ One of the two men responded to our verbal challenges with the correct passwords and so both were allowed to draw fairly close. That’s where it all started going downhill.
Now from time to time we would have totally random things happen during these war games, news crews in a combat zone, refugees fleeing the enemy, etc. The idea being that this was a good way to test how we responded to the stress of an unplanned for variable. That is just what was happening to Snuffy.
We quickly learned that one of the men, a friendly, was being held hostage by the other ‘enemy’ soldier. Without exposing ourselves we did our best to deal with the situation; reasoning, bluffing, and berating the man. Nothing got him to budge. Well ole Snuffy finally stood up and talked to the man face to face(obviously Snuffy was a bit shaken), in an attempt to gain his confidence, I guess, but he only gained the confidence of some fellow squad mates, who also stood up.
I just saw things going from bad to worse and Snuffy was losing control of the situation. Sure enough it wasn’t too long before shots were fired (a BIG no-no in this situation) and both of the men along with 3 squad members were dead. Snuffy gets the ‘bodies’ together and pretends to have them buried. Meanwhile the grader is standing by communicating via ‘radio’ (we just used code names and talked to the grader as he stood next to us). While Snuffy was collecting the bodies the grader began to get a confused look on his face. Sweat beaded on Snuffy’s face while he thought of what he was going to do next.
Finally the grader ‘radios’ Snuffy and asks for a report of the situation; what enemy has he run into, how many, with what weapons? Does Snuffy have any casualties, how much ammunition has he used, does he need resupply? Snuffy fumbles through his pocket and starts to put the needed info on a form to keep it all straight during his ‘reply transmission.’ Even with the aid of the pre-printed form Snuffy stammered through his report, screwing everything up such that the grader couldn’t make out what he was saying. Finally Cadet Snuffy stood there, on the brink of tears at his mission having gone to pot and replied ‘Commander, this is Snuffy, report NEGATIVE contact with the enemy!’
That was the last straw, not only had his mission been all jacked up but Snuffy had just failed to report the ‘deaths’ of 4 friendlies and an entire hostage situation. It was unthinkable, espically since the grader had witnessed everything first hand.
Cdt. Snuffy was on a bus home that night.
Actually it wasn’t a nail gun. It was a bigger gun that shot steel bolts out, about 1/4 inch in diameter if I remember correctly. Anyhoo, shoot these things through the flooring into the wooden spars underneath. Guy was walking down the length of a hallway casually shooting the bolts down a straight line. Put one right through his industrial Red Wing boot upper, through the foot and through the steel shanked bottom and into the flooring. We had to saw through the flooring and the bottom cross spar, and take his bleeding foot to the hospital nailed through all this wood.
Working as a valet driver in an Atlantic City casino, I saw one of my co-workers commit the ultimate DUH!
Now our valet garage can take a full-sized van with a regular roof, but the custom conversion hi-top vans must be parked in an outside lot (just won’t fit inside).
This guy took this van in at FULL SPEED, and converted it into a, well, a convertible.
$14,000 worth of damage.
This was witnessed by the owner, our general manager, several casino executives, and about 200 customers waiting around the porte cochere.
Can you say, “OOPS”?
Working at a liquor store, the boss handed me a bottle that once contained windex, but had a clear fluid in it. He told me to use this to remove old stickers from wine bottles. (He had the stickers put on the bottles before the store opened for inventory purposes.) The “cleaning” fluid made me and my co-workers dizzy and light-headed. I asked him what this stuff was, and he said he had no idea, but golly gee wasn’t it great? He said it worked for getting old oil spots off the floor in the back room and a few other tasks. I dug up the original container and since he had just promoted me to “front-end supervisor”, forbade anyone to use that liquid until I knew what it was. Turned out Mr. Genius had us working with a solution that broke down if exposed to sunlight to phosgene. He also had not a clue that we HAD to have a MSDS book for the store. He didn’t even know what a MSDS was. (He gave me the nick-name “OSHA lady” after that, but I wasn’t offended so he dropped it.)
He still hasn’t gotten around to buying any “caution wet floor” signs for that place.
I didn’t see this firsthand, but knowing the guy I have no trouble believing it.
I work picking up bodies for funeral homes in Los Angeles. One time there was a residence call, and there to comfort the widow was a Big Name Television Producer, who was friends with the deceased. I can’t remember exactly who it was, but it might have been Garry Marshall. If it wasn’t him it was someone of his calibur, a real Hollywood Bigshot. So Dumbass finishes the paperwork with the wife and then starts pitching a script to Mr. Bigshot! Can you imagine? This guy probably has to put up with that crap all day and now he has to hear it when his friend is laying there dead? In a way I’m glad I wasn’t there, but in another way I would have loved to have seen it.
I’m always amazed that some people have no idea how to conduct themselves in front of a grieving family. I’ve seen guys take personal phone calls on their cell phones in the middle of a removal. One guy used to go into the house and ask the family for a glass of water like he was at Howard Johnson’s or something. And some people are just too damn perky, as if they’re selling Amway. I’ve heard guys actually say “Have a nice day” as they’re leaving. Oh, sure. The guy’s wife just died, so I guess his day couldn’t get any worse. I mean it’s not like we have to act like the Grim Reaper, but we have to remember that people aren’t terribly happy to see us.
This happened to a friend of mine!
Scene: a large car plant in Oshawa, Ontario.
My friend is an electrician, working the high-power lines. (He has seen a screwdriver vaporise as it shorts out part of a 600V three-phase circuit. But that’s not what this is about.)
One day my friend and a co-worker are repairing a big transformer. They have to crawl inside it to repair it. So following procedure and permission, they go to the power control panel, shut the power off to the equipment, and lock it out.
When you lock a piece of equipment out, you shut it off, and attach an actual padlock with a red metal tag informing potential users that the equipment is Not To Be Used. The lock physically prevents anyone from turning the switch or pulling the lever to reapply power. The lock is separately locked by the electrical worker and by the production supervisor in charge of the equipment. It is Hideously Illegal to tamper with such locks.
So, the power is shut off and locked out. My friend and his coworker enter the equipment and start to work. After a time they sense the walls humming and realise that power is back on the transformer that surrounds them.
They cannot get out because the clearance around the exit is insufficient without touching high-voltage surfaces. They yell and scream, and after about half an hour someone else either hears them or notices something wrong at the control panel. Hastily they shut the power off again and rescue my friend and his partner.
Yes, you guessed it: another worker had come along and not only ignored the lockout tag but, incredibly, cut the lock away with boltcutters to turn the power back on.
This was at the very least an immediate firing offence. I wouldn’t have been surprised at criminal charges–I don’t know the subsequent details.
My friend was off for two weeks due to sickness and disorientation caused by the intense magnetic fields inside the transformer. And both of them were very lucky to be alive: if they’d happened to have a tool touching the wrong part when the power returned, they would have been killed instantly… 
My anecdote contains no nifty explosions, but I have to mention my former co-worker Phil. We worked at a sawmill, which (in case you didn’t know) is a fairly dangerous working environment where body parts can get cut off if you’re not careful.
Phil would go out into a secluded part of the yard and smoke pot on the job, which is just incredibly dumb. No, he never lost any of his fingers. But his tenure at the mill came to an end when, at a company meeting, he got up and asked the boss to supply him with uppers to help him stay awake on the job.
What an asshole.
About them undertaker horror stories…
A few years ago, when my grandmother died, I was talking to the funeral director and the subject of body pick-up came up. He told me the story of how he was apprenticing under his father and the body to be picked up was of a rather obiese man. The lady got very offended when the father announced he was going to “load” the body into the wagon.
He tried to placate her saying " How do you put luggage into the trunk? How do you put film in a camera? How do you put bullets in a gun?" and then he realized the body was a suicide…he shot himself.
When the police arrived, they wondered whether or not to investigate the suicide, or protect the mortician from an impending murder from the lady!
Well, that’s the story the funeral director told me.
Well, this is kind of a co-worker. Anyway…
This took an amazing amount of time to understand ebay. What’s the big difficulty? She also managed to get “Buy it now!” exactly backwards when I explained it, being careful to state it correctly, with an example.
But what really made me scream in my head was that she bought a trip to a timeshare or something, and after she won the auction asked, “Does it include airfare?”
!!! You bought it without knowing if the plane tickets were included???
I think they were, so good for her, but she’s just lucky.