I might have shared this story here before back when I was working for the Bosshole. We had a forklift for the warehouse that only a few people were trained to use. The boss’s douchebag son was not one of them but he decided he would use the forklift anyways. He managed to run the forklift into a support beam in the warehouse, take out a stack of shelves, and almost run over one of our summer help teenagers in just a few minutes time. If it had been anyone else they would have been fired on the spot, but douchebag kid could do no wrong.
It happens with even worse results sometimes. We had an incident in a sister facility a few months ago where a forklift driver ran over a coworker. It didn’t kill him but it did amputate his legs. That is certainly horrible but the result for the rest of us was that we all have to wear florescent yellow safety vests at all times from now on. I have my own office and I try to dress nicely but you wouldn’t ever know now because we all look like road crew construction workers. The first thing I have to do when meeting visitors like salespeople is to outfit them with a bright orange safety vest that loudly identifies them as an outside person even if we are just going into a conference room. That is on top of the toe protectors that I call clip-clops that make you sound like a Clydesdale when walking if you don’t have steel toed shoes. I am sure hard-hats will be next even during meetings.
All of that came from one idiot that wasn’t paying attention. We already had good safety procedures in our facility already to protect against such accidents and we never had one but corporate policy always leans towards CYA.
Advertising. Here’s the one I posted in one of the earlier threads. Still makes me smile.
We were making an advertorial section for a major business magazine, which consisted of interviews with about 20-odd CEOs. One agency had been hired to do the interviews and write the articles, while our agency would handle production (design, layout, etc) plus copy editing the writers’ work.
The boss of the writers’ agency was kind of a prima donna, even though the quality of their work was fair at best. We sent back one article with extensive fixes (several things flat-out wrong and many more that were just sloppy), which resulted in an angry letter from the boss saying that they were the writers, we were the hired help doing the grunt work, and we were not to tell them how to do their jobs.
Up to this point, manuscripts would go through us before being sent to the magazine and the CEO-interviewee for review. This time, however, she made a point of cutting us out of the loop and sending it to everyone directly, only including us as a BCC. Since we’d have to put it in the layout anyway, we opened up the article to see how it was.
The writer had included his comments in red text throughout out the article. A bit sloppy-looking to send to a client, but no biggie. Except that his comments included a lot of rude potshots at the CEO (“I guess that’s why their cars are such shit.” “Does this moron even listen to himself?”). As icing on the cake, the final comment was “[co-worker], please remember to remove the comments before sending this out.”
This was sent to everyone. All the involved staff at the magazine (who’d hired them), the CEO of a major car company and his whole PR department. And because they’d tried to slight us by adding our names in the BCC field, we had absolutely no involvement in it at all.
After that, we once again were in charge of copy-editing, and they were very quiet.
State Government contract worth approx 50M to replace a large chunk of infrastructure. Got so pear shaped the Department and contractor agreed to walk away from the table…after paying said contractor nearly 30M and a legal stipulation what we’d never say anything bad about that contractor. (Later experience with contractor makes me think that that’s REALLY their business model - get paid for never executing on a contract)
We then proceeded to have a $2M project just to see what we had. So, $32M in and no changes to existing IT infrastructure.
I remember this …
mrAru’s silly sub story - idiot officer on a Sturgeon class out of Norfolk decided he wanted to see what a button did, so he did a fast flood on a ballast tank. Thereafter he was referred to as Fast Flood Floyd. What a wing nut.
Hm, back in the day for me, I can remember a couple of the warehousemen deciding to take the yard horses and play off road in the back storage yard, sinking both of them above the decks in the mud. I also remember being rudely awoken from a nap I was taking in the ‘vault’ [secured storage for expensive metal stock for my machine shop] because the boiler blew up in the room next door. I was never so thankful for 5 foot thick walls as that day … And while working as a renta-tech working nuke plant refits, a company known for freezing pipe to isolate valves so they can be repaired sort of didn’t so when they cracked the valve, it dumped lovely radioactive coolant so that I got rained upon … nothing like getting burnt for the year on one contract [hey at least they paid me for the lost jobs at $35/hour and $95 per diem =)]
When working for a major alarm company, the Montreal office went dark, which shifted all the calls to Hartford CT - we had Latinos, we had Thai, we even had a couple Urdu speakers. I got more overtime because I was the only person fluent in French … I also remember when the server crashed during an update and we had to go manual - every alarm signal printed out, and several people had to pull the printouts, cut into single signals and distribute them to the operators and we had to deal with them without any computer help at all. Not fun. Same company had pretty much every alarm blow surrounding a major city harbor when a film production company ‘blew up’ a ship in the harbor. Every glassbreak for 40 square blocks cooked off. Oops. [And for extra fun, the hold up buttons scattered around the call center were not well isolated and at least once a month someone would accidentally trip a hold up alarm. Nothing like heading out for a cigarette break and coming face to face with a SWAT team … ]
And finally, while working for a waste stream management company, my first solo Sunday shift the morning shift manager calls in light up because the grease recycling truck driver ‘dumped used oil all over the parking lot’ - so I call the company, no driver had been there or even in the town for several weeks. They said they would send out a crew to clean up the spilled grease. Then I go a call from the fire department telling me the flow alarm in the storm sewers had gone off, so they sent a crew out to investigate. It all culminated in the idiot manager going next door to the Home Depot, renting a power washer and hosing his parking lot into the storm drains, grease detergent and all. The restaurant got fined for discharging illegally into a storm drain, polluting the Avon River with said discharge, and charged for a proper clean up by a haz mat company. The manager was now of of a job, I had a couple hours of putting my hazmat training to use by knowing who to call and what to arrange, the State got some money from the fines and a happy boss who didn’t have to come in on sunday and hold my hand through a difficult set of calls. [It was actually fun, gave me something to do other than sit waiting for calls to come in.] Oh, and what caused it? A couple kitchen monkeys were taking a 5 gallon bucket of used grease from the fryer out to dump and spilled it. If anybody had just dumped a bag of kitty litter on the spill it could have all been avoided.