Working with idiots

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

I had a customer complaint last week because another customer was asking me about my new baby.

I’ve been working at this company for about 16 months, 3 months after I started, I became pregnant. I worked 45 hours a week up TO the day I delivered. My pre-pregnancy weight was 120lbs, I am 5’8". A tad on the thin side. At the time, our uniforms required our shirts be tucked in, got the visual?

When discussing the customer complaint, my boss asked me how did the customer even know I had a baby.

What is my job? Answering service operator? Tech support? Customer service inbound? Phone sex operator?

Why no. I am a poker dealer. I sit at a table with up to 10 people within arms reach of me, we also sit high to the tables.

Now…how on earth would they know I just had a baby…hmmm…BECAUSE I WORKED 45 HOURS A WEEK WITHIN ARMS REACH OF EVERY CUSTOMER WE HAVE.

This guy has a kid too.

While I was pregnant, I asked if they would provide me larger shirts, or if I would have to buy them. He asked me why I needed bigger shirts. I explained to him that there is one thing pregnant women are usually pretty reliable about, GETTING BIGGER.

Did I mention he’s come to work with a black eye from a bar fight?

Then there is the supervisor who finally gave a female dealer a code 1 (bathroom break) and asked her in front of several people, why she needed her purse.

Back in the day, when I worked in the tech industry, we had a guy who begged for root access, we were ultimately forced to give him limited root access (to some throw away servers). We were able to rescind it when we found a text file on his laptop desktop titled passwords.txt with, you guessed it, all the passwords to everything.

22

When I was younger, I would have been mortally embarrassed by this question. Now that I’ve gotten older and more cynical and less willing to deal with idiots, if someone asked me why I was taking my purse to the bathroom, I would reach in, pull out a tampon and say, “This is why. That okay with you?”
Let him be embarrassed.

23

re: highly educated people.

There’s a sub-category - HPSP. Highly Paid Stupid People.

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I once had a high level SVP of a large multi-national banking/finance company tell me she had no idea you have to pay off your mortgage when you sell your home. :eek: While I realize that payoff procedures may vary around the world (I know in some places the mortgage travels with the property), but in the USA, it’s standard procedure.

I still can’t quite believe that someone in that position didn’t have the basic grasp.

VCNJ~

24

The question, worded that way, is pretty dumb. But, there are actually several common implementations of the “%” key on calculators – it doesn’t always do the same thing, and there’s no obvious way to tell what it’s going to do for a given calculator except to try it.

Take several non-RPN calculators, type in “10” “+” “20” “%” “=” and marvel at the different answers you get - all of which are “reasonable” in some sense. Usually you’ll get either 12 or 10.2, but I’ve seen at least one other answer, too.

There was a mailbag article on it here and some follow-up conversation here.

25

Add to this “I think I just passed a clot. A big one.” If he doesn’t know what you’re talking about, then offer to bring back an example. Obviously, this only works if you can produce a nice big clot.

26

You know, Lynn, I saw your name in this thread and wondered, and then I remembered that the Mods don’t actually work here at the SDMB…

flees :smiley:

27

Lynnnnnnnnnnnnn! Need that pukey smiley, fast!

28

Reminds me of my gym teacher in high school, a man in his sixties who could NOT understand why some of us girls would have to skip swimming from time to time. He thought it was a conspiracy and we were “up to something.”

If I could go back in time, I would and say, “Because I’m on the rag, dumbass!”

29

My gym teacher took pride in not being oogied. I remember one day I didn’t get changed, and he said “What’s wrong with you?” and I told him I had cramps. He took it in stride. Then he turned to the guy next to me and said “So, you got your period, too?”

30

This guy was a total ass. He used to wear white swimming trunks (you can imagine what they looked like when wet!), and would come into the girls’ locker rooms and on one occassion, the showers (fortunately, we were all in our bathing suits, just washing our hair).

Man was a perv.

31

This may not be the stupidest story, or even entirely work related, but it still cracks me up.

It’s traditional to throw birthday parties in this office. A few weeks ago it was the new employee Cindy’s birthday. We threw her a cake and ice cream party. There were two kinds of ice cream, chocolate chip, which is white with brown flecks, and mocha almond, which is brown.

So Cindy herself is serving the ice cream, putting a scoop on each plate that had already been caked, then passing them down the line. She started out by scooping out the mocha almond. Someone suggested to her that she might want to ask people which flavor they wanted before scooping it out.

Her response? heavy sigh “HellOOO? It’s CHOCOLATE. Who doesn’t like chocolate? Duh.”


Long ago I was a temp. The temp agency offered a special assignment to me, one with a major international corporation (rhymes with Blodak). The deal was that if I worked there for a month with no major problems, it would turn into a permanent full time job for me. I liked the sound of that.

Turns out, this offer was made to about a dozen temps. We were all called to a meeting with the guy who would be our supervisor, so he could explain all about the job, and so he could get to know us.

He explained that Blodak was creating a new branch of business, and we were to be the first employees to run it. "It's a great deal", he explained, "because you'll be getting in on the ground floor."

"Oh good", said a particularly airheaded woman. "No elevators, or escalators... I like that!"

It was a Blodak Moment.
32

Once I worked for a largish defense contractor that built radios for the military.

Our department was in charge of maintaining the copiers scattered around the building.

One copier was stationed in a glass atrium. One windy Sunday it rained so hard that water leaked into the atrium – we think that the glass panes were flexed by the wind and lost their seal around the edges.

When we came in on Monday, my boss went around and turned on and checked all the copiers. The atrium copier’s lid was raised…and water pouring down from overhead had flowed around the glass platen (which was NOT sealed or in any way waterproof). End result: the interior of the copier, plainly visible through the glass platen, was filled with water. It looked like a fish tank.

Very grateful that the copier had been off all weekend, my boss ever-so-carefully unplugged it. After thinking for a moment, she rolled it a good distance away from the wall outlet, for safety. Thenm she went to find a large marker to make a sign on the order of “DO NOT PLUG IN THIS COPIER OR YOU MAY DIE --WATER AND ELECTRICITY DO NOT MIX”.

When she returned with the marker, she found an electrical engineer rolling the copier back over to the wall socket to plug it in. Water was audibly sloshing in the machine and leaking steadily all over the floor.

“STOP!” she shouted. “That machine is FULL OF WATER!”

“It’s okay,” the engineer explained to her. “I’m only going to make one copy.”

Sailboat

33

At my very FIRST job, I was asked to take a large pile of boxes of documents to the basement and put them onto the steel shelves for long-term storage.

I went to the basement to scout it out before starting. It was full of steel shelves, packed completely full of boxes of paper. There must have been actual tons of documents; hundreds of paper boxes stacked on shelves reaching nearly to the ceiling. There was no free shelf space at all, and nearly no floor space.

I returned and told my boss the shelves were completely full. The conversation followed this pattern:

“Is there somewhere else you’d like me to put the boxes?”

“Put them on the shelves,” I was told.

“Okay, what would you like me to do with the stuff that’s currently on the shelves?”

“Just put the boxes on the shelves.”

“Yes, but the shelves are full, should I just throw out what’s on them now?”

“Don’t throw anything out. Just put them on the shelves.”

“Maybe it would help if you came down and looked at what I’m talking about – there’s no room to do that.”

“Don’t give me any attitude. Just put these boxes onto those shelves.”

“Can I move what’s on the shelves now?”

“No.”

So I put the boxes on the shelves. What else could I do? And, because I’d been forbidden to remove the material already ON the shelves, I simply put the new matter into the *same already-occupied atomic space * as existing matter, violating the laws of physics and causing an explosion to destroy most of the Eeastern United States.

No I didn’t. In fact, I never did anything at all, and completely ignored the nonsensical instructions. There was never any mention of the boxes again; my boss never noticed that I had or had not followed her orders; there werer no repercussions; and I only became a little bit cynical about workplace stupidity.

Sailboat

34

“I’ll only die a little.”

Man, we could probably do an entire thread on copier/printer abuse.

When I worked for a large international corporation (let’s call it HAL, nicknamed Large Indigo), I was in charge of maintaining the imaging machines. The big HAL printers the size of refridgerators were constantly busy, and would often get so backed up with jobs that they’d freeze up. It was pretty substandard technology. Sometimes the only way to reset them was to, well, reset them.

Of course this would purge all pending jobs.

This often resulted in this conversation:

Dipshit: Where’s my damned prinout?

Me: I had to reset the printer.

Dipshit: So my print job is lost?

Me: 'Fraid so, ma’am.

Dipshit: But that was for a ten million dollar proposal! The presentation is in 15 minutes! If I don’t have my printout, we’ll lose the bid! Ten people will have to be laid off! We’ll have to close the office in Skokie! We’ll no longer be able to make our contributions to the Bangladesh Relief Fund! If I don’t have my printout, MILLIONS OF PEOPLE WILL DIE!

Me: Calm down, ma’am. Just send the print job again.

Dipshit: Are you crazy? I can’t do that! It’s not like I saved the documet! I already deleted it when I knew it was printing!

HAL, folks. THE HAL.

35

Ah, so that was you.

I’m telling!

36

I worked for Company A. It was a BIG company, with masses of vital commercial data, held on computer.
So they decided to make a ‘disaster store’, with copies of everything on a separate computer. Very sensible. :slight_smile:
Except they put the ‘disaster store’ in a basement next to the River Thames. :eek:
When it flooded, they were able to reconstruct the ‘disaster store’ from the original data. :confused:

I worked for company B. They wanted to attract sponsorship.
So they paid a ‘clippings’ firm loads of money to spot any reference to company B in the National Press, then send a clipping to company B. :slight_smile:
This would have been good, except they never got round to appointing a Director for Sponsorship. So the clippings were never used. :eek:

37

I’m sorry, I flatly refuse to let these idiots off the hook for this. She was trying to figure out what 25% of something is. One quarter. Screw the % key on the calculator, how difficult is either: “x * .25 =”, or “x/4=”? Not to mention that neither one of them were even looking as far as a whole, dedicated KEY devoted to percentages, they just absolutely had no idea whatsoever, given a dollar amount and the need to derive one fourth of said number, how they were to begin to proceed using a standard WinBloze calculator.

Absolute frackin’ idiocy, pure and simple. :smack:

38

I think that the worst case of office stupidity I’ve ever observed was a conversation between two of my coworkers at the job I just left a couple weeks ago. We used these nice folders that the company had printed up to enclose our information to send our clients. The folders lived in boxes in the copy room. My unit, which was composed of myself and two other women (the one in question I shall call K), was in charge of making sure we had these folders in stock.

Stupid Coworker: Hey, K, where are the folders?
K: They’re in the copy room.
SC: I was just in there, and I didn’t see any.
K: Really? There should be a bunch.

<At this point, she led him off to the copy room to double check. Later, she relayed the rest of the conversation to me.>

SC: See? No folders!
K: You have to open the new box.

That’s right. There were plenty of (distinctly shaped) boxes, but the concept of actually opening one was waaaaay too complex.

What makes this even more pathetic is that the exact same scene occurred again a few weeks later. Argh. K deserves a medal for not punching him in the face the second time round.