My first job out of college was at a pharma research lab. In some our work, we used radiochemicals and thus had to wear monitoring badges that were periodically sent off site for contamination analysis.
Well, one month my boss’s badge comes back so screaming hot, the NRC was threatening to pull our license permanently. I’m talking her badge had several lifetimes worth of exposure. The entire hot lab is shut down and we have federal inspectors going over everything.
In the end, it turns out, the last activity of a pissed off employee had been to smear her badge with undiluted test compound. Not sure what he thought it would accomplish, but needless to say, he was in mucho trouble.
After that, all badges were kept locked in a cabinet and you had to check yours out when working with certain isotopes.
I pulled in the parking lot at work one day to find about a dozen employees gathered around an ambulance in the parking lot. Dread crept up my spine as I instinctually knew that whatever it was, it was going to be somebody on my staff.
Sure enough. My secretary, in her $9.99 payless shoes, was trying to get out of her big conversion van and slipped on the wet pine needles in the parking lot. Somehow she shattered her ankle on the way down. She ended up with about three plates and a dozen screws in her leg, holding her ankle together.
Four surgeries (and four Workman’s Comp claims) later, her ankle bones are now fused, most of the hardware removed and she limps, but gets around just fine.
I was hoping someone would. 
But the reality is not all that interesting.
The main stage for the festival is beneath a large tent. The stage itself is relatively old and in poor repair. The hem of her gown got caught either on a nail, rough patch, or some other obstruction as she was exiting the stage for intermission. The hem tore visibly in front of several hundred people. As they were already shuffling about for intermission, I am not sure how many actually saw.
So she stormed backstage, extremely irritated. She asked if anyone had a knife, and I cheerfully volunteered to relieve her dress of its hem.
Her teacher wasn’t satisfied with my apparent hack job, so she changed before finishing the show.
I may have posted this before, but I’m not sure. A former co-worker of mine once worked on an assembly line. There was an unusually chatty guy next to her that operated a press. It was non-stop jabber, jabber, jabber, jabber, and he always tried to maintain eye contact with you with his eyebrows making that “don’t you think so too?” expression. So clearly he wasn’t watching what he was doing. He just jabbered and operated the press.
All day long you would hear:
“Jabber, jabber… KA-CHUNK…jabber, jabber, jabber… KA-CHUNK…”
One day he was chatting up a storm, but then it went:
“Jabber, jabber… KA-CHUNK… (silence)”
At the sudden silence, everyone turned to look at him. He was standing holding his hand out in a fist with his thumb extended like Fonzie. Except his thumb was really big, really round and really flat. He’d stuck it in the press and it looked like a Wile E. Coyote thumb. No blood, just big round flat-like-a-spatula thumb.
No one could help themselves, everyone started to laugh – including Flat-Thumb himself. (He claimed it didn’t hurt that much, but after the initial shock wore off his eyes were all teary while they waited for the ambulance.) My co-worker switched to my department with a totally different job description, so she never found out if he lost the digit.
I was working at the beach volleyball venue during at the 1996 olympics. I was a parking attendent and every so often, the manager would swing by on his golf cart and collect all of us attendents so we could get lunch. We would climb up on the cart and hang off the sides (there was about four of us) and he’d slowly take off.
One day, he was going a little bit too fast around a corner and I fell off. I got up laughing, trying to play it off so that they others wouldn’t freak out, but I quickly realized I was in pain. I didn’t have any skin on my thigh where I had fallen! An area the size of my hand had been scraped off on the asphalt.
To make matters worse, the manager was so scared that he’d get fired that I promised I wouldn’t tell anyone. So for the rest of the Olympics, I had to suffer my road rash in pain-filled silence.
Well it wasn’t really an emergency, but when I was working in my last office one of the attorneys had me take delivery of a prosthetic leg for one of her clients. He had been taken to jail, and apparently they wouldn’t allow him to have it there. I spent the rest of my day at the receptionist’s desk with this leg, it was quite interesting.
Sorry, my bad. It’s great country with really nice people just with 1% bona fide idiots.
My co-workers and I knew a big thunder-storm had been predicted one day. After noticing that the outdoor lights came on at 1pm because it was so dark, the next thing we see is a fire at the fringe of the parking lot.
Due to a tremendous gust of wind, a small airplane had been forced while landing to be perpendicular to the strip at the community airport across the street. The pilot and his passenger were pretty badly burned, but survived. No other vehicles were damaged as the crash was in the area where all the recycling dumpsters were kept. The fire marks are still quite visible on the larger trees that clipped the wings. That was maybe two years ago.
Gather round, children, and hear a tale that has become a legend in its own time. At least on my team at work.
Our company was hosting several conferences for clients and prospects in several cities around the U.S., and each conference was coordinated by two people on in my group. Most of the conferences went extremely well, but the one in Chicago… didn’t. Mishaps included, but are not limited to,
- Flight delays
- Union electricians refusing to work
- Ruined signs
- Failed air conditioning w/ jackhammers going outside when windows were opened
- Last-minute seating and PowerPoint changes
- Repossessed grand pianos and thus new musicians hired at the 11th hour
… anyway, no one got any sleep, the CEO was pissed off, etc., etc., etc. They live through it all, though, and discovered that a severe snowstorm had hit and no major airlines were flying back to Minneapolis. So, the two on our team were asked to fly back on the corporate jet (a Lear), with the CEO and other high-ranking execs who had come in for the conference.
Once they were on the plane, they decided to be helpful and set out the food and napkins. The captain told them where to find everything, and asked that when he announced the plane’s descent, that they cover everything to prevent it from spilling.
“Sure!” They say. The captain assumes they’ve done this before, and doesn’t give any other instructions. So, G and M (my coworkers) look in the storage spaces and find TONS of food: trays of sandwiches, trays of fruit, chips, salsa, dips, cookies, you name it. Far more than the 8 people (10 counting them) could ever eat. They decide that this must be standard treatment for the bigwigs, and lay all of it out and serve the others with it.
Flash forward to the captain announcing their imminent arrival in the Twin Cities. G and M dutifully cover the food and take their seats. The plane descends. So does the food.
As soon as the plane pointed its nose downwards, ALL of the food trays and bowls slid off their ledges and rolled, splattered, and winged their way into the seating area. There was sour cream in the carpet. Grapes rolling up to the cockpit. The CEO grimly picking salsa out of the cuffs of his pants. M’s scarf doused in dip. Cookies wheeling grandly everywhere space was available. M and G, after their sleepless, stressful, horrible time in Chicago, reach their breaking point and start cracking up. They laugh so hard they collapse into their seats. No one else laughs. Not one exec even smiled.
The plane landed. Without a word, the execs grandly exited the plane and stepped into their heated cars and drove out of the hangar. M and G stayed on to clean up as best they can, covered in food as they were. They gave it up as a lost cause, collected their luggage, and began the dreary treck out to the regular airport parking lot, where they had parked assuming they’d fly back on a regular airline. There was ice on the pavement and snow everywhere else. The wind was cutting. It was a very long walk.
They arrived and G’s car and discovered her windshield was entirely caked in ice. And since it was late spring, she’d already taken her scraper out. Too tired to try anything else, they gamely climbed into the car and drove slowly home, with the windows down and their salsa-bedecked heads poking out so they could see.
The next day they found out that the reason there was so much food on the plane was that the CEO of our company’s parent company (not our CEO, but an uber-CEO) was flying out an hour after their own flight, to the Bahamas. That CEO was in for a long flight with no food to eat, but plenty of it on the ceiling, ground into the carpet, etc.
We laugh about it now, but man. A painful episode.
Kalhouns post reminded me of a story I totally forgot about.
Back in 1994 I was an assistant manager at a Pizza Hut. One Sunday night at about 10:00 two couples came in to eat. They were the only customers. At the time only the waitress, Christy, and I were working because Sundays were always slow. So anyway the couple ordered, I made the stuff and Christy took it out. About 20 or 30 minutes later I hear alot of yelling from the dining room and Christy comes running up and tells me that one of the guys punched his girlfriend. I told Christy to call the cops ran out to see what was happening. I found one of the guys pounding on the womans restroom door screaming at his girlfriend. The other girl was yelling at the guy and trying to go after him but she was being held back by her boyfriend.
So I walked up to the guy pounding on the door and told him to stop, that the cops are on the way and that he needed to leave the restaurant immediately. He turns around and starts yelling at me. Oh, did I meantion that this guy was about 6’4 or 6’5 and built like Schwarzenegger? I’m 5’9 on a good day. Anyway I repeat that he needs to leave. Then his equally big friend comes over and starts yelling at me that it is none of my buisness and I should just leave them alone. Being stupid I start yelling back at them and somehow got them out the front door which I then locked.
Once the guys were outside Christy, the other woman and me tried to talk the woman out of the bathroom. It took about 5 minutes and she finially agreed to go into the managers office. Once in there she promptly locked everyone out.
Then the cops show up. We tell them what happened and they go to talk to the woman in the office. She won’t have anything to do with them. The cops tried for about 20 minutes, gave up and called a counselor. The counselor showed up and talked her way into the room. It took the counselor about an hour to get the woman out of the office. At this point they all left. It was about 12:00. The store closed at 11:00 on Sundays and we would usually be out of there by 11:30. Since the woman took over the office I couldn’t do any paperwork so I spent another 20 minutes getting all that done.
The aftermath, the woman had one hell of a shiner, the bathroom door had to be replaced and the guy who hit her was charged with domestic violence and destruction of property.
Just to make the whole thing worse, the district manager tried to write me up for closing the store early.
Slee
Oh me or my I have so many…
I have been called out to many "baby locked in car" calls. Best guess I am hovering around 100 to date. Most times everything turns out ok. But this once..
Fire dispatch gives us a call, I am right around the corner and make it prior to the fire truck. I get there the mother is screaming her head off, it seems she realized she had no keys and reached to stop the door with her hand before it shut. She managed to have her hand wedged in a closed and locked drivers door.
I get the passanger door open quickly, dive thru the car and get the drivers door open, Mom is now Bawling and crying in the fetal position on the curb, baby is in the back seat snoring (yes snoring the tyke could sleep thru anything I imagine). I grab a few ice packs from my lunch chest and get them on Moms hand and try and keep her calm till the firetruck makes it with their EMT guys.
I have gone out and had to remove handcuffs off a high school senior in a motel room. Seems her boyfriend had forgotten the keys. I show up with my tools to get her unlocked and boyfriend panics and grabs his overnight bag, jacket in a bundle and runs off! I cover the young lady in a blanket then get the handcuffs off her. Come to find out, in his haste Boyfriend scooped up her dress and her purse when he darted out the door with his coat and what not. So, Being the nice guy I am give her my overcoat (12 lbs of siberian wool, oh how I love that coat) and drive her home. She does not have her purse, and is begging me to pick the front door lock so she can get in. No problem, I am there and already out of the money but I know I am going to be laughing when I get out of eat shot. So, I grab my trusty picks and start picking the door. Next thing I know there is lots of light, a big burly man with a shotgun standing in the doorway real pissed off (thought I was a thief) So there I am standing in the cold, staring down a shotgun barrel held by a man who's daughter I brought home form her prom nekid except for an overcoat thinking.. I am so fu**ed.
Girl screams daddy, runs inside to change and I have to explain what has gone on this evening. Girl comes down the stairs, give me back my overcoat, and I scoot out the door.
3 years later I am waiting tables at a resturant ( for spare cash)I get the booby prize and get a buisness dinner party fo 20. I an running amok the kitchen is screwing up orders and the head honcho of the party is pissed. I go over to him since he is wanting to bitch to someone and I was a sorta manager, durring his course of ranting he says something to the effect of "You look familiar… have you F----ed up my order before? I am livid and pissed ot the point of screaming in his face.
Then,I recognize him finally is is “daddy with a shotgun” (he had lost weight and shaved off the beard.) I calmed down and in a firm voice mentioned “we met the night of your daughters prom”
I guess, he feared his coworkers were going to hear the whole story and promptly became nice and polite and left a HUGE TIP!
I had to go and open a safe at a crime scene once. The police call me to come and they need this safe open as soon as possible. Seems a man was shot in his living room and they needed the safe open to see if his guns were stolen in the process.
I had one lady who went out to her car in the garage to get her celphone dressed only in pantys and a sports bra lock herself out of the house. I have had locks malfunction where people where locked into their offices.
A coworker was called out to make keys to a padlock some man had locked up on him err “member”
To many strange emergencies these past 15 years it seems. Those are the tip of the iceburg.
I do tech support for mainframes. A couple of times we’ve had a system almost grind to a halt because some user out in Buttfark Egypt had a stuck Enter key. One guy, when we finally tracked him down, said he’d spilt Coke on the keyboard. The programs are not supposed to allow infinite re-submission, but apparently not everyone got the word.
Television broadcasting and live news.
Hmm, where to start?
There was the time when the satellite dish on the uplink truck froze in the “UP” position while covering a story at a distant ski resort. No problem you say? Problem - there was a hostage incident with a shooting that was breaking 40 miles or so away from teh ski reort just as the ski piece ended. That sat truck was the ONLY one available to go quickly. Heat guns, hammers and a couple of videotape boxes broke enough of the ice to get the dish folded back up so the truck could go down the highway - 45 minutes later than all the other stations.
Or how about the time when one of our VERY pregnant female anchors was doing an early morning news update and began experiencing a bout of morning sickness roughly 18 seconds before the automated switching system was about to put her update camera on the air LIVE. What did viewers see? An empty newsroom chair and this really wierd “RALLLLLLPHH!!” noise. (She hadn’t had a chance to get her microphone pulled off before she dove off camera and stuck her head in a wastebasket!)
Then there was the time when a distraught and slightly irate viewer arrived at our front desk claiming to have various weapons in his backpack and that he would use one or several of them to off himself in our lobby unless he got to talk to the President. We weren’t ever really sure if he meant the President of the company or the President of The United States…
There was that one time when we were having a new diesel tank installed for the transmitter backup generator. The generator was hooked up to a little 100 gallon day tank just to hold it for a bit in the event of one of our occasional 30 minute power interruptions. Of course, Murphy being Murphy, during the project, we had one of the worst wind/rain storms to hit the area in 40 years and when the power went out, it stayed out. We spent the next 38 hours running 55 gallon drums of diesel fuel to the transmitter site in the back of a pickup truck to keep that damned day tank filled and keep the transmitter on the air - a fun trick when the generator consumes about 25 gallons per hour at full load and the nearest diesel filling station was 22 miles away down the mountain.
I got a million of 'em.
Ahhhh, I love this job.
I was working for a short time at a company that cleans and renovates houses after fires or other situations that would warrant it. One of the houses I was at had a fire and we needed to tear down the walls, ceiling, etc. Next door there was damage to that houses roof as well, so their were roofers there.
The house I was at was a single story house while the house next door had two floors. The roofers had a plank running from the second floor window to the houses roof I was working at.
While me and my friend were working in seperate rooms there was a huge crash. My friend asked if I was alright, I said yeah and that was that.
A minute later I go to borrow some planks from the roofers and I see one of them freaking, while the other looks like he is in shock sitting on a plank between the houses roof and second floor. He tells me his leg is broken. I then call to my friend who is trained as a firefighter and we head over.
We both run up to the second floor and I grab a couple of planks and put them alongside the guy, because he is two stories up. My friend can see his leg and immediately tells them to call 911.
We eventually get him inside and lie him on the floor, and now I can see his leg.
He had a compound fracture in his ankle and we could see the shape of the bone sticking out in his sock. When the paramedics got there, I held a flashlight for them as they cut off the shoe and sock. It was not pretty!!!
One evening in August 1985, my father had just gotten off work in a large office building downtown. He went to the underground parking garage to get his car. Just as he was about to get into his car, he felt a huge vibration. The floor trembled underneath his feet, and the walls of the parking garage rattled. My father wondered, “What the **** is going on?” He thought that there had just been an earthquake or a bombing. The other people in the parking garage were worried, too. Everyone got out of there quickly. My father came home and turned on the TV, and he found out what had happened. There had just been a terrible plane crash at DFW Airport. More than a hundred people were killed. The vibration that my father felt in the parking garage was caused by the crash. Even though his office was miles away from the airport, the shock waves from the crash were strong enough to be felt in the underground parking garage. Isn’t that spooky?
My two or three:
My mom worked for awhile during Vietnam spot-welding fins on rockets. Apparently, the spot welder she used had pins on it that came down in a type of press. One fine day, she ran the spot welder through her thumb. She had to shout firmly for her co worker to not turn on the juice. They disassembeled the machine and she went to the hospital carrying the machine part in her hand, with her thumb still impaled on it.
Several years ago, I was working in the chemical stockroom of our pharmaceutical company. We had about 12,000 different bottles of goodies on the shelves. It is not unusual for a chemical manufacturer to pack a bottle inside a large can full of vermiculite (which is why Fisher and Aldrich sell kitchen can openers).
One day, I saw my boss coming from the back of the stockroom with something in his hands. He made some smart remark like “If anything happens to me, tell my wife to spend the money well.” I looked at the object he was carrying gingerly: it was a can, a foot high by four inches wide. The top and bottom were both bulged outward at least an inch – who knows how much pressure was contained within the can. He put it inside a fume hood and called Safety.
Within an hour, the scene turned surreal: the site was evacuated. The police blocked off the main road so that we could evacuate as quickly as possible. The state police bomb squad came in. They placed the bulging can inside some sort of heavy metal bomb box and carried it out to the edge of the corn field by the parking lot. They then put a bit of explosive on the can and detonated it from afar (this told to us by the security guards who watched it all on their video cameras).
The funniest thing was that all of the older chemists were saying “What’s the big deal? Just put it under the fume hood, poke a hole in it and let it vent.” And they were probably right!
When I worked at a movie theater, there was a riot during the showing of Toy Story. It was a racial thing, with many people involved. It seems that one fellow on one side hit the girlfriend of a fellow on the other side and that’s all it took to spark the riot. When it was all done, there were several police cars, many injured people, a few ambulances, and I didn’t see a thing since I had been in the kitchen, washing dishes. I found myself giving a deposition in the matter six months later (didn’t see a thing!). Apparently one of the injured parties was suing the theater.
We get a call into the help desk…
“What do you do about a deer in the computer room?”
Not at work, but while serving in the danish navy:
It was in the middle of the night and we had just about finished a weeks training guarding a harbour and trucks where send out to collect sandbags/telephones etc left at various places around it.
One truck with 12 soldiers where send out on a narrow pier on their way one wheel hit something and the truck dived into 5 meters of water with 12 people in the back of it and 2 in the front.
There was one guy that saw it all and he ran back to the rest of us screaming to come and help. Some jumped on bikes and others ran, but as it was quite far away I and a few others saw our chance to jump into the back of a jeep - in the instant the driver started to accelerate I fell out of the back of the jeep - my boot laces got caught on a bit of metal and I where dragged after it for a few meters before the others managed to pull me in again.
When we arrived at the site of the accident the water was filled with people, none of those in the back had been strapped in and where able to swim out, the front window had been pushed in and those in the front got out after the truck hit the buttom of the harbour.
Luckely none got really injured just some scratches and bumps, but as it was in the middle of winter they where all very cold a darn scared.
// blinx
I remember an article in my ISP´s customer magazine a few years ago when they talked about traffic levels being highest from about 8 or 9 in the evening, except on Thursdays because that was when X-Files was on.
Ahh, the retail days…
Sunday afternoon. The lines are backing up so I hop onto a register. Scanning away and chatting with a customer, I hear a huge crashing noise. Being jaded, I think “Great, some kid knocked over a display” until my customer screams.
I turn around to see a car halfway into the store. A girl on her permit panicked and hit the gas instead of the brakes. Half the car is in the building, half out. Glass and bricks everywhere.
No one was hurt, thank god. The cashier who was closest to the accident and who had seen the car coming in her direction was sent home. We stayed open the entire time (I couldn’t reach the man who could give us permission to close). Had the mess cleaned up and the hole boarded up within three hours.
Fun with retail.