Your strangest work place emergencies?

In My Humble Opinion
41

Remember when your teacher used to tell you to stop tipping your chair or your desk like that? Here’s the reason: If a 120# girl tips her desk juuuuust right, and it happens to hit the floor land with her finger beneath it, said finger will be scooting, hockey puck-like, into the next row of desks. Nasty stuff to be happening in the midst of English class.

I also had a kid open up a nice huge gash in his hand one time–also due to desk-tipping.

And one memorable afternoon I returned to class to find one of my seventh graders handcuffed to the door. THAT was interesting.

42

The other day here one of our secretaries got a papercut.

On her eyeball.

[sub]The doctor said it looked like she was trying to do “home laser eye surgery.” Thankfully, there was no permanent damage.[/sub]

43

minor7flat5: excellent username. Just had to say that.

In 1990 or so, sitting in my cube while most of the office was at lunch, I stabbed myself quite badly in the palm with an X-Acto knife. Blood was literally spurting, and pretty much covered my desk and all the papers on it.

I grabbed the lady in the next cube and asked - no, told - her to drive me to the hospital. We were gone for over 2 hours while I got stitched up. Neither of us thought to call the office.

We returned to a crowd gathered around my desk, assuming I had killed myself horribly, but wondering where the body was. I have never, before or since, attracted so much attention on the job. I may have to try that stunt again someday.

44

I faked a work-related injury once (sort of). Office morale had been really, really bad, and upper manageemnt didn’t seem inclined to do anything to improve working conditions. For Halloween, a friend had some new theater makeup he wanted to try out on me. He did a kickass job with some liquid latex on my wrists, then injecting some fake blood underneath with a syringe, then slashed it carefully with a razor and let it dry. It looked for all the world like I’d slit my wrists (for a second, anyway, if you didn’t look too closely).

I left it on until the next morning, when, after our usual staff meeting, I pulled aside the big boss (a psychologist, BTW)and asked if I could talk to him for a minute in private. We went into an empty ofice, when I showed him my wrists. He just about had a stroke! (I clued him in practically instantaneously, lest you think I was too cruel.)

45

I was sitting at my desk, calmly finishing medical charts, waiting for my next patient when I heard and felt a loud crash right next to my door. I ran into the hall to find my patient had driven her car halfway through our back door. Luckily, she was unhurt, but I assumed she must have had some medical emergency. It turned out her brakes had gone out and she had decided to stop the car by driving into our medical office. I still tease her by reminding her that this is not a drive-through medical clinic.

46

A guy at a different company in our building tried to strangle his boss with a rope. We all looked out the window as they took him (the strangler) away… (Lots of ambulances and fire truck.)

47

This was a personal emergency while serving in the USN.

I was pulling a 2 hour sentry watch from abt.2-4 AM,IIRC.The first time I’d ever had to pull guard duty on our Base, a combo airstation and tech training site.After all this time I can’t bring myself to reveal the location.Happened over 40 yrs.ago.

Anyway my job was to walk around a school building,then meet with the person guarding the adjacent structure and say"post #3 secure" or something like that.These messages are eventually filtered back to the master of the guard,or whatever he was called.(I wasn’t the most militarily enlightened of enlistees).

Somewhere in the middle of this watch,I had to crap like crazy.Not knowing what to do in this emergency,I went down the stairs leading to a basement part of the building,away from prying eyes,and relieved myself.I thought nobody would discover it,at least in the darkness,since going down those stairs wasn’t a regular part of the watchtour.

Turns out I was right,because next day,on a smoke break between classes,I watched as a couple of lowly ship’s company grunts were down in those stairs armed with a shovel and container of some sort.

It was all I could do to hold back the guffaws,even now when I’m typing this and thinking of the scene.
Guessing the statute of limitations for a court martial for unauthorized shitting on USN property is passed.

I was also,along with 2 of my buddies,the one to tie the base goat mascot to the captain’s door on halloween.When this goat started bleating and the Capt.opened the door to see what all that noise was about, the goat got loose.I was among the detail dispatched to chase him down.This created a minor uproar at the time,and until now,that case has been unsolved.

Alas,my civilian employment history was much more routine.

48

About 10 years ago a fellow co-worker said he wasn’t feeling well and was going to the rest room. This was about 7 am just after the shift started. Pete was about 55 and was rather tall and portly. He had health problems in the past but had done okay for a couple of years. About half an hour after Pete went to the restroom, someone came out of the restroom hollering for someone to call the fire department. The company I work for has it’s very own fire department. The paramedics arrived first but despite their attempts, could not open the door to the stall. Pete apparently had a heart attack as died on the crapper. One paramedic went over the top of the stall but was still unable to open the door. Pete had fallen forward and was wedged between the toilet and the door. And he was way to heavy for the paramedic to lift up.

An hour after the paramedics arrived it was decided to remove the door to remove Pete’s body. The door was held on with security screws, the kind that are easy to screw in but have little ramps to keep them from being remove. You would think that a large company that produces 737’s and 757’s would have a tool to remove the screws. The fire department used just about everything and nothing worked. They went through the tool boxes of the employees hoping someone had something to remove the screws. They found nothing. At about 2 pm a rotary air tool with an abrasive cutting wheel was brought in and the hinges on the door were cut. I left work that day at 3:18 pm and Pete’s body was still in the restroom.

The real sad part of this story is that Pete’s wife and daughter were informed about the death at about 9 in the morning. They arrived at the plant gate an hour later but security would not let them in that day because some Chinese political leader was visiting the site. They had to wait outside the gate Pete was brought out about 7 hours later.

49

Tapioca Dextrin, Maeglin, I think bayonet1976’s point was that the country is Colombia, not Columbia.

50

9/11 :frowning:

My office is a few blocks away from the WTC.

51

Animal Antics:

When I was a grad student at Bucknell, a few of the baboons got out of their compound and sat on top of the research trailers. The caretaker came to work, saw the baboons and stared at them. They stared back. He yelled and fortunately, they scampered back into their compound. Escape hole was repaired.

When at ISU, the freezer that contained the animal carcasses used for the museum and biology department broke. Us grad students spent a few hours dragging things like a thawing snow leopard, a camel and buckets of frogs to an alternate freezer.

Not really an emergency, but more of a puzzlement: This past semester, we (well, not me, fortunately since I have a worm phobia) kept finding maggots in the conference room at the mosquito labs. They’d be crawling on the floor or on the tables. Couldn’t figure out where they were coming from, but they were a Calliphora species, suggestive of something dead. Finally someone saw one fall from the ceiling vent onto another’s pizza (the second guy was warned). On the roof was a deer carcass that one of the grad students left to skeletonize. For this species of fly, the larvae crawl away from the carcass to find a place to pupate, and that’s just what they were doing (except the carcass was too close to the vent).

52

I worked at a resort hotel that didn’t have air conditioning. In the summer we would leave the front doors open to get some airflow through the lobby. One night my coworker happened to glance over the front desk and noticed something with a black and white tail heading our way. The skunk sauntered through our office door and went into the small employee’s bathroom connected to the office. At that point we vaulted over the front desk and ran to the pay phone to call the police (the only thing close to animal rescue up there in the mountains). They showed up, but just got a good laugh out of our predicament and refused to wrangle this fuzzy guest for us. Meanwhile, my coworker went down to the vending machine and bought some popcorn, which he laid out in a little trail to the front door. This actually worked, and the skunk happily ate its way outside without incident.

Chipmunks got inside all the time, which frightened the rodent-phobic guests but merely amused us. Thank goodness no bears decided to stop by.

53

Whoops, I guess I forgot to post mine.

This happened a bit before I worked there. This company occasionally got business by destroying fireworks that had either been damaged or weren’t legal to sell in the U.S., by having bad fuses or too much powder or whatever.

They had a few methods of doing that, one of the scarier of which was to just make a big pile and light it on fire. That was done with cake items, which are more paper and clay than pyrotechnic compositiong. They’d then drive a Land Cruiser with a snowplow through the large burning pile of fireworks to stir it up to get the tightly would cardboard tubes to burn.

That’s not really an emergency, but this one was: they were disposing of cases of shells. They did the usual tests, and didn’t think they’d detonate in large quantities. So they stuffed a big iron outdoor incinerator full of these things, lit it and ran.

It detonated. It was completely demolished, sending large sheets of steel plate as far a a quarter of a mile, to be found by farmers when they went to plow their fields.

Did I mention that it was about 500 feet from a warehouse full of fireworks?