Ask Lemmy

I saw a dude lose a hand because they ignored everything about passing through the water tight doors when they were moving.

My place of work used to have a fairly large "data entry" department until they... did... something to make that job kindof unnecessary. They laid off pretty much all of that department. And I'm told the boss who was over them before they were laid off returned to his office to find a sizeable human shit directly atop his desk.

Another story. My own boss (actually my boss's boss) was a massive asshole. Committed the team to a completely unreasonable deadline in conversations with the C-level folks above him, and then threw temper tantrums when the deadline wasn't hit. He turned the daily standup into a 7:30am (in-person) daily demo to prove we were making progress and weren't... I dunno... slacking off or whatever. Many a temper tantrum was had in those demos as well.

I quit and made no secret of why. After I left, I heard through the grapevine that in a meeting with the CTO, the asshole boss accused the CTO of being incompetent and said that he was gunning for the CTO's job. The CTO, sensibly, told the asshole boss to do not pass go, do not collect $200, security will escort you out of the building and we'll ship you your personal effects from your office.

And then I quit the place I'd gone to and went back to where the asshole boss had been and I'm still working there. Definitely would not have considered coming back if he was still there.

Ok. One more story about the other place. They switched from one chat provider to another. But they never actually shut down the one they were migrating away from. Several folks never left the old chat. When it was discovered that on the old chat service, said folks were trading really really inappropriate holocaust jokes, the whole office got a talking to in very vague terms. It wasn't until like a month later that someone explained to me what had precipitated that.

Before my time, but they tell tales of the "Phantom Shitter". Someone had... issues, physical and/or mental, and would leave streaks of waste both going to and from the bathroom. Very liquid waste. Sometimes stepped in. "Phantom" because initially no one knew who was doing it. They just found the results. Eventually he was found out, sent home for a bit, and then fired when it happened again after he came back.

Since I worked there: Guy came in for an interview. I don't know if he was already having a bad day or what, but he got upset that his first interviewer wasn't there to greet him at the front door. It escalated, rapidly, leading to threats of violence, an arrest, and a couple of cops searching his car.

Had a guy bring in a sandwich baggie full of hair, put it in front of me and asked "Do those look like crabs to you?"

Nope'd the fuck out of that situation.

we hijacked a conference room on a shared floor for a week and built a three-phase high-voltage line in there by hunting around the building for which sockets were on which phase, then plugging them into industrial transformers.

A patient escaped his police escort through a crawlspace above the showers. The whole building went on lockdown (with loudspeaker announcements about not interacting with any naked men you come across) before they eventually found him a mile away, still starkers.

Pharmacy got robbed with a crossbow back when I was managing a Shoppers Drug Mart in the bad part of town back in the day.

I knowingly stalled a counterfeiter for ~20 minutes while we're waiting for police to arrive.

I just well full inept dipshit worker on the guy and he believed my act.

Guy could have just walked out and been free but he stuck around over less than 200 dollars of fake money he was trying to wash through us.

Worked at an absolutely soul-crushing gig after a new micro-manager took over and the next gig was slow coming. The micro-manager didn't like one smart but blunt underling correcting him so he took away the OT and standby the underling had depended on - and us; the underling was smart as fuck - and financially ruined the underling by timing it right after a new car and house purchase based on that 10 year financial history.

Underling attempted suicide-by-hanging in front of our main dev area.

Company had counsellors for a whole day, and the micro-manager immediately focused on how unstable someone must be to commit to suicide instead of on how awful a workplace it must be.

An employee was angry about an unfair policy and was being punished for not complying, and in his anger he threw a chair. This was before my time, but security had to escort the employee out of the building and he was fired on the spot. That story still circulates even though it's been over a decade.

At another workplace some employees were caught having sex.

At another workplace a manager and employees were running a drug operation out of a drive-thru.

There were other things, but honestly humans are so predictable, they're usually:

• fucking one another
• threatening, fighting, or trying to kill one another
• trying to get high or stay high
• stealing, cheating, or otherwise trying to enrich themselves

So a lot of the stories are of one form or another - employee who always came in extremely drunk and worked her shift drunk for years, only fired after some violent incidents and indecent exposure because of excessive drunkenness.

One employee was homeless and sleeping on the roof of the store, he was caught climbing down one morning.

Another guy was peddling drugs outside the store.

Another employee was stealing stock from the store after hours and was fired after getting caught.

Anyway - poverty is fun, y'all!

A coworker that got pissed when things didn't work and threw them across the shop floor was getting fired. He was getting fired mostly because the owner of the company--hereafter referred to as Asshole Boss--was a dick, and the coworker scared him. (Note that the coworker was never violent towards people. Just machines.) Anyway, the Asshole Boss got a bunch of cops there on the day that he was gonna fire him, but the employee heard what was going to happen and just... Didn't show up.

This is the same Asshole Boss that fired me maybe a year, year and a half later. He fired me because I had a 'bad attitude' because my partner of ten years had said that they wanted a divorce two days earlier. I got driven straight to the hospital and checked in after telling my supervisor that I was going home to commit suicide. Yeah, the suicide part didn't work out after all. (The divorce was ugly; they tried to bankrupt me and saddle me with all of their debt.)

...But it all ended well. Asshole Boss fired the management team that was making the whole business work in a fit of pique; the management team got some funds together and started a company that was in direct competition with Asshole Boss. I ended up being their first hire. Asshole Boss ran his business into the ground in less than a year and a half, and the company the management team started is growing and expanding a decade later.

Not super crazy and this was a long time ago, but there was a guy who was just around 3 months with the company who was causing a ruckus.

We only knew about it because he went live on social media while he was at the reception floor of the building claiming the company was engaged in fraud or something. It wasn't intelligible to be honest and I couldn't really understand what he was specifically accusing them of. I think he was fired on that day, and he went live shortly after he was told. He also claimed he was not being allowed to leave, but I think the reason was he refused to give up the company mobile phone that was issued to him, claiming it contained evidence and he wanted to take it with him.

I never heard anything about it since, and I don't know what happened to the guy and if the claims were true.

I work in 911 dispatch, so this is going to depend a bit on if we're counting incidents that we've handled as dispatchers, or if we're only counting incidents that physically happened at our dispatch center.

For the former, I'm going to just leave it at- we've handled a little bit of everything. If you can imagine it we've probably had something similar happen. I'm not going to go into any detail because our craziest incidents would probably be googleable and point you to my workplace.

Limiting it to things that happened here, we had one of the local crazies call in a bomb threat to our dispatch center. We weren't taking it too seriously, he's a known party and mostly harmless, but out of an abundance of caution our breaks were postponed while the sheriffs swept our building.

Our dispatch center shares a big campus with the county prison, and a few other county offices and facilities, we're at the end of a long hilly driveway/private road with a guard shack at the top and the driveway for a few neighboring businesses branching off from it. It's not totally uncommon for various people to be walking up our driveway, people from those other businesses out for a walk, people going to visit an inmate at the prison, the occasional person with business at one of those county offices, etc.

Anyway, one day one of my coworkers is driving into work and sees an older guy walking up the driveway, the weather was pretty shitty that day, so he decides he's going to be nice and give him a lift up to the guard shack. He comes into work and by the time he's logged in there was a call for a disturbance at the guard shack, the old guy was some sovereign citizen type trying to pull some first amendment audit bullshit at the prison. So we all got a memo about not giving anyone rides.

Shortly before I started, there was a small fad of people making s'mores in the lunch room microwave. One of the newer trainees was a younger guy, still lived at home, was a little clueless, and decided to make himself a s'more. He microwaved it way too long and smoked up the building, it was probably about as close as they've ever gotten to having to evacuate to our backup center. So we now have a "no s'mores" rule.

There was also one new guy that honestly probably shouldn't have made it through our background checks who was a real piece of work. He is probably the only person in living memory to use the shower here, we suspect he may have been living out of his car. He had some weird shit on his record, some strange domestic bullshit, he was a volunteer firefighter and had been in trouble a few times for trying to pull people over with the lights on his personal vehicle (basically impersonating an officer) and was just generally a really strange dude. He nearly got into a fist fight with his trainer and that was the final straw. There's been a few other weird stories involving him since we got rid of him but those are pretty googleable.

Kathleen brought salmon and nuked it in the microwave.