Inspired by the very similar thread about school incidents.
My company called all lab staff “pandemic heroes” for coming in every day during the pandemic and taking on extra work to compensate for management and office staff who stayed home for years.
Then shortly after return to office, they closed the lab and laid off all lab staff.
Sounds like your company took the Veterans Affairs approach to “hero response”.
Worst part is that they did it mostly to boost the IPI right before we went public by driving down operating costs.
We weren’t even able to buy in u til 6 months after going public and the price leveled off at 6 months
One day a coworker of mine was walking into our huge office building and thought he saw a mitten on the ground of the lobby. When he picked it up it was actually a pair of lacy women’s underwear. Ostensibly it fell out of someone’s gym bag or got caught in their pant leg in the laundry and dislodged there. He drops it immediately and comes into the office. He doesn’t mention this to anyone.
Two hours later the main receptionist comes in with the underwear in front of our whole group and says she saw him drop these this morning and she wants to return them. He’s denying the whole thing and at this point none of us have the previous context and all locked in to the conversation and silent laughing. She says, “We just want to give these back in case they have sentimental value!” and the the whole group is dying laughing now. He eventually convinces her he isn’t interested in a stranger’s underwear (which she bare handing) to which she says she’ll keep them in case he changes his mind (???).
It’s been 5 years and it gets brought up nearly daily
Funny if they were her panties all along. Turned the embarrassment from “Guess who dropped her panties in the lobby” to " Guess who was playing with panties in the lobby."
This adds a whole new dimension to the lore.
Someone must’ve summoned Shenron the day before he found them and got underwhelmed by the wish fulfillment.
Oolong back on his shit
Software company before git. The source server corrupted and the product code was lost. 5 guys had to get together and figure out the latest version between them (everybody had different changesets) and produce a new “current” version. At the end we lost all history prior and ever since all changes prior to 2008 have been attributed to 1 guy.
I used to work at an accounting/consulting firm who were dead set on writing business applications in VBA within Excel. The code was embedded in the notebook, and to distribute the software was sending the latest version of the Excel file. This made version control virtually impossible, and we would instead combine our work manually.
I cannot recommend having tech-illiterate people lead software projects.
Gotta respect that save. Reminds me of the Toy Story 2 assets being lost from a server failure and they were saved by one employee having a copy on their personal computer at home.
Drive Savers rescued an episode of The Simpsons. Back when that show was good.
It wasn’t a server failure. Someone rm -rf on the root of the server. The server did what it was told.
deleted by creator
More impressive than the fact that you saved a repo once is that the same repo still exists today with the complete git history. At the rate companies abandon products for new ones, old repos are rare.
Our repo is old as time. Carried through from SourceSafe to TFS to Git
Subversion has existed probably for longer than your company, the fucking managers couldn’t be arsed to read a damn book?
They were using SourceSafe back then. But any source control that isnt decentralised has the same problem. If the central server gets deleted so does all history
I had a worse experience. My first internship was doing web development in ColdFusion. Why that language? Because when the company was first starting, none of the funders wanted to learn Linux/Apache administration and CF ran on Windows.
Also, the front end development team did not have version control but shared code via a file server.
The overnight IT guy was caught watching porn while working (this was over a decade ago, he was in the office every night and not a remote worker). How was he caught? He was saving the pornographic photos on a shared network drive…
When confronted, he didn’t try to deny anything, his explanation was simply, “That’s just my thing.”
Boss: “Were you looking at porn in the office?”
IT guy:
We should be able to look at a liiittle porn at work.
Aside from the obvious don’t watch prom at work, I don’t see how anyone does it with company property. Doesn’t pretty much everyone have a phone or computer these days? Shouldn’t it be common sense to use your phone rather than the work computers need by your employer?
As a treat.
You’re a rock star!
I respect his owning it shamelessly.
I was working at an assembly plant for plane motors (the big kind) and one of them literally blew up in the test bed. There was chunks literally embedded in the safety glass, it was a huge mess.
Turns out someone left an orange rubber mallet inside of it. Over the course of a year, they reassembled the shredded mallet and traced it back to the toolbox that used it. The guy lost it and instead of reporting it and disassembling his last job, he just stole one from an other toolbox.
Not mine but my buddy used to build kayaks. One of the employees took a dump in one of the kayaks and it only got caught because of a random QC test. I always giggle thinking of the client who would have received it.
TRUSTY-COOK
Traded guns for booze in Baghdad. Every NCO and officer involved got removed mid-deployment
Where R they now?
Prolly cops
Not Baghdad
No clue.
Girl did dabs on break with her gf came back zonked out since she’d never smoked weed before.
Ended up slapping manager and getting taken away by ems
Cook got arrested at work one time when cops came to pick her up at her job. She was 4 feet tall so we joked they picked her up and carried her away. She had to use a step stool to make the soup and someone would hide the stool from her so she’d be pissed the next morning.
Same place had a cook drinking lean and offering it to people.
Retirement home btw
Any workplace sitcoms about retirement home you know of? I would be all over that since South Park did the rap-heavy retirement home drug episode
There is absolutely room for it. Have so many stories. From the bpd woman who mentally and verbally harassed the boy with fetal alcohol syndrome.
To finding absinthe in the chefs office.
Then there would need to be an arc about the time there was a chef who couldn’t read. His wife did his emails and we couldn’t get avocados because he was spelling them wrong I’m the hardies order system
I feel really bad for the woman with bpd and the guy with FAS. Those are both horrible disabilities.
They were both tragic figures.
Whats ur job?
This was working as a server/cook/bistro at an independent living retirement community. During covid which added to the fuckery. Over the course of about 3 years.
Do they eat well? Like good shit?
Sometimes.
Food like bistro I made it right in front of you and did whatever you wanted. Sandwiches, breakfast, tacos, burgers etc. We tried our best with what we had.
This setup was different from the main dining room which was lunch line batch cooking. Dinners were kinda sucky occasionally.
If you’re into Ricky Gervais, he did one.
Where?
Just looked it up. It’s called Derek and it’s reportedly on Netflix.
Spanks!
What’s lean?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_(drug)
It’s essentially cough syrup mixed with a soda. Think his specifically was with sprite. Remember my co worker being especially fucked off of it and he was routinely baked.
I was a square.
I’ve tried almost everything but I’ve never tried lean. I want to sooooo badly.
So buy some cough syrup and sprite. Also most cough syrup has acetaminophen in it so I hope you didn’t need that liver.
Most cough syrup sold as codeine/promethazine cough syrup nowadays is actually just fent.
I was supervising filling in a pit we had dug on the edge of a forest. We had dump trucks coming in dumping gravel. One particular driver wasn’t great at his job and there had been issues with him in the past.
That driver came in and dumped his gravel, but then he drove off with his bed still raised and almost immediately smashed into electric lines that ran off into the forest. One telephone pole even snapped at the base and fell over.
Within 30 seconds multiple cops came speeding onto the job site. It turns out those electric lines ran to a radio tower in the woods that ran the police radio. The idiot in the dump truck had taken out the police comms for the whole town.
Note: if you’re planning a crime in that town, you only have to cut one wire to disable all police communication.
That’s some lacking infrastructure
This is why we shld bury our lines, much more effort to dig down six feet than get a ladder and snip
A wild backhoe appears!
It used Dig! It’s Super Effective!
What does a network engineer bring on a hiking trip in the woods? Water, snacks, extra sunscreen, a first aid kit, bug repellent, bear spray … and a folding shovel and a piece of fiber-optic cable.
(What’s the fiber for?)
Well, if you get lost in the woods or need to be rescued, you take the shovel, dig a trench, put the fiber in it, bury it … and within an hour, someone with a backhoe will show up to tear it up. Then you can just follow the backhoe tracks back to civilization.
And this is how a micro quake severed our T1 line from LA to Phoenix and shut the network down in our office for a week.
Honestly never thought of that, sounds like there would need to be some sort of protective channeling, with space to allow some shifting
Or use mobile phone networks.
Buried lines of all kinds are frequently severed by excavators because their position isn’t properly or fully documented.
The best set up I ever saw was a sewer tunnel, almost 12 feet tall, that handled all the services. From sewage to water to electricity to data; it held everything and was trivial to maintain and run new lines in.
line sounds like a really interesting idea, although I feel like documenting where you put things should be a basic task. Probably why it’s not done properly
You’d be surprised, how fragile critical infrastructure often is. There was an incident in Europe a few years ago, where a single miscalculation in a planned power line shutdown almost caused the entire European grid to split.
It slowed down a bit, and then we quickly learned that maintaining the perfect 50hz wasn’t actually necessary anymore. Few people still have clocks that depend on it
I’m not talking about the incident in Romania, but in Germany.
A shipyard needed some wires over a river deactivated and that caused an overload cascade, because the river was the border between two providers who had different assumptions about the capacity of the power lines connecting them.
oh damn, ain’t something. I will be looking into that, thank you!
Clocks, true.
Computer systems in general, however, will start acting very squirrelly outside of an approved MHz range. Wall warts and power supplies can handle only so much deviation from the norm. It’s why high-end UPS systems do power conditioning to provide a pure sine wave.
No worries we’re talking like 49.9995 hz
That’s some lacking infrastructure
They probably had plenty of infrastructure for normal operations.
What they were lacking was a BCDR plan.
…which includes having backup lines or a more robust installation. Police officers aren’t engineers or system administrators for public infrastructure.
You’re right tho, a backup alone would not be sufficient
Couldn’t they sell a few of their spare MRAPs to buy a backup generator and a redundant microwave link? Sheesh.
Previous HR was well beyond retirement age essentially working to have something to do and one day emailed all of management a spreadsheet asking us to verify our information. That sheet contained each of our full names, addresses, phone numbers, birth dates, social security number, etc.
To my knowledge nothing of significance happened. I have my credit frozen.
I worked for a company that handled a ton of personal data. Pretty much every person in Germany, including addresses, bank account details, etc.
On my first day there (fresh from university) I was given literally full read access to the entire database. And as I later found out by accident: they did not track any data exfiltration at all. I copied several gigabytes of data without anyone noticing.
Your data is only as secure as the least motivated data broker sees fit. And that’s not very fit.
A few years ago I asked a customer for a list of employees, so I could verify who could purchase on their account. They replied with their personnel files. Luckily it didn’t have social security numbers, but it had a LOT of personal information. Medical records, drug test results, stuff like that.
Had an executive assistant at my company who did very little if anything. Nobody knew why she was kept around and paid so much. Everyone pressured the CEO to fire her, but he strongly resisted. Eventually she was fired, but immediately threatened to sue for sexual harassment. CEO threw her a lovely settlement check despite claiming that nothing ever happened. Mmhmm.
HR coordinator sharing around her Onlyfans on the dl with people and was found to be giving preferential treatment to her fans. She got fired. But a lot of people got to see her naked, so I guess that’s fun.
Giving “human resources” a whole new meaning, or maybe just its oldest meaning.
I must admit, I never saw it, but she DID have vast “resources”.
What’s her of?
An IT contractor at my government job was one of the people that tried to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer.
big gretch! she’s so cool. looks like she could command a battlestar.
Working at McDonald’s at the time. The HR manager went on bereavement leave and a replacement was brought in. The day the HR manager came back she was told she was demoted and was put as the DriveThru order taker for a couple months before finally being fired and given severance.
A month or 2 later the old restaurant manager who was now the “Systems Manager” and in charge of all the admin tasks stopped doing unpaid overtime, so all of his duties were taken away and he was put as DriveThru order taker.
For 3 months he came in for exactly 8 hours every day, only did order taking in DT, and left. He was still being paid his restaurant manager’s salary during this time, the new restaurant manager was in over his head and would not ask the old restaurant manager for help. Eventually the old RM left to work for a competitor working with the old HR manager.
Apparently the owner called the competitor to scream at them for stealing his staffYeah, stole them; that’s what happened here. They obviously didn’t drive them away. /s
Not technically AT the work place, but a couple employees decided it would be a good idea to sneak off to a side room during the company Christmas party to fool around. They got caught and nothing happened for a couple weeks. Then, for the first and last time in the company history to my knowledge, both employees were asked to provide proof of gym attendance to justify the stipend they were collecting, then fired when they failed to do so.
What’s fun is the couple were married (to each other) and it didn’t happen on company property or during business hours, so this was totally just a “We’re icked out by this” move by HR. Gotta love working in the South.
Why is your company paying for personal gym memberships
Likely some sort of health insurance initiative. Lots of health insurance companies will give discounts to companies that can prove they have taken steps to improve their employees’ health. So things like mandatory smoking cessation classes, drug tests, gym memberships, etc are all encouraged by insurance companies.
My former company actually did things backwards; They offered a $20 weekly stipend to anyone who committed to stop smoking via a monthly smoking cessation course. It was basically just a monthly 30 minute video you watched, then answered some questions about… You could do it on company time, so it was an easy $80 per month that you were leaving on the table if you refused. The backwards part is that they didn’t offer the same stipend to people who never smoked in the first place. So all of the non-smokers suddenly signed on as smokers, signed up for the smoking cessation program, and immediately “quit” smoking so they could get that easy extra cash. I even used to keep a pack of menthols in my desk drawer, in case I was ever questioned about whether or not I really smoked. The first month they introduced the program, the company’s insurance must have been screaming, because every single employee suddenly reported as smokers.
Good benefit packages, keeping employees on.
Hmmm I guess we have two of different types
1: late into pandemic when inflation was really bad a bunch of the workers were super upset by their wages, management got together to get a solution. The plant supervisor called a meeting and told everyone there would be a “substantial raise”, it was $0.20. Less than 1%
The second, more recent, a fire broke out after a maintenance repair went awry. Someone pulled the fire alarm and it failed to work. Someone pulled a second fire alarm, it failed to fully initiate the system. Then on the last attempt it finally went off but the fire suppression system and sprinkler system did go off but not over the actually burning area. This lead to a whole region of the building getting smelted and a big investigation on the fire suppression system. After it was resolved they asked employees to continue working their shift, even in the smoked out areas. The stench was horrible and probably carcinogenic lol
A similar thing to the first point happened at my old company.
When it became clear that working from home won’t go away, management came up with some new and actually reasonable rules, that basically allowed 100% wfh, if the team was okay with it.
Now, here in Germany east/west differences are still pretty stark. So someone asked “sooo, I’m in the East, get a low wage, but work with a team from the West. If my neighbor would start working for the same team, formally at an office in the West, but 100% from home, he’d get West wages”. Management didn’t address that at all, so a bunch of people (including myself) just said fuck it, quit and now earn way better wages working from home.
That’s wild! In the states there’s a similar issue with cost of living being vastly different in different areas of the country. I have a family member who does financial stuff for business but works from home. They ended up having to get a postal mailing address in a higher cost of living area so they could get fair wages since their normal address would make business offer only real low wages. It’s asinine
Holy shit do you not have any fire inspectors? Would you describe your local and state governments as “Republican”, or “very Republican”?
I’d actually describe them as Blue/non-designated, it feels red-leaning recently with some of the stuff they are passing though
The fire department comes and checks stuff out really only when there’s an issue. We do have test fire alarms though they never use the fire suppression system, mostly only the noise alarm. I’m unsure if they pull the same one or random ones for the test but either way, it wasn’t good enough apparently.
And this is why we need unions.
I’m definitely pro union, my work did almost go union actually! But we just follow a union contract that another workplace has from their union. For the most part I think its the best of both worlds, but if they keep aggravating people we aren’t too far away.
I’ve been following what’s been going on unionwise all very the USA and I’m kinda pumped about it
