The big incident at my previous job was the (extremely incompetent) HR person accidentally sharing a spreadsheet of every employee’s salary. I was an hourly worker at the time and thought it was funny, but some of the senior engineers were pissed to find out how much more other engineers made. HR was not fired, instead she was put on a temporary paid leave.

Other incidents include:

• One of the owners’ vape exploded, forcing everyone to evacuate.
• VP of the company got caught buying escort services on the company credit card.
• Aforementioned owner (who was no longer an owner after the company was bought out) got fired shortly after a town hall zoom meeting, where he used a Trump/Pence background.
• The head of the NOC team had a stroke at work.
• COO “accidentally” revealed in front of everyone that one of the Project Managers had cancer. She sued, and they settled.
• COO verbally abused one of the senior managers over the phone during a big meeting. He sued, and they settled.

It was a pretty shitty company.

So my team lead ordered a bottle of a particularly nasty chemical (don’t remember what, this was long ago) Thing is, he went on holiday immediately after and didn’t tell anyone about it. The bottle had to be shipped and kept at -20℃ otherwise it would decompose into a deadly gas; one of those lovely CMR types. So next thing that happens is, I get called on my day off by the boss saying that there is a scary box in the lab and if I could check it out. I was reluctant but I figure I’ll check it out. I though to myself that it was a little unusual that they would ship it in a styrofoam box without any dry ice (it had evaporated) so I take out a slightly bloated bottle which seems to be filled with some liquid. I then tear of the package label and read the MSDS. At this point I read all the scary labels and realize that this thing has been out here for a while, all the dry ice has evaporated, the bottle is bloated and filled with gas which I am sitting right next to. So I turn on ventilation and GTFO. I inform the boss who immeditally got his home freezer to cool it down. I meanwhile started to notice a stinging in my eyes (which was one of the effects) We wash out my eyes, stinging goes away, lungs are fine and everything ends without injury.

TLDR

Coworker orders deadly chemicals, goes on holiday, doesn’t tell anyone, almost kills me.

A productive team member was heard giving their daily stand-up report during their team’s daily stand-up…

To another company. Oops! Don’t forget to mute your mic if you’re working two jobs at the same time!

This was actually after I left, although I have a million crazy stories about this place- but the guy who I used to work directly under was an alcoholic, and one day Monday he didn’t show up for work, wasn’t answering his phone, etc. This was pre-social media, so they couldn’t ask around or anything.

He comes in a week later and it turned out that over the previous weekend, he had gotten drunk, driven from where we lived in Indiana down to Georgia for some reason (he had no connections in Georgia), went into a bar in some small town, got into a fight, and wound up in the slammer for a week.

He was no longer employed after that. And this is a small business where every employee was so vital to the owner that I once got mad at him, screamed, “GO FUCK YOURSELF, [his name]!” and stormed out and went home and he called me up the next day, apologized and begged me to come back in with various compensation promises which I can’t remember. It took a lot to get fired from there, but that was enough.

The CEO sent out the email that COVID vaccination was required for all employees or the people that refused would be terminated, like most workplaces. It was fully expected seeing as it is a hospital, and all but a handful of employees compiled. This moron decided to reply all (the reply all to CEO emails has thus been disabled since) with a lecture full of antivax nonsense about how COVID vaccines were experimental and contain fetal cells, and the revelation that they had been reading patient charts that they had no business reading for COVID test results and the consultation or ER notes, and wrote about the “proof” that they had that nobody had died or gotten really sick from COVID, and how the CEO was extremely misinformed on the subject of COVID. That resulted in immediate termination and it was pretty hilarious to read their nonsense and the fact they admitted to every employee they had been violating patient confidentiality. You want to be that dumb, have at it.

Years ago I worked for a large-ish post production company. They had recently moved into a swanky new location and everything there was tailored to spec, including the server room. In norwegian we sometimes call a server room a ‘machine room’, this is relevant.

As a part of the server room spec, a dry fire suppression system was among the requirements.

The summer of the incident was particularly hot, and we experienced some trouble with our cooling, so a cooling technician was called to have a look. While he was working on the unit inside the server room, he made a mistake that caused all the cooling gas to dump into the room, triggering the fire extinguishers.

A dry fire system works by releasing an inert gas into a space to displace any oxygen, effectively choking any fire. I imagine this is usually done by some solenoids opening some canisters of gas and the room quickly, but gradually becomes oxygen free. Luckily, my boss at the time was present and he quickly got both himself and the tech to safety.

All good right? No. The contractor who constructed the new location had ordered and installed a system meant for maritime machine rooms, not the computer ‘machine room’ we had. In an environment filled with fuel and grease, you optimize towards filling the room with an inert gas as quickly as possible, and it turns out they use explosives to complete the task. In this room there were three canisters in the ceiling with fire shooting out of them, burning pellets to generate the inert gas. The gas and smoke from the canisters combined with the leaked cooling gas, and started condensing.

Into hydrochloric acid.

While all this was going on, all of the servers and workstations were happily humming along, sucking the now extremely corrosive atmosphere into themselves, making sure that every nook and cranny inside and outside got covered in a thin greasy film of acid.

The aftermath: Mine and two colleagues’s summer break was cut short, as we were called in to do damage control. Ripping out and wiping hard drives clean was what we did all summer. With external help we managed to recover all of the data. One feature film was delayed a few weeks. The insurance payout actually made the company a bit ahead financially. As far as I know there’s still burn marks in the floor of the server room, from when flames shot out of the fire extinguishers. Everyone involved now knows what a proper dry fire suppression system for a server room looks like.

The kicker is, the cooling was messed up because a fabric awning on the building had fallen down and was covering the air intake. If anyone had thought to check the roof this whole thing would have been avoided, and that server room would probably still have bombs attached to its ceiling.

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.

Coworker in sales got mad at one of the shipping guys thinking his packing of the pallet was insufficient. They get into a verbal spat until the sales guy walks to his car and pulls his gun on the shipping guy, the shipping guy, who also happened to be a retired marine and allowed by the owner to open carry in the office. Sales guy was lucky the only thing he lost that day was his job.

No shots were fired since the sales guy was stupid but not that stupid. We kind of had a collective “that’s not terribly surprising” moment later when the cop was over for the police report and brought up sales guy’s past mugshots like “was this the guy”.

Anticlimactic but back when I was working for an ISP we had a couple portable Honda generators that we used to power gear when the power went out.

We never tested the generators because we were using them every 2 months because Australian power problems.

One time I get to a radio tower and the genny doesn’t start, add a splash more fuel in the tank, still no start. Drive back to the office and grab the second one, and return to the radio tower. Second genny doesn’t start, but power comes back after a bit.

We took them to a place to be serviced and they each and a different problem, but the third one I didn’t grab was perfectly fine.

From then on I did a monthly test on all 3 gennys and they never had a problem.

Our department sometimes had a few interns, most of them young and female. Usually one of them got her workplace in the boss’s room in the office and he had plenty of time to show them how things are done etc.

One day the boss invited all staff to his house for a nice little summer barbecue. Later in the evening we recognized him being absent from the party for nearly 2 hours, and one of the interns was missing for exactly the same time.

stressed out researcher tried to get a temp to ship out biological specimens by fedex.

Used to work at a local resort. One time, Kid Rock rented out the whole top floor of the hotel, and requested no staff go up there during his stay. Of course, it’s a hotel full of minimum wage teenagers, so intra-staff communication is abysmal. A maid ended up running into a naked Kid Rock holding a bag of cocaine lol

I hurt my back working today. That was an incident.

Worked in a small Unix team under a broader IT department at a university. The manager of our team was awesome in part because his attitude was “I deal with all the university politics so you can focus on your work”. Anybody who has worked at a large university knows what the politics can be like.

The VP of IT retired and the replacement was hired from an IT department at another university. The new VP’s overall policy was “We will do things this way because that’s how we did it at my old university”. Within about 6 weeks we had a round of “layoffs” that targeted our manager and one other manager that was also known to push back against the university politics. They were the only two people let go out of a department of roughly 100.

Within about a year of that happening every last member of our tight knit Unix team left for greener pastures.

A male staff member was yelling at and berating a female for god knows what. She was trying to get away from him, and he’d followed her around the office down the stairs and into the washroom.

She was the manager’s fiancee, and there were three witnesses. We were honestly worried for her safety and the receptionist was about to call 911.

Consequences for the abusive minidicked coworker? NONE.