From my current workplace:
Someone was putting mail in a cabinet under their desk instead of the outbox, we’re talking hundreds of letters/cheques/invoices and some life-changing documents from a few months.
The mail outbox was on their desk, and easier to reach than the cabinet.From previous workplaces:
- Breaking down a door and raping someone that had barricaded themselves behind said door.
- Sexual interference.
- not having a licence, and getting a DUI with a work truck that they stole.
And outrageous in a different way:
for only beating last year’s sales by 3% instead of by 4%.Have you heard any specific reasons for the mail hoarder’s actions at your current workplace, or is it still a fresh case? I’m guessing it was nefarious, since the mail outbox was closer and seemingly more obvious than the secret stashing cabinet. Just wanted to be a dingus to intended mail recipients? I’d also be curious if it was all mail they handled or just select pieces. So many burning questions!!
I am a contractor so I don’t work in a standard office setting right now. I miss the heck out of juicy office gossip, at least about those who deserve such sordid stories! (Karen in accounting is actually really nice, Carl.)
The reason why some people think they did it was because it was their job to take the mail to the mail room. But they were also the person who needed to go to the mail room to get our mail every day, which they did, every day. If they were already taking the elevator down to the mail room to get the mail, why not take the outgoing mail?!?
We also found out that they were just marking tasks as complete about 20% of the time, so we had to double-check every task assigned to them for the previous 6 months.I earned my living with a hammer or a forklift for most of my life, and I never thought I would like the office gossip. But, It’s kinda great.
It’s generally a different level than it was with the construction guys.
“Joanne’s boyfriend might be emotionally abusive, and she won’t break up with him. Be kind to her.”
vs
“John got drunk last night after losing custody, and put his new girlfriend into a coma. We’ll need you to help with the gable overhangs.”
Someone got fired making an “inspirational” Andrew Tate inspired speech on slack about how depression doesn’t actually exist. This was on a company wide channel about promoting/raising awareness for mental health issues. Two comments prior someone had described in heartbreaking detail how their stepchild had committed suicide last year.
Worked at sheetmetal manufacturing plant. Had aisles of welding booths. Old dude welder would smoke in the building in his booth letting the smoke get sucked through the table vents. Well sure as ahit one day a little more than just smoke gets sucked up and next thing you know thr whole ventilation system goes up in flames. Never saw the dude again.
Same plant but one of the robot welders, the worker would mount an unrelated electrical box on the robot welder rig. Then hit the foot petal and it would clamp 3 of the 4 sides down with a fuckton of pressure. Months after opening back up after ventilation fire this new chick was running the robot welders and steps on the fucking clamp petal while still holding everything in place. She clamped her whole hand smashing all the bones in her hand I think. Never saw her again either. It was a freak accident not even anything you can point a finger at. I guess she lost balance a little to make her step and didn’t have her hands in way so the e-stop light bar that senses if you are in the way wasn’t tripped but she slamed her hand onto the box as it was closing trying to catch herself.
They had tons of people I never saw before come in and assess the robots and turret presses and they installed the petals that have covering flaps you need to lift to get your foot in the petal. All in all the place was super safe and the dude that smoked was super fucking belligerent and was going to be fired the next infraction before burning the ventilation system down.
A manager got fired for sleeping with an underage waitress.
A GM got fired after stealing ~$13k from deposits
A guy got fired for telling the GM to go fuck herself completely unprompted.
Food service is wild
Different times and companies, but I’ve seen people fired for
- being in his 30s and sleeping with the 14-15 year-old worker (I forget exactly how old she was). This was working in a movie theater and he was the GM.
- found CSAM on their computer
- many for sexual harassment (a few different jobs in IT)
I think that’s it for the NSFW stuff.
This got me into a way bigger rabbit hole than I remembered… The person is not officially “fired” since you cannot fire a tenured, distinguished professor and a former department head, but I suspect she was persuaded to leave. The incident is quite wild, I was just a random undergrad hired to do lab tests so I only knew some details.
This is about Dr. Connie Weaver, professor emeritus and former department head at Purdue’s Department of Nutrition Sciences (her ORCiD). She was known for nutrition research where the institution recruits adolescents summer-camp style (similar to a clinical trial), and in 2017 she started to lead a multi-year (lasted one month before it was shut down) study on low-sodium diets in adolescents, Camp DASH. Supposed to be a gold-standard diet study… close to 10 million dollars of NIH money on the line too.
And then things went off the rail. The operation tried to cut a lot of corners: pretty much all of the employees were undergraduates who couldn’t find other things to do for the summer, training was minimal or nonexistent, and the employees-to-camper ratio was very, very low… oddly similar to the recent MrBeast incident where participation oversight seems to be very bad.
This then led to sexual harassment, abuse, etc… one poor girl’s nude was shared online, probably more cases of sexual assault, several adolescents got into serious fights with each other, and from what I’ve heard some of the undergrads who were on supervisory roles were also injured. Several lawsuits were filed, the university stepped in and stopped the study (I just remembered them stop scheduling me to work in July and was wondering what went wrong lol), the issue got elevated to the university president, and more lawsuits…
Obviously tenure means someone should be protected from being terminated at-will like most employment contracts. So the reason I have my suspicion is… Dr. Weaver became a professor emeritus not long after the incident, but is now somehow still publishing work while working from… San Diego State University? Doesn’t seem like someone who retired on their own will to me.
If you are interested in the full detail… here are some news articles on this incident. Exponent is Purdue’s student-run newspaper
Okay, this is fascinating … And makes me wonder how often this–what I will call “academic honorable discharge”–really occurs across institutions, well-known or not.
I haven’t delved into your sources yet, so this is my somewhat educated guess … Environmentally, this type of social breakdown makes sense with the lack of proper oversight, seasoned leadership, and organization appropriate to the study population. But did the low sodium diet itself serve any factor in the violence that occured in this botched study? Like, did kids being dietarily withheld a critical electrolyte affect the speed and intensity with which cracks in the camp structure split open?
Not trying to be too lighthearted here, but my guess in short: The kids went extra bonkers because of altered body and brain chemistry, with a lack of sodium (assuming the diet was initiated on Day 1) being a key aggressor in… making teen aggression more aggressive?
Was it sponsored by the Dash low sodium seasoning?
Manager (34) impregnated a delivery driver (16/17) and ran away to Tennessee because he couldn’t be prosecuted for it there.
You are prosecuted where you committed the crime.
He wasn’t that smart.
I love it. You can’t see me because I can’t see you!
I used to unload trucks in an absolute madhouse.
The heat in the back of the transparent roofed trailers in summer was a nightmare so some of the lads would strip down to their boxers then pop their boots and high vis back on. We eventually got cameras installed pointing down the trailers and we’re suddenly required to be fully clothed at all times. Our shift lead took particular offense to this and flashed his cock at the camera whilst shouting obscenities. He didn’t come back to work the next day.
We had 4 guys sacked for not only opening customers parcels but for taking fireworks out of said parcel and taping them to Frisbees which they then threw to each other. One inevitably went off in one fella’s hand. He eventually managed to sue for unfair dismissal somehow.
Another guy was caught trying to sneak a slab of wine out to his car.
A… slab? Of wine?
Is that a whole pallet or something?
Ikr? How is wine measured in slabs…
I’m guessing this wine’s vintage is some time last week?
In Australia the call a case (24 bottles) of beer a slab.
Maybe this is some kind of canned wine?
24 bottles but yeah.
This guy in the warehouse made a deal with another guy to sell his porn collection. So he brings it in one day in a big cardboard box and leaves it sitting in the coat room with the top open, you could see X-rated stuff just walking by. Someone says something to management and the box gets confiscated, but they don’t know who it belongs to so that’s pretty much the end of it. Until our hero goes and files a complaint about the theft of his property.
Did both parties involved in the transaction get fired?
I think the other guy got a warning but I’m pretty sure he wasn’t fired
A guy in our data center couldn’t figure out who owned a particular machine that he needed to work on. So his solution to figure it out was to let them come to him. He went and pulled out the network cable and waited. He was escorted out a little while later. The moral of the story is don’t go disabling production machines on purpose.
Where I worked we had a very important time sensitive project. The server had to do a lot of calculations on a terrain dataset that covered the entire planet.
The server had a huge amount of RAM and each calculation block took about a week. It could not be saved until the end of the calculation and only that server had the RAM to do the work. So if it went down we could lose almost a weeks work.
Project was due in 6 months and calculation time was estimated to be about 5 1/2 months. So we couldn’t afford any interruptions.
We had bought a huge UPS meant for a whole server rack. For this one server. It could keep the server up for three days. That way even if wet lost power over the weekend it would keep going and we would have time to buy a generator.
One Friday afternoon the building losses power and I go check on the server room. Sure enough the big UPS with a sign saying only for project xyz has a bunch of other servers plugged into it.
I quickly unplug all but ours. I tell my boss and we go home at 5. Latter that day the power comes back on.
On Monday there are a ton of departments bitching that they came in an their servers were unplugged. Lots of people wanted me fired. My boss backed me and nothing happened but it was stressful.
I’d be super gluing those plastic toddler plug covers all over that thing.
fuck those other departments.
At a startup a long time ago, I was working on the weekend and brought my 3 year old with me. We had a customer coming in next week and this one machine was 5 days into a 7 day model build.
We had to go into that office to help someone with something unrelated. The little shit saw the blinking light and headed straight for the button.
On this computer (HP 710), it didn’t shut off until you released the button. He actually was just pressing it but got spooked when I tried to get to it.
The next day our CEO told the guys that built that app that it had to be made so it could recover from crashes and restart from where it left off.
Honestly we do that when we ask and no one speaks up. Lovingly called the “scream test” as we wait to see who screams.
I guess it depends on where you work. This was a large datacenter for a very large health insurance company. They made it a point later that day to remind people that it was a fireable offense to mess with production machines like that on purpose. And evidently the service he disabled was critical enough that it didn’t take long for the hammer to come down. There were plenty of ways to find out who owned the machine, he just chose the easiest and got fired on the spot for it.
So it wasn’t accurate when you said he “couldn’t” figure it out.
Well I am not him, so I can’t tell you whether or not he actually “could” have figured it out. The options to figure it out did exist, but he chose not to use them giving it the appearance that he “couldn’t”. Are you this much fun at parties?
He couldn’t figure it out, a competent person could have without unplugging it.
Scream tests are a last resort though.
Sounds like it was a last resort if he “couldn’t figure out” whose machine it was.
I don’t understand how that is even possible.
Are there no logs? No documentation? Does everyone share an admin user with full rights?
I mean, there has to be a way to find out who accessed the machine last time.You’d be surprised. I had some security devices that I was actively using get shut down simply because some paperwork didn’t get filled out properly and the data center team claimed they had no documentation on them.
You’d be surprised with inheriting tech debt. Quite often there’s no documentation, the last person to log in to the system is an admin that quit 3 years ago, but it doesn’t much matter because that’s only for a direct console login which normal users don’t do when accessing the application. With tribal knowledge gone and no documentation, only when you pull the network for a bit do you discover that there was this one random script running on it that was responsible for loading up all the needed data in the current system, when 9 of the other 10 times those scripts were no longer needed.
In a perfect world you’d have documentation, architecture and data flow diagrams for everything, but “ain’t nobody got time for that” and it doesn’t happen.
I read that as “lazy to the point of unprofessionalism”. I’m super lazy too, but it just means I try to automate the absolute shit out of everything I do to the greatest degree possible.
If you fear reprisal for a scream test then you need to make it look like an accident.
Yeah, I’ve done that before – after asking literally everyone in IT, plus our external consultants, and getting the go-ahead from my team lead and the head of IT.
Not crazy, just sad.
Middle of the day, sitting at our desks working. This middle aged guy who was usually happy as Larry gets up and leaves the office leaving his stuff behind. Not a word said. I just assumed he was getting a coffee or something.
End of the day rolls around, stuff still there. Same thing the next day. Still there the next week.
People start asking what happened to him, but the agency he was working through kept telling us he’s coming back soon.
Over a month later, someone packs up his stuff and puts it in the bin. The guy was never coming back, turns out he went left and ended his own life the day he walked out. Never made it home.
The agency apparently only found out he was dead a few weeks after the incident, then strung us along so they could find a replacement. We terminated their contract and offered the handful of other employees jobs.
———
Another job, we had a new guy start. Very conventionally attractive and he seemed normal enough.
A few weeks later one of the women complained to HR that someone was stalking her. She was getting ‘flattering’ letters, emails, notes etc and they often contained information and photos in/about/around her work. Flattering, but not something she was comfortable with
Few weeks later, we’re told new guy won’t be coming back due to inappropriate behaviour.
Woman had to get a restraining order against the guy. In a twist of irony, she said that if the guy had just talked to her, she would have gone on a date with him in a heartbeat.
Not my workplace exactly, but I used to hang out with this Kiwi who worked as a foreign English teacher in Korea in the same small Korean city as me. The foreigner community was fairly close-knit because there was only 50ish of us.
We all knew him. Everyone liked him. Fun guy. A little weird sometimes. He never told anyone his last name. The end of his pinkie finger was missing and if you asked him about it, he always said a shark bit it off.
One vacation about two years into his tenure, he decided to take a trip to Las Vegas. He never came back. I’m not 100% on the details past this point, but what I heard was they stopped him from entering the US because he was wanted in New Zealand on 37 counts of distributing child pornography. He was basically extradited back there and as far as I know went to prison. His trail disappears there.
When I worked in data entry fresh our of college, there was a mass firing. Turns out people were signing in and leaving. Like, to go to the movies, to the store, to just hang out, for their entire shift, and would then log out at the end of the day. Damn near every person under 30 was gone. Some quit before they could get fired. It took all day, and there were plenty of performances. Now, it was data entry, which meant our activity was tracked, from the inactivity to how much we got through in a day. I have no idea how they didn’t think anyone would notice.
When I was in the military, two officers got caught fucking in a stairwell. They were caught by a security camera while attending training. They were both married and not to each other.
There is so much stupid shit that you can get away with in the military, I have never understood why anyone would even get close to breaking the fraternization rules. They literally give you a copy of the rulebook in boot camp! Did no one read the damn thing?
I was a Nuke though, so up to my neck in daily fires to put out. No time for a social life.
The girl doing meth in her car.
Also the guy being arrested for having CP on his personal device and never coming back technically counts too, right?
I went to a temp agency one time and went through the enrollment/placement tests. I told them up front I was just looking for competitive offers to bring to my 5 year review to ask current employer to match. They were cool with it after i told them I would be back if employer doesnt match.
So I’m taking the test and was blown away at the test questions. I’m reading them outloud to the agents at their desks asking them which ones people actually respond honestly to. They start telling me hilarious stories of people theyve had fail the test.
They eventually told me they have had at least one person at some time answer every question with the very honest but very damning wrong answer. They said none of the people they told me about were even the assholes intentionally failing the test just to show proof they applied. They were people being waaaay too fuckin honest about their liberal drug use.
Some of the more memorable questions:
In the last 8hrs how many times have you smoked meth?
A. 0 times
B. 1-4 times
C. 5-10 times
D. 10 or more
Have you ever smoked crack cocaine while on the clock?
A. Yes
B. No
C. I don’t know
D. Maybe
Would you ever smoke crack while on the clock?
A. Yes
B. No
C. I don’t know
D. Maybe
How many alcohol beverages do you have on your lunch break?
A. 0 drinks
B. 1-4 drinks
C. 5-10 drinks
D. 10 or more drinks
How many alcohol beverages did you have today before this interview?
A. 0 drinks
B. 1-4 drinks
C. 5-10 drinks
D. 10 or more drinks
Describe your performance at work while high on alcohol or narcotics compared to your performance at work while not high on alcohol or narcotics.
A. Have never worked high on alcohol or narcotics.
B. I perform worse while working high on alcohol or narcotics than working not high on alcohol or narcotics.
C. I perform the same while working high on alcohol or narcotics than working not high on alcohol or narcotics.
D. I perform better while working high on alcohol or narcotics than working not high on alcohol or narcotics.
Edit for formatting and grammar.
Holy shit that’s amazing. honestly what surprised me most is that you were upfront about the competitive offer thing and tney were cool with it
Right?! Especially if it was an off-the-cuff agreement. But if I had a few minutes to think it over, I would buy that anyone serious enough to get verifiable competitive offers using a third party would be serious enough to come back for those better offers if the current employer doesn’t bite. (This is assuming you can’t arrange new employment without the temp agency’s involvement for whatever contractual reason. Not sure how they typically work.)
It’s rural town USA. The company I was pressing to match the competitive offer was actually my own family’s manufacturing corporation. The temp agency knew exactly who I was when they saw my last name. They had good fun joking about how they knew my family doesn’t pay their employees enough but having the owner’s son threatening to quit for better pay really solidified it as a good ole hardyharhar to them. I knew it. They knew it. Plus we have done a ton of business with them over the years filling entry level temp to perm positions, so the whole thing was really super laid back.
Eight HOURS?!
