What was "the incident" at your work place?
What was "the incident" at your work place?
Inspired by the very similar thread about school incidents.
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.
Not a fun story but new CEO comes in, pricing structure heavily modified to be more aggressive towards bringing clients into our ecosystem of products, we lose a whale of a client, 7 percent of the company is laid off including the newest guy on my team,and then magically acquire new responsibilities for the same pay. Capitalism baby.
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.
One of the two bosses didn't turn up for work one Friday. On the weekend, we all received a call that he had died.
Monday was horrible. We had new starters that came into an office full of people crying, and people from our HQ joining to set people up with any counselling.
The worst part? We had deadlines to meet, and clients didn't give a fuck that the person responsible had died. One large client outright said to me on the phone on that first Monday "that's sad and all, but I don't really give a fuck, have it done by end of day". To HQ's credit, after I had told them they asked me to stop what I was doing (had already delivered the work) and our CEO called them and told them we were to terminate our contract with them. One woman I worked with, a Project Manager, was repeatedly brought to tears by clients checking on work or trying to sort out meetings with a guy that was in a morgue. I was able to power through, up until the day of his funeral when we all went to the pub after and saw his children playing without a care in the world.
Initially, it brought us all closer together, but within three months people started to leave - and by the end of the year the HQ decided to just close the office entirely, firing everyone that was still there.
I hate to say it, looking back, but this gave me without question one of the best answers for behavioural interviews in tech, since I ultimately ended up having to help deliver everything and onboard people in a stressful scenario. Knowing the guy, it's what he would have wanted.
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.
We had to close our sky several times during those last 4 years (meaning no aircrafts allowed above the country). Several times for technical failures, the last one this summer wasn’t our fault but was cool.
I arrived at work for a night shift in the ACC (area control center), heavy rain above the city, I see a small lake forming up against the building underground.
When I reached the elevator, I took off my EarPods and heard a shower like sound coming from the elevator. Eh let’s take the stairs… Curious, I venture to the underground where I’m greeted by a bunch of laughing air traffic controllers and the ACC supervisor for the night. There is something like 40cm of water everywhere, blocking access to the -1 floor and our smoking corner. We joke about doing the "clear the sky" procedure because we can’t use the smoking corner.
A few minutes later we are all back in the ACC, I wasn’t seated yet when the crisis phone rang: We mobilize the board of crisis, reason is the flooding reached some electrical supply rooms, like UPS and batteries rooms.
30 minutes later the AC is down. AC for us humans in the building but mostly for the data center with all the ATC systems needed for our work. Some systems start to overheat and fail.
Less than one hour into my shift, the board of crisis that quickly assembled comes to us in the ops room and says: "We clear the sky, it’s too dangerous".
For us in air traffic control, clearing the sky is easy, you just tell aircrafts a heading to quickly get the fuck out of our airspace and then you stay in front of an empty radar screen. Capacity management people have a little bit more work to do, announcing Europe and Eurocontrol that our ‘capacity = 0 please don’t send traffic’. It’s the tech people that have a lot of work in those situations, personally I just sat on my ass making jokes and scrolling lemmy.
We ended up switching off all the unused screens, systems etc to avoid heat. Opened all the electronics hatches, all doors, everything we could do to have some fresh air inside as it was getting hot. Airport fire squad quickly came and pumped out the water from the basement. They did that all night until morning.
At the end of my shift at 6, temperature inside the ACC was 29 degrees C (instead of 23) and humidity % unknown but it felt "sticky". Sky was still closed. Apparently during the day it felt like a sauna.
The tech guys managed to restore some AC only for the data center and the ACC but not the rest of the buildings so it was mandatory work from home for non ops people. When I came back the evening for my second night shift, everything was back to normal for us and it was a sad normal night with no fun events.
It turned out that the flooding reached 40 cm on the -1 floor and 1m40 on the -2 floor. There is a small underground river below that with a pool that is used as natural cold water for AC. That cold pool was filled with hotter (and unclean) rain water, killing the cold production loop.
Not current workplace but previous ones.
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Used to work with a guy who had no filter whatsoever and would openly brag about how efficiently and quickly he'd work and multitask, and about the 9/10 models he used to shag back when he lived in South East Asia. He was fired from my workplace after a string of incidents where he growled at a female colleague, bullied several other colleagues over bad quality monitors and openly used racial slurs in the office.
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That same guy went to work for an energy company that I had other friends work at. I learned he was fired and escorted out by security within minutes after being reprimanded by a team leader. He went into a company-wide Slack channel and openly called her a "fucking bitch."
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Two people got fired for taking dick pics in the office whilst on an evening shift and posting them on their socials.
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Boss tried to shoot himself, missed because he was really drunk, hit the radiator and flooded the whole shop.
An IT contractor at my government job was one of the people that tried to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer.
Company moves into a new building, threw a big Christmas party with booze. Most of the management fucked someone not their wife/husband, lots of condoms as well as heroin needles and smudges of coke left in the bathrooms. Drugs and booze all over the damn place.
We got cards and little bits of candy after that, never another Xmas party
On a Saturday evening, a couple of guys were out mudding in their personal trucks. One truck got stuck badly in some mud with the consistency of Elmer's glue. The second truck tried to pull it out and ended up equally mired.
Someone had keys to the work truck which had a winch on the front. They brought the work truck out to the stuck trucks, now in the middle of the night, and freed them using the winch. The trucks were so stuck that even the winch struggled, and blew out. When told to rewind, it limped back to a position approximating being rewound but the cable was a mess and clearly the winch was toast.
The work truck was taken to a self-service truck wash and everyone present hosed all of the mud off it, leaving it immaculately clean. The truck and keys were returned to their proper spots.
On Monday morning, everyone went to work and was shocked (shocked!) to find out that somehow, mysteriously, the winch on the truck was in bad shape and needed to be replaced. The boss was suspicious but decided not to ask questions he didn't want answered.
Guy was up on a mezzanine installing rubber roofing (I work in an RV factory), suddenly either seized or fainted or had a stroke, nobody's really sure, fell off the catwalk and landed on his head 19ft below on concrete. Died immediately. It happened maybe 50ft from my workstation.
The company suits came by to sing kumbaya and tell us how we're all a "family", took a single day of production off (so they could clean the blood up, presumably) and production started back up as normal. He had been working there for 25 years.
Years ago when I worked at Taco Bell someone got fired because the manager walked in on him snorting coke off the bags of strawberry they used to put on top of the fruitista freezes in the walk-in.
Also some asshole pulled a gun in drive thru during my shift because he ordered extra cheese on his 7 layer nachos and apparently did not get adequate cheese.
There are two that come to mind for me. I work at a big box retailer that sells a lotta different stuff.
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One of our front end managers' car caught fire randomly one night. I don't actually know what caused it though but it was kind of a big deal. Thankfully no one was hurt.
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Years ago, we had a frozen stocker who was pretty bad at his job, and was also a racist little shit. He worked with another guy who was a light skinned black dude (who was a very good stocker), and while they were normally fine, one day our terrible stocker got upset over something one day and called him a slur. It wasn't received well, and some shit went down, but nothing serious at this point.
Now I mentioned that terrible stocker was terrible. Management had reprimanded him a few times already, so on this particular night where he was doing very badly, there was no more room for conversation, so he was fired. The firing manager was this super cool African fella. The firing was not received well, and caused terrible stocker to lose his shit. He stormed out of the office, shouting racial slurs at everyone he saw, and ended up cutting his hand with his box cutter. He then proceeded to smear his blood all over the frozen doors and then ran outside and smeared his blood all over the firing manager's car. The police were called and he was arrested. No idea what happened to him afterwards. It was pretty wild.
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Production operator with IBS pooped on the floor in a clean room. Kinda ick, and they had to call the spill team to clean up the hazard, but not really the employees fault and no one is really upset. Later, IBS employee is elsewhere, more poop is found on the floor. No one comes forward. No one is identified. Management puts out a "Please use the bathrooms" email and calls it a day.
Guy on the team rage quits one day. Few days pass and HR goes to clean out his desk. Finds a paper bag full of syringes and a very graphic instruction manually on how to inject something into your dick.
Whatever it was, I guess it can't wait until you're at home to inject into your dong. It has to be at work.
Cherry on top was that HR policy was to box up all personal belongings left behind and have the ex-employee come pick them up. So, if he had forgotten these things were in his desk, he certainly remembered after he came back and they handed him the bag.
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.
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.
At an old employer: delivery driver for a fuel truck company parked his truck one day and robbed a bank. Got arrested, we had to go get the truck back from where he parked it a few blocks away.
At my current employer: literally last weekend the freezer in our storage area failed and a boar, some elk, and fish went rotten over the weekend. The smell in my office the last 3 days has almost killed people, this will not be forgotten
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
Guy found a gun in the customer’s stuff
Guy starting waving it around and playing with it, pulled the fuckin trigger, almost shot one of his coworkers
Cops came, guy said he was moving a cabinet and it went off which obviously no one believed, somehow he wasn’t arrested, idk
Guy was fired over the phone before he left the customer’s house
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 staffWorked at a place where our CIO was completely unqualified to be a leader, much less a leader in IT. She was a micromanager who took the position of "telling stakeholders" instead of "working with stakeholders" so any project she was on was really her pushing through whatever agenda she had at the time. Meanwhile her deputy CIO was stealing computer equipment from the server room but I digress....
April fools one year and I decide to prank it up. I moved the hinges (not the door handles) of the freezer/fridge in the breakroom so that the handle and hinges were on the same side. It's a fifteen minute job to move everything so I did it the night before the 1st.
The next morning our hungover CIO stumbles into the breakroom and cannot get the fridge to open. After a few seconds of futile tugging on the handle, she gave up and took her lunch to her office.
Others in the office figured it out pretty quickly and had a good chuckle.
Later on that day CIO sends out a nastygram about pranks being unprofessional, property damage, someone was going to be in huge trouble, yadda yadda....
But she's not the director. The director tells her to basically fuck off, it was a funny prank, and perhaps she needed to lighten up.
She never found out it was me.
I remember working at a restaurant once that was open on Christmas. We were expected to be working for at least 12 hours, but we had two 30 minute breaks and a 1 hour lunch.
One dude brought in a 6 pack of Red bulls, but he was clearly high AF as well. Not sure on what (we suspected speed or something as he was flying), but he chugged those RBs throughout the shift.
By noon he was in an ambulance on the way to the ER.
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.
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
Creepy guy got fired. Showed up the next day and confronted HR. Idk what went down but they had to call the cops.
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.
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."
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.
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
INC-224, never forget.
I am an infra engineer at a fairly large scale (not like Amazon, but we have some BIG customers) SaaS company; despite our scale, we are only like 250 people and of them only about 90 engineers. We store a bunch of data in MySQL.
15:30:00, I get a page “MySQL table is full.” I immediately know my day is ruined, since I’ve never heard of this error before, but know it ain’t great.
15:30:10, every Pagerduty escalation policy in the entire company gets bombarded with pages.
I look at the database instance. The table size is “only” 16TiB, so it’s a bit confusing.
We are hard down for several hours as we scramble to delete data or somehow free up space. Turns out, google backs ClpudSQL MySQL instances with ext4 disks instead of zfs, and the max file size on ext4 is… you guessed it, 16TiB.
We learned a LOT of lessons from this, and are now offloading a shitload of json into either MongoDB or gcs, depending on the requirements. The largest table is down to 3TiB now :D
I was one of the assistant managers at a restaurant and we hired a new head general manager. I guess the owners didn't vet her very well because she worked for them before and they were happy to have her back.
The shenanigans started with her asking to take a loan out of the petty cash to help cover her move to the area. Then she starts buying us new equipment with her own checks and reimbursing herself with the cash from the safe.
Soon after, we start getting calls from home Depot and everywhere else she bought the equipment from. Turns out her out of state checks were for an account that was closed. The district manager came and told her about the situation and that she needed to pay out ALL back ASAP. After he left, she said she needed to run an errand and we still don't know what happened to her after that, besides hearing some rumors about a meth habit.
We had another manager at a different location that was supposed to take a $2 or $3,000 deposit to the bank. We probably should have specified which account to put it in, because it never made it there. We never saw that person at work again.
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.
One of the owners was at a conference with a number of other employees and showed his dick to one of the women. I think she got $100k to resign.
One of the owners came back to the office after a summer party and did coke off of someone else’s desk and left it there. Didn’t hear if they had to do anything for that.
One of the married older owners paid one of the married younger assistants for some in-office sex during the day. Got caught.
One of the married owners got his married assistant pregnant. She left town for about a year.
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.
Owner shot himself after bankrupting the company through embezzlement and we had to vacate all residential patients within a week knowing we wouldn't get paid and would be losing our jobs, haha!
We had a 2 drinks limit at company after hours gigs. Not that bad, but it was apparently because someone drank a bunch and then walked onto a highway. There was also the time the FBI came into the building to ask about a sales guy who took part in 1/6.
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.
A coworker aggressively made out with my face at a work event out of town and they stopped letting us put alcohol on our expense reports. I was universally blamed for the policy change and HR tried to send ME to sexual harassment training because it was my fault for socializing with her, apparently!
Direct quote from the HR director: "If you knew she was a sloppy drunk, why did you go out with her?"
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.
Depends. Had a client pull a knife on me once, and another dragged me around the facility for an hour while he tried to break down a door to "kill" another client because he had stolen the change from a $5 Taco Bell gift card.
The other incident being was a coworker harboring one of the fugitive kids at her house with her like....6 children while her husband was away in Nebraska for work. Randomly saw her in family court a year later while I was working another job, hopefully while her husband fights her for custody of the kids...
That time the food cart pod exploded:
https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2017/10/food_cart_pod_on_fire_in_downt.html
That's complicated to answer in my case, as nobody gets along (I'm one of the few people with a relatively stable work relation), so there's an incident everyday, though there are also occasional ones that stand out a lot. I for some reason have a lot of bad rep without any actual cause for it and remember people storming into our operations more than once and demanding I be exiled from the place. There are two types of people in this situation whenever it has happened: those who are almost about to oblige and fulfill their wish, and me who calls authorities and ends up dealing with the situation before they can do so before everyone just forgets all that happened.
Jason spilled a barrel a barrel of ink and fell in it. 🤣
a guy mixed the wrong chemicals and work shut down for a week. of course that happened before i was hired and hasnt happened since. everyday i pray someone did that and shuts down work for a week so i get a free week off