What's the stupidest thing that you've experienced at work?

[Willy Wonka]

Including bad bosses, stupid employees or even dumb customers.

The reason I'm asking is cuz I'm reading "Idiots at Work" by Leland Gregory, and it's full of laughter. I want to see what you guys have experienced.

[greatauntoftriplets]

1. It's bedtime for me....

I couldn't even begin to tell you...except that laziness gets rewarded and work does not.

[Kire]

2. They had a going away party for me on my break.

When I came back, they left me a piece of cake.

[Orangepeel]

13. Oh, my!

well, that seems like a crappy place to work, but at least you got a good story out of leaving!

:D

[BlueJazz]

3. About 4 years ago, when I worked for Kodak as a....

..network engineer, I told the "higher-ups" that I couldn't see putting too much money into new film-processing equipment (I'm talking Millions and Millions of bucks) because Digital Cameras were about to really explode on the market and film processing will take a nose dive...I was told...and I quote:

"Give me a break, it's going to be 10-15 years before those types of cameras will be truly popular"

The plant closed down last year.

Stupid short-sighted bastards.

[johnnie]

4. That's one of those things to be proud of

I hope you run in to some of those people at a store selling digital cameras behind a counter..lol. I'm sorry if you lost your job though.

[BlueJazz]

5. Thanks..but I left before the plant closed. I could see the .....

...hand-writing on the wall. I moved back south to my hometown. (in Florida)
I DID hear from one of my former workers/friends saying that everybody was surprised when the order came down to close the plant.....Geez....Duh.. :)

[miss_kitty]

37. There ya go!

an entire factory has to close to prove your point.

Ah! the pointy-haids

[Red State Rebel]

6. Chauvinistic Bastards

I was an accountant for a large construction company. Because I am a FEMALE, I was on rotation to gather and do the dishes for the office one week out of 5. I have a freaking college education, I'm working 60-70 hours a week trying to put their screwed up books in order in time for an internal audit and I have to stop everything and do FREAKING DISHES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The men didn't do dishes - grrrrrrr..... I told my boss I didn't know what would benefit me more there, getting my CPA or a sex change. I left after one year, they hired a CPA to replace me and payed him 20,000 a year more to do the same job. Assholes.

[Debi]

21. So, who does the dishes now..

I wonder! :grr:

[WMliberal]

7. co-worker tonight

I convinced her that the pigeons you see in cities are just the babies. The adults have 12 foot wingspans and live in the mountains.

[proud2BlibKansan]

10. That's mean

but funny too.

[barb162]

8. the boss I had for 12 years. Fucking pig; he's dead now

[LynzM]

9. Oh, a few....

The woman who saw my screensaver (there are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who know binary, and those who don't) and asked me what 'bin-airy' was.

The woman who used to work as a nurse and asked me 'now, don't laugh at me, I'm really bad with fractions. What's bigger, a third or a quarter?' (SCARY, really...)

Several other dumb things, mostly involving people being resistant to change a system that clearly isn't working well. Ah well, done with that job, at least...

[proud2BlibKansan]

11. That reminds me

of a teacher who tried to convince me that 2 is an odd number.

[proud2BlibKansan]

12. I used to be advertising manager for a retail store

And each dept manager had to turn in sales figures to me after every sale. The form they had to fill out had three columns - total inventory before the sale and after the sale and the last column was the total number sold.

Every week I got forms that had a bigger number AFTER the sale than before. So I realized they were probably only counting the inventory they had on the shelf before the sale and forgetting to count the inventory they had in the stockroom. So I redesigned the form, adding 2 columns where they would list inventory in the stockroom before and after the sale.

The first week they used the new forms, one of the dept managers had multiplied the two new columns and added that number to his sales total. Another one had left those new columns blank. When I asked her to fill them in, she admitted she didn't know what a stockroom was.

I quit that job a week later.

[Solon]

14. Beat this...

OK, some background, worked at Wal*Mart for 2 years, from 1997-1999, in that time we had 3 store managers, and this is the short and sweet story of number 2. So number 2 comes to the store, thinking he is all that, he's one of the "Jock" types, all brawn(looked like a football player/marine type), literally, and very little brain, but I will say he worked hard. Anyways, it was during the springtime, we set up the displays outside in L+G and we kept the double doors open for customers to go out to the fenced in area. It was are 2 o'clock in the afternoon, a nice day, I was just getting off my last break, as soon as I enter L+G, there is the store manager number two looking up at the ceiling with a pellet gun in his hand. He comes up to me and asks if I saw the bird that flew into the store, I said no, and he said for me to keep a lookout for it. I was in shock, WTF was he doing with a freaking pellet gun in the store? He ends up taking off towards the front of the store and I heard later that he took quite a few shots at the bird, never did hit it I don't think. I clocked out at 4 like I supposed to, come in the next day, and low and behold, he's gone, lasted a total of like a month, dumbass. Though what's even dumber was that he wasn't fired, he was sent back to Bentonville for "retraining". I wonder what store he's managing now?

Of course we also had another manager, an Associate Manager, who was a real asshole, he tried to get me fired one time, I really hated him. His name was Dick and I always said it just the wrong way when I had to talk to him. He got fired for coming in drunk one day and passing out in the middle of an aisle, those were good times, let me tell you. He ended up being a clerk at the CFM I always went to, loved tomenting him there. :evilgrin: Didn't last long there either.

[Codeine]

15. It's always body fluid oriented...

I had an extremely drunk customer start to ask me where the bathroom was, then get a very relaxed look on his face as he proceeded to piss all over the floor. Right in front of me.

I've walked into the customer restroom to find the walls smeared with shit, and I regularly find people have placed the used toilet paper in the trash instead of the toilet.

Someone once deposited a used maxipad on the tomatoes in our produce department. That was lovely. Someone once took a shit on the floor in a lonely corner of the store.

I fuckin' love retail.

[pres2032]

38. wow, remind me never to go into that store!

[CO Liberal]

16. I Used to Work For a Small Relay Manufacturer in New Jersey in the '70s

We used to joke that the company slogan was "Save Money At All Costs."

The company president bought some old machinery and asked the guy in the machine shop to refurbish it. The machinist said he would need a gear puller to do the job. He was asked how much a gear puller would cost - he said around 20 bucks. The president said, "That's too much - can you make one?"

It took the guy a week and a half to make the gear puller. It wound up costing the company far more than the 20 bucks it woulds have cost to just buy one.

Maybe that's why the company is no longer in business....

[Willy Wonka]

17. kick

kick for the morning crew

[Allenberg]

19. After 6 years in the Air Force...

...I've seen too many stupid people/things/events.

One of the funniest, was when I was assigned to a new office, and was tasked to set the zulu clocks ahead an hour for DST, and me not knowing how to do it, getting pissed, and punching a wall.

[jmowreader]

46. You know that's a newbie joke, right?

Greenwich mean time (Zulu time) doesn't go into DST.

[regularguy]

18. I worked a place that was so effin' cheap that

they didn't have hot water in the employee bathroom. Also, instead of re-paving the entire parking lot the just paved the area reserved for executives and let the rest stay like a war zone. I guess I could probably think of something stupider, but still....

[BiggJawn]

20. Re-organizations that violate the rule of "If it ain't broke....."

"...don't FUCK with it!"

Dumb-asses. I STILL can't figure out why the IT geeks forced their Dilbert culture on our Video services group...

[skygazer]

Oh, gosh, too many to mention

But here's one of them. I was working construction one summer on a road crew. I was assigned to work with this guy putting up silt fence which is a shitty job. We were working over rough ground, pounding posts into the ground, running this black fabric fencing and nailing it up to the posts. Then you have to bury the bottom part in the dirt - it keeps down erosion and prevents silt from getting into waterways.

So here we are, muddy and filthy, tramping through this crap, and I'm pounding fence posts in while he's leaning against a tree, telling me why women should not be allowed to work in construction (I'm a woman). Meanwhile, I'm doing 90% of the work! :wtf:

Another day, I got stuck with the same moran and we had to carry bags of fertilizer and grass seed up a steep hill that had just been blasted. About five 80- pounders and maybe ten 50 pounders. I grabbed an 80 to get them over with - he grabbed a 50. I ended up carrying ALL the 80's and most of the 50's while he took his sweet time, bitching about women construction workers the whole time!

He was later fired when they found him sleeping in the woods when he was on the clock.

[Debi]

22. I hired, trained and fired my replacement

When the office I was working at no longer wanted me to run errands and get coffee and other grunt work I was told to hire one so I could get other work done.

My boss and I interviewed several and hired a college student to come in on afternoons to run to the bank, clean up the break room, etc.

I showed her how to do the jobs and after a couple of weeks she got bored and started not doing the work or calling in w/emergencies.

My boss made me fire her and I went back to doing the grunt work along w/my other work....is that what they call irreplaceable?

[CBHagman]

26. Is there a problem with the work ethic in this country?

I remember my flatmate, an extremely well educated woman who had an advanced degree and was working on yet another, took a job at a community center one summer. She had to work with kids and also do routine work, such as sweeping the floor.

Well. Those very young teenagers working with her would sneer that they WEREN'T GETTING PAID ENOUGH to sweep the floor. And in case you're wondering, this wasn't a wealthy neighborhood, either; it was working and lower middle class.

Anyway, I've noticed a lot of people are chronically late to work, without apologies, to the point where I've seen a manager deliver a wake-up call to an underling. Is everyone independently wealthy? Do they not care?

And don't get me started on the other irritations; we'll be here all day. One co-worker, who is in a position that requires a lot of proofing and editing skills, can't recognize a run-on sentence and doesn't know how to punctuate, for the most part.

Then there are the people who openly trash other employees during private chats within earshot of the entire department staff.

My supervisor put down a couple of us to another employee while she was performing the latter's evaluation. Nice, huh?

And then there's the coworker who's in her 50s but won't use a tissue or handkerchief. She just sniffs loudly, like a child in the principal's office, every time her nose acts up. Grr.

[Debi]

33. I think there's a trend that way.

Whenever a college student (and not all college students so don't flame me) would get hired to do the grunt work they would compalin that they were getting the degree and that I should be running errands while they got files ready for trial (worked in a law office - no, I do not have a degree).

I was fine w/whatever work I did, it was work and I was paid to do it and it was fun to leave the office to run to the Courthouse and bank and to clent's and other attorney's offices. But it was hard to do that AND meet w/clients and get files ready for trial.

I don't know anyone who should think they are TOO GOOD to do the work.

[kittycat1164]

23. On September 11 my boss lost it

We have an auditorium at the library where I work that has a HUGE TV screen. An email from the Director's Office was sent out telling us that the live feed would be broadcast and that anyone wanting to watch could go. My co-workers and I went. While we were sitting watching the towers fall - along with Faculty from all over campus, staff and the Dean of the library, my boss came in tapped me on the shoulder and said very loudly "you have work to do and you have a student assistant waiting for you at your desk. Get back to work" I was dumbfounded! I called her on the carpet when we got back to my cube. She and I were yelling at each other. She is by far the most intellligent person I have ever met, but as far as people skills---she is lacking. I told her she was out of line, she said she didn't know where her department was. I told her that she was the most intelligent person I know, and if she couldn't figure it out, she had a problem. She had no right to call me out in front of faculty, staff and the Dean. She said there's nothing we can do about what's going on in NY, but you have a rush book to catalog here. I was so angry I was shaking. I ended up leaving for the day. As it turns out, we respect each other very much now, we both know we can be honest and straight with each other. And I'd much rather have that than someone stabbing me in the back. But I still shake my head remembering her reactions to that tragedy.

[Patiod]

32. went into boss's office and told her the Berlin Wall had fallen

when the E. German govt. announced that it was lifting travel restrictions.

I don't know - I thought the Fall of Communism was kind of exciting.

She just looked at me like I had announced that I had lowered by car insurance or lowered my cholesterol and said, "get back to work". It's all about priorities, I guess.

[Skittles]

34. conservative coworkers talking about what "we" should do in Iraq

I told them NONE OF YOU HAVE EVER SPENT ONE G.D. DAY IN THE MILITARY SO SHUT THE F*** UP.

[AccessGranted]

24. The Essence of Stupidity (2 Instances)

Instance of Stupidity #1

I'm a consultant at this company and I've been here for about 4 months. A few days ago they had a Christmas Party for the department I work in. Everybody left while I was in the bathroom. They forgot I existed! An hour later one of the office managers called me from a cell phone, apologized and said that they forget about me. She told me I could drive over to attend the party if I wanted. Yeah right! I went down to the cafeteria and got a plate (prime ribs, mmmmmm), then came back to the nice quiet, idiot-free office and truly enjoyed my lunch while blabbing to my fiance on the phone and surfing the internet for three hours. I had my own office party! Honestly, I was glad they left me behind, because I don't like schmoozing with stupid people anyway.

Instance of Stupidity #2

I was working on a project that consisted of doing a lot of statistical research and it was really tedious, so one of the Vice Presidents suggested that she could supply me with printed data to make my project a lot easier and faster. I spent 4 days inputting data based on the printouts she'd given me. On the 4th day she walked by my office and said, "Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you that the figures on those printouts I gave you was wrong - I made a mistake in the query". Of course, my 4 days of work was worthless and had to be done over manually. The upside is that I'm a temporary consultant and every time they do something stupid it just keeps working longer, so I don't really care. This project was supposed to be completed in 6 weeks or less and I've been at the company for 4 months. Most of the time has been spent doing absolutely nothing while the higher-ups fumble around trying to generate Access queries which are always wrong and trying to figure out what's wrong with the Oracle database. Their stupidity has generated quite a bit of income for me, so who cares. LMAO. (And these people make how much money a year and have degrees in what??????) Wheeeeeeewww!!!

[Blue Diadem]

25. They took the toilet paper

Years ago, a collection agency I worked at, removed all the toilet paper without letting us know about it. That is until we went into the bathroom. Just imagine about 25 women without toilet paper!

The owner had horses and they claimed one of the babies had the runs. That's what the son of the owner said. He was the one who took all the cases of TP. It all sounded like malarky to me. All I know is we had to chip in and buy some for a few weeks.

[sakabatou]

27. A student wouldn't listen to me

gave me attitude, made faces and was really lazy.

BTW: I teach martial arts

[flvegan]

28. 2 hours ago, the people in the dept next to me

JUST learned about the tsunami. I heard one guy explaining it, and everyone was just losing it.

No, really, I'm serious. Didn't know what a tsunami was to begin with, didn't know one had hit, didn't know 100,000 folks were dead.

[micrometer_50]

29. injury alert !

An ex-coworker was using a foot operated shear (it could cut a piece on aluminum that was 1/8 inch thick and 4 feet wide).
He was cutting small pieces, holding them from behind the blade instead of the front.
He nearly severed his thumb. with his own foot power!

[Ivan Sputnik]

30. I worked with someone

who literally wrapped her arms in aluminum foil because she was convinced that radiation from her computer was harming her. I guess you could say she was a tin-foil hat type.

Most of my experiences at that place were not at all humorous. When my boss was fired and a new supervisor came in, the new boss decided to get rid of the entire staff. She used any excuse, no matter how absurd or trumped up, to fire people or get them to quit, often after publicly humiliating them in meetings. It wasn't pretty, and she did not last long there herself. (Too long for me, though, unfortunately.)

[Texasgal]

31. Dumb patinet story #1

I am an RN for a lasik surgical center. One day last year we consulted a very weird wacked out woman for lasik.

The day of surgery she came in wearing pajama's and holding a small teddy bear, as I prepped her she kept asking if I had washed my hands! DUH! I am standing there in gloves and full surgical garb ( mouth cover, cap, and shoe covers ) Ummm...no lady....I haven't washed my freakin' hands! STUPID!

[queenjane]

35. The geography-impaired at work.

About 10 years ago, I had a temp job (for the longest month of my life) in the Bursar's office of a large private university. One of my tasks was sending collection letters to former students who owed money for lost library books, overdrawn accounts, bounced checks, etc. (The alumni with the highest amount of debt had studied at the London School of Economics for a semester; guess they didn't cover the importance of financial responsibility there . . .) Anyway, the woman I was assisting, a 20-year employee, was complaining that she had sent one student 6 letters, and had had no response. Curious, I checked her copies of the old letters against the student's file.

I then went to the woman's office, where I announced I might know why we hadn't collected on the account. "You've been sending the letters to Belgium."

"That's right. So?"

"Sofia is in Bulgaria, not Belgium."

"What." She obviously didn't get it at all.

"The student lives in Sofia. The capital of Bulgaria. You're sending the collection letters to Belgium."

"Aren't they the same thing?"

I stared for a moment, sighed deeply, and backed out of the office. The next day, the head Bursar offered me a permanant job in her dept. Sorry, I told her. I don't think I'm stupid enough to work here.

[Patiod]

41. That's better than not knowing what state Delaware is in

In the early days of FedEx, when they didn't deliver everywhere, I called our home office to have some stuff sent to a mall in Dover, Delaware.

"I don't think they deliver there."

"I'm sure they do - it's the capitol."

"Capitol of what?"

"Capitol of Delaware."

"What state is Delaware in?"

[Not_Giving_Up]

49. I'd like to overnight this package to Pa-ho-nix

I love that commercial!

[miss_kitty]

36. A boss who I had stuck up for and supported

wrote me up for not wearing make up, not getting my hair done, and wearing the same type of clothing everyday. :eyes:
she had to take it back. Of course, that didn't actually change her opinion of me. I was happy to see her demoted-exept she was demoted to the same dept I had been demoted to. They had to transfer me out

[4_Legs_Good]

39. The Quality System!

I HATE it. We went from doing stuff right to documenting everything, tripling paperwork and no end of "authorizing" every little tiny thing we do. It's idiotic. We can't experiment to figure out what works best anymore without filling out 200 forms and getting permission from 10 different people and involving departments that don't need to be involved.

Idiotic.

david

P.S. Plus the Quality Manager is a Bush voter. I almost decked him the day after the election when he tried to shake my hand.

[AllegroRondo]

40. Working retail in high school

at the customer service counter for a department store

This guy comes in and says he would like to return a pair of blue jeans.

Me: Have these been worn?

Him: No.

Me: So I guess this isn't your wallet in the back pocket, then?

[CO Liberal]

42. Here's One That Happened to My Late Mother

Mom was a telephone operator at the old Allied Chemical Corporation's headquarters in Morris Township, NJ (later Allied Signal - now Honeywell). When she started there back in the late '60s, they still had the old cord-type Centrex phone system like you see in old movies, when the operator plugs cord into various jacks to connect a call. Any one who had to make a long distance call had to call the operator, and the operator would complete the call.

One day, an engineer called my mother and said that he needed to speak to a certain professor at "Notre Dame University in Notre Dame, Indiana". Mom replied, "Don't you mean 'South Bend, Indiana', sir?" To which the brilliant engineer replied, "No - the college has been there so long, I'm SURE they've named the town after it by now...."

This was a college graduate, folks!!!

:-)

[davis_islander]

43. I had a client that was explaining to his executive team...

that we were not planning any "changes" to the system, but that instead we were going to do some "modifications." They seemed to understand.

[maveric]

44. A co-worker was writen up for, "Laughing in Spanish".

The hospital I work for has an english-only rule. Although most of us are from other countries, and Tagalog seems to be tolerated, english is the language we must use.
A Mexican friend of mine was in the break room listening to a joke from a vendor(coke machine dude), also mexican, and she laughed loudly when the Asst, DON(director of nursing, who looks like Peggy Hill), walked in and scolded her for not upholding the english-only rule. My friend then told her that she didnt actually speak anything, she just laughed. The moran ADON then tells her that she is writing her up because she laughed in spanish. Can you beleive that?
My friend asked the ADON if they have any literature about laughing in english so that she wont get in trouble again. Well they wrote her up for using sarcasm.
Fucking Nazis!

[CO Liberal]

45. I Used to Manage a Dunkin' Donut Shop

Back in the Late '80s. The shop was in a mall, and was only open during mall hours. Most of our workers were high school kids, between 16 and 18 years of age.

One girl, Annette, was the stereotypical dumb blonde. She even started most sentences with the word "duh" - "Duh ... what would you like with that? Duh ... can I help you?" Rumor had it that she and her equally challenged blond brother were the result of their mother using a lot of drugs back in the Sixties.

Because we were handling food, everyone had to wear a hat at all times. The guys wore folding paper hats that were shaped like old Army hats. The women wore cloth hats, and most of them used bobby pins to hold the hats on their heads.

One night Annette showed up for work without her hat, and had to wear on of the paper hats. It kept falling off her head, because she had a very poofy hairstyle, with lots of hairspray holding the hair several inches higher than her head. Each time her hat fell off, she would tuck it under her arm and keep working.

Finally, I called her aside and said, "Annette, I don't care WHAT you do - you have to do SOMETHING to keep that hat on your head." I expected her to go across the mall to the CVS store and get some bobby pins. Instead, she went over to the cash register and used the stapler we used to close donut boxes to STAPLE THE HAT TO HER HAIR.

At the end of the night, she had to use a staple remover to take the hat off.

[greendog]

47. A 34 hour workday...

...I probably saved their business...I was fired a week later.

[darkstar]

48. Lot's of good stories above.

Here's my tale.

Remember when "schwing" from the SNL was a big public buzz phrase?

Woman I worked w/--a fundie, kid-in-religous-school type, mind you-- latched on to that for some reason, thinking the sound, in conjunction w/ the motion, meant, I don't know..."That was a close one" or "We dodged a bullet." Something like that.

So there she would be, sitting in meeting, learning that we almost didn't win the re-bid, putting her hands on her chair arm so she could do her little pelvic thrust towards the table and say "shwing" because she knew we would all laff reeeeeeealy hard. Every time.

[jmowreader]

50. Here's the ballsiest thing I ever saw

We get lots of letters from people asking us to donate things to their causes. Usually they're pretty benign--the Boy Scouts need a couple 1x10 boards to make a project, an elementary school needs some scrapwood, things like that.

Sometimes they're a little more out there--churches asking for donations of "anything from this list" of nine or ten different building materials.

If it's less than $20 and you've got proof you're a 501(c)3 group, anyone in our building can approve it. Between $20 and $49, an assistant manager can sign off; between $50 and $99 the store manager has to approve; and anything $100 and up goes to district.

But on December 23 we received possibly THE ballsiest donation request I ever heard of: the woman started an in-home daycare center, she got more applicants than she had floor space to accommodate, she wanted to accept them all but couldn't afford either to expand or to lease another facility, so she wanted us to donate to her enough materials to build a 30' x 40' addition onto her house. She even got an architect friend to draw up a complete set of plans and to generate a bill of materials. For the hell of it I ran the numbers; she was asking us to hand her a little over $9000 in free building materials for her private business.

We hung the request on the bulletin board along with the estimate I generated. It incites gales of laughter in all who see it.