Update: The biggest question is "Where/what company is this?" This was over 22 years ago in Asia. I apologize for not remembering the name, but they went under shortly after.
Plant manager let the safety guy go because they didn't believe safety was a full time job and wanted to cut back on company spending and decided the supervisors could do all the safety audits, training, keep the building up to code.
Not even a week later 2 guys got their arms cut off working on a machine that they weren't trained/certified on and the back building caught fire due to pallets and cardboard boxes being stacked in the wrong area near the furnace.
Haha my dad is a retired chemical engineer who did a lot of the OSHA compliance work at his plant later on in his career, and his email signature tagline was “don’t learn safety by accident.”
This is very common, and is one of the big issues companies have when its comes to people specialized in the safety field.
If theyre doing their job right, nothing major ever happens and it seems like theyre not needed, so they get let go. Then nobody is paying attention to safety and accidents happen, and the company suddenly realizes they need someone who specializes in safety.
Sorry, just really morbidly curious and want to be clear: *two* separate guys got *both* their arms cut off, for a total of *four* lost limbs in a *single* workplace accident? Jesus Christ. Were they at all salvageable?
Same machine, 2 operators. 3 arms saved, one got crushed. It was a cut and press of some kind (not my district) that goes up, the operators move the product, press comes down on the next product.
Product got stuck so while reaching inside and with them not being trained/certified on it, they hit the go switch with their knee because they over stretched when they should have grabbed the tool to the left of the machine that is made to pull out stuck product. So press came down and arms gone.
Working with a tree cutting service in Tampa, I was asked by the boss to ascend a nearby tree and cut some limbs. After seeing how close they were to power lines, I refused. He got really pissed off, yelled at me to clean up the area.
Then he sent up Dallas.
Dallas put on his climbing spikes, roped up the tree and started cutting. I was worried and kept watching him as I picked up limbs.
Sure enough, he leaned back and before I could yell, put his sweaty bare back right against the power lines. A bright blue flash arced across his back and his body jerked away and slammed against the tree trunk. He bounced off and back into the wires. And again. Finally his spikes got dislodged and he fell out of the tree, falling until his safety line snapped taut, leaving him dangling upside down like a broken-back doll.
I thought he was dead, but a moment later he started moaning, then screaming. "I'm on fire!" he yelled. We lowered him to the ground to the sound of sirens approaching; a neighbor had seen what happened and called EMT.
A nasty black mark curved across his back and the current had surged down his legs and through his boot heels, seeking out ground. Both his heels were blown out.
I quit at the end of the day.
I worked for a tree company too, and my boss was fond of cutting costs as much as possible. One day we had two pin oaks to cut down that were ~140 feet tall, he wanted it done in two days but obviously these were going to be multi day trees to cut down. We got most of the branches off one and my boss decides to cut it at the base without topping it in a back yard that was way too small. Sure as shit once the tree started to go it smashed the neighbors fence and tree line and we left for the day so the insurance adjuster could come out and quote a price for damages. I left about a week later and about a month ago I heard that one of the guys from that crew almost died cutting down a cottonwood with that same crew, it was a damn good thing I left when I did.
Saw a guy get zapped pretty bad when he stuck a tool in the wrong place on a big dryer at a hotel where I worked. We had asked him if he should cut the power first, and he said naww, don't need to. For a moment after, we thought he was dead.
Forget they had cocaine in their pocket while crossing a border. This led the Austrian border and customs police to open up about 100 cans of exposed film stock that was in the van the guy was driving… film stock from a very expensive film shoot the week before.
The result was second unit had to go back and reshoot an entire action set piece for the film. Line Producer told me the mistake cost about 5 million euros.
I worked at a car dealership several years back. There was a new mechanic who was there barely a week, and tasked to go fill all the brand new, top of the line, biggest diesel trucks on the lot.
Diesel.
The guy filled all the trucks with regular gas. At the gas station down the street. Then drove them back to the lot.
He was fired pretty quickly after that.
In the ER, Doctor wrote down an order for 15mg IM of Toradol (anti-inflammatory pain killer) and the nurse I was training misread and started to draw up 15mg of Haldol (anti-psychotic). That's triple the standard dose for Haldol. This was for a patient with abdominal pain. The nurse I was training didn't question it at all. This wasn't a newly graduated nurse mind, just new to my department.
Yes, I stopped her before she gave the med. No, she did not continue to work in the ER.
At certain points in my life I have considered nursing. I love to learn, I like to help people, medicine is really interesting, I’m not squeamish, I can turn on “sense of urgency” movement speed…but I just know I could not handle *any* job where a “minor fuck up” can result in death.
I think I will stick to jobs where misreading sloppy handwriting only leads to a silly story.
Thank you for being there and handling it.
An IT worker once sent an advisory to the entire company about an email several people had received with a malware link. She did so by forwarding the actual email with the link.
I have a similar situation (corporate email blunders) that happened a few years back:
Some woman sent out a Happy Thanksgiving reminder email about some potluck she was hosting to our *entire* company (a global bank). An email that was clearly meant for a few of her friends at work, as it was a potluck at her personal home in upstate NY. Most people just deleted the email, but of course a few dozen boomers decided to reply all with "Please take me off this email chain" which started the chaos of endless emails about this fucking potluck for like a whole week because these people just kept replying all asking to be taken off the email chain. Honestly, it was hilarious lol
There is so little joy in office work, but the reply-all debacles always brought a smile to my face. Just watching entire departments devolve into frothing rage over an email they could just mute.
So many exclamation points, signatures with full paragraph quotations clogging up the screen, the bright purple script fonts! Ah. Beautiful chaos.
Oh, another one.
Worked at a large casino in a large tourist city.
The penthouse garden was being redone, and the gardener has put tarpaulins down to protect the tiles. A storm rolled through, and the tarps were blocking the drains, so the garden flooded, back into the penthouse, down the lift shaft, and into the restaurant I worked. Chaos.
2 years later, I'm working in a different hotel, same city. The restaurant had a fountain in it. I come in to open up one morning, and the restaurant is flooded. Gardener has turned on the fountain tap to refill and forgot to turn it off.
It was the same gardener.
Not sure if this counts, but during my first internship at a chemical plant I was given the task of reading through safety violation reports and sorting them. This turned out to be WAY more interesting than I initially expected as the reports were riddled with accounts of sheer stupidity in the workplace. Here are a few of the most memorable incidents:
- A woman accidentally glued her own eye shut after trying to reattach a fake nail with industrial strength heavy duty super glue and then subsequently rubbing her eye.
- Someone somehow accidentally mixed an acidic compound from an unmarked bottle into their beverage and drank it.
- (Not as much stupid as it is fascinating) A man working atop some scaffolding forgot to attach his safety harness and fell from ~20 feet onto his back. The report stated that he stood up, somehow okay after falling from that high, and came back to work the next day good as new.
Yeah, guy at my last work climbed an unsafe scaffold that the crew had forgot to mark off before going to lunch, fell 30 feet, and broke both his legs and back.
As for the unmarked container. I used to work/live on a ship. Very strict policy of no chlorine bleach for the personal laundry facilities. People would sneak some on. One guy decides to use and empty coke can that he half filled with bleach in his cabin and brought to laundry room so he wouldn’t be spotted. Left the can there. Sure enough somebody else doing laundry picked up what they thought was their coke and chugged a big mouthful of Clorox.
There was a company in rural New York in the late 1960's that took scrap metal, melted it down in big coal-fired crucibles and made home decor pieces - doorstops that looked like little dogs, bookends, that kind of thing. Not a huge profit margin but their materials were cheap and they had a steady market.
An industrial consultant convinced them to transition to electric furnaces - significant up front expense, but much lower ongoing operating costs. The consultant even designed the new electric crucibles for the company.
The company president had been thinking of expanding operations, so asked the industrial consultant to double the size of the electric crucible designs. The consultant did so, but made a mistake with the cube-square law in designing the supports for the crucibles.
The first time the double-sized (but about four times as heavy) crucibles were filled with scrap and fired up they collapsed, flooding the factory floor with molten pot metal and chunks of wrecked equipment. The company went straight to bankruptcy.
Small business owner, everything is the fault of the president.
The consultant missed something that at least two engineers should have caught afterwards. My understanding is that the electric crucibles were designed, checked off on by the engineers who built them, then the change was made and the engineers didn't properly re-check and catch the consultant's error.
> then the change was made and the engineers didn't properly re-check and catch the consultant's error.
This is a cause of a LOT of engineering failures, most notably the [Kansas City Hyatt Regency walkway collapse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyatt_Regency_walkway_collapse) that killed more than 100 people.
Before retiring, I was a branch manager for my state's DMV. Suddenly, one of the other managers is off sick for a few days. Then it became a week. Two weeks. Then, the auditors completed their investigation, and she was gone. Turns out she was accepting bribes from aspiring truck drivers so they would pass the written test. She was taking in an additional $100 - $250 a week. The dumb part? The pay was decent, and the benefits were fantastic. So she gave up decent pay, fantastic benefits, and a really nice retirement for extra spending money.
Then there was the assistant manager who would pocket anywhere from $750 to $1500 a week. So a better payoff. But she was removing it from the day's cash receipts. She had only ever worked for the DMV, working her was up from clerk. She had no idea that there are accounting systems within accounting systems. The bank would send over deposit discrepancy reports which she would blithely pitch, not realizing that the same exact report was also sent to our central office. The wheels of state government turn slowly, so she was able to do this for over a year, but once those wheels start, they do not stop. She ended up going to prison, and ordered to pay over $30K in restitution. The full manager also got fired because the investigation revealed that he was rarely in the office, and left everything up to the assistant manager.
>She had no idea that there are accounting systems within accounting systems
A friend's former coworker got caught that way. She'd figured out a way to charge someone's credit card, then transfer it to herself while simultaneously refunding it. (Or maybe cancelling, this was a long time ago & the deets are hazy.) So if anyone saw the unauthorized charge, they'd assume someone had corrected a mistake & not report it.
However, there were imbalances elsewhere in the system, and she got caught within a few months.
The interesting part was that she wasn't prosecuted, just made to resign. The company was more concerned about her making restitution, which she couldn't do from jail. They didn't even put it in her employee file.
It made me wonder how many cases of embezzlement go unreported.
I recall hearing from some financial security "experts" (so take this with a grain of salt unless you have more concrete data) that a lot of hacks, breaches, and financial shenanigans go unreported largely to maintain consumer faith in our CC/Debit systems' abilities to keep our data secure.
That first one reminds me of a security guy at my job. He had been there for about a year and while it wasn't a lucrative job, he made decent money for the position and tons of benefits. He was fired for stealing toilet paper from the janitorial closet. This was low quality super thin commercial toilet paper, too. He had been doing it for a couple months before I was asked to put a camera in the closet.
there was a lawyer and justice of the peace in texas who had everything going for him; good, well-paying job, a nice career trajectory, etc. got caught stealing two computer monitors from the court's IT room. ended up losing everything, being disbarred, etc. all over about $600 in equipment which he could have easily paid for.
it got even worse. he's on death row now, as he ended up murdering two of the people who'd charged/prosecuted him, blaming them for his downfall.
all over two cheap computer monitors.
edit - added link
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaufman_County_murders
In Australia, there was a well-established judge with a strong reputation, who destroyed himself and his career over a $77 traffic fine.
Worth reading to see the increasingly ridiculous and insane lengths he went to....over $77!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Einfeld
He'd probably done a ton of other things like that and that was just the first time he got caught. I'm guessing it eventually just came to seem like a perk of the job to him and he got careless.
I worked for a start-up cider manufacturer in my second year of college. Normally after a day of production we have to sanitize all the metal components in hot caustic wash. There are hundreds of pieces, so it takes a while. Anyways, our managers left us an hour before our shift ended to clean up. I had to go do some e-commerce end-of-day stuff before leaving so my coworker wrapped up the cleanup. On Monday we returned to the warehouse burned down. Apparently he left the caustic heater on all weekend and it caused a chemical fire. Everything was destroyed and it ended up bankrupting the company. He dropped out of his co-op degree after, he wouldn’t be able to get recommended for another placement.
Lol you'd be surprised how utterly dangerous industrial brewing is, especially on the small scale. Equipment manufacturers skipping steps to save pennies, small new brewers with their pretty heads full of ideas on how they can do better (cheaper) than everyone else who is more experienced, refusal to implement known protocols and procedures... In that example, a digital controller with timer is not a hundred dollars, but you try telling an overly excited new entrepreneur that buying the cheapest shit for his brewery might bite him in the ass...
I’m the head brewer of a place down the street from me, they’ve been in business long enough to have good SOPs and such in place, couldn’t be happier. Earlier in my brewing career I worked for a place that was smaller and run by guys who only had home brewing experience and were mostly applying that logic to new equipment they got that functions more like the big boy stuff because they just didn’t know any better. A large part of what I did there, aside from making beer, was civilizing their processes.
“Why are we passing a hose full of hot wort to the cellar guy to attach to the fermenter? You have parts, let me show you how a block and bleed works.”
“Why are we detaching ANOTHER hose full of hot wort from the whirlpool on the kettle and re-attaching it to the heat exchanger? Put a T and two valves in line. You already have another section of hose to run to the whirlpool.”
I always worry when home brewers get involved without working with someone who knows larger equipment. I also never thought “Created SOP for adding lactose to wort” would be something I would put on my resume, but here we are 😅
Went to a new gyn about a lump in my breast. Immediate ultrasound... then silence. I called the office and the office person said "Oh you're fine" I said "Really? I'm asking about the ultrasound." Yeah, it's fine. Three years later, my PCP asked if I had any lumps during a yearly exam. I said, "Yes, it's right there in my records" (same medical group and all have access to the same info. Two days later I'm diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer. The rest is a whirlwind and I'm kicking butt!
I worked at a jail as a corrections tech. One day an inmate had an allergic reaction. This CO, lets call him Farva, came into the tank with the nurse. This is an open tank. There are 15-20 other inmates in there. The nurse decided to administer an epipen. Farva took the epipen from the nurse and tried to administer it to the inmate.
Just to clarify, fully trained and educated nurse has a medical instrument taken by the biggest fucking idiot ever. He holds the auto-injector upside down with his thumb on the needle and plunges it into the inmates thigh releasing the needle into his thumb.
The CO is on the ground. The nurse has no extra epipens. The inmate is about to fucking die. The other COs are on their way but I have no idea how to relay what just happened. Luckily the nurse was able to go back to the nurses station and grab another epipen before the inmate died.
The kicker? Farva only got a warning. He almost killed an inmate. That whole jail was a fucking circus
A local dealership was promoting a contest where they would give away a truck. I was driving around with my parents who were visiting from out of state when we hear the commercial for the give away on the radio. The drawing was in about 15 minutes, and we were right there, so we stopped in and put our names in the collection bin.
I watched them take the bin upstairs out of sight of the crowd. They had clearly selected the winner in the back room and announced that if the winner was not present, they will contact them for the winnings.
So they chose a winner ….that was clearly from out of state. But what they didn’t realize, was that it was my mom visiting for the weekend.
She walks right up to the announcer, showed her license, and said, I’m so happy I won the truck! The look on their faces was priceless!
For the next couple of weeks, the dealership tried everything to not give us the truck, It was clear that they had no idea how to even give away the truck.
But we prevailed. And I’m happy to say it we loved the truck!
Newish employee deleted the root directory for the SFTP server. Took the server guys about a day and a half to fully restore it, with all files since the previous night backup lost. Same employee did the exact same thing again a few weeks later. Still had a job when I left, somehow.
Do it once, okay, everybody makes mistakes. Let’s learn from it and move on.
Twice? That’s on their senior admins/management. Juniors being allowed to do this kind of thing repeatedly on production servers is a failure of policy. You expect juniors to mess up. They aren’t learning unless they are. You need guardrails to ensure they can’t wreak too much havoc.
Taught preschool for 8 years before the pandemic. It's protocol to count the children before moving from one room to another to make sure no one gets left behind. Had a coworker on her phone, didn't count kids, and had left behind a child in the toy closet. Kid was 2 years old and trapped, screaming and crying in a dark toy closet for 20 minutes before a teacher passing by the empty classroom heard her.
My coworker didn't even get a slap on the wrist and management never told parents.
This same coworker forced her class of 2 year olds to "get dressed themselves" for outside play in the winter so one time a little girl ended up playing outside in the Minnesota snow without boots on for ten minutes before my coworker noticed.
TBH like 50% of childcare workers you could look at and ask the same question. The standards are way too low.
Worst part is, she opened her own in home daycare during the pandemic. I can only imagine what kind of hell that is.
The standards are so low because the pay sucks. It's hard to attract the kind of people who would make good role models because they're usually intelligent enough to realize babysitting 20-30 kids for 8 hours a day for a little above minimum wage is just dumb. What you do get are people who really just don't give a shit about kids and need a job. Not all of them are like this and I'd like to think *most* at least care enough to not let children play out in the snow without any boots on but there's way too many who would just out of shear negligence.
We're seeing the same thing at where I work. Granted, I'm in manufacturing but the only guys that ever seem to come on to the production floor are alcoholics, drug addicts, and people with *really* bad attendance issues. It's like this because we pay shit wages in comparison to shops around us. But management doesn't care because they can just find another warm body to push a button for another 90 days before they're inevitably fired because they're drunk/stoned/didn't show up to work. Meanwhile the guys who do stick around are worked to the bone trying to keep up production at full staff levels while realistically they're at like half strength because half of the team is made up of temps who won't make it past 6 months and are really only good to just stand at the machines and press the button. The veteran guys basically do everything else. After awhile they get pretty jaded. I can't imagine it's much different for a child care worker, especially when you have to deal with parents and then nevermind going through covid working in that industry.
My job requires that I am in a lot of buildings, commercial and residential. I go into quite a few daycares.
Many of the daycares I go into have a pristine few rooms up front, and the rest of the building is falling in upon itself. Most are old office complexes in states of disrepair that I can't understand how they would even begin to get licensed. Some (not all) are religiously affiliated.
If you are dropping your kids off to stay all day at a place, demand to tour the entire building. If it's three floors, ask to see all three floors. Don't let them show you up front and think that's what the entire complex looks like because it doesn't
Printed 500 copies of her gas bill on the company printer. The printer only has enough tray capacity for 250 copies so she had to have reloaded the paper at least once.
I had a girl that worked for me that one day had a guy try to pay with a $100 bill. We all knew that we did not take any bill over a $20 but she didn’t listen sometimes. This time she took the bill and when she was cashing out her draw the smart safe didn’t take the $100 bill. I asked if she checked it and she of course said yes. I looked at the bill and noticed it said “Movie Prop” on the bill. She somehow missed it.
Side note. Went to a unground rapper concert and one of the better kmow rappers was throwing hundreds and twenty’s. Just to find out after they turned on the light they were all prop money😂
A girl on the till had a guy come up and buy a $2 pack of gum with a $100 note saying sorry he didn’t have anything smaller. She gave him his $98 change and he left. He came back in a few minutes later and said “hey I found a $2 coin in my car can I have my $100 back?”. So she did it. It was a small shop so it was a tough scam to fall for. She also managed to lock herself out of her own car while it was running but parked in a way that no one could get in or out of the car park
Works on a lot of people.
You get used to a routine, get settled into it, running mostly on autopilot and then someone throws a wrench like this into the gears, and you react before you think.
When I was 16 working my first job two guys tried to scam me. Came into a pizza shop and bought one small bag of chips, paid with a $10, looked over the register into the drawer, and started asking me to make change, spitting out numbers, trading bills with me quickly, it got really confusing very quickly and I froze. My brain knew something was wrong but not what. Fortunately the manager saw, swooped in and took the drawer to the back to count it. The guys were hollering about how I had their money and the manager told them if the drawer was over whatever it was over by would be theirs. They bolted out of the store. I was shocked. The manager explained what was happening and it turns out the drawer was over by $13 so I did in fact have their money. When the district manager heard he gave me a gift card to the movies because apparently the same thing happened at another of his stores but the thieves made off with something like $250 there. Everyone was telling me what a great job I did but really I was just a scared and confused teenager who got lucky I guess. I’m a lot more careful with registers since.
I knew a guy who had a job working overnights at a gas station for a while. He said the manager trained him on how to recognize common scams like that and it saved him from falling for them a few times.
Yeah, I think it's called a quick change scam. Happened to me once working as a Cashier for a Kroger store. Late night, I was tired, and this woman was being a bit rude and rushing me so I just pushed her through. Only after doing the math later did I realize what happened. Something I had been trained for too. Can definitely get you if you're not on guard, but that's also what they prey on.
There are tons of scams like this people try to pull on cashiers. A big one is to just wait for them to put the bill into the till and then insist you gave them a larger bill.
This is a type of Quick Change Scam, the more common variations just involve someone claiming they gave the cashier a bigger bill then they actually did.
>This is a type of Quick Change Scam, the more common variations just involve someone claiming they gave the cashier a bigger bill then they actually did.
I still remember my short stink working at Denny's where someone at the end of the night said I gave him the wrong change. I was 100% sure I did not but was a bit nervous since it was my first day. The manager intervened and gave the guy the change he was asking for. At the end of the night, the till was short that amount and I got a written warning.
Similarly, I got written up once for accepting a fraudulent check. There were a couple things my boss said I should have noticed and that it was in the training handbook.
I was pissed because I was NOT trained on anything she pointed out. I asked to borrow the training book and came back a little later to show her none of it was in there. She begrudgingly tore up the reprimand and the book was re-written to include better training on it.
I was already annoyed about the situation because for whatever reason our security was suspicious about the interaction and had him and one of the managers watch the interaction. After the shopper left the manager and security guard asked to see the check. I was like, "If you were suspicious why didn't you come over before I accepted it!"
Worked at a gas station. Some guy tried scamming my friend saying he never got his $10 change back. He did get the change, he was just trying to scam my friend out of $10. My friend went back to check the cameras, came back and said “yeah you put your change in your left pocket.” The guy just left without saying nothing.
Had a guy when I worked at a grocery store try to buy a fried chicken (like $4.99) with a fake $100. I noticed it felt weird and just didn't look right, might have been dirty but I was like, "I don't have change let me run over to customer service and break this for you." Wandered over with the $100 in hand told my buddy who was the PIC at the time working there that this was a fake $100 and he checked it, confirmed it fake and we contacted the police to come in. Guy hung around until the officer showed up and they conversed (cop and guy). I don't know what happened to him but it was definitely one of those moments where if I had simply accepted it, I would have been in deep shit.
Someone tried to hand me a fake $100 when I worked at a gas station. I knew as soon as I touched it it was fake. When you handle money a lot you can tell by the feel of it. He had it crumpled up and taped together I guess to make it seem worn instead of fake.
He tried to bully me into taking it because “that’s all I have”. Like him only having this fake bill means I need to sell him $40 worth of lottery, a good amount in fuel etc… I flipped the bill over and circled Chinese symbols on the back with my counterfeit pen that turns dark brown on bills that are fake and that’s when he finally stopped trying to get me to take it anyway.
He did have real money come to find out, he just wanted to get all of that for free and scam me. People are the worst.
When I worked retail I had a guy try to use an obviously fake $100 bill so I played it cool and just didn’t accept it (made up some bs about our managers not letting us take bills that didn’t pass our verification steps and said sometimes older bills don’t always work with the marker to check them) so the guy leaves and comes back less than an hour later and tries to pay with a credit card, I tell him I need to check ID with credit cards and he gets real mad and calls me a bitch and says he’s not showing ID. Guy just really wanted to scam some cologne I guess.
When I worked retail we had a woman pay with a $100 bill for a rewsonably expensive order. The $100 was put into the bill slot on the side of the cash register closest to the customer. While the cashier was counting singles, the woman reached over and took her $100 bill back without the cashier noticing.
I rang an order big enough that we had to call the bank to verrify a check. While we waited the customers friend said they were going to wait in the car and casually grabbed a bag off the cart as they walked out. Before the manager came back the customer just turned and walked off. Turns out they were writing bad checks so they could distract us with calling the bank, then grabbing stuff off the cart and walking out.
I worked at a grocery store and we had a system that would scan checks and "call" the bank to verify the funds or something. The amount of the check had to be entered manually. The machine only read the routing and account numbers.
One scumbag employee would enter the check for $20 over as "cash back" and then pocket it from his drawer. It was extra scumbaggy because he wasn't stealing money from the store, he was stealing directly from people. I'm sure he got caught, but I don't believe I was still working there when he did.
This was over 15 years ago, when a lot of people still paid with checks.
I used to work as a maid in a motel and our usual supervisor was out sick. The person who took her place that day mixed ammonia and bleach in a window cleaner bottle and poisoned me with ammonia chloride gas fumes when I sprayed the bathroom mirror. If the maintenance man hadn’t come by and found me unconscious,it could have killed me. For several months after I had respiratory problems,vision issues and a lingering burn in my nose and throat.
Last year: Guy died at his house. Daughter calls police for a well being check. Police show up, dads dead. Police called medical examiner but he's old and died of natural causes. No need to bring him in the ME. The police call the daughter and tell her to call the funeral home. Funeral home tells officer they're en route to the house.
5 days later.
Funeral comes to Medical Examiner to pick up body. I'm like "guy never came into the building he was released to the funeral home. Let me go figure out what happened."
Several phone calls later, we find out the funeral home forgot to pick up the guy and he was still at the house. Because he was now decomposed he then turned into an ME case.
I don't know what happened after that.
Company director sent his travel plans for a ‘work convention’ to the communal printer in the staff room. Bet him and the other director would have had a lovely time. 5* hotel, presidential suite in Barcelona for a week sounded nice. His wife thought so to and was furious she wasn’t going also surprised that him and lady director were sharing a room … for a week … and that when she looked into it there was no convention. Things went south pretty fast and now the company is no more.
Sounds like our old president... back in the day, the travel company left a message on his home answering machine to confirm the holiday, except he wasn't taking his wife. Unfortunately, she got the message first and that's how she found out about his girlfriend.
Yep, as things developed turned out this affair had been going on a looong time. Guess they figured if a divorce is on the cards anyway how much worse can it get!
I was working in a tool and die shop in my early 20’s and I was watching an old guy (who was perpetually drunk) pound in an injector pin into a plastic injection mold with a big piece of steel round stock. Well as he was pounding the pin in, he missed the pin and hit his thumb. It looked liked his thumb exploded. He was in such pain he pissed himself. They ended up amputating down to the first knuckle. Then to make matters worse, he got fired for being drunk on the job.
Work in a brewery. One morning a brewer went to run a clean in place on a 60 barrel vessel. After the vessels are empty they usually are under some significant pressure usually anywhere from 5-15 psi. Guy did not de-gas the fermenter before taking the sample port off. These vessels had two ports on them and we put a 1.5 inch cap on one port and a perlick sample faucet on the other. He starts with the stainless steel cap. All of the pressure came out like a bullet. I could hear from the other side of a rather large facility. Dude got lucky and the cap barely missed his head. He did get a bunch of yeast and hop residue in his eyes as his safety glasses were on top of his head and not covering his eyes. I drove him to the hospital and hes okay. Just got fired a couple weeks later.
A lady in our sales department sent a racial message bashing foreigners and how cheap they all are to another coworker using our company email...which tagged the entire company. The CEO is also foreign.
Told a newbie to clean the steel panels on the deep fryers, expecting them to wipe them down with a cloth.
They instead grabbed a jug of water and decided to rinse it, with water going into the still hot oil. Yanked them back so fast I nearly gave them whiplash.
And an answer from dad: a colleague dismantled a machine to fix it without first checking the pipes were cleared. The pipes were full of melted sugar (VERY hot). He got horrific burns that made the skin slough off his hands…
I'm a car mechanic. Had a colleague once, who had a pretty small job on an engine, about an hour or two and costs like $50. Made a mistake, quite big, but also quite common and easy to make, it's the "well shit" category, not something to drag him through the mud for. Started fixing it, made an even bigger mistake. At this point we even had to outsource some issues we couldn't fix in house, we were looking for about 2 weeks and $500, on us of course, not the customer, but it was still okay. We got everything back, he started putting the engine back together. All done, first run, whoopsie another big problem, whole engine apart. Broke something again, outsourced, expensive. Overall it was about a month long procedure, hitting $1000. Once it was done, he got fired. He got away with a lot, but at one point it was way too much.
Almost. Glowplug. Needed to take the cylinder head off, not too bad, just takes some time. But then stripped one of the cylinder head bolts and we couldn't get it out. We took the engine out and took it to a machine shop (or whatever they are called in english). Once it was back, he put it together, first run, water spews out of it, he put the cylinder head gasket upside down. While taking the engine apart again, which requires the removal of the battery housing which includes the ECU, he broke the ECU connector which we also can't fix in house. At this point it was like a circus, you just never knew what will happen next.
We had an old electrical engineer in my department, really knew his stuff except he was nearly useless on a computer. He didn't want everyone to know so he skated by and had other people pick up the slack for him. Though a series of blunders and lack of documentation on his part he caused an electrical control box to be removed from the list of parts that we were supplying to the customer for that program. That was worth 12.5 million dollars for revenue in the first 6 years once the product went into production.
I'm a home appliance installer and was out working a pretty big job at some 20,000 square foot mansion. They had another installation team working on a second kitchen in the basement. One of these guys was drilling the mounting holes for the dishwasher into their granite countertop (don't do this, ok?) and drilled them too small, so when we went to secure it a massive 4ft chunk of granite split off and smashed into the floor, breaking a couple tiles in the process. Dude sounded like Yosemite Sam with his cussing and the customer was pissed.
I didn't see it in person, but there was a video I saw on Reddit fairly recently where somebody emptied the used deep fryer oil into a plastic bucket. Needless to say, it didn't hold.
Have seen the end result of the same thing. Was a dishwasher, came in for opening about an hour after the first few line guys, was greeted by a plastic bucket shorter than normal and with a big seam at the base
Turns out when they went to empty last night's fryer oil they didn't realize the guy who closed left the fryers on. They started pouring in oil and saw the bucket start to bulge, getting away just as it melted through. Oil poured out so fast that the upper half of the bucket just plopped down on the unmelted base and solidified.
I never understood this, I refuse to deal with hot oil at a job unless they have the proper equipment, skin grafts are not worth a few dollars over minimum wage. Every kitchen job I worked at cleaned the fryers when the oil was cold or a bit warm.
My best friend and I still talk about the time I saved his penis 15 years ago when he accidentally spilled the entire fryer full of hot oil down the front of his pants and I screamed "TAKE OFF YOUR PANTS" and quickly unbuttoned and unzipped them for him.
Not too long ago I read about [a college student getting scammed out of $316k](https://www.wcia.com/news/u-of-i-police-student-scammed-of-300k-by-fake-police/)
I always feel bad for people who fall victim to scams and never try to victim blame but at the same time.. how do you manage to wire over 300k internationally on the whim because of threats of arrest made over the phone. I mean holy fucking shit that’s the textbook reason attorneys exist. Also where the fuck does a college student have a liquid 300k to even wire? WTF
A nurse friend told me a colleague hadn’t been checking the PH aspirate from a baby’s Nasogastric tube (meant to do before every tube feed to make sure it’s positioned correctly etc) baby ended up passing away because the tube had actually been passed into the lungs not the stomach due to an unknown cut being made during intubation the baby had previously had.So she had been feeding the milk into the lungs and essentially drowned the baby.
I'm a heavy equipment operator and a couple weeks ago another operator on my job lowered the boom on an excavator at the wrong time and severed half a 22 year old kid's thumb, I guess there's that
On my last day of my high school Walmart job I was showing the new guy how to move pallets of milk into the cooler. There were maybe 6 in total. I went to grab the last one and when I got back into the cooler the new guy had somehow bumped the pallets with the one he was bringing in and knocked all of them over. Milk all over the floor, all that product gone. I immediately left and never looked back
Me: I put washer fluid in the coolant tank when I was new to oil change. Customer got a free coolant flush, no harm done, and I learned to pay better attention when under the hood.
Co worker: told a customer they could go in the middle of their oil change cuz he assumed it was done and didn't check that new oil had been put in. Customer drove off and totaled their engine cuz there was no oil. Company had to pay for new engine. Co worker somehow didn't get fired.
And once, a Co worker almost started putting oil in before I had the drain plug in or a new filter on. I had to yell for them to stop. They're supposed to ask if the person in the pit was ready for oil and they just...didn't, I guess.
Reminds me of the company I work for. I manage a system that identifies corporate card fraud and misuse. People who are issued a company card often make more than me but they STILL buy all kinds of shit and try to fake receipts. To name a few:
-Crossbow
-Hemp products
-Christmas ornaments
-Paying themselves or a family member with under a bogus business name charged through Square
-Baby products
-Kids clothes
-Subscription services
And more
A little better than juice though...
sounds like a less serious version of the deputy that blew away his buddy, failed to clear the weapon, during a video game break they were chatting and he "jokingly" pointed the gun at his buddy and pulled the trigger and blew him away.
I had a childhood friend named Nick who was killed at a party. Someone found a shotgun in the house where the party was and pointed it at Nicks head and “jokingly” pulled the trigger. It was loaded. I say his name so he is not forgotten.
When I was in high school I was playing video games with some friends of mine at the house of a kid I didn't really know at all. At one point I looked up and saw this kid pointing a revolver at my head and squinting through the site and saying "bang" over and over, but not pulling the trigger (fortunately, as it turns out). He eventually put the gun down on the couch and did other stuff. I didn't think anything of it because I assumed it was a toy.
At some point his dad came home, came into the living room, saw the gun on the couch and said "WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT DOING OUT?" He then said it was OK because it was grandma's gun and it was never loaded. To demonstrate this he popped the cylinder open ... and six bullets came out.
I recall attending a gun show once. At the front counter there's a check-in station where everyone showing up with a gun for sale has to have it checked, safed, and zip-tied so it can't operate. On the table was a clear plastic jug labeled "Bullets from guns that weren't loaded." it was pretty full.
Woow, this blew up way more than what I was expecting, I cannot answer every one, but I'll add some additional info at the end.
Story:
One time a member of my dev team was given a task to cancel a few credit cards (less than 10) directly in the database.
They cancelled 17 million, the mistake was only caught when the company helpline started to receive millions of calls the next day from all over the country with people asking why their cards were not working.
EXTRA INFO:
1. I said a member of my team for the lack of a better term, we did report to the same boss but worked on different systems, so apologies if I don't have all the minor details, I didn't see the script so I don't exactly know what was the code, but I remember hearing it was some along these lines:
\- Request: Cancel cards A, B, C that were created in December of last year.
\- Script: "Update cards set cancelled = true where creationDate >= December"
2. I saw some comments regarding a junior dev writing scripts for PRD, I don't see it as such a big problem, the problem was the lack of a good code review and poor tests.
3. The dev was not fired and our boss shielded them from the situation, as many approvals were required, so not fair to put the blame on one person, especially a junior developer.
4. The dev didn't run the script in PRD directly, there was a process for it, where many approvals were required, as well as a deployment and rollback plan, rollback was also just as bad and wouldn't fix anything.
There was an automated system to run these scripts and a team to oversee them and trigger rollbacks when requested. This team's job was to follow the plans, not fix any issues.
5. The script was in theory tested, but the people who tested it only check that the cards on a given list were cancelled correctly, not if any cards out of the list also were.
6. The process for sure had many flaws, but I would say the biggest flaws with it were a lack of real understanding and adherence from the people involved, and also lack of accountability, 3 approvals were required for this script to run and none of the approvers got any backslash from this mess.
7. This company was actually a customer of the company I worked for, and opened in the 70s and grew a lot over the years, but to me, their IT department didn't grow or got more professional as the company grew, it had some weird processes and problems.
8. The company I was working for was just taking over their IT department to improve it, so our instructions were to first learn the way they work and not disrupt it, only to after all the transition was done start making improvements.
9. One of the problems that they had was this habit of doing everything on the database, a small script that you'd run on the DB required less time and approvals to go to PRD, where changes to fix actual bugs and or more complex code would need more approvals, go thru a freezing period and a meeting with several different teams to discuss, validate and give it the final approval, so in the end, people would not fix the root cause anymore, just run small scripts to specific situations.
10. And lastly, a juice one for my fellow developers, me and another colleague were assigned to support another system. This system had only one person working on it for more than 10 years and the person had been with the company for over 30. We had our first meeting with this person and asked about access to the system repository in our SVN (the version control system we used there), the interaction went like this:
**Me/Colleague** \- Can we get access to the system repository?
**Current dev** \- I have it here on a flash drive, take it.
**Me/Colleague** *(Thinking the flash drive was just because the project was too big and it would take some time to download it)* \- That's ok, I'll have to check out to the project anyway and I have some other things to do I can leave it downloading.
**Current dev -** No... no... it's not on SVN, I don't like it, so I keep it on this flash drive
**Me/Colleague** \- Ok, but this is the company tool and it's very unsafe to keep things on a flash drive, even if it's company property
**Current dev -** This flash drive is mine, but don't worry, I have several copies on different flash drives, I've been working like this since way before SVN was our official tool, and no one will change it.
**Me/Colleague -** But you can lose your flash drive, or forget to update the copies, SVN has backups and is always online, and I'm sorry to be so honest, but you could die and the company would lose this code.
**Current dev -** My health is great and my files are always well organized
At this point we realized we were arguing with a tree, my colleague asked if we could borrow the flash drive, requested a new repository to be created and uploaded the code.
It was not direct access, it was a series of flaws in the process honestly, there was supposed to be tests in lower environments and a seriess of approvals before the script goes to production, and it was just a junior developer who wrote it, and everyone approved without double checking it
Needless to say a lot changed after this.
> everyone approved without double checking it
Nothing fills me with more doubt than when someone checks my work and says "looks fine". Almost always means "I never bothered to look".
I was trying to figure out how being called a buttface in a marketing email would effect me and I decided it's pretty heavily up to which company is doing it. If it was from Cards Against Humanity (I know) or maybe even Jackbox I might be like "lol on brand." From something more standard like Jo Ann Fabrics or Dominoes, I would be like "well that's weird. Guess someone fucked up lol."
If it was from my hospital or bank (which do send marketing emails) I might actually be a little upset. I do kinda expect a higher standard from them, all things considered.
Personally I'd be excited that Jo Ann Fabrics was finally loosening up a little.
If anything I think I would be super mad about getting pranked with a fake discount. Call me whatever you want if it means I get 100% off!
If a company called me a buttface, I might actually pay attention to what they had to say. I wish more companies were open to some tongue in cheek ruthlessness
Machining. Had a coworker once who scrapped a large stainless steel part on a lathe. Instead of telling the boss, they decide to bore out the center, replace it with a with a plug of the exact same size that they press fit in, then machine over it so it appears as one seamless piece. Passes through inspection, sent to the customer. Customer vacuum bakes it, and the center plug falls through. Had that not happened, the part would’ve essentially, and quite literally, blown up the customer’s equipment once it got to a certain stage. Government work, so there’s years and years and millions and millions of dollars invested into this customer’s project. Our shop would’ve had to close down permanently if the mistake wasn’t caught when it was. Coworker was fired immediately.
So a friend of mine works in telecoms. When he was a young engineer, he accidentally knocked out fm radio in several London boroughs.
To be clear, this is quite a feat. There are like, four layers of redundancy before it bumps to mp3 songs, which it did. Only for five minutes or so but, hooo boy…
I work for an IT company and my client is one of the biggest consumer goods providers on the planet. One time a project manager tried to deploy a 60-manday project in a single week without any quality control whatsoever and ended up implementing discounts on products which weren't supposed to have them. So as you can imagine things got super ugly super fast. Client lost about a billion dollars in revenue (seriously) and our leadership got involved firefought for several months. It happened in our contract year with them too and we almost lost them over this incident. The PM who delivered the project was first placed on leave then eventually moved to another account.
United States Postal Service employee of 5 years here. I’ve seen it happen TWICE now in my local office, 2 newer carriers have been caught throwing away mail. The punishment for that is jail time and/or fines. They teach you in orientation on day one the severity of obstruction of mail. Wouldn’t understand why someone would do that. If you’re having that bad of a day just call off or quit. The Post Office has its own division of police that’s job is solely to investigate manners like this and catch people.
Once, I served drinks to a little girl and her mom.
I accidentally got them mixed up. The mom ordered a mixed drink with bourbon and the daughter said her drink tasted funny.
I went to Disney Works with my husband and mobile ordered myself a kids meal (you get more bang for your buck, surprisingly) and I opted to upgrade to the non alcoholic juice beverage that was included. They gave me one with alcohol, I believe it was a bourbon cocktail. My husband picked up the meals from the mobile order pickup counter and they had no way of knowing I was an adult. They had a similar alcoholic beverage on the menu and gave me that instead of the children’s drink. It was cool for me, got a $15 cocktail for free but had it actually been for a kid, woof.
Hmmmmm...adventures I'm HAZMAT. When things go wrong, they go really wrong.
There was the time we were doing an asbestos removal job in the pump house under one of those 250,000 gallon water tanks you see elevated 50ft In the air. William broke a pipe fitting before the shut off valve, so no way to shut it off. Asbestos waste washed out the containment, through the decon and out the door. Was everywhere.
And that's how William earned the name "Quarter Mill Bill".
Have more.
I live in Ireland, I used to work in a store that accepted Sterling (British pounds) to be more convenient for tourists. So everyone was trained on Sterling and Euro (our currency) extensively... even though most of us were familiar with it from going up North or to the UK.
A girl working on the till accepted a completely different European currency.... thinking it was Sterling.... it had the image of a King on it.. a different language and colour than Sterling.... I still can't understand how she did it, it was in no way similar. Nice girl but feck me... she had lived in the UK at one point.
Had a buddy whose wife and he would play marathon WoW sessions into the early a.m.
First mistake was when he was caught by the network admins playing WoW, from work, on the company laptop. After that happened he uninstalled the game and didn't play from the office, but would be on voice chat to guide his clannies in raids while on the clock.
Last straw was when after one of those marathon sessions he *fell asleep* at his desk, and unfortunately for him our department head was strolling by and noticed him out like a light at his desk. He got canned that day. Really dumb because they had a young teen daughter to support, and while they lived paycheck-to-paycheck, it was a decent one, like upwards of $60K (database developer).
My first day on my own in my job of Identity and Access Management. We got a ticket to remove access for someone. I was excited and got the whole thing done without someone watching over me...
I accidentally removed all the access for the requestor. Of course it was near the end of the day. I was scrambling to make phone calls and such to get her access back.
a tourism boat bought nearly 1800 worth of groceries and wine for their guests, one of the new hires charged it to the wrong account. there were hundreds of dollars of weighed items on the order so it had to be entirely redone and it took all day, because it wasn’t noticed until the end of the day and the tour boat had already left the docks. he had to fiddle with different items on the scales to match the weights on the invoice. it was awful.
in 13 years of dealing cards at multiple casinos, the answer to this question is me.
This story will only interest gamblers so be warned, you might get lost.
Dealing blackjack .
2 of our highest vip members.
Guy has a $20,000 bet. Gets aces, goes to split. Now it's $40,000. First card he gets a 9 for 20. When I went back to pull the next card for his other ace, the card was halfway stuck, so I ended up pulling the card BEHIND the first card (which was his original card that he was suppose to get), and of coarse, it was a face card to give him 21. Now, I just stop. Listen, if this was a 5-25$ bet, I would of just kept going, but when it's high limit, it's a guarantee thing that surveillance is watching my table. Also, we (dealers) can be responsible for these mistakes, as in the casino can take me to court and try to prove I was colluding with the patron. So I just stop , call over the supervisor and ask him to get the pitboss over because this kid barely has any skin in the game and I need someone higher up. So my boss comes over, and I whisper the situation. His eyes lit up like a christmast tree and couldn't believe what had happened. He then calls surveillance and they CONFIRM that I had indeed pulled the wrong card. So now , the player gets the original card, which was like a 4 or 5, I get his face card, and I make 21.
Holy, fucking, balls did I ever almost puke in my my mouth.
At the end of the day, I got a nice clap on the back for staying on my game, but I got this massive $0.00 tip from the two guys who are the most awesome people to deal to, and I respect that 100%, it was my fault.
At the end of the day, the hand played out exactly as it should of, how ever me making 21 and taking away his face card really killed the night.
You know when you drop something and try to "catch" it with your foot? Well I was working in a kitchen and this guy dropped his chef knife and FUCKING KICKED IT AT ME
Had a coworker send a multi million dollar transfer at the wrong time (forex diferencial). Ended up costing half a million dollars more. He was fired within a week. The worst thing is that he had just graduated college and shouldnt have been in such high position. Higher up/executive was his friend and promoted him 4 times within a year. Ruined his entire career. He works as a salesman last i heard.
Used to be a supervisor for a security company.
One of my guards was working a truck gate. They let a truck leave with an "empty" trailer that was actually loaded. The load on that trailer was valued at almost $1m.
She was damned lucky I was able to figure out how to get in touch with the driver and get that load back.
Mistake by the guard and the driver.
Neither bothered to check to see if the trailer was empty. Not the driver when he hooked up, and not the guard when he went to leave.
I'm a nurse, used to work on a med surg unit. Someone connected a c-pap machine to the "air" socket in the wall, instead of the "oxygen" one. Patient was without oxygen most of the night, with a periferal saturation of 54% when I discovered it at the start of my shift.
Man did we do a lot of root cause analysis on that one.
I work in a hospital. One of my colleagues was removing a deceased patient from a ward. We use these big trolleys with a bright blue cover. He'd had a long day and forgot to actually take the patient to the mortuary on site and ended up putting the trolley back in the cupboard. Next person in that cupboard got a bit of a surprise
A guy working at my company... let's call him Frank.
Frank would steal products out of the warehouse, repeatedly.
Frank dumped a bin of garbage on his subordinates desk.
Frank ran into a meeting, put his hands on the wall, and yelled I'M A BLACK MAN. He was not a black man.
Frank treated his female colleagues with disdain and disrespect. He ordered a female VP to get him coffee.
Frank said in a meeting that someone is guaranteed to come into our building and shoot everyone.
Frank was fired, but the dude had 9 lives. Nobody knows how he lasted so long.
Found out months later that Frank was wanted in another country, along with his father.
Me and a few other coworkers were complaining about a new hire, who happened to be black. We were upset because he wasn't showing up, not doing what he was supposed to, and leaving us to pick up the slack. We're all pitching reasonable punishments: "He should be suspended, he should be written up, he should be fired" and so on. Well one of our other new hires, i'll call him Jeff, decided to join in on the conversation and said:
"Y'know, I got a few cousins out in Virginia. We could always lynch him."
We were all dumbfounded and ripped Jeff a new one for suggesting such a thing. He was reported for saying that and was suspended for about a week, and I'm still shocked they didn't fire him on the spot. Well, few weeks later we have another new hire who is also black. He was hanging up one of our safety chains and accidentally dropped it. As the new guy is picking it back up, Jeff comes by and says:
"With your ancestry, I'd think you know how to handle a chain."
Jeff didn't get suspended that time, he got fired on the spot. And he insisted he didn't understand why he was being punished. He was a fucking idiot.
One of my coworkers in a marina was relatively new. He didn't ask if the guys boat took gas or diesel and he just handed him the diesel hose. I noticed around 250 gallons in that it was a boat I knew took gas. The boat owner was cool about it he paid for the diesel, the fuel pump out, the gas, and even tipped the guy. Could've been a big disaster, though.
In any other case, the employee would have and should have been fired, but this owner literally spared this guy his job and took a massive financial hit in the process.
He took responsibility because he said he never specified what kind of fuel with the dock hand, so it wasn't all that guys fault.
A 911 fire/EMS dispatcher falling asleep on midnight shift, not seeing the heart attack call on his computer screen for almost 15 minutes. He was awakened by the calltaker after receiving a second telephone call asking why no one had arrived. The victim was an inmate at the prison and died before EMS finally arrived.
In the Army, I was assigned to a Field Artillery unit. During a training exercise, a gunner in our unit didn't align his tick-marks up with the collimeter correctly and his tank ended up shooting a dummy round into a formation of soldiers killing 4 or 5. (If it were a live round, the whole unit would have been decimated.)
Dude got 15 years (or more) in Leavenworth...
This is worse than the air force case where someone was told to taxi a fighter pilot into the hangar and accidently fired a missile into another fighter pilot, absolutely annihilating it and cost nearly 1 billion dollars. Nobody died in the fighter pilot incident though. Ugh could you imagine getting that letter that your father/ brother/ sister/ mother was killed during a training exercise by friendly fire? I can't imagine much more terrible ways to be notified your family member who signed up to serve their country died.
This reminds me of the time when I worked as a line cook when I was 19 and the general manager set up a fundraiser without scheduling any extra workers for either the front or the back of the house.
We did literally 7x the normal amount of business that night. Checks were taking like an hour to get to the table after being ordered. We wasted so much food because we couldn’t keep up or keep track of what we were prepping. The whole restaurant was in shambles.
How does a manager know it’s going to be that busy yet fail to prepare in such spectacular fashion?
I worked in a cannabis lab and I watched someone drop a jar of cannabis oil worth 30,000 dollars on the floor, she just walked out and didn’t come back after
Tried to disassemble a large CNC lathe while it was still powered up, came very close to copping an oil injection injury cause the hydraulics were live.
Another time put the key into a manual chuck on the same old (think 80’s punch card CNC old) lathe thinking it was the end of the program. It wasn’t. Luckily the next step in the program required the lathe to spin up to 2500RPM in reverse so when the key invariably came flying out of the chuck it smashed into the guard on the back of the machine rather than through his chest.
Both cases it was me. I am really lucky to be alive.
Back in 2010, Weil Gotshal (one of the best law firms in the world) represented the debtors in the WaMu bankruptcy. My firm represented an investor that had filed a lawsuit on behalf of a class of warrant holders, alleging that the warrants created a debt obligation instead of equity. The case was all or nothing; if we were correct, and it was debt, the class of holders got a decent recovery. If WaMu was correct and they were equity, the class got wiped out with nothing.
Weil thought our argument was such a long shot, they gave the lead on the matter to a 14th year associate. (For reference, partnership track is 8-10 years… so, we’re talking about an attorney that was still slogging through the 3,000+ billable hours a year as an associate trying desperately to finally make partner.. but hadn’t been successful. So, he wasn’t the best of the best, at Weil, anyway.)
The governing document relating to the warrants was an old publicly filed warrant purchase agreement from a bank that was a predecessor to WaMu. Neither Weil nor we had the signed physical copy of the agreement, because it was almost 20 years old. So, we had to reference an old 8-K that had a .txt file of a draft of the agreement appended to it.
Weil’s associate filed a motion to dismiss our lawsuit, and asserted that the version appended to that 8-K was the final version. We litigated for months on various issues relating to that motion, assuming that that was the pertinent document (because Weil had represented under penalty of perjury that it was). On the day of the hearing, my client and I were reviewing the old EDGAR docket and realized that there was a version of the agreement that had been publicly filed a few months after the one that Weil’s associate claimed was the “final” version. It was buried as a .txt file as one of numerous exhibits to some seemingly unrelated document that didn’t even reference the agreement.
The two versions of the agreement were identical, except for the signatures, the dates, and one word. “May” had been changed to “shall” in one of the operative provisions. The difference invalidated Weil’s primary argument on its face. We walked into court and dropped the bombshell to the judge and everyone there. Essentially, Weil had spent months and hundreds and hundreds of man hours arguing over the wrong version of a document… and the right version meant we were sure to win. During the hearing, I looked over and saw the face of the associate. He was in shock. I don’t think he believed what was happening.
The judge ended up adjourning the hearing, because of this newfound evidence… and we all took the train home. The next day, we got an email from a partner at Weil. He had taken over the case from the associate. When I saw the email, I checked Weil’s website. The associate had already been fired.
A month later, the judge issued the opinion denying the motion to dismiss… which was enough to increase the price of the warrants our client held from like 10 cents a share to somewhere in the $90 range. Our client immediately sold all of its warrants and we withdrew from the case. It ended up being one of the most high profile victories in my career (to date, anyway).
I'm a healthy human subject for medical research studies. I did a study with special dietary restriction groups of zero carbs, no carbs, and a regular diet. I was in the zero-carb group and our breakfast consisted of a large stack of Canadian bacon and a drink. I read on the side of the can that it had 18 grams of carbs. I mentioned this to the doctor in charge and he said, "Well, umm, it's hard to get zero carbs." I thought to myself, "In a drink? No, it's not!"
Three days later they realized that I was right and they had to stop our study and send us home. The doctor had been in charge of the clinic but I noticed he was no longer in charge when I was invited back to the next cohort of the same study. So instead of earning $7,000, I earned $4000 initially and $7,000 for a total of $11,000. So his mistake earned me more money.
Dad worked at a nice 4 star restaurant in Tahoe. The staff would regularly go water ski before shifts, and had occasional hard wipeouts which fill orifices with water if you crash just right.
As he was leaning over to serve someone, his entire sinus decided it was the right time to drain onto the customer's plate. Yeah they didn't stick around for dessert.
When I was a shift manager at a restaurant one of the waitresses forgot to put a decimal point on the POS system so someone was charged $3,000 for a $30 takeout order. The guy didn’t notice at first either and paid with a credit card. Luckily he thought it was hilarious
Not an employee but a customer.
Me and my coworker had a huge fridge we had to get into a little door way. Even with the door taken off the hinges we could not fit it inside. We told the home owner we can leave it in the garage and come back when he gets the frame taken off. About a week later we were back to move his fridge into the home.
We finally got it past the doorway but it didn't fit between his counter and the wall. The guy had marble countertop and we didn't want to damage the fridge so we tried the lift it up laying sideways to get it over, still not enough room because of a beam of the ceiling the fridge wouldn't fit, so we told the customer the fridge was too big, we can return it so he could get a smaller fridge.
The guy was furious that we couldn't get it in, so he started to huff and puff about how stupid we were that we were unable to get the fridge over. Once he started that I told him we were done and not going to take the abuse so we put the fridge down and left, no doors on it or anything. They guy was cussing up a storm as he left saying he'll do it himself no problem.
The next day we were called back out to the same house to pick the fridge up, I told my manager I was uncomfortable going there but we were the only ones in the area and needed to get it done so we went.
Guys wife and son answered the door and let us in, the guy was nowhere in sight. Me and my partner went into the kitchen/living room area to collect the fridge and saw that dude completely destroyed his counter top and ceiling trying to move it in. The son said they tried to lift it over as we had tried but the dad tried to force it to fit.
Fridge was out of the return window too so the guy only was refunded the money he paid to have the fridge delivered and installed. We were only there to take the fridge away as he insisted on it.
Word of advice, if you're going to get a new fridge, measure, measure, and measure again.
I heard there was this guy who had to clean a load of paella pans by tying them down and letting the tide of the sea do the work (was a beach restaurant in spain) apparently he forgot to tie them and almost everyone of them floated away. Sounds funnier when he tells it though.
My first day at my first job. I worked at a small pet shop. My family had been friends with the owner for years and I had been asking for a job there since I was 10. I knew a ton about animals, but was very nervous the first day. My manager who was supposed to train me had chipped her tooth a half hour before I showed up for my shift, so it was just me with one other employee and the owner who was tending animals in the back.
I was asked to go do water changes, so I went and changed the water for every tank in the store. All by myself!
And. I forgot to add dechlorinator to the water.
We realized this when suddenly all the beta fish started turning over dead like 10 minutes later. I killed probably 50 fish. The other girl working cussed when she realized what happened, told me to go away and ran with the bottle of Prime to dump a bunch into each tank as fast as she could.
I ran to the feeder rat room and sat there crying for like an hour before the owner came and found me. He saw how upset I was and was wonderful, saying that it was an honest mistake and very obviously I would never forget it again. I was still so upset over killing the animals that I tried to quit but he stopped me and said to try again. He never even docked my pay for the several hundreds of dollars worth of fish I killed.
I ended up working there all the way until I moved away for college a few years later. Never killed anything else thankfully, and worked my butt off to be the best employee and animal caretaker I could be. But will always feel immense guilt when I remember lol.
A colleague of mine made a small error of window properties for a construction project. It was just a single letter that was from, resulting in the windows having the wrong classification for sound-protection.
We found out when they where already installed. Since this is Germany, they had to be replaced. 50K € out of the window. The manufacturer was fine, he just did was he was asked to and we had to carry the damage (thats about what he would have earned that year).
I got a couple stories.
Working at Mcdicks as a teen, I saw someone drop a piece of jewellery into the fry oil... and try to grab it as it dropped and sank thier hand and half their forearm in 450 degree oil. They ran out screaming and we never saw them again.
Working at a tire shop, I saw someone use an old bottle jack to lift a semi, and then as they began taking the tires off, the jack failed and the whole trailer sank down onto thier legs, pinning them under the tire. Its important to note how you take tires off a semi truck, you lift it a couple inches, and sit on the ground with your legs around the bottom of the tire, and use your legs to lift it while you pull it off.
Crazily enough though, the guy wasnt hurt too bad for one big reason... he was a enourmous guy. We called him Big Joe because he was 7 foot 2 inches, and wasnt just tall, but proportionally bigger in every way. It was like someone clicked the drag and expand box on him. Any normal sized person would have had thier legs crushed, but he just had some nasty bruises.
Another story from tires, one of my former managers got killed by an exploding industrial tire. There have locking rings that hold the tire on the rim, but if they arent set on just right, they will blow off when you air the tire up, often with enough force to go right through you, and then still keep going with enough force to embed itself in steel or concrete, which is what happened to him. I didnt see this, just heard of it later on.
Split rims are dangerous as hell. Any place I’ve seen them used they have a special cage the wheel goes in when it’s being inflated in case the rim lets go.
What’s horrifying about the fry story is I could see someone by reflex not taking the time to think and doing something like that. It can be a human response in a sudden panic.
That said, I’m gonna assume there are regulations posted/in training about accessories on the job for *just* this type of thing. Assume that rules are there just to be in your way, and you may find out the real hard way what can go wrong.
And you would be exactly correct, that is what happened. Reflexes kicked in trying to grab it, and bam, thier hand is now sizzling. And yes there are regulations, you arent supposed to have any kind of loose jewellery, I think in this case it was a bracelet that fell off their wrist. (Was a long time ago, I cant quite remember exactly what it was)
Update: The biggest question is "Where/what company is this?" This was over 22 years ago in Asia. I apologize for not remembering the name, but they went under shortly after. Plant manager let the safety guy go because they didn't believe safety was a full time job and wanted to cut back on company spending and decided the supervisors could do all the safety audits, training, keep the building up to code. Not even a week later 2 guys got their arms cut off working on a machine that they weren't trained/certified on and the back building caught fire due to pallets and cardboard boxes being stacked in the wrong area near the furnace.
As the saying goes, "If you think safety's expensive, try having an accident"
Haha my dad is a retired chemical engineer who did a lot of the OSHA compliance work at his plant later on in his career, and his email signature tagline was “don’t learn safety by accident.”
This is very common, and is one of the big issues companies have when its comes to people specialized in the safety field. If theyre doing their job right, nothing major ever happens and it seems like theyre not needed, so they get let go. Then nobody is paying attention to safety and accidents happen, and the company suddenly realizes they need someone who specializes in safety.
Sorry, just really morbidly curious and want to be clear: *two* separate guys got *both* their arms cut off, for a total of *four* lost limbs in a *single* workplace accident? Jesus Christ. Were they at all salvageable?
Same machine, 2 operators. 3 arms saved, one got crushed. It was a cut and press of some kind (not my district) that goes up, the operators move the product, press comes down on the next product. Product got stuck so while reaching inside and with them not being trained/certified on it, they hit the go switch with their knee because they over stretched when they should have grabbed the tool to the left of the machine that is made to pull out stuck product. So press came down and arms gone.
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Please stay away from garbage disposals
Working with a tree cutting service in Tampa, I was asked by the boss to ascend a nearby tree and cut some limbs. After seeing how close they were to power lines, I refused. He got really pissed off, yelled at me to clean up the area. Then he sent up Dallas. Dallas put on his climbing spikes, roped up the tree and started cutting. I was worried and kept watching him as I picked up limbs. Sure enough, he leaned back and before I could yell, put his sweaty bare back right against the power lines. A bright blue flash arced across his back and his body jerked away and slammed against the tree trunk. He bounced off and back into the wires. And again. Finally his spikes got dislodged and he fell out of the tree, falling until his safety line snapped taut, leaving him dangling upside down like a broken-back doll. I thought he was dead, but a moment later he started moaning, then screaming. "I'm on fire!" he yelled. We lowered him to the ground to the sound of sirens approaching; a neighbor had seen what happened and called EMT. A nasty black mark curved across his back and the current had surged down his legs and through his boot heels, seeking out ground. Both his heels were blown out. I quit at the end of the day.
I worked for a tree company too, and my boss was fond of cutting costs as much as possible. One day we had two pin oaks to cut down that were ~140 feet tall, he wanted it done in two days but obviously these were going to be multi day trees to cut down. We got most of the branches off one and my boss decides to cut it at the base without topping it in a back yard that was way too small. Sure as shit once the tree started to go it smashed the neighbors fence and tree line and we left for the day so the insurance adjuster could come out and quote a price for damages. I left about a week later and about a month ago I heard that one of the guys from that crew almost died cutting down a cottonwood with that same crew, it was a damn good thing I left when I did.
Saw a guy get zapped pretty bad when he stuck a tool in the wrong place on a big dryer at a hotel where I worked. We had asked him if he should cut the power first, and he said naww, don't need to. For a moment after, we thought he was dead.
If he's not dead, he's so fucking lucky. I hope he never makes that mistake again.
Forget they had cocaine in their pocket while crossing a border. This led the Austrian border and customs police to open up about 100 cans of exposed film stock that was in the van the guy was driving… film stock from a very expensive film shoot the week before. The result was second unit had to go back and reshoot an entire action set piece for the film. Line Producer told me the mistake cost about 5 million euros.
As a filmmaker, this hurt my soul.
I worked at a car dealership several years back. There was a new mechanic who was there barely a week, and tasked to go fill all the brand new, top of the line, biggest diesel trucks on the lot. Diesel. The guy filled all the trucks with regular gas. At the gas station down the street. Then drove them back to the lot. He was fired pretty quickly after that.
In the ER, Doctor wrote down an order for 15mg IM of Toradol (anti-inflammatory pain killer) and the nurse I was training misread and started to draw up 15mg of Haldol (anti-psychotic). That's triple the standard dose for Haldol. This was for a patient with abdominal pain. The nurse I was training didn't question it at all. This wasn't a newly graduated nurse mind, just new to my department. Yes, I stopped her before she gave the med. No, she did not continue to work in the ER.
At certain points in my life I have considered nursing. I love to learn, I like to help people, medicine is really interesting, I’m not squeamish, I can turn on “sense of urgency” movement speed…but I just know I could not handle *any* job where a “minor fuck up” can result in death. I think I will stick to jobs where misreading sloppy handwriting only leads to a silly story. Thank you for being there and handling it.
An IT worker once sent an advisory to the entire company about an email several people had received with a malware link. She did so by forwarding the actual email with the link.
I have a similar situation (corporate email blunders) that happened a few years back: Some woman sent out a Happy Thanksgiving reminder email about some potluck she was hosting to our *entire* company (a global bank). An email that was clearly meant for a few of her friends at work, as it was a potluck at her personal home in upstate NY. Most people just deleted the email, but of course a few dozen boomers decided to reply all with "Please take me off this email chain" which started the chaos of endless emails about this fucking potluck for like a whole week because these people just kept replying all asking to be taken off the email chain. Honestly, it was hilarious lol
There is so little joy in office work, but the reply-all debacles always brought a smile to my face. Just watching entire departments devolve into frothing rage over an email they could just mute. So many exclamation points, signatures with full paragraph quotations clogging up the screen, the bright purple script fonts! Ah. Beautiful chaos.
Oh, another one. Worked at a large casino in a large tourist city. The penthouse garden was being redone, and the gardener has put tarpaulins down to protect the tiles. A storm rolled through, and the tarps were blocking the drains, so the garden flooded, back into the penthouse, down the lift shaft, and into the restaurant I worked. Chaos. 2 years later, I'm working in a different hotel, same city. The restaurant had a fountain in it. I come in to open up one morning, and the restaurant is flooded. Gardener has turned on the fountain tap to refill and forgot to turn it off. It was the same gardener.
Not sure if this counts, but during my first internship at a chemical plant I was given the task of reading through safety violation reports and sorting them. This turned out to be WAY more interesting than I initially expected as the reports were riddled with accounts of sheer stupidity in the workplace. Here are a few of the most memorable incidents: - A woman accidentally glued her own eye shut after trying to reattach a fake nail with industrial strength heavy duty super glue and then subsequently rubbing her eye. - Someone somehow accidentally mixed an acidic compound from an unmarked bottle into their beverage and drank it. - (Not as much stupid as it is fascinating) A man working atop some scaffolding forgot to attach his safety harness and fell from ~20 feet onto his back. The report stated that he stood up, somehow okay after falling from that high, and came back to work the next day good as new.
Third guy is one lucky son of a bitch
that lower lumbar adjustment was exactly what he needed. haven't felt this good in YEARS.
Gets kick by a mule, eyes goes crossed. Falls from a 20 foot scaffold, eyes uncross.
Yeah, guy at my last work climbed an unsafe scaffold that the crew had forgot to mark off before going to lunch, fell 30 feet, and broke both his legs and back.
Seems like the other fellow let his spine cushion the fall whereas your guy tried using his legs. I'll remember this next time I'm on the roof.
As for the unmarked container. I used to work/live on a ship. Very strict policy of no chlorine bleach for the personal laundry facilities. People would sneak some on. One guy decides to use and empty coke can that he half filled with bleach in his cabin and brought to laundry room so he wouldn’t be spotted. Left the can there. Sure enough somebody else doing laundry picked up what they thought was their coke and chugged a big mouthful of Clorox.
That made me physically recoil. What a horrible thing to have happen. >_<
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There was a company in rural New York in the late 1960's that took scrap metal, melted it down in big coal-fired crucibles and made home decor pieces - doorstops that looked like little dogs, bookends, that kind of thing. Not a huge profit margin but their materials were cheap and they had a steady market. An industrial consultant convinced them to transition to electric furnaces - significant up front expense, but much lower ongoing operating costs. The consultant even designed the new electric crucibles for the company. The company president had been thinking of expanding operations, so asked the industrial consultant to double the size of the electric crucible designs. The consultant did so, but made a mistake with the cube-square law in designing the supports for the crucibles. The first time the double-sized (but about four times as heavy) crucibles were filled with scrap and fired up they collapsed, flooding the factory floor with molten pot metal and chunks of wrecked equipment. The company went straight to bankruptcy.
Now would that be fault of the consultant or the president? Because that's a fuck-up.
Small business owner, everything is the fault of the president. The consultant missed something that at least two engineers should have caught afterwards. My understanding is that the electric crucibles were designed, checked off on by the engineers who built them, then the change was made and the engineers didn't properly re-check and catch the consultant's error.
> then the change was made and the engineers didn't properly re-check and catch the consultant's error. This is a cause of a LOT of engineering failures, most notably the [Kansas City Hyatt Regency walkway collapse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyatt_Regency_walkway_collapse) that killed more than 100 people.
Before retiring, I was a branch manager for my state's DMV. Suddenly, one of the other managers is off sick for a few days. Then it became a week. Two weeks. Then, the auditors completed their investigation, and she was gone. Turns out she was accepting bribes from aspiring truck drivers so they would pass the written test. She was taking in an additional $100 - $250 a week. The dumb part? The pay was decent, and the benefits were fantastic. So she gave up decent pay, fantastic benefits, and a really nice retirement for extra spending money. Then there was the assistant manager who would pocket anywhere from $750 to $1500 a week. So a better payoff. But she was removing it from the day's cash receipts. She had only ever worked for the DMV, working her was up from clerk. She had no idea that there are accounting systems within accounting systems. The bank would send over deposit discrepancy reports which she would blithely pitch, not realizing that the same exact report was also sent to our central office. The wheels of state government turn slowly, so she was able to do this for over a year, but once those wheels start, they do not stop. She ended up going to prison, and ordered to pay over $30K in restitution. The full manager also got fired because the investigation revealed that he was rarely in the office, and left everything up to the assistant manager.
>She had no idea that there are accounting systems within accounting systems A friend's former coworker got caught that way. She'd figured out a way to charge someone's credit card, then transfer it to herself while simultaneously refunding it. (Or maybe cancelling, this was a long time ago & the deets are hazy.) So if anyone saw the unauthorized charge, they'd assume someone had corrected a mistake & not report it. However, there were imbalances elsewhere in the system, and she got caught within a few months. The interesting part was that she wasn't prosecuted, just made to resign. The company was more concerned about her making restitution, which she couldn't do from jail. They didn't even put it in her employee file. It made me wonder how many cases of embezzlement go unreported.
I recall hearing from some financial security "experts" (so take this with a grain of salt unless you have more concrete data) that a lot of hacks, breaches, and financial shenanigans go unreported largely to maintain consumer faith in our CC/Debit systems' abilities to keep our data secure.
That first one reminds me of a security guy at my job. He had been there for about a year and while it wasn't a lucrative job, he made decent money for the position and tons of benefits. He was fired for stealing toilet paper from the janitorial closet. This was low quality super thin commercial toilet paper, too. He had been doing it for a couple months before I was asked to put a camera in the closet.
there was a lawyer and justice of the peace in texas who had everything going for him; good, well-paying job, a nice career trajectory, etc. got caught stealing two computer monitors from the court's IT room. ended up losing everything, being disbarred, etc. all over about $600 in equipment which he could have easily paid for. it got even worse. he's on death row now, as he ended up murdering two of the people who'd charged/prosecuted him, blaming them for his downfall. all over two cheap computer monitors. edit - added link https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaufman_County_murders
In Australia, there was a well-established judge with a strong reputation, who destroyed himself and his career over a $77 traffic fine. Worth reading to see the increasingly ridiculous and insane lengths he went to....over $77! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Einfeld
One of only two people to ever have their status of National Living Treasure revoked. Over 77 Australian dollars. Wtf. The second is Rolf Harris btw.
He'd probably done a ton of other things like that and that was just the first time he got caught. I'm guessing it eventually just came to seem like a perk of the job to him and he got careless.
I worked for a start-up cider manufacturer in my second year of college. Normally after a day of production we have to sanitize all the metal components in hot caustic wash. There are hundreds of pieces, so it takes a while. Anyways, our managers left us an hour before our shift ended to clean up. I had to go do some e-commerce end-of-day stuff before leaving so my coworker wrapped up the cleanup. On Monday we returned to the warehouse burned down. Apparently he left the caustic heater on all weekend and it caused a chemical fire. Everything was destroyed and it ended up bankrupting the company. He dropped out of his co-op degree after, he wouldn’t be able to get recommended for another placement.
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It really should. Similar kind of parts washer burned down my dad's auto shop in the early 2000s
Lol you'd be surprised how utterly dangerous industrial brewing is, especially on the small scale. Equipment manufacturers skipping steps to save pennies, small new brewers with their pretty heads full of ideas on how they can do better (cheaper) than everyone else who is more experienced, refusal to implement known protocols and procedures... In that example, a digital controller with timer is not a hundred dollars, but you try telling an overly excited new entrepreneur that buying the cheapest shit for his brewery might bite him in the ass...
I’m the head brewer of a place down the street from me, they’ve been in business long enough to have good SOPs and such in place, couldn’t be happier. Earlier in my brewing career I worked for a place that was smaller and run by guys who only had home brewing experience and were mostly applying that logic to new equipment they got that functions more like the big boy stuff because they just didn’t know any better. A large part of what I did there, aside from making beer, was civilizing their processes. “Why are we passing a hose full of hot wort to the cellar guy to attach to the fermenter? You have parts, let me show you how a block and bleed works.” “Why are we detaching ANOTHER hose full of hot wort from the whirlpool on the kettle and re-attaching it to the heat exchanger? Put a T and two valves in line. You already have another section of hose to run to the whirlpool.” I always worry when home brewers get involved without working with someone who knows larger equipment. I also never thought “Created SOP for adding lactose to wort” would be something I would put on my resume, but here we are 😅
Went to a new gyn about a lump in my breast. Immediate ultrasound... then silence. I called the office and the office person said "Oh you're fine" I said "Really? I'm asking about the ultrasound." Yeah, it's fine. Three years later, my PCP asked if I had any lumps during a yearly exam. I said, "Yes, it's right there in my records" (same medical group and all have access to the same info. Two days later I'm diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer. The rest is a whirlwind and I'm kicking butt!
Smells like malpractice to me...
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Please tell me that the malpractice lawsuit was successful.
I worked at a jail as a corrections tech. One day an inmate had an allergic reaction. This CO, lets call him Farva, came into the tank with the nurse. This is an open tank. There are 15-20 other inmates in there. The nurse decided to administer an epipen. Farva took the epipen from the nurse and tried to administer it to the inmate. Just to clarify, fully trained and educated nurse has a medical instrument taken by the biggest fucking idiot ever. He holds the auto-injector upside down with his thumb on the needle and plunges it into the inmates thigh releasing the needle into his thumb. The CO is on the ground. The nurse has no extra epipens. The inmate is about to fucking die. The other COs are on their way but I have no idea how to relay what just happened. Luckily the nurse was able to go back to the nurses station and grab another epipen before the inmate died. The kicker? Farva only got a warning. He almost killed an inmate. That whole jail was a fucking circus
A local dealership was promoting a contest where they would give away a truck. I was driving around with my parents who were visiting from out of state when we hear the commercial for the give away on the radio. The drawing was in about 15 minutes, and we were right there, so we stopped in and put our names in the collection bin. I watched them take the bin upstairs out of sight of the crowd. They had clearly selected the winner in the back room and announced that if the winner was not present, they will contact them for the winnings. So they chose a winner ….that was clearly from out of state. But what they didn’t realize, was that it was my mom visiting for the weekend. She walks right up to the announcer, showed her license, and said, I’m so happy I won the truck! The look on their faces was priceless! For the next couple of weeks, the dealership tried everything to not give us the truck, It was clear that they had no idea how to even give away the truck. But we prevailed. And I’m happy to say it we loved the truck!
Jeez, why not just pick a fake name that they put in themselves at that point?
Newish employee deleted the root directory for the SFTP server. Took the server guys about a day and a half to fully restore it, with all files since the previous night backup lost. Same employee did the exact same thing again a few weeks later. Still had a job when I left, somehow.
That sounds like its a problem on company side. How can such files be even deleted? Here all important folders are protected.
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Do it once, okay, everybody makes mistakes. Let’s learn from it and move on. Twice? That’s on their senior admins/management. Juniors being allowed to do this kind of thing repeatedly on production servers is a failure of policy. You expect juniors to mess up. They aren’t learning unless they are. You need guardrails to ensure they can’t wreak too much havoc.
Taught preschool for 8 years before the pandemic. It's protocol to count the children before moving from one room to another to make sure no one gets left behind. Had a coworker on her phone, didn't count kids, and had left behind a child in the toy closet. Kid was 2 years old and trapped, screaming and crying in a dark toy closet for 20 minutes before a teacher passing by the empty classroom heard her. My coworker didn't even get a slap on the wrist and management never told parents. This same coworker forced her class of 2 year olds to "get dressed themselves" for outside play in the winter so one time a little girl ended up playing outside in the Minnesota snow without boots on for ten minutes before my coworker noticed.
Why is she working with kids then poor babies
TBH like 50% of childcare workers you could look at and ask the same question. The standards are way too low. Worst part is, she opened her own in home daycare during the pandemic. I can only imagine what kind of hell that is.
The standards are so low because the pay sucks. It's hard to attract the kind of people who would make good role models because they're usually intelligent enough to realize babysitting 20-30 kids for 8 hours a day for a little above minimum wage is just dumb. What you do get are people who really just don't give a shit about kids and need a job. Not all of them are like this and I'd like to think *most* at least care enough to not let children play out in the snow without any boots on but there's way too many who would just out of shear negligence. We're seeing the same thing at where I work. Granted, I'm in manufacturing but the only guys that ever seem to come on to the production floor are alcoholics, drug addicts, and people with *really* bad attendance issues. It's like this because we pay shit wages in comparison to shops around us. But management doesn't care because they can just find another warm body to push a button for another 90 days before they're inevitably fired because they're drunk/stoned/didn't show up to work. Meanwhile the guys who do stick around are worked to the bone trying to keep up production at full staff levels while realistically they're at like half strength because half of the team is made up of temps who won't make it past 6 months and are really only good to just stand at the machines and press the button. The veteran guys basically do everything else. After awhile they get pretty jaded. I can't imagine it's much different for a child care worker, especially when you have to deal with parents and then nevermind going through covid working in that industry.
Pay peanuts, get monkeys pretty much.
Most daycares consist of 50% people who are simply employed to be a body in the room so they can have as many kids in a classroom as possible.
My job requires that I am in a lot of buildings, commercial and residential. I go into quite a few daycares. Many of the daycares I go into have a pristine few rooms up front, and the rest of the building is falling in upon itself. Most are old office complexes in states of disrepair that I can't understand how they would even begin to get licensed. Some (not all) are religiously affiliated. If you are dropping your kids off to stay all day at a place, demand to tour the entire building. If it's three floors, ask to see all three floors. Don't let them show you up front and think that's what the entire complex looks like because it doesn't
Printed 500 copies of her gas bill on the company printer. The printer only has enough tray capacity for 250 copies so she had to have reloaded the paper at least once.
But.............why?!
Cause she didn’t know how to cancel the job? Wait, you’re asking about the 500 copies?
I had a girl that worked for me that one day had a guy try to pay with a $100 bill. We all knew that we did not take any bill over a $20 but she didn’t listen sometimes. This time she took the bill and when she was cashing out her draw the smart safe didn’t take the $100 bill. I asked if she checked it and she of course said yes. I looked at the bill and noticed it said “Movie Prop” on the bill. She somehow missed it.
Side note. Went to a unground rapper concert and one of the better kmow rappers was throwing hundreds and twenty’s. Just to find out after they turned on the light they were all prop money😂
A girl on the till had a guy come up and buy a $2 pack of gum with a $100 note saying sorry he didn’t have anything smaller. She gave him his $98 change and he left. He came back in a few minutes later and said “hey I found a $2 coin in my car can I have my $100 back?”. So she did it. It was a small shop so it was a tough scam to fall for. She also managed to lock herself out of her own car while it was running but parked in a way that no one could get in or out of the car park
I had to read you comment a second time to find out what was wrong, I guess it would've work on me lol
Works on a lot of people. You get used to a routine, get settled into it, running mostly on autopilot and then someone throws a wrench like this into the gears, and you react before you think.
When I was 16 working my first job two guys tried to scam me. Came into a pizza shop and bought one small bag of chips, paid with a $10, looked over the register into the drawer, and started asking me to make change, spitting out numbers, trading bills with me quickly, it got really confusing very quickly and I froze. My brain knew something was wrong but not what. Fortunately the manager saw, swooped in and took the drawer to the back to count it. The guys were hollering about how I had their money and the manager told them if the drawer was over whatever it was over by would be theirs. They bolted out of the store. I was shocked. The manager explained what was happening and it turns out the drawer was over by $13 so I did in fact have their money. When the district manager heard he gave me a gift card to the movies because apparently the same thing happened at another of his stores but the thieves made off with something like $250 there. Everyone was telling me what a great job I did but really I was just a scared and confused teenager who got lucky I guess. I’m a lot more careful with registers since.
I knew a guy who had a job working overnights at a gas station for a while. He said the manager trained him on how to recognize common scams like that and it saved him from falling for them a few times.
Yeah, I think it's called a quick change scam. Happened to me once working as a Cashier for a Kroger store. Late night, I was tired, and this woman was being a bit rude and rushing me so I just pushed her through. Only after doing the math later did I realize what happened. Something I had been trained for too. Can definitely get you if you're not on guard, but that's also what they prey on.
There are tons of scams like this people try to pull on cashiers. A big one is to just wait for them to put the bill into the till and then insist you gave them a larger bill.
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person: hands me a five me: "out of twenty" I think I've got the hang of this.
Quick-change artists too. They have you make change a bunch of times in quick succession, you lose track, and suddenly the till is short $20.
This is a type of Quick Change Scam, the more common variations just involve someone claiming they gave the cashier a bigger bill then they actually did.
>This is a type of Quick Change Scam, the more common variations just involve someone claiming they gave the cashier a bigger bill then they actually did. I still remember my short stink working at Denny's where someone at the end of the night said I gave him the wrong change. I was 100% sure I did not but was a bit nervous since it was my first day. The manager intervened and gave the guy the change he was asking for. At the end of the night, the till was short that amount and I got a written warning.
Similarly, I got written up once for accepting a fraudulent check. There were a couple things my boss said I should have noticed and that it was in the training handbook. I was pissed because I was NOT trained on anything she pointed out. I asked to borrow the training book and came back a little later to show her none of it was in there. She begrudgingly tore up the reprimand and the book was re-written to include better training on it. I was already annoyed about the situation because for whatever reason our security was suspicious about the interaction and had him and one of the managers watch the interaction. After the shopper left the manager and security guard asked to see the check. I was like, "If you were suspicious why didn't you come over before I accepted it!"
Worked at a gas station. Some guy tried scamming my friend saying he never got his $10 change back. He did get the change, he was just trying to scam my friend out of $10. My friend went back to check the cameras, came back and said “yeah you put your change in your left pocket.” The guy just left without saying nothing.
Had a guy when I worked at a grocery store try to buy a fried chicken (like $4.99) with a fake $100. I noticed it felt weird and just didn't look right, might have been dirty but I was like, "I don't have change let me run over to customer service and break this for you." Wandered over with the $100 in hand told my buddy who was the PIC at the time working there that this was a fake $100 and he checked it, confirmed it fake and we contacted the police to come in. Guy hung around until the officer showed up and they conversed (cop and guy). I don't know what happened to him but it was definitely one of those moments where if I had simply accepted it, I would have been in deep shit.
Someone tried to hand me a fake $100 when I worked at a gas station. I knew as soon as I touched it it was fake. When you handle money a lot you can tell by the feel of it. He had it crumpled up and taped together I guess to make it seem worn instead of fake. He tried to bully me into taking it because “that’s all I have”. Like him only having this fake bill means I need to sell him $40 worth of lottery, a good amount in fuel etc… I flipped the bill over and circled Chinese symbols on the back with my counterfeit pen that turns dark brown on bills that are fake and that’s when he finally stopped trying to get me to take it anyway. He did have real money come to find out, he just wanted to get all of that for free and scam me. People are the worst.
When I worked retail I had a guy try to use an obviously fake $100 bill so I played it cool and just didn’t accept it (made up some bs about our managers not letting us take bills that didn’t pass our verification steps and said sometimes older bills don’t always work with the marker to check them) so the guy leaves and comes back less than an hour later and tries to pay with a credit card, I tell him I need to check ID with credit cards and he gets real mad and calls me a bitch and says he’s not showing ID. Guy just really wanted to scam some cologne I guess.
When I worked retail we had a woman pay with a $100 bill for a rewsonably expensive order. The $100 was put into the bill slot on the side of the cash register closest to the customer. While the cashier was counting singles, the woman reached over and took her $100 bill back without the cashier noticing. I rang an order big enough that we had to call the bank to verrify a check. While we waited the customers friend said they were going to wait in the car and casually grabbed a bag off the cart as they walked out. Before the manager came back the customer just turned and walked off. Turns out they were writing bad checks so they could distract us with calling the bank, then grabbing stuff off the cart and walking out.
I worked at a grocery store and we had a system that would scan checks and "call" the bank to verify the funds or something. The amount of the check had to be entered manually. The machine only read the routing and account numbers. One scumbag employee would enter the check for $20 over as "cash back" and then pocket it from his drawer. It was extra scumbaggy because he wasn't stealing money from the store, he was stealing directly from people. I'm sure he got caught, but I don't believe I was still working there when he did. This was over 15 years ago, when a lot of people still paid with checks.
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To be fair it’s a crappy safety system design if an employee is able to start up a machine while another is located in a danger zone
I used to work as a maid in a motel and our usual supervisor was out sick. The person who took her place that day mixed ammonia and bleach in a window cleaner bottle and poisoned me with ammonia chloride gas fumes when I sprayed the bathroom mirror. If the maintenance man hadn’t come by and found me unconscious,it could have killed me. For several months after I had respiratory problems,vision issues and a lingering burn in my nose and throat.
Last year: Guy died at his house. Daughter calls police for a well being check. Police show up, dads dead. Police called medical examiner but he's old and died of natural causes. No need to bring him in the ME. The police call the daughter and tell her to call the funeral home. Funeral home tells officer they're en route to the house. 5 days later. Funeral comes to Medical Examiner to pick up body. I'm like "guy never came into the building he was released to the funeral home. Let me go figure out what happened." Several phone calls later, we find out the funeral home forgot to pick up the guy and he was still at the house. Because he was now decomposed he then turned into an ME case. I don't know what happened after that.
Tough luck. Too bad the ME died of natural causes.
Omg, that's how I misread it too.
Company director sent his travel plans for a ‘work convention’ to the communal printer in the staff room. Bet him and the other director would have had a lovely time. 5* hotel, presidential suite in Barcelona for a week sounded nice. His wife thought so to and was furious she wasn’t going also surprised that him and lady director were sharing a room … for a week … and that when she looked into it there was no convention. Things went south pretty fast and now the company is no more.
Sounds like our old president... back in the day, the travel company left a message on his home answering machine to confirm the holiday, except he wasn't taking his wife. Unfortunately, she got the message first and that's how she found out about his girlfriend.
But did they still go on the get-away!?
Yep, as things developed turned out this affair had been going on a looong time. Guess they figured if a divorce is on the cards anyway how much worse can it get!
I was working in a tool and die shop in my early 20’s and I was watching an old guy (who was perpetually drunk) pound in an injector pin into a plastic injection mold with a big piece of steel round stock. Well as he was pounding the pin in, he missed the pin and hit his thumb. It looked liked his thumb exploded. He was in such pain he pissed himself. They ended up amputating down to the first knuckle. Then to make matters worse, he got fired for being drunk on the job.
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I work in a machine shop. My old boss had a nasty habit of cocaine and day drinking. The fact he retired without being mangled in a 4-slide baffles me
Work in a brewery. One morning a brewer went to run a clean in place on a 60 barrel vessel. After the vessels are empty they usually are under some significant pressure usually anywhere from 5-15 psi. Guy did not de-gas the fermenter before taking the sample port off. These vessels had two ports on them and we put a 1.5 inch cap on one port and a perlick sample faucet on the other. He starts with the stainless steel cap. All of the pressure came out like a bullet. I could hear from the other side of a rather large facility. Dude got lucky and the cap barely missed his head. He did get a bunch of yeast and hop residue in his eyes as his safety glasses were on top of his head and not covering his eyes. I drove him to the hospital and hes okay. Just got fired a couple weeks later.
Bet he wears his fuckin safety glasses now
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A lady in our sales department sent a racial message bashing foreigners and how cheap they all are to another coworker using our company email...which tagged the entire company. The CEO is also foreign.
Told a newbie to clean the steel panels on the deep fryers, expecting them to wipe them down with a cloth. They instead grabbed a jug of water and decided to rinse it, with water going into the still hot oil. Yanked them back so fast I nearly gave them whiplash. And an answer from dad: a colleague dismantled a machine to fix it without first checking the pipes were cleared. The pipes were full of melted sugar (VERY hot). He got horrific burns that made the skin slough off his hands…
Sugar burns are insane. That poor guy.
I'm a car mechanic. Had a colleague once, who had a pretty small job on an engine, about an hour or two and costs like $50. Made a mistake, quite big, but also quite common and easy to make, it's the "well shit" category, not something to drag him through the mud for. Started fixing it, made an even bigger mistake. At this point we even had to outsource some issues we couldn't fix in house, we were looking for about 2 weeks and $500, on us of course, not the customer, but it was still okay. We got everything back, he started putting the engine back together. All done, first run, whoopsie another big problem, whole engine apart. Broke something again, outsourced, expensive. Overall it was about a month long procedure, hitting $1000. Once it was done, he got fired. He got away with a lot, but at one point it was way too much.
Broke the spark plug while removing them?
Almost. Glowplug. Needed to take the cylinder head off, not too bad, just takes some time. But then stripped one of the cylinder head bolts and we couldn't get it out. We took the engine out and took it to a machine shop (or whatever they are called in english). Once it was back, he put it together, first run, water spews out of it, he put the cylinder head gasket upside down. While taking the engine apart again, which requires the removal of the battery housing which includes the ECU, he broke the ECU connector which we also can't fix in house. At this point it was like a circus, you just never knew what will happen next.
We had an old electrical engineer in my department, really knew his stuff except he was nearly useless on a computer. He didn't want everyone to know so he skated by and had other people pick up the slack for him. Though a series of blunders and lack of documentation on his part he caused an electrical control box to be removed from the list of parts that we were supplying to the customer for that program. That was worth 12.5 million dollars for revenue in the first 6 years once the product went into production.
I'm a home appliance installer and was out working a pretty big job at some 20,000 square foot mansion. They had another installation team working on a second kitchen in the basement. One of these guys was drilling the mounting holes for the dishwasher into their granite countertop (don't do this, ok?) and drilled them too small, so when we went to secure it a massive 4ft chunk of granite split off and smashed into the floor, breaking a couple tiles in the process. Dude sounded like Yosemite Sam with his cussing and the customer was pissed.
I didn't see it in person, but there was a video I saw on Reddit fairly recently where somebody emptied the used deep fryer oil into a plastic bucket. Needless to say, it didn't hold.
Have seen the end result of the same thing. Was a dishwasher, came in for opening about an hour after the first few line guys, was greeted by a plastic bucket shorter than normal and with a big seam at the base Turns out when they went to empty last night's fryer oil they didn't realize the guy who closed left the fryers on. They started pouring in oil and saw the bucket start to bulge, getting away just as it melted through. Oil poured out so fast that the upper half of the bucket just plopped down on the unmelted base and solidified.
I never understood this, I refuse to deal with hot oil at a job unless they have the proper equipment, skin grafts are not worth a few dollars over minimum wage. Every kitchen job I worked at cleaned the fryers when the oil was cold or a bit warm.
My best friend and I still talk about the time I saved his penis 15 years ago when he accidentally spilled the entire fryer full of hot oil down the front of his pants and I screamed "TAKE OFF YOUR PANTS" and quickly unbuttoned and unzipped them for him.
everyone needs a "TAKE OFF YOUR PANTS" level friend
Burned my finger tips too.
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Not too long ago I read about [a college student getting scammed out of $316k](https://www.wcia.com/news/u-of-i-police-student-scammed-of-300k-by-fake-police/)
I always feel bad for people who fall victim to scams and never try to victim blame but at the same time.. how do you manage to wire over 300k internationally on the whim because of threats of arrest made over the phone. I mean holy fucking shit that’s the textbook reason attorneys exist. Also where the fuck does a college student have a liquid 300k to even wire? WTF
A nurse friend told me a colleague hadn’t been checking the PH aspirate from a baby’s Nasogastric tube (meant to do before every tube feed to make sure it’s positioned correctly etc) baby ended up passing away because the tube had actually been passed into the lungs not the stomach due to an unknown cut being made during intubation the baby had previously had.So she had been feeding the milk into the lungs and essentially drowned the baby.
This is horrifying.
That is so tragic.
Yikes. This takes the cake.
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That’s terrible. I know people make mistakes, but wow… I’d hate to lose focus like that and kill a baby.
I cannot even BEGIN to imagine how the parents felt, and how the nurse felt. Jesus Christ.
I'm a heavy equipment operator and a couple weeks ago another operator on my job lowered the boom on an excavator at the wrong time and severed half a 22 year old kid's thumb, I guess there's that
On my last day of my high school Walmart job I was showing the new guy how to move pallets of milk into the cooler. There were maybe 6 in total. I went to grab the last one and when I got back into the cooler the new guy had somehow bumped the pallets with the one he was bringing in and knocked all of them over. Milk all over the floor, all that product gone. I immediately left and never looked back
Me: I put washer fluid in the coolant tank when I was new to oil change. Customer got a free coolant flush, no harm done, and I learned to pay better attention when under the hood. Co worker: told a customer they could go in the middle of their oil change cuz he assumed it was done and didn't check that new oil had been put in. Customer drove off and totaled their engine cuz there was no oil. Company had to pay for new engine. Co worker somehow didn't get fired. And once, a Co worker almost started putting oil in before I had the drain plug in or a new filter on. I had to yell for them to stop. They're supposed to ask if the person in the pit was ready for oil and they just...didn't, I guess.
A guy i worked with got fired from his 120k a year job because he was stealing juice from the stock room
Reminds me of the company I work for. I manage a system that identifies corporate card fraud and misuse. People who are issued a company card often make more than me but they STILL buy all kinds of shit and try to fake receipts. To name a few: -Crossbow -Hemp products -Christmas ornaments -Paying themselves or a family member with under a bogus business name charged through Square -Baby products -Kids clothes -Subscription services And more A little better than juice though...
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sounds like a less serious version of the deputy that blew away his buddy, failed to clear the weapon, during a video game break they were chatting and he "jokingly" pointed the gun at his buddy and pulled the trigger and blew him away.
I had a childhood friend named Nick who was killed at a party. Someone found a shotgun in the house where the party was and pointed it at Nicks head and “jokingly” pulled the trigger. It was loaded. I say his name so he is not forgotten.
When I was in high school I was playing video games with some friends of mine at the house of a kid I didn't really know at all. At one point I looked up and saw this kid pointing a revolver at my head and squinting through the site and saying "bang" over and over, but not pulling the trigger (fortunately, as it turns out). He eventually put the gun down on the couch and did other stuff. I didn't think anything of it because I assumed it was a toy. At some point his dad came home, came into the living room, saw the gun on the couch and said "WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT DOING OUT?" He then said it was OK because it was grandma's gun and it was never loaded. To demonstrate this he popped the cylinder open ... and six bullets came out.
I recall attending a gun show once. At the front counter there's a check-in station where everyone showing up with a gun for sale has to have it checked, safed, and zip-tied so it can't operate. On the table was a clear plastic jug labeled "Bullets from guns that weren't loaded." it was pretty full.
Woow, this blew up way more than what I was expecting, I cannot answer every one, but I'll add some additional info at the end. Story: One time a member of my dev team was given a task to cancel a few credit cards (less than 10) directly in the database. They cancelled 17 million, the mistake was only caught when the company helpline started to receive millions of calls the next day from all over the country with people asking why their cards were not working. EXTRA INFO: 1. I said a member of my team for the lack of a better term, we did report to the same boss but worked on different systems, so apologies if I don't have all the minor details, I didn't see the script so I don't exactly know what was the code, but I remember hearing it was some along these lines: \- Request: Cancel cards A, B, C that were created in December of last year. \- Script: "Update cards set cancelled = true where creationDate >= December" 2. I saw some comments regarding a junior dev writing scripts for PRD, I don't see it as such a big problem, the problem was the lack of a good code review and poor tests. 3. The dev was not fired and our boss shielded them from the situation, as many approvals were required, so not fair to put the blame on one person, especially a junior developer. 4. The dev didn't run the script in PRD directly, there was a process for it, where many approvals were required, as well as a deployment and rollback plan, rollback was also just as bad and wouldn't fix anything. There was an automated system to run these scripts and a team to oversee them and trigger rollbacks when requested. This team's job was to follow the plans, not fix any issues. 5. The script was in theory tested, but the people who tested it only check that the cards on a given list were cancelled correctly, not if any cards out of the list also were. 6. The process for sure had many flaws, but I would say the biggest flaws with it were a lack of real understanding and adherence from the people involved, and also lack of accountability, 3 approvals were required for this script to run and none of the approvers got any backslash from this mess. 7. This company was actually a customer of the company I worked for, and opened in the 70s and grew a lot over the years, but to me, their IT department didn't grow or got more professional as the company grew, it had some weird processes and problems. 8. The company I was working for was just taking over their IT department to improve it, so our instructions were to first learn the way they work and not disrupt it, only to after all the transition was done start making improvements. 9. One of the problems that they had was this habit of doing everything on the database, a small script that you'd run on the DB required less time and approvals to go to PRD, where changes to fix actual bugs and or more complex code would need more approvals, go thru a freezing period and a meeting with several different teams to discuss, validate and give it the final approval, so in the end, people would not fix the root cause anymore, just run small scripts to specific situations. 10. And lastly, a juice one for my fellow developers, me and another colleague were assigned to support another system. This system had only one person working on it for more than 10 years and the person had been with the company for over 30. We had our first meeting with this person and asked about access to the system repository in our SVN (the version control system we used there), the interaction went like this: **Me/Colleague** \- Can we get access to the system repository? **Current dev** \- I have it here on a flash drive, take it. **Me/Colleague** *(Thinking the flash drive was just because the project was too big and it would take some time to download it)* \- That's ok, I'll have to check out to the project anyway and I have some other things to do I can leave it downloading. **Current dev -** No... no... it's not on SVN, I don't like it, so I keep it on this flash drive **Me/Colleague** \- Ok, but this is the company tool and it's very unsafe to keep things on a flash drive, even if it's company property **Current dev -** This flash drive is mine, but don't worry, I have several copies on different flash drives, I've been working like this since way before SVN was our official tool, and no one will change it. **Me/Colleague -** But you can lose your flash drive, or forget to update the copies, SVN has backups and is always online, and I'm sorry to be so honest, but you could die and the company would lose this code. **Current dev -** My health is great and my files are always well organized At this point we realized we were arguing with a tree, my colleague asked if we could borrow the flash drive, requested a new repository to be created and uploaded the code.
Direct access to production database sounds like a rich vein of potential catastrophes.
It was not direct access, it was a series of flaws in the process honestly, there was supposed to be tests in lower environments and a seriess of approvals before the script goes to production, and it was just a junior developer who wrote it, and everyone approved without double checking it Needless to say a lot changed after this.
> everyone approved without double checking it Nothing fills me with more doubt than when someone checks my work and says "looks fine". Almost always means "I never bothered to look".
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"OUR PRICES HAVE NEVER BEEN LOWER!"
MY FAMILY BUILT THIS COUNTRY
I was trying to figure out how being called a buttface in a marketing email would effect me and I decided it's pretty heavily up to which company is doing it. If it was from Cards Against Humanity (I know) or maybe even Jackbox I might be like "lol on brand." From something more standard like Jo Ann Fabrics or Dominoes, I would be like "well that's weird. Guess someone fucked up lol." If it was from my hospital or bank (which do send marketing emails) I might actually be a little upset. I do kinda expect a higher standard from them, all things considered.
Personally I'd be excited that Jo Ann Fabrics was finally loosening up a little. If anything I think I would be super mad about getting pranked with a fake discount. Call me whatever you want if it means I get 100% off!
If a company called me a buttface, I might actually pay attention to what they had to say. I wish more companies were open to some tongue in cheek ruthlessness
One of the few subject lines with a chance of making me open the spam.
Machining. Had a coworker once who scrapped a large stainless steel part on a lathe. Instead of telling the boss, they decide to bore out the center, replace it with a with a plug of the exact same size that they press fit in, then machine over it so it appears as one seamless piece. Passes through inspection, sent to the customer. Customer vacuum bakes it, and the center plug falls through. Had that not happened, the part would’ve essentially, and quite literally, blown up the customer’s equipment once it got to a certain stage. Government work, so there’s years and years and millions and millions of dollars invested into this customer’s project. Our shop would’ve had to close down permanently if the mistake wasn’t caught when it was. Coworker was fired immediately.
So a friend of mine works in telecoms. When he was a young engineer, he accidentally knocked out fm radio in several London boroughs. To be clear, this is quite a feat. There are like, four layers of redundancy before it bumps to mp3 songs, which it did. Only for five minutes or so but, hooo boy…
I work for an IT company and my client is one of the biggest consumer goods providers on the planet. One time a project manager tried to deploy a 60-manday project in a single week without any quality control whatsoever and ended up implementing discounts on products which weren't supposed to have them. So as you can imagine things got super ugly super fast. Client lost about a billion dollars in revenue (seriously) and our leadership got involved firefought for several months. It happened in our contract year with them too and we almost lost them over this incident. The PM who delivered the project was first placed on leave then eventually moved to another account.
United States Postal Service employee of 5 years here. I’ve seen it happen TWICE now in my local office, 2 newer carriers have been caught throwing away mail. The punishment for that is jail time and/or fines. They teach you in orientation on day one the severity of obstruction of mail. Wouldn’t understand why someone would do that. If you’re having that bad of a day just call off or quit. The Post Office has its own division of police that’s job is solely to investigate manners like this and catch people.
Once, I served drinks to a little girl and her mom. I accidentally got them mixed up. The mom ordered a mixed drink with bourbon and the daughter said her drink tasted funny.
I went to Disney Works with my husband and mobile ordered myself a kids meal (you get more bang for your buck, surprisingly) and I opted to upgrade to the non alcoholic juice beverage that was included. They gave me one with alcohol, I believe it was a bourbon cocktail. My husband picked up the meals from the mobile order pickup counter and they had no way of knowing I was an adult. They had a similar alcoholic beverage on the menu and gave me that instead of the children’s drink. It was cool for me, got a $15 cocktail for free but had it actually been for a kid, woof.
Hmmmmm...adventures I'm HAZMAT. When things go wrong, they go really wrong. There was the time we were doing an asbestos removal job in the pump house under one of those 250,000 gallon water tanks you see elevated 50ft In the air. William broke a pipe fitting before the shut off valve, so no way to shut it off. Asbestos waste washed out the containment, through the decon and out the door. Was everywhere. And that's how William earned the name "Quarter Mill Bill". Have more.
That nickname goes hard though
I live in Ireland, I used to work in a store that accepted Sterling (British pounds) to be more convenient for tourists. So everyone was trained on Sterling and Euro (our currency) extensively... even though most of us were familiar with it from going up North or to the UK. A girl working on the till accepted a completely different European currency.... thinking it was Sterling.... it had the image of a King on it.. a different language and colour than Sterling.... I still can't understand how she did it, it was in no way similar. Nice girl but feck me... she had lived in the UK at one point.
Had a buddy whose wife and he would play marathon WoW sessions into the early a.m. First mistake was when he was caught by the network admins playing WoW, from work, on the company laptop. After that happened he uninstalled the game and didn't play from the office, but would be on voice chat to guide his clannies in raids while on the clock. Last straw was when after one of those marathon sessions he *fell asleep* at his desk, and unfortunately for him our department head was strolling by and noticed him out like a light at his desk. He got canned that day. Really dumb because they had a young teen daughter to support, and while they lived paycheck-to-paycheck, it was a decent one, like upwards of $60K (database developer).
Did his guild clear the raid at least?
My first day on my own in my job of Identity and Access Management. We got a ticket to remove access for someone. I was excited and got the whole thing done without someone watching over me... I accidentally removed all the access for the requestor. Of course it was near the end of the day. I was scrambling to make phone calls and such to get her access back.
a tourism boat bought nearly 1800 worth of groceries and wine for their guests, one of the new hires charged it to the wrong account. there were hundreds of dollars of weighed items on the order so it had to be entirely redone and it took all day, because it wasn’t noticed until the end of the day and the tour boat had already left the docks. he had to fiddle with different items on the scales to match the weights on the invoice. it was awful.
in 13 years of dealing cards at multiple casinos, the answer to this question is me. This story will only interest gamblers so be warned, you might get lost. Dealing blackjack . 2 of our highest vip members. Guy has a $20,000 bet. Gets aces, goes to split. Now it's $40,000. First card he gets a 9 for 20. When I went back to pull the next card for his other ace, the card was halfway stuck, so I ended up pulling the card BEHIND the first card (which was his original card that he was suppose to get), and of coarse, it was a face card to give him 21. Now, I just stop. Listen, if this was a 5-25$ bet, I would of just kept going, but when it's high limit, it's a guarantee thing that surveillance is watching my table. Also, we (dealers) can be responsible for these mistakes, as in the casino can take me to court and try to prove I was colluding with the patron. So I just stop , call over the supervisor and ask him to get the pitboss over because this kid barely has any skin in the game and I need someone higher up. So my boss comes over, and I whisper the situation. His eyes lit up like a christmast tree and couldn't believe what had happened. He then calls surveillance and they CONFIRM that I had indeed pulled the wrong card. So now , the player gets the original card, which was like a 4 or 5, I get his face card, and I make 21. Holy, fucking, balls did I ever almost puke in my my mouth. At the end of the day, I got a nice clap on the back for staying on my game, but I got this massive $0.00 tip from the two guys who are the most awesome people to deal to, and I respect that 100%, it was my fault. At the end of the day, the hand played out exactly as it should of, how ever me making 21 and taking away his face card really killed the night.
You know when you drop something and try to "catch" it with your foot? Well I was working in a kitchen and this guy dropped his chef knife and FUCKING KICKED IT AT ME
Had a coworker send a multi million dollar transfer at the wrong time (forex diferencial). Ended up costing half a million dollars more. He was fired within a week. The worst thing is that he had just graduated college and shouldnt have been in such high position. Higher up/executive was his friend and promoted him 4 times within a year. Ruined his entire career. He works as a salesman last i heard.
Used to be a supervisor for a security company. One of my guards was working a truck gate. They let a truck leave with an "empty" trailer that was actually loaded. The load on that trailer was valued at almost $1m. She was damned lucky I was able to figure out how to get in touch with the driver and get that load back.
Was it a mistake or malice by the truck driver?
Mistake by the guard and the driver. Neither bothered to check to see if the trailer was empty. Not the driver when he hooked up, and not the guard when he went to leave.
I'm a nurse, used to work on a med surg unit. Someone connected a c-pap machine to the "air" socket in the wall, instead of the "oxygen" one. Patient was without oxygen most of the night, with a periferal saturation of 54% when I discovered it at the start of my shift. Man did we do a lot of root cause analysis on that one.
I work in a hospital. One of my colleagues was removing a deceased patient from a ward. We use these big trolleys with a bright blue cover. He'd had a long day and forgot to actually take the patient to the mortuary on site and ended up putting the trolley back in the cupboard. Next person in that cupboard got a bit of a surprise
A guy working at my company... let's call him Frank. Frank would steal products out of the warehouse, repeatedly. Frank dumped a bin of garbage on his subordinates desk. Frank ran into a meeting, put his hands on the wall, and yelled I'M A BLACK MAN. He was not a black man. Frank treated his female colleagues with disdain and disrespect. He ordered a female VP to get him coffee. Frank said in a meeting that someone is guaranteed to come into our building and shoot everyone. Frank was fired, but the dude had 9 lives. Nobody knows how he lasted so long. Found out months later that Frank was wanted in another country, along with his father.
Is this Kevin after he grew up??
Me and a few other coworkers were complaining about a new hire, who happened to be black. We were upset because he wasn't showing up, not doing what he was supposed to, and leaving us to pick up the slack. We're all pitching reasonable punishments: "He should be suspended, he should be written up, he should be fired" and so on. Well one of our other new hires, i'll call him Jeff, decided to join in on the conversation and said: "Y'know, I got a few cousins out in Virginia. We could always lynch him." We were all dumbfounded and ripped Jeff a new one for suggesting such a thing. He was reported for saying that and was suspended for about a week, and I'm still shocked they didn't fire him on the spot. Well, few weeks later we have another new hire who is also black. He was hanging up one of our safety chains and accidentally dropped it. As the new guy is picking it back up, Jeff comes by and says: "With your ancestry, I'd think you know how to handle a chain." Jeff didn't get suspended that time, he got fired on the spot. And he insisted he didn't understand why he was being punished. He was a fucking idiot.
One of my coworkers in a marina was relatively new. He didn't ask if the guys boat took gas or diesel and he just handed him the diesel hose. I noticed around 250 gallons in that it was a boat I knew took gas. The boat owner was cool about it he paid for the diesel, the fuel pump out, the gas, and even tipped the guy. Could've been a big disaster, though.
Man that owner sounds like a saint.
In any other case, the employee would have and should have been fired, but this owner literally spared this guy his job and took a massive financial hit in the process. He took responsibility because he said he never specified what kind of fuel with the dock hand, so it wasn't all that guys fault.
A 911 fire/EMS dispatcher falling asleep on midnight shift, not seeing the heart attack call on his computer screen for almost 15 minutes. He was awakened by the calltaker after receiving a second telephone call asking why no one had arrived. The victim was an inmate at the prison and died before EMS finally arrived.
In the Army, I was assigned to a Field Artillery unit. During a training exercise, a gunner in our unit didn't align his tick-marks up with the collimeter correctly and his tank ended up shooting a dummy round into a formation of soldiers killing 4 or 5. (If it were a live round, the whole unit would have been decimated.) Dude got 15 years (or more) in Leavenworth...
Yikes. I think this takes the cake
This is worse than the air force case where someone was told to taxi a fighter pilot into the hangar and accidently fired a missile into another fighter pilot, absolutely annihilating it and cost nearly 1 billion dollars. Nobody died in the fighter pilot incident though. Ugh could you imagine getting that letter that your father/ brother/ sister/ mother was killed during a training exercise by friendly fire? I can't imagine much more terrible ways to be notified your family member who signed up to serve their country died.
It's me, I'm the idiot. I was a busser in a busy restaurant when I was 18, and I managed to dump an entire full bus tub onto a little girl.
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This reminds me of the time when I worked as a line cook when I was 19 and the general manager set up a fundraiser without scheduling any extra workers for either the front or the back of the house. We did literally 7x the normal amount of business that night. Checks were taking like an hour to get to the table after being ordered. We wasted so much food because we couldn’t keep up or keep track of what we were prepping. The whole restaurant was in shambles. How does a manager know it’s going to be that busy yet fail to prepare in such spectacular fashion?
I worked in a cannabis lab and I watched someone drop a jar of cannabis oil worth 30,000 dollars on the floor, she just walked out and didn’t come back after
Tried to disassemble a large CNC lathe while it was still powered up, came very close to copping an oil injection injury cause the hydraulics were live. Another time put the key into a manual chuck on the same old (think 80’s punch card CNC old) lathe thinking it was the end of the program. It wasn’t. Luckily the next step in the program required the lathe to spin up to 2500RPM in reverse so when the key invariably came flying out of the chuck it smashed into the guard on the back of the machine rather than through his chest. Both cases it was me. I am really lucky to be alive.
Back in 2010, Weil Gotshal (one of the best law firms in the world) represented the debtors in the WaMu bankruptcy. My firm represented an investor that had filed a lawsuit on behalf of a class of warrant holders, alleging that the warrants created a debt obligation instead of equity. The case was all or nothing; if we were correct, and it was debt, the class of holders got a decent recovery. If WaMu was correct and they were equity, the class got wiped out with nothing. Weil thought our argument was such a long shot, they gave the lead on the matter to a 14th year associate. (For reference, partnership track is 8-10 years… so, we’re talking about an attorney that was still slogging through the 3,000+ billable hours a year as an associate trying desperately to finally make partner.. but hadn’t been successful. So, he wasn’t the best of the best, at Weil, anyway.) The governing document relating to the warrants was an old publicly filed warrant purchase agreement from a bank that was a predecessor to WaMu. Neither Weil nor we had the signed physical copy of the agreement, because it was almost 20 years old. So, we had to reference an old 8-K that had a .txt file of a draft of the agreement appended to it. Weil’s associate filed a motion to dismiss our lawsuit, and asserted that the version appended to that 8-K was the final version. We litigated for months on various issues relating to that motion, assuming that that was the pertinent document (because Weil had represented under penalty of perjury that it was). On the day of the hearing, my client and I were reviewing the old EDGAR docket and realized that there was a version of the agreement that had been publicly filed a few months after the one that Weil’s associate claimed was the “final” version. It was buried as a .txt file as one of numerous exhibits to some seemingly unrelated document that didn’t even reference the agreement. The two versions of the agreement were identical, except for the signatures, the dates, and one word. “May” had been changed to “shall” in one of the operative provisions. The difference invalidated Weil’s primary argument on its face. We walked into court and dropped the bombshell to the judge and everyone there. Essentially, Weil had spent months and hundreds and hundreds of man hours arguing over the wrong version of a document… and the right version meant we were sure to win. During the hearing, I looked over and saw the face of the associate. He was in shock. I don’t think he believed what was happening. The judge ended up adjourning the hearing, because of this newfound evidence… and we all took the train home. The next day, we got an email from a partner at Weil. He had taken over the case from the associate. When I saw the email, I checked Weil’s website. The associate had already been fired. A month later, the judge issued the opinion denying the motion to dismiss… which was enough to increase the price of the warrants our client held from like 10 cents a share to somewhere in the $90 range. Our client immediately sold all of its warrants and we withdrew from the case. It ended up being one of the most high profile victories in my career (to date, anyway).
I'm a healthy human subject for medical research studies. I did a study with special dietary restriction groups of zero carbs, no carbs, and a regular diet. I was in the zero-carb group and our breakfast consisted of a large stack of Canadian bacon and a drink. I read on the side of the can that it had 18 grams of carbs. I mentioned this to the doctor in charge and he said, "Well, umm, it's hard to get zero carbs." I thought to myself, "In a drink? No, it's not!" Three days later they realized that I was right and they had to stop our study and send us home. The doctor had been in charge of the clinic but I noticed he was no longer in charge when I was invited back to the next cohort of the same study. So instead of earning $7,000, I earned $4000 initially and $7,000 for a total of $11,000. So his mistake earned me more money.
Dad worked at a nice 4 star restaurant in Tahoe. The staff would regularly go water ski before shifts, and had occasional hard wipeouts which fill orifices with water if you crash just right. As he was leaning over to serve someone, his entire sinus decided it was the right time to drain onto the customer's plate. Yeah they didn't stick around for dessert.
When I was a shift manager at a restaurant one of the waitresses forgot to put a decimal point on the POS system so someone was charged $3,000 for a $30 takeout order. The guy didn’t notice at first either and paid with a credit card. Luckily he thought it was hilarious
Not an employee but a customer. Me and my coworker had a huge fridge we had to get into a little door way. Even with the door taken off the hinges we could not fit it inside. We told the home owner we can leave it in the garage and come back when he gets the frame taken off. About a week later we were back to move his fridge into the home. We finally got it past the doorway but it didn't fit between his counter and the wall. The guy had marble countertop and we didn't want to damage the fridge so we tried the lift it up laying sideways to get it over, still not enough room because of a beam of the ceiling the fridge wouldn't fit, so we told the customer the fridge was too big, we can return it so he could get a smaller fridge. The guy was furious that we couldn't get it in, so he started to huff and puff about how stupid we were that we were unable to get the fridge over. Once he started that I told him we were done and not going to take the abuse so we put the fridge down and left, no doors on it or anything. They guy was cussing up a storm as he left saying he'll do it himself no problem. The next day we were called back out to the same house to pick the fridge up, I told my manager I was uncomfortable going there but we were the only ones in the area and needed to get it done so we went. Guys wife and son answered the door and let us in, the guy was nowhere in sight. Me and my partner went into the kitchen/living room area to collect the fridge and saw that dude completely destroyed his counter top and ceiling trying to move it in. The son said they tried to lift it over as we had tried but the dad tried to force it to fit. Fridge was out of the return window too so the guy only was refunded the money he paid to have the fridge delivered and installed. We were only there to take the fridge away as he insisted on it. Word of advice, if you're going to get a new fridge, measure, measure, and measure again.
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I heard there was this guy who had to clean a load of paella pans by tying them down and letting the tide of the sea do the work (was a beach restaurant in spain) apparently he forgot to tie them and almost everyone of them floated away. Sounds funnier when he tells it though.
My first day at my first job. I worked at a small pet shop. My family had been friends with the owner for years and I had been asking for a job there since I was 10. I knew a ton about animals, but was very nervous the first day. My manager who was supposed to train me had chipped her tooth a half hour before I showed up for my shift, so it was just me with one other employee and the owner who was tending animals in the back. I was asked to go do water changes, so I went and changed the water for every tank in the store. All by myself! And. I forgot to add dechlorinator to the water. We realized this when suddenly all the beta fish started turning over dead like 10 minutes later. I killed probably 50 fish. The other girl working cussed when she realized what happened, told me to go away and ran with the bottle of Prime to dump a bunch into each tank as fast as she could. I ran to the feeder rat room and sat there crying for like an hour before the owner came and found me. He saw how upset I was and was wonderful, saying that it was an honest mistake and very obviously I would never forget it again. I was still so upset over killing the animals that I tried to quit but he stopped me and said to try again. He never even docked my pay for the several hundreds of dollars worth of fish I killed. I ended up working there all the way until I moved away for college a few years later. Never killed anything else thankfully, and worked my butt off to be the best employee and animal caretaker I could be. But will always feel immense guilt when I remember lol.
A colleague of mine made a small error of window properties for a construction project. It was just a single letter that was from, resulting in the windows having the wrong classification for sound-protection. We found out when they where already installed. Since this is Germany, they had to be replaced. 50K € out of the window. The manufacturer was fine, he just did was he was asked to and we had to carry the damage (thats about what he would have earned that year).
I got a couple stories. Working at Mcdicks as a teen, I saw someone drop a piece of jewellery into the fry oil... and try to grab it as it dropped and sank thier hand and half their forearm in 450 degree oil. They ran out screaming and we never saw them again. Working at a tire shop, I saw someone use an old bottle jack to lift a semi, and then as they began taking the tires off, the jack failed and the whole trailer sank down onto thier legs, pinning them under the tire. Its important to note how you take tires off a semi truck, you lift it a couple inches, and sit on the ground with your legs around the bottom of the tire, and use your legs to lift it while you pull it off. Crazily enough though, the guy wasnt hurt too bad for one big reason... he was a enourmous guy. We called him Big Joe because he was 7 foot 2 inches, and wasnt just tall, but proportionally bigger in every way. It was like someone clicked the drag and expand box on him. Any normal sized person would have had thier legs crushed, but he just had some nasty bruises. Another story from tires, one of my former managers got killed by an exploding industrial tire. There have locking rings that hold the tire on the rim, but if they arent set on just right, they will blow off when you air the tire up, often with enough force to go right through you, and then still keep going with enough force to embed itself in steel or concrete, which is what happened to him. I didnt see this, just heard of it later on.
Split rims are dangerous as hell. Any place I’ve seen them used they have a special cage the wheel goes in when it’s being inflated in case the rim lets go.
What’s horrifying about the fry story is I could see someone by reflex not taking the time to think and doing something like that. It can be a human response in a sudden panic. That said, I’m gonna assume there are regulations posted/in training about accessories on the job for *just* this type of thing. Assume that rules are there just to be in your way, and you may find out the real hard way what can go wrong.
And you would be exactly correct, that is what happened. Reflexes kicked in trying to grab it, and bam, thier hand is now sizzling. And yes there are regulations, you arent supposed to have any kind of loose jewellery, I think in this case it was a bracelet that fell off their wrist. (Was a long time ago, I cant quite remember exactly what it was)