Guy in my department strolls into my office and says, “Welp, this is probably my last day working here.” I asked him why he would say that. He sits down and shoves his phone across the desk toward me. I start reading and it’s an email from him to the CEO comaining that our boss is, in so many words, a complete fucking moron.
I finished reading and was just like, “Yeah, you shouldn’t have done that.” I mean, he wasn’t wrong. I agreed with basically everything in his email. He was also right about it being his last day working there because he was fired that afternoon.
What eventually happened to the boss?
Nothing. As far as I know he’s still there. That company was a raging dumpster fire.
This sounds a lot like a company I’ve worked at honestly.
We had a guy that would email the CEO with audio or video of him singing or something. Good dude. Sold people eggs every week from his hens. Got fired for actual bullshit his lead should’ve been canned for.
Hmmmmm. Been thinking about starting a youtube channel. Maybe ballads to the CEO could be the theme. I wonder how long before it’s get called in by hr.
Manager (34) impregnated a delivery driver (16/17) and ran away to Tennessee because he couldn’t be prosecuted for it there.
You are prosecuted where you committed the crime.
He wasn’t that smart.
I love it. You can’t see me because I can’t see you!
An IT company I worked for many years ago went through a massive growing phase. One of the things that lead to this growth was the hiring of much more competent management, particularly in security and the data center.
Security actually started doing their jobs and started routinely doing network scans. They discovered two servers that were not located in the data center, which was a huge no no. The servers were running two porn websites off the company’s internet connection. He had been doing it for years and apparently was making many times his company salary from them.
Different times and companies, but I’ve seen people fired for
- being in his 30s and sleeping with the 14-15 year-old worker (I forget exactly how old she was). This was working in a movie theater and he was the GM.
- found CSAM on their computer
- many for sexual harassment (a few different jobs in IT)
I think that’s it for the NSFW stuff.
From my current workplace:
Someone was putting mail in a cabinet under their desk instead of the outbox, we’re talking hundreds of letters/cheques/invoices and some life-changing documents from a few months.
The mail outbox was on their desk, and easier to reach than the cabinet.From previous workplaces:
- Breaking down a door and raping someone that had barricaded themselves behind said door.
- Sexual interference.
- not having a licence, and getting a DUI with a work truck that they stole.
And outrageous in a different way:
for only beating last year’s sales by 3% instead of by 4%.Have you heard any specific reasons for the mail hoarder’s actions at your current workplace, or is it still a fresh case? I’m guessing it was nefarious, since the mail outbox was closer and seemingly more obvious than the secret stashing cabinet. Just wanted to be a dingus to intended mail recipients? I’d also be curious if it was all mail they handled or just select pieces. So many burning questions!!
I am a contractor so I don’t work in a standard office setting right now. I miss the heck out of juicy office gossip, at least about those who deserve such sordid stories! (Karen in accounting is actually really nice, Carl.)
The reason why some people think they did it was because it was their job to take the mail to the mail room. But they were also the person who needed to go to the mail room to get our mail every day, which they did, every day. If they were already taking the elevator down to the mail room to get the mail, why not take the outgoing mail?!?
We also found out that they were just marking tasks as complete about 20% of the time, so we had to double-check every task assigned to them for the previous 6 months.I earned my living with a hammer or a forklift for most of my life, and I never thought I would like the office gossip. But, It’s kinda great.
It’s generally a different level than it was with the construction guys.
“Joanne’s boyfriend might be emotionally abusive, and she won’t break up with him. Be kind to her.”
vs
“John got drunk last night after losing custody, and put his new girlfriend into a coma. We’ll need you to help with the gable overhangs.”
This happened more than 15 years ago and is a pretty wild ride. I may have a few minor details askew, but this is the basic story.
There was this police officer who was operating as a controller for another undercover police officer. A controller is the interface between the undercover guy and his team in the office. It allows the undercover guy to operate loose as a goose and the controller runs about behind the scenes making things happen.
Well, one night the controller gets completely hammered, off his tits drunk, then picks up a hooker and takes her to a dodgy motel and has sex. Then he passes out. The hooker couldn’t wake him, so she takes his car keys and drives to where she was picked up from and abandons his undercover car with the keys still in the ignition.
Back in the hotel, the controller wakes up to find the car gone - along with suitcase containing several thousand dollars that was sitting in the trunk. Every note in the stash, naturally, had the serial number recorded.
The controller panicked and called a bunch of off-duty and on-duty friends who attempted to locate the car, and hopefully the drug-buy cash, before they had to officially report what happened.
In the end, they couldn’t find the car, so the controller self-reported the whole sorry story. He was arrested and sacked, but didn’t do time. They eventually found the car, still with the keys in the ignition and the cash still sitting in the trunk, safe and sound. All his friends got into various amounts of trouble for assisting with the cover-up.
Bonus points. While this wild escapade was happening the controller’s wife was sitting at home with a newborn baby.
It is still talked about today - with reverence - as the single biggest display of mass stupidity in the department.
Working on a boat. We got a new shipmate who had worked there on previous seasons, most of us didn’t know him but he was good friends with another member of the crew. The day he got in the two of them spent the night catching up and getting absolutely trashed. Night ended with new guy stumbling in to the cook’s cabin and pissing right on the cook while he was sleeping. New guy was fired that morning without having worked a single day.
Hopeful ship was at shore still at the time? Would suck to be fired while out at sea. Awkward ride back.
We were in Puerto Rico for our winter maintenance period, just starting to bring on crew for the sailing season. I’ve never worked on a boat where people drink underway and I don’t think I’d want to.
On boats you usually don’t get told you’re fired until you reach port.
There was a guy who was in tech support who talked to a customer about who was hot or not in the company. It was actually the customer who started the conversation, but the rep ran with it and used all kinds of unprofessional and disparaging language when describing his female co-workers.
That call happened to have a supervisor listening in, so he was fired immediately after he got off the call. The thing is found out who called in, and the women on the team had to assist him when he called for support.
A guy on my team was absolutely convinced the external monitors he had were 1080p and not 1680*1050 resolution, and that everyone else using 1680*1050 were just wrong. He got into an argument with IT service desk over HDMI cables, which he wanted to prove himself correct (since everyone else were supposedly chumps for accepting the tyranny of having to use DVI cables for their monitors, thus forcing them to use the lower resolution). The argument escalated and well, he kind of just disappeared after that and never came back.
The IT service desk folks were already touchy about their HDMI cables since people were apparently stealing them for use in the meeting rooms.
Pity, I liked him but that was kind of unhinged. Besides, the monitors’ native res was definitely 1680*1050 lol.
Unhinged entry level employee screaming and swearing and threatening the CFO and spit in her coffee mug.
An email went out to the whole company telling us not to let him in the building before he even got back to his desk to be fired. This is a software company, not exactly the type of place that has armed guards, but the (ex-military) information security dude set up in the area packing for a few weeks after that.
Hope the info sec guy got some hazard bonus. Doubt he/she would ask for it though.
Someone got really drunk and was in the bathroom willing to take all comers at a work function.
It was a shame, I liked working with them.
was in the bathroom willing to take all comers
Can’t tell if they wanted to participate in sex acts or have a brawl
It was a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B.
Por que no los dos?
A guy in our data center couldn’t figure out who owned a particular machine that he needed to work on. So his solution to figure it out was to let them come to him. He went and pulled out the network cable and waited. He was escorted out a little while later. The moral of the story is don’t go disabling production machines on purpose.
Yeah, I’ve done that before – after asking literally everyone in IT, plus our external consultants, and getting the go-ahead from my team lead and the head of IT.
Honestly we do that when we ask and no one speaks up. Lovingly called the “scream test” as we wait to see who screams.
Scream tests are a last resort though.
Sounds like it was a last resort if he “couldn’t figure out” whose machine it was.
I don’t understand how that is even possible.
Are there no logs? No documentation? Does everyone share an admin user with full rights?
I mean, there has to be a way to find out who accessed the machine last time.company a gets bought by company b. company b fires 50% of company a.
even a scream test won’t get you answers because nobody is around that could complain nor know where the docs are.
You’d be surprised with inheriting tech debt. Quite often there’s no documentation, the last person to log in to the system is an admin that quit 3 years ago, but it doesn’t much matter because that’s only for a direct console login which normal users don’t do when accessing the application. With tribal knowledge gone and no documentation, only when you pull the network for a bit do you discover that there was this one random script running on it that was responsible for loading up all the needed data in the current system, when 9 of the other 10 times those scripts were no longer needed.
In a perfect world you’d have documentation, architecture and data flow diagrams for everything, but “ain’t nobody got time for that” and it doesn’t happen.
Had that the other way around recently. A docker container failed to come back up after I had updated the host OS.
Was about ready to restore the snapshot, when I looked further back in the logs on a hunch.
Turns out that container hadn’t worked before the update either. The software’s developer is long gone, and no one could tell me what it was supposedly doing.
You’d be surprised. I had some security devices that I was actively using get shut down simply because some paperwork didn’t get filled out properly and the data center team claimed they had no documentation on them.
I guess it depends on where you work. This was a large datacenter for a very large health insurance company. They made it a point later that day to remind people that it was a fireable offense to mess with production machines like that on purpose. And evidently the service he disabled was critical enough that it didn’t take long for the hammer to come down. There were plenty of ways to find out who owned the machine, he just chose the easiest and got fired on the spot for it.
So it wasn’t accurate when you said he “couldn’t” figure it out.
He couldn’t figure it out, a competent person could have without unplugging it.
Well I am not him, so I can’t tell you whether or not he actually “could” have figured it out. The options to figure it out did exist, but he chose not to use them giving it the appearance that he “couldn’t”. Are you this much fun at parties?
Where I worked we had a very important time sensitive project. The server had to do a lot of calculations on a terrain dataset that covered the entire planet.
The server had a huge amount of RAM and each calculation block took about a week. It could not be saved until the end of the calculation and only that server had the RAM to do the work. So if it went down we could lose almost a weeks work.
Project was due in 6 months and calculation time was estimated to be about 5 1/2 months. So we couldn’t afford any interruptions.
We had bought a huge UPS meant for a whole server rack. For this one server. It could keep the server up for three days. That way even if wet lost power over the weekend it would keep going and we would have time to buy a generator.
One Friday afternoon the building losses power and I go check on the server room. Sure enough the big UPS with a sign saying only for project xyz has a bunch of other servers plugged into it.
I quickly unplug all but ours. I tell my boss and we go home at 5. Latter that day the power comes back on.
On Monday there are a ton of departments bitching that they came in an their servers were unplugged. Lots of people wanted me fired. My boss backed me and nothing happened but it was stressful.
At a startup a long time ago, I was working on the weekend and brought my 3 year old with me. We had a customer coming in next week and this one machine was 5 days into a 7 day model build.
We had to go into that office to help someone with something unrelated. The little shit saw the blinking light and headed straight for the button.
On this computer (HP 710), it didn’t shut off until you released the button. He actually was just pressing it but got spooked when I tried to get to it.
The next day our CEO told the guys that built that app that it had to be made so it could recover from crashes and restart from where it left off.
I’d be super gluing those plastic toddler plug covers all over that thing.
fuck those other departments.
If you fear reprisal for a scream test then you need to make it look like an accident.
Coworker found him on the sex offender registry for messages with some woman trying to arrange a sexual meetup with her daughter. Not even a statutory teenager situation, an actual child. Apparently he had some connections with law enforcement which kept him out of jail.
Everyone already hated him for general creepiness and being terrible at his job, so there was a degree of vindication in confirming how horrible of a person he was. Still super fucked up.
This is one of my favorite stories. I only observed the events or was told firsthand by those involved. This is a true story.
Working in a crappy thrift store chain. Coworkers are cool as shit though. Befriend all the ones remotely close to my age. Customers are still terrible though. Especially the ones with the shitty kids that just terrorize the store while they absent-mindedly browse and shop.
One day this little shit is just running around the store and just making extra work for everybody for no good reason. Opening sealed bags of random toys. Etc.
After finally having enough of his bullshit, a coworker friend goes over to the kid and tells him, very sternly, he needs to go back to his mom. Little shit runs back and complains to his mom whom happens to be a total bitch; like when I hear the term “Karen” being used, she’s a textbook example of one.
Karen escalates, fast forward to outside the managers office, there stands Karen, my Friend, Manager and Little Shit.
While Karen is bitching to the Manager about how “Friend can’t talk to her kid like that” & “he’s not his father,” etc. The Little Shit looks at Friend and with a taunting edge stated: "You’re gonna get fired!" Without missing a beat Friend looks Little Shit in the eye and replies with a simple Fuck You. A 34 year old man saying that to some 10 year old brat? Hilarious. Everybody just fell silent with their jaw on the ground. Karen, Manager and Little Shit all silent for a moment. The rage building in Karen was written all across her face though. When she could finally utter words Manager started with "Friend, go home." “Okay!” He left with a great big smile on his face… he did get fired because of that though. He said it was worth it.
That’s a very bad decision as a manager, if I was another employee in that store I would take that to mean never control kids in the store, let the manager deal with that.
And if I was the friend I would have asked during that exchange with the manager present “So, I assume that means she’s paying for everything the kid broke before I asked him to stop, right?” Just to see the reactions.
She was a very bad manager and always quick to make the customer happy. I ended up leaving shortly after that incident.
Not my workplace exactly, but I used to hang out with this Kiwi who worked as a foreign English teacher in Korea in the same small Korean city as me. The foreigner community was fairly close-knit because there was only 50ish of us.
We all knew him. Everyone liked him. Fun guy. A little weird sometimes. He never told anyone his last name. The end of his pinkie finger was missing and if you asked him about it, he always said a shark bit it off.
One vacation about two years into his tenure, he decided to take a trip to Las Vegas. He never came back. I’m not 100% on the details past this point, but what I heard was they stopped him from entering the US because he was wanted in New Zealand on 37 counts of distributing child pornography. He was basically extradited back there and as far as I know went to prison. His trail disappears there.
