I work in 911 dispatch, so this is going to depend a bit on if we’re counting incidents that we’ve handled as dispatchers, or if we’re only counting incidents that physically happened at our dispatch center.
For the former, I’m going to just leave it at- we’ve handled a little bit of everything. If you can imagine it we’ve probably had something similar happen. I’m not going to go into any detail because our craziest incidents would probably be googleable and point you to my workplace.
Limiting it to things that happened here, we had one of the local crazies call in a bomb threat to our dispatch center. We weren’t taking it too seriously, he’s a known party and mostly harmless, but out of an abundance of caution our breaks were postponed while the sheriffs swept our building.
Our dispatch center shares a big campus with the county prison, and a few other county offices and facilities, we’re at the end of a long hilly driveway/private road with a guard shack at the top and the driveway for a few neighboring businesses branching off from it. It’s not totally uncommon for various people to be walking up our driveway, people from those other businesses out for a walk, people going to visit an inmate at the prison, the occasional person with business at one of those county offices, etc.
Anyway, one day one of my coworkers is driving into work and sees an older guy walking up the driveway, the weather was pretty shitty that day, so he decides he’s going to be nice and give him a lift up to the guard shack. He comes into work and by the time he’s logged in there was a call for a disturbance at the guard shack, the old guy was some sovereign citizen type trying to pull some first amendment audit bullshit at the prison. So we all got a memo about not giving anyone rides.
Shortly before I started, there was a small fad of people making s’mores in the lunch room microwave. One of the newer trainees was a younger guy, still lived at home, was a little clueless, and decided to make himself a s’more. He microwaved it way too long and smoked up the building, it was probably about as close as they’ve ever gotten to having to evacuate to our backup center. So we now have a “no s’mores” rule.
There was also one new guy that honestly probably shouldn’t have made it through our background checks who was a real piece of work. He is probably the only person in living memory to use the shower here, we suspect he may have been living out of his car. He had some weird shit on his record, some strange domestic bullshit, he was a volunteer firefighter and had been in trouble a few times for trying to pull people over with the lights on his personal vehicle (basically impersonating an officer) and was just generally a really strange dude. He nearly got into a fist fight with his trainer and that was the final straw. There’s been a few other weird stories involving him since we got rid of him but those are pretty googleable.
I was working part time as a software developer while a grad student and was assigned under a full time employee. We were the only ones working on that project. I came back after the Christmas break to be informed I was the new project lead because the full time employee i was working under got fired after he sexually assaulted one of the female employees after getting drunk at the company Christmas party.
Congrats on your field promotion
Pharmacy got robbed with a crossbow back when I was managing a Shoppers Drug Mart in the bad part of town back in the day.
Literally got medieval on yo ass.
Did he have an accomplice with a halberd behind him? :o
That situation could have gotten so much worse if there was a mage in the party.
I saw a dude lose a hand because they ignored everything about passing through the water tight doors when they were moving.
Holy fuck that’s terrifying
what line of work?
Crewman on a cruiseship. I was basically room service/janitorial. The guy who lost his hand was one of the kitchen people for one of the several restaurants onboard.
What’s it like to actually work on a cruise ship? I always wondered
My experience may be a little different than most; the ship I was on, for the time I was on it, was not actually in service yet. I boarded in Bremerhaven 2 weeks before construction would be finished and it started making its way to Hawaii. I fell down some stairs carrying some shit on our way across the Atlantic like 2 days before we got to NYC and I was going to be out of commission for 2 months, so they let me go. The only passengers we had were some bigwigs from the company.
As for fringe benefits and perks? I was averaging 16 hour days and you don’t get days off so I didn’t have the energy to do much other than sleep by the time my shift was over. But you only work 5-6 months periods, you get room and board, and since you’re not really spending anything you earn, by the time you get off to go back home, you’d have a pretty nice sum in your bank account. I had 1 month of paid training and was only on the ship for about 3 weeks, and when I got off in NYC, I had almost $10k.
An employee was angry about an unfair policy and was being punished for not complying, and in his anger he threw a chair. This was before my time, but security had to escort the employee out of the building and he was fired on the spot. That story still circulates even though it’s been over a decade.
At another workplace some employees were caught having sex.
At another workplace a manager and employees were running a drug operation out of a drive-thru.
There were other things, but honestly humans are so predictable, they’re usually:
- fucking one another
- threatening, fighting, or trying to kill one another
- trying to get high or stay high
- stealing, cheating, or otherwise trying to enrich themselves
So a lot of the stories are of one form or another - employee who always came in extremely drunk and worked her shift drunk for years, only fired after some violent incidents and indecent exposure because of excessive drunkenness.
One employee was homeless and sleeping on the roof of the store, he was caught climbing down one morning.
Another guy was peddling drugs outside the store.
Anyway - poverty is fun, y’all!
At another workplace a manager and employees were running a drug operation out of a drive-thru.
They really wanted to be Gus Fring so badly
honestly I think they just wanted to make money - it went for a while without being caught
My place of work used to have a fairly large “data entry” department until they… did… something to make that job kindof unnecessary. They laid off pretty much all of that department. And I’m told the boss who was over them before they were laid off returned to his office to find a sizeable human shit directly atop his desk.
Another story. My own boss (actually my boss’s boss) was a massive asshole. Committed the team to a completely unreasonable deadline in conversations with the C-level folks above him, and then threw temper tantrums when the deadline wasn’t hit. He turned the daily standup into a 7:30am (in-person) daily demo to prove we were making progress and weren’t… I dunno… slacking off or whatever. Many a temper tantrum was had in those demos as well.
I quit and made no secret of why. After I left, I heard through the grapevine that in a meeting with the CTO, the asshole boss accused the CTO of being incompetent and said that he was gunning for the CTO’s job. The CTO, sensibly, told the asshole boss to do not pass go, do not collect $200, security will escort you out of the building and we’ll ship you your personal effects from your office.
And then I quit the place I’d gone to and went back to where the asshole boss had been and I’m still working there. Definitely would not have considered coming back if he was still there.
Ok. One more story about the other place. They switched from one chat provider to another. But they never actually shut down the one they were migrating away from. Several folks never left the old chat. When it was discovered that on the old chat service, said folks were trading really really inappropriate holocaust jokes, the whole office got a talking to in very vague terms. It wasn’t until like a month later that someone explained to me what had precipitated that.
Boss was arrested for ordering expensive toner cartridges for “store use” and reselling them. He had racked up around 80k and a felony charge.
Also, the absolute horrors that occurred in another job’s bathroom were biblical.
Christ.
You reminded me that I had to waste like an entire hour of my day a couple of weeks ago convincing my boss that yes, we absolutely can eBay off the four or five unopened toner cartridges we have lying around here for a printer we no longer have. It’s fine. Just let them go. We can use the money for some other operational expense. “But already paid for them and that means we’ll take a loss on them.”
Sure, genius. Versus what, exactly? Leaving them mouldering on the supply room shelf until the day the sun burns out? An 80% return is better than 0% return.
Worked at an absolutely soul-crushing gig after a new micro-manager took over and the next gig was slow coming. The micro-manager didn’t like one smart but blunt underling correcting him so he took away the OT and standby the underling had depended on - and us; the underling was smart as fuck - and financially ruined the underling by timing it right after a new car and house purchase based on that 10 year financial history.
Underling attempted suicide-by-hanging in front of our main dev area.
Company had counsellors for a whole day, and the micro-manager immediately focused on how unstable someone must be to commit to suicide instead of on how awful a workplace it must be.
Food cart exploded.
A patient escaped his police escort through a crawlspace above the showers. The whole building went on lockdown (with loudspeaker announcements about not interacting with any naked men you come across) before they eventually found him a mile away, still starkers.
Barring a very specific set of circumstances or two, “don’t interact with any naked men you come across” is probably good advice.
I knowingly stalled a counterfeiter for ~20 minutes while we’re waiting for police to arrive.
I just well full inept dipshit worker on the guy and he believed my act.
Guy could have just walked out and been free but he stuck around over less than 200 dollars of fake money he was trying to wash through us.
we hijacked a conference room on a shared floor for a week and built a three-phase high-voltage line in there by hunting around the building for which sockets were on which phase, then plugging them into industrial transformers.
Did you build Tesla coils or something? Were there intentional sparks involved?
no, and yes. i’m not going into more detail for fear of doxxing myself but basically we wanted the waveforms generated by a high-voltage short circuit.
later tests involved help from a power company and actual high-voltage lines.
Sounds like a very cool job
Those sparks must be epic, should give you the feeling of being a Nordic god or something
The smoke from failed tests must be epic too
Okay -
- 1, that’s awesome;
- 2, for what purpose?
- 3, is it normal for buildings to have 3-phase in split into different single-phase sections? That feels like you could get some iffy stuff from wildly different loads on the different phases.
Sounds like an industrial setting, they typically get three phases. Probably also explains the desire.
we were recording the magnetic fields generated by a high-energy short circuit. we hung a mouse trap from one of the lines, with a lead going to one of the others, so that they fused together when it sprung.
it is normal here, yes. larger appliances get three phases, and single-phase outlets are split between them as evenly as possible.
First off, instead of using bullets and then manually enumerating then, try putting "1. " at the the start of every item in the list. Don’t increment the “1”.
Around me the only homes without 3phases are older small apartments. Most houses have a 35A 3phase supply, although 63A may become the norm on account of EVs. It’s quite normal to have a 3 phased fuse where each phase is used for something different. Say a fuse box is used for lighting and outlets, but L1 is ground floor, L2 is upstairs and L3 is outdoors.
BTW if you ever move into a house where someone has put outdoors on the same rcd as the rest of the house, then do yourself a favor and get a separate combo rcd/fuse for outdoors. When the rcd trips, it’s always the outdoor usage, and it sucks when all the lights go out, because a gasket died in an outdoor lamp.
A coworker that got pissed when things didn’t work and threw them across the shop floor was getting fired. He was getting fired mostly because the owner of the company–hereafter referred to as Asshole Boss–was a dick, and the coworker scared him. (Note that the coworker was never violent towards people. Just machines.) Anyway, the Asshole Boss got a bunch of cops there on the day that he was gonna fire him, but the employee heard what was going to happen and just… Didn’t show up.
This is the same Asshole Boss that fired me maybe a year, year and a half later. He fired me because I had a ‘bad attitude’ because my partner of ten years had said that they wanted a divorce two days earlier. I got driven straight to the hospital and checked in after telling my supervisor that I was going home to commit suicide. Yeah, the suicide part didn’t work out after all. (The divorce was ugly; they tried to bankrupt me and saddle me with all of their debt.)
…But it all ended well. Asshole Boss fired the management team that was making the whole business work in a fit of pique; the management team got some funds together and started a company that was in direct competition with Asshole Boss. I ended up being their first hire. Asshole Boss ran his business into the ground in less than a year and a half, and the company the management team started is growing and expanding a decade later.
Good grief! I’m glad you made it through all that.
Kathleen brought salmon and nuked it in the microwave.
I’m a manager at a small laid back warehouse. It’s not uncommon for coworkers to all go out as a group for drinks from time to time.
A subordinate and I became genuine friends at one of these outings and hung out for a couple of months. They caught feelings, I didn’t reciprocate and backed away from social time with them outside of work. Fast forward a few months and they tried to kill themselves in the parking lot one day after I said I didn’t want to hang out with them anymore because of our work dynamic.
I don’t go to work hangs off the property anymore.
That’s awful, I’m sorry that happened. Also just be aware that’s a classic dv abuser tactic.
Absolutely. I had a stalker once. Was terrifying, and that sounds just like what they do.
