Author Topic: What was the worst/best/weirdest thing that happened to you at work????  (Read 575 times)

Offline Crispycritter

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I read ask a manager a lot, and wondered if any of you have interesting stories to tell from your work. 

I've had many many outlandish things happen either to me or to someone that I worked with.  For example, I had a boss that hated me with every cell of her being.  She wrote me up for anything and everything that she could - and yet she didn't have the power to actually fire me.  I would have quit, but was way too stubborn to give her the satisfaction. 

What was sort of funny about it was that each punishment that she could dole out to me ended up working out in my favor.  I was given the "problem" account that nobody could get the order right for.  It was a definite land mine where you just could not do the job.  Well - due to a dear coworker in a different department that had overheard a lot of the vicious gossip about me and decided to watch out for me - that account became my best and favorite part of the day. 

I ended up getting a bonus, extra vacation and a company wide letter sent out about my accomplishment from the president of the company.  Ha!  Boss was green over it.  And you would have thought that I would begin to be treated better by her??  Nope, she kept on trying.  I have many more stories about that job than I should for the 3 years I worked there. 

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Offline Airelenaren

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This wasn't a proper job so much as it was a sort of program, with different "sections" you could pick from.
I decided to give the kitchen section a try, since I like cooking and baking well enough and have some basic skills in both.
To get into the kitchen section, you first had to go through an educational course (consisting mostly of watching videos) about proper kitchen hygiene. This was presented to be extremely important and taken very seriously.
Cue my first day in the kitchen.
Some of my "coworkers" are not wearing their hats properly (wearing it like a fashion statement, rather than in a way that prevents hair from falling into the food).
Unwashed ingredients, washed ingredients, the trash can and dirty dishes are all touched with the same pair of gloves. One member sneezes into their gloved hand. The instructors do not seem to find it necessary to tell anyone in these examples to wash or change their gloves. When I point out these problems, I am essentially told to shut up and mind my own business.
I later found that they washed all the day's dirty dishes, including the greasy pan, in the same water (which looked brown after they put the pan in - and no, they did not put the pan in last).

Yeah, I did not return to that section. In fact, I might have clued in people in other sections not to buy any food from the kitchen. 

Offline Kiwi Cupcake

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The weirdest was the time the manager gathered a group of new hires to inform them wearing undergarments is a must. We had a field day with that one.
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Offline cayenne

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Sometimes people will leave random things behind which I find during my final check before closing. The second strangest things I have found are a radius and ulna, and the following week a scapula, from the plastic anatomical model that belonged down the hall in another room. The oddest thing I've found is one small uncooked russet potato laid carefully in the middle of a chair seat one evening. No one could figure out why someone would possibly have left that there, lol.

Offline shadowfox79

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While signing in at work one morning I noticed a marrow had been left next to the signing-in book.

I didn't comment on it at the time, but my manager did when he arrived. Nobody ever admitted to knowing where this random marrow came from.

Offline whiterose

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Oddest, strangest, most bizarre, most impossible request ever:

A customer asked me in Spanish if we could mail items to a prison library in PR.

I told her that she would need to do the Interlibrary Loan through that library. Then I asked her which items she wanted to find in our catalog- after all, if we do not have them, I would have to refer her to another library that did.

Nope- she wanted to mail coloring books and crayons to prisoners. Coloring books and crayons she brought in- not items available for checkout at our library system!

Apparently, she had been told that items could be mailed to prisons via libraries. That UPS/USPS/FedEx would not do it- but that libraries could.

No, we cannot.

While we do Interlibrary Loan, it is with items found in our system and findable through our catalog. Not coloring books some random person wants to send to some inmate at some prison in a US territory.

I may have had other unusual requests that we could not meet. But this one certainly wins the grand prize.
I have pet mice!

Offline cayenne

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While signing in at work one morning I noticed a marrow had been left next to the signing-in book.

I didn't comment on it at the time, but my manager did when he arrived. Nobody ever admitted to knowing where this random marrow came from.

Now if someone would just leave a nice Vidalia onion, we could make vegetable soup.

Offline Crispycritter

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One of the best work related things that happened to me was making a good friend.  I was in outside sales and was making calls with our new manager.  She was telling me about a new hire (Karen) that wasn't meeting expectations in her job.  She hadn't seen it herself, but was being told about it from others in that branch.   A long list of grievances from how Karen dressed to her arriving late to the office (we didn't have set times to be in the office - many days we didn't even go in), and many little things she was doing wrong with her paperwork.  Most of the things were absolutely trivial and could be easily corrected with just a small meeting.  The manager also told me that Karen would be getting put on probation for all of these issues and that the manager was doing a surprise visit on her the very next day.

I didn't like this, it wasn't my business to hear about it, and the whole thing reminded me too much of how I had been treated in other jobs.  So I called Karen that evening and warned her about the surprise visit for the next day.  We went over each and every point that she needed to be on spot for.  I knew that it was quite a risk to take and could mean the end of my job, but it wasn't a great job imo anyway.  The manager showed up, and Karen was there 1/2 hour early, dressed in a suit, with her sales binder in perfect order.  Karen and I became good friends and stayed friends for many many years. 
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Offline MrTango

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I found a dead body.

It was back when I worked for campus security.  I found the body of a guy who had ignored the "Stairs closed for the season" signs, slipped on ice, and fell down about 30 concrete steps onto a sidewalk.  I remember when writing the report, I felt the need to justify everything that I'd seen that led me to choose *not* to start CPR on the corpse.

I didn't sleep well for a couple weeks.

Offline cayenne

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If you wouldn't mind, would you like to tell about it? (Not if it's traumatic, of course.)

guest348

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If you wouldn't mind, would you like to tell about it? (Not if it's traumatic, of course.)

He did - the text is whited, you just need to drag your cursor over it to highlight it and then you can see it.

Offline cayenne

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If you wouldn't mind, would you like to tell about it? (Not if it's traumatic, of course.)

He did - the text is whited, you just need to drag your cursor over it to highlight it and then you can see it.

OK, thanks!

Offline VorFemme

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I arrived at the restaurant where I worked "on time" - nobody else was there and the back door was **** open, so I assumed that someone had gotten a ride to work, unlocked the door, and was in the bathroom...

Then I walked by the office and saw that that door had been broken into and the office was a wreck. 

It had been robbed and I was walking all over the crime scene, setting tables (at least they weren't in the bar, where the office was, but in the dining room on the other side of the restaurant)), and setting up the coffee machine.  Ooops...oblivious?  Or just not used to being around "that sort of event"?  I walked into my own house some four years later to find that it had been burgled - I did react a bit more quickly.  To be fair, the front door had a tendency to "bounce" back if you tried slamming it behind you, so it would look closed but the  latch/lock wouldn't have caught.  That time, someone came in the kitchen window and left through the door - instead of a family member exiting in a hurry & slamming the door behind them (without looking to see if it caught). 

So - similar thing happened at work and at home.