Let me complain about my workplace.
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@dohpaz42 said:
I am IN LOVE (with the project, not you).
This isn't the first time someone told me this, and I have a feeling it won't be the last time either.
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#whatever: I learned today that chairs cannot be moved between two cubicles without going through upper management, even if said chair is not "assigned" to any cubicle in particular. (Those chairs are labelled! With numbers!)
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@TsukikoRain said:
#whatever: I learned today that chairs cannot be moved between two cubicles without going through upper management, even if said chair is not "assigned" to any cubicle in particular. (Those chairs are labelled! With numbers!)
If you're the type who likes a good prank, you could either come in real early one morning, or stay real late one night - basically, be the first/last one in the office - and rearrange the chairs so the numbers are all out of whack (don't forget to do yours too, so you're not singled out). That would be hilarious to see those Type A/OCD managers go berserk!
As an aside, on the topic of pranks, I used to work in a place where the new manager was equally hated by everyone (the ONE thing he did - by accident - that was good was to bring unity to our disjointed team; the enemy of my enemy, and all), and someone once put an open can of tuna fish up in the drop ceiling of his office. He never did figure out where that smell was coming from... Just sayin'.
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@TsukikoRain said:
#whatever: I learned today that chairs cannot be moved between two cubicles without going through upper management, even if said chair is not "assigned" to any cubicle in particular. (Those chairs are labelled! With numbers!)
That is easy to solve, just change the labels
Now I'm getting curious about your particular branch, I mean... not even the people I worked for in there worried that much about chairs
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@dohpaz42 said:
I used to work in a place where the new manager was equally hated by everyone (the ONE thing he did - by accident - that was good was to bring unity to our disjointed team; the enemy of my enemy, and all)
That's basically the Marine Corps primary leadership tool. Only it's on purpose.
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@dohpaz42 said:
If you're the type who likes a good prank, you could either come in real early one morning, or stay real late one night - basically, be the first/last one in the office - and rearrange the chairs so the numbers are all out of whack (don't forget to do yours too, so you're not singled out). That would be hilarious to see those Type A/OCD managers go berserk!
Put the same number on like 15 chairs, and cram them all around the same cubicle.
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25 WTFs in a first post? Tsukiko, I can see you are going to fit in just fine around here. :D
@Matt Westwood said:
@Lord abletran said:
@hoodaticus said:
... had a sex sling in his living room.
So... were you in his living room? Seeing his sex sling?More to the point: who went on top?
More to the point: EWWWW. Even more to the point: am I the only one who noticed hoodaticus is no longer replying?
@derula said:
@dohpaz42 said:
I am IN LOVE (with the project, not you).
This isn't the first time someone told me this, and I have a feeling it won't be the last time either.
Perhaps it would help if you habitually misrepresented yourself as the founder/creator of said projects?
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@Cad Delworth said:
No, you didn't specifically mention you were a US federal contractor, but #19 was kind of a giveaway.
Not to mention #25.
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@TsukikoRain said:
#whatever: I learned today that chairs cannot be moved between two cubicles without going through upper management, even if said chair is not "assigned" to any cubicle in particular. (Those chairs are labelled! With numbers!)
Dismantle your chair and the chair you want. Keep in place only the one piece that has the label on it. Rebuild your chair, starting with that piece, using all the pieces of the other chair. (And vice versa)
If anyone asks who authorized, tell them Mr. Theseus.
@dohpaz42 said:
As an aside, on the topic of pranks, I used to work in a place where the new manager was equally hated by everyone (the ONE thing he did - by accident - that was good was to bring unity to our disjointed team; the enemy of my enemy, and all), and someone once put an open can of tuna fish up in the drop ceiling of his office. He never did figure out where that smell was coming from... Just sayin'.
I've heard the same but with a single shrimp sewn into the hem of the office curtain.
Or put a shrimp in a thin, airtight baggie. Put the baggie in the telescoping stem of his chair. Wait a good long while, then raise the chair an inch. He'll have to re-adjust the height, which for any normal human means dropping the chair to the minimum height first. The bag will burst and hillarity will ensue. Except for the shrimp. It will be cooly indifferent.
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@TsukikoRain said:
17. 'Efficient' co-worker has been reported for sexual harassment twice by two different women. He still has his job. He claims that repeatedly asking women up to his apartment and sniffing hair and suggesting he 'steal them away' was a joke/misunderstanding. Boss believes him. Recently, he was put in charge of both women when boss went on vacation. Fortunately, no disasters yet.
@Cyrus said:
At my last job my balding, near 300 lb manager got comfortable enough around me that one day he started tell me about one of his favorite hobbies...S&M. I think I instantly developed an eye twitch from the effort I put into suppressing the mental images.
Had a network troubleshooting call from a home business that sold Christian music CDs. I boiled the issue down to a bad DSL modem, and drove out to swap it. The owner, a 60-ish fat man in a "I <3 Jesus" t-shirt hemmed and hawed when I asked where his modem was. "Can't I replace it myself?" "If I have to come out again because it isn't the problem, I'll have to charge you a fee." "How much of a fee?" "$70." "Let me get you some coffee, I'll ask the wife, uh, where it is.". He proceeded to bring me a mug with a picture of Jesus on it.
Five minutes later, his equally old, equally fat wife walks into the room, hissing. "God, my husband is such a weakling. Follow me."
The DSL modem was in the basement, in the glam-rock themed S&M dungeon.
Another odd one was while I was covering for a friend and while he was out of town. He called, directed me to a nice glass building in a upscale office park, and told me the server seemed to be rebooting randomly. I almost instantly found the issue, a dying CPU fan, and asked the secretary that had shown me in if they had any Vaseline or WD40 I could use to lubricate it as a temp fix. She came back with a unopened 5lb container of water-based 'sexual lubricant'. I about died. Seems they manufactured and sold sex toys and accessories.
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@Lorne Kates said:
Dismantle your chair and the chair you want. Keep in place only the one piece that has the label on it. Rebuild your chair, starting with that piece, using all the pieces of the other chair. (And vice versa)
Hilariously enough, I'd absolutely have to do it this way. The labels aren't adhesive -- they purchased some permanent white stuff that felt like drawing with lipstick and wrote directly on the chairs. I guess the part that qualifies as another WTF is the fact that there are actually two chair sizes -- the bulk of the chairs are the same, but there are somewhere around a dozen that have wider seats for the, er, wider people. If someone leaves or moves cubicles, the wide chair has to stay where it is. The result? A wide person in an uncomfortably small chair and/or a skinny person in a large chair that they don't need.
EDIT: Oh, I forgot another one.
I discovered something along the lines of:
switch 1:
case a == b
case a == c
etc.
Person responsible (sexual harassment man) and my boss both defended it. Boss changed her mind when I pointed out that switch a, case b, case c was both prettier /and/ didn't make me start choking on stupid.
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@TsukikoRain said:
#whatever: I learned today that chairs cannot be moved between two cubicles without going through upper management, even if said chair is not "assigned" to any cubicle in particular. (Those chairs are labelled! With numbers!)
You have to read the book "Then we came to the end" by Joshua Ferris. It's a workplace novel, and while it's not the main plot, there is a very interesting twist of events involving chairs and serial numbers. Awesome book.
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@NoOneImportant said:
@TsukikoRain said:
17. 'Efficient' co-worker has been reported for sexual harassment twice by two different women. He still has his job. He claims that repeatedly asking women up to his apartment and sniffing hair and suggesting he 'steal them away' was a joke/misunderstanding. Boss believes him. Recently, he was put in charge of both women when boss went on vacation. Fortunately, no disasters yet.
@Cyrus said:
At my last job my balding, near 300 lb manager got comfortable enough around me that one day he started tell me about one of his favorite hobbies...S&M. I think I instantly developed an eye twitch from the effort I put into suppressing the mental images.
Had a network troubleshooting call from a home business that sold Christian music CDs. I boiled the issue down to a bad DSL modem, and drove out to swap it. The owner, a 60-ish fat man in a "I <3 Jesus" t-shirt hemmed and hawed when I asked where his modem was. "Can't I replace it myself?" "If I have to come out again because it isn't the problem, I'll have to charge you a fee." "How much of a fee?" "$70." "Let me get you some coffee, I'll ask the wife, uh, where it is.". He proceeded to bring me a mug with a picture of Jesus on it.
Five minutes later, his equally old, equally fat wife walks into the room, hissing. "God, my husband is such a weakling. Follow me."
The DSL modem was in the basement, in the glam-rock themed S&M dungeon.
Another odd one was while I was covering for a friend and while he was out of town. He called, directed me to a nice glass building in a upscale office park, and told me the server seemed to be rebooting randomly. I almost instantly found the issue, a dying CPU fan, and asked the secretary that had shown me in if they had any Vaseline or WD40 I could use to lubricate it as a temp fix. She came back with a unopened 5lb container of water-based 'sexual lubricant'. I about died. Seems they manufactured and sold sex toys and accessories.
One time I was starting a new contract and the client required me to use their hardware but they did not have a laptop available. They called their vendor and the guy said I could have the demo he was carrying with him, so I would be able to start working immediately. The laptop was configured for auto-logon and as I was about to reconfigure it, I noticed a folder called "New Folder" on the desktop. It contained quite a few pictures of the vendor, naked. There were no strong chemicals available at the office so until I brought the machine home to clean it, I used pencils to touch the keyboard.
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Please tell me you burned the pencils.
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@TsukikoRain said:
Please tell me you burned the pencils.
Funny thing is, I did not, and I actually got to use them again a few weeks later when another consultant was fired and I was asked to retrieve stuff from his laptop. The guy was always eating at his desk and the keyboard was incredibly oily; it was also covered with spots of dried ketchup, chocolate (I hope), peanut butter and mucus (allergy season...). It was mesmerizing to see the bizarre pattern that crud and oil made on his keyboard, showing how he was using the spacebar, what shift he was using more often, etc. We had usb mice, I used my own because there was just no way I would touch his, with sweat burns on top and dark stains at the tip of the buttons and around the wheel. His monitor also had lots of mucus and various stains but I was lucky enough that he left it in an upright position so I did not have to touch it. Some areas on the monitor were difficult to read because of the stains, especially in the bottom right, for some reason. Good times.
When I left I gave back the pencils to the guy they were borrowed from (a guy that, as I found out when I saw him switching from his boots to his shoes, was wearing woman stockings, but this is another story).
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I cannot express in text the level of "eew" that story spawned.
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@thistooshallpass said:
disgusting
Please disclose the general geographic location of these stories so that we may avoid them.
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@TsukikoRain said:
I cannot express in text the level of "eew" that story spawned.
Let me cheer you up with a few sweet memories then.
- A while ago, a consultant hired by my employer said that he could not access our email server, so I went to double-check the Outlook settings on his laptop. I noticed that he also used Outlook to subscribe to various usenet newsgroups, many of which involved "inter-species interests".
- More recently. a manager came to the IT department with his personal PC and asked a tech to reinstall Windows. The tech told me that while he was running a backup, he noticed a very large quantity of adult entertainment material, all neatly sorted by "genre" (apparently the manager had eclectic tastes). Just for fun I told the tech that IMHO since he was the one doing the backup he should review the content and make sure there was no pedo stuff so he would be legally covered. He found none, but what a nice way to spend an afternoon!
- One time I received a notice from the ISP that someone on the company network was accessing "specialized" websites that had been flagged by the police. The culprit was a female employee (mid-twenties) and she apparently had a thing for non-consensual intercourse and amputees (maybe midgets but I'm foggy on this one). I did not block or report her immediately - I raised her status in webspy then I used her browsing history to improve the firewall blacklist. I printed a list of the websites she visited and a few keywords she used in search engines to support the case with HR, and to this day some of these keywords are still haunting me.
- In the early 2000s, I mistakenly put a FTP server on internet with anonymous r/w enabled. The company had a IP in a range known for hosting and there were probably scanners running 24x7 on that range because over a single weekend the hard disk was filled with warez, p*rn and whatnot. The ftp service was quickly shutdown, but over the next three months the bandwidth usage was significantly higher. I found out that one of the sysadmin apparently learned from that mistake and he put another ftp server online (on the company network) so he could build his private collection of p*rn. When the HR girl saw what this guy had on his workstation she was creeped out, and the guy excuse was that he was collecting this stuff so he would have something to trade for games on a warez forum.
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@thistooshallpass said:
he was collecting this stuff so he would have something to trade for games on a warez forum.
Okay, that part made me laugh. I forgive you. :D
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@thistooshallpass said:
The culprit was a female employee (mid-twenties) and she apparently had a thing for non-consensual intercourse [...] I printed a list of the websites she visited and a few keywords she used in search engines to support the case with HR, and to this day some of these keywords are still haunting me.
The Fuck.
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@Xyro said:
@thistooshallpass said:
even more disgusting
Please disclose the general geographic location of these stories so that we may avoid them burn their filth to the ground.
FTFM
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@thistooshallpass said:
When I left I gave back the pencils to the guy they were borrowed from (a guy that, as I found out when I saw him switching from his boots to his shoes, was wearing woman stockings, but this is another story).
Wearing women's stockings/pantyhose/leggings under your clothing in the late fall and winter wasn't that unusual among the biking/jogging/hiking crowd even a few years ago. Common enough in high school sports too.
