The Strangest Story from Your Career

[bradly1101]

I had to share this. Thoughts came up of it when I was thinking about my old job from another thread (and more grayed thoughts). It's 100% true, I swear it on a stack of Bibles holding up my mother's urn. And it's not a contest...

[I was hired at career day at my technical school. Great company. Mark Ain was among the first to apply computing to the collection of employee-generated time and attendance data (computerized time clocks), and process the data on the ever more ubiquitous IBM PC, linking with payroll companies. Many large companies were still using huge systems with those big tape drives behind windows for other computing tasks. My company had ventured into job data collection for tracking trends and such, and shop floor part/build/order tracking. Everyone was sticking barcodes on everything. You had to bring the part to the terminal, so it wasn't well suited to huge shop floors. Robertshaw Controls was one who tried it (their tech guy was cool, I hung out with him, his wife, and their new baby). But our terminals were hand operated. I'm sure by now they're mostly automated.

Our terminals and SW were everywhere; a lot of the big hospitals; Marie Calanders; every single Marriott (with the LGBT-friendly Mormon owner, you go where the bucks are, right?) - we had to open a branch in Singapore driven largely by Marriott's growth; banks, one in Honolulu, I was sent there and put up at a hotel in Waikiki for a week right around these places (I was a nut for the dance floor - nothing else, I was in a committed relationship back on the mainland); I could go on. Then there was this place:]

...One of our customers was named Louise's Trattoria when it was on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills...

[I had to find parking for my Camry among the vehicular swank. The terminal was having comm. problems. It turned out the daughter card was coming loose as the swinging kitchen doors slammed into the wall where the terminal was between them. We relocated it, finding an even better spot.

Another trouble-shooting adventure came at a big hospital in Orange County. More comm. problems. A big Hayes modem for every line, something about the way they were in the old building. New 9600 baud ones, smokin', they actually got very hot. Whoever it was who did the install (my co.) stacked two columns of about six modems each directly on top of each other and directly next to the other column, the top one was so hot I immediately had to pull my hand back. Once they made little shelves for each one, the comm. problems disappeared. At our expense, the ones that seemed damaged were replaced. An expensive lesson about heat and electronics, who knew?]

...As I was leaving Louise's, a woman off to the side started yelling. I couldn't help but hear that she felt jilted. "Who is she?!!! I can't believe I came this far..." I looked over at the lothario, he had to be cute, she was hot. It was Nicholas Cage, he had more hair back then, a bit higher on his head. He looked like a puppy scorned. Nobody seemed to care. Career memories.

 

[Pulsar]

Well.... uh.... when I was 16 I got my first computer - an HP 486 dx2 50. a month later the screen when black and white. It took me nearly a year to find out that for some reason HP buried an option in the bios that turned the screen black and white. I was too scared to tell my parents I'd broken my new expensive toy.

 

[shortylickens]

Most of my Navy stories are not appropriate for the public.

And my civilian stories are so boring I've forgotten most of them.

OH WAIT! I HAVE A GOOD ONE!

After I left Tektronix they called me Typhoid Travis.
Apparently the weird disease I got my last week there spread around and made everyone hella sick. To this day I still dont know what it was. Flu-like symptoms for a whole month. When I moved to virginia my new doctor took a chance and prescribed antibiotics. Whatever it was went away inside of 24 hours. We're still not sure what happened to me. I sent an email to my old supervisor and told her to get everyone on antibiotics. Apparently each of them did, and they were all fine, eventually.

 

[skyking]

I was right out of high school, and my older brothers and brother in law wanted to go into cutting firewood. I had no better plan, and we purchased some trucks and a dozer and started cutting down timber at the 4000' level up Chinook Pass. We busted our asses and lost them, too much equipment, too many breakdowns, you name it.
After the dozer got repaired, we had to go up and close our road to prevent erosion, putting in big water dams called " thank you ma'ams".
It was mid-December when we finally got the dozer out of the shop, and the snow was 12" at the bottom of the hill. No worries, I had full chains on the truck and a 12,000 pound JD350 on the back for weight. Everyone had taken turns on the dozer until it became apparent that I had a knack for it.
My brothers followed in my ruts with a little Datsun pickup, chained up and getting dragged by me up the steeper sections.
We were almost there when I got a little wheel hop, and the motor mount broke. The engine torqued over, popped the shifter out of the transmission tower, and floored the gas as the linkage bound up. Before I could key off ( the clutch linkage came loose too) I had slid into the ditch.
the truck was at a precarious angle. We felled a large tree right behind the truck, cut wedges and jacked and jacked until the truck was reasonably level, and dove off the back of the truck with the dozer on our improvised log ramp. By then it was dark. I drug the truck out of the ditch and around until it was pointed down the hill, got the clutch and throttle working but the transmission was stuck in granny gear.
We used flashlights and I dug in the water dams across the logging road, and then I set off on the dozer, one brother in the truck following and getting dragged up the hills, and pushing the little Datsun ahead of me as needed. It was about 5 miles of this, and at the bottom of the hill we met search and rescue guys unloading snowmobiles to come look for us. Mom had called the state patrol when we did not show up.
Edit: I found one reference to " thank you Ma'am" as we used it.
https://books.google.com/books?id=h...nepage&q=thank you ma'am erosion dams&f=false

 

[Red Squirrel]

I've heard all sorts of interesting stories that happened at my workplace or same industry but can't think of any I've personally been part of. But here's a fun one from many years ago. Practically an urban legend at this point.

So way back in the old days they used to actually fix phones. More than likely those old style rotary ones that are all metal. They sure don't make stuff like they used to... but those things were actually serviceable. So anyway tech goes to this old lady's house to look at her phone, brings a spare just in case it's not fixable. Her dog was always in the way and when she was not around he gave the dog a little tap with a screw driver just to "choo" it. Well he accidentally killed it right there and then. Not wanting to cause a scene or be responsible for that, he packed the dog in the phone box, finished his job and went on his way. The lady asked if he saw her dog and he said he saw him going outside but other than that was not too sure. Drove off and on his way back he just throw the dog out the window. Poor lady probably never found out what happen to her dog.

 

[bradly1101]

Most of my Navy stories are not appropriate for the public.

And my civilian stories are so boring I've forgotten most of them.

OH WAIT! I HAVE A GOOD ONE!

After I left Tektronix they called me Typhoid Travis.
Apparently the weird disease I got my last week there spread around and made everyone hella sick. To this day I still dont know what it was. Flu-like symptoms for a whole month. When I moved to virginia my new doctor took a chance and prescribed antibiotics. Whatever it was went away inside of 24 hours. We're still not sure what happened to me. I sent an email to my old supervisor and told her to get everyone on antibiotics. Apparently each of them did, and they were all fine, eventually.

Freaky.

 

[Iron Woode]

I work in a sandwich shop (not glamorous) doing the evening shift and close at midnight on a Saturday. At 11:30PM 3 obviously drunk teenage girls (under 16) enter the store and then sat down while one passed out on the floor. I was like, "oh shit". So I called 911 while the passed out girl puked on the floor. Anyway, the cops and ambulance show up and the other 2 girls were taken into custody. The following Monday I was working lunch when this gentleman came in and asked me who was working Saturday night. I was like oh great, someone is going to bitch that their precious child was locked up. I told him I was working that night. He thanked me for getting his daughter medical help as she had alcohol poisoning. That was probably the strangest story.

 

[KMFJD]

Some angry man from New Jersey some how got our service desk number and yelled at us saying he was going to shoot some guys that where digging up a gas line in his front yard. Or the guy that demanded that IT come and fix the bad smell in the bathroom.

 

[SearchMaster]

After I left Tektronix they called me Typhoid Travis.

And you wonder why you're having trouble finding a job today...

 

[shortylickens]

And you wonder why you're having trouble finding a job today...

No I'm not wondering you stupid WUSS!

I mean, "Hi Buddy!"

 

[IronWing]

Dealing with the radioactive dead dog landfill and the radioactive dead monkey landfill rise to the top of the list.

Then there was the guy who wanted to stop us from reclaiming an old mine because he wanted to use it as a set for a cowboy zombie movie. The mine was stupid dangerous and would have provided actual dead people had he tried to send people into it. Looking back, the guy was way ahead of his time as his plan predated the zombie craze of the past decade. He would have been famous.

 

[purbeast0]

This isn't really strange but my favorite story about working is how I got a job at Best Buy when I was 18 solely because I wanted to buy a new TV and 5.1 stereo system and I knew I could get a huge discount as an employee. But you had to work for 30 days in order to be able to use the discount.

So on my 30th day I bought about $3000 of stuff - Sony Wega TV, the best JBL speakers they carried at Best Buy, 12" floor firing subwoofer, most expensive AVR they sold, DVD player, TV for my mom, and service plans for everything, Monster cables. I saved probably between $1500 and $2k on discounts.

Then the next day, my 31st day, I quit.

Mission accomplished.

 

[Kaido]

At 11:30PM 3 obviously drunk teenage girls (under 16) enter the store and then sat down while one passed out on the floor.

Not work related, but I was in the ER a couple years ago in the middle of the night & a couple of female cops escorted a young girl (16 & drunk) in & started to lecture her. Apparently she was a teen mom, who had left her baby with a random friend so she could go out drinking with her friends, and always ended up plastered & sick in the emergency room. And this had been happening since she was like 13 or 14 because this was a regular occurrence with the same pair of cops. Pre-teen alcoholism...yikes.

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

I spilled wine on Luciano Pavarotti's date and then he brought the house down singing happy birthday to her. Werner Klemperer and John Banner used to frequent my restaurant and Werner was fond of leaving Shakespeare quotes on a napkin along with the tip. When I was in the car rental business, I was working one night having failed to get tickets to the sold out Stones show when I got the call to pick someone up from the private airport. It was the Stones flying in for the show.

 

[DigDog]

i was running a small restaurant-fish&chip thing. It was me (accounting, cleaning, cooking), the fryer girl (fry and register), and three waiters who rotated. in these days i was doing 70~80 hours per week and i was NOT in the mood for anything weird.

the place would very much be full at some hours, and empty the other. this guy comes in not-quite-at-closing-time but nearly. he just stares at the menu board for a cool 5 minutes. mind you, we're basically a fancy burger shop, 10 seconds should be all you need to order. Our attempts to say "how can we help you" are wasted.


he finally orders a full sized fish and chips. and he starts to go all Sheldon on us. The peas must not touch the chips. there must not be this and that or other weird rules.

ok , we're like, dude, we're just going to give you this (shows mock-up of plate), is this ok? and he says yes.

we serve him, and at first he has a brief moment of skitz-out because a pea touches a chip, but he calms down.


he then proceeds to sit and stare at his food for .. half an hour. the restaurant is empty. the fry girl and the waitress are staring at him with that "when are you going home" look.

ok, at this point i need to say that, although we were all tired and we were generally rude people, we did understand that this guy had some issues and we were willing to give him a bit of leeway;

around 1 hour in this guy has managed to get through half his food. the restaurant is now half shut off and the girls have told him repeatedly that they will be closing soon.
I finally step in a tell him buddy, you need to go.


ok, the guy gets up, and pays. he leaves to go to the bathroom, and we start to get ready to shut down and go home. mind that we didn't touch his plate, we would do this after he has left.

He comes back after a solid 5 minutes and .. sits back down on his table.

At this point we dont give a toss anymore and are doing our shutdown procedure right in front of him, we haven't been rude but we're getting irritated by this weirdo and we can't hide it anymore.

We keep cleaning for about 10 minutes, the guy hasn't left and he's staring into his leftovers. I finish cleaning one station and go to take a piss.

in the bathroom.

Spoiler

WAIST-HIGH SPRAYS OF SHIT EVERYWHERE

my brain shuts off and i go in Berserk mode.

i run back to the front and grab this guy by the collar and belt and i'm about to throw him out of the restaurant.

Now, at this point, the weirdest thing happens. The guy ... i don't know how to explain .. "mimicks" getting thrown out. When i'm about to throw out, he "helps" by basically jumping, and winds up flying on the sidewalk. Think, instead of resisting, the opposite. Like an actor playing a scene where he's being thrown by the cuff.

Less funny is that the guy hits the pavement pretty hard, but he got up and walked away and frankly i was in shock and couldn't get my head around what was happening.

TLDR i assaulted a probably disabled guy who nuked my bathroom. And i spend a solid hour and a gallon of bleach + 1 new mop on cleaning it.

 

[olds]

Cliffs:
Attacked by a murderer

It was a dark and stormy night. Literally, I was in a plow truck. I pulled into the closed CHP scales (I have a key) in Camino, CA to use the bathroom. As I pulled into them, I saw a person at the pay phone jumping up and down. I didn't see a vehicle so I assumed he had walked there. I didn't know why at the time, but he gave me the creeps.

I pulled past the building about 40’ and positioned the truck so I could watch him in the mirror. I figured when he left, I’d go in the building. I reached way over and locked the passenger door. I thought I’d locked the driver’s door. I watched him dance (he was still jumping around) up to within 20’ of my door. He started yelling to me and I rolled the window a little more than half way down so I could hear him. He was rambling and he came over and stepped up onto the fuel tank step. I turned on the interior light and saw blood splatters all over his face and the front of his jacket.

I assumed he had been in a wreck (no car) and he had walked to the scales for help. I asked him if he had wrecked and was anyone else hurt? Speaking very quickly he said that he had to get down the hill. I asked him again where his car was at and did he need help. He’s holding on to the partially raised window and rocking back and forth saying he had to go down the hill.
I told him I’d call the CHP for him and get him a ride. He started yelling, NO COPS! NO COPS!

Now I was wondering WTF? I told him to get down off the truck and to go around to the passenger door and I’d give him a ride. I figured when he got down, I’d drive away.
Instead, he tried to drag me through the window by my jacket. I knocked his hand off of me then punched him in the face and knocked him off the truck. He hit the ground on both feet and was stumbling backwards. I hit the door lock with my left elbow to double check the lock and it clicked down. My butt puckered up and grabbed the seat cushion: I thought I had locked the door. I am releasing the brake, grabbing the radio mic and shifting all at the same time. As I am doing this I am looking at him to see if he is going to jump back on. Plow trucks have no acceleration. I see he has a wooden stick in his hands and I am wondering where that came from as he had both hands on the window. He doesn't try to get back on and I head for next exit and call my lead worker and he tells me he heard on the scanner that there was a guy up there with an ax. Seems the guy tied to get a ride just before I got there and that person had called the cops. The guy didn't try to jack his car, he just left.

I get to the next exit and turn back in the direction of the scales. I park on the shoulder and wait for the cops. A couple of minutes later, they (2 cars) go blowing by me on the way to the scales. I head back to the scales and as I enter them, they have him at gun point. He has his hands in the air and is turning in circles. I put my high beams on him and one of the cops holsters his weapon and attempts to hand cuff the guy. He resists and the fight is on.

I get out and they have him on his hands and knees and he’s not fighting but he is resisting. They can’t get him prone or cuff him. Another cops shows up and he starts nailing the guy with his baton. The sound is echoing off the building with each blow. And this cop was good sized. The guy on the ground isn't even flinching. Another cop shows up and the four of them get him cuffed.

They get him in the back of the car and are interviewing me. I tell them what happened and about the stick I saw. One of the cops goes over to the building and comes back. He said, "is this what you saw?" It was. What I had seen was the handle of a hatchet. I never saw the other end because of the light.

They took him to the hospital and then jail and on the way he broke out the side window with his head. They stopped and hog tied him.

The next day, a man took his niece home to his sister’s house because the girl’s mom didn't show up that morning to pick up her daughter. She lived below the scales just over the bank a ways. When they got there, there was blood everywhere and mom was dead.

Cops come and find a restraining order against the guy they had arrested at the scales with me. Seems she got the order because he threatened to kill her with an ax.
I end up testifying in court and he’s found guilty.

Turns out he was on PCP and he already had two strikes.

Too top this off, two weeks after this happened I was parked down by a river getting a snack out of my lunch box. A deputy pulls up beside me and says: "Hey Chris. You see a guys wearing a hockey mask and carrying a rifle running up and down the river bank?" I laugh because I think he is teasing me about the killer. He assures me that they have a report of the person. I tell him I hadn't seen him but if he was there, he'd find me. So I left.

https://imgur.com/npfW00B

 

[DigDog]

I wanted to buy ... Monster cables.

reported

 

[nakedfrog]

The strangest story is that after being involved with projects for some of the largest companies in the world, is that I continue to be amazed that anything works anywhere. At all.

 

[purbeast0]

reported

Monster cables are just fine. It's their price that is not fine. And with the employee discount, it was like buying cables from monoprice.

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

Lots of ramshackle garbage IT solutions in the military (the pringles-can microwave link between buildings comes to mind). One site had a fiber cable system running from telephone pole to telephone pole, including across a street. Got ripped in half by trucks a time or two before they figured it should go underground.

Good one would be a network outage I experienced. This was a small-ish sub-site (~1k users) of a larger unit, came in to work one day and I, strangely, could hear fans spinning from outside the door to my building, which was peculiar, because every potentially audible fan was behind at least one more door and a good 30 feet from that doorway. I open the door and am hit immediately with a blast of ~90F air (normally ~75F) and I can hear an absolute roar of fans from the end of the hall, in the pathetic broom closet (literally, it was a broom closet at one point) that became a network closet ~7 years prior. I quickly move down there, grab the door handle, and get flashbacks from childhood of 'if the door handle is hot, there's fire on the other side, don't open!'. I ignore of course, open the door, and am hit with ~150-200F temps, seriously, like opening an oven.

Apparently AC system failed (there was a single duct that piped cold air into that room), the Cisco 6500's we had in there started to overheat, and apparently after reaching ~95C or so they go into a shutdown procedure which takes 5 minutes. Apparently if they don't shut down fast enough, they freak out and lock up instead. So both of those were, i don't know, stuck in a processing loop? or something... fans full blast, piping extremely hot air into that closet. Cat5 cladding was malleable (and a lot of our runs fused together), remarkably the other Cisco switches stayed running... I knew there was a reason we spent so much on those. The 6500's ended up dumping their configuration but was able to reinstall it from backed up configs, and they were otherwise okay. We stuffed a portable wheely AC unit in there from that point on.

A lot of other ones are, unfortunately, classified... but suffice to say it's always fun to put a 2-star on hold because you've got something more important happening on another line.

 

[olds]

... but suffice to say it's always fun to put a 2-star on hold because you've got something more important happening on another line.

Must be the new military.

 

[boomerang]

I'll make this as brief as possible.

They modernized our machine shop with the latest in CNC equipment. Big machines capable of machining huge dies. Opportunities opened up and people from various trades transferred in. After a year or so it became apparent that management had really fucked up the whole setup from soup to nuts. It was a work environment that had no winning built into it. People started transferring out which we were contractually allowed to do.

I reached my limit and put in my paperwork. They had 10 days to make the transfer but it could take as long as two weeks because they wouldn't do a transfer mid-week. Two weeks later I'm still there.

I started asking around starting with my union rep. He was an alcoholic that eventually hit a woman with his car killing her and he ended up doing hard time. I got nowhere with him. His superior in the union was giving me lip service. I moved onto the union big boys on day shift. (I was working the afternoon shift at the time.) I got nowhere there. I went to upper management and got nowhere there. I called the regional office of the union and literally got laughed at.

I called the international office of the union and spoke to the servicing rep for our local. He was flabbergasted that I had not been transferred and promised that he would get it taken care of. At this point it had been nearly one year since I put in for transfer. He stopped taking my calls after about 10 days. I remained where I was.

Management, seeing the handwriting on the wall decided that cross-training needed to commence. People were transferring out, (not me though) retiring, nobody was transferring in and the whole operation was going to circle down the drain if there weren't people to run the equipment. They brought in the former top dog of our local union to work with me for some cross-training. I never cared for the guy when he was functioning within the union but he was a pretty good guy otherwise.

Eventually our conversation got to my plight. Nearly 18 months trying to transfer out with no joy at that point. He asked what I had done to date and I related it all. He then asked if I had read our contract. Mind you, our contract (what we were allowed to see of it) was the size of a paperback book and a little over an inch thick. Read it, sorta. Certainly not word for word. I replied that I had but that I found nothing in it to utilize. He told me that what I needed was in there. He gave me a page number and told me when I went home that night to open it up to that page. I did.

The heading at the top of that page consisted of one word, 'Discrimination'. I read no further and hatched a very simple plan with a huge grin on my face.

The next day I sought out the highest authority within our union on the shop floor. He had taken to hiding behind columns when he saw me but I got face to face with him. I asked how my case was going and got the same bullshit answer he'd been giving me for many, many months. Now Fred was black and I'm white so when I told him I wanted to write a discrimination grievance Fred was genuinely incredulous for about a second before anger flashed in his eyes. This, from the guy that is supposed to be representing me.

He said, "you wanna write a what"? I repeated that I wanted to write a discrimination grievance. He asked, "based on what"? I said because I believed that everybody that had transferred out ahead of me had brown eyes and I had blue eyes. I followed that up with a stare right into his eyes. He was no dummy and knew that things had just gotten serious. A discrimination grievance at that time (might be the same now for all I know) was a serious thing. NLRB involvement, depositions all around. Not good.

He told me to see him tomorrow. I replied that he better have my grievance in his hand or that I was going to write one against him.

The next day I saw him and asked where my grievance was. He answered that I could transfer back the following Monday if I didn't write the grievance. I told him that would be just fine. Eighteen months of top-notch union representation later, I had to resort to threats to get the same treatment as literally scores of others had already attained.

They did follow through. The following Monday I was back to my home group.

(Names have not been changed to protect the innocent. That bastard Fred was far from innocent.)

 

[BudAshes]

I use to use movie poster tubes to blow bong rips out the ticket window with my manager when the theater I worked at was showing crappy movies no one wanted to see. Sometimes no one would show up for either show in the movie theater and we'd have hours to waste. I really earned that 6 bucks an hour as a teenager.

 

[Pulsar]

I had a couple of my underlings return to the plant after getting totally shitfaced. They ran through the plant naked smashing computer monitors with a crowbar. They were fired. And were back to work 3 months later (UAW).

 

[kranky]

On my way out of the plant for lunch one day, a guy carrying a towel was coming up to the door from the sidewalk and went in the door as I went out. I stood outside waiting for my buddy and heard screaming and a series of thuds. I ran back in and saw the guy who just went past me lunging (slowly and ineptly) at the receptionist with a foot-long kitchen knife - the missed swings hitting the desk making the thuds as she ran around the desk to avoid the knife. She ran out of her office and yanked the door shut, and a co-worker grabbed the doorknob and hung on to keep the guy from opening the door. I ran down the block to the police station, panted out what I saw and two cops jumped into a cop car and drove up to the plant.

By the time I ran back they were taking the guy out in handcuffs and now it was obvious he was stumbling drunk. The co-worker who was holding the door shut said the guy never tried to open it and was just sitting at the receptionist's desk when the cops told my co-worker to move away and went in with guns drawn.

Found out that the towel he was carrying was hiding the knife, and the guy was the receptionist's ex.

To make it weirder, the big VP insinuated that I should have realized the guy had no business going in the plant and stopped him. No matter that they regularly hired people on work-release to do manual labor and the receptionist's ex was better groomed and less intoxicated than many of those ex-cons.