Inspired by the very similar thread about school incidents.
The big incident at my previous job was the (extremely incompetent) HR person accidentally sharing a spreadsheet of every employee’s salary. I was an hourly worker at the time and thought it was funny, but some of the senior engineers were pissed to find out how much more other engineers made. HR was not fired, instead she was put on a temporary paid leave.
Other incidents include:
- One of the owners’ vape exploded, forcing everyone to evacuate.
- VP of the company got caught buying escort services on the company credit card.
- Aforementioned owner (who was no longer an owner after the company was bought out) got fired shortly after a town hall zoom meeting, where he used a Trump/Pence background.
- The head of the NOC team had a stroke at work.
- COO “accidentally” revealed in front of everyone that one of the Project Managers had cancer. She sued, and they settled.
- COO verbally abused one of the senior managers over the phone during a big meeting. He sued, and they settled.
It was a pretty shitty company.
The CEO sent out the email that COVID vaccination was required for all employees or the people that refused would be terminated, like most workplaces. It was fully expected seeing as it is a hospital, and all but a handful of employees compiled. This moron decided to reply all (the reply all to CEO emails has thus been disabled since) with a lecture full of antivax nonsense about how COVID vaccines were experimental and contain fetal cells, and the revelation that they had been reading patient charts that they had no business reading for COVID test results and the consultation or ER notes, and wrote about the “proof” that they had that nobody had died or gotten really sick from COVID, and how the CEO was extremely misinformed on the subject of COVID. That resulted in immediate termination and it was pretty hilarious to read their nonsense and the fact they admitted to every employee they had been violating patient confidentiality. You want to be that dumb, have at it.
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a guy mixed the wrong chemicals and work shut down for a week. of course that happened before i was hired and hasnt happened since. everyday i pray someone did that and shuts down work for a week so i get a free week off
Be the change you want to see
Unpaid?
paid or unpaid i dont really care free week of not working pays for itself 😂
If it was unpaid for me I’d be fucked.
Years ago I worked for a large-ish post production company. They had recently moved into a swanky new location and everything there was tailored to spec, including the server room. In norwegian we sometimes call a server room a ‘machine room’, this is relevant.
As a part of the server room spec, a dry fire suppression system was among the requirements.
The summer of the incident was particularly hot, and we experienced some trouble with our cooling, so a cooling technician was called to have a look. While he was working on the unit inside the server room, he made a mistake that caused all the cooling gas to dump into the room, triggering the fire extinguishers.
A dry fire system works by releasing an inert gas into a space to displace any oxygen, effectively choking any fire. I imagine this is usually done by some solenoids opening some canisters of gas and the room quickly, but gradually becomes oxygen free. Luckily, my boss at the time was present and he quickly got both himself and the tech to safety.
All good right? No. The contractor who constructed the new location had ordered and installed a system meant for maritime machine rooms, not the computer ‘machine room’ we had. In an environment filled with fuel and grease, you optimize towards filling the room with an inert gas as quickly as possible, and it turns out they use explosives to complete the task. In this room there were three canisters in the ceiling with fire shooting out of them, burning pellets to generate the inert gas. The gas and smoke from the canisters combined with the leaked cooling gas, and started condensing.
Into hydrochloric acid.
While all this was going on, all of the servers and workstations were happily humming along, sucking the now extremely corrosive atmosphere into themselves, making sure that every nook and cranny inside and outside got covered in a thin greasy film of acid.
The aftermath: Mine and two colleagues’s summer break was cut short, as we were called in to do damage control. Ripping out and wiping hard drives clean was what we did all summer. With external help we managed to recover all of the data. One feature film was delayed a few weeks. The insurance payout actually made the company a bit ahead financially. As far as I know there’s still burn marks in the floor of the server room, from when flames shot out of the fire extinguishers. Everyone involved now knows what a proper dry fire suppression system for a server room looks like.
The kicker is, the cooling was messed up because a fabric awning on the building had fallen down and was covering the air intake. If anyone had thought to check the roof this whole thing would have been avoided, and that server room would probably still have bombs attached to its ceiling.
Great story! Very well told. I can tell you must enjoy retelling it to newbies when they join the company :)
But wow, other than 2 summer breaks being cut short, it sounds like a good outcome. Especially considering no one was seriously hurt
I’m not with that company anymore, but given the right audience, ‘that time the server room blew up’ is a big hit.
It could have gone way worse. A stressful lesson and a good story is best case scenario outcome when stuff hits the fan.
Sounds perfectly normal for a construction/install team to me. “Maritime…doesn’t that mean like ocean or something?” “Hey the drawing says install it so I’m installing it.” “…yeah fair enough.”
Jason spilled a barrel a barrel of ink and fell in it. 🤣
Shorts got banned because ceo saw someone’s balls.
Real question was why they were looking so closely at that workers crotch while we were in chairs
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Wow and if your balls are low enough to be visible you know it’s got to be hot, thus proving the necessity of shorts!
But yeah, some humans have balls and sometimes you’ll see them, get over it. I hope no one tells this ceo about breasts.
Wasn’t that they were low, more the angle he was at let him see up the crotch
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Hmmm I guess we have two of different types
1: late into pandemic when inflation was really bad a bunch of the workers were super upset by their wages, management got together to get a solution. The plant supervisor called a meeting and told everyone there would be a “substantial raise”, it was $0.20. Less than 1%
The second, more recent, a fire broke out after a maintenance repair went awry. Someone pulled the fire alarm and it failed to work. Someone pulled a second fire alarm, it failed to fully initiate the system. Then on the last attempt it finally went off but the fire suppression system and sprinkler system did go off but not over the actually burning area. This lead to a whole region of the building getting smelted and a big investigation on the fire suppression system. After it was resolved they asked employees to continue working their shift, even in the smoked out areas. The stench was horrible and probably carcinogenic lol
Holy shit do you not have any fire inspectors? Would you describe your local and state governments as “Republican”, or “very Republican”?
I’d actually describe them as Blue/non-designated, it feels red-leaning recently with some of the stuff they are passing though
The fire department comes and checks stuff out really only when there’s an issue. We do have test fire alarms though they never use the fire suppression system, mostly only the noise alarm. I’m unsure if they pull the same one or random ones for the test but either way, it wasn’t good enough apparently.
A similar thing to the first point happened at my old company.
When it became clear that working from home won’t go away, management came up with some new and actually reasonable rules, that basically allowed 100% wfh, if the team was okay with it.
Now, here in Germany east/west differences are still pretty stark. So someone asked “sooo, I’m in the East, get a low wage, but work with a team from the West. If my neighbor would start working for the same team, formally at an office in the West, but 100% from home, he’d get West wages”. Management didn’t address that at all, so a bunch of people (including myself) just said fuck it, quit and now earn way better wages working from home.
That’s wild! In the states there’s a similar issue with cost of living being vastly different in different areas of the country. I have a family member who does financial stuff for business but works from home. They ended up having to get a postal mailing address in a higher cost of living area so they could get fair wages since their normal address would make business offer only real low wages. It’s asinine
And this is why we need unions.
I’m definitely pro union, my work did almost go union actually! But we just follow a union contract that another workplace has from their union. For the most part I think its the best of both worlds, but if they keep aggravating people we aren’t too far away.
I’ve been following what’s been going on unionwise all very the USA and I’m kinda pumped about it
Working at McDonald’s at the time. The HR manager went on bereavement leave and a replacement was brought in. The day the HR manager came back she was told she was demoted and was put as the DriveThru order taker for a couple months before finally being fired and given severance.
A month or 2 later the old restaurant manager who was now the “Systems Manager” and in charge of all the admin tasks stopped doing unpaid overtime, so all of his duties were taken away and he was put as DriveThru order taker.
For 3 months he came in for exactly 8 hours every day, only did order taking in DT, and left. He was still being paid his restaurant manager’s salary during this time, the new restaurant manager was in over his head and would not ask the old restaurant manager for help. Eventually the old RM left to work for a competitor working with the old HR manager.
Apparently the owner called the competitor to scream at them for stealing his staffHR finds out the leg is not grateful for the boot
Yeah, stole them; that’s what happened here. They obviously didn’t drive them away. /s
This sounds like a really easy case for a labor lawyer
Double dipping~~
Hahhahhahahahahaha
Was it good?
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Worked in a small Unix team under a broader IT department at a university. The manager of our team was awesome in part because his attitude was “I deal with all the university politics so you can focus on your work”. Anybody who has worked at a large university knows what the politics can be like.
The VP of IT retired and the replacement was hired from an IT department at another university. The new VP’s overall policy was “We will do things this way because that’s how we did it at my old university”. Within about 6 weeks we had a round of “layoffs” that targeted our manager and one other manager that was also known to push back against the university politics. They were the only two people let go out of a department of roughly 100.
Within about a year of that happening every last member of our tight knit Unix team left for greener pastures.
Probably one of our male executives ‘gracefully’ stepping down after being caught having sex on security camera at the construction of a new location with the overseer of the construction that was the husband of the security director that found the footage.
Im gonna need a map or a family tree or something. I can’t follow who was who.
Construction overseer is a guy who banged the exec who is a guy and was caught by the security person of indeterminate gender, who was married to the overseer. That’s what I gathered.
Exec + Unmentioned Wife
Head of Security + Husband that works in construction
Camera = Exec + Husband of Head of Security doing the construction junction.
Edit: Head of Security is female. Both couples were thought to be married heterosexual couples which added to the surprise.
Of course nothing wrong with the gay part, it was just more shocking to most considering the Bible belt location of it all.
It also wasn’t company wide news, just word that got out to some.
What??? 😂😂
Lmao.
Not a fun story but new CEO comes in, pricing structure heavily modified to be more aggressive towards bringing clients into our ecosystem of products, we lose a whale of a client, 7 percent of the company is laid off including the newest guy on my team,and then magically acquire new responsibilities for the same pay. Capitalism baby.
