Tales From Work

[Arntonach]

Re: Tales From Work

@TheThong you need to clarify that you're closed. Like specifically say "We're closed".

[TheThong]

Re: Tales From Work

@TheThong you need to clarify that you're closed. Like specifically say "We're closed".

There's a sign at the front that says we're closed, and also on the windows it says our opening times. When the guy came in, I told him we weren't open straight away so that's pretty obvious for a nice way of saying ' we're closed'. The guy was an ass anyway, so nothing I said would've worked. We had plenty of other customers who would come in at an early time too, and do the same thing and when I told them we weren't open until 11am, they'd just be like ' ok' and come back then.

[FoJaR]

Re: Tales From Work

i worked at the cafeteria in college for a semester and one time i got to make rice crispy treats. it was NOT FUN. had to stir up a giant pot of them with literally a canoe paddle. they were tasty though.

hmmmmmmm one time when i worked installing closet shelving units we were out in the country and the lady left just the biggest revolver sitting on a chair right by the front door. must have been a 44mag. thing was huge. i guess they were far enough west that it wasnt a thing to just leave a gun out when you have strangers working in your house. weird.

also i used to do phone surveys and it got to the point where i could read a book and conduct a survey and record responses all pretty much at the same time. but doing secret shopping for fedex kinkos was much better because they put you on hold so much i got a ton of reading done. also i was a badass secret shopper.

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm when i worked in the meat department of a grocery store i would clean the meat room every day before i left, all the saws, the grinder, hose down the various puddles of blood and goop etc. never buy anything on manager's special and always smell your meat before you buy it. unless of course you have an iron stomach. in that case do what you want but definitely cook things well done.

[botchi246]

Re: Tales From Work

My first job was working at Target as an overnight stalker. This Target hadnt opened yet, so we basically stocked the whole store. Plenty of interesting people and stories from that job. It was from 9pm - 6am.

The sleeper stories:

So we had this big black guy that worked with us, and I am talking big! Like 300lbs, 6'6" at least, a bear of a man. Every time after we finished unloading the trucks he would mysteriously disappear before setting the store up to put the product on the shelf. Eventually we found out that he was going to the bathroom and passing out in there for hours at a time. He got fired. I didn't care, let the big man sleep!

We had another employee who was tall and gangly. Never smelled good and liked to hang out in the freezer doing that stuff. So one time, he was in the freezer doing his thing and the manager called him out to go stock paper towels and toilet paper and whatnot. Well we all know that when you come in from outside from cold weather into a warm place, you get comfortable and tired. Well this guy was in the aisle and literally fell asleep standing up and fell back over some paper towels! He was literally a human scorpion and still asleep! I don't know why he got fired, but he was hilarious.

[lofty rhino]

Re: Tales From Work

my current coworker is a great dude, actually
he told me a story about how he beat the shit out of illegal immigrants with a 2x4 back when he was working in construction
he regularly calls black dudes "******s"
he makes jokes about women in front of customers and sometimes they reference my sister (who he's dating)

great dude

i'm pretty certain he has the same intelligence level as a glass of wendy's iced tea

Seems well-adjusted.

I worked at a grocery store as a cashier one summer and there was a pretty insufferable dude there.

He would constantly hit on middle-aged women, most of which left feeling berated.

He would call me over to show me the drugs he had in his pockets and continually wink at me from across like five registers afterwards.

On one occasion there was a woman with an Australlian accent who he kept referring to as English.
He mimicked her accent by using stereotypical British phrases.
She got aggravated and eventually just stopped responding.

When he finished ringing her up, he let her go with a "cheerio!"
Her face was pretty priceless.

[Dynam0]

Re: Tales From Work

I used to work for the water and sewer dept. of my city as a summer student, depending on which crew you were on you would either be bored our of your tree or working your balls off (I preferred the latter because the day would fly by).

I was with the capital projects crew for about two full summers, basically they would be contracted to install large sections of water/sewer services or replace an existing street that is particularly old (80+ years in some cases, some water mains are so corroded and barnacled, the inner diameters are reduced to the size of a garden hose, you'd find tons of liquor bottles from guys getting drunk on the job too).

-So one summer we were in a more run-down area of downtown for a few weeks; most people would avoid the job site but just being in that area you see some funny stuff. One day a bicyclist decided they would bike over a bunch of fencing that was on the ground rather than simply go around it and they ended up eating it really bad. Everyone stopped working and asked if he was okay, he didn't seem like it but just got back on his bike and booked it away. Pretty lucky because everyone sues the city for shit lol.

-Another day some guy who is absolutely plastered (it's like 10:00am) comes up to the hole asking for a smoke. Everyone shakes their head and tries to avoid talking to him, he turns to me and starts yelling some gibberish and almost falls into the hole (which is full of sewage). I grab him and get him turned back toward the sidewalk where he decides to lay down behind a bush and take a nap. About 30 mins later he gets up and asks everyone again for a smoke, we ignore him. He calls us assholes and stumbles on his way down the sidewalk, literally makes it one block before a cop pulls over and arrests him.

-Another time we literally had a police chase through the job site which was insane because the first car almost drove right into the hole and would've killed half the crew, he fishtailed and went onto the sidewalk, the cop didn't even slow down, it was nuts.

-Different location but one of the excavators was moving some dirt beside me and another worker and caught a set of power lines with his boom (that weren't live), we tried yelling at him but he didn't notice and kept turning the machine, the wires went taut and it caused the top of the telephone pole to snap right off and nearly crush me and the other guy, it ended up staying hanging from the wires but yeah, final destination style lol

-Countless shit stories

[Gundam-Dude]

Re: Tales From Work

My first job ever was working as a dairy clerk at a grocery store for several years, usually closing shifts. Stuff I've experienced, witnessed, heard, etc.:

· Store had a sale on 500ml 35% Whipping Cream and before store closing, this lady came in and wanted to buy a minimum of 200 cartons. She explained that her son ran a bakery and needed a fuck load of whipping cream for cheap, and apparently my store had the best sale price at the time. A single milk crate holds 16 cartons, but you can fit up to 28 cartons by putting a second row of 3 directly on top of the bottom layer. That being said, I basically toss 13 crates into her shopping cart and she proceeds to go checkout. After closing hours, my manager comes up to me and instructs me to pull every 500ml 35% whipping cream carton off the display shelves because customers had been complaining that the cream we had been selling had a foul smell, which could only be described as rotten eggs. So essentially the supplier issued a massive recall because the products were somehow contaminated. tl;dr version, I unknowingly sold 200+ cartons of 35% whipping cream that smelled like rotten eggs to a customer. gg man gg

· I've witnessed both my manager and an undercover cop chase after a guy from inside the store out to the parking lot because the guy tried stealing $200 worth of meat. At the time of the incident, I was outside bringing back shopping carts into the store, so I basically had a front row seat to the fiasco.

· Interacting with high as fuck shoppers during evening hours of April 20th. Most of the questions that I can recall are people asking me where something is when it's right in front of them in their line of sight.

· Countless incidents of seeing pre-teen/teenage boys bawling their eyes out in the manager's office begging my manager/colleague not to tell their parents or call the cops because they tried to shoplift and got caught in the act.

· Being heckled one night for about 10 minutes by a black dude that didn't believe my real first name was a generic "white" name as opposed to a Chinese/Asian one. He saw my name tag and absolutely refused to believe that was my actual name????????????

· Their was an incident that happened at the store where a customer filed a complaint because someone had stolen approximately $300 from her purse which was left unattended in her shopping cart. Upon reviewing security footage, it turned out that one of the store's employee's, who was trusted enough to have key access to the cash office for several years, had stolen they money. Said person instantly got fired, but the fact that someone trusted enough not to be stupid enough to steal ended up doing just that, just not from the store but a customer instead.

· Several incidents of dumbass employees being fired for being caught shoplifting, either by security footage or in-the-act. A lot of these people I've worked with for several years and never would've imagined them committing the acts. smh fam

· This happened fairly recently (last year?) but my manager had told me that a couple of our newly hired cashiers were gullible enough to make change for $50 in counterfeit U.S. money. Now let me explain that this counterfeit money was literally printed on a shitty home office inkjet printer on regular 20lb bond paper, and not one but TWO of the cashiers were completely oblivious to that and gave the guy free money. Both cashiers played the whole ignorance card, claiming "they didn't know how to tell apart counterfeit money" so they only got a slap on the wrist with a 2–3 week suspension from work shift scheduling instead of getting fired. Are you fucking kidding me? smh fam

· Me, being the only person in my department that performs date checks, pulling off thousands of dollars worth of product from the sales floor that end up being thrown straight into the garbage/garbage chute.

· I've witnessed an improperly tied cardboard bale literally explode. My coworker spent over an hour cleaning up the mess he had caused.

More to add to this grocery store workplace later on if I can recall more.

I'll make some posts later on that cover more recent workplace stories, such as stuff I've run into throughout the years as a freelance, part-time, and full-time graphic designer, and my current job at a print shop.

I've also got plenty of workplace FUCK UP stories, but idk if this is the right thread to be posting/confessing those in, lol .

[Charu]

Re: Tales From Work

I've also got plenty of workplace FUCK UP stories, but idk if this is the right thread to be posting/confessing those in, lol .

I say share. I mean, I said both highs and lows!

[Poison-]

Re: Tales From Work

I used to work at a bar where the majority of the crowd was 30+. I was groped, spanked and hit on every night. At first I thought it was pretty flattering, but after a few weeks it became a negative part of my job

[DarknessXoXLight]

Re: Tales From Work

Not very extensive, just stupid. Happened yesterday.
Three 14 year old boys come into Gamestop and start asking if they can take stuff for free. My coworker and I play along at first because they aren't harming anybody and they're just kids so whatevs but then they start following customers and yelling and telling them not to shop with us. We tell them to stop but they basically go 'what're you gonna do if we don't?'
I mean.. I'm tired kid, I'm paid very little lmfao I ain't dealing with you. So they stopped for a bit and we finished helping everybody until they're the only ones left in the store.
We close in like 15 minutes so I'm not too concerned but then they start picking up some of the loot merch we have, throwing it around the store, wearing some of the hats/clothes we have for sale, and end up breaking a display.
At this point I'm not having it anymore, too bad so sad that you're kids, you're kicked out. So we told them to leave. They do, but then they hang out in front of the store blocking the door so another customer can't come in. So I go out there and tell them we will call the cops if they don't leave.
They disappear for like five minutes but come back right before we lock up with cameras and start recording us. This is where I draw the line because we've had a real problem with people recording employees so it's just 100% not tolerated. They start asking us whether we're feminists, whether we're lesbians, why we work for such an awful company. Real original ya toddlers i hope your youtube video gets a billion views for being so hilarious. I'm really tired kid. Cops show up, now they're banned. lel

[Charu]

Re: Tales From Work

What... what kind of 14-year-old would ask "Are you feminists?"

What the heck

[MixMasterLar]

Re: Tales From Work

Damn, there's some wacked crap in here lol. Hang on let's see if I can match it with two of my favorite customer stories.

* While working in dairy, rotation is really important. A common strategy is to let whatever is on the shelf sale before you restock the shelf. For a slow day this is pretty easy to do without getting caught with an empty space.

I once was trying to let maybe 5 or 6 gallons of milk sale out before restocking because the date was 1 day off. As silly as it may sound to some of you well-adjusted folks, if I where to mix them (even putting the new ones in the back) those 5 or 6 would never be touched and would literally sit there for two weeks before having to be pulled for being out of date. People have this weird idea that the milk is gonna taste like anything besides hormone-filled utter juices if it expires 13 days out instead of 12. Anyway I leave to check on cheese and come back to an empty shelf. I'm like, oh ok great, let's fill this sucker up.

So I do that.

Right as I finish, a gentleman who was shopping walked up to me but didn't say a word. In his cart where all the "old" gallons of milk. Without a word, a moment of pause, or any indication that this wasn't pre-meditated at all he pulled them from his cart and sat them on the floor. He then reached in the back corner and pulled one gallon out and placed it his cart next to his beer and calmly walked away as if it was routine.


12 or so days later I poured 5 or 6 gallons of milk down the sink and watched my department take the loss, which of course in addition to wasting food products made my employers pretty stingy about giving out yearly raises to workers who have alot of wasted food reported on their shift.

Basically people who do this sort of things can go shove their head in a cow's ass.

Working as the manager of Produce at this point. In the back, our Produce space was next to the restrooms. Made running in there to escape some of my co-workers really easy.

One time I went in there to use the restroom as slowly as possible before I had to clock out. My excuse was it was super slow and everything was done. My actual reasoning is that I hated my soul. Anyway, bathroom has one urinal and one actual stall with a toilet. I'm the kind of guy who rather use the stall regardless of the nature of my business, but it was taken today and I simply used the urinal. Not that big a deal.

While using it, I heard a grunt from the stall.

No bigger, don't make a deal of it. Some things a man has got to do for himself, feel me? Wish him luck in a little prayer and move on. And maybe make sure you pick up a Fiber One on the way home.

Another grunt. Drawn out. Gets a little higher in pitch as it finishes.

Uh huh. Maybe chillin' in here for the last two minutes before shift's end is not what's gonna happen today. I start washing my hands and use a little less soap then I would have.

But then I hear the sound of a man trying to move porcelain and I knew that something shittier then shit was afoot. I quickly left and waited outside, ducked in my workroom out of sight waiting for the man to leave. This doesn't take too long to happen.

I go in and brace myself as I walk into the stall. I look at the back of the toilet and steel myself to open the back and see what he ditched in there.

I knew what I would find

Hell, you know what I did find.

I opened it to find it anyway.

A very used cucumber.

"Yeah so this guy just left and ditched a, uh, used cucumber in the back of the pot. Yeah no I have to clock out you know how Jack and Kent feel about overtime for the department managers orders from up high you know? Yeah uh byyee boi holla back pce"

Hearing the clock churn out my card never sounded so good.

when I used to work at Fry's grocery store back in high-school I found a playboy calendar still sealed in shrinkwrap in one of the shopping carts. It was out in the open lot late at night when I was just putting carts away like usual. I took it home and gave it to my older brother for his birthday XD

Best little bro ever.

She takes it, smiles, and then walks off saying. "MmHMM, that's right, can't be losing money, nu-uh. I gots a family to feed."

Working in a job that requires working with the public will make you raciest in a heartbeat brohan.

I got some really bad welfare stories that hit these same notes.

On one occasion there was a woman with an Australlian accent who he kept referring to as English.
He mimicked her accent by using stereotypical British phrases.
She got aggravated and eventually just stopped responding.

When he finished ringing her up, he let her go with a "cheerio!"
Her face was pretty priceless.

My job, too, had to enact a "no accent" rule.

· Being heckled one night for about 10 minutes by a black dude that didn't believe my real first name was a generic "white" name as opposed to a Chinese/Asian one. He saw my name tag and absolutely refused to believe that was my actual name????????????

My name is Lar

I feel this pain.

Also so many people try to pronounce it as Leer it's enough to make me kick eggplants.

They start asking us whether we're feminists, whether we're lesbians, why we work for such an awful company.

.....

Well, we're waiting! I kid we're cool

[TheThong]

Re: Tales From Work

I was on night shift, and the ambos brought in this lady who was refused by another hospital. She had called the ambos to bring her in because she said she was pregnant and wanted her baby to be checked.
This is a 50+ lady fyi. She's known to (frequent flyer) be delusional.
So anyway, she comes in. I ask her for a urine specimen, so I can do a pregnancy test for her. Surprise, not pregnant. She tells me she hasn't had sex in 20 years, and proceeds to tell me she is ' god's child ' and is 'the next Virgin mother'. Oh yeah. Although she could walk, she also decided to pee on the floor three x. This is between 2-4am in the morning.

Had another night shift where it was 3am. One of the mental health patients was singing '... In the jungle the mighty jungle ' on repeat for a good 10 mins. Across the room from him, a patient yells at him to stfu, and as he continues to sing, pt no 2 goes into his room and punches him. We had to call a ' code black ' and get security to separate the two.

Anyway, a good hour passes and patient #1 wakes up, and decides it's a good idea to go to patient #2's room, and punches him back. We call another code black, and end up having to move one patient to the opposite side of the department.

Lots of fun patients.

[Charu]

Re: Tales From Work

Had another night shift where it was 3am. One of the mental health patients was singing '... In the jungle the mighty jungle ' on repeat for a good 10 mins. Across the room from him, a patient yells at him to stfu, and as he continues to sing, pt no 2 goes into his room and punches him. We had to call a ' code black ' and get security to separate the two.

Anyway, a good hour passes and patient #1 wakes up, and decides it's a good idea to go to patient #2's room, and punches him back. We call another code black, and end up having to move one patient to the opposite side of the department.

Lots of fun patients.

Well, that's certainly one way to get some peace and quiet once and for all, lmao

[Gundam-Dude]

Re: Tales From Work

Workplace fuck up story time. A lot of these were mistakes made around the time I just started working at my current job at a print shop (with a couple slip ups happening just last year). Only including major/notable ones worth posting about that I can recall atm.

I still have MORE stories related to graphic design gigs, but that'll be saved for yet another post later.

· I once printed on the wrong side of 2-part carbonless paper because I wasn't paying attention when loading the printer with paper. 90 sets went straight into the recycling bin and my boss had to order a new ream of paper so I could re-print them.

· A customer came in with numbered tickets imposed in sequence on a multiple paged PDF. For whatever reason, I didn't realize this and somehow thought that they were duplicates, so I ended up printing page 1 out of 10 multiple times. The customer came back the next day to get them re-printed, free of charge.

· I once printed 300 adhesive labels without remembering to preflight the document before hand, causing transparent objects in the artwork to appear translucent. They all went straight into the recycling bin and I had to re-print them.

· A client supplied a 16-page booklet document, that was mostly white space without proper crop/trim marks, and I printed a quantity of 250 without realizing the registration/alignment was completely off as soon as I fed 1 set through the booklet maker (which is a machine that folds and saddle-stitches sheets of paper). The size of the booklets were supposed to be 5.5" x 8.5", but because the alignment was off, the only solution without re-printing was to face trim an extra 3/16" off the width. At the time our client comes in to pickup the booklet order, the guy busts out a ruler and goes full on OCD mode to check measurements, alignment, and even the fucking grain of paper on a couple of the booklets—now let me tell you that in 2 years of working at the print shop, this is the ONE and ONLY customer I've ever run into that has done this. At this point, I'm screaming in my head, "FUCK MY LIFE", but surprisingly the guy didn't start up a shit storm and just took the booklets and left—the wave of relief afterwards was unreal.

· I once printed 500 envelopes with the wrong mailing indicia. The envelopes were printed with an Addressed Admail indicia (now known as Personalized Mail by Canada Post as of 2016) instead of Lettermail. Because Canada Post has strict mailing requirements when creating a Statement of Mailing, we had no choice but to mail the pieces the way it was because they had already been stuffed and sealed, which cost both my workplace and client extra money. Addressed/Personalized Mail items have a minimum requirement of a 500 pieces, but if the quantity falls under, they have a minimum charge of $254.50+tax (price might have gone up since then). Only 300 or so envelopes were going to be sent out, so gg man gg.

· This one is a fairly long one, so I'm going to shorten it by doing some summarized greentext version below:
> Gets usual purchase order for labels from one of our major accounts.
> Proofs to customer and they approve it without issue.
> Outsources label to our supplier because we do that for larger quantity orders.
> Receive proofs of the artwork plates from our supplier. I skim through most of them like I usually do and approve all for production.
> About a week later, labels are delivered to customer.
> Customer calls back and says one of the labels they received is wrong even though they proofed and approved the correct version.
> Realize that I accidentally approved the wrong artwork on one of the plates. FUCK MY LIFE
> Have to get 1,000 labels re-printed at our cost because I fucked up hard.
> Boss gives me shit.
> Get the re-prints of the labels delivered to customer promptly.
> I make arrangements to pickup incorrect version of labels.
> Customer accidentally ends up returning the re-prints that were delivered to them.
> Boss gives me shit again.

· Another fairly long one, so I'm going to do the same as above block:
> Customer, in a huge rush, comes in around opening hours (8:30am) and needs spiral bound booklets done within the next hour or two because he was catching a flight at noon.
> Customer pulls out his Mac and takes his time trying to figure out how to copy files over to a USB stick. Mind you, he was an older gentlemen probably in his 50s.
> Supplied two PowerPoint documents that are both over 1GB in size. Each PowerPoint document takes a minimum of 15 minutes to open on my work PC because it was 100+ slides with a fuck load of images.
> Takes an additional 15 minutes per document to export slides to PDF for printing.
> Print, punch, and bind the job without any problems.
> Customer comes in around 10:00am to pick up job and accuses that we printed the wrong PowerPoint for one of the documents. He was furious at this point.
> I show him my monitor so he could see what PowerPoints he gave me.
> "I gave you the wrong PowerPoint. This is why I hate Macs, but you guys should've shown me what I gave you before printing." Basically, trying to pin the blame on us even though it was HIS fuck up.
> Supplies the correct version of PowerPoint and basically repeat earlier process of opening, exporting, and production.
> Customer comes back around 11:00am to pick up job. For whatever reason doesn't realize that he's paying for everything that was printed and done already. He thought we were going to correct HIS fuck up free of charge, when that's not how it works. I mean sure, if it was a fuck up on the print shop's part, then yeah we'd consider doing it free of charge. But that's not the case here.
> Guy is fuming, but sucks it up and pays for the order before storming out and saying that, "[he's] never coming back again."
> ?????????????????????????

· Not so much a fuck up story, but I once had a customer storm out the shop steaming at the ears and cussing at everyone because they just would not accept the fact their supplied document was not set up properly to be printed the way they wanted it. It was apparently too much of a hassle to either A) Pay us extra to fix it for them or B) Fix it themselves. Basically from what I can recall, this lady wanted to print out 50 sets of a 5.5" x 8.5" half-fold pamphlet/booklet that was saddle-stitched on regular 20lb bond paper in colour. She supplied a Word document and when I opened it up to take a look, basically it was setup in a tiny ass landscape wordart frame that was not to scale, and it was imposed on portrait letter sized (8.5" x 11") orientation. I calmly explain everything the best I could in layman's terms (because she clearly didn't understand), and she basically goes on this angry rant about how we "print people" don't know what we're talking about because she was able to print the document on her shitty inkjet printer blown up by around 300% to fit the paper size, even though it's the wrong orientation to begin with. First time I've had a customer scream, "FUCK YOU THIS IS A SHITTY AND UNPROFESSIONAL BUSINESS AND I'M NEVER COMING BACK HERE AGAIN", directly in my face.