Some of my favorite things that happened to other people at work

These are some stories that I love. They didn’t happen to me, but I heard about them first hand from family and friends.

You know you aren’t valued when…
A QA department at a very uninspiring job I once had was quartered in a crummy ground floor room that was intially a storage area. It was a dingy space to say the least, but we made the best of it and set up our QA lab, hung our classic Apple Computer posters, and set up our Lord of the Rings RISK game table. There was a tester there who did excellent work and had ridiculously been a temp for about 3 years. He was starting to get understandably irritated that the company wouldn’t actually hire him, since his time as a temp lasted longer than most companies in the tech industry at that time. He was feeling undervalued and it was starting to finally show through a bit in his attitude. (I would have started being surly at 9 months!) Well, one day the ceiling right over this guy’s workstation started leaking. Within an hour a large puddle has amassed on his computer and was starting to pool in the flourescent light holder above him. He finally gave up trying to be productive, moved his stuff and left to investigate the leak. It turns out that the men’s bathroom was right above him — and a toilet was leaking!!!!!!!!

A Manager is Chained to his Desk
I used to work with some folks who had all previously worked together at a small software company. The company was started by a young programmer who used to be a wrestling champion. He was a big, strong, and fairly serious guy. The story goes that a friend of mine walked into work one evening – he was going to work some late hours. He heard a noise coming from the boss’ office. When he investigated, he found his boss completely trapped in his chair at his desk. Somehow he had gotten his chair rolled far enough under the desk so that he couldn’t move his arms, nor could he roll the chair back. He’d been stuck that way for quite a long time. It was a good thing my friend decided to work late that night!

Feed the Meter
A friend of mine worked at a photo lab on a busy city street where the boss was pretty much described as crazy and the atmosphere of the job left something to be desired. Still, for an aspiring photographer and project manager, it wasn’t a bad job. A new woman started work one day and spent the first couple of hours doing usual first day on the job things, training and getting the lay of the land. She announced that she had parked on the street and needed to feed the meter. She never came back to work. Now, whenever I am having a bad day, I announce with a wink and a nudge that I need to go “feed the meter.”

HR PI
A woman I know is a Human Resources Director (a.k.a. Personnel Director) for the Health District of a well-known west coast city. Let’s call her Consuelo for the sake of this story, though that is not her real name. She oversees personnel issues for city staff like public nurses, epidemiologists, and health inspectors for swimming pools and restaurants. A public nurse had been charged with not actually visiting some of his patients, but was still billing the time and mileage. Consuelo was in charge of investigating this. It was a big political ordeal and a lot of mudslinging was going on. Consuelo was, of course, being painted as the “big bad” for just doing her job. An investigation pretty much consists of interviewing the patient, the employee, the person who made the charge, and the employee’s manager. Pretty standard stuff. Consuelo had a meeting that was unrelated to this, but with someone who was stationed in the same building as the nurse under investigation. The meeting was after lunch and Consuelo was really exhausted, so she decided to drive to the building, eat lunch in her car, and take a little cat nap before the meeting. She had sunglasses on, because she lives in a very sunny city. Well, the cat nap turned into a 3 hour snooze fest. She awoke to find that she had completely missed her meeting. She rushed into the building to find her appointment and apologize profusely for being so late. The woman she was meeting with laughed and said, “Well, all the nurses think you are out there spying on them. They think you are tailing them to make sure they make all their reported stops.” Word spread through the building like wildfire that Consuelo was out in the parking lot – disguised in sunglasses – spying on them! Consuelo was hysterical with laughter — she’d been sound asleep.

Did I Eat That?
A friend of mine works at a company that allows employees to bring their pets to work. My friend grabbed some coffee and a muffin on the way to work and was in the middle of munching on it when he had to go to a meeting. He left the half-eaten muffin on his desk and attended the meeting. When he returned to his desk a few hours later, the muffin wasn’t there. He thought about it and wasn’t sure whether he’d actually finished it or not. Then, he noticed a few crumbs on his desk next to a big slobbery looking wet spot. He peaked over his cube wall. Sure enough, the next door neighbor’s dog was asleep in the cube, incriminating crumbs on his lips, and a very satisfied look on his face.

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