Ask Lemmy

There are two that come to mind for me. I work at a big box retailer that sells a lotta different stuff.

1. One of our front end managers' car caught fire randomly one night. I don't actually know what caused it though but it was kind of a big deal. Thankfully no one was hurt.

2. Years ago, we had a frozen stocker who was pretty bad at his job, and was also a racist little shit. He worked with another guy who was a light skinned black dude (who was a very good stocker), and while they were normally fine, one day our terrible stocker got upset over something one day and called him a slur. It wasn't received well, and some shit went down, but nothing serious at this point.

Now I mentioned that terrible stocker was terrible. Management had reprimanded him a few times already, so on this particular night where he was doing very badly, there was no more room for conversation, so he was fired. The firing manager was this super cool African fella. The firing was not received well, and caused terrible stocker to lose his shit. He stormed out of the office, shouting racial slurs at everyone he saw, and ended up cutting his hand with his box cutter. He then proceeded to smear his blood all over the frozen doors and then ran outside and smeared his blood all over the firing manager's car. The police were called and he was arrested. No idea what happened to him afterwards. It was pretty wild.

One of the two bosses didn't turn up for work one Friday. On the weekend, we all received a call that he had died.

Monday was horrible. We had new starters that came into an office full of people crying, and people from our HQ joining to set people up with any counselling.

The worst part? We had deadlines to meet, and clients didn't give a fuck that the person responsible had died. One large client outright said to me on the phone on that first Monday "that's sad and all, but I don't really give a fuck, have it done by end of day". To HQ's credit, after I had told them they asked me to stop what I was doing (had already delivered the work) and our CEO called them and told them we were to terminate our contract with them. One woman I worked with, a Project Manager, was repeatedly brought to tears by clients checking on work or trying to sort out meetings with a guy that was in a morgue. I was able to power through, up until the day of his funeral when we all went to the pub after and saw his children playing without a care in the world.

Initially, it brought us all closer together, but within three months people started to leave - and by the end of the year the HQ decided to just close the office entirely, firing everyone that was still there.

I hate to say it, looking back, but this gave me without question one of the best answers for behavioural interviews in tech, since I ultimately ended up having to help deliver everything and onboard people in a stressful scenario. Knowing the guy, it's what he would have wanted.

Worked on a military base that had a small lake. Against policy, a civilian employee went out fishing during his lunch break, somehow capsized his rowboat and had to be rescued by the on-base fire department. Unsurprisingly, he didn't lose his job over it.

We had a 2 drinks limit at company after hours gigs. Not that bad, but it was apparently because someone drank a bunch and then walked onto a highway. There was also the time the FBI came into the building to ask about a sales guy who took part in 1/6.

Years ago when I worked at Taco Bell someone got fired because the manager walked in on him snorting coke off the bags of strawberry they used to put on top of the fruitista freezes in the walk-in.

Also some asshole pulled a gun in drive thru during my shift because he ordered extra cheese on his 7 layer nachos and apparently did not get adequate cheese.

Used to work at a local resort. One time, Kid Rock rented out the whole top floor of the hotel, and requested no staff go up there during his stay. Of course, it's a hotel full of minimum wage teenagers, so intra-staff communication is abysmal. A maid ended up running into a naked Kid Rock holding a bag of cocaine lol

A coworker aggressively made out with my face at a work event out of town and they stopped letting us put alcohol on our expense reports. I was universally blamed for the policy change and HR tried to send ME to sexual harassment training because it was my fault for socializing with her, apparently!

Direct quote from the HR director: "If you knew she was a sloppy drunk, why did you go out with her?"

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.

We had to close our sky several times during those last 4 years (meaning no aircrafts allowed above the country). Several times for technical failures, the last one this summer wasn’t our fault but was cool.

I arrived at work for a night shift in the ACC (area control center), heavy rain above the city, I see a small lake forming up against the building underground.

When I reached the elevator, I took off my EarPods and heard a shower like sound coming from the elevator. Eh let’s take the stairs… Curious, I venture to the underground where I’m greeted by a bunch of laughing air traffic controllers and the ACC supervisor for the night. There is something like 40cm of water everywhere, blocking access to the -1 floor and our smoking corner. We joke about doing the "clear the sky" procedure because we can’t use the smoking corner.

A few minutes later we are all back in the ACC, I wasn’t seated yet when the crisis phone rang: We mobilize the board of crisis, reason is the flooding reached some electrical supply rooms, like UPS and batteries rooms.

30 minutes later the AC is down. AC for us humans in the building but mostly for the data center with all the ATC systems needed for our work. Some systems start to overheat and fail.

Less than one hour into my shift, the board of crisis that quickly assembled comes to us in the ops room and says: "We clear the sky, it’s too dangerous".

For us in air traffic control, clearing the sky is easy, you just tell aircrafts a heading to quickly get the fuck out of our airspace and then you stay in front of an empty radar screen. Capacity management people have a little bit more work to do, announcing Europe and Eurocontrol that our ‘capacity = 0 please don’t send traffic’. It’s the tech people that have a lot of work in those situations, personally I just sat on my ass making jokes and scrolling lemmy.

We ended up switching off all the unused screens, systems etc to avoid heat. Opened all the electronics hatches, all doors, everything we could do to have some fresh air inside as it was getting hot. Airport fire squad quickly came and pumped out the water from the basement. They did that all night until morning.

At the end of my shift at 6, temperature inside the ACC was 29 degrees C (instead of 23) and humidity % unknown but it felt "sticky". Sky was still closed. Apparently during the day it felt like a sauna.

The tech guys managed to restore some AC only for the data center and the ACC but not the rest of the buildings so it was mandatory work from home for non ops people. When I came back the evening for my second night shift, everything was back to normal for us and it was a sad normal night with no fun events.

It turned out that the flooding reached 40 cm on the -1 floor and 1m40 on the -2 floor. There is a small underground river below that with a pool that is used as natural cold water for AC. That cold pool was filled with hotter (and unclean) rain water, killing the cold production loop.

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.

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

This was actually after I left, although I have a million crazy stories about this place- but the guy who I used to work directly under was an alcoholic, and one day Monday he didn't show up for work, wasn't answering his phone, etc. This was pre-social media, so they couldn't ask around or anything.

He comes in a week later and it turned out that over the previous weekend, he had gotten drunk, driven from where we lived in Indiana down to Georgia for some reason (he had no connections in Georgia), went into a bar in some small town, got into a fight, and wound up in the slammer for a week.

He was no longer employed after that. And this is a small business where every employee was so vital to the owner that I once got mad at him, screamed, "GO FUCK YOURSELF, [his name]!" and stormed out and went home and he called me up the next day, apologized and begged me to come back in with various compensation promises which I can't remember. It took a lot to get fired from there, but that was enough.

Not current workplace but previous ones.

• Used to work with a guy who had no filter whatsoever and would openly brag about how efficiently and quickly he'd work and multitask, and about the 9/10 models he used to shag back when he lived in South East Asia. He was fired from my workplace after a string of incidents where he growled at a female colleague, bullied several other colleagues over bad quality monitors and openly used racial slurs in the office.

• That same guy went to work for an energy company that I had other friends work at. I learned he was fired and escorted out by security within minutes after being reprimanded by a team leader. He went into a company-wide Slack channel and openly called her a "fucking bitch."

• Two people got fired for taking dick pics in the office whilst on an evening shift and posting them on their socials.

Manager was stealing money.