An IT company I worked for many years ago went through a massive growing phase. One of the things that lead to this growth was the hiring of much more competent management, particularly in security and the data center.
Security actually started doing their jobs and started routinely doing network scans. They discovered two servers that were not located in the data center, which was a huge no no. The servers were running two porn websites off the company’s internet connection. The guy had been doing it for years and apparently was making many times his company salary from them.
This guy in the warehouse made a deal with another guy to sell his porn collection. So he brings it in one day in a big cardboard box and leaves it sitting in the coat room with the top open, you could see X-rated stuff just walking by. Someone says something to management and the box gets confiscated, but they don’t know who it belongs to so that’s pretty much the end of it. Until our hero goes and files a complaint about the theft of his property.
Did both parties involved in the transaction get fired?
I think the other guy got a warning but I’m pretty sure he wasn’t fired
This is one of my favorite stories. I only observed the events or was told firsthand by those involved. This is a true story.
Working in a crappy thrift store chain. Coworkers are cool as shit though. Befriend all the ones remotely close to my age. Customers are still terrible though. Especially the ones with the shitty kids that just terrorize the store while they absent-mindedly browse and shop.
One day this little shit is just running around the store and just making extra work for everybody for no good reason. Opening sealed bags of random toys. Etc.
After finally having enough of his bullshit, a coworker friend goes over to the kid and tells him, very sternly, he needs to go back to his mom. Little shit runs back and complains to his mom whom happens to be a total bitch; like when I hear the term “Karen” being used, she’s a textbook example of one.
Karen escalates, fast forward to outside the managers office, there stands Karen, my Friend, Manager and Little Shit.
While Karen is bitching to the Manager about how “Friend can’t talk to her kid like that” & “he’s not his father,” etc. The Little Shit looks at Friend and with a taunting edge stated: "You’re gonna get fired!" Without missing a beat Friend looks Little Shit in the eye and replies with a simple Fuck You. A 34 year old man saying that to some 10 year old brat? Hilarious. Everybody just fell silent with their jaw on the ground. Karen, Manager and Little Shit all silent for a moment. The rage building in Karen was written all across her face though. When she could finally utter words Manager started with "Friend, go home." “Okay!” He left with a great big smile on his face… he did get fired because of that though. He said it was worth it.
That’s a very bad decision as a manager, if I was another employee in that store I would take that to mean never control kids in the store, let the manager deal with that.
And if I was the friend I would have asked during that exchange with the manager present “So, I assume that means she’s paying for everything the kid broke before I asked him to stop, right?” Just to see the reactions.
She was a very bad manager and always quick to make the customer happy. I ended up leaving shortly after that incident.
I used to unload trucks in an absolute madhouse.
The heat in the back of the transparent roofed trailers in summer was a nightmare so some of the lads would strip down to their boxers then pop their boots and high vis back on. We eventually got cameras installed pointing down the trailers and we’re suddenly required to be fully clothed at all times. Our shift lead took particular offense to this and flashed his cock at the camera whilst shouting obscenities. He didn’t come back to work the next day.
We had 4 guys sacked for not only opening customers parcels but for taking fireworks out of said parcel and taping them to Frisbees which they then threw to each other. One inevitably went off in one fella’s hand. He eventually managed to sue for unfair dismissal somehow.
Another guy was caught trying to sneak a slab of wine out to his car.
A… slab? Of wine?
Is that a whole pallet or something?
Ikr? How is wine measured in slabs…
I’m guessing this wine’s vintage is some time last week?
In Australia the call a case (24 bottles) of beer a slab.
Maybe this is some kind of canned wine?
24 bottles but yeah.
Not crazy, just sad.
Middle of the day, sitting at our desks working. This middle aged guy who was usually happy as Larry gets up and leaves the office leaving his stuff behind. Not a word said. I just assumed he was getting a coffee or something.
End of the day rolls around, stuff still there. Same thing the next day. Still there the next week.
People start asking what happened to him, but the agency he was working through kept telling us he’s coming back soon.
Over a month later, someone packs up his stuff and puts it in the bin. The guy was never coming back, turns out he went left and ended his own life the day he walked out. Never made it home.
The agency apparently only found out he was dead a few weeks after the incident, then strung us along so they could find a replacement. We terminated their contract and offered the handful of other employees jobs.
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Another job, we had a new guy start. Very conventionally attractive and he seemed normal enough.
A few weeks later one of the women complained to HR that someone was stalking her. She was getting ‘flattering’ letters, emails, notes etc and they often contained information and photos in/about/around her work. Flattering, but not something she was comfortable with
Few weeks later, we’re told new guy won’t be coming back due to inappropriate behaviour.
Woman had to get a restraining order against the guy. In a twist of irony, she said that if the guy had just talked to her, she would have gone on a date with him in a heartbeat.
It’s health care so obviously we were told that we’d have to be vaccinated against COVID or be fired, like many. Most people went along with it, but the CEO sent out a final warning email to the whole network, and this antivax dingdong somehow managed to reply all to the CEO giving him a patronizing lecture about how COVID wasn’t real, how nobody had died of it, and how he had read several patient charts that proved this, and how the CEO was making a very big mistake, and how he, this clerk, knew science better than the CEO did. He was fired for reading patient charts he didn’t belong in, of course. The email was super patronizing and he claimed to have an M.Sc and that meant he knew better, despite the fact he was working as a clerk, and gave all sorts of false “evidence”.
Anyway he was fired and reply all to the CEO is disabled.
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A guy in our data center couldn’t figure out who owned a particular machine that he needed to work on. So his solution to figure it out was to let them come to him. He went and pulled out the network cable and waited. He was escorted out a little while later. The moral of the story is don’t go disabling production machines on purpose.
Honestly we do that when we ask and no one speaks up. Lovingly called the “scream test” as we wait to see who screams.
I guess it depends on where you work. This was a large datacenter for a very large health insurance company. They made it a point later that day to remind people that it was a fireable offense to mess with production machines like that on purpose. And evidently the service he disabled was critical enough that it didn’t take long for the hammer to come down. There were plenty of ways to find out who owned the machine, he just chose the easiest and got fired on the spot for it.
So it wasn’t accurate when you said he “couldn’t” figure it out.
Well I am not him, so I can’t tell you whether or not he actually “could” have figured it out. The options to figure it out did exist, but he chose not to use them giving it the appearance that he “couldn’t”. Are you this much fun at parties?
He couldn’t figure it out, a competent person could have without unplugging it.
Scream tests are a last resort though.
Sounds like it was a last resort if he “couldn’t figure out” whose machine it was.
I don’t understand how that is even possible.
Are there no logs? No documentation? Does everyone share an admin user with full rights?
I mean, there has to be a way to find out who accessed the machine last time.You’d be surprised with inheriting tech debt. Quite often there’s no documentation, the last person to log in to the system is an admin that quit 3 years ago, but it doesn’t much matter because that’s only for a direct console login which normal users don’t do when accessing the application. With tribal knowledge gone and no documentation, only when you pull the network for a bit do you discover that there was this one random script running on it that was responsible for loading up all the needed data in the current system, when 9 of the other 10 times those scripts were no longer needed.
In a perfect world you’d have documentation, architecture and data flow diagrams for everything, but “ain’t nobody got time for that” and it doesn’t happen.
Had that the other way around recently. A docker container failed to come back up after I had updated the host OS.
Was about ready to restore the snapshot, when I looked further back in the logs on a hunch.
Turns out that container hadn’t worked before the update either. The software’s developer is long gone, and no one could tell me what it was supposedly doing.
company a gets bought by company b. company b fires 50% of company a.
even a scream test won’t get you answers because nobody is around that could complain nor know where the docs are.
Where I worked we had a very important time sensitive project. The server had to do a lot of calculations on a terrain dataset that covered the entire planet.
The server had a huge amount of RAM and each calculation block took about a week. It could not be saved until the end of the calculation and only that server had the RAM to do the work. So if it went down we could lose almost a weeks work.
Project was due in 6 months and calculation time was estimated to be about 5 1/2 months. So we couldn’t afford any interruptions.
We had bought a huge UPS meant for a whole server rack. For this one server. It could keep the server up for three days. That way even if wet lost power over the weekend it would keep going and we would have time to buy a generator.
One Friday afternoon the building losses power and I go check on the server room. Sure enough the big UPS with a sign saying only for project xyz has a bunch of other servers plugged into it.
I quickly unplug all but ours. I tell my boss and we go home at 5. Latter that day the power comes back on.
On Monday there are a ton of departments bitching that they came in an their servers were unplugged. Lots of people wanted me fired. My boss backed me and nothing happened but it was stressful.
I’d be super gluing those plastic toddler plug covers all over that thing.
fuck those other departments.
At a startup a long time ago, I was working on the weekend and brought my 3 year old with me. We had a customer coming in next week and this one machine was 5 days into a 7 day model build.
We had to go into that office to help someone with something unrelated. The little shit saw the blinking light and headed straight for the button.
On this computer (HP 710), it didn’t shut off until you released the button. He actually was just pressing it but got spooked when I tried to get to it.
The next day our CEO told the guys that built that app that it had to be made so it could recover from crashes and restart from where it left off.
Yeah, I’ve done that before – after asking literally everyone in IT, plus our external consultants, and getting the go-ahead from my team lead and the head of IT.
If you fear reprisal for a scream test then you need to make it look like an accident.
We had a new group in from another regional site come for training.
It turned out the one was actively also a prostitute. She was freely distributing her social media, showing people videos of herself, and asking us where the secluded parts of the campus were so she could do her thing with some of the scientists.
She didn’t do very much actual work, or at least not what she was supposed to be doing there. I give her credit for seeming to be very proud of her side gig. She seemed to really enjoy it. I think she just eventually stopped coming in after they went back to their own site, so maybe she did find herself a scientist.
Definitely the wildest person I’ve ever worked with.
there should be a study on workplace efficiency that includes sexual gratification vs not.
Good heavens, I’d hate to see which co-worker I’d get paired with! That’s some type of Russian Roulette! 🤣🤢
meet Delores, she’s here to ensure you’re satisfied with your job.
Lol she might possibly be an upgrade!
It’s no nutley, but it’ll do
Guy in my department strolls into my office and says, “Welp, this is probably my last day working here.” I asked him why he would say that. He sits down and shoves his phone across the desk toward me. I start reading and it’s an email from him to the CEO complaining that our boss is, in so many words, a complete fucking moron.
I finished reading and was just like, “Yeah, you shouldn’t have done that.” I mean, he wasn’t wrong. I agreed with basically everything in his email. He was also right about it being his last day working there because he was fired that afternoon.
We had a guy that would email the CEO with audio or video of him singing or something. Good dude. Sold people eggs every week from his hens. Got fired for actual bullshit his lead should’ve been canned for.
What eventually happened to the boss?
Nothing. As far as I know he’s still there. That company was a raging dumpster fire.
This sounds a lot like a company I’ve worked at honestly.
Hmmmmm. Been thinking about starting a youtube channel. Maybe ballads to the CEO could be the theme. I wonder how long before I get called in by hr.
Mike would walk into random meetings that he didn’t belong in, lay his head on the table, and knock out. Snored loud as fuck. He did this in my meetings alone at least three times a week.
He’d be found sleeping in the driver seat of his car about once a day too, clocking hours.
I saw the dude sneak up on a lot of people and assault them. Smack mens asses, rub women’s shoulders, he put this catholic nerd in a chokehold and whispered “security can’t help you here, n****” and then let him go.
He’d talk about how sick work from home was, how he’d just play NBA2K and Tekken all day, work on his car, sleep, and get paid.
Homie worked with us for like 3 or 4 months before he got fired. When he left, I got assigned his work. He had one ticket. It was three months old, and it was to update some software on our platform from vX to vX+1. It took me three minutes.
Dude was reading comic books at his desk the entire time he was there. He was really living the dream for a minute, I heard after he got fired that he moved from computers to car mechanic.
How did that take more than 3 months? Surely he should have been noticed within a week…
My company is small enough that it doesn’t legally need HR.
Nobody to report him to except the company owners who didn’t care for a while
This doesn’t sound like the dream to me at all
Guy was having fun being a menace, and making 6-figures.
He would also record/take pictures of girls he’d meet online, and show off their nudes to people at work. And complain about paying child support. Gross ass dude.
He was hired on the recommendation of an already existing (seemingly normal) employee. Once mike got fired, his recommender immediately ““quit”” before they could also get fired
WFH with video games, and watching Office Space and Fight Club a little too literally.
Dude brought a sex worker into his fiber splicing trailer and the boat was a-rockin’ when the supervisor came knockin’.
Not my workplace exactly, but I used to hang out with this Kiwi who worked as a foreign English teacher in Korea in the same small Korean city as me. The foreigner community was fairly close-knit because there was only 50ish of us.
We all knew him. Everyone liked him. Fun guy. A little weird sometimes. He never told anyone his last name. The end of his pinkie finger was missing and if you asked him about it, he always said a shark bit it off.
One vacation about two years into his tenure, he decided to take a trip to Las Vegas. He never came back. I’m not 100% on the details past this point, but what I heard was they stopped him from entering the US because he was wanted in New Zealand on 37 counts of distributing child pornography. He was basically extradited back there and as far as I know went to prison. His trail disappears there.
This got me into a way bigger rabbit hole than I remembered… The person is not officially “fired” since you cannot fire a tenured, distinguished professor and a former department head, but I suspect she was persuaded to leave. The incident is quite wild, I was just a random undergrad hired to do lab tests so I only knew some details.
This is about Dr. Connie Weaver, professor emeritus and former department head at Purdue’s Department of Nutrition Sciences (her ORCiD). She was known for nutrition research where the institution recruits adolescents summer-camp style (similar to a clinical trial), and in 2017 she started to lead a multi-year (lasted one month before it was shut down) study on low-sodium diets in adolescents, Camp DASH. Supposed to be a gold-standard diet study… close to 10 million dollars of NIH money on the line too.
And then things went off the rail. The operation tried to cut a lot of corners: pretty much all of the employees were undergraduates who couldn’t find other things to do for the summer, training was minimal or nonexistent, and the employees-to-camper ratio was very, very low… oddly similar to the recent MrBeast incident where participation oversight seems to be very bad.
This then led to sexual harassment, abuse, etc… one poor girl’s nude was shared online, probably more cases of sexual assault, several adolescents got into serious fights with each other, and from what I’ve heard some of the undergrads who were on supervisory roles were also injured. Several lawsuits were filed, the university stepped in and stopped the study (I just remembered them stop scheduling me to work in July and was wondering what went wrong lol), the issue got elevated to the university president, and more lawsuits…
Obviously tenure means someone should be protected from being terminated at-will like most employment contracts. So the reason I have my suspicion is… Dr. Weaver became a professor emeritus not long after the incident, but is now somehow still publishing work while working from… San Diego State University? Doesn’t seem like someone who retired on their own will to me.
If you are interested in the full detail… here are some news articles on this incident. Exponent is Purdue’s student-run newspaper
Okay, this is fascinating … And makes me wonder how often this–what I will call “academic honorable discharge”–really occurs across institutions, well-known or not.
I haven’t delved into your sources yet, so this is my somewhat educated guess … Environmentally, this type of social breakdown makes sense with the lack of proper oversight, seasoned leadership, and organization appropriate to the study population. But did the low sodium diet itself serve any factor in the violence that occured in this botched study? Like, did kids being dietarily withheld a critical electrolyte affect the speed and intensity with which cracks in the camp structure split open?
Not trying to be too lighthearted here, but my guess in short: The kids went extra bonkers because of altered body and brain chemistry, with a lack of sodium (assuming the diet was initiated on Day 1) being a key aggressor in… making teen aggression more aggressive?
“academic honorable discharge”
I am aware of this happening in multiple cases involving scientific fraud… no idea how exactly this is being done though.
But did the low sodium diet itself serve any factor in the violence that occured in this botched study?
Not sure… but even without dietary interventions, there are a lot of simple explanations to how this could have gone wrong. This was a much larger study than the Camp Calcium series this PI did, a lot of the recruited kids are low income/from problematic households, with very little to no adult oversight, and there were very few activities for entertainment/enrichment… Also the dorm they lived in was technically separated by gender, but let’s just say that it is not difficult to get to the other gender dorm… So yeah.
Was it sponsored by the Dash low sodium seasoning?
Dash low sodium seasoning
No idea lol… But DASH is a real NIH-supported diet (https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/education/dash-eating-plan).
Edit: the study obviously isn’t sponsored by the seasoning company, but I’m not sure if the DASH diet itself is.
We had an A/P manager who chewed her way through 3 entire staffs before management decided the problem was actually her. Two of them collectively quit in a group on one day! That was the most outrageous I think. How did it take FIFTEEN people quitting because of her management before they fired her?
Also one manager who came in shitface drunk and swinging when she got fired. That was the most dramatic.
Figured this out some time back. Firing a manager is an admission of failure by someone even higher.
Not always. Some people change once they get power, I’ve seen 2 supervisors go that way. Awesome co-workers, cunts to work under.
Also, not everyone that is good at a job has the personality to be in management. I’ve found myself in several management roles before I realized I absolutely hate being responsible for other peoples’ work and am just not cut out for it.
I use those people that I used to work with as a “what not to do” guide.
Sometimes I want to say to staff “You keep up shit like this and you wont have a job much longer” but I remember how fast people turned on that guy, so instead I have a sit down with them and say “I cant keep not reporting this stuff, its going to risk MY job. So I need you to lift your game because we’re friends and all but I’m not going to get fired to protect you and once I start reporting it up the chain, I cant fo anything to protect you”
I like your approach much better.
This is true and I’ve seen it. However, I still think that it’s possible someone above didn’t want to acknowledge that they were a bad read of character. That’s how it felt in the situation I saw firsthand anyway.
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When I was in the military, two officers got caught fucking in a stairwell. They were caught by a security camera while attending training. They were both married and not to each other.
There is so much stupid shit that you can get away with in the military, I have never understood why anyone would even get close to breaking the fraternization rules. They literally give you a copy of the rulebook in boot camp! Did no one read the damn thing?
I was a Nuke though, so up to my neck in daily fires to put out. No time for a social life.
