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.
I’ve worked with a lot of good and a lot of bad surgeons, but even the bad ones aren’t usually dangerous bad, but like slow af, sub-optimal but passable outcomes, shit like that.
I’ve worked with ONE who was just absolute shit at his job… and his incompetence got at least one patient killed.
He got axed pretty quick… hopefully his license was revoked and he got charged with murder, but I never got any details of post-firing.
Not that I’ve had a ton of surgeries, but I’ve had a couple, and anytime I go under, I’m desperately hoping that my surgeon wasn’t a C student and has the calmest of hands.
Most docs have some kind of internet presence nowadays, so definitely look them up. Also in the later preop stages when you talk to your OR nurse, look your nurse in the eye and just straight up ask “Would you be comfortable with this doctor operating on you?” They won’t be actually allowed to talk shit on their surgeon, but the second of panicked silence as they try to come up with some kind of non-answer without blatantly lying will tell you everything you need to know.
This might be like 30 mins before your surgery - you have the right to refuse up until you go unconscious. It’ll feel dirty, but those standards exist for a reason.
That’s a good suggestion about talking to the nurse, thank you.
omg it wasn’t “Dr Death” aka Christopher Duntsch was it?
No, he never got any media attention that I’m aware of. My concern is that he’s just hopping from hospital to hospital - hiring on, fucking up, killing someone, getting fired, hiring on, fucking up, killing someone, etc.
Hospitals are pretty protective of their reputation and their doctors; and death is a thing that can happen in surgery so it be swept off as a “Oh well, patient signed off on the risks; and oh hey, this Dr said some mean things to our staff, so let’s fire him for that and hope we don’t make national headlines…”
That’s exactly what happened with Dr Death and why he wasn’t caught for such a long time.
Oh, well shit. Dr Death was before this shit, but it sounds like basically Dr Death 2.0.
…kinda makes me wonder how common this is.
Curious how common the truly bad ones are. I’d assume quite uncommon between licensing, hospital hiring, chart data analysis at scale, etc., but…
Counting down the days to a relatively minor surgery I need. No real concerns, I’ve met the lead surgeon a few times, but plenty of unknown humans are part of the process too.
The bosses favorite guy at my work who got 2 promotions got arrested by the FBI for sextortion of teenagers. It was only shocking to him.
From my current workplace:
Someone was putting mail in a cabinet under their desk instead of the outbox, we’re talking hundreds of letters/cheques/invoices and some life-changing documents from a few months.
The mail outbox was on their desk, and easier to reach than the cabinet.From previous workplaces:
- Breaking down a door and raping someone that had barricaded themselves behind said door.
- Sexual interference.
- not having a licence, and getting a DUI with a work truck that they stole.
And outrageous in a different way:
for only beating last year’s sales by 3% instead of by 4%.Have you heard any specific reasons for the mail hoarder’s actions at your current workplace, or is it still a fresh case? I’m guessing it was nefarious, since the mail outbox was closer and seemingly more obvious than the secret stashing cabinet. Just wanted to be a dingus to intended mail recipients? I’d also be curious if it was all mail they handled or just select pieces. So many burning questions!!
I am a contractor so I don’t work in a standard office setting right now. I miss the heck out of juicy office gossip, at least about those who deserve such sordid stories! (Karen in accounting is actually really nice, Carl.)
The reason why some people think they did it was because it was their job to take the mail to the mail room. But they were also the person who needed to go to the mail room to get our mail every day, which they did, every day. If they were already taking the elevator down to the mail room to get the mail, why not take the outgoing mail?!?
We also found out that they were just marking tasks as complete about 20% of the time, so we had to double-check every task assigned to them for the previous 6 months.I earned my living with a hammer or a forklift for most of my life, and I never thought I would like the office gossip. But, It’s kinda great.
It’s generally a different level than it was with the construction guys.
“Joanne’s boyfriend might be emotionally abusive, and she won’t break up with him. Be kind to her.”
vs
“John got drunk last night after losing custody, and put his new girlfriend into a coma. We’ll need you to help with the gable overhangs.”
There was a guy who was in tech support who talked to a customer about who was hot or not in the company. It was actually the customer who started the conversation, but the rep ran with it and used all kinds of unprofessional and disparaging language when describing his female co-workers.
That call happened to have a supervisor listening in, so he was fired immediately after he got off the call. The thing is found out who called in, and the women on the team had to assist him when he called for support.
The girl doing meth in her car.
Also the guy being arrested for having CP on his personal device and never coming back technically counts too, right?
I went to a temp agency one time and went through the enrollment/placement tests. I told them up front I was just looking for competitive offers to bring to my 5 year review to ask current employer to match. They were cool with it after i told them I would be back if employer doesnt match.
So I’m taking the test and was blown away at the test questions. I’m reading them outloud to the agents at their desks asking them which ones people actually respond honestly to. They start telling me hilarious stories of people theyve had fail the test.
They eventually told me they have had at least one person at some time answer every question with the very honest but very damning wrong answer. They said none of the people they told me about were even the assholes intentionally failing the test just to show proof they applied. They were people being waaaay too fuckin honest about their liberal drug use.
Some of the more memorable questions:
In the last 8hrs how many times have you smoked meth?
A. 0 times
B. 1-4 times
C. 5-10 times
D. 10 or more
Have you ever smoked crack cocaine while on the clock?
A. Yes
B. No
C. I don’t know
D. Maybe
Would you ever smoke crack while on the clock?
A. Yes
B. No
C. I don’t know
D. Maybe
How many alcohol beverages do you have on your lunch break?
A. 0 drinks
B. 1-4 drinks
C. 5-10 drinks
D. 10 or more drinks
How many alcohol beverages did you have today before this interview?
A. 0 drinks
B. 1-4 drinks
C. 5-10 drinks
D. 10 or more drinks
Describe your performance at work while high on alcohol or narcotics compared to your performance at work while not high on alcohol or narcotics.
A. Have never worked high on alcohol or narcotics.
B. I perform worse while working high on alcohol or narcotics than working not high on alcohol or narcotics.
C. I perform the same while working high on alcohol or narcotics than working not high on alcohol or narcotics.
D. I perform better while working high on alcohol or narcotics than working not high on alcohol or narcotics.
Edit for formatting and grammar.
Eight HOURS?!
Holy shit that’s amazing. honestly what surprised me most is that you were upfront about the competitive offer thing and tney were cool with it
Right?! Especially if it was an off-the-cuff agreement. But if I had a few minutes to think it over, I would buy that anyone serious enough to get verifiable competitive offers using a third party would be serious enough to come back for those better offers if the current employer doesn’t bite. (This is assuming you can’t arrange new employment without the temp agency’s involvement for whatever contractual reason. Not sure how they typically work.)
It’s rural town USA. The company I was pressing to match the competitive offer was actually my own family’s manufacturing corporation. The temp agency knew exactly who I was when they saw my last name. They had good fun joking about how they knew my family doesn’t pay their employees enough but having the owner’s son threatening to quit for better pay really solidified it as a good ole hardyharhar to them. I knew it. They knew it. Plus we have done a ton of business with them over the years filling entry level temp to perm positions, so the whole thing was really super laid back.
Different times and companies, but I’ve seen people fired for
- being in his 30s and sleeping with the 14-15 year-old worker (I forget exactly how old she was). This was working in a movie theater and he was the GM.
- found CSAM on their computer
- many for sexual harassment (a few different jobs in IT)
I think that’s it for the NSFW stuff.
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.
If you fear reprisal for a scream test then you need to make it look like an accident.
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.
He couldn’t figure it out, a competent person could have without unplugging it.
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?
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 read that as “lazy to the point of unprofessionalism”. I’m super lazy too, but it just means I try to automate the absolute shit out of everything I do to the greatest degree possible.
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.
You’d be surprised. I had some security devices that I was actively using get shut down simply because some paperwork didn’t get filled out properly and the data center team claimed they had no documentation on them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’d be super gluing those plastic toddler plug covers all over that thing.
fuck those other departments.
Sex in the stock room. Caught by manager.
18, sex in the stock room, didn’t get caught.
Even had a handful of more standard dates afterwards, always with sex.
No negative outcome, fortunately. Except for the really damn cold stockroom floor, but that was her problem not mine…
Think we just lost interest, I moved onto another job, that was that.
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.
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.
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.
What eventually happened to the boss?
Nothing. As far as I know he’s still there. That company was a raging dumpster fire.
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.
———
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.
I’ve had 2 coworkers lose their jobs for being diddlers, but nothing other than that really. Only other one 8 have, I didn’t get to witness since I was living out of town at the time, but a shithead ex-boss got walked out by some feds and wasn’t seen again. Gossip was it was INS, and it would serve him right to get deported.
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.
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.
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?
In Australia the call a case (24 bottles) of beer a slab.
Maybe this is some kind of canned wine?
24 bottles but yeah.
Ikr? How is wine measured in slabs…
I’m guessing this wine’s vintage is some time last week?
