Professional Darwinism: Update to OP on p.74

[Dazi]

Many moons ago, two of my CWs were both fired for being caught mid-scrabble...in a subzero freezer.

Yes you all read that correctly, a subzero freezer.  They got caught because they would both disappear for 30min-45min each afternoon (this went on for several weeks).  I never managed to figure out how they accomplished this feat.

I couldn't be in there more that 5 minutes even with the super insulated coats/gloves and a hat on...the thought of naked, or nearly so, just makes me cringe.

[hot_shaker]

Many moons ago, two of my CWs were both fired for being caught mid-scrabble...in a subzero freezer.

Yes you all read that correctly, a subzero freezer.  They got caught because they would both disappear for 30min-45min each afternoon (this went on for several weeks).  I never managed to figure out how they accomplished this feat.

I couldn't be in there more that 5 minutes even with the super insulated coats/gloves and a hat on...the thought of naked, or nearly so, just makes me cringe.

Er, well, I guess you could argue that they were engaged in an exothermic activity so maybe that kept them plenty warm.    I'll say though, I'd MUCH prefer to find a warm room or a dark room if I were to engage in similar behavior at work.

[SiderisAnon]

This happened shortly after I left a company.  I knew someone who still worked there.

The really good HR person had left the company and so corporate had to hire someone new.  This company published statistics on workplace diversity because of all the government contracts and e-mailed this to the entire staff, which was located across multiple states.  This was the HR person's responsibility.

Well, apparently she didn't really know how to use Outlook and Excel all that well.

Instead of mailing everyone a copy of the section on racial makeup, meaning just sending out a chart in the e-mail, she attached the entire spreadsheet to the e-mail.  This was the full employee database, including everyone in the company's salary information.  Turns out, there were some huge disparities in pay at a time when people were being laid off or having their salaries cut to "control costs".

The resulting chaos storm got ugly, to say the least.

(I still don't know why the company insisted on using a spreadsheet instead of a real database.)

[Balletmom]

Many moons ago, two of my CWs were both fired for being caught mid-scrabble...in a subzero freezer.

Yes you all read that correctly, a subzero freezer.  They got caught because they would both disappear for 30min-45min each afternoon (this went on for several weeks).  I never managed to figure out how they accomplished this feat.

I couldn't be in there more that 5 minutes even with the super insulated coats/gloves and a hat on...the thought of naked, or nearly so, just makes me cringe.

This does make hitting the "reply all" key seem rather small potatoes, doesn't it?

Perhaps they were penguins at heart!

[Nurvingiel]

My brain is quite boggled trying to imagine the poo storm that would occur after the entire company received salary information of their coworkers during layoff time, especially when there were discrepancies.

Why didn't she copy that one sheet into a new workbook and attach that?

Many moons ago, two of my CWs were both fired for being caught mid-scrabble...in a subzero freezer.

Yes you all read that correctly, a subzero freezer.  They got caught because they would both disappear for 30min-45min each afternoon (this went on for several weeks).  I never managed to figure out how they accomplished this feat.

I couldn't be in there more that 5 minutes even with the super insulated coats/gloves and a hat on...the thought of naked, or nearly so, just makes me cringe.

Er, well, I guess you could argue that they were engaged in an exothermic activity so maybe that kept them plenty warm.    I'll say though, I'd MUCH prefer to find a warm room or a dark room if I were to engage in similar behavior at work.

What, was the supply closet already occupied?

[MissRose]

I cant even imagine getting naked in a freezer.

I remember when I used to work at the Golden Arches, and had to go to the freezer for stuff that I always grabbed a heavy coat that was kept there.  Even that didn't keep me warm LOL.

One girl I worked with tried to shut me in a walk in fridge at the same place with a male co-worker I fancied at the time.  It didn't work, and I wasn't gonna do anything with the guy anyways!

Many moons ago, two of my CWs were both fired for being caught mid-scrabble...in a subzero freezer.

Yes you all read that correctly, a subzero freezer.  They got caught because they would both disappear for 30min-45min each afternoon (this went on for several weeks).  I never managed to figure out how they accomplished this feat.

I couldn't be in there more that 5 minutes even with the super insulated coats/gloves and a hat on...the thought of naked, or nearly so, just makes me cringe.

[HonorH]

*One girl was overheard telling a customer "What do you want me to do, hold your hand?".  Keep in mind this is a tech support help line.

Maybe she had one of the customers from Unsupportable:

http://www.customerssuck.com/index.php?categoryid=18
http://www.customerssuck.com/index.php?categoryid=19

My favorite Professional Darwinism story is a cautionary tale told to all ALTs entering Japan.  Japan has very, extremely strict drug laws.  Stuff that will get you a slap on the wrist in America will get you jail time in Japan.  Every ALT from any country who enters Japan is informed of this and told not only to stay away from drugs yourself, but to steer clear of anyone you know is doing drugs, since you can and will be brought in for questioning simply for having in your cell phone the number of someone who got caught with drugs.  You are lectured, you're told being caught with drugs (not even arrested) is grounds for immediate dismissal, you're made to sign a contract, etc.  In other words, there's no shades of gray about it.

Yeah, well, one brilliant ALT decided to grow his own marijuana behind his apartment building.  It got discovered by a little granny doing her gardening.  He was arrested, thrown in jail, fired, and then deported.  Hope the weed was worth it.

What's an ALT?

Sorry!  It's an Assistant Language Teacher.  There are simply tons of us in Japan.  Also called AET (Assistant English Teacher) or NS (Native Speaker).

[HonorH]

Other ALTs in another year chose their first weekend in the country to get completely plastered and to cook up as much rice in oil as they could find and have a rice wrestling contest in front of all the rice farmer neighbours.  That little escapade garnered an official bowing on the floor apology at the prefectural board of education on Monday, and a good number of ALTs that weren't even at the stupid party were screamed at by their entire Japanese staff merely because they were ALTs from the same city.

We were all told, at orientation, in many ways and multiple times, that the Japanese idea of Collective Responsibility makes it so that if you screw up, every other ALT in your area will pay, especially if you're all from the same company.  Companies have lost contracts with entire Boards of Education because of a few idiots.  Often, the only way for a company to salvage the situation is to throw the book at the offender(s).  Moral of the story: Don't be a screw-up lest you risk deportation.

The same merry bunch decided to conduct the first annual naked Olympics at 3am at the prefectural ALT meeting in a rather swanky hotel.  I had earplugs in my ears and they woke me up, despite being two floors above me.  The sporting event was broken up by the Minister of Education.

Ooh, that's bad!  What kind of yahoos were they?  Suppose it's fairly lucky for them that the Japanese in general have a high tolerance for drunken shenanigans, but getting a government minister out of bed to break them up can't have been good.

The thing that finally got the morons fired was that they all went to Tokyo to party and got plastered (legal) and completely strung out on cocaine (definitely not legal).  They didn't actually get caught in Tokyo, but they came back to the province and wrote all about it in great detail in their blogs.  The ministry of education reads our blogs.  In Japan, actually being caught in the act is not required to be held accountable.  Most were at least smart enough to leave under threat than to make the country actually deport them.

*headdesks*  Yet another lesson in "What Happens on the Internet Stays on the Internet . . . Where Everybody and His Dog Can Read It."  Why won't people learn this?

[Dazi]

Many moons ago, two of my CWs were both fired for being caught mid-scrabble...in a subzero freezer.

Yes you all read that correctly, a subzero freezer.  They got caught because they would both disappear for 30min-45min each afternoon (this went on for several weeks).  I never managed to figure out how they accomplished this feat.

I couldn't be in there more that 5 minutes even with the super insulated coats/gloves and a hat on...the thought of naked, or nearly so, just makes me cringe.

This does make hitting the "reply all" key seem rather small potatoes, doesn't it?

Perhaps they were penguins at heart!

<tee-hee>  Penguins...that is a possibility I hadn't thought of   .

[mich3554]

My only contribution in 25+ years of employment is this:

We were running a product study for one of the drug manufacturers, using non-human primates.  The monkeys had to be given a tablet twice/day, every day.  During the weekend, the dosing was shunted off to all the lab staff, so that all of us had to come into work twice/day each weekend to dose about once/month.  Kind of a pain in the neck, but the nature of the beast.

Well, the study required that we keep track of the drug, so each week the study coordinator would count out the number of days x 2 x #animals and add 10% for breakage/loss.  The people dosing weekends had their own stash of drugs for that weekend.  We were paid a LOT of money (I'm talking a couple million $$) by the company to run this study.  I'm at a university and grant funding was really tight at the time, so this study kept us afloat until we could bulk up our grants.

There was one guy who was hired that his total responsibility was the animals.  His responsibility was dosing during the week, sedating the animals for testing, giving treats and taking care of the animals beyond what the staff vet did.

About halfway through the study, the study coordinator noticed that a lot of pills were remaining in the container at the end of the week, despite the fact that the guy who dosed logged in the dosing.  So each night for 3 weeks, the study coordinator came into the lab and counted the pills, noting when there was a discrepancy between the amount of pills there should have been vs the # that should have been used to dose that day.

All of a sudden the study was cut short, all samples thrown out and things came to a screeching halt.  Turns out the animal person was cheating on the logs, saying he had dosed the animals when he hadn't.  The idiot didn't even have the intelligence to throw out the pills he *should* have dosed with, he just left them in the container.  He is the ONLY person who I have ever worked with who was immediately fired on the spot (which isn't easy to do in this system).  Fortunately the company that we were working with gave us another opportunity to complete the study, but the animals had to rest for a couple months before we could start the study all over again, which meant that things were financially VERY tight for about 6 months.

[StressedGroom]

I had a guy working for me who was coming into spend a week working on one of my contracts.  He drove 400 miles to get to the customer site and headed off to do his drug test.

He came to me after the test and told me he had failed the drug test, so I asked him if it was because of his medications (he was in his 50's and had a heart attack earlier that year), he told me no, he had been at a party a couple weeks ago an indulged.  The idiotic thing was, I had told him there would be a drug test when he got there, he could have backed our or told me then.  Instead I had to sit in front of the plant manager and explain why my employee failed the drug test.

He kept his job, we had recent officially became a drug free work place, but HR found out that you need to tell people that, updating the online employee handbook isn't enough.

[Yvaine]

We used to have annual sales meeting where there would be a lot of drinking and "bonding" amongst our sales force and some of office people we rarely see (most of us are remote employees).  I was at one of these meetings the first night sitting in the hotel bar with a couple of coworkers when a woman at a table across the bar started calling over to one of my coworkers (Alan):

Drunk woman: Hey Alan, you know what this means?  (Places her hand on her forehead with here middle finger and thumb extended); It means you're a F****** (middle finger extended in front of her) Loser!!! (thumb and index at her forehead). 

At this point she was pulled back to her seat by one of the other women at her table. 

I leaned over and asked him:

SG: Who was that?
Alan: Christine Smith
SG: From HR?
Alan: Yes.

She didn't last long, we had a long history of bad HR people.

You can't see me, but my jaw is currently on the floor.

Pixie's rule for Happy Hour with coworkers: 2 drinks, sip them slowly, and drink 2 large glasses of water with them.

And eat heartily before starting! 

[the Wyffe]

Here's another.  A friend of a friend applied for a job, and for a reference gave the name of the boss who'd just fired him.  Who had sacked him for gross misconduct and thought he was a disgrace.

Apparently the new workplace rang him up and had to hold the phone a foot away.  He didn't get the job, but they did tell him why.

[ginlyn32]

comment deleted by poster.

[missknowledge]

We once had a guy who thought it was cool to shoot fireworks in the shipping office.   Bottle rocket went up into the corner where the mop was stored.   Whole crew goes to the field, and a couple hours later my then husband and I notice smoke pouring out of the window.   We went and got the hose and put out the fire.    Nitwit guy didn't even get fired for that.  He finally got fired for not showing up for work, and then came back, broke into shipping office for keys and stole the company four-wheeler/ATV.