Coworker in sales got mad at one of the shipping guys thinking his packing of the pallet was insufficient. They get into a verbal spat until the sales guy walks to his car and pulls his gun on the shipping guy, the shipping guy, who also happened to be a retired marine and allowed by the owner to open carry in the office. Sales guy was lucky the only thing he lost that day was his job.

No shots were fired since the sales guy was stupid but not that stupid. We kind of had a collective “that’s not terribly surprising” moment later when the cop was over for the police report and brought up sales guy’s past mugshots like “was this the guy”.

The CEO sent out the email that COVID vaccination was required for all employees or the people that refused would be terminated, like most workplaces. It was fully expected seeing as it is a hospital, and all but a handful of employees compiled. This moron decided to reply all (the reply all to CEO emails has thus been disabled since) with a lecture full of antivax nonsense about how COVID vaccines were experimental and contain fetal cells, and the revelation that they had been reading patient charts that they had no business reading for COVID test results and the consultation or ER notes, and wrote about the “proof” that they had that nobody had died or gotten really sick from COVID, and how the CEO was extremely misinformed on the subject of COVID. That resulted in immediate termination and it was pretty hilarious to read their nonsense and the fact they admitted to every employee they had been violating patient confidentiality. You want to be that dumb, have at it.

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.

Years ago I worked for a large-ish post production company. They had recently moved into a swanky new location and everything there was tailored to spec, including the server room. In norwegian we sometimes call a server room a ‘machine room’, this is relevant.

As a part of the server room spec, a dry fire suppression system was among the requirements.

The summer of the incident was particularly hot, and we experienced some trouble with our cooling, so a cooling technician was called to have a look. While he was working on the unit inside the server room, he made a mistake that caused all the cooling gas to dump into the room, triggering the fire extinguishers.

A dry fire system works by releasing an inert gas into a space to displace any oxygen, effectively choking any fire. I imagine this is usually done by some solenoids opening some canisters of gas and the room quickly, but gradually becomes oxygen free. Luckily, my boss at the time was present and he quickly got both himself and the tech to safety.

All good right? No. The contractor who constructed the new location had ordered and installed a system meant for maritime machine rooms, not the computer ‘machine room’ we had. In an environment filled with fuel and grease, you optimize towards filling the room with an inert gas as quickly as possible, and it turns out they use explosives to complete the task. In this room there were three canisters in the ceiling with fire shooting out of them, burning pellets to generate the inert gas. The gas and smoke from the canisters combined with the leaked cooling gas, and started condensing.

Into hydrochloric acid.

While all this was going on, all of the servers and workstations were happily humming along, sucking the now extremely corrosive atmosphere into themselves, making sure that every nook and cranny inside and outside got covered in a thin greasy film of acid.

The aftermath: Mine and two colleagues’s summer break was cut short, as we were called in to do damage control. Ripping out and wiping hard drives clean was what we did all summer. With external help we managed to recover all of the data. One feature film was delayed a few weeks. The insurance payout actually made the company a bit ahead financially. As far as I know there’s still burn marks in the floor of the server room, from when flames shot out of the fire extinguishers. Everyone involved now knows what a proper dry fire suppression system for a server room looks like.

The kicker is, the cooling was messed up because a fabric awning on the building had fallen down and was covering the air intake. If anyone had thought to check the roof this whole thing would have been avoided, and that server room would probably still have bombs attached to its ceiling.

An IT contractor at my government job was one of the people that tried to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/wisconsin-man-pleads-guilty-michigan-gov-whitmer-kidnap-plot-rcna75191

The big incident at my previous job was the (extremely incompetent) HR person accidentally sharing a spreadsheet of every employee’s salary. I was an hourly worker at the time and thought it was funny, but some of the senior engineers were pissed to find out how much more other engineers made. HR was not fired, instead she was put on a temporary paid leave.

Other incidents include:

• One of the owners’ vape exploded, forcing everyone to evacuate.
• VP of the company got caught buying escort services on the company credit card.
• Aforementioned owner (who was no longer an owner after the company was bought out) got fired shortly after a town hall zoom meeting, where he used a Trump/Pence background.
• The head of the NOC team had a stroke at work.
• COO “accidentally” revealed in front of everyone that one of the Project Managers had cancer. She sued, and they settled.
• COO verbally abused one of the senior managers over the phone during a big meeting. He sued, and they settled.

It was a pretty shitty company.

A productive team member was heard giving their daily stand-up report during their team’s daily stand-up…

To another company. Oops! Don’t forget to mute your mic if you’re working two jobs at the same time!

So my team lead ordered a bottle of a particularly nasty chemical (don’t remember what, this was long ago) Thing is, he went on holiday immediately after and didn’t tell anyone about it. The bottle had to be shipped and kept at -20℃ otherwise it would decompose into a deadly gas; one of those lovely CMR types. So next thing that happens is, I get called on my day off by the boss saying that there is a scary box in the lab and if I could check it out. I was reluctant but I figure I’ll check it out. I though to myself that it was a little unusual that they would ship it in a styrofoam box without any dry ice (it had evaporated) so I take out a slightly bloated bottle which seems to be filled with some liquid. I then tear of the package label and read the MSDS. At this point I read all the scary labels and realize that this thing has been out here for a while, all the dry ice has evaporated, the bottle is bloated and filled with gas which I am sitting right next to. So I turn on ventilation and GTFO. I inform the boss who immeditally got his home freezer to cool it down. I meanwhile started to notice a stinging in my eyes (which was one of the effects) We wash out my eyes, stinging goes away, lungs are fine and everything ends without injury.

TLDR

Coworker orders deadly chemicals, goes on holiday, doesn’t tell anyone, almost kills me.

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.

Guy on the team rage quits one day. Few days pass and HR goes to clean out his desk. Finds a paper bag full of syringes and a very graphic instruction manually on how to inject something into your dick.

Whatever it was, I guess it can’t wait until you’re at home to inject into your dong. It has to be at work.

Cherry on top was that HR policy was to box up all personal belongings left behind and have the ex-employee come pick them up. So, if he had forgotten these things were in his desk, he certainly remembered after he came back and they handed him the bag.

HR coordinator sharing around her Onlyfans on the dl with people and was found to be giving preferential treatment to her fans. She got fired. But a lot of people got to see her naked, so I guess that’s fun.

Guy found a gun in the customer’s stuff

Guy starting waving it around and playing with it, pulled the fuckin trigger, almost shot one of his coworkers

Cops came, guy said he was moving a cabinet and it went off which obviously no one believed, somehow he wasn’t arrested, idk

Guy was fired over the phone before he left the customer’s house

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.

A coworker set the break room on fire by microwaving her lunch for 30 minutes instead of three. No idea how you forget your lunch is in the microwave, let alone for half an hour, but hey I got to go home early.

Worked at a place where our CIO was completely unqualified to be a leader, much less a leader in IT. She was a micromanager who took the position of “telling stakeholders” instead of “working with stakeholders” so any project she was on was really her pushing through whatever agenda she had at the time. Meanwhile her deputy CIO was stealing computer equipment from the server room but I digress…

April fools one year and I decide to prank it up. I moved the hinges (not the door handles) of the freezer/fridge in the breakroom so that the handle and hinges were on the same side. It’s a fifteen minute job to move everything so I did it the night before the 1st.

The next morning our hungover CIO stumbles into the breakroom and cannot get the fridge to open. After a few seconds of futile tugging on the handle, she gave up and took her lunch to her office.

Others in the office figured it out pretty quickly and had a good chuckle.

Later on that day CIO sends out a nastygram about pranks being unprofessional, property damage, someone was going to be in huge trouble, yadda yadda…

But she’s not the director. The director tells her to basically fuck off, it was a funny prank, and perhaps she needed to lighten up.

She never found out it was me.