Inspired by the very similar thread about school incidents.
My company called all lab staff “pandemic heroes” for coming in every day during the pandemic and taking on extra work to compensate for management and office staff who stayed home for years.
Then shortly after return to office, they closed the lab and laid off all lab staff.
Sounds like your company took the Veterans Affairs approach to “hero response”.
Worst part is that they did it mostly to boost the IPI right before we went public by driving down operating costs.
We weren’t even able to buy in u til 6 months after going public and the price leveled off at 6 months
One day a coworker of mine was walking into our huge office building and thought he saw a mitten on the ground of the lobby. When he picked it up it was actually a pair of lacy women’s underwear. Ostensibly it fell out of someone’s gym bag or got caught in their pant leg in the laundry and dislodged there. He drops it immediately and comes into the office. He doesn’t mention this to anyone.
Two hours later the main receptionist comes in with the underwear in front of our whole group and says she saw him drop these this morning and she wants to return them. He’s denying the whole thing and at this point none of us have the previous context and all locked in to the conversation and silent laughing. She says, “We just want to give these back in case they have sentimental value!” and the the whole group is dying laughing now. He eventually convinces her he isn’t interested in a stranger’s underwear (which she bare handing) to which she says she’ll keep them in case he changes his mind (???).
It’s been 5 years and it gets brought up nearly daily
Someone must’ve summoned Shenron the day before he found them and got underwhelmed by the wish fulfillment.
Oolong back on his shit
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.
Ha!! As an appliance repair guy i learned about reversing the door hinges+handles a long time ago. It never occurred to me to use it for a prank until i was living in my apartment for a few years, and realized it really would make more sense to reverse the hinges to open the door the other way. I moved the hinges, but then it occurred to me that i can leave the handles where they were and prank all my friends when they came over. Unsurprisingly, it works! People usually would figure it out eventually but sometimes we had to intervene if they were getting too rough with it.
I got so used to having it set up that way that once in a blue moon I’d go to open other people’s refrigerators the wrong way (not the best look for a repair tech, LOL)
Software company before git. The source server corrupted and the product code was lost. 5 guys had to get together and figure out the latest version between them (everybody had different changesets) and produce a new “current” version. At the end we lost all history prior and ever since all changes prior to 2008 have been attributed to 1 guy.
I used to work at an accounting/consulting firm who were dead set on writing business applications in VBA within Excel. The code was embedded in the notebook, and to distribute the software was sending the latest version of the Excel file. This made version control virtually impossible, and we would instead combine our work manually.
I cannot recommend having tech-illiterate people lead software projects.
The amount of times I hear people telling me that “I should just do it in Excel”. Excel. Is not. A database.
Excel is a whole OS unto itself. Like Emacs except you can get out of it.
Good software starts in Excel honestly. But oh god should you not stay there… Its not designed as a database indeed.
Access is the worst of both worlds.
Excel is a single-assignment dynamically-typed functional programming language with a really obtuse editor.
Stop… Stop… I’m already dead
Gotta respect that save. Reminds me of the Toy Story 2 assets being lost from a server failure and they were saved by one employee having a copy on their personal computer at home.
Drive Savers rescued an episode of The Simpsons. Back when that show was good.
It wasn’t a server failure. Someone rm -rf on the root of the server. The server did what it was told.
deleted by creator
More impressive than the fact that you saved a repo once is that the same repo still exists today with the complete git history. At the rate companies abandon products for new ones, old repos are rare.
Our repo is old as time. Carried through from SourceSafe to TFS to Git
Subversion has existed probably for longer than your company, the fucking managers couldn’t be arsed to read a damn book?
They were using SourceSafe back then. But any source control that isnt decentralised has the same problem. If the central server gets deleted so does all history
I was working at an assembly plant for plane motors (the big kind) and one of them literally blew up in the test bed. There was chunks literally embedded in the safety glass, it was a huge mess.
Turns out someone left an orange rubber mallet inside of it. Over the course of a year, they reassembled the shredded mallet and traced it back to the toolbox that used it. The guy lost it and instead of reporting it and disassembling his last job, he just stole one from an other toolbox.
Not mine but my buddy used to build kayaks. One of the employees took a dump in one of the kayaks and it only got caught because of a random QC test. I always giggle thinking of the client who would have received it.
The overnight IT guy was caught watching porn while working (this was over a decade ago, he was in the office every night and not a remote worker). How was he caught? He was saving the pornographic photos on a shared network drive…
When confronted, he didn’t try to deny anything, his explanation was simply, “That’s just my thing.”
Boss: “Were you looking at porn in the office?”
IT guy:
We should be able to look at a liiittle porn at work.
I would say no. But there is a part of me that sees he’s an overnight IT worker, and then I’m like “what the hell else would he be doing?”
As a former overnight IT worker, I always just assumed my browsing history would be reviewed by other IT people. Maybe they wondered why I spent so much time on horror game forums, maybe they already knew I was a disturbed mind.
WoW
EvE Online until he perfecta his spreadsheets
Aside from the obvious don’t watch prom at work, I don’t see how anyone does it with company property. Doesn’t pretty much everyone have a phone or computer these days? Shouldn’t it be common sense to use your phone rather than the work computers need by your employer?
I respect his owning it shamelessly.
Traded guns for booze in Baghdad. Every NCO and officer involved got removed mid-deployment
Where R they now?
Not Baghdad
No clue.
Girl did dabs on break with her gf came back zonked out since she’d never smoked weed before.
Ended up slapping manager and getting taken away by ems
Cook got arrested at work one time when cops came to pick her up at her job. She was 4 feet tall so we joked they picked her up and carried her away. She had to use a step stool to make the soup and someone would hide the stool from her so she’d be pissed the next morning.
Same place had a cook drinking lean and offering it to people.
Retirement home btw
Any workplace sitcoms about retirement home you know of? I would be all over that since South Park did the rap-heavy retirement home drug episode
There is absolutely room for it. Have so many stories. From the bpd woman who mentally and verbally harassed the boy with fetal alcohol syndrome.
To finding absinthe in the chefs office.
Then there would need to be an arc about the time there was a chef who couldn’t read. His wife did his emails and we couldn’t get avocados because he was spelling them wrong I’m the hardies order system
I feel really bad for the woman with bpd and the guy with FAS. Those are both horrible disabilities.
They were both tragic figures.
Whats ur job?
This was working as a server/cook/bistro at an independent living retirement community. During covid which added to the fuckery. Over the course of about 3 years.
Do they eat well? Like good shit?
Sometimes.
Food like bistro I made it right in front of you and did whatever you wanted. Sandwiches, breakfast, tacos, burgers etc. We tried our best with what we had.
This setup was different from the main dining room which was lunch line batch cooking. Dinners were kinda sucky occasionally.
If you’re into Ricky Gervais, he did one.
Where?
Just looked it up. It’s called Derek and it’s reportedly on Netflix.
Spanks!
What’s lean?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_(drug)
It’s essentially cough syrup mixed with a soda. Think his specifically was with sprite. Remember my co worker being especially fucked off of it and he was routinely baked.
I was a square.
deleted by creator
I was supervising filling in a pit we had dug on the edge of a forest. We had dump trucks coming in dumping gravel. One particular driver wasn’t great at his job and there had been issues with him in the past.
That driver came in and dumped his gravel, but then he drove off with his bed still raised and almost immediately smashed into electric lines that ran off into the forest. One telephone pole even snapped at the base and fell over.
Within 30 seconds multiple cops came speeding onto the job site. It turns out those electric lines ran to a radio tower in the woods that ran the police radio. The idiot in the dump truck had taken out the police comms for the whole town.
Note: if you’re planning a crime in that town, you only have to cut one wire to disable all police communication.
That’s some lacking infrastructure
This is why we shld bury our lines, much more effort to dig down six feet than get a ladder and snip
A wild backhoe appears!
It used Dig! It’s Super Effective!
What does a network engineer bring on a hiking trip in the woods? Water, snacks, extra sunscreen, a first aid kit, bug repellent, bear spray … and a folding shovel and a piece of fiber-optic cable.
(What’s the fiber for?)
Well, if you get lost in the woods or need to be rescued, you take the shovel, dig a trench, put the fiber in it, bury it … and within an hour, someone with a backhoe will show up to tear it up. Then you can just follow the backhoe tracks back to civilization.
And this is how a micro quake severed our T1 line from LA to Phoenix and shut the network down in our office for a week.
Honestly never thought of that, sounds like there would need to be some sort of protective channeling, with space to allow some shifting
Or use mobile phone networks.
You’d be surprised, how fragile critical infrastructure often is. There was an incident in Europe a few years ago, where a single miscalculation in a planned power line shutdown almost caused the entire European grid to split.
It slowed down a bit, and then we quickly learned that maintaining the perfect 50hz wasn’t actually necessary anymore. Few people still have clocks that depend on it
I’m not talking about the incident in Romania, but in Germany.
A shipyard needed some wires over a river deactivated and that caused an overload cascade, because the river was the border between two providers who had different assumptions about the capacity of the power lines connecting them.
oh damn, ain’t something. I will be looking into that, thank you!
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.
Giving “human resources” a whole new meaning, or maybe just its oldest meaning.
I must admit, I never saw it, but she DID have vast “resources”.
What’s her of?
INC-224, never forget.
I am an infra engineer at a fairly large scale (not like Amazon, but we have some BIG customers) SaaS company; despite our scale, we are only like 250 people and of them only about 90 engineers. We store a bunch of data in MySQL.
15:30:00, I get a page “MySQL table is full.” I immediately know my day is ruined, since I’ve never heard of this error before, but know it ain’t great.
15:30:10, every Pagerduty escalation policy in the entire company gets bombarded with pages.
I look at the database instance. The table size is “only” 16TiB, so it’s a bit confusing.
We are hard down for several hours as we scramble to delete data or somehow free up space. Turns out, google backs ClpudSQL MySQL instances with ext4 disks instead of zfs, and the max file size on ext4 is… you guessed it, 16TiB.
We learned a LOT of lessons from this, and are now offloading a shitload of json into either MongoDB or gcs, depending on the requirements. The largest table is down to 3TiB now :D
I love it.
All the other comments had guns sex and drugs.
Your story had mySQL.
Mad lad.
I understood almost none of that.
Database (thing that holds and retrieves bunch of data) broke when it reached a size of 16 Terabytes because the underlying filesystem (Thing that lets you store data on a physical disk like a hard drive or SSD) has a maximum possible size of 16 Terabytes by default (ext4)
16 TiB is roughly 16,000 Gigabytes which is roughly 16,000,000 Megabytes
Ty. I understood the tb but I didn’t know what a lot of the other abbreviations meant.
Not technically AT the work place, but a couple employees decided it would be a good idea to sneak off to a side room during the company Christmas party to fool around. They got caught and nothing happened for a couple weeks. Then, for the first and last time in the company history to my knowledge, both employees were asked to provide proof of gym attendance to justify the stipend they were collecting, then fired when they failed to do so.
What’s fun is the couple were married (to each other) and it didn’t happen on company property or during business hours, so this was totally just a “We’re icked out by this” move by HR. Gotta love working in the South.
Why is your company paying for personal gym memberships
Likely some sort of health insurance initiative. Lots of health insurance companies will give discounts to companies that can prove they have taken steps to improve their employees’ health. So things like mandatory smoking cessation classes, drug tests, gym memberships, etc are all encouraged by insurance companies.
My former company actually did things backwards; They offered a $20 weekly stipend to anyone who committed to stop smoking via a monthly smoking cessation course. It was basically just a monthly 30 minute video you watched, then answered some questions about… You could do it on company time, so it was an easy $80 per month that you were leaving on the table if you refused. The backwards part is that they didn’t offer the same stipend to people who never smoked in the first place. So all of the non-smokers suddenly signed on as smokers, signed up for the smoking cessation program, and immediately “quit” smoking so they could get that easy extra cash. I even used to keep a pack of menthols in my desk drawer, in case I was ever questioned about whether or not I really smoked. The first month they introduced the program, the company’s insurance must have been screaming, because every single employee suddenly reported as smokers.
Good benefit packages, keeping employees on.
An IT contractor at my government job was one of the people that tried to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer.
big gretch! she’s so cool. looks like she could command a battlestar.
Had an executive assistant at my company who did very little if anything. Nobody knew why she was kept around and paid so much. Everyone pressured the CEO to fire her, but he strongly resisted. Eventually she was fired, but immediately threatened to sue for sexual harassment. CEO threw her a lovely settlement check despite claiming that nothing ever happened. Mmhmm.
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.
I’m in awe about this. I work in compressed gasses and it’s pretty common knowledge in our industry that the environment dictates usage. I cannot believe they never consulted a gas specialist or used a completely inert gas that could have done the same thing.
Sounds perfectly normal for a construction/install team to me. “Maritime…doesn’t that mean like ocean or something?” “Hey the drawing says install it so I’m installing it.” “…yeah fair enough.”
Great story! Very well told. I can tell you must enjoy retelling it to newbies when they join the company :)
But wow, other than 2 summer breaks being cut short, it sounds like a good outcome. Especially considering no one was seriously hurt
I’m not with that company anymore, but given the right audience, ‘that time the server room blew up’ is a big hit.
It could have gone way worse. A stressful lesson and a good story is best case scenario outcome when stuff hits the fan.
