Confess your worst day at work - where you should have just stayed in bed

FelineGuitars

Thought it would be fun for us to all confess our worst days at work - the ones where by bad luck or poor judgement we didn't exactly cover ourselves in glory.

I'll set the ball rolling 

Came into work with a lot of work to do on a project that had quite a lot of time pressure

Was building a couple of guitars for a player whose band was touring with Iron Maiden and needed these two guitars making in time for the next leg of the tour.

Superstrat type necks , that I was going to dot inlay and feature our catseye logo in at the 12th fret 

So I drew on the centre line & carefully counted the fret slots (so I thought) and went about routing out the recess for our pearl cats eye inlays...came out really neat too - was well pleased 

Wasn't till I went to drill and inlay the dot markers and side markers that my error was revealed - I had inlay the eyes between the 12th and 13th frets, instead of the one before.

BUGGER!

I had to start the project over and make a whole new neck - much panic and pressure (but came right in the end)

The messed up neck was a nice neck and I ended up scalloping the board from the 13th fret up (losing the offending inlay) and it was a neck I used on my own guitar for years.


What bad day at work stories do you guys have......

stickyfiddle

I'm not having a great time today tbh...  currently working my 13th day straight (most of those 12+ hours) trying to model rainfall and water usage over the next 30 years to explain to a client why the job they've hired me & my team to do isn't necessarily feasible and probably should be cancelled. Yay!

jonnyburgo

My bad days at work usually involve some kind of attempted assault at the hands of teenagers, too many to mention really.

Fretwired

Two wows ... I feel for you @FelineGuitars ; .. I'm useless at DIY and have managed to bugger up assembling an IKEA table ..

My day's crap as well .. on the phone to HSBC to arrange a payment gateway for a client ... we have more options than a Chinese menu as the woman I was speaking to didn't listen. Now off to the client to suggest we go back to my plan - use anyone but HSBC.

Lestratcaster

I'm a self employed guitar tutor so I work mostly from home. Thankfully I haven't had any really bad days as I really enjoy my work. However the numbers are a bit low at the moment, most of the kids are doing summer school exams (GCSE, A-levels) and its approaching holiday period for the adult learners. Alot of people are missing next week due to half term as well as the bank holiday Monday weekend.

I had a chap visit from Portugal who booked two lessons this week just to evaluate this playing. When first receiving the enquiry I first thought it as a scam so was very cautious, asked for payment upfront and didn't disclose my address. On Tuesday (the first of the 2 lessons) we agreed to meet at the train station and having already paid I was confident he'd show up. He did, and turned out to be who he said he was thankfully.

Back to the teaching room and he told me he was a so-called "self-taught-out-of-the-box" type learner. Ok no problem, I set out to see what he really knew and where to improve. I asked a series of questions but he didn't really listen and went off widdling about telling me what he thought it was, and I was getting annoyed I couldn't talk. It was almost as if he was the tutor! His timing and technical ability was very poor yet he didn't want to be shown certain things, like a scale or something, deeming himself "too old" for that shit. I have a few self-taught players who come for a trial lesson and I discover they lack basic knowledge such as rhythm skills and have learnt bad habits, and things in the wrong/unstructured order, preferring to skip the basic/important bits and try to do the advanced stuff without going simple first to get the idea. I also found he found it hard to apply anything found in books/YouTube videos to the guitar.

I think as he was a retired student he hasn't been in a learning environment for a long time and was always conscious of his playing in front of someone else, and felt judged everytime. I tried to help him feel at ease by saying there was no pressure to learn 1 scale in 2 seconds. But he wasn't really listening. We did a jazz standard on this day and I didn't know what to conclude.

The 2nd day he booked (Weds) he came back and asked to take a photo of him, grabbing on of my guitars off the stand without asking and posing with it. This pissed me off as you do not touch other people's gear without asking first. We picked up from the previous session covering the jazz standard, but he wasn't really listening again, preferring to do his own thing. I showed him the dorian mode and broke down the intervals very clearly using fret numbers on a line. It started to click a little bit but again very sparse and fragmented.

I'm not sure these two sessions were worth the hassle!

ICBM

Mentioned before, but the day early in my repair career when I dropped a customer's Les Paul Custom onto the back of its headstock by leaving the case latches undone was quite bad. I literally thought I was going to have a heart attack and die - I felt a tightening in my chest and no heartbeat. I think what actually happened was that time slowed down so much due to the fear that it just seemed like a minute before it started again...

Thank God for Norlin and their maple necks . That might actually count as a lucky day rather than an unlucky one, in fact - if it had been a mahogany neck I'm certain it would have been splinters and I'd have been buying the guy a new guitar. I was working for a Gibson dealership at the time so that might well have been the outcome.

I hate to say this because it's going to come back and bite me now, but as far as I can remember I've never actually done any serious damage to a customer's guitar or amp - a few small scratches and accidentally blowing some replaceable components by not being careful enough when testing amps and pedals are about the worst.

There have been a few jobs I should never have accepted though, with the sinking feeling when you get part way in and realise you just can't do it to the standard you'll ever be happy with - even if the customer seems to be... converting a late-70s Les Paul Firebrand to double-cutaway would probably be top of that list. I really tried to not do it, but in the end I quoted a stupidly high price - and the guy accepted.

jonnyburgo

Sounds v frustrating @Lestratcaster ;

Lestratcaster

jonnyburgo said:

Sounds v frustrating @Lestratcaster ;

Makes me hate what I do sometimes but these people exist unfortunately. They're so far down the road with their learning they refuse to accept constructive criticism off others. I'm only there to evaluate where they're at and help.

Its actually more difficult to do lessons with someone who can already play as opposed to a complete beginner, at least if you're a total newbie we can start from the ground up in a structured way and cover all the necessary basic essentials. For some reason I get a lot of people who can already play before they come to me, thus learnt bad habits and missing basic fundamentals.

thecolourbox

Lestratcaster said:

I showed him the dorian mode

Is that Music Tutor Slang for "I kicked him out"?

digitalscream

I can beat pretty much anyone. Way back in '99, I was working for a bank. We had comms rooms at opposite ends of the building, with an exact copy of the main environment in the other one for redundancy.

We were patching everything for Y2k, and the first job was the main database server - with multiple CPUs. I grabbed the patch, gave it to the guys heading off to the other room. We'd been given a seriously short window for doing it, and nobody wanted to be the one to make the decision...so I said that we'd tested the patch successfully, so we might as well just patch both at once.

Only problem was...the server we'd tested it on only had one CPU, so the patch we'd used was for a single-CPU machine rather than SMP (this was Windows NT 4). As soon as we realised the mistake - when the primary database server wouldn't boot up - I legged it over to the other comms room (because, ironically, it didn't have a phone in it) and got there just in time to see them hit "reboot".

Cue the entire bank's systems being offline for three days while we tried to get it all back up and running.

Oops.

Lestratcaster

thecolourbox said:

Lestratcaster said:

I showed him the dorian mode

Is that Music Tutor Slang for "I kicked him out"?

Lol something like that!

MrBump

I rebooted a bank once.

Only the London bit though.  Still, about ~600 workstations, traders, sales analysts,the lot.

The first conversation my boss and his had was "can I fire him..?".  Thankfully, I had some pretty niche knowledge locked up in my otherwise idiot head, so I was safe.

thecolourbox

digitalscream said:

We were patching everything for Y2k,

I always thought y2k was just one of those things made up to scare people into paying for more IT stuff? A bit like the Windows Troubleshooting line costing so much per minute.

I think my worst day was at my last job when, in the midst of trying to get 5 awkward bloody minded office tenants to agree for me to deduct their arrears from their deposits, before arranging the refunds and then completing a back to back surrender of our lease to our landlord with the tenants in place to start new leases, I had TWO separate bailiffs turn up - one at the big HQ of my client (big TV company) and the other in our actual office, about two business rates balances that the bloody London Borough of bloody Hounslow had cocked up billing for, thus had not allocated our payments, and were therefore hounding me to pay about £650k within 30 minutes. Council would not back down despite it being their error (I used to do their work for them fairly frequently on other sites as well as they would invariably mess it up at their end) and bailiffs were understandably quite keen to collect to get their commission.

I was only a property administrator at the time and only covering both of these things because (for the surrender) my Boss was off ill and (for the rates) because large TV companies don't like paying money for business rates services but do rather like picking faults with the non-specialist service provided by a young trainee with a bit of Excel knowledge.

I could quite easily have died on the spot and been happier with the outcome...

randella

About a month into my first job out of university one Friday afternoon, I uploaded a database from our office in Manchester to our client's server over in Yorkshire.  Monday rolled around and I found I'd uploaded the wrong one and caused a traffic jam in Sheffield.

thecolourbox

I had a job once working in a forest, I saw some tracks on the ground and spent ages arguing and discussing with my colleague whether they were fox or badger tracks. In fact we were still arguing an hour later when the train nearly hit us.

blobb

Not me directly, but a colleague of mine, responsible for the process security of a rather large sewage works 'oop North. On hearing of a major toxicity incident in his catchment - involving a petrol tanker - went to investigate. Petrol was flowing into the works, threatening to wipe out the bug population. So he decided to burn it off before it caused havoc - the resultant fireball shot back up the sewer towards the lovely town of Scunthorpe quicker than you can say 'I don't think that match is the answer Mick'.

I shut down a works and backed the sewer up until it blew the manhole upstream. Sainsbury's in Bishops Stortford weren't very happy when I did that.

Bucket

Probably any number of the mindless, soul-sappingly tedious and grindingly irritating days I did as a shop-floor wage slave for M&S while I was at school and uni. An average day would consist of:

a) Stacking shelves
b) Cleaning up after the idiot customers who dropped pots of yoghurt or soup on the floor, or took frozen food and left it on the shelf with all the biscuits, because they're either stupid and thoughtless or actively trying to be cunts
c) Cleaning up after my idiot colleagues who would completely miss packs of food which were still on the shelves three days after their sell by date, or would stand around on the shop floor doing fuck all when queues were building up on the tills
d) Getting enraged by the myopic unhelpfulness of the shite jobsworth management I'd invariably be working under
e) Warding off the steady flow of shoplifters who were really quite determined to relieve us of all our expensive cuts of steak
And worst of all, f) serving the endless hordes of unpardonably rude, petty, self-righteous and arrogant cunts while being forced to stand still, and maintain a tissue-thin veneer of politeness for four hours at a time on a till. If there's one thing I learned from those five years (yes, five fucking years), it's that "the customer is always right an arsehole".

Blimey, typing all of that out sent it streaming back to me, which made me angry again even though I've been out of there nearly a year. Never again will I allow myself to settle for such a depressing job. No enjoyment, no prospects, less than no satisfaction.

stickyfiddle

@Bucket - so, on balance, you enjoyed retail, then?  

Bucket

stickyfiddle said:

@Bucket - so, on balance, you enjoyed retail, then?  

I enjoyed it in much the same way I might enjoy sharing an elevator ride with an overflowing burlap sack of enraged weasels.

earwighoney

Bucket said:

 it's that "the customer is always right an arsehole".

+1

Phil_aka_Pip

As an office dogsbody in 2010 for a small engineering company in Ipswich every day was the worst day. Treated like dirt, no authority to make anything happen, but always my fault when things didn't happen. Was told I must hassle management to do this, or that, but when I did (no matter how I worded it) the response was invariably along the lines of "Don't talk to ME like that". One of the directors demanded that I gave him some paperwork (NOW), then he lost it, and blamed me. I know what would have happened if I'd refused him the originals and insisted on taking a photocopy first.