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"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
Slowly but surely I've eliminated that, but there have been a number of learning experiences.
I also wrecked a neck (partly due to being very tired) which needed starting again, by marking out, recognising that it didn't look right, marking out again and then cutting to the first, partly rubbed out, lines.
One of the funniest when I was a motorbike mechanic was replacing the front tyre on an old wreck of a moped. I had to put it on axle stands as the main stand was broken, and while trying to loosen the front axle managed to tip it off the bench and upside down onto the workshop floor. Fortunately it was such a mess you couldn't be sure I'd done any damage or not.
For six months I worked as a chef in a Greene King Meet and Eat pub. I'd taken the job on the basis that it was close and it was advertised at 35 hours per week. Six days a week working, one day was a three hour shift. It was way way below the level I'd cooked at previously but stupid me thought "Short shifts, I can do the study I want to do". No fucking chance.
From the outset it was shit. When I left, I was averaging over 60 hours per week. A mass of problems and difficulties characterised my time there. I could regale you with tales of steaks arriving off the lorry, opening the bags, and finding them to be rancid. I could then move over to the griddle used for cooking steaks and meats. From my very first shift, I reported that it was under-powered and needed to be replaced. Three months later I came into work to find it had been removed. It had been leaking gas for ages and had been condemned by the gas safety inspector. Greene King deemed us so useless that we didn't have a replacement for a week and so I was expected to cook up to 100 meals a day on three burners. It is important to note that the Business Development Manager for the area was so tight, we weren't even allowed frying pans. So for a week I cooked with pans I brought from home. Throw in rota lies, total contravention of the Working Time Directive, situations where pay was incorrect and I found evidence and reported it that the staff time system was being doctored to save on wage costs... When I began there the place was a dump. The two chefs there at the time were lazy fucks. I asked one of them how often the oven was cleaned. He said weekly and I laughed, asking him to justify that when it was now August and there were crusty old parsnips and pigs and blankets in there left over from the previous Christmas. GK cheap pubs don't employ dishwashers for the most part (Friday night, Saturday night, and Sunday lunch I was granted a waitress to wash dishes for three hours each shift). Penny pinching by that point meant that chefs were expected to work alone and run food to tables and wash up. Technically management said that we had to be done by 9.30pm in order to meet the wage budget. Quite how a chef is meant to finish serving at 9pm when the resident dart and pool teams were to be fed at 10pm as stipulated fell onto deaf ears.
It was a shithole when I started. It was a mammoth effort on my part to get all the fridges and surfaces clean. We then got to Xmas and broke records for the area in terms of food sales. By the start of February I was ready to leave and started hunting around for a new job, handing my notice in on February 2nd. I gave four weeks.
So we get to Monday February 6th. I arrive at work to find that Bidvest had delivered my food order and it was wrong. Their system had fucked up and when that happens, they go for what they term a backup order ie. one of everything. They deliver at any time between 8am and 8pm. Mondays was just me in the kitchen. So I am there at 10am, I have to do the fryers, and then somehow put £1300 worth of food into freezers that are already full. We have customers in early doors. By 11.30am, I am introduced to my prospective replacement, a scouser called Steve. He ingratiates himself by taking over some basic sandwich duties at the start of the lunch shift, saying how he has high standards.
By 12.30pm I am still packing away food. I have a bag of frozen chicken portions on the side next to cellophane double wrapped frozen pies. Steve has demonstrated his standards are fucking low by spitting on the kitchen floor twice during cooking whilst being unable to
We then get hit by the Monday OAP crew in for their two courses for £4.49 special.
At 1pm we get a Greene King manager in. He's doing a pre-EHO check, something we knew would happen at some point as it had been nearly two years since the last Environmental Health check. The manager decides to tear into everything. His final report states he'd award us two stars for cleanliness based on a) a piece of cellophane under a fridge and b) one bag of chicken defrosting next to something else defrosting. This is bad in his view because we need to defrost everything in the fridge. (A word for the unknowing:: GK pies need 48 hours to defrost in a fridge. Once you take them out, you are supposed to have a three day shelf life. In other words, if you take them out on Monday, put them in a fridge to defrost for 48 hours until Wednesday, you need to sell them Thursday or bin them. It's ridiculous and impossible to ever do. But that is the GK model. Idiotic impossible standards in order to reduce any possible legal threat to them).
When he told me of the two star award, I looked at him and said he was wrong and ignorant. I put a week's wage on us getting five stars. He threatened me with disciplinary action and suspension, a threat I openly laughed at as being put on such a report means suspension on full pay, not exactly an issue for a guy who is leaving. Steve the prospective replacement chef left the building (he was actually given my job and quit before I had left: this then happened again. Two replacements in, both change their minds before they start).
The rest of my day continued like this. I started work at 10am, grabbed a smoke at 3.30pm for five minutes, and then worked flat out until 1am. 15 hour work days were not unusual there: I did do 8am to 1.30pm once.
I got home at 1.30am and wrote a new resignation letter. I left on Sunday.
Two days after I left, the EHO inspector came in. We were given five stars. I emailed the GK manager I had argued with No reply. So I took the traditional approach and sent him a fax with one word written on it: Vindicated.
Moral of this story: never ever give your money to a Greene King owned establishment. They're some of the vilest conditions you can ever imagine. As companies go, I have never come close to working for anyone as disgusting.
I once drove 5h30 each way in the same day to push a printer cable back into a printer the customer had “checked all the cables on”.
I accidentally rebooted the entire EPOS system in a large, packed, supermarket on Christmas Eve causing 16 checkouts to have to rescan everything again.
I also accidentally rebuilt a RAID 1 array from a disk that had been offline for several days, thus overwriting everything that had been done since then. I had to restore from the backup tape from the previous night but they still lost everything they’d done that day!
I once picked up a brand new Ford Focus hire car and wrote it off within ten minutes. Luckily, the other driver was to blame (though if I’d not been distracted I could probably have avoided it).
Oooh, what else... Worked in a rough old pub once and the gents urinals were blocked. Someone gave me one of those ‘pump up air pressure type plungers’. I pumped it up and triggered it into one of the urinals, whereupon high pressure columns of stale piss shot out of all of the others, and soaking me in it.
Offset "(Emp) - a little heavy on the hyperbole."
Well of course I thought I knew better and dropped the thing on the ground. Thought I was gonna be instantly sacked on my return. Proper cold sweat thinking just how long I'd need to work for to pay it off.
On test, the machine still worked, so the boss rang the customer to say the case was marked due to sliding down the back of the workbench & although they were none too pleased, it was accepted...……………………..till a few days later when they phoned to say a neighbour of theirs had witnessed the whole thing !
Somehow kept my job and wasn't required to work for months on end to repay the seemingly impossible (to me) figure.
When I worked in a working men's club years ago the staff told me on my first day I had replaced a chap who had been killed trying to stop a pub fight. There was always trouble, as the countdown to midnight started on new years eve my mate and I were between a bloke with a chair and a bloke with a fire extinguisher. Shortly after midnight a man was glassed in the face by his wife.
One of my first jobs as a teenager was working in a bakery with a 5:30 start. I had frequently been clubbing all night and had to go straight to work. Hated every minute of every shift!
I remember organising a case conference on someone ( these were the days before I had a mobile phone) and getting doctors, social workers, etc, to turn up and forgetting to do so myself. My lovely colleague Barbara bluffing like crazy for me in my absence apparently. Not sure why I didn’t get into bigger trouble than I did.
Being physically assaulted by a service user/ client ( for which he went to prison) and quite a few threats to me over the years. One of my very aggressive chaps had an affair with my next door neighbour’s daughter ( I think she was the barmaid in his local pub at the time) so his threats really did carry a ‘I know where you live’ message.
I did a visit to HMP Littlehey and they had a security lockdown whilst I was there so I got to spend several hours locked in a small room with a convicted rapist ( although it was more boring than threatening in the end).
Being admitted from work to hospital with a heart attack like event brought on by work stress.
I’m currently serving my 10th year in retail. This October I get a plaque and an extra weeks holiday, but only for this year..
I had 2 choices, go to prison or work for hmv.. damn it, if I’d have gone to prison I’d be getting out today.
well I was given root access to the production system and was told I could connect to the development system from there.
So I telnet to the system concerned and change to username . Do my bits and pieces and then proceeded to delete all directories from my home directory.
Type CD to get to the room of the home directory. And type rm -rf *.
However somewhere along the line I'd managed to log myself out of the development system.
All of a sudden the sys admin gets lots of phone calls.
I'd deleted the entire production system of a major retailer.
Took 36hours to restore the system and reprocess all the idocs from every till in the country