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

Deadman

Grounding a squadron of Tornados (Gulf war bound) for losing a set of wire snips in the maintenance hangar. Not my greatest moment.

ICBM

Deadman said:

Grounding a squadron of Tornados (Gulf war bound) for losing a set of wire snips in the maintenance hangar. Not my greatest moment.

Could be worse. Someone at the Vulcan To The Sky Trust left a bag of tools (I think) in one of the engine intake ducts just before an engine test run, and it wasn't spotted.

JerkMoans

Without naming names or giving pack drill, in summary form: turning up to court, still drunk.

Paul_C

ICBM said:

There have been a few jobs I should never have accepted though

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.

Heartfeltdawn

Easy. Monday Feb 6th 2017. 

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.  

FreddieVanHalen

Paul_C 

I also wrecked a neck 

I think providing you are not an osteopath this is probably ok

Emp_Fab

I have many tales usually involving monster journeys for no point at all.  Yesterday I drove 3h15 to a site only to find my stores dept had sent out the wrong parts.  Drive 3h15 back home again.  Back up there again today to fit the correct parts....  they hadn’t even sent the fucking things out at all...  So over 13h behind the wheel for absolutely nothing.

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.

blobb

We shouldn't be let loose in public.

ToneControl

Lestratcaster said:

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!

I felt sick just reading the title of this thread, I think you've picked a better career choice than me if that's your worst story my friend

digitalscream

thecolourbox said:

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.

Not at all. It's just that everyone did such a good job of patching everything that nothing went wrong - IT is one of those careers where, if you do it flawlessly the best thing you can hope for is that nobody ever notices you're there. The worst - as demonstrated - is that everyone thinks you're conning them because nothing that big could possibly go without a hitch

Winny_Pooh

Made a "joke" to someone calling in to complain about a letter we sent to their neighbor. Joke was taken out of context and got us an additional complaint and investigation by the solictors regulation authority. 

kossofffan

Back in '82 when VHS machines were about a £1000, the repair shop I'd just began my first job in, had a mini van that we would use to collect customers repairs. I was told to ALWAYS place the machine on the ground before opening the doors & never to balance it on my knee whilst trying to find keys etc etc.
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.

munckee

I arrange insurance for large companies and ex local authority institutions so a major mistake would cause untold horror which in 20 years, touch wood, I've never done.  I did have to go to a 28 storey apartment block in january where there had been a major leak which meant no power and no heating.  I managed to keep warm by walking up and down the 56 flights of stairs 4 times with various people.  Met two workmen carrying a 60 kilo pump up the stairs, they pointed out they were averaging 10-15 trips up and down the stairs each day.

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!

EricTheWeary

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. 

monquixote

Lots of horror stories from working in a restaurant kitchen, but two that stick in my mind is having a chef kick over a 5 litre container of rancid fat and making me clean it up and being made to shred a 30 litre container of onions in a small room which was like being tear gassed.

skunkwerx

Bucket said:

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.

True that. 

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. 

Perdix

I was sent to replace some pipework in a school toilet block. I put a cap over the smoke alarm as there were only a couple of joints to solder. Had just finished when the cap fell to the floor and a thin whisper of smoke floated into the smoke detector. 500 kids + staff evacuated into the pouring rain, two fire engines as the school was linked directly to the fire station. I wasn't very popular.

skunkwerx

Perdix said:

I was sent to replace some pipework in a school toilet block. I put a cap over the smoke alarm as there were only a couple of joints to solder. Had just finished when the cap fell to the floor and a thin whisper of smoke floated into the smoke detector. 500 kids + staff evacuated into the pouring rain, two fire engines as the school was linked directly to the fire station. I wasn't very popular.

You became a hero to those 500 kids!

Deadman

ICBM said:

Deadman said:

Grounding a squadron of Tornados (Gulf war bound) for losing a set of wire snips in the maintenance hangar. Not my greatest moment.

Could be worse. Someone at the Vulcan To The Sky Trust left a bag of tools (I think) in one of the engine intake ducts just before an engine test run, and it wasn't spotted.

Mate after 31 years working in and around aviation I've seen a lot worse than that. I couldn't put it on here!

Axe_meister

Doing some work on a customer system which meant deleting a whole bunch of file systems.
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