That time the food cart pod exploded:

https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2017/10/food_cart_pod_on_fire_in_downt.html

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.

Jason spilled a barrel a barrel of ink and fell in it. 🤣

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.

stressed out researcher tried to get a temp to ship out biological specimens by fedex.

Hmmm I guess we have two of different types

1: late into pandemic when inflation was really bad a bunch of the workers were super upset by their wages, management got together to get a solution. The plant supervisor called a meeting and told everyone there would be a “substantial raise”, it was $0.20. Less than 1%

The second, more recent, a fire broke out after a maintenance repair went awry. Someone pulled the fire alarm and it failed to work. Someone pulled a second fire alarm, it failed to fully initiate the system. Then on the last attempt it finally went off but the fire suppression system and sprinkler system did go off but not over the actually burning area. This lead to a whole region of the building getting smelted and a big investigation on the fire suppression system. After it was resolved they asked employees to continue working their shift, even in the smoked out areas. The stench was horrible and probably carcinogenic lol

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 male staff member was yelling at and berating a female for god knows what. She was trying to get away from him, and he’d followed her around the office down the stairs and into the washroom.

She was the manager’s fiancee, and there were three witnesses. We were honestly worried for her safety and the receptionist was about to call 911.

Consequences for the abusive minidicked coworker? NONE.

a guy mixed the wrong chemicals and work shut down for a week. of course that happened before i was hired and hasnt happened since. everyday i pray someone did that and shuts down work for a week so i get a free week off

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Incoming manager was supposed to come in for a walkaround with the outgoing manager. No show no contact. Saw his name in the news a week later. Think Chris Hanson type news.

Creepy guy got fired. Showed up the next day and confronted HR. Idk what went down but they had to call the cops.

Company moves into a new building, threw a big Christmas party with booze. Most of the management fucked someone not their wife/husband, lots of condoms as well as heroin needles and smudges of coke left in the bathrooms. Drugs and booze all over the damn place.

We got cards and little bits of candy after that, never another Xmas party

Owner shot himself after bankrupting the company through embezzlement and we had to vacate all residential patients within a week knowing we wouldn’t get paid and would be losing our jobs, haha!

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.