Apophrycal Work Tales

[TelephoneAngel]

Does anyone else work somewhere where there has always been some tale of something which happened , names are vague, but everyone always says it?

For example when I worked in a carpet store "the district manager used to lock himself in the store cupboard with one of the salegirls every lunchtime", nobody ever saw this happen but everyone KNEW it happened.

At an office I once worked "someone was found murdered in an upstairs fileroom", who or why or why it was not in the local news archives was never explained.

At my present company "a customer punched another customer in the face because he was shouting at one of the salesgirls".Nobody saw this first hand, nobody knows at which of our locations it happened, but everyone KNOWS it once happened.

[Lehk]

at my previous job there was the story about the new guy who drove a power jack off one of the loading lifts and got fired on the spot.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Oh yeah, that would be the story about the backroom guy taking various and sundry females into the locked electronics stockroom for teh secks.

How he could do this without winding up on camera is beyond me.

[KellyHabersham]

Off the top of my head, the closest I can think of would be people assuming that at some point, I "must" have caught someone having sex in the library.

[Sleepwalker]

I used to work at a place like that. People doing lines of coke off each other in the freezer, etc.

Funny how no new rumors appeared after one shift leader was fired... man, she was a busy little bee.

[Victoria J]

The people who've been there for years all tell a story about how a customer once died while waiting to be seen - and all the details seem to change every time.

Otherwise everyone has their stories they tell every time we get a chance to talk. One woman always tells the story of how when she was a young and naive adviser she wrote a blistering letter to the police asking why they were holding the personal property of her client, this poor innocent old man, and asking when exactly they would be releasing his goods. The police responded that he could pick up his cannabis plants never. Idiot had been growing them on a balcony facing the police station...

Last time some of us went out to dinner (for someone's leaving do) my manager told us how he'd once advised 2 men who'd been thrown out of the French foreign legion That impressed me.

Victoria J

[cinema guy]

I used to work for a window manufacturer. One of the factory guys (FG) was fired by the Operations Director (OD) shortly before Christmas. FG shows up at the Christmas party drunk and beats ups OD in the gents toilets, or so the story goes.

Another version of that story, didn't involve FG at all. OD simply slipped (or fell down cos he has drunk) and injured himself.

A further story concerning OD, who was ex-army and liked to drink, was that he was drunk one night and fell asleep in his parked car. A policeman saw him and woke him up. OD supposedly woke with a start and thumped the policeman. Since there was no indication that there was ever any consequences for this, I think the story was apocryphal.

[PepperElf]

Does anyone else work somewhere where there has always been some tale of something which happened , names are vague, but everyone always says it?

Navy. Sea Stories. 'nuff said.

[Midorikawa]

The only stories of the sort around here either have proof, or have been verified by the people responsible.

One was an admin who went through and killed off a home directory of a customer server. 550 users at that time, lost their entire accounts since we didn't keep backups back then either. He got a slap on the wrist, and a "don't do that again."

A week later, he did it again, and was promptly terminated. A friend works with this admin now, and he's verified that it did actually go down like that. He readily admits he was cocky back then, and has gotten a lesson in humility since.

Another was one that happened to the guy who does training now, back when he was a tier 1 support tech. The customer was from china, and the language barrier made the Berlin Wall seem small. The customer could only say "I break! You fix!" in English, and he had about 40 domains on his account, which made finding what he broke hard to find. That call was amusing to listen to. It's in the list of "epic calls taken by techs" here at the company.