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ITT: weird stories from weird jobs

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digdug2k

Member
I quit a job as a bank manager, and went back to school. I picked up two jobs at the time, one of which was delivering pizza. My buddy was the manager, and another buddy from high school was in charge of my training. After a couple of days riding along with another driver I was finally able to deliver my first pizza. I mean, I was in my late twenties, in the town where I grew up, and I was familiar with knocking on doors and the overall "you give me money, I'll give you pizza mechanic." What could go wrong?

My trainer buddy was amped, he was so excited to see me deliver my first pizza. I really thought he might tear up a little when I got out of the car with my first delivery. I get to the door, and a guy wearing a paper skirt answers, and he had very heavily accented English. I tell him the pizza is $22 and some change, and he hands me a wad of cash. no biggie, except this pizza had already been paid for by card. I tell him this, then he goes into a fit of rage, calls his wife over and starts screaming at her. They are literally arm's length from me, and look like they are about to come to blows. He just keeps yelling "YOU PAID WITH THE CARD!" Then she replies in another language, he turns to me and very calmly says "I'm sorry sir, there must be some mistake. My wife didn't use a card." I show him the receipt where is clearly shows this was paid by a card. He then turns to here and starts screaming again. We go through this several times, and while he's yelling a teenage boy that is obviously mentally disabled starts slowly inching out from behind a wall across the room, and he is completely naked.

At this point I walk back to my buddy's car and explain that there seems to be an issue with payment. He calls the store, references the receipt, and confirms payment was made by card. I go back to the door, and the whole shit show starts all over again. in the midst of trying to not be a witness to a domestic dispute or underage nudity I start staring at the pizza box, and that's when I notice the ticket on the box only says $15 and change. Then it hits me that $22 is a lot of money for one pizza. I cross reference the receipt in my hand with the one on the box, and realize they aren't for the same order. I apologize for my error, collect his cash, and walk back to the car with my head hanging pretty low. My amped buddy in the car is trying to build me up as I explain that we had two receipts, and doesn't yet know the full details of the delivery. He wouldn't shut up long enough for me to explain what I just witnessed, and figured my attitude was about having the wrong address. Once I finally cut him off and expained what I just saw he barely said anything for the rest of the night.

I still catch shit for this, years later, when a group of us from high school all get together.
Lol. I delivered for two different pizza places in college. Neither of them ever trained me at all that I can remember. It was just "Hey, here's the pizza and here's the address. Put the thing on your car and go as fast as you can. The cops won't pull over a pizza guy."

I never got to see any nudity or solicited though. My life is boring :( Sometimes I think about staging some elaborate production for the pizza guy just so he'll have a story when he goes back to work.
 
Your IT guy probably had an aneurism. I know I would.

Funny thing is, we didn't have one! He just hired a dude to do all of his shit when setting up the company and basically googled any problems that came up. You can imagine how well that went last time.
 

The Enchanter

Neo Member
I currently work in waste management and had someone send me a box of syringes through the post. I'd been in the country for 6 months, and there were no procedures in the office to deal with this so I had to manage it on my own.

I'm leaving at the end of the week.
 

Cracklox

Member
Years ago I worked for a pretty big pay tv provider where I live. I had access to anyones account I wanted to and when it was quiet a few of us used to search any local celebs to see if they had an account and more importantly, if they used it to book any of the lame (R rated) porn on the adults only channel.

Most didn't, but there was one quite prominent day time tv/game show/variety show host who has been around for quite a while that ran up a list pages long. To this very day, I don't look at the guy the same
 

noface

Member
My main job is a pretty dry office job as an IT-dispatcher sending out engineers for printer or notebook repairs but on my weekends I work overnight in a well known Currywurst shop (I am from Germany) where all the drunken party people come to eat after partying their asses off.

One time a pretty aggressive guy, seemingly on drugs and alcohol startet tearing the small store to pieces so we grabbed him and threw him out (while wilding out he broke the ribs of a small woman standing in his way). I was standing in front of our store and watched his 'friends' try to hold him back but he just threw them off. He was getting back up puffing like a grampus, his head turns around and I saw in his eyes that he was in absolute lock-on mode. The moment he saw me and recognized I was part of the crew who just threw him out he stormed at me like a train coming.

After years and years of honing my skills with video games I can proudly say I effectively used the well-known technique of stepping aside at the last moment to let the boss run into the wall behind me in real life. This guy bounced of the wall like a rubber ball and then lay sleeping at my feet.
 
You know when you read something and you don't believe a word of it? Yeah...

Haha, I know these stories are pretty out there, but they're true. I used to think there was some sort of a chemical leak or fungus in the water supply that made everyone insane.

Did you find out what that was?

Yup. It's not too salacious, but basically, the office owner didn't want to pay people overtime, so she made everybody clock their overtime hours on yellow post-it notes instead of on their actual hours card. You'd get paid for the hours, but not at an overtime rate. The overtime hours weren't on the hours cards, so if there was ever a government raid because somebody ratted her out, she could say, "Huh? What overtime? Nobody did any...!"

My last year on the job, a disgruntled former employee (of which there were many) actually did call the government, and the office got raided by FBI, IRS, and a bunch of government agents. It was completely surreal, I just sat there in silence, and I was sure that it was about all the drugs and other sordid shit going on. But no, it was all about overtime hours. The cops actually found a huge stash of those yellow post-it notes and after 6 or 7 months, their accountants had cross-referenced everything and figured out how much people were owed. The office owner's ultimatum was to pay her employees what she had stiffed them out of or close up shop. Some people got checks for 9 or 10 grand. I got exactly 73 dollars because I was a student and had no time for overtime anyway.

In a move of supreme boldness, the office owner then told everyone, "Okay, sign that you've received the check, and then give it back to me, because I can't afford to pay you this money." 90% of people gave it back, rationalizing that it was better to have a stable job than to take one big chunk of a few thousand bucks.
 
I have a few good stories about this farmer I worked for when I was a kid (from 11 till I was 15). He was a notorious drunk, and his exploits were local legends because some of them were so over the top nobody would believe them until evidence was produced. But my favorite that I witnessed first hand was the story of the Stubborn Boulder.

We were picking rock in his field when I was 12, and we can across what we thought was just a big rock. We started to dig it out, and quickly realized that this was gonna be trouble. After about an hour, we finally found the edges and dug around it. This thing was massive, probably the size of a large pickup. Easy 6-7 tons of solid granite. No way we were moving it so we have one of the older kids drive off to get the farmer.

About half an hour later he shows up as drunk as he normally is, takes one look at the Boulder and proceeded to curse up a storm that would make a sailor blush. He then storms off in his truck. We all get back to work picking rocks, figuring he is just going to get a payloader and bury the rock. Boy, were we wrong.

He shows up a hour later in his pickup, and gets out. He opens up the tailgate, and opens up a crate he has sitting in the bed. He then proceeds to start removing the dynamite from it. Yah, the drunk farmer was going to try and blow up the rock. This was bound to go well, right? Anyways, he plants a couple sticks next to it and winds out his detonation wire. Tells us all to get behind the truck, wires it all together, and sets it off. Big boom. We all walk back to the Boulder, and not a scratch on it. But a decent sized hole. This sets him off. So he goes through the process again. Same result. And again. Mind you, he is stupid drunk and really pissed now, so his only option is going overboard.

So he proceeds to start planting dynamite all around the boulder. Not just a few sticks either, oh no. He wasn't going to just blast it into smaller pieces, he was apparently going to try and launch it into the next county. Every other foot or so, he is jamming dynamite into the ground under the boulder. We were all watching him, and wondering if we should go get an adult that was a bit more sober, but we knew it was already to late for that. We were about to witness something that would be amazingly tragic, or amazingly awesome. No way we were leaving.

He finally gets done planting and wiring all the explosives, and stumble walks his way back to the truck. He tells us all to get behind the truck, and cover our ears. Of course, we all do everything in our power to peek under or around the truck to watch the results. He hooks up his detonator, covers his eyes, and hits it.

Ever seen those pictures of bombs going off where it looks like the earth itself is rising up the wage war against the sky? Yah, it was a bit like that. Only way closer and louder. Mind you, we were only a few hundred feet away from it, so we got to experience the full brunt of the explosion. Pretty sire the truck moved from the Shockwave, and all of us were planted firmly on our backs. Oh, and it was now raining dirt. So much fucking dirt. It was certainly an experience. Once we felt it was safe to move again, we got out from behind the truck and saw the farmer standing about where the Boulder was. So we went to look and see what happened.

Now, anyone else who has worked with explosives can tell you a single dynamite charge is usually more than enough. Two is pushing it. A couple dozen? Your asking for trouble. And boy did he find it. Pretty sure the hole in the ground was about 30 feet across and just as deep. It was also filling with ground water. Not what any farmer wants to see. So he immediately blows what was probably his final gasket, storms off to his truck, and leaves. Doesn't tell us what to do next, just leaves.

A while later the sherif arrived, and we explained to him what happened. He does his normal routine of nodding and rubbing his eyes whenever this farmer is involved. He says he'll make sure we all get home and he radios for some people to come pick us up. We all get home, explain to our parents what happened, and get to watch as this farmer gets his ass chewed into the next century by some very understandably pissed off parents. He agrees to never use explosives around kids again (lies, total lies) and he gives us all triple pay for a full days work even though we only put in a few hours if nobody presses charges. Oh, and he left the hole in the ground so we had a new swimming hole for the summer.

But yah, that's just one story about that guy. There are probably a dozen others that I witnessed, and God only knows how many I didnt. Needless to say working for him was always interesting. And now always in a safe way.
 

Babyshams

Member
I work at a powerplant. We had a guy "find" a recording device. A month or so later he starts making complaints about our bosses, saying they were going through his truck and that the state(I work for the state of CA) had cars outside his house and that he knew they had come into his house and gone through his mail cause it was moved. He also accused a guy of purposefully taking him with him on a job to "get him out of the way" so that my bosses could go through his car.

He was a pretty nice guy, former army, we think it was PTSD related, but he refused help so they had to let him go.

We are pretty sure he was the one who put the recording device and got caught replacing the tape so he claimed he found it.
 

DoctorManhattan

Neo Member
The only crazy thing I've had happen was we just hired this guy and his manager and him are making the rounds giving him introductions to everyone ( its a small office ) and he goes to his desk and starts doing first day job orientation training stuff.

a little while later he goes to the bathroom for a while and he informs his manager he feels really bad that this is his first day but he feels hes becoming violently ill and he goes home.

We all get pulled into an office the next morning informing us he passed away in his sleep that day after he got home. Dude was only 32 and just had a baby girl a month earlier. I'm not sure exactly what happened but thought it was crazy.
 

NandoGip

Member
I worked for an insurance corporation that would hire literally anyone that could pass the test. About 200 or so freshly out of college dudes and chicks that were hired to be salespeople. This place was literally a mash up of boiler room and wolf of Wall Street on a smaller scale.

-biweekly office parties where people were getting shit faced and fucking in the side rooms
-do whatever it takes to sell culture. People would lie through their teeth to sell and then brag while managers turned a blind eye to it
-CEO straight out of the scumbag movie business man catalog. Big fancy suit, overblown personality. Would promote chicks and make others his assistant if they fucked him. Many girls would.
-people doing and selling drugs on the sales floor. Cocaine and adderall. Huge blunt sessions in the parking lot, before, during, and after work. Management pretended not to notice
-this one office girl who was very attractive but literally fucked maybe 40 dudes one by one.
-one of the managers gave no fucks and joined in on a party night with the employees. They all gathered at the office and took a shitload of drugs and drank then went on a party bus to a club. Some people returned to the office after. Next morning some naive employee who was unaware of the seedy underbelly walked in to find two naked dudes passed out with open bottles of booze
-one of the directors was literally Leonardo DiCaprio from wolf of wall st. Made a lot of money scamming and then managing, then became this baller who would do so much drugs in the office. He'd buy Coke and pills not realizing the whole office knew. Would slam whiskey shots and not realize people can smell it.
-most people would get hired and by the time they left they'd have at least one dui

I'm sure there's more, I'll post when I remmeber
 

Sandoval

Member
My first summer job was working as a groundskeeper at a cemetery. While trimming hedges and random bushes I came across at least six caches of condoms and petroleum jelly secreted away in different areas. Ignoring the whole 'banging in the graveyard thing', who in the hell uses an oil based lubricant with condoms...
 
The only crazy thing I've had happen was we just hired this guy and his manager and him are making the rounds giving him introductions to everyone ( its a small office ) and he goes to his desk and starts doing first day job orientation training stuff.

a little while later he goes to the bathroom for a while and he informs his manager he feels really bad that this is his first day but he feels hes becoming violently ill and he goes home.

We all get pulled into an office the next morning informing us he passed away in his sleep that day after he got home. Dude was only 32 and just had a baby girl a month earlier. I'm not sure exactly what happened but thought it was crazy.

Whoa, this is sobering.
 

wondermega

Member
I worked for an insurance corporation that would hire literally anyone that could pass the test. About 200 or so freshly out of college dudes and chicks that were hired to be salespeople. This place was literally a mash up of boiler room and wolf of Wall Street on a smaller scale.

-biweekly office parties where people were getting shit faced and fucking in the side rooms
-do whatever it takes to sell culture. People would lie through their teeth to sell and then brag while managers turned a blind eye to it
-CEO straight out of the scumbag movie business man catalog. Big fancy suit, overblown personality. Would promote chicks and make others his assistant if they fucked him. Many girls would.
-people doing and selling drugs on the sales floor. Cocaine and adderall. Huge blunt sessions in the parking lot, before, during, and after work. Management pretended not to notice
-this one office girl who was very attractive but literally fucked maybe 40 dudes one by one.
-one of the managers gave no fucks and joined in on a party night with the employees. They all gathered at the office and took a shitload of drugs and drank then went on a party bus to a club. Some people returned to the office after. Next morning some naive employee who was unaware of the seedy underbelly walked in to find two naked dudes passed out with open bottles of booze
-one of the directors was literally Leonardo DiCaprio from wolf of wall st. Made a lot of money scamming and then managing, then became this baller who would do so much drugs in the office. He'd buy Coke and pills not realizing the whole office knew. Would slam whiskey shots and not realize people can smell it.
-most people would get hired and by the time they left they'd have at least one dui

I'm sure there's more, I'll post when I remmeber

I love this. I wanna quit my job and work for this guy right now. Anyway, where's the gaffer who took a shit in a library elevator as a punk kid, then years later got a job at the same library?
 

cr0w

Old Member
Back when I worked for Fry's, we had a brand new Xbox 360 set up on an endcap with one of those gaming chairs that were all the rage for a little while. I think we had Forza running. Anyway, we set it up and went about doing our jobs, and about an hour later I was walking by when I noticed something was odd about the display.

I walked closer and noticed what appeared to be melted chocolate smeared all over the chair, controller, console and television. I figured some idiot kid had been eating while playing and just made a mess. Then the smell hit me. Someone had managed, in the busy fucking store, to shit themselves in the gaming chair and proceed to smear it all over the entire endcap and demo station and disappear without a trace with no one noticing until after the fact. This was at the front of the department, which was right outside the cafe. The busiest part of the store. I just let the manager know and walked away, I don't know who cleaned it, I don't know what happened afterwards or if they ever figured out the story behind it. To this day I don't know how they pulled it off.

Then there was the apparent explosion in the men's room, in which someone left behind nothing but a bloody, shit-stained elastic waistband from a pair of tightey whities that had only a few strips of fabric hanging from it. It was almost like the force had blown the underwear apart and the elastic was all that survived.

A few years prior I was working at Toys R Us, either 2004 or 2005, and we had pallet stacks of whatever the hell was supposed to be the hot toy that Black Friday on the floor. We opened the doors and it was your typical madhouse, then I hear screaming and thud after thud after thud, and my co-worker Patrick was hollering, "HERE YOU GO! TAKE IT! YOU WANT IT SO BAD, HERE!" and just chucking the damn things into the crowd. The thuds were from when the item was hitting the people who wanted it, usually dead in the face. And they were happy for it.

EDIT: I also spent a week 'working' for Kirby vacuums. That entire week was one big weird story.
 
The only crazy thing I've had happen was we just hired this guy and his manager and him are making the rounds giving him introductions to everyone ( its a small office ) and he goes to his desk and starts doing first day job orientation training stuff.

a little while later he goes to the bathroom for a while and he informs his manager he feels really bad that this is his first day but he feels hes becoming violently ill and he goes home.

We all get pulled into an office the next morning informing us he passed away in his sleep that day after he got home. Dude was only 32 and just had a baby girl a month earlier. I'm not sure exactly what happened but thought it was crazy.

Wow :(
 

Mupod

Member
I worked nights as a cleaner at a college for a while - surprisingly very little ever happened outside of catching a few students watching porn in the top floor open access labs at 3AM. Fun fact: I ended up working IT at that college quite a few years later, and those late open access labs were referred to as the 'spank labs'. Always wash your hands after using a public computer.

Anyways, the weirdest thing was in a men's washroom located in one of the newer/fancier wings of the college that was mostly used for medical stuff and several mac labs for graphic design students. It usually was one of the cleaner washrooms, although the same can't be said for the women's washroom down the hall...anyways, the weird thing was the men's room. I took one step in there and my brain couldn't quite process what was happening. Someone had printed out hundreds if not thousands of pages of porn and glued - I hoped it was glue - them to every inch of every surface in there. When I showed my supervisor he lost his shit laughing and got some other guys to come help deal with it.

Less gross and more horrifying was related to this incredibly potent concentrated orange cleaner we used to use for the nastier stuff. You needed maybe a tiny capful for a huge bucket of water. Since this place generally employed people who were not well off, it was normal for us to swipe supplies once in a while (I never paid for garbage bags when I worked there). Anyways, this guy had the bright idea to fill up a plastic bottle with the orange cleaner and take it home with him. Apparently he'd also bought a bottle of coke and wasn't paying attention which bottle was which...ended up having to call an ambulance and he was out of commission for a couple weeks. Apparently really messed up his throat for a while but I don't think there was permanent damage.
 
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