Funny work stories

[User 180565 is taking donation]

We all have them, rather it's just starting out or you have years of experiences the best of us have those good moments. I got plenty.

This happened to me as janitorial, I was cleaning a pavilion center which was for MRIs and x-rays. They had a automatic circular door I had to vacuum that I thought was key activated only. Turns out they had an emergency release button and I wasted securities time over freaking out thinking I was stuck and going to run out of air. I can't really remember what led to me thinking I was stuck. Either it was still automatic and stopped at a certain time or something like that.

[Artemis]

When I ran an editing company I had a client come in with an unusual request. It all started when I got a phone call at 4am from someone ask for editing services. I was confused, since I didn't have my number listed on the company site (and also it was 4am), but we figured it out. I asked them to send me what they had and I could look it over.

Several days later I get an envelope in the mail. The client had sent everything by post, which had also never happened. They were making a children's music book and the papers were full of illustrations and written music notes. There was some text, but not much, so I asked what they were after. It started getting confusing here, because we weren't connecting somewhere; we offered to digitally recreate each page so it wouldn't be handwritten and attached an example, they said no. We offered to edit just the text, and they said no.

So finally we scanned the pages of the book individually and compiled them together, then emailed it to them and asked what they wanted the next step to be. And they said... thank you, that's all they needed.

They just wanted us to scan the pages and email them the scans. That was it. They didn't even ask us to send the pages back.

Mind you, this was a client from across the country, so they sent all those pages a long way. And they were very nice the whole time, happily paid us (even after I said it wouldn't be necessary), and gave us a good review. Between the time it took for us to get the book via post and try to figure out exactly what the client wanted it took over a week, and it was all so... anti-climactic and unusual that it was kind of hilarious.

[Syko Nachoman]

My work doesn't lend itself to a lot of hilarity, unfortunately, so most of the things that come to mind are dumb programming mistakes I've made.

One funny thing happened when I first started to learn how to program and work with datasets. I wasn't super familiar with SQL, but a task  required me to write and perform an SQL query to join two datasets together. I wrote the program, which should have taken a minute or two to run. After 10 or 15 minutes, it was still running, and I started to get concerned, so I checked the log and realized I had written the "where" statement of the program so badly that it was joining every single record with every other record in each dataset (and these datasets had millions of records each). Afterward, I calculated that if the program had somehow finished running without running out of memory, it would have generated a file several quadrillion megabytes in size.

Another time, there was this dataset I was trying to create where every single record kept getting a value of 0 for this one variable (which was meant to be calculated based on other variables; every row should have had either a 0 or a 1). I was expecting somewhere between 5-10% of the records to have a 1, but instead, none of them had a 1, and I was baffled. How was every single record getting a value of 0!? Well, after spending over an hour staring at different parts of the program, isolating and debugging different portions of it, and generally having no idea what was going wrong, I finally spotted this line of code near the end:

variable=0;

Yep, for some reason I had written a line that set the variable equal to 0 for every single record, which (because it appeared at the end of the program) was overwriting everything that came before it. I'm not sure how that ended up in there, but it was pretty funny to think that the program was giving every record a 0 because I was telling it to do so.

[Darkmage4]

Having worked at walmart, I mainly have gross stories.... People are gross, but it could also have been mental illness too, which you can't fault them for, but still. The whole context of the bathroom was gross. The Janitor quit on the spot. lol.


I guess my own personal story would be that since I have long hair, the guy came up to me and said "Miss" and I turned around, and his eyes got huge, his face bright red, as he noticed my full on bushy beard (both my hair and beard are a lot longer now than before though) and he apologized profusely. I said don't worry about it mistakes happen. I'm sure he too is also remembering this story, and also have told it to many others. lol. It's a funny and harmless story, and happens to many of us. His girlfriend died of laughter, which also made him super embarrassed I think. I smirked, and I said please don't worry about it. I addressed his question, they wanted a steak, as it was their anniversary, and he wanted to make steak and other things. (I mainly remember the steak, because it was a 20 dollar thick steak, and I worked in the meat dept.)

He said, not a lot of fat, but enough for it to still be good. I found the perfect one for them, as I love steak myself, and always pick out the best ones for myself. So, I went in back, found it, and I really hoped they had a great steak dinner, and a funny story to talk about to their friends and family. lol.