We had a second-shift manager who also owned a business nearby. After a while, people realized that if you called him after dinner, you had to wait while he “came back from another part of the plant”.

They staked out the gate and called him, and sure enough, he drove in after a few minutes. So, someone tipped security, who set up surveillance. It turned out this manager was going to his other business and doing bookkeeping!

The manager in question was “allowed to retire”.

He wasn’t the only one, either.

I am looking for work, and I applied for an opening in a factory. After a week, I was contacted by a temp agency that had been hired to handle the first round of interviews and was offered an online interview on a date two weeks in the future. That was a bit long to wait, but the job was perfect for me, and since the alternative was no interview, I accepted their schedule.

Almost two weeks later, I suddenly received a text saying the interview had been postponed for the time being due to an illness.

Another week went by, and I got an email from the company I had applied to directly, informing me that interviews were over and I hadn’t been selected. I tried emailing them back to ask what had happened to my interview, only to get a notification that my email couldn’t be delivered because the server at the other end rejected it. I was mildly annoyed at this 100-year-old company with global recognition in its field for its unprofessional hiring practices.

Then, a few days later, I received another text about rescheduling my interview for Friday at noon.

What. The. F***.

I texted them back asking what they were talking about; the hiring was over already, wasn’t it? I also said that Friday was impossible.

Apparently not. The employee I spoke to said there were still a couple of positions open and the email had been sent prematurely. She apologized for the mess. I was asked again about Friday at noon. I probably should have noticed the battalion of soldiers in WWII Red Army uniforms marching on the Red Square waving red flags in my face and ignored her, but instead, I simply replied that unfortunately, Friday was impossible. She then suggested Wednesday at noon, which I agreed to.

Today at noon, the interview started, and I was told that I was being interviewed for a different, lower-paying job listing than what I applied for. I answered her questions, and she informed me that the client company would make the selections for the second round of interviews in a few days. It was a twenty-minute interview after almost a full month of waiting.

Still an infinitely less enraging experience than the hoops I had to jump through to get my last job.

For some reason, my desk has become the default drop-off point for anyone bringing things to our department. This is frustrating because: A) I already have enough crud on my desk, B) they have to walk past four other people’s desks to reach mine, and C) one of those people is my manager, whose job it is to actually delegate work. Depending on how focused I am when someone drops things off, I might end up taking care of ten tasks by myself thinking we were just flooded, and meanwhile, everyone else is sitting around. Like I said, frustrating.

Today, I’m currently working on The Big Project. It’s one of those ones where no single part is difficult, but it’s made of a hundred or so different little tasks, and if they don’t line up just right at the end, it all has to get redone to figure out where it went wrong. I’ve got a “DO NOT DISTURB” sign taped to the side of my cubicle, another taped to the back of my chair, and a third on the other side of my desk next to the group printer. It’s worked (reasonably) well so far today, but someone that I normally get along with comes up and just holds out a handful of papers at me without saying anything, just on the edge of my peripheral vision.

Me: “Give it to [Team Member], please.”

Coworker: “Oh… um, but…”

Me: “I’m really deep in the middle of something and need to focus, please.”

Coworker: “Okay… So… Well…”

Me: “Seriously, please, she’s right there. She has her hand out.”

Team Member: “Hi!”

Coworker: “Well… See? I just, here!”

I let out a sigh, snatched the paper in a more frustrated way than I “should have”, got up, walked the two steps to [Team Member]’s desk, handed it to her, and gestured with a big smile before going back and sitting down. And I lost my place, meaning I had to go back and restart the section I was in and lost ten or fifteen minutes of work.

The reason [Coworker] just stood there stammering? Someone said, “Give this to [My Name] in [Department].” They didn’t just say to give it to our department, but to me specifically, so she took it literally and was apparently just “shy” and couldn’t explain it to my face.

We did some rearranging in our little side office, so the printer table is now in the front area, and it has a big “DROP OFF HERE” sign. I don’t have high hopes.

I work at a manufacturing facility. Among the equipment we have is a water-cutting table, which uses a stream of very high-pressure water to cut through various materials. It is just as dangerous as any saw blade, but some people just don’t respect that.

We had a new hire who was working at a station to apply paints to different materials. It was coming up on his break, so he stepped back and then started to look around for a sink.

Suddenly, he turned to one of the other operators.

New Guy: “Hey, can you show me how to turn on the water cutter on low? I need to wash my hands.”

That got several laughs as we all figured he was making a joke. Nope. His face made it clear that he had been serious and didn’t get why we were laughing.

We told him that he should never try to use the water cutter for washing his hands, and I ended up going to tell our direct supervisor that he may want to review the safety briefing with [New Guy].

He was ultimately let go after he got caught reaching into the machine and inching his fingers toward the water cutter’s blade when it was in operation, apparently to “touch it and see if it was really sharp”.

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Literally Life-Threatening Levels Of Stupidity

As well as being a design engineer, I was considered a Lead Auditor by my previous employer. As such, I would be asked to go to their other sites and carry out Health, Safety, and Environmental audits. Most of the time, all was fine and dandy, but there were a couple of Not Always Working-worthy moments. Both involved heat treatment plants, but not the one I wrote about in this story.

The first one was when I saw someone not wearing safety glasses in the plant in an area that was clearly signposted as requiring safety glasses. I asked him about it; as a permanent member of staff in the area, his training would have required him to know the required PPE [personal protective equipment].

Worker: “Oh, these are safety glasses. I just removed the shields as they got in the way.”

I had to point out that this was not just breaking company policy but breaking the law.

The second tale happened at a different site. Heat treatment isn’t just a matter of heating and cooling of metals. Well, it is, but it’s how you heat and cool them down that matters. Did you know that to give some steels a very hard surface, you heat them in a bath of potassium cyanide?

As you can imagine, you have to be very careful about how you store these chemicals. My knowledge of chemistry isn’t that great, but I have read enough Agatha Christie to know that cyanide salts are very dangerous.

Something else I read was a note on the sacks of potassium cyanide stored on pallets in the chemical storage area — that these must not be stored next to acids. This is because acids plus cyanide salts will create hydrogen cyanide gas, which is quite high up on the list of Chemicals To Run Away From Really Fast.

Stored next to these sacks were acids.

I raised this as a major non-conformance, which in these sorts of audits is the highest level: basically, it’s only luck that’s stopping you from having a major incident. I made sure the heat treatment manager and the site health and safety manager were aware, and I made it very clear in my audit report, of which they both got copies.

A year later, I was back at that heat treatment plant. The heat treatment manager was very keen to show me the improvements they had made since the last audit. No longer were these dangerous chemicals stored on pallets in the middle of the chemical store room; the room now contained several special heavy-duty lockable chemical storage safes. This added an extra level of security instead of just relying on the lock to the chemical storage room.  

He opened one safe to show me what was inside: several sacks of potassium cyanide salts… right next to the same acids as before.

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Managers Might Not Foresee What Happens, But Our Readers Will