The joys of being a night-shift worker...
At the tender age of 19, I was hiding up in North Wales, doing a psych degree. Being a student, I was desperately poor, but having a high-maintenance girlfriend meant that wasn't really an option if I wanted to keep ploughing her lovely furrow. So, to BnQ I went, with my hands out, begging to be employed as part of their 'night crew'.

Roll on three weeks and i've been trained as an on-site forklift driver, meaning that I am qualified to drive a forklift, but only on that premises. Hilarity. Over the course of 6 months, I destroyed china baths, whole pallets of bricks and paving slabs, an oven, two washing machines (speared them) and one highly-expensive RF gun (ran it over).

Fortunately, my friend Mike was equally destructive (spilt 300 gallons of white emulsion in the stock yard... took 6 hours to clean), and was 'best mates' with the wideboy of a shift manager, so he covered for us and we overlooked his late-night shenanigans.

One night, somewhere around the witching hour, I was carefully manoeuvring a pallet of loft insulation to the top deck of racking in store, (about 2/3 storeys high), when I accidentally nudged the racking. "A nudge? What's so bad about that?" I hear you ask... This nudge resulted in the store's fire alarm wire being cut clean through (due to it being in the wrong bloody place), setting off the sprinklers. Doesn't sound so bad, right? However, the servicemen for the fire alarm system had been during the week, and had forgotten to close off the main stopcock for the sprinklers, meaning that thousands of gallons of rainwater per minute was gushing down to the floor... Right over the wallpaper aisle.
The fire alarm was connected to the emergency services line, so while we were watching BnQ slowly flood, wondering what the fuck to do, the boys in blue, plus a fire engine, plus a bloody ambulance all turn up in the carpark, expecting the worst. The manager goes outside to tell them that nothing too serious has happened, but we may be flooded within the hour. The firemen help to close the stopcock and the water stops gushing... All we could hear was the steady drip, drip, drip of water on paper.

Damage? In excess of £10k. The fire alarm servicemen took the rap, as the wire that I cut due to my negligent driving wasn't meant to be where it was in the first place... And I got an overtime bonus for helping clean up the water! Result.
(Ragathi wants to know where his evil twin is on, Sun 10 Oct 2010, 21:41, Reply)