buyer/warehouse agent for department store in Canada
I use to work as a buyer/warehouse agent for a department store in Canada. The job was particulary difficult. I had to use some hardcore math to create buying forcasts. If suppliers didn't ship on time I would have to call them and give them hell. The whole culture of the company was screwed up. Managers would insist that you be polite and diplomatic when dealing will store managers and suppliers, but they would look the other way if you told them off. The whole computer system was a 50 year old mainframe which had this "message / action" service that was not user friendly.

For example if your stocking auto-headlights, and you run out of stock and want to substitute different product, you had to use an "ALT" command. The command might auotmatical substitude the new part for the old and send the new product to the stores. Or the "ALT" command might cancel all shipments to stores and send a message for stores to reorder. Or the "ALT" command might ask stores to return the old stock. You were never really sure what the command did. Setting or changing the options was not easy.

Anyway, I got fed-up of the job and dicided I was going to come to work and PLAY! I started playing with all the order and shipping commands of the computer system. Trying this command, and that command and the other. The next day my phone was ringing off the hook from complaints from stores. I was having a good time. I was probably the only one in the whole company that was learning the function of some of the most obscure commands on or network system. Unfortunately I was doing it by trial and error. Needless to say I was fired in two months.
(fcknuts, Tue 3 May 2005, 19:19, Reply)