I worked for a long established family business.
The entire empire consisted of three shops over which Mr Proops (not his real name) had total sway despite being in his eighties. He was a very impressive octogenarian: first in in the morning, last home at night. I can only hope to be so energetic at his age. Sadly, however, he also had some octogenarian attitudes which did not sit well in the 21st Century.

It was all a bit Grace Brothers - the boss had to be referred to at all times as Mr Proops while his sons who also worked for the business had to be called Mr Insert-Son's-First-Name. This made my soul writhe so I would perform the most ludicrous feats of syntax to avoid using any names whatsoever. All the female staff were girls, be they 16 or 60. He wanted to tap into the local teenage customer base and would hire young, grungy Saturday staff to lure them in. After a couple of weeks he would then take exception to their grungy appearance and nag them constantly to smarten up. As he favoured bow ties and suits, he thought this should be the norm. It was his business and up to him so it was all amusing enough not bother me until he needed to hire a new department manager.

Up went an advert in the shop window asking for applicants to bring in their CVs. One morning a man came in with an exceptional raft of experience and, as Mr Proops liked to grasp the bull by the horns, I thought he would want to speak to this paragon straight away. I belted up to the office with the CV and said the man was waiting downstairs if Mr Proops would like to chat to him. He followed me out to the head of the stairs and I pointed out the candidate. He was black which is something of a rarity in the town. Mr Proops took one look, shook his head and said "I'm not hiring one of those" and stomped back into his office. I was completely shell-shocked and have never felt so awful in my life as I headed back down and mumbled something about the manager getting in touch later. Suddenly the olde-worlde stuff was no longer funny and I left very soon afterwards.
(Innogen, Sun 10 Jul 2011, 12:41, 7 replies)

My boss was a supermodel
And she used to make me fuck her on the bonnet of her Honda Accord while snorting coke off her huge tits.

One day I refused as I had the chance to go fuck 10 supermodels at once on a Honda Accord powered private jet, so she sued me for half of the 166M I won on the Euromillions.

The bitch.
(Galahad is out of his gourd on yellow bentines, Sun 10 Jul 2011, 11:54, 4 replies)

I used to work for a large UK bank...
based on Lombard Street in London that had the letters T, S and B in its name.
My line manager told me to try not to allow any Nigerians to open bank accounts as 'they were all dodgy'. If by some miracle one of them did get an account, their Visa card/loan application would be mysteriously turned down.
Nothing like racial stereotyping, is there....
and this was in 1989 before teh internets and 'you have been awarded $200 million dollars if you just let me have your account details'
( Sallyrsm, Sun 10 Jul 2011, 9:36, 9 replies)

Poor drunks!
I used to work in a very upscale bar in my hometown. It's a nice area, and we have quite a lot of famous footballers and BBC types since it's not that far from London.

Behind the bar was what we called The Money Bottle. It was a very nice Remy Martin XO, and it cost £18 a measure. Nobody would buy it of course, which is why we were instructed to ask drunks if they'd like one, take their cash, and give back their change in the smallest denomination we had so they would never check, or know how much they had paid.

Great job though, footballers trying to show off would let me keep the change from a £20 for a single pint as a tip.
(bobman500 enjoys a grope as much as the next fella, Sun 10 Jul 2011, 7:54, 7 replies)

The Graveyard Shift
Back when I was around 14 or 15, the mode du jour was to spend one's pocket money on cheap cider and evo-stick, and one's dinner money on Benson & Hedges.

Unfortunately, pocket money was not a big thing in our house, and my social life was restricted. Too lazy to get a proper job like a paper round, I stumbled onto an absolute gold mine just when I needed it most.

The local vicar was married to a girl who happened to be a distant relative of my mother's. The vicar was a decidedly dodgy fucker with a business empire that involved creaming a profit off of the Xmas Hamper fund, a scheme that my father was an unwitting stooge in. However, my father came home and said that this guy needed a grave digger. How hard could that be?

So I was employed for the first time ever. Now... the graveyard was pretty much full, and I was not tasked with excavating full size final resting places, no, that would have been too much for the idle-me. It was only allowing ashes caskets to be buried (why anyone wants to bury ashes is beyond me - but this was quite fashionable).

Some of the caskets were like mini coffins - not coffin shaped, but ornate pieces blinged up with brass on fine well carved wood. I would usually have to dig a hole 3 foot by 3 foot by 3 foot, keep the soil tidy. I would have to dig it the day before, then fill it in on or just after the day of the funeral. And for this I would get 10 British Pounds.

Shifting a cubic metre of soil is not easy, and I would often sub-contract out half the work to my mate for 3 pound (a pint of beer was around .50 pound at the time).

It turns out that the vicar was charging families 30 pound for a council grave digger for 2 days work (dig and fill) and he was pocketing 20 quid.

On my last ever grave, I was hiding behind a wall with my shovel, puffing on a Benson, and watching the graveside ceremony take place. When it was over, I waited 20 minutes as instructed and then went to fill it in.

As I was whistling, scooping and treading down the soil on the recently departed, I felt I was being watched. I turned round to see the family watching me through the church railings. I never got any work after that.
( Piper Alpha is being a grumpy northerm bastard on:, Sun 10 Jul 2011, 6:53, Reply)

Is it dodgy ethics to drive your employees batshit insane?
I once worked in a shop that amongst other things sold music CDs by local musicians.
Whenever a new CD came in we had to play it, and only it, for the entire shift.
8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for at least 2-3 weeks till a new one came in.
The reasoning being that potential customers would come in and say 'ooh thats nice, what is it?
For the first week I could just about fakely enthuse to encourage a sale, after that I'd rather pour molten lead into my ears and didnt give a damn if they bought it or not.
This was one of the contributing factors to my leaving that job. having been caught out listening to the radio several times and pleading for a break from the same fecking CD over and over
The sad thing is, one of the musicians was rather good and under other circumstances I would have liked their music, but having it rammed down my ears for weeks destroyed it.
I dont think they like me too much either as when meeting them later and them asking what i thought of their music I replied 'Sorry I cant bear it any more"
I did explain why but i dont think it went down too well
(insomniac-surfer oh go on then, just this once, Sun 10 Jul 2011, 3:25, 3 replies)

I'll just leave this here.
b3ta.com/questions/littlevictories/post1076079
(Misery McUglywife an attention seeking sociopathic fuckstain., Sun 10 Jul 2011, 1:43, 3 replies)

Function venue
Not me, but a coworker. We were having a planning day and she was telling us about how she hated her previous job working for venues like the ones we were currently sitting in. One of her jobs (at the bosses insistence) was to collect all the dead bottles and pour the dag ends into a new bottle so a "new" bottle of wine could go back into the room. This was moderately gross, but plucking out cigarette butts was a step too far.
(xixax, Sun 10 Jul 2011, 1:27, Reply)

Crappy job meets surly teenager
My first job was in a little coffee house in the remote English village I lived at the time (think 'League of Gentlemen' but with prettier flowers). The problem with being a teenager in need of cash was there was only two options in the village. Either the co-op, who would only hire 18+ so they could sell booze (inevitably to their underage classmates) or this coffee house. As I was only 17 it was lattes and toasted tea cakes for me.

Although I feel I could answer this qotw on the uniforms alone (candy pink and white striped shirt and apron complete with frilly detail) it was more the ethics of the boss which annoyed me. He was no devil, he didn't poison anyone (to my knowledge) and there were no spectacular thefts. The problem with him was he knew us tween waitresses had nowhere else to go. We were paid off the books and recieved a whopping £2.10 an hour, cash in hand, for our troubles. The only other staff (apart from the cook who was quite pleasant) were all in their 60's topping up their pensions.

Aside from the normal chronic understaffing and rubbish pay his personal slights against me were

-After cutting my thumb pretty spectacularly open on a rusty nail in the outdoor toilets I was refused the chance to nip across the road to the doctors surgery to get it taped up (and perhaps a quick tetanus shot). After reasoning that customers may be suspicious of their pink cappuccinos I was begrudgingly offered a plaster and told to wash the dishes 'one-handed' in the back as the wound was 'unsightly'.

-It seems I'd made an enemy as pot washing became a more regular duty for me (as well as still serving front of house). After a few days I woke to find I had developed zombie hands. Whatever soviet industrial detergent they had provided me was stripping the top layers of skin off. It was like I'd covered my hands in PVA glue and it was slowly peeling off. It wasn't painful, just really icky. Works response? "You can't prove it was our stuff that caused it."

-I was serving a table with two very lovely women one day. One woman had very severe learning difficulties but they seemed pleasant enough. While reaching over to serve a pot of tea this woman took a liking to my bracelet, reached out and snatched my wrist towards her. This sent a near scalding pot of tea over my arm. I was actually surprised by my employers response of soaking my arm in cold water and giving me an hour for the pain to subside (I was thankfully not injured, just sore). I was less pleased to find I had been docked that hours pay.

Now I am not afraid of hard work. I tried damn hard at that job and as a timid teenager took a lot of crap for it. I just wanted fair pay and to feel my efforts were appreciated. I then learned that the UK were bringing in minimum wage for 16-17 year-olds *applause and woots*. When did this come in I hear you shout? October 1st, 2004.....my 18th birthday. Now I've never really been one for revenge when quitting a job. I think the majority of 'hilarious' leaving work pranks only hurt your colleagues. My revenge was to print out a list of what the tweens were entitled to, the pay levels, hourly limits, phone numbers for support and the detail that the cash in hand method was because the boss didn't want all that pesky 'tax' bother. Every waitress knew what they should be paid and how to enforce it.

The icing on the cake for me was calling in the morning of my last shift and having roughly the following conversation;

'Hi I'm afraid I can't make it in today.'

'Well why not? Your shift starts in ten minutes! Blah blah useless kids blah blah not worth trouble blah blah I hate puppies and smiles.'

'Ermm.....I'm in Brighton. Take care!'

What I got up to in Brighton was a weekend with my favorite band at the time (Susperia if you're interested and yes, I have grown out of that very angry kind of music) and getting quite friendly with the bassist (minds out the gutter please, no naughtiness happened).

No apologies for lack of funnies. I think this was my best attempt at class and dignity my New Rock-clad younger self could muster.
(Gherkinlasagna is probably doing something stupid on, Sun 10 Jul 2011, 0:29, Reply)

In the 80's after I'd left the army me and a few mates started doing contract work and one of the
best contracts was out in Sri Lanka. You have to bear in mind that the local forces are typically shite so they like to use westerners for important jobs as well as a status symbol. (I'm so important I have two Brits guarding me and all that.) A lot of our work was up North working on securing the "border" around Yapanaya and stopping Tamil Tigers from wandering out and killing Sinhal locals. Usual yarbles if you've ever spent time swopping fire with distant wankers.
We used to get one weekend in three off and typically enjoyed the tropical delights on offer, but after a few months we got offered some extra work.
The job was to take old Israeli Dvora fast attack craft up to the Northern waters (NNA/NCNA) and sink just about anything up there which wasn't official Lanka traffic. It did used to have suicide boats picking on international traafic as well as Indian boats smuggling arms to the terrorists. It wasn't difficult work, especially as the main gun is a 20mil and a single shot from one of those will bring down a full grown palm tree - I know because we took turns doing just that when it got quiet.
It was "off book" work but at 5k a weekend each (in the 80's) it was a great earner, even if a trifle naughty.
(PhosphorBurnedEyes Swastika Shop opening here soon, Sat 9 Jul 2011, 23:53, 8 replies)

Not my story...
...but the guy who told it me swears it's true.

They were shooting a big-budget film in the desert in Namibia a few years ago. That shoot has since become legendary because of the light-fingered nature of the local crew. Literally anything that could be moved was stolen. Food, equipment, even a couple of Land Rovers and a 100-ft Technocrane all disappeared into the desert, never to be seen again.

The best part happened right before the main shoot started. The production company sent a coordinator out a few days early to check on the progress of the crew who were supposed to be setting up marquees and whatnot for craft and costume, and generally preparing the location for shooting.

When she arrived at the location, instead of finding a fully prepped site she found a generator truck and a solitary tent. Inside the tent she found the handful of crew hands who hadn't heard her vehicle approach and scarpered. Blind drunk. In a jacuzzi.

How do you fill a jacuzzi in the middle of the desert I hear you ask? They'd been using the expensive bottled mineral water that had been shipped out for the cast.

Legends.
( pixel_fucker is going to need a bigger brush, Sat 9 Jul 2011, 23:23, 3 replies)

I knew a shifty looking Pakistani barmaid at our local used to flog new films on pirate DVD for a quid.
Oh, wait,you asked for dodgy ETHICS!
(888777555, Sat 9 Jul 2011, 21:57, 26 replies)

Half dodgy ethics at work, half you-would-though-wouldn't-you
I knew a girl some time ago who had lost her virginity, aged 16, to a strapping lad who had delivered a sofa to her parents house while they were out. I think they may even have thus christened the sofa itself.

This came up in conversation with her because she'd just spent a weekend back at her parents place (~5 years later) and believe it or not, the same guy turned up with new bed. After a sideways glance and a big grin from both of them, they got straight down to it again.

As far as this QOTW goes, it's probably stretching the truth to suggest that any of this happened on the instruction of the guy's boss, but it's still broadly under the umbrella of ethically questionable behaviour at work.

You would have though too, wouldn't you?

Length? I'd guess about 20 seconds, given the circumstances.
(Sir Reginald Slapknackers last slapped his knackers at, Sat 9 Jul 2011, 20:21, 5 replies)

the not-a-lot-of-love boat
not me, but my ex.
before he got a McJob, Creepy Thin Man(CTM) got a job working on a Rhine cruise ship as a steward. he wrote to me every week, telling me how much he loved his new job. apart from getting the knock back from one of the female barstaff, things were going well.
one night, after drinking far too much with his dinner, the captain piloted the ship onto a sandbank, causing much disturbance for passengers and crew alike and, thanks to the jolt involved in actually hitting the sandbank, several minor injuries. after several large coffees, the captain was fit to be questioned. he strongly denied having had anything alcoholic to drink and blamed the accident on "faulty" navigation equipment.
now, CTM can be curiously moralistic at times. this was one of those times. he went to speak to the captain, telling him that, if he was interviewed, he would see it as his duty to inform the authorities that the captain had, in fact, been drinking.
less than 24 hours later, CTM found himself unemployed. the captain had talked the barmaid into making a formal complaint against CTM, giving the captain the excuse to fire him on grounds of sexual misconduct. he was told that any allegations of drunkenness made by him would be seen as a case of sour grapes. nothing was done, nobody shouldered the blame and CTM found himself back home in record time.
yes, his boss was a cunt, but am i the only one thinking that confronting him like that was a wee bit stupid?
( Smash Monkey lowering the tone of the whole internet, Sat 9 Jul 2011, 19:04, 12 replies)

Plenty of beer stories, how about milk?
I once worked in a milk bottling plant for a week (Leeds - Kirkstall Rd, early 90's) couldn't stand anymore than a week. Apart from it being a smelly job, your clothes would always smell of off milk, I learned the truth about fully skimmed milk.

Basically, as the plastic bottles whizz about on their rollercoaster ride to get filled with different milks and then away to get stacked into the metal cages you see in the supermarket, some of them get tired and can't wait so piss milk all over the floor. Because the bottles weren't formed properly or whatever, see?

The whole floor is tiled and sloped into a central grate which in turn feeds a big tank. This is where all the full fat, semi-skimmed and fully-skimmed milk goes after being paddled around in by all the workers, rats, dropped things, spit and God knows what else. And then it sits festering. When it's full it gets reprocessed by straining the big bits of crap out and then re-homogenised, re-pasteurised and eventually gets bottled again as fully skimmed milk and sold to the public.
( Nuisance Value, Sat 9 Jul 2011, 17:17, 2 replies)

I used to work for a company that Managed Anger
The first rule was 'if you wouldn't stick it in your mouth, don't stick it in your cunt'

It was hard sometimes...
(Nigella Pussycat picking baked-in hair from creme brulee, Sat 9 Jul 2011, 10:23, 2 replies)

My boss used to pay me to fuck her daughter.
Only she called it "babysitting." But we all know what she meant
(CactusZack Shaved his coin purse on, Sat 9 Jul 2011, 3:03, 13 replies)

As a student from 1990 - 1992, I worked part-time at McDonalds
and I really hate to put this, but 'nuff said.





But, on a less macro scale, the store itself, the staff morale and the general atmosphere was great.
( sandettie light vessel automatic New Twitter - @bollocksreally, Sat 9 Jul 2011, 1:16, 6 replies)

I worked in a bar, in Cornwall four about four years (on and off).
It is no longer there. The bar was part of a large chain (I think it still exists in some form) and the management who ran it were just incredible. Had it been run properly, it would have made the company an incredible amount of money. It still did do pretty well for a number of years and was a lot of fun for a long time.

Management scams included:

1. If we started the cover charge at 7pm, the till would be switched on at 8. All money taken before then would be... well... stolen.

2. The company provided the managers with a generous 'buy people drinks' allowance. They were allowed to give out a number of free drinks vouchers to anyone they pleased, it was about a thousand a month. When you were given a voucher, by a punter, you had to ring in what they had and press the 'voucher' button on the till. The managers would ask selected staff, on busy nights to use the voucher button, when people paid, give them change from the drawer and then print a receipt so that they knew how much to take out of the drawer. A couple of hundred from two tills in a busy night would be scammed.

3. Stock walked in a big way. A friend of mine, who was supervisor at the time, was fired after the manager back-doored too much stock and needed a scapegoat. He was later re-hired after the dust had settled. On the general managers 40th birthday, about a third of the stock, in the bottle room (a BIG room) was taken to his party. Most of the furniture too, although that came back.

4. Out of date stock was sometimes knowingly sold.

There were other scams going on, but I never knew exactly what they were. The good thing about it was that it would pay for staff outings. If there was a company party going on somewhere, the scams would pay for all the staff to get on a coach (with a load of stolen stock) and go for a massive party. It would also subsidise the occasional go-karting or laser quest party too. Cool eh?

If they'd ever been caught, I often wonder if we'd have been blamed and gone down for it.
( The Togaboy The world will end on, Sat 9 Jul 2011, 1:13, 5 replies)

Dodgy Delivery
Years ago I worked for a major high-street electrical retailer, doing a "work for dole plus a tenner or we'll stop your benefit" job. When the area manager found out I could drive, he soon had me covering for the delivery drivers if they were ill, pootling all over town in a luton transit.

One afternoon he called me into the warehouse, and told me there was a washing machine needed delivering. He'd already loaded it on the van, and gave me an address. I didn't need to bother with the delivery paperwork, he'd sorted that for me. I set off, and naively delivered it to an old lady on a council estate.

Next day the warehouse manager called me over.

"Do you know where the Zanussi is that was back here?"
- "Yes, Graham told me to deliver it last night."
"Where's the paperwork for it?"
- "Paperwork? He didn't give me any."
"Oh fuck. Another {insert area manager's name} special! Where did it go to?"
- "A council flat in East Hull."
"That's his fucking mother's place."

Apparently (allegedly) the washing machine had been suspiciously reduced under some managerial price code to just £1. I was let off, as I was new, and hadn't been warned about "managerial specials".

Since I left there, I hear the area manager was sacked after a number of other specials came to light...
(Captain Coffee Break, Sat 9 Jul 2011, 0:52, 5 replies)

Not mine, really...
I used to work for a medium-sized civil engineering firm. We initially had only one IT guy, though they eventually got two when the first guy quit. Being a geek myself, the IT guys and I got along very well and hung out together quite a lot.

One of the things that one of them told me was that the company was doing naughty things with software- in fact, that they owned about 40 licenses for AutoCAD but had loaded it onto about 150 machines. They told him not to get worried about it, just keep loading it on as they told him to do.

I was not the only one he told this to.

From what I hear, when they got turned in by a disgruntled former employee they had to pay over $800,000 in penalties. This does not include the time they were shut down while AutoDesk audited every machine they owned. I suspect that the ultimate price tag for being cheap with licenses and treating their employees poorly was in excess of $1.5 million.

Lesson to be learned: don't fuck with the geeks, they know where the skeletons are.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Fri 8 Jul 2011, 23:20, 4 replies)

over 10 years ago I used to work as a lifeguard and I had one bitch of a manager
Imagine my suprise when last year the door to my office is opened I'm introduced to a new member of staff and it turned out to be her. Strangely enough, no matter what computer she's on one of the main program she uses runs really slow. I keep promising to look into it....
( Crap Little Monkey Deathstar, so good they built it twice, Fri 8 Jul 2011, 23:10, 6 replies)

Drill rig fraud
Worked as a blast hole driller in the mines in Australia for about a decade before regaining my senses and going back to uni. The boss and I go down to the nearest port city to pick up a brand new half-million dollar drill rig (I'm along for the ride simply to drive the thing out of the shipping container and onto the flatbed truck, 'cause the boss barely knows where the start button is). Problem is, the boss and I stop for a few drinks before the 15 hour drive back up to the mine. And a few drinks becomes a hideous shitload of drinks, because neither of us are really looking forward to the drive or being back at the mine. Nonetheless, we eventually stagger out the door and the boss is certain he's still in fit condition to be behind the wheel of a 36 wheel flatbed truck with a 16 tonne drill rig on it, and I'm far too plastered to object. We drive off. The boss knows a 'shortcut' which might avoid the police breathalyzer roadside stops. A shortcut involving a railway underpass. Slightly lower than a 16 tonne drill rig on the back of a flatbed. Drill gets swiped off flatbed with a huge fucking bang, and we grind to a huge jacklegged halt. Fortunately we're so limp from all the alcohol neither of us is so much as bruised. Boss calmly flags down a passing taxi, and the two of us return to the pub, where the boss promptly calls the cops and reports his truck & drill rig have been stolen. Cops turn up to interview us. We're clearly way too shitfaced to have driven the thing away, so thieves it is. Middle of the conversation other cops call in to report the drill and truck have been found lying in the road under a slightly bent railway overpass. The truck is undamaged enough to drive away, so a crane is brought in to tip the drill back up. I'm driven down to the scene by one of the cops and given special dispensation to get in the rig and drive it back onto the truck, despite my legless state, so the road can be cleared. The truck is moved to a side street around the corner and parked. More drinking commences, followed by vague memories of finding a nearby hotel and drinking from the mini-bar. I'm awakened sometime before dawn by the boss retching into the carpet, then demanding I get up. I get up, have a bit of a retch myself, then we take another cab to where the truck is. Boss insists I get in and drive the truck up to the mine "and park the fucker out of sight and don't tell anyone". I somehow manage to do so, despite still being fairly plastered and having to pull over to throw up several more times over the next 15 hours. A couple of days later, the boss shows up. The truck and rig have been reported as stolen again, the insurance company has been convinced the rig was a write off anyway, and have agreed to pay out for a new rig. The boss has me and my workmates replace a few smashed parts on the 'stolen' rig and it's rolled into service. No idea what happened to the truck - he probably sold it or something. Half a fucking million dollars fraud, repeat DUI.. All this was 18 years ago now, and he never got found out.
(spasm Caitifty, Fri 8 Jul 2011, 23:08, 4 replies)

My boss made me fuck her maybe.
Oh I don't know, probably in the arse or something.

God I'm bored this evening.
( 2 Can Chunder Word to your mums, I came to prod bums, Fri 8 Jul 2011, 22:55, 6 replies)

Food distribution
When I was much younger I had a rather brief stint in a warehouse. The job involved zipping around on 'ride on' elctric pick trucks (think baby fork lift truck but with no roof) and moving crates of canned, glass jar or boxed foods. Oddly enough, this same warehouse also handed tinned pet food, but I digress.

The place had this big computerised warehouse called the 'high bay'. Palelts of goods could be seen stacked what seems like miles up and miles away. Tinned goods goods could be stored for years. Normally you wouldnt go in there as it was all computerized machinery that handled everything. The problem was, the high bay got very hot in the summer, what with the metal skin of the building and no ventilation. The volume of air in there was so great that on hot days it would still be warm the next morning, meaning it got even hotter as the day went on. The more hot days we had, the bigger this cycle got.

As some cans (especially the pet food) arrived from the manufacturer so quickly, they were still hot to touch (literally cooking in their cans). Together, the heat of the high bay and the heat of the cans produced an interesting result - the odd quirk of infrequenly making cans explode, usually causing other cans around them around them to pop too.

As no one usually goes into the computerized warehouse (unless something mechanical/electrical breaks), these pallets can sit around festering for weeks or months. There was even the legend of the pallet that had been in for a year after spunking a load of its cargo down into the depth of the warehouse. They just sit in that high bay, warming up. That is until a computer somewhere decides: 'Hello, Pallet location B-129-a. You are due to come out and be shipped to a customer." Electronics whirr into life, robotic sounds come from the high bay. Within a few minutes the festering pallet of *brandname* stewed steak rolls along the converyor, out of the high bay into the main warehouse.

As the stench makes its presence known, supervisors make a dash for the toilets. Seasoned workers jump in their forklifts and disappear into the racks of the main warehouse. All the permanant workers leg it to the canteen. This leaves us, the agency staff, eyes watering and faces gagging from the offensive odour of this stuff, to realise that the problem is now ours. Just then, no doubt alerted by the cacophony of the permanent staff arriving in the canteen, the manager bounds out of his office and over to our little group.

"Right, get your pick truck," he says to me "load up the pallet and take it out the shed. Stay there, Ill be over in a minute."

Why me? !? :(

The shed, I should conject, was not your common garden vareity, it was what appeared to me as a modern industrial unit that could house a truck and it was cleverly situated as far away from the warehouses as you could get. So off I drove through the yard at the 3mph the pick truck would go, with this festering pallet dripping what can only be described as 'gunge' (I shan't elaborate on that one, trust me) in a path behind me. I opened up the 'shed' and stuck the pallet inside, which is when manager put in an appearence.

I wont bore you with his droning words, but the basic gist of it was simple: I was to don the thin latex gloves he was giving me and strip the pallet down of all the cans. Anything which was broken I was to throw into the skip out back. Anything which was not broken I was to wipe of the gunge, maggots and unidentifiables with the provided rag and stack them on the nice shiny new pallet. The cusomter needed their order, and it could be 30 cans short if need be.

Well now I know why i was off in "the shed" where no one ever went. If any food standards or any other H&S such oversight people turned up, what I was doing was well out of sight. It was one of the lowest points of my life. No doubt a breach of a multitude of food hygene and H&S laws. Just me, my jeans, my tshirt and two latex gloves and the rancid, petrid task before me.

I did it. I puked a few times. I came close to cutting myself on a rancid can once, but thankfully it was just a close shave.

Once I was finsihed, I scrubbed *a lot* with the anti bac soap in the loos and theh let the manager know i was finished.

"Great, good work," he says unconvincingly, "The pallet from below that last one is already out, go take care of it."

So this is how I ended up, back in 'the shed' with a pallet full of boxes of pasta, stripping it down and wiping off the gunge that had dripped from the pallet of tins (that had been stored above it).

So next time you pick up a can (or any box of foodstuffs for that matter) and you see the label has got wet and dried, or has this dark stain on it that you cannot identify - its not from some random in a warehouse somewhere spilling his drink. Its not dried coca-cola. Its the gunge from rotten food (or rotten pet food), maggots and flies fucking that some agency worker has had to wipe off in a nondescript warehouse somewhere.

Enjoy your dinner
(shamen Geekius Maximus, Fri 8 Jul 2011, 21:58, 3 replies)

newspaper is not clean!
we get our rolls from canada, on about 9 out of 10 rolls, a rat,mouse,vole or bat etc gets squashed onto the rolls as they are transported into the states.
We commonly only roll off enough squashed animal so that its harder to see there was something that died and then go ahead and use some of the paper, the side that was mucked up we will make sure an advert with alot of like colored ink will be used in that spot. That way less paper is wasted.
It saddens me because tho it is illegal,it is bad to waste paper, but the worst part to me is the total morons who put fried foods on newspaper because they think it is a clean cheap way to drain off the excess grease....but they never stop to think that maybe a squashed critter was there first.
Gota remember people, we also sneeze,cough and flick boogers on the paper as it rushes by on the presses, its our way of killing time at work lol.
(zhinka If you don't rescue,don't breed!, Fri 8 Jul 2011, 20:03, 3 replies)

H&S? I shit em
My mate was on a job in (african_republic - Ghana or Ivory Coast, can't remeber which), driving out to one of the bigger masts, when he sees something falling off the mast from a distance - no way he can make out what it is, and annoying in that it's going to be a serious headache if it damages anything on it's way down.

So he gets to the enclosure and asks the local crew what fell off the mast - no-one is admitting to anything - so he has a look around the surrounding area to see what the deal is. What he finds is one of the local riggers, having fallen fifty odd meters into the dirt, dragged off and fucked into the bushes and covered up with leaves / soil. No harnesses for those lads, just some rope and a pair of flip flops.

On the same project; copper theft was a serious problem, so some locations would have security guards left overnight if job materials were to be left on site. The contractors come back the following day, no security guard - they eventually find him in his tent, macheted into pieces, and "stacked with his fucking head on the top of it". No copper left on site.

Dodginess : the vendor or operator doesn't want to know any of this as long as the job gets done.
(mymilkshakebringsallthemongstotheyard poison hearts, poison minds - joining hate, Fri 8 Jul 2011, 19:35, 2 replies)

Call centre shite
Working in call centres tends to involve being a bastard in one way or another. I'm currently working for a large media company trying to save customers money on the phone bill.

Basically, my computer dials a number, an account opens and I get a recommendation on what to sell them. Usually this will be a saving of about £1.50 a month, so most people don't care, though it isn't exactly immoral. The immorality comes in last month, when I was told I MUST sell what the soaker says, not what the best deal is, unless the customer asks for it them self.

So I had a call recommending a £10 per month package for a customer when a £5 per month would do the job. That's £60 a year out of the customers pocket, which is a reasonable sum of money. The customer was friendly, chatty, and had a young kid I could hear gargling away happily in the background. That £60 could be a family day out or a night off for the parents. So here is my dilemma, do I save the family money at the risk of getting in trouble or do I waste money for a young family too avoid getting in trouble in a job I hate.

Hope they put the £60 to good use.
(Mong goose, Fri 8 Jul 2011, 18:30, 10 replies)

I used to work for a building maintenance company
You know, the company that your company hires to come and clean the offices and such. As you can imagine, many of our employees were underpaid immigrants. And I'm not sure how, but mid-Ohio has a massive number of Somali immigrants. (Seriously? Ohio? This place sucks! Why would you come here?)

One of our big customers, an unnamed ISP, has (had? I'll have to check. They were pretty big way back when, but now every time I see an email address with this in it, my estimation of the person's IQ drops 40 points) a massive building downtown. So massive that we had about 100 workers in there every night cleaning. Apparently, one of the higher ups at the ISP heard a rumor that the Somalis might be terrorists. They informed us that they didn't want any terrorists working at their building, and told us we had to get rid of all of the Somali workers. (This was before 9/11, so they didn't even have that as a piss poor excuse for racial panic.)

I was the CEO's assistant, and as such I was in the management meeting, taking minutes when this was brought up. And I sat there, taking notes, as they brainstormed ways to fire all of the Somali workers, and I took notes as they decided on a course of action, and I took notes as they assigned the firing to certain management. And over the next week, I worked there as they systematically fired close to 150 Somali workers for various fictitious reasons.

And I never said a word to anyone til now.
(ladydyani, Fri 8 Jul 2011, 17:54, 2 replies)