She Was Someone's Co-Worker
Attempting to buy lunch from a local Chicken Treat led to the following conversation:

Me: I'd like six pieces of chicken

Her: I can 't do that, we sell them in ones, fives, or nines.

Me: Can you sell me a five and a one then?

Her: Oh

A testament to Australia's education system.
(Scooby Don't, Wed 9 Mar 2011, 12:07, 12 replies)

I think this should win...
I used to work with someone who always put the milk in first when making tea. ALWAYS!
(The Archduke of South London I'm in your Girlfriend eating her organs, Wed 9 Mar 2011, 11:35, 18 replies)

I have a co-worker: A nice lad, and far more intelligent than he pretends to be.
Unfortunately, he pretends to be a weight-lifting, fake-tan wearing child-man.

His sense of humour is such that he will keep calling you any name that he thinks will get a rise out of you.

I have, by subtle suggestion and feigned outrage, convinced him that I hate being called an Empirical Rationalist.
(universalpsykopath loves what you've done with your hair., Wed 9 Mar 2011, 10:50, 1 reply)

Lent
I work in a place where religion is high on the agenda.
Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of lent.
No meat is allowed. Even the canteen cannot sell it.
There have been religious ceremonies this morning violating people’s foreheads with ash.
I have just attended a celebratory morning tea for a staff member’s extra year of life.
They bought sausage rolls as a food offering.
Two of the more higher up and deeply religious staff members ate the sausage rolls.
Sausage rolls have meat in them.
That is all.

personally, I ate four of them, being:
a. Not religious and therefore not violated with ash, and
b. They were extremely yummy
And I’ve got chicken for lunch. Mmmmmmmmm
(Monkee girl not a monkee, not a girl, Wed 9 Mar 2011, 2:08, 35 replies)

Dear Japanese Coworkers,
This is a memorandum to remind those who wish to write English business correspondence to offshore programming teams that the opposite of the English word "increment" is not "excrement". Please make a note of it.

Thanks awfully,
(The 2-Belo OH SHI--[Sound of impact][End of recording], Wed 9 Mar 2011, 1:58, 13 replies)

Ronnie
I was onboard a frigate back in the 80's and lived in the S&S Mess (Supply and Secretariat.The Chefs, Caterers, Stores etc.).

On a Saturday night at sea the duty watch of chefs would always make an extra effort and run a cook to order counter.

Steak? how would you like it? Omlettes? what would you like in it?

This particular day Jan, the guy in charge of the Galley sat down with Ronnie and went through the evening's menu.

"Usual menu" said Jan. "But tonight we'll also do a 'Spud'U'Like' counter for the lads.

"Righto!" Says Ronnie (who it must be said, was never the sharpest sandwich in the sea). And off he went to begin his watch.

That evening Jan and I queued up and looked over the epicurian delights that Ronnie and his lads had toiled over all afternoon.

No lovely baked spuds, no fillings, just chips.

I looked a Jan, he looked at me then shugged his shoulders and said.

"Oh well, I s'pose they're spuds 'e likes!".

One Monday morning Ronnie turned up in my sick bay with a face like a job lot of fire damaged lego (Challenge of the week anyone?).

"Who the fuck did that to you mate?". I naturally assumed he'd had 10 bales of shit knocked out of him over the weekend.

"No one". He replied. "I did it Waterskiing".

Now I've seen many sporting injuries in my time but what is now called the Mechanism of Injury just didn't equate to the damage to his face, so naturally I gently probed further.

"Fuck Off Ronnie. How'd you really do it and no bullshit!"

"I really was waterskiing Doc. I hit a tree"

His Missus was the same but her little story can follow if I haven't bored you all enough already.
(Pugwash, Wed 9 Mar 2011, 1:34, 1 reply)

I used to work with some bloke
who used to sit and read The Daily Mail on his lunch hour and lapped it up like it was gospel the thick cunt.
( sandettie light vessel automatic New Twitter - @bollocksreally, Tue 8 Mar 2011, 23:30, 25 replies)

I used to work in a call centre in a small Scottish town on the West Coast
Minimum wage job mixed with small town mentality meant I had loads of 'interesting' colleagues to keep me amused.

Many instances stick in the mind, but one in particular beggars belief. It involves L, one of those ditzy blonde kind of girls who always look slightly puzzled at everything, like a labrador being taught how to read.

Anyway, one day a few of us were out in the smoking shelter, whiling away the blessed minutes spent off the phone by committing slow suicide, when the discussion turned to the weird shit you can buy online. Someone mentioned that Christina Aguilera's bath water had been sold over ebay, and we were discussing how easy it would have been for the seller to rip someone off (I mean, it's not like you can test for this kind of thing) when L pipes up with, "Yeah, they probably just sent them some black guy's bath water"

Hands pause in the middle of lifting cigarettes to lips, and all eyes turn to L as we try to digest this.

"Uh...why a black guy, L?" I ask.

"Well, she wears a lot of fake tan, right? So, it would be better if it was a black guy..."

"Fake tan...L, you do know black people don't dissolve in water, right?"

L's look of slight puzzlement turns into outright confusion. "But fake tan comes off in water, so I just thought so would the blackness..."

The poor girl had went through life thinking that every time a black person takes a bath, they slowly dissolve.

Bless
(Godwin's Lawyer is more evil than Hitler, Tue 8 Mar 2011, 22:42, 18 replies)

Mavis and the Vegetarian misunderstanding...
Mavis and I never got on. I'd started as a temp and secured a permanent position not 3 months later, but Mavis still treated me like a lackey. One day she was discussing her vegetarian diet with another colleague; I knew damn well she ate fish, and as a 'proper' vegetarian I took offence.

"Vegetarians don't eat fish" I remarked, "..the name for your dietary choice is pesco-vegetarian, or pescetarian."
"No, I'm a vegetarian" she replied, adamantly.
"But you eat fish - they have flesh, blood, eyes...mothers...fish is meat"
"No it's not, I'm a vegetarian"

No amount of arguing would convince her. The next day when she came in, all self righteously and smugly she announced that "I looked pescetarian up in the dictionary and it's not there, so I AM A VEGETARIAN".

I didn't bother to retort.
(mcnelson, Tue 8 Mar 2011, 21:50, 8 replies)

box of steam
Burger King. 1994. "Fiona, the steamers ran out of steam, can you go up to the stock room and bring another couple of boxes down."

She was gone for 45 minutes. Overqualified for that place really.
(shengus, Tue 8 Mar 2011, 21:33, 6 replies)

once about 10 years ago
It was lunch and a few of us went to the chip shop around the corner. We were waiting in the queue getting served when I turned to Emma, the office temp what she was having.
"I don't want fish, I've never been keen on it. I don't want just chips either, I'm starving"
"Have a burger then, they do them here" I suggested.
"I'm not eating beef, not with mad cow disease as bad as it is". This was about the time when all the nation's cattle ended up on a big barbecue.
"Umm, I'll just have a steak pie then please"

I wasn't going to laugh until I saw the look on the face of the bloke serving at which point I had to go outside.
( sandettie light vessel automatic New Twitter - @bollocksreally, Tue 8 Mar 2011, 20:35, 2 replies)

Special fire...
I once had to rescue a PhD biologist from certain scarring after she almost attempted to neck a Sambuca while it was still lit. "I thought they used a special kind of fire that didn't burn" was her considered response after I'd narrowly saved her lips and eyebrows.

Admittedly she was in a fairly advanced state of refreshment at the time...
(Billy The Fish wants to gargle with Lucy Pinder's bath water, Tue 8 Mar 2011, 19:48, 9 replies)

A simple tale
Office junior in the first company I worked for. Nice enough bloke, but you had to think that somewhere a McDonalds was missing one of their benches.

He got asked to collect everyone's birthday date so we could get cards around. Told him mine was on the 30th February.

He duly noted it on his list, he went on his merry way, and I never received a card the entire six years I was there.

In retrospect, it was probably myself who was the stupid one.
(Glis, Tue 8 Mar 2011, 19:32, 1 reply)

Back in the summer of '95...
...I was working at a packing factory with the usual mix of students, no-hopers and hard-working family men/women.

Half way through the summer I changed shift rota and ended up working with a new bunch of people. They all assumed I was new and wet behind the ears so one long dreary night shift I was given the customary ribbing by the old gits who'd been working there since day one. However, they were so stupid they they got it all wrong and mixed up. Thus I was asked to fetch from the warehouse:

A cross-head screwdriver (they meant left handed screwdriver)
A tub of tartan grease (it's tartan paint OR elbow grease you morons)
A spirit level with a bubble (duh - it's a bubble for a spirit level)

I felt sad for them.
( caldini Have you seen my polar bear?, Tue 8 Mar 2011, 18:45, Reply)

I didn't know he was a musician...
The date was 31st August 2004 and I was having lunch with my boss, an intelligent and well respected professional.

The footballing granny-admirer, Wayne Rooney had just joined Manchester United from Everton in a big money deal, in fact I think it was an unprecedented valuation for such a young player.

Halfway through lunch my boss says:

"I didn't know Wayne Rooney was a musician as well as a footballer"

"He isn't"

"Yes he is, I just saw a newspaper headline which said 'Rooney Signs Record Deal'"

"...."

That is all.
(MrHungry, Tue 8 Mar 2011, 18:00, Reply)

Not in the same league as some posts , but....
earlier today, I was asked by one of the girls in the office to add a report to the system to show a list of jobs that used a certain material that we'd delivered this year. I told her I could get to the data quicker by simply querying the database directly and giving her the list in Excel or similar.
I was struggling to find a link between one of the tables and the table with the packaging sizes (they wanted it grouped by size). I'd found the table, but it was returning too many rows (I suspect an inner rather than an outer).
Her boss came over and said "she's really got to get on with this, so if you just give her a list of jobs, she can go through them manually". There were over 3000 jobs to go through, each one she'd have to load up in the system and click through many pages to get the info for each job.
In 10 minutes I could have had the whole thing done in SQL, but no, her boss would prefer her to spend the next 4-5 days going through the whole lot manually.
Daft as arseholes.
(dchurch bah, Tue 8 Mar 2011, 18:00, 1 reply)

Oh nearly forgot
Once had to drive a few people up to York to a training thing. One of them, Lee was riding shotgun. As we entered each village on the way, you have to drive over a set of 3, 2 and then 1 ridge across the road (or is the other way around). I could see out of the corner of my eye he was thinking of something. Then he pipes up:

You know those lines across the road" he asks
"Yeah?" I reply
"Is it so blind people know when to slow down?"
I was too shocked to burst out laughing. "Like Braille? Yes they are"
The ones in the back were not so shocked to laugh and guffawed thoroughly
( sandettie light vessel automatic New Twitter - @bollocksreally, Tue 8 Mar 2011, 17:47, 1 reply)

Measly
A very blonde friend of mine whom we shall call 'Blonde Claire' (for that is what we have always called her) has a track record of brilliantly blonde moments, accentuated by a broad Essex accent. These incidental facts are tempered by the fact she's also an internationally respected scientist with a PhD in Geology.

On starting our undergraduate degrees together some 10+ years ago we had to get together our standard field kit; water bottle, compass clinometer, hand lens, geological hammer etc.

Blonde Claire was somewhat daunted by the amount of things she had to carry around with her; as well as being blonde she is also very slight of frame. She therefore undertook a very simple rationilisation project.

Rather than carry around a big bulky couple of kilos of steel hammer, she went down to the local DIY shop and got herself a tack hammer. The most pathetic little thing you've ever seen, which immediately became named Measly. 8 inches long, narrow wooden handle, easily fitted into a pocket. The stump left in the closing scenes of Shawshank was more substantial than this thing.

Measly the hammer came with us on a great number of field trips, and was tested at hundreds of outcrops, on hundreds of rock types, at every stage of weathering, in a number of countries, with varying amounts of enthusiasm, by a number of people.

Not once did we find a rock it could break.
(OP, Tue 8 Mar 2011, 17:31, Reply)

A colleague once reset a voicemail password for a user.
He then rang her to inform her of her new password. She wasn't there though, so he left a voicemail message informing her of the password.
(Me, I'm not... in any way intoxicated, Tue 8 Mar 2011, 17:26, Reply)

Some of my ex-wife's co-workers*...
Are working with someone who thought train drivers were actually steering the train to keep it on the tracks!

She's a teacher.

*See what I did there?
(Captain Placid 24/7 ball gags, brownie mix and clown porn, Tue 8 Mar 2011, 17:20, 4 replies)

My colleague was an hour late this morning....
"Oh, I'm sorry I'm late, but I got confused. I saw that it was 7:21 on Daybreak this morning, so I assumed that the clocks had gone back last night so I changed all mine and came in later. Turns out I'd been watching ITV +1..."
(Miraclefish How appropriate, you fight like a cow, Tue 8 Mar 2011, 17:07, 1 reply)

Really, though, ladies and gentlemen - really - I wouldn't say my secretary's thick, but - no! Honestly! Honestly I wouldn't ... I wouldn't say she's thick, but ...
when I asked her for a blow-job, I didn't want a kiss!
( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Tue 8 Mar 2011, 16:41, Reply)

X Marks the Spot
As a dashing young undergraduate during the heady days of Britpop, one of my coursemates (let's call him Dan, for that is not his name) and I went on a placement to a major US-based tech company that had two sets offices in our town. I was based in one office, Dan the other. Dan was a well-meaning chap, but a bit dim, and it's fair to say that the team was assigned to never really warmed to him.

One day a person in the team I was in got an email from Dan.

"Oi, Spaceship. What's Dan's middle name?".

I had no idea and told her as much, but was to curious to know why she wanted to know.

"Well, it's just that his email address is [email protected], and I was wondering what the 'X' stood for."

A quick survey of all the people in the team revealed that the only name we could think of beginning with 'X' was Xavier, which seemed unlikely given the prosaic nature of the rest of his name. Everybody was curious, so it was decided that I, as the person that knew him best, would be the person to call him up and ask, while the others listened in on speaker phone.

"Hi, Dan, it's Spaceship. This is a bit of an odd question, but what's your middlename?"

"Erm... I don't have one." I figure he's maybe a bit embarrassed, so I press on as gently as I can...

"But your email address has an 'X' for the inital?"

"Yeah, when I was filling out the personal details form when I joined, I put a cross in the section for middlename because I don't have one..."

That's as far as the conversation went before we all dissolved into laughter and he hung-up.
(I Was a Teenage Spaceship, Tue 8 Mar 2011, 16:23, 4 replies)

venting
I work in a pub in Cardiff. Things my charming workmates have said:
About my ex-boyfriend, who is black (I am white, so are all my workmates): "I don't know how you could ever sleep with a black guy."
"I'd never sleep with a girl if she'd slept with a black man before. Once you go black we don't want you back."
"If a paki fell off his motorbike I wouldn't help him. It's not like he would help me." "Yeah, exactly, all pakis hate white people, I read it in the paper." "Which paper?" "The Sun."
An asian guy I recently met is ALWAYS referred to as "your 'coloured' guy", even though I'm not involved with any other men at the moment.
The 24 year old who sleeps with 14 year old girls says: "A man sleeping with another man is wrong. It says man shall not lay with man in the bible. Yeah, I'm a christian, that's why I have this (MASSIVE CHEAP GROSS) cross tattooed on my forearm."

They seem SO NICE otherwise. Funny and I get on well with them. It's so sad they have such ridiculous views.
Sorry for no lols :(
(reducedfatLOLcat, Tue 8 Mar 2011, 16:19, 10 replies)

not my stupid colleague, but the wifes
Whilst out for the Christmas Dinner Party, my wife orders suckling pig. One of her colleagues pipes up in disgust. "But thats baby pig, its so cruel, its not even had a chance to live...."

"What are you going for then??"

"Oh I'll Have the Lamb please"
(Fridgy, Tue 8 Mar 2011, 15:58, 11 replies)

Seriously, though, seriously!
My workmate's so stupid, when I 'phoned him up while he was doing some ironing, he burnt his ear!
( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Tue 8 Mar 2011, 15:55, 5 replies)

Hostile Takeover
OK - there's a bit of backstory to this. I used to be the managing director of a company. (The actual owners had a very hands-off role.) This company was pretty big, but it had been bigger - huge - in the past. At some point, long before I arrived, it had had a range of subsidiary companies, most of which it had got rid of. As my company shrank, one of these ex-subsidiaries grew, to the extent that it was now the biggest in the market by quite some way, and would frequently contract work out to us. Let's call this other company "Company 1", and mine "Company 2".

Got that? Right. The CEO of Company 1, whom I'll call G, had a long-running dispute with the guy who ran what I'll call Company 3 - a guy called S - and was on the lookout for any way to fuck him over. And, eventually, the opportunity arose. G needed my help with some of the details, but basically, the idea was to launch a hostile bid against Company 3, force S out, fill the board with G's own guys, and control that part of the market like an aggressive toad in a garden pond.

My board didn't much like the idea, but I could see some sense in it; and I thought that it'd be an easy way for us to mop up some of the leftovers from G's little enterprise. Through sheer force of personality (and, I have to admit, a few white lies), I managed to get enough support to force the contract with Company 1 through. We were ready to go.

Unfortunately, I hadn't banked on G being such a monumental chimp. Though he launched takeover proceedings with brutal efficiency, it turned out that he hadn't done due diligence - and had taken business advice from people who were, frankly, crooks. (This made things hard for me; I've had to tell a few more white lies since...) Not only that, but the management team he parachuted in was woefully underprepared. Finally, though he sacked almost all the guys from Company 3 pretty quickly, he forgot to ensure that they no longer had access to Company 3's resources: a good number of them simply filled vans with company equipment and vanished into the willing arms of other competing organisations. They were angry with us, and determined to undermine our increasingly-rickety enterprise at any opportunity. There was quite a lot of blood on the carpet.

The whole thing was, frankly, a very expensive disaster.

G lost his job in 2008, and is now a farmer of some sort. Company 3 remains a mess, and probably will be for a while yet. As for me? Well, I'm working freelance as a consultant, and on a much better wage. Get in!

Your pal
Tony.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Tue 8 Mar 2011, 14:23, 11 replies)

My close mate who used to be colleague
thought unicorns were real.
(Shapethrower It's what you want, Tue 8 Mar 2011, 14:21, 2 replies)

Chops!
I used to work with a laddie who was convinced that lamb chops (the meat product) came from the sides of sheeps’ faces - cos they're the same shape as 'mutton chops' – as you would describe a gentleman’s semi-beard sideburns. Presumably he thought the facial furniture came before the cut of lamb. "There must be a lot of faceless sheep about" he once said.
I also once knew someone who – admittedly when he was younger – thought that the whole world was in black and white prior to the 1970s – because all the old TV programmes and films from that period are in black and white. And presumably that colour was invented around the same time as decimalisation.
(Quercus Bundle, Tue 8 Mar 2011, 13:21, 8 replies)

Yay, I just htought of one!
I used to work for one of those temp companies that supplies staff for big events like the chelsea Flower show and Ascot. Low pay and long hours but you can make good tips if you're lucky with your assignment.

I was working at some race course or another with a friendly, if slightly chavvy chap. It was a quiet day so we got talking about all sorts of things and he mentioned that he'd studied catering for a year at college. I love to cook but have never had any profesional training so was eager to find out what he's been taught. Apparently chopping and clearing up were the whole content of his course, and he reserved a special hatred for green beans.

I of course asked him why:
"Why do you hate green beans?"
"They take fucking ages to chop the ends off!"
"But it's really quick, you can chop a whole pack of them in about 10 seconds!"
"No you can't, theres loads in a pack!"
"Er, you grab a handful, tap one end of your bunch on the worktop to line the ends up and then chop them all. Flip them over and repeat."
"I never thought of that... shit."
(ElectricSexPants would like to be the Sultan of something, Tue 8 Mar 2011, 13:18, Reply)