A workmate and I were driving to a job but it was in the middle of nowhere. He was navigating - paper based as this was pre satnav. We'd been heading along a road and hadn't seen anyone or anything for ages and I was sure something was wrong. So I said to him 'Are you positive this is the right road?' and he replied 'No, but we will know soon enough because it goes off the edge of the map'

Not much you can say to that.
(XmanX captain upsetter hahahahaha, Thu 3 Mar 2011, 19:34, 5 replies)

My first IT job...
...was for a firm of Accountants with offices based in two major cities of the Northern variety. As it was my first job and I was a little shy the IT Manager seemed to think I was slightly incapable (despite the fact he'd offered me the job). He would try to reassure me by saying that Catherine, the Administrator, used to work in IT and could assist me with any problems I may have. I'd asked her politely what she'd done in IT and it soon became apparent she'd worked on a hell desk and wasn't really the uber techy she and the IT Manager thought she was.

My first job was to upgrade the office computers to Office 2007 from Office 2003 one-by-one. A simple and straightforward task. After upgrading Catherine's PC she called me to say that since her computer had been upgraded that she had "lost a lot of e-mail folders".

What had actually happened was she'd not pressed the "folder list" icon within Outlook that showed public folders.

Total facepalm.

I tried to keep the look of WTF? from my face as I demonstrated with a single mouse click how to remedy the problem. We never spoke of IT matters after that day.
(Fireyfox is prepared to change, Thu 3 Mar 2011, 19:30, 1 reply)

Unbelievable ignorance.
There's a bloke I work with who doesn't like breasts.
( Amorous Badger NAKED BEA ARTHUR PHOTOS 4U, Thu 3 Mar 2011, 19:28, 24 replies)

Nice but dim
I worked at a company that made computer-related publications. One fine day, the glamour fairy visited our building and invited several of us to the premiere matinee of hot Hollywood movie... 'The Lawnmower Man'.
Yeah, it was shit. Anyway. A freshly-underwhelmed group of us are in a cab on the way back to the office, debating more productive uses of two hours and ten million dollars when the (very posh, very attractive) girl from marketing spoke up in its defence: 'But didn't you think it was scary?' We had to admit the possibility of Jeff Fahey winning an Oscar for playing a monger was a little unsettling.
'No!' she continued, with a saucer-eyed tremble, 'I mean, it really could happen, couldn't it?'.
Bear in mind, this was 1992/3 - Mosaic didn't even exist then, let alone fucking magic internet brain download global fucking digital control juice (which I believe is still two to three years off). Thereafter she was referred to as 'the Lawnmower Maid', and to be fair if anyone ever wants to test a poorly-CGI'ed cure for shit-thickness, she would be an excellent candidate, so she may well get the last laugh.
(electricteeth, Thu 3 Mar 2011, 19:27, Reply)

Idiot Production Manager
(first time posting! be nice to me. Or I will cry.)

I work at a small publishing company. The Production Manager is a complete idiot, and talks on the phone LOUDLY all day to her loser daughter Violet, who is 20 years old and lives at home, sleeps all day, and apparently cannot shit, eat, or take a shower without 3 loud nagging phone calls from her mother. She routinely has to leave early or take entire days off because she has to "take Violet to the doctor". Most recently, Violet has had several doctors' visits because she "smells funny."

No one in the office can stand this woman, and she is such a complete moron that it is nearly impossible to have a conversation with her. Our offices are situated beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, and we have a fantastic view of the New York Harbor and the Manhattan skyline, including the Empire State Building. It's stunning, and this idiot has her desk in the corner with a tremendous panoramic view of the whole thing. So one day she stands up and looks out the window like it is the first time she has ever seen the view and asks, "So what is that? Is that New Jersey over there?"

She also has a tremendous hangup about the door. I sit near the door, and this results in at least one insipid conversation about whether or not to leave the door open or closed every single day. Today's conversation:

her: do you want me to leave the door open or closed?
me: I do not care one way or another.
her: because it was closed when I got here, so I thought maybe you wanted it that way for a reason.
me: I DO NOT CARE ONE WAY OR ANOTHER.
her: well sometimes, you know, people complain that it is too hot in here so they want to leave it open. did anyone say it was too hot in here?
me: [no response]
her: you see, if I leave it open, I think someone is going to steal my coat!
me: no one is going to steal your coat.
her: I'd better just leave it closed.
me: [no response]
her: maybe I should just take my coat back to my desk with me in case someone leaves the door open.
me: [no response]
her--loudly, to everyone sitting in the vicinity: does anyone care if I leave the door closed?!
entire office: [no response]
(WorksInDUMBO, Thu 3 Mar 2011, 19:25, 1 reply)

Whoops Mrs Miggins, you're sitting on my artichokes!
The secretary at work referred to the Mitchell and Webb character "Sir Digby Chicken-Caesar" as "Sherlock Chicken"

She also believed that Leonardo DiCaprio was an italian painter, (and thought how wonderful it was that he acted as well).
(LunarJim, Thu 3 Mar 2011, 19:13, 7 replies)

mi koleeg kant spel
A colleague/work buddy recently pulled a chair away just as I was sitting down. I fell on the floor. He laughed. I asked him to write down a number. He did. Then he asked what it was for. It told him it was for the AA (which for all you johnny foreigner types stands for Automobile Association) and that he would be needing them later. It was just a jokey way of implying I was going to smash his windscreen, cut his brake cables or slash his tires as payback for his three stooges style prank (which I have to admit is a classic). Harmless humerous hyperbole!

He then mumbled something about there being no need to threaten physical violence. Not quite getting what he meant I asked him to clarify. He said that threatening him with a trip to accident & emergency was a bit much. I quietly pointed out that emergency is spelled with an e.

Not quite the tale of the guy conned into buying the eiffel tower but it put a smile on my face.

And before the pedants worm their way out of the woodwork I know this post is probably full of spelling mistakes but I am typing it on a 3.2 inch resistive touch screen without a stylus whilst scotrail do their best to shake my fillings loose so get wrapped right fucking round yourselves.
(OTT, Thu 3 Mar 2011, 19:12, 3 replies)

My wife told me one yesterday.
She's a university professor, and periodically has to take part in Faculty Senate, where the provost hears concerns among the faculty and then makes rules accordingly. In this particular session they were discussing summer classes.

Professors are generally paid based on working nine months. During the summer they can do whatever they like for extra income, and will sometimes teach a summer course. This had been set up to pay them according to a percentage of their base pay, which meant some pretty serious variation across the spectrum. The provost decided that this was unfair, and set additional limits- namely that the professor would not be paid less than $3000 for a class or more than $7000, so that the lower paid faculty wouldn't be so badly screwed.

The upper limit only really affects maybe 25 professors faculty wide, but all of them are in the School of Business. When the provost made his announcement about limits one of them stood and went on a long rant about why these limits shouldn't be in place and that they were using skewed data and rambled on for a bit because he would be impacted by the upper limit. He finished by declaring that this was as bad an idea as "the S word."

The provost looked at him blankly. "The S word? What's that?"

The business professor drew himself up and shouted "Socialism!" as though it were the vilest curse he could throw.

Apparently the business professor didn't understand that when everyone in the room cracked up they weren't laughing with him...
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Thu 3 Mar 2011, 19:06, 7 replies)

At the newsagents
I asked the young girl behind the counter for "Half a dozen first class stamps please". She gave me a rather puzzled look then turned to her boss and asked "Er, Mary.... wots arf a dozen? "
Don't you just love the British education system!
(Mackeson_drinker, Thu 3 Mar 2011, 19:05, 6 replies)

I once worked with a team doing software rollouts.
We had a gut that lasted about a week. Not only did he screw up half the computers he worked on but on his first day, when on a team lunch, thought he's regail up with a story of how he was wronged by a hooker that wanted to finish him off by hand rather than doing the full monty.
( riverghost servicing your mum since, Thu 3 Mar 2011, 19:00, Reply)

One of my workmates has rather a vague (but kind of endearing, really) grasp on English idiom and vernacular. His gems include:
"That guy's not the brightest button on the penny"
"Oh yes, the company's new vans are much faster. They shit like a shovel."
And, in reponse to someone who he wasn't sure was joking or not:
"Are you taking the giraffe?"
My other colleagues and I so look forward to his verbal creations that we almost forgive him for being fucking useless at his job. Almost.
(scunnydelight, Thu 3 Mar 2011, 18:57, 2 replies)

The other day
my boss turned on the old industrial dishwasher in the cafe, having filled it up with plates.

Trouble was, he'd forgotten to shut the door first. A series of jets of water burst from the machine's stomach, picking up pieces of cheese and potato as they escaped, gleefully splashing him from head to foot. When he eventually manages to get the door shut, he decides that it would be a good idea to mop the floor early that day. Hm.

That dishwasher gives us a fair amount of fun anyway. It only has one button that works, and the other buttons (to the best of my knowledge) serve to find any weakness in the ancient door and spray water through it at random intervals. This makes training confident new people quite fun, as they always try to skip the introduction talks, "I know how a dishwasher works!"

Finally, if we put plastic beakers in it they fly around and make clonking noises, but don't actually get any cleaner. But for some reason, despite being powerful enough to do that, the dishwasher appears to be vegetarian and refuses to clean any pate from any plates.
(Sivvus trolley collision in the fruit aisle led to a jam, Thu 3 Mar 2011, 18:13, 2 replies)

Most of my CV consists of industrial jobs,
and in my experience, colleagues who were lacking in academic achievements generally made up for it in common sense. People who are severely lacking in common sense are rare in these jobs (or at any rate, they don't last long.)

Let's start with a fairly minor example. Recently, one of the company's other sites closed - their production lines were moved to our site, and set up in the old warehouse. During the first few weeks of operation, the lines were staffed almost entirely by agency workers and there were no regular supervisors; a few of the supervisors in the main factory would check every now and then, but that was about it. It took one of the mixing operators to notice that one of the lads on the line had boxed the products up without using any tape, so the boxes didn't stack correctly, fell to bits if you tried to pick them up and were completely useless. *facepalm*

A few years ago I temped in a joinery workshop that made staircases and doors; full of dangerous stuff like bandsaws, pneumatic vices, nail-guns etc., so really not the ideal environment for mongs. The young lad who started at the same time spent most of his few days there doing things dangerously wrong, mucking around, and constantly arguing with and talking back to everyone who dared to give him instructions. Though this was poor attitude rather than outright stupidity, I have never been so embarassed on someone else's behalf before or since.

Another lad who'd been there a bit longer was apparently not aware that when you fire a nailgun, the nails exit the barrel at a very, very, very high speed. So just for a laugh, he fired a nailgun at a vice. The nail ricocheted and narrowly missed the boss's ear, just as he was showing some representatives from a major builders' merchant round. The boss was not a patient man even at the best of times - when the lad later received a bollocking I believe they were still searching for the epicentre the next day.

Finally, a (dis)honourable mention must go to a few of my fellow night-shift temps at the central distribution centre of a certain large supermarket, who would routinely wrap pallets without attaching the wrap (like extra-strength clingfilm) to the base at any point; this would have caused the stock on the pallet to slip and slide around in transit, possibly getting damaged, almost certainly getting mixed up with that on other pallets, and negating the entire point of wrapping.

When this was pointed out to the supervisor, he said something like "eh, they'll be right" and sent the pallets down to Goods Out - where the wrapping got caught on the forks just as the FLT was pulling away, wrenching the stock off the pallet and all over the floor. Brilliant.
( The Mock TurtIe ™ --- Thinks you are a cunt, on, Thu 3 Mar 2011, 18:05, 1 reply)

Guy I worked with used to say,
"Well it's three of one and half a dozen of the other." We couldn't convince him he'd got it wrong because, "Three is half of six and six is half a dozen." Also he would regularly hear owls hooting in the middle of the day (wood pigeons)
( edjogs Collared doves are shit., Thu 3 Mar 2011, 17:59, 1 reply)

My old boss
At an ad agency in the West End. He was stupid in the way only the truly posh can be.

Highlights included August 2005 (note date) when he left his shotgun on the train during morning rush hour. Listening to his PA attempting to track it down via a series of increasingly desperate phone calls was one of the most entertaining mornings I've ever had. He got a visit from Her Majesty's Finest and a very hefty slap on the wrists for that.

Following a boozy client Christmas lunch, which he insisted on our agency paying for, he was barred from travelling on the Tube for being too pissed and then attempted to lecture one of the staff in Latin about the rights of man. After moaning all the way back to the office in a taxi we then discovered he'd left the company credit card behind and we'd just walked out on a four figure tab.

The time he told me with pride about his 15 year old daughter's 34EEs 5 minutes before we went into a client meeting.

He put his pen in his mouth during meetings when not talking and without fail would remove it, sniff it, and then make his point.

He once used the word 'routinise' - as in to make something a regular occurrence.

I'm sure I'll think of more. There are a lot of dickheads in advertising!
(Milo Minderbinder, Thu 3 Mar 2011, 17:59, 3 replies)

Pea
Slight pea
Cue wavy lines~~~~~~~~ : 1998 Stood at the desk of a pretty but deeply irritating trust admin in a large accountancy firm office.

"The reason your disk won't work has nothing to do with the platform upgrade we carried out over the weekend. No your PC is not broken. No we haven't messed anything up. No I am not picking on you because of previous issues we may have had. Floppy disks don't generally work when users wrap the label over the shutter!"

It doesn't make them work any better if you then insist that other members of your office coven have used them successfully.

That ladies and gentlemen is why I no longer work in IT support.
( number5 has been fighting tramps and losing., Thu 3 Mar 2011, 17:53, Reply)

I once worked at a popular national sandwich chain.
I came into work one sunny summers day to find two of my colleagues peering into a paper cup. Intrigued, I inquired as to what they doing, whereupon they beckoned me over, and showed me what they were so fascinated with.

It was a single coffee bean, floating in hot water. They were waiting to see how long it would take to dissolve.
( Mr.Ons knows you can hear him, Earthmen., Thu 3 Mar 2011, 17:47, 4 replies)

Working in Sales
There was a young lad we took on at one point, Rob, fresh out of school, kitted out with his Burton's suit and tie, and ready to make his mark in the world of work.

I was selling advertising space in local newspapers. We let him call up a regular client and he got off the phone delighted:

'I've just got him to do ads on Wednesdays as well as Thursday and Sunday!'
'Oh, Brill. How much money is that then?'
'How do you mean?'
Well - how much more are you charging him?'
'Nah, I've persuaded him to do it by giving him a discount.'
'Erm... how much discount?'
'He's getting the Wednesdays free.'
'Right. So you haven't really sold anything, have you Rob?'
'Yeah - he's doing more advertising. That's what we're supposed to do, isn't it?'

He couldn't grasp it. It was explained several times, but the way he saw it his job was to sell people more advertising, and he didn't care how much he got for it. He lasted a month.
(SnowyTheWereRabbit the Leporid from Hell, Thu 3 Mar 2011, 17:30, 2 replies)

21st century fail
I do freelance IT, mostly troubleshooting networking issues or organisational strategy (yawn).

I got called to an office last week as the network was down.
I check the router and the server, everything seems fine.

Checking one of the pc's, I can see the server and network shares. Everythings fine.

The problem was, they all had their homepage in IE set to a website that had gone down.
None of them knew how to enter a web address to try going somewhere else.

This was an office with about 15 people, mixed age group and experience. I still cant believe it.
I had to show each one of them how to change it.

A few days later I got called back as someone hadnt been there that day and needed to be shown how to do it.

Amazing
(EvilMeister, Thu 3 Mar 2011, 17:29, 3 replies)

Only a few weeks back
a colleage said to a newish member off staff when the phone rang "pass me the phone please Tom". This duly happened and more experienced member of staff went on to answer the phone in his polite, professional manner, only to find that the phone was still ringing. Looking at the handset he beheld he looked over at Tom and despairingly said "pass me the phone that's ringing Tom."

I'm not sure who is stupider, the chap who passed the phone that wasn't ringing or the experienced staff member who didn't spot that it was the wrong handset.

Whilst I'm here, wasn't Frankenstein almost based on a true story as Mary Shelley took inspiration from Dr. Gallvan's work, a French doctor who tried to bring frogs back to life by passing electric current through them? Not a human of course, assembled from various parts of various corpses, but certainly not as fanciful as many things?
(Vega31, Thu 3 Mar 2011, 17:29, Reply)

I'm being dragged out with my gf's work colleagues tonight
They're fairly unreconstructed construction types, so we'll probably end up having many beers, go for a curry and then on to a strip bar. Discussing this with my colleagues just now, the girl who sits next to me said: "But strippers are all really ugly, right?"
Slightly bemused, I agreed with her. "Yeah, strippers are really ugly. Men pay money to see ugly women take their clothes off."
She's French, and doesn't really get sarcasm if she's not paying attention: "Yes, because my friend's boyfriend went to a strip club on a stag night, but it was okay because he told her all the strippers were really ugly. I don't understand why men would want to look at ugly women."

There was a little more sarcasm before I told her the truth.
( emvee cruor deo cruoris, Thu 3 Mar 2011, 17:28, 5 replies)

I like the stupids.
My favourite work place dope is this bloke. There’s hardly a day goes by when I don’t wish he was still my boss.

www.b3ta.com/questions/buzzwords/post688991

The most recent was a guy who arrived at work with a killer hangover. He soldiered on for the morning, then took himself off to the un-used parcel packing room for a crafty lunch time kip. He laid out a huge sheet of bubble wrap and rolled himself up into a massive sausage and fell asleep, and act of near genius.

The ‘near’ part of the genius being that he over-heated and further dehydrated himself to the point where he was found later in the afternoon in semi delirium and had to be carted off to the hospital. It’s now de rigueur to sneak up behind him and pop bubble wrap.
( Ring Of Fire A petty, drooling belming butthurt retard., Thu 3 Mar 2011, 17:24, 1 reply)

Probably from all the chimp-like abuse....
...I gave it as a teenager but I'm finding nowadays that, when I'm giving the old todger a serious handshake, it can take so long to pop that the source material that was inspiring me has already finished.


Oh.
(R. Jimlad twitter.com/sirmarkymark, Thu 3 Mar 2011, 17:22, 1 reply)

Me actualy
A few years ago I worked for a couple of years at a home for people with learning difficulties. As with the entire sector, paperwork and such has grown in amount massively over the last decade or so, and to cut down on paper a lot of paperwork was done on the computer, emails and such.

Of course I thought I was being smart because I was the only person (I thought) who knew how to touch type, send emails with attachments, where to find downloaded files and set up printers etc... just the normal everyday computery things that took up a lot of my managers time. As I'm sure you've guessed this was pretty dumb on my part. I found out 2 things rather quickly. Firstly, my manager was damn lazy and had me doing a lot of boring tedious computer based work, and secondly quite a few of my colleagues knew how to do these things but had been smart enough to play dumb when asked and not volunteer themselves for a tonne of extra work.
(Fredz A graveyard of hopes, a dump of ambition, Thu 3 Mar 2011, 17:20, Reply)

Useless IT people
I've worked with IT for over 20 years now. Here are some of the things I've had to put up with from collegues.
A Support Technician who did not know what F1 does (It's the help key).

A Network Specialist who does not know what a subnet is or how to tell a class A from a class B IP range.

A Support Manager who did not know the difference between the internal network and the internet.

An Operations Manager who does not know the difference between a router and a switch.

These are just a few examples of the stupidity of "professional" people who are "highly educated" and work in IT for a living. All very well paid, all clueless.

It's enough to make you want to gnaw your own leg off.

Booce
(Booce, Thu 3 Mar 2011, 17:15, 30 replies)

Ditzy rather than stupid
But she did once get a daiquiri on a night out, and, finding that because it was quite thick and wouldn't suck through the straw easily, she decided to 'loosen it up' by blowing in it really hard, causing a daiquiri explosion over her face.

Unrelated to work, directly, but she also tried to dry her hamster in the microwave.

And her best mate (who's a schoolteacher) thought the World was exactly 2011 years old.
(SnowyTheWereRabbit the Leporid from Hell, Thu 3 Mar 2011, 16:59, 5 replies)

You know, I go to this place sometimes, it's like a public forum.
And whenever someone suggested the week's task, there was always a group of people that would stand at the back of the room, shaking their heads sadly. As the week went on, the suggestions were met with more derision, more scorn. But never once did the people in that group suggest something different, or try to make the most of what they saw as a bad situation. After all the years I went there, I always looked back and thought... wow. Those people kept showing up, year after year, just to shake their heads and complain? It's amazing how stupid some of these people can be.
(Sivvus trolley collision in the fruit aisle led to a jam, Thu 3 Mar 2011, 16:55, 15 replies)

Blond
I have a colleague who didn't know a couple was 2, didn't know a chilli was a type of pepper (despite admitting to knowing the band red hot chilli peppers) and thought that venison was a fruit.
(TheBat, Thu 3 Mar 2011, 16:53, 5 replies)

Africa & Dalai Lama
I once worked with an American lad (who was a geologist) who thought Africa was a country!? When he left his boss was furious at all the mistakes in his work which had "Africa" written in the country list. Facepalm!

When working in Sydney, I got the chance to see the Dalai Lama (work was organising it). The 20yr Hindu girl I sat next to had never heard of him!? I even tried explaining a little of the history and why he does what he does. Still, nothing.
(RJWEcology is just sharpening his axe on, Thu 3 Mar 2011, 16:52, 8 replies)