Moved to the US after Uni...
A southern state, where when the cotton is high, so is half the human population from necking Benadryl. I phoned an ex colleague about some scientific nonsense or other and was going through the initial catching up when I said:

"Yeah, it's going great. Completely stuffed up, though. There's all sorts of plant shit in the air around here."

A bit surprised to get this reply:

"Oh, do they have hayfever in America?"
(SlantedScience, Sat 5 Mar 2011, 1:01, Reply)

The post below made me think of this
not strictly my colleagues, but my parents colleagues.

As well as holding down their jobs, they also owned and ran a function type place. It did weddings, christenings that kind of thing, and it also operated as a standard restaurant. In any other part of the country it'd have been nice but decidedly slightly old-fashioned and certainly not gourmet food. However in this area this passed as 'proper posh,' which confused my mother in particular since as well as owning and running it, she also worked in the kitchen and all the food was stuff she could make easily and had done before she started the business.

Now something in the water made finding staff with even two braincells to rub together near impossible. There's a long long list of all of the incredibly stupid things that happened- the time the chef didn't know how long to whip cream for and just tipped half-whipped cream onto meringues, when cooking sausages cut them in half (lengthways) to try and get them off the pan, the disastrous attempt of asking her to try and make whisky and pepper sauce, rather than just buying in pepper sauce and dumping some whisky in it.

However the crowning jewel was the time she asked my parents if they'd let a young trainee chef come and work for a bit, to get a hang of the business etc, saying he was already mostly trained and wanted hands on experience. He proved so completely useless and fundamentally stupid, that my mother eventually just asked him to go and prepare the bread/toast for pate, thinking he could do no harm there.

When she came back, he was not only carefully buttering every piece of bread to be toasted, he was buttering both sides, and on all four of the edges, since 'he hadn't been told which side.'
( Amberl was stripey and dominated Europe, Fri 4 Mar 2011, 23:42, 1 reply)

One of the girls I work with is a twin....
and she is extremely thick, to test out her stupidity I once asked her when her twin sisters birthday is, she was flummoxed! desperately racking her brain for a good 5 minutes before I grew bored of her stupidity. When I told her, she responded by saying, "Oh yeah! I completely forgot she's my twin!"

And it's worth mentioning that she's blonde, which doesn't help dismiss the notion of blondes!
(Squid83, Fri 4 Mar 2011, 23:37, Reply)

Brown soup
I used to work as a kitchen bitch for a fairly well-known pub/restaurant chain. It has a set menu in all its pubs for which they supply cards telling you how to prepare each meal and present it, with an accompanying photo just so you could be sure. At the time they did a chocolate bombe but because it was launched just after 9/11 it was renamed a truffle ice. To present it, you placed it in a bowl and sprinkled chocolate over the top, probably the easiest thing in the whole place to make.

One guy I worked with had an aversion to the recipe cards and seemed to think he knew how to make everything perfectly already through divine inspiration or something. One day when we were both working one of these puddings got ordered and he made it and sent it upstairs. About two minutes later a manager rang the kitchen and asked me to go and look at the truffle ice the guy had sent up. In the lift was a bowl of brown soup. Rather than read the card and this being his first one, he had guessed that he had to microwave the truffle ice. Bewildered I asked him why he had done that. 'Because it was cold' was the reply I got.

Why? Why? The clue is in the name. The mind still boggles on that one.
(pooster found out how long a piece of string was on, Fri 4 Mar 2011, 23:22, Reply)

Moving
We were moving house a few years back and our stuff was going to be in storage for a while so we had to get a few household items.

A kind person at my partner's work said "Dont buy anything because we have 2 of everything at our house so borrow off us". My partner, pleased with the offer, said "You havent got 2 mops have you?" Her workmate replied "What on earth do you want 2 mops for?"
(XmanX captain upsetter hahahahaha, Fri 4 Mar 2011, 23:01, Reply)

In the same job as the girl who thought that Manchester was in London
I worked with a girl who had had a very privileged upbringing. Her dad had been the ambassador to Japan so she had grown up in Tokyo and been privately educated. She was actually really nice and not at all daft, just slightly unworldly.
Her folks thought that it was important for her to work for a living even though they were loaded.
Because of this she used to work where I worked during the week and then on the checkout at Sainsbury's on a Sunday.
This was in the early days of loyalty cards, before nectar cards, and Sainsbury's had their own one. When you reached enough to have £5 off your shopping the checkout person would tell you. If you didn't want to then you could save them up for other rewards.

One day she said to me, 'I don't understand why people take £5 off their shopping, they could save them up and have £50 of a skiing holiday'.
I honestly couldn't explain to her that some people couldn't afford the rest of the costs of a skiing holiday.
( Mrs Entity is in hiding., Fri 4 Mar 2011, 22:41, Reply)

Head of Department in a Shop
A long ex boss of mine, lets call her Hracey Tart to obscure her identity, was once making a window display with my friend. The display was based around some rather nifty new gift items which were various sized giraffes carved out of tree trunks plus some of the fake plastic flowers artfully arranged around them in a sort of greenery landscape. The immortal comment "so what did giraffes eat in the olden days then" was soon deciphered to understand she was of the idea giraffes were a form of extinct dinosaur. The only thing that makes this kinda sad is that she had two small kids- clearly she never took them near a museum or a zoo then...
(Caroh_2008 Caro, Fri 4 Mar 2011, 22:24, Reply)

Back in the 90's, before broadband...
...I used to work in a design studio in a large food company based in Manchester. In those days the only way to shift large computer files (back then 'large' meant half a megabyte) was to put them onto a ridiculously expensive and fragile SyQuest disc and courier it. Then we got a new-fangled ISDN line installed - at the time this was absolutely cutting edge technology. It became known that we could send things around the world with unprecedented speed.

One day a particularly shrill and strident member of the Marketing Department swept in waving a reasonably thick report: "I need this to be ISDN'd to the advertising agency in London, they need it within half an hour". We had a look and explained that it would take longer than that just to scan it all. Even copying and faxing it would have been quicker.

"No, no, I don't want it scanned, or a fax, or a copy, that's no use - they need the ACTUAL BOOK." It took us five minutes of baffled enquiry before we got to the bottom of it: she actually thought that ISDN had the power of teleportation, to instantaneously and physically send the report to London. Sometimes I sit quietly and reminisce about the look on her face as realisation dawned...
( sijones, Fri 4 Mar 2011, 20:43, Reply)

This chap was a better salesman than a historian:
"Hitler? Wasn't he the guy who burned books or something?"

umm, amongst other things, yes.
( Citizen Cavy Admires your passion for conformity, Fri 4 Mar 2011, 20:41, Reply)

If you asked the average man in the street
what the fundamental step is in preparing a Pot Noodle, he would probably say "add boiling water".

He would not say: "Place the unopened Pot Noodle into a microwave, unwatered, and heat on high for two minutes."

My colleague's unauthorised and stupid approach to snack preparation resulted in one broken microwave, one burnt-out kitchen and one evacuated office.
(Waspard has your wank bank account details, Fri 4 Mar 2011, 20:26, Reply)

One of my workmates
a late teens girl doing A-levels was doing a crossword. The question was, what is a female dog. She thought the answer was cat.
(Testicles just for you, Fri 4 Mar 2011, 20:10, 3 replies)

Way back before most of you were born (1977)
I was studying for my undergraduate degree in geology and got a cool summer job in minerals exploration. The company used to hire a bunch of university students because we were cheap and would generally do whatever we were told.

One of the summer grunts was not the sharpest tool in the box, not he brightest bulb on the Christmas tree, and for him anyway, the light was on but no one was home.

I had him believing that the fake "leather" naugahyde vinyl came from the Australian Nauga which was the marsupial equivalent to a dairy cow. He fully believed this so for the rest of the summer we made up other marsupials. He went back to school in the fall to study biology with his new found knowledge.

The internet and Wikipedia has really made it much harder to fool even the least sophisticated.
(MichaelS wasn't picked again, Fri 4 Mar 2011, 19:47, 11 replies)

Has It Got Power?
A repost, but more on topic this time, I think.

Barry was an asshole. Everyone except Barry knew this, and only the fact that he was far senior to most of the shop kept him from general ridicule and rebuke. Our shop fixed medical equipment for a large hospital, and Barry had a habit of turning up at your shoulder asking the most insulting and basic questions:

Is it plugged in? Has it got power? Did you check the fuse?

After a safety inspection, we were all issued new lighting for our workbenches. However the lights came without switches or power plugs, having been designed for permanent installation on remote circuits with wall switches.

This didn't present a problem to us, we had plenty of plugs and switches. All of us wired up our new lights without difficulty - except Barry.

Barry managed to wire his switch so that it was a direct short. When he flipped the switch, the switch went up in smoke, the wires in the conduit rattled, and the circuit breaker for half the building tripped with a loud snap!

Cue the general cries of "Hey, Barry - Is it plugged in? Has it got power? Did you check the fuse?"

Too funny. Then we helpfully pointed out that he'd wired the switch backwards. He rewired a new switch, and this time he confidently called out: "Let there be Light" before he threw the switch and plunged us into darkness yet again.

We laughed so hard we all cried. Months later a call of "Let there be Light" would reduce us to a puddle of laughter.
(danalan Pretty good, for an amateur., Fri 4 Mar 2011, 18:56, 1 reply)

"Intellectual" is not synonymous with "Intelligent"
In the '90s, I worked at a graduate school, surrounded by professors with loads of degrees from prestigious institutions of higher education. During one particularly sloppy winter, a student mailed in a take-home exam sealed in a plastic ziplock bag - the sort you use to store leftover food in - to protect it from the elements. The professor who received the exam wandered out of his office with the sealed exam in hand, utterly perplexed and in search of help in removing the exam from the bag. Apparently, he'd never seen a ziplock bag before and couldn't figure out how the closure worked ... nor could he figure out that cutting or tearing the bag would solve the problem just as well.

That was the day I stopped feeling inferior for not having a graduate degree and understood that being smart would get me through life a lot better than being intellectual would.
(bunnybutt, Fri 4 Mar 2011, 18:36, 1 reply)

I think I was the stupid colleague...
Last year, on our uni course, we were sent to study education in alternative settings and this included a museum/art gallery. We sat in front of a big family portrait, and the lady leading the session was talking about how people can make themselves look better than they are. She pointed to a different portrait of a rather large lady in a blue dress; "for example, this lady [the baroness of something or other] has had herself painted to look like the Goddess Fortuna..."

I couldn't figure that out and had to ask the person next to me "Fortuna? Like, she was the goddess of fish?"

Not my finest hour.
(sanity challenged, Fri 4 Mar 2011, 18:31, 6 replies)

Today (Friday)
A lady in my office insisted that it is in fact Pancake Day today...
(Beaverman Opulence, I has it., Fri 4 Mar 2011, 18:26, 5 replies)

my best mate
sadly no longer with us, was a stupid colleague. the lad she used to work with is now one of my best friends, so i've heard all the tales.
one that sticks in my mind was the time she was sent to the off licence for a packet of ovary eggs. despite being a woman of 20, she didn't know what ovaries were. she came back from the offy, bright red, after being given an impromptu sex ed lesson from the shop assistant.
( Smash Monkey lowering the tone of the whole internet, Fri 4 Mar 2011, 17:45, Reply)

The bank told me that the price of my house could rise or fall
So all the banks gambled that house prices would keep on rising.
(McChinaman banned, Fri 4 Mar 2011, 17:45, 2 replies)

Quite a few years ago...
I was playing around on the internet at work, and saw a photo that gave me the giggles. I'm 75% sure it was here on b3ta, but I may be wrong. If anyone knows who created it, please do let me know.

The photo:



The photo made me giggle like mad, so I immediately set it to my desktop background.

A few days later, our IT helpdesk "professional" came to my office to install some software updates. As I was playing on the internet again, I immediately hit Window+D to minimize all of my open windows. She spotted the picture on my desktop and said "Oh! That's a pretty picture! Did you take that?"

As I quickly right clicked and closed my windows, I muttered "Yes, of course. I managed to capture Darkwing Duck in his native habitat."

This same IT "professional" was the one sent to replace cartridges in printers when they'd run out. (Honestly, I think the IT dept was a bit baffled as to what to do with her.) Every time she had to replace a cartridge on a shared printer in our area, someone would complain that the printer wouldn't work. Every time, I would go out to the printer, remove the cartridge, pull off the tab, then replace the cartridge.

Every. Single. Time.
(ladydyani, Fri 4 Mar 2011, 17:43, 2 replies)

Back in the mid 1990s, I worked with the following shower:
A bloke who thought that apes were the result of early humans having sex with monkeys.

A bloke who, when exposed to the internet for the first time, sat for hours clicking on random websites after one asked him whether he would allow it to send him "a cookie" - he was absolutely convinced that if he did it enough times, he would receive a pack of them in the post. (No lie, he did think this.)

A bloke who believed that the channel tunnel would, when complete, create a tidal wave of such force that millions of people in the south east would die.

A bloke who passionately believed that EVERYTHING would stop working due to the millennium bug, to the extent that he dug a cellar under his house, filled it with enough tinned food to last for months and prepared to wait out the carnage. He even looked into buying a gun so he could protect his hoard from starving neighbours.

A woman who emigrated to southern France, only to sell up and come home because she couldn't speak any French.
(IHateSprouts is baking a huge pie shaped like an enormous pie, Fri 4 Mar 2011, 17:27, 6 replies)

privileged
Coffee break time, and for some reason conversation got onto how poor we all were growing up. Nothing major, as no one had a really deprived upbringing, just; no holidays/dodgy homemade xmas presents/could never afford Heinz baked beans sort of thing. Our receptionist felt she must contribute something, but all she could come up with was "we were so poor one year we almost had to sell the pony". Her face looked for sympathy, she got increduality.
(Dreadful Scathe, Fri 4 Mar 2011, 17:04, 17 replies)

Duuuuuuuuuh
I have a few dopes at my place of work, these are some of the quotes I can remember:

"are all albinos from Albania?"

commenting on the premature baby that another colleague had "so which one is her birthday? the due date or the date she was actually born?"

commenting on the noise in the background of a phone call (Siberian huskie pups) "there's a noise in the background, Nigerian huskies apparently"

"which way up do I put the paper in the shredder?"

"I'm going to stop smoking when I get my next set of teeth" I then enquired why at the age of 22 she'd still got her milk teeth "no, not my 2nd set, got them ages ago... my 3rd set of teeth - I'm going to look after them"

there are more, I'm no longer in the office much but it used to be a quote of the day text message to my wife.
(Ross McBingobangobongo bingobangobongo, Fri 4 Mar 2011, 16:44, 2 replies)

(More than) Slightly off topic, but I was bored........
Using my elaborate set of calculations (that make anything Stephen Hawking has done look like an order for a Chinese take-away for a family of three), a thirteen year-old Dell, a red Bic with a chewed lid and working only when the second phase of Jupiter can be seen by standing on the rear porch steps of number 37 Fairbank Terrace, Bournemouth (I don't mean Jupiter is on the steps, that would be ridiculous), I have worked out that the amount of time the internet has saved businesses since its creation is 0.001753% of the time employees waste on the internet.
You can thank me later.
(Mao's stepson is doing his bit for East/West relation's, Fri 4 Mar 2011, 16:40, 2 replies)

Where's Wales again?
I worked with a girl, studying politics, long ago in a student run charity. One day while reading the newspaper she turned to the group hanging around the office and asked:

"Where's Wales again? I can't remember if it's above or below England"

After much giggling and general 'what the fuck?' type questions we managed to find the root of her problem. She admitted that she never had an interest in geography but she was interested in politics. She presumed the elaborate graphics that news reports showed on the TV during the elections were just "brightly coloured maps of the UK" and not in fact a Bar Chart showing the breakdown of the votes across the UK.
( Bamboo Steamer, Fri 4 Mar 2011, 16:39, 2 replies)

The posh.
A few years ago I had the lovely fortune of working for a very posh socialite type woman... She'd decided to borrow from mummy and set up this business as she was bored of travelling about the world.

She was a brilliant character though and some of the general things she did were quite amazing. But the cream of the toast was when she told me about her car.

Every week or so it was costing her a fortune, it was always in the garage and her boyfriend didn't like her constantly having to borrow his car.

I digress - I finally find out why this is happening, it had a small radiator leak but for some reason unknown to me it was never fixed, but rather than manually keeping an eye on the water level and toppping up once a week or what ever, she was running it dry and then taking it to the garage. I showed her how to top it up and couldnt beleive I knew how do it.

it kept that garage afloat I swear.
(feedingtimeatthezoo day 1 of his bikini diet started, Fri 4 Mar 2011, 16:04, 8 replies)

The coal mine
I used to love spending time with my granddad. I'd sit down in the lounge and listen in rapt attention as he regaled us children with the stories of his life. I recall a few of his stories were from his days working as the operations manager at the Witbank coal mine in what was then called the Transvaal in South Africa.

He said that the mines weren't as safe back then as they are now and accidents were more frequent. Injuries ranged from minor things like a cut finger to death. As the operations manager he was acutely aware what went on at his mine. One particular year he said the accident rate shot up dramatically. Mostly because they had a large influx of new personnel in an extended part of the mine they had opened up. In fact there were so many injuries that the authorities started to ask questions and when that happens heads can start to roll. If they start sniffing around they can and sometimes do shut the mine if they aren't happy. Then the unions got involved because they said safety standards at the mine were starting to slide and if they weren't improved then they would call a strike. The whole debacle was turning out to be quite nasty. By then the whole sorry mess was getting quite a bit of coverage in the local press and granddad was taking a lot of flack.

The cherry on the cake for his awful year was when granddad's mine was voted the worst mine to work at in South Africa by Mining Weekly, the industry rag. Grandma said she recalls the day he found this out because he stormed into the kitchen after work, threw down the paper and shouted "Who gives a fuck about these stupid coal leagues anyway!!".
(The Archduke of South London I'm in your Girlfriend eating her organs, Fri 4 Mar 2011, 15:59, 7 replies)

Working at a newspaper
in the late 80s, there was a bloke who worked on the presses who wasn't the brightest. Now, he was clearly hugely capable at his job, and did stuff I could never have done in a million years, but was still given to asking stuff like "Why haven't they given us one of those typewriters with the TVs on them yet?"

One day I turned up with the paperback collection of all the Monty Python TV scripts. Now, the thing about this was that Series 1 was printed one way up and Series 2 the other, so that when you've finished one, you turned the book over and started reading from the other side. So he picked this up, and stared at it, and stared at it some more, then opened it, turned it over, opened it again, turned it over, opened it, turned it over, opened it again and handed it back to me asking "How the hell do they do something like that?" Which I would tend to regard as a fairly reasonable question from LITERALLY ANYONE WHO DID NOT OPERATE PRINTING PRESSES FOR A LIVING.
(Wong Fei-Hung - now with added flickr.com (see profile), Fri 4 Mar 2011, 15:44, Reply)

Broken Education
There are supposed to be sex ed classes in China, but according to my friends there the teachers are too embarrassed to actually teach it.

My lovely, bright co-worker and I were outside on break while I was working in Nanjing and we were laughing about necrophilia together, which led to a general discussion of sexual practices and the process of human reproduction. Suddenly she got quiet and then asked very seriously: "Is there something that connects babies to the mother when they are born?" She knew what necrophilia was, but I had to explain umbilical cords. Guess what China? That's what your kids get when they have to learn about sex on the internet.
(WordsMeanThings, Fri 4 Mar 2011, 15:26, 2 replies)

The much-missed Jessie had some shocking encounters with colleagues...
...some of them stupid, some of them just plain nasty.

One that sticks in my mind is one of the women she worked with who very nearly got her sacked (through accusing Jess of a spurious, fictional and nonsensical racist slur).

When Jess died this woman demanded that she be allowed to attend the funeral O_o
(Professor Kenny Martin Hmm? What?, Fri 4 Mar 2011, 15:17, 14 replies)

What an idotic twat
I once worked with a fat twat that was so dumb and full of shit his colleagues at the previous software studio had made a website dedicated to the stupid shit he would say: "It looks like a pigs den in here" "Who rattled your bananas?" Nick: "Mr X you are homophobic."
Mr X: "No I'm not Gay."

I believe this may have made the b3ta site many years ago but it still amuses me especially as the daft cunt got fired from our studio (he was fucking shit)!
www.hanleyisms.com/
(markthatiscalledmark, Fri 4 Mar 2011, 14:59, 4 replies)