I work in the same office as Professor Brian Cox*
Bless him he tries, but he's really not the sharpest sandwich in the toolbox.
I couldn't help but laugh when he told me that the universe will only consist of magazines produced by Games Workshop, and copies of a BBC Sci-fi comedy series set aboard a mining vessel.
I keep telling him that as soon as all the suns in the universe have expired, God will hit the 'Reset' button and the big bang will happen all over again like it did the last time.
I'm just not getting through to him.
Moron.

*May contain lies
( TitanLX, Mon 7 Mar 2011, 13:03, Reply)

Public sector risk averseness gone mad
Once worked on a government project to build a website. Obviously, what with bringing in consultants and having meetings with stakeholders they never actually *built* it. Before this became clear I met the head of department to talk about how to publicise this expensive site when it went live. She rejected a mention on Wikipedia as "too risky"...
( calgacus Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae, Mon 7 Mar 2011, 13:01, Reply)

Turning Into A Woman
Not my colleagues but they're someones colleagues I spose.
Two of my male flat mates are convinced if they had one of my other flat mates period pain relief tablets that they'd turn into a girl.
I'm not quite sure how or why that's supposed to work seeing as its just a paracetamol with period pain relief written on the box.
(FootOfTim, Mon 7 Mar 2011, 12:48, 3 replies)

Small companies, Small brains
It’s pretty obvious that you’re going to come up against a fair few morons when working in PR, Marketing etc . However, I can generally handle the PR bitches ok. It’s the people at the top that you’ve got to watch out for. Let me take you back through some highlights of moronery in my professional career.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Wavy Lines~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

My first job was in a Family-run online gift retailer. Some highlights of that position included

- Being given an official warning for asking how we were going to get paid over Christmas

Let me elaborate on that a little.

We were all gathered to the customer services area one afternoon and told, with the air of someone giving a great gift, that we were to work longer days and weekends to cope with the increase in customer service calls over Christmas. No matter what your job, you were to do customer services. Not only that, but (if the company can afford it) we’d get Christmas bonuses to pay for it!

The rest of my colleagues seemed a bit too slow to put the pieces of this statement together. They basically wanted us to...

Work longer hours which meant driving in the snow/ice in the dark – each day was a bit of a death-defying adventure – 45 mins journey each way turned into an hour and a half some days.

Give up our weekends – the only Christmas shopping days left.

Give up our normal tasks to take on full time customer service.

All this and they couldn’t promise to pay us for it!

I thought I must have missed something. I asked a couple of colleagues over lunch who generally didn’t know/hadn’t asked and were just going to go with the flow (morons).

Turns out my boss was eavesdropping and when I arrived the next morning, I was pulled into a full disciplinary meeting because I had asked about how I was to be paid for my work.

- When a family member couldn’t be arsed to do his job, I had to do it for him with no extra pay while he still received his pay check.

I was given the excuse “what can I do, it’s family?”

My next job – in a small, yet international, design company run by a handful of exquisitely pretentious morons – was roughly the same.

It took them 8 months from my start date to provide me with suitable equipment to do my job. I had to bring it in from home. This included computer, software, camera etc.

9 months after my start date they let me go. Never mind the fact that I’d made them over 40k over those 9 months (they only paid me 18), dedicated hours of my life out of work hours, used my own equipment came in every day - no sick days - and did my job well.

It’s true I’m still bitter about it, it only happened in January. I’ve learned some valuable lessons about small companies now. Mainly to avoid them like the plague as they’re all run by incapable idiots who think they can get away with anything.
(Katzilla Follow Me! @Kat_Zilla (I don't promise funnehs), Mon 7 Mar 2011, 12:37, Reply)

My mate summed it up perfickly; "Don't you just hate it when you say something dickish, trying to be funny, and people miss it and just think you're a dick?"
The job I currently do started with me at the very bottom of the pile, and as such doing a lot of filing.

A few weeks into it, I attended some sort of works-related party of Mrs Vagabond's, where I got talking one of her colleagues whom I only really see at these sorts of things.

"So what are you up to these days?" she asked.

"Well I started my new job a couple of weeks ago" I replied.

"Oh right - how's it going?" she enquired.

"Well" I said, "OK, but - haha - the other day, I accidentally filed an A-run top sheet ... under the B-Runs! Haha!" I said, attempting to mock my lowly position.

"Riiiiight ... " she said, wandering off with her drink.
( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Mon 7 Mar 2011, 12:26, 1 reply)

One of my colleagues, an electrician called Graeme,
came up to me with a question the other day. Now considering he'd been to college as part of his apprenticeship for for years, then spent 2 years working in peoples houses, you'd think he might have some sort of understanding of how electricity works.
Obviously not, since he asked "is it true that lightning is 4 volts 16 amps?"
Yes graeme, that's why you see lightning flashing across the terminals of a battery.
( parttimedogfish is a Born-Again Reincarnationist, Mon 7 Mar 2011, 12:06, 13 replies)

My mum used to work in research, in a dairy
They had to wear lab coats with the chest pockets. One of her jobs was to test temperatures and so on, so she generally had one of the old fashioned glass thermometers on her. She absentmindedly put it in her chest pocket when she went to the bathroom, pushed aside the coat... and naturally the thermometer fell out and smashed on the floor.

I asked her if she got in trouble. Answer: no, it happened maybe once a week for the year she worked there, there were lots of thermometers, and it was considered a standard expense to have to replace them.

It's nice that the dairy preempted that people would be that daft, but even so...
(Sivvus trolley collision in the fruit aisle led to a jam, Mon 7 Mar 2011, 11:42, 6 replies)

Thick and slightly racist
I know there will be a lot of IT related posts, but I still feel the need to share.

A woman I worked with in my last job was, without a doubt, the most useless person I've ever worked with, especially when it came to anything IT-related.

A couple of times a day, I had to show her how to print from Word "click on the icon that looks like a printer. no, left click. Click with your left mouse button. Look at your mouse, there's two buttons, press the left one. No on the icon that looks like a printer. No, not that one, THAT one! Now left click on OK. No, LEFT click..."

We had to password protect all our documents, because she couldn't grasp the difference between copy and paste and cut and paste. Or why she shouldn't save a document she had cut massive chunks out of.

One of our systems was designed to be used on touch screens, she never could work out why she couldn't use the touch screen functionality on her ordinary, non-touch screen monitor.

She couldn't work out emails. At all. She would reply half a doxen times to each email she got. Normally with blank emails, because she would click reply, then send - reasoning that she wanted to send a reply. When the email "disappeared, she would do it again.

She regularly had problems when she "ran out of mousemat" and couldn't get to the edge of the screen with her pointer.

A couple of times a day, she would panic about what she was doing and switch her PC off by holding down the power button. Then moan when she had lost what she was working on.

We were given encrypted pen-drives. She taped a post-it note to hers with her password written on it, preceded by "password:"

And her job? IT Trainer.

Her non-IT stupidity included: believing the binmen only work one day a week, since her bins were only collected on a Monday, claiming to be vegetarian but eating chicken and bacon, because they "don't count" and referring to a colleague as "coloured", despite me pointing out that the correct term would be "black" - her response was "black is a colour, isn't it?"

When I started there, she asked me where I was from, when I said "Liverpool", she said "you don't sound much like Cheryl Cole!"
(ScousersPet, Mon 7 Mar 2011, 11:29, 3 replies)

They think I'm the stupid colleague
my colleague turned to me last week and tried to show me how to do a search on the website we run. He was quite shocked that I already knew how to do it. Through the big 'SEARCH' box in the top right hand corner of the screen. He insisted on repeating the search for me though, and was again shocked that he got the same results.

Actually, I think this may just be because he's a patronising shit who thinks all women are morons.
( ascorbate, Mon 7 Mar 2011, 10:28, 4 replies)

Well...
I work in KFC, (as a Shift Runner, not a pleb)...

Enough said
(AMTF uses MS Paint to make B3ta competition pictures, Mon 7 Mar 2011, 9:50, 8 replies)

Bless
My normally intelligent colleague was talking about The Million Pound Drop and said 'Well, there was a question and I knew the answer wasn't Billabong because that's one of those sticks you throw and it comes back'. After a few bemused looks, she realised her error and said 'God, I am so stupid, that's a boomerang. Billabong is that dried meat'.


Mind you, this is the same girl who didn't want to be 'gangbanged' into eating pizza.
( scarpe We Stole Bikes, Mon 7 Mar 2011, 8:54, 13 replies)

Not so much a stupid colleague and batsh1t mental, but still.

I started off my working life after uni in the civil service. Being low on actual work experience, I started as an Admin Assistant while my immediate supervisor had been there for years so experience meant she had risen to one grade above me.

Her highlights included sticking an A4 printed sheet on the department hole punch reading:-
"Please do not use the 2 hole punch to punch one hole in paper as it grinds down the metal punchers"
Predictably, by the time she got back from her lunch that day someone had punched a single hole in the note.
The request for hole punch respect was voluntarily removed that afternoon.

After we stopped working together but in the same section I was told by my official boss to sort out First aid courses for the appropriate people. I worked my way round the section asking if peoples certificates were up to date eventually arriving at H's desk to find she was off sick that day.
So the person she worked beside volunteered the information that H had been on the course a month previously, I marked that on the records and job done.
2 days later I get into work and my boss pulled me aside to tell me that H had filed a 3 page official complaint about me for "talking about her courses behind her back."
I kid you not.
My boss gave it the due consideration it deserved and binned it before it went any further, but still.

I should mention that I thought H and I got on fine and we had never had any run ins before this point. There was no animosity between us and Id never knowingly done anything to antagonise her.

Of course, things started to take a more crazy turn when she came in after Christmas one year saying her fiance (who had never been mentioned before) has been out on his motorbike over the holidays bombing down a country lane when he ran fowl of a wire someone had run at head head between two trees. This apparantly decapitated him, killing him instantly (as decapitation will do.)
Thing was, this never made the news and she never took a single day off to grieve. Not even for the funeral.
I'm not sure how stupid she thought anyone else was that we would believe this....especially so soon after her 'hysterectomy' that again she took no time off to recover from.

Of course, I do realise that this goes beyond stupidity and borders on psychological problems. Didn't stop her getting promoted up the chain after I left though.

As bad as this sounds, she wasn't the worst mentalist I met while in the civil service. The place was afraid to let anyone go, so you ended up with a abnormally high amount of crazies and dead weight in one building.

,
(Upallnighteatingcheese, Mon 7 Mar 2011, 8:53, 2 replies)

Idiot schoolteachers
The teachers in my school just sat through an hour-long, text-heavy, death-by-powerpoint lecture by a leading school dumbass on how we should not be teaching the kids by using long, text heavy, death-by....well, you get the idea.
(Daoloth, Mon 7 Mar 2011, 6:43, 3 replies)

My boss isn't the most IT intelligent.
He managed to get a virus yesterday, he claims he just turned on the internet and it downloaded. SO I must update my firewalls, and virus deleters before connecting to the internet....bless him.
(Dante licked your nipple on, Mon 7 Mar 2011, 1:11, Reply)

Back in the ancient mists of time (or 17 years ago, which is much the same thing)
I was enjoying my work experience in a quality control laboratory. It was pretty routine stuff, but exciting for the 15 year old science geek that I was. I thought it was fairly intelligent work, and I was getting a bit snobby around my mates who were doing admin work and the like.

One break time, I was brought down to size a bit and reminded that any fucker can do quality control, when helping my supervisor with the crossword in The Sun. She was stuck on one answer - the question was 'A small green insect eaten by Ladybirds'. There was a bit of discussion in the office, so I piped up with 'the answer's Aphid'. My supervisor was delighted, but after looking at the puzzle for a couple of minutes, she looked confused again.

'Do you spell that with one F, or two?'
( Wicca'd Witch needs ideas for a new sig on..., Mon 7 Mar 2011, 0:43, 7 replies)

I know this is a very old joke
But I swear this happened.
I used to work on a production line where they made cooker hoods. My chargehand, a very pretty lady who we shall call Jenny, was doing a crossword.

'Mr O'Reilly' Says Jen, 'Whats this one - To egg on, 5 letters?'. That was the clue, not like in the joke, 'egg on'.
I looked at her expecting her to say 'Is it toast?', which she did, so I laughed politely, little suspecting that she was serious and she'd never heard the joke. She shouted at me when I laughed, claiming 'well, it FITS!!!'

My Dad, bless him, shouted up to me when I was in my room one day asking what was the name of 'that pub near the college?'
'The Talbot' I answered.
'That's it, thanks' sez Dad.
'What do you want to know that for?'
'It's a crossword clue - drinking place, 6 letters, starts with ta'...
( His Popiness the Hole Invaded Poland on, Mon 7 Mar 2011, 0:09, 6 replies)

A colleague on my course at Uni...
...was one of the great dizzy non-blondes of the age. Her greatest hit probably has to be "Oh, do you need to EMPTY the vacuum cleaner?". I have no idea where she thought all the dust and hair went once it had gone up the tube. Maybe into a little black hole or something.

Either way, she's now teaching kids about science.
(wolf_ie, Sun 6 Mar 2011, 23:30, 2 replies)

big numpty prick
My missus was asked to run her eye over a friend-of-a-colleague's CV that wasn't getting much in the way of responses, despite plenty of experience. Turned out his previous position had been with the Banque Nationale de Paris, and said CV was littered with references to his previous work with the BNP.

Apparently, even when it was explained to him, he still didn't quite get it.
(zebideedoodah likes florence but prefers venice, Sun 6 Mar 2011, 20:42, Reply)

Can't remember how the subject came up...
...but after saying something about an abbatoir I had to explain to a colleague that no, butchers don't leave animals to die of old age before we can eat them, actually people are a little more pro-active in the process. She was appalled.
(bondsnood twitter.com/bondsnood, Sun 6 Mar 2011, 20:31, 5 replies)

Ginger People
A couple of years ago I worked with a woman who was utterly convinced that ginger-haired children are the result of a hasty fumble between a brown-haired and a blonde-haired parent. She wasn't a complete idiot by any means, but she just could *not* understand that hair colour is connected to genetics and is NOT the human equivalent of mixing the poster paints.
(Draco Rattus ate all the pies on, Sun 6 Mar 2011, 20:12, 9 replies)

Years ago
I worked for the publishers of the Hull equivalent of the Yellow Pages. For a couple of weeks, we had a work experience kid come in. In the canteen one lunchtime, he said about how expensive it must be to print it on yellow paper and they should use white paper instead.

Oh how we laughed when we realised he wasn't kidding and we had to explain to him that it WAS printed on white paper and the yellow was printed on later leaving spaces for the other colours so they would appear true rather than tainted as they would if printed on yellow paper.
( sandettie light vessel automatic New Twitter - @bollocksreally, Sun 6 Mar 2011, 18:25, 5 replies)

Tsk.

I worked with a guy who though C30 was the same as RC40.

What a cunt.
( Larry Death Anger Pain Fear Aggression, Sun 6 Mar 2011, 18:11, 4 replies)

Horse
I once interviewed a chap for a design job who didn't have a lot of, well, variety in his CV. When I questioned him about this he said "yes, I know it might look like that but actually I'm not a one horse town."
(Telly Toning my vagheen, Sun 6 Mar 2011, 17:14, Reply)

My sister works in a school library
She told me that when she arrived she had to unbox a lot of stored books.

Boxes were labelled variously:
'Fictoin'; and
'Encyclopsedias'
( WormuIus, Sun 6 Mar 2011, 17:07, 4 replies)

Welcome to Academia
I briefly worked as an admin assistant to the principal of a major university. One day he called me into his office, to ask me how to insert a CD into his computer. He'd got as far as ejecting the tray, but then got stuck.
( pidg, Sun 6 Mar 2011, 15:41, 2 replies)

Zoo..?
A few years ago, one of the secretaries at my old job went on holiday to Africa. Lovely lady, would do anything for you, but not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

When she came back, she delighted in telling anyone who would listen her exploits when on holiday. One such activity was a safari through the Serengeti.

"We saw all sorts of animals" she said. "Such as?"
"Well there were Lions, elephants, we saw giraffes, baboons and we saw some buffalo. Didn't see any tigers though."

Bless.
(animal252 last activated his kitten hammer on, Sun 6 Mar 2011, 13:45, 7 replies)

Oil!
My colleague Sean (pronounced Sharn - she was a girl) dipped the oil in her brand new car and seeing it was below the top mark on the dipstick, decided to put more in. She took off the filler cap, looked inside, saw there was no oil visible and just kept topping it up until the rocker cover was full. We only found out when she complained it wouldn't start.
(Zumbruk, Sun 6 Mar 2011, 12:45, 1 reply)

What's my name?
One of the very senior VPs at a previous place of employment (a prestigious private bank) never used to log out of his Reuters terminal. So, if something happened to the system and he needed to log on, he used to call the Helpdesk (which I ran) to get his terminal logged on again. We'd set it up without a password to make it easier for him and his username was ... his name. Yes, he earned about £2M a year and couldn't remember his name.
(Zumbruk, Sun 6 Mar 2011, 12:40, Reply)

Half Safe?
My father was in a nursing home in the USA. One of the nursing aides asked where we lived, and upon being told the UK, asked if we had driven from there to Pennsylvania.

I suppose wiping arses and cleaning up sick doesn't need much in the way of smarts. They were nice to my Dad, though.
(Zumbruk, Sun 6 Mar 2011, 12:38, 2 replies)

Amazing how many men on this list
have an attractive, young, female colleage who is terribly stupid.
(apeloverage committed the vile act of onanism on, Sun 6 Mar 2011, 12:31, 13 replies)