Today's activities
Well following on from my previous post in this topic - today started in a very similar vein.

Rather than going home however, I decided to spend the entire morning constructing a very simple little macro based game in excel so myself and a colleague could play.... wait for it... BATTLESHIPS! Very carefully constructed grids in full technicolour, with instructions on what ships to build and how big they should be as well as macros to reset the grids and exit the game.

As it transpires, I am absolutely shiiiiiite at battleships as I have lost all three games we have played (well two out of three as my boss caught us playing the third and was not amused).

I think I will spend this afternoon making an electronic version of the old classic - connect 4. Thats if I don't get focussed on making blu-tac animals again like yesterday. (I have pics of said animals if you really want to see - but I must warn you... they are awesome.)
(Spangulum nailing your mother since 1824, Tue 13 Jan 2009, 12:34, 7 replies)

Calendar
I work from home mostly, which is lucky as my office is 100 miles away. For Christmas, I got a Paper Airplane 'Fold-a-day' calendar. Fortunately, it's not 1 fold per day, but fold 1 paper airplane per day (except at weekends, when one plane has to last you 2 days). So when my job gets boring, I can sit there and make my paper plane, and fly it about. Hurrah! Today's plane is an origami F-4 Phantom, by Kyong H. Lee. Apparently.

Ok, so not too exciting, but I enjoy it. And you can't have those 10 seconds of your life back.
(BombayMick Dogs are better than cats, Tue 13 Jan 2009, 11:50, 9 replies)

Pranking
This all started off when i joined my current employer.After about 2 months i started to get the hatred of two directors that my collegue and friend had.They could not direct a car down a one way street,One has one eye and is nearly deaf and the other well lets face it hes the same as lurch out of the adams family

They both use the same printer which we dont,So the usual game of who can fuk it up just as there printing started.They would come in load there paper bills into the printer and walk into the other office to press the print button.The game was to run over and change the font type and settings before it started printing ,this became to easy for us.Next it was glue the paper together as it was in a roll.

There we were sat opposite to each other mongy loads the paper and walks back into the office.Cue laughter as its a ticking time bomb,Starts printing grrrrrrrrrr then a snap.Christ its broke this started laughter that came with tears as mongy was confused,Cue his mongy mate one eye run in.Never before have you seen to men stare at a printer for so long till one eye says "someones sabataged this "

This daily boredom ritual of completely making there life hell contined which included my master plan.This was to superglue the roller just before it printed.This nackerd that up so they purchased another. "there the old ribbon type anyways.Next new printer was to get random objects placed into it,We loaded the rear of it with around 1 box of staples ,50 or so paper clips,ciggy and a rubber,a teabag, were all stuck in the printer on a daily basis.When the new one was not printing properly.One eye decided to turn it upside and shake it "incase there was something in there,cue one eye shaking the huge printer,with his man moobs bouncing about " a barrage of objects fell from it.

Many a day was spent with these fucktards master planning and waiting for the prank.Ahhh them were the days !!Sadly hes left the company now so its just me vs them,im still bored as hell.
(Uncle Ed is lurking around, Tue 13 Jan 2009, 10:57, 25 replies)

Back in the day
when I used to look at directory entries in BT I also used to work on the faults desk with a number of BT engineers on the broadband side of things. Now obviously I was just at this job to get some extra beer money while I figured out my career (still telecoms it appears) and so a lot of time was wasted on the internet.

Till I got caught by my boss by spending wayyyy too much time on the t'interweb...

Got taken into a little office with my boss who basically said 'You;re spending far too long on the internet and not enough time doing tickets, sort it out' and then gave me a really low expectation of how many tickets to do a day.

Cue My mate and me doing the requisite number of tickets in the morning and spending all afternoon on the internet and MSN, it was ace!

So a lesson for bosses, don;t set your expectations too low for your employees!
They will take the piss!
(Fuckarma was masturbating into your handbag, Tue 13 Jan 2009, 10:31, Reply)

Pump Truck Gangs
Many moons ago when I was a teenager I used to work in a cash & carry after college. This involved stacking shelves, serving customers etc...

Now the other people who worked there were either in the latter part of their lives or spotty teenagers like myself. And as teenagers get bored very easily we invented many a time wasting game. Football with the plastic wrap was our first foray but would take too many people to play.

Then one day some bright spark took a pump truck (used to lift and wheel heavy pallets of sh!t about) and started riding it like a skateboard, all be it one with a handle for steering.

This cuaght on quite quick with everyone else. soon we were ripping the stickers off the products and sticking them to the sides of our pump trucks. Mine was Special 22. We formed gangs and if you caught someone using your pump truck you went mental. Even the older staff fell in line with our pump truck gang rules.

We had drag races and would battle them. The funny thing was the mangers didn't really seem to mind as long as we got some work done. Even though we scared the poop out of the customers.

It was a bit like Lord of the Flies, but we had fun.
(profektus, Tue 13 Jan 2009, 10:24, 5 replies)

It’s her fault for dressing so provocatively.

Many moons ago, I briefly worked in the offices of a local warehouse. I was given the opportunity of taking over a meagre management role from a sweet girl who was working her notice.

The girl in question was called ‘Hayley’. She was quite pretty, but more importantly, she sported such prestigious and pendulous norkage that she could render a man to full-on, diamond-cutting stiffiness from 500 yards.

Anyway, I started work and the flirting began almost immediately. She would wear fishnet stockings over her shapely legs, carefully ensuring that I saw the stocking tops under her increasingly alluring clothing.

She was also very ‘touchy-feely’ and would giggle outrageously at my jokes, blushing every time I was 'suggestive'.

Word soon started to spread around…and because I had to ‘shadow’ her for the entire handover period, it became almost inevitable that something would happen. The chemistry all but fizzed and crackled in the air.

For meetings with the ‘big boss’ (who was an 'Uber-cunt extraordinaire'), we used to relieve the boredom by playing the tried and tested game of dropping obscure words into the conversation. As soon as one person had managed it, the task was passed to the other.

It was always worth a little chuckle, but worth much more for the gropes hugs I would receive as we laughed about our jollities later.

We were getting on so well, that after a while I decided to add a little 'rule' for the next meeting...that the person who ‘lost’ the game had to pay a forfeit of the winner's choosing (to make it more ‘interesting’).

What followed was a ridiculous situation where, much to our erstwhile manager’s confusion, we mercilessly (and increasingly tenuously) managed to insert the word ‘badger’ into the meeting about 17 times each…

Inevitably, we were both soon running out of ideas…and it was my turn…

But then, after a flash of inspiration, I picked up the report we were about to discuss and commented:

“This report doesn’t look very ‘corporate’. It doesn't even show the company Badge…

...errrr”

Hayley burst out laughing, before announcing: ‘That doesn’t count!’ in front of an utterly bewildered boss who had no idea what we were talking about as we playfully argued mid-meeting.

But afterwards, Hayley was a good sport…she eventually conceded defeat and accepted my forfeit.

...which was to do her up the arse.

Oh, how we laughed...as my hot splooge dribbled down her succulent bum cheeks after the frenzied rampant anal pummelling that she won’t forget in a hurry.

Them's the rules.
(Mr Twisty Cheeky The worst kept secret in B3ta..., Tue 13 Jan 2009, 9:36, 1 reply)

Easiest Job Ever
A friend of mine, Huw, was made redundant last year while working for BT's corporate 1st line support.

Because his department dealt with BT's major business customers, the team was always overstaffed in case a server error occurred which would result in carnage. However, this was an extremely rare occurrence, so the average day for Huw would involve maybe one or two customer enquiries, filling out a ticket for each which would be passed to 3rd line, totalling roughly 15-20 minutes of actual work a day. The challenge was attempting to while away the other 7+ hours a day by playing online games and spinning in his chair going "WOOOooooooooooooooWOOOOOooooooooooooooo".

So it was that, after 4 years in the job, an internal auditor turned up to witness that they were employing a dozen or so people (on admittedly poor wages) to do practically bugger all. This resulted in the amalgamation of tech support departments, and the team's inevitable termination.

Huw accepted his fate gracefully: "I had a feeling it was coming when I overheard the auditor asking, 'would it be fair to say you could train a monkey to perform this role?' while I was spinning in my chair."
(LLPaulJ 's momma said knock you out, Tue 13 Jan 2009, 9:17, Reply)

Chinese Restaurant
My sister used to work in a Chinese Restaurant in my Mum's village - she'd been there years, they trusted her and so on - so when I needed some money, they decided to give me a job because I was my sister's brother and they were sure I'd be good.

So they gave me a job. Only the once. Behind the bar.

Big no-no.

I was told that I was allowed any non-alcoholic drinks, so I had grapefruit juice.

As it was a village Chinese Restaurant, it wasn't exactly busy so staring into space got really dull really quickly and I didn't have anything to read/do for most of the evening, so after looking around, I spied the one thing to make it entertaining. Throwing things into the fishtank got dull which was when I remembered that **hey, I'm working behind a bar!**

It turns out that if you put Vodka in Grapefruit Juice, you can't smell it and you can't really tell. (So I thought).

Unless you drink over half a bottle of Vodka that is. While you're supposed to be serving drinks - and carrying them to people's tables - and **acting sober**... As we all know, an 18/19 year old **acting sober** is the most unconvincing thing in the world.

My (furious) sister practically dragged me home, yelled at me (a lot) and I didn't get paid.

I did, however, get a date with the pub-next-door-landlord's daughter for a few days later as she came in and fancied me :) but she was a munter and I turned up to her pub to pick her up after 9 and a half pints of Guinness, but that's another story....
(james_tiger_woods is going to start his killing spree on the, Tue 13 Jan 2009, 9:04, Reply)

Back in Sheffield
I used to work for a now renamed Government department while on Student placement and I used to work really hard. Most of the time.

Some days, however, were taken over completely by "hang" time. By "hang" time, I really mean "hang-OVER" time - the local management would turn a blind eye to myself and Scott being usually face down on keyboards or desks on certain days as they knew our social life plans quite well.

(Apart from when we had actual work to do, in which case it would get done)

My desk used to be a recognised disaster area with many reams of paper strewn all over it - one time after a morning nap after a seriously late night (I'm not sure that I even made it home TBH) - I woek up with my head having been buried under a massive pile of papers - naturally, I sat bolt upright, scattered paper everywhere and that was the point when senior management happened to be doing a walk-through :)

Well, they were paying me slightly less than minimum wage....
(james_tiger_woods is going to start his killing spree on the, Tue 13 Jan 2009, 8:46, Reply)

Work
Um, well, I come in to the office and work. Really hard.

I do NOT loaf around for two hours pretending to work, I do NOT start work at 10 wondering how it got to 10, I do NOT go for lunch at 12 until 2 most days going off to the local shopping mall (Meadowhall), I do NOT leave at 4:15 because I'm fed up/bored and I do NOT say how busy I am to everyone.

Honest :)
(james_tiger_woods is going to start his killing spree on the, Tue 13 Jan 2009, 8:42, 3 replies)

Since I suggested this topic...
I feel it would only be right to share some of my work "Down Time" with you.

Once when working for a well know PC company that rymes with Fudge it an Sue I was taking this rather dusty PC apart and found the issue etc and had to wait days for the part, During this time and a few phone calls later I asked a few people how much they would pay if I were to eat a massive lump of dust from the PC... Over a few people easiest £40 I ever made. Wish I still had the video of it.

Just recently we have brought 2 of those RoboQuad pets for out office to roam around the floor. I work in an IT dept and its just me and Rob for that is his name and gets quite amuzing when managers come in and there are 2 robots walking around, But on the whole they get a good reception.

Well hope you all enjoyed this weeks topic :D
(tfi049113 Was found alive on, Tue 13 Jan 2009, 8:36, Reply)

Make it stop...
Normally being surrounded by a pack of unenlightened halfwits, I spend most of my days curled into a foetal ball, rocking myself and longing for the sweet release of death.
(lustfish, Tue 13 Jan 2009, 7:19, 4 replies)

I'm a plastic copper so...
How do I amuse myself? I laugh at my colleagues:

My newest deputy has been excitedly telling old ladies in the park about how the chalk markings on the pavement are "drug dealers marking prices and territory". Or, as the old lady in question was telling me "I didn't have the heart to tell him that it was kids playing hopscotch".

Same one today was telling me how he'd confiscated a child's mobile phone, used it to call the kid's mother and ordered her to drive down and pick him up immediately. A telling off in front of his pals, being dragged home by a furious mother, and a lifetime's resentment of the police...and the crime? He'd shook up a can of coke and sprayed his mates with it.
(Caveat Emptor, Tue 13 Jan 2009, 0:53, 3 replies)

It's all about perspective really
I review TV shows, which means I basically come to the office and watch telly.
Usually while sitting on a couch with a cup of Milo.
People walk past my office and say, at least 20 times a day, "I wish I had your job!" and sometimes I agree.
Try watching a marathon of new pilots from the US and keeping your attention levels up.
Sometimes when I'm really bored I ask people if I can help them write a report of collate some stats or anything that doesn't involve another hour of Home and Away.
Yesterday I got bored after watching a few eps of some TV sports challenge show so I started phoning a random colleague (dial out first so they don't get your number) and hanging up as she answered.
She thought she had a stalker and went a bit mad as the day went on... it helped pass the time.
Speaking of which, it's time to go back to "work". In this case that means watching the new series of Life on Mars.
And I'm nearly out of Milo. Work sucks.
( difficultchild, Tue 13 Jan 2009, 0:25, 4 replies)

Call centre work is excellent
- Spinning in your chair making people around you piss themselves laughing whilst talking seriously, dealing with a complaint

- Putting people into the longest queue in the company (whether or not they need to be there) because they've just given you verbal abuse

- Pretending to be each others' supervisors. Perfectly fine if you don't say 'I'm x's supervisor'.

- Locking each others screens whilst they're in a call

- Fag breaks off the clock when you're doing outbound calls

- Playing Tetris online whilst giving people professional advice; you mention this stuff 100 times a day, it's all in the head now

- Trying not to laugh when somebody has just called you whilst you're in the middle of talking about the filth you did last night

- Having the manager call that awkward customer a tosser when they release the call

- Laughing at funny names

God help me when I get a real job.
( Methylene Blue - electrohead, Mon 12 Jan 2009, 23:11, 3 replies)

I used to wait tables at a tiny little restaurant that has since gone bankrupt. Anyhow, it was a horrifically boring job as about two customers actually came in a day. So we played the who-can-steal-the-most-food-from-the-kitchen game. By the time my shift was finished, I had eaten more in a few hours than I usually ate in a week. I also nicked an entire box of chocolates belonging to my boss and surrepticiously devoured them all while hiding behind the coat rack. Ah, happy days, happy days.

It's a wonder my clothes still fit after that job.

A mate of mine used to work with a guy who'd never do any work at all. He'd just slope off to the toilet, nab a cubicle and read a comic book with his pants around his ankles. For the entire day. He thought he was being crafty, but everybody knew what he was up to. He lost his job after a few months of this.

To amuse myself in another one of my underpaid jobs, I hacked my company's website* and exchange my boss's picture for one of Chuck Norris. Took 'em forever to notice, and nobody suspected me. Heh heh.


*This was about as difficult as putting on a hat; nearly everyone who works there is pretty much computer illiterate. Especially the IT guys.
(TheWonderfulWombat It came to me in a dream., Mon 12 Jan 2009, 21:53, Reply)

The Two Word Film Title Game
While at work, nothing is more fun than the Two Word Film Title Game. The rules are simple.

1: Take two film titles with two words only in the title, such as "Top Gun" and "Deep Impact"

2: Swap the last words of each title.

3: Say the names of your new films out loud. "Top Impact" and "Deep Gun".

4: Watch as other people think of film titles and crack up.

Most notable examples included mixing the following:

Dirty Dancing
Hot Fuzz
Free Willy
The Hole

Once you play the game once, it sticks in your head forever. I've so far lost the equivalent of 9 afternoons to the game.
(mediumpete and his frozen cheese collection wrote this, Mon 12 Jan 2009, 21:36, 3 replies)

Pegging
One of my workfriends devised a game whilst drunk at a house party involving clothes pegs.. he waited for his mates to pass out and then placed clothes pegs on them, then waited for them to find them.
At xmas time our workload in the lab goes down and we get bored easily, so one trip to the pound shop later and we started "pegging" our work colleagues.

Once everyone knows about the game it becomes a good way of inducing paranoia as everyone becomes afraid to turn thier backs on each other for more than a split second

the rules are simple.
place a peg on one of your colleagues whilst they are distracted.
don't get caught.

initially it was easy as they weren't expecting it, it has now become so wide spread that everyone is at it, (admittedly it has died down now the work has picked up)

It was quite satisfying when one of them had three pegs on her lab coat for about 3 hours without noticing until someone from outside the department asked what the pegs were about. Thinking they were refering to the peg in her pocket she explained. The reply came
"not that one those three on your back"
(the welcan monkey Forgot what I came in for, Mon 12 Jan 2009, 20:59, 3 replies)

Tales From The Football Days......
When I left school I was awarded an apprenticeship with a football club. For obvious reasons I can’t disclose which club, what I will say though, is, it was a professional club, but wasn’t a particularly high profile one, and the town it was in was quite possibly where the earth ends. I mean, I was getting a train home one day when a stranger stopped me in the street. ‘Your not from round here are you mate?’ said a gentleman wearing various bits of sporting attire. ‘No’ I said back, to which he decided to reply in a physical form as oppose to the verbal form I was used to. In other words he knocked my fucking tooth out of my face, the big, dirty northern Neanderthal cunt pig.

Anyway, as trainees we wasn’t fortunate enough to be pandered to in the same way trainees would be at Manchester United, Arsenal or Liverpool. And general bullying seemed perfectly acceptable from day one. We have all heard of initiation rituals when starting a new job. On the first day, new boy makes the tea, go to the shed and get me some sky hooks, do you have a left handed screwdriver etc etc. In other words, the usual banter and general tomfoolery you get in the workplace. However, my initiation at this football club was a little different to say the least. First of all, all sixteen of us were locked into a tiny room, no bigger than 15 feet x 8 feet. In pairs we were given boxing gloves and were forced to fight one another, at which point we were still complete strangers. I ended up fighting some guy who was at least a foot bigger than me, and it was fair to say, he gave me a proper dead leg in the face.

After this beating and humiliation we were forced to stand in a room with the first team members. At this point we were alone and didn’t have our new and freshly beaten up team mates by our sides for moral support. We were then forced to sing a song at the top of our voice. If the first team decided your effort wasn’t good enough we would then have to pull our trousers round our ankles and have sex with a bench. Of course, no matter how good the effort was, it was never quite good enough. So here I am, on the first day of my football career, I’m bollock naked, fucking a changing room bench with a black eye. It has to be said, I have had better and more attractive moments.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. Although in the modern day game apprentices were not meant to do general chores like mop the changing room floors, clean the toilets, make first team players tea etc, this particular club made us do all of this stuff. So when the first team had finished at two o’clock, we would have to do all the chores, and get the place spotless for the next day. This would normally take an hour or so, which meant we had roughly two hours to kill before the coach would come and inspect what we had done and deemed it acceptable (thinking about it, this was more like being in the army than a football team).

During this two hours I saw some of the most horrific, violent, homo-erotic shit going. Imagine a dinner party around a conservative members house (or park) and your not far off. One particular lad took flack for heavy bullying. They used to rub deep heat down his foreskin, round his arsehole and then round his mouth. There was a small boot room with no windows, so when you turned the lights off you could literally see nothing. They used to send this lad into the room, and one lad used to go in with him and pin him down. Randomly one of us would have to go into the room and then slap him around the head with your cock, and then he had to guess who it was.

The ringleader was actually good friends with me (thank God) and wouldn’t pick on me, but some of the shit he used to do was cringe worthy. For instance he had a pretty big dick, we all knew this because we obviously showered together. During one of hour spouts of boredom, one guy asked him how big he was erect. I thought he would just say, oh 10” but no, that was too simple. He had to show us. So there I am, watching a 19 year old bloke have a wank in front of fifteen other men. I then had to drowned in my own inferiority as his dick was so big you could have probably tattooed, ‘I have a dick the size of an extremely large telegraph pole’ on the side, in Times New Roman on size 36. Then, I had to watch while five or six of the other lads poked it and admired it.

Also, back to the dark room. The ring leader used to send three people in there at a time to fight in the dark and see how long they would survive. I saw one lad have to go to hospital, where he had 7 stitches and had to be treated with concussion. We then had to explain to the gaffa how is star man had slipped and cut his head and as a result had to miss the biggest game of the season.

The thing is, during the height of this boredom, we were genuinely enjoying the things we were doing. Looking back now, I feel a tiny part of me may have died in the 12 months I was there. It was fucking gay, but it was fucking hilarious though.

Hope you enjoyed a wee bit of an insight into what football is really like at grass roots level.
(Sir_Digby_Chicken_Caeser [email protected], Mon 12 Jan 2009, 20:21, 5 replies)

hmm could be costly ...
When I am bored at work I play Ebay roulette. It's where you bet on shit you really don't want just to bump up the price for those poor sad twats that do want the item. In the past couple of weeks I have very nearly got lumbered with the world's ugliest sideboard. Some other numpty only outbid me by 56 pence. That was a lucky one. But not for the poor cunt who had to pay £130 more than before I got involved. Sorry love, if you're reading this.
( Sallyrsm, Mon 12 Jan 2009, 20:17, 5 replies)

most boredom ends up with bodily fluids
and this story is no different.

Whilst this doesn't bear comparison with some of the xlnt stories to date, it's good to know the corporate world is safe and secure in the hands of creative people...

So anyway, me and a few other miscreants who were deemed having no career potential as future banking industry leaders were tasked with throwing away mounds of cheques in our branch of Floyds Tank. This was a dull task at best so we made best use of our time - after working out it would take a days hard work we settled on 3 days being a good amount of skive time. This was spent mostly reading NME/Sounds, throwing bundles of paper around the room to different corners to make it look like we'd done something and also games of "Flob Cricket"

The premise was simple - we used a piece of card about 6 x 4 inches and would drop a line of flob and then try and hit it across room. It was pointless in all respects but it passed the time.

There was also time wasting amongst the male population of wanking, sleeping on the shitter and drinking cheap whiskey. Let's face it - on the salary they were paying, who'd actually work hard?
(Feckalluse Give me shelter, shelter from the storm, Mon 12 Jan 2009, 18:55, Reply)

I work
in an office slap bang in the middle of a field just outside of Brighton. It is very rural indeed and although nicer than some city high rise; rather annoying if you want to pop to the shops at lunch. It really is in the middle of nowhere.

Anyway this means that to pass the time I normally end up gawping out of the windows like some bovine dimwit at all the pretty wildlife.

I've seen rabbits, robins, massive spiders and a stoat which, on that day, was the most exciting moment of my professional career.

We have also recently been infested with ladybug like creatures that I'm told aren't ladybugs even though they look just like them. They are exactly the same shape but are reversed colours; so they're black with red dots. They look like a ladybird's sinister cousin.

Failing this I go onto b3ta and try not to laugh out loud. I work in an open plan office. It can be hard sometimes...
(Eldoofus, Mon 12 Jan 2009, 18:54, 3 replies)

The Earl Grey Missile Test
The civil service! Career of choice for dopes and under-achievers, and I ended up in a smart little side office on the tenth floor of the Ministry of Cow Counting in Reading.

They managed to get eight of us in an office the size of a broom cupboard, four of us straight out of college, gaseous as festering skunks. They should have known.

Bored stupid by the lack of stimulation, the bookie's phone number getting blocked by the switchboard, we had to make our own entertainment. We raided the stock cupboard - no mean feat, as it meant distracting the evil-faced old harridan who stood guard over it. We marvelled at our spoils. There was going to be hell.

We created dozens of elaborate elastic-powered missiles made of tightly rolled paper, drawing pins and paper clips. When fired from launchers cobbled together out of rulers, bulldog clips and triple-strength elastic bands, could easily break a) the sound barrier and b) any human skin it came into contact with. 007's Q-branch would have had orgasms.

Soon, our desks were fortresses with huge piles of files for protection (not to mention giving passing managers the illusion that actual work may have actually been taking place), with cunningly designed slits to fire our weapons onto the unsuspecting enemy.

It was chaos, and before long we were covered in bruises and dreading the day's battles. It would, of course, only be a matter of time until the cold hand of authority tapped us on the shoulder...

Three shots caused our downfall. Call them lucky. Call them irresponsible. We called them downright funny, and we laughed all the way to the personnel office.

Shot 1: "Tea?"

Your hero primes his weapon, loads his best missile - an arrangement with protrouding drawing pins called "Al's Skull Modifier", carefully aims and lets rip with the shot to end them all. And what a shot. It hit the spoon in Geoff's freshly made mug of Earl Grey, causing the contents to spill over Geoff, our so-called supervisor Mark, and a pile of files marked "In Confidence"

Shot 2: Laughing fit to burst, I stood up from behind my fortress so as to taunt Geoff further. Twack! Geoff's number one weapon "The Thug" caught me square in the bollocks. Enraged, we slugged it out on the carpet between the desks, teapots flying.

Shot 3: In stormed our department head, determined to put an end to this childish behaviour. Twock! Mark's "Disaster Area". Right in the flange. Doom.

She'd seen enough, and as soon as her eyes stopped watering, we were marched over the road to be dressed down by some senior personnel manager like a bunch of naughty schoolboys. We were split up, myself to the hell of accounts, Geoff got a cushy number editing the staff magazine while Mark got Export Document Registry, the civil service equivalent of Siberia, ruled with a rod of iron by a former school mistress who insisted on absolute silence and her permission for toilet breaks.

My first action in accounts was to get a pineapple, stick a stupid face on it and fire elastic band powered weapons at him until he turned to mush. The fruit wars had begun.

Original 12-inch version (what I wrote five years ago) HERE
( Scaryduck LIKES EGG, Mon 12 Jan 2009, 18:14, 6 replies)

more tech support tales...
Back when I was starting out in the world of work, I was a tech support phonemonkey for a large (and now defunct) PC company. We specialised in selling PCs to utter fucking morons.

To pass the time between calls, we devised the "Moron of the Month" competition and the winner would be voted for by the senior techies and bought a congratulatory beer.

Winners included:
1) The man who wrote in to say he was going to protest about how crap our company was because we wouldn't fix his digital camera. He included a photo of himself in full protest regalia. It was taken on the camera he said was broken and printed on the printer he said didn't work. His wife obviously knew how to use them.

2) The woman who rang up to ask for a new laptop because she had a) spilled red wine on hers, then b) washed it in a bath of soapy water. She thought it was unfair we wouldn't replace it because it didn't turn on anymore.

3) The man who waited in a queue for 35 minutes with messages saying "Thank you for calling **** Computers, your call is in a queue and will be answered shortly", only to be stumped when asked for his order number or the serial number of his PC so we could look up his record. His response was "PC? I'm rining about my 3-piece suite" - he had waited over half an hour to get through to DFS. He then ranted for 10 minutes when we couldn't put him straight through...

4) The woman who rang up because her PC wouldn't turn on. When asked to change the power lead with that for the monitor, my colleague heard a loud thump and a lot of swearing - it turned out she had banged her head on the desk, as she couldn't see much during the power cut...

Other than that, other activities included unscrewing the wheels on peoples' chairs, powering down their PC when they were on a call and watching them try to solve the problem, whilst wrestling with the power lead under the desk - all whilst trying to sound like they weren't straining for a crap over the phone. Oh, and my personal favourite was seeing a colleague sit under his desk with a waste bin on his head, rustling paper into his headset mike to that everyone who rang up with a "modem problem" (usually hadn't paid for an ISP back in those days, or had forgotten the dial-in details) could be told it was a "line fault" and that they should call BT instead...

Oh, and getting the guy in the wheelchair to escort people out of the building when they were fired was always amusing - he'd loudly declare he was making sure they didn't cause trouble while we all wet ourselves...

Other than that, it was pretty dull, really.
(Chad, Mon 12 Jan 2009, 16:59, 5 replies)

Oh, Blu-Tac!
When I worked for agencies, ie a different workplace every couple of days, I'd pocket the office 'tac and in a quiet moment, fashion from it tiny cocks'n'balls.

Then I'd stick them onto drawing pins on the notice boards and forget about them.

Sometimes I'd go back and, disturbingly, the little grey genitalia'd still be there, at face-height, next to the PRIZE BINGO! leaflet. How could the staff, or better still, visitors, have missed them?

Sometimes of course they'd be gone. I like to think a boss somewhere discovered one, and another, and another, and was forced to make a panicked sweep of all the building's notice boards.

It was a form of art, really.
(Juan Quar is clinging to her front teeth on, Mon 12 Jan 2009, 16:56, 5 replies)

I always wanted a toy farm set
I used to work for an environmental management company. Their main business was to make land usable again after such things as aeroplane crashes and open-cast mining. So, lots and lots of soil samples and photos of fields passed through our offices, some of the samples on the stinky side, others just common or garden variety dirt.

In more creative moments I made mini farm animals from every day office things. I took delight in making blutac sheep with paper clip skeletons. I would paint them white with correction fluid and draw little smiley faces on them. I even had some on giant photos of fields. I knew it had gone too far when I put tiny samples of real sheep poo around their sheepy bum holes (not that the models were that realistic or detailed you understand, just where they would be if they did have an anus) and on the shiny surface of the grass photograph.
(herefromthere, Mon 12 Jan 2009, 16:49, Reply)

Ahh, the innocence of youth.
While idly filling time at work by playing with his lap top, my young colleague informed me of a website he had found which he told me was most disturbing. Yes, he has found an old Goatse. Bless...

I could almost have hugged him and welcomed him to my world, a world where Goatse is pure simple fun and for real horror you need to be looking beyond TGOC and church of fudge. My Ex-boyfriend (who is a thoroughly decent chap) loved to send me links for horrific shock sites.

However, there really is nothing like the warm glow that sharing some ones first Goatse brings.

Shame that work did not approve.
( Rev. Jayneflakes Buy my book, I need the cash for drugs and hookers, Mon 12 Jan 2009, 16:40, 2 replies)

Story not involving sex so may be acceptable to the virgins on here....
Our old office was horrific. Dingy creamy walls, hideous brown carpet. Everything that the 1970s had to offer - but vomited forward into the 90s. The whole place was really manky as well, with an slight odour of unknown origin eminating from the aircon system, but reminiscent of stale milk.

I used to sit at the window, facing my immediate boss. For some reason flies used to congregate near the window - probably attracted to the rancid odour coming from the vents.

In moments of ultra-tedium, my boss - a normally very straight-laced, hard-working, very serious IT type - would join me in trying to hit the flies with elastic bands. Sounds like a ridiculous concept, but after much effort we actually got quite good at it. With a little dedication we were both able to hit a fly maybe 5 or 6 feet away from us with perhaps a 40-50% hit rate.

Maybe we should have this in the 2012 Olympics?
(Reverend Fister "a disciplined fuckwit", Mon 12 Jan 2009, 16:38, Reply)

I work in porn
and believe it or not, I am bored of looking at pictures of naked ladies.

Most people who look at porn at work have the frantic Alt-F4 (or whatever your favourite method for killing windows is) - for me it's the other way round.

If i'm looking at BBC news or something, I have to frantically bring up porn sites when I hear my director coming.

The Escort readers wives submissions can be funny though. There's a legendary one in the office known only as "devil-fish".

We're currently building a load of new sites, and I've decided that we should get all of our content tagged really accurately, so we've had to sit around in meetings for ages discussing the different possibilites of categorising body shapes, skin colour/ethnicity (that one took hours to agree on), pubic hairstyles etc.

It's still quite bizarre sitting in a room full of grown men in suits debating this kind of thing without so much as a smirk on our faces.
( HoratioFellatio Taking the the out of psychotherapist, Mon 12 Jan 2009, 16:27, 10 replies)

ELASTIC BANZAI !!!

A game of skill and endurance concocted by my associate Coxy and yours truly.

Place:
BT Connect (business internet) support office, Cardiff, circa 2002-3.

Time:
Every Friday afternoon, 5 - 5.30pm, when the management had left.


Quite a simple premise, but this became a staple precursor to our Friday evening piss-ups, with HUGE crowds* gathering to watch.


Apparatus required:
Post-It^® Notes (those ones which are about 5 inches wide)
A number of elastic bands
Two opposing desks in an open-plan office
An independent adjudicator

Rules:
-The two contestants** sit at either side of the desk facing one another. Players should be sat ideally approximately a metre apart.

-Player 1 is given three elastic bands (N.B. it is useful to have a few spares standing by. Also note that consistency of stretchiness and length is important in determining a fair result).

-Player 2 wears a Post-It^® Note as a visor (á la the blast shield on Luke Skywalker's helmet during Jedi training). This is for a) protection and b) the element of surprise, a vital element in Elastic Banzai. Player 2 then places hands behind the back of his*** chair.

-Player 1 shoots his three elastic bands at Player 2's face. (Hint: The length of time taken before releasing each elastic band adds to the tension in the receiving player. This is a useful tactic for taking your opponent unawares.)

-Player 1 then wears a Post-It^® Note, and play passes to Player 2.

-The player who says "ow!", "ouch" (or any utterance deemed by the adjudicator to voice displeasure or pain) fewer times after half an hour is declared winner and pussy magnet****!


*Literally tens of people
**i.e. Coxy and I. Usually we were the only ones foolish enough to compete
***Disclaimer 1: This game is not recommended for girly girls and their lovely, pretty faces
****Disclaimer 2: Neither player is likely to get any fanny as a result of playing this game
(LLPaulJ 's momma said knock you out, Mon 12 Jan 2009, 16:23, 2 replies)