Honestly, if rich lunatics are allowed to crush themselves in tin cans, why can't middle-income lunatics zorb their way to certain doom?
The “WTF?!” Thread
- Thread starter hanselthecaretaker
- Start date
Apparently, "stupidity" is a rich man's sport anymore. We poor folk have been relegated to "crazy," i.e.: mass shootings, fentanyl, and voting for Trump.
I'm so poor I just go zorbing in a carrier bag down a hill.
My guess is the Coast Guard, what with being an agency primarily charged with the preservation of lives at sea, have a moral and legal obligation to see to save people who are in distress or danger on the ocean.
And whatever that dingus believed, they were in fucking danger.
Or be rather less unwise and build a more practical vehicle and travel the great lakes or something safer. Have to respect people coming up with weird ways of travel and going around places if it's down sensibly. People who convert land rovers to run on steam, or build replica monowheels or propeller driven cars and the like.
Oh, I understand the Coast Guard was simply doing their duty, just a shame their efforts were wasted on 1.) someone stupid enough to try to traverse the Atlantic ocean in a homemade contraption, and 2.) someone who, in turn, threatened them.
I don't respect insanity, no matter how crafty someone may be. Smart enough to build and stupid enough to actually use for a highly impractical voyage is a wash. I applaud none of his efforts.
Absent
And twice is the only way to live.
- Jan 25, 2023
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I do, generally. And there's been a lot of succesful projects built around unconventional, out-of-the box ideas. Like Yann Quenet (https://www.giornaledellavela.com/2022/12/11/yann-quenet/?lang=en) or even D'Aboville (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gérard_d'Aboville), to take very different examples just in the seafaring department. But, you know, it can also be about other projects, such as Cheval's palace (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Cheval) or various humanitarian or commercial or artistic endeavours that were deemed doomed at the start...
And of course, such projects vary in objective feasability and actual thoughtful preparations, but even the dumbest "weeeee I'm the new icaruuuuuusplat" gets some amount of respect from me. So, my dilemma is more like... shall we save that person's life or let them go full "make or break" with their dream... It's a genuine question, a moral one, hard to solve (for me), and in addition to the more pragmatic and partially more objective one "do they really have no chance to succeed, are are we just applying regulation there, or even evaluating chances through a too conventional technical approach". Case by case basis. So no preconception on this specific project, beyond the possibly misleading "it looks crazy" (given that so many crazy-looking things have succeeded - by chance or design).
And that guy's unhinged reaction also has me feel two contradictory ways. On one hand "what an asshole", on the other "what a level of despair, so, if he really wants so much to gamble his life on this... i don't know, is it ours to weight a life's length versus a dreamed death, and to anticipate his possible but uncertain last minute regrets"...
But the general background sentiment is sympathy. For insanity.
And if that other twat had imploded alone next to the Titanic, I wouldn't have had much to reproach him.
In this case yeah, I was thinking more of someone who spends a lot of time in a strange, but harmless hobby. Don't try to cross oceans with that thing, but it'd look cool going across a lake.
Absent
And twice is the only way to live.
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E(high) E(high)
It was a short song, but that little fly did look a bit tired afterwards.
Y'all wanna hear "WTF?", I got "WTF?" for you.
So I've made it no secret around these parts, I work for Amazon. I quit in 2019, went back in 2020 because it was the only place hiring during Covid and they had to treat workers decently for once, as they couldn't abuse work visas to suppress wages, and as a band-aid for horrific turnover rates and bad reputation. My primary job my first time around was an inbound problem solver, which meant I did quality assurance, and researched and fixed inbound freight and inventory exceptions. Practically the day I came back, word got out and I went right back to my old position due to a severe labor shortage in positions that required expertise, experience, and a unique skillset which I had.
My site is/was a softline facility, which means we handle apparel, shoes, and jewelry. Which brings me to the "WTF?".
On my second or third day back, my old supervisor hunts me down in the warehouse and asks if I'm cool to problem solve. He also had a mischievous shit-eating grin, which I knew meant he was up to something. I figured at the time it was just due to us colluding under-the-table to poach me from new hire training straight into my old department, that is until I saw what he wanted me to research and fix.
Butt plugs.
At some point between when I quit and went back, Amazon recoded butt plugs from novelty and health, to jewelry. Which meant our site was getting all the butt plugs. Butt plugs were everywhere in this fuckin' building. Not a few butt plugs. Not even a few hundred, or few thousand. A few hundred thousand butt plugs. Closer to a quarter million butt plugs in the entire warehouse, by conservative estimate.
In every conceivable location, just random butt plugs of every conceivable shape, size, material, and design. In apparel drawers, jewelry drawers, flat pack, totes, amnesty, rebin, suspected theft, everywhere.
That day, I had to research and exception-receive 16,000 butt plugs, because the vendor who sent them put the wrong shipping labels on the cases. 40 cases of 400 butt plugs each.
I was one of maybe four people in the entire building who knew our inventory control toolkit well enough to research purchase order by vendor, identify the PO that was sent instead of what was listed on the shipping label, unreceive the inventory, and just re-receive the inventory under the correct PO. Had the whole thing fixed in a half hour, whereas anyone else it would have taken about twenty labor-hours just to draft the trouble ticket for research by corporate.
Our onboarding and training staff were quite perplexed at how and why this apparently random new hire was being pulled to do one of the most complex and demanding jobs in the building, and was processing units at 32,000% to expectation, on his first week on the job...and was using software tools that were supposedly deprecated a year before his hire date to do it.
So I've made it no secret around these parts, I work for Amazon. I quit in 2019, went back in 2020 because it was the only place hiring during Covid and they had to treat workers decently for once, as they couldn't abuse work visas to suppress wages, and as a band-aid for horrific turnover rates and bad reputation. My primary job my first time around was an inbound problem solver, which meant I did quality assurance, and researched and fixed inbound freight and inventory exceptions. Practically the day I came back, word got out and I went right back to my old position due to a severe labor shortage in positions that required expertise, experience, and a unique skillset which I had.
My site is/was a softline facility, which means we handle apparel, shoes, and jewelry. Which brings me to the "WTF?".
On my second or third day back, my old supervisor hunts me down in the warehouse and asks if I'm cool to problem solve. He also had a mischievous shit-eating grin, which I knew meant he was up to something. I figured at the time it was just due to us colluding under-the-table to poach me from new hire training straight into my old department, that is until I saw what he wanted me to research and fix.
Butt plugs.
At some point between when I quit and went back, Amazon recoded butt plugs from novelty and health, to jewelry. Which meant our site was getting all the butt plugs. Butt plugs were everywhere in this fuckin' building. Not a few butt plugs. Not even a few hundred, or few thousand. A few hundred thousand butt plugs. Closer to a quarter million butt plugs in the entire warehouse, by conservative estimate.
In every conceivable location, just random butt plugs of every conceivable shape, size, material, and design. In apparel drawers, jewelry drawers, flat pack, totes, amnesty, rebin, suspected theft, everywhere.
That day, I had to research and exception-receive 16,000 butt plugs, because the vendor who sent them put the wrong shipping labels on the cases. 40 cases of 400 butt plugs each.
I was one of maybe four people in the entire building who knew our inventory control toolkit well enough to research purchase order by vendor, identify the PO that was sent instead of what was listed on the shipping label, unreceive the inventory, and just re-receive the inventory under the correct PO. Had the whole thing fixed in a half hour, whereas anyone else it would have taken about twenty labor-hours just to draft the trouble ticket for research by corporate.
Our onboarding and training staff were quite perplexed at how and why this apparently random new hire was being pulled to do one of the most complex and demanding jobs in the building, and was processing units at 32,000% to expectation, on his first week on the job...and was using software tools that were supposedly deprecated a year before his hire date to do it.
Oh, that's not even my weird butt plug story.
At one point five years or so back, our department had a bit of a drama spat with customer returns. The desk magnifiers they used to assess returned product were all worn and busted, and instead of just buy new ones they argued we didn't need ours and took them. Except, we needed them to research and assess inventory, too. Management predictably didn't listen to us, and wouldn't let us take ours back.
So one day we had this monster clear glass butt plug show up in our "found unlabeled, research and identify, and return to inventory or liquidate" pile. And when I say "monster", I mean this thing was the size of a Coke bottle. After the initial round of novelty, this bigass butt plug kind of became the "unofficial problem solve mascot": we kept it out during shift, hid it at the end of shift so some churchie or cowboy manager wouldn't get buttmad about it, and would secret it away in places our coworkers would find it for a funny surprise.
One day I needed a magnifying glass to read an incredibly small label, and for wont of anything else to do held the butt plug over the label. I figured, a butt plug shape would refract the light if I held it just right, and it would work as a pseudo-magnifying glass. I'll be damned if it didn't, and from that point forward I started using this giant glass butt plug as a magnifying glass when I needed one...and beyond finding it absolutely hilarious, so did my coworkers.
Until one day when my own manager was doing a walk through and saw me doing it. He walked over and asked what on Earth I was doing, clearly trying his hardest to not completely lose his shit and failing. And I told him -- customer returns took our desk magnifiers and magnifying glasses, they won't give them back and operations won't listen to us when we say we need them, so I'm making do with what I had available to do my job to the best of my ability. He said he'd take care of it, and double timed it out of sight to keep from pissing himself in laughter on the production floor.
The very next day, the butt plug was gone but we had our magnifying glasses back. I suspect "our problem solvers are so strapped for equipment they're using comically-oversized sex toys as magnifying glasses" was finally the argument that convinced operations we did, in fact, need magnifying glasses to do our job.
Yeah, same.
Actually, I'm sure there's some good material here.
One of the weirdest things I ever did was answer a call from someone who wanted to know if they could get on a bus with a box containing venomous snakes. Apparently he goes to remote areas to show people who've come into the area for work some of the dangerous wildlife to avoid. Didn't have the answer, though, transferred that one.
One of the people I work with apparently got a call about lost property. Which turned out to be substantial amounts of illegal drugs. The person calling was sufficiently high to say this, and not think that there might be legal repercussions to doing this. When this was pointed out they hung up...though now that I think of it that means there were dangerous substance around that weren't reported.
The weirdest one, though, was also lost property, again not something I dealt with myself. Apparently someone was transporting human organs for transport using public transport, and left them behind on a bus.
Well if you want weirder...
Not long after I originally started there, a young woman on nights was busted giving head, $10 a pop. Right there on the production floor, she'd just sneak off into a gaylord or in a quiet spot and get to work. The WTF part of this, was she wasn't fired for blowing guys at work for cash, she was fired for TOT (time off task, i.e. that highly controversial business practice where they count seconds between each scan and write people up/fire them if they're taking too long). The literal prostitution happening on company property, on company time, wasn't the deal-breaker, it was the associate not being productive enough while giving blowjobs.
And, those of us who've been around a while count peak seasons (i.e. Christmas season) by "theme"...
2014 was the year of the convict labor. Our site didn't hit staffing goals (turns out an $11/hour starting wage and wage cap of $12.50/hour wasn't all that compelling, least of all when you've pissed off literally every single prospective employee in a hundred mile radius), so they got convict labor from the state to work night shift. Pretty ironic that for as selectively hypervigilant as Amazon is about theft, you'd come in at start of shift and see hundreds of convicts duck walking through security surrounded by armed guards.
2015 was the year of the sex toy theft ring. Employees just got it in their heads to steal sex toys like a ************. At one point that peak, our backlog for suspected theft research in sex toys alone was over a hundred thousand dollars' worth of inventory.
2016 was the year of the swingers. It was the last year our site used camper force for...reasons that will become obvious, I assume. Camper force is generally retired/semi-retired, younger folks that lack permanent housing, or other itenerant workers that live and work out of RV's; that year, instead of renting a campground, our site hosted camper force in our outer parking lot. Well as it turns out, camper force has a healthy number of...let's call them "alternate lifestyle" folks.
Or to put it another way, our site's parking lot was host to a 24/7 swinger party for the entire month of December.
2017 was the year of Code Schwifty. It's entirely possible it was just something in the water as our site has never been diligent about maintaining water coolers, but we had a month-long plague of people shitting everywhere but in the toilet. Shitting in trash cans, shitting in totes and throwing them on the conveyance, shitting in shipping cases, shitting in gaylords, even just straight up shitting on the floor: someone, somewhere, at least once per shift would take a public shit. Just, shit everywhere; the highlight of the month was when someone took a big, healthy dump in front of the bathroom.
It happened so often that year, my department changed our Skype for Business channel name to "Schwifty Watch" and we would call out when, and where, people were shitting that day. We called it, as you probably guess, Code Schwifty. We had people from other departments, up to and including regional and corporate salaried employees, joining our department's channel for a laugh.
But we were all a little fucky in the head that year. Harvey and Irma knocked out most of Amazon's fulfillment network, and we were one of the last softlines facilities in operation east of the Mississippi. We'd been on mandatory overtime for five months before December, and we'd stay on mandatory overtime until March of 2018.
It is tales such as these that I both adore for their hilarity, and also keep as sober reminders that few of my work problems, if any, will ever get remotely this bad.
If I had a hat, I’d tip it to you and the rest of the mad bastards you work with.
"Fearful"? Fucking "Fearful"?? What scientist did they manage to smuggle out of which chronic anxiety clinic for this bullshit spin?