The most stand out moments you ever had at work.

[Hard-Target]

I recently got my first job(off the books but who cares?) and i got into a discussion with an old buddy of mine about the best/worst things that had ever happened to him at work. He said one of the biggest scares he got as wide eyed teenager delivering pizzas for Dominoes was the one time the guy who ordered the pies tried to jack him for his car. He had waited for him to arrive and then took out a knife and tried to force his way inside the car. My buddy managed to step on the pedal and drove quickly back home. He called his boss that night and quit his job.

Now i know this question was more than likely asked already but i figured it was still worth stating. So, to repeat, what was the most stand out moment at your work place? Wether good or bad.

 

[tippy2k2]

I used to work at NCO as an Apple iPod tech support technician (*makes the sign of the cross to ward off the evil).

Working as a Tier 2 tech support (when you call, you talk to T1; when you demand a manager or if your problem is too much for them to handle, you talk to me) person, you got to talk to all sorts of interesting/horrible things.

If there's one thing I found fascinating while working there, it's this:

Apple users are surprisingly OK with their iPods exploding.

Part of T2's job is to take "safety" calls. If there's any risk that the customer is going to be hurt (or could have been hurt) by an incident, they are automatically bumped up to me. In my year and a half as a T2 agent, I had three separate incidents of iPod's exploding (one on a charger, one sitting on the table, and one shockingly in the dudes God damn pants[footnote]I had pictures of every one of these incidents btw[/footnote]...) and all three of them said the same thing: "I don't need a new iPod or anything, I just want you guys to know so that they can look into this so it doesn't happen to other people".

I, being the T2 agent who somewhat gave a shit, gave every single one of these people brand new iPod Nanos for their trouble (one of the few benefits of being a T2 agent is I had the power to give shit away for free).

 

[Shoggoth2588]

When I worked for Blockbuster, there was a snow storm to the extent that I could only make it to work because of the fact that I could walk to the place. The snow was up to about my waist so I wasn't expecting customers but since there was power in the shopping center, we had to go in. The stand-out moment is this: My manager and I sat around watching The Punisher: War Zone...until a guy came in with his 3 or 4 year old kid...GREAT FUCKING PARENTING AND THANKS FOR MAKING ME TURN OFF A CLASSIC, MARVEL FILM!

 

[Spinwhiz]

I used to work right here at The Escapist....the stories I could tell!

 

[Little Woodsman]

Oh, there are soooo many...how about I stick to a funny one...

While I was working at a blood center we had a regular donor who would always kick when we inserted the needle, no matter how gently or smoothly the needle insertion went. Usually I got the task of holding her feet down to prevent this, but one day I was the one who got to draw her blood, and everyone else was busy, and since she had been much better about not kicking much in her last few donations, I thought it would be fine to go ahead with the procedure without her feet being restrained. So when I do the insertion WHAP, her foot comes up and clocks me in the side of the head. Now it didn't hurt, and more importantly to me I didn't hurt her or mess up the needle stick. In fact, I was trying *really* hard not to laugh about the whole thing. (Wasn't entirely successful at not laughing...)
The poor lady was so mortified that she wouldn't stop apologizing to me, no matter how many times I told her it was all right and she didn't need to apologize. Unfortunately, she never came back after that....

 

[Guffe]

I can't tell too much about it.
But I had been at my current work for about 3 weeks.
Had to investigate a suicide were a guy had shot his head of, I always knew it might come eventually something like this, but 3 weeks in?
Well, yeah...
Not the nicest of sights, but wasn't as bad as I had prepared for either.

 

[JoJo]

I used to work right here at The Escapist....the stories I could tell!

Spinwhiz?! We haven't forgotten your reign of terror yet ;-)

OT: Most likely Prom Night at the place where I used to work, when my special someone and I spent most of the evening holding each other, to bemused looks from others. It was one of the stand out moments of my life, let alone work (since I was technically on duty at the time).

 

[Scarim Coral]

The only stand out moment I had so far in work (not my favourite) was during Sunday afternoon it was half an hour until closing down until suddently there were THREE buses loads of kids and teachers entered the store!

Ok sure having a huge burst of customers coming in is not strange per say but what I found strangest the most is that they were on a school trip and the decided to visit our store as a equivalent of a gift store. I worked in a bargain like store that sell cheap brandeed stuff or proper branded stuff that are also cheap. Not only that but I also lived in a costal resort town with a beach and pier. So my question is why on Earth did they visit our store as a gift store for the kids???

Seriously there are plenty of gift stores arond the town (rock candy shop, seashell and beach shop by the pier and actual gift shops and etc). Before you asked what they bought inside the store, it was mainly sweet and a coupld of mini gift for their parent (like a mugt or a plastic flower with a pot or siberling (like a toy car).

Needless to say it was a pain in the ass serving those kids as they made a huge mess inside the store especially when I had it neat and tidy a few minutes ago and we (only me and the supervisor on a Sunday) end up standing an hour more since we were still serving those brats after closing time!

Granted the manager was please with the result despite the huge mess since we took in £200 alone from them and it turn out there were around 80 kids that had enter and bought stuff in the store!

 

[Bug MuIdoon]

I remember a lot of pretty awful incidents.

Without going in to too much detail, I found a good friend/colleague/boss with her wrists cut in a locked toilet.

Another time when a little girl had been kidnapped and I was the middle man between the police and the girl's mother for a good few hours. She was eventually rescued, which is great, but her mother sent me loads of gifts to my workplace and I got treated like a Hero at work for a while, which is always nicer.

I've had to talk people out of suicide, over the phone, quite a few times, whilst I get in contact with the proper folks to deal with it.

I've had to deal with people being held hostage.

I've even been held hostage myself. When I was 16, me and my fellow night-shift colleagues were held at gun and machete point, tied up with our own aprons and locked inside a store room. Fun times!


Though on the flip side I also have a lot of very funny work related memories.

Homeless folk using our private bathroom and smearing shite all over the walls, Getting ridiculously drunk and playing Destruction Derby on forklift trucks, Funny arguments with drunk old women over banal things and most importantly making some great life-long friends.

 

[Miyenne]

I managed a shoe store, so I just got a lot of dumb people.

This happened when I was alone, as my employees didn't bother to show up that day.

One woman asked to see all the moccasins in size 6. Now, my store had moccasin in the name. We had a lot of shoes that could be called a moccasin. Like, hundreds of styles. And each of those styles in 2-10 different colours.

So when I told her that and asked for her to specify, she got snippy and told me to bring them all out, each style and every colour of each style. My mouth kinda fell open at that point and I said "You want me to bring out several hundred pairs of shoes for you to look at them all?"

Yep. She demanded it. Like, stomped her foot and pointed at me and demanded it.

I snorted and said no and walked away.

She called to complain to the manager the next day. I was like "Uh, yeah. That was me yesterday, and I'm the manager so.... Yeah. Bye."

Or the woman who brought in moccasins she had bought that had gum rubber soles. Gum rubber is not like regular soles, it's not as solid as normal shoes, it's gummy which means it grips better. It also wears out faster.

So the woman wore suede gum rubber moccasins through a mud puddle. She hadn't treated the leather or anything. She shows them to me. The leather is destroyed from her hand washing them, and then, here's the kicker, she said to dry them she put them outside sole up on her picnic table that was painted dark brown... On an incredibly hot summer day.

The soles had melted. She wanted me to fix it.

I said I couldn't. Rubber melts, and she didn't take care of the shoes. I wouldn't help her. She got so angry, she didn't understand why the shoes had melted. She couldn't get it through her head. I didn't know how to explain it better than "rubber melts".


Or the picky lady who kept pointing out flaws in the leather shoes. Marks on the skin. Which, as everyone knows can't be avoided. Animals get scars. If it doesn't affect the durability of the leather, the leather is still used. She didn't understand why there were marks on the shoes and kept asking for discounts. I finally snapped and said "What do you want, a cow that lived in a bubble?"

The store, full of customers, ended up laughing at her for that.

Hm. I kinda come off as a ***** with these, but generally I bent over backwards for customers if they treated me with respect. These people didn't.

 

[Someone Depressing]

I work at GAME. A woman came in, complaining that her copy of GTA5 was hacked, and she was with her son. She said that she couldn't start the game; so, I told her that every time you wanted to play it, you had to install it. She then said that it was an outrage and that I should fix it; I told her I couldn't, and that it was supposed to be like that. This went on for about 15 minutes, before I agreed to take the game from her, I went to the back, went back to her, and handed her the same copy. She then said I was a prick, exact word, and then I never saw her again. The disc was fine, everything was there, it was not a bootleg.

What made it so bad is that the kid started crying, and called me all kinds of things because I refused to help his mother. When I bursted out laughing at some of the things, the mother was red-faced and started screaming at the top of her voice. The store was mostly empty though; there were 2 kids looking for used copies of PS3 games, and a girl talking to a cashier. It was very exhausting, due to the fact that this dragged it on about another 5 minutes, to a total of 15.

I was pretty rude, but so is a mother who barges into a very peaceful, quiety place that people went to do their shopping, and shouting about something that wasn't an issue. I'm a bastard sometimes.

Anothing thing was when a very mousy-looking guy had knocked over a cabinet. After I picked it up, he began to apologise profusely, and offered to pay for any damages. And when I told him that the only games in it were Call of Duty and nobody would want to pay to get new ones, he burst out laughing and fell over. And then began to apologise again.

I also once got a package with an XBOX that smelt like sashimi and barbecue in it, and a letter that said, "My xbox caught on fire; I had to go to work, so I'm leaving it with you. Do something. Anything. Thanks."

 

[Sarah Kerrigan]

I used to work for a neighbor and his wife over the summer helping them organize her recently deceased mother's objects. I then worked for a few months organizing their basement of DVDs, old family photos and documents. I was going through their movies (I got first rights at borrowing and such) and I am a huge buff myself.

The Husband works as a manager on ebay, and he has alot of doubles of movies and old gaming stuff they tried to sell at yard sales and couldn't. So, he let me have the guide for Dino Crisis on the Playstation, a few older movies and even a few old playstation and xbox games i've been wanting to try.

And hell, I was getting paid for doing everything too. They even offered me dinner and stuff. Best job ever imo.

 

[Mr Fixit]

Well my job is quite boring, so the only thing even worth mentioning is the day I got to work to find the building right next to us was burning down. Completely burning down & the flames were getting very close to my building. Not to bad of a day though, boss man took us out to breakfast that morning & no one died, so it's mostly good I guess.

 

[Flutterguy]

I had a particularly useless coworker, he would spend all of his time pretending to work. Alot of rookies tend to do this the first few days so we let it slide. One day we were told to load a truck and we could leave. He decided we had to pick up the pace and yelled at us to do so. The entire crew burst out laughing and immediately went on break. Apparently he lost his motivation, and spent the last 20 min in the porta-potty. He quit the next day.

 

[Dirge Eterna]

I worked at Best Buy for a while when I was going to College, this was in Wichita Kansas. One day a couple came in and bought a PC, monitor, Printer, laptop and a bunch of software and DVD's. This was in 2000 or 2001 so computers were a lot more expensive back then and they bought the top of the line stuff we had at the time. I think the total was a little over $4k. Put it all in the truck bed of their pickup and proceeded to drive down to the Walmart that was also in the shopping mall. They go in and do their thing and come out and of course all their stuff is gone. These brainiacs decided it was Best Buys fault because we helped load the stuff into the bed of their truck, apparently because we didn't say hey idiot don't leave this expensive gear sitting out to be stolen it was our fault. So they start demanding that we give them all new stuff to replace what was stolen. Of course the managers were like no way. It went on for about 30 minutes till someone called the police and they were told they had to leave. We were all in shock like did they really think it was ok to leave all that stuff just sitting in the parking lot for an hour or so?

 

[Teoes]

In my current job I've re-designed a central aspect of the company's business and built it from scratch, so any time anyone has a query or needs something fixed they come to me. That's a pretty good feeling.

In an old job, working at a hotel: making the beast with two backs with my girlfriend of the time in the dining room - and again in the lounge. We had to pause so she could go to reception and check in some new guests. Bloody glad they didn't take a wee tour to see the dining room..