Asklemmy

I've got two stories, both temp jobs in my younger years.

I was working a temp job on some weaving machine with some girl. I was engaging in some chit chat while we were monitoring the machine until the next manual interference had to be done. She asked me if I liked the job. I told her it was fine, I was just there to earn my bread, I didn't think much of it. It was just chatter, or so I thought.

After the break, the manager came to me and told me that since i didn't like working there, I was fired. Turns out the girl went to the manager office, literally crying, telling him that I was complaining about the job and she feared that it would badly influence her position in the company and that I was sabotaging the company.

That was fucking weird! Anyways, I was out of there and didn't care a bit. I was 19 or so and had a new job the next day. It was only a summer job anyways.

Another summer job (a year later) was another temp job. I had to go to some distribution company and they'd tell me what to do. Fine.

I got there and they tell me I had to wipe conveyer belts with a cloth. That sucks, but allright, it was only for a week. A few moments later, one of the workers came up to me and asked me why I was there. I said I was there to work. He said, "No, I mean what did you do to be put here". He thought I was a convicted fellon doing my time there. Clearly this was that kind of job. Needless to say I rung up the temp agency and explained to them that I wouldn't be going back there.

It was my first job in a hostile city. My apartment was trash so I learned to sleep under my desk instead of going back there. My parents were getting divorced and it ended up forcing me to pick sides. I cut off communication from both of them due to the pressure, and decided to do something positive in my life. I joined a gym. It cured all my social anxiety, my stammer was gone, I could look people in the eye, and I was getting a lot of attention from girls. This made me more angry than happy as I realised that these same girls did not care to talk to me before I got fit. I isolated myself at work too as I tried to distract myself in my work from my unstable life, but one girl would not let up and would actively touch me and try to get me to react to her. It was harassment, but I never reported her. I endured it for a year or two, then she left, and afterwards I left the country.

I was once held at gunpoint over a 6pack of crunch donuts. I caught a guy cutting catalytic converters out of cars, and he then proceeded to chase me with a Sawzall. I watched an elderly man get run over by his wife and as i was rendering first aid he died. A homeless man once took a boxcutter from a grocery store employee, held it to his neck and said "watch me die".

None of those were my worst day at work though. My worst day was a 16 hour shift where I had to sit in a cubicle, with no phone, tv, or ac. I was staring at a monitor showing a camera feed that was only showing a door. It was just me, alone, and bored and cold and miserable for 16 hours. I like to think that's what the CIA did to people in the 60's to mentally break them.

This happened about 10 years ago. In my job, we have 'slots' that we occupy for our given speciality, so my 'slot' is Engineer. Well I had just gotten my Master of Science in Systems Engineering, and my work had Team Leader System Engineering positions that had to be filled. Seemed perfect for me, the only caveat was I had to bring my 'slot' with me, which means when I left my current group, they would be down a 'slot' and couldn't immediately backfill my position until the got approval for another 'slot'.

So I send my resume over, talk to my immediate supervisor, who was supportive and on board, but I also had to talk to his boss, the manager over the group. He says he would love to support me in my career and my moving up and asked me to describe the job. I did, including telling him I would need to bring my 'slot' with me. Well, his attitude immediately changes and he said no in a very gruff way and told me to get out of his office.

I stop there a minute, and still trying to be optimistic about it, I asked if that because my work and skills would be hard to replace and that is why he is acting that way, and that I would be glad to help train a replacement and maybe even do a part time split between the two teams until my replacement was up to speed.

He looked at me, sighed, and said it had nothing to do with me, he could care less if I left, my work wasn't that stellar, he just didn't want to lose a 'slot'. That really broke my confidence as an engineer and frankly as a person to have this guy just dismiss me and reduce me down to just having physical body on his team. I ended up quitting a few months later. I wish I had some sort of karma follow for that, but I was replaced within a few days. Thank god my bosses boss didn't lose his slot though 🙄

A sysadmin couldn't install a Debian server, because the internet was unavailable. There were 2 net cards in the machine (either had an interface twice the size of the PCI slot it was sitting in, the other was regular PCI). My dear mentor put the LAN cable into the regular card, the told the installer to use the other. I told him to finish my work and installed the server for him.

Same sysadmin told me to graft two CAT5e cables. I wired a small cable (10 cm), starting with green-white at both ends, then grefted the two cables with it. Later he complained, that I made a crossed wiring, because the other cables started with orage-white. I couldn't explain, if you double-cross a wire it becomes a straight one. Then I told him, that modern routers configure themsefves, no matter how messed up the wiring.

At another company there were 3 pieces of free antivirus on every PC. A onedrive (free) account was our cloud service. The boss wanted me to teach the store manager how to develop a website and I had one week to do that, that was my last week.

Wow, I literally live in the developing world and most of the stories here are worse than mine.

All I've got is the time I did the Q2 accounting with an open head wound I didn't clearly remember getting -- although it was more scary looking than actually dangerous. I've been hospitalized for overwork a couple of times. The ceiling fell on me once, but it wasn't that heavy. Pretty mild stuff compared to a nurse or convenience store clerk in the West.