Edited because this was a personal and limited-time only, story about my past. I don’t want this to keep lying around forever. Ask me in person if you want to hear it again :)
When I worked in the south we had a fellow that decided because he got fired by a black woman that everyone was a racist despite there being zero racial tension in the store other than his personal vendetta. He came back and tried to murder the most patently inoffensive skinny white dude in the the parking lot. He throttled him and was yelling he was an ___ lover because he was friendly with everyone. So its 1AM at Walmart and I go charging across the parking lot with zero plan. I ended up getting his attention then backpedaling at which point his victim had fled and he realized there was nothing else to do and ran off himself. I tried to give the cop the shirt that somehow rednecks feel like they need to shed before they “get physical” with someone and got only an offended look in return. They didn’t even take a statement.
Same Walmart we had a fellow that was very clearly a recovering addict of some kind who want from hyper religious praise Jeebus to sullen and increasingly angry. He got to the point where he was showing up to get paid but wouldn’t do much work and would ride his bike around the backroom. I remember him becoming convinced we were all Satanic because we were talking about a fantasy setting. He told us we need to find Jesus I quiped “Does he provide an experience bonus” Not long after that we had cops monitoring the exit to ensure nobody got murdered on the way out. I’m not sure exactly what he said when they fired him but I understand threats were made.
Same store there was the boss who turned on the electic door motor while I was fixing it causing the little hand crank to go flying across the room like a spear.
Then there was the fellow who would just NOT stop stealing shit like blatantly who was eventually at long last fired for stealing root beer.
A couple come to mind
The guy who ran a porn server from work. Was finally caught when the internet bill was huge and the cio and a tech tracked it through the network to his port. Waited until he walked away for a minute and when he came back found them on hands and knees about to pull the network cable from the server under his desk. Apparently he was making quite a bit off it too. His first words were ‘I’m fired, aren’t I?’
A woman who lied constantly. She’d claim we built something other than what we were asked to make, and the only defense was to show her the email where she asked for exactly what she got. We learned to document everything with her.
Funny side story. When I joined, all bright eyed and energetic, they assigned me to support her. No warning. I went on and created some software for her, only to get screamed at an blamed for made up reasons. I thought I was about to get fired… Turns out my team was kind of being assholes too. They all decided not to tell me anything to see if a fresh unbiased person had issues too.
Long time ago my boss
tells me to make an SSH account called “companyname” with password “companyname123”
I refused, that’s stupid, it’s a security nightmare waiting to happen. I’ll happily make a different account and you know, make you use a good password
No, you MUST do this.
Okay, I protest, but orders are orders
Fast forward 2 months. Servwr gets hacked, through that account. Boss tales awayy year bonus because of this.
YOU FORCED ME TO DO THIS! !
yes I did but you are still responsible for the security of all the servers. This server was hacked, and because of that you will be denied your bonus
The stupidity that some people can display is amazing, really
I think I’ve blocked out most of the bad ones, and most of my coworkers have been good or okay.
This one guy I remember though. This might only be relevant for people who live in software.
He refused to name his tests. Normally with jest or mocha you have tests like
describe(“user settings page”, () => { it(“allows the user to change their name”, () => { etc
But he refused. He’d put empty string in both spots. So you’d open a test file and there’d just be a dozen anonymous unlabeled tests and you’d have to puzzle out what they were trying to do.
He was a reasonably nice person when we talked, at least. But this drove me crazy.
A previous workplace had a former contractor I constantly had to fix his shit from. One of his many peccadilloes was how he did shell scripts. He’d have dozens of scripts in folders, each named things like “bsr001, bsr002, bsr003,” and so on. Each script was only three lines.
- The usual #!/bin/sh
- One line of code.
- A call to execute the next script in sequence
Some of his stuff was “encrypted” by base64 so you couldn’t read them. I mean, it was easy to figure out how to decrypt them, but still annoying.
Guy charged $250k/year for his work. And apparently was so surly, when I started working there after him, they were shocked how friendly I was.
This is some next level awful. Reminds me of that “inner json effect” dailywtf post from ages ago https://thedailywtf.com/articles/the-inner-json-effect
He said that the test names were essentially comments, and “comments quickly become lies”. Which, fine, we’ve all seen bad comments. But the test names are more like file names than comments, and no sensible person is going to suggest we get rid of file and folder names. Except the other guy who responded to me with the shell scripts with no names that each call each other, maybe.
He was on a different team at a large company so I didn’t get wind of this right away. We had a meeting scheduled to hash it out, but then there were mass layoffs that day and I left shortly after. For all I know he’s still there
