Foo - Work place incidents

Has there been a situation at your work place where someone has completely lost it?

An irate customer? A frustrated fellow employee? Argument with the boss? Delivery people with attitudes?

Please tell us....:D

I had to break up a fistfight between a couple co-workers one morning. Never did find out what it was about.

I've seen some crazy stuff. When I worked at Sears many years back, someone went after a guy with a power saw. A lot of people piled onto the guys involved, and no one was hurt.

This was several years ago, but it's a classic.

Working overnights, a 'customer' was stopped for attempting to steal cigarettes. He started to get loud and abusive, prompting someone to call for 'backup'. By the time I got up front, the situation was over, but my 2nd wife and a buddy were there for the whole thing. They told me he was tirading on all of them:

"So WHAT you caught me stealing? I'll be back to steal again, and if you try an' stop me, I'll kill ALL you honkey muthaf****s!"

My 2nd wife is of mixed ancestry, never been called 'honkey' before....

My buddy knows it's me when I call or text and call him '*****', I've been teasing him with that ever since.

Nothing in my direct office, but the manufacturing building had some sort of a love triangle going on where one guy threatened to kill the woman and the other guy. He was fired and we now have a security guard posted at the door of that building.

There is this one guy...

Once, he was irate with me because I failed to read an email he had sent that he thought was very important. It may have been, but sending it from an @aol.com address to my work address failed to capture my attention. He had an irate, foul-mouthed confrontation in a meeting shortly thereafter. Afterward, his immediate supervisor offered to hold him down while I sucker-punched him (a joke, of course). His manager issued a formal apology. Still unsatisfied, he quit. But he kept ties to the company with his new consulting firm.

A later episode involving him an a customer of his ( a training seminar at his location) couldn't grasp a concept, so he stormed out, hopped in his corvette and made a dramatic exit. He left everyone there.

Another episode involved him teaching a class at a nearby manufacturing facility. I don't know the details as to why, but apparently he was escorted off the premises before the class was complete. He did donuts in the company's lawn.

He still works for us on occasion, but he is carefully insulated from people.

Years ago I was working for an executive jet charter company. I had received a call to do a short notice flight to Castlegar BC. The trip was to take a "comedian" and drop him off as they were filming a movie nearby.

I was the first in and did all the flight planning etc associated with the flight. While in the hangar checking the aircraft, a moderately attractive blonde woman approached and started the normal niceties of the day conversation. She was dressed in jeans and a jean jacket but looked really well put together.

I left to carry on with preparations when I received another call with the passenger names. They were:

Steve Martin, Damon Wayans, Fred Willard, Shelly Duvall, Michael Pollard, Rick Rossovich and the blonde in jeans, Daryl Hannah.

They were all flying up to Nelson BC to shoot "Roxanne". Fun trip on a beautiful summer day and my first carrying celebrities.

One of my employees took an axe to some office furniture at one of our off-site locations.

We've had two accidental discharges that I know of.

Once in a while we get an irate tenant.

Typical government office.

yeah. working retail, a pair of irate customers were yelling at me because I wouldn't sell them an AC-DC adaptor for a laptop that the store had for $60, but they wanted it for $20 because they saw it on ebay for that price.

and I subsequently quit retail.

I work for the city in the code enforcement department. There's been some "almost" incidences between me and my sorry-assed supervisor. Our manager had to break us up once. That 5 year wonder (my supervisor) always caters to the neighborhood action groups and makes me stop what I'm doing and work on their special projects. I keep having to remind him that we are here to serve the citizens and not a small special group. I've been doing that job for 13 years (17 total with the city) and this young pup is gonna tell me how to do my job. Makes me wanna put my fingers around his neck! Grrr!
I guess I'll never be a supervisor, 'cause I'll never kiss anyone's butt. If you're wrong, I'm gonna tell you that you're wrong. and not sit there and giggle.
Ernest

Jdon,how did you like flying into Castlegar International?

Jdon,how did you like flying into Castlegar International?

Daylight is fine. I used to hate the night medivac flights though.

I was living in Nelson when they filmed that. Big activity for that town.

The 2008 election brought out all kinds of crazy at my office.

I have always had a reputation for being extremely calm and collected in all work situations, including medical or physical emergencies. I have a very stoic personality at work, and sometimes that gets misinterpreted; a co-worker once got upset at me during a meeting and said "I know you're a machine and don't care, but other people have feelings."

The result of this has been that I get to be the hatchet man. I have had to tell many people that their services are no longer needed. That tends to lead to interesting "losing it" moments. Like when I fired someone (and their immediate supervisor) for falsifying time sheets to indicate she had worked when in reality she never actually showed up for weeks on end. After letting her know this in her office, she followed me out into the public area and she screamed (at the top of her lungs) at me that I was the Devil and how did I feel knowing that her children would starve, and many other things that would be bleeped on TV.

I calmly told her to make sure all her personal belongings were removed within the hour, and security would escort her out of the building. I'm a machine.

I totally lose it daily. I lose control of all bodily functions and just sit in my office chair raging and soiling myself.

Been there. I've found Xanax helps.

I totally lose it daily. I lose control of all bodily functions and just sit in my office chair raging and soiling myself.

Pics, or it didn't happen. :D

First week on the job as the new white boy from the suburbs in the Chicago ghetto I set off the panic alarm several times (I kept pressing it wondering when something was going to happen) which had several police cars drive into the shop and the cops get out expecting an armed robbery. I didn't lose it (and they all believed me I really was the new white boy from the suburbs) but some of the customers got kind of freaked out.

Another time at another job I came back from lunch to see one of our employees being put in the back of a squad car (got busted for driving without a license), we had to call the cops on a crazy customer another time, and I had a guy come back suffering from roid rage after his girlfriend thought we didn't treat her right. I don't miss retail either.

Ah yes. Retail. I hated working in that horrible industry. My favourite work place incident was about 18 years ago when I worked in a gift shop selling sports/tourist tshirts and sweatshirts. My boss was an awful, awful woman who made it loud and clear to me and my co-workers that the rules were for us and not her. As the months passed we were reminded daily that even a minute's lateness would mean working late night shifts for a month (regardless of either plans or commitments), being off any amount in the cashing out reports were recorded and once it surpassed $2 in a month the person would get a notice that his or employment would end the next time any outage or overage was recorded (we tried to bypass this by adding our own pocket change when any of us were over or short, even a penny, for each other), and NO PERSONAL PHONE CALLS. I know, these are pretty basic rules. Not out of the ordinary but it was the way she'd get really close to our faces when she wanted to know why I was short $0.03 in my cash report. Or holler at someone who'd spent an hour on a crowded train that was stuck in a subway tunnel from an electrical short. But oh my. Never touch the phone. That made her crazier than anything. But mostly because she needed that phone for her own personal calls that came through all day long. That woman was never off the phone to her friends, mother, boyfriends, or her awful brother who came in to "borrow" team jackets on weekends.

One weekend she called the store and I answered the phone. She told me to take $50 out of the till, grab a sweatshirt and pants from the stock, and come to a motel in the west end of the city. Turns out her date the previous night took her to a motel and left before she woke up the next morning, taking her purse and clothes. My chin was on the floor. This was not a typical retail situation by any stretch of the imagination. There was no way I could take money and clothes from the store because my rat manager told me she was naked in a motel. She had plenty of people she could call but the store employees shouldn't have been on her short list. It was the manager's bad luck (and my good luck) that the store owner and his wife had come in about a half hour earlier. I put the manager on hold and whispered to the owner what the manager told me.

Good times.

We had a new manger on Monday. She was much better. I quit the job after Christmas and the new manager told me to call her the next time I needed work.