A Swiss IT dude took offence at being criticized by his manager for having taken time off work to go have his hair cut by reminding the offender: "Well.. it does, also, at the company's time grow…"
Recession panic landed a US company in court after trying this brainless move. The dim bulbs involved thought it was a great idea to fire a very productive young couple in their employ that had just bought a house and were expecting their first child. Actually, they only really wanted to get rid of the woman but one pf the smarter fellers figured hubby'd be mad that his wife was fired and so they were better off to fire him too. The couple are awaiting a handsome settlement to start off their New Year.
This case study comes from an Atlanta placement agency and is just the kind of thing that keeps them in business.
“I sent a digital resume and cover letter via email to apply for a position as a technical writer. Within a few hours, a message from the director in charge of hiring came via email. Full of anticipation, I opened the email to find a terse message: ‘your resume is infected with a virus and has been quarantined.’ A person cannot recover from an infected resume. I did not pursue the position further.”
Prepping another candidate for a job interview, the 20-something was asked about his greatest accomplishment. He replied that it was writing a short novel. When the caseworker said, ‘No, I mean something you did while at work,’ the candidate replied, ‘But I did write it while at work. Wrote the whole thing on their time ”
Then there are the times when it's someone else who messes you out of a jib. The same agency reported a client who returned to his hometown after a stint in the big city, anxious to get into the real estate game. As he had all the requirements, they had no trouble getting him appointments with the biggest players. The job he wanted was a done deal as soon as he met one of the co-owners who was out of town, She returned, they had a pleasant lunch together and as they were puling into the company lot, the boss person looked over at him and purred sweetly.
"And you're Ann Wilson' s younger brother, correct?"
"" Correct. So do you know Ann?"
“She was dating my husband. My married name was Keller.”
Out on probation on fraudulent offences and getting wind of an IT related job in a neighbouring state, the attorney representing this young job seeker had this to say: "My client is so desperate to turn his life around, he knowingly crossed the Maryland state line in violation of his probation, feeling the interview was worth risking possible jail time.” Wonky logic but solid work ethic.
Sometimes the office building itself will turn on you. This one’s from the UK. “One of my first jobs as a supervisor was to interview candidates for an administrative assistant,” Leigh S. recalls. “We scheduled a full day of screenings. Following a very wet and rainy night, some areas of our office roof were leaking and maintenance had a couple of buckets in the hallway. Not a great first impression, but hey, it was a quaint old office building. Each applicant had to complete a battery of written tests.
“As one candidate dutifully sat at a desk outside my office, I heard a “crack,” a “swoosh” and then a huge splash. The ceiling tile just above the candidate had collapsed under the weight of the rainwater and drenched her. Wet but unharmed, the experience clearly dampened her spirits and her prized interview suit. She immediately informed me that she was no longer interested in the job.”
Sometimes it’s the whole system that’s out of order. The Tourist Board in Athens embarked on re-education program in the summer to counter allegations of tours guides behaving badly. Among the problem behaviours, theft, overtly hitting on the tourists and setting their own agendas, including keeping their charges standing around in front of sites with no-smoking policies, while the guides enjoy their smoke breaks.
When an actor delivers a wooden performance, it’s said he/she ‘mailed it in’. The postie shoulda mailed this one in....
A 17-year employee of the U.S. Postal Service is on unpaid leave after being charged with public intoxication. Police in Marion, Iowa, say the woman was found inside a home, drunk on the kitchen floor, eating leftover noodles.
Ditto for U.S. surgeon Mark Weinberger, who had been on the lam for five years avoiding a flood of malpractice lawsuits, when spotted in Italy and about to be captured. Rather than face justice, he tried to check out by stabbing himself in the throat, but as befitting his status as a world-class screwup surgeon, he missed the key artery and is now in custody.
Even workplace sex isn’t what it used to be. Worst On The Job Sex.Ever
A female art teacher at W.T. White High School in Dallas, Tex., called the police on her student, Martin Guerrero, 17, whom she caught in the middle of class in full masturbatory mode. As she approached, he "began to moan and said 'aye mami,'" and kept right on going.
Japan Today reported that truck driver Yuuki Oshima, 22, was arrested for a November 19th incident in which he allegedly urinated though the mail slot in a woman's apartment door. Police said Oshima told them he did it out of unrequited love, that "I absolutely went crazy for her the first time I saw her."
Russell Vanderwerf, 44, a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms official, faced several charges after making himself at home in a Residence Inn in a New Orleans suburb. Police said Vanderwerf, among other things, modified a room door to install a glory hole padded with duct tape.
However, while many industries are cutting back, the sex trade continues to grow and grow. Nevada State Health Division is set to include men in the codes governing prostitution in early January. Bobbi Davis, owner of the Shady Lady Ranch, is waiting to add 2 men to her current stable of 5 women in the hopes of tapping into the female market. She wants to start offering the service to ladies by mid January. George Flint, a lobbyist for the profession, does not foresee success in the venture. According to Flint it has been tried before, but women want to spend too much time with the male sex workers for it to be lucrative. The lobbyist does suggest that male prostitutes for gay clientele might be a better way to go.
Field Trip Of The Year comes from Music teacher, Mary Segall who accompanied 40 students to a performance in downtown Phoenix. Then she took the students to a local restaurant for lunch. That would have been fine except the restaurant chosen was Hooters. The teacher claims it was the only place they could get seated due to the size of the group. School officials don't buy it though, so Ms. Segall is on administrative leave. She is retiring end of January and the district won't say if she will return to the classroom before then or not. Hooters is hoping she returns to their place of learning at least once more, with students.
In another food-service related item, a fight over a grocery cart at an Aachen, Germany supermarket escalated into a full-on brawl with the dread call on the PA system, ‘SWAT Team in Aisle 9’ .A 74 year old man got into an altercation with a 35 year old woman, her 24 year old brother and their 53 year old mother. It started in the parking lot and continued into the store, where two of the four armed themselves, one with a salami and the other with a piece of parmesan cheese. At the height of the throwdown, bystanders became involved and in the end two people had to be treated for minor injuries at the hospital.
It took someone else to demonstrate Best Distrust of the Medical System. With considerable reluctance and only after much effort from his family,Yitzhak Ganon, 85, finally went to see a doctor, in Petach Tikva, Israel, because of a life-threatening infection. Mr Ganon explained it was his first doctor visit in 65 years, since the last time he saw one led to a nasty experience (in Auschwitz, Germany, when Dr. Joseph Mengele removed one of his kidneys without anesthesia).
The recession hit the airline industry particularly hard but this is not just an otter flight delay rant. This one was a tad outside the box. Two otters busted out of a cargo hold in a Continental jet at Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston in high spirits and went touring. Quickly captured by the otter-security trained ground crew, they were removed from the plane in a secured box. Or not. as one otter again broke out and this time, having checked out the surroundings, eluded capture for another 45 minutes, for a total of an hour and 20 minutes late as the plane lifted into the sky carrying a hundred stories starting, “Honey, you won’t believe what happened at the airport…”
Work doesn’t get any better even when it’s your own business. This case underlines why the self-employed can never take vacations. A successful vet in an upscale neighborhood went away for a week and left the biz in the capable hands of her bright, young and enthusiastic assistant. The relevant excerpts are taken from the assistant’s very detailed notes and shed light on what happens when youth, inexperience and enthusiasm for a job well done mash together.
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“ The kitten (client name withheld) brought in was about 8 months old, with vomiting and anorexia. Upon abdominal palpation I could feel a foreign body. At x-ray, it appeared to be a ring the kitty had eaten. I went to surgery and removed it It was a really nice looking ring, kind of antiquey. I thought (client name withheld) would be very happy to get it back as it looked to me like a wedding band). Strange thing. When (client name withheld) did come in and I told her the whole story and gave her the ring, she wasn’t all that excited. She became very white and distant (I thought it was the shock of her bill…for which she had signed an estimate for!). No, she said the bill was fine…the problem was that the ring was not hers. Then I remembered they’d just moved in but when I said, “Indoor only kitty and a new house” and she didn’t look happy, that’s when I realised. Wow! did I feel terrible!
Finally, if there were any lingering doubts, absolute proof there’s no such things as the ‘perfect job’. The man who scored what was dubbed "the best job in the world" as the caretaker on a tropical island off Australia has been stung by a lethal jellyfish. Briton Ben Southall, who beat 34,000 applicants to secure the position, was stung during his last week in the job. The culprit was the peanut-sized Irukandji jellyfish, whose venomous sting can be lethal. In his blog, which he keeps as part of his job, he describes the incident as "a little sting on the beach". But it was his progressive symptoms of fever, headache, lower back pain, chest tightness and high blood pressure that led doctors to diagnose the sting.
"I thought I'd done particularly well at avoiding any contact with any of the dangerous critters that consider this part of the world their home," Mr Southall writes in the latest update to his online diary.
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