Workplace horror stories

[Elijah_Morendale]

...who's got 'em?


I'll hold off on some of mine until I see what you guys have.

[Varia]

I almost cut my finger off once!


I worked at a pizza place when I was seventeen, and I was left at work by my manager.. Left all by myself (which was against regulations). And I was walking by the sinks in the back, where my moron of a manager had left a vegetable slicer on top of a tub, balanced on top of the sink. The walkway back there was very small, and my elbow nudged the tub, and it started to fall. Me, not realizing what was falling, and thinking there might be breakables on it, reached out to catch whatever it was. The bottom of the vegetable slicer met my thumb, and sliced a big, deep gash in the side. I left the damn slicer on the floor and ran to the sink. My hand was GUSHING blood at a rate that I'd never seen before. I was in the store by myself, and couldn't make a single pizza because my hand was bleeding so bad it needed constant pressure. Putting a band-aid on it was pointless because I bled through them too fast. There was a big ass group of kids in there, and I had no way to close the store or even call my manager. When the bitch finally got back, I was dizzy and she made me bus tables with her. All the while clutching my bleeding friggin' hand. I was told later that I should've gotten stitches.

And as a surprise.. She fired me a few weeks later. She fired me. I'm far too nice for my own good.

[Rassius]

About 6 years ago I was prepping for a wedding, cutting turkey on the food slicer. I don't remember exactly what happened but all of a sudden I was in a helluva pain. Cut my thumb, nearly off. I was so lucky the thumb nail almost got ripped off. I still have the shivers when I think about it. >_<

[Elijah_Morendale]

Here's one to start me off.

Last winter, I clocked in just coming off of seven hours of Guitar Hero 2. I manned the register in my department, and cashed someone out. They discovered that they didn't have any money to pay for their stuff, so I had to negate the transaction. I hit the key to do that, which on the register says "abort trans". I also had to page out for one of the CSMs to come back and key their numbers in so it could go through. When you make that page, you're supposed to say "void transaction", but instead I said, "Can I have a CSM back to electronics for an abortion?"

I swear to whatever gods may be up there that time froze. Everyone in the store was looking at me. I hung up the phone, looked at my department manager, and said, "Did I really just say that?"

The customer service desk said that they had sixteen people come up to them and complain about my page.

Woo hah! I live in infamy!

[Wraith]

Hell, I can beat that easy.

I work everyday. I hope that's enough of an explanation as to any way I act.

So, I was putting out items at the Hardware store I work at. It's Harvard Square, and it's busy as hell with the soon-to-be students coming in for their crap. So we're in overall mode. So, a customer comes up to me and starts badmouthing the cashier, who also happens to be my best friend. She couldn't help him with a lightbulb, which was in the process of being put out. So he comes up to me, and says, "The genius cashier couldn't help me, so could you? Thanks man, she looked at my like I was insane."

So, he buys his shit and leaves, and being the friend I am, I go over and tell my friend what he said.

Well, lets just say, he came back for one more. A word of advice, if a female cashier gives you lip and throws change at you, don't call her a cunt. For the love of God.

[Skie and Avery]

Nursing: I have many from the nursing home days, but one still gives me nightmares. I was taking an old lady to the bathroom, walking close behind her as she used her walker to get there. We had just crossed the threshold into the bathroom when she muttered "Gotta pee..." and then her knees started to shake. I grabbed her under her arms so she wouldn't fall, supporting most of her weight against mine. As I moved to swing her to the toilet, I heard the weirdest squelching sound. Hot, wetness hit my legs, my feet, and I looked down. No, she didn't pee. Instead, what looked like strawberry jam had begun to spurt from her anus. Well, the folds of wrinkled skin that hid her anus from view. ANYWAY. Apparently, whenever she eats things with seeds in it, she shits blood everywhere. I freaked out, and tried to step away. My shoes, wet with bloody crap, slip. I manage to toss her onto the toilet before I completely lose balance and fall right into the puddle of blood soaked feces!

In trucking: I was waiting for a place I was delivering up to in the wee hours of the morning in some warehouse district of Chicago. Three guys, greasy and strung out, are coming walking down the street. I'm in the driver's seat with the engine off, my doors locked, listening to the XM radio and chattering with some local warehouse guys on the CB. One of the guys stops at the back of my trailer. I didn't really pay much attention, since it was empty, until his friends came up opposite sides of the truck. One jumped up to my passenger door, the other to the driver's side, trying to open them. I was like, "What the hell!" The guy on the driver's side had a knife, and was yelling at me to open the door. Right, like I was really going to do that. I got my dispatcher to send me directions to the nearest truck stop, told her what was going on, over the onboard Qual Comm computer and put the truck in gear, started the engine. The guy on the passenger side wised up, jumped off. The guy on the driver's side didn't. I started rolling, he's screaming for me to stop, and even though I was only going like 5 mph, I really wanted to just go faster. I opened the door, he lost his footing, fell off the side of my truck and I hit the gas. Didn't check to see if the trailer tires hit him, just went.

There are many trucking stories i have involving hookers, and with the way most of those toothless hags look, they are real horror stories. x.x

[Elijah_Morendale]

Hmph. I once got called a miserable prick by a six year old boy while working the drive-thru window at BK a few years back. But that doesn't compare.

Maybe this will.

So I'm chilling by my register at Wal-Mart, and I see this small family a few feet away at the photo center. The mom is looking at cameras, the eight year old son is looking at his four year old sister, who is sitting in the shopping cart.

The little girl lifts up the front of her dress. No big deal, right? Kids are prone to streaking and stuff, especially at that age. My gaze wanders back to the losers failing at life and the Geometry Wars demo when I hear the little girl say, "Touch it! Touch it!" I turn my head to see her thrusting her pelvis at her brother. The little boy repeatedly says no, so the girl sort of shrugs and... well, she slid her hand inside her own panties. Through the leg, not the waist.

I had to choke back bile and insane laughter and turned my head (child masturbation ain't my bag, dawgz). One of my fellow associated called to me, and I turned around just in time to see the little girl licking her fingers clean. I didn't quite know what to make of that, and I still don't.

[Varia]

Thank you, Elijah, I now feel ill.

But, talking about register stories.. I was working at the register at Michael's (arts and crafts store) around christmas. Every customer coming through had been an absolute asshole, but nothing beat these two ladies I had.

Apparently the one woman (we'll call her bitch#1) had trouble at another register, because Anetta, my supervisor, sent her over and told me to help her before anyone else. I'd just gotten on, and someone (we'll call her bitch#2) skitted in front of the woman. I lean over my counter, and gesture to the woman behind her, telling as politely as I can that I've been sent to help her before all else. My register light wasn't even on yet. Bitch #2 just laughs, slams her items down on my counter and says she's not moving. I sigh, giving bitch#1 the most apologetic look I can, and ring up bitch#2 as quickly as possible. Within the duration of me ringing up her 5 tiny items, they get into what I like to call a "bitch fight". It's not screaming or yelling, there's no kicking or punching, it's just muttered insults and dirty looks.

It started the second I began to ring up bitch#2. Bitch#1 sits back there and scoffs, muttering curses. It worsens, when bitch#1's child starts wandering to the door. She calls her child back, and bitch#2 gets this surprised look on her face, and tells bitch#1 that she's scaring the whole store with her screaching. Bitch#1 comes back with a question, asking if bitch#2 would prefer her child run out on the street and get kidnapped. Bitch#2 replies that the child was probably running from her insane mother. At this time, I finish ringing up the one, and she starts walking out the door. My friend Carrie is wide-eyed in the register next to mine, looking scared. Then, as a finale, bitch#1's husband calls bitch#2 a bitch, low enough that his wife would think he's tough, but quiet enough so the woman couldn't even hear him.

They were, by far, the biggest wusses, and most annoying customers I've ever helped.

[The Emerald Hind]

Okay, my story doesn't involve any potential loss of limbs, or any horrific bowl movements, so it's by no means as bad as it can get, but for me it was pretty awful.

I worked for Blockbuster for two years, and was promoted to manager. I just started at a new store and hadn't been there for more than a few months when this one happened. It was a Sunday and my CSR called in, again, and no one could come into until four, which was rather pointless. So, I was all alone, trying to keep up with the day's traffic, and doing a fair job since the day saw so little traffic, until about eleven when all the church goers came in. I'm checking out customers as quickly as I can when this upper middle class wannabe rich bitch comes through the door with her brat, and swings around to my station to demand that I tell her what out last Tuesday. I asked her to wait a moment so I could check out my customer, or, if she wanted, she could look at the board behind me that lists everything. The woman glared at me and stalked off to follow her kid to the game section, where she proceeded to say rather nasty things about the store while on her cellphone.

After about five minutes, though, she was getting on other people's nerves with her abnoxious conversation, which was being conducted loud enough that she could be heard at the other end of the store. I had customers making comments when they got to the register, and I by that time I was getting a bit upset. However, no sooner did one of my favorite customers get me in a better mood and the woman started yelling at me from the other side of the store demanding to know if the Incredible Hulk for PS2 was for rent. I promptly told her no because it just so happened to be one of the "problem children" on my list of missing titles. She demanded how I can know that without looking it up, and I politely told her that it had been missing for some time and we knew that it had not been returned. A few moments later and she demands that I stop everything I'm doing and tell her whether or not the game is for sales. I looked it up only to tell her note. She then went into another one of her fits and got back on her phone, louder that time than before, and proceeded to call me a lazy, useless bitch.

Unfortunately, instead of storming out like I thought she would, she got in line with a game for her yelling, screaming child, pushed her way to the front of the line, and slammed the game along with some candy on the counter. I went through my usual thing, skipping the sales pitch, and proceeded to check her out. But the woman started yelling at me, demanding that I get the person who had the game she wanted for her son on the phone and tell them to bring it in. I told her I couldn't, and she began to call me these realy ugly names, and I got loud in response, trying to make my point clear and to get her to be quiet. She kept yelling, though, and eventually threw her items at me before stalking outside, but not before getting the name of my manager and my district leader from the information board. Her last words to me were to warn me that I should file for unemployment.

Luckily for me there were two off duty officers, a journalist for the local news paper, and two long time customers in the store when this happened, and they all gave me their contact information. One of the cops even followed her out the store and told her to get out of the shopping center or she was going to be arrested for disturbing a place of business.

A few days later I went into work and my manager calls me into the back room. He informs me that the woman called him and then my district manager demanding that I be fired. However, he wasn't taking it seriously, because he was laughing so hard he can barely tell me what was going on. Apparently, not only did the woman want me fired, but she wanted to sue the store and me for mental and emotional anguish. She told both my superiors that I was rude and offensive and called her horrible names, and that thanks to all my "incoherent and completely unwarranted yelling" that I caused her child to have nightmares and start wetting his bed at night. Funny thing is, everyone who heard that story afterwards and knows me also began to laugh hysterically. Unless you catch me on the wrong day in the wrong mood for the wrong reason (a hard thing to do), I'm the nicest person in the world. I appologize for everything, even things I didn't do, and I bend over backwards to make everyone I know happy. I also don't yell, I don't use harsh language unless I'm angry and amongst friends, and I'm terrified of confrontation. The person this woman described was not me in the least bit. My manager said as much, and he also told her just how many people were willing to testify on my behalf if she did go through with a suite. He also made mention of the fact that I could counter sue and that Blockbuster could take action, as well. She hung up the phone and was never heard from again.

[Varia]

Ahhh.. I've been threatened to be sued before, too. Some lady paid with a check at my register, and we're required to copy two things onto the check before we can accept them. (DL# and Phone number) I ask for both, and this woman just looks away from me, and flat out says "No." I explain in the nicest terms I possibly can, that I can't accept the check without a phone number. She glares at me at spits "Fine! But if I get a single telephone call from this store I'm suing you."

It just made me wonder.. What kind of loser she thought I was.. To sit there and copy down all the phone numbers that went into my register, just to call them later. o_O


Another person I've had, refused to give me his zip code. We're required to put in a zip code before the transaction will even complete. It's just to find out where the store's customers come from, so that we know where to send the coupons, etc. I ask for his zip code, and he told me no. I look surprised, as no one has ever refused before, and he seems shocked no one has. It's your freakin' zip code. What can I do with it? Find your town? Oh noes! I'm in ur town, doing NOTHING because It's a little hard to stalk someone knowing only that.

[Daggertail]

lets just say I'm lucky and people are smart enough not to bug the drivers. They know if a driver gets upset that he might do something stupid and get everyone killed^^

Not that I would, it's mostly a joke I tell because even the most nightmare customers are nice to me.

well one time, and it was partly m fault for getting lost in Tahoe. I was looking for sugar pine lane or something but got it mixed up with sugar pine point, a popular campground and it didn't help that none of the rangers knew that the other place existed and it took 3 hours to figure things out and get there. Then once I foun them they were angry as hell and refused to speak to me other than say how late I was and argue amongst themselves in German for a whole hour because of the trafic jams that plague tahoe city in the summer.

[Messenger]

Very good stories so far. So here is mine.

I'm or was a kind of a jack of all trades for my job whatever my bossed needed me too do I could do. If it was filling in for some one for a specific location like being the live target, park cars, or deal with money he called on me. So this one time my boss asked me to plug in this wire in the top of a skull head for a ride. Seeing as it was some 20ft or so in the air heights weren't a problem so i said "of course." When I got to the top the Skulls mouth wasn't as big as it looked and it had sharp teeth only a foot tall from top tooth to bottom. So i squeezed my self in and realized this was harder then I thought and when I moved my body deeper into the mouth a tooth impaled me. Now I was stuck in the mouth but I got the wire hooked up and this thing really hurt. My boss looked up and asked if I was ok but I couldn't tell him the situation and it took me 5 minutes to shift my body over and get out of the damn thing hehe. So when I got down and told him what happend then showed him my wound he laughed and said good job. And now I'm left with a scar of that damn skeletons tooth on my stomach haha.

[Breaker]

This summer I've been a painter, and a recent injury from the job caused me to miss a couple days here on Althanas.

I was painting the sides of the wooden trim on this super rich old couple's boathouse. Now, this "boathouse" is such, but also a 2 car garage and a 2 bedroom apartment. The thing is huge, with a gridwork of wooden trim we're painting brown (yes, this job is still ongoing), while the main walls are being painted cream. Now, we can use paint rollers on the face of the wooden trim, but on the sides of it we need to brush cut. I spent an entire day climbing up and down a ladder, moving the ladder, and painting the edge of wooden trim which is about 1.5cm thick, which is the same thickness as my brush.

Now, this is something of a horror story in itself (joking) but just the lead in to the real thing. I had been doing this for eight hours. I was sweating like a pig in my paint covered clothes, my hands and arms were also covered in paint, and my brush/paint bucket is rapidly thickening in the excruciating sun.

The ladder I was using is a beastly old thing, a 5 metre extension ladder (10 metres when fully extended). The feet don't work properly so I had to use rocks to make it balance evenly (and when you're 10 metres up it needs to be PERFECTLY balanced or you die), and the pully mechanism always jams up.

For those of you who don't know, you expand an extension ladder by holding the ladder straight up in the air in front of you, and pulling on a rope which works a pulley at the top of the ladder. There are pegs which, depending on how you set them, will either catch on or slide past the rungs. It's a pretty simple system, but it's tough with the old piece of junk in question.

Anyways, I had just climbed down from the top of the ladder, which was extended about 8 metres up. To avoid scratching the paint job I've already done, I have to heave the ladder up and hold it vertical in front of me, then stabalize it with one hand and my body while working the pulley with my other hand. I got the ladder up fine, and began shortening it, until I had it down to about 6 metres, ready for the next level of painting. I set the pegs on the right rungs no problem, then let go of the rope.

About two seconds after I let go of the rope, the pegs slipped, and the top section of ladder slid down fast and hard. My instinct was to let go of the damn thing and run, but if I did that it probably would have fallen over and killed someone, possibly me. So I held on. Suddenly, the top section stopped sliding, and my left hand was in a world of pain.

My thumb got pinned in between the two sections of the ladder. With a ladder made in this decade, this probably never would have happened, but this old beast is made of steel, not aluminum, and had the weight to slide a solid 6 inches of itself over my thumb before jamming to a stop.

The space between the two rails is normally about 2mm, and my thumb was stuck between them. So I was standing there, one hand literally pinned to the ladder, the other trying desperately to keep it upright, and I can see blood running down the rails. With the rails already stretched a centimeter wider apart than they normally are, I had no chance in the world of prying my thumb out; a crowbar wouldn't have done the job. If I tried to slide the rail back up, or set the ladder down, I would have lost control of it and it probably would have snapped my thumb clean off (the bone would have been shattered for sure). I tried to move my hand, and I couldn't. So I looked for help...

I was working as part of a three person team that day. The other guy was working on this superich old couple's actual house, which is, believe it or not, beyond shouting distance away, their estate is so huge. The third member of our team, a 5'3" girl who probably doesn't way more than 90 lbs, was working on the boathouse just about twenty feet from me, and hadn't noticed anything was wrong. I couldn't imagine what she could do to help me (she doesn't do ladder work because she can't lift the damn things) and had the feeling she might freek out if she saw my predicament, because it did look pretty gruesome. I didn't want anyone panicking in this very fragile situation, so I decided not to call her. Back to square one.

The pain was intensifying, building up as the ladder's rails tried to squeeze back to their natural position. Again, I couldn't move my hand, I needed more power. So I braced my legs against those of the ladder (you learn to balance these things with your whole body after awhile), looped my right arm through the rungs, hugged the ladder against me and used my right hand to force my thumb down and out of its trap. The blood helped to lubricate my thumb a little, but it still took me about ten seconds of outright effort to slide it out. When my hand finally came free, the ladder rails sprung back together like a bear trap.

As calmly as I could, I leaned the ladder against the wall (it wasn't easy; my left hand was shaking and I couldn't fully close it), then walked over to where the girl was working, grabbed my water bottle and started rinsing the cut out. She turned around to see what I was doing and actually screamed. There wasn't much blood, but the cut looked really gross. The other guy we were working with didn't come running, because he was too far away to hear.

I finished rinsing out the cut and took a ten minute break in the shade, waiting for my hand to stop shaking and loosen up. After that I worked for another hour with a kleenex wrapped around my thumb. Now, I have a partially healed Y-shaped cut on my thumb that'll probably turn into a scar to match the one on my character's face.

[Messenger]

dude I feel for you man. I was a carpenter once and worked with ladders but man I probably would have cried haha not really but man that must have hurt.

[Moonlit Raven]

I have nursing home horror story to add to the pile. We had a lady that was normally very sweet that was a walker. I remember running down the halls at least twice a night after she opened the emergency exit, setting off the alarms. To try and stop her excessive wandering her doc changed her meds and got her on a strong sedative.

Shortly after dinner I found her asleep in one of the chairs around the nurse's station. It took a bit of coaxing but I got up her and into her bed. I'll never figure out how she managed to do it but she kicked me in the face. I was standing up by her shoulders. It surprised me into freezing for a moment. Blood promptly started pouring out of my mouth. I covered my mouth and ran out of the room and up to the head nurse for my ward. The look on her face was funny when she shrieked.

I wound up having the gums of my upper bridge re-contoured. The kick had torn the left side of my mouth up and exposed the nerves of four teeth. My left eyetooth still has no feeling in it. The lady was transfered to a lock down ward the next day, the facility made her family pay for my dentist bill and the days I missed of work.

[Breaker]

Gah, all the nursing stories win automatically. I know a guy who used to be a nurse (he now owns a bong shop) who told me a story about how he was re-bandaging a man's foot and a toe came off in his hands.

Nurses should have their own thread for this :P