I was taken along for a job as a “technical advisor”, just in case. I only got told what the job is actually about on my way there - and my reply was: “The software cannot do that!”. We had spent a fortune on hiring equipment for this special job, and it would be a total waste.
So I told the project leader that I would write the necessary software for this job before the event starts. I got setup with server and PC before anyone else, and went to bed at 4am. Software worked perfectly, customer was happy.
Not mine, but a guy I know got hired to be fired.
He got a job with a company that managed storage systems. They hired him and gave him some basic training for the systems. After a few months, they sent him to a client who was irate. The client was angry when he got there and there was nothing he could do to appease them. The client demanded that they fire him so they did.
He found out after that this was all theater for the client. The company would regularly hire someone new specifically so they could fire them when they sent them to this client. It sounded like the client was borderline insane, and this was how they managed to keep sucking massive amounts of fees out of the client without losing employees they actually valued. Once they fired a sacrificial tech, the client would be happy, and they could send one of their “permanent” employees out to deal with the technical issue.
It worked out well for the fired guy. They hired him at a salary much higher than he was getting previously. The training he got there allowed him to move on to better jobs doing the same thing for even more pay working for employers who weren’t insane.
The stupid thing is that they could create a position just for that, and tell them their job is to be fired. A new hire every day, don’t waste time on the training. Or is there an employment watchdog who cracks down on these schemes?
I think the issue is the one client that needed the special treatment needed to see them fire someone new every time, and they couldn’t send someone who didn’t know enough about the storage system to be worth firing.
Sacrificial tech support. What an amazing story ! also a shitty experience for the lamb- I mean, the rookie employee. But if all ends well, what can I say
You would think that would work once, maybe twice before the client would pull the plug and move on.
My understanding was that there was nothing wrong with the service the client was getting. They were just assholes who liked the ego boost they got from being able to force their vendor to fire someone.
They didn’t have any legitimate complaints. They just needed to believe they were important enough to get anyone fired they wanted to.
It would be way to long to tell the whole story here but incompetent management and a bad trainee basically made my life hell for 6 months. This guy was not interested in learning the job and was way more interested in messaging Instagram thirst traps on the clock. Management didn’t want to fire him because it’s hard to find people in this industry to even apply for the job. Every time they would bring him into the office to talk to him he would tell them how he would put his phone away and start really applying himself.
As the primary person training him I was instructed to give him any of the hands on work that came in so he could practice and I would walk him through how to do it or if he already knew how I would just supervise him doing it and check the work after. Normally we only do this for about a month before they are sent to another location because my location can be run by just me alone. The manager of the location he was supposed to be going to didn’t want him working there so they kept him with me in the trainee position for some reason. About 5 months into this I ask him to put his phone away and actually do the stuff he’s supposed to do and he goes on a huge rant about how he’s not lazy and how dare I call him lazy when he’s in shape and I’m overweight and he does all the work that comes in and I just sit around.
I told management I would be quitting at the end of the month if he was still working on my store. I can put up with a lot of bullshit but personal attacks on my weight cross the line and I don’t need his help in my store and if he’s not going to this other one why am I still training him? They brought him into a meeting and told him he needs to apologize for the comments and he did but he wasn’t fired yet. After the end of the month he wasn’t fired either and I went into the managers office resignation letter in hand and she said to give them a week to process the paperwork and let him go and I should have just quit right then and there but for some reason I didn’t.
Anyway he got fired at the end of that week and about a year after that the manager responsible for this whole mess got forced out of her management position because all the department managers threatened to quit if she stayed on. Later we found out the trainee was claiming he worked for us for 5 years to make his resume seem impressive.
A few months of techwork, Copying VHS porn for a distributor. Hundreds of tapes everyday. I had to monitor the source while it ran. I still wonder if the hundred guys in 24h record has been broken.
I was once hired as a lifeguard, but the pool wasn’t finished being renovated in time for summer so instead I spent the summer repainting speed bumps of the community.
I worked on the “slime line,” gutting fish in Seldovia Alaska when I was young. One long summer was more than enough for me. Also spent time while i was there “de-byssing” mussels on a raft with my buddies for some side cash. Same as debearding, but the guy called it “de-byssing.”
I worked at billing in a company serving adult content phone services, sex line if you will. We had quite casual fridays, meaning going out for longer lunch and having few beers and then back. One friday they were making an audio tape but lacked one male participant and obvious thing happened and they asked me to join in. Well… few beers later I was to be found on one audio story.
I had a patient who attempted suicide by overdose on OTC pain relievers because their parents refused to buy them cat-ear headphones, and was then presented said cat-ear headphones in hospital by their parents.
MAN, social work or Healthcare is wild for this.
Tons of little “yeah, loved talking to the kid. Then the foster family said they couldn’t play Grand Theft Auto in the house their young children live in, so he chucked a controller through a wall. His bio parents bought him a new controller”
So children can be fostered and still in contact with their biological parents?
Oh yeah, happens a lot when parents or the kid are in the system.
For this kid, essentially, although they didn’t prep me as his case worker, had to be put in foster care to keep his other sibling safe. He had assaulted her in some degree that wasn’t disclosed to me, and they still attended family sessions together so I’ve always been unsure of the severity.
Anytime there’s a court involved with kids being taken from parents, temporary or otherwise, a foster care situation will take place over any group home type thing and will be the preferred placement where possible and safe.
Had one young girl who’s parents regularly missed visitations because she was moved states after the father visited the foster home (shouldn’t have had the address, all assumed the daughter passed it on). She was moved out of state to a foster home in the region I worked in, she knew her parents, but hadn’t seen them in person in more than a year, mostly because both parents were addicts and both were on the last straw with the courts, and the dad’s vibes and frequency of calls suggested he wasn’t planning on seeing her again. That girl had to be moved after she bit a chunk of cheek off of her foster placement mom, the sweetest lady I’d met in my time there who had just gotten approved to foster and this was her first placement.
Social work sucks
a co worker years ago who loudly bragged about how she got fucked in the ass last night in the break room. and would flirt with me and every guy with a pulse in the office.
she got fired after multiple sexual harassment complaints
I also had a couple of co-workers hit on me really hard, and ask me out. they were trying to cheat on their boyfriends, so i politely declined seeing them again.
I was snoopy at a fair. The requirement was “be 160 cm or shorter”. I am 161. I’ve never felt that one centimeter more.
My first job at 14 years old was working a hot dog cart for a big burly asshole. His wife would come visit me while I was working and hit on me all the time. “You’re the most attractive man I’ve ever seen”, shit like that. She’d sit me down and have me watch her ass while she sold hot dogs. Looking back she was pretty hot, but when I was 14 she looked ancient.
Dude I think you were in a porno but everyone forgot to tell you.
I know, so cliche, but I was too young, stupid, and terrified to move the plot along.
Parking lot attendant for a couple of lawyers looking to make money with an unused, vacant lot in the city.
Every weekend, I must have had about a dozen cars towed and about as many times been angrily filmed with (the then new) iPhone cameras stuck in my face.
Did they even have signage up?
One parking lot pays the groceries for several lawyers? Hmmm…
Being hired and told not to do anything. Everything, down to cleaning out my desk, required upper management approval.
Craziest place I ever worked. They wanted spineless yes men with zero initiative.
sounds like to pad the numbers of thier hiring they report to local govt?
Weirdly, it was an online betting company… 🤷
Was there anything you actually were allowed to do? What did the work day consist of?
I had job duties, but I couldn’t do anything without running it through this narcissistic and nepotistic executive structure.
The top brass were all related and crazy.
I grew up in a town called Charlottesville Va (C’ville). It is where the University of Virginia (UVA) is located. C’Ville was a straight up college town back then.
I attended the public school and one of my best friends attended a small Private school.
So my friend and I got hired by a guy to do odd jobs for him. Move that to there, take this stuff to one of his rental apartments. Just sort of random handyman stuff. We really loved it as it wasn’t a lot of hours but it was enough to get us pocket change, that we mainly used to buy pot.
The guy had a number of apartments in C’Ville, a pretty good sized farm that my buddy and I and other kids, the guy hired, would do the odd jobs at. He had at least three crews who did stuff like this.
The guy had arrange a number of scholarships to prestigious universities for kids at that private school. My friend’s brother had a full ride to Carnegie Melon that this guy had arranged.
The guy let a lot of the kids from the private school hang around his house. Which when I got to be an adult I realized how strange and wrong that was. Back then that was no big deal.
For all the bullshit lamenting that you see online about how kids in the 80s would leave at sunrise and not come home until sunset, what they are glossing over is just how many doors that opens for predators and bad actors to connect with kids. Because that is exactly what happened.
In the 80s when I was in high school it was completely normal for us to be at some adults house smoking dope, drinking their beers etc. Also it was totally normal for the adults to fuck the kids. It happened all the time. Healthy adults do not spend time with teenagers.
So how the job worked we would show up at his house and he would give us our daily assignment. We would go off and do whatever it was and at the end of the day he paid us in cash.
So one day we showed up and all the other kids he had hired were also at the house, which was strange because we rarely all saw each other.
He was no where to be found and his house was wide open. There were a few legal looking documents on his kitchen table. He had been arrested by the C’vill PD for embezzling money from UVA.
As we learned later from the newspaper later he had embezzled a lot of money from UVA. The scholarships he was “funding” was from money he was embezzling. The scholarship my friend’s brother had from this guy, was done. He had to leave Carnegie Mellon and went to a shitty school that his folks cold afford.
The whole thing was really weird. Why did he hire all these kids? Why was he funnelling money to these scholarships. I get the motivations for stealing money. That is easy to understand, but why do all the other shit? It had to be some sort of self image thing.
