What's the dumbest thing you've ever had to do at work?

[sniffles]

But this year I have to nominate the annual "Self-Evaluation and Upcoming Goals" paperwork from Human Resources. Not only do the goals that administration usually set basically amount to "Keep doing the same thing you're doing now..." but this year, even though I'm leaving in two weeks, they still wanted me to fill it out...

Since I'm going to Graduate School, I put down things like "Be on time to all my classes" and "Study Hard"...

LOL! I like your response!
I have to fill out those stupid forms too. It's a complete waste of my time - although I have to admit, having me assess myself in my previous position was better than having my (former) supervisor do it, since he didn't have the faintest notion of what my job entailed.

Back to stupid things at previous jobs:
I once worked at a fast-food outlet that specialized in preparing chicken-fried steaks. As the name indicates, they are a fried food. The restaurant did fried chicken, too.
Our restaurants all had terra cotta tile floors in the front area and dining room. If you've ever dealt with that type of tile, you'll find that it gets slippery pretty easily, especially with grease on it. Not that other floor types don't get slippery with grease too, but terra cotta seems like the worst culprit. It was really fun to rush back and forth getting customers' orders while trying not to fall on my butt on the slippery floor. Whoever did the decorating for the restaurants obviously didn't give any thought to practical matters. :\

As an aside: One of the stupidest mistakes I've ever made at work involved that restaurant, too. We had containers of jalapeno peppers by the cash registers for the customers to select. At closing time we had to put the peppers back into their jars and put them in the refrigerator. I discovered just how bad pepper spray could be when I accidentally rubbed some jalapeno juice in my eye one night.

 

[Tolen Mar]

I worked at a pizza joint. It wasn't the cleanest place in the world I guess, but we tried. Its just hard when you have that much going on (and also the reason why we tended to stay past 1 am to close down).

So one day, the drain under our steam sink plugs up...water everywhere.

Guess who walks in that very afternoon? The health inspector...

Hey, I got a day off the next day while management and two unlucky victims..er volunteers unplugged and cleaned everything again.

 

[Pigeon]

T

To that end, the one client who could actually speak, bathe and dress herself was supposed to be learning to handle money. The staff were supposed to take her once a week to a frozen yogurt shop for a treat. She had to be taken on the city bus, so she could learn about riding public transit, using money, and how to cross the street. It didn't matter that abstract concepts like money and how to cross a street didn't mean anything to her, and that the word 'yogurt' wasn't even in her limited vocabulary (she called it ice cream). It had to be done, because someday she would become independent. Yeah, right. :\

That's a bit harsh. She probably enjoyed the trip, on whatever level - better than staring at the walls. People with learning difficulties should be out there doing stuff, not locked away so no one can see them (not that you were saying that they should be obviously)

 

[glass]

In 20 years in IT, my favorite was always when I'd be responsible for some huge mainframe money system requiring me to access a lot of sensitive file systems...

A few years back, I got landed with looking after IT for our office's small network of PCs (on top of my normal duties), and I had a very similar issue with one of my bosses.

We ended up having a very surreal conversation about how there was no point my denying myself access to the company's financial info, because if I actually was going to go snooping, I could just give myself it back.

Sadly, with people leaving, things seem things seem to have gone full circle now and I seem to back to looking after IT again, which I really don't have time for these days. I sepnt yeaterday lunchtime transfering my bosses contacts from his old phonew to his new (same boss, as it happens).


glass.

 

[glass]

Try to explain to people that we don't serve x item on our menu.

If you don't mind my asking, why is it on the menu if you don't actually serve it?


glass.

 

[Ao the Overkitty]

On thursday I got to stand and watch a lightbulb (that was on). The assistant manager got paged to take a phone call, so I got flagged down as the lucky employee. He told me to watch the light until he got back. Took him half an hour to get back.

I will say I did my job well. I was fully prepared to run and tackle that lightbulb, should it have tried to escape.

 

[Huw]

My wife is a translator. One of her specialties is translating TV adverts for market research. She is assigned work by country. Her language is Mandarin.

She gets this advert through from Taiwan. Thing is, it's not in Mandarin or even Hokkien, it's in English - but in English so badly scripted and so strongly accented that neither she nor her employers could recognise it.

So I spend half an hour with this 30 second clip listening over and over again, each time making out an extra syllable or two. So the dumbest thing I've had to do is translate English into English.

 

[Arravis]

I work for the US govt space agency, let's leave them unnamed. At the specific center I work at, it was being investigated for having too many management retreats. For those unfamiliar with these things, it's essentially a mini-vacation for management, all expenses paid of course, where they "discuss" the issue at hand over golf and drinks.

So the wise management of this center put together a committee on this, and of course... they had a retreat on the issue of having too many retreats.

I wish I was lying or making this up . Of course, this is from the place that has, on several occasions, demanded I work overtime on graphics and presentations for meetings on the issue of having too much overtime...

No wonder they now have a horrible rep and an atrocious record.

 

[ceratitis]

A few years back, I got landed with looking after IT for our office's small network of PCs

say does that make you the DM ?

Z

 

[wingsandsword]

The most ridiculous thing I ever had to do at work . . .

While working as a retail sales clerk at a big department store, at around the time for the fall clearance sale, I had to take huge piles of shirts (the kind that come folded up with cardboard and straight pins and plastic to hold the collar in place), remove all that cardboard/pins/plastic, mark them down from $60 each, to $30, then put them on hangars, and put all the hangars on a rack and roll that rack into storage. Then, later, roll the rack out of storage, mark the shirts down to $15, and roll it back into storage.

We didn't have the floor space to sell the shirts, and our inventory system still tracked them and was cutting the price because they were unsold, but we couldn't sell them because we didn't have room. Finally, these shirts were cut to $7.50, and ultimately $3.75, of course I had to retag them all and wheel them in and out (from the original $60, which was a rip off given they were cheaply made polyester shirts that never sold, the store tended to overcharge for everything , and it liked to act like it was a real upscale place with high-class clientele, it wasn't).

Finally, the management was desperate to move these $3.75 shirts, so they had us do anything to make room for them, and start shoving them into any unused rack space or empty places on racks. Eventually a good number of them sold, I guess anything will sell if you mark it down far enough.

Amusingly enough, we had so many people try return scams with those shirts, by peeling off the $3.75 markdown label and trying to demand $60 back. Fortunately, our inventory system was real good at catching scams like that, and we had more people trying to return those shirts and demand the full original retail price for them than we actually sold of those shirts at full price.