The Horrors of the "Professional" World - Stories that will make you wonder how we exist.

[Ichimaru Gin]

I used to work retail online, and the company I worked for had a policy to resend orders that went missing, or arrived damaged, or were wrong products or whatever. The problem with this is that the program used to resend the orders either wasn't working very well, didn't update very fast or had attained sentience and a sick sense of humor, because sometimes when replacing an order, the item the customer needed suddenly went out of stock.

You have not experienced true terror until you see "OUT OF STOCK" in the checkout sheet, and just know this call will turn into a 30 minute-long exercise in futility.

 

[NQ 952]

You have not experienced true terror until you see "OUT OF STOCK" in the checkout sheet, and just know this call will turn into a 30 minute-long exercise in futility.

explain

 

[Ichimaru Gin]

Let's elaborate with an anecdote: A woman called me one day demanding to know where the rest of the items in her order were. I tried to reassure her to the fact that we at ***** have the best outsourced customer service in the country and we totally give a shit about these purchases getting there in time for Christmas/birthdays/MLK day/whatever.

So after hearing her rant about how urgent it was she got these Vera Wang bathrobes or whatever, I asked her what her order number was. She gave it to me and I quickly searched for it in the program.

The woman had ordered around 40-50 items during a clearance sale.

"Alright Gin, don't fret, you can do this. Just copy the ID numbers in notepad and put them on a new order", I thought, while at the same time she kept chewing my ear off about what could possibly be taking me so long.

If you are in this situation; you are fucked, because you have to go through every single item on the list with the customer to see which ones got there, which ones didn't, which ones are broken/wrong color/size/fabric/etc. The discounts are no issue because under special circumstances, CS has special codes that never expire to make the discounts valid to a disgruntled customer.

But as I pasted each of the codes into the system and refreshed to check their status, I realized very quickly that more than a quarter of them were out of stock, and even more ran out of stock as I continued refreshing and modifying the order. So the conversation would detour to:

"Ma'am, I'm sorry about this, but item ******* is currently out of stock, can I instead interest you in [Fuck whatever else]?"

Followed by more complaints about what an irresponsible company we are, how we are assholes for not getting the items there (To this day my image of the people in charge of sending orders out is a room full of chimps because they fucked up often and nobody knew who or where they were), strings of increasingly creative insults, threats of legal action, and other fun stuff.

A call like this where one or two items are out of stock can easily stretch to 30-45 minutes depending on how pissed the customer is. Mine took 5 hours until me, my supervisor, his supervisor and the customer all gave up and just settled on giving her discounts for similar items in the future.

TL;DR: Retail online fucking sucks.

 

[Damocles_Sword]

"Oh, hey, Damocles, our client miraculously finished up the construction on the half of the job you weren't focused on 3 weeks early, you got that SCADA program that we don't even have the software license for yet finished?"

 

[Meat_Puppet]

One of the first jobs I ever had was working at a Marathon Gas Station. Seemed like it would be an easy job (running register, counting cigarettes, and knowing basic English). I start working my first week and I notice I'm getting only 16 hours a week (2 days) because the hiring manager took in 4 new people. The job itself was not tough or demanding, and I figured if I just kept at it I would end up making more hours. About a month in my supervisor asks me if I would like to get more hours working at another location about 5 minutes away. 40+ hours sounded pretty good and I took him up on his offer. He ends up placing me at the location on Woodward (fucking) Ave. (anyone from Detroit should be familiar). During my time there I had.
- Witnessed a shooting
- Had someone try to rob the store, even though I was behind half inch thick glass
- The cheap stereo system in my car was stolen, and a few pairs of clothes I had sitting in there
- Had to deal with frustrated customers who thought they could pay for gas with food stamps
- Would call the cops to what seemed like weekly brawls only to have them arrive hours later
- Dealt with the backlash of customers when we ran out of Newport cigarettes for a week
I'll admit it was nice having a job where I could sit most the day and not have to clean or stock anything due to the circumstances of the stores location. But after a month I just stopped caring and "forgot" to show up for work.

 

[LegoChris]

This is a good example of me being a clueless sperg.

I was on the job site and working with me, among others, is a young(ish) woman and an older man.
- Woman casually mentions "Yeah it's my birthday so I'm going to Red Lobster"
- Me: "Oh really, how old are you?"
- "30" she says without a smile, obviously not keen on being 30.
This is where it gets really autistic on my end:
- I fucking turn to the guy, trying to make it seem like I wasn't singling the woman out for her age, and ask how old he is.
- "I'm 64"
- This guy didn't look so old, so I said "Wow, you look young for your age. I never would've guessed 64."
- At that point I realized that statement would've served the woman a lot better.
- She did not look pleased

Fuck me.

 

[yasscat]

Woodward (fucking) Ave. (anyone from Detroit should be familiar).

I am so sorry. Did your life flash before your eyes at any point?

 

[captn_kettle]

I work as a Web dev in the IT department and it's usually the tech support which gets the exceptional stories.

"Hello, my phones not working"
"OK, what's wrong with it?"
"Well I went on holiday, came home and found my phone was leaking water"
"Oh.....ok"
"I don't know what happened to it"

We had a guy who worked here for 6 months (i think) programming. When he left I was in charge of his work. Opened one of the php file to see 6,000 lines of code comprised of html, php and javascript.

We hired another guy who apparently got his masters degree in computing. Every day he had problems with his project. Eventually he got let go, and I took over his work.

Most of it was spaghetti code and hard to read. The worst was an if statement that checked a variable, and directly below it was where the variable was being populated. After that I just rewrote everything from scratch.

 

[jace821]

Let's elaborate with an anecdote: A woman called me one day demanding to know where the rest of the items in her order were. I tried to reassure her to the fact that we at ***** have the best outsourced customer service in the country and we totally give a shit about these purchases getting there in time for Christmas/birthdays/MLK day/whatever.

So after hearing her rant about how urgent it was she got these Vera Wang bathrobes or whatever, I asked her what her order number was. She gave it to me and I quickly searched for it in the program.

The woman had ordered around 40-50 items during a clearance sale.

"Alright Gin, don't fret, you can do this. Just copy the ID numbers in notepad and put them on a new order", I thought, while at the same time she kept chewing my ear off about what could possibly be taking me so long.

If you are in this situation; you are fucked, because you have to go through every single item on the list with the customer to see which ones got there, which ones didn't, which ones are broken/wrong color/size/fabric/etc. The discounts are no issue because under special circumstances, CS has special codes that never expire to make the discounts valid to a disgruntled customer.

But as I pasted each of the codes into the system and refreshed to check their status, I realized very quickly that more than a quarter of them were out of stock, and even more ran out of stock as I continued refreshing and modifying the order. So the conversation would detour to:

"Ma'am, I'm sorry about this, but item ******* is currently out of stock, can I instead interest you in [Fuck whatever else]?"

Followed by more complaints about what an irresponsible company we are, how we are assholes for not getting the items there (To this day my image of the people in charge of sending orders out is a room full of chimps because they fucked up often and nobody knew who or where they were), strings of increasingly creative insults, threats of legal action, and other fun stuff.

A call like this where one or two items are out of stock can easily stretch to 30-45 minutes depending on how pissed the customer is. Mine took 5 hours until me, my supervisor, his supervisor and the customer all gave up and just settled on giving her discounts for similar items in the future.

TL;DR: Retail online fucking sucks.

Did you work for Zappos?

 

[alex_theman]

I work as a Web dev in the IT department and it's usually the tech support which gets the exceptional stories.

"Hello, my phones not working"
"OK, what's wrong with it?"
"Well I went on holiday, came home and found my phone was leaking water"
"Oh.....ok"
"I don't know what happened to it"

We had a guy who worked here for 6 months (i think) programming. When he left I was in charge of his work. Opened one of the php file to see 6,000 lines of code comprised of html, php and javascript.

We hired another guy who apparently got his masters degree in computing. Every day he had problems with his project. Eventually he got let go, and I took over his work.

Most of it was spaghetti code and hard to read. The worst was an if statement that checked a variable, and directly below it was where the variable was being populated. After that I just rewrote everything from scratch.

Did you consider submitting any part of it to the daily wtf?

 

[captn_kettle]

Did you consider submitting any part of it to the daily wtf?

I didn't unfortunately, although i've got used to the insane problems some people have.

Another good one: someone needed help with their computer, phones up IT and requests help. Try to remote into the laptop and its not working:

-"have you got your laptop on you?"
-"No"
-"Ok where is it?"
-"Its turned off and locked in my car. Do you need it on to access it then?"

And not as funny as the others, it turns out more people than you think treat their spam box as if it were their inbox.

Someone opened up an email in their spam folder and downloaded an attached excel invoice. Once opened, theexcel spreadsheet said you needed to enable macros. Despite reading the prompts that say there are security issues with opening macros from unknown sources, that was ignored because of course it must be real.

Half a day goes by, and our IT start seeing files with an odd extension and quickly called the user listed as the creator of the file. This person had managed to deploy the LOCKEY ransomware and despite the wallpaper being changed to "you need to pay us to get your locked files back", it was much better just to keep quiet about it.

It had also found an avenue onto our servers, and was encrypting all sorts of shit including documents needed for certain programs to function. Thats why its always a good idea to do regular off-site backups.

 

[alex_theman]

How many times have people been told not to click on random crap in their Spam box?

 

[yasscat]

How many times have people been told not to click on random crap in their Spam box?

Not enough, apparently.

 

[geodestro]

Great thread! I've enjoyed reading through all of your tales of woe, and figured I'd add one of my own. I work as a service tech fixing machines on the road. We have a few hundred accounts spread out over the state, and I generally enjoy my work. One of my coworkers is a bit of an alcoholic stoner, so he'll fuck up and forget to bring the right parts, or generally be too lazy to fix something if it's too complicated. This is fine with me, because his bullshit generally makes me look better in the end.

What bothers me is that the go to thing he tells customers when he can't fix something is "I'll get my best guys on it!". Motherfucker, you are the guy! You don't have any guys! So now, because of the way he talks he's convinced some of our customers that he is in some sort of management position, which couldn't be further from the truth. I won't have previous knowledge that I'm following this guy up, but it's always a dead giveaway when I hear the phrase "I'll get my best guys on it!".

 

[Bagronkleton]

When I was interning for an Network Information Security / Linux instructor I was monitoring the network activity during a midterm, right? Mostly did this because I wouldn't have anything particularly pressing to work on during tests and shit like that. watching network activity during down times made it apparent who were making an effort to learn the material and who was just filling a seat to collect student loans. We had some who were really goddamn exceptional. One guy in particular took the cake.

Older black guy in his late 50s, dumber than a sack of shit, and sloppy as hell. We'd always daily how the fuck he made it this far in life when class was over 'cause man..he was somethin else. Would always insist he knew what he was doing because he knew Fortran, COBOL, or something else on a daily basis for some reason whenever he'd get worked up over something.

Anywho, now mind this situation was midterm and all. 45 minutes into it he finally figured out how to work the hot swappable hard drive to start up the lab drive. Then announced really loudly that he 'got the drive in' and then proceeded to go to youtube and watch some fishing clips. I catch his activity and unplug him from the switch, as my instructions were to do so with any student caught cheating or otherwise not doing their work, or just browsing the internet. The internet access being something of a litmus test, really. Use the internet for whatever reason and you get docked significantly. Something we stressed numerous times before the midterm test itself just so no student would complain that we didn't tell them (even when printed on the handout). They're supposed to do their work and shut the computer off when done and leave the class for that day. Despite all that, Ol' Grampa Dindu starts yelling up a storm that his innanets is off and he wanted to finish watching fishins. We had enough of his shit at this point. Fails the midterm on the spot. We both get accused of being honky-ass racists. Gets removed from class permanently.

We later hear he tried to storm into the Dean's office during a SUPER IMPORTANT meeting that day. Wasn't allowed to step foot on campus after that when he threatened the dean, me, and Instructor Linux. Three weeks later he was sitting at his old spot like nothing happened to which he was escorted off campus by a couple officers. Never saw him again after that.

Dunno how you teachy types put up with that kinda shit on the regular.

 

[NQ 952]

My 70 hour work week beings today.

 

[SPARKLETWAT]

Job horror is working in an ER and seeing the shitty awful things parents do to their kids.

I had pieces of a kid's brain on my gloves because a third of his head was mush and he had an eye blown out of its socket. He wailed one time and his intact eye went blank. He coded and we threw everything at him because his mom was watching and we had to try for her sake. He died in my hands.

His drunk fuck of a dad shot him point blank in a drunken rage. I'm shocked the kid stayed conscious that long and that his head didn't blow apart like an exploded watermelon. There was no saving him, too much of his brain was splattered everywhere and the blood loss was horrific. But we tried for his distraught mom and wehn it got clear we couldn't save him I told his mom "say you love him" and she did. We called it afterward.

I have tears rolling down my face. I can still see the kid's one eye glazing over as he died. I hope he knew we tried to help him. His mom's screaming haunts me because that is the worst pain a human being can face, a parent losing their child. Nothing compares. NOTHING.

I stil have nightmares about that poor little kid. The dad is rotting in jail and I hope that fuckass drops the soap every day. I hope all his time in jail is worse than the last few conscious minutes that little boy suffered through. He deserves zero mercy. People who hurt and murder kids make me rage hard.

 

[DildoGaggins]

Job horror is working in an ER and seeing the shitty awful things parents do to their kids.

I had pieces of a kid's brain on my gloves because a third of his head was mush and he had an eye blown out of its socket. He wailed one time and his intact eye went blank. He coded and we threw everything at him because his mom was watching and we had to try for her sake. He died in my hands.

His drunk fuck of a dad shot him point blank in a drunken rage. I'm shocked the kid stayed conscious that long and that his head didn't blow apart like an exploded watermelon. There was no saving him, too much of his brain was splattered everywhere and the blood loss was horrific. But we tried for his distraught mom and wehn it got clear we couldn't save him I told his mom "say you love him" and she did. We called it afterward.

I have tears rolling down my face. I can still see the kid's one eye glazing over as he died. I hope he knew we tried to help him. His mom's screaming haunts me because that is the worst pain a human being can face, a parent losing their child. Nothing compares. NOTHING.

I stil have nightmares about that poor little kid. The dad is rotting in jail and I hope that fuckass drops the soap every day. I hope all his time in jail is worse than the last few conscious minutes that little boy suffered through. He deserves zero mercy. People who hurt and murder kids make me rage hard.

The literal arm and a leg I'd give for a horrifying rating. Holy shit man.

 

[Yaks]

The only real horrors I have at my current job is scrotum mold, so.

 

[Lackadaisy]

Job horror is working in an ER and seeing the shitty awful things parents do to their kids.

I had pieces of a kid's brain on my gloves because a third of his head was mush and he had an eye blown out of its socket. He wailed one time and his intact eye went blank. He coded and we threw everything at him because his mom was watching and we had to try for her sake. He died in my hands.

His drunk fuck of a dad shot him point blank in a drunken rage. I'm shocked the kid stayed conscious that long and that his head didn't blow apart like an exploded watermelon. There was no saving him, too much of his brain was splattered everywhere and the blood loss was horrific. But we tried for his distraught mom and wehn it got clear we couldn't save him I told his mom "say you love him" and she did. We called it afterward.

I have tears rolling down my face. I can still see the kid's one eye glazing over as he died. I hope he knew we tried to help him. His mom's screaming haunts me because that is the worst pain a human being can face, a parent losing their child. Nothing compares. NOTHING.

I stil have nightmares about that poor little kid. The dad is rotting in jail and I hope that fuckass drops the soap every day. I hope all his time in jail is worse than the last few conscious minutes that little boy suffered through. He deserves zero mercy. People who hurt and murder kids make me rage hard.

Goddamn. This is a thread ender, right here.