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

[XYZpdq]

Energy sector. 95% of why we do anything the way we do is "because someone might die if you don't" and so when you Fuck Around even if everyone involved manages not to get hurt, that's it. You're brown bread. Done-zo. Kaputski.

My office is located on a road with a lot of manufacturing offices. In the last six months there have been a total of three fires, two involving explosions, in said businesses within a block of my office. All due to negligence, two resulting in catastrophic loss.

Just follow the fucking rules, kids. Eggheads come up with them so us dummies don't cut our fingers off or blow our heads off or get lung cancer.

I knew a guy who did heavy duty electrical shit and he'd claim that at some sites he'd see the melted boot remains of the guy he replaced.

 

[Meat Poultry Veg]

This is the long awaited sequel to my nightmare job working for the Chinese:

To get you up to speed, I had quit my job after months of a fruitless stealth job search because I got fucked in the ass hard by both the job itself and a glowing job prospect that ended up being a dud. I had reached the point where possible homelessness and suicide were preferable to taking their bullshit.

I ended up getting a job three months later. In the interim, a bunch of people left, including MY PAIN IN THE FUCKING ASS boss and our cut-corners HR. Of the twelve or so people that were there with me on the first day, only two remain.

 

[Wingus Dongshire]

I just got done moving some SQL databases to a new server and needed an account with which to test their associated program. The one we had on file was out of date, so I decided "This program looks sufficiently horribly written, I'll just null out a user's password field in the user table."

One SELECT TOP 20 FROM USERS later and I'm staring at a list containing 20 users with their plaintext, unsalted, unhashed passwords. These were all decently complex, and, knowing they're average end users, I'm sure they're tied to bank accounts and social media the world over. I fucking hate programmers.

I also fucking hate "web designers" whose skillset stops at "i can install a wordpress plugin!"
If I get one more of those fuckers asking me "yeah just change this MX record so we can email from our website's form submission" I'm jumping through the internet at them. I had one who got pissy that I wouldn't give him rights to a corporate DNS account stating it was causing his SSL renewals to fail. I try and talk him through HTTP verification for renewal, but got nowhere. I, by the grace of god, somehow got flung to the top of the ladder straight to their CEO (It's a relatively small, local business) who agrees immediately to give me root access to their web server. I'm on there and find not one, but TWO fucking instances of LetsEncrypt certification software: the standard CertBot, and LEGo (Let's Encrypt for Go, because every aspiring web dev uses Go and calls it a momentous feat.) After digging a little further, turns out that cert was renewing perfectly fine but the fucker had been renewing from LEGo while still having certbot's renewal in cron. Digging even further, I found out his configured certificate location was not only actual copied files instead of a symlink, but he copied the incorrect, miles out of date CertBot certificate and chain.

I had another web vendor who a client went with because they were "much cheaper than everyone else," which meant "we host it on a shared environment." When their new site went live, their corporate email went down for anyone out-of-office. Turns out their "much cheaper" hosting software forces its own HTTPS root autodiscover for its own shitty IMAP, which takes precedence over our CNAME autodiscover.[domain] configuration. Not wanting to dedicate the rest of my natural life to constantly adding "ExcludeHTTPSRoot" to registries for every user on every computer, I contacted their hosting provider. Their response? "We can't turn this off for your domain, it's a shared resource for everyone in our shared hosting environments."

There's also the fucking print vendors, whose economic lot in life is to either shrivel up and die, as no one needs them to change fucking toner in 2019, or branch out to being a full MSP, which they're not even remotely knowledgeable or qualified for. We had one of those who branched out to web design (their customer website portfolio is all 404's and geocities vomit catastrophes) and VoIP. I had to deal with their VoIP not working at a client site, and, surprise surprise, they blamed our firewall. What followed was me showing them SIP exchange after SIP exchange where they're authenticating to the phones as 192.168.1.10 (falsified) with the packets originating from the entirely different LAN 10.1.2.3 (likewise.) I even showed them packet captures I took straight from our edge device with the RTP chain in its entirety, exported as a wav, showing that the voices that don't make it to the other end CLEARLY LEAVE OUR FIREWALL STILL INTACT, they refuse to acknowledge it's a problem on their end.

When I inquired as to what PBX solution they were using, they gave me "Oh it's a [their company name] phone system!" Yeah, okay. I also have one of those, and it runs on a specific Asterisk frontend. It might be a [my company] Phone System(tm) but I sure as fuck didn't program it. Regardless, we placated them by swapping their edge firewall from one vendor to another just to prove that it wasn't that. Phones still don't work. They still say it's the firewall.

Granted, they were accurate to a degree; when you have a hundred STUN provisioned phones using the same 20 RTP ports behind a single NAT device I guess you could consider it "a firewall issue."

I've got more bullshit for another time, for those so inclined.

 

[Sped Xing]

I've never stayed in any job an entire two years, even in the military.

With constantly moving around, I've lost my fear of it. I think a lot of people get stuck in a job they hate because they're scared to roll the dice. It's understandable to feel that way, but at least in America if you're reasonably healthy, you've got a modicum of self discipline and know how to interview, you'll only ever be unemployed long by choice.

So I'm just saying, Kiwis. Don't hesitate to reroll.

 

[Capsaicin Addict]

I've never stayed in any job an entire two years, even in the military.

With constantly moving around, I've lost my fear of it. I think a lot of people get stuck in a job they hate because they're scared to roll the dice. It's understandable to feel that way, but at least in America if you're reasonably healthy, you've got a modicum of self discipline and know how to interview, you'll only ever be unemployed long by choice.

So I'm just saying, Kiwis. Don't hesitate to reroll.

Agreed. At some point, you need to sit down and look at your situation, and ask -- 'Is this job damaging my health and psyche?'. If the answer is yes, it's time to dust off the resume, update your LinkedIn, and get to interviewing. Even if you're still stuck at the job in the interim, keep in mind the bills still gotta be paid.

 

[Kiwi Lime Pie]

I'm sure most everyone at some point has had to deal with door to door folks at the workplace. Today I had an interesting twist. To keep it brief, I'll use green text.

> Working away, when I hear our outer door open and voices in the alcove between our outer and inner doors.
> Eventually there's a knock. I go to answer and see a white woman holding a tablet and a sharply-dressed African American man.
> Man claims he wants to talk to me about Jesus. Being busy, I decline.
> Man then asks why I'm not interested in talking about Jesus. I tell him I already go to church and assume the pair is preaching door to door.
> I promise to pray for them and their efforts.
> At one point guy asks why I haven't opened the inner door for him and his colleague. I let him know we've had too many people cause problems in the past.
> Guy then reveals he's some sort of telephone service person and starts talking about service upgrades in our area with hints he wants our office to start using fiber internet service.
> After some back and forth, I tell him we're not interested. After telling him how someone door to door slammed us and our phone service, I make it clear I'm not disclosing the workplace's current phone company or service, and I wish the pair well before turning around and returning to my desk.

Since I did promise to pray for them, I then prayed that they found a more satisfying, honest job.

 

[Sped Xing]

It never occurred to me to use fake proselytizing as an in when I was a salesman

Though my bosses kept telling me I should join a church to network

Have I mentioned how glad I am to be a truck driver again?

I was talking to the new kid at my work today. He said "this is my last day on the floor" when I asked him to turn on the diesel pump for me. Turns out he's going to be "managing social media" for my company, and him being behind the counter was just some sort of weird initiation

I'm glad they didn't make me file paperwork or stock shelves for three weeks before they let me start driving the truck

 

[Malagor the dank omen]

I've never stayed in any job an entire two years, even in the military.

With constantly moving around, I've lost my fear of it. I think a lot of people get stuck in a job they hate because they're scared to roll the dice. It's understandable to feel that way, but at least in America if you're reasonably healthy, you've got a modicum of self discipline and know how to interview, you'll only ever be unemployed long by choice.

So I'm just saying, Kiwis. Don't hesitate to reroll.

Damn, i'm not afraid of not getting into new trades. The bad thing about me is no experience nor higher education (always a failure), but i'm quite eager to try whatever comes my way and i've tried quite a few things already. I'm kinda interetsed in farm work and animal husbandry because i might end up with my gramps farm if my aunt ends up fed up with it.

Is it possible to still rack it up when you don't have much to offer?

 

[Sped Xing]

If you want to learn about animals, one potential route is working for a large animal veterinarian.

They always need a lot of work that even.the biggest idiot in the world can accomplish; feeding, storing hay, cleaning up manure, watering animals, removing dead animals, and so on. If you get a job doing that kind of thing, and show you're willing to work and learn and aren't a squeamish little faggot, they might be willing to OJT you as a tech. It depends on the laws in your state whether you could be a licensed veterinarian technician; in Texas you need at least a telephone year degree for that. But vets OJT people here all the same, and just aren't technically supposed to call them techs.

Veterinarians love to talk about what they know. Most of them are nerds who are a decade of income in school debt for a.job that's as hard or harder to get a degree for as human medicine and pays nothing like as well.

A bit rambly, but that would be my move-- find work with a vet that regularly treats cattle and offer to do grunt work for them, and include you'd be interested to learn to make yourself useful with tech type.work since you want to be a farmer eventually.

EDIT: So you know I'm not pulling this out of my ass, I was a tech for a cow vet for a bit under a year. I had a degree and passed the national exam but never felt it worth my while to get the license. I was only making 15 an hour, so I moved on to trucking, but I did gain a shitload of knowledge that I apply to my farm, which is "nice supplemental income" until I can buy more land and make a living off it.

 

[Fek]

Powerlevel-free edition:

A company I used to work for had an assembly area for one of their products back in a warehouse. This area was staffed entirely by Mexicans (read: illegal greenback thieves). They'd come up to the front desk in the office without being capable of speaking a lick of English, then repeat the name of their goddamned operative on the inside (he wasn't even in the HR department or a US citizen himself..work visa) until they were allowed to speak with him. A few days later, thanks to the "illegals R us" fast-tracking, they'd have a job based on their blatantly phony documents and get most (or all, in some cases) of their pay under the table. I'm sure there's yet more I was never privy to going on as well.

That town had an employment crisis for working class folks, just by the way. Fucking despised that place's business practices.

 

[Malagor the dank omen]

If you want to learn about animals, one potential route is working for a large animal veterinarian.

They always need a lot of work that even.the biggest idiot in the world can accomplish; feeding, storing hay, cleaning up manure, watering animals, removing dead animals, and so on. If you get a job doing that kind of thing, and show you're willing to work and learn and aren't a squeamish little faggot, they might be willing to OJT you as a tech. It depends on the laws in your state whether you could be a licensed veterinarian technician; in Texas you need at least a telephone year degree for that. But vets OJT people here all the same, and just aren't technically supposed to call them techs.

Veterinarians love to talk about what they know. Most of them are nerds who are a decade of income in school debt for a.job that's as hard or harder to get a degree for as human medicine and pays nothing like as well.

A bit rambly, but that would be my move-- find work with a vet that regularly treats cattle and offer to do grunt work for them, and include you'd be interested to learn to make yourself useful with tech type.work since you want to be a farmer eventually.

EDIT: So you know I'm not pulling this out of my ass, I was a tech for a cow vet for a bit under a year. I had a degree and passed the national exam but never felt it worth my while to get the license. I was only making 15 an hour, so I moved on to trucking, but I did gain a shitload of knowledge that I apply to my farm, which is "nice supplemental income" until I can buy more land and make a living off it.

On this matter, i could try doing some volunteering while i can (i got my current job thanks to volunteering. Owner saw potential in me and gave me a shot. Now i'm manager) since here in Europe there are lots of farmsteads that ask for people in either spring or summer for volunteer work (or working holidays if you like). I always wanted to try but i'm held by my family since they want me to "get a job that pays big without effort. Don't break your back like a chump" and until i save more money i won't be able to cut off any contact with them and do whatever i want (For them manual work is beneath me even tho i want to pick up a trade). If i manage to go around some farms i would be able to pick up some knowhow about animal care and crops.

But let's not get too off topic, I will tell something that happened last week around here. I already explained that i despise chinese customers with all my might and that's why when i tell them the rules i try to be as blunt as possible so they don't step out of line later. The thing is that this month i got a taiwanese coworker that managed to speak with a group of 4 chinese people that booked a room. The moment they arrived they left all their food and drinks in the middle of the living room upstairs, leaving no place for anyone and they hanged their clothes from the balcony railing even tho we told them we had a clothes rack outside in the yard. Soon enough they started to ask us to do a hundred things for them: book tickets for nearby places, do their laundry, cook... And i saw the girl was having a very rough time with them. Later she explained to me that these people felt that they were entitled to us being their slaves because they paid money and they would only back down if it costed them more money (like how they rejected to do laundry just because it costed 10 euros and they tried to bargain with us).

Since then i have an even lower opinion of chinese tourists and i give them the bare minimum of service. The girl even goes as far as to not speak mandarin in order to avoid accidentally having chinks demanding a hundred things from her.

 

[Sped Xing]

My advice is certainly less useful somewhere so topsy turvy that people do farm labor for free.

I was a night Auditor for a hotel for a little while. I started out trying to do a good job, but I eventually found such contempt for the customers that I would just turn on the no vacancy sign and watch adult swim.

"Hey, why haven't you made any coffee?!". Because it's eleven PM, dickface. This isn't a 7-11

That experience is why I never eat the "free breakfast" at any place below a Marriott. I don't need salmonellosis.


EDIT: People generally pretend not to believe manual labor is beneath them in America, but they do all the same. Thanks to market forces, that means being willing to sweat can be highly profitable. Stacking boxes is no way to spend your whole life, but learn a skill other than being a sessile office life form and you might find not only profit but satisfaction. I definitely feel better at the end of a day making junk food deliveries than I did beating feet trying to sell insurance plans, and I make more money, too.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

Possibly the worst job I ever had was cinema ushering during my student days. This meant standing at the entrance ripping tickets, cranking the popcorn machine, scooping out ice cream into cups, and sweeping the auditorium afterwards.

Christ on a bike. People who watch films are fucking animals. After a showing they would not take their rubbish with them like civilised human beings, but they'd just dump it. Some of them would take an almost perverse pleasure in grinding blobs of ice cream or half-melted sweeties into the carpets just because. They'd leave half-empty Gigantic Gulps of Coca Cola balanced precariously on the folded up seat next to them and then, wouldn't you just know it, they'd fall off and spill their glucose-laden contents everywhere. The worst ones were the groups of teenagers who would invariably end up throwing things at each other all throughout the showing or wanking each other off in the back row and not even having the common courtesy to wipe up their hideous spooge afterwards. I dreaded the Friday nights for this very reason.

Saturdays were pretty awful as well as that's when they had the kids go half price spectacular.

None of this would have been so bad had the powers that be given us proper gear to clean it up. Hell, even a battered old Henry Hoover would have been nice. No. They set us to with these flimsy as fuck long handled dustpans and brushes that were okay for removing hard or loose items like dead cans or bits of popcorn, and the one vacuum cleaner in the building was an asthmatic upright with a cord that was way too short.

On Saturday mornings we'd have a Kids Half Price fun fest, which meant screeching children full of technicolour sugar and Alvin and the Chipmunks in 3D.

The manager was also a tremendous penny-pincher. Obviously, on the drinks machines they were these standard stick the cardboard cup under the dispenser and press Small, Medium, Large, or Gigantic Gulp. However, he'd turned back all the timings so they never filled properly and asked us to fill it up with ice. Fair enough, this is usual. But if someone says it's too much ice, do we scoop some of it out and refill? Do we fuck. He told us to say that "Ice is a part of the recipe and makes the drink taste how Coca Cola want it to taste." I happen to know that he and all the projectionists were taping all the films on first showing or even after hours and flogging dodgy DVDs down the pub.

The other thing I remember is that there'd be a prize draw each week for some of the memorabilia and advertising stands. One bloke ended up getting some giant cardboard cutout of Mamma Mia. Not being a menopausal woman, he didn't really want it and so flogged it on eBay. Manager finds out and fires him. Apparently this wasn't allowed and was some sort of breach of copyright or something, I don't know. Allegedly all the standees and marketing crap has a secret hidden serial number in it or something. No idea how true this is.

Oh, and they would routinely pay us late and fuck up our tax codes.

 

[Sped Xing]

>Getting fired for selling your property

JFC we need to bring back dueling

 

[Malagor the dank omen]

Nah, still good advice for someone that has no idea where to begin with. Some pointers are always good for clueless idiots like me. Also, here in Europe is very prevalent the "manual labour is for chumps" mentality among people, specially parents pushing their kids into college, which makes college degrees nearly useless because an oversaturated market of college graduates (except engineers, they are always in demand) while plumbers and electricians make cash hand over fist, even more if they get picked up by an insurance company.

As for the work doing reception, i'm glad i don't have to stay up at night waiting for people to come late, since we close office at 10. That still doesn't make me avoid smartass customers that get assblasted because they have to pay 3 euros for parking (compared to the 10-15 in most places). It was particularly annoying a group of scottish bikers that came here a couple of days ago and when i told them they had to pay 6 euros per day to park their bikes (they had 4) they complained for 5 minutes straight about how we advertise "free parking" (we don't). During their stay i was as polite as i could be because they were very disgruntled and i did them a good service, but they still were incredibly asspained for paying 6 euros per day. Before they left, they told me they would not stand for that and they would leave a negative review stating that we make false advertising.

This kind of shit really sours my mood, but it's an important lesson in this business: usually, the customer is never right and they will try to pull your leg. But i'm cool with it because i can stay most of the time goofing off during reception dead hours playing games or watching movies.

 

[Sped Xing]

"Manual labor is for chumps" is for chumps.

It's not that the sign is misspelled, but the fact it's clearly a professionally-made sign that someone at this enormous company purchased. It's an entire chain of illiteracy.

 

[Malagor the dank omen]

"Manual labor is for chumps" is for chumps.

It's not that the sign is misspelled, but the fact it's clearly a professionally-made sign that someone at this enormous company purchased. It's an entire chain of illiteracy.

Manual labour is one of the most rewarding things in life and even if it doesn't pay much, it's far better to work in a job that you love and you're passionate about than making a lot of money in a job you feel miserable.

Also, how much does it cost to proofread something these days? Because i also see shit like this sometimes when i work subtitling movies and nobody takes the time to check if everything is properly written. And the most important thing, never allow the person that made the document to proofread it, because they will fuck it up.

 

[Sped Xing]

The secret is to make a shitload of money in a job you love, then retire and fuck bitches on your yacht forever.


Don't spread it around too much.

 

[Basic Bleach]

"Manual labor is for chumps" is for chumps.

It's not that the sign is misspelled, but the fact it's clearly a professionally-made sign that someone at this enormous company purchased. It's an entire chain of illiteracy.

The number of signs is usually inversely proportional to the literacy level of the people they're directed at. If a place is plastered in signs, expect to have a really fun time.

Especially if it's the bathroom.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

Back to cinema horror. I don't know about our seats, but according to this, cinema seats are usually contaminated with E.coli bacteria. That's what you get in shit. I would routinely see people duck out of an auditorium to visit the toilet and there's no way they were in there long enough to wash their hands. That's probably where it comes from.

Then people would happily eat popcorn or sausages in a bun with the hand that was gripping the armrest.

Ever wondered why the seats in a cinema are all a dark colour but not black? Usually crimson or navy blue? It's because those are the colours that don't show the dirt. I don't recall seeing a carpet shampoo machine or steam cleaner being deployed once in the time I worked there. Given the heavy traffic, when you sat on one of those seats you were probably sitting in the combined sweat, shite, jizz, blood, technicolour sick, and so forth of a thousand people before you. Add to this spilled drinks and ground-in ice cream. You know what happens if you leave food waste out in the open? That's right, it gets mouldy and bacterial. And us with our flimsy brushes. I tell you, we were polishing turds. Literally.

Oh, and guess what the break room / locker room was furnished with for us? Three rows of cinema seating that was too physically knackered to be acceptable for the punters.

See, we'd clean and scrub out all the metalwork from the popcorn and sausage trays and so forth every evening before we closed because if they got mouldy we'd be condemned and closed down. But the seating in the auditoriums? Nobody cares, as long as there's not visible crap all over it.