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The Absolute Worst Working Environment?
goodEvans writes "As I write this, there is a window open behind me with a small jet engine outside. This is supplying vast amounts of compressed air to the aircraft undergoing heavy maintenance in the hangar right outside my door. There is a 6-inch diameter air hose going through the office and out the door. All this requires that I sit at my desk wearing a body warmer to keep out the cold, and both ear defenders AND ear plugs to keep out the noise! And this will go on for half a day once a week! What are the worst conditions you have ever had to work under?" Can you top that? (If top is the word ...)
I had to get up in the morning, at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill and pay mill-owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our dad would kill us and dance about on our graves, singing Hallelujah!
Oh, ay. And you try and tell the young people of today that, and they won't believe you.
Back in early/mid 80's we had to power the computers with coal-fired generators. The geeks would take turns going into the mine to dig out a few buckets of the stuff. We'd lose two or three people a month in "the pit", but dammit, the data had to flow! Pink slips would fly if a single 110/300 baud modem lost power. We were dedicated!
Now all these young punks with their Just-Plug-Into-the-AC-Outlet-and-Let-the-Power-Co
Harummmmph...
Remind me to tell you how we put the hole in doughnuts back in the day...
Trolling is a art,
Yeah, well, I'm sitting here in my Aeron chair, in my private office, working on a computer with a 400mz Pentium II processor and a 5-year-old CRT monitor which is running Windows 98. I think I've got it worse.
.)
(Not that I'm offering to trade, mind you . .
The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer. - Albert Einstein
I had this job once where they expected actual output! And they wouldn't pay me unless I "produced" something!
/. at work.
Thank goodness that nightmare ended and now I can suff
I once had my office on a sales floor with about 20 women. You think a jet engine is annoying, try that out for size!
Me fail English? That's unpossible!
The concept was simple enough. I opened latch one and placed the hose onto the opening. This was provided that the second hatch had not failed and excrement flew everywhere. If things worked correctly, I placed a hose onto the opening and released latch two. Everything would go down via a simple gravitational setup. Often, however, the second hatch failed and would get stuck. This required removing the hose and opening the second hatch by hand and hoping that the excrement had not already released while in transit, and therefore reside behind hatch two. The lever would often fail and there would be a race to reapply the hose before the shit hit the fan, so to speak.
I could give a better description but I don't feel like reliving this. Back to work...
At my company they make me sit in a small gray box with a computer. The walls are only about 6 feet high!
And it doesn't end there. My small gray box is just one in a sea of boxes, it's like some cruel farming experiment. Every so often, yet another manager comes by and asks about some memo or putting a stupid cover page on some report. And they expect me to just sit here all day and type stuff into this PC.
Think outside the box? How?
i work in an environment which consists mainly of windows 98 machines.
Gyrate Dot Org - "Where high-tech meets low-life"
Being the only tech support rep, and having no authority. For four years. No holidays or weekends.
Beat that. I was every customer's verbal-abuse toy.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
I shit you not, every time somebody would call on this line, a fucking klaxon goes off.
This company was extremely strange in other ways. The guy who founded it made tents for the Israeli army. He comes into my office one day and sees me debugging code. Mind you, this was a Mac shop, and the debugger on the Mac (Macsbug) does have an unusual appearance. He takes one look at it, and tells me I have a bug. Well, no shit, that's why I'm using the debugger! He says no, that the debugger is a bug, and that he can tell because of the way it makes my screen appear, and to please remove it immediately.
And how did he get his funding? A really big investment firm whose name shall remain, um, nameless. Turns out that one day they decide they're curious about what this guy is doing, so they send one of their drones over to take a look around. We sit him down in front of the lead programmer's computer, and show him the software that was being worked on. Mind you, this was a fairly involved piece of software, and though I didn't like the framework being used (THINK Class Library) it was nevertheless rather impressive. The drone followed the presentation carefully, or so it appeared, intently staring at the screen during each step of the presentation. Finally, about half an hour later, the presentation ends, and the drone is asked if he has any questions.
So he asks one.
"What's that little box in the lower right-hand corner for?"
He was talking about the grow box. You know, the thing that makes the window grow bigger and smaller.
So we demonstrate how you can change the size of the window. This, it turns out, was the most amazing thing he had ever seen! He starts nodding appreciatively, as if he's sure their investment in this company is a good thing after all. Then he leaves.
I think this is when I started smoking pot.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
hit command-w, and you'll be fine.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
I wouldn't want to be the alien that has to do all the anal probing. I mean c'mon! Have you seen the people that get abducted?
[ Don't reply to this ]
I don't think I'll be buying colo service from you...
I Work for SCO... top that!
Me too!
I've had this sig for three days.
I work for a small town maintance dept. One of the task was to monitor a sewage lift station. Once a month or so the trash pump would get bound up with rubbers and tampon strings. The only way to free the pump was to reach in up to the shoulder and pull it free. I told my supervisor where he could purchase shoulder length gloves.
They didn't tell you that the floor tiles can come off?
Normally we can get one engine done in half a day, then we pack up and move on to the next jet engine in the next hangar.
It goes on like this all day, every day, 5 days a week.
I look at the other people sitting inside the buildings and think how lucky they are to only have to put up with this for 1/2 a day once a week.
I like microcars
I worked at the university doing tech support for students in the dorms. The section I worked in was filled with the sororities. As such you can imagine the computer problems (they varied from computer is physically destroyed to bonzi buddy won't go away). Of course the challenge was fixing the computer in a room with 6 19-year-old, very attractive women while they were changing (literally). My highlight was attempting to defrag a drive (so this is basically watching the bar go across the screen) while 3 girls where dancing and singing around the room. They were in towels just out of the shower and waiting for me to leave.
Sure, the conditions weren't that bad, but you try fixing computer equipment under those conditions; it's not easy!!!
Yes, and the phrase you're looking for is: "I hate you."
All ya pansy coders out there with your ooh-so-bloody-fancy optimized compilers and step through debuggers...when I started codin', there were only 1's and 0's...and we couldn't afford the 1's!
No, I mean at -20, that must be pretty tough shit.
I work in Newark, New Jersey. Top that.
Intercarve Networks, LLC
That only sucks if you actually worked for the data center.
Turn that around and it would be uber-elite if you were hacking into the datacenter, and you had gained physical access through the false floor.
"VPS Colo: Hosting your web server from our secure location, beneath the false floor at Global Crossing. Rock bottom prices!"
Back in 1996, I worked for a Cyber-cafe type operation. With a few days til launch, the "bricks" side of the operation wasn't complete. (To be fair, neither was the "clicks" side)
They were still doing construction, so there was sawdust and paint particles in the air. My partner and I had to wear respirators and goggles for two days while we wrote code.
The worst part was that we had to do some motherboard surgery one night. We didn't finish, so we left the PC cases open and put up a big sign that said "DO NOT PAINT IN THIS ROOM".
Of course, we came in the next day to find the room freshly painted, along with the motherboards. They used a power sprayer which coated everything in the room.
Yeah, that sucked.
> lying flat on my back for 12 hours ... type using one hand
"Alright where the fsck is Rus NOW?
The router is choking on PORN and the IP is Rus's laptop.
Why are you all smirking?! Where the HELL is he?"
"um... you are standing on him, sir. He's crawled under the floor again."
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
How would you know ?
;-)
I mean, if you were schizophren, wouldn't you be writing exaclty this ?
J.
I used to work in an office in a hospital which happened to be next to a cleanup room, where various sorts of waste used to get dumped, between pickups from the cleaners who would take it off to the incinerator.
One morning I come in and open up my office door when I realize I am standing in a pool of liquid of some sort, smelling a little funny. I trace it back to a split waste bag (with biohazard trefoils - danger clinical waste). I'm a little worried so track around the department trying to find out what moron failed to double-bag their rubbish correctly and what was in it.
Eventually I got somebody to admit it might be theirs and offer to clean it up, so I asked them what I now had all over my shoes...
"Oh, you're OK, I autoclaved it"
"Yeah, but what was it?"
"Well... infected human urine and blood samples, but I autoclaved it..."
Of course I had to assume that he had probably autoclaved it equally as well as he had bagged up. i.e. wrong. At this point I went a bit verbal at him and got called up before the head of department - who shut up pretty quick once I threatened to get the local safety rep involved.
-- Nothing unusual happened today
Farming out the shit, eh?
Are you my manager?
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
And frankly, I'm older than Frank. At least he had ones and zeros. We had to pick slivers of flesh from our arms to make ones.
I was a ride attendant at an amusment park and one day a group of people decided to set themselves on fire while in line for the ride I was running. (this was during a religous event that was happening in the park that week, and is the busiest week in the park)
Religious nuts setting themselves on fire? I thought this was supposed to be the worst working environments?
This is a special excite
This
I remember once after a long midsummer night's party back in 1999, a couple of the brothers and myself drank ourselves silly on their terrace. I proceeded to puke all over the place. I somehow ended up home later that night. A couple days later I ran into my friend and apologized for not cleaning it up. He told me not to worry - nobody else was going to clean that up. It was still waiting for me over a week later.
I'll try not to remember the time somebody made a large boil of boiled shrimp (probably 100 shrimp in all) and left the entire thing sitting in kitchen. For two weeks. After a while it became a control issue - nobody wanted to be the one to give in and clean it up. Meanwhile, the entire building had an overpowering odor of dead rotting seafood all about it. Eventually somehow it got cleaned up but it took at least a month for the stench to go away.
You are a character from a Jean Paul Sartre book, aren't you?
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Which pays better, programming or spraying shit?
Best Slashdot Co
You mean you work for SCO both as a programmer and as a lawyer?
How about not having sex with monkeys for starters?
> How about not having sex with monkeys for starters?
Quit joking around, we want serious solutions: not your unrealistic expectations.
> > One as a half-assed programmer, the other cleaning monkey shit
> You mean you work for SCO both as a programmer and as a lawyer?
Come on, SCO is a software company... They don't hire programmers.