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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.
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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...
They didn't tell you that the floor tiles can come off?
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."
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!"
> 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.
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
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?
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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.