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Sunday, May 31, 2009

Mercy Killing Candidate


Seriously. Sometimes stuff happens in the office you can't make up. The other day this sorry specimen had been moved from this spot, to a little space in the office that has linoleum flooring. The office manager said "Why is this in HERE?" He was informed that there had been a complaint from the floor below that this "thing" had been leaking water, through the floor planks, and onto a desk.


The office manager said: "THIS Plant?" So he picks it up, frowns, and decides to move it right back to where it had been. "They" must have been out of the office, or this plant had finally drained all the excess water. Because I waited all day for someone to come upstairs and punch the office manager right in the nose. Didn't happen. Hope springs eternal for Monday.

4 comments:

Stephen said...

Ooh. Office managers.

My un-favourite was an idiot I worked for in London, a man whose stupidity was such that he could single-handedly disprove Darwin. Examples of his idiocy were many and varied (he once had to be disabused of the notion that I would be able to go out onto the street and hail a London cab while carrying a 7ftx5ft polystyrene representation of a rock from the Grand Canyon which we'd got as a prop for some exhibition or other), but my favourite was the day - this was in the mid-90s - when the police came in and told us that we'd have to evacuate the premises because they'd received a coded warning that the IRA had planted a device at the rear of the building. Mr. Stupidissimo asked them if, since the device was apparently in the back alley, we could continue trading from the front of the building.

gemoftheocean said...

! Sheesh.

My favorite "stupid secretary" remark goes as follows. This was related to me by a co-worker, Clark, in the mid-1980s.

Clark: So, Karen, I'm walking out the door of building 4 to building 5 [a distance of all of 30 yards] with MissDumbass and I say to her: 'there it is, ground zero.' (Building 5 was were Tomahawk cruise missiles were assembled.) So I explaned to her that if the soviets WERE going to nuke anything in San Diego, that building was surely going to be a target. So help me, Miss Dumbass said 'thank God, I work in buidling 4.'

True story.

Stephen said...

Trouble is, this guy wasn't a secretary or an assistant. He was the managing director (he was the managing director until quite recently, in fact, though it's 11 years since I worked there). I mean honestly, can you imagine? A policeman comes into the building where you work and tells you that you have to evacuate because they've had a report of a bomb, you know full well that such things are usually hoaxes but you *also* know that there's a very small but very real possibility that something nearby may be primed to explode, and your idiot boss, instead of hitting the fire alarm and getting everyone the hell out of the building (not a terribly large building, by the way), engages the policeman in a discussion about which parts of the building it's necessary to evacuate.

The policeman's response was priceless (the gist of it was, "You idiot, you need to get the f*** out of here NOW!")

gemoftheocean said...

Please tell me the whole office errupted into applause after the policeman said that!!

I have to say that one time when I was working in a secure facility, they conducted a fire drill. We were later told off for shutting down our computers. "Yes, we commend you for you desire to protect classified data, however, in this case, it's really okay to get your asses out of the building rather than fry to a crisp.

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