Lazy/funny co-worker stories
- Thread starter Great White Drake
- Start date
While operating our drill rigs. We always use a two man crew. Usually you work with the same guy for years. One of my helpers we worked with each other for 5-6 years. Well during that time he would shit himself one to two times a year without fail.
He eventually quit and worked for another drilling company. one day I just happen to be talking to another driller from that other company. Turns out my old helper shit himself a couple of times in the few months he was with the new drilling company.
He eventually quit and worked for another drilling company. one day I just happen to be talking to another driller from that other company. Turns out my old helper shit himself a couple of times in the few months he was with the new drilling company.
Mike, our night shift guy, flicked a cigarette out of the stake truck window and lit a pallet of toilets on fire (they were in boxes). He didn’t notice till that fucker looked like a Roman candle going down 80. Eventually it got put out. Cops were laughing so hard they didn’t give him an inspection. The best part? Mike told our boss the cause of it was kids shooting fireworks at the truck.
I worked with a guy that would watch wood working videos all night long not do shit and tell you everything was running great in the morning, you would find out 2 minutes after he left that he never looked at anything and it was a giant ball of fail that needed hours of adjustments to straighten out, I work with a guy right now that sleeps 8-10 hours every shift, he actually knows what he’s doing though and if shit hits the fan you just have to wake him up he has no problem helping out, my boss comes in and sleeps for a few hours every night
I covered the dumbass, now let’s get to the worst, laziest piece of shit I’ve ever encountered and the biggest reason I’m good at working solo in a job that takes 2 people. To paint the right picture he drove a bucket truck which carries cable reels and is essential for placing cable and I drive a boom truck which can’t carry a reel of cable but is used to pull cable into and through backyards, manholes, place and remove poles etc. The time we get allotted for our jobs is predetermined by what the tasks are to complete the job. Example is you have 3,000 feet of cable and strand to place in an alley, you get 18 hours to complete it. Place and remove a pole, transfer cables = 19 hours. All time has to be divided by however many techs are on the job, in order to run at 100% productivity you have to charge out 111% of work for the day (I know, that doesn’t make sense to us either) or you have to charge out 11 hours worth of work per person in an 8 hour shift.
We start work at 6:30, he shows up 20 to 45 minutes late EVERY DAY.
He only shows up maybe 3 days a week.
Load up the trucks with cable or whatever supplies we need....he’s nowhere to be found.
Have to load a pole on a trailer.....doing it solo, he’s gone. Other guys come up to help me since you’re really not supposed to do it alone “Where’s Frank?” Me “Fuck if I know!”
However long it takes to drive to the jobsite multiply it by 4x and that’s when you can start looking for him to show up. He’d drive all the way out to the job after being MIA for 3 hours then get out of the truck at 10 and say “I’m taking a half day today.”...... 8 hour shift, 6:30 start time, 10:30 is a half day. Meaning I’m fucked.
Get out to a job and size it up with him and he’d come up with 1,000 reasons why we couldn’t do it or claim he doesn’t have the right supplies. “Don’t worry Frank, I have all that. Let’s get started.” What’s his response? “Ok. Let me go find a place to take a shit first.” Hour or so later he’d send me a text saying he’s going home early.
He was notorious for hiding down the street or within a mile of the job and doing whatever he was doing that wasn’t work. Then he’d send a text saying “I’m leaving early.” and screw me over because the cable is on his truck and what we were doing I couldn’t do by myself. Leaving me holding the bag and I’d have to explain to the boss why it’s taking weeks to do something we should be able to do in 2 days.
3,000 feet of strand (strength member that holds up the cable), 3,200 feet of cable, 20-30 poles to frame with hardware. SHOULD take myself and another seasoned lineman 4 days tops to finish........NOPE. 3 weeks into it Frank decides to call in sick for a week leaving me out to dry. The boss sends another guy out with me to finish and I’m done placing 2,000 feet of strand and cable in 2 days. Boss wants to know why it takes us so long to get jobs completed and I tell him “I can’t place a cable that doesn’t show up to the job.”
Boss told me to straighten Frank out and get him to start working. I start by being nice, he tells me to fuck off. I tell him to get out of the truck and let’s get started, he tells me to fuck off. I plead with him and rationalize that he and I are the most tenured linemen in our garage and we can get everything we need done in a fraction of the time it takes other crews to do it and our productivity will go up and we won’t be suspended and I won’t get bitched at by the boss all the time. He tells me “I have a business to run and I can’t get started until later because I have to take care of that. I don’t care about this place or you getting in trouble.”
From then on Frank only got to charge out what he did for the day (he never figured out what we were charging time to, I had to do it). If he didn’t get out of the truck or never showed up I’d give him a step that had 2 hours on it that he’d charge 8 hours to, negative productivity. He placed 300 feet of cable and I hung 1800 feet of strand, he gets to charge out 300 feet of cable, negative productivity.
After 2 years of his bullshit and me finally giving him spoonfuls of his own medicine we get called into a meeting with our boss and our union steward where he tries to throw me under the bus for “our” bad numbers. Problem was I always had backup jobs that I would go do alone and charge my time to those while he was charging days worth of time to a step that only had 3 hours of chargeable time and still wasn’t finished because he never showed up to the job but still needed time to cover his day. When I was asked about it I simply said “I gave him time for what he did for the day. Am I supposed to falsify timesheets and give him time for a job I did while he was at home? I can be fired for that.”
He straightened up for a few days then 3 weeks later he was back to the same bullshit and he was told he wasn’t allowed anymore time off until his numbers improved. I drove out to a job we had in Park Ridge and waited for him to show up, 10 o’clock rolled around and still no Frank. I called the boss and told him I was taking a half day because I wanted to start my vacation early, Frank is a no show and I left. An hour later Frank is lighting up my phone asking where I was. I got a call from my boss who was laughing when he told me Frank waited until 1 o’clock to call him asking where I was. Meaning Frank didn’t do a fucking thing.
Frank was fired a total of 4 times in his career, twice while I was his partner (never anything I did or was even associated with). He blamed other people for him getting busted sitting at home for 3 hours while on company time, it was the bosses fault he had drugs in his system in a zero tolerance union and company and it was someone else’s fault he backed into a car and ripped their bumper off because he was backing up while texting.
We start work at 6:30, he shows up 20 to 45 minutes late EVERY DAY.
He only shows up maybe 3 days a week.
Load up the trucks with cable or whatever supplies we need....he’s nowhere to be found.
Have to load a pole on a trailer.....doing it solo, he’s gone. Other guys come up to help me since you’re really not supposed to do it alone “Where’s Frank?” Me “Fuck if I know!”
However long it takes to drive to the jobsite multiply it by 4x and that’s when you can start looking for him to show up. He’d drive all the way out to the job after being MIA for 3 hours then get out of the truck at 10 and say “I’m taking a half day today.”...... 8 hour shift, 6:30 start time, 10:30 is a half day. Meaning I’m fucked.
Get out to a job and size it up with him and he’d come up with 1,000 reasons why we couldn’t do it or claim he doesn’t have the right supplies. “Don’t worry Frank, I have all that. Let’s get started.” What’s his response? “Ok. Let me go find a place to take a shit first.” Hour or so later he’d send me a text saying he’s going home early.
He was notorious for hiding down the street or within a mile of the job and doing whatever he was doing that wasn’t work. Then he’d send a text saying “I’m leaving early.” and screw me over because the cable is on his truck and what we were doing I couldn’t do by myself. Leaving me holding the bag and I’d have to explain to the boss why it’s taking weeks to do something we should be able to do in 2 days.
3,000 feet of strand (strength member that holds up the cable), 3,200 feet of cable, 20-30 poles to frame with hardware. SHOULD take myself and another seasoned lineman 4 days tops to finish........NOPE. 3 weeks into it Frank decides to call in sick for a week leaving me out to dry. The boss sends another guy out with me to finish and I’m done placing 2,000 feet of strand and cable in 2 days. Boss wants to know why it takes us so long to get jobs completed and I tell him “I can’t place a cable that doesn’t show up to the job.”
Boss told me to straighten Frank out and get him to start working. I start by being nice, he tells me to fuck off. I tell him to get out of the truck and let’s get started, he tells me to fuck off. I plead with him and rationalize that he and I are the most tenured linemen in our garage and we can get everything we need done in a fraction of the time it takes other crews to do it and our productivity will go up and we won’t be suspended and I won’t get bitched at by the boss all the time. He tells me “I have a business to run and I can’t get started until later because I have to take care of that. I don’t care about this place or you getting in trouble.”
From then on Frank only got to charge out what he did for the day (he never figured out what we were charging time to, I had to do it). If he didn’t get out of the truck or never showed up I’d give him a step that had 2 hours on it that he’d charge 8 hours to, negative productivity. He placed 300 feet of cable and I hung 1800 feet of strand, he gets to charge out 300 feet of cable, negative productivity.
After 2 years of his bullshit and me finally giving him spoonfuls of his own medicine we get called into a meeting with our boss and our union steward where he tries to throw me under the bus for “our” bad numbers. Problem was I always had backup jobs that I would go do alone and charge my time to those while he was charging days worth of time to a step that only had 3 hours of chargeable time and still wasn’t finished because he never showed up to the job but still needed time to cover his day. When I was asked about it I simply said “I gave him time for what he did for the day. Am I supposed to falsify timesheets and give him time for a job I did while he was at home? I can be fired for that.”
He straightened up for a few days then 3 weeks later he was back to the same bullshit and he was told he wasn’t allowed anymore time off until his numbers improved. I drove out to a job we had in Park Ridge and waited for him to show up, 10 o’clock rolled around and still no Frank. I called the boss and told him I was taking a half day because I wanted to start my vacation early, Frank is a no show and I left. An hour later Frank is lighting up my phone asking where I was. I got a call from my boss who was laughing when he told me Frank waited until 1 o’clock to call him asking where I was. Meaning Frank didn’t do a fucking thing.
Frank was fired a total of 4 times in his career, twice while I was his partner (never anything I did or was even associated with). He blamed other people for him getting busted sitting at home for 3 hours while on company time, it was the bosses fault he had drugs in his system in a zero tolerance union and company and it was someone else’s fault he backed into a car and ripped their bumper off because he was backing up while texting.
I'm just glad that this story ended with him finally being fired. People with that attitude drive me crazy.
Actually he didn’t get fired. He squeaked along long enough and got a SIPP offer and quit with an extra $30k when they were trying to reduce headcount. From what I’ve heard he’s trying to come back as a term employee while we do the fiber build over the next 5 years.
Well now I'm mad again. lol
Outlaw and I could tell some stories
We had a co-worker that was not only lazy, he also was a complete piece of shit.
There is not enough time in the day for me to vent about that one
So part of this reminded me of someone else I worked with. He was an in-house repair tech for an inserter. As in we printed material and they'd use the inserters to combine different printed pieces into an envelope.
Every day someone would be wandering around looking for him, nowhere to be found. This went on for a good year or two. You'd call his cell phone and he'd eventually answer and say, "oh I'm at another location working on 'x' piece of equipment, I'll be there in a bit." Hours later he might show up.
One day his boss stopped in to see how things were, and of course the guy wasn't there and he had just given us the aforementioned excuse. His boss goes, "another location? What the fuck is he talking about? This is his ONLY location."
So they set him up. The production manager calls the tech again to ask him when he'd be back to fix the equipment. He says, "in about two hours once I'm finished up here." His boss then speaks up and says, "Hey it's [insert name], what's this other location you're talking about, because you're supposed to be here, you don't have any other locations to be at!".
Silence.
Guys boss says, "wherever you are, stay there, I'm calling you back from my phone". Well, since the guy was using a company phone it had GPS, so the boss calls his IT and asks him where the phone is.
Great America. The tech is at Great America with his grandkids. Holy fucking ass reaming. We all sat back with sodas and got to listen in. We had no idea that he was assigned only to our place.
Next day the tech is there, right on time. This lasts for about 2-3 weeks, then he starts coming in later, leaving early, not showing up. Instead of calling him the production manager calls his boss and says, "you might want to ping his phone to see where he is.". Phone comes back to our building. Now what's going on? He would leave his company phone at our building and use call forwarding to a burner phone. That way he could roam around and it would show him where he was supposed to be. Unreal.
Never saw him again, he was fired after that.
Have another one that just came to mind, will use another post.
Okay, without getting too detailed, same location as above, but different piece of equipment, proprietary inkjet printing. Need an in-house tech cause there are three machines, two using therm thermal heads (think of your home inkjet printer) and a Piezo head press.
They hire a guy that used to be a mechanic in the Air Force, so they think this is the best option. First off, he was quickly nicknamed "dragon breath". The dude had the most horrid, putrid, nauseating, room clearing breath that you could imagine. Even at 6' distance you could smell it. He smoked this weird tobacco in a pipe and the oils from the tobacco would permeate the tissue in his mouth, and we would swear it was like rotting flesh. His clothes just reeked from the smoke. You really couldn't be within 15' of him.
As a test, one day I brought in a few packages of Tic Tacs. A group of us planned to play a "how many can you fit in your mouth at once?" game. So I grab a handful and we start. This catches his attention so we invite him to play. I hand him a full container, which he promptly empties into his mouth.
Success!!!!! yeah right, no impact what-so-ever.
So the smell is just the start of it. It seemed like he used every opportunity he could to alienate himself from everyone. He'd bring his own netbook (remember those?) and go out into his POS Ford Escape (it was literally falling apart) and watch videos and play games, while the presses would be needing maintenance or repair. If a press isn't running you're not making money, and you risk missing an SLA which could result in huge penalties.
This shit went on for months. The press operators would always be looking for him. One time he actually answered the phone while in the shitter just to tell the operator to fix it themselves.
There is an electronically control paper guide (ribbon shfiter) that was always problematic and a pain in the ass to properly calibrate and make work. So one day an operator asks the tech for help to get it working. The tech isn't exactly jumping to be of assistance. So the operator asks again. The tech grabs the operations manual, tosses it at the operator and tells him, "you figure it out". Operator isn't the kind of person to take shit, so he throws it, like overhand throws it back and says, "it your fucking job to fix it. If you don't or can't then get the fuck out so we can hire someone that is willing to do their job" and walked away to report him to the Team Lead.
The dude thought he knew better than everyone else, but when it came down to it, he didn't know shit and caused more problems than he was worth.
Good example of this, the Piezo press, the heads are in a fixture that allows for hundreds of thousandths of an inch increments for alignment. They have to be placed into that fixture in an exact precise procedure using an electronic microscope at 100x. There is a major catastrophe on the press and it destroys about 80 of these heads, which are about $6000 each. So we spend days trying to fix it, see what can be salvaged, do triage, etc. They fly in someone from Utah and from Buffalo to help sort it out, so there is four of us.
It's the tech's job to align the heads in their fixture, which we then install in the press. We're like 40 or 50 hours into fixing this thing and can't get anything to properly align. Can't figure out what the heck is going on. Finally, the guy from Buffalo is standing behind the tech watching him align the heads in the fixture using a jig. Sees that he is doing it wrong, which he would know, since Mr. Buffalo trained dragon breath how to do it.
Asks him casually why he is doing it in that particular manner. Got an answer that he felt it was the better way to do it. Buffalo then explains to him that they way he is doing it is preventing the heads from aligning to each other because there isn't enough travel for them to move in the necessary direction, which is why he was explicit when he told him how to do it.
So we wasted a good 40 hours trying to make it work, not counting the difficulty of taking these heads in and out of the press, since you have to deal with fiber connections, ink lines, power cables. Every single one was done wrong. The amount of hatred towards dragon breath was damn near the boiling point.
I quietly stepped away, told dragon breath's superior what was going on, why it was taking so long, and how he decided that he knew better, which completely fucked us. Suggested he tell dragon breath to go home for the night so we could go back and redo all the work he had done. We spent all night pulling every single head from the press and redoing the alignment. The three of us were tapped out physically and mentally after doing numerous 18-20 hour days in a row to get the press back up.
By the time it was over it turned out to be almost $780k in parts. Didn't even want to calculate the man hours wasted.
Just so everyone can put a face to the what we were dealing with, think of Cleveland from Family Guy. No joke. They could be twins. Same hair, same bulging eyes, same physical build.
The dude would just not follow instructions and it bit him in the ass all the time. Asked if he knew how to use backup software to make images of the servers for safety's sake. "yeah, I know how to use them, I've been using computers for 20+ years blah blah blah". They day I'm moving my shit out of that location to go to another I get a call from my boss telling me to show him how to do the backups. Told him that DB said he knew all that shit and didn't need/want instruction from us. I had him sign off on it, just to cover my ass.
Few weeks go by and a server at his location goes down. Tell him no problem, just remove the drive from the RAID array, reimage from your backup and go. "I don't have a backup". What? Why not? "Didn't think I needed it."
But he tells his supervisor that I wouldn't train him on the software. I get a nasty call from my boss asking why the fuck I won't show him how to use the software. Tell him to hold on a minute. Scanned in the signed paper saying he was waiving instruction, emailed it to my boss, his boss, and BCC'd the VP of the plant. No way I'm getting thrown under that bus. Fuck him.
Yeah, he got reamed all right. CYA procedure fully justified there. Asked the DB's supervisor and my supervisor for an apology for not believing me when I told them he declined the training.
So guess what, I had to make a full on step-by-step instruction manual to give to this asshat so he could do backups, which he still decided to not do. For any IT people out there, it was using Acronis True Image in the PWE from a USB stick, backing up to an external 2TB hard drive. HOW FUCKING HARD IS THAT? Hint to non-IT people, it's not hard, at all.
I need a drink.
They hire a guy that used to be a mechanic in the Air Force, so they think this is the best option. First off, he was quickly nicknamed "dragon breath". The dude had the most horrid, putrid, nauseating, room clearing breath that you could imagine. Even at 6' distance you could smell it. He smoked this weird tobacco in a pipe and the oils from the tobacco would permeate the tissue in his mouth, and we would swear it was like rotting flesh. His clothes just reeked from the smoke. You really couldn't be within 15' of him.
As a test, one day I brought in a few packages of Tic Tacs. A group of us planned to play a "how many can you fit in your mouth at once?" game. So I grab a handful and we start. This catches his attention so we invite him to play. I hand him a full container, which he promptly empties into his mouth.
Success!!!!! yeah right, no impact what-so-ever.
So the smell is just the start of it. It seemed like he used every opportunity he could to alienate himself from everyone. He'd bring his own netbook (remember those?) and go out into his POS Ford Escape (it was literally falling apart) and watch videos and play games, while the presses would be needing maintenance or repair. If a press isn't running you're not making money, and you risk missing an SLA which could result in huge penalties.
This shit went on for months. The press operators would always be looking for him. One time he actually answered the phone while in the shitter just to tell the operator to fix it themselves.
There is an electronically control paper guide (ribbon shfiter) that was always problematic and a pain in the ass to properly calibrate and make work. So one day an operator asks the tech for help to get it working. The tech isn't exactly jumping to be of assistance. So the operator asks again. The tech grabs the operations manual, tosses it at the operator and tells him, "you figure it out". Operator isn't the kind of person to take shit, so he throws it, like overhand throws it back and says, "it your fucking job to fix it. If you don't or can't then get the fuck out so we can hire someone that is willing to do their job" and walked away to report him to the Team Lead.
The dude thought he knew better than everyone else, but when it came down to it, he didn't know shit and caused more problems than he was worth.
Good example of this, the Piezo press, the heads are in a fixture that allows for hundreds of thousandths of an inch increments for alignment. They have to be placed into that fixture in an exact precise procedure using an electronic microscope at 100x. There is a major catastrophe on the press and it destroys about 80 of these heads, which are about $6000 each. So we spend days trying to fix it, see what can be salvaged, do triage, etc. They fly in someone from Utah and from Buffalo to help sort it out, so there is four of us.
It's the tech's job to align the heads in their fixture, which we then install in the press. We're like 40 or 50 hours into fixing this thing and can't get anything to properly align. Can't figure out what the heck is going on. Finally, the guy from Buffalo is standing behind the tech watching him align the heads in the fixture using a jig. Sees that he is doing it wrong, which he would know, since Mr. Buffalo trained dragon breath how to do it.
Asks him casually why he is doing it in that particular manner. Got an answer that he felt it was the better way to do it. Buffalo then explains to him that they way he is doing it is preventing the heads from aligning to each other because there isn't enough travel for them to move in the necessary direction, which is why he was explicit when he told him how to do it.
So we wasted a good 40 hours trying to make it work, not counting the difficulty of taking these heads in and out of the press, since you have to deal with fiber connections, ink lines, power cables. Every single one was done wrong. The amount of hatred towards dragon breath was damn near the boiling point.
I quietly stepped away, told dragon breath's superior what was going on, why it was taking so long, and how he decided that he knew better, which completely fucked us. Suggested he tell dragon breath to go home for the night so we could go back and redo all the work he had done. We spent all night pulling every single head from the press and redoing the alignment. The three of us were tapped out physically and mentally after doing numerous 18-20 hour days in a row to get the press back up.
By the time it was over it turned out to be almost $780k in parts. Didn't even want to calculate the man hours wasted.
Just so everyone can put a face to the what we were dealing with, think of Cleveland from Family Guy. No joke. They could be twins. Same hair, same bulging eyes, same physical build.
The dude would just not follow instructions and it bit him in the ass all the time. Asked if he knew how to use backup software to make images of the servers for safety's sake. "yeah, I know how to use them, I've been using computers for 20+ years blah blah blah". They day I'm moving my shit out of that location to go to another I get a call from my boss telling me to show him how to do the backups. Told him that DB said he knew all that shit and didn't need/want instruction from us. I had him sign off on it, just to cover my ass.
Few weeks go by and a server at his location goes down. Tell him no problem, just remove the drive from the RAID array, reimage from your backup and go. "I don't have a backup". What? Why not? "Didn't think I needed it."
But he tells his supervisor that I wouldn't train him on the software. I get a nasty call from my boss asking why the fuck I won't show him how to use the software. Tell him to hold on a minute. Scanned in the signed paper saying he was waiving instruction, emailed it to my boss, his boss, and BCC'd the VP of the plant. No way I'm getting thrown under that bus. Fuck him.
Yeah, he got reamed all right. CYA procedure fully justified there. Asked the DB's supervisor and my supervisor for an apology for not believing me when I told them he declined the training.
So guess what, I had to make a full on step-by-step instruction manual to give to this asshat so he could do backups, which he still decided to not do. For any IT people out there, it was using Acronis True Image in the PWE from a USB stick, backing up to an external 2TB hard drive. HOW FUCKING HARD IS THAT? Hint to non-IT people, it's not hard, at all.
I need a drink.
Starol Cream (Carol Stream), in the center of a black hole of non-existent fiber.
Exactly. I even had the BIOS boot order set to check for USB before the RAID so all you had to do was insert the drive, bounce the server, let it PWE boot into Acronis. Then just connect the external drive so you could write to it.
Dead fucking simple.
I showed my 70 year old computer-challenged mom how to do it. This guy couldn't figure it out, but "knew all about backup software and how to use it". Maybe that's why his breath was so bad, he was completely full of shit. Actually, a shit smell would have been more bearable.
He was talking to the CQT manager and she made that "who farted?" face cause his breath was so bad. She took a few steps back desperately looking for clear air. He closed the gap in response and she put up her hand and said, "please stay back there and keep your distance".
I think this thread was therapeutic for some people lol. I realized a few years ago,every company I worked for puts up with shitty workers because they’re willing to give their good workers more burden. Every. Fucking. Job. Boomers lied to us, there’s very few jobs I’ve seen people work their way up a ladder.
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