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I'm currently interning at a place and I'm about to enter my second year in about a month. I'm a high school junior, soon to be senior! :D

Anyway, I wanted to know from those who have jobs (part time or full time) to discuss crazy moments at work. It could be something bad to something crazy! :)

My worst moment at work was when I was told to walk from Canal street to Washington Square Park (in NYC) in a heat wave on my second day on the job. This was all for a flower pot. I was told it would be about 10 minutes. Turned out to be about 30 minutes. We had poor directions to the store so we ended up walking by it about 4 times. 10 minutes later, we find the place, bought the pot. :P At least I got to learn about the area more.

I've heard stories about our tech support having to explain what a "desktop" is, but the one call I'll always remember was when our lead dev had to explain to a customer what sort of information they could put in a particular blank in the software. He had to explain the difference between numbers, dates, and text several times, the final attempt was something like: During that call, he also put the customer on hold and swore most strongly at them. It was really terrible. The call went on for something like two hours. The whole time he looked like he was ready to cry.

Tech support's bad, but when you're a little start up company that's convinced your customers that you should be their one-stop shop for all tech support questions, not just the ones for the software you sold them, it's really bad.

-- I've got a million of 'em --
We also do a lot of remote assistance style support, where we connect to our customer's computers and fix issues for them directly. The standing policy is that if the customer is using the system, you minimize it and wait for them to be done. I've spent a half hour waiting for a customer to finish playing solitare before I got to fix a problem. I hear stories about catching our customers looking at ASCII porn. I got a good laugh the one time we caught one chatting in in a lesbian IRC channel. We're pretty sure the customer involved wasn't even a woman, let alone a lesbian... Which is probably pretty normal for a lesbian IRC channel, come to think of it. And for the record, THEY connect to US, and it changes the color of an icon in their system tray -- they have to know we're watching.

Ne'er worked there, but there's a a good deal of nice ones at my GW.

Staff member took an activated Foam Cutter and pressed it to the meat of a coworkers arm.

A man in a banana suit was chased by a man in a monkey suit outside.

A child ran into the front window screaming for some unknown reason. We just here a "WAAAA- *Thump*" and watch a kid stagger away from the window.

An in depth conversation on Cannibalism.

The worst moment at my work (Wal-mart), Was when two Idiots tried to walk out of the store with a 40"in Plasma. They droped it and ran, once out side.

I used to work in fast food, so there's a boatload right there, lol.

Odd moment at the video store though, would have to be the guy who had a tantrum over Shrek the Third. Movie released and, duh, they all get checked out on the first day. Some guy comes in - in his mid thirties, early forties - in the late afternoon asking if we have Shrek in. We tell him no, it sold out around two-ish like they always do.

Guy storms out cursing up a storm, and tells us he's never going to [censored] come to our store again, blah blah... we laughed.

:) I suppose most of our crazy stories will be about the [censored] customers?

I used to work at gamestop and we had customers just like that but with Wiis. I don't understand why people can get so mad at trivial thing like that.

I've learned the fine art of passing the blame. We don't have any Wiis in, so I just pass blame onto Nintendo's mysterious distributor. Customers seem to get that it's not the cashier's fault if you throw vague things at them like that. Plus, they blame Nintendo rather than where I work, so I don't get that residual flak either.

After some point of working in a video store, you just learn to ignore [censored] customers and pamper the nice ones. :twisted:

My personal favorite is from when I worked at a movie theater. At this time, we had just gotten a new general manager, and were still working out the kinks. Anyway, the GM had switched a few of the movie theaters -- without telling projection. So what was supposed to play Babel ended up with some chick flick, and well...here's where it gets funny.

If you've ever seen Apacolypto, the opening scene is a pig being brutally hunted down and sacrificed. Well, as luck would have it, that movie got switched with Charlotte's Web. So, all the kids were in there waiting to see Wilbur, when *gasp* THERE HE IS MOMMY---OH MY GOD!!!

We gave sooooooo many refunds that day.

On my first trip overseas as a young and ambitious and pretty stupid soldier, I had an awesome platoon commander. He was a fresh 2nd Lieutenant and Ranger, but wasn't an [censored] like most butter bars are. He always carried around a portable radio with him from which he would always blast classic rock music. Everybody loved that guy.

We had to spend 2 weeks in a deserted village a couple months before we went home. We spent the days lounging around and jumping from roof to roof because we were bored and idiots. The last of those merry days our platoon commander is sitting on a roof with his radio playing about a foot from his head, and four gunshots sounded from the far end of the village. Three missed, one went right through that radio and blew it apart.

First he nearly jumped out of his skin because a bullet came within a foot of his head, then he ducked because he realized it was a sniper, then he realized his radio was broken and went insane. Stood back up, jumped off the roof and started running towards the sound of the shot screaming his head off and used about 3 of his 8 magazines in less than a minute. I've never seen a guy so angry.

We had to leave the next day so we never found the sniper. But you know, that sniper didn't bother us one bit for the rest of that day. Shooting a soldier is one thing, but shooting his *radio*, well, that's inviting rage incarnate to come charging at you.

A woman slipped in the milk she spilled at a register back when I was still working at Wal-mart.

Another thing at my job was I got to watch a shipment of boxes on those crate platform things being loaded onto a regular elevator. It took around 10 minutes then it was sent down. Lots of irritated people looking at them and sometimes me... I had to unload about 100 boxes by myself and had to bring up some of those to the second floor. The elevator only goes up from the basement so every time I dropped off the boxes at our office, I had to run down the stairs with a hand truck thing and repeat the process for about 30 minutes while the rest of the people at the office threw a birthday party. The eventually noticed my absence. :lol:

I don't have an actual job yet, but I do some volunteer work from time to time. In October our township has something called "The Haunted Trail". It's a pretty cheesy faux haunted house type thing, and I was a "story teller". I basically led them through the trail and explain the different scenes.

This year a group of kids who were obviously there to just make trouble were in a group I led. During the entire thing "thats not scary" and "wow thats so fake" etc. I felt bad because there were actually a few little kids having fun, and they were ruining it. So we got a fork in the trail, and they were still causing trouble, I told them to go left if they were so tough, and the rest of us went right.

They walked straight into the police who "escorted" them off the trail \m/.

[music] For those who have a job...We solute you! [/music]

ACDC has been stuck in my head for days now. I had to do it.