Quake3World

I was wondering in this global community we inhabit what is the strangest, most interesting, perhaps disturbing job or incident you have been paid to do?

Any length of time will do. Be it years in a dingy office, down a coal mine or being a checkout operator in a supermarket for an hour before giving it away.

Come on confess your sins.

I will save one of my more interesting ones for later but here is my first odd one. I am sure you have stories to tell, so play the game

Working for a land Surveyor, just after leaving school, we were 'pegging' out a building block on the coast and I was hip deep in seawater (ocean) when asked by my boss, don't put a (survey) peg in, just bang a stake in there and that will do.

I was 10-20 metres from the water line (beach) but a true story, that is where the original boundary corner was

My grandad was a stone mason and the house upto a few years ago was filled with grave stones in the garden, some had names on and were used for walls / paving slabs / plant pots n all sorts, the downstairs bathroom floor was a 1/2 foot thick marble slab that offered little in reading material. Wasn't til I was a lot older when a few mates seen it that I realised it was actually a bit freaky when they stopped coming over, they thought I lived in the middle of a graveyard lol.

Came in handy for keeping kids out the garden n all, just told them that's where I buried their mates.

ITV Antenna Installer...

One of our subcontractors needed someone to install ITV antennas on the top of 100' poles. Months prior they had to lay off their pole climber because business slowed down. So I volunteered to help them out. I only ended up climbing two poles. But it was good money while it lasted.
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Gramps has been up a few poles in his time.

weirdest contract I ever worked on was when a bunch of us claim stakers got together the night before a big job on the Detour Lake gold rush.

we dtarted out at a titty bar and I left when it got late.
Next morning they told me of their exploits each watching each other fucking a stripper called Spinny.

A couple days into the job they all left because of crabs.
Bush rats are retarded people.

The oddest thing I ever had to do was when me and a colleague had to go to a customer and do "something" there, it didn't really matter what. It was a purely political move from our company to please the customer who demanded for some reason we have people on site with them. Fortunately, they gave me and my colleague a private room, so instead of being in the office, working hard to resolve their issues, I was sitting in the customer's building browsing Q3W.

There's also some hilarious ways how people report issues to us (or anyone for that matter, it's a global IT problem). Most of that stuff's in Dutch though so not very entertaining to this audience.

cool couple of stories, jer

My current job, working with paranoid schizo's. This morning, i come to work to find out one of our loonier female patients has figured out how to put youtube vids on the interwebs, there is now a bunch of vids up showing her in her room cursing and screaming at the unjust world, and then performing a nearly naked shakira dance with all the sexy elegance of a demented hippo. Jesus... lol.

similarly to Eraser, our stories aren't disturbing but they are weird on in the The Office kind of way.

Once we deployed a complete redesign (both front and back) of a website for a big client. They also paid and got a full CMS training. Hours of training computer illiterate people how to use their new content management system later they said to us "Ok cool, thanks. Now here's the content for the site, put it on there".
Not really a problem cos we're happy to send you the bill if you ask us to do it. Seems odd how they would willingly throw 10K+ of money away like that.


At a previous job of mine, the company was launching an all new gamechanging product onto the market. Everything had to be ready in time; website, billing systems, etc. We had less than 3 months to do it in and we told them multiple times that that wasn't going to be enough time. But no, the deadline was set in stone due to marketing, commercials, physical infrastructure and the like. We worked late every day but it was still looking like we wouldn't make it. Two weeks before launch we expressed our worries once again but to no avail; as a result we worked around the clock, watching the sun come up more than you would want to. And the very day before going live - a Monday - the higherups decided to kill the entire project. Just like that. No explanations, no apologies. Just forget about this here thing and continue your other work as normal. We didn't even get a day off as a thank you for all those extra hours now that I think of it.

What baffles me is that millions were spent and now wasted. The decision to cut your losses like that (if any) is not made overnight. They had to know about potentially cancelling the product for a while, yet we had to keep on pushing 'till the very last minute.

ffs

Oh yeah, a job i also really enjoyed was working at Zonnet with mr. MKJ, that was a wild and crazy time... it was the last few months of the internet bubble and everyting seemed possible, even sending your two junior shitheads to cover a huge gaming conference in London was deemed a fine idea.

Good times

Interesting stories so time for me to add one.

I was once asked to be security for a lingerie parade. About 50 guys in a local hall, yes years ago.

Funny thing was I was dragged by the boss back stage to meet the 10 or so girls
I guess so they were to feel a little comfortable knowing there was some sober security about if things went bad.

Funnier still because he didn't warn them of my sudden appearance and they were quite spooked, probably thinking I was a stray audience member. They were in all states of (un)dress but and became friendly quick enough..

I went on the be his security on a couple of home 'private' shows.
Trust me, nothing really happened and most of the paying guests behaved themselves.

Being driven around the Jo Burg shanty towns in South Africa by a raging racist resting a assault rifle on his lap.

an

Lol jobs...

Grats on the 10000 posts

While this doesn't fall into the disturbing category, it was definitely over the professional ethics line.

We had built a pair of identical test systems for a major client, they replaced an older, larger, far less efficient system. Our systems were exposing a number of flaws in the client's test coverage because we were giving them more accuracy and in some cases testing things the way they were supposed to be for the first time.

Note that these parts were being tested after manufacturing and prior to taking their place in a rather complex, um, thing. Yes, let's just call it a thing that carries people in some manner.

So one of these tests that was raising eyebrows required the unit under test to move through a certain profile while we recorded the force and position. There was a certain event that had to happen within a window of position and force in order for the unit to pass. Our system just did the analysis and reported a pass/fail result, displaying the entire motion profile to the operator. The old system had some odd means of allowing the operator to move the "passing" window around on the plot, this was never fully explained to us.

They had a lot of units start failing this test, and we were asked to look into the cause. We couldn't find any reason, the systems were testing the parts in accordance with the client's customer's test plan (customer was responsible for assembly and test of the entire "thing" and as such dictated the test plan), the units were just all failing. So, there was a lot of investigation by our client, and they kept asking us to "make it work like the old system", which meant allowing the operator to move the passing threshold around.

This did not sit well with me, because what the fuck is the point of testing at all if you're simply going to demand that your operators be allowed to mask failing test results? The client wanted us to change the test so they wouldn't have to go to their customer and essentially tell them that they'd lied about the way they tested the six hundred or so units they'd already shipped them.

So, I was told to just make the changes and allow them to fudge the test results. I did it, because I didn't want to get fired and because the client accepted full responsibility. The reason why this still bugs me is because I've seen many instances of this sort of stupidity in American manufacturing. Rather than dealing with the client honestly and telling them that there was a mistake that needed to be fixed, things are masked, altered, or omitted in order to keep to production schedules and yield targets.

Hell, I had one friend that worked as a test engineer for Bose, in their car stereo production division. Those guys were so fucked up and producing such garbage that they were actually HAVING CARS CATCH FIRE because they were ignoring manufacturing defects to meet yield goals. He quit after a short time there.

Assholes.

I doubt that sort of thing is unique to the US.

Oh, I also had to deal with a saboteur working for (or against) a client of us (same client as mentioned before). He would randomly wipe content from the system and then report issues about content disappearing from the system. At first we couldn't figure out what went wrong because he cleaned up traces of his handywork. We installed a patch that added some additional logging functionality without telling them. Thats how we figured out what was up.
His motives were clear. He was the king, the be-all-end-all within their organization when it came to the old system that we were replacing. He was afraid to lose power and prestige when our system took over so he wanted it to fail. Cheeky bastard.

I did some voice acting for a movie when I was a kid. I remember being in the dark sound studio as they played parts of the movie that we were supposed to record over (I don't remember the movie, some kind of historical war drama). I also remember raiding the giant bowl of jelly beans in the lobby of the studio. I got paid $100/day and my dad helped me open up my first bank account a week later so that I wouldn't spend it all on candy or toys. Responsible parents.

Eraser wrote:I doubt that sort of thing is unique to the US.

Oh, I also had to deal with a saboteur working for (or against) a client of us (same client as mentioned before). He would randomly wipe content from the system and then report issues about content disappearing from the system. At first we couldn't figure out what went wrong because he cleaned up traces of his handywork. We installed a patch that added some additional logging functionality without telling them. Thats how we figured out what was up.
His motives were clear. He was the king, the be-all-end-all within their organization when it came to the old system that we were replacing. He was afraid to lose power and prestige when our system took over so he wanted it to fail. Cheeky bastard.

lol, that's just sad.
You know if the guy got fired?

I worked in a massive store where people tried to steal stuff...2 well known female light fingered fucks tried to steal things by supposedly going to the changing rooms and putting them in their chuffs. Police called on suspicion of theft, taken to the station. Never found out what happened...

Ryoki wrote:My current job, working with paranoid schizo's. This morning, i come to work to find out one of our loonier female patients has figured out how to put youtube vids on the interwebs, there is now a bunch of vids up showing her in her room cursing and screaming at the unjust world, and then performing a nearly naked shakira dance with all the sexy elegance of a demented hippo. Jesus... lol.

Can we get a link to those vids? Thanks...

Teaching PHP to adults when I was 13. Had a couple people drive 4-5 hours from San Francisco to pay me $300/hr to go over how content management systems worked and how they, too, could have their very own PHP-powered website.

Tried to do the same with the faculty at the school at the time. They balked at having to write words themselves though and wanted their assistants to edit the old static HTML files as usual.

It seems strange to me now, but I guess anything was possible in the dot-com bubble =\

uuuggg where to begin

plained wrote:uuuggg where to begin

How about somewhere near the end?