heart-stopping OH SHIT moments at work

Too late. The fuser rollers were fucked. And by this time, the company couldn't even afford a roll of scotch tape to tape pictures down on the drum scanner, so I made the last copy that copier ever made. The boss was very calm, even though I busted one of the last revenue streams the company had.

Last time I did this, in 2001, we discovered that we'd lost the original discs for our big important client database *after* I'd uninstalled it from our old computer :-(

The customer was actually really cool about the whole thing, but I got called on the carpet for it during a staff meeting, AFTER I'd been chewed out in private twice. Awful. I have not, however done anything this stupid since.

Everytime I remember this, I think "uh, well...good thing the company's server logs were destroyed on 9/11...I guess..."

he didnt get me fired, but then actually put me on the guestlist for his dj gig. so nice!

Immediately after, S3l3na (KM) asks me to talk, they had run a ticket audit on the last week's shifts and noticed some discrepancies between my voids and those managers remembered making, they might be going back further in my tickets and I was off the schedule until I came in and had a talk with M!ilt0n. I said sure, I'd come in the next day he worked to clear things up, it must be a mistake - and hauled ass out of there, never looking back.

It only took them six months to catch onto the void scam. God bless corporate incompetence.

(Busdriver taking the piss, just in case you didn't get it...)

i used to work on the back bench at a sunday newspaper, and often designed and produced the arts/entertainment supplement.

even though i say so myself, i came up with a fucking beauty of a design for a feature about antonio banderas. it was across a bitch of a tabloid false spread, where the left-hand page was colour and the right-hand page was black and white ... oh, it was lovely. even the notoriously-hard-to-please deputy editor was impressed. this spread had "one for the portfolio" written all over it.

the headline (which was in 88pt griffith gothic black, for those who care) was "THE SINNER".

so: it's saturday morning and i'm busy battering away at the live news pages while the early sections - including this arts one - are on the press. at about noon my phone goes. it's the duty manager at the print plant. "yer pre-prints are on the way up, son," he says.

smashing, thanks.

"really like that antonio banderas spread, son. clever work with the colour and stuff."

beat.

"shame about the fuck-up in the headline, though."

yes: i'd made a fucking mistake in the headline. not "sinner" but "sinnner", with three Ns. oh, how my colleagues laughed. oh, what bastards the inkies were for not ringing to tell me BEFORE they'd printed it.

the bastards.

(these days, when the magazine comes back from the printers, my heart still skips a beat; i still expect to open it and find some honking howler/upside-down page/the word "CUNT" in 300pt type which i somehow overlooked.)

THANK FUCK i had enough word/excel etc. documents in there so that it wasn't going to show Thumbnails, so nothing is seen. Then he started browsing other folders and my heart was beating like hell, if he had clicked on "My Pictures" by accident, I was history!

he's up to the FOLDER! he's checking the FOLDER! he's clicking the FOLDER!!!

The other scam I don't think they ever discovered was that I also figured out how to add money to gift cards through the credit-card terminals and fed my friends for months.

a DUDE

I left for lounch ina sickening cold sweat. I rang my old colleague and asked them to help, and we concocted a plan whereby with some judicious DOS work, we could erase my misdeeds and blame it on a knackered machine. I think I got away with it.

ALso, whenever I had an advanced group I'd just throw them down anything at Coqspeed and rarely a kid would get hurt - required by law to fill incident report for even a suspected injury, but i never did even once, cuz the kids loved me and would never snitch. One time though this kid crashed and I told his (very cool) parents to just get him looked at inside, fuck a report, and ten minutes later the parents tell me he sprained his thumb just BARELY outta earshot of a superior, thankfully they just take him home and he's good for the next lesson.

b. had fleshbot open on a monitor when our ex-creative director needed to see something on my computer. (NB: ex-creative director = my wife)

c. can't say the real one, would bum everybody out a shitload

I’ve not sent any similar e-mails since.

Nothing I could do so I went home and spent the weekend crapping myself - these printers are worth thousands of £££s and if they knew I'd been doing non-civil servicey work then I'd be in line for a surefire sacking. All next week I'm sat RIGHT NEXT to the printer. Various tech people keep coming over, having a fiddle with it, frowning then walking off. My heart's in my mouth each time. After a while it seemed like it'd been forgotten about, the printer was just left alone, a big dead useless beige rock that no one could be bothered fixing. Then about three weeks later Not-Goodwin there walks over and drops a lumpy object, like a transparent twig on my desk and says "Look what the IT tech just pulled out of that printer..."

No one else ever knew it was me, suckaz.