When my dad was a young copper
He was based in a fairly rural police station. On one of his first mornings there he took a call from a local man whose elderly mother had died in the night, and could he come over and help out?
No problem, my dad said. I’ll be there in an hour.
He found the farm house and knocked on the door. A grieving lady answered, eyes red with sadness. “Oh officer, thank you for coming. I’ll make you a cup of tea. Everyone’s just through there.”

My dad stepped into a room full of mourning family members. He removed his hat and said sorry for your loss and all that, taking an empty seat on the sofa. He started making gentle enquiries of the family – was it expected, are you all ok, that kind of thing. They were being a bit cagey and awkward, and my dad was beginning to get a little confused at how the situation wasn’t progressing. Finally he just came out and said, “So, could you let me know where the body is?”

Everyone blinked nervously at each other. “But officer,” said a young woman, pointing. “She’s right there.”

The ‘devastated relative’ my dad had squeezed in next to on the sofa was actually the stiffening corpse of grandma.
( Wet-chinned bag shanker Cannot parse Wogan, Fri 6 Sep 2013, 10:13, 1 reply)

Steel Mill
This is true - I was on site when it happened.

I worked at British Steel Stainless in the 80's (yes I'm that old!) and our melting shop was called SMACC (stainless melting and continuous casting).

The basic melt is made in a mahoosive cupola that held in the region of 80 tonnes of scrap metal that is melted by an equally mahoosive electric arc and it gets very hot, very quickly.

It was winter and the scrap was kept outside. Part of said scrap was a fridge with the door open and it filled up with snow.

It was soon discovered that if you place a fridge (with the door now shut) filled with snow and heat it with a fucking great spark of electricity that it will fly sideways through the wall of the cupola and straight through the Shift Managers office. Poor bugger was sitting there having a cup of tea when it came through one wall and out the other. I think he lost the gift of speech for a while.
( Blackdogmanguitar is out with Fat Larry's Jazz Band on, Fri 6 Sep 2013, 12:52, 7 replies)

So anyway, back when I was a student..
..coming into my final year I spent a few weeks working in theatres.

On the day of this tale I was detailed to work in a partiular theatre on the urology list. The list for the day comprised exclusively circumcisions, mainly in young lads who'd got a phimosis.
Finally the last customer of the morning comes in.
Gentleman in his 60's, rather shy, had needed YEARS of nagging by his wife to get it seen to apparently.

The first stage of the op, once the patient is safely aneasthetised is for the surgeon, or his assistant to 'prepare' the area for surgery. In the case of a circumcision this involves yanking down the tight collar of the world's smallest polo neck and cleaning underneath.

Operating theatres are often warm places, which can, if conditions are right(lots of procedures needing diathermy, fat sweaty cunts working there, etc) make it rather whiffy.
The punter's foreskin came back to reveal that the chap had quite possibly never washed under it his entire adult life, On a first glance it appeared to have been inches deep in knob cheese, but, mercifully at this point there was no smell.
So the surgeon whips out his forceps and gauze and begins cleaning.

Did I mention that it was last case of the morning?
Keen to get out for his urgent appointment with the golf course the surgeon set about prepaing the area with a considerable amount of vim.
The cheese went EVERYWHERE, including into the goggles of his assistant and the scrub nurse, the overhead lights, the patient's ear and as a coup de grace, the aneasthetist's cup of water, which the aformentioned gasman then, not realising, drank.

Worst thing about the whole affair?

Agitating the layers caused the previously docile penile fromage to release its fragrance.

Like cheap mozzarella.

Gone off.

And then eaten and sicked up by a French dog.

Vile stuff.
Since then, I've seen gangrenous wounds filled with maggots, 80%+ burns, people who've been so constipated they throw up shit and YM but this is still, 15 years on, the nastiest thing I've encountered.
( Amorous Badger NAKED BEA ARTHUR PHOTOS 4U, Tue 10 Sep 2013, 20:54, 62 replies)

More knocking shop shenanigans
My friend Jim used to live in London, Westminster to be precise. He got to know a lot of the local people, including the proprieter of a "high-class" brothel that catered to a number of well-known names, including some serving MPs.

One day when I was visiting him, we got talking about the brothel. He said that as he was on such good terms with the madam, we would be able to go and visit to have a look around if we wanted. This would have been a good offer at any time, but six pints of cider down and it seemed like the best idea ever.

So he led me down a back street, and we knocked at an unmarked door. We were warmly greeted by Madam Charlotte. Jim evidently wasn't lying when he said he knew her as they spent a good ten minutes catching up and having a surreally normal conversation.

Sat in the office, Charlotte told us that we were welcome to go on a tour, but that we weren't to open any closed doors for obvious reasons. However, she told us with a knowing smile, there was a secret passage past some of the rooms, and due to the two-way mirrors we would be able to catch a glimpse of the goings-on therein.

Sworn to absolute silence, we tiptoed down the hidden corridor. The first room was empty, but I still took a minute to take in the decor: lots of red velvet, an expensive-looking chandelier and one wall made up entirely of a (normal) mirror.

At the next room we were greeted by a frankly disturbing sight - a very much larger lady sitting on the face of a man who, judging by the pin-striped suit littering the floor, was some sort of banker or other City high-flyer.

The next room was far more normal, a beautiful and well-presented young lady was pleasuring a gentleman using conventional methods, although she did seem to be very good at it.

The fourth room was quite a shock. There were two men in there, and on the bedside table there was a lot of white powder, some of it cut into lines. One man had black, curly hair but I couldn't see his face as he was fellating the other man, who looked somehow familiar. After a minute or so, I realised who the fellatee was. I had seen him being interviewed on Newsnight barely a week previously. I was witnessing a senior government minister being serviced by a man, in a whorehouse. I won't name him as he's still in office and I imagine that there would be quite a fuss if it came out, so to speak.

Anyway, the biggest shock was still to come. The kneeling man stood to walk over to the bedside table to powder his nose, and he also looked familiar. He turned round after beaking his line and there was no doubt, it was Velvet Undergroundist Lou Reed!

The cider was starting to sit uneasily in my stomach, so we decided to leave. As we were leaving, Jim said to me, "I told you you'd see some sights, didn't I?"

"Well yes," said I, "but I never would have guessed that Lou Reed works Tories".
(Eukanuba, Fri 6 Sep 2013, 17:54, 15 replies)

BARRY!
(I just wrote this out for something else, but realised that with a little intro and postscript I can force it into this week's question. This was Barry Roach's day at work, remember.)

12 seconds into the second half of Southend's game today, Morecambe scored. Two minutes after that, we're all miserable and aware that it's just going to be one of those days, we're not going to win. And then there was a break in play. The ground was silent. And I wondered if it would be possible to get their goalkeeper to react. so I shouted his name in the silence.

"BAAAARRRRYYY!"

I was sure I saw him nearly turn round. Just a twitch. But I assumed I was wrong. Until I realised someone else must have seen it too. A shout came out frome somewhere to my left. "BAAAAARRRRRYYYY!".

And then a few seconds later, from somewhere behind me. "BAAAAAARRRRRRYYYYY!". From somewhere else, "BAAAAARRRRYYYYY!". from me, "BAAAARRRRYYYY!". from somewhere to my right, "BAAAARRRYYYY!". And then Barry Roach turned round and smiled at us. I assumed I'd be the only one to do this, but as I did at least three other voices yelled "MADE YOU LOOK!"

Then someone shouted "Barry, I love you!" and it escalated.

For the entire second half. In no particular order, my favourite shouts: "Barry, You're my hero', "Barry, you kicked that ball good", "Barry, What did you have for breakfast?", and, actually in particular order because it's by far my favourite, , "Barry, Dance for me like Louis Spence."

My only regret is that after he pulled a corner out of the air and someone shouted "Barry, you're breaking my heart" I didn't think until i was on the train home that I should have shouted "Barry, you're shaking my confidence daily".

(Also, there were some lurid things said. See, told you I could make it fit.)
( scarpe We Stole Bikes, Sat 7 Sep 2013, 20:02, 8 replies)

I’ve worked in some risky jobs in the past including heavy industry and underwater demolitions. Sure enough some other people have come to grief, sometime permanently, but I wanted to write something about ME ME ME.

I’ve been wracking my brains for the worst work related injury I’ve had and all I can think of is the time I cleared a paper jam from the office copier with too much of a flourish and gave myself a paper-cut on the end of my nose.

It really really stung.
(Brigadier an old boot sitting on a man's face - forever, Fri 6 Sep 2013, 18:15, 4 replies)

I no longer work for investment banks
I now live in the French Alps, driving ski lifts. Whilst most work accidents are of the "I fell over skiing and fucked my knees" kind, there are a few more "interesting" ones.

For instance, when I started, we had to do a basic safety course, and the instructor, who was also the resort's head mechanic, was insisting on the importance of not starting a lift until you're absolutely, 100% sure it's safe to do so. Especially if there are people working on it, and even more so if your only contact with them is by walkie-talkie. At this point, he raised his hand, which was minus 3 half fingers - he'd been working on the top pulley of a draglift, told the driver to *not* start the lift as he had his hands between cable and pulley. The driver had misheard this as "start the lift" and that's 3 fingers chopped in half. Stories like this are not uncommon, and usually involve the victim being between the spokes of, or sat on, the pulley when the lift starts, and thus either chopped in half or less 2 legs.

Where I currently work, one colleague accidentally dropped a large spanner on a colleague's head, landing him in hospital for 3 weeks.

Another good one is the piste grooming machines. When they are on really steep pitches, they anchor themselves to the top of the slope, and winch themselves up and down. Of course, as they move across the slope, the winch cable, which has 10 tons of grooming machine on the end of it, has a tendency to move laterally as well. This movement is usually jerky, resulting in a 12mm steel cable whipping across the top of the slope. The grooming machines work at night, and more than a few unaware nighttime skiiers have been bisected by cables they hadn't even seen.

Grooming machines work, largely, via hydraulics, and this is why one of our mechanics has the tip missing from his index finger. There was, it seems, a slow leak in one of the hydraulic lines on one of the machines, so he ran his finger down the line to see if he could feel where it was leaking. The nearly-invisible jet of hydraulic fluid in the still-pressurised system cut the end of his finger off.

Meanwhile, client-side, there's a good number of our clients who ski with the shoulder straps of their salopettes hanging around their arses. Sure, it looks "hip", and "young" and "groovy", but they also have a tendency to catch on the chairlift chairs. What generally happens is that the skiier comes off the chair at 15kph or so, and continues going forwards, whilst the chair goes round the pulley and heads off in the other direction at 15kph or so. Inbetween the two is an elastic shoulder strap, and when it comes to a battle between 450 kilos of steel driven by a 600 horsepower motor and a bit of elastic, the loser is fairly easy to guess. The first thing that happens is the skiier falls over, as they are now attached to a very solid something moving at 15kph in the opposite direction. What happens next is down to luck. If they are lucky, the strap(s) are ripped off entirely, and added to the lift's "trophy pile". If they are less lucky, they stretch to about 5m long before letting go and flying back with a resounding "snap" into the witless fucker's arse. This always gets a grin. If they are *really* unlucky, the arse comes out of the trousers with the straps, and the whole lot comes back to slap them handily in the bollocks. Seen that happen twice. It was hard not to laugh, so I didn't try.

It's hard to laugh about skiiers actually hurting themselves on the slopes. It gets really nasty, especially with collisions. Consider that a ski or snowboard is basically a 1.5m or longer double edged razor blade travelling at speed, with upwards of 80 kilos of fuckwit on it. Broken bones are OK (unless they are open fractures), but it's really nasty to find a kiddie on the slopes desperately trying to hold the flapping remains of their cheek in place.

We have "phantom shitters" too. Big logs coiled on the toilet seats, used tampax on the floor, shit smeared on the walls, I see it all. *And* I get to clean it up.

Snowmobiles are fun, too. Get to drive one occasionally, but it's never in good weather. They are pretty easy to endo or roll, which is embarassing enough, but the worst is parking one and have it run away downhill and bury itself in the nearest pylon/tree/snowdrift.

And I haven't even started on when I worked as a motorcycle courier.
(m.auron, Sun 8 Sep 2013, 18:55, 5 replies)

Lunching perhaps too well
Secondhand, so probably somewhat exaggerated, but it's a story my old boss told me, and knowing him quite well, it rings true, so here goes.

Him and his mate had a competitive relationship, where they'd constantly be goading each other in the office about who was fitter, who had the better car, who could drink most, etc. One Friday, they had a quiet afternoon so they headed out for a curry together. It all got a bit competitive and his mate (whose name I don't actually know but let's call him Bob), challenges him to eat the hottest curry on the menu. They both order the vindaloo accompanied by pints. Then another pint, and another, and another, and another.

After finishing the meal, Bob reckons Dave is done, and bets him he can't have another pint. So they have another pint, and another pint, and another pint...

By this time, it's about half past four, so they've got to negotiate the discreet walk back into the office without attracting attention, which is going to be difficult because they're both pissed as newts, and Bob is giggling like a loon. Dave walks in first, and sits down at his desk, immediately beginning to fumble purposefully with some paper, and try to look busy.

Bob walks in a minute later, and heads to his own desk. He then steps on his chair, steps up onto the desk, and shouts 'Dave! I reckon we're going to have to settle this whole thing properly. Who's got the biggest cock?', at which he drops his trousers and pants and spreads his arms, inviting the assembled colleagues to inspect his meat and two veg.

At this point, the PA shoots out of her seat, rounds the desk, and sprints across the room at full pelt, before executing a perfect rugby tackle that takes Bob clear off the desk and onto the floor a good few feet below, causing him to start throwing up lagery, semi-digested vindaloo all over the carpet.

Bob didn't work there anymore, but the PA had been promoted.
(SnowyTheWereRabbit the Leporid from Hell, Fri 6 Sep 2013, 15:05, Reply)

Ice, Ice Baby
Our story takes place at an ice rink, a popular hang-out for kids who were not yet old enough to go to pubs, but who had enough brain cells to find that congregating in bus shelters and outside chip shops held little appeal. It would have been a perfect place to socialise, were it not for one particular staff member: one of those lads with ingrowing acne, a polyester uniform, and a chip on their shoulder which meant that they gleefully wielded the miniscule amount of power they actually had at every possible opportunity. He saw it as his solemn duty to prevent any kind of fun being had by any of the customers, and would enforce rules far beyond the bounds of reasonableness or proportion.

His reign of terror, however, came to a crashing end one day, when shouts and screams from one corner of the rink caused him to bustle over with his usual puffing self-importance, demanding to be let through to see what misdemeanor he could inflate out of all proportion. As the crowd parted, he was confronted by the sight of a punter lying sprawled on the ice, arm outstretched, with several fingers bloodily severed by a passing skate blade. At which point the self-promoted rink-fuhrer turned a deathly shade of greenish-grey, and fainted away like a little girl.

At which point my mate stood up, wiped the ketchup off his "special" hand - the one missing the three fingers that he'd been born without - picked up the hot-dog sausages he'd arranged on the ice and covered in more ketchup, and joined the others in pointing and laughing at the now groggily recovering victim.
(moon monkey is busy making memories worth repressing, Wed 11 Sep 2013, 10:09, 1 reply)

The Pie Man
Further to my previous post on this subject, next door to the Precision Engineering Works was a place that made the... stuff... that goes into Steak and Kidney Pies. Meat, allegedly; but it looked like lumpy brown paint, as I found out when I went round to borrow their oxy-acetylene torch kit.

I got to know one of the blokes who worked there; let’s call him Simon, for obvious reasons. He was a big chap with disturbingly large muscly arms, and an incongruously donnish, ascetic face, complete with round wire-framed specs. He had a shy affable manner and we would often lunch on the riverbank, where we would discuss his favourite subject, wrestling. I chummed up with him mainly because he looked like he could handle himself in a fight, unlike the lardoes I worked with, in case the Graff’s ‘Livithian Invincibles’ should come a-calling.

Simon often called round to ask for our help in fixing bits of their machinery. He’d wander in, apron smeared in brown goo and red stains which looked disturbingly like blood, bearing machine parts that needed welding or lubricating or something. We would gladly help out in exchange for pies.

One day by the riverbank Simon seemed quieter than usual. I asked him what was wrong. He sighed and said they’d had to sack Hector, one of their oldest employees, as he kept turning up to work drunk and could not be trusted with the machinery. Oh, I said, that’s sad, how did he take it? Simon replied that Hector had taken it very badly. He had not said a word, but simply walked up to the big vat containing the pie mixture, dropped his trousers and crapped into the slowly rotating slurry.

Oh dear, I said, what a waste of ‘food’! Simon shrugged and said, not really. They figured that the ratio of faeces to pie mix was enough for the latter to sufficiently dilute the former.

Next time Simon wanted a part fixed I politely turned down his offer of a nice hot Steak and Kidney Pie as payment.
(Dr Skagra glorious glargzhem, Sat 7 Sep 2013, 9:55, 1 reply)

fFs!
I aM sat heRe at woRk as we sPeak, and for the %tH tiMe todaY the PhanTom ShiFTer has struck!
(the_icks has the sweet essence of giraffe, Sun 8 Sep 2013, 18:51, 3 replies)

Things I have experienced...
1. A railroad worker in a trainyard stepped in between two tanker cars to straighten the couplers so they could be joined properly. The brake on the rear car hadn't been set properly and the car had just been shunted. The load shifted, propelling the car forward and cutting him in half at the waist. The pressure was such that it pretty much liquefied his internal organs, which then spilled out on the track. We found later that he had been the one who was responsible for the improperly set brake.
2. Discovering a dead newborn baby in a garbage bag tossed in a dumpster. Investigation found the teenage mom - who very nearly died of blood loss - and the father - who was also HER father.
3. The man whose neighbours hadn't seen him in two weeks and finally called the police and fire department. He had been dead all that time in a house with the central heating going full blast. The smell was indescribable. We had to borrow respirators from the fire department to even get into the house, and when we did find the body it had actually burst from decomposition. I had to throw my uniform away, and I heard later that the relatives had to have the house completely redone, and remove the flooring and subflooring in the room where he had died.
I do pass these on to the rookies, but never talk about them outside work - except I just did, didn't I?
(Smudge the Demon, Sat 7 Sep 2013, 5:01, 3 replies)

Hot Steel Suicide
My first real job after school was as an apprentice in a steel factory in South Africa. The process could be roughly divided in to four parts: smelting of iron in blast furnaces, conversion to steel in the steel mill (basic oxygen process), casting in to rough shape, and finally forging or rolling in to the final shape. The iron was transported to the steel mill in huge open pots which crusted over in transit, but the product of the steel mill was pure molten steel, moved around by crane in open pots which didn't crust over. Sometimes large drops of molten steel would fall in to puddles of rainwater (the roof leaked), and it went off like a bomb, shaking the whole building.

You can probably guess where this is going: the story I was told was about a worker who committed suicide by jumping, from a significant height, in to an open pot of molten steel. One counter-intuitive point to note is that molten steel is still steel, nearly 7x as dense as water: the result being that (even at high impact velocity) packages of meat and water don't go "splash", or even "splot", they just go "thud" and float on top.

I don't believe anyone stopped to check whether he survived the actual fall, given that he was soon melting / burning / disintegrating at temperatures exceeding 1500°C. The worst part? That whole vat of steel was contaminated and had to be recycled, costing thousands of Rand.
(Tsukemono, Sat 7 Sep 2013, 19:38, 14 replies)

Not me but a mate has just given me this. Tear to your eye sort of stuff.
I remember one Saturday morning in early autumn, very like this one, a good few years ago, when, in one of my many odd jobs, I had to move a huge amount of those old 3x2 council paving stones with some hulking, silent brute called Frank. It was a back-breaking task, but one which I carried out with the utmost alacrity. Well, I was on a tenner a day! Anyroad, on trip 400 or so to the truck, I ripped off a tremendous fart, with quite alarming ferocity. It really was a cracker, I'm still proud of it to this day. To my surprise, this led to Frank breaking his trappist vow. In the lilting September sun, this huge fella slowly put down his end of the paving flag we were carrying, stood stock still, took off his gloves and stated, in a loud, clear, steady voice "By eck! It's a confident man as does that on a Sat'dee mornin!" I'd never associated farts with confidence before. Me Nan had always referred to them as "letters from shit. To let you know 'e's comin!" However, here Frank stands before me, unwittingly shaking the entire foundations of my world to the core with a simple remark. It was obvious that, when it came to farts, Frank took the more prosaic view. He viewed them as an expression of self-worth, strength, confidence. Frank had provided me with a clear insight into the worldview of blokes, something absent from my upbringing in an all-female household. As this simple, hard-working man put his gloves back on, I'm sure he had no idea that, in many ways, he had played a significant part in my growing up. For one brief, fleeting moment, it felt like I'd had a Father. I owe a lot to Frank and, wherever he is, I wish him well!
( rjmrjm, Sat 7 Sep 2013, 14:04, 1 reply)

Don't sit on chemical drums
I worked in a PCB plating factory for years. One of the production lines used fluorine-based chemistry of some sort (I forget what exactly) to etch off the patterns of circuits on PCBs.

Now, apparently, a new batch of this chemistry was being made up by the chemical company rep and one of our technicians. There are dozens of drum of chemicals being added into the production line - all very heavy hard work.

Chem Co rep, tired, takes a short sit down break on one of the empty drums.
He feels his arse dampen, then itch.
He stands up, and sees that the top of the barrel is wet with the dreaded fluorine-based etchant.

Fluorine compounds can be quite insidious and nasty, as many a chemist will tell you. As it was explained to me, the fluorine ion is small, and can pass through cell membranes without much fuss. It'll move through flesh without damaging it very much, cause it's not too interested in reacting with organic stuff.

Calcium, however, it loves. It'll chew through the calcium in bones, turning them rubbery and floppy.

So Chem Co rep had to be rushed to hospital, and have the flesh of his buttocks cut away to halt the spread of the fluorine to his pelvis.

Arsectomy.
( Invisible Wizard - 9th Level Pissant, Sat 7 Sep 2013, 13:49, 17 replies)

Surprise!!
My first job after leaving school was in the anatomy department of Bristol University. The floor above where I worked they kept the bodies the medical students practice on. My supervisor Pete who was an extremely laid back fun bloke to have in charge of you came into my lab looking concerned.
"can you help me with something sittingduck?"
"sure, what is it"
"it's in the body room, I hope you don't mind, you'll find out when we get there"
I was a bit apprehensive I was 17 and I, obviously, had never seen a dead body before. I wasn't scared or anything stupid like that,it just felt a bit weird about it.

He solemnly lead me upstairs and into the room. There were lots of tables and on each of them was a body covered with a sheet. He approached one of the tables still looking very grim then whipped the sheet off and shouted and pointed
"look at the size of that cock!" and pissed himself laughing

It was fucking huge mind
(sittingduck Attention seeking, bullshitting fuck-knuckle, Fri 6 Sep 2013, 13:14, 5 replies)

Work made us do training about the dangers of electricity
by showing a succession of slides displaying photos of the blackened finger stumps, carbonised limbs, cooked flesh and pitted eyeballs of people who had suffered electrocutions, as a warning about how dangerous electricity is- except they were talking about people working in 33,000 volt electricity substations, not our 200-300V setup.

They also did a 'how much electrical current do you think it would take to give you cardiac arrest?' quiz. Turns out is is surprisingly low but it was pretty much like a daily mail article- backed up by mathematics (Ohm's law) that had unreal figures to begin with, e.g. assuming that a human body only has an electrical resistance of 1kiloOhm between one hand and the other hand.

I know the idea is to make people think about safety and not be cavalier in their attitude to electricity but I've had plenty of shocks in my time from mains so I'm either non-conductive or they're going all-out crazy to make you think that you will explode in a hail of bloody meat shrapnel if you test a 9V battery's charge by touching the terminals to your tongue.
( Rotating Wobbly Hat That's not a banana. THIS is a banana., Thu 5 Sep 2013, 19:22, 11 replies)

30-40 years back I worked as a roadie for a well-known musician, who to spare his blushes shall remain nameless.
On one of his tours of the US he developed IBS and could never stray too far from a toilet. This came to be a bit of a problem on his tour bus, as the stench from the built-in loo got too much to bear. So the guys thought of renting out one of those toilet chairs that the elderly have, so after the star had done his business he could wind the window down and throw the contents out. He always had a laugh about this and we took the piss out of him, calling him an old codger and asking where he'd hidden his zimmerframe.
I left that line of work ten years later but still keep in touch with the roadies, some of whom he still uses, and spoke to one of them the other day. Apparently the IBS has returned with a vengeance and his rental commode has become a purchase. To the gentleman in question, should he be reading this, I have only this to say: "In 2013, now you own it."
( drimble he'd been white, he'd been black, Wed 11 Sep 2013, 11:52, 14 replies)

Welding flash
My welding instructor told us about a job he did in the Northern Territory back when safety standards on building sites were less rigorous.

Anyway it was really hot so he was wearing a mask and gloves, but below that, just a pair of shorts and some thongs. Hot as it was, he was also free balling and it all hung out as he squatted to weld steel laid out on the ground.

Weld flash is basically really bad sunburn. Just where he realised when he finally stood up.
(xixax, Mon 9 Sep 2013, 13:00, 9 replies)

Customer left an eye-wateringly large poo in the toilet at a place I worked once.
Not on the floor, or the seat, or the wall, or in a cup... just in the toilet, where it was supposed to be.

The length and width were truly amazing though; and prompted my mate to proclaim "If that gets into the north sea, it'll be a danger to shipping!"
( skullfunkerry In case of implosion do not look into implosion, Fri 6 Sep 2013, 12:33, 3 replies)

I've got a couple for this week.
Workplace Infidelity.

A few years ago I had a manager called Joseph. He was fairly short, balding and dumpy. Not really a "bad" bloke but sometimes his morals were, shall we say 'questionable' - as we shall see.

*Before I get the usual faeces-flingers going on about OkCupid or god knows any other sites on the world wide web I may have signed up for for whatever reasons - I've never held myself up to be a paragon of virtue. I'm quite aware of my failings and I can live quite comfortably with my conscience thank you. & no, this is not an acknowledgment of guilt.*

Unfortunately Joe's memory was also absolutely shocking. Ask him what he had for tea last night and he'd still be looking blankly at you several minutes later. I wish I could say it was induced by alcohol or medications but unfortunately as a manager of an aged care facility Joe was blessed with probably the worst short and mid-term memory in the place!
As part of our regular influx of workers there arrived a young nursing student lass named Ashlyn. Now Ash was kinda pretty in an English Rose way. Long tresses of more strawberry than blonde hair, a waist that curved nicely inwards, hips that flared out and a lovely pair of boobs. Of which I'm thankful to say, since Ash had no qualms about displaying her cleavage were completely unadorned with tattoos of cocks. There was much more "Phoawr!" at work if you were looking for it but I can see where the attraction stemmed from.
Ash and Joe hit it off together from the outset. Laughing and sharing many a secret joke. Soon Ashlyn was getting the pick of all the best shifts (which often coincided with Joe's hours) and frequently they would leave the site in Joe's company SUV to enjoy a far-longer-than-allowed-for-lunch. Gradually the lunches became longer and longer and several times they raced back into the front doors of the facility when Joe was late for a meeting, both looking puffed and disheveled.

People were starting to notice what was going on and discuss their suspicions - it was fast becoming apparent that more than one type of "Manual Handling Training" was going on here. Who knows where they were going to have a fuck but it was clear to young and old that they weren't playing Tiddly-Winks. Being the only other male staff member at time apart from Joe I tended to nod my head sagely, "A-hummed" at what I hoped were the right points in the conversation and mulled over in my head the phrase "Don't shit where you eat."

It all came to a head one Wed. arvo. Ashlyn and Joseph had jauntily all but skipped out the front door, off for another "long & loose lunch" as they had come to be known by most of the staff, with the receptionist hurrying after Joe desperately trying to remind him about something really important for that day. Which Joe ignored as he climbed into his car with Ash and drove off.

About 10 min later Joe's wife arrived ready to go out for lunch with him for their 22nd wedding anniversary. Which he'd been reminded about umpteen times by at least 3 staff members in the days leading up to and that morning. Suffice to say both Joe & Ash turned off their phones when they 'went to lunch' and neither could be reached.
Sadly the receptionist had no "lunch-time meeting" logged to assuage Joes wife's stress.
Most uncomfortable lunch evar! for me sitting in the outside gazebo as she steadily went from concerned to severely pissed off, texting and leaving messages for him every 5 mins.

Joe and Ash turned up nearly an hour later (as usual) looking for all the world like the cats that just got creamed. As Joe's wife watched.
Joe went home early that day. I'm guessing it was a long, quiet drive home. And an even quieter night at home.
Ashlyn got a transfer to another site the following week and Joe got a job working with his missus within a month.

tl;dr? - "Don't shit where you eat." Particularly when you are 1 of two married blokes working with nearly 2 dozen ladies.
(s0ckpuppet logging out to reply to you if you're not careful, Fri 6 Sep 2013, 10:31, 2 replies)

Behold the cup!
I am one of those people who regularly attends the office bogs every day as I am quite happy to say I feel 10 times better after a good dump, whether it be in work in a toilet cubicle or in my own home (on a toilet, of course :p).

As I work in a large office however there are various Gents dotted around the large building. A result of this I am very picky as to what toilet I want to use. If there is a small puddle in front of it, urine smudged upon the seat or maybe something worse, I will avoid like the plague. Also if the lock on the door fails to work then neither do my bowels, amount of loo roll left etc etc. So I end up drifting about like a twitching hobo until I find a loo that fits my criteria. When I do find one, 5-10 minutes of bliss is experienced as I deposit the faecal matter into the pot of despair. All is well in the land of Jeccius once more.

However. One particular fateful day in the office and Jeccy was doing his usual "toilet surveillance", and spotted a nice tidy and more importantly dry cubicle to "pay my deposit to the porcelain bank" as it were. I sit down and lean forward, egging my way towards some brown bliss when for some reason I turn my head to my left, following a smell which was not coming from me. At eye level, just about a foot from my nose was the plastic toilet roll dispenser. And sitting upon the top of this was a plastic cup from a vending machine in the break area.

And the cup was full of shit. Someone else's shit. And it stank. Of shit, no less. It stank of someone else's shit.

I almost puked. But I had another problem too. I'd only noticed this alien-turd-coffee after I had started releasing one myself, and for the love of God I couldn't stop mid-flow. So I sat there, hands clasped around my mouth as I struggled to evacuate both the contents of my arse and myself out of the cubicle before I'd add some chunder to the potent mix. I managed to finish up rather quickly, grab some roll rather sheepishly from under the brown cuppa-soup and wipe like my motherfucking life depended upon it. Once done, a quick flush and I was out of there.

5 minutes later I actually had to report it to our HR (which was fun), and they had to send in some poor bastard from Facilities to properly give the contents of the cup a burial at sea, but they never did determine which dirty bastard in our building laid the cup-log in the first place.

I have an enemy in this building, and he currently has no face. But he has logs and is not afraid to share them. He is my unknown toilet-nemesis, and I still live in fear of finding another Chalice of Ultimate Brown-Power.

Slight apols for rp :p
( Jeccius Steam Borderlands 2 junkie, Thu 5 Sep 2013, 20:36, 2 replies)

I was once listening listening to a chef tell a pretty boring story
and, due in no small part to the sheer boringness of the story, I was idly playing with a knife, rocking it side to side on its blunt back edge.
He was watching the to-and-fro motion of the blade as it went, and eventually his story petered out mid-sentence. "You've gotta stop doing that. It freaks me out".
"Why?" asked I, the impetuousness of youth demanding an answer before I obliged.
"Cos when I was a kid I was a second chef in New Zealand, and I was stood doing exactly what you're doing while a chef was telling me a story, and when he got to the end he leaned forward for emphasis. Because the blade was edge-on to him he didn't see it, and he put all of his weight down, then slid along the length of it. Slit him open from palm to inner-forearm."
"Ah. Right. OK then" said I, laying the knife on it's side.
Which is a shame really cos the story was pretty fucking boring. A bit like this one, I guess.
(Paolo Nutini's Bikini Better than Frederick Fleet's optometrist, Tue 10 Sep 2013, 22:28, 3 replies)

Pick'n'mix
I work for a cinema, and have a relatively high turnover. So we always have a bit of fun with te newbies. It's a test of their character, lets us see how well they'll fit in with the rest of the staff.

One of our favourite games to play is to send them to stick up the pick'n'mix. The majority of the list will be what we need, but we'll throw in a few made up sweets to see if the newbie is paying attention. One day we took it too far... having added the made up sweets such as marshmallow pillows, tangerine trees, sour trouts, a colleague wrote down clunge buckets at the end of the list. I thought he'd ruined it. I thought there was no way in hell that we were going to get away with this.

30 minutes later the newbie reappeared with the list asking if I could help him to find the clunge buckets. I thought he must have clicked and was winding me up, but no he was being serious. Having realised this I sent in a more experienced member of staff to help him before running away to laugh. 5 minutes later the more experienced member of staff appeared in a fit of uncontrollable laughter proclaiming that the newbie was still looking for the clunge buckets.

I have no idea when the boy gave up looking for them, or if he has ever figured out exactly what clunge bucket really
Means. All I do know is we are evil bastards and I'm okay with that.
(mightneverreachyou, Sat 7 Sep 2013, 0:06, 3 replies)

I used to work track testing on our glorious rail network
Before they let anyone loose on the rail track you have to be in possesion of a PTS basically a certificate to say you have undergone track safety training.
Ths basically consisted of the do's and don'ts of rail safety punctuated by industry produced videos (ranging from the unintentionally comical to nightmare inducingly scary) and graphic photographs of accident damage. As this was a requirement of all employees of the large firm i worked for we had an in house training officer, a large fellow with a false arm who walked with a bad limp.
He was an ideal choice for safety officer as he served as a walking example to us all.
When walking track side you are supposed to walk on the bank side of the rails towards oncoming traffic and when a train driver comes towards you he will blow his horn to warn you. You are then supposed to acknowledge that you have heard it by raising your right arm.

The safety officer got his false arm and his limp by walking on the opposite side of the tracks. It was a windy day and an oncoming train blew his horn. The officer raised his arm to acknowledge it just in time for the arm to be hit by the train coming behind him. The impact took the arm clean off at the elbow (It was found about 200 yards down the track) and drove a squash ball sized piece of stone up through his boots and foot into his ankle smashing it to bits.

He wasnt bitter about it and it did more to reinforce track safety than any video ever could
(andythepieman Is surfing the waves of indifference on, Fri 6 Sep 2013, 9:50, 6 replies)

Bin O' Panties
Way, way back in the day, I was a part-time janitor in a women's clothing store. Inventory Day came, and I was given the job of counting all the panties in the "Bin O' Panties".

At first, it was delightful fun, but after an hour, I realized I had basically made no progress. So, I began counting handfuls of panties - about ten panties per grab.

Hours later, little progress. Panties compact small, so removing the weight of panties from the bin just allowed the others below to expand into their place. No one had any earthly idea how many panties were in the bin.

My memory is that I never finished. No one had ever succeeded in completely-counting the panties, and I just joined their number.
(Perv With A Dog had his eyes pecked out by scrub jays on, Thu 5 Sep 2013, 21:13, 5 replies)

I once had a shit while havng a shower. Instantly regretting it, I tried to squish the turds down the drain with my foot but all they did was clog it and soon the shitty broth was overflowing onto the bathmat. I'm sorry, what were we talking about again?

( cumquat may will not be commenting further on the allegations, Thu 12 Sep 2013, 9:29, 7 replies)

An electrical engineer
that I used to work with (he's now retired) was telling me about an experience when he was a callow youth.
He was working up on about the 7th floor where I currently work (a power station - so there's very few people up at that sort of area) and he heard a noise. He popped around the corner and saw a couple of blokes at it, and I don't mean fighting.
They didn't see him as they were a bit too "engrossed", so he went back down to the engineering office to tell his gaffer what he'd seen. The gaffers response being "don't talk such bollocks lad!". Anyway, he persuaded his gaffer to come and look, so that he would be believed - on arriving at the area, the two blokes were still "engrossed" but for one subtle difference - they'd changed ends.

Oh, and they were contractors that had come in to do some specialist work on some the equipment that they had supplied. The company's name? Fairey Engineering.
( social hand grenade I was a lurker before you were a lurker, Sat 7 Sep 2013, 15:02, 1 reply)

A while back
I used to work for a large investment bank. My team looked after data feeds from the front office, where all the high paid barrow boys work, and back office, where people actually work. As the IT support people were elsewhere in the building, it wasn't always possible to contact them by phone, so we had implemented an instant messaging system that would hit them with a console message wherever they were. It was dead handy, but, as with all "dead handy" things, it got abused.

The rot set in with collating the bets for the office betting pool every other morning without it being obvious what was going on, went on to "organising trips to the strip clubs on Whitechapel Road", and slowly degraded into something that was taking up a lot of time. It was the "text-based fantasy spice girl mud wrestling" that got us into trouble. Unbeknownst to us, the office grass (who disapproved seriously of the betting pool) was logging everything, and the aforementioned TBFSGMW was, as he saw it, his chance of glory. Especially the bit Jim added where "the girl from HR with the big tits" joined in and the whole thing turned into a rather fun text-based fantasy lesbian romp. He duly logged the lot and turned it over to, of course, the girl from HR with the big tits.

Somehow we didn't eventually get fired - the girl from HR obviously had a sense of humour and had expunged the more gory bits before passing it upstream to management - although it was a close run thing and the meeting to discuss what sanctions should be applied was, shall we say, "stony" (although, once it was over, the boss indicated he knew the logs had been sanitised, and that he found the whole thing rather amusing). The chat server had to go, obviously, which was a shame.

The office grass suddenly found himself excluded from daily life, and within a week he asked for, and was granted, a transfer to another team. He handed in his resignation within a month; everyone in the building knew what had happened (and although several were slightly miffed not to have been invited onto our "private" chats, his new teammates were pretty much all disgusted that he had dobbed us in) so he took his pariah status with him.

And the girl from HR with the big tits started coming to the pub with us. But not the strip joints on the Whitechapel Road. She was definitely fun, but Jim got the lesbian bit wrong.
(m.auron, Fri 6 Sep 2013, 18:54, 4 replies)

Train spottin
Many many year ago (before health n safety - THAT long ago) my big tough hairy british biker cum hells angel mate was working as a ganger on the tracks close to Gatwank airport.

Well everybody loved this tough guy so much that they had a chat with the engine driver of the ballast train

He steamed down the tracks at 10mph and switched his engine off at Horley station, about 3 miles up track.

Now theres a lot of noise what with hammering and power tools etc, so we kept him busy looking DOWN track and making the noise...

Then this Huge fucking ballast train comes up behind him, still moving and then sounds its horn.

Its good thing those bikers wore 2 pairs of jeans.. e had to take the afternoon off. We laughed till we cried, we were nasty buggers.
( Traducer, Fri 6 Sep 2013, 14:58, 6 replies)