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  • There was a guy who was in tech support who talked to a customer about who was hot or not in the company. It was actually the customer who started the conversation, but the rep ran with it and used all kinds of unprofessional and disparaging language when describing his female co-workers.

    That call happened to have a supervisor listening in, so he was fired immediately after he got off the call. The thing is found out who called in, and the women on the team had to assist him when he called for support.

  • Not crazy, just sad.

    Middle of the day, sitting at our desks working. This middle aged guy who was usually happy as Larry gets up and leaves the office leaving his stuff behind. Not a word said. I just assumed he was getting a coffee or something.

    End of the day rolls around, stuff still there. Same thing the next day. Still there the next week.

    People start asking what happened to him, but the agency he was working through kept telling us he’s coming back soon.

    Over a month later, someone packs up his stuff and puts it in the bin. The guy was never coming back, turns out he went left and ended his own life the day he walked out. Never made it home.

    The agency apparently only found out he was dead a few weeks after the incident, then strung us along so they could find a replacement. We terminated their contract and offered the handful of other employees jobs.

    ———

    Another job, we had a new guy start. Very conventionally attractive and he seemed normal enough.

    A few weeks later one of the women complained to HR that someone was stalking her. She was getting ‘flattering’ letters, emails, notes etc and they often contained information and photos in/about/around her work. Flattering, but not something she was comfortable with

    Few weeks later, we’re told new guy won’t be coming back due to inappropriate behaviour.

    Woman had to get a restraining order against the guy. In a twist of irony, she said that if the guy had just talked to her, she would have gone on a date with him in a heartbeat.

  • This got me into a way bigger rabbit hole than I remembered... The person is not officially "fired" since you cannot fire a tenured, distinguished professor and a former department head, but I suspect she was persuaded to leave. The incident is quite wild, I was just a random undergrad hired to do lab tests so I only knew some details.

    This is about Dr. Connie Weaver, professor emeritus and former department head at Purdue's Department of Nutrition Sciences (her ORCiD). She was known for nutrition research where the institution recruits adolescents summer-camp style (similar to a clinical trial), and in 2017 she started to lead a multi-year (lasted one month before it was shut down) study on low-sodium diets in adolescents, Camp DASH. Supposed to be a gold-standard diet study... close to 10 million dollars of NIH money on the line too.

    And then things went off the rail. The operation tried to cut a lot of corners: pretty much all of the employees were undergraduates who couldn't find other things to do for the summer, training was minimal or nonexistent, and the employees-to-camper ratio was very, very low... oddly similar to the recent MrBeast incident where participation oversight seems to be very bad.

    This then led to sexual harassment, abuse, etc... one poor girl's nude was shared online, probably more cases of sexual assault, several adolescents got into serious fights with each other, and from what I've heard some of the undergrads who were on supervisory roles were also injured. Several lawsuits were filed, the university stepped in and stopped the study (I just remembered them stop scheduling me to work in July and was wondering what went wrong lol), the issue got elevated to the university president, and more lawsuits...

    Obviously tenure means someone should be protected from being terminated at-will like most employment contracts. So the reason I have my suspicion is... Dr. Weaver became a professor emeritus not long after the incident, but is now somehow still publishing work while working from... San Diego State University? Doesn't seem like someone who retired on their own will to me.

    If you are interested in the full detail... here are some news articles on this incident. Exponent is Purdue's student-run newspaper

    • Okay, this is fascinating ... And makes me wonder how often this--what I will call "academic honorable discharge"--really occurs across institutions, well-known or not.

      I haven't delved into your sources yet, so this is my somewhat educated guess ... Environmentally, this type of social breakdown makes sense with the lack of proper oversight, seasoned leadership, and organization appropriate to the study population. But did the low sodium diet itself serve any factor in the violence that occured in this botched study? Like, did kids being dietarily withheld a critical electrolyte affect the speed and intensity with which cracks in the camp structure split open?

      Not trying to be too lighthearted here, but my guess in short: The kids went extra bonkers because of altered body and brain chemistry, with a lack of sodium (assuming the diet was initiated on Day 1) being a key aggressor in... making teen aggression more aggressive?

  • A manager got fired for sleeping with an underage waitress.

    A GM got fired after stealing ~$13k from deposits

    A guy got fired for telling the GM to go fuck herself completely unprompted.

    Food service is wild

  • Worked at sheetmetal manufacturing plant. Had aisles of welding booths. Old dude welder would smoke in the building in his booth letting the smoke get sucked through the table vents. Well sure as ahit one day a little more than just smoke gets sucked up and next thing you know thr whole ventilation system goes up in flames. Never saw the dude again.

    Same plant but one of the robot welders, the worker would mount an unrelated electrical box on the robot welder rig. Then hit the foot petal and it would clamp 3 of the 4 sides down with a fuckton of pressure. Months after opening back up after ventilation fire this new chick was running the robot welders and steps on the fucking clamp petal while still holding everything in place. She clamped her whole hand smashing all the bones in her hand I think. Never saw her again either. It was a freak accident not even anything you can point a finger at. I guess she lost balance a little to make her step and didn't have her hands in way so the e-stop light bar that senses if you are in the way wasn't tripped but she slamed her hand onto the box as it was closing trying to catch herself.

    They had tons of people I never saw before come in and assess the robots and turret presses and they installed the petals that have covering flaps you need to lift to get your foot in the petal. All in all the place was super safe and the dude that smoked was super fucking belligerent and was going to be fired the next infraction before burning the ventilation system down.

  • When I worked in data entry fresh our of college, there was a mass firing. Turns out people were signing in and leaving. Like, to go to the movies, to the store, to just hang out, for their entire shift, and would then log out at the end of the day. Damn near every person under 30 was gone. Some quit before they could get fired. It took all day, and there were plenty of performances. Now, it was data entry, which meant our activity was tracked, from the inactivity to how much we got through in a day. I have no idea how they didn't think anyone would notice.

  • Coworker found him on the sex offender registry for messages with some woman trying to arrange a sexual meetup with her daughter. Not even a statutory teenager situation, an actual child. Apparently he had some connections with law enforcement which kept him out of jail.

    Everyone already hated him for general creepiness and being terrible at his job, so there was a degree of vindication in confirming how horrible of a person he was. Still super fucked up.

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