Things You See at Work

[innominate]

 

[cycleguy2300]

This was a few weeks ago in North Austin.

Sent from your mom's house using Tapatalk

 

[benenglish]

This was a few weeks ago in North Austin.

How far was that from the crossing?

 

[cycleguy2300]

How far was that from the crossing?

Exactly the distance it takes a commuter train to stop from 45mph...

Right at 300' iirc

Sent from your mom's house using Tapatalk

 

[Texasjack]

I saw a car get hit by a train back in my college days. Fortunately for the 2 girls in the car (an old Chevy, as I recall), it was a super-slow moving yardbird that was filling in spots along the tracks with gravel. Must have been going less than 20 MPH when the girls' car stalled out and maybe 10 when it hit. It still took 150' or more to stop. The girls weren't seriously hurt, but they lost fluids from every possible orifice and just sat on the ground crying and babbling. Funny thing was that they had the time to get out, but just panicked and stayed in the car. They probably could have pushed it off the tracks if they tried. That car ended up almost exactly like the one in the photo.

 

[Axxe55]

Passenger vehicles ain't no match for a train. I have only seen one vehicle hit personally many years ago. I was sitting at a crossing with the bars down, lights flashing and an idiot decided to weave around the crossing bars, and try and beat the train. He didn't make it. How far the train pushed that vehicle, I have no idea, but it was pretty far and I saw pictures of the vehicle in the local paper the next day. It was not even recognizable as a vehicle anymore.

 

[deemus]

According to my mother two of her aunts were killed when their car stalled on some tracks. They were pretty old when it happened.

 

[cycleguy2300]

According to my mother two of her aunts were killed when their car stalled on some tracks. They were pretty old when it happened.

I grew up next to the tracks, could literally chunk rocks and hit the tracks from our driveway...I remember watching a northbound UP stop VERY fast. Sometimes they would stop and grab some bbq from Junek's Store down in Welborn, but this was fast and they had gone too far. I ran down to see what was up and sure enough a young female had music blaring and didn't look to cross the uncontrolled crossing, got smacked and died.

Sent from your mom's house using Tapatalk

 

[Vaquero]

I lost 3 friends and co-workers in one train wreck. Truck and wire trailer got hung up on an unimproved crossing. Big fire. 3 closed casket funerals in one day.
We need a different topic.

 

[ZX9RCAM]

Damn!

 

[kyletxria1911a1]

This was a few weeks ago in North Austin.

Sent from your mom's house using Tapatalk

Go figure

 

[cycleguy2300]

I lost 3 friends and co-workers in one train wreck. Truck and wire trailer got hung up on an unimproved crossing. Big fire. 3 closed casket funerals in one day.
We need a different topic.

Dang, sorry man...

Sent from your mom's house using Tapatalk

 

[Axxe55]

Some years ago, when I was working at an equipment rental yard, one of my jobs was overseeing the yard hands that loaded equipment for the customers. Well one morning, I had an outside service repair call to make on one of our rentals. So I got my tools together and left for a few hours.

I got back later, to notice one of our ride-on trenchers was under my outside repair shed. Hmmm....So I got my tools and stiff unloaded and went to look it over. That trencher had road rash all over it, and quite a few bent and broken items as well. WTF?

Walked into the shop, asked the other shop manager, Dave what happened to the trencher? Dave just rolled his eyes and so go ask Brian. Went up front and asked Brian about the trencher.

Well, two of the idiot yard hands decided to load our trencher onto one of our heavy duty bumper pull trailers. All of our larger heavy duty dual axle trailers had 2 5/16" hitches on them, and not 2" like most trailers. Customer's truck was equipped with a 2" ball! Customer was driving too fast on the loop around town and the trailer came loose from the ball, and the only thing that kept it from coming completely loose were the safety chains. Trailer got upside down, and the trencher came loose as well, and got upside down itself. Trencher suffered more cosmetic damage and I got it repaired, but the trailer was totalled.

Yard hands tried to blame it on the customer was driving too fast. I was livid. Dave was livid. Brian was livid. But Andy, the owner Brian's father was the most livid!

It was massive custerfluck!

 

[Moonpie]

Ben’s story about sexual harassment reminded me of a silly woman at my work.
mechanical engineer job opened up and a number of people tried for the job. Eventually they hired somebody. This somebody turned out to be this woman. Off the record we were warned she was very very sensitive to any and all forms of sexual harassment. Fact is she had filed numerous complaints over it. HR knew her well. At my work being accused of SH was a death blow to your career so we were quite worried how this new relationship would work out.
so the day comes when she shows up. We were expecting some sort of attractive woman when in walks the decidedly unattractive little BBW with the pissed off at the world face.
i’m sitting there thinking people sexually harassed her?!?!?!
It didn’t take long. Soon she complained she was being harassed because she wasn’t be harassed. Everyone was so afraid of her everyone was strictly business with her. So she bitched.
Eventually management had enough and showed her the door.

 

[Texasjack]

Sexual harassment! Working in a refinery and my office was near the door pointed at the refinery. HR was past our offices. One day I see the head of HR running - seriously running - out to the refinery. Anybody know what that's all about? My buddy John says they have to fire a guy for harassment and he proceeds to tell me the story. Let's call the protagonist, "Joe" (I honestly don't remember his actual name). Joe is in the lunch room eating and across the table from him is a female technician of some kind that is sitting there going on and on about how horrible she gets treated by everyone in the plant. It's fairly well known that she only dates girls, and so that aggravates the situation a bit. At some point Joe gets up and says, "You know what you need?" He stands up on the table, drops his pants, and whips it out, then says, "You need some of this, baby!" This is a big room and there are maybe 100 people in there. The girl curses and runs off, and his job is pretty much over before he gets his pants back up.

So I ask John, "What kind of idiot pulls a stunt like that?" John asks if I know so-and-so. Yeah, I do. It's a guy who is pretty much constantly in trouble and has impregnated several women who work there over the years. "Well," says John, "that's his little brother." OK, that's exactly the kind of idiot that would do that.

 

[Texasjack]

I was working for a company in NY and we hired this secretary. She had an amazing resume: college degree, spoke like 5 languages fluently, etc. She had just moved to the area because her husband's job moved there and her two kids were now old enough to go to school so she could go back to working. She was tall and thin - could have been a model a few years earlier, I suppose. There were some odd things that happened, but nobody really saw a problem. One day, her doctor (psych) calls and tells us she's flipped out and she's not going to be back to work. Normally he wouldn't call, but since she had some violent thoughts, he felt he had to warn us. Violent thoughts? Yeah, turns out that she specifically wants to kill me. What?!? Somehow I reminded her of her dead father and she hated him, so she had uncontrollable thoughts about killing me. Great.

Her husband came to pick up her personal items a week or two later and filled us in on the details. Apparently she was driving down the road and suddenly "woke up" to find herself in a random town 100 miles away with no idea how she got there. She contacted her shrink and he had her committed to a hospital and drugged up. She decided she no longer loved her husband and filed for divorce, and she didn't want anything to do with her kids. She hated everybody she had worked with and, for absolutely no real reason, still wanted to kill me. The husband and kids were devastated, to say the least.

About that time, one of our best clients came by for a meeting and he asked about the now missing secretary. My boss told him she had left, and the client said that since she was gone he felt he could confide something that had happened a month earlier. The client was in a meeting and excused himself to go to the restroom. No sooner did he start to relieve himself but this secretary came in and propositioned him. My boss asked why he didn't say anything at the time. The client replied, "Well, I wasn't sure if it was just a weird woman or if you were using her to try to get more business." My boss responded, "Oh, no! I wouldn't have done that! But, just for the sake of argument, would it have worked?"

 

[glenbo]

I was working for a company in NY and we hired this secretary. She had an amazing resume: college degree, spoke like 5 languages fluently, etc. She had just moved to the area because her husband's job moved there and her two kids were now old enough to go to school so she could go back to working. She was tall and thin - could have been a model a few years earlier, I suppose. There were some odd things that happened, but nobody really saw a problem. One day, her doctor (psych) calls and tells us she's flipped out and she's not going to be back to work. Normally he wouldn't call, but since she had some violent thoughts, he felt he had to warn us. Violent thoughts? Yeah, turns out that she specifically wants to kill me. What?!? Somehow I reminded her of her dead father and she hated him, so she had uncontrollable thoughts about killing me. Great.

Her husband came to pick up her personal items a week or two later and filled us in on the details. Apparently she was driving down the road and suddenly "woke up" to find herself in a random town 100 miles away with no idea how she got there. She contacted her shrink and he had her committed to a hospital and drugged up. She decided she no longer loved her husband and filed for divorce, and she didn't want anything to do with her kids. She hated everybody she had worked with and, for absolutely no real reason, still wanted to kill me. The husband and kids were devastated, to say the least.

About that time, one of our best clients came by for a meeting and he asked about the now missing secretary. My boss told him she had left, and the client said that since she was gone he felt he could confide something that had happened a month earlier. The client was in a meeting and excused himself to go to the restroom. No sooner did he start to relieve himself but this secretary came in and propositioned him. My boss asked why he didn't say anything at the time. The client replied, "Well, I wasn't sure if it was just a weird woman or if you were using her to try to get more business." My boss responded, "Oh, no! I wouldn't have done that! But, just for the sake of argument, would it have worked?"

Was she the Texas City Dyke?

 

[Brains]

Off the record we were warned she was very very sensitive to any and all forms of sexual harassment. Fact is she had filed numerous complaints over it. HR knew her well. ... in walks the decidedly unattractive ... Eventually management had enough and showed her the door.

One of my past jobs we had a similar situation unfold. They hired this woman, not even sure what her position was, but news quickly spread that she had a history of running to HR with claims people would sexually harass her. Someone in the office worked with her before at another company, and got the news out.

This woman was quite large, very unattractive by any metric, and had a stench that could make a freight train take a dirt road detour. It could have been something else, maybe a plant or something, but we never had flies in the office before she showed up. No exaggeration, it was bad. Point is, nobody would go near her much less sexually harass her. I never even learned her name, but lets call her Red(head).

Her cubicle was somewhat close to the printer/copier, with one empty cube between her and that area. So close enough to where if you really tried to pay attention and someone was speaking loudly enough, you could hear what they were saying. If you were paying attention to work, you wouldn't be distracted. Previous to her being hired, people would tend to idly chit-chat while they waited for their jobs to finish. After, people tended to be very careful and refrain while they were in that area. As luck would have it, one day a couple people were talking at the copier and one person let an F-bomb fly. Not in reference to the physical act, but a WTF or something. Red wasn't involved, wasn't part of or mentioned in the conversation. She just heard the F word uttered, and went straight up to HR to file a formal sexual harassment claim. After the investigation into what happened, she was terminated with cause for filing a false claim.

 

[benenglish]

Hmmm. Along the lines of the last couple of posts - We had a clerk who was a big NAAFA booster and, true to her beliefs, she started posing nude for men's magazines. She was fired not because the whole situation was gross (300+ lbs gross) but because she failed to get an outside employment request approved before she started modeling.

 

[toddnjoyce]

Had an airman who sought off-duty employment at a local strip bar near Eglin, and was denied approval. She fought the denial and got approved to work as a waitress.

After a while, it became know that she was performing as well as waitressing. During the Article 15 proceedings, she put forward a defense that since she only performed on amateur nights and she didn’t work on amateur night and didn’t get tips, she wasn’t violating the terms of her off-duty employment conditions.

Creative, but the Article 15 was issued for conduct unbecoming.

Had another guy that applied for a bootstrap program and was supposed to be going to school full time and participating in an ROTC program, which he was doing. Meanwhile, he took off-duty employment driving garbage trucks, never even sought off-duty employment approval. Part of the bootstrap program required him to report for duty when on school breaks, and this guy always seemed to have at least one class going on in mini-terms or he’d just burn leave to stay out of the squadron. The commander didn’t particularly like this guy and finally ordered him to report for duty to complete his PT test, so the guy shows up at the gym for his PT test wearing the garbage company uniform, goes and changes into PTUs, takes the test, then changes back and goes back to his other job. First Sergeant saw the garbage truck uniform and calls over to see if our guy was working for them and sure enough, he was. Our guy took an Article 15 over it, became ineligible for a commission, which triggered bootstrap going away, and he was offered the opportunity for an admin separation, which he took.