Episode 6

Ever had something crazy happen at work? These are the top seven incidents that happened during our careers. All names and identities have been changed to protect the innocent. The truth is, we’re all a little crazy in the long run. Don’t take this too seriously 🙂

Yep. Freddie’s gone bye bye. I called HR. I didn’t want to be a Narc but my office had 2200 people in it. Better safe than sorry.

The Vampyre (so vampiric he should spell it with a y)

Lets call him Offred.

Picture Kate Beckinsale from Underworld, only unattractive, male, and with greasy hair. Complete with sword!

And threats.

And narcolepsy.

If you have narcolepsy, I’m sorry about that. It’s just one of those things lots of folks claim to have. In reality, they stayed up playing Dungeons and Dragons all night.

Nothing is better than a vampire sleeping in the training room where 20 other people are trying to watch the mandatory training. At least he was honest about how boring the training was.

The guys thought it was funny at first. I don’t remember who hired him but that guy needs a spanking. Offred must not have worn his floor length leather vampire jacket to the interview.

The Reverend Prostitute Murderer

We pointed intrusion detection devices at one of our office floors. These things allow us to spy on the network.

We saw…at lot.

The subject of this investigation, a part time reverend, was a bit naughty. Let’s just say that user sexy4u isn’t really female. Or remotely attractive. Mainly we just made fun of him.

Little did we know how naughty he was. A couple of years later, his former manager told me that he was in jail for murdering a prostitute in New Orleans.

It’s sad, but the stress of a big company interferes with a lot of lives.

“Hey Jeff Don’t Come to Work Thursday”

Our next person was a good guy, always nice, very considerate, and effective at work. But he’d been going through some stress. Maybe a lot of stress.

10:00 am: The phone rings.

It’s Freddy. He sounds drunk. He says, “Hey man. You are one of the good ones. Don’t come to work Thursday.”

Being the socially awkward person I am, I simply ask, “What?”

“I’m licensed to kill by the FBI.”

Yep. Freddie’s gone bye bye. I called HR. I didn’t want to be a Narc but my office had 2200 people in it. Better safe than sorry.

Last I heard, he was getting some help.

I just hope he isn’t mad at me.

Squatting down, he licked his “paws” and looked around with an alluring look on his face. He gained fame in the company forever.

Stealin Snacks’

This next person had some issues, like:

Putting up mirrors on her cube to see who’s watching.

Stealing food from the break room.

Stealing other’s lunches.

Walking into the boardroom during an actual board meeting, and grabbing a big handful of granola bars. The board members and executives seemed…confused.

Mr Cats

I love this next one because it has a certain flair. Mr Cats was pretty high ranking. A VP. Most VPs know how to hide their pathological habits. But they still have them. We’re all human.

Mr. Cats attended the company party, where he had too much to drink.

Oh boy did he love cats. I mean this guy really dug cats.

He sat at a table with some female employees. Not really at the table. More like on the table. On the middle of the table top that is. Right on top of the chips and queso.

Squatting down, he licked his “paws” and looked around with an alluring look on his face. He gained fame in the company forever. He left pretty soon after that.

We See What You Do

We had one hundred thousand employees. An employee was leaking our company memos to a gossip site.

One of my developers mentioned it offhand to our customer… a member of the CIA. Our CIA friend didn’t tell us anything secret. He pointed us to a public website about steganography…the art of hiding secret messages in plain sight.

So…we used steganography to tag everyone’s email. Next time an email was leaked, we’d know who did it.

Our new CIO was a recently retired rear admiral. He had a meeting with several of us right before an all hands presentation.

He complained about the leaks. I piped up. “Hey, we wrote a steganographic email program so we can catch the jerk doing this”.

Eyes around the table focused on me.

The CIO was clearly the only other person in the room who knew what that was. “Where did you guys learn that,” he asked? I explained that the CIA showed us how. Everyone else looked pissed.

The CIO was hooked and excited. My peers were green with jealousy. I’d showed up the whole meeting.

He walked out of our room and went to the big conference hall for his all hands meeting. He spoke into the video camera streaming his comments to all 100k people.

“We have ways of knowing what you do.”

Yep. I’d created a monster. Unfortunately, I didn’t really know if it would work at the time I mentioned it. Luckily for me, it did. We caught the leaker and he confessed.

The Armed Robber

We had a coworker who became very stressed out after the company did a round of mass layoffs. The stress of potentially losing one’s livelihood can cause highly irrational behavior, even in a highly technical, experienced software developer.

In this case, our co-worker randomly drove to a random family’s house and tried to rob them. The problem? The family had credit cards, but no money. Our guy, being “solutions oriented,” sent a family member to the ATM, expecting him to come back with money.

That’s when the family member did something our co-worker didn’t expect. He returned with the police, complete with SWAT team and hostage negotiators.

Luckily, the negotiation went well and the family went free. So all was good in the end.

We hope you enjoyed these snippets of our careers! Don’t act like these people did. If you get stressed out, and you will, just try to “be cool.” If you should find yourself doing something crazy at work, just remember, we’re all crazy in the end.