Amusing tales from places of work

I’ve worked at a number of places, and I’ve collected some interesting stories over the years. I got to remembering some of those during an earlier post, and decided to just go full bore in to a whole post. I can’t cover every story…if I were to put everything in to this post, it would become something best described as a tome. So I’m narrowing it to a few ‘greatest hits’.

First off, ‘Phil’ from Prairie Seed. I have to begin this by explaining the whole Phil thing. That wasn’t his actual name. I just called him Phil for so long that I forgot the unimportant bit of information that is his real name. Why did I call him Phil? Because of a Kids in the Hall sketch…

…and I can’t find the damn thing. Stupid Youtube! A quick summary : Loser guy known as ‘Phil from the warehouse’ who has pains that make it hard to live. From the moment that sketch was seen, every idiot that I have worked with has been known simply as Phil.

So, I’m working at a seed plant many moons ago, and it’s about as exciting a job as one would imagine. Mix seed in a hopper, pour it in to  sacks, sew those shut with a portable sewing machine, stack them on pallets. Repeat ad nauseam. After I’d been there for a little while, Phil arrived. He was the son of some higher up in the company. He was a complete moron. Yes indeed, he was too stupid to grasp working at a seed plant.

One day, I was doing the always thrilling job of stacking bags on pallets. Phil was working with the sewing machine. Imagine a tiny sewing machine with basically a pistol grip, hanging from the overall machine structure by flex cord. Something like this, only less modern looking :

Anyway, he’s using that. Now, Phil was slow as Hell to begin with, so I didn’t really take immediate notice of the fact that his productivity had dropped from ‘Sweet death will end this boredom’ to nothingness. After a few moments, though, I realized that he seemed to be fighting with the machine. I thought maybe it had run out of the string it uses, so I went to help him replace the roll. As soon as I got to him, he turned me and told me very quietly “I…I…uhhh…I think I’ve got a little problem here.”

“Okay, what’s up?” I asked him.

“I sewed my hand to the bag.”

Now, that machine pictured above is all safe and modern. There were no guards on the old school ones, and they go FAST. I asked him to repeat himself, and he told me the same thing. So I looked. He had managed to sew that chunk of flesh between the thumb and index finger to the bag. So he was stuck holding the machine, which was wedged right up against his hand, with a couple stitches attaching that hand to the bag.

After taking a moment to drink this in, I did the responsible thing that you do when some useless co-worker who you don’t like screws up…I went and told the guy running the seed hopper, giggling the whole time. He in turn went to get the warehouse manager. And it went on and on for a bit. Finally, someone freed the poor bastard from his predicament.

Now, I would normally commend Phil for not even whimpering once through what had to be a bit of a painful ordeal. However, I suspect that he was simply too dumb to register pain.

Next up isn’t really a work story. No, it is the tale of the single moist insane job interview that I’ve ever been a part of. I got in to this during one of the early Violent Aggression podcasts, but since probably nobody listens to those, I’ll repeat it here.

I honestly cannot remember the company, but I think that it was one of the approximately 7,000 divisions of Baker Hughes in Nisku at that time. I showed up for this interview at a warehouse, and ended up talking to some obviously very lonely woman. Actually, not talking…listening. And listening. And listening. After an HOUR, I was still listening.

She talked about how much she just loved some line of face cream put out by one of the original Charlie’s Angels actresses. She talked about how the guy I was interviewing to replace (I don’t know where he was…perhaps he’d made the correct decision and killed himself) would sleep in the office when the weather was too bad to drive, and that afterwards she’d find beer cans in there. She talked about the gazebo she really wanted for her back yard. She talked about the mouse problems that the warehouse had from time to time, and explained that that was the reason for the various cats walking around the complex.

During this horrific expenditure of time (I swear that time stopped at some point, because I’m certain that I spent a year or two there listening to this droning nonsense), one of the cats was always in the office. It would hop up on the big early model laser printer they had, up on the top tray where the printed pages come out, and she would shoo it off. This repeated several times. Eventually, I guess she’d had enough. She went and grabbed a lighter.

Now, even in my slumbrous state, I realized that this was a bit strange. This woman was clearly desperate. Did she have a bomb under her desk, one that she would light the fuse to now that it wouldn’t mean dying alone? Was this the end?

No. Not for me, anyway. Seeing me looking at her with what was probably an expression of alarm, she reassured me that she was going to ‘Teach this little bugger a lesson’ (while indicating the cat) by ‘giving him a hotass’. This was not reassuring in any way. She was still carrying something that produces fire, and I had no goddamn idea what in the Hell she meant by ‘a hotass’.

Everyone is familiar with a hotfoot? I’ll grab a definition :

The practical joke of lighting a match that has been secretly inserted between the sole and upper of a victim’s shoe.

So, take that basic concept, only the flame is being applied to the cat’s ass. Well, she went ahead and did so, and it worked! The cat immediately fled the printer tray.

The bad news…it’s tail/hindquarters area was on fire.

So now, the cat was sprinting around the office, smoke pouring from it’s smouldering back end as it did so. And chasing behind it was this same woman, pleading with it, “Stop! I want to help you!” Not surprisingly, the cat was unconvinced of promises of aid from the person who had ignited it, so it kept running.

The stink of burnt hair was everywhere. Finally, she caught up to it and liberally sprayed it down with one of those squeeze bottles normally used to water small plants in an office. The smoke stopped, and the cat fled the office area.

She looked back at me through the slight haze that now filled the air and asked if I could just forget what had happened. I don’t remember what I said. I’m not even sure I actually said anything. I just remember getting the Hell out of there, hopping back in the car, and making it about a block and a half before I had to pull over and laugh for a good ten minutes.

Finally, I’ll recount some of the things I witnessed during my time working on the flight line at the Edmonton International Airport. Prepare to be horrified at the level of incompetence of the people responsible for getting your flights loaded and gassed up.

On at least once occasion, we learned after the fact that a flight we’d loaded the luggage on to had had to make an emergency return. The reason? Too much of the fuel was loaded in to one wing (no, we weren’t in charge of fuel). See, modern aircraft have wet wings, where the fuel tanks are actually in the wings. To put this in to perspective, everyone is incredibly conscious of weight when it comes to loading aircraft. Part of the way that different ‘pits’ are assigned to different sets of bags is to balance out the weight distribution on the plane. Now imagine what happens when one wing contains…say…7,000 pounds of gas more than the other. Also, one time the fuel guys never actually put any gas in the plane. It had to be brought back to the gate because it was way too low on fuel. A truck had been there…I guess he forgot? Another flight had to make an emergency landing in Red Deer due to, again, not actually being fuelled up.

The front cargo area of the planes we were working on is where traveling pets were kept, since it has air and heat. I have never hopped out of one so fast as the time I jumped in as usual and found myself face to face with a large dog. He wasn’t in his kennel. The morons who loaded it somehow tripped one of the latches, so he forced his way out during the flight. Turned out he was friendly but…yeah.

Over the holiday season of this particular year, the International bag room was packed with piles and piles of bags that Air Canada had sent to the wrong places. I’m talking hundreds of bags and boxes and crates (probably well over 1,000 at the peak), and there were daily lines for their baggage services counter extending to well over 100 people. Anyway, we would have to head over there to load bags we offloaded from Northwest or Horizon flights on to the belts. It began to smell a bit…funky. Now, I’m sure some of that was spoilt food. However, we also found out later that somewhere amongst that heap was a casket. It wasn’t empty. I don’t know how you accidentally unload a casket. They’re heavy, they’re bulky, they’re difficult to maneuver in and out of an aircraft. Air Canada managed to do just that, though. I’d imagine that family got themselves a sizable chunk of money.

Then there were the vehicular collisions.

The Air Canada guys had to temporarily move their break room, because someone drove a belt loader up on to the curb and smashed through one of the windows in to their existing break room.

My personal favourite involved another company’s de-icing truck. Now, these are big vehicles. The entire back of it is one enormous tank, and when it’s full of de-icer that’s a LOT of fluid weight sloshing around. So you have to do everything gradually…turning, braking, everything.

And of course, they have a boom arm that lifts someone up in a basket so that they can spray de-ice fluid on to a plane before it takes off. Well, one night a few of us were on the International side working. We heard a loud bang and went to investigate.

Imagine what happens when a de-ice truck with the boom arm elevated careens in to a bridge-way.

Now, that picture on the right isn’t 100% correct to this particular scenario. Before you get to the part that extends to the plane, there is a long, solid portion to get there. It’s covered in aluminum siding, but it’s basically cement and rebar. THAT is what this genius smashed the boom in to. And no, I have no idea why he was driving next to the terminal building with the stupid thing raised in the first place.

The result…that boom arm was smashed in about 7,354 different places. De-ice fluid was everywhere…all over the truck and splattered all over the surrounding area, meaning the whole zone had to be taped off as a toxic clean up site. The bridge siding was partially torn away, and the idiot was driving fast enough that the boom actually punched a decent sized dent/hole in to the bridge itself.

The best part? So far as I know, dude didn’t lose his job. Proof positive that ‘Phil’ is truly everywhere.