Let's talk about funny work stories.

For a summer job I got the chance to be a grocery checker in a Yellowstone National Park tourist trap. When coming from the south entrance my store was the first place to stop, buy fuel, groceries and see thermal features. The majority of the people coming through my register were just tired, hungry, and excited to see the amazing beauty of Yellowstone. But, there was a special kind of customer we called a touron. (a combination of tourist and moron.) They would loudly complain about the lack of animals to see (it’s a national park not a zoo), complain about the price of fuel and groceries (yeah, so? You could have planned ahead) and best of all, wanting to know when Old Faithful was going to erupt.

Our turon friends would demand that I give them the time of the next eruption, which from my store was impossible. (this was pre-smartphone/internet) When Old Faithful erupts depends on the length of the previous eruption plus or minus 15 minutes. After patiently explaining that to the first 2 dozen or so touron families and being rudely treated I gave up with mister nice clerk. You should know that on slow day with no tourists Old Faithful was 40+ minutes away from my store. Add an animal jam (when people come to a dead stop in the middle of the road to gawk at some critter), and normal summer traffic and Old Faithful was at least an hour away. My new spiel went like this:


Touron – (rudely) Tell me when Old Faithful goes off!
Me – (feigning a look at the clock and talking excitedly) Oh, if you hurry you can just make it. It’s 2:05 and it will go off at 2:30 sharp.
Touron – (rudely to his family)Marge! We’ve got to get moving, Old Faithful is about to go off!

I’m probably a bad person for doing that, but it accomplished an important goal for me, getting the touron out of my face and out of the store.

 

In the mid 90’s I was working as a CNC Programmer in a mold shop in Akron Ohio. PC’s were really beginning to take off, and photo processing was really coming into its own. Adobe Photoshop was all the rage, and we happened to have an “evaluation version” of it in the office.

There was a floor supervisor, who was the kid brother of the plant manager. The guy was a huge PITA, and every other statement was “That burns my ass, why did you...”, on and on and on. He would come in to our office area and raise 6 kinds of hell, only to discover later it was him that had screwed the pooch. Happened this way almost every day.

Well, one of my fellow programmers, Larry, was a well seasoned guy, who had a natural talent for Photoshop. He very quietly spent several lunch periods working out a label for a can of WD-40. Looked almost like it was the real deal. He color printed that label, and placed it over the can perfectly.

Instead of being WD-40, it was now “Ass-No-Burn”. The next time the floor supervisor came in on his high horse, old Larry, reaches over and grabbed that can, and hands it to the supervisor. This set him off even worse. He takes the can, storms out of the office and doesn’t come back for the rest of the day. This happens every day for the rest of the week! I think we cleaned out the supply of WD-40.

The following Monday, both Larry and I end up in the owners office. 6 cans of “Ass-No-Burn” are lined up neatly on his desk. This owner wasn’t known to be humorous or even friendly. We were both thinking we were going to be looking for work that afternoon. The owner very calmly, takes one can, and sits it on his shelf. He takes another can, and hands it to Larry, and says to keep it on his desk. He looks at me, tells me to remove the labels from the rest and put them back where they belong. We both then got chewed on for the next 5 minutes for wasting company time and resources, and sent back to work.

That can sat on the owners shelf until the day he sold the place. I think Larry took his when he retired. We never had to deal with the ass-burning floor supervisor in our office again. I left that place a long time ago, but this is just one of many stories from that time that will always stick with me.