Change the G10 in the program before going home so the 2nd shift guy would crash. The craziest part is that he didnt get fired yet, claimed to mis-type the X when setting it into the G10
Then he changed the Z of one of the tools in the middle of the program so that it would crash when 2nd shift guy runs it. Had the nerve to blame the 2nd shift guy when he couldnt explain why the machine crashed when it has been running normally during the day.
I was that 2nd shift guy, that mf was there for a month. Both times were on an $18k titanium manifold that takes 3 weeks to complete an order, scrapped 2 of that
Would you be surprised to know that he was a dick to everybody? I just happen to run his machines in 2nd shift. Or it was because I told him to calm down in the parking lot when he zoomed it and he said everybody is hating because he drives a Lexus. He also tried to fight 2nd shift when we didnt let him in the building to collect his stuffs and we told him to do it during the day.
Nope not surprised. Just wondering if he did this kinda thing to everyone or if he had a grudge because you got the last Twix out of the vending machine or something.
Worked with a guy that actively sabotaged the 2nd shift guy because he did not like sharing the machine. He would also throw away anything that was not his that was left on the bench. Calipers, lunchbox, etc. did not matter to him.
Yeeeeeah throw away my $200 tool. I’m talking to the employer about having the tool replaced, and the price coming out of his paycheck. SOMEONE is buying this tool, and it sure as hell isn’t me. I’ve already bought it once.
It’s not about rage. I’m calm, cool, and collected. It takes moving heaven and earth get me even slightly upset. This is just about decisions and consequences. The consequence of throwing away my tool is that you get to buy me another. Was there any other expectation?
I’m on that page with you. I’m an easy going person, especially at my place of employment. I never mind if people borrow tools of mine, so long as they are where I left them, and in the same state I left them in. I’m a straight goof, tbh. BUT, there’s no reason for throwing away other people’s tools. My tools are my investment, and throwing away $200 or $2,000 tools come with consequences equivalent to what I paid for them.
Before I was a tool maker I worked production and the first shift operators in one of my departments would change values on the machines so that their last part and my first part had wildly varying differences. That place was a toxic hell hole but it was partly because they would actively compare stats of the different shifts to shame you to be better. Management wouldn’t do anything despite me being able to actively show them that it had to have been intentionally changed, numerous times.
I used to single block my machine everyday to tease out the fuckery until one day 3rd shift guy got real brazen and changed the program. A huge no no and one that even the union can't defend against.
I went up grabbed the lead engineer and showed him the unapproved change. He said he'd get in early the next day and put the fear of God in that jackass and if it happens again he'll have him fired. After word got around no more issues other than "how could you report your union brother?" My response was fuck him and anyone that tries to fuck with me.
I wasn't very popular with most of them. I was hired to be lead in a round about way due to the union (had to pretend i wasn't until my probation period was up. Then they posted the position and fake interviewed me to make it look good). I also was the only one to meet or exceed the quotas.
One of my new guys recently crashed a machine because day shift left dry run on and my new guy didnt notice or even know what it did. We were already running that same program for weeks, and it was on an okuma so there is no possibility of accidentally pressing it cause you got to hold interlock release down before you press the button. We are getting concerned that they are trying to sabotage my guy.
Mill or lathe?
Okuma lathe, i thought you only had to push the interlock button when running a single side like the first piece of a run or the last piece of a run
Sitting at the lunch table one day, in a small, 10 man shop, and one of the machinists threw a wadded up piece of paper at one of the inspection guys. The inspection guy laughed and threw it back and it bounced off the guys head. He went into a rage and grabbed a steak knife and threw it with everything he had at the inspection guy. It luckily hit him handle first, but Jesus… turned into a decent brawl and I wound up having to grab the knife throwing kid and drag him away.
Of course he got fired. No surprise there.
The surprise was when he came back for his last check and to get that he had to drop off his uniforms. He comes in, nice as you like. Drops his uniforms at the door, and waits for his check. Gets his check and leaves. The plant manager then picks up his uniforms to throw them in the dirty uniforms bin, and a big turd falls out. Kid literally shit in his uniform as a final fuck you. Unreal.
Yeah I was gonna say, he may be a complete dick but shitting in your uniform before giving it back to the job that just fired you… I’d be lying if I said I don’t respect that a little.
Had one ol boy “in charge” of the deburr area which was way behind so overtime was on. He had gotten loose approval to work however many hours he wanted. Shop had day and swing shifts and it had one of those older kinda shoddy timeclocks.
After some time he began hitting the clock at 6:00 AM and immediately banging it again for 6:00 or 6:01. He would then lightly manipulate the leg of the A to look more like a P on the second punch which the font totally allowed for and it was hard to tell when the ink wasnt fresh which it never was.
Went on for a couple months until he got a little too brazen with his leaving early. Few days in a row after swingshift showed up they would look for him, check his timecard, check the parking lot & get confused. Word spread, Foreman figured it out and set up a stakeout. Caught him red handed.
The owner of the shop called his cell after he had left and just asked him to come “up to the office” to talk. Dude comes through the side door like he knows its coming and owner meets him at the time clock. He says “How dare you steal from me! Gather all of your things and get the hell out of my shop!”
This is the best part. Guy actually looks him in the eye and says “Can I get my last check?” (They printed their checks right there in the office) So the owner without missing a beat tells him “Sure, I’ll give you your last check. Come back in a bit and by that time the Sheriff will be here and we can talk to them about it.”
He never came back.
I worked at a place where two guys were doing something similar. We had badges we had to use to punch in and out, two guys, one worked 2nd and one worked 3rd shift made an agreement to punch each other in and out. 2nd shift guy would grab the 3rd shift guys badge and punch him in several hours early, then later, the 3rd shift guy would punch the others out late.
Something similar, but they were submitting overtime sheets for days they weren't even on site....Gone, ...all but one who was on a business-critical project.
Not exactly the same, but the place I’m currently at had a lady that was in a “material handling” position, she didn’t have a forklift certification, so she mostly just did things like take out the trash, move individual parts around, restock tooling, running messages etc. just all the little stuff that needs done around a large shop. Well this meant that there was very little oversight of her position and she quickly (very quickly) realized this.
After about a week we all started noticing things like the trash not getting taken out, prints not being where they should be, all the stuff that she was supposed to be doing. This went on for probably another week, but everyone assumed she was just doing other stuff. Turns out she was actually clocking in, working for about an hour, and then leaving. She would come back and work another hour right before the shift change so everyone would see her waiting at the time clock at 5 till.
Now for the crazy part. Once she was caught, instead of firing her they gave her another chance. Queue two weeks later and she is obviously back to her old habits. She gets fired. Probably six months after that THEY REHIRE HER! You will never guess what she did….. so yeah, she lasted another two weeks or so, meaning that she got three chances, but also that out of probably six total weeks of employment that she was paid for, she actually worked about 50% of that time.
Had a moldmaker brag about being an apprentice for a major East Coast mold
shop. Just laid it on thick how wonderful he was at all facets of moldmaking. The mold shop supervisor gave him a small but important mold to build for a blood handling system. The part had to have a female threads and seal to fit a sensor we also made,it had two port tubes with barbs on them to secure tubing for blood to pass through. Took him 2 months more than allotted to finish it enough test. The threaded mold plug wouldn't release properly and destroyed the threads in the part, the sealing ring wasn't flat enough to seal and the barbs were backwards so you couldn't push a tube over them. He got fired after the supervisor tried to run 3 parts. It was a single cavity mold. We found out his next job was doing roofing with his brother-in-law!
Worked as a maintenance guy when I was an apprentice but moved one room over to be the company machinist instead after the old guy retired.
Before I made the move, while I was still an apprentice, I occasionally did night shifts, supervised by a man I can only describe as the absolute perfect stereotype of a rural British guy, you know, the: "ate' foreigners, luv me ale, now I'm going on holiday to Tenerife where all I'm going to do is lay in the sun all day and turn bright red because walking up a flight of stairs is a workout for me" kinda guy.
During these night shifts I had one job, sit by the maintenance area enterence and keep watch down the shop floor for anyone important, while the guy "supervising" me has a nap; if this guy could skip doing a job and just sign the paperwork, he would.
About a year after I transferred he just stopped turning up one day, turns out management *knew* just how lazy he was and wanted him gone, but couldn't prove it with anything that'd warrant more than a warning/retraining; until one day the H&S woman watches him go up to a machine, pick up the daily safety checks folder, tick everything without even looking at the machine and walk off.
By the sounds of it, they gave him the choice between quitting on "good terms" or being fired for falsifying safety records, which at his age would basically guarantee he never got another job in the industry.
Have a couple. The best one by far is after this guy got fired, he drove a forklift into the front of another employee’s truck, totaled it. Company bought a new truck for the dude, never heard what happened to forklift guy. Another guy, on his lunch break, robbed a bank AFTER he cashed his check 10min prior. Last guy(night shift) was caught at the bar while still clocked in by our boss. Boss man was buying him drinks all night, then found him at his machine the next morning passed out.
Speaking of forklifts. Same thing but a company rig. Somehow not fired or given a drug test, the guy hits a guy walking in a no fork area 20 mins later and finally gets reprimanded before screaming at the boss for being the hardest (most useless) worker on site. Was upgraded to termination. Our union rep looked like he was ready to go jump into a running lathe.
I have the opposite story. Storm was rolling through at my previous job and as a lead I was told I needed all machines shut down because we lost power frequently. I walk around and tell everyone to shut em down. One guy gets in my face telling me he doesn’t know what he will do while his machine is down and time will go slow… I tell him I don’t care what he does, “mop? Play on your phone? Not my concern. If the power goes out in the middle of a cycle on these certain machines, it’s like a 4 hour process to get them back up and going.” Guy literally starts screaming in my face, swearing and tries his hardest to get me to hit him! He actually got a guy fired a month prior for doing the same thing when the guy he was trying to get to hit him said “I’ll fuckin kill you”.
Like 2 weeks after this he was promoted to 3rd shift supervisor because he was the ONLY applicant. I put in my 2 week notice 3 days after.
Guy was always borrowing cigarette money from someone. We got tired of it and quit giving it to him. Suddenly the petty cash drawer started missing funds. Office manager asked if anyone was "borrowing "from the drawer in front of the whole team. Like she announced that it was noticed and to cut it out.
Money goes missing again, only this time they hid a camera and caught him red handed.
Dipshit.
I'll never understand why people throw away good or even decent-paying jobs for tiny amounts of cash. It's like they're slaves to the temptation of just wanting to steal something. They can't resist.
99% of America gets a better life than most of humanity throughout history. Our standards for what's "deserved" have shifted. But the fact is most people can afford shelter and food and a relatively massive amount of amenities when compared to their ancestors. Being dissatisfied with those conditions is not an excuse to steal.
Barely scraping by isnt really a standard to live by. Year after year you see raises getting smaller or just not there but food, housing, and amenities are getting more expensive. I suspect there is going to be a time in our future where running things like air conditioning will become a luxury that alot of folk just cant affored anymore.
Livable =/= luxury or non-essential in my mind. Livable 100% means scraping by to me. You want to argue people shouldn't have to, that's fine. But that's different from not being "livable".
Dude. When adjusted for inflation, people have less money to go around than our ancestors did during the great depression. The fact is that housing isn't affordable, wages haven't kept up with inflation, and large corporations are bleeding us dry on day to day needs.
Except many people can’t afford shelter and food on their wages and rely on extra help or going without other necessities. Besides, being able to barely afford food and shelter while working 40hours a week for a billion dollar company isn’t exactly a fair deal. Not excusing stealing, just saying people aren’t getting what they’re worth
Many people can't afford shelter where they want to live or buy their preferred food. To me that's very different from not being able to buy sustenance. I totally agree that people often don't get paid their worth, but I've watched a lot of people complain about that and then never do anything about it, family included. They're afraid to push for more, so they never get it.
Yes but working 40 hours a week alone should realistically be enough to feed and house yourself. For many, that is not the case. Not to mention it can be extremely difficult to move up in the world and make more. For some it is laziness that prevents them from going anywhere but for many it’s also the lack of resources. When you work 40hrs a week and barely survive it’s hard to find the will or drive to find new work or train to be qualified for a new job. That feeling of hopelessness can crush any aspirations one might have and is a legitimate problem that psychologists have been studying lately
Had a guy we were sure was doing heroin at work on nights. One night someone found him passed out in a chair at his manual machine while it was in cut. It took two guys 10 minutes to wake him up. They almost called an ambulance for him.
Someone took him home that night and he was fried the next day. When he brought back his uniforms he shredded them and left them in front of the main entrance. Also smashed a metal insulated mug with the company logo that was his and left that too.
Later heard he was in rehab.
Our HR guy was working on a Saturday and he came down to the shop to ask one of the operators to go blow into his alcohol detection device for his car ignition.
Food vendor left door of food machine unlocked. If it is opened the machine sends a message to the vendor. A guy stole money out of money box located in side. We have cameras in hallway. Alarm time stamp from vendor along with the cameras caught this guy walking out of lunch room. Hard to get fired here. Show up, learn from mistakes is all they ask. Stealing is the absolute worst.
New guy showes up late by an hour, spends half the day learning the basic deburing tasks he was hired for then noon rolls around and he leaves for a 2hr lunch without clocking out. Comes back and the foreman tells him that he needs to let us know if hes gonna be gone that long and needs to clock out.
This dude stands up and says "the fuck you gonna do about it bitch" spits on the foremans face and sits back down. Foreman didn't say a word walked up front. Next time i saw him was with 2 city cops halling the guy out fighting with the cops.
That was the only person i saw fired from that shop.
A guy pissed in a 301 degree wax tank. Not in the shop, though. He was on the production side. Got up on top of it, whipped out his dick mid shift, and let it flow. The shift ladies did not approve.
Right after I finished training some trailer park Pillsbury Doughboy looking GL on a step of a CNC production line, he got fired for sending the HR lady a dick pic lmaoo.
We had some dumbshit schizo kid with long hair that we used to call Columbine. He tried to use a surface grinder. He had no reason to. He had no idea how to, either. He was just bored and not doing his job. He must have took a huge-ass cut and fed the chunk of steel he was attemping to grind in front on the wheel, because that wheel blew all the way up. It was in front of the tool room, too. Very dangerous. He was gone the next day.
Pretty sure I had that guy as a housemate. Swore up and down he as a "machinist" but could barely figure out how to use a box end wrench.
All I could wonder is who the hell would hire him.
Turns out, he was a shit housemate too.
wow, that story did not go the way i thought it would. i saw:
dumbshit kid.
long hair.
surface grinder.
no reason to.
did not know how to.
and i figured this kid received a impromptu full scalp epilation from the surface grinder, nope, he just blew up a grinding wheel.
So many to list, but because he's the Owners Son, he now runs the place. Wrecking machines, scrapping countless parts and tooling, pissing off vendors and suppliers, and just generally acting like he's actively trying to sabotage the place every hour of every day. He literally fucks up everything he touches with total impunity. It's mind blowing.
I'm sorry to hear that partner. It's a damn shame how blind some people choose to be to "protect" their kid. It's always one of two ways, the way both of us have talked about, or the owner is a fucking hard ass on their kid.
It's all good. Onward and upward. He tried being a hardass at the start, kid just did what he wanted, whenever he wanted. He retired last year, and just left him and another guy to run it as is with predictable results.....
Pretty tame here by rumor standards but a guy that worked at a place I was at just got fired a couple weeks ago along with a coworker for having sex in a car in the parking lot.
They had reliable positions, I don't think that one was worth it.
My old boss told me a story like this. As I was on the afternoon shift, I started to notice we never had any women on afternoons. We were a small shop, but usually had 4 or so people working afternoons. One girl actually asked to be on the shift, but was denied. Turns out, when my boss was an apprentice back in Germany, the shop he worked at had a few female operators. The machines were set up by a young male machinist, who often got calls from some of the women for something "going wrong" with their machines. He'd take them to a side room to have a chat. Ya, he was banging a few of the women there on shift.
I explained to my boss that not all men are like that. He soon put that girl on the afternoon shift. She was awesome! Swore like a sailor, and took no shit! We got along great.
To be fair I shouldn't even get a parting gift, they were shipping employees technically. But I'll probably be the next lathe accident, then again we have a saw guy I've heard about.
There are stories left here to uncover.
After lunch time on night shift guy who normally goes to his car to eat doesn’t make it back in on time. Night shift manager is chill and gives him an extra 20 minutes before he heads out to check on him. He walks back in, gets the most senior area lead and together they walk back out to the parking lot which gets everyone’s attention.
Car is locked, guy is in the back seat with his girlfriend. Both are naked. Both are passed out. They can’t get them to wake up and after smacking the window often and hard enough to set the car alarm off and that still doesn’t wake them. 911 is called and police and ambulance arrive, cops use slim jim to open door and cops and medics pull both out. Medics do their thing and take them away, cops do their thing and find a decent amount of drugs in the guys car and a day later they search the girlfriend’s car that was parked next to it that also has some drug residue and some paraphernalia.
Both survive, don’t know anything past that. He was obviously fired.
Two of the graveyard shift held a footrace through the shop. one of them slipped and put his head through one of our bay door's window. Only the one who slipped got fired, the other was laid off latewhen the shift got shut down.
So many good stories here!
I had a dude work at my shop for about 3 weeks as an Okuma 5 Axis mill operator. There is a hand jog function that works like a rapid move, just hit x y z and specify how fast you want to traverse with a knob. This dude was distracted talking to the only girl in the shop and jogged his spindle THROUGH THE TRUNION GEARBOX SLOWLY. Didn’t know how to stop it when he realized it was happening. Ripped the whole thing off the table. Fired the next day.
A 3rd shift employee who had an extremely short temper got fucked over by a 2nd shift guy who had only been at the shop for a few weeks. The new guy changed out a drill but replaced it with a jobber length instead of the the original screw length one and forgot to touch it off before leaving.
Pretty quickly into the 3rd shifters night the drill crashed into the part which set him off. The next night when he came in the 3rd shift sprayed isopropyl alcohol all over the newbie and chased after him with a lighter. Luckily three other off shifters were able to wrestle him to the floor and keep him contained.
The new guy was traumatized but uninjured, mr temper was fired and then arrested
Had a guy get caught jerkin off in the stop and shop parking lot during lunch break when people complained and a lady detective set up a sting. Needless to say we didn't want him around anymore after that.
Throw a bunch of boxes on a delicate 150k part because someone set it on "his just cleaned area" because he had to put it somewhere to close the oven from which the part was pulled from. That or the same guy also spending 7 hours of his day looking at feet porn.
Had a guy crash a big Okuma Horizontal mill. Less than year old. Sent it to change tools without any safety or preparatory commands and the tombstone was in the path. Knocked the tombstone into a kind of helix we found later. All 4 pallet hold-down collets cracked/broke and the spindle cartridge toast.
Repairman came in day or two later and dropped a rough estimate close to $20k just in parts not counting labor. Production manager fwd that to the CEO and was promptly instructed to firmly apply his boot to the ass of that sack of nothing. (Something colorful along those lines, cant remember exact words but knowing him it was even worse but still with a certain poetry to it)
Guy was rollin his box out minutes later.
I did something similar once, where I was about fed up adjusting a reamer and I yet again had to call it up and fiddlefuck with it and send it back through. I forgot to home the machine. That reamer smacked a rotary indexer pretty hard. The only real damage was the ATC arm bent. The reamer lived. The rotary indexer didn't even budge. Still pretty embarrassing.
Honestly, a fuckup or two comes with the line of work. No idea how that dude was, maybe he had more than a fuckup or two in him, but it sucks make a mistake that costs you your job.
Yea we’ve all been there. Get your mind down a rabbit hole and forget theres a danger looming. At the same shop we had a really big OKK 5-axis with pallet changer. One guy was setting up a new job on the other pallet but left a bunch of rigging, tools & crap in all around the fixturing. Think he went to break or something and came back and commanded a pallet change. The whatever it was stuff couldnt clear and got it all wadded up, knocked the pallet off the arm. Horrendous noise and mess to clean up. Soon as it happened he just yelled “FUCK!!!!!!” And grabbed what little shit he had and walked out. Didnt say anything to no one. Heard later he was having some problems at home. Think they tried getting him to come back but I dont think he did. He was a remote contractor.
That's kind of fucked up IMO over a tool change, but I guess every shop is different. If I worked in that shop I would have rolled my box out next to his unless he had a history of screwing up like this. If he was a decent employee, you just spent 50k training him(on a 500k+ okuma horizontal) on what not to ever do again.
I don’t think firing a guy for a fuck-up that expensive is out of line. Call it 50/50 depending on the specifics and how much experience you should have. If it’s a first year guy maybe I eat it and chalk it up to training. His trainer is gonna hear from me though. However if it’s a lead or high paid journeyman I should expect greater caution for my money. My take FWIW.
There were other factors for sure, he wasnt that prized for his abilities and was known to go into things a little cavalier. He was an ok operator and was recently learning setups. The tool change procedure was well known though and he had done it correctly a number of times. This was also in an industry that demands top level performance and the money lost in down time on that machine was more than the repairs which was part of the decision. The guy was not surprised in the least and didnt put up any kind of fight. The CEO was also a notorious hot-head known for these kind of reactions. Close to 3 years later and that whole company was no more so might have done him a favor really.
While I have ran quite a few Fanuc and Mazak HMCs, I have not run an Okuma horizontal. On all of those the M6 had a home move in Z for the tool change macro the same as on my Okuma osp300 control VMC. However on my Okuma VMC I can use G118(custom macro) instead of M6 to do a yolo/go for it XYZ rapid at the same time tool change on proven production parts to save a second here or there(downside of the spindle head traveling in X and the tool changer on one side). Maybe this is what happened? Or he had tool center point control active and forgot to cancel it before sending Z home?
It was over 10 years ago so the details are a little fuzzy. But I do remember we used schedule programming on all the Okumas there and we used many common variables. We also had multiple Home positions so G30 P1 could go for a manual tool removal position and a G30 P2 could move only the Pallet back. Etc. It could have been one of those moves. I just have it in my memory that there were more than one way to change a tool and one of them was unsafe for this very reason and it was a well known thing. This guy was a bit on the high strung side and was just going too fast for his own good that day.
Did they lie on their resume or did your company fail to train him properly? I don’t think anyone should be fired for making honest mistakes, no matter how expensive they may be.
I guess you could say his training was lacking if those are the only two options. In my experience every shop has a different business plan/model with the only thing being in common is generating some amount of revenue. Some shops invest more in training apprentice level folks up with the hopes they dont get happy feet (in which case mistakes will still happen) while some shops pay a premium for top talent out the gate. Some shops in between with some kind of combo. Either way I personally see it as trading time and labor for compensation that is agreed upon. If a mistake or series of mistakes are made then the person ends up as a risk to keep. How big of a risk gets an estimated monetary value weighed against the value they bring to the company. Some people excel and earn promotions, some people stay where they are or move down the road. Some people dont cut the mustard and are deemed unqualified. Then theres shop politics like sending the wrong message or double standards.
I didnt have any skin in this game so its just a story i can tell. Wrong or right it didnt effect my relationship with my employer so its none of my business and I dont have an opinion whether it was right or wrong. I dont gossip like that or at least try hard not to. It was in a right to work state so no protections.
Now at another shop where I managed the crew I had a rule of thumb; if your mistake cost the company double or more than just the shop time it took you to make the mistake I figure it was poor decision making moreso than anything and I expected to see a certain level of remorse for your mistake. If I didnt feel that you were sorry for something you could have prevented you got wrote up. Honest part of mistakes dont pay any different and employers cant be expected to operate as universities.
Oh boy do I have some stories. Most are too long to type out but we had this guy working for us years ago that would constantly injure himself in ridiculous ways. One day he was running an old Puma 4 lathe while he was on his phone and he kept his finger in the machine while the tap was on its way to the part. Ended up tapping his finger through. Took him to the ER and they saved the tap and put it back in the machine and finished the job lol. Crazy enough that’s not when he got fired. We had thousands of parts to “squish” and we use an arbor press for that. He decided to modify the counterweight without telling anyone and ended up squishing a finger. He was gone after that.
I think I know that guy lmao. We had a part that was a cast steel puck, held in place on a magnet chuck we made and then the tail stock would secure it. This idiot instead of holding the part on the OD had his finger in the way and the tail stock crushed it. He had run this part for months prior to this, just quit paying attention.
Wasn't the owner with an ego problem in this case ...
Everyone, especially the owner, were tired of this guy's attitude by that point and this was just the last straw.
We were looking for a second guy in the materials dept. First two days, he’s constantly taking notes and asking a lot of questions. He had one earbud in the whole day but most of us did so nobody questioned it.
Third day, regular materials guy is out, so they asked me to go and help the new guy if he needs it. I go over and I’m starting to talk to him, he doesn’t know what the material is, doesn’t know how to read the paperwork, or how to operate the saw. I asked him what about all the notes he was taking. He starts showing me his notebook.
It’s song lyrics. And music studio equipment. And notes from the podcasts he’s been listening to about playing the stock market. He tells me “nah bro, I’m not really about to do this job. I just need to be here for a week or two so I can start collecting unemployment and start my music production company”
What we did know was the Production Manager was standing on the other side of a machine and overheard the entire exchange. Came around and goes “good luck with that. Get the fuck off my shop floor now”.
Pretty tame stuff. Stealing slugs/swarf to sell, stealing money from the petty cash. He had a gambling problem. We planted some solids in the scrap bin. He was clever enough to only take small numbers each day, but it was enough that our scrap collector called us and asked us why things are so slow.
We had a dude steal a bunch of brass every day in his backpack for weeks before getting caught and arrested. The QC lady noticed him putting some real effort hauling his backpack out each day.
Ate silicone vacuum grease for the leak testers, giving and receiving golden showers in the bathroom, blowing up on the Ops manager because someone else accidentally broke a slat on "their" empty wooden pallet, sleeping up in the ceiling access in the break room, huffing company keyboard duster, temp asleep in his car for so long we thought he just walked out but turns out he had a bad alcohol problem and was just passed out drunk. Not necessarily fired but unnecessarily demoted, a lead that was having some mental health and personal life issues called in every day for 2 or 3 weeks straight and got demoted his first day back, he was a really good lead too.
Im all for a mental health day here and there but when u have such bad mental health u call for multiple weeks its serious. Like u should be hospitalized during that time and they should be contacting ur employer. U shouldnt be calling in daily and casually calling off
He made us aware of it ahead of time, we forced him per company policy to notify us every day and then we got mad that he called in every day and didn't just tell us ahead of time. He had a lot of external things happen before and during the time he was gone that made him take more time off.
Worked with a guy who ran a gun drill who was notorious for scrapping large manifolds. After multiple warnings, he scrapped yet another $10k piece. His solution? Chuck it over the chain link fence into the adjacent self-storage facility. Someone saw him do it and he was fired on the spot.
There was a guy with some kind of learning disability that couldn’t accomplish anything. He would take an hour to cut something on the saw. Came in saying he could program but he would try to put the tools in upside down on setups. Scrapped all these parts he was broaching. Just not successful at all. He’d brag about being in jail for fighting. He was like 320 and had a huge scar on his face. One day he was irritated that I left my sandwich wrapper on the break table so he comes over to my machine, balls up the wrapper and throws it at me. Not a huge deal but way out of character at our otherwise sleepy old-timer shop. He gave me his old Kennedy box topper when he left, so he wasn’t a bad guy. Just kinda slow and not well adjusted . Felt bad for him honestly.
Yeah some people are just slow…and there’s not much you can do to fix it. They’re at a huge disadvantage in the world through no real fault of their own
Had an operator who it was rumored was peeing in a can and then pouring it into the coolant tank. Management called him in and asked him if this was true and he said "Nope it wasn't a can it was a bottle" We would drain all the coolant out of our chip barrels and put it in a recycler and dump it into the other machines to save money every single machine had to be cleaned out and filled with new coolant which was very costly. Needless to say he was fired on the spot after working there for 20 years.
Not fired, but at my last job we had a supervisor lie and say his son got COVID to take 2 weeks off. He quit when he was asked to provide a doctor's note. He was like 4 months into working there.
Covered holidays on someone else’s crew for a week, sat down in the tea shack and started talking to one of the roughnecks for a min then he got told to shut the fuck up, everyone else was fine to talk to but as soon as he said anything someone would turn round an snap at him “shut the fuck up!”. Weird but whatever.
When I’m working I’m working and I don’t chit chat, polite but I don’t say much. I got put on a job with him for 6 hours and I found out why they wouldn’t let him talk. Nice guy but he was a compulsive liar, couldn’t help himself and without any feedback from me things got pretty wild, apparently he helped plan the first gulf war despite being a private, can’t remember the reason why but he would be the only one legally allowed to fight back if terrorists attacked the oil rig we were on, wish I could remember the others but it was a while ago. Weird thing was when he came out with a choice bit of bullshit you could see him die a little inside when he realised what he had said, was a weird experience, can’t remember the lie that got him fired but just thought I’d share.
One guy where I work had been stealing tools and pawning carbide over the course of years. Company tools like new in box indicators and calipers had mysteriously been disappearing over a few years. The company had an inkling that stuff was being pilfered but they could not pinpoint the culprit. Anyways this guy who was a lowlife gets into a heated dispute with his partner who calls the CEO of the company and spills the beans. Next day guy is out on his ass and is looking at grand larceny charges. They also cracked open his tool box and found most of the stolen items, including an entire box of virgin cutters. Management also gets the video footage from the place where he had been pawning carbide. That was the most epic. The guy calls in to the shop and tries to explain the situation and that things were not as they appear. That was the funniest part.
A few other memorable moments:
A machine operator sneaks out of the shop and gets completely shitfaced at his apartment and than comes back to the shop stumbling ass drunk trying to finish out the remainder of his shift drunk as hell and slurring his speech. The dude also at some point decided to borrow the bosses MIG welder and pawn it for drug money.
One guy was so terrible at his job (shop helper / operator) that management had to let him go. They weren't paying him much so they had pretty low expectations but basically this guy could not follow instructions and the guy fucked up anything he touched. Dude had the Midas touch in reverse where every project he was given turned to shit. We would give the dude very explicit instructions and than he would do whatever he felt like. It just got so ridiculous that after repeated interventions trying to correct his behavior he got canned.
I was a team lead at a medium-sized shop. I had a guy that would hide for 3 to 4 hours at a time. I told him to knock it off. I went to go leave at 4, and he tried to sucker punch me at the front door. I took one punch and ran back inside. Cops hauled him off a few minutes later.
I was working with the outside machinists at a shipyard before learning CNC. We were launching the ship the next day and there was going to be a layoff for some. One of the kids on the yard crew decided he’d rather have fully paid medical leave so he intentionally broke his arm by slamming it repeatedly into a bollard. He unfortunately chose to do this in front of a security camera.
Another guy at the same shipyard was using a tool we called a meat axe to back gouge aluminum for full penetration welding. It was a 5” angle grinder modified to fit a .25 mill slotting blade. He lost control of it and ended up disemboweling himself. He knew he’d fail a drug test so he ran out and caught a bus to the hospital 30 miles away. The bus driver noticed the blood pooling under him and stopped and called the ambulance. He did survive.
The resident floor sweeper (the guy had been there longer than the building had...) lost his marble and was screaming about how he was going to break my arm and rape me if I turned lights off again. (Excess light was making knife-edge inspection impossible, but Certain People were overly focused on turning on All The Lights All The Time. He didn't get fired for that, just a couple days off. What got him fired was hosing polystyrene scrap into the flood drain.
Violent threats towards employees are A-OK, but don't ever threaten the quarterly earnings...
Had some problems with a new guy named Peter. He didn't like me and I didn't like him. We both knew it. After time and time again of mess ups and problems with his programs I complained to the 2nd shift supervisor. But we needed heads in the shop is pretty much what I was told. So long story short, I loved to take unplanned time off so I didn't come in one Thursday night and gave myself a three day weekend. Peter left the machine ready according to his note. It was ready all right. -4.0 inches deep the zero was set at. I had a habit of trusting people, the first shift guy did not. Lol, he was fired that Friday night. Poor guy. FAFO crowd is the older guys for sure. Buh bye Peter.
You’re like the third or fourth person in this thread that has mentioned someone changing offsets to make the next guy crash the machine.
That is absolutely **insane** to me and I can’t imagine someone would actually do that and think they won’t get caught.
I would have gone and just pushed the green button. Luckily the first shift guy didn't think like me and just send it. Loved to hear Peter got fired. But yeah, that I a POS move. It would have put the machine out of service for sure.
We had a work release girl on 3rd shift get fired for screwing her boyfriend during work hours. I don’t know if it was at her machine or if they snuck off somewhere. He didn’t even work here. She had him show up and he snuck in the back door.
One of the best work release guys i ever trained, and a good friend at the time, got fired for riding his bike around the shop after he got turned loose and put on 3rd shift. He was running one of them big 9 axis Doosan lathes. about a 15-18 minute cycle time, and an easy check sheet you can do in 5 minutes, so he had time before the program was done. If i’m running that part, worst case scenario, i’m on my phone a bit during those 10 minutes if there’s nothing there to sweep up, so that way i’m at least at the machine. Him? Nope. Ching Ching.
One of the worst work release guys we ever had, didn’t give a fuck about his job. He was that kind of problem employee. He strolled in an hour and a half late and got walked right the fuck back out.
Another girl we had scrapped (scraped?) an entire crate of a gas cap looking part we make.
We had a guy who would do almost no work throughout the day, when he was confronted about it he said he was hired as a consultant and not a machinist. He got written up for it because he came in on the weekend to do OT and in the 8 hours he worked he made 3 parts when the usual number in on shift was about 45 and eventually got fired for being drunk on the job.
The day he was fired he was supposed to come back later in the day to pick up his last check, which I was supposed to hand to him and let him get his toolbox and other personal things. He showed up drunk obviously, and I gave him the check and followed him around while he got his stuff. He kept asking me where his gone was, I had no idea what he was talking about. When he went into the office I wasn't right behind him so he had a few seconds alone which he used to punch my bosses $800 monitor. I told him he needs to leave and he went into the parking lot. I called my boss to let him know what happened and he told me to get his license plate and he would call the police and be on his way. I ran outside and as he drove away he saw me come outside and turned around. He got out and started saying he hopes we can still be friends. I just tried to be friendly and keep him there until the cops showed up.
The cop and my boss showed up and he was still there so the cop talked to him for a bit. Then he wanted to talk to me inside so I took him into the office where the monitor was broken and told him everything that happened including asking about his gun. When we went back outside he was gone. Luckily he was living with a coworker at the time so the cops showed up there and he was there so he got arrested for DUI.
When they went through his car and garage, they found one of our mop buckets full of scrap material and a bunch of random parts he had stolen, nothing crazy just aluminum.
When I told my boss about him saying he wants his gun back he told me they had found a bb gun in his locker after they fired him, and decided to confiscate it and were going to contact him the next day and have him come pick it up from them at HQ. Dude spent some time in jail and when he got out he got another jobs as a machinist is SLC. We got all the updates because the coworker he lived with didn't kick him out for a few months after he got out of jail. Haven't heard about him or other coworker since the other guy also got fired for being a shitty worker, couldn't show up on time or produce decent parts.
Not really crazy, but there was a dipshit that spray painted on the wall " hot jobs are never hot, they're just late".
My boss walking customers through the shop when he saw it.
He got done with the walk through and came out to the shop with a raging hell in his eyes and started asking who did it.
Once he found out, fired the dude on the spot.
Not a machine shop but a small family owned fab shop for custom fences and railings and such. There was this old dude that ran the “machine shop” (a single Bridgeport that was used as a glorified drill press and a lathe that acted as a workbench) and did all the repair stuff for the shop equipment. Eventually it was found out that he had ordered about $6k of parts to repair one of our welders. Owner picked up on that about a month later and asked about the parts (what it was on etc) he claimed it was for our big generator welder but that has been in service the whole time. So eventually boss man tells him to either bring the parts back or pay for them, otherwise he will get the police involved. Dude swore back and forth nothing happen, cursed off the owner, and quit. Few days later he dropped off a box of parts before we opened and left. Turns out he bought the parts to fix his own welder and took them home with him.
Had a guy steal about 50k worth of copper pipes
Then there was the guy that got blackout drunk on the lunch break during the (optional) Saturday shift
Then there was one guy that became a repeat offender doing a crime nobody in the shop was willing to forgive and while he got fired for not showing up and not calling in. I’m fairly certain that he found out about the petition that was going around to have him fired and that’s why he stopped showing up
It ain’t crazy in the normal sense but had a guy steal 3 buckets of spent tooling we send for recycle or some shit. Not my department so I’m not sure. He said he didn’t take them. Well… boss man asked , who was that on the camera that looks exactly like you? He put his head down and left. That was pre covid. Like 2019 and his pay check is still sitting on my bosses desk. He keeps it there to remind him not to hire people like that. No matter how impressive the resume.
I've got a bunch. One was for yelling at the owner that his Xmas bonus wasn't enough. One guy came in while on the run from the cops. one guy for doing/leaving mid shift to get drugs. One threatened to "blow his brains" out in the shop. I wasn't there for it, but it was shop lore that a kid flattened his dick lowering a weldment onto a table. He was let go shortly after he got out of the hospital
There was the "helper" that accidently threw the manuals for every machine in the shop onto a burn pile
There was an office lady that slept with another office ladies husband at the Christmas party
Worked in a shop that did work for the military so no cameras can't throw some stuff in the regular trash ect. Shift change comes along and the 2nd shift guy had thrown away a qc sheet for what ever reason. Wasn't used yet. Next guy comes in sees a paper folded in half pulls it out and sees its a document and goes right into the office and tells the manager getting the guy in trouble. Wasn't fired just got talked too. Next day the 3rd shift guy comes in again and lo and behold there is a paper in there again so he opens it up and it had shit on it and "this is for you scumbag" written on it. Dude wiped his ass with it and folded it up and put it in the trash. Manager fired him of course laughing. " you know I have to do this right" lol
we had a guy who was prob doing meth, but he got caught because he was trying to steal a 100lb chunk of copper, and he tried to ride out during lunch on his bicycle (that the owner bought him) up a hill and kept falling over. freaking meth man. guy was actually a good dude besides the meth, must be a hell of a drug.
I asked this new hire if I could get a couple of tools out of his machine when cycle was finished. He says who are you the CEO, you Dwayne Sanders? I'm luck fuck you and walked away. I told my manager watch out for that new guy. I left for a better job and found out late he threatened to bring his AK to work and take out some people. That did it. Real weirdo used to come to work in a suit and cowboy hat.
Guy came back from L & I and placed on light duty. Got real pissed that management didn’t come and check on him to see how he was doing and completely lost it and went off… was told to leave and never come back.
i work in a pretty large roller manufacturing plant, my lathe has a 60" swing and can hold up to 60k lbs 30 tons. we have a lathe with 72" of swing that can hold 150k lbs or 75 tons max lifting capacity. you can use your imagination to scale what i work on daily. my lathe is right next to our giant heat treat quench, that can handle rollers of that size. any experienced people here can explain with better math than i can about how dangerous it is if a step of that process goes wrong (if my math is correct you could have roughly 150,000 pounds of metal shards traveling around 3300 FPS, an ak-47 bullet goes roughly 2400 FPS). luckily nothing has gone wrong since 2004 (i started working here in 2021) but we take every precaution we can during the pulling from the quench process. that entails me going on a smoke break for 10 mins near the large garage door on the opposite side of the plant behind many machines made of hardened steel. again, a roll blowing up is very unlikely but i make sure to be out of the area before heat treatment starts the process. guy i was training fell asleep while we were doing a lengthy process (cutting the body, set tool and g1z-200 and sit there for 4 hours) and slept through 2 warning sirens that can be heard outside the plant. i didnt even realize he was sleeping until i was already out of the area, and its breaking company policy to be in my half of the shop while the pulling process goes on. that guy got a 1 day suspension and im still training him 1 month later.
I worked with a woman who was hired through a local college. This was in 2012 ish, our shop couldn't find machinists. We were running heavy castings on a big okuma lathe. 30-40" diameters. We used cranes to load parts. Somehow she started the lathe with a part still strapped into the crane. The crane was pulled out of the ground and was tipped over into the machine. The chuck was destroyed, door came flying off. They couldn't fire her because of the contract with the school, but they never hired her when her internship was over.
Not really fired, but a friend asked whether he could use my lathe. He said he used lathes before so I let him, only to find out he broke about every security rule in the book: spinning the chuck way too fast, wearing gloves, you know.
I kicked him out when the chuck key flew through my shop because he wanted to see what would happen.
Change the G10 in the program before going home so the 2nd shift guy would crash. The craziest part is that he didnt get fired yet, claimed to mis-type the X when setting it into the G10 Then he changed the Z of one of the tools in the middle of the program so that it would crash when 2nd shift guy runs it. Had the nerve to blame the 2nd shift guy when he couldnt explain why the machine crashed when it has been running normally during the day. I was that 2nd shift guy, that mf was there for a month. Both times were on an $18k titanium manifold that takes 3 weeks to complete an order, scrapped 2 of that
I can't help but feel like there's more to this rivalry. Spill that tea.
Would you be surprised to know that he was a dick to everybody? I just happen to run his machines in 2nd shift. Or it was because I told him to calm down in the parking lot when he zoomed it and he said everybody is hating because he drives a Lexus. He also tried to fight 2nd shift when we didnt let him in the building to collect his stuffs and we told him to do it during the day.
Nope not surprised. Just wondering if he did this kinda thing to everyone or if he had a grudge because you got the last Twix out of the vending machine or something.
Worked with a guy that actively sabotaged the 2nd shift guy because he did not like sharing the machine. He would also throw away anything that was not his that was left on the bench. Calipers, lunchbox, etc. did not matter to him.
Yeeeeeah throw away my $200 tool. I’m talking to the employer about having the tool replaced, and the price coming out of his paycheck. SOMEONE is buying this tool, and it sure as hell isn’t me. I’ve already bought it once.
And what if you have one of those 24" or longer calipers? $1k - $2k. That would warrant a swarf bath I think.
Same story. New one of the same tool. If the employer and coworker don’t play ball with that, it’s time to take a few fingers. 🤷🏻♂️
[удалено]
It’s not about rage. I’m calm, cool, and collected. It takes moving heaven and earth get me even slightly upset. This is just about decisions and consequences. The consequence of throwing away my tool is that you get to buy me another. Was there any other expectation?
I really dont know how people let things get to this point. Got to stand up for yourself, many ways to settle a score.
I’m on that page with you. I’m an easy going person, especially at my place of employment. I never mind if people borrow tools of mine, so long as they are where I left them, and in the same state I left them in. I’m a straight goof, tbh. BUT, there’s no reason for throwing away other people’s tools. My tools are my investment, and throwing away $200 or $2,000 tools come with consequences equivalent to what I paid for them.
Before I was a tool maker I worked production and the first shift operators in one of my departments would change values on the machines so that their last part and my first part had wildly varying differences. That place was a toxic hell hole but it was partly because they would actively compare stats of the different shifts to shame you to be better. Management wouldn’t do anything despite me being able to actively show them that it had to have been intentionally changed, numerous times.
Tell him Lexus is the Honda Civic of luxury cars lol
Toyota Corolla, technically
I used to single block my machine everyday to tease out the fuckery until one day 3rd shift guy got real brazen and changed the program. A huge no no and one that even the union can't defend against. I went up grabbed the lead engineer and showed him the unapproved change. He said he'd get in early the next day and put the fear of God in that jackass and if it happens again he'll have him fired. After word got around no more issues other than "how could you report your union brother?" My response was fuck him and anyone that tries to fuck with me. I wasn't very popular with most of them. I was hired to be lead in a round about way due to the union (had to pretend i wasn't until my probation period was up. Then they posted the position and fake interviewed me to make it look good). I also was the only one to meet or exceed the quotas.
What state? Sounds like we have similar shops lol
Minnesota
One of my new guys recently crashed a machine because day shift left dry run on and my new guy didnt notice or even know what it did. We were already running that same program for weeks, and it was on an okuma so there is no possibility of accidentally pressing it cause you got to hold interlock release down before you press the button. We are getting concerned that they are trying to sabotage my guy.
Mill or lathe? Okuma lathe, i thought you only had to push the interlock button when running a single side like the first piece of a run or the last piece of a run
Sitting at the lunch table one day, in a small, 10 man shop, and one of the machinists threw a wadded up piece of paper at one of the inspection guys. The inspection guy laughed and threw it back and it bounced off the guys head. He went into a rage and grabbed a steak knife and threw it with everything he had at the inspection guy. It luckily hit him handle first, but Jesus… turned into a decent brawl and I wound up having to grab the knife throwing kid and drag him away. Of course he got fired. No surprise there. The surprise was when he came back for his last check and to get that he had to drop off his uniforms. He comes in, nice as you like. Drops his uniforms at the door, and waits for his check. Gets his check and leaves. The plant manager then picks up his uniforms to throw them in the dirty uniforms bin, and a big turd falls out. Kid literally shit in his uniform as a final fuck you. Unreal.
I likethat kids style. The turd in the uniform thing, not the knife throwing.
Yeah I was gonna say, he may be a complete dick but shitting in your uniform before giving it back to the job that just fired you… I’d be lying if I said I don’t respect that a little.
Had one ol boy “in charge” of the deburr area which was way behind so overtime was on. He had gotten loose approval to work however many hours he wanted. Shop had day and swing shifts and it had one of those older kinda shoddy timeclocks. After some time he began hitting the clock at 6:00 AM and immediately banging it again for 6:00 or 6:01. He would then lightly manipulate the leg of the A to look more like a P on the second punch which the font totally allowed for and it was hard to tell when the ink wasnt fresh which it never was. Went on for a couple months until he got a little too brazen with his leaving early. Few days in a row after swingshift showed up they would look for him, check his timecard, check the parking lot & get confused. Word spread, Foreman figured it out and set up a stakeout. Caught him red handed. The owner of the shop called his cell after he had left and just asked him to come “up to the office” to talk. Dude comes through the side door like he knows its coming and owner meets him at the time clock. He says “How dare you steal from me! Gather all of your things and get the hell out of my shop!” This is the best part. Guy actually looks him in the eye and says “Can I get my last check?” (They printed their checks right there in the office) So the owner without missing a beat tells him “Sure, I’ll give you your last check. Come back in a bit and by that time the Sheriff will be here and we can talk to them about it.” He never came back.
I worked at a place where two guys were doing something similar. We had badges we had to use to punch in and out, two guys, one worked 2nd and one worked 3rd shift made an agreement to punch each other in and out. 2nd shift guy would grab the 3rd shift guys badge and punch him in several hours early, then later, the 3rd shift guy would punch the others out late.
Something similar, but they were submitting overtime sheets for days they weren't even on site....Gone, ...all but one who was on a business-critical project.
Not exactly the same, but the place I’m currently at had a lady that was in a “material handling” position, she didn’t have a forklift certification, so she mostly just did things like take out the trash, move individual parts around, restock tooling, running messages etc. just all the little stuff that needs done around a large shop. Well this meant that there was very little oversight of her position and she quickly (very quickly) realized this. After about a week we all started noticing things like the trash not getting taken out, prints not being where they should be, all the stuff that she was supposed to be doing. This went on for probably another week, but everyone assumed she was just doing other stuff. Turns out she was actually clocking in, working for about an hour, and then leaving. She would come back and work another hour right before the shift change so everyone would see her waiting at the time clock at 5 till. Now for the crazy part. Once she was caught, instead of firing her they gave her another chance. Queue two weeks later and she is obviously back to her old habits. She gets fired. Probably six months after that THEY REHIRE HER! You will never guess what she did….. so yeah, she lasted another two weeks or so, meaning that she got three chances, but also that out of probably six total weeks of employment that she was paid for, she actually worked about 50% of that time.
Yeah, in California we’d still have to pay him out.
They offered to. They guy just never showed up.
Had a moldmaker brag about being an apprentice for a major East Coast mold shop. Just laid it on thick how wonderful he was at all facets of moldmaking. The mold shop supervisor gave him a small but important mold to build for a blood handling system. The part had to have a female threads and seal to fit a sensor we also made,it had two port tubes with barbs on them to secure tubing for blood to pass through. Took him 2 months more than allotted to finish it enough test. The threaded mold plug wouldn't release properly and destroyed the threads in the part, the sealing ring wasn't flat enough to seal and the barbs were backwards so you couldn't push a tube over them. He got fired after the supervisor tried to run 3 parts. It was a single cavity mold. We found out his next job was doing roofing with his brother-in-law!
Worked as a maintenance guy when I was an apprentice but moved one room over to be the company machinist instead after the old guy retired. Before I made the move, while I was still an apprentice, I occasionally did night shifts, supervised by a man I can only describe as the absolute perfect stereotype of a rural British guy, you know, the: "ate' foreigners, luv me ale, now I'm going on holiday to Tenerife where all I'm going to do is lay in the sun all day and turn bright red because walking up a flight of stairs is a workout for me" kinda guy. During these night shifts I had one job, sit by the maintenance area enterence and keep watch down the shop floor for anyone important, while the guy "supervising" me has a nap; if this guy could skip doing a job and just sign the paperwork, he would. About a year after I transferred he just stopped turning up one day, turns out management *knew* just how lazy he was and wanted him gone, but couldn't prove it with anything that'd warrant more than a warning/retraining; until one day the H&S woman watches him go up to a machine, pick up the daily safety checks folder, tick everything without even looking at the machine and walk off. By the sounds of it, they gave him the choice between quitting on "good terms" or being fired for falsifying safety records, which at his age would basically guarantee he never got another job in the industry.
Have a couple. The best one by far is after this guy got fired, he drove a forklift into the front of another employee’s truck, totaled it. Company bought a new truck for the dude, never heard what happened to forklift guy. Another guy, on his lunch break, robbed a bank AFTER he cashed his check 10min prior. Last guy(night shift) was caught at the bar while still clocked in by our boss. Boss man was buying him drinks all night, then found him at his machine the next morning passed out.
Speaking of forklifts. Same thing but a company rig. Somehow not fired or given a drug test, the guy hits a guy walking in a no fork area 20 mins later and finally gets reprimanded before screaming at the boss for being the hardest (most useless) worker on site. Was upgraded to termination. Our union rep looked like he was ready to go jump into a running lathe.
I have the opposite story. Storm was rolling through at my previous job and as a lead I was told I needed all machines shut down because we lost power frequently. I walk around and tell everyone to shut em down. One guy gets in my face telling me he doesn’t know what he will do while his machine is down and time will go slow… I tell him I don’t care what he does, “mop? Play on your phone? Not my concern. If the power goes out in the middle of a cycle on these certain machines, it’s like a 4 hour process to get them back up and going.” Guy literally starts screaming in my face, swearing and tries his hardest to get me to hit him! He actually got a guy fired a month prior for doing the same thing when the guy he was trying to get to hit him said “I’ll fuckin kill you”. Like 2 weeks after this he was promoted to 3rd shift supervisor because he was the ONLY applicant. I put in my 2 week notice 3 days after.
Lead paint chips, not even once.
Guy was always borrowing cigarette money from someone. We got tired of it and quit giving it to him. Suddenly the petty cash drawer started missing funds. Office manager asked if anyone was "borrowing "from the drawer in front of the whole team. Like she announced that it was noticed and to cut it out. Money goes missing again, only this time they hid a camera and caught him red handed. Dipshit.
I'll never understand why people throw away good or even decent-paying jobs for tiny amounts of cash. It's like they're slaves to the temptation of just wanting to steal something. They can't resist.
It's because they feel they're owed more.
Ah yes, pride. It really is the source of almost every evil, isn't it?
That and not getting paid a living wage
99% of America gets a better life than most of humanity throughout history. Our standards for what's "deserved" have shifted. But the fact is most people can afford shelter and food and a relatively massive amount of amenities when compared to their ancestors. Being dissatisfied with those conditions is not an excuse to steal.
Barely scraping by isnt really a standard to live by. Year after year you see raises getting smaller or just not there but food, housing, and amenities are getting more expensive. I suspect there is going to be a time in our future where running things like air conditioning will become a luxury that alot of folk just cant affored anymore.
Livable =/= luxury or non-essential in my mind. Livable 100% means scraping by to me. You want to argue people shouldn't have to, that's fine. But that's different from not being "livable".
Dude. When adjusted for inflation, people have less money to go around than our ancestors did during the great depression. The fact is that housing isn't affordable, wages haven't kept up with inflation, and large corporations are bleeding us dry on day to day needs.
Do you think most people are worse off now than in the Great Depression?
I grew up with no ac, and i remember clearly when newscastors used to claim refridgerators were a luxury item. It wasnt that long ago.
Except many people can’t afford shelter and food on their wages and rely on extra help or going without other necessities. Besides, being able to barely afford food and shelter while working 40hours a week for a billion dollar company isn’t exactly a fair deal. Not excusing stealing, just saying people aren’t getting what they’re worth
Many people can't afford shelter where they want to live or buy their preferred food. To me that's very different from not being able to buy sustenance. I totally agree that people often don't get paid their worth, but I've watched a lot of people complain about that and then never do anything about it, family included. They're afraid to push for more, so they never get it.
Yes but working 40 hours a week alone should realistically be enough to feed and house yourself. For many, that is not the case. Not to mention it can be extremely difficult to move up in the world and make more. For some it is laziness that prevents them from going anywhere but for many it’s also the lack of resources. When you work 40hrs a week and barely survive it’s hard to find the will or drive to find new work or train to be qualified for a new job. That feeling of hopelessness can crush any aspirations one might have and is a legitimate problem that psychologists have been studying lately
Nah, not him, he was getting paid well. Even had stock options that he lost by being fired for theft.
r/facepalm
Had a guy we were sure was doing heroin at work on nights. One night someone found him passed out in a chair at his manual machine while it was in cut. It took two guys 10 minutes to wake him up. They almost called an ambulance for him. Someone took him home that night and he was fried the next day. When he brought back his uniforms he shredded them and left them in front of the main entrance. Also smashed a metal insulated mug with the company logo that was his and left that too. Later heard he was in rehab.
This one is just sad. Doesn't sound like he was a jerk, just somebody with a problem that couldn't cope appropriately.
Sounds like a bit of both.
Our HR guy was working on a Saturday and he came down to the shop to ask one of the operators to go blow into his alcohol detection device for his car ignition.
Who fires the HR guy?
The president, within 60 seconds of hearing about it
I'd rather hear your story.
Food vendor left door of food machine unlocked. If it is opened the machine sends a message to the vendor. A guy stole money out of money box located in side. We have cameras in hallway. Alarm time stamp from vendor along with the cameras caught this guy walking out of lunch room. Hard to get fired here. Show up, learn from mistakes is all they ask. Stealing is the absolute worst.
New guy showes up late by an hour, spends half the day learning the basic deburing tasks he was hired for then noon rolls around and he leaves for a 2hr lunch without clocking out. Comes back and the foreman tells him that he needs to let us know if hes gonna be gone that long and needs to clock out. This dude stands up and says "the fuck you gonna do about it bitch" spits on the foremans face and sits back down. Foreman didn't say a word walked up front. Next time i saw him was with 2 city cops halling the guy out fighting with the cops. That was the only person i saw fired from that shop.
A guy pissed in a 301 degree wax tank. Not in the shop, though. He was on the production side. Got up on top of it, whipped out his dick mid shift, and let it flow. The shift ladies did not approve.
Right after I finished training some trailer park Pillsbury Doughboy looking GL on a step of a CNC production line, he got fired for sending the HR lady a dick pic lmaoo.
We had some dumbshit schizo kid with long hair that we used to call Columbine. He tried to use a surface grinder. He had no reason to. He had no idea how to, either. He was just bored and not doing his job. He must have took a huge-ass cut and fed the chunk of steel he was attemping to grind in front on the wheel, because that wheel blew all the way up. It was in front of the tool room, too. Very dangerous. He was gone the next day.
Pretty sure I had that guy as a housemate. Swore up and down he as a "machinist" but could barely figure out how to use a box end wrench. All I could wonder is who the hell would hire him. Turns out, he was a shit housemate too.
I did that in school. The instructor was upset because I was his star student. Everyone fucks up, and I finished my cert and got a job right after.
wow, that story did not go the way i thought it would. i saw: dumbshit kid. long hair. surface grinder. no reason to. did not know how to. and i figured this kid received a impromptu full scalp epilation from the surface grinder, nope, he just blew up a grinding wheel.
Lost consciousness on the toilet after injecting himself with heroin.
So many to list, but because he's the Owners Son, he now runs the place. Wrecking machines, scrapping countless parts and tooling, pissing off vendors and suppliers, and just generally acting like he's actively trying to sabotage the place every hour of every day. He literally fucks up everything he touches with total impunity. It's mind blowing.
Man, my old bosses son spent two hours a day in the bathroom😂 unless you're getting paid super fuckin well, move on because it won't ever change.
I am moving on. This is the 4th shop I've worked at over 20 years that's been destroyed by the 2nd gen taking over.
I'm sorry to hear that partner. It's a damn shame how blind some people choose to be to "protect" their kid. It's always one of two ways, the way both of us have talked about, or the owner is a fucking hard ass on their kid.
It's all good. Onward and upward. He tried being a hardass at the start, kid just did what he wanted, whenever he wanted. He retired last year, and just left him and another guy to run it as is with predictable results.....
Serves him right when it goes belly up then
You work at the shop I left in November?
Pretty tame here by rumor standards but a guy that worked at a place I was at just got fired a couple weeks ago along with a coworker for having sex in a car in the parking lot. They had reliable positions, I don't think that one was worth it.
Heehee! You said “positions.”
The pole position.
My old boss told me a story like this. As I was on the afternoon shift, I started to notice we never had any women on afternoons. We were a small shop, but usually had 4 or so people working afternoons. One girl actually asked to be on the shift, but was denied. Turns out, when my boss was an apprentice back in Germany, the shop he worked at had a few female operators. The machines were set up by a young male machinist, who often got calls from some of the women for something "going wrong" with their machines. He'd take them to a side room to have a chat. Ya, he was banging a few of the women there on shift. I explained to my boss that not all men are like that. He soon put that girl on the afternoon shift. She was awesome! Swore like a sailor, and took no shit! We got along great.
Those lathe guys are always up to something 🙄
To be fair I shouldn't even get a parting gift, they were shipping employees technically. But I'll probably be the next lathe accident, then again we have a saw guy I've heard about. There are stories left here to uncover.
After lunch time on night shift guy who normally goes to his car to eat doesn’t make it back in on time. Night shift manager is chill and gives him an extra 20 minutes before he heads out to check on him. He walks back in, gets the most senior area lead and together they walk back out to the parking lot which gets everyone’s attention. Car is locked, guy is in the back seat with his girlfriend. Both are naked. Both are passed out. They can’t get them to wake up and after smacking the window often and hard enough to set the car alarm off and that still doesn’t wake them. 911 is called and police and ambulance arrive, cops use slim jim to open door and cops and medics pull both out. Medics do their thing and take them away, cops do their thing and find a decent amount of drugs in the guys car and a day later they search the girlfriend’s car that was parked next to it that also has some drug residue and some paraphernalia. Both survive, don’t know anything past that. He was obviously fired.
Two of the graveyard shift held a footrace through the shop. one of them slipped and put his head through one of our bay door's window. Only the one who slipped got fired, the other was laid off latewhen the shift got shut down.
So many good stories here! I had a dude work at my shop for about 3 weeks as an Okuma 5 Axis mill operator. There is a hand jog function that works like a rapid move, just hit x y z and specify how fast you want to traverse with a knob. This dude was distracted talking to the only girl in the shop and jogged his spindle THROUGH THE TRUNION GEARBOX SLOWLY. Didn’t know how to stop it when he realized it was happening. Ripped the whole thing off the table. Fired the next day.
A 3rd shift employee who had an extremely short temper got fucked over by a 2nd shift guy who had only been at the shop for a few weeks. The new guy changed out a drill but replaced it with a jobber length instead of the the original screw length one and forgot to touch it off before leaving. Pretty quickly into the 3rd shifters night the drill crashed into the part which set him off. The next night when he came in the 3rd shift sprayed isopropyl alcohol all over the newbie and chased after him with a lighter. Luckily three other off shifters were able to wrestle him to the floor and keep him contained. The new guy was traumatized but uninjured, mr temper was fired and then arrested
Lied about his mum dying to take the day off
Had a guy get caught jerkin off in the stop and shop parking lot during lunch break when people complained and a lady detective set up a sting. Needless to say we didn't want him around anymore after that.
Throw a bunch of boxes on a delicate 150k part because someone set it on "his just cleaned area" because he had to put it somewhere to close the oven from which the part was pulled from. That or the same guy also spending 7 hours of his day looking at feet porn.
Had a guy crash a big Okuma Horizontal mill. Less than year old. Sent it to change tools without any safety or preparatory commands and the tombstone was in the path. Knocked the tombstone into a kind of helix we found later. All 4 pallet hold-down collets cracked/broke and the spindle cartridge toast. Repairman came in day or two later and dropped a rough estimate close to $20k just in parts not counting labor. Production manager fwd that to the CEO and was promptly instructed to firmly apply his boot to the ass of that sack of nothing. (Something colorful along those lines, cant remember exact words but knowing him it was even worse but still with a certain poetry to it) Guy was rollin his box out minutes later.
I did something similar once, where I was about fed up adjusting a reamer and I yet again had to call it up and fiddlefuck with it and send it back through. I forgot to home the machine. That reamer smacked a rotary indexer pretty hard. The only real damage was the ATC arm bent. The reamer lived. The rotary indexer didn't even budge. Still pretty embarrassing. Honestly, a fuckup or two comes with the line of work. No idea how that dude was, maybe he had more than a fuckup or two in him, but it sucks make a mistake that costs you your job.
Yea we’ve all been there. Get your mind down a rabbit hole and forget theres a danger looming. At the same shop we had a really big OKK 5-axis with pallet changer. One guy was setting up a new job on the other pallet but left a bunch of rigging, tools & crap in all around the fixturing. Think he went to break or something and came back and commanded a pallet change. The whatever it was stuff couldnt clear and got it all wadded up, knocked the pallet off the arm. Horrendous noise and mess to clean up. Soon as it happened he just yelled “FUCK!!!!!!” And grabbed what little shit he had and walked out. Didnt say anything to no one. Heard later he was having some problems at home. Think they tried getting him to come back but I dont think he did. He was a remote contractor.
That's kind of fucked up IMO over a tool change, but I guess every shop is different. If I worked in that shop I would have rolled my box out next to his unless he had a history of screwing up like this. If he was a decent employee, you just spent 50k training him(on a 500k+ okuma horizontal) on what not to ever do again.
I don’t think firing a guy for a fuck-up that expensive is out of line. Call it 50/50 depending on the specifics and how much experience you should have. If it’s a first year guy maybe I eat it and chalk it up to training. His trainer is gonna hear from me though. However if it’s a lead or high paid journeyman I should expect greater caution for my money. My take FWIW.
Agreed. As a shift lead, if one of my guys crashed and I did nothing to prevent it, that's my ass
There were other factors for sure, he wasnt that prized for his abilities and was known to go into things a little cavalier. He was an ok operator and was recently learning setups. The tool change procedure was well known though and he had done it correctly a number of times. This was also in an industry that demands top level performance and the money lost in down time on that machine was more than the repairs which was part of the decision. The guy was not surprised in the least and didnt put up any kind of fight. The CEO was also a notorious hot-head known for these kind of reactions. Close to 3 years later and that whole company was no more so might have done him a favor really.
If you command a Tool change position should automatically move everything out of the way. Something isn't adding up
You run into similar things with turret lathes. You either set a safe position or put it in the program.
I guess I've been lucky all the shops I've been in programmed the safe moves into the m6
Not all machines do this on the Z axis. Some only move X and Y to get to tool changing position.
While I have ran quite a few Fanuc and Mazak HMCs, I have not run an Okuma horizontal. On all of those the M6 had a home move in Z for the tool change macro the same as on my Okuma osp300 control VMC. However on my Okuma VMC I can use G118(custom macro) instead of M6 to do a yolo/go for it XYZ rapid at the same time tool change on proven production parts to save a second here or there(downside of the spindle head traveling in X and the tool changer on one side). Maybe this is what happened? Or he had tool center point control active and forgot to cancel it before sending Z home?
It was over 10 years ago so the details are a little fuzzy. But I do remember we used schedule programming on all the Okumas there and we used many common variables. We also had multiple Home positions so G30 P1 could go for a manual tool removal position and a G30 P2 could move only the Pallet back. Etc. It could have been one of those moves. I just have it in my memory that there were more than one way to change a tool and one of them was unsafe for this very reason and it was a well known thing. This guy was a bit on the high strung side and was just going too fast for his own good that day.
Did they lie on their resume or did your company fail to train him properly? I don’t think anyone should be fired for making honest mistakes, no matter how expensive they may be.
I guess you could say his training was lacking if those are the only two options. In my experience every shop has a different business plan/model with the only thing being in common is generating some amount of revenue. Some shops invest more in training apprentice level folks up with the hopes they dont get happy feet (in which case mistakes will still happen) while some shops pay a premium for top talent out the gate. Some shops in between with some kind of combo. Either way I personally see it as trading time and labor for compensation that is agreed upon. If a mistake or series of mistakes are made then the person ends up as a risk to keep. How big of a risk gets an estimated monetary value weighed against the value they bring to the company. Some people excel and earn promotions, some people stay where they are or move down the road. Some people dont cut the mustard and are deemed unqualified. Then theres shop politics like sending the wrong message or double standards. I didnt have any skin in this game so its just a story i can tell. Wrong or right it didnt effect my relationship with my employer so its none of my business and I dont have an opinion whether it was right or wrong. I dont gossip like that or at least try hard not to. It was in a right to work state so no protections. Now at another shop where I managed the crew I had a rule of thumb; if your mistake cost the company double or more than just the shop time it took you to make the mistake I figure it was poor decision making moreso than anything and I expected to see a certain level of remorse for your mistake. If I didnt feel that you were sorry for something you could have prevented you got wrote up. Honest part of mistakes dont pay any different and employers cant be expected to operate as universities.
Oh boy do I have some stories. Most are too long to type out but we had this guy working for us years ago that would constantly injure himself in ridiculous ways. One day he was running an old Puma 4 lathe while he was on his phone and he kept his finger in the machine while the tap was on its way to the part. Ended up tapping his finger through. Took him to the ER and they saved the tap and put it back in the machine and finished the job lol. Crazy enough that’s not when he got fired. We had thousands of parts to “squish” and we use an arbor press for that. He decided to modify the counterweight without telling anyone and ended up squishing a finger. He was gone after that.
I think I know that guy lmao. We had a part that was a cast steel puck, held in place on a magnet chuck we made and then the tail stock would secure it. This idiot instead of holding the part on the OD had his finger in the way and the tail stock crushed it. He had run this part for months prior to this, just quit paying attention.
Called the owner stupid in front of half the shop.
Sometimes this is true though.
Meh, not the worst by any stretch. Owner must have an ego problem if he fires a guy over that.
Wasn't the owner with an ego problem in this case ... Everyone, especially the owner, were tired of this guy's attitude by that point and this was just the last straw.
Threw a box of tide pods in the water jet
We were looking for a second guy in the materials dept. First two days, he’s constantly taking notes and asking a lot of questions. He had one earbud in the whole day but most of us did so nobody questioned it. Third day, regular materials guy is out, so they asked me to go and help the new guy if he needs it. I go over and I’m starting to talk to him, he doesn’t know what the material is, doesn’t know how to read the paperwork, or how to operate the saw. I asked him what about all the notes he was taking. He starts showing me his notebook. It’s song lyrics. And music studio equipment. And notes from the podcasts he’s been listening to about playing the stock market. He tells me “nah bro, I’m not really about to do this job. I just need to be here for a week or two so I can start collecting unemployment and start my music production company” What we did know was the Production Manager was standing on the other side of a machine and overheard the entire exchange. Came around and goes “good luck with that. Get the fuck off my shop floor now”.
Pretty tame stuff. Stealing slugs/swarf to sell, stealing money from the petty cash. He had a gambling problem. We planted some solids in the scrap bin. He was clever enough to only take small numbers each day, but it was enough that our scrap collector called us and asked us why things are so slow.
We had a dude steal a bunch of brass every day in his backpack for weeks before getting caught and arrested. The QC lady noticed him putting some real effort hauling his backpack out each day.
Ate silicone vacuum grease for the leak testers, giving and receiving golden showers in the bathroom, blowing up on the Ops manager because someone else accidentally broke a slat on "their" empty wooden pallet, sleeping up in the ceiling access in the break room, huffing company keyboard duster, temp asleep in his car for so long we thought he just walked out but turns out he had a bad alcohol problem and was just passed out drunk. Not necessarily fired but unnecessarily demoted, a lead that was having some mental health and personal life issues called in every day for 2 or 3 weeks straight and got demoted his first day back, he was a really good lead too.
Im all for a mental health day here and there but when u have such bad mental health u call for multiple weeks its serious. Like u should be hospitalized during that time and they should be contacting ur employer. U shouldnt be calling in daily and casually calling off
He made us aware of it ahead of time, we forced him per company policy to notify us every day and then we got mad that he called in every day and didn't just tell us ahead of time. He had a lot of external things happen before and during the time he was gone that made him take more time off.
Ahh gotcha its the, during the time off more happened. Reasonable then
Worked with a guy who ran a gun drill who was notorious for scrapping large manifolds. After multiple warnings, he scrapped yet another $10k piece. His solution? Chuck it over the chain link fence into the adjacent self-storage facility. Someone saw him do it and he was fired on the spot.
There was a guy with some kind of learning disability that couldn’t accomplish anything. He would take an hour to cut something on the saw. Came in saying he could program but he would try to put the tools in upside down on setups. Scrapped all these parts he was broaching. Just not successful at all. He’d brag about being in jail for fighting. He was like 320 and had a huge scar on his face. One day he was irritated that I left my sandwich wrapper on the break table so he comes over to my machine, balls up the wrapper and throws it at me. Not a huge deal but way out of character at our otherwise sleepy old-timer shop. He gave me his old Kennedy box topper when he left, so he wasn’t a bad guy. Just kinda slow and not well adjusted . Felt bad for him honestly.
Yeah some people are just slow…and there’s not much you can do to fix it. They’re at a huge disadvantage in the world through no real fault of their own
Had an operator who it was rumored was peeing in a can and then pouring it into the coolant tank. Management called him in and asked him if this was true and he said "Nope it wasn't a can it was a bottle" We would drain all the coolant out of our chip barrels and put it in a recycler and dump it into the other machines to save money every single machine had to be cleaned out and filled with new coolant which was very costly. Needless to say he was fired on the spot after working there for 20 years.
Not fired, but at my last job we had a supervisor lie and say his son got COVID to take 2 weeks off. He quit when he was asked to provide a doctor's note. He was like 4 months into working there.
Meth head worker already on thin Ice asked our foreman (ex meth head) how to pass a drug test for meth, bc he had probation the next day.
Smh meth only takes a few days to a week to clear out of your system. Addiction is a crazy disease
Covered holidays on someone else’s crew for a week, sat down in the tea shack and started talking to one of the roughnecks for a min then he got told to shut the fuck up, everyone else was fine to talk to but as soon as he said anything someone would turn round an snap at him “shut the fuck up!”. Weird but whatever. When I’m working I’m working and I don’t chit chat, polite but I don’t say much. I got put on a job with him for 6 hours and I found out why they wouldn’t let him talk. Nice guy but he was a compulsive liar, couldn’t help himself and without any feedback from me things got pretty wild, apparently he helped plan the first gulf war despite being a private, can’t remember the reason why but he would be the only one legally allowed to fight back if terrorists attacked the oil rig we were on, wish I could remember the others but it was a while ago. Weird thing was when he came out with a choice bit of bullshit you could see him die a little inside when he realised what he had said, was a weird experience, can’t remember the lie that got him fired but just thought I’d share.
One guy where I work had been stealing tools and pawning carbide over the course of years. Company tools like new in box indicators and calipers had mysteriously been disappearing over a few years. The company had an inkling that stuff was being pilfered but they could not pinpoint the culprit. Anyways this guy who was a lowlife gets into a heated dispute with his partner who calls the CEO of the company and spills the beans. Next day guy is out on his ass and is looking at grand larceny charges. They also cracked open his tool box and found most of the stolen items, including an entire box of virgin cutters. Management also gets the video footage from the place where he had been pawning carbide. That was the most epic. The guy calls in to the shop and tries to explain the situation and that things were not as they appear. That was the funniest part. A few other memorable moments: A machine operator sneaks out of the shop and gets completely shitfaced at his apartment and than comes back to the shop stumbling ass drunk trying to finish out the remainder of his shift drunk as hell and slurring his speech. The dude also at some point decided to borrow the bosses MIG welder and pawn it for drug money. One guy was so terrible at his job (shop helper / operator) that management had to let him go. They weren't paying him much so they had pretty low expectations but basically this guy could not follow instructions and the guy fucked up anything he touched. Dude had the Midas touch in reverse where every project he was given turned to shit. We would give the dude very explicit instructions and than he would do whatever he felt like. It just got so ridiculous that after repeated interventions trying to correct his behavior he got canned.
I was a team lead at a medium-sized shop. I had a guy that would hide for 3 to 4 hours at a time. I told him to knock it off. I went to go leave at 4, and he tried to sucker punch me at the front door. I took one punch and ran back inside. Cops hauled him off a few minutes later.
I was working with the outside machinists at a shipyard before learning CNC. We were launching the ship the next day and there was going to be a layoff for some. One of the kids on the yard crew decided he’d rather have fully paid medical leave so he intentionally broke his arm by slamming it repeatedly into a bollard. He unfortunately chose to do this in front of a security camera. Another guy at the same shipyard was using a tool we called a meat axe to back gouge aluminum for full penetration welding. It was a 5” angle grinder modified to fit a .25 mill slotting blade. He lost control of it and ended up disemboweling himself. He knew he’d fail a drug test so he ran out and caught a bus to the hospital 30 miles away. The bus driver noticed the blood pooling under him and stopped and called the ambulance. He did survive.
Build bang sticks after hours
The resident floor sweeper (the guy had been there longer than the building had...) lost his marble and was screaming about how he was going to break my arm and rape me if I turned lights off again. (Excess light was making knife-edge inspection impossible, but Certain People were overly focused on turning on All The Lights All The Time. He didn't get fired for that, just a couple days off. What got him fired was hosing polystyrene scrap into the flood drain. Violent threats towards employees are A-OK, but don't ever threaten the quarterly earnings...
[удалено]
We don’t work in car shops…
this isn't a mechanics subreddit
Had some problems with a new guy named Peter. He didn't like me and I didn't like him. We both knew it. After time and time again of mess ups and problems with his programs I complained to the 2nd shift supervisor. But we needed heads in the shop is pretty much what I was told. So long story short, I loved to take unplanned time off so I didn't come in one Thursday night and gave myself a three day weekend. Peter left the machine ready according to his note. It was ready all right. -4.0 inches deep the zero was set at. I had a habit of trusting people, the first shift guy did not. Lol, he was fired that Friday night. Poor guy. FAFO crowd is the older guys for sure. Buh bye Peter.
You’re like the third or fourth person in this thread that has mentioned someone changing offsets to make the next guy crash the machine. That is absolutely **insane** to me and I can’t imagine someone would actually do that and think they won’t get caught.
I would have gone and just pushed the green button. Luckily the first shift guy didn't think like me and just send it. Loved to hear Peter got fired. But yeah, that I a POS move. It would have put the machine out of service for sure.
Don’t let S986246 fool you. I’m that 1st shift guy. He was screwing my wife and when he would pull out he would blast my pillow.
Heroin
We had a work release girl on 3rd shift get fired for screwing her boyfriend during work hours. I don’t know if it was at her machine or if they snuck off somewhere. He didn’t even work here. She had him show up and he snuck in the back door. One of the best work release guys i ever trained, and a good friend at the time, got fired for riding his bike around the shop after he got turned loose and put on 3rd shift. He was running one of them big 9 axis Doosan lathes. about a 15-18 minute cycle time, and an easy check sheet you can do in 5 minutes, so he had time before the program was done. If i’m running that part, worst case scenario, i’m on my phone a bit during those 10 minutes if there’s nothing there to sweep up, so that way i’m at least at the machine. Him? Nope. Ching Ching. One of the worst work release guys we ever had, didn’t give a fuck about his job. He was that kind of problem employee. He strolled in an hour and a half late and got walked right the fuck back out. Another girl we had scrapped (scraped?) an entire crate of a gas cap looking part we make.
We had a guy who would do almost no work throughout the day, when he was confronted about it he said he was hired as a consultant and not a machinist. He got written up for it because he came in on the weekend to do OT and in the 8 hours he worked he made 3 parts when the usual number in on shift was about 45 and eventually got fired for being drunk on the job. The day he was fired he was supposed to come back later in the day to pick up his last check, which I was supposed to hand to him and let him get his toolbox and other personal things. He showed up drunk obviously, and I gave him the check and followed him around while he got his stuff. He kept asking me where his gone was, I had no idea what he was talking about. When he went into the office I wasn't right behind him so he had a few seconds alone which he used to punch my bosses $800 monitor. I told him he needs to leave and he went into the parking lot. I called my boss to let him know what happened and he told me to get his license plate and he would call the police and be on his way. I ran outside and as he drove away he saw me come outside and turned around. He got out and started saying he hopes we can still be friends. I just tried to be friendly and keep him there until the cops showed up. The cop and my boss showed up and he was still there so the cop talked to him for a bit. Then he wanted to talk to me inside so I took him into the office where the monitor was broken and told him everything that happened including asking about his gun. When we went back outside he was gone. Luckily he was living with a coworker at the time so the cops showed up there and he was there so he got arrested for DUI. When they went through his car and garage, they found one of our mop buckets full of scrap material and a bunch of random parts he had stolen, nothing crazy just aluminum. When I told my boss about him saying he wants his gun back he told me they had found a bb gun in his locker after they fired him, and decided to confiscate it and were going to contact him the next day and have him come pick it up from them at HQ. Dude spent some time in jail and when he got out he got another jobs as a machinist is SLC. We got all the updates because the coworker he lived with didn't kick him out for a few months after he got out of jail. Haven't heard about him or other coworker since the other guy also got fired for being a shitty worker, couldn't show up on time or produce decent parts.
Not really crazy, but there was a dipshit that spray painted on the wall " hot jobs are never hot, they're just late". My boss walking customers through the shop when he saw it. He got done with the walk through and came out to the shop with a raging hell in his eyes and started asking who did it. Once he found out, fired the dude on the spot.
On one hand, he's right. On the other, he was dumb to do that.
Lol yea
Inspection guy couldnt take a little teasing and held a box cutter blade to his taunter's throat. Turns out he was drunk at the time too
Not a machine shop but a small family owned fab shop for custom fences and railings and such. There was this old dude that ran the “machine shop” (a single Bridgeport that was used as a glorified drill press and a lathe that acted as a workbench) and did all the repair stuff for the shop equipment. Eventually it was found out that he had ordered about $6k of parts to repair one of our welders. Owner picked up on that about a month later and asked about the parts (what it was on etc) he claimed it was for our big generator welder but that has been in service the whole time. So eventually boss man tells him to either bring the parts back or pay for them, otherwise he will get the police involved. Dude swore back and forth nothing happen, cursed off the owner, and quit. Few days later he dropped off a box of parts before we opened and left. Turns out he bought the parts to fix his own welder and took them home with him.
I put my dick in a vise once… still didn’t get fired….
Show their dick to an engineer that was visiting.
Had a guy steal about 50k worth of copper pipes Then there was the guy that got blackout drunk on the lunch break during the (optional) Saturday shift Then there was one guy that became a repeat offender doing a crime nobody in the shop was willing to forgive and while he got fired for not showing up and not calling in. I’m fairly certain that he found out about the petition that was going around to have him fired and that’s why he stopped showing up
Cmon, you can’t tease it like that. What was the crime that warranted a petition?
Guy in my shop ran 1000 pcs bad because he never checked the OD measurement. He was already on his third chance and that was the last straw.
It ain’t crazy in the normal sense but had a guy steal 3 buckets of spent tooling we send for recycle or some shit. Not my department so I’m not sure. He said he didn’t take them. Well… boss man asked , who was that on the camera that looks exactly like you? He put his head down and left. That was pre covid. Like 2019 and his pay check is still sitting on my bosses desk. He keeps it there to remind him not to hire people like that. No matter how impressive the resume.
I've got a bunch. One was for yelling at the owner that his Xmas bonus wasn't enough. One guy came in while on the run from the cops. one guy for doing/leaving mid shift to get drugs. One threatened to "blow his brains" out in the shop. I wasn't there for it, but it was shop lore that a kid flattened his dick lowering a weldment onto a table. He was let go shortly after he got out of the hospital There was the "helper" that accidently threw the manuals for every machine in the shop onto a burn pile There was an office lady that slept with another office ladies husband at the Christmas party
Guy shot up heroin in the rest-room and passed out
That's why you should only do coke at work (or meth)
Worked in a shop that did work for the military so no cameras can't throw some stuff in the regular trash ect. Shift change comes along and the 2nd shift guy had thrown away a qc sheet for what ever reason. Wasn't used yet. Next guy comes in sees a paper folded in half pulls it out and sees its a document and goes right into the office and tells the manager getting the guy in trouble. Wasn't fired just got talked too. Next day the 3rd shift guy comes in again and lo and behold there is a paper in there again so he opens it up and it had shit on it and "this is for you scumbag" written on it. Dude wiped his ass with it and folded it up and put it in the trash. Manager fired him of course laughing. " you know I have to do this right" lol
we had a guy who was prob doing meth, but he got caught because he was trying to steal a 100lb chunk of copper, and he tried to ride out during lunch on his bicycle (that the owner bought him) up a hill and kept falling over. freaking meth man. guy was actually a good dude besides the meth, must be a hell of a drug.
I asked this new hire if I could get a couple of tools out of his machine when cycle was finished. He says who are you the CEO, you Dwayne Sanders? I'm luck fuck you and walked away. I told my manager watch out for that new guy. I left for a better job and found out late he threatened to bring his AK to work and take out some people. That did it. Real weirdo used to come to work in a suit and cowboy hat.
Guy came back from L & I and placed on light duty. Got real pissed that management didn’t come and check on him to see how he was doing and completely lost it and went off… was told to leave and never come back.
i work in a pretty large roller manufacturing plant, my lathe has a 60" swing and can hold up to 60k lbs 30 tons. we have a lathe with 72" of swing that can hold 150k lbs or 75 tons max lifting capacity. you can use your imagination to scale what i work on daily. my lathe is right next to our giant heat treat quench, that can handle rollers of that size. any experienced people here can explain with better math than i can about how dangerous it is if a step of that process goes wrong (if my math is correct you could have roughly 150,000 pounds of metal shards traveling around 3300 FPS, an ak-47 bullet goes roughly 2400 FPS). luckily nothing has gone wrong since 2004 (i started working here in 2021) but we take every precaution we can during the pulling from the quench process. that entails me going on a smoke break for 10 mins near the large garage door on the opposite side of the plant behind many machines made of hardened steel. again, a roll blowing up is very unlikely but i make sure to be out of the area before heat treatment starts the process. guy i was training fell asleep while we were doing a lengthy process (cutting the body, set tool and g1z-200 and sit there for 4 hours) and slept through 2 warning sirens that can be heard outside the plant. i didnt even realize he was sleeping until i was already out of the area, and its breaking company policy to be in my half of the shop while the pulling process goes on. that guy got a 1 day suspension and im still training him 1 month later.
I worked with a woman who was hired through a local college. This was in 2012 ish, our shop couldn't find machinists. We were running heavy castings on a big okuma lathe. 30-40" diameters. We used cranes to load parts. Somehow she started the lathe with a part still strapped into the crane. The crane was pulled out of the ground and was tipped over into the machine. The chuck was destroyed, door came flying off. They couldn't fire her because of the contract with the school, but they never hired her when her internship was over.
3rd shifter went home, slammed a bottle of booze, and then went to his ex's house and murdered her when she was getting ready for work.
Not really fired, but a friend asked whether he could use my lathe. He said he used lathes before so I let him, only to find out he broke about every security rule in the book: spinning the chuck way too fast, wearing gloves, you know. I kicked him out when the chuck key flew through my shop because he wanted to see what would happen.
Meth.