let’s discuss egregious safety violations at work

by Alison Green on May 2, 2024

You’d think safety would be top of mind for employers, but some are willing to tolerate egregious safety issues in order to keep people working. Some examples that have been shared by readers in the past:

•  “At a call center job, there was a tornado that touched down just a few miles away and they refused to let people off the phones to seek shelter. Another time someone pulled the fire alarm and no one moved. They just kept on taking calls because they would get in trouble or face getting fired if they did not take phone calls. A third time people were getting sick. There was an odd smell throughout the center. People were allowed to leave but they did get docked a half point. Someone called the fire department because it could have been a gas leak. Instead of evacuating, they kept everyone working and the fire department walked around with some sort of meter thing. We never found out what it was.”

•  “I worked on the top floor of a seven-story building and looked out one day to see fire engines everywhere. I asked the office manager if he knew what was going on. Apparently, there was a bomb threat but our office did not want to evacuate!”

•  “I once couldn’t get an employee to take shelter on his own during an active shooter situation. He just wanted to stay at his desk and play on his computer. (!!!) I had to get help from a male coworker to physically drag him into shelter.”

What egregious safety violations have you seen in your own workplaces? Let’s discuss in the comments.

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  1. Dee906*

    Very interested to see the outcomes of this. Am a Division EHS Manager at a large manufacturing company. Remember everyone, anyone can call OSHA.

    1. I'm just here for the cats!*

      I’m the one who wrote about the call center. I know after the fire alarm incident they created a “safety committee” I only know one person who was on this committee. They never did anything. There was never any drills or instructions, or anything added to training. And with the amount of turnover at that place there was constantly new people.
      The call center closed in 2017 after it got bought out from another company who didn’t want to pay the wages that we had.

      1. Richard Hershberger*

        Back in an earlier life I was an hourly grunt for Walmart. The store had a safety committee, because that was a requirement. The assistant manager I directly reported to asked me to join it. I didn’t want to, but he asked me as a personal favor. In spite of being a Walmart assistant manager, he was a total mensch, so I agreed. I tried to take it seriously. The store’s fire extinguishers were out of compliance, so I found a local fire extinguisher company and got a quote. I took it to the store manager, who was a walking example of the Peter Principle. She told me it wasn’t in the budget, and to stop wasting her time and get back to work. So after that I regarded the safety committee meetings as a mid-day break. About a year later the fire extinguishers were in fact serviced, though not by the outfit I had found. I suspect word trickled up above her head and she was told she had to do this.

      2. a fever you can't sweat out*

        i too once worked for an office who had call metrics (drink water because that will make you have to pee and take time away from the phones!) and i literally had to drag people out kicking and screaming during fire alarms.

        1. Bananapants Circus with Dysfunctional Monkeys*

          I worked in a call centre that was a hellhole in a lot of ways, but they had a really good fire alarm evacuation policy: apologise, hang up (with no penalty, even if the customer complained, and they did) and get out. The alarm was audible on the call which helped.

          They also had training on evacuation chairs for our wheelchair users AND did the training WITH them so they knew who’d be taking them out (we were second floor) so they were comfortable with the procedure and weren’t being left behind to be rescued, which is apparently policy in some places!

          1. CozyDetective*

            I worked at a community college on the third floor, and our policy for wheelchair users was to leave them in the stairwell to wait for evacuation in the case of an emergency (which included fire, hurricanes, tornadoes and even active shooter situations if barricades didn’t work). We even did drills where we practiced leaving them behind. It was despicable.

            1. Elizabeth West*

              Eff that. Wheelchair users, I’ll wait with you. I don’t care what HR says.

              I do think about this because we’re on an upper floor. No chair users in my office but that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t have visitors who might be.

            2. Momma Bear*

              I once worked for a company where the evacuation in case of an airborne concern included walking more than a mile to a safe zone. One of my coworkers took that in, thought about her mobility issues, and said to leave her behind. I wouldn’t be able to do that – I’d drag her along on an office rolly chair first, but it was reallllly sobering to realize the plan didn’t include 100% survival.

            3. Dawbs*

              this is actually standard practice for wheelchair “evacuation plans”

              it’s infuriating.
              is ableism.
              it’s legally allowed.
              and people mostly don’t notice and dint care.

              there ARE devices for this (they’re expensive and bit required. I helped a previous employer get a grant)
              there are speed to be “shelter areas” (usually stairwells) and it’s a shit system.

              i hope every person who reads this thread who works in a multi-floor building goes to work tomorrow and asks what the plan is. (And ‘we don’t currently have disabled employees’should make you want to burn down the building).
              Ask for a copy of the disabled evacuation plan.

              1. GythaOgden*

                In the UK there’s something called a PEEP (Personal Emergency Evacuation Plan) where they work with the person involved (so they know the person’s individual capabilities). It’s not easy for anyone but if you are disabled or have limited mobility, you should be planning for it directly with your employer ahead of time. Individuality is at the heart of disability issues; if you’re like me and at least basically mobile, just lame, I might need assistance if the fire is spreading rapidly because I can’t run, but if it’s contained, I can exit normally. If you’re in a wheelchair you’re not necessarily stuck, but it’s going to be a challenge and thus people need to be trained by the employer and have the right equipment fitted.

                https://www.hantsfire.gov.uk/safety/the-workplace/supporting-people-with-disabilities

                This is my local fire service advice. The section marked Refuges is an offshoot of the compartmentalisation plan for most buildings in that sheltering within a building is sometimes better than actually getting out. Fire compartments are designed so that people who can’t necessarily get to an exit cleanly are safe from the spread of fire until they can be rescued from a different direction. Thus some procedures do sound counter-intuitive but they’ve been developed by people like my colleague Yazz, who is a former firefighter and went into drafting legislation and building assurance.

                All companies should have a Yazz <3.

              2. Been There*

                I just started a new job and they explained that we have to leave people with mobility issues in this one specific hallway that is fireproof (something in the design of the building). Firefighters know they have to check those hallways first.
                We don’t train for other situations, such as hurricanes or active shooters (not in the US, not in a hurricane country).

            4. Oska*

              My previous job didn’t care much about safety, but our one wheelchair-using employee was technically covered: A team of employees were responsible for carrying him out in case of fire. (A few years later, a new safety warden managed to push through getting a proper device for carrying people in wheelchairs down stairs.) However, this procedure obviously involved some risk – someone could trip and fall, causing a chain reaction of havoc. So during known fire drills, we just… didn’t practice that part, to avoid the risk. The poor guy was left alone in the office every time. :-\

          2. The Starsong Princess*

            Shout out to my company’s CEO! If the fire alarm went off, he would go around and yell at anyone who wasn’t evacuating quickly enough, including people on the phone. He was a “not on my watch” kind of guy.

            1. Ace in the Hole*

              Failing to evacuate when the alarm goes off is cause for disciplinary action at my workplace. You will get written up if you’re not at the muster point by the time we do the headcount unless you have a very, very good reason. I’ve only ever seen that happen once, because usually everyone responds immediately.

              I think it helps that in our line of work we DO have emergencies like fires and hazmat spills often enough that people are aware it’s a real, serious danger.

          3. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

            There really aren’t a lot of good options for evacuating wheelchair users from, say, the 19th floor. The stairwells in taller buildings are usually fire-resistant, and it may be the least bad option for them to wait for trained rescuers.

              1. Anonomatopoeia*

                We used to be instructed to tell a wheelchair user where a safe fire door was, and then also on our own evacuation find a firefighter and TELL THEM, so I kind of think that’s a useful reason to leave, so the firefighter can directly go do rescuing rather than checking each of the 9 tall staircases on their own. Now we’re told to just leave immediately and everyone else is going to fend for themselves, an approach I hate both because it loses this and because also in my context there are probably between 25 and 200 people wearing noise-cancelling headphones whom I would like to help not be a distressing statistic.

              2. Ace in the Hole*

                Staying with them means now there are two people who need rescue. If something goes wrong either (or both) of you may be incapacitated or injured. So whatever resources and personnel would have gone to rescuing the chair user now have to be split between two people, one of whom could have left under their own power.

                I get why it feels horrible and seems cruel, but it’s not an arbitrary selfish policy.

          4. a good mouse*

            That’s really great! It’s also made me plan to ask our security lead what we would do if we had a wheelchair user (5th floor) during a drill. I don’t think it’s ever been covered. We don’t have any regular employees in wheelchairs but you never know when a visitor is on site and an emergency happens.

          5. Merrily we roll along*

            I am a wheelchair user, and throughout my working life (retired now), I’ve done my darndest to never work above the ground floor. I haven’t always been successful. There is literally no good option – “shelter in place” is terrifying, and relying on co-workers to carry you down stairs is also terrifying.

            I’ve evacuated from hotels twice for fire alarms. One hotel had a system that automatically shut down the elevators when the fire alarm went off, but there was a slight delay, and I *levitated* out of bed, got to the elevator just before the doors slammed shut, and made it down to the lobby before they shut to power down. Maybe not my brightest decision ever (I didn’t even think about being stuck in the elevator during a fire), but it worked out. That fire alarm was set off by drunken convention goers discharging a fire extinguish. The other one was a kitchen fire in the middle of the night, and management didn’t really seem to care, so I packed and checked out at 4 in the morning and went hunting for another hotel.

            I’m sure that there are bazillions of co-workers/passersby/random people who are happy to help in an emergency, but I always assume that I’m going to need to get myself out of whatever emergency situation I might find myself in – I figure that way I’ll never be disappointed. Don’t even start me on airplanes.

            1. Tinkerbell*

              My cousin has been in a wheelchair since a car accident when she was in college. She works in the theater, which often means lots of areas not designed for wheelchair users and historic older buildings which never had to retrofit to ADA standards. In her case, she’s a very small woman (I’d be shocked if she was over a hundred pounds) and the one time I remember her telling me about where there was an emergency, she got a piggy back ride from a much sturdier friend to the evacuation area while a second friend schlepped her chair. That shouldn’t have to be the standard, and “well we’ve never had a wheelchair user working for us before” is not an excuse :-\

          6. J. Quadrifrons*

            That was the policy at the public library where I worked – we routinely evacuated to the basement for high winds or tornado warnings, and the elevator was in a two-storey foyer that was 3/4 glass. The only option we had for people who couldn’t manage stairs was to leave them in the staff hallway. A public library.

      3. 1-800-BrownCow*

        I worked at a MANUFACTURING facility (read: flammable materials EVERYWHERE) where we’d get in trouble for leaving the building if the fire alarms went off, unless you saw flames. During the 2 years I worked there, the fire alarms went off about 3 times. I was the one who let the fire department into the building the one time and the fire chief was pissed that no one had evacuated. I worked on 2nd, so basically just us shop floor employees. Sadly, the company owners took advantage of the fact that a high majority of shop floor employees were new to the country and many didn’t speak English and needed steady work. Do what your told and don’t speak against management and you got to keep your job.

        Another time at that same manufacturing facility, a machine operator found me and pointed a piece of equipment was on fire. Turns out there was cardboard sitting on the machine and some wire connected to some auxiliary equipment had shorted, sparked and caught the cardboard on fire. The flames were about 1-2 feet high. I grabbed a nearby fire extinguisher and put the fire out. The next day I came to work to find out I had been written up because using the fire extinguisher meant the machine was not operable until it was cleaned up. We had zero safety training there so I asked them what they wanted me to do instead and I was told to blow it out with my mouth next time. I’m normally a quiet, non-confrontational person (especially when I was young), but I got angry and yelled that it wasn’t some damn birthday candle and that if the company wasn’t going to provide any safety training to employees (because sitting through safety training meant people weren’t working) then you can’t yell at us for doing what we thought was the best thing to do in that situation. I told them next time I’d just walk away and let the building burn down. They shut up and I was no longer written up for using a fire extinguisher to put out a fire.

        3. OMG, Bees!*

          Well all of that is horrible. Just a new Triangle Shirtwaste Factory waiting to happen.

          The first part of no one leaving reminded me of an old apartment building almost 20 years ago where the fire alarms went off accidentally so often I eventually stopped listening to them and evacuating when it happened. Tho a huge reason for that was I lived on the 15th floor and once one enters the emergency stairwell, you cannot reenter a floor, only walk all the way to the ground floor. Good for security, I guess (although floors were not restricted via elevator…). And this is a 30 story building! Would have been even worse higher up

          1. TRC*

            The fire alarm goes off in my building all the time. The city has a live list of 911 fire dispatch calls and so we always check that right away. If it says “Auto Fire Alarm” and only one or two fire vehicles are being dispatched, we don’t even bother to do anything. If several trucks have been dispatched, that’s a totally different issue.

            What was horrifying was there was an actual fire in a unit 3 floors below ours and one unit over. Apparently there were 15 or 20 vehicles out there. But our bedrooms don’t face the street and we never heard them. In fact, the guy in the apartment right above the one with the fire didn’t know anything about it until the fire department knocked on his door to see if there was any damage. He’d slept through it too. So quite a mob of us were asking management a lot of extremely hard questions about why the building alarm didn’t go off. The stories they made up to explain why were epic.

            All to cover that the fire control box for the building was not operating properly. They have spent the last year and a half replacing the panel and tracking down faults/errors in everything that reports to it. There were a lot of them. Installing the new panel probably didn’t take long. Finding all the glitches took months.

            1. OMG, Bees!*

              Sounds like from the end of your comment the building management finally fixed the fire control issues also. Took months in my case, but management did eventually fix the false fire alarm also, so I learned to trust it again

        4. Mouse named Anon*

          Thats surprising. I worked someone where, that I was in charge of gathering data of fire drills ran by our various buildings on campus. If people did’nt evac fast enough or they didn’t leave the building the city would make us re-do the fire drills.

        5. goddessoftransitory*

          WTAF? Double fried and dipped in hearty THE HELL sauce???

          How on earth these people aren’t on trial for mass murder is a miracle of sorts.

    2. not nice, don't care*

      And then OSHA ignores the call, or responds but sides with management, and there is retaliation against the complainant because somehow word always gets out.

      1. AngryOctopus*

        OSHA does not ignore calls. OSHA takes workplace safety very very seriously. OSHA will write up violations as fast as their agents can see them.

        OSHA needing more funding and people is definitely an issue but that’s not relevant to how they operate. Working in a sector where OSHA can come on in anytime and check things out, it’s very clear how seriously they take safety.

        2. wlasscar*

          I’ve worked in pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturing for the last 14 years and have NEVER had an OSHA inspection or anything of the sort. Admittedly, it might just be because I’m in the Southeast.

          1. Dee906*

            OSHA is severely underfunded and has woefully few inspectors compared to the number of workplaces. They try with NEPs and focused inspections to keep folks safe but unfortunately are not provided the resources to do so effectively.

            1. Chirpy*

              It was just in the news that my state has 1/10th the OSHA inspectors that it needs.

        3. Lenora Rose*

          I’d argue the whole point of underfunding OSHA Is to get people feeling cynical about them; they blame the department with its lack of inspectors over the people who have withheld the needed numbers and power to do the job, then those people agree when they say “obviously public funding doesn’t work”, which allows the people funding it to slash EVEN MORE funding.

          “not nice, don’t care” and others with that attitude are doing the dirty work for the people holding the purse strings. Which might not be nice of me to say, but, well…

      2. Angstrom*

        I had a good experience working with MIOSHA. If you asked for an inspection, you wold not be fined if the infractions were corrected in a timely manner. So we asked them to come in and do a safety assessment. They found a few things that were out of code, we fixed them, and that was that.

        1. Former EHSS "lead" aka "Ignored"*

          Most states don’t have a robust workplace safety agency. I’m glad yours is otherwise.

          1. Dee906*

            Correct, and the Feds lack the funding and support to be as effective as state plan states.

      3. SuperNova*

        OSHA has to prioritize inspections because there are not enough inspectors to everything they should be doing.
        1. Imminent danger situations
        2. Death or severe injury or illness
        3. Employee complaints
        4. Referrals
        5. Targeted inspections
        6. Follow-up inspections
        Inspectors do not have time to just show up for a surprise inspection at the office down the street which has never shown to be a problem. Employee complaints must be further prioritized by the seriousness of the risk, the likelihood of it resulting in injury, and the severity of the consequences if it does happen.

    3. Dinwar*

      OSHA and MSHA (Mine Safety and Health Administration), as well as numerous federal, state, and local authorities, which should be outlined in your onboarding and in the safety plan(s) that you sign prior to work.

      I’m a safety officer on a Superfund site, and I find egregious safety violations personally offensive. The world we live in is dangerous enough–if you have a NIOSH handbook, a good way to give yourself nightmares is to identify the contents of train cars as they go by. We don’t need to cause additional problems for ourselves.

      It’s also telling that in every business I’ve seen, safety violations go hand in hand with production issues. Basic safety makes the work MORE productive, not less. Someone too stupid to follow basic safety procedures is also going to be too stupid to follow proper production procedures, documentation procedures, accounting procedures, etc.

      2. Sharpie*

        Safety officer on a Superfund site? That sounds… Interesting and ominous all at once. Well, the reason for a site being a Superfund site is never good, let’s be honest.

        1. Dinwar*

          Eh, most of it’s boring (which I prefer). As long as you follow the safety protocols it’s fine, just the same thing over and over and over again. The ideal is that everything is meticulously planned, carefully and thoughtfully executed, and thoroughly documented. And honestly most of the stuff on the National Priority List isn’t the showy “kill you this minute” contamination (though some is). A huge amount of it is BTEX, PCE/TCE/DCE, and the like–stuff that won’t kill you for 30 years, then when you retire you’re dead in 18-24 months. Which is good and bad. On the plus side, you’re unlikely to die from exposure. On the minus side, this causes a certain percent of people to conclude that it’s safe. I have unfortunately lost some good coworkers that way.

          Other than Consultant Syndrome, the biggest safety issues I’ve had were from other people working in the same area. You can have all the policies and procedures you want, but if someone isn’t subject to your protocols there’s not much you can do except watch and be ready to act.

            1. lina*

              Not a verified answer, but a guess: consultants who assume they know best, and who are assumed to know best by The Boss because of how much they cost, and override the actual experts on site who’ve been doing this for thirty years.

              1. Dinwar*

                Honestly, mostly I’ve seen the opposite. Folks in my industry are MUCH more conservative when it comes to safety than our clients are, and a lot of what we do is tell them “You can’t do this, if you do you’ll go to jail and/or people will die.” It’s part of the contracts in many cases–our literal job is to keep people from doing egregiously stupid things. We DO in fact know more, we’ve seen what can happen, and you’re paying us to use that knowledge to protect you from yourself.

                In the industry…yeah, this happens. One of the surprising things I recently learned was that people with 10+ years of experience accounted for fully half the fatalities in mines last year. The reason is exactly what you say: They think “I’ve done it this way for years, no stupid paper-pusher will tell ME how to work!” Then they light a cigarette in an atmosphere with 24% O2 and their beard explodes (yes, this happened, and the safety officer specifically called me out as someone at risk of this happening to me). It’s one reason I’m looking to get out of fieldwork.

            2. Dinwar*

              It’s when you pick up a bunch of low-level crap on various jobsites and your body starts to shut down. It’s never enough for an individual incident to trigger any alarms on your HAZWOPER physical, but it starts to kill you none the less. It can happen fairly quickly–I’ve seen cases happen in as short a time as 6 months–or it can take years–people frequently die 6-12 months after they retire in my industry.

              Consultant Syndrome isn’t a technical name for it. Mostly there isn’t one. But it’s what I’ve always heard it called. In at least one case the official diagnosis was “walking pneumonia”, but the doctor admitted that it’s because he didn’t have anything else he could call it on the form.

        2. goddessoftransitory*

          If you could, could Allison interview you? This is such an important part of our infrastructure and I know (and would bet most people) next to nothing about it!

      3. RC*

        I was at a job for about 2 years before I learned it was physically on a Superfund site (the Bay Area has several of them, turns out; Silicon Valley manufacturers apparently used to think it was totally fine to just … dump waste everywhere??)

      5. Cari*

        That’s awesome – I’d love to hear more about your experiences with that!

        And I completely agree with you about the direct link between safety and productivity issue. There’s a fantastic description of Paul O’Neill’s take over and time at Alcoa and the impact of safety culture in Charles Duhigg’s “Habit” that conveys it really well. (Plus, Duhigg starts it with investors’ bolting to sell in at his introduction being about safety – a response implicit and explicit in a lot of the stories here!)

        1. Dinwar*

          Like I said, 99.9% of it is “Yup, another well. The Conductivity isn’t behaving, so I need to take two more readings.” Or trying to get a hand auger through stuff. Crushed shells are the worst, though being 20-somethings we turned that into a race. Routine, mundane stuff that’s incredibly boring–and after moving up the chain-o’-command, I now see that’s because there’s a dozen or more people working hard to keep you alive.

          The 0.1% of the time gets interesting. But of course that’s the stuff covered by the NDAs. :D

      6. Hungry Magpie*

        Howdy, fellow contaminated site person! I was a Contaminated Site Risk Assessor for the better part of a decade, though not in the US. Gotta love the stories we get from working on sites…(e.g. “you dumped WHAT WHERE?!” or “name that goo”).

        1. Dinwar*

          That’s the truth. :D That, and the “What’s in the unmarked drum we just found?” game…. I freaking hate underground storage tanks.

        2. Ace in the Hole*

          I’m a bit downstream from you folks, working at a hazardous waste facility… “name that goo” and “you have WHAT in your shed?” are always fun times.

        3. Perfectly normal-size space bird*

          So my spouse’s parent was the head of Environmental Health & Safety for a well-known oil company in an extra-damp state known for having lots of issues with oil spills. Part of this parent’s job included things like personally taking a tank of hazardous waste by-product and spraying it around some dedicated locations to dispose of it. Not like, putting it in containers so it won’t contaminate anything, this procedure was to specifically spray it around some wilderness so it would theoretically safely break down in the environment. This was the 60s and 70s. None of these substances could safely break down in the environment. The fact that sometimes this happened in the wee hours or late at night is probably a good clue that they knew this.

          And that is the story of why I have no interest in swamp tours.

    4. ShineSpark*

      Much younger me worked in a mini-supermarket. The stockroom had high shelves, and there was only one stepladder provided. It was the kind you folded out into and upside down V shape, then snapped two braces into place to keep it steady. Only one of the braces was badly bent, and the only way we had to keep the ladder from buckling under the weight was jamming a big screwdriver through the frame above the broken brace.

      The store manager insisted we didn’t have budget to cover a new ladder. I was scared of heights anyway, but left as soon as I could.

      1. Someguy*

        As we got better at inspecting and throwing away suspect ladders (and lifting straps, and and and), we then realized we also had to destroy them, else they would be rescued for personal use by employees at home.

      2. goddessoftransitory*

        I’d bet they didn’t have “the budget” to cover workman’s comp, either. Geez.

    5. Lifelong student*

      I was told many years ago that OSHA has no authority over office workplaces. Was I told a falsehood?

      2. Cyborg Llama Horde*

        Not only does it apply to office workplaces, but office workplaces are required to post those big OSHA posters somewhere in the office.

          1. Teapot Connoisseuse*

            Was there also a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’?

            1. Sharp-dressed Boston Terrier*

              No, because that’s on the door of a disused lavatory.

      3. Seven If You Count Bad John*

        Yes. OSHA covers all workplaces. Just because you’re a receptionist or an accountant doesn’t mean they can scrimp on trip hazards, fire safety, mold problems, air conditioning, ventilation, etc.

        1. Manda*

          OSHA doesn’t cover ALL workplaces. If you’re in a government run office or your industry is highly regulated by a different federal agency, then they can’t get involved. :)

          1. Constance Lloyd*

            OSHA does monitor and inspect federal offices. I work at a federal agency and my duties include but are not limited to recording and reporting workplace injuries to OSHA. Certain injury criteria automatically trigger a full investigation, and if somebody so much as gets a paper cut and goes to the nurse’s station for a bandaid, we record that and provide them with a dense packet of their rights as an injured worker.

          2. Former EHSS "lead" aka "Ignored"*

            It doesn’t cover, like, a small family farm. And yes some workplaces are also covered by other agencies. But OSHA does cover nearly every workplace, as far as my OSHA certification course taught me. Perhaps clarification can be provided along with the winning stories.

          3. Nonanon*

            Bingo! My partner is employed by municipal government, and every time I joke about him committing an OSHA violation (he has not to my knowledge ever ACTUALLY committed a violation, it’s just one of the weird in jokes we have), he just tells me that OSHA has no power over him.

          4. It Might Be Me*

            OSHA does apply. From the website addressing the US military. If it’s uniquely military it doesn’t apply (say a tank).

            “On the other hand, the Department of Defense employs 700,000 civilian personnel, many of which work on equipment, systems, and operations that are ‘not military unique.’

            “OSHA does apply to those employees under those conditions. For example, OSHA can inspect U.S. Coast Guard facilities where civilians do office work without advanced notice, just as they can with a private-sector workplace.”

      4. Dinwar*

        There’s not a lot of ways to get OSHA involved in office work, but there are a few. Electrical, fire, noise, and ergonomics, for example. And they’re expanding their interpretations of some things. I found it rather grimly amusing (occupational hazard; field geologists seem to develop a rather twisted sense of humor) that for several years the office workers had the highest number of incidents in the company I work at–we’re digging up cancer-causing chemicals, or munitions, or sampling acids that dissolve glass (that was a fun day) and we’re fine. Johnny McOfficeworker, on the other hand, fails to pick up his feet and breaks a wrist walking to the copier. OSHA’s not as amused, however.

        That said, as others have said, check on that. There are other agencies that may have jurisdiction. Office workers associated with mines are covered by MSHA instead of OSHA, for example–they’re still miners. Fire departments and other emergency responders also fall under different jurisdictions, because there’s simply no way to do those jobs and comply with OSHA requirements. And even if you are under OSHA’s jurisdiction you’re unlikely to be audited unless there’s something just egregiously wrong. They properly focus their efforts on the areas with the highest risks, and offices are MUCH safer than jobsites (which causes the injury rates we see; complacency kills).

        1. Elizabeth West*

          We had our OSHA guy come to OldExjob and give me, the front desk, safety training. Mostly it was dealing with potential threats — our front door was open and anyone could just walk in. And I sat with my back to the door. It drove me nuts because I do not like to sit with my back to the door. I’m also one of those people who looks for exits and anything I can use as a weapon when I’m in a store or whatever.

          This freaked our OSHA guy out a little bit, lol. I was like oh, I can hit Threat with my stapler, and here’s a giant heavy sample I can throw at him, etc. When he was done with my training, he told my boss, “I’m more worried about the bad guys than I am about her!”

        2. Recovering EHS Director*

          Geologists REPRESENT. (I’m not a geologist but I worked in the remediation field for many, many years and really appreciated the skill set geologists bring to the job.)

          Not surprising at all that office workers had more accidents – on our job sites we would typically have things like morning tailgate safety meetings, safety plans, inspections, etc., and we’re expecting something goofy to happen, where as office workers… don’t. It just feels like a safe environment, and what could possibly go wrong when you’re just typing and in meetings all day?

          All kidding aside, I feel like office workers and office environments get neglected when safety is discussed; bringing more awareness to the potential for injury would help bring incident rates down.

        3. goddessoftransitory*

          Johnny McOfficeworker, on the other hand, fails to pick up his feet and breaks a wrist walking to the copier. OSHA’s not as amused, however.

          This reminds me of an old safety short Rifftrax did about office safety–it was made in the days when actually killing a stunt guy seemed to be deemed “unfortunate, but…” I couldn’t believe the death field that the typical office apparently presented–this was also when the average piece of office equipment weighed 900 pounds and was made of iron corners and exposed wiring, so you were lucky to live through the day!

        4. Part time lab tech*

          There was a norovirus outbreak. In the hospital microbiology laboratory I was working in, the only person to get sick was the single admin staff who didn’t handle stinky samples. My theory is that although lab staff had good asceptic technique between samples and while entering and exiting the lab area, they were not 100% careful within the lab area and probably touched a door handle or two with contaminated hands. The admin didn’t handle the samples and I suspect didn’t have as good entering and leaving hand washing protocols.

        5. Anax*

          Late, but also: If there’s danger related to your membership in a protected class, including disability, also report to your state civil rights department or federal EEOC. The sooner the better, because underfunding means these agencies have a huge backlog.

          Honestly, I’m just waiting for someone to die because of California’s current return-to-office policy for state workers. It’s being enforced with ‘no exceptions’ unless you have sick leave to burn – and the PTO allowance isn’t generous, nor is there any guarantee that using it won’t be held against you.

          In the couple months I was working in-office, I was required to go in during a pretty severe storm, with downed trees/power lines and major highways closed due to flooding. No word on how they’re going to handle wildfire season or other natural disasters.

          And, well. That doesn’t get into how they’re handling disability, which is… bad.

          I had to quit because of it – hot environments make me faint, and I’m terribly prone to heat-related illness. With no accommodation – and I tried HARD to get one – it was just a matter of time before I either got heatstroke or fell and hit my head. (Among other things. It was bad.)

          I’ve heard a lot of other stories that stick with me – like the guy who has epilepsy, had his first seizure in years, and had his license pulled by the DMV for six months. With no flexibility in RTO and no public transit, he was looking at losing his job and his housing.

          Or the guy caring for an immunocompromised child – when CalOSHA told people with COVID-19 to come in as long as they’re asymptomatic.

          Or the woman recovering from double hip replacements, who could walk – but getting around a large office building was a lot more walking than recommended at this stage of recovery, and could have serious effects.

          There are systemic effects too – the number of disabled state workers has dropped by 40% since 2017, even before RTO was announced, and RTO has definitely made it worse.

          We’re fighting it, but… I’m very afraid someone is going to die or be horribly hurt before the regulatory bodies act, and that’s upsetting. We’ve got another six months minimum before the Civil Rights Department expects to finish its investigation, and if they choose not to act, then waiting however long it takes the court system.

          It’s the drum I keep banging because it’s been a big part of my life for the last few months, but… yeah.

          (And yes, if CRD doesn’t act, I’m planning to sue, and I have a lawyer on hand. Public shaming had some effect – I had a really nice article in the local paper which has brought some attention – but it hasn’t forced a policy change.)

    6. safety? what safety?*

      OSHA has like 17 people covering giant regions. My partner works in skilled construction. Before he was working union, the non union company he worked for didn’t want to pay for a lift. So when something needed untangling or fixing at the top of the crane, they just put a man in a skiff, and let him dangle in the wind while they raised him up to fix whatever needed fixing. Or tried to fix it, while swinging back and forth in the wind. OSHA did exactly nothing when they were called, because they are massively understaffed and completely overworked. And a lot of people at OSHA in this region used to work in the industry, and so are friends with many of the people they have to cite for violations.

      1. Dee906*

        Absolutely they are underfunded. And you have to have the right set of circumstances for there to be action. But it’s a good reminder to talk to your representatives and ask for change. State plan states are much more effective at regulating work place safety and health and updating standards to reflect current science. For the feds, it’s nearly impossible. That’s why we have standards from 1970s still trying to be enforced even if we know they aren’t enough.

  2. DeskApple*

    I was 16 working for my school district tech department and driving my mom’s mini van. For some reason, the school didn’t want to pay for anyone to transport laptops (back when they weighed around ten pounds each) to other campuses and told me to use my mom’s van to transport more than two TONS of recently purchased computer equipment in the van, stacked on all the seats, with nothing holding them down from sliding off and at me in the car or through the front window. I drove very slow nearly dragging the ground but I made it with no lost computers.

        1. Wendy Darling*

          I was gonna say imagine what happened if you braked suddenly but then I realized that with 2 tons of laptops in a mini van, any braking was going to be veeeeeeeery veeeeeeeery slooooooow.

          1. Reluctant Mezzo*

            Extra mass is not your friend when braking. (even in no gravity, extra mass is gonna move sometimes and it won’t be fun for anybody).

    2. Wolf*

      My chemistry teacher at school had to do that run to get gas bottles for the bunsen burners. In her own car, because the school wouldn’t pay to get them delivered.

  3. Tradd*

    People often seem to treat fire alarms as nothing. Years ago I worked at a place that had a fire alarm that turned out to be the real thing. There was an electrical fire in the building. There was SMOKE! My department was on the second floor and I was up fast with my purse in hand, but coworkers were still working away. I finally yelled at them to MOVE NOW! and that got them to leave.

    1. Cubicles & Chimeras*

      Our building had regular (yearly) fire alarm and drill tests. We were all told it is non-optional to participate, that the building was to be fully evacuated any time we heard the fire alarm go. (Building required it, Company agreed, multiple emails/chats/etc were sent about it.)

      You’d be surprised how many people I had to kick out of the building since I had the duty of clearing out my floor. Very much the types I anticipate that wouldn’t evacuate in a fire either.

      1. Ally McBeal*

        I worked on Wall Street for a while and was shocked by how many analysts stayed glued to their desks despite deafening sirens and obnoxious strobe lights during fire drills. Sales would’ve stayed too except it was hard to work through client calls with all the noise. At one point our building’s management asked for a volunteer from each floor to be fire marshal and I pretended I didn’t hear him ask because I was NOT going to be responsible for begging all those nerds (I say that lovingly) to leave their terminals.

        1. Eggo*

          I am Fire Marshal for my floor because it’s very funny to me. I’m terrified of an actual fire one day because no one listens when I try to force people out during drill! I’ve accepted that walking around with a printed map and asking people to point to the staircase was good enough.

          1. A Person*

            I’m outside the US, but fire wardens here are told not to *force* anyone to leave in an evacuation. Instead we tell them clearly that they need to evacuate and they’re in danger if they stay, and if they still refuse, just evacuate without them and advise the fire brigade when they arrive how many people remain in the building and where they are. In my org staff who refuse to evacuate may also face disciplinary action for failing to follow safety procedures.

          2. Whistler’s Daughter*

            I’m probably too late posting this for anyone to see, but…I was fire marshal for my floor, and having been in quite a few fires, I took the job seriously.

            I was issued a vest and whistle. One time during a drill I put in a vest and grabbed the whistle. Some stupid executive was slow -playing leaving her office, so I blew my whistle at her. She was so shocked that it worked great! She immediately followed my orders and got up and left.

            Give the whistle a try!!

            1. Azure Jane Lunatic*

              Whistles are unexpectedly useful in the workplace! I used a toy slide whistle to keep an internal conference on schedule.

      2. Thetidesturnforeveryone*

        When I was a floor fire officer, part of the job was going into every washroom to ferret out the people who would rather hide in a toilet stall than walk down stairs.

    2. WeirdChemist*

      At my old job, the building was undergoing massive renovations including to the fire alarm/suppression system. While they were working on it, the construction workers set off the alarm *constantly* including for testing that they wouldn’t bother to warn us about ahead of time. We would of course evacuate every time, and we’re required by policy to wait outside until the fire department cleared the building. The problem was that the construction company would tell the fire department that they were only doing testing, no need to come out, so we would have to call the fire department multiple times to be like “hey no really, we can’t go back in until you guys come out here” so we would be sitting outside for an hour or more. And sometimes this happened multiple times a week. And of course this happened in the middle of winter.

      So yeah, after a few weeks of this people were definitely in the bad habit of taking their time, gathering coats and keys and whatnot, finishing up what they were doing, etc before they evacuated. Good thing there was never an actual fire when I was there…

      1. Ann O'Nemity*

        We might have worked at the same place!

        At some point we just stopped taking the alarms as seriously. It was very much a “boy who cried wolf” type response.

        It did get a little better after the fire department started fining the tenant, who in turn passed the bills on to the contractors.

        1. ECBT*

          The company had six floors, and the top floor was all the call centers – tech support, product support, customer service, all of it. One day we all smell smoke and the alarms go off. An announcement is made: floors 1-5, please evacuate the building. Floor 6, please remain on the phones.

          The customer I was talking to heard and asked, “where are you?”
          Me: 6th floor. But I can smell smoke.
          Customer: please go. You can call me later, if your building doesn’t burn down. And you should find a new job.

          The elevator had caught on fire. And I did find a new job.

          2. Momma Bear*

            There’s a reel going around FB/IG about someone whose manager said to stay on the phones during a fire alarm. I would think it would not be a good look to customers if they could hear the alarm that was being ignored. Glad your customer told you to just go.

            Old job had a lot of false alarms but we marched out and went to our meeting place *every* time. Once or twice it was a kitchen fire (we shared a building with a restaurant).

            Current job’s alarms and lights are so obnoxious you have no choice, which I’m sure is the point.

            1. Seeking Second Childhood*

              The horns and strobes are indeed bright and loud on purpose. But it’s not to be annoying. It’s designed to give the best chance of alerting everybody – including those who are blind or deaf, and even when the building is filled with smoke.

        2. canuckian*

          I work at elementary schools and in one of them, if the day care/afterschool program uses the toaster in their room. It sets of the fire alarm. We have to evac and the fire department still has to come and clear us. And this was NOT burnt toast, just regular toast. They have been banned from making toast.

          We also discovered last year that if the prekindergarten rooms make toast, they also set off the fire alarms. So, they too, can no longer have toast.

          We have an actual kitchen with cafeteria service this year and *touch wood* nothing she’s done has caused the alarm to go off.

      2. Elitist Semicolon*

        This happened at one of my old lab jobs when facilities came around to update the smoke/vapor detectors and decided to install the new ones in the room with the two giant autoclaves. We had an entire week of the building-wide alarms going off at least once a day and we had to stand outside because we couldn’t go back in until the fire department cleared us.

      3. Turquoisecow*

        My office, a few years ago. The landlord sent an email saying they would be testing the fire alarm on Wednesday, so if the alarm went off that day, there was no need to evacuate. Great.

        The fire alarm went off on Tuesday. Lots of confusion – do we evacuate? They said there’d be a test. No but that’s tomorrow. Or is this the test? Finally we trooped down the stairs (thankfully only on the fourth floor and not higher) only to find someone from building management downstairs in the lobby with a fire inspector, annoyed, telling us all to go back upstairs, it was a test.

    3. MsM*

      We also had an actual (very minor) fire not too long ago. Someone had to go back in and tell the coffee shop to quit serving coffee.

    4. nonnynonny*

      I worked at a job where we so far behind schedule program management gave the build guys hearing protection for a planned fire drill. They didn’t want them to stop working for the 20 minutes the drill took. Everyone “joked” management would’ve made the same decision in the case of a real fire.

    5. CowWhisperer*

      Honestly, that happens even in places where safety drills are practiced a lot e. g, schools. When I taught HS, every unannounced fire drill involved me yelling “Get up, drop your stuff, and get out! Let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s go!” repeatedly until my students moved.

      I think the reason we practice them is so that at least one person starts screaming directions and others follow.

      1. Tinkerbell*

        My daughter missed most of a day of school a few weeks ago because there was some sort of short in the fire alarm and NO ONE COULD TURN IT OFF. The principal came on the loudspeaker and said to ignore it, but of course it’s impossible to teach when the alarm is blaring, so most of the teachers took the kids outside and just held recess until it got fixed – but it kept NOT being fixed, so finally the parents all got an email that we could come pick the kids up early if we wanted.

    6. Managing While Female*

      I’d guess it’s probably a ‘boy who cried wolf’ kind of situation since people pull fire alarms so often as a ‘joke’.

      Still, where there’s smoke there’s fire, people! Or, at least, a very dangerous situation!

      1. La Triviata*

        Ages ago I worked in a building that had a kind of controversial tenant. They’d periodically get bomb threats that led to the entire building being evacuated to check for actual bombs (there were never any). Then there were a LOT of “bomb threats” that seemed to occur towards the middle of the day when the weather was good; it turned out people were phoning in fake threats in order to get a little extra time outside at lunch time.

        1. The Prettiest Curse*

          The legal penalties for calling in bomb threats became much more severe in the US after 9/11, so I imagine they had to knock if off after that point. Similarly, the safety manager of my previous office (skyscraper in San Francisco) mentioned in a training that the building got fairly frequent bomb threats prior to 9/11 because one of the tenants had an employee who would call in a threat as a distraction whenever they were running late for work. (Don’t try this at home, kids!)

          1. TiffIf*

            When I was in middle school and high school calling in bomb threats was a way kids got out of exams. Last time I remember it happening was in 2000 when I was a sophomore.

            1. Bast*

              My mom mentioned that in the late 60s/early 70s this was a common tactic to get out of finals and exams, and said no one really got into much trouble for it — maybe a stern talking to and a “don’t do it again” kind of deal. Same with pulling the fire alarm. Common tactic to get out of exams. They HAD to evacuate because it was procedure, but everyone assumed it couldn’t be real.

              Definitely not what would happen now.

              1. Elitist Semicolon*

                At my uni in the 90s we could always tell when one of the large STEM weed-out classes had an upcoming exam because a fire alarm would go off in more than one dorm the same night.

              2. Insert Clever Name Here*

                Unfortunately the modern equivalent is calling in an active shooter threat against a school. It happens multiple times a year in my state and yeah…if they figure out who did it, there is a heck of a lot more than a “stern talking to” that happens.

              3. Dog momma*

                I worked in a nursing home where one of the demented patients for some reason kept pulling the fire alarm. We weren’t exactly downtown. The fire dept HAD to come out. After the third time, he told the administrator they were going to start fining them big time every time unless they got the resident under control. We had a big meeting with the chief in the hall on that floor and he was spitting nails. I’ll be darned…., it never happened again. lol

                1. Dog momma*

                  Would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when the fire chief met with the administrator in his office!

            2. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

              Happened repeatedly in spring at my high school–until one kid did it from a pay phone inside the building less than a month after the Oklahoma Federal Building bombing while a Ryder truck was parked in view of the front office. After he was frogmarched out of the building–law enforcement took the longest possible route through the building, passing as many classroom doors with windows as possible–there wasn’t another threat until after I graduated years later.

              1. goddessoftransitory*

                Wow, talk about NOT reading the room, kid. I would have made him walk on his hands.

            3. BrightLights*

              My high school was a mile down the road from another larger school. They would routinely call in bomb and gun threats to get out of exams and because of proximity we were evacuated too. It got old. 2005-2007.

            4. Orv*

              Happened at my high school, in the 1990s. A student called it in from the payphone in the hall directly opposite the administrative office, in full view of the office windows. They were, of course, caught immediately.

          2. EtTuBananas*

            When I was in elementary school, a local volunteer firefighter would call in bomb threats (from the pay phone by the Dairy Queen) because he was bored and wanted something to do.

          3. Hosta*

            After some local news about the penalties for calling false bomb threats, someone at a college my mother used to work at found a way to get classes canceled that was less likely to get their front door kicked down: they called in bedbugs.

            Honestly, people probably evacuated quicker when they heard it was bedbugs and not a bomb

        2. Good Enough For Government Work*

          Kate Adie is a legendary British war reporter who worked for the BBC during the height of the Troubles. She writes in her autobiography that Aunty Beeb was getting bomb threats on a roughly basis for years; unsurprisingly, people got cynical about it. So if a threat was called in and it was a nice sunny day, they’d evacuate; if it was p*ssing it down or they were tight on deadline they’d risk it for a biscuit (as it were). At one point some bright spark left some wires sticking out of a shoebox clearly marked ‘OIRISH BOM’ for the Bomb Squad to find (unsurprisingly, they weren’t impressed).

          Ah, the Seventies.

        3. goddessoftransitory*

          That happened back in my high school! Some group of kids decided calling in bomb threats during their lunch hours was a hilarious way of extending their breaks. This was long before 9/11 and school shootings, so they didn’t get into as much trouble as they should have.

      2. Ally McBeal*

        I once worked at a college, our offices were on the ground floor of a dorm and you would NOT believe how often fire alarms go off in dorms because someone forgot they left a pot on the stove.

        1. Le Sigh*

          Popcorn. Every friggin time. 10 stories of students would flood out because Jake and Josh could never remember how to not burn popcorn.

          1. Wendy Darling*

            Every semester at my college around finals time, someone would be up studying for exams sometime between 1am and 5am and would microwave themselves some cup noodle but forget to put the water in, and we’d all have to get out of bed and evacuate.

            Also the radiators in our dorms were unhinged overachievers to the point that we slept in shorts and tank tops and cracked the window even in the dead of winter so I have more than once stood outside in a parka over shorts and a tank top. Which sucks.

            1. Chirpy*

              One year, my dorm had both a pyromaniac (so, real but small fires, often like a burning shirt left on a tiled floor) and someone who pulled the alarm FOUR TIMES IN THREE DAYS (twice a night, every other night! ) in January. The university offered a reward, but by that point every single person in the dorm would have turned in the person just to get some sleep.

          2. Dog momma*

            that brings back more memories.. also worked in a ICU and we all lived on coffee. We had 2 pots going ALL THE TIME. well, there were times we got really busy admitting patients from the OR, or during a code…& the empty pot set off the fire alarm.. and we couldn’t necessarily evacuate. After about the 3rd or 4th time, the fire department got sick of coming out , we got yelled at etc. So the Chief of our service asked what we wanted as an Xmas present from them..usually it was food). One of the nurses got a catalog and picked out the biggest, needed six pot coffee maker that Bunn made. So at that time it cost about $400. Doc never blinked an eye & it was delivered post haste! We never burned A coffee pot again and ALWAYS had coffee!

        2. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

          I lived in a dorm where TWICE the honors’ floor set off the fire alarms by hitting the smoke detectors with water balloons. During finals week. In the middle of the night. The third fire alarm went off at 2 AM and I started putting on a coat and shoes. My roommate wanted to get fulled dressed. (I was fine in jammies. I’d STILL be fine in jammies.) As I went to the door, I said aloud, “There better be a fire or else someone’s dying.” I opened the door to smoke, told my roommate to throw on pants and shoes (socks optional), and to hurry to get out. Turns out someone on my floor left a lit candle (!) next to a Christmas tree (!!). Fortunately, there wasn’t much damage and we were let in really quickly, but it was an interesting night.

          1. Le Sigh*

            The alarms were triggered so often my freshman year that my dorm roommate and I started sleeping through fire alarms. Which is not good! But apparently I had become desensitized to the sound. I think they started fining people who were repeat offenders, which seemed to help.

            1. djx*

              There was a fire on the floor of my dormroom in college that destroyed another room and would have killed people who did not leave. And I saw a fire next door to my old apartment that scared me so much that I literally could not dial 911 – my hand was shaking so much I kept mistyping.

              That said, an alarm doesn’t make me want to just run. To me they mean “Pay attention and be ready to go.” Or “Leave if it’s not clear what’s up soon.” Alarms can be common.

          2. Siege*

            At my college in the UK – I never lived in the actual college building but heard about it – if you used hairspray it would set off the fire alarms because the smoke detectors were positioned in such a way that the mist hitting the sensor was common, and it read as smoke to the device.

            1. Good Enough For Government Work*

              Happened at my UK uni too. The wetrooms in our halls had a two-inch gap at the top of the doors… right next to the smoke alarm. If you took a shower and didn’t remember to plug the gap with a towel first, the steam would set off the sensor and off we’d go.

              The number of drunk students who forgot about this at 4am… well, it’s been 15+ years and I’m still just about capable of sleeping through a fire alarm.

              1. londonedit*

                Yep, when I was in halls in my first year we were forever having to trek downstairs at 4am and stand around in the cold because someone had come in from a night out and decided to make some toast or grill some sausages or whatever, and of course they’d burn things and set the alarms off. And of course being in central London they’d have to send the fire brigade out every time (I think it was two fire engines minimum each time – the Great Fire may have been in 1666 but we still take things very seriously!) It got to the point where we were threatened with having to pay for the callouts – I think one or two flats (corridors with bedrooms and a kitchen off them, really, but each had its own front door and was called a flat) did end up having to fork out.

          3. AngryOctopus*

            There was a small dorm fire on my campus my freshman year because some brain trust threw a pair of boxer shorts over the top of one of those halogen lamps (you know, the ones that get super super hot) to “set the mood”, and well, you can figure out what really happened.

            2. Wendy Darling*

              The cautionary tale we were all told my first year in dorms was about a kid who had an illicit toaster in his dorm room and set off the fire alarm burning toast, and then tried to hide the evidence by unplugging the toaster and throwing it under his bed.

              Which was where he also threw all his returned homework and papers.

              The toaster set his homework on fire, which set his bed on fire, which did so much smoke damage the entire room had to be gutted and this kid had to pay for it and then thank them very much for not expelling him.

              I do not know if this story is true, but it is incredibly plausible.

          4. Zephy*

            The building I lived in my freshman and sophomore years of college *allegedly* had an absurdly short burn time (3-5 minutes was the rumor). It was a 120-year-old building, primarily wood construction, so we all decided “five minutes to burn to the ground” sounded reasonable. There were a few late-night fire alarms every semester – I never found out if they were pranks or mistakes, but that building sure didn’t burn to cinders in the 20-40 minutes we spent standing around in our jammies at 2 AM waiting for the fire department to come clear it.

          5. Desk Dragon*

            My freshman year dorm had fireplaces in many of the rooms (oldest dorm on campus, dated from when that was the only heat source to get students through a New England winter, though they’d added radiators since). We also had a central vacuum, the kind where you plugged a big hose into access points in the wall. During finals period in December someone had a fire, put it out, and then used the central vac to clean the (not fully cooled) ashes out of their fireplace, setting the whole system on fire in the middle of the night and putting us all outside, in the snow, most of us in PJs. Fortunately, the fire department got it put out quickly and the damage was confined to the vacuum system.

            The next term, again finals, still winter weather, someone else had a fire and didn’t open the flue. I was about to get in the shower for that one, so I was out in the snow in nothing but a bathrobe and flip-flops.

            When students came back on campus the next school year, all the fireplaces had been bricked up.

          6. Momma Bear*

            At my college, someone burned part of a dorm with an illegal heat lamp in the closet for their illegal pet snake.

            Another time my friend was in the shower when the alarm went off. Poor woman stood out with the rest of us in her robe and a towel until we got the all clear.

        3. Crooked Bird*

          My particular dorm’s fire alarm could be set off by hairspray being used on a top bunk or otherwise too close to the smoke sensor. Notorious for it. The fire alarm was UNBELIEVABLY loud too, and included flashing lights, all of which is a great safety feature (you pretty much physically couldn’t stay inside under those conditions, at least I never met anyone who could stand it) but very frustrating when you know it was hairspray.

        4. InsufficentlySubordinate*

          Microwave pancakes burned at 1 am during Finals week. Later found nailed to the responsible person’s door with a knife.

          1. Teapot Connoisseuse*

            Should have done that with the food of the vegan who decided to break her long-held principles with some bacon at 2am one morning in my 3rd year.

        5. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

          I worked my way through college as a hockey referee. I would have been an OSHA nightmare–I slept on the boards during forfeits, would be run into numerous times during a shift (often at full speed by guys who were significantly heavier than I was, and referees don’t wear the body armor hockey players do), took my fair share of tumbles into the boards or hard to the ice, et cetera. Young and invulnerable.

          My 4th year (1st senior year), I stayed in the dorm closest to the ice haus. It seemed like a good idea the year previous when rooms were selected. However, it was a co-ed dorm with alternating single-sex floors (males on the 1st, females on the 2nd, males on the 3rd, etc). Fire alarms. Every. Single. Night. It was close to the edge of campus, so most of us would conject that alcohol and marijuana buzzes were involved. We’d joke about “someone making out with the fire alarm again.” It got to the point where I would wake up in the middle of the night, after 4-6 hours of hard skating and maybe 2 hours of sleep, and if there were no daylight coming through the windows, I just wrapped myself in my trench coat (I got into the habit of keeping my keys in it), slipped my feet into my boots (and tucked in the untied laces), and started walking out of the room towards the stairs. There was a specific Northern Red Oak tree I would lean against and half-sleep.

          Sure enough, every single night, there would be a fire alarm a few minutes later. On the weekends, there might be 2 or 3 of them. Sometime in February, the fire department had had enough and stopped coming; the RAs had to check the building and call the FD if flames were found.

          While it did my grades no favors, I can’t claim it’s why I had to go back for year 5, though.

          1. Zelda*

            About forty years before I was there, my college had a dorm burn down in the middle of the night. Nine students died. After that, the college Did. Not. Play. when it came to fire safety– tampering with the alarms or extinguishers could get a person expelled. The… “pranksters,” for lack of a better term, that you put up with would have been prosecuted into the Stone Age for that crap.

            Campus security still had their share of burnt-popcorn calls, but we students all got the message loud and clear that the consequences of any deliberate false alarms would be very, very not worth any concevable benefit.

      3. OMG, Bees!*

        I posted elsewhere, but I had this experience in an old apartment building with false fire alarms going several times a month. The main reason I stopped evacuating was because I lived on the 15th floor, and once you enter the stairwell to evacuate, you cannot reenter a floor, so only walk all the way down. Several times of hearing the fire alarm stop when I had reached the 6th floor made me not trust it.

      4. Turquoisecow*

        My college dorm often had people pull fire alarms in the middle of the night. As far as I know there was only a minor fire once.

        The damn things were so loud and annoying there was no way to sleep through them and we all went outside mostly to get away from the noise.

    7. 1-800-BrownCow*

      About 6 years ago my family and I were staying in a large hotel when the fire alarms went off. Only a couple dozen people evacuated, there were even hotel employees inside, some people were going through the breakfast buffet getting food with loud alarms going off around them. Fire department showed up and went inside for about 30 minutes or so. Eventually they came out and said it was safe to go inside. We later found out from a hotel employee that in one of the hotel suites that has the kitchenette, a guest left the stove on with food on it and it caught fire. Their room had filled with smoke, and the fire department put it out, but there was no major damage. It just shocked me that so few people, including hotel employees, had evacuated the building. Especially since the building’s main fire alarms were going off, not just a smoke detector in one guest room.

      1. Le Sigh*

        A store I worked at had design issues that caused it to flood occasionally. When this happened, we had to close and get everyone out. And without fail, there was always one person just shopping away — nevermind that they were standing in 1/2 – 2 inches of dirty water that was carrying in cigarette butts and leaves and trash from the parking lot. And they would ask, with a totally straight face, if they could keep shopping while we clean up.

        While I like to bargain hunt as much as the next person….

        1. Dawn*

          One night when I was working at a retail store, a bunch of us were asked to stay late because there were significant renovations going on; officially we were closed but with so many workers going in and out (and so many expensive products and fixtures) we had to have enough staff to keep an eye on everything throughout the store.

          Now, this was a full-on construction site. They were completely demolishing several fixtures and installing new ones in their place; the store was in shambles.

          Some dude off the street just walks in and starts browsing the merchandise literally in the middle of the construction. I went up and explained we were closed and we were in the store for the renovations, and he said, “It’s fine, I’m just browsing.” Again, standing in the middle of a construction site with no protective equipment.

          I got a lot less polite and my manager got mad at me for it later, but good heavens. Yes, I think you actually can talk to customers like that when polite isn’t budging them and they are standing around endangering themselves in your closed storefront.

          1. Le Sigh*

            “It’s fine, I’m just browsing.” People would say this to me, too! Sir, it is not fine! The store is closed! It is a liability for you to be here! Leave!

            1. Daubenton*

              You’ve both reminded me of what fun it was when the bookshop I worked in was completely refitted, including putting a new staircase in to give access to the basement. The doors couldn’t be locked but they were plastered with large notices saying we were closed and the interior was dark, empty of books and full of builders. But, still, they came. “Are you open?” “No.” “Can’t I have a look round?” “No!”

              Two weeks later when the doors were wide open, the lights were blazing, the beautiful new shelving was full of books, and eager booksellers were standing around with welcoming smiles they came back. “Are you closed?” “No.” “Can I have a look round?” “Yes!”

          2. Laser99*

            I don’t know if this counts but in two individual stores where I worked, they made you keep working through power outages. Since the computers weren’t operational, we had to write down the item code and a description, then make change out of the drawer. The individual sale money would be placed in a paper bag to deal with later.

            1. Le Sigh*

              This happened to me a few times — maybe it was just that the registers were down, and not the power? Either way, when that happened we had to break out the old fashioned credit card sliders. I don’t even know if you could find those anywhere these days.

              1. Windsorite*

                My latest credit card doesn’t have raised text, all the info is just printed. I guess they would have to handwrite a log instead in that case?

    8. Golden*

      This is true! I was part of a residential life peer group in undergrad, and the most common cases we oversaw included students being disciplined for not leaving the dorm during a fire drill.

    9. Antilles*

      I experienced this at my first company. We hadn’t had a fire drill in a couple years. My office-mate and I hear the alarm, glance at each other, figure it’s a drill, but still decide to at least go outside to the parking lot to comply with the drill.

      On our way out, one of the hallways to the side that we walked past was filled with smoke, which obviously caused us to hurry up on our way out. Turns out that it was indeed a fire caused by a contractor working on the building who forgot to unplug some of his equipment which was leaning against some drywall sheeting.

      I later learned that a guy in the office adjacent to the smoke-filled hallway not only couldn’t be bothered to walk the 15 feet outside, he was so unfazed by the alarm that he didn’t even bother to raise his head from his computer where the smoke would have been pretty much right in his line-of-sight.

    10. Cyborg Llama Horde*

      I used to work for an office space company, and we had people whose job it was to make sure each floor was cleared — and yes, we did have policies for what to do about the clients who refused to leave (the person assigned to that floor would make sure that they’d noticed the strobes and loud siren, and knew that it was a fire alarm, but thankfully there was no expectation that we’d argue with them, just make a list of where there were people who hadn’t evacuated). Sometimes those were legit fire drills, but sometimes they were caused by things like people microwaving something they shouldn’t have.

    11. HBJ*

      To my mind, it’s because we have bad fire alarm implementation. I’ve been subject to so many drills, so many prank alarm pulls, so many home smoke detectors going off because I cooked at too high of heat (didn’t burn anything, to be clear, just cooked at 450* or fried something or whatever). Never once been in a situation where a fire alarm/smoke detector went off for a legitimate evacuation/safety need. So they just don’t trigger a “this is a serious emergency” response in my brain.

      I remember in college, there was a fire alarm early on in the dorm. I was sitting in the common area watching TV. The fire alarm went off and a few minutes later a fireman came in and said, “the alarm!” “Yea?” “You need to get out!” “…Oh.”

      To be honest, I don’t know what I was thinking. It was a long time ago. I think it just never entered my brain as “oh, I need to evacuate, that’s a fire alarm.” I was just thinking something like, “that’s annoying. I wish someone would turn it off already.”

      1. LingNerd*

        The closest I’ve ever experienced to a real alarm was someone pulling it because they thought they saw smoke. It’s happened twice, two totally different situations. Otherwise just a lot of drills and burned popcorn. And one time, a spider trying to make its home inside the smoke detector at 5 in the morning

      2. JustaTech*

        The last time the fire alarm when off in my building we were in the middle of a very special session with an outside presenter that was Very Important.
        Not long after lunch the fire alarm starts going off. Obviously this wasn’t a planned drill, and it’s a lab building, so we actually evacuated. Once people started getting outside they looked up and there was a *huge* plume of smoke that looked like it was coming from our roof. So we evacuated a little bit farther away.
        Then we hear that it isn’t our building, it’s a truck on the highway above our building that has caught fire.
        And the truck was full of gas cylinders. So we then retreated to the underground part of the parking structure when there’s an incredible BOOM and we all feel the explosion reverberate though us.

        Eventually the building who’s garage we’re standing in lets us inside because it is very hot, and an hour or so after that the fire department says we can get our stuff (and cars) but we can’t stay in the building. Amazingly no one was hurt, and the exploding gas cylinders didn’t damage anything, but it was a heck of a day.
        (And the VP was mad that we didn’t get to finish with our Very Important presenter.)

    12. PDB*

      Not an office but I live in a 60+ unit apartment building where there are lots of false alarms and now they are ignored. God help us if there’s a real fire.

      1. Turquoisecow*

        My old apartment was set up horribly with the smoke detectors right outside the kitchen. The water wasn’t even boiling and the damn thing would go off. I tried putting a fan on the counter pointed at the alarm, to keep the heat away from it, but this only worked for a while and finally I just took the battery out.

        I’m pretty sure this was the cause of a fire in another building in the complex, though I never heard for sure. Building management reacted by putting fire alarms in the hallways (I assume another issue was that one unit’s alarm was not audible in another apartment, so fire could spread. Of course like the second day they were in, the alarm started going off in the afternoon. I opened my door, looked into the hall, saw no one evacuating and no sign of fire or smoke, and went back inside. A few minutes later the alarm stopped.

      2. Distracted Procrastinator*

        Our last apartment complex had about 100 units. Someone thought it was funny to pull the whole building alarms at 11 pm at night. No one evacuated. We were five minutes from a fire department but it would take 20 minutes for them to show up and clear the alarm. They saw the address and didn’t bother to hurry.

    13. Chauncy Gardener*

      When I was an auditor for one of the big firms, no one would ever leave when the fire alarms went off. Our clients had to come into the conference room and tell us in no uncertain terms to get the heck out of the building!

    14. dePizan*

      We moved back into our building recently after a major renovation. After we were back in, there still some final work going on and so constant construction noise and occasional fire alarms going off. One day, the fire alarm goes off. I was in the bathroom. No idea if it was another false one, I’m frantically trying to finish up and get out.

      And then I have a bad ankle and they shut the elevators down during an alarm, so trying to haul myself down the stairs without falling, with our security guy doing a sweep for stragglers at my back yelling at me to hurry. With the smell of smoke finally reaching us. We were the last ones out of the building. Luckily it was just some welding that had got to hot, and so while there was smoke, but no fire.

    15. sacados*

      Other alarms too!
      My second job (this was outside the US) … the office was just one big open floor plan with probably too many people crammed in, not to mention that due to the nature of the work almost everyone had two computer towers at their desk.
      Well one day, we get an email from the building operations saying “Over the past few weeks our CO2 counter has consistently showed CO2 levels higher than the standard indoor value. This coupled with high indoor temperatures creates a poor work environment. We ask that you take regular trips outside to take deep breaths.”
      I found out later there was a CO2 alarm that they had at some point just turned off because it was being very annoying by beeping all the time.

      1. Kristin*

        Wait, their response to elevated CO2 levels was to tell you all to “go outside and take deep breaths”, not opening a window or something? That is bonkers.

      2. beep beep*

        Um. CO or CO2? Concentrated levels of both aren’t incredible as I understand it, but one is far worse than the other.

      3. Alpacas Are Not Dairy Animals*

        A relative of mine works at an ice-skating rink near Buffalo NY where management made a similar decision with the carbon monoxide alarm, with the eventual result that a bunch of 8-year-old hockey players had to go to the hospital and the ownership of the rink having to pay their medical bills.

        Who could’ve foreseen? Well, all the non-management employees who knew that the alarm had been going off for days before the manager had the battery pulled…

    16. EvilQueenRegina*

      When I was at university, the hall I was in had a separate annexe which was rented out to some family. They never used to bother evacuating when we had a drill or alarm caused by burning dinner etc. Then when there was a real fire, it was in their annexe and they had to be rescued.

      They weren’t there the next academic year, but I don’t think that was the reason. (That was St Andrews 2001, so there was a lot of demand for accommodation that year!)

    17. Marzipan*

      I work at a college that trains paramedics. They are the worst at fire drills. They believe they are emergency professionals and therefore exempt from fire drills. We’ve paid so many fines because of their refusal to leave the building.

      1. Happily Retired*

        This is amazing. Not surprising, but amazing still.

        Has your college started fining the paramedic department the exact amount of the fines? Maybe with a little interest included?

        That’s the only way to make egomaniacs listen up, as best as I can tell.

      2. Still trying to adult*

        New rule: Any people that are in for training must adhere to evacuation orders, or they A) immediately fail the course, B) are reported via mail or email to their direct manager and company HR.

        Clue: As a contractor I’ve been thru security training at a large airport. If you break one rule on site, you are escorted off, and can’t come back until you take training again. WITH YOUR MANAGER IN ATTENDANCE TOO!! It gets harsher if you break rules again.

    18. goddessoftransitory*

      Back in the day I managed an apartment building–I went to the basement one day and found smoke! I ran up and down four flights pounding on doors to get everyone out, grabbing my cat and calling the fire department. (Luckily it was just a guy who had burned his frozen pizza.) As I recall no fire alarm ever went off–I would bet because he had popped the batteries out of his smoke detector (grrrr.)

    19. Cheshire Cat*

      School, not work, but close enough. My senior year of high school, there were some kids who would go around the school and randomly pull the fire alarms. If it wasn’t a scheduled fire drill, one of the vice principals would immediately go on the intercom and tell us to disregard the fire alarm.

      You can guess where this is going.

      One very cold day in January, the fire alarm rang. And the vice principal made the usual announcement. Then, about 3 minutes later, he came on again and said that there was a real fire and everyone should evacuate the building!

      1. Cheshire Cat*

        Of course no one stayed in our designated places outside; everyone ended up at the back of the school building, watching the flames shooting up from the gym.

        I heard later from a friend who was in gym class that period that one of the gym teachers took off down the hall to the office when the “disregard” message went out. Luckily the gym and the office weren’t too far apart, although I’ve always wondered why she didn’t use the intercom.

        It turned out that someone had been smoking in the stairwell between the gym and the locker rooms, and dropped a lit cigarette onto the wrestling mats stored in the stairwell.

    20. Reb*

      I used to work in a pub and was the only one who ever evacuated when fire alarms went off. And the only reason I didn’t get in trouble for that is because the manager figured the noise was triggering my autism.

    21. Six Feldspar*

      I used to work in a large warehouse building and right at the top of the ceiling was a fire alarm that went off at anything and everything, including water vapour and dust. The switch to reset a false alarm was in a locked cupboard in the same warehouse. Every time it went off we had to get the fire marshalls down from the main office to verify the false alarm, unlock the cupboard and reset…

      Well, that was the process until we had to call them three times in about two hours one morning. After that we were allowed to have the cupboard open and reset the alarm ourselves as long as we promised to really check it was false.

      On the one hand, it was a big warehouse to fit a couple of pieces of equipment and had multiple large doors to get everyone out. On the other hand, the humans were about the only flammable things in there which doesn’t fill me with confidence looking back…

  4. Gus TT Showbiz*

    My sense of what’s egregious or not has been wildly skewed by years of working for public schools, but we did have multiple students pass out from heat in our building on the same day and the district response was…nothing. Literally, lots of people contacted them about it and nobody got a response.

    1. Amber T*

      It’s been a while since I was in school, but I remember those days. Our rule was if the room had a window, it didn’t need an AC unit… I remember nearly passing out in my physics class because the room was so damn hot (and my teacher trying to guilt us for being “too sleepy” in class – dude, it was over 90 degrees in the room!). There were only two rooms in the entire building that didn’t have windows, so they got small AC units. It was funny how suddenly everyone needed to speak with either their English or Social Studies teachers when it got hot out…

      1. Wolf*

        Our head teacher had his office in the basement facing north, and if his office wasn’t too hot, that meant everyone else just needed to stop conplaining.

    2. Bird Lady*

      Can confirm. When I was in high school back in the mid-90s, we had to take our final exams in the metal building called “the field house”. There was no climate control. So they we were, in 100 degree heat in June, taking our exams in a metal building. We were not allowed to bring water or cool beverages, only a number two pencil.

      People passed out. One girl went into a coma and almost died.

      The next year, we took our exams in the same building, in the same heat and once again were denied water. People literally showed up in bathing suits.

      1. Ruby Soho*

        My HS is in an group of 3 relatively old buildings that had very poor climate control. Definitely no AC. And they decided when wearing sweaters was no longer mandatory, usually sometime in April, when we would get the occasional hot day. Some teachers would threaten to write up any kid who removed their sweater because it was too hot to be wearing said sweater. But they’d all be wearing short sleeves! It was insanity. A new prison was built a block away, and we’d all be looking out the window, lamenting that even people in jail were more comfortable than we were allowed to be.

      2. mopsy*

        I never understood the no water rule in schools. What do they think kids are gonna do, drink it??

        1. JJLib*

          They might’ve been thinking:

          “If students have water, they’ll drink it. If they drink it, they’ll ask to go to the bathroom. If they ask to go to the bathroom, they might not come back, or they might meet another student and share answers to the test, or…”

          1. darsynia*

            At my oldest’s high school, they won’t let them have water cause they are afraid it’ll be vodka. The number of kids who would bring in vodka is so small compared to the people who NEED WATER and I don’t understand and never will understand the need to punish people who want good things in case IN CASE someone does something bad that won’t affect anyone else.

            1. Perfectly normal-size space bird*

              Potential alcohol was the reason my high school didn’t allow us to have water bottles. We could go outside to the vending machine in front of the gym between classes and get a soda and drink it right there but we couldn’t bring anything into the classrooms from home or bring the soda back with us. And with no AC and in a US state in warmer regions, it really sucked in late spring and early fall.

              Though my English teacher swore it wasn’t about alcohol, it was to protect us from lip cancer. Apparently she’d “read a study” that found when teenagers had to pucker their mouths to drink out of their bottles, it caused lip cancer. She’d write up anyone she saw drinking out of a water bottle, even when not at school.

        2. Mouse named Anon*

          Now they are crazy about kids having water lol. Must be why. We get emails constantly from the school (in the winter no less). DON”T FORGET TO SEND YOUR KIDS WITH WATER.

          1. Cormorant*

            Right? Nobody had a water bottle when I was a kid. If we were thirsty, we could wait until recess to drink from the water fountain outside.

            Now, every kid in school has their own personal reusable water bottle, and backpacks are designed to have a water bottle holder on the side.

            1. Hawkwind80*

              And my local school district has banned the water bottles because they are too often being used as weapons in student fights on campus.

        3. Nobby Nobbs*

          I always heard they thought we were going to smuggle alcohol in our water bottles. Yes, this sounded just as stupid to a middle schooler as to an adult.

          1. New Jack Karyn*

            I have actually known a couple of high school students to do this–have some vodka in their water bottle.

      3. Zombeyonce*

        They could have installed HVAC for what that lawsuit would have cost them.

    4. singularity*

      Yeah, doing active shooter drills with high schoolers who’ve been doing them since pre-school and kindergarten hits a little different and it definitely skews your sense of what is ‘acceptable.’ After the Jan. 6th insurrection, none of my students felt any sympathy for members of Congress and the terror they went through.

    5. CL*

      My employers have been generally good about safety and I’ve been through a fire in a high rise, an earthquake, a gas leak, and a hazardous materials lockdown. My local school system makes me tear my hair out. I’ve given up calling the school safety and security people.

      1. Zombeyonce*

        Don’t give up trying to fix it, but talk to different people. Take it to the school board’s public meeting(s) and get enough parents there to raise a fuss with you if you can.

    6. Cyborg Llama Horde*

      There was a while when I was a kid when we weren’t allowed to drink the water in the water fountains because of the lead pipes. Now the same school district is in an argument with the city over… I don’t remember if it’s lead or asbestos, but the city insists the school buildings aren’t safe, and the school district is pointing out that they don’t have anywhere else to put the students (and the city hasn’t coughed up the money for new or even temporary school buildings, so it’s at a bit of an impasse).

      1. Tinkerbell*

        My high school was built in 1929. There was asbestos in the insulation and in the tile. The summer they finally tore it all out, I had to stop by the school office for some reason or another – there was a “CAUTION: ASBESTOS REMOVAL” yellow tape down the middle of the hallway. Construction on the classrooms on one side of the hall, the office staff working happily away on the other :-\

        1. merula*

          This is actually safe. Asbestos fibers are fairly large and fall relatively quickly. They don’t float around in the air like dust. The hazard is from actually disturbing or releasing them, or from re-releasing them from clothing later if you’re not wearing coveralls.

    7. Ink*

      Did you know there’s a number of bats you have to have in a building before it gets condemned? I don’t actually know if that’s true, but my old high school seemed to think so. The tipping point was somewhere between the 6-12 regularly visiting our halls when I was there and the dozens that got a wing of the building condemned when my brother was there a couple years later.

      The district didn’t have the funds to fix the roof! (But did have funding to build a new high school in the rich part of the district, a new building for the existing rich school, and for our terrible principal to construct a few weird ego monuments… I assume they saw the light when someone pointed out that bats carry rabies, and having to pay for vaccines for students and probably some sort of lawsuit would be MUCH WORSE than just replacing the stupid roof. The poor custodians they tasked with containing the infestation until then deserve medals. And raises far higher than they’d ever actually get.)

      1. I hate bats*

        Only about 1% of all bats have rabies. The scary part is you can be bitten without ever knowing it because of how small their teeth are and once you’ve started to show symptoms it’s too late for the shots. As a result it’s recommended that you get the shots if you realize a bat has been in your living areas, especially if it was overnight.
        Which is why my kids and I are fully vaccinated against rabies.

      2. Tiny Soprano*

        Oh wow that reminds me of another fun anecdote regarding bees.

        My mother worked in an old building, and a few of them started to notice this sweet, rancid smell, a lot of noise, and heaps of bees indoors. The building was owned by the local council, so of course it took ages for it to be investigated. By the time they did, there was an entire hive in the wall. 50kg of honey was removed. This was like a good 7 years ago and that office still stinks of fetid honey.

        2. Tinkerbell*

          My public library was small – essentially one room, a storage area, and a single-stall bathroom. I was the “branch manager” but also the only employee. My desk was in the middle of the room, with a tube running up to the ceiling for the computer cables and power and such. There was a small bank of three computers along one wall and books along the others.

          The issue: if anyone used my electric pencil sharpener, all the computers in the library would reboot. The public computers reset when that happens, so you lose all your work.

          The compounding issue: clearly it was a power problem, but we couldn’t fix it because the wiring all ran through a MASSIVE wasp nest in the attic. IT (rightfully) didn’t want to mess with that, so it continued to be an issue for about six months until the town facilities and maintenance guy basically suited himself up in as many layers of clothing as he could manage and went up there to empty three cans of wasp spray at the nest. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that about a week after discovering the issue, I’d simply… unplugged the electric pencil sharpener.

    8. Anonymous For Today*

      okay so there’s no way to anonymize this enough so. new name for the day!

      I coached gymnastics. my boss did not understand the safety requirements of gymnastics facilities. this. individual. bought a backyard trampoline because he did not want to buy the matting that you need to buy with a competitive trampoline and set that sucker up in the middle of our gym. (backyard trampolines are dangerous as a toy. it’s irresponsible to use them as a training tool)

      1. Anonymous For Today*

        aw dang it that was supposed to be its own thing not a sub comment. sorry about that!

    9. Kevin Finnerty*

      I looked into filing an OSHA complaint about temperature in the public school where I work and was horrified to discover our building, which was basically a sauna, was not hot enough to be worth complaining. In fact, OSHA is pretty board-minded about temperature.

      1. Bob-White of the Glen*

        Yes, I demand we shut down when the building temp is over 85, but there is no temperature regulations in place for a library building. We’ve been as low as 57 and as high as 89. OSHA needs to have a range that an office scenario cannot fall above or below. Especially in buildings where no space heaters are allowed.

        1. Orv*

          Yeah, I work at a university where the buildings don’t have A/C. About two or three times a year my office tops 90F.

    10. TiffIf*

      When I was in elementary school (2nd grade) we once got sent home early because the building had no AC and students were showing signs of heat exhaustion.

      That summer Central AC was installed in the school

    11. E*

      Sort of the opposite, I went to a university that never closed for bad weather. The area didn’t get much snow, but a lot of ice and below freezing temps. After a week of extremely cold weather, the health center staff all threatened to quit because of the amount of frostbite cases they had.

      1. Perfectly normal-size space bird*

        I lived in a similar area, with ambient temps that would reach -40F at least a few times a year and windchill temps that could reach -70F. Ambient temps of -10F to -20F were very frequent in winter and for three months straight it never got above 0F. One year, we had a cold snap with record-setting ambient and windchill temps with incessant high speed wind gusts. Cars straight up would not start. There were not enough heater blocks for all the school busses so the local schools shut down because it was too dangerous for people to walk. Businesses shuttered and even the crappy call center I used to work at canceled work for the day.

        The university refused to close. They said since students live on campus, they can easily walk from building to building to stay warm. They failed to realize 1) not all students lived on campus, including students living in off-campus university housing and 2) 99% of the employees don’t live on campus. Despite employees putting up a fight, the university president refused to close campus. He lived in the university mansion that was also his office, so it’s not like he had to travel anywhere.

        Fortunately, most instructors had better sense and canceled classes, while most staff called in sick. The university president’s contract was not renewed the following year.

    12. St. Mary’s Institute of Historical Research*

      And at the other end of the weather spectrum, my son’s school has been battling black mold for years. They keep telling parents it’s completely safe because the humidity readings they take… once a month on selected dry days and in rooms not affected by the mold… are within federal limits. Meanwhile the mold is visibly creeping along the ceilings and teachers have had to throw out their classroom books.

    13. Striped Badger*

      The flashbacks to primary school. You know how they love to give a Christmas show for all the parents at the end of the year?

      In Australia, December is SUMMER. The height of summer.

      The number of times a kid fainted because they had to stand on the auditorium stage for hours while everyone had to practice their part for the show…

    14. Tiny Soprano*

      My bestie works at a school where somehow, the thermostat sensors are buried in concrete between the floors, so the heating and cooling is all over the shop. Her classroom is frequently around 13 or 14 Celcius in winter. She calls it the ice box. How the students are supposed to concentrate I have no idea.

  5. Amber T*

    Why does no one move when the fire alarm goes off? When I first started at my job, the fire alarm went off and I dutifully got up, grabbed my bag and walked out of my cubicle… and everyone in their offices acted as if they didn’t hear it (and it was LOUD). The response? “Oh, it’s probably nothing.” And in this instance, yeah it ended up being nothing (the system was faulty or something? I forget what, but no one pulled it and there was no emergency), but I’m not getting trapped inside a burning building for “it’s probably nothing.”

    1. Chidi has a stomach ache*

      This is so funny to hear – I’ve primarily worked in educational institutions (secondary ed, universities) and everyone very dutifully evacuates for a fire alarm, even in admin buildings. All those school drills really work to instill the instinct.

      1. londonedit*

        I think that’s the problem – in most office buildings there will be a weekly fire alarm test, and various fire drills, so I think people just hear an alarm, and if there’s no obvious fire nearby then they shrug and think ‘must be another test’.

        2. ThatGirl*

          I’ve never heard a weekly fire alarm; most offices I’ve worked in have had them once or twice a year. And never at my current building!

          1. londonedit*

            Not a drill, but someone will come round to test the alarms once a week. Doesn’t require any evacuation or anything, it just makes an annoying noise and everyone goes ‘ugh, right, it’s Tuesday, fire alarm testing’.

            1. MsSolo (UK)*

              Everywhere of a certain size that I’ve worked at in the UK has weekly tests, at the same time every week, usually with an announcement that it is a test, and exhortation to let security/H&S know if it didn’t sound in your part of the building.

              1. The Prettiest Curse*

                Yup, we have weekly tests at our office building (which has lab space too) – but I work a hybrid schedule, so I don’t think I’ve ever heard the alarm!

                1. unheard*

                  If you get a notice that’s happening on X day, and on X day it doesn’t happen, you let them know.

                2. Sharpie*

                  Let security know if the *alarm* didn’t sound, not if they didn’t hear the announcement. Fire alarms don’t use the PA system in the UK, or at least they don’t use the same system in my experience.

              3. BubbleTea*

                Yes, UK here and my office building has a weekly test apparently. It’s on a day I don’t usually work so it won’t affect me much.

              4. Lexi Vipond*

                Tuesday at 8:55 am for us. I don’t often hear it – I tend to come in just on 9 – but we have a lot of corridor doors kept open by magnets that close automatically when the alarm goes off, so if you find them all closed then it must be Tuesday.

          2. nona*

            Uh – also have never worked anywhere with a *weekly* alarm test.

            I do live in the Upper Midwest and we get tornado/severe weather siren testing (outside, not for buildings) the first Wed of every month (Apr/May – Oct-ish) at 1 pm. So, you’ll hear the (air raid) sirens just after lunch and then be “oh yeah, its Wed”.

            1. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

              Our tornado sirens (central Indiana) go off every Friday at 11am. (That’s how I know when the AAM open thread is up. :P )

              1. Just Another Museum Nerd*

                I’m in East Central Indiana and can comfirm the tornado sirens go off every Friday at 11am. I can hear them really well in my office and I’m always surprised that the morning has been going by so fast.

              2. Orv*

                When I lived in Michigan it was the first Monday of the month at noon. They were old Thunderbolt civil defense air raid sirens. The deep growl of one of those winding up still makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. During an actual storm, with the sound fading in and out of the wind, it was downright apocalyptic.

            2. ThatGirl*

              Yeah, ours are the first Tuesday of the month at 1o a.m. Always a minor jump scare.

            3. Gracie*

              Also UK – my office tests every Friday, my building where I live tests every Thursday. Super normal. Maybe it’s just a UK thing, based on who is confirming that this is common

            4. Feckless rando*

              Ah yes, the Wednesday Wee-Woos as we called it in high school. My mom calls it “it’s noon already!?”

            5. AngryOctopus*

              Weekly ones are mostly tested before most people are in the building (think 5:30/6AM), and only facilities/maintenance are there to make sure it’s working. Minimal disruption for the non-safety workers.

            6. Elitist Semicolon*

              Same, only it’s noon here. I come from a tornado-less part of the country and the first time I heard the siren test here I almost fainted, because in my old hometown, that noise means the nuclear plant has melted down.

              1. Orv*

                One town I lived in used the same sires both for tornados and for calling in the volunteer fire department. A rising/falling tone meant a fire, a steady tone meant a tornado.

              2. Neurodivergent in Germany*

                Me too.
                I grew up two towns over from a nuclear plant. I worried about that one when I was too young (or too head-in-the-clouds) to pick up on the regular testing schedule.
                Those old air raid sirens used to freak me out; now I am freaked out about not having heard them tested in years.

              3. Dog momma*

                Our nuclear plant had advertisements on the radio and TV stations the day before and the day of testing so people would know.

            7. Distracted Procrastinator*

              our sirens are on the first Saturday of the month.

              One day about 18 months ago, we were expecting severe storms in the afternoon that would pass through during normal work hours. I asked where the tornado shelter was in the building and got “huh, I don’t think we have one.” “So where do we go if there is a tornado?” “Find a spot that looks safe?” It’s been 18 months and we still don’t have a severe weather plan for the employees. I do not work for Amazon.

              1. The Provisional Republic of A Thousand Eggs*

                Where I live (Finland), all residential buildings have air raid shelters (that could presumably double as shelters from all sorts of other things). Without fail, these shelters will be filled with storage units, something like 2×2 m per apartment.

                I live in an assisted-living facility, and here it’s different. Our shelter is used for medical and sanitary supplies.

                Well, probably doesn’t matter much. Our sirens aren’t very loud anyway. (I know because they’re tested on the first Monday of each month, 12 noon, and most of the time I can hardly make them out even with the windows open.)

          3. Chas*

            Our workplace (a UK University) has a weekly test to make sure the alarm is working (which we know in advance is going to happen at 3pm on a Tuesday), but we’re not expected to leave the building unless the alarm hasn’t stopped after 30 seconds. Of course, this always leads to a moment of hesitation whenever the alarm goes off, because everyone spends 10-30 seconds thinking “is this the test or do we have to leave now?”

        3. EvilQueenRegina*

          Where I am, there’s a regularly scheduled time for the drill (usually first thing on Wednesday morning), so if it’s at that time people will shrug it off but evacuate if it happens any other time. I remember in my first year at university, the time was 2.30pm Monday for the test in our halls, and since I usually had a class then, I usually missed it and therefore forgot all about it until the time when it was revision week and I was home at the time, I was half way down the stairs before it stopped and I realised.

        4. Dust Bunny*

          We don’t, because every time someone looks at the fire alarm funny a fire truck shows up (we once had three in a row because the guys from the fire alarm monitoring company were trying to do basic maintenance. Pretty sure my supervisor passed the bills on to them), but I’m the department fire “captain” and if you don’t get your ass out to the (clearly communicated and easy to locate) designated meeting spot in the parking lot I’m coming after you with something sharp.

        5. Bagpuss*

          When I was a student, in my first year I lived in Universiaty accommodation and we had reguslar alarm tests evey Wednesdya at around mid day. They were to test the system and we were notified in advance, told it would be a could of brief rings and that we were not required to evacuate.

          Whe we did have a genuine alarm it was, inevitably, at noon one Wednesday, and almost no one evacuated. A lt of people sat in their windows ogling the firefighters as they arrived and only leftwhen people came running along the corridors to tell them to.
          (no one was hurt, it turned out to be a minor fire in the kitchen of the dtudent union bar, which was part of the same building – it was put out by the workers before it got big, but it had triggered the automatic alarms and that triggered the auto call to the fire service.

          When I was taking exams at school when i was 16 we had a fire alarm mid-exam. We were all escorted out of the exam hall onto the tennis courts and had to staf 3 feet apart while the invigilators walked up and down telling us we were still under exam conditions and not permitted to speak or move closer to each other! It turned out to be a false alarm, a younger student had set the alarm off as a joke, so after half an hour or so werwe were escorted back in and had to finish the exam, and the school had to send a report to the exam board about the disruption.

        6. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

          I’ve worked places with and without regular testing, but usually they’re scheduled for off hours (like 7 am) and we’re notified in advance.

        7. Labrat*

          My site has a special “this is a test of the system” announcment followed by mellow piano for our weekly tests. I suspect just so people don’t go right back to work in a real alarm.

      2. Not Tom, Just Petty*

        Not being contrary, but it’s funny you say that because it reminds me:
        I was in 2nd grade, brother in middle school, sister in high school.
        Bro said they had a fire drill. The went outside. I was all jealous.
        My sister said the fire alarm went off at HS, too, but nobody gets excited because nobody moves. I was scandalized, I tell you! You get up and file out.
        Eight years later, freshman year. Alarm goes off. Nobody moves unless there’s an announcement beforehand because some jackass pulls one every week. Got so we really could ignore the sound.
        It was absurd.
        They retrained us to ignore it!

        1. Amber T*

          In high school we were told that either the alarms would shoot ink and spray the person pulling it OR the cages were locked and only opened with a key that admin staff had to dissuade us from pulling it. To be honest, I was a full grown adult when I realized that neither of those were probably true.

          1. Tinkerbell*

            Actually, some fire alarm pulls do have a dye that squirts onto your hand, for this very reason :-) Not quite a “spray you in the face” scenario, but it allows for proof and prosecution if someone is abusing the system.

          2. Jessastory*

            the ink should be a thing- it’d be a badge of honor for whoever pulled the alarm in a real emergency. we had a small electrical fire at my school this year and there were students both bragging to have warned the office about it( truthfully) and claiming to have started it (falsely). the rumor mill is mighty.

      3. Nonsense*

        I actually had a fire alarm go off during my 7:30 am diff-eq midterm in college. Everyone froze and just sort of stared at each other, because waddya mean a fire alarm is actually going off in a class building, not a dorm?? And then 12 years of fire drills kicked in and we all grabbed our bags and dutifully shuffled outside. Our prof kindly dropped the midterm from our grades.

        But it wasn’t an organized effort to leave. A different class in the same building didn’t leave until they smelled burning rubber (electric fire). We really did just rely on the old habits from fire drills.

      4. RabbitRabbit*

        I’d evacuate for class building fire alarms but where I went to college, the second dorm I lived in was a large brick and concrete high-rise. We had fire alarms essentially every weekend (which can extend into Thursday nights the way college goes) at extremely late/early hours. These were generally set off by drunk students alarm-pulling on their way out of the building, but also via drunk students playing with fire extinguishers, or less commonly by late night burning popcorn in the microwave.

        You learned pretty quickly to listen to the alarm blare pattern. It would let you know what floor it was on and what wing. It got to the point where if it wasn’t your floor or an adjacent floor, a lot of students wouldn’t leave – and you’d only leave on an adjacent floor because the rumor was that the Fire Department would search rooms and fine you a ton of money if you hadn’t evacuated.

        There was one real fire that I knew of, in an adjacent building of the same construction. Someone went to class one morning and left a window open and a candle burning. The wind knocked the candle over. The room was gutted but the thick wooden door was left intact, and the cinderblock construction left the adjacent rooms just fine, maybe a little smoke seeping in.

        1. BubbleTea*

          My uni accommodation was all one building but essentially multiple blocks connected by corridors, and when the fire alarm went off in one building, a separate alarm went off in the adjacent ones. We had an awful few months where a fault kept setting off the alarms at night and not showing on the controls that the adjacent alarms were going off, so someone would have to go to the office at 2am to get it sorted.

        2. Anon for this one*

          I was once receiving an IV chemotherapy infusion (a several-hour process) at the hospital when the fire alarm went off. The pump on the IV had a battery backup, so in theory I could unplug it and walk outside, but had no idea if I should do that or wait for my nurse to disconnect the IV. A minute or so later she came in, said the alarm was for another wing of the hospital, and we should stay put.

          2. RabbitRabbit*

            I work for a hospital so the wing construction is very important – basically ours is constructed such that we have doors that automatically shut to block off wings/floor portions (and if you’re in an affected wing, you just move down the hall through a fire door to a safe region). Then if need be, you move down a floor to escape a floor with too much smoke/fire involvement, and final resort would be a full building evacuation. Fortunately the latter two have not been required!

            1. Nightengale*

              Hospitals can evacuate horizontally across fire doors! And I have actually done this. I had actually had nightmares all through medical school about someday having to evacuate a hospital.

              I worked in a tiny rehab hospital/clinic/school that was very dysfunctional but had an amazing fire protocol. If you were with a student/patient you stayed put and awaited further directions. If you were not working with someone, you went to a “manpower pool” (mostly women) and a designated staff for the area with a fluorescent vest and walkie would give directions, like to send people from the clinic area to help evacuate the school. We did a full drill evacuation once a year.

              One day I was in with a patient and the alarm went off and we stayed put as ordered. Our office manager came to get us and said we had to go. I assumed we were going outside but she led us to the cafeteria across fire doors. (I learned later it was POURING outside.) A teenaged patient had set a fire in the bathroom in our wing so there was an actual fire. The whole thing was very organized. Except for possibly my next patient who had arrived and who was running laps around the cafeteria. Since most of the people he was running around were pediatric occupational therapists though, no one really minded. I remember someone called down on a walkie about a patient whose mother was upstairs and being told the child was completely safe and in the arms of her therapist.

          3. Deborah*

            Yeah, hospitals can cover ACRES so location is important. Whenever the fire alarm goes off at mine, they tell you WHERE the alarm is pulled so you can assess your risk level.

      5. Seriously?*

        Except now, after Parkland, you have to sit in the room and wait for them to tell you if you should evacuate or not.

      6. Lunchtime Doubly So*

        I worked in secondary ed and agree that schools are very orderly in their process in how to evacuate for a fire alarm. However, one private school I worked wasn’t quite as well organized. When they walked the teachers through a mock drill, they basically just showed us what exit was nearest to use. When I asked what the procedure was for signaling a room was empty (some schools want you to close the door as a signal, some want the door to be open and have someone else come by to verify), they said, “If there’s a fire, you won’t have time to open or close a door, you just need to get out of there!” I pointed out that keeping calm during a fire alarm was probably best, especially in front of students, but they didn’t seem to agree.

        1. Lora*

          Did they tell you run out panicked? Probably not. You get out calmly and don’t bother about doors.

    2. djx*

      In most big office buildings in my city (New York) you’re not supposed to evacuate when the alarm goes off. Rather you’re supposed to be prepared to evacuate and listen for further instructions. But not head out just due to an alarm.

      Mass evacuation has risks too, and it might be the case that only specific floors are at risk whereas filling the stairs with everyone might prevent movement to safety by people who need it. Or the alarm might be for danger outside the building and instead we should stay put.

      1. Amber T*

        That does make sense. We were ~50 people in our own building that was somewhat long but all one floor. To be honest, fire safety and what to do when the alarm goes off has never been covered at our work… I was fresh out of college and used to the school drills where it’s “everyone get out in an orderly fashion, but every one get out.”

        1. djx*

          We got trainings on fire/emergency safety twice a year in both large office buildings I worked in most recently – mandated by the City (though many people did not attend).

        2. I Have RBF*

          Every place that I have worked for more than six months had at least one scheduled fire drill. We’d get notified that “there will be a fire and evacuation drill during the week of X, Y, Z. Please evacuate to your designed location.”

          In California you need to have evacuation drills once a year:

          Furthermore, CAL OSHA requires employers to conduct fire drills at least once every 12 months for all employees. The drills must be designed to familiarize employees with the sound of the fire alarm and to train them on the proper evacuation procedures.
          — https://nevasoftai.com/cal-osha-fire-drill-requirements-legal-compliance-for-businesses/

      2. New Yorker*

        Yes, at my previous office building (12-13 stories) we were only supposed to evacuate if the fire was on our floor, or the one immediately above or below us. If the alarm went off and it wasn’t for a fire, we were supposed to wait for further instructions because it might be safer to shelter in place.

        1. djx*

          Shelter in place.

          Avoid – Barricade – Confront (for active shooters or other violent people).

          All the good stuff.

        2. Oryx*

          When I lived in the dorms in college, the ours/above/below was the rule for fire alarms as well.

          1. Missa Brevis*

            God, I wish. We had so many evacuations because of people smoking in the attic. (I do not actually wish we had that rule. Our building was 100 years old and built on the site of a previous building that had burned down, the college was totally sensible to maintain an ‘everybody out’ policy.)

      3. Observer*

        In most big office buildings in my city (New York) you’re not supposed to evacuate when the alarm goes off. Rather you’re supposed to be prepared to evacuate and listen for further instructions. But not head out just due to an alarm.

        I don’t think that that is correct. Unless it’s for buildings where pretty much the only way out is the elevators and you need to find out if there are any that are safe to use.

        Or the alarm might be for danger outside the building and instead we should stay put

        I don’t know of any building where something like a fire alarm goes off *inside* a building for a situation happening *outside*.

        1. Askew*

          This is standard in my (huge) London office – there is an alarm followed by a recorded announcement that there is an incident and to stand by for further instructions. Sometimes it’s followed by instructions to evacuate, sometimes it’s followed by an announcement that the incident is over. Office is in the City which has been / still is a previous target of both terrorism and large protests

        2. zinzarin*

          You “don’t think” and “don’t know” whether another poster’s personal experience is true or not, so you came here to correct them even though you “don’t know?”

          1. Observer*

            That’s not what I said.

            What I said is that what that person said is not universal at all. Based on my experience in the same city.

            1. New Yorker*

              You said, “I don’t think that that is correct. Unless it’s for buildings where pretty much the only way out is the elevators and you need to find out if there are any that are safe to use.”

              I can tell you from personal experience it is correct for some people/buildings. The building I mentioned in my post had a stairwell and elevators. As an aside, what (read 6 or more stories) office building in NYC wouldn’t have elevators? That’s bananas. I don’t even know if it’s legal to have elevators as the only means of egress.

              We had one alarm system in the building where I worked (again 12-13 stories). If it went off the building staff would follow up with an announcement over the PA system about whether it was a drill or not. We had regular trainings for fire, shooter, etc. responses. If it’s something outside the building (e.g. chemical leak, or police activity) it may be safer to shelter in place.

        3. Maglev to Crazytown*

          Workplaces absolutely should have a notification system for things that are happening outside the building where the best option is to safely shelter in place. That is standard, and you absolutely want to ask about this at yours. Look at all the people in office buildings who have had to shelter in place for an extended period due to a chemical train derailment or facility incident even MILES away from them. People should NOT be running outside into a situation that is best handled as a shelter in place.

        4. spiriferida*

          Multi-story buildings often have different fire management strategies than smaller buildings and personal homes. Usually it’s because they’re designed to be segmented, to prevent fire from moving through the entire building and causing collapse. So yes, in something like New York City, the instructions are often to remain in place unless the place you’re in is directly threatened by fire.

          1. Seeking Second Childhood*

            Commercial fire alarm systems can be designed to take control of HVAC equipment to manage spread of smoke in a building. It’s one thing that makes segmented evacuation a safe concept.

        5. Spreadsheets and Books*

          Live and work in New York, and all of my offices have been in high rises along 6th Ave. This has been the policy in all of my buildings.

          And all of them have instructed us to evacuate to other floors, not out of the building entirely, unless something really wild is going on.

      4. LabSnep*

        Yeah, where I work now if the alarm goes off we are to, as one surly firefighter said over the comms one day like we were his kids “stay in your room” (we all laughed).

        Then the direction we evacuate depends on where the fire is, and unless the entire building is at risk it’s only two fire doors away in one direction or another (or down two floors)

      5. Springtime*

        Yes, I’ve experienced the same when working in a high-rise in my city. Floors were often evacuated to other floors, rather than out of the building entirely. And one stairwell was reserved for the use of the fire department coming up, so you had to wait to be told which one to use.

        Also, I’ll note that organizations in my area had a rash of bomb threats last year, leading to recent trainings for that type of emergency. Evacuation for a bomb threat is not the default, because it’s more likely that someone wants people out of the building for nefarious purposes (including doing harm to people as they rush out) than it is that there’s a real bomb.

      6. AngryOctopus*

        In a lot of tall buildings they only evacuate the floor with the issue and one other. A warning goes off for the whole building, but the announcement says to not evacuate unless the alarm then goes off after the announcement is done. So you’re alert to an issue, but you may not have to leave right away (fire department will come and sound the alarm generally if you all have to get out).

    3. CTT*

      So, at my office there are apparently extremely sensitive smoke detectors and we have what turn out to be false alarms quarterly. My office is also on the 19th floor, and after multiple times of being halfway down the stairs and hearing “all clear, false alarm,” it gets old! To be fair, our admins have been really trying to get people to take it seriously, and my new habit is to just leave and WFH the rest of the day. But all those false alarms do create a “boy who cried wolf” scenario that don’t have me running for the stairs.

      1. Mad Harry Crewe*

        My building forgot to tell our floor about an alarm test one time. We all grabbed our laptops and trooped down the stairs and hung out in the parking lot across the street – my coworker who lived nearby walked home to finish his day. Unfortunately, my bike was still in the office bike room and I was stuck until we knew it was safe to go back in.

      2. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

        Especially when, as in many places, the stairs are exit-only for security reasons, so you need to go all the way downstairs anyway, then wait for an elevator back up!

    4. ThatGirl*

      Heh, my office recently stared at each other as the tornado sirens were going off outside, wondering if we should do anything. (There was not a tornado near us, but there was some cloud rotation in the region.)

      As to fire alarms – my junior year of college a dorm burned down on campus. I was off-campus at an internship that semester, but just happened to be back for the weekend for my college paper’s 150th anniversary. I left to go back to the airport before the fire broke out (around 7 a.m. on a Sunday) but one of my friends was still there and had been staying in that dorm, and had to leave her suitcase and purse behind. Nobody was hurt, thankfully, but that friend had a fire alarm go off a few weeks later at the office she was interning at and you better believe she promptly gathered her belongings and exited the building.

      1. Tinkerbell*

        My sister is a museum curator. She was working a small local museum when there was a tornado warning. They herded everyone into the basement… where there was currently an exhibit on the giant tornado of 1974 that leveled most of downtown. Including a video on a ten-minute loop, complete with lots of dramatic footage of buildings being destroyed. They all got to listen to how impressively dangerous tornadoes can be SEVERAL times through before they got the all-clear!

    5. Medium Sized Manager*

      My husband is like that and it drives me nuts. Even if the building does have a lot of false alarms, why do you want to sit and listen to it?? Go outside where it’s not obnoxiously loud??

    6. JFC*

      Because it’s usually nothing. They used to go off with some regularity at my old building for either testing or false alarms. Most people can tell if there’s an actual fire by smelling smoke, seeing flames, etc. and then they’ll move. Disrupting the workday for a faulty beeping is unnecessary.

      1. Kivrin*

        This is a bit off topic but I have a friend whose condo building frequently had those “it’s really nothing” types of alarms. It went off at 6 am so he decided to get up and put on his running gear and go for a run until the alarms stopped. There was a real fire and he wasn’t allowed to go back into his unit for more than a month — and there he was in his running gear, nothing else. So I always lean into “it might really be a fire, I’m out of here.”

      2. Kara*

        You may wish to check how many people die each year because they didn’t see obvious signs of a fire until it was too late. It’s a false alarm until it isn’t.

      3. Observer*

        Most people can tell if there’s an actual fire by smelling smoke, seeing flames, etc. and then they’ll move

        This is absolutely not true. But this idea DOES lead to lives lost.

        We’ve had a couple of fires in our building. In neither case would most of our staff have known that there was a fire until it was at a point that getting out would have been much harder, and some people would probably have been trapped. Fortunately, in both cases the Fire department showed up before the fire reached staff areas, but that’s REALLY not something to depend on. Especially since some fires move very, very quickly.

      4. Sweet Fancy Pancakes*

        Except that sometimes the alarm is going off for other reasons- gas leak, for example, so you wouldn’t see anything at all.

    7. LunaLena*

      Part of is the human desire of wanting to believe that nothing is wrong, and the world is not about to change. There’s a really good book on the subject called The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes by Amanda Ripley, with each chapter studying a different of disaster (Hurricane Katrina, the Virginia Tech shooting, people getting crushed in the crowds at Mecca etc), how people reacted in each situation, and how that often determined who lived and who died. The last chapter was on 9/11, and focused on security expert Rick Rescorla, who was responsible for security at Morgan Stanley and strictly drilled everyone on how to safely evacuate the Towers regularly, to the point of even taking phones out of top exec’s hands during drills and forcing them to evacuate. As a result, almost all 2700 of Morgan Stanley’s employees survived, though Rescorla did not, since he refused to leave until everyone else had gotten out.

      When bad things happen, I think a lot of humans have a tendency to unconsciously think “Make this not be happening,” and pretending that everything’s okay is a result of that. Actually moving to evacuate would force us to acknowledge that this is indeed happening, so in a weird kind of paradox we want to stay put instead. Having other people stay put reinforces that as well.

      1. KT*

        Just checked that book out from the library! Sounds really interesting – thanks for the rec.

      2. Managing While Female*

        “though Rescorla did not, since he refused to leave until everyone else had gotten out.”

        That’s really heartbreaking.

        2. Laser99*

          Wait until you read what he and his wife told each other right before the end. I had to go outside.

      4. CowWhisperer*

        People also tend to think conservatively rather than analytically in an emergency. We tend to save mental energy by following routines. When I taught college labs, most of my students would exit the building by the entrance they used every day – despite the fact that everyone else used that exit and it took 5 minutes or more. The few who got out in a minute used the less used fire stairwell exits we showed earlier in the year.

        I firmly believe I could die in a disaster – so I run mini mental drills when out and about for fires and shootings to think about where I would exit, how I would assist my son with CP before he could self-evacuate and a fast backup plan.

        1. megaboo*

          Honestly, we need to keep aware of our surroundings. I work in a public library and you better believe I’m evacuating. I know where my exits are and I get folks out. Same thing for theaters, grocery stores, dang Disney World…maybe it sounds paranoid, but I don’t know if I’m going to freeze in an emergency. I need a plan!

          1. Angstrom*

            Yup. People tend to try to leave the same way they came in. In theaters, for example, there are almost always exits near the screen/stage, but most people go out the back even if they are sitting in front. Resturants always have an exit through the kitchen.

          2. Panicked*

            I saw a picture not too long ago showing an indoor queue for a very popular ride at Disney, where everyone was extremely close to each other. Very little room for anyone to move and both the doors leading into and out of the space were closed. The person who posted the picture said they had been stuck like that for nearly 45 minutes.

            Now Disney controls things extremely well, but they control people when they panic. I have read lots on crowd crush and all it takes is one tiny thing to set people off. When people panic, all rationality goes out the window. It’s terrifying! I took some time to learn what to do and now I make sure to know where each exit point is.

            1. megaboo*

              And what is helpful at theme parks is that there are sort of no exits when you’re in line, but places like Disney have exit points in the line where you can get out/parents leave with scared kiddos, etc. It’s just a good idea to think about it.

      5. Big Daddy Al*

        Read about Rick Rescorla in Hal Moore & Joe Galloway’s “We Were Soldiers Once, and Young.” It recounts some of Rescorla’s experiences in Vietnam. He was an amazing guy. People who knew him said that his behavior on 9/11 was absolutely what he would do – he knew no other way.

      7. Mad Harry Crewe*

        My ex and I liked the youtube channel Fascinating Horror, which does mini-documentaries about disasters (I like him because he’s very respectful of the dead and focuses on what caused the accident and what, if anything, changed afterwards. It’s not just about spectacle). In a lot of the fire stories, people died because they were looking for their families or otherwise not focused on getting out. We were both very clear – if there is a fire, I will *meet you outside* – do not come and try to find me.

      8. Insert Clever Name Here*

        The podcast Cautionary Tales has a really interesting episode (The Final Illusion of the Great Lafeyette) that talks about several fires with both successful and unsuccessful evacuations, including the Kings Cross escalator fire in 1987, and the fine line between panic and calm that has to be walked in order to actually get people to evacuate from a situation when there is imminent danger.

    8. Seashell*

      My old office had a fire alarm that frequently went off for nothing. Early on, we used to start to go out, but when it was happening at least once a week, we tended to just sit there and see if it continued.

    9. FunkyMunky*

      you’re supposed to do nothing, each office usually has a designated fire Marshal person who will direct people in evacuation.

      1. Mad Harry Crewe*

        That is not a universal statement! Do not assume that someone will tell you to leave!

        If that’s how your office’s fire safety policy works, great. It’s not been the case with any of my offices.

        1. Missa Brevis*

          My lab has designated Emergency Coordinators and Sweepers for each building, but you’re still supposed to evacuate yourself out the nearest door!

          Not sure about FunkyMunky’s office, but our EC is mostly responsible for doing headcount at the muster zone out in the parking lot and to communicate with security and/or emergency services if need be.

        2. Sunbeam+Nap=winning*

          in a lot of modern high rises, stay put for instructions is quite common – we only evacuate a couple floors above and below the fire, everyone else stays in place because it’s actually safer. But yes, this is absolutely dependent on your building, it’s not universal.

    10. kiki*

      I think if you work somewhere where there are a lot of false alarms, it becomes normal to ignore them rather than go through the hassle. I’m with you– I think it’s better to be safe than sorry. I also just like to take the excuse to stretch my legs and get outside!

    11. Spacewoman Spiff*

      I’ve always wondered this too–I haven’t really experienced it at work, but definitely at a couple apartment buildings I’ve lived in, when I’d be one of just a few people to evacuate during an alarm. Yeah, it’s annoying to jam the cat in his carrier and run through a blaring loud hallway to get outside but…that’s a lot better than being trapped in a fire if it’s a real alarm?

    12. AngryOctopus*

      Yeah, we had one go off at OldJob and people were casually going back to get their coats, etc. because “it’s cold out”. Yeah, and it snowed 15″ yesterday and THIS IS NOT A DRILL BECAUSE THEY WOULD HAVE CANCELLED A DRILL BECAUSE OF THE NARROW SNOWY SIDEWALKS, GET OUT. (Yes, I was literally yelling at people. Yes I had my coat, only because I was in my office at the time and I grabbed it on my way out. I was also wearing my ‘inside flats’ instead of snow boots.). One of the chemists had thrown something inappropriate in the biohazard trash and started a fire. We were kicked out for 3 hours because they had to do air quality tests because of what it was that he had disposed of, in addition to it burning in a box full of biohazards and the plastic bags for the biohazard trash. The Ops manager threatened that if he ever saw anyone going back for a coat again, including in a planned drill, there would be consequences, and he was not kidding around.

      1. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

        If I’m at my desk I’m grabbing my coat (back of my chair), purse, and phone (on my desk), but I’m certainly not going out of my way for them! (Or taking my laptop. It’s company property, they can worry about it.)

        1. AngryOctopus*

          Yep! Grabbed my coat because it was right there, but didn’t take bag (should have, could have gone home, I lived a 5′ walk away). Did take my phone, it was probably in my pocket anyway. So I could purchase coffee at the mall Dunkin as we waited to be cleared.

      2. Orv*

        I started grabbing my coat for alarms in my college dorm after one incident where I was stuck outside for an hour, in 10 degree weather, in only my pajamas.

    13. NobodyHasTimeForThis*

      I worked as a process engineer for a company that had very flammable and dangerous chemicals and during start up they were having issues with the fire alarms triggering for no reason. It was expensive to evacuate because everyone wore cleanroom suits so they issued a directive that all alarms were false alarms and do not evacuate.

      Uh no buddy, these are chemicals that can potentially explode the entire building – if the alarm is going I am out of there. Every time. About half of the technicians went with me. Their supervisor threatened them. I told them loudly that if they got written up they should contact OSHA. They didn’t threaten anymore but still only half the people evacuated.

      I did find out years later that they complained to my boss and he asked if they wanted to put it in writing that they demanded people not evacuate during an alarm.

      1. Hazel*

        Good luck to anyone telling a process engineer that … you plan for and around sequences of events, including ones that create hazards!

    14. Maggie*

      This terrifies me. My dad was a firefighter, and he always said that even though 95% of the time it’s a false alarm, you treat it like the real deal. Because that 5% could be a gas leak, or an electrical fire in the walls, who knows? Shortly before he started at his department, they lost an experienced firefighter when a “routine false alarm” turned out to be an electrical problem that caused a transformer to explode.

    15. thatsoundsfishy*

      We were told to “shelter in place” during fire alarms. Yeah, I don’t understand it either but I knew where the nearest window was and had a chair in mind that would break it if needed.

    16. Julia*

      I work in a library and there are always people who will not move when the fire alarm goes off. Once we made an announcement we were closing immediately due to a gas leak. People kept on asking if it was necessary and arguing when we told them the fire chief ordered the building closed.

      1. Ev*

        Lord, some library patrons. Our library building had a fire once, there were several fire trucks parked in the parking lot, and we had patrons *parking in between the fire trucks* to try to go in to pick up their holds. It took several minutes to talk people out of it.

      2. Cheshire Cat*

        My former library was in a rural county where there was an Army training camp of some sort during WW2. The camp closed but occasionally there would be stories about people finding unexploded bombs in the woods.

        One day while I was working, someone found a bomb in the woods. He *put it in his pickup truck* and drove it into town, to the National Guard armory. The nearest military base sent a bomb squad to safely take care of it.

        The police evacuated a several block radius around the armory, and the library was in the evacuation zone. We didn’t have a PA system so staff had to walk around and tell patrons that the library was closing immediately. Most people were cooperative but there was one woman waiting to use the public computers who wanted her internet time first…

    17. Bast*

      We were the opposite. At Old Old Job, the fire alarm went off at least once a month because someone burned something in the microwave/toaster. We all WANTED to leave because that place was a hellhole, so even though we knew it was likely that the alarm went off because someone burned popcorn again, we’d dutifully gather outside for as long as we reasonably could, dragging our feet when the fire department said it was safe to go back in. We would get out as fast as possible and go back in as slowly as we could.

    18. Kyrielle*

      I am with you, I am walking out when it goes off. And even if I were inclined to ignore it – which I’m not, I prefer to remain un-cooked, thanks – I still would. Do these people not get *headaches* from the noise?

      1. JustaTech*

        Seriously, ours our nauseatingly loud, even when you cover your ears.

        One lab where I worked the whole building had a fire drill (announced well in advance) and the bakery downstairs promised everyone who evacuated a cookie (really big good cookies) and they still only got about 15% of people to leave. And probably half of those people were people from my lab who were herded out by me and the lab manager.

    19. BookishMiss*

      I worked in a call center, and they were very “if the fire alarm goes off, you end the call and gtfo.”

      One of my coworkers missed the “hang up” part and put a caller on hold for a fire drill. Caller was still there when we got back, and Coworker has become legend.

  6. cindylouwho*

    Similar to point 3: active shooter in the building, locked down, lights off, and my coworker kept opening our door to go to another room where we worked, then coming back into our room (he had a key) to go about his daily work…

    2. Shirley Keeldar*

      My first thought was—what. WHAT.

      My second was—oh yeah, I tend to react to panic like that, by doing weirdly normal things. Wandering around cleaning this or that, often. I think my brain finds it soothing? Look, I am dusting the mantel. Nothing really bad can be happening if I’m dusting the mantel.

      (I hope in a dreadful situation like that described here I would overcome the impulse! And if not, full permission to tackle me.)

    4. milkdudsnotdrugs*

      In my opinion, this should be a fireable offense. He was literally leading a murderer to his coworkers location. You are all very lucky he was not spotted. This is egregious, reckless, shocking and just insane. I would struggle to ever trust or work alongside with someone so willing to flippantly risk my life.

      1. Kevin Finnerty*

        I agree with this. I used to work in a building that was considered a very likely target for a mass shooting and… yes, this should be fireable.

    5. Ink*

      I have a book called The Unthinkable about how we react to emergency situations, and this is apparently pretty common. Kind of like how denial is a stage of grief, people kind of short circuit and it can be hard to snap them out of it into an appropriate response.

      Hard second to the tackling though, I’m sorry you had to have an extra layer of stress added to an already awful situation.

  7. call center trauma*

    “At a call center job, there was a tornado that touched down just a few miles away and they refused to let people off the phones to seek shelter. Another time someone pulled the fire alarm and no one moved. They just kept on taking calls because they would get in trouble or face getting fired if they did not take phone calls. A third time people were getting sick. There was an odd smell throughout the center. People were allowed to leave but they did get docked a half point. Someone called the fire department because it could have been a gas leak. Instead of evacuating, they kept everyone working and the fire department walked around with some sort of meter thing. We never found out what it was.”

    I’m pretty sure I worked at this call center and was eventually “promoted” to the front desk. What this meant was that I would get .25 bump per hour to man the phones for the receptionist when she took lunch (a whole other story). OSHA called regularly.

    If this is the same call center, the receptionist called the district manager “Daddy Bear” and he called her “Baby Bear”. I was twenty-three and felt the ick but didn’t know I could report this at the time. Wish I had ask a manager.

      1. call center trauma*

        One time the district manager brought her a stuffed bear. They would chat on teams (there was a general “receptionist account” so I could read it) and call each other this where everyone could see. Baby bear eventually left for another job.

        Baby bear was a great example of how not to behave at work. She would tell me and the other “relief” person about faking pregnancies to keep her boyfriend from breaking up with her and once gave me a detailed explanation of 50 shades of grey.

        I’ve used this as an example now for younger colleagues I work with now–that if they feel the ick–or something makes them feel uncomfortable that HR exists for these reasons.

    2. I'm just here for the cats!*

      That was mine. Were you in the cheese state in a city known for its octoberfest and world largest beer cans?

      1. call center trauma*

        It was the same call center.

        I also recall the bathrooms. They were covered with so many bodily fluids. I worked there more than a decade ago–but still have nightmares about working there. It was so abusive.

          1. call center trauma*

            There was so much wrong with that call center. I sometimes would go on the reddit, and read about COVID times (I hope you weren’t there for that). Working there really shaped my management style and I hope to never have anyone that works for me feel that way.

            Also clean bathrooms not covered in every type of bodily fluid.

            1. Miette*

              On behalf of, IDK, humanity? I am so sorry you both had to work at such an awful place.

              1. call center trauma*

                The call center had to maintain certain levels of call center employees because they performed a very specific service that received federal funds. If it dipped in numbers or quality they would get fined. Basically, this meant that a few people would get paid a ton of money, and that admin did not care about the folks doing the actual work.

                There was a lot wrong with it. You’d get scored on how many calls you could take and get a slip everyday that would tally the times and length you went to the bathroom. Sups would walk around and if they caught you reading or doing anything else on a call, would write you up so it felt like someone was watching you the entire time.

                Mostly, there were times in which, as the original poster writes, where you really had to question personal safety due to inclement weather.

                Once a year they’d give you an extra ten minute break for a holiday potluck. This was generous.

                1. I'm just here for the cats!*

                  I don’t think we are talking about the same call center. Maybe in the same city. Mine worked for company that answered CS phones for Verizon wireless and so we did not get federal funding. I worked from 2014 until they closed in 2017.

                  I’m shocked that there were 2 places that were exactly alike though! However, I know people who bounced around to all the call centers, so it’s not surprising.

              1. call center trauma*

                Yeah, this place was still going. Same area. I think there was a lot of cross pollination.

                The thing that sucked about this call center was that there was a weird human experiment going on where if you were management you had a lot of power. I heard so many supervisors say the worst thing about their subordinates. Nothing to do about it either.

                The economy was really tough when I worked there so leaving wasn’t really an option for a lot of folks working there.

      2. PlainJane*

        Oh hey, I think I know this call center. I had friends who worked there! (I’m also in the land of cheese, Oktoberfest, and giant 6-packs).

      3. Chirpy*

        Ok, now I’m really glad I heard enough rumors about that place that I didn’t apply there despite several people suggesting it, because I’m pretty sure I know which one it is.

  8. TappedOut*

    I was a counselor at a summer camp for a global mega church that did not want to spend a penny more than it had to even if it compromised camper safety. They got a deal on a plot of land for the girl’s camp with NO walled buildings (just porta potties). When a tornado touched down, they made us gather all the girls in an amphitheater and “scream hymns to still the storm”. Come to find out the Boy Scouts in the congregation were in paid for cabins while all of our possessions were removed from the earth.

    2. CanadianNarwhal*

      That’s horrendous! When I was younger I worked at a camp when a tornado touched down nearby. Thankfully on the weekend when there were no kids there, but still plenty of staff. Also thankfully our camp was fine (the trailer camp next door, not so much). But our camp had no buildings with good basement areas for shelter. Within a couple of years they’d started building new cabins which all had basements, and regularly practiced tornado drills.

    4. Albatross*

      Oh dear. My summer camp had a tornado incident at one point – I didn’t find out the full details until later, only that the counselors woke us all up and told us we needed to move into the basement of the building. I mostly remember the only entertainment we had handy was a jumbo pack of coloring sheets clearly meant for small children, and my group was mostly people in the high school credit program, so we spent a couple hours laughing at the coloring sheets. (I have since started including a deck of playing cards in every evacuation kit I make. It’s small, it’s light, and it’s something to do.)

  9. Anon for this*

    ***Mentions 9/11
    My company holds a 30 story building in an east coast city near one of the alternate crash sites. The evacuation was left to individual departments and some people didn’t get word to leave until hours after other floors had been told to clear out. There was no central notice given.
    (after this, emergency plans kicked up 10 fold and there is a central plan that has yearly test runs.)

    2. Clementine*

      I always try to remember that if there’s any unusual event (like a plane crashing into a building), I am giving myself permission to be a “slacker” and just leave, even if not directly affected. I’m haunted especially by the people who could have been saved had they evacuated before plane #2 hit.

      1. Not Tom, Just Petty*

        Honestly, same. We heard the news before any official announcement from coworkers who had signed up for CNN updates that would pop up all day. I flashed back to my first boss at my first job in a 90 year old, 36 story university building: “you hear an alarm, you get up and leave. You’ll know the way because you will see me. Trust yourself and don’t wait for anyone to approve leaving if you think you are in danger.”
        It had been about 6 years, and I put it to use.

      2. AVP*

        I know a man, retired now, who was a manager on one of the upper floors in the second building. The minute the first plane hit, his bosses were like, oh, let’s wait and see what the building management says, etc etc. He said nope, forced his team to leave immediately via the stairs, and they were on a ferry to NJ by the time the second plane appeared.

        The man is very, very rich from his financial career and honestly he deserves it!

        1. Lizy*

          It’s amazing how many literal lives can be saved by one person saying “nope – I’m gonna do the right thing”

          1. Artemesia*

            It just breaks my heart to think about those people who evacuated from the second building and then went back up to their offices when told to do so and died.

    3. Elle*

      I was in lower Manhattan on 9/11 and heard some doozies from the day and the months following. We were required back in the office two weeks after, blocks from the site and the site was visible from our windows. Not only were we breathing in the orange dust that was always floating around we were constantly traumatized by the trucks of debris going by. My bosses didn’t understand what the big deal was and lost about half the staff in the months following due to trauma, lack of compassion and feeling ill from the debris in the air.

      1. Gila Monster*

        Before we met, my husband worked next door to the WTC. After the first tower was hit, his manager refused to let the team leave. They had to return to the main offices within a week of 9/11, and he had mild respiratory issues for many years that started then.

    4. Seashell*

      I was in a tall building in lower Manhattan on 9/11. We left after the second plane hit. We weren’t sure what to do or if to officially sign out, but our supervisor said to just go. She had been there during the 1993 WTC bombing and said they all just left then. We took the elevator down, which may have been a safety mistake, but we were more than 30 floors up and just getting out ASAP made sense at the time.

      1. Elle*

        We took the elevator as well! My boss couldn’t understand why people were panicking. Prior the second plane the finance director was walking around telling everyone to get back to work.

  10. HS Teacher*

    I think maybe teaching in a public high school in an old building can skew your sense of normal, but recently during an all staff meeting at my school, a swarm of termites was in one part of the auditorium. The people sitting near the swarm (which included me) were told they could move to another area, but the meeting continued on for the next hour. At the end of the meeting our principal announced that the auditorium would be closed from now on until further notice. I came home and took a hot shower, ew!

    1. GirlBob*

      Yeah, I feel like if you have been through An Event in your past, it probably effects how you react to potential Events occurring around you. I went through one, got PTSD the whole nine yards, don’t recommend. Even before, I was always a bit of an “okay, let’s go…” type, but I could be influenced out of it if I was told not to and nobody else seemed to care. But now? I’m like “RIGHT LET’S GO, YES I MEAN YOU LET’S GO EVERYONE OUT I AM NOT PLAYING”. I’m getting out as quickly and safely as possible and taking as many people with me as I reasonably can. I don’t wait.

    2. Sam P.*

      Heck, going to school in an old building can skew your sense of normal too. I went to elementary school in a building that turned 50 when I was in 5th grade (we all got cake!) and that building had Problems. Like lead water pipes that spewed black water after breaks (but just run it for 30 seconds before you let 30 6-year-olds drink it, you’ll be fine!) and multiple occasions of ceiling tiles falling from the leaky roof. All of that was normal. You didn’t walk under the tiles that had weird spots, if you could you brought a water bottle from home.

      When I got to middle and high school and was talking with friends from different elementary schools, they were horrified. I never really thought twice about how bad my elementary school was before that.

      1. Wolf*

        In my school, you had to check with everyone on the whole floor before you plugged in a TV. If another room on the same floor made coffee, or ran another device, the breaker would turn off for the entire floor.

      2. Jessastory*

        I had to evacuate my classroom last time it rained because the ceiling was leaking bad enough I was afraid the ceiling tiles would collapse. who knows how long the leak has been there previously unnoticed, but once I said we needed to evacuate, the custodial team got it fixed within the next two hours.

  11. Anonymous vet*

    I work in a vet clinic where the building has been “condemned” by the owning company- meaning they won’t repair anything since they want the money to go to whatever new building they find. The roof has collapsed in the lobby, and exam room, and X-ray (3 different incidents). A lead wall fell on a pregnant assistant. I got called in to “fix things” when there was an isoflorane leak mid surgery (the room was full of a toxic gas that causes headaches, passing out and miscarriages). Instead of turning the gas off they called me in to figure it out- while pregnant.

    2. Mastermind*

      Probably when they required everyone to report to work the day Hurricane Ian, a category four storm that went through Florida in 2022, because “one of the truck lines wasn’t closing” (it has no office or facility in our area and only like one truck per week coming for pickups) and “we can work in the morning before it gets bad” (storm left several dead and thousands of people out of power by the end of the day) and none of the spineless owners wanted stand up.

      We sell wholesale flowers. Needless to say I didn’t work that day.

    3. BryOake*

      Oh my god. I’ve never hoped more that the company suffered some kind of consequences or backlash for this. Were you/the assistant okay?

    4. Meganly*

      Wait, you still work there?? I would be calling OSHA and health & safety inspectors every day until the building gets condemned for real.

    6. The OG Sleepless*

      OMG. When there is an iso leak, you close off the room and don’t go near it. That goes double for pregnant employees. I do not mess around with iso.

      1. Me*

        isoflurane is an anesthetic gas. it puts people to sleep. it is used daily in operating rooms everywhere

        1. Snax*

          … yes, but you can see why a leak of uncontrolled iso being dumped into a room mid-surgery versus someone trained administering it in controlled, contained amounts aren’t comparable, right?

        2. The OG Sleepless*

          …yes, that’s my point? Not sure what you’re saying. I’ve worked with isoflurane for decades. The situation being discussed is an isoflurane *leak.*

        3. spiriferida*

          And a gas that is safe at measured concentrations administered by an anesthesiologist is not safe when there is a leak leading to unknown concentrations in the space, especially when its literal medical purpose is causing unconsciousness, so yes, an evacuation of the room would be an appropriate response. Especially for a pregnant person.

        4. Hrodvitnir*

          People really be forgetting that anaesthesia is controlled poisoning. Remove the “controlled” and we have a problem.

          (Isofluorane is one method used for culling experimental animals FYI, though not the most common.)

    7. question*

      Is.. anyone finding a new rental and breaking the lease? That sounds horrific.

    8. cindylouwho*

      We also have an iso vaporizer that has the wrong scavenger attached to it, and it just hasn’t been fixed for 5 years….

  12. theothermadeline*

    I was in grad school studying theater management on a very old campus. Due to the nature of theater and the number of venues we operated, we had a dedicated health and safety director. When we were finally allowed back into buildings in the fall of 2021, I was talking to this person near-constantly making rehearsal and performance protocols for us to re-start productions.

    The building with my office in it was slightly notorious for false smoke alarms, especially during load-in or load-out processes. One day, I was on a Zoom call in the office, and the fire alarm went off again. Forgetting that I wasn’t muted I looked to a coworker and said “Oh god, do you think we really need to leave?” and the health and safety director I was on Zoom with answered “YES!”

  13. Guest*

    Before my workplace moved, our building had craptastic security and our grandboss at the time refused to improve it. Multiple people, myself included, had our purses stolen and one day a bunch of equipment walked. I had to work alone at times and took to locking the crash bars on some doors that led to a shared hallway with a bicycle chain. Caught two guys rattling those doors one time and they took off running when they saw me.

    1. A Significant Tree*

      Better (appearing) security isn’t always the answer. I work in a secure building: guard at the one entry gate to the parking lot, badge entry or guards + metal detector + sign-in sheet with the sponsor’s name to get into the building…

      Story 1: after the fact, all of us with space in the building were notified by email that a non-badged, non-escorted individual was allowed to roam the first floor *filming* the area. TWICE. No follow-up on why that was allowed, who it was, what they were doing – nothing.

      Story 2: happened to a colleague – the building is still very much empty most of the time. Colleague (a woman) was on a floor that appeared to have only one other person (a man) working at the time. Colleague did a walk around the floor to stretch her legs and passed this person. A short time later, colleague stopped in the rest room and immediately was face to face with the man, who was exposing himself. Colleague rushed out of there, down the stairs, and reported it to the guards at the front desk. Who … did nothing except take the report. Colleague followed up with a call to Security who … implied that they couldn’t do anything because the individual may have been using their gender-preferred restroom, despite all evidence to the contrary (trans-people do not as a general rule bare themselves outside of a stall and specifically at another person).

    1. There's a podcast for that*

      If you have enjoyed I’d really recommend the final segment of the “Well there’s your problem” podcast (also on YouTube) which they call ‘Safety Third’. Eye-wateringly stressful stuff though.

  15. Miss Chanandler Bong*

    I worked at an open concept building. The central lobby was in the center of the building, and the upper floors were on the outside of the building, so you had overhangs over the lobby. The first year we were there, they decided to hang Christmas decorations over the rails above the lobby. The IT help desk, where you could walk up, was directly under an overhang. A Christmas ornament, one day while I was standing at the help desk, fell directly onto the (thankfully empty) chair next to me and shattered.

    They just swept up the pieces without checking that the other ornaments wouldn’t do the same thing. We had several falling ornaments.

  16. Dawn*

    I worked for a call centre which had a phone script agents were told that they had to read out if the building were on fire before we could disconnect the call and, you know, flee for our lives.

    Putting aside the fact that it existed at all, it was also not nearly as short as one would expect it to be…

    1. Dawn*

      Oh yes, I forgot. That fire safety plan, aside from the script (which I still think was the most egregious part) also had a flow chart that started with: “If a fire is found: Remain calm! Contact the Acting Manager and they will determine if: 1) Fire is controllable 2) Fire is uncontrollable 3) Remain Calm!!!”

      It talked about how important remaining calm was to saving lives in an emergency, but also stressed that you should never leave the building until instructed to do so by management.

      1. GirlBob*

        Oh no oh no oh no “go get a manager to see if this fire is actually a problem” oh no oh no

      2. Kate, short for Bob*

        Search “IT Crowd Moss Fire” on YouTube to see this exact scenario

        1. Dawn*

          “I’ll just put this over here with the rest of the fire.”

          Not that I’m real keen on supporting Graham Linehan’s work these days, but that scene was excellent.

      3. Artemesia*

        People are oddly passive in the face of danger. I have been in two situations where people just stood around while a fire burned asking each other ‘is that a fire?’ — in one case I grabbed an extinguisher and put it out — it was a brush fire behind the building I was living in.

        IN the second case a car was burning on our street and people just stood around; I called the fire department.

    3. purple monkey & bubblegum tree*

      I would be so horrified if a call center agent ever started reading me a script like that.

    4. Kara*

      Is it wrong that I’m giving them kudos for at least letting their employees hang up and leave? I feel like the bar here is so low that it’s embedded in the floor.

      1. Dawn*

        This might have been because we were in Canada, so they at least had to pay lip service to the concept of keeping their employees alive and well.

    5. I'm just here for the cats!*

      This reminds me of the 2nd call center type work i did after the horrible one at the top. Luckily this one took safety seriously. The fire alarm went off and we all evacuated. I was on a call with a client who was arguing with me and wanted a supervisor. I’m sure he thought this was some ploy, but I told him that the alarms were going off and I had his info and someone would call him back. he kept arguing with me and wanted to know when someone was going to call him. I said I don’t know, I guess as long as the building doesn’t burn down, it will be in a few hours.
      guess what, when the supervisor did call him back, he never answered!

      1. Dawn*

        I worked the “callback” side of things for quite a while at my last job and it is sooooo normal that people don’t answer after requesting a callback, or they answer and say “I never asked you to call me,” etc etc

        People used to call one of my employers and they were literally asking us for important information and when we called them back they’d assume we were telemarketers and do horrible things to us. Even though they’d reached out to us in the first place!

        1. goddessoftransitory*

          Our drivers get this SO MUCH. A customer will request a call, and then not answer when the driver’s at the door with their food because “I didn’t know the number.” Dude, this was what you asked for!

    6. OrigCassandra*

      Where is RP Tyler when you need him? “Young MAN your CAR is on FIRE and you are still IN IT!”

      2. Good Enough For Government Work*

        I shall write to the Tadfield Advertiser about it immediately!

  17. Yes And*

    Minor earthquake in a city not accustomed to earthquakes. The general manager screams, “Everybody out now!” And we all dutifully troop down the 12 flights of stairs (because we know better than to get in an elevator during an earthquake). After about 20 minutes of milling about the sidewalk watching the city go about its business around us, we all turn around and troop back up the 12 flights of stairs (in case of aftershocks? idk).

    Some time that afternoon, it occurs to someone to google what you should do in an earthquake in an urban setting. They find an article that leads off with something to the effect of, first thing you do, DO NOT GO OUTSIDE.

    1. djx*

      “DO NOT GO OUTSIDE”

      Depends on how good the buildings are where you live. Where I live (NYC and probably most of the US), yeah, don’t got out. In places with poor buildings/poor code enforcement go outside and get away from tall buildings.

      1. not nice, don't care*

        In Seattle most of the earthquake retrofitting done on older buildings involves little metal brackets installed to keep suspended ceilings from coming down. Not much structural work at all. One of my former spouses worked for a company doing the retrofitting, so I know this to be true. So glad I moved to an area with very few tall buildings.

        1. dePizan*

          That’s terrifying. I’m in Oregon, and my work is in a historic building owned by the state. We just went through a major earthquake retrofitting where they put in base isolators and other substantial measures so now our building won’t (hopefully) collapse around our ears when the big quake comes….

        2. PresidentBob*

          I, too, live in Seattle and spent much of my life in Charleston, SC. Both of these cities are a combination of retrofitting/fixing buildings after a previous earthquake. Both of these cities will fall over when the next one happens because of it. Both are due for one.

          1. Artemesia*

            I was in an old building in Seattle in 1964 or so when there was a big earthquake — my book cases dumped their books, the chandelier in the staircase was swinging and bounding into the walls –you can believe we got our rears out of their and stood in the middle of the street.

          2. goddessoftransitory*

            I was in the Borders Books downtown when that last one hit–had to yell at the top of my lungs at the customers who immediately headed towards the glass doors and giant, plate glass windows to get the hell away from there and under something solid.

            1. Dogbythefire*

              I was working downtown (Seattle, right?) when plate glass did fall. I can’t remember exactly what building, but I think it was maybe the Borders building? Wasn’t it Pike and 4th or something? That was scary, but I don’t think anyone was hit.

      2. Orv*

        The problem with going outside is pieces of the building facade are likely to fall on you. Facade collapses are way more common than whole buildings coming down, at least in the US.

    2. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

      It really, really depends. Someplace with good earthquake codes? Stay put. A non-earthquake area? Maybe get clear. (I am in the DC area, and had moved from California shortly before the 2011 earthquake. I was working in Alexandria, VA at the time and my thought process was “Earthquake. Not big. No earthquake codes. I’m getting under my desk now”. The best part is I was on the phone with my wife who was in Maryland at the time, so I got to say “Oh wow, do you feel the earthquake?” just in time for her to say “earthquake? what…oh, earthquake!”

    3. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain*

      Yes and no. Do not run outside while the earthquake is happening — shelter in place under a table/desk, away from windows, if the table moves, hold on and move with it. The old info about doorways being a safe spot has proven to be false. I’m in So. California so we just got a minor earthquake yesterday lol. Yesterday, no one evacuated. We are supposed to evacuate once the shaking has stopped — get to a safe location away from potential falling debris, trees and power lines.

    4. Cormorant*

      I mean, don’t go outside while things are still shaking, but earthquakes can cause fires due to broken gas lines and whatnot, and you never know if things are going to collapse later due to damage from the quake, so it’s safer to get clear of buildings once it’s safe to do so.

      I’m in California and we did earthquake drills in school regularly. It was always “under your desk until the shaking stops, then go outside until you’re given the all clear.”

      Of course, in reality, if it doesn’t shake hard enough to knock things off the shelves, we just kinda shrug and then go back to what we were doing.

    5. Ace in the Hole*

      Don’t go outside while it’s actually shaking – the most common injuries in earthquakes are from people falling down or tripping, second most common is being hit with debris like broken windows or objects falling off shelves. So during shaking, duck and cover.

      After it stops shaking, go outside ASAP until you can be sure the building is safe. It could have been structurally compromised by the shaking, meaning if there are aftershocks (second round of shaking) it could come down on you.

  19. AwesomeSauce*

    my husbands old employer refused to accommodate anyone during a state wide power outage and weather emergency, because SHE worked from her car (presumably on) in a closed garage (!!!!) so she expected all the lower level staff to do so as well.

    1. AwesomeSauce*

      They do work on computers, so electricity on some level is necessary for the job. This same company went back to mandatory in person work April 2020, when even some essential workers weren’t back in person yet, let alone jobs like theirs that can be done 100% remotely

        2. Zombeyonce*

          I’m just going to assume the fumes were affecting her management decisions and how she got some fresh air.

    3. Liane*

      Similar – but minus the CO poisoning risks – happened some years ago (pre-COVID) to a friend. At the time, Friend’s position was in-office. The state was shut down/no driving except emergency vehicles by the governor’s order. So of course the highest-ranking people at his office ordered “everyone [who isn’t us] must come in or be written up!” while they stayed home. I believe Friend stayed home anyway.
      Thankfully, the Sucky Bosses’ orders and write ups were cancelled by their bosses who worked elsewhere. Friend later told me that when his company did its annual December winnowing (so months later), Sucky Bosses were laid off.
      Thankfully

      1. Grizabella the Glamour Cat*

        That (the sick bosses getting laid off) is what I call a happy ending!

        1. Grizabella the Glamour Cat*

          That was supposed to be SUCKY bosses (stupid autocorrect)!

  20. Furious Giles*

    I don’t know if this qualifies as egregious, but I am hopping mad about it, so here we are:

    My building houses the materials (MT) offices, where my desk is, and the administrative (AD) offices. Once spring hits, it is never below 80 at my desk. Right now, my thermometer reads 84, and a couple of summers ago it hit 89 a couple of times. The AC just does not work well on the materials side of the building… but it works fine on the AD side (our lounge/bathrooms are on that side, so I routinely get up sweating and pass AD workers wearing sweaters). For four or five months out of the year, it is stultifying in my department, and what the MT staff gets is a shrug and a “Well, not much we can do about it, it’s cool everywhere else in the building.”

    Our satellite offices get closed for HVAC failures left, right, and center, but here at MT it simply does not happen.

    1. Percysowner*

      I worked in an old courthouse that had steam heat and no air conditioning. I was in the law library and we had the top floor to ourselves. The librarian told the county that books had to have temperature control and got them to install AC in our floor. We were so popular during the summer. This did not help the heating situation. In winter the heat was turned off over the weekend, but since steam heat takes a while to ramp up we would come into offices that were around 40 degrees on Mondays. The flip side of that was once the heating system DID ramp up, you couldn’t regulate the temperature. Tuesdays were getting comfortable, Wednesday mornings were really warm and by Wednesday afternoon we were throwing the windows open. To add to the problem, the handles to the steam radiators had broken off, so you could not turn them off by hand. My boss bought a pair of vice grips and on Wednesday mornings we would run around turning the radiators off using the vice grips. On Monday morning we ran around turning the radiators ON using the vice grips. Eventually the entire building was renovated, mostly because the weight of our books were too much for the floor to hold and we sued to get it fixed. For some reason, most of the courthouses in our state put the law libraries on the top floor and never even considered that books weigh a ton and stress the supports.

      I will also say the judges were so happy we sued. They had ceilings dropping plaster in the court rooms and were blowing fuses with the window air conditioners. The County Commissioners didn’t want to do anything because how could they explain to the taxpayers that millions of tax dollars would be spent to “pamper” judges and county employees. Then the big, mean library sued them and won and what could they do. They also decided that this meant they could finally renovate all the county buildings, because they sold the upgrades as being tied to the forced courthouse renovation.

        1. follow-up*

          OK, I see it says “the library sued” – but isn’t the library part of the county? How could it sue itself?

    2. Beth*

      My first job out of grad school, the exec offices had climate control. Our area did not. I wore a coat and winter hat and fingerless mitts at work, and kept an electric heater (strictly against code) at my feet.

      I do recall the one time I had to go to the offices to ask something, and the prez looked up at me as I entered and said “Oh, is it cold in your area?”

    3. Teach*

      Yes, isn’t that remarkable? I work in a school where our hallway regularly loses heat in the winter and AC in the summer…but the admin suite, which is on our hallway, is always nice and comfy! I’ve taken kids in there to warm them up.

  21. I'm a Pepper*

    When I taught high school, it was a year after our area had seen a terrible flood, so all the school buildings were under construction and we had to teach in these long “pod” buildings instead. They were mostly okay except that they were clearly not meant to be used as long and as intensely as we were using them. Some of them developed a weird mold or something similar, some classrooms had an intensely chemical smell, and many teachers started getting regular headaches or even getting sick more often. The school DID largely try to figure things out or move people around as this was happening, but it was such a mess. The pods deteriorated quite a lot in the time I was there – once I and half my students got trapped in our classroom for several hours because the door handle completely broke. We were debating evacuating through the windows while maintenance tried to get the door open. I do not miss the pods (or, frankly, working in a public school).

    1. Sam P.*

      I remember being in portable/pod classrooms a lot in middle school particularly. Those things always had the weirdest smells and horrible temperature control- I can’t imagine being stuck inside of one.

  22. I'm an NP now*

    I worked at an urgent care center with two bathrooms. One day the toilets backed up to the point that there was standing water (and whatever else) in the hallway – instead of closing the office for the day, or even telling patients we could not perform any tests that would require a urine sample, we were encouraged to walk patients down the block to the neighboring ER (which we were not affiliated with) and have them use the bathroom there to collect samples if needed.

    1. DramaQ*

      I had this happen at my former workplace. TWICE! The first time the city shut off the water with no indication of when it would be back on. We were told to keep working and use the gas station bathroom three blocks away if we needed it. The second time we had literal raw sewage backing up into our lab. We were told to keep working anyhow. It ended up with one person stuck in the lab area the rest of us stuck in our office area because otherwise we’d be tromping raw sewage all over the lab. The poor guy stuck in the lab area had to do all the work and was texting me for help. I decided when I was looking for a new job that a #1 dealbreaker on my list was going to be non-functioning toilets after that.

      2. Tris Prior*

        This happened to me too!

        Our toilets backed up – during a public event, no less – and it was determined that the plumbing in our small building had not been installed correctly. Like, basic drainage principles were not followed AT ALL.

        We continued the event (!!) and the company stayed open. We got to know the employees in the subway next door very well as we kept going in to use their bathroom for the next week. Fortunately they didn’t care if we did.

  23. We still use so much paper!*

    My ex-husband worked in a building that had been red tagged (no occupancy allowed) after an earthquake. His boss had bribed FEMA with office space to let them back in. The spouses found out when the boss let it slip at a company dinner. The silence was deafening and the dinner ended quickly.

    1. Kaden Lee*

      I’m impressed the bribe worked given FEMA knew how crappy the office conditions were since they were the ones able to lift the order.

  24. NameRequired*

    When I was in high school our drills were always 3rd period, which annoyed my math teacher so much that he sent us all to the corner for an active shooter drill and then kept teaching to a group of teenagers huddled on the floor.

    2. NothingIsLittle*

      I’m sorry, but that’s hilarious. As long as you knew it was a drill, I completely understand; it’s not like you’re doing anything productive with that time.

      1. NameRequired*

        In hindsight, the image of him continuing to explain complex calculus to a group of teenagers sitting on the floor is hilarious. At the time, we were just annoyed that we didn’t get a break from calculus even for active shooter drills.

      2. New Jack Karyn*

        Yeah, those drills are announced in advance. They don’t want kids freaking out over a drill.

    3. Tinkerbell*

      My senior year, we had bomb threats approximately every other morning for about a month. Some kid was leaving them as a message on the office answering machine and the secretary kept not finding them until about five minutes after first period started , but by the second week we all brought our keys, coats, backpacks, etc. to class because we knew we’d probably be sent to the gym for the next hour. (We were dubious that the bomb squad REALLY cleared the whole gym so quickly every morning…) Anyway, it eventually got to the point we begged our AP Biology teacher to just hold class in the corner of the gym instead, to save time.

  25. Awlbiste*

    I can’t describe the super egregious ones without outing myself (I think my boss reads this blog), but there have been SO MANY. I guess the most anonymous one is that he refused to enforce our state mask mandate during early COVID and when an employee tipped off our state OSHA, our boss lied about it. That was very frustrating. Employees have reported violations to state OSHA several times and nothing ever comes of it.

    1. Dawn*

      …. does he read AAM just so he can do the opposite of whatever Alison says, or..?

    2. JustaTech*

      If it makes you feel better, my VP did that too, so there’s more than one of them out there, so it’s clearly not *you* writing in to AAM, it’s someone else.
      lolsob.

  26. HSE Compliance*

    Oh good, my favorite topic!!!

    1. Caught the facilities team storing ammonia and bleach together in a cabinet, mostly uncapped and jauntily stacked. Several times. Also in a flammables cabinet, which is not where they needed to be either.

    2. Had an intern take a nap behind pallets in a semi trailer parked at a dock, where we were going to start loading more pallets.

    3. Audited a facility that was using the “sniff check” to check for a chlorine leak instead of the standard ammonia test.

    4. Audited a facility where they had electric carts (on a track, like a tram car thing) moving material and they had a person welding on the line without any sort of barrier, LOTO, or anything.

    5. Audited a facility that made RVs, where they were coating sheets of plywood with glue by standing on the lip of the tank and dropping in sheets…. by hand. Shirtless, mind you.

    6. Multiple instances of people refusing to leave their desk for severe weather, fire, etc. drills (that were not announced, they just said feck it for whatever reason). And then got crabby when they got verbal discipline.

    7. The security desk sent away someone who wandered into work incredibly drunk…. not by calling them a taxi home or anything, just let them leave in their own vehicle.

    8. At a large heavy manufacturing facility with heavy parts, we had someone decide at their workstation on the floor that their feet were too hot and they took off their steel toe boots to walk around in their socks.

    9. While using a multiton crane hoist, got into a fistfight with another employee and left the hoist in a huff with the load attached and suspended.

    10. Got confused and drank disinfectant out of the dispenser thinking it was water (??? it was labeled??? and also purple??? and there was an actual water sink next to it???). Did not get help or let anyone know until quite some time later when complaining of a stomachache.

    I could go on for a very, very long time.

      1. HSE Compliance*

        Yup!! Came in to the HSE office like 2? 3? hours later saying he had a stomachache and wasn’t sure why. Standard question is to ask what they’ve ate or drank that day and his description of what he drank out of (by MOUTH, by the way – direct on the spigot itself) tipped us off.

    2. whimbrel*

      “jauntily stacked” has me rolling, thank you for that!

      The second one makes me think of Staplerfahrer Klaus…

        1. HSE Compliance*

          This person was also walking around on grating for this. I was impressed that walking around on grating was more comfortable for them than wearing their safety shoes.

    3. CDL Anon*

      1 reminds me of our prior “flammables cabinet” which was just a plain cabinet with a “Flammable” sign taped to the front of it. Apparently the prior safety director had given this the a-okay. (We have an actual flam locker now, thankfully.)

      Since we’re a CDL training school, 2 is an absolute Y I K E S from me.

      1. I went to school with only 1 Jennifer*

        I only know CDL as California Drivers License….?

        1. Hlao-roo*

          I think in this context is “commercial driver’s license” and CDL Anon has a higher appreciation for how safe/unsafe loading pallets into a semi trailer is than the average person.

      2. HSE Compliance*

        We had a CDL driver forget to use a brake. Not the parking brake – which wasn’t used either – but like….. not put in park? somehow? and let the trailer go across the public road and hit another business’s sign. This was for some reason a very nonchalant report.

    5. Former EHSS "lead" aka "Ignored"*

      Yes. This is the content I came here for. I too spent some time as an EHSS auditor / consultant. When you get us together over a couple of drinks (alcoholic or NA, NBD)… you can learn a lot about what NOT to do!!

      1. HSE Compliance*

        Not only am I active HSE (in the field for about 10 years), prior to that I did unsafe housing inspections for complaints like hoarding, drugs, lack of sanitary systems, etc.

        I have so, so many stories.

    6. HSE Compliance*

      Oh! Another fun one! At an ethanol facility, when I was doing a spot check with operations during a shutdown cleaning, discovered that the common hazing activity was to send new employees into the distillation column without ventilating, to see how long it would take them to get (in essence) drunk and stumble back out.

      People got fired that day.

    7. Recovering EHS Director*

      Reading just a few of these made me want to go lie down in a cool place and think happy thoughts. Ye gods.

    8. Nina*

      ohhhhh my god #1
      I used to be the HS rep and on-site chemist for a [industry] test site. Successfully trained the test techs to come and ask me before mixing chemicals together for the first time. “Hey Nina can we use isopropanol to clean the high-test peroxide storage container just before we put peroxide in it?” No, that’s an alcohol, no alcohols in the HTP, you already know this. “Hey Nina can we use acetone then, that’s less alcohol-y.”
      Acetone + HTP = TATP, a sensitive contact explosive.

    9. Katie Impact*

      There’s a reason there are very detailed lists of what you’re not supposed to do when storing hazardous chemicals, and the reason is that people keep doing the things you’re not supposed to do.

      I worked in a university science lab back in grad school, and during a routine cleanup we found a lidless plastic tub containing multiple kilograms of potassium cyanide in the back of a cabinet where all kinds of other chemicals were stored. I’m not sure what anyone in the lab was doing with that much cyanide in the first place, but it’s definitely not something you want to keep in the same place you keep any kind of acid, unless you’re trying to create poison gas. Words were exchanged and the tub was swiftly removed.

      1. Tinkerbell*

        The chemistry teacher at my high school retired after 30+ years of teaching. He did not clean out his storage cabinets first. My little sister got to do an “extra credit project” involving going through the cabinets and identifying/sorting all the contents. Many were various flasks/containers of unlabeled or improperly labeled substances. She found a vial of mercury, a lump of sodium, and a few other lovely things that were generally not standard in US high schools by the late 90s :-P Seems to me this should have been a task NOT left up to a 17yo, especially since identifying some of the substances did involve a fair amount of chemistry, but she had a blast.

        1. mymotherwasahamster*

          I’m really glad you (apparently) don’t mean that ending literally. ;)

        2. Music With Rocks In*

          My high school science told us a horror story of discovering an old storage cabinet full of corroding containers and improperly stored chemicals. The bomb squad was called, apparently, and said some of it was volatile enough to take out a chunk of the school if mixed/agitated.

          They cleaned it out; the 2001 Nisqually earthquake hit a few weeks later.

    10. Sharp-dressed Boston Terrier*

      Hopefully someone can explain to me the apparent contradiction between #1 and #3 before the replies are shut down? Combining bleach and ammonia is dangerous (#1), but that’s exactly what you need to do to detect a chlorine leak (#3)? I am slightly confused.

      1. Hlao-roo*

        I’m not an expert by any means about how to properly check for a chlorine leak, but I think the difference between “uncapped and jauntily stacked” bottles of bleach and ammonia and “test for chlorine leak using ammonia” is that in item #1, the bleach and ammonia are in danger of combining in uncontrolled quantities, at any time. People could be exposed to dangerous amounts of toxic gases without warning.

        For a chlorine leak check, a “sniff test” sounds like a bad idea to me because (1) it’s unreliable and (2) it could be dangerous for the person doing the sniffing. The standard ammonia test probably involves safety precautions like using a small, regulated amount of ammonia, venting the area, wearing PPE (respirators/gas masks/whatever level of protection is appropriate). Again, I don’t know what the “standard ammonia test” actually looks like, but these are my guesses about what makes it a better/safer situation than a “sniff test” and than leaving bottles of ammonia and bleach in danger of mixing.

      2. HSE Compliance*

        A controlled reaction is much more appropriate than an uncontrolled reaction – the ammonia check for chlorine is “poofing” a very small amount of ammonia to Cl2, which creates a white poof as a visual check.

        Combining bleach (which is NaOCl, not Cl2) and ammonia will create chloramine fumes, which in bulk (i.e. in storage containers) can be deadly.

      3. Ace in the Hole*

        Chlorine bleach and ammonia will react with each other to produce chloramine gas, which is irritating and can be toxic when the concentration is high enough. It’s not dangerous for a few drops to mix, but having gallons of it in uncapped containers stored together could cause significant quantities to mix and make quite a bit of gas.

        Ammonia is also used to detect chlorine gas leaks specifically because it reacts with chlorine. You puff ammonia vapor over the area you’re checking. If chlorine is present, it will create a white mist. The quantities involved are so tiny it’s not dangerous. Plus, chlorine gas is just as deadly as chloramine – so the leak you’re checking for is more dangerous than the byproduct.

  27. not owen wilson*

    I’m an engineer, and my first job was doing nuclear research. I was using a hammer and a screwdriver to break a fused salt out of a crucible when the head of the hammer flew off. I asked my coworker if there was another hammer in the glovebox and he went, “Use a wrench?” And so I finished chipping this salt out by banging on a screwdriver with a wrench. We also had a filing cabinet full of uranium salts and another one full of plutonium salts.

      1. Filthy Vulgar Mercenary*

        Can you explain why? I know zero and all I heard is salt so …

        :)

        1. not owen wilson*

          In chemistry terms a salt is a type of chemical compound! NaCl is table salt, for example. I mainly worked with UF4.

    2. not owen wilson*

      Oh I have another one from this job! I started on site full time in summer 2020, so my online training record looked fabulous and my irl training was…. spotty. I was trying to break beryllium fluoride out of a crucible using a mortar and pestle, and hit my hand instead of the small crucible. I split my glovebox glove, and I was working in a radioactive material box. It was 4:30 pm on a Friday, so I taped over the hole, rolled up the glove, and marked it out of use. Left the lab after surveying out (you had to use a hand and foot monitor to check for radiation every time you’d enter and exit the lab) and 15 minutes later Health Physics came barreling into my office. That’s how I found out you were supposed to call them and wait in the lab so they could check you and the area for radioactivity! I was totally fine luckily, but I did have to give them a snot sample and they surveyed me multiple times.

      At this same job, they also had me decontaminate a glovebox that had been used for cadmium experiments in the 80s — literally boiling kilogram quantities of it, it was evaporated on every surface inside. I went at it, and then I found out they’d recently decontaminated a similar box across the hall — except they had industrial hygenists and professionals do that one, not a 21 year old with a bachelors.

    3. cindylouwho*

      I used to work in a lab that dealt with radioactive materials. Someone spilled Cesium on the ground and never told anyone. A year later someone pointed a Geiger counter at the ground for fun and it LIT UP. The research safety people got called, a bunch of people have to do yearly medical checks now, and we all got exposed to unsafe high levels of radiation for a year….

  28. AnonForThis*

    TW: school shooter threat

    Sad to say that I work in a school and there was a call- only a prank call, thank god- that a shooter was on his way down the street with his AR15. I was not there that day, and luckily none of our students were either because we were on break. The few staff members in the building immediately fled and called the police. Police were on the scene in a few minutes, call was traced (no one found, unfortunately, but confirmed to be out of state), superintendent was informed, principal sent a message of support to the affected staff, etc.. All’s well that ends well. However…I went to work the next day and had no idea that any of this had happened; no school-wide or district-wide memo was sent. There was only 1 facilities worker besides me in the whole building, and only the emergency lights on. We have no security guards during break, but office admin like me aren’t allowed to work remotely even when the building is otherwise closed. I found out a week later what had happened and found it pretty egregious that 1) I wasn’t informed and 2) office admin weren’t excused from in-person work that week in an abundance of caution.

    1. djx*

      My boy’s middle school is pretty good. They lost power and there was smoke earlier this school year, so they all evacuated to the playground/yards. It was a nice day so they kept the kids outside till it was safe to return and pick up stuff. Then because kids were all hyped up from hours outside, cancelled teaching and just had a giant play date in the yard till the end of the day. Parents were told to not come to try to get their kids – all staff were busy and could not deal with the distractions.

      1. AnonForThis*

        I’ve worked at a few schools and always found that teachers know when to cut their losses. I’m glad they found a way to distract the kids during a stressful moment!

        1. djx*

          One other thing – the teachers were yelling “This is not a drill” as they got the kids out, and the kids took it more seriously that usual. A few were crying, but listened.

          The incident got on the news – a news helicopter was hovering over the building and yard for a while.

    2. EvilQueenRegina*

      My neighbour works at our local railway station, and came into work one morning just before Christmas to find out someone had broken in and trashed the place. She rang her head office and whoever took the call said “Oh yes, we’ve been expecting you to ring up about that.” She was not happy that they’d already known about it and let her walk into that with no warning.

      1. AnonForThis*

        That’s so horrible! What a stressful thing to “discover.” I’d probably have called the police, too, and I imagine they would just say “Again??”

  29. CreepyPaper*

    Not me but Mr Creeps (my husband) is from Eastern Europe and let’s just say the pictures you’ve seen online of forklifts lifting forklifts and people standing on ladders over hundreds of foot drops are not an exaggeration!

    He works as a transport manager for a big freight company now with proper safety regulations, but how he and his colleagues did not pass away in their younger years is miraculous to me.

    1. Oh Yes*

      My boss at my last job showed me a cell phone pic of a forklift lifting a scissor lift at manufacturing plant in the Detroit, Michigan area to get at something on the outside wall of the building. It was wild.

    2. SuperNova*

      I have a coworker from eastern Europe and the stories he tells about work! Particularly during the communist years. One great one was him (because he is small) shimmying behind a giant oven in some kind of foundry. Ridiculously hot back there. They tied a rope to him and told him to talk or sing the whole time he was back there. If he stopped they would assume he had passed out and drag him out with the rope.

  30. NobodyHasTimeForThis*

    Hydrofluoric acid. HF is one of the nastier chemicals because it burns more from the inside out by bonding to the calcium in your body. You can get a very damaging and potentially lethal burn without realizing the initial severity. Industrial HF is supposed to be stored in secondary containment cabinets with leak detection

    I walked into the room where my chemicals were stored. My department used primarily solvents. Exposure could lead to bad headaches and potentially after years and years of exposure liver damage. And there in the middle of my safe chemical room was an unshielded OPEN 55 gallon drum of 100:1 HF.

    I walked out and alerted safety and nobody seemed to think it was a big deal.

    This was one of many reasons I left that job after only a few months

    1. Lady_Lessa*

      Two more things about HF, it is very good at munching on glass, so must be stored in plastic. (not sure about metal).

      I first learned about it from Star Trek, TOS. (The Horta episode).

      At one job, I had to weigh it out so that it could be used to etch circuit boards in specific, precise places.

    2. RabbitRabbit*

      What. WHAT.

      I was shocked that I found an old ground-glass-stoppered bottle containing maybe a half cup of liquid mercury in a cabinet in our office’s conference room (this was in a clinic building – the room used to be some kind of imaging/x-ray area judging by the metal plate running down the center of the wooden doors).

      That is… wow. That’s insanity.

      1. RabbitRabbit*

        Forgot to add: For the hidden bottle of mercury, I called the safety department, who asked for a description of the location, containment (nicely sealed bottle), and volume of the stuff, and came by that day to whisk it away. IIRC they thought it might have been used for some kind of Rather Old imaging, perhaps in picture development or something similar.

        1. LabSnep*

          I also found a bottle of mercury once, but in a lab.

          Nobody had cleaned under that sink in DECADES and nobody knew how long it had been there.

          Materials Management came and took it away, as well as the bottle of NaOH that had been there so long that the lid was crusted permanently on so we couldn’t discard it any other way.

          1. Ink*

            Well now next time I find something weird or gross cleaning under my plain old kitchen sink I’ll have some perspective! X’D

        2. AngryOctopus*

          My first job was in an older building. We got dinged for excessive mercury in the wastestreams. Safety combed all workers up and down and couldn’t find the source–they then found out that there was mercury in a lot of the (very old) sink traps, probably from before 1980, and for whatever reason we were all running enough water to dislodge it now. It was quite a cleanup, and quite a lesson in “look what used to be acceptable in this space!” for everyone.

        3. canuckian*

          When I was in grade 7 science, we actually played with mercury (I don’t remember why just that we had it in our science lab class) we probably weren’t supposed to touch it, but we did. This woulda been 83-84ish. I kept a small ball of it (maybe 5mm wide, if that?) in a little plastic tube for a few years…honestly not sure what happened to it, probably got thrown in the garbage….

      2. Jack Russell Terrier*

        My friend prosecuted hate crimes for the DOJ and always had crazy stories. Someone was upset that Cleveland’s ‘Slavtown’ was getting less Slavish. They wanted an interracial couple out. That couple found their children playing with mercury on their porch.

        Yup – a hate crime perpetrated using mercury.

        There’s a very short article you can find a bit more if if you type in into google cleveland slav hate crime

      3. SuperNova*

        OMG, I found the exact same thing on a shelf in a house I moved into! The owner knew it was there and said it had been there when he bought the house. He just left it because he didn’t know what to do with it. I took it to the Haz Waste place in my city, and they looked at like I had 3 heads when I handed it to them. “What are we supposed to do with that?”

        1. Ace in the Hole*

          I’m surprised they were surprised. I’ve worked at that sort of facility… bottles of elemental mercury aren’t an everyday thing, but they’re not super rare either. We got at least a few every year. We handled it like everything else – packed it up to DOT standards and shipped it to a disposal facility.

    3. CoffeeIsMyFriend*

      yikes. having worked in labs I’ve been browsing this post for Dangerous chemical stories

    4. Bruce*

      I changed my career early on to avoid working with HF and any other wet chemicals. My early mentor before that change did not believe in gloves because he said he was careful never to spill anything on the bottles. My thought was “OK, you are careful but what about the other 5 people that use this wet chemistry bench?” We were not working in the fab, just doing failure analysis work on a case by case basis… but I had a bad history with hands on chemistry!

      1. Bruce*

        To be clear, the career change was a good step and there was a lot more to recommend it than avoiding working with HF, but that part of my original job really gave me the willies!

    5. coachfitz13*

      Literally the stuff Walter White used to dispose of his enemies in Breaking Bad.

      1. AngryOctopus*

        It doesn’t actually work that way though. It’s much more terrifying. But it won’t dissolve a body or a bathtub.

        1. Bruce*

          Yes, HF gets on your skin and you don’t feel any pain… until you do! like I said, gave me the willies!

          1. AngryOctopus*

            Oh yes. That was one thing I’d never want to work with. I did have to use picric acid for an assay a LONG time ago–all sorts of warnings about how you can’t let it dry out on the jar mouth, because it’s a contact explosive and screwing the lid off/on would be enough to trigger it. That made me paranoid enough!

    6. Nesprin*

      Okay you win.

      “unshielded OPEN 55 gallon drum of 100:1 HF” is about as awful as things could get short of that freezer at the NIH where they found viable smallpox last year, or the pits at the Hanford nuclear site.

      PS: please check out Derek Lowe’s blog “in the pipeline” on chlorine trifluoride.

      1. metadata minion*

        Wait, they found MORE smallpox?? I thought that was back in about 2015.

    7. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

      I said “Oh. Oh no.” after the first two words, and it just kept getting worse.

    9. Swix*

      I initially misread the chemical as hydrogen fluoride (which turns to hydrofluoric acid when dissolved in water) and had flashbacks to the training I had to do to even be allowed near the unit where they made it.

      Concentrate hydrogen fluoride can soak through your skin and muscles and start a reaction that damages your bones, in addition to turning into hydrofluoric acid. Was very glad I never had to go into that area and that it never had any releases while I was there. (It was a big plant, and all open air.)

    11. Ace in the Hole*

      YIKES.

      I work in hazwaste disposal. I’m buddies with the local hazmat response team. HF is one of the few chemicals I’ve gotten my hands on that made the captain of the hazmat team say “holy shit, get that away from me.” And that was only about 500 ml of 47% HF solution.

      Just for kicks… other chemicals on the hazmat team’s “holy shit list” include: zinc phosphide, calcium cyanide, picric acid. Every single one of these was brought to us from a residential source. Meaning someone had it in their house.

  31. bamcheeks*

    Office-based, and very boring– there’s someone standing on a wheeled chair to put Christmas decorations up every year but so far nobody has fallen off. And back when I was waitressing I walked into the kitchen to find the 15 year old in charge and everyone else outside watching the 14yo try weed for the first time— but really, pretty standard stuff.

    1. OtterB*

      My SIL was an occupational health nurse for a large corporation until she retired a few years ago. She said the two most common causes of injuries she dealt with were (a) slicing bagels, and (b) standing on a wheeled chair for something.

      1. ferrina*

        I regularly stood on wheeled chairs to hang decorations. A couple times I stood on the arms of the wheeled chair to get extra height.

        This ended when the office manager caught me and yelled at me for about 10 minutes straight, threatening to ban me from decorating if she ever saw me do that again. She put the righteous fear into me (she was also the best office manager ever!).

      2. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

        My MIL once had to go to the ER (on the morning of December 24) with a bagel slicing injury. The doctor who stitched her up said that the most common hand injuries he saw were from slicing bagels or avocados. (She did not think it was funny when we gave her a bagel slicer for Christmas the next year!)

      3. bamcheeks*

        Why are bagels more dangerous than any other bread bun? Genuine question, I’m intrigued!

        1. Nesprin*

          Because people hold them in between thumb and fingers (making hand like a c shape) and cut using a bread knife towards those delicate and important structures in the thumb webbing and the palm of the hand. They’re also pretty hard so you cut with sawing motions and some force.

          Most other bread things you cut towards a cutting board and away from a hand.

        2. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

          The harder crust means it takes more pressure, and the shape means both people are more likely to hold it in their hand and slice downward towards the hand, and more likely for knife or hand to slip.

        3. Black Horse*

          I can tell you how I sliced my thumb cutting a bagel: they’re tougher than most bread, and the surface is both rounded and sorta smooth. The serrated knife slipped right off.

          I absolutely should have gotten stitches, but had no one to watch the 3 under 6 kiddos and a high deductible for my insurance.

          We did purchase a bagel slicer within the week though.

        4. Cardboard Marmalade*

          Others have mentioned that bagels are tougher/smoother on the outside than most other breads, and just in the interest of pure nerdiness I want to add that this is because of the way they are made, which involves a step of dunking the formed, unbaked bagels in boiling water before they then get baked in the oven. It creates that smooth, almost leathery skin that a regular bread knife can just slide right off.

    2. BryOake*

      That second one made me laugh out loud. Objectively, encouraging a child to do drugs is terrible…but the mental image of a bunch of adults cheering on an eighth grader who doesn’t know how to smoke a blunt is hilarious.

      2. bamcheeks*

        I mean, the rest of the kitchen staff were 16-17, and the front of house staff were only 18-19. no fully formed frontal lobes were involved in the decision-making process at any stage.

    3. Artifical morning person*

      Yes to standing on the wheelie chair… but they’re not hanging decorations, they’re changing fluorescent light bulbs (which shatter explosively if dropped)… and they’re not in an office building, but on a ship in the middle of the ocean.

    4. Wolf*

      I once broke my arm when I was standing on a wheeled chair. But I was 11 years old, and I’d expect adults to be a tiny bit smarter than that.

  32. SquarePizza*

    Back when I worked foodservice in high school, it was at an event facility that catered to corporate picnics/outings. The only operational problem we consistently had was that the larger events would simply generate more trash than our dumpsters could handle. So like 1-3 times a year we had nowhere for the trash to go.

    One year, we just duct-taped a guy into a trash bag suit (he volunteered), and hoisted him up into the dumpsters to Macho Man the trash down and create more room. Second year, the getup was improved with an army surplus gas mask to protect the head from the smell/garbage juice. It became kind of a tradition. Trash-stomper was an honored position.

    This was a bad idea for so many reasons, not the least of which was strapping on a black trash bag outfit in the height of summer.

    Lesson: teenage boys are idiots, even if they’re all-in on doing a good job. ESPECIALLY then.

    3. New Jack Karyn*

      Teenage boys are full of nonsense. Most of them grow out of it most of the way, but while teenagers? Full of nonsense.

  33. EngGirl*

    I worked at a summer camp with no real buildings, mainly just sports fields and a pavilion with a roof but no walls. It was a day camp at a public park, so no one was staying overnight or anything, but they would not close for ANYTHING.

    It’s going to be 100+ degrees today with a heat index putting it at 115? Keep em under the pavilion and make sure everyone hydrates.

    There’s a thunderstorm and a tornado warning? Keep everyone under cover. Just ignore the rain flying through the because there are no walls.

    The camp was meant to be incredibly cheap childcare for families that needed it, and I was 18 and didn’t question it, but in retrospect it was kind of nuts especially considering the staff was like 6 18-22 year olds all of whom (myself included) would have been useless in an emergency.

    1. Former EHSS "lead" aka "Ignored"*

      And this is why I pay for quality camps that are certified and insured and …
      Glad everyone lived to tell the tale!
      Wish we cared about kids and working parents more!

  34. Another Kate*

    15 years or so ago, Spouse was working at a location that had been a site of a few minor Civil War battles. Construction workers on-site found live ordnance (think large unexploded cannonballs). While the bomb squad did their thing, the entire staff was herded into the nearby cafeteria…which was surrounded by floor-to-ceiling glass windows on three sides.

    1. Dawn*

      Juuuuuuuust for the record, cannonballs don’t have an explosive charge. They can’t be unexploded because they don’t explode. They’re kinetic only.

      1. Bruce*

        If you are going to nitpick someone’s story: in the Civil War there were plenty of explosive shells being used, especially with mortars

        1. Dawn*

          I did talk to a friend who is an expert on war history and he did correct me, and I was just on my way back to write my mea culpa, so thank you, acknowledged.

          In my defense: they weren’t (to his knowledge, at least,) percussive explosives; they were fused powder shells and assuming the powder were still dry at all it would require a mighty effort to ignite one.

          1. Bruce*

            Agreed, it’s not likely an old mortar bomb would blow up, but it would be pretty bad if they did! Sorry if my response was snarky, have a nice day!

          2. Missa Brevis*

            I also had a moment of ‘hold on a second, wouldn’t civil war cannon balls be solid shot?’, and now I’ve gone down a rabbit hole about ordnance in the American Civil War.

            It looks like they mostly used time-fused powder shells, but percussion-fuse shells have also been recorded.

            Ref: https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA638753.pdf

        1. Dawn*

          In my defense, a bomb and a cannonball are two different things.

          Also as a Canadian I don’t spend a whole lot of time analyzing the American national anthem.

        2. metadata minion*

          The rockets’ red glare. If the ramparts are glowing red, your fort is on fire.

      3. Kara*

        Most were, but there were at least some explosive cannonballs in use. In fact, i believe a Sam White was killed in 2008 when a Civil War cannonball he was restoring exploded somehow. The explosion was powerful enough that a piece of shrapnel landed a quarter mile away.

  35. Jennifer Strange*

    Many moons ago I worked at a country club as a waitress and bartender. Worst job of my life. I would work full day shifts (6:30am to 6:30pm) by myself, or the owners would come in with friends before closing and tell me it was okay for me to stay late for them (as though it was a privilege. One time I felt light-headed and thought I was going to faint. A co-worker told me I was pale as a sheet. The owner’s response was “But you can still work the event tonight, right?”.

    Anyway, one time after I locked up (by myself) I was walking through the kitchen and noticed that not only had one of the burners been left on, but a dish towel was sitting no more than half a foot from it. I think I stood there looking at it for a solid five minutes before begrudgingly turning the burner off.

    1. I'm just here for the cats!*

      That sounds like an insurance fraud attempt. They would probably have blamed you too!

  36. Lab worker*

    I used to work at an overcrowded lab. There were lit, unattended Bunsen burners at the ends of the benches (right where your elbow goes when you walk down the aisle).

    Most labs I’ve worked in have been great about safety culture, though.

    1. Milo*

      I worked with a guy who one day lit a whole row of bunsen burners just because he felt cold.

      we didn’t need flame for anything in that lab anymore. All the burners and lighters were quietly removed.

  37. Ms. Teacher*

    I am a middle school teacher. At a school I previously worked at, in an area with a lot of gang activity (I have had multiple former students shot and killed, it’s a school with a lot of trauma around gun violence) a student brought a gun to school – admin was notified and did absolutely nothing. Didn’t call a code red, didn’t call the police. When confronted about this (because all the teachers heard about it), they said they wouldn’t discuss the issue because they thought no one was in danger but confirmed there was a gun brought to campus. They then told us that if we see the student (who was expelled) on campus to notify them. But also said they couldn’t tell us which student it was…

    1. Observer*

      a student brought a gun to school – admin was notified and did absolutely nothing

      That’s a shockingly common response. I *really* don’t get it!

      It made me think of the 6yo who shot his teacher. The school knew he had a gun and did nothing about it….

  38. Collarbone High*

    I used to work a 4 pm-midnight shift as a newspaper copy editor. One night around 9 pm, everyone suddenly developed a severe headache and started feeling nauseated and sluggish. Then we heard a scream from the mezzanine above our work area and looked up to find a cleaning crew in respirators and hazard suits. They yelled down that no one was supposed to be there because they were polishing brass, and inhaling the vapors was dangerous. There were no windows and no real way to mitigate what had already happened, and people were ill for the rest of the night.

    Our boss confronted the office manager about it the next day and the response was “oh, we forgot about you guys.”

  39. SMH*

    Trying to get people to realise that no, you’re not allowed to eat or wear sandals in a workshop environment is one of the most thankless tasks ever. Like it’s for *your* benefit to not be poisoned or injured??

    1. AngryOctopus*

      People get really angry when you tell them you have to wear closed toed shoes in the lab. Listen, I get it, my feet get hot too. So I commute in flip flops, and then I CHANGE MY SHOES to lab appropriate shoes!!! Pretty sure if you dropped one of the 4L glass bottles of water on your foot, you’d get why your toes have to be covered!

      1. DannyG*

        Day 1 of the sterile procedures class I taught I would do a demo of various sharps dropped onto various shoe types. The students got the point quickly. That’s why I required leather, closed toe shoes.

    2. Seven If You Count Bad John*

      I know of at least one coworker who defied the no-flip-flops rule in a call center, and ended up getting injured in pretty much a textbook example of why we had that rule in an office environment. I had no sympathy.

    3. JustaTech*

      I remember once in college watching a classmate who was headed to the metal show to do some work. She was wearing platform sandals, very short shorts and a bandana top (the kind with no back and lots of ties).
      10 minutes later she came stomping back, having been sent back to her dorm to change into “not the “what not to wear” poster!”

    4. Cat*

      Had to read that one again as the first time my brain parsed it as “eat or wear” sandals rather than eat, or wear sandals

      1. allathian*

        Reminds me of the sign in a college cafeteria: “Shoes are required to eat in the cafeteria.” Penciled underneath: “Socks can eat anywhere they want.”

  40. Emmers*

    I got stranded with my 1 year old daughter in a blizzard and had to walk an hour home in my rothy flats carrying her because my educational director wouldn’t call off the final exams for a med school course. Worst day of my life and lots of people had similar stories (yes PNW) of that day but there was absolutely nothing done.

    1. not nice, don't care*

      Not sure if it was the same blizzard, but I recall walking for hours to get home after leaving the car of the person I was riding with who stayed stuck in traffic for longer than it took me to walk home. I remember seeing women in heels pushing strollers, carrying giant bags etc abandoning cars on the same road (in West Seattle).

    2. Magc*

      December 1990 in Seattle?

      The team I was on had a weekly meeting Mondays at 1; the director of the department stuck his head in around 2 to let us know that traffic was looking bad and people could leave if they wanted. My boss at the time lived a short walk from the office and glared at all of us, so only one woman got up; it took her 3+ hours for a commute normally no more than 45 minutes.

      I was fortunate enough not to have kids yet and to only live 2.5 miles away, but it still took 2+ hours to get home. The first mile was via car and took over an hour, at which point I parked to walk the rest of the way. Fortunately, I’d worn flat boots that were comfortably taller than the snow was at that point. I remember being amazed by the lightning & thunder while walking through falling snow.

      My spouse worked in the SoDo area (south of downtown), and volunteered to take a co-worker home (she’d ridden a bike into work that morning). I think it took them 2.5 hours to get the south edge of downtown (about 2.5 miles — they had to stop for gas along the way), and when a parking spot opened up right outside a popular bar / restaurant, they saw it as a sign that they should get dinner. I was home by then and very relieved to hear that they were fine; I think it was after 11 by the time he arrived home.

      2. not nice, don't care*

        Thunder snow. I only had to go from Georgetown to High Point, but what a trip.

    3. Spero*

      This is actually a terror of mine and when I had a baby I specifically chose my daycare based on proximity to my work so I would be able to get to her and get her out if there was a road-disabling disaster. Even though she would probably be safer at daycare than with me on the road in a disaster, I couldn’t imagine not being able to get to her.

    4. Music With Rocks In*

      Was this early 2000s Seattle? I got stranded at my library job and a coworker kindly drove me south out of the valley we worked in because all the buses going north towards my house couldn’t handle the snow.

      1. Anon Librarian*

        2000s Seattle library worker here. Was that Snowpocalypse 2008? That was the year no branches were within walking distance of my apt so I still had to drive to my snow branch. Down a loooooong hill.

  41. Ms. Yvonne*

    I used to climb out of a second storey bathroom window, set up a ladder, and change the marquee film titles at a movie theatre. This was okay when it was summer or there was deep enough snow (the ladder didn’t wiggle around), but one time I was on the marquee and it was pure ice, so the ladder was slowly drifting edge ward as the strong arctic wind blew down the street. After that I tossed a rubberized mat out the window and set the ladder up on that on icy days. I was just barely, barely tall enough to reach the top row of letters, which required I was at the last usable step of the ladder and although am okay with heights (but perhaps should not have been okay with the potential for a broken neck), it made me jittery to have to reach the beginning and ends of words by putting the ladder close to the edge (you could stand in the middle and try shoving letters along, but it did not always work). It was very hard to do – replacing the letters – on cold days, fingers were frozen. I never got any mild electric shocks on rainy days, but others did.

    1. Former ehss consultant*

      There is a actually a ladder safety certification course through OSHA and I’m sorry you had a horrible manager

  42. Peanut Hamper*

    I was the building representative (i.e., shop steward) for our middle school building when one of our 8th grade English teachers came to me and said she found live ammunition on the floor in the back of her classroom after school one day, bagged it up, and took it to our principal. She had not heard a thing in the two weeks since, and was asking me to look into it.

    So I went and asked our building principal. She told me she had nothing to report yet and would let me know.

    At our next staff meeting a couple of weeks later, the principal announced that a rumor had been going around saying that someone had found live ammunition in the building, and that this rumor was false, no ammunition had been found, and that we were not to discuss it further or risk being written up for spreading false and malicious information about the school.

    Both that English teacher and I left at the end of that school year. She left for another district and I left for another field entirely.

    1. Ms. Elaneous*

      Peanut, I would absolutely support you outing the name of that school system.

      My lesson from this is
      2. Photograph everything.
      1. Call the press (first).

      1. Peanut Hamper*

        If you’ve eaten breakfast cereal in the United States, I’m sure you are familiar with this small midwestern city between Chicago and Detroit that is the home of two major cereal manufacturers.

        That entire district has half the school population now that it did when I was teaching there. I don’t have to wonder why.

  43. Space Coyote*

    This is not particularly serious (and definitely more a case of poor personal judgment than workplace carelessness in particular), but I still kind of laugh thinking about it, so:

    Our maintenance office at an old job was sort of shoddily constructed and we had insect problems, mostly consisting of (very) large house centipedes that would appear on the walls, hang out for a while, then disappear back to the shadows. I was sitting at my desk one morning when Frank, one of the maintenance supervisors, came back and pointed out one on the wall behind me. I was used to them at that point and didn’t much care, but he was determined to catch and kill it. It was high up, near the junction of the wall and ceiling. Frank proceeded to get a chair from a nearly office and climb up onto it to swat at the centipede with his clipboard.

    Yeah, he swatted it. And it fell directly onto his face, at which point he made a sort of shrieking sound and ALMOST fell off the chair. Luckily he caught himself and there were no injuries or casualties (including the centipede, which scuttled away to parts unknown). Soon afterwards, the company hired a pest control company and the bugs mostly disappeared.

      1. Mad Harry Crewe*

        House centipedes are only dangerous to other little bugs. They’re not even considered a pest species as far as I know – just little predators that like dark and quiet and keep the silverfish and spiders down.

        1. allathian*

          Spiders are also little predators. We sometimes have them in the house and I’d rather live with (non-venomous) spiders than ants. When I was a kid we lived in a house that was built in the 1860s for a while, and the summer when we had an infestation of carpenter ants was memorable to say the least. Large ones can be 18 millimeters long (1 inch = 25.4 mm).

  44. Watry*

    My mom used to work in the call center for a major communications company. The fire alarm went off and everyone on her floor was actually forbidden to evacuate. It was a drill, but they didn’t know that.

    Someone on that floor knew someone very, very high up in the company. Someone got demoted.

    Unfortunately I think most call center workers probably have similar stories; they’re notoriously awful places.

    1. Managing While Female*

      My first job was at a call center. I was 15. I think it clouded my perception of what a ‘normal’ work environment was for a long time and… yeah, it was awful.

    2. MassMatt*

      I can confirm, they are generally awful places to work, but surprised at the level of danger reported in them here.

    3. milkdudsnotdrugs*

      There have been so many terrible call center stories in this thread! It makes me grateful that the mid-west company I work for takes safety extremely seriously. We (in the call center) have been told multiple times that if a fire alarm or tornado siren sounds, to not even bother telling the customer on the phone what it happening and to evacuate or seek shelter immediately. We have a storm radio with a very loud alarm and management is always watching the weather. We have safety plans for every scenario.
      Tornado? Go to the basement and gather in your designated area.
      Fire? Evacuate and gather in your designated area in the parking lot.
      Active shooting? Run. Don’t stop, don’t gather. Just get to safety however you can.
      We have safety drills and managers have roll call lists of everyone in their division on shift. And the company just recently took great pains and cost to tighten up our security systems with designated key fobs to unlock the entrances and track who is entering the building to cut down on even the potential for unwanted/unknown trespassers.
      The warehouse has very strict safety standards and training and all chemicals are packaged and stored according to safety standards.
      Obviously this is how it SHOULD be- but clearly there are many companies who just don’t care. I’m feeling a renewed appreciation for my company today.

  45. K D*

    Apologies if I am stretching the definition of work, but a few years back there was a tornado warning and then a tornado actually touched down within 15 miles of my college and there was no safety alert from the college about it? (this is in the late 2010s, so we would get safety text alerts about things). I am glad it missed us because tornadoes are not common in my state (NJ) and I don’t think most people were aware or sheltering.

    1. Wilbur*

      My company talked up how they used a private company to monitor for tornados, so when we got the alert for one on our phones from the National Weather service they told us to ignore it. I found some work to do in the service level. Later that afternoon people were sharing videos they took of the tornado from the parking lot. They ended up changing to relying on both the NWS and the private company after that.

      1. Lee the sql*

        I have this exact story, wonder if its the same company. My work group all went and hung out in the take cover shelter when our phones went off even though the building alarm didn’t, but we were alone in there.

      2. Tree*

        hey, former co-worker (I hope!) My building’s facility manager personally found everyone and sent them to shelter after he couldn’t get security to sound the alarm. And so I didn’t take a transfer across the street to your place.

        (if this happens in multiple companies… I vote we riot)

    2. Luanne Platter*

      Hi, I live in an area where tornados are common. Fifteen miles from a touchdown isn’t really dangerous, especially if it’s a smaller tornado. If it helps you feel better, you can turn on alerts from weather services on your phone that will alert when a tornado warning is issued, so you don’t need to rely on your college. But modern weather technology is really good at predicting paths of tornados, so if your college didn’t alert you, there was probably no danger.

      1. K D*

        I do have the weather service alerts on my phone and that had alerted me and many other students and had told us to take shelter, which is why I side-eye my college.

      2. LeFlutterBee*

        Yep, more than 5 miles away wouldn’t warrant action unless it was headed your direction.

  46. JustaTech*

    I used to be on the safety committee for my lab. One time another committee member and I were doing our monthly inspection tour when we entered a lab that was currently being used by a contractor who was a former employee (and the only person who knew how to work that instrument).
    We walk in the lab and find a half-empty bottle of blue Gatorade inside the instrument enclosure.
    And a BANANA on the acid cabinet.

    (The most basic of lab safety rules, that most people learn back in high school, is no food in the lab. And 98% of people who have any kind of science degree understand why the rule exists. Are there reasonable, since-based exceptions? Sure. But not in that lab.)

    1. Bunch Harmon*

      When I taught biology, I had my own classroom, but shared a lab with several other teachers. The lab was frequently requisitioned for other things (testing, school pictures, etc), which were generally fine. What wasn’t fine was when admin told the senior class sponsors that the seniors could prep for their service project in the lab. They were making PB&J sandwiches to hand out to homeless people. Multiple people were surprised to hear that it was an issue. Gross.

    3. Alice*

      Oh god. I did work experience in a Cat 2 lab, which in the UK meant they handled things like blood samples from patients, meningococcal bacteria and other infective or potentially infective material.

      One of the scientists would eat her lunch while preparing samples. Not between preparing samples, while preparing them. You could watch her cut up a biopsy sample, put down the scalpel, take a bite of sandwich and then pick it up again. Horrifying.

      1. JustaTech*

        OMG, I am screaming.
        The guy who taught me how to prepare mouse spleens did it while chewing gum. But not like, in the back of his mouth chewing, but this weird open-mouth chewing. It was really gross.

        1. JustaTech*

          In a different lab I had a much older coworker who had done most of her training in the USSR. One day we were working with blood samples in these itty bitty glass tubes. To get the blood out you would tap on the top end with your (gloved) thumb and eventually all the blood would run out into the collection tube.
          Well, this hurt her thumb, so one day I looked over and there she was mouth pipetting blood!
          I shrieked, and told her that she must never, ever do that again, and if it was that bad I would tap the tubes. No mouth pipetting!

      2. DramaQ*

        I heard a legend from one of my old PIs that apparently someone at her previous workplace was eating a microwave burrito while working in a BSL 3+ lab dealing with Bubonic plague. While dressed in full PPE.

        The other one was in her lab. Someone injected themselves with West Nile Virus. Using a dual lock needle. That one boggled my brain because the whole point of a dual lock needle is it LOCKS and you need to actively push to get it to engage and release. They are designed to prevent the very thing he did. I commented that dude was either an idiot or was really hoping to get himself a class action law suit.

  47. Plantlab*

    My research lab uses razor blades to cut leaves off plants all the time. And we leave the razor blades on the bench when we are done, because we will probably need them again in a few minutes. Our entire lab usually had 20-30 rusty razorblades sprinkled over any flat surface at a given time. EHS (Environmental Health and Safety) hated us.

    1. Plantlab*

      We had very few injuries. I cut myself twice, once while using a razor blade on rotted rubber tubing, and the second time when I put loose razor blades in my purse to transport them to the greenhouse. I thought I got them all out, but I was wrong…

    2. SciDiver*

      I used to work in a (non-medical) research lab that used needles for one particular task. We didn’t use them frequently enough for the lab manager to justify *the hassle* of getting a sharps container from EHS. His solution was to put them in a cardboard box hidden on top of one of our sample fridges nobody used, with the label “Noodles”. It’s been 3 years since I left and I’d bet it’s still there.

      1. A Girl Named Fred*

        I used to work for a blood bank (office staff, not phlebotomist, but still) and I just full body cringed so hard I think I pulled a muscle. Noodles?!

    3. Nesprin*

      Oh this one is so easy to fix- you put a binder clip on the business end of the razor and your risk of accidental cutting is 0.

  48. MassMatt*

    Over a summer I worked for a hotel and they needed to install some bolts on the walls of the pool to string lane marker bouys. The day manager thought facilities was taking too long to fulfill the request so he did it himself.

    He stood in the pool, chest deep in water, drilling into the walls of the pool with a corded electric drill! Oh, and the cord was plugged in to the outlet on the other side of the pool, and the extension cord was mostly submerged!

    When employees expressed their horror, he told them to shut up and get back to work.

    I will say that at least he did this himself vs: ordering an underling to do it.

    1. purple monkey & bubblegum tree*

      This one. This is the worst one. This is breathtakingly dangerous and stupid.

  49. Pajama Mommas*

    My wife once worked for a small school for students with learning disabilities that was located in a strip mall. She has a lot of stories from that time, but 2 of my favorites are:
    1. The students had recess in the parking lot, and there were just a few cones put up to try to prevent drivers who were visiting the other business in the strip mall from running over the children.
    2. OSHA was called at one point and determined that there was not enough oxygen inside for the number of people who were in the building. The solution was to prop open the one door that led to the parking lot.

    1. The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon*

      Ah yes, the well-known method for addressing learning disabilities: less oxygen.

  50. GiantPanda*

    Not really egregious, but:
    During fire alerts all the entrances to our office building are supposed to be blocked. People can leave but not go in (and walk right into the fire).
    Except they forgot the door from the basement parking – and I came in late, went up, started work, wondered where everyone was.

    Luckily, it was only a drill, and has been fixed.

  51. exoboist1*

    Our building currently doesn’t have working fire alarms. They have issued me an air horn and a whistle to use if I see or smell fire/smoke. But I’m only here during business hours and other people use the building later. It is estimated we’ll have alarms back in a month (if we haven’t burned down in the meantime).

    1. WLP*

      How is that building even certified for occupancy under those conditions? That’s crazy.

    2. NothingIsLittle*

      When one of our buildings had an electrical problem that kept setting off the fire alarm (faulty triggers, not dangerous or creating smoke) one of our employees had to do hourly fire checks of the property! Granted, it was a historic building so the requirements may have been different…

  52. MicroBioChic*

    The production plant I worked at several years ago had a fire on the roof that the company across the street had to call and tell them about because no one noticed. I don’t know the details because it happened first shift and I was third.

    Same place, happened on my shift while I was there. Temporary shift lead was walking around (regular shift lead spent all night in his office) and walked past a maintenance worker smoking a cigarette while doing something in one of the electrical panels. She told him he wasn’t supposed to be smoking indoors, and according to the rumor mill, his response was “no f’ing shit.” He put the cigarette out though, so at least there was that?

    My first job out of undergrad, I was the only worker in a very small on site QC lab for a slaughterhouse. The company I worked for specialized in these small on site labs run out of specially made trailers. The autoclave went out, and the company didn’t want to pay for a technician to come, so they diagnosed the issue based on video I took of the autoclave, and sent a replacement part. They talked me through replacing it over the phone, and it worked! I was very proud of myself at the time, and it wasn’t until several years later I realized just how wrong amateur autoclave repair could have gone. I definitely should have told them to pay for a technician to come out and diagnose/repair it.

  53. Medium Sized Manager*

    I worked at an indoor soccer club in college, and they would regularly schedule 21/22-year-old women to close alone. The facility wasn’t in the greatest part of town, and drunk men would hang out in the parking lot after games (we sold beer). Despite our complaints, they never scheduled a second closer, so one or more of us would always hang out off the clock to make sure everybody got to their cars safely. The men were…flirty enough indoors and none of us were interested to see what the outdoor personalities were like.

    1. PepperVL*

      I bet every one of those men and every one of the people who did the schedules doesn’t understand why women choose the bear.

  54. Juicebox Hero*

    When I worked retail, something happened that knocked out power to the whole block. I remember it was a Saturday and I was eating lunch at a McDonald’s around the corner when it happened. I heard later that a squirrel got into a bundle of power cables or something, which I’m sure got it mad props in rodent heaven.

    I went back to the store to see if we were allowed to go home. This was an old 5-floor standalone store and there were no windows unless you were on the first floor near the entrances or near the doors to the parking garage on the upper floors. For the rest of the store, “stygian” fits pretty well. No escalators, emergency backup lights, elevators, cash registers, etc.

    They made us go back to our departments, in the pitch dark, walking up or down escalators, and wait to see if the power would come back on in a timely fashion. So we’re bumbling around in the dark in a store full of metal clothing racks with sharp corners, glass displays, fragile mannequins, shelves sticking out – the works.

    A few departments had flashlights – this was the early 00s before most people had cell phones, and the phones didn’t have flashlights – for rooting around in the badly lit and cluttered stockrooms which were a whole world of OSHA violations in themselves. Most people just kind of clustered around the light sources near the escalators so we wouldn’t have to walk around too much, although some sadistic department managers made their employees unpack stock or straighten displays in the dark.

    They finally gave up and closed the store about 90 minutes later, and again everyone was on their own for finding the exit.

    It’s been 20 years, but if I bump into someone else who worked there at the time, we still talk about the time the power went out to the whole store and they wouldn’t let us go home.

    1. allathian*

      Yikes.

      When I was in college, I had a job at a fast food stand inside a railway station. Our changing rooms and stock room were in the basement. There were no windows, and all the lights were on timer switches.

  55. spuffyduds*

    The library I (formerly, thank goodness) worked at reopened to the public in June 2020. (Their general covid response is a whole ‘nother story.) They did have plexiglass screens at the front desk, but some of them were so badly attached to the desk that they tipped over if patrons touched them. A couple of the young and limber assistants managed to dodge quickly enough to get out of the way of falling ones, but an older assistant who had a limp was understandably worried about getting bashed in the head. She asked for it to be fixed, and when nothing happened she followed up. Boss’s response was to be irritated with her for bringing it up more than once.

    1. not nice, don't care*

      (Some) libraries are the worst in terms of worker safety and decency. Administrations really depend on vocational awe, even to smooth over assaults from patrons.

    2. cloudy*

      My friend was a school nurse when the kids in the district went back to the classroom in September 2021. The school had these covid desk shields for kids to put around themselves in the classroom to separate them a bit more. She treated at least 2-3 kids a day who had minor cuts and scratches from the shields falling on them because they were left completely unsecured.

      At one point they added clips to try to stop the constant sea of what she described as “desk shield casualties,” but it didn’t help much. The kids still constantly managed to hurt themselves on the things. One kid even managed to poke themselves in the eye with it (it had rounded corners and everything).

  56. Bruce*

    Summer job before going to college at a jewelry factory/foundry in SF in the late 70s: We’d all gather on the back roof for lunch on sunny days, and some people would pass around a joint. Then we’d go back inside to work with belt sanders, torches, and foot pedal activated presses that predated modern safety lock-outs. One day the most stonery stoner mangled his finger in a press, almost chopped it off. The next day the manager called a meeting and explained that lunch time pot smoking had to stop…

    1. Bruce*

      After college worked in a company with a semiconductor fab. Our CEO was a veteran of a war in a Middle East country and liked to make comments comparing business to combat. We were sometimes downwind of the local land fill, and the smell would be bad enough that a fab worker would activate the gas-leak alarm and evacuate the fab. But one day a real gas fire started on the roof… this was nasty stuff that burned on contact with air (Silane, I think… there were other gases that were much worse!). The fire department decided to let it burn itself out, but the CEO wanted to get production going again so he borrowed a thermal fire suit from the fire fighters and ORDERED the fab manager to borrow one too, then they both went up on the roof and found the valve to cut off the gas. One could argue that this showed leadership and initiative, but the fab manager decided he’d had enough and quit shortly afterwards… the next time I saw him he was telling this story in a bar and getting wide eyed reactions!

      1. Polaris*

        Recently in my general vicinity (meaning, you could SEE the glow from my house because it was high and bright against the night sky) there was a huge warehouse fire, complicated by incorrectly stored something-or-other-tane cannisters. A lot of them. A lot lot of them. That the building was NOT rated to house. It was its own self contained fireworks show, unfortunately. It caused property damage, bodily harm, and unfortunately one casualty.

        This is why my jaw is currently in the basement at work over your anecdote. I’m going to go collect it now.

        1. Bruce*

          At least in our case the fab building did not go up in flames. Going up to turn off the silane valve by itself was probably not extremely dangerous, but like I said there were other gases being piped around that were really bad… I think the joke about arsine was “what does arsine smell like? Nobody living knows…”

  57. WellRed*

    During my recent brief stint stocking shelves at Target (yeah! I’m naming names) I was appalled and terrified by the u-boats. A long narrow shelving cart that they would overload with boxes of merch, including stacking heavy boxes higher than my head. I was also always worried some unattended kid would try to scale one when I wasn’t loooking ; )

    1. Alton Brown's Evil Twin*

      Ouch, yeah. At the Trader Joe’s I worked out, u-boats were not allowed on the floor if there were customers present.

    2. hard same*

      I had to call the fire marshal on my location after backstock got so bad from understaffing that the fire exits were all blocked

  58. not nice, don't care*

    Fairly minor, but the director of public safety at a public library repeatedly took all the radios that security staff depend on in encounters with violent and mentally ill visitors. There have been assaults on staff, repeated hate crimes, furniture thrown etc. and no way to summon help, yet this person is fine taking the radios for a very unnecessary training session for non-security staff.

    Same director is very eager to escalate confrontations with disruptive people (she’s proud of her kick boxing lessons), in direct disobedience to orders from administration. She loves to amp up people then fade while security staff try to de-escalate and prevent injuries.

  59. Alton Brown's Evil Twin*

    Worked in a wine bar. So many instances of thin-walled wine glasses being broken in the 3-compartment sink (wash/rinse/sterlize), but people just keep working away instead of draining, cleaning out the shards of glass, and refilling.

  60. Le Sandwich Artiste*

    Probably fair to include one of my own safety blunders from my restaurant days. I was managing a Subway restaurant, doing the closing shift by myself. The water pan in the bread steaming machine (of course, the actual word escapes me now) had run dry and gotten calcification/whatever on it. In my infinite wisdom, I decided to double up on the cleaning agents to make sure and get it clean. I think I decided to use oven cleaner + bleach. Mere minutes later, toxic fumes take over and I desperately open the front and back doors to try to air out the place. I was eventually able to get back in and finish up, but that was a late night. Lesson learned: do NOT mix cleaning chemicals. Ever. Oh, the cringe.

    1. Lab Boss*

      We never saw oven cleaner mixed with bleach, but many many young men at my summer camp job learned for the first time that when cleaning out an industrial oven with oven cleaner, you occasionally need to come OUT of the oven so you don’t get ragingly high on oven cleaner.

    2. Peanut Hamper*

      Yep. Never mix anything with bleach. Almost everything that results is deadly.

    3. Menace to Sobriety*

      Ooooh yeah I was working retail once when MUCH younger and was told the clean the bathrooms and “the cleaning supplies are in that closet.” So I used…well all of them…including bleach and ammonia. The store had to be evacuated, because I had essentially made mustard gas. And I got in trouble even though I was never told what chemicals were/weren’t safe to use. The jerks.

      1. saf*

        Once upon a time…. I worked in a neighborhood pizza place. Our maintenance/cleaning/everything not kitchen or FOH guy was from Guatemala, and had been military there. He was tough, and strong, and declared war on the rats in the alley behind the place.

        He was NOT safety minded. He found the rathole under the dumpster. He poured a bottle of bleach and a bottle of ammonia down the hole. Then he put a sheet of plywood over it. It killed a LOT of rats. We all worried about the fumes though. He did not understand why we were worried.

  61. KnightOfTruth*

    I work for a huge tech company.
    They decided to delocalize all of the Customer Support services in another Country, where they could find much cheaper workers.
    It was brought to the company’s leaders’ attention that the wages they pay are so low that some of these workers are selling accounts and account info to third parties for money.
    The proof was found, the general level of Customer Support tanked, and the bosses still wrote it off, saying that players are happy, and it’s important to keep the costs down.
    We are talking of a billionaire company.

  62. WeirdChemist*

    When I was in grad school, I was working in a campus building on a weekend afternoon when there wasn’t a lot of people around. When I left for the day, a chunk of the road near my building was closed off, but I couldn’t tell why. Mildly annoyed that my normal route was blocked, I eventually made it home. About FOUR HOURS LATER, the school send out a campus alert that there was a shooting directly outside that building… about 10 mins before I left. Umm… would have liked to know that before I almost drove through an active crime scene!

  63. Lab Boss*

    We were preparing for some testing involving an extremely nasty shellfish toxin (think: a barely-visible droplet touching your skin means you WILL die before any aid can be rendered, and it will hurt the entire time you’re dying). Official safety protocols included extra-long gloves of a specific material and the use of a specific type of respirator mask and enclosed hood. Out manager told us that we should use all of our normal equipment because “it’s too expensive to get a bunch of fancy stuff for one study” and “If you’re really good at your job you shouldn’t be spilling things anyway.” Upper management did back us up but not until we flatly refused to do the job without ALL proper equipment.

    That same manager also told us to “Just work on the other side of the room” when a mercury thermometer shattered on the floor of the lab.

    And finally a summer camp story: we got a “blob” (as popularized in the movie “Heavyweights,”) a giant air sac that floats in the lake. You take turns jumping from an elevated platform onto one end, launching each other into the lake from the other end. For safety we recommend a maximum ~50 pound weight difference so a heavy jumper doesn’t launch a small flyer too high. But when the EMPLOYEES got to play with the blob, we did things like “put a 100 pound 15 year old out at one end, and have three ~250 pound guys all jump on the other end at once.” You could see them going above the tree line. It was a miracle nobody was hurt but man was it fun.

    1. Nesprin*

      Ooh conotoxins? Those are definitely break out the good glove worthy+ call OSHA if the good gloves are not forthcoming.

      When I had a student working with chemo agents in my lab I made him calculate the 50% lethal dose for his bodyweight of everything he worked with. He was appropriately respectful of the doublegloving and disposal rules after that.

      1. Lab Boss*

        Not conotoxins- it’s been a few years but I think it was one of the paralytics- saxitoxin maybe? Nice exercise to induce the right state of terror… er, “respect,” in a student though. My very first PI was more blunt- he just pointed me to the hood that had mutagens in it and said “never open that or you will get cancer and you will die.” Words to live by.

    2. sb51*

      I had a chemistry teacher in high school who was old enough that her brain defaulted to mercury in thermometers, even though all of the lab thermometers had been non-mercury for a good while at that point. Someone dropped and shattered one, and immediately went to her because we were always supposed to make everything stop if there was broken glass, even though we didn’t really work with anything dangerous.

      Upon hearing “I broke a thermometer” she went bone-white and basically bodily flung us all out of the room. And then sheepishly went “oh, right”, and let us back in while she cleaned up the glass.

      1. Nesprin*

        Oh I’ve cleaned up mercury thermometers before in the winter- mercury won’t atomize very well if it’s cool. On a hot day it’s EHS’s chance to break out the moon suits.

      2. Artemesia*

        surprises me as the mercury in thermometers is not very dangerous — it just beads up, it doesn’t evaporate into the air. Not good to have lying around, but not an immediate criss either.

        1. New Jack Karyn*

          Yeah, but high school students will mess with it. See earlier points about teenage boys being full of nonsense. In this instance, a bunch of female students will also act foolishly.

        2. metadata minion*

          Yeah, it’s my understanding that while obviously you shouldn’t go playing with liquid mercury bare-handed, it doesn’t absorb readily through the skin, and the real danger is when you’re either around vapors or getting exposed through diet.

        3. Turtlewings*

          My high school science teacher told us about a friend of his whose children found an old mercury thermometer and were playing with it. Of course they broke it — and the mercury dripped down the heating vent. The whole family died. Some of them that night from inhaling the mercury, some years later from slower things, but all caused by that night.

    3. STILL ALIVE*

      Is there anyone else of a certain age who actually used to play with the mercury from a broken oral thermometer? It was so interesting to watch the way it moved!

      1. allathian*

        I’ve played with mercury in my high school chemistry class. Granted, it was under a fume hood, but…

      2. mymotherwasahamster*

        Yes! I was just remembering a time when I was a kid and my mom’s oral thermometer broke, so she used her fingernail to show me how the mercury would bead up (and made it VERY clear to me not to touch it). This was around 1990 and she was an X-ray tech at the time, so I always assumed she was being… okay maybe not “reasonable” per se but at least not foolish. But after reading the comments above I’m wondering if this assessment was inaccurate?

        Side note, around that age I always thought it was cool how the word “thermometer” had “mom” in it, since that’s who sticks it under your tongue…

      3. Happily Retired*

        In my 10th grade chemistry class, we had, umm, access to mercury. We used to flick little mercury balls across the counter at each other, like some early version of Pong.

        We also pipetted by mouth, including (weak) acids. This was 1970 or so.

  64. Collarbone High*

    I once stumbled on a website where military personnel were encouraged to report safety violations, and the photos included someone dragging a venomous snake off a tarmac by the tail, and a guy changing a light bulb above a filled swimming pool who was standing barefoot on a metal ladder stacked on top of another ladder. The second one was captioned “I don’t even know where to start.”

    1. Not a Vorpatril*

      Heh. I talked frequently with the base Safety Officer in my time, and his favorite was the Hummer that got flipped due to an invading “Al Qaeda Grasshopper”. That and reminding our younger members that we are not in the navy, so we should not be pretending to be submarine captains during the winter, peering out of one tiny patch of cleared window after a snow storm.

      1. NotWhatIThoughtBookieMeant*

        How many of them have you growled “Ivan, you idiot” at?

  65. Truthy*

    I work for a huge tech company.
    They decided to delocalize all of the Customer Support services in another Country, where they could find much cheaper workers.
    It was brought to the company’s leaders’ attention that the wages they pay are so low that some of these workers are selling accounts and account info to third parties for money.
    The proof was found, the general level of Customer Support tanked, and the bosses still wrote it off, saying that players are happy, and it’s important to keep the costs down.
    We are talking of a billionaire company.

  66. Percysowner*

    I worked in a law library on the top floor of a courthouse. There was an attic over us. Our fire alarm system was notorious overly sensitive. It would go off whenever the cafeteria in the basement burnt toast. Everyone pretty much ignored the alarms unless they continued for quite a while. One day, the alarm went on a bit longer, and the sensors indicated the problem was in the attic, above our floor. A maintenance man went to the attic and came down yelling “Fire in the attic”. The alarm kept on and most of the building evacuated, except for us because our boss said they weren’t leaving. We could if we really WANTED to, but they didn’t think it was a big deal, so the staff acted like ninnies and stayed. About 5-10 minutes later the fire department came up, having climbed the stairs going to the attic. The gave us all the strangest looks. One week later, the word went out, from then on there would be surprise fire drills, everyone had to clear the building, every floor would be checked afterward to make sure everybody had left. If anyone hadn’t left, there would be words and possibly worse. For the next 15 years I worked there every so often the entire building had to evacuate, because of my boss not wanting to leave.

  67. Soup Sandwich*

    I was an admin for a boarding school. The cafeteria was part of the main campus at the top of a huge hill. My office was down the hill at the student center, which had a smaller cafeteria. The main cafeteria was under construction, so the staff had to cook in our kitchen and take all the food up the hill in our work van. We get horrible winters, so the kitchen staff was understandably less than thrilled driving vans full of piping hot food up an incredibly steep hill in huge snow drifts since the road to the big house was an unplowed service road. The administration was adamant it be hot, cooked food, and not food easy to transport like sandwiches and pasta dishes. There was an option of temporarily expanding the kitchen in our building and having students eat their meals here as it was closer to their dorms and classrooms. The administration argued it would be too expensive and disruptive to the student’s daily routine. They were adamant that this process would work but wouldn’t get appropriate snow tires for kitchen vans. From a food service and a vehicle safety standpoint, it was a terrible idea.

    One day, I saw the kitchen van sliding sideways and backward down the hill past my window and hit a telephone pole. The two staff members were fine—rattled but okay. It looked much worse outside of the van because a heavy steel pot of soup flew forward and smashed the windshield from the inside. It’s a good thing it was below zero that day because they were splattered with soup that would have otherwise been scalding.

    Suddenly the administration had the totally rational and original idea of temporarily expanding the kitchen in our building and pivoting to food that didn’t need as much prep, like sandwiches.

  68. Your Social Work Friend*

    In college I worked in a restaurant that was a converted house. The front seating area had once been the front porch and was very narrow, and had one long table in the back. A party came in with an older gentleman who was in a wheelchair. The lead hostess sat them at this table . . . in the back of the “porch,” down an aisle they you had to walk single file. Had there been an emergency, we never would have been able to get the guy out, or anyone seated on the other side of the table. I argued with the lead, the family thanked me, the table was switched. Instead we sat them in the main building. There was a small step to get over the threshold and no permanent ramp (and someone kept moving the movable one). A couple of staff PICKED UP THE MAN’S WHEELCHAIR WITH HIM IN IT to get him over, without asking him if it was okay. We could have killed that guy if he had tipped back and fallen on his head. No one saw any problems with this.

  70. ursula*

    I worked at a Walmart when I was 16, in their photo lab. The machines constantly went on the fritz and they would do anything to avoid the delay and cost of calling a professional to fix them. That meant that we all had to try and fix them ourselves. The number of times I ended up elbow- or shoulder-deep in a machine with moving parts that was still plugged in….

    My brother worked for one of those companies where students paint houses one summer in cottage country. At one point, his supervisor tried to force him to get up on a 20′ ladder that they were setting up in a shallow part of the lakebed beside a client’s dock. He got fired for refusing.

  71. AnonymousForObviousReasons*

    At one job we had a 2ft wide heavy duty fan that did not have a cover that we were supposed to move around by hand WHILE IT WAS OPERATING. It was suspended by a rope and we needed to move it in and out of a hole based on air readings, or when people needed to climb out of the hole. When my coworker inevitably sliced her finger open and had to get stitches they blamed her. I took her spot when she went to get stitched up and had to clean up her blood so I wasn’t sitting in it.

  72. Private*

    Just before I was hired, my company had fire in their warehouse. Ambulances were called to treat employees for smoke inhalation. The company promised to invest in better fire mitigation and detection. For context, fires are a known risk in this industry. Fast forward 6 months or so and none of these safety systems have been implemented. Turns out that the OSHA investigation showed that the current system met minimum standards and upgrades would be expensive, so management decided to do nothing. I left for other reasons after a few years, but the business continues to have fires every few years.

  73. AnonForThis*

    I used to work for the US fed government. Once, our building was having some ceiling/duct work done and my boss had to keep going over to the workers to remind them “Hey, you’re literally in an OSHA building… please stop messing around on the ladders…”

    1. Tinkerbell*

      A friend of mine works for the CDC. His office building was in terrible shape but since they were just office and IT guys, not important labs, the CDC kept putting off moving them. The building got shut down for an outbreak of Legionnaire’s disease, and finally was condemned for black mold before the CDC finally sprang for better offices.

  74. Sevenrider*

    I was working at a law firm downtown in a major city on 09/11, right across the street from one of the tallest buildings in the U.S. Our entire building was evacuating that morning, except the law firm where I worked. Office manager actually yelled at people who wanted to leave. Of course attorneys were packing up and leaving, but staff where not told they could leave. Then the building management finally stepped in and announced the building was closing. I was on my way in that morning and in the lobby when I heard a rep from the building say they were going to close. When I asked the OM, she blew up at me and snipped “NO, WE ARE NOT CLOSING.” I then overheard her say staff just wanted to leave so they could enjoy a day off. Seriously? So much loss on that day and what sticks in my mind is how simple a grown woman acted in the face of that tragedy. Shame on you R, wherever you are today.

  75. Bee*

    During my first year as an educator, I got written up for not sending a student to the nurse when he had a headache. Why didn’t I send him from our portable building to the main offices where the nurse was stationed? Because an escaped felon had decided to use our open campus as a hiding spot during a stand-off with police and the campus was actively on lockdown. I hadn’t wanted to give the desperate criminal a 7-year-old hostage, but . . . you know . . . clearly I was in the wrong and needed to be reprimanded.

  76. Wiscogirl*

    When I was 19 and very naive, I worked nights in a factory. I was the smallest person on the crew, so they would send me into confined space permit areas by myself and tell me to “just jiggle this or pull that.” They would also send me under the machines for product that had fallen under the machines WITHOUT TURNING OFF THE MACHINES. I would have to hold my hair down and crawl on my stomach, hoping my hair and clothing wouldn’t get caught in the running belts. I honestly could have died.

  77. Garblesnark*

    I worked in a medical school that was physically connected to a hospital. As in, there were multiple points where there was a hallway where a person could be completely indoors and inside both the medical school and the hospital at the same time. There were no physical barriers of any kind between the two buildings. One did not need identification or credentials to pass between the two areas.

    When there was a dangerous emergency in the medical school and the medical school was evacuated, everyone calmly walked over to the hospital. And then they stopped walking. Every time.

    Genuinely I cannot think of a single emergency that would be stopped by the imaginary line or change in flooring that separated the entities.

    1. Admin of Sys*

      Okay, that’s just funny. I used to work in a set of connected buildings where three buildings had been stitched together, and they all had independent fire alarms. But they also had fire safe walls and mag doors that automatically closed if an alarm went off (assuming someone hadn’t propped them open with a brick, but that’s a different problem).
      It was always a bit nerve racking to sit at work while the hallway 2 doors down had a firealarm going off though. We usually went outside to hang with the folks from the evacuated half of the buildings, jic.

    2. Tree*

      after an actual emergency at work, we evacuated, counted noses, and just kept walking. we were several miles from town, but we weren’t staying there. so it might have been ok!

  78. Daughter of Ada and Grace*

    I went to a small high school, where the same teacher taught both chemistry and physics. My senior year, the new chem/physics teacher was inventorying and clearing out a bunch of chemicals from storage. (His predecessor had been teaching there for decades before retiring.)

    One of the things he found was approximately a pint of mercury. In a glass milk bottle. He let a couple of us hold it before putting it away again and adding it to the list of hazardous materials to be disposed of. (Incidentally, a pint of mercury is really freaking heavy.)

    1. danmei kid*

      Found the same type of thing cleaning out an old lab room. It was in a screw cap mason jar with the cap mostly rusted by that point.

    2. Peanut Hamper*

      Our high school chemistry teacher used to pour some mercury into an Erlenmeyer flask and pass it around the class so we could all look at it.

      The 1980s….good times, good times.

      1. Lady_Lessa*

        One time, I found liquid mercury in a child’s toy in a Kmart. It was the moving part of a maze. I immediately took it to customer service and explained the problem. I hope that the store manager did the right thing.

        1. Lab Boss*

          I had a maze just like that, in the early-mid 90’s. So, quite a while ago, but really recently enough that someone should have known better.

        2. Chauncy Gardener*

          I had a maze like that in the 60’s. Played with it all the time. My husband, from an Eastern Euro country, played with ACTUAL mercury on the floor of his home!

          1. Daughter of Ada and Grace*

            Playing with mercury happened in 5th grade. I think a thermometer must have broken, because that was about the quantity I remember seeing rolling around on a sheet of paper. Terrifying in retrospect (by which I mean senior year when the pint of mercury reminded us of the incident), but our 5th grade teacher remained amazingly calm about getting us to stop playing with it so nobody panicked or spilled it off the paper.

            1. L*

              Yup. As a kid it was fascinating if a thermometer broke! We played with the blob of mercury until Mom noticed, yelled at us, and cleaned it up (and put the mercury in the trash . . . )

              I am old.

              1. ICodeForFood*

                Same her, except it was my father, a CHEMIST, who showed us how the blob of mercury could roll around before he disposed of it (I hope in some safe way, but I don’t know…)

                I, too, am old.

                1. mymotherwasahamster*

                  Phew! I wrote in a different thread above how some of the mercury-related comments were making me second-guess my X-ray tech mom’s wisdom in seeking to pique my curiosity for med tech by watching her do the same thing. Maybe still a questionable parenting choice, but at least not uniquely so. ;)

          2. STILL ALIVE*

            Yep. I am old and played with mercury. Although, isn’t it mercury vapors that are the most dangerous?

            1. Peanut Hamper*

              I believe so. I think it was the mercury vapors from pressing hats that caused so many hatmakers to go bananapants. Hence, the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland.

      2. AngryOctopus*

        I found a mercury candy thermometer when cleaning out my grandma’s house. I brought it to work (lab) because I knew they’d be able to safely dispose of it.

      3. Sue Smith*

        In HS chemistry class in the ’70s, we actually got to get a bit of mercury at our desks so we could push it around with our fingers. It was great fun breaking it into small beads and then rejoining it into a larger bead. No health warnings–we were supposed to be careful not to lose any so it could be returned to the teacher.

    3. My Boss is Dumber than Yours*

      During my junior year, our AP Chemistry teacher decided she didn’t want to bother going outside for a fire drill (this was November in Arizona, so just laziness on her part). Instead, she took us all and had us hide in the lab so the classroom looked empty. She went to her office…

      Being the good students we were, we immediately started playing 9-volt chicken. In this game, you put your fingers to the ends of a 9-volt battery, then pass it to the next person. Each time it goes around the circle, you add another 9-volt to it. If you drop the batteries or can’t hold on for three seconds, you’re out. So, yeah, during a fire drill we were in the lab electrocuting ourselves with a good dozen 9-volt batteries chained together.

      1. Esmae*

        My high school physics teacher made the mistake of bringing in some kind of device that would generate an electric current between two wires. Of course a couple of the guys immediately started a challenge to see who could pass the highest voltage through their tongue.

        1. Artifical morning person*

          When I was in third or fourth grade, our teacher brought in a 9-volt battery and had us put our tongues to the contacts to feel the (mild) shock. One battery, passed around for however many kids to lick and get zapped.

    4. Diatryma*

      I think science teachers have a lot of opportunity to get weird. Or at least mine did, including my dad.

      So one day in high school, an announcement comes over saying that due to a boiler problem, the school doesn’t have heat, and please let your students go to their lockers to get their coats if they wish. Cool. We continue with classes. The science teachers at one end of the hall decide that it’s cold, we know how to fix cold, break out the Bunsen burners! Also cool. But the school doesn’t have burners for every classroom, so the other end of the hall is out of luck. Dad, showing the kind of resourcefulness and understanding of air/fuel ratios that makes you an Eagle Scout, lights the gas jets directly.

      The only time I’m aware of that he actually set fire to the classroom was lesson-related. This worked out fine.

    5. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

      My junior year of high school, I was taking physics, and the teacher decided to go drag stuff out of the back room the last week of classes to see what was there. (This was in a new building, but all the stuff had been moved over from the old 100-year-old building.) One of his friends was… something…in a small (palm-sized) manila envelope, wrapped in lead. Even with the wrapping, it registered on the Geiger counter. Did he put it as far from us as possible and back away slowly? No, he unwrapped it, to reveal “Uranium” written on the envelope. (No idea how old the sample was. It could have predated the Manhattan Project for all I know.)

    6. Proofin' Amy*

      In 1990, I had an unpaid internship at a small publishing company, and needed to make some money to at least pay for my train ticket into the city. So I worked for my cousin’s friend, the dentist, who was too cheap to hire a trained hygienist, and had recently let his secretary go because she had cancer. One of my jobs was to mix amalgam for fillings, and I definitely spilled the mercury more than once. Those were also the days when dental X-rays were still on film, and I eventually realized that if you didn’t put the film in the fixative for a long enough period, the X-rays would go blank once they dried. I’m assuming the dentist also realized this about six months later when his patients came in for their next checkup.

  79. Riggs*

    I worked for a defense contractor with many locations in our region. One year there was a massive snowstorm that closed the government and the majority of schools. My company sent closures to some offices, but not others – I looked on a map and there was no rhyme or reason to which were open or closed. I did end up getting told our office was closed, at 11am after I had already been there for 3 hours.

  80. danmei kid*

    Walked in to the research lab one day to find my boss down on the floor with two sheets of notebook paper trying to scrape up little balls of mercury from a flask he’d just broken, intending to flush them down the sink.

    I called the hazmat team from my desk while he protested that it was “just a little mercury”.

    Reader, I was 7 months pregnant at the time.

  81. Chocolate Teapot*

    I was a fire marshal at a previous job and it was decided to do a major fire drill exercise. However it was not possible to sound the alarm so the CEO sent an email to tell everyone to evacuate the building.

    Unsurprisingly nobody took any notice, spending time putting coats on. One girl decided to use the bathroom before she left and refused to listen to me saying she had to leave before me so I could check everyone had left.

    My boss thought it was hysterically funny I was treating it as if there was a fire. I didn’t agree.

  82. Mining mishaps*

    I work at a mine. A real honest to goodness we pull chunks of dirt and ore out of the ground, transport them in vehicles with tires taller than some buildings, and then process and ship to corporate consumers. I have worked here five years. In that time …

    -four members of labor pool have been fired for “jousting” with abandoned lengths of PVC. Their chariot of choice? The Kubota buggies (think hi-vis off-road golf carts)
    -the QA lab is ROUTINELY sending out reminders about NOT DRINKING FROM UNMARKED OPEN CONTAINERS found in their lab. Because apparently this is an issue!!!!
    -the second floor of one of our processing buildings collapsed in a roughly 10×10 hole. Because it was a wooden platform built in a steam environment and the wood rotted away. The temporary solution was to place a “catwalk” across the middle. Two years ago. I had to use it yesterday delivering equipment.

    The jousting was my favorite. i threatened to quit before going across the catwalk again.

      1. Mining mishaps*

        I heard about the jousting and got to watch the security camera playback later. It was genuinely entertaining.

        The most concerning for me isn’t our missing floor though. It’s what kind of lunatics are drinking from unknown unmarked containers! I have not left my diet cokes unattended since.

    3. Six Feldspar*

      I previously worked five years in the mining industry, it’s a strange world…

      Some of the safety processes they did pretty well when I was there (e.g. so much sun protection that a major mining town is now a hotspot for vitamin D deficiency). On the other hand, when a bull wandered into the car park one day the best idea we could come up with was to have our site manager go and yell at it…

  83. Not your typical admin*

    Worked at a grocery store in high school. One time we had a hurricane come through our area. The weather started out fine that day, and gradually got worse and worse. The store was packed and the owners didn’t want to close. They finally decided it was wise to let us go when our sign blew away

  84. Nobody Important*

    Worst I can think of was around 20 years ago when I worked for a certain Midwest-based discount store that had just expanded to the east coast (not the red one).

    One year we were in the path of a hurricane/tropical storm. Regional management decided to keep the store open as everybody else in the area closed.

    We got maybe 3 customers (yes, there were customers that dumb) all day while watching the wind-whipped rain outside as the hurricane hit, and the husband one of the employees came and got her while yelling about how the store needed to be closed.

    Eventually we got the all clear to close (I think we had maybe $20 in sales). As we started closing a lull hit and we get a call from the DM saying “well, it seems to have calmed down, you can probably stay open”

    Store was closed as planned and everybody got home before the rain started back up again.

    1. Beth*

      I was doing a volunteer stint that had me in a rural area in mid-Florida, We arrived on Wednesday to prep for an event that weekend.

      It was hurricane season. A storm shifted its track overnight to point directly at us, with a likely arrival on Sunday or Monday.

      We reached out to the head honcho in charge of the event, who was new to Florida. HE DID NOT WANT TO CANCEL. He figured we could get 200 people into a rural site, have a weekend event, and then they could all go home before the storm hit, right???

      For those not familiar with Florida hurricanes: storms can speed up, slow down, get bigger suddenly, get smaller, change direction, and pretty much do anything expect disappear altogether. The LAST place you want to be in the two days before a hurricane arrives is at the end of a series of small local roads hours from home, where you can be left stranded by closed roads, traffic jams, empty and closed gas stations, full hotels, shuttered businesses, etc. You want to be home with a full tank of gas.

      The idiot wouldn’t agree to cancel the event until it became clear that he was the only person still planning to attend. Everyone else was staying home and battening down. Meanwhile, he was prepared to leave the volunteer staff in the path of an oncoming hurricane, when we needed to be home doing our own prep.

    2. NotRealAnonForThis*

      Not a hurricane, but a blizzard. I was an assistant manager at a small chain specialty store.

      Retail days, yada yada. Blizzard ramping up, mall management opts to close the mall, three hours early. For the scale of this decision, understand that I live in a midwest state where snow is not a huge deal.

      For some reason the freaking out of state CEO decided to call about 5 minutes after published closing time to get our sales numbers for the day. And for similar some reason, we did not have an answering machine or voicemail on our store line. So he proceeds to redial the store for an hour, all the while vacillating between worry and pissed, to no avail. He calls mall management, but by now, nobody is there, so he leaves a message. Of course, the morning shift in the management office doesn’t know of the early-call off from yesterday, so they return his call with a baffled “huh, no idea why they were closed, the mall was open”. And of course, the morning opening staff at our store has no idea either, because I wasn’t going to bother her at 10 at night when mall management made the call.

      So I get a phone call from CEO AT HOME where I’m asleep (I worked the afternoon to close shift – I did not get up early) demanding to know why I left early. Um, because mall management closed the mall. Except, now, nobody in the mall management office at this hour will own up to it, so obviously I’m lying. I suggest that perhaps he either call the mall office later in the evening, or perhaps the local police department who likely heard the information, but that I’m quite honestly, on my day off and not dealing with this.

      Got to meet this CEO in person three weeks later – he was every bit the tool he came across on the phone. Never did apologize to me for his screaming fit over “closing early” even though he did find out the truth later that day. And he was Pikachu faced when I refused to stay on for a “$1 for every hour worked we’re closing your store lump sum bonus” because I already had a new job regardless the news of the store closing or not.

  85. Oryx*

    I worked at a career college (nonprofit on paper but very much operated as a for profit) and student attendance was a big KPI for both students and per school location as well and they hated closing or cancelling classes. Many of our students and some of the staff took public transportation, with the closest bus stop being half a mile away up/down a hill.

    During the polar vortex of 2014 they refused until the very last minute to cancel classes despite knowing how many of our students would have to walk a not insignificant amount to get there in subzero temps. When they did finally cancel, only teachers and students got off and the rest of us had to go in or use PTO (which, whatever. I had a car and as the librarian spent the day reading). But seeing how little they cared for the safety of the student population was very eye-opening and I started job searching soon after.

    1. not nice, don't care*

      My university always sends out notices when they aren’t going to close for bad weather, saying that it’s a personal decision blah blah blah. Meaning go ahead and risk your lives getting here, just as long as we stay open and collect those federal dollars.
      Definitely changed post-lockdown.

  86. My Boss is Dumber than Yours*

    I’ve adjuncted at four different universities. Only one of them gave adjuncts keys to the classroom. Thank G-d it never came to this, but this means that it was impossible for us to lock the doors in an active shooter situation. To this day, I immediately scan rooms for what large objects can be quickly moved to barricade a door.

    1. lab*

      Lucky! I never got keys while adjuncting. At one place, I didnt even get a badge and the library wouldn’t let me in :(

  87. Ms. Teacher Person*

    I worked in a classroom where the roof was flat. It had been documented for several years that the roof was “compromised.” I came in to find it raining inside my room and black mold growing down the walls and on the floor. The district elected to “spray a bleach solution” around the room and then deemed it safe for students and staff. After that, the union got involved and the room had to be gutted. I had to get hospitalized for a severe mold reaction. Fun times.

    1. Peanut Hamper*

      People really underestimate how seriously mold reactions and infections can be. They can kill people. I’m sorry you had to go through that.

      1. Peanut Hamper*

        Also, if I recall correctly, bleach doesn’t really do anything to mitigate mold. But I may be wrong.

        1. Artemesia*

          Bleach does a great job on mold used early and often — I do’t think once you have a seriously compromised wall or ceiling, anything sprayed on will work — it is a tear down situation.

  88. MsM*

    Not my story, but from a friend who works for a multinational conglomerate that recently shifted from flexible remote policies to mandatory 3x a week in the office. Due to some kind of restructuring, her old desk had been reassigned and she was told to report to a smaller one-story building off to the side of the main office. Well, apparently no one had bothered to check this building since pre-pandemic, much less before sending workers there, because she walked into find a pipe had burst at some point. The carpets were coated in mildew, the walls were cracked, and nobody wanted to touch the electrical sockets for obvious reasons.

    She snapped a bunch of photos for documentation, drove back home, and emailed her boss with the photos attached to inform them she’d be continuing to work remotely until the situation was addressed. Last I heard, they’d brought contractors in, but no one’s tried to force her back on site.

  89. AnonForNow*

    A forklift ran into the gas main, causing a leak, and they decided to quietly wander around and inform individuals one at a time, so as to ‘not cause a panic’. When they got to our section, we pulled the fire alarm on our way out.

  90. LunaLena*

    I don’t know if this is really egregious, but I used to work in an office that was an open floor plan and everyone had semi-open cubicles. There were not a lot of people in our company, maybe a dozen or so. I was on the phone with a customer, and when I hung up several lengthy minutes later I noticed that it was strangely quiet in the office. I looked around and everyone had disappeared… and finally I spotted them through the window, staring at me from the farthest away point of the parking lot. When I went outside to find out what was going on, they told me that someone had hit a gas line right by the building, so they were told to evacuate until the gas company safety inspectors checked everything outside and gave them the all-clear. I asked why no one told me, and they said “I waved to try to get your attention, but you didn’t notice, and I didn’t want to be rude and interrupt.”

    Fortunately everything was deemed safe a little while later and we were all allowed back inside. But I still think of it as the time Midwestern Politeness could have been the death of me.

    1. Mad Harry Crewe*

      Yes, that is really egregious. You could have died or been severely injured in a gas explosion.

    2. Lurker*

      This is funny and terrible at the same time. If there was a fire, would they still have let you finish the call before saying something?

  91. Juicebox Hero*

    Another story from the big old junky store I worked at in the 00s.

    With big old buildings heating and cooling are always a problem, but at this place it was just horrible. In the cooler months it was on city steam heat, with is either off or on full blast. The department I worked in was one of the hottest in the store. I can remember waiting for the bus in the snow, wearing cropped pants and sandals, because closed shoes and long pants were too dang hot to work in.

    Summers were even worse because the prehistoric air conditioning units didn’t like to work and the owners were too cheap to replace or repair them properly, to the point where it would get up to 85+ degrees F in the hotter departments. I had problems with nausea, lightheadedness, swollen feet, and other heat-related problems. Our manager would actually bring in coolers of ice water for us on the worst days, and we had some friggin’ hot summers while I worked there.

    The only solution was to Push the Button. The unit that theoretically cooled our end of the 2nd floor was in the basement. It was a big green monster of a thing with pipes and shafts connected to it, and it had a button that when pushed would usually restart the compressor long enough to give us cool air. The problem was that the thing made ungodly noises and in particular when you pushed the button it sounded almost like a gunshot, and the compressor made a noise like a Mack truck bearing down on you. We took turns doing down to press the button and prayed that we wouldn’t be blown sky-high.

    Management told us we had to stop doing it because we weren’t authorized to handle the equipment. Also they expected us to get rid of our electric fans and act like we were perfectly fine and comfortable when customers complained. We stopped pushing the button, but we kept the fans and agreed wholeheartedly with the customers!

    During one extra hot summer things came to a head when a customer fainted from the heat, and suddenly management was dodging the local news channels and papers and OSHA reps. By sheer coincidence (not!) the AC instantly worked passably well for the rest of that summer. Then it was time for city heat and summer clothes in February.

    This is why I keep my house as cold as I can all year round now.

  92. Lurker*

    A former employee at my now-former job glued the fire door shut.

    Not out of malice, which would almost make more sense. The back area of our office was a storage area we haphazardly converted for our use and the double doors (one of only two exits for the whole office) were old and super drafty. This guy fancied himself a Mister Fix-It and refused to understand that you can just start yanking sinks apart in a rental unit. Anyway, apparently he had gotten some caulk and applied it all the way around the doors.

    We only noticed when we were decluttering and tried to take some trash out the back way, and thank god we did. The doors were sealed shut and we had to go at them with a steak knife to open it again. Our manager laughed it off like it was hilarious, which is just one example of the Alice in Wonderland logic that ran that place.

  93. Burning Sensation*

    At a previous job, our procedure for fire drills was for each person in our hallway to go into their office (on the 3rd floor with windows that didn’t open at all), close the door, and continue working. That never made much sense to me but I was the most junior on the team and never spoke up.

    I finally learned one day when I was filling in for the fire drill safety inspector that the *actual* procedure we were supposed to follow was that everyone closes their office doors and assembles in a common area to make sure everyone is safe. I’m pretty sure our boss just didn’t want us to stop working for the 15 minute or so that the drill was going on. I’m thankful to be in a much more safety-conscious workplace now.

  94. bookbug71*

    I worked at a downtown library and during an active shooting happening at a bank two blocks away, other nearby businesses went on lockdown. Not us. Doors stayed opened. Staff on the floor weren’t allowed phones so had no idea what was happening unless someone happened to mention it.

    1. megaboo*

      Same, we saw the cop cars surrounding our library and went back inside. No one informed us of what was going on or that we were on lockdown.

  95. ConstantlyComic*

    I used to work at an old gold mine-turned tourist site. One of the main activities there was panning for gold-visitors paid for a pan’s worth of dirt, and staff would teach them the method. The panning area was a dirt pile surrounded by troughs that never seemed to get any breeze, so it would get swelteringly hot in the summer. Officially (according to the State), we were supposed to close the panning area if the heat index got over 100 degrees F to avoid the risk of staff or visitors getting heat stroke. We never actually did. We had people passing out from the heat at least once just about every one of the hot summer months that I worked there.

    I also had a coworker who had a medical condition that made it hard for her to retain water and was hired under the impression that water would be supplied to staff. It was–for about a month. After that it was either use the sulfur-tasting, lukewarm water from the one water fountain on the property or bring even more of her own water. She did the latter.

    1. ConstantlyComic*

      Just remembered another story from that gold mine:

      There had been some really bad storms and rain in the area, leading to flooding, trees down, and power outages that were days-long in some areas. One of those areas included my old workplace. I believe that there was some sort of emergency lighting in the tourable mine tunnels, so visitors could still experience that, but the power was out in the visitors’ center. It was, of course, unsafe to be in the building with all the power out, so instead the site manager set up a folding table in the entryway (fortunately under a covered part of it), got out the cash box we used for events, and had us work from out there. While storms were still happening. I don’t know why the site couldn’t have just closed for a couple of days until the power came back–there aren’t that many tourists wanting to go tour an old gold mine in a downpour.

    2. Former Mailroom Clerk*

      Isn’t passing out from heat exhaustion part of the authentic gold mining experience? They were going for realism there!

  96. High School Teacher, Texas*

    Last week, in the evening, we had a credible threat against our school. One kid was arrested, others were questioned by police.

    The district did not say anything until the next day, AFTER the mandatory attendance reporting period. This is also known as the “money” period, because it affects state funding. Butts in chairs = payment by the day by the state.

    When the school finally alerted parents to the arrest the previous night and the removal of a group of students from campus, the parents rightfully swarmed the school to pick up their kids. And then someone pulled the fire alarm. It was pandemonium. Administrators were yelling at teachers to get kids back to class and to ignore the alarm, kids and parents were fleeing thinking there was a shooting event.

    The district has said nothing to teachers, parents, or students about their poor decision making. This was the last straw for me. After 20 years, I’m out of K12 ed forever.

    1. Jenzee*

      I’m so so sorry. Our teachers (and kids and parents) should never have to put up with this crap.

  97. Dust Bunny*

    For a semester in college I had a room in a dorm that shared a basement level with the dorm next to it. If a fire alarm went off in one dorm it also went off in the two neighboring dorms since they were very near each other and connected by a covered walkway. So this one dorm could be set off by five dorms. It was a constant nightmare of Saturday-night burnt-pizza fire alarms. Also, the dorm room doors were so heavy that if they were closed you could barely hear the alarm in the hallway. It wasn’t a volume problem–the alarms were skull-spitting if you were in the hall–but they apparently did not cheap out on the doors.

  98. Tired All The Time*

    Two examples, one more egregious than the other:

    1. I worked for a massive company with hundreds of locations that made national news a few years ago after a staff member was violently murdered in the middle of the reception area by an angry client. Corporate made a “renewed commitment” to employee safety that never amounted to anything. I had one client scream at me while punching furniture so aggressively that other clients complained on my behalf, and another client wrote me a very calm email about all of the guns he owned and how even though company policy did not allow guns at our location I would “never know if he was armed” so I should be “careful to provide only the best customer service.” I documented everything with my district manager and HR and the only response I got was to stay professional and not give them a reason to “escalate.” I left after less than a year and found out later that my replacement was suing that same district manager after he fired her for yelling at/kicking out a vendor who THREW SOMETHING AT HER, which was especially egregious considering she was visibly seven months pregnant at the time. She’d been told “not everyone is cut out for customer service” and I don’t know what happened with the lawsuit but I hope she won.

    2. This isn’t quite as bad. I worked at a major retail chain and people would bring in dogs that clearly weren’t service animals, and at least once/week we’d find dog poop on the floor or in a cart (including in the grocery section!). Only managers could talk to customers with dogs for fear of discrimination lawsuits, and the ones at my store would stall until the person left to avoid confrontation, then make the floor staff clean up the mess. I knew from past work at a different location that there was a corporate rule that only people with special biohazard training (pretty much only managers) could deal with waste so I discreetly started telling my coworkers so they could refuse on the grounds that they “don’t want to violate company policy.” I was only seasonal and I don’t think it solved the root problem, but it at least gave people a way to get out of cleaning up poop.

  99. Samsally*

    When I was in high school the protocol for tornados was to all line up against the walls in the basement. Only… there wasn’t enough basement wall for everyone so some of the less lucky classes were put on the first floor. Right next to the wall of glass doors.

    The teachers and staff all seemed to go mysteriously deaf when I loudly pointed out that this wasn’t ideal.

  100. Abogado Avocado*

    I worked for a non-profit in a 1920’s-era, sparsely occupied former bank building with this motto chiseled above the front door: “Frugality is the Mother of All Virtues.” That maxim apparently guided the building’s non-resident owners, who made repairs only when forced by a higher power, such as city inspectors.

    Once, just one of the building’s two elevators was functioning — and only if the “concierge” (actually, the unfortunate son of the property management company owner) climbed on the top of the elevator and held two very large electric cables together to make the contraption rise or fall. I am not making this up. Every time someone needed to use the elevator, the “concierge” would use a ladder he had placed inside the elevator, pull himself up through the access port in the ceiling, stand atop the box and hold those two large cables together. When the building’s few lessees expressed fear that he might electrocute himself or fall, he said he had to do this because the building owners hadn’t authorized an elevator repair. There was some scuttlebutt that his parent’s property management company was paid more if it minimized repair costs.

    My coworkers and I put up with this dangerous nonsense for a few days because we worked on what effectively was the 13th floor — that is, until someone clued in the city’s elevator inspection office. The city shut down the building until the elevators were repaired (correctly) by a recognized elevator repair company.

    And we all went about our business until a water valve in the basement failed in a major way, flooding said basement with eight feet of water and knocking out all power to the building for two months. But that, my children, is another story. . .

    1. Observer*

      That’s insane. But the management company owner was a “special” level of bad.

      I mean the owner LITERALLY put their kid at risk of being killed – and pretty painfully, at that – to save a couple of dollars for the owner. I’m sure they could have forced the issue if they had wanted to, but apparently that “extra bonus” was more important than their own child’s safety.

      I hope the son eventually went “no contact” with parents.

      1. JSPA*

        As a teen or 20- something I’d have totally loved to have an excuse to climb on top of an elevator and bring wires into contact (though I think / hope I would have demanded electrician-quality gloves and shoes, which i’m guessing this guy didn’t get).

        Plus we don’t know if it was the high voltage powering the elevator, or essentially doorbell-voltage connection allowing the buttons or door sensor to “talk” to the safety override system.

        (With heavy high voltage wire, you don’t have to bring the ends together from each side to meet in front of you. You can hold them at an acute angle a couple-three feet away from you, to touch them together. With low voltage wire, there’s no real electrical risk.)

        As to the risk of riding on top of an elevator, that’s highly dependent on the type of elevator.

        On the one hand it’s definitely a safety violation. On the other hand, I’ve seen elevator repair people do pretty much both of these things… which suggests that while it’s a significant hypothetical danger, it’s not necessarily an absolute / unmitigatable danger.

  101. La Peregrina*

    Many years ago I worked as a seasonal intern at a nature sanctuary in Florida. One of our jobs was working with the resource manager on invasive species control projects. This involved spraying a concentrated herbicide on trees and shrubs. The herbicide needed to be diluted in a large amount of oil, usually vegetable oil, but our management was cheap and used diesel fuel instead.

    Now, it’s bad enough that they’re asking us to spray large amounts of diesel fuel directly into the swamp at a *nature sanctuary*. But there we are out in the direct sun in 90-100F weather, carrying around heavy backpack sprayers and inhaling diesel fumes all day! We got disoriented, several of us fainted, and our resource manager nearly stepped on the biggest Eastern diamondback rattlesnake I’ve ever seen.

    We complained to our boss and grandboss, and even brought this up with the organization’s CEO when he visited, but everyone dismissed our complaints. I hear they finally changed the policy years later, but it’s amazing no one got hurt.

  102. Mastermind*

    Probably when they required everyone to report to work the day Hurricane Ian, a category four storm that went through Florida in 2022, because “one of the truck lines wasn’t closing” (it has no office or facility in our area and only like one truck per week coming for pickups) and “we can work in the morning before it gets bad” (storm left several dead and thousands of people out of power by the end of the day) and none of the spineless owners wanted stand up.

    We sell wholesale flowers. Needless to say I didn’t work that day.

  103. werewolf*

    one time the copperhead snakes that were kept in the nature classroom attached to my office managed to find a breach in their enclosure and got halfway out before their caretaker responded to my officemate’s frantic phone call to come and get them back in

    1. JSPA*

      Copperheads?!? In a classroom?!? That’s already one of the worst things on this list. Even before the breach. “Rarely fatal” is not you’re looking for in a classroom setting.

  104. Amari*

    My friend works as a mechanic and their boss/HR kept writing people up for uniform violations – people just weren’t wearing the required provided coveralls. They thought it was just people screwing around for no reason until my friend kindly explained to management that it was because they were cheap polyester coveralls and unsafe if there was a fire. There had recently been a fire. HR person had never considered even for a second that this might be a safety issue.

  105. Better believe I'm anon for this*

    This was a few years ago when pot was just becoming legal in some states. In our state, it was illegal but CBD oil was not. In our very crunchy small business grocery store / vitamin store we had an entire display.

    For those who do not know, CBD is the compound in marijuana that gives pain relief and anxiety relief but does not get you high – that would be THC.

    When our state legalized medical marijuana, you had to get it from a state dispensary and pay a lot of state taxes. I’m guessing it was for this reason that the state began cracking down on CBD sales, since they saw us as eating into their profit. Even though no one ever got high from CBD.

    Our city person in charge of said cracking down enjoyed frequenting our store and was cynical about the reasons behind the new enforcement, so he made sure to keep our higher ups informed about everything and let us know the entire procedure – that we were okay selling it until he sent us an official cease and desist letter, and after we received the letter we would have to remove it from shelves but he gave us a lot of info on certification etc. so we would be able to sell it again.

    Having this inside information, did the higher ups actually do anything proactively? No they did not. He even gave us timing on the letter (“you have about a month”) and when it came they still absolutely lost their collective minds. We got conflicting info from several people about what to do now, and finally were told that what we should do is move it all to the office behind the registers, and if a customer asked about it, we were to clandestinely bring them back behind the registers and sell it to them out of that office in brown paper bags. Not sketchy at all, no sir!

    I was following this new “protocol” when the cashier’s eyes bugged out and she motioned me away frantically. I was confused (and so was the customer) but we awkwardly went away until she was finished with her customer – who was a reporter from the big capital city paper who was interviewing her about the new policy and what we were doing about it!

    I still can’t believe with all the advance notice “sell it out of the back office like it was actual pot” was what the executives agreed on. They must have been high.

  106. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

    I moved to Seattle about six months after the Nisqually earthquake and my first job (starting the first week of September 2001, yes) was on the 40th floor of an office building downtown. When I was getting the first-day tour of the office, bathrooms, office supplies, etc, I noticed a set of earthquake safety tips taped to the front of the supply cabinet, and later went back to read it. The last thing on the list was “Remember, you can’t get everybody out. Some people are just going to have a bad day. :) ” (Yes, with the smiley face.)

  107. Exacademic*

    Instead of buying new, sealed radiation sources, our PI suggested that we crack open a bunch of smoke detectors and take the tiny radiation sources from them.

    Fortunately logic prevailed, but it was a worrying suggestion from the person who was supposed to be charge of the departments radiation safety program.

    1. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

      Maybe he read “The Radioactive Boy Scout” one too many times!

  108. La Triviata*

    Not work, but several years ago the apartment building I lived in had a bad fire. It was old and hadn’t been well maintained, so a number of the alarms did not go off at all. Many went off after a while and people couldn’t get out because the (internal) fire stairs were full of firemen and hoses, etc. Some people in the upper floors were debating about throwing their children out the windows, since they couldn’t carry them down. Some people didn’t know there was a fire until the firemen broke in their windows. The day after, the fire marshal and a number of building management people had a meeting with all tenants to discuss it; a few days later, they had the fire marshal back while they tested the fire alarms and most of them didn’t go off at all.

    The building’s been sold, the new owners are doing major renovations; I moved years ago.

  109. Jumping Jehoshaphat*

    I walked into the office and immediately smelled gas. No one else had noticed it. Bosses/owners are never in the building. Basically, no one is in charge. We can’t get them on the phone, so someone calls the fire department. Turns out extreme cold weather has iced up the air vents on the roof, forcing gas back into the building. Bosses/owners are pissed we called and won’t send us home for the day, so we lug equipment (pre laptop days) to the nearby coffeeshop to work. No, nothing was that urgent. Nothing.

    The next day, the weather is even colder, so the exact chain of events happens all over again.

  110. Laura*

    I worked in a lab that was in a shared space with a HIV lab and so we all had to wear disposable booties & tyvek suits instead of just a lab coat. There was a room to gown up in and then a sort of airlock-style room with a trash can where you removed your dirty PPE – like an airlock, only one door could be opened at a time. Fire drills were the worst because you had 15 people slowly waiting their turn to squeeze into the room to remove their PPE, inevitably the trash can would fill up so someone would have to empty it and put in new trash bags, and it took forever to get us all out of the building. I always swore that if there was an actual fire I was going out the emergency door in my full PPE and they could figure out a way to decontaminate me outside. I was so happy to move out of that building!

  111. NameWithheld*

    A long ago company I worked for had a server room with halon dump fire suppression. It was properly wired to auto seal the doors and had override buttons at regular intervals to delay the dump / unlock the doors – but some of the buttons were broken. The solution? To prop open the nearest door with a backpack while working in the room.

  112. Dust Bunny*

    I’ve posted about this before, and apparently there are no/far too few laws to do anything about it: My first job out of college was as a stable hand at a summer camp. Only it “sort of” had a horse program. There are a lot of things you can half-ass but a horse program is not one of them. They got their horses from a guy who bought them at auction and brought them literally anything that didn’t try to kill him as he put it in the trailer. We had horses that were ancient, sick, lame, psychologically broken, not trained to saddle, the works. Other camps in the area had experienced, well-cared-for school horses leased from private owners or from schools.

    We lumped it with our few functional horses until the women’s organization that helped support the camp came to visit and my supervisor cornered them and gave them a rundown. We got sent home early with the rest of our summer pay. I hope they either got their act together or gave up on the horse thing entirely.

    1. whimbrel*

      >half-ass
      >horse

      I feel like there’s an excellent joke about management being donkeys in there but but I can’t quite put it together.

      (Also, I hope the horses ended up in better situations!)

  113. Serenity*

    I worked for nearly a decade in an office where the overhead announcements were not audible in the back hall. This mattered, because we worked with clients who could potentially be violent, and though we had locked/keyed doors to the staff area, part of the response plan to a violent intruder was to announce this to staff. We had an ALICE training, and no one in the back could hear the “armed intruder” alert. Admin’s solution is that staff will just inform other staff. (As I worked there for years before I even discovered there WAS a paging system, this solution is garbage.) They looked into fixing the speakers but said it’s too hard.

  114. Red5*

    At my very first job out of college, there was an open hole in the drywall next to my desk large enough that I could’ve crawled into it. The building was old enough that asbestos would’ve definitely been used during construction. I complained about it enough that eventually someone came in and taped a piece of clear plastic over the hole. They must have used some cheap tape, because it didn’t take long for it to lose its stickiness and half of the plastic peeled off and just kind of hung there. I complained again and was told that asbestos won’t get into your lungs if it isn’t disturbed, and anyway, it wouldn’t affect me until middle age anyway. As if I would be okay with getting mesothelioma in my 50s from a job at 21 that paid $9/hour.

  115. You want stories, I got stories*

    Not a safety issue, but it is funny.

    I used to work in a 35 floor building. My company occupied floors 21-28. We got an e-mail that floors 29-35 would be conducting a fire drill, but we could ignore it. I happened to be on the phone when this drill happened. The customer was, “Are those alarms going off, do you need to leave?” I apologized and explained it was for a different floor and didn’t concern me.

  116. Ruby Soho*

    My former company had upper mgmt’s kids working there in the summers. All were in high school and under 18, which means they are legally not allowed to work in the warehouse or production areas (not sure if it also applies to office areas). The kids tooled around on hover boards and segues even if they were pulling pallets around on a pallet jack, they took naps on stacks of pallets, climbed to the 3rd level of the warehouse racks to pick since the forklifts were all broken. There were probably a lot more horrible things I – luckily – did not witness.

  117. Bad Wolf*

    I work in film production. Sooo many hair raising stories. Producers will do anything to “get their shot.”
    One time, we were shooting an exterior scene in a field. The actors got wind there might be snakes in the tall grass. Understandably, they did not feel comfortable going in there. So the producers made the Production Assistants (the youngest, least experienced, least paid, non-unionized, do-what-ever-needs-done position) go in the grass and beat it with sticks to chase away the snakes.
    Thankfully, no one got bit. But man. Talk about paying your dues.

    1. metadata minion*

      Were the snakes dangerous or aggressive? Most snakes are not going to hurt you, and will scurry away the second they hear a lot of big potentially-dangerous creatures (i.e. humans) tromping through their habitat.

      If you live in an area where there are fer-de-lances or something, obviously the equation changes.

  118. Adriano*

    “You’d think safety would be top of mind for employers”

    Look, I know where you’re coming from, but no, we wouldn’t.

  119. SALC*

    At my university I worked in the IT department which OF COURSE is in the basement because classic. For some reason even though the rest of the building’s air intake was on the roof, the basement air intake was at street level in a pedestrians-only zone with giant signs that said NO SMOKING! AIR INTAKE! But everyone smoked right outside it anyways

    And then they started doing construction in that area, redoing the walkways etc. Right outside our air intake. OVER AND OVER they would forget to switch or ventilation to the roof intake and start doing work with crazy chemicals and smells right outside our air intake. Every Friday like clockwork, the most sensitive employee (allergic to everything, including perfume and cigarette smoke) would get a headache, the rest of us would realize there’s a weird smell, and someone would take a peeek upstairs and see the construction workers doing whatever and wearing protection so they wouldn’t inhale the insane chemicals. And then we would evacuate and work from a nearby computer lab. EVERY FRIDAY for weeks on end.

    Eventually someone called OSHA who came and investigated and idk what happened besides them leaving us with an air quality monitor device in our office, but it did stop after that.

  120. LabSnep*

    In my former career of a graphic designer, I worked in an old, old building with a boiler.

    Once it wasn’t working and it was too cold to work. Like, even if you are too small to have an OHS department it was illegal per the employment law. We were chastised for leaving (we could see our breaths).

    Another time, the boiler had an obvious gas leak we could smell through the building. We all left in spite of my boss telling us we were overreacting and we should just all open the windows. I had a headache from the fumes.

    Turns out the boiler WAS leaking gas and it could have been catastrophic in terms of an explosion or, you know, carbon monoxide poisoning.

    1. Mad Harry Crewe*

      There was a gas leak and then explosion several years ago in my downtown. We heard it from probably two miles away. Luckily, everyone was evacuated successfully before the explosion and nobody died – I think one of the fire fighters was thrown or struck by something and broke his leg, but that was the worst of it.

  121. SBT*

    As a former teacher and someone who works in education, the overwhelming number of responses related to school buildings is amusing and so, so concerning.

  122. Seven If You Count Bad John*

    I once interviewed for a bench job at a dental place—they made false teeth, bridges, dentures, like that. There were a lot of red flags during the interview process (speaking of arduous interview—this place ran me through FIVE separate meetings, hired me, and then when I showed up for my first shift, the HR person didn’t know anything about it and thought I was there for yet another interview…I walked out. But anyway).

    So I’m doing my bench test and in the casting room I see the workers handling investment with no masks, and kicking up clouds of the stuff, really careless handling. Dental investment isn’t toxic but it does need to be handled with respect, because it’s a respiratory hazard—you can develop long term lung problems from inhaling that fine dust. I really should have bailed out of the job then and there, but I was desperate.

    1. La Triviata*

      Some years ago, it turned out that a man was packaging and selling mercury for dental amalgam from his home. He’d been doing it for years and, when he was investigated, it turned out that he’d contaminated his entire neighborhood, including neighbors’ vegetable gardens.

  123. Damn it, Hardison!*

    As someone who grew up in tornado alley and had tornado drills in school, I have a healthy respect for tornado alarms and am inclined to find appropriate shelter when I hear one. I went to college in a state where they are not rare, but people’s attitudes about them were much more laid back. Tornado sirens went off during my undergraduate thesis presentation, which was already extra stressful for me because of the unexpected faculty members who decided to attend. I stopped, asked if perhaps we should take a break and maybe head to a basement, but no, I was assured it was nothing and to keep on going. So I finished my presentation and answered what felt like a million questions while the sirens went off and the sky turned a weird green color. There were in fact tornados in the area, but perhaps they thought that God would spare a room full of people listening to a (very pompous and totally ridiculous) undergraduate thesis on theology and existentialism.

    1. LingNerd*

      I grew up in a place like that! Plenty of tornado sirens, but not very many actual tornadoes, and the few that did happen were usually small and short-lived. That seems to be how it is in the Midwest outside of tornado alley. I’d definitely be heading to the basement if I saw the sky turn green though

      1. A Girl Named Fred*

        Same. Where I grew up, people’s first reaction to a tornado warning siren was to go outside and look around. Which is both funny and horrifying to think about when I look back – but even then, if the sky starts turning green all but the most hardcore (read: stubborn) folks will go to their basements.

    2. JustaTech*

      My husband’s company has a bunch of sites in Tornado alley.
      Each site has very few staff, but they have to be there, so even during peak COVID they were on-site (and just staying away from each other).
      Then the tornado alarms go off and they’re all like – go down to the shelter where we’re safe from tornados but crammed in with this scary respiratory disease, or stay up in the fresh air and tornado?
      They chose to risk COVID and hide in the shelter, which was wise because there were several touch downs in their area (but thankfully not their building).

  124. Derry Girl*

    Back in the 80s in Belfast, there was a bomb scare in my workplace, the local university. A few years previously a member of the security forces who was studying there had been killed so if there was even a hint of trouble we were straight out of there. Not one of the students though who insisted that he was staying in the library to finish his essay. I literally turned him round and pushed him out ( in retrospect probably a sackable offence but in the circumstances….) pointing out that there were things that I would die for but that place wasn’t one of them. Only after I shouted it a couple more times did he eventually move …

  125. Nobby Nobbs*

    This was not a violation on the part of the company, as the employee in question is no longer employed here, but: there was The Guy Who Rode The Aerator. This was not a ride-on aerator. It was a walk-behind aerator. I was on the ride-on aerator, thinking about how nice it was to have a crew who could just be given their instructions and go do their jobs when a crew member walked up to me and showed me a video: this guy sitting sidesaddle on the walk-behind aerator, steering it one-handed across the customer parking lot, surrounded by other people’s parked cars, in front of God, his coworkers, and our customers and clearly thinking himself extremely cool. Again, he is no longer employed here.

  126. Lurker*

    Not super egregious but I walked out over it. I was a bartender in the South. It gets hot over summer. The new manager was putting me on patio every. single. shift. I started waking up the morning after my shifts feeling hungover (I don’t drink). I said I didn’t want to work on patio anymore, since the rest of my shifts I was actually working in our food truck that featured a 500-600 degree pizza oven and broken AC that they were reluctant to fix because “it wouldn’t really make a difference.” (We did have another AC attached to the truck but with 90-100F weather we needed everything we could get.) Anyways the new manager told me I “couldn’t make demands” not to work outside every shift. Literally not a single other person there was made to work on the patio every single shift like me. So I walked out and have never felt more satisfied with a decision to quit a job.

    1. LingNerd*

      I once got severely dehydrated over the course of several days while working at a restaurant and walking to and from work in the summer. I was on cold appetizers and desserts so I wasn’t even in the hot part of the kitchen! I just didn’t drink enough during my shift and was too busy to realize. I didn’t have to go to the hospital, but it was close. I’m glad things turned out alright for you, since it sounds like you were probably getting pretty dehydrated if you woke up feeling hung over

      1. Lurker*

        Yeah, I think it was also heat exhaustion. It’s extremely humid where I was working so 90F can easily be a +100F heat index, and sweating doesn’t help you cool off. The shift I walked off, I had shown up in jean pants. She was still going to make me work patio, even though there was literally no reason why someone else couldn’t do it. She just didn’t like me I guess.

  127. Tracy*

    My boss decided to save money by hanging some new cabinets himself. He then proceeded to stack about 50 lb of stuff on top of each of them PLUS what was stored inside. They came crashing down one day extremely narrowly missing hitting and crushing my coworker. My boss just laughed maniacally while he screwed them back up to the wall without any extra support and stacked the same stuff on top again. It was so incredibly wild and unhinged.

  128. Nightengale*

    My two are not terribly egregious except I discovered them both (one before and one after) taking a required safety survey at work.

    I’m a doctor working in an office as part of a large hospital system, for reference.

    One was our new photocopier that had been placed on top of our paper shred bin. I could not reach the photocopier buttons without standing on a chair. I am actually average height for a woman. ..

    Then I decided after several months working in the office to check out our back evacuation exit. The corridor was completely full up of tables, desks, etc. I might have been able to slip through. A person using a wheelchair absolutely could not have.

    The coda to this second was that our office manager went to meet with the office next door about the stuff they had been storing in the back evacuation hallway. They said to her, “what hallway? there’s a storage closet back there!”

    1. Observer*

      One was our new photocopier that had been placed on top of our paper shred bin. I could not reach the photocopier buttons without standing on a chair.

      That’s one of the weirdest stories I’ve seen. Why on earth would anyone do that?!

      1. Annie*

        Two plausible guesses: Someone was trying to save floor space, or someone stacked them like that “temporaily” then forgot to take the copier off the top.

      2. Nightengale*

        The installation worker was tall and didn’t think about other people being less tall? There was plenty of floor and counter space that could have been used.

        My hospital system in general has a terrible case of “We did not think this through”

        1. Chirpy*

          I have an electric rope cutter at work (basically, a hot wire to melt through the rope). I am average height for a woman, and everyone else in my department is similarly sized. The guy who installed the cutter was over 6′ tall and didn’t listen to me telling him it was too high, so now we all have to risk burns while standing on tiptoe to reach the thing.

      3. MA Dad*

        If it’s the type of shredding bin like at my work, a company comes once in a while to empty it out and wheel the bin back up to us. Wouldn’t they have to move the copier every time?

        1. Nightengale*

          I think our shred bin opens from the front and the bag of shredded paper gets loaded onto a portable shred cart without moving the bin itself. I think?

          Also, clearly the person doing this wasn’t thinking of anything practical like how to open the shred bin. I’m not sure the person was clearly thinking of anything beyond “deliver and plug in photocopier.” Fortunately the Giant Fuss I created got the photocopier moved to a safe location before we had to find out what happened when the Shred Bin Person came.

  129. anon for this*

    Because the janky old multi-story building I worked in had only one elevator, which was usually out of service, and because I had multiple doctors’ notes on file with the company outlining the impossibility of me navigating the stairs, the cheapos in charge at my former job came up with a brilliant solution.

    The receptionist would notify me every time the building was scheduled for a “random” fire drill, so that I would know to come down in the elevator ahead of time and wait around outside until the drill was over. (We only had the drills because there were students on another floor of the building.)

    I once asked the safety officer what would happen in the case of a real emergency. He just smiled and said, “Well, I guess I’d just carry you down the stairs.” (I was six inches taller than this dude and probably twice his size.)

    What’s that, you say? Work from home? No, not possible! (Even though a big chunk of my department of people doing my exact same job worked from home all or part of the time.) No, no, accommodating me in ANY way was an undue financial hardship for the company, or so everyone from the HR VP on down kept telling me…

    1. Filthy Vulgar Mercenary*

      “Oh, how fun! so let’s practice you carrying me during each drill just so we know what it’s like”

  130. Margo*

    Once had one of those override alerts on your phone where it blares a noise even when on silent- it said a tornado had touched down nearby seek shelter. We were in the woods and hadn’t had tornado safety plan (to my knowledge). When I called the supervisor, located elsewhere but also in the field, he told us to keep working until we saw a tornado and then head to the truck. My partner and I opted not to follow those instructions and immediately headed to the truck in time for the downpour and second warning. No actual touch downs where we were, luckily.

    Did not work there much longer though that story is more supervisor specific than company.

  131. Cabbagepants*

    My company would have people work back-to-back 80-hr weeks for months during production startup. We were exempt so I guess it was legal. It got to the point that people would fall asleep at the wheel driving home and crash and die. The company responded by giving vouchers to spend the night at a hotel across the street from the factory. I believe this was not because they cared about us but because they were clearly understaffed so losing someone would be an inconvenience.

  132. ferrina*

    Working with young kids when a tornado touched down near us. My employer was well prepared and had designated locations for us to shelter in place. The issue was getting the kids there. As soon as they heard the tornado alarm, one kid started to panic. That caused a second kid to panic. Within seconds 6 or 8 kids yelling and crying and unable to move anywhere.

    I don’t know what came over me. My brain did split-second calculous of how long it would take to talk them down kindly and gently and thought- nope, too long. I went full drill sergeant. “In Line! Eyes Forward! When I Say Line Up, You Line Up! No, No Questions! Eyes Front, Mouths Closed! And Walk!”

    Maybe I was also channeling Granny Weatherwax, because it worked. The kids responded automatically, lining up and pausing their crying and marching along to the designated place. I don’t know if it was the air of authority, the shock of the yelling, or if they realized that while the tornado was scary, it was somewhere out there and I was right here. We made it fine, the tornado didn’t come near us, and there was no lasting damage from either the tornado or the yelling.

    1. EssieMegNoteSpelling*

      Like a Magpyr, you got Weatherwaxed! I’ve worked with kids for years and now have my own, and while I’m very pro “gentle parenting” I also think that sometimes, kids instinctively understand that The Only Way Out (of whatever it is they’re kicking and screaming over) Is Through, and really appreciate the adults they know will get them Through, even despite their own best efforts to the contrary.

    2. Observer*

      We made it fine, the tornado didn’t come near us, and there was no lasting damage from either the tornado or the yelling.

      Even if the kids had been hurt by the yelling, you probably saved their lives.

      It’s really true – there IS a time and place for pretty much everything. Including yelling at kids.

    3. Cormorant*

      There is a time for kind and gentle, and there’s a time for “follow my instructions RIGHT NOW or we might die!”

    4. Gumby*

      This makes sense. I’ve been told that flight attendants are instructed to yell short/clear commands during in an evacuation. Not in a panicky way – but authoritative. When all around you is chaos, people are going to follow the instructions from the person who sounds like they know what to do. But they also need to break through their own paralysis and hear the instructions thus the yelling.

  133. Quartermaster*

    Oh I’ve got one for this-

    I used to work for a local historical park- think low budget colonial Williamsburg. We had dozens of poorly maintained old buildings, and almost all of the buildings had bats nesting in them. We were told to just vacuum up the bat poop when we saw it, and that they couldn’t ‘evict’ the bats because they were a protected species. The worst part was a giant set of lincoln logs we had for a demonstration on how to build a log cabin- the bats nested directly above it, so it was always covered in guano, and it was just out for anyone who came in the park to play with.

  134. hypoglycemic rage*

    wooo boy. my last job, we were under a cold threat – we’re in the midwest, and used to the cold. but this was like -30 degree weather, and officials were telling all of us to stay inside because we’d get frostbite really quickly.

    my boss’s boss was very, uh, old school, butts in seats kind of person (and remote in another city most of the week). we had a meeting a couple days before the cold weather was supposed to happen, and hr was on this call. he said if he was the only one coming in on those days, it was fine, we’d be remote.

    the next day, he talks to just us (hr is not on this call), and says that “this is a business!!!” and he wasn’t “closing the office just because it’s cold!!!” we tried explaining that it was more than just “cold” but he insisted that someone had to be there to get the mail (which we didn’t get daily and fedex said they weren’t delivering anything the days it was supposed to be really cold, so there was no reason for someone to risk their life to come in).

    one of my coworkers volunteered to come in – he got his uber ride comped, but only after his boss intervened, because grandboss wouldn’t have done anything to show appreciation.

  135. Cranky-saurus Rex*

    The company I used to work for set up a “smoke shack” for smokers to have a small sheltered area for smoking when the weather was bad – basically a concrete pad and small roof on columns, no walls, similar to a carport. The day after construction was completed, one of the smokers came inside and reported to his manager, “did you know the new smoke shack is directly next to a sign that says ‘DANGER: gas main, no smoking within 25 feet’? The furthest side of the smoke shack is less than 25 feet away from that spot.” How did they correct this, you may wonder? By removing the sign, of course.

  136. Percysowner*

    I worked in an old courthouse that had steam heat and no air conditioning. I was in the law library and we had the top floor to ourselves. The librarian told the county that books had to have temperature control and got them to install AC in our floor. We were very popular during the summer. This did not help the heating situation. In winter the heat was turned off over the weekend, but since steam heat takes a while to ramp up we would come into offices that were around 40 degrees on Mondays. The flip side of that was once the heating system DID ramp up, you couldn’t regulate the temperature. Tuesdays were getting comfortable, Wednesday mornings were really warm and by Wednesday afternoon we were throwing the windows open. To add to the problem, the handles to the steam radiators had broken off, so you could not turn them off by hand. My boss bought a pair of vice grips and on Wednesday mornings we would run around turning the radiators off using the vice grips. On Friday, or Monday morning if we forgot on Friday, we ran around turning the radiators ON using the vice grips. Eventually the entire building was renovated, mostly because the weight of our books were too much for the floor to hold and we sued to get it fixed.

  137. MechE31*

    My favorite incident was when a contractor dump truck driver went around a bunch of temporary road closed signs to get to a dumpster that happened to be right next to vents for hazardous chemicals that were being actively used. The chemicals had breathing zone limits of 5 parts per billion and would result in death or serious long term health issues if exposed in high enough quantity (which was not a very large amount). His site badge was revoked immediately.

    At that same company where the incident happened, we dealt with a lot of hazardous substances and environments. The safety standards were clearly spelled out and enforced, but the culture caused people to ignored them unless safety was around. Management actively encouraged us to follow all the rules but also set unrealistic schedule targets that required a lot of overtime. Milestones were often hard milestones where you stayed until the milestone was hit even if that meant 16 hour days. The lower level teams encouraged each other to ignore safety rather than stay later.

  138. Rocket Raccoon*

    Mine is about employees being the safety issue. My husband left his crew on a jobsite and came back to an OSHA guy writing them up for not using PPE. The PPE that my husband provided to every crewman. With extras in the trailer. He had signed safety sheets for every employee stating that they’d been given the PPE and told how to use it (part of their onboarding), but still had to pay a multi-thousand dollar fine.

    1. HannahS*

      In Canadian (and most American) healthcare facilities, “code white” refers to a violent or aggressive person. I briefly worked in a medical/forensic facility that did not have a working code white button. As in, a patient was throwing furniture, broke into a locked room and cornered a staff member with an improvised weapon, and when the staff member pressed the code white button, nothing happened. Also, the electromagnetic doors on the units were faulty, so sometimes we would be unable to enter or leave the unit. Also they were chronically understaffed. Also the staff (who were not nurses) seemed to think that the medical orders were mere suggestions that you could consider instead of, you know, an important part of keeping the patients alive.

      To the shock of no one, multiple staff members were assaulted and management didn’t care. More than one patient had to be transferred to the hospital. I reported all of it, was retaliated against, and got out right quick. Big ol’ F that place.

    2. Smithereen*

      In my time at a healthcare facility we had: roaches, mice, mold, leaks/flooding of water, oil tank leak behind a locked door none of us had the key to, cleaning staff who routinely mopped the carpet — with wet mops, windows painted shut, a/c units that were not weatherized, and when turned on for the summer would spew puffs of black stuff and smell acutely of mold, drafts, icy walkways and doors without proper hinges that slammed shut alarmingly and once on someone’s finger.

    3. Safety Squirrel*

      This can vary a bit by OSHA inspector, maybe he just had one who was a bit of a jerk. In my experience, they’re trying to look a bit more at the program as a whole. If you just have one guy who’s not wearing his stuff, it’s gonna make the OSHA guy ask questions. If no one’s wearing it, there’s a lot more questions. Some inspectors will let you off with a warning if you have some evidence that you’re enforcing the PPE program – but without evidence that the company is enforcing it, there’s still an issue. Employees have personal responsibility too, but if they’re not doing what they need to do safety-wise, it’s on the company to address it, document it, and escalate as needed. They can’t just shrug their shoulders and say “eh, we gave ’em the hardhats, they know where they are”.

  139. LingNerd*

    I wouldn’t necessarily call it egregious, but there once was an incident with a chemical spill where someone got it on herself and ran to the locker room instead of using the emergency chemical shower because she didn’t want to strip in front of her male coworkers. Obviously not the safest choice, but it makes sense that the mortification of definitely being naked at work in front of opposite-sex coworkers would, in the moment, outweigh the risk of maybe getting chemical burns. To be fair, our EHS person responded to that by getting some privacy curtains installed around the emergency showers

    1. JustaTech*

      I’ve heard this story from several different EHS officers/trainers, so when I do the “here are the safety showers” talk I say “if need be, your coworkers will shield you with their lab coats, strip.”

  140. Rainy*

    When I was much younger I did admin for a family business in the pet services industry: I did scheduling, billing, bookkeeping, ordering, etc, but of course if you work with animals in any way you do have to handle animals. We had a super stressed cat one time who, as my boss yelled at me to “just grab the damn thing”, bit me pretty badly on my right index finger.

    The bite was obviously serious–it was right on the joint and very deep–and I said to my boss that I needed to go to the worker comp urgent care immediately and get antibiotics etc for it because I was concerned that it had pierced the cartilage in that PIP joint. My boss refused to let me leave because it was “just a little bite” and I would “probably be fine”.

    I woke up the next morning and my index finger was the size, shape, and color of a Ball Park Frank. I drove to work left-handed and brandished my bright red, grotesquely swollen finger at her and was finally given permission to go to the worker comp urgent care, where I was lectured for not coming in immediately with such a dangerous animal bite. You really can’t win sometimes.

    1. Observer*

      was finally given permission to go to the worker comp urgent care, where I was lectured for not coming in immediately with such a dangerous animal bite

      I understand the clinic people. What your boss did was flat out illegal.

      It’s also seriously stupid, because this could have turned into a fairly big claim, and that can up your company’s workers comp insurance costs. And that’s true even if the company had handled stuff correctly. Given your boss’ egregious mishandling of the situation, that could really jack up their costs, or (if it’s a pattern) lose them the *legally required* insurance.

      1. Rainy*

        It could have been so serious–cat bites are notoriously infection-prone. But I couldn’t go to worker comp urgent care without permission from my employer, and I frankly couldn’t afford the $50 copay to go to my insurance’s approved urgent care back then if a cheaper option was available, and I was also worried that even if I did, once they found out it happened at work my insurance would deny the claim, which has happened to people I know.

        My finger was ultimately fine, thankfully, and you can’t even see the scar anymore (25+ years later). The rest of me not so much–I have vaccine reactions so the tetanus shot messed me up pretty hard and that visit was how I found out I’m allergic to azithromycin. A lousy experience all around, but at least I still have the finger!

        1. Observer*

          It could have been so serious–cat bites are notoriously infection-prone.

          Yes. Which makes your boss an absolute jerk- he had to know what he was doing. But also probably why the clinic people freaked. I’m betting that it never occurred to them that someone in the pet services business would be so stupid, reckless and irresponsible.

          But I couldn’t go to worker comp urgent care without permission from my employer,

          I’m pretty sure that it’s illegal*. Which I’m not surprised that you didn’t know that, but it makes your boss’ behavior even worse.

          *I just checked, and in NYS what your boss did was definitely illegal. And you would have been able to go to your doctor without paying even the deductible. What you would need to do is to report it as a workplace injury, and the doctor would then get reimbursed by your company’s insurance carrier.

          1. Rainy*

            Oh..interesting. In the state I was in at the time, your employer can specify who you seek treatment from for a workplace injury, and if you choose to see another provider, they’re only obligated to pay a certain amount, and anything above that is out of pocket. (The limit for 2024 is $500.)

            1. Observer*

              Good to know.

              Are they allowed to prevent you from seeking care? That’s what I was really looking for, and I found the other information along the way.

              1. Rainy*

                I don’t think so, but I was also maybe 22 and didn’t know that I had rights, let alone what they were. My boss told me that I couldn’t go to workers comp without permission and I believed her.

  141. Katherine*

    I used to develop online training for a large retailer. One of the courses I was asked to create was on what to do in a fire. The head honcho providing me with the training material wanted to mention that it was fine to go back for your handbag if you forgot it during a fire evacuation.

    I refused to include this – I’d recently had a house fire and lost most of my possessions in the 10 minutes it took for the fire brigade to extinguish the fire. I also provided less subjective info as to why this wasn’t a good idea. The honcho wouldn’t budge, so I secretly rewrote the content and got the health and safety manager to approve the course instead.

    The same organisation (which used forklifts in its numerous warehouses and was located in an earthquake zone) delivered all of its H&S training via a binder of ancient internet printouts.

    I loved many aspects of that job but still expect to see the org’s name in the headlines.

    1. Rainy*

      I had a temp coworker once whose response to the campus safety officer asking “what do you do if you hear a fire alarm” was “I investigate whether it’s really a fire or not” and the *look* on the safety officer’s *face*…

      1. ferrina*

        Yikes! The correct answer is “grab your laptop so you can continue working outside”

      2. JustaTech*

        I once had two undergrads working in my lab actively ignore a piece of smoking equipment that was moments from catching fire.
        I’m sitting at my desk and I smell hot/melting plastic. That’s not right, so I get up to sniff around for it. And I find it right away, a water bath that had boiled dry (someone set it to 70C and took the lid off) with a foam tube-floater inside. The foam floater was now melting onto the heating element.
        “Do you smell that?” I demanded of the undergrads. “Yes?”
        “Were you going to do something about it?” “No…”
        “Were you going to tell someone about it?” “No…”
        “This could cause a fire that would destroy all our research!” “Oh…”

        (I unplugged the water bath, used tongs to fish out the melted foam, and told the lab manager so she could give the undergrads what for.)

  142. heyella*

    I worked as the director of a very small library in a tiny town in tornado alley. This library was a one-room facility attached to the local school (which was one building for Pre-k-12), but we weren’t school employees–the school district essentially rented out the space to the city for the public library. Our library had two doors: one public door to the outside, and one inner door leading into the school, which was kept locked at all times but we could buzz students in and out to visit the library. Our library also had no tornado shelter, but the school did. It was an above-ground structure that was specially built to withstand tornado force winds, and it was an addition to the school after a tornado took the roof off about five years earlier. This specially built tornado shelter housed the school’s three preschool rooms, and was kept locked at all times so even if you were within the school, you needed a key to access the area. It did have its own outside door, off to the side, which was kept locked but teachers used it to take the little ones out at recess. The shelter was also located at the opposite end of the school from the library, and during school hours the tornado procedure was for everyone, K-12, to evacuate down the central hallway to the preschool room, which presumably staff could unlock, and all cram inside.

    As library director, I only had a key to get us from the library into the school, but that key didn’t open anything else. While we could easily join in on this procedure during school hours because someone else would open the shelter door, I asked what we’d do if a tornado struck on a weekend or after 5 pm or when school wasn’t in session but we were still open…and I got a massive shrug. The school was absolutely unmoved by my entreaties that we still needed to access the building’s only shelter if no one was around to let us in. They would not let me have a key to the shelter, because that key could then open up every door, every classroom, every closet…you get the idea. I escalated this issue to our city management, and luckily city council agreed the library staff and patrons needed a shelter in the event of major storms. They met with the school board, and the solution they figured out? The school would give a master key to the fire department, and if and only if the tornado siren went off, a member of the fire department from eight blocks away would drive over and unlock the small outside side door to the shelter and let any member of the public inside but they would close it after 5 minutes or if a tornado was spotted. That meant that if the tornado siren went off, I would have to evacuate my staff and patrons OUTSIDE OF THE BUILDING, have them walk around the full length of the school, and meet a firefighter outside the tornado shelter…all within five minutes of the siren going off.

    I had very little faith that a firefighter from our tiny half-volunteer department would actually show up in such an event, in which case we’d all be stuck outside with a potential tornado bearing down on us, far from any open door to any sort of shelter. When I complained, both parties refused to reconsider. The key was given to the fire department and I went back to my staff and told them what the powers that be had decided. Every single one of my staff members told me they’d cram into the library’s small, single stall bathroom before leaving the building if the siren went off. I gave them carte blanche to do whatever they thought was safest in the event of a tornado because I sure as heck wouldn’t be going outside either.

  143. Pam*

    I grew up in an earthquake zone. There was at least one earthquake every decade and at school we had earthquake drills alongside our fire drills.

    I was in high school when the Big One came. The floor started waving. Someone shouted “earthquake!” and we all dove under our desks. Except the teacher. She was from Iowa, far far away from the earthquake zone. She had no clue what to do. She started to walk toward the back of the classroom, stopped, then turned around to walk to the front of the classroom. Every single student was under their desk, and she was walking around. Finally someone yelled “get under the desk!” and she figured it out. It took a while for the earth to be done with its dance party.

    Finally all was still, and she climbed out and said “Okay, everyone line up!” Almost on cue, the loudspeaker came on and we heard the principal: “Everyone stay under your desk. There may be aftershocks. We will let you know when it is safe to evacuate.” At that point we realized that we’d need to coach her through it. You never saw teenagers be so gentle with their teacher- explaining after shocks in a gentle voice, lining up swiftly and silently, someone saying “Why don’t you hold the door with me, ma’am?”, leading her through the evacuation route as though we were babysitting her. She recovered from her shock well and let us take charge, and the next day, we all pretended it didn’t happen to preserve her dignity.

    1. JustaTech*

      When I moved to California for college I asked during freshman orientation if we were going to have earthquake training. “Oh, you all know what to do!”
      “No, I don’t, I’m from back East.”
      “Eh, you’ll be fine.”

      Now that I think about it, we never had a fire drill either.

      1. Quill*

        Moved out west (mountains) asked my new boss what the tornado drill protocol was… got laughed at for a minute until someone explained that we were more likely to get earthquakes.

        We had THREE electrical fires at that job and I was only there a year and a half.

  144. Mouse*

    I work in a school where pretty much everyone has the summer off (I don’t have the seniority to have that much vacation yet). And oh boy, the place doesn’t run the same when it’s me and a skeleton crew of admins and security guards.

    The place is always rented out to a summer camp while everyone’s away, but last summer we were also undergoing major renovations. For weeks, kids walked around the hallways while the ceiling was open with wires hanging down. It looked like a horror movie set. I don’t think there were any incidents though, thankfully.

    The previous year though, there was an afternoon where the fire alarm was pulled twice, and both times I evacuated the building (as you’re, y’know, supposed to). I belatedly found out that both times, the alarm had been pulled by camp children. The 2nd time I went back in, a guard made fun of me for actually evacuating. Thanks, Gregory.

  145. Coasterchick*

    On 9/12/2001 (so the day after the 9/11 terrorist attacks) my co-worker and I were in our office with the door closed as we were seeing an increase in student traffic in our waiting room due to the prior day’s events. We worked in the International Programs Office so lots of people coming to see their advisors.

    We heard this dinging sound that in no way sounded like an alarm, and wrote it off as someone doing some sort of tribute to the victims. I stepped out of our office to get my next appointment to find the lobby totally empty. I commented on that to my colleague and she assumed I meant empty compared to earlier, not totally void of people. I checked again a few minutes later to discover that there was a police officer at our main office door and my colleague and I were locked in!

    Turns out the sound we heard was the alarm and our entire building had evacuated an hour prior due to a bomb threat. We had never had a fire drill and had no formal evacuation plan so half the office went one way and the rest another and everyone thought we were with the other group. When I left at the end of the school year we still had no formal evacuation plan!

  146. Happy*

    The active shooter one seems less like a safety violation than a person reacting poorly to a rare and shocking situation. Which isn’t uncommon!

    That’s why they specifically advise in active shooter situations to try to get people to evacuate with you, but to abandon them if they refuse.

    1. Rainy*

      We used to do bomb/shooter/threat drills in my office (there are good reasons for that–the most recent death threats we got were only a few months ago) but leadership decided that it was “too disruptive” and scared people too much, so we’re not allowed to do them anymore.

  147. That Govt Grunt*

    We had a fire alarm yesterday. Not a drill. An actual alarm.
    The whole courthouse had to evacuate, including judges in their robes whose hearings were interrupted.
    It was a false alarm. Someone pulled the alarm on the 6th floor. Maybe they hoped they would get a mistrial?

  148. Zona the Great*

    Ski resort. No health insurance offered. My office was ski-in only. A very dangerous activity was required to do my non-ski-related job and I had to use my own skis, boots, and helmet.

    1. JSPA*

      Are you implying that skiing is highly dangerous? And did they not cover the cost of lift access? (That’s quite a perk.)

      I mean…the job may have been a bad fit for you.

      But I’d compare it to someone who has a weak immune system, emetophobia, doesn’t like kids and doesn’t have kids, working at a preschool whose main perk is free care for the children of their employees.

  149. Generic Name*

    Apparently universities are notoriously bad about lab safety. I worked in a biology lab that used formaldehyde as a preservative, and part of my job was to put the creatures that were suspended in formaldehyde in a small dish and identify the species. Formaldehyde exposure can cause all kinds of health effects, plus it just smells really bad. The lab’s “solution” to this was to strap some cardboard to a fan and turn the fan around to suck the fumes away from the technician’s face. It only sort of worked. Later, I was tasked with dumping jars with creatures+formaldenyde into 55 gallon drums so they could be disposed of. They offered me no PPE and told me to just do it in front of an open window. At one point I was overcome by the fumes and I refused to empty any more containers until I got a respirator and safety glasses, which they did. I am now sensitized to formaldehyde, and I list it as a past exposure on health forms for work.

  150. Nesprin*

    Bench scientist here. Some of the most egregious I’ve experienced:

    While I was an intern, walking in to the lab and seeing my putative mentor pipetting blood from donors who had not been screened for HIV without gloves or labcoat using a spinal needle.

    A grad student who directly connected a piece of tubing to the house vacuum. (for those not in the know, you’re supposed to set up a trap to collect liquids into a flask + protect the vacuum system.) He was also fond of lighting a Bunsen burner then wandering off to do something in another lab.

    A piece of equipment that could only be turned on by reaching your hand into a live 240V junction box to flip a switch.

    A co2 laser setup to be pointed directly at the entry door with no door interlock. (There was a laser curtain but I have a smidge of retinal damage from that one).

    1. Rainy*

      My dad was a microbiologist with the state when I was a kid; he was hired to take over the syphilis testing lab, and when he started, his trainer showed him how they mouth-pipetted everything, with a little wad of cotton stuck in the end of the pipette “for safety”. Dad was like, have you never heard of finger-pipetting. He wore out the distal joint in both index fingers and the IP joint in one thumb and was pipetting with his left thumb when the lab finally bought autopipettes.

      My first husband was an OR tech and loved to tell the story of the lab tech who was exiting the OR on the way to the lab with a bunch of abdominal fluid samples from a patient (who was suspected to have several STIs) in their aspiration needles on a tray covered in a drape when someone busted in the double-action doors the tech was exiting and slammed the tray into the tech’s chest, sticking him with several of the contaminated sharps.

      They had to take a whole new set of samples (for a whole new lab tech to carry much more carefully), and the hapless lab tech went straight into a procedure room to be filled full of antibiotics and antivirals.

    2. Bruce*

      When I was taking undergrad optics one of the professors gave a demo with lasers, he called up one of the other professors and had her hold a piece of paper in her hand… and then set it on fire with the laser! It was definitely creepy and dangerous…

  151. Nuke*

    A little over a month ago, my area had a terrible ice storm that impacted thousands upon thousands of people. So many trees down, the majority of roads were inaccessible. Power lines and trees down everywhere, and the transformer right outside my house blew. Needless to say, I was out of power. I hung in there for as long as I could, but I eventually had to evacuate to my sister’s house about 20 minutes away – packing up and taking my 10 reptiles and my dog with me.

    This all happened on a Saturday, and power wasn’t restored until Monday. Roads weren’t completely cleared for several days. So, I called out of work on Monday, knowing that my job had “Natural Disaster Leave” that was instated after the big Texas snowstorm…

    Well, I got back to work and they told me the disaster leave didn’t apply. To quote my manager: “The policy applies only to disasters that are on the level of Hurricane Katrina. Also, the office was open for you to be able to come to work. You will have to use your own PTO for that day.”

    The office for my job is technically the next county over from where I live, which did not get hit severely by the storm. I’d say expecting an employee to dodge live wires and trees to get to work WHILE EVACUATED is a pretty unsafe move. But, I lost the fight with my manager and HR.

    Didn’t get a single word of concern or “I’m glad you’re all alright” either!

  152. Anonymous Engineer*

    I work at a manufacturing facility in the safety department and regularly have to remind people not to feed the alligators.

    1. Dinwar*

      Or to pet the armadillos and prairie dogs. Or to wrangle the snakes. Or to try to chase off the bobcats. Or to mess with the coyotes. Or……

      1. Gumby*

        The (really quite excellent) National Park Service social media/Instagram person has included several reminders to not take selfies with the wildlife.

  153. Diatryma, microbiology tech*

    I work in a large hospital lab; like everyone else has mentioned, fire alarms are a little less pressing than would be ideal. We joke that someday we’ll have an alarm go off while we’re being inspected, and that’ll shut us down. And, of course, the one time there was a fire, we never got an alarm or university alert– we spent the morning talking about how it smelled like something was on fire, but assumed it was outside our air intake, and then one tech got a call from her spouse saying that it was breaking news that her building was on fire, was she okay? We evacuated down the hall* and spent a couple hours waiting to be cleared to go back. Eventually our managers and one or two people went back because the hospital didn’t slow down and we had samples to process (do you want to call the NICU and tell them they have to draw more blood because the first sample sat out at room temp for too long?).

    *big hospital with connected buildings; evacuation procedure is ‘get past a fire door at least, to another building if possible’

    The thing is, ‘big hospital lab’ is an edge case. Normal offices aren’t dealing with that kind of physical infrastructure or time-sensitive patient-related anything.

    On the other hand, I will someday snap and say, “You are chewing gum; your argument is invalid.”

    1. Diatryma, microbiology tech*

      Oh, I’ve also worked in special ed, and I’m told it’s great fun to make the active-shooter trainers say aloud, “Then you abandon your students and run.” They do not like it.

  154. Lola*

    I worked for a non-profit, safety net hospital, which means we always operated on the thinnest of margins. There were Fridays where we weren’t sure we’d still be open come Monday. So making repairs or building new facilities was often not an option.

    The building I worked in was primarily for administration, as it was over 100 years old and didn’t have sprinklers in case of a fire. Apparently sprinklers are required for patient spaces, but not for staff???? And this building was a tinderbox.

    Of course I did work on the one floor where we did see patients, but I guess that was kept secret from the state and auditors. Every fall, when the weather would start to turn cold, mice would come in seeking warmer shelter. At least once a day you’d hear some staff member screaming at the sight of a mouse. One time I was seeing a patient in crisis and I had to sit there with an expressionless/calm face as several mice ran around behind her. Fortunately they seemed to hide during our busy patient hours, when the clinic was pretty loud.

    I used to joke with my supervisor that I was going to bring my cats over the weekend, when the clinic was closed, and let them take care of the problem, because maintenance did very little.

  155. TaylorK*

    Old Employer I was at. Was working as a claims adjuster for an Auto Insurance Company. Had to give a denial notice to a customer on a claim (valid denial due to unable to provide proof of damages and his entire story contradicted the police report and photos that were provided by other party.) which did not end well. Customer immediately went on a tirade and made many threats. Customer called back about 20 mins later from another line. Here is the things he listed below:

    My full name
    Where I worked: address and location and even what my hours were
    Where I lived (aka my home address)
    What kind of car I drove
    How far away my home address was from my work location
    My SO’s vehicle at the time
    Things he would do to me for not sticking up for the “little man”: Find and slash my tires with his buck knives, Run my car off the road, Shoot out my car windows, Find me and make sure I understand what true pain and agony felt like. (Fyi this mans location was within a reasonable driving distance from where I worked (less than 30 minutes away)

    I immediately notified my supervisor along with HR and our Security and Safety team. The protocol was supposed to be have increased security around my work place and home as well as notify law enforcement about the threats so that proper authorities can get involved.

    Actual Protocol: Lets just wait and see if he actually will live up to these threats. He cant be that harmless. Just be extra cautious when your out and about. No need to get the police involved. You could of handled the situation better to take care of our customer.

    I immediately started job hunting after that incident. I care more about my life and safety over “our customers” if that is how we allow them to act.

  156. Sunshine Gal*

    Many moons ago I worked in the social services field with folks with brain injuries (ABIs) in a community hub location (basically a community-based center with various services/supports, including a policing office).

    From the get-go, one of my clients took an immediate dislike to me and was hostile in all interactions. The client had an ABI and undiagnosed mental health conditions. The client would routinely issue verbal threats (to burn down my house; to kill me; to blow up my car; to slit my dogs throat) and the threats were often accompanied by attempts at physical intimidation. I brought all concerns forward to my supervisor, manager, and OH&S committee. My supervisor did not take the safety risks seriously, even after a police officer from the community office witnessed an incident and had to get involved to de-escalate the client. Not long after this incident, the client stabbed me with a 12-inch hunting knife, piercing my lung and me spending 10 days in the ICU. The incident was caught on video at the community hub, and I was able to press charges and obtain a restraining order. When I was healed enough and cleared to return to work, my supervisor tried to tell me I had to continue to work with the client who assaulted me. I ended up getting the police’s watch commander involved to tell her that no, I could not work with this client due to the active restraining order and that she needed to give her head a shake about taking personal safety risks seriously and to take better care of her staff. I ended up successfully suing my boss and workplace due to unsafe working conditions as they had 2.5 years’ worth of documentation from me about the safety concerns with this client and little to no precautions offered from the employer (there were even flippant replies to my emails from my supervisor that I was over reacting and to not be so worried about the client). Workers Comp also upheld my claim given the safety risks that were well documented and the lack of appropriate intervention from my supervisor, manager, and OH&S committee.

    1. Abogado Avocado*

      You are badass! Way to hold that outrageously bad management accountable!

  157. Tired Introvert*

    Not really egregious but at a call centre job none of us new hires were briefed on emergency protocols so when a tornado touched down nearby and we had to evacuate to the basement, I was still on the phone apologizing to a customer for the air horns blaring in the background til a supervisor came and pulled me away. I had no clue what was happening plus they were so strict that I was afraid to leave without permission.

  158. umami*

    On that last one, we train our staff that during a live situation or drill, they can tell others what they need to do, but after that they need to look after their own safety. If someone refuses to comply, your own safety is paramount!!

  159. Tired SW*

    I used to be a direct care provider for intellectually and developmentally disabled adults. Medicaid classes their IDD clients based on SIS (support intensity levels). It’s a scale 1-6 with 6 being the highest need. 7 can be awarded by the state in exceptional circumstances. There was one client who was notorious for aggressive behavior when in vehicles. In my 3rd week, I was assigned to have him and 3 other clients in a company vehicle. I told my supervisor that I didn’t feel safe driving him. I was told that I’d be fine. I wasn’t. He “escalated” 5 minutes into the drive and grabbed my hair, dragging me over the gear shift. Caused a head on collision, we shut down lain street for 3 hours. All the clients were fine. I got whiplash and severe sprains of the L knee and wrist. In compensation, I was given the rest of the week off. I was in PT for 2 months. I should have sued, but I was desperate for a job that used my degree. The client was classified as a Level 7 a few months later and Medicaid paid for 1-on-1 care for him for the rest of his life. I stayed at that job for almost 3 years.

  160. Sweet Fancy Pancakes*

    I don’t know if this counts, because it wasn’t the fault of the workplace, but at a library where I worked we called the fire department because there was a weird, noxious smell (not exactly like a gas leak, but not NOT like a gas leak, you know?) and evacuated the building, turning on the fire alarm. Well, tried to evacuate, because one woman refused to get off the computer, saying that she knew it was just a drill. It was not a drill. And employees couldn’t leave until we had cleared the building. She wouldn’t budge, until one of the firefighters read her the riot act about how it wasn’t a fire, but also wasn’t a drill, and she was endangering lives by not leaving the building. Even when she finally went outside, she hung around right outside the front door instead of moving across the parking lot to the designated safety zone. That got her yelled at by another firefighter.

  161. Shopping is my cardio*

    Here is a story. Many moons ago I worked for a medium size company (300 to 400 employees). I worked in inside sales so all of us were in the younger side (mid 20 to mid 30). One day we all get called to meet with the VP of sales for a brainstorming session. This was not normal so we all sat there are chatted with him for an hour or so, kind of strange but whatever. When the meeting was done we realized that everyone had evacuated the building, the entire company was outside in the parking lot. It turns out we had a bomb thread called in and they suspected that it was someone in our group. Their way to flush the person out was to have everyone sit in this “brainstorming session” to see if anyone was acting strange. We were all dumbfounded and pretty pissed off actually.

    1. Bird names*

      As you should have been. What were they thinking? Were they even thinking?

  162. Anne Cordelia*

    This is tricky because I know there’s privacy laws etc, but….I was working as an ESL teacher in an elementary school (so, traveling around to different classrooms), and I was pregnant. I found out weeks after the fact, that a student in one of the classes that I visited had Fifth Disease. This is a known risk for causing miscarriage, and I had just had a miscarriage prior to this successful pregnancy. The nurse and principal didn’t inform anyone except the classroom teacher, but so many other people may have contact with a student —art teacher, gym teacher, librarian, office staff, lunchroom staff…It may not even be obvious who is pregnant, and the risk is actually highest in the first trimester. They didn’t even have to name the child —they could have at least put out an all-staff announcement saying “there is a child in Mrs Smith’s class who has Fifth Disease, anyone who has contact with that class may have been exposed.” Nothing ended up happening, thankfully, but I was upset. There has to be some reasonable balance between privacy and risk.

    1. 1LFTW*

      When there was a covid exposure at a childcare program I worked during the pandemic, they handled it exactly as you described. Everyone who came in contact with the kid was notified that “a child” at the program had tested positive, and we should also get tested. A similar email was sent to the other kids’ parents.

  163. Vienna*

    At 15 I got my very first job at a local water park, where I cleaned bathrooms/hauled trash/scrubbed literally every bodily fluid imaginable off the concrete. Management was HORRIBLE to the staff, because they were the only company in the area that would hire 15 year olds and they knew that they could replace any of us with zero difficulty. Towards the end of the summer, the majority of the lifeguards quit so they could enjoy the last few weeks before school began. The park obviously couldn’t function without life guards, so they started having the cleaning team members stand in. I was asked to monitor the wave pool, the most dangerous part of the park. I refused, and my manager told me if I didn’t just shut up and sit in the chair that they would consider that my resignation. I tried explaining that it would be illegal for me to life guard for a few reasons: 1) In the state I lived in, you had to be at least 16 to be a life guard. 2) I was not a licensed life guard. 3) Most importantly, I CANNOT SWIM. Their resolution? I could guard the kid’s slides instead since there would be one actual life guard stationed at that pool as well and the water was shallow enough for me to stand in. I never went back.

  164. Zipperhead*

    I worked for a radio station years ago where the station owners expected the DJs to climb up the radio tower to change the warning lights. I believe one of the DJs did it once or twice because he got some extra pay, but he quit doing that when the rest of us asked if he was really willing to die for the bosses’ greed.

    (I could fill a thick book on how awful the owners of that station were, but I believe that was the only time they did stuff that could’ve killed employees…)

  165. Zona the Great*

    Oh I do have another. Worked for a place where you had to badge into every exterior door and then into interior doors all the way through the depths of the building. You also had to badge out of the same doors to get out. Which means if there was a fire, you had to have your badge to get out of every internal layer and out to safety. No one–NO ONE–seemed to care in the slightest no matter how many times I pointed it out.

    1. Llellayena*

      That’s actually not as much of a problem as you think. Badge systems should be directly tied to the alarms and should be set to “fail-safe” which means that all doors release when the alarms are triggered (I don’t think a properly scheduled and programmed test needs to do so, but an actual trigger does). So in the event of a fire, you would not need your badge to exit the building.

    2. Observer*

      Which means if there was a fire, you had to have your badge to get out of every internal layer and out to safety. No one–NO ONE–seemed to care in the slightest no matter how many times I pointed it out.

      These systems are generally designed to “fail safe”. Which means that when there is a fire, the locks disengage.

      When we put in our access control system, the company would not enable it till the Fire Dept came in and tested that it worked properly. At least in NY, that’s a legal requirement.

  166. J*

    (nb: most states do not have regulations on heat exposure in the workplace, so none of this was technically illegal, it just sucked)
    In high school, I worked in retail in the southeast US, and on one of the hottest summer days of the year, our A/C went out in our store. You better believe we were still required to work and not allowed to have water on the floor. One person collapsed and was allowed to go home. Aside from that, the A/C in general shut off at 10pm – woe unto you if you were a closer and had to stay until the work was done. We also didn’t have laws governing work hours for workers under 18 during weekends/school breaks, so I regularly worked until 2am.

    I now work in academia; a couple of years ago we unfortunately had a shooting occur in close proximity to academic buildings (we are in a major city and do not have a “campus” as such – the areas around our buildings are public space). I heard the gunfire from my office. About twenty minutes later, we got a “run hide fight” text from campus security; most faculty continued class uninterrupted. That was the extent of our active shooter response.

    My partner worked in a call center in Massachusetts during the Boston Marathon bombing. The city was put under full lockdown during the hunt for the bombers, with strict orders not to leave our homes unless there was an emergency. The call center told my partner they still had to come to work.

  167. ohcomeon*

    High school received a bomb threat (fake) and they evacuated everyone onto the open air football bleachers that were only about 50 feet from the building. Also, they didn’t bother to check for bombs in the bleacher area first.

  168. FuzzFrogs*

    I work in a public library. I had to go into our maintenance closet one day to get some more toilet paper for our patrons. The toilet paper was kept in a filing cabinet as old as I am (there were Putt Putt and Freddi Fish stickers plastered to it). It swayed like a willow tree every time it was opened and closed. So when I went to get toilet paper, it swayed and

    BAM! A loud, dull impact, my vision went white, and I felt something heavy fall into my arms. By the time I was thinking clearly again my manager had run in from two rooms away. The falling object? A leaf blower. A leaf. Blower.

    In the months that followed, I: had a complex concussion, got called in for questioning multiple times, and avoided any formal write-ups by pointing out that it was not exactly reasonable for me to have to look for dangerous leaf blowers stored above my head. In that time, our upper management debated various policies and ultimately decided that we just…couldn’t get toilet paper for anyone, ever again. I had several stern talks with our maintenance guys, who continued to store the leaf blower on top of the cabinet despite being told to stop by management.

    I don’t know why I described the cabinet in the past tense, because guess what? It’s still in that closet, six years later. And it still stores the toilet paper.

  169. Former teacher*

    During peak covid and pre-vaccine (June 2020-January 2021), my school district was one of the few that did in-person school. There was no testing, cases continued to rise, and indoor dining was banned in our county. Teachers were allowed to and did eat lunch together indoors (maskless obviously) on a daily basis. The district ignored the CDC contact tracing guidelines and would try to get us not to report if we were a close contact of a student so that the teachers wouldn’t have to quarantine when the student tested positive. For PPE, we received expired hand sanitizer and moldy wipes. Needless to say I ended up quitting that job eventually.

  170. kiki*

    Don’t know if this is terribly shocking or funny, but I worked for a company who had a volunteer safety committee who was supposed to come up with safety protocols and procedures for the company. Basically, junior folks were voluntold for the committee. Nobody had any training or guidance, just a general goal of safety. Some basic things were fine– we could coordinate a fire drill and have procedures for that. But then one day we were tasked with coming up with an active shooter protocol and drill. It was wild! Apparently the year before I joined it went terrible because somebody just brought in a squirt gun and ran around squirting people with water to demonstrate???

    1. JustaTech*

      When we had (real, paid for) active shooter training my coworkers started joking about how, if there was a shooter, they would smother me because I have a strong startle reflex. It was sort of funny once, but they kept it up the whole training, even after I asked them to stop. (“Can’t you take a joke?”)

      I wish the trainer had told them off.

  171. Juicebox Hero*

    In college, smoking inside the buildings was allowed until my junior year, and was finally nixed due to smokers stubbing out their butts on the windowsills and tossing them away anywhere they pleased, not out of health considerations. I once saw one of the biology professors walking around with a cup of coffee, a lit cigarette, and a can of ETHER. He always had the coffee and the smoke, but the ether could have been a teeny weeny problem :O

    Then they had designated smoking areas, one of which was right where the fume hoods from the organic chemistry lab vented.

    1. Mouse named Anon*

      We had a smoking dorm in college and this was in 04 and 05! I think they turned it non-smoking shortly after. We also still had smoking lounges all throughout campus.

  172. Lady_Lessa*

    This is one time when I chose which safety concern was more important.
    First year grad student in chemistry as a TA in a lab. The lab was large, the ceiling was all skylight, the time early fall in the US South. So hot, The lab was teaching the students how to run Gas Chromatographs, which are nice instruments which produce a lot of heat and either each student or pair of students have their own.

    I chose to allow soft drink cans in the lab, because I was more concerned about human heat issues than the chance that chemicals would get into them. (The test solutions were in small narrow mouthed containers, also making it harder to contaminate the drinks.

    1. I Have RBF*

      Ooof. Yes, I agree with your choice.

      Older GCs operate using simple ovens, which then open to vent their heat into the room during their cool-down cycle. One GC lab I worked in kept the A/C at 60, because the chill reduced the time for the GCs to cool enough to start the next run. It let us run a few more samples per machine per day. We wore sweaters in the lab when it was 80 degrees outside. But the samples were all contained in vials and moved from vial to machine using Luer syringes, so nothing was being splashed around.

  173. Violinrunner*

    I am a professional violinist, and one of my jobs is in a ballet orchestra. Every December we perform the Nutcracker roughly 30 times. Which should probably be considered a safety violation by itself. But the *actual* safety violation was a couple years ago.

    Christmas Eve afternoon we finished our final performance of Nutcracker and walked out of the pit to the piercing screech of the fire alarm! We never heard it in the pit. And to make matters EVEN WORSE the door to the outside was locked and we had to wait for building security to open it for us.

    Apparently there wasn’t a fire. Actually I never did find out what happened. But it’s a good thing there wasn’t because our first clue would have been actual fire on stage or something equally horrible.

    The strangest thing is that as far as I know, the theater that houses the ballet takes security and backstage safety pretty seriously, so not sure who dropped the ball on Christmas Eve 2022.

  174. Anonymous in Connecticut*

    Years ago we had many heavy blizzards in a row. The Monday after a long snowy weekend, the sprinkler systems were all visibly lower than the drop ceilings, and some interior walls had cracks starting.

    Despite clear signs the roof was starting to buckle, we were not sent home. Instead the entire facilities team went up to shovel the roof.

    They had been shoveling for a couple of hours before anyone realized they should have harnesses, since there were no rails at the edge of the roof.

    The entire company now gets periodic training reminding us about working safe at a height. But I’ve seen nothing saying to evacuate if the roof could collapse!

  175. Anonymous For Today*

    I accidentally made this a sub comment so I’m reposting it as definitely its own thing because it’s egregious (and also maybe people will learn a thing.)

    There’s no way to anonymize my job so. new name for the day!

    I coached gymnastics. my boss did not understand the safety requirements of gymnastics facilities. this. individual. bought a backyard trampoline because he did not want to buy the matting that you need to buy with a competitive trampoline and set that sucker up in the middle of our gym. (backyard trampolines are dangerous as a toy. it’s irresponsible to use them as a training tool)

    1. Gumby*

      If you want to spontaneously break out in hives, listen to the Gymcastic episode about terrible training equipment/set ups and eyebrow raising meet stories. I felt much better about my own training environment after hearing that.

  176. CJ Cregg*

    Not sure if this is safety or more health and wellness, but during the panini, upper management fled the building in March of 2020 and basically never returned. Most of the staff was sent home, but some of us were required to stay in the building full time (despite the fact our jobs could be done from home). Management decided our water lines (both to the water cooler and coffee machine) needed to be cut off, effectively leaving us without drinkable water. They also took away our fridge and microwave (especially frustrating for those of us who got to work at zero dark thirty and relied on heating up leftovers for meals). We raised enough of a ruckus (along with several threats to call OSHA) that they bought us bottled water and snacks for about a year and a half.

    1. Annie*

      Was any reason other than “to stop pathogen spread” and “you employees are even grosser than you realize” given for cutting off the water lines and taking away the fridge and microwave?

      It happens often enough that something is turned off or disconnected for one reason and then you find out it needs to stay that way for another reason.

  177. VinnyVinnie*

    A private school I used to work at overseas changed buildings to a brand new location (previously it was in pre-fab containers). The new location was beautiful but definitely kind of a death trap. The fire department came to yell at the school because it was built specifically on a spot vulnerable to collapse during earthquakes, or possibly it wasn’t up to code for earthquake safety. I’m not sure exactly what the issue was (I don’t know the local building laws) but the fire department was not happy with us. The fire alarms also weren’t real. Plus, the outside courtyard was tiled and it rains the whole winter there. Once the rains started small children would regularly slip on the wet tile, fall, and slide across the courtyard, crashing into other people as they did. There weren’t any drains in the courtyard either, despite most of the other floors having drains, so it would regularly flood.

    They had also installed several of the large, very tall windows upside down in the first and second grade classrooms so the bottoms opened up instead of the tops. Those classes were in the second floor overlooking the tiled courtyard, making it a fall hazard. They fixed the window issue at least, mostly because one window fell out and bounced off a six-year-old’s head while my friend was teaching. The glass pane landed right on his head. Luckily it didn’t break but it was definitely cracked.

    When she asked him if he was okay, he answered immediately and fluently in a strong American accent despite normally struggling to use English, which kind of freaked my friend out. But he wasn’t hurt and at least the upside-down windows got fixed.

  178. I've Escaped Cubicle Land*

    Worked at a hardware store where an employee accidentally flooded the store with some kind of gas (propane? I don’t recall) Some poor customer fainted and hit their head on a display. The smell was real bad and they opened the doors to let it dissipate. Right were I and the other cashiers worked. So all that smell/gas came our way and the manager was actually angry when I threw up and insisted on leaving.
    Remember the Anthrax scares after 9-11? I worked at a mail opening place at the time and some mystery powder was spilled out of the mail. Now this place had a rule that you couldn’t leave the building during the shift. No outside breaks. only 1 corner of the warehouse was the break room. This might have been the last place on earth where people were allowed to smoke inside the building. And 75% of staff was smokers. So mystery powder spills. Everyone freaks. Authorities are called and we are all sent to break. Inside. With almost every one smoking. What ever safety office responded had absolute kittens about people smoking inside anyway let along if Anthrax was milling about the air system. Totally screamed at the managers and made them send us all out to the parking lot. Mystery powder ended up being dish detergent. That place didn’t have a outside break yard until a member of management quit smoking and insisted on 1.

  179. Gretchen*

    I live in the southern US in a city where it snows only a few times every winter, and the city completely shuts down when it does. Schools shut, businesses close, offices close early.

    We had a very bad snow and ice storm.This was the late 80s, and this was my first real job out of grad school–a tiny business with only a few employees. My mentally unstable boss WOULD NOT LET ME LEAVE, even though the roads were unsafe and getting worse. When I eventually left the office at my normal quitting time, I was the only one there. Even my terrible boss was gone. The building was dark, the parking lot was empty. The sidewalks, stairs, and parking lot were covered in slush and ice. I was wearing a sweater suit, stockings, and heels. I realized that I could not safely step down from the curb to the slush-covered parking lot while wearing high heels. I removed my shoes, and risking frostbite, trudged across the parking lot. The water and ice were ankle deep. I still remember my breathless shock as I stuck my stockinged feet into the slushy mess in the lot. Somehow I made it to the car. My stockings were ruined.

    If I remember correctly, my battery was dead. I think that I had to sit in my car and wait for my husband to come and jump the car. I know that I didn’t have a cell phone back then (who did?), so I’m not exactly sure how I contacted him. I might have had to go back inside.

    I did not stay long in that job–a year. I actually set a record at that company for my sheer longevity. The only people that stayed longer than a year were my boss and his business partner.

  180. Susie QQ*

    I used to be a professor at a community college. One day we noticed the faint smell of gas in the building. When we asked, we were told that the situation was under control and we were not excused. People started getting headaches and throwing up. Some of the people in the building were pregnant.

    There was obviously a gas leak. When we complained to the administration the next day, they told us that “You’re an adult. If you feel sick, it’s on you to go home.” Keep in mind we had _very_ limited sick time.

    To make the situation even more infuriating, there happened to be a childcare center in the building and the kids were all evacuated. Just not the faculty or college students.

  181. I watered your plants while you had covid*

    In my misspent youth I worked as an field tech for a university affiliated archaeology firm. I was older than the vast majority of the crew by about 5 years and there were some spectacularly clueless supervisors. Two incidents come to mind.

    On a rural project we needed to dig a line of test holes in the path of a road construction project. We came up to a fence labeled “Warning! Bull Inside!” with said bull being apparent in the distance. Our supervisor instructed the mostly college aged field techs to climb the fence to complete the test holes, rather than dig them closer to the edge of the existing road. I said hell no and pointed out the sign and the bull and he eventually allowed the accommodation (which was within parameters for the survey!).

    Second incident – I was working in the lab and a very very new grad was supervising their first field team (all under the age of 25), and they all came in on a Friday from another survey, this time in the woods – during deer season. They had not been given hi-vis vests and when I asked what they did to stay safe they told me they tried to be as quiet as possible and work as fast as they could (if you don’t know, this is exactly how you get shot in the woods in November). They even saw hunters. I blew up and the next week they went out in high visibility vests and had instructions of be as loud as possible and even to play music and scare off every deer and hunter in a 3 mile radius. They all survived the remainder of the project.

    1. ferrina*

      These are both appalling! The bull story had me laughing- a good portion of my family grew up in farm country, and they have stories about bulls. One does not play chicken with a bull.
      The hunting one terrified me. These poor kids had no idea what they were doing or how incredibly dangerous that was! Good for you for informing them as forcefully as you did!

      1. Farm Girl*

        I grew up on a farm with cattle and hogs. We were allowed to roam around the farm pretty much as we pleased with two exceptions: we were not to go anywhere near where the bull or boar were housed. (They were kept separate, too.) When the bull was in a largish gated area next to the farm buildings (as opposed to out to pasture), the pen had both an electric fence and then large metal gates/fence outside of that.

      2. Observer*

        These poor kids had no idea what they were doing or how incredibly dangerous that was!

        Absolutely. That supervisor should have gotten a stern talking to by their management. Those kids could have gotten killed.

  182. Rook Thomas*

    Worked at a law firm that did defense work in a few areas of law, including worker’s comp. Had an atty do this several times: stand on a rolling desk chair to get to a shelf with office supplies. Yes, a chair that rolls. Even though there was a stepstool that was firm to the ground (no wheels).

  183. Jane Bingley*

    I live in a part of the world that has very cold, messy winters. Occasional snow days are inevitable. I had a boss who hated giving snow days and so his rule was that we could leave work early only if the police were asking people to stay off the roads. Which meant we were going on the roads only when it was extremely unsafe to do so.

    I’m very grateful now to work from home, even though I don’t get snow days anymore.

  184. anon teacher*

    I live in the northeastern USA, where we get (or used to get) a fair amount of snow in the winter.
    In my first teaching job, the superintendent was absolutely determined not to call for a snow day until the last possible minute. We could have 2″ of fresh snow every hour, freezing rain, gale-force winds…no matter how bad it got, he wouldn’t call until the next morning. More than once, the call went out after I had already left for work, meaning that I braved the weather and drove in – passing through a half-dozen towns that had called a snow day the night before – only to discover that school was in fact cancelled.

    His excuse? “We’re hearty New Englanders – we can handle snow!” It still makes me seethe, even a decade and two job changes later.

    1. Bast*

      As a fellow New Englander who has heard this many times and didn’t used to think anything of it — my whole attitude changed once I got into a bad accident because of being called out to work in a snow storm. It was restaurant work, so NOT essential; we could have closed. Whenever anyone tells me “This is New England, we get snow” or anything similar, I always tell them that I can get another job, but not another life. And there are at least half a dozen posts on the neighborhood app for every storm — “Does anyone know if Dunkin is still open?” Thankfully I work in a field where I can WFH, but people are willing to risk driving in a blizzard for coffee, and… well, that says a lot about the attitude a lot of people around me have about snow. They just don’t see it as a big deal.

      1. Bast*

        And to clarify, I do mean ACTUAL BLIZZARDS and not just a little snow; I understand that for many people in this area an inch or two of snow is not a big deal, but when they’re calling for a foot and they’re out here asking about Dunkin, that’s wild to me.

    2. STILL ALIVE*

      Oh, boy….we used to live in North Dakota and they actually did such a good job with that! Something about it being easier for parents/bussing/etc. to call off school the night before than to do it in the morning.

    3. EvilQueenRegina*

      UK here and my dad used to work for a school that was equally determined. He was living in a bit of a remote area at the time, and I remember him calling in to find out if it was opening, got told yes, to come in. He stopped off en route to collect someone else, called from her place to ask “Are you sure you’re open?” as it was still snowing, was once more told to carry on. He got there to find a very sheepish looking headteacher. “Um…we just decided to close.”

  185. Alex*

    I worked at a grocery store that was so understaffed we literally didn’t have people to cover the entire day (we were only at about 40% of the staff our department actually needed). This meant that we couldn’t complete the required food safety checks at the correct intervals. We kept getting points deducted for our department’s performance because of this. “You didn’t perform the 2pm safety check.” “That was because no one was working at that time because we are so understaffed.” “We understand you are understaffed but still need to complete every safety check even if no one is on duty.”

    I quit.

    1. Observer*

      Yeesh!

      I’m glad you quit. Working for people who expect magic is crazy making.

  186. Microbio Grad Student*

    I came in at the very tail end of this and don’t know all the details, but when I was going through the basic safety training for my first job as a lab tech at a biotech company (just reading through the safety standards pamphlets/watching some videos that were standard for all the company locations) they brought in a new rule for our location only. Specifically, that going forward it would be a firing offense for any employees “to store fireworks or other personal explosives” in any of the Flammables cabinets. (Ironically, fireworks weren’t even legal in the state we were in to begin with.)

  187. SnickersKat*

    Worked for Target when I was a teen. It was back when the food court employees were legitimate short order cooks, which is where I got hired. My first week there working alone after “training” and I had to clean the hot grill at the end of the night for the first time. I put the chemical cleaner on the grill and started to scrub, but got some on my thumb. My thumb immediately blistered and was bright red and double it’s normal size. I went to find a manager and found the GM (head of our whole store location). She said put a bandaid on it and walked away. No injury write up, no now at all that I just got an incredibly bad burn. I was too young to know any better, so just went back to work trying to not cry from the pain.

    Also working there we never washed our hands between taking money and making food, and didn’t have to wear gloves while preparing food too. So sandwiches, salads, etc were covered in money germs. I’m so glad I didn’t make anyone sick from the food!

  188. Jane*

    This isn’t work, but I had a teacher in high school who would not let us leave the classroom when the fire alarm went off.

    1. New Jack Karyn*

      Oh, man. I am a high school teacher, and that person should have been reported to administration. A write-up, at the very least.

  189. Bruce*

    Didn’t happen to me, but a friend worked as a fry-cook as a teen. One night he had to dump the fryer oil out, he had to pick up the whole pot of hot oil to dump it… lost control and spilled it down his chest. He had scars that would stay with him for life, and was lucky to not have been maimed in a disabling way…

  190. Tree*

    My first job with health insurance, i had to buy a bunch of tools on payroll deduction. When they arrived, my trainer showed me how to take all the safety guards off! But when the big tornado came we were all in the shelters and nobody got hurt.

    Next job contracted security was responsible for triggering tornado alarms. No big deal, right? Except that the building I was in didn’t have security after 3pm. And we weren’t supposed to have our phones on the shop floor. So I’d been under a tornado warning for 10 minutes when I wandered past my desk and saw I had a message…

    A couple years later (different building same company) the county set off the sirens, and all our phones went off. EHS had sent an email that morning that they would trigger the alarm if necessary, so we kinda killed around. Until the building manager came running thru the office “get to the shelter! Who’s in the shop I need to find them all!” while the next lower guy failed to get security to trigger the alarms. It wasn’t a big tornado, but you could see it from the parking lot…

  191. NopeRope*

    We had rattlesnake babies in the warehouse. How did we find out? One went on top of the owner’s foot during an open house event.

    Turns out the Shop Foreperson knew about the rattlesnakes and just didn’t tell anyone for weeks.

    In a good end to a not great story, once the owner was involved, wildlife control was contacted and appropriate policies were implemented. The policies boiled down to “if you see bugs/wildlife/snakes/etc tell X or Y.”

    X and Y handle contracting our regular pest service and wildlife pest control.

  192. arachnophilia*

    When I was in middle and high school in the 1980s, my mom worked for a textile plant on the factory floor. This was in the Southern US, where union-busting is a favorite pastime, and to try to head off people joining a union, the leadership put together a “safety committee.” My mom, who was an amateur artist, created a little safety mascot with some sort of clever acronym for a name, which was posted out front with the number of days since a safety incident.

    Then, as a part of the committee, she reported a safety issue within her department – essentially, she would have to take very heavy (70lbs or so) rolls of fabric, stack them in a bin, and wheel them to the next step in their production. Except there weren’t enough bins, so people would stack them very high – more than head-high – above the sides of the bin. This, my mom explained, was a problem because the rolls were rounded and it was just a matter of time before one fell onto someone and injured them. Everyone shrugged, nothing changed.

    And then I came home from school to find my mom in a sling and in awful pain. Guess what had happened? Exactly – a roll had come off the top of the bin and landed on her, dislocating her shoulder and knocking her to the concrete floor, where the top of the arm bone shattered.

    The kicker? She was not allowed to take sick leave for this incident. She had to come in and do admin work or just sit around all day so that it would not be considered a “lost-time incident.”

    A few years later, she put herself through nursing school, which had its own safety issues, but nothing like that place.

  193. LBLBLB*

    This is a work adjacent tale…

    I had to travel to Hong Kong for work at the end of 2021. This happened to be during a time when the rest of the world was opening up and C-19 had just started really spreading in HK. As an American, there was a 3 week quarantine in a hotel. If you left your hotel room, you would be detained and threatened with fines/jail time. The hallways were monitored with CCTV to make sure you didn’t break quarantine.

    With less than a week left in my quarantine, the fire alarm went off in the hotel at 3am. I got out of bed, put on my shoes, grabbed my important items, went to the door and froze. What happens if I leave? Do I go to jail? With alarms blaring, I try the front desk and no answer.

    Then I call the health department, still with the alarms blaring. They tell me that I should leave if it is an emergency but not if it is a false alarm. I ask how do I tell the difference and they said to wait for the fire department to show up. I tell them that the fire trucks are here. They then tell me if I leave my room, I will be detained unless it is a real fire. Mind you, I’m on the 30+ something floor so a long way down if it is a real fire.

    Finally, the alarms stop and the fire trucks pull away. No announcement from the hotel. In the morning, I called down and asked what I should do if it happens again. The front desk person just laughs and tells me to ignore all fire alarms as they are usually false alarms. Luckily I only had to go thr0ugh one of those.

  194. Willem Dafriend*

    At one of my first jobs, there was an active shooter situation and virtually no one responded appropriately except us entry level, new to the working world staff.

    We had to argue with our bosses to convince them to let us lock up, and senior staff kept standing by windows, working at their desks, or going in and out of the building while the rest of us were hiding under desks and trying to secure the room like we’d been taught. The kicker was that our whole department had just done a mandatory active shooter training.

    Everyone in my office was fine, and after a couple hours we were given the all-clear. I hope management overhauled that training, though.

  195. Mad Harry Crewe*

    I’ve been lucky to work in offices where health and safety were not completely disregarded. However – I was a theater tech in high school. Our theater was probably built before WW1 and it had some… peculiarities. And being teenagers, we were quite sure we were immortal.

    The worst one was the Walk of Death, which crossed the entire house from the proscenium to the lobby. You got into it from the catwalks at the stage end, and there were several yards of very nice railed walkways so you could access the lighting bays in the ceiling. Then there was a wall and a doorway, and on the other side a single 2×10″ or 2×12″ board walkway, no railings – you held on to the wire supports suspending the board. That went on for quite a ways, and at the other end you popped out a trap door in the ceiling of the second floor lobby, right behind the booth. Obviously, it was considered a rite of passage for new techs to do the Walk of Death.

    The heavy fire door above the proscenium was left standing open my freshman and sophomore year – freshman year we had an awful theater teacher who simply did not care about anything. He left (fired? probably/hopefully) and I suspect our new teacher just didn’t know about any of this sophomore year. When she did find out, that door was kept locked and only opened for lighting techs who actually needed to go up there, and hopefully the board walk section was completely closed off.

    There were other very questionable things, like the cherry picker that had to be lifted and rotated over the seats to access some of the house battens – we definitely almost dropped it on me, once. That was scary. I think they got a new, smaller, cherry picker after I left.

    1. Zap R.*

      Oh god, Friend A dropped a wrench on Friend B while using the cherry picker. Everyone was mad at Friend A but in his defense, he was a 15 year-old kid being made to operate heavy machinery in a high school auditorium and no adult saw fit to provide anyone with PPE.

      1. Mad Harry Crewe*

        Oh, don’t worry about that, we observed proper theatre safety: you tied a loop of cord to the handle of your wrench, and hung it from a belt loop.

        Also came back to mention, the ceiling that the walk of death passed over was, I dunno, plaster? Probably? Nothing that would have held the weight of a falling student.

  196. Name Anxiety*

    our while library system staff were required to go through emergency response/CPR/first aid training with the fire department and I need to go to a session separately from my branch which was built on fill (big rocks, wood and sand) way back when the city was being constructed and they wanted more waterfront. When the trainer asked what we would do in an earthquake I cheerfully said “Slowly sink into the bay!” He laughed and agreed after confirming where I worked and asked someone from a different branch to respond since my situation wasn’t broadly applicable.

    At another library, the safety coordinator had taped foil packets of mini glow sticks from Oriental Trading to the wall of each of the elevators in case of an emergency. I was very excited to have the opportunity to break those out but we never had a power outage.

  197. Jam on Toast*

    A funny safety violation story. I taught in higher ed for many years. Humanities. The worst thing that usually happened was a paper cut or eye strain from reading one too many run-on-sentences.

    But one term, I was teaching in a big lecture hall. There was a plywood folding table down on lecture hall stage and as I’m walking back and forth, I pause to lean against the desk. BAM! I go crashing to the floor when the table just collapses. I’m on the floor amidst the wreckage, with a throbbing tailbone and the class is howling with laughter at my Buster Keaton impersonation. Very embarrassing. But as I get up and dust myself off, I discover that the reason the table has collapsed is because someone has purposefully removed all the screws that hold the folding legs together. Prank? Intentional destruction? I have no idea. But I want to make sure no one else gets hurt, so after class ends, I call Facilities to ask them to remove the broken desk and encourage them to check any other desks for loose screws. I return to the lecture and figure no harm, just a little bit of foul to my ego, right?

    But somehow, my call about the table gets back to HR. I’m making dinner that night and the phone rings. My husband answers. It’s the VP of Safety and Something or other, calling to ask me about the incident. I find myself describing — in detail — just how bruised and sore my butt is to a random leadership person and being asked to complete an injury report. “How bruised is your tailbone?” “How far does the bruising extend? Do you have any other injuries?” “Will this affect your ability to perform your job?” Mr. Jam is standing there, wildly amused by the questions and generously offering to conduct any inspections I might need done, in the name of “workplace safety” ;). It amuses me to think that somewhere, in some filing cabinet or backup drive is a report describing my injured behind.

  198. Zap R.*

    The G20 Summit took place in my city several years ago. My city’s police force is not particularly known for its competence; thus, one of the worst riots in my country’s history ensued.

    I was working in housewares retail at the city’s busiest intersection during the riot. Instead of closing the store, head office sent us some plywood and duct tape to board up the windows and informed us that we were still expected to meet our sales targets for an ongoing kitchen knife promotion. We had to continue to let people in and out of the store while the riot raged outside and then try to sell them high-end meat cleavers. My manager quickly gave up and let us go early but my coworkers and I had to walk through the riot to get home.

  199. Khai of the Fortress of the Winds*

    Not me, but a friend used to work at a facility for high-risk offenders who could not be incarcerated. A new supervisor decided that the clients should have knives in the kitchenettes, which promptly led to a stabbing, and that there was no need to have plexiglass shields over the televisions, which promptly led to all of the televisions being battered to pieces by the chairs. The next new supervisor went the other way and insisted on evacuation for every time the fire alarm went off. Unfortunately, that included the time a technician was repairing it and set it off as a reported test of the system (not a fire drill). All clients were evacuated, including the bedridden clients housed (for no known reason) on the second floor who were carried down the stairs by staff resulting in several broken limbs.

  200. ZinniaOhZinnia*

    I worked at a science museum in the butterfly garden. We had to keep the temperatures pretty warm (low 70s/high 80sF) or the butterflies wouldn’t fly. One day, the HVAC system had some… issues, resulting in the garden space being 115-120 degrees F (!). We made a lot of money off this exhibit, and because the butterflies were all non-native species, we legally had to have a museum representative in the space whenever visitors came through. My boss (older, hated his job) chose that day to leave early and left me (23yo, first fulltime job ever) alone in the exhibit- meaning, I couldn’t leave the 115-120 degree greenhouse for hours. He did, however, provide me with one small bucket of ice. Thanks, Bob.

    The exhibit was finally closed for the day when a VP and his wife toured it and his wife noted it was “a little hotter than usual” in here.

  201. Sometimes I Wonder*

    I had worked for this employer for over 10 years and through three moves. Our first day in a new-to-us building, the city inspectors declared the building was unsafe for human occupation due to structural issues in the basement and foundation! We were on the fifth floor and had to take the stairs down. We hadn’t even had a practice evacuation to a designated meeting place (an annual event for that business, they always chose something at least two blocks away) so none of us knew where to congregate to get any news. We had the next day off but came back to work on the third day, after the building had made some repairs.

  202. Mrs. Hawiggins*

    I worked in a place where the mailroom man came around and calmly told us to go down the stairs and meet in the parking lot because there was smoke in the elevator shaft.

    No fire alarm, no bells nothing. Just the absolutely wonderful mailroom guy who kept us all calm as smoke started making its presence known.

    Management downplayed it of course but the fire marshal’s and the OSHA team’s presence for several days afterward rattled some nerves. Management: “It was a malfunction we’re all fine.”
    So I told my boss – the largest downplayer, that she can be fine without me, and quit. They were fined so heavily they couldn’t afford the retrofitting and the improvements so they folded.

    “Oh we’re all fine,” I always think of that company when I see that dog/fire meme on line.

  203. AnonFed*

    Professional estate sales folks in a town near me have repeatedly made the news over the incredibly unsafe things they regularly find. The major town employer there is a federal research lab dealing with everything from infectious diseases to explosives and chemicals and a LOT of folks took stuff home in the days before security increased in the mid 90’s. The hazmat folks regularly get called out for everything from bio waste to possible radioactivity to unstable crystallized impact explosives. And the stories of the folks who work at the research lab who clean out old offices and labs after people leave or retire are equally harrowing, they never know what they’ll find leftover or hoarded. The worst I’d heard was a lab cleaning which got delayed by about 6 months and by the time they got in whatever leftover unlabeled chemicals had been left in the fume hood had melted through their plastic containers and the drips pooled together to form something that was gently giving off dark brown fumes.

    Don’t ask about laser safety, I might explode from the unsafe things I’ve seen at work, especially the rust cleaning and etching lasers that get deployed without any kind of eye protection or vapor shielding. Yup, great idea, vaporize the top layer of metal without any lung protection, sure, that’ll end well, /sarcasm. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve had to point out to folks that airborne metal particles are hazardous to the point of OSHA laws regulating them, only for folks to say something like “well it hasn’t hurt me yet so I’ll keep taking my chances.” Surprisingly the younger folks don’t put up nearly as much fuss as the older ones do and usually start taking proper precautions. They give me hope.

  204. BabaYaga*

    When I was in university, I worked at a golf course in both the kitchen and on the course with maintenance. The chef in the kitchen was an irresponsible blowhard and a bully. He got mad at me for refusing to use our meat slicer until I was shown how to do so safely and later berated me for pointing out that one of our deep fryers was on a particle board end table (not intended for kitchen use) that was clearly wobbly and that nothing in that area was even braced.

    After a while, I transferred out of the kitchen and just did maintenance full time since the chef was constantly changing my hours without telling me, getting angry at me for not somehow sensing when he had changed my schedule without telling me, and just being a jerk in general.
    (He had me meet him in the main club seating to berate me about how I clearly couldn’t hack working in a kitchen because of my safety concerns and it made me so mad that I cried. For once, the patriarchy worked in my favour and one of the club members complained to management about him “making that nice girl cry in front of everyone for no good reason”.)

    3 weeks later, we all get sent home and the course is shut down for the day. Remember the deep fryer I mentioned? The particle board table it was on collapsed and hot oil gave one of the other kitchen employees 3rd and 2nd degree burns all over their body. I don’t know if the course ever got sued for it but the employee needed in home care for the rest of the summer.

  205. Liz*

    My husband worked for a subcontractor at a steel foundry — the dirty, non-union-protected work. This was during the height of the opioid crisis, and quite a few of his coworkers had legitimate prescriptions for Oxycontin and related meds. They were very easy to get at that time, especially working at a place that destroys your body.

    But these coworkers were not taking the medication as directed and were instead crushing and snorting them. My husband reported a couple of guys who passed out or were clearly a danger to themselves and others (and whose jobs involved driving heavy machinery in a zero-visibility environment) and was basically told, “yeah they tested positive but they have prescriptions, so….”

    1. Safety Squirrel*

      This is why drug testing is such a dumb move for employers. Really, it should be based on training supervisors when to recognize that someone is impaired, not whether or not they pop positive on a test. But that takes training time and they don’t want to do that, of course. Training is also an advantage because it covers things that won’t show on a test or that are legal (i.e., alcohol, drowsiness, legal marijuana).

      Also, many employers seem to think that if any employee tests positive for anything, they’re automatically off the hook for Workers Comp – absolutely not true. They may still be partially liable, or 100% liable if the worker’s injury wasn’t directly related to their impairment. So it really all comes down to impairment anyway.

      I read an interesting case where one guy tested positive for cocaine, the company denied him WC, and he contested it. Turns out he just had it in his system from the past, had multiple people (including the ER doc) who vouched for him not being impaired at the time of the injury, etc. They ended up having to pay his WC – this particular court doesn’t care about the legality or not of their substance use.

      I also read another fun one where a construction carpenter and his coworkers all went off-site for lunch, they all got drunk, and went back to work. He got injured, and this man legit got in front of a judge and claimed he was just as good of a carpenter when he was drunk as when he wasn’t. His BAC at the time of the injury was like a 0.12. At work! I don’t remember how it ended, but the sheer balls on that guy impressed me, lol

  206. Caramellow*

    My last company had an active shooter drill (put on by a paid expert) that required us all to climb up to the second floor. Where there was no fire escape or way to get out. My colleagues and I devised an actual plan which had us all running out of the first floor exits into the woods. Because that just made more sense.

  207. Ishkhara*

    I worked in a museum which had a couple of historic firearms. I also lived somewhere with very strict gun regulations and no one on staff had a firearms license (dangerous and very illegal). The board refused to get me certified. My boss brought in a printout of the relevant laws and the *city councillor* on the board simply refused to read them.
    I don’t work there anymore or in a place where I need special licensing to touch the stuff.

  208. Choggy*

    I work for a utility company, and we have a standing safety meeting every week, office or field worker alike, everyone must attend, even if the topic is not directly related to your area of work. We also have a safety committee which has put its money where its mouth is. I was on it for a few years, and learned a lot about safety regarding our field personnel which was an eye opener since I am an office worker. It so important that everyone in the company, from the top down, care about safety. We’ve had instances of people doing unsafe things, and they’ve paid for it, either with a painful injury, or a write up. It’s never worth ignoring safety, whether at work or home.

    1. Mouse named Anon*

      I also work in the utility space. My company takes safety so seriously. Sometimes we kind of roll our eyes at how serious. Lol

      1. Choggy*

        I roll my eyes at some of the safety videos the safety manager picks for use to view. I don’t know how anyone can take the cartoon ones seriously, they are designed for children, not adults. I can say I did learn important tips about using a fire extinguisher (everyone should have a working fire extinguisher or two in their home!) and ladder safety which were really useful in my personal life.

  209. Mouse named Anon*

    Many years ago I worked at a really awful company. They were super toxic in many ways. It was winter and either day before or after a holiday. So not many people were in the office. Including my boss or my boss’s boss. We were getting slammed with a snow storm. The state called it a level 2 or 3 of emergency. Mean stay the eff off the roads. Also meaning if you did happen to get pulled over you could get cited. It was about 2pm. Many of us in the office were starting to get worried about the weather and getting home. We tried calling and texting our boss and got no answer. There was hardly anyone there, we could “Ask permission” to leave. So we decided to head home.

    The next working day was a monday. We all got written up for leaving without permission. A few of us refused to sign the write up. I can’t remember much else that happened other than a “Don’t do it again”. I hate stuff like this. WE are all adults. We didn’t leave work because we wanted to go drinking with buddies. We left because it was blizzard outside.

    This was the same place that wanted to write me up bc I asked for an unplanned day off. The reason…. I had a miscarriage and needed a surgery bc of it, right away. I left pretty much after that.

  210. Petra*

    My boss had bought a bunch of brand new Apple computers for the office from some vaguely shady guy. Next thing you know he is being dunned to pay immediately and in cash for the computers that just arrived. Apparently the guy who owned the company was going bankrupt and needed some ready cash to stash away. My boss refused since what if then it looked like we still owed the money for the computers to the administrators?

    So anyhow, that is how we all ended up locked in our offices waiting the boys to pay us a visit and break my boss’s legs. I had already asked to go early for an appointment, but he made me call and cancel since I was, like, 22 at the time and he thought the leg breakers might not want to get too violent around a girl.

    Never turned up in the end. Turned out they didn’t trust the bloke to pay them either so just ghosted him.

  211. Schrute Farms*

    Last summer our office was in an old historic building that couldn’t be fitted with air conditioning units. We’re in an area where the summers can get up to 110 degrees F and we work with the public. Closing our offices or working from home weren’t always an option but had to be done as the inside of our building reached 120 degrees last summer during a heat wave. As a government services office, it basically took an act of congress to figure out how to get free-standing AC units in the building. The units brought the temperature down to the low 70’s, which yes is a shock at first, but much-needed. We had people passing out and vomiting from the heat.

    “Kyle”, one of our interns, was in love with “Kelly”, another intern. Kelly was always complaining about how cold she was, even when the office reached mid-80s or the 90s with the AC going full-blast. Kyle took a white-knight stance with Kelly and ran to get her a sweater or hot tea when she complained about being cold. He even emailed me multiple times asking if we could turn off the AC because it was “unhealthy”. Dude.

    One Monday morning we had an extreme heat warning, like melting your tires heat warning. We advised our staff to do what they felt comfortable with RE coming in to the office or working from home. I came into the office in the morning with the intention of checking on the team and ushering everyone home if it got too hot. It had been incredibly hot all weekend and the AC units were on timers to prevent them from overheating and would cycle on and off, so I expected the office to be a little stuffy but at least cool.

    It was like walking into hell’s oven, I literally stumbled back from the door like a cartoon character. Somebody (Kyle) in a fit of chivalry had turned them from AC to FAN, which had the units pulling hot air in from outside without cooling it. We couldn’t risk turning the AC units back on without them overheating so we had to let the staff work from home for most of the week until we could get the temperature back to something sort of normal.

  212. Archaeologist*

    I worked for a Professor of Archaeology who, unprompted, tried to send us on a museum archives trip to Syria.

    In 2022.

    Right.

  213. SmokeyTheBear*

    I was a contractor doing after hours work in a public building. The occupant of one office asked us to wait in the hall while he packed up, then he suddenly shut the door in our faces. Thinking he had a phone call or something to finish, we wandered the halls looking for other work until an armed SWAT team surrounded and escorted us out. Turns out the building was on lockdown with an active shooter threat! My team was not notified, and the occupant chose to lie to us and not let us in. Phone calls were made and heads rolled after the threat was cleared. Now there is a safety plan-in-progress and every security officer has my direct phone number in case of another incident.

  214. Chaos coordinator*

    First winter at my old job, we had a November snow storm that mostly left icy slush and ice. The employee lot had not been plowed or salted. I fell in the parking lot walking into work. Filled out an incident form, had my elbow x rayed. The safety committee reviews all incident reports is supposed to suggest how preventable accidents can be prevented. So I assumed the safety committee would recommend earlier plowing or salting. Nope. They recommended I walk on the “pathway” they said they always salted— which was basically a strip down the middle of the lot.

  215. H.C.*

    There was an active shooter incident at ExJob (a rather larger healthcare campus); when our team (PR/marketing) got alerted about it, my VP’s first response was trying to dispatch me to the site to check out & report back on what’s going on so we can draft an appropriate press release.

    I replied how about letting security do that and have them relay any crucial comms info we need to tell patients/visitors/media.

  216. PubintAtty*

    I am guilty of not evacuating when the fire alarm goes off- after 20+ years in nonprofit and gov work (in old and poorly maintained buildings) I assume every alarm is a malfunction. I can recall one building where any time it rained the alarm would go off every hour or two for a couple of days and another building where the alarm system was damaged in renovations so would go off any time a particular door was opened or closed.

  217. Mazey's Mom*

    Hurricane Andrew, August 1992. I lived in South Florida and worked as an assistant manager to a national retail store in a mall about 30 miles away from home, both in the direct path of the hurricane. Not my first rodeo working in retail, nor for a company that put profits ahead of safety and expects their employees to work through hurricanes just in case we get the one idiot who wants to spend their money in our store as a major meteorologic event roars towards us. I was told that if I didn’t come in to work, I’d be fired. Also was told that corporate was leaving the decision up to the mall about whether or not to close, and mall management dithered over a decision. Only found out about the mall closure once the phone lines were back up and running because when the winds hit, I was snuggled up in bed. Thankfully, we didn’t sustain any damage, but our delivery driver who lived in Homestead lost his home and everything he and his family had.

  218. La Triviata*

    For a change – someone doing something responsible. Several years ago I was in a department meeting in the conference room – five of us. Suddenly I heard a “WHOMP’ that sounded like it came from the HVAC system. The only other woman in the meeting heard, but none of the men noticed. Fairly soon after, building management evacuated the entire building.

  219. Art3mis*

    I also worked at a call center when the tornado sirens went off and they did nothing. But the room we were in was internal with no windows, and the building had no basement, so I guess we were as safe as we were going to get?
    When I was in high school we had a fire in the building during school and they didn’t evacuate us. Luckily it was contained quickly, but you know you spend your whole school career preparing for that moment and then nothing. We had a fire drill the next week and I went up to a teacher during it and said, “Excuse me, I thought we weren’t supposed to evacuate during a fire?” She didn’t have a response. This was 1995 and I was not a trouble maker so I don’t think she expected that.

  220. StressedButOkay*

    I lived for several years in a former 55+ apartment building and most of the tenants were still older, many with health issues that included wheelchairs or mobility devices. Nearly the entire time I lived there, there was ALWAYS an issue with the fire alarm system – it went off once 10 times throughout the night, false alarms, so we all stopped trying to get out of the building and just slept through it.

    Eventually the fire department had had enough. The cited the complex and forced them to turn the fire alarm system off until it was fixed. While it was being fixed, we were on ‘fire watch’ – which were patrols of (mostly employees but sometimes random 70 year olds) wandering the halls to make sure nothing was on fire.

    This went on for TWO YEARS. Two years with no working alarm or sprinkler system until they replaced the entire system. Nothing made you feel safe like knowing Nana and Papa were shuffling through the halls looking for fire…

    (According to their reviews, they are still having issues with the fire alarms….)

  221. fallintoabook*

    I used to work for a government office in a really old building where about 75 people worked. Our boiler was notoriously wonky and it was always stifling in our building. People would complain to our grandboss, who would shrug and blame it on a temperamental old boiler but otherwise not do anything about it. Well, we had someone on staff, Jim, who was actually licensed to maintain boilers before taking a position in our office and when it would get really bad someone would go find him and beg him to look at it, and Jim would make some adjustments and the rooms would go from 88 to 78 degrees and we’d all get some relief. Not sure how above board this was, as he was not our building’s boiler manager but it was a good thing we had him on staff because one day someone smelled something weird–not burning, but dangerously hot. They followed the smell to the basement door, got scared, and went to go get Jim. Jim goes to check it out and comes back five minutes later and walks right into our grandboss’s office. Within a minute we were evacuating the building, and I’d never seen our grandboss look so scared. Turned out Jim peeked into the boiler room and it was glowing red–something had gone wrong, everything was dangerously overheated, and Jim thought it could blow at any moment. When the fire department arrived, they couldn’t even risk pouring water on it without it exploding. The entire office closed for two days while they disconnected the boiler, waited for it to cool down, and then replaced it. Jim was a hero and our grandboss now checks the new boiler three times a day, even in summer.

  222. DivergentStitches*

    When I worked at a staffing agency that placed workers in a manufacturing facility, our 3rd shift team lead ignored a warning sign and reached into a machine to do something. He was sucked in, his chest was crushed, and he was killed. That was a hard day :( I liked him very much.

    1. Former ehss consultant*

      I’m sorry
      That stinks
      A lot of injuries happen to new and onboarding employees when time for onboarding and safety orientation is minimized

      Good reminder of the importance of workplace safety

  223. anonymous for this*

    I worked in a therapeutic role on an acute psych unit. Space was limited on the unit, so my office was off the unit and I would come onto the unit to hold groups and meet with patients. My new supervisor wanted me to be on the unit, so she decided that she was going to convert the storage closet on the locked section of the unit with the most acute patients into my office. The patients in this area were there because they were currently a danger to themselves or others, e.g. suicidal, homicidal, violent, psychotic.

    I asked the supervisor what she planned to do with the medical supplies currently being stored there (including needles, razors, etc) and she told me she would just push the shelves to the back of the closet. I asked what I should do if patients tried to get at them (because btw, she wanted me to keep the door open when I was in there so patients could come in and hang out), and she said, “just tell them, ‘oh no, we can’t go back there!'” It should also be noted that this unit was on the second floor of the building, and there was no escape route from the closet, AND the door opened to the inside, which meant that someone larger/stronger than me (a fairly small woman) could potentially barricade me into the closet with them, and one of our security guards told me that they would not be able to do anything in that situation to get me out.

    When I raised concerns about this plan (later, in writing, because I’d been too shocked to respond to the conversation in the moment), my supervisor lied and said she’d never said that about the supply shelf. She also told me that if I was scared, “some people are not cut out to work in mental health.”

    I never had to move into the office because there was a delay in getting the maintenance people to paint it, although she did offer to me that if I picked out the paint color, she would get it for me and I could paint it myself. I politely declined, and soon after quit without having another full-time job lined up. She had hired a friend of hers into the position about 24 hours after I gave my resignation (the person she’d been comparing me to for her entire tenure as my supervisor), and never made that person move into the closet. I did some freelance work until covid, and now am in what had been my dream job for about a decade. My supervisor is great, values my work, and would never knowingly put my safety/life in jeopardy.

  224. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain*

    Right out of college I worked for a commercial printing company — long run, web presses, we mostly printed payroll checks/cheques so the building was in a heavily industrial part of the city — not a corner print shop that customers walk into. I try to get to work one morning and police and fire trucks have barricaded off the road leading into the area. At first, I try to take detours around the closure until I realize they have cordoned off several square-blocks around my employer. I manage to ask a police officer what’s going on and they inform me a chlorine gas leak at a nearby business means the area will be closed for several hours. I call my employer and they tell me to find a way around the barricades, I’m expected at work — they made it through and so can I. I’m like, “Nope, I think I’ll follow the officer’s instructions.” Get there about 3 hours later and get a bit of a talking to but not in formal trouble. Chlorine gas! The people who had either gotten there before the spill or had gotten through the barriers(!) had just kept on working instead of evacuating.

  225. LadyCerevisiae*

    Trigger warning: workplace shooting

    …
    …
    …
    …
    …

    I was working as a PhD student at a US university when there was a shooting in the building next to ours that was connected via bridges on a few different floors. At the time they believed there were potentially multiple active shooters, though afterwards it was discovered to have been a murder-suicide.

    We received phone and email alerts to go to the nearest locked and windowless room to shelter in place. I was already in our shared office so I stayed there. Several of the postdocs decided that they would keep working, walking through the hallway in and out of the various lab rooms we had, which all had window doors instead of the opaque office door! To give context, our boss was infamous for not accepting any excuse like illness, wanting to work less than 60 hrs a week, it being the weekend, etc, to be out of the office/not working.

    The SWAT team sweep reached our area about an hour later, and I could hear them banging on the doors down the hall, shouting, “Police! Open up!” I could hear female and male voices shouting this, and I had never hear of a mixed gender group of mass shooters, so I grabbed my bag and opened the door. Pro-tip, definitely announce you are opening the door before you actually do, so that they stop hammering it and give you space to open it.

    The SWAT team rounded up everyone from the other lab/office rooms in our hall and had us sit against the wall in the hallway. A new postdoc in our lab from Uganda sitting next to me started making jokes and finger guns while I tried to point out that this was not the safest move for him to do during an active shooter situation, surround by cops with really big guns.

    They eventually marched us out of the building with our hands on our heads and we had to evacuate that part of campus. About 30 min later, when campus re-opened, our boss very generously messaged the whole lab to say that we could go home for the rest of the day, but basically everyone (including me, since I was hosting a symposium the next day) came back to the office and worked as normal.

    Later I found out that one of my friends in the same department had sheltered in one of the locked windowless lab rooms and peed in a beaker rather than risk going into the hallway during this event. I thought that was brilliant, but a bunch of other people in the department teased her about it, as though risking getting shot was no big deal!

    It probably comes as no surprise that my colleagues rarely evacuated during fire alarms either.

  226. BadHospital*

    Worked for a hospital as back office staff during Covid. My department was particularly nasty about it.

    1) WFH was banned as soon as the local stay at home mandate was lifted because “it’s not fair nurses can’t work from home”. Most departments kept staff as WFH.

    2) most of my coworkers were Covid deniers and refused to wear their N95s or surgical masks even though it was policy. I’d say about 70% of them. Anyone who complained was unofficially punished. They coudnt do any official punishments, like taking away PTO accrual or assigning the asinine “levels” that the place did because they knew they were not following the Covid SOP.

    3) due to PPE shortages back office staff were only allowed one surgical mask per week and nothing more. No gloves, no shields, no nothing. No exceptions were made for us who worked closely with clinicians or even patients (this jewel was sadly hospital wide and not just my department).

    4) In August of 2020, “due to unprecedented call outs” they instituted a new policy that anyone reporting Covid 19 symptoms who was tested and found negative would be given a level 1 (no PTO would accrue for a month). This was before widespread testing of the civilian population was available and it basically meant that no clinician would risk reportinh Covid symptoms anymore.

    By October of 2020 95% of people in my 150 person department had Covid. 4 were long haulers, 1 of which was forced to retire at 55. I know the nurse who had to retire did her best to share how serious Covid really was (she was a former denier) but by then it was heavily politicized and fell on deaf ears. Officially only 20 people had Covid and the rest just had “bad colds”.

    A couple of years later the hospital was sued for firing staff or forcing early retirement of staff who had Covid or suspected Covid. Now they are begging people to come work for them. I left in September 2020 and never looked back.

  227. chellie*

    I had breakfast with my parents awhile back, sitting next to a window across the street from where some construction was happening. As we ate, we gradually stopped talking about whatever we usually talk about and started staring out the window. “hey, none of those guys are wearing helmets”. “wow, that’s a really steep roof”. “He’s on the roof now, does it look like he’s wearing a line?” “NONE of them are wearing lines!” “what should we do if someone falls off?” (No one fell off, at least during our pancakes.)

      1. New Jack Karyn*

        Because it’s often hot, and the helmets are uncomfy. And wearing safety lines slightly impedes your freedom of movement. And maybe a little toxic masculinity.

    2. Albatross*

      I once spent about an hour in Berlin Hauptbahnhof watching a crew work on the roof of our platform. It was a rainy day, and the roof was glass. I saw at least one person slip and fall… less than five feet before his harness caught him. Much better than the alternative.

  228. ItsAMeMaria*

    Last week, a colleague accidentally shot himself in the office. He’d been carrying a loaded, cocked gun in his pants pocket and jostled it as he was using the bathroom. This occurred next to the room I was giving a tour to a school, 10 min before the students and I arrived. No one was told about the incident until a blase email from leadership the next day, reminding us of their “no guns” policy and saying the man had no ill intent (but then, why bring a loaded gun in at all)?
    My coworkers are up in arms about their rights – apparently quite a few are carrying. I asked HR what safety measures they’re putting in place to prevent weapons from coming onsite – actually locking the external doors that say they’re to be locked at all times? Metal detectors? actually having the security team staff the booth instead of doing other tasks? I spoke to the top rep in HR, who said I’m being paranoid (“safety in life is an unreasonable expectation”) and nothing will change. I’m beside myself but can’t figure out what to do.

      1. Artemesia*

        Trained police officers leave their loaded weapons in airport or school bathrooms; trained officers have their guns stolen and used by criminals. How soon before the first kid dies because another kid got ahold of the weapon, or it fell and discharged?

      2. dawbs*

        Twenty years ago, my parent was a teacher andthey were told to keep an eye on 2 kids; their father had gotten out of prison and had made noises about hurting them, hurting other people, taking them, etc.
        When teachers asked what they were supposed to do and whether the school would FINALLY lock the back door next to the classroom they were told “well, he’s a little guy, the 3 teachers nearest that door are all bigger than him”.

        It’s endemic.

  229. AnonymousForToday*

    I have posted here several times in the past under a different name.

    I have been in health care for 40 years, specifically in anesthesia for the past 33 years. (wow)

    Surgeons are a different breed for sure.

    I worked with a certain surgeon who was simply put, terrible. Poor technically at his profession, and blatantly abusive to staff. He was written up dozens of times for unprofessional behavior. If he found out you had reported him he used the personal phone numbers on the disaster”fan out” sheet to call employees at home and threaten them. He would then ban you from working in his OR again. Actually, that was a job perk in a way. I once reported him to my boss because he walked in the OR with arms dripping from scrubbing ready to glove up, looked down the front of my scrub top, and very clearly said to me “nice t!ts” – unfortunately he did NOT kick me out of his room because the optics would have been very bad in the dept. – but I made it very clear that I refused to do his cases in the future. The hospital never took action against him because the surgical group brought in lots of $$$$/”good ole boy white male privilege” network back then–but even his partners knew he was an a$$hole and a liability. Very demoralizing to the staff knowing this guy felt he was invincible. It was only a matter of time though…

    One day he was in the throes of a big procedure, and instead of getting his scrub tech’s attention by saying her name, he used the bulb syringe filled with the patient’s bloody irrigation fluid to squirt her IN THE FACE. In front of everyone else present. And for some reason that day she didn’t have eye protection on. One of my close friends was there behind the sterile drape when this happened. Cue the pending lawsuit, supported by a whole bunch of write-ups lurking in the archives of HR.

    That was the “incident” that finally woke up administration to take action. Gee, now they interviewed EVERYONE that had reported him in the past, including me. He was banned from the hospital grounds for 2 months but he never returned. Imagine as a patient having your office visit or planned operation abruptly cancelled but not knowing the reason.

    He then became staff at the new hospital in the area–my significant other was heavily involved in its’ formation, and cautioned the higher ups that this guy was bad news. They did not listen to him, and paid dearly for that because he caused havoc there, and was subsequently dismissed. My husband met him at a reception meeting once, and when this ahole introduced himself my husband said ” My wife is____, and she’s already told me ALL about you”.

  230. AndThatsHowICommittedMutiny*

    Be Me: freshly minted degree, idealistic, desperate for job in my field – marine science.
    Cross international border to accept position: 4-month live-aboard “research vessel” as junior scientist. (surprise, it was not a research vessel, and the ‘senior’ scientist never showed)
    Ask a Manager would have been a great resource for dealing with the micromanagement & variety of -isms that presented themselves.
    Safety Issues:
    1. not required or even encouraged to wear life vests on deck, even after someone fell overboard in frigid northern waters (we got them back on board fairly efficiently, but it was scary)
    2. Marine heads (toilets) can be tricky – so its normal that nothing could be flushed besides human waste products, but the bin for used toilet tissue had no lid, and would frequently overflow b/c we didnt stop in port often enough & did not have good waste storage solutions on board
    Final straw:
    3. Our captain had set an auto-pilot course to navigate a wide channel. The project director took the helm, and changed course without alerting anyone. He proceeded to get involved in an argument with several crew members and neglected to watch where we were going. He ran us aground on a reef so clearly marked, it is named on google maps. Resulting crew injuries included broken nose & ribs, whiplash, burns from someone who was cooking, tweaked back, contusions, etc. We were adrift in a shipping channel while we figured out if we were sinking or not/ untangled our prop from gear that had gotten stuck in it & NO distress call was made to the coastguard. After limping back to a safe harbor, it turned out that the project director expected us to use our own health insurances to pay for care – despite being told before coming on that the project had insurance. He also had the gall to tell us we would do the fiberglass repairs to the ship ourselves (because he had already insulted all the professionals in town & no one would work with him) and set sail again without a professional inspection. My colleagues and I mutinied rather than get back on board.

  231. Dexter Narcisse*

    I work in organ transplant, and once someone dumped the contents of an organ transportation cooler into the regular breakroom sink.

  232. The Ear*

    two stories that fit the bill:

    I once worked in a very small office (just 2 of us employees and the boss) that shared a space with…. a motorcycle repair shop, of all things. We were in a creative field and I suppose it seemed edgy to work in such an industrial space. Just one thin door separated our desks from the garage, and the space would fill with gas fumes daily. We worked long 12 hour days, and I’d find myself lightheaded and gagging on the fumes. My boss was rarely there and my only coworker never seemed to notice. She just shrugged it off when I brought it up and kept on with her work.

    At another job, we had a workshop with a laser cutter, but no one ever bothered to finish installing the ventilation system. People would laser cut plexiglass hours at a time and the whole space filled with the pungent gases of burning plastic. Here, too, nobody else in the office seemed to notice that the space was filling with toxic fumes – not even the very pregnant woman who might have had an extra incentive to be vigilant about basic air quality. I tried to make some noises about it and had to step outside for fresh air periodically. But i was just an intern then
    and everyone just kept right on working and breathing in those fumes with every breath.

  233. BootlegIndy*

    Archaeologist here — never underestimate the level of danger that is acceptable when budgets are tight but there are old buried things left to be discovered. I think an excavation on a small desolate island surrounded by 60ft cliffs took the cake for my most dangerous workplace. We needed top-down images of each of the excavation units at regular intervals, so the bootleg solution was to set up a rickety 8ft A-frame ladder next to the unit and have the team member least afraid of heights (which turned out to be me) perch on top of the ladder with a camera and lean out over the excavation trench…next to the cliff…in high winds. At least I had two heat exhausted colleagues there to hold the ladder — very reassuring! This particular excavation also included an unplanned island evacuation due to an incoming storm that involved a scramble (WITH OUR ARTIFACTS AND TOOLS) down a part of the cliff with no path to a fishing boat we had to jump into by timing our jumps with the movement of the waves, no dock to land at each day (just a plank of wood tied to some rocks), moving 200+ stone artifacts down the cliff switchback path using a rusty wheelbarrow, and a truly impressive Swedish geocacher who suddenly waltzed through the excavation site after swimming out to the island in just a speedo and no shoes (he needed to be sternly convinced to wait to take the fishing boat back with us due to extremely dangerous rip tides between the island and shore).

  234. No? Yes? Maybe.*

    When I was in high school in Tornado Alley, USA, the protocol for tornado warnings was to gather in the field house, which was fine for the main school building immediately adjacent to the field house, but the population had outgrown the building and a number of classes were held in an abandoned elementary school 1/4 of a mile away. The protocol was still to take students for this walk OUTSIDE during a tornado warning. Thankfully, the couple of times that there were storms close while I had classes there the teachers assured us we would stay put.

  235. Alianne*

    Former bookseller–ten-plus years ago when what they were calling Frankenstorm was barreling down on the East Coast, the store closed early. Great, one would think, to ensure the employees get home safely! Ha ha ha no, it was to keep us an entire extra 90 minutes to sandbag the doors, stack the chairs, put some displays up in the cafe and other slightly elevated areas, and otherwise attempt to protect valuable merchandise. All while people banged on the doors and demanded to be let in to buy just one book! When we were finally allowed to leave, the rain was sheeting down, the parking lot was flooded almost ankle-deep, and it took me over an hour to get home because several roads were already flooded and closed.

  236. I survived!*

    I worked at a nursery as a teenager. Safety violations were everywhere! The outhouse drained into the pond. The water source for the nursery was the same pond… we worked with rooting hormones and sometimes when we got bored, we’d mix the powder with water and draw “tattoos” on each other. One day we read the box and it recommended using rubber gloves and an n-95 respirator when working with it. We were in a barn in shorts and tee shirts… The boys were in greenhouses even when it was 40 degrees Celsius. The boss would spray pesticides in fields where people were working. He drove us around in a large van with all the seats removed. We’d have ten people sitting in the floor or on buckets as he sped over farm roads filled with pot holes… Not coincidentally the majority of the staff were either teenagers or people who did not speak English well.

  237. ILoveLllamas*

    Many years ago I was in property management for a large office park. I have 2 stories from that era. First was our window washers – great guys, been working on the buildings for years. I am walking over to another building and see one of the workers being wheeled out of the building on a mop bucket. He had dislocated his kneecap when he tripped on something on the roof. His buddy lowered him through the roof hatch with the hoist and was planning on getting him into the truck to drive him away. My building engineer and I immediately stopped that, called 911 to have the paramedics transport him. The paramedic walked up and immediately gave him a heavy dose of morphine because he said the pain must have been unreal (the guy was going into shock by the time I got there). The window washer’s colleague was telling us “we don’t want to cause any trouble.” I made sure the boss explained to them that NOT reporting and calling 911 was the WRONG move. Geez.

    The other story – we were transitioning to a new landscape company. The landscaper had a crew fixing the floating fountain in the retention pond. I drove by and saw 2 guys up to their necks (literally) in the pond ….. while lightening was striking in the immediate vicinity. I came roaring into the office and began yelling at him to get his guys out of the pond and to shelter. He was so nonchalant about it. Thus began my campaign to get him fired….

  238. Safety Pshaw*

    As a former field archaeologist, I have so many! Here’s a few of greatest hits:

    Having to excavate in narrow, deep hole (approximate dimensions were about 10 x 20 feet wide and 15 feet deep) where the only way to get out was by stabbing trowels into the excavation walls and climbing up them like a rock climbing wall.

    I worked at a company that refused to give the archaeologists protective equipment. This included hydrogen sulfide monitors (toxic gas that causes nerve damage produced by crude oil deposits) to crews surveying in oil fields or snake guards in rattlesnake-heavy areas.

    Another company I worked at refused to include cold weather safety stipulations because fieldwork was occurring in southern New Mexico and should be warm (work was occurring in February 2021). The polar vortex hit and we had to stop work for a couple of days and have crews buy winter clothes in order to prevent hypothermia. The project manager was furious about this delay in work, called the crews expletives, and then forced us all to have massive training sessions in enclosed spaces (at a time when NM was still under strict COIVD lockdowns) that created a COVID super-spreader event.

  239. Jonathan MacKay*

    The warehouse job I gladly ran away from 2 years ago had a few doozies. I won’t even go into the detail about the accident which resulted in my bosses finger being crushed such that the bone split vertically – as that’s a secondary one caused by poor maintenance on dock plates where apparently were old, out of date, and ought to have been replaced a decade before….

    No, the safety issue that comes to my mind is one that I sadly went along with due to the lack of other options. We needed to get something heavy down from a pallet stack – so the solution was to put a skid on the forklift, something to sit on on the skid, and raise an employee (me) up to the level needed to get the item onto the skid and bring it down. I’d say it was approximately 20 ft, with no fall restraints whatsoever. I mentioned it in my Health and Safety course for my HR program…. the reactions were about what anyone with a modicum of common sense would expect…..

  240. What_the_What*

    When I was 19 I worked part time at a military base car service center at the counter, checking the cars in and out, taking payment, ordering tires, whatnot. One day I dropped a key and when I stood up, I hit my head on the corner of the steel cabinet we kept the keys in. I felt pretty woozy and it hurt like hell, and as a head wound does… it bled… a lot. I went to my manager, and said “I think I need to go to the ER” and she said, “there’s nobody else to work the counter, you have to stay.” I said, “Um… YOU could work it until someone comes in,” but she was “too busy” (side note: she was not busy). So, I kept working. I was writing up a service order and a customer said, “OMG your HEAD IS BLEEDING!” and I said, “yeah I know, my manager won’t let me leave.” She said, “we’ll fix that!” She left (no cell phones in the 80s) and about 20 mins later the phone rang, man on the other end asked for manager. The guy on the phone was the base commander; the woman was his wife bringing her car in for an oil change. He must’ve ripped her a new one, she came out red-faced and POd and told me “go to the ER if you must. But bring back a doctor’s note so I know you didn’t just go home.”

  241. Spurs*

    Worked as a phlebotomist at a plasma center where management at one point was in a standoff with the people who picked up our biohazard boxes. I guess the biohazard pickup people raised their rates, the plasma center didn’t want to pay the new rates, and they refused to pay any of the invoices, which caused the company to refuse to pick up until the past due balance was paid.
    So we found ourselves with biohazard bins that were overflowing with used needles and other items that were literally soaked in blood. Coworkers were jumping on top of the biohazard bins to try and make more room, we had bags that were piled up to the ceiling, and bags on the floor were so full they couldn’t be tied off.
    It. Smelled. Awful. And it went on for close to a month.
    Not sure who exactly made the phone calls to the appropriate agencies, but after a surprise visit from some truly disgusted government folks the bills were paid and bio-bins were picked up that day.

  242. EggyParm*

    Reading through all of these comments, I think I have a great idea for your next guest post! Allison – you should try and get an OSHA rep to talk through safety in the workplace. It seems there is so much confusion about who is covered, reporting processes, etc that I’m sure people would appreciate an first-hand account of how OSHA works.

    1. Lab_Cat*

      I would like to second this. I worked in a lab setting where I was definitely taken advantage of at the expense of my safety because I was scared of losing my job.

  243. The Ear*

    I should add that the workers in the motorcycle shop kept their garage door open when they worked so they had a level ventilation that we did not in our closed office space.

  244. Safety Squirrel*

    I’m so excited for this one. I work in occupational safety, so I’m popping my popcorn already.

    I left my recent job because they told me they wanted a safety culture but didn’t actually want a safety culture. We had a fire drill shortly before I left (unplanned, due to someone not turning off the horns during testing). Folks didn’t do their assigned jobs. so nobody ensured everybody was out of one area. But we’re all adults, right?

    Nope, one of our higher level managers admitted that he never left his office, he just shut the door. He was on a meeting, after all. He said this in a full meeting with all the other managers. And somehow this was my fault, not the fault of a grown man who chose to ignore a fire alarm because he just assumed it was a drill.

    As a sidenote, stories like the ones in this thread are why I find it so valuable to talk to actual folks doing the work versus the managers or higher. The amount of times I’ve heard “they should be doing…” and then found out they were “actually” doing something different… infinite. “Should” does a lot of work at some places, haha.

    1. JustaTech*

      Many years ago my office was getting ready for our Halloween party. The Halloween party was a *big* deal, so the two guys leading the charge (Thing 1 and Thing 2) decided to get a smoke machine. And then they had to test it.
      In a building where none of the windows opened.
      Nigel (their boss or 2x boss) walks into the space where they’re testing the smoke machine and can’t see his hand in front of his face (but he can hear Thing 1 and Thing 2 giggling). “How have you not set off the smoke alarms?” Blare Blare Blare.

      Downstairs, those of us who were actually working dutifully vacate, (not knowing about the smoke machine). Eventually the alarm stops and we head back in. Then it goes off again, so out we go (because of course we can’t vent the room full of smoke). Nigel comes to stand with our group “well at least it’s not raining!” It starts raining.

      The alarms stop again, we troop inside, but keep our coats close because, unsurprisingly, the smoke still hasn’t cleared. At that point everyone either went to the coffee shop or home. Or so we thought. Turns out that several managers were having meetings so they just closed their office doors.

      They’re very lucky the fire marshal (who was already beyond pissed about the whole thing) didn’t open those doors, because that is a very serious fine.

      The smoke machine was returned to Amazon.

    2. 1LFTW*

      I wish I could believe that you’re the occupational safety person who recently left my current employer, but sadly, “says they want a safety culture but don’t actually want a safety culture” is not as unique as it should be. Management where I am schedules safety inspections during off hours, supposedly for “convenience”. I’m sure the fact that this effectively gatekeeps the process is just a coincidence.

  245. Cheesesteak in Paradise*

    I didn’t work there at the time but heard about it.

    I work in surgery and at my old hospital an employee overdosed and passed away in essentially a supply closet in the OR suites during off hours. He was found in the morning and the area was cordoned off by the police. Surgical leadership decided to proceed with scheduled surgeries and patients were wheeled past this closet. No one was given the morning off to mourn their colleague.

  246. Sparkles and Chaos*

    I had staff get locked down during a mass shooting that made national news.

    I was supposed to be the manager on duty that night, but the problem child supervisor had asked if we could swap shifts and I agreed. Well, that was a mistake because he was the absolute worst person to have there.

    Firstly, they only found out about the mass shooting because someone was checking SnapChat during their bathroom break and saw what was going on. Second, AFTER FINDING OUT ABOUT THE SHOOTING, he dismissed someone for the day and expected her to leave while there was an active shooting in the building (we were a suite inside a much, much larger building… we subsequently found out the shooter’s car was parked directly under our space and there was a suspicion of explosives being present). The building was locked down, so that employee ended up getting pushed back into the building and knocked on the back door, which he promptly opened without asking who it was.

    He did not turn lights off. He did not have them hide in the back, where there were no windows. He complained about how long it was taking and asked if they would “be down” to just leave so they wouldn’t have to keep waiting. One of the staff members was a minor and called me crying, seeking guidance on what to do. I ended up meeting them at the evacuation site and he left the minute he was able to, despite three staff members still waiting for rides. The company subsequently gave us a couple paid days off and arranged crisis counseling for us.

    In hindsight, I had called security the two days prior to that and the first time, it took 3 hours for a response, the second day, they didn’t respond at all. So, after this happened, I stayed another 5 months before moving somewhere else (the final straw was being called unprofessional for reporting that same problem child for doing openly doing cocaine at work).

    There’s so many more details of how poorly that night was handled, but it would make this situation way too identifiable if I mentioned more.

  247. Orbital*

    I think I’ve made a comment about this on a post before but…

    When I worked on a military base in the mountain west, my team was seated in a “temporary” building that was built in the 1980’s. I worked there from 2017 to 2021. The bathrooms would flood about once a year so badly that water would spill out into the hallway, which lead to our break room/kitchen, and out into the cubes that were closest to that hallway. The only other bathrooms in that building were directly below, so water would drip through the floor/ceiling and they would flood too. The military’s solution was for us to use the bathrooms in the building next door!!! The bathrooms were usually out of commission for a WEEK when this happened. I came very close to submitting an OSHA complaint the last time this happened before I left, but I recently learned that military bases don’t need to comply with OSHA guidelines, so it wouldn’t have done any good anyway…

  248. Jigglypuff*

    I worked at a summer camp, supervising teen volunteers who served the meals in the dining hall. We were told that the teens used too many dishcloths while cleaning after meals, so they had to lay them all out on a table to dry in between and use the same cloths all day long.

    That is, until the day we were going to be inspected by the health department. Then all of a sudden it was fine for us to use as many fresh washcloths as we needed.

  249. MrTed*

    About 7 years ago I worked in a building that didn’t have fire alarms. I was told if you saw a fire you needed to go to the breakroom and grab a megaphone that was stored under the sink and walk around the building announcing there was a fire. The part that makes this even more ridiculous is there was a large chunk of the building that you needed a keycard to access and I didn’t have one. So technically, if I saw a fire; I would have to go into one office and ask for a keycard, then go to the breakroom to get the megaphone, and then walk into a part of the building I was unfamiliar with to announce there was a fire!

  250. Safety Squirrel*

    Ooh, I thought of another one! I used to work in academia doing research safety. Now, one of the problems with professors is that they rarely seem to retire on purpose. Many of them just do a slow fade, scaling down over the years until they have one grad student a ton of lab space, and way, way too much stuff hoarded. (We’ve legit had some professors we had to have the fire marshal work with them because they had so much paper hoarded in their office).

    But where this slow fade issue really comes into play is with chemical storage. Some chemicals (ether, picric acid, other peroxide formers) dry out over time and create touch-sensitive crystals that may explode when disturbed. Combine this with a professor who’s been mostly out of the lab for 20 years and hasn’t cleaned out their stuff since they started… You’d probably be surprised how much your local university calls the bomb squad.

    During my 6-7 years there, I know we had at least 3-4 visits from the squad, including one longer planned event where they cleaned out one professor’s work area after retirement. He’d passed his equipment along to a new guy, telling him, “Don’t tell EHS about this one”. Well, thankfully, the first thing the new guy did was pick up the phone and call us. We went over to investigate and it was a hot mess. The guy wasn’t a “researcher”, so he wasn’t on our regular inspection rounds, and he’d been a bit of a cowboy. So he’d been DIYing a bunch of his own explosive compounds for demonstrations, storing them however worked best, etc. My fave was the stuff stored in Altoid tins and unlabeled pill bottles. But he knew what it all was, so it was fine. (/eyeroll)

    A week or so later, the bomb squad had a planned event on a weekend where they removed everything from the lab and dealt with it. I got to deal a bit with the bomb squad myself later when another group ended up with WAY too much of a reactive compound on their loading dock – it was a “donation” from a local company (that didn’t want to pay hazmat disposal costs on it so they graciously donated it to our undergrad rocketry club).

    1. Bruce*

      “donated to our undergrad rocketry club” ??? HAH HAH HAH HAH! Reminds me of “October Sky” mixed with one of Heinlein’s young adult novels about a teen club that scales up from model rockets to a full moon lander…

    2. JustaTech*

      Even non-science professors can be a safety issue.
      Back at the turn of the millennium I worked at a major graduate library of an Ivy (as a summer intern). The library was under renovation, but was far, far, far too large to close, so the whole thing was done in sections.
      Now, at this very prestigious school, the most prestigious offices for humanities professors were *inside* the library stacks. Like, you had to walk through the stacks of books to get to these very small offices (maybe 10 feet square?). Given that they were the very best offices (except in every possible way), only the most senior emeritus professors had them. So, basically everyone was at least 85 and only had one or two grad students.

      The facilities team would give these professors months and months of notice to vacate their offices for the renovation (temporarily!). And then the crew would show up (two days in advance, after the first dozen) and there would be a stack of “you are moving” warnings on the floor and approximately one ton of books still on the shelves. So then the professor’s grad students would be rounded up and given boxes and carts and then work several 18 hour days packing up the professor’s office.

      I will say that during the renovation the fire alarm would regularly get tripped by the dust and every single time everyone evacuated, busy students and elderly professors and everyone else. My mom (who worked there full time) said it was pretty annoying in winter, and somewhat scary as everyone was sure that one of those elderly professors would slip on the marble steps and just shatter, but everyone survived.

  251. FionasHuman*

    A social service org I worked for did site visits. They insisted on sending workers out individually despite the fact that the sites we visited sometimes had bullet holes, at least one person had been mugged, and another raped while on the job (not by clients; the attackers were others in the area). We were also told very clearly that, in the event one of our clients (people living with severe mental illness) were to become physical with us, our only recourse was to leave the situation ASAP. Self-defense would be cause for immediate dismissal. I’m a woman, 5′ and about a quarter inch tall. Those policies were two of many reasons I GTFO.

  252. fire? what fire.*

    Once I worked in a salaried job that nonetheless meticulously tracked butts-in-seats hours. It started by making all employees badge in and out of the building, but then there was a rumor that smokers were paying colleagues to use their badges to get extra breaks, so HR switched us to biometrics. Any movement in or out of the building required a fingerprint.

    Then one unfortunate day a fire alarm went off. I think there was an issue with something in the kitchen of the on-site cafeteria?

    Regardless of the cause, picture a long winding queue of business casual employees covering their ears as the fire alarm wailed, waiting to finger print out. They didn’t let us out during an active fire alarm. We collectively learned nothing from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.

    1. New Jack Karyn*

      Unless I misunderstand you, this shows that not all badge-out systems automatically release during a fire alarm. A couple folks upthread stated that they do, but I am not at all surprised to learn that these are not always set up properly, and/or occasionally malfunction.

  253. Bitsy*

    I’m an academic librarian. I’ve worked at several colleges, in old library buildings, where we never, ever, had a fire drill. Where we never, ever, learned what our fire evacuation procedures were. When there’s an alarm should we just leave? Should we sweep the floor and force students to evacuate? Should we run around and close all the doors? Where should we meet outside? What are our responsibilities? I could guess, but I wanted answers from an actual, trained fire professional.

    I was working in big, old buildings full of PAPER often without sprinkler systems, once without a fire alarm system at all, and couldn’t get anyone to implement a fire drill.

    I’m still amazed that a fear of litigation alone wouldn’t be enough to … heh… light a fire under somebody to schedule a drill. So I would get my staff together and we’d just decide on a procedure, and a muster point, all on our own, with plenty of disclaimers from me. “This is not official! I am not trained in fire safety processes!” But we had to do SOMETHING.

    About two weeks after the last meeting like that we had mysterious fumes throughout the library and were able to implement our own plan, thank goodness. And bought a bullhorn.

    But we shouldn’t have had to do any of that on our own. And we’re lucky that there was never a fire.

    1. Laser99*

      This is what baffles me. Even if you don’t care about everyone burning up, what about the litigation after the fact? It

    2. JustaTech*

      I’m kind of shocked the librarians weren’t super concerned about the books!
      (The academic library I briefly worked in got a lot of practice with fire drills due to construction and they got very fast. But I think the head of facilities or the head of safety had some real power there.)

  255. JadziaSnax*

    Shoutout to the rickety, wood-rotted, 40+ year old ladder and the single floorboard between two ceiling beams that I had to climb up and stand on to open the one window in the Ren Faire shop I worked at in 90-degree heat. I love heights and climbing but it still struck the fear of god into me every time, and I was pretty bitter when I went back to visit last year and they’d replaced it with a modern, steel ladder & a full platform to stand on.

  256. Pdxer*

    Many years ago, I worked for a cruise line as part of their ground crew in Alaska, on the train that ferries passengers from Anchorage to Fairbanks. Fires are common in the summers, and this year, a huge blaze started near the town of Nenana. Instead of pulling the staff off the train, like sane individuals, management thought it would be cheaper to run the train through the fires with all the staff – but not the passengers – onboard (even though in some places the rail ties were actually burning) since diesel fuel apparently “doesn’t catch fire as easily as gasoline, so you should all be fine”. It’s the first time I’ve stared face to face at the “soulless corporate overlord” cliche.

    1. Mad Harry Crewe*

      I mean I imagine the views were spectacular but… no, thank you! If anything goes wrong – like, say, damage to the rail line, you are now stuck in the middle of a forest fire. Hard pass from me.

    2. linger*

      Admittedly, Nenana sounds like an accident waiting to happen.
      And, even leaving aside the reckless endangerment of staff, management’s seriously lacking in imagination about how easily wooden components of tracks may catch fire, and metal components twist. (We just had a relatively minor fire close a rail line for several days of repair.)
      But how was it economic to keep running the train at all if there were no paying passengers?
      And were staff able to push back against this insanity?

      1. Pdxer*

        Initially, no. They did take us through on board the train by rationalizing that the flames were a good 20-30 feet away, no big deal, and that fire-fighting planes were flying over the tracks, dumping water on us, so why were we complaining? The experience was completely hellish and we all thought we were going to die.

        The problem with the whole set-up was that the trip was generally two days – one day north to Fairbanks, one day south to Anchorage, and this fire fiasco took place on the northbound trip. Because completing your shift was the only guaranteed way to get a ride home, employees who were completely fed up with this nonsense had to wait until they were back in Anchorage to quit, because this company would *totally* have left people behind.

  257. And You Can Marry The Cat!*

    I once worked in the public schools as a special education assistant in a preschool program primarily for kids with mobility issues, several of whom used walkers or wheelchairs. At one point the district put us in a 100+ year-old school on the second floor, accessible for those kids by elevator only. The first time we do a fire drill we are told that two SEAs will take the kids who can’t use the stairs down the hall to the “fireproof” room, where, in the event of a real fire, we would call the office and tell them to tell the firefighters where we were and to rescue us.
    When we pointed out that no one would be in the office during a fire, we were told to yell out the window to get the firefighters attention, who would then have to rescue us via the window because this magic fireproof room was in the middle of the second floor, far away from any stairs.
    When we pointed out this would surely result in the deaths of all of us in the event of an actual fire, we were told that this was the plan and that no further discussion was needed. So all us SEAs quietly got together and decided amongst ourselves who would carry which kid down the stairs in the case of a real fire because none of us was going to lead them into a deathtrap.

    1. Gumby*

      That’s insane. In the building that I am the most familiar with, the ‘areas of refuge’ each have a phone with a direct line to the fire department. No counting on you having your cell phone in an emergency, no hoping someone in an office who can direct help your way answers your call. They also have signs right by the phone that identify which area of refuge you are in so you can tell emergency personnel where to find you.

  258. pally*

    Wow there’s some doozies here.

    We stored some weak NaOH solution in 3 or 4 plastic 5 gallon containers on the floor of the manufacturing area. Containers the boss purchased at a very good price (always looking for a deal!).

    Every evening the cleaning crew had to clean around these vessels.

    We started noticing liquid on the floor close by. Blamed the cleaning crew for being sloppy. Slip hazard! They were called and complained to. They promised to do better.

    These leaks continued. We complained. They sent their best crew. Place never looked better. Impressive!

    However, the leaks got worse. In fact, one of us picked up one of the nearly empty NaOH containers to find the bottom had completely cracked. Clearly this was caused by the cleaning crew. They were probably slamming the containers down on the floor when cleaning. That’s what we told ourselves anyways.

    We complained. They’d damaged a container. They fired their best crew.

    Only, when someone ordered a replacement 5 gallon container, they read the fine print: do not stores bases in this vessel. Apparently NaOH causes cracking of that particular type of plastic. That’s why they were so cheap!

    When this fact was made known to the boss, he would not let us inform the cleaning company that this was in no way the fault of their best cleaning crew. Yeah, somewhere out there is a cleaning crew who are no doubt bewildered over how they lost their jobs.

  259. BottaBing*

    My cousin was a HUGE fan of the ‘house of mouse.’ Years ago, she was thrilled when she was hired at the happiest place on earth. Being barely 5′ tall and 90 pounds soaking wet, they hired her to portray a certain fairy character. This character was to ‘fly’ from the palace to the main street down below with only a small, hooked belt around her waist inserted through a very narrow metal cable about 100 yards long. She declined.

    1. Bruce*

      Not even a proper harness? Wow, definitely a no-no. My sister knew one of the original TeleTubbies, but the worst they had to deal with was overheating in those heavy suits…

  260. Hershele Ostropoler*

    My department was split across two locations when there was an earthquake (a very rare occurrence here). The location where I was evacuated, but the other location reportedly didn’t

  261. Slinky*

    One day, I was sitting at a service desk and the internet just went out on my computer. We had to conducted searches for people, so the internet was definitely necessary. We called IT. They investigated and sound that workers in the basement had just sawed through a bunch of cables. They assumed they were old and unused so they just cut right through them. My internet going out proved that this was *not* the case. Given that cables also carry, you know, electricity, this seemed like a really risky bet!

  262. Perihelion*

    In Batman vs Superman a Wayne Enterprises office building didn’t evacuate during Superman’s fight with Zod until Bruce Wayne called and gave them permission.

  263. EEEEEEEEEHSLady*

    I work in EHS for a large manufacturer with facilities around the globe, and I get an email anytime there’s a safety incident. I read all of them. My least favorites are our field engineers falling through open floor tiles at customer sites (the sub floor is 30+ feet below in some cases, and space is tight so you can’t always see an open tile until you’re falling in it if it hasn’t been properly barricaded). My most favorite recordable incident was someone eating a rotisserie chicken, who broke a finger on the lunchroom table trying to fling off a piece of chicken skin.

  264. The Leanansidhe*

    Academic lab, my first year there. I was prepping for the yearly audit with a long-term lab tech. On a whim I opened our very broken scintillation counter from the eighties– it’s a machine that measures radioactivity. There were samples in it. Not little traces of samples on wipes in scintillation vials, like they were being tested; like someone had left a tube labeled with a radioactive isotope in there for the last thirty years. I called our safety people and the half-life was such that anyone who had been around it in the last few years was fine. Hopefully everyone who worked here in the nineties had no ill effects from that… those machines have shielding but this one was not in good shape. Our PI insisted holding onto it in case it could be used for parts at some point, so now it’s a monument to the early days of our department.

    1. The Leanansidhe*

      Hm and bonus points for controlled substances from very old research on mice. Found an open bottle of prescription fentanyl hanging out on a shelf among other things. Always wondered if an opportunistic undergrad ever took some of the narcotics for themself

    2. Nonanon*

      Ahh, labs. Never doubt the weird stuff that is stored there that the PI will not let go of.
      (One of my friends was a student worker and was tasked with cleanup of someone’s lab once they retired. They found rotting tissues in bench drawers.)

    3. Lisa Simpson*

      My high school renovated their science wing while I was a student, requiring the teachers to clean out the storage rooms. They found: A gallon of mercury (uncovered), arsenic, cyanide, and a cadaver fetus in a jar.

      In a high school!

  265. Archaeo-Honesty*

    Hold my beer, I got archaeology stories

    – a company I did survey work for in Texas refused to provide snake guards as PPE until a girl got hospitalized for being bitten. They still tried to figure out a way to make it her fault. A truck’s tires were also shot at during this project because of a disgruntled land owner.
    – During Hurricane Harvey, crew chiefs attempted to call off work for the day because, ya know, hurricanes. The project manager called back saying it wasn’t raining that hard, because she checked weather.com in the wrong location, and made them go out anyway.
    – We had to dig a full scale excavation between October 30 and December 21st one year in Kentucky. At one point we were facing daily ankle deep water, freezing temperatures, and rain, sleet, and snow all in one day.
    – During survey work for a coal mine, the field director had us climbing over a timber pile up hill. So literally traversing hundreds of trees.
    – Polar vortex happened. Sub arctic temperatures and ice on the ground. Still got sent out to the field because “there’s no snow on the ground.”
    – Dug during a heat advisory. When we ran out of water around 2 and started getting dizzy, we called the office to say we were calling it early due to heat. The response from the office was that we still had 3 hours left in the day and it was possible to drink too much water.
    – A crew member died on the job due to heat stroke. The CEO emailed everyone the next day reminding the other offices to stock up on water and gatorade.

  266. Ciela*

    To the same co-worker
    “your leg is not a cutting surface”
    “do not huff heptane”

    also, do not plug space heaters into the back-up power supply for your computer. If you do, and a bunch of smoke comes out, and then the ENTIRE SHOP jumps up and tries to find the source of the burning smell, do not pretend that you don’t know!

    We wanted to find the smell, because we do sometimes do things that smell like burning, but are actually fine. So if someone shouted “that’s me! I’m cutting wood!” no one would worry.

  267. katydid*

    My first job out of college I worked at a mental hospital. There was a risk of people starting fires by smoking in bed, so not only did we have fire extinguisher training, we also got trained on how to put out a bed on fire. They had a bed in the parking lot with a plastic sheet over it, sprayed it with lighter fluid and lit it on fire. You had to use one of the standard wool blankets and put it out. I am surprised no one burned themselves.
    At a server job, I was taking silverware out of the kitchen at the end of the night and the non-slip mats were already rolled up so people could mop. I slipped and hit my head on a metal prep table and had to go the ER. I had a concussion and black eye that lasted a month.

    1. BookishMiss*

      ooof I also had a food-service mopping-induced slip&fall and ended up with hairline fractures in my dominant wrist &elbow, bruises all over the place, and nerve damage in both wrists. -10/10, do not recommend.

    2. Mad Harry Crewe*

      Wool is self-extinguishing and quite fire resistant. If there were chemical nasties in the extinguishers, or if the blast could injure someone (inhalation? frostbite due to rapidly expanding gases?), I’m not surprised that the preferred method was a wool blanket.

  268. Lu*

    My first ‘real’ job after grad school was at a nonprofit where only critical staff members were required to regularly work in person — as a department coordinator whose job included processing checks and doing large mailings, I was often one of the only people in the office. One of our remote employees as the IT/building operations director who got into the habit of messaging me whenever there was a building issue so he wouldn’t have to come in. I was asked to investigate a gas leak in a rarely used basement, a transformer explosion outside the office, and an actual fire in the office started by an ancient coffeemaker. I quit soon after the last one.

  269. Little Bobby Tables*

    One set of cheesey safety training videos (is there any other kind?) had one “what not to do” example showing a worker drive in to work, pull a whiskey bottle out of the glove compartment, and chugged it before going in to work. Everyone watching the video laughed – who would do something that blatant?

    One month later, one heavy equipment operator who had been laughing at that scene got fired for doing exactly that.

  270. Lisa Simpson*

    My two favorites from my pool manager days:

    -I start a new job at an outdoor pool and discover they are lighting their pool deck with the sort of tripod work lights that contractors use indoors. Said tripod lights are right at the edge of the pool, where a decent gust of wind could tip them over into the pool, electrocuting everyone. These lights were turned on and off by plugging in/unplugging an extension cord into an outlet that zapped you as you did it.

    -New job at an indoor pool, go into the chemical room and find all of the chemicals are stacked helter skelter. Acids on top of bases! Liquids on top of powders! Then one day I go in and find a roof leak, drenching all of the dry chemicals that are still stacked inappropriately. I said this was unacceptable and got called a drama queen.

  271. Milky Finebaum*

    Years ago, I worked as the Office Manager at a Country Club. We had no HR, so it fell to me. We actually had great employees who were, for the most part, seasoned professionals. The maintenance crew however, drummed to their own beat. I was constantly on them about safety violations:
    – caught one filling the pool with straight chlorine and no mask. He said that he was a man and that he was outside so ‘it was fine.’
    – a different one stepped on a nail and refused treatment. Said that all doctors were ‘crooks and couldn’t be trusted.’ Besides he stated that he had a home remedy that worked better. (I will say that he didn’t get an infection so…)
    – caught them multiple times standing on chairs instead of ladders to do any overhead work. Because “chairs are just easier.”
    – No hard hats in construction zones during remodeling. Because “hard hats are for sissies and they are also a conspiracy of the government to keep us down.”
    – working on an electrical issue WITHOUT turning off the electricity (I’m assuming because the panel was waaayyyy down in the basement?)
    They also liked to hug all the women even when told to stop, but that’s a whole other story. They owner loved them since they provided free maintenance at his residences as well. All I could do was document.

    1. JSPA*

      Picking chairs over ladders can be because of plantar fasciitis, calf cramps, and / or a need to twist or turn.

      Platforms (work stands) or larger-platform stepstools will help, if so. (Which is to say, just because people are being cowboys about a bunch of stuff doesn’t mean they can’t also have a legitimate beef about a specific tool.)

  272. Lisa Simpson*

    Oh here’s another one! We had Sharps containers in each locker room, and a biohazardous waste bin in the first aid station. The maintenance director directed an employee to dump the needles and razors from the Sharps container into the trash bag in the biohazardous waste bin, then reuse the Sharps container for another month to save money.

    Said employee got a needlestick, spent the night in the ER, and 90 days on an ugly cocktail of meds to prevent infection, hepatitis, and HIV.

    No word on if anyone at the waste company ever got stuck due to him storing needles in a plastic trashbag.

  273. Kesnit*

    I worked for a Big Box Baby (and toddler) Store doing “back of house” on the closing shift. We sold everything new and expecting parents could want – including furniture. Most of the time, my job just involved pulling items out of storage and putting them on the sales floor. However, if a truck had come in that morning, I had to have the entire thing unloaded before I could go home. This included toddler beds, dressers, and other very heavy items that were clearly marked “2 person lift.” There were 3 people in the store – the cashier who could not leave the front, the manager on duty, and me. Some of the MODs were good about helping to unload the truck, but there were a few that – no matter how helpful they wanted to be – just couldn’t lift what needed to be lifted.

    More than once, I spent my shift in constant fear of a boxed-up piece of furniture tipping over as I tried to push it from the truck to the side of the room. And it wasn’t as simple as just pushing, because at least one end of the box had to be lifted over the lip from the back of the truck into the store. How my back, shoulders, knees, and feet survived that job, I have no idea. (My wrist did not. It did get twisted once. Nothing severe and it was fine by the next day. HR asked if I wanted to file an injury report. I kind of wish I had, but that would have meant admitting I was doing two-man lifts alone, even though the only person who could help me was 90 pounds (40.8kg) soaking wet.)

  274. Other Duties as Assigned*

    From my very first job (age 17-18)–working in a paper converting factory.

    –my main position was working on a 1910-vintage paper cutter driven by a large leather belt from an electric motor. This was one of those cutters often used in book manufacturing that can make a clean vertical cut of a thick stack of paper (look for videos of “hydraulic paper cutter”). I would stack material to be cut under the blade, then had to activate the blade, which for safety required using both hands to operate two levers simultaneously. When it went back up, I’d reach under the blade again to reposition the product to make another cut (there were three cuts in each process: I was cutting the original material into sixths). I was curious about what held the blade up when I was working under it, so I foolishly looked underneath the unit at the machinery. I found a large cam about the size of a softball was what locked the blade in the up position after each cut. Shockingly, it was a mass of welds, indicating it had often cracked over the past half century of use. The job was a lot more nerve-wracking after learning that.

  275. RussianInTexas*

    At previous job friend-coworker was the fire warden for the floor. She had the whistle and the cap and everything. It was her job to herd everyone during the fire drills and the alarms.
    There was one lady that WOULD NOT move from her desk during the drills, even though they were scheduled, warned about, and participating was mandatory. Coworker could not make her move.
    Finally HR had a stern talking to the lady, warning if the city fire marshal comes through and fines the company for people not participating in the drill, the company will pass down the fine onto her. The fine was something like $5000. This worked.

  276. Friendly Fire*

    Not mine but my significant other: a deep fryer at her restaurant was actively on fire and the owner told everyone in the kitchen to work around it. Apparently the fire alarms never went off.

  277. Lab_Cat*

    I have one that has been shared with every person in my field, which sadly has many safety health violations, and I astound just about everyone:

    Part of our lab was under construction, and due to space constraints, meant there was a constant shuffling of reagents, building materials, and work spaces. This was nearing the end on an exhaustive series of projects that took twice as long as it should have due occurring during the pandemic.

    One of our main reagents was acetone. Industrial grade acetone that came in boxed cubes in roughly 4 liter volumes. And we ordered them in pallets with all boxes having the necessary warning signs so even those without science degrees could know that they were extremely flammable.

    And it was these pallets that the contractors we had hired, without asking for the reagents to be removed, proceeded to weld pipes together in the ceiling. Thankfully for all involved, I suppose the producers of our acetone package them for shipment in such a way as to prevent them from igniting in transit, and this held up to the stray sparks from molten melt being joined less than 10 feet above them.

    The messed up part is I’m not the only one in my friend group who has a workplace story about welding over bulk amounts of acetone.

    1. Quill*

      Swear to god welders need the chem lab safety trainings more than the chem lab people.

    2. Apt Nickname*

      My brother has a story of someone welding next to a pallet of a chemical that happened to be a strong oxidizer.

  278. Recovering Registrar*

    I worked at a higher ed campus with a one-stop desk. An angry (and possibly unstable) alum was yelling and threatening the student worker at the desk and we called security. They went to the wrong building. We called again. They diligently checked the wrong building again. We called again to see when they would come. The dispatcher assured us that the security officer has assessed the situation and verified no threat. We described the situation, restated our location, and the dispatcher was like, yeah, they were just there and nothing is happening. The alum left of their own accord. We asked for a meeting with security to see how we could avoid this is in the future, and they refused. According to their version of events, there was nothing they could have done to improve their 100% effective and professional response.

  279. Quill*

    My favorite (I filled out like seven safety reports about it over three months) was the giant hole in the concrete floor of a storage room in one of my labs. The explanations given were as follows

    1) we need access to the drains because of the construction work
    2) nobody goes in there (key secured room)
    3) We covered it with plywood, that should be safe enough!

    No.

    1) It was not near the construction
    2) *I* go in there every day!
    3) a sheet of plywood over a hole that goes up to my knee is just as dangerous, actually.

    So I spent several months trying to jump that gap while carrying equipment. And got congratulated on filling out more than my per-capita requirement for EHS reports.

    1. Mad Harry Crewe*

      Oh, I really want past you to just include yourself in the “nobody” who goes in there. “Quill, we requisitioned the centrifuge for today?” “Oh, it’s in the storage room.” “Well, can you get it out?” “No, nobody goes in there!”

  280. OneofFive*

    In the late 90’s I worked in an older building in the Union Square area in NYC. We were a satellite office to the nearby company headquarters and occupied an entire floor in this building. We had a couple of unusual safety issues come up while there.

    1. There were mice all over the place. Many of the people on that floor had literal pantries of food underneath their desks, including open boxes of cereal, crackers, cookies. A feast for the mice who brought fleas with them.
    There were glue traps all over and often times the mice caught in them were still alive, either “crying” or trying to move with whatever limbs were not immobilized in the glue. It was awful.
    The fleas started biting workers. They seemed to especially like picking on women wearing dresses and biting their legs. One young woman was under medical treatment for the bites. But still nothing was done until…
    I went out to the local PetCo pet store and bought a big spray bottle of “flea-be-gone.” I loudly proceeded to move around the office spraying areas where people had been bitten and there were signs of mice.
    Senior management finally listened and we had a multi-day full office clean up. All “desk pantries” were discarded and dumpsters were throughout the building. Casual cleaning clothes were the norm.

    2. And then, the mercury leak started. One of the office cleaners was dusting a window sill in one of the executive offices when she noticed a silvery material. She started wiping it down and it was spinning into little balls. She continued using the same rag as she made her way down the row of offices. She mentioned it to one of the VP’s who was still in his office after hours. He went and took a look, and realized that it was probably liquid mercury she was spreading around.
    The next day a hazmat team was brought in to isolate and clean that office and inspections were made of the rest of the floor. It turns out that the mercury was leaking through the walls from an upper floor. At one time the building housed milliners and furriers who often used liquid mercury as part of their procedures.
    Turns out that was the only office that had an issue, and the VP’s pregnant assistant was immediately sent home not to return to that office. Everyone was given an opportunity to be tested for mercury poisoning. As far as I know, the only person that had any medical issues related to mercury was the VP where the leak was discovered. His assistant and her baby were fine.

    What really irked me was that this division that was housed on the floor in this building had business directly related to health care. We moved to a new facility about a month afterwards.

  281. NMitford*

    This is not the most egregious example in the world, and I may or may not have told this story before, but the proposal team at one company I worked at had a dedicated rolling cart so that the proposal managers could carry large, heavy boxes of proposals down to the mail room for shipping when the requirement was a hard-copy delivery. The cart lived in the proposal production room.

    The Human Resources team routinely borrowed this car to stack inboarding materials and benefits packets on in their area in preparation for the next round of new employee orientation, which took place every other Monday. This was in spite of the fact that we had reminded HR that the cart was there for employee safety, not just because we were too special to carry things to the mail room. It would have cost maybe $150 for HR to buy its own damn cart but, no, they felt no need to do and continued to take ours, without asking or notifying us.

    I had a huge proposal to produce, and the two boxes weighed over 30 pounds total. One was a small FedEx box where we’d put multiple copies of the slim cost proposal. The other was a big box that had previously held the empty binders and held the technical volumes. Production had extended into the after hours and I was the only person left on my team. Sure enough, the cart was nowhere to be found. I looked for it the HR department, but I’m guessing that someone had locked in their office when they’d left for the day. I had to get the boxes down to the mailroom for the final FedEx pickup, so I had no choice but to carry them down myself.

    As I went to badge in to the mail room, balancing the box on one raised knee while trying to swipe with my free hand, the box slip and I instintively when to grab it so that it didn’t hit the floor. The box was heavy, and it took my hand down with it.

    I tore three tendons in the top of my hand and injured the two tendons that attach to the thumb so badly that I diagnosed with de Quervain tenosynovitis. The company’s workers comp carrier delayed authorizing surgery for about 18 months. Then, after the surgery, it delayed authorized follow-up physical therapy for another six months.

    As a result, I have a permanent disability rating in my right hand (and I’m right handed). My HR representative had the nerve to be shocked! shocked! when I cited the way the whole situation — from the disappearnce of the cart to being written up for waiting to call the workers comp 800 number till the next morning to having surgery delayed for so long — as one of the primary reasons for my leaving the company.

  282. Emotional support capybara (he/him)*

    Pretty mild compared to… basically everyone else’s, but here’s an exchange I overheard behind me at my previous computer repair job:

    Tech A: Is this CMOS battery good?
    Tech B: Did you try licking it?
    Tech A: What? Ew. No.
    Tech B: It’s the easiest way to test it. Just lick it.
    Tech A: …….. ugh, okay….. auh! Ith good.
    Tech B: What’s it taste like?
    Tech A: a battery.

  283. AmuseBouchee*

    I would advise anyone to walk off if they feel unsafe, if you can. Nothing will change until people do.

  284. Anon School Flunky*

    I work for a large school district in IT. I’m pals with the (relatively new) hazardous materials manager. They recently told me that NONE of our schools have eye wash stations in the custodial areas. You know, the areas where the custodial staff work with lots of chemicals.

  285. So many questions*

    I work(ed) in healthcare for “CORP”. One of the buildings (I believe owned by CORP) had a carbon monoxide leak. For MONTHS – at least 4-5. People were getting sick. Apparently CORP knew about but just didn’t do anything for several months? Until finally, people got TOO sick, and they shut down the office/building for repairs. Tried to fix it – didn’t work. Ended up having to close that building/office. Really made me feel super safe knowing that CORP had my best interests at heart. /s.

    1. I might be wacky*

      Meant to say the CORP knew about carbon monoxide leak, but didn’t do anything. At least until employees started getting blood work back that was positive for carbon monoxide.

  286. NervousYolk*

    The septic tank for the library wasn’t properly flushed out over day and the contents overflowed from the first floor bathrooms, including the children’s area, and into the library carpet. The issue was that our director didn’t want to close the library for the day to get things properly cleaned and fixed. So a bunch of heavily perfumed cleaning products were just poured out onto the carpet and a fan was set out for air circulation. Nothing was announced or explained to patrons. The carpet was wet the entire day – you could hear the carpet squish under your shoes. Children were crawling around on the carpet. The smell was revolting and we didn’t have any functioning bathrooms for days. I’m fairly certain mold devolved under the carpets after this incident and the fragranced concoction was sprayed on the carpet for at least a week. I requested if something non-fragranced could be used instead as I was having allergic asthma reactions (it probably wasn’t the only thing I was responding to) and noted the ADA for an accommodation. My supervisor responded that it didn’t apply in this situation and that I’d need to learn to deal with things and move on.

  287. Apt Nickname*

    A couple of weeks ago, I was cleaning off some shelves in preparation for some construction work. As I lifted two stacked boxes off the top shelf, what I referred to later as a ‘f@%#ing shiv’ fell onto me. Luckily I was wearing a lab coat, so the point didn’t penetrate skin. It was a wood-handled paring knife that had bright orange electrical tape wrapped around the handle. The blade had been sharpened so many times it was narrow with a wavy edge. The room had previously had the lights replaced, so I figure an electrician set it down on top of the boxes when they were up on a ladder and forgot about it. I stuck it in a sharps container and threw it away.

  288. CzechMate*

    I used to work at a beauty school in the downtown area of a major US city (it’s not there anymore). Because of the location, it was not uncommon for individuals experiencing homelessness to just walk in off the street, and sometimes they were on drugs, experiencing mental health episodes, or both. Sometimes our adult students would also have partners/ex partners/stalkers barge in and cause scenes.

    Whenever that happened, the admins would call all of the offices/classrooms and use the codeword “Green Comb.” The teachers and staff would come to the area of activity and literally form a human shield to protect the students until the offender left or the police arrived. Fortunately no one was ever hurt, but looking back, it’s kind of shocking that something like that ISN’T a safety code violation. Why can a company be fined for having an employee work on shoddy scaffolding, but teachers and admins can be expected to create buffers between students and whatever some random person off the street wants to unleash upon them WITH THEIR BODIES?

  289. Art of the Spiel*

    My husband is now on disability due to this:

    US OSHA code for manually unpacking boxes that weight up to 80 lbs is no higher than 4 ft, when these came from US suppliers they were 4 ft, but they switched to an overseas supplier and parts came stacked up to 7 ft high on pallets and shrink-wrapped together. Husband’s boss stated the warehouse “didn’t have time” to unwrap and re-stack these, so he should just pull the boxes down. He also forbade anyone in nearby areas to assist! (I swear he was *trying* to hurt my husband!)

    They also glued an anti-static mat to the floor using the wrong (cheaper) adhesive, and it began to tear and bunch up. Not a problem for the fork lifts, but – you guessed it – boss decided warehouse “didn’t have time” to drive pallets all the way into the work area, just ordered them to drop the loads at the edge. So Husband pulled the pallets on hand carts across that mat, which jerked to a stop at every rip in the floor.

    Both of the above are OSHA violations.

    Husband’s prize was about 3 years of wages in settlement and a monthly SS check – at the age of 47. Five surgical repairs over the years. Boss’ prize was getting laid off a couple years later with 2 weeks of severance at the age of 57. His life did not get better after that, can’t say I’m sorry.

  290. Museum Worker*

    A community group loosely associated with an event my colleagues were hosting planned an unannounced and unsanctioned fire ceremony at the museum I worked at. The group transportes the gasoline for their ceremony in a plastic water jug, not realizing the gasoline would burn through and into our porous stone floors. They had to evacuate the entire campus, which was one of our city’s largest cultural facilities, the Thursday before 4th of July, when there were about 500 kids on campus for summer camp. They sent notification of the evacuation via email, which meant absolutely nothing in our conservation lab, where the 2 conservators were obliviously cleaning a stone sculpture for 2 hours while the entire building was evacuated around them. I had put in my notice the Friday before and was just waiting out my 2 weeks. I have never been happier to leave a job.

  291. thebluestchu*

    I work at a small satellite office of a bank, with only one door. My coworker joked that the brick we use as a door stop was out security (to smash a window if we couldn’t use the door.

    After taking the annual safety training for years, I finally asked if there are specific procedures for out branch. My HR person just blinked and said “Well, don’t you have that brick?”

  292. Katie*

    I used to work in the microbial testing lab of a manufacturing company, and someone flipped the circuit breaker switch to the lab I was in, while I was working with BSL-2 stuff, with no warning, because he was trying to figure out which breakers went to which circuits. Thankfully I didn’t get sick, but I had e coli and staph cultures out at the time.

  293. Eireann*

    So pre-pandemic, I was assigned to a work team in which my teammates had a very intense, annually recurring project. I was not involved in that project, so when they all decided to relocate upstairs to a small conference room for easier collaboration, I stayed downstairs.

    With them upstairs, I was isolated from the rest of the building staff almost completely. Our building had three hallways forming three sides of a square, in the middle of which was a temperature-controlled room full of high performance computers and servers. My office was at the end of the back hallway near an emergency exit.

    I was working at my desk when I heard a huge noise, somewhat like a really big piece of equipment falling over – a really big THUMP – and immediately after, a super loud whooshing sound. I just sat still for a minute, wondering what was happening. No alarms sounded and no “Please evacuate the building” announcements were made over the PA (as usual for fire drills, etc.), so I got up and looked into the hallway. The whooshing noise (really freaking loud) was much louder and I could see papers, insulation, ceiling tile pieces, and all sorts of debris flying around in the hallway, so I ducked back into my office and shut the door.

    After a minute or two I heard someone running down the hallway so I got back up and opened the door just in time to see a coworker (not on my team) about to push open the emergency exit door. I yelled “What’s going on?” and he said, “The halon dumped in the server room! Get out of the building!” He then fled through the exit. I grabbed my purse and ran out too, and as I passed the adjoining hallway I could see significant damage to the hall’s wall that enclosed the server room: it was somewhat crumpled and sort of caved in.

    I went on outside and went to where we gather during a fire drill, where I discovered the entire office staff and my own team already there. Not a single person in the entire building had thought to stop by my office to check on me. No one on my team, even my manager, had even wondered where I was. I had been working there for over ten years at that point, was well known to everyone, yet in the emergency of the halon dump – which basically removes all oxygen from the server room – I was completely forgotten.

    I walked up to my manager and said, “So y’all got out, did you even wonder where I was?” He was very obviously surprised to see me; it was clear that he was just that very minute remembering that he was responsible for counting noses and ensuring that his reports got out of the building safely, as we’ve practiced several times a year for over a decade.

    It turned out later that the ONLY person who ran down to my end of the building was the co-worker who had yelled at me, and only because he had tried to open the door to the server room, which was just across the hall from my office door, and when he realized he couldn’t do that, had continued on to the exit near my office. The danger was not only from the halon itself, but from the fact that the implosive force of the halon dump had revealed that the interior walls around the server room were not strong enough to withstand the force, and there was a huge amount of particulate matter in the air flying around, and we were warned that if we’d breathed it, we could have experienced exposure to toxic materials.

    A week later, I was on a “lessons learned” team that was assigned to write up what had happened and what went wrong, and the team leader said, “Well, at least everyone got out of the building safely, so that part of the process worked.” I said, “That is NOT TRUE. I was left alone in the building, no one pulled the fire alarm which would have gotten me out, no one made an announcement over the PA, and nobody knocked on my door to see if I was still in there. My manager did not even realize I wasn’t outside with the rest of our team, so no. The process did NOT work correctly. Nobody did a thing to ensure my safety or even noticed I wasn’t out of the building.”

    Needless to say, my trust in my co-workers and my manager was shattered that day.

  294. Rage*

    This is not egregious, but it is funny:

    The place my dad worked when I was in high school (he was an Accountant). It was a food/ag processing plant. The plant went 100 days without a safety incident! So they had a big reception with their OSHA rep and the plant safety guys and the division head and yadda yadda. Cake, punch, the whole 9 yards.

    After the party, my dad went back to his office. His desk phone rang. He answered and, during the call, leaned back in his desk chair. The chair, having a fine sense of irony as well as a mean streak, broke. He fell backwards and hit his head on a filing cabinet.

    And, thus was their 100 day safety streak broken.

  295. IrishElizabeth*

    When I was in college about 20 years ago, I worked as a cashier at a well known orange home improvement store.

    We had 2 registers in the garden area. It was fall and getting cold so not many people were shopping out there, and they only staffed one register. It would start getting dark before they closed up. The main registers were way on the other side of the store. I could work an 8-hour shift and see no coworkers and a handful of customers.

    I was already pretty uncomfortable with being out there alone (I was young, female, and in no way intimidating). Then one afternoon at the start of my shift we got a call that a nearby store was robbed in the garden center. There were no cashiers around at the time and a register was jimmied open.

    I was then immediately told that I would be working in the garden center. By myself. I pointed out that the thief could be targeting other garden centers, and just because he didn’t have to deal with employees getting in his way, it doesn’t mean he wouldn’t. The manager on duty told me to “keep an eye out” for anyone who “looks suspicious.” What?!

    I refused. They all acted like I was paranoid and nuts. They ended up sending another young woman to work out there alone. Luckily nothing happened but WTF.

  296. Harper the Other One*

    My first job was in retail in a very old building. Some dust built up on top of one of the very hot ceiling lights and caught fire. This resulted in multiple shenanigans:

    -They didn’t immediately realize it was an actual fire because one of the “been with us forever” employees often smoked cigarettes or weed in the back.

    -no fire alarm went off at any point

    -I worked on the mezzanine with three other people. They forgot to notify us that they were evacuating so we found out when we heard the fire truck pull up

    -as we evacuated we saw one of the sales staff still behind the front counter, directly underneath the light emitting smoke, continuing to negotiate with a customer for a commission sale as the firefighters walked by.

  297. JustaTech*

    Oh, confession time!
    At my very first lab job, I, the temp, was given the undesirable task of doing the final waste dump/glass washing on Friday afternoon. I knew how to do this, I had been trained (ish).
    But it was Friday and I was impatient to leave.
    So I did not wait long enough to finish flushing the material with ammonia in it down the drain before I started bleaching the next set of fluids.
    You can see where this is going – a big old cloud of chlorine gas.
    So I opened the drain all the way, turned the water on as high as it would do and bolted out, where I then stood all nonchalant in the hallway, tears streaming down my face, to make sure the cleaning crew didn’t walk in before the gas had cleared.

    At least it was a mistake I only made once?

  298. Knighthope*

    Elementary school with a double “classroom” “relocatable” with a ramp with balusters not secured. Vandals came along and kicked some out, so there were 4 ft. long pieces of wood with long nails sticking out just lying around in the grass. I had just transfered from a high school where some students would not have hesitated to use them as weapons to puncture someone. School administrators were unconcerned until a newly appointed superintendent who had been a HS principal visited, was appalled, and put in an emergency work order that was competed immediately.

  299. Matt*

    Nearly 20 years ago I worked for a very large, well known pet supplies company for a total of 4 days as an operations manager.

    I had to pass a test to be allowed to drive a forklift. they spent all of 3 minutes training me, put me in a room, and gave me the test… and also made a big show about placing the answer key on the desk next to me, and telling me how I shouldn’t look at it after they close the door and walked away. I literally had no idea how to drive one or what the rules were.

    Wasn’t the only reason I quit with no notice, and they didn’t even attempt to contest me going back on unemployment. The culture there was terrible.

  300. BookishMiss*

    So one just happened to me on Friday! The front of my office building is being repainted, which requires a cherry picker to get the tall bits. I got to work on Friday, and the cherry picker was right over the front door, with cones under it and everything.

    The folks at the front desk told me to walk around the cones and under the cherry picker instead of going in the back door, on the grounds that “other people are doing it, it’s fine,” and only let me in the back door after I put my foot down that I was not walking directly under heavy machinery just to go sit at my cube.

    I worked from home Monday and Tuesday, had yesterday off, and was able to enter the building without having to skirt any machinery.

    1. BookishMiss*

      My second favorite is when I worked at a big box store in the bakery and just climbed on the steel in the freezer to get product instead of waiting for a forklift. I needed those croissants when I needed them, dangit!

  301. groceryb*

    During the Canadian wildfires last year, I had the misfortune of working in an NYC office with a LOT of windows. On the worst day of the smoke (the sky/air was dark orange at 12 in the afternoon!) I had to *politely* ask a bunch of senior level employees to kindly STOP OPENING ALL THE WINDOWS because they were quite literally poisoning us all (seriously, we were having coughing fits indoors, through masks and with an air filter).

    Their reasoning? It was just soooo hot during their meeting :(

  302. Spcepickle*

    My team manages road construction. By far the most dangerous thing we do is work near all of you driving. Please put away your phones and STOP driving impaired. There is not a project I work on that doesn’t have a drunk and / or distracted driver go through our traffic control. My team is worth way more than your text.

  303. PhysicsGenius*

    As a grad student in physics I once watched a classmate take Cobalt 60 out of the locked (highly radioactive materials) cabinet and shove it down his front jeans pocket to take it back to his lab station. The rest of the lab section gave him a hard time about it basically until graduation.

  304. UnsafeAndInnaccessible*

    As some who is disabled and uses a walker, it is a rare day when I don’t run into at least 3-4 blocked hallways, sidewalks, doorways, etc.

    Every winter I end up walking in busy streets because even if the sidewalks are technically cleared (which is iffy) the pathway on/off is not cleared at the place with the ramp.

    Most doors that require key cards cannot be accessed by many with Walker’s or manual wheelchairs.

    Automatic door opening buttons are designed for use with motorized wheelchairs and are often unsafe for a variety of reasons if using a walker or (sometimes) manual wheelchair.

    I could go on for a long time…

  305. Digital Hubbub*

    I worked in an admin office in higher education some years back, next to two big quiet study rooms. One afternoon the fire alarm went off. Ten seconds later, it’s still going, not the usual testing time or day either, OK, this could be real.
    I was the only one in the admin office so I grabbed the clipboard with the fire safety zone map and glow in the dark Fire Marshall vest and went about my training. Office was empty, so my list says clear study room A next. I walked in to 40 or so students hard at work (spring, so they’re all frantic about exams). I got the small pleasure of announcing in my best ‘to the BACK of the theatre’ voice ‘FIRE ALARM! OK, everybody evacuate right now, nearest exit this way, quickly and calmly’. 40 startled heads popped up like so many meerkats, then did as they were told!
    I checked they were going out and spoke firmly to a couple of stragglers.
    Off round two corners and down the steps to clear out study room B next. This was less attractive and tends to be overlooked, so people who do use it often settle in and get comfortable. Sure enough, 20 to 30 students were in there still. Why haven’t they paid attention either?!
    Then I saw them. Two of the staff technicians used a room off the side as a storage cubby. And they were standing outside their door LAUGHING AND CHATTING while the fire alarm had been going off for over two minutes. Some of the students were milling around, not certain of what to do.
    I was beyond angry. The technicians should have at the least evacuated themselves. Not only that, their bad example was encouraging the students to remain indoors and in potential danger!
    I decided to ignore them, repeated my performance, and shooed students for the door. I had to talk sternly to a couple of them who thought they could pack up their books first. ‘Never mind those, your LIFE is more important if there’s a fire’ got me some more startled looks and everybody left. The technicians strolled after me still joking.
    I reported the whole business to the office manager the next day, with particular reference to the fact that as staff members the technicians had a duty to protect their own safety which they were not doing! She was appalled and promised to report it up the chain.
    I like to think that affected the senior technician’s decision to retire six months later – maybe not. But I’m pretty sure they got an unpleasant conversation out of it anyway.
    The fire drills started happening more randomly and with really evil twists thrown in too, to make people think. I like to think that was partly my doing!

  307. PlainJane*

    Our furnace and utility room is on the roof. During one sloppy winter day, it went down. I was sent up to check it–accessed by a vertical ladder over an overstuffed supply room, through a hatch on the roof, onto an icy surface. In office shoes (ballet flats, in that case).

  308. Lis*

    Back in the 80’s my Aunt, an engineer at a time there were very few women in the job, got a job in a European country who as a stereotype have and follow ALL THE RULES.
    In her induction she had to read all the policies etc. and when reading the evacuation one it said to assemble at the designated point. So she asked her supervisor where the assembly point was, his response? Well here in the lab of course.

    She pointed out that in the event of a fire etc. maybe assembling in the building that was on fire/under threat was not ideal.

    She was then told that everyone would just leave and go home. She asked if everyone just left how would they know if anyone was missing and/or trapped without a headcount.
    Supervisor said to leave it with him.

    Shortly later she was in her grand bosses office talking about something and happened to see a note from her supervisor to the boss outlining the situation and saying she was obviously not able to understand the policy and how should he proceed.

  309. TRC*

    I’m from the west coast and the first week at my new temp job in Wisconsin, there was a legitimate tornado warning and reports of a touchdown near by. They evacuated us to the basement. I did what I would have done in any emergency evacuation situation and grabbed my coat, purse, phone and car keys.

    Once we get downstairs, I ask if this happens often. Nope, apparently it was the first time and they’d been at that location many years.

    Then everyone starts commenting on how smart I was to grab my coat and everything else. Asking themselves “why didn’t they think of that?” I was seriously the only person of maybe 30-ish extremely competent adults that did this. I got to meet a lot of them due to being the “prepared new girl”.

  310. Lady Kelvin*

    I work in a non-military building on a military base. Often the only time we find out that there was an emergency on base is when we get the all-clear message over our loud speakers (which are supposed to announce the type of emergency when the alarm goes off, like “active shooter, take cover” or “fire, evacuate the building”). One particularly memorable time was when we got an announcement about some unnamed emergency and that we should stay in our offices. Only about half of our staff have offices, and our offices have full glass walls in the front with privacy shading from about knee to head height. Only after we got the all clear were we informed it was an active shooter event elsewhere on base, but we were still not allowed to leave our building for several hours. Cue panicked phone calls to the childcare facilities across the street, which thankfully was also not the location of the shooting.

  311. Orv*

    Went out to the warehouse to find a warehouse worker attempting to unload a container from a flatbed, while my boss looked on. The container exceeded the weight limit of our forklift and the forklift kept tipping forward. My boss started recruiting people to sit on the forklift’s counterweight to try to get the back wheels to stay down. I decided this was a good time to have urgent business somewhere else in the building.

    They must have finally given up, because the next day a larger forklift was delivered.

  312. Science!*

    I worked in a remote lab — I was still in college — and they hired a lab manager with an English literature degree. When lab safety came to visit, I walked them through my little setup — the processes I’d been trained on the summer before, the labeled and tracked waste disposal for those processes, the workarounds for lab safety based on site as agreed by previous lab managers and lab safety (for example, the fume hood was an aftermarket build to meet certain specs), the storage for various classes of chemicals, etc. etc. I was 20. Then the lab manager was like “Hi! Here’s my stuff!”
    – He had lost 1/3 of the radioactive carbon that he was issued.
    – He had not been separating the radioactive solid waste from the chemical solid waste.
    – When he had decanted the deep cell batteries? He had ended up with a plastic bucket of battery acid? He’d attempted to neutralize it with some NaOH he’d found but it just melted the bucket :(. He’d added some more things he’d found around the lab and kitchen to neutralize it but it was still acidic enough to strip the dye out of all of our pH strips.

    Lab safety had kind of given me a hard time about like. Homebrewed eyewash station pressure. But they were so nice to him. So supportive. So understanding. Of course they’ll take the acid bucket. At the end he said “and you thought that would be hard!”

    Then their report came back.

    1. Mad Harry Crewe*

      I would imagine they nuked him from orbit. Why on earth would you hire a lab manager without a lab science degree?

  314. Lab Safety Guy*

    Oh boy. I work in health and safety so I have a few. There was a researcher who put a vial of flammable solvent in an oven to get the last bits of water out. Needless to say it exploded, blowing the door off the oven (no one hurt, thankfully). During the follow-up meeting I diplomatically asked “what was the desired outcome of this procedure?” The researcher replied “do you mean ‘what the **** were you thinking?’ Because I don’t know.”

    Another time we got a report of a spill of dichloromethane (recently banned by the EPA because it’s a nasty carcinogen). During the follow-up it came out that they’d actually spilled several liters of it the night before. When asked why they didn’t report it or clean it up, the person responsible looked me in the eye and said “I mean, partly just because I was feeling lazy.”

    2. Lab Safety Guy*

      Then there was the time the fire department ordered a floor cleared before they would come in and remove a pyrophoric chemical (i.e., one that ignites on contact with air) that was trapped under a beaker. I went through the lab, telling people to leave, and one person asked how long they had. I told them they had no time, the fire department ordered them out. They walk off and when I reach the next room the same person is there, stirring a chemical reaction. I tell them again they have to go. They roll their eyes and leave the room. Finally I get to the last room in the hall and there they are again, stirring another reaction. At that point I lost patience and just yelled “GET THE **** OUT!” I didn’t get in trouble because their boss was chair of the safety committee and if they’d reported the interaction, there would have been a lot more questions for them than for me!

    3. Lab Safety Guy*

      Then there was the time I walked into to a lab and saw someone standing on a lab benchtop trying to reach a shelf. I’m talking beakers and containers of chemicals all around their feet. I gathered myself and said “you can’t stand there!” They said “oh! I’m sorry!” and stepped onto a very wobbly stool, at which point in desperation I just burst out “that’s not better!” When they asked how they were supposed to know not to do this I said “don’t do anything your mom wouldn’t let you do as a kid.” They said “she would have let me do that!” So I gave up and said “fine, then don’t do anything MY mom wouldn’t have let me do as a kid!”

      1. JustaTech*

        I’ll fully admit to having climbed onto the lab bench in order to replace parts of an instrument, but! The rest of the bench was clear of stuff, I had a proper stool to get up and down, and I never *stood* on the lab bench (just knelt).

    4. Observer*

      During the follow-up meeting I diplomatically asked “what was the desired outcome of this procedure?” The researcher replied “do you mean ‘what the **** were you thinking?’ Because I don’t know.”

      I got a good laugh out of that. At least he realized that he’d been a major class idiot.

      the person responsible looked me in the eye and said “I mean, partly just because I was feeling lazy.”

      This person needs to be fired. Like the guy who tossed someone an ax.

  315. Admin-ninja*

    I worked for a daycare that shared a building with the United Way. One snowy Colorado afternoon, the fire alarm went off during naptime. Most of the children were asleep, with their shoes off, and naptime was when staff members took lunch breaks, so we were only about half-staffed. The office workers from the United Way helped us carry the groggy and sleeping children outside (in the snow, without shoes) until the fire department cleared the building. It was a false alarm, but when we discussed what had gone right/wrong in our next staff meeting, someone pointed out that we didn’t actually know all the office workers, and the people helping us could have been strangers off the street. We made some new policies, and got to know the office workers in the building, and we didn’t let the kids take off their shoes at naptime anymore.

  316. Clara Bowe*

    I worked as a student in a major state school academic library when I was in the last year of college. This was a building that had gone through years of “deferred maintenance” and by the time I was as hired, things had gotten more than a little dicey. The worst was that the heavy plastic coverings over the light fixtures (replaced/installed in the early 60’s when this was the early aughts) would just start letting go because the fasteners were so brittle.

    The scariest thing happened when I was talking to my supervisor. I had asked him a question and he turned his body away to pull something off his desk when the full 5’x3’ plastic light fixture dropped directly where he had been standing, spraying both of us with shattered plastic. It was heavy enough that it left a huge dent on the corner of his desk, where part of it landed.

    Six months later, another light fixture fell in front of said supervisor in another part of the building. We teased him that the building had it out for him until he got a new job.

    Also, this was the same building where they just didn’t have the $$ (deferred maintenance!!!) to replace light bulbs when they burned out. Or fell. When they FINALLY got a line item for lampers a year after I left, my coworker told me they had to replace 54% of the existing light bulbs. It took another three years after that to replace the falling light fixtures.

  317. Dawn*

    I am a teacher and just moved from a portable classroom into a classroom in a newly constructed wing of my building. I was supposed to be out there for two years. Thanks to covid, two became five.

    I definitely sensed that my little two-classroom outbuilding engendered a sense of resentment due to the extra work and hassle it created, which manifested as straight-up ignoring the repeated health and safety issues or dodging them when they were brought up. First, was covid. A global pandemic felt like a Hollywood horror film when our little building was leased, and given that we were on a two-year timeframe, it was decided that the added $15K cost of installing running water was not worth it. Naturally, this became problematic during covid, when the students and I would sometimes go hours without access to washing our hands.

    Next, it came to my and my fellow marooned colleague that our building was not being disinfected. To make matters worse, we teach the oldest kids in the school, i.e., the only group that was actually at significant risk of catching covid. When I pushed on this, I found out that it was just too much hassle to drag the special disinfecting equipment out to our building. (This was eventually—supposedly—resolved.)

    We live in a place that gets a lot of snow, and if you live in such a place, you are familiar with the rare sunny day producing truly impressive-if-scary avalanches of snow off of roofs. The snow would be hanging two feet past the edge of our roof, draped like an awning over the ramp my students and I used to enter the building. I’d bring it to the custodial staff’s attention and was consistently told that it had been checked and was of no risk of falling on the ramp. A few hours later, every time, I’d hear it come crashing down. Thankfully—and somewhat miraculously!—it never landed on a student. Or me!!!

    Of course, we are a school, so we are constantly worried about safety and lockdowns. There was no way to lock our building without stepping outside it. After numerous proposals were made by administration that didn’t work for how our doors were configured, this turned into a massive shrug. I would regularly coach myself mentally to the exact motions I’d have to do to lock the building in the case of an active shooter to try to achieve economy of action that might allow my life to be saved. The issue never was resolved and, for a while, the door was misaligned so that it couldn’t lock at all. That was eventually fixed. Unfortunately, in the fixing, a half-inch gap was left under the door, which this year, invited in a small hoard of mice. Remember, we didn’t have running water, so I had no way of cleaning it up, and the custodial staff, for whatever reason, simply ignored the problem even though surfaces were covered in shit. Finally, when there were several turds per square inch on my desk (which I don’t consistently use) and I observed a student fling mouse shit while removing a marker from a caddy and I was regularly going home with hives and respiratory problems, then I escalated to my principal, who saw that it was cleaned up.

    We are in the new building now, and I hope that the newness of the space means that it is better cared for than my colleague and I and the 40-odd students we serve were.

  318. Onestarawake*

    I was working for a law firm in an area affected by the Columbia Gas explosions in Mass back 2018*. I had actually been working late when our entire building was evacuated by the fire department around 7pm as we were indeed supplied by Columbia and were therefore in danger of gas leaks. I woke up the next morning and called first thing (around 6am) to confirm work was closed…and got a recording saying to arrive as normal, employees were expected to be allowed in the building shortly. This was shocking at the time. The entire area was under a state of emergency. Most of the area was evacuated, and the route I would take to get there was shut down. I let my manager know I wouldn’t be able to make it in.

    An hour later, I checked again. New recording. This time saying that the building was still closed, but expected to reopen shortly, and for employees to remain on site. I was starting to get texts from coworkers who had arrived and were congregating in the parking lot. I did notice that the person recording the messages was starting to sound…harried.

    9am. Another recording. This time the person on the message was sounding quite upset. The building was still closed, but that company management was about to enter talks with building management to reopen at 9:30am. Please remain on site. Coworkers – and all other employees – were still stuck in the (rather small and close to the building) parking lot. The area was still under a state of emergency, and gas and electricity had been shut off en masse to the affected areas.

    10am. Last message. The person on the record sounded angry, this time. Like they were talking through their teeth. After meeting with building management it was determined that the building would not be opened for business by decree of the fire department. All employees were told to leave and come back tomorrow.

    *If you aren’t familiar with what happened back in 2018…basically, the gas company that serviced a large portion of the Merrimack Valley area of Massachusetts made an error where the gas lines were wildly over-pressurized, leading to gas leaks all over the area, fires, explosions, 1 fatality and 22 injuries. Many people were without gas for months, and repairs were constant for at least a year after. This particular company, if you’re interested, responded to the resulting traffic snarls and difficulties by removing the 15-minute arrival grace period they’d had for many years and writing up anyone who was late…retroactively.

  319. Poppy*

    Working on archaeological digs in the 1970s, we we working under a three metre section in a trench that had all sorts of bugs in it. After heavy rain. If the section had collapsed, anyone working at the bottom of the trench would have been killed.

    On another dig, we were working in an old factory from which the floor had been excavated. The glass roof of the factory was still in place. We wore hard hats to protect us from falling glass. The rest of our bodies… no protection at all.

    Post-holes were routinely a metre and a half deep, and students were sent into these to excavate the bottom. No shoring-up of the holes, and they had large stones in them, places by the Romans to secure their posts, which could have fallen on the students at any time.

    We were taken from this site to a sport ground to use their showers in the back of a Transit van, sitting on the floor with no seat belts or means of securing ourselves whatsoever.

    Archaeology in the Seventies was a dangerous game.

  320. DorothyGale*

    Working at a fast food restaurant, the manager asked me to clean the wall behind the deep fryers. I was told to stand on the (slippery) metal divider between two deep fryers full of hot oil to accomplish this. I told them they were insane.

  321. melissa*

    I’m a nurse. This week I had to do my annual mandatory infection control training. They had a section about airborne viruses with a slide that said “N-95 respirator masks are single-use, and must be discarded after each use.” OH REALLY?!?

  322. Student*

    Was working in a lab. Lab was a kind of fully-enclosed cubical space within a much larger open warehouse area. The walls of our lab are mostly clear plastic dividers. The ceiling is thick metal plates bolted to a frame. There’s a staircase that lets you get on top of our cubical area, still within the bigger warehouse area, to a sort of rough workspace patio on top of us.

    Somebody had decided to do some remodeling of the work area on top of our lab. This involved cutting some thick metal posts with a cutting torch. The posts make up the safety railing around the workspace on top of our lab, so people don’t fall off the edge. This work was going to happen while we were working in the lab. With no notification to us, or apparent safety assessment of the work space. I was sitting at a computer, shooting atoms around the lab (don’t ask) when this started.

    As they cut these posts, sparks and red-hot fragments of metal began to rain down on us from the ceiling around the edge of the room. I stared at this in shock for a good 5 seconds or so (which is not good for one’s eyes), looked at all the flammable things (huge blueprints, papers, some office furniture, lab miscellanea, etc.) that the sparks and red-hot metal was falling on, and ran outside, up the stairs, waving my arms and yelling “STOP WORK” at the top of my lungs to the guy with the cutting torch.

    That is what one calls “issuing a stop work order”; they are generally supposed to be absolutely respected. They are supposed to be followed up with some involvement from supervisors and a safety rep. Readers, that is not what happened.

    This fellow turns off his cutting torch, takes off his welding mask, and listens to what I have to say. I explain the situation. I gesture to the pile of papers he was dumping sparks directly onto. I tell him this is very unsafe and won’t work for us. He pauses, looks at me, thinks a moment, and says to me, “Nope. I need to get this done. But I’ll go get you a flame retardant blanket.” He also does not take the time to explain his scope of work, which will be relevant later.

    So he gets me some fireproof bit of cloth that’s about the size of a bath towel and tells me to put it over our lab stuff. I’m a bit gob-smacked, but it’s clear to me that the gentleman with the powerful torch is not particularly willing to listen to my safety concerns. I’m thinking that maybe this fireproof towel will get me through the metal post he’s cutting, and we’ll be over with this faster than any other options I have. I move the papers out of the way, throw down the blanket over the remaining miscellanea, and he promptly starts his torching again.

    I keep a nervous eye on the shower of sparks across the room. He cuts through the metal post without any additional burning or melting of our work area, huzzah! I’m ready to go get a celebratory drink.

    And then immediately starts cutting ANOTHER POST that is about a foot down the way from the first one. Spraying sparks, with no warning, on a different area of the lab. I SCRAMBLE to move the fireproof blanket down to the new area – which is not exactly a safe endeavor itself, as I’m tossing the blanket into the unpredictable rain of fire.

    At this point, I turn to my compatriots also working in the lab. All of us are grad students. We confab. It’s now obvious that this guy is cutting ALL the posts around the ceiling of our lab, which is probably going to be 10-20 of them. Torch guy is not going to play ball with us about the obvious fire hazard. None of us know who torch guy is, or who his supervisor might be. Further, upon rigorous polling, I find that the other grad students believe this rain-of-fire situation to be hilarious, and have determined that I am both a buzz kill and a worrywart. They are of the learned opinion that torch guy probably knows what he’s doing, I probably do not. When I point them at numerous burned objects or close calls with red-hot metal nearly raining down on people, or point at the million-dollar lab equipment in the center of our lab, they do not find my arguments compelling. As any good grad student would do, I make a permanent note in the lab book to register my disagreement with their consensus opinion – and I circle & highlight the new burn marks in said lab book, to emphasize that the available data is in my favor.

    Grad students are not fonts of common sense, it bears saying.

    On my own, I decide to go get the lab’s boss, who is a grumpy German professor very protective of his million-dollar lab equipment. Turns out that he is out of office for the week! So, I turn to his second-in-command, the under-boss, a more jovial German professor who is also protective of the expensive lab equipment. The under-boss struggles with non-laboratory English sometimes, and as I try to explain what is happening, it is evident that he is completely baffled by the language barrier. So I drag him, bodily, to the lab. I point at the fire raining down from the ceiling. I throw up my hands, palms up, in a gesture of frustration and exasperation. He makes the finger-pointing-straight up, eyes-wide gesture that is universally recognized as the “I have an idea!” pose. He says to us, “I’ll be right back!” and dashes down the hall. I am relieved; someone will stop this madness.

    The under-boss comes back in. He is carrying his camera. He takes a couple photos of the welding sparks spraying out across our lab. He gives me an enthusiastic thumbs-up, says, “Thanks! That is very cool!” Then, to emphasize that he knows exactly what he is doing, he clicks his heels, lets out an evil cackle, and saunters out, waving goodbye to me. Apparently, the under-boss has voted the other grad students. At least he has some flair.

    I am beginning to wonder, at this point, if I may have blown all this out of proportion. A fresh batch of molten metal bursts from the ceiling, leaving small burns on my arm and my chair, strengthening my resolve. I will do what no grad student would normally dare to do – I will talk to the OSHA guys.

    I leave the other grad students on fire-watch duty with the flame-proof towel while I look for our resident OSHA folks. On the door to their office, I find a notice. They are at a campus-wide OSHA convention for the rest of the day! So they will be out of contact, along with every other OSHA person in the local area. Didn’t know there were OSHA conventions; kind of wish I could attend.

    I’m done at this point. Defeated. I go back to the lab, move our flame-proof towel around the room as the rain of fire circles us, insist the grad students not stand in the fire as the day wears on, and scoot the most valuable lab objects out of the way as best I can. The day passes with only minor burns and singes, and maybe some lingering spots in the eyes.

    But revenge, as you know, is a dish best served cold. And revenge I would have, in a manner of speaking. Or, at least, vindication, which may be even better.

    One week later, I am safely ensconced in my grad student office, slaving away on a paper. I check my email for the morning. The lab boss is still out on his trip, but I have an urgent-marked email from one of the lab boss’s close professor friends. It was addressed to everyone in my particular lab, and it said, simply, “Your lab burned down this morning. Go clean it up!” Not very helpful, but I give him credit – that man gets straight to the point.

    I ran down to my lab to find out what had happened and see the damage. All the other grad students are already there, plus the under-boss, in cleaning gear of various sorts. They’ve clearly been at this for hours before I noticed the email. Many things are burned, a mysteriously large amount of melted plastic is all over, there’s goo all around, and the smell is sub-optimal. One of the other grad students stops cleaning and comes over to me. “We’ll take care of this. You head back to your office. There’s damage, but everything can be repaired or replaced easily. You sit this one out.”

    I find myself once again baffled. I have always been one to look a gift-horse in the mouth, so I ask him, “Why didn’t you guys come get me right away? I should help clean this up.”

    He looks at me for a moment, thinks hard about what he wants to say, and slowly responds with this absolute gem:

    “We didn’t take it very seriously when you warned us about the sparks from the welder. We didn’t believe you, we didn’t help, and we made fun of you. A couple days ago, a crafts guy was painting the metal plates that make up the lab’s ceiling. He put a plastic tarp along the ceiling to keep paint from dripping all over our lab and left it in place as the painted dried.”

    “Then, the guy with the torch came by to cut more posts first thing this morning, around 6 AM. The sparks lit the plastic tarp on fire…. The fire burned into our high voltage cage.”

    [Aside to readers: a “high voltage cage” may sound kind of dangerous, but the name is misleading – it is in fact very deadly when it is on, but mostly harmless when it is off].

    “The crafts guy used a fire extinguisher to put it out. He put the extinguisher inside the high voltage cage to do it, but luckily the cage was turned off. The plastic tarp lit most of our high voltage cables on fire and maybe damaged a couple other things. None of us were in the lab that early in the morning when the fire started.”

    “This is bad, but it could’ve been a lot worse. You warned us. We were jerks! So, we will clean this up. We all agreed.” I left them to it, and to their credit they did a great job with the clean up. They even left some supporting observations in the lab book, next to the burn marks I had circled.

    1. Gamer Girl*

      Oh. my. gods. The absolute levels of groupthink you were working against has me gobsmacked.

    2. Part time lab tech*

      What is the back up plan if there’s an OHSA convention?
      That’s hell of a tragedy of errors. A classic example of the fact that disasters often happen through a series of unfortunate events a lack of common sense and a dismissive attitude to occur.

      1. Perfectly normal-size space bird*

        This is exactly how every episode of Seconds From Disaster plays out. “Preceding incident happened, which is normally not a big deal but on that day X also happened which would have been prevented by safety system Y but Y had been damaged and was not signaling the error which would have still been caught by backup safety system Z except Z was down due to someone unplugging it to run the toaster.”

  323. kupo*

    the building wad closed down for a day or two (don’t remember exactly) for an ozone cleaning (they hired an outside service for this). The day the building opened again the whole builds melted funny and people (myself included) felt nauseated and got headaches. They told us it was psychosomatic and wouldn’t let us go home.

  324. Niks*

    My team and I were moved to work in a tower block. It was an old ex government tower block, but the space was alright. We went from working in another building on our own to being in a big space with a lot of others. Weirdly my team suddenly had a massive spike in sickness, particularly headaches and chest issues (feelings of breathlessness). People would take time off, get better and then come back and it would repeat.
    After months of going round in circles wondering what on earth my team were passing around each other, we discovered that the air vents were sucking air out of the building meaning that the area where my team worked did not have enough oxygen. We had the equivalent of altitude sickness, which is why we always felt better after a day or two at home.

    We had this reported and they came to look, checked everything and then…. just let us carry on regardless.

    It never did get fixed.

  325. kupo*

    The building was closed down for a day or two (don’t remember exactly) for an ozone cleaning (they hired an outside service for this). The day the building opened again the whole building smelled funny and people (myself included) felt nauseated and got headaches. They told us it was psychosomatic and wouldn’t let us go home.

  326. SuperMouse*

    As the property manager for a big office, I have too many stories. Instead, I’m going to go the other way:

    There is Exactly One person over in IT that I can trust will consistently, every single time, consider OSHA properly. We know her by face and name because if there is a problem in her area, she will tell us BEFORE anyone gets hurt. No one else is EVER proactive. I secretly think of her as the OHSA champion for the whole IT department.

    The first aid cabinet ice packs have disappeared? She’s the one that tells us her floor is missing them. Everyone else waits until they’re audited.
    The lights in the evacuation stairs stopped working? Everyone will walk in the dark except her.
    Someone burnt their hand getting hot water from the tap? She’s the one that raises an incident so that we know the burn cream got used and needs replacing. Never the person’s manager like policy says.
    We got new heart attack emergency packs. She’s the only one who requested a walkthrough on how they’re used.
    I’ve seen her greeting new starters for her team; the very first thing she does is show them the fire escape and tell them the evacuation procedure.

    Once, the break room in one of the kitchens had warped (really bad hailstorm broke the window over the weekend, so there was still water there for a few hours before anyone came in). IT-Champion came in for her In-Office day. By 9am was lined up at my desk to let me know. I came over to have a look, and she’d strung up printed WARNING signs she’d made herself between chairs around the aforenoted area, just to be extra sure no one tripped until she could get the real hazard comes from us.
    IT-Champion’s in-office day was Thursday. Someone walked in to fill their water bottle, saw what we were doing, and admit they’d tripped over the uplifted tiles and bumped their leg on one of the tables on Tuesday. And still they didn’t tell anyone.

  327. Striped Badger*

    I had to knock on the door to my boss’ office, and tell him “The fire-alarm isn’t a drill. The smoke is up to my knees. Time to go.” before he noticed.

    For full disclosure, I was filling in as a fire warden as the time; it was a part of my responsibility to do a sweep of the floor before leaving myself. So I suppose the policy DID work.

  328. Red Headed Stepchild*

    Partner’s job at a metal plating factory. The hoist was broken and the 2 factory employees refused to try and plate the metal beam (heavy enough to require a hoist) because it was unsafe to maneuver the equipment without the support. The owner came out to prove them wrong and show them how to get it done. The employees were not wrong as the giant metal beam tipped over and pinned the owner’s head to the ground. The EMTs were shocked he was alive when they got there, everyone else was shocked that he lived through the whole thing. One of the employees got PTSD.

    Same guy had his underage kids cleaning out chemical barrels without any PPE and running the water from cleaning them out into the ground.

    Covid closed them down and not too long after the EPA had to come out to clean up to the tune of over a million dollars.

  330. Lava Lamp (she/her)*

    Things I’ve seen and in one case reported; worked briefly at a small countertop shop. Dudes were SMOKING around the acetone and other chemicals. Also chatting on the phone while driving the forklift. I absolutely made a report to OSHA. That place was just asking to have another accident.

    I currently work for a hospital laundry company. We have a lot of very dangerous chemicals and machines. Fire drills are taken extremely seriously, and if maintenance is working on something that will make the fire alarm go off they will stop by my office and let me know it’s them and not to be alarmed. The biggest safety concern is heatstroke in the summer. Industrial dryers make the building so hot we have multiple water stations and training on how to recognize heatstroke.

  331. Lepidoptera*

    My senior year in college I worked second shift in a laboratory. In our department we were mostly prepping things for the next day before closing overnight. The other departments did not slow down and were fully staffed on all shifts. We had usually 3-4 staff on evenings, when day shift had 30 plus management.

    The building we worked in was very old, and our department had not been renovated in probably 50 years. It was spread out and maze like with 3 big rooms and tons of teeny tiny rooms. We had at least one bunsen burners in pretty much every room. Each bunsen burner had 1-2 fire extinguishers nearby depending on the layout of the room. Plus there were fire extinguishers in the hallways, our stock rooms etc- at least 20 in our department. None of the other departments used bunsen burners, were not designed by Escher and had 3-4 fire extinguishers max.

    The way I was trained was when there was a fire alarm, we should each grab the closest fire extinguisher and the lead would grab the roster of who was there, and the department fire blanket and evacuate to the meeting point. At the meeting point the senior person would take attendance. During drills we were timed up to the point that attendance was successful completed. If anything or anyone was missing, if a fire extinguisher was expired or if it took longer than 5 minutes your department would fail.

    My very first fire alarm Rachel, Dave and I were working. We grabbed the list, fire blanket and each had a fire extinguisher. Even though we are farthest from the meeting point we get to the meeting point first, a security guard was there it was a drill.

    The Security guard takes issue with the fact that we didn’t bring all the fire extinguishers issued to our department. We said we thought we were only supposed to bring 1 each, but he insisted that we needed all of them. Rachel questioned this- we would be back tracking to get fire extinguishers including having to get keys and unlock rooms, and that we had a 1:1 ratio of people to fire extinguishers where the other departments it was more like 1:4. He said he would discuss it with his boss but we should be bringing all the fire extinguishers.

    The next day when we came and it had turned into a huge kerfuffle, because our department failed the fire drill so badly the whole division was having to be retrained and have repeat fire drills. The new director for our division was very furious, wouldn’t listen to our explanation and wrote all 3 of us up. Our manager and HR were basically you have to sign it, it doesn’t mean you agree. Rachel, who has been the lead, got a final because she was the lead and for questioning security.

    We got our new training, which emphasized that each department was responsible for bringing each fire extinguisher issued to their department to the meeting point. Again we brought up the back tracking and the locked rooms. Again the answer was, bring every fire extinguisher.

    The next time the 3 of us are working we see Larry the Director of Regulatory and Compliance for the whole company park outside our window. And sure enough a few minutes later the fire alarm goes off. We start grabbing fire extinguishers, there was too many for us to carry so Dave grabbed a couple of carts.

    It was took forever for us to grab everything. Finally we arrived sweaty and out of breath pushing our creaky old carts piled high with fire extinguishers. Not only was Larry there, our director and all the managers for our division are there as well-and they are annoyed it took us so long.

    Larry jumped in first “Why did you bring so many fire extinguishers???”

    Rachel explained the whole thing. Larry said that is was completely backwards and he did not understand where that came it was more dangerous for people to be going in an Easter Egg hunt for fire extinguishers. That was not the policy, Security had made the whole thing up. The actual policy was to take a fire extinguisher if there was one along your evacuation route. We ended up getting the write ups removed and an apology. Strangely enough neither Dave nor I accepted a full time position after we graduated and Rachel found a new job shortly after.

    I know this was not the only reason our the Director got his probation extended and eventually fired, but I like to think it helped.

  332. EggyWaffles*

    I worked at a political nonprofit in the Montana wilderness, where our offices were a lodge on the property of our oddball director’s summer home. Interns lived on-site with a very summer camp vibe, while staff commuted from the nearest town over. One day a wildfire broke out along the single access road between town and the offices, and the entire area was under evacuation orders.

    Our terminally weird director thought evacuations were for sissies and told staff we had to come into work anyway or be fired, and then refused to help facilitate evacuating the 20+ interns. Every staff member held firm and worked from home, but these poor college kids were stuck on-site for 3 days hoping the winds didn’t shift.

    To make it all worse: A few days later after the fire was contained, Director throws a party for only those “brave enough” to come into work (i.e. the underaged kids he wouldn’t let leave). I had to drive one of my interns to the emergency room the next morning because of alcohol poisoning from his insane party.

  333. Knighthope*

    American Education Week in a middle school, fire alarm sounds. This is odd, because we would never have a drill with parents observing. Principal gets on PA, calling it a false alarm and commands us to stay in our classrooms. I smell smoke and cautiously peek out and SEE smoke. I tell the parents and students, that despite the directive, WE are evacuating! Someone flicked a lit match under the door into a closet down the hall. Principal is informed and building is evacuated.

    Different middle school – after renovation. First fire drill of the new school year (announced to teachers, so we are treading water with our lessons, since we know they will be interrupted momentarily). Principal tries to activate the alarm. Nothing happens!

  334. New Yorker*

    During the recent earthquake in NJ, which was felt in NYC, the NYC alert with instruction on what to do arrived on most people’s cell phones 30-40 minutes after the earthquake.

  335. Name Anxiety*

    When I was in high school, we came back from winter break to find that the corner of our science classroom was being held up by what looked like an old railroad tie. Our biology teacher calmly explained that the building was sinking so this was holding the ceiling up until they could repair it. It at least encouraged us to get to class early to avoid the tables on that side of the room.

    1. GythaOgden*

      Yeah, frustrating. Demolition work at one of our sites required another building to be propped up with similar struts so it could be worked on later once the demolition site had been made safe. But those were properly done by an experienced contractor.

  336. FlatWhiteWalker*

    1) NewAdmin!Me used a pair of scissors opened out like a knife to open a parcel in the mailroom. I got a verbal warning and a shiny new safety knife.
    2) OlderAdmin!Me walked into the staff kitchen to find HR Dude about to open a coffee packet with a knife… pulling the blade towards himself… at eye level. I yelped at him “DON’T DO THAT.” My manager overheard and gave me a formal written commendation.
    We worked in a manufacturing/production environment and everybody involved should have known better.

    1. Perfectly normal-size space bird*

      I used to work at a big blue retailer and our training video on knife/boxcutter safety very clearly and repeatedly stated we were to cut with the knife going towards ourselves. We were never to cut with the knife going away from ourselves because we might injure a customer if (I assume) the customer suddenly materialized inches from us.

      Having had proper knife safety drilled into me over and over by parents and teachers growing up, this drove be a bit bananapants. I was constantly getting scolded by one of the co-managers for “endangering others.”

  337. StormyTeapot*

    As a student I worked part-time at a chain casual dining restaurant as a busser. I came into the kitchen after clearing a table to find it full of smoke and the broiler up in flames. None of the kitchen staff knew of the correct Fire Extinguisher to use, and the LEV extraction system missed it’s scheduled cleaning and maintenance, so had a lovely build up of fat and grease deposits, which due to the heat, passage of oxygen, also ignited spreading the fire to the roof.
    Customers were already getting concerned over the Fire Alarm sounding. You would have thought that the duty manager would have considered evacuating the building, but no he cried out that he was calling the Fire Brigade and then locked himself in the office. I ended up making the decision to evacuate, and just as we got the last customer out the manager came running out of the office and proclaimed “It will be ok – I have a Fire Blanket!”. Like that would work now the fire had spread to the roof.
    In the end we all got two weeks off on full-pay whilst the restaurant had emergency repairs. Fifteen years on from this, I now work as a Health and Safety Manager and often use this experience as an example when training folk on fire safety and how people respond in an emergency.

  338. Inspector Raquel Murillo*

    We had a fire evacuation practice (only myself as fire warden, the head of department and health and safety team knew it was a practice, everyone else in the building thought it was real). As fire warden, I was tasked with making sure no one was left in their office on my floor. I get to the end of the corridor and see an office door wide open with a coworker just sitting there on their laptop. They had no headphones on, they were just sat with a wide open door listening to the alarm and having seen everyone else on the floor rush out. It was only until I told them to get out did they start to slowly pack their stuff up…

  339. anontoday*

    In my last (European) company in a multi story building, fire drills were a regular thing and worked well. We had some trash can fires, too.
    Unfortunately, there also was a small kitchen with a stove in the break area. The single microwave always was running or foul, so I reheated some food in a pot on the stone. BAM! Fire alarm and evacuation, with the fire wardens pushing me out of the break area while I yelled “I gotta turn off the stove or there will be a REAL FIRE!!” They didn’t care about a one second action and I left, telling everybody in sight, including the CEO, about the hazard in the kitchen.
    Turns out it was a drill and I safely returned to my overcooked rice.
    We did get more microwaves.

  340. Laskia*

    I worked at a power plant once. We had a critical failure in the reactor and had experts come and investigate. We were instructed to not evacuate because “If it blows up, the whole town will be flattened anyway”. Thankfully it didn’t blow up and I’m still here to write this :’)

  341. Retired Artilleryman*

    Over 20 years ago, I was a Lieutenant in the US Army Field Artillery on what used to be Fort Hood. For those who don’t know, the Field Artillery are the big guns that shoot very long range, up to 30 km. All the artillery on Fort Hood was either 155mm cannon or rocket, and this involves a cannon unit. I was not directly involved in this situation, it was the next unit over, but I did have to read the investigation results.
    One night, the range control office received a phone call from a farmer whose land bordered the installation. This is not unusual, the cattle farmers were, at that time, allowed to graze their cattle on the installation as long as they didn’t interfere with training, and the farmers would be compensated for any cattle killed by military operations. But this call was a little different. It seems the Army was in the process of blowing up his back yard. Once the people in range control were suitably convinced that this farmer was neither drunk nor making it up, they issued an installation wide check fire, which stops all units currently shooting anything.
    Then came the investigation. Turns out that this artillery unit had one gun that was firing 180 degrees, or 3200 mils to use artillery speak, in the wrong direction. At the time, the guns used an inertial navigation system, and generally knew where they were. But there were some procedures that had been skipped by this particular gun crew and the gun thought it was on the other side of the artillery impact area.
    When these guns pull into position, the driver points the front of the vehicle, and therefore the gun, in the general direction that they intend to shoot. The Gunner, the second in charge of the gun, has to get out and check with a compass that the gun is pointing in the generally correct direction. The Gun Chief has some things to do with the onboard computer to tell the gun where it is and that they are preparing to fire. The gun will automatically slew to its firing azimuth when a button is pressed on the computer.
    Everything in the artillery requires “dual independent checks” to ensure that we are shooting in the correct direction, with the correct shell/fuse combination and the correct powder charge. So, it should have been noticed by the gun chief or the gunner when the gun slewed around to shoot over the back door, but evidently not. Instead, they fired 13 155mm high explosive rounds over the course of several minutes, and those rounds ended up impacting off installation in this farmer’s back yard.
    Fortunately, no one was hurt. The back yards of Texas cattle ranch houses are apparently quite large. The farmer received a financial settlement, and several people in the chain of command in that particular artillery battery were relieved of their responsibilities and became an object lesson to the rest of us as to why we need to follow procedures.

    1. New Jack Karyn*

      OMG. My best friend was a forward observer in the army, giving coordinates to the gun crews. (Thirty years ago, in peacetime for the US.) He would shiver in fear and dread if I told him this story.

  342. AggroTurkey*

    School, not work. When I was in grad school, attending an award ceremony, the campus’s tornado sirens went off. A student later took a picture of a funnel cloud clearly visible from campus, but for the moment, the ceremony just… went on. Nobody really seemed to know what to do. The room was filled with bright, beautiful, highly-shatterable floor-to-ceiling windows, and a British professor said, “Shouldn’t we evacuate?” Another professor said something along the lines of, “Nah, happens all the time.” And so we stayed.

  343. Baffled*

    I once left work and stepped into a cloud of acrid smoke that burned my throat and eyes. Turns out, a train had derailed in a tunnel in front of the building, catching fire and burning the chemicals on board. The local news reported that nearby buildings had been evacuated. I don’t know about the rest of the building, but our company hadn’t said a word.

  344. moxie*

    I once worked for a tiny town that struggled to fill positions–we were just so rural, and it was really hard to pay people on our limited budget when two factories within 30 miles were starting people out at $25-30 an hour. One spring, in a fit of desperation, city council approved hiring teens under 18 for the open seasonal road crew, park maintenance, and sanitation positions. (There were no state laws or OSHA regulations against it, but I think we all knew it was a Very Bad Idea.) Well, we made it until August when one of the teenagers was assigned to trim limbs in the city park cut off three of his fingers with a chain saw. He’d been given warnings about safety before because he was a bit reckless, so no one was surprised. But of course this triggered a massive OSHA investigation, the kids’ parents sued because the damage was so bad that he had permanent loss of use of his right hand, and the city had to pay a massive fine the wiped out our emergency fund and then some. The city council immediately reversed their rule allowing people under 18 to work those positions and most of the council realized they’d messed up…except for one council member who went behind everyone’s backs to badmouth the city to OSHA and try to get the council members in even more trouble. The irony was that we had the minutes to prove that she was the one who moved to allow under 18’s be hired in the first place! She was flummoxed when her mayoral run failed 15 months later.

  345. Gamer Girl*

    Not my story, but my mom’s. My mom worked in a hospital lab, and there was a person who worked there who was very VERY tall. This person would routinely move and store large, heavy jugs and jars of chemicals on the highest shelf possible, which everyone else would either have to climb a small stool or stepladder to reach. This person moved very fast and got very annoyed at people who “took too long,” and she disliked bending over to reach things under cabinets. After her shifts, nearly all bottles ended up on the top shelf in whatever part of the lab she’d been working in, whether they were supposed to be stored there or not. This was a major inconvenience for the rest of the all-women staff who were nearly all very short to average height.

    (TW: severe bodily injury; no graphic details).

    A short woman reached up to grab a jug of, iirc, either bleach or EDTA off a high shelf, rather than getting a stool. As she pulled the jug off the shelf on her tiptoes, the jug tipped over and the chemical splashed and poured directly onto her face and into her eyes. The bottle on the top shelf was not closed properly. The cap had been placed on top but not screwed on.

    Though the other women in the lab rushed her to the eyewash station immediately and a fleet of doctors and nurses came running at the code, she was blinded in one eye and partially blinded in the other.

    The safety investigation could not prove who had placed the jug on the highest shelf or left it unscrewed, and no one was fired. Training ramped up in how to properly store chemicals, but heavy bottles still ended up improperly stored on the top shelf with no apparent disciplinary action taken.

    My mom had a ramp up in her OCD symptoms since this incident (understandably) related to things being properly closed. She was very strict with my siblings and I about how to properly store and dispose of anything, but especially chemicals. This is also the reason that I have folding stools in my house next to any set of cabinetry or shelving so that no one has to reach up high without seeing what they are reaching for, ever.

  346. CommanderBanana*

    This thread is a great reminder that Your. Employer. Does. Not. Care. About. You.

    1. JSPA*

      And that groupthink isn’t limited to teenagers. And that some of your coworkers are a menace to anything and everyone. And that OSHA exists for a reason.

  347. Lou's Girl*

    Years ago, I worked for a large, regional bank. One branch was built next to a small mountain, and there was a separate building for the vault and safety deposit boxes. The separate vault building was built directly into the mountain for added security. Since it was a separate building, it was manned by a full-time employee. Other branch staff would come and relieve her periodically for breaks.

    One Thursday, at closing time, the vault door closed automatically behind her last customer while she was still in the vault area, and essentially locked her in the vault. She did not have her keys on her and this was before cell phones. The manager was SUPPOSED to make sure everyone was gone before he left, but unfortunately, he just scanned the parking lot and not seeing her car (her neighbor had driven her to work since her car was in the shop), assumed she had already left for the night.

    She had no way of leaving the vault and no way of contacting anyone. She lived alone so no one was checking on her either. She was locked in the entire evening- no food, no bathroom, no phone, nothing. The manager found her the next morning. She quit after that, the manager was written up, and a phone was installed in the vault first thing Monday.

  348. browneyedgirl79*

    The office I used to work in was on the ground floor of the building, and the fire exit was in the bottom of a stairwell. One afternoon the fire alarm went off, so my coworker “Eric” put on his hi-viz jacket and we all made our way to the exit, only to find a huge crowd of people in the way, blocking it off, as well as a huge horde all the way up the stairs.

    Eric elbowed his way to the front to find out what was happening and discovered a group of people refusing to go outside because it was raining. Their hair would frizz! Ugh! In the meantime the kitchen on the fourth floor was on fire and nobody could get down the stairs to get out.

    Needless to say, Health and Safety gave us hell over that one.

  349. Northern Attitude*

    My SCIENCE laboratory job brought in a diesel power backhoe into the building and was seemingly surprised when people complained about the fumes. They had all the doors closed (a worker eventually opened them) and told us if we went home, it had to come out our PTO. We employed a lot of contract workers who didn’t have PTO so people stayed because it did not seem fair to them. At one point, they blamed the opened doors were making the smell worse so they shut all the doors. I started throwing up in the parking lot and then they took all the complaints seriously. Another worker and I had to go to the ER. Where the ER doctor was mad. He wrote very stern letter back to them saying NEVER do that again. The person in charge after claimed they must have been suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning too since they were making terrible decisions.

  350. a rare bird*

    During my stint at a now closed retail chain, officially we were directed to shelter in a central area of the store if there was a tornado warning. It was about as good as could be managed in a big box retail setting, centrally located away from exterior walls and windows, with an open area to provide safety from collapsing shelves. I experienced a few instances of a tornado warning being issued during my shift and having to herd customers to that area (and we couldn’t actually force them to stay in shelter if they decided they’d rather keep shopping, or leave the store…) Mostly no incidents, storms were close but didn’t impact the store. However…

    Once, in the middle of the day, we’d had storm after storm hit that day with strong winds and heavy rain, a couple trees in the parking lot lost branches, it was worse than I’d previously seen. We lost power and then got a tornado warning. I set out herding customers, finding them by ear in some cases as wireless emergency alerts were blaring from phones.

    And the manager on duty told us to come to the front of the store, by the huge plate windows, to avoid hazardous liability from keeping customers in the dark center of the store. (“What if a customer trips in the dark and sues us?”)

    I and a couple other employees pointed out the serious hazards were a lot higher at the front of the store, because at this point we had very strong winds blowing things through the parking lot, ping-pong sized hail stones hitting the building, and, oh yeah, a tornado warning. Manager said the chances of getting hit were far lower than the chance of a random fall in the dark. And I mean, technically true, and the tornado ended up tracking a few miles from our store, but IF those windows had broken, flying glass debris would have been extremely bad news to anyone standing nearby.

    Same manager was known for other less advisable things, like pressuring people to come to work when roads were unsafe from ice storms. We were by a highway ramp that always closed due to accidents in icy conditions and the closure would end up blocking the main parking lot access, and he’d tell employees to abandon their car on the side of the highway and walk the rest of the way “since you’re almost here.” He did get told to stick to sheltering for tornadoes in the center of the store, especially considering that tornado had hit some other big box stores that partially collapsed and people had been trapped. But I definitely didn’t want him to be the on duty store manager when bad weather hit.

  351. DVM*

    I once tried to stop and then witnessed a coworker hang a poster by climbing an extension ladder in high heels, in what she believed to be a feminist move. Nothing bad happened, but I think about it a lot.

    1. JSPA*

      Was she using her toes, or using the arch of her high heels, stirrup style?

      Riding boots for cavalry (at several points in human history) used to be high heeled, because they hold better onto stirrups (such that you can shoot guns or arrows or wield blades at extreme angles without losing a stirrup). With a solidly made pair of high heels, you might actually be safer on a ladder than in standard work shoes, depending on technique?

  352. SnookidyBoo*

    My last job was working for the public art department in my city. Highlights include

    – Having to have a meeting to ask permission to stop using extremely hazardous chemical cleaners and let me research environmentally safe cleaning solutions to clean graffiti. I had to also ask permission to purchase safety equipment.

    – My department boss asking me to go and buy hydrochloric acid like I was picking up milk from the grocery store (thankfully she backed off the idea of using it when I told her you needed to have a certificate to buy it)

    – Cleaning public art often meant going to blighted neighborhoods/areas. More than once I had to step over used needles and work around homeless camps. Some of the parks that had a public sculpture or mural were also places where shootings had taken place. More than once I ran across prostitution. Parks in the middle of day are isolated and creepy. When I brought up that I was uncomfortable working in these places alone my boss said, and I quote ‘It’s not like you’re walking in downtown L.A. for God’s sake.’ and refused to let us go in teams.

    – The last straw was when I was prepping an electric box for a mural that was in front of a gas station in a really rough part of the city. A mentally ill homeless man who had been screaming at the light post spotted a black man getting gas and launched into a racist tirade. The black man pulled out a gun, pointed it at the homeless man and started screaming back. Thankfully, there wasn’t a shooting and it happened so fast there wasn’t time to call the police (who probably wouldn’t have been any use anyway) but it was terrifying as I had taken shelter crouching down behind the electric box with some poor older woman who had been walking home with her groceries.

    I quit the public art technician job after that.

    (Other highlights include my boss and another prominent person involved in the gallery/art scene sexually harassing me, my boss taking the credit for what the art technicians did, and my boss ‘forgetting’ to give the public art technicians crucial information that she KNEW we were looking for that was integral for doing our job.

    If you ask why the hell I stayed there so long the only reason I can come up with is Stockholm syndrome and the fact the City kept promising they were going to move me into a higher, better paying job. They did not.)

  353. Dr. Vibrissae*

    During my time at a Large University our building suffered a major rat infestation. My office mate and I would routinely hear what sounded like chihuahua-sized rats fighting in our ceiling in the evenings. At one point we trapped a rat in the copy room in the middle of the day (like we saw it in there and had to trap it in a box). We routinely reported these issues and were told that since the University had switched to outside service contracts to save money, there were only 2 pest control personnel for the campus, and our building was on a months-long waiting list. Seems like we weren’t the only ones, since they later sent out several department-wide emails asking people not to leave out rat bait or their own traps, because the animals were dying in the walls, which was causing a bigger issue. Did I mention that this was during the period when hantavirus outbreaks were in the news and that my office was just across the hall from the cafeteria that served our building?

    Another time, at the same University we found a live bat that had gotten trapped in a box in front office area. Several bats on campus had tested positive for rabies previously, and there were protocols about what to do if you found a bat. However, because we found ours on the weekend the person on the hotline suggested that no one was around to get it, and we should just let the bat go…

  354. DefinitelyAnon*

    One of my previous employers, despite being a scientific research facility, had… lax safety oversight (esp. compared to my meticulous current employer). While most of the hazardous operations in which I participated were done in a very safe manner, there were some exceptions: 1) I was working with chlorine gas in a sealed gas handling system mounted in a fume hood. The only time there was ever any free chlorine gas in the hood was when the system was pumped out and the (admittedly small) amount of it was vented directly into the exhaust system. That worked great, until the one day that my hood was shut down for routine maintenance without notice and I noticed the lack of hood flow just before I turned the valve to pump down the system. It probably wouldn’t have killed me, but let’s just say that “probably” is not very comforting. 2) A colleague of mine had no respect at all for electrical safety. He would blithely make and break connections on energized systems, dissipate extra current by running it through a stretch of coiled nichrome wire (which would glow red-orange when it was doing its job) strung loosely over an optical table, etc. One time he needed a very stable power supply for a device that ran on standard wall voltage (120 VAC, 10 A). So, he got a DC-to-AC converter and powered it by wiring together 10 car batteries in series. Said moderately terrifying bank of car batteries, exposed terminals and all, was simply placed on a floor-level rolling platform. We were all just waiting for him to get a visceral lesson in just how much energy is stored in such a battery bank by dropping a wrench on them or something.

  355. Still trying to adult*

    Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire.

    Hamlet NC Chicken Processing Plant Fire.

    ConAgra Foods Plant Explosion, Garner NC, 2009

    West Pharmaceutical Services explosion, Kinston, NC, 2003.

    Bhopal Disaster, 1984.

    MV Dali & Frances Scott Key Bridge, March 2024.

    And of course, 9/11. The story of Rick Rescorla in “The Unthinkable” is haunting.

  356. Ash*

    Used to work for a logistics company; came across a coworker who’d spilled corrosives on his pants, had no idea that it was corrosive. SDS says to wear a respirator for cleanup, which by company policy means a spill team should be called (there’s a noticeable odor.) I inform management, who says it’s only a small spill and decide to clean it up themselves. Walk past their office a couple minutes later and hear them complaining about a headache. Yikes. Requested that the manager review hazmat safety and identification with the team the next day.

    Had a manager tell a coworker he wasn’t sure if the eyewash station was maintained (after the coworker had gotten chemicals in his eye and used it). This was not comforting because I often handled hazmats, talked to him the next day and he said it was a joke, supposedly it was checked every month by a third party. Don’t joke about safety.

  357. Incognito*

    At my old office, the owner did all the maintenance rather than hire people who knew what they were doing. The fluorescent fixtures often had burned out tubes – probably needed to be replaced because I’m sure they were at least 40 years old. Anyway, after he replaced the burned out tube, he’d dispose of it by smashing it on the edge of our office waste can. Some of the glass went into the can. We were expected to clean up what ended up on the floor and under the desk.

  358. Allison*

    I used to work in a store. Something about one of the shelving units was broken. Someone had decided to “fix” it by attaching it a pole using bungee cords. These shelves held glassware. The only thing supporting whole shelves of glass was about 8 cheap bungee cords. It was like that for the entire 6 years I worked at that store.

  359. Buckle up--bumpy night*

    Where to begin… for context I am a newbie middle manager in an environment of “we have always done it this way/well nobody has died yet”. Here are some highlights.

    -Loads weighing a literal ton being suspended over workers by chains not rated for overhead lifting.
    -Chemicals being used in non-functioning fume hoods.
    -No chemical safety training or hazard communication, leading to chemicals being mixed that form carcinogenic fumes.
    -Fire drills involve marching past huge fuel tank to reach evacuation point.
    -Spill kits and first aid kits were decades old and dry rotted.
    -Expired chemicals were “stored” shoved together in a biosafety hood.
    -Toxic chemicals were being used in benchtop without any safety procedures.
    -Chemicals were being burned to dispose of them (I was told “It’s not illegal if you don’t get caught”).
    -No gas detectors where natural gas was being used (found this out when walked into a room with active leak).
    -Panic button installed in the open, in plain sight of customers, three feet away from admin who would need to press it.

    Unfortunately higher management:
    -said there is no need to drill or otherwise prepare for active shooter, since employees could get shot buying groceries and work isn’t any different.
    -said there was no reason folks should not use a certain chemical out in the open…despite that chemical being listed as causing severe health damage via inhalation.
    -argues we don’t need multiple chemical cabinets (apparently we can just shove all the incompatible chemicals together).
    -argues we don’t need to have procedures or training to use safety equipment despite no one using it properly.
    -pushes back on safety changes that cost money/require effort/would make it clear that the previous way of doing things was unacceptable.

    My “favorite” was when I got some folks to come do a mock safety audit to find problems. We were checking out a rarely used room and pulled a door closed to find a pile of expired chemicals and fluorescent bulbs behind it. Turns out folks must have listened when I told them expired chemicals couldn’t just be left in hoods and decided to hide them.

  360. TheOtherLaura*

    This was not as egrerious as many others, but the degree of stupid still baffles me:

    Used to be that all alarms came with a siren and instructions over the PA system (like “This is a fire alarm, everyone evacuate right now and go to [meeting point]”). Very old fashioned.
    They changed the alarm to an electric beeping. Like some cell phone. Or a computer doing weird stuff. Or a lorry driving backwards. Or one of your central servers crying for help.
    We had some of the large servers in our lab, which was divided from the rest of the building by load-bearing walls, and the beeping sent everyone hurrying to a) find that annoying cell phone, and b) check which of the servers was beeping, and why.

    It took three or five minutes for someone from outside to open the door and say, “By the way, guys, there’s a fire alarm.” Fortunately, it was just an exercise. They changed the sounds after the review of that exercise and ensured that everone got mandatory training (with auditory samples) ASAP.

  361. KayleeKat*

    I use to screenprint t-shirts for several years but have since moved on. To this day, the first print shop I worked in was the sketchiest place I ever worked. The entire workshop was covered in a half-inch of lint, including all the powerstrips and outlets which, oddly enough, had scorch marks around them. When the machines needed a spot welding we had to spend a half hour getting as much lint cleaned out of a 5 foot area as possible and then stand around the boss/owner as he welded in order to stamp out flames as the sparks inevitably found some bits of lint we had missed. The boss has also completely dismantled the safety lines surrounding the presses which would normally be used to prevent people from getting caught in the press while it was in operation and to stop the press automatically should someone ‘break’ the safety line. This was gotten rid of because it prevented people from refilling the screens with ink as the press was in operation, which is what the boss preferred we do to prevent downtime. Nothing quite like a metal table being slammed into your hip as your hand gets crushed because you were a millisecond too slow with the ink! All this for 10.50 an hour, paid once a month.

    The business had to close its store front recently and is now ran out of my ex-boss’s basement.

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