May 1

[gordonzola]

In honor of International Workers Day, please comment with your best workplace sabotage story. I just got my internet back, (an hour of tracing exactly which cable was defective, fun!) and I have to go to work, but I'll write a good one up for next week. Wildcat worker action, strike support, individual maintance of one's self-esteem, flat out vengeance... let's hear it all, workers.

Post anonymously if you feel the need.

Comments

[sabotabby]

Can I make this into a meme?

Okay...here goes. I was working in a yuppie bakery and hating every moment of it. Most of my coworkers were decent, but the managers treated us like shit, and the customers? Oy. We were the scum of the earth even if we did serve them fast enough.

We had a mouse infestation. A bunch of mice had gotten trapped under the floorboards and died there, and we could smell them as they decomposed. The baker fainted from the fumes. The rest of us were sick all the time. We complained, but the management wouldn't do anything about it.

One morning, we opened the bakery to find, fused to the bread slicer, a burnt mouse corpse. One of the guys scraped as much as he could off. But you know, mouse bits. For the rest of the day -- and most of the month -- I responded to customer rudeness with a cheerful, "And would you like your bread sliced, ma'am?"

Then I got fired.

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

Absolutely, meme it. Workers of the world unite and all that!

[ex-motel666812.livejournal.com]

HAHahhahahahahahahahah!!!!!!!!

xoxoxoxoxoxooxoxoxoxoxooxoxoxoxo

[amnesiascope.livejournal.com]

After college I worked for a newly-founded local bookstore chain in Atlanta. It was one of the first bookstores to offer discounts on bestsellers and on new books in general. The owners attempted to make much of the chain's alleged "indie" status but were straight-up haute bourgeoisie out to make a buck by building a huge number of locations and then selling off the stores to a large retailer. Because I had facial piercings, I was quickly moved to a new location which occupied the former site of an indie queer bookstore; in fact, they tucked all the freaks away at this location.
I later became the cause of their policy against piercings after I led a revolt against their attempts to impose dress code.

Anyway, although the owners attempted to retain the queer base, they also began trying to attract the yuppies then gentrifying the neighborhood. In retaliation, the magazine buyer and I ordered the dirtiest gay porn we could find and, with some of our favorite customers began placing it on a daily basis in all of the fave yuppie sections -- business, computers, religion, etc. We were deluged with complaints from soccer moms and stockbroker dads, but the owners couldn't stop ordering the porn because it sold so well.

After a year without raises -- we were told to suck it up and 'grow with the chain' in anticipation of future rewards -- I and my friends changed the register receipts at all of the stores, which were computer-printed, from the company's slogan of "prices so low you'd think we were going bankrupt" to "wages so low our employees are going bankrupt." The receipts stayed that way at most of the stores for months afterwards, during which time the owners must have looked over hundreds of returns with receipts stapled right to them.

[ex-motel666812.livejournal.com]

AWESOME. :)

xoxoxoxoxooxoxoxoxoxoxooxoxoxox

[felicks.livejournal.com]

Yes, I doff my hat to you. (Or is it don my hat? No, I"m thinking doff, but maybe I spelled it wrong. Anyway, awesome about the receipts).

[liveavatar.livejournal.com]

I am deeply impressed.

[mercyorbemoaned.livejournal.com]

This is so beautiful, I am weeping.

[nightgarden.livejournal.com]

i know exactly the bookstore chain you're talking about! (grew up in atlanta.) the bit about the register receipts is excellent. i went to junior high with the son of one of the people who owned it--obnoxious kid.

which indie queer bookstore did it replace?

[sabotabby]

Well done!

[jamie-miller.livejournal.com]

Oh man, there are so many. I'll just share one for now.

First there was the legendary Kinko's sabotage. A disgruntled co-worker (not me, I worked with the computers, not the copiers) decided to wreak revenge on the store right before he quit. He made several hundred copies of messages like "KILL YOUR BOSS" and "GOD IS DEAD" on plain white paper, then went back to the storage room, opened several boxes of paper with unused reams inside, carefully opened the reams, inserted a couple dozen messages into each ream, then resealed the reams and boxes and put them back where he found them.

For months afterward enraged corporate customers would run into the store yelling "WHAT THE HELL IS THIS 'GOD IS DEAD' MESSAGE ON MY ACCOUNTING PRESENTATION??!?!?!?!!" and we would all laugh, laugh, laugh.

[ex-motel666812.livejournal.com]

*literally laughing out loud*

xoxoxoxoxoxooxoxoxoxoxoxooxox

[jactitation.livejournal.com]

I J-rooted (http://texaspinestraw.tamu.edu/glossary.html#Anchor-33869) over 40,000 trees in the swamps of Louisiana that were supposed to become (http://www.macraesbluebook.com/search/company.cfm?company=424213&prod_code=750) Kraft liner board.

[beautifultoxin.livejournal.com]

For every hour I was made to sit in cold storage at Godiva Chocolatiers, wathcing coprorate videos & learning how to hard sell "European" dark chocolate that was in fact from Pennsylvania, I made it a point to procure at least a 1 pound box (retail value in 1997: $29) to give away to the punk kids in Copley Square.

[princessrugger.livejournal.com]

that's AWESOME. i used to work at the copley gap and i can totally relate.

[flipzagging.livejournal.com]

Not my story, but I was a witness.

A Canadian woman travels Thailand, learns to speak fluent Thai, and is hired by a local private museum to do translations. Said museum is just a rich girl's hobby and is located in an out-of-the-way area where no one ever goes. She spends many an afternoon getting drunk with her Thai co-workers.

One day, a Burmese guy starts work, and in contrast to the rest of the staff is working hard all the time, even inventing tasks for himself. She tries to get him to slow down, but he shakes his head and explains the situation. The rich heiress's money ultimately comes from the family business in the Burmese slave trade.

On her last day of work, she deletes every bit of translation she ever did.

Sabotage is for pussies. Direct action is where it's at.

[jette.livejournal.com]

In 1988 I worked briefly at a diner (one of those sort of lucky penny places, not a real Denny's.) I was trying to get a waitress job, but they said they needed to hire me as a hostess first and I'd be trained for waitressing within a few weeks. Okay, that made sense. But after about a month I realized they had no intention of making it so.

Well this was a cop hangout, and all the cops always wanted ice tea. I'd always ask them if they wanted a straw, and just when they were about to reach for one, I'd say something like "Silly me! Only women drink out of straws!" and not give them one.

Now this place had a day manager and a night manager. Very good cop and bad cop, and the night manager would always bitch about the day manager's ineptitude and the day manager would do things like make me crawl under the table to get something dropped under there. He was fairly rude to everybody under him and didn't have many fans except for his few favorite waitresses who got the plum shifts, etc. (I should say that most of my co-worker's dreams were to snag one of our hot cop customers and quit waitressing to raise little copper babies, something I really couldn't understand at the time - they hate us, we hate them etc. My feelings on that have changed but so has the world and the nature of rebellion.)

After about three months of this, with no waitressing job in sight, I was working a morning shift with no time to eat, and grabbed a piece of pie and took a nibble near the cash register. I got reprimanded by the bad day manager for being "unprofessional" in my pie-eating.

So I shouted at him, "I'll show you unprofessional!" while spraying whipped topping all over his face, grabbed my pie, my purse, and stormed out.

I saw one of the bus boys on the bus a few months later. He said I was their hero.

Re: Sabotage is Direct action

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

they hate us, we hate them etc.

Understand it! We're fighting a war we can't win!

After the revolution, you'll get a statue for that?

[charlottecooper.livejournal.com]

I stole and shredded top secret files when I worked at the _________ . The files were collated on people who hadn't given my department private information about themselves, and they were going to be prosecuted because of it. My boss was a real vindictive nazi, whom I hated, and so I stole the files to piss him off, and also because I felt sorry for the people who were going to get done.

I also re-routed the phone lines in that office one day, when working late, so that everyone's line got sent through to somebody else. I did this for fun and because I was bored. Tee hee.

[msjen.livejournal.com]

Okay, this isn't that much of a sabotage, but...

I used to work at a bagel and coffee place on Newbury Street in Boston, which meant many rude yuppie customers. The owner was very shady -- our paychecks used to bounce, so he started paying us directly out of the register. We had to change coffee distributors several times during the summer I worked there alone. (It's now out of business.) He also yelled at me for coming in with blue hair -- yet I had had purple hair the day before, and it was purple the entire time I worked there and during my interview, and that somehow was not a problem. He told me I was driving away his more sophisticated clientele. I was only 19 and a was very timid person at the time, or I would have told him to fuck off.

Anyway, one of my coworkers and I quit on the same day. He stole the most expensive items that he could from the store, including a stick of smoked duck. Why on earth anyone would want smoked duck on a bagel is beyond me. There was nothing for vegetarian me to steal that was worth anything, so instead we both spent the rest of the day telling customers, no matter what they ordered, "I'm sorry, we're out of smoked duck."

Again, not really sabotage, but the best I can do because since then I've mostly worked in schools and I think it would be bad karma to do anything to an educational institution. Giving the kids subliminal messages, that's another story entirely...

[brownstargirl.livejournal.com]

The summer I was 19, I got a job casheiring at a real shithole of a health food store in the Village that catered mostly to bodybuilders and yuppies buying protein powder and overpriced moisturizer. The boss had ten people working there at any one time, which was around three times too many people, and thought he was giving us an amazing deal we should be grateful for by paying $5 off the books. His bitchy mother sat next to you at the cash, screaming whenever you made a mistake and stalking the halls grilling everyone as to whether they'd paid for their Snapple. They were too cheap to put in air conditioning but had 'organic' tuna fish sanwiches on the counter, which meant that customers would routinely come back and scream at you after vomiting from eating our food.

Myself and a friend worked out a scam where we gave a friend of hers who was on welfare thousands of dollars of Camocare bodycare products over three months, which she resold at a nice profit. Noone every caught on.

[sdn.livejournal.com]

wait, i think i remember this place.

[walktheplank.livejournal.com]

A large multinational food and cereal corporation was having their annual corporate meeting in the board room and the auditorium at my workplace (why they didn't have a board room or an auditorium in their 30 story corporate headquarters is beyond me). Anyways, it was pretty high security, as those things usually are. Even before September 11.

The company hired their own private security guards in addition to the usual M__ security, and all of us who worked at the _____ were getting stopped on our way into the building. I made a point of totally ignoring them, on the grounds that "Hey, I work here. Get the fuck out of my face." ("Sir! Sir! We'll need you to stop and show us some I.D.." -- Still walking briskly -- "This is a restricted area!")

(The faded Army surplus clothing probably didn't help!) :P

So I'm sitting at my desk, when the chief executive comes in, and asks if he can print out a copy of their annual report. On my computer. He hands me the disc, and walks away. (Now what have we here...?) So while I was printing it off, I saved an extra copy on the hard drive.

It was two weeks after September 11, and their annual report was trying to put a patriotic spin on Third Quarter sales of liquid yogurt and breakfast cereals -- we're all in this together! -- while simultaneously serving as a pep rally for their yogurt-lids-for-breast-cancer campaign... Which was apparently very good for business.

The company was especially proud of the fact that they were donating $250,000 worth of surplus cheerios to the people of New York City (such generosity!) -which was even more pathetic when you consider the fact that Dr. Dre had just given away $1 million of us his own personal fortune, and this was a Fortune 500 company with annual revenues greater than those of many Third World nations.

I wound up forwarding their report to everyone in my mailbox. I wish I still had a copy, it was a pretty entertaining read.

Oh, yeah, and I also had a job working the graveyard shift at a hotel where they paid us $5 an hour and they only paid us once a month(!)

By the time I quit, I'd made a habit of clocking in, taking the keys, and sleeping in one of the hotel rooms 'til about an hour before the end of my shift. Other people raided the liquor cabinet and made use of the hot tubs in empty rooms. I think everyone who worked there wound up having sex in that hotel at one point or another.

[travisd.livejournal.com]

Post the name of the company -- I can probably get a copy of said annual report in PDF.

[elusis.livejournal.com]

Dunno that it counts as sabotage per se, but when I walked out of WF, I had been busting ass to line up demos with local vendors and had managed to secure some real coups, like a Blue Moose demo every week between then and the holidays, and multiple rounds with a few other locals as well. But I hadn't written out the November demo calendar yet, nor sent any schedule or ordering instructions to the specialists. So when I walked, knowledge of what I had promised vendors walked with me and I made no effort to communicate it to anyone. I suspect the store probably attempted to save face by painting me as an unreliable flake, but they still lost a shitload in demo fees and probably wound up wasting a fair amount of demo product that I really hope vendors demanded recompense for. November and December are huge demo months too, and having one of the top 10 stores in the country without a demo person, losing demos by the day, probably didn't sit too well.

Oh, and I left two carts full of half-eaten hummous, dirty bowls, drying out quartered pita bread, and assorted sampling equipment sitting in the community room, where I imagine they were forgotten about for at least a day or two. The way no one ever bothered to clean up their own food and serving items left over from meetings, I bet it was days before someone dealt with it. Pity I hadn't locked them in the demo closet so they'd mould before being discovered.

[jamie-miller.livejournal.com]

Oh, I just remembered -- this isn't sabotage, it's work-shirking, but still.... I had a tech support job at a sticker factory owned by a right-wing Christian family. How right-wing were they? They wouldn't print any stickers that had anything to do with unions or queers, but they would print National Alliance stickers without blinking. They had to have a manager escort the NA order through the factory because there were lots of workers who would have trashed or "lost" the order in a heartbeat.

Anyway, I hated that fucking job, so I spent most of my time hiding in toilet stalls or hiding in the vast tech support storage area. I guess there was some "sabotage" since I did occasionally delete a few key lines of code in the factory software.

I also told everyone not to buy stickers from those assholes. I guess I can say the name of the company: DISCOUNT LABELS. They do a lot of work for Kinko's and other printing companies, so if you ever order stickers from anyone, make sure you ask whether or not they use Discount Labels.

[genderfur.livejournal.com]

Hey, if having fun at work is like stealing from the company (that's a Dilbert line, dude) then I'd say that finding ways to hide out and still get paid count as sabotage.

[bklyndispatch.livejournal.com]

once a large well known bookstore chain employed a kid who had just moved to new york. this kid figured out a way to get lots of money out of the register everyday enough to eventually fund his moving to california. one of the coke head manager's eventually caught on and started demanding a cut of the money taken out of the resister and eventually demanded that all the people working registers on his shift do the exact same scam each one giving him a cut of the profits. what had started out as a way to get over on the boss eventually turned into yet another job for a mother fucker.

[bikenerd.livejournal.com]

Once upon a time, a young lass was temping at a large banking institution. Her job was to send investment projections on various parts of the world to CEOs of various corporations. She wrote wee notes on many of the reports, comments on their geo-political impact and general fucked-uppedness and sent them out.

[metacara.livejournal.com]

I worked at a coffee cart in a hospital and got to know a lot of the employees really well. There was this one guy who had a very strange affect- I will call him "Craig"- and i could never tell if he was a genius, or developmentally delayed, or just fucking with everyone. He was an administrative assistant at the hospital and worked there almost the entire time I was there, for about 2 years. He was very disaffected with his job and his boss, as thsi story will illustrate. One day he came down and told me that it was his last day at the hospital and that in honor of his quitting, he had gone into his boss' office and taken a dump on his carpet, right near the desk. I laughed and gave him free coffee in honor of his departure, but didn't entirely believe him (although it was definitely a 50-50 thing with someone like him), until I heard other employees talking about it the next day. I don't know if his boss deserved it or not, and it really is disgusting, but Craig stands out forever to me as a wage slave who knew no constraints, and you have to admire someone like that a little. As for me, I just gave free coffee to my favorite customers, so... not that subversive.