FRIDAY FUNNY: Anecdotes From Around The Water Cooler

Posted by Heidi Schwartz

What is the funniest/weirdest/oddest thing that has ever happened in your facility? These are some highlights from Funny Office Stories. Feel free to add yours in the comments section below.

Turning The Server Room Upside Down
One particularly slow day, I was going around the office finishing up my daily duties. One of my duties happened to be changing out the backup tapes for the next day.

I placed my finger on the reader for the server room, opened the door, reached for the light switch, and nothing happened. The only lights I see in the server room are the ones coming from the servers themselves. Again, I try flipping the light switch on and off—nothing.

So I go back to my desk and grab a flashlight. Shining my flashlight into the server room, I realize my problem—half of our ceiling was on the floor. We had gone through a three week period with nothing but extreme humidity—which instantly started eating away at the already half rotten 20 year old ceiling tiles.

Light fixtures were hanging by wires which were situated directly above our main server rack. I immediately went to get my boss and said, “Um, you need to come see this.” He actually tried to brush me off and I said, “No, you really really need to come see this now.”

I was surprised, but he actually had a sense of humor about it and we both laughed from that day on about us being so busy that we didn’t even notice the ceiling falling in.

Here, Kitty Kitty Kitty…
A cat got loose in the plant and found its way into my boss’s office. My co-worker and I hear meowing and go into the office to investigate. We find a tiny kitten curled up underneath the desk.

I start calling to the kitten to come out, and here comes boss man. He asks “What are you doing?” and lets out a yell when he sees the kitten “Get it out of here!!! Get it out!!”

Little did we know—he was deathly afraid of cats. He made us shoo it out of his office with a yard stick and refused to go anywhere near his office until he was positive it was gone. I have never seen a grown man be so terrified of something so cute and fuzzy.

More Pesky Ceilings And Pests
I was working as a network engineer for a defense contractor at an AF base and received a call about a loss of network connectivity in one of the older buildings on base. We did our normal troubleshooting but couldn’t reach the switch in that building. A co-worker and I went over to troubleshoot, found that the switch was up but the uplink was dark.

Long story short, we traced it down to the fiber connection, so my co-worker “volunteered” to trace the line through the false ceiling starting at the comm closet. Thirty minutes later (as the building was filling with senior officers attending a meeting) my co-worker, who by now was 75% of the way through the building tracing the line, let out a shrill girlie shriek, jumped off the ladder, and ran down the hall followed by a VERY pissed off raccoon.

Needless to say, it was complete pandemonium, with people running all over. It took 45 minutes for the animal control folks to corral this raccoon after chasing it throughout the building with the raccoon pissing everywhere it could.

Luckily, we only had to repair the fiber where the raccoon had chewed through it, and not replace any of the PCs that had been sprayed. Made for an interesting morning!

Not An Exchange Fan
Walked into the server room one day and saw my boss kicking the Exchange server. We were able to purchase a new one after that.

In A Tight Spot
A female coworker and I were trying to plug in a CAT5 cable in CEO’s office. Of course the plug was behind one of those wrap around desks. This desk was very heavy and shoved quite close to the wall. There was a small gap, but only a couple of inches.

I was not able to reach down between the desk and the wall. My coworker was able to bend over the desk and get her arm down to plug the cable in, but when she attempted to pull her arm out she became stuck. I was bent over her trying to pull her arm free when the CEO’s secretary came into the office. Needless to say, this appeared to be a somewhat compromising position.

At any rate, we finally got her arm free and it took us quite awhile to live down the incident. Fortunately there were no pictures.

Oh, The Temptation…
A secretary brought a snake to work and left it with another secretary who promised to “look after it” while secretary #1 popped out for something or other. Of course, the damn thing slithers into the printer.

Being “the IT guy,” I was asked to remove it (unharmed). This led to some very detailed discussion as to the exact type of snake. (I’m not particularly scared of them, but poisonous is poisonous.)

After carefully dismantling the entire printer, I got the snake out and returned it to the very relieved owner. Landed up dating for a while, so I guess it turned into a win-win all around.