f13.net

Starting a general thread of interesting works stories because, well, I wanna hear em.

My latest is a weird, but funny, old lady that drives a Mazda 323 hatchback from like...mid 90s I think. Can't remember year now. Anyhoo, she has it towed in from about 25 miles out, said it got hot. It starts, and runs, but no oil and no coolant. Open the radiator and  it looks like a white russian. Notice the split in the top of the radiator thus explaining why/how it got hot. Theorize that the head gasket has blown mixing the oil/coolant thus spelling death for the vehicle.

Now, she's already talked about getting another car, which sounds to me like a great idea. My dear mother, however, says the ever popular words, Lets see if we can save your baby. Shit, says I. So we stuff a radiator and new hoses on it. (The old ones were so brittle...this engine had been seriously hot.) Put new oil and filter in it and fire it off. Runs without missing a beat. We do a couple heat cycles and hill climbs to test, and performs just fine. Absolutely incredible. This engine should have been dead. Now we did tell her not to take it out of town, but she didn't really listen to us last time we did major work, so we'll see. Just amazing.

There's a shell script that some people run about once every six months.  Suddenly it stops working, or a bit of it does.  It's an archaic bit that does something like:

SYSTEM=$(expr subst $(hostname) 1 3 | tr [a-z] [A-Z])

That's not how I'd do it since I'm using the "new" ksh (1993), but whatever.  Bourne is a classic.  Anyway, the bit that stops working is the tr.  What? says I.  What could be wrong with tr?  After several trials and advising the guy that it works if you use quotes like so:

ts "[a-z]" "[A-Z]"

I figure out what it must be.  There must be files with single-letter names in the cwd of the script when it runs.  The unquoted square brackets are processed by ksh every time but normally don't match a filename due to the dearth of single-letter filenames (except in my own directories; I have a fondness for single-letter filenames).  Quote them and they fall through the ksh into the tr every time.

I haven't explained this to the guy yet.  Hopefully tomorrow he will tell me that he has updated the script.  He doesn't want to, but there isn't any better way to have this work every time.  Remember kids, don't write sloppy code.

One of these stories I was able to understand without having to scratch my head for a little bit.

I have a co-worker who thought that emoticons in her email were causing her computer to crash, so she sent emails to the people she was in contact with to kindly ask them to stop including "little people" in their correspondence with her.

A friend of mine works for a greeting card company doing PR and received the following unsolicited email:


Of course my friend has absolutely nothing at all to do with anything remotely related to the design of the cards...

I could help Fluffles maybe. The company I work for prints and designs greeting cards.

My very first day on the job, some guy that they said was a spitting image of me stole 197,000 bucks from the agency he worked for..

My third week on the job, I was stopped by the FBI, DEA, US Customs, and ICE on the way to a ship that had just arrived.  The captain and the stevedore had apparently been bringing in cocaine in fairly large quantities.  Once DEA and Customs 'raided' his ship, he was trying to sling bags and bags of cocaine out a small porthole window that was barely open. 

A Filippino crewman fell 90 feet from the top of a hatch cover to the tank top bottom after failing to make sure his rigging and safety equipment was properly rigged and safe.

Watched a 738 foot long panamax vessel with a deadweight of about 78,000 tons shift on it's drydock supports 2 minutes after I walked down the gangway. Promptly threw up after that one.

Had a crewman get cut in half when the hatch covers closed on him.  Threw up for DAYS after that.

During Hurricane Katrina, the Rig Chemul broke loose of it's mooring lines/drydock, and proceeded UP river whereby it hit two vessels in port, destroyed a coal barge loading spout, the wedge itself under a suspension bridge.

Had a tanker lose power midtransit, and the captain came within a hair of dropping 2 15 ton anchors on top of the I-10 tunnels (that he didn't know was there).  If he'd have done that, it would have caused the tunnels to collapse, flood with water, and anyone in the tunnel to drown, or get smushed.

Lessee...

Had a ship stay here so long due to USCG restrictions that the absolute ugliest guy on the ship got married to the absolute ugliest, nastiest dockwhore in town.  He couldn't stay, as he was Nigerian.

Two Columbians rode for 5 days in one of my tanker's rudder housing, exposed to the seas with only 3 feet worth of space to sit in and try and hold on.  The rest of the space was taken up with 240 lbs of cocaine.  That was an interesting experience, seeing that ship come up river with about 5 helos, and an uncountable number of police, flotilla, USCG and other LE boats surrounding it.

Some old Greek captain, who hadn't been off the ship (at all) in four years finally snapped and locked himself in his room.  This was after he greeted me and the other government officials in the nude during arrival formalities.

One of the three times I've had to pull out my pistol...INS detained a Turkish crew on board (no Visas), and the captain didn't seem to like it.  And neither did the crew (all 26 of them).  To say they got a bit aggrevated is an understatement, which was met by my .40 cal, the INS officers pistol, as well as the two Customs inspectors.  The police were called during the "standoff", essentially taking the ship over in riot gear.

I was introduced to Fish Head Soup about a week into the business. It's exactly what it sounds like, and it's even nastier than it sounds.

Watch a guy lose his hand as it was crunched by mooring lines being winched up against a ballard.

Had to arrange medical assistance for a captain that complained of having an itchy anus for 2 weeks prior to his arrival.

I could go on and on.

It made ME laugh, but I suspect your "target audience" is pretty limited. Most people here are just going to scratch their head :)

Remember kids, quote EVERYTHING. Single quotes if possible.

Hey kids, it's time for Adventures in Quack Scripting with Moosehands!

I've got a Perforce depot that is too big for the hardware it is on, which led eventually to our weekly depot verifications failing for lack of memory.  So I dig into the script to break the verifications up into a series of smaller jobs.  Of course I don't have a sandbox instance to play around in so the best I can do is wrap everything in echo commands to let me see what the output is going to be, get it to look right, then remove the echoes.  This is how I learned a New Thing (tm) about Bash.

p4 verify -q '//${foo}/...'

vs.

echo "p4 verify -q '//${foo}/...'"

My dry runs were expanding ${foo} but the live run not so much.  I'm constantly amazed that people keep giving me jobs that involve scripting.

I'll give Snake more time to write some things before I make with the dork talk again.  Actually much of it is more about the people who shouldn't be doing or making decisions on things.  It is still fairly inscrutable to normals.  Best to just read Dilbert.

Snake's job sounds like something I'd see on the Discovery Channel. 

It happened before I got there but the bank where I worked was involved in the then biggest corporate buyout in Canada which involved a transaction in the billions of dollars.  The old mainframe system couldn't handle a number that large all at once so they had to break it up into two smaller pieces.  Code was added to say that once a transaction greater than a billion dollars was found set a flag and first debit/credit nine hundred million dollars from the accounts, then do the remainder.  It worked just fine and the transaction went through without a hitch.

One slight problem though, they forgot to unset the flag.  Every single transaction that went through after that also got debited/credited with nine hundred million dollars so everyone else's account was either in the hole for almost a billion dollars or they had this insanely large balance.  They had to pull in people from all over the place and work right through Christmas to manually fix it all.

Heh.  It's interesting at times, that's for sure...

Occasionally have to brave one of the local seamens clubs (i.e. whore houses) to try and find some crew man that is late getting back to the ship...

Middle of the night phone calls from overseas because the person can't comprehend that I live in a different time zone and haven't replied to the email they sent me at 2 am local time...

Seeing the following come up the river, and wondering just how in the world that it made it all the way here from the other side of the world:

(http://k53.pbase.com/v3/45/387545/1/45141834.DSC07311.jpg)

Looking down into the tanks of an OBO carrier that's loading diesel fuel or paraxylene and seeing the static electricity sparks as it's being loaded...

Laughing at a (fat ass) CBP inspector for balking at an 'unsafe' gangway because they're insurance wouldn't cover them if they fell.  She couldn't, however, come up with a reason why if he was after a terrorist or somesuch it would then be justifiable since it was part of her duty  :roll:.

Yelling, cussing, screaming, and anything else I could think of at union stevedore labor that wouldn't work past 1800 hrs by 2 hours and subsequently delaying the ship for 14 hrs, costing the ship (and in the end, consumers) untold amounts of money.

Yelling, cussing, screaming, and anything else I could think of at CBP officials because their inspectors were an hour late to boarding/clearing a ship.  That one hour delay caused the ship to be delayed an additional day because the union stevedore labor would not work past 2300 hrs, costing the ship (and in the end, consumers) untold amounts of money as a result of future delays.

Laughing at the head of the local CBP for saying that they didn't have the technology to roll the main phone line to the on duty CBP officer (72# is apparently too hard).

In general, laughing at the stupidity of CBP on a regular basis.

My work stupidity is all pretty simple, as I deal with the public. Last weekend's gems were the following two phrases:

"Are these real, or do you make them?"
"How much do the $13 pendants cost?"

I once noted that union rules -- like those "won't work past X" rules -- tended to be ludicrous in practice, but were often founded in past abuses (often long past). I don't know about stevedores in particular, but I know many of those "won't work past X" rules came about for one (or both) of two reasons: Because management started requiring long-ass (and unsafe) hours (like routine 60+ hour weeks in an enviroment where fatigue-based mistakes could get people killed), or because management worked out that it was cheaper to hire one guy to do two guy's work and just make him stay until it was done (which, admittedly, is a fucking incentive to work fast since you'd like to go home).

It's  real pisser when you're on the other end of it, and I know for a fact that it gets brought up in response to purely reasonable requests (Like: "Dude, is working 9 hours this once instead of 8 going to kill you? Come on!") and you still get the "No, I don't work past X" response. It's infuriating, but I try to bear in mind that -- well, as ridiculous as it fucking sounds right this instant, there actually is a reason for it.

Although you are making me glad I don't have to deal with that sort of shit in my own job. :) I just have to deal with people who can't grasp that I, a highly trained and educated software engineer, who is there purely to support our own products during critical events, am not trained, authorized, or have the accesses required to fix their goddamn laptops.

As it is, I'm nice enough to unjam their fucking printers and explain to them that their monitor isn't working because, well, some fucker hit the "input" button for unknown reasons. I regret that much, some days.

Was that the TD/Canada Trust merger?

Just some random stuff from my jobs:

I worked for Sears for awhile. Big part of the job was loading big items into vehicles. Far too often, people would not believe me when I said item A would not fit into vehicle B. Exchange goes like this: "Ma'am/Sir, this isn't going to fit in your civic." "Oh come on, lets just try! How about out of the box?" "Well, no, it won't, but if you insist..." *item does not fit* "Oh, I guess we'll have to come back for it later."

I did photos in Walgreens for awhile. People REALLY don't understand how film exposure works, or that shitty $1 disposables re-use name-brand disposables, and use shitty film, and that's why they get shitty pictures.

When I worked security, my manager was a real fucking trolly of a bitch. Also, her supervisory role was the best job she had ever had. She was also an idiot, who could not comprehend that I could both read something, and listen for door chimes/radio calls/PC alarms, at the same time. And that expecting a person to sit around and do NOTHING for 8 hours is fucking torturous.

Gamestop....lol. "Do you have Wiis!? Why don't they just make more? Are those Wiis sitting up on that little shelf, easily within reach for the taking? What games are good? Have you guys played (random girly/child/movie game)?"

The bank I work for now....you wouldn't believe what sort of people they having working in their facilities that deal with your vital documents. Like the fucking morons working in the collateral dept, whose only jobs are to deal with collateral, and they can't fucking keep track of random mortgages/titles - as in, they lose shit daily. Or that cannot tell if the document they are looking at is a copy or original...as in they cannot tell if the signatures are photocopies or ink.

In other departments, people just generally cannot understand/write proper English, or properly fill out their forms. Clownshoes, I say.

No it was when Rogers purchased some smaller cable company and we were their bank.

Sure, they were needed at a point in time.  These days?  Not so much.  

It's so bad, that most of the time they aren't willing to accept a 4 or 8 hour guarantee even if they only work 1 hour past their cut off point.  The ILA unions cost the public an unGodly amount of money in my line of work.  Add incompetent CBP officers?  

And it's a financial Molotov's cocktail disaster.

I ran the numbers based off educated estimates of the costs, and it really would surprise you.  The daily rate of your average panamax sized vessel (738' LOA, 105' beam, 75,000 deadweight) is around 55,000 USD per day right now.  An aframax tanker (850' LOA, 145' beam, 90,000 DWT) is roughly 95,000 USD.  Factor in fuel costs, crew costs, stand by or overtime labor for stevedores (union and nonunion), the potential to run into another day's dockage charge, it all adds up very fast.  All those costs get passed right down to the consumer.  Those charged with facilitating trade are, in fact, making trade more expensive every day.

Agreed - unions themselves are mostly holdovers from past abuses.

My turn. I would occasionally get emails from a poor individual in another department who's parents had decided it would be a good idea to name them "Courvoisier."

After a while I finally met Courvoisier - and I was privately shocked to discover that he was a man.

That's a girl's name, amirite?  :awesome_for_real:

I "tutor" (read: Underpaid student teacher who babysits class so the real teacher can leave for 3 hours) at an "urban" middleschool in Fort Worth..you would be amazed at the names I see.  We have a kid whos name is TrshTrck.  Thats right, no vowels, vowels are for honkeys.  Oh, and how could I forget "Trashauna" we have 3 or 4 of those, although they do a get a bit upset when I don't call them "Tra-Shauna".  Sorry darlin, but your first name starts with "trash", deal with it.

What's CBP stand for? My acronym dictionary is failing.

SnakeCharmer wins this thread.  Everyone else can stop now.

What I don't get. Why isn't there a seperate night crew working the off hours if its that important? Can't cost more than having the ships wait another day. Doesn't the union support that solution? If so, are they daft?

I don't get out in the field enough these days, but that's where things are rife with story opportunities as Snake illustrates.   I've got two from my latest job and two from a previous job, however.   I've got a bunch of AutoCAD stories, too, but those fail to convey the idiocy if you aren't very familiar with the program. (like the code ones  :drill:)

First, we were building a park shelter that was on a prominence in the community.  Since it's an open sided structure in a windy area with a big enclosed roof on it, there was some concern over uplift when the wind conditions were noted in the field.  To combat the roof flying off there were several very strong 'hurricane' ties added at the beam/ truss and beam/ post unions.  These worked fantastically the night we had a big wind storm and kept everything together.  Too bad nobody followed through on the structural logic and did a post-to-slab connection.  The shelter was lifted up like a kite and flew about 5' off of the foundation.

The day before we close a new house there's usually still a few touch-up and clean-up (Punch-out) items to be done.  The punch-out showed up for work at 7 on a particularly stormy day and was standing in the driveway unloading his tools when lightning struck the house.  In addition to knocking him on his ass and dazing him for a minute or so, the house caught on fire.  He was able to call the Fire department, but the house was ruled a loss and we had to rebuild it.   I wonder where the customers lived for the 3 1/2 months it took, since part of our sales contract is that their original house must be sold prior to closing (if they can't get financing for 2 mortgages, that is.)

In Cincinnati there's very clayey soil, and sometimes you find a super expansive patch.  This stuff can be shrunk for years, but then get wet and shift 3 to 4 feet or more, or reverse and dry out then shrink by the same amount.  The few soil samples you pull in an entire development or a lot isn't always enough to locate this as the patches can sometimes only be 10' across so you'd completely miss them.   The worst such example was a house my old company had to buy back because the soil heaved enough to raise the back wall two feet.  The rear door (steel) was bowed about 6" and the entire floor system was ruined to the point even furniture wouldn't stay in place.

Then there's the subcontractors.  My favorite story is walking around a site in Dallas and seeing one of the framing crew tugging on an air hose for his nail gun.  He was trying to get some additional slack, and was visibly frustrated that it wouldn't budge.   Without moving, those of us inspecting looked into the next room to see his coworker standing on a ladder nailing something into place with his buddies air hose wrapped around the leg of the ladder, still being yanked on from the other room.  :awesome_for_real:

I remember my introduction to the dark side of the american workforce. I've had a solid work ethic ingrained in me forever and my first job was road construction, which put it to good use. One winter I did some work with a cleaning company, cleaning out airplane hangars. It consisted of sweeping the hangars while my partner emptied garbage and the supervisor vacuumed offices. This took about an hour. Then they'd go into an office and sleep for 7 hours.

I couldn't take it, so I would just leave and forge my timesheets. Worked until I was leaving one day as the boss pulled up. Used to work so many of those shit jobs, where you can laugh and walk away because you can get more pay at another job the next day.

When I was working at walmart, I had a habit of transferring the best-looking cashiers to overnight shift and then shagging them everywhere in the store. Changing rooms were so tame. Best was probably behind some bags of dog food while the store was open. In a closet in the gaming room while the unloaders were playing games. On the boss's desk. In the back of the truck while the guys unloaded the front. Outside in lawn&garden during the summer. Good times.

Merusk, I didn't realize you were in residential.  My sympathies.

In the summer between my high school senior year and my college freshman year, I worked as a pipe fitter helper at a chemical plant. It was decent money but it was a shit job. My days were spent cutting pipe, putting a bevel on the ends, helping the welder weld them together, helping the pipe fitters install, and then cleaning up after. One day one of the fitters wanted to get a couple pieces of metal, about 3" x 3" out of about 1/2 " thick metal. Unfortunately we didn't have any flat plates to cut that from. His solution: Cut a chunk out of the end biggest diameter pipe we had. Since it was from a big pipe, it had just a little bit of a curve to it. In order to flatten it out, he set it on the worktable and smashed it with a big hammer. After hitting it a few times, one blow caught the piece right on the corner causing it to fire off the table and hit him right in the nuts.

He fell to the concrete ground and started rolling around, clutching his crotch. We were having a hard time asking him if he was ok because we were laughing so hard. He eventually got up and staggered off to the bathroom. When he came back, he had this haunted look on his face. "My nut went back up into my body... I had to pop it back down..."

Yeah, thanks.  I went in this direction initially because 1) the pay was a lot better than commercial and 2) I really like working on houses a LOT better than industrial complexes/ office rehabs/ mega supermarkets and business hotels.   

Over the last year or two, however, I've begun to rethink that because.. my god it's a clusterfuck in this little corner of the industry.

I can't speak for Snakecharmer, but a generally similiar situation has come up in the -- heavily unionized -- refineries I am familiar with.

There were two general cases wherein union rules preventing overwork kept costing the refineries money -- there was one-time, seasonal, or otherwise unusually high work loads that simply required more hours on rare occasions problem. This was fixed early on wherein the union was quite happy to accept overtime (well compensated and subject to sane limits, since refineries are dangerous places) pay for things like turnarounds, emergencies (when shit blows up, breaks, or has to be fixed yesterday).

The other problem was -- the company didn't want to hire an extra person when what they really needed was just an extra five or six hours a week out of a handful of folks. The union held their ground on that one, reasoning that their workers shouldn't be required to do two people's worth of work just so the company didn't have to hire someone else.

I'd imagine Snakecharmer's business is more like the former -- it seems like it'd be slow/busy cycles -- but apparently they're not losing THAT much money if they're not willing to hire more hands.

Snakecharmer:

You honestly think those past abuses wouldn't occur again? Hell, I've got a friend at Fed-Ex who has been eagerly watching a lawsuit against the company -- he wears their uniform, drives their truck, works the hours the post, drives the routes they say -- but they claim he's an "independent contractor" so they can save money by making him pay the company's share of his FICA taxes (among other things). Of course, the IRS is in the process of bitchslapping those fucks silly for it -- but it's quite obviously in management's best interests to push the limits are far as humanely possible. A company isn't in business to treat their employees well -- it's in business to make money. They'll only refrain from fucking over the employees when forced to, either by law or the simple fact that there's generally a line SOMEWHERE in which you can't hire employees (that line, of course, gets moved pretty far when you hire illegals or during economic downturns).

No, I really don't.  Not in this age of instant information and such.  There's hundreds of thousands of lawyers waiting in the wings to take it to the man in a lawsuit regarding (perceived or real) unfair labor practices.  (Edit:) These are the same lawyers that don't charge a fee unless you win, so the person making the allegations/lawsuit doesn't have to come out of pocket.

The FedEx thing seems like a different issue altogether.  And if they're union (no idea on this), their union should have sniffed this potential problem out a long time ago - if it didn't, it's a textbook example of the union failing the employee.  I'm not a lawyer and didn't spend the night at a Holiday Inn Express last night but it doesn't look like it's a union relevant thing (for lack of a better word).  I don't know enough about the FedEx thing, honestly, to even hazard a guess - I'm just sort of speculating blindly.  I can't imagine FedEx not having some sort of idea that their accounting practices (which is what it really is, at the core) regarding this wouldn't bite them in the ass at some point.

If the IRS reams FedEx, how would this affect the employees, in a nutshell - beyond layoffs?  Would the employees THEN be required to pay some sort of back taxes?  It seems all of it's falling into the lap of FedEx.  And FedEx is going to jack up their rates to make up for the 4 point some odd billion dollars in penalties and back taxes if all this goes through.

I'd guess though, that FedEx lobbyist and lawyers will cop some kind of deal with the IRS in the end.

Our illustrious Customs and Border Protection.

(insert laugh track)

As someone that sees what and how they do it on a daily basis, it really is laughable.

I'm actually still curious, as Tebonas asked, why the docks don't seem to have a night shift for this sort of work, Snakecharmer.  Do the unions prevent it in some way?

FedEx employees are not unionized, as far as I know. As far as how it would effect the employees -- FedEx would be required to treat them AS employees, including paying the employer part of the FICA match. (There are a number of other things -- like, I would imagine, unemployment benefits, protection from wrongful termination, and all sorts of other goodies that employees get that independent contractors don't. Independent contractors tend to charge a lot more for that very reason.)

As for not biting them on the ass at some point -- dude, businesses don't care. They saved hundreds of millions a year for at least five years (this has been ongoing since 2002 at least). The guys who started this stuff already exercised their options, made their buttloads of cash, and are probably working for another company now.

Short answer:  Mostly because the maritime industry is STILL very archaic and backwards and very resistant to change.  The overall line of thinking is "this is the way it has been done, this is the way it shall always be done".

Long answer:  It mostly depends on the type of cargo.  Bulk cargo (coal, grain, oil, etc) is discharged around the clock.  General/breakbulk/project cargo is discharged (usually) from 0700 hrs to 2300 hrs.  It's extremely expensive to work past 1800 hrs, even for non-union labor/stevedores. 

And, logistically, it can be a nightmare due to heavy load permits.  Mobile is a very project cargo centric port.  By project cargo, the definition is "cargo that does not meet traditional standards of measurement", in a rough way.  Once the ship is in, the goal is to get the cargo to the receiver as quick as possible.  And often it's discharged direct to truck.  These loads are such that the DoT only allows daytime transfer across our interstates.  When is the last time you saw a double wide trailer being moved at night?  Same principal / DoT laws.  (Edit to clarify) If you can't move the cargo, you don't need to waste the labor cost in double handling it (discharge to dock to wait for daylight, then load the trucks after you've already touched it once).

The new DHS/USCG/TWIC laws are going to make it even harder on stevedores (and by extension ships/shippers/receivers/etc).  It's an expensive one time fee for someone to get a TWIC card, and the brutal reality of it is that many longshoremen won't be able to qualify for one due to past transgressions of the law.  Labor is going to be at a premium, and that premium is going to cost people (consumers) money.  Even qualified stevedore foremen are going to be tough to come buy.  Most stevedoring companies pull from the same pool.  And it's a risky financial proposition for these companies to pay for TWIC applications for people that probably won't qualify, and further, there's no guarantee that these same workers are going to be reliable and show up consistently.  The non-union stevedores are going to be hit particularly hard from this because they hire from Labor Force or Labor Finders or some other employment service on a need basis.  Basically a van goes to these places, and the driver yells "Who wants to work!" and boom, there's some of your grunt labor. 

Stevedores, agents, and towage are contracts and rates that are typically negotiated down by charterers, owners, shippers, and receivers.  In the mid 90's, there was a HUGE influx of Mom and Pop companies (except towage) that utilized low overhead to barter extremely low rates, and that effect is still being felt today - despite these Mom and Pops pricing themselves into poverty, as well as being swallowed up by bigger companies.  The net effect is that nearly everyone started lowering their rates to compete, and the quality of work declined by an inexperienced (read: cheapest available) workforce.  There is a resurgance in the local shipping community for those of us that work together (despite being competitors) and in turn not lowball the hell out of projects just to get the business.  The result is that we can pay better, hire (and keep) qualified individuals that do top notch work.  If a company hires mine to represent them, it's going to be expensive.  But you're going to get quality work and service.  I would rather pass over three shitty paying jobs/contracts, and get one great one that pays the same or more.  And to be fair, the work I (my company) does is slightly more specialized than your average ship agency.  We are moving away from traditional cargo ships (whilst maintaining and picking up ace clients), and have moved towards about 75 percent offshore support with the oilfields and research vessels.  I've got enough contract work right now for the next 14 years to keep me busy.

Anyway, don't know if I answered your question or not :P

I can't get enough of your job talk.

Also a dumb guess: TWIC = To Work In Cargo.

Not sure if you're serious or not...Heh.

Transportation Worker Identification Credential. (http://www.tsa.gov/what_we_do/layers/twic/index.shtm)

Mandated by the federal government.  Farmed out to the lowest bidder (Lockheed Martin).  Then subcontracted out again by Lockheed Martin to the lowest bidder.  We've been waiting over 3 months for our cards, and this goes 'live' in about 8 days.  'Tis a shit shit shitty shit shit system.  It's so full of holes, it's really quite sad.  Here's the really fun part:  The TWIC card for Mobile will not be accepted by, say, Pensacola Port Authority.  The TWIC needed for the Pensacola docks won't be accepted by the Port of Panama City.  No port will accept a TWIC card issued from another port.  So, not only do agents (which is what I am) have to get multiple federal IDs for multiple ports, so do truckers, longshoremen, stevedores, and everyone else.  I work 7 ports within 250 miles of here (Mobile, Pensacola, Panama City, Pascagoula, Gulfport, New Orleans).  Occasionally, we'll have work in Tampa, Jacksonville, and elsewhere.

They still haven't solved the issue of truckers coming and going with cargo, that may come from all over the country to pick up goods and transport them elsewhere.
They still haven't solved the taxi issue so that crew can go to and come from town.
They still haven't solved the issue of ancillary services such as seamens missions (religious based charity groups that take crew to shore, as well as provide spiritual guidance and worship for those that desire it), or other groups that might go to a ship and sell phone cards or disposable cel phones and such to the crew.

CBP is a joke.
USCG, at least on the Port State Control level, is a complete joke.  I should PM you the local USCG emergency terrorist alert or environmental alert hotline.  If it wasn't so funny, you'd CRY. 

Those charged with facilitating trade are doing nothing but inhibiting it and making it astronomically expensive for everyone involved.

I could tell you stories that would make you completely and utterly dumbfounded.  My favorite one so far is, will be relatively quick:
Tanker was inspected by USCG offshore prior to coming in for a 'routine' HIV inspection (High Interest Vessel).  When the USCG boards, they're in full gear with M14s or whatever, so it can be more than a bit intimidating to the crew as you can imagine.  It's pretty typical for tankers carrying Anhydrous Ammonia, so no big deal.  Ship had a full Chinese crew, and they barely spoke much english.  The USCG freaked out over a magazine found in one of the crews rooms, and called in all the heavy hitters.  Across the top, the following is written:  KEEP ME IN S/R.  In big, bold red letters.  They don't tell the captain what they found.  They don't show it to him.  They just inform him there is a problem, gun safeties come off, radios start squawking.  The USCG immediately went to lockdown.  The captain is scared shitless, and clams up.  The crew is scared shitless.  Two USCG cutters and a helo escort it in.

Fast forward a bit....

Once I get on board, I see the magazine.  The poor crewman is scared completely white.  The captain is relying on me to sort this out.  Anyway, I see the magazine and start laughing, nearly hysterically because I cannot believe what has just happened.

The Coasties look at me as if I'd just kicked all their dogs and kids squarre in the junk.  I get up, walk out, go two doors down to another room (with one of the armed Coasties in tow), and grab an armfull load of magazines and DVDs and then walk in and toss them on the table.  Written across every single one of them is KEEP ME IN S/R.  I held one up to the lead guy, and said "Keep.  Me.  In.  Smoking.  Room.  It's a slash to abbreviate SMOKING ROOM.  It means this is not to leave the smoking room because someone else might want to read it when you're done"  Some dumbfuck Coastie saw it and read it as "Keep Me In, sir", as if it was a warning by another crewman that THIS crewman was a threat.  The COTP (Captain Of The Port) didn't appreciate me telling him is guys were the most incompetent jokes I'd ever seen, and that if we ever had a real threat, we'd be in trouble.

The other story is the same COTP leaving Mobile the day before Katrina hit, then noone could reach him to find out the official status of the port until 4 days after.  He's since been restationed elsewhere.

CBP, USCG, DHS...

It's all a joke.  We're less safe now than ever before. 

the warehouse fella quit. So i had to supervise the people upstairs before they get a new one. I told them we need a packing list. You put stuff in the box, note down how many inside. Then you measure and weight the box, write in on the list. I'll process the list and call the shipping company over before updating the stock database.

'We don't know how to measure'
What?
'We don't know how to measure, Lawrence used to do it for us.'
For 20 years?
'Yes we don't know how to measure the cartons.'
I picked up an empty carton. There, printed on its side is a weird code. 58X34X20
I wonder what they mean?

Working in IT means my stories are the same as everyone elses.  My friends have much more interesting jobs, like my son's godmother who's a peadiatric doctor who specialises in post-natal care - essentially she's the person you call when a baby needs resuscitating if they're not breathing after being born. 

This one time she was called in to help deliver a baby that was about a week premature and was quite small.  There were complications during the labour and it came out blue and not breathing.  She rushed it over to the table and did her best to save it but, sadly, she couldn't.

All the time she was doing this, the father of the baby was recording everything on video for posterity.

The hospital has subsequently banned video cameras from delivery rooms.

Yes, I would believe that actually. I've worked with a statewide bank here on web stuff for years, and the amount of incompetence from top to bottom is staggering. Many companies out there make money in spite of the stupidity of their employees.

I was serious about the shipping stuff.  It is incredibly interesting to me.  And another reason for me to dislike DHS, which I really didn't need.

OK, this just happened to me yesterday.

I am like 3rd or 4th in line to back up the receptionist's phone- if no one picks up, it eventually rings to my desk. Recently, I had gotten a few calls for a former employee- some of them rang through to my desk, others looked they had been transferred to me by the receptionist. I had heard her voice around the office again recently, but assumed she was either visiting or consulting, since I didn't get any heads up that she was working here again. Finally I asked one of the callers if they knew her extension, and they provided it to me- hey, that was easy!

Fast forward to yesterday afternoon. I get a call for this woman that looks like it was transferred from the front desk (instead of ringing through as the default), but I barely know how to use our phone system, so I shrug it off. I answer as if I am answering a front desk call (basically just stating the name of our company in a questioning voice), and a guy asks for this employee again. It so happens that this time it is her husband, who also used to work for us (and who happens to be the guy who originally hired me). I explain that I have been getting a lot of calls for his wife, and wonder why...I also mention that I assume it came through to my desk, and assume that the receptionist hadn't picked up. Oh no, he assures me- he had spoken to her, but somehow the call was STILL transferred to me. I apologize and transfer him to his wife.

I then call the receptionist and ask why she keeps transferring this woman's calls to my desk. Her answer? "I don't know what her extension is." My head explodes, but I find the wherewithal to ask "And how exactly am I supposed to know what it is? YOU are the one who sends out the spreadsheet with the extension list on it!" She give some half-assed answer and giggles.  Of course, I actually had finally discovered what the extension was, but seriously...WTF.

My job is to push important clients through an onboarding system that involves 4 countries, 3 timezones in 2 continents and mutiple stages. The majority of the workforce are outsourced, English is a second language and have a set of procedures that are rigidly followed to the point of utterly anal obstinance, but don't actually work with anything remotely complex. It's like a caricature of an out of control bureaucracy. As a result, you can take anything from 2 weeks to 6 months trying to hammer a square client into a round hole.

The IT front end doesn't work, and the database is one of the worse i've ever used. The document management system is beyond worthless. Very important records go missing all the time. The entire division has hundreds of employees and is a result of little more than empire building, and has only been in existance for a few years, replacing a streamlined system that whilst not brilliant, worked. It costs millions too.

One of our competitors' procedures involve a handful of people and take 24-48 hours from start to finish. Others are similar.

So many tales I can tell, but for today, the story of why I left a FTE position with a mega-global shipping company that begins with a 'D' and ends with an 'L'…

Really don't want to get into the bowels of a giant clusterfsck from company buying out a whole bunch of companies and then trying to integrate dozens of different IT systems into one… …as well as having like a dozen different departments and half-dozen problem/project application updates… …consolidated Unix servers for them as an independent "service partner" but came aboard after nearly a year long migration effort… …was Unix guy but bossman wanted me to lead a team of mainframe dinosaurs too, guys marking the calendar to retirement who babysit archaic subsystems that were so far sunsetted and plagued with bugs for which there was no recourse (other than tossing the whole deal into trashcan and embarking upon migrating to a new system, which was in effect, but it was in midst of a multi-year boondoggle, captained by complete morons and miscasts…)… …things were such a joke that a simple one line program change would have to go through 3 departments, then get shoveled off to onsite/offsite outsourced Indian team.

One spring day, bossman pulls me aside and first, applauds my efforts and accomplishments at keeping systems afloat (including all the Unix systems I wrote and left for another team…) but that he wanted me to "shake my team up", etc.… …to which I responded "do you know how close some of those guys are to walking" and "do you have any clue what they do to keep these fscked up systems afloat"? To which he responded "I prefer to keep my head in the sand like an ostrich". In that moment, the decision to quit was made and everything else was a mere formality… …because he was the model for advancement there, a know-nothing that did nothing except cause me to write extra emails explaining what he mangled in his conference sessions…

…he was a nice guy and all, but at that stage in my career, life far too short to endure all that corporate suck… …a week later, I handed him a resignation letter, and I could not suppress an ear to ear smile…

Shit, I can sympathize with that. The White House decided -- for reasons neither fully explained nor sensical -- that they'd interpret a rather vague and general Congressional requirement as towards government workers and contractors in the most fucking asinine, expensive, intrusive, and work-stoppingly bad as fucking possible.

For my part of it, I -- as well as every other NASA contractor, civil servent, general flunky, or guy who is contracted by the contractors to fix the fucking copiers -- had to fill out a fucking 40 page manifesto listing everywhere I've lived, worked, travelled, married, divorced, fucked, wanted to fuck, thought about fucking, etc over the last goddamn seven years. For each and every goddamn item on the list, I had to come up with ONE fucking person who could verify this information -- and I wasn't allowed to reuse people, wasn't allowed to use family, wasn't allowed to use current coworkers or civil servents. Do you know how goddamn difficult it was to track down someone who knew me at every address I've lived at for the past seven years? At every college I ever took a single class at? At every job I worked at? And who were willing for me to provide their fucking name, address, and telephone number to the goddamn government? Without resuing ANYONE? (And for the record: If I used my friend Joe, I couldn't use Joe's wife -- or his sister, or brother, or shit like that).

Then of course, I had to provide a list of personal references who could "vouch for my character". None of these, of course, could be family or anyone I'd used to verify my previous addresses, colleges, jobs, marriages, pets, and whatever the fuck else I had to list down.

Once I got all this shit down, I printed out the now-filled in PDF I was sent (yes, we filled it out electronically) and then horsed over to another fucking building, wherein I inputted it all manually into another goddamn system. I was fingerprinted four freakin' times -- not because of "mistakes", seriously, four fucking fingerprintings. Not even electronic -- I had to keep washing ink off so they could do it again.

I then underwent a VERY thorough background check, EVERYONE I used as a reference got letters in the mail asking them to please verify the information and my general character and return it (at least they didn't need postage) and according to at least one of my schools they wanted transcripts.

Here's the kicker: I don't have nor need a security clearance. I access a variety of "sensitive but not classified" information, occasionally work in a room whose access DOES require a minimal "Have you ever been in jail" FBI check, but no formal security clearance. Two members of my team HAVE had real security clearances in the past (they provided software and data flow to people who DID use highly secret rocket -- like as in "ballistic missile" rocket -- data in the 70s and 80s. As such, it was felt someone should have clearance in case there was a problem that needed them to go fix it directly). They said the clearance process was not nearly as in-depth as this one.

It wasn't just me. It was every civil servant and every contractor -- down to the goddamn janitors who never so much as see even a 'sensitive but unclassified' piece of equipment or data -- in all of NASA. Not by NASA order -- in fact, one flight center's employees are suing over it -- but by White House order. I understand the program is planned to be universal, to every government agency and all it's employees and contractors. Even the fucking Park Rangers.

I shudder to think about how much money and time was wasted with that clusterfuck of a process. And get this -- if I ever actually NEED a security clearance, it won't count. I'll have to do it seperately.

And that, ladies and gentleman, is how we're fucking Securing the Homeland.

Well, my work is considerably less exciting than all of yours.  The most exciting thing that has ever happened to me was when I crossed a 480V 3Φ line with my fingers while it was live powering a 50kW supply that was in idle and lived to tell about it.  That strange sensation where you are being electrocuted, can't do anything about it, and wondering if you are truly going to die this time is a very odd one, feels like it lasts 5m when in reality we're talking 30s top.  Then of course the routine of checking my heart rate to make sure it is rhythmic and not out of rhythm and explaining to the wife why you are doing it and why you didn't tell the boss-man or anyone else about it.  Electrical burn stories sure are great filler material when people ask why your fingers are all scarred up.

Most recently I just get to deal with outsourced suppliers who don't feel the need to bother to meet our schedule and don't understand why the "we're dropping the program and you guys can fix it on your own dime" talk occurred.  I'm just waiting for the program management to get annoyed at the cost delays and pull the plug.  Although once the program manager found out that if it took too long it would be bumped to the next program manager and HIS budget, she stopped caring about it and said it could take as long as they wanted it to since it would be out of her responsibility (but not mine naturally).  It rapidly approaches Dilbert levels of management honestly.

It really sounds like your standard SF-86 that has been around for quite a bit longer than homeland security. It's NOT intended for use except in, as you suggest, classified work.

One word of advice: I hope to hell you photocopied it, because if you have to submit another one for a "real" clearance and they compare the two and your dates are off between jobs, you're kind of fucked when it comes to arbitration.

I had a real hard time when I was doing small contract work, I was technically "out of a job" for a week here, a week there. I ended up having to itemize a lot of it, and somewhere along the line I probably rounded to an arbitrary month.

And finding enough people was absolutely fucking ridiculous.

The best part? When trying to hunt down and confirm that I actually worked for PRC, a company which Northrop Grumman had bought, they could not actually confirm anyone had worked there because the records were lost / misplaced somewhere along the way.

Northrop was the one sponsoring me.

I'll go a different route. I worked as a staff accountant/FA for about 2 years in a real estate company. The work was boring as shit, but the staff was really awesome. Also, the head of the company was a family friend of mine and always took care of his employees real well. One of those things was an annual lake party at his lake house.

This lake party was a business party, but it was well known as "what happens there, stays there" party of the year. Nothing you could do there would be held against you as part of your job. It was strictly fun, no strings. We chartered a bus at 8AM out of the lot that Friday, drinking started at 8:01 in the back of the bus. As part of my agreement with the other employees, I made 2 gallons of my Phi Delt Vodka Punch. The first gallon was gone by the time we arrived at 10AM. We also polished off a full handle of vodka with bloody maries. There were probably 30 people on the bus, and not all of them were drinking yet, so the ones that were got pretty buzzed before breakfast.

This was a company where i was the youngest. I was 22 at the time, and the next closest person to me was 26. The average was probaly a solid 30-35. And yet, when we get to the lakehouse, it turns into a college frat party. I shit you not, there was an actual beer bong. I watched a 35 year old married chick with kids bong a beer. I watched the 45 year old Director of Development do a body shot off the receptionist. These people were accountants mostly which was sort of rocking my world as a newly hired person straight out of college. I sort of looked around wondering what had changed, if anything.

Anyway, at this point where everyone's totally liquored up after lunch, my boss unlocked the boat house. Turns out he has a pair of ski-doos, one of which I recognize as a very very fast model. I'm not drunk yet, so since I've had experience on them, I take the fast one out first. The damn thing tops out at 65 on the lake. I promptly turn it around, take it back to him, and tell my boss to lock that thing up. So instead, we take the boat out and let people go tubing. I'm of the recommendation you have to be drunk to tube, because it hurts like hell when you fall. That hurt was lessened by dual riding with the hot blonde chick with the huge rack in sales. I recommend that too.

So, the part draws to a close and we get back on the bus, but missing a few people. Noticably a few of the younger chicks and a few of the guys. Apparently, they were going to hang out for the weekend somewhere. Turns out that I found out later that they were all sleeping together, and that the guys were actually married. Not to those chicks obviously.

I guess it was my first experience that the business world isn't what they tell you when you're in school.

Bhodi: It was very similiar -- I'm pretty sure they modeled it off that. I've got an electronic copy of it somewhere. I was lucky -- I had one trip to a foreign country in the time frame. A coworker skis overseas each year. She had over 25 foreign trips alone, always with the same folks -- mostly coworkers who couldn't be used as verification.

Paelos: Man, I don't care what anyone says. I don't now and will never trust "What happens X won't affect your job". The few years I worked for a company with an actual Christmas party with booze, I didn't drink. Company parties are, to me, dull affairs in which I try not to be noticed. :)

Yeah I didn't trust it either the first year, but I knew one of the directors got totally naked one year and chased our controller lady around in public. After hearing that, I relaxed.

I was chewed out by the head of the department I represent because the apostrophes and quotes on some of my documents (the form docs that were imported from WP files) were straight instead of curved.

Funny.  I dislike curved quotes.  It's one of the first things I disable in Word.

Company parties?  What are those?  I work with engineers and scientists.  They go out to Hooters and get wasted, but that is about it.  If you don't drink, you aren't invited.  Not to mention not having any women in my department means there is no hanky panky going on behind the scenes (or at least that *I* know about or even really want to find out about...).

Heh, on a social level, my little dept is getting more ridiculous on a weekly basis.

Having a Bad Day

Apologies to those who have read this before when I posted it on Grimwell’s site,

We get all types in the Emergency Department (ED), just the other day; we had a drunken guy from the local jail.  Drunk guy had been picked up on some warrants, booked in the jail (his blood alcohol level [BAL] was about 0.24 which is right near the cutoff of 0.25) and was drunk and loud.  While in jail he went to the bathroom, got toilet paper wet and threw it up on the camera in the john, and was singing, “I got drugs.”  Drunk dude took some pills out of his ass and swallowed them, while the jailers were rushing in to stop him.  He swallowed about 4 to 6 pills is what the jailers were thinking, of course drunken dude was not saying anything except, “FUCK YOU!”  So off to the ED he goes!

   Drunken dude comes in and is yelling, “Fuck you, fuck you, and fuck you!”  He really had a grasp on the English language.  So we start the work up, it was me, another RN, and the security guard, plus the jailers (2 of them), and we tell drunk dude that he will have to drink some activated charcoal, pee in a cup, and give us some blood.  Drunken dude tells the security guard, “Fuck you! You Otis Mayberry wannabe, you ain’t making me do shit!”  I said to drunk dude, “Hey come on lets do this the easy way, instead of fighting.”  At which drunken dude yells at me, “Fuck you!  You Mary Poppins mother fucker!”  The other RN had walked in with the gear and heard him yelling at me, which made her pissed, she replied back at drunk guy, “Oh no!  No one talks to Jimbo like that but me!  Now are you going to drink this charcoal or are we shoving it up your nose?”  At which the drunken dude said to her, “Fuck you!  You fucking cunt licker!”  So he gets forced down on the bed, a nasogastric (NG) tube placed, suction of his stomach contents, and placement of activated charcoal.  NG’s freaking hurt; dude was a total dumbass to fight drinking that stuff.  So do you think the genius learned his lesson?
   
   Of course not!  As soon as we pulled the NG tube, we asked can you pee in a cup.  This came back a reply of, “Fuck you bitch!”  So now we hold him down and pull his pants down.  He’s screaming as the catheter gets placed, bladder drained, and urine sample obtained.  We then ask are you going to give us blood, at which drunken dude finally says, “Okay, take it.”  He then holds out his arm and we get the blood without any problem.
   
   After a while, drunken dude passes out and starts to snore, we’re still zooming around with the other patients and about an hour later I ask what he took.  Doc gets the urine and blood toxicology report back, and the dude is negative!  So, we recalculate his BAL for the time, he is cleared for jail, when we wake up drunken dude I tell him, “Hey man, you are going back to jail you didn’t take anything.”  This throws drunken dude, he looks like he has been sold the golden gate bridge and a bag of beans.  Drunken Dude says, “But what about the 6 oxycontin I took?”  I look down at his toxicology report; about the only thing even slightly elevated is his aspirin level.  I say, “Well, you should learn the difference between aspirin and oxycontin.”  He walks out looking like someone has kicked his dog, I hear drunk dude say, “I can’t believe I paid $100 for aspirin,” as he shuffles out to jail.  Sometimes Karma is sweet!

I'm curious as to what your general rule-of-thumb is about forcing medical procedures? I'm guessing he evaluated as way too drunk to be considered competent to make medical decisions. :)

Sounds to me like "Drunk and ARRESTED" were enough to rule out the necessity of his compliance in this case.

One time I was helping my ex tape down wires at a club because I am such a nice person and I fell off the stage and chipped a tooth.  I got an emergency dentist appointment the next morning and was in a car accident on the way and fractured my jaw.  That night I dropped a dinner plate, tried to catch it and broke a nail.  It was a tough weekend!

He was allready booked in the jail, drunk, and took meds that were not his (let alone out of his ass...), clearly he wasn't in sound mind to make judgements on what he can and cannot refuse.

Oh just some samples, inmate (I can't make differentiation between federal, state, and local--i.e. we see them all) comes in calming he was raped. He had the full gamut of jailers (since that is a way they could theoretically plan an escape), with some in the hall and some in the room.  I come into the room with the lead officer, and I ask him who raped him. He replies, "Los Diablos! The devil he raped me!" I'm like, "Excuse me? The devil raped you?" The inmate goes on, "yes he raped me, the devil is my roommate who lives under my bed! But sometimes he sits in the window and talks to me."  I then turn and ask for the med list that the prisoner takes along with his past history.  BINGO! The guy was on anti-psychotic meds and history of schizophrenia.  I then ask if he has been taking his meds. The prisoner goes, "No, no, no, those pills are for crazy people!  I have been spitting them out for the past 6 weeks." The head jailer is livid, he can't figure out why no one asked the prisoner who raped him before they left the jail. At least we found out before the rape exam was done.

Another day we had a drunk guy @ 7pm, he was passed out on one of the avenues, and the city police were being nice and told him to go home. So what did he do? Try and beat up the officer for not letting him pass out on the street! Well he was a handfull, he was cussing and fighting the whole time. Plus it looked like he had just had some knee surgery and was in a walking cast (the metal kind that pivots). We ended up cuffing him to the bed and getting the blood level, with a lot of screaming by the drunk dude and 4 of us to hold him still. Since he wouldn't stop screaming and we had a full ER, we patted him down (me and 2 other officers), and shut his door, but kept the window open so we could see him. The 2 officers and I started in on all the paperwork that must be completed to send them to jail with a clearance, when we heard the drunk dude yelling, "Help me! Help me! I'm on fire!" All three of us yell at him to shut up in unison. Then another nurse beside us goes, "Oh my God! There really is a fire!" So we hall asses and elbows into the room, beat out the fire. Drunk guy didn't get burned, my cot was okay, he did burn up a sheet, the two officers suffered minor burns. Since he had a lighter hidden in his cast or clothing or somewhere, we decide to re cuff him naked. Of course drunk dude is still yelling cuss words like a sailor on leave. Oh and when we were getting him ready to leave we stand him up to dress him and he pee's on one of the nurses. Dumb ass could have just gone home and slept it off (the patrolman wasn't planning on charging him with PI), instead he gets public intox, assult and battery on police, assult and battery on healthcare workers, assult and battery with bodily fluids, reckless endangerment of a public facility (for starting the fire), some charge for endangering all the people in the ER (if he had gotten the fire going and really caused damage...too much stuff that can go boom!), and public intox.

Now on forcing medical procedures:
Medical personnel can not force anything on anybody unless they are deemed incompetent.
Verbal consent is when I would come up and say, "Hi, I'm RN or Paramedic Jimbo, is it okay for me to help you?" That is condensing it, but I talk to my patients and get them to say it is okay to treat them and they want my help.
Written is writing it down, usually done to verify what I have talked to them about, some jokers think they don't have to sign, I then come in, "Well, when you first got here you asked for help and told me we could treat you, if you have changed your mind that is fine, but we will document it and not do anything else, I'll be more than happy to tell the provider seeing you, that you have had a change in what you wish to have done."
Implied consent is when they can't communicate with you, you assume they would want your help. This is one time assuming stands up in court. Usually they are unconscious.

Impaired patients= whole diffrent ballgame.  A judge, doctor, or police have found you incompetent and you have limited say in what can or cannot be done. Police can observer you doing something that is dangerous to self and others and have you put on a 24hour hold for treatment--that is called a Immediate Detention (ID 24hour hold), if the doctor and me observe stuff and find out all kinds of things, we call a judge and get an Emergency Detention (ED 72 hour hold). OH, weekends and holidays don't count, so don't go nuts on a Friday night on a 4 day holiday weekend. Then you get into the stuff I don't know a lot about, like the ones that have a patient placed under someone care as a guardian, committed for long term care, assignment of case workers and care givers, that is usually handled by the family, family doctor, psychiatrist, and a judge.

spelling fixed...I hope

My work is boring as shit, no Wow here.

I just find it awesome that "Assault and battery with bodily fluids" is an actual charge.

I could see assault, but battery? That's a powerful stream.

Speaking of urine, over the last couple years the new trend is for teens to piss all over the public restroom. Only one has been disgruntled with us, the rest just did it for giggles. And got busted because we have a camera there (specifically put there a couple years ago for this reason). Sad.

We also get a few public masturbators. One violently insane guy who destroyed a few bookshelves when he freaked out. We weren't allowed to touch him and his 'handlers' were two small women who he beat the shit out of. I almost went to jail that day because I wanted to restrain the asshole. Woman would yell "NO, don't touch him" and THWACK he'd punch her in the face and knock her on her ass. Stupid.

Not as bad as the walmart stuff, more shitters over there. One drunk pissed on a cashier. Funny video of shoplifters. Seems shoplifters like to use baby carriages alot, stuff the items under the mattress then put the baby back in.

I take it the law is pretty lenient on iffy cases, or do you have to follow some laid out guidelines to judge a case? To pull an actual recent case -- if some guy was hauled into the ER, bleeding profusely from a fresh head wound and showing signs of either neurological trauma or drunkness -- could you legally force an exam on him? (In the case in question, the man is suing because they gave him a quick rectal exam. There was an explanation of how that was, in fact, a test for spine damage of some sort from the accident and quicker and easier than an MRI or whatnot. Something to do with sphincter reflexes. I admit I was surrpised at that test.The man is currently sueing, as he really didn't want the rectal exam and said so at the time. The doctors are saying, quote, "The man had a serious head wound and was acting highly irrational. In order to evaluate his competence, we had to evaluate the damge -- which included the rectal bit).

Assesing mental competence with head wounds, or severe intoxication or drug use, would seem to be something of a judgement call -- and a fine line to walk. You don't want to punish doctors for doing their jobs, but you also don't want to give them to the tools to force treatment on people willy-nilly by declaring them "impaired".

Not that I happen to think there's a ton of ER doctors out there jonesin' to force treatment, and the ER and EMT's would seem to be the ones to make the vast bulk of those "Is he competent to refuse this" calls. So maybe it's effectively moot.

I'm no lawyer (but I play one in this commercial), but battery just has to involve contact; actual injury isn't required.  I think.

Assult and battery=
Assult= threat of touch without consent
Battery=just touching someone without consent
Since he pee'ed on the nurse, she filled the assult and battery or whatever it is, and since it is a bodily fluid, it gets a higher punishment.  The bodily fluid assult and battery was added due to people being mean as hell and trying to threaten with HIV, Hep C or B, or anything else they might have.

I have read somethings on that case Morat20, I'm curious as things are not making sense on it.  That might be a case where it was overstepped, but then again it might not.  I don't have the chart, have not heard all sides, and was not there, so I'm going to refrain from judgement on it.

Head trauma and not acting right can make you impaired, but you and the doc had better chart the hell out of it and make sure you document anything noted by anyone else in the room.  It all comes back to documentation.

It is the old damned if you do, damned if you don't.

What the hell just happened?

Another satisfied customer. As a bonus, this was transcribed (perfectly, as you see) from a customer care voicemail using our visual voicemail feature.

Date: Feb 20 2008 10:03:25 AM
From: 1866XXXXXXX
To : Executive Response Team (1862XXXXXXX)

"You asshole, nigger bastards think you can sit here, and route people
to the Philippines, and be left on hold for 2 hours while you refuse to
cancel an account? I will fucking run you over with a truck. You get
some of your fucking niggers on the phone. You answer it, and you
provide the fucking service we paid for, there would be hell to pay."

Nice, I'm sure we could swap call center stories all day if need be, there is nothing like dealing with hordes of imbeciles all day.

I wasn't really asking for a judgement -- just more of a "How you guys handle it". From what I recall of the case, the only reason it made the news was because "rectal" makes it seem sexual. Maybe the doctor was in the right, maybe the wrong, it's all going to come down to hospital procedure and witness statements to whether the patient met their standards for competency or not.

I did hear and ER doc state that if he wanted to get even with a particular dick of a patient, unnecessary rectal exam would be last on his list. It sounded unpleasant, at least. He didn't deny that, on occasion, punitive medicine happened.

Which hell, I knew. I knew an EMT who responded to an assault -- they were told it was a probable domestic disturbance, and got there before the cops. They saw the woman through an open doorway with an obviously injured arm and a bloody nose. So they disregarded procedure and went to the door, asked her if the attacker was still there. She said no, they came in, and a big guy just hammered into them from a side room. Knocked them on their asses, was waving a baseball bat and stating words to the effect of "I didn't go through the trouble of beating her for you to fix it. She needs to learn her lesson".

Only, drunker and less coherent.

So one of the EMTs (not my friend) smacks the guy across the knee with the oxygen tank. Guy goes down hard, seriously broken knee. They ignore him and tend the woman. They left the guy there screaming until the cops arrived. THEN they stabilized him and transported him. After all, he was violent and couldn't be approached without police backup. So I know that pissed off, stressed out EMTs and Doctors will occasionally choose to do things that, while addressing the problem, were perhaps not the best solution in terms of minimizing patient discomfort.

Fuck, they're only human.

Don't see anything wrong with that scenario. Approaching that fuckhead without a police escort would have been dangerous. The oxygen tank could have slipped and crushed his skull.

I can't get that song from Metallica out of my head.  :ye_gods:

Oh, I've got to use that one.

I had an angry teen patron threaten to burn my house down. He was at a friend's house in my neighborhood (friend is now in prison for chopping cars at said house, told you it was a ghetto), and saw me pull up. Talked all kinds of shit. Got to the line about burning down my house and I finally turned to him and said "Really? That's the best you can do?" Looked at his friend and told him to teach his buddy better threats, I heard shit like 'burn your house down' when I was in kindergarten.

Then he gets all pissed and says, "So? What you gonna do?" I replied, "I'm going to take these groceries into the house, what are you going to do?" At which point his friend told him to stop being a douchebag and they walked away. Literalism is fun.

That's pretty much what he thought. The guy was suspended for three months over it, since entering the house before the cops cleared it could have gotten him and his partner killed. (I understand the baseball bat did crack a rib). He quit a few years later -- I gather you have to develop a sort of emotional toughness to do the job (I mean, when you're playing "Find the body" after a massive high-speed wreck because the fucker wasn't wearing a seatbelt, and someone says "empty baby carrier" and you start wondering if the driver wasn't the only one thrown clear -- if you can't distance yourself, I don't see how you could stand the job), and he didn't like what it was doing to him.

I've got nothing but respect for EMTs -- even the asshole ones. It's a tough fucking job. I hear their burnout rate is pretty high.

Thanks Morat20, we allways hear about how much EMS, Fire, Police, Nurses, or Doc's are assholes, and never enough on our saves.

I have had a couple of times I've been brought back to tears of joy/weak kneed/"the OMG you fucking lived and are normal!"

A 12 year old girl and 24 year old male:

The girl was a bad Multiple Vehicle Crash, disaster protocol kicked in and worked great, it was like a 20+ car pile up on Interstate 70, and I was doing ride along for paramedic training (I was allready an ER RN and Advanced EMT, needed to get my paramedic, so was more or less doing the run, but had the paramedic there for guidance, was in the final stages so the runs were mine), and we pull up as the 2ND squad on scene.  2ND on a disaster gets the most critical and hauls ass to the hospital or air evac area depending on what we have coming.  Our town isn't equipped with the Level I trauma centers (we only are level 3 and not certified) so we have to ship to the two Trauma centers in Indianapolis.  Anyway, she was a 12 year old girl, who was in a Motor Vehicle Crash going about 70 mph, she was in the top of one of those campers and had been pinballed around the back and top of it.  She was posturing out (looked like decerebrate), screaming unintelligibly, her face was hamburger, and I had Mom beside her.  The medic who was over me said, "you got it?"  I said, "Yep, allright lets do this, this, this, and this, and went into my head trauma mode."  Her breathing was crap, she had a head injury, and facial trauma.  We tried intubating her to keep her breathing in the field with RSI (rapid sequence intubation), but there was so much freaking blood in the air way that as soon as I would suction clear it was back to a blind intubation.
We tried in the ambulance while in route, mom was a rock, I told her everything going on and what and why she needed done, then as soon as we hit the hospital, I was telling doc we can't get her tubed and her airway is crap.  The Respiratory Therapist said she couldn't', the ER doc made the call to do a Cricothyrotomy, I was still at the head and bagging and thinking, "holy fuck, it has gone from TARFU to FUBAR."
  The ER Doc made the cut and blood blew up out of her neck.  It was not like the others ones, he didn't cut bad or anything like that, it was from the head trauma we found out later, but as I'm keep bagging her and keeping and eye on her vitals, it takes the ER doc, plus 4 other surgeons to get the Cricothyrotomy done.  We finish, keep her sedated, vitals are stable, the heli is here, we transfer her to Indy, in route the Flight crew had to give her lots of fluids and blood and some drugs to keep her stable (didn't get the full story but heard it was a freaking intense 30 min flight), she hit surgery and they found the bleeder in her neck and took care of it and was still in Neuro ICU the next day.
  A year later, in comes this Mom and a healthy, beautiful, girl.  She came in and her and her daughter thanked me and the rest of us for what we had done on that day.  That was the best feeling ever.

  The 24 year old male was involved in a bad single car accident at high speeds, had an obvious fracture of the right femur, a head injury, facial trauma, and possibly something in his abdomen or chest since he was an unrestrained driver who hit a tree at high speed.  I was called in that morning, because the weather sucked and the heli wasn't flying, our local ambulance would take him to Indy, but that is a 70 min drive if you are lucky, and the guy was in bad shape but needed to get to Indy, they had him stabilized but had given him a couple of units of blood, so I knew he could crash in route again.  They gave me two units of blood to infuse in route to Indy and I was to help transport with the Paramedic.  Well I kept the Blood going as fast as I could, kept watching his pressures, and he would loose his pressure and then get a really fast heart rate, then we would loose him when he would go into V-Tach, we actually shocked him once to get his rhythm back, and had pushed all the blood, had a ton of fluid, there was freaking blood coming from his face and nose that we couldn't get stopped, the blood didn't look like it was coming from his ears, it looked more like the bandages were getting soaked threw on the head, and his abd was more rigid.  We kept resuscitating him in the back of the ambulance with CPR and drugs, as we were working him I hear are driver cuss and look up to see a semi had nearly hit us, I was never so thankful to see Indy traffic, as that meant we were closer.  We got him there, handed off, and they went to town.  He hit surgery pretty quick, he had a spleen that ruptured, along with all the bleeding in the facial trauma, and the fractured femur, and he had a cervical fracture (not sure which one), the guy was lucky we got him there.
  About 2 weeks later he came into the ambulance center and thanked us for getting him to Indy, he had on a halo traction device, but he was up and walking.  That was another OMG you lived!

Those are some Work WOWS! I live for...

Damn, that's awesome.

Respect.

(http://img153.imageshack.us/img153/8875/respekknuckles0vx.jpg)

You should write a book about life as an EMT, Jimbo.

Insert any one of a million stories of clients that can't find their alt key trying to tell me what is wrong with our software/servers.

In other news, I was rickrolled when I was put on hold by a client this morning.  :ye_gods:

The joys of my desk dob are a lot less powerful, but the depressing part isn't as bad either.

My EMT friend did say the word he dreaded most was "unrestrained" in the context of any vehicular call. He absolutely refused to move his car if everyone wasn't belted in. I've seen the aftermath of a 40mph three-way collision (40 mph hitting dead stop truck, bouncing sideways into another car -- nasty little accident involving stacked up traffic and a hill. Driver did manage to get from 65 to 40ish once he saw the taillights, which was something). Deep seat-belt bruises for everyone in the car, broken windows, totalled cars.

But 70mph? Not wearing a seatbelt? I'd rather go play russian roulette. It seems far safer.

Flies invaded the studio (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl5QQE0jSrk)
Reporter waiting for live cross didn't know her mic was on (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtMaSX8vlmc)
Soundbite from a news tape ended up looping on a prime time documentary (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzwQotiDXAc)

These happened around me, not to me. I can't tell my own stories till I leave :)