HR Undercover

I own a retail store that carries kitchen accessories.  One day a man who walked in caught my eye.  I was not sure why, but he gave me the creeps and I felt I needed to keep an eye on him – just as soon as I finished the task at hand…    A few minutes went by and I started to walk around the store to check up on the guy.  I did not see him anywhere.  I did see two women engaged in conversation and focused on merchandise on “the kitchen gadget wall”.   As I walked around a display there he was slithering on his belly right at their feet looking up their dresses!  I yelled for my co worker to call 911 and the man jumped up and ran out the store.  The two women really had no idea what had even happened.  We refer to our friend as Inspector Gadget

So, do you think Letterman was off base when he made the joke about Palin’s teenage daughter?   See what Attorney Deborah King’s reaction is and her thoughts on jokes in the workplace.

http://www.nj.com/business/index.ssf/2009/06/jokes_on_the_job_not_a_laughin.html

Do you agree wt Deborah? Do you have stories of jokes in the workplace gone awry?   Share confidentially on this web site.

I prep display windows in a department store. An executive on the merchandising and display team has a fixation with including live animals in the display window…. Really, what are they thinking?

It’s Easter – wouldn’t baby lambs be cute in the window with the merchandise? Well yes, they are adorable until that one gets sick with diarrhea – and rubs his rear all over the window! Ahh, the customers walking by thought it was so cute! It was loads of fun to clean up too.

Or Summer…. What could say summer better than a flock of Pink Flamingos? Do you know how tall Pink Flamingo’s are? Let me tell you. They are so tall, that when they poop it can – and it did – fall on the top of the kid size mannequins. Not the kind of image that the merchandising team was going for.

Sometimes it is the customer on display. In our store, the windows all connect to one another, so the crew can basically walk window to window for the whole block. One day, a woman walked past the first window. Unbeknownst to her, the back of her skirt was tucked into her panty hose – exposing a good portion of her butt – and yup, there was no underwear. Obviously a quick potty break gone bad. Of course all of us inside working on the window display were laughing hysterically, and some followed her all the way down the block trying to get her attention. She could not hear them – and do you know NO one on the sidewalk, or at the cross walk stopped to tell her about her “display”? Yes, they saw and were staring and laughing but no one said anything to her! I often wonder how she found out.

After waiting several weeks for a new vice principal at our school, we were introduced to him one morning before classes began.  Unfortunately, most teachers were not impressed.  Later on, we knew we were right when he made the daily announcements over the  public address system.  He got right to the point by telling us that he knew that the PA System didn’t work in a lot of class rooms. So, he would fix that immediately, but he had to know which class rooms were not receiving his message.  In order to find out which class rooms were not hearing him, he requested that those teachers who could not hear him please call immediately and identify their room.

I began my career as a recruiter, hiring IT folk. In my third week I interviewed a lady who arrived with her newborn baby in a sling around her shoulder. Unsure as to whether this was normal practice or not, I began going through my interview script and the interview was ticking along nicely until the baby began to get upset. Without missing a beat, my interviewee pulled down one side of her shawl and began to breastfeed the baby whilst still discussing her experience with me; I was a pretty shy 24-year old at the time and didn’t really know where to look, though both mother and nipper looked happy enough. We concluded the interview with baby still suckling and I trailed back to my desk, wondering whether I’d made the correct career choice or not! Disappointingly, nothing remotely similar has ever happened since.

One of my bosses was interviewing a college student in one of those small interview rooms in a college placement office when the interviewee passed gas.  Since there were only two present, it was clear who the culprit was.  The young man blushed apologized and promptly left the room.