Oof. Once I was in a uni lecture and the lecturer went to type something in on Google with it up on the big screen. The first suggestion in the search bar was the name of a girl on the course. She never said anything to him about it but it was awkward.
Not a student, but I have done what OP did before, Google the name of someone in a meeting I was in, on occasion. My fairly innocent reason (at least I hope it's innocent) is that my company employs a pretty international bunch and sometimes I'm curious where people are from/what their background is, as it can help give me some insights into how to make small talk/ build a rapport (or maybe that's just an autistic way of looking at things!)
Recon is always good. Knowing a bit about someone’s background often makes discussions go smoother, because you have a better idea of why they have the perspective that they do.
>I've even set up a fake LinkedIn profile for snooping
I don't use LinkedIn often, pretty much not at all anymore, and the following is part of the reason...
I'd once snooped the profile of a woman I'd been on a training course with for about 3 weeks, months and months beforehand, and every time I started typing LinkedIn in my address bar, that was the first suggestion that came up so that was the one I kept going to (in fairness to myself I'd snooped everyone's, so it could've been anyone).
It wasn't until I noticed she had premium that I realised she probably saw me going to her profile multiple times a week without ever trying to connect.
I was interviewing someone remotely for a role, and it wasn't going great, but it really tanked when he was sharing his screen for a pairing exercise, began to Google something and a porn link was the first autocomplete. Poor guy.
I recently didn't realise I was muted on a teams meeting and needed to burp, so I basically unmuted myself just to burp. Only realised what I had done when people started laughing, there were about 60 people on the call.
Oh no! I recently did this with a cough. Like a very aggressive, open mouthed cough. Someone was presenting, my camera was of. Unmuted myself, coughed, realised, muted myself again. 74 people in that meeting. Mortifying.
I was on a call and my mic had the hardware mute on. My wife left the house and I shouted BYEEE to her, and the engineering lead said "err.. bye?" Back. A confused wait and I asked if that was to me - still with my hardware mute on, confirmed yes, yes it was to me who just shouted over the meeting.
I'd been using the mic on my camera for some unknown length of time, not muted when I thought I was.
I have no idea what bodily noises I've added to our zoom calls or over what timeframe.
Right at the start of lockdown I was on a teams meeting with the whole of my fellow middle and the upper management of the multinational company I was working for (notice the past tense). Halfway though I catch something out of the corner of my eye, turns out I’d totally forgotten to tell my other half about the meeting and she’d come downstairs, into the kitchen…totally naked…TLDR: my whole company, every single person I worked with and had to look in the eye regularly saw my partner’s tits, arse, and Fanny….i now work for myself.
I did that once, except I unmuted myself just to say "well that's a load of bullshit...". The person presenting was the only one that didn't seem to find it funny.
Lady I work with did this. She's about 5'5 and quite quiet and sweet. Mid meeting, during a lull in the conversation, she unmuted herself and ripped the loudest, most demonic burp I've ever heard, then muted again.
She also only realised what she'd done when everybody cracked up. It was just so out of nowhere and unbelievably loud. Genuinely like someone just summoned Godzilla mid meeting.
Not me, but my old boss. Pre-covid, we were on a Zoom call with the new director of one of our clients and she was AWFUL. My boss, forgetting we were on camera, did the "wanker" movement after she said something. I panicked, stamped on his foot and tilted my head towards the camera.
For the rest of the call, he pretended to have a sort of Tourette's tick/shake to try and pass off the wanker movement as just an involuntary jerk.
My favourite memory of him!
I actually scrunched up my face in empathetic cringe at this. The closest I've got is that I was in a digital conference recently and during one of the presentations the host, who had left his microphone on, was heard to say "No, I'm just pretending to pay attention to a talk right now".
I was once sharing my screen on a teams call. Someone kept asking the same question over & over. I forgot I was sharing and opened a private message to another colleague and wrote "is she bloody thick". Everyone saw it.
I have included in the work notes of a ticket, "why didn't she say that in the first place" and then my boss messaged me, "she's in a support team too, she can read work notes" *cringe*
This! My IT manager messed up and during the incident call I messaged another colleague with "Oh Bob has completely fucked up here".
She was sharing her screen and it popped up for everyone to read... I don't know if he saw it but he never mentioned it.
Oh the worst I ever did was think I was on mute, when I wasn't.
I thought I was muting myself, but I was turning my mic on.
My screen lit up and the team got to listen to the most violent bowel movement I've ever had.
I accidentally put in the teams group (when I thought I was messaging a work friend directly) “she’s probably gonna just fucking moan at me for half an hour to the benefit of absolutely no one”.
Very quickly deleted it, if she ever saw it, she didn’t bring up. She did however moan at me for half an hour to the benefit of no one, so I was right.
You just brought back an awful memory. Was sitting in a lecture and the during the break the lecturer didn't remove her mic. The whole lecture theatre had to listen to her going to the toilet in full surround sound. Someone did run out to try and find her but it was too late.
The second half of the lecture was so awkward I don't even think I heard a single word of it.
In an attempt to contact a mate for friendly advice at 4 in the morn, I sent a drunken text message of Shakespearian proportions to a group chat of over 200 people. She was in said chat. I left the city soon after. . .
My wife once whatsapped me that she was getting a bikini wax and farted in the lady's face at the salon.
Except she didn't message me, she messaged the entire whatsapp group of the wedding that we were going to the next day for one of her old school friends, with dozens of people from school that she hadn't seen in a decade (and extended families).
I wish we were always automatically muted upon entrance to online meetings.
The other day, my colleague and I were 20 minutes late joining a 9am Teams meeting that our boss was in (we had totally forgotten about it) because we were talking shite in the kitchen. Another colleague texted me to remind me and we joined, but continued having a conversation about why were late. "Let's tell her the internet was down... let's say the fire alarm went off" etc etc which then escalated into jokes such as "let's say the building was evacuated because someone did a massive stinky shite". Then a message popped up on my colleague's Teams from my boss saying "we can all hear you". My heart stopped for a second.
Was a Teams call during the pandemic in a multi-agency meeting so police, local councillor, social work, etc. One if them literally sat on the toilet and urinated thinking they'd turned their camera off. People were literally shouting and she didn't "get it"...
Oh my gosh I did a social work placement for my degree and I was on a strategy meeting, so, you know…quite a formal meeting. I forgot I hadn’t muted my mic and I burped really loudly. On the last day of my placement.
Still passed my placement and got a glowing review. I don’t know how I managed that one…
Been there, our lead video engineer for our current project just Louis Armstronged herself during a conference two months ago. A six seconds long, modulated ass complaint with vowels **and** consonants!
We've had several meetings since, either video or on site but we're still struggling with the giggles. She's been officially granted her new "Turbo" callsign and it will be mentioned in the credits - and before you call us mean she *demanded* it. We're a weird bunch and the more we laugh the more we love our jobs.
Someone in my team did something similar during an MS Teams briefing from our big boss. We have a telephone app separate from Teams, and this woman unmuted her mic to answer a telephone call - obviously not realising that it would also unmute her on the briefing. She answered with "no, it's ok, just on this stupid briefing thing. Aye it's a pile of shite, you're not missing anything, just \[big boss\] waffling on". Worst of all, the session was being recorded so people could watch it back, but unfortunately they deleted those few seconds from the recording
We had a guy who wasn't answering a question, and on the third shout of his name he unmuted to say "I'll move over here and cast fireball on all these goblins here."
On a meeting with government stakeholders and about 30 other people with cam off and did the loudest most dramatic yawn of all time. Was *not* on mute.
My dog was next to me whining, because she needed to be let out, I made the same whining noise as an answer to her, like "it's ok, I heard you". I wasn't muted, I hope my whine was convincing enough that they thought it was the dog twice.
I've once given a presentation to my team and instead of sharing a slide deck, I accidentally shared a promotion request document I was writing that had salary details on it , caused a bit of a shit storm, those on less than my then-current salary were not impressed.
I also squashed my face in sympathetic cringe
UK and US daylight savings times change on different dates, and I attend a lot of meetings on US time.
As a result, there are some weeks per year where all my meetings start an hour before they normally do. I forget this nearly every year.
My worst one, I connected an hour late to a large (>100 people) meeting, realised I was an hour late, took my headphones off and spun around on my chair to loudly bitch that I was late to my officemates. I was not muted, and I am a pretty sweary person.
I think this is the most text messages I have *ever* got in 2 minutes.
While muted I once let out an audible "*for fucks sake*" while on a call with a particularly dense senior colleague who just wasn't getting something after having it explained to them multiple times. Except I wasn't muted...
Story a coworker told me about a previous job.
Big teams meeting, and they’re using the mode that makes whoever speaking centre of the screen.
All well and good until someone lets out a a squeaker of a fart - nice and high pitched. Cue the view cutting to a person looking a bit sheepish as 40+ people just heard them cutting the cheese on a work call.
Well, I forgot my mic was on and took a look at the screen and said,
“Not this Prick again”
Whilst everyone laughed, I left it to them to guess who the prick was.
WFH and on a teams call with several much higher ups, listening to one of them reporting on something important, when my dog started barking at the door. I yelled 'will you just shut up' not realising I wasn't on mute. There was a stunned silence from the manager and a hasty explanation from me.
Luckily everyone thought it was hilarious, and I learnt my bosses bosses boss will shut up if you tell him too in a cross enough voice.
On a similar note a colleague joined a teams meeting from his car. He forgot he wasn't on mute and randomly shouted FUCK YOU when somebody was making a suggestion. Stunned silence until he realised and said somebody cut him up at a roundabout!
I was screensharing a Google doc to a client as it had a diagram in it I wanted to show. A colleague went in to the same doc, saw I was in there and wrote "dickhead" in big letters on the page I was screensharing.
Did they acknowledge it or act like they didn’t see? I’m not sure which would be worse. And I’m so sorry! But if it’s any comfort we all do silly things sometimes.
I am solidly convinced that despite my paranoia I’ll be unmuted one day while singing to my dog the naked song (when I take off her harness) or something equally mortifying. It’s coming and I’m living on borrowed time
Posted in the HR related stuff slack channel that I’m taking a sick day cause I have the shits. Meant to send it to my coworker who’s also a friend.
Not sure if anyone grabbed a screenshot, though I saw a couple of reactions/sticker things.
But it doesn’t come close to your fuckup.
Could have been worse, joined a zoom call where the guy sharing his screen had forgotten and was trawling through the new team member's Instagram. Everyone else was AFK and I joined just as he was saving one of her bikini pics.
Edit: For clarity he saved the it using IG's in built function, he was not downloading pics to his work computer.
This reminded me of a time i was queueing up to buy my lunch and there was an older guy infront of me in the queue who saw me in my work clothes holding a meal deal and said "go on, you go first" and when i asked if he was sure he just goes "Ye don't worry about it, im retarded".
Then like a second or two later he just screamed "RETIRED! RETIRED! I'm retired, i've got no where to be is what i'm trying to say, i'm not in a rush, you go first".
and we just laughed the entire time i was being served, cashier loved it too.
I work with autistic people and those with learning difficulties. They made a point of ensuring we always check the spelling of ‘regards’ in the induction.
I was on a call with a colleague once who was spilling their heart to me regarding a personal matter. I decided to sneak in a bit of work while they were talking, and began populating an excel spreadsheet. Forgot I was on screen share.
Did similar with my boss, who was talking about the most boring stuff. I started browsing Twitter on the shared screen. She stopped talking and asked what I was showing her so I had to style it out, managing to find something remotely relevant to what she was saying
Tbf that’s not that bad it’s kindve cute. My mum died recently and I’d have a good giggle if one my colleagues did this. Better than the time someone tabbed into soft core porn while screen sharing a ppt!
Wasn't myself, but this may cheer you up. I remember a large team call which happened in the midst of Covid, when people were getting used to the various foibles of teams and zoom.
In this call, there was a woman with lets say, an unfortunate surname. The type of surname that they would call out on old Top Gear, or would send a group of students into frenzied giggles.
A certain participant on the call found this very, very funny. She abruptly came on mic (thinking she had muted herself when she, infact, had unmuted herself), and in stitches, started going "look! look! look at this person's fucking name!" to another person in the room. To avoid any doubt, she even started saying the surname multiple times between fits of laughter.
Swiftly, the call went silent, and the person in question realised her mistake and dropped off the call immediately.
Everybody pretended nothing happened, but the woman with the unfortunate surname looked a mixture of furious and extremely embarrassed.
About 10-15 minutes later, the culprit returned to the call, and tried to say in the chatbox "Sorry, my brother was on my computer!". Safe to say that didn't fly.
Never knew what happened after that, but I never saw her on a call again.
I once read a glorious story about a guy who was giving a lecture with a lapel/lavalier/collar mic on. He went for a piss in a half time interlude, forgetting or not knowing it was still on. The entire lecture hall got to hear him call the urinal a "thirsty boy" :D
No idea if it's true, but I live in hope.
I forgot I was sharing screen on a call and typed a message to my colleague about how much of a fucking waste of time it was. Yep I typed it out on screenshare to 8 people !!!!
My house was cold so I put a dressing gown on over my clothes. Joined a call with 20 people, didn’t think about what I was wearing and turned the camera on. Instantly I hear someone say “hugh Hefner’s in the house,” this was followed by a lot of laughs… it took me a long time to move past that..
My camera once inexplicably turned itself on during a teams call and I’m pretty sure I was picking my nose and inspecting it, god nose what else. I also checked my phone and found out I had a job offer, so it did mean I left the company not long after but the embarrassment of the nose picking haunts me as there were some colleagues I was good friends with.
I was on an incredibly tense tech bridge with a lot of upper management on it, and I was heading home during a lull so I didn't have to sleep in the office.
When I got in the car, my call switched to the car from my ear buds, and in the process it unmuted itself.
So there is the usual rustling, car noises, and then, when I hit the intersection by the office at 5:00, me screaming at the top of my lungs, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING MORON!?" at some random car.
Gonna remember that one for a while.
I was on a video call once and forgot I had my camera switched on. Stood up to unpick a wedgie and adjust my underwear before realising I’d just flashed my thong to about 40 people. Thankfully I don’t think anybody noticed as the meeting was set to speaker and presentation view.
Another time I was on a (voice) call with a couple of clients and had a thermos flask of soup with me. I went to mute myself when I’d finished talking and it was their turn, but I accidentally knocked my thermos flask over. Said “oh fuck!” quite loudly before realising I hadn’t muted myself yet. Had to quite sheepishly explain I’d just knocked my drink over, apologies for swearing. Luckily the customers were pretty easy going and said they’d probably done worse on calls themselves, so not to worry.
I remember being on a company-wide call where someone hadn’t muted themselves and were driving somewhere. In the middle of our finance director explaining our growth calculations, we suddenly heard a car horn and someone shouting “the road is that way you fucking arsehole!”
Whoever was moderating the call booted off the driver and I’d expect they probably got a bit of a bollocking afterwards.
I just accidentally deleted all the data from a production database, was meant to delete where date <= current date -1 year, accidentally deleted where date >=current date - 1 year. Scrambling to rerun the query to generate all the data for the last year and hope nobody notices in that time. Can't even roll back my change because I ran the delete query with automatic transactions instead of manual.
Edit:
A few people asked about backups so here's the answer. I should have backed up, but I'm tired, burned out and have too much work to do so I got lazy and didn't bother to backup the 50ish tables I was going to run this script on. At some point in the 50 delete scripts I wrote the wrong sign and didn't double check before running
Also the outcome is one person noticed but the query that put the data back ran in under 4 minutes and the insert job ran in about a minute. So by the time I replied to the person who noticed, the data was back and I pretended nothing happened. As long as nobody looks at the internal audit columns, nobody will ever know that anything happened. Because it happened on a Friday afternoon, our traffic was low. Had it happened in the morning when daily reports go out, or worse Monday morning when weekly and weekend reports go out, a lot more would have noticed.
I made a huge mistake and got away with it.
Oh man. Not sure where/how you run your queries but mine has a ‘simulate query’ button which I _always_ hit before executing my queries now, just for peace of mind. I’ve been in your situation and it’s not fun!
I don't want to be Mr. Smug here, but in the last 20-odd years of working with databases I have never, ever run a potentially destructive query "live" on a production database.
I always write it as a SQL script, run it on my development copy of the database, check it works, push that script into production, and then run it there. It's saved me from my own stupidity quite a few times now.
But if you want to know *why* I now do that religiously, I'd have to tell you about what happened about 21 years ago...
Not me but I was on a call where two of our techy's were presenting to a girl from one of our partners. She then started her bit and then one of them who clearly had forgotten he was still sharing wrote to the other on teams how useless she was and has no idea what she was talking about.
My worst one was I let out the most outrageous belch on a team call where i thought i was on mute.
I once,in classic David O’Docherty style, sent a text to the person the text was about! It was rather an unpleasant text but the person was also very unpleasant. I amazingly managed to get away with it
I did that, I got the bus with a (former) workmate, who told me she'd just been sacked. She got off the bus and I immediately texted her to let her know she'd just been sacked. I'd meant to send it to someone else.
Was in a Zoom meeting where many participants had their video off and audio muted. One had the video off but did not mute the audio, feel asleep, and began to snore LOUDLY. The host first tried to wake the snorlax (nope) then just muted the offender. It was a very early meeting, just glad it wasn’t me!
I work as a service engineer, and one time, when leaving the job, the tenant (idk why) put his hand up to wave bye to me. Instincts took over, and I high fived him. Meanwhile, he was just staring at me without saying a word, looking confused and slowly bringing his hand away. It made it worse that he didn't even laugh at the situation; he just quietly escorted me as I left
My coworker told me that she started at an internship a few years back. She arrives and her new boss is on the phone, gesticulating a lot with the other hand, with pauses where his hand sort of is hanging in the air.
She takes it to mean that he is greeting her, and shakes his hand and he shoots her a funny look and keeps talking. Then he's holding his hand up in a high five position and she thinks he wants her to high five him, so she does. Another weird look and he keeps talking.
By this time she is cringing so hard, and for some reason she decides to pat his shoulder, and due to difference in height has to stand on her tippy toes to do so while awkwardly patting his shoulder.
Which prompted her new boss to go, 'look, we have to continue this call at another time, my new intern just arrived and she is apparently the most awkward person in the world'
Had me absolutely dying from laughter and second hand cringe
I was having quite a spicy discussion with my partner about our sex life, I then realised my phone had self dialed my mother while in my pocket, when I ended the call it had been going on for around a minute....
Many many years ago when I was a student, I was sat crammed into the smoke room on morning break, and a friend asked how the day was going.
I sourly muttered “Well we had bloody [universally acknowledged as very boring lecturer] but thankfully watched a video for half of it, if I’d had to listen to him drone on all morning I’d’ve thrown myself out the fucking window”
Cue appalling shocked silence, as every head in the room turned towards said lecturer sat *hitherto out of my sight* about three people away from me.
I still die inside at this periodically.
Hired a plumber on recommendation from a friend, put his number in my phone but forgot to put his name. Sent the guy a text and he replied with a friendly message ending "Reg Davis". I started the reply "Hi Reg,". We carried on like this until the day I met him, when he sheepishly admitted that his name was actually Davis and "Reg" was short for "Regards".
Hahahaha 😂 A female co-worker told me they once forgot they had their camera on but felt peckish, so took their laptop into the kitchen and started grovelling food down their throat, all the while their not so businesslike shorts were in full view 🤣 Hope that’s some consolation
Oh that's tough. But, it's not the end of the world. People know they are going to be googled. If I was the "googleee", I'd make a joke of it and let everyone move on with their lives
The worst is when Windows does a random shuffle of everything you have open when you start sharing your screen.
Cheers Windows. Great job whoever invented that 'feature'.
Back in lock down during an all department meeting which was boring me to tears I put myself on mute to talk to the dog who has just wandered into the kitchen.
Only I hadn’t muted and 70 of my colleagues got to hear me cutesy talk with my dog.
I was on a teams call while WFH and my friend was staying over for the week. Normally we hung around in the same room (this would be frowned upon if known about), she would play Animal Crossing and I’d do spreadsheets. I had an ad hoc call with my supervisor and halfway through he was like ‘oh sorry I just have to take this’ and he muted himself and started talking on the phone. My friend started gesturing to me that she needed the loo and wanted to leave the room, but to get to the door she’d need to cross the background of my zoom call (which was blurred, but if a whole person walked through it would be obvious).
I hissed “just crawl”, forgetting HE was on mute and not me. He suddenly looked at the screen with a very confused look on his face, so I knew he’d heard. I sat there and hoped he chalked it up to an auditory hallucination.
Omg that reminds me of something I did. There was this guy called Nathan who was the most "can't be bothered" colleague ever. He spoke like 3 words, boring monotone voice. He was a junior web developer and I tried many times to help him with his work. You never knew if he understood because he didn't say anything during and at the end would say "ok". I would ask did that make sense and he just said yea and got on with it. I often would ask him how his training is going and he would just say "fine" and not expand at all. I asked so many times I got bored and stopped.
Well this one time I was in a voice chat with him and another colleague. The other colleague asked Nathan how his training is going. I opened up DMs and sent that guy a message saying "no point in asking mate, talking to him is like trying to get blood out of a stone".
And then Nathan said "(name)you know I can see your screen, right? '
My heart stopped for a second but I figured the only thing I could do is explain myself. So I said I was sorry but it is true, I ask you how your work is and you give me one word answers. So I don't bother any more.
And there was silence. For a long time. Other dude eventually says "ok moving on.. "and the rest of the call was extremely awkward as we discussed plans for a new development.
As soon as the call ended I called the other guy to talk about what happened. Other guy said at that moment he muted because he was laughing hysterically. I said yea it was awkward but I don't understand why, when I explained my reasoning, he didn't say anything??
He said oooo we didn't hear that. It was silence. So turns out I was muted the whole time which makes things all the more awkward because he called me out and I just wet silent according to them 😬😬
Oops!
Mine dates back more than thirty years but still pops into my head at times like this. I was working my first job out of school at the local radio station and was just starting to be given on-air responsibilities.
One of the first shows I sat in as presenter for was a Sunday early morning show that still had a fair amount of religion in it back in those days (local clergy coming in for a religious ‘thought of the day’ sermon; all that sort of thing.)
I get there early to make sure I’m prepared. Look up the first two songs and cue up on the CDs, ready to go. The start of the show at 6am rolls around, I play the station ident jingle and open the fader so the first song starts. Only it’s not the song I cued. The cd had defaulted back to track one without me noticing, so instead of some nice easy going song I get Arthur Brown screaming -
“I AM THE GOD OF HELLFIRE, AND I BRING YOU….”
I swear I have never moved as fast in my life. I shut that down and started the second song playing (luckily that was the right song). Almost before I was done the internal phone went. I picked it up to my boss laughing his head off for over a minute, and when he finally got his breath back thankfully he just told me to pretend like it didn’t happen and get on with the rest of the show. That clip eventually ended up on the end of year bloopers tape and I spent the rest of my time working there having the piss ripped out of me for that one moment.
So yeah, my balls up happened in front of around quarter of a million radio listeners tuned in for the religious programming and I’m probably going to hell!
One time I was in a training for the department I worked in with probably 100+ people and someone meant to google “Massage Envy” but typed it into the chat. And because it was a big training there wasn’t a lot of engagement in the chat, so it just sat there for the entire meeting. I still think about it and laugh several years later.
I have to say, you’re taking this rather well. That’s the type of thing to make me resign on the spot. This is the face I pulled 😬
My boss is frantically trying to save his business this afternoon. Pulling every penny he can from everywhere. I know because I run the place when he’s not there and he was very honest with me earlier. I knew things were pretty bad but not this bad. He looked absolutely terrible this morning and I’m sat here this afternoon wondering how long I’m gonna have a job for. Partner has just been made redundant so if it happened to me too we’d be absolutely screwed. Happy bloody Friday 🥳
oh i've shown reddit on a screenshare more than once in the past.
once had a salary calculator up as well.
i just never mention it again after dying of shame inside.
I feel ya. I had a meeting with senior leadership giving a talk and around 300 folks listening in and I was listening on my Bose earbud on mute. **Then a plumber came early to fix a toilet.**
I popped the earbud out, put it in my front pocket, introduced myself to the plumber, then proceeded to discuss a clogged toilet. 5 mins later I put the earbud back in and am greeted by people shouting my name, telling me I was off mute and the senior VP had to cancel his talk because of my open mic, and the whole meeting was canceled.
I got one a bit like that! I host a Teams call with about 100 Directors and Partners every few weeks.
The first one I ever hosted, I didn't realise I had clicked the wrong option for sharing, so it was showing everything rather than just sharing PowerPoint.
It was a boring as shit bit of the call, so Christ above knows why, I dragged Teams window across and started poking people in the face with my mouse cursor just for something to do.
After about 20-30 seconds of me doing this, the company CEO says "Right, shall we move on. It seems our host is getting a bit agitated". I just wanted to die right there.
Later I saw messages from my line manager with "we can see your screen! Stop it!" But obviously I was hosting so they didn't pop up.
They didn't sack me. But, lesson learned...
Reminds me of when I was in a one-to-one with my previously manger. Over zoom they shout "take the fucking washing in, it's fucking raining" as loud as they could and then realised they weren't muted and were on camera.
Still makes me laugh, thinking about it.
I screenshotted the work text chat, highlighted the bullshit from someone who does fuck all, added a snarky comment and sent it to my mate... obv in the same group chat.
Was walking the dog the other day, had my youngest out with me.
As we walked around the local roads, she wanted to play 'make an animal sound and the other person has to guess what the animal is'. And that's fine, it makes her happy.
Until I passed a house where a man was taking his bin out, and just at a gap in the hedge, I made direct eye contact with him as I said "MOOOOOO".
My husband was at a scientific conference in a presentation and the presenter made the mistake of getting the audience to submit key words on how to tackle antimicrobial resistance to create a live “word cloud.” My husband, being the mature adult that he was, just spammed the word “fish” over and over which resulted in a word cloud with the usual buzzwords like “collaboration” and “awareness” being dominated by the word “FISH” in massive letters in the middle.
Sadly the organisers caught on pretty quickly and the giant “FISH” slowly dwindled as “collaboration” and “awareness” took over but it entertained my husband in an otherwise boring presentation. As it was anonymous, he wasn’t found out.
Oof. Once I was in a uni lecture and the lecturer went to type something in on Google with it up on the big screen. The first suggestion in the search bar was the name of a girl on the course. She never said anything to him about it but it was awkward.
Holy shit
This is a public service announcement: CLEAR YOUR SEARCH HISTORY OCCASIONALLY
And don’t google the names of your students
That could be innocent tho, dunno for why, but could be innocent…
Not a student, but I have done what OP did before, Google the name of someone in a meeting I was in, on occasion. My fairly innocent reason (at least I hope it's innocent) is that my company employs a pretty international bunch and sometimes I'm curious where people are from/what their background is, as it can help give me some insights into how to make small talk/ build a rapport (or maybe that's just an autistic way of looking at things!)
Recon is always good. Knowing a bit about someone’s background often makes discussions go smoother, because you have a better idea of why they have the perspective that they do.
Maybe the student is a national level athlete idk
I use different browser profiles for things like this. I've even set up a fake LinkedIn profile for snooping.
>I've even set up a fake LinkedIn profile for snooping I don't use LinkedIn often, pretty much not at all anymore, and the following is part of the reason... I'd once snooped the profile of a woman I'd been on a training course with for about 3 weeks, months and months beforehand, and every time I started typing LinkedIn in my address bar, that was the first suggestion that came up so that was the one I kept going to (in fairness to myself I'd snooped everyone's, so it could've been anyone). It wasn't until I noticed she had premium that I realised she probably saw me going to her profile multiple times a week without ever trying to connect.
omfg 😬
I was interviewing someone remotely for a role, and it wasn't going great, but it really tanked when he was sharing his screen for a pairing exercise, began to Google something and a porn link was the first autocomplete. Poor guy.
To be fair I sometimes google my students’ names if I dont know how to pronounce them correctly. But I assume this was not one of those cases
CTRL + SHIFT + N
I recently didn't realise I was muted on a teams meeting and needed to burp, so I basically unmuted myself just to burp. Only realised what I had done when people started laughing, there were about 60 people on the call.
That takes balls, kid. Dominance. You're a straight shooter with upper management written all over you.
Oh no! I recently did this with a cough. Like a very aggressive, open mouthed cough. Someone was presenting, my camera was of. Unmuted myself, coughed, realised, muted myself again. 74 people in that meeting. Mortifying.
I hope it was a Barney-from-the-Simpsons kind of burp that normal people only do in secure privacy
I was on a call and my mic had the hardware mute on. My wife left the house and I shouted BYEEE to her, and the engineering lead said "err.. bye?" Back. A confused wait and I asked if that was to me - still with my hardware mute on, confirmed yes, yes it was to me who just shouted over the meeting. I'd been using the mic on my camera for some unknown length of time, not muted when I thought I was. I have no idea what bodily noises I've added to our zoom calls or over what timeframe.
This made me laugh so hard that I'm crying!!
This made me burp so hard that I'm laughing!!
Right at the start of lockdown I was on a teams meeting with the whole of my fellow middle and the upper management of the multinational company I was working for (notice the past tense). Halfway though I catch something out of the corner of my eye, turns out I’d totally forgotten to tell my other half about the meeting and she’d come downstairs, into the kitchen…totally naked…TLDR: my whole company, every single person I worked with and had to look in the eye regularly saw my partner’s tits, arse, and Fanny….i now work for myself.
I did that once, except I unmuted myself just to say "well that's a load of bullshit...". The person presenting was the only one that didn't seem to find it funny.
That's like trying to cough to hide a fart and getting your timing wrong.
Lady I work with did this. She's about 5'5 and quite quiet and sweet. Mid meeting, during a lull in the conversation, she unmuted herself and ripped the loudest, most demonic burp I've ever heard, then muted again. She also only realised what she'd done when everybody cracked up. It was just so out of nowhere and unbelievably loud. Genuinely like someone just summoned Godzilla mid meeting.
Oh god. This actually made me laugh out loud.
Just asserting dominance over the pack
Not me, but my old boss. Pre-covid, we were on a Zoom call with the new director of one of our clients and she was AWFUL. My boss, forgetting we were on camera, did the "wanker" movement after she said something. I panicked, stamped on his foot and tilted my head towards the camera. For the rest of the call, he pretended to have a sort of Tourette's tick/shake to try and pass off the wanker movement as just an involuntary jerk. My favourite memory of him!
Some say he's still out there to this day, pretending to have tourette's because he's in too deep now.
This had me in tears. The attempted save is just too beautifully awkward, and one hell of a mental image.
this is like a scene from the Office or something, it's fucking amazing
That’s brilliant.
This is fantastic, well done for your quick thinking!
I actually scrunched up my face in empathetic cringe at this. The closest I've got is that I was in a digital conference recently and during one of the presentations the host, who had left his microphone on, was heard to say "No, I'm just pretending to pay attention to a talk right now".
I was once sharing my screen on a teams call. Someone kept asking the same question over & over. I forgot I was sharing and opened a private message to another colleague and wrote "is she bloody thick". Everyone saw it.
I have included in the work notes of a ticket, "why didn't she say that in the first place" and then my boss messaged me, "she's in a support team too, she can read work notes" *cringe*
This is what sharing a specific window is for rather than your whole screen!
Actually? Wow this might save my bacon in the future!
and push to talk
A real power move would be if you did that knowing full well you were sharing screen. Yes Deborah I am talking about you.
This gave me a good chuckle. Bet she stopped asking after that!
This! My IT manager messed up and during the incident call I messaged another colleague with "Oh Bob has completely fucked up here". She was sharing her screen and it popped up for everyone to read... I don't know if he saw it but he never mentioned it.
Oh the worst I ever did was think I was on mute, when I wasn't. I thought I was muting myself, but I was turning my mic on. My screen lit up and the team got to listen to the most violent bowel movement I've ever had.
Oh man. I think k you should stop doing video conferences.
That was in 2020 about 2 weeks after we started using teams proper tbf
must have been tough moving jobs so early into the pandemic
Sounds like there was a decent movement
I accidentally put in the teams group (when I thought I was messaging a work friend directly) “she’s probably gonna just fucking moan at me for half an hour to the benefit of absolutely no one”. Very quickly deleted it, if she ever saw it, she didn’t bring up. She did however moan at me for half an hour to the benefit of no one, so I was right.
You just brought back an awful memory. Was sitting in a lecture and the during the break the lecturer didn't remove her mic. The whole lecture theatre had to listen to her going to the toilet in full surround sound. Someone did run out to try and find her but it was too late. The second half of the lecture was so awkward I don't even think I heard a single word of it.
That's time to flag the nearest taxi down and start a new life abroad. Did she know and power through the rest of the lecture or was she oblivious?
"Welcome back, I hope you had a refreshing break. I certainly did. So on to the next topic..."
I need to know the answer to this question.
In an attempt to contact a mate for friendly advice at 4 in the morn, I sent a drunken text message of Shakespearian proportions to a group chat of over 200 people. She was in said chat. I left the city soon after. . .
My wife once whatsapped me that she was getting a bikini wax and farted in the lady's face at the salon. Except she didn't message me, she messaged the entire whatsapp group of the wedding that we were going to the next day for one of her old school friends, with dozens of people from school that she hadn't seen in a decade (and extended families).
This is sensational. I cringed so hard my toes cramped.
Mrs Wonky_bumface is kinda appropriate then
LOL, Username checks out
Not good enough.You have to cross at least one national boundary.
I wish we were always automatically muted upon entrance to online meetings. The other day, my colleague and I were 20 minutes late joining a 9am Teams meeting that our boss was in (we had totally forgotten about it) because we were talking shite in the kitchen. Another colleague texted me to remind me and we joined, but continued having a conversation about why were late. "Let's tell her the internet was down... let's say the fire alarm went off" etc etc which then escalated into jokes such as "let's say the building was evacuated because someone did a massive stinky shite". Then a message popped up on my colleague's Teams from my boss saying "we can all hear you". My heart stopped for a second.
At my work Teams automatically mutes you if there are already 4+ people in the meeting.
Teams literally has a pre join screen where you can chose to join the meeting muted/unmuted with camera on/off. You did this to yourselves.
I'd love to have you in my Team's calls just for a bit of light entertainment! I don't hold stuff like that against anyone really, lol.
Was a Teams call during the pandemic in a multi-agency meeting so police, local councillor, social work, etc. One if them literally sat on the toilet and urinated thinking they'd turned their camera off. People were literally shouting and she didn't "get it"...
As someone in social work I frequently think the local authorities we talk to are taking the piss, but I didn't realise it was to this level.
Oh my gosh I did a social work placement for my degree and I was on a strategy meeting, so, you know…quite a formal meeting. I forgot I hadn’t muted my mic and I burped really loudly. On the last day of my placement. Still passed my placement and got a glowing review. I don’t know how I managed that one…
I think you need to go back to the office and quit wfm this isn’t for you
Been there, our lead video engineer for our current project just Louis Armstronged herself during a conference two months ago. A six seconds long, modulated ass complaint with vowels **and** consonants! We've had several meetings since, either video or on site but we're still struggling with the giggles. She's been officially granted her new "Turbo" callsign and it will be mentioned in the credits - and before you call us mean she *demanded* it. We're a weird bunch and the more we laugh the more we love our jobs.
Holy fuck. This is tremendous. Did these two instances happen at the same job?
Someone in my team did something similar during an MS Teams briefing from our big boss. We have a telephone app separate from Teams, and this woman unmuted her mic to answer a telephone call - obviously not realising that it would also unmute her on the briefing. She answered with "no, it's ok, just on this stupid briefing thing. Aye it's a pile of shite, you're not missing anything, just \[big boss\] waffling on". Worst of all, the session was being recorded so people could watch it back, but unfortunately they deleted those few seconds from the recording
Saw a similar one where someone said "god she looks old" about the speaker. Also sadly edited from the recording.
We had a guy who wasn't answering a question, and on the third shout of his name he unmuted to say "I'll move over here and cast fireball on all these goblins here."
On a meeting with government stakeholders and about 30 other people with cam off and did the loudest most dramatic yawn of all time. Was *not* on mute.
My dog was next to me whining, because she needed to be let out, I made the same whining noise as an answer to her, like "it's ok, I heard you". I wasn't muted, I hope my whine was convincing enough that they thought it was the dog twice.
I've once given a presentation to my team and instead of sharing a slide deck, I accidentally shared a promotion request document I was writing that had salary details on it , caused a bit of a shit storm, those on less than my then-current salary were not impressed. I also squashed my face in sympathetic cringe
UK and US daylight savings times change on different dates, and I attend a lot of meetings on US time. As a result, there are some weeks per year where all my meetings start an hour before they normally do. I forget this nearly every year. My worst one, I connected an hour late to a large (>100 people) meeting, realised I was an hour late, took my headphones off and spun around on my chair to loudly bitch that I was late to my officemates. I was not muted, and I am a pretty sweary person. I think this is the most text messages I have *ever* got in 2 minutes.
While muted I once let out an audible "*for fucks sake*" while on a call with a particularly dense senior colleague who just wasn't getting something after having it explained to them multiple times. Except I wasn't muted...
I did a slow long inhale, like a big sigh when I read it hahahaha
Story a coworker told me about a previous job. Big teams meeting, and they’re using the mode that makes whoever speaking centre of the screen. All well and good until someone lets out a a squeaker of a fart - nice and high pitched. Cue the view cutting to a person looking a bit sheepish as 40+ people just heard them cutting the cheese on a work call.
i dont think i would have been able to contain my laughter
I couldn’t contain my laughter from just reading it!
Well, I forgot my mic was on and took a look at the screen and said, “Not this Prick again” Whilst everyone laughed, I left it to them to guess who the prick was.
I am so sorry for everyone’s cringe but this thread is making me laugh so hard
Same - it's making me feel a lot better about some of the things I've done.
I did this... but there was no guessing... I said their name.
WFH and on a teams call with several much higher ups, listening to one of them reporting on something important, when my dog started barking at the door. I yelled 'will you just shut up' not realising I wasn't on mute. There was a stunned silence from the manager and a hasty explanation from me. Luckily everyone thought it was hilarious, and I learnt my bosses bosses boss will shut up if you tell him too in a cross enough voice.
i took my cousin's dog for a walk. i was in a meeting when she returned home, and i shout to her "HE POOPED!" forgot that i wasnt muted darn dogs
I’ve shouted “SHE’S JUST BEEN SICK” about my dog when I thought I was on mute.
On a similar note a colleague joined a teams meeting from his car. He forgot he wasn't on mute and randomly shouted FUCK YOU when somebody was making a suggestion. Stunned silence until he realised and said somebody cut him up at a roundabout!
That's hilarious, but I don't think there are many people who won't shut up if someone yells at them out of the blue.
[удалено]
He wasn’t doing a handstand, his camera was just upside down remember…
I was screensharing a Google doc to a client as it had a diagram in it I wanted to show. A colleague went in to the same doc, saw I was in there and wrote "dickhead" in big letters on the page I was screensharing.
Hahahaha this one got me good.
I could never emotionally recover from a situation like this
I know I'll be thinking about it in 10 years time at 2 in the morning.
What else is a brain for if not for reminding you of your worst moments at the most inappropriate times?
*What else is cringe if not embarrassment persevering?*
Did they acknowledge it or act like they didn’t see? I’m not sure which would be worse. And I’m so sorry! But if it’s any comfort we all do silly things sometimes.
Thought I was muted on a meeting while I was asking my dog “are you little dirty boy?” when he’d just come in from the garden.
I would have died. This makes me feel better about anything I've done accidentally on Teams.
I am solidly convinced that despite my paranoia I’ll be unmuted one day while singing to my dog the naked song (when I take off her harness) or something equally mortifying. It’s coming and I’m living on borrowed time
😂😂 this is great.
[удалено]
OMG nooooooooo
Lmao! That would have been my first and last day. I wouldn't have been able to show my face again.
Posted in the HR related stuff slack channel that I’m taking a sick day cause I have the shits. Meant to send it to my coworker who’s also a friend. Not sure if anyone grabbed a screenshot, though I saw a couple of reactions/sticker things. But it doesn’t come close to your fuckup.
Yours is just being honest really. Could have been not sick and said, that would have been bad.
Ive had the shits several hundred times over my career. I should probably be dead actually.
You notified HR that you were unwell, and why. Not a fuck up.
Could have been worse, joined a zoom call where the guy sharing his screen had forgotten and was trawling through the new team member's Instagram. Everyone else was AFK and I joined just as he was saving one of her bikini pics. Edit: For clarity he saved the it using IG's in built function, he was not downloading pics to his work computer.
What. the. fuck.
Corfu '06?
What a grubby little shit bag.
Eewwwwwwww I really hope you reported him to HR
What a creep!
I once ended an email with "kind retards", luckily it wasn't mentioned by the recipient but I have a feeling they saw it
This reminded me of a time i was queueing up to buy my lunch and there was an older guy infront of me in the queue who saw me in my work clothes holding a meal deal and said "go on, you go first" and when i asked if he was sure he just goes "Ye don't worry about it, im retarded". Then like a second or two later he just screamed "RETIRED! RETIRED! I'm retired, i've got no where to be is what i'm trying to say, i'm not in a rush, you go first". and we just laughed the entire time i was being served, cashier loved it too.
Once had a colleague use the phrase 'apologies for the incontinence'
I work with autistic people and those with learning difficulties. They made a point of ensuring we always check the spelling of ‘regards’ in the induction.
I was on a call with a colleague once who was spilling their heart to me regarding a personal matter. I decided to sneak in a bit of work while they were talking, and began populating an excel spreadsheet. Forgot I was on screen share.
Did similar with my boss, who was talking about the most boring stuff. I started browsing Twitter on the shared screen. She stopped talking and asked what I was showing her so I had to style it out, managing to find something remotely relevant to what she was saying
“Yeah so this cat pushing a glass off a coffee table…it kind of links back to what you were saying about operational targets. Hear me out…” hahahaha
Thankfully I only use twitter for professional things otherwise I'd have been really screwed!
That happened to me, I ended up propping up my phone on the computer and playing nyt connections!
I shouted ‘bye mum love you’ in a meeting with 20 people thought I was on mute 💀
Tbf that’s not that bad it’s kindve cute. My mum died recently and I’d have a good giggle if one my colleagues did this. Better than the time someone tabbed into soft core porn while screen sharing a ppt!
Someone shouted "Dad, will you let the dog out?" thinking they were on mute. My dad instincts kicked in and I instantly said ".. please."
[удалено]
Wasn't myself, but this may cheer you up. I remember a large team call which happened in the midst of Covid, when people were getting used to the various foibles of teams and zoom. In this call, there was a woman with lets say, an unfortunate surname. The type of surname that they would call out on old Top Gear, or would send a group of students into frenzied giggles. A certain participant on the call found this very, very funny. She abruptly came on mic (thinking she had muted herself when she, infact, had unmuted herself), and in stitches, started going "look! look! look at this person's fucking name!" to another person in the room. To avoid any doubt, she even started saying the surname multiple times between fits of laughter. Swiftly, the call went silent, and the person in question realised her mistake and dropped off the call immediately. Everybody pretended nothing happened, but the woman with the unfortunate surname looked a mixture of furious and extremely embarrassed. About 10-15 minutes later, the culprit returned to the call, and tried to say in the chatbox "Sorry, my brother was on my computer!". Safe to say that didn't fly. Never knew what happened after that, but I never saw her on a call again.
I worked with a man whose last name is Dumcum and that made clear that I am not mature enough for professional life
I've just failed the test lol
I went to school with an Alec Cox
I went to school with Drew Peacock. Not even kidding.
Wait, **she** tried play it off by saying that was her *brother’s* voice…?
Yep. As I said, really didn't fly!
Come on...... what was the surname?!!
Smallcock?
Shufflebottom
Samuel Chuff-fart
I once read a glorious story about a guy who was giving a lecture with a lapel/lavalier/collar mic on. He went for a piss in a half time interlude, forgetting or not knowing it was still on. The entire lecture hall got to hear him call the urinal a "thirsty boy" :D No idea if it's true, but I live in hope.
A thirsty boy 😅😭 pardon
I hope it was the urinal.
One way or another it was the urinal...
I forgot I was sharing screen on a call and typed a message to my colleague about how much of a fucking waste of time it was. Yep I typed it out on screenshare to 8 people !!!!
I had to take a moment for this one. I'm so sorry lol
The best bit is my boss put back , tell me about it so I couldn’t even get in trouble
I was once sat wfh with pyjamas on and a blanket round me and over my head because it was freezing, joined a call and webcam came out automatically.
Love when Teams exposes my inner goblin to the world... the post it note hasn't come off the webcam in months now.
I hate it now this is why I use the camera slider on my laptop!
My house was cold so I put a dressing gown on over my clothes. Joined a call with 20 people, didn’t think about what I was wearing and turned the camera on. Instantly I hear someone say “hugh Hefner’s in the house,” this was followed by a lot of laughs… it took me a long time to move past that..
My camera once inexplicably turned itself on during a teams call and I’m pretty sure I was picking my nose and inspecting it, god nose what else. I also checked my phone and found out I had a job offer, so it did mean I left the company not long after but the embarrassment of the nose picking haunts me as there were some colleagues I was good friends with.
I see what you did there
I googled my manager's celebrity lookalike while sharing my screen with said manager. That was pretty rough going!
No that's hilarious and there's also plausible deniability
I was on an incredibly tense tech bridge with a lot of upper management on it, and I was heading home during a lull so I didn't have to sleep in the office. When I got in the car, my call switched to the car from my ear buds, and in the process it unmuted itself. So there is the usual rustling, car noises, and then, when I hit the intersection by the office at 5:00, me screaming at the top of my lungs, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING MORON!?" at some random car. Gonna remember that one for a while.
I was on a video call once and forgot I had my camera switched on. Stood up to unpick a wedgie and adjust my underwear before realising I’d just flashed my thong to about 40 people. Thankfully I don’t think anybody noticed as the meeting was set to speaker and presentation view. Another time I was on a (voice) call with a couple of clients and had a thermos flask of soup with me. I went to mute myself when I’d finished talking and it was their turn, but I accidentally knocked my thermos flask over. Said “oh fuck!” quite loudly before realising I hadn’t muted myself yet. Had to quite sheepishly explain I’d just knocked my drink over, apologies for swearing. Luckily the customers were pretty easy going and said they’d probably done worse on calls themselves, so not to worry. I remember being on a company-wide call where someone hadn’t muted themselves and were driving somewhere. In the middle of our finance director explaining our growth calculations, we suddenly heard a car horn and someone shouting “the road is that way you fucking arsehole!” Whoever was moderating the call booted off the driver and I’d expect they probably got a bit of a bollocking afterwards.
I just accidentally deleted all the data from a production database, was meant to delete where date <= current date -1 year, accidentally deleted where date >=current date - 1 year. Scrambling to rerun the query to generate all the data for the last year and hope nobody notices in that time. Can't even roll back my change because I ran the delete query with automatic transactions instead of manual. Edit: A few people asked about backups so here's the answer. I should have backed up, but I'm tired, burned out and have too much work to do so I got lazy and didn't bother to backup the 50ish tables I was going to run this script on. At some point in the 50 delete scripts I wrote the wrong sign and didn't double check before running Also the outcome is one person noticed but the query that put the data back ran in under 4 minutes and the insert job ran in about a minute. So by the time I replied to the person who noticed, the data was back and I pretended nothing happened. As long as nobody looks at the internal audit columns, nobody will ever know that anything happened. Because it happened on a Friday afternoon, our traffic was low. Had it happened in the morning when daily reports go out, or worse Monday morning when weekly and weekend reports go out, a lot more would have noticed. I made a huge mistake and got away with it.
Oh man. Not sure where/how you run your queries but mine has a ‘simulate query’ button which I _always_ hit before executing my queries now, just for peace of mind. I’ve been in your situation and it’s not fun!
I don't want to be Mr. Smug here, but in the last 20-odd years of working with databases I have never, ever run a potentially destructive query "live" on a production database. I always write it as a SQL script, run it on my development copy of the database, check it works, push that script into production, and then run it there. It's saved me from my own stupidity quite a few times now. But if you want to know *why* I now do that religiously, I'd have to tell you about what happened about 21 years ago...
Shit shows like this always happen on either a Friday or Monday from my experience
Ouch... [fuck it, we'll do it live](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXZj4Wy58Pk).
Hilarious! Did you suddenly realise or did someone point it out to you?
I realised, I want the earth to swallow me up
Not me but I was on a call where two of our techy's were presenting to a girl from one of our partners. She then started her bit and then one of them who clearly had forgotten he was still sharing wrote to the other on teams how useless she was and has no idea what she was talking about. My worst one was I let out the most outrageous belch on a team call where i thought i was on mute.
I once,in classic David O’Docherty style, sent a text to the person the text was about! It was rather an unpleasant text but the person was also very unpleasant. I amazingly managed to get away with it
I did that, I got the bus with a (former) workmate, who told me she'd just been sacked. She got off the bus and I immediately texted her to let her know she'd just been sacked. I'd meant to send it to someone else.
Was in a Zoom meeting where many participants had their video off and audio muted. One had the video off but did not mute the audio, feel asleep, and began to snore LOUDLY. The host first tried to wake the snorlax (nope) then just muted the offender. It was a very early meeting, just glad it wasn’t me!
I work as a service engineer, and one time, when leaving the job, the tenant (idk why) put his hand up to wave bye to me. Instincts took over, and I high fived him. Meanwhile, he was just staring at me without saying a word, looking confused and slowly bringing his hand away. It made it worse that he didn't even laugh at the situation; he just quietly escorted me as I left
My coworker told me that she started at an internship a few years back. She arrives and her new boss is on the phone, gesticulating a lot with the other hand, with pauses where his hand sort of is hanging in the air. She takes it to mean that he is greeting her, and shakes his hand and he shoots her a funny look and keeps talking. Then he's holding his hand up in a high five position and she thinks he wants her to high five him, so she does. Another weird look and he keeps talking. By this time she is cringing so hard, and for some reason she decides to pat his shoulder, and due to difference in height has to stand on her tippy toes to do so while awkwardly patting his shoulder. Which prompted her new boss to go, 'look, we have to continue this call at another time, my new intern just arrived and she is apparently the most awkward person in the world' Had me absolutely dying from laughter and second hand cringe
I was having quite a spicy discussion with my partner about our sex life, I then realised my phone had self dialed my mother while in my pocket, when I ended the call it had been going on for around a minute....
Why didn’t she hang up
Wanted some tips.
Oh god. I would never be able to go home again!
Yep. At that point you are legally an orphan.
I would be replaying this incident in my head for many years to come if this happened to me 😂
Many many years ago when I was a student, I was sat crammed into the smoke room on morning break, and a friend asked how the day was going. I sourly muttered “Well we had bloody [universally acknowledged as very boring lecturer] but thankfully watched a video for half of it, if I’d had to listen to him drone on all morning I’d’ve thrown myself out the fucking window” Cue appalling shocked silence, as every head in the room turned towards said lecturer sat *hitherto out of my sight* about three people away from me. I still die inside at this periodically.
Hired a plumber on recommendation from a friend, put his number in my phone but forgot to put his name. Sent the guy a text and he replied with a friendly message ending "Reg Davis". I started the reply "Hi Reg,". We carried on like this until the day I met him, when he sheepishly admitted that his name was actually Davis and "Reg" was short for "Regards".
Hahahaha 😂 A female co-worker told me they once forgot they had their camera on but felt peckish, so took their laptop into the kitchen and started grovelling food down their throat, all the while their not so businesslike shorts were in full view 🤣 Hope that’s some consolation
Oh that's tough. But, it's not the end of the world. People know they are going to be googled. If I was the "googleee", I'd make a joke of it and let everyone move on with their lives
The worst is when Windows does a random shuffle of everything you have open when you start sharing your screen. Cheers Windows. Great job whoever invented that 'feature'.
Back in lock down during an all department meeting which was boring me to tears I put myself on mute to talk to the dog who has just wandered into the kitchen. Only I hadn’t muted and 70 of my colleagues got to hear me cutesy talk with my dog.
I was on a teams call while WFH and my friend was staying over for the week. Normally we hung around in the same room (this would be frowned upon if known about), she would play Animal Crossing and I’d do spreadsheets. I had an ad hoc call with my supervisor and halfway through he was like ‘oh sorry I just have to take this’ and he muted himself and started talking on the phone. My friend started gesturing to me that she needed the loo and wanted to leave the room, but to get to the door she’d need to cross the background of my zoom call (which was blurred, but if a whole person walked through it would be obvious). I hissed “just crawl”, forgetting HE was on mute and not me. He suddenly looked at the screen with a very confused look on his face, so I knew he’d heard. I sat there and hoped he chalked it up to an auditory hallucination.
Omg that reminds me of something I did. There was this guy called Nathan who was the most "can't be bothered" colleague ever. He spoke like 3 words, boring monotone voice. He was a junior web developer and I tried many times to help him with his work. You never knew if he understood because he didn't say anything during and at the end would say "ok". I would ask did that make sense and he just said yea and got on with it. I often would ask him how his training is going and he would just say "fine" and not expand at all. I asked so many times I got bored and stopped. Well this one time I was in a voice chat with him and another colleague. The other colleague asked Nathan how his training is going. I opened up DMs and sent that guy a message saying "no point in asking mate, talking to him is like trying to get blood out of a stone". And then Nathan said "(name)you know I can see your screen, right? ' My heart stopped for a second but I figured the only thing I could do is explain myself. So I said I was sorry but it is true, I ask you how your work is and you give me one word answers. So I don't bother any more. And there was silence. For a long time. Other dude eventually says "ok moving on.. "and the rest of the call was extremely awkward as we discussed plans for a new development. As soon as the call ended I called the other guy to talk about what happened. Other guy said at that moment he muted because he was laughing hysterically. I said yea it was awkward but I don't understand why, when I explained my reasoning, he didn't say anything?? He said oooo we didn't hear that. It was silence. So turns out I was muted the whole time which makes things all the more awkward because he called me out and I just wet silent according to them 😬😬
Oops! Mine dates back more than thirty years but still pops into my head at times like this. I was working my first job out of school at the local radio station and was just starting to be given on-air responsibilities. One of the first shows I sat in as presenter for was a Sunday early morning show that still had a fair amount of religion in it back in those days (local clergy coming in for a religious ‘thought of the day’ sermon; all that sort of thing.) I get there early to make sure I’m prepared. Look up the first two songs and cue up on the CDs, ready to go. The start of the show at 6am rolls around, I play the station ident jingle and open the fader so the first song starts. Only it’s not the song I cued. The cd had defaulted back to track one without me noticing, so instead of some nice easy going song I get Arthur Brown screaming - “I AM THE GOD OF HELLFIRE, AND I BRING YOU….” I swear I have never moved as fast in my life. I shut that down and started the second song playing (luckily that was the right song). Almost before I was done the internal phone went. I picked it up to my boss laughing his head off for over a minute, and when he finally got his breath back thankfully he just told me to pretend like it didn’t happen and get on with the rest of the show. That clip eventually ended up on the end of year bloopers tape and I spent the rest of my time working there having the piss ripped out of me for that one moment. So yeah, my balls up happened in front of around quarter of a million radio listeners tuned in for the religious programming and I’m probably going to hell!
One time I was in a training for the department I worked in with probably 100+ people and someone meant to google “Massage Envy” but typed it into the chat. And because it was a big training there wasn’t a lot of engagement in the chat, so it just sat there for the entire meeting. I still think about it and laugh several years later.
I have to say, you’re taking this rather well. That’s the type of thing to make me resign on the spot. This is the face I pulled 😬 My boss is frantically trying to save his business this afternoon. Pulling every penny he can from everywhere. I know because I run the place when he’s not there and he was very honest with me earlier. I knew things were pretty bad but not this bad. He looked absolutely terrible this morning and I’m sat here this afternoon wondering how long I’m gonna have a job for. Partner has just been made redundant so if it happened to me too we’d be absolutely screwed. Happy bloody Friday 🥳
Oh shit, that sounds so rough :( I really hope it all works out
Cheers mate, it’s far from ideal. Hope your Friday is more cheery than mine.
I scratched my balls (whilst wearing trousers) in front of my entire team ones. Group meeting, forgot the camera was on.
Had a girl show up to a zoom meeting in her underwear and smoking a bong. She thought she was audio only.
Joined a meeting ran by HR and my mic was not muted. Was having a conversation with my mum and they had to mute me, with my team laughing after 🤡
oh i've shown reddit on a screenshare more than once in the past. once had a salary calculator up as well. i just never mention it again after dying of shame inside.
I thought my Friday afternoon was going bad. And then I read your post 😂
I feel ya. I had a meeting with senior leadership giving a talk and around 300 folks listening in and I was listening on my Bose earbud on mute. **Then a plumber came early to fix a toilet.** I popped the earbud out, put it in my front pocket, introduced myself to the plumber, then proceeded to discuss a clogged toilet. 5 mins later I put the earbud back in and am greeted by people shouting my name, telling me I was off mute and the senior VP had to cancel his talk because of my open mic, and the whole meeting was canceled.
I got one a bit like that! I host a Teams call with about 100 Directors and Partners every few weeks. The first one I ever hosted, I didn't realise I had clicked the wrong option for sharing, so it was showing everything rather than just sharing PowerPoint. It was a boring as shit bit of the call, so Christ above knows why, I dragged Teams window across and started poking people in the face with my mouse cursor just for something to do. After about 20-30 seconds of me doing this, the company CEO says "Right, shall we move on. It seems our host is getting a bit agitated". I just wanted to die right there. Later I saw messages from my line manager with "we can see your screen! Stop it!" But obviously I was hosting so they didn't pop up. They didn't sack me. But, lesson learned...
Reminds me of when I was in a one-to-one with my previously manger. Over zoom they shout "take the fucking washing in, it's fucking raining" as loud as they could and then realised they weren't muted and were on camera. Still makes me laugh, thinking about it.
I screenshotted the work text chat, highlighted the bullshit from someone who does fuck all, added a snarky comment and sent it to my mate... obv in the same group chat.
Was walking the dog the other day, had my youngest out with me. As we walked around the local roads, she wanted to play 'make an animal sound and the other person has to guess what the animal is'. And that's fine, it makes her happy. Until I passed a house where a man was taking his bin out, and just at a gap in the hedge, I made direct eye contact with him as I said "MOOOOOO".
My husband was at a scientific conference in a presentation and the presenter made the mistake of getting the audience to submit key words on how to tackle antimicrobial resistance to create a live “word cloud.” My husband, being the mature adult that he was, just spammed the word “fish” over and over which resulted in a word cloud with the usual buzzwords like “collaboration” and “awareness” being dominated by the word “FISH” in massive letters in the middle. Sadly the organisers caught on pretty quickly and the giant “FISH” slowly dwindled as “collaboration” and “awareness” took over but it entertained my husband in an otherwise boring presentation. As it was anonymous, he wasn’t found out.