As much as I would love to blame all my office "accidents" on a piece of machinery, sometimes it's just me. For example, when I was working for a psychologist in Vacaville, CA, I had the "water cooler incident." My coworker and I came to work one morning to find that our boss had purchased a water cooler. In our thoughtfulness, we decided to set it up for him before he arrived later that morning. The instructions said to run water and a little bit of bleach through the machine before using it. Lo and behold, there was no bleach in the office...but there was Simple Green! It didn't take long for us to figure out the difference between bleach and Simple Green: suds. You can imagine our alarm when bubbles started coming out of the faucets! Frantically, we flushed the machine with as much water as possible and were just finishing up when our boss walked in the door. He wanted to be the lucky one to try the first cup! I was horrified when he used the hot water tap and soapy water came out (we'd forgotten to rinse out that one). The situation was so ridiculous that I started laughing hysterically till I cried! He was very nice about what happened, but no amount of rinsing ever managed to remove the soapy taste. He ended up exchanging it for a new one!
Yesterday, it was the "coffee maker incident." When I got to work, I found my coworker amidst an explosion of coffee and coffee ground. The filter had somehow fallen out of the industrial coffee maker and spilled its contents everywhere. I helped her clean up the mess with the few napkins that we had, but it ended up being a long process as we kept finding more granules (in the cabinets, in the fridge, etc.). The coffee mess had managed to get under the coffee maker, so we gently moved it over to get underneath it. Well, my co-worker was shifting the machine back into place when water started spraying everywhere. I'm standing there in shock, yelling as she is getting her second shower of the day. Somehow, she had the presence of mind to shift the machine again to get it to stop spraying. It seems that the copper piping in the back isn't flexible enough to be moved (Who knew?!) Fortunately, the maintenance guy helped us clean up the new mess and we're supposed to get the pipe fixed tonight. Two days is two days too many to go without coffee!
Alright, now that I've dished my embarrassing office stories, it's your turn! Please share and help ease my own shame!
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