While working on Pirates if the Caribbean at Disneyland, I accidentally hit the all-ride stop instead of the station stop. The station stop just stops the boats at the load dock, the all-ride stop shuts everything down. A mom hasn’t gotten in the boat with her kids, and had turned around to talk to someone that was still in line, so I give the safety spiel and everyone in the boat is sitting ready to go. I send the boats, and she turned around and lurches toward the boat saying “Wait! My kids!” I couldn’t tell they were in the same group at the time I sent the boat, and her reaction made 18 year old me panic and hit the stop ASAP. The problem with having two big red buttons somewhat next to each other that look almost identical, save for one saying “station” and the other saying “ride” on them is that in a panic, it’s easy to hit the wrong one. The writing was etched into the plastic red buttons, so at a glance it wasn’t super obvious and being relatively new, it was an easy mistake to make. So I hit the button, and it was like in a movie where you just hear everything power down. All the ambient noise of water pumps, gears, the far off sound of running water, it all just kind of fades out and everything goes kinda quiet except for the music that plays overhead. Everyone is looking around a bit confused. I realize what I’ve done pretty quickly. I pull the ride stop button back up, (it was the kind of button that stays in an up position, then when you press it it stays clicked down until you pull it back up. Pulling it up activates a safety mode in which the ride can then be powered back up again), and I call up to the tower on the ride phone and tell them what happened. A lot of awkwardness ensues over the next 20 minutes as we try to power it back up. The breakers tripped and won’t reset, so the power up just isn’t happening. 30 minutes after the initial power down and the manager calls an evacuation, since it won’t power up. An evacuation involves telling everyone in line that the ride is not working and they have to turn around and come back later when it’s fixed. That’s never a pleasant thing to do. It also involves having to evacuate people off of the ride that are already inside, sitting on the boats. During the process, overhead announcements are made to the people in the ride that there has been a technical difficulty and we are attempting to fix it. So a bunch of us get in hip waders and hop into the water, pushing the boats to their respective closest evac area. If you’ve ever been on Pirates of the Caribbean, then you may have noticed that at certain times it feels like you are on a more open water area, and other times the area closes in like a cave or dock. In these spots there are areas that people can step out of the boats and be escorted back to the park. Everyone that was inside the ride got a pass to not have to wait in line for 3 other rides. These passes had to be hand written on a little card and then stamped. With about 35 boats, each carrying 12-18 passengers inside, it took a very long time to get everyone out and give them their passes. It was extremely embarrassing, but I didn’t get in trouble. Although I did hit the wrong button, I was told that in the situation I reacted quickly and that’s what mattered. Other people that were working the load dock and tower had my back and told management about how panicked the mom was and how I had fast reactions, and how it looked like she was going to try and jump into the moving boat, so ride-stop or not, preventing the woman from being injured was considered a victory. Another factor that prevented me from getting in trouble was the fact that normally the ride could be restarted working 10 minutes but it was the problem with the breakers that prevented that, so even an all-ride stop shouldn’t have been “that” big of a deal. Some time afterward, the all-ride stop and the normal station stop buttons were reconfigured on the control panel to be more easily discernible and not so close to each other. That wasn’t even the craziest thing that happened while working on Pirates of the Caribbean, but it’s probably the biggest work mistake I’ve ever made.

Being a trucker, when you are on certain yards, there are what we call yard dogs or shifters. They drive these small, nimble tractors with a hydraulic fifth wheel that lifts the trailer so they don't have to get out & they can also get trailers in to some very tight places that a full size semi can't. At the hub in Dallas, they were getting some work done on the property & they had one of those roll off dumpsters on site for disposal ( https://images.app.goo.gl/EXi1Mg7gHzZVp9vEA ). The thing about those dumpsters, is that they are very low & semi trailers, especially cargo chasis trailers are rather high. ( https://images.app.goo.gl/w7zicKgepQEV4XsE7 ) Well, this dumbass shifter was running & gunning around the yard & he whipped around a turn too tight with a 53’ chasis trailer & high-centered that sucker right on top of the damn dumpster. The yard truck was off the ground, hanging with the front wheels about 3 inches off the ground and the trailer was blocking everything. This was a fully loaded trailer, but because it was stable, they could not unload it and we could not get a wrecker out there to lift it off, until insurance gave the all clear. So for 2 weeks, we had this trailer & shifter truck just hanging out on this dumpster & gumming up the works. It was cool as hell watching them lift the whole thing up and then sliding the dumpster out from under it. The dude has been fired about 3 times since then & he still gets his job back, everytime.

I unload trailers at a warehouse and my old coworkers and I would sometimes stack boxes up and hide ourselves from our supervisors. In the back of the trailers we'd do WWE moves on each other and act like WWE performers do, selling and all. We almost got caught one time when I did The People's Elbow on one of them and we were both on the floor. Security drove by on their golf cart and we immediately jumped up and acted like we were working. Thankfully they didn't see us lol

The seniors decided that for the end of the year water balloon fight, the water would actually be pee instead. No one knew about it until after.

Were y'all not following the recommended distance to stay away from the power lines?

About 2 years ago we had the shop foreman have one of the shop ladies stand on the fork lift, and raise her up to do something (no idea what), and she fell off and broke her arm..... Neither were fired. The foreman is a relative of the owners, and the lady quit not too long afterward anyhow.

Little zap or big zap?

Most of the tools to do PDR are made of stainless steel and have a rubber coating on the handle (per the picture). When you have been doing work for as long as I have (currently about to round the bend of 15years) that rubber tends to wear away on the bars that you use often. Well that had happened on one of my bars and I was using it to fix some hail damage underneath the hood of a Chrysler 300 one autumn day. One of the problems with this car was that the battery had to be jumped off before I could bring it to my truck to be fixed. That being said I didn’t want to shut the car off only to have to jump it again once I was done with it. So with the engine running, and the car not having a hood liner, I was fixing some hail dents when that bar with no more rubber on the wide handle end slips from my hands. With my cat/ninja-like reflexes, I catch the business end of the bar with my right hand......at exactly the same time the wide stainless steel handle part of the bar touches both the positive and negative ports of the battery on a car that is [u]running[/u]. Long story short......it shocked the literal piss out of me and I had to go see the Doc because the owner wanting to make sure I wasn’t going to die from a heart attack or something. It burned my palm pretty good too!