Spooky Season is Here - Share your Horror Stories 👻!

Miša Hennin
Miša Hennin Admin, MeisterLobster, EN Business, DE Advocate Posts: 1,307 Community Admin
edited September 2023 in Community Café

It's time we had some festive fun in our young Community, so let's celebrate by sharing some of our greatest productivity nightmares 🧟‍♂️, spooky mistakes 🎃 and time mismanagements 🦇.

Add your own terrifying tales of organizational mishaps in the comments below, I can't wait to read them! I'll go first!

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Comments

  • Emily
    Emily EN Pro Posts: 132 Star Contributor

    Hahaha, this is brilliant @Miša! (And of course, terrifying!) I can imagine some of my students have experienced similar nightmares.

    I'll try and think of one of my own stories when I have some time this afternoon.

  • Andrew Lapidus
    Andrew Lapidus Admin, MeisterLobster, EN Business Posts: 1,007 Community Admin

    Nice, @Miša! 😁 I definitely found myself trembling with terror at the thought of revisiting the horror of college essays🧟‍♂️

    My terrifying tale of mismanagement comes from my first ever job in Austria, working as an office assistant for an international organization in Salzburg. My first week was filled with 40 hours of very menial (but very important) clerical work: organizing and preparing administrative documents which were to be submitted to the Austrian government.

    My boss was thrilled at the speed of my work - turns out that my output within that 40 hour week was much higher than she had anticipated. Then she took a closer look: everything I had done was useless: I had prepared, printed, filed and submitted literally thousands of pages which were dated in the American style, with the month first and day second.

    Every single submission was rejected by the Austrian government, but things got even worse: Their office would not accept any resubmissions until they had fully processed our current outstanding requests. In other words, it took the office over a month to "confirm" that my work was useless.

    Anyways, that's how I single-handedly caused a 7 week delay at a high-powered NGO in my first week on the job. Happy Halloween!!!!🎃🎃🎃🎃

  • Emily
    Emily EN Pro Posts: 132 Star Contributor

    Wow @Andrew Lapidus your story is quite impressive 🤣!

    I remember a pretty bad situation from years ago. I got home after teaching all day and sat down to do my marking. I spent a good two hours marking some short essays from one of my English classes. As I finished them, my partner came home with a takeaway and a bottle of wine. I stacked up all the papers and moved them to the side of the table so we could eat. After dinner, I was clearing the table and I knocked over the bottle of wine. And yes, of course, I knocked it all over my stack of marking.

    Cursing my stupidity, I tried to wipe it up as quickly as possible. Almost every student's essay was left smelling like wine. I was lucky the wine was white so I could still read the blotted handwriting but I was humiliated by the alcoholic smell.

    Rest assured, I never ever left my marking on the kitchen table again!

  • Richard
    Richard EN Basic Posts: 20 Active Contributor

    @Miša, @Andrew Lapidus and @Emily these were great to read! Brightened my afternoon for sure! thank you😃 (hopefully we've all learned from past mistakes such as these)