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Creative industrial sabotage by bored employees

Mama_Kitty

Gone But Not Forgotten
(ACCOUNT RETIRED)
Joined
Apr 4, 2002
Messages
352
My Dad has been telling this story for years:

Apparently his uncle bought a new car and kept noticing a rattling sound from time to time. It got really irritating and after taking it to various mechanics, nothing was found which caused the problem, and more importantly, nothing fixed it. This went on for months and months with the car being virtually stripped to the ground, and still nothing.

Eventually he decides to take the door panels off (not sure why you wouldn't try that first!) and inside one was a biro on a string with a note on it that said 'You found it at last'!

It seemed likely enough to me, but I've heard similar stories involving marbles inside the doors too.

Anyone else heard similar stories? Can any of them be verified?
 
There was a thread on here about, if i remember correctly, a biscuit company whose tins for a while featured a painting with some rude scenes in the background, painted by a disgruntled employee.
 
Not so much sabotage.

In the school summer holidays just outside Bristol myself and several friends worked at a factory assembling and packing toys for Kiddicraft. Being bored stupid most of the time but thankful for the cash we would 'enhance' some of the toys, particularly the play-people type scenarios. Most toys would be assmbled then packaged with, for instance, a space rocket and a space man and lunar vehicle inside a lovely sealed box with a picture of the posed contents on the outer.
In one magnificent day at the height of summer we managed to pack an extra lunar vehicle and two extra men in each of several hundred boxes. We felt like Santas at the thought of kids getting the toys home and discovering their extra surprises. I suppose it was more anti-sabotage than sabotage. :D
 
I've done the one of leaving little notes inside packages saying "Help me, I'm being held prisoner", when I worked in the warehouse of cosmetics company one summer.

No-one ever complained though.
 
Boyf used to work in the dock building cruisers and scribbling things like "I built this ship" and "Boutrous Boutros Ghali"(?!?) behind the wall panels. When I worked on an assembly line making and packing cell phones, I was tempted to do something similar, but since I knew I would be easily tracked (damn those bar codes) , I resisted. I did plant lots of hair inside the boxes, though untentionally.
 
We felt like Santas at the thought of kids getting the toys home and discovering their extra surprises. I suppose it was more anti-sabotage than sabotage. Very Happy

One of my old teachers had a story like that. After a few weeks working at a sausage packing factory (cira early 70s?) she decided to see just how many sausages could be crammed into every box:D
 
I'd read something similar to the OP, from another message board here:

OK, mebbe I got the colour wrong of the overspray, but the rest of the story is true. This was a long time ago, circa 1969, when Austins was Austins, and BMC did not exist, and they had not invented masking tape, and Minis and A40's had the same spark plugs. So there! Nah, Nah, Nahn, Nah Nah!

Yeah, I got some more! And just as archane.

At Austins, on Friday afternoons, the scallywags on the assembly line used to hang a nut off a bit of welding rod and tack it inside one of the body panels, where it would rattle whenever you went round a corner, never to find the source of the noise.
[...]
 
For many years I worked in a food production plant. One of our products was hot mustard, a fairly popular item. Our biggest fans were a bunch of volunteer firemen who lived in the little town where our plant was located. They always pestered our employer to make a special batch of mustard with double the heat. So one night, several of us snuck into the plant and made them a case of Firehouse Mustard, with double the horseradish and mustard oil per thei request. We left the case on the firehouse doorstep with a warning note. The results are still talked about in town now and then. Beer sales were up for a full month after we delivered our 'gift'! ;) Not exactly sabotage, but our employer would have taken our access keys away if he'd ever found out about it.

I had some friends back in high school who worked on GM and Ford assembly lines during summer vacation. They said it was common practice to mark out one car to be a lemon. Don't know if that's true, I've heard it as UL also. (Someone bought a car, went through innumerable repairs, and eventually found a note scrawled inside a door: 'let's make a lemon'.)
 
A college friend had a summer job some years back with a 'premium marque' car European manufacturer. He was shocked to find the bored employees on the night shift welding bottletops into inaccessible body parts. He related numerous incidents (most of which I've forgotten) but do remember they had competitions to see who could fit the most central locking pipe into the door panels.
 
About 6 years ago, I bought my daughter a Barbie, Cherry Blossom if i remember correctly. When she opened it, a note fell out of the place between the cardboard backing and the box. It said , and yes, this is serious, "Barbie farts". At the time, we all laughed like 8th graders over it, but i always figured maybe one of the teenagers at the toy store did it. However, after reading all this, maybe it came from the assembly line. Would be interested to know how many people have found too many of something, odd notes, etc in things.
 
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