Offbeat

He knew this was amazingly dumb but couldn’t stop laughing as the fruit went splat

WHO, ME? Many people start the day with a glass of orange juice to give them energy. Here at The Register, we start the working week with a new instalment of Who, Me? – the reader-contributed column that we hope gives you the little kick you need to avoid making workplace mistakes by learning from fellow readers’ confessions of their worst moments.

This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Kirk” who told us about “the best-paid, easiest job of my life.

Kirk told us the gig involved “Walking around a landmark important government building swapping out computers and monitors. I would plug in the new kit and take away the old.”

The pay was decent, and the job even helped Kirk to stay fit because it involved plenty of walking.

One of his workmates also enjoyed the gig, but one day succumbed to boredom.

“He bought a bag of organic oranges – and expensed them to the client, as you do on a government contract – and started lobbing them from an upper window onto the roof of a van parked below.”

This was obviously a dumb thing to do but the reaction of the van driver soon had Kirk and his mate in stitches.

“The driver went berserk,” he wrote. “He would jump out and spin around trying to find where the orange came from.” Once he gave up, Kirk’s mate would lob another orange.”

“I was nowhere near the window. I was crying,” Kirk admitted.

And then things got serious, because Kirk and his colleague saw security guards emerging from the building next door.

“They saw everything – the van driver slowly unravelling, the cascade of oranges from nowhere,” he wrote. “They were pointing at the ground, running floor to floor.”

But they couldn’t see who was throwing the oranges.

Kirk took a lesson from the incident: “You can't see what you can't believe to be true,” he wrote. So he and his colleague kept their jobs, but also stayed on the straight and narrow afterwards.

What’s the dodgiest item you’ve ever expensed? And how did you get away with it? Spill your story by clicking here mailto:whome@theregister.com to send email to Who, Me so we can share the receipts with the world – anonymously of course – in a future column. ®