Sometimes, first-day nerves are the least of your worries…
One new starter was locked out of the building on her first day. Everyone was in a meeting and didn’t hear her knocking on the front door. All our phones had been redirected to answering machines. We eventually heard her and let her in, but she was a tad cross to say the least.
We had a new starter who arrived, burst into floods of tears and said she didn’t want to work for us as she couldn’t cope with the computer. This was a receptionist role and she had claimed to be computer-literate. She was so upset I asked her to contact me when she got home. Which she did. By email.
A new recruit was introduced as “Brock”. After calling him “Brock” for a week, he finally built up the courage to tell us it was his surname.
I’m originally from a northern part of the US and am used to travelling in snow. On the day I was due to start a new job in London, the city was experiencing heavy snow for the first time in years. Although I eventually managed to make it in, very few of my new colleagues were actually able to get to the office, so I was told to go home and come back in a week. For months afterwards, my teammates would talk about how embarrassed they were about not making it in that day.
We hired a new PA who started off OK but got less coherent as the day went on. Things reached a head when she picked up the phone, said ‘goodbye’, put it straight down again and slumped onto her desk. It turned out her litre bottle of mineral water was actually neat gin.
One new starter went out for his lunch hour and never came back.
I once turned up for my first day only to realise quickly from the look of horror on the receptionist’s face – and the lengthy wait in the lobby – that nobody was expecting me. HR had confirmed my start date without actually telling my receiving department head.
I worked for an insurance company that had regular intakes of 12–18 people at a time. During a coffee break at one induction, a sheepish man from the group said he had to leave. When I asked why, he explained he was a GP and he was supposed to be starting work as a medical consultant at the NHS offices next door.
On my first day, I woke up with an ear infection. It wasn’t relieved until I put on some headphones to listen to a new starter induction video. Let’s just say it’s hard to make a good impression when you’re draining blood from your ear.
I started one new job to discover my office was just the way my predecessor left it. If the papers strewn everywhere weren’t bad enough, there was a collection of old socks and manky tracksuit bottoms.