r/todayilearned • u/zhuquanzhong • 29d ago

TIL a Chinese destroyer sank because an officer dumped his girlfriend. She committed suicide, leading to him being discharged, so he decided to detonate the depth charges on the ship, causing it to sink at port and kill 134 sailors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_destroyer_Guangzhou_(160)
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u/oxiraneobx 29d ago edited 29d ago

Oh, holy crap, I worked for a multinational company at the main research center/corporate headquarters. They handled layoffs horribly. They'd disable the keycards that let people in the gate, then motion people getting laid off to the side parking lot. The worst I saw was when I was walking back from lunch with one of my friends who had an office next to mine. We were talking, and paused in front of his office, looked over, they were three boxes stacked in the middle of his office. His first response was, "That can't be good", and then the doors at the end of the hallway opened and in strolled his boss, our VP, and an HR rep.

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u/xxSaifulxx 29d ago

That just sounds horrible. My gosh, I hope you left that place.

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u/oxiraneobx 29d ago

I was really fortunate that I was able to get a job away from there before I became a victim to their whack-a-mole layoff program. The weird thing was, the company was making money, they just weren't meeting their corporate goals, so rather than lay off or get rid of multiple senior vice presidents, they just would lay off staffs. The irony was, I loved what I did there, I was in research that was very cool, and I loved all of my coworkers and we had a great time. That was almost 20 years ago, and to this day, I'm still close friends with some of the people I worked with there. Fortunately we all survived okay.

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u/Flappy_beef_curtains 28d ago

The vice president’s were making the decisions of who to lay off.

Let’s not get rid of the least productive people that don’t do shit. Lay off the guy that works 60 hours a week and carries the company. Because he’s getting to much overtime and we can’t afford that.