It’s the late 90s and I was working in IT for a small (200 employees) company.
One of my tasks was performing daily data backups, which ran for about four hours and started after everyone else had left for the day.
We had an intercom system in the building, where if you picked up your phone and dialed a specific extension, you could page someone, or make announcements so everyone could hear.
One night I was in the process of running Ethernet cable from switches on the second floor down to individual terminals on the first floor, so there was a lot walking around the building.
I like to have music when I’m working, but I didn’t have an MP3 player at the time, so I thought… “I have music on my PC and no one is around. Why don’t I just…”, and I went around and cranked the volume knob on every ceiling intercom speaker in the whole building. Then I dialed into the intercom from the phone in my office, put the handset up as close as I could to my PC speakers, and boom, music throughout the building.
Cut to a few hours later, it’s late, I’m tired, the backup is finished, so I close down the system, hit the lights, lock the doors, and go home.
The next day, I come in, not thinking about anything from the night before, and get to work. About 11:00am, the owner’s secretary got on the intercom to page someone… and blew everyone out of their seats. There was an almost collective, “What the fuck!!!” from everyone, and an “Ohhh, shiiit” from me, because of course I immediately knew what happened.
I ran around like a madman, turning the volume down on all of the speakers that I had forgotten the night before, while saying, “No idea… Yeah it’s crazy… No no, it’s fixed now…”
No one ever found out exactly why the volume was so loud that morning.
I worked for the railways, in commuter trains. My job was to harass innocent passengers by walking back and forth and enabling them to buy a ticket should they need one. And at certain routes also check the tickets of every new passenger.
It was nice using a dialect from eastern Finland, the Savo dialect for that. It has a tendency to change plain vowels for diphtongs. It adds a kind of a “wee-wow” twang to the language. For example the word for “closet” is “kaappi” in standard Finnish, “kuappi” in the dialect spoken in Savo. The “aa” is just a long “a”, sound. Pretty much the same as the “a” in the English word “car”. And “ua” is pretty much like “oi” in “choir”. Imagine pronouncing the word “car” with the “a” replaced with the “oi” sound of “choir” and you might get an idea of how that crazy dialect likes to mangle every damn word. And the “ar” in “garlic” would be pronounced with the same change as well. Etc.
And maybe at this point it’s worth mentioning that I still had a fully male gender expression at that point.
So, we have just left the station of Haarajoki. In the Savo dialect that would be “Huaarajokj”.
I enter the part of the wagon through its end door. I start shouting “Haarajoki passengers, tickets please!”, but. But.
As it happens, “huaara” is how they would pronounce also the word “huora” over in Savo. And that happens to mean “whore”. Luckily I noticed. So, I managed to stop myself from uttering anything further. Unfortunately, I only managed to stop after having already said the first half of that word, “huaarajokj”: Yes, “huaara”.
In other words, I entered the passenger wagon through the end door in the railway worker’s uniform, immediately bellowing “WHORE!”, and then shutting up.
Definitely an “oh shit” moment!
After that:
Me: “Hm. This station is not terribly compatible with the Savo dialect, apparently.”
A female passenger: “You should have continued to the end, would have gone much less badly”.
Me: “Yup!”