A Gun in the Front Row, 300 Fake Employees, Power Plant Explosion

What happens when a company hires 300 actors to pretend they work there, a comedian finds himself staring down a gun from the front row, and an ordinary morning at a power plant becomes a fight to get home alive?

On Episode 15 of I Used to Work There, Kelly Kennedy brings you eight true workplace stories featuring terrible bosses, a haunted heritage house, a comedy competition gone wrong and extraordinary accounts of survival. We start with Day Shift laughs before heading into a Night Shift where everything can change in seconds.

Day Shift opens with comedian Keith Ross Nelson, whose wife joins the audience for a comedy competition and discovers her favourite performer. There is just one problem: it might not be him. Then Andrew takes us inside a consulting company with an unusual plan to impress a potential client: hire more than 300 actors to fill the office and pretend to be employees.

Barbara follows with two stories about terrible bosses. A door-slamming outburst pushes her to confront the man everyone else is afraid of. Then, at another workplace, landing the company’s biggest contract in 25 years still isn’t enough to earn her boss’s respect. This time, she decides one of them has to go.

When Night Shift begins, Alex takes us into an old heritage house where footsteps travel across the floor above him and voices carry through rooms that should be empty. He goes looking for visitors. What he eventually finds suggests he is far from the first employee to experience something strange.

Master electrician Jason shares how a routine job at a hotel swimming pool becomes a life-threatening emergency. An arc flash leaves him severely burned, facing a long recovery and wondering whether his hands will ever work again.

Keith returns with a very different comedy story. During a show in Mississippi, a man sitting just feet from the stage pulls a gun and tells him to change the subject. The bouncers do nothing. Keith still has a show to finish.

Finally, Joe takes us inside a coal-fired power plant on a beautiful October morning. He has coffee, talks with a coworker and exchanges messages with his wife. Then a coal bunker explodes.

What follows is an extraordinary account of escape, coworkers coming to his aid, and a family facing the possibility that he might never come home. Through humour, faith and the difficult reality of life after the accident, Joe shares what it took to survive and what it meant to finally return to the people he loves.

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