Funny Stories?

Is anyone willing to share stories from their work experiences that could be used as inspiration for comedy? Think The Goes Wrong Show but set in a futuristic manufacturing context.

I am working on a sci-fi novel that deals with bad management, bad quality control, and generally problems caused by shortsighted thinking and false urgency. My own work experiences are limited, so I am interested to hear other perspectives. That way, I can make a more believable chain of interconnected problems across multiple companies and departments that don't communicate well with each other. Once I finish a draft, I will also be looking for beta readers.

 

I'm looking for common and believable small problems that could lead to much worse things. Generally problems that people choose not to fix when they are first noticed, which results in something worse happening later on, and then what people do about the worse thing makes it even worse. But it doesn't have to follow that exact format or cover every part of it.

The story I'm writing will have short scenes of different perspectives from design, subassembly, assembly, configuration & programming, users, and tech support. Management and marketing also have a presence. The end result is a space ship with a lot of different systems on it and people stuck in space trying to get back to Earth.

I want the problems to feel in character like problems people have been frustrated about in their own workplaces. I don't personally know a lot about the manufacturing setting, though. My knowledge base skips from design to programming. I want to write something more interesting and less vague than "cheap machining," but I don't want to write something so absurd that people in the industry will say it could never happen that way. I'd rather write a scene that looks like a common occurrence that was badly (but believably) mismanaged.

Sort of like how there are common ladder safety violations, so if I write a scene where someone is doing unsafe ladder maneuvers and then they fall off a ladder, that's believable. Even if you've never seen someone fall, you've probably at some point thought that someone might fall from an unsafe position. Though, in the case of ladder safety, it's SO common and predictable that it would probably only be interesting as a red herring.