Dealing with Karens as customers are hard, but having to deal with Karens as co-workers is a whole other struggle. The following stories prove that Karens exist everywhere—even at the office. Read on for some truly annoying workplace horror stories:
1. Stranger Than Fiction
Many years ago, the bookshop I worked at in the UK hired a new employee with terminal cancer. It was very sad since she was quite young. She wasn't around too much due to the chemotherapy, but when she was in, she worked in the children's department, and she was actually a pretty good salesperson. She was also was a huge fan of a fairly major American children's author.
She ran the UK branch of his fan club and knew him personally. He occasionally flew her out to the States for events. One day, she wasn't in, and all employees were called to a staff meeting. We were informed that she had passed. There was a lot of sadness, and her close colleagues were devastated. Then, we found out the jaw-dropping truth.
A few days later, one of our staff happened to go into a branch of McDonald’s in a nearby town. Guess who was working behind the counter? Go on, guess. Turns out, she was never ill. She had made the whole cancer thing up and also faked her own passing for reasons that we never really fully understood. The general consensus was that it started out as a way to connect with her favorite author and kind of spiraled from there.
In the end, she couldn't handle living the lie anymore and so... she had her mother tell people that she’d passed. Then she got a job at McDonald's a few miles down the road and was surprised when she got found out. That was a pretty what-the-heck sort of experience for us all.
1. Mr. Softie
When the boss is at another location, it's so easy to get away with doing nothing. At least that's how it was for my old officemate. He literally turned his desk into his personal office from which to run his side business (he owned an ice cream store). He only got caught when he sent a GIANT print job to the printer for birthday cake forms.
The printer ran out of paper, so he thought they all printed. Someone comes in and sets more paper in the tray and...what the heck is all this?? Stacks of this guy's flyers were coming out. He denied up and down that he was doing it. When we cleaned out his office, his drawers were full of his personal business' employee information, tax stuff, bills. Nothing actually related to his supposedly full-time job. He got away with it for months if not longer. Crazy.
2. I’m Special
Early in my Navy career, there was this kid whose after-hours stunts were absolutely legendary. He was a nice guy who always seemed to be smiling, but the stories about his off-duty antics were just insane. Nothing crazy dark, just WILD. For example, he solicited a contract marriage on Craigslist, with benefits. He also paid his “wife” an allowance as part of the contract.
He loved to pay for intimacy while he drove around with someone else in the back seat— he’d pay them to sit there, too. He has a big, weird list of bedroom proclivities. Anyway, it finally got to the point where his supervisor was concerned enough to refer him to a mental health specialist. By the way, that does not happen in the Navy. Usually, you'd be hung out to dry or end up behind bars LONG before anyone ever considers the mental health option.
He ended up being the only guy I’ve ever known to be a medically diagnosed psychopath. As he put it, smiling, “They said I have an inability to experience human empathy!” He had to go home.
2. Hush, Sonny!
We have a coworker who keeps putting the Grease soundtrack over the PA. She does not do this as a joke but because she thinks it’s actually good music.
3. The Tip Of The Iceberg
The finance director was having an affair with his assistant, who was married to a different employee in the company. That's not the insane part, though. What's insane is how we found out. I was the HR director at the time, and a court investigation is still underway, so some details have been changed. One day, the CEO approached me about rumors of the finance director’s affair.
In retrospect, maybe I should've dug into it, but things were busy enough, so I discouraged him from listening to scuttlebutt. I said we should only worry if we thought there was an operational impact. Private lives are private, in my opinion. A few weeks later, our auditors got in touch to point out that a subcontractor had the same company name as a dormant business owned by the finance director.
A quick call to him followed and he confirmed that it was a mere coincidence. “That's funny,” said the auditor, “Because it has the same tax number, too.” Whoops! Things happened quickly after that. The finance director, who was on holiday, resigned before we could push him with extreme prejudice. But at the end of the investigation, it turned out that he had set up a pal to work as a subcontractor so he could cream the profits off work sent his way.
Plus, he'd also been making creative use of the company credit card and had authorized a company loan to himself. A check of the company cell phone records showed that there had been communication between his ex-assistant and him since he jumped. So we recovered her phone, examined the SMS history, and found out not only that she was telling him about the progress of our internal investigation, but also the full history of their affair, with explicit detail.
The assistant's marriage imploded. She resigned. In the end, the whole affair swept up multiple employees who'd been involved in the fraud, gutted the finance team, and taught us all some valuable lessons.
3. Dang, Daniel
Let's call him "Danny." Danny doesn't wash his hands. Danny for some reason feels the need to not use a spoon to put coffee in the communal coffee maker. Instead, he's "gotta" use his hands because people need to "quit being afraid of germs." That's not the worst part. Danny takes a poop, comes out to join everyone in a company lunch, and sticks his germ hands down the bucket of KFC to get a piece at the very bottom.
Danny came in hungover one day and just slept for eight straight hours at his desk. Danny doesn't flush. Danny loses every form of paperwork given to him. Danny is a jerk, but is also apparently too good of an engineer to fire. I hate Danny.
4. We’re All Friends Here
I was the head night auditor at an upscale airport hotel. We had a young night auditor who put a room into “out of order” status and let his friends party in it...for an “intimate group event” that he joined during his lunch break. He got caught because of a noise complaint. We called the authorities, and he was fired and blacklisted from being hired back.
4. Feeling Free at Work
He always asks questions in the slowest manner possible. Over explains what he is doing to people who are already aware of what's going on. Oh, and he gets buck naked in the bathroom before and after work and just sits on the bench, private parts spread out. No towel or anything. Then, he gets dressed and tries to strike up conversations with everyone. It's a small two stalls, two urinals, bathroom in an aircraft hangar. No one gets so dirty from the work we do that they need to change even their underwear on a daily basis.
5. Do You Know Who I Am?
I was working in a bank. We had a teller who was about 19 years old and he got really angry at the way a customer would send in her deposits at the drive-up window. He ended up complaining about the customer on a public Facebook post. But, oh, that was far from all. He also tagged the lady, as well as her store, in the post!
The customer, who was furious of course, called the bank and told me. I told the customer we would investigate, and then I asked the teller. He straight-up admitted it, saying, "What's she going to do about it? My grandfather is friends with the bank president." I called HR and the bank president on a conference call.
The girl lost her job in less than 15 minutes of me receiving the call from the customer. Breach of customer confidentiality in banking is a MAJOR law violation.
5. Misusing the Tip Jar
The woman would use money from our pooled tip jar to fix her pricing mistakes. She literally stole money from her coworkers to cover herself. We all hated her. I never heard about any compensation. We were all just glad to see her go, because along with stealing she was also just a pain to work with. Dramatic and honestly kind of weird. She would also sometimes leave her dog in her car for her entire shift.
6. Power Plays
I worked in a factory. There was a kid whose father was the regional manager, so he felt like he could do whatever he wanted. This kid was maybe 18 years old and went around flashing a knife at people he didn’t like...which was basically everyone. It had a six-inch blade and he kept it under his shirt in a holster. He also harassed all the women, never did any work and blamed the temps for his failures.
He would constantly be pushing up against women and telling them what he wanted to do to them, and he even took personal information from the computers for employee records to get their phone numbers and addresses. How he got access was easy—the manager above him let him use the computer with his password whenever he wanted because he always pulled the “I can do what I want because my dad is the regional manager" card.
He had tons of complaints against him. The authorities even showed up once and detained him at work, but nothing ever came of it. They took his knife as far as I know, but he had a new one a week later. Before I left, he was made a full manager, and whenever anyone went directly to his dad, his dad just sighed and kind of zoned out, acting like he couldn’t hear.
It was a messed up place, but luckily it closed down a few years back. I don’t know where he’s at now. A funny detail to add is some girl there did actually date him for like a month for some reason. She said it was literally the worst intimacy she ever had, so we got to have a laugh at him for a few days. That said, they had a massive argument and she was “let go” the next day when they broke up.
6. Cake Boss Gone Wrong
My mum works in a coffee shop and the manager will regularly take staff tips to cover any till discrepancies. A total jerk move because the tips are pooled monthly and divided so it affects staff who weren't even in at the time. Once, the manager accidentally ordered two cakes. Only one was sold and the other went out of date. He refused to have it on his wastage, denied making the error and took £75 out of the staff tips for that one cake alone, because that was the resale cost. Makes me heave.
7. A Shady Past
We hired a guy on a trial basis. He was super polite and careful when speaking to me, but several of my female employees told me that he was creepy when I wasn't around. After his first five days, one of them came to me and said almost verbatim: "I think he's a molester." She just had a gut feeling about him. So I ran a background check on him and...yep, he was convicted.
For what it’s worth, this was almost 20 years ago when it was not standard procedure to run background checks, and I was not in charge of that regardless. In this case, I requested it specifically from HR because the safety of my employees appeared to be at risk, but not one other time in my career did I feel the need to ask for one.
7. Selfish Questions
A woman who, on her first day, went around asking a series of oddly specific questions like, "Are you white, or mixed?" "How old are you?" "Are you religious or not?" We stupidly answered them, thinking she was just being friendly (she put on a sweet, naive demeanor). We were so wrong. After a couple of months of sitting on her butt and doing nothing but lying about her knowledge base, skills, and her progress on several projects, her supervisor tries to fire her.
Of course, she's union, so that's not as easy as it sounds. We find out she's filed grievances against all of us: The white male is prejudiced; The 1/2 Korean lesbian supervisor is ageist; I'm prejudiced because I'm non-denominational Christian and she's Baptist; The African American female around her same age was after her job. This woman literally pulled every card she had. She managed to keep her job too, but thankfully, corporate transferred her and got her out of our hair.
8. In The Money
I knew a guy who worked at Subway back when they gave out stamps. Basically, for every six inches of sub you bought, you earned a stamp. Once you filled a card with eight stamps, you could get a free six-inch sub. So this guy started only giving stamps to customers who asked for them. If they didn't ask, he pocketed their stamps and grew a sizeable stack of complete stamp cards. Then he set his brilliant plan into motion.
Over time, he started cashing them in. Like, when a customer paid with cash, he would ring it in as a freebie, place his own completed stamp card in the till, and pocket the cash. The customer got their sub, the till was balanced, and he had an extra five to 10 bucks in his pocket. He worked there for a few years, and the word was he racked up a few thousand dollars running this scheme.
I have no idea if anybody complained or if he was ever caught, but he did buy a motorbike.
8. Paging Punxsutawney Phil
My boss's wife has been given a position of authority over my department, despite having no experience or expertise in the area. But the worst part is, she is an older lady and by all accounts seems to be suffering from dementia. Every single email you send her or e-mail chain she's included on, she will respond without having any understanding of what was written to her. So then you have to spend an hour explaining what just happened to her. It's like Groundhog Day.
9. Every Dog Has Its Day
There was this guy named Gus who worked in retail with me. My boss told me, "Hey, this guy's got anxiety, go easy on him OK?" So I was like, okay, that's cool, I can relate. I did everything I could to help him make sense of the infernal godforsaken hellscape that is retail. He started off with little mistakes that were forgivable things—forgetting a task, accidentally giving the wrong information...things like that.
However, he quickly devolved in popularity as his complacency grew over time and his helpful attitude shrank. Gus started screwing around during his shift, getting caught on his phone while ignoring backup cashier calls, etc. He would also make stabbing motions behind the manager's back to other employees, then and play it all off like he was some innocent dope who didn't know any better.
None of this got him fired. Day after day, there was a new complaint from a different employee about some responsibilities he shirked. He also got reported for telling customers blatantly wrong info, saying stuff like, "Oh yeah, we have another location up on the hill" when we didn't. We had no idea whose son he was or whatever because that was apparently all kosher. What ACTUALLY got him fired was a doozy.
One day, he brought a dog wearing a super-expensive dog collar into work. He claimed he almost hit the dog on the way to work and it was running around wild, etc. He then tried to sell the dog collar to a customer, and even pushed to "adopt out" the dog to a co-worker. This co-worker was competent enough to take the dog to a vet, whereupon they found a microchip and contacted the actual owners.
THAT'S where the fun started. It came out that Gus never found the dog at all. He straight up KIDNAPPED this dog from his neighbor and tried to pawn it off, knowing full well what he was doing. The guy lawyered up immediately, tried to sue Gus, and threatened to sue the store and the store manager if Gus wasn't fired. Suffice to say, Gus was gone the very same evening. We talked about him for years and years.
9. The Resale Artist
A guy in our office bought the snacks from the company's vending machines and tried to sell them back to coworkers for a profit.
10. Mental Health Check
He was a new hire. He was kind of weird and definitely suffering from a lack of social skills, but whatever. Well, fast forward a few days—a customer came back to return a piece of merchandise, claiming that when they got home, there was blood on it. We looked. Yeah, there was blood. We looked up the transaction, which was only made about 45 minutes earlier.
The new hire had set it up. We went to find him, but he wasn't in his department. But that was not necessarily a big deal, since we had to go back into the warehouse for stuff all the time. So now we went to find him in the back and there he was, in the warehouse, cutting his wrists with a razor blade and bleeding all over the place.
10. Appearances Can Be Deceiving
This old woman looks like the sweetest lady, but she's actually the exact opposite. She'll hide behind pillars and around corners just to catch you doing something tiny so she can tattle to management. Everyone hates her but pretends to be nice to her because she's been there for 30 years and one of the managers is banging her niece or something.
11. Work Is A Four-Letter Word
I was a supervisor at a movie theatre. We had a new hire, who had been on the job less than a week, throw a very loud, unbelievably childish tantrum in front of a lobby full of customers. Why? All because her direct supervisor asked her to sweep up some popcorn that a customer spilled. She kept screaming, "I ain't cleaning up someone else's mess! Make them do it!"
She was 24 years old. The meltdown she had when she got fired for her tantrum was nuclear, with lots of screaming and threats about how her parents were going to "call the company and get everyone fired!" The next day, someone claiming to be her dad did call and told us that we were “going to rehire my daughter and apologize to her or else."
But nothing more came of it—the top manager just laughed and hung up. I've never seen such an epic, entitled tantrum before or since.
11. Dwight Schrute 2.0
My worst coworker constantly eats throughout the day, so he's always going to the canteen to get food. Every time he gets up to grab a snack, he takes a 20-minute break. Then he complains if anyone asks him to do anything as he is always "too busy." He becomes deeply offended at any change in the office, especially if the temperature isn't freezing cold (apparently he can't work if it's too warm). He can't stand the coffee addicts in the office as they need caffeine...but he drinks several bottles of Coca-Cola everyday.
I have been in the office for nearly two years and I still don't know what he actually does. He smells, he's sweaty and when he sneezes he wipes his nose with his hand and cleans it off on the desk. I hate him and so does everyone else.
12. Oh, Poop
Our construction worker took a dump in the toilet of a vacant apartment that didn't have running water and then left without saying anything. All the workers were aware that they are supposed to use the bathrooms in the offices and clubhouses because the vacant units never have running water. The complex didn’t find it until three days later when they brought in a potential tenant for a walkthrough.
It had been over 100 degrees all week. The woman I spoke to said there wasn’t any toilet paper, either.
12. I Mean, He Engineered a Sweet Gig?
He's a level three engineer who does absolutely nothing all day. He'll book a conference room and sit in the dark for hours. He'll sit at his desk and do actually nothing except exist. But his team (which he did not assemble and which he does not actually lead) is good enough to make him look good, so he keeps getting more responsibilities.
13. An Acquired Taste
I had a co-worker who always had a really strong stench, and I thought it was just bad BO. Turns out, she was addicted to mothballs and she was licking them during working hours. The chemicals gave off an unbelievably strong smell through the skin. We got complaints about her odor but didn’t take them seriously since we thought people were just being jerks.
That is until someone saw her actively licking mothballs on the job. I was leaving my job when this was discovered and I was sworn to secrecy because it’s not the kind of thing we can advertise around our office. It was the kind of smell where you could never really quite put a finger on what it was, but once we figured it out, it made a lot of sense.
It doesn’t smell exactly like the real thing...more like it’s been processed through the body and skin.
13. It’s Interim for a Reason
We have a girl who was recently promoted to be an "interim education director" position, but she fails to leave out the "interim" part when introducing herself. She brings her untrained disobedient dog to work, wears highly inappropriate clothing to a job that requires working with kids, tells people they have to respect her because she's a director, leaves her desk a mess, makes every story about her, and willfully ignores safety protocols if she doesn't have time for them.
So how'd she get the job? She called the boss "daddy" and sat on his lap at the Christmas party.
14. Phoning It In
I’m an HR head. I once got a call from a “private chat administrator” informing us that our official account was unpaid. They said they would take court action if we didn’t pay immediately. I thought it was a joke. And then we got an official notice! At that point, HR investigated, and the “chat” company sent us a copy of the phone calls.
As soon I played it, my co-worker’s face went white. She screamed, “I know this guy, he works in the supply chain!” Apparently, he had been making these chat calls using our company landline. We politely told him to pay up and settle the matter, and then we issued him a final warning letter. He’s lucky he didn’t lose his job that day.
14. To Err is Only Human
Our most hated person is a person who survives off boogies, diet Pepsi and the souls she drains (mine included.) Some of her greatest hits: telling me I am not getting any younger therefore my babies will be disabled. Telling a delightful tale of how she once snuck pork into a Muslim's diet. Going on about her husband's pension and how she doesn't have to work, she just works for the fun of it. Yet she bums smokes and bus fare off people half her age.
She lives to get anyone into trouble, yet she's incompetent herself and when she's called on it, she says, "to err is human." Every week she threatens to quit but nowhere would have her.
15. Why Can’t We Be Friends?
I work the night shift at a packing line. We had two new temps in, and they were polar opposites. One was a super bubbly religious guy who was pretty emotional. Like, he cried during his favorite songs. The other guy was grungy, pretty cynical, but a darned good worker. Well, they both ended up working on adjacent lines and I was training them.
Things were great until the bubbly guy decided it was his mission to befriend the grunge guy. The grunge dude wanted to be left alone so he could work, but the bubbly guy kept going to our team lead to tell her he couldn’t understand why the grunge guy wouldn’t be his friend. My team lead, who was oblivious and despised by most of our crew, came down and told them to play nice and be friends.
I told her that bubbles needed to leave grunge alone, but she wouldn’t have it. Grunge walked out, and bubbles cried for two nights straight. He never came back.
15. Learning from Mistakes
When I was younger, it was me. I was pretty immature and when it was time to leave my job, I called a bunch of people out on a chain email at work. I ended up going back to that company later but in a different department. It was...very awkward. I am not proud of my younger self in any way, but looking back, I could definitely see how miserable I was and how much of a pain he was to be around. You live and you learn.
16. You Think You Know Someone
We had this guy as a delivery driver. He was super nice, quiet, and never showed any signs of anger even in stressful situations. Then we started getting calls, mainly from older women, saying that our delivery driver was cutting them off, flipping them off, and calling them names. I didn’t believe it at first. I thought maybe they cut him off, he honked, and they wanted him fired so made up some big story.
Then I saw that the back window got busted out of the vehicle and the radio looked like it got punched out for whatever reason. Everything came together and we found out he had huge anger issues. He stopped showing up so it resolved itself, but it was crazy how good of a front he put on.
16. The Pugnacious Guy Who Doesn’t Actually Know Anything
My office has the classic "Argue About Anything" guy. I mentioned once that I had recently rewatched the movie Equilibrium. This guy butted in and announced that the movie actually sucks. Spent about 10 minutes saying the effects were lame, the costumes were lame, futuristic movies are so overdone (obviously not knowing this movie came out 15 years ago), then ends it by saying "I haven't actually seen it, I'm just saying." Unbelievable.
17. Long And Strong
This girl left an unbelievable and non-flushable gigantic poop both in and out of the toilet. I went into the bathroom to deal with what I thought was surely an exaggeration and probably just a standard, nasty diarrhea mess. But no. There was a single, unbroken, enormous log that was hanging down over the outside of the toilet seat, going up over the seat and back down through the hole into the drain, as far as the eye could see.
All in one piece. Flushing it had no effect. None. It didn't budge, it didn't wiggle. Nothing. Gravity didn't even pull it apart when it hung over the side of the bowl halfway to the ground. It was...well, it was unbelievable. No one knew what to do. No one wanted to clean it up. Someone wondered aloud if we should send her to the hospital. Honestly, I can't remember what happened next, only that there were tools involved, but I can still see that monster poop like it was yesterday.
It was in 1997. I could never look her in the face again. I just kept wondering HOW? Mattie, wherever you are, I hope you're doing better.
17. The Dangers of Water
The best moment had to be when one coworker decided to mess with "that guy" at our work. He posted a warning about the dangers of Dihydrogen Monoxide (AKA H2O). The coworker told this guy that "illegalizing" this "dangerous chemical" was important since dihydrogen monoxide can suffocate people. Guy totally agreed and went around telling everyone about "dihydrogen monoxide." It was so beautiful seeing the boss correct him.
18. Drive Me Crazy
This happened recently at my driving job. I got this person through our training process and we set him out to train. The trainer came in, exasperated. Apparently, this dude couldn’t even drive, which was supposed to be the easy part of the job. He also couldn’t secure cargo, which was more challenging, but still a relatively straightforward task.
He started crying while driving, and he ignored instructions. This went on for a week. Eventually, the trainer said he was not going to be able to pass the guy. I told my boss his options were to have him retrain under another trainer, do a ride-along with him so he could draw his own conclusions, or just terminate the guy. Eventually, my boss opted to do the ride-along with him.
The guy nearly caused a wreck, all while doing exactly what I told him not to do just three minutes before. During his ride-along, he ran two stop signs and nearly had a head-on collision. My boss wanted to give him another week as long as he didn’t mess up his paperwork...but then he proceeded to back out of the lot with both hands off the wheel. Yeah, that was it.
18. Not Our Boy Roy
I had one coworker (call him Roy) who was a POS. We worked in IT support and Roy was considered the "expert" for a certain system our team managed. He was supposed to train me but he only taught me very basic stuff. He never told me about the plethora of problems that can occur with the system. When something did happen and I didn't know how to deal with it, he would chastise me and throw me under the bus.
There was one incident where Roy had to work overtime. I knew he wouldn't show and that I'd be forced to go in, so to try to stop that from happening, I called Roy first thing in the morning and reminded him to get to work. He says yes, but then I get a call that makes my blood boil. Roy never showed so I had to work 10 hours that day to cover his laziness.
Surprisingly the incident didn't get him fired, but he did proudly announce he found a new job a month later. The new job rescinded their offer, and he went into survival mode. He deliberately continued to train me poorly to make himself "unreplaceable", but the company refused to let him stay. Watching him pack up his desk = priceless.
19. Fake It Till You Break It
I got hired as a long-term temp with one other person to do some basic data entry work at a major brand that pretty much everyone has heard of. It was at their corporate headquarters too, so pretty prestigious. Anyway, we went through all of this on-boarding stuff in the morning that required us to get photo IDs and figure out parking and all that stuff.
Then, after two or three hours, we were introduced to one of the employees in the new department. They began telling us what we were going to be doing. None of it seemed overly difficult and I figured that while it was a new system I had never used before, I'd be able to work it out in a few days as long as I asked questions and took notes.
And that was the thing that made me realize that the other person who got hired with me probably lied on her resume. She was completely out of her depth—she didn't take any notes or ask any questions. And whenever I glanced at her, I could see flashes of panic on her face. Well, lunchtime came and when we came back, she said that another company had called her and offered her a permanent position so she couldn't work with us any longer.
Both myself and the person training us knew what was going on, but I'll give the other lady credit for finding a way out without losing face too badly. The takeaway here is: Yes, "Fake It Until You Make it" can and does work. But you gotta be able to fake it. You can't fake faking it.
19. Lock Your Workstation, People
She's a pretend celiac. Everything must be gluten-free. Except if someone has something delicious that includes gluten, she can miraculously have some. She'll ask you a question then walk away while you're answering her. She'll walk up to your desk and assign you some of her work that she doesn't want to do. If you leave to do something and come back to your desk she's standing in front of your workspace reading your emails.
20. Best Friends For Never
I had a co-worker who was adamant about being my friend, and I did not reciprocate. It got to the point where I went to the owner of the company and straight up told them, “Please tell this guy I am here to work. I don’t want to be friends. I just want to work my job and then go home.” I had told him several times before that that he was making my job difficult and I didn’t want to be friends.
I thought it was finally resolved when I went to the owners. I was so, so wrong. The next day, he came in and told me, “Even if you don’t want to be friends, I still see you as my best friend.” Eventually, I went in to quit, and instead, they called me into the office to let me go. They said even though I was their hardest worker and got the most customer satisfaction the atmosphere was "too tense" when we both were working.
See, he had anger issues and would curse up a storm if I didn’t respond kindly to friendly banter. In front of customers. He would literally ignore customers to ask me things like, “What’s your favorite movie?” making me have to stop what I was doing to help the customer. He’d then go into the backroom and kick something or spew just tons of profanity that you could hear if I didn’t answer his question.
He even had a habit of yelling at and harassing customers. Anyway, the owners decided it was my fault for not wanting to be his friend. So they let me go. Really. Then they handed me a paycheck for $20 and told me not to worry, they hadn’t taken the taxes out. I heard they made him a manager and then later fired him after finding out he was taking merchandise.
I liked that job until he was hired.
20. The Manager Other Managers Love to Hate
We had a manager who was one of those authoritarian, anal-retentive types that just had a negative outlook on things in general. She was shrill and petty and I found out later she told another coworker/manager that I would never amount to much of anything after I interviewed for a promotion with her and that other manager. After she left and that other coworker got his own team, guess who was the first person he brought on board and was eventually his first promotion?
I not only outlasted her but earned three Employee of the Quarter awards. Other managers hated her too and at one point one of them stuck a fish in the ceiling above her office and just left it there as it started to rot and stink up the space. They would just snicker as they walked by her office while she was lighting candles or air fresheners.
21. Thank You, Next
My document-processing clerk was getting married and going on his honeymoon, so I got a short-term temp. It wasn't a temp-to-hire, and everything was out in the open through a legit temp agency that generally performed thorough screening. Well, on the temp's very first day, he showed up with a box of things: photos, mugs, office equipment, and stuff to decorate a cubicle with.
I advised them not to unpack since we were getting right into training. Within two hours after I cut him loose on a computer and told him, "Let me know if you need anything or have any questions," he said, "This mouse is hurting my wrist. It gave me carpal tunnel. I'm going to need worker's comp paperwork." I made an immediate call to the agency to end this contract.
I then told the temp, "Your paperwork is at the temp agency office. Go ahead and go see your rep there." He left their box of stuff behind and I had to have the temp agency pick it up.
21. The Negatives to Self-Employment
Today, my jerk coworker showed up four hours late because he "overslept." He had to hand in a 1,000-word piece and, with a few hours left on the clock, he has 114 words in the document. Then he went into the backroom and just chilled on Reddit for an hour. He has eight things on his to-do list, and he's barely started the first one. This is a normal occurrence at least once or twice a week, and then he scrambles on the other days to try and catch up, so he can slack off later. It is infuriating. I would fire him if I could.
22. Working For The Weekend
My co-worker at a sandwich shop when I was 17 would “steal hours” by coming back to the store to clock himself out a couple of hours after he left. We made minimum wage and he was canned after the fourth time he did it. He took, at most, 40 dollars with that brilliant strategy.
22. Run, Coworker, Run
There is a woman that runs everywhere (inside an office building) for exercise. She runs through the aisles, to the bathroom, to the printer, to meetings. It makes the ground shake because we are on the second floor.
23. Red Redemption
I had a horrible supervisor once. I was working in the snack bar at a local Target, and we'd gone through a handful of employees who just didn't work out for whatever reason. Then, they hired this guy—I'll call him Red because he had reddish hair. He was to be a supervisor. He was probably in his late 20s, early 30s, somewhere around there. He was also a total jerk.
In case you don’t know, all the department leads at Target had walkie-talkies and headsets. Red had neither because we just didn't need them in the snack bar. Red, however, insisted that we did and threw a fit to multiple department leads, including the customer service lead, about it. Because of the store's location, we often had construction workers come in to grab a quick breakfast.
One of the construction workers who came in regularly for about two to three weeks was a lady, and Red decided to try and hit on her. When she told him she was married, he upped the ante. One day, she came in, and before she could even walk up to the counter, he reached out and grabbed her hand, trying to pull her towards him. Baaaad idea.
The next day, her husband, who was several inches taller, heavier, and more muscular than Red, came in and told him to leave his wife alone or he was gonna get it. Another time, Red started hitting on one of the pharmacists. She didn't want anything to do with him, so he followed her out to her car. When she locked the door and told him to get lost, he walked to the back of the car and started pushing up and down on the bumper.
This obviously freaked her out and she called the authorities. The absolute last straw was when he pulled a no-call, no-show. I'd left a note for our lead supervisor about his no-call, no-show and Red became absolutely furious at me. Like, screaming in my face, threatening to hit me. THAT got him fired. Why his other creepy behavior didn't, I’ll never know.
23. The Temps
Our temps are always an...interesting group of characters. Our current batch includes a girl with a wonky eye who openly tells people she's on dope and doesn't have custody of any of her kids and randomly interjects personal questions while you're working with her. This woman is always on her phone (against factory policy) and wanders away into the bathroom for long periods of time.
The other one everybody hates is a passive-aggressive terror of a lady who's catty towards all the other girls, then plays dumb and teases guys into doing her work for her. They are the worst.
24. It’s Always The Quiet Ones
We had an employee that was actively robbing local banks on his days off. I believe he hit eight to nine different banks before he got caught, and we only found out about it during an early morning FBI raid of the employee locker/break rooms, which was done in conjunction with a raid of his house. To say it was a shock was an understatement. He wasn’t even top 20 of my list of potential felonious employees.
24. Nature Made Him a Freak
"Wolverine" was a middle-aged balding guy who wore button-downs with torn off sleeves, and he had the top buttons opened to expose his manly chest hair. Oh, but it gets worse. He was a total perv who hit on an 18-year old me constantly and then called me a skank when I turned him down.
25. What Goes Around Comes Around
My boss at a tech company was incredibly awful to me. Among many other things, she made me do push-ups for every minute I was late due to public transportation delays—even though the delays were somewhat normal for the commute I had. For “team bonding,” she would take us out to drinks and proceed to get blacked out. She was also sleeping with two of the other people on my team.
There were multiple times at said “team bonding” events where she and one of my other colleagues disappeared into a bathroom...I brought up some of this with HR when I quit, but no one ever looked into it. All the same, she ended up getting fired a few years later due to harassment. Worst boss EVER.
25. Cool Story, Bro
We had some 20-something kid who was being let out of prison to work....he wore this shirt that said, "Cool story babe, make me a sandwich" every night. He never shut up; claimed he had his own business and would tell stories about how he ended up producing seven children by different women while still currently married to the first one.
26. The Jewel Mule
The critical items at our jewelry counter were anything over $500 and they had to be counted at the start and end of each shift. Well, items kept going missing, and one of the other employees complained that it was a certain lady stuffing it up her hot pocket. Security took her to the bathroom. It was true. She had a men's necklace shoved up there.
I can't imagine who she was going to give that to.
26. Brenda’s Got a Bad Job
Let me tell you about supervisor chef "Bob." We all hated Bob. Bob wasn't a team player, you see. When we were swamped, everyone would skip breaks, except for Bob. We would all help whoever was falling behind, except Bob. Bob did his own thing and left you to the wolves. Bob always pointed out what you did wrong.
Eventually Bob started helping me a little when I would fall behind. I thanked him once for grilling a steak for one of my orders, and I made the mistake of telling him that steaks are my weak spot, I had trouble cooking them just right. For weeks after that, he arranged it so that I cooked every single steak. Time passes and I become, not to brag, one of the competent employees. I noticed one night that Bob was jumping in to help me whenever I fell behind.
Bob would even ask what I wanted him to cover. Once I was working with him and I noticed Brenda was falling behind. Brenda is always falling behind. I was clear for a minute and told Bob that I was going to go help Brenda for a minute. Bob said no, Brenda has to learn how to do her job. She won't learn if we always do it for her.
And I saw Bob in a whole new light. He wasn't lazy, he just wanted us all to know our jobs. Once he knew anyone could handle anything, then he was quick to help out. He was, he admitted to me once, very bad at remembering who had taken breaks. He had no problem covering for a break, we just had to ask him instead of waiting for him to tell us to go. Now, Bob is gone. I was genuinely sad to see him go. Standards have fallen, and Brenda still is incapable of doing her job.
27. No Really, Pick On Somebody Your Own Size
I worked at a huge, well-known international company. There was this young, straight-out-of-college guy who we had just hired—as in, his first day had been the same week. He had moved from Eastern Europe to our corporate location. Cue company ski trip, with lots of free booze—some of his new colleagues who he thought were his "friends" told him that this woman was checking him out.
He started hitting on her, and mind you, he was already tipsy at that point. She told him to knock it off and that she wasn't interested. He kept being pushy. This large, scary dude beside the woman also told him to knock it off. He swung at the large, scary dude, and promptly found himself face first in the snow. The woman in question? Head of global HR. The large, scary dude? Head of global corporate security. The young schmuck? Fired.
27. The Dreaded Cat Lady
She isn’t hated. She's dreaded. This is the story of our work's crazy cat lady. So I work in a Best Buy-type of store. And we have company reps come in to teach us about products. We had this woman from HP. She came in on every other Friday. The moment she walked through the door I knew because my eyes would water. She smelt like she bathed in cat pee. She would have pee stains on her shirt. One time she had cat poop on her collar rubbing against her neck. I almost vomited.
28. Watch Your Mouth
I was a shift lead at a gas station. I had a customer tell me that one of my guys, who was like 80 years old, told him to “screw off” after the customer rolled his eyes at the price of an item. I talked to my guy because I was sure that, at the very least, the circumstances were different than the customer had claimed. Nope. It happened just like the customer said.
My guy apparently didn't realize his speaker was still turned on and said his spiel as soon as the customer's back was turned. The guy turned around and that started an even bigger verbal fight. I was mulling over what to do about it, but the very next morning, the employee showed up to work wasted, yelling about a bonus check that we owed him. That's when he got fired.
28. A Pack of Camels a Day Keeps the Coworkers Away
When my awful coworker gets any project that is slightly inconvenient, he screams “c'mon!!” followed by a series of curse words, as loud as he can. He smokes at least a pack of camels a day, complains loudly if people ask him to go outside, and his area is filthy. He drives a Hummer h3 with "Batchelor" on the back of it. (Yes, it's spelled like that. Incorrectly.) When his wife calls him, they argue with each other, and he always has his phone on speakerphone so the rest of the techs can hear their conversation in detail.
He's just an intentional jerk to everybody, he loves making people angry and saying things to get a response from bystanders.
29. Party On, Sue
I used to work as a night auditor at a hotel, and one day I was told that one of the daytime workers was fired. She was this really sweet older lady who worked part-time. It was really hard to get fired there, so I was very curious. I soon regretted finding out the answer. Several customers had complained about her, concerned that there was something very off.
She was slurring and just seemed very off that day. Management was also concerned, at first thinking there was a medical issue. After a few more incidents, they checked the cameras and found out she was taking shots of straight Smirnoff throughout her shift. Like, an absurd number of shots. I can't remember how much, but I remember being rather impressed that she could function in any capacity.
29. Señor Staples
You know those "rows" of staples you put in a stapler? Well, this coworker takes two of those, faces them against each other and rubs them between his fingers all day. It is worse than nails on a chalkboard, and he will not stop for anyone.
30. Out To Lunch
I worked for a staffing agency early in my career. One day, we got a call that one of our placements was taking his lunch break and not clocking out for it. Oh, and he was taking two-hour lunch breaks. Also, he brought in his George Foreman grill and cooked for himself in a highly flammable warehouse. So many crazy stories from that place…
30. The Coworker with Nine Lives
The guy isn't exactly hated, it just astounds all of us how he can continue to be employed here after all his mess-ups. Stuff that any one of us would get fired for (most likely) but he continues to clock in each day. Examples: took a customer car that was in storage and put about 100 miles on the car. He had no permission from us or the customer to take it. He almost set the whole one side of our workshop on fire because he decided to overload the circuits.
He has detailed customers' cars for cash deals from them all while using our shop space and supplies. He has been seen skateboarding (and failing with epic falls) in the workshop when guys are working on customer cars. This is all on video from security footage. He sits in this little side office that the detail guys use and smokes pot, and the smell is so strong I have walked past and wondered how customers haven't noticed. The only thing we can come up with is that he has something on someone higher up and will blab if he gets fired.
31. The Wrong Man
My boss lost an internal power struggle and was soon fired. The official reason given was that he was submitting doctored expense reports. I wasn’t promoted, but was still given all of his responsibilities...plus I inherited his administrative assistant. Suddenly, charges for car service, local hotels, and local stores appeared on my corporate credit card.
I asked the assistant about the charges and she gave me an explanation that was plausible but that I knew wasn’t accurate. So I called the credit card company and contested the charges until they provided more information. I also started doing some of my own research on the charges. That's when it all became frighteningly clear. Turns out, the assistant was a drinker who lived with her dog in the local hotel—a hotel that I was getting charged for.
She was also having the car service pick up her booze at the local store and deliver it to her at the hotel. Why? Apparently, her dog had a nervous condition and he liked that hotel. He would get upset if she went out to the store after she got back from work, so she used the car service so she wouldn’t leave and upset the dog. She charged the expenses to our corporate cards because we “owed” her for making her come to work and leave her dog alone.
I got her fired and successfully fought the credit card charges. Even though I found the person actually committing the expense report problems, my boss was still considered “fired for cause” because he signed those expense reports.
31. Sleeping on the Job
He's not here anymore, thank god, but let me tell you about this stain on society's behind. For reference, I work in a "troubled youth" therapeutic center. My worst coworker refused to get a key to the gate that led to half of all the buildings, of which he most commonly went to. When asked why not, he would just say that "that's what I have you guys for" and expect us to escort him around whenever he needed to go anywhere.
He was frequently late clocking into work. He fell asleep on the job almost every night, but the people in charge couldn't get rid of him because we're so horribly understaffed, and the kids liked him. When confronted by other staff, he got defensive and told us to mind our own business. He rarely ever wore the company uniform, he almost always wore awful sports jackets over a long sleeve shirt.
One night I was paired with him, and I'd had enough. I wrote him a note (so as not to alert the kids as to what was going on) that said if he fell asleep that I would report him to our supervisors. He literally began harassing me, calling me trash, saying that I have no life, I should just take my own life, etc. Nobody misses you, Jordan.
32. A Bad Egg
I just fired an intern because he thought it'd be funny to smack one of the girls on the butt...except, that was just the tip of the iceberg. Upon further investigation, she had been having anxiety coming to work because he would ask all sorts of ridiculously inappropriate questions. For example, he once asked her if she had a good weekend.
When she told him yes or some plain answer, he then asked her if it was because she slept with her boyfriend a lot. Needless to say, her anxiety was warranted and we fired him as soon as we could. The mood in my group seems a bit more relaxed this week...
32. World of Workcraft
We had a guy who would come in nightly with his gaming laptop, put in both earbuds, and play WOW all night. He did not help with nightly chores to prepare for morning unless asked, and got upset when you did. In crisis situations, he would stand at the front door for a little bit, then wander off into the staff office sometimes, doing who knows what.
We've currently got another guy with similar behaviors, except instead of a laptop, he just sits in front of the TV all night watching whatever sports he can find. I've been called to crisis situations where he's there with his nose in his phone, doing nothing.
33. Everybody Has A Breaking Point
This was shortly before I joined the company. I'm the dispatcher for a local food delivery service. Anyway, we had this driver and she apparently decided enough was enough one day. The complaint was that she was an hour late and was very confrontational and messy. While being sternly reprimanded, we got another call from the customer.
They had opened the order, only to find mashed up a French fry and ketchup soup that she had made of a kid’s meal in the order. The chicken fingers were also eaten down to the burnt ends. They got a full refund and were offered a fresh meal brought by another driver, but they refused. When we confronted the original driver, her reply was “What? I was hungry. The fat little porker who answered the door could have missed a meal or two. What are you going to do? Fire me?"
She then tried to sue for discrimination because she claimed she was fired because she was gay.
33. Hang Up
Beverly. She is super uptight about everyone doing exactly their own tasks. One time, she was standing RIGHT OUTSIDE the staff office when the phone rings. I was on my way back from the bathroom and figured she'd get it, right? Nope. She coldly said, "I believe that phone is for you" and watched as I ran down the hall to get it. Screw you, Bev.
34. It’s Not A Good Fit
I ran an in-house training course, and an apprentice from another department was sent along to see if she’d be a good fit for the job. It was a small room lined with computers along three walls, with me and a projector at the front. We had lots of practical examples to work on throughout the day, so each person sat at a computer for the duration.
We all agreed on a 30-minute lunch break, but she demanded a longer lunch as she had “things to do.” I declined her 1.5-hour lunch break, and she took it anyway. She then used her computer to apply for another job during the practical part of the course. She had chosen a computer at the back, so I couldn't see what was on her screen from my position at the front—or, at least, she thought.
I paused to get everyone’s attention but she was so engrossed in what she was doing that she didn’t notice. I let the silence hang, which usually works to get people looking up sheepishly, but she still didn’t notice. Everyone in the course was now looking at her screen and we could all see she was applying for another job. We got through the course and I reported her to her manager, who fired her.
She left the company a negative Facebook review naming me as someone who harassed her because of her mental health.
34. Give Me a Break
There is a lady by the name of Katina. She is heavily addicted to nicotine, and will complain to anyone who will listen about not getting her smoke break. Lady, we're understaffed and kids are literally always going off somewhere. Deal with it. Last month she brought up how she doesn't get long enough cig breaks, and how it's a "very big problem." Everyone was glaring at her from all around the room, it was pretty hilarious.
35. Full Of Hot Air
I’m a mechanic. I had a co-worker who would poke a hole into customers’ tires just so they would come back and buy more—yes, he did it to new tires as well. We finally caught him one day after I found it odd that it was only the customers he put tires on that kept coming back for more tires. At first, I thought maybe he wasn't putting enough air into them, so I kind of hawk-eyed him without him knowing.
Sure enough, he would put the tire on the rim, and then he would put a small slit with his pocket knife into the tread on the tire. Caught him red-handed. Fired on the spot. Screw you, Brett.
35. Sneezasaurus
Lady who sneezes louder than a jet hitting Mach 2 directly over your head. She sneezes at random, striking when no one is expecting it and sending children running for their mothers. She adds an extra scream at the end of her sneeze, not only to make sure you heard her, but to prove to you how painful it was for her to deliver such an overwhelming explosion out of her mouth.
Even when people scream "JESUS CHRIST WOMAN," she never stops. She's the horror in the night, and she sits right behind my desk. She strikes when you least expect, and causes enough damage to destroy entire files, hours of work and preparation, all out the window because of a sneeze.
36. All Signs Point To “Fired”
I managed a girl who was a loose cannon. She was a drinker who had multiple appointments every week. Psych, physio, solicitors, all of it. She was constantly disappearing from work at random hours for like half a day, and as her drinking intensified, she would show up stinking of booze. I’m a former drinker and the same age, so I tried my best with her.
Anyway, she was on the long stretch towards getting performance-managed, but she sped it up herself. We shared a building with the council and knew all of the staff, including the council rangers who patrol the streets and give tickets, etc. One morning, on her way to work, she saw a street sign she wanted to take to give to a friend (I cannot tell you why).
She pulled a screwdriver from her bag (why she had it, again, I cannot say) and unscrewed it while standing on a milk crate…in front of one of the rangers. She then brought it into the office, told everyone, and asked another staff member to hide it for her in case a ranger came looking for it. Then she also put photos of it on Instagram with the office and company signage in the background.
We had a meeting planned that day about her absenteeism and she told me about her little crime too because she thought it was a good laugh. Anyway, it took a few days, but she quit when HR started investigating.
36. Sneaky Bible Study
There is a woman who is in a position of managing a lot of new hires (but they only work under her for a few months). Every time she gets a new group, she invites them over to her house for dinner. They always go, because they are new hires right out of college, and she is their boss. Then, after dinner, she busts out the bibles and has a bible study. Without telling them beforehand.
37. High On Your Own Supply
I worked an administrative job and a new hire came in. We thought something was up with him as he was always spaced out, but we decided maybe he was just settling in. Then, one day, he called in sick only to turn up five minutes later...having no recollection of our conversation, he went up the stairs to the office and walked straight into a wall.
When he got to his desk, he watched sports on his computer which facing the whole office. We asked him to highlight some lines on a page and he colored the whole page in instead. We told our boss we thought he was on something. The boss thought we were exaggerating—that is until he kept doing things like this and we had to let him go.
We later found out he was a dealer selling out of his bedroom.
37. What’s That Smell?
We have a girl who stinks. Absolutely reeks. I can't even identify what it is...it's like body odor combined with...I don't know...rotting meat? And the bosses have gently brought it up many times. It’s not a secret. But if it was just that we could live with it. Unfortunately, she's also a terrible person. She regularly says awful things, but one day she went to another level.
She told our innocent 19-year-old junior staff member that since her boyfriend was going into the Navy, he must be gay. Also, if she wanted to try illicit substances in a “safe” way then come over to her house, and she'd help her. Great stuff.
38. Wasn’t Me
I only know of this because it involved myself. I was a new hire at a security company, and I’d only been there about four months, give or take. One week, I was given a new assignment with a couple of other guys on rotation. Someone who got hired a week or so before I did gave me the obligatory tour of the site and pointed out some hot spots.
They showed me some key equipment that needed an eye on them, etc. Less than a week of shifts go by, and the same guy offered me a bump. I declined. Then, just over a month later, I had a perfectly fine shift with no issues. About an hour before my next shift started, my boss called me up, furious at me. Obviously confused, I got to the place early.
Well, the place had been turned over. The equipment is gone, the fence is busted wide open, the works. One of the on-site trailers has been broken into where just over a grand was taken from a safe I knew nothing about because it was always locked. Still, I was blamed as the culprit. It took less than five minutes of conversation with the boss to get it ironed out.
See, not only had stuff gone missing from this place, but other stuff had gone missing from other sites the other guy had been to before. For example, one of the things that were taken was towable, and they found it in the guy's driveway. He might as well have dipped his hands in red paint. Needless to say, he didn't work for that company after that.
38. A Reprehensible Teacher
My coworkers and I despise this one woman we work with. She's a special education teacher and she mocks her student's disabilities behind their back.
39. Don’t Mix Business With Pleasure
I was working for an agency in New York City, and we went to a series of client meetings for starting a new project in Boston. One of the project managers who worked for the same agency in the LA office flew in and joined us for the week-long meetings with the customer. He was a super nice guy who did his homework and gave really good presentations.
Everyone liked him. After wrapping the meetings the whole week, I flew back to New York that Friday. The next week, there were supposed to be video conferences with the client, but they sent an email at the last minute saying that they are canceling all the meetings. Well, none of us thought much about it and carried on with the day. Until we found out the chilling reason for the drop.
In the evening, we learned from our boss that this “super nice” guy had sent his intimate photos to one of the female members of our client group. None of us could believe this, but it turned out to be completely true.
39. The Guy You Can’t Get Rid Of
This guy who is kind of condescending and overcomplicates things. He thinks very highly of himself and a while back was always whining about wanting promotions but never getting them, because there were more deserving people. Earlier this year he finally got his promotion, but then got a job offer, negotiated to stay with our company AND THEN LEFT. Less than six months after he left he was begging to return. They re-hired him and he asked for ANOTHER promotion (two within a year). They turned him down.
40. You Can’t Hide
I was a production control analyst in a call center about 10 years ago. I saw and heard more than you'd probably believe, and helped to term out more people than I will ever be comfortable with. The most insane but true complaint came from the housekeeping staff. The janitor walked up to me one day and said, "I got to close the men's restroom for a bit. I don't know who done it, but you need to find him.”
Someone had smeared poop all over the walls in there. It took some detective work, but we found him; a guy had been hiding his mental issues when he started work there, and apparently, he hadn't been taking his medications in a while because he didn't want us to find out, even though he had insurance through us. So he went nuts and started smearing his own poop all over the restrooms.
There were apparently some other aberrations that led us to him and were listed as the actual behavioral reasons for his termination, but I never got the details.
40. The Out of Touch IT Guy
We had an IT guy for our department who was so out of touch with tech that he would simply refuse to work with ANY Mac products. He needed two more years to retire and just didn't care. His favorite activity was mouth-breathing in the secretary's cubicle and leering at all the women in the office.
41. Hope It Was Worth It
When I worked at Sam’s Club, one of the cashiers pocketed a few grand from his drawer and put it on Facebook. We were a new club, so if that much money went missing, it would have taken them a while to figure it out. Or so I was told. However, one of the managers overheard and they put two and two together. He was fired and then put behind bars.
41. The Juicer
There was this guy that I worked with, who will be called Toby. At the time, I worked in a manufacturing plant, and we started work at 5 AM. Toby was originally a temp, and I was fresh into the job, not even a week. Toby would show up late to work nearly every day, around 8 AM. He was decent to talk to...until he started a crazy new diet. All of a sudden, he was extremely into juicing carrots, beets, etc. He kept pressuring me to buy a juicer from him. Then he got worse.
A few days later, he was having issues weighing some stuff and asked me to come hold the bag open, so he could finish up the batch. As the product starts to overflow onto the floor, Toby realizes his scale was in kilograms and the recipe was in lbs. As soon as the manager sees this bag of now ruined product, Toby quickly declares that I was the one responsible. After throwing me under the bus, he tells me I could lose some weight and tries to get me to buy a juicer from him. Unreal.
42. Five Second Rule
One of my current co-workers told me this story the other day: He used to be a manager at a fast-food restaurant. He said that one night, after a busy rush, a woman called his store to complain that her fried food item had hair all over it. The manager denied this claim and assured the lady that the food items had never been in contact with hair, and would never have left the store in a dirty manner.
He backed his store and employees all the way and insisted that the woman was mistaken. Upon further investigation, one of the kitchen employees admitted that she had dropped a food item on the floor that night and didn’t want to risk having the customer wait an extra five minutes to make a new one. So yeah, very hairy burger, order up.
42. You’re Allowed to Have a Bad Day
The woman who makes it her sole priority to find out what's wrong if you’re having a bad day. As if you’re going to help and no, being a mom doesn't give you special abilities to cheer someone up. Leave me alone.
43. Feedback Welcome
I was reviewing employee evaluations at a Fortune 500 company, and one of them complimented an employee for improving as “he hadn't yet eaten any glue this quarter.” I thought it was a mean joke about his intelligence, so I went to the manager and asked if there was a way she could cut the insults. Manager: “It's not an insult. I caught him eating glue twice last year. Wrote him up for it, too. He's the reason the folks in documents have had to switch to different glue types.”
In these same comment evaluations, I found a comment card in our suggestions box that said, "Improve your seafood selection! Your trout made me sick!" We were a hardware store. The boss mentioned it at the next store meeting, laughing and taking bets on which customer left it and which store she'd mistaken us for. Marko, one of the assistant managers, went white as a sheet.
Boss: “What's the matter, Marko? Trout got your tongue?” Marko: “Umm, no, but that might have been me. I told a couple of customers about all the fish I caught on my vacation, and one of them asked if I'd caught any trout.” So he sold them some trout.
43. For the Love of Fish
There is an older guy at my place, who is a senior developer. He is knowledgeable, dependable, consistent, realistic, has a grasp of the projects he is working on, and is a hard-working engineer. He'd be a good coworker, except for one thing. Every single day, exactly at 1 PM, he enters our kitchen, which is exactly in the center of the floor, with straight corridors leading to every corner of the office, and sits down to eat his lunch. Fishes. Canned fish, fish in sandwich, fish soups, he even microwaves fish. For Christ's sake, every single person in the building hates his guts to the bitter end.
44. Surf And Turfed
I once had a co-worker selling our shrimp from the dumpster. He picked them out after brunches, popped a few on a skewer, and then sold them in the bars that night. He eventually got caught in a bar with the manager, and the CCTV caught him dumpster diving.
44. Useless Knowledge
From her long and loud personal phone calls during work, I know how many pushes her daughter needed for labor, how much she's in debt, how her son-in-law is borderline abusive, and the grooming schedule for her dog (Peaches). But here's the worst part: her ringtone is a CAT MEOWING.
45. A Hard Day’s Work
I spent my summers in college working as a laborer for a construction company. We were doing a bunch of renovations in an active hospital, so noise and dust were a huge concern. We were a small crew and just starting renovations on an area with a super tight schedule, so the company hired a subcontractor for some of the work. Enter these two clowns who showed up to do some demolition work.
The foreman gave them the talk about how they may be used to doing things a certain way, but as they would be working in an active hospital, he'd rather the work take longer than for them to make a huge mess or a lot of noise. An hour later, we apparently got multiple complaints about the noise and the mess, so the foreman called me up and told me to go over there and clean up. He also said he'd be by shortly to see what the heck was going on.
These dudes had dust and broken pieces of wall everywhere. I could hear them halfway down the hall, just smashing away without a care in the world. The foreman showed up and we walked into the room to witness this dude standing on a pile of rubble, swinging a sledgehammer over his head at a brick wall that he'd removed the bottom. Somehow, the rest of the wall was still hanging from the ceiling...I have no idea how.
The guy wasn't even wearing a hard hat, apparently oblivious that at any moment that wall might give way and crush him. The foreman lost his mind on these guys. He kicked them out immediately and got on the phone with their company and told them he didn't want to see these guys on-site again. Lots of choice four-letter words were used, and he even threatened to fire the subcontractor entirely and get someone else to do the work.
45. Communication is Key
Far and away the most hated person in my carpentry shop is the deaf guy. I've only been working there a year and everyone thinks he is the most vindictive, hateful, selfish, paranoid jerk to walk the earth. He's also easily the hardest worker there. I can tell you with confidence that he has generated the most money for the company out of anyone on staff.
He absolutely OWNS his portion of the shop. He has it down like clockwork and doesn't waste a second. All that being said, he throws an absolute rabid fit whenever anything out of routine happens, and he won't look anyone in the eye, and he calls everyone lazy jerks. I found a solution, though. I started to learn ASL (American Sign Language). I'd sign "Happy Monday" and "how are you" to him. Pretty soon he's teaching me a word a day. Fast-forward a year and we talk constantly.
That's when I learned the truth. He gets mad because he's been passed up for promotions because he's deaf. People don't tell him when overtime is available which he wants. He sees people coming in late and taking breaks, and he NEVER breaks those rules. I unknowingly became his liaison. He stopped fighting with people. He's able to get all of the jokes we tell at lunch because I can translate. He can joke back through me. Other people are learning sign language as time goes on too.
What I don't get is why no one ever gave him the benefit of the doubt. It would suck to be deaf and never know what was going on. Some people have worked with him for 15+ years and no one ever learned any ASL. He thanked me recently for being a good friend. He said things are a lot better now.
46. Toxic Environment
I had a number of complaints about a new member of staff soon after she started. They said that she kept taking off her shoes, pulling dry skin from her feet, and eating it. I thought the other staff was lying and being mean about her just because they didn't like her...Until I saw her do it. She didn't finish the week, but not because we fired her.
She quit about a week later. She didn't really get on with the other staff because they all thought she was a bit gross, and she quickly got into a bad mood because of it. That said, I'm not entirely blaming her. It’s a small group of staff, and they all collectively decide pretty quickly if they like or dislike someone. If they decide they like you, you're golden.
If they decide they don't like you, however, you are shut out. By all of them. It’s quite a brutal environment psychologically. She got cold-shouldered pretty quickly, and left before the week was out.
46. The Pretentious Mr. Magoo
He is no longer working with us, but he is still legendary to this day. I will refer to him as Magoo. Magoo and I both started at the same time in a science-based company, but in different departments. He looked really good on paper, well qualified, and interviewed fairly well (from what I was told). I sat next to him and we began chatting.
It quickly became clear that something was wrong with him. He would giggle to himself during the conversation, and immediately began one-upping me in the conversation, saying how he had something better or knew more about what we were talking about. Not a big deal, I work with scientists and engineers, being one myself, and odd personalities are the norm.
Within a day or two, I knew that I was not going to enjoy my time with Magoo. Our office has a tradition of getting bagels and cream cheese every Friday as a sort of reward for a long week. I get in at 8:30, Magoo is already munching happily on a loaded bagel and giggling to himself. Not a big deal either. But an hour later, I see Magoo eating another bagel, then fifteen minutes later, ANOTHER. I confront him and tell him you can't eat 3 bagels before some people have had one. He brushes it off and tries to pretend like he didn't know he had done it. This guy is in his 30s by the way.
The worst part of being around him is that he takes over EVERY conversation he is in, and he makes sure he is in EVERY conversation. He will literally walk up to a group of people, no matter what they are talking about, laughing like he heard something funny, and then interject with how he knows more about it or is an expert at it. It got to the point that we would avoid him at all costs, or just leave when he came around. It didn't matter to Magoo, he would follow you and talk about his knowledge anyway.
He began to get bolder. He interrupted the CEO of our company during an important meeting to correct him on a detail that didn't matter. He once ordered over $10,000 in materials for an experiment that he wasn't authorized to work on. The last straw was when he started insulting people if they disagreed with him, including his boss.
At this point, most people wouldn't even respond to him when he spoke to them, and most people just left when he came around, even in mid-sentence. How he lasted three months is beyond me, but the day he was fired, we were told to stay out of the offices in case he did anything drastic. After he was gone, he asked his boss for a reference.
47. You Don’t Need It Where You’re Going
The cemetery director was selling plots, pocketing the money ($750), then selling the same plots to other families. The other families would show up ready to bury their deceased, only to find the graves already being used. He got away with it for a year.
47. The Office Martyr
This person does "favors" for people consisting of doing things no one asked for. Such as choosing a schedule because they think you'd prefer the one they didn't take, or talking to the boss about something "for you" so they can "defend" what you did. Then they act like you owe them for these things. On top of that they constantly do things outside of policy and act like a victim or martyr when they get into trouble.
48. Let’s Go To The Tape
A colleague checked out of the mediocre but adequate hotel where we were having a conference and checked into a 5-star luxury resort. She then submitted an expense report for her stay. She claimed that she felt unsafe in the original hotel, but did not elaborate. Someone called the hotel, which checked the security camera footage. We all thought she was crazy, but we were proven way wrong.
At least four separate men tried to enter her room that first night. No wonder she left.
48. Ruining All the Good Things
Tim was the guy everybody hated; he was lucky we all felt bad for his quirks. Every working day Tim punched in exactly at 8:00 AM and out at 5:00 PM, in between those hours you were lucky if you saw him working. Because of him we no longer have Secret Santa during the holidays, catered monthly lunches, or Holiday Bonuses.
Secret Santa: Tim was quite frugal, and when I say quite, I mean he was as cheap as it gets. But still, the recommended spend for Secret Santa was $50. When people started opening presents, it was clear that everybody went over that amount. Tim received a pair of tickets to a Dodgers Baseball game plus some Dodgers T-shirts and a hat. When it came down for Tim to give his gift, I watched in horror. He gave his desk-mate Jesse, who was the sweetest, most polite, quiet girl in the office, the most inappropriate gift. When she opened it, I wanted to die. He got her lingerie. Not just any lingerie, crotchless panties and matching bra. HR had a hay-day with that one.
Catered Lunch: Tim got so upset that he couldn't have Mexican food every single week that he raised a huge stink and made our bosses cancel the entire program.
Holiday Bonuses: This is what got the ball rolling for Tim's demise. Our company manufactured steel products and shipped them to different distribution warehouses. Nobody in our office worked in sales, so nobody had commission-based pay. Every year before our 2-week holiday vacation we received our last checks for the year and a bonus.
The bonus was a percentage of the profits divided up between all employees. It was great. Who doesn't like more money right before the holiday season? Tim, that's who. This particular year had been a bad one for us, profits were down 10% due to one of our distributors filing bankruptcy. So our bonuses were not as big as before, but they still equated to a paycheck's value.
Everyone, other than Tim, was ecstatic they were still receiving bonuses. When Tim opened his check, insanity broke loose. I've never seen someone so angry about a bonus check in my life. First he goes around asking everyone how much they received (we all received the same amount), but nobody wanted to show him their check.
Then he tries to talk to his desk-mates about receiving less than last year and this is where it goes downhill. Everyone he asks tells him they received more than last year's amount. You can see where this is going now. After everyone's gone for the day and a few of us stay to clean up the Holiday Party mess, Tim rushes to the company owner and yells at him about how low the bonus was.
After the holidays, we're told that our branch's bonus program was canceled. Everybody knew why. A month later Tim finally got fired after his poor desk-mate Jesse revealed that he'd been harassing her pretty much non-stop. Last I heard he moved to Kansas to live closer to his family.
49. Imperfect Strangers
I found out that this guy was stalking a female employee. We worked at a 24-hour retailer and she was a morning shift worker while he was a night shift worker. Basically, there was no way they knew each other. Then, one day, I was filling in for a different manager and he came into the break room, taking pictures of the morning shift schedule.
I asked him why and he told me some story about another employee who just wanted him to send their schedule to them. I came in on my day off later that week during the day shift and caught him staring at her from a different aisle while she was stocking. She had no idea. The full story was so creepy, though. He would follow her home and watch her house and all that.
She was 17, he was 38. I called the authorities and had him escorted off the property. I also helped her get in touch with the right resources for a restraining order. He ended up violating the order multiple times and the last I heard, he’s behind bars.
49. Larry David Would Hate This Guy
We have this goober of a guy who works probably one full day a week. I actually get surprised if I don't have an email in my inbox in the morning of him saying he won't be in. Worst of all though, he sits nearest to the bathroom and makes comments like, “WOW you were in there a long time! Must've been a number two?!” when people come out.
50. The Doctor Is Out
I used to work at a rural hospital in Texas. We had a surgeon who was always asking the assisting nurses to leave the OR to get some random supplies. Fun fact: you are never supposed to have only one person in the OR, but he would always figure out some way. These were minimally invasive surgeries that just required sedation, so there were no other assists besides nurses.
He was the only physician. The door would also “mysteriously” lock and the nurse would have to knock to get back in. One of our nurses got fed up and knew something was going on, so she set up her phone to video him. That footage still haunts me to this day. It turned out he had been taking his, uh, “manhood” out around the patient. He was of course fired, but horrifically, he did not lose his license.
51. I Don’t Like The Cut Of His Jib
This guy was teasing another employee really, really badly. Like, American high school movies in the '80s badly. The reason? He was from out of town. That was it. I thought there HAD to be more to the drama, so I went to the location, interviewed a few people, watched it happen myself, and…yeah, it seemed like this guy could NOT take the fact that this kid was from another state.
I was absolutely expecting the sort of drama that location was more famous for—like baby daddies, sleeping with someone’s wife, etc. But nope…
Sources: Reddit,
