March 26, 2019 | Eul Basa

People Share The Most Shocking Thing Their Colleagues Have Gotten Away With At Work


We've all worked with at least one person who got away with something on the job that no one else would have. Whether it was a simple mistake or an outright act of defiance, this coworker was somehow able to get out of a seemingly doomed situation.

Perhaps they were close to someone in upper management or were simply luckier than everyone else in the office. For whatever reason, they escaped the cold clutches of unemployment with aplomb. Here are stories from internet users detailing the crazy thing they saw a coworker get away with at work even though they shouldn't have.

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Don't forget to check the comment section below the article for more interesting stories!

#1 Punishment For Everyone

One girl stole money from the bags in the locker room. Instead of firing her, they just took the door off the room and put in a camera. Now we have to show up to work in uniform with a shirt over it. It's very hot and I end up sweating buckets by the time I get to work.

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#2 Information Gone Forever

I worked at a web hosting tech support company. A coworker accidentally deleted another customer's website. This was on a Unix system, so it wasn't possible to undo the delete. He deleted the command history to cover his mistake and then told the customer that the website was lost due to a hard drive failure. The customer hadn't been keeping backups and said that he lost his entire livelihood.

The employee told management about the situation and they ran with it to avoid getting sued. They told the customer that hardware issues sometimes happen and because he hadn't opted into our managed backup services, the data loss was on him. They offered the customer several months of free web hosting as compensation and the problem went away. A week after seeing this play out, I put in my two-weeks notice.

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#3 Once Is Okay

He used his corporate credit card on over $10,000 in personal purchases. He was reprimanded, but not fired OR made to pay the company back. Within the next year, he did the exact same thing. Only then did he get fired.

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#4 A Cruel World

I worked at a school for kids who need emotional support. We had a classroom aide who would scream at the kids until they cried and then actively mock them for crying. It sucked to work in a place that allowed abusive behavior to happen. She was close friends with the principal. It's very hard to help a child when they learn from a young age that adults aren't able to make things better and are capable of incredibly mean things.

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#5 Ballsy And Stupid

A coworker of mine forged a document then lied about not forging it. One partner at the firm wanted her fired, but another one didn't, so the forger stayed.

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#6 Hard At Work Or Hardly Working?

We had a sales guy who was generally not expected to be in the office for most days. He was supposed to be out making sales but he just never did. At one point, he had been working at the company for a year, and he asked me, the tech-savvy receptionist, how to enroll a new customer in our system. We were pretty sure he had another full time job.

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#7  Hockey's More Important, Apparently

I work as a paramedic and firefighter. This happened at my last job. One of the medics on ambulance duty wanted to leave for a few hours one night to go play a hockey game. Normally, it was no big deal. We had enough people on duty that someone from the fire truck could just slide over for a few hours. He wanted to leave around 8 p.m.

Cut to 7:30 p.m.—the fire truck goes out to fight a fire. We come back around 10:30 p.m. Pulling in, we notice that his car is gone. The dude just left. There was no one to cover his spot. He didn’t even tell the other guy on ambulance duty. He simply walked out to his car and left to go play hockey. Thank God there were no calls in that time frame.

This guy had a long, documented past of doing really dumb things. Somehow, he skated by this one. He even tried throwing every member of the crew under the bus instead of taking the blame.

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#8 When You're The Best At What You Do

At a previous job, we had an "employee" who was called in to clean on an as-needed basis. The employee, who we will call Fred, owed a lot of child support. After an unusually long break of not working, we called in Fred to clean the workplace. I think he expected to be paid under the table because when he was given a paycheck, it was darn near zero from all the back-due child support he owed. He literally started screaming, swearing, calling the boss every name you can think of, punching the walls and threatening to light up the place.

Despite all that, the boss still calls him back to work as needed to clean because he "is really good at cleaning."

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#9 Actual Fire But Not Fired

He liked throwing ice cubes into the deep fryer. He'd stand far enough away that he wouldn't get splashed, which made it a complete surprise to the person working the fryer. It kind of causes a mini explosion of bubbles in the molten grease, which splashes everywhere and makes a mess.

When this got too boring, he started stealing kids meal toys and chucking them into the fryer. It took longer for them to start melting, and if he couldn't get them out, we had to turn the thing off for the rest of the day because it takes hours for the machine to cool off. I can't remember what it was that he threw, but it caught on fire and he ended up pulling it out with a pair of metal tongs. He threw it in the sink, turned on the water and made an even BIGGER FIRE. Did he get burned? Yes. Did he get fired? No. Did he do it again? Sort of. I think he went back to ice cubes after that.

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#10 Exploitative Behavior

I worked a terrible retail job near the University for a bit. The store manager was asking a young employee out on dates and she turned him down. In retaliation, he secretly docked hours off of her paycheck for a few months, and it took forever for her to notice. When she told the store owner, they back-paid her and the store manager kept his job.

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#11 Coasting Along

I worked with a guy who literally had no job. He was a "studio supervisor" but there was no activity in the studio to supervise because the studio had effectively become non-operational. He coasted for a full eight years at this job. He would come in the morning, open his email, get coffee, gossip and complain about the industry for an hour, leave for an hour, come back for lunch, leave for another three hours, come back, send a few emails and then officially leave for the day. It was infuriating and majestic.

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#12 Nope, Can't Today

A guy I worked with ran a food truck into an airplane. When they tested him for illicit substances, his results were positive. They didn't fire him, but they started going to his house every week to keep up regular testing. He was still employed when I transferred from that airport.

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#13 Promotion Undeserved

My boss forged my name on a number of documents because she didn't have the required certifications to sign the documents herself. She went through with this even though I constantly refused to sign them. I know this because after things went horribly south, they tried to claim I was the one who screwed up. The worst part is, even after they found out she was behind the forging, she still got promoted again. You will never guess whose mother owned the company.

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#14 Naptime At Work

I was brand new on the job. My new coworker came up to me on a weekend shift and said, "I was up really late last night, I'm gonna go lay down for a few minutes." Three hours later, he woke up and came out to work again. In the interim, one of the people we worked for found him asleep and told my boss. He got a warning.

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#15 Missing Meds

I work in the healthcare field. I had one coworker who had a LOT of liquid narcotics with off counts after every shift. Somehow he did not get fired or even investigated. He wound up quitting after just a few months, good riddance.

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#16 Aww, I Bet She Was Up Late

I worked from home at my last job and my coworker would sometimes not log in until like 11 a.m. She would just completely skip meetings that she was supposed to run, too. One time she missed a meeting with our boss and my boss just said, “Well, I bet she was up late working.”

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#17 Extremely Expensive Trash

I had eight servers delivered very late and left outside of the data center. Everything was in boxes on a pallet.

The janitor thought it was trash and took all of them to the trash compactor. Each box weighed 80+ pounds; they weren’t ours but a company we contracted with owned them.

We had to buy all new servers and the guy didn’t even get a write-up. He had a family member on the board.

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#18 He Wins In A Headbutt

My coworker cracked the casing of the most expensive piece of equipment in the lab by headbutting it. He had major anger issues. He was a team leader for that section.

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#19 Waitress Walked Away

I worked at a chain restaurant and this one server had decided she had enough. She walked out in the middle of her shift while she was still waiting on tables. Then, she showed up the next day as if nothing happened. She didn't get fired. She didn't get written up. She didn't get warned.

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#20 Tyrannical Boss

I'm leaving the job partially for this reason. My manager speaks to all the employees like they are idiots. Despite multiple HR reports, she still works here. She talks down to people and belittles them. She makes decisions and tells people to do things just to throw her weight around. And rather than letting people take sick days, she makes them take personal days. When people try to call when they are legitimately sick, she tries to make them feel bad.

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#21 Wrong Way To Collect

We had a guy in our collections department show up tipsy at a customer's apartment at 3 a.m., screaming and beating on the guy's door. The dude's payment for the month was comped, but the employee didn't get so much as a write-up.

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#22 Should Have Known Better

A guy named Jack drove an oversized company vehicle into a garage that was too short for it. It peeled back the roof like a sardine can. He'd driven this vehicle before. He even parked it beside the other oversized company vehicles right outside the parking garage.

Jack got transferred to another department. When he goofed up something in the new department, he got transferred again. He never got fired.

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#23 Dangerous Curiosity

The car dealership I worked at had an automated garage door that opened REALLY fast and closed REALLY fast. The shop had AC and heat, so they didn’t want to waste either.

One time, two mechanics went up to the door. One of them stood under the door and proceeded to instruct the other one to push the manual override close button so that it would close on his head. He wanted to see what it would feel like. He ended up breaking the motor and costing the shop $15,000, plus whatever medical bills he may have procured. Not fired.

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#24 Managerial Privileges

My store manager got caught adding hours he didn't work to his time card. He got a reprimand and they removed the ability for managers to edit their own hours.

About a month later, he got caught using another manager's login to add more hours he didn't work. He simply got another slap on the wrist. He is still working at the same place.

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#25 Dare Refused

I had a coworker who sat down across from our supervisor, explicitly refused to do his job, then dared the supervisor to fire him. It was the most incredible meeting I've ever witnessed. He was not fired and quit on his own for a new job.

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#26 Shuffling Numbers

I was a sales manager, salaried with our yearly bonus mainly based on making the budget. Another manager whose district was south of mine was about 25K short of making his numbers for the year, so he placed an order for a large corporate customer (several pallets worth of products weighing well over a ton). He had it shipped to a storage facility, all without the customer knowing, let alone agreeing to it. After the new year, he returned it for credit, but not before the customer was invoiced and raised hell over it. Yet he kept his job, made his number, and got his bonus.

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#27 Dozing On Union Time

I had a coworker who repeatedly slept at work. I was never like, a two-minute doze off, either—I’m talking hours. He has been caught multiple times. He was even filmed twice by a new hire. But the union won’t let him be touched, not even with a suspension.

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#28 Just Improve Your Performance

We do community-based skills for children with severe emotional disturbances. Many of these kids are also DCS-involved. A coworker of mine told a four-year-old with a severe emotional disturbance to “stop being a little witch" or her parents won’t ever get clean for her. She said it because she was screaming and crying in the car. This happened to at least two other clients of hers that I know of. She was given a performance improvement plan.

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#29 Just "Being Nice"

While working at a utility brokerage as a call center agent, I worked with this girl who would literally just email our boss at the end of the day to take credit for the work I did.

Our boss lived and worked in Thailand, so he wasn't exactly able to oversee us with complete accuracy. We were supposed to email in at the end of each day with a report of what we had done. She asked me if she could write up the day for the two of us, which I thought was a little odd but guessed she was just trying to be nice.

Eventually, she stopped telling him it was me doing the work and I lost my job because she took all the credit.

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#30 Get Your Tickets Here!

I used to work in the sports industry making ticket sales. Part of our responsibilities was to do private tours of the stadium with our customers. We would show them around the facility, explain the different seating options, and just to better build a relationship with them. I had one co-worker who would lie to the customer about the pricing. She would sell the seats and packages at a lower price, then lie about different benefits that came with buying half season and full season packages. She would then go into our system to change the pricing behind our manager's back. Eventually, she was caught, but somehow she still got promoted because she had great connections in the city.

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#31 Mmm, Pancakes

She sent out an image of pancakes with several syrups bring poured into it with a highly inappropriate caption to the entire Western region of our Fortune 500, PC, very reputable company.

She feigned innocence. She thought it was baby talk for "pancake-y"

She's still around after essentially harassing hundreds of thousands of people.

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#32 Taking Advantage Of A Good Thing

There's someone in the office I work in who routinely leaves when the office clears out. He comes back just slightly before the doors close so that he can clock out for the night. He does this every single week. It's infuriating because the company I work for does a lot of awesome stuff for their employees, and seeing people take advantage of it sucks.

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#33 Safety, Not So Important

My supervisor removed a safety feature on a tube bender. Basically, this safety feature would automatically shut the machine off if a body part was in reach of the machine while it was running. He never told anyone until someone nearly had their arm removed. All the company did to "punish" him was put him on leave for a week. He got a free vacation for almost maiming his employees.

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#34 Remote Shopper

My old boss would "work remotely." My officemates regularly told me that they would see her out shopping or at a restaurant.

She still hasn't been fired. She also survived the last round of layoffs.

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#35 Master Of Yelling

My housemaster at the boarding school where I used to work had a notoriously short fuse and an incredibly inappropriate choice of words. I heard him refer to an 18-year-old student with a derogatory word, and it took three of the kid's friends to hold him back from obliterating the housemaster's face. Not only was nothing done about this despite a complaint being made, but this man is now deputy headmaster of the entire school.

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#36 Not In The Mood Today

I worked in an office dealing with vendors. My coworker would answer her phone very casually when it was supposed to be extremely professional. One time, she answered her phone and said, "I'm not in the mood to deal with you today because my husband and I are discussing divorce." Then she hung up. She didn't even know who it was.

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#37 Hello, I'm Rebecca

A coworker of mine at a coffee chain had his hours cut after working for the company for over 12 years. He started drinking milk out of the jug and introduced himself to the customers as Rebecca (he was a 6-foot dude, looked and sounded just like Hannibal Buress).

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#38 No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

I’m 24 and an older lady in the factory I used to work in literally took my glasses off my face and snapped them in half. She then gave them back to me and told me to end myself because I was a stupid kid. Because she was old and “didn’t understand,” she didn’t even get a write-up. She did this because I was showing her another way to run a CNC machine that was more productive than what she was doing. I was literally just trying to help.

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#39 Fighting On The Job

I was a private contractor that worked at many different high-end furniture companies in the '80s and '90s. I saw two guys get into an argument. One guy hit the other upside the head with a nail gun. His forehead immediately started bleeding. He was taken to the ER by the guy who hit him. They came back an hour or so later, both laughing about it. Neither got fired.

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#40 Twenty And Tantrumming

My wife works in retail. A 19- or 20-year-old girl started in the customer service area with her. She was terrible and kept making major mistakes, which meant more work for the other staff. She was shown repeatedly how to do things but she kept messing up. This went on for months.

Eventually, she messed up royally and management got involved. They tried to train her themselves. Management decided to give her a break from customer service and put her on cash. She flat out refused, flung herself on the floor in front of customers and threw a tantrum that a three-year-old would be proud of. She was laying on the floor thrashing her hands and feet on the ground.

Still works there to this day and that was over a year ago.

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#41 Bloody Unethical

When I was working as a phlebotomist, I saw one of my coworkers pour one patient's blood into an empty tube, and label it with another patient's label... Absolutely ridiculous, and easily the most unethical thing I've ever witnessed.

She missed a tube earlier in the day and didn't want to call the patient back for a recollection because they were fairly difficult to collect from. When I confronted her, she was so nonchalant with her excuses, which led me to believe she'd done it before.

She had a squeaky clean record and was very popular with her patients. According to her, it was their word against hers... She was right. I was pretty new at the time, and unfortunately, I was never able to prove it to my manager due to the main lab discarding samples once testing was completed.

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#42 Happy Accident

I had a coworker that messed up a report, causing hundreds of employees to get overpaid. I think the company had to go and ask for that money back, or at least tried to; I'm not sure.

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#43 Hiding From Work

One coworker of mine would disappear and hide in the bathroom for hours at a time. And it wasn't a secret—everyone knew. Management would often ask, "Have you seen this person?" It got to the point where I told them straight: "Probably hiding in the bathroom, like always." Their response? They laughed a little and said, "Ask an honest question."

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#44 Principal Failure

I saw a principal rip a rosary off of a boy's neck. She said they were "gang beads." When I tried to put them in a corner so no one would slip and fall on them, she told me to leave them where they were.

This woman has also been found guilty of failing in her role as principal due to a cheating scandal during the Regents exams.

She still has her job.

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#45 The Smoking Jacket

My coworker stole a jacket from a VIP customer at our facility after the customer forgot the jacket after her appointment. The women ended up coming back to find her jacket a week later and the boss connected the dots. He realized his employee had taken the jacket. He got the customer her jacket back but it was too late, the employee had already gotten it dirty and essentially permanently tainted it with ketchup.

She received no repercussions for her actions, barely even a talking to.

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