Let’s face it—sometimes work sucks. Whether it’s an unreliable co-worker, an irritating customer, or poor working conditions, the day-to-day drama is both endless and amusing. So if you’re feeling down about your job, take comfort in the fact that you’re not alone. Read on for some scandalous—and hilarious—work drama from these Redditors.
1. When Reality Strikes
My co-worker got her car repossessed. She had it for six months, almost tore the bumper off, and just beat the thing relentlessly. For some reason, she thought she could just make partial car payments for it. She didn't want to pay 100% of all of her bills because then she'd have very little money left to do fun things like go out all the time.
Now she has to come up with $1100 in 10 days to get her car back as well as provide proof of insurance. Not only does she not have $1100 OR any insurance, but it gets stupider. She doesn’t even have a valid license to drive with. She thinks she can just let the car go without any consequences and the dealer will just sell it. Good luck, fam.
2. You’ve Just Been Bamboozled
One of our full-time guys started dating a temporary seasonal worker on the down-low. However, the temp worker says she's moving away once her contract is up. This set off a chain of tragic yet hilarious events. The full-time guy decides to tag along with the girl, so he puts in his two-weeks notice to follow his heart. Big mistake.
When these two weeks are up, the seasonal worker suddenly has a change of heart and applies for the full-time position (his old one) that's now open. She ends up getting hired on as a replacement for our full-time guy. What a ride.
3. Fashion Faux Pas
I work at a daycare, and one of the mothers there keeps dropping her three-year-old son off in a dress. The choice of clothing isn’t a big deal, of course—plenty of boys like dresses and dolls and princess stuff. But the real issue is: he HATES it and makes that very known. Needless to say, there’s been a pretty big debate about it among the staff.
4. Horrible Queues
I’ve been working at a factory, and the lines stop pretty frequently for reasons beyond our control. Sometimes we can fix the issues ourselves, but other times we have to wait for someone from another factory to repair them. My boss's solution was ridiculous. Recently, management decided to take our chairs away, arguing that we will be "more productive" if we’re standing.
Now, when the lines stall, we just stand around. It’s a nightmare.
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5. The Old Bait-And-Switch
The owner of the plaza I work at hired people to come into our store and "fix” the business—and he did this without informing the store owner. Turns out that these people are con-men who have now taken over the business and pushed my previous employers out. No one knows how it happened, and now everyone is quitting.
6. Sibling Squabbles
I'm a restaurant manager. Both my brothers are servers with us and the two of them also live together. My older brother has been in love with a waitress for six months. Until recently, the waitress had a boyfriend, but that all changed for the worse. She just broke up with that guy and started dating my older brother. But it doesn't end there.
She moved into his house and, less than a week later, had a fight with my older brother and started banging my younger brother. Calamity at work ensues.
7. Project Mayhem
I work on campus and a big project of ours just got canceled somewhat out of the blue. 24 people got fired, and a bunch of people resigned—including the head of campus and his deputy head. The company had just moved to a bigger site, but now everything is in chaos and a bunch of people are working on campus with no boss to report to.
8. I’d Rather Stay In The Dark
This chick at my work got married after three months of knowing the guy because they’re both super religious and wanted to wait until marriage. I found this out in dribs and drabs from her, but today she dropped the real stunner on me. They’ve now been together for around five years, and she told me they have never once been intimate with the lights on.
9. Dress Code Drama
The main office of my workplace has been going back and forth for MONTHS on whether or not they should allow a "casual Friday" which would permit administrators to wear jeans. It has caused a lot of contention between those who believe that non-holey jeans should be classified as business attire, and those who don't like any sort of change.
Meanwhile, I'm sitting here in one of the satellite offices in jeans and flip-flops on a non-Friday because that’s how we do…
10. They Just Can’t Catch A Break
We have no break rooms where I work. The last time a room became available, management betrayed us. They turned it into a conference room. We ended up eating in the hallway for like two weeks. We still don't have a break room but we are now allowed to sit at the conference table if it happens to be free…and so long as we keep it spotless, of course.
11. Milk Bandits
I work in a daycare that is also a pre-school preschool. We have several young mothers on our staff as well. Understandably, a couple of them breastfeed and pump at work. Except someone took some of the pumped milk out of the fridge and no one can figure out who did it…or why. It has caused a lot of drama and accusations between the mothers.
12. Prank Calls
One woman at my work cheated on her baby daddy with a friend of 15 years. But that was just the start of the drama storm. The friend also had a girlfriend, who found out about the affair. This scorned woman now makes fake client accounts to fill my co-worker’s book up with non-existent clients just to mess with her. I guess you reap what you sow.
13. Talk About TMI
My husband usually handles oversharing at work by just tuning it out as it happens. But he once had this co-worker who was converting to Judaism—which, I mean, yay! It’s great that he found something meaningful and important. Unfortunately, the guy couldn’t stop talking about his upcoming circumcision with great delight…
14. Patience Is A Virtue
My supervisor was annoyed because my co-worker didn't initial the cap on her water bottle while they were both working at a remote location so that they could differentiate whose bottle was whose. There's just one problem. There was only one other employee there at the time; me. It was a complete overreaction...but my supervisor was just getting started.
She asked whose bottle it was and my co-worker said "Mine", then the supervisor threw the bottle at her feet while she wasn't looking. The supervisor may get fired.
15. Lacking A Filter
I work part-time at a college. One of the instructors got reported by numerous students in the same class. Turns out he was running his fingers through one of the female student's hair while talking to her about other inappropriate things. When he finished his story he looked at one of the male students in the room and said," You know what I’m talking about”.
He’s under investigation and banned until it’s completed.
16. One Word: Boundaries
My ex started working at the same place my current girlfriend and I work. Here's the thing: It's not a coincidence. My ex has been stalking and copying my current girlfriend for the past six months. She also hates everything that comes with this job, but she knew we were working here and just started. We can’t even go to the authorities since her dad is a department captain or something.
It’s really starting to get creepy at this point.
17. Overreactions
There’s a girl from work who I've been talking to for a few months now. A bunch of us are in a group chat together and she invited all of us out to a bar. I'm the only one that showed up. Her reaction was deranged. She then proceeded to call me creepy and hasn’t talked to me since. I really don't know what happened but a bunch of people don't trust her at all now.
18. Insufferable Suck-Ups
I just got out of the Navy and started working at this great place. I was hired a week before another person who also recently left the Army. We both got along well for the first day, and then it went downhill fast. This guy started interrupting instructors and answering questions before they could even finish talking to him about whatever.
I told him, "It’s okay to be wrong, and it’s okay to ask for help". This made him pretty angry, but when he noticed I was getting along with the instructors by being genuine, he backed off. He also must have overheard me talking about a book I read about the company because the next day he showed up with the same book and walks now around with it like an expert.
19. Three's Company, Too!
I worked a sales job where we spent a lot of time in the office. At one point, I noticed two employees, a girl and a guy, getting kind of close, and it started to interfere with their work. The girl was engaged to another girl at that point, so I thought they were just friends, but it turns out she did indeed sleep with that guy at some point.
After about a month, she announced to the office that she was pregnant. She then told her fiancée and they all decided to move in together and start a family—two moms and one dad. To this day they are still living together and honestly, it is a little weird to me but it must be easier to take care of the baby. I mean, what do I know? Still: dramatic as heck.
20. Email Etiquette
I sent my boss an email saying, "Hi. Tomorrow my husband is going out of town and I need to get my daughter on the bus. Is it alright if I start work at 9 instead of 8"? My boss then told me that I need to talk to my husband before I ask for anything personal so he (my husband) can assure I’m asking for the thing "correctly”.
I’m a recruiter, working normal business hours, who was told when interviewing that those hours are super flexible. Apparently, I didn’t ask my boss appropriately?
21. Missing The Mark
A colleague ran over and killed her dog a few days ago. She immediately wanted to get a new dog, and specifically one from Ukraine. I told her I thought that it was maybe a bit soon. She had a complete and total meltdown. In this rant, she compared her recently deceased dog to my deceased husband. Needless to say, I was not amused.
22. False Accusations
A beloved co-worker got fired for "causing a power outage"...during an apocalyptic rainstorm...in a building with a leaky roof...and documented shoddy construction work. Now 90% of the workforce is looking for new jobs, because the next time there's a minor natural disaster it could be our heads on the block.
23. Talk About Getting Swarmed
My work is infested with drain flies, and no one besides me is attempting to do anything about it. I called the department of health once, but by the time they showed up the weather had cooled and the flies had gone away on their own. Now that it's warming up again, they're back with a vengeance. I'm the only one who does any work cleaning the drains and taking other steps to mitigate them.
The place is filthy and no one cares—not even the general manager.
24. Nose Out Of Joint
I work in an office department but only report directly to one guy. A co-worker just retired and I was given a share of their responsibilities along with a small raise. This slightly altered the hierarchy. I still report to the one guy primarily for my original job. Nonetheless, he turned on me. I guess he didn't like how he found out about the (slight) change and it now constantly passive-aggressive towards me.
25. Have You Tried Turning It Off And On Again?
My company has lost most of its engineering and technical talent after releasing major upgrades and new model controllers. The new hires (along with the rest of us) can't figure out how the old software even works, let alone troubleshoot the new stuff or its compatibility with the old. This is one of the largest companies in the world and I'm watching it implode from within.
26. No News Is Very Bad News
I work in a test lab that is attached to a huge testing location. We just found out that our location will be closed at the end of May—from the news. There was zero communication between the operators and our lab. On top of this, new testing regulations were implemented and five of our staff were let go immediately. I myself got cut back to one day a week. We're all still in shock over it.
27. No Need For Nepotism
The owner's daughter is being trained to eventually take over the small CNC machine shop I'm at. This is a very bad idea: here's why. She makes terrible decisions on most things, and she's really good at ticking people off—up to and including the company we use for maintenance and our customers. Oh, but she's just outdone herself.
She just told my boss, who has done basically every job here, including administration, that he doesn't know the company's needs.
28. Ask And You Shall Not Receive
Last week one of our departments got together and talked about their pay. New hires are starting out with a $2 increase from what current employees are making. One girl quit, one girl put in her two-weeks notice, and the other that was the "leader" in discussing pay is rumored to be getting disciplined when she gets back from vacation.
The whole company is buzzing about what's going to happen next.
29. Safety First
We just got a new supervisor from within the company and everyone who has worked under him in the past has nothing but horror stories. He was being a big jerk to us all one day, so one of our safety guys (who have the authority to write up anyone and everyone for safety violations) wrote him up for not wearing shaded safety glasses in a weld cell.
Ballsy move by the safety guy but he's basically irreplaceable to the company as he's the only one who knows how to operate and repair our aging weld robot systems.
30. Holier Than Thou
I work at a church and there's been a really big issue with people giving out the parish library after-hours code to nonmembers. For what it's worth, it's free to become a member but you have to sign up. Somehow, word got out to some homeless people, who then set up a little motel in one of the back study rooms. It went unnoticed for about a week.
Until that is, ashy butts started appearing in trash cans throughout the library building. Chaos ensued. Now there's this huge all-staff email thread going on and on about whose fault it is and how to fix this issue.
31. Pranking The Staff
I just started working for the same company that my wife works for, but I’m in a different department. Someone started up a rumor about how the "new guy" is having an affair with some woman down in marketing. It’s caused a lot of speculation, but they are 100% talking about me and my wife—who works in marketing.
32. Ready Or Not
I work in the bakery at a grocery market, and our manager started to hide the free cookies because co-workers from other departments were taking handfuls. They are supposed to be taking one (at most) because the cookies are really only for the little kids. Now it's like hide and seek in the back room. This guy from seafood found a bunch of cookies hidden in a box of raisins and told everyone.
33. Vegetables In Strange Places
I work in childbirth at a hospital. When I was coming into my shift one day, I heard there was a guy in the emergency ward with a carrot up his butt. I didn’t get all the details, but apparently, it keeps traveling up. Last I checked, they were still trying to figure out a way to get it out that didn’t involve surgery. The clock is ticking.
34. Mysterious Inhabitants
We hired a Venezuelan immigrant who just recently got his documents. A week into his employment, his girlfriend kicked him out, so we allowed him to stay in one of the buildings on the property as long as he didn't tell anyone. The other staff was confused as to why previously broken machines and pipes randomly got repaired overnight. Only the management knows.
35. Awkward Exchanges
I was closing at Dunkin’ Donuts one night, minding my own business. Then disaster struck. A recent ex-husband of another employee came in. They started yelling at each other and she whipped a ring at his head before going to the back to smoke for an hour. It was only me and her working and I had no clue what to do besides keep stocking some cups.
36. Blast From The Past
My bosses at my grocery store are slowly finding out that their designated "expiration date checker" employee is slacking horrendously. Yesterday I found some candy dated 2016. I haven’t checked out dates in this particular section for a long time, so I have no idea how long it has been happening. Now I’m both intrigued as to what the bosses are going to do with the person and scared of what kind of expired goods this person has missed.
37. Incriminating Pictures
At work one day, this one guy called out for a family emergency, saying that his girlfriend was in the hospital. Later in the day, he was caught red-handed. His girlfriend was posting pictures of them hanging out in some city a few hours away. One of the higher-ups told the manager to give the guy a second chance and to text him to come in.
Thing is, my manager didn't like the guy to begin with. The manager didn’t text him, so he didn’t know to come in, so he didn’t come in, so he got fired.
38. Talk About Going Behind Her Back
This week, my 45-year-old co-worker got caught having an affair with my 18-year-old co-worker. No one knows how long it’s been going on, but they have been working in the back of the building together for a while. Oh, and all of this was going on while his pregnant wife works as a receptionist up at the front. Not cool, dude.
39. That Little White Lie
Quite a few years ago, my boss left our office in Washington DC and went to Florida on a company-paid business trip to attend a meeting near Tampa. It was springtime, and baseball training season. The second morning after my boss was away, The Washington Post published a photo on the front of the sports section showing a line of fans waiting to get autographs from Cal Ripken.
Who's first in line? My boss. Later that day, I was in the office of my boss's boss with two other guys. They laid a brutal trap for him. My boss calls in, and the head dude puts him on the speakerphone. The conference is going well, my boss says. He's meeting lots of good business contacts that should promote sales, and even though the meetings are running long and a little boring, he's keeping up with them.
He gets back two days later and gets his company travel privileges suspended for two years.
40. It’s Completely Illogical, Captain
I work in the transportation department for school buses of my town's public school district. A lot of the drivers are currently very annoyed because the higher-ups in the district have suddenly decided that elementary school students cannot be let off of the buses in the morning until the school bell rings. Prior to this decision, the drivers would just let their students off of the bus as soon as they pulled up to the school.
Now, some of the drivers are choosing to start their morning a bit later than they normally would just to avoid having to sit in front of the elementary school for 10 plus minutes with a bunch of anxious grade-schoolers. This caused mass confusion, and a few parents drove their kids in themselves because they thought they had missed the bus.
41. Insecurity
I recently quit a security job, but my friend stayed on. The other guards have been harassing her—and their reasons why are chilling. She caught them messing with the sensitivity that triggers the cameras, all so they can sleep without being caught. This was among other things. She told the security company about these infractions repeatedly, every step of the way.
Now one of their customers just found out what the guards have been up to. She has also let him know that her supervisor for the company has been aware since day one and hasn't done anything. I'm hoping the security company loses this contract. They allowed me and a lot of other people to be harassed as well by another guard and didn't do anything for a year and a half.
42. Cut It Out
I was training a new guy at a gas station. The first hour was a rush but everything went normally. When the crowd calmed down, we started to settle in and I started going through the typical routine with him. As we're talking, he pulls out a knife and a stone and starts sharpening the blade. I looked at him and thought for a second about how to respond.
I then firmly say, "You need to put that back in your car now and never bring it to work with you again. Carrying a concealed and unsanctioned weapon is grounds for immediate termination if security or management sees that". His response: "Oh, Ok". He starts walking to his car, presumably to drop the knife off. And then he drives away, never to be seen again.
43. Time To Check-Out
A little while back, one of the cashiers at the grocery store I work for told us she was pregnant. She was only 17 at the time, but everyone was really supportive and let her know that she’d still have a job when she came back from maternity leave. Well, one day she was shopping at the store on her day off when she ran into the father of her kid. She couldn't believe her eyes.
He was with another girl. The two of them were being cuddly and holding hands and stuff. So this poor, pregnant teen goes off on them: "How could you? I kept the baby because of you” and all that. They get in a huge fight and have to be escorted from the store by management. The store manager didn’t recognize her because she wasn’t in uniform.
He then tried to have her banned from the store. She ended up quitting because of it, had her baby, and is now doing just fine.
44. Cheating The System
One of our corporate perks is that each month, the company allocates a "snack budget" to each team. It's about $20 per person, per month. So if your team has 10 people, you have $200 a month to spend on snacks. When our team lead asked us what kind of snacks we wanted, one person asked whether we could have a big meal instead.
This got us thinking, So from the start of the year, our manager has been buying gift cards to a local steakhouse and now we have over $1,000 saved up (we still bought some small snacks so it wasn't suspicious) and we’re all excited to plan our big dinner. It's been fun keeping it a secret and has really helped team morale.
45. Competition At Its Finest
After a year, one of my co-workers still doesn't understand that in retail you HAVE to take returns. She loses it when she has to do a refund because she is worried about her average sales. She's a very competitive person…but, like, we don't really get anything for having a high average sale. So it's really just her being an idiot.
Now she’s constantly looking at everyone's ratios and blabs about taking the next big sale in front of customers. She's super unprofessional and it's starting to become a huge problem. The manager even told her that it's retail and refunds are normal and we have to work together. She’s started walking away from small sales on purpose and everyone’s on edge.
46. Proof Before Sending
My work colleagues recently found a printout of an email that was accidentally printed on the wrong office printer. Its contents were jaw-dropping. It let us know that our employer will soon secretly begin training staff in China so that they can off-shore all the jobs in one of our departments by the end of the year.
We are the market leader in what we do and most of the local guys are very good and skilled workers. Some people have been with the company for 20+ years and work a ton of unpaid hours. Everyone is angry now. The management has no idea that we know and we’ve all made a pact to leave well before they can get China up and running.
47. Unexpected Gifts
I work at a fast-food joint with this blonde woman, Beth. Beth is overly enthusiastic to the point of being incredibly annoying to every employee and customer. Beth is apparently also a pathological liar and frequently leaves her shifts early without explanation. Early this week, Beth got fired. She came back today with a present all wrapped up with a white bow and everything.
It was meant to be an apology to the manager, but she quickly dropped it off and took off. It smelled like it had been doused in a gallon of perfume, but she seemed half-crazed so whatever. The manager for her department at the time took it and opened it near the registers. We couldn't believe what was inside. A lump of poop. Her OWN poop.
She pooped in a box and gave it to her manager. As a gift, of course…
48. She Needs To Sort Out Her Priorities
We have this one relatively crazy woman who works in our shop. She’s got a son who, at the time of this story, was around 16. Well, this woman decided that her son needed some experience with an older woman. Her actions only got more deranged. She actually went to one of the women in our accounting department—who was like 60—and asked her if she’d be interested in sleeping with her 16-year-old son.
All because she wanted his first time to be with someone experienced. I kid you not, I was sitting outside our HR office when the complaint was filed.
49. The Lunch Bandit
There was this lady at my first job out of college who would sneak away into the lunch room, which was in the basement of the building, and take lunches. She'd go through all of them, taking little bites and sometimes finishing all of it. If she took a bite of something she didn't like, she'd then just throw the whole thing in the garbage.
Staff would come downstairs to find their lunches devoured or in the trash with just one bite taken out of it. This all came to a head one day when some guy was up in arms after his meatloaf sandwich fell victim to the lunch lady. He ended up catching her and she was fired...but she did kind of get the last laugh. She keyed everyone's cars.
50. Mystery Droppings
We have been noticing small, mysterious changes over the last month in our office. First, a square of brand new carpet was torn up and replaced in a hallway. Then the runner in front of the cafeteria disappeared. Parts of the hallways have been strangely roped off. We also just had security cameras installed in all of the walkways. Then the ugly truth all came out.
The situation was finally brought up and discussed in a private meeting. Apparently, an employee has been pooping randomly throughout the building during business hours. These have been rather large piles of poop that people have narrowly missed stepping in. This is a very professional workplace, which makes this entire situation all the more perplexing.
This person is still on the loose and it could be anyone.
51. Too Good To Be True
One of our recent hires appeared to be a godsend. She was very comfortable around computers and by day two she had everything figured out. She was picking up on her job far faster than anyone in recent memory. It turned dark in an instant. One day her boyfriend calls the school she was working in, swearing and asking why our manager’s name is in his girlfriend’s phone.
Please note: Obviously it is TOTALLY NORMAL for her to have her manager's number. In any case, he threatens to come down to the school and drag her out...so the school goes into lockdown. The new girl is asked to give information about her boyfriend since the authorities wanted to press charges. Her response was scarily nonchalant".
Oh, don't mind him....he gets like that from time to time. Just don't press charges, please...if he violates his parole again, he'll be back behind bars!" She was immediately fired. Don't know if they ended up pressing charges against the boyfriend.
52. Be Careful What You Wish For
I worked for a big company years ago as the shipping manager. One of the guys I hired was an ex-Russian army guy. He was pretty good, a hard worker and all that, but a little weird. So one day he doesn't show up, no phone call or explanation. The next day he calls me and he sounds like he's really out of it. Turns out, he's in the hospital.
After work, I go by the hospital and his whole right side is black as night—serious bruising, broken leg and arm. I asked him what the heck happened and he told me that he and his friends were "having party" in his fifth-floor apartment. He was having an argument with one of his friends, who accused him of never following through with his word.
My friend says "I always follow through. If I told you I would jump out that window, I would". His friend said he wouldn’t dare, so crazy Yuri runs and leaps out of the window, down onto the parking lot below. He spent over a month in the hospital to prove a point. Ridiculous. He quit and I didn't see or hear from him until years later.
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