The average person spends more than half of his or her life at work, so it only makes sense for people to seek workplaces they can tolerate to be in every day. Unfortunately, not all workplaces are made equal, and sometimes one's work conditions are so unbearable, there's no other option but to quit on the spot. Here are some real-life office dramas to get your blood boiling:
1. For Official Reasons
A teacher at our school was constantly being reported by her assistant for grossly and absurdly exaggerated offenses because the assistant doesn't like the teacher she's been assigned to this year. The teacher is new to our school. The assistant is related to a high-up administrator and has already been moved several times.
Administration kept writing the teacher up despite her protests that the complaints were absurd and kept requesting this assistant be switched with another. Teacher finally had enough and quit. Admin spread around the rumor that the teacher had to leave her job for "mental health reasons."
2. This One Starts and Ends With a Beach
Boss pitched a sales incentive trip to Cancun if the team hit the goal. My team exceeded the goal, and then they cancelled the trip. Two people quit, I accepted a position with their main competitor, and less than a year later, they closed in bankruptcy. Karma’s a beach.
4. Taking Out the Trash
I work in a big corporate building. The same older lady came by everyone’s desk towards the end of the day to collect the trash. Just the sweetest lady ever and every time she’d walk to my desk she’d give me a big smile and ask me how my day was and chat for a minute as she got my trash (usually I’d dump it in for her). I had some rough days but she has a way to cheer me up and send me home on a higher note. I know I’m not the only one either.
So then a few weeks back our work implemented a new policy to "cut down on trash usage." It’s no longer allowed to have a trash bin at our desk and we have to walk across the room and use the community trash to throw anything away. Not a huge deal but the real reason they did it is so they can cut down on cost... i.e. the cleaning crew.
Sad to say that I haven’t seen Sharon since.
5. Stalemate
Everyone is trying to figure out who left the egg sandwich in the fridge that's been there a month. It stinks like death, but no one is owning up to it.
6. Surprise! Nothing Works Right Anymore!
This school wanted to switch to Chromebooks. So what did they do? One summer while teachers weren't working, they removed every single Windows station and replaced them with Chromebooks to be issued to teachers. They were told to "figure it out."
When teachers came up and asked how they could teach Photoshop, programming, AutoCAD 3d modeling, etc., admin basically googled their program name plus "Chromebook extension" and told them "see? There's an extension for it and it works!" I don't think I have to add that it did not work.
They ended up bringing back the desktops for most teachers.
7. Work Fun Shun
One co-worker had a bunch of cash stolen from her purse. Everyone knows who did it. Not only was she the only one not in attendance at a meeting when the money went missing, but she suddenly started avoiding my co-worker when they had been friends before that. Also, she would have to know exactly where the purse was stored in order to sneak in and back before being noticed.
Now no one in the office is talking to the alleged thief. That’s our version of office justice since management can’t fire her without more proof.
8. Maybe Find a Solution Instead of Adding to the Problem…
Put up a poster that said "Complaining is like vomiting. You feel better but everyone around you feels sick." The morale was already bad but it was just an awful way to take a hit at upset employees rather than do anything positive.
9. Team Strategies
One of our full-time guys started dating a temporary seasonal worker on the down low. The temp worker says she’s moving away once her contract is up. He decides to tag along with her and puts in his two weeks. Poor sap—he had no clue what was coming. Two weeks is up and the seasonal worker suddenly has a change of heart and applies for the full-time position that's now open and ends up getting hired on as a replacement for our full-time guy.
10. Newsflash: Employees Are Not Your Slaves
I was one of a large number of programmers working on a project at CSC. We had a deadline coming up in a couple months and they over-promised to the client and then asked us all to work extra hard to meet the deadline, and asked us to work 50+ hour weeks. Which we did—and then some: some of us put in 70-80 hour weeks to meet this deadline.
But once that deadline was met, suddenly there was another deadline they needed to meet. And another. People got tired, had lives to lead, and scaled back on their hours. Most of us were still working 50-60 hours a week, but not a lot more than that.
Once they realized we weren't killing ourselves on their project any longer, there was an All Hands meeting where the managers told us that they were incredibly disappointed in our lack of professionalism because so comparatively few employees were now working more than fifty hours a week.
One of our harder workers stood up and said, "Look, I have three kids. I'm driving an hour into and out of work every day, I'm taking care of my family, I'm trying to get presents for Christmas, write out Christmas cards, decorate and clean the house for everyone we're having over for the holidays—I'm having a really hard time just getting to fifty."
And the manager looked at her and sneered, "If it wasn't Christmas, it'd be because it's Easter, or Memorial Day, or because it's summer and it's nice out. You'd always have some excuse."
There was dead silence in the room.
When we left that meeting, we didn't talk to each other, but every single worker on that project put in exactly fifty hours a week after that.
Then came Christmas—raise and bonus time! Every worker on the project got a 1/2 percent raise; the managers got a five-figure bonus. We were pissed.
For management, the pain came after Christmas. First week of the year, four programmers had better jobs lined up and quit. Three more the following week. Five the next. We hemorrhaged 3-5 programmers every single week for over three months. It got to the point where the managers had to schedule a meeting every Monday at eleven to discuss that week's resignations and rearrange the surviving staff.
Screw CSC.
11. Seating Arrangements
We had a community cozy chair. It added some character to the office until we hired another employee who claimed it as her own. It's 8:00 PM and I'm camped near the printer on five hours of sleep. I'm using the chair while listlessly stapling packets on auto-pilot. The moment I stand, I kid you not, she grunts and drags the chair away to the front of the office. I nearly fall on my tail-bone.
It's a constant source of trouble and she wasn't getting much work even before this point. She hates doing the very thing she originally agreed to do. She sits in the chair in a state of near-sleep. Occasionally, she startles, because the way she sits cuts off her circulation, but settles back into a state of lethargic grumpiness. It blows my mind.
She staffs the check-in desk when I need to be elsewhere, and, frankly, it doesn't look very good to visitors. I'm responsible for her, but can't fire her. The chair is now gone. She looks for it, but she'll never find it.
12. A Three-Part Plan That Can Never Fail
Bought a manufacturing plant.
Fired everyone.
Tried to hire them back for $2 less.
13. This Can't End Well
I work for a before and after-school program for elementary school kids. It was the end of the day and I was outside with maybe 15 kids ranging from 5-12 years old because we mix age groups at the end of the day. One of my fourth grade boys was playing tag and accidentally ran into a first grade girl and knocked her over. She cried and he helped her up and apologized. That should have been the end of it—but this was far from over.
She was fine until she saw her dad walking up to the school. The second she sees him she starts wailing again and runs up to him. I’m with the rest of the group and we are slowly making our way inside before it gets dark. Dad walks up to the fourth grade boy and yells in his face, "Did you punch my daughter?!"
Immediately I tell the kids to go inside to the other staff inside and not come out and I stay outside trying to calm down the man. As I explained that I saw the entire situation and thought that maybe she was confused he proceeded to yell in my face things like, "Are you calling my daughter a liar? YOU are the liar," etc.
It turned into this big thing where my bosses were asking if I wanted to press charges and all of this stuff. They also did not want me to be the only staff with his children even if there are many other kids around. I felt bad for the man's older son who had no idea what was going on and was actually good friends with the boy who accidentally knocked his sister down.
I didn't press charges. I just ignored the man every time I saw him. It was very, very hard.
14. Just Looking Out For Number One
I once had a retail manager who sent out a memo that we worked so hard and did such a great job this month that she gets a bonus. That went over like a lead balloon.
15. Periodic, Arbitrary Rules
I got a drink of water and my manager made a new rule on the spot that I had to ask permission to get a drink and "how dare I disobey her rules?" This caused a manager from another department to call me childish for not following "rules." We also aren't allowed to say, "Bye Felicia," and if we do, we get written up because one of the girls thought she was being called something else.
Apparently though, we can yell "poop nugget" across the store while guests are shopping.
16. Summoning the Crickets
I told the hiring manager that I was disappointed in one of his hires because he knew literally NOTHING about our job and asked him “doesn’t that cheapen my knowledge and expertise?”
His response: “Well, let’s be honest, your job doesn’t really need all that, does it?”
There were four other people my level, with varying fields of expertise, at that meeting, and it got real quiet after that.
Las Adicciones Tienen Solución
17. What a Bagel
We have bagel day every Friday at work, but there's been a lot of drama because one person doesn't bring butter, another person wants an egg bagel but comes in later and there are no egg bagels left, or someone else gets them from the supermarket instead of a bagel shop. Now bagel day is cancelled and everyone's angry. These are mostly 50+ year old men.
18. We Can’t Go On Together With Suspicious Minds
I worked at a club in Miami and the owner was out of his freaking mind thanks to years of drug abuse. When the housing market crashed obviously people were spending far less going out, but he insisted we were all stealing. We had meetings once a week with all kinds of threats.
Finally he put in an automatic pouring system for 50k+, it basically looks like you're pouring drinks from a soda gun, super boring. The fun vibe and flair we had was totally gone which made sales drop even more. He ripped the system out two weeks later.
19. Bad Competition
Everybody here plays "The Points Game" to see how much they can get away with without getting in real trouble. You get "points" for things like being late, calling off, etc. If you get enough of these "points," you get written up, suspended and then fired. After enough time, the points go away. On top of how uncool that is, they talk about it incessantly and hate each other for doing it. It is endlessly annoying.
20. A Bit Standoffish
Two other teachers I work with at an elementary school both had daughters. The daughters were about 6 or 7 and were friends. Teacher 1 walks into Teacher 2’s classroom and calls her kid stuck-up for not including her daughter in a play date with another kid...all the while the kids were in the room.
21. You’ve Got to Get Up Pretty Early in the Morning to Outsmart This Kitchen Staff
My mum is the cafeteria/kitchen manager at a school. For the past decade, the admin has been trying to find a way to fire the entire kitchen staff and hire new people for minimum wage. They currently make great money and the benefits are better than my dad's, who works at a Dow 30 company. She's part of a union, for the record.
Yet, they haven't been able to let anyone go without there being a serious lapse in responsibilities. Let one person go, suddenly all of the dairy in the fridge is expired because the new, $8 an hour person has zero training and doesn't know when things need to be pitched and re-ordered. Surprise! Sorry kids, no milk or cheese for the next two weeks! (Bring on the parental complaints.)
Their most recent strategy was to hire [the SIL of a high-ranking administrator who is] a "nutritionist." I researched her, her only "qualifications" are a decade-old two year degree in hospitality management, and an "approval" from an unaccredited, unrecognized NPO. She got hired making $150,000 a year. Thanks, public records.
The most recent strategy to oust the current employees was a massive testing program on stuff people working for the school for 20+ years have never had to know. Every employee but one passed the three different weed-out tests.
Apparently, the nutrition monster stormed out of the meeting yelling when she found this out.
22. Keeping the Thermo-status Quo
Over in customer service, Brenda is complaining about being too hot and throws a tantrum every time someone touches the thermostat. Brad, on the other hand, because he's cold and fed up of Brenda, keeps messing with her by changing the thermostat.
23. Deli-cate Promises Are Made to Be Broken
Worked in a deli years ago and the manager promised us a no-holds-barred BBQ at his place if he got his bonus for the deli performing well.
He got his bonus and, surprise surprise, we got nothing. Apparently the wife wanted the bonus for their kids' private school fees.
Doug—you suck.
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24. Bathroom Etiquette
The office building where I work has been trying to catch the mysterious Phantom Pooper. The office building has multiple companies per floor, but only one multi-stall bathroom to serve each floor. Every single day, someone from the other company on our floor blows up the bathroom, poops on the toilet seat, the floor, doesn't flush, etc.
Through careful analysis, cunning detective work, and a fancy Excel spreadsheet, we feel like we have determined who the offender is, but are not sure how to confront her. Now we are getting remodeled bathrooms and have to use the bathroom on the floor below ours. Guess who struck again?
25. Stepping in to Correct the Record
I, along with nine other coworkers, did a Kaizen project where we cut customer complaints from over 100 a month to single digits due to streamlining our process.
The plant manager sent out a company wide email essentially taking credit for the whole thing. He noted how he put together this team and under his direct supervision he got the project done without even mentioning our names. T
hat pissed all of us off until the Continuous Improvement manager sent a reply thanking all of us in a big screw you move to the plant manager. I was just happy that the CI manager was a no BS guy. I left that job a few months after we completed it and still use it on my resume.
26. Know Your Place
We just got a new supervisor from within the company and everyone who has worked under him in the past has nothing but war stories. He's been decent so far, but one day he was being a big jerk to us all. Then one of our safety guys wrote him up for not wearing shaded safety glasses in a weld cell. Our safety guys have the authority to write anyone and everyone for safety violations.
It’s a 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.
27. Nothing Requires Your Full Attention
They banned phones, electronics, puzzles, books, etc. from being used at your desk. I work at a call center. We were expected to just sit and wait for the next call to come in “distraction-free,” even if it was a super slow day.
28. Hanging by a Thread
I am pretty sure my CEO has been stealing money from our company. I’m a textile designer and we have factories in India and China. No one wants to ship our product because they haven't been paid and personally, I haven't gotten a raise in three years. All the while the CEO is driving a Bentley and just purchased a new $2+ million-dollar home.
He is constantly getting angry calls from our factories, some of which he owes millions of dollars. In fact, he owes $7 million to one factory in particular. But that's not even the worst part: I’m pretty sure that if he went to China, he would be legally detained because of how much he owes people. A lot of them fly to our office here in the States and wait for him for meetings but he ducks out the back door like a coward.
One day he even drove an old truck to work so no one would know he was here.
29. Gotcha!
Telling employees that they are going to fire you if you don't make more sales. Then when someone quits tell them naww that was just motivation. We were never going to fire you.
30. Battle Queen
I worked in a small office of seven people at a university for two years. I worked most closely with another woman who was 36 and dating our student worker who was 24. The woman and I had a lot in common and got along pretty well at first. We even double-dated a few times. About a month in, she started oversharing drama with me about her boyfriend.
They would get into huge fights based mostly on things surrounding their age difference. One time when he broke up with her, she insisted on laying dramatically on the floor of her office crying she was “sick” instead of going to our presentation, all to get attention from him. She would stop talking to him and expect me to communicate work-related matters to him.
I flat out said this was unprofessional and I wouldn’t do it. She dated or chatted up other male employees in different departments at the university in between break-ups then ghost them making them call and/or show up at our office. One day when they were on-again, her boyfriend went out for drinks with one of our gay coworkers.
He told the guy he thought he might be gay. The guy propositioned him and said, “If you sleep with anyone it better not be with (other gay coworker).” Then the boyfriend went home and told this woman everything. She flipped out—not at the boyfriend, of course, but at the coworker. She straight up showed up at his house to fight over her man.
Literally half of our office wanted to sleep with or hurt one another.
31. How Soon We Forget
New principal came in. It was like he forgot what being a teacher is like... he made us sub constantly on our plan periods instead of getting around to calling a sub. If we weren't subbing, he would come into our rooms as we worked on plan time things and go over ridiculous things that could have better been sent in an email. He fired the lunch supervisor and made us supervise lunch. Then he started giving us a hard time about using the bathroom between classes because if we were in the bathroom, who is supervising the halls?
It boiled down to us working before and past contract hours with zero breaks. No bathroom. No lunch time (you can't eat and supervise). I went off on him one day because he accosted me for going to the bathroom. I went to the bathroom to change my tampon. I waved a spare tampon around in the hallway in front of God and students and told him I'd had enough of this and if he had time to drive to McDonalds for lunch (he had a fry box in his hands) I could be spared two minutes of supervision to change a tampon.
To add insult to injury, the staff banded together and we documented these things to get him fired. The next person comes in and decides that action of creating unity with the staff needed to be dismantled so she changed where all our rooms were and in most cases what we taught (regardless of our certification). I quit. I couldn't take it anymore. Kids are my number one concern in teaching and when a school dissolves into politics and nonsense it just isn't worth it to me. I could get treated like crap in any profession and probably get paid more.
Australian Society for Evidence Based Teaching
32. Payback
A colleague who clips her toe nails at her desk can't seem to find out what's wrong with her computer mouse saying they move fast new but slowly die out. She's gone through 3 so far—and it's all according to my devious plan. Little does she know I slowly turn down the sensitivity until she's freaks out and buys a new one. Screw her. Don't clip your toe nails at your office desk.
33. Can't Pull One Over on Us
Removed COLA raises each year for all employees and implemented a “raise when promoted or taking on more responsibility” model. However promotions are very rare and raises are never approved. So everyone is losing money to inflation each year and they tried to sell it as a big "win" for the employees.
We aren’t stupid people.
34. Crimping Our Style
I work at a place that manufactures hose. Part of the process of making hose is inserting various types of nozzles into the end then crimping it tightly to the hose so it does not come off. When we crimp a nozzle to a hose, it leaves a specific pattern that is unique to our crimper. We received a report that one of our customers' hoses had failed at the nozzle.
That's bad because when a high-pressure hose fails, you want it to explode in the middle rather than at the nozzles. You want it that way because when those nozzles come off with several hundreds or even thousands of PSI of water in them, they're like a deadly weapon. We sent someone to their location to see the hose that failed.
After 30 seconds he said, "This isn't our hose, it's not the same crimp spec or pattern," and then he left. It turns out that company had actually tried to crimp the hose on their own, using the wrong spec, which is why it failed at the nozzle. They were going to use it to get free hose out of us.
35. If It Ain't Broke, Don’t Take a Sledgehammer to It
Had a boss everyone loved, then she got transferred to another store and the new guy that replaced her decided the schedule that we'd all gotten used to needed to be "shaken up." He posted the next week’s schedule that was completely different than it had been under the previous manager, got a bunch of complaints from people saying they can't work x days or y times and it SEEMED he was receptive since he took that schedule down. Then suddenly BAM, he just reposted the same exact schedule and said screw everyone.
Oh, we had some people calling in sick from time to time under the old manager, but this new manager has pretty much half his crew every single day calling out because of his scummy tactics.
Here's the first thing to learn about being a good manager... you don't need to "shake things up" for people to be better workers. You don't need to "put your mark" on anything if it's working just fine the way it was.
36. Dumping Grounds
We have been noticing small mysterious changes over the last month in our office. A square of brand-new carpet being torn up and replaced in a hallway. The runner in front of the cafeteria disappeared, and a few weeks later we got a brand new one. Parts of the hallways have been strangely roped off. We also just had security cameras installed in all of the walkways.
The situation was finally brought up and discussed in a private meeting. The explanation was absolutely insane. 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. It could be anyone.
37. Get Your Priorities in Order, Kid!
A grocery store I worked at for just about four weeks or so in 2000 did something stupid. The manager, who primarily employed high school seniors like myself, would state "your employer is your number one priority. You work for them, not the other way around.
I don't care about whatever teenager/high school things you have going on. If you can't work the shifts I want you to, I don't want you to work for me." Only job I straight up walked out on after he told me I couldn't get off for my own graduation.
38. Restricted Operations
There is a very exclusive donut club in which members take turns each Friday bringing in donuts for the other members in the club. It is very serious business. My second week I received a page long email offering some donuts because it was a special occasion and most of the club was out of the office, but it was very clear this was a one-time deal and usually outsiders partaking in these tasty treats would be punished.
A few Fridays ago, it was the IT guy's turn to bring in donuts. I don't know if he forgot or what, but he ended up getting a donut box from one of the local donut chains and filled it with the little donuts from a packet in the vending machine. He emailed the club like, "Hey everyone, donuts are here!" and people were livid because he clearly was trying to pull a fast one, he was not joking and I guess didn't realize that people would notice. They noticed.
The next week is when I was filled in on all of this. Apparently, the IT guy had been on vacation and was returning that day, so everyone was buzzing about how to get their revenge. They ultimately had settled on putting 12 cheerios in a box and sending him the "donuts have arrived!" email. I learned about all of this on revenge day, when my new boss invited me into the club, 2 or 3 weeks ago.
I politely declined mostly because I don't pass any donut places on my way to work, but a little bit because it's way more fun witnessing this all from the outside.
39. This is Not What I Signed Up For…
My boss changed half the shifts to 3 am shipment and the other half were regular retail hours mostly for school kids lol. Turns out the four teenagers that go to school that he switched to 3 am never came again. The shipping manager quit because she had a 2nd job that was more important during the day.
The new manager was just too stupid to notice any of it and I too just stopped showing up because, I kid you not, he tried to make me a janitor after the contracted janitor serviceman quit lol. "I need you to come in tomorrow when Les would come in and do all the toilets and floors." Uhh I'm not a janitor so I have none of that equipment. "Bring it from home."
I found a new job two days later.
40. Don’t Shoot the Messenger
I had been hanging out with a girl and we had talked about the possibility of dating, but she wanted to know me better first before getting into anything. So, we're just friends for the moment until we got more of an opportunity to get to know each other. About two weeks after that, she tells me she doesn't want to lead me on but is now seeing someone else.
I'm fine with that, so we just continue being friends. She doesn't really talk about it beyond that, doesn't tell me anything about him, and I don't ask. I'm still interested and don't really want to give up, but I'm not pushing it. Two weeks later, she's dropping less than subtle hints that she wants to tell me who it is. I ask and apparently, it's a coworker of ours.
Trick of it is, she's 21 and he's over 40. She's looking for serious long-term commitments too. I try to break it to her that it's really unlikely that she's going to find what she's looking for with this guy. She takes it incredibly poorly. We're now no longer friends. I ran into the guy in the hall today and he stared daggers at me.
41. False Sense of Hope
Told a bunch of people they were going to be promoted to get us to do extra work, but no one actually got promoted. I basically did her job for a month. Me and three of my co-workers quit and she got fired a few months later.
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42. Pregnancy Paralysis
We had a new employee who used her pregnancy to get out of doing any work. She was only a few months pregnant and every time she was told to do even a minimal amount of work, she'd hold a napkin over her mouth, put on her best puppy dog eyes, and pretend to be nauseous. And it always happened after she was asked to do some work and even then, it was always at half the capacity the rest of us had to do.
I knew that she was faking her illness to get out of work. Everyone at the office accused me of being "a hater" for daring to suggest that she was pretending. But then she went and told me straight up, "Every time they tell me to do work, I just act like I'm sick! Hahaha!" My manager overheard her when she said this. She was given the option of quitting or being fired.
43. All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy
She actively tried to ban friendships.
If co-workers became friendly she would schedule them so they would NEVER see each other. "You're here to work! Not to socialise!"
She also banned everyone from coming into the workplace when they were not working. It was a pub. She banned socializing in a pub.
This was a corporate pub, so drinking for free was never allowed. She was literally turning away paying customers. A co-worker once asked her if he could bring in his visiting Grandpa to show him where he worked and she told him to screw off.
She became insanely paranoid when she learned four people were in a WhatsApp group. She said the only reason people who work together set up group chats is because they wanted to talk trash about her. She was actually kind of right.
44. Dewey Decimal’s Motel
I work at a church and there’s been a really big issue with people giving out the parish library after hours code to non-members. Word got out to some homeless people who then set up a little motel in one of the study rooms in the back. Somehow, it went unnoticed for about a week until cigarette butts started appearing in trashcans throughout the library building, which isn’t a very big building.
Now there's this huge all-staff email thread going on and on with people clicking reply all about whose fault it is and how to fix this issue.
45. Kindness Just Flew Away Here
At an airplane factory: manager started rationing gloves, hairnets, masks, and trash bags at the same time we had to go on a 12x6 workweek, like that was gonna make up for the increase in labor.
46. Background Check Optional
Since I started my new job two months ago, we've had the head of marketing leave his position. Come to find out, he was not only in charge of much of the company's financing, but also the owner's financing. He has been stealing money—over $100,000—from the owner. He was opening credit lines in his name, draining bank accounts, etc.
I’m not sure how long it's been going on. But I did find out that the same guy was in jail from '94-'98 for embezzling over $1 million. I’m also not sure why they hired him here in the first place back in 2003 knowing this. I work IT so I've had to spend my time going through his emails and his personal computer and shutting down his access to anything and everything.
47. Not the Handiest Manager Around
I worked at a new car dealership for a few years as a technician. The first year and a half I was there we were allowed ONE box of gloves per month. Penny pinching, number fudging manager was let go, manager that had actually turned wrenches in the past gets hired and immediately tells us to get gloves when we need them because he wants zero complaints about interiors getting dirty while in the shop.
Of course he didn’t last and we got a manager that said to me “pack up your stuff and get the heck out” (not fired apparently but I was already one foot out the door). We went from a shop with no tech turnover to all but three people leaving.
48. Obvious Threat
This ex-employee just moved in next door to my boss, two months after getting fired for violent, crazy outbursts. He already knew where she lived and he still chose to live there too. So now my boss is filing a harassment order.
49. Something to Get Excited About...Not!
Held a super positive, pep rally style company wide meeting about how they were going to start combining our sick days with our vacation days and now just call them "PTO." This was presented to us as a great thing, since we could all now use our PTO days fully as vacation days if we wanted to.
Once the system was implemented, everyone realized that instead of getting 10 vacation days and 10 sick days per year, we now all had 15 PTO days. Everyone was pissed.
50. Man Made Disaster
This all started about 18 months ago between my boss, Megan, her husband, Daniel, and my colleague Melissa. Me, Megan, Daniel and Melissa all work in the same department, however Daniel works on a different team because Megan can't be his boss. Anyway, we're all going for a team night out but Megan can't make it. Daniel, Melissa, and I all go for the curry, along with a couple of others.
Come Monday morning, Megan calls me in to a meeting, crying her eyes out because she's convinced Melissa and Daniel slept together on the night out. She's absolutely hysterical so I agree to ask Melissa as we're pretty close. I ask Melissa, who also hysterically cries telling me that Megan is using her power as her boss to push her out of the company and begs me to believe that she didn't sleep with Dan.
I trust her; I mean, we've known each other for a long time. Dan also promises me nothing happened, however Meg and Dan's marriage suffered as a result of all the drama. Months go by, Megan becomes really strange and starts following Melissa to the bathroom trying to listen to her recorded calls, and access her emails.
I tell her that she can't use her position like this and we do this weekly routine where she cries, promises me she won't do it again, and she does it again the next week. Anyway, it gets to a point where Melissa can't cope and she resigns. Megan walks around all triumphantly. Dan seems to reconcile with his wife and they start trying for a baby. This is where things REALLY went off the rails.
Last night, Melissa posts a picture of an ultrasound clearly stating that it is her and Daniel's baby. It turns out they'd been sleeping together for two years and she'd lied to me the whole time. Megan is obviously devastated walking around like a ghost of herself. Daniel thinks it's the funniest thing ever, now lives with Melissa and is expecting a child...on his anniversary date with Megan, which also happens to be Meg's due date with Dan's child.
51. Second Thoughts About a Messy Decision
They got rid of their night cleaning crew the week after I started and we had to learn how to clean the whole department on our own before close. I work in a meat department so this meant taking apart and cleaning two meat grinders and a band saw that were covered with meat goop.
Almost the whole department quit because of this, but I stuck around and got the hang of it. After about three months though they hired the cleaning crew back. Now closing is a breeze.
52. The Rumors Are True
I work with my wife in a separate department but I just started working here. Someone started up a rumor that the "new guy" is having an affair with a woman in marketing. But they are 100% talking about me and my wife, who works in marketing.
53. It's the Little Things That Count
In a very short span of time, they changed everyone's 401K plan (for the worse) and then implemented an office-wide cleanliness policy. No eating at your desk. Only three personal items on your desk. Everything labeled. No items other than your keyboard, mouse, and monitors on your desk at the end of the day.
Talk about pissed off. You could feel the gloom when you walked in. Everyone's give-a-hoot meter broke at once.
54. Computer Fraud
Our computer guy has been with the company for upwards of 10 years, charging premium. I have been working with computers and can do some basic stuff since I started crashing them due to visiting bad sites as a kid. Basically, I know a lot of about recovery restoring and stuff like that. The IT guy claimed one of the computers was slow because a couple of my photography works are on the computer.
This is after he couldn’t figure out what was wrong for about two hours and tried to throw me under the bus. I get on the computer and fix it in ten minutes in front of the owner. Things got really quiet and they both left.
55. But Tell Us What You Really Think
In a company of six people, owner said in a meeting with everyone that his two sales guys are irreplaceable and that the rest of us are "just paper pushers."
56. Gaslighting Specialists
At an old company I used to work for, we had this accountant I'll call Laurie. Laurie was her 40s and just insanely gorgeous for her age—not fake and plastic surgery looking, just natural beauty. We all tended to work late and she was no exception—not always, but maybe 2 days a week she'd stay over an hour or two.
It got to where her husband would call our department's phone since the main line would go to a recording after regular hours and ask whoever to go find his wife. Sometimes she was there, but if she wasn't, the husband would get weird and start badgering whoever picked up "She's messing around on me, I know it. Who's she sleeping with?"
So, we'd have to be careful about answering, as to avoid this guy and his questions. She has young kids and every so often, after he'd call, we'd get a call from her kid(s), asking to speak to their mom. Eventually, we brought it up to her and she was so embarrassed, swore that he was possessive and crazy and she wasn't doing anything wrong.
We would always tell her it was between her family and we didn't care, but she would always just deny and say her husband was nuts. It got to the point where my boss who was friends with her would argue with her husband and tell him he was possessive and that he was crazy. Eventually, we would all argue with the guy when he called and confirm that she wasn't cheating.
I stayed out of it for a long time, but after watching Laurie cry in our office after being confronted on it, I started to stand up to the guy when he'd call too and tell him that I work with her and had never seen her act improper and that the accusations were taking a toll on our workplace. He would usually talk to me fairly rationally and always say that the signs were all there and he was almost certain she was cheating, but I always stood up for her—which made what happened next all the more painful.
One day, she put in her notice, just like that. We were all stunned as she'd worked there for 20 years and definitely seemed like a lifer. It was only after she left that I found out she'd been having numerous affairs over the course of several years with coworkers as well as other random guys. And to make it worse, my boss had known all along and was helping to cover for her.
I felt terrible for sticking up for her and really trying to convince the husband that she was faithful.
57. Give Credit Where Credit is Due
Try working in IT. Apathetic attitudes towards us are just the standard state of being.
It's a job where if you work absolutely perfectly, you're totally invisible and only appear on the radar when something messes up.
Just a few weeks ago we did a major office move. My department worked back to back 12-18 hour days to get everything moved over, which we managed with less half a day's down time (and we were moving the company's main data center).
By the end of the final weekend after carrying 30+ servers (plus cabs) up four stories, re-cabling 200+ desks and literally moving trucks worth of gear I got home and my legs just wouldn't work any more. I still have the blisters on my feet from walking about 30 miles in two days... and I was still at my desk at 7am the next day to run around the office fixing teething issues.
Then, a few days ago the chief got the whole office together to thank everyone for their hard work. He had a stack of envelopes with "thank you" cards and £50 vouchers in them. Everyone who volunteered to help with the move got one...including the people who "volunteered" to have an early snoop around the new office, spent 30 minutes on site and did precisely zilch.
You know who didn't get a mention, or an envelope? Anyone in IT. The people who were there working unpaid overtime until 2 am for weeks.
58. Over Gripe
We had a visit from a corporate higher up today, and one of my coworkers knowingly violated policy in front of said higher up. Not surprisingly, the higher up was furious and insisted my coworker be written up. Usually my boss is very lenient about this specific policy and many others and will just remind everyone not to do it, but never actually write anyone up.
Apparently, the best way for my coworker to handle the situation was to yell at my boss that "This usually isn't a big deal, I do this all the time, what the heck?" My boss, who is fortunately a pretty chill person, just looked at her and responded, "If you really want to complain that I don't write you up every day, I'd be happy to change that for you."
Now my coworker is complaining about the higher-up, my boss, and the policy. My other coworkers are complaining about how she should've been fired. My boss is complaining about the whole situation. And now I'm complaining about all the complaining.
59. Selectively Poor
Cancelled the Christmas party and Christmas bonuses for the whole company because we "didn't have the money for it." I found out later the CEO and the CTO used company funds to take a week-long ski vacation in Whistler instead of doing something nice for the employees. You better believe I spread that evidence around the office.
60. Lovable Larcenist
I work in a hostel in Amsterdam. It's a quick turnaround because we hire travelers who are passing through and we let them work for their bed, changing bed sheets and cleaning toilets. People usually stay a couple months. There's this new guy who everyone loves, but I am growing more and more suspicious of him. Things keep going missing in the rooms that he cleans. It started off small with things like earphones, sunglasses, hats.
Last week 150 pounds was stolen and two days later he asked me the exchange rate for 150 pounds to euros. He also told me that he is traveling on his brother’s passport using a fake name and was kicked out of his parent’s house for stealing. I don't know who to turn to. I like the guy, but we can't have a thief working in the building.
61. Technically Speaking, You’re Screwed
It's not one specific incident, but my current company in the last couple years switched from guaranteed permanent employment for anyone who worked there long enough to a system of permanent contract labor for a huge section of their workforce. Rumblings of unionization have started amongst the contract workers…
62. Team Quitters
We recently got a new general manager who seemed fine at first, but it has become increasingly obvious she doesn't know what she's doing being a manager. She's been giving everyone bad hours except a few people she likes basically because they're friendly with her not because they're especially good at their jobs or preferred by customers. She’s also terrible at keeping track of who needs what days off, even when they text her, write notes, put it through the online system, etc.
My department makes most of the profit of the store and under previous general managers our supervisor was basically our boss with very little interference from the general manager. My department’s supervisor is thinking of trying to transfer to a different store which would probably lead to a bunch of other people quitting beyond those who already have or are planning to.
63. Sometimes It’s Best to Keep Your Mouth Shut
Company consisted of something like 1,200 employees at the time, and rented out a big conference center for a Christmas party. At the opening of the party, the CFO was giving opening remarks, and asked—expecting cheers—if everyone liked their Christmas bonuses.
He got booed.
See, of that 1,200 people, a bit over a thousand were in customer service. No one in customer service got bonuses, only people in the "corporate" departments got bonuses. And our awesome CFO decided to rub everyone's noses in it, because clearly the Chief Financial Officer of a company would have no idea that 80%+ of his company didn't get bonuses.
At the same party, the CEO made an announcement that the company would be closed on Friday (Christmas that year was on a Thursday), and everyone got a day off. Now, he had literally just finished making a speech about how everyone was important, and everyone was part of the company, no matter the department. He had shoveled crap hard, trying to make CS happier.
The next day, we all got a memo that Customer Service still had to work on that Friday. We apparently didn't count as "everyone" and the CEO just hadn't realized that the announcement wouldn't apply to anyone.
January saw a 60% attrition rate.
64. At the Flip of a Switch
I work with documents from a short-wall cubical. I get to my office at around 6AM. My boss shows up around 5:30AM. It's just us for the first few hours of the day. We prefer the lights off because we have windows producing natural light when the sun comes up. The lights in the office are too bright and bother us.
Every single day, this guy, we'll call him Ron, shows up and turns on all the lights in the office. Ron will even turn on the lights in rooms with no one in it. We've told him that we don't like the lights on in our area. It's bothersome. Ron flips out and says we have no authority over the lighting in this area and that OSHA is on his side.
He then calls up the legal team and demands for an OSHA representative to be sent to check for the lighting levels in the office. Someone came out and said it's fine. Ron demands another test. This time they send a team of people to check the light levels and try to come up with a solution. Because of this, a lot of testing has to be done on our light system.
So now, we have maintenance people running around turning the lights on and off to see what happens. This has been going on for months. Everyone in the office is sick of the lights being messed with but Ron keeps making a deal about it. Recently, a couple people have sided with Ron that the lights should be at full power at all times throughout the day.
So now there's a huge feud in the office between team no-lights and team full-bright-blinding-lights. The teams are getting bigger and it's to the point where some work isn't getting done because of the feud. Some people say, "I can't work with the lights so bright—I'm going home," while others say, "The lights aren't bright enough and I can't see without them on so I'm going home until OSHA fixes it."
People are starting to play pranks on each other, such as buying lamps and flashlights for team bright-lights. This is a huge company, think Google or Microsoft size, yet we're raging a war based on a light switch.
65. A Fight to the Death
Started firing people by lining two up at a time and seeing which one they prefer to keep on. Didn't matter if you were there for 20 years or two.
Also hiring management from outside and not promoting within which means the new managers have no knowledge of anything that company does in terms of ethics, procedures, or employee status. It has turned this "clique" type environment into every person for themselves. Very toxic.
66. Smells Like Trouble
The person in the cubicle adjacent to mine has a plug-in fragrance thing and the rest of us were debating asking her to remove it. I honestly would like to see it go, not because it's a smell that bothers me, but because I don't like the precedent that we can impose our preferred fragrance on others willy-nilly; but now that we've established that it's there and we're all kind of neutral but also kind of want see it go. It's entered like a Cold War status where we're all not talking about it anymore but I think we still want to see it go.
67. I Can List All the Things Wrong With This
Changed up the metrics that determined people's bonuses. And included things that were important for the business to know, but completely beyond the control of the people who's bonuses were impacted.
For example, we had a "right party contact" rate—how many times you actually got the person you were calling vs. the number of calls you actually made. The problem was the phone number list came from elsewhere, and the people making the calls were just given a list of numbers, and you had to call them all. No leeway.
So you're calling blind from a list you don't control... and get penalized if the list is lousy.
Oddly enough for the people in charge of making the phone number lists, their bonuses were not influenced by right party contact rate.
68. Naughty Yachty
An ex con who was in jail for murder works at my old job and is living on the company owner's private yacht because he's homeless and they desperately need this guy for his skill set. And that's just the beginning...Other guys were searching to buy their other coworker a male escort as a joke for his birthday and stumbled upon the ex con on the owner's yacht, advertising as a male escort for males.k We raised a ton of money to fix the sound system. The fix sucks. Now the music person is leaving at the end of the week and none of us are going to be fully equipped to troubleshoot the sound system for church services, funerals, etc.
On top of that, all the old people throw a fit when anyone uses the kitchen in the parish hall and doesn't leave it immaculate. They usually blame me or the youth minister, and neither of us ever use it. The teachers at the school also put up a big sign on their supply room door that says, "These supplies are for school staff only," because "someone" keeps taking supplies and leaving the room a mess.
Again, they blame me and the youth minister when we have our own supply closets to us. Teachers can be just as petty and passive-aggressive as their middle-school students.
69. X Does Not Mark the Spot in This Office
Casually said that the best employee was X and everyone, including X, knew that X was among those who did the least amount of work.
X was the most friendly to the boss, always coming in to say, "Hi, do you need anything?"
70. Towering Tales
We have a pathological liar at the bank I work for. She's just an intern—on calls with the NYC office, she said she went to Yale. We noticed. Girl, I've seen your resume, it's the local state school, and there's no shame in that, it's a quality education. Plus, you know lot's of people here know people from that Ivy school, right? Or went there? But here lies only get bigger from there.
She's dating a brain surgeon who also has cancer. Girl, we found his picture that you sent us on Tinder. One of us matched with him. He doesn't know you. She's been accepted to Harvard Business school, but instead is accepting an offer with a big consulting firm. She's in an abusive relationship and was thrown through a glass wall, injuring her wrist, which healed somehow without scars.
Finally, she was called into the MD's office. Legal was there too. They confronted her about her lies. Now she had tonsillitis surgery and is too unwell to come in for the remaining two weeks of her internship. And this is how you lose your chance of getting an offer.
71. So How Did You Enjoy My Wrath?
Head of department realised that we weren’t about to meet our targets for the financial year. Completely banned annual leave for three months, forced anyone who didn’t fill in their timesheet on time to attend a disciplinary meeting (despite problems with the system meaning that some didn’t get filled in) and generally had lower management terrified, causing a massive blame culture and several people to be signed off with mental health issues.
In the end, the employee survey which went to his bosses was hilariously bad, and he’s now somewhere else making some other people’s lives a misery. The best part was when his replacement came in and fired his right hand man who was also a jerk.
72. Sinking Ship
Two employees had a serious issue due to both being loudmouthed and polar religious opposites, one called corporate and got people needlessly shifted around between locations. The guy who called corporate is now at my location and he's lazy. I've gotten three complaints about him from client-company employees in the 1.5 weeks he's been here and he already managed to wreck a company vehicle.
An ex-employee keeps showing up wanting to "visit people." He was removed from the premises last year under threat of trespassing charges, but our company has no official protocol for what to do if an ex-employee actually shows up. Official instructions are to let it happen and sweep it under the rug afterward, as long as it's on weekends.
Oh, and our electrical room where everything is running 480v keeps threatening to flood whenever it rains. That's fun.
73. Check Your Personal Problems at the Door
Had a big fight with his wife in front of everybody. I don't think you should run a restaurant with your family members unless you're really solid with each other.
74. Problems with Management
One of the cashiers at my last job got pregnant; she was 17 at the time. Everything was well and good and we all supported her decision, and let her know she’d still have a job when she got back from maternity leave. I didn’t know who the father was and frankly, it was none of my business—but whether I wanted to or not, I was about to find out. One day she was shopping on her day off when she ran into the father of her kid with another girl.
They were being cuddly and holding hands and stuff while they too were shopping. So, this poor, very pregnant teen went off on them, “How could you? I kept the baby because of you!” They got in a huge fight and had to be escorted from the store by management. The store manager didn’t recognize her because she wasn’t in uniform and he was an oblivious jerk anyway.
He tried to have her banned from the store. She ended up quitting because if it, had her baby, and I think is doing OK despite the circumstances.
75. A New Level of Jerkery
Fired the girl who was in her third trimester of pregnancy three days before her maternity leave was to start.
76. Cutthroat Power
Our president is a busy guy, traveling a lot, etc. He has a lot on his plate, so the vice president pretty much runs the show in our building. As long as I've been employed here, he's butted heads with a senior manager, Susan. Susan has an attitude problem, is extremely type A, and everything has to be just to her liking or she'll literally refuse to do work to advance the many projects we have going on.
The president loves her because she's great at what she does, unfortunately, so all of her demands are given in to. Fortunately, my team and her team are able to work separately. Susan and another manager Linda have had a long-standing feud for reasons I don't even know. It got crazy enough that company lawyers had to get involved. There was a blowout last week where essentially Linda told the president, "It's either me or Susan." Monday, Linda no longer worked with us.
There's some construction going on in our building which pretty much brought our work to a grinding halt. We use some very sensitive and expensive equipment that can't be moved from the construction space, so we just cover it up with plastic tarps. Susan's workspace was first on the construction list. Vice president notices that the day before construction was scheduled to start, one of Susan's employees forgot to cover up a piece of equipment.
Since Susan literally loses her mind if anyone touches her stuff, he chose to not go in her workspace but just let her know instead. This resulted in one of the craziest screaming matches I've ever seen. Susan, red in the face, was bellowing that vice president has no right to tell her what to do, go in her workspace, or touch her things, but as vice president and Susan's superior, he literally has the right to do all of these things.
The next day, Susan had put duct tape to the doorknobs and keyholes to all of her workspaces. Even when her employees needed to go inside, she'll cut open the duct tape for them, wait for them to finish, and then seal it back up when they're done. The rest of us are equal parts entertained, disgusted at the petty behavior, and nervous that it might come down to Susan or the VP. And if we lose the VP, essentially, we are all out of jobs.
77. The Fun Police Reporting For Duty
We were once in the middle of a very stressful period of work, and everyone was feeling it. However, one afternoon, an off-hand comment turned into a conversation that we all got involved in which led to a few laughs. My manager, returning from a meeting, piped up "Oh we've finished tomorrow's work, have we? What's all this about (insert subject matter)?" Entire team instantly deflated.
Unnecessary. Every employee needs time to blow off a little steam.
78. Bare Minimum
I work in a restaurant, and since I can complete most tasks my bosses tell me to do without complaining, I'm stretched over bus-boy, dishes, and cook, all that after having worked about a month there and having close to no prior restaurant experience of any kind. One of the cooks is a middle-aged woman with severe untreated ADD who's always confused and never knows what's going on.
The main dish lady is always complaining and asking everyone to make her job easier when she'd never reciprocate for someone else, and most of the bus-boys appear to have never worked in their life, they go back and forth between the beverage fridge in the front and the fridge in the kitchen with two cans per trip rather than take the crate of 24 cans to the front.
79. A Tale of Freezes and Fridays
It was a one two punch.
The company wide meeting announced the promotion of several high level management and executives (mostly title and responsibility changes). Lots of smiles and handshakes, not unlike a college graduation ceremony.
After these promotion announcements, they declared that due to the stagnant economy and poor sales, the entire company would be experiencing a pay freeze as a result. So, no raises for anyone.
They then concluded the meeting by discontinuing "Casual Fridays." So, no more jeans on Friday.
It almost felt like it was designed to make people want to quit and leave. It worked though, I and many others moved on to greener pastures within the year.
80. Mixing Business and Pleasure
I was working at a contact center with about 100 people in New Zealand. It was pretty obvious that Manager M at the time had a bit of a thing with another manager, Manager F. There was lots of flirting. And while my manager normally had a bit of a personal space radius, that completely dissolved when the other manager was around. Still, for the most part, they kept it professional.
Their personal lives were never the topic of conversation, it was just a bit of an elephant in the room. The occasional, "Hey did you see M & F arrived at the same time this morning" comment, but nothing too outlandish. One day, Manager M didn't show up to work. That's not too out of the ordinary, except for around 11 AM in the morning, a random female visitor we'd never seen before stormed into the office. Finally, we got the whole, crazy story.
Before our receptionist could ask her who she was here to see, she screamed out, "Where's the woman that's been screwing my husband?" Manager F was out of the office at the time, and while I don't think Manager M's wife knew who she was looking for, it took a few moments for staff to calm her down, convince her to give up her search, and find her a quiet room to sit down in before leaving on her own terms.
Manager M came back to work after about a week and Manager F resigned a month later. I'm not sure if it was related, but likely.
81. Small Business, Big Problems
Small business. 20 employees +/-. Boss made a big speech about austerity measures and no raises this year. A week and a half later he drives up in a brand new Silverado with all the bells and whistles. Expensed to the business of course. He would hate to have to pay taxes on those profits.
One of the less subtle members of the staff took a literal dump in front of his office door.
82. Carling Out
We have an employee named Carl. Carl is "That Guy." You know he was unpopular and unsuccessful growing up, never changed, and now he's in his 40s so that's his lot in life. Carl graduated high school with the president of our company, who is a total Golden Boy, so you can imagine Carl's insecurity. Carl got demoted a few years back and now does a job that's pretty entry-level.
He didn't get fired because Golden Boy felt sorry for him. At the time our company was small, so Carl's job title wasn't a big deal. Well, we've grown substantially and there are now people in their mid to late 20s with the same job title as Carl, and they are way better at this job than Carl ever was. You can sense the insecurities growing.
One of these people in their 20s is "Greg," who's especially good at his job and will be getting promoted to Carl's previous job title within the next few years. Carl is not happy about that. Carl will constantly make digs at Greg that he passes off as "jokes," but you know they come from a very salty place.
A lot of it has to do with Carl tracking Greg's office attendance, which he has never been tasked with but has taken upon himself. Greg works 7:30-3:30 instead of the typical 9-5 because, well, he wants to and the bosses don't mind. Carl works 7-6 because he'd rather be here than home with his miserable wife. Every time Greg leaves at 3:30, Carl makes some sideways comment along the lines of, "Oh, look at Greg skipping out early again!"
Carl has also been checking up on Greg. For example, if Greg has to go to a company worksite, Carl will text someone at that worksite checking that Greg got there. Obviously, the text recipient tells Greg this immediately, and Greg gets super mad, yet Carl will swear up and down that it's "just a joke."
It all came to a head when Carl pulled his little texting maneuver and when Greg came back to the office, he finally just snapped. He told Carl that his job isn't to track Greg's whereabouts, that he's sick of Carl, and just dressed this guy down. Carl was less than pleased and they met with HR.
HR and Golden Boss agreed that Greg, although his methods were unorthodox, was technically right. So, Greg is fine. This was Carl's first "offense" so no one is losing their job, but Golden Boss did have a very long talk with him about the appropriate way to treat your coworkers, especially those who work alongside—and not beneath—you.
Golden Boss also had to explain to Carl why it's not nice to be nosey and that he should really focus on doing his own job more and leave the worrying about Greg to Golden Boss. I think that's the greatest consequence of all because Golden Boss was MUCH more popular than Carl ever dreamed of being in high school.
83. The Devil's in the Details
Former teacher. The administrators at my school were usually pretty chill, but had a habit of randomly coming up with minor rules that they would enforce for us (male teachers had to wear ties even on jeans day, etc.). Overall it wasn’t bad, except for the time an administrator made a crucial mistake... they banned staff from drinking coffee in front of students.
Now if you’ve never worked in a school, you’d think this isn’t a big deal. When you spend nearly 100% of your day in front of students, it definitely is a big deal.
First we tried to find any loophole we could. Energy drinks? Banned the next week. Tea? Banned two days later. It was chaos.
Eventually, we realized they couldn’t fire an entire school’s worth of teachers and aides, so we ended up doing the one thing that private schools fear most: we formed a union.
Realistically, it was more of a weird pseudo-union focused specifically on civil disobedience regarding the coffee issue, but it ruffled feathers nonetheless. The administrators caved to our “demands,” allowed us to drink coffee again, and even bought each of us a reusable coffee mug as a gesture of goodwill.
And that’s the story of how a handful of school administrators almost accidentally created a teachers union over a complete non-issue.
84. Seed Sowing
My married, 35-year-old boss who has four kids is two months pregnant with my 20-year-old coworker's kid. Additionally, my 30-year-old co-worker who is married with five kids is four months pregnant with the same 20-year-old co-worker's kid.
85. Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely
I used to work at an English immersion middle school in Korea. The admin was all Korean, including my boss, the vice principal.
Word started going around that the school was under investigation for certain admin taking bribes to admit students. The VP got visibly anxious for a few weeks.
Then one Sunday night we got a text message from one of the Korean teachers at the school: "The vice principal has passed away." It turns out he had hung himself in the school lobby that afternoon. The teaching staff still had to be at school the next morning even though classes were canceled for several days. I remember walking into the school and seeing a custodian mopping the spot where the VP had been hanging.
Morale tanked pretty hard for a while.
86. Who Took the Cookie from the Cookie Jar?
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 they're really for the little kids. It's like hide and seek back there. This guy from seafood found them the other day in a box of raisins. My manager has lost some brownie points.
87. Simple Solutions
Co-worker got her car, which she only had for six months, repossessed. She almost tore the bumper off and just beat the thing up like crazy. She thought she could just make partial car payments. She didn't want to pay 100% of all of her bills because she'd have very little money left to do fun things like get really drunk. She has to come up $1,100 in ten days to get it back and provide proof of insurance.
Well, not only does she not have $1,100, she also does not have insurance. In order to get insurance, she needs a valid driver's license, which she also does not have. She thinks she can just let the car go without any consequences and the dealer will just sell it and recoup their losses. And this week she has bed bugs!
She thinks she can just move downstairs because the bugs are upstairs.
88. Convoluted Certitude
There's a coup shaping up right now. About four years ago, we were purchased by a foreign company that cleaned house at the top ranks and decided to promote a new CEO internally to try and keep some stability. The final candidates were the VP of Engineering, VP of Sales, and VP of Business Development. The VP of Engineering ended up being promoted and has done an abysmal job running the company.
The VP of Business Development ended up working at a competitor after getting passed over for the promotion. The company has not grown as expected since the acquisition and now the company that owns us is showing signs that they're ready for a shakeup. The VP of Sales here was previously the CEO at a different company, so the company that owns us is starting to ask him a lot of questions about what's going on since he has executive experience.
He's been going behind the CEO's back to give the company that owns us the story of what's really happening—at the same time, the CEO is getting desperate to save his own skin. Where this really goes off the rails is that at a tradeshow several of us were at, a few of us overheard the CEO talking to some competition about jumping ship and joining them.
It was completely coincidental, we all went to the same bar after the show without knowing each other were going to be there, and the CEO didn't realize we were the next table over. Someone—I really don't know who, there were five of us that overheard that conversation—secretly told the company that owns us that the CEO is getting ready to sell out the company and work with competition despite having a non-compete.
The company that owns us doesn't know what to think about it because they don't know who to trust. Things are going to be interesting in the next couple months.
89. Can You Check in the Back?
My 45-year-old coworker got caught having an affair with another coworker who’s an 18-year-old girl. To top it all off, they worked in the back of the building alone together while his pregnant wife was the receptionist at the front.
90. Substitute Punishment
One of the Spanish teachers was out that day and the class had a substitute. The class wasn't behaving properly and the substitute was angry at them. While she was chastising them, the fire alarm went off—and her reaction was utterly chilling. She decided that the kids didn't deserve to be rewarded with time outside, so she refused to allow the students to leave.
She reportedly even put a desk in front of the door to quell any notions about unauthorized egress. If it had been a drill, chances are pretty good nobody would have noticed. However, it was not a drill. Instead, it was arson. The arsonist had lit fires in the maintenance closets near each set of stairs with the intention of having the fire spread to the stairs and trapping people inside the burning building. The Spanish class became trapped downstairs with no exits.
Fortunately for everybody involved, the stairs never actually caught fire, they were just impassible with smoke. Once the fire department put out the fire in one stairwell, they were able to evacuate the students and the substitute. I believe they actually took them out a nearby window and not the main entrance.
After the students told the administration what the substitute did, a story rather supported by the fact that the firemen had to push through the desk that had been propped against the door, the sub was actually arrested and charged with 30 or so counts of reckless endangerment of a minor. I believe they dropped the charges in exchange for the substitute giving up the ability to hold a teaching job of any kind for effectively the rest of her life.
The arsonist was eventually caught, this being the third and largest of six different fires he eventually set. I believe he was committed to a mental institution where he clearly belonged.
91. Keep Them Fed
At my job, there was this guy who kept buying his direct supervisor lunch. Every day. One time the supervisor asked him why he kept doing it, to which he responded, "The king's got to eat." Everyone in the immediate area cringed super hard at that, including the supervisor.
92. Give Me Your Brains!
A co-worker of mine would talk up the boss during meetings. "Mrs. Boss, you're the smartest person I've ever known! I wish I had some of your brains."
93. Here Comes The Choo-Choo Train
A colleague tried to feed the manager during lunch saying, "just one more bite, please." Both of them were female but still, I was so embarrassed to witness that.
94. Messed Up
A guy at my job would counteract his bad performance by kissing up to the boss. It helped him keep his job for a very long time…but eventually, his time came. He told someone to screw off on a recorded call.
95. They’ve Got His Name
I still can’t believe this happened. I had a co-worker who named both his children after the boss/owner.
96. All Part Of The Job
I had a co-worker that went to the boss’s apartment to massage his feet.
97. Show Some Respect
Once at work when I had just started out, I called my boss by his first name. My co-worker scolded me after he walked away saying, “No!! You call him Mr. so-and-so.” She would also always go out and buy him his lunch. Like, he cut your maternity leave short, and he underpays you, what’s in it for you?
98. Best Man For His Daughter
The worst was a guy I worked with at my last job doing HVAC. He always gave the boss a full report on whatever crew he worked with that day. If you said something negative about the boss, he was going to tell on you. If you were a minute or two late coming back from lunch, he had a picture on his phone with the time stamp.
If you didn't hang something perfectly level or straight, he'd toss a level on it, snap a picture and send it to the boss. He also came in every Sunday and washed all the trucks with no pay, to make sure we kept a good image. I couldn’t believe someone would do all that just for a mediocre job—and then I found out the hilarious truth. This guy was dating the boss's daughter and he was trying to prove himself the whole time.
99. A Way To The Top Is Through Their Stomach
I work for a guy that has multiple companies, hotels, and event halls. Due to the pandemic, one of his restaurants acts like a canteen for all of his employees. They prepare one meal for every day. And that's it. One day I went to the restaurant and on the way, I ran into my boss who was also on his way to have lunch, so we went together.
When we entered the restaurant, my boss asked the chef what was on the menu. The chef told him and directly followed up with "But if you don't want it, I can prepare you something else!". I didn't think anything about it at first, because let's be real here. My boss earned every bit of respect, not only due to his handling of the whole situation in 2020.
He didn't fire anyone even though the event halls and restaurants are basically closed for over a year now. Not a single person. It didn’t matter if it was part-time or full-time. My boss said to the chef that he's fine with the menu and doesn't need something special. That’s when things started to get…uncomfortable. The other guy followed up with "You sure? I can prepare you something! That's really not a problem."
And again, my boss said, "Really, it's fine. I’ll eat what we have." We got our plates and sat down. Not even five minutes later, the chef came over to our table with a plate full of six different meats, vegetables, fries. Food which was worth three to four servings. My boss looked at him, looked at the plate, and just said, "Ok. Just leave it here then."
The second my boss was done with his lunch; the guy ran over and took his plate back to the kitchen. And only his, not mine, which was fine because canteen service doesn't include this anyways and I was not expecting him to clean after me. He came back with coffee. One coffee. When my boss asked, "Can you please bring a second one?" he just glared at me but did it anyway. But it didn’t end there.
Shortly after the coffee, he got a dessert for our boss. And again, nothing for me. Our boss asked him to please bring a second one, because otherwise, it would be rude towards me. But I just declined and said I was full already because I was actually expecting him to spit into it as his gaze said it all. It was overall really uncomfortable for me the entire time.
He jumped through a lot of hoops to please our boss, who didn't want anything special in the first place. And he had this burning hate in his eyes towards me, because I was sitting at the same table.
100. Doing Him Right
I used to work at a restaurant and one of the servers was having an affair with the general manager. I'm pretty sure she was literally a butt-kisser. She was awful to work with and a total snob. She got paid more than everyone else and she didn't have the minimum wage that servers got. Her paycheck said she was a cook and she made an extra $2/hour plus tips.
She always got the “good” section of the restaurant. It was a seat yourself kind of place so some sections were consistently better than others for tips and she refused to pull her weight or help anyone when they were busy but would expect help from others when she was busy and even when she wasn't busy she'd expect people to help her like bus her tables or make her drinks for her which was part of the server's job.
And she was allowed to do that because she was literally doing the boss in the office during work. And that's how everyone knew.
101. Company Transformers
At my last job, they told us “Under no circumstances are you even to look at what's going on in the other half of the plant.” Obviously, I decided to peek, but when I saw what was going on, my stomach dropped. All of us were doomed. They were building an automated side of the factory. I got replaced by a robot a year later.
NASA
102. 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.
103. Overwhelming Toxicity
I visited this one Brazilian family weekly. The couple had a tumultuous relationship—he ran around on her all the time and was known to give her a smack every now and then. Any time she spoke up, he threatened to kick her out. She was undocumented and he wasn’t, so she and her kids would have been homeless or worse.
The social worker and I had been secretly working with her for a while, trying to get the authorities involved, etc. Then, one day, I was doing therapy with the baby when the husband came out to show me the revolver he just bought. His next words were appalling—he said he got it so that he could “deal with anyone who messed with his family.”
I felt terrible because they pulled me out of the home right away and left the baby there. I don’t know what happened to that family. Worst of all, our Brazilian translator just brushed it off, saying, “Eh, that’s just how Brazilian marriages are. “ It broke my heart.
Shutterstock
104. 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.
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