You can’t love all your co-workers. That’s just a fact of life. But, no one should have to put up with co-workers this brutal. From horrible odors to disturbing comments and everything in between, these people have seen the worst co-workers the world has to offer.
1. Nepotism At Its Worst
The owner's nephew was brought on to be an assistant manager. In the same night, he slept with some random woman on the office desk, on top of the staff paychecks. Then when we closed up for the night, he stumbled into the bar next door where I was having a nightcap with industry friends. He didn't see me, but he threw his credit card down and said, "I'm a club owner. I drink for free here."
He kept shouting that until he was asked to leave. He wasn’t the assistant manager for long.
2. Fight Club: Workplace Edition
She didn’t officially work at my store’s location. She was supposed to be at another location training to be a manager there, but her predecessor was still working at said location, and the upper management/boss didn’t want too many people working there at once. So, she had to work at my store’s location instead. As soon as she started, she had a problem with me.
I don’t know why, I’ll never understand why. She essentially bullied me from the get-go and when I told my manager about it, she claimed nothing could be done since the rude lady wasn’t officially under my manager. But one day, she went too far. She started bumping into me and saying, “You have a problem with me? Let’s take it outside.” Stuff like that.
I was half her size, I’ve never fought in my life outside of sibling squabbles, and I have terrible social anxiety. So I went to the bathroom, called my significant other to come pick me up, grabbed my things, and walked out on my shift. I didn’t say a word to anyone and left her there alone during the lunch rush. Honestly, she deserved it.
I later learned from my friend who also worked there that my manager didn’t blame me, and officially, on my papers, she said I left for “personal reasons.” She was a nice woman and I don’t blame her for not being able to do anything. Upper management at this chain was very irresponsible and didn’t seem to care about that store location whatsoever.
3. Obsession At Work
I have a co-worker who was an absolute nightmare. He spread rumors about me and told people I got the job by sleeping with some manager I've never met in person. He had a history of becoming obsessed with women at work and some have left because of him. It got so bad that another contractor within our workplace noticed and took action.
This contractor, who has an office within our building, had to blast out a company-wide email telling staff to not attend their office because my co-worker would continually go down there and flirt or harass the office lady. He turned into a stalker and still continues to park his car next to mine and stare me down in front of colleagues.
Turns out, the guy has Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and isn’t exactly self-aware. It eventually became way too much for me to take, so I tried to complain. When I complained, HR labeled it as a "personal issue" and victim-blamed me. I was asked by the top manager, "But you wanted it, yeah?" Disgraceful. He will get fired eventually.
4. The Office Gossip
I had a co-worker who would call people individually and complain about other people. It got to the point where people were fed up. They were telling the people he was complaining about, and tell them what he was saying. It got a little too personal for me, so I sent his manager an email to have an unofficial conversation about his behavior.
I was allowed to stay anonymous, so at this point, I was. His reaction was chilling. He lost his mind and ended up going off sick for seven months due to the stress it caused him. He constantly asked HR who complained about him, and that he wouldn’t be able to come back to work if he didn't know. I dropped my anonymity because I didn't want him off work, I just wanted him to change his toxic behavior.
In the official meeting with HR, he brought up my mental health, saying that it was no secret that my depression had caused me to over-exaggerate my emotions. He got an official warning because he counter-complained about the company, and lost his appeal as well. Eventually, he decided to quit and stop wasting everyone's time.
5. Just Go With It
I used to be a cashier manager at a big box store. There was this useless kid that finally stopped showing up. A few days go by, and I see him walk in, so I assume he's going to come up front and we can do the whole formal exit process since he missed shifts. He never comes up front and nobody hears from him. It’s like he just disappeared.
A few weeks go by, and we end up terminating him. Then, I go back to the lunchroom one day, and the useless kid is just sitting there. I ask him what he's doing and he says he's on break. I'm like, “No, you stopped showing up weeks ago and were terminated.” He acts like he didn’t hear me and says he is going back to work, and leaves.
I confirmed with all the other managers that he was indeed fired and not working in another part of the store. A few weeks later, he shows up in the lunchroom again. It turns out, he didn't want to tell his mom he doesn't want to work, so he kept letting her drop him off and he'd hang in the lunchroom for a bit. This way, it looked like he still had the job to his mom.
6. Dang, Daniel
Let's call him "Danny." Danny doesn't wash his hands. Danny for some reason feels the need to not use a spoon to put coffee in the communal coffee maker. Instead, he's "gotta" use his hands because people need to "quit being afraid of germs." That's not the worst part. Danny takes a poop, comes out to join everyone in a company lunch, and sticks his germ hands down the bucket of KFC to get a piece at the very bottom.
Danny came in hungover one day and just slept for eight straight hours at his desk. Danny doesn't flush. Danny loses every form of paperwork given to him. Danny is a jerk, but is also apparently too good of an engineer to fire. I hate Danny.
7. Roger That
Roger. He was a software developer, he was very very smart and stupendously incompetent in the ways that only really intelligent people can be without everything collapsing around them. Everyone hated him. We cheered when he finally left. He was condescending to the point where he would stand behind people and tell them what to type on their computers.
He was a colossal jerk. Years later, another co-worker was getting his security clearance. I got interviewed as a reference. One of the questions was "Did the applicant get along with everyone?" I said, "Yes, except for one guy." I couldn’t believe the interviewer’s reply. She just said, "I've heard all about Roger, and I don't think I've ever encountered a more universally despised person in my life.”
8. You Don’t Have To Post Everything
We had a co-worker who would either call in sick or leave early all the time, while bawling her eyes out because her dad was in and out of the hospital, in very bad condition. We all felt so bad for her that we rushed to cover her shifts and offered whatever we could do to help. Shortly after I got a different job, I heard she had called out for a whole week.
She said that her dad had passed on and she had to help plan the funeral. The company sent their condolences her way and the rest of us all offered to help some more. A few days later, another co-worker checked this girl's Snapchat and made a disturbing discovery. The co-worker found dozens of pictures of this girl and her friends going out to clubs and partying all week.
Shortly after she brought this up to the general manager, they saw the girl’s dad walking around the mall our store was in. They talked to him, and found out he'd never even had the flu that whole time, much less been in the hospital. She got fired, and then text spammed the other co-worker to "please talk to the GM, I know I messed up but please you gotta help me."
9. Wrong Hole
There was an employee who we noticed was falling asleep a lot at work, so that got all of our attention. So, she usually took a few ten-minute naps throughout the day, which isn't a big deal because you can have breaks, but what caught our attention was when one of the employees heard a can getting cracked open in the bathroom one day.
The employee suspected it was an alcoholic beverage, so they told another employee, and when the girl came out of the bathroom, they waited about 10 minutes and then went in and checked the trash cans. Sure enough, she was drinking an alcoholic beverage. Also, there were some paper towels in there with blood spots on them, too.
We searched her belongings and found several other alcoholic beverages and a funnel. However, we noticed that her breath didn’t smell like she had been drinking. It didn’t take us long to figure out what was going on. Instead of drinking the beverages, this crazy lady was butt-chugging the Miller High Life to get lit at work.
10. An Old Grudge
I briefly had a co-worker at my current job at a local grocery store, who we'll just call "Fred.” Fred was one of those people who are always talking on their phone in the break room, and that's my personal pet peeve at work. More often than not, he was usually arguing with his girlfriend, and he doesn't seem to care that anyone's listening.
He'd do other annoying, gross things like chewing with his mouth wide open, and wiping his boogers all over the place, but then there was one day when he tried to flush a hot pocket down the toilet. Needless to say, that it didn't play out so well, and that temporarily put an end to our closest employee restroom right by the break room.
He surprisingly didn't get fired over that, but he did get fired when one of his old high school teachers came in shopping, and he threw a whole sack of potatoes at her. She was an elderly woman who got seriously injured, and both the ambulance and the authorities had to get involved. I never did hear about what happened to his old teacher.
11. Taken Down And Out
I had a former supervisor who was a bully, a gossip, and an all-around horrible person that picked one or two people to be her punching bag. My introduction to her was absolutely horrible. I was sitting at lunch, and she came barreling out to one of my co-workers and proceeded to literally scream and curse in his face in the break area.
She also had a habit of gossiping in the warehouse office in full hearing of other people, which made me uncomfortable. It's one thing when a co-worker gossips to another, but it's an entirely different thing when a supervisor gossips about those under them to others. I actually mentioned to a different supervisor that it made me uneasy to be in the office.
While this was going on, she got wind of my complaint. She then decided to make me her target. Over the span of six months, she bullied me and behaved in some really disrespectful ways. For one, She gossiped about me. How did I find out? She started doing it in front of me. It was not exactly subtle. But wait, there’s more!
She gave me a very unflattering nickname. I found out when she blurted it out one time when I came into the office after being paged. She was passive-aggressive towards me in all respects. She actually growled at me, seriously growled at me, in the ladies locker room, and put papers over her face so I couldn't "look" at her.
She frequently sighed or scoffed when I tried to engage in conversation with other people that weren’t her. She ignored me or outright walked away when I needed a supervisor override. She told me I needed "to step it up" with my work. I was the second most productive worker, with the second-lowest fault rate of my department.
To give you an idea of a typical day: the most productive would do around 25 jobs, I would be at roughly 23, the other five people averaged around 15 jobs apiece. I finally had a breakdown after she started doing it in front of other supervisors and the manager. This was a week after I told the manager, again, about her behavior. Nothing was being done about it.
I was ready to just walk off the job and had a breakdown. Someone told the manager’s boss that I was having a breakdown, and she called me directly to find out what was going on. I was walked through an official HR report that went to the front office. She was given one last chance. I told them she wouldn't last a month.
Three weeks later, she had a screaming match with another employee and was suspended and subsequently fired. I later found out she was directly responsible for three people quitting, and one person getting fired because they couldn't take it anymore and threw a pair of gloves at her. Thank heavens she’s finally gone now.
12. Dragging Everyone Down
I work in a hospital as a nurse’s aide, and my department focuses on bringing patients around the facility for tests and room changes. I work night shift, and this person who just had the nastiest attitude started their shift at 6 AM. Normally, I can get along with most folks just fine, but not her.
She brought the whole room down with negative vibes. Nothing was ever good, and she always had bad shifts. One thing she did that upset a lot of people was take patients down for x-rays and abandon them down there so she could return to our office. The main thing here is that x-rays only take 2-5 minutes tops.
Every morning, there are x-rays to do, and right as she got back from dropping off patients, I’d have to send her back to bring patients to their rooms after the x-ray technicians call. These instances of her leaving patients were common, so I had informed my boss about the situation several times in person and by email.
She had an attitude with every other department that worked with us and never informed nurses when she’d move patients, which is a huge no-no because they constantly needed to monitor patient vital signs. One time, she ditched a patient in the ER waiting room to wait for a ride home and then didn’t tell anyone.
The patient was just sitting alone for 15-30 minutes without supervision until security found them. After this and a year of recorded evidence, she was finally fired. When that happened, it as if a dark cloud lifted, and everyone was relieved. She only got one signature when she asked people at work for support.
13. Self-Made Center of Attention
I worked in a certain touring exhibition last summer. And out of 200 people who applied for positions, there were only 20 who got the job. We were all very close-knit and had a love for the exhibit content, and being all genuinely interesting people, it made us family. Except for one totally awful woman.
She thought she was the world's biggest star for having made a two-second guest appearance on a TV show. She would send nasty messages and made similarly nasty calls to many of us. She bothered this lovely guy on the shop team who showed no interest. She undermined the bosses constantly, talked back, and was rude to customers.
When she thought we were talking about her, she got defensive and spiteful even though we weren't. One day, the shop guy shut her down for good, and for some reason, she decided to take it out on me. She started a smear campaign against me and said things to every co-worker but never said anything to my face.
Then she called me a white snake. Now, I am albino, and growing up, kids weren’t so accepting, and they were very cruel during school because I was different. So, with everything she was saying about me, the name-calling was the most hurtful. I had enough, and I took it to HR, and she was fired for her actions.
14. Biding Their Time
I had an employee that would file a grievance over every little issue. And of course, they usually won. So, I would end up having to pay him for lost time, overtime, etc. We eventually just gave up and gave him a cushy job where he didn’t have to do anything. We basically paid him to just not give us any trouble. I know it's really stupid, but it was the easiest way.
He was one of those guys that you give an inch and he takes a mile. He was maxed out at $32.50 an hour, he worked over 10 hours of overtime a week, and was the highest tenured employee at the company. Yet, all he had to do for work was push a push broom around the warehouse, and he still managed to find a way to mess that up.
Then one day, we finally got him. A supervisor discovered that he had started an ongoing poker game hidden behind a bunch of boxes in the warehouse, so we posted a hidden camera in the area. We gathered two weeks’ worth of poker games with audio. This game was played while on the clock, and included a rotating cast of employees.
Anywhere from four to eight players at a time, gambling for real money, and our "godfather" was even getting paid by employees just to get into the game. When it was all said and done, we fired him and three other employees, who were numbers one, two, four, and five on the tenure list. We also wrote up 11 other employees.
We met with the union rep and we told them that we had these guys on camera admitting to theft of product, company supplies, and time. We had them for gambling, drinking on the clock, and violating a host of company policies and CBA rules. We decided to ask for the moon so we had negotiating power, as that's how unions work.
So, instead of just firing them and negotiating down to a suspension, we informed them that we were going to press charges and seek compensation for all lost product, time, etc. It was totaling in the tens of thousands of dollars and likely prison time. They agreed to voluntarily resign if we didn't press charges.
However, this "godfather" character had the balls to ask for a severance package. What an idiot. He made way more money than any of my supervisors and did almost zero work, and yet he somehow managed to throw it all away.
15. Dupe the Newb
I worked with my worst co-worker when I was a cashier at Walmart. She approached me and asked me to cash out her paycheck. I was still new at the job and never got training on how to do that function. She was sympathetic, so she walked me through how to do it. Transaction over and done, I went on about my day.
A few days later, I got called into the manager’s office. When I got there, my blood ran cold. A group of managers circled me in the office to accuse me of being a part of the con. After tears, videotapes, and telling them what happened, they told me that this co-worker of mine had not just duped me but several others. They just wanted to confirm I wasn't in on the deal.
16. Let The Games Begin
This co-worker loved to try to pit people against each other with gossip. My grandfather passed. I live in the South, and he still lived in the mountains of West Virginia. It was midwinter, and a storm was expected. I made the decision not to go to the funeral for fear of being snowed in out of state. I continued to work to keep my mind off of things.
Another co-worker lost a family member a couple of months later. She went home for the funeral. She posted pictures on Facebook about seeing friends she hadn't seen in years. This apparently ticked off Miss Gossip. She started telling everyone about how horrible she was to be out with friends when she was gone for the funeral.
When that co-worker and Miss Gossip had it out, that co-worker brought me up as an example of how people deal will grief differently. Miss Gossip immediately ran and told everyone how that co-worker called me heartless. Suddenly, everyone thought I needed to be mad at that co-worker. I just told everyone to consider the source, and that it was none of my business.
17. Time For Some Detox
We had a co-worker who kept bringing negative and toxic energy into the workplace. I remember one day, she kept coming up to my desk and saying, “Can you check my back? I think there’s a knife back there.” Like, haha, do you get it? I was tempted after a while to say, “I have no idea what you are talking about!” but I didn’t want to engage.
She requested a two-week vacation at the last minute, and was of course denied because other people had already been approved for that time off. Being totally melodramatic, she quit and sent a group text to everyone saying, “I won’t let our boss destroy my marriage!” Like she was being brave for quitting a perfectly fine job because she didn’t get her way.
She also borrowed money from multiple co-workers and never paid them back. A year ago, we heard she had reapplied to work for us. As you can imagine, none of us wanted her back at all. In fact, multiple co-workers went to our new boss, and begged her not to hire her. Yes, she was really that bad of a co-worker. I’m so glad she’s gone.
18. No Good Deed Goes Unpunished
She was our neighbor, a young mother whose husband was a truck driver. I knew they struggled with finances, had been evicted from past apartments, gone to their church for help with food and utilities, etc. When she told me she was laid off from her job at a bank, I hired her at the store I managed. What a horrible mistake.
It was the beginning of the busy season, and I figured that would give her a few months to get back on her feet while she looked for something back in banking. Instead, she worked for me for less than two weeks. In that time, she took from the register and another employee, was late twice, and quit by leaving her uniforms balled up in a grocery bag with a note saying she "just couldn't do it anymore."
That chick was an A1 scam artist and I held a grudge against her for a long time.
19. Undercover Boss
I had announced to the floor workers that there would be random substance testing, and one of them says, “nope” and proceeds to run out of the building. I'm talking he ran so fast that he could have qualified for the Summer Olympics. He makes it to the parking lot, jumps into his car, and just stays there. Before we can even process what happened and chase after him, he reemerges with a smile.
He hands me a sheet of lined paper that says, in his handwriting and very sloppily, that he is exempt from random screening, per his employment letter, which is signed by the President of our company. He then proceeds to walk smugly back to his workstation. The best part of this is that I know for a fact that the President has never even met that worker because—you guessed it—I am the President of our company.
20. The Great Pastry Caper
I used to be the manager of a high volume Starbucks inside of Target. I had hired this 18-year-old girl who was very perky and energetic, so I thought she'd be a great fit. She went through training with no problem, was one of my top baristas, and helped me a lot with the general keeping of the store. About three months in, though, her crazy started coming out.
She was diabetic and would intentionally leave her insulin at home just so she'd have a dramatic episode at the store. She'd start crying in the middle of her shift to get attention from customers, and there was one time that she wanted to go home early but there was no one to cover for her so she made herself throw up in the sink in the back room.
Since the other two things were sensitive subjects and I can't write someone up for being diabetic or dealing with mental illness, if that's what she was actually dealing with, I couldn't do a whole lot about her. That was until one day when I came to work and my loss prevention team for Target was escorting one of my other employees out of the building.
I was confused and wondered what was happening, but they weren't able to disclose anything at the time. Later that day, the crazy girl also gets escorted out, but still, nothing was said to me. As the days went on, I saw every single one of my employees get escorted out with the exception of two, who also ended up getting fired later on.
That's when I found out the bizarre truth. It turns out, the crazy girl had put together this big operation of taking pastries and sandwiches from the store and writing them off at the end of the night. Since Target differs from Starbucks, we didn't have a solid way of monitoring that kind of thing because it gets thrown in the garbage at closing instead of counted and donated.
So, I lost eight out of eight of my employees in under one week because of the pastry incident. I wasn't told anything about it at first because they were investigating me as well, and they didn't want to disclose anything in case I was also guilty.
21. No Taking Out
Back when I worked at a restaurant, I was friends with the bartender who was a chill dude—right up until they made him manager. The small amount of power and increase in pressure made him so angry all the time. He screamed at me that I was terrible at my job because I didn't do something that I'd never been asked to do before.
He made me miss my last bus, so I couldn't get home. It was pitch black outside, and I cried on the bench outside the restaurant. It was my worst working day with my worst co-worker ever. It took a long time to get over that and realize I wasn't a bad worker, but that he was stressed and didn't know how to handle it.
22. You’ll Smell, You’ll All Smell!
The office where I worked years ago instituted a scent-free policy. One woman who was already insufferable was so offended by it that she sneaked in her perfume collection. She'd walk down the halls and spray perfume into empty offices or cubicles when no one was looking or before everyone arrived in the morning.
This went on for well over a month or two, and we had no idea who was responsible. My coworkers and I started referring to this mysterious person as the Chanel Bandit. She was finally caught on camera in the act. She'd left for a three-week vacation and was unaware that we had installed cameras after a break-in.
Some of us had already suspected her since the Chanel Bandit mysteriously stopped spraying the whole time she was away. She quit and left right after she was caught on video. None of us could say that we were sad to see that cedar-scented lover leave our office and we were all excited to breathe scent-free air again.
23. The Bad Scientist
I had a girl starting her PhD in the lab I worked in. She was the embodiment of entitled, lazy, and spoiled. She’d come late, leave early, do next to no work, and constantly complained she needed more money. After a while, we all just hated her, mostly due to the fact that while we all worked our butts off, she did nothing.
However, the bosses didn’t seem to care at all and just let her hang around in the lab for years. When the time came to hand in her thesis, we were all curious what she’d hand in, since she basically hadn’t done any work. I was convinced she’d somehow weasel her way out of it, like she had done all the times before.
I was convinced that when you can pull off being in a lab for years doing no work but no one fires you, you must be somehow a bit clever to pull that off. But nope, she got what was coming to her. She failed so spectacularly. I’d never seen anyone fail like that before or since. So note to everyone: you can’t be lazy and stupid; you can only be one of the two.
24. Jan the Scammer
I worked in data entry with her at a debt settlement office. She got suspended for a few days for actually tossing the mail rather than processing it. This included settlement offers, up-to-date balances, and letters from debtors. But that's not what made her the worst co-worker. Like I mentioned, this was a debt settlement office.
We took monthly payments from people in order to settle their debt, so we had sensitive banking information to process their payments. Well, she got caught using their information to buy things online. That's right, this woman literally took money from the poor! People who are already in debt and she took from them! The lowest of the low. She went into HR crying and begging them not to fire her.
They told her they didn't call her in to fire her, they called her in because the authorities were outside to arrest her, and they escorted her out of the building.
25. Spotty Reception
My receptionist is the most useless person I’ve ever met. She ignores the phones while playing on her device, takes personal calls, and does all personal business on her work computer from shopping to bills. Every day, she’ll find ways to avoid doing work by getting up and talking with anyone patient enough to listen.
My personal favorite? She does not take an ounce of criticism whatsoever. Every question or suggestion is an attack or mistreatment in her opinion. She has filed countless HR complaints because other employees have suggested that she focus on work. Countless meetings and time have been wasted trying to appease this person.
26. Nepotism Will Get You Everywhere
Worked with the owner's son at a marketing company. Dude was disgusting. He had been let go a few years prior to when I started because a co-worker caught him watching adult stuff on his laptop while at work, and he had been re-hired about a year after I started. This guy ate gefilte fish for lunch at least three days a week.
Would get sushi and drink the remaining soy sauce. Pants to the floor when he was at the urinal. Just an all-around slob. The last straw was when he pulled out his phone and thought his headphones were plugged in. Lo and behold, he was blasting some nasty adult audio in an office full of people. My friend had to tell him to turn it off.
Nothing came of it. I left that place soon after.
27. Mood Swings
I used to work at this grocery store where there was a guy who was an absolute psychopath. Some days, he would be totally chill, and other days he'd be down people's throats. I reported him for threatening another co-worker. When word got to him, he literally threatened my life if I ever spoke about him again.
I was terrified to make eye contact with the guy. He stayed for months despite no-call-no-shows and more reports about him. He seemed to like me after a while and was always happy to see me for some inexplicable reason. After some scary guys came to the store looking for him, the new store manager had him tested for substance use. He was fired.
Even worse is that a couple more people came forward to say they knew he was stealing things and doing other things in the bathroom. Nobody felt safe around this guy, but he was so unstable that not many people wanted to come forwards about him. Last I saw, he works at a Walmart now, which I avoid like the plague.
28. Just a Nibble Trouble
I had a co-worker, J, at my McDonald's job when I worked there in high school. On one particular occasion, I kid you not, J showed up OBLITERATED on god knows what, working the 4 PM to 7 PM dinner shift. The manager was young and absolutely did not care as he was on most occasions like that at work as well.
Everyone in the kitchen was cool and would let J trip out while they picked up his slack, but he’d regularly wander off to the fridge and nibble cheese like a mouse. The manager showed me video of J in the fridge, crouched over, nibbling cheese with both hands for five minutes straight. The GM saw the video the next day, and J was fired.
29. Real Life Game Of Thrones
This co-worker would tell peers at my level horror stories about the way I would supposedly treat her. At the same time, I was dealing with my own staff complaining about her lack of work ethic. I was overworked before she got there, and after she started, I felt no relief. Little did I know that her gossip was actually turning people in the company against me. And then it hit the fan.
Eventually, it all came to light when she made an accusation that was so far off that HR couldn’t even believe her anymore. When she was found out, and finally let go, she caused a public scene. For weeks afterward, co-workers came up to me to apologize for believing her. My own staff always had my back through those times, which I think is why she didn’t “win”.
30. The World Is Unfair
She was a lady in her 50s. We worked at a doctor’s office. She could not take even the nicest constructive criticism, and constantly complained about EVERYTHING. One of my nicest co-workers ever often was the recipient of her blame, and because she never took responsibility, it was regularly the same issues she never learned to correct.
They bickered a lot after a couple of years of this. One day, the nice co-worker went to the car to grab her anxiety medication, and the obnoxious co-worker’s reaction was chilling. She went to the office manager as well as HR, saying she thought the nice one went to get a weapon to hurt her. Like what?! She didn't even own a weapon? That’s not even the worst part. The nice one GOT FIRED. I was absolutely SHOCKED.
31. Don’t You Dare Be Good at Your Job
My first job out of college, I worked in an HR department. We hired a new VP of HR, so, technically, my boss's new boss. Before Day 1, I scheduled a flight of hers and forwarded her all the information along with a friendly email saying that I was very excited that she was starting at our company. I told her to let me know if she needed anything.
Very typical email for me to send, didn't matter your role at the company. Day 1, she walks in and asks for me specifically. I stood up and smiled and went to shake her hand warmly, because who asks for the lowest on the totem pole? She refused to shake my hand and showed me an email. The email I sent her with her flight information.
She asked what was wrong with it. I was alarmed and read through it again, then had to sheepishly admit I wasn't sure, but I'd love to know for next time. What she said next made my blood run cold. She told me, "You come across as SUCH a brown noser! I came to talk to you first so you could rub your face in my butt now and we could get it over with." Ummm.
I told her that's how I talk to everyone at the company, I see us all as a team and that's how I work. She guffawed and handed me a piece of paper she had shoved in her pocket. "Here, good to know you are for real! You can get started, then." My list of tasks included getting her computer set up (already done), her email up and running (already done), her new passwords (already done), and a few other things for comfort around her office, which I could complete in about five minutes.
I did so and returned promptly. She slapped the piece of paper out of my hand and called me a liar. I told her making sure that she was comfortable on her first day was part of my job and I accomplish many of the tasks before new employees arrive. She asked me to escort another employee into her office, so I went and got that employee and brought them down to the new VP's office.
That employee was promptly fired, no reason given, and the two had never spoken before…and I was asked to escort that employee out. It was at that moment I decided to start looking for new roles. The new VP basically made me her gofer for the next three months while I looked. I was denied any vacation requests, sick leave, breaks, whereas my peers in my department could do whatever, whenever.
About one month into her tenure, she pulled all of us into a room and made sure we were sitting down. She then told us that a department member of ours had died by suicide over the weekend. We were shocked and saddened and obviously emotional. VP then did two things: she didn’t let us go home to mourn in peace and we weren’t allowed to tell anyone that this employee had died, only that they were no longer at the company.
I could only apologize when people asked, say I was not allowed to talk about it, and quietly suggest that they Google her and that they could come to me with any concerns. Her obituary was public and one of the first things you would see on a cursory Google search. VP went to the funeral on the company’s behalf and forbade us from going. We ended up putting a picture of her up and paying our respects that way in a corner of the office.
I finally got an offer and went to resign with my two weeks' notice. I told my direct boss first, who congratulated me, and he also said he'd tell the VP for me since he was so worried about her reaction. The new VP came in screaming about how working for her was the opportunity of a lifetime, how could I pass that up, I am an idiot, that's why nobody can be trusted. I was so glad to get out of there.
32. But Wait, There’s More!
A girl who worked for me at a mortgage company went into our system, pull the credit report for her ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend—no idea how she got her social security number—and used that information for a truly evil purpose. She went on the girl's Facebook page and posted messages about all of her debt, past-due accounts, the terrible kind of car she drives, etc.
I ended up getting an angry call from that girl who had been victimized, who wound up being a pain in my behind for a while. We fired the employee who did that—but the story didn’t end there. About a week later, an agent from the Department of Treasury came in asking questions about the employee. It turns out, she was being investigated for a series of fraudulent things, like operating as a loan officer without a license.
She also took out a bunch of federal student loans in her grandfather's name. The agent wanted me to provide some information on her because during his initial investigation he learned that she had been fired from the company for some sort of malfeasance, and he wanted the details. They eventually caught her and she went away to the big house for a while.
33. Young And Foolish
I used to work part-time at a shipping warehouse, and at one point, we ended up hiring this 16-year-old kid. He made a ton of mistakes that we ended up having to fix for him, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt at first just because he was new. But not only did he never learn from his mistakes, but he was incredibly lazy and lacked any self-awareness.
There were instances where he was given a task, but then he'd either mess around on his phone most of the time, hide out in the bathroom for like 45 minutes and then hoped we wouldn't notice, or just whine to my supervisor that he didn't want to do whatever he was assigned. Because of that, he would often take half the day to do like 30 minutes of work and would then complain that he had too much work piled on top of him. It was ridiculous.
34. Light Work, Lazy Worker
I once had a housekeeper on light duty because she was about 65 years old. One day, I gave her four stayover rooms, which meant she just had to refresh the rooms as the guests were staying another night. As I passed one of those rooms, there were four guests standing outside and couldn’t get in because their key didn’t work, which happens often.
I tried their key and it lit up, as if the door was bolted from inside. Occasionally, the bolt will get accidentally thrown as it closes, so I called security to use our override key to open it. The guests had already been there 25 minutes trying new keys by the time I got security there. Security opens the door and we make an unbelievable discovery. There’s my housekeeper, on the couch, feet up on the table, watching TV.
Her immediate reaction was to pretend nothing happened. She said something like, “Oh, hi. I was just finishing cleaning your room!” But one guest had seen her before she jumped up, so he threw his stuff on the table and kicked her out. I wasn’t there for that, I left the security manager to do his thing, so he called me and asked to meet.
I was talking to him and the front office manager to get the story and figure out how to make it right for the guests, when the housekeeper found me. She told me that she only sat down for a second, that the TV was already on, and she didn’t do anything. She tried to make me the bad guy since she was 65 and on light duty.
She said things like, “I can’t sit down for one minute?” Sure you can. But inside a guest’s room? No! We have a break room! So anyway, she claimed that she wasn’t in there as long as we said, since we insisted she was inside as long as the guests were in the hallway, which was at least 25 minutes. She said she left and came back so she wasn’t in there the whole time.
For some reason, she wasn’t grasping the concept that the guests were standing there the entire 25 minutes and she would have had to open the door and walk by them. Also, our locks could tell us every time a specific key unlocked a door, and her key only unlocked the door once, 45 minutes before they were able to enter.
Since she just denied the whole thing she got a written warning…and still works at the hotel.
35. Gut Settling
Dan was 37 working at a job going nowhere as a lab specimen processor in a windowless room for nine hours a day. He ate only Burger King but never with any lettuce because that’s “rabbit food.” He literally drank a gallon of Mountain Dew a day and didn’t understand everyone’s horror. “There’s water in it,” he would say.
He said if he ate corn, he’d get sick and need to go to the hospital. He’d tell me his “theories” coming from his “gut,” and one he firmly believed was that man and dinosaur roamed the earth at the same time. We got into an argument once, and it got ugly. Dan was fired. I got out of there as soon as possible.
36. Some Sleight Of Hand
We had one employee, Johnny, who just didn't want to do any work. He was in the kitchen so his duties were to cook, prep, clean, and restock. His favorite thing to do was prep. Ask the man to make a Big Mac and you'd get the worst sandwich ever. Ask him to slice tomatoes and you'd get perfection. Anyways, one day Johnny comes to me—and when I saw him, my blood ran cold.
His hand is sliced, bad. It’s down to the bone, he’s bleeding everywhere. It looked like he put his hand in the tomato slicer and just smashed it onto his hand. Thing is, he was so calm. He looked pleased with himself. We sent him home thinking that was that. He strolled out, said goodbye to his co-workers and we never saw or heard from him again.
That night, I was sorting out all the tills to take the dailies to the safe drop at the bank. We were missing nearly $5,000 in cash from the manager's safe. Never happened before. Never happened again. Don't know how he did it.
37. A Not-So-Sweet Story
He was in his 50s, had uncontrolled diabetes, and was 6’4” tall. I was 24, and a full foot shorter. Normally, he was a teddy bear, but when his blood sugar got low, he would get violent. He tried throwing punches at me for suggesting he get a coke from the vending machine in the hall. It was a good thing that he was slow and clumsy in that state.
When we were in the truck together once, and it started making a weird sound, I wanted to take it into the shop, but he insisted we didn't need to by yelling at me and pounding his fists on the dash. We were going to a remote area and I didn't want to have to try and find help if the truck broke down and the radio didn't work.
I had to call search and rescue on him once because he didn't come back to the truck after doing a job related to biology. You guessed it, he had low blood sugar and was not able to find his way back to the truck. He had no education or experience in biology, but he just couldn't be fired from his job, which was just driving a plow.
38. The Juicer
There was this guy that I worked with, who will be called Toby. At the time, I worked in a manufacturing plant, and we started work at 5 AM. Toby was originally a temp, and I was fresh into the job, not even a week. Toby would show up late to work nearly every day, around 8 AM. He was decent to talk to...until he started a crazy new diet. All of a sudden, he was extremely into juicing carrots, beets, etc. He kept pressuring me to buy a juicer from him. Then he got worse.
A few days later, he was having issues weighing some stuff and asked me to come hold the bag open, so he could finish up the batch. As the product starts to overflow onto the floor, Toby realizes his scale was in kilograms and the recipe was in lbs. As soon as the manager sees this bag of now ruined product, Toby quickly declares that I was the one responsible. After throwing me under the bus, he tells me I could lose some weight and tries to get me to buy a juicer from him. Unreal.
39. Fool Me Once...
HR hired an employee to work on the mine I manage. On his first day, he showed up 45 minutes late wearing shorts and crocs. I proceeded to fire him on the spot. He tried to claim that his wife had kicked him out of the house the night before and wouldn't allow him to get any of his work attire. I leaned on the side of caution and called HR and his former employer.
It turns out, he used the exact same excuse with his former employer. Also, he showed up late to employee orientation/training the day before his first shift and used the same excuse there, too. Obviously, this guy was a compulsive liar and an idiot, and I can't have that kind of character in a highly hazardous working environment.
I ended up getting a framed letter from corporate, jokingly congratulating me for having the shortest tenured employee in company history.
40. Cooking Plot
I hired a cook on a good recommendation. He was just fine for the first two weeks—but then I began to notice things. First, I noticed food going missing. Then, supplies started disappearing. The final straw was when a customer told me that he had been automatically adding 30% tips for his food purchases. I went to look at the books to see if he was doing anything else.
I saw that he had been adding 30% tips to ALL the credit card sales. The cash rings weren’t what they should have been. I fired him. The next day he came in to apologize. He said he was dealing with addiction and was getting help. I wished him well. I thought it was over, but I was so wrong. The next day, he tried to break in after closing and was caught.
41. Biting Down
I worked in childcare; They’d hired a new trainee teacher for my room since each room required two teachers. The trainee constantly argued about ridiculous topics and always tried to argue with me about both company and state childcare policies because “That’s useless.” Every day of her first week, she was late.
Once, when I was changing diapers and she was holding a two-year-old on her lap, I saw that a child was biting another child and told her, “You need to go help them,” since I was in the middle of dealing with a very explosive diaper change by the changing table and couldn’t leave the boy alone on there.
She didn’t get up. I repeated myself, and she said, “Well, I have this kid on my lap.” So, I told her to, “Take him off your lap.” “He’s strong,” she responded as if she, a fully-grown adult was unable to move a two-year-old because of some weird toddler super strength. Then the child bit the other child again.
At this point, I was mad and told her she had to get up and help them now. She then proceeded to say, “So what? I have to watch these four kids while you just have ONE up on the table?!” As if I was somehow supposed to have all of the children on the table at once to make her job of sitting on the floor easier.
Our ratios were 4:1, so I finished my diaper change, stuck my head out the door, and told my supervisor to, “Get this lady out of my room.” They wrote her up after reviewing the footage. She was fired for not showing up the next week. I’ve worked with a lot of dummies, but she was so awful in such a short time.
42. As I Was Saying
I worked with a guy who'd interrupt any conversation to talk about anything and everything as if he was the expert. And I’m not using the word "anything" as a hyperbole. He truly had something to say about anything including the things that he didn’t even know or even heard of or obviously knew very little about.
When the subject of the conversation would fall into the category of things that he didn’t know and couldn’t talk about, he would slowly steer the whole conversation away from whatever it was to whatever he wanted to discuss at the moment. It was both amazing and the most annoying thing I have ever had to deal with.
He was like that Wikipedia game where you start reading about one thing and end up on something unrelated. The "conversation" was basically 98% of him talking non-stop. Most people just tried to stay away from him, but he'd follow them around. I eventually left, but I remember having a nightmare where he was the best man at my wedding.
43. Time for a Refreshing Glass of Chicken Broth
The CEO's girlfriend was a devout vegan who would patrol the office around lunch to make sure that anyone who was eating meat promised not to use the sponge in the kitchen to wash anything that touched meat. She did this in yoga pants and heels, for some reason. Everyone thought she was so unlikeable and awful.
So, for April Fool's day, I came up with an extremely satisfying prank. I rinsed out a carton of chicken broth and then filled it with some mango juice. When I made a point of pouring myself a glass and drinking it in front of her, she was truly disgusted, which made it twice as delicious and worth the effort.
She was the financial manager and HR, so everything people shared was pillow talk between her and the CEO. He’d sprinkle what he knew at meetings as if everyone was in on the secret. This pair was rotten. Someone heard him say, "I wouldn't care if I didn't hear music again in my life." Who says that? Sociopaths.
I was eventually fired, and the official reason was that I had "Photoshopped grotesque images of several people in the office." She failed to mention to the department of labor representative that I did it all on my own time on my own computer, and each co-worker asked me to make them one after I made my photo.
The one I made for myself had my eyes moved farther apart so I only looked abnormal. For other coworkers, I flipped their faces upside down, made their eyes too big, removed their noses, or covered their mouths with beards. While discussing unemployment, the agent asked me to email her the photos, and it made her audibly laugh. Being fired was worth it just for that.
44. No Free Samples
We had a trainee show up for her first day, immediately go to the bar and order a mixed drink. She then took it to her seat, where she was taking the first menu test. The trainer came over and asked if she was drinking an alcoholic beverage, to which she responded “Yes.” The trainer informed her that they weren't allowed to drink on the job.
Her response to that was, “Oh, you mean like no hard stuff? That's cool, I'll just grab a pint.” When she discovered that no alcoholic beverages were to be consumed at all while working a shift, she stormed out, yelling, “I can't work here!”
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45. Follow The Crumbs
I was a kitchen manager, and one night, I was out on our back dock and saw that someone had left a full trash can sitting out beside the dumpster. I went over and started to lift the trashcan to dump it in the dumpster, when the back door opened and one of my cooks walked out. He immediately rushed over and insisted that I don’t dump the trash.
He wanted me to let him do it because, "It's too heavy for you! I don't want to see you get hurt. Let me do it." Now, I am a small female, but I'm tough, and I've been lifting heavy trash cans for years, while the guys looked on and never batted an eye. So I thought that was strange, but, whatever. I just kind of put it in the back of my mind.
A couple of hours later, we were finally closed, and my employees were all leaving for the night while I was in the office doing the deposit and finishing up all of the end of day stuff. The same cook from before poked his head in the office to say goodnight, but didn’t head out through the front like everyone else had done.
Instead, he proceeded to walk through the dark kitchen, where all the lights had already been shut off, and head out the back door. I thought that was strange, so I turned to the monitor, which showed all of the cameras that we had throughout the restaurant, and pulled up the camera for the back dock. Sure enough, the cook exited through the back door.
He then went behind the dumpster, out of camera range, retrieved a duffel bag that was stashed back there, and left. From there, I pulled up the footage from the trash can incident from earlier, and could see that as soon as I went back inside, the cook looked around, then dug through the trash, pulled out something that he had buried, and took it back behind the dumpster. At that point, I was determined to solve the mystery.
By pulling up footage from different cameras, I was able to see that earlier in the night, he had taken the trash can into the walk-in freezer, where there are also no cameras, then exit with the same trash can a few minutes later. He then pushed it out the back door, and about 10 minutes later, I came out and saw it there.
It all made sense now, so I burned a copy of all the footage that I had found, in sequence, and left a copy of the DVD for my general manager, who was opening in the morning. I attached a note to it that read, "Watch this. I think I just solved our food cost problem." Well, the general manager watched the DVD, then called the cook into the office.
He then had the cook watch the DVD, and afterward, asked him to sign his termination notice. The cook's defense was that I had set him up. He said that he had dropped some steaks on the floor, and since they couldn’t be used, he asked me if he could take them home, and I said yes. Then, I decided to set him up for stealing, because I'm a jerk.
I like to imagine that the fake conversation we had went something like this—Cook, “Hey, can I take these unusable steaks home?” Me, “You most certainly can. But, only if you bury them in trash and store them in your duffel bag behind the dumpster for a couple of hours in the sweltering heat of mid-August. Cook, “Sounds reasonable.”
46. Pushed His Luck
One time, there was this guy who was a temp at the small, 30-man auto shop in Livonia I worked at. He always wanted to be hired full-time but never was, so one day, he hatched a plan. He came in very early one morning and put up motivational signs all over the building. He made them himself out of cardboard and markers.
They were equivalent to the kind of posters you'd expect to see "will work for food" written on. The posters said things like, "If you're not giving 100% today, go home and I'll get someone who will," and, "What did you do to earn your check today?" He signed them all with the owner's name. Well, we hired him. It was hilarious!
However, as soon as he was full-time, he started shirking and demanding raises. I guess he assumed he could join the UAW and get all kinds of benefits after he was hired. But we were just a small shop and didn't even have health insurance. He was fired about a week later and we were still finding hidden motivational posters for a month.
47. We’ll Never Know
I used to supervise a Forest Service recreation crew. Since we all worked weekends, we had different weekdays off. One of my first season crew members was starting to show himself as a bit of a screw-up, and one Monday, one of my other crew members came in and said, "What happened to the kid’s truck?" I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "It's wrecked." I said, "Beg pardon?"
We went down to our garage to check out the truck and it looked like someone had taken a baseball bat to it on the passenger side, and the hood, and cab, and the top of the tailgate. The driver's side was fine though. Turns out, the kid had gone out to do his work, some crazy stuff happened, and then rather than reporting it to me, he just parked the truck and went home.
My boss and I talked about it and we decided the kid would get fired when he came back to work on Wednesday, which was my day off. When I came back to work, the kid was gone, and I asked my boss, "How'd the truck get wrecked?" He said, "I never asked him." To this day, I still have no idea and it drives me a little crazy.
48. She’s Good at What She Does
When I was an intern, there was this old lady who would call people into her office that shared a thin wall with my cube shared a thin wall. She’d gossip with one person about another person. Then, immediately after, she’d call the person who she was just gossiping about with the other person into her office.
Then she'd tell them what the other person said about them and stuff like that. She would try to frame people for things she did wrong. She was so arrogant. She refused to adapt to workforce modernization like once, she refused to learn how to hyperlink in emails, documents, etc. Real ray of sunshine she was!
49. Sleeping on the Job
He's not here anymore, thank god, but let me tell you about this stain on society's behind. For reference, I work in a "troubled youth" therapeutic center. My worst coworker refused to get a key to the gate that led to half of all the buildings, of which he most commonly went to. When asked why not, he would just say that "that's what I have you guys for" and expect us to escort him around whenever he needed to go anywhere.
He was frequently late clocking into work. He fell asleep on the job almost every night, but the people in charge couldn't get rid of him because we're so horribly understaffed, and the kids liked him. When confronted by other staff, he got defensive and told us to mind our own business. He rarely ever wore the company uniform, he almost always wore awful sports jackets over a long sleeve shirt.
One night I was paired with him, and I'd had enough. I wrote him a note (so as not to alert the kids as to what was going on) that said if he fell asleep that I would report him to our supervisors. He literally began harassing me, calling me trash, saying that I have no life, I should just take my own life, etc. Nobody misses you, Jordan.
50. Not Very Slick
My first job, I worked at a grocery store. I don't remember much, but I do remember one day when the store got crazy busy, and they had to pull people like me from other departments to work checkouts. They have me as a bagger, and the guy at the scanner is another guy that I worked with in produce.
Now, when this guy gave change, he'd "accidentally" pull out an extra fiver, and pretend to put it back in the register when counting out change, then he'd slip it into his pocket once the customer turned around. I noticed this pretty quickly because he's doing it with literally every customer. Even if they weren't getting change, he'd pull one out and act like he forgot they paid with a card.
After I noticed it, I saw him do it a couple more times and thought, "Wow. Wonder how long he can get away with that." Not two seconds pass between me thinking that and me turning to see that night's manager with a police officer walking towards our checkout counter. Fired on the spot and 9-1-1 called.
51. Bringing Down the Evil McQueen
In the interview, she said something to me that was along the lines of, "You're quite young. How do we know that you'll be responsible enough to work with our team?" as if she was running an Olympic team and not a fast-food joint. I know this is not an unusual question, but her attitude spoke more than her words.
Well, I was technically homeless, a young teenager at the time, and staying in a shelter. I explained my situation to be my motivation. I needed a day program, wanted a permanent place to live, and that someday, to be comfortable financially to go back to school. Before I was homeless, I had amazing grades in school.
Well, I had gotten another job, but was more than willing to work two jobs to achieve my goals. My first day on my first shift, she gave me the basic instructions. Read the employee handbook and then come get her. She was adamant I was illiterate because I was so quick, which meant that I must not have read it.
She was pointing to random words getting me to read them. It was annoying...but goals...homeless and all. She walked me over to a till, put me in a headset, and told the other woman at the till to make me do all the work. I tried my best, but with zero training on ANYTHING and no guidance, it went bad, fast.
Mid-order, she grabbed my arm and dragged me into the office. She berated me for a solid 10 minutes on how I was just some pathetic disgusting homeless scum with no manners, no wonder no one wanted me, no wonder I was homeless, how pathetic. Honestly, it makes me cry thinking about how cruel and harsh she was. Finally, she finished. I took off the headset, went to the staff room to change, grabbed my stuff, and left. No one said a word to me. I just left.
Once I was just far enough away, but in front of another business, I fell to my knees and cried. A full-on breakdown the kind where it feels like you’ll never stop. While I was crying, someone came up to me and put her arm around me. I just cried in her arms. When I was done, I finally saw who it was. It was the assistant manager from the exact place I just left.
I was flustered and furious and embarrassed. She just looked at me and told me “MANAGER is the absolute worst.” Then she told me the horrible manager was going to be fired that week, with the assistant manager promoted to her position. She said to me, “What she did was very wrong. If it's okay with you, I would still like to hire you. I think you would be a great asset to the team.”
I worked there for nearly 10 years. I got my high school diploma, went to college, became an adult there, and worked my way up the chain of command. Well, as high as I could since the manager was so incredible the turnover rate was crazy low. There, I had both my best and worst bosses of all time at that place.
52. Management Is Overrated
Steve was an outside hire. He was a “co-manager” at another store. To me, that translates to, “he was a manager who couldn’t handle being a manager.” Steve got hired in as a second-in-command. He was really inept at running the sales floor, but we cut him some slack. Our location is quadruple the size of most stores in just about every way.
After about 3 months, I realized he was not really picking things up. Not just that, but Steve felt as though his set schedule didn’t matter. He came in late and left early. If someone asked him to cover, he just had us swap shifts because he didn’t want to do it. He ended up getting an attendance warning from our Store Manager, Mary, but it didn’t change things.
Mary quit about four months after he was hired—and the reason why was brutal. Mary couldn’t handle Steve’s ineptitude, and eventually, they left because of it. Now that Mary was gone, Steve got promoted to interim First Lead. Basically, Steve thought he was on easy street. Corporate heads came through at one point and asked us how it was going with Steve. We spoke the truth: Not good.
It was even more detrimental when Steve showed up almost two hours after he was scheduled, when we told the corporate heads he’d be in the building. He did not call. Paul, our other lead, was left with people they’d never met before, which was great because Paul was an adult who could handle things. Basically, they ended up hiring Paul to become our first-in-command.
We chugged through a disappointing holiday season. Steve and Paul are basically going around in circles, with Paul trying not to kill Steve the whole time. Meanwhile, Steve rarely made it to work on time, and ended up, quite a few times, making Paul and I switch days because Steve didn’t want to work late. I was also running my departments and Steve’s departments, because Steve just hid in the office all day “writing schedules.”
Paul and Steve had several conversations about Steve’s performance over a period of a month and a half, and Steve got put on an official action plan. This basically meant: “One more mess up and you’re fired.” Steve finally, FINALLY, got fired. The last I heard, he was going to culinary school.
53. Not So Big Anymore
I've worked a lot of factories, but there was one where I worked that hired felons. The was pay complete dirt, and they work you so hard it tears up your body and mind. I just graduated high school, so I didn't know any better. I worked with this one guy that we nicknamed Big Matt since there was already a Matt.
Well, Big Matt was a big fan of taking unhealthy supplements, so the dude was absolutely jacked, but this 35-year-old was still living with his mother. He said it was because when he was a kid, he’d walked into her room and saw something traumatic happening, and ever since then, he never wanted to leave her alone.
At the time, I thought wow, that would explain taking the type of supplements he did because he just wanted to be strong to protect her. Well, I was made a real fool because two months later, Big Matt and two other coworkers didn't come to work. I asked the supervisor what happened, but he didn't know either.
The next day, I found out the dark truth. One of my coworkers came in and told us that all three had been taken into custody because after buying something, Big Matt's mom called to report them. So, before anybody showed up at his home, Big Matt, a six-foot-something buff guy under the influence, had beaten his mother for just for making the call.
54. Hello, Nurse!
I work in ER registration. This co-worker smelled bad. She never shut up and always talked at max volume. Very very stupid. Needed a Chevy's waiter to read and explain the menu to her. She needed to keep a list by her work station to remember how to spell basic words like “stomach” and “heart” and “emergency.” She also insulted others based on their appearance.
She asked me how much I would pay for a laptop. When I asked what kind, she replied: "A stolen one." During a snowstorm, she bragged that she was a better driver than everyone else and that everyone else is stupid. The next day, we hear that she got her car stuck blocking her apartment’s parking lot. When she got out of the car, she fell and couldn't get back up.
A man tried to help her up, but couldn't lift her. After a second man came to help, she insulted the first guy and said he wasn't a man because he was too weak to lift her. She weighed at least 300 pounds. She was eventually fired for sending a person with weakness and chest pain home to get his insurance card.
Luckily, the hospital's shuttle bus driver recognized him coming back out of the ER and was like "Wait, weren't you having a heart attack?" She was suspected of stealing co-pays. She supposedly marched elderly ER patients to the ATM in the lobby and forced them to pay cash so she could pocket it. This is unconfirmed and we only heard about it after she was fired.
I fully believe it, knowing her.
55. No, You Do It
My bad coworker just...wouldn't work at all. This was in a research lab. He was a visiting researcher from another country, and he spent a lot of time asking tons of non-work-related questions to the point of disrupting other people’s work. In a year, he designed one very basic experiment and didn't even go through with it. He only designed it.
He was above doing bench work, apparently. He picked fights with everyone doing anything related to his. He didn't want to have to share credit with anyone. He wouldn't clean up after himself or pick up things from the floor. He once called me from another room because he didn't want to take a string-less teabag out of his mug.
Also, on a different occasion, he'd knocked some things off a hanger on the back of the door and, for whatever reason, wouldn't pick them up. It was kind of like working with a child. I don't know how, but he was there for his PhD. My boss fired him. He was one of two people in her 30+ year career that she'd fired.
56. Stay Grounded, Please
This was a person that was in the aircraft qualification training squadron at the same time as me. He wasn't an intentionally terrible person, but his lack of self-awareness made any interaction around him difficult and exhausting. He washed out of another flying career field. In initial training simulations, he refused to use established procedures.
That was bad enough, but there was more. He managed to fail his first instructional ride, despite it being nearly impossible to fail if you show up. He could not figure out how to take leave, despite several people walking him through the process. Rather than trying to solve any problem, he would announce it to the rest of the room, and if no one jumped in to help him, asked the nearest person.
He managed to both frustrate and take up the time of the kindest instructor I knew because he didn't have a basic understanding of a training airspace. In a bid to get back to more pressing tasks, he gave me an apologetic look as he suggested that I, being a smart student, could probably help him get up to speed. I could not.
57. OSHA Rules, Schm-OSHA Rules
I worked with a guy that was a supervisor in another department. He was both dumb and a jerk, which was a terrible combo. He would constantly insist that I do things that violated OSHA rules or were physically impossible. He wanted me to work on a 20-ton bridge crane while he was using it. Obviously, I said NO. I wanted to leave work intact, thank you very much.
Every time I would refuse one of these ridiculous demands, he would send out an email with EVERYONE CC-ed, from the area manager, plant manager, all the way down to my boss. Soon after, I left for a better job, he was fired, and they closed his email account as he was writing a manifesto. I heard they hired security to keep a look out for him for the next month.
58. For the Love of Fish
There is an older guy at my place, who is a senior developer. He is knowledgeable, dependable, consistent, realistic, has a grasp of the projects he is working on, and is a hard-working engineer. He'd be a good coworker, except for one thing. Every single day, exactly at 1 PM, he enters our kitchen, which is exactly in the center of the floor, with straight corridors leading to every corner of the office, and sits down to eat his lunch.
Fishes. Canned fish, fish in sandwich, fish soups, he even microwaves fish. For Christ's sake, every single person in the building hates his guts to the bitter end.
59. Nursing Resentment
When I started, at my first job outside placement there was this horrible lady who just really hated any new people. When I was introduced to a group of my coworkers, she interrupted the supervisor who was saying how good it is to have new people just to tell him that she hated people who “don't know anything.”
She’d consistently came to the nurses’ station to ask for someone to help her with a two-person patient job and then would turn to me and say, "not you," or other small and petty stuff like that. Thankfully, everyone else was nice but it was hard to build your confidence with stuff like that happening every day.
60. Pretty Wild
We used to have a young blonde at my last security job that we could tell our boss hired her only for her looks. She had the personality of a doorknob and the I.Q. of a jar of mustard. Though the worst thing about her was that we quickly learned that she had an addiction and would randomly pass out in her chair.
She’d even start drooling on herself or disappear somewhere and return only to be acting really goofy. Some days, she’d do this in front of the workers as they’d walk through our guard shack. I’d always cover for her and say she wasn’t well. We had every intention of getting her fired, but she quit before that could happen.
61. Playing Both Sides
We hired a guy from another firm and he worked for us for two weeks, then called in sick for several days and we couldn't reach him. One of his friends, who he had previously worked with at the other firm but who now also worked for us, tried to reach him since HR couldn’t get a response, but he couldn’t get a hold of him either.
We finally hear from the guy and he comes in another two days before calling in sick for another five days in a row. Come to find out, he never quit his other job at the other firm and was using his vacation to "try us out" and then taking sick days to come into work for us. We found out after their principal called ours to let us know.
They had put two and two together after he left our company's new hire paperwork out on his desk. He was fired on the spot from there and we told him to never come back. He was pretty much blackballed in the industry, too. The guy had a wife and four kids and lost all his benefits. It was a stupid move but it seemed like a good plan, I suppose. He just didn't play it out right.
62. Promising To Do Better
Worked at a restaurant that was having a meeting with everyone present, including the higher-ups. Pretty normal meeting and everyone is discussing changes they’d like to see or changes they’d appreciate, etc. At one point head manager asks if anyone else has something to share. This one dishwasher raises his hand. None of us were prepared for what he was about to say.
“I know I’ve not always been the best, but I’m gonna work on that. From now on I won’t get high in the stairwell by the dumpster. I’ll walk down the street on my break. You won’t even smell it on me anymore, promise.” Dead silence in the room. Manager speaks up, “Did everyone else just hear that?”
We all nod. “Great, so now I have to look like a bad guy and fire you. What were you thinking?” Manager says. Dishwasher is shocked. “But, but I said I was fixing it. You guys won’t even know anymore!!” He was walked out and removed in front of the whole staff.
63. Color Me Surprised
I worked at a little gas station. I had a co-worker we'll call "Jenny." Jenny was on "light duty," as ordered by her doctor, when I first started working there. Her injury was a heel spur, and she never missed an opportunity to complain about it. She wasn't supposed to lift more than like 30 pounds or stand for more than a half-hour at a time. Not a big deal right?
The first time I came in to relieve her from a shift, it was a busy Friday afternoon. She had two full pages of her coloring book colored in, and thought it would be cute to write that on our task list for the day under "additional tasks completed.” Alright, annoying, but she's youngish. What do you really expect from a 20-something-year-old with a medical issue?
Over time, her antics became more and more ridiculous. A stray dog wandered over to the station and she brought it inside. She let it wander around the inside of the store, where there was plenty of food on the shelves for it to get into. She then proceeded to make a Facebook post about it, and also wrote those things on the task list as if it were part of her job.
Eventually, the assistant manager told her she couldn't bring her coloring books to work anymore. She'd been off light duty for months, but continued sitting at the desk coloring during all her shifts while neglecting all her cleaning duties. She cried and walked out mid-shift when she was told, and then filed a complaint with corporate, claiming she was being bullied by the assistant manager.
64. The Dreaded Cat Lady
She isn’t hated. She's dreaded. This is the story of our work's crazy cat lady. So I work in a Best Buy-type of store. And we have company reps come in to teach us about products. We had this woman from HP. She came in on every other Friday. The moment she walked through the door I knew because my eyes would water.
She smelt like she bathed in cat pee. She would have pee stains on her shirt. One time she had cat poop on her collar rubbing against her neck. I almost vomited.
65. Fight Fire With Fire
My first day at work, I noticed the back of my female supervisor's arms were covered in green, purple, and black bruises. I'm talking from elbow to shoulder. Naturally, I asked her what happened, and absolutely could not believe her answer. She said that our boss would sneak up behind her, pinched the back of her arms, twisted, and then laughed hysterically when she cried out.
I am a super-passive, terrified-of-confrontation type of girl, but the one and only time he did that to me, I turned around and told him if he ever laid a hand on me again, he would regret it for the rest of his life. I was taking martial arts classes at the time, which he knew, and between that and I think the fact that no woman had probably ever spoken to him like that before, he backed right off.
66. Not a Thai, Girl
On the first day on the job at a store that sold spare parts, the assistant manager looked me up and down and said, "Yeah. I don't work well with other women.” Well, that was a great omen. For the next four years, she made me do my job "her way" only for me to get in trouble from head office, which was whenever we had a store visit.
She'd pretend that she'd never actually instructed me to do it her way and then berate in front of the big bosses saying, "Why did you do this like that? You know that's wrong." This happened the entire time I worked there. We had a retail conference in Melbourne every year for all our company’s retail coordinators.
Every year, they had an incentive for us to try to win. One of those years the prize was an all-expenses-paid holiday to Thailand for two. Basically, to win it we had to exceed sales targets for three months and increase our margin as well as create a visually appealing display for a sponsor’s product by the due date.
She told me not to bother to try to win because I’d never, and it would be a waste of time. She held my position before I started and told me she'd never come close to winning. Well, I worked hard, and I won it. Boy was she upset about that. She wasn't happy that our small country store had won such a big thing.
Considering that we have over 200 locations across Australia, for us to win was amazing. She actually tried to go out of her way to get our sales figures from head office, so that she could disprove that I'd really done my job. For a few weeks, she was determined to prove that I didn't do enough work to win it.
She tried to convince me that they lied, and I didn't win. When she finally accepted defeat, she asked if I was taking her. I told her my boyfriend was going, so she threw a huge tantrum and told me I was selfish for not taking her. We had a great time. I sent happy snaps to our store’s email every day to rub it in.
67. Working with Children
My first job at 15 was at an outlet shop for teenage girls. There was one guy who worked there, Josh, who was in his 20s, and clearly, at least part of the job perks for him was being surrounded by adolescent girls dressing and undressing. Then, I came along changing from my Catholic uniform to work clothes six days a week.
Josh would frequently “forget” that I was changing as he was checking nobody had left anything behind and get an eyeful of my sensible beige bra. He also tried to introduce group hugs, so he could touch my butt. Eventually, our supervisor reprimanded him, and he didn't work there again.
68. Doing the Dirty
I worked in an office with a woman who rarely showered and always dressed as if she was auditioning for a role as a stereotypical bag lady. Her hair was unkempt and uncombed. She stank up the area around her desk. The owner would talk to her from time to time about her appearance and how she needed to clean up.
This was important especially for our clients who we had traipsing in and out of our office all day, but that upkeep would eventually dive back down. The owner would offer help in any way she could, but nothing sunk in. One day, there were these little bits of crumpled up papers trailing all over the office.
The manager started picking them up as we all looked over to figure out what they were. There were some papers with red stuff all over. The trail led to the bathroom. We figure out that this pig woman used toilet paper as a menstrual pad, and as she walked around the office, her makeshift pad disintegrated and fell out.
She walked around the whole day leaving bits of crotch rotted paper everywhere. And there was even evidence that she went into the bathroom and came out after all that mess was made. It was not something that you wouldn't notice on the dark maroon carpet. She knew she made the mess and left all of it anyways.
Her husband and children would also come to the office frequently to visit her. They were just as disgusting and dirty as my co-worker as well. It was actually very sad, but it was also extremely infuriating to have to work in the same vicinity as someone who doesn't care for anyone else much less themselves.
69. Communication is Key
Far and away the most hated person in my carpentry shop is the deaf guy. I've only been working there a year and everyone thinks he is the most vindictive, hateful, selfish, paranoid jerk to walk the earth. He's also easily the hardest worker there. I can tell you with confidence that he has generated the most money for the company out of anyone on staff.
He absolutely OWNS his portion of the shop. He has it down like clockwork and doesn't waste a second. All that being said, he throws an absolute rabid fit whenever anything out of routine happens, and he won't look anyone in the eye, and he calls everyone lazy jerks. I found a solution, though. I started to learn ASL (American Sign Language). I'd sign "Happy Monday" and "how are you" to him. Pretty soon he's teaching me a word a day. Fast-forward a year and we talk constantly.
That's when I learned the truth. He gets mad because he's been passed up for promotions because he's deaf. People don't tell him when overtime is available which he wants. He sees people coming in late and taking breaks, and he NEVER breaks those rules. I unknowingly became his liaison. He stopped fighting with people. He's able to get all of the jokes we tell at lunch because I can translate. He can joke back through me. Other people are learning sign language as time goes on too.
What I don't get is why no one ever gave him the benefit of the doubt. It would suck to be deaf and never know what was going on. Some people have worked with him for 15+ years and no one ever learned any ASL. He thanked me recently for being a good friend. He said things are a lot better now.
70. The Pretentious Mr. Magoo
He is no longer working with us, but he is still legendary to this day. I will refer to him as Magoo. Magoo and I both started at the same time in a science-based company, but in different departments. He looked really good on paper, well qualified, and interviewed fairly well (from what I was told). I sat next to him and we began chatting.
It quickly became clear that something was wrong with him. He would giggle to himself during the conversation, and immediately began one-upping me in the conversation, saying how he had something better or knew more about what we were talking about. Not a big deal, I work with scientists and engineers, being one myself, and odd personalities are the norm.
Within a day or two, I knew that I was not going to enjoy my time with Magoo. Our office has a tradition of getting bagels and cream cheese every Friday as a sort of reward for a long week. I get in at 8:30, Magoo is already munching happily on a loaded bagel and giggling to himself. Not a big deal either. But an hour later, I see Magoo eating another bagel, then fifteen minutes later, ANOTHER. I confront him and tell him you can't eat 3 bagels before some people have had one. He brushes it off and tries to pretend like he didn't know he had done it. This guy is in his 30s by the way.
The worst part of being around him is that he takes over EVERY conversation he is in, and he makes sure he is in EVERY conversation. He will literally walk up to a group of people, no matter what they are talking about, laughing like he heard something funny, and then interject with how he knows more about it or is an expert at it. It got to the point that we would avoid him at all costs, or just leave when he came around. It didn't matter to Magoo, he would follow you and talk about his knowledge anyway.
He began to get bolder. He interrupted the CEO of our company during an important meeting to correct him on a detail that didn't matter. He once ordered over $10,000 in materials for an experiment that he wasn't authorized to work on. The last straw was when he started insulting people if they disagreed with him, including his boss.
At this point, most people wouldn't even respond to him when he spoke to them, and most people just left when he came around, even in mid-sentence. How he lasted three months is beyond me, but the day he was fired, we were told to stay out of the offices in case he did anything drastic. After he was gone, he asked his boss for a reference.
71. Delusional Distractions
The first terrible co-worker that pops in my mind was this chick who was obsessed with these two other girls who were BFFs. They were always whispering to each other about absolutely nonsense like taking their kids to Disney on Ice together. But the dumb co-worker just constantly insisted and whined and complained that they were talking about her.
Finally, I snapped after maybe three weeks of her huffing, getting upset, and glaring at them. As soon as she opened her mouth to complain, I hissed at her that she wasn't that interesting or important for everyone to be thinking about her. She was super shocked because I'd been chill, but she was driving me nuts.
72. Losing The Popularity Contest
I worked in a restaurant for my first job in high school. I was about 16 when we hired on my co-worker’s little cousin. This kid was a year younger than me and a total jerk; no one liked him because of his attitude and behavior issues. Anyways, the kid gets hired and at first he's chill. Him and I both LOVED the same band, so we had a mutual bond and a common thing to talk about.
Other than that, though, I couldn't stand him much. During his first week, he starts to step on people’s toes quite easily because he notices some of us who are friends liked roasting each other, and he thought he could join in. However, the comments he was making weren’t silly banter, they were full-blown rude comments that made some of us mad.
We also started to notice that this kid didn't do his job properly, either. He worked the dish pit, and when working alone, his lack of proper cleaning of dishes, cutlery, and etc. threw everyone behind on their closing tasks because we'd have to ask him to re-wash literally everything due to food chunks being all over things.
After two to three weeks, a number of us complained to management. This kid’s older cousin even complained about him it got so bad. The last straw, I think, was him taking this dishwasher sprayer and starting to spray people as they walked into the kitchen. He got screamed at by a number of us and was fired a few days later when management noticed how angry all of us were with this kid.
73. When Time Is An Enigma
He told the General Manager that he might be a bit late for a shift due to his second job. When the GM reluctantly said OK, he apparently took this as thinking he had free reign to come and go as he pleased. He'd show up anywhere from 7:30 to 8:30 for his 7:00 shift. Then, when the doors closed, he'd insist he had to "head out."
Apparently, he had an early morning the following morning, leaving everyone else to do the closing work. He also had other issues like being rude to customers and other employees. People mostly kept quiet until one day, a higher-level manager had to sub in on the night shift. When he went to leave early, the manager flipped.
He said, "If you lay a FINGER on that money before this work is COMPLETELY DONE, don't bother coming back." The guy insisted he "had permission" and left anyway. When our GM returned and he tried to come back, our manager said, "You warned me you were going to be late ONE TIME, and I never once gave you permission to otherwise start late or leave early. Clean out your locker NOW."
74. Science Project
Back when I was a food service manager, we had just trained a couple of new hires and part of that included proper chemical safety, like don't mix LimeAway and bleach, etc. The next morning when I came in to open, the walk-in had a horrific smell inside. I watched the camera footage and saw one of the new hires going in with two spray bottles.
I then questioned him, and apparently, he was stupidly curious about the chemical reaction and wanted to see what happens when bleach and ammonia are mixed. He didn't work there long.
75. One After The Other
I have so many stories about a former employee. Me and my former boss interviewed him for a position in IT and I got a really weird vibe from him but my boss was really impressed by his CV. There was lots of stuff like "Cisco certification course teacher", and honestly, I was about to quit, so I didn't really put up a fight about it and he was hired.
On his second day, he brought in a three-foot-long RC helicopter and put it in his office. Day three, he was told to order a laptop for himself, as part of the job was ordering IT stuff, and he bought the most expensive computer he could find. I’m talking titanium and a $10,000 price tag. The fourth day, he ordered an office chair in leather with built-in massage stuff.
Day five rolls around, and he gets into a big argument with my boss and is told he can’t do anything without me approving it first. The next few days are normal, until day eight, when he tells me he wants to apply for public IPs for every single piece of equipment at all the company offices—there were several thousand IP's—because NAT sucked.
It turns out, he didn't know what it was, so he clearly lied in the interview about being a Cisco teacher. Day nine and he’s changed the domain admin password to a password some dudes at an IRC channel had told him was the most secure password in the world. Then around day 15, he tells me he needs time off because his girlfriend left him for his RC helicopter instructor.
He wanted to be at home because he was scared she would take stuff from their shared apartment. There is so much more to tell, and yet, even with all of that, he somehow managed to avoid getting fired until a few weeks after I had left. The last I heard, he was selling VPN services to people using his own home broadband connection.
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76. Speed Demon
One of our drivers was an absolute waste of space. He would write terrible fanfiction and original stories in the back room. However, the day he was fired was when he drove 70 in a residential area and almost hit a guy. We found out because there were several calls made around the same time from approximately 30 people about a crazy driver.
These people knew to call us after the incident made it to the Neighborhood Facebook page and they figured out who was driving—but that’s not even the worst part. Shortly after being fired, he was apprehended by law enforcement for trying to hire a homeless person to kick a pregnant woman in the stomach. How he was even hired in the first place I have no idea.
77. A Cry For Help
I worked for a big home improvement store that I won't name, all I can say is the stores are orange. We had a guy come into work, very in his cups, and run one of the forklifts into the outdoor storage racks with customers around. Another employee forcibly removed him from the lift and dragged him to the back. But then something surprising happened.
Dude was given two options: Walk and potentially face charges, or go to an inpatient treatment center on the company's dime, and his job would be there if he wanted it after he got out. I can honestly say it's the one actually good thing I ever saw the company do at a corporate level.
78. Nothing Worse Than a Close Talker
The laboratory where I worked hired an older fellow who had come in for his interview in jeans and a flannel shirt. When he started, he was...inclined to give minimal effort. He would take multiple half-hour breaks every day even though my job doesn't allow this, since you only get one-hour lunch and two 15-minute breaks.
When an important task came along that didn't let him sit down at a desk and fill in his notebook every five minutes, he would just leave. He would get uncomfortably close to people thrusting his face to within inches of others to talk, and he would corner the other technician and me in the cramped preparation room.
He also called me "Toots." He didn't like that he had to learn things and do work, so he turned in his resignation after two months. He told the other technician and me who were training him that he refused to do any more work before he’d leave. He spent the time writing an insane letter to a state commissioner.
The letter went on about our "horrible" laboratory practices and how our boss would make him cry or something like that. I believe the wording was something like, "and I had not cried since I lost my dog." At least we got some good mileage out of that. We used to jokingly make fun of my boss about the guy’s dog.
79. Read The Room
Within minutes of being hired, shown to his desk, and given a company email address, this new dude emails the entiiiiiire company (500+ employees) that he has pre-screeners on DVD for movies that were not even in theaters yet. I think that at the time, one of the ones he offered was Spider Man 2. And one of the Resident Evil movies, I think.
Lots of titles, he said, $10 each. Anyway, he was fired, out the door, in under two minutes, it was pretty amazing. After all, we were a game software company, and someone looking to make fast money on pirated stuff was, well...incompatible with corporate culture, let's say.
80. Not A Cat Person
One and a half hours into my shift as an animal care worker, I was showing my trainee how to clean the kitten rooms and started him on the easiest cage. We’re talking neonatal, six-day-old bottle feeder kittens. I explained how to set up the kennel, clean them up, etc. I turned around to grab some towels and a fresh hot water bottle when I heard a thump.
And then another thump. Turned around, and he was tossing the kittens to the other side of the kennel to move them. Like, underhand lobbing a softball, just tossed three kittens out of his way. I freaked out and yanked his butt down to the supervisor’s office. His excuse was the kittens were “attacking” him, and he felt threatened? So he threw them!!
No warnings, fired on the spot. The kittens all were fine and got adopted out a few months later.
81. Clean Yourself Up
I delivered pizzas for Sarpino's for a while. It was in a wealthy suburb on the outskirts of the Kansas City metro area—Leawood, KS—so the tips were plentiful. Anyway, the manager got a call from a customer who claimed to have ordered a full order of wings, not a half. They said only four wings were in the box, when there should've been eight or nine.
The manager says, “OK, we'll have a driver deliver you the correct order of wings, free of charge.” A couple of minutes later, I kid you not, the delivery driver who initially dropped off the wings returns. I take one look at him and shake my head in disbelief. There is wing sauce just caked around his lips. After a session of laughing uncontrollably, the delivery driver was terminated.
82. The Manager Other Managers Love to Hate
We had a manager who was one of those authoritarian, anal-retentive types that just had a negative outlook on things in general. She was shrill and petty and I found out later she told another coworker/manager that I would never amount to much of anything after I interviewed for a promotion with her and that other manager. After she left and that other coworker got his own team, guess who was the first person he brought on board and was eventually his first promotion?
I not only outlasted her but earned three Employee of the Quarter awards. Other managers hated her too and at one point one of them stuck a fish in the ceiling above her office and just left it there as it started to rot and stink up the space. They would just snicker as they walked by her office while she was lighting candles or air fresheners.
83. Finally Giving An Excuse To Be Fired
I was working as a baggage handler (Ramp Agent is the real job title, FYI), and they'd hired a guy whom everyone hated. He was lazy, stupid, and annoying. One of the big rules when working around airplanes is you don't go anywhere near the engines while they're still running. They'll suck you right in and cut you into a million little pieces in 1 second.
They put the fear of God into you about this during training, well before you get near an airplane. Once a plane pulls into the gate, you wait until you have confirmation that the engine has been turned off before you approach it. If you're not sure, you don't approach the plane. Well one day a plane pulls up to the gate, and he walks right up to the engine while it's still running.
People are yelling, his vest is flapping like crazy, but he's so aloof he doesn't notice. Someone runs up to him and yanks him back to a safe distance. They had already been building up a case to fire him, but that made it a lot easier. The supervisor walked him into the manager's office, and he was fired right away. We all rejoiced.
84. Need You to Do Your Job
I worked at a grocery store with this one scheduling lady who was the absolute worst. I’m not complaining about scheduling because it's expected to have shifts at different times each week. Just about two years into working there, I had an accident and broke my thumb/hand when I wasn’t at work and needed surgery.
I went to apply for Employment Insurance (EI), and they required a Record of Employment (ROE). So, I asked the woman in charge of that, the aforementioned scheduling lady, if she wouldn’t mind sending the ROE so that I could still pay rent while I was off work recovering. She told me that she already sent it.
I went back to the EI offices, and they told me that they still had no ROE. I went back to my old work and asked her for a second time. It only happened after I asked her to do it four times. This whole delay meant that I had to borrow money from my parents as my Christmas present so that I could keep paying my rent.
85. Keeping the Team Balanced
I worked in a three-person department that included me, an awesome dude, and this terrible new co-worker. She was fresh out of college, which made her believe she was smarter than me and our other teammate. She totally discounted anyone's opinions except her own, and one manager let her do whatever she wanted.
She was the worst one-upper than I'd ever met even for the smallest of things like going to a coffee stand. She'd chime in and say how her friends work at a coffee stand and they know her order by heart – just things like that. She thought she was adorable and charming but was incredibly grating and worthless.
She constantly messed up, but if you tried to help or give any constructive feedback, she'd cry and go to the one manager that liked her. She lasted almost four years, which blew my mind. She was furloughed recently, but she won’t be returning as the owner’s daughter now has taken her position. Phew.
86. An Unlucky Reaction
I had an assistant manager at Walmart that was notorious for pinching people if they said the wrong thing to other managers or to customers. One day, I was helping a customer in the food section, since that’s where I was stocking that day, and the assistant manager came over to see how I was doing. Apparently, I said something she didn’t like so she decided to pinch my tricep really hard.
This really hurt, especially because of her nails, and I instinctively backhanded her in the mouth. I admit it was a weird, unintentional thing to do, but there was a lot of childhood history behind me getting hurt by my siblings, so hitting back became second nature to me. And that was how I lost my job at Walmart after only working there for four months.
87. You Get What You Paid For
My former company went through a phase where they would hire people who would accept a ridiculously low starting salary for an administrative job. So, they would put a job listing out there, and get lots of applications. They would make the offer to the top candidates, but with a salary that was about 25% lower than a "normal" salary for that type of position.
It was framed as a "cost-saving measure," but all it did was get the top candidates to laugh and say no to our offer. Then we went to second-tier candidates, who did the same, and then, finally, some third-tier candidates who were, let's just say, third-tier candidates for a reason, and pretty desperate for work, would accept the position.
Well, you know the saying, "You get what you pay for?" Yep, 100% true. MAN did we get some doozies in the office back in those days. There was "Vic," who tried to log into adult sites up to 60 times per day during work hours. Although they were all blocked and inaccessible, he was caught by the IT guys. The IT guys could see his search history.
There was "Stacy" who, despite being trained multiple times by multiple people, couldn't even handle the most basic tasks of the job after six months. I'm talking straight data entry and filling out purchase orders. There was "Jess" who came in dressed in skin-tight clothing, platform heels, and fishnet stockings. She spent most of the day walking around the office, showing herself off.
There was "Rob" who came in so hungover 90% of the time that he only got about 10% of his work done on any given day. I could go on. After about two years of this, my former company realized that they were hemorrhaging time and money by hiring these duds, raised the starting salary to a realistic level, and finally started getting some decent folks in the door.
88. Pretty Grate Co-worker
Out of all the bad co-workers I’ve had, Bag Salad was by far the worst. It was my job to train her on a position that only I knew how to do, and they lied to me when they said I would definitely be involved in the interview process for the position. I'm still not sure why they did that. No hyperbole, but I crushed that job.
I had exemplary reviews every year and positive relationships at the company all around. I didn't need or want the help, but they said they were hiring her for the, "anticipated future workload." It's been so long I don't even remember why she got that nickname, but it really suited her somehow. She was exhausting.
She didn’t know how to do anything. She didn't understand how to take messages, forward or reply to emails, or print anything. All day long, she would talk to herself in this weird half-whisper lip-smacking way that was like, "Hmm, ok, if I just copy, oh no, maybe move it but I, ummm, oh, ok, maybe I'll hmm…"
Then she would turn to me with her big buggy eyes waiting for me to acknowledge her rather than just asking me for the help. And every breath she would take, her nose would whistle, and what was worse was when she breathed through her mouth, she would smack her lips or tongue every single time she took a breath!
She loved Big Bang Theory and would regale me with the plot lines of episodes she'd watch, she would say things to me like, "And then the one, the Sheldon? Goes bazinga, and oh, how I laughed! Goodness, it's soo fun-ny! Hee hee,” with every vowel lasting much longer than needed in her unbearable sing-song voice.
She felt the need to jump in on every conversation she was able to overhear. If I was talking to a friend about a trip or something, “Man, Chicago was great. I hope I can go again someday,” she’d pop out of nowhere and go, “I never went to Chicago, but my uncle's friend did in the 80s and he said he used to…”
I really hated her and couldn’t stand her. I know it sounds like a woman out of her depth who was just trying to fit in, and that's true. But some people just grate, and she grated every last nerve and ounce of patience I had. I tried, I just couldn't hack it, and I quit that job two months after she started.
89. What’s A “Job?”
We had a system admin who would come to work and run his real estate business from his desk while he was supposed to be working. The whole time, he was coughing and sneezing and sniffling constantly. We called him "Itchy." He would also call friends and family and have hours-long conversations with them while we all had to listen.
He picked up the nickname "Thanksgiving dinner guy," because he used the break room to cook entire meals that wouldn't be out of place at a family gathering. One of the offices in another wing had a sheet by the door for people to log when they saw him, and to write down what he was cooking that day. He didn't like any of us and left books like Jerks at Work on his desk.
When he finally got fired, they found out he never did any of his sys admin work. No backups, no password changes, no log monitoring.
90. Master of None
I worked with a guy who just couldn't learn new skills. When he started at the job, he had to learn new programs and processes just like anyone would need training for any new position. He couldn't pick anything up whether it was where to click in a software to get a certain result or how to fill out a report.
The team took turns to show him the ropes, but it never stuck. Once, I got so frustrated when he couldn’t minimize a window. "Top right corner. Click on the straight line." It took him four seconds to drag the mouse to the corner and then he'd hover around it but never on it. He was nice but couldn’t work with us.
91. Not Our Boy Roy
I had one coworker (call him Roy) who was a nightmare. We worked in IT support and Roy was considered the "expert" for a certain system our team managed. He was supposed to train me but he only taught me very basic stuff. He never told me about the plethora of problems that can occur with the system. When something did happen and I didn't know how to deal with it, he would chastise me and throw me under the bus.
There was one incident where Roy had to work overtime. I knew he wouldn't show and that I'd be forced to go in, so to try to stop that from happening, I called Roy first thing in the morning and reminded him to get to work. He says yes, but then I get a call that makes my blood boil. Roy never showed so I had to work 10 hours that day to cover his laziness.
Surprisingly the incident didn't get him fired, but he did proudly announce he found a new job a month later. The new job rescinded their offer, and he went into survival mode. He deliberately continued to train me poorly to make himself "unreplaceable", but the company refused to let him stay. Watching him pack up his desk = priceless.
92. Liar, Liar…
This girl I worked with when I was a personal shopper tried to get me fired a couple of times because she saw I was moving up faster than her. We both got sent to work at a different location for a couple of months, and she went around bad-mouthing me to anyone who would listen, so they thought I was a terrible employee and that she was amazing.
I proved myself with my work ethic, and they realized she was a liar. It definitely changed their opinion of her. I ended up going to a different location, and when she went back to our original location, she continued to say horrible things about me. My co-workers took my side and called her out. She left not long after on a bad note with them.
93. Listen Up
I had an employee go to a client's house to walk their dogs. I had pointed out to her in training that the client had both indoor and outdoor cameras. However, she didn’t listen to me, and instead of taking the dogs out for a walk, she put them in the backyard and then proceeded to stay inside and play on her phone for 30 minutes.
She then wrote a note for the client stating that she took the dogs to the park. She did this for three days until the client got suspicious, watched the videos, and called me. I had to fire her, and her response was, "I don't know what I was thinking."
94. The Case Of The Disappearing Co-worker
We had an assistant who plotted to get me fired and take my job. Some of my workers let me know, because he tried to get them onboard with him. Eventually, due to work politics, I was demoted, but asked to be put on the shift relieving him. After being called in to relieve him by phone a couple of times, which is against the rules, I intentionally came in four hours early
Surprise surprise, he was nowhere on site. I still got a call from him, as if he was on site and needed to be relieved. I let the guards know. They videotaped him and I got him fired.
95. Dwight Schrute 2.0
My worst coworker constantly eats throughout the day, so he's always going to the canteen to get food. Every time he gets up to grab a snack, he takes a 20-minute break. Then he complains if anyone asks him to do anything as he is always "too busy." He becomes deeply offended at any change in the office, especially if the temperature isn't freezing cold (apparently he can't work if it's too warm).
He can't stand the coffee addicts in the office as they need caffeine...but he drinks several bottles of Coca-Cola every day. I have been in the office for nearly two years and I still don't know what he actually does. He smells, he's sweaty, and when he sneezes he wipes his nose with his hand and cleans it off on the desk. I hate him and so does everyone else.
96. IRL Dwight Schrute
My co-worker has been vying for promotions for years, but he never gets them. Then, after just a few months, I got promoted ahead of him. When he found out, he went ballistic. He turned bright purple and violently stormed out of the building. When he came back 30 minutes later, he walked into my cubicle and rubbed my back while telling me he wasn't mad at me, just mad at the system. I was so uncomfortable, I wouldn't even look him in the eye.
Then later, I heard him on the phone, applying for yet another promotion, and I finally understood why he got rejected every time—it was the most brutal conversation I’ve ever heard. This was his opening line: “Yes, is this Pam? This is Gary, you probably don’t remember me, but I interviewed for you a couple of months ago for the _____ position. I must have been a bad boy [said like you would say if you had a baby talk fetish] though, because I didn’t get a callback. Do you remember me? No? Oh…well, anyway, I was calling to set up an interview for the _____ position you have open over there.”
97. C For Commitment
I had an employee call and tell me she had just lost her mother. Well, I got an anonymous phone call from someone later telling me she was lying, so I called the number I had on file to send my regards and get an address to send flowers to. In the meantime, the office had collected an envelope of money to help with the costs of the funeral and missing work.
When I called, I couldn’t believe who answered. Yup, it was the mother who picked up the phone, and who was totally shocked to find out her daughter lied about her and used her as an excuse to go to Las Vegas for the weekend. That’s when I came up with a devious plan. When the daughter returned, I held a big meeting with everyone in the office and presented her with the envelope of money and flowers.
She actually took it and fake cried! I called her into my office to reveal that I knew, then fired her and took the envelope back. She said, and I quote: "I don't give a care" and then left.
98. Extreme Measures
I worked with an older diabetic lady at Taco Bell who had a disturbing habit. She would chug regular soda to cause a diabetic reaction so she could be sent home. She did this so often that the EMTs all knew her by name. The crazy part is that I’m pretty sure she was actually trying to lose her feet to diabetic complications, so she could collect disability checks.
99. Just a Reminder
My annoying co-worker loved saying dumb stuff to get a rise out of me. One day, I made him regret it. He shouted at me from across the floor that “there's a woman on the phone, and she says she's pregnant, and she thinks the baby might be yours.” I just shouted back at him, “Tell your mom to stop calling me at work."
100. Expensive Tastes
First week, a customer called over my co-worker to the unstaffed truffle counter. He hasn't been trained in truffles, so he just grabs one from the display case and sells it to the customer. This turned out to be a massive mistake. See, what he didn’t know was that the display "truffles" aren’t actually real truffles; they are made of plastic.
By the time he realized, the customer had already left and paid $90 for it. Fired.
