Dealing with troublesome customers at work is bad enough, but having to put up with horrible co-workers for entire shifts at a time is a whole other kind of misery. When your co-worker is a Karen, it becomes a lot harder to do your job effectively, and they can even push you to your breaking point. From incompetent workers who contribute absolutely nothing of value to their teams to two-faced staff members who are hellbent on getting others fired, these Karens are valid reasons to wave the white flag and say, "I QUIT!"
1. Friends In High Places
At the last real job I had, not counting a short stint at a call center, I was working for a contractor. Another contractor bought out the company, and they shuffled some of us around. About halfway through my stint at a new location, I started having some serious problems with one of the leads. Basically, these were guys who were one step below the supervisor.
Long story short, this guy was harassing me, falsifying records, and claiming that I was wasting time. Just a whole laundry list of accusations. I went to HR to voice my concerns, only to have the new HR director take the lead's side because they were old friends. I was given one of two options. Either they would buy out my remaining contract...or I could accept a transfer to somewhere else.
Based on my skill set, I didn't relish the idea of being shuttled off to God knows where, so I let them buy out my contract. They paid me about half of what my remaining contract was, and I never looked back.
2. Karma Comes Back Around
This woman named Cheryl thought she was hot stuff because she was married to a retired football player. One day, she came in and started beating on one of our plant vendors. When we told her we were calling 9-1-1, she tried to angrily drive her SUV away. Thankfully, karma was on our side that day—she accidentally backed into a pallet of ceramic pots and then hit the front end of an officer's car when she pulled forward.
The best part? The officers immediately did a search of her car and they found a flask of Jack in her purse. She was subsequently apprehended and charged.
3. Peer Pressure
During an exit interview with my last job, HR asked me where I was going to next. HR: So, what’s the name of the company you are moving to next? Me: I'm not really comfortable disclosing that. HR: Are you sure? It would really help us out. Me: I'd rather not say. HR: It’s company policy. You need to tell us. This is where I snapped.
Me: I said NO, and if you continue further you'll be hearing from my lawyer. I told my old boss this after I left and he was absolutely shocked. HR has no right to know anything about the next place you are moving to. It’s literally none of their business but they tried to press it out of me anyway, more than likely to call them up and talk bad about me.
4. Lovable Larcenist
I work in a hostel in Amsterdam. It's a quick turnaround because we hire travelers who are passing through and we let them work for their bed, changing bed sheets, and cleaning toilets. People usually stay for a couple of months. There's this new guy who everyone loves, but I am growing more and more suspicious of him. Things keep going missing in the rooms that he cleans. It started off small with things like earphones, sunglasses, hats.
Last week 150 pounds was stolen and two days later he asked me the exchange rate for 150 pounds to euros. He also told me that he is traveling on his brother’s passport using a fake name and was kicked out of his parent’s house for stealing. I don't know who to turn to. I like the guy, but we can't have a thief working in the building.
5. Keep It In The Family
The HR lady was the boss’s sister, and the boss just so happened to be a narcissist. As an HR lady, she had very little actual life experience because they both came from a big pharma family and never really had a sense of what working a real job was like. The boss could do no wrong in his sister's eyes, so complaining about anything just got you gaslit. I’m so glad I'm not there anymore.
6. Thrashed Around
In another job, a roofer was carrying a sheet of plywood on top of a four-story beach house. It was windy, so it was dumb for him to be up there in the first place. All of a sudden, a big gust of wind got underneath the plywood, and, for some reason, he held on. The events that followed made me wince. He ended up falling off the roof and hitting his head on the concrete.
The corner of the sheet of plywood also went through his chest. It was gory; so much so that the owners were traumatized and ended up selling the unfinished house.
7. Candid Camera
We found a spy camera in our department office. It was shaped like a charging brick and had been recording video and audio all night. We copied the videos off the camera after the offender took them down and left them out on their desk. We then took the video file, which showed the person sneaking around an employee to remove the camera, and turned that in with the information of what happened.
That was almost a year ago now and nothing has been done. We are getting ready to turn it in ourselves to the FBI. No idea why the company hasn’t reported anything.
8. The Jewel Mule
The critical items at our jewelry counter were anything over $500 and they had to be counted at the start and end of each shift. Well, items kept going missing, and one of the other employees complained that it was a certain lady stuffing it up her hot pocket. Security took her to the bathroom. It was true. She had a men's necklace shoved up there.
I can't imagine who she was going to give that to.
9. Liar, Liar
HR ordered me to downgrade my three excellent employee reviews to “satisfactory” because management didn’t recognize their names. I got written up for telling my employees this. But that wasn’t even the worst part. After that, HR denied that they told me anything, even though I had the emails from them documenting it.
Totally worth it. My employees were excellent and got the raises they deserved.
10. Corporate Wolves
One of my managers was having an affair with one of her subordinates. They got caught making out while at work by another associate, who then reported them to HR. The manager convinced HR that she caught the associate stealing and that she made the story up to cover for herself. HR sided with the manager and they fired the reporting associate on the spot, despite having no proof.
Two months later, she got caught again with a different subordinate, but HR refused to take action because it would mean they would have to admit that they fired the first employee wrongfully. That was bad enough, but it gets even worse—they ended up promoting the manager to an unfilled position in a different department. I left shortly after all that.
11. Micro-Management
In the six years I worked at this company, I forgot to hit the "Submit" button on my timesheet once. Queue HR telling me that I wouldn't get paid for my worked hours. They also called me in for a disciplinary interview which was essentially one hour of four people telling me how dare I forget to click "Submit." FYI, I forgot to hit "Submit" because I was so overworked, and I couldn't believe all four of them had time to waste an hour on such a useless meeting.
12. This Paints an Ugly Picture
I worked in automotive painting. I had been complaining about my mask parts needing replacing for a few weeks. Finally, my mask broke and I refused to paint because toxic fumes were coming into my mask. Being the only automotive painter, this meant work came to a halt. I was told to get in there and paint or else.
I pointed at the security camera and asked him to say that again but a little louder. He fired two people that day, but I wasn't one of them.
13. Crash And Burn
My co-worker accidentally backed his company truck into my personal car while it was parked. He alerted me and our local manager immediately—we took photos, filled out the incident report, yadda yadda yadda. We did all the proper stuff we were supposed to do. Everyone in our office was in agreement about what happened; that it was an honest accident and the company's insurance should cover the cost of fixing my car.
Then the HR director got involved. First, he tried to get me to assume liability since it was my personal vehicle that "caused" the accident. Um, my car was parked in the parking lot and I was inside at my desk when it happened. When I pointed this out, he backed down and said he would file the claim. But he had another nasty surprise in store for me.
Next, I got a call from a hostile insurance adjuster from my company's insurance demanding that I provide my insurance information or they would be pursuing court action. It turns out the HR director had filed the claim saying that I had run into the parked work truck with my car and tried to flee the scene until a co-worker saw what was going on and reported me. REALLY.
I informed the adjuster of what had actually happened and emailed her the photos, signed incident reports, and witness statements that we had filled out. She changed her tune pretty quickly and said she would get back to me. The next day, I was slapped with a "settlement agreement" from HR asking me to accept $1,100 for repairs and to sign a form releasing the company from any further responsibility.
I had only just dropped my car off at the body shop and hadn't even gotten the estimate back yet. When I obviously declined, I was told that I either had to accept their offer or be out of luck. At this point, I reached out to my own insurance and told them what had happened. As I went through the sequence of events, I could hear my agent getting almost giddy about all the blatantly improper tactics HR had tried on me.
In the end, they processed my claim and pursued my own company's insurance through subrogation. He also mentioned that they would probably be seeking additional damages due to the falsification of statements in the initial claim. In the end, the damage ended up costing over $4,000 to fix but I didn't have to pay a cent, not even my deductible.
I don't know if the HR director experienced any consequences, but there was a comment in our finance VP's year-end report about needing to "reduce extraneous costs due to reporting delays and inaccuracies in liability claims."
14. The Takeover
I worked a job a few years ago for a company that was sold to new ownership unexpectedly. One day, a bunch of guys in suits walked in and announced that everyone in upper management was fired. Everyone else was required to do job interviews and substance tests to see if they would get to keep their jobs. It was absolute chaos.
Upper management started packing their offices and calling their significant others, crying. Middle management was running around trying to keep things functioning while preparing for their job interviews. Meanwhile, about four employees were very focused on the substance tests—one of them even went to hide in a shed on the property with a five-gallon jug of water from the water machine.
He drank the entire thing too fast and ended up going into a seizure during his interview from desalinating his body. Another guy went home for lunch and came back with his infant's urine in a bag taped to his thigh. But the worst part was when they told me that I failed my test. I have never done substances in my life, so I was naturally angry.
I made them test me again and the results came back clean; however, it took two weeks before I was allowed to return to work. I stayed for like three more months after that, then I bounced. The new management was terrible and lazy. They blamed everything on the original employees and would say stuff like, "If you all were so good at your jobs, why did we have to buy the company?"
This was in 2008 when the market was in shambles from the housing collapse. Our original owner was a wealthy guy who had a dream of making it big, but he couldn't sustain the losses forever and eventually sold the company.
15. Don’t Sleep On This
I'm in IT at a hospital and I put in long hours, weekend work, etc., regularly. I've been here for over 10 years and basically rebuilt their operation properly from the ground up. I once had a server incident and put in 12 hours on a Sunday night, which everyone knew about. The following Monday, there was a staff meeting that ran three hours in a hot room, and I went to sleep during a particularly boring rant.
I got called into HR over this—for the first time in my 30+ years of employment. They lectured me about commitments to work and even had the nerve to warn me that they "fire people for sleeping on the job." Yes, they fire nurses who sleep on the night shift without monitoring their patients, not staffers who drift off in a status meeting after finishing a 90-hour week and operating on a couple of hours of sleep.
Apparently, the only reason they were up in arms, though, is that the ranting person complained about not having my attention "in a critical staff update" to her friend…the CEO. That was two years ago and I'm still not over it. Every time a recruiter calls me and I'm tempted to dodge them, that incident comes to mind.
16. No Really, Pick On Somebody Your Own Size
I worked at a huge, well-known international company. There was this young, straight-out-of-college guy who we had just hired—as in, his first day had been the same week. He had moved from Eastern Europe to our corporate location. Cue company ski trip, with lots of free booze—some of his new colleagues who he thought were his "friends" told him that this woman was checking him out.
He started hitting on her, and mind you, he was already tipsy at that point. She told him to knock it off and that she wasn't interested. He kept being pushy. This large, scary dude beside the woman also told him to knock it off. He swung at the large, scary dude, and promptly found himself face first in the snow. The woman in question? Head of global HR. The large, scary dude? Head of global corporate security. The young schmuck? Fired.
17. A Real Piece Of Work
The head of HR molested me. He used all the wording from the anti-harassment training that he had arranged for the place. At the time, my employer was deciding whether to keep me or can me, and I was very stressed about it. He was the one to decide. I had a meeting with him about it and he made up a bunch of excuses to keep hugging me.
"Ha ha ha, this is OK, right? I have your consent, right? Gotta ask consent! Ha ha ha." I mean, who do you go to when it's the head of HR that does this? Oh, but there was a cruel twist. They had already fired me at that point and he knew it, but he didn't tell me. We had another meeting with the head of my division a week or so later where they just said, "We aren't renewing you.”
He then tossed a big envelope across the table with all the unemployment stuff.
18. A Near Miss
One night, I was doing nighttime delivery of bread all around Melbourne, to both stores and markets. I took my usual shortcut through the back of Brighton which involved going up a driveway and then turning through a grass park that led into the next main street. As I was driving towards the end of the road, I saw heaps of blue and red flashing lights.
I assumed it was a booze bus, but it was 3 am on a Tuesday morning, which was kind of unusual. As I got closer, I was confronted by a ton of officers pointing their weapons in my direction. I came to a stop and held my hands up out of just instinct. I approached one officer who told me to pull over on the left and not move until I was told to.
When they finally told me what all the fuss was about, my face turned white. Turns out, I subverted a complete lockdown of the street during an active shooter incident. I straight-up told them that I had simply cut through the park to make my deliveries. At that very moment, I heard a huge bang back down the road from where I came from.
I was told to get the heck out of there immediately. I found out when I got home at 6 am that I had driven right through a terrorist attack. The suspect managed to end a homeowner’s life during his rampage.
19. Removing The Problem
My much older, married boss kissed me after a day off-site. I told a woman in HR. She was furious. The next day, she said that the MALE CEO wanted to handle the situation. I was removed from the project and my boss was not punished. HR is a joke.
20. Full of Hot Gas
My first boss was the manager at a gas station where I used to work. He was good in most ways—efficient, fair, disciplined, ran a tight ship. There was just one drawback. He was racist. And when I say racist, I don't mean that he was insufficiently outraged by Dukes of Hazard re-runs. I mean that he used terrible racial slurs often and loudly.
This guy resurrected some old racist words that would have sent Bull Connor running for a thesaurus. And to make matters worse, the truck driver who delivered our tankers of fuel every week was a minority, and he often overheard my boss using this kind of language. The two of them almost came to blows over this on more than one occasion.
His comeuppance finally came when the corporate office hired a new third-level supervisor, a young man out of business school who happened to be of a minority background. The racist boss just could not take orders from someone of another race. When he quit, he trashed the office and tore up every floppy disk we had (it was the 80s) so that we couldn't do our accounting for a few days.
21. Sugar And Spice And Nothing Nice
One of my co-workers is known to be a general screw-up, but she would make up for this flaw by being nice and participating in every social committee. Well, she recently changed departments due to being promoted. How did this even happen? Her manager would cover up her bad work for reasons that seemed to make no sense to me. Predictably then, her new manager soon noticed she couldn’t actually do her job and wanted to send her back.
Our department quickly blocked this request—no one wanted this woman! So her manager actually quit for another job. Seriously. Soon after, a new manager came in from another department. He apparently got the job by saving the company a lot of money cutting useless stuff in his older department.
He doesn't care about typical work hours—he says you can set your own schedule just as long as things work. If it doesn't work, he will require an explanation about why it doesn't so he can help fix it. There was also a rumor that he is autistic or something because he's really unflappable and believes people when they tell him about things, almost to a fault.
So this new manager tried his magic on this woman, but she just wasn't doing any work, and any work she was doing was terrible and full of errors. At some point, he asked her what was going on. She said she didn't have time in her day to do the work as there was too much and she never had any training. In response, he had her pulled from three social committees, hooked her up with a hired temp for four weeks, got them both training, and even took the training himself too.
How did this screw-up of a woman thank him? She complained to HR. HR wrote him up for promoting a “toxic work environment.” To defend himself, the manager showed them the email where she was basically working on social committees for five hours a week and she was behind in her work. So he hired a temp, got everyone trained, and the temp who had less education than him and this lady was doing better than his actual staff.
HR then started ducking her calls. They didn't want to tell her she was a screw-up because they were biased towards her and liked her. So, despite the manager kept things really well documented and having proof that she couldn't do her job they just urged everyone to forget about the whole thing.
But the woman was not having any of that. She started hanging out on coffee breaks with the HR Vice President and her previous department head, going on about how she was a nervous wreck, how she hadn't received any training, and more. Keep in mind that both these management types know for a fact that she has had training. They started to get really sick of her complaining all the time. And that's when HR flipped out.
They got her pamphlets on the benefits package outlining the help and psychiatric line, and they stopped hanging out with her. She tried applying for a job in her old department, but they still didn't want her. She was telling everyone her situation and how unfair it was. Little did she know she was digging her own grave.
There was an anonymous employee survey. Everyone in her department stated they were pretty happy—except her. She thought it would be clever to say that the management team in her department was doing horrible things. And everyone in the department knew who was telling the lies because the screw-up woman told everyone, like an idiot.
Things got ugly after that, and she got escorted right out of the building. All of this happened because she didn't want to do her work. She thought she could get away with it because HR was her best friend...the moment they weren't anymore, it all crashed down around her ears. It was bonkers. That woman was probably the stupidest person I’ve ever met.
22. What A Shocker
My co-worker was removing the top of a tree. He was using a rigging system, but the guy on the ground let it run too far down. The tip of the tree ended up on top of a primary power line, and the bottom got wedged into the crotch of another tree, creating a nonstop current of electricity. It wasn't too scary at first...but then the worst-case scenario happened. After the first few initial blue explosions, the tree started catching fire.
The poor climber had to stay at the very tippy-top of a spar and hang out there for two hours, breathing in smoke because he did not want to move and risk being electrocuted. The fire department eventually came, and the whole neighborhood went pitch black, but luckily no one got hurt.
23. Sign On The Dotted Line
I worked for a company for four years. About three years in, they hired a new head of HR who was a total witch. She would hardly speak to anyone who wasn't on the management team and treated everyone else in the company with contempt. A colleague of mine (who is now my boss) gave his notice because he was offered a better salary at a competitor company.
On his last day, the HR lady basically tried to force him to sign a contract saying that he was giving up his right to sue the company for any outstanding pay or bonus. Of course, he didn't sign, but the HR lady wouldn't take NO for an answer and kept hounding him. I gave my notice a few months later, and she tried the same stuff with me.
Having been warned by my buddy, I did the same thing—I returned all the company property (laptop, office keys, etc.) and had them sign the receipt that they received everything, but I refused to sign the agreement that I gave up the right to take them to court if they tried to screw me.
The company we work for today is very different. First off, my buddy is a C-level executive there, and I report straight to him, so we're both very high up in the corporate organization. The HR people are excellent in this company—helpful, friendly, and most importantly, competent. Good riddance to that ridiculous, power-tripping woman.
24. Watch Your Mouth
I was a shift lead at a gas station. I had a customer tell me that one of my guys, who was like 80 years old, told him to “screw off” after the customer rolled his eyes at the price of an item. I talked to my guy because I was sure that, at the very least, the circumstances were different than the customer had claimed. Nope. It happened just like the customer said.
My guy apparently didn't realize his speaker was still turned on and said his spiel as soon as the customer's back was turned. The guy turned around and that started an even bigger verbal fight. I was mulling over what to do about it, but the very next morning, the employee showed up to work wasted, yelling about a bonus check that we owed him. That's when he got fired.
25. Power Trip
One of our departments shut down at noon thanks to an HVAC issue. The building management needed to move cubicles and pull out a chunk of the drop ceiling, so the manager took us all out to the bar for a “team-building exercise.” We had no idea we were walking right into a disaster. Everyone in the department arrived the next morning to a "Final notice in lieu of termination" on their desk.
Apparently, our awful HR department found out about the trip. The notice also cited that we had been "drinking on the job and wasting company time." The manager who was with us had an extra-special third citation for improper use of a company credit card. None of what we’d done was against company policy, so the manager's boss, the vice president, called HR and told them to back the heck off.
Instead, HR forwarded over a brand-new policy manual and told the VP to make sure all the write-ups were signed and returned by the end of the day. The VP then up the chain to his boss, the CEO. The CEO hadn't even seen it nor authorized it. But HR didn't want to back down, even when the CEO called them. Sure, he hadn't authorized it, but he had asked them to consider revamping it back in March. This was the glorious revamp!
Oh, and they'd been enforcing it since May, so it would probably be best for him to just sign off on it and any concerns he found could be incorporated in a future revision. Yeah, no. The CEO didn't make it past the first page before finding a contract law violation. Actually, there were several all throughout it. The head of HR was asked to resign. When she refused, she was fired.
26. An Unbearable Pain
A dad was co-sleeping with his new baby in a comfy chair in their room on postpartum. I was told that dad stumbled out to the nurses' station cradling his cold dead child. We coded for an hour and we were able to get ROSC before shipping out via helicopter, but that baby was mostly brain dead by that point. The most heartbreaking thing is how it actually happened.
The baby got malpositioned and suffocated with its face pressed up against the dad. They ended up donating the organs a few days later. I've seen way worse things happen to babies, but this will always stick in my memory because of that dad. He was broken in a way that I'm not sure can ever be healed. Utterly, inescapably, indescribably, and permanently devastated.
I hope dad is okay. I hope that the postpartum nurse is okay. Practice safe sleep.
27. Danger Zone
I worked in a warehouse that regularly concealed the shipping of dangerous goods to save money. This went on for years. As time went on, I bubbled up through the ranks and was eventually made manager of the warehouse. I then outright refused to ship anything anywhere until we started to claim our dangerous goods shipments properly.
Their solution? The boss started to sign his name instead. This went on for a few weeks until HR found out. They obviously knew how much trouble the president could have gotten into, so they wanted somebody else to take the fall. The next time a shipment had to go out, they got the newest guy in the warehouse to start signing his name instead.
They claimed they were training him how to do paperwork, but the poor kid had no idea...So when the driver showed up to pick up his shipment, I told him that there were a bunch of dangerous substances concealed in the shipment. He refused it and left. I got told later that my actions were "damaging to the company image" and it had to stop.
I told HR exactly what was going on and how I would not be a part of it. Less than a week after that, I was removed from my position due to "company restructuring." Some of the most crooked stuff I've ever seen. My rough estimates ballpark the money they saved at about $250,000/year. Scum...the whole family.
28. Team Quitters
We recently got a new general manager who seemed fine at first, but it has become increasingly obvious she doesn't know what she's doing as a manager. She's been giving everyone bad hours except a few people she likes basically because they're friendly with her not because they're especially good at their jobs or preferred by customers. She’s also terrible at keeping track of who needs what days off, even when they text her, write notes, put it through the online system, etc.
My department makes most of the profit of the store and under previous general managers, our supervisor was basically our boss with very little interference from the general manager. My department’s supervisor is thinking of trying to transfer to a different store which would probably lead to a bunch of other people quitting beyond those who already have or are planning to.
29. I Don’t Get Paid Enough For This
I was coming into a job that I was overqualified for, but I took it for the same salary as my last job because I hated my previous job and wanted an out. Plus, I really liked what the company did—it was in the railroad industry, my dream come true. They also said they couldn't offer me more on the salary and claimed it was already more than what they could offer. So, fine.
I was the IT guy for HR, and one day about seven months in, they asked me to pull a list of everyone who had left the HR department in the last year. The list consisted of only three people, one of whom was my predecessor. When I pulled the information from their database, I made a blood-boiling discovery. See, some of the information included his salary.
They had been paying my predecessor, who was less qualified than I was, $20K a year more than myself. I was also driving over 90 minutes to and from work every day for this job because it was a dream of mine to work in the railroading industry. I had a new job within a few weeks, only a half-hour away from my home, and it came with a raise.
30. Maintenance Mishap
I used to work in retail at a big box store. We had a maintenance guy who was an immigrant from eastern Europe. He was always nice to everyone and was able to fix practically anything. One day, I came into work and saw the whole office and locker area was wet and they had these carpet drying fans everywhere. I asked what happened and my manager told me a pipe broke in the sprinkler room and flooded the front.
I was buddies with one of the security guys there and I asked him what caused the pipe to break. His revelation shook me to my core. He told me that the maintenance guy had hung himself in the sprinkler room by the pipe and it broke under his weight. It was really disturbing to find that out. The place was never the same after that.
31. Time To Face The Truth
I am on an HR team that supports a wide variety of US cities for our company, including our colorful Florida locations. This is the best story I heard. We had a woman try to avoid doing work by sitting out in her car in the parking lot. While she was hiding out there, she needed to use the restroom. Well, instead of going back inside (or doing literally anything else) she decided to pee out her car window.
I, also a woman, was both impressed and disgusted by the physics behind this feat. She had stuck her bare butt outside the window and just went for it. Unbeknownst to her, though, her male co-worker had arrived at work late due to an appointment. He drove past to find a parking spot as this was happening and got the full view.
He then reported the incident to us. One of our HR people had to investigate this, and sure enough, the parking lot cameras could corroborate his story. Our HR person confronted the woman. Her response? "Well, how did he know it was me?? It could have been anyone." We thought, OK, fair enough. The cameras aren't state-of-the-art, so we only saw the butt part.
It was harder to completely identify the face. So we went back to the male peer and asked how he knew it was her. His response? "Oh, it was definitely her. The face tattoos are pretty recognizable." We definitely don't get paid enough for this.
32. Party On, Sue
I used to work as a night auditor at a hotel, and one day I was told that one of the daytime workers was fired. She was this really sweet older lady who worked part-time. It was really hard to get fired there, so I was very curious. I soon regretted finding out the answer. Several customers had complained about her, concerned that there was something very off.
She was slurring and just seemed very off that day. Management was also concerned, at first thinking there was a medical issue. After a few more incidents, they checked the cameras and found out she was taking shots of straight Smirnoff throughout her shift. Like, an absurd number of shots. I can't remember how much, but I remember being rather impressed that she could function in any capacity.
33. Smell Ya Later
At one place I used to work, one of the upper management guys who was in charge of the warehouse would hop on the forklifts and do donuts. He also had colon cancer and was always having surgeries to remove another section of his colon, so he had a colostomy bag. He would like to squeeze the air out of his colostomy bag while he was doing donuts on the forklifts.
This would waft this god-awful stench everywhere. Everyone thought it was hilarious and would immediately run outside for a break until the scent dissipated. The smell was bad enough it made a co-worker puke. When a new guy went to report it to HR one day, they kind of just looked at him and blinked. The man has cancer! Let him stink it up.
34. Code Yellow
I'm a psych nurse in a psych unit. There was this one female patient who hated female nurses. When one of them brought the patient her medication, the patient screamed at the nurse and refused to take her meds. As the nurse left, the patient did the unexpected—she jumped on the nurse and tried to pull her eyes out. Luckily, one of the staff saw this and screamed out, "Code Yellow!"
The entire staff grabbed the patient and medicated her before she could do any real harm.
35. A Dream Disappointed
I’ve been an executive at several large companies and I know just how messed up it can get inside the halls of HR. It could be one of the best roles and companies ever—like, let’s create the greatest culture and attract the best people to make this a fun, rewarding, challenging place to be with loads of development opportunities, support, coaching, and all the trimmings.
Let’s recognize that a company is really its people and create fertile soil for them to grow. When they feel fulfilled, we’ll be the greatest evangelists for the company. The reality, however, is a nightmare. HR is actually like: No, screw you, we’re here for the sole purpose of making sure you don’t sue the company and that when we want you to leave, we’ve got enough data and leverage to make sure you go without a fuss.
36. At the Flip of a Switch
I work with documents from a short-wall cubical. I get to my office at around 6 AM. My boss shows up around 5:30 AM. It's just us for the first few hours of the day. We prefer the lights off because we have windows producing natural light when the sun comes up. The lights in the office are too bright and bother us.
Every single day, this guy, we'll call him Ron, shows up and turns on all the lights in the office. Ron will even turn on the lights in rooms with no one in it. We've told him that we don't like the lights on in our area. It's bothersome. Ron flips out and says we have no authority over the lighting in this area and that OSHA is on his side.
He then calls up the legal team and demands for an OSHA representative to be sent to check for the lighting levels in the office. Someone came out and said it's fine. Ron demands another test. This time they send a team of people to check the light levels and try to come up with a solution. Because of this, a lot of testing has to be done on our light system.
So now, we have maintenance people running around turning the lights on and off to see what happens. This has been going on for months. Everyone in the office is sick of the lights being messed with but Ron keeps making a deal about it. Recently, a couple of people have sided with Ron that the lights should be at full power at all times throughout the day.
So now there's a huge feud in the office between team no-lights and team full-bright-blinding-lights. The teams are getting bigger and it's to the point where some work isn't getting done because of the feud. Some people say, "I can't work with the lights so bright—I'm going home," while others say, "The lights aren't bright enough and I can't see without them on so I'm going home until OSHA fixes it."
People are starting to play pranks on each other, such as buying lamps and flashlights for team bright lights. This is a huge company, think Google or Microsoft size, yet we're raging a war based on a light switch.
37. Spill The Beans
My ex's mom was in HR. She was pretty darn crabby about it and loved nothing more than coming home and telling us all the drama and gossip. That's how I found out the married physician who I worked with at the time was schtupping the married doctor in the next office over. That woman could NOT keep her mouth shut. It was hilarious for me at the time, but looking back, that trait was obviously not the best thing for an HR person to have.
As for my own experience, I reported my boss to HR for mistreatment. HR said they'd talk to me again before going to him. Well, he fired me two days later, with HR at his side. He was friends with all of the higher-ups, so I wasn't exactly surprised. They escorted me out before I could collect what I needed from my computer for proof. Yeah, I was young and dumb, and I have since learned: have backups!
38. The Dressing Room Vandal
In the '90s, I worked at a JC Penney Catalog Outlet. The catalog sold wedding dresses, so the ones that didn't sell would be sent to the outlet. Typically, the fitting rooms were staffed by women, as you could only go into the fitting room of the opposite gender when it was empty. Since men tried on fewer clothes than women, it made pretty sense to have female staff there.
Please remember this was the '90s, so people were not aware of gender identity and LGBTQ issues. A gentleman came in, informed the staff that he and his partner were having a ceremony, and that he wanted to wear a wedding dress. He reported to the staff that he identified as a female and he asked to use the women's dressing room.
Due to the time period, and store regulations we were unable to comply. We did offer him the male fitting rooms though. The customer took the six dresses to try on in the men's fitting rooms and we were unable to check on him. After three hours, we called security. They checked in on him and he said he was almost done.
When he finally came out, comes out, he said none of the dresses was his type. He left them in the dressing room for a staff member to collect. When she went inside, she was absolutely mortified. Every. Single. One. Was. Soiled.
39. Hidden Agenda
I worked in HR, and here's my advice. Never, ever willingly give up any information on questions that are fishing for it. Make sure your answers are brief, succinct, and don't elaborate unless absolutely necessary. Don't give second-hand information unless it directly impacts you or your work environment. My goal was to protect the bottom line under the guise of employee relations.
If you become a headache and disruptive, regardless if you are in the right, HR will find a way to terminate your employment. I spent hours upon hours in training learning how to ask the right questions to get the companies their desired results. I will admit this may not be true for all HR departments, but for larger companies, HR is not your friend and our attitude and pseudo-compassion are used as a disarming tactic to obtain the information they are looking for.
Despite what you may be told, HR does have an agenda.
40. Out To Lunch
I worked for a staffing agency early in my career. One day, we got a call that one of our placements was taking his lunch break and not clocking out for it. Oh, and he was taking two-hour lunch breaks. Also, he brought in his George Foreman grill and cooked for himself in a highly flammable warehouse. So many crazy stories from that place…
41. Just Checking Up
The HR director put not one, not two, but three people on the job of auditing everyone's medical leave applications. We were to look up the medical terms, print out layperson-friendly summaries of them, and add any notes of our own that might be helpful if we had prior healthcare experience, all so she could make sure no one was “fraudulently” taking medical leave.
For anyone who may not be aware: The Family & Medical Leave Act in the US gives employees the right to take up to 12 weeks of leave from their job...unpaid. None of this information was any of this witch’s business, and none of the employees had any idea she was doing it.
42. Cast Iron Catastrophe
I used to work at this restaurant where we had seafood platters that were served on cast iron skillets on top of wooden planks. They were heavy to carry, needless to say. I was an experienced server and would carry those huge trays on my shoulder no problem. Well, one day, my table ordered six seafood platters, so I put them on a tray and hoisted it onto my shoulder.
At the time, I was 5’5" and 100 lbs, so it was a lot for me. But I still got to the table without issues, with the tray over my shoulder and a tray stand in my hand. I put the tray stand down, but when I went to set the tray on top of it, I lost my balance. It was bad enough that I dropped six cast iron skillets, but then I realized where I had dropped them—right on top of this three-year-old kid, knocking him out of his seat.
Luckily he wasn’t injured; just covered in pounds of greasy fried seafood, fries, and sauce. He screamed, I screamed, and the parents screamed. It was pure chaos. Obviously, they got a free meal and a gift card. No tip for me, but I wasn’t even mad about it. I'm just glad I didn’t end the poor toddler.
43. This Cat Has Nine Lives
Amanda. She smelled SO bad and knew it—because she'd make excuses. "I forgot to shower." "I showered, but my washing machine is broken so I have to wear dirty clothes." There was documented disciplinary action about her hygiene. One day, she legit smelled like old maxi pads & got sent home. The same girl always "forgot to eat breakfast," so she took extra breaks to gob McDonald's and Uncrustables.
Also, she couldn't (wouldn't) vacuum the store at closing because she "heard screams coming from the vacuum" and thought it was ghosts. I documented EVERYTHING. Verbals, written warnings, she always stopped whatever stuff was afoot at the second write-up (third was termination). I finally got the green light from HR to let her go.
The very day she was getting fired, our owner decided to shut the store down and gave everyone (including freaking Amanda) severance and unemployment. Not fair.
44. Let It Burn
About 13 years ago, I worked at a Saskatchewan oil patch. I was on the last day of my seven-day hitch, and about 13 hours in. I hadn't been sleeping much as I had lots of personal stuff going on. At some point, I got complacent—I'd been doing the same run for over two years and I knew each location and tank by heart, from which ones were finicky to which ones were likely to sand off, etc.
I was looking forward to my days off as my parents were on their way to visit me for their anniversary. My brain fell out of my head for two seconds, but that's all it took for disaster to strike. I ended up pulling my hose off the valve without closing it first. Keep in mind, in Saskatchewan, they heat their tanks to help with the water and oil separation...
So I got doused in 160-degree water through a four-inch hole in the side of the tank. They had also just chemically treated the tank with defoamer, so the burns were partially chemical as well. I went to the local hospital where I was given a prescription for Tylenol 3 and a sick note for four days off work. When I went to another hospital nearer to where I lived (about an hour away), they told me I'd be off for at least two months.
It was too late for skin grafts, but I got lucky. I came away with one barely visible scar and, well, my life.
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45. The Wrong Man
My boss lost an internal power struggle and was soon fired. The official reason given was that he was submitting doctored expense reports. I wasn’t promoted, but was still given all of his responsibilities...plus I inherited his administrative assistant. Suddenly, charges for car service, local hotels, and local stores appeared on my corporate credit card.
I asked the assistant about the charges and she gave me an explanation that was plausible but that I knew wasn’t accurate. So I called the credit card company and contested the charges until they provided more information. I also started doing some of my own research on the charges. That's when it all became frighteningly clear. Turns out, the assistant was a drinker who lived with her dog in the local hotel—a hotel that I was getting charged for.
She was also having the car service pick up her booze at the local store and deliver it to her at the hotel. Why? Apparently, her dog had a nervous condition and he liked that hotel. He would get upset if she went out to the store after she got back from work, so she used the car service so she wouldn’t leave and upset the dog. She charged the expenses to our corporate cards because we “owed” her for making her come to work and leave her dog alone.
I got her fired and successfully fought the credit card charges. Even though I found the person actually committing the expense report problems, my boss was still considered “fired for cause” because he signed those expense reports.
46. Caught Red-Handed
I work at a bar. One night, after closing and finishing up my cleaning, the supervisor made a round to check the premises. There was a locked stall in the washroom, so he got the master key thinking he'd need to wake someone up who had passed out inside. Upon opening the door, the supervisor was confronted with a startling sight.
It was a guy, with his pants down, making out with a woman. But here's the kicker—the supervisor knew who the woman was. She was married to one of his friends...and the guy she was within the stall was NOT her husband!
47. Not Very Appetizing
When I was 17 years old, I worked at our local Chipotle. My manager was cool sometimes, but when things got busy—and, keep in mind, Chipotle is almost always busy—she would sweat a ton. I didn’t have a problem with that, because I knew it was obviously not something that she could control. It was one particular habit of hers that was the issue…
Whenever she would sweat, she smelled really bad...and her idea of encouraging people would be to go up to them, give them a big hug, and say, "Here, have some of my sweat!" Now, Chipotle is a very open restaurant, as in you can see almost every employee while getting your food. This means that customers could see her doing this.
I saw customers leave on multiple occasions as a result.
48. All The Rewards
At my work, we have a rewards program where we need to ask for people’s addresses to sign them up. Some customers don’t want to give their address, so my manager told me to just enter a fake address she uses: 123 Tree Rd or something like that. Well, the other day, we got a call from a very confused man, and as he was explaining his situation, my eyes widened.
He said he got hundreds of coupons from us, all addressed to different people. Turns out, 123 Tree Rd is a real address, and the poor man was signed up for hundreds of rewards programs. Luckily, he was a good sport about it. When my manager got off the phone with him, we laughed about it for the rest of the day.
49. A Bad Egg
I just fired an intern because he thought it'd be funny to smack one of the girls on the butt...except, that was just the tip of the iceberg. Upon further investigation, she had been having anxiety coming to work because he would ask all sorts of ridiculously inappropriate questions. For example, he once asked her if she had a good weekend.
When she told him yes or some plain answer, he then asked her if it was because she slept with her boyfriend a lot. Needless to say, her anxiety was warranted and we fired him as soon as we could. The mood in my group seems a bit more relaxed this week...
50. A Dark Realization
I used to be an officer back in the day. I did collision reconstruction and substance enforcement. I responded to a fatal accident once—the victim was 12 years old and it was her birthday. A lady made an unsafe left into the parking lot at Amazing Jakes. The worst part was having to inform that lady the stone-cold truth—that she was responsible for her own daughter's demise.
Turns out, when she turned into the parking lot, she fatally hit her daughter. I can literally still hear this woman and her husband screaming in my head.
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51. The Dating Game
I worked as a barista for a while, and I had this one customer who came in a few times a week. He was awkward, not in a cute way, but I didn't think much of it. He'd try to start a conversation and I'd be polite but I wouldn't necessarily encourage him. He mentioned where he lived, and I noted that my chain had a coffee shop in his town, but he drove a couple of towns over to mine, which I thought was odd.
One day I'm at work and he orders a coffee. As I'm making it, he starts talking about how cool and pretty I am and asks if we could go out sometime. I was pretty annoyed and I politely declined, saying I had a boyfriend—which I did at the time—and he said "He's lucky, I wish I had a girl like you," which creeped me out.
That was on a Friday. I come in for my shift on Monday and my blood runs cold. He's behind the counter in a uniform. Excitedly tells me he got a job here. I didn't really know what to do. Not only did he continue to hit on me and constantly try to get my social media from me, but he was also absolutely incompetent, and a health hazard.
He came in with a disgusting rash on his arm once and he would scratch it and then handle people's food. I told the manager if she didn't fire him I'd quit—I was the longest working employee there by far, so I figured she'd fire him. She didn't, so I left.
52. Instant Regret
I was working in a kitchen at a local restaurant. The staff usually cut corners to get more work done. I was working with this one dude and we were flipping the fryers at the end of the night, doing it hot. This dude was letting it drain into a pot while texting with one hand and, at some point, the phone slipped into the pot. That's when things went immediately downhill.
His instant reaction was to reach in and grab it…He screamed, then pulled his arm out. I rushed over to take a look and I almost fainted at the sight. His skin was instantly peeling from intense third-degree burns. We hurried him to the hospital and the rest was history (and by history, I mean months of agonizing pain and skin grafts).
53. Everybody Has A Breaking Point
This was shortly before I joined the company. I'm the dispatcher for a local food delivery service. Anyway, we had this driver and she apparently decided enough was enough one day. The complaint was that she was an hour late and was very confrontational and messy. While being sternly reprimanded, we got another call from the customer.
They had opened the order, only to find mashed up a French fry and ketchup soup that she had made of a kid’s meal in the order. The chicken fingers were also eaten down to the burnt ends. They got a full refund and were offered a fresh meal brought by another driver, but they refused. When we confronted the original driver, her reply was “What? I was hungry. The fat little porker who answered the door could have missed a meal or two. What are you going to do? Fire me?"
She then tried to sue for discrimination because she claimed she was fired because she was gay.
54. Stage Fright
I used to be a stagehand. In the theatre, the lights and scenery are set up by lowering a bar on a pulley system to the floor. Panels are hung on the bar while people on a catwalk in the rafters load metal bricks on a counterweight. One night, we were preparing for a show and the bar came down, but it was brought down too low to hang the lights.
We told the operator and he pulled the break off. It seemed fine until we realized that the counterweight had already been loaded. When he cut the break off, it was too late—the bar went flying. The stage manager grabbed the rope, trying to slow the fall. Big mistake. The rope quickly ripped through his glove and took off the top few layers of his skin.
A guy on the loading bridge did the same thing and got his hand sucked into the pulley. He lost a few fingers.
55. Excuses, Excuses
You want to know the story of my worst boss? All I can say is...Jerry. Jerry wouldn't let me leave work to go to the emergency room after the heavy bleeding I had been experiencing suddenly got way worse. I went over his head and got permission to go from the higher-ups. I then called my mom and told her to meet me at the ER.
The ER nurse said he had never seen so much blood in his entire career. An ER nurse said this. It was then determined that I would need a couple of blood transfusions and would then be admitted to the hospital. My mom calls Jerry to inform him of all this. Jerry then proceeds to tell her that it's probably just stress and that I NEED TO GET BACK TO WORK RIGHT AWAY.
At this point, I couldn't even lift my own head up, but sure, I can take a bus across town and go back to work. I ended up needing another hospital stay later for a follow-up operation. They found a large growth on me that needed a biopsy. Jerry kept insisting that it couldn't be cancer because, if it was, I “would be tired and losing weight.”
What he hadn’t been aware of was that I had lost about eight pounds in under a week, and had been going to bed the minute I got home every day. I was still recovering from the procedure when Jerry called to let me know that I was being fired for taking too much time off. Five days later, I was diagnosed with cancer.
To hell with you, Jerry. Screw you.
56. Gone Too Soon
My colleague went to the toilet. When she didn't come back, we checked on her. She clearly needed an ambulance. Everyone downstairs was told to stay inside as she was taken down from our floor. The blinds were shut, so no one from the main floor had a clue about what happened. The paramedics continued working on her in the middle of the car park, but it was too late. Less than an hour later, she passed.
When the hospital told us what had happened to her, we were all shocked. They said it was a blood clot, which was surprising because she was still so young and healthy. It was the worst day I've ever had at work.
57. It’s Not A Good Fit
I ran an in-house training course, and an apprentice from another department was sent along to see if she’d be a good fit for the job. It was a small room lined with computers along three walls, with me and a projector at the front. We had lots of practical examples to work on throughout the day, so each person sat at a computer for the duration.
We all agreed on a 30-minute lunch break, but she demanded a longer lunch as she had “things to do.” I declined her 1.5-hour lunch break, and she took it anyway. She then used her computer to apply for another job during the practical part of the course. She had chosen a computer at the back, so I couldn't see what was on her screen from my position at the front—or, at least, she thought.
I paused to get everyone’s attention but she was so engrossed in what she was doing that she didn’t notice. I let the silence hang, which usually works to get people looking up sheepishly, but she still didn’t notice. Everyone in the course was now looking at her screen and we could all see she was applying for another job. We got through the course and I reported her to her manager, who fired her.
She left the company a negative Facebook review naming me as someone who harassed her because of her mental health.
58. A Beautiful Mind
I worked at this place for years and it was a great family-run manufacturing company. We had a brilliant engineer who was smart, funny, good-looking, and personable, but something just wasn't right with him. I was usually the last to leave the office, but on this one Friday night at 7 pm, he was still feverishly working away in his cube. I said good night to him and left.
The following week, on Monday morning, the whole office was in turmoil. I went around the office and what I saw sent chills up my spine. The guy basically went all Beautiful Mind on us. He spent the entire weekend in the office hiding files, hacking into emails, and doing all kinds of weird stuff. To top it all off, he turned it all into a game, leaving clues all over the place.
For example, on the president's desk, he left a note with a riddle that led to the next clue. Overall, he had set up like 50 sequential clues. It was brilliant. I mean I love puzzles and I enjoyed the challenge, but the bosses were livid. Many of us spent the entire day trying to solve the clues and puzzles to get our stuff back. Every clue was impressive, but nothing beats the last clue.
It led us to his resignation letter. Because some of the clues had threatening statements directed to his boss and the head of engineering, the local authorities were called. It turned out that he suffered from a mental illness, but he had managed it for a long time with medication. His new girlfriend was Muslim or something she and was fasting for some religious holiday, so he had joined her.
Not eating had messed up his medication. He ended up hospitalized for a couple of weeks and tried to get his job back when he was released from the hospital. They did hire him back, but he didn't last long after that. I think the stigma was too hard for him to deal with and he left for a fresh start.
59. Smells Like Trouble
The person in the cubicle adjacent to mine has a plug-in fragrance thing and the rest of us were debating asking her to remove it. I honestly would like to see it go, not because it's a smell that bothers me, but because I don't like the precedent that we can impose our preferred fragrance on others willy-nilly; but now that we've established that it's there and we're all kind of neutral but also kind of want see it go. It's entered like a Cold War status where we're all not talking about it anymore but I think we still want to see it go.
60. Pre-Grave Digger
The body of my co-worker was discovered in one of our warehouses by our supervisor. Instead of calling 9-1-1, he took the wallet off the corpse. We know this because the deceased’s wife came up asking for the wallet as it was nowhere to be found. They had already cleared his locker out but the supervisor showed up and said he found it in the locker during a “second” check.
Needless to say, he doesn’t work here anymore.
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61. Full Of Hot Air
I’m a mechanic. I had a co-worker who would poke a hole into customers’ tires just so they would come back and buy more—yes, he did it to new tires as well. We finally caught him one day after I found it odd that it was only the customers he put tires on that kept coming back for more tires. At first, I thought maybe he wasn't putting enough air into them, so I kind of hawk-eyed him without him knowing.
Sure enough, he would put the tire on the rim, and then he would put a small slit with his pocket knife into the tread on the tire. Caught him red-handed. Fired on the spot. Screw you, Brett.
62. So Heartless
A guy literally had a seizure and fell down the stairs. Instead of getting help or having someone else get help, our dirtbag supervisor made the most appalling accusation: "Oh, we need to test him for substances. He's obviously faking." Honestly, it made me feel not so bad when the dude faked certain situations to get me fired later.
He just honestly was such a horrible piece of garbage.
63. Cart This Guy off
I worked at a golf course and Sean the cart attendant was the worst, I'd say. Sean was just plain lazy and got the job because his grandfather worked as a ranger there. If I saw my name on the schedule with him, I knew I'd be doing all the work even though I was a clubhouse worker. We'd often run out of carts and have to help him because he was so slow.
And if he closed with you, well, get ready to clean the bathrooms, restock the merchandise, vacuum, etc. all by yourself. We once caught him sleeping in the cart storage area on a busy Saturday. Needless to say, he wasn't asked back the next year.
64. All Signs Point To “Fired”
I managed a girl who was a loose cannon. She was a drinker who had multiple appointments every week. Psych, physio, solicitors, all of it. She was constantly disappearing from work at random hours for like half a day, and as her drinking intensified, she would show up stinking of booze. I’m a former drinker and the same age, so I tried my best with her.
Anyway, she was on the long stretch towards getting performance-managed, but she sped it up herself. We shared a building with the council and knew all of the staff, including the council rangers who patrol the streets and give tickets, etc. One morning, on her way to work, she saw a street sign she wanted to take to give to a friend (I cannot tell you why).
She pulled a screwdriver from her bag (why she had it, again, I cannot say) and unscrewed it while standing on a milk crate…in front of one of the rangers. She then brought it into the office, told everyone, and asked another staff member to hide it for her in case a ranger came looking for it. Then she also put photos of it on Instagram with the office and company signage in the background.
We had a meeting planned that day about her absenteeism and she told me about her little crime too because she thought it was a good laugh. Anyway, it took a few days, but she quit when HR started investigating.
65. Giving New Meaning to “Swept Under the Rug”
A customer once accidentally spilled—or intentionally poured out, for all we know—an entire bottle of deer attractant on the floor under the shelves in the sporting goods section of the Wal-Mart where I used to work. My boss could not be bothered to ever clean it up. The whole store stank of deer urine for...well, actually, it probably still does!
After all, who has time to clean? We had ammo to sell!
66. High On Your Own Supply
I worked an administrative job and a new hire came in. We thought something was up with him as he was always spaced out, but we decided maybe he was just settling in. Then, one day, he called in sick only to turn up five minutes later...having no recollection of our conversation, he went up the stairs to the office and walked straight into a wall.
When he got to his desk, he watched sports on his computer which facing the whole office. We asked him to highlight some lines on a page and he colored the whole page in instead. We told our boss we thought he was on something. The boss thought we were exaggerating—that is until he kept doing things like this and we had to let him go.
We later found out he was a dealer selling out of his bedroom.
67. Naughty Yachty
An ex-con who was in jail for murder works at my old job and is living on the company owner's private yacht because he's homeless and they desperately need this guy for his skill set. And that's just the beginning...Other guys were searching to buy their other coworker a male escort as a joke for his birthday and stumbled upon the ex-con on the owner's yacht, advertising as a male escort for males.k We raised a ton of money to fix the sound system. The fix sucks. Now the music person is leaving at the end of the week and none of us are going to be fully equipped to troubleshoot the sound system for church services, funerals, etc.
On top of that, all the old people throw a fit when anyone uses the kitchen in the parish hall and doesn't leave it immaculate. They usually blame me or the youth minister, and neither of us ever use it. The teachers at the school also put up a big sign on their supply room door that says, "These supplies are for school staff only," because "someone" keeps taking supplies and leaving the room a mess.
Again, they blame me and the youth minister when we have our own supply closets to us. Teachers can be just as petty and passive-aggressive as their middle-school students.
68. Wasn’t Me
I only know of this because it involved myself. I was a new hire at a security company, and I’d only been there about four months, give or take. One week, I was given a new assignment with a couple of other guys on rotation. Someone who got hired a week or so before I did gave me the obligatory tour of the site and pointed out some hot spots.
They showed me some key equipment that needed an eye on them, etc. Less than a week of shifts go by, and the same guy offered me a bump. I declined. Then, just over a month later, I had a perfectly fine shift with no issues. About an hour before my next shift started, my boss called me up, furious at me. Obviously confused, I got to the place early.
Well, the place had been turned over. The equipment is gone, the fence is busted wide open, the works. One of the on-site trailers has been broken into where just over a grand was taken from a safe I knew nothing about because it was always locked. Still, I was blamed as the culprit. It took less than five minutes of conversation with the boss to get it ironed out.
See, not only had stuff gone missing from this place, but other stuff had gone missing from other sites the other guy had been to before. For example, one of the things that were taken was towable, and they found it in the guy's driveway. He might as well have dipped his hands in red paint. Needless to say, he didn't work for that company after that.
69. Towering Tales
We have a pathological liar at the bank I work for. She's just an intern—on calls with the NYC office, she said she went to Yale. We noticed. Girl, I've seen your resume, it's the local state school, and there's no shame in that, it's a quality education. Plus, you know lots of people here know people from that Ivy school, right? Or went there? But here lies only get bigger from there.
She's dating a brain surgeon who also has cancer. Girl, we found the picture that you sent us on Tinder. One of us matched with him. He doesn't know you. She's been accepted to Harvard Business school, but instead is accepting an offer with a big consulting firm. She's in an abusive relationship and was thrown through a glass wall, injuring her wrist, which healed somehow without scars.
Finally, she was called into the MD's office. Legal was there too. They confronted her about her lies. Now she had tonsillitis surgery and is too unwell to come in for the remaining two weeks of her internship. And this is how you lose your chance of getting an offer.
70. Don’t Mix Business With Pleasure
I was working for an agency in New York City, and we went to a series of client meetings for starting a new project in Boston. One of the project managers who worked for the same agency in the LA office flew in and joined us for the week-long meetings with the customer. He was a super nice guy who did his homework and gave really good presentations.
Everyone liked him. After wrapping the meetings the whole week, I flew back to New York that Friday. The next week, there were supposed to be video conferences with the client, but they sent an email at the last minute saying that they are canceling all the meetings. Well, none of us thought much about it and carried on with the day. Until we found out the chilling reason for the drop.
In the evening, we learned from our boss that this “super nice” guy had sent his intimate photos to one of the female members of our client group. None of us could believe this, but it turned out to be completely true.
71. The Last Straw
During college when I worked food, I had a co-worker who absolutely could not handle customers coming in. I mean, we’d open and wouldn’t have anyone come in for an hour, and as soon as someone walked in, he’d throw a fit. He was there so long, it just broke him I guess. Towards the end, he took a chair and sat just outside the back door to the restaurant so he didn’t have to be in the place.
It was really sad honestly.
72. You Can’t Hide
I was a production control analyst in a call center about 10 years ago. I saw and heard more than you'd probably believe, and helped to term out more people than I will ever be comfortable with. The most insane but true complaint came from the housekeeping staff. The janitor walked up to me one day and said, "I got to close the men's restroom for a bit. I don't know who done it, but you need to find him.”
Someone had smeared poop all over the walls in there. It took some detective work, but we found him; a guy had been hiding his mental issues when he started work there, and apparently, he hadn't been taking his medications in a while because he didn't want us to find out, even though he had insurance through us. So he went nuts and started smearing his own poop all over the restrooms.
There were apparently some other aberrations that led us to him and were listed as the actual behavioral reasons for his termination, but I never got the details.
73. Jailbreak
At one of the places where I used to work, federal agents swarmed the office with a search warrant one afternoon before shutting down all our computers in order to inspect the hard drives as part of some kind of investigation. Believe it or not, according to my boss, we were still all expected to stay at work for the rest of that day!
We all just puttered around for the next few hours without computers before we finally got sent home at the regular time.
74. Hope It Was Worth It
When I worked at Sam’s Club, one of the cashiers pocketed a few grand from his drawer and put it on Facebook. We were a new club, so if that much money went missing, it would have taken them a while to figure it out. Or so I was told. However, one of the managers overheard and they put two and two together. He was fired and then put behind bars.
75. Sinking Ship
Two employees had a serious issue due to both being loudmouthed and polar religious opposites, one called corporate and got people needlessly shifted around between locations. The guy who called corporate is now at my location and he's lazy. I've gotten three complaints about him from client-company employees in the 1.5 weeks he's been here and he already managed to wreck a company vehicle.
An ex-employee keeps showing up wanting to "visit people." He was removed from the premises last year under threat of trespassing charges, but our company has no official protocol for what to do if an ex-employee actually shows up. Official instructions are to let it happen and sweep it under the rug afterward, as long as it's on weekends.
Oh, and our electrical room where everything is running 480v keeps threatening to flood whenever it rains. That's fun.
76. Five Second Rule
One of my current co-workers told me this story the other day: He used to be a manager at a fast-food restaurant. He said that one night, after a busy rush, a woman called his store to complain that her fried food item had hair all over it. The manager denied this claim and assured the lady that the food items had never been in contact with hair, and would never have left the store in a dirty manner.
He backed his store and employees all the way and insisted that the woman was mistaken. Upon further investigation, one of the kitchen employees admitted that she had dropped a food item on the floor that night and didn’t want to risk having the customer wait an extra five minutes to make a new one. So yeah, very hairy burger, order up.
77. Problems with Management
One of the cashiers at my last job got pregnant; she was 17 at the time. Everything was well and good and we all supported her decision, and let her know she’d still have a job when she got back from maternity leave. I didn’t know who the father was and frankly, it was none of my business—but whether I wanted to or not, I was about to find out. One day she was shopping on her day off when she ran into the father of her kid with another girl.
They were being cuddly and holding hands and stuff while they too were shopping. So, this poor, very pregnant teen went off on them, “How could you? I kept the baby because of you!” They got in a huge fight and had to be escorted from the store by management. The store manager didn’t recognize her because she wasn’t in uniform and he was an oblivious jerk anyway.
He tried to have her banned from the store. She ended up quitting because if it, had her baby, and I think is doing OK despite the circumstances.
78. Feedback Welcome
I was reviewing employee evaluations at a Fortune 500 company, and one of them complimented an employee for improving as “he hadn't yet eaten any glue this quarter.” I thought it was a mean joke about his intelligence, so I went to the manager and asked if there was a way she could cut the insults. Manager: “It's not an insult. I caught him eating glue twice last year. Wrote him up for it, too. He's the reason the folks in documents have had to switch to different glue types.”
In these same comment evaluations, I found a comment card in our suggestions box that said, "Improve your seafood selection! Your trout made me sick!" We were a hardware store. The boss mentioned it at the next store meeting, laughing and taking bets on which customer left it and which store she'd mistaken us for. Marko, one of the assistant managers, went white as a sheet.
Boss: “What's the matter, Marko? Trout got your tongue?” Marko: “Umm, no, but that might have been me. I told a couple of customers about all the fish I caught on my vacation, and one of them asked if I'd caught any trout.” So he sold them some trout.
79. Sick Leave
About a month after this lady started, she ran into the building bawling, saying she had breast cancer and would need one day off every two weeks for treatment. Our director complied—until it was revealed that the lady had been caught shoplifting and was taking the time off to go to meetings with her parole officer. She then got fired.
80. Surf And Turfed
I once had a co-worker selling our shrimp from the dumpster. He picked them out after brunches, popped a few on a skewer, and then sold them in the bars that night. He eventually got caught in a bar with the manager, and the CCTV caught him dumpster diving.
81. Caught Red-Handed
Bruce is the one I have the most stories about. I came in to work one day and started printing out a bunch of chapters for a meeting later in the day. I find it's faster to print one copy and use the Printer Manager to tell the printer to reprint that job four times instead of telling it to print five times upfront. I have the bulk feeder removed because it just causes jams.
So the tray empties and needs to be refilled a few times. Bruce opens up a ream of paper only to see that there are red marks on almost every sheet of paper he touches. He's getting upset because he thinks we got a batch of flawed paper. Like a whole bunch came off the press with ink on it and they all came to us.
I look at the paper for a few seconds. Then I grab Bruce's hand and flip it over. He'd cut his thumb and was bleeding on all the paper.
82. A Hard Day’s Work
I spent my summers in college working as a laborer for a construction company. We were doing a bunch of renovations in an active hospital, so noise and dust were a huge concern. We were a small crew and just starting renovations on an area with a super tight schedule, so the company hired a subcontractor for some of the work. Enter these two clowns who showed up to do some demolition work.
The foreman gave them the talk about how they may be used to doing things a certain way, but as they would be working in an active hospital, he'd rather the work take longer than for them to make a huge mess or a lot of noise. An hour later, we apparently got multiple complaints about the noise and the mess, so the foreman called me up and told me to go over there and clean up. He also said he'd be by shortly to see what the heck was going on.
These dudes had dust and broken pieces of wall everywhere. I could hear them halfway down the hall, just smashing away without a care in the world. The foreman showed up and we walked into the room to witness this dude standing on a pile of rubble, swinging a sledgehammer over his head at a brick wall that he'd removed the bottom. Somehow, the rest of the wall was still hanging from the ceiling...I have no idea how.
The guy wasn't even wearing a hard hat, apparently oblivious that at any moment that wall might give way and crush him. The foreman lost his mind on these guys. He kicked them out immediately and got on the phone with their company and told them he didn't want to see these guys on-site again. Lots of choice four-letter words were used, and he even threatened to fire the subcontractor entirely and get someone else to do the work.
83. Weathering the Storm
Hurricane Katrina was going to make landfall that day, and the owner of the restaurant I was managing at the time got super angry when I said I wasn't coming in. He wouldn't accept my reasoning and kept bargaining with me. "Okay,” he said, “you can go in for four hours, and I can get [another manager] to come to relieve you.” Umm, no.
He finally agreed to let me take time off as long as I hid my key somewhere so that a substitute could come to pick it up. I, of course, accepted this deal. After the storm hit and devastated New Orleans, the owner called me up because he wanted me to return to town immediately. He needed people to open the restaurant for him.
Now, the roof had just blown completely off of my house and there was no way I could live in it until it was fixed. I asked my boss where he expected me to live while I was working for him if I returned right away. He said to just get a hotel as if he was paying me enough to afford such a thing. I also think hotels in the area were pretty well full at that time...
84. Toxic Environment
I had a number of complaints about a new member of staff soon after she started. They said that she kept taking off her shoes, pulling dry skin from her feet, and eating it. I thought the other staff was lying and being mean about her just because they didn't like her...Until I saw her do it. She didn't finish the week, but not because we fired her.
She quit about a week later. She didn't really get on with the other staff because they all thought she was a bit gross, and she quickly got into a bad mood because of it. That said, I'm not entirely blaming her. It’s a small group of staff, and they all collectively decide pretty quickly if they like or dislike someone. If they decide they like you, you're golden.
If they decide they don't like you, however, you are shut out. By all of them. It’s quite a brutal environment psychologically. She got cold-shouldered pretty quickly, and left before the week was out.
85. Bad Reception
I worked as a receptionist for a couple of months. If one thing was ever out of place in the entire lobby, my boss would yell at me and, for some reason, say that I was wasting money. She would do this repeatedly and I never understood why. Sometimes, when things were out of place in the lobby, I simply didn't have the energy to get up and fix them—especially since it wasn’t my job, to begin with.
She would just keep saying that I was wasting money and I never understood it...until one week, I’d had enough and decided to grab chairs and purposely mess them up. I also tipped over trash cans to spill little bits of garbage out and so on. That week, I noticed on my paycheck that I had gotten paid $80 less than usual.
I then took a closer look at all of my recent paychecks, and suddenly realized that the more the lobby had been messed up, the less I had been getting paid each week. I was totally shocked. As soon as I made this discovery, I confronted her about it and she gave me the money back. But the whole situation was still pretty messed up. She was also extremely rude when dealing with it...
86. You Don’t Need It Where You’re Going
The cemetery director was selling plots, pocketing the money ($750), then selling the same plots to other families. The other families would show up ready to bury their deceased, only to find the graves already being used. He got away with it for a year.
87. The Wind That Broke the Camel’s Back
I have two who actually tie into each other. I worked at Walmart when I was 20-ish and worked in the back, receiving, sorting, and staging products as they came off the truck. There were four of us: the lead Robert, myself, and two kids. We also had the three folks from the team who processed returns to merchants. One of those was a middle-aged man named Jan.
We all reported to one boss in the back who was never actually there, and none of us really knew when he'd be around. To start off with, I had worked at a Walmart previously, so I had experience coming in. You'd think I'd be on a track to promotion, and so did I...til Robert just vanished. Robert was gone for two months in total.
During this time, the boss had been notified and he asked me to step into Robert’s role as the lead, which consisted of a bit of scheduling and mostly making sure the others didn't mess around all day. I did this with no problem for two months. Then, as quietly as he disappeared, Robert came back. No notes, no doctors’ explanations, no anything.
He was immediately handed his old vest and the boss told him he'd "sort out the re-hire later." Just like that, the interview I had for Robert’s position as a lead was closed, and Robert was re-hired without any penalty despite two months’ no-show. On that particular day, it was 110F and I was already absolutely fuming when a truck that we had been waiting on rolled up.
Turns out, the driver had tried to drive in overnight and was going to exceed his driving allowance so had pulled over at 6 am and slept till 1 pm. The trailer had sat in the sun and was HOT. I'm talking "open the door and heat just blasts you"...but we needed to get it unloaded, so one of the boys and I dove in and started pitching everything we could out.
Robert got a pallet jack and was trying to arrange some stuff to make the two 7-foot high pallets of dog food easier to get out, but had got them stuck instead and called Jan over to help. Jan is a big guy. He's German, complains loudly and often, and ate sauerkraut without fail for lunch every day. Jan and Robert are working away trying to get these pallets out while I and the kid were basically stuck in the sweltering trailer.
Suddenly, I hear Robert cough and Jan goes "Oof. Ohhh...Ooh" and Robert backs slowly away from the truck while Jan just gets back into it and keeps working away. Then the smell hit. We're in a trailer that's easily 120 in the sun, baking, sweating, and barely able to breathe, and Jan just let out the most god-awful silent toot.
Sauerkraut and Sausage.
We had fans blowing into the trailer over the dog food pallets to keep me and this poor kid from dying of heat exhaustion, and suddenly we're ground zero of this nuclear fart. I can taste it, my eyes are watering. The poor kid next to me is dry heaving and we're ABSOLUTELY STUCK because Robert jammed the god darned pallets together at a messed-up angle.
I slice the shrink-wrap and just start chucking bags of dog food behind us. The kid starts helping while he's gagging and finally we clear about four rows out and I boost him up and crawl up myself and out into the warehouse. I ripped my vest off and walked into the office where the boss was and chuck it in his face and walk out.
As I leave, I can hear him asking Robert what happened and a "Christ. What's that smell?"
88. Let’s Go To The Tape
A colleague checked out of the mediocre but adequate hotel where we were having a conference and checked into a 5-star luxury resort. She then submitted an expense report for her stay. She claimed that she felt unsafe in the original hotel, but did not elaborate. Someone called the hotel, which checked the security camera footage. We all thought she was crazy, but we were proven way wrong.
At least four separate men tried to enter her room that first night. No wonder she left.
89. Ya Done Goofed
I worked in the Air Force. HR called me and said they wanted me to go over to their office. I got interrogated for about 10 minutes, with them accusing me of indulging in substances and hanging out with some other dude I barely knew. After me arguing with them for those ten minutes or so, they finally said, "Aren’t you this Airman s0-and-so with the common last name?"
I was like, “Yeah, but there's multiple Airman s0-and-so's with the common last name in my shop alone.” Turns out, they meant a different person completely. They saw my last name and never checked my ID or asked my first name. I had to get read into the investigation because they messed up so badly. Someone should have had to go to HR for that.
90. Don't You Dare
My boss had been making my life a total nightmare—but when he threatened to fire me, I got back at him. According to my contract, I had days off accumulated, but he claimed I didn’t and threatened to fire me if I took a single day off.
I just smiled, because he didn’t realize his days were numbered. For months, he’d been changing people’s hours to steal overtime from them, and I’d recently reported him to the head office and to the Department of Labor. Within days, he was fired.
91. Gaming The System
One day, our HR sent out an "anonymous" survey in a Word file by email, saying we should reply back with filled blanks. There was one huge problem. We figured out it was not really anonymous, as who sent it would literally be written in "from" on the email. So we all filled the forms on the same machine and sent all of them in a single email.
HR was immediately like, "Wait, you can't do that. By anonymous, we meant we will not tell the boss and just aggregate data for them." Can't say it inspired a lot of trust.
92. Imperfect Strangers
I found out that this guy was stalking a female employee. We worked at a 24-hour retailer and she was a morning shift worker while he was a night shift worker. Basically, there was no way they knew each other. Then, one day, I was filling in for a different manager and he came into the break room, taking pictures of the morning shift schedule.
I asked him why and he told me some story about another employee who just wanted him to send their schedule to them. I came in on my day off later that week during the day shift and caught him staring at her from a different aisle while she was stocking. She had no idea. The full story was so creepy, though. He would follow her home and watch her house and all that.
She was 17, he was 38. I called the authorities and had him escorted off the property. I also helped her get in touch with the right resources for a restraining order. He ended up violating the order multiple times and the last I heard, he’s behind bars.
93. Real Pain, No Gain
I worked for a doctor who was incredibly cruel to patients. I had to sit by—but one dark day, he took it too far. Finally, I knew I needed to act. He assumed that everyone who claimed to be in pain was clearly faking it to get pain killers, so he never treated them properly.
Then one day, a senior director from Microsoft came in, but this doctor assumed, as always, that he was faking it. The man died from a heart attack soon after. At that point, I stepped in and went to management. I wish I’d done it sooner, but at least he can’t hurt anyone else.
94. The Doctor Is Out
I used to work at a rural hospital in Texas. We had a surgeon who was always asking the assisting nurses to leave the OR to get some random supplies. Fun fact: you are never supposed to have only one person in the OR, but he would always figure out some way. These were minimally invasive surgeries that just required sedation, so there were no other assists besides nurses.
He was the only physician. The door would also “mysteriously” lock and the nurse would have to knock to get back in. One of our nurses got fed up and knew something was going on, so she set up her phone to video him. That footage still haunts me to this day. It turned out he had been taking his, uh, “manhood” out around the patient. He was of course fired, but horrifically, he did not lose his license.
95. The Letter Of The Law
I got fired for having depression and being forthcoming about it. The symptoms started after I started to get drowsy from a new medication I was put on. All I'd asked for was two days off in a year to just spend time at home while I was adjusting to the new meds. I got a letter on my desk from my boss after I came back. Its contents destroyed my life. It was titled "Termination of employment" and specifically asked me to come to a meeting two days later with HR.
I strode in and told them that if they were honestly firing me for having depression, that was fine; but they could not say it was for my performance, which I know for a darn fact has been fantastic. They doubled down and said that they were not able to accommodate someone with my "unique circumstances." Honestly, screw those people.
96. Overwhelming Toxicity
I visited this one Brazilian family weekly. The couple had a tumultuous relationship—he ran around on her all the time and was known to give her a smack every now and then. Any time she spoke up, he threatened to kick her out. She was undocumented and he wasn’t, so she and her kids would have been homeless or worse.
The social worker and I had been secretly working with her for a while, trying to get the authorities involved, etc. Then, one day, I was doing therapy with the baby when the husband came out to show me the revolver he just bought. His next words were appalling—he said he got it so that he could “deal with anyone who messed with his family.”
I felt terrible because they pulled me out of the home right away and left the baby there. I don’t know what happened to that family. Worst of all, our Brazilian translator just brushed it off, saying, “Eh, that’s just how Brazilian marriages are. “ It broke my heart.
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97. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
I worked in the bakery at a Fred Meyers store for about six months when I was freshly 19. There was this 45-year-old guy in the meat and seafood section who was super creepy. All of the women in my department, including a previous employee who had moved because of him, warned me about this man from day one.
Any time I was on my break, he would "coincidentally" be on his break too. He'd follow me into the break room and try to flirt with me the entire time. If I had to walk to another part of the store to get anything, he would run to catch up to me and walk with me. He also followed me to my car a few times after I got off shift.
The scariest time was when I was closing by myself and he came into the back of the bakery, following me around the long table. He kept telling me how much he liked me and how badly he wanted to be with me. When he got too touchy, I told him no and to leave me alone. But that's not even the worst part—the managers who were there to witness the situation just shrugged and said "that's just how he is."
My boyfriend threatened him when he got off work one time. Heck, even my father came in and threatened him because NO ONE was doing ANYTHING. The final straw for me was one night when I was closing alone again. He came into the back area, followed me into the freezer, and tried to kiss me. He also grabbed my butt. I pushed him away and ran to the closing manager who also functioned as HR.
He said he'd "watch the store footage" and talk to me the next day. When I came to work the following morning, he pulled me into his office. He said that he saw the video and had already "talked" to him about his behavior. Apparently, the creepy co-worker responded that it was just a "misunderstanding," and that was good enough for HR.
I replied that this had been going on for months and that I wasn't going to take it anymore. He then had the NERVE to tell me that, "He just does this to all the new girls. As soon as another girl gets hired, he'll leave you alone." I quit on the spot—but I soon found out the disturbing truth. Turns out, the creep was the brother of the store’s owner.
This guy had been behind bars in the past for assault but was now "cleaning his life up."
98. Breach Of Privacy
I used to be a math tutor for high school kids back when I was in university. I was teaching this one 15-year-old kid, Chris, who had a 20-year-old sister who still lived at home. I was going over a geometry problem with him one day when his father started screaming in the living room, calling for the daughter to come out. They had an epic fight, with the father calling her every name in the book.
Chris and I were cowering in his room trying to figure out what was happening. Later on, we found out what really happened and our jaws dropped. Turns out, his sister had cheated on her ex-boyfriend and he found out a few months after the break-up. Instead of being the bigger man, her ex decided to mail them all the intimate pictures he had amassed of her during their time together.
He also sent a note confirming that he had found out about the cheating. Usually, our lessons last one hour, but I ended up staying three hours that time because the fight lasted so long. I ended up sneaking out because I didn't want to trouble them about paying me that time. I mean, they already had enough issues.
99. An Eventful First Day
10 years ago, I was in between career paths and I got a job in a hospital as a telemonitor. I was responsible for monitoring heart rhythms all night and looking for signs of heart attacks or problems. During orientation, they told us that if they paged "Dr. Strong" to a specific part of the hospital, that meant a patient was being combative.
Being that it was a small rural hospital, each floor would have to send two employees to attend the call. On my first day, a "Dr. Strong" was called overhead and my new coworkers thought "dive in head first" was the way to go. So they sent me to deal with it. Now, after years at that place, I've attended thousands of those calls.
Sometimes they are nothing, and sometimes it's like Fight Club at work...but the very first one I ever took was so insane, I'll never forget it. Me and my co-worker, a CNA named Shawn, were headed down to the ER when a scrappy woman who was clearly addicted to substances decided to go into one of the trauma rooms and rip the morphine line directly out of what I can only describe as a giant Valkyrie of a woman.
She then shoved the needle into her own arm, hoping to get her "fix." Well, Valkyrie was not pleased to wake up that way. She saw what was happening, stood up, and took all the staff by surprise with her next move—she just started beating the ever-loving heck out of the woman. But the addict was not going to go down without a fight.
She clambered onto her back like a spider monkey and started wailing on the back of her head like it was a speed bag. Both of them had blood all over them, from the ripped-out IVs and punches to the face. Valkyrie had a black eye and cut lip, but the addict's eyes were both swollen shut from the beating by the time we pried them off each other.
We restrained them, called 9-1-1, and gave our statements. Day 1 of my healthcare journey.
100. Ménage A Trois
I work in an industrial lab. I came in to work early for a morning shift. I heard noises from the back corner of the office portion of the building, but couldn’t make out what they were because of distortion. I headed over that way to see what was going on as I was the only one there—or so I thought—at 3:00 am. I ended up seeing my lab manager boinking the district manager (her boss)…all while the HR rep for the district was sitting there, enjoying the view.
I NOPED out of there, went to the lab, and tried to forget what happened.
101. Cheater's Karma
My scumbag boss cheated on his wife with a 22-year-old customer and got her pregnant. Later, he called me into his office. I was completely done with him at this point, so I looked him dead in the eye and said: “The last girl who went down there with you ended up getting pregnant.”
I lost my job instantly, but it was so worth it. He was a complete creep, and walking out of there was one of the best moments of my life.
102. Behind The Door
My colleague was absent from work for a couple of days and she wasn’t answering their phone, so my boss and I went to her home. The building manager gave us a key to her apartment (which was totally against the law, I know), and we opened her unit. What we saw shook us to our cores—there she was, on the floor, completely lifeless.
Even before we entered, I had already smelled something sickly sweet and I just knew it wasn't good. We had to wait for the ambulance service to come to declare her dead…Turns out, she was sick for days and she didn’t contact a doctor or anyone else. She just slowly wasted away at home. I will never forget that first look into the apartment.
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103. I Don’t Like The Cut Of His Jib
This guy was teasing another employee really, really badly. Like, American high school movies in the '80s badly. The reason? He was from out of town. That was it. I thought there HAD to be more to the drama, so I went to the location, interviewed a few people, watched it happen myself, and…yeah, it seemed like this guy could NOT take the fact that this kid was from another state.
I was absolutely expecting the sort of drama that location was more famous for—like baby daddies, sleeping with someone’s wife, etc. But nope…
104. Bates Motel
I started working at a by-the-hour motel when I was 14. It was owned by a woman who didn't bother with hazardous waste procedures. One night, she told me to clean up one of the rooms, and when I opened the door, my blood ran cold. I walked into what looked like a horror scene. There was blood everywhere, and she had only supplied me with bleach and kitchen gloves.
I was absolutely positive that when I pulled the shower curtain open there was going to be a body in the bathtub. Thankfully there wasn't, just blood everywhere. The owner refused to let me report it and I didn't want to get into trouble for bleaching a potential scene at 14, so I never did call the authorities.
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105. Bait and Switch
I used to be a hostess in a pizzeria chain, and I worked with the worst waitress of all time. I'll never forget this family of eight who gave me—THE HOSTESS—a $25 tip on a $50 bill, all because they hated their waitress and I was the one who kept refilling their drinks. The waitress was beyond peeved, but my manager said to her: "Should have been paying more attention…the tip is hers." Best day ever.
106. Company Transformers
At my last job, they told us “Under no circumstances are you even to look at what's going on in the other half of the plant.” Obviously, I decided to peek, but when I saw what was going on, my stomach dropped. All of us were doomed. They were building an automated side of the factory. I got replaced by a robot a year later.
NASA
107. Doing Him Right
I used to work at a restaurant and one of the servers was having an affair with the general manager. I'm pretty sure she was literally a butt-kisser. She was awful to work with and a total snob. She got paid more than everyone else and she didn't have the minimum wage that servers got. Her paycheck said she was a cook and she made an extra $2/hour plus tips.
She always got the “good” section of the restaurant. It was a seat yourself kind of place so some sections were consistently better than others for tips and she refused to pull her weight or help anyone when they were busy but would expect help from others when she was busy and even when she wasn't busy she'd expect people to help her like bus her tables or make her drinks for her which was part of the server's job.
And she was allowed to do that because she was literally doing the boss in the office during work. And that's how everyone knew.
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