Entering the working world can be intimidating and exciting. It’s a big chapter of your life getting a job and working with different people. But we all know that not all people we meet will be friendly or easy to work with. Some people you can just ignore, but other people bring down everyone’s mood when they enter a room. These real-life stories about absolutely awful coworkers shared on Reddit will have you thanking your lucky stars that you didn’t have to deal with them.
1. Close to Home
I worked with this really strange guy for four months who was also secretly living in the office and was always completely nonsensical when he was actually doing his "work". We found a mattress folded up in the warehouse after he was let go, as well as a brand new pipe with a price tag on it squirreled away back there.
The craziest part? It wasn’t just him living in the office. He’d moved his entire family in. They left discarded food everywhere, put pizza crusts in the toilet brush holder in the bathroom, and left hair in the sink in the bathroom. They were obviously bathing in there too since we had no actual bathing facilities in the office.
One day during his tenure, this guy sent an email to everyone saying he slept in because his alarm didn't go off and he'd be in later at a certain time. He kept moving the time back later and later until he eventually showed up at 4:40 PM when we closed at 5 PM. And remember, he was secretly living in the office.
2. Over Talking to You
My co-worker likes to initiate conversations then pauses a long time as if to let you say something back, but then he cuts you off and keeps talking. He has entire conversations all by himself. And that’s not even the worst part. He also likes to make changes to my paperwork before it’s turned in, so it ends up riddled with spelling mistakes while he tries to make the content look smarter.
Fortunately, it’s all electronically stamped with who made revisions.
3. This Isn’t Your Living Room
I worked with this girl who would sometimes just lay on the floor and play games or something on her phone. She would routinely flip out about something her boyfriend did and just start screaming curse words sometimes even in front of the customers. The day she was fired was just so wonderful.
4. Cooking Plot
I hired a cook on a good recommendation. He was just fine for the first two weeks—but then I began to notice things. First, I noticed food going missing. Then, supplies started disappearing. The final straw was when a customer told me that he had been automatically adding 30% tips for his food purchases. I went to look at the books to see if he was doing anything else.
I saw that he had been adding 30% tips to ALL the credit card sales. The cash rings weren’t what they should have been. I fired him. The next day he came in to apologize. He said he was dealing with addiction and was getting help. I wished him well. I thought it was over, but I was so wrong. The next day, he tried to break in after closing and was caught.
5. He’s All the Rage
I worked with this guy. His behavior in meetings was truly bizarre. In half of our meetings, he wouldn't say a word, but for the other half, he would go on a huge rant at whatever topic we were discussing and pick people out telling them why they are wrong without offering any valuable solution. He would turn bright red and fume for a while. The only reason management kept him on so long was because he was one of their first employees.
6. Darn Daniel
I used to work at McDonald's with this guy named Daniel in high school. He let everyone know he worked out and enjoyed being on the football team. He had this thing about going to the washroom five times a day. He would walk by on his way back from the toilet, chest out, shoulders back, and triumphantly announce, "That's trip number three!"
7. Throwing It Out There
Once, I worked with a manager who decided to dump all this trash on my desk on my third day on the job. She told me she did that to remind me that it was my responsibility to take out the trash because it was a part of my job description. Here’s the thing: it wasn’t. I was working as a research assistant at a mortgage firm.
8. You’ll Smell, You’ll All Smell!
The office where I worked years ago instituted a scent-free policy. One woman who was already insufferable was so offended by it that she sneaked in her perfume collection. She'd walk down the halls and spray perfume into empty offices or cubicles when no one was looking or before everyone arrived in the morning.
This went on for well over a month or two, and we had no idea who was responsible. My coworkers and I started referring to this mysterious person as the Chanel Bandit. She was finally caught on camera in the act. She'd left for a three-week vacation and was unaware that we had installed cameras after a break-in.
Some of us had already suspected her since the Chanel Bandit mysteriously stopped spraying the whole time she was away. She quit and left right after she was caught on video. None of us could say that we were sad to see that cedar-scented lover leave our office and we were all excited to breathe scent-free air again.
9. Dupe the Newb
I worked with my worst co-worker when I was a cashier at Walmart. She approached me and asked me to cash out her paycheck. I was still new at the job and never got training on how to do that function. She was sympathetic, so she walked me through how to do it. Transaction over and done, I went on about my day.
A few days later, I got called into the manager’s office. When I got there, my blood ran cold. A group of managers circled me in the office to accuse me of being a part of the con. After tears, videotapes, and telling them what happened, they told me that this co-worker of mine had not just duped me but several others. They just wanted to confirm I wasn't in on the deal.
10. Not Good With Direction
He'd walk in every day with no memory of anything he learned about the day before. He could only focus for the first half-hour, and then the rest of the time he’d be on his phone trying to work with one hand…in a RESTAURANT. Then, he didn’t show up for a whole week. He was confused when he came back and was fired.
11. Ready or Not
I worked as a supervisor at a clothing store when I was 25. One of my employees who was technically under me, but I had no real authority over was this middle-aged white woman who hated having a young, liberal supervisor. When Obama was the front runner for the Democratic Party in ‘08, she brought up the election.
In a casual conversation, she said to me, "I’m just not ready for a president like him". I told her that was the worst thing I had ever heard. After that, she complained about me constantly to the store manager while also viciously trying to make my life horrible. I was so happy when Obama won.
12. She’s Good at What She Does
When I was an intern, there was this old lady who would call people into her office that shared a thin wall with my cube shared a thin wall. She’d gossip with one person about another person. Then, immediately after, she’d call the person who she was just gossiping about with the other person into her office.
Then she'd tell them what the other person said about them and stuff like that. She would try to frame people for things she did wrong. She was so arrogant. She refused to adapt to workforce modernization like once, she refused to learn how to hyperlink in emails, documents, etc. Real ray of sunshine she was!
13. Need You to Do Your Job
I worked at a grocery store with this one scheduling lady who was the absolute worst. I’m not complaining about scheduling because it's expected to have shifts at different times each week. Just about two years into working there, I had an accident and broke my thumb/hand when I wasn’t at work and needed surgery.
I went to apply for Employment Insurance (EI), and they required a Record of Employment (ROE). So, I asked the woman in charge of that, the aforementioned scheduling lady, if she wouldn’t mind sending the ROE so that I could still pay rent while I was off work recovering. She told me that she already sent it.
I went back to the EI offices, and they told me that they still had no ROE. I went back to my old work and asked her for a second time. It only happened after I asked her to do it four times. This whole delay meant that I had to borrow money from my parents as my Christmas present so that I could keep paying my rent.
14. Real Don’t Getter
I worked in a law office with a secretary who refused to do anything because, "she didn't know how," and she refused to try to learn. She couldn't create documents in Word, scan anything, or use the billing software. She’d just do nothing. In a crunch, she would take the work home, so her grandson could do it for her.
15. No Taking Out
Back when I worked at a restaurant, I was friends with the bartender who was a chill dude—right up until they made him manager. The small amount of power and increase in pressure made him so angry all the time. He screamed at me that I was terrible at my job because I didn't do something that I'd never been asked to do before.
He made me miss my last bus, so I couldn't get home. It was pitch black outside, and I cried on the bench outside the restaurant. It was my worst working day with my worst co-worker ever. It took a long time to get over that and realize I wasn't a bad worker, but that he was stressed and didn't know how to handle it.
16. Not So Big Anymore
I've worked a lot of factories, but there was one where I worked that hired felons. The was pay complete dirt, and they work you so hard it tears up your body and mind. I just graduated high school, so I didn't know any better. I worked with this one guy that we nicknamed Big Matt since there was already a Matt.
Well, Big Matt was a big fan of taking unhealthy supplements, so the dude was absolutely jacked, but this 35-year-old was still living with his mother. He said it was because when he was a kid, he’d walked into her room and saw something traumatic happening, and ever since then, he never wanted to leave her alone.
At the time, I thought wow, that would explain taking the type of supplements he did because he just wanted to be strong to protect her. Well, I was made a real fool because two months later, Big Matt and two other coworkers didn't come to work. I asked the supervisor what happened, but he didn't know either.
The next day, I found out the dark truth. One of my coworkers came in and told us that all three had been taken into custody because after buying something, Big Matt's mom called to report them. So, before anybody showed up at his home, Big Matt, a six-foot-something buff guy under the influence, had hurt his mother for just for making the call.
17. Seriously Laughing It Up
My old supervisor was way "too nice". Laughing was her nervous tick, and it was constant. She was never assertive, which is an important quality for someone whose job is telling others what to do. She could only be passive-aggressively nice if she really needed something done, which just made everyone dislike her.
18. Dragging Everyone Down
I work in a hospital as a nurse’s aide, and my department focuses on bringing patients around the facility for tests and room changes. I work night shift, and this person who just had the nastiest attitude started their shift at 6 AM. Normally, I can get along with most folks just fine, but not her.
She brought the whole room down with negative vibes. Nothing was ever good, and she always had bad shifts. One thing she did that upset a lot of people was take patients down for x-rays and abandon them down there so she could return to our office. The main thing here is that x-rays only take 2-5 minutes tops.
Every morning, there are x-rays to do, and right as she got back from dropping off patients, I’d have to send her back to bring patients to their rooms after the x-ray technicians call. These instances of her leaving patients were common, so I had informed my boss about the situation several times in person and by email.
She had an attitude with every other department that worked with us and never informed nurses when she’d move patients, which is a huge no-no because they constantly needed to monitor patient vital signs. One time, she ditched a patient in the ER waiting room to wait for a ride home and then didn’t tell anyone.
The patient was just sitting alone for 15-30 minutes without supervision until security found them. After this and a year of recorded evidence, she was finally fired. When that happened, it as if a dark cloud lifted, and everyone was relieved. She only got one signature when she asked people at work for support.
19. Gut Settling
Dan was 37 working at a job going nowhere as a lab specimen processor in a windowless room for nine hours a day. He ate only Burger King but never with any lettuce because that’s "rabbit food". He literally drank a gallon of Mountain Dew a day and didn’t understand everyone’s horror. "There’s water in it," he would say.
He said if he ate corn, he’d get sick and need to go to the hospital. He’d tell me his "theories" coming from his "gut," and one he firmly believed was that man and dinosaur roamed the earth at the same time. We got into an argument once, and it got ugly. Dan was fired. I got out of there as soon as possible.
20. Self-Made Center of Attention
I worked in a certain touring exhibition last summer. And out of 200 people who applied for positions, there were only 20 who got the job. We were all very close-knit and had a love for the exhibit content, and being all genuinely interesting people, it made us family. Except for one totally awful woman.
She thought she was the world's biggest star for having made a two-second guest appearance on a TV show. She would send nasty messages and made similarly nasty calls to many of us. She bothered this lovely guy on the shop team who showed no interest. She undermined the bosses constantly, talked back, and was rude to customers.
When she thought we were talking about her, she got defensive and spiteful even though we weren't. One day, the shop guy shut her down for good, and for some reason, she decided to take it out on me. She started a smear campaign against me and said things to every co-worker but never said anything to my face.
Then she called me a white snake. Now, I am albino, and growing up, kids weren’t so accepting, and they were very cruel during school because I was different. So, with everything she was saying about me, the name-calling was the most hurtful. I had enough, and I took it to HR, and she was fired for her actions.
21. Probably Blind Then
At my first job as a vet assistant at a small animal clinic, there was this middle-aged woman who worked as the receptionist was constantly snarky and rude towards me and my work. Once, I was sharing with another co-worker that I was planning to go to school to become a vet. Then the receptionist said something that absolutely shattered my heart.
She told me, "I don't think I could see you as a vet". I was only 16 years old, mind you; I had big dreams and goals, and I was taking solid steps towards achieving them. I remember standing there quite taken aback, and I was honestly trying my best to hold back my tears or any other indication that I was upset.
22. Biting Down
I worked in childcare; They’d hired a new trainee teacher for my room since each room required two teachers. The trainee constantly argued about ridiculous topics and always tried to argue with me about both company and state childcare policies because "That’s useless". Every day of her first week, she was late.
Once, when I was changing diapers and she was holding a two-year-old on her lap, I saw that a child was biting another child and told her, "You need to go help them," since I was in the middle of dealing with a very explosive diaper change by the changing table and couldn’t leave the boy alone on there.
She didn’t get up. I repeated myself, and she said, "Well, I have this kid on my lap". So, I told her to, "Take him off your lap". "He’s strong," she responded as if she, a fully-grown adult was unable to move a two-year-old because of some weird toddler super strength. Then the child bit the other child again.
At this point, I was mad and told her she had to get up and help them now. She then proceeded to say, "So what? I have to watch these four kids while you just have ONE up on the table?!" As if I was somehow supposed to have all of the children on the table at once to make her job of sitting on the floor easier.
Our ratios were 4:1, so I finished my diaper change, stuck my head out the door, and told my supervisor to, "Get this lady out of my room". They wrote her up after reviewing the footage. She was fired for not showing up the next week. I’ve worked with a lot of dummies, but she was so awful in such a short time.
23. Hard of Providing
About two years ago, I started work as a receptionist in this audiology clinic, which provides hearing aids and hearing tests for people. Going into this position, the only knowledge and experience I had about hearing aids before was that my grandpa had used one, and that was just about the extent of what I knew.
Eight months after I started I had only that much experience with anything related to hearing. Then they hired a new provider who I would later discover knew nothing about anything—not hearing aids, not basic you-should-know-this-if-you've-had-a-job-ever, not how to handle talking to bosses, patients, phone calls, etc.
One time, we had a patient who left her hearing aids to be fixed. She would regularly call to check on them, and I’d tell her, "I'll ask the provider to call you and update you," which I did. FOUR MONTHS LATER, she calls again, and I found out that the provider ignored me all those times and never even called.
Again, she’s the "professional," and I'm the receptionist who has eight months of experience with hearing aids. She wouldn't do chart notes for weeks. She would have patient charts stacked in the corner of her office for days, forget to make chart notes, put in the incorrect dates, and spell the patient’s name wrong.
I’d have to double check every chart before putting it back on the shelves every time! If she didn't know what to do with a patient, which happened often, she would just do nothing. So, I would have to pick up ALL of that slack, deal with the patients, take their complaints, talk to manufacturers over the phone.
Plus, our company was starting to notice that she wasn't making them any money. Our boss and trainers had daily zoom meetings with her. After all of those meetings happened, they finally realized why she was making next to nothing, which was because she was super incompetent, obviously, and then they fired her.
They told her they were shutting down the clinic, but instead, they hired someone else with more education and experience. They found someone who’s confident and young and knows how an iPhone works. All I got was a 30-cent raise and an increase in my medication dosage. But the new provider is now my new best friend!
24. Time for a Refreshing Glass of Chicken Broth
The CEO's girlfriend was a devout vegan who would patrol the office around lunch to make sure that anyone who was eating meat promised not to use the sponge in the kitchen to wash anything that touched meat. She did this in yoga pants and heels, for some reason. Everyone thought she was so unlikeable and awful.
So, for April Fool's day, I came up with an extremely satisfying prank. I rinsed out a carton of chicken broth and then filled it with some mango juice. When I made a point of pouring myself a glass and drinking it in front of her, she was truly disgusted, which made it twice as delicious and worth the effort.
She was the financial manager and HR, so everything people shared was pillow talk between her and the CEO. He’d sprinkle what he knew at meetings as if everyone was in on the secret. This pair was rotten. Someone heard him say, "I wouldn't care if I didn't hear music again in my life". Who says that? Sociopaths.
I was eventually fired, and the official reason was that I had "Photoshopped grotesque images of several people in the office". She failed to mention to the department of labor representative that I did it all on my own time on my own computer, and each co-worker asked me to make them one after I made my photo.
The one I made for myself had my eyes moved farther apart so I only looked abnormal. For other coworkers, I flipped their faces upside down, made their eyes too big, removed their noses, or covered their mouths with beards. While discussing unemployment, the agent asked me to email her the photos, and it made her audibly laugh. Being fired was worth it just for that.
25. Keeping the Team Balanced
I worked in a three-person department that included me, an awesome dude, and this terrible new co-worker. She was fresh out of college, which made her believe she was smarter than me and our other teammate. She totally discounted anyone's opinions except her own, and one manager let her do whatever she wanted.
She was the worst one-upper than I'd ever met even for the smallest of things like going to a coffee stand. She'd chime in and say how her friends work at a coffee stand and they know her order by heart – just things like that. She thought she was adorable and charming but was incredibly grating and worthless.
She constantly messed up, but if you tried to help or give any constructive feedback, she'd cry and go to the one manager that liked her. She lasted almost four years, which blew my mind. She was furloughed recently, but she won’t be returning as the owner’s daughter now has taken her position. Phew.
26. Pretty Grate Co-worker
Out of all the bad co-workers I’ve had, Bag Salad was by far the worst. It was my job to train her on a position that only I knew how to do, and they lied to me when they said I would definitely be involved in the interview process for the position. I'm still not sure why they did that. No hyperbole, but I crushed that job.
I had exemplary reviews every year and positive relationships at the company all around. I didn't need or want the help, but they said they were hiring her for the, "anticipated future workload". It's been so long I don't even remember why she got that nickname, but it really suited her somehow. She was exhausting.
She didn’t know how to do anything. She didn't understand how to take messages, forward or reply to emails, or print anything. All day long, she would talk to herself in this weird half-whisper lip-smacking way that was like, "Hmm, ok, if I just copy, oh no, maybe move it but I, ummm, oh, ok, maybe I'll hmm…"
Then she would turn to me with her big buggy eyes waiting for me to acknowledge her rather than just asking me for the help. And every breath she would take, her nose would whistle, and what was worse was when she breathed through her mouth, she would smack her lips or tongue every single time she took a breath!
She loved Big Bang Theory and would regale me with the plot lines of episodes she'd watch, she would say things to me like, "And then the one, the Sheldon? Goes bazinga, and oh, how I laughed! Goodness, it's soo fun-ny! Hee hee," with every vowel lasting much longer than needed in her unbearable sing-song voice.
She felt the need to jump in on every conversation she was able to overhear. If I was talking to a friend about a trip or something, "Man, Chicago was great. I hope I can go again someday," she’d pop out of nowhere and go, "I never went to Chicago, but my uncle's friend did in the 80s and he said he used to…"
I really hated her and couldn’t stand her. I know it sounds like a woman out of her depth who was just trying to fit in, and that's true. But some people just grate, and she grated every last nerve and ounce of patience I had. I tried, I just couldn't hack it, and I quit that job two months after she started.
27. Essence of Fish and Eggs
I'm pretty cool about most people because we all have a role to play, but one time we had a secretary that would microwave eggs and canned tuna every morning in a bowl. Now...I am not a mean person at all, but that smell generated from microwaved eggs and canned tuna is downright repulsive by anyone's standards.
28. Master of None
I worked with a guy who just couldn't learn new skills. When he started at the job, he had to learn new programs and processes just like anyone would need training for any new position. He couldn't pick anything up whether it was where to click in a software to get a certain result or how to fill out a report.
The team took turns to show him the ropes, but it never stuck. Once, I got so frustrated when he couldn’t minimize a window. "Top right corner. Click on the straight line". It took him four seconds to drag the mouse to the corner and then he'd hover around it but never on it. He was nice but couldn’t work with us.
29. Privacy Listing
I worked with a guy that regularly Googled everyone that worked there. He knew information about the apartment me and my partner had just sold and told everyone at our department meeting how much we got for the sale.
30. Not My Management
On my first week at the job, my boss confided in me that we ought to do something about Obama, and that's when I knew I was not going to enjoy working with her. And over the next three years, I was tormented as she learned more about me. When she learned I loved animals, she told me she’d hurt a skunk before.
She’d say outrageous and offensive things, so the whole team with the exception her favorite pet had gone to her manager to address her horrendous and unprofessional comments and behavior. In four months, we would lose five employees because of her, with each one listing her as the main problem why they were leaving.
Finally, after three years of her doing her thing, I finally snapped and demanded to speak to her on the patio of our office and tore into her for at least 10 minutes viciously explaining to her why she's a terrible human being and just unleashed everything. The next day HR contacted me and asked me what happened.
I asked them, "How much time do you have?" And they said, "However much you feel you need". I thought I was definitely getting fired. So, I said, "Well, it all started when she said something about the president…" and for two hours I went through my entire dossier that I’d kept on her for the whole time. It terrified HR.
HR called her into their office later that day, and the next day after, the VP of Marketing addressed the whole team and explained that she wouldn't be returning and that she'd agreed to take another position working alone from a different building. And shortly after making that announcement, she quit her job.
I worked another six months before I saw that the company was going to let me go because of poor numbers. Her favorite pet team member wound up being her replacement, which was much better because she was much better at the job. I, on the other hand, was horrible in the position and had a bad view of the company.
The Pet recommended to me that I talk to the IT department about a possible position, and over the Christmas holiday, I taught myself enough to get hired on the team as HelpDesk Support. Now, I’ve been doing that for two years, and I love my job and company—but I still despise the marketing department, of course.
31. Argument Resources
The HR manager at my last job had zero training, education, or experience in HR. She was argumentative, passive-aggressive, and incompetent. Toward the end, she asked me "Why are you being resistant," and, "You’re not being a team player," when I was advocating for client safety. I was the second person in less than a year to leave and hire an attorney.
32. Bringing Down the Evil McQueen
In the interview, she said something to me that was along the lines of, "You're quite young. How do we know that you'll be responsible enough to work with our team?" as if she was running an Olympic team and not a fast-food joint. I know this is not an unusual question, but her attitude spoke more than her words.
Well, I was technically homeless, a young teenager at the time, and staying in a shelter. I explained my situation to be my motivation. I needed a day program, wanted a permanent place to live, and that someday, to be comfortable financially to go back to school. Before I was homeless, I had amazing grades in school.
Well, I had gotten another job, but was more than willing to work two jobs to achieve my goals. My first day on my first shift, she gave me the basic instructions. Read the employee handbook and then come get her. She was adamant I was illiterate because I was so quick, which meant that I must not have read it.
She was pointing to random words getting me to read them. It was annoying...but goals...homeless and all. She walked me over to a till, put me in a headset, and told the other woman at the till to make me do all the work. I tried my best, but with zero training on ANYTHING and no guidance, it went bad, fast.
Mid-order, she grabbed my arm and dragged me into the office. She berated me for a solid 10 minutes on how I was just some pathetic disgusting homeless scum with no manners, no wonder no one wanted me, no wonder I was homeless, how pathetic. Honestly, it makes me cry thinking about how cruel and harsh she was. Finally, she finished. I took off the headset, went to the staff room to change, grabbed my stuff, and left. No one said a word to me. I just left.
Once I was just far enough away, but in front of another business, I fell to my knees and cried. A full-on breakdown the kind where it feels like you’ll never stop. While I was crying, someone came up to me and put her arm around me. I just cried in her arms. When I was done, I finally saw who it was. It was the assistant manager from the exact place I just left.
I was flustered and furious and embarrassed. She just looked at me and told me "MANAGER is the absolute worst". Then she told me the horrible manager was going to be fired that week, with the assistant manager promoted to her position. She said to me, "What she did was very wrong. If it's okay with you, I would still like to hire you. I think you would be a great asset to the team".
I worked there for nearly 10 years. I got my high school diploma, went to college, became an adult there, and worked my way up the chain of command. Well, as high as I could since the manager was so incredible the turnover rate was crazy low. There, I had both my best and worst bosses of all time at that place.
33. Baring It All
I worked with a teacher that sat at his desk the ENTIRE year. Kids walked in and out whenever they wanted to. They did practically no work. He told offensive jokes and was terrible with the students. One day, I was sitting in the teacher workroom, and another teacher noticed a phone on the counter.
She asked me if it was mine. When I told her that it wasn’t, we looked at the lock screen to see whose it might be. The picture on the lock screen was of someone’s, a woman’s, bare chest. A few minutes later, the bad co-worker walked into the workroom and picked it up. Needless to say, he was eventually let go.
34. Carb Keto-sistant
A guy at work was trying the Keto diet, and it was all he could ever talk about. One time, he overheard a conversation I was having with a colleague on a particularly stressful day I was having. He interrupted our conversation to suggest I give up carbs in order to reduce my stress levels, so I’d feel better.
35. Spotty Reception
My receptionist is the most useless person I’ve ever met. She ignores the phones while playing on her device, takes personal calls, and does all personal business on her work computer from shopping to bills. Every day, she’ll find ways to avoid doing work by getting up and talking with anyone patient enough to listen.
My personal favorite? She does not take an ounce of criticism whatsoever. Every question or suggestion is an attack or mistreatment in her opinion. She has filed countless HR complaints because other employees have suggested that she focus on work. Countless meetings and time have been wasted trying to appease this person.
36. Programming Code of Conduct
A "programmer" I inherited would take half a day to start fixing a bug because he kept his own version of source code full of debugging information and refused to follow instructions. I'd been with the project long enough that I'd suggest the module, file, function, and sometimes even line number he had to fix. A day later or so, he'd fix the minor error.
37. No, You Do It
My bad coworker just...wouldn't work at all. This was in a research lab. He was a visiting researcher from another country, and he spent a lot of time asking tons of non-work-related questions to the point of disrupting other people’s work. In a year, he designed one very basic experiment and didn't even go through with it. He only designed it.
He was above doing bench work, apparently. He picked fights with everyone doing anything related to his. He didn't want to have to share credit with anyone. He wouldn't clean up after himself or pick up things from the floor. He once called me from another room because he didn't want to take a string-less teabag out of his mug.
Also, on a different occasion, he'd knocked some things off a hanger on the back of the door and, for whatever reason, wouldn't pick them up. It was kind of like working with a child. I don't know how, but he was there for his PhD. My boss fired him. He was one of two people in her 30+ year career that she'd fired.
38. Inhaling Pay
I worked with a guy who would never do his job, which was stocking shelves at a local grocery store. He just sat against the forklift all day, which he couldn’t operate because he was under 18. He’d spend all his time vaping in the bathroom the back alley, telling people twice his age what to do, and when the owners would walk by, he’d either get twice as rude or go vape. I liked when he got fired.
39. Orange You Glad
There was a guy at my work who used to use oranges for "pleasure". The weirdo would be in the washroom stall doing god knows what and would leave a desecrated orange behind. They eventually caught him and confronted him. He was never let go. They just wanted him to tone it down with the washroom-citrus business.
40. Not a Thai, Girl
On the first day on the job at a store that sold spare parts, the assistant manager looked me up and down and said, "Yeah. I don't work well with other women". Well, that was a great omen. For the next four years, she made me do my job "her way" only for me to get in trouble from head office, which was whenever we had a store visit.
She'd pretend that she'd never actually instructed me to do it her way and then berate in front of the big bosses saying, "Why did you do this like that? You know that's wrong". This happened the entire time I worked there. We had a retail conference in Melbourne every year for all our company’s retail coordinators.
Every year, they had an incentive for us to try to win. One of those years the prize was an all-expenses-paid holiday to Thailand for two. Basically, to win it we had to exceed sales targets for three months and increase our margin as well as create a visually appealing display for a sponsor’s product by the due date.
She told me not to bother to try to win because I’d never, and it would be a waste of time. She held my position before I started and told me she'd never come close to winning. Well, I worked hard, and I won it. Boy was she upset about that. She wasn't happy that our small country store had won such a big thing.
Considering that we have over 200 locations across Australia, for us to win was amazing. She actually tried to go out of her way to get our sales figures from head office, so that she could disprove that I'd really done my job. For a few weeks, she was determined to prove that I didn't do enough work to win it.
She tried to convince me that they lied, and I didn't win. When she finally accepted defeat, she asked if I was taking her. I told her my boyfriend was going, so she threw a huge tantrum and told me I was selfish for not taking her. We had a great time. I sent happy snaps to our store’s email every day to rub it in.
41. Working with Children
My first job at 15 was at an outlet shop for teenage girls. There was one guy who worked there, Josh, who was in his 20s, and clearly, at least part of the job perks for him was being surrounded by adolescent girls dressing and undressing. Then, I came along changing from my Catholic uniform to work clothes six days a week.
Josh would frequently "forget" that I was changing as he was checking nobody had left anything behind and get an eyeful of my sensible beige bra. He also tried to introduce group hugs, so he could touch my butt. Eventually, our supervisor reprimanded him, and he didn't work there again.
42. Doing the Dirty
I worked in an office with a woman who rarely showered and always dressed as if she was auditioning for a role as a stereotypical bag lady. Her hair was unkempt and uncombed. She stank up the area around her desk. The owner would talk to her from time to time about her appearance and how she needed to clean up.
This was important especially for our clients who we had traipsing in and out of our office all day, but that upkeep would eventually dive back down. The owner would offer help in any way she could, but nothing sunk in. One day, there were these little bits of crumpled up papers trailing all over the office.
The manager started picking them up as we all looked over to figure out what they were. There were some papers with red stuff all over. The trail led to the bathroom. We figure out that this pig woman used toilet paper as a menstrual pad, and as she walked around the office, her makeshift pad disintegrated and fell out.
She walked around the whole day leaving bits of crotch rotted paper everywhere. And there was even evidence that she went into the bathroom and came out after all that mess was made. It was not something that you wouldn't notice on the dark maroon carpet. She knew she made the mess and left all of it anyways.
Her husband and children would also come to the office frequently to visit her. They were just as disgusting and dirty as my co-worker as well. It was actually very sad, but it was also extremely infuriating to have to work in the same vicinity as someone who doesn't care for anyone else much less themselves.
43. Delusional Distractions
The first terrible co-worker that pops in my mind was this chick who was obsessed with these two other girls who were BFFs. They were always whispering to each other about absolutely nonsense like taking their kids to Disney on Ice together. But the dumb co-worker just constantly insisted and whined and complained that they were talking about her.
Finally, I snapped after maybe three weeks of her huffing, getting upset, and glaring at them. As soon as she opened her mouth to complain, I hissed at her that she wasn't that interesting or important for everyone to be thinking about her. She was super shocked because I'd been chill, but she was driving me nuts.
44. Nursing Resentment
When I started, at my first job outside placement there was this horrible lady who just really hated any new people. When I was introduced to a group of my coworkers, she interrupted the supervisor who was saying how good it is to have new people just to tell him that she hated people who "don't know anything".
She’d consistently came to the nurses’ station to ask for someone to help her with a two-person patient job and then would turn to me and say, "not you," or other small and petty stuff like that. Thankfully, everyone else was nice but it was hard to build your confidence with stuff like that happening every day.
45. Pretty Wild
We used to have a young blonde at my last security job that we could tell our boss hired her only for her looks. She had the personality of a doorknob and the I.Q. of a jar of mustard. Though the worst thing about her was that we quickly learned that she had an addiction and would randomly pass out in her chair.
She’d even start drooling on herself or disappear somewhere and return only to be acting really goofy. Some days, she’d do this in front of the workers as they’d walk through our guard shack. I’d always cover for her and say she wasn’t well. We had every intention of getting her fired, but she quit before that could happen.
46. Mood Swings
I used to work at this grocery store where there was a guy who was an absolute psychopath. Some days, he would be totally chill, and other days he'd be down people's throats. I reported him for threatening another co-worker. When word got to him, he literally threatened my life if I ever spoke about him again.
I was terrified to make eye contact with the guy. He stayed for months despite no-call-no-shows and more reports about him. He seemed to like me after a while and was always happy to see me for some inexplicable reason. After some scary guys came to the store looking for him, the new store manager had him tested for substance use. He was fired.
Even worse is that a couple more people came forward to say they knew he was stealing things and doing other things in the bathroom. Nobody felt safe around this guy, but he was so unstable that not many people wanted to come forwards about him. Last I saw, he works at a Walmart now, which I avoid like the plague.
47. Just a Nibble Trouble
I had a co-worker, J, at my McDonald's job when I worked there in high school. On one particular occasion, I kid you not, J showed up OBLITERATED on god knows what, working the 4 PM to 7 PM dinner shift. The manager was young and absolutely did not care as he was on most occasions like that at work as well.
Everyone in the kitchen was cool and would let J trip out while they picked up his slack, but he’d regularly wander off to the fridge and nibble cheese like a mouse. The manager showed me video of J in the fridge, crouched over, nibbling cheese with both hands for five minutes straight. The general manager saw the video the next day, and J was fired.
48. Nothing Worse Than a Close Talker
The laboratory where I worked hired an older fellow who had come in for his interview in jeans and a flannel shirt. When he started, he was...inclined to give minimal effort. He would take multiple half-hour breaks every day even though my job doesn't allow this, since you only get one-hour lunch and two 15-minute breaks.
When an important task came along that didn't let him sit down at a desk and fill in his notebook every five minutes, he would just leave. He would get uncomfortably close to people thrusting his face to within inches of others to talk, and he would corner the other technician and me in the cramped preparation room.
He also called me "Toots". He didn't like that he had to learn things and do work, so he turned in his resignation after two months. He told the other technician and me who were training him that he refused to do any more work before he’d leave. He spent the time writing an insane letter to a state commissioner.
The letter went on about our "horrible" laboratory practices and how our boss would make him cry or something like that. I believe the wording was something like, "and I had not cried since I lost my dog". At least we got some good mileage out of that. We used to jokingly make fun of my boss about the guy’s dog.
49. Try Our New Flavor!
I worked in fast food, and there was a guy who mixed up a bag of ice cream flavoring with a bag of ranch dressing. We served ranch ice cream for half a day, and nobody ever called to complain.
50. As I Was Saying
I worked with a guy who'd interrupt any conversation to talk about anything and everything as if he was the expert. And I’m not using the word "anything" as a hyperbole. He truly had something to say about anything including the things that he didn’t even know or even heard of or obviously knew very little about.
When the subject of the conversation would fall into the category of things that he didn’t know and couldn’t talk about, he would slowly steer the whole conversation away from whatever it was to whatever he wanted to discuss at the moment. It was both amazing and the most annoying thing I have ever had to deal with.
He was like that Wikipedia game where you start reading about one thing and end up on something unrelated. The "conversation" was basically 98% of him talking non-stop. Most people just tried to stay away from him, but he'd follow them around. I eventually left, but I remember having a nightmare where he was the best man at my wedding.
Sources: Reddit,
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