Loud talking and gossip are the most irritating office pet peeves, according to a 2023reportfrom Robert Half.Some awkwardness is to be expected, as many employees switched jobs duringthe great resignation, and getting accustomed to internal politics takes time. Plus, others may have developed new habits working remotely that push the boundaries of appropriate behavior.However, there are many more ways through which people become infamous corporate legends.So Reddit userMurkantilismmade aposton the platform asking everyone to share the craziest things they’ve seen their colleagues do and has received plenty of stories of juicyworkplace drama.This post may includeaffiliate links.
Loud talking and gossip are the most irritating office pet peeves, according to a 2023reportfrom Robert Half.
Some awkwardness is to be expected, as many employees switched jobs duringthe great resignation, and getting accustomed to internal politics takes time. Plus, others may have developed new habits working remotely that push the boundaries of appropriate behavior.
However, there are many more ways through which people become infamous corporate legends.
So Reddit userMurkantilismmade aposton the platform asking everyone to share the craziest things they’ve seen their colleagues do and has received plenty of stories of juicyworkplace drama.
This post may includeaffiliate links.
I’m a sonar technician in the US Navy. A good portion of my watch standing consists of staring at a radar-like screen. I was standing a late night watch one night, when in walks my workplace-supervisor. For the sake of the story, we’ll call him Soup. So Soup walks in and says “You bored?” “Like a raggedy as mother f**r.” Soup proceeds to walk over to the WQC-2, which is for all intents and purposes, an underwater megaphone. You speak into it just like a CB radio, and it projects your voice into the water. Soup unhooks the mic and sets it on one of the chairs. He turns his back to the chair, and drops his coveralls to his ankles, exposing his bare as. He then reaches behind him, clicks on the mic and lets one rip. BOOM. This thing was loud. As soon as I got done laughing over the sight of what he did, he points to my sonar-gram. And I’ll be damned, amidst all the white noise and regular garbage we pick up aurally, his fart hung there, proudly and prominently displayed as a bright green fuzz. THEN. Soup takes control of my console. He selects the fart, and sends the information (sound recording and all) to the team on the bridge.They had no idea what it was. We told ‘em it was a whale fart.Best. Watch. Ever.
A guy I used to work with at a Sonic Drive-In once hopped out the drive-thru window while wearing skates to chase down a woman who’d left her credit card. My co-worker didn’t quite get to her before she got out of the lot, but he persevered and caught up with her at the light about a quarter mile down the road. I was thoroughly impressed.
I got fired from KFC as a teenager when a pigeon flew from the front of the shop and I started chasing it yelling “S**t! The chicken has got loose again!”
When I was 14 I worked at a floral business who basically hired anyone. My duty for that day was to stand in one of the greenhouses and shove seeds into little soil pots all day. I was partnered up with this guy probably in his early twenties..typical burn out with the 24/7 confused look who would spend all day telling everyone about how much of a badss he is. My boss was f*****g insane. He had an incredibly short temper. His typical reaction to someone doing something wrong would be to throw his hat then break things (including but not limited to plants, chairs, a tow motor once, etc). Anyways, apparently the kid I was working with f***d something up and the boss had just noticed it. He comes storming into the green house red in the face. He starts yelling at the kid for something he had done previously, then begins kicking st over and eventually telling him to “GET THE FK OUT AND DON’T COME BACK..YOU’RE FIRED”. Instead of this kid walking out with his head down, he runs up to the boss, rips his shirt off, and yells “IF I CAN DO 100 PUSH-UPS IN ONE MINUTE I KEEP MY JOB”. He wasn’t asking, he was telling. He drops down and begins doing the fastest push-ups I’ve ever witnessed. He mumbled his way to 100, put his shirt back on, walked back to the bench, and continued planting seeds like nothing ever happened. Boss never said another word.
I was working in a large warehouse style supermarket and had the job of showing a teenager to the back office to fill out a job application. After 30 min he had finished and exited the office into our back storage warehouse. A forklift was in the middle of the floor. Seeing this shouted (not sure to who, no one was really that close)** OH SWEET A FORKLIFT YOU NEVER SAID I GET ONE OF THESE!**I stood agast as he jumped right up into the seat, cranked the wheel, floored it, sending it into a Tasmanian- devil style spin.I could hear him maniacally laughing for a good 10 seconds, but was helpless to do anything lest i get forked.The spin ended abruptly when one of the fork tines caught the corner of a palate of pepsi cases knocking nearly a row of them out. We both watched as a tower maybe 30ft tall of cases of soda slooooooowly started tipping towards usseeing his life in danger he decided to quickly back out of there. although he had great spinning skills, he must of skipped the lesson on reverse. He floored the forklift which lunged forward into to tower causing the entire tower of hundreds of cases of soda to collapse in a **deafening, carbonated explosion.**the fork had a cage on top so he emerged unharmed, looked at me (i was the only one there and said “YOU NEVER SAW ANYTHING"He ran out the front of the store leaving a trail of sticky brown footprints.*Epilogue*: Within minutes the entire staff rushed to the back room to find me standing alone, of to my knees in brown foam. No one said a word.while we stood there silently, the doors burst open, the teenager sprinted to the back office, grabbed his paper application (our only means of IDing him) and blew past us on his way out. He was wearing those shoes with wheels on the bottom and apparently just slid all the way through the checkout and out the front door.**TL;DR GODDAMN TEENAGER ON FORKLIFT**
I work at a Med School and I was in a meeting full of Ph.ds and MDs. Well the meeting got a little heated and one of doctors who was arguing climbed up on the table and started tap dancing while screaming “You can’t fire me!! I’ve been here forever! I can say whatever I want!” It was hilarious.EDIT:I guess I should clarify that, in general, he’s great. Nice guy, loves the students and will do what ever he can to help them be successful. But if you give him an opening (i.e do or say something something stupid that makes you seem like an idiot), he is on that st like white on rice. He has a low tolerance for b*t and the majority of his antics are directed at his colleagues who get caught up in being Medical doctors or scientists and in the process lose site of what their job is which is helping people, students, etc.And no he didn’t get fired. A beautiful thing called tenure. I make sure to sit next to him at every meeting. It’s guaranteed entertainment. He gives little, to no, fs.
Watched a coworker throw a fresh-out-the-oven pizza at a customer after they commented on her rack.
At the Best Buy, there was also this kid Eddie. If you worked with him, you could finding wandering around the media section mumbling and talking to himself. Customers would avoid him, hell, even managers would be wary of talking to him. One day, we’re having a store meeting and it hadn’t started yet. Eddie starts talking to us…. but he’s seeming all normal. So I, being the ae I am, go… Me: “Hey Eddie. Are you on some new medication or something man?” Eddie: “No… why?” Me: “Well… you’re acting all normal and not talking to yourself.” Eddie: “Oh, I just do that so I can work without any annoying customers asking me questions all day.” Fg. Brilliant.
A guy showed up for a job interview at my work (municipality). The job he applied for was an opening as a police officer. Now it clearly states on the application that you must go through a background check. This dumb*ss comes in for the interview, agrees to go have a background check and quickly gets arrested for his armed robbery charges he knew he had warrants for.
When I was in High School I worked at Best Buy. In the in the back warehouse there was a cardboard crusher, and one day me and another employee were throwing boxes down into it. All the sudden the machine jams and starts making an awful noise. Apparently someone had put a wooden pallet down the chute, but before I could say or do anything, the guy I’m working with says “I got it”. He then proceeds to dive head first into the cardboard crusher and ride the 12 foot steel chute like a slide. The Warehouse manager saw what just happened and lost his s**t, he came running across the warehouse screaming “Did he just jump in there? He did not just jump in there?”. The manager runs over and hits the emergency stop button and the guy comes out of the Cardboard Crusher wondering what the big deal was. Should probably mention too that that employee was missing the tops of two fingers because he had cut them off in shop class.
I once had a co-worker lift me up on the forklift/lift truck to the top rack in the back corner of our warehouse where I took a 2 hour paid nap.
A long time employee at mcdonald’s said you would not get burned if you stuck your hand in the fryer oil and pulled it out real quick. I said you would. he showed me. he got burned.
We used to play poker underneath a nuclear reactor. We all had top security clearance and nobody else could get into that room without us knowing about it.
I worked with a girl who faked kidney failure, dialysis, surgery the whole bit, to take advantage of the company’s sick-leave policy. she’d come back from weekends sunburned but always had a story of why she was outside during the weekend (i.e. watching her brother play kickball). she was found out when we contacted her parents to try to get her hospital room number so that we could send her get-well flowers.
I used to work in a big factory, one guy got fired for missing too many days, there was a rumor going around that he was going to streak throught the factory floor, no one really believed it, but the guy was a bit of a looney so the HR guys escort him off the premises with a security guard… 10 mins later he climbed over a fence, naked, to get back in and proceded to run around the factory holding his privates yelling “wwwhhhooooooo” funniest day at work ever!!
My best friend and I were working in the same place and one day he decided to quit. Our boss was an equal opportunity hater and my friend wanted to make sure our boss knew how much everyone despised him. So he borrowed a brush from a female coworker and pulled almost a handful of hair out of it.He walked up to the boss, put the wad of hair on his desk and stood there for a moment until boss man finally said “okay you got me, what’s this?".Friend - “I shaved my as so you can kiss it m*********r, I quit!“The look on the boss’s face was priceless. He sat back in his chair, took off his glasses, looked dumbfounded for a few moments and said, “okay, you can leave”. My buddy said “nope, you escort me out, I have a few things to get off my chest”. He let him know how he felt all the way out to the parking lot.
Caught an employee yelling at my toaster after hours on the security camera.
In conference room, during meeting, boss gets up, walks to the corner of the room, and while still talking unzips his pants and pisses in a fake plant. He then sits back down like nothing happened, still mid-sentence.
First week at my last internship, I saw one of my coworkers pick up his desk phone and powerbomb it to the ground. It shattered everywhere, as it was a big phone. He stormed off and didn’t come back for a few hours. He later denied it, and kept saying that it fell off the desk. That place makes people crazy.
Working as a janitor at a church, ive seen fellow employees turn the heat up in the baptismal fountain and use it as a hottub. Also have seen people steal and snack on the wine and hosts and someone got a bj during work in a confessional.
Dude got in trouble for bringing strippers back to the office at like 2am after bar close. He f****d them on the conference room table and then stole some computers.
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I delivered pizza for Papa Johns for about 4 years. Obviously you see a lot of people come and go during that amount of time, but one guy stood out. He got lost on all his runs..even basic short hops down major roads. Within a couple of days the other drivers were calling him Rain Man, which is not a very good nickname, I know. After a few days of this, the manager finally decided to let him go. He grabbed his car topper and spiked it at the ground, then came around front and tried to throw it through the front window. Crazy enough, I guess. She got a restraining order on him and we thought that was that. Fast forward a month or 2. It’s St Patrick’ Day, 2003 I think. I am the closing driver and the only other person working is the shift lead, who’s in the cash office counting down tills. I am walking out the front door with a big delivery. As I start to load the bag into my car, I notice several police sirens and I can tell they’re moving pretty fast. I look over my right shoulder at the main throroughfare we were located on and see 2 cop cars flying down the street. I instinctively track left to follow them but they don’t go where I think they should be. I become aware that something crazy is happening right now as I see a pickup fly up over the curb into our parking lot and hurtle toward the store with the cops following. The car slams into the front floor-to-ceiling windows and through the front counter. The truck is completely inside the store when it comes to a stop. Cops fly out and swarm the vehicle. I hear screaming about a grenade. Up til that point I’ve been standing less than 10 feet from where all this happened and it suddenly hits me how close I came to getting hit and I finally get the fk out of the area. Turns out “Rain Man” was severely off balance. He had started f***g with a cop at the Denny’s down the road, hit a cruiser with his truck, then backed up and hit it again, then took off and they gave chase. For some reason he decided to end their chase at the place he’d worked for several days. He ended up in a mental facility I believe. I used to keep a chunk of the glass from the broken window in my pocket as a reminder.
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TL;DR Had a fire drill and coworker ran down the deck of the ship in nothing but his underwear, cowboy boots, and cowboy hat screaming for his life.
When I used to work in a kitchen there was a verbal fight between a dishwasher and the food and beverage director/cook lady. Since we are in the kitchen, we wear a certain type of work clothes and leave our civilian clothes in the bathroom lockers. Everything goes alright the rest of the day until its time for the boss/cook/director to leave and we hear a scream while she is changing in the bathroom. Someone..had st in her shoe. There was a human st tucked neatly inside one of her bunion smugglers, well I imagine it was once neat but the picture afterward was nothing of the sort. The thought alone of expecting a room temperature shoe and instead getting a squishy luke warm stinky mashed potato was enough to gag. I laughed, the other cooks laughed, and just about everyone in the kitchen laughed so she quit the next day. Moral of the story, don’t f**k with middle-aged Somalian dishwashers.TL DR; A communicational indifference leads a woman to quit when her secret santa gift arrives early.
My uncle, who is no longer my uncle on account of divorce, had a real short temper. We were electricians finishing up a very large, very expensive medical building. My uncle was the foreman of this particular job. Before finishing a project it is customary to do a walk around with the owner/tennant and whatnot. At one point the owner asked that we move an electrical outlet to the other side of the wall. My uncle, in all his short tempered glory kicked the outlet right through the wall, looked at the owner with a completely straight face and said “anything else I can do for you?”. It was awesome, he was fired, then he got divorced from my aunt. He’s no longer my uncle, he’s just my friend now. We go shooting all the time. I figure if he’s gonna snap again I want him on my side.
There was a guy I worked with at mcdonalds a few years back, he came in for a morning shift after being up for a couple of days straight and under the influence of various substances. He spent an hour running around the staff room with no trousers on looking for his polka-dot uniform that he swore he put in his bag and then came into the kitchen pushing himself along the floor apologizing for being late beecause his boat was f****d and he had to swim to work. He proceeded to try and work and when the big mac buns told him how much of a st his mum was he buggered off. Found him an hour later sleeping on the top shelf of the stock room with a sign next to him sayin ‘dragonz fk off please”
Working in a cell phone repair office, we had a customer keep complaining that we got fingerprints on her new lcd screen. We wear gloves and take other precautions so it is impossible for us to leave fingerprints, dust, or other particles on the inside of the LCD screen. My lead tech comes out of the office, tells the customer to come to his desk. He pulls up the customer’s account, pulls out his notepad, and writes the customer’s address down. The customer asks what he is doing. My lead tech tells her that he is writing her address down so he can come to her house and do unmentionable things to her and her family. He then takes the phone out of her hand and throws it against our tech window, shattering the phone and cracking our window. He comes back to the tech office, takes a monitor and throws it against the wall. He grabs his coat, tells the store manager, “I need some time off,” and leaves the store. The aftermath: Amazingly, he was not fired as he was in “anger management classes (stupid policy IMHO).” The customer was given a new phone and the glass and monitor was repaired at tech’s expense. TL:DR tech loses his cool, threatens a customer, and destroys phone, window, monitor, does not get fired.
We had a guy in an office of forty people who was a little OCD. He would circle the entire room full of cubicles (it’s just one big open floor) about three or four times and then go in the mens restroom. If you entered the restroom while he was in there you would see two bare feet on one of those paper toilet covers, his pants and shirt would be hung over the stall, while he sat and pooped. He would also talk to his brother about sports on the phone. “Do you think Green Bay has a chance? Ughhhh.” Plop.It happened about once a week for the three years that I worked there. Eventually we all learned not to go into the restroom for those 40 minutes.tl;dr This guy at work would poop naked and talk on his cell phone for 40 minutes at a time.
A guy once sneezed on his hand about 4 times till there was enough mucus to warrant a wet floor sign. Then he rubbed it on his crotch and winked at a customer. He still works there..
Use a forklift to lift a person about 25 feet in the air to grab just one box of cheez-itz from a pallet on the top rack of storage…. I was the one on the forklift. F**k safety codes.
This happened before I started working, but an ex-employee at my retail job was working at the cash. A client put down her items and her drink on the counter. The employee then said that she hadnt tried that drink yet from Starbucks( or wherever it was from) and picked it up, put the straw in her mouth, and drank some. All the other employees were stunned as well as that poor client. My boss had to do a pay-out to give the girl some money to buy a new drink.
From my days as a valet at a hotelBellman taking fruit from fruit baskets for intended guests and rubbing them on his balls when they were rude.Valets racing and crashing carsValets having sex with each other in carsBellman going into cars after woman got out and sniffing the car seatsValets super gluing the gas cap on to the car when they were treated rudely. ~not sure if it worked~That’s all I can think of right now.
One of the engineers had been complaining about working 15 hour days 7 days a week for over 10 months straight.The CEO was tired of hearing about it and went into his office in the basement and blasted a hole in the cinderblock wall with a shotgun, just inches from the head of the engineer. People came running out to see what was going on and he turned around and said “Anybody else have a problem with the hours they are working?“That engineer walked out and never came back.I have a few others from that place but that was the most dramatic one.
A colleague once pulled down her pants in front of me in the staffroom to check if her pad was leaking… Scarred for life ;_;
I was in the security’s command center one time and I saw a co-worker eat something off of the ground on one of the cameras. To this day, I’m not sure what it was. It looked like bird s**t. She walked up, leaned down, stared at it… put her finger in it, brought it back to her mouth and even kept her finger in her mouth for a good 6 seconds. It was special.
At my last internship…a coworker army crawled out of her cubicle, through the hall way, and onto the elevator. Nobody ever saw her again.
I worked at a monkey lab and Mark, the night security guard, would take the security truck, pick up some booze, drive 80 miles to San Francisco, pick up a hooker, drive the 80 miles back to his trailer, drink more, get laid, drive the hooker back to San Francisco and then would return to work still drunk, right before the morning crew showed up. On a fairly regular basis.
At my first job ever, I worked with a mth head. Like he did mth in the bathroom. M*th. He had worked there for two years and never got caught. One day he came up to me after the store closed (this was a grocery store) and asked if I could cover the last hour of his shift since he covered an hour for me earlier this week. I said sure and he was so excited that he took a bottle of windex off the shelf and took a drink of it. True story.
First week working a new shift I go to see what my coworker is doing and I find him drinking Everclear(95%, not the wannabe s**t) straight from the bottle. He got fired a few weeks later for crashing a forklift into the garage door. I wonder if he’s dead yet.
Used to work in a deli with a remote order station in front of the counter. People can put in their order into the machine and come back later for their stuff. The workers hated that thing since all it did was just add to our workload, esp when things were crazy at the counter. One especially busy Sunday, one of the dudes just lost it. He marched to the machine and punched it so hard it fell over. Took off his apron and marched out of the store. I think he got canned soon after.Also, when I left the job at the end of the summer, one of the guys there threatened to kill me if I came back ever again. Which I did the next summer cause I couldn’t find anything better. True story.
I used to be the first one in at a Bakery/Cafe every morning. One morning I went in, turned on the ovens/lights/music as I did every morning. About 20 seconds after I had turned the lights on I see the owner of the Cafe laying in one of the lounge chairs with his shirt half off and his pants around his ankles..I didn’t ask.
I was working as a contractor at a government facility and this guy who was a week from retiring showed up with a gun and held his female boss at gun point after having her strip naked and parading her through the facility.
Disgruntled, recently made redundant employee sh**s in the file cabinet.
Someone took a s**t in a wastebasket. The owner of the small dotcom found it and proceeded to angrily carry the bucket around and ask each employee, “DID YOU TAKE A SMASH IN THIS WASTEBUCKET?!” while holding it in front of our faces. Of course everyone denied it. I later heard that he very nearly fired every single employee and start over, but obviously thought better of it.Best day at work ever.
When were were lining up to sign in with the finger scanner, this guy just randomly loses his mind, screams and kicks it clean off the wall.True story.
Got so drunk on whisky that I crashed on my office couch and only woke up the next afternoon.
Working at a UK electricity company office a decade ago. Needless to say it’s a very laddish environment.This big lad comes back from the toilet, and his mate shouts across the office at him: “You’ve just been for a wank!”. Big lad flaps his d**k out in the middle of the office and replies: “It would have a sticky end if I had.“Mixed gender office of course, there were women there.
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