Have you ever (or do you still) work with that one person that made your work place a living nightmare? In this article, people share the most nightmarish co-worker story that will leave you feeling uncomfortable.
[Source can be found at the end of the article]
We found out that she had been posting terrible things about employees and the business on Facebook. Where she was friends with half of the staff at aforementioned business.
Pretty sure she was stealing too.
Throwitaway9009y
Currently working with a person who has had a sinus infection since November 2016. That’s right: wet, chunky coughs, 9 hours a day, 5 days a week, for going on 10 months.
No she does not leave the team area for coughing attacks, she just retches up whatever it is and gulps it back down. 10 months of that in a quiet office.
84th_legislature
I have a co worker who insists on talking to me like I have 0 knowledge in my field despite me actually having more experience and a higher job title than him. He also lectures people like he is their manager even if they have been there longer than him. I even listened to him “reprimand” his own supervisor! He just gave me a lecture the other day on how to install a network printer… I’ve been in IT for 8 years now and in a hell of a lot more industries than he has.
DasCthulhu
I have posted stories of Karen before, like the time the meeting didn’t go her way so she smashed a keyboard across her desk and went home. Or how she would sit behind me disparaging me for being “pathetic”. Or how she stank of wet dog all the time. Or how she derailed a safety-critical update because nobody was allowed to criticise her code. Or how she demanded that I should be fired when I called her out for falsifying reports.
generic_brand_cola
My bosses, which are all related to one another, being a family owned business, have no clue about technology. The VP is the worst. They are all decent people, but he gets angry when technology does not work for him. In this case, he got upset that his tiny netbook with 4GB of memory was slow. Upon inspection, he had 5+ tabs open, along with various Office apps and a music player. I found it very hard to explain that the little device just wasn’t built for that kind of load.
izwald88
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The work canteen was far too small for everyone to use, besides it was kind of the territory of the shop floor workers anyway. This meant us office folk ate at our desks.
Unfortauntely for one horrible year I was sat next to this guy that clearly never been told to keep his mouth shut when chewing. It was like a pig at a trough. It turned my stomach so every time his lunch box came out, I had to retreat down to the car park across the road and sit in my car.
To make matters worse when he wasn’t eating, there was a constant waft of body odor from his direction. Some days it was mingled with Lynx as I actually think he believed in the “shower in a can” nonsense.
ExxInferis
New guy I was training to cook at KFC, slower than a sloth and whenever I would show him the way we do things he would just do it his slow way and say it’s easier, you haven’t even tried the way we are SUPPOSED to do it.
He put his jersey on top of the cardboard boxes which were on top of the lockers, I grabbed his jersey off to get a box down and his phone fell out of his pocket and hit the ground, I picked it up and checked if it smashed, it hadn’t so I put it back in his pockt and went on with work.
The next day he came up to me angry, saying I have to pay for a new phone because I smashed his, he showed me his phone and there was literally a 2mm crack in the bottom right-hand corner.
I just told him maybe he shouldn’t put his stuff on top of things that we needed everyday.
This was within three days of him starting, he was a smart guy but an absolute 0 in the social department and general tasks.
Kozmik786
Work in an office. Have a colleague who is literally the world’s worst diabetic. Her eyes are going and she has problems with her feet.
She makes a huge deal about making sure everyone sees her take her insulin and then eats a whole giant bag of haribo, 5 bags of crisps and half a cake (I really wish I was exaggerating).
It’s ridiculous, we keep having to ring ambulances for her because she’s eaten too much sugar. She’s nearly killed herself at least twice as a result.
maccathesaint
Working in fast food, training a new guy. He got caught stealing drinks from the fridge, decided to defend himself by saying he saw me stealing cola and thought it was a job perk. (it was well known in the store I hate cola). Also he used to skip certain procedures which could result in food poisoning. When I confronted him about it, he shoved me into a wall and threatened to punch me.
gargoyle_eva
Currently still a nightmare, CC’s the entire office including multiple owners of the company when she corrects something I’ve done. My office is about 10ft from hers. Every time she does it I just think why cant you walk 10ft and come tell me or address the issue with me. Usually it’s something small or extremely irrelevant. But now I just correct her or show her that it’s not wrong at all and press “reply all” so they can see it.
gt35r
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This lady in a different department has been here for 30 years and thinks the department I work in shouldn’t exist. Thus, she makes it her life’s mission to mess up our work at every twist and turn.
She has contact with many of our clients and will deliberately sabotage events we have planned for them. She refuses to do stuff that is part of her job description and forces us to do it. She gossips all the time and I’ve discovered on numerous occasions that I’m either a fascist, a liar, a womanizer or just plain incompetent. For the record, I’m none of these things.
The only reason she’s still around is she’s best friends with the boss, and so not only is her job protected but crossing her means a call into the bosses office. She’s a nightmare and everyone but the boss wants her gone.
urgehal666
I had a co-worker lose his marbles, started texting me all sorts of weird stuff and wanted to do some sort of murder suicide pact after he walked out in the middle of the day without saying a word. I was the only person on my team he did this to. Cops and corporate security teams got involved. My team was told to leave the building and work from home for a while. I still work from home. I guess it worked out pretty well for me in the long run.
NonContextual_Text
My ex boss, he was a total diva and a snob. He literally acted like he was auditioning for RuPaul’s drag race. While quirks like that are fine what pissed me off was how incompetent he was and a terrible manager. Literally made me finish some other employees’ office work which took days to get over with the had the audacity to question me why I didn’t finish the work he had assigned me. Made me go to a workshop, the same one I had attended sometime before because my coworker who was supposed to go was “busy” with her work. The workshop was a week long and located in an unsafe area. I was left in tears one late evening after the workshop because a male started following me aggressively and making lewd comments. Of course after the workshop finished why I was unable to do my assigned work that week! I was at the workshop you!
NachoDumpling
I had a coworker who was employed in the role above me in the management chain. We both started the job on the same day and it was a short term contract, about 3 months. After a week, she realises that she can’t handle the job; keeps losing vital paperwork, telling clients wrong information, paying staff the wrong amounts. She’s too proud to quit, but she has a trump card: her coeliac disease (i.e. a dangerous inability to digest gluten, meaning that wheat products make her incredibly sick.) She eats an entire loaf of bread on her lunch break and ends up in hospital, and quits the job because of her ill health. I have to take on her job as well as my own, doing 2 jobs for 3 months, because we can’t find anyone to replace her. Worst of all, my other coworker has her on Facebook, and we discover that she spent several weeks in Disneyland after she was released from hospital.
I don’t think she’ll be getting much more work from that company.
whateverismyusername
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Worked at Best Buy for a couple of years in college. One guy was on a lot of drugs and was nuts. We had a theft problem with iPads. He was being watched, but they couldn’t catch him. There were days where he would be yelling and shouting across the department. It was scary a few times since he would be yelling and cussing at me. I was put on final warning for the register being $100 off. My GM and managers knew it wasn’t me, but they had to do it since I was logged into that register that day. He stopped showing up at some point fortunately. I was told that he and the Apple rep were the ones stealing the iPads to get money for their drug habits.
Kelslaw
2 years ago I worked in an office for a fairly crap company thats known to be a revolving door of employees in Omaha. Was on the information security team that they somehow saw fit to place in the middle of HR. For those of you who don’t see the issue with that, security teams are notorious for not being the most HR friendly teams, and are typically loud. Anyways, my desk was right next to the paper shredder, paper cutter, and the pencil sharpener. Since we were in the middle of hr it was pretty much silent all day every day.
There was a guy that would come over daily and sharpen 2 boxes of pencils. Im talking 40 pencils or so a day, every single day. He would also use the paper cutter to manually shred his papers before dropping them in the iron mountain cans.
f8al
I work in a dog grooming salon. My coworker “A” is a self-professed “cat person”. She doesn’t like our customers, she doesn’t like most dogs. She complains if she’s booked dogs, she complains if she hasn’t booked dogs. She somehow never managed to commission, and complains about that too.
She never helps clean, and when I close with her she will disappear because at 8:30pm apparently she has to take a twenty minute poop in the bathroom.
She claims to be allergic to most foods but still eats McDonalds and Burger King. She allegedly has Celiac’s disease but has never been tested. She also is allergic to cats, flowers, latex, almost anything. Despite claiming to be an avid Gardner the one time a coworker got flowers she insisted they be removed from our work area because she was allergic. Same when another coworker received balloons.
She has said on more than one occasion she likes to find out people’s weaknesses and pick at them. One of my coworker’s lives with her in-laws as both of them have student debt they are very close to paying off. “A” will constantly add small digs at her like “Not that you would know, it’s not like you have to pay rent or a mortgage like real adults.”
Everyone complains about her but our one manager has worked with her since the beginning and clearly doesn’t feel comfortable talking to her, and our other manager is best friends with her husband.
She is good at her job, and even deals with difficult dogs well. She just has such a terrible personality and is so negative about everything.
neverbelieveagain
Engineering consultancy. We have our fair share of part time house wives who do menial admin work but one in particular who sits with our team and main job is to manage a technical support inbox somehow thinks she can tell senior engineers what to do.
She’ll often ask them if they’ve finished their tea/coffee and if they reply yes she’ll instruct them to “take their mug to the kitchen and wash it up then.”
She constantly speaks down to team members who are way above her pay grade and experience and tries to get system engineers to do things like update incidents when they’re busy working on live customer systems.
She has the mentality of a child and comes in every morning singing at the top of her voice “Good morning, good morning” in high pitched warbling. I’ve been there almost 2 years and she does it every day.
Narthax
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I had a co-worker who started back in 2012, about the same time as me. I had been with the company for a while before, but this was a new role to both of us. We got off to a great start. She seemed to know her stuff, was funny, could joke around with the boys, etc. However, over time small things started to pop up. She didn’t seem to get what she was supposed to be doing. Her work started to get dumped on the rest of the team, she was still dishing out the jokes, but couldn’t really take them anymore, started talking about her sex life in extreme detail, spreading false rumors about people at work, talking about them behind their backs… Just little things really, but they added up to where I couldn’t stand her anymore. Finally, she reported me to HR for discrimination. I don’t actually remember what she said about me, but it was something ridiculous. Thankfully, my manager had known me for a while, and this kind of behaviour on my part seemed out of the ordinary. We talked about it, and she realized this lady was full of it. A short while later, she was let go as part of company restructuring. It was a bit of a nightmare to deal with her every day after she started getting on my nerves.
octavian_c
I used to work in an office and we had this new guy start. On his first day on the job he came in really early for some reason (keen I guess) and I arrived some time after him. We were the the only two in our companies section of the building besides the janitor who unlocks every morning. I went into the toilets to take my morning dump before too many of my colleagues arrived and I find this guy I’ve never met before standing with his back to the urinal with his pants around his ankles, peeing backwards into it. It looked like he was peeing out his butt. He looked up at me and I just sort of froze not really comprehending what I was seeing. Instead of reacting like any normal person would he just stared me down and continued peeing. He maintained eye contact the entire time. Unable to fathom the kind of guts this guy had I lost my nerve and just sort of backed out and shut the door. I saw him around a few times that morning and he would keep his eyes locked on mine no matter what way his body was facing. It would have been super uncomfortable even if I hadn’t caught him doing that. What makes him a nightmare co-worker is that he told EVERYONE in the office that he had caught me doing what I in fact had caught him doing. I never even heard him speak. The people in my office already thought I was a bit strange so when I protested and told them which way round it happened no one believed me. He quit by lunch time that same day.
anoddbodd
Here’s a story of 4 people being fired in one day for different reasons, a 5th unknown stealing money, and my 17 year old self wondering how did I get myself here?
Worked at a family owned fast food Italian place. Nice job, easy work, free food, decent hours, not bad for 17 year old high schooler.
I check the schedule for who I’m working with tomorrow and it’s Manager A and co-worker A that then switch shifts (I was across two shifts, after lunch and closing) with Manager B and Co-worker B. They’re all decent I suppose, though one blatantly did hour fraud (came in at 8:30, entered time as 8:00).
Shift goes to switch so and the Bs and As brief each other on what’s happening. Owner and Manager C (who’s the best one, no illegal stuff) come in and tell them all to pack up and leave. Turns out the As were in a relationship and were stealing money to fuel her pill addiction. The Bs were caught having sex in the office (manager was married), plus Bs hour fraud and were also fired. This all happens as I’m cleaning a table bewildered.
Thinking his stealing issues were over, owner leaves and Manager C calls employees to fill in for tomorrow’s vacancies.
Turns out, someone ELSE steals from the register the next day and we’re all told to submit to a lie detector test. Manager C comes up to me and says “We’re closing so you don’t have to come in anymore.” “But what about the lie detector test?” “Even if you told me you did it, I wouldn’t believe you. You’re fine.” That last part was nice (I didn’t steal it by the way).
RealFunnyTalk
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I used to run my family’s business almost 20 years ago. The business was a subcontractor for Home Depot/Lowes. When customer’s would buy stuff like security doors, or tool sheds and they wanted Home Depot to install/set it up for them in their homes, they’d farm that work out to us.
Anyway, I could go on for hours but every installer that worked for us had issues. Alcoholics, sloppy craftsmen, you name it. The majority of them had just worked for my uncle (the owner) for years despite their flaws so I was essentially stuck with them.
They’d routinely not show up for jobs, and thus the people running the back office would have to deal with the barrage of phone calls from pissed off customers who took time off work for their appointment windows, stuff like that.
One guy, his name was Mario, was a degenerate gambler and the only guy who did sheds. One time this massive shed job came through and it wasn’t like 10 minutes from a Casino. The evening before the job I had a chat with him about showing up at the site early and to not go to the casino. He swore to me he’d be there at 5am (this was a 2-day job, massive tool shed).
The next morning I come into the office and the voicemail is full. It’s 8am and the customer is PISSED. Mario? A no-show. I call him immediately and he picks up his cell, he assures me he didn’t go to the casino and is just stuck in traffic (slurred speech) yet I can clearly hear the sounds of slot machines going off in the background”clink clink clink, clank clank clank”…
Z0MBGiEF
I used to work at McDonald’s and there was this one manager that was just an absolutely horrible person. She barely spoke english, she couldn’t write in English properly.
So not only did she have problems with English, but she was the rudest person around. I asked her to throw out a straw wrapper as she was leaving after she clocked out, and she looks at me and goes “I’m off the clock” and then takes off.
At McDonald’s, the way the breaks work is that you get a 30 unpaid after some hours if possible, but every time I came in, it was like 30 minutes into my shift and she would me on my 30 minutes already. Okay so now I have a 10 nonpaid left. So about like 3 or 4 hours later I am really tired and need to sit down and eat something so I ask if I can go on my 10, she tells me soon, so I just say okay whatever I will just sneak some food real quick. The last 7 minutes of my shift she would tell me go on my 10 and at the point it was just like NO! I’m clocking out for the day because you cant give breaks the right way. On top of this I ask the general manager to speak to this individual shift manager and he tells me I need to sit down and get on the same page as her and I could not believe it. Almost everyone in that place hates her and keep in mind that the McDonald’s I worked at was privately owned and this manager supposedly came from a corporate location and it was just so terrible.
BAI112
So I was the underling and this was my boss, but still a coworker story.
So this guy was a jerk. I get told to do X and when I did X I then get told that I should have done Y.
One of the more memorable things that occurred happened in summer with 90+ degree weather. I had to take 4 computers into a building in about a 1/2 mile walk to and from the parking lot. So obviously, I am dripping sweat after my two trips. I then finish what I needed to do there and went back to the main office, not told anything. So the next day, I get called into a meeting. My boss then tells me he had a complaint I smelled from one of the ladies. I calmly stated, I delivered 4 machines and in 90+ degree weather. I also have hyperhydrosis, so I sweat a lot. He then immediately asks me why don’t I work out in a gym to solve the problem. Like losing a couple pounds would change that labor in 90+ degree weather would solve me sweating. It continued in a circular discussion like that. He then asked me why I couldn’t take meds to resolve the hyperhydrosis. I told him the meds are extremely dangerous since it won’t let your body sweat if I take it. He didn’t believe me and told me modern medicine should have solved that problem. And I was stupid for not taking dangerous meds.
The last incident was odd. I am an expert and he knows almost nothing of technology. I state a fact to him in his office on why I did something in some way. He then tells me “no you needed to do it X way” I then tell him that it would not work if I did X. We continued that argument for 30min-1hr before he called a coworker over the phone and he told him, what I did was right..
Loads of other incidents, but the guy was a jerk.
crazykid01
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