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30 Times Workers Did Something So Unhinged, They Became Office Legends For All The Wrong Reasons
Loud talking and gossip are the most irritating office pet peeves, according to a 2023 report from Robert Half.
Some awkwardness is to be expected, as many employees switched jobs during the 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 user Murkantilism made a post on the platform asking everyone to share the craziest things they've seen their colleagues do and has received plenty of stories of juicy workplace drama.
This post may include affiliate links.
#1
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 a*s 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 a*s. 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.
#2
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.
#3
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!"
#4
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 bad*ss 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 s**t over and eventually telling him to "GET THE F**K 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.
#5
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 us
seeing 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**
#6
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 s**t 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, f***s.
#7
Watched a coworker throw a fresh-out-the-oven pizza at a customer after they commented on her rack.
#8
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 a*****e 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." F*****g. Brilliant.
#9
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.
#10
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.
#11
i was a waiter in a relatively upscale restaurant in town, and one night we had a 25 person party for dinner in the front of the dining area. a fellow waiter was carrying water out for them. and being the kind of guy who hated multiple trips, had crowded all 25 glasses onto one tray.
i was watching from the back when i saw the first wobble. anyone who's worked in the restaurant biz knows that first wobble when carrying something heavy needs immediate attention before it becomes a...
"oh god..." the second wobble. by this time the world was moving in slow motion, and i felt rooted to the spot as i saw the tray start to seesaw back and forth. my friend looked over his shoulder at me, aghast and helpless. i could do nothing for him. but then i saw a look creep into his eyes...
without hesitation, he turned back and in one smooth motion hurled the entire tray of water glasses to one side. the cacophony of shattering glass and rushing water caused a sudden silence to sweep through the restaurant. and without missing a beat, my friend turned to the 25 person party, stunned and wide-eyed at his sudden violent action and said,
"those waters were bad, allow me to get you new ones."
and then he turned and walked back to pour more. without a single f**k given.
he and i cleaned up the mess while the order was being filled, i wasn't even mad.
#12
I was Operation Duty Officer for an airline in Canada. Our office was on the second floor of a hangar with planes and stuff. I had to supervise flight dispatchers. In those days, printers were not really reliable and one of the dispatchers seemed to be very unlucky with them. He was trying to print a flight plan with the weather forecast but every time, the paper would jam. After a certain amount of time, he had to redo the whole flight plan because it had "expired". After the third time of redoing his flight plan, when the paper jammed in the printer again, he just took the printer and threw it out of the window. It flew by the wing of an ATR42 and crashed landed next to the landing gear.
Everyone in the office went livid. I had to leave because I couldn't hold my laughter in.
#13
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.
#14
I work in a fairly large factory. This one guy, upon getting fired, rode his motorcycle all around the shop floor. The shop foremen chased him around for like 10 minutes before he finally left. Pretty epic goodbye, I'd say.
#15
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.
michael Chock 9 months ago
I dropped something while working a fryer, my brain caught up to my reflexes as my hand was wrist deep in the boiling hot fryer oil, fortunately my reflexes caught up to my brain and sent my hand into the sink full of cold water before it became deep fried. Whole thing happened in less than a second, didn't feel a thing. I don't think I could pull it off again if I tried
J C 9 months ago
That is the stupidest idea! Even if there is a way to do this with wetting your hand (not sure thats even true), it is so not worth it. Do you even know what happens when you get second and 3rd degree burns on your hands? Under the skin are structures that are vital to movement and they get scarred and may take many painful operations, a lot of therapy, etc to get moving again if they even do. I've seen it.
Somebodys grandmother 9 months ago
I have actually done this. Turned a springroll in the frier in a restaurant with my fingers.... I didn't 🙈 think until after... and I didn't get burned at all!!! It still amases me... that h🔥t oil!!!!
DUN DUN 9 months ago
if you wet ur hands first and bring it out quick enough, you won't be burned
Verena 9 months ago (edited)
Wanted to say the same, with the exact explanation as below (dip hand in water and, without shaking it off, in the oil to grab whatever you are frying. Be very quick, to get out before the thin film of water has evaporated). I have seen it working, but never dared to do the same.
Load More Replies...
rumple slunkskin 9 months ago
I once hired an ex con who had a sob story about wanting to turn his life around for his new baby, i lobbied hard to get him this job because fry cook is pretty low-stakes, and finding employment afterprison is hard. guy battered and fried his hand, thinking it would make a hand shaped batter creation... unsurprisingly, it didn't. about a month later he robbed the store with a squirt gun ike no one would know it was him. I refuse to ever be in charge of hiring again.
Chris Landrum 9 months ago
years ago, one of the top 5 students in our senior class was working at MCD's and put his hand into the frier to save a McNugget that fell in. Took awhile for the burn to heal
AspieGirl88 9 months ago
I wonder if he watched that YouTube video of that Indian chef who is seemingly immune to hot oil … as tempting as it may be to see if you have the same immunity, it’s not advisable. Burns can be very serious & you don’t want to ruin your hands forever. 🤔🤦♀️
#16
Back in the early 80's at a private tow pound in New York City I witnessed a guy take off a another guy's left arm with a machete, just above the elbow, in one stroke. The guy that had his arm sliced off was a pretty big big dude and the guy with the machete was a little guy from the islands (either Haiti or Jamaica I'm not sure) and both worked as tow truck drivers for the company that had the city contract to tow illegally parked cars in Manhattan. The big guy would merciless tease the little guy and had recently taken to smacking him on the back of the head whenever the opportunity presented itself. On the fateful day, after getting smacked in the head the little guy warned him that if he ever touched him again he would cut off his arm. The big guy couldn't resist and as the little guy walked by a few minutes later he smacked him on the head. The little guy went straight to the bosses office and asked to borrow $20 in advance on his salary which the boss was glad to do as up until that day the little guy was one of his best workers. The little guy walked a couple of blocks to a hardware store, bought a machete and had it sharpened, wrapped it up in a newspaper and returned to the tow pound. The big guy was sitting in his tow truck with his left arm out of the window and I was about 12 feet away when the little guy slid the machete from his makeshift newspaper scabbard and delivered the single blow. He then placed the machete on the floor and sat down in a chair to wait for the cops. There was lots of blood, screams from the big guy, yelling for ice to put the severed arm in, freaking pandemonium and the whole time the little guy just sat there and waited for the cops to arrive.
#17
I used to work at an electrical contracting company in the DC area. Our company had engineers and electricians working side by side. The engineers (college educated) were the project managers, the electricians (high school educated) did the install. Needless to say there was a lot of tension between the two camps.
Anyways, I worked on site at one of our government jobs. The project manager (PM), who was kinda a lazy bum, and was not liked by any of the electricians. So one day during the PMs two week vacation the head foremen gets some drywall guys to come in and remove his office door, drywall over it, and install a 2'x2' metal access panel to his office. They did the trim and painted over it all so it looked like it had always been that way.
The PM returns from his vacation and is LIVID. He didn't talk to anyone else in the office for almost a week. He cried all the way up to the upper-upper management and demanded the foremen get punished but nothing ever happened. Everyone back at corporate thought it was funny as hell.
Best part of it was he even had the alteration put into the blueprint/cad drawings of our office area, so even on the blueprint you could see where it designated a 2'x2' access panel to his 15'x15' office space. Foremen are awesome.
#18
One of my first jobs was at an amusement park and if you were a "good employee" (showed up on time and sober) you would get advanced pretty quickly. Soon I was in charge of giving people breaks and training new employees, which was a pretty sweet job (you got to basically do what you wanted as long as everyone got their break on time) and paid slightly more.
One day I go to give a break to a new guy, he smiles and takes his bag full of change (containing 1-2 grand in ones/fives/tens/twenties this late in the day) and runs off to presumably lock it in the little safes they give us to hold the money.
The guy never came back. Security and management come by, they ask me a bunch of questions about him, and eventually they realize that he gave completely fake information and worked one day so he could steal a couple thousand dollars. They never found the guy.
#19
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.
#20
I work at a printing company. We often print on foil paper. That's aluminum foil laminated to regular paper. On the press the rolls spin pretty fast and are up to five feet in diameter. They are essentially massive, 1500 pound capacitors.
One guy stands there holding his hand to the roll as it spins and waits for an unsuspecting passerby. When the victim walks by he reaches out to them and shoots a thick, crackling arc of static electricity at them, up to a foot away. He literally has a bright lightening bolt shooting from his fingertips.
#21
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.
ॐBoyGanesh 9 months ago
Kinda opposite happened to me 1st job outta college. About a year in, I had to take a two-week sick leave for in-patient surgery & recovery. Office mgr. didn’t believe me. Thought I wanted leave to travel. Emailed me a denial unless I explained (medically) why. Replied telling her she couldn’t ask that & I would have doctor’s release to return. While in hospital she called to ask how I was doing, but got nowhere. Showed up with flowers & got as far as nursing station, claiming to be my sister. They knew better. Called my mom claiming to be old school friend & my mom told her what was up. She proceeded to talk about it at work with people who were not her friends or associated with her. Told the entire break room my private info in hopes of encouraging folks to send me well wishes. I was contacted by random coworkers who were uncomfortable with her taking openly about my medical situation. DFEH investigated, she was fired, I got a huge severance.
#22
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!!
#23
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 a*s 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.
#24
Caught an employee yelling at my toaster after hours on the security camera.
#25
I work at a TV station. I've been here for about five years now. When I first started, about six months in, there was a station wide email about someone smearing s**t all over the stalls in the mens bathroom, and the janitorial service quit on the spot. Now, again, this is a TV News-station with reputable people in an average market.. I don't think they ever found out who did it, but I always had my suspicions.
#26
I large fella working with me years ago used to run and jump to hit the vending machines at work when a selected item failed to drop. I was on break with another fellow employee when her selection got stuck in the vending machine. The large fella takes 7 or 8 steps back and runs, jumps and with his legs tucked under his body smashes through the vending machine glass. The hollow whoosh noise was quickly followed by the tinkling of much glass and the stress of his large frame against the metal shelves. His look on his face will always be a treasure of mine. My co-worker and I stood there with our mouths open and a few seconds and while the large slightly scratched co-worker extricated himself from the machine's embrace, he reached in and grabbed the bag of potato chips for the female co-worker. So the story has a happy ending.
#27
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.
WindySwede 9 months ago
Autopilot and then mid pee realising and thinking "act like nothing is happening" ? Or just a perv? Or MHI or stress?
#28
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.
Marcellus II 9 months ago
I overlooked the "phone" part of "desk phone", because it started a new line... Was pretty impressed by a guy lifting a desk & shattering it, thought of Mr. Incredible at his insurance job.
#29
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.
#30
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.
What do you think ?
Keller Worthen 9 months ago
My story: I was becoming gradually fed up with my job at a grocery store, and eventually decided I had enough. I filled out a two weeks notice form, but there was only two lines on the "reason for leaving" question. I wrote a two and a half page essay on why I was leaving and stapled it to the form.
Keller Worthen 9 months ago
My story: I was becoming gradually fed up with my job at a grocery store, and eventually decided I had enough. I filled out a two weeks notice form, but there was only two lines on the "reason for leaving" question. I wrote a two and a half page essay on why I was leaving and stapled it to the form.
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