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Most workplaces have a number of guidelines for what is and isn’t appropriate at work. However, humans being humans, folks find all sorts of ways to do truly disgusting things in the workplace. Normally, this is where the beleaguered folks at HR have to step in.
Someone asked “Human Resources people, what are some NSFW complaints you've had to investigate about your workers?” and netizens shared their horror stories. From inappropriate use of office equipment to outlandish and bizarre behavior, get comfortable as you read through, upvote the most shocking examples and be sure to share your own thoughts and experiences below.
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#1
Not HR, but I was a manager of a retail store so I did a lot of HR related stuff.
Most of my employees were women; most of my customers were women. The women's bathroom got 90% of the attention, but that said, the men's room was a bad time with the rare man that came in.
Day comes, we get a complaint about the smell coming from the bathrooms. I'm a big guy, and my main rule was that I wouldn't ask my employees to so things I wouldn't do because I made much more than they did, so I put on the latex gloves and marched back to the men's room.
It was fine. Completely fine. Well, a scrap or two or toilet paper but fine.
I open the women's room door and I am struck by the stench of rot. It basically knocks me off my feet. I open the door all the way..
The ceiling, floor, and every wall is covered in s**t. Finger marks in it so it was *painted.* I take a minute to be shocked, close the door, tape it off, tell my boss I'm calling a clean up crew. He says no, I can clean it. I tell him he can get bent, if he'd seen what I'd seen, he would know better. He says okay.
10 days or so later, it happens again. And at that point, the only women in the store had been my employees. It was essentially an open and shut case--one is a barely functional germophobe, and the other had washed her hands at least 5 times, smelled like death, and wouldn't make eye contact with me.
"Maria, what the f**k are you doing?"
"Sometimes I smoke a little somethin' and then I hear the bugs in the toilet. I just have to fish them out before they drown."
"Uh huh. So I'm gonna go find a pen that I don't want anymore, you can keep it after you touch it, and just write down everything you just told me and how many times you've done that. That way I can figure out what to do from here."
While she did that, I called my boss.
"Hey, so there's a problem with Maria."
"When there's an employee, there's no problems, just opportunities."
"Great, so Maria has an opportunity with doing d***s then smearing s**t on the walls because she hears bugs in the toilet."
Obviously she got fired, but I kept her on staff long enough to get her into rehab.
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#2
Not HR, but I had to report a guy to HR.
He (a full grown adult man) would PRETEND to wash his hands.
If he assumed nobody was in the bathroom, he would walk in, turn the faucet on, go to the urinal as it ran, walk back to turn it off, grab a dry towel, wipe his hands with a dry paper towel, then leave.
Now, some people may think that I shouldn't care. However, this guy's job was to touch/package hundreds of pieces of medical devices going to compromised individuals.
I left the job shortly after that, but old work friends said he got fired for a pile of other things, but the not washing hands was directly mentioned and supported by others who reported him as well.
#3
Around the year 2008, our IT director came into my office and wanted me to see something that he had discovered in our internet surveillance software. A guy in accounting had installed a program on his computer to make it appear that he was on yahoo while he was actually surfing p**n. There were 1000’s of images saved in a hidden folder on his computer. It was an open and shut investigation. Also explains why he took such long bathroom breaks. The dude just about passed out when we confronted him. As I was walking him out of the building, he asked if I was going to tell his fiance. Uh no way dude, but I will share it on Reddit in 2024.
Tom Brincefield 6 months ago
He was lucky they just fired him. A couple of decades ago, I served in a local grand jury. And they presented a case where the IT guitar the local vocational school was caught with almost a terabyte of downloaded porn on the school's computer system. This was when a gigabyte was a lot of information. We indicted him.
#4
I was the manager. An employee complained that there were condoms in her garbage can. Often. We installed a camera in the hallway outside her office after the third or fourth time. It was her. With different guys. A coworker who knew her husband found one, so she made upba story about people breaking into her office after hours and doing it on her desk. But she was staying late and had at least three guys she admitted to after she got caught.
#5
Someone calling a black employee the N-word and then the manager retaliating against that black employee for “making a big deal out of it”. Several people fired and a generous severance for the victim (who very much wanted to leave the company and had a new job lined up).
#6
Not HR, but I work in a hospital setting and heard about it from HR. The hospital I used to work at had generic ID cards (i.e. they had your name only, not your title). A housekeeper (aka janitor) bought a white doctor's coat and stitched his name in it to pass off as a doctor. Thankfully he never attempted patient care- he only did it to hit on nurses.
Supposedly he was quite successful! He only got found out because a nurse he used to be with caught him with another nurse, and a sexual harassment complaint was made against him to retaliate. I can only imagine HR's face when they slowly realized that there was no Dr. "John Smith", only a housekeeper John Smith!
Enuya 6 months ago (edited)
It's rather sad that he thought he needs to pretend someone with higher status to find a partner. And also, accusing someone of sexual harassment to retaliate is a new low... and one of the reasons why so many peopke still don't take these accusations seriously. All in all while the guy did a stupid thing, I sort of feel sorry for him.
#7
A warehouse worker complained about an older female colleague who constantly pinched his bum and would make sexual comments about him. She tried to make light of the whole thing and implied he was over reacting and the complaint was frivolous. I left before there was any conclusion to the mess.
#8
Somewhat NSFW. One of our executives was working abroad when he had a mental breakdown and disappear. The country he was working in was not extremely modernized.
Fearing he was taken hostage, we engaged a security service to locate and retrieve him. 4 weeks later they found him almost 300km from where he disappeared. He had started a cult, claimed to be the living embodiment of the damned. He had almost 300 followers.
The security company extracted him and he spent 3 months in a mental hospital. It's almost funny if he wouldn't have castrated himself and at least 40 of his followers.
#9
A minor, sending everyone video of him having sex with another minor who also worked there. Then an adult manager who decided she should proposition the male minor because of his “performance” in the video.
#10
Employee coming in early and taking a dump on bosses desk.
#11
Not HR but IT. I told this story recently, but it goes like this.
We had a break in. It was going to be a week till the new security system was installed, so we hired an off duty cop to watch the place at night.
The next day my boss (a nosey a*s) wanted to know what he was doing on the computer all night, so I checked his Internet history.
It took be.a.while to figure out what was going on because it was simultaneous, but eventually here's what I got.
He had 2 windows open all night.
One, as you might expect, had naked ladies on it.
The other was dead bodies. Mostly rotting.
Needless to say, he was not asked back.
#12
We had to fire an employee, who worked on an offshore rig, for masturbating too much. He was repeatedly caught and given warnings. It got to be so bad that the cleaning crew said his sheets “felt like potato chips.”.
Guy-Incognito 6 months ago
Lol stuck on an off shore oil rig for weeks and you can't even have a w*nk?
#13
I was managing a drugstore and was called in because two pharmacy assistants were beating up a pharmacist.
Turns out he was having sex with both of them. He was married and was telling both of them he was about to leave his wife for her.
1- I was happy they beat him up and not each other.
2- Both girls got fired because they instigated the right. At that time in the industry, you kept every pharmacist you got. I understood the decision, but I hated it.
#14
My old job had security go through and check to make sure the offices were locked at the end of the day. So as a result they more than once walked in on people f*****g in offices.
The best example was a manager with an engineer from a different department. You could argue it wasn’t too bad since he wasn’t sleeping with someone he had direct oversight over, the only problem being what his department was. He was the manager of HR.
Needless to say he was no longer employed there after that.
#16
Not human resources but I need to get this out of my brain.
I was working in Germany on an IT green card, and so was this dude. He banged on about being from Pakistan but NOT being Pakistani. Like literally every day. He is Indian! Literally every day exclaiming he's Indian but was raised in Pakistan. But he is NOT Pakistani.
Whatever. No one cares.
He poured powdered Tang (orange drink) on a plate and ate it with a spoon. Every day.
He YouTube'd Britney Spears songs over his desk speakers and sang along with his super high pitched voice.
He wore 3-piece suits when then rest of the company wore khakis/jeans/casual clothing.
His head was shaped like a volleyball but had no neck.
He lived in the West side, but one day announced that I, east sider, could find better places to eat (he was stalking me). He would take the U-bahn to my neighborhood on the weekends.
One day, he came to the office with black sesame seeds(Nigella?)
He told me that they were a gift from his mother. Because they were for fertility. Because I needed to bare a child(?!?!?!?!??!!?!)
The HR woman didn't even know how to handle everything.
Bookworm 6 months ago
Buried the lede here. His obsession with his nationality, his dietary habits and his physical appearance and clothing style might make him the office weirdo, but aren't actually HR problems. The stalking and the fertility treatment, on the other hand, are extremely creepy and I hope this guy got fired.
#17
IT - years ago I had a coworker complain that his computer was slow and acting funny...all the telltale signs of a virus/ malware issue. I told him upfront, tell me where you were online and what you did so that I'm not spinning my wheels finding the root cause. He swore he didn't do anything. Fine. Dug into it and found thousands of farm animal p**n images and videos. Seriously... thousands.
Glasofruix 6 months ago (edited)
Seriously, if you have questionnable material on your computer, unless it's in an encrypted folder IT would, most of the time unwillingly, find it. It's even worse when the material is of more personnal diy nature. Also urologists, holy mother of god, turn off previews in the folders.
#18
So far, the most NSFW complaint that I dealt with was a male employee who propositioned a female coworker offering his entire paycheck for a hookup. This dude was married so how he would explain a whole two weeks worth of pay gone to the wife, I don’t know.
#19
A friend of mine is an engineer that was using ChatGPT to help write his Emails and help with Excel formulas and macros. However, he was signed into ChatGPT with his personal Email account, which also had a log of the more *private* writing exercises he would have ChatGPT do for him.
This was noticed during a Zoom call when he was presenting a report by sharing his desktop. An eagle-eyed viewer noticed the ChatGPT logs in the sidebar while he was cycling between Internet tabs, and managed to grab a screenshot of it.
So the sidebar read things like "How to reference adjacent cells in data validation." "Automatically outputting spreadsheet data into a formated Email." "The sexy island adventures of Dread Pirate Booty Beard." "Importing generated MD5 file hashes into a cell."
IT investigated his computer and reviewed the ChatGPT logs. It was determined he was writing ChatGPT erotica in his free time, and the nature of the erotica wasn't anything too terribly outlandish. But the funniest thing about it was how 80% of the erotic conversation was this poor guy constantly fighting with ChatGPT to ignore its content filters and to stop using the term "female genitalia" when he obviously wanted his smut less clinical sounding.
He had an uncomfortable meeting with HR, was notified that his "personal projects" should never ever touch company computers, and he had to create a new Email account to sign in to ChatGPT. Which caused a problem. He was paying premium for his personal account, so he had to choose between premium ChatGPT for his career, or premium ChatGPT for smut.
He chose smut.
I don't blame him. Dude's paying for it with is own money, so he should use it for personal use. If the company notices a dip in quality work because he has to use an older ChatGPT model, well, they mandated it, they can pay for it.
Upstaged75 6 months ago
"The sexy island adventures of Dread Pirate Booty Beard" just made me spit coffee on my keyboard! :)
#20
Tldr: employee mu***red two people, chopped them up using work knives, and soaked them in acid. Was caught because his roommate turned him in. First month at a new job. Was not HR, but the safety manager. Was asked to collect all knives assigned to the overnight clean-up crew and turn them into HR. After that, numbers were engraved on knives. They were to be assigned and accounted for at the end of the day. Weird, but whatever. The day before the knife collection, one of the overnight employees came in to see if he could collect his paycheck earlier. Sometimes, they showed up a couple of days early. They had not this time. I chatted with this guy on the floor. Nice enough guy. No big deal. I told my boss, HR, that he had come in. It was an offhand comment. Nothing I was concerned about. My boss freaked out, told me if he came in again to call the police. She wouldn't answer my follow up questions about why. That's right, she never told me about the m***er. Later, the police had me confirm that a knife they had was indeed one of my employers knives and that this employee had access to it. I found out after that that this was not the first time an employee at that place had m***red someone.
#21
I got 3 good ones, think grocery store setting 1. The store has a public bathroom downstairs that was always destroyed. It was in a bad part of town and d**g users would shoot up and s**t all over the floor, people would p**s on the walls, and generally not usable. There were also employee bathrooms upstairs. This particular employee didn't want to go up the stairs so he would go in the coolers and p**s in the drain. One day there was a young girl (18 or 19) that was in the cooler and he didn't see her but she saw him drop pants to the ankles and p**s down the drain. He was let go. 2. One of the employees was a drunk who would constantly talk about how he would get drunk and beat his wife because she would talk back to him. After a while he would complain about how she didn't have sex with him anymore. Another employee (who is gay and very open about it) told him, "Me and you can go back into the cooler right now and I'll suck you off." Then proceeded to offer him sex acts constantly throughout the week. It was brought up with HR with 6 witness statements and we were sure he was gonna be gone. He wasn't fired. 3. There were 2 overnight employees, one a janitor and one an overnight stocker, that were really good at what they did. They had been both working there for 20+ years and had no complaints against them. One day there were multiple lockers broken into and they pulled security footage on the break rooms and watched all of it. These 2 employees were f*****g in the break room for 3 to 4 hours every time they worked together. Our footage only goes back a week or so, so we don't know how long it has been going on. They still managed to get everything else that was assigned to them on half of a shift.
#22
Not in HR but was a manager at a grocery store. Had to investigate complaints that a cashier was having sex with people in their cars while she was on break. She was :/.
#23
Not HR, but was a manager. Had to let an employee go because he decided to send unsolicited d**k pics to a cashier and tried to solicit her for a threesome with his girlfriend. I think calling HR was her way of declining the invitation.
#24
I worked in the construction industry when this happened. Our call center received a call about an employee (in a company truck) having sex with another man in a public park bathroom. Apparently, some guy took his grandson in there to use the bathroom, saw it, and called it in. We checked his truck’s GPS and sure enough he was going to that park regularly during the workday/after work. There was no actual evidence of wrongdoing and no history of disciplinary action. Per company policy, reasonable personal use of company vehicles was permitted so he wasn’t even really violating any policy. The manager damn near lost his mind when I explained he could only address use of the vehicle lol.
To make it that much messier, the employee was married to a woman and their shared son also worked at the same location. Controlling the rumor mill and subsequently updating company policies took much more effort than actually handling the situation.
#25
Manager here, not HR. Female employee sent a NSFW video of herself to another female employee who made the complaint. Last message between them had been months before and was work related, so there was no prior contact that would suggest she might want to receive a video like that. Sender didn’t deny it, but thought it was not that serious and was shocked to lose her job over it.
#26
I didn’t have to do this, but my black female supervisor had to deal with it. White male Employee was seen on an old episode of Jerry Springer for being super racist- N word and all. He claimed it was “all for TV” but there was a lot of animosity after that.
Freya (she/they/he) 6 months ago
Same thing happened with one of my coworkers. She ended up quitting her job due to racism from a customer at the store that has a long history of misconduct
#27
I work in IT. We had a user with personal p**n on a micro sd drive. She was using her laptop during a meeting when she accidentally clicked on it in file explorer. Thumbnails were turned on so everyone got a good view. I had to search her computer for more. I told them I can just reload it and it will be gone but they wanted more evidence. Luckily I never found any more.
#28
Not HR, but IT. There were only 2 cases I had to report to higher ups. 1. My first IT job was at a MSP (think third party IT). I had to manually apply patches to computers at theaters after hours. It was mostly mindless so I was sitting next to my GF at the time doing it while watching a movie. I was watching the movie when my girlfriend was like "WTF are you doing?" I was remoted into a computer and there was a bunch of gay p**n on the screen. Turns out it was that user's personal photos they were uploading to their computer. 2. My second week at a job I noticed a user changed their computer desktop to a very famous picture of a migrant family that died trying to cross into the US. The pic is their dead bodies floating in a river. I let my boss know and that we should lock desktops down so people can't change them.
#29
Not in HR, but I was in orientation with a guy (just he and me) and HR was explaining why you can't have any p**n on company property. He argued that if he wants to sit in his car and read Hustler at lunchtime, it's nobody's business because it's on his own time and in his car. Surprisingly, he didn't lose his job, but he got written up three times in 30 days for various infractions, and he was gone.
DramaDoc 6 months ago
I teach college and every semester part of my 1st day of class speech to students is to please, please, PLEASE don't watch p0rn on personal devises during class. I caught 1 student 1 times years ago and now it's part of my spiel. Only now I add that if caught, I will put said images on the big screen and then the entire class will critically evaluate lifestyle choices and make wild assumptions about personal, er... endowments.
#30
I was the IT guy HR would call when something internet nsfw oriented would arise. So many people doing so many stupid things on the company internet. Downloading p**n was of course the most common but one instance I saved someone their job. P**n ads in the logs appear as if the person visited the site but only for a few seconds and then another. I trained HR to be able to tell the difference when going through their internet reporting software.
What do you think ?
Zephyr 6 months ago
So I've learnt that most workers are toddlers, sex offenders, tattletales, inconsiderate and HR is just useful for firing staff and not preventing workplace discomfort, so sad
PeTeH 6 months ago
One time at a chemical plant turn around, where they fix and maintain things, a welder had sex with a fire guard in a tent built around the welding spot. They fired the guard, because it's hard to find good welders, but not fire guards.
DC 6 months ago
Good Welders are a rare breed ... understandable, that, for that reason. But ... still ... why on the job? Why in a way that gets you caught? Why?
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Zephyr 6 months ago
So I've learnt that most workers are toddlers, sex offenders, tattletales, inconsiderate and HR is just useful for firing staff and not preventing workplace discomfort, so sad
PeTeH 6 months ago
One time at a chemical plant turn around, where they fix and maintain things, a welder had sex with a fire guard in a tent built around the welding spot. They fired the guard, because it's hard to find good welders, but not fire guards.
DC 6 months ago
Good Welders are a rare breed ... understandable, that, for that reason. But ... still ... why on the job? Why in a way that gets you caught? Why?
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