30 Spicy, Wild, And Disturbing Workplace Incidents That HR People Had To Sort Out

Was once asked to investigate a sexual harassment situation where three different women were coming on to a male coworker throughout their shift. I took down the details, got the names, easy peasy investigation so I thought.

A week later, nobody by these descriptions or names had ever worked for the company. I decided to talk to the gentleman again. After a lengthy conversation where things didn’t quite stack up I asked him how these women communicated with him.

I s**t you not, with a straight face, he looks me in the eye and replies “telepathically” like I’m some kind of idiot.

I had never sent an employee for psychological evaluation up to that point and I hope never to have to again.

So yeah I was asked by a delusional schizophrenic to conduct a sex harassment investigation on the voices in his head.

I don’t work in HR but I do have a nightmare HR story. When I was on my gap year I worked a part time job as a fitness instructor at a leisure centre. One of my coworkers, call him Bill, was a nice guy and I would often sit and chat to him on my breaks etc. Long term GF and baby at home.

As part of my job I used to teach spinning classes on a fairly regular basis. I would normally leave my phone in the staff room while I was teaching, or behind the reception desk. Both these places were secure and my phone had a passcode on it. I didn’t want it going off while I was teaching because the when it received calls/texts it interfered with the stereo in the spin studio. I didn’t have a locker or anything where I could store it.

Sometime in around January I was at at uni for an interview weekend. My girlfriend at the time had come to pick me up and while she was waiting in the car, she was scrolling through my messages on my iPad. When I got in the car she showed me one of my chats and said why did you send this video to Bill? I had no recollection of sending any videos to Bill, since I did not speak to him outside of work beyond “I’m going to be late” or similar.

I thought it was a mistake but as I scrolled further back up I saw that “I” had sent this same video to Bill a couple of weeks prior. Feeling thoroughly perplexed I clicked into the video and saw it was a video of me (20F) and my girlfriend (26F) on holiday in Thailand. I’d like to stress that it was not a sexual video, we were just joking around but we had just got out the shower and were both naked.

At this point I’m still thinking it’s some kind of big mistake as Bill is a nice guy with a baby at home. However, I look a little closer and realise that the dates / times of when “I” had sent these videos was at times I was teaching spin classes and therefore had left my phone unattended.

Bill, being the sicko he was, had the obviously seen me put my passcode into my phone during all the times we had been sat chatting on breaks etc. and had memorised it. He had then taken the opportunity to scroll through all my personal photos and videos when I had left my phone unattended to go and teach classes. I’m assuming that he had deleted the video once, hence why he had sent it to himself again a couple of weeks later. He’d also deleted the chat history from my iPhone but hadn’t realised it synced to my iPad (this was in around 2012 btw). I would only have been about 18/19 at the time when the videos were taken.

Obviously I reported this to my manager and to HR but it was a bit of a minefield for them to navigate. I don’t know what he told them but I imagine it was along the lines of saying I sent them to him of my own free will, how would he have known my password etc. It took a long while to get sorted but in the end he did get sacked, thankfully. The police also paid him a visit so I’m sure he had some explaining to do to his SO.

I had an employee put in a complaint because another employee didn't want to give them a hug. There was no reason for a hug. The other employee was very sympathetic when I spoke to them (because I had to!!!) and just didn't want to hug people.

The original employee was insistent and complained to anyone that would listen. Most of the staff took her side and thought he was a jerk for not wanting a hug. I kinda wanted to hug him for the s**t he was given for wanting the basic human right of autonomy....

Not HR, but I had a coworker at a bakery who quit in a most spectacular fashion. She was quirky to say the least. The first time I met her, I was shoulder deep in a big bowl of buttercream when I felt a hard slap on my a*s. I turned around, totally shocked, my arm covered in frosting, to see a total stranger. She grinned and said "Hey, girlfriend. Which one's your favorite Prince song?" I said I wasn't sure and she responded "Me neither, but if I had to pick I'd take broccoli over asparagus any day."

One day she was working up front, making coffees, and helping customers and what have you. She was in the midst of filling the honey container that went out for customers to use for their coffees. This was a messy sticky job, as the honey came in a 50 lb tub, and it needed to go into one of those tiny bears. Our manager asked her to come to the back for a second. I was back by the ovens pulling out a rack of cookies and I overheard the manager informing her that she was being written up for tardiness. Which was fair, she was 15-30 minutes late every day. He asked her to sign a document saying that she had been informed of the write up so it could go in her file.

Girlfriend lost her mind. She started shouting and insulted everything from his choice of shoes to his wife's hair, to the way he walked. She then threw her hat at him, ripped off her shirt (buttons and all) tossed it on his desk while shouting "I quit your dumb a*s job". She then preceded to take off her pants as well, tossed them in the guy's face and left. She walked across the bakery, through a line of customers, across the parking lot, and out to the bus stop to wait for the bus while shouting, wearing only her undergarments, and smeared with sticky honey. Our co-workers were giving the manager some very dirty looks. The thing that has always baffled me about this whole exchange is that the hat and shirt were issued by the bakery and had the logo on them, but the pants belonged to girlfriend. Why in the world did she decide to take off the pants too?

When my wife was pumping, she'd put the milk in an insulated lunch bag and keep it in the break room fridge. She kept it discreet. Someone must have looked in the bag because HR informed her she could no longer keep milk there because an anonymous coworker complained that knowing the milk was there made him think about breasts (!?). They also told her she had to pump in the bathroom. My wife refused and quoted the law that requires companies to provide a room to pump in. HR lady wasn't having it. My wife threatened to sue and informed them that the optics of all this would be bad seeing it was breast feeding awareness week and the company was involved in the cause. Long story short, HR lady barely kept her job, had to apologise to my wife, and had to go to sensitivity training.

I had one employee submit a form to increase her own salary, she also forged her manager's signature.

Like, for real?

Ok, here goes:

I am not in HR, but I worked at a small company (approx. 50 people) who hired a new receptionist (I'll call her Jen). She was nice enough, though the more I talked to her, the more I caught her in little lies about her life/family/etc. I thought it was weird but just a quirk, nothing major.

One day, we get an email from HR that sadly, Jen's husband had passed away and there was a collection for flowers, etc. Everyone felt terrible, she was only mid-thirties, no kids, and had talked fondly of this guy (I'll call him Frank). She got 2 weeks off for bereavement, and came back as shaken up as anyone who just lost their spouse would be.

One day, I had to cover the reception area while Jen took a break. Imagine my surprise when I get a call asking for her...from her husband! I asked who it was, and made him repeat it, and he repeated, "This is Frank, Jen's husband." I wasn't sure if it was a prank or a goddamn ghost, but I freaked out and didn't tell anyone for months.

When I was finally ready to quit that job, my coworkers took me out for a goodbye party. I got drunk and mentioned the story to the HR lady, thinking I was going to shock her with my secret knowledge. "Oh yeah," HR lady says, "we know. She wanted 2 more weeks of vacation, which she got as bereavement. But there's nothing we can do about it because she knows the company President is sleeping with half of the admins and threatened to blackmail him."

Great place to work. I also got harassed by my boss for months, and HR told me not to make a big deal of it because "he said he was sorry."

I work for the civil service in the HR department, and I’ve heard some crazy things. A lot comes to mind, but I suppose the first thing that I thought of was the time that we were clearing out room old paperwork and I was relatively new. Some of the older colleagues were commenting on some of the files we were finding as they remembered the cases. Things like “Oh I remember this woman, she got married to this guy in the Post Office” or “This guy go through Stage 4 cancer, good for him”.

One of the files they picked up they just said casually “Remember this job? He’s the one that stabbed his manager in the face and ended up with a promotion. Crazy.” ... and just moved right on past. I was like woooah hold up, I need the end to that story please.

Turns out they were out for a Christmas dinner and this guy had a fight with his manager, grabbed a steak knife and stabbed him in the cheek. Because of some strange circumstances at the time in government and who he was connected to, they couldn’t or wouldn’t fire him so they decided to transfer him to a different department. Only that there were no more positions left at his grade, and he wouldn’t settle for a lower grade so they ended up promoting him to a higher position including all benefits and pay. Civil service eh?

My dad was pretty high up in HR for a F500 company, he had some great firing stories.

They had to fire one of their VPs because he was stealing bacon from the cafeteria every morning. He'd get his tray and put his newspaper over the bacon and then go through the cashier line. He lost a $200k/yr job over 60 cents worth of bacon every day.

He also handled the on the job deaths since it was a utility company. Since it was a power company, many of the power plants were cooled with water from natural bodies of water. The plants would have a water intake pipe submerged in a river for this purpose. They were big too, easily seven or eight feet in diameter.

The intakes would fill up with debris from time to time and they'd have to send a diver down into it to clean it out. The intakes used an impeller to pull in the water, which is basically just a big fan blade. The impeller would have to be stopped for the diver to go down in there. One time they sent a diver down there thinking the impeller was stopped, but it wasn't. The diver was dead before they could pull him out. Evidently, there wasn't much left of him and the company ended up having to shell out a lot of money for psychotherapy for the guys that had to go down in there and recover what was left of him.

I am on the HR team that supports a wide variety of US cities for our company, including our colorful Florida locations. This is the best story I heard.

We had some woman trying to avoid doing work by sitting out in her car in the parking lot. While she was hiding out there, she needed to use the restroom. Well, instead of going back inside (or doing literally anything else) she decides to pee out her car window. Even though I am also a woman, I was impressed and disgusted by the physics behind this feat. She had stuck her bare a*s outside the window and just went for it. Unbeknownst to her, her male co-worker had arrived at work late due to an appointment. He drove past to find a parking spot as this was happening, and got full view. He then reported the incident to us.

One of our HR people had to investigate this, and sure enough, parking lot cameras could corroborate his story. Our HR person confronted the woman. Her response: "Well how did he know it was me?? It could have been anyone." We thought, ok fair enough. The cameras aren't CSI grade zoom, so we only saw the a*s part. It was harder to completely identify the face. So we went back to the male peer and asked how he knew it was her. His response? "Oh it was definitely her. The face tattoos are pretty recognizable."

We definitely don't get paid enough for this.

EDIT: for you investigative sleuths out there...our cameras are not as amazing as you think they are. It's a parking lot, not the white house. The one camera that caught the event didn't have hyper zoom on the license plate. That's why we have a witness.

I was sitting in the HR office with one of the members of HR, I was waiting on her to finish a form so that we could go eat lunch. Suddenly, this guy comes in, he was a young temp employee and had only been there a week or so, and says he has something he needs to talk about. I start to get up to leave when he blurts out that he doesn't like that fact that there are so many gays and lesbians working in the company. Once he says that I sit right back down. The HR employee asks him to clarify and he goes on about how his trainer was gay and his team lead is gay and his manager is a lesbian (all true) and he doesn't feel comfortable working around all these gays and lesbians. The HR employee asks him is anyone has every sexually harassed him, which he says they haven't. She then says 'so you want me to fire these employees, strictly based on their sexual orientation, just so you don't feel uncormfortable?' He says yes, after which she tells him to leave the office. She then calls in his manager and talks with her about it, he ends up quitting by the end of the week.

We had a woman show up to work in a fishnet shirt and a black bra, which basically meant she was wearing a bra around the office because the fishnet did nothing to hide her skin. Her male manager came to me with an exhausted look on his face and asked me to come talk to his employee about dress code. I had to take the 40+ year old woman into an office and explain she had to go home and change, and no, she wouldn’t be paid during her time away from the office because she violated dress code.

She demanded I call my boss (regional HR director) because she said I was lying and being a racist. We made the call, she got sent home for the full day without pay, and we wrote her up for it. She left shouting about how I was a racist and she was going to file a complaint.

This lady eventually got fired for a bunch of other insanity, including having sex with a coworker in our parking lot with the door open.

I’m very glad I no longer work in HR.

1) I had a bookkeeper that paid himself two checks every week. We did not catch it for a year.

2) Another bookkeeper quit and files for unemployment. He then claimed a claim with EEOC that he had a disability and we failed to make accommodations for him. The disability was alcoholism, and the accommodations were leaving early to attend AA meetings. Seriously, we had to hire a lawyer to fight that.

3) A guy I hired hurt himself on the first hour of the first day of work, he claimed he fell and hit his head on the wall. He was out for weeks on workman's comp form the concussion. Then when he came back on light duty, he could only do desk work but managed to fall again in the bathroom and hit his head again. It took me 9-months to get rid of him. It turns out this was not his first rodeo, when I called his former employer the lady I spoke to made an offhand comment about workplace accidents and head injuries and the importance of cameras in the workplace

4) While doing a remodel of a museum, one of my employees helped himself to a gun that was on display. It was very ugly and embarrassing for everyone. My company was kicked off the job and banned from ever working for them again. I fired the guy and he filed a discrimination claim with EEOC because I did not fire the whole crew, just him.

I got more..

I had a friend working a GM when HR thought it was a good idea to test everyone on the skill set needed for their department regardless of how long they were in their position. Long careers, 15, 20, 25 years were ruined because even though they worked there for a long time with a long string of great performance reviews, they didn't pass the test that measured what HR thought was required for the department.

Say your a materials expert working in a design department. You may know barely enough in the CAD system to draw a cylinder. On the other hand, given a cylinder, you can whip out all the properties that cylinder would have if it were made from aluminum, cold rolled steel, fiber glass etc. You'd be out of your job because HR said you had to have a certain level of CAD expertise even if it wasn't relevant to your role in the design process.

I’ve got a good one. Last place I worked was a crappy internet company. I was on tech support, the higher ups fed us all lies to tell customers when their service was bad. The GM at the time was a smile at you when you’d talk to him and then humiliate you in front of everyone kinda boss. And the owner was a family friend of my wife, a youth leader for the church and young marrieds group. But at work he was rude cussed at us, total fake act. I was working a pretty entry level position at the time but my wife ended up with a health diagnosis that required us to need more money for treatments so I setup a meeting with owner, expressed my struggle and asked for growth opportunities and training to move up in the company. He seemed like he genuinely cared and said we’d talk again soon. Mind you he spent half of every year in Austria for the youth program so getting to sit down with him was a rare opportunity. Side note, a few projects he put me on required all his logins to manage his yelp page and have him sign off to have a graphic designer paid for a troubleshooting guide we designed, I sent maybe 7 emails requesting the same info and he would never reply. Anyways a week goes by and then he calls me into the office, here I am all stoked for some good news. He proceeded to point out how the projects he put me on weren’t complete, I tried to explain the reason but he didn’t want to hear it. And then he began mocking me using a stupid voice about how my wife had health issues and that I needed more money. And laughed at me, tore me a new one then fired me on the spot. Of course I could go into the aftermath but there is a satisfying ending here. A couple years later it comes out that a family in Virginia is pressing charges against him in regards to somethings he did with an underaged girl. Mind you he’s a good looking guy in his early thirties with a wife and 3 young boys. Turns out he was conducting private bible studies with some of the girls over seas, having them pray together and then make them, pleasure him. Yeah dudes in jail in Virginia for 7+ years. Your sin always finds you out.

Came in to work early for a morning shift (work in an industrial lab). Heard noises from the back corner of the office portion of the building but can't make out what they are because of distortion. Head that way to see what was going on as I was the only one there (so I thought) at 3 am. See my lab manager f*****g the district manager (her boss) while the HR Rep for the district is sitting there ... enjoying the view. I NOPED and went to the lab and tried to forget what happened.

Saw a guy blatantly lie in his recruitment form....(watching him fill it out in front of me!)...it was total bollocks....apparently he was 15th in line to the throne, went to Eaton, studied at Oxford and served in the Army for 9 years after training at Sandhurst....not bad for a 21 year old! Who had in fact spent 3 years in a Young Offenders institute, battling a drug problem......

A friend of mine who did HR for a museum just reminded me of this one: It was a history museum, dealing in famous people from American history, and one of the senior museum guys was an expert on ... let's say Alexander Hamilton. Gradually, over the course of a couple years, it became clear that at some point this guy had started believing *he was Alexander Hamilton.* Either literally, or reincarnated, or possessed -- I have no idea. His e-mails only used words and phrases that appeared in Hamilton's writing (which made for high hilarity when they wanted to talk about an interactive online exhibit), and when people insulted him/Hamilton he would start calling them 18th century names and get pissed they were impugning his/Hamilton's honor. He started getting angry at the other museum guys if they tried to put "wrong" things in the Hamilton exhibit (things that didn't suit his preferred narrative of Hamilton).

When he challenged another employee to a duel because he was angry at the verbiage on a sign explaining an exhibit item, they had to call the police and have him escorted off the premises and get a restraining order. It was INSANE.

(the figure was not Alexander Hamilton, but this guy did literally challenge another employee to a duel and appeared extremely ready to follow through, to the death. The police put him in the hospital with a psychiatric hold, I don't know what happened after that.)

There was a dude in our other facility that was going around and wiping their a*s and shoving the s**t back up into the toilet paper dispenser so that when the next person goes to reach ...

My friend who worked in HR told me about her old job where the boss had drilled a hole from his office through to the ladies changing rooms and was perv whacking it every chance he could get. They found out because someone saw the light through the hole as he took the cover off for a peek. He denied everything and they had to take a dna sample from the carpet under the hole which confirmed it was a) him and b) that he had indeed been whacking away.