30 Infamous Workplace Scandals That Made For A Spicy Workday

Old man who owned our company retired and let his son run the company. Son got caught having an affair with a woman from the secretarial pool. Son got divorced married the secretary. Old man died, leaving the company to the son. The son died of a heart attack, leaving the company to his new wife. The wife went from secretary to owner in less than 5 years.

This was a pretty famous incident (at least amongst my work group) at a large company I worked for a long time ago…. My boss’s admin wrote a semi erotic sci fi fantasy western story with him as the main character. He wrote it on his work computer and when he was done he tried to email it to someone. He emailed it to EVERY person in the region who held a specific job, about 20 people. Needless to say, they shared it with anyone they could. By the end of the day it had been read by a vast majority of employees on the west coast. Hundreds of employees read this thing, with the senders name on it as well as IN it as the protagonist. Somehow, he did not get fired. I really have no clue how he didn’t. Anyway, it’s a thing of beauty. This happened in 2008 and I still have it saved in my personal email. I read it at least annually for a laugh. It’s got everything. Sex, cowboys, aliens that bestow rocket fart powers. 

Let’s see, my old job had several:

Guy working on a machine got decapitated because he forgot to turn the lift off that was right above him. I was there but did not see it, however, production continued and all they did was section off the part of the plant he was at.

Another guy had a heart attack on the assembly line, witnessed as they tried using a defibrillator to bring him back, but we were all given very specific instructions as to not stop the line whatsoever.

A couple got caught having sex in the bathroom and the wife tried to claim that she was only helping him tie his shoes.

This crazy woman decided to come in on night shift (when she worked day shift), locked somebody in a supply closet and wasn’t found out until she was spotted sitting in front of the closet and singing to the person she was holding hostage.

I used to work at a big corporate law firm, and every year they would take on about 15 law students. One year, 3 of the students were almost identical. Kind of generically pretty honey-blondes, about the same height and body type, all with similar haircut, very similar glasses, similar clothing style, etc. 2 of them were with us for 3 years and the other for 2, and for that entire time people at the firm were mixing them up. So the first year, when they were still pretty fresh and literally nobody could tell them apart, one of them (or more??) got white girl wasted at one of the firm events. She (they??) started asking people to do m***y with her in the bathroom, insulted one of the senior partners, got in a fight with an important client, threw up at the bar, and made racist comments to the hr director about the cab driver and refused to get in with him so a second cab had to be called. The partners were furious, staff was furious, clients were furious, hr was furious. There were senior level meetings about it for about 2 weeks, but the problem was that nobody could say for certain which one of them it had been, or even if it had been only one. They were interrogated repeatedly but nobody confessed and nobody was able to implicate any one of them with any real certainty. So nothing happened. Only one of them ended up being hired on as a lawyer, and to this day (11 years later) nobody knows if it was her or not.

Had a pretty boy boss (ex airforce) that was a serious womanizer. He got his son a job at the same glass factory. The son was over the moon as his wife was having a baby. After, it was born, the DIL confessed that the father-in-law as the real birth father. Daddy cleaned out all his bank accounts and disappeared with the DIL leaving his wife destitute. The last I heard the son had a gun and was looking for his dad!

The crazy bunny hoarder lady. She was completely normal and forgettable at work, but turns out to have hoarded hundreds of bunnies in her home; filth everywhere, the usual animal hoarding setup. She quit when she was arrested and the bunnies were removed from her home and she eventually moved away. One of the terms of her release was that she was not permitted to have pets and all her neighbors had to be informed of her animal abuse and were instructed to call the cops ASAP if they spotted any signs of her collecting bunnies again. There were jokes at work for years about checking desks for hidden bunnies, and every time a new employee asked what the joke was, someone would Google her and find out about whatever her newest bunny-related charges were. She did not stop hoarding bunnies.

At my wife's workplace one evening, one of her workmates was being banged on the boardroom table by a manager, seen by a whole array of people at a 2nd story bar across the road. The colleagues must have thought the glass wasn't see-through from outside. Cellphone footage went globally viral in a matter of hours. One of the witnesses at the bar was a friend of ours, who sent a text to my wife when we were home that evening. After a few hours, my wife text her workmate to see if she was ok, because my wife thought the girl would have found out the global sensation by now. She didn't know, and my wife had to tell her that she was on a viral video of her being screwed in the office.

Come Monday, butt-prints were found on the table when people arrived at work. Poor girl agreed to resign while the older guy continued his career.

We had to do a sting operation in our work where a bunch of lockers over a couple months were broken into and all employee cash nicked. Didn’t take long to realise it always happened after pay day and the employee was talking in the lunch room about going shopping after work. Well we loaded up a camera in a locker and had a colleague announce loudly in the break room about going xmas shopping later and how they were worried about having so much cash on them. It turns out it was one of the managers. Honestly that woman was the shame of the place. Was immediately let go and last I heard was practically chased out of the town we lived in. (Her house/car was constantly getting vandalised).

Headmaster of my daughter's school had an affair with a parent. She and her husband blackmailed the school to keep quiet. When that tactic didn't work, they outed him by 1) throwing fliers around at a PTA meeting and 2) simultaneously sending whatsapp messages to the entire parent body.... Of the naked selfies he sent to her. This sparked a chain of events including press exposure (no pun), he said-she said. 2 very broken families and damaged children. Selfish as f**k. The next headteacher who took over was m******d shortly after.

I worked in a factory that had windows on one side. Upper management would give tours to important people to show off the factory. One of the maintenance guys got in a huge fistfight right next to the window just as a tour group walked by.

Someone was caught stealing scratch cards from the customer service desk, scratching them and trying to claim them from the lottery. Didn't know that the tickets aren't valid until "Activated" at the till, similar to online store credit coupons.

Also, the company's regional manager almost cost us our liquour license because he tried to force a checkout employee to run alcohol through for a suspected underageed customer and, when said employee refused even with the objections, tried to kick her off the till and run the purchase through himself (because she was still logged into the till, it would've been blamed on the checkout girl since the evidence pointed to her). The shift manager had overseen the argument and dragged his a*s out the back to give him the third degree, but not before asking for ID and refusing the purchase.

Turns out it was a police-sanctioned test purchase.

About 20 years ago I got an internship working in an office of a random factory near campus for one semester. It was a peanut butter factory. One day someone drove a forklift off a ledge into a giant vat of peanut butter.

I witnessed the discussion among managers of if/how the peanut butter could be saved. They ended up not saving it, but there was a huge fight as the general manager really really wanted to hide this accident.

I was an English teacher in Japan and at one school we had these "private" rooms that were basically meant for 1 - 3 students and a teacher.

They were tiny rooms with a round table. The doors were made of transparent glass.

One of the teachers was caught having sex with his student on the table when she requested a private 1 on 1 lesson.

To be fair they were already dating and both were of age. It was, however, against school policy to f**k your students.

Another time we found a wireless hidden camera in the girl's toilet.

There was two goofball I worked with, lets call them Jim and Kevin.

Both of these guys were pathological liars, and pretty stupid to boot. As a couple of examples, Jim bought a sport bike her could barely ride and immediately claimed he was in the "Rough riders", a motorcycle stunt gang. Kevin would make outrageous claims like the exhaust on his truck netted him a hundred horsepower, or that Subaru was a German automaker. They were always calling each other out on their obvious lies, and loathed each other.

The controversy begins when we had the yearly shift bid, and Jim took a spot that Kevin wanted. It's seniority based, so Jim of course has every right to take the shift. Kevin didn't like that so he followed Jim to the local 7-11 at lunch and tried intimidating Jim into pulling his name. Jim goes to our manager and makes a complaint. Kevin denies the whole thing, but they suspend him while they investigate. So Kevin leaves and waits across the street for Jim to leave. He follows Jim home, but Jim is the smarter of the two and drives a police station instead. Kevin, being the moron that he is, follows him into the police station parking lot and is quickly set upon by the officers there. They drag him out of his truck and it turns out he was armed. Not completely sure what happened to Kevin after that, but we never saw him again.

A production manager and the HR lady had a fling going on. The general manager replaced her office door with a windowed door to cut down on their alone time. She raised hell with corporate to get it switched back because she required privacy with “disciplinary discussions”, neglecting the fact that disciplinary meetings always required 2 managers.

Work had to call in a substitute for me because I was at a conference. They called in a sub manager who had been drinking all day so they reported anyway. So, she goes to use the restroom in her state, locks herself in a stall and can’t get out. Instead, she knocks down two of the three walls of the stall. While drunk. Sent her home that night for good.

The 39 year old IT guy who drove five hours away to have sex with a 15 year old girl he met online. He got caught and was never seen again by anyone from the office.

Had an IT guy that didn't wash his hands after he pooped. He wore Nike shoes that were like super bright and vibrant, so if you were sitting in a stall, and saw those shoes next to you you'd know it was the IT dude taking a dump. You'd hear him wipe, flush, pull his pants up, and then walk out of the bathroom. His nickname was poopy fingers, and ever since then I have always had a thing of Clorox wipes at my desk. Like this guy would put his hands on your mouse, all over your keyboard, desk phone, and it was possible he had just taken a s**t before working on your computer. Several people went to HR, and for some reason they literally did nothing. People do this day still wonder why I don't partake in office potlucks. Well, one day ole' Poopy Fingers didn't show up for work. Then it became a few days, then about a week, and then a couple of weeks. People started asking, and looking around. Turns out Poopy Fingers was a huge c*****e dealer, and very involved in money laundering. The FBI raided his apartment and has been incarcerated ever since. That was approximately six years ago.

About 30 years ago a lady at my work k***ed her father because he had cancer and was in pain and asked her to. She was arrested, there was a trial, the whole thing. I live in a kinda conservative country so it was big news and hotly debated. The oddest thing was that our company paid for her defence. She was found not guilty although people said it was only because of emotions and not facts.

One teacher was accused of abuse because he didn’t give the girl a good grade. His reputation was ruined. An investigation cleared him.

Another teacher was caught taking pictures of students and was arrested and prosecuted; no alarms were raised by students but by his wife. He went to jail.

Both incidents happened at the same time.