40 Ridiculous, Bizarre, And Dumb Stories From People Who Had To Deal With The Most Frustrating Things At Work

Worked in HR for a non profit that hired people who are legally blind. That was the mission. One day, two employees got into a fight. One was partially sighted and the other totally blind swinging his cane. I had four witnesses to the altercation. But they were all totally blind and thus, couldn’t tell me what happened.

When I worked in the NHS, I had to take part in an investigation about a poo on the floor in a community hospital. A patient had missed the bog, so it sat steaming on the floor. The nurse said, too busy, can't clean that up, get the cleaner. Cleaner said can't touch that, it's biological waste. Went back to nurse who said find a healthcare assistant. Healthcare assistant said can't do it, haven't been signed off on the infection control policy. Escalated to sister who said the student nurse should do it. Student nurse vomited and ran out crying. I was in the building at the time and heard all the fuss. Thought FFS and cleaned it up myself. Got reported as I was just a manager and not clinical.

My boss was making fun of a lady for calling in sick to work. In front of god and everyone. The person that called in sick, has ovarian cancer. I quit ten seconds later.

I was working as a sign language interpreter in a classroom setting and the teacher’s aide decided to stand between me and the student, blocking their view. I asked her to move and she told me that she was doing it on purpose so that the student didn’t rely on me too much.

A coworker attempted to prove that you couldn't actually hurt yourself slipping on a banana peel by stepping on one. After which he slipped and hurt himself.

I refused to write it up as an incident. It was too stupid.

A coworker screaming at me for leaving food to rot in the shared fridge. It was my first day there and I hadn’t even unpacked my belongings yet.

I work in film and television. We were shooting in a pretty upper-class neighborhood and the woman living beside the house we were filming in decided that she hasn't been paid enough. So a few hours into our day she starts playing opera music as loud as she can with all her windows open. After an hour or 2 of that and no one batting an eye she ramps it up and starts mowing her lawn.

Once that was done she just sits right on her property line with the mower going full blast until a producer went iver and kindly asked her to stop. I'm not high enough in the production to know how much she was asking for but apparently it was too much because he walked away shaking his head and told the sound guys there was nothing he could do.

Once night rolled around my boss decided screw this lady legs annoy her right back, so we got some 10k lights which are pretty goddam bright, and pointed then directly into her windows. It was basically mid day sun light blasting into her house at 10pm. That's when she called the police saying that we were filming illegally (it was a full union show with permits and on duty police were also there).

So a cop pulls up sees the other police already around for blocking traffic, goes to the craft table and gets a snack and leaves. We turned off the lights to her house around 1am because we're not animals.

Used to work in a Muslim country where this one guy would almost force me to go pray with him. I told him as nicely as possible that I’m an atheist and don’t feel comfortable being asked to pray. He complained to HR and I received a warning saying I was hampering the work place sanctity by expressing “anti religious sentiment”.

As a teenager while working as a cashier at a store, I was robbed at gunpoint by two dudes with guns pointed inches from my face. The store manager and someone from corporate showed up shortly after the police came to show support. Immediately after the police left, both the manager and corporate rep tried to convince me and my other coworkers that also had a gun in their faces to keep the store open for the remainder of the shift (~6 hours). I was literally still shaking from the ordeal, and somehow they felt that I was good to work until midnight as a teenager. I asked to go home, as did everyone else. Management decided to compensate us for the trauma by paying us for the remainder of our shifts but, said that we still had to work our next shifts and could not call out. It's amazing how insensitive some people in management can be.

Mcdonald’s employee here - customers. never in my life have i dealt with anything worse than an after church crowd on a Sunday afternoon.

the amount of straight up b******t that comes with working in fast food is absolutely not worth the pay and i will fist fight anyone that would like to argue we’re paid enough to put up with your s**t.

That would have to be the time I asked for time off on a Friday to go to my wife's grandmother's funeral. I knew we were in a big deadline crunch, but my wife was really broke up by the loss, and I felt I needed to be there for her.

I had been averaging over 50 hrs/week at this firm (salaried, so no overtime), with many weekends and holidays spent in the office, so I really didn't feel I was asking for the moon, but I still felt bad leaving the team in the lurch.

Anyway, I realize that one task still had to be done Friday morning, and I was really the only person who could do it, so I asked my wife if it was OK that I ran into the office for a couple of hours in the AM to get it done. She was fine with it.

So I run in, and there I am, sitting at my computer, EARLY, on the day I asked to have off, wearing my funeral suit, and my boss sees me. So he sidles up and says, sarcastically, "So, I guess they cancelled that funeral, huh?"

F**k that guy.

One time while working front desk at a gym, a woman complained that there were too many geese outside and they should’ve flown south by then and we needed to do something about it.

Kind of weird - but here I go. I work in politics and part of my job was reporting to my board the status of a various advocacy groups. Like what issues are they working and who funds them. With one group a major donor was George Soros. I put him on the list with all the other major donors for a power point presentation. A staff member freaks out and says I’m anti-Semitic because I listed Soros. I’m very confused because I thought the factually incorrect meme was that he was a Nazi (he clearly was not). Anyhow - HR gets involved and I have to apologize… me being of a family who was Jewish and literally chased out of Germany in the 1800s.

From then on if Soros was a donor I just put “major donor”. A board member asks who it is. And I refuse to answer. Staff member figures it out and accuses me again for being anti- Semitic for leaving him off.

Nobody would stick up for me, because they were terrified of her, so I took a buyout and got another job

Oh boy, story time. I Work in a fairly large factory, we had one employee who was in his late 30s who had apparently never been taught/learned how to use a urinal before. We received a few complaints from different people that it was uncomfortable in there at times. He would go in and drop his pants and undies to his ankles, pull his shirt up under his chin like a toddler and hands on hips just p**s away into the urinal. In all his years using a restroom with other guys he never noticed he was the only one getting almost buck a*s naked to take a p**s. It was a very awkward conversation to have with a grown man, thankfully he stopped doing it.

A co-worker took a work truck “hostage” until my boss paid him the 100 dollars that he was owed from a pay-cheque. He then sent her a pin on google maps of where it was parked in the middle of downtown.

I got pulled aside and told by my boss, "It's been noticed that you tend to only work your scheduled hours and no more".

I told him that 1) when needed I often stayed back to finish a task and b) If they wanted me there for more hours, I'd need to be paid for those hours!

He let me go and I heard no more about it. I've done enough unpaid overtime in my life, no more.

My boss made us play a game to keep moral up: There were several rules like calling each other certain nicknames or you could challenge someone to "rock,paper, scissors". If you break a rule or loose in "rock,paper, scissors", you needed to do 10 pushups. It was all in good fun, or so I thought. On afternoon I didn't feel like doing pushups, and my colleagues we're kinda teasing me about it, but again all in good fun. Turns out, my boss didn't like my refusal at all and fired me the next day. This was as a work and traveller in NZ, so not to horrible, although it still bugs me that I got fired because I refused to play a silly game lol.

TLDR: Got fired because I refused to play a silly game which had nothing to do with my job

I’m a nanny and I had one boss ask if I was interested in inducing lactation to nurse her child and the one on the way. She even gave a lactation consultant my number.

Another time when I was a teenage babysitter, one parent literally gave me a spanking. Now I was young, 14. But that was insane.

My wife had a miscarriage when I was at work. I left to take her to the hospital and support her. The next day when I went to work I got written up for leaving.

Call center setting. Someone came to me to complain that there was an inordinate amount of pubic hair on the flat top of the urinal in the men's room. Went to check and there were a remarkable amount of pubes there. Nasty. And clearly placed there by someone on purpose.

Cleaned them off with a paper towel, washed hands vigorously, and continued on with my day.

A couple hours later, I'm told the pubes have returned. Not quite as much as the first time, but still too much for the universe to have deposited there naturally.

I and another manager have our suspicions as to the culprit. We try to catch him, but can't get more than circumstantial evidence. Not enough to confront.

After a third iteration, I've had enough. And so call all the male staff into the board room and address them as a group that the disgusting behavior had to stop immediately, because there would be grave consequences for whomever was caught doing it. I make sure to make eye contact with the main suspect multiple times during the meeting.

It never happens again.

Still boggles my mind that I had to deal with that crazy behavior, but you know...call centers.