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

Intern once thought that he could fax a physical object to the receiving machine.

He was trying to fax his belt to a friend.

Kid was either an acting prodigy or maybe he needed a life jacket to eat soup. I guess I’ll never know.

English as a Second Language teacher here. A mom came very angry to my coordinator to complain about the grades I was giving to her daughter.
Thing is... I gave her an A+ because she was super responsible, got everything right in her monthly exam and participated a lot.
Apparently I was not doing an appropriate job because she expected her kid not to be an amazing student.
But she was. Easily within the top 5 I've ever had. Smh.

I had someone throw a drink at me through the drive-thru window, which is an unwise thing to do to someone standing in front of a shelf of other drinks waiting for the customers behind you.

Close second: we had a guy that robbed our gas station for like a month with a finger gun before he finally got caught. Everyone knew it was a finger gun, but you have to comply when someone robs the store so.... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I install flooring and I was working on the third story of a house newly under construction. Long story short while I was installing some flooring in some upstairs bathrooms (third story) some framers were scheduled to repair the stairs from ground level to the second story. There was no communication and I went downstairs to grab something and to my surprise there was no downstairs! The framers had completely torn out the entire staircase without checking if anyone else was upstairs! I ended up trapped on the second story for a little while until someone brought a ladder lol.

I worked as a PA for a billionaire and when covid hit she still wanted me to come in to work (aka her house) but didn’t like that I had to take transit, so she bought the her neighbours house so I wouldn’t track covid into the house. So for over a year I sat alone in a 6,000 square foot home next door to her.

I work in the funeral industry, so I get to deal with new ridiculous things on a near-daily basis. For example, today I had to look for a bullet in a body bag, because the list of personal effects of a deceased that we got from the medical examiner included 'ammunition x 1.' This person was going for cremation, and bullets in a crematorium are a no-no for obvious reasons.

So, we looked and looked, inside the body bag, inside the clothing, pockets, shoes, under the body; I even shone a flashlight into the hole that used to be the deceased's face to see if it was maybe still in the head-ish area, but no. So after 20 minutes or so of thoroughly searching this poor dead person, I called the MEO to see if *they* had the bullet. The girl who answered the phone checks with the morgue and comes back to say "yep, it's here, we always take and keep the bullets!" Great! Then *WHY* list it on the personal effects sheet with everything else that is still with the body??

My job is weird as hell, y'all.

I work at a library. The amount of people who don't bring their library card with them and then refuse to give me ID so I can look up their account is baffling. I'm just trying to prove they are who they say they are.

Also a mentally ill lady once told me that Osama bin Laden wanted to steal shoes from the artist formerly known as Prince.

I was a tour guide in Central America for a few years. Here is a short list:

- bribed border officials several times. I could actually claim those on my expense reports.

- Passenger took drugs from a stranger in El Salvador and apparently didn’t pay for them. Drug dealer came to the hotel late at night looking for money. I paid him to go away.

- had to get a passenger out of jail in Belize.

- had to evacuate our tour out of Honduras due to a coup and subsequent lockdown/curfew in 2009.

- had to evacuate a group out of Belize for a hurricane that never came.

- had to kick a guy off the tour in Guatemala for being an a*****e.

- whole tour group (including myself) got food poisoning in Ometepe Island, Nicaragua. Fun times.

- got food poisoning myself a separate time in Guatemala and had to explosively s**t on the side of the road in front of my tour group.

- got a panicked knock on my door to procure plan B (morning-after pill) for girls a few times. Not a result of my actions.

- had a couple decide they wanted a divorce halfway through the tour, but wanted to finish the tour. They had horrible fights in front of the tour group daily.

- passengers complained about seeing one of the other passengers with prostitutes that looked uncomfortably young.

- had a passenger that was mentally ill and started to self-harm during the trip

- I got deported from Canada

- a passenger went to a seedy strip club alone one night and woke up the next morning with pink eye.

- passenger was so scared of eating local food that she brought a small duffel bag of protein bars and only ate those. By day 4 she was complaining of stomach cramps and her farts were so bad that I thought they would strip the paint off the interior of the bus. I had to help her find a McDonalds or something so that she would eat actual food.

- I’ve been to countless world wonders and UNESCO world heritage sites hungover or still drunk from the night before.

- Passengers hooked up with other passengers. Passengers hooked up with other passenger’s friends. Passengers hooked up with locals. Passengers hooked up with way too many locals. Passengers hooked up with other random travelers and invited them to follow our tour group for a week. Passengers hooked up with tour guides. Tour guides hooked up with other tour guides. Passengers hooked up with the local white water rafting guides. Tour guides hooked up with locals… You get the picture.

- much much more. If you have questions or want more stories, fire away!

Edit: Wow. People seem most interested in my diarrhea and getting deported. I've expanded on those stories in comments below.

My boss invited us to her bachelorette party. Work is kind of her whole life so she doesn’t have friends outside our company. The invitation asked us to bring a pair of “sexy panties” for her as well as a “naughty toy” for her and her soon-to-be husband to use on the honeymoon. Btw I am 22 and my boss is 50. She’s older than my own mother.

A lady getting mad because the breading on our CHICKEN nuggets wasn’t vegan

I work in influencer marketing and we hired an Instagram influencer to work on a yogurt brand campaign. As part of the activation we also sent a tie-dye kit and branded swag for them to make tie-dye shirts, hats, etc, with their friends or family. One of the influencers pulled the tie-dye ink out of the t-shirt kit and used it to tie-dye her yogurt bowl, took a video of herself eating it, then shared the video with her followers who ultimately alerted her that you can't eat tie-dye ink. This was, of course, our fault (the agency) for not being more clear that the tie-dye kit was not edible.

TL;DR hired someone who ate paint

Worked at a grocery store. Customers dog takes a s**t at the front of the store by the registers. He stands there while I’m cleaning it, and the dog takes a second s**t as I’m cleaning the first. As I’m cleaning the second s**t, the dog then pukes. As I’m cleaning that, the owner pats the dog on the head saying “good boy.” He was trespassed after so at least there’s that

I tattooed a cartoon character (the image my client picked out) and then they complained because it was "too cartoony"

I worked in returns at IKEA and had a customer complain that they accidentally ripped the instruction manual in half for the furniture piece they were assembling when they were cutting open the box and couldn’t finish assembling it.

I politely informed them that all our instruction manuals were available online in pdf form, but this just made her mad and she wanted to speak to the manager. Manager gave her a few $5 gift cards just to get her off my back but I will always find it so funny that this lady thinks accidentally cutting in half an instruction manual (she had both halves too so she could have just easily put them together to read the instructions) inhibited her from assembling furniture.

A group of four grown men sneaking into the fitting room to smoke a joint. This would already be really, really dumb except the store they did it at was…Justice. For non-Americans and those outside the demographic, Justice was a clothing store for teen (or 8-12 year old) girls. They didn’t sell anything for men at all and it was literally impossible for them to blend in. Moreover, the tops of their heads were visible over the child-sized stall curtains. We called security, they got escorted out, and we had to close to air out the windowless store. I have no idea how they thought this was going to play out.

I had to fix my boss’s company issued laptop and found a ton of farm animal and granny p*rn links stored on it. My boss was a Mormon woman in her 50s.

I was serving at Cracker Barrel and a woman came up to me saying her son thought I was Shaggy from Scooby Doo and practically begged me to come to their table to talk to him. I gave them the laziest attempt at a Shaggy impression.

One time my boss saved a hurt goose and put it in a box and made me take it to an animal hospital. Driving down the highway the goose started flapping and got out of the box. I didn’t know what to do and I was scared to grab the goose so I drove the whole way there with a goose riding passenger

I worked at Uncle Buck’s in a Bass Pro. For those of you that don’t know, it’s a bowling alley/restaurant. One night a group of people come in to celebrate their friends 27th birthday. After another host and I set them up at a lane, the manager comes over to tell us that they are getting a warning because she caught a few of them on camera pissing on the side of the building before they came in. And that’s not even the worst of it.

Some time later I receive a call at the front desk from the police saying that they were outside would like to speak to the manager. Turns out the manager caught the party doing coke in the bathroom. A few people in the party were detained and 1 guy tried to fight a cop. The rest that were left alone started raging. They started screaming slurs, smashed glasses and plates, stuck ketchup in the bowling balls and even tried to grab me over the counter. It’s the only time I ever felt unsafe at work.

As a concierge in a luxury hotel in Europe, I have seen all kinds of ridiculousness.

The most harmless was a woman who had a tantrum because we couldn't spontaneously organise a Maybach transfer and she had no idea how taxis or Uber worked, which really boggled my mind.

One guest called her assistant in Austria, who then called us at the concierge only to ask how far away a store was from her current location. It was 7 mins and she could have just googled it.