35 Reddit Stories About Coworkers People Still Think About, For All the Wrong Reasons

The one who loves talking way too much, even when I have earphones on.

Compulsive liars. They turn everything into a big wild story about themselves. And nobody wants to comfort them. I just avoid eye contact and don't listen.

When I was an intern, there was this old shrew who would call people into her office (my cube shared a thin wall), gossip, then call those people in to tell them what was said, etc. She would try to frame people for stuff she did wrong. She was so arrogant. And she refused to adapt to workforce modernization. Example: she refused to learn how to hyperlink in emails, documents, etc. A real ray of sunshine she was.

This girl identified herself as a mermaid. Every time I would get mad at her, she would call me discriminatory towards mermaids. She was completely serious about this.

I work with this guy who tries to convert people to his religion every day, and it’s super annoying.

I had a manager who was really sarcastic, which I usually enjoy. But when she was sarcastic, it just felt really mean instead of silly. I told her this as a subordinate, that it made me feel bad, even though I know she's probably joking, and asked her if she could do it less with me. Her reply was, "That's the only way I know how to communicate, so I'll probably just not talk to you much."

The person I work with at the moment. The whole office is in agreement that she is crazy. She once didn’t speak to anyone but the men in the office for an entire month. There are so many small details that would make me sound petty, but become so grating when you deal with it everyday. The one that everyone can agree on, though, is the mood swings. She can be fine one minute, and the next she’s gone off. It’ll be an hour before I can work again because I have to talk her down. No matter what job I take after this and who I work with, it will never not amaze me that I spent a chunk of my life babysitting someone who is 15 years older than me.

Worked with a girl who would sometimes just lie on the floor and play on her phone. She would routinely flip out about something her boyfriend did and just start screaming bad words, sometimes in front of customers. She was eventually fired.

Three-person department. Me, an awesome dude, and this terrible new co-worker. She was fresh out of college and believed that she was smarter than myself and our other team member because of that. She totally discounted anyone's opinions except her own and one manager who let her do whatever she wanted. She was the worst one-upper I'd ever met. Even for stupid things, like going to a coffee stand, she'd chime in and say how her friends work at a coffee stand, and they know her order by heart. Just stupid stuff. She thought she was adorable and charming, but was incredibly grating and worthless. She constantly messed up on her job, but if you tried to help or give any constructive feedback, she'd cry and go to her wet nurse (aka the one manager who liked her). She lasted almost four years, which blew my mind. She was furloughed at the beginning of Corona, but will not be returning as her position is being taken by the owner's daughter. The company split about two years ago. I went to the new company, and she and the awesome dude stayed at the old one.

This girl who genuinely thought the earth was flat and would not shut up about it.

I worked with this guy who would show up and never work, then he had a second job and would show up once every three weeks and just call in sick. It reached the point where he would complain and whine about the management not wanting to work with him, even though they'd make up shifts around his schedule just so he could work at least 4 hours in the week.

The HR manager at my last job had zero training, education, or experience in HR. She was argumentative, passive-aggressive, and incompetent. Toward the end, she asked me, “Why are you being resistant?” and “You’re not being a team player,” when I was advocating for client safety. I was the second person in less than a year to leave and hire an attorney.

My current co-worker. He loves to watch my work. Track my tickets, wants in on all my meetings, not to be helpful but to insert himself into everything I do. If I don’t jump on something in 1 minute, he will ask if I missed the email, the ticket, or the request. Then he plays 20 questions with me like I report to him or something. The worst part is he isn't mean about it. So I can’t say something to him because he just says we are a team and work together, so he is helping. I think he is just passive-aggressive and just really good at it. Over time, it just is on my last nerve.

I worked with someone in retail. He was my boss, and not a particularly bad guy, but he was a control freak who had to interject his opinion during every conversation anyone was having with a customer. This also went as far as him being in the middle of helping someone himself, stopping helping that customer to lean over to my till to “help” me with my transaction, even though there was no indication I needed help, and I had worked there for over 5 years. This “help” would be in the form of him telling me what button to hit next on the till, to telling a customer they were wrong to have any given opinion on a topic, to telling customers that their choice of entertainment they were purchasing wasn’t what they were after, even if they specifically came into the store for that specific item. He was also very lazy! Not a bad guy, but I do not miss working with him.

I had a different coworker called bag salad. Every day for lunch, she would pull out these giant bags of salad. Freezer bag of lettuce, 1/2 gal ranch, and a long handle fork. Only lettuce and ranch...She was a Gene Simonds impersonator, full makeup, boots, the whole nine yards.