37 Random Stories Of Coworkers Displaying Unhinged Behavior, As Shared Online

He was a strange looking person. Also smelled strange and said strange things to some people. None of which was very good for a temp looking to be made permanent. Words were had with him in private and to everyone's surprise, he turned it around. He's a strange looking person in general but he addressed the issues around personal hygiene and his general appearance (more groomed and professional looking) and he changed how he interacted with people. He got his permanent position and seems to be well liked overall. Just shows it's not too late, someone could be "that co-worker" because of issues in their private life. A few discreet words from a superior can make all the difference. Just knowing someone is paying attention can be enough to start a change for the better.

He missed work unexpectedly. The next morning the FBI showed up and went thru his desk. They only found a post-it that read, "Too slow FBI". It also had a smiley face on it.

A small company. The dude who absolutely STANK, and I mean you could tell he had been in a room 10 minutes later it was so bad. After about a year at a staff part I think, someone had the (liquid) courage to ask him what was up with the odor.

Turns out he showered regularly but he was eating medicinal garlic oil which caused the terrible smell. Oddly, he had NO idea. He switched to a different type of garlic oil and the smell went away almost instantly.

Great guy, was at the company several years afterwards.

Male employee took female employees' house keys out of her purse and had copies made on his lunch. When the female employee got home from work that day, he was waiting for her in her bedroom. Thankfully she got out quickly and without harm and was able to call the police.

He got a forklift stuck in the grass while drunk. They tested him and he was positive for [illegal substances] too. On his way out he tried to argue "but half the warehouse gets high!" The next day there was a random [illegal substance] test and half the warehouse was sacked

Turns out her cancer was faked and she scammed us all out of $100K. Now she's in prison.

(google Amanda Riley, I worked with her around 2015-2016ish)

College Junior, 1980's, office job proofreading. I get a new partner. A few years older than me, Army-style haircut, very fit and muscular.

He is nervous so I give him easy stuff and bring him along slowly. After a week or so he relaxes and tells his story.

He joined a cult as a teen, the Moonies. He rose through the ranks until he was running a team of teens traveling the country raising money for the cult.

They sold flowers and magazine subscriptions door-to-door, in malls, train stations and airports. He drove them in a van and they all slept in one room at cheap motels. His job was to watch them, keep them in line and earning.

He did it for years, always traveling, barely sleeping until he finally had a breakdown and ended up in a psych ward. Working with me was his first real job back in the world. We did fine, he was always on time and like me, read books during downtime.

I found out from my supervisor that they gave him to me because if he went berserk I had the best chance of surviving @6' 4" and 230 Lbs.

Partner eventually requested a move to the day shift and I got an opera singer for my new amigo. Day shift is busier than nights. Ex-Moonie couldn't cope without my support and went Hulk smash and destroyed the office until the cops came.

Oh, they came in with a potbelly pig as their emotional support animal. Office meetings just got a lot squeakier.

Management finally took notice and "reorganized" so that he no longer had any staff under him, but gave him a higher title and almost no work in the process. A short time later, they used layoffs as a reason to get rid of him entirely, but he parlayed his higher title into a more powerful, better paying job elsewhere, where they're now trying to figure out how to get rid of him. Basically, he failed up. That's what you get when you have hiring managers who get star-struck at an Ivy League education without checking if there's any substance behind it.

Kid-centric water park. He put broken glass in the pool because he didn’t get one day of the four day span he requested off. We were taught in training that if broken glass was found in the pool, the park would have to be closed for about three days to complete a process to make sure it was fully removed. He figured he could use this to his advantage.

He got his day off, him and the rest of the morning shift were sent home while the glass was removed. The park ended up opening later that afternoon after the removal process was expedited. Luckily no one was hurt because this all happened in the morning before we opened to the public.

He bragged about it to some of our other coworkers who ended up reporting him.

She accepted a fake $100 bill that literally said “FOR MOVIE USE ONLY” on it and had Benjamin Franklin on both sides. We worked at a bank.

She starved her handicapped son with hot sauce and left him to die in an ice bath. F**k you, Shanda.

He was the life and soul of the office, a proper family man, and a trusted department manager. His wife was sadly diagnosed with cancer, so for a couple of years, he was on reduced hours to look after her and his young son.

Sadly, he passed away (never found out how), but the strange thing was the police had to reach out to the company as he had no next of kin. Turns out he didn't have a wife or son or any other close friends or family. Very sad.

I used to work for this extremely unethical medical device company. The owners had really strong "timeshare salesman" energy, and would say or do *anything* they thought would make sales or improve their bottom line. As a result, most employees (myself included) got grossed out and left within a year or two, with the only ones staying having something deeply wrong with them, either ethically or professionally.

As a result, a lot of s****y behavior was tolerated from senior employees becuase the owners couldn't retain anyone else. Enter Bill. In the year I worked alongside Bill, I watched him:

* Ask a brown-skinned coworker how "his people" prayed. Said coworker was born and raised in Maryland.
* In a conversation about how people's personalities change when they drink, suggested to another coworker that he probably got "more autistic" (said coworker was not, and had never implied to be, autistic).
* During the George Floyd protests, assured everyone in the lunch room that he and his church had an impressive stockpile of weapons in case that kind of civil unrest cropped up in our town.

That's just the stuff I witnessed first hand, pretty much everyone had similar stories of Bill.

The straw that finally, *finally* broke the camel's back came during a company picnic. We were playing cornhole and Bill, unprompted, said very loudly that I "should be careful not to throw the beanbags towards [the name of the only two black employees in the company] because *Black Lives Matter*" and then grinned like he'd told the funniest joke in the world. Everyone, including the two employees in question, heard him. Afterwords, as I was explaining the incident to HR, our HR director shook her head and said "this is really bad, you know this isn't Bill's first strike." Yeah no s**t Stephanie.

One of the supervisors finally confronted him about the ever present smell of rum on his breath and his ever present, yet lighter in shade, bottle of soda. After being told he'd be given a breathalyzer at work he claimed he "had never been so insulted" by an accusation in his life and immediately quit...never letting go of his soda bottle.

He started making fart noises every time my other coworker bent over. To get something out of a case, pick something up, whatever it was, he was flarping it up and laughing it off.

We fired him when he tried to fist fight a customer.

Woman I worked with, both of us in our early 20s, came into my office, grabbed my hands, and started crying with joy that I was in heaven with her. She was relieved to see a familiar face.

After a bit more of this conversation, I told her she should take the rest of the day off and get some rest.

Then she left work and [took her own life].

(Edit: I felt like it was my fault for a long time.)

I taught new technicians on the machines we worked on. In our work area all of us were required to wear work smocks. New hire I noticed kept eating M&Ms out of his pocket, with tweezers. Food in the work area is prohibited, so I told him he needed to stop. He didn’t. I told him again to stop, he didn’t. I told him to go to his locker and leave the food. Caught him later the same day eating something else out of his pocket, again with tweezers. He didn’t make it past probation.

Worked in a different office but, serial killer. Possibly 25 victims in Southern California. Apparently he was religious and kept mostly to himself.

Company put us all up in a hotel for one due to snow closing the roads and public transportation down. One of my co-workers decided living in the hotel was way better than at home and extended his stay for a week.

He got fired when the company got the bill for his hotel stay. No idea why he thought they would pay for it.