35 People Share The Most Unhinged Things Their Colleagues Did At Work

To me the most frequent and frustrating, has been: I propose an idea. I get told, “No, that won’t work because XYZ”. Frustrating but, it happens. Male coworker proposes an idea, it gets put into action.

I’ve started calling it out? “Okay, that sounds like a great idea, it’ll definitely help boost ABC. To confirm - I had brought this up as an idea previously and we had decided not to do it at that time because XYZ. Have we changed our position on XYZ?”

It's also really fun if they treat my male assistant like the boss and me like the assistant even after it has been made clear who is who.

This was a few years ago, about... 14 years to be approximate. Feels like a life time ago though. I was a support contractor at a call center, and the company we were doing work for would occasionally send some of the senior support individuals to our office to teach us things, socialize, etc. During our team meeting that week, our manager... who was questionable in behavior at times said "now our visitor (by name) is going to get up on the table and dance for us", My brain automatically went to "nope, bad nightmare, that did not just happen". The following week those of us in the meeting had interviews with other management about the incident, HR reports were filed from the visitor with BOTH our company, and the parent company. it came to light that this wasn't the first series of HR reports for sexual misconduct. I'm unclear to this day - but he kept his job. At any respectable place of employment, pretty sure he would have been fired at that point. The Visitor said as long as he was employed there, she would Never under any circumstance come back to visit.

Worked at an SMB, and we would give managers and directors and partners' company phones, tablets, and essentially anything they needed if reasonable.

During my last year there, we were trying to lower costs with cell use. We wanted to stop buying and setting up phones for people. Anyways, if someone broke their phone, we would get them a replacement. Except one time, right in the morning, this manager comes in walking fast, pissed off, vein popping out of his forehead. I've never seen him like that, always a funny chill, dude. As he walks towards his desk, he's on the phone having an argument with someone else, and it's getting louder, and people are noticing. This is a modern open layout office, too. People are looking and wondering what's going on. Gets quiet.

He yells at someone on the phone and then chucks the company phone at the floor, and it violently smashes, and you can hear what's left of the phone thud against the desk wall separators. Everyone is kinda shocked and like, "what the f**k". The guy realizes his mistake and you can tell he regretted it.

My manager, who sits behind me, takes his headphones off, turns around and looks at me with disgust, and despises and says, "If he asks for a phone replacement, we're not doing it. And just in case if he asks you, tell him to talk to me." A couple weeks later, he was let go for drinking on the job after getting a warning. Yeah, that was interesting and unprofessional.

CEO called new place where I got a job offer from to ask them to rescind the job offer. Managing partner at new place had to explain the request was illegal. They did accounting services for a lot of companies and unfortunately let the company were they're poaching an employee know. I was not thrilled to find this out.

I took a thankfully second job offer I had and nope'd out.

CEO drove company into ground, they went bankrupt within two years.

My former boss literally threw a printer at another employee full force for leaving it on his desk without putting in a help desk support ticket.

I once had a tech that screwed up a task, not that significant a thing mind you but enough that another staff member emailed my boss to complain about it.

The tech logged into my bosses mailbox and deleted the email... after she had already read it and was talking to HR

30 seconds of pulling logs later he was fired.

You could have just gotten a slap on the wrist dude, but no you needed to turn it into an RGE didn't you?

I had a coworker brag to me that one of our clients that he did some web dev work on the side, separate from our MSP SLA paid him twice for the same work and didn’t notice. I was like dude…that’s basically stealing, you know they’ll eventually find out right? He was super proud of himself. My first thought was alright well this guy can’t be trusted.

I worked for a call center where several employees would regularly do h****n in the bathroom.

A former fellow admin was caught spying on HR's emails.

User was phished. They changed their password back to the same password only changing a symbol. There were compromised again in under a week. Which I had to deal with on a Friday afternoon. Wasn’t pleased.

edit: oh yeah and no 2fa because I can't convince the boss otherwise.

Had a guy that worked for our company and he was in charge of getting rid of previous employee's company credit cards. His job was to log into the system, deactivate the card than shred it. Instead of shredding it he would use the dead card to go open bar tabs on the weekend and obviously never pay for his drinks.

It only caught up to him when he was long gone and had left the company.

Was told a story about a previous exec who was 1000% certain that his laptop was faulty. When he was told that, "No, I can't just give you a new one" he violently slammed it to the ground in front of the IT Manager at the time and walked away. He was eventually fired, but for other performance based reasons.

A coworker still falls asleep from time to time during IT meetings and org wide meetings. Usually scares himself awake, you know because the pen goes flying.

Passive aggressive emails. I had a boss who would send me an email criticizing my work or questioning me on why I did something and cc’d everyone else in my office when it was clearly directed at me. Plus, they would do it while sitting in their office that was 10 feet from my desk when I was at my desk. Finally at a staff meeting I said to the person, in front of everyone: “if you need to discuss a work related issue with me, please come talk to me about it in person because cc’ing everyone in an email directed at me is extremely passive aggressive.” He never acknowledged the issue, but never did it again.

Plus being mansplained to or treated like I’m incapable multiple times: I once had someone tell me at a training that the training wasn’t for someone in my position in the company and they started telling me I wouldn’t understand the subject matter and it wouldn’t be relevant to me... I was actually the trainer, they just didn’t know it yet.

Last month someone asked me if I would drive on site (I've worked from home since I was hired and I live over an hour from my job site) to scan some documents for them, and referred to me as the intern in the email chain requesting my assistance.

I'm 25 years old, have a master's degree, have a lot of work experience, etc..Gotta love being a woman working with engineers.

I once worked at an MSP that provided on-site and remote support for a couple of, major, hotel chains. The, mostly married, guys that I worked with used to brag about being "King of the [help] Desk", in relation to how many people they'd managed to have an affair with. They even had a rule, requiring them to prove they'd done the deed, via a WhatsApp group (so, again, not only were they doing this behind their families backs, but they were taking photos/ videos for 'bro-points'). A really, scummy, outfit.

I stayed for 2 months before high-tailing it out of there.

It was a family-run business, too.

A co worker was an absolute perv. Constantly talking about female colleagues in a sexual manner, values by them by their appearance. I’m no SJW, but people deserve respect according to their ability. I left. He’s now a regional managing director…….

When I got started in help desk, they laid someone off. He walked back to his desk screaming profanities. When he got to his desk he tossed EVERYTHING. He was a big a*s dude too. Never seen anything like it before or since.

I was a new IT sysadmin at a software company. My immediate manager got unreasonably pissed at a young programmer who was just asking for some info on the status of a server that was being worked on. He was worked up to the point where he physically blocked the doorway to prevent the kid's escape and poked him in the chest to emphasize his point. The kid laughed at the ridiculousness of the situation. IT manager decided he didn't like being laughed at, escalated to shoving, then erupted when the kid continued to laugh out of nervousness, took the kid to the ground, straddled his chest and started punching him in the face with both hands while screaming at the top of his lungs. The door between us wedged closed in the struggle and I was only able to helplessly listen to the screams from both of them after that. The entire floor watched stunned and unable to react. (See: "normalcy bias") Took several guys to get them eventually separated.

He wasn't even fired, but left a few weeks later anyway because nobody wanted to deal with him any more.

Software companies are weird places to work.