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Thursday’s Final Word – HotAir
Sometimes a person can take an entire workplace by storm, and certainly not in a good way. We’re talking about that one coworker who complicates simple tasks, makes meetings tense, and also turns lunch breaks into drama-filled nightmares. If you’ve ever found yourself saying, “You won’t believe what my colleague did this morning,” or maybe even “ Wait till you hear what happened at work today,” then this list is for you. We combed through Reddit to bring you 35 stories from everyday people who’ve had their own awkward run-ins with some pretty awful coworkers. You might find some of them hilarious and others just plain weird, but one thing’s for sure: they’ll all leave you stunned.
#1
I once worked with a guy in a kitchen who frequently misread decimal points. Once he gathered 100kg of flour because a recipe asked for 1.00kg of flour.
Image source: Karolina Grabowska
#2
I had a manager once who dumped trash on my desk on my third day there. She said it was to remind me that taking out the trash was part of my job description (it wasn’t, I was a research assistant at a mortgage firm).
Image source: Getty Images
#3
I worked with a guy who regularly googled everyone we worked with. He knew information about the apartment we had just sold and told everyone at our department meeting how much we sold it for.
Image source: solenfeyissa
#4
I’m pretty cool about eh, people all have their role to play, but one time we had a secretary that would microwave eggs and canned tuna every morning in a bowl. Now… I am not an angry person, but the smell generated from microwaved eggs and canned tuna is downright repulsive by anyone’s standards.
Image source: hartono subagio
#5
Hired a cook on a good recommendation. He was just fine the first two weeks. Then I noticed food going missing. Then supplies started going missing. Then a customer told me that he had been adding an auto 30% tips his food purchases. When I looked at the books, I saw that he had been adding 30% tips to ALL the credit card sales. And the cash rings were off from what should have been sold. I fired him that day. The next day, he came in and apologized. Said he had problems and was going to rehab. I wished him well. The next day, he tried to break in after closing and was caught.
Image source: Or Hakim
#6
I worked with a teacher who sat at his desk the ENTIRE year. Kids walked in and out whenever they wanted to. They did practically no work. He told bad jokes and was terrible with the students. One day, I was sitting in the teacher’s workroom, and another teacher noticed a phone on the counter. She asked if it was mine. When I said no, we looked at the lock screen to see whose it might be. The picture on the lock screen was an inappropriate picture. A few minutes later, the bad coworker walked in and picked it up. Needless to say, he was let go.
Image source: Max Fischer
#7
Had a co-worker who always gossiped about others and would say horrible things about everyone in the office. It created a super toxic culture and caused many people to leave, not because they didn’t like the work, but because they just hated the culture.
Image source: Yan Krukau
#8
I worked retail with a guy once who was the worst. He would always go to the gym before work, and would never shower. He stank so bad. He was also a self-important person who thought he knew everything. He wouldn’t let his girlfriend even get a haircut without clearing it with him first. He never said it, but you could tell he thought men were much better at everything than women. He would regularly come and do my jobs, without me asking, jobs I was very capable of doing myself. I would just tell him to go away.
Image source: pexels
#9
Oh, I have several. But to pick one I guess one of the worst was the one who every time they walked up behind me they’d grab my shoulder and squeeze my shoulder every time they walked past me even if they weren’t trying to get my attention (Which I think the most appropriate way to get someone’s attention is to call out their name or to tap them on the shoulder instead of grabbing and squeezing their arm) and I’ve had a traumatic childhood so I especially never took this behavior well. I ended up reporting it to my supervisor.
Image source: RDNE Stock project
#10
I have several bad ones, but the one that drives me the craziest is a lady who creates problems just so she can solve them. Ugh. She takes a simple job, finds the one tiny issue, blows that up, and freaks everyone out, and then “solves” it so she can be the hero. Just take the 1 minute to fix the issue in the first place. It would save the literal hours she spends working everyone up, so she can be their savior.
Image source: Toa Heftiba
#11
Not necessarily a “co-worker,” but my old supervisor literally told me not to think, even if it’s wrong that I do things her way, and not to ask questions because I should already know what to do. I had just gotten the position.
Image source: Curated Lifestyle
#12
I worked somewhere in the last 3 years where they hired a secretary who refused to use a computer! I couldn’t believe it in this day and age.
Image source: Mimi Thian
#13
My worst co-worker was one I worked with when I was a cashier at Walmart. She approached me and asked me to cash out her paycheck. I was still new at the job and never got training on how to do that function. She was sympathetic, so she walked me through how to do it. Transaction over and done, I go on about my day. I got called back a couple of days later by my managers, and they circled me in an office and accused me of stealing. After tears, videotapes, and telling them what happened, they told me that, apparently, this coworker of mine had stolen not only from me, but also from several other people that day as well. They just wanted to confirm I wasn’t in on the deal.
Image source: Getty Images
#14
My old supervisor. She was that special brand of “too nice.” Laughing was her nervous tic, and oh boy, it was CONSTANT. She was incapable of being assertive, which is not the best quality for someone whose job is telling other people what to do. The best she could do was be passive-aggressively nice when she really needed something done, which just made everyone dislike her.
Image source: Getty Images
#15
This girl I work with is overly picky about stuff, everything has to be her way or no way… She does everything louder to make it seem like she’s working, but she’s not actually getting anything done. She has been caught stealing from other servers several times, but we have no concrete proof. She “accidentally” takes people’s tips.
Image source: Getty Images
#16
At my first-ever job, I worked with a middle-aged guy who lived in his car, picked at his face constantly, and would always ask me and the other teenage employees if we needed a ride home from work. He gave off the creepiest vibe and was eventually fired.
Image source: Thirdman
#17
The woman who talks a lot. She can give a ten-minute answer to a yes-or-no question. And that’s not an exaggeration. The problem is, she still knows a lot about the job (and uses her excessive words to prove it), so she’s the hero of the upper management.
Image source: SHVETS production
#18
This might not seem that bad if you haven’t worked with someone like this, but mine was an overly dramatic coworker. She would come in and start complaining about traffic as if no one had experienced something so awful before. Then she would complain about everyone in the office. “So and so has been at lunch for a while, must be nice,” then loudly complain as people left that she had to stay because she apparently thought she had more work than anyone else. Reality was that while she was complaining, we were working. It’s draining being around someone like that every day.
Image source: Curated Lifestyle
#19
Current new(est) hire at the bakery I work at. He nailed the interview. He was a former kitchen manager at multiple well-off restaurants, worked at a few bakeries, etc. Dude can’t measure anything. Everything is consistently wrong. He doesn’t clean up, he smells, he comes in late, and leaves early. If you try to fix the issue or show him how to do something correctly, or that he did something wrong, he just gives you puppy face.
Image source: Sandi Benedicta
#20
The one who loves talking way too much, even when I have earphones on.
Image source: cottonbro studio
#21
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.
Image source: SHVETS production
#22
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.
Image source: Getty Images
#23
He just…wouldn’t work. Just wouldn’t. This was in a research lab. He was a visiting researcher from another country, and he spent a lot of time asking tons of non-work-related questions, to the point of disrupting others’ work. In the course of a year, he designed one very basic experiment and didn’t actually do it. Just designed it. He was above doing bench work, apparently. He picked fights with everyone doing any experiment related to the one he was planning, because he didn’t want to have to share credit with anyone. He wouldn’t clean up after himself, wouldn’t pick up things from the floor. He actually called me in from another room because he wouldn’t take a stringless tea bag out of his mug. Also on a different occasion, because he’d knocked some things off a hanger on the back of the door and for whatever reason wouldn’t pick them up. It was kind of like working with a child. He must’ve had servants where he lived. I don’t know how, but he was there for his PhD. The boss fired him. He was one of two people in her 30+ year career that she’d ever fired.
#24
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.
Image source: Aleksandra B.
#25
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.”
Image source: Sora Shimazaki
#26
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.
Image source: Andrej Lisakov
#27
This girl who genuinely thought the earth was flat and would not shut up about it.
Image source: Porapak Apichodilok
#28
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.
Image source: Getty Images
#29
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.
Image source: Vitaly Gariev
#30
I work with this guy who tries to convert people to his religion every day, and it’s super annoying.
Image source: Curated Lifestyle
#31
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.
Image source: Getty Images
#32
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.
Image source: Vitaly Gariev
#33
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.
Image source: Andrej Lisakov
#34
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.
Image source: Yunus Tug
#35
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.
Image source: Getty Images
