Getting to interact with coworkers can be one of the best things about a job. However, there’s always that one coworker who is a little… off. People share hilarious stories about the weirdest coworker they’ve ever had. This content has been edited for clarity.
Weird Ann
“I had a really weird coworker once- I’ll call her ‘Ann.’ Ann was in her late 20s. She constantly tried to drown out the rest of us who were typing or talking by turning up one of those ‘sleep machines’ quite loudly. She also loved to remind everyone that she was germaphobic and preferred things perfect and clean at all times. One day, a coworker who sat all the way across the room from her came in with a bit of a cold. That coworker couldn’t help from coughing and sneezing.
Ann made it known she would have preferred someone contagious to stay home even though the sick coworker kept to herself, didn’t touch the shared stuff, and sat far away from Ann. Everything was silent when I noticed Ann get up and head toward the sick coworker. Without saying a word, I hear an aerosol can go off, followed by ‘What the hell, Ann? Don’t just SPRAY ME with LYSOL! What’s wrong with you? You can’t just sneak up on people and spray them with chemicals!’
Ann tried to apologize but of course, in her mind, she was doing the sick coworker a favor by just drive-by-spraying her with a disinfectant. She kept insisting that although she would never go to work sick, if she did, she would absolutely appreciate it if we sprayed her with Lysol.”
Mysterious Disappearance
“About 10 years ago, I worked at a glass and glazing factory. They hired a 16-year-old kid once. Every day he worked, he would disappear in the bathroom for at least 20 minutes at a time, upwards of three times a day. We all assumed he was beating off in there and had a laugh about it amongst ourselves.
It got progressively worse, though. One day he literally wasted 2.5 hours in there. The next day our boss told him he needed to pick up his act. ‘I don’t appreciate having my work ethic questioned. I’m not coming back on Monday,’ the kid replied. After that conversation, he disappeared into the bathroom again.
After about an hour, he came out and said that he’d been bitten by a redback spider (black widow) and needed to go to the hospital, so he got on his BMX bike and left. One of the other guys went in there after to kill the spider and discovered a stash of our touch-up spray paint bottles hidden behind a steel I-beam in the corner of the toilet. The kid had been stealing the spray paint and huffing it in the toilet until he passed out.”
Armed And Dangerous
“I had a coworker named Bob who sat across from me in our office. He often turned his chair around so he could lean on the back while typing. One day, his pants slipped down a bit and I noticed he was wearing women’s panties. ‘Okay, no biggie,’ I thought, ‘We all have our kinks and we’re all adults here.’ I shrugged and went on with work.
Not long afterward, he asked out one of the women at work, and apparently, their first couple of dates went okay. Then he started doing things like blowing her kisses across the office. She was visibly embarrassed and asked him to stop. He didn’t, so she asked me to ask him to stop (I was the manager). I got him aside one day and said ‘Hey, man, Barb’s a little upset with the PDA. Believe me, I have better things to do at work than talk about this kind of stuff, so knock it off, okay?’
Little did I know she had broken up with him the night before. He got angry, called me a few names, and stalked off. I just let it go. A week or so later I got to work early and was walking down a deserted hall when Bob walked out from an empty office (I later learned he had been sleeping there). He got in my face and said, ‘I know you’re talking about me behind my back!’
Out of pure reaction, I stiff-armed him and said ‘I don’t talk about you at all unless your work is late or sloppy. Now, go away.’ A few nights later, I was covering the night shift when one of the back shop guys came into my office and said, ‘Hey, Bob’s outside in the parking lot.’
‘So?’
‘Well, he’s got a baseball bat and said he’s going to f*ck you up.’
We called the cops and they came and disarmed Bob. Long story short, I fired Bob and he drove off. A few weeks later, Barb told me he had shown up at her place trying to win her back by shouting her name over and over at 2 a.m., much to her neighbor’s displeasure. That got him a cooling-off night in jail and he vanished after that.”
Meltdown
“As far as a weird coworker goes, I worked for a construction company in accounting. There were 4 of us in the department and we shared one big room as an office. Our supervisor sat on one side and the other three of us on the other. The company was extremely lax with no real dress code. You just had to get your work done.
We all got along fine except this real old lady in the department, let’s call her ‘Leslie.’ She hated all of us except our supervisor who was much younger than her. One day, our supervisor sat us down and said, ‘I feel the need to address something because it has been brought up to me nearly every day for the past 6 months. I know we are very relaxed here, but apparently, phone usage is a problem with some people.’
My coworkers and I side-eyed each other and Leslie started to full-blown cry. ‘It’s only HER!’ she shouted while pointing at me, the youngest of all 4 of us. ‘She just is always on her phone. She never puts it down,’ she said while sobbing with tears and snot running down her nose.
My supervisor’s eyes got really wide and she said, ‘Leslie, I really don’t see her on her phone that much. No more than any of us here.’
‘NO! YOU JUST DON’T SEE IT! SHE IS ALWAYS ON HER PHONE!’ Leslie screamed, her voice echoing in the room. At that point, my supervisor escorted her out for the rest of the day. The next day, a few construction guys from the yard are in our office building her a cubicle in the corner of the room. She literally just could not stand to see me. It was definitely one of the most bizarre experiences I’ve ever had with a coworker.”
Compulsive Liar
“I worked with this lady, I guess I’ll call her ‘Sue,’ in my current housekeeping job when I first got hired. She seemed nice enough, but I noticed she was a little off. If we were cleaning a room together, she was cheery, but if we were separated, I was the scum of the earth to her. I just decided to ignore her most of the time and I ended up excelling extremely well at the job while she started lagging behind.
I was asked to help her with her rooms one day as I had finished mine and she barked orders at me to help her with making the beds. As I was fluffing out a sheet, she was distracted and instead of catching it, it hit her in the face. I apologized, she laughed it off, and I thought nothing of it.
The next day, she was in tears explaining to our supervisor that I was horribly violent and I beat her whenever I was asked to do her rooms. She crocodile teared this to everyone on staff in the hotel with the intention of turning them against me. That put me in tears with an anxiety attack because I couldn’t afford to lose my job.
I did my work for the day and went home, fully expecting to be fired. The next day, I got told they were permanently separating us to never work together again. No problemo. So again, I was kicking ass while she was lagging behind and she started sucking up to me like we were best buds.
‘Don’t I beat you or something? Buzz off,’ I said.
‘What!? I never said that!’ she screeched.
‘Bye, Sue,’ I said.
To end this, everybody figured out she was a bloody liar and a lousy housekeeper. Once she was outed, she conveniently moved away to ‘be closer to her horses.'”