Co-workers are with you at least eight hours a day, five days a week. With all that time spent together, you're bound to stumble upon them up to something...odd.
At Ease!
“I guess I could consider other trainees in boot camp co-workers right? Well if that’s the case there’s this:
I had entry controller duty one night around our 7th or 8th week of training. Basically it means another trainee and I took a two hour shift doing checks and maintaining security while everyone else slept. Well, almost everyone. Part of our checks is to check the bathroom every ten minutes to make sure nobody hung themselves or anything else crazy. We were dead tired and barely paying attention. I went into the bathroom for a check and noticed the light was on, so I figured someone was taking a s— or rubbing one off, the usual stuff. When I rounded the corner I saw another trainee doubled over, completely naked, looking at a mirror from between his legs with a razor to his a–hole. When he heard me come in he just stared at me, knowing he’d been caught in a moment of complete weakness. I said ‘Heeeeeeeeey man.’
His reply was ‘Sup.’ I turned around and went back into the hall.
He REALLY Loves Star Trek
“I worked for a software company a while back, One of the programmers was a huge Star Trek fan, he had all kinds of Trek stuff in his office. On several occasions, I caught him playing with the action figures, (like Rick Moranis in Spaceballs), having them kiss and hump each other. Once, he had Kirk and Picard get into a gay lovers’ quarrel where they ended up having action figure makeup sex.
That’s not the weirdest thing I caught him doing, though. One time, when he thought no one was watching, he got up, took down one of his big Trek mugs from his shelf, held it up to his a– and farted. He then started huffing it like he’s smelling the cork of a fine wine. About an hour later, he walked into the break room, with the cup and proceeded to fill it with soda from the fridge, without washing it.”
No Rest For The Weary
“I had recently started sharing an office with an older lady. One day, I came back from lunch and she wasn’t there. I went about my afternoon. About 20 minutes later, I saw her come out from under her desk. It was so awkward. She was napping underneath and thought I’d walk out of the office at some point and she’d be able to get up without me finding out she had been under there the whole time.”
All Work And No Play…
“I worked in a machine shop for a few years and I can’t believe some of the s— I’ve seen people do. Weirdest thing? I guess that’d have to be when I caught one of the engineers walking around like a velociraptor or something. He was bobbing his head and making his hands look like claws and sort of doing this wide stance tip toe striding move, much like a dinosaur would. Opening his mouth like he was roaring and moving his head around violently. He noticed me looking at him, stood straight up and started doing the stretch yawn.
Another one of the guys got caught trying to make alcohol in his desk drawer with apple juice. Everyone noticed a nasty smell coming from his area and one of the shop managers finally had to inspect it. They found a bunch of rotting juice boxes in a back in the back of his desk. He fully admitted to trying to make alcohol and he was pissed that they had ruined it for him. He had been with the company since day one so everything was cool. Wow, the memories.”
Quite The Eyeful
“I worked at an ad agency with an ‘open concept’ floor plan. Cubes have low walls, and the offices have walls, but they don’t go to the ceiling. As a result, it’s loud and if you choose to, you can hear most everyone.
Anyways, my office sits outside a section of cubes and in particular there are two cubes that I can see right into if I wheel my chair back a bit and look out my door.
About a year ago, we had two extremely attractive female 20-somethings sitting there. I’m working on my computer, and I hear the one whisper to the other (the loud whisper which is more of a, ‘hey, I’m whispering so everyone will pay extra attention now’) that she can see the girl’s underwear line under her skirt.
Of course my radar pops up and I slowly wheel my chair back to see what’s going on. The other girl is apparently very embarrassed that her underline is visible and proceeds to remove her underwear at her desk and stuff them in her purse.
I tried to think of a million reasons to go talk to her that day.”
Don’t Beat Yourself Up About It
“Worked at a warehouse for a short bit. One day ‘Mike’ asks the new co-worker girl (super cute, everyone fell for her at some point) out. She turns him down. Fast forward a few minutes and when he thinks he’s alone in the back aisle. I observe him cursing himself…he then proceeded to start punching himself (really f—ing hard) in the side of the head. Turns out, it was good I happened to be there as he wound up knocking himself unconscious…good times!”
Total Creeper
“I worked at a web development company and, one day, another programmer and I are discussing a new project, and we hear bang bang bang bang…for like a solid 30 seconds coming from the next office, we look at each other then slowly creep next door, to see wtf just happened.
There’s another developer in there, with his head down on the desk, and we’re like ‘Uh… ___, are you okay??’ he picks up his head and the whole front of his face is red and already swollen. He proceeds to explain he was just ‘frustrated with some code.’ Turns out, he repeatedly smashed his face into his keyboard and desk because he kept getting errors…. he was bruised for a few days after that.
Now that I think about it, this was not even close to the weirdest thing he did.
I’d have to say the weirdest thing was that he was married and wrote a love song to this girl who worked there, who was also married, and brought a guitar and sang it to her. In front of everyone. She actually quit because of that. I found out years later from his wife (ran into her while she was drunk at a bar) that she even got a restraining order against him so it was apparently more than that song. His wife was just as weird, if not weirder than him. She was drunk, out without him for some reason, and just went on a rant out of the blue about the whole thing. She was like, ‘They were just friends, she took it wrong.’
I wanted to say, ‘Yeah…you didn’t hear the song.'”
A Bit Of An Odd Bird
“We had an attorney who would flip out every once in awhile and hide in her office. I walked by her office and noticed the door was cracked. I peeked through and saw her sitting in the floor with one of those big tubs of cheese puffs. She had downed about half of it and I knew it was a new tub because she laid the lid wrapper on the floor. Her face and hands were covered in cheese dust.
She basically had been downing cheese puffs for about 45 minutes straight.
Another time, she took us to her house to help move an item and she had NO furniture. She had taken cardboard boxes and made makeshift chairs and tables out of them. Her tv sat on the box it came in from Wal-Mart.
This chick made about $70,000 a year, and couldn’t afford furniture.”
Waaay Too Much Information
“I’m the IT director for a group of auto dealerships and my boss has monitoring software on every machine we use. This helps him exert authority, but the truth is he has no idea how to monitor the staggering amount of information that comes in. Naturally, that falls to me. Internet histories, right down to your Google search history, all end up visible to me eventually, and let’s just say that while I understand luxury car sales is a boring gig but…Jesus.
A lot of normal stuff. ESPN, YouTube, sports blogs, ordering food online. Then an equally large amount of highly disturbing stuff. Super fringe porn, browsing for sex toys (at work? Really?), the Google search phrase, ‘Are black warts near my crotch herpes,’ a married male salesman browsing other men’s profiles on OkCupid, it goes on and on and on.
The worst part is, it’s kind of like being a porn store clerk. The nature of your job exposes you to deeply personal (and disgusting) information about people you’d rather regard as strangers.”
Yummy!
“My boss will pop his blackheads and eat them. He also eats his earwax and his boogers. When he starts, it’s usually a ten to fifteen minute ordeal. He will go through all three disgusting steps and then he uses hand sanitizer. I’m not sure what the point of that is. We share an office, so I’m exposed to it on a regular basis.”
Extra Curricular Activities
“At my local fire department where I volunteer, I went into the engine bay at about 2:00 AM to get an extra sweat shirt from my locker. I noticed that the checkout light was on in the ambulance, so I went to investigate. I hopped up on the bumper and glanced inside. My new EMS probie had somehow rigged a nebulizer tube to the portable suction unit, and was laying on the cot with his penis in one hand and the tube in the other.
I didn’t want to deal with the situation myself, (because I’m female, and was a little creeped out) so I woke up the career fire captain and then I went to bed.
From the bed, I heard the captain yell, ‘What in the deep-fried f—!?’
Cap told me the next morning that he made the guy toss all the equipment he ‘soiled’ and sterilize the inside of the ambulance before kicking him out in the middle of the night.”
About Face
“Walk into break room.
Co-worker talking on his cell phone, with his back to me, ‘F— you, just poke holes in the box, it doesn’t even matter, because it’s going to die anyway.’
Walk out of break room.”
Team Building Activities Taken Too Far
“I worked a stretch at a popular Arts and Crafts store for a few months. One day, I was taking our useless glass scraps to the trash compactor, and I see two of my co-workers, a dude and a girl from our sales floor, next to the entrance to our trash compactor.
Now, our compactor was the kind that sat in a loading bay, and had a long metal chute at about 45 degrees to go down in there. Sometimes, an employee would have to climb down there with a flashlight because there was something jamming it.
So I come in and wait behind them, and they turn look at me and said, ‘Umm, wait a sec.” They open up the chute, and call down. Soon, another dude comes sprawling out, followed by another girl, both covered in paper, wood chips, a small pieces of metal.
They climb out, dust themselves off, and all four return to the sales floor, leaving me staring after them, bewildered. Two weeks later, they were fired. I found out that these four teens would apparently crawl down into the trash compactor and have sex while the other group listened, then switch girls, and go again. They found about a dozen used condoms at the bottom of the trash compactor at the end of that week after it wouldn’t run because of a thick metal beam getting stuck. That is what tipped off management.”
Scratch ‘N Sniff
“In a big department store, I work on the floor that sells women’s nightwear and lingerie. So, we’re all tidying up after the store closed and this new kid, a Christmas temp who was a bit weird, was tidying one of the underwear tables. The floor manager was walking past and noticed that he was sniffing one of the knickers.
So she asked him, ‘[Name], what are you doing?’
To which he replied, ‘Oh… sorry, [Name]. I was just checking if they’d been worn.'”
The Food’s Not The Strange Part…
“I have a co-worker who hides cans of Chef Boyardee at his desk. Every day, he’ll pop a can open and eat it right out of the can. Once he’s finished with his ‘meal,’ he’ll clean his hands and shoes with Windex.”
Just Chilling
“Guy I work with laid face-up on the floor of his office with the top half of his body under the desk, his hands out at his sides (think the “corpse pose” in yoga). I actually stuck my head in to see if he was all right because, frankly, he was laying in such a way that, if I was laying that way, I’d hope someone would come check on me.
‘Oh yeah,’ he said nonchalantly without moving. ‘I’m just thinking.’
I left him to it.”
I’ll…Just…Leave You To It
“I started out as a busboy, so I mostly just lurked around unnoticed. I once saw one of the sous chefs take a knife and slowly cut along his finger, then stand there, watching the blood drip down his arm. Then he cleaned and got back to work…”
Imaginary Friend
“One of the janitors I worked with for five years – whenever you approached him, you could hear him talking to someone, but when you finally catch sight of him, he’s alone.
I saw him doing it from a distance a couple of times- He would be chatting away, complete with ‘eye contact,’ hand gestures and sometimes laughing. Whenever I got too close he’d put his head down and go back to mopping.”
Inappropriate Viewings
“A co-worker and I frequently noticed another co-worker seemed to be looking at photos on his computer of young boys in their underwear. We work for a retail site, and we weren’t sure if he was looking at something we were selling or what, so we brought it to our supervisor’s attention after much deliberation. He couldn’t really explain it, I guess, and he was fired. Then, a few months later, he was arrested for being involved in a child pornography ring. He even filmed some of it himself, according to the papers. The guy was a total weirdo.”
Taking A Tinkle
“I used to work in aerospace and this one guy was so lazy, he wouldn’t even get up to go to the bathroom. He’d just pee in a bottle while sitting at his desk (in a two person cubicle). The worst part was watching him take the bottle and empty it in the drinking fountain.”
Total Misnomer!
“Some of the guys from our Denmark office are in town. I went to pee while I was working graveyard shift. It’s 2am and I’m definitely the only person in the building in my mind. Wrong. In strolls Dúdbrö, who completely undresses, and neatly folds his clothes. Then walks into a handicapped stall. Walks back out, then walks into the next stall, and the next, until he was out of stalls. I’m done peeing, but I’m still watching for the WTF factor. Guy walks up and, in broken English, asked where the shower is. It all made sense at that point, but definitely strange. The next day, he asked in a meeting why it’s called ‘bathroom’ when you don’t bathe in it. I had never put much thought into it until that point.”
Musical Discoveries
“The maintenance guy sleeping in the broom closet with his pants around his ankles comes to mind. I never even told my boss about that because I was so embarrassed I didn’t want to even get into it. I’m just a ‘everyone do what the f— they want as long as it doesn’t bother me or make my job harder’ type person.
Also, the dude in the office to the left of mine was singing along and doing the dance to the Hairspray soundtrack. You have to pass through his office to get to the back office where the part-time scanners work, and his office was empty for so long, we were used to just walking in to pass through. I totally forgot someone was in that office now, so I didn’t knock, and yeah he was mid -twirl and I caught ‘hey mama, hey mama-‘ and then he turned red and kind of choked.”
A Little Too Hard On Herself
“I witnessed her drop a Snapple in the hallway, then slap herself full in the face and say, ‘You big idiot!’ She also wore noise-cancelling headphones and talked to herself, most often saying, ‘Susan, Susan, Susan…’ and ‘Whoops!'”
Some Things Cannot Be Unseen
“It was my job to open the mail each day and sort it out to the attorney that was working the cases. I open this large envelope addressed to my boss and discovered he had apparently applied to a nudist club and they were not accepting new members currently, so they mailed back his application and all the nude photos that he had sent in with his application. I walked a couple of blocks away from our office and threw the whole thing in a dumpster.”
A Real Vendetta Against Geckos
“We worked at a reptile breeding facility. She would always complain about getting attacked by geckos and would show everyone the bites. They do occasionally bite (usually they’ll snip at your fingers), but this chick had bite marks all up and down her arms and even once got bit in the face. One day, I saw her smacking a gecko against her arm in an attempt to get it to attack her. I would imagine she also smacked her face with the gecko to provoke it. I have no idea why she did this. She later got fired because she ‘didn’t feel like’ feeding about 200 animals in one day.”