We've all worked with people that we wished we hadn't. These stories expose those awful coworkers that we've all had, the ones that make it hard to come to work in the morning and make you watch the clock all day, waiting for the time when you don't have to be in their presence anymore.
“She Was Among The Top Five Dumbest Creatures On Two Legs”
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“One of my former coworkers was among the top five dumbest creatures on two legs. Her highlights were:
-Her cell ringtone was some guy yelling ‘YOUR PHONE IS RINGING. PICK UP DA PHONE, YOUR PHONE IS RINGING!’
-She shuffled her feet and coincidentally got up to walk around every few minutes.
-She needed help with 98% of her daily work, so she’d get up, shuffle (see above) to our manager’s desk, ask for help on whatever mundane task, then shuffle the long way back to her desk. The long way was taken to either a) see what everyone else was doing (nosiest person on earth), and/or b) ask someone else the same question she had asked the manager. Her questions were the same most of the time, as she had zero retention.
-She would send someone a message, then promptly shuffle over to their desk and start with, ‘I just sent you an IM,’ then proceed with her idiotic questions.
-She had no sense of boundaries. She’d ‘walk’ right into an office where people were talking, walking between the people involved and stand over the shoulder of the person behind the desk.
-She would go into the bathroom if she was looking for someone to ask for help. If she saw you in the parking lot getting out of your car, she’d ask questions despite knowing that you’d need to be at your computer to see what she was talking about.
-One time, she spent an hour calling her desk from her cell phone trying to figure out why there was a bell with a line through it on the display. Luckily, she was educated on what having the ringer off meant.”
Not As Charming As He Thinks
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“I have a coworker who thinks he is the most charming person on the planet when in reality he’s an oblivious moron that everyone hates and wants to shut up.
He’s extremely preachy and butts into conversations he is not a part of to offer unwarranted advice. I was on my break with a pregnant female co-worker of mine and I made a comment about how I was going to ask her for Midol but remembered she’s pregnant and wouldn’t be carrying any. The annoying co-worker stopped me after my break and made some weird comment to me about how he had overheard me and wanted to inform me that the best form of birth control is actually abstinence. I asked what he was talking about and he said he heard me asking our other coworker for her birth control. He thought Midol was a birth control pill of some sort. He then went on a whole spiel about how making love is sacred and to respect me. I told him to shut up before I reported him.
In addition to this, he tattletales on other coworkers for using cuss words. The last time he tattled to our boss that my 29-year-old coworker cursed when he spilled coffee on his shirt.
My boss was so fed up, his exact words were, ‘Do I look like I give a crap?’ Which left our annoying coworker absolutely speechless.
This guy is so annoying, he constantly shows up to our workplace when he isn’t scheduled and hangs out off the clock for hours, being distracting and trying to have conversations with people who are actually working.
I could go on a ten-hour long rant about this guy.”
Pretty Little Liar
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“My fiancee has a co-worker who lies about stuff that could be true, theoretically, so you can’t call her out blatantly, but just isn’t true. It’s just one big false story after another with her. I’m also not even sure that if she was confronted with 100% truth and evidence of a situation she would accept it.
She has only been working there for a few weeks and so far she is totally cured of the stage four brain cancer she had when she was younger. There was a medical journal about her case, she claims, but was unable to find it when someone asked about it. She also saved two children from a burning boat and the fire department gave her a key to the city. Bill and Hillary Clinton were at her grandfather’s funeral and Hillary was on her phone the whole time, so she didn’t vote for Hillary because she was a disrespectful person.
She talks about her grandpa a lot and the smallish town she grew up in. Turns out one of the other colleagues spent some time in that town and brought up how everyone had known this old guy in the town, but no one knew his name, they just called him Buck.
She then exclaimed ‘That’s him! That’s my grandpa.’
They then asked, ‘So what is your grandpa’s real name?’
She said, ‘…I don’t know, we always called him Buck.’
Oh, and also she is a descendant of Tesla, Elie Wiesel, and Rasputin. I can’t wait to find out who she is related to next!”
He Had Never Been So Excited To See Someone Retire
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“I had to share a small office with this guy. For one thing, he always talked at a volume that might be appropriate if you were standing next to a jet engine and frequently scream sneezed, which made it awkward when I was on phone calls. He was also incredibly nosy and took Dwight Schrute levels of joy in enforcing pointless, minor rules. He once wrote me up for a safety violation for having my car keys on my desk, because someone could have stolen my car, crashed it and hurt someone. He once tried to go over my division manager’s head when she bought me a new chair because he thought it was not from an approved vendor (it was).
Everyone hated this guy so much that they would only speak to him through me. I have never been so happy at someone’s retirement party.”
Chaotic Coworking Space
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“I work in a coworking space (basically a shared area where small business owners or remote workers can rent a desk). My area is open and I share it with about eight other people. We are all respectful of each other: try to keep convos short and quiet, try to keep phone calls quiet (or go in the phone booth), and just maintain that balance of keeping to yourself while also being generally pleasant.
One guy is absolutely the most infuriating person I have ever met. He screams on phone calls…which are usually personal, not business. We once listened to him completely disrespect an AT&T customer service rep by trying to imitate his accent…TO THE REP! Anytime I understand a reference from the past, he announces to the room that a millennial understood the reference. He challenges unprovoked people on their political views and whether or not they support Trump.
However, the worst thing he does is linger. None of us want to talk to him, so we don’t typically initiate conversation. To combat this, he will hover. He will slowly get up from his desk, try to make eye contact with one of us, and then select a victim. He silently stands diagonally behind you or next to you and hovers until you remove your headphones/workflow and say, ‘Do you need something?’ Most of the time it’s about his current opinion on the military or those darn millennials.
Work conversation is fine, but we are all owners of our own businesses and are usually tasked with a lot of work, so it’s incredibly frustrating.”
Dumb As A Doorknob
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“I worked with a girl in a small company where we did everything – sales, shipping/receiving, marketing…whatever needed to be done. It was just the owner and us two.
She was dumb as a doorknob.
She couldn’t figure out how to calculate the tax on a sale when switching from one province to the next. I had to teach her how to calculate the sales tax and that the formula was the same for different provinces, you just have to plug in different numbers.
One day, I saw her staring at the screen for minutes. She was confused. It also did not look like work, so I decided to check in with her.
Me: ‘Is everything ok?’
Her: ‘Yeah.’
Silence.
Her: ‘What is the calculation you taught me for tax?’
Me: (Explaining it quickly) ‘…but…are you calculating tax for a sale or something else?’
Her: ‘The government is asking me how much tax I paid last year. It’s for child support.’
Me: ‘…’
Another time, we picked up a new brand to represent. They were based out of Sweden. She wrote up a whole email to send to all of our clients about our great new brand and all of their features, etc. I was the one who would edit all the important stuff that went out to large audiences as I, this isn’t saying much – I was clearly the most qualified to do so.
I had to change the part where she wanted to say, ‘…introducing our new Sweetish brand…’
Fun times.”
She Gives The Most Dramatic Employees A Common Enemy
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“My coworker is a compulsive liar. It’s not completely outlandish stuff, but everything is either exaggerated or a complete lie.
She constantly wants to be the center of attention to the point where I was telling her a recipe my grandmother showed me and as soon as I said, ‘My grandma showed me this recipe where…’
She instantly blurted out, ‘My grandma’s dead!’ Her mother, who works in the office next door to us, said my coworker’s great-grandmother died but all of her grandparents were still alive.
We work in a pretty laid back office that has flexible hours. There’s only four of us that work in the front office and you can pretty much request time off if the other three are okay with it. She works full-time but is constantly taking time off work to the point where she’s worked eight full days out of the last 30 and just today, requested Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday off of this week. She just got back from having time off last Wednesday through Friday. When she doesn’t get a requested day off, she calls in sick. She got her schedule adjusted with my manager to have every Wednesday off in general (this is fine because it was one of the original things she told my manager before getting hired) so it’s, in my own opinion, impossible to be burned out by working two days on two days off.
She doesn’t have a car and gets a ride from her mom (the one that works next door) to work and asks us almost every day if she can leave an hour early to get a ride home with her mom because she can’t afford an Uber. Which, I’d like to point out, is only because she hardly works to begin with and is financially irresponsible (hence no car).
When she manages to show up for work, she doesn’t concentrate on doing her job of answering the phones but instead goes around asking other people if they need help with anything, leaving the people who aren’t working phones to answer the phones.
She complains about the job every day and acts like every little thing is stress inducing torture. She got mad at another coworker for leaving her up front by herself to use the restroom. She’ll tell you all of the drama in her life, not to tell a soul, and then you find out she told every soul in that office the same thing.
She’s been working with us for about a year now. You can feel in the air that she’s either going to get fired or quit soon.
The good news is she caused the two drama filled girls working with us up front to become best friends by giving them a common enemy.
I tend to stay away from drama and try to be the neutral party in any office situation. I’ll try and give people the benefit of the doubt but this girl has been driving me crazy and not in a good way.
I blame myself. Telling me she had NSFW piercings out of the blue on the first day of working with us was a big red flag but I naively assumed that would have been the extent of it.”
“Just Thinking About Him Gives Me A Headache”
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“This man that I worked with was sexist, told terrible jokes, and always tried to get in my pants. He’d ask me on dates all the time and flirt with me. He’d also cut you off before you could even say one word. I was his boss, too. When I mentioned the behavior to my manager, he just laughed it off and said he’s harmless. Every day that he worked with me was a nightmare.
When he finished his work, he’d just follow me around like a lost dog and talk my ear off about the dumbest stuff. He’d make excuses as to why he couldn’t work some days. Someone actually had slept with him enough times to where he has two children. He made every woman customer uncomfortable to where I put him on dishes permanently. We received complaints about him all the time, but my boss wouldn’t let him go.
I no longer work there (thank God), but just thinking about him gives me a headache.”
Quitting Was Better Than Having To Work With Her
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“When I was young, I worked at a sub shop as the morning baker/lunch rush guy. I would show up at 5 am and be alone until 10 when the openers came in.
One was a micromanaging pain in the neck who would come in and ask about the bread. I would give her a count and she would double check behind me on that. She would double check every step of every action every employee took and criticize and nitpick. She wasn’t a manager, I might add.
The final straw was when I came in one morning at 5 and went to crank some tunes. Remember, I was solo for the first five hours. There was a note where the radio was. It said, ‘No music in the kitchen.’ When she arrived, I asked what was up with that and she told me, ‘I don’t like music.’ I was confused. Rock? Country? Classical? No, she didn’t like any music. At that point, I told her I was amazed because I’d never actually met someone without a soul.
I talked to the owner, an old, meek, religious man, and asked why she was allowed to dictate what I do when she wasn’t even there and be such a nonstop pain to the employees creating a hostile work environment. He told me he just lets her do her thing because it’s easier that way. I handed him my shirt and wished him good luck. She then tried refusing to give me my paycheck when I stopped in on payday. Just an all-around miserable, meddlesome, bland human being.”
“When She Was Fired, I Bought Flowers For Myself”
“Queen TMI was a coworker who, for some reason, thought we were friends. She latched onto me like a remora, spilling her guts daily and telling me all about her dysfunctional home life: her daughters, her separation from her husband, her affairs with random gang banger types, her medical history. Sometimes she would cry at my desk. I would hide from her when I saw her coming.
One day she told me, ‘I had an abortion over the weekend.’
She drove me insane to the point where people thought I was overreacting.
When she was fired, I bought flowers for myself.”
The Office Flirt
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“My former supervisor was so annoying. I’m in IT and there is a breed of IT girl who lives for the attention of the male-dominated work environment.
Don’t get me wrong, as a fellow IT girl, I have dated a coworker or two, but this girl could not get enough. She flirted with everyone. She slept with everyone. She then acted like they were just so crazy for thinking she liked them. It was constant drama. The icing on top was that she did not know how to do her job and instead used her string of flirtees to do it for her.
I spent a year desperately trying to get upper management to realize. When they finally did, it was a great day.”
He Was Super Chill…Until He Stopped Actually Doing His Job
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“Lemme tell you bout this guy named Jones. Jones was a co-worker of mine who got fired yesterday and lemme tell you, I’m glad he’s gone. He and I met at orientation and I thought he was cool at first. We’re around the same age, both smoke weed, both like to joke around and whatnot. Seemed like a really chill dude at first. Well, with time he became less chill.
I would be getting the bar set up at the beginning of the day and be cutting fruits and whatnot. I would ask him to grab me some ice to fill the well and he would reply, ‘Nah, I’m gonna go talk to the hostesses.’ He would then later complain to our manager that I didn’t do anything at all and that he did all the work that day, even though he would only come to the bar when a customer was there. If there wasn’t a customer, he would walk around the restaurant talking to people and flirting with the female workers while I was left maintaining the bar, restocking it, cleaning it, etc.
When he would be working as a server, he would come behind the bar, push me to the side and say, ‘I’m not doing anything so how about I make the drinks and serve people while you restock?’ Dude, you’re not even working the bar today. What do you think you’re doing?
He would refuse to serve certain people if he knew they wouldn’t tip well. There are some regulars who never tip at all (they just scratch out the tip box) and when it was his turn to take them, he would refuse. I told him he doesn’t have a choice and he has to serve them and he would tell me to do it if it was so important. I would then tell him he was a server that day and I’m a bartender, so it’s not my job to serve them. He would then throw a temper tantrum and tell a manager that I was giving him attitude.
Literally, any time you’re talking to someone, he would barge in, make some stupid comment and try to make himself the focus of the conversation. You can try to ignore him but he’ll just get more and more intrusive until you either focus all attention on him or walk away.
He tried taking more of my tip out percentage because the bar was full and since I was busy serving the bar customers, he had to open his own bottles for his table. His logic was, ‘I had to go out of my way to open three bottles with a bottle opener so he should give me some of his earned tips for that.’ Not a chance.
He would complain about literally everything. He would walk into the kitchen, an area he had never once worked in, see some sticky residue or a soy sauce stain on the counter and flip his lid about how nobody but him cleaned the place right and how he shouldn’t have to work in these conditions. He would then go to call all the other workers lazy, clean that tiny, little stain then make himself seem like some kind of god for being so noble.
I could go on for hours about this guy. All I know is he walked in yesterday, immediately got pulled to the side by management, got into a yelling match with the manager, tried clocking in, got told to eff off and left. He apparently didn’t show up for a bunch of shifts and didn’t call out, so they canned him. Good riddance, Jones. Everyone wanted you gone, anyway.”
She Had A Flair For The Dramatic
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“My coworker is 60 years old and honestly, one of the most vapid humans I have ever met. She is just clueless.
I don’t know why she even still has a job as she does about a third (or less) of the work of any other person on the team, and she makes the same mistakes over and over again on the work she DOES do.
She also talks non-stop, complains about EVERYTHING, and has a flair for the dramatic. One example of this: she fell while walking at work. Just fell on the flat floor. Anyway, she reported it through OH&S (as she should) because she hurt her foot and was sent for x-rays. They said she was fine. She insisted she wasn’t and would play it up BIG TIME for attention at work. My work bestie swears she saw her nursing the wrong foot one time! Anyway, she ended up seeing an orthopedic surgeon and he basically told her she was completely fine, and absolutely did not need surgery. She was going around work accusing the surgeon of being in cahoots with worker’s compensation because they didn’t want to pay for her surgery. We live in Canada. The surgery would have been 100% covered by provincial health care. I suspect she wanted a big payout from worker’s compensation but didn’t get one, as no doctor would sign off on her needing to miss any work.
The list goes on and on with this lady, including the most annoying laugh ever, but, I am on maternity leave and already raging just thinking about going back to work with her in 6 months, so I will leave it at this.”
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