At RateMyJob, we believe work shouldn’t be a chore, but when it is, you should at least get a good story out of it. So we’ve scoured the web for the funniest and most outrageous stories from professionals from all industries, to bring you a little humor and entertainment when you need it most.
We join the workforce because we need a job to stabilize our lives, right? However, it can be oh-so annoying when all you want to do is do your job, get a check, and go home yet there’s got to be an oddball to complicate things with their lack of brain cells. In this segment, workers recall the moronic things they’ve witnesses their not-so-bright co-workers do that made them want to pull their hair out.
Years ago I was a line chef at a high volume fine dining Italian restaurant. Occasionally I was deemed responsible for training new guys on the line in addition to my normal responsibilities.
I had this new trainee who was a nice young man in his early twenties. He came in claiming he had four years of high-volume line experience. We had a steam table that held 6-inch third pans, one of which contained red sauce, one an Asiago cream sauce, and one a lemon-butter sauce. When they ran out and we were busy we’d throw the third pan in the microwave to heat the sauce up, which was not exactly optimal, but it got the job done.
I sent my trainee to grab a third pan of red sauce from the walk-in and heat it up in the microwave. Because he was supposed to be relatively experienced and I was short-handed in the middle of a dinner rush, I did not monitor him while he completed the task. The microwave settings were up high over the line. All he had to do was pop the third pan in there with a lid on it and set the timer for ten minutes.
He had one job.
A few minutes later I smelled something burning. I warned everyone to double-check their food to figure out where it was coming from. I even did the same with my own orders. At first, I thought my mind was just playing tricks on me. Everything seemed fine… until I looked up.
To my horror, flames were inside the microwave! I yelled for everyone to step away from the microwave, and used tongs to open the door. Molten plastic was literally DRIPPING FROM THE MICROWAVE DOOR once it was open.
And what caused this conflagration?
Well, the prep guys would sometimes run out of plastic third pans during the day and use metal ones as well. When you needed the contents you would transfer them into a plastic one, which by then would have been used/washed/put away in the course of the day. My trainee put a metal third pan in the microwave, set it to run for ten minutes, and then walked away.
After that, we moved him to prep, where it was quickly discovered that he had no idea what he was doing there as well. Although we felt safer having him mess up there than nearly having him burn the place down.
I was a bartender at a local pub and it was my night off so I hit the gym. On my way home, I decided to grab something to eat and stopped by the pub. It was a slow night and my coworker, Nicole, was behind the bar. Nicole regularly modeled for Budweiser posters and truly was stunning but unfortunately, had a terrible attitude. She was rude to everyone except for me for whatever reason.
I grabbed a seat at the bar, ordered food, and started to read my book. That’s when I overheard Nicole say to her boyfriend, ‘Those bimbos need to learn how to tip.’
Two girls sitting at the bar immediately stopped talking and shot nasty looks at Nicole.
That’s when all hell broke loose.
The two girls she was referring to were sisters and very beautiful but they were also ‘homegrown Brooklyn.’ They, too, had overheard what was said and the situation quickly escalated to one of complete madness.
Keep in mind that Nicole was the messiest barkeep I’ve ever seen and left pint glasses, sugar caddies, and dirty ashtrays all over the bar. So, these girls in unison started picking up anything they could find hurling them at Nicole. She was bobbing and weaving as best she could and each time she ducked, another projectile destroyed a bottle behind her.
I was very concerned and jumped up. I ended up restraining one of the girls from behind. I was just trying to give Nicole a chance to escape because the girls were out for blood.
As I was holding one girl who was twice my size, the other sister punches Nicole’s boyfriend in the face and breaks his nose. I finally got one of the girls out of the bar and they both ran from the scene. The bar was destroyed and tons of bottles had been smashed.
I was amazed the mirror behind the bar didn’t smash.
When it quieted down, Nicole didn’t bother to thank me for saving her ass. I did let her know the fight was her fault and any seasoned bartender should know how to stop fights, not start them.”
“I worked at a crummy corner store with a deli in it once.
My coworker, Mary, was a handful. There was always drama going on with her involving her feuding with baby-daddies or family members. She wasn’t the brightest person in the world.
One day, one of our customers came in with her baby and asked if we had a place to change her. We didn’t have a public restroom or changing table, so the correct answer was supposed to be, ‘No.’
Mary’s response? ‘Sure! You can change your baby right over there, hun!’
Once I saw where she was pointing, it confirmed how truly dumb she was.
‘You can change her diaper on the meat-slicing table!’ Mary cheesed at the customer.
Before I could object, the customer proceeded to do. As she was finishing up, Mary said to the customer, ‘Now, don’t tell Andrew about this.’ Andrew was the guy in charge of the deli. He was an Iraq war veteran in his late twenties, a college student, and hated his job but tried to make sure everything was on the level. He came around the corner from prepping pizzas out back just in time to hear Mary.
‘Don’t tell Andrew about what?‘ he hollered across the store.
‘She let me change my baby on this table.’ The customer said, smiling blissfully and bouncing her baby up and down.
Andrew’s eyes fell to the meat-slicing table. ‘Mary let you change your baby on the meat-slicing table?!’
Silence engulfed the store.
‘Mary let you change your baby on the meat slicing table?!’ he repeated, louder.
‘Of course,’ Mary said in an idiotic chiming tone of voice. ‘Of course, I did. Why the hell wouldn’t I?’
That began an explosive screaming fight between the two of them while he doused the table in bleach for a half hour straight. For the rest of the night, Andrew found various ways to slip Mary’s horrible actions into the conversation,
For example:
‘Andrew, can you slice some more tomatoes?’
‘Sure, Mary, can you let some more customers change their infants’ diapers on the meat-slicing table? Thanks!’
Mary never understood why what she did was wrong, or unhygienic. Andrew never gave up trying to drill into her head why it was disgusting by openly mocking her about the incident in front of customers.
Eventually, they both quit.
Both claimed that they couldn’t work together anymore.”
This was a long time ago but this story has stuck with me.
It was delivery day. The truck pulled up and we started offloading everything. One crew went to make sure the perishables got into the freezer immediately. After that was taken care of, the non-perishables were put away.
By the time we put away most of the delivery, the lunch rush was starting so we had to leave the non-perishables where they were and get back to making food.
About an hour went by and one of my co-workers was tasked to take some trash out. This normally took about three minutes, tops.
Fifteen minutes later the manager realized she hadn’t gone back out to the dining area. He went to check on her and found her throwing some boxes into the trash.
When he asked her what she was doing, she announced she was taking care of the ‘mistake’ the warehouse made with our delivery.
My manager placed a trembling hand over his mouth to keep from screaming.
According to her, the warehouse made a HUGE mistake in sending supplies that had expired the day before.
Now, remember, all of the perishables were already stored.
It turned out she was throwing out boxes of napkins.
She had read the shipping label, which clearly listed the day before as the ‘shipped date’, as the expiration date, and thought the napkins had expired.
To top it off, she knew they were boxes of napkins.”
“The publishing firm I work for had just put out an advertising-heavy special edition.
Since we had to do our normal publication on top of this the boss kept trying to cut hours and avoid overtime, he chose to hire an outside production freelancer to lay out the special section.
We sent the freelancer a placeholder copy (lorem ipsum) and ads so he could mock up the layout. As the approved ads and the final copy came in, we would send him the finished replacements to flow into the designated spaces.
The freelancer worked from home, but our boss kept in contact with him and assured us everything was going fine in the special section.
When print day rolled around, it became apparent that nobody could get in contact with the freelancer. He stopped responding to e-mails and answering his phone. The boss said everything was fine. He then said he already reviewed the section and claimed it was ‘perfect.’
As more time elapsed, it was two hours past our print deadline. My boss came into the room, and tossed us a DVD with a wink, before saying, ‘See? I told you everything would work out just fine.’
The freelancer had stopped by and delivered our section, picked up his check, and abruptly left.
We were still a little late to start printing, but at least we had our section. Everyone on my team prepared themselves to do some rapid corrections using InDesign before our final prints were sent out.
We inserted the DVD to see what we were working with and were immediately met with by far the most abominable thing in my career.
Flattened, uneditable PDFs that were essentially pictures of each page of the special section greeted us. Each page was a disaster.
The boss had sent the freelancer an uncorrected copy to use as placeholder text, and that’s what was in the PDFs. All of it was practically teeming with typos and notes to the editor. One article was still completely in (lorem ipsum.)
Large sections of each page were left blank. The paper itself was full of outdated and expired placeholder ads.
There were even full-page color ads for serious advertisers like Microsoft that consisted of a blank white page with ‘ad: Microsoft written in the middle.
We all turned to the boss in amazement. It was a complete disaster. We couldn’t run it. At that point, we all needed to somehow create an entirely new special section in the next thirty minutes, or else we’d be ruined.
That’s when my boss said he told the freelancer to send the files directly to the printer.
It’s was 4 in the morning, meaning it was much too late to stop printing, and pulling the special section means we would have to pull the normal publication, as well.
So the special edition hit the streets in shamefully amateur disaster nightmare form, and we had to void fifteen thousand dollars worth of advertising contracts.
I went through three bottles of Jameson that week.”
“I work at a furniture store. A few years ago, so did a guy Steve.
He was a less-than-decent employee when it came to doing work, but there was something about Steve that we did not know.
The first incident seemed perfectly innocent. Steve accidentally set fire to a huge warehouse beside the store that was full of carpet. He immediately set off the fire alarm. Firemen were taking a while to arrive and there was Steve, proud as could be with a fire extinguisher in his hand furiously battling the inferno that had since engulfed the warehouse.
Good job, Steve! We all thought. The warehouse was rebuilt, the stock was replaced, and it was forgotten about for a while.
Fast forward two months. Steve lived in a tiny home beside the store the boss owned, along with his wife and child. The fire alarm was once again raised and the firefighters arrived to find Steve on the roof of his humble abode. His wife and child were trapped inside. Steve was doing what any good little fireman would.
This time eyebrows began to raise. It was decided that Steve’s fires are something to be watched, especially since they were the only significant fires in the shop’s history.
Several more months passed and the dead of night is broken once more by the wail of sirens. But this time, it was not the shop.
This time Steve had truly outdone himself.
When the firemen arrived at the site of the fire, they found Steve standing outside of another warehouse already engulfed in flames. This time the fire was at the store’s main warehouse, located several miles away from the store. There was no doubt about it. Steve had just torched a warehouse containing over three million euro worth of stock and he was caught red-handed.
Needless to say, Steve is in prison now, but it took a damn long time to recover from the five million euro worth of damage he did.
I can’t help but get angry when I think of the petty and childish way he actually put the lives of his wife and child in danger.”
“There were two people in the office I worked for. Yes, they were married to each other.
The husband, my boss, abusively used commas in just about every email he sent out. If you read commas with a pause after each one, as you should, this guy went above and beyond to have the most ridiculous pauses. Here’s a quote from an email he sent me:
‘Kindly go on the internet, to try to find banks, that would make a car loan, under ten thousand, for a car that is a 1994 model year.’
I worked at a technical writing firm. How his errors were tolerated in a writing environment, coupled with the fact that he ran the place, was beyond me. We also did staffing and contract hires on the side for companies. I often helped out with this. He and I shared the same HR email account for the company. I witnessed him sending out emails with similar comma stutters as the one above to both companies and interested candidates. It was ridiculous.
His wife ran her own company, separate from technical writing, but in the same building. She was technically incompetent and clueless. She would always complain about some problem on her Macbook Pro that she claimed wasn’t her fault but it always, most certainly, was.
It was always either my co-worker or me that had to deal with it because she came directly to us for help.
The time when she came to me asking for help with shipping something from Stamps.com takes the cake.
She had some promo credit to use and wanted to burn it on sending a package out. She told me the Stamps.com program had to be downloaded and used to run on her Macbook, but it wasn’t working, ‘for some weird reason.’
Looking at the Stamps.com site, the software was Windows-only so she was straight-up lying. After telling her this, she stuck to the lie and said it used to work, but now we had use a PC to get it settled.
I got on a PC and download the software. The prompt immediately asked for a username and password. She typed it in and claimed it was right, only to get the ‘invalid username or password’ message repeatedly.
For whatever reason, she couldn’t retrieve the username or password. Then she admitted it was because she apparently set it up on an old email account. So, she resorted to calling Stamps.com support to get it which was absolutely tedious to do.
At this point, I left her to work on something else, but I was still within earshot of the conversation. Customer support asked her, ‘Have you downloaded the software?’
‘I don’t know if I did,’ my boss’s wife admitted and I immediately heard frantic clicking noises. I walked over to see what the hell was going on. I found her opening the .exe installer from the Firefox download window, saying ‘it’s not working.’
I wanted to bang my head on the nearest desk.
After passing this giant obstacle, she logged in and asked for my help actually getting the postage prepped. At that point, it had been nearly an hour and a half since she came to me for help. The program asked for the dimensions and weight of the package, so I grabbed the box from her to measure it.
I looked at the box and wanted to scream.
There was already a freaking prepaid shipping return label on it.”
I had a coworker named Tea (pronounced ‘tei-uh’). Everyone knew her, so everyone knew we had a coworker whose name was spelled like the drink.
Tea wanted to take home some iced coffee concentrate, so started brewing some then afterward placed a note on it that said ‘Iced coffee for Tea,’ so people would leave it alone.
I came in one day and a couple of minutes later there was a disappointed customer at the counter, declaring his drink tasted funny.
He ordered an iced tea, but… it tasted like really nasty coffee. It turned out, one of my other coworkers, who was one of the most scatterbrained men I have ever met, thought ‘Iced coffee for Tea’ meant he was supposed to use it to make tea.
Never mind it made absolutely no sense. In case you’re wondering, he had worked for us for a while, so he knew it was coffee, even if he didn’t read the note.
This is the same guy who put his backpack in the sink in a bathroom because he didn’t know where else to set it down. The sink had automatic faucets, and the backpack had his brand-new, expensive laptop in it.”
“I worked with a woman in school who did not know how nor understand the concept of sweeping.
I was her manager, and she was working a shift behind the bar. Part of closing involved sweeping the dining room floor and behind the bar area. As she was cleaning up, she asked what else she had to do so I asked her if she had swept yet.
The woman just stared at me blankly so I took it as a no.
We went to the back and I showed her where the broom and dustpan were. I then showed her the area she was responsible for sweeping. Again, the woman gave me a blank stare.
Then she asked me, ‘What am I supposed to do?’
That time, I gave her a blank stare.
‘D-do you not know how a broom works?’
‘No,’ she admitted.
I like to think I have a great sense of humor. So did she, or so I thought.
‘Haha, nice one. Get to work, ok?!’
The woman continued her blank stare.
‘Holy crap!’ Are you serious right now?!’
‘…Yeah.’ The woman looked down sheepishly.
So, I showed her how a broom works and how to sweep the dirt, dust, and debris, into the dustpan. I then walked the dustpan over to the trash can and flipped it over to dump the trash into the trash can.
I later learned she was from a wealthy family and I guess had swept or seen it done before. It turned out she was very smart as far as book smarts went.
I believe she’s a marine biologist or something now, but that was a moment I don’t think I’ll ever forget. I hope she learned a lot at that job.”
“I worked with a crew at a local Wendy’s during summers in high school. It wasn’t the best job, but I was pretty good at it and was okay with my current station because it was only temporary. I was going to college and had career plans that would transition me from behind the counter.
I got to the point where my manager would put me with new hires or troublesome employees to help show them how to do things. I would pick up their slack so they could train on position without diminishing the performance of the store.
One guy was the exact opposite of me. He was a middle-aged adult who lived with his mother and at best had a high school education.
So far, this sounds like a sympathetic situation, right?
That was how I initially approached working with him, but then it soon became apparent that he thought he was “the big cheese”. He was talking down to me, making references to street cred and other nonsense, and his attitude reflected he was too good for the job and smarter than the people around him. He didn’t believe it was the manager’s place to boss him around.
Well, my sympathy went out the window pretty fast. I won’t go further into his attitude except that he had no right to it. He was terrible at his job. He was the kind of guy that would respond to every request by sucking his front teeth and saying ‘maaaan…’ as if it was too much trouble for him to do his job.
We basically put him in a position to be a low-level runner. All he had to do was go get whatever was needed to support whatever station during the lunch rush. This was a job that carried low risk since normally the person working on the station would go get more of whatever was needed at their station:
One time, the frosty machine was running low on frosty mix. I glanced around but couldn’t find the runner to bring more frosty mix from the walk-in cooler.
‘Jarvis, where are you?”
I heard his voice sound off from the back. ‘I’m getting more frosty mix!’ His voice boomed.
It had been about five minutes since we told him to get frosty mix which was an eternity during the lunch rush.
The frosty mix was a brown liquid in a large sealed plastic bag on the right shelf at eye level as we walked into the cooler.
Everyone rushing out orders kept wondering: ‘What is taking Jarvis so long?’
I turned to bag a takeout order before I heard my manager say, ‘Jarvis, what are you doing?!’
I turned back to see Jarvis holding an open bag of chili meat over the frosty machine
Chili meat was overcooked burger meat. It was stored in the walk-in freezer which was very different from the cooler. We had to walk past the frosty mix and into a separate room that is much colder to get to the chili meat.
‘I’m filling the frosty machine like you said!’ Jarvis was annoyed.
‘No! That’s not frosty mix!’ My manager and I both yelled in unison.
Jarvis sucked his teeth and rolled his eyes. ‘Man, how y’all want me to get some frosty mix?’
My manager stood there dumbfounded before she shook her head and said, ‘Just go sweep the dining room.’ She then turned to me. ‘John go refill the frosty machine.’
Jarvis sucked his teeth again. ‘Man, come on!’ He muttered something as he walked off.
After a few months of working at Wendy’s, Jarvis mistook chili meat for frosty mix after he had handled both before. He nearly ruined one of the most expensive pieces of machinery in the store.
It was a crisis averted and the rest of the crew shared a good laugh.”
