You can't get along with everyone, especially at work. However, you do hope that even if you don't like some personalities, you can all work together well enough that everything gets done. Unfortunately, that isn't always the case. There are those people who just want to come in and collect a paycheck without having to do anything. The people in the following stories found themselves having to work with these leeches. The outcome left them questioning why they even bothered showing up at all.
The following points have been edited for clarity.
Mixing Business With Pleasure
“A woman at work was not good at her job and was demoted. I was asked if she could be placed under me. I agreed because I felt maybe she didn’t understand what she was doing in her former position.
The first week working for me, she was supposed to fly to meet a customer for a potential deal to demonstrate equipment and close the sale. At the designated time, the customer called and asked where she might be.
Turns out she never woke up that morning and missed her early flight because she was tired from the night before. I informed her that this was unacceptable and I would finish her sales trip and she should work on some other things for the rest of the week, and I gave her specific projects that needed to be completed.
I hastily booked a flight that same day, closed the deal with the original customer and then flew to her next assignment that night. When I arrived the next morning at the customer’s location, she was there and seemed surprised that I was upset with her. After allowing her to stay and informing her that she should use this as training, I worked on this account all day. I decided to take a few of the prospective customer’s employees out to dinner to try to make the deal over dinner and drinks.
As we drove back to the hotel, I gave her instructions to meet me in the hotel lobby to go to dinner.
I show up at the agreed upon time and wait for her. She doesn’t show up. Fifteen minutes later, I call her cell phone and she answers, ‘Hello?’
‘Where are you?’ I ask.
‘I caught a cab to the restaurant, why?’ She answers.
‘I told you to wait here.’ I say.
I show up and she’s hammered already, and saying horribly inappropriate things. About an hour in, she leaves the table and disappears. A long time later, at the end of the meal, we all leave.
Right as I get back to the hotel, my cell phone rings. As it turns out she has climbed into the back of one of my customer’s employees pickup trucks, passed out on the bed of the truck. She rode to his house in the middle of nowhere and then came to.
She then proceeds to hit on him and try to get into his house (She is in her early 30s and he is in his late 60s and married). His wife finally calls the police and they arrive at the same time I did. I discuss with the police that I am her boss and I will take care of it.
When I get into the car in the morning to go to the airport, I try to gently explain to her that she no longer works for the company. She proceeds to ask why. She then asks, ‘Does this mean that I don’t work for you either or is it just the company?’
‘YOU STUPID JERK, YOU ARE FIRED!’ I shout and then enjoy an awkwardly silent ride to the airport.”
Karma Is Ruthless
“A guy got hired as my swamper. The boss says, ‘Got a good one for you. He’s big and strong; Seems nice!’ What a great change from the scrawny 18-year-olds he usually hired to help me, that would work for three days and quit because it was too physically demanding.
He starts. His first hour, we are driving to the site, he’s bragging about the illegal substances he did last night, the girls that he got to kiss him at the club (he’s married with a toddler).
The second hour. At the site, he’s asking if I can pick him up for work every day if he gives me 25 bucks a week (was fair, he didn’t live far from the shop).
The third hour. He’s asking to borrow 100 bucks until payday, I decline and say I never lend money to co-workers.
By the end of our eight hour day, he had gotten lunch and promises to be picked up/dropped off every day. I get it. When you start a new job, sometimes you’re short on money. It happens, I’ve mooched stuff off people in my first weeks too.
Two weeks go by and he hasn’t paid me a cent for gas (he kept promising once he gets paid he’ll pay me everything at once).
The third week goes by. He gets his first paycheck, but only for one week (week hold back rules), he gives me 10 bucks. The fourth week I tell him if he doesn’t pay me the gas money today, he’s finding his own rides. He responds by saying, ‘Fine, I’ll just walk anyway.’
Next day: he’s 30 minutes late because I wasn’t there to pick him up, so he had to walk! I tell the boss to fire this idiot and he does (I’ve been here for a while at this point, he needs me to be happy). The guy comes to me saying, ‘I hope you know you’re taking food off of my toddler’s plate, just some food for thought.’ I tell him to screw himself.
I run into him and his wife a couple months later. He comes to me, hands me $100 bucks cash, and says, “Sorry for how I acted, I was on stuff for most of that, You think you can get me a job again?’
I laugh and say no, I wasn’t going to put my butt on the line for him after how he treated our company.
He then asks for the $100 bucks back, I tell him sure, hand it back, and ask him if he has food for his baby. His wife looks confused. They didn’t have a baby, just a way to get money out of concerned people.”
Eww Dirt? But My New Work Boots!
“I had a new guy to train in my job where we installed televisions and various other electronics in expensive houses. I had a small part in hiring him and even though he wasn’t from our industry he seemed to have good skills in related fields and seemed willing to learn what he needed to.
Our first two weeks were spent finishing up a really nice theater. The house was completely finished and it was pleasant and easy indoor clean work. Then we moved on to the next job and had to wire the house, which involved crawling through the attic and underneath the floors pulling new wires.
I turned to this guy and told him to take these five wires down underneath the house and crawl them to the other side. He looked at me like I had three heads and said, ‘What? No way! I’m not going under there.’
I was taken aback. This is a huge part of the job and he had to have known that when he was hired. After a couple minutes of talking to him, it was clear he had no intention of doing any ‘dirty’ work. He ended up going out and sitting in the work van pouting. I called our manager, and when we drove back to the office at the end of the day his final check was waiting for him. He was completely stunned and got really upset, trying to blame me as his trainer for ‘setting him up,’ and ‘making him do stuff that no one would ever want to do.’
I didn’t get to see the final encounter myself, but it became the talk of the company for a while. Apparently, he never managed to get it through his head that we all had to do that type of work and I wasn’t singling him out. He blamed me and the company for him losing his job all the way out the door.
Apparently, he also tried lying to the unemployment office and got shut down hard when my manager explained why he was let go and he corroborated it, still assuming that we were in the wrong for asking him to do that type of work.”
These Kind Of Tests Shouldn’t Be That Hard
“My dad works for a small heating/AC company and is the supervisor for all the servicemen. I remember him talking about a new guy earlier this year who he claimed was just awful; I think his name was Kenny. He said anytime a guy goes out on a call, afterward they have to fill out paperwork stating what was completed and when, and the paperwork is due to the office within two days of when that particular job was completed.
Kenny would not do his paperwork for weeks at a time, and not until my dad hounded him about it. I remember my dad saying for one job, a week went by where he had told Kenny every single day to do the paperwork, and he never did it. He wanted to fire Kenny because this had happened multiple times, but he has to run all decisions by the owner before he fires someone and the owner kept telling him to give Kenny another chance.
He eventually did get fired, but it was due to failing a narcotics test. He failed once and my dad confronted him about it. Kenny begged to be allowed to retake it, claiming there had to be some mistake. So he was given another chance. Now when their company does these tests, they are allowed to go to a clinic of their choice within the allotted time. So for his second test, Kenny allegedly brought in a handwritten note from a doctor that just said ‘Kenny passed his narcotics test’ with the doctor’s signature. No paperwork, no test results faxed to the company. Just a handwritten note. So the owner asked Kenny for the contact info for the doctor so they could call and speak with him. When they called, it was a random number and they had no idea who Kenny was. So the owner confronted Kenny, and he confessed that he wrote the note himself because he knew he couldn’t pass the test. So my dad was then allowed to fire him, finally. The whole story was so absurd that it’s laughable.”
Would You Like A History Lesson On The Password?
“This one person couldn’t figure out how to log in to email with step by step directions on the first day. They needed step-by-step directions every day for everything on the computer. On day three I asked, ‘Did you double-click the Outlook icon?’
He answered, ‘Oh yeah. Now, what do I do?’
‘Type in your password,’ I said.
He then asked, ‘What’s my password?’
I said, ‘You picked your password the first day. That’s why it’s called a password. Only you know it.’
He said, ‘Oh yeah.’ Then proceeds to sit there for 15 minutes doing nothing because he doesn’t know his password.
I’m usually pretty gentle when I fire someone. He wanted to argue he was computer literate during his termination meeting. You keep using that word…
I ran a call center. Incoming and outgoing calls. Turn on three programs, hit the button and everything works automatically. Pretty simple. This guy was in his early to mid-30’s. Had been a mortgage broker before getting arrested for taking his neighbor’s life. The other employees refused to help him after the first week because he would ask the same questions every day. THE EXACT SAME QUESTION. He would ask me and I’d look at the rest of the phone room like are you kidding me, is this a prank? This has to be a prank right? Do you have a condition where you forget everything every night? It took me three weeks to go through all the Performance Improvement Plan steps to fire him. But basically, I wanted to fire him on day three. I knew I done goofed.”
But What A Tan Though!
“Oh, my good buddy Simeon. He got hired right out of school for a basic sales job. Two weeks in most of the office is at a convention, I left the office early to finish off the day from home (on me, I am in tech and could work from home no problem – should NOT have left him alone). The day finished out and nothing big happens.
The following Monday security stops me as I am walking into the building to ask about what we did to this kid after he got caught. ‘Caught doing what?’ Well, it turns out Simeon decided to take a break after I left for the day. He went and bought a six pack and broke onto the roof of the building to drink and tan. We are in an 11 story building. On either side of us are 15+ story buildings. Simeon decided to strip down to his underwear and tan on the roof. Security catches him, he blows smoke in the guard’s face and tells him to go away. He gets kicked off the property.
Remember, none of us in the office heard anything about this. Simeon was ‘sick’ and had worked from home the rest of that week. Eventually, the building contacts our Human Resources department and Simeon is given a warning. He is somehow allowed on the property again and is told he has two strikes against him now (he had consistently been showing up over an hour late each day).
The next day Simeon shows up at noon for a 9-5 job. He calls in first to see if it is okay to come in, he slept through ‘six’ alarms. The manager says sure, come on in. Simeon arrives and is finally fired on the spot. Craziest hire/fire I have ever seen.”
It’s Slimy, But It Clever
“I did work at a call-center with a couple that got hired into different divisions. He went to work in sales, and she went into customer service. This isn’t all that unusual by itself. What happened next though… wow.
Their plan from the start was to see how quickly each of them could get let go after they’d started their medical benefits, which kicked in around the 90-day mark. So they were both fairly exemplary. During that time, they both began talking to co-workers in their divisions about their off-work time, internet habits, etc. Eventually, they started canvassing their respective divisions with business cards advertising their adult site and inviting people to join.
Apparently, they did this pretty frequently – get a job to get medical insurance, then plot to get ‘let go’ so they could draw unemployment and continue to keep medical insurance going via COBRA. In the meantime, they’d get as many of their doctor and dental visits as they could schedule. THEN, they’d drum up interest in their cam-site, because by then they’d have gotten to know a ton of people… and who doesn’t want to see the hot girl/guy at the office in that way?
Even the managers involved in this messed up plan had to admit that the angles on all this were exceptionally slick. Also, because Phoenix is rife with call-centers, they were able to work their way up and down a certain area of town without any of the respective businesses becoming the wiser.”
I Get No Respect
“My mom hired her, but I fired her. My mom needed a website and didn’t want to wait for me to set it up – I already had a domain, hosting, graphics, and Word Perfect theme, so it needed maybe four hours of work, but I was busy. She decided to hire some lady to do it.
I email the lady and give her the login info and FTP access to the stuff. She emails my mom a week later, saying I got a broken theme and she’ll need to build a new one from scratch. She’ll charge hourly, but my mom will get a discount because she understands kids messing up (meaning me).
I immediately go in, kill all of her access, and change passwords – I have the next day off and plan on doing it then. The lady emails me a few hours later saying she can’t log in or access the materials, did something happen? I tell her off, let her know I’ve looked at her ‘resume’ and she just stole stuff from other people and put her name on it (seriously, the code comments still showed credit to the actual creators), that I’ve blocked her completely, and that her ‘help’ is no longer needed. I CC my mom, then call her to explain in more detail.
Mom proceeds to be furious with me for being rude to this scammer. Until I get her site up and running the next day. Oh, look, no ‘broken’ theme.
Mom never apologized, but she also stopped calling out my ‘rude’ behavior and even seems oddly proud of my assertiveness now.”
Sometimes It Pays To Keep A Bit Of Mystery About You
“We once had a new employee shadow me since I was the stock manager and on day one he bragged to me about how many illegal substances he had done the night before. The store manager was about five feet away and I simply looked over the new guy’s shoulder and shook my head. He was gone soon after.
He wasn’t immediately let go because at the time we really needed the seasonal help but even so it only took a couple shifts of being late and smelling bad for him to be dealt with.
I used to work retail relatively close to a college town so it’s not unusual to have employees hungover etc. I had just assumed that was the case. Mentioned in small talk that I myself was a little hungover and he just stops and goes, ‘Oh dude, let me tell you about this party,’ and continued on into his extravaganza of a night. Throughout the day he had been making frequent trips to the bathroom and told me it was because his nose kept bleeding. I now knew why.
Several months later he came back to reapply for his old job because the store was under new management. I don’t think he realized that I was part of that new management or he had assumed I was just cool with it. I also have reason to believe he snuck off on his lunch break to do some more illegal substances.”
Who Cares If I Get Cancer?
“I was his foreman. On day one, I have him gluing together some PVC pipes using an extremely runny, very toxic purple primer chemical. Safety glasses are mandatory. I look over, he’s gluing these pipes directly above his head, glasses off, and the chemical has a very low viscosity so it’s running down the underside of the pipe and about to drop right in his face and eyes. I yell over for him to stop and step away and explain he could have been permanently blinded. He proceeds to freak out on me and yell about how I’m not speaking to him in a ‘respectful manner’. I’m flabbergasted at this point, but I calmly tell him that he was in imminent danger and to get his glasses on. At this point he’s already used up all his strikes with me, but it’s not my call. Okay, like a half hour later, despite me trying to keep an eye on him, he comes up to me with his mouth and lips stained with this primer liquid, and he’s laughing about how he accidentally got it in his mouth. I’m totally lost for words. I’ve already explained to him that this stuff for sure can give you cancer, but he thinks it’s a huge joke. Anyway, he lasted a couple months SO many more stories. Finally, I just went ballistic on him one day and that was that.”
Maybe This Guy’s On To Something
“When I started work at my first real job out of college, I laughed because they had spelled out in the employee handbook, ‘No sleeping in the conference rooms.’
Apparently, that rule was specifically written after it was discovered one of the staff was living in the office. Like, he kept a sleeping bag in his cubicle and just slept in the conference rooms. He was an odd guy.
This was a public accounting firm (so frequent 80-90 hour work weeks), in a building with a private gym, showers, and a nicely stocked kitchen (always had ramen, chips, nuts, candy, fruit, soda, etc). They catered dinner six nights a week and lunches and breakfast on weekends. So it’s almost set up in a way to discourage you from going home. It was extremely common for staff to use the gym and showers during the busy season. Also common for people to nap in their cubes. So it’s not too hard to see why it would be tempting to just skip the commute. I definitely considered it a few times.”
Just Destroy Everything
“A friend of mine works at a construction recruitment agency and recently his colleague got a phone call in the office from a client – the foreman of a large construction site, who immediately began to scream at him to come to the site and collect a laborer from the agency who was on his first day working there. It transpired that this young, temp had left the tracked excavator he was supposed to be operating to find the foreman and demand a socket set to remove the excavator’s seat, as he’d dropped his phone under it and couldn’t reach it. The foreman told him to go away and get back to work and that he could try to retrieve his phone at the end of the day once he was off the clock (phones weren’t allowed on site anyway). After a shouting match, the temp stormed off, climbed into the neighboring excavator and used its bucket to rip the cab off his machine to get to his phone. Needless to say, the agency took him off its books.”
For The Love Of God, No One Let Him Near Any Electrical Outlets
“We hired a bench technician to do electronics repair. The first job I asked his help with was to extend a comm cable. Three conductors – easy peasy. Cut the cable, splice in x amount of new wire, done.
He comes back to me an hour later with the original cable, cut in two, then spliced back together… without adding anything to it. Instead of extending it, all he did was cut it and put it back together. It took him an hour.”
Some People Just Aren’t Cut Out For Retail
“I work in retail and my very first hire ended up getting fired for stealing from the salad bar which is $6.99/lb. and protested that she thought it was free for employees.
The next person my boss hired was to be multi-dept trained so he was getting his register time in. His first day alone on the register I bring him a loan of $10’s and there is a massive folding knife sitting next to him but gladly it’s below the register belt so customers didn’t see it. I tried to just ask him to put it away but he wanted to be a jerk about it so buh-bye he went.
The final one was a hire from a job fair. If you worked in retail, just reading ‘job fair hire’ most likely makes you cringe internally. So this chick who is in her late 20’s with a child, is five foot nothing and looks like a teenager. Not only does she look like a teenager, she acted like one! Constantly scoffed and rolled her eyes whenever any sort of criticism was being given. Would walk away from her department to go hit on customers who were way younger than her. She took about five breaks during a 5-7 hour shift. She would also constantly be complaining on the phone to her friends that she can’t go to the party or whatever because her parents wouldn’t watch her daughter after she got off work. I complained for a long while to get her canned. But she finally did her self in when someone busted a bag of dog food in her department and the District Manager was passing by during a tour. He asked her politely to get stuff and clean it up, and she exploded on him. I got my bro in LP to burn that to a DVD! Once the Store Manager who was not far behind the District Manager walked up and was apologizing profusely. The look on her face was solid gold.”