Maybe it isn't a dream job, but it shouldn't have to be a waking nightmare! All it took was for one coworker to ruin everything and make these poor employees regret the life choices that lead them to this job. How these literal monsters didn't get fired immediately for their disturbing behavior is beyond me. Content has been edited for clarity.
Send The Divine Wrath Against Them
“I’m gonna go with this crazy conservative christian guy I worked with about seven or eight years ago. We were account managers for a telecom company, and we were part of a team that specialized in a specific type of product, so there were seven of us crammed into a small room in the back. This was back when Glenn Beck only had his stupid AM talk radio show, and this guy listened to it all day. We asked him to wear headphones, but he refused. This coworker would say weird, prejudiced quotes from the bible frequently, and he wouldn’t let his wife work, even though she was in the pharmacy business and we only made about $12/hr at the time. Up until this point, the craziest thing he had done was take the day off on June 6th, 2006 (666) to hide in his bunker. Then one day, he was served a protective order against his wife and daughter and divorce papers all on the same day. This unlocked the true craziness. He then started spending all day talking on the phone to lawyers and family members, either quoting even darker bible verses and wishing his soon to be ex wife was dead, or complaining about not doing it anymore. He then started saying that god ‘takes care’ of monsters like his ex wife, and when god does it, he wants pictures of his ex’s body to show his daughter what happens when women don’t obey their husbands. Finally, all came to a head over striped socks. It was a typical morning, he was on the phone whining to someone, and a girl came in wearing striped socks. We kinda laughed about it and were joking around with her when suddenly crazy christian guy SLAMS his phone down and yells, ‘OH GREAT, BECAUSE YOU ALL WERE LAUGHING IN THE BACKGROUND, THE JUDGE DENIED MY VISITATION WITH MY DAUGHTER!’
Another lady just made the comment, ‘Jeez Jeff, don’t go postal.’
He then replied, in the flattest, coldest tone I’ve ever heard in real life, ‘Oh I won’t go postal. God will kill you all, and when he does, I’ll be there to take pictures of your bodies to show my daughter what happens to monsters like you.’
Oh, and when we told the supervisor he said that, she laughed then said, ‘What did you guys say to him? You know he’s going through a hard time. You all need to be more sympathetic towards him!’
We threatened to put a restraining order on him, and so they moved him out of the room, to the first desk outside of the door. So we had to walk past him and still heard the awful Glenn Beck show. I quit shortly after that, but to this day I keep a look out in the news for the headline ‘Man mows down office building with AK-47 in one hand and a polaroid camera in the other.’
Bonus story: the director over my department was also dating a friend of mine. Every time they got in a fight, she threatened to fire me. I received so many texts and phone calls from my friend saying, ‘take an early lunch’ so I could dip out of there and not get any sort of repercussions. The director also charged at me one day. I don’t remember exactly why, something about coming to her office me saying I didn’t want to go in there alone because she would say really unprofessional things to me. Like she would basically have temper tantrums and called me names, but no one ever believed me because it was my word against the director’s. It was such a ridiculous place to work.”
The Mouse’s System Is Rigged
“As a Disney cast member, dealing with bad coworkers is a fact of life. Unfortunately, Disneyland requires literally tens of thousands of employees in order to stay running, and this means that there will inevitably be some people with zero work ethic who roll their eyes at the job, like it’s beneath them because it’s ‘just Disneyland.’. What compounds the problem is that it is nearly impossible to get ‘separated from the company’ (read: fired) for incompetence or poor performance. Instead, Disney operates on a rigid point system. Call in sick? 3 points. Clock in late? 1.5 points. Get 15 points in 6 months, or 24 points in a year, and you’re fired. The points stay on your record for 365 days. So if you are terrible at your job and fail to perform your basic duties, such as being in your correct position, using appropriate language, being friendly and helpful to guests, being accessible to guests, and emphasizing safety first, it will most likely go unnoticed. Even if guests complain about you, this will likely be covered up by the immediate supervisor, in order to prevent further audits and oversight from upper management. Strangely enough, one thing Disney is incredibly concerned about is the online activities of its cast members. Using social media to speak badly about the company, or trying to sell or barter your Disney benefits (ie: ‘Give me $20 and I’ll get you into the park for free’) will get you terminated instantly, and they are very watchful for these things. For this reason, I cannot be more specific and risk revealing my exact position, but the next time you are at Disneyland, really take a critical look at the cast members. Every single one of them should be bright eyed and smiling, ready and happy to help you, never leaning or sitting, never idly chatting among themselves, never turning their back on guests, and never accessing personal electronics in view of guests.
When I see two cast members leaning against a wall, chatting with each other, or ignoring guests and checking their cell phones, it’s just incredibly frustrating, because I know they’ll never be punished, and to rat them out serves no purpose except to make everyone hate you. You just have to let them make you look bad and decide that you’ll be that much better to make up for it.”
Ken Created All The Chaos
“Ken is the only person in the world that I would never save if he was choking on a piece of food. I write this for a few reasons. He eats the most disgusting smelling food on earth. I have no idea where he find that literal garbage. He also chews with his mouth wide open, cookie monster style. Only he isn’t cute and funny, but he is very loud and annoying. He is a gum chewer, and I can hear every horrid piece squishing between his teeth every single time. Just thinking about it makes me want to punch this man in the face right now. If he has a fruit cup, or really any sort of drink or soup, he will slurp it as if he is purposefully trying to be as loud and disgusting as possible. He also loudly sucks on hard candies constantly. He will also blow his nose, pick his nose, cough up mucus, floss his teeth, clean his ears, and clip his nails (fingers and toes) all in front of everyone in the office space. The flossing is the worst because it is followed by ten minutes of sucking his own teeth, which make me really want to cause him serious bodily harm. We as a group have tried practically everything short of murder. We have left him anonymous notes, lft articles about annoying habits on the printer, taped the articles next to his cubicle, and even sent out mass emails about office etiquette. One day, he came into my cubicle, smacking his gum while asking me about some paperwork I was finishing up. I told him as politely I could to please spit that gum out before talking to me, as it was quite distracting. Later on, my manager asked me why Ken told him I was being rude to only Ken and no one else. I told my manager that no one else in the office has the gut-curdling disgusting habits that Ken does. I seriously loath that guy with a passion.”
The Seductive Stench Of Death
“I used to work for a full-body donation facility. This was a place where you donate your body to science, and we would cut it up and send your different parts to researchers all over the world. In this facility, we had lots of gurneys to transport the seven or eight bodies we received a day. We would also cut up the bodies on the gurneys, which meant these things were pretty disgusting. We tried our best to clean them, but still. My coworkers and I began noticing that some of the gurneys weren’t always in their rightful place when we opened shop in the morning. Immediately you would suspects ghosts, right? Nope. Turns out two employees were always staying late and HOOKING UP on them. I am being completely serious.They didn’t get fired for it. They did get fired though, once they forged letters to their welfare agent saying they got paid below X amount of dollars and still needed welfare. Which was a lie. They signed the bottoms of the letters, each claiming to be the other’s boss. But seriously, you would not believe how many people found that particular occupation a turn-on. The job didn’t actually pay that well, and a lot of training took place on the job, as a sort of preparation for becoming a nurse. The most stringent requirement was having the stomach for it. First day we’d sit you down in the lab and teach you how to properly skin a human head. If you didn’t puke or pass out, you usually became one of the team. After going through one thousand bodies, risking numerous diseases, and spending two hours a day in a horrid freezer digging through dissected body parts for clients, you tend to look for another position. Honestly, working in surgery is a much better paying gig, would highly recommend.”
Collision Course With Murder
“Let’s talk about my current coworker, who I’ll call Jenny. Jenny is 30 or 31. I have never worked with a more incompetent person in any sort of job ever. We’re both pharmacy technicians, and I honestly believe that if she keeps working in this job, she is going to kill someone. Over the past few months, I’ve had to deal with some of the most incredibly stupid questions that could ever come out of a person’s mouth, especially since she went to one of the local trade schools to prepare her for this ‘career.’ Recently, Jenny had a conversation with a pharmacist who was filling in at our store for a few days last week. The pharmacist was talking to her about school, after hearing that she’s going to one of the big technical colleges in the area, and asked what she was studying there. Jenny said that she was studying engineering, but she didn’t even know what that meant. Apparently, she was hoping to get a job making, ‘those board things that go in computers.’ I am really hoping that Jenny quits soon. She hates this job because she apparently cannot stand people telling her what to do. She recently told another pharmacist that when it comes to doing basic tasks, like helping to put our weekly order away or using the register, she doesn’t want to do it. She doesn’t care that it is a part of her job description, it isn’t for her. Here are just of a few of the many idiotic questions she asks the rest of us on a regular basis:
‘What is menopause?’
‘Can men get bipolar?’
‘I didn’t think I’d be thirsty because it’s raining out, but I’m thirsty. Can I go buy a soda?’
‘Wait, ‘ludicrous’ is a real word? Not just a rapper?’
‘So… you do weed with a needle, right?’
‘What’s that cancer that makes your hair fall out?’
‘Is a tablet the same as a milligram?’
When she ever asked if weed was injected, I could barely contain my laughter. She’s taking an electrical engineering course on the taxpayer’s dime, and she literally has no idea what she’ll be doing. She also didn’t plan on even going to the school in the first place. She had applied because she wasn’t certain she would be able to get a job after graduating from the trade school, and then when she was accepted, she felt like she couldn’t tell them she was no longer interested. She worked in some sort of factory assembly line doing something with pc boards, which is what she wants to get back into doing, a job where she can sit on her butt and do the same thing over and over again. Thankfully, we’re not a 24/7 store and are one of the slower stores in our district. I’m pretty sure that’s the only reason she is still working for us. We’re currently working on getting someone else trained because we don’t expect Jenny to actually complete the required certification. She had to get a full background check before she was hired, and she got glowing references from the pharmacy she had done an internship at. However, I’m not entirely certain exactly what is flagged as unemployable with the check and our company, as I’ve turned up two arrests within the last three years for her just through simple web searches.”
Don’t I Deserve Basic Human Dignity?
“How about the guy who kept on harassing me? At first, he just struck me as a weird dude. He was overweight, had a ponytail, and two kids with his ex girlfriend who he was kind of still with or something. I thought he was like 35, but apparently he was 26, and I was 19 at the time. He wasn’t great at small talk and would just tell me weird facts all the time while I was on register. One day we’re on the closing shift with two others. While I have the last few customers in my line, he starts talking to me, thus forcing me to ignore the customers for the most part. He went on about how his baby mama saw me and him chatting after our shift last week, and she got all up in his face saying, ‘I know you’re hooking up with that white girl, I know you’re doing it!’ to which I stood there staring at him, having no idea what to say. I finally said something like, ‘Well you told her were not right? So it’s not really an issue…’
He then spent the rest of the shift telling me why he would hook up with me. Not date me or something respectful like that. He would hook up with me because I apparently seemed pretty into him. So I let him know I’m seeing someone, which was half true. This turns into him telling me the guy I’m seeing doesn’t actually care about me. Thank goodness my shift is over and I can escape! I call in the next morning to check my schedule, only to find out that I am closing with this guy again. I tell my boss that I would rather not work another closing shift with him because he was acting inappropriate towards me. I didn’t think it would turn into much of a thing, but this coworker essentially was told not to speak to me unless it was absolutely necessary and completely business related. My boss told me if he so much as glanced at my butt to tell her immediately, and she would fire him on the spot. I quit a few weeks later to go back to school, and I heard he was fired for threatening to beat up my manager one day, after he was accused of blatantly ogling a customer’s chest.”
Bookstore Blow Up
“I worked at Barnes and Noble. I honestly can’t remember the woman’s name who did this, so we’ll just call her Cathy. But one night when I was still learning the ropes, and the shop was closing up, I was told (or so I thought) by a manager to go stand behind the cash register with another girl, until everyone was out of the store. Meanwhile, Cathy and another guy were arranging the bookshelves and cleaning up the store for it to be closed. The next day I was called into the managers’ office and told that when the store is closing, I need to be tidying up the shelves, because they had been told I was just standing around doing nothing. I explained myself, and I left to go apologize to the two who had to close up shop without my help. One of the guys was fine. Next, I went up to Cathy and said, ‘Hey, sorry if it seemed like I was slacking off the other night, I wasn’t intentionally being lazy, I thought-‘
She cuts me off with, ‘Yeah, you were.’
I continued, ‘No I thought I was supposed to-‘
She again cuts me off with, ‘No, you need to go talk to a manager.’
At this point she looks shaken, as if I’m attacking her. I try to explain I’m apologizing, but I get nowhere, so I just kind of walk away. Not two minutes later, I get a loudspeaker call into the manager’s office. I walk in and one of the managers tells me, ‘So I’ve been told you and Cathy just had words.’
I don’t know what I said, probably because my rage at this incident wiped my memory. He tells me he’s received complaints from other staff that I had a bad attitude, or they would tell me to do something and I’ll scoff or something. Let me just say that is pretty much the exact opposite of how I behave at work. I asked him, ‘Is that YOUR impression of me?’
‘Well no, but…’
Essentially he just scolded me for nothing, and the whole thing blew over. To this day, thinking about her running off and telling the manager that I confronted her when I was trying to apologize makes my blood boil.”
Ruthless Ruth On The Hunt
“It was the summer of 1979, and I was 20 and living in New York City. I got a job as the receptionist at Mayfair Travel on West 57th Street. This wasn’t your regular travel agency. This place arranged the tours for entities like the Cleveland Symphony and the Metropolitan Opera, and the owner, John Zorek, knew everyone important in the entertainment industry. So I thought that this job would be really cool. And a couple of times it was, like when Henry Fonda called and I picked up the phone. But day to day, the job sucked. Part of the problem was the owner, Mr. Zorek. He was a nutty older guy with a strong Austrian accent. I pegged him to be in his late seventies, but decades later when I found his obituary in the Times, I realized that he was only in his late sixties at the time that I worked there. Anyway, Mr. Zorek had very unreasonable expectations. He would burst out of his office, waving his arms frantically, crying, ‘Hold my calls!’ and then disappearing back into his lair. So, until further notice, I took messages. An hour later, he would burst out of his office demanding to know who had called. Apparently he wanted me to send the call to him if it was someone special, but he never told me that. His only response was that apparently I should just know these things automatically. That was only the first problem.
The second problem was my office manager, Ruth. Ruth was an embittered woman in her late forties, who had been dumped by her husband for a much younger trophy wife. Ruth was definitely not a happy camper, and she would always take it out on me! She would sit right behind me and watch every single move that i made. For example, should I attempt to place a paper clip around a clump of invoices, there was Ruth hovering over my shoulder to tell me that I was doing it wrong. ‘It goes on the left side, not in the middle,’ is one example of her helpful advice. Now, the entire office was about 20 feet long. Zorek had his own office, but the rest of us were in one large room. There was me, Ruth, and three travel agents. So when the phone rang for one of them, it seemed logical for me to simply turn around and quietly tell that agent that she had a phone call. Ruth would bark at me to use the intercom. If this wasn’t bad enough, this was the middle of the United Airlines strike, and being well before the invention of phone trees, either you got through to the other airlines, or you got a busy signal, so I spent literally hours a day dialing a rotary phone over and over and over again until it finally rang. After two months of this torture, I found a better job and gave my notice. Mr. Zorek was sad, mourning that everyone always wanted to quit his agency. Maybe there was a reason for that…”
Family Business Or Family Nightmare?
“Gather round children and let me tell you the tale of why you should never have a family business. My uncle and his wife might be the most incompetent people I have ever met. They are single-handedly running the business into the ground while driving nearly every employee into quitting. They are oblivious as to how hated they are and how bad they are business-wise, so it’s almost comical at this point. Anyway, my aunt is the biggest witch ever. She is 50, but she acts like a teenager. She likes to go to clubs to try and pick up 20 year olds. She’s wrecked numerous households across the country (not an exaggeration), yet somehow her idiot husband is totally oblivious to it, even after he found the texts. She then befriends the wives of the houses she’s wrecked and tries to help them move on from their husbands, without mentioning she’s the reason for the broken home. She uses the company credit card to pay for hotel rooms to sleep with all these men and pay for dinner for their wives and kids. She is beyond deranged. Onto the work part: she wants to check all the manufacturing orders that come in, because clearly everyone else is incompetent in her feeble mind. Our normal time frame for manufacturing is eight weeks from the time the order comes in. Well, she sits around with literally hundreds of manufacturing orders, so some don’t even get entered into the computer system for six weeks. Hint: it takes longer than two weeks to make and deliver our product. So obviously customers called in, annoyed that their order isn’t there in time. She and her husband field the calls and blame everyone else, even if that person had nothing to do with the order (as in, they haven’t even seen the order because it wasn’t in their area of production. She has also changed people’s orders because, according to her, ‘That’s not what they want, my way is better.’ She also can’t speak French but changes the spelling of French orders, so we have to remake the whole order AFTER it’s been delivered. Yeah, that goes over really well with customers. But again, somehow she pins it on other people and gets away with it. I’m not even going to get into great detail about how she brings in her dog to work every day. The dog vomits and poops everywhere and barks at EVERY customer that comes in. Then she talks badly about the customers that say they’re afraid of dogs. She literally treats her dog better than her kids, because one day she made her son sit on the floor in her office while the dog sat on the chair, because according to her, ‘Where else will the dog sit?! He can’t sit on the floor!’ It’s gotten to the point where multiple people have quit over her, along with her stupid husband who yells violently at everyone for no reason. So if you’re seriously considering starting a family business, DON’T DO IT!”
Karma Has Never been So Sweet
“So let’s talk about a pair of bimbos from HR at a company I worked for for one year. This was one of the largest engineering companies in Europe, but each contract had its own HR department, this one consisting of two permanent staff and a temp, all women. To avoid confusion, I’ll call the manager Bimbo and her permanent colleague Dipsy. The temp was fine and we got along really well, both of us being keen horse riders. Bimbo had initially started working as a temp and got along with most people, with the exception of her manager at the time. Her manager had tried to get rid of her a few times, but her requests kept getting blocked by the people above her. She had lied on her CV, claiming she had extensive IT experience, when, simply put, she didn’t have any. Her saving grace was that she knew the (married) regional contract manager from outside of work and, after a big Christmas event, found her way into his hotel room. Tired of having to rely on someone who was both incompetent and in bed with the boss of her boss, she requested a transfer to another department. Bimbo instantly got offered a full time job with the company and a promotion to HR manager, despite having no management experience. Left with a vacancy in her department, Bimbo hired a new temp to take over from her roles. In four months, prior to my joining the company, she had gone through five different temps. All were perfectly qualified and competent in the roles they had been assigned. The problem was that they were too good, which made Bimbo look bad. Eventually Dipsy showed up, who had also lied on her CV about her IT experience. She lasted a record one month before being made a permanent staff member. My main duty at the company was to take care of our KPIs (key performance indicators). We had a series of targets to meet, and if we successfully met them, our client (the government) would give us a bonus. Each month, the client would send us their figures and I would go through the jobs that missed the target, looking for extenuating circumstances or mistakes in the paperwork filed. There was also a six month backlog for me to go through when I arrived at the company, which took me about three weeks to get through, requiring trips to various depots, calls to subcontractors, and lots of flicking through folder upon folder of job tickets. When I submitted the updated KPIs to my manager, he was shocked to find that we had scored vastly better in the six months I had reviewed than the eight months prior, and he asked me to go through the records for the 8 months prior to the backlog. This required visiting HR, as they had been dealing with KPIs prior to my arrival, and it was their incompetence that led to the six month backlog. After a month of working at the company, I had my first dealings with Bimbo.
In short, she couldn’t understand how I could get through the six month backlog in less than a month, as it had taken her department roughly two months to go through each month worth of KPIs. God knows why. Sure, the work was tedious, but it was remarkably simple. She felt I was challenging her authority and her ability when I asked for the 8 months worth of data. It was all kept in one folder in a large cupboard, and all I needed from her was the folder, but she wouldn’t have it. I couldn’t open the cupboard without her standing over me because there were ‘files filled with private and personal staff records’ alongside it. No there weren’t. They were kept in a locked filing cabinet that not even she had the key for, but whatever. I also couldn’t take the file out of her department, as she couldn’t have me tampering with historic records, despite the fact that my job was to review the records and rectify any mistakes. I asked if I could take photocopies of the contents of the file, so that I could work from my desk on another floor, but she wouldn’t allow that either. Meh. If you want me to play by your rules, I’ll play by your rules.
There were four desks in her department, but only three computers and three phones, and she wouldn’t let me use them. I didn’t really need a computer while I was going through the records, but I most definitely needed a phone. Rather than go to my boss and complain, I called up our IT department and had them install a new one. This was the first thing to tick her off, as the only spare socket was by her desk, so she ended up with an unsightly cable running across the room. When she complained about the safety hazard (someone might trip over the cable), I went to our HSE officer and he purchased a cover for the cable, charging it to her department, which annoyed her even more. She also couldn’t stand the way that I chatted socially with staff at the depots and the client over the phone when querying jobs, claiming it was inappropriate. In actual fact, she was jealous that I got to deal directly with the client. When her department dealt with it, they had never thought to phone up the client about the discrepancies between our figures and theirs!
She also regularly complained that I was being disruptive to her staff when I would enter and leave with various files filled with tickets. She also questioned my ‘space and time management’, claiming I could do the job more efficiently if I planned ahead and got all the folders at once. We filled four files a month with tickets and I was going through eight months of tickets, not to mention the files were held by three different departments depending on the type of job. The straw that broke the camel’s back was when my opposite number at the client came into the office one day to see my boss. The topic of KPIs came up and he wanted to meet me personally, so him and my boss headed down to my desk to say hi. When they saw I wasn’t there, they were puzzled and were told that I was doing the work from HR department, so they came up to see me. The boss and the client were complaining about the KPIs before I was working on them, and Bimbo’s face was priceless. I cannot describe the look on her face. Shock, horror, anger, and disgust, all at once. She looked like she was going to explode. My boss put his hand on my shoulder and simply said, ‘I think you should take this to your desk downstairs,’ before handing me the folder I was allegedly not allowed to take out of the office. I really didn’t get along with Bimbo after that. Truth be told, there are too many stories to tell, but none are as good as this one. She tried to make my job as difficult as possible, only to get chastised by my boss (who was also her boss) and insulted by the client.”