Some co-workers leave everyone in the office wondering, how did they get hired? These co-workers are typically the ones that show up last, leave first, and commit other egregious acts that do nothing but set back their co-workers. Yet they still feel entitled to preferential treatment as if they are a star employee.
Let's take a look at some of the most entitled co-workers people have had.
All posts have been edited for clarity.
Bullying Manager
“I had a former supervisor who was a bully, gossiped about her subordinates, and was just an all-around horrible person that picked one or two people to be her punching bag.
My introduction to her was when I was sitting at lunch, and she came barreling at one of my co-workers and proceeded to literally scream and curse in his face in the break area.
She also had a habit of gossiping in the warehouse office in full earshot of other people which made me really uncomfortable. It was one thing when a co-worker gossiped to another, but it was an entirely different thing when a supervisor gossiped about those under them.
I actually casually mentioned to a different supervisor that it made me uneasy to be in the office while this was going on. When she got wind of it, she then decided to make me her target. Over the span of six months, she bullied me and behaved in some really disrespectful ways.
She immediately began gossiping about me. I found out because she would literally do it in front of me. She gave me a very unflattering nickname which she blurted out one time after paging me into her office. She was passive-aggressive towards me in all respects. She even started growling at me in the ladies locker room. When I would pass by her office, she would cover her face with a piece of paper so I couldn’t look at her. She openly sighed or scoffed when I tried to engage in conversation with other employees. Not even her. She would also ignore me or outright walk away when I needed assistance from a supervisor. She told me I needed to step it up with my work, despite me being the second most productive employee in my department with the second-lowest error rate.
I finally had a breakdown after she started doing it in front of the other supervisors and the head manager, the very same week that I had contacted the head manager about her behavior. Nothing was being done about it. I was ready to just walk off the job and had a breakdown.
Someone told the general manager that I was having a breakdown and she called me directly to find out what was going on. She walked me through an official HR report that went to the front office immediately.
The manager was given one last chance. I told them she wouldn’t last a month.
Three weeks later she had a screaming match with another employee and was suspended and subsequently fired. I later found out she was directly responsible for three people quitting and one person getting fired because they couldn’t take it anymore and threw hands with her.”
Lazy Co-Worker Part 1
“I had a co-worker that was his own special blend of awful. For the record, I worked in sales at a warehouse. These were some of his finer qualities.
When the phone rang, he literally put his hand on the receiver, stared at the caller ID, then looked around the room to see if anyone else would answer it before he did. It didn’t matter how busy we were, he did that with every single call. If a customer walked in the door, he would try to hide behind his monitor, even though his desk was the first one they would see when they walked in the door.
When he would actually assist a customer, he would stop helping them and answer every single phone call that came in.
He also didn’t care unless it was a big order. If someone had an order that was only around fifteen dollars, he would just forget about it. Then he would act like he had never talked to the customer whenever they called back to complain. He also wouldn’t look up any products for the customers when they were on the phone. He would give them the product number and make them look it up by themself. As if he hadn’t been sitting in front of a computer.
He would also try to poach sales from other employees. If he got a call from a customer another employee had assisted, he would offer them a lower price for the product they had already ordered so he could make the commission off of the sale.
He would constantly be eating candy, chips, cupcakes, cookies, tacos, pop tarts, chili, etc at his desk. That wouldn’t normally be too bad, except when he would eat, he wouldn’t work. This also had a separate side effect. He was heavy, but it was all upper body weight. Which meant when he walked, he had to constantly hold his pants up with his hand. That made it very difficult for him to help move stuff in the warehouse or put things away because he was constantly holding his pants up.
He was somehow completely computer illiterate, even though he sat in front of a computer for ten hours a day. He actively refused to learn new things or organization tactics for using the computer. For example, a customer would call and ask for a copy of an invoice. In our program, you could generate a PDF copy to email directly to the customer without ever getting up. Instead of learning how to do that, he would print the invoice, walk across the room, put it in the scanner, scan it, save the scanned copy as a PDF, then email it to the customer. That process would normally take thirty seconds, but his way took about ten minutes. It took even longer because he would only get up to go to the printer around once every hour.
Don’t even get me started on email.”
Continued Below.
Lazy Co-Worker Part 2
“The last time I looked, he had over 29,000 unread emails. Emailing him was a great way to ensure he would never see the message. Unless it was an incoming order, then he would read the email right away.
He had exactly one administrative responsibility and that was to enter in tracking numbers after products have shipped. It is a task that would normally take ten minutes doing it once a day. It took him at least forty-five minutes. He would usually miss a day or two of entering order numbers at a time, so the task would usually take him around two hours when he finally got around to them. That was if no one had gotten upset and done his job for him because they were receiving complaints from customers about not having their tracking information.
He would leave handwritten notes to call customers back, but his handwriting was so bad it was impossible to read what he had written. The account numbers were the most important information on those handwritten notes and they were always the most illegible.
When he was alone in the office with another co-worker, he would use that time to make a long personal call about a hospital bill, or a call to his bank, or checking on parts he ordered online. So I would end up doing all the work so he could haggle about getting a two-dollar late fee removed from an account.
He wouldn’t directly ask people to do something, he would be extremely passive-aggressive about it.
For example, instead of turning on a light switch, or asking someone to turn on a light switch, he sat there and said, ‘Man, kinda dark in here. Wish someone could get that light.’ Then he just stared at everyone else waiting for them to turn on the light.
He would not handle a single problem in the warehouse. If a customer needed to make a return or exchange, he would completely disregard it. He would flat out not answer the phone if a customer had a defective part and needed a replacement.
I dreaded going to work every day just because I didn’t want to resolve the variety of messes he would leave for his co-workers to resolve.”
Sous Chef Part 1
“The place I worked had a small restaurant with a pub attached to it, along with a function room. We had the head chef, sous chef, three other chefs, and a kitchen porter. We were one family in that kitchen and we never used ranks as a point of power, everyone was equal.
Now before I start talking about my co-worker, I feel like I should say that in my opinion, he has some sort of mental illness that he is either unaware of or is unwilling to tell people about. He was hired to replace the sous chef of the restaurant. His resume looked good, his personality checked out, and he came from the same background as me. I was training as a sous chef at that point since I wanted to learn it. I worked under him and we got along well at first. I had a holiday booked just after he arrived so I didn’t spend the first two weeks with him. After I returned, I began working with him and everything seemed fine. Then, one day, just like flipping a light switch, he flipped.
All I did was text him and ask if he put a certain ingredient in a sauce because it was about seven o’clock, the restaurant was busy, and it was an urgent question. He said that I could text him about anything at any time since I was by myself for the first time. He completely freaked out. My phone was going crazy, buzzing constantly. He went off on me about how I shouldn’t be going against him and how I shouldn’t be attacking him about that one ingredient. I was only asking if he put anchovies in the sauce because a customer had a severe allergy to fish and the dish was new to me. He then started saying how he would go to the head chef and report for me attacking him about it all.
I just let it go that night and focused on effectively performing my job. I went to bed immediately after work and forgot that I was working with the sous chef the following day. However, when I got to work he acted as if nothing had happened. It was weird but I brushed it aside and continued with the prep work. Everything was normal until he pulled me aside and asked if I could chat with him outside.”
Continued Below.
Sous Chef Part 2
After he walked outside, I quickly grabbed the other chef working on the shift and explained everything that had happened the night before. The other chef decided to stay close whenever I went outside to talk to the sous chef. I was glad that he did because the sous chef went absolutely psychotic on me over the anchovy question. He said he reported me for asking, lectured me on how he didn’t believe in using rank as power before continuing on about how he was in a higher position than me and that I should obey every command. Even his eyes were locked onto me in a freaky way, like when your cat stares at you from down the hall for no reason. He told me to never speak to him again and that he wanted to lower me back to a kitchen porter to learn to obey higher ranks. Then at the end of it all, he wanted me to shake his hand and have a cup of tea as friends. He immediately changed his tone when the other chef came out to ask me a fake question because of how uncomfortable I looked.
That went on for a little while. We would work shifts and he wouldn’t really say anything to me. Then out of nowhere, he began speaking to me about my day during our shifts but things quickly returned to silence.
One day, we had a big wedding party to prepare for, and the sous chef texted me out of the blue. He said that he would never work at the restaurant again because of me. That left me and the other chef to handle both sections of the wedding party that contained about a hundred people each. The entire staff on shift came together and worked extremely hard that day. They constantly offered me moral support and cold drinks which were very nice in the hot kitchen. Despite skipping out on work that day, the sous chef still reported me to the head chef.
So the head chef called a meeting in which every member of the staff attended. During the meeting, the other chef decided to speak to the head chef and explain everything he had witnessed between the sous chef and me. The other employees backed up his statements and provided other incidents that they had witnessed. Rather than admitting to any wrongdoing, the sous chef took that as an opportunity to explain his leadership style and reinforce that everyone had to obey him at all times. They decided to fire him and promote me to sous chef on the spot after I showed that I am capable of running the restaurant. That was proven because the wedding party was overjoyed with their experience and even left a tip of around two thousand dollars.”
Scamming Waitress
“I was a table busser and food runner at a restaurant when I was a senior in high school. It was a brand-new restaurant, so all the staff members were new together.
There was a server there who was in her late twenties had been waitressing since she was seventeen or eighteen in a few different places, so she was pretty good at her job and well-liked by many customers. She could handle a lot of tables and would make great tips, but she hated sharing them.
Table bussers were to be tipped three percent from the wait staff’s tips at the end of the night. She argued that was way too much. She cited she was older and needed the money more than we would because she had a car payment and rent. She successfully made them bring it down to one and a half percent.
A few months went by, and I noticed my tips were always lower when I was working in her section even if she was working the larger section of the restaurant. She would switch shifts or take off when it would be her turn for her to work the smaller section of the restaurant, so she would always have the bigger section.
She knew how to finesse the system so she always made the most money, but not in a way that was fair to the other employees.
I began to realize that she was intentionally shorting me on tips when I overheard her say, ‘She missed a plate, that’s going to cost her,’ to herself out loud.
She would also ask me to make her desserts in the kitchen then get angry whenever she had to run food out to a table because I was busy making food for her.
I eventually called her out in front of the rest of the staff, and she hated my guts after that.”
Compulsive Liar
“I worked in restaurants for years which came with a whole slew of crazy characters, but the one that affected me the most was actually a guy at an office job I had a few years back. The biggest thing was that he was a compulsive liar. He also made inappropriate comments to me and other women on our team but I could honestly deal with that. It was the constant, bald-faced lies he told literally every time he spoke.
He would call out sick from work the time with various ailments. One time his ear lobe was a little swollen so he called out. He also claimed that he didn’t drink or use any illicit substances, but he would go out with his friends to bars every night and very clearly get trashed. He often called out because he was hungover but wouldn’t admit it. No one in the office was sure why he lied about not drinking in the first place. He would constantly make up random excuses to call out sick. Our boss called him out on it and he just made up new reasons to call out sick.
The most egregious excuse he ever used was calling in sick because his car had been stolen out of our office building’s parking lot. He claimed he left a little late one night, so a lot of us were already gone. However, most of the bosses were still in the building. He went out to the parking lot and his car was completely gone. That alone was shady because the office was on the main road in a business district with cameras on most of the buildings. Theoretically, he could have been parked outside the view of any cameras but it would be difficult because our office building was surrounded by coffee shops, restaurants, and other office buildings with cameras. He was claiming someone stole his random economically priced car in the middle of winter in Alaska. That isn’t even the most absurd part of the story.
He claimed he went outside and realized that his car had been stolen. However, he did not go back into the building and call the cops or tell a manager what was going on to see if they could pull the security tapes. On top of not going back inside for help, he didn’t contact anyone for a ride. Not even an Uber, friend, or co-worker that was still at the office.
He said that when he got outside and saw that his car was stolen, he simply walked home. That was during a blizzard in Alaska and the sun had already gone down at the time of day he was claiming that he left. He did not have a heavy coat or snow boots, he just walked home in his business professional attire. He expected us to believe his car was stolen and he did not call the police, go back into the building and tell someone, or even call a ride. He just walked several miles back to his apartment.
I ended up quitting before they finally ousted him. A couple of weeks after I left, he finally got fired because he called in sick then someone showed the boss a Snapchat story of him partying the night before. Not a private story or a snap sent personally to the other employee, just on his public Snapchat for everyone to see. He had already doubled his sick days at that point.”
Co-Worker That Took Edibles Every Day
“I had this co-worker who always high off his rear end. I’ve met plenty of people who smoke daily but this man took edibles each day. We worked in a restaurant. The restaurant was in a small town so we all knew each other a bit because we were around the same age. I primarily worked in the front of the restaurant and he typically worked in the back. He would wander around literally just messing with things.
He didn’t want to be in trouble for being high at so he convinced our general manager that he had special needs as an explanation so we couldn’t complain about him or express our frustration. We were all especially frustrated because he did not have any special needs. We all went to school with him. He even admitted to faking this to the manager. It was funny to him.
I would be running orders out and I would catch him literally passing out random food to tables. He wouldn’t remove the order tickets either so we would have no idea what was taking so long for a table’s order to be prepared.
During rushes, he would go out into the seating area and pretend to sweep. When he pretended to sweep, he wasn’t even actually sweeping. He would just hover the broom over the ground and move it back and forth in place.
He would wander into the kitchen to help. His definition of helping was entering random orders into our system so the cooks would waste their time preparing fake orders. He wouldn’t remove the orders from the screen so we were left wondering what table had made the orders.
He would go into the kitchen and break dishes for absolutely no reason. He would also walk into the freezer and spill water because he thought it was funny.
At least he didn’t drive to work high. Unfortunately, that meant he would always ask us for rides after we closed and promised to pay us back for gas. He never did. It was always one of our responsibilities to drive him twenty minutes away to his house. We were guilted into it because it was like zero degrees most of those nights after closing.
He eventually stopped showing up because he started selling other illicit substances.”
Record Store Boss
“My old boss at a record store I worked at for a few years. I think he did a lot of ecstasy in the 90s and had this weird residual gurn and eye movements that were really offputting. Imagine a combination of Basil Fawlty and Sean Penn in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
For some reason, the store was open from nine in the morning to midnight seven days a week. After seven o’clock, nobody would come into the store, let alone buy anything. Once employees were done processing the stock, there was quite literally nothing to do. I typically used that time to sit in a chair behind the counter and read stuff online.
He saw me reading the news at work once and didn’t say anything to me in person, but drove home and called the store then proceeded to unleash a ten-minute verbal tirade of incomprehensible screaming about how I would get a virus on the computer. He came in the next day and installed a bunch of anti-virus software that was loaded with malware, and wouldn’t listen to anyone who questioned its credentials.
One day, he decided that he hated the idea of his staff sitting down, so he banned us from using the chair. He would call the store every few nights, make small talk and ask how many sales we had made, then he would ask if we were sitting down. I was usually sitting down, because I’m not going to stand up doing nothing for six hours, so I would say no. He would then laugh and say he could see me sitting down, as he’d been parked on the other side of the road watching me sitting down for an hour.
The store had a few glass cabinets containing moderately expensive hi-fi equipment that didn’t have locks, so naturally, everything in the cabinet was stolen constantly. For some reason he didn’t want to put locks on the cabinets, so he’d sit outside the store in disguise and wait for someone to leave who he thought was a thief so he could nab them. This led to a lot of racial profiling, angry customers, and the actual thieves getting away with it for months. He also expected us to chase the thieves on foot if we caught them stealing anything.
Crazy guy, really unpleasant to be around as he had this really awkward, uncomfortable aura to him.”
Crazy Carol
“Let me tell you a bit about Carol. She was the partial owner and manager at the Japanese restaurant I worked at in college. She was one hundred percent the reason why that place had a revolving door of cashiers and delivery drivers and she knew it but didn’t care. In her eyes, if you couldn’t stand her then you were weak.
The restaurant had two locations and new employees started off at the less busy location with the other partial owner and manager, Cindy. Cindy was really nice, patient, and a cool person. New employees were trained for a few days there by her and whoever was the cashier on shift on all the duties. We were lulled into a false state of security by the place and by Cindy until we were transferred to the other location with Carol.
The other location was much busier, so even though we were trained, things could get overwhelming as a new employee. Carol used that opportunity to berate the new employees. If we were moving slow, she would stand way too close and starting yelling to hurry up in our ear.
She would also use the customers to guilt us and would say things like, ‘Come on, why you keep this nice lady waiting?’
If we forgot how to do something or made a mistake, she would ask if we were stupid and call us useless as she literally pushed us out of the way to do it herself. I saw her make a new cashier quit and run out of the store crying because they were so overwhelmed.
She was borderline psychotic too. One of her favorite tricks to play on new employees was to have them come back in the kitchen and help with washing dishes. She would stand next to the employees sharpening sushi knives on a whetstone in complete silence. Then she would slap them on the arm with the back of the blade. She enjoyed seeing the new employees freak out and would laugh maniacally afterward. I was warned by one of the cooks beforehand so I never gave her that satisfaction.
On her days off, she would sit at home and watch the security cameras. If she saw an employee standing around, she would call up to the restaurant just to scream at them. She constantly harassed the drivers too. She would call them and ask where they were then tell them to hurry up with their delivery even if there weren’t any deliveries waiting for them when they returned.
I was at the restaurant one day when another driver came back from a delivery super happy because he got a twenty-dollar tip from a customer. The lady got locked out of her house when she came outside to get the food. The driver volunteered to pull his van up close to the house, climb on top of it, and crawl onto the balcony that she had left unlocked. She was so thankful for the above and beyond delivery driver that she tipped him twenty dollars.
Carol refused to give him the tip and accused him of adding a zero onto a two-dollar tip. She didn’t even believe him when he showed her the footprints on his van. She made him call the customer to confirm that she gave him the tip. Even after the customer confirmed, she was reluctant to give him the tip but eventually caved. She did whatever possible to suck the joy out of our days.”