That Was The Day “Dave” Became A Legend
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“I used to work for one of England’s most well-known carpet companies at their head office and main warehouse in South East London.
It was abundantly clear that there was a BIG divide between Warehouse staff and Office staff. Office tended to get paid at least $3-4K more per month than the warehouse did. The offices were decked out with fancy dining areas, smoking areas on balconies, a pool table and chill out room, and not to mention a big expensive tropical fish tank display next to a seating area.
Warehouse staff had to go out the back or side fire exits to go smoke. We were timed for how long we could go and if we took too long, we had to make it up over lunch or by staying late. And even though we were doing very heavy duty manual labor, had to specialize in operating forklift trucks and carpet cutting tables as big as a medium-sized swimming pool, we always felt like we were undervalued.
Anyway, one particular staff member (Let’s call him Dave) LOVED to moan and whine about it on a weekly basis. Any time we would be in the canteen and a group of white shirt, stiff collar, suited, snobby office guys would walk past, he would always make some snarky comment.
‘Privileged little rats!’ vaguely mumbled under his breath.
The office staff mainly rubbed it in his face by laughing as they got in the lift to go and play pool upstairs, or occasionally would say something from the smoking balconies if one of us was below on the floor level huddled around a smoking area bench.
One day, when I was about halfway through my shift, three forklift drivers suddenly came shooting down the isles towards the cutting dept, all beeping their horns and waving down anyone who would see them.
One of the guys pulled up beside my area and said, ‘The boss just tried to fire Dave!
Me: ‘What do you mean “tried” to fire Dave?!’
Turns out that Dave was pulled into a meeting with the warehouse manager and an office manager who was rather recently promoted from 2nd-floor office staff to a head of Dept on the 4th floor.
He had enough of Dave always making digs at the office team and his blatant disregard for respect, so he wanted to make an example out of him.
But when he made his argument against Dave in front of the warehouse boss, he apparently made a LOAD of stuff up about him just to make sure he got fired.
Well…Dave didn’t take too kindly to that and had lunged across the office table and knocked out this office manager in one fell blow. According to the warehouse manager a few weeks later, he told me that it was a punch so well executed, that he wished he had filmed it in slow motion.
But that’s not all Dave did. We had a mini in-house radio station for the warehouse staff as it was such a large building. They pumped all sorts of music into the warehouse all day and occasionally interrupted it from one of the office girls who would announce any weekly/monthly/annual profits or staff member birthdays, and so on.
Well, Dave broke into the glorified broom closet filled with a sound system and a microphone, right after he knocked out the office manager. He kicked out the girl who looked after the desk there and locked himself in. He then spent the next 45 minutes using the microphone to verbally abuse every single office worker who had wound him up over the years, all in between songs boomed out into the warehouse!
‘That was Michael Jackson with his hit song, “Beat it!” Seemed an appropriate choice after remembering when I saw Jeremy from accounts beating it in the smoking area balcony one late shift when he thought he was alone. What a sad excuse of a man. Anyway, next we have Cindy Lauper with “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” A song dedicated to Janet on sales on floor one, for the countless men she’s slept with in that office while spreading her diseases across the whole team. Get tested boys! She may leave a lasting impression on you.’
Eventually, police were called and he was dragged out and we all had a meeting with our managers, who told us that we had to sign new forms forbidding us from entering office areas without an office manager present and that any other feuds between Warehouse and Office staff would be met with disciplinary action.
Dave was a Legend.”
This Is Why You Should Never Put Your Hands On A Coworker…
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“This happened only a couple of days ago at my work. I didn’t see it but everyone’s been talking about it. Apparently, girl A came up behind girl B and slapped her on the hard hat and said, ‘Learn how to do your effing job,’ and girl B just went completely nuts, like full UFC, on girl A. Chokehold, face punches, regular choking. Girl A tried defending herself with various building parts as weapons. Both are now fired, but I don’t really blame girl B. Girl A was an annoying idiot and had been pushing everyone’s nerves since she started and I wouldn’t want someone like that walking around treating co-workers that way.
Someone was bound to take her down a peg eventually.”
When In Doubt Smash!
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“When I was an intern, we had a high priority project come through that my mentor was working on. It needed a really fast turn around with many late nights, horrible coffee, and good drinks. Anyway, it was towards the end of the project and I was finishing up at my bench when I heard my coworker muttering quietly to himself. I looked up to see if he needed me and watched him absolutely POUND a computer monitor with his fist then grab it, smash it down on the floor before stomping on it and screaming, ‘There’s no godforsaken DRC error, you utter harlot!’
He calmed down after a bit, got a drink, then requested a new monitor. That’s when I learned that no matter how mad you are, screaming at Altium will not make your sleep deprivation better.”
Well Played, Howard…Well Played
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“I’m in radio and one of the group of stations I worked at had an oldies station, a rock station and a pop station in the same building. We had an announcer who was really eager and wanted to learn and work and was really a great guy, but the big bosses were total jerks to him and were stuck in their old ways of doing things. They treated the announcer (we’ll call him Howard) really poorly. Howard used to come in and vent about it.
He ended up getting hired at another station but before he left, he went into the music libraries and replaced all the Led Zeppelin songs on the rock station with a gospel song from the oldies station called, ‘Trumpets Of Jesus.’ For an entire weekend, any time Led Zeppelin was supposed to play, Trumpets Of Jesus played instead. Howard has since gone on to become program director and has won all kinds of leadership awards…total legend!”
Poor Mr. Price…
“We had this like 400-year-old substitute teacher in high school named Mr. Price. He was one of those, ‘I AM NOT A SUB I AM A REAL TEACHER AND YOU ARE GOING TO LEARN,’ types. One day he came in and our teacher was going to let us watch ‘The Patriot.’ Our class was super rowdy and Mr. Price always tried to crack down and get all tough, so as punishment for being noisy, he took ‘The Patriot’ out of the DVD player and made us all like, read from the book or some other busy work. He locked the DVD in the teacher’s desk and then some kid called him a name for it and Mr. Price dragged the kid to the office.
In a Shaymalan level plot twist, some kid actually had another copy of ‘The Patriot’ in his backpack (I think the teacher had told two kids to bring a copy) and put it in the DVD player, fast forwarded it to where we were, then got back in his chair. When Mr. Price came back, he literally blew a gasket. He staged a 25-minute inquisition on who had broken into the desk and taken the DVD out, but since that isn’t what happened, nobody copped to it. He proceeded to call us all little idiots, and I think he even threw the N word in there? He started literally writing up every single student in the class. I finally made a deal with him and bargained that if the DVD was in the desk still, he would have to drop the whole thing and tear up the write-ups. The look on his face when he opened the desk was priceless. The bell rang. We all ran off.”
Actually Somewhat Satisfying
“A co-worker who’s hard of hearing had to BLAST the radio. Another guy got sick of complaining to a feckless manager who did nothing about it, so one day, the second guy silently ripped the radio off the cubicle and smashed it on the floor. Hard. Really really hard. Like the thing killed his grandmother. He did so with a look of silent but unfathomable rage on his face, like Hugh Jackman coming out of the water or whatever in that Wolverine Origin movie.
It exploded. All the guts -capacitors, coils, resistors, transistors, circuit board etc., went flying. And then as people were gasping and screaming, he just sighed, satisfied like he’d just busted a huge nut. Then he left.
I pretended to be horrified but I was so happy inside.”
A Woman On A Mission
“We had this girl at work who liked to wear pants that showed a significant portion of her butt. Like, if her crack was the Gulf Coast of the USA with Key West being her cheeks, we were probably at Tallahassee.
Someone complained to her manager. He didn’t believe us so we had him sit in a meeting behind her and he was completely horrified. So he had a conversation with her about proper workplace clothing. Well, she never got the message and she soon got a phone call from HR giving a formal warning. She flipped out, stormed into a meeting, called her boss a huge pervert, then proceeded to yell, ‘IF YOU WANT TO SEE MY BUTT, THEN SEE THIS.’ She then mooned the room and stormed off in a blaze of glory!”
There’s Only So Much A Pregnant Woman Can Take
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“I was about 7 months pregnant and had just recently been moved to a different office. The new office had all kinds of rules no one informed me or my fellow coworkers of and I kept getting hauled into the office to be told off for things I didn’t even know I was doing wrong. Now, if it was just friendly reminders, I wouldn’t have had a problem but my supervisor was this high and mighty witch that kept belittling me and trying to make me feel bad, and kept commenting on how I wasn’t fit for this job. Keep in mind I had been doing this job for over two years at this point with the no problems. Just before the big blow out, she said I’d be written up next time she has to talk to me.
So I was working away, trying my hardest to not mess up because I really didn’t want to be written up and I honestly couldn’t handle any more stress. Well, I got called into the office with her and our union rep and I saw a notice on her desk. I LOST IT. I started yelling and crying and listing off all the horrible things she’d been putting me through and how it was unfair for her to treat me like this and how half the stuff I wasn’t even told about.
I think I actually started having a panic attack during the whole ordeal and told the union rep some of the comments she’d made to me over the past few months. It felt good to get it out and finally put her in her place. She was so taken aback that I stood up for myself (read: freaked out) that I ended up being sent home early because they were worried about my baby’s wellbeing. The notice turned out to just be a list of expectations (only six months late) which I had to read and sign, but at least she left me alone after that.”
Well, Who Helps The Help Desk?
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“I worked at a call center. One day, while I was listening in on a coworker’s call, this woman had a very slow meltdown over the phone that ended in her in sobs. The caller didn’t hear something my coworker had said and asked her to repeat herself. My coworker repeated herself in a really irritated tone and then said, ‘Why does everyone want me to be mean today?’ She said this to the caller. The woman on the other line was obviously confused and asked her if she was having a bad day and if she should to speak to someone else. The co-worker then said NO and that she would be the one helping her…
It gets worse.
She bombed this call. Like, totally did not do her job correctly and made this painfully obvious to the point where the caller said that she would help the worker figure this out together and had to tell her not cry anymore. This was a help desk type job for other employees. Well, they didn’t figure it out and my coworker ended up crying. You could hear her snapping at someone else in the office, which obviously made the caller insanely concerned. My coworker then went on a rant about how people are hateful and that she hates this job and that it’s too hard for her to do (it wasn’t really easy for everyone) and finally told the caller she’s going to be transferred…
We had to call back and issue the caller an apology. She responded by asking if my coworker was going to be okay. We said yes…but no, she wasn’t. The office manager ended up having to fire her for another call where she was complaining and abusing the caller. Before she was fired, she was told she could use her benefits to speak to a counselor because she kept having outbursts at work and everyone was getting worried about her. She said this wasn’t the first time she heard that and didn’t know why people kept saying it…
I still think about her (this was two years ago) and wonder if she ever got help.”
Teaching Is Not Meant For Everyone
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“The best meltdown I’ve ever seen was my 7th-grade math teacher. There was a girl who always talked in class. She got moved to the front at some point and she was laughing and giggling as always. After telling the girl to be quiet about eight times, the teacher was standing front and center in front of her, with his back to her as he wrote an example on the board. The girl had one of those plastic pencil boxes all the girls used to decorate sitting on the front corner of her desk. Then she leaned over to the kid next to her and loudly ‘whispered’ something.
The teacher just cracked. In one smooth motion, he spins around, yelled, ‘SHUT UP,’ and smacked the box as hard as he could. It went flying 15 feet across the room, smashed into the wall. Pencils. Were. Freaking. Everywhere. He swiftly walked to the door, walked out, slammed it shut, then we could hear pounding on the wall. One brave kid peeked out the window…the teacher was banging his head against the wall.
About two minutes later, he walked back in. Crickets, not a noise in the classroom. He began walking around, picking up every single pen and pencil, put them all in the box, and placed it gently on her desk… And then just continued teaching the example like the nothing ever happened. It was exquisite.”
Trying Way Too Hard
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“When I was in college, I worked at an animal hospital. One week, the boss/owner was on vacation and several coworkers joked about having a ‘liquid lunch’ together one day. One girl thought it was such a good idea that she brought a bottle of something back to work from her break. She tried to get us all to drink together, while on the clock, but no one else participated. She was butthurt and drank herself into oblivion. She made an absolute fool of herself. During all this, she hid one person’s wallet, asked me on a date, cursed two people out, spun herself around in circles on the floor like a break dancer, and puked all over the only employee bathroom and passed out. The office manager helped her to the couch to sleep it off.
As most folks were leaving for the day, she woke up and snuck out to her car and flew out of the parking lot, almost hitting a coworker. She floored it down the road and eventually ran over a large curb, which messed her small car up, and she left it and walked to a friend’s house.
Yeah, she got canned the second the boss got back, and even acted surprised about it…go figure!”
One For You, And You, Oh And Can’t Forget You
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“In high school, I worked at a grocery store and this kid was all upset at another bagger and swearing in front of the customers. He said he was hoping he’d get fired. I told him he should quit before he gets fired so that it would look better on his resume in the future.
A few minutes later, I realized he was missing, then suddenly he came around the corner from the manager’s office, no longer in uniform (he’d thrown his uniform in the trash in front of the manager). He looked at me and said loudly, ‘I took your advice’ then proceeded to walk across the front end. As he did so, he’d point to each associate, flipping off each of them before finally walking out.
Everyone was staring at me after and I said ‘I did not tell him to do THAT!'”
Sally Picked The Wrong Day To Mess With Jake
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“One of my old coworkers told me about the biggest meltdown he ever saw. The job was a pretty high stress to begin with, and people were always on the verge of screaming at each other.
So, this guy (let’s call him Jake), had been working 12-14 hour days. He was on call 24 hours a day and spent two hours commuting each day. Said he never saw his girlfriend who he lived with. He even missed his niece’s first birthday because of work. Dude was on the edge.
Enter Sally. Sally was in charge of invoicing and had spent the whole previous week on vacation spending time with her daughter who was visiting. She came in on a Monday to finish up some billing but was taking the rest of the week off for more vacation. She approached Jake while he was in the middle of working out some major issues and told him he needed to get some things for her to finish billing. Jake told her he would get to it as soon as he could.
Sally continued to ask again every ten minutes, getting more irritated with each request. Finally, she entered Jake’s office and nastily said, ‘It’d be really nice if you’d do your job so I can go home and see my family!’
Jake proceeded to kick the door to his office open, breaking the frame and the automatic closer. At the end of the hall, he kicked another door open, putting a hole in the wall behind it. He then went to the equipment storage area and began throwing pieces of metal rigging around, making a ton of noise. This drew the attention of others who came to check out what was going on. When someone asked what was going on, Jake said, ‘If that crazy woman says one more word to me, I’ll be leaving in the back of a cop car!’ Sally was gone by the time Jake calmed down enough to go back inside.
Jake wasn’t fired or even written up. Management knew he was under stress and Sally was told to keep her distance.”
He Could Handle The Slurs, But Then Things Got Physical
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“I worked at Target while in college for about three and a half years. It was wild. I saw coworkers get arrested, get in fights, get caught banging, and yes, melting down.
An Egyptian man we put in Electronics and Toys was massively overqualified, with a masters in computer science in Egypt. He was a great guy, had plenty of product knowledge, but just wasn’t trained well and couldn’t understand the stupidity of pushing credit cards that customers didn’t want or need. Well, one day some redneck gentleman tried switching price tags on some items so he could get something expensive for cheap. Our guy caught it and told him no, so this redneck guy just totally lost it. He started screaming Islamaphobic insults, which our guy didn’t react to. Then redneck guy decided to escalate the issue and came around the counter to push him. That’s when our guy, who came from Egypt during a lot of civil strife, just laid this guy out in one or two punches.
Management starts berating him after despite it being self-defense, so he screams back at management about the stupid policies they have (like being punished for defending himself) takes the electronics keys and places them out of the shorter managers reach (the guy was tall), and walks out.
He’s managing a car dealership now so it was probably a good career move all things considered.”