Whether you work in retail, an office, or a restaurant, you have to work with a team of very different people who you aren't always going to get along with. That's fine, you can deal with being polite with people to get through the day. Unfortunately, in some places, there are those people who are so terrible that being polite to them seems too much. You'd rather just quit than have to deal with them. The people in the following stories share how they tried hard to work peacefully with the most annoying, self-involved, idiots they'd ever met, but in the end, it became too much.
(Content has been edited for clarity)
It’s Hard To Tell If She’s faking It Or If She Really Is THAT Dumb
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“My current coworker, we’ll call her Jenny, is 30 or 31. I have never worked with a more incompetent person in any job, ever. We’re both pharmacy technicians, and I honestly believe that if she keeps working in this job, she’s 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’. Is a tablet the same as a milligram? What’s that cancer that makes your hair fall out? Is (certain illegal substance) kept in the safe? What medicine is it that makes you want to eat people? Wait… ‘ludicrous’ is a real word? Not just a rapper? I didn’t think I’d be thirsty because it’s raining out, but I’m thirsty. Can I go buy a soda? Can men get bipolar? What’s menopause?
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, ‘I’m studying engineering.’
The Pharmacist said, ‘Oh, that’s cool.’
‘Yeah, I don’t even know what that means, but I’m hoping to get a job making those board things that go in computers.’ Jenny said.
I’m hoping she quits soon; she hates the job because, ‘People be telling me what to do, like, ‘Jenny do this’ and, ‘Jenny do that’.’ She just recently told a pharmacist that when it comes to doing the basic tasks like helping to put our weekly order away or using the register, she doesn’t care if it’s part of her job description, she doesn’t want to do it.”
He Said He Couldn’t Wait For God To Punish Them So He Could Take Photos
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“I worked with this strange conservative Christian guy about 7-8 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 Glen 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.
He would say weird quotes from the Bible frequently and wouldn’t let his wife work even though she was in the pharmacy business and we only made about $12/hour at the time.
Up until this point, the strangest thing he had done was take off 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 beast.
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 getting any anymore.
He then started saying that God ‘takes care’ of loose women 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.
It all came to a head over striped socks.
It was a typical morning, he was on the phone complaining 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, ‘Geez Jeff, don’t go postal.’
To which he replied, in the flattest, cold 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 loose women 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 Glen 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.'”
The Most Oblivious Man In The World
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“There was a guy I worked with who was 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 only 26 (I was 19 at the time), wasn’t great at small talk, and would just tell me weird stuff all the time while I was on the register.
One day, we were on the closing shift with two others. While I had the last few customers in my line, he started talking to me (thus forcing me to ignore the customers for the most part) 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 doing that white girl, I know you’re screwing her.’
I just stood there staring at him, having no idea what to say and 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 do me. Not date me or something respectful like that. He’d do me because I seem chill about that kinda stuff. So I let him know I was seeing someone, which was half true. We ended up having this awkward conversation about how I like Jewish guys, not overweight Mexicans, which turned into him telling me that this guy I’m seeing probably just wanted me for my lady bits and doesn’t actually care about me. Finally, the shift was over and I escaped.
I called in the next morning to check my schedule and was told I’m closing with him again. So I told my boss I would rather not work another closing shift with him because he was acting inappropriately. I didn’t think it would turn into much of a thing but he 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’d 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. So he was a winner.”
She’s Come Undone
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“I once had a coworker who wouldn’t do a freaking thing if the boss was not in the store. If he wasn’t there, she would be on the store phone talking to her baby daddy, outside, or out in the mall shopping. She would do enough work to cover a 15-minute break if you complained long enough about one.
However, if the boss was there, she was all over the customers like they were her new best friend and all in the boss’ face saying, ‘Look at how well I work!’
I complained, naturally. He just said there was nothing he could do because he never witnessed any of this behavior. Well, one day, while she was pulling her bull, another coworker and I were hit hard with a really huge rush. She was supposed to be helping with handing out orders, making fries and drinks, and whatnot. Instead, she was off on the phone talking about hanky panky, loudly, in earshot of the customers.
I had a mental breakdown and just started crying. I turned around and yelled at her, saying something along the lines of, ‘No one cares about your stupid personal life. Not me, not (coworker) and not the customers. Either get up here and DO YOUR JOB or just leave now.’
She came up to ‘help’ but with the worse attitude ever. As soon as the rush died down, I booked it to the back, grabbed the cordless phone, and called the boss in tears. I thought I was going to get fired for yelling in front of customers. He agreed to do a ‘stake out’ and watched her from afar. She was fired. I was given a raise. I quit two months later.”
Those In Glass Houses Shouldn’t Throw Stones
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“I share office space with a woman who’s been working in our firm for 35 years now. Underneath her desk, she has a banker’s box half-filled – at least 10 kilos – with colorful rocks.
One day I asked her about the rocks. ‘Oh, every time somebody really angers me, they get a rock in my box, so I can remember it.’
‘You mean, all of those rocks represent somebody?’
She rummaged in the box for a second and pulled one out. ‘This is for the time (department secretary) didn’t invite me to her Christmas party, even though I gave her a present.’
I picked one out at random. ‘So…who’s this for?’
‘That’s for (old boss, retired circa 2003), that jerk. I told her not to hire that chick for accounting, and she got pregnant six months later. She should have listened to me,’ she said.
I stared. ‘So. Do I have any rocks?’
She just glowered at me for a second then turned back to her newspaper.”
Maybe Someone Should Mind Their Own Business
“Dianne and Brenda from the pet store were both horrible, old, post-menopausal ladies with bad attitudes. They both believed they were just a step below the managers and acted like total jerks 90% of the time, even to customers. Dianne had about a dozen or so complaints against her from customers while I worked there. Things like breaking merchandise by throwing it down into the bag really hard, slamming the cash register because someone forgot to give her their coupon, and making a big show of wiping something off the counter and throwing it into the trash can angrily.
Probably the funniest thing happened because of a policy our store had. The cashier had to say ‘Hello’ to every single customer who walked through the door. Dianne was in a mood one day because the manager told me to put something away and he usually asked her to put things away, so she was jealous. When I got back, she said something like, ‘Butt kisser, doing anything you can to get off that register, you’re lazy.’ I told her to screw off. The next customer who walked through the door heard her say, in her rudest, loudest voice, ‘HELLO!’ It was the angriest hello in the history of greetings and was so shocking that the customer jumped with fright.
Now Brenda. She had no sense of humor and reported me to the manager for every joke I made. Once she asked what I did all weekend, I jokingly said, ‘I drank myself into a coma Friday and woke up Sunday.’ She went to the manager and told him he should test me for illegal substances because I admitted to doing them on the weekends. Once I was joking around with another cashier and said, ‘I’m going to just clock in, go home, and go back to bed, cover for me please.’ She ran to the manager quickly and told him I was about to walk out on the job.
By the time I put in my two weeks there, I’d just started saying off the wall stuff to mess with her.”
The World’s Grossest Man
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“My coworker Ken is the only person that I would not save if they were choking on a piece of food. Here is the reason why I say this: he eats the most disgusting smelling food on earth. I do not even know where he finds this crap.
He also chews with his mouth wide open, cookie monster style, only not cute or funny but loud and annoying.
He is a gum chewer as well. Not in the quiet, every now and again blow a bubble kind, but to the point that I can hear it squish between his teeth every time chews. Just talking about it makes me want to punch him in the face right now. That’s not all though, he also slurps. Whether it’s a juicy fruit like a peach, a cup of coffee, or soup – it sounds like he is purposely trying to be as loud and disgusting as possible.
Oh and all the gag reflex inducing bathroom activities that you leave for at home in the bathroom? He does them right out in the open. Blowing and picking his nose, hawking up loogies, flossing teeth, cleaning ears, fingernail clipping, toenail clipping. He would practically poop his pants when he farted, then he’d walk over to other people’s cubes to keep the smell out of his own. The flossing is the worse because it comes along with about a 10-minute teeth sucking exercise that makes me want to cause him serious bodily harm. We as a group have all but beat the snot out of him. We’ve left him anonymous notes, left web articles about annoying office habits at the printers, left the same articles outside his cube, sent out mass emails about office etiquette among other things. He came into my cube one day last week smacking his gum while talking to me about some paperwork I was finishing up. I told him as politely as I could to spit that gum out when he is talking to me or get outta my cube. Our manager asked me later why Ken told him that I was being rude to him and no one else. To which I replied no one else has gut curdling disgusting habits like Ken did. I hate and loathe that guy with a passion.”
We Have Lives Too, Glenda!
“My coworker on the front desk was fired recently. She was an old Jamaican lady who was our night audit, and after a year and a half of experiencing her habits, I completely reformed my schedule to morning shift just so I didn’t have to be in contact with her like I did for the night.
Night audit comes in at 11 pm to relieve night shift, and my coworker would come in 5 minutes late on the dot. Due to an idiotic corporate policy that allows this 5-minute courtesy (Hilton hotel run by management company – franchised), there was nothing the managers could do, so I and my partner would wait with our drawers counted and drops ready for deposit as she lumbered down from the clock room. By the time she’d counted her drawer and was fully ready to relieve us, it would already be 11:15 pm. It’s not like we were sitting there twiddling our thumbs either because during her leisurely preparation, we’d be taking in money, checking in guests, and constantly recounting the drawers just so we could minimize our delay in ending our shift. Otherwise, we either left at 11:15 pm with everything in disorder (not in my character), or left at 11:40-45 pm.
She was a God-awful front desk agent, mumbled to the guests, was barely personable, but she survived by slipping under the radar because she always met the minimum of expectations.
She was fired on a technicality (made a reservation at this hotel for her family without authorization) and I’m glad she’s gone. There are so many workers in this city that deserved her spot that she wastefully occupied for seven years.”
The Impossible Job
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“It was summer 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 70s, but decades later when I found his obituary in the Times I realized that he was only in his late 60s at the time that I worked there.
Anyway, Mr. Zorek had unreasonable expectations. He would burst out of his office, waving his arms frantically, crying, ‘Hold my calls!’ Then disappear back into his lair. So, until further notice, I took messages.
An hour later, he would burst out of his office again, ‘Who called?!’
‘Well, first it was Stephen Brown from the Cleveland Symp-‘ I started to say.
He interrupted with, ‘What? Why didn’t you tell me?’
I answered, ‘Um, you told me to hold your calls?’
‘Not Stephen Brown! You should know that!’
‘But you never told me that.’ I had been working there all of a week or two.
He responded with, ‘Well you should just know.’ Right.
So that was the first problem. The second problem was the Office Manager, Ruth. Ruth was an embittered woman in her late 40s who had been dumped by her husband for a younger trophy wife. Ruth was not a happy camper, and she took it out on me. She sat right behind me and watched every move 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.
‘Use the intercom!’ Ruth would bark.
If this wasn’t bad enough, it 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. ‘Everyone quits,’ he mourned.”
Just A Generally Horrible Person
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“I worked with a painter, Jeff, who would constantly complain about anything and everything. ‘It’s too hot, too cold. I’ve got too much work, not enough work. It’s 4:30 and I have nothing prepped for the next morning so I’m just gonna send the rest of the team home and ride the clock until 5 so I can collect a larger share of the billed hours for the day. I’m gonna go to lunch at 11:30, come back at 1, then announce to the whole shop that I am leaving again to go let the dogs out. I love to make crude jokes insinuating that people are attracted to children, or gay, or that they do it with animals, and it will be funny because I’m bigger than anyone else and I’ve been working here longer than anyone so no one will do anything anyway. Someone makes a joke about me and I go crying to the owner that people are being spiteful and are out to get me.’
I quit after almost two years of hearing that stuff. When I put in my resignation, the department head said that I had trouble working with people and that I had upset a lot of the more senior employees in the shop. After I finally left, I found out Jeff had been talking about me to the manager the entire time I worked there and that he was excited to see me leave. I talked to several of the other employees a few months later and Jeff is STILL talking about me. Everyone tells him to shut up and that he is one of the main reasons I quit. They are all annoyed because every person they have gotten to replace me has either been a complete failure or they are a total jerk.'”
Can’t Do Anything Right At This Place
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“I worked at Barnes and Noble. I honestly can’t remember the woman’s name who did this, 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, 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’d been told I was just standing around doing nothing. I explained myself and left to go apologize to the two who had to close up shop without my help. One of the guys was fine.
So 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 cut me off with, ‘Yeah, you were.’
I continued, ‘No, I thought I was supposed to -‘
She again cut me off with, ‘No, you need to go talk to a manager.’ At this point, she looked shaken as if I was attacking her. I tried to explain that I was apologizing, but I got nowhere so I just kind of walk away. Not two minutes later I got 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’ll 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…’ He said.
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.”
Theirs No Time For Chit Chat In The Happiest Place On Earth
“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. If you 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/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, never accessing personal electronics in view of guests.
When I see two cast members leaning against a wall, chatting with each other, 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.”