“Suspicions Confirmed”
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“At my old job, the director of the company (male) was sleeping with the COO (female). She was useless at her job and one of the reasons I left. The director’s wife worked close to the company and I think she had an idea something was going on.
Anyway, the director went on a ‘business trip’ to Dubai the same time as the COO was on ‘holiday’ in Spain. They were both still emailing work right at the same time as if they were working next to each other.
I decided to find out where they were, so I looked at the time stamp and the IP address the emails were sent from using Google. They were in the same hotel. Suspicions confirmed.”
You Are (Not) The Father
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“I once worked in a very rural area with identical twins (steel-working, hardcore guys). The one twin’s wife had an affair with the other and had a child. Genetic testing couldn’t tell the difference between the two potential fathers, so they took it to Maury. Highly entertaining. I would watch it again if I could find it. Thanks for the memories, Arkansas!”
He Went Missing, Then Popped Up Again In The Strangest Place
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“I work at a small college and there are very few faculty members. One day, one of the professors we were working with just disappeared in the middle of the semester…like, he was teaching classes one day and then gone the next. No information about where he went, or why or what happened and if he was coming back.
He was even named the professor of the year and a colleague accepted it for him and was like, ‘This would mean so much to him.’ Almost a year went by and everyone was still thinking maybe this guy is coming back.
Anyway, one day we got to work and everyone was freaking out because this guy was on the front page of the paper for distributing child smut. Bad enough, except then later a story was published that stated he wasn’t a pedo. He was a closeted married, Mormon guy and what he would do is go into chat rooms and act like he was a 12-year-old girl to get these guys to expose themselves to him. So he was essentially using the illicit photos because he didn’t want to be gay because that was too much for him. It was pretty much the stupidest crime and he blew his whole life over it.”
Alone On The Bus
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“I was teaching in Korea at private English school. One of the bus drivers, an older guy, was purposely missing bus stops and not picking children up so he could get a particular kindergartener alone in the front seat of the van. He’d give her candy and teach her how to kiss with tongue.
She ended up greeting her uncle at a family gathering and tried to use her tongue to say hello. The bus driver taught her that that’s how adults greet each other. Who knows what else he taught her or what other kids he touched. When confronted, he didn’t even deny it.
I ate lunch with this guy every day for a year, and he’d always talk to me about his church. He’d give me pamphlets and try to convert me. It makes me sick to my stomach.”
He’d Soon Come To Regret Hooking Up With Her
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“Two years ago, one of the managers hooked up with one of the bookkeepers. It was against company policy and supposed to be all hush-hush, but she couldn’t keep a secret and told the rest of us in accounting. Surprise, surprise, it got out and back to the senior management team. They had to have a big meeting with HR about how to handle things, where she announced that he had knocked her up.
Everyone assumed she was lying, but sure enough several months later it was quite apparent that she was keeping the baby. Then she started getting creepy. Despite the fact that it was a fling and he wanted nothing to do with her, she kept pestering him, leaving him voicemails, showing up at his house, the whole stalker thing. I guess he didn’t want to poke the bear or something and left it unchecked for a while.
Then one day she showed up very not pregnant. He walked by and asked if she’d had the baby over the weekend and said he was amazed at her being back to work already. In response, she said, ‘You’d be a terrible father, you miserable jerk. I got the baby aborted, so I wouldn’t be reminded of you.’
Keep in mind, she was like eight-months pregnant at this time. We have no idea what actually happened that weekend. She did end up getting dismissed a few weeks later though for insubordination, but the mystery that was Caroline’s baby will live on as an office legend.”
Scandals Seem To Follow Him Wherever He Goes
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“I work in advertising, SO MANY SCANDALS! Here are just a few, from various agencies I’ve worked, at various times in my career:
- A married colleague texted a pic of his junk to the sweet young receptionist and got fired on the way to the Christmas party. Everyone was like, ‘Hey, where did George go?’
- Group Creative Director got canned for sleeping with an account executive in the parking lot of our office building, which was owned by our biggest client, who had the parking lot under video surveillance. Apparently, there was a video of his white butt cheeks bobbing up and down that the client’s global CEO viewed.
- On a commercial shoot in South America, the Creative Director got wasted on the plane, walked off with two paid female companions at the airport, and disappeared for two straight days. He missed the pre-production meeting, location scouting, final casting. No phone calls, nothing. We thought he was dead. He shows up on shoot day, trying to act nonchalant, but finally admitted the women tied him up at a motel near the airport, robbed him and left him there. He’d spent the last two days wriggling out of his ropes.
- At distillery school in Sweden, after we won the Absolut business, the gay owner of the agency blacked out at a bar, got handsy in the bathroom with a straight guy who started beating the crap of him, and the creative director literally had to fight their way out of the bar.
- The married with kids president of the agency had a mistress who showed up unannounced at the production studio and made the in-house photographer take raunchy pictures of her feet, which she planned to present to the president as a Christmas present.
- My boss used to download so much smut that it slowed down network server performance for the ENTIRE AGENCY. The IT department had to have several VERY awkward conversations with him.”
“You’re Welcome” For The Recession
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“I was one of the thousands of bankers who helped trigger the Global Financial Crisis.
One memory that sticks with me is walking into the associate lobby of one of the bank’s towers and seeing a large poster of a beautiful chart. The chart was beautiful because it was decorated with images of smiling attractive families sitting on lawns in front of immaculate homes. The graph itself was exactly what employees and investors want to see in a graph – up and to the right. And on top of the graph was a wonderfully typeset title: ‘Balance Building.’ Yes, people, we are doing inspirational altruistic work here at the bank. We’re helping America build balances and doing a remarkable job of it. Balances are building exponentially. After a half-second glance at that chart, I felt energized and positive about the work I was doing. I’m going to work even harder now to build balances.
It wasn’t until a few days later that I thought back to that chart and its meaning. Balance Building was, in fact, a creepy corporate Orwellian spin on what the rest of the English speaking world calls ‘debt.’ We were driving Americans deeper and deeper into debt and celebrating it. Or perhaps we were just trying to convince ourselves that there was a positive dimension – home ownership, helping people realize the American dream – to the crap we were shoveling.
A colleague of mine used to joke that we had to check our souls in at the door every time we stepped into that place. But that was no joke. From the CEO down, that’s what we were doing. And I’m sure other banks were the same. And we all brought you the biggest recession since the depression. You’re welcome.”
The Sheer Number Of Pills That Went Missing Could Only Be Because Of One Person
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“I worked at an animal clinic for five years. It was a decent job; I loved the dogs. We got a new employee who brown-nosed their way to being highly trusted by the owner/head vet within a year.
Around one year in, medications start to go missing. She was the main suspect among all the employees for two reasons:
1) It was discovered 80 pills went missing one day when she had arrived early for the morning shift, like two hours before we open early.
2) For the next month, it was apparent to everybody she was messed up on something. Constantly swaying/off balance and flush red. Despite this, we had no concrete proof, so we had cameras installed all over the place. The owner still trusted her for another six months before she was fired.
The day she was fired, the police were called to investigate a situation at our clinic. Rumors started to fly but what everyone gathered is what follows: We’d recently had our computer and payroll systems updated and revamped to make things run smoother. The brown-noser had been given massive authority to help with this transition. It is suspected that she used her access to steal over $20,000 from the clinic’s bank account and, in the hugest move of criminal stupidity I’ve ever seen, HAD IT DIRECT DEPOSITED INTO HER OWN PERSONAL BANK ACCOUNT.”
The Mustard Incident
“I work at a manufacturing plant that runs continuously – three shifts a day. The graveyard crew can be a colorful bunch of folks and something odd or unusual has been known to happen from time to time. So when a bunch of mustard packets started showing up in the men’s room every morning, people just figured it was those wacky overnight guys making trouble and being weird again. But it kept happening. Then there was more than open/empty packets. It was smeared on the walls and the floor of the men’s room.
So security started doing diligent patrols of the bathroom attempting to find out who it was. They walked into the men’s room in the wee hours one morning to find two gentlemen, half-naked, engaged in some rough fun on the floor, with mustard to make things easier.
The company tried to keep it secret, but yeah right. It is now referred to as the ‘Mustard Incident.'”
She Thought They Were Recruiting Them, But That Wasn’t The Case
“The National Security Agency (NSA) sent a guy to Detroit to try to recruit Arabic-speaking residents. The Detroit metro area is home to the largest number of Arabic speakers in the world, outside of the Middle East.
The NSA guy (his name was Mike Stone) talked my boss, an Iraqi American with strong ties to the Arabic community, into helping him recruit these people. This Mike guy more or less convinced my super greedy boss that he could put together a language institute for the NSA and make a bunch of money doing contract work for the NSA. My boss ate it up.
In the process, we hired several ex-military people, one of whom was well versed in the security clearance process. This woman was then given an abbreviated version of the SF86 to have EVERYONE my boss was trying to attract to the program fill out so this Mike Stone guy could look them over and help us pick the ‘right candidates.’ We collected THOUSANDS of these things from people and more or less turned them over DIRECTLY to the NSA.
After about a year, this Mike Stone guy evaporated and we never heard anything from them ever again.
I’m pretty sure I helped the NSA gather domestic intelligence on the local Arab community in Detroit.”
When You Become Part Of The Story
“The day after 9/11, I was working as a videographer with a news reporter who broke the story that Mohamed Atta and Marwan al Shehhi had trained in Venice, Florida. It was a huge story. Six months later, we went back to visit Rudy Dekkers, who owned Huffman Aviation where the two extremists had trained. Up until this point, the US government had claimed that the terrorists had entered the country illegally and that they were illegally trained to fly.
As we spoke with Dekkers, he went to check his mail. Lo and behold, the INS issued visas for the two terrorists had arrived in the mail that morning, proving that the US had known all along that they were here. It was a HUGE blunder.
We broke the story and within hours the CIA showed up to confiscate the visas. The next morning, the place was crawling again with media and guys in black suits and glasses. To put it into perspective, I got up the next morning and watched as President Bush addressed the nation about the story we had done the night before.
Ultimately, the INS was disbanded over the issue and reformed as ICE.
We won an Edward R. Murrow award for continuing coverage for that story. I also have a photocopy of their visas around here somewhere.”
My Boss, The Thief
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“The boss was stealing tons of things. He would order things for the company and then he’d load up his car with it all at the end of the day. He had the company mechanics repair his personal vehicles. He brought his 40-foot boat to work, built a special garage for it on the grounds, and had the electricians, plumbers, carpenters, and mechanics all work on the boat on company time. He would also send employees to his home for the same purpose on company time. He was cheating on his wife with one of the top female executives and his wife would call me and beg me to tell her the truth. I said I didn’t know anything.
He was a real bully and a prick to all of the men that worked under him. His arrogance finally caught up with him when one of the guys in the union took a photo of him filling up the boat’s gas tank at the company’s gas tanks (they were there to fuel all of the equipment). He sent the photo anonymously to the Chairman, who did an investigation and promptly fired my boss.
None of it ever came out in the media because the company didn’t need any more negative attention, so no charges were ever pressed, but I believe he lost his pension. He was a jerk the likes of which I hope to never meet again.”
His Reaction To A Wrongful Termination Lawsuit Was A Little Overblown
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“The boss at a place I worked at years ago was a total redneck prick. He fired a guy when he found out he was gay. So, the gay guy sued for wrongful termination (like you would), and the boss guy went to his house and beat him within an inch of his life. He’s in jail now. I quit right after.”
The Big Boss Was Living A Secret Second Life
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“I work in a government building. One of the more prominent figures in this building, also a staunch conservative and very vocal on his stance against gay people, was terminated from his position when he got caught sleeping with another guy in his office.
The guy has had a wife and kids, but I really don’t feel bad for him. He’s a creep and shouldn’t be involved in our government. I’m just a college kid and work with other people my age, but I remember one of my coworkers telling me about how this guy had added him on Snapchat and would invite him out for dinner and stuff, which I thought was a little strange but never gave it much thought. Then apparently he would add guys my age (early 20s) on Facebook and message them asking for pics.
One day, after he had been fired, I got an invitation to connect with him on LinkedIn. I opted out of that one.”
Even Though They Were So Close, He Still Kept Secrets
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“It was my first job. I got on really well with this guy from work. It was totally platonic but everyone we worked with knew how close we were and would tease us. We worked in an office and ignored all the gossip. We went to lunch every single day for over four years and would talk about everything, mainly his wedding and, after that, his baby being born. He was strapped for cash after the baby came and complaining about needing a raise etc, but then he suddenly stopped complaining. I thought he’d just decided that maybe I didn’t want to hear about it or maybe his wife had gotten a raise or something – so I never really questioned him about it.
Turns out he was in charge of ordering the prepaid postage bags at work and was helping himself to some and selling them on eBay. He got caught as he used his work email as the eBay contact. He was marched out of the office by the police and charged.
The thing was, seeing as we were so close, people assumed I had something to do with it or at least knew about it. I had no idea he’d done this and hadn’t spoken to the guy since. I ended up leaving that job shortly after because I couldn’t handle the fact that I was under suspicion. Before this event, I’d been implicitly trusted by my boss to do anything. Suddenly I had IT going through my emails and Finance checking all of the company purchases I’d made (and there were lots as that was sort of my job).
It was a heartbreaking situation. It had totally nothing to do with me and I’m still angry as heck at the guy.”
His Arrogance And Brash Attitude Couldn’t Save His Job
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“A guy got forced into resigning from his position at work. He was a big-shot in the company. His father worked here for decades, then he came in and worked here for at least two decades. The guy was a jerk – loved to push people around, belittle them, berate them over trivial junk.
He was slated to become president of the company but I think most of the workforce declared they’d quit if that happened (which would completely put the company out of business since most of those guys are skilled labor).
I also have a sneaking suspicion that he may have been involved in an ethics violation, but I’ve never asked the other people whom I think are involved.”