Hidden behind the office perks and company holiday parties lies some of the darkest and most intense gossip one can find. When someone's personal life collides with their professional life, the results are beyond messy and dramatic. The lives caught in the crossfire will never be the same. This content has been edited for clarity.
Pastor On The Run
“Our pastor was having an affair with his cousins wife. One day while giving a sermon, the cousin storms into church, tackles the pastor, and starts to throw punches at him. The cousins’ wife is trying to pull her husband off the pastor. The pastor’s wife quickly figured out what was happening, ran up, and clocked the wife from behind, knocking her out. People are trying to separate everyone. Total chaos.
The pastor skipped town because his cousin said if he finds him, he’s gonna kill him. The ex-wife is still here in town. Lots of stories about where the pastor might have gone, but no one knows for sure.”
Passion And Hospital Bills
“I always thought Grey’s Anatomy was ridiculous with all the medical residents sleeping with each other. Turns out it’s real. Several residents have been playing around with each other in our program. It’s rocked 4 marriages, and one couple has already divorced.
The chief resident (single) was playing around with a therapist. The therapist stopped taking her birth control without telling the chief, in order to get pregnant and pressure him into a proposal. It worked, but he still cheats on her. They moved away to the other side of the country and are trying to work things out.
At a female Bible study, one resident’s wife admitted her marriage was strained because her husband cheated on her with a colleague. Another resident’s wife asked who her husband was sleeping with. Turns out their husbands were both sleeping with the same resident, and all the dirty laundry got aired in front of everyone at Bible study. One of those wives was pregnant when she found out her husband was cheating, by the way. Both of those marriages are still together – for now.
The fourth marriage was a resident and a girl way out of his league. She left Miami to marry him, and she was a straight gold digger. Even so, he was the one that cheated on her. When she found out, she sent a message under her husband’s account to the hospital that said, ‘I’m a cheating monster.’ Then she peaced out back to Miami after a few domestic violence charges on both sides. They are now divorced, and the husband is hooking up with the same female resident that slept with both husbands in the previous paragraph.”
Divorce On Thursday, Married On Friday
“Last year, my vice principal announced that he would be leaving at the end of the year. Let’s call him Mr. Bob. I was shocked, as I liked and respected him a lot. It was well known that he was pretty unhappy, and it had been a tough year. I was confused though, because nobody else seemed shocked or upset. At the end of the year, I thought it would be nice to have everyone sign a card for him, but when I took it around, people started giving me these weird looks.
Fast-forward to halfway through this year. One of our teachers showed up with a change of her last name. It was now Mrs. Bob. I congratulated her and said I didn’t even know she was seeing anyone, to which she laughed and said, ‘You’re so bad.’
I was confused and shook it off.
Long story short, I just recently found out that she and Mr. Bob had fallen in love or something and he left his wife for her. He literally divorced his wife on a Thursday and was married by Friday. I had no idea until she mentioned his first name and that they were moving out of the state.
Looking back on it, I face palmed so much. His wife at the time also worked for the district and at one point I ran into her and expressed how much I would miss working with Mr. Bob. She gave me a weird look and said, ‘Yeah, well apparently he’s been pretty miserable.’
To which I idiotically responded, ‘Well let’s hope he finds what he’s looking for.’ I assumed it was all about his job satisfaction, not his love life.”
Double Dose Of Infidelity
“This happened at my work. My office manager is married to one of my technicians, and we’ll call him technician #1. One of my other installers is getting a divorce from his wife, so my office manager offers him a place to sleep on her couch. Technician #2 starts sleeping with the office manager. So she kicks out technician #1 and files for divorce. Technician #1 moves back in with his parents. Two weeks later, I found out technician #1 is sleeping with technician #2s ex-wife! Technician #2’s ex-wife then empties technician #2’s bank accounts and retirement fund to the tune of over $350,000. Technician #1 then steals about $10,000 from office managers bank account.
Another two weeks passes, and she announces to the entire office that she’s pregnant with technician #2’s baby. Well, the couple’s rent was under technician #1s name, and he’s not paying, so they get evicted. They begin living in the hotel. That week, she confides in me that about a year ago, she and technician #1 had a secret love child with another women.
While living in the hotel, their funds get low and she needs to buy a car. My boss, out of the kindness in his heart, lends her $1,500 to help her put a down payment on the car. She said she’d pay it back within two weeks. Well, during that two week period, technician #2 gets fired for threatening management. The day the loan is due, the office manager conveniently quits.”
Scandalous Morning Commute
“My classmates and I totally got our bus driver fired when we were in the fifth or sixth grade. We let slip to a teacher that the driver (a man in his late 50s or early 60s) had been picking up some random younger woman while he was dropping students off from school. It was totally against school policy to provide transport to anyone who wasn’t either attending the school or working for it (like for field trips). He’d been doing this for a while, several weeks to maybe a couple months. Us kids all thought it was weird. Suddenly after a classmate let that news slip, he was just no longer our full time driver. The lady we’d periodically had as a substitute driver just took over his daily route, and we never saw him doing work with the school after that.
I pieced it together a few years later when I realized what the driver had actually been doing: He’d been using the school route to pick up this younger woman he was having an affair with. The guy was married to a woman closer to his age. I only knew that because they both came to a basketball game at our school, and my parents struck up a conversation with the couple. My mom said the guy, our bus driver, tried to hit on her during that brief interaction, while my stepdad used the restroom. Mom wasn’t too pleased.
This driver was likely picking up his mistress with the school bus, would finish dropping off the last few kids on the bus, and then go off to do whatever with her, thinking he could blame the time difference on route issues. We lived in a super rural area, so depending on the weather, the bus route timing could vary. Usually it took about an hour to drop off all the kids because it was just one or two buses for the whole school. I have no doubt that he was using that as a cover with his wife.”
She Spent Her Life Savings On What?
“My work requires everyone in our group have security clearance. It’s boring work and needs the most basic of clearances. On Wednesday, a coworker’s desk was completely cleaned out. We were told she lost her clearance and was fired. Weird. Her close friend spilled all the beans later. Turns out Sharon had met a man online, and the two of them were madly in love. And she cashed out her 401k, her life savings and a second mortgage to send to him. She’s 67.
To no one surprise, he’s not a real person, and it was all a scam. He actually claimed he was royalty from Nigeria. The workplace found out when she started borrowing money from coworkers, and the news made its way to our boss. It’s very sad but still! She was definitely around when the whole Nigerian email scam was around! She really should have known better.”
She Almost Got Away With It!
“We got a new boss like a year ago at work, and we’ve been hating it. People are getting written up for petty reasons, being suspended, and losing their bonuses. I’m a good employee, but this stuff finally caught up to me too and I got written up for getting injured at work. I don’t play, so where the write-up said ’employee comments’, I said ‘see attached’, and I typed out a 3-page defense. I talked about how I thought it was unfair and how I thought people had been getting treated unfairly for a year now. The next day, I got called into a meeting by my boss, and his boss, and his boss, and an HR rep, so they could all grill me about it.
By the end of the meeting, we had all figured out that it was actually the HR rep who had been messing with people for a year now, and the anger shifted completely away from me and onto her. I went around and told everybody about it. We’re going to make this witch pay I was talking about how I didn’t think it was fair that my boss kept writing us up for petty things, and my boss’s boss said it wasn’t him. It was apparently the new HR lady cracking down. My boss just delivers the slips, and he gets nervous when he does it, so he smiles like he’s enjoying it
“I think she thought it was her job to come down hard on people and disrupt our work as much as possible, and the fact that she accidentally was having the blame deflected off her made it all the more easy.”
HR Hoax
“I have now left this job after dealing with far too much, including me dealing with constant panic attacks and severe depression, stemming from the terrible people I had to deal with every day. I have since moved on to a new job, and as of me quitting, nothing was done against this manager that I know of. My office manager has a huge giant massive HR case being built against her because she’s been pulling royally shady scams.
Last year, some of us had been having issues with system access at my job. It’s a known issue and it’s been getting fixed here and there, but then it rears its head again. Anyway, about five or six months ago, a friend of mine in another department started losing access. My office manager (who is my boss’ boss) tells this person to go home for the day, since they don’t have system access, and my office manager specifically told that it wouldn’t be held against her. She goes home. This happens about 8 more times when she comes to work and her systems don’t work and she is told to go home.
Now, fast-forward to about two weeks before the year ended. The girl whose been being sent home gets called over by her manager, and she is told that she has to sign a final written warning. When asked why, she is told it’s because she has used all her paid time off AND sick leave. She said that is not possible and asks for proof before signing the document. Her manager pulls up all the times and days it was used and, lo and behold, it was every single time she was told to go home because of system access.
This is, of course, illegal as all get out. My coworker did not choose to go home, she did not choose to use her paid time off and sick leave. My office manager DID THAT FOR HER. So just about three weeks ago, my coworker gets called in to our office managers office and is told that she needs to give up her medical records. Which is also super duper illegal.
She declined and told her she will not do that and is still not signing the final written warning. She then proceeded to call HR with all of this, who then tells her, ‘It’s funny you should bring this to our attention, because you’re not the only one whose called us about things like this happening with her. We’re building a case against her as we speak.’
Stuff about to go down and I’m so here for it. No clue how long this case has been built by JR, and no clue how long it wioll take to come to fruition. I hate my job, and I’ve actively been looking for a new one, but part of me wants to stick around to see if they tote her off to jail, or the mass chaos that will happen when my office manager is fired.”
His Wife Was Horrified
“The 32-year-old happily married general manager of a bar owned by the restaurant I work for was just very publicly outed as a child predator.
Turns out he had been caught by a local vigilante group targeting potential offenders. They posed as a 14-year-old girl and messaged with him for weeks. On the night he agreed to go to this ‘girl’s’ house, they dropped the curtain and revealed that it had all been a sting. He insisted he was being framed, but he was almost instantly removed from the company with no leniency. Meanwhile, his wife works with me at our restaurant! Her world is totally shaken.
Everyone was made aware of the situation, primarily so we understand how to address it if guests ask. At first, it was looking like his wife would stay, I think she really wanted to believe in him. But she told me a few shifts ago that she is actively looking for a new place to live, and that she is so embarrassed to have never seen the writing on the wall before.
This all went down about two weeks ago, and I have to say she is taking it all in stride. Many people at work didn’t get along with her but the whole company really rallied around her with love and support, which I know must mean the world to her. She and I have bonded more in the past two weeks than ever before this all went down.”
Next Level Scamming
“A co-worker was caught completely on accident by a higher up giving sellers with our company more money than they should’ve been given, including over $10,000 more for one guy.
It was caught because that seller called the higher up and went, ‘Hey, I think you guys gave me too much?’ The higher up logged into the banking files for our sales and discovered he was right, and he asked the co-worker for her work on that sale. Instead of following through, the co-worker called up the guy and told him to mail her back the over-priced check personally, basically admitting to him that she’d made a mistake. It had happened with other sellers, and she was trying to cover it up so she wouldn’t get in trouble
The higher up was angry and told our two CEOs, who demoted the lady down to some of the most tedious, travel-exhaustive work they could. Two weeks later, she quit. They basically forced her into it to punish her for cheating the company out of over $100,000. By doing so, they also diabolically set it up to where she had no choice but to quit, because if they’d fired her, she could’ve filed for unemployment benefits. Since she quit, she can’t file, and they can’t owe her money for it.
She’s also had issues with other coworkers, including my department- we collect the money from sales, getting people to pay. She would do things like insist we weren’t notifying her when things were sold, and demanding from our IT team that they send her every auction, item, and who it sold to for how much, despite her already having complete access to all of that. My department thought it was weird when we got a couple calls from people asking about seller’s checks and such, but since we don’t have access to the 9,000 page excel sheet, we couldn’t tell them anything and had no idea what was happening.”
Good Old Fashioned Nepotism
“I work for a small business, very small, we’re talking about twenty employees. We found out two to three weeks ago that our secondary program director (very similar type of work to an administrative assistant) had been let go because she was ‘no longer needed’ a month ago. Nobody announced that she was no longer with the company. We’re friends on Facebook, and I know she and her daughter keep getting recurring sicknesses, so I thought that was why she hadn’t been around. She ended up telling me when we ran into each other in person that she was let go. Being regularly sick doesn’t tend to be a fireable offense for this company, as the primary program director is literally allergic to everything under the sun and will go several times a without coming in.
Last week, I found out that they fired her so they could give the job to the owner’s daughter-in-law, who didn’t need the job anywhere near as badly. It makes me really glad I’m planning on leaving soon.”
Nothing Adds Up
“This was a couple of years back. I know a lot of bartenders in a small but affluent city. It’s a pretty tight-knit community. There is one bartender we will call Jay. He is well known and well liked. He is the kind of guy that would show up to cover your shift and then not take the tips if you were in a bind. He is part owner of a popular bar. I know him mostly from the community, but not that well he hung out at my house once. Great dude.
I find out from another bartender friend, let’s call Ryan, that Jay has cancer. Ryan and the other bartenders have been giving him money for treatment for the last year or so. My wife and I consider giving money to Ryan to give to Jay, so Jay doesn’t know that we know. We discuss it, but we never give any money.
Jay has a partner in the bar that doesn’t think everything adds up. So he low-key follows Jay one day when Jay says he has to go to treatment. Jay spends the day going from bar to bar, never going to a doctor’s appointment. The partner confronts Jay and that’s when it hits the fan. He has taken tens of thousands from people over the years. He is basically run out of town. I don’t know about other people, but he did slowly pay Ryan back the $5,000 he had taken.”
High Stakes Betrayal
“My fiancé works closely together with two colleagues: one is my best friend (let’s call her Beth) and the other is his best friend (let’s call him John). We like to hang out with Beth, John, and both their significant others.
Beth is getting married to this really good guy, Jerry, this year. He is nice and sweet, although his jokes never really land. This is where John comes in. You see, when Beth started at this workplace years ago, she was single and instantly smitten with John. She found him nice, funny and handsome. Only John was in a long-term relationship, so nothing came of that except for friendship. Along came Jerry into Beth’s personal life, and he and Beth started dating.
Meanwhile, Beth and John stayed very good friends and colleagues. Then, two years ago, Johns long-term girlfriend cheated on him. He ended the relationship. In the meantime, Beth and Jerry had started living together, but things weren’t running so smoothly: Jerry is away for work A LOT, and due to a combination of circumstances, he was away for almost eight months.
In this time, Beth and John became even closer than they already were. They went out for drinks with colleagues, but they would be the only two hanging around until the end of the night. She has this special tone in her voice when she talks to John. A lot of people started making little jokes about them being a couple.
One night, there was this work party. John put his new status as a single man to good use, flirting away with a lot of female colleagues. Beth backed off for a bit, but later that night, she had to go to the bus and John offered to walk her there. And when they were there, waiting for the bus – talking, laughing, goofing – they looked at each other and there was this spark.
They ALMOST kissed, but at the last moment Beth pulled away, because of course, she was together with Jerry and didn’t want to do that to him. Plus, John is her friend and her colleague, so kissing him would probably just complicate things instead of improving them. So they both just kind of acted like that never happened. Beth told only me and my fiancé about this weirdness between her and John.
Quite soon after this, John got into a new relationship. This girl, Natalie, is a sweetheart, only she is quite possibly the polar opposite of Beth. Soon after John and Natalie started dating, Jerry proposed to Beth. And she said yes. We were all very surprised, not only because he asked her to marry him so soon after this rough patch they just went through, but also because they were together for only two years at this point, and Beth was only 25, which is quite young.
It seemed as if, as soon as John heard the news, he also wanted to do something drastic. After just four months of dating, Natalie moved in with him. She instantly started replacing all of his stuff with things that were more to her taste, up until the point where it feels like I’ve set foot into someone’s Pinterest board when I visit.
John and Natalie don’t really seem happy. Beth and Jerry have been planning their wedding for the past two years, but Beth tells me that sometimes, she wonders what could have been between her and John. Of course, soon after admitting that to me, she rushes to add that it would never work between them. Natalie has been dropping hints about getting married, buying a house and having kids from the moment she moved in with John, and this September, they’re going on a big road trip. He is going to propose. We all know, even though he didn’t outright tell us. If he chooses this path, this time next year he will have an expensive Pinterest wedding coming up, plus probably a mortgage and a baby.
Meanwhile, Beth and John keep doing fun stuff together, like having drinks and working out. Natalie has started to give Beth some snark because of it. But when I talked to Natalie about our friend group, she only said super nice things about Beth, almost desperately so.
I know Beth has her doubts. I know John has his doubts. But it seems like they go through with their respective Big Life Altering Plans as some weird game of Chicken. My fiancé and I just feel like there will be a moment in the future when the feelings they bottled up all come bursting out, and by that time there will probably be kids and other high stakes involved.”