An Assisted Murder Suicide
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“The pediatric clinic I was working at had a picture of one of their old employees up on the wall, pretty much a memorial for her. The story was that she was at work one day and her soon to be ex-husband (they were in the process of getting a divorce) came to the clinic looking for her. The other employees were not aware of the divorce and thought everything was fine, so they led him to where she was working. She was documenting some patients vitals and was behind the desk. He went up to her, shot her point blank in the face, and the shot himself in the head.
This was in front of other staff and kids that were patients there……
Or there was the other clinical I did some time at where the husband of a patient (this was a senior center clinic) came in and shot her in the head, basically euthanasia. She was terminal and non-responsive to anything/anyone basically in a coma, so he wanted to put her out her misery.”
The Mysterious Case Of The Bathroom Bomber
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“I used to work as a janitor at a 24-hour supermarket chain on the East Coast. I usually worked nights and would ‘closing maintenance,’ which meant I had to make sure everything was up to par and supplies were all filled to last the night because my shift would end at nine.
About once a week, I went into the men’s room to do my final check before punching out for the night, and there would be explosive diarrhea all over the walls/floor/toilet/etc. It was a NIGHTMARE. It took me about 45 minutes to clean it up every time.
I got so sick of this that I ended up waiting in/by the men’s room at night to try and catch the offender. One night I got lucky. I walked into the bathroom and heard what could only be pure desecration of my day’s work. So I waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. After about half an hour, this old man walks out and starts to wash his hands. I go into the stall because I’d been waiting long enough, I HAD TO KNOW. Sure enough, it was my guy. Being completely fed up with this crap (quite literally), I confronted him: ‘Sir, this is ridiculous. Would you do this in your home?!’
He looked at me and said with a straight face, ‘Nope, I come here to do it just to ruin some poor sucker’s day. Enjoy.’ He then calmly walked out of the bathroom. I was stunned.”
She Was Punished For Speaking Out
“I work in IT and the department I was in had too many people to fit in the room designated for us. Three of us, two men and I (female) worked in another office on a different floor. I was checking the news repeatedly one day. It was the day the Prop 8 decision was coming down in California a couple of years ago.
One of my coworkers asked me why I kept refreshing Google News. I told him I wanted to know the Prop 8 decision. He asked why I would care so much, seeing as I’m a woman married to a man. I replied that on a non-personal level, the basic human rights issue behind it mattered to me, but on a more personal level, I follow gay rights closely as I’m bi.
I shrugged and went back to work on replacing a laptop’s heatsink. Or so I thought. My coworker had gotten up and spun my chair around. Then he bent down and tried to shove his tongue down my throat. When I forced his lips away from mine, he tried to kiss my neck. I finally fought him off of me.
He stood between me and the door and accused me of bringing it on myself. He told me that when I told him I was bi, he suddenly ‘knew we had a connection.’ I told him that didn’t make any sense. He said, ‘But you’re bi.’
I told him that the fact I’m not straight doesn’t mean I’m non-monogamous, and even if I wasn’t monogamous, I wouldn’t have picked him. He got angry and told me that if I knew what was good for me, I wouldn’t report it. After all, my bisexuality would come out and ‘everyone will hate you for it.’
I blinked at that. I wasn’t closeted. Most of our co-workers knew. I had been surprised that he hadn’t when we were discussing the Prop 8 issue.
He continued to tell me I deserved it and stayed between me and the door, preventing me from leaving. I was afraid to call the campus police, as there were many sharp things in the room. I did manage to text ‘SOS’ to my husband, who worked on the same floor as me in a biomedical research lab.
My husband came by and knocked on the door and asked to talk to me through the door. I shouted that I would be out in a minute. My coworker gave me a very ugly look but stood aside as I left, probably knowing I would have started screaming for help and the door lock code if he didn’t move.
My husband took one look at my face and rushed me to his lab, so he could lock the door and I could compose myself. I registered a formal complaint against my coworker with HR and my department.
HR came back several weeks later and told me they substantiated my claim. They said that it was awful what happened to me. Their solution, however, showed how little they gave a crap. He was not fired. Neither of us was moved to a different unit. I lost the private overflow office and was moved to a desk right next to my boss, as he stated, ‘This way I can make sure you don’t get into trouble.’ And my assailant? He promised not to speak to me again.
Yeah, you read that right. He was left in the unsupervised office and I was the one who was suddenly extra-supervised. But he promised to leave me alone, so it’s all sunshine and roses.
I registered a complaint with the EEOC because I thought it was ridiculous. The caseworker agreed; Unfortunately, the only thing they could do would be to have me moved back to my original location, as moving me for making the complaint could be seen as retaliation. There would be no guarantees my assailant was moved out of that office. Nothing could be done to punish the guy because in the eyes of the law, my employer had done something (spoken to him and extracted a promise to leave me alone) and until he assaulted me again, there was nothing that could be done.
My only options were to deal with it, sue, or find other employment. I soon found I couldn’t handle working in that environment, having weekly meetings where I had to stare at that guy across a table. My husband and I were broke and couldn’t imagine affording a lawyer.
So I quit that job and went to work as a temp for a full year before I could find a permanent IT job elsewhere.”
The Worst First Job Ever
“My first job after graduating college was at a start-up company in a very small town in my region. The town had a population of roughly 4,000 people if you counted everyone in the state prison that was there and all the people from out of town staying in the rehab center. Aside from those two places, the biggest employer was a factory that made phone books and junk mail flyers. There were persistent rumors that the prison was going to be closed and the phone book factory had been struggling for years (phone books quickly being made obsolete by smartphones). As you can imagine, the town was concerned about its future and was looking for new employers.
The owner of this startup offered to build his new factory in town and employ people from town. This town and a couple of other towns in the area loaned him millions and millions of dollars (often that the townspeople raised themselves) in order to help him start this business and give their citizens jobs. A local couple sold him a building complex that used to be a car dealership at a low price to use for manufacturing.
I started working there as their first full-time employee. As I wasn’t from the town, this made some people angry who were under the impression that the factory was intended to employ locals. The owner defended his decision as there wasn’t anyone around with my specific qualifications (I was a product designer and this was a rural area). Unfortunately, I remained their only full-time employee for months, working 70-90 hours a week with no overtime doing work well beyond my job description. At first, I justified this as necessary because this was a startup after all, but it began to grate on me after a while. The owner and his wife would often leave the office around 5 or 6 and expect me to stay until 9 or 10 after they were gone. They also seemed to be making no effort to hire anyone else to help with the workload.
I continued to work long hours (120 hours in one week one time, only stopping at 120 because it hit midnight on the first day of the next week), for months while this owner lied to his potential clients about his manufacturing capability (he claimed he could have product to them in a month’s time despite owning no machinery and having one single employee, me), lied to the town councils investigating what he was doing with their money (buying himself a 3d TV and a moped/fertility treatments for his wife, among other things) and lying to me about his future plans for the company.
I quickly decided I needed to get the eff away from that company and started looking for another job, but design is a very competitive industry and jobs in that area are scarce, so I needed to keep paying my bills, even on my meager salary, and stuck it out.
The moment I decided to quit even without any other prospects was the day I stopped feeling safe working with him. We were attempting to install an air conditioner in the building (it was often 103 degrees at my desk in the summer). He had bought an industrial unit from the closing prison and wanted to install it as a window unit. To get the window out (very old glass) he enlisted my help, and the help of an older, experienced shop worker he had recently hired. We wanted to tape the window, carefully break it out, and then remove the wooden frame. He was convinced he could sell the glass if he could keep it intact (he was really into American Pickers and shows like that) and wanted to remove it in one piece. To do this, he had me smacking the wooden frame with a 2×4 to try to loosen it. This was a four foot by seven foot pane of hundred-year-old glass that had not been moved in just as long and I knew I wasn’t going to get it to budge, so I was ‘smacking’ it very lightly, just trying not to shatter anything. The owner declared that I am a pansy and takes the 2×4 for himself. He has me and the shop guy try to hold the frame while he winds up. This older shop guy is visibly wincing.
Of course, he misses on his first swing and puts the 2×4 right through the glass. Shards go everywhere, some reached across the street outside where kids were riding their bikes. They covered the floor in the shop. It was such a mess the police showed up because neighbors called in. The only thing he said after doing this was to yell ‘Well it’s a good thing I own this place so I don’t have to be the one to clean this crap up!,’ after which he shoves a push broom into shop guy’s hands and just leaves.
I ended up calling in sick the next day to interview for a job I took immediately.
Turns out this same guy was trying to open the actual manufacturing wing of his new business in another part of the country with the money the locals had given him. The thing that bugged me was that this guy loved that whole ‘middle America is the real America’ schtick, but would speak openly with disdain for the rural locals. His business’ advertising and marketing was centered around that whole ‘rusty 1950s pickup, kids in overalls and American flags’ ideal, yet he was a guy from LA who swooped in, took these people’s money and tried to leave the state with it.
The last I checked, the company had gone bankrupt and was trying to sue the people who had given him their money claiming that they had done something ‘fraudulent’ that I didn’t quite understand.”
When Office Shenanigans Cross The Line
“My last workplace had a webcam in the lunchroom. I once looked at it and saw one of the workers cleaning the soda machine and she was bent over and her buttcrack was hanging out. I decided to screenshot the picture, showed my co-worker in the cube next to me and we giggled about it.
Big mistake.
My co-worker went into the lunch room later and told her that I had shown it to everyone in my department. This was not true. She, of course, got upset and rushed over to my desk and told me to delete it etc. and also told the directors. I got called into the office and had to sign a harassment complaint. I should have got fired and I never felt more embarrassed and dumb. I couldn’t stand having a harassment warning on my file, and I later quit not long after the incident. Despite my warning, I was really good at my job and a promotion was still coming my way, but the shame and guilt were overbearing, and I couldn’t go on, so I quit—not having another job lined up.
I don’t blame my co-worker, it was my own fault and I shouldn’t have done it. I certainly learned from my mistake and moved on.
I now work for a great company and never again will I do anything and unprofessional like that.”
Maybe He Wanted To Get Fired
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“Guy shows up wasted to the office. Starts a political conversation with the first black guy he sees, bashing Obama. The other guy quietly and politely defends Obama. The guy proceeds to yell at top of his lungs and slams the office door.
I walk in and tell him to get out of the office. I wasn’t 100% sure he was wasted because he was generally a jerk anyway. Later that morning, he goes into an office where a woman was wearing a dress and sitting at her table. He leans down and makes a comment to her about looking up her skirt. He then leaves her office and stops an intern in the hall and says, ‘If I were 30 years younger, I’d take you down to the beach and tear you up.’ Finally, at this point, he was reported to the boss and fired.
The weird thing was, in between these random spurts of harassment, he was still doing work. When he was fired, he was loading up his car with hardware to move it to our other location, still obviously wasted. He was probably drinking in his office.”
Never Came Home
“A guy didn’t go home one night. The next morning his wife was freaking out and people started reviewing the security footage. He hadn’t left the building at all.
The police got involved and his picture ended up all over the news. Still nothing.
Finally, that night, they found his body right next to the building in some thick bushes. He’d either jumped or fallen from the roof. No one will ever know what happened.”
The Last Straw
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“I used to work for a community-based residential program for people with mental illnesses. We had a small staff office in the carport of the apartment and the main office a few blocks away.
One of the mentally ill residents was mad at the staff (because we made him throw away all his crap, including his bottles of urine and a weapon that we found and were about to kick him out of the program over) so he took one of his 2-liter bottles of stored up urine and splashed it all over the carport office door. There was a horrible stench of urine in the area but none of us at the time thought the smell was coming from the door. We thought someone had peed on the dirt next to the garage.
Later we were in our main office discussing the matter, eating snacks around the conference table, when suddenly we realized the urine was on the door, we had all touched it and hadn’t washed our hands before eating the snacks.
That was the last straw for me working with mentally ill people.”
Trapped In A Legal Bind
“I used to work at a secondhand electronics store. One time, this kid comes in to sell a Nintendo DS, but he was under 18 (probably 17, maybe 16) so he legally wasn’t allowed to. So he finds some random guy on the street to do it for him. The guy gets the DS booked in (items had to be tested before they were bought, so selling something was a two-step process), gives the ticket to finish the transaction to the kid, and takes off.
So the kid comes back in expecting to either get his DS, or money for his DS. But we have to tell him that he didn’t give the DS to us, so we legally have to assume it belongs to the other guy, so we can only give it back to him. Naturally, the kid flips out and starts yelling that if we don’t give him the DS or money he’s going to kill someone. So we try to kick him out, and he’s just walking around and yelling. Then one of the supervisors goes around the counter to just point him towards the door, and the kid grabs a wet floor sign, hits the supervisor over the head with it, and runs out the door.
One of our staff, who was a part-time local MMA fighter, runs after the kid. They run into a CVS across the street and get into it. Somehow, they end up on the other side of CVS’s counter, and the kid gets his face completely wrecked by our employee.
The cops assumed the kid swung first so they let our guy go. And upper management got a kick out of the story, so the employee wasn’t disciplined at all, either. That’s possibly the weirdest part of this story right there.”
The Luckiest Dad Alive
“In the ’80s, my dad was working at a print shop in Tampa that got shot up by a lady’s deranged ex-husband.
He told me this story a long time ago and hasn’t mentioned it in years. He was working in the front when the man comes in and pulls out a weapon. His boss got shot first; my dad said he could see it in his eyes that his boss was dead before he hit the ground. The shooter turns the weapon on my dad as he’s turning to run away and shoots him in the chest.
Luckily, he was turned in such a way that the bullet went just under the skin, bounced off his rib cage, and lodged in his armpit. He crawled out the back door and got to the pizza shop next door where they thought he was playing a prank on them because of how close it was to Halloween. The shooter then found his estranged ex, killed her, and then himself. My dad was pretty much alright.
He also got hit by a train when he passed out in his car on the tracks. After the train dragged the car for a mile his only injury was a bruise from the seat belt.”
Thanks For The Warning
“Location: Electronic Arts Canada, 4400 Dominion St, Burnaby.
One of our senior producers gets on the phone system intercom and announces to the whole office, ‘If anyone is easily offended, please do not look out the north window at the hotel across the street; I repeat, if anyone is easily offended, please do not look out the north window at the hotel across the street, thank you.’
On the hotel balcony directly across from our office was a couple getting it on.”
“Insurance Covers Attack By Cows, Right?”
“I work in an office out in the country (Britain, man.) And my bosses son was due round any minute, so we tidied the office, and we had a nice little cake prepared for him, just because we’re all lovely as heck.
Anyway, boss pulled up, his kid got out, saw that there was a freaking giant pink cake for him, he ran full pelt towards the office. What I haven’t mentioned is that the entire front of the office is pretty much a single massive sheet of 6-inch thick glass. So smack goes his face onto that pristine glass. His face pretty much split open at that point. He was very seriously injured. But everyone in the office just saw a kid walk into a window. So we all burst out laughing. It wasn’t until about 10 seconds later that we realized what had happened. On impact his face had split open, his bowels had released what contents they had, and nobody was willing to help first off.
We called an ambulance, which seemed like a good idea, but oh no. The sirens you see, startled a herd of cows nearby. So then we had a bit of a stampede on our hands. Nobody was hurt in that stampede, but a LOT of expensive cars were damaged. Insurance covers attack by cows, right?
But yeah, that day was messed up. It was just one thing after another…”
“Every Day Is An Adventure”
“10 US Marshalls in full gear came in with weapons loaded and ready and handcuffed one of our salesmen in front of everyone because it turned out he’d been diddling a teenage girl. Saw him get arrested in our break room while a dozen Feds pounced on him. He was her martial arts coach. Took her to events out of the country and it became a felony. He’s doing 10 years right now in a Federal pen.
Once a guy crapped his pants in the warehouse bathroom, then flushed them. It clogged the entire sewage system. Our maintenance guy had to remove the toilet and pull out the pants from the piping below with his hands. The maintenance guy ended up robbing a bank 3 months later. 3 years in prison. Found out he had cancer in prison. Died last year.
Also, every day we have a driver who poops in the parking lot. My brother who works on trailers out there has to watch himself because there’s nothing but crap all around them.
Another driver had 3 dogs he would keep in his cab. After he quit we had to strip the cab to the frame because the dogs had urinated so thoroughly everywhere that the smell stained the actual freaking metal.
One time a driver got Lice and spread it to the entire shop after they worked on his truck.
I could go on. Every day is an adventure.”
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