Is the job worth it if you have to put up with such garbage people? These employees encountered some of the worst humanity has to offer while on the job. Whether it was their boss or co-worker, the tantrums and disturbing behavior didn't stop until some bold confrontations took place. Even if you're stuck at home, at least you don't have to encounter these walking nightmares!
Supervisor Hulk Rage!
“Not my coworker, but my boss. I had a data entry job. Nothing difficult, but the pay was terrible, and all the good employees left and made twice as much working elsewhere. I only stuck around for as long as I did because I was halfway out the door, moving out of state to go to college.
When I started at this place, I was a temp. My boss, Lorie, verbally abused everyone except for me. I figured I was somewhat shielded since I wasn’t technically their employee, so when I was asked if I wanted to be hired on permanently, I said no, and told her bosses that she was a bully. They just shrugged and said, ‘Yeah, that’s the way she is.’
I pointed out that this was unacceptable. She once slammed a coworker into the wall. Hard. I don’t know why. How she wasn’t fired for this is still beyond me. She once told a coworker that she was stupid, to her face, which I overheard. She later tried to deny this.
She often spoke about beating up people in her front yard. She said she once slammed her sister’s face on her driveway, repeatedly. She bragged about this stuff all the time. She also owned multiple weapons and bragged about them. I was apparently the only one who was horrified that someone so unstable owned deadly weapons. She once threatened to beat me up because she thought I was talking about her behind her back, when she saw a coworker and I talking in the parking lot. We were literally talking about donuts. She screamed at me like a banshee, jumped in her car, and zoomed out of the parking lot. I emailed all the bosses and told them what happened, and I told them that I felt unsafe at work due to Lorie bragging about her weapons and her history of literally abusing people at work. The bosses said they’d handle it. They ‘grounded’ her for three days. She wasn’t allowed to speak to anyone, but she was still at work. She scowled at me the entire time.
Last I heard, she was still working there, some 6 years after I started there. She’s the only person I’ve ever known that I sincerely wish something bad would happen to.”
VP Makes His Life A Living Nightmare
“My first job out of college was working in a Human Resources department. We hired a new VP of HR, which was my boss’s new boss. Before Day 1, I scheduled a flight of hers and forwarded her all the information, along with a friendly email saying that I was very excited that she was starting at our company. I told her to let me know if she needed anything. Day 1, she walks in and asks for me specifically. I stood up and smiled and went to shake her hand warmly, because who asks for the lowest on the totem pole? She refused to shake my hand and showed me an email. The email I sent her with her flight information. She asked what was wrong with it. I was alarmed and read through it again, then had to sheepishly admit I wasn’t sure, but I’d love to know for next time.
She said, ‘You come across as SUCH a brown noser! I came to talk to you first so you could rub your face in my butt now and we could get it over with.’
I told her that’s how I talk to everyone at the company, I see us all as a team and that’s how I work. She guffawed and handed me a piece of paper she had shoved in her pocket. ‘Here, good to know you are for real! You can get started, then.’
My list of tasks included getting her computer set up (already done), her email up and running (already done), her new passwords (already done), and a few other things for comfort around her office, which I could complete in about 5 minutes. I did so and returned promptly. She slapped the piece of paper out of my hand and called me a liar. I told her making sure that she was comfortable on her first day was part of my job, and I accomplished many of the tasks before new employees arrive. She asked me to bring another employee into her office, so I went and got that employee and brought them down to the new VP’s office. That employee was promptly fired, no reason given. The two of them had never spoken before, and I was asked to take that employee out. It was at that moment I decided to start looking for new roles. The new VP basically made me her slave for the three months while I looked. I was denied any vacation requests, sick leave, breaks, even though my peers in my department could do whatever, whenever.
The owner hired her. He enabled all of this. There was no reporting her because it would have been directly to him and that would have gotten us fired immediately. How was that firing allowed to happen? I am located in an at-will state, which means in short that anyone can be fired for any reason at any time without ‘just cause’, so long as that reason is not discriminatory. Trust me when I say that there was more than one ‘spectacular’ firing when she was there.
One month into her tenure, she pulled all of us into a room and made sure we were sitting down. She then told us that a department member of ours had committed suicide over the weekend. We were shocked and saddened and obviously emotional. VP then did two things: she didn’t let us go home to mourn in peace, and we weren’t allowed to tell anyone that this employee had died, only that they were no longer at the company. I could only apologize when people asked, say I was not allowed to talk about it, and quietly suggest that they Google her and that they could come to me with any concerns. Her obituary was public, and it was one of the first things you would see on a cursory Google search. VP witch went to the funeral on the company’s behalf and forbade us from going. We ended up putting a picture of her up and paying our respects that way in a corner of the office. Everyone was looking for a new role after that.
I finally got an offer and went to resign with my two weeks’ notice. I told my direct boss first, who congratulated me, and he also said he’d tell the VP for me since he was so worried about her reaction. The new VP came in screaming about how working for her was the opportunity of a lifetime, how could I pass that up, I am an idiot, and that’s why nobody can be trusted. I was very happy to walk out that door.”
Completely Delusional
“Oh boy. There are always those types of workers who think they are amazing and that management is out to get them, but they have no idea why. So we’ll call this particular guy Chatty Chad. He has a business degree but has not used it at all. Chatty Chad gets bored at jobs frequently, so he hardly stays at a job more than a year. But usually at or before the one-year mark, he grows increasingly upset with management because they treat him so unfairly.
Chatty Chad would tell you that he is the hardest worker of all his coworkers. That he goes above and beyond what everyone else does. That he does the most and the best work. He complains about ‘those 18-year-olds that get hired right on as servers’, whereas he’s been stuck busing dishes and for whatever reason, gets constantly passed up to be promoted to an actual server. Chatty Chad gets so heated about how the management seems to be out to get him because they’re always hiring these inexperienced younglings to be servers and he keeps getting stuck as a busboy. And how after a while, these places always end up cutting down his hours, so he has to get another job and then eventually leaves the old one.
What Chatty Chad does not tell you, but that my boyfriend will (he worked with Chad for a while during college), is that Chatty Chad does a fraction of the work he thinks he does. While he says he’s busting his butt carrying several totes of dishes and doing a ton, the reality is he is standing around talking at the person actually carrying around the totes. He is sitting and talking with customers while the other employees are trying to work around him. He says he’s a hard worker, but the managers see that the guy that isn’t actually getting anything done, because he can’t close his mouth long enough to do anything. So yeah, some people are completely deluded in what they think of themselves versus how they actually are.”
Mistaken Conspiracy Theory
“He was 17 at the time. We’ll call him Jerry. We were working in a grocery store when I met him. Jerry wanted so bad to be a bodybuilder-bro. He idolized The Rock. He spent countless hours in the gym every day. He woke up at 4 a.m. to run a 5K. He only slept for 20-minute increments throughout the day because, ‘that’s what Marines do’. He also made sure everyone knew about his ‘no excuses’ attitude, even though all he ever did was complain and make excuses. Jerry would give speeches about hard work and dedication, and whatever other nonsense he obviously pulled from a motivational social media post that day. He really did put time in at the gym though. He had the arms and chest to show it. But if you gave the kid a basic task, he was useless.
Cleaning the bathrooms? He left stains and toilet paper everywhere. Stocking shelves? Product was always facing the wrong way or in the wrong spot. Offering additional assistance to customers? He never bothered, always got yelled at, and he never changed. Even just consistently working was an issue for Jerry, because he had to stop like every hour to eat a snack or drink a Monster.
For some reason Jerry thought I was his friend, and he would always complain to me when he got yelled at by management. He made up this conspiracy theory that management hated him and wanted to see him fail. According to him, he was never actually messing up, management was just bullying him. He would say things like, ‘They’re just jealous. They don’t work as hard as me, and that makes them jealous.’
Jerry lived in a fantasy land that was a product of too many quotes he probably got from some bodybuilding calendar.
Eventually Jerry quit because he was ‘tired of the nonsense, and he went to work in fast food under his older brother. Jerry got fired by his older brother. Jerry tried joining the military but apparently couldn’t hack it. Tried becoming a cop but couldn’t hack it. Now he’s a valet at the local mega-church, and he recently turned 25. He’ll probably get fired or quit there too.”
Spectacular Failure
“I had a girl starting her PhD in the lab I worked at. She was the embodiment of entitled, lazy and spoiled. She‘d come in late, leave early, do next to no work and constantly complained that she needed more money.
After a while we all just hated her, mostly due to the fact that while we all worked our butts off, she did next to nothing, but the bosses didn‘t seem to care at all and just let her hang around in the lab for years. When the time came to hand in her thesis, we were all curious what she‘d hand in, since she basically hadn‘t done any work. I was convinced she‘d somehow weasel her way out of it, like she had done all the time. I was convinced that when you can pull off being in a lab for years doing no work but no one fires you, you must be somehow a bit clever to pull that off. But nope, she failed so spectacularly like I‘d never seen anyone fail before or since.
It was a combination of shortcomings. One issue was really basic administrative stuff. Things like not sticking to the required format, not handing in additional documents which were required and/or not sticking to deadlines when it came to handing in the written thesis itself. And apparently she wanted to hand in her thesis without checking back with her advisors. Please. When they did get the thesis to check, turned out the content of what she had written was apparently not exactly up to scratch. As far as I know, they gave her another few months to fix all the shortcomings, giving her a new deadline, but she never handed anything in.
So note to everyone: you can‘t be lazy and stupid; you can only be one of the two.”
“His Eyes Were Like Sharks”
“I’m a steward, so I often end up knowing far more about what’s going on with employees than management does, and often way more than I really want to. This guy though, I wanted this dude gone in the worst way. I started hearing about him from other stewards, first. He didn’t apply for different jobs, he was moved, typically with no word on it, which is rare to see even once, much less the four times it happened. What I kept hearing was that female coworkers were universally concerned about being alone with him. He was one of those guys that sets ‘predator’ senses going.
Then he got moved to my office, and I saw it for myself. I work in human services, and one of the things we’re trained for is recognizing abuser patterns. It’s one thing to read about it, or talk to someone who is living with it, but the first time you see an abusive, manipulative person turn on the charm to relax their target, it’s a chilling thing, let me tell you.
He went through about three relatively vulnerable women here. Every last one of them thought the girl before couldn’t have been right, and that he was the nicest guy, you just don’t understand, and so on. He had his hands all over one, while they were driving in a government car, and I didn’t find out about it until way later. He eventually went to another job, and the last I heard, he had gotten embroiled in a three-way dispute between two women he was sleeping with in his unit, causing them both to get divorced, and then HR from that company came and asked me what I knew.
He was easily one of the scariest individuals I’ve ever personally worked with. His eyes were like a shark’s, just cold.”
Ground Zero For Quitting
“I worked at Walmart when I was 20-ish and worked in the back, receiving, sorting, and staging product as it came off the truck. There were four of us, the lead Robert, myself, and two kids. We also had the team that processed returns to merchants, one of those was a middle to late aged man named Jan. We all reported to one boss in the back, who was never actually there and none of us really knew when he’d be around.
To start off with, I had worked at a Walmart previously, so I had experience coming in. You’d think I’d be on a track to promotion, and so did I, until Robert just vanished. Robert was gone for two months. During this time, the Boss had been notified and he asked me to step into Robert’s role as lead, which consisted of a bit of scheduling and mostly making sure the others didn’t mess around all day. I did this without a problem for two months.
Then as quietly as he disappeared, Robert came back. No notes, no doctors explanations, no anything. He was immediately handed his old vest and the Boss told him he’d ‘sort out the re-hire later’. And just like that, the interview I had for Robert’s position as a lead was closed and Robert was re-hired without any penalty despite two months of no-show.
On that particular day, it was super hot outside and I was already absolutely fuming when a truck that we had been waiting on rolled up. Turns out the driver had tried to drive in overnight and was going to exceed his driving allowance, so he had pulled over at 6 a.m. and slept until 1 p.m. The trailer had sat in the sun and was HOT. I’m talking open the door and the heat just blasts you. But we needed to get it unloaded, so me and one of the boys dove in and started pitching everything we could out. We called Jan over for help, because Jan is a big guy. He’s German, complains loudly and often, and ate sauerkraut without fail for lunch every day. Jan and Robert are working away trying to get these pallets out while me and the kid were basically stuck in the sweltering trailer. Suddenly I hear Robert cough and Jan goes ‘Oof. Ohhhhhh,’ and Robert backs slowly away from the truck while Jan just gets back into it and keeps working away.
Then the smell hit.
We’re in a trailer that’s baking. We are sweating and barely able to breath, and Jan just let out the most awful silent fart. Sauerkraut and Sausage. We had fans blowing into the trailer over the dog food pallets to keep me and this poor kid from dying of heat exhaustion, and suddenly we’re ground zero of this nuclear fart. I can taste it, my eyes are watering. The poor kid next to me is dry heaving and we’re ABSOLUTELY STUCK because Robert jammed the items together at a messed up angle. I slice the shrink wrap and just start chucking bags of dog food behind us. The kid starts helping while he’s gagging and finally we clear about four rows out and I boost him up and crawl up myself into the warehouse.
I ripped my vest off and walked into the office where the boss was, chuck it in his face, and walk out. As I leave, I can hear him asking Robert what happened and a ‘What’s that smell?!'”
Working three days straight
“I used to work as an operations supervisor for a security company. I had a coworker that was used for backup, lets call him James. We lost one of our regulars and had to use James. James would complain about the work all the time and he wasn’t very good at his job. I was working the night shifts one rotation and he was covering the afternoons. We were working a 12-hour shift back to back. On Saturday, he relieved me at Noon as normal and I went home to sleep.
I woke up around 8 p.m. and went for a run. I got a series of text messages but I didn’t check my phone until I finished my run. When I finished, I got texts from James. He told me that I needed to cover his shift the next day, because he was too stressed out and needed time away from the office. Essentially, he was asking me to cover my shift later that night (midnight – noon), cover his shift (noon – midnight) and then cover my normal shift again. He asked me to work a 36-hour shift because he was stressed out. I told him ‘no’ and called him crazy. The moment I said this, he agreed to come in as normal.
Now you might be asking why he needed to ask me this in the first place. The reason why he asked me to cover his shift, the reason he was so stressed out, was because there was a girl he liked but she started dating someone else.”
All This Over Some Bread
“I worked with someone who, by now, would be known as an entitled Karen. I was still a teenager back then, and it was just a side job for me. I was a sales assistant in a bakery. Or, to be exact, in one store of a bakery chain. I had been there almost a year, worked 2-3 times every week, and I usually worked alone closing the store. I knew what I was doing. So did the apprentices who were my age. They hired a part-time worker. We were the age of her children, and she treated us as if she had the right to give us orders. She didn’t ask if we would clean the glasses but ordered us to. She didn’t do things herself. She supposedly knew far more than we could ever hope to.
The most horrible instance was when I was with a customer and sold them a large loaf of bread, bigger than our normal paper bags. I put it into two bags, but not in the plastic bag, as bread really does not belong into plastic bags. In front of the customer, she told me multiple times how what I was doing was wrong and I needed to do it differently and how dumb I was. I finished the sale and talked to her in the back. I, a 17-year-old, scolded her massively and told her never to do that in front of customers again, and that she had no idea what she was talking about. Why was I so sure? A month before I had been to a workshop on product sales, professional attire and employee conduct. Which covered exactly this sort of behavior. The apprentices made her quit after a few months.”
Disgusting Discovery
“I worked in a bookstore that also included a café, and the café manager was my worst coworker ever. She was so beyond unhygienic. We’d had to discuss more than once not using the dish sink in the cafés backroom to bathe herself in. She always smelled slightly sour. Well one day while covering the café manager’s break, an employee discovered a pair of freshly stained underwear that she’d washed in the dish sink, hanging off the counter in the cafés backroom. She got fired for that one.
She was not homeless. I’d driven her home more than once when her car was totaled, and from what we were told, she owned her home. Other issues? Maybe. Couldn’t say and I won’t speculate, but regardless it isn’t a minimum wage employee’s job to look out for their bosses who make twice as much as they do. I don’t know how she even got promoted honestly.”
“An Idiot With A Short Fuse”
“Oh man, where do I begin. I worked for a medical supply company who specialized in oxygen therapy and other respiratory supplies. I worked with this guy, we’ll call him John. John was very religious and was a part of one of those cult like churches who speak in tongues and force their beliefs on you. After while, he saw that I wouldn’t play into these discussions at work or any other time, and this made him angry. John would act very Christian-like until something made him angry. He would throw things around the warehouse for having to do his job. One time he decided to throw an oxygen tank, filled to 2000 psi. He regretted this decision when it hit one of the tank carts, sheared off the top, and took off like a homing missile right back at his shin.
I believe his shin was like a jigsaw puzzle that had to be put back together, because it looked like a bag of Legos between his knee and ankle. What’s even better is that since he was such a monster to me and everyone else he worked with, he refused to pick up his phone for on-call duties, so it would be forwarded to me in the middle of the night. I decided to let the manager know how this happened. John spent months out of work and fought the company to get workman’s compensation, but when they found out how it happened, he was denied. I’m assuming this was because he was an idiot with a short fuse.”
Predator Behind Closed Doors
“He stole from people, would ‘let himself in uninvited’ to homes, groom and prey on teens, harassed a girl for years and pulled a knife out on her when she rejected him, and more. He didn’t get the boot until years later because ‘he was such a good worker’. The guy is in his mid to late 30s and still does this garbage working not far from a middle school and his former workplace.
When any of the above happened, the higher ups would say, ‘He never acted like that around me,’ and they would ignore the situation.
This dude would socialize with people outside work and built a trust with them. He was around 18-23 when he was hanging out with some teens (14-17), trying rip them off buying their video games for next to nothing. If he didn’t get it, he would guilt trip, harass them, and sometimes threaten. I remember he ‘borrowed’ someone’s expensive game, only to lose it the same day and miraculously find a copy the same that was totally different. It wasn’t, and he pulled a knife out on the 15-year-old who called him out on him stealing. Nothing was done because, ‘The kid must have annoyed him.’
After making friends with the teens, he would often hang out with them. Some of the times he would harass girls being the ‘give me a hug’ guy while groping them, and in his words ‘keeping tabs’ on some of the girls. One incident was when he was creeping on a friend’s younger cousin when she was 15. He was in early to mid 20s and kept cyber-stalking her for nearly eight years before one family member told him to stop. Shockingly, he didn’t and has been on her case for over a decade. A lot of the people around didn’t put all the pieces together until later, and some of the victims don’t want to go forward pressing charges. Most of us stopped shopping where he works at, but others that he befriended over the years still deny what he’s been doing.”