Regardless of where someone works, there is always that one employee that everyone questions how they got hired in the first place, and how they haven’t been fired since. That is, unless someone works from home, then maybe they’re the weird one? We’re getting off track here, the point is that every job has that one crazy, weird, strange, ridiculous person, who does things like lie about losing a parent so they can go on vacation rather than just ask for time off, or sweep the floor of a grocery store and eat any food they find. That is an actual story found on a Reddit thread about the worst employees people have worked with, along with every other story that made it on this list.
1. Undercover Boss
I had announced to the floor workers that there would be random substance testing, and one of them says, “nope” and proceeds to run out of the building. I'm talking he ran so fast that he could have qualified for the Summer Olympics. He makes it to the parking lot, jumps into his car, and just stays there. Before we can even process what happened and chase after him, he reemerges with a smile.
He hands me a sheet of lined paper that says, in his handwriting and very sloppily, that he is exempt from random screening, per his employment letter, which is signed by the President of our company. He then proceeds to walk smugly back to his workstation. The best part of this is that I know for a fact that the President has never even met that worker because—you guessed it—I am the President of our company.
2. Light Work, Lazy Worker
I once had a housekeeper on light duty because she was about 65 years old. One day, I gave her four stayover rooms, which meant she just had to refresh the rooms as the guests were staying another night. As I passed one of those rooms, there were four guests standing outside and couldn’t get in because their key didn’t work, which happens often.
I tried their key and it lit up, as if the door was bolted from inside. Occasionally, the bolt will get accidentally thrown as it closes, so I called security to use our override key to open it. The guests had already been there 25 minutes trying new keys by the time I got security there. Security opens the door and we make an unbelievable discovery. There’s my housekeeper, on the couch, feet up on the table, watching TV.
Her immediate reaction was to pretend nothing happened. She said something like, “Oh, hi. I was just finishing cleaning your room!” But one guest had seen her before she jumped up, so he threw his stuff on the table and kicked her out. I wasn’t there for that, I left the security manager to do his thing, so he called me and asked to meet.
I was talking to him and the front office manager to get the story and figure out how to make it right for the guests, when the housekeeper found me. She told me that she only sat down for a second, that the TV was already on, and she didn’t do anything. She tried to make me the bad guy since she was 65 and on light duty.
She said things like, “I can’t sit down for one minute?” Sure you can. But inside a guest’s room? No! We have a break room! So anyway, she claimed that she wasn’t in there as long as we said, since we insisted she was inside as long as the guests were in the hallway, which was at least 25 minutes. She said she left and came back so she wasn’t in there the whole time.
For some reason, she wasn’t grasping the concept that the guests were standing there the entire 25 minutes and she would have had to open the door and walk by them. Also, our locks could tell us every time a specific key unlocked a door, and her key only unlocked the door once, 45 minutes before they were able to enter.
Since she just denied the whole thing she got a written warning…and still works at the hotel.
3. Listen Up
I had an employee go to a client's house to walk their dogs. I had pointed out to her in training that the client had both indoor and outdoor cameras. However, she didn’t listen to me, and instead of taking the dogs out for a walk, she put them in the backyard and then proceeded to stay inside and play on her phone for 30 minutes.
She then wrote a note for the client stating that she took the dogs to the park. She did this for three days until the client got suspicious, watched the videos, and called me. I had to fire her, and her response was, "I don't know what I was thinking."
4. Accidentally On Purpose
I was a valet captain at an expensive restaurant, and the parking lot we brought the cars to was two blocks away. Well, one day, one of the valets I was supervising "took a wrong turn" in a customer's 2016 Audi Rs7, and ended up getting pulled over and thrown in the back of a squad car for going 110 in a 70 on the interstate.
5. What’s Ribbit In French?
I had an employee call a French woman a frog and then start ribbiting. That was kind of awkward.
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6. Just Go With It
I used to be a cashier manager at a big box store. There was this useless kid that finally stopped showing up. A few days go by, and I see him walk in, so I assume he's going to come up front and we can do the whole formal exit process since he missed shifts. He never comes up front and nobody hears from him. It’s like he just disappeared.
A few weeks go by, and we end up terminating him. Then, I go back to the lunchroom one day, and the useless kid is just sitting there. I ask him what he's doing and he says he's on break. I'm like, “No, you stopped showing up weeks ago and were terminated.” He acts like he didn’t hear me and says he is going back to work, and leaves.
I confirmed with all the other managers that he was indeed fired and not working in another part of the store. A few weeks later, he shows up in the lunchroom again. It turns out, he didn't want to tell his mom he doesn't want to work, so he kept letting her drop him off and he'd hang in the lunchroom for a bit. This way, it looked like he still had the job to his mom.
7. Worth It
I used to work in the deli at a SuperTarget. We had an employee who would eat food from the deli in the walk-in freezer because it was the only place without cameras. One time, I peeked through the window and saw him shivering, with his mouth full of meatloaf, while holding an entire meatloaf. It caught me off guard and I couldn't stop laughing.
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8. Fool Me Twice...
I had an employee fail a random substance test. The standard operating procedure in this case is a week off without pay. The day he returned, we tested him again. Big shocker, he failed, again. His response was, "I didn't think you would test me again so soon."
9. 10 Second-Ish Rule
I was a supervisor at a bulk food store. We had a staff member who was responsible for sweeping the floors and I would catch him regularly snacking on what he swept up.
10. Fool Me Once...
HR hired an employee to work on the mine I manage. On his first day, he showed up 45 minutes late wearing shorts and crocs. I proceeded to fire him on the spot. He tried to claim that his wife had kicked him out of the house the night before and wouldn't allow him to get any of his work attire. I leaned on the side of caution and called HR and his former employer.
It turns out, he used the exact same excuse with his former employer. Also, he showed up late to employee orientation/training the day before his first shift and used the same excuse there, too. Obviously, this guy was a compulsive liar and an idiot, and I can't have that kind of character in a highly hazardous working environment.
I ended up getting a framed letter from corporate, jokingly congratulating me for having the shortest tenured employee in company history.
11. Pushed His Luck
One time, there was this guy who was a temp at the small, 30-man auto shop in Livonia I worked at. He always wanted to be hired full-time but never was, so one day, he hatched a plan. He came in very early one morning and put up motivational signs all over the building. He made them himself out of cardboard and markers.
They were equivalent to the kind of posters you'd expect to see "will work for food" written on. The posters said things like, "If you're not giving 100% today, go home and I'll get someone who will," and, "What did you do to earn your check today?" He signed them all with the owner's name. Well, we hired him. It was hilarious!
However, as soon as he was full-time, he started shirking and demanding raises. I guess he assumed he could join the UAW and get all kinds of benefits after he was hired. But we were just a small shop and didn't even have health insurance. He was fired about a week later and we were still finding hidden motivational posters for a month.
12. But Wait, There’s More!
A girl who worked for me at a mortgage company went into our system, pull the credit report for her ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend—no idea how she got her social security number—and used that information for a truly evil purpose. She went on the girl's Facebook page and posted messages about all of her debt, past-due accounts, the terrible kind of car she drives, etc.
I ended up getting an angry call from that girl who had been victimized, who wound up being a pain in my behind for a while. We fired the employee who did that—but the story didn’t end there. About a week later, an agent from the Department of Treasury came in asking questions about the employee. It turns out, she was being investigated for a series of fraudulent things, like operating as a loan officer without a license.
She also took out a bunch of federal student loans in her grandfather's name. The agent wanted me to provide some information on her because during his initial investigation he learned that she had been fired from the company for some sort of malfeasance, and he wanted the details. They eventually caught her and she went away to the big house for a while.
13. Does Anyone Smell Smoke?
One time, the supervisor of our computer operations fired up a barbecue and grilled hamburgers and hot dogs in the computer room. I still can't believe he wasn't fired for that.
14. Playing Both Sides
We hired a guy from another firm and he worked for us for two weeks, then called in sick for several days and we couldn't reach him. One of his friends, who he had previously worked with at the other firm but who now also worked for us, tried to reach him since HR couldn’t get a response, but he couldn’t get a hold of him either.
We finally hear from the guy and he comes in another two days before calling in sick for another five days in a row. Come to find out, he never quit his other job at the other firm and was using his vacation to "try us out" and then taking sick days to come into work for us. We found out after their principal called ours to let us know.
They had put two and two together after he left our company's new hire paperwork out on his desk. He was fired on the spot from there and we told him to never come back. He was pretty much blackballed in the industry, too. The guy had a wife and four kids and lost all his benefits. It was a stupid move but it seemed like a good plan, I suppose. He just didn't play it out right.
15. An Extended Break
We had a guy that would vanish in the middle of the day for roughly three or four hours, then return at the end of the day. Come to find out, he would go home during that time, play with his dogs, smoke, and then come back to work. When we sat him down to explain that he couldn't just leave work, he totally flipped out.
He told us all to go screw ourselves and to just fire him. We didn’t, and all he got was a warning. He still works here and HR still does nothing when he disappears.
16. Sneaky, Sneaky
Back when I worked in the retail book industry, I had this employee who would take a bathroom break anytime another employee got called into the office. Why? Well, because he had somehow discovered that if you went to the men's room and stood on the toilet and lifted one of the ceiling tiles, you could sort of make out conversations in the manager's office that was adjacent.
He also discovered, during one of his frequent smoke breaks, that there was an access hallway for grounds maintenance—we were in a shopping mall of sorts—that also had a ladder that went to the roof. He'd occasionally vanish and basically go sit on the roof. In his mind, if no one could find him, he couldn't get in trouble.
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17. A Foot Long Amount Of Reasons
I had an employee who sent pictures of his feet to other employees—and that’s not even the worst part. He also talked to the girls about their feet, and sometimes asked to see them. If I recall correctly, there were four separate girls who complained about the foot stuff and then several others regarding general cleanliness and attitude.
He looked disheveled all the time, but never stopped grinning. He was really strange. It reached a point where enough girls complained, so I fired him.
18. Follow The Crumbs
I was a kitchen manager, and one night, I was out on our back dock and saw that someone had left a full trash can sitting out beside the dumpster. I went over and started to lift the trashcan to dump it in the dumpster, when the back door opened and one of my cooks walked out. He immediately rushed over and insisted that I don’t dump the trash.
He wanted me to let him do it because, "It's too heavy for you! I don't want to see you get hurt. Let me do it." Now, I am a small female, but I'm tough, and I've been lifting heavy trash cans for years, while the guys looked on and never batted an eye. So I thought that was strange, but, whatever. I just kind of put it in the back of my mind.
A couple of hours later, we were finally closed, and my employees were all leaving for the night while I was in the office doing the deposit and finishing up all of the end of day stuff. The same cook from before poked his head in the office to say goodnight, but didn’t head out through the front like everyone else had done.
Instead, he proceeded to walk through the dark kitchen, where all the lights had already been shut off, and head out the back door. I thought that was strange, so I turned to the monitor, which showed all of the cameras that we had throughout the restaurant, and pulled up the camera for the back dock. Sure enough, the cook exited through the back door.
He then went behind the dumpster, out of camera range, retrieved a duffel bag that was stashed back there, and left. From there, I pulled up the footage from the trash can incident from earlier, and could see that as soon as I went back inside, the cook looked around, then dug through the trash, pulled out something that he had buried, and took it back behind the dumpster. At that point, I was determined to solve the mystery.
By pulling up footage from different cameras, I was able to see that earlier in the night, he had taken the trash can into the walk-in freezer, where there are also no cameras, then exit with the same trash can a few minutes later. He then pushed it out the back door, and about 10 minutes later, I came out and saw it there.
It all made sense now, so I burned a copy of all the footage that I had found, in sequence, and left a copy of the DVD for my general manager, who was opening in the morning. I attached a note to it that read, "Watch this. I think I just solved our food cost problem." Well, the general manager watched the DVD, then called the cook into the office.
He then had the cook watch the DVD, and afterward, asked him to sign his termination notice. The cook's defense was that I had set him up. He said that he had dropped some steaks on the floor, and since they couldn’t be used, he asked me if he could take them home, and I said yes. Then, I decided to set him up for stealing, because I'm a jerk.
I like to imagine that the fake conversation we had went something like this—Cook, “Hey, can I take these unusable steaks home?” Me, “You most certainly can. But, only if you bury them in trash and store them in your duffel bag behind the dumpster for a couple of hours in the sweltering heat of mid-August. Cook, “Sounds reasonable.”
19. Things Are Heating Up
I had an employee who was a driver, and he had to go for a substance test because it was mandatory for all drivers with a CDL. Well, he used his 10-year-old son's urine and warmed it up on the defroster in his car on the way to the test center. The center called and told us they were surprised he was alive, considering his urine was approximately 130 degrees.
Needless to say, he wasn't employed much longer.
20. Nepotism At Its Worst
The owner's nephew was brought on to be an assistant manager. In the same night, he slept with some random woman on the office desk, on top of the staff paychecks. Then when we closed up for the night, he stumbled into the bar next door where I was having a nightcap with industry friends. He didn't see me, but he threw his credit card down and said, "I'm a club owner. I drink for free here."
He kept shouting that until he was asked to leave. He wasn’t the assistant manager for long.
21. The Great Pastry Caper
I used to be the manager of a high volume Starbucks inside of Target. I had hired this 18-year-old girl who was very perky and energetic, so I thought she'd be a great fit. She went through training with no problem, was one of my top baristas, and helped me a lot with the general keeping of the store. About three months in, though, her crazy started coming out.
She was diabetic and would intentionally leave her insulin at home just so she'd have a dramatic episode at the store. She'd start crying in the middle of her shift to get attention from customers, and there was one time that she wanted to go home early but there was no one to cover for her so she made herself throw up in the sink in the back room.
Since the other two things were sensitive subjects and I can't write someone up for being diabetic or dealing with mental illness, if that's what she was actually dealing with, I couldn't do a whole lot about her. That was until one day when I came to work and my loss prevention team for Target was escorting one of my other employees out of the building.
I was confused and wondered what was happening, but they weren't able to disclose anything at the time. Later that day, the crazy girl also gets escorted out, but still, nothing was said to me. As the days went on, I saw every single one of my employees get escorted out with the exception of two, who also ended up getting fired later on.
That's when I found out the bizarre truth. It turns out, the crazy girl had put together this big operation of taking pastries and sandwiches from the store and writing them off at the end of the night. Since Target differs from Starbucks, we didn't have a solid way of monitoring that kind of thing because it gets thrown in the garbage at closing instead of counted and donated.
So, I lost eight out of eight of my employees in under one week because of the pastry incident. I wasn't told anything about it at first because they were investigating me as well, and they didn't want to disclose anything in case I was also guilty.
22. No Free Samples
We had a trainee show up for her first day, immediately go to the bar and order a mixed drink. She then took it to her seat, where she was taking the first menu test. The trainer came over and asked if she was drinking an alcoholic beverage, to which she responded “Yes.” The trainer informed her that they weren't allowed to drink on the job.
Her response to that was, “Oh, you mean like no hard stuff? That's cool, I'll just grab a pint.” When she discovered that no alcoholic beverages were to be consumed at all while working a shift, she stormed out, yelling, “I can't work here!”
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23. Shortcut
I hired a couple of guys once to help a friend re-shingle the roof on his little single-story house in south Seattle, and told them to each bring a friend that wanted work. One of the friends that showed up was an Albanian guy, who was about 35 years old. He tells me he just got out of prison and was very thankful for the opportunity to work.
There was a little bit of a language barrier but I figured it's only roofing so it can't be too bad. I gave everyone the breakdown of what needs to happen and we all go up on the roof to start stripping the old shingles off. This Albanian guy is just so excited to work that he is right on my heels the whole way. Finally, just to get a little space, I ask him to grab me some tools from the front of the truck.
I point down the peak of the roof, roughly in the direction of the truck. Without a pause, he runs full sprint across the roof and jumps off the peak. All I see are arms and legs flailing as he disappears over the edge. We all scramble over to the edge just in time to see him pop up and grab the tools out of the truck. He then runs them back up the ladder.
I never thought I would have to clarify that he could take the slow way down, but to his credit, he worked harder that day than anyone I have ever seen in my life.
24. You Don’t Have To Post Everything
We had a co-worker who would either call in sick or leave early all the time, while bawling her eyes out because her dad was in and out of the hospital, in very bad condition. We all felt so bad for her that we rushed to cover her shifts and offered whatever we could do to help. Shortly after I got a different job, I heard she had called out for a whole week.
She said that her dad had passed on and she had to help plan the funeral. The company sent their condolences her way and the rest of us all offered to help some more. A few days later, another co-worker checked this girl's Snapchat and made a disturbing discovery. The co-worker found dozens of pictures of this girl and her friends going out to clubs and partying all week.
Shortly after she brought this up to the general manager, they saw the girl’s dad walking around the mall our store was in. They talked to him, and found out he'd never even had the flu that whole time, much less been in the hospital. She got fired, and then text spammed the other co-worker to "please talk to the GM, I know I messed up but please you gotta help me."
25. Who’s There?
I used to work for an MSP and they had an office with a big tile missing in the ceiling. Apparently, the story goes that they had this accountant who was working late one night when she heard God calling her from the ceiling. So, she proceeded to climb up onto her desk and into the ceiling, then managed to get into one of the offices next door.
When everyone came into the office the next day, they found a hole in the ceiling, which remains there to this day.
26. Worth It
I used to work at a B&Q in the UK and one time, the forklift driver went on the speaker as the store was closing and said something absolutely legendary. "This is a customer announcement. Could you all pick up your things and screw off out of the store. We all need to go to the pub. Thank you". As he turned around, the store manager was behind him. You can imagine what happened.
27. Wrong Hole
There was an employee who we noticed was falling asleep a lot at work, so that got all of our attention. So, she usually took a few ten-minute naps throughout the day, which isn't a big deal because you can have breaks, but what caught our attention was when one of the employees heard a can getting cracked open in the bathroom one day.
The employee suspected it was an alcoholic beverage, so they told another employee, and when the girl came out of the bathroom, they waited about 10 minutes and then went in and checked the trash cans. Sure enough, she was drinking an alcoholic beverage. Also, there were some paper towels in there with blood spots on them, too.
We searched her belongings and found several other alcoholic beverages and a funnel. However, we noticed that her breath didn’t smell like she had been drinking. It didn’t take us long to figure out what was going on. Instead of drinking the beverages, this crazy lady was butt-chugging the Miller High Life to get lit at work.
28. There’s A Time And A Place
Three of the five members on my team were caught sleeping multiple times on the job, and twice they were caught sleeping in front of clients. The other two team members actually took pictures. They knew they were in the wrong but kept it up anyway. I finally got the pictures, showed them to my boss, and he called a meeting.
During the meeting, the three of them argued that their privacy was invaded, claimed that this whole thing was unacceptable, and asked who took the pictures. I simply said, "you're sleeping on the job, and we are giving you a warning." They do good work, and I didn't want them to lose their jobs over a really stupid mistake. To this day, those three guys feel like they were outed and snitched on.
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29. Silent But Deadly
I had a guy not shower for three weeks straight in protest because he was unhappy with the new job he had chosen to take on. He smelled so terrible that I had to bring him and his union steward in to talk to him. I left them in my office and watched as the union steward writhed in the stench from the camera monitors in another office.
30. Biding Their Time
I had an employee that would file a grievance over every little issue. And of course, they usually won. So, I would end up having to pay him for lost time, overtime, etc. We eventually just gave up and gave him a cushy job where he didn’t have to do anything. We basically paid him to just not give us any trouble. I know it's really stupid, but it was the easiest way.
He was one of those guys that you give an inch and he takes a mile. He was maxed out at $32.50 an hour, he worked over 10 hours of overtime a week, and was the highest tenured employee at the company. Yet, all he had to do for work was push a push broom around the warehouse, and he still managed to find a way to mess that up.
Then one day, we finally got him. A supervisor discovered that he had started an ongoing poker game hidden behind a bunch of boxes in the warehouse, so we posted a hidden camera in the area. We gathered two weeks’ worth of poker games with audio. This game was played while on the clock, and included a rotating cast of employees.
Anywhere from four to eight players at a time, gambling for real money, and our "godfather" was even getting paid by employees just to get into the game. When it was all said and done, we fired him and three other employees, who were numbers one, two, four, and five on the tenure list. We also wrote up 11 other employees.
We met with the union rep and we told them that we had these guys on camera admitting to theft of product, company supplies, and time. We had them for gambling, drinking on the clock, and violating a host of company policies and CBA rules. We decided to ask for the moon so we had negotiating power, as that's how unions work.
So, instead of just firing them and negotiating down to a suspension, we informed them that we were going to press charges and seek compensation for all lost product, time, etc. It was totaling in the tens of thousands of dollars and likely prison time. They agreed to voluntarily resign if we didn't press charges.
However, this "godfather" character had the balls to ask for a severance package. What an idiot. He made way more money than any of my supervisors and did almost zero work, and yet he somehow managed to throw it all away.
31. Sending Mixed Signals
I was middle-management at my old job. What that means is I had a team below me, but plenty of awful people above me. I had one of my people specifically request only closing shifts, because it was easier on her family for child care purposes. After a month of this, she ended up complaining to my awful boss about no shift diversity.
He talked with me about it, ignored the fact that she had requested it, and demanded I give her day shifts. So, I gave her three day shifts and she missed all of them. She blamed me for not giving her the night shifts she wanted. My idiot boss yelled at me for giving her day shifts too, despite me telling him this would happen when he forced me to do it initially.
I ultimately fired the girl for missing so many shifts, and she recruited five guys, who were the fathers of her various children, to come to yell at me for ruining her source of income.
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32. Bring Your Own
I had an employee taste and snack on co-workers' food in the breakroom. She would also take food out of the garbage that others had thrown away.
33. Speak Up
My dad told me about when he was an MP in the Air Force and another guy fell asleep while driving around the base on his rounds that night. Well, he wrecked the car by running it into the front landing gear of a plane. He tried to hide it and the damage to the aircraft wasn't discovered until the next flight when it malfunctioned.
It was so stupid. He could have seriously endangered people. The good thing is it led to an investigation and he got discharged.
34. Speed Demon
One of our drivers was an absolute waste of space. He would write terrible fanfiction and original stories in the back room. However, the day he was fired was when he drove 70 in a residential area and almost hit a guy. We found out because there were several calls made around the same time from approximately 30 people about a crazy driver.
These people knew to call us after the incident made it to the Neighborhood Facebook page and they figured out who was driving—but that’s not even the worst part. Shortly after being fired, he was apprehended by law enforcement for trying to hire a homeless person to kick a pregnant woman in the stomach. How he was even hired in the first place I have no idea.
35. Won’t Know Until You Try
I once walked into the office and witnessed two women crushing up birth control pills and putting the powder into a bottle of shampoo. When I asked them why they were doing that, they claimed that it was supposed to keep them from losing their hair. Rather than try and ask for an explanation as to how that worked, I just shrugged and walked out of the office.
36. Lending A Helping Hand
On my day off, I randomly stopped by the spa that I’m the manager at and happened to stumble on two children sleeping in the waiting room. Come to find out, the receptionist was "babysitting" for a friend, who was also at work. I admired her hustle, but she was fired.
37. We’ll Never Know
I used to supervise a Forest Service recreation crew. Since we all worked weekends, we had different weekdays off. One of my first season crew members was starting to show himself as a bit of a screw-up, and one Monday, one of my other crew members came in and said, "What happened to the kid’s truck?" I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "It's wrecked." I said, "Beg pardon?"
We went down to our garage to check out the truck and it looked like someone had taken a baseball bat to it on the passenger side, and the hood, and cab, and the top of the tailgate. The driver's side was fine though. Turns out, the kid had gone out to do his work, some crazy stuff happened, and then rather than reporting it to me, he just parked the truck and went home.
My boss and I talked about it and we decided the kid would get fired when he came back to work on Wednesday, which was my day off. When I came back to work, the kid was gone, and I asked my boss, "How'd the truck get wrecked?" He said, "I never asked him." To this day, I still have no idea and it drives me a little crazy.
38. One For You, Seven For Me
It’s the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and it is one of the busiest days of the year for us. A customer comes up to me to tell me their server just dropped a platter of nachos on the ground in front of them, then proceeded to swear in front of the family and walk away without cleaning any of it up. I pull her aside, and my blood runs cold. She is visibly intoxicated.
I ask her if she has been drinking and she screams in my face "You wanna fight right now? I fired her on the spot. I later found out she did seven shots in about 30 minutes.
39. That Didn’t Take Long
When I worked at Bojangles, we once hired this guy who was maybe 19 years old or so. He came in for his first day and showed up 15 minutes early with his fresh new uniform shirt and all the appropriate attire. He was basically a model employee. He then proceeded to get trained on the cash register and was struggling pretty hard.
About 14 minutes later, he just walked out the door and never came back.
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40. Can She Be Anymore Obvious?
Back in my call center days, I had an employee show up with a Jaeger bottle and just start drinking from it while taking calls. She said it was a "reused bottle" filled with tea, but regardless, it had to be tossed. Unfortunately, I wasn't allowed to write her up or fire her because of retention, and the fact that I couldn’t prove what was in the bottle.
41. Clean Yourself Up
I delivered pizzas for Sarpino's for a while. It was in a wealthy suburb on the outskirts of the Kansas City metro area—Leawood, KS—so the tips were plentiful. Anyway, the manager got a call from a customer who claimed to have ordered a full order of wings, not a half. They said only four wings were in the box, when there should've been eight or nine.
The manager says, “OK, we'll have a driver deliver you the correct order of wings, free of charge.” A couple of minutes later, I kid you not, the delivery driver who initially dropped off the wings returns. I take one look at him and shake my head in disbelief. There is wing sauce just caked around his lips. After a session of laughing uncontrollably, the delivery driver was terminated.
42. They’re Listening
I work at a customer service center and I once had an employee that would call friends from his work phone and talk for hours to avoid having to take phone calls. For some reason, he didn't know that kind of stuff was monitored. He was shocked when we asked him why, during a typical eight-hour shift, did he have six or eight incoming calls that lasted three minutes each and five or six outgoing calls that lasted for over an hour each.
43. Science Project
Back when I was a food service manager, we had just trained a couple of new hires and part of that included proper chemical safety, like don't mix LimeAway and bleach, etc. The next morning when I came in to open, the walk-in had a horrific smell inside. I watched the camera footage and saw one of the new hires going in with two spray bottles.
I then questioned him, and apparently, he was stupidly curious about the chemical reaction and wanted to see what happens when bleach and ammonia are mixed. He didn't work there long.
44. One After The Other
I have so many stories about a former employee. Me and my former boss interviewed him for a position in IT and I got a really weird vibe from him but my boss was really impressed by his CV. There was lots of stuff like "Cisco certification course teacher", and honestly, I was about to quit, so I didn't really put up a fight about it and he was hired.
On his second day, he brought in a three-foot-long RC helicopter and put it in his office. Day three, he was told to order a laptop for himself, as part of the job was ordering IT stuff, and he bought the most expensive computer he could find. I’m talking titanium and a $10,000 price tag. The fourth day, he ordered an office chair in leather with built-in massage stuff.
Day five rolls around, and he gets into a big argument with my boss and is told he can’t do anything without me approving it first. The next few days are normal, until day eight, when he tells me he wants to apply for public IPs for every single piece of equipment at all the company offices—there were several thousand IP's—because NAT sucked.
It turns out, he didn't know what it was, so he clearly lied in the interview about being a Cisco teacher. Day nine and he’s changed the domain admin password to a password some dudes at an IRC channel had told him was the most secure password in the world. Then around day 15, he tells me he needs time off because his girlfriend left him for his RC helicopter instructor.
He wanted to be at home because he was scared she would take stuff from their shared apartment. There is so much more to tell, and yet, even with all of that, he somehow managed to avoid getting fired until a few weeks after I had left. The last I heard, he was selling VPN services to people using his own home broadband connection.
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45. Worth A Shot
One of my employees had a bonfire at his house and I was there with some of the other employees. We ended up staying pretty late. I got a call early the next morning from the employee who was at the party who was supposed to open. He said he was sick and wasn't going to be able to come in. “Dude, I just saw you a few hours ago, remember? You had better be at work.”
I ended up firing him a few months later.
46. On The Nose
I once watched a cashier ring up his friend and pretty much give him everything for free. I mean, I get it, nobody likes the store and we all try to discount stuff for friends, but don't make it so obvious.
47. Man Of A 1,000 Voices
I worked at a call center. I was doing a weekly call monitor on one of my better employees and found he was doing an Indian accent. I was a bit surprised, so I went back and listened to over five calls of his from that week and found he was doing different impressions for almost every call. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mickey Mouse, Apu from The Simpsons, a pretty solid Christopher Walken, and a few others.
48. Extreme Measures
I worked with an older diabetic lady at Taco Bell who had a disturbing habit. She would chug regular soda to cause a diabetic reaction so she could be sent home. She did this so often that the EMTs all knew her by name. The crazy part is that I’m pretty sure she was actually trying to lose her feet to diabetic complications, so she could collect disability checks.
49. Believe It Or Not
I manage a small weld shop, and generally, I don't care about less than clean background checks or whatnot, as long as you come into work every day and do your job. Finding reliable welders is difficult, so I let a lot of stuff fly. However, this sometimes leads to me hiring weird employees. This one guy we hired just stopped showing up.
Then, after like three days, he walks in the door and tells me a story so jaw-dropping, it’s unforgettable. He's bright red from being sunburnt and his clothes are torn to shreds. It turns out, this dude was drinking on a little aluminum boat and somehow got lost at sea. He looked like Tom Hanks from Castaway! He didn't have cell phone reception, so he wasn't able to call me.
He did take a bunch of pictures over the few days he was lost at sea, though, including one where he was being rescued by the coast guard. They took him to the hospital, but he checked himself out and immediately came into work. He didn't even go home and shower. I gave him the rest of the week off. He was an odd dude.
50. C For Commitment
I had an employee call and tell me she had just lost her mother. Well, I got an anonymous phone call from someone later telling me she was lying, so I called the number I had on file to send my regards and get an address to send flowers to. In the meantime, the office had collected an envelope of money to help with the costs of the funeral and missing work.
When I called, I couldn’t believe who answered. Yup, it was the mother who picked up the phone, and who was totally shocked to find out her daughter lied about her and used her as an excuse to go to Las Vegas for the weekend. That’s when I came up with a devious plan. When the daughter returned, I held a big meeting with everyone in the office and presented her with the envelope of money and flowers.
She actually took it and fake cried! I called her into my office to reveal that I knew, then fired her and took the envelope back. She said, and I quote: "I don't give a care" and then left.
Sources: Reddit,
