Craziest thing to happen at work

DWSTXS · Feb 25, 2008

Okay, most of us aren't lucky enough to write for a living. This means that we have to go to work every day and grind it out.

I was just thinking the other day, about some of the things that have happened at work, over the years, and which of these incidents would make it as a scene in a novel.

Here's mine:
***
James works in my office. He's been employed here about 90 days. We've become buds. Go to lunch every now and then, make fun of management types in meetings etc etc.

James walks into my office. Puts his hand out. Says, 'Well, it's been good working with you, just wanted to say bye.

You leaving?

Getting fired.

You got fired? no way! B S!

No, I haven't got fired yet, but I will be. Within the hour probably.

You're shi**ing me. Why? This a joke?

No joke. Any minute now.

For what?

Casie (the receptionist) walked into my office earlier and saw me looking at Porn on my computer.

What? actual porn, or just an naughty e-mail of some sort that a rep sent?

Actual porn.

Pictures or movies?

Movies. The real thing. I went to a porn web site, I know it was stupid, but I did it, and she walked in and caught me. She's on the phone with the owner now. I gotta go clean out my office. Seeya!
***

I found out, an hour later, that it was exactly as he said. This was an executive too.

So, let's hear it people. What's the craziest thing that's happened to you, or to someone else, in your workplace?

Devil Ledbetter · Feb 25, 2008

Was he an executive in the department of Duuuuuh?

eldragon · Feb 25, 2008

I wrote an entire book about crazy things that happened at work.

Lots of funny things happened.

But some things didn't make it into the book, so lets see:

There was this one time when a homeless woman pretended like she had a gun and held my boss and two other employees hostage in my bosses office for about an hour.

I was the person who called security.

It was pretty scary, because the faux criminal had the three women on the floor of the office, and of course, everyone thought that the lady had a real gun in her pocket.

The cops showed up and recognized the woman as being a local, and were pretty sure she didn't really have a gun.

My boss was ok, and even though she credited me for thinking on my feet and calling security when I did, it didn't stop her from firing me several months later and giving me a bad reference when I applied for another job.

I wish she had been ~~shot~~ taught a lesson that day.

sheadakota · Feb 25, 2008

I'm a nurse in ICU. The medical director of the unit was turning 50 and his secretary thought she would do something funny- she hired the "balloon lady" and her dress up as the Grim Reaper to deliver the birthday balloons.

She was supposed to deliver them to his office, weellll, he was in the unit with a family who were withdrawing care on their 16 yr old son who was brain dead.

Mom took one look at the Grim Reaper and passed out cold.

I swear I'm not making this up!

bluntforcetrauma · Feb 25, 2008

I saw a guy squirt a whole bottle of mustard on a co-worker. Bizarre.

A. Hamilton · Feb 25, 2008

Some of these sound like scenes from Arrested Development.

WildScribe · Feb 25, 2008

sheadakota said:
I'm a nurse in ICU. The medical director of the unit was turning 50 and his secretary thought she would do something funny- she hired the "balloon lady" and her dress up as the Grim Reaper to deliver the birthday balloons.

She was supposed to deliver them to his office, weellll, he was in the unit with a family who were withdrawing care on their 16 yr old son who was brain dead.

Mom saw one look at the Grim Reaper and passed out cold.

I swear I'm not making this up!

I nearly passed out cold myself. That is SUCH a bad idea in the ICU...

DamaNegra · Feb 25, 2008

Well.... I don't work but the strangest things that have happened to me at school lately have been:

I was sitting at a bench when I heard someone sniffing me. I turned around and there was a deer about to take a bite out of my hair! We were both so startled (me, because there was a freaking deer trying to bite my hair out, and the deer because I was not a bush) and just stared at each other for the better part of three minutes until the deer left. Yes, at school.

Also, the time I was sitting having lunch with some friends when I watched a samurai pass through the parking lot: shaved head, moustache, katana, traditional japanese clothes, sandals, everything. So I said: "guys! guys! there's a samurai in the parking lot!" Since we were at school, no one looked up and said: "Dama, you're halucinating." And no one would believe me until I forced them to look and yes, I was not halucinating. There was a samurai walking across the parking lot.

The third most bizarre thing is when I was walking to one of my classes and suddenly bumped into Big Bird. Yes, big bird (well, the latin american version). I just stared at him and saw him spread out his wings, aiming for a hug, so I said: "Oh no you don't!" and he replied: "It's Valentine's! You are getting a hug!" and then wrapped me in feathers and squished me. Then he left. Yup, that also happened at school.

Silver King · Feb 25, 2008

This is no joke.

A woman who worked for me once asked to borrow money. I told her no. She said if I didn't give her the money, she'd tell my wife we were having an affair.

I said, "Go right ahead. She'll never believe you."

Then I told her to pack up her things and leave. I was tempted to have her arrested for extortion.

When I got home, my wife said, "I got the strangest call earlier. Some woman said you were screwing her left and right, but I knew she was lying."

"Oh yeah?" I said. "How can you be so sure? Maybe I was screwing her up and down and all around, too."

She gave me look as if I was a five year old. "Don't be so stupid. If you really were, she wouldn't have hung up the phone before I could ask her any questions."

kikazaru · Feb 25, 2008

I worked for a small publishing house for a short time (a very short time) which was owned and run by a vile tempered little man who drank to excess at every noon hour. This made him even more ill humoured and extremely unpredictable. One afternoon after a particularly potent liquid lunch, he made a beeline to the only men's bathroom on the floor - a single stall with a rickety full length door- only to find it occupied. After muttering expletives for a moment, he decided that his need was much more urgent that the poor guy sitting on the toilet - so he kicked the door down!!

sunna · Feb 25, 2008

Unpleasant crazy story: When I was 13 I used to help out at my dad's gas station when he needed help (read: I needed money) by cleaning the shelves. One day while I was on my knees dusting endless lines of canned peas from the disco era a nice, polite man I'd seen stop in came to ask me if I wanted to earn a little extra money being a model. "No" apparently wasn't the right answer. He'd waited until the guys working were out back or at the pump, halfway smart - what was stupid was not noticing that I bore a pretty strong resemblance to almost everyone working there, including the owner and several of the regular customers. He actually got me about halfway to his car, gouging and kicking the whole way, before my dad, my two uncles, and the other guy working that day caught up. They beat him until he was curled up and screaming, then picked him up and got him in his car, and he drove off crying and blaring on the horn like it was a parade. Sullen teen though I was shaping up to be, I was pretty proud to be part of the family that day.

Funny crazy story: snowball fight in the parking lot at my first job out of college, The Execs vs. The Grunts. We lost, but it was damn close, and they bought us all martinis afterward.

Kerr · Feb 25, 2008

I raised my girls waiting tables, so I could probably fill several books. But let's see, just one. I had two growths removed from my throat in my mid-twenties. Some time later, a customer asked what the scar was from on my throat.
I replied, "I had a head transplant."
"No s--t?" said he, his mouth gaping.
"Duh... yeah. The udder one didn't wuk so good. Dis one's a whole lot better."
We all laughed ourselves sick that night.

Zelenka · Feb 25, 2008

I worked for a while on those open-topped tour buses in London, and was called in one day to take a private party of Portuguese school kids around. I was to speak in English even though they understood only about two words of it, because it was some exchange trip thing to learn the language. Anyway, we got to Fleet Street and slowed down to look at the Royal Courts of Justice. The road there splits to go around St Clement Danes' church so it's only one lane, and at the back of the church there is a traffic island with a big ornate lamppost on before the two lanes join again.

I noticed, as I'm rambling on about the highest civil courts in England blah blah that I wasn't really holding their attention and they're all staring at something behind me. I turned around and came face to, well... with a naked man who was clinging to the top of this lamppost.

Apparently he was protesting the right to go naked in public. Thing is, because we're on the top deck of the bus, he's right on level with us.

I think a lot of the kids enjoyed the tour though. I know I did

Also I remember one time we had to chase a guy off the bus. He was dressed as a giant twig. Like, his costume made him nine feet tall. How the hell he managed to get on the bus was beyond me.

That job was pretty much one big continuous line of crazy to tell the truth.

MonaLeigh · Feb 25, 2008

I don't know if this is crazy as much as disgusting. My husband and I own a house cleaning business and we had a guy leave the house just as we got there. We smelled something nasty upstairs and couldn't figure out where it was coming from. Finally I walked into the bathroom and the guy had puked in, on and around the toilet and just left it for us! It was so gross. My husband immediately started gagging and throwing up in the other bathroom. I just closed the door and left it in there. The following time we came to clean, the guy had the nerve to tell us that he pays us good money and there was no reason we didn't clean that bathroom. Luckily we had already called his wife and told her we couldn't clean it. She was embarrassed that he left it and apologized. We still clean for him and he's still a freak.

Susie · Feb 25, 2008

This is more a crazy story of going to work than being at work: Many eons ago when I worked in a bank on Wall Street, I was on the train going to work and an elderly lady came in carrying a large brown bag. Before we knew it, she dropped the bag, by accident, and live crabs came crawling out and trodded down the aisle, as if they owned the 'joint.' All the passengers screamed, including me, and we quickly lifted our feet. We couldn't help but laugh, when that little lady, looking strong as could be, came running down the aisle, picking up every last one of them and placed them back in the bag, proud as could be. PS Those crabs sure are smelly!

DWSTXS · Feb 25, 2008

Years ago, I worked for a retail electronics chain store. I asked my friend how he got promoted so quickly to his position (he was unusually young for a mid-level mgmt position) and he told me the story (I later had it corrobrated by the man in question)

My friend comes to work one day, and walking to the office in back of the store, he opened the door to find the manager of that store on his desk, fu***ng the wife of the district manager. Right there.

He was embarrassed, and he closed the door. He turns around and sees, the District manager. He tells him, I wouldn't go in there if I was you. Then he steps aside and waves the guy inside. The District manager fired the manager on the spot, tells his wife to go to a hotel (not home) and to make sure she has a lawyer because the next day he was going to file for divorce.
Then he turns to my friend and promotes him on the spot.

This district manager moved up the ladder pretty quickly, and every time he got promoted, he promoted my friend into the spot he vacated.

JamieFord · Feb 25, 2008

Ah, geez...where to begin?

I had a client that was crazy paranoid. She worked for a grocery chain and was certain her competition was spying on her. During one late-night meeting she literally jumped across the conference table and covered some documents with her body when a janitor walked by.

We also had a senior account manager go off her medication and try to throw herself down a flight of stairs. We heard this blood-curdling scream from the stairwell. We all ran to the door and found our production manager (another woman) wrestling this other woman down.

The absolute weirdest was my former CEO. He had a printed collection of porn in his office. His client files were all filled with porn. They were labeled with client names, but each folder was filled with....um...well, use your imagination. There were HUNDREDS of files. Oddly enough, the shareholders fired him for other reasons...

KikiteNeko · Feb 25, 2008

Hahaha NICE. I love it. Who watches porn videos at work? I can't say I have any stories so interesting as that, and I've worked a lot of places.

I would love to be able to work full time as a stay-at-home writer. Then I'd make up and write about all sorts of fun work stories.

DWSTXS said:
Okay, most of us aren't lucky enough to write for a living. This means that we have to go to work every day and grind it out.

I was just thinking the other day, about some of the things that have happened at work, over the years, and which of these incidents would make it as a scene in a novel.

Here's mine:
***
James works in my office. He's been employed here about 90 days. We've become buds. Go to lunch every now and then, make fun of management types in meetings etc etc.

James walks into my office. Puts his hand out. Says, 'Well, it's been good working with you, just wanted to say bye.

You leaving?

Getting fired.

You got fired? no way! B S!

No, I haven't got fired yet, but I will be. Within the hour probably.

You're shi**ing me. Why? This a joke?

No joke. Any minute now.

For what?

Casie (the receptionist) walked into my office earlier and saw me looking at Porn on my computer.

What? actual porn, or just an naughty e-mail of some sort that a rep sent?

Actual porn.

Pictures or movies?

Movies. The real thing. I went to a porn web site, I know it was stupid, but I did it, and she walked in and caught me. She's on the phone with the owner now. I gotta go clean out my office. Seeya!
***

I found out, an hour later, that it was exactly as he said. This was an executive too.

So, let's hear it people. What's the craziest thing that's happened to you, or to someone else, in your workplace?

KikiteNeko · Feb 25, 2008

Huh. I wonder who would have to sleep with whom at MY job to get me promoted.

DWSTXS said:
Years ago, I worked for a retail electronics chain store. I asked my friend how he got promoted so quickly to his position (he was unusually young for a mid-level mgmt position) and he told me the story (I later had it corrobrated by the man in question)

My friend comes to work one day, and walking to the office in back of the store, he opened the door to find the manager of that store on his desk, fu***ng the wife of the district manager. Right there.

He was embarrassed, and he closed the door. He turns around and sees, the District manager. He tells him, I wouldn't go in there if I was you. Then he steps aside and waves the guy inside. The District manager fired the manager on the spot, tells his wife to go to a hotel (not home) and to make sure she has a lawyer because the next day he was going to file for divorce.
Then he turns to my friend and promotes him on the spot.

This district manager moved up the ladder pretty quickly, and every time he got promoted, he promoted my friend into the spot he vacated.

KikiteNeko · Feb 25, 2008

Some managers are jerks. There was never a gun pointed at anyone (real or imaginary) when I worked at Starbucks, but my manger was a biznotch. I once worked a 12-hour shift JUST to help her out because she would have been alone after my shift ended, since this other guy didn't show up. And he rarely did, and didn't call, just showed up for another shift without a word.

A few months later, I left for college. When I moved back home a semester later and asked for my job back, she refused, telling me she needed a "more motivated" staff. Guess which employee of the month was still there.

God. People.

eldragon said:
I wrote an entire book about crazy things that happened at work.

Lots of funny things happened.

But some things didn't make it into the book, so lets see:

There was this one time when a homeless woman pretended like she had a gun and held my boss and two other employees hostage in my bosses office for about an hour.

I was the person who called security.

It was pretty scary, because the faux criminal had the three women on the floor of the office, and of course, everyone thought that the lady had a real gun in her pocket.

The cops showed up and recognized the woman as being a local, and were pretty sure she didn't really have a gun.

My boss was ok, and even though she credited me for thinking on my feet and calling security when I did, it didn't stop her from firing me several months later and giving me a bad reference when I applied for another job.

I wish she had been ~~shot~~ taught a lesson that day.

ChaosTitan · Feb 25, 2008

Yesterday, two of my sales associates were behind the cashstand chatting. It was kind slow, only a three or four customers in the store, so I was in the office doing manager stuff. A third associate comes into the office and said the two up front were losing it, and that one had actually fallen down laughing. Naturally, I go investigate.

Turns out a customer (male, late twenties, looked very normal) had walked up behind them at the cashstand, made a monkey noise, and walked away. One of those "ooh-ooh-AH!" noises chimps make.

No joke.

Siddow · Feb 25, 2008

When I was bartending, I caught a co-worker pocketing tips. I went to mgmt, who told me to keep an eye on her, to which I replied, "Eff that! She's stealing my money!"

So I confronted her in the nicest possible way ("I saw you stuff that ten-spot in your pocket, and if you know what's good for you, you'll go put in the tip jar just like the rest of us") and she went ballistic. Three-deep at the bar, four bartenders, and she starts chucking glasses from the rack. POW! CRACK! SMASH!

Silence then, other than her heavy breathing. Glass everywhere. Guests leaving.

Gal ended up in rehab the next day. Ah, fun times.

Cassiopeia · Feb 25, 2008

Silver King said:
This is no joke.

A woman who worked for me once asked to borrow money. I told her no. She said if I didn't give her the money, she'd tell my wife we were having an affair.

I said, "Go right ahead. She'll never believe you."

Then I told her to pack up her things and leave. I was tempted to have her arrested for extortion.

When I got home, my wife said, "I got the strangest call earlier. Some woman said you were screwing her left and right, but I knew she was lying."

"Oh yeah?" I said. "How can you be so sure? Maybe I was screwing her up and down and all around, too."

She gave me look as if I was a five year old. "Don't be so stupid. If you really were, she wouldn't have hung up the phone before I could ask her any questions."

You have the coolest wife!

JoNightshade · Feb 25, 2008

I worked at this used bookstore in college. All sorts of weird stuff happened. Weird guys would ask me out simply because I was a bookstore chick, and one guy even tried to get me to model for him. (Yeah, I know what THAT means, thankyouno.)

Anyway we also had a fair number of tramps coming through. (I wouldn't call them homeless... just lazy young guys.) This one dude wanted to trade in ONE book we didn't even want. When we refused him he got all hostile and started demanding TWO QUARTERS FOR THE DAMN BOOK! (Uh, yeah, we gave him the quarters.) The weirdest thing was that there was like this cult of Jack Kerouac. These dudes would come in ALL THE TIME and ask for any books we had by him. They even had a dog named Kerouac. After a while it got to be kind of like, "Look, you know Kerouac is dead, right? He's not gonna write any more books."

Priene · Feb 26, 2008

The company above where I used to work was an office furniture company. One day there was a commotion next to a van in the car park. When I went outside, I found one of the furniture movers lying unconscious on the floor of the van with three of his colleagues standing over him trying to stop eight vertically-stacked desktops, now angled at about 60 degrees, from falling on him. They didn't have enough strength to push the desks back to the vertical, so everybody was motionless. Including three of my co-workers who had arrived before me and were just watching the action. They only thought to do something once I climbed into the van and started helping to push the desks back.

I swear they would have let that unconscious man get crushed to death. Life is weirder than novels.

Craziest thing to happen at work

Mr Mojo Risin...

Come on you stranger, you legend,

in a van down by the river

part of the human equation

Esquire

here for a minute...catch me?

Slave to the Wordcount

Mexican on the loose!

Megalops Erectus

Benefactor Member

I vant to bite you

Going home!

Wasting time

Thanks, special friend for my avi!

Mr Mojo Risin...

giving resonant directions

.

.

.

Around

I'm super! Thanks for asking

Otherwise Occupied

has finally arrived

Out to lunch