33 Disturbing, Wild, And Terrifying Stories About *That One Coworker* That Will Go Down In Infamy At People's Workplaces
3. “The IT department had noticed a huge increase in the company internet usage (this was years ago, when you still paid for the amount used rather than just having an open, unlimited supply). So they started monitoring everyone’s browsing habits. The company was pretty cool on ‘normal’ internet usage, so no shit given for browsing Reddit or social media, etc. Turns out one of the sales guys had downloaded literally terabytes of porn, more than anyone could possibly watch in one lifetime. He received a final, written warning for this as he had been problematic before.”
“A few weeks later we have a company event and this brain surgeon proceeds to get obliterated and stick his hand up our female CEO’s skirt. Needless to say, he was fired over the weekend and asked to bring his laptop and equipment to the front desk on the Monday morning, which he dutifully does, with an added surprise. When the IT guy goes to inspect his equipment they find that he’s curled out a turd on the laptop keyboard and mushed the lid shut. The smell in the office was apocalyptical and everyone was sent home until the place could be aired and cleaned.”
7. “I worked for the Mouse as a character. One gal was just…odd. She had zero filter and would just blurt out whatever was floating in her head at the time, and more often than not, it was just MEAN and nasty and unwarranted. She would pride herself on being ‘brutally honest’ — yeah, one of THOSE. Anyway, one day she simply snapped during a hotel shift. She went over to the buffet, IN CHARACTER, grabbed a fistful of bacon, and almost threw her head off but the lead luckily stopped that in time and escorted her to the back. She was fighting and struggling with the lead, but never let go of the bacon and kept screaming ‘BACON’ over and over, and started smearing the bacon all over the costume. Lead had to call security. She was fired that day, obviously, and when she was being escorted out, she was acting like nothing had happened saying, ‘See you fucks tomorrow, bye!'”
“We heard from the only person kind of close to her that the day before this all happened, her boyfriend broke up with her and she fell apart. After she was fired, she went to his house, broke in, and destroyed his room. I don’t know what else happened after that, but yeah…damn. That was wild to see.
(I was Pluto that day, and she was Chip.)”
8. “Coffee shop downtown. We were very understaffed, so when this nice clean guy in his mid-twenties applied, we hired him without much thought. We’ll call him Justin. First couple months he was an above average worker. Fast learner, kind, always smiling. Justin was not shy talking about his past, however, which included stories of when he was manufacturing and selling meth, smuggling it across the states, and then spending like four years in jail. He seemed to be past all of that though, and even apparently led a weekly NA group. After a couple months Justin just stopped showing up. Completely AWOL, no one could reach him and no one knew anything as to why. After he’d been gone two weeks, I was on a morning shift when I heard some yelling outside the front door and I looked and saw a woman scrambling to get up in the middle of the street as the car she’d just fallen out of sped away.”
“We helped her inside, got her some water, and once she could breathe again we learned that she was an Uber driver and her rider had just put a knife to her throat and forced her out of the car before taking off.
Thankfully she still had her phone with all the ride details and sure enough, it was our boy. Conveniently, the woman was also able to GPS track the car from her phone, and the police response was pretty quick as well. They had him arrested about an hour later. As for details, all I know is he was picked up from the airport, and after stealing a car, he was headed to the next big city a couple hours east where he had some family.”
15. “He worked in the kitchen at the restaurant I waited tables at. He gave off creepy, violent vibes and I avoided him when I could. The restaurant closed and I thought I’d seen the last of him. A woman who lived in my building found him walking a puppy with bloody paws and brought him to our building to clean the puppy up. He’d been in a coworker’s car once when I needed a ride, so he recognized the building and mentioned me. The girl brought him in and they knocked on my door. I was cordial but excused myself quickly saying I had an exam later.”
“After that, I slept with my windows closed despite the early spring heat and lack of A/C. I was terrified he’d come back. A month or so later I learned he’d been arrested for murder. His brother had been in an altercation with a man at a party. His brother left the party, picked him up and then went back to hurt the guy from the party.
The intended victim was gone. All that remained was an 18-year-old college freshman who was cleaning after the party. He stabbed her to death with a carving fork. That summer I slept with the windows closed and spent many nights at my boyfriend’s.
Meanwhile another coworker from the place I knew him from and I were working together at another facility. We picked up a few extra hours one week while another person had jury duty. She came back to work and announced they had found him guilty. She started sharing details and we realized we knew whose trial she had been on. We gave her his name and she confirmed it was the guy.”
26. “When I worked at Disneyland, I had a female coworker who constantly made flirtatious comments and advances to one of my male coworkers. He refused to be alone with her and she was unbothered by everyone’s reminders that he was engaged and loved his fiancée very much. Nothing could get done because he was too shy and too nice to say anything to management. The comments turned into touching of the shoulders, and it escalated pretty quickly because he wouldn’t say anything. Some strange part of her thought it would be a GREAT idea to jump on him and bite his neck. He immediately went to management, and within minutes security took away her ID, had her return her costume, and took her completely out of the parks/backstage area.”
“I saw her years later while I was working at a completely new job and she recognized me. I pretended to believe that she had left due to other career opportunities to avoid anything awkward (i’m not comfortable with certain conversations). But she felt the need to tell me that she had left Disney because of something stupid she did. I left it at that.”
31. “I worked at a digital company during the first dotcom boom. Although still small, there were three of us with the same first name. By order of arrival, I was ‘First Bob. Then there was ‘Second Bob’ and ‘New Bob.’ Our new receptionist calls me, ‘Bob,’ down to her desk. When I arrive, two plainclothes cops ask me if I’m ‘New Bob.’ No, I’m ‘First Bob.’ Can you show us ID? I do. Receptionist apologizes, she’s new. She calls down ‘New Bob.’ I pass him on my way back; he looks freaked. Never saw him again.”
“Cops had an arrest warrant. Apparently the bank he had previously worked at discovered he’d set software to skim deep decimal percentage points into his own bank account, figuring no one would find out. They did.”
33. And finally, this one’s super long but worth a read.
I had a job working as a security guard right out of high school. One of the guys I worked with was your average run of the mill oddball. He was nosey and often did stuff to see how people would react. He would wait for you to leave the desk and he would check what you brought for lunch. He wouldn’t mess with it or take anything, he’d just see what you had. When you’d come back, he’d say ‘ham and cheese again, that’s three days in a row.’
On the weekend midnight shift, we’d often watch a movie or two in between our other responsibilities. He would always bring the the most fucked up gory horror and zombie films that nobody ever wanted to watch with him at night in a dark security office. … He shared a house with a couple of other guards and upon moving in, had to be told not to hang a cross upside down on his bedroom wall.
… One weekend, while Oddball was thankfully working with someone else, he disappeared from the desk for a couple of hours. While a break from his weirdness was generally welcomed, the guy he was working with was flipping out because he needed to use the restroom. Oddball returned to the desk only after being called several times on the radio and left again immediately after the other guard returned. A short time later, another building employee stopped into the office to grab something he had forgot at his desk. He came across Oddball using a carpet cleaner to clean up some ‘oil’ on the carpet. The employee dipped something into the ‘oil’ and said it looked like blood not oil and told him to stop. The two of them looked around for someone who might be injured and found some personal items on the desk of a woman in HR. They checked the immediate area and washrooms and then headed to the front desk to see if she had possibly signed out and headed to a nearby hospital. After checking the sign-in book, it was discovered she had signed out about an hour earlier when Oddball was at the desk. He indicated he remembered someone signing out but didn’t lift his head from the book he was reading to see who it was. A check of the parking lot revealed her car still parked.
At this point, the other guard called the police and our manager. As the police and our manager were headed to where her desk was, a building engineer saw them and said he’d found what they were looking for. Her body was found in a stairwell leading to the roof with her wrapped in a garbage bag. The two guards working that evening as well as a few other people who were in the building were put on temporary paid leave pending the investigation. About a week later, Oddball was located at his parent’s farm. He was talked out of killing himself, arrested, and charged with first-degree murder. … About 8-9 months after his arrest, he plead guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 20 years. …
It was never released what his motivation to kill her was. My theory was he got caught looking at personnel files in HR. Human Resources was included on the route of the security rounds completed several times a shift. We were supposed to check that certain doors were secure and make sure wall-mounted file storage was locked in a few areas. I assume he wasn’t aware she was at the office as it was a Saturday. He likely found the HR cabinet unlocked and his nosey nature led him to start poking around in some files. She likely caught him and headed to the front desk to report him. This would have cost him his job immediately. In a state of panic, he probably grabbed her and hit her in the head with the punch clock he carried on his rounds. The round metal punch clock was encased in leather, about 9″ in diameter, 4″ thick, and it weighed 10-12 lbs. He then wrapped her head in a garbage bag and headed to the only stairwell with unmonitored access to the roof. The other guard’s need to piss likely interrupted his original plan and he left her on a landing halfway to the roof. Had he gotten to the roof, he could have dropped her onto the grass on a dark side of the building. Upon returning to the area following his co-worker’s piss break, he probably thought cleaning up the blood puddle was more important than getting the body onto the roof.
Despite the outcome, in the 35 years since, he’s not the oddest person I’ve ever encountered on the job. He’s probably not even in the top 10 characters. If you had said to me at the time one of my co-workers would kill someone, Oddball wouldn’t have been in my top five nominees from the list of the 12–15 guards I worked with at the time.”
