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32 Ridiculous, Bizarre, And Dumb Stories From People Who Had To Deal With The Most Frustrating Things At Work
Article created by: Viktorija Ošikaitė
We spend 8 if not more hours of the day at work and that’s without commuting, which is a notorious time-eater. That’s also a third of our day, and it takes up 5 days a week. That means that in the US, a full-time employee spends an average of 2,080 hours per year at the workplace.
That also means it gives us enough time to gather some great memories and valuable experiences, as well as moments we’d much rather forget. And this post is about the latter scenario.
“What is the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever had to deal with at work?,” someone asked on Ask Reddit and the sea of responses started flowing in. With 5,936 upvotes and 3,844 comments, the stories range from pure entertainment to something you’d see in a horror movie.
This post may include affiliate links.
#1
Worked in HR for a non profit that hired people who are legally blind. That was the mission. One day, two employees got into a fight. One was partially sighted and the other totally blind swinging his cane. I had four witnesses to the altercation. But they were all totally blind and thus, couldn’t tell me what happened.
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#2
When I worked in the NHS, I had to take part in an investigation about a poo on the floor in a community hospital. A patient had missed the bog, so it sat steaming on the floor. The nurse said, too busy, can't clean that up, get the cleaner. Cleaner said can't touch that, it's biological waste. Went back to nurse who said find a healthcare assistant. Healthcare assistant said can't do it, haven't been signed off on the infection control policy. Escalated to sister who said the student nurse should do it. Student nurse vomited and ran out crying. I was in the building at the time and heard all the fuss. Thought FFS and cleaned it up myself. Got reported as I was just a manager and not clinical.
#3
My boss was making fun of a lady for calling in sick to work. In front of god and everyone. The person that called in sick, has ovarian cancer. I quit ten seconds later.
#4
I was working as a sign language interpreter in a classroom setting and the teacher’s aide decided to stand between me and the student, blocking their view. I asked her to move and she told me that she was doing it on purpose so that the student didn’t rely on me too much.
#5
A coworker attempted to prove that you couldn't actually hurt yourself slipping on a banana peel by stepping on one. After which he slipped and hurt himself.
I refused to write it up as an incident. It was too stupid.
#6
A coworker screaming at me for leaving food to rot in the shared fridge. It was my first day there and I hadn’t even unpacked my belongings yet.
#7
I work in film and television. We were shooting in a pretty upper-class neighborhood and the woman living beside the house we were filming in decided that she hasn't been paid enough. So a few hours into our day she starts playing opera music as loud as she can with all her windows open. After an hour or 2 of that and no one batting an eye she ramps it up and starts mowing her lawn. Once that was done she just sits right on her property line with the mower going full blast until a producer went iver and kindly asked her to stop. I'm not high enough in the production to know how much she was asking for but apparently it was too much because he walked away shaking his head and told the sound guys there was nothing he could do.
Once night rolled around my boss decided screw this lady legs annoy her right back, so we got some 10k lights which are pretty goddam bright, and pointed then directly into her windows. It was basically mid day sun light blasting into her house at 10pm. That's when she called the police saying that we were filming illegally (it was a full union show with permits and on duty police were also there).
So a cop pulls up sees the other police already around for blocking traffic, goes to the craft table and gets a snack and leaves. We turned off the lights to her house around 1am because we're not animals.
#8
Used to work in a Muslim country where this one guy would almost force me to go pray with him. I told him as nicely as possible that I’m an atheist and don’t feel comfortable being asked to pray. He complained to HR and I received a warning saying I was hampering the work place sanctity by expressing “anti religious sentiment”.
#9
As a teenager while working as a cashier at a store, I was robbed at gunpoint by two dudes with guns pointed inches from my face. The store manager and someone from corporate showed up shortly after the police came to show support. Immediately after the police left, both the manager and corporate rep tried to convince me and my other coworkers that also had a gun in their faces to keep the store open for the remainder of the shift (~6 hours). I was literally still shaking from the ordeal, and somehow they felt that I was good to work until midnight as a teenager. I asked to go home, as did everyone else. Management decided to compensate us for the trauma by paying us for the remainder of our shifts but, said that we still had to work our next shifts and could not call out. It's amazing how insensitive some people in management can be.
#10
One time while working front desk at a gym, a woman complained that there were too many geese outside and they should’ve flown south by then and we needed to do something about it.
#11
Kind of weird - but here I go. I work in politics and part of my job was reporting to my board the status of a various advocacy groups. Like what issues are they working and who funds them. With one group a major donor was George Soros. I put him on the list with all the other major donors for a power point presentation. A staff member freaks out and says I’m anti-Semitic because I listed Soros. I’m very confused because I thought the factually incorrect meme was that he was a Nazi (he clearly was not). Anyhow - HR gets involved and I have to apologize… me being of a family who was Jewish and literally chased out of Germany in the 1800s.
From then on if Soros was a donor I just put “major donor”. A board member asks who it is. And I refuse to answer. Staff member figures it out and accuses me again for being anti- Semitic for leaving him off.
Nobody would stick up for me, because they were terrified of her, so I took a buyout and got another job
#12
A co-worker took a work truck “hostage” until my boss paid him the 100 dollars that he was owed from a pay-cheque. He then sent her a pin on google maps of where it was parked in the middle of downtown.
#13
I got pulled aside and told by my boss, "It's been noticed that you tend to only work your scheduled hours and no more".
I told him that 1) when needed I often stayed back to finish a task and b) If they wanted me there for more hours, I'd need to be paid for those hours!
He let me go and I heard no more about it. I've done enough unpaid overtime in my life, no more.
#14
My boss made us play a game to keep moral up: There were several rules like calling each other certain nicknames or you could challenge someone to "rock,paper, scissors". If you break a rule or loose in "rock,paper, scissors", you needed to do 10 pushups. It was all in good fun, or so I thought. On afternoon I didn't feel like doing pushups, and my colleagues we're kinda teasing me about it, but again all in good fun. Turns out, my boss didn't like my refusal at all and fired me the next day. This was as a work and traveller in NZ, so not to horrible, although it still bugs me that I got fired because I refused to play a silly game lol.
TLDR: Got fired because I refused to play a silly game which had nothing to do with my job
#15
I’m a nanny and I had one boss ask if I was interested in inducing lactation to nurse her child and the one on the way. She even gave a lactation consultant my number.
Another time when I was a teenage babysitter, one parent literally gave me a spanking. Now I was young, 14. But that was insane.
#16
My wife had a miscarriage when I was at work. I left to take her to the hospital and support her. The next day when I went to work I got written up for leaving.
#17
Intern once thought that he could fax a physical object to the receiving machine.
He was trying to fax his belt to a friend.
Kid was either an acting prodigy or maybe he needed a life jacket to eat soup. I guess I’ll never know.
#18
English as a Second Language teacher here. A mom came very angry to my coordinator to complain about the grades I was giving to her daughter.
Thing is... I gave her an A+ because she was super responsible, got everything right in her monthly exam and participated a lot.
Apparently I was not doing an appropriate job because she expected her kid not to be an amazing student.
But she was. Easily within the top 5 I've ever had. Smh.
#19
I had someone throw a drink at me through the drive-thru window, which is an unwise thing to do to someone standing in front of a shelf of other drinks waiting for the customers behind you.
Close second: we had a guy that robbed our gas station for like a month with a finger gun before he finally got caught. Everyone knew it was a finger gun, but you have to comply when someone robs the store so.... ¯_(ツ)_/¯
#20
I install flooring and I was working on the third story of a house newly under construction. Long story short while I was installing some flooring in some upstairs bathrooms (third story) some framers were scheduled to repair the stairs from ground level to the second story. There was no communication and I went downstairs to grab something and to my surprise there was no downstairs! The framers had completely torn out the entire staircase without checking if anyone else was upstairs! I ended up trapped on the second story for a little while until someone brought a ladder lol.
#21
I worked as a PA for a billionaire and when covid hit she still wanted me to come in to work (aka her house) but didn’t like that I had to take transit, so she bought the her neighbours house so I wouldn’t track covid into the house. So for over a year I sat alone in a 6,000 square foot home next door to her.
#22
I work in the funeral industry, so I get to deal with new ridiculous things on a near-daily basis. For example, today I had to look for a bullet in a body bag, because the list of personal effects of a deceased that we got from the medical examiner included 'ammunition x 1.' This person was going for cremation, and bullets in a crematorium are a no-no for obvious reasons.
So, we looked and looked, inside the body bag, inside the clothing, pockets, shoes, under the body; I even shone a flashlight into the hole that used to be the deceased's face to see if it was maybe still in the head-ish area, but no. So after 20 minutes or so of thoroughly searching this poor dead person, I called the MEO to see if *they* had the bullet. The girl who answered the phone checks with the morgue and comes back to say "yep, it's here, we always take and keep the bullets!" Great! Then *WHY* list it on the personal effects sheet with everything else that is still with the body??
My job is weird as hell, y'all.
#23
I work at a library. The amount of people who don't bring their library card with them and then refuse to give me ID so I can look up their account is baffling. I'm just trying to prove they are who they say they are.
Also a mentally ill lady once told me that Osama bin Laden wanted to steal shoes from the artist formerly known as Prince.
#24
My boss invited us to her bachelorette party. Work is kind of her whole life so she doesn’t have friends outside our company. The invitation asked us to bring a pair of “sexy panties” for her as well as a “naughty toy” for her and her soon-to-be husband to use on the honeymoon. Btw I am 22 and my boss is 50. She’s older than my own mother.
#26
I work in influencer marketing and we hired an Instagram influencer to work on a yogurt brand campaign. As part of the activation we also sent a tie-dye kit and branded swag for them to make tie-dye shirts, hats, etc, with their friends or family. One of the influencers pulled the tie-dye ink out of the t-shirt kit and used it to tie-dye her yogurt bowl, took a video of herself eating it, then shared the video with her followers who ultimately alerted her that you can't eat tie-dye ink. This was, of course, our fault (the agency) for not being more clear that the tie-dye kit was not edible.
TL;DR hired someone who ate paint
#27
I tattooed a cartoon character (the image my client picked out) and then they complained because it was "too cartoony"
#28
I worked in returns at IKEA and had a customer complain that they accidentally ripped the instruction manual in half for the furniture piece they were assembling when they were cutting open the box and couldn’t finish assembling it.
I politely informed them that all our instruction manuals were available online in pdf form, but this just made her mad and she wanted to speak to the manager. Manager gave her a few $5 gift cards just to get her off my back but I will always find it so funny that this lady thinks accidentally cutting in half an instruction manual (she had both halves too so she could have just easily put them together to read the instructions) inhibited her from assembling furniture.
#29
A group of four grown men sneaking into the fitting room to smoke a joint. This would already be really, really dumb except the store they did it at was…Justice. For non-Americans and those outside the demographic, Justice was a clothing store for teen (or 8-12 year old) girls. They didn’t sell anything for men at all and it was literally impossible for them to blend in. Moreover, the tops of their heads were visible over the child-sized stall curtains. We called security, they got escorted out, and we had to close to air out the windowless store. I have no idea how they thought this was going to play out.
#30
I was serving at Cracker Barrel and a woman came up to me saying her son thought I was Shaggy from Scooby Doo and practically begged me to come to their table to talk to him. I gave them the laziest attempt at a Shaggy impression.
#31
One time my boss saved a hurt goose and put it in a box and made me take it to an animal hospital. Driving down the highway the goose started flapping and got out of the box. I didn’t know what to do and I was scared to grab the goose so I drove the whole way there with a goose riding passenger
#32
As a concierge in a luxury hotel in Europe, I have seen all kinds of ridiculousness.
The most harmless was a woman who had a tantrum because we couldn't spontaneously organise a Maybach transfer and she had no idea how taxis or Uber worked, which really boggled my mind.
One guest called her assistant in Austria, who then called us at the concierge only to ask how far away a store was from her current location. It was 7 mins and she could have just googled it.
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