Weirdo Coworkers

I was talking to a buddy yesterday about strange people we've worked with. I realized I've worked with some very odd people over the years. Here are some examples:

• When I was doing desktop support on campus in college, this one middle-aged guy name John was a network admin responsible for fucking up Novell on a daily basis and then fucked up the roll-out of Active Directory. Anyone anytime of the desktop support mentioned some kind of physical activity, John would hoist himself up between two narrow cubicle walls and start doing dips, counting them aloud until he got tired then sat back down and wouldn't say anything. We would start doing this multiple times a day until he was too exhausted to do dips anymore. Eventually he got a talking to by our manager for disturbing the work of others. He would also sometimes join us to visit the food trucks for lunch during the summer and would proceed to speak Spanish to the workers. They did not speak Spanish and neither did he really. He would just make Spanish language-type noises. It was very awkward.

• When I worked at Staples I worked their EasyTech counter, which was somehow a downgrade from Geek Squad. My shift supervisor Eric was would show up to work wearing a tan vest and weird hat that Crocodile Dundee would wear. He would claim that he been on the verge of graduating from Yale with a degree in archeology but hadn't been able to finish it because his wife was "dying of cancer." Sometimes she was a recovering drug addict, others she had left him and his daughter and he was trying to put his life back together. None of which was true. His wife was actually his girlfriend, was perfectly fine, and he was never enrolled at Yale. Sometimes he would do parkour on the guardrails in the parking lot during his breaks.

• When I spent a year working in banking, the admin that handled all of our documentation for our group, Trisha, was an insane Disney Adult. She would use her work laptop to run a Disney vacation travel agency, which involved booking someone a flight to Orlando on Expedia. She would talk about her parrot, Gusto, and how she taught it all the known swear words. One time she sort of threatened another woman in our office because she was booking a Disney vacation and did not go through her agency. She eventually got fired for using a racial slur in an email.

I also had a coworker that got arrested for soliciting a prostitute while we were on a business trip, but I think i've written about that before.

Focus: Insane coworkers.

 

• Couple of substance abuse cases. Not so much insane but pieces of shit. One a cocaine addict at my first real high school job at a fast food restaurant. He would verbally overcharge people at the drive through, ring them up normally, and pocket the difference. He got busted for that a supposedly forging company checks. He somehow skated in court on the check forging. Tried to extort money from me when I accidentally backed into a neighbor’s trailer hitch after a party (I told him if she really had an issue he could give her my number, never heard about it again). He also claimed his mom was the local hot news anchor as they had the same last name. Some managers talked like she was but I also heard it was bullshit. The other was at my current job. Head of the marketing department. Alcoholic that would come in drunk and high and just stare at his screen all day. He ended up straight up embezzling 5k he got approved for a project. The owners quietly let him go and didn’t file charges. He still LinkedIn creeps on the young marketing intern he hired.
• Devin, another fast food coworker I had at another restaurant I worked at. Mid 40s still just an entry level worker. I had heard he had been caught cashing SS checks he stole from his apartment building mailboxes. He was having his checks garnished as restitution. Seemed like a nice enough guy. He started “dating” this waitress. An absolute smoke show and probably still two or three hottest girls I’ve ever personally known. Way way out of his league. He took her to Bengals games, bought her a pro shop jersey, 150$ plus on a dinner. Spent a good 500$ on her in about a week. He barreled right into the friend zone and she was naive enough not to see his intentions. She eventually rebuffed him and the next day she came in screaming at him in front of the whole restaurant, to stop calling and texting her. “You text and left 150 messages in 6 hours leave me alone you are insane!” He just stood there shaking holding back tears and followed her to the back begging her to let him explain himself. That ended that. Couple years ago during covid I saw him arguing on facebook with another coworker about how George Floyd had it coming and she immediately posted Devins county arrest records. Hey had a couple dozen convictions of drug use (crack) and petty theft. Boy restaurants are fun.
• My last job at an IT company we had a girl in the billing department no one liked. I never interacted with her with my department but ever said she was the single dumbest coworker they had ever met. Less than zero common sense. Fucked up every project she worked on. She did organize a volley ball league at her old work and I was thinking about asking to join her team as I was looking for an outlet like this. One day at a happy hour she came and sat down at the table I was at and started talking with me. Randomly asking “Do you see colors in the air?” “Uhh… no?” “Well I do, I see colors in the air in front of me all day at my desk. Some times the colors tell me to do things. It’s why I am so creative!” After a couple of minutes of this I excused myself and went and sat with some other people. I never talked to her again and she was laid off in the same round of cuts I was. Don’t know what happened to her.
• I’ve talked about the owner of my first post college real job before. A true DSM V narcissist/psychopath. Her level of illness if it had been schizophrenia or bipolar she’d have been a rambling homeless person on the street. Instead she was a multi millionaire “pillar of the community” hosting frequent meetings of the charitable organizations she was involved with at our building. Supposedly one of them was an anti bullying group but that would have been too perfect. All a facade as she treated her workers as human pieces of shit. Always on edge every sentence of blowing up and screaming at you, belittling you, or blaming you for all the problems at the company. Most toxic workplace I’ve ever been in. I didn’t know people could treat others the way she did and not wind up in jail. I still hope to hear about her dying so I can go piss on her grave. She is the reason I don’t say “I don’t wish cancer on my worst enemy” anymore, as someone who lost a parent in my teens to cancer, because some people on this earth deserve it. Hitler, Ted Bundy, and Cathy types all deserve cancer.
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Shit I forgot about the seasonal CSR we had last year that was a flat earther. I had two interactions with her. Once randomly stopped me as I was walking by her desk and told me we all lived in a multi dimensional paradox and she believed we lived in at least 5 matrix like dimensions. The other she called me to our store to help a customer with technical questions. Turns out he was just a salesman that worked with milling equipment and wanted to pitch somebody his company’s products. As I was taking his card and trying to play him off she goes “let me call the owner to see if she is at her desk, she might be interested!” I had to grab the phone before she picked it up and just convinced her to call her supervisor in. I honestly don’t know how these people survive life.

 

Had a guy on my team who was charged with manslaughter, but we couldn’t fire him until after he was found guilty.

Currently have a guy refusing a background check as required by my company, and is taking it to court. Not sure if he’s a registered sex offender or just doing it out of principle.

Have a guy who is a moron but bullshit his way to a senior technical architect position in AI. Until me and my team were brought in and asked to review his stuff. Beyond crap, and when I had a call with him to discuss our findings, he full on raged and got super personal with me and lost his fucking mind. While it was being recorded. And I just sat there not saying anything. HR got a copy of the video, he lied through his teeth about the call and they called him out on it. HR then called me and apologized for what I had to go through. He’s currently on week 2 of 3 mental health leave and I’ve taken over his project and team. Should be fun when he comes back as ER (the legal arm of HR) are opening an official investigation into the call and expect him to be fired for cause.

 

When I was a general contractor, I worked with an extremely odd guy who asked me to look at his computer because it was slow. Porn, everywhere. So much porn, to the point where there were things like word documents that had porn pasted into them. I told him I couldn't figure it out. A year after I left that job, he was sent to prison for a couple decades for child porn.

On that subject, I worked with a guy in a different division who seemed very normal. Very good at his job. Very social. I couldn't say we were friends, but we worked together a lot. Gave his notice and told me he wanted to focus on his health. Two months after he left I found out he was serving 15 years in prison for child porn.

While I was at the only job I was ever fired from, the boss would roll in mid-morning with a 12-pack, and go out after lunch for another 12-pack. It was a weird experience working there. I got a formal warning letter for, apparently, a small clerical error (which I doubt I made but couldn't prove), and then another warning for something equally trivial. He then fired me for closing the shop early, which I had provably not done. No idea why he hired me and then seemingly had it in for me immediately, but soon after I was fired, he got arrested for selling steroids, then the feds knocked down his door for years of tax fraud, to find his business abandoned and he skipped town.

My other weirdos were mostly not law related. A woman who used to stick her finger into all of the jelly donuts at the office to see what was inside. A guy who was fired for jerking off in his car on his breaks, underneath the parking lot security camera. A guy who went to Vegas for his 40th birthday, got drunk, lost his virginity to some random from a bar, then spend 6 months trying to track her down because she was clearly his destiny.