Ask Lemmy

From my current workplace:
Someone was putting mail in a cabinet under their desk instead of the outbox, we're talking hundreds of letters/cheques/invoices and some life-changing documents from a few months.
The mail outbox was on their desk, and easier to reach than the cabinet.

From previous workplaces:

• Breaking down a door and raping someone that had barricaded themselves behind said door.
• Sexual interference.
• not having a licence, and getting a DUI with a work truck that they stole.

And outrageous in a different way:
for only beating last year's sales by 3% instead of by 4%.

This happened more than 15 years ago and is a pretty wild ride. I may have a few minor details askew, but this is the basic story.

There was this police officer who was operating as a controller for another undercover police officer. A controller is the interface between the undercover guy and his team in the office. It allows the undercover guy to operate loose as a goose and the controller runs about behind the scenes making things happen.

Well, one night the controller gets completely hammered, off his tits drunk, then picks up a hooker and takes her to a dodgy motel and has sex. Then he passes out. The hooker couldn't wake him, so she takes his car keys and drives to where she was picked up from and abandons his undercover car with the keys still in the ignition.

Back in the hotel, the controller wakes up to find the car gone - along with suitcase containing several thousand dollars that was sitting in the trunk. Every note in the stash, naturally, had the serial number recorded.

The controller panicked and called a bunch of off-duty and on-duty friends who attempted to locate the car, and hopefully the drug-buy cash, before they had to officially report what happened.

In the end, they couldn't find the car, so the controller self-reported the whole sorry story. He was arrested and sacked, but didn't do time. They eventually found the car, still with the keys in the ignition and the cash still sitting in the trunk, safe and sound. All his friends got into various amounts of trouble for assisting with the cover-up.

Bonus points. While this wild escapade was happening the controller's wife was sitting at home with a newborn baby.

It is still talked about today - with reverence - as the single biggest display of mass stupidity in the department.

Jerking it in the bathroom

It wasn’t even the unisex one

The girl doing meth in her car.

Also the guy being arrested for having CP on his personal device and never coming back technically counts too, right?

It's health care so obviously we were told that we'd have to be vaccinated against COVID or be fired, like many. Most people went along with it, but the CEO sent out a final warning email to the whole network, and this antivax dingdong somehow managed to reply all to the CEO giving him a patronizing lecture about how COVID wasn't real, how nobody had died of it, and how he had read several patient charts that proved this, and how the CEO was making a very big mistake, and how he, this clerk, knew science better than the CEO did. He was fired for reading patient charts he didn't belong in, of course. The email was super patronizing and he claimed to have an M.Sc and that meant he knew better, despite the fact he was working as a clerk, and gave all sorts of false "evidence".

Anyway he was fired and reply all to the CEO is disabled.

Coworker found him on the sex offender registry for messages with some woman trying to arrange a sexual meetup with her daughter. Not even a statutory teenager situation, an actual child. Apparently he had some connections with law enforcement which kept him out of jail.

Everyone already hated him for general creepiness and being terrible at his job, so there was a degree of vindication in confirming how horrible of a person he was. Still super fucked up.

Not crazy, just sad.

Middle of the day, sitting at our desks working. This middle aged guy who was usually happy as Larry gets up and leaves the office leaving his stuff behind. Not a word said. I just assumed he was getting a coffee or something.

End of the day rolls around, stuff still there. Same thing the next day. Still there the next week.

People start asking what happened to him, but the agency he was working through kept telling us he’s coming back soon.

Over a month later, someone packs up his stuff and puts it in the bin. The guy was never coming back, turns out he went left and ended his own life the day he walked out. Never made it home.

The agency apparently only found out he was dead a few weeks after the incident, then strung us along so they could find a replacement. We terminated their contract and offered the handful of other employees jobs.

———

Another job, we had a new guy start. Very conventionally attractive and he seemed normal enough.

A few weeks later one of the women complained to HR that someone was stalking her. She was getting ‘flattering’ letters, emails, notes etc and they often contained information and photos in/about/around her work. Flattering, but not something she was comfortable with

Few weeks later, we’re told new guy won’t be coming back due to inappropriate behaviour.

Woman had to get a restraining order against the guy. In a twist of irony, she said that if the guy had just talked to her, she would have gone on a date with him in a heartbeat.

Dude brought a sex worker into his fiber splicing trailer and the boat was a-rockin’ when the supervisor came knockin’.

A guy in our data center couldn't figure out who owned a particular machine that he needed to work on. So his solution to figure it out was to let them come to him. He went and pulled out the network cable and waited. He was escorted out a little while later. The moral of the story is don't go disabling production machines on purpose.

Guy in my department strolls into my office and says, "Welp, this is probably my last day working here." I asked him why he would say that. He sits down and shoves his phone across the desk toward me. I start reading and it's an email from him to the CEO complaining that our boss is, in so many words, a complete fucking moron.

I finished reading and was just like, "Yeah, you shouldn't have done that." I mean, he wasn't wrong. I agreed with basically everything in his email. He was also right about it being his last day working there because he was fired that afternoon.

A guy on my team was absolutely convinced the external monitors he had were 1080p and not 1680*1050 resolution, and that everyone else using 1680*1050 were just wrong. He got into an argument with IT service desk over HDMI cables, which he wanted to prove himself correct (since everyone else were supposedly chumps for accepting the tyranny of having to use DVI cables for their monitors, thus forcing them to use the lower resolution). The argument escalated and well, he kind of just disappeared after that and never came back.

The IT service desk folks were already touchy about their HDMI cables since people were apparently stealing them for use in the meeting rooms.

Pity, I liked him but that was kind of unhinged. Besides, the monitors’ native res was definitely 1680*1050 lol.

This guy in the warehouse made a deal with another guy to sell his porn collection. So he brings it in one day in a big cardboard box and leaves it sitting in the coat room with the top open, you could see X-rated stuff just walking by. Someone says something to management and the box gets confiscated, but they don't know who it belongs to so that's pretty much the end of it. Until our hero goes and files a complaint about the theft of his property.

Working on a boat. We got a new shipmate who had worked there on previous seasons, most of us didn’t know him but he was good friends with another member of the crew. The day he got in the two of them spent the night catching up and getting absolutely trashed. Night ended with new guy stumbling in to the cook’s cabin and pissing right on the cook while he was sleeping. New guy was fired that morning without having worked a single day.

Mike would walk into random meetings that he didn't belong in, lay his head on the table, and knock out. Snored loud as fuck. He did this in my meetings alone at least three times a week.

He'd be found sleeping in the driver seat of his car about once a day too, clocking hours.

I saw the dude sneak up on a lot of people and assault them. Smack mens asses, rub women's shoulders, he put this catholic nerd in a chokehold and whispered "security can't help you here, n****" and then let him go.

He'd talk about how sick work from home was, how he'd just play NBA2K and Tekken all day, work on his car, sleep, and get paid.

Homie worked with us for like 3 or 4 months before he got fired. When he left, I got assigned his work. He had one ticket. It was three months old, and it was to update some software on our platform from vX to vX+1. It took me three minutes.

Dude was reading comic books at his desk the entire time he was there. He was really living the dream for a minute, I heard after he got fired that he moved from computers to car mechanic.

When I was in the military, two officers got caught fucking in a stairwell. They were caught by a security camera while attending training. They were both married and not to each other.

Unhinged entry level employee screaming and swearing and threatening the CFO and spit in her coffee mug.

An email went out to the whole company telling us not to let him in the building before he even got back to his desk to be fired. This is a software company, not exactly the type of place that has armed guards, but the (ex-military) information security dude set up in the area packing for a few weeks after that.

We had a new group in from another regional site come for training.

It turned out the one was actively also a prostitute. She was freely distributing her social media, showing people videos of herself, and asking us where the secluded parts of the campus were so she could do her thing with some of the scientists.

She didn't do very much actual work, or at least not what she was supposed to be doing there. I give her credit for seeming to be very proud of her side gig. She seemed to really enjoy it. I think she just eventually stopped coming in after they went back to their own site, so maybe she did find herself a scientist.

Definitely the wildest person I've ever worked with.

There was a guy who was in tech support who talked to a customer about who was hot or not in the company. It was actually the customer who started the conversation, but the rep ran with it and used all kinds of unprofessional and disparaging language when describing his female co-workers.

That call happened to have a supervisor listening in, so he was fired immediately after he got off the call. The thing is found out who called in, and the women on the team had to assist him when he called for support.