Before my time, but they tell tales of the “Phantom Shitter”. Someone had… issues, physical and/or mental, and would leave streaks of waste both going to and from the bathroom. Very liquid waste. Sometimes stepped in. “Phantom” because initially no one knew who was doing it. They just found the results. Eventually he was found out, sent home for a bit, and then fired when it happened again after he came back.

Since I worked there: Guy came in for an interview. I don’t know if he was already having a bad day or what, but he got upset that his first interviewer wasn’t there to greet him at the front door. It escalated, rapidly, leading to threats of violence, an arrest, and a couple of cops searching his car.

Massage Therapist here had a client come in with a live tick on his back that my coworker removed successfully. And then carried on with his massage

An employee was angry about an unfair policy and was being punished for not complying, and in his anger he threw a chair. This was before my time, but security had to escort the employee out of the building and he was fired on the spot. That story still circulates even though it’s been over a decade.

At another workplace some employees were caught having sex.

At another workplace a manager and employees were running a drug operation out of a drive-thru.

There were other things, but honestly humans are so predictable, they’re usually:

• fucking one another
• threatening, fighting, or trying to kill one another
• trying to get high or stay high
• stealing, cheating, or otherwise trying to enrich themselves

So a lot of the stories are of one form or another - employee who always came in extremely drunk and worked her shift drunk for years, only fired after some violent incidents and indecent exposure because of excessive drunkenness.

One employee was homeless and sleeping on the roof of the store, he was caught climbing down one morning.

Another guy was peddling drugs outside the store.

Another employee was stealing stock from the store after hours and was fired after getting caught.

Anyway - poverty is fun, y’all!

First day on a job and a coworker took a pistol out of his briefcase/bag and began cleaning it/wiping it down. It was a small office of 5ish people. I was just basically there to help play a tech support role for some outdated software they were running. My coworker was an older sales rep for the company and he was responsible for hiring me (don’t ask me why). Anyways, first official day I was working he brandished his pistol. I don’t know why. He looked a bit like Kelsey Grammer which bummed me out because I love Frasier. (Shout-out to /c/Frasier ) He had other hangups and ultimately quit a few weeks later.

When he pulled that gun, time slowed down. With all of these mass shootings I just didn’t know what to expect. My mind raced but my body froze. I wish I could say I said something but I didn’t. I kept my mouth shut and pretended like nothing was happening.

People can be so unhinged. That was almost 10 years ago now.

Kathleen brought salmon and nuked it in the microwave.

Food cart exploded.

https://youtu.be/w9ct4sgfwTw

we hijacked a conference room on a shared floor for a week and built a three-phase high-voltage line in there by hunting around the building for which sockets were on which phase, then plugging them into industrial transformers.

I won’t say this is the craziest thing that ever happened, just the first thing I thought of. I once had a short-term contract job at a place that didn’t have a sink in the office so to make coffee you had to get water from a drinking fountain in the hallway and dump it out/wash it in a bathroom sink–which was already gross enough. Also, whoever took the last cup was supposed to make the next pot–but the boss would never make a new pot, just wait until someone else did.

One day after I’d been there a couple months, one of the employees went around telling everyone “Stop drinking the coffee unless you want to drink <boss>'s backwash!” She’d seen the boss walk up and grab the coffee pot, dump his leftover cold coffee out of his coffee cup into the pot, pour himself a new cup and put the pot back. He was too lazy to go dump his cup out in the sink or fountain.

And that was the end of making coffee in that office. People would buy it elsewhere or bring a thermos.

Oh! And another thing that happened when I worked there was someone killed themselves by jumping off the roof. Funny how I remembered the coffee thing first.

Went to the bathroom for 3 minutes, came back and my co-worker had been arrested for gooning joggers that morning public masturbation.

EDIT: This guy would park his car, start jerking off, then ask women for directions. That morning someone recognized him, and he freaked out and drove away. He got sober after that and turned things around.

I used to do dispatching for night-shift security for a large computer-related company in a western state in the U.S. (sorry for vagueness).

One foggy night/early morning as we were nearing the end of our shift, one of the patrol guys calls in from his vehicle and says he found a dead cow on one of the roads that ran adjacent to company property. Our building was surrounded by fields that sometimes had cattle on them, so we figured one must have gotten loose somehow and got hit by a car, probably because it was so foggy and hard to see. The officer was on his way back to dispatch anyway, but 3 minutes later, as he’s on his way back and on another road (the company site was several acres), he calls in again to say there are MANY LIVE cattle all over the road and running into one of the parking lots in front of the main building. Turns out they all busted a fence and escaped, and were now freely running around the campus. We have no idea who they belong to, so we call the head of security (who was on his way in as by now it was like 6am), then call the cops to see if they can tell us who owns the land the cattle escaped from.

Meanwhile, other people who work in the building are arriving for the day, and they are calling in to dispatch saying they cannot leave their cars because they’re surrounded by cattle. The herd (we later learned it was about 100 head) split into several groups, and started blocking the entrances to the building, and people were just afraid to get out of their cars with them roaming around. The fog made everything worse because you couldn’t see very far across the lot before you were suddenly up against a herd of spooked cattle.

Eventually we got ahold of the owners, and they had to come out to the campus with horses and literally round the cattle up with lassos and herd them back into the fields. The cops came to redirect traffic on the highway to avoid the worksite entirely while our patrol assisted with the Jeeps. It was utterly ridiculous. Thankfully the only casualty was the 1 dead cow.

The computer that controlled all the doors refused to open any of them, including the door to the room in which it was physically located.

It wasn’t quite HAL 9000 because doors could still be opened from the inside, but control over the computer was regained only with the help of a locksmith.

Manager got fired for stealing alcohol from the restaurant

A patient escaped his police escort through a crawlspace above the showers. The whole building went on lockdown (with loudspeaker announcements about not interacting with any naked men you come across) before they eventually found him a mile away, still starkers.

Boss was arrested for ordering expensive toner cartridges for “store use” and reselling them. He had racked up around 80k and a felony charge.

Also, the absolute horrors that occurred in another job’s bathroom were biblical.

Christmas party, of course. We had an Indian dude join the company. Really nice lad that I got on great with.

There’s a company meal kicking off at 7pm not far from where we work so the entire office (about 40 odd people) decide we’ll get a few scoops in beforehand.

Well this lad was quite small and very obviously not used to drink. He was fairly toasted before we even got to the restaurant. He kept drinking then became belligerent.

Proceeded to puke all over the place half way through the meal. He went out to get some fresh air and the CEO went out to have a chat with him and suggested he head home.

Promptly told the CEO to fuck off and leave him alone.

My bestie was his boss and at that point basically wrestled him into a taxi. The CEO took it well in fairness. It was totally out of character so he kept his job (and his visa which was dependent on the job).