Working can be so hard, it can be overwhelming, but that shouldn't be an excuse to act like a child. We've all seen a bad coworker acting out at least once in our lives. But what if they took it to the next level where it wasn't just a comment or complaint, but was full on acting out.
We wanted to see just how salty some coworkers can get, and how immature they can be so we looked throughout Reddit and found the most insane immature moments by coworkers. This content was edited for clarity.
Mean Girls In Real Life
“I worked with a girl who could have been Regina in Mean Girls. She would purposely walk by 5 girls at the front desk in the morning and only say hi to 1 or 2. She loved to come up front and make ‘plans for the office’ that excluded a quarter of the office, and usually the ones within earshot.
She was almost 40 but still treated the office like senior year in high school.
Her signature move is to have the person she deems uncool take the group photo so they’re not in it, then she prints it and puts it on the wall of cool people by her desk. I have taken a couple of those pics. One of them is from my 40th birthday. I am not on the wall.”
Like A 5-Year-Old’s Tantrum
“My team shared one large workstation and our team leader was former military, so he liked things kept neat. Nothing huge, just supplies put back where they should be, caps kept on pens and markers when not used, safety covers on cutting instruments. Not a big deal. The team leader was hated by another department head, Ranty. Ranty was nicknamed so because she’d go off on anyone at any time for any reason or no reason at all. Everything annoyed her. But nothing annoyed her more than the team lead’s neatness. She hated it and would do things like set a dripping cup on our desk, randomly mess up papers, move supplies around, and generally complain about how annoying and unnecessary it was to have to take a cap off a marker. The reason Ranty would use our markers and pens was because all of hers kept drying out. Wonder why. The team lead would just quietly tidy up while rolling his eyes. One day, after yet another reprimand from their boss about their interactions, Ranty came into our office.
She then took every pen and marker lid, every sharp edge cover, every bit of scratch paper, and all of the fast food condiments that the team lead had brought in and threw them underneath a large piece of machinery, where the team lead would not be able to reach them due to back injuries he sustained during the military. Standing in the room with her, it was like watching a five-year-old proudly surveying the damage done after an epic tantrum. Still didn’t get her fired though.”
Just Endangering Lives
“This guy was a janitor, he was angry at management for moving him from a warehouse where no one was watching him to a plant where people were actually present and could see if he wasn’t doing any work. These were literally his words. So the guy started throwing staples and other similar things into food that was being produced and packaged in the plant. He figured he’d get back at the company for making him work more by endangering lives.
I helped catch him. I couldn’t believe when I first saw him actually do it, blatant, then he said, ‘This is what they get for switching my location!’
I know he got fired, but if I remember right, they were going to charge him and found out he was an illegal immigrant with warrants back home for something, so he got deported there.
Thankfully, the company who produced it checked it before shipping. The last mile of production is to metal detect incase residue off the machines got in there and, of course, this was a lot more than warn machines shedding particles. They were pretty sensitive and easily picked up and rejected the product. So thankfully none left the premises or it could have been bad.”
She Forgot About The Cameras…
“I worked with a girl who was either my age or slightly younger (26/27). This girl had a known grudge against me for no reason other than I was friends with someone she hated. One time I left a speaker at work, one of the tiny USB ones from target that cost probably 20 dollars. I knew I had left it at work because that was the last place I had it. But when I went in the next day, it was missing. One of the other people I work with said he had put it on a desk in the main office, which I believed because he had literally no reason to lie to me. But the speaker was missing, and I was losing my mind trying to find it.
My boss suggested I look at the security footage to see what had become of it, so I did so.
I saw the girl described above take the speaker and put it in her bag the prior night. So she stole it.
I was kind of surprised because everyone else seemed to like her. So I decided when she came in, I would ask her about it.
I make sure my boss is sitting in his office, and someone else is also in the office. She comes in, and I’m reading through email. I asked her, ‘Hey… Did you see a speaker last night? I thought I left it here.’ There was a pause, and then she said ‘No,’ and left the room.
So she’s a thief and a liar. But what she did next actually made me so angry more than her stealing my stuff and then lying about it.
I came in later that night after hanging out with friends, and my boss beckons me over.
Boss: ‘So she found your speaker.’
Me: ‘Oh yeah, where?’
Boss: ‘In a desk drawer.’ I immediately got angry.
Me: ‘She’s SO FULL OF IT.’
My boss went back and watched the security footage for that too, and saw her take it out of her bag and put it in the desk drawer, and then ‘conveniently’ find it when my boss walked into the room.
So she tried to make me look like an idiot.
But honestly, what kind of idiot forgets that we have FIVE CAMERAS in the office area.
There was an HR investigation that I did not know the outcome of, but she did keep her job. Thankfully she moved to another location so I don’t have to deal with her anymore. But holy cow how childish can you be.”
She Just Wanted To Start Drama
“I had one coworker who was angry that I got assigned to run a project that she applied for even though I was assigned, despite the fact that she applied and I didn’t. She was so furious about it that she created a spreadsheet to document the exact times I came into work and every time that I left my desk and came back so then she could get me in trouble with my boss. She did this for two months, and then brought the ‘evidence’ that I’d been showing up to work between 8:15 and 8:30 am instead of 8 am, and was taking breaks closer to 20 minutes than 10.
My boss laughed her out the door. We had an agreement that I could show up when I felt like it and could take the break lengths I wanted since she knew I was working a minimum of 60 hours a week and would be there way past 5 pm even if I took no breaks. Partially because I had to pick up the slack of the other employees, partially because we got so many contracts in at once.
She would do a monitor thing too, she would even walk out of her way to go by my desk and tell my boss that I had facebook up or something on one of my monitors. Boss’s attitude was, ‘as long as she is working above productivity levels, I don’t care what’s on the 4th screen.’ But, coworker never learned and coworker never won.
This wasn’t too surprising though as she was the office busy-body. Always trying to cause a problem, get and start gossip, and thought that she was just the best at everything. She was that employee that went desk to desk bothering people and didn’t do her own work. I didn’t indulge her shenanigans time wasting since I wouldn’t get to go home until everything was done. She made me her number one target. She completely turned on me when our team split in half- all the people with experience that didn’t need to be babysat went onto one team, lead by me, and the others that either needed babysitting or didn’t have enough industry experience onto another, which she was put on despite having worked there for a couple years.
Anyways, you probably shouldn’t create your own project to get another employee in trouble when you have no idea what their situation is and you didn’t get the project you wanted to run because you already wasted too much time at work and can’t be trusted to stay on task or use fair judgment regarding fellow employee roles. Well. She certainly proved their analysis of why she wouldn’t be a good leader true.
My supervisor and I had a good laugh about that one. I ended up leaving the company shortly afterward anyway, but I don’t think she ever got the project leader roles she wanted.”
She Sounds Like A Gem!
“I’m obviously a bit biased because I was so offended by this, but several years ago, the receptionist at a company I worked for brought her husband in on a Friday morning to discuss with the company CEO/president of our small firm (under 15 employees) why she should be allowed to take PTO the following week instead of me. Her husband demanded of the CEO that I move my vacation by a week because that was ‘only fair,’ given that she’d worked there 10 years longer than I had.
SHE BROUGHT HER HUSBAND IN TO TALK TO HER BOSS.
I was going out of the country to visit a college friend and had put it on everyone’s calendar two months in advance. She wanted to go on a self-described ‘spontaneous trip to the beach’ with her daughter and infant grandchild, who lived next door to her.
I actually wasn’t made aware of the full details of her husband’s visit before I went on vacation, only found out later. I went on my trip and apparently she went on hers, and another woman in the office (who was scheduled to cover for me) ended up covering for both of us. This was a very significant burden for her and I felt bad about her getting all of that work thrown at her.
Fast forward a few months, I was going to take a long weekend with my girlfriend, and the receptionist apparently threw a fit because she counted the days I’d taken off, realized that I got more PTO than she did, and sent me a weird rambling email that my PTO ‘was actually not approved’ and my PTO accrual rate was erroneous.
I forwarded her email to the CEO, who had no real reaction, but noted the receptionist had been there for many years. I quit two weeks later and never looked back, though I did learn a lot.”
Nothing Like Seeing A Grown Man Cry
“I had a bad supervisor from a long time ago that didn’t like for any of us to jump the chain of command when dealing with an issue. He always felt doing so was a threat to his job. At the end of the first year of service, we’re supposed to get a sitdown evaluation with HR which also determines our performance-based raise. After 13 months I had to pester the supervisor about setting up my review. He kept telling me HR was busy but they’ll get to me eventually. After almost a half a year of waiting for my evaluation, I finally went directly to HR to ask them why the heck I didn’t have my review yet. HR told me this is the first they heard I was up for my evaluation (small company of about 50 people so not everything was electronic). Turned out my supervisor was lying to me about setting up the meeting because he felt I was going to let them know about all of the times I found my supervisor leaving work early or hiding or anything else dumb during a shift.
I confronted the supervisor about all of this and his response was to start crying. A 40-year-old man crying to someone almost half his age because he felt betrayed I no longer trusted him. He was soon reassigned to a different department.”
How He Started Hated Elizabeth
“I was working some terrible job years ago where we had assigned breaks (NOTE: the job was terrible all on its own and that had little to do with assigned breaks though that helped.) It was one of the DMV facilities in my state so pretty close to a mental hospital. It was the height of the recession and I needed some kind of work. My break was from 10:15 am to 10:30 am and a woman named Elizabeth’s was from 10:30 am to 10:45 am.
On the second day I was there, as we were locking up, a 40-something-year-old woman ran up to me and asked me why I hated Elizabeth. I said I didn’t hate Elizabeth because I had not actually met anyone named Elizabeth. I was then introduced to Elizabeth who told me that I hated her because I walked past her in the break room that morning.
For hours this was getting passed on from person to person until it became truth. I was there for eight months or so and everyone just said it like it was a universal truth. The sky is blue, I ‘hated’ Elizabeth even though I never interacted with her that day or in the 8 months after.”
Just, Gross
“I worked with plenty of high-schoolers doing food service. After 5 or 6 years of doing so, I came to the conclusion that I’d never eat in a place that was staffed primarily by high-schoolers. Things can get a bit crazy when a 17-year-old is put in charge of four 16-year-olds…using food that had been dropped on the floor is just the tip of the iceberg.
Example: Clock in. The general manager is leaving for the day, as usual. He asks the kitchen crew to clean the refrigerators. Specifically, the shelves (made of metal grating) needed to be scrubbed. Upon closer inspection, the tops of the shelves were a bit grimy from spills. The bottom was a bit rusty from humidity.
At the bottom of one cooler was a 3-gallon container of ranch dressing. The lid was off. My line cook (a 16-year-old) starts scrubbing away at the shelf above the ranch dressing. Bits of black are falling in. He realizes what he’s done, looks around, then stirs in the contaminants. Being as how they are black flecks, they mix seamlessly with the dressing. He pops a lid on the dressing and continues cleaning.
Events like this were a normal occurrence. I worked at four different places over that 5 year period. Never would I trust the food prepped by the part-time high school students. Or anything they touch.”
She Wouldn’t Want To See Those Reports…
“I was an HR director at a nursing home at the time. I hired a guy who had just finished his CNA certification and had good references. On his first day on the job, I had several of our female employees come and complain to me that he had been showing them pictures of his junk that he had taken with his phone. I started a quick investigation and found he had shown these pics to 6 different employees. He was fired on his first day. I didn’t want him around the staff and definitely not around the residents since we specialized in Alzheimer’s care, so about 80 percent of residents had some form of it.
His mom came up to the office and yelled at me and demanded to see the investigation notes on why exactly he was fired. I just kept telling her that I could tell her nothing of what happened that day since her son was over the age of 18 and this was something to take up with him. She just kept screaming at me and calling me names. It was crazy.”
He Was Better Than That
“He got angry when the manager told him to go clean tables in the dining room (fast food restaurant) and began yelling how he is a manager at his other job and is better than that. The assistant manager then asked him politely to just take an order to a table instead and to please lower his voice because customers could hear. He then grabs the tray and mutters ‘effing witch…’ which she hears. Then after being called into the office we just see him leave in tears blubbering about how much he needed the job and such…. but hey he was a manager at his other job, what was he worried about?”
His E-vites Were Unwanted
“A man I worked with wrote to basically every woman in the company, asking them to be a part of his ‘game project.’ He wrote to me too and I was like, ok maybe, then 3 min later he asked me for a threesome. Eventually got fired for harassment.
He worked there for a bit more than a year though. He just made a reputation for himself and was known as ‘touch yo tiddies Silvio.’ During a company party he snuck up behind a female team lead he had the hots for, yelled ‘I’MMA TOUCH YOUR TIDDIES’ and kinda let his hands hover over her chest. I guess he thought she would find that charming or something.”
Everyone Should Have This In Their Cubicle
“I’m oddly proud of this, but I am actually the one that acted unprofessionally. I worked in a clothing company’s call center taking orders at the time. The environment was slightly casual but still fairly professional. One day the servers went completely down but our phones were still working. (Servers were housed off-site in another city.) We were required to continue taking calls and apologize that we couldn’t process any orders/returns/et cetera at that time.
I was starting to get frustrated explaining to people how I could answer the phone and not be able to process any transactions, so I took a longish bathroom break just to get off the phones for a while. The bathrooms were near a product room. The room had one of nearly everything we sold and we were allowed to put customers on hold and grab the item so we could answer their questions about it better.
I decided to grab a sheet set and several pillows. I then proceeded to turn the cubby (the area where your feet go) under my desk into a pillow fort and crawled in. I took my headset in with me and continued to answer calls. It wasn’t like I needed access to my computer at the time.
HR was more confused than anything. ‘You built a… pillow fort?’
Nobody ratted me out. The floor supervisor happened to walk past my cubicle and heard me talking to a caller.
She just kind of shook her head and basically said, ‘I don’t even know what I’m supposed to do about this.’ Then made me put the stuff back in the product room.
She was actually pretty laid back compared to the other floor supervisors. I think I mostly just broke her brain. She mentioned a couple times how never in a million years would she expect to see a pillow fort at work.
Pretty sure the main reason I got away with it was that my call stats were always really good and I was decent at up-selling.
They basically just told me that it was unprofessional and not to do it again.”
Not Fair!
“At my current job (I was hired as an iOS developer) I couldn’t figure out why a lot of people were hostile towards me.
One lady, in particular, would come over, run her finger across the Mac on my desk (you need one for iOS development obviously) and started asking things like ‘Who pays for this?’, ‘Who gave this to you?’, ‘Why do you get one and the rest of us don’t?’
She wasn’t the only one who expressed not-so-subtle jealousy, she was just the most aggravating because she came over a few times a day with that nonsense.
Turns out, everyone was upset because they wanted to work on mobile development but didn’t have the skills (they thought reformatting web pages to fit on a phone screen was ‘mobile development’), so I was hired for the job. That was an enormous spot of contention (and still is years later).
Somehow it was my fault that I had a skill they didn’t.”