Typical water cooler conversations at the office entail sports, weather, and what a coworker did last weekend, etc., etc. However, when something scandalous happens at work, those thirst quenching story times become a bit more exciting. These stories have the perfect mix of scandal, controversy, and downright absurdity! Content has been edited for clarity.
The Funeral Director’s Lovers
“I worked in a cemetery for years. I remember one of the funeral directors was banging a receptionist and one night she met him out in the wall crypts and the security guard caught them with my homie’s pants down. Hilarious.
Sidenote: he was engaged to somebody else who worked there. The fireworks were legendary.
He bribed the security guard not to tell, but his fiancee eventually found out. She wasn’t really big on self esteem and forgave him, but one day the receptionist said good morning to her and the fiancee basically told her in the middle of the lobby, ‘Bimbo, don’t you ever look at me in my effing eyes or I’ll RIP yours out.’
I almost forgot the best part: the funeral director found out the receptionist was also hooking up with a few other guys working there as well. He went berserk and went around hunting people down, asking them, ‘ARE YOU SEEING THE RECEPTIONIST?! I’M HITTIN THAT, BACK OFF!’
Everyone was like, ‘Wait, aren’t you engaged to-‘
‘MAN, DON’T BRING HER UP!'”
This Start Up Shouldn’t Have Been Started
“Way back before the original dotcom bubble bust, I worked at this scrappy startup. It was my first real career job and I was so intimidated by the office, the receptionist, the people in nice clothing. I thought this was the big leagues! Looking back, that place was a total freakin’ circus.
Here are some of the raunchy highlights:
-A woman was busted for stealing Herman Miller Aeron chairs and then selling them online. She had been pulling her truck up to the back and putting 6 or 7 in per run. They don’t know how long she had been doing it, but they counted the chairs and we were short about 150. They did a sting, and while being arrested, she mooned everyone.
-We made a deadline and secured another series of funding from a hot shot investor. Founder said we should celebrate. People took it very literally. By about 10 am, everyone was lit and one creative director was demanding people take turns on the razor scooter competing for prizes. Said creative director took a spill and broke her arm. Ambulance came. Next day the lawyers came and explained the company’s new ultra serious zero tolerance policy regarding adult beverage consumption in the office.
-One guy kept a bed roll and a brewski fridge under his desk and I think was homeless for a while. He was at work 24/7. I have always been an early riser, and on more than one occasion I arrived to find some random floozie in his ‘bedroll’ under the desk with him, half clothed, partied out, etc. I was amused but the girls were like ‘wow this is the worst walk of shame ever.’
-What takes the cake is the all-hands meeting that the founder and CFO had. He was a total rooster, typical alpha male moron. The CFO was basically the female equivalent. Nice pantsuits, impressive salary, took no prisoners. We knew they were banging in his office regularly. The door overlooked a sea of cubicles. Someone had made a secret blog that detailed each time they came out with rumpled clothes. But the kicker was that all hands meeting because it was to announce that the startup was failing and going to shut its doors. They made some stupid speeches and pretended to care about all the lost jobs, said they did their best and one guy from the crowd muttered:
‘Well maybe if you two addicts actually did something besides snort coke and mess around we’d all have jobs.’
A stunned hush fell over the crowd as 200 people silently went, ‘LOL AWESOME!!!’ and the CFO said, ‘Excuse me? That is uncalled for. We’re going to have a chat with —’
And another person interrupted her and said, ‘Hey what’s that on your nose?’
CFO looked mortified when she wiped her nose and saw white powder …
It was a glorious moment.”
Things Get Out Of Hand Backstage
“At a summer theatre I performed at, a 17/18 year old hair and makeup intern was ‘befriended’ by a group of performers who were much older than her. At the opening night cast party, they got her wasted, took her back to their company-owned apartment, did their business, taped the whole thing, and showed it to other actors at the theatre the next day.
The messed up thing is that they fired the intern and sent her home for drinking underage at a company event. Absolutely nothing happened to the actors who assaulted a barely legal teenager (she claims she consented, but she could barely talk, she was so out of it). General consensus was that the theatre management thought it would be impossible to replace such a big chunk of the cast on such short notice, so they got rid of the ‘problem’ and swept it all under the rug. I’ve seen some pretty hedonistic stuff in my time in the arts, but that one always stuck out as particularly messed up.”
They Helped An Old Man, Then Lost Their Jobs
“I used to be a system administrator at a nursing home. One day, I’m at a branch fixing a cart PC and there is this guy screaming at the top of his lungs in the room next door. All the nurses and doctors treated my IT team like they were human scum, so when I tried to tell a nurse about him, she told me to mind my own ‘nerdy business’ and just get their computer fixed.
About half an hour goes by and he’s still screaming. I finally snap and yell at one of the nurses, she basically tells me to buzz off and file a complaint if I have an issue. So I recruit a maintenance man and we go in there and pick this guy up and put him back on his bed. He’s covered in poop and pee from laying on the floor for almost an hour. He thanks us profusely and explains that the help button was out of reach when he was on the floor so all he could do was scream.
As I was washing the poop and pee off my clothes and arms, a nurse comes in and goes nuts. She starts yelling about how she’s going to report us because we weren’t certified aids or nurses or something and by doing that we violated some laws. Then some doctor comes in and joins in with her. He starts telling us that he’s going to have our jobs and all this other junk. I didn’t even try to make my case with the doctor. I just said forget it and left.
About a week later, I get called into what I thought was a meeting. Little did I know it was a review board to go over my actions the week before. They explain to me how I put the company in a difficult place and they already had to let the maintenance man go because of it. I tried to make my case but they weren’t hearing it. I get put on third notice which is basically like strike three even though I had never had any notices before that day. A week later, I quit and mailed the maintenance guy my last pay check.
Worst job ever.”
Management Has Its Perks
“Thank goodness I didn’t personally witness this. One of our old managers, Tom, would use his position of power to woo some hapless servers. Trust me, it wasn’t his looks or personality. Now don’t get me wrong, he can mess with whomever he pleases, but he would wait until after hours and do it in the office, in full view of the security cameras. One server blew the whistle and all the managers involved had to watch the tapes. The front of house manager told me he was hairy like Ron Jeremy…without the package.”
Bringing Some Spice To The Cubicle Boring Cubicle Life
“One of my coworkers loved to wear miniskirts and go commando. I know this because our cubical desks didn’t have vanity panels and her desk faced mine across an aisle. I didn’t spend my time trying to look, mind you, but when she got on her hands and knees one day to check the wiring on her PC, it was hard not to notice.
She was also either a natural redhead or very thorough.”
Assisting Someone Else
“I had a friend who was a plumber. He was installing a water heater on the roof with his assistant.
He was on the roof and the assistant was fetching him tools and passing them up the ladder.
After a while, he asked his assistant for something and realized he wasn’t there, so he climbed down the ladder to see where he was.
He found him doing it with the homeowner’s maid on the kitchen table, they’d just met about one hour earlier.”
That’s One Way To Close The Deal
“I worked at a Nissan dealership located at a busy intersection in my city back in the early 2000’s. One of the younger car salesmen was trying to sell a new car to a woman who looked to be in her 40’s. It was going well, they were working on closing the deal. So I take a break and walk to the back car lot for a smoke to find the salesman wedged between 2 cars amongst a row of cars with the woman he was selling a car to on her knees doing the dirty. I was in complete shock. She never stopped and he just smiled and gave me a thumbs up. I am a 36 year old female and still think of this one often enough, ugh.”
She Wasn’t In The Stirrups For That Kind Of Procedure
“I work in a hospital ER. I had a female patient come in for pain where the sun don’t shine. I worked her up and positioned her in the stirrups so the doctor could come in and do a quick pelvic exam.
Right after I did that, a critical patient came in that required the doctor’s attention for awhile. After about 20 minutes I went back in to the pelvic exam patients room to apologize for the wait and put the stirrups back down so she could lay normally until the doctor had time to examine her.
I walked in to her boyfriend on his knees going down on her. I asked him what the heck he was doing and he told me he just couldn’t resist with her in that position. I tossed him out to the waiting room and told security he wasn’t allowed back in.
Turns out she had chlamydia…shocker.”
Sorry, The Hotel Is Booked For A Private Event
“I used to work at a fairly upscale hotel (no way am I saying which one).
The owners were a movie star and a politician, this was a great big estate type building that had 25 or so rooms.
So anyway, one of the owners was a little bit crazy. She would do things that aren’t exactly legal, all to achieve a visual aesthetic or give it what she called ‘the locations flair.’
Well, one weekend, there was a party for all of her rich friends, except it was not a normal party. It was a ‘getting busy’ kind of party, the entire hotel was blocked off for two days.
Now, they also had workers carrying drinks and food on trays and the owner originally approached us on-shift workers to try and get us to do that, except we also had to be topless, including the women. So we all said forget that and they had to hire externally for that event.
Not being there physically for the party, I only heard what I can imagine was the boink of a century for the venue.
Clean up was very poor, there was a stench of sweat, pee and other substances in many rooms which persisted for days. A couple of weeks after the party, apparently, a family staying in a room found a used contraceptive in a toy chest with kids toys in the room. They got a colossal compensation package for that one.”
A Terrible, Grisly Accident
“To work on jet engines, workers would stand on a platform. Most common was the B5 Stand, which has a small gap between the platform and stairs. One evening, a technician was working on an engine and was shuffling toward the back of the stand and closer to the ladder.
His foot was just wide enough that it slipped down into the gap to about mid shin. Naturally, as that side of his body rapidly dropped, he fell off the stand in the direction of the ladder. His femur snapped and he was stuck dangling by skin and muscle upside down, unable to bring himself back up. I was maybe 200 yards away and heard the screams. He had to be lifted up and his foot slipped out in order to free him.”
Don’t Eat The Popcorn
“I worked in a crusty movie theater when I was an innocent 16 year old. Here is a summary of the stuff I saw people my age doing:
*Popping prescription pain killers in the bathroom
*Dipping balls or spitting in the popcorn
*Workers doing it in theaters/closets/parking lot
*Cleaners popping E before their shift
*Various things smoked behind the dumpster
*Manager selling substances for employees to do on their shift
*Employee parties held in our 25 year old manager’s trailer
*Cans of graffiti remover next to popcorn bags lying around the back, it was common for them to be taken out and huffed.”
That’s Not On The Menu
“I managed a bar two years ago. I had this girl that bartended for me who would go missing on camera all the time. I had the cameras everywhere inside, she’d just disappear for half an hour at a time. I investigated. I was pretty close with a lot of the regulars (small, family owned place in a suburb) and came to find out that she had been offering herself for money. Soliciting inappropriate acts from behind my bar.
She was gone shortly thereafter. I couldn’t fire her for something that I couldn’t prove, I ended up letting her go for neglecting to fulfill her duties as a bartender. She was written up for multiple occasions of leaving the bar customers unattended and that was enough to get her the heck out. I don’t know if that could somehow fall back on me, or the bar, but I was not interested in finding out.”
K The Waitress Had To Go
“I worked at a restaurant a few years back. It was a terrible place to work at, in a shady part of town. Roaches, rats, management sleeping with servers during work hours, sketchy deals in the bathroom. They even had to have an off duty cop work as security, it was just a complete disaster. I was a hostess and I had the immense displeasure to work with this CRAZY girl I’ll call K.
K was rude. She was unprofessional, unhygienic, lazy, volatile, and had to have had some form of blackmail against the General Manager because if anyone else had pulled half the stuff she did, they’d have at least been written up, if not fired. She blatantly stole, argued with customers, pushed an old lady out of her way, disappeared for hours on end, and threatened several co-workers daily. I hated working with her. I would do anything I could to not work the same shifts.
What finally got K fired, though, was when she got into an argument with the District Manager. He told her to leave the premises, and she lost it. She spat on him, threatened to burn down the building and shoot up the place, and had to be walked out by security. Last I heard, she was working at the Whataburger nearby. I quit that job shortly after because they were talking about bringing her back.”
So Who Fires The CEO?
“I worked at a place that had a boardroom that overlooked the factory. The boardroom windows were covered in mirror vinyl and usually its brighter in the factory than the boardroom so you can’t see in from the factory.
After work, it’s getting dark so the lights in the boardroom are brighter than the factory so the effect is reversed and you can see everything in the boardroom from the factory but can’t see the factory from inside the boardroom.
That’s when the CEO walks into the boardroom and starts doing it with a receptionist on the boardroom table with a whole bunch of factory workers watching.”
That’s One Way Of Asserting Dominance
“A well qualified female was promoted to be a line supervisor at a manufacturing facility I worked at years ago. One of the men on the line was rather upset that he’d have to be reporting to a woman. When the newly promoted line supervisor was making her first review/inspection of the line, he dropped his pants and underpants and waved his junk at her in defiance. Her first administrative act as supervisor was to terminate his employment.”
She Couldn’t Handle That Class
“I wasn’t there to see it, but my coworkers have talked about ‘the cabinet incident.’ Last year was my first year of teaching and I was working in a low-income inner city school. People kept saying to me, ‘There’s no way you could possibly be worse than the last girl we had.’ When I asked what they meant, I was told that a few years prior, the principal had hired a first year teacher. Apparently one day, she got so overwhelmed and upset by the behavior of her class that she chucked a ream of paper out the window and then ran into the back room, shut herself in a big cabinet and cried. Her class was unsupervised for a while (apparently none of the kids had told anyone what happened) and when the principal found her, she was curled up on the floor of the cabinet, rocking back and forth and sobbing. Clearly, she was fired soon after that.
I didn’t stay at that school longer than a year because the principal was the equivalent of Satan, but when I left she said to me ‘despite all the hassle you were put through this year from your kids, you’re the first teacher I can remember who I never saw cry at school.’ I’ll take that as a compliment, I suppose.”
Going Into A More Suitable Line Of Work
“I walked into the office kitchen and had a female work colleague take off her top and asked me what I thought of her chest.
I was a bit blindsided by this and said, ‘I’ve only come for a cup of tea.’
This girl is young enough to be my daughter. A few days later, she came into my office, wiggled her bum at me and asked me what I thought of it.
I did raise this issue with the boss, who just laughed and said, ‘She’s a character.’ She had resigned anyway and I was taking over from her sans the flashing.
She told me she was a model and she couldn’t show me the photos because they ‘were not suitable for work.’
She had shown the photos to a very conservative sales rep, who refused to come to our office after that.
She also spent a lot of time dancing on a pole in the courtyard, and I’m not sure she was ever wearing underwear beneath her short skirt.”
That’s Amore
“I worked at an Italian restaurant/pizza place that was across the road from some cheap motels. Cheap motels were where tricks were turned. We found out the hard way that one of our pizza chefs was paying for illicit favors with pizza. I’d see him slip the girl a pizza through the window, then he’d disappear for 20 minutes. I only walked in on them in the act once and it was enough for me.”
That Is Definitely Not The Bathroom
“One of my coworkers took a dump in a client’s attic. I work in the life-safety department at my job. I install fire alarms, security systems, and access control both commercially and for residential. This particular client, a church complex mind you, happened to be one of the worst jobs that I have worked on. My coworker and I came into this job half finished as the previous person installing their systems put his two weeks in and didn’t care what happened to this place. Sheetrock was already put up in a lot of places and junctions of wire weren’t made up or acknowledged. Wires weren’t labeled, no wire map was made, etc. This is on top of a client who would change things constantly. A ‘We’re changing the ceiling tiles so you’ll have to reinstall all of the devices that you just put in’ sort of thing. We were finally finishing up this place weeks past schedule and way over bid and my coworker and I are finishing that last short pull to tie a pull station in that the client really wanted to move and I look over to see him pooping in this attic. On one hand I’m appalled at the lack of professionalism as I take pride in my work, but on the other hand, I’m sort of impressed that anyone could harbor that level of hatred to a person and place that they would DUMP in their attic.”
The List Goes On
“-The fire alarm went off at 6:30 in the morning because someone decided to not only smoke indoors but to break the smoke detector as well causing the entire office to be late to work for several hours as the fire department sorted everything out. Us early people got to watch the firetruck pull up to the wrong building before doing a comedic back out and race over to ours.
-A dead hobo was found outside covered in broken glass from one of the windows. No one knows what happened.
-TVs were installed in every break room with instructions that the only channel it could be on was CNN. We did this so in the event of some emergency broadcast that we needed to know about. It immediately became political because a lot of people felt they should be given the option to watch Fox News and it made the office environment heated. They changed the floor 3 break room to Fox News and announced that if you would like to watch CNN you can do so from floor 2. This sparked an immediate outrage so all TVs were removed.
-Walked into the bathroom to hear what was obviously some guy watching smut. He tried to cover it up (poorly) by coughing as loud as he could over the noise.
-Employee thought she was above everyone else and refused to play nice and provide information to be let back into the building because she left her badge at her desk. She got belligerent enough that the facility manager came downstairs and told her in under no uncertain terms that she needed to stop or she would be removed from the building. After she told him to get bent, he backed up and security promptly put her in handcuffs and called the cops.
-A couple that was dating had a fist fight in the parking lot that got serious enough to warrant getting security involved. Somehow talks about bringing a weapon came up and every entry point except for the front entrance that goes by the security desk was permanently locked down.
-One of the branch chiefs in HR was having an affair with one of the employees below him. She immediately turned into psycho stalker lady, somehow found out who his wife was and proceeded to stalk/harass her. He had to file a formal report about it as a result and stalker lady got fired.”
Oh, So That’s How That Works
“I was working in restaurant a few years back. Most of the servers were college aged women but there were a couple older ones approaching their 30’s. This specific one was older and had an infant. The younger servers were asking her questions about pregnancy and motherhood, and feeding came up. She thought the best way to explain it would to be to show them. So I’m in the back and she just pulls her whole chest out and squirts out some milk. Oh, I also saw a dishwasher doing crank.”
“Yeah, It Happens”
“We had a big Christmas gala at work. The marketing director brought his wife and daughter along because his brother owns the company and they pretty much did whatever they liked. His daughter, who was in her early twenties, spent the entire evening schmoozing around the tables, talking to ‘Daddy’s staff.’ She’s a good looking girl with not much between her ears – mostly because she doesn’t need anything there because she’s set for life. She spends time at our table, taking someone else’s seat, gets up and cozies up to her dad, puts her arm around him while he wipes the traces of powder from his nose. The daughter moves on table hopping and chatting, the whole entire time she has half her chest fully out, it’s all anyone is looking at, no one cares that dad is wired out of his mind, no one mentions mom’s awful full back tattoo, nope just the kids chest. Finally someone gets the gall to mention it to her, she looks down, moves her hair out of the way so everyone gets a better look and just says, ‘Yeah, it happens.'”
“Everyone Would Get Absolutely Wild”
“I worked in a bar once where on the Saturday around Valentine’s day a group of people would run a half mile in their underwear in around 20 degree weather and all come into our bar when it was over. I don’t know what it was, probably a mixture of the extreme cold and people in their underwear, but everyone would get absolutely wild.
I walked downstairs to the basement bar to clear away glasses and two girls and a guy were getting very busy.
Security and the bartenders watched for a couple minutes before kicking them out.”
Take Cover In The Next Bunker, This One Is Occupied
“While in the military, I was deployed in Qatar, and a man and woman were in a ‘bunker’ going to town. They saw me, while I peed in the bunker next to them, and by the time I finished, they were on the steps to our domicile crying…well the guy was, talking about his marriage was over (probably thinking I would snitch). I casually told them that I don’t care, as I walked back inside.”