Being a good coworker can mean different things to different people, but being a bad coworker? Thats somehow seems to be easier to pinpoint and explain. We all know the worst people we’ve worked with over the years, and for me, some of them seemed pretty awful at the time.
But now, reading about the people these 18 people share daily space with, idk. Maybe mine weren’t so bad after all.
18. This isn’t surprising but it’s also kind of sad.
Hired a cook on a good recommendation. He was just fine the first two weeks. Then I noticed food going missing. Then supplies started going missing. Then a customer told me that he had been adding auto 30% tips his food purchases. When I looked at the books, I saw that he had been adding 30% tips to ALL the credit card sales. And the cash rings were off from what should have been sold. I fired him that day.
The next day he came in and apologized. Said he was on drugs and was going to rehab. I wished him well. Then next day he tried to break in after close and was caught. Idiot.
17. Sounds like someone isn’t as smart as they’d like to think.
My coworker likes to initiate conversations, then does long pauses where you go to say something back, then he cuts you off and keeps talking. He has entire conversations almost entirely by himself. He also likes to make changes to my paperwork before its turned in.. ends up riddled with spelling mistakes while he tries to make the content look smarter. Fortunately its all electronically stamped with who made revisions.
16. Really inspires you to leave your kid with people, doesn’t it?
I worked in childcare, and they had hired a new assistant/trainee teacher for my room(each room has 2 teachers).
She just constantly argued about the dumbest shit, and always tried to argue with me about both company and state childcare policies because “that’s dumb”. Also was late every day her first week there. It all just started adding up until I was changing diapers and she was holding a 2 yr old child on her lap. I see a child biting another child and say “you need to go help them” as I have a child in the middle of a very explosive poopy diaper change up on the changing table and can’t leave him there obviously.
She doesn’t get up. I repeat it, and she says “Well I have this kid on my lap” so I say “take him off your lap”. She responds “he’s strong” like this grown ass adult is unable to move a 2 year old off her lap because of some weird super strength. Then the child bites the other child again and at that point I’m mad and tell her to get up and help them now. She then proceeds to say “So what, I have to watch these 4 kids while you just have ONE up on the table?!” like I’m somehow supposed to have multiple children on the table at once to make her job of sitting on the floor making sure kids don’t get bit twice in a row easier, and our ratios were 4:1 anyways. I
finished my diaper change, stuck my head out the door to my supervisor and told her “get this lady out of my room” and they did after and wrote her up after reviewing the footage of the incident. She was fired for no call no showing the next week. I’ve worked with a lot of idiots in childcare but she was so shitty in such a short amount of time.
15. It sounds like she probably didn’t much care.
Worked with a girl who would sometimes just lay in the floor and play on her phone.
She would routinely flip out about something her boy friend did and just start screaming curse words, sometimes in front of customers.
She was eventually fired for smoking weed while on the clock.
14. Sounds like it would have been easier for the company to just fire her.
The HR manager at my last job had zero training, education or experience in HR. She was argumentative, passive aggressive and incompetent.
Toward the end she asked me “Why are you being resistant” and “You’re not being a team player.” when I was advocating for client safety.
I was the second person in less than a year to leave and hire an attorney.
13. I’d like to know how that woman rose to the top.
I had a manager once who dumped trash on my desk my third day there.
She said it was to remind me that taking out the trash was part of my job description (it wasn’t, I was a research assistant at a mortgage firm)
12. Wouldn’t it be simpler to just do your job right the first time?
I have several bad ones but the one that drives me the most crazy is a lady who creates problems just so she can solve them. Ugh.
She takes a simple job, finds the one tiny issue, blows that up and freaks everyone out and then “solves” it so she can be the hero. Just take the 1 minute to fix the issue in the first place.
It would save the literal hours she spends working everyone up so she can be their savior.
11. I feel like this is not an uncommon story.
Fast food. Third shift.
The only other employee stayed in the bathroom doing blow.
10. Well, that took a turn.
I’ve worked a lot of factories, but one I worked at was mainly for felons. The pay you complete shit and work you so hard it tears you body and mind up. I just graduated high school and it was my second factory so I didn’t know any better. One guy I work with, we nick named Big Matt since we already had another Mat.
Well big Matt was a big fan of crystal and steroids so the dude was absolutely jacked, but this 35 year stilled lived with his mom. He said it had to do with him being a kid and walking in her being raped and ever since then he never wanted to leave her alone. At the time I thought wow, that would explain the substance abuse, he just wants to be strong to protect her. Well, I was a fucking idiot.
Two months later, Big Matt and two coworkers didn’t show up, so I asked the supprivisor what happened but he didn’t know either. Next day one of the coworkers came in and told us that all three had been arrested because after buying an o of weed, Big Matt’s mom called the cops on them. So before the cops showed up Big Matt, a 6 foot some odd inch buff meth head beat his mother with in an inch her life for calling the cops on him.
Next day I looked him up, and sure enough he was booked in a local prison.
Suppose that has to be the worst coworker out of all the ones I faced
9. You have to be pretty bad to have not one single supporter.
Context: I work in a hospital as a nurse’s aid and my department focuses on transporting patients around the facility for tests and room changes. I work night shift and this person started their shift at 6 am.
There was this lady I worked with that just had the nastiest attitude. Normally I can get along with most folks but this person just brought the whole room down with negative vibes. Nothing was ever good and she always had bad shifts. One thing she did that upset a lot of people was take patients down for xrays and leave them down there to return to our office. The big thing to remember here is that even the lengthiest xrays take maybe 10 minutes at the very most (2-5 mins on average for the scans). Every morning we got xrays to do and I had to send her back down to return patients to their rooms after the xray technicians called right as she got back to our office.
The instances of leaving patients were common so I informed my boss several times in-person and email. Apparently she had an attitude with every other department we worked with and never informed nurses that we were moving their patients (big no no when meds and vital signs need to be done). One day she had abandoned a patient in the ER waiting room when they were waiting for a ride home and told no one so security had found a patient just sitting alone for 15-30 mins without supervision. It took this and a year of recorded evidence for this person to finally get fired. When that happened it’s like a dark cloud lifted and a lot of people were relieved.
Oh and she tried to get various employees around the facility to sign a form to argue against her case – one person signed.
8. What an absolute psycho.
This is about 15 years ago but the office I worked in instituted a scent free policy. One woman, who was already insufferable, was so offended by it that she snuck in her perfume collection.
She’d walk down the halls and spray perfume into empty offices or cubicles when no one was looking or before everyone arrived in the morning.
This went on for well over a month or two and we had no idea who was responsible. My coworkers and I started referring to this mysterious person as the Chanel Bandit.
She was finally caught on camera in the act. She’d left for three weeks vacation and was unaware that we had installed cameras after a break in. Some of us already suspected her, as the Chanel Bandit mysteriously stopped spraying while she was away.
She quit right after she was caught. None of us were sad to see that cedar scented psycho leave.
7. That’s not the initial conversation you want to have.
Not necessarily a “co-worker” but my old supervisor literally told me not to think, even if it’s wrong that I do things her way, and not to ask questions because I should already know what to do.
I had just gotten the position.
6. This is one of the weirdest things I have ever read and honestly, I need a followup.
I worked at Starbucks for a year (one of the very worst years of my life) and while I was there had a coworker named Eric.
I was at the till the day Eric came in with his resume, and there under his name he had typed “architect of imagination.” Eric was an aspiring writer, but he had trouble stringing a sentence together. He couldn’t be on the machine because he couldn’t remember how to use it or how any single drink was made. He couldn’t be a support role because he had no way of predicting or understanding what anyone else on the floor needed or even was saying. He couldn’t be on register because he couldn’t mark a cup and even our most patient customers would inevitably raise their voices at his incompetence. Reliably, he would genuinely look like he was about to cry. I was so torn between rage and pity… he made a terrible job so much harder, but he was just so breathtakingly, pitifully, shockingly dumb. I have never met anyone like him – before or since.
One night I was thinking about something particularly vicious I had said in response to something particularly baffling Eric had done, and found myself wondering about his life outside of our store. Was the world scary and confusing to Eric? Did it seem like life was just happening to him? I imagined him standing in traffic, looking vaguely surprised and confused, forgetting how he had gotten there. I looked him up on Facebook and was pretty disturbed by what I found.
Eric didn’t look awkward or scared on Facebook. He looked stylish, suave. He had product in his hair. Beautiful women in expensive-looking clothes smiled in his photos. Several posted on his wall, expressing what a good time they’d had with him recently, often siting a “writing sesh”. It felt like I was on a different plane. It felt like I was having a stroke.
So then my question became, who is Eric?? And who is scamming whom??
The popular theory in the store was that Eric was essentially a method actor, doing research for a book or script. I came close to asking him about it a few times, but I was so afraid that I was wrong. I imagined myself over and over asking, “Are you a method actor, or are you really and truly this stupid?” It just wasn’t something I could bring myself to risk. I wonder about him all the time, actually, and who he might be terrorizing today.
5. Sounds like it was definitely time to retire.
When I was an intern, there was this old shrew who would call people into her office (my cube shared a thin wall), gossip, then call those people in to tell them what was said, etc.
She would try to frame people for shit she did wrong. She was so arrogant. And she refused to adapt to workforce modernization. Example: she refused to learn how to hyperlink in emails, documents, etc. A real ray of sunshine she was!
4. What is it with dudes and pooping?
This guy named Daniel I used to work with at McDonald’s in high school.
He let everyone know he worked out and enjoyed being on the football team. He had this thing about taking 5 shits a day.
He would walk by on his way back from the toilet, chest out, shoulders back and triumphantly announce “that’s shit number 3!”… fucking Daniel.
3. Some people have a lot of nerve.
No contest. It was the literal crackhead I worked with for 4 months that was also secretly living in the office and being completely nonsensical when he was actually “working”. We found a mattress folded up in the warehouse after he was let go and an actual, brand new crack pipe (with a price tag on it, to boot) squirreled away back there.
He and his family (not just him living in the office!) left discarded food everywhere like pizza crusts in the toilet brush holder in the bathroom (wat even) and they left hair in the sink in the bathroom as they were obviously bathing in there, too, as we had no actual bathing facilities in the office.
One day during his tenure, he sent an e mail saying his alarm didn’t go off and he’d be in at x time, which kept getting moved back later and later. He eventually showed up at 4:40 pm and we closed at 5 pm, lol. See comment above about secretly living in the office.
There’s so much more I could go into; it was a wild 4 months, that’s for sure.
2. I mean. Bless his heart?
He would walk in every day like it was his first day with no memory of anything we showed him the previous day. He was only focused for the first 30 minutes then the rest of the time would be on his phone and try to work with one hand which is bad because I work in a restaurant. Can’t cook with one hand but that didn’t stop him from trying then one day he just stopped showing up for like a week then was confused when he came back and was fired.
Edit: I’m not sure if he had memory issues or anything like that, at least he didn’t tell us or the owner. He did however like to talk about how easy our job was because he’d had four other restaurant jobs before this one. He was only 19, but we didn’t make him do anything complicated but he would forget easy things like where we kept burger buns or where buttons were on the register. Also he always left trash laying around after he was done with a job it would be me and my other coworkers who cleaned up after him and his excuse was always that he didn’t think it mattered because it was gonna get cleaned up eventually.
He still comes in every once in a while to watch our Tv, sometimes with friends and sometimes by himself, he never buys anything but he just does it quietly so no one bothers him.
1. Whoa, what a nightmare.
My worst co-worker was one I worked with when I was a cashier at Walmart. She approached me and asked me to cash out her paycheck. I was still new at the job and never got training on how to do that function. She was sympathetic, so she walked me through how to do it. Transaction over and done, I go on about my day.
I get called back a couple of days later by my managers and they circled me in an office and accused me of stealing. After tears, video tapes, and telling them what happened they told me that apparently this coworker of mine had stolen not only from me, but several other people that day as well. They just wanted to confirm I wasn’t in on the deal.Fuck Walmart, and fuck that bitch for almost getting me arrested.
What is wrong with people, y’all?
Do you have a story that could rival any of these? If so, please share it with us in the comments!
