9. Dianne and Brenda
Dianne and Brenda from the pet store.
Both were old ladies with horribly bad attitudes. They both believed they were just a step below the managers and acted like total [jerks] 90% of the time, even to customers. Dianne had about a dozen or so complaints against her from customers while I worked there, things like breaking merch by throwing it down into the bag really hard, slamming the cash register because someone forgot to give her their coupon, making a big show of wiping something off the counter and throwing it into the trash can angrily.
Probably the funniest thing happened because of a policy our store had. The cashier had to say ‘Hello’ to every single customer who walked through the door. Dianne was in a pissy mood one day because the manager told me to put something away, he usually asked her to put things away and she was jealous. When I got back, she said something like ‘Doing anything you can to get off that register, you’re lazy.’ I told her to [go away]. The next customer who walked through the door heard her say in her loudest booming voice ‘HELLO!’ It was the most angry hello in the history of greetings and was so shocking the customer jumped with fright.
Brenda had no sense of humor and reported me to the manager for every joke I made. Once she asked what I did all weekend, I jokingly said ‘I drank myself into a coma Friday and woke up Sunday.’ She went to the manager telling him he should piss test me for drugs because I admitted to doing drugs on the weekends. Once I was joking around with another cashier and said ‘I’m going to just clock out, go home, and go back to bed, cover for me please.’ She ran to the manager quickly and told him I was about to walk out on the job.
By the time I put in my two weeks there, I’d just started saying off the wall [stuff to mess] with her.
10. Sneaky sneaky…
I was a swing manager at McDonalds in high school. We had one employee, Johnny, who just didn’t want to do any work. He was in the kitchen so his duties were to cook, prep, clean, and restock. His favorite thing to do was prep. Ask the man to make a Big Mac and you’d get the worst sandwich ever. Ask him to slice tomatoes and you’d get perfection.
Anyways, one day we’re really busy and I’m helping out in the basement with an inventory order. Johnny comes downstairs and his hand is sliced, bad. Down to the bone, bleeding everywhere. It looked like he put his hand in the tomato slicer and just smashed it onto his hand. Thing is, he was so calm. Looked pleased with himself. We sent him home thinking that was that. He strolled out, said goodbye to his coworkers and we never saw or heard from him again. That night I’m sorting out all the tills to take the dailies to the safe drop at the bank. We’re missing nearly $5,000 in cash from the manager’s safe. Never happened before. Never happened again. Don’t know how he did it.
11. Jenny
Jenny is 30 or 31. I have never worked with a more incompetent person in any job, ever. We’re both pharmacy technicians, and I honestly believe that if she keeps working in this job, she’s going to kill someone. Over the past few months, I’ve had to deal with some of the most incredibly stupid questions that could ever come out of a person’s mouth, especially since she went to one of the local trade schools to prepare her for this ‘career’: ‘Is a tablet the same as a milligram? What’s that cancer that makes your hair fall out? Is crystal meth kept in the safe?’
Recently, Jenny had a conversation with a pharmacist who was filling in at our store for a few days last week. The pharmacist was talking to her about school, after hearing that she’s going to one of the big technical colleges in the area, and asked what she was studying there.
Jenny: ‘I’m studying engineering.’
Pharmacist: ‘Oh, that’s cool.’
Jenny: ‘Yeah, I don’t even know what that means, but I’m hoping to get a job making those board things that go in computers.’
I’m hoping she quits soon; she hates the job because ‘people be telling me what to do, like ‘Jenny do this’ and ‘Jenny do that’,’ and just recently told a pharmacist that when it comes to doing the basic tasks like helping to put our weekly order away or using the register, she doesn’t care if it’s part of her job description, she doesn’t want to do it.
12. Failure to Communicate
I work in an engineering contracting firm. We mainly do electro-mechanical work from water-related projects.
We had this one electrical engineer who had a major issue with communication. I was his project engineer for one project and he would never ever ask me anything or give me any information unless I asked for it. He would never take on tasks unless I told him to do task X, Y. He never even communicated with the mechanical engineer, although for our projects, there needs to be a lot of coordination. When we’d find out something went wrong on the electrical side, he’d blame us for not giving him information. Or he would blame us for not asking him to confirm beforehand. Further, whenever I’d ask him for something over the phone, no matter how small (like confirmation on an instrument tag number for example), he would request that I write him an official e-mail with the question.
Needless to say, we [messed] up on every project he’s worked on. He was fired.
13. Dirty Gurneys
I used to work for a full-body donation facility. Like, you donate your body to science, we would cut it up and send your different parts to researchers all over the world. In this facility we had lots of gurneys to transport the 7-8 bodies we received a day. We would also cut up the bodies on the gurneys…which meant these things were disgusting. We cleaned them…but still.
My coworkers and I began noticing that some of the gurneys weren’t always in their rightful place when we opened shop in the morning. Immediately you think, ‘ghosts.’ Nope. Turns out two employees were always staying late and having sex on them. They didn’t get fired for it. They did get fired though, when they forged letters to their welfare agent saying they got paid below X amount of dollars and still needed welfare. Which was a lie. They signed the bottoms of the letters, each claiming to be the other’s boss.
14. “Baby mama issues”
We had a guy on the night shift that would come to work clock in and then drive away, come back at the end of his shift and clock out. The manager was told about it a number of times but said ‘I didn’t see it, so I can’t do anything about it.’ This guy was doing this for over a year. I ask what was up and the manager said, ‘He has baby mama issues.’
15. Darwin Award Winner
I had a coworker so incompetent he only LIVED for 2 days.
A bit of background: I worked construction back in the day and was working at the world expo 88 site in Brisbane, Australia dismantling the buildings and displays.
Anyway, day one of this new guy showing up for work, I was teamed with him as we had a pretty easy task of using a cherry picker inside the USA pavilion and removing ceiling panels. I was stacking them in the cherry picker with us and he decides he is just gonna start throwing them over the side, telling me they had to be down there anyway, well, one of the panels smashes into the side of the cherry picker severing the main hydraulics hose. The thing dropped out from under us so fast we were both briefly floating in the air before we came crashing down on it and bounced out. I was pissed, he thought it was a big joke.
Next day: I am teamed with him again which didn’t make me very happy at all.
We are now working on the monorail station platform loosening bolts from the concrete walkway that lead to the top where you would board the train for the tour of the site.
While we are doing this we are told the crane needed to be re-positioned so it could lift the concrete slabs from the walkway, I take this to mean we got ourselves a few minutes break so I walked away to go sit under a tree, I look up and see the idiot I am working with standing underneath the platform so I motion for him to come to me because it wasn’t bolted down, he refuses so I walk over to him and explain that to him and he just shrugs and says whatever, he just wants to be there to chain the crane to the slab asap so we can go do something else.
After a minute or so of telling him he is a moron I just turn and walk away, not 3 steps into the walk I hear a mighty crash and the ground below me shudders, I turn back and the concrete slab above this guy has fallen on him. I run over and start lifting the slab (which by the way is apparently 3 tons) and between me and another worker we lifted it. At that point just about every drop of blood in this guys body came shooting out from under the slab from the deep gashes in the top of his head.
Needless to say, he died instantly but damn that guy just didn’t give a [crap] and I still can’t work on construction sites because of that event.
