35 Reddit Stories About Coworkers People Still Think About, For All the Wrong Reasons

I'm pretty cool about eh, people all have their role to play, but one time we had a secretary that would microwave eggs and canned tuna every morning in a bowl. Now... I am not an angry person, but the smell generated from microwaved eggs and canned tuna is downright repulsive by anyone's standards.

I had a manager once who dumped trash on my desk on 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).

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 an 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 had problems and was going to rehab. I wished him well. The next day, he tried to break in after closing and was caught.

I worked with a teacher who sat at his desk the ENTIRE year. Kids walked in and out whenever they wanted to. They did practically no work. He told bad jokes and was terrible with the students. One day, I was sitting in the teacher's workroom, and another teacher noticed a phone on the counter. She asked if it was mine. When I said no, we looked at the lock screen to see whose it might be. The picture on the lock screen was an inappropriate picture. A few minutes later, the bad coworker walked in and picked it up. Needless to say, he was let go.

I once worked with a guy in a kitchen who frequently misread decimal points. Once he gathered 100kg of flour because a recipe asked for 1.00kg of flour.

I worked retail with a guy once who was the worst. He would always go to the gym before work, and would never shower. He stank so bad. He was also a self-important person who thought he knew everything. He wouldn't let his girlfriend even get a haircut without clearing it with him first. He never said it, but you could tell he thought men were much better at everything than women. He would regularly come and do my jobs, without me asking, jobs I was very capable of doing myself. I would just tell him to go away.

I worked with a guy who regularly googled everyone we worked with. He knew information about the apartment we had just sold and told everyone at our department meeting how much we sold it for.

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 got called back a couple of days later by my managers, and they circled me in an office and accused me of stealing. After tears, videotapes, and telling them what happened, they told me that, apparently, this coworker of mine had stolen not only from me, but also from several other people that day as well. They just wanted to confirm I wasn't in on the deal.

Oh, I have several. But to pick one I guess one of the worst was the one who every time they walked up behind me they'd grab my shoulder and squeeze my shoulder every time they walked past me even if they weren't trying to get my attention (Which I think the most appropriate way to get someone's attention is to call out their name or to tap them on the shoulder instead of grabbing and squeezing their arm) and I've had a traumatic childhood so I especially never took this behavior well. I ended up reporting it to my supervisor.

Had a co-worker who always gossiped about others and would say horrible things about everyone in the office. It created a super toxic culture and caused many people to leave, not because they didn’t like the work, but because they just hated the culture.

I have several bad ones, but the one that drives me the craziest 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.

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.

I worked somewhere in the last 3 years where they hired a secretary who refused to use a computer! I couldn't believe it in this day and age.

This girl I work with is overly picky about stuff, everything has to be her way or no way... She does everything louder to make it seem like she’s working, but she’s not actually getting anything done. She has been caught stealing from other servers several times, but we have no concrete proof. She “accidentally” takes people’s tips.

My old supervisor. She was that special brand of "too nice." Laughing was her nervous tic, and oh boy, it was CONSTANT. She was incapable of being assertive, which is not the best quality for someone whose job is telling other people what to do. The best she could do was be passive-aggressively nice when she really needed something done, which just made everyone dislike her.

At my first-ever job, I worked with a middle-aged guy who lived in his car, picked at his face constantly, and would always ask me and the other teenage employees if we needed a ride home from work. He gave off the creepiest vibe and was eventually fired.

This might not seem that bad if you haven’t worked with someone like this, but mine was an overly dramatic coworker. She would come in and start complaining about traffic as if no one had experienced something so awful before. Then she would complain about everyone in the office. “So and so has been at lunch for a while, must be nice,” then loudly complain as people left that she had to stay because she apparently thought she had more work than anyone else. Reality was that while she was complaining, we were working. It’s draining being around someone like that every day.

The woman who talks a lot. She can give a ten-minute answer to a yes-or-no question. And that's not an exaggeration. The problem is, she still knows a lot about the job (and uses her excessive words to prove it), so she's the hero of the upper management.

He just...wouldn't work. Just wouldn't. This was in a research lab. He was a visiting researcher from another country, and he spent a lot of time asking tons of non-work-related questions, to the point of disrupting others' work. In the course of a year, he designed one very basic experiment and didn't actually do it. Just designed it. He was above doing bench work, apparently. He picked fights with everyone doing any experiment related to the one he was planning, because he didn't want to have to share credit with anyone. He wouldn't clean up after himself, wouldn't pick up things from the floor. He actually called me in from another room because he wouldn't take a stringless tea bag out of his mug. Also on a different occasion, because he'd knocked some things off a hanger on the back of the door and for whatever reason wouldn't pick them up. It was kind of like working with a child. He must've had servants where he lived. I don't know how, but he was there for his PhD. The boss fired him. He was one of two people in her 30+ year career that she'd ever fired.

Current new(est) hire at the bakery I work at. He nailed the interview. He was a former kitchen manager at multiple well-off restaurants, worked at a few bakeries, etc. Dude can’t measure anything. Everything is consistently wrong. He doesn’t clean up, he smells, he comes in late, and leaves early. If you try to fix the issue or show him how to do something correctly, or that he did something wrong, he just gives you puppy face.