Recently, we wrote about the wildest, most memorable coworkers people ever had, and now we're back for even more. Here are the terrifying, heartbreaking, and downright bizarre coworker stories the BuzzFeed Community shared.*
*We also included some responses from this Reddit thread.
1. "I had a technician that worked for me kill his wife, who also worked for me, with a hammer. He came to work as if nothing had happened, told me that she was sick and wouldn't be in, and put the hammer into his toolbox. Imagine my surprise when the cops showed up a couple of hours later looking for him."
2. "I worked with a girl who faked kidney failure, dialysis, surgery, the whole bit, to take advantage of the company's sick leave policy. She'd come back from weekends sunburned but always had a story of why she was outside during the weekend (i.e. watching her brother play kickball). She was found out when we contacted her parents to try to get her hospital room number so that we could send her get-well flowers."
3. "During one summer in college, I worked at a summer camp where the counselors' ages ranged from high schoolers (you had to be at least 15 to work there) to young adults. One year, a counselor who was in her 20s was fired because she was texting a bunch of the teenaged girl counselors asking them to have sleepovers with her and her husband, about their sexual history, to send pictures of themselves to her and her husband, and just other inappropriate things. She would even give their numbers to her husband, and he would text them. She was immediately fired, and the parents of the girls understandably wanted to press charges, but law enforcement said they couldn't since nothing physically happened. I hope those two are on some watchlist because I fear what will happen when they manage to find a victim."
4. "I delivered pizza for Papa John's for about four years. Obviously you see a lot of people come and go during that amount of time, but one guy stood out. He got lost on all his runs, even basic short hops down major roads. ... After a few days of this, the manager finally decided to let him go. He grabbed his car topper and spiked it at the ground, then came around front and tried to throw it through the front window. ... She got a restraining order on him, and we thought that was that. Fast-forward a month or two."
"I am the closing driver, and the only other person working is the shift lead, who's in the cash office counting down tills. I am walking out the front door with a big delivery. As I start to load the bag into my car, I notice several police sirens, and I can tell they're moving pretty fast. I look over my right shoulder at the main thoroughfare we were located on and see two cop cars flying down the street. I instinctively track left to follow them, but they don't go where I think they should be. I become aware that something wild is happening right now as I see a pickup fly up over the curb into our parking lot and hurtle toward the store with the cops following. The car slams into the front floor-to-ceiling windows and through the front counter. The truck is completely inside the store when it comes to a stop. Cops fly out and swarm the vehicle. I hear screaming about a grenade. Up 'til that point, I've been standing less than 10 feet from where all this happened, and it suddenly hits me how close I came to getting hit, and I finally get the fuck out of the area.
Turns out my old coworker was severely off balance. He had started fucking with a cop at the Denny's down the road, hit a cruiser with his truck, then backed up and hit it again, then took off, and they gave chase. For some reason, he decided to end their chase at the place he'd worked for several days."
5. "I had a colleague who was married with three children. We knew each other enough to say hello and make small talk, during which we learned that our daughters shared a first name. From that point on, we'd often talk about our families and home life to the point where I considered him a friend. A few months later, he told me his wife was leaving him for another man. He was distraught but seemed like he was trying to accept it as much as possible. A friend and I met him for coffee one evening and talked with him about his divorce. He was sad but resigned; he even said he loved her very much, that he just wanted her to be happy, and had no intention of dragging out the divorce. Two days later, I learned that he had gone to the boyfriend's apartment where his wife and kids were."
"He confronted the boyfriend, then killed him with a gun, then shot himself in the head. Thank God the wife and children were spared. I'm still baffled that there had been no signs of what he had been planning."
6. "At my first job ever, I worked with a coworker who did meth in the bathroom. Meth. He had worked there for two years and never got caught. One day he came up to me after the store closed (this was a grocery store) and asked if I could cover the last hour of his shift since he covered an hour for me earlier this week. I said sure, and he was so excited that he took a bottle of windex off the shelf and took a drink of it."
7. "I worked at a monkey lab, and Mark, the night security guard, would take the security truck, pick up some booze, drive 80 miles to San Francisco, pick up a sex worker, drive the 80 miles back to his trailer, drink more, get laid, drive the sex worker back to San Francisco, and then would return to work still drunk, right before the morning crew showed up. On a fairly regular basis."
8. "Back in the early '80s at a private tow pound in New York City, I witnessed a guy take off another guy's left arm with a machete, just above the elbow, in one stroke. The guy that had his arm sliced off was a pretty big dude, and the guy with the machete was a little guy. ... The big guy would mercilessly tease the little guy and had recently taken to smacking him on the back of the head whenever the opportunity presented itself. On the fateful day, after getting smacked in the head, the little guy warned him that if he ever touched him again, he would cut off his arm. The big guy couldn't resist, and as the little guy walked by a few minutes later, he smacked him on the head."
"The little guy went straight to the boss's office and asked to borrow $20 in advance on his salary which the boss was glad to do as up until that day, the little guy was one of his best workers. The little guy walked a couple of blocks to a hardware store, bought a machete and had it sharpened, wrapped it up in a newspaper and returned to the tow pound. The big guy was sitting in his tow truck with his left arm out of the window, and I was about 12 feet away when the little guy slid the machete from his makeshift newspaper scabbard and delivered the single blow. He then placed the machete on the floor and sat down in a chair to wait for the cops.
There was lots of blood, screams from the big guy, yelling for ice to put the severed arm in, freaking pandemonium, and the whole time, the little guy just sat there and waited for the cops to arrive."
9. "Back in the day where dial-up internet ruled, I worked for a large airline. One of my coworkers would often work late, and apparently, he liked to surf porn. He later explained to me that this was because the airline paid for wired broadband, so he could surf at high speed."
"Anyway, he worked late one night and went about his (apparently) regular late-night porn surf. He was especially fond of erotic stories featuring young Asian women. You may be wondering how I know this: It was because he printed these stories (to take home later?) and in his post-whack daze, left them on the printer.
So, the following morning, the Christianity-as-a-lifestyle lady that sat directly next to the printer got a fun bonus when she went to print something — a thick stack of erotica. To give context to her outrage, this is a woman who would take her breaks to pray, kept multiple pictures of Jesus at her desk, and would wedge bible verses into conversation.
Oddly, this didn't get the gentleman fired. ... The head of our department promised David that next time, he would be fired. To go along with that, David was now under constant scrutiny. Whenever David left the office for any length of time, the head of the department would wander over and start probing David's machine for incriminating evidence. This put a big damper in David's private internet time, at least for a little while. Six months later, the heat had died down quite a bit, and David started right back up again. His desires had apparently shifted, and now young Asian women no longer sufficed. His preferences had migrated to photos of barely legal Asians. No doubt you realize how I knew this — yes, buried several folders deep, David was keeping his digital spank-bank on his company owned computer.
If you think this is the point where the story ends, and David gets the pink-slip, you'd be wrong. Our mutual employers desire to fire him was only equaled by their desperate need for qualified employees. So, David stayed. The head of the department told him that next time, he would most certainly be fired.
As is often the case with companies, the airline we worked for was owned by an even larger company. ... The folks working at the parent company...treated everyone at the airline with a casual disregard that would shock royalty. ... David ended up working with a member of the IT department for the parent company. While they worked together on some connectivity project, the guy from the parent company made it a point to insult David, David's work, and the network it ran on. ... David took this as a challenge, and went about running a just recently released NTLM password cracker on the parent company's network. To no one's surprise, David was able to harvest a large portion of the parent company's usernames and passwords. The next time those parent company guys gave David any crap, he was going to show them.
A few days later, David ended up back on the phone with the same IT guy from the parent company. As expected, he was just as abusive to David as ever. David pulled out his secret weapon, and told the IT guy in intimate detail how easy it was for him to get the parent company's passwords, and how their network wasn't any more secure than the airline's.
The next day, David, our department head, and the CEO of the airline went into an office, and David was unceremoniously shit-canned. The IT guy from the parent company had labeled David as a hacker and went to the head of the parent company to make sure David's career was over. Not satisfied with simply terminating David, the FBI was also called in to look into the hacking, as well as allegations that David was trafficking in child pornography. That's right, David's cache of barely-legal porn was now the subject of an FBI investigation. His coworkers were compelled to give statements to the feds, and his direct supervisor, when asked about the ages of the women in David's porno stash, emphatically replied, 'With Asian girls, you never can tell!'
The feds were never able, or never interested in building a case against David, and he quietly moved on to other work."
10. "I worked for a car dealership, and one of the representatives in the buy center (where people could come in and sell their cars to the dealer group to become used car inventory) would walk around carrying his steering wheel. It was a quick release steering wheel — like what people usually put on a race car — but inexplicably, he'd put it on his CRV and would just take it off every day when he parked and take it around with him. He didn't work there very long, but it made an impression... So when he ended up on the news for murdering his ex-girlfriend, it made it a lot easier to remind curious coworkers who he was."
"'Who was that?' 'The one who carried the steering wheel around.' 'OH! THAT GUY!'"
11. "When I was in high school, I worked at Best Buy. In the back warehouse there was a cardboard crusher, and one day another employee and I were throwing boxes down into it. All of a sudden, the machine jams and starts making an awful noise. Apparently, someone had put a wooden pallet down the chute, but before I could say or do anything, the guy I'm working with says, 'I got it.' He then proceeds to dive head first into the cardboard crusher and ride the 12-foot steel chute like a slide. The warehouse manager saw what just happened and lost his shit. He came running across the warehouse screaming, 'Did he just jump in there? He did not just jump in there!' The manager runs over and hits the emergency stop button, and the guy comes out of the Cardboard Crusher wondering what the big deal was. Should probably mention, too, that that employee was missing the tops of two fingers because he had cut them off in shop class."
12. "A guy from my office robbed a bank in the middle of the day while driving one of the company's vehicles that had been assigned to him — which was caught on camera."
13. "I worked with a guy at a fast food restaurant who turned out to be a neo-Nazi. One day he and another coworker quit to go traveling together. A couple weeks later, we find out during police questioning that he had brutally murdered the coworker friend with a machete and set his body on fire several states over."
14. "In the conference room, during a meeting, my boss gets up, walks to the corner of the room, and while still talking, unzips his pants and pisses in a fake plant. He then sits back down like nothing happened, still mid-sentence."
15. "I had a coworker who got caught performing sex acts in the parking lot with his drug dealer. Who caught him? A 15-year-old hostess! It was her first and last night working there! Poor thing — it was also her first job. The guy in the car performing just never came back in!"
16. "A longtime coworker at McDonald's said you would not get burned if you stuck your hand in the fryer oil and pulled it out really quickly. I said you would. He showed me. He got burned."
17. "I once went and hung out with a coworker at their house. She told me she has to let her dog hump her leg. The dog has a 'specific' whine for when it wants to hump her leg. About 30 minutes into us hanging out, the dog whines — my coworker put a blanket on her leg and then let her dog go to town. After the dog was 'finished,' she made several comments about how happy her dog was, and that’s why she lets her do it. We never hung out again."
18. "A nurse I worked with was found unresponsive in the bath stall. This incident had clear indicators of IV drug use. A syringe/injection set found on the floor, and blood was running down the inside of her arm. ... Rather than management jumping to 'Holy $***, we’ve got a problem,'...we kept her alive and woke her up in the ED. Our manager listened to her tearful explanation of being tired, having sick kids, and not sleeping, and allowed her to go sleep in a call room. Not kidding. It takes another month before the cognitive dissonance dissolves. Extensive audits were done — they were found to have diverted an estimated tens of thousands mg/equivalent of morphine."
19. "One of my first jobs was at an amusement park, and if you were a 'good employee' (showed up on time and sober), you would get advanced pretty quickly. Soon I was in charge of giving people breaks and training new employees, which was a pretty sweet job (you got to basically do what you wanted as long as everyone got their break on time) and paid slightly more. One day I go to give a break to a new guy. He smiles and takes his bag full of change (containing 1–2 grand in ones/fives/tens/twenties this late in the day) and runs off to presumably lock it in the little safes they give us to hold the money. The guy never came back."
"Security and management come by, they ask me a bunch of questions about him, and eventually they realize that he gave completely fake information and worked one day so he could steal a couple thousand dollars. They never found the guy."
20. "When I was 14, I worked at a floral business who basically hired anyone. My duty for that day was to stand in one of the greenhouses and shove seeds into little soil pots all day. I was partnered up with this guy probably in his early 20s...typical burnout with the 24/7 confused look who would spend all day telling everyone about how much of a badass he was. My boss was fucking unhinged. He had an incredibly short temper. His typical reaction to someone doing something wrong would be to throw his hat then break things (including but not limited to plants, chairs, a tow motor once, etc.). Anyways, apparently the kid I was working with fucked something up, and the boss had just noticed it."
"He came storming into the greenhouse, red in the face. He started yelling at the kid for something he had done previously, then began kicking shit over and eventually telling him to 'GET THE FUCK OUT AND DON'T COME BACK. YOU'RE FIRED.' Instead of this kid walking out with his head down, he runs up to the boss, rips his shirt off, and yells, 'IF I CAN DO 100 PUSH-UPS IN ONE MINUTE, I KEEP MY JOB.' He wasn't asking, he was telling. He drops down and begins doing the fastest push-ups I've ever witnessed. He mumbled his way to 100, put his shirt back on, walked back to the bench, and continued planting seeds like nothing ever happened. Boss never said another word."
21. "I worked for a state agency about 20 years ago. New Division Director sent out a long and very stern email telling employees that there would be zero tolerance for porn on company computers. Fast-forward two years and our IT group reported him for having porn on his office computer. I can’t wrap my head around how he thought he wouldn’t be found out. Of course he was fired."
22. Relatedly... "I had a coworker who stayed late to watch porn. Another coworker caught him USING MY COMPUTER. He couldn't even use his own computer to do it!"
23. "I will never forget the day our GM almost got us shut down. I worked at a Fuddruckers, and he brutally murdered an opossum that was outside our back doors on the patio by hitting it over the head a few times with a hammer and then stabbing it repeatedly with a prep knife...in front of about 20 elderly women."
Finally, let's end on some lighter ones that are just completely unhinged:
24. "I work at a printing company. We often print on foil paper. That's aluminum foil laminated to regular paper. On the press, the rolls spin pretty fast and are up to five feet in diameter. They are essentially massive, 1,500-pound capacitors. One guy stands there holding his hand to the roll as it spins and waits for an unsuspecting passerby. When the victim walks by, he reaches out to them and shoots a thick, crackling arc of static electricity at them, up to a foot away. He literally has a bright lightening bolt shooting from his fingertips."
25. "I work in a fairly large factory. This one guy, upon getting fired, rode his motorcycle all around the shop floor. The shop foremen chased him around for, like, 10 minutes before he finally left. Pretty epic goodbye, I'd say."
26. "I used to work in a big factory. One guy got fired for missing too many days. There was a rumor going around that he was going to streak through the factory floor. No one really believed it, but the guy was a bit of a loose cannon so the HR guys escort him off the premises with a security guard... Ten minutes later, he climbed over a fence, naked, to get back in and proceeded to run around the factory holding his privates yelling 'wwwhhhooooooo!'"
27. "At my last internship...a coworker army crawled out of her cubicle, through the hall way, and onto the elevator. Nobody ever saw her again."
What's your wildest coworker or boss story? Let us know in the comments.
Submissions have been edited for length/clarity.