Recently, we wrote about the wild coworker stories people have, and the BuzzFeed Community piped in with their own answers. Here are 36 more coworkers who ended up in hot water, along with some answers from the original Reddit thread that were too shocking not to include.
1. "Had a friend from college who I also worked with. Partied with him, he gave me rides to work, he seemed kinda geeky but overall a nice guy. One day he didn’t show up to work. When I called his house (this is back in the pre-cellphone era), his roommate said he’d packed a suitcase and left suddenly. All he said was that he was in trouble and had to leave. His roommate went in his room and found young girls’ underwear and photos. Turns out the dude was a pedo and was running away from the police."
"About a week later, he called me at work from Puerto Rico (where I’m from) asking me if I knew someone who could help him get settled and get work. I asked him where he was staying and the phone number, which I quickly passed on to the police. No idea what happened to him after that, but I hope he’s either locked up or dead."
2. "A coworker asked our marketing team to design an explainer document using an illustration of a glove. There were five topics — each topic would get a finger. We designed something like a Mickey Mouse glove, but it didn't work for him. He ends up sending a picture of his hand in a thick black rubber glove. It gave off bodies in the basement vibes. We just agreed to scrap the glove idea. Anyway, fast-forward a few months, this coworker and another man were arrested for running a sex trafficking ring."
3. "Coworker came in one day and said he got married. Didn't even know he was seeing anyone (he was very odd and not too bright). Showed a picture, and she was gorgeous and over 6' tall. A model. This guy had zero game, so we were immediately suspicious. We honestly thought he made the whole thing up. Turns out he met her online at some 'Russian Bride' site, and she immediately wanted to get married. Came over and lived with him. Then had him arrested and committed to a psych ward."
"Cleaned out his bank accounts, sold all his possessions, and disappeared. He just disappeared from work with no call-in, and didn't answer his phone. They eventually called his mother, and our boss went with her to get him released, and it took a while. He came back to work, and nobody gave him any crap. Just took up a collection for him to at least buy some furniture."
4. "He was arrested and taken out by the feds for ordering nurses to kill hospice patients so he could get more Medicare cash. His wife, same. ... Nurses that complied in prison, too. Two doctors gave their triplicate pads to him and signed off on the death certs. Yep; they’re in prison, too."
5. "I worked at a pizza delivery place with a guy who had been to prison twice before. Once was for robbing the local grocery store at gunpoint. (Small town.) He talked about being worried about 'getting a bitch' — getting a third conviction and found to be a habitual criminal with a stiffer sentence. He was a good worker, and a pretty cool guy who was generally chill but easily took offense and would get very intense. He got into an argument at a party and stabbed a guy repeatedly. I know he went back to prison but don't know for how long."
6. "They tried to sell weed to a table as a server. The people at the table didn't smoke weed."
7. "He shot his brother to death over the Christmas closure. He had just come back to work after being on leave for having a new kid, and we spent a few weeks leading up to the closure BSing and getting through the day while work was slow. I hired in with him years ago, and we got along pretty well, so it was a surprise to learn that during Christmas, he got blackout drunk with his brother, some sort of argument happened, and it ended with him shooting the guy in the head a few times. I guess they had a history of provoking each other and some bad blood, but nobody at work saw it coming. He called the cops on himself and didn't fight the charges."
8. "He came into work one morning skipping. When I say that, I mean literally skipping everywhere he went. Went about his job skipping all over the shop. Tried to talk everyone else into skipping, too. When we refused, he got pissed, threw down his tools, clocked out, walked out the door, and we never saw him again."
"He was a really strange guy. About a month before this, he was on vacation; he lived about 40 minutes away. Every day of that vacation, when the lunch bell rang, he walked in with a plate of food, sat in his regular seat, ate, and when the bell rang again, he got in his car and left."
9. "She left for two weeks for wedding and honeymoon. She came back married to another guy than the one she planned to marry."
"We had onsite daycare that her toddler daughter attended. She used to call all men she saw 'daddy.' Serious bummer all around."
10. "When I was 19, I worked with this guy at Starbucks who talked about how he lived in this upscale neighborhood in the area. He was really nice, and a bunch of us hung out outside of work. At one point, I lost my debit card, and it was being used. A couple others had missing cash and stuff. All seemed coincidental. Then one day, the cops showed up during his shift. He had been returning expensive espresso machines to his credit card. He got caught because he returned one to the drive-thru register. Literally no one returns items like that via the drive-thru. After the fact, we checked cameras and caught him stealing from our purses/wallets. He was using a fake identity and didn’t live in that neighborhood he said. Also, he literally shit his pants when he was arrested."
11. "He got a forklift stuck in the grass while drunk. They tested him, and he was positive for coke and weed, too. On his way out, he tried to argue 'but half the warehouse gets high!' The next day, there was a random drug test, and half the warehouse was sacked."
12. "She was constantly flirting with all of the guys in the office. Flipping her hair and asking for favors from them. She shit-talked every other woman in the office she deemed a threat, professionally and personally. And there was a rumor (that turned out to be true) that she was secretly dating a manager. Eventually, she started calling out of work once to twice a week, leaving work sick and nodding off during meetings. Her work laptop had to be taken by IT to be fixed because it was inundated with nasty porn viruses that 'came out of nowhere.' And cash started disappearing from the safe over the weekends. Eventually, the manager she was secretly dating ended up revealing that she was addicted to heroin after he tried to get another coworker to go home with him. That coworker told the bosses, and she was fired."
13. "He got fired for sexual harassment. Repeatedly saying sexually suggestive stuff to two coworkers. One of the two coworkers told their husband, and he broke the guy's nose."
"We had one of those, too. Got suspended and a warning for harassing one female employee, only to do it again to the mother of the first one!"
14. "The guy who trained me at my current job was let go for being constantly late (sometimes hours). I knew him vaguely outside of work because he had worked at a bar with my partner years ago. A little snippy and quick to snap mean comments at customers if he thought they were being rude, but was always nice to us coworkers. I'd see him in town every few months and say hi and chat for a minute or two. Found out last month that he'd been approached at his new job by a man claiming to be 16 and propositioned by him. He agreed to meet up outside of work to 'hang out,' where the guy again told my old coworker he was underage. He still invited him back to his apartment to hook up. Turns out, it was part of a local sting operation, and the 16-year-old was actually an undercover cop."
"Genuinely never saw that one coming, but I'm glad I never got close to him."
15. "Got fired for sleeping with too many customers. We worked fast food, and he would write his number on drink lids at the start of every shift. If a woman he found attractive came in, he'd chat her up a little bit and send her off with a free drink. His success rate was low, but he did it so often that he had hookups booked every day of the week. Eventually, management caught on when several women were asking for him daily."
16. "My boss of five years was laid off because we worked for a nonprofit and they needed to cut larger salaries. I thought it was strange he told me he knew he was getting let go. Turns out, he had made himself a delegate to the email accounts of all our C-level executives. When I was going over vendor invoices after he left, I found a vendor I didn’t know of (managing vendor invoices was part of my job). It was a shell company he created. He embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars over three years. Best part: He was sentenced by now-Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson."
17. "[He] shit his pants intentionally 30–40 times over the year to be able go home early to play video games before his wife and kid got home. Age at incident: 37."
18. "I had a coworker at my grocery store get reported by a customer who was in the restroom and saw him jacking off outside of their stall. The manager then went to the staff restroom and walked in on him jacking off again. Worst part is they tried to fire him, but his family threatened to sue because he has autism, and they claimed it was discrimination. Instead of being fired, the company settled with his family. We all were very angry he was still there and refused to ever shake his hand."
19. "I honestly wonder what the other teachers at my middle school thought when it turned out that the guy who had been hired as the principal not only lied about his experience on his résumé, but that he had also concocted a whole identity for himself before he ran off with a bunch of money the school had recently received for some much-needed classroom upgrades and supplies."
"I didn't find out about it until years later, only knew that one day we suddenly had a new principal, and no one ever talked about the old one."
20. "Years ago, I worked at a job that had a lot of turnover, so there were quite a few stories. There was a lady that worked with us for a few months, then a couple months after she left, she stabbed her wife to death in front of their kid. She was a little odd, but we definitely didn't see that coming."
21. "My husband is a teacher. He found out the head of his department is a pedophile when he saw her on the news — she’d been arrested for having sex with minors. It sent his department in a total tailspin for the rest of the year."
22. "My partner in surveillance...started leaving me for hours at a time which got really frustrating. I would try to find her on camera so I knew where to call to get her to come back so I could have a bathroom and/or coffee break. I started to notice that every time I looked for her, she was chatting with this one new girl. This was happening every day, and then I noticed they started taking night shift breaks together. Then one night, I saw them head outside together. They both got in her car and were just chatting in the front seat. Suddenly, they start making out, and next thing I know, they're both getting out and getting into the back seat. This became a regular thing on night shift. Fast-forward several months, she's now separated from her husband and living with this coworker."
23. "Her husband was the head of a department in another area of the company, banging his secretary. She’d, I guess, had had enough of his BS and unfortunately decided to confront him at work by bursting into his office and stripping off her clothes in front of his whole department screaming, 'Am I not woman enough for you?' Husband and wife were both in their mid-60s. Both got fired/forced retirement. Not sure about the secretary — I think she just never came back to work. I felt sorry for the wife. He was a known prick, and she must have gone through a lot to get to that point and snap."
24. "It was obvious he was a hard drinker. What took the weirdness to the next level was when I was almost home and a voice called out my name and it was him. He had actually stalked me. I'm a thin 5'5" woman. He tried to be casual about it and extended an invitation to a neighborhood bar. Inner monologue went from This guy followed me from Manhattan to Brooklyn on the Subway? Whoa to He doesn't live in this neighborhood. to Does he know which apartment I live at? Maybe I should walk to the fire station and call a roommate."
"His voice trailed off seeing the expression on my face, which probably looked like you have bad idea written all over you.
He was a raging functional alcoholic who was on the razor's edge of slipping into dysfunction. If you've met the binge drinking college student whose idea of bravado is how much they can put away in one night and still function the next day, he still had that outlook on life in his early 30s.
Yet, he wasn't aggressive. Just accepted my slow, 'Um, no thanks' and shuffled away.
Instead of talking to the boss, I kept polite distance. He never tested that boundary again. A year later, I left that job."
25. "The coworker we called 'The Mad Shitter.' Someone would come in on a weekend, or third shift, and just absolutely COVERED the walls, stalls, floor, ceiling...any surface of a random bathroom with feces. Men's one time, women's the next, women's again, then men's, etc. And they never got caught. Must've happened a dozen times over the five years I was there."
26. "One of the supervisors finally confronted him about the ever present smell of rum on his breath and his ever present, yet lighter in shade, bottle of soda. After being told he'd be given a breathalyzer at work, he claimed he 'had never been so insulted' by an accusation in his life and immediately quit...never letting go of his soda bottle."
27. "So there was this guy we will call L. He was a line driver at the water bottling plant I work at. His job was when the finished pallet of bottled water got to the end of the line, he used a forklift to put it away. L also likes meth...a lot. He had done so much one night that he was having hallucinations that there were people in black suits trying to get him. So he blocked off every entrance and pathway he could with pallets of water. He even had them double stacked. I work in a different part of the building, but when I got over there, I saw it, and I was mind-blown. It was obvious that he wasn't right in the head."
"I pulled up next to him and asked him what was going on. He legit looked scared. I went up to his lead, told him what was going on, and cussed him out a little for not checking on his guys. I went back over by L, and he looked at me, peed his pants, and walked off. Our plant manager found him at the end of the parking lot, car running with a meth pipe in hand."
28. "Dude hit someone and got a DUI in the company Excursion, hooked to a trailer, on the I-70 west on-ramp that my Dad's (the owner) office overlooked. At 7:30 in the morning."
29. "I used to work for this extremely unethical medical device company. The owners had really strong 'timeshare salesman' energy, and would say or do anything they thought would make sales or improve their bottom line. As a result, most employees (myself included) got grossed out and left within a year or two, with the only ones staying having something deeply wrong with them, either ethically or professionally. As a result, a lot of shitty behavior was tolerated from senior employees because the owners couldn't retain anyone else. Enter Bill. "
"In the year I worked alongside Bill, I watched him:
—Ask a brown-skinned coworker how 'his people' prayed. Said coworker was born and raised in Maryland.
—In a conversation about how people's personalities change when they drink, suggested to another coworker that he probably got 'more autistic' (said coworker was not, and had never implied to be, autistic).
—During the George Floyd protests, assured everyone in the lunch room that he and his church had an impressive stockpile of weapons in case that kind of civil unrest cropped up in our town.
That's just the stuff I witnessed firsthand, pretty much everyone had similar stories of Bill.
The straw that finally, finally broke the camel's back came during a company picnic. We were playing Cornhole, and Bill, unprompted, said very loudly that I 'should be careful not to throw the beanbags toward [the name of the only two Black employees in the company] because Black Lives Matter' and then grinned like he'd told the funniest joke in the world. Everyone, including the two employees in question, heard him. Afterwords, as I was explaining the incident to HR, our HR director shook her head and said, 'This is really bad, you know this isn't Bill's first strike.' Yeah, no shit, Stephanie."
30. "Showed up in the middle of the night and shredded all the paperwork. Then disappeared."
31. "Oh, Gregory? Gregory started getting more and more and more fucked up at work, to the point where he was taking four-hour-long fifteen-minute breaks. Boss wouldn't fire him because, quote, 'He's not as high today as he was yesterday.'"
"Once, his mother showed up and followed me around the sales floor demanding to know why I didn't take care of her, quote, 'precious boy' and protect him. From what, she never specified, and I later figured out that she was trying to get me to stop him from shooting up in the parking lot, without saying with her out-loud voice that that was what he was doing. I tried explaining that I was neither a manager nor a babysitter, but she just kept repeating that he was precious and that I was supposed to protect him.
Anyway, eventually the manager above my manager did fire him. Only for him to come in the next day. And the next. Not to work; to skulk around my department with his hoodie up and his hands in his pockets in a very I-have-a-gun way, muttering about what assholes we all were. For hours. My manager wouldn't do anything, because she felt bad for him.
Eventually, the manager above my manager had him escorted out and banned."
32. "She threw her lit cigarette into a dry ass bush outside the building, during a drought, that coincided on the hottest week of the year ever recorded. We all had fire safety training after the bush lit up, and the fire department had to come put out the fire on the side of the building. Good old Sherry. "
And finally, let's end on some lighter, sillier stories:
33. "They came in with a potbelly pig as their emotional support animal. Office meetings just got a lot squeakier."
34. "She accepted a fake $100 bill that literally said 'FOR MOVIE USE ONLY' on it and had Benjamin Franklin on both sides. We worked at a bank."
35. "I received an invitation to a free catered lunch on company property from a coworker. My suspicions weren't raised because members of HR, IT, Accounting, etc. were all on the invitation list. I figured it was extremely generous of my coworker, and perhaps she would be announcing her departure and future plans with lunch served as a celebration. Instead, we all walked into a pyramid scheme presentation."
36. "Guy got through the interview process, I don’t know how. Offset lithography, web fed (as opposed to sheet fed, so big rolls of paper), gave himself a paper cut on the first day, and that became his nickname. I don’t remember his actual name anymore, he is just Papercut. He started wearing those canvas and leather work gloves after that, which is problematic in an environment that requires fast-paced fine motor skills, but he persevered. The sandwich vending machine at work, the little doors would open once the item in it was sold, and we watched him go through the carousel on the third day and take every leftover ketchup and mustard packet that anyone had left behind, then sit down at the cafeteria table and eat each single serve condiment packet, one by one. He lasted the whole week but didn’t show up for the start of the next shift. Disappeared with only some empty ketchup and mustard packets to show that he’d ever been there."
What's your wildest coworker or workplace story? Let us know in the comments.
Submissions have been edited for length/clarity.