Who was your worst coworker?

I had a brief stint in a shit hole during COVID lockdowns. This old dude started and it turned out his wife and the lady in charge were friends. He was one of the dumbest people I've ever met. He legit had someone else's glasses on and didn't know until the other guy was trying to find his. He said he thought it was weird that he couldn't see properly. He also seen a few guys with face screens rather than masks and he wanted one. We told him you can get them from health and safety, so off he goes. Comes back and says they're awful, you can't see shit out of them. He hadn't removed the protective covering...

I've worked with some apes in my time but I've no idea how this guy got so far in life without dying or something

I work at a call center, and a few years ago I got moved next to this person when we changed management teams. She was a very nice person in general, but for some reason as the day went on her voice would get louder and louder. I was amazed our manager never said anything as it sounded like she was screaming at the people on the phone by the end of our shift. I thought maybe she was just having a bad day or something so I didn't make a big deal out of it.

She kept getting louder though.

It got so bad that I was eventually pressing my hands over my headphones because she sounded louder than my own customers I needed it listen to. After about a week of this I'd finally had it, and I tapped her on the shoulder and asked if she could please try to keep her volume down since I couldn't hear my own callers anymore.

She looked at me like I'd just kicked a puppy or something. She made a HUGE show of gathering up all of her possessions and moving all the way to the other end of our row as far from me as she could get, all in complete silence

I think she actually expected me to come find her and apologize lol but since THAT wasn't about to happen I lived happily ever after never having to listen to her big fat mouth ever again

There was the guy who left milky coffee mugs in his office until they became hairy with mold.

There was the guy who skipped out on work to go play basketball with his buddies.

There was the guy who almost handed a new computer to the dean, with the dean's name misspelled into an embarrassing word on his login screen.

Oh wait, those were the same guy.

There was a different guy, Bob, who proudly called himself a sexist. He was the tech support manager. More than half of his direct reports were women. He'd double-check their work because they were women. He was usually wrong.

I was running network security for the organization. I'd kicked a machine off the network because it was sending out virus spam. (This was the early 2000s when that was a thing.)

Bob said, the machine is clean, put it back on the network.

I checked, it wasn't clean.

He said they needed it back on the network now.

I said, have Debbie check it again.

Debbie went and checked it again. There were processes called fuck.exe running, trying to initiate port-25 connections to various IP addresses.

Yeah, Bob, Debbie is right. Because she actually looked, instead of just trying to play nice with the user.

Machine got wiped and reinstalled. Then it went back on the network.

I once worked with a Puerto Rican. I'm not being racist, he literally couldn't go more than an hour without reminding someone he was from Puerto Rico. He tried playing it like some kind of race card at least once a day. One time I heard one of my coworkers say loudly from across the room "No, being Puerto Rican has nothing to do with it. I don't like you because you're stupid."

New guy at my job, polish dude. He seemed decent enough, just a bit.... odd... but most of us were; after all, we were the kind of people who are willing to work on ships on the wrong side of the world for weeks, sometimes months at a time.

I trained him to do the job I did, so he could run opposite of my shift, with some assistance from the chief tech and various others. The rest of the crew were pretty experienced, so it made it easier when he needed help with the more complex stuff. He did reasonably OK for a newhire. Nothing spectacularly good, but nothing spectacularly bad either.

Until the crewing department told us he had been arrested back home, multiple counts of murder, and we were unlikely to have him onboard again, so we needed to train his replacement.

Turned out he was a serial killer who killed people for their properties. He's in prison now, and I'm sure you can google the person. I'm not sure what his actual name was, but we called him Winny. Any poles here who happen to remember the case and could link a news article? This happened roughly 10 years ago.

I worked with this guy when I was a sysadmin. There were usually three of us on shift. He refused to do anything and would encourage us to ignore tickets as well. He tried to be the manager once the manager was out for the day cuz we worked a swing shift. I already disliked him, but one day the first shifter came back from vacation in Miami. He asked if the first shifter "saw any of them [slur for gay people]"

I'm gay myself and immediately went to HR and he was fired on the spot. For the next couple weeks, if I went out for a smoke, the chill as shit security guard would stand outside with me, cuz this guy definitely had anger problems. He was worried he might try to come back and hurt me.

I used to be a delivery guy at a local pizzeria. One of the other delivery guys was the laziest piece of shit I could imagine.

There was one time they couldn't find him, his car was there, the delivery car was there, and he wasn't exactly the type of guy to go take a walk, so they figured he had to be in the store somewhere. Eventually they found him taking a nap in the walk-in, he brought a chair down with him and hid behind a wall of our buckets of cheese and sauce.

Another time they found him taking a nap in the delivery car, engine running, music blasting, seat reclined parked right in front of the store.

We were one of the rare places that had their own delivery cars, and he constantly left trash in them. I was about the only guy who ever bothered to clean them out (to be fair we only ever had about 3-4 delivery guys) There was one night I cleaned it out, he worked the day shift the next day, and I worked the next night, and when I came in the car was filled with trash again. He worked nights at a gas station in the area, so when I stopped that night to get gas, I brought in the bag of trash that I again had cleaned out and called him out for trashing the car again in such a short amount of time. I then took the bag out with me because I'm not an asshole, and threw it away properly. The next time he worked he was telling our coworkers that I dumped the trash on his counter at the gas station, which everyone knew immediately was a crock of shit (but they also all agreed that I totally should have done it.)

I worked with John Doe, who said no woman could tell him what to do, not even his wife. His new boss was a woman who wasn't having his shit. He quit after a few months.

Right, had this dude who applied for a job at a wireless internet company, the job posting had very specifically mentions that you will be working at Heights and you will be required to pass a 2 day working at heights safety course.

2 rounds of interviews we ask them how they are with heights and so they have an issue with climbing ladders or working on elevated work platforms. Dude says no worries in both rounds of interviews.

First day on the job we do some basic ladder safety to prepare them for the course. Storing a ladder, securing a ladder to the work trucks, securing the ladder to a roof, how to wear a harness.

Say 2 of the job is the First day on the training course and we hear from the training provider that the guy refuses to participate in the practical work and they won't be accepting him for the second day.

He comes into the office on what was going to be his second day of training and has the stones to say he won't be working in the field as he is scared of heights.

He didn't make it till lunchtime that day.

I had a dude who tried to get me fired by stealing client data and trying to frame it on me. He confessed to someone he was so fucking sure would just take that in stride and not go to management with that.

I also found out that he thought that would work because he thought I was on a final write up for another thing that he tried to pin on me before that. But his whole claim there made no fucking sense and was dismissed within minutes, so nothing ever ever came of it. He just assumed it had worked without trying to confirm anything.

I was a manager and was hands on training "Gary" day one. Gary continued to get audible dings and read text messages and type while I was talking directly to him. After the 2-3 time I asked if everything was alright and Gary needed to step out to handle something. He said something like, "oh no it's just a text chain...". I asked them stop texting but they sort of tried to hide the fact that they continued as I tried to get their attention and they just kept texting. After some more time I stopped after a simple demonstration and asked if they could do what I just did. Gary didn't do the simple task correctly. I excused myself and walked to office I said to the other people managers /hiring staff, "I don't think this is going to work out with Gary. It's day one and he refuses to pay attention." They expressed that another good coworker and friend had recommended him for the job and I just get through some stuff. Ok maybe Gary was having a bad day.

Later that week I learned Gary didn't have a car even though transportation was required for the position because you might be working different locations all over town and Gary thought that his friend would be nice and just drive him to whatever job he needed to go to and then drive to their own job somewhere else. It lasted a few days and Gary didn't arrive at locations we need him at. When we called he said, "I don't have a ride I can't work." I asked if there way to figure out the transportation and he said it would be alright. I think he took a cab a few times but the locations are 20-30 mins away. After multiple no shows or very late arrivals we had to let Gary go.

Now I spoke with Gary several times. I don't think this was some sort of condition were he didn't understand the job and what he needed to do. I believe that Gary really thought we were all just living in his world or maybe he had to get out and prove he got a job. After he was gone I asked Gary's friend, "So what happened?". She confirmed that he never had a car or equipment needed. I asked if he got another job. She said, "Oh I don't know, I don't like Gary very much".

Homophobic, racist, misogynistic, pro russia russian guy. It still is.

A moron who was hired to be my boss, even though they didn't tell me that was the case -- who, with a straight face, dead serious, and with an undeserved authority befitting a piece of shit, told me that Object-oriented programming was a fad. This was in 2008, 30-40 years after OOP was first introduced to the world.

I used to work in a warehouse when I was young. No training on some things, so sometimes I'd just be just hanging out when my duties were finished, and still get paid for it. Not my fault. Had this one woman and her husband doing delivering of packages for the company, and she made a snobby comment saying "wish I was paid to do nothing", but in fact she was, cause she did nothing. All she did was sit in the passenger seat.

She was a bit of a coward.

I once worked for a small ISP that decided to enter the calling card business. I built them a voice prompt system on top of Asterisk that made received PSTN calls over PRI and made outbound VoIP calls, all metered to cards with a unique number and a balance, and a UI to activate them. The business got boxes of physical cards printed, with a plan to sell them to convenience stores.

They hired a salesperson (AKA worst coworker) to sell the boxes of cards. This coworker then sold many boxes of activated cards to many small stores at an unauthorised discount (below the level of profitability), for cash rather than the approved methods for retailers to buy them, and then apparently spent said cash at the casino. The business had to honour the cards (i.e. not deactivate them) at a big loss to avoid ruining their reputation, since the buyers apparently did not know the deal was dodgy. His tenure was, suffice to say, not long, but in his short time there, he managed to put the business under financial strain and it eventually went into liquidation.

Some annoying dumb fuck I don't even remember the name anymore. That was almost a decade ago.

Dude was a compulsive liar, he would brag about being some sort of super genius, but couldn't even understand basic instructions.

When he wasn't slacking off, he was failing at doing the most basic tasks and annoying other people into doing it for him.

I think he didn't even last three months on the job. Given his lack of shame, ability to confidently lie and over hype his non existent qualities, I imagine he must be a successful politician or CEO nowadays.

Brian

A wannabe manager / story teller type.

He couldn’t tell the truth to save his life. He would tell stories all day within earshot and you could hear the story morph through the day.

He’s a director of IT now I think. I can’t be sure because he never told the truth.

I worked with Aaron Barr

He went on to be CEO of HBGary, a federal contractor. He claimed he could dox Anonymous. It didn't go well for him.

I think I've blocked out most of the bad ones, and most of my coworkers have been good or okay.

This one guy I remember though. This might only be relevant for people who live in software.

He refused to name his tests. Normally with jest or mocha you have tests like

describe("user settings page", () => { it("allows the user to change their name", () => { etc

But he refused. He'd put empty string in both spots. So you'd open a test file and there'd just be a dozen anonymous unlabeled tests and you'd have to puzzle out what they were trying to do.

He was a reasonably nice person when we talked, at least. But this drove me crazy.

I think I have been lucky in that most of my coworkers have been either very friendly or pretty neutral at the very least.

But there was this one old fat bitch I worked with who would just randomly try to start fights with people for no particular reason. No one seemed safe from her wrath with most people taking turns on the shit end of it. It would always catch me off guard when it happened and would honestly tend to make me rather upset. In between her episodes she seemed like a normal person though which was confusing. I'd imagine that and the fact that she had worked there forever also would have made it difficult for management to consider getting rid of her.

For context, I worked in a lab where I was handling blood and urine. One day I was minding my own business when she comes up to me and starts trying to start a fight for God knows what reason about something I can't remember. I had a container of urine with me and it took everything in me not to chuck it at her ugly face. But I knew that would just get me fired and possibly an assault charge. So I managed to grit my teeth and settle a bit.

Several years later and I'm now in a different, way better job making a ton more money than her sorry ass. So I guess I kind of win??

My current coworker who has the same position as me but does nothing but sit there and stare at his phone all day. I do more work than him in 10 minutes than he does all day long and he is getting paid $3/hr more than me. On top of that, he has a dead tooth or something because it always smells like shit near him. By midday, the entire room will stink of his shit breath. I assume he's never heard of tissues because he blows snot rockets onto the walls and floor daily. He takes half an hour bathroom and smoke breaks. 2 each daily so he is on break about 2 hours a day not including his lunch. Plus he takes that long breaks at the busiest times of the day. He basically works an hour or less a day.

If I had to choose just one then it would definitely be the pedophile.

My boss by a long shot. It seemed like he'd been promoted past his realm of competency and wanted to be demoted, but didn't want to take the pay cut associated with it. The result is that there was a lack of communication on his part which left me guessing as to how I was supposed to be doing my job. Then he'd complain because I didn't do something right, or I didn't get something done when he was expecting it. He seemed nice, aside from the fact that he seemed to be unintentionally sabotaging any effort I tried to make to be a productive worker; except that I always felt like I was talking to someone who was trying to decide if I'd taste good. I ignored it and tried to do my job, but as a projectionist, you're locked in a dark, very noisy room by yourself for hours on end.

My mental health started slipping, I got written up a couple times, and then I asked for accommodations. I figured I was pretty safe doing that, everyone at the theater was nice, the chain was small, had a good reputation with customers and staff, staff felt comfortable being gay, trans and/or enby in front of customers in Texas so I thought, they shouldn't have a problem with making accommodations for my depression, anxiety and adhd, right? That's when I found out why I felt like he was trying to decide if I tasted good or not. He did the whole song and dance of "okay, we can work something out" while suddenly seeming annoyed (as opposed to his normally somewhat happy, albiet potentially cannibalistic demeanor).

Two weeks later I get fired for something he'd never asked me to do and he comes up to the booth with the theater manager while wearing the most triumphant look on his face, before announcing to me that it's a shame that I'm not a good fit for the company and that we'll have to be parting ways. I asked if there was anything I could do to fix the situation and the theater manager seemed apologetic and genuinely upset and started to say something only to get cut off by my boss who told me that there was absolutely nothing that could be done (as a projectionist, I was kinda in a pseudo-managerial role, the managers technically couldn't tell me to do anything, nor could they fire me, but I had to have a good reason if I ignored them or wasn't properly communicating with them). The manager apologized while he was escorting me out and told me he knew it was bullshit, but he couldn't do anything because neither of us were under him. He also mentioned that he'd been frustrated with my boss since the chain began reopening after COVID, but that he had seniority and been with the company since it's founding, so it was basically impossible to remove him.

Yay.

Worked with a murderer who was living under a fake name, back in the 90s. But he was actually fine.

There were probably terrible people at that job, but I don't remember... Oh, the first actual real, live creationist I ever met was at that job.

The preschool I work at was in the news because one of the other teachers hit a child

Fucking Isaac. You know what you did Isaac

A couple come to mind

The guy who ran a porn server from work. Was finally caught when the internet bill was huge and the cio and a tech tracked it through the network to his port. Waited until he walked away for a minute and when he came back found them on hands and knees about to pull the network cable from the server under his desk. Apparently he was making quite a bit off it too. His first words were 'I'm fired, aren't I?'

A woman who lied constantly. She'd claim we built something other than what we were asked to make, and the only defense was to show her the email where she asked for exactly what she got. We learned to document everything with her.

Funny side story. When I joined, all bright eyed and energetic, they assigned me to support her. No warning. I went on and created some software for her, only to get screamed at an blamed for made up reasons. I thought I was about to get fired.... Turns out my team was kind of being assholes too. They all decided not to tell me anything to see if a fresh unbiased person had issues too.

Edited because this was a personal and limited-time only, story about my past. I don't want this to keep lying around forever. Ask me in person if you want to hear it again :)

Back in high school, I worked with a girl who simply would not do her job. She’d walk away from her cash register at will. She’d go on break without telling anyone (never mind asking, like she was supposed to), and wouldn’t answer her radio, so people were constantly asking where she was. She wouldn’t follow instructions from anyone except the general manager - as if she outranked everyone else (which, of course, she didn’t). Everyone who actually had to work with her couldn’t stand her. From her perspective, though, she was always the victim. Nothing was ever her fault.

She would also talk your ear off. It was impossible to work with her and not hear several stupid, irrelevant, boring stories every hour. Fortunately, I didn’t have to work full shifts with her very often. If I had, I probably would have quit long before I had to leave for college.

I strongly suspect that the main reason she wasn’t fired is because it had taken months to fill her position, and filling it again would take months more. Plus, she only annoyed management; she didn’t completely exasperate them like she did the rest of us.

Wow. It’s been years. I’m surprised I still remember this so clearly.

Jesus was a horrible copilot!

Kevin. "I thought you knew I wasn't serious about the instructions I just gave you." Also: "I hate you. Just kidding." I hope you're even more miserable than you were, Kevin.

Definitely the married one who clearly wanted to fuck me. I did not enjoy hearing about her marital problems or being told how good I looked. Was definitely like the whole, rule one of flirting be attractive situation though. Would of made me a lot less uncomfortable if she wasn't disgusting.

Scott

When I worked in the south we had a fellow that decided because he got fired by a black woman that everyone was a racist despite there being zero racial tension in the store other than his personal vendetta. He came back and tried to murder the most patently inoffensive skinny white dude in the the parking lot. He throttled him and was yelling he was an ___ lover because he was friendly with everyone. So its 1AM at Walmart and I go charging across the parking lot with zero plan. I ended up getting his attention then backpedaling at which point his victim had fled and he realized there was nothing else to do and ran off himself. I tried to give the cop the shirt that somehow rednecks feel like they need to shed before they "get physical" with someone and got only an offended look in return. They didn't even take a statement.

Same Walmart we had a fellow that was very clearly a recovering addict of some kind who want from hyper religious praise Jeebus to sullen and increasingly angry. He got to the point where he was showing up to get paid but wouldn't do much work and would ride his bike around the backroom. I remember him becoming convinced we were all Satanic because we were talking about a fantasy setting. He told us we need to find Jesus I quiped "Does he provide an experience bonus" Not long after that we had cops monitoring the exit to ensure nobody got murdered on the way out. I'm not sure exactly what he said when they fired him but I understand threats were made.

Same store there was the boss who turned on the electic door motor while I was fixing it causing the little hand crank to go flying across the room like a spear.

Then there was the fellow who would just NOT stop stealing shit like blatantly who was eventually at long last fired for stealing root beer.

I mean, you want his name? I got his name. Oooh, made me shiver just now.

I wish I had an answer besides it being a tie between all of them, but sadly they're all that bad.