what’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen at work?

by Alison Green on August 28, 2014

On a post last week, commenter Joey said: “I used to work with a guy that did triathlons and biked 12 miles to work in the Texas heat. He’d wear his Lance Armstrong wear on the way to work, strip down in the staff bathroom, use a wash rag to take a bath in the sink and get dressed for work. He didn’t wear underwear under his bike stuff.”

The gauntlet has been thrown down. What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen at work?

(Edited to add: People who don’t normally read the comments, READ THESE. We’re only 12 in as of this writing and they’re already amazing.)

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  1. Phoenix*

    OH MAN I HAVE ONE. The office I used to work in had a bedroom in it – fully furnished, with a bed and sheets and a dresser and side table (but no windows). At one point, the (very scary and extremely hated) manager was LIVING in the office with his wife and their two dogs. She would walk around the office in her house robe and slippers, carrying one of those dogs. She’d page her husband over the loudspeaker to come to his office, where they’d proceed to argue very loudly for the whole office to hear.

    When the HR manager tried to call the company insurance company to see how much of a liability it was to have an employee and his wife AND DOGS (I can’t get over that part) literally living in the office, the manager slapped the HR manager hard enough across the face to leave finger-shaped welts and give him whiplash. The manager was not fired or reprimanded in any way.

    Oh, how I don’t miss that place. That was the tip of the iceberg.

    1. tt*

      There are so many things wrong with that scenario, I think my jaw dropped.

      Did they ever get rid of that manager (and wife and dogs)?

      1. Phoenix*

        Copying part of a reply to someone else:

        The manager eventually left for unrelated reasons – the juicy gossip is that he had gotten a customer pregnant at a company event several years prior before his retirement, and coming back to our state had put him in the line of fire for child support because she hadn’t been able to find him before. The manager certainly did leave town with no notice (like we literally found a note saying he was gone on a Monday morning), and there were certain other corroborating events. Whatever the reason, the HR manager came back to work when he left.

      1. Phoenix*

        Oh, yes – the employee who was assaulted was out on disability (for both the whiplash and for diagnosed PTSD – I totally believe it) for a while, and did press charges. I don’t know what the outcome was there.

        The manager eventually left for unrelated reasons – the juicy gossip is that he had gotten a customer pregnant at a company event several years prior before his retirement, and coming back to our state had put him in the line of fire for child support because she hadn’t been able to find him before. The manager certainly did leave town with no notice (like we literally found a note saying he was gone on a Monday morning), and there were certain other corroborating events. Whatever the reason, the HR manager came back to work when he left.

      1. Phoenix*

        That was my reaction – I was on vacation when the assault happened, so it was relayed to me when I came back. If I’d been there, I don’t think I would have been able to restrain myself from quitting on the spot, student loans and crappy economy be damned. As it was, I was there for another four or five months before I managed to find a different job.

    5. Muriel Heslop*

      That is completely unbelievable! And was there a special reason your office had a full bedroom? Just curious. Seems like an invitation for disaster (as you have proven.)

      1. Phoenix*

        I heard later that the owner’s son had lived in it previously, so it was likely just an office that had been set up for him as a bedroom? It was definitely courting disaster – but the manufacturing and lab portions had so many safety and OSHA violations that the bedroom would have looked like nothing in comparison.

      2. neverjaunty*

        In some industries (law, IT) it’s not unusual for people to pull all-nighters and I have been at places that had a “crash room” for people to grab a little sleep – basically a repurposed supply closet. Not a fully furnished bedroom that anyone LIVED IN though.

        Oh wait, untrue. One former employer had a remote/satellite office that was a two-room suite (bedroom and office) so people working out of that location didn’t have to try and work from their hotel room. That got shut down the day a support staff member showed up at the office for a late-night project and walked on her manager going at it with a prostitute.

      3. MaryMary*

        I worked for a very small business (I think I was employer number five), and the owner had a bedroom/living area set up in a corner of our office with a futon. There was also a full kitchen and bathroom in the office. The owner split her time between our office and her home in Florida, and spent a decent amount of time on the road, so she was probably only around a quarter of the time. It was a little odd, but she was always fully dressed and professional when the rest of us were in the office.

      4. Elizabeth West*

        I used to work at a lab where the owner lived in another state. He had a Murphy bed in his office and when he was on one of his monthly visits, he would sleep in the office to save money. There was a shower in the basement so he could wash up.

      1. Chloe Silverado*

        This isn’t my story, but I used to work for a homebuilder in their Design Center. We had fully mocked up rooms showing the various finishes and upgrades you could select. It could be a scenario like that?

        2. MJH*

          It’s like that episode of Are You Being Served? where they all have to live in the department store set that’s meant to look like a house.

      2. Phoenix*

        Copying my reply to someone else:

        I heard later that the owner’s son had lived in it previously, so it was likely just an office that had been set up for him as a bedroom?

      3. Agile Phalanges*

        I can’t speak for the original comment writer, but felt compelled to add a comment about why my (now-former) company had a fully furnished bedroom. When designing the building, the CEO included the bedroom as a way to save on hotel costs. As the corporate office of a company with other facilities in other locations across the country, we often had employees from one of those other locations as visitors to our location, often for an entire business week.

        The CEO figured that, rather than pay nearly $200 a night (including taxes) for these guests, they could stay on site for basically free, and designed the building accordingly. There was pass-through kitchen, and the door could be locked to keep people from the rest of the building out of the kitchen (or lock the door between the “apartment” and kitchen, instead or in addition). Then there was a living room area, quite spacious, with a couple of couches, a TV, and even a Wii. That room was sometimes used for meetings when we didn’t have out of town guests, but became their living room when they stayed on site. Then there was a very small bedroom, just large enough for a bed and one nightstand.

        Only a couple of people felt comfortable enough to use it, but one person was a little TOO comfortable. He was from one of our more eastern locations, and didn’t realize that a lot of people in our west-coast-based corporate office would come in quite early and work hours more compatible with the eastern location, so he was making himself a nice little breakfast in the kitchen, in his tighty-whities, without having locked the door between the rest of the building and the kitchen. Someone walked in to make themselves toast or get coffee or whatever, and they both got quite a big surprise.

        I don’t think ANYone used it as a hotel room after that, and the space soon was relegated to storage and meetings. The larger room was a great multi-purpose room, and we had cooking demonstrations, yoga classes, and more in there. The former bedroom was nearly useless, though, and was mainly used for storage.

      1. Phoenix*

        The HR manager did press charges, as well as being out on disability leave for a month or so – whiplash and PTSD. I don’t know how the charge-pressing went, though.

        I wasn’t at work the day it happened, or I’m fairly sure I wouldn’t have been able to keep from quitting on the spot. One employee did – the poor guy had only been there for two days!

    8. Windchime*

      I love the idea of the wife wandering around the office in slippers and housecoat, carrying a dog. That is just so horribly bizarre. I’m glad you got out of there.

      1. Phoenix*

        Thanks – so am I!

        Typing all this out is making me appreciate my nice, normal job all over again…

        1. SerfinUSA*

          I worked for a person who falsified many documents to get financing for a house in the US built (she and hubby were Canadian citizens). While the house was being built, they lived in a room of the fabric wholesale/import warehouse her business was in. The building used to be a cabinet finishing place, so had a nice big bathroom with shower.

          It was really gross. Both of them had no class, no manners, and hubby would take naps on the breakroom couch, or be in the bathroom for long stretches of time, preventing workers from using the facilities. He also walked around the warehouse farting and cracking jokes about it, chatting with friends on the phone about his bathroom achievements, and showing us inappropriate vacation pictures of his wife.

          Wifey, on the other hand, was more about using employees as servants, enlisting (coercing) our assistance in defrauding her bank and insurance company, not to mention cheating customers. I could write 5 or 6 paragraphs on her other abuses…

          I did enjoy quitting that job in a blaze of verbal fury though. She came in one morning calling me out for helping another employee contact our state employment agency about time card doctoring. I was furious, and cut her off with the statement that she was lucky not to be deported for criminal activity. There was a brief interlude of me loudly mentioning how interested her customers might be in documentation of her constant cheating, some chit chat about customs, insurance fraud, etc. I closed with a rousing “I quit! And if I get any trouble filing for unemployment there will be hell to pay.”
          She did make trouble, and she was rewarded for her efforts. The unemployment office was quite impressed with my documentation of her ‘managerial style’ and awarded me benefits. And some anonymous person tipped off her biggest customer (someone who makes red carpet gowns for celebrities) about the cheating.

          She is no longer in business, but I still bear the scars of that 1.5 years of my life.

          2. SweetSweetBerryWine*

            Whoa. Please tell me you filled out the IRS whistle blower form! You could also get money. I called the EEOC and they didn’t care but believe me the IRS just LOVES to hear about people not paying their dues. I hope you’re okay and not too permanently scarred. I dealt with Baptists who brandished guns at work and threatened to kill me.

            I reported them to the police and was told it “was not their problem”. Yeah…

    9. Forest Plot*

      Did you work in a department store? As a kid, I always wondered if people lived in those fake rooms showcasing beds. The hard platforms under the bed spreads confused the heck out of me.

      1. Leah*

        There’s a whole book about kids running away from home to live at the Met Museum. I always thought that they should have tried to live at Macy’s , although it would have messed up the rest of the story line.

        1. Phoenix*

          I love that book! It’s called “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler” – it was a childhood favorite of mine. :)

          2. Abradee*

            I used to work at a very large organization in a big city where housing is unbelievably expensive. This place also has an internship program that college kids and recent grads come from all over to participate in. Urban legend has it that there was once an intern from out of town who managed to get away with sleeping under his desk at night (George Costanza style, I suppose) in order to avoid spending money on temporary housing. He almost got away with it but was eventually caught right before his internship was coming to an end.

            Whenever money was tight or I was having housing issues, I would concoct an elaborate (though not serious) plan as to how I too could live at work without getting caught. Man, the money I would have saved on rent! And no commute!

            2. Joel*

              a similar thing happened with an NYU student who was caught living in the library ~2004. I don’t remember if he lived there for his entire college career or just one semester/school year.

    10. Liz in a Library*

      Whoa!

      I always thought it was strange that the store my mom worked for recently (and which was open to the public) was also the owner’s home, with her bed directly behind the register (with no barrier from public view, including through the full front glass windows).

      This adds an extra special level of crazy though. Geez!

    11. Vicki*

      I know about a company that had 4 little apartments (one in each corner of the office floor) with engineers living in them. I wondered: what if you leave the company? You lose your home!

      The employees used the company break room kitchens and apparently, during working hours, other employees used the bathrooms. Most weird.

      The county had them in some sort of work/living zoning.

    12. SF*

      Everything about this is so bizarre that it sounds like someone describing a dream. “For some reason there was a bedroom in the middle of the office, and the boss and his wife were living there, I think? And they’d yell at each other in their pajamas, and dogs were everywhere. Then one day he hit someone for no reason and left these weird marks on their face. Oh, and then I realized I was naked and had to take a geometry test I hadn’t studied for.”

  2. KayDay*

    There was a zumba class right outside my office (as in, outside under some trees) during lunch today. There’s nothing like hearing a song while at work to make you realize how inappropriate some of the lyrics are. And as much as I love zumba, I’m not sure I would be comfortable with my colleagues seeing me shake my tail feathers like that . Although, seeing that it was a zumba class made it less weird than when it was just some guy sitting around listening to reggeton under a tree in a tank top and shorts (before the class started)….the grounds surrounding our building are secure, so I had been wondering if I needed to alert security to an “intruder”.

    2. Fact & Fiction*

      I’m laughing at this because I’m a Zumba addict and go to classes 4-5 times a week. How funny to have to listen to that at work, though.

    3. Wren*

      My in laws are obsessed with line dancing. One time, my husband and I had a giggle on finding a printout belonging to my mother in law for a routine danced to “Smack That.”

  3. Apollo Warbucks*

    When I worked at a DIY store, I saw the cleaner performing a sex act of the manager in the bathroom, during the night shift

    1. reader*

      Had a co-worker who dated a former co-worker before I started who told me that had sex in the store room.

    2. MaryMary*

      At my former employer, a group of employees walked into a conference room for an early morning meeting and found two of their colleagues having sex. Even after being interrupted (maybe they didn’t notice?), the love birds finished before leaving the conference room.

      The worst part is that both of those individuals were married, and one was married to another employee.

      2. Haha!*

        Either this is more common than it should be, or I know where you work! I’ve definitely heard this story before.

      3. Ewwwwww*

        At one place I worked, a couple of people in a different department liked to make use of a storage room in their department. What they didn’t seem to realize was that it shared a very thin wall with another department’s employee restroom, and everything they did or said could be easily heard. Most people were very cautious about using that restroom.

    3. Bea W*

      Had a couple of co-workers who parked up on the roof the garage during lunch and did it there before returning to work. They’d walk back to the building separately to not arouse suspicion (or perhaps other things).

    4. Agile Phalanges*

      Not my story, but a former co-worker had previously worked for a company that manufactured high-end motor-coach-sized RVs (caravans in Australia, and possibly the UK too?). Two employees were caught in the act inside a coach that had just been completed and was about to be delivered to the customer. As I understand it, the employees were fired, and the coach was gutted and completely refinished. Not sure WHAT the employees did in there that it couldn’t just be cleaned, but I guess the company had high standards, which is nice to know.

    5. MisterPickle*

      “Was that wrong? Should I not have done that? I tell you, I gotta plead ignorence on this thing, because if anyone had said anything to me at all when I first started here that that sort of thing is frowned upon… you know, cause I’ve worked in a lot of offices, and I tell you, people do that all the time.”

  4. E.R*

    My boss, the CEO, has changed in front of me, top to bottom but leaving his underwear on, twice during conversations. The second time I saw it coming and tried to back away, but he followed me because he still had more to say. He does this to everybody, its just more uncomfortable for me because I’m a woman and he’s a man and I don’t know where to look. For anyone thinking this is some form of sexual harassment, you have to take my word for it that it’s not – he’s simply the weirdest person I’ve ever known.

    1. sjw*

      I had this happen to me once as well. I am female as was my boss, who I did not know very well. While we were meeting (door closed) she suddenly starting changing clothes, stripping down to undies while we talked, as if nothing strange was happening.

      She was later fired for behavior that stemmed from her raging alcoholism.

    2. KellyK*

      It doesn’t have to be malicious or deliberately making you uncomfortable to be sexual harassment. I’d say that certainly qualifies.

      1. The Cosmic Avenger*

        Agreed, although I can understand E.R. deciding to let it go if she’s sure that it’s just a profound lack of awareness and there’s nothing sexual about it.

    5. blu*

      I believe you. My old director used to come in my office and sit at the desk across from mine, through his leg up and then rotated out in the swivel chair. He would then sit like that, spread eagle, for the entire conversation. He was completely oblivious and it became a running joke in the office to refer to it as “leg sex”.

  5. anon*

    ~1000 person muti-floor office with attached cafe that apparently was not good enough for one woman who kept a coffee maker and WAFFLE IRON in her cube. She’d literally make waffles mid day like it was perfectly normal.

    1. Stephanie*

      And she just kept the batter in the fridge? I had to hide my space heater from facilities because of safety worries, but this lady got away with a waffle iron?!

    2. Judy*

      Sometime before 7 am, there was a guy that made bacon in the microwave every morning for a while. His truck had a camper shell, and it turned out that he was living in the truck, which seemed to involve lots of cooking in the office, and sleeping in the conference rooms. I had to wake him once when I had an early meeting. It also involved a round of the office around 9:30 am to make sure there were no donuts or anything out anywhere in the building.

      1. De Minimis*

        I heard about a guy like that at my current job, he was let go not long before I arrived…he was living in a camper and kept pestering co-workers to let him park on their property. He was also stalking some of the female employees, but I think he was fired for taking apart expensive equipment for no apparent reason and then not being able to put it back together again.

        1. Molly*

          He was stalking female employees, but *messing with equipment* is what got him fired.

          I only wish I were more surprised…

          1. De Minimis*

            It may have been a combination of things….one of the women he was freaking out was a manager, so he might have ended up getting canned even if the equipment thing hadn’t happened. The stalking was borderline—a group of women would walk every day and he’d join them without being asked, one employee found out that he had been in her neighborhood late one night [she lived in another town.] Just a lot of weird behavior.

            What seems to happen here is that people have a pattern of things that get them in trouble, but then it’s some other event that actually results in termination. I think maybe if he had not creeped people out they might not have fired him for that.

        2. Wander*

          One of my coworkers right now keeps “joking” about how people should let him set up his trailer in their backyard and live there. I’m pretty sure he’s not serious, but with the way he keeps carrying on about it, even after clearly being told no, I’m not sure.

          1. VintageLydia USA*

            My FIL does the same with hubby and I. He says he’s joking but sometimes I’m not so sure…

      1. Gene*

        For our small office of 5, we have two waffle irons and an electric griddle. Breakfast IS the most important meal of the day!

          1. Gene*

            Best was the morning we made a crock pot full of sausage gravy, brought in a half-gross biscuits, and invited everyone in the plant for morning break.

            1. Elizabeth West*

              My company does that for charity–they collect donations and you can get a big old plate of biscuits and gravy and sausage. Right now they’re having an ice cream social on the patio (though I’m having to avoid the treats right now because dieting).

              I love this job.

        2. SerfinUSA*

          My partner & coworkers celebrate Våffeldagen once a year, with everyone bringing assorted fixings.

          1. Anonylicious*

            Oh, my goodness. I had never heard of Våffeldagen before, and now I have a new favorite holiday.

            1. Jazzy Red*

              And behold, waffles will come thundering down from the sky riding on a sausage horse…

              Judgement Day and breakfast, all at the same time. Works for me.

      2. Jamie*

        Me too – if that waffle iron woman ever applies here I’ll lobby hard to get her hired.

        And this post today, when I have 2 audits to oversee and a meeting? Really? I need to close this right now and block AAM from my network until my day is over.

        And the first commenter wins as far as I’m concerned. Bathrobes, domestic bickering, slappy the manager…I don’t know what can top that.

      3. Melanie*

        I have a Nespresso machine in my cubicle, and no the coffee at work isn’t good enough:) Of course anyone is welcome to use it, and in my former place of employment people started buying their own pods to use it. I hope thats not really that strange:)

    4. TaterB*

      When I was teaching, my principal had a Fry Daddy in her office. To her, it was no big deal to offer us fresh fries (or fish) during staff meetings.

      As with many other stories, that was just the tip of the iceberg.

      1. Stephanie*

        Ew. Her office must have smelled terrible. Did she just have old grease sitting around everywhere?

      4. Lizzie*

        I would love it if my principal did this. She does consistently supply us with bagels and cookies, though, so I guess I can’t complain.

      6. Jean*

        I am reading and cackling and splitting my sides! Haven’t laughed this hard at an online forum since reading the “Weirdest Things Flung” comments on Flylady’s web site. (People fessed up, online, to tossing out stuffed animal heads, dead washing machines, decades-0ld jars of home-canned food, false teeth, you name it.)

    5. AdAgencyChick*

      I don’t know, there’s someone in my office who brings in his waffle iron once a month or so and makes waffles for the team. I don’t eat them because I eat Paleo, but everyone loves it. Gets him plenty of goodwill, and he cleans up after himself so why not?

      1. Anon for today*

        Yeah, there was a thing at one of my offices called “breakfast club” where groups of people brought in breakfast on Fridays. It started out simple, like donuts or quiche, but some groups took it pretty far. There was definitely a manager in one of the groups that brought in a waffle iron, batter, fruit toppings and bacon for his weeks and set them up in the empty cube next to his desk. Breakfast burrito bars and crockpot oatmeal bars also made appearances. Then that empty cube got a blender and the people in that group started making smoothies regularly … I was just waiting to see what small appliance showed up next in that cube.

      2. Allison (not AAM!)*

        I used to work at a small tech startup, one of the engineers brought in his bread machine, and a couple of times a week he’d make us fresh bread – all kinds – sourdough, cinnamon raisin, whole wheat… We’d take turns bringing in butter and fancy jams, and those were some of the best days. Unfortunately, it was costing me money to work there (I did say startup), so I had to leave. But I’ll never forget Dave and his bread…

      1. Mabel*

        I know! I have some frozen waffles, and I’m working from home today, but I should not eat them now. Too much starch in one day is not good!

    7. Hilary*

      Was she Leslie Knope?

      “We need to remember what’s important in life: Friends, waffles, work. Or waffles, friends, work. Doesn’t matter, but work is third.”

      2. Mints*

        I’d be so happy working with Leslie Knope. I also realize the waffles are weird, but if I liked the people and it seemed clean, I think it’d be a perk

  6. Stephanie*

    Some people decided to dress up for Halloween at FirstJob. Somebody dressed up as Pinhead from Hellraiser and went all out, including the pins, white greasepaint makeup, and long-ass robe. It was creepy.

      1. Anonathon*

        I just spent 5-10 minutes googling “why does Pinhead have pins in his head?” It is hard to find a concise answer!

          2. Anonathon*

            Aha! According to the Hellraiser wiki: “Hell took him, placed nails in his head, and gave him no memory of his former life. He was now evil.” … I guess that wasn’t too helpful.

    3. Claire*

      Last Halloween at our school we had a supply teacher show up (on her first day!) in full costume, makeup and wig as a zombie. At a high school. No one else, staff or pupil, was dressed up. She told the entire staffroom at break that we were weird for not doing it, threw a hissy fit because the cake club (group of staff who baked cakes to share with other members of the group) didn’t offer her cake, and refused to come back to our school ever again.

      1. KerryOwl*

        I actually think the strangest part of this story is that NO ONE in an entire high school dressed up for Halloween. Where are you located?

        1. Anonsie*

          Where I went to school it wasn’t allowed and you would be sent home immediately. Staff weren’t allowed, either.

        2. Claire*

          I’m in Scotland. It’s just not a thing we do in school. We have a Halloween party for the youngest students (in S1) in the evening where they dress up in costumes and do activities and games and a ghost tour etc, but not during school hours.

          It was so out of place that everyone still talks about the weird supply teacher who was a zombie. It’s been several years, and some of the kids still laugh about her.

          1. hellokitty*

            Our office manager decided to get in the Halloween spirit and gave us all that disgusting peanut butter taffy. I said I felt sorry for her because no one was eating her candy. Someone else mentioned that he felt sorry that she was the only one in costume. Up to that moment, I hadn’t realized she was wearing a costume. (Hygiene and fashion were not her thing.)

      3. Willow Sunstar*

        I find it odd that someone would dress up on a first day without trying to first find out if it was a. normal there and b. allowed by the dress code.

    4. Not sure I should put my name on this, so I won't*

      Many years ago, one of our senior managers – male – arrived for Halloween dressed as “Little Red Riding Ho” – he proclaimed himself as such. Mini skirt, fake breasts and skimpy top, wig, high heels…. He swished.

      One of the men in sales came as a nun the same year.

      It was hilarious.

      1. EG*

        One of our department managers offered to dress up as anything for Halloween to the department who donated the most for a local charity. The winning department selected Ariel from the Little Mermaid, and he went all out with wig and costume, even makeup. Funniest thing ever to see him go outside on smoke break, since we share the smoking area with two other buildings. Another year he was Shirley Temple. Of course, the year he wore a pregnant nun costume and traffic kept slowing down to watch him on smoke breaks was even better!

      2. Liane*

        Just last night, oddly (very oddly!) I was thinking about an evening shift at work a few years back. It was around Halloween and I was helping a woman, when this male customer was shopping nearby. He was wearing a very similar costume, with very, high, spike-heel sandals. The lady & I both kept looking at him, then looking back at each other, and then, when he was out of earshot, discussing whether it was just a costume or if he was a cross-dresser. I think a couple other customers in line weighed in. I later learned that it was the latter, he was IT at the local Big University and he always dressed like that and was known for it.
        __
        Me, I stick to my Jedi robes for working Halloween. It’s the full handmade movie-quality costume I wear for appearances except that I have a toy lightsaber on my belt rather than the expensive and fragile prop-saber. Of course, I never win the prize–that goes to someone in a $30-40 off-the-rack costume.

      1. Stephanie*

        Yes! He looked exactly like guy in the movie. Public transit commuting was pretty common at that job, so I wonder if he took the Metro dressed as Pinhead.

        Also, I loved the Metro November 1 (or the day after weekend Halloween celebrations)–it was amusing seeing hungover people still in costume taking the Metro home.

        1. Molly*

          I live in Boston, and we have a guy who routinely rides the trains dressed authentically as Ben Franklin. I’d love to see him sitting next to a Pinhead or Freddy Krueger at Halloween…

          1. Lizzie*

            I want to see this. My commute would be so much more interesting if there were costumed historical figures. What line?

          2. Molly*

            Ummmm I am also Molly in Boston and my mom and dad go to this one bar just to get beers with him sometimes.

    6. Cath in Canada*

      We once had someone show up in a “Halloween costume” that looked more like full-on bondage gear – all leather straps, and not much coverage. I don’t know what he was thinking, especially because he’d been there for a few years and the most anyone else ever did for Halloween was wear a silly hat. Nice six-pack though :D

      1. Anon for this!*

        When I was 23 and teaching, I dressed up for Halloween using anything I could find. That year it was a red wig and a lot of bruise makeup from Walgreens. I SO did not think it through because some parents thought my haphazardly placed bruises made it look like I was a drug addict. Oh yeah, it was a middle school. I am dying of cringe right now.

        1. Elizabeth West*

          I had nothing one year at a job where we DID dress up. I dug around and found this fake tattoo that looked like a bullet hole, so I stuck it in the center of my forehead and put on pale lipstick. People were all, “Why are you not wearing a–GAH!” :)

          1. Emily, admin extraordinaire*

            As a person who is less than thin, I’ve thought recently that a perfect Halloween costume would be to stick a zipper on my forehead and go as a Slitheen.

      2. Anonymous*

        My office has a costume contest that’s not well participated in (at least these days). One of the older, fairly heavy gentlemen dressed up as Superman one year. Unfortunately, he’d bought a cheap, off-the-rack costume that was fairly thin and was a little too small for him, and he didn’t wear anything under it. It was the most awkward trick-or-treat and group photo ever – even in the photos you could clearly see EVERYTHING through that costume. And the worst part – management wouldn’t even bring it up with him or tell him he couldn’t be in the photo.

  7. PEBCAK*

    More funny than weird:

    My company held a lactation class for new mothers one day at noon, and the memo said, “Lunch will be provided. Please bring your own beverage.”

      1. Mommaries*

        As someone who is currently breastpumping in her low walled cube, why is everyone looking at me weird?

  8. Diet Coke Addict*

    As a teenager I worked at a big warehouse-style shoe store. We had a customer come in wanting a shoe sizer (those metal things that slide to tell you what size shoe you wear) and measured his hands with it. Then he would corner the sales staff one at a time and proceed to tell us all his revolutionary theory that everyone’s feet and hands were exactly the same size. Nothing could convince him that this was not the case, not even the evidence of his own feet and hands not measuring it. Those were “an aberration in the data” and it was “true for most people.”

    My very first job ever at age fourteen was at a local ice-cream shop. The owner was so dreadfully cheap that when the chocolate ice cream got low, he would send one of us to the Jewel down the street to buy two quarts of generic chocolate ice cream and mix it in to the Edy’s in the display case. Instead of just ordering more. He also made all his ice-cream cakes in the dead of winter and left them frozen in the display case for seven or eight months. Once there was a power outage and the cakes dripped onto each other–I watched him tell a customer the drips and splatters of chocolate ice cream on a white vanilla cake were “for decoration” despite looking exactly like you would expect splattered chocolate ice cream to look.

    1. Eliza Jane*

      The hand-foot guy is I think my favorite example of willful ignorance ever. This is always true! The fact that every piece of evidence I’ve ever found contradicts it does not change its truth!

      1. James M*

        I feel only pity for people who cling so hard to “facts” that are continually contradicted by reality.

        1. Jamie*

          Don’t pity us, we’re happy in our delusions….as long as you aren’t smacking us in the face with reality.

          And everyone loves being audited because they understand it’s a useful process and they appreciate having their deficits pointed out and then having me track their progress in fixing them. They DO love it and they DO love me for doing it. I believe it therefore it is so.

    2. Rose*

      Why would you need a shoe sizer to measure that?? Couldn’t you just put your hand next to your foot? It’s kind of the best part.

      1. seesawyer*

        Well obviously there’s something wrong with that measurement method, as it didn’t show his hand and foot being the same size. Therefore he needed better measuring tools. …Now I am picturing this guy escalating from placing hand and foot next to each other, to a ruler, to the shoe sizer, to like lab-grade calipers, each time sincerely believing that the better tool will get him the answer he wants.

    3. E.R*

      I love the hand-foot guy. If I dug far back enough into my employment history, I could find so many colleagues and customers just like him.

    4. Carrington Barr*

      The lengths of your hand and foot do not correlate, but the length of your forearm (from the inside of your elbow to the inside of your wrist) and your foot DO.

      1. Elsajeni*

        1. This is true.
        2. I’m going to really enjoy spending the rest of the day picturing hundreds of AAM readers, all over the world, furtively bending under their desks to compare their feet to their forearms. (Like I… totally didn’t just do.)

        1. TK*

          I had never heard this fact before in my life, and I just saw it on Reddit two days ago, and now I’m encountering it here. Isn’t there a name for that sort of phenomenon?

            1. MommaTRex*

              Thank-you!!! I’ve been trying to find the name of this for a couple of years, but in a twist of irony, I didn’t hear the phenomenon mentioned more than once!

          1. Tinker*

            Er, that was meant to be the furtive shifty gaze of someone who totally did not just do that.

        8. Salyan*

          And…. I now have great respect for anyone who can actually get their forearm next to their foot to measure it. :-P

      2. Spidergirl*

        Well my weird office story is that my boss just walked into the office to find everyone upsidedown measuring their feet against their arms to test this…

      5. teclatwig*

        Ouch! Just pulled something…er…while *not* contorting myself to confirm. Not at all, nosirree….

        In other news, I am so chuffed that the measurement from my elbow to my wrist is exactly one foot.

        1. teclatwig*

          Hey, that sounded like a joke. Darn, I wish I were that clever. I meant 12″, a useful measuring stick.

      6. Mabel*

        A (thin) friend swears that if she folds a pair of pants in half and can reach the waistband completely around her neck that they will fit her waist (in other words, her waist is twice as far around as her neck). I don’t think this could work for everyone.

        OK, just measured my neck. I WISH my waist was twice the circumference of my neck!

    5. kris walks around*

      Was the ice cream job in Illinois? Sounds like an ice cream shop operator in my hometown.

        1. kris walks around*

          Yes! Hello from an ex-Illinoisan! I had my share of crappy teenage jobs in Palatine, but at none of my jobs did my boss wake me in the night to make me try to salvage melted ice cream.

          1. Diet Coke Addict*

            Oh my god! Yes, that shop was just as horrifying as the place looked from the outside–the last time I was there visiting my parents, it had closed for good. (Or perhaps due to rampant health code violations, I don’t know.)

            1. Current IL*

              This guy was selling “31 flavors” for many years before “Eddys”. Think the franchise may have been revoked. He was a charecter.

              1. Diet Coke Addict*

                I am so entertained to find other AAM readers who know exactly who I’m talking about!

                1. cuppa*

                  My brother lived down the street from there for about 10 years. Glad I never got ice cream there.

      2. Cristina in England*

        I always thought that people who obscured almost every detail in their posts were slightly paranoid about being identified, but I guess I was wrong!

        1. Cristina in England*

          (obviously no one in the ice cream thread is trying to obscure detail, I mean people who are afraid of being outed to their managers for complaining about them, etc)

  9. ThursdaysGeek*

    I’m so looking forward to reading all the comments on this one!

    I kept black widows as pets at one job, but they came with the office and all I did was contain them. (And feed them. And name them. Perfectly normal, I tell you!)

    1. Mike C.*

      You remind me of one of my advisers in college. We were at the field station when he turn over a bucket, got really excited and told us all to gather around. He then points and shouts, “Aren’t those the biggest black widow spiders you’ve ever seen!? Look at the size of the hour glass!”

      Admittedly, it was pretty cool…

    2. KerryOwl*

      My husband and I have adopted the spiders that made their webs on our front porch. They’re not black widows (though we have seen those in our yard as well) but they ARE really big and creepy. He feeds them daddy longlegses.

        1. KerryOwl*

          I agree! But they are also apparently very delicious, and we are not going to run of out daddy longslegses any time soon. Mama’s gotta eat.

      2. Katie*

        Aww, daddy longlegs are the only spiders I can tolerate. My roommate and I have an “agreement” with the ones that live in our house. They get free reign of all corners and crevices and eat other bugs/spiders to their tiny little hearts’ content. As soon as they enter the shower, all bets are off–die, sucker! Die!

        It’s a relationship of mutual respect and understanding.

        1. ThursdaysGeek*

          Ah, see I keep jumping spiders as my kitchen spiders, to eat the other bugs. Besides, they are cute and fuzzy and they look at you. I’m pretty ambivalent about daddy longlegs, although I’d probably remove them from the shower and take them outside. Normal bathtub spiders go down the drain, because there’s no ambivalence there!

          2. Rana*

            I love jumping spiders. Once I was even able to play with one on my computer screen; it kept chasing the cursor!

        2. Elizabeth the Ginger*

          You might not be seeing daddy longlegs, but cellar spiders. They’re similar-looking (and equally harmless) but daddy longlegs (a.k.a harvestmen) are not actual spiders but from another branch of the arachnid family. They have only one body segment, not two; they don’t make silk and therefore can’t make webs; they usually live outside; and many of them are scavengers that don’t eat live prey but instead consume dead stuff (dead bugs, leaves, etc.). Cellar spiders have two body parts like other spiders; they make messy (not neat and spiral-y) webs in garages, attics, basements and windows; and they do catch live bugs. Their webs aren’t sticky – it’s just the tangled, irregular shape that traps bugs.

          Wikipedia just told me, however, that both these critters are often called “daddy longlegs,” though that disagrees with the books on spiders here in my classroom. :-)

            1. DMented Kitty*

              Ugh, I hate those things. They keep trying to fly into our patio doors, although we have a screen — but that means I don’t want to use the patio doors to get out. They do disappear when the day gets sunnier.

              And yes, I typically leave the daddy longlegs/cellar spider alone, don’t cross my path, I won’t cross yours. And the tub is off limits for anything creepy-crawly.

              Also, those house centipedes — UUUUUGGGH. Surprisingly, I am OK with millipedes, though.

          2. UK Nerd*

            In the UK, daddy longlegs usually refers to the crane fly, which isn’t an arachnid at all. This is why I now don’t call anything a daddy longlegs.

    3. Jamie*

      And that does it…I will never look for another job because that might be awaiting me.

      I physically froze in fear reading that.

      1. ThursdaysGeek*

        Ah, but Jamie — I’m a database geek — maybe you’ll hire me! :)

        (Don’t worry, I don’t plan on moving away from the Pacific NW, so you’re safe.)

    4. Monodon monoceros*

      There was a spider (no idea what species) with an amazing web in my office window earlier this summer. I watched that cool spider do web maintenance for weeks, and then I went on vacation and when I came back the spider was gone and the web was a mess. I’ll admit I was sad and probably spent way more time than I should have wondering where the spider was and if it was OK.

    5. StellaMaris*

      To each their own, but weren’t you worried about liability issues? Black widow bites can be very dangerous, if the person bitten has other kinds of allergies. My nephew has a peanut allergy, got bitten by a black widow, and spent a week in intensive care.

      1. ThursdaysGeek*

        They are very dangerous; it doesn’t sound like the allergy made it any worse. That’s the reason they went into a jar: because when I started they were just hanging around the office. Oh! You mean I should have squished them?

        1. StellaMaris*

          Squish or confine, your choice. Since I am mortally terrified of anything with more than four legs, I would have called the exterminator from my cell phone, at least a block away from the office! What’s even worse is that brown recluse spiders are now being found in the Chicago area, and that just makes my day in all kinds of ways.

          1. Hlyssande*

            There’s a picture set floating around on tumblr and cheezburger where someone found an egg sac in their tennis shoe, then found the proud mama deeper in the shoe. It was a black widow.

            The third picture is the shoe, sitting in a flower pot, on fire.

            Yep.

          2. Contessa*

            I’m with you on this one. I would be down the hall in the janitor’s room begging him to GO KILL THEM WITH FIRE RIGHT NOW! I’m an avowed leggist, but I’m only prejudiced against anything with 6+ legs because I’m okay with starfish.

          3. Jessica (the celt)*

            Are brown recluse spiders uncommon in the Chicago area? I’m originally from West-Central IL (near Quincy), and my grandfather was bitten by a brown recluse over 10 years ago, so I didn’t realize they weren’t further north already. He was diabetic and hadn’t realized what happened (also had eye problems, so he didn’t realize it wasn’t just a “regular spider” that had bit him or that it caused such a bad reaction) until my uncle noticed it when he was putting on his socks one day. He had a nasty wound due to the venom’s effects, and it took ages to finally heal up after he received care. Whenever his wound care nurse would come to change bandages out, he’d ask everyone if they wanted to see the wound (no one did), and he had a gross scar where his skin was all dented from the loss of flesh. Yuck.

    6. EngineerGirl*

      This reminds me of the rats we found in the girls locker room when we were in junior high. The science teacher (a woman) caught them and put them on display in cages in her class. This immediately made enemies with the gym teacher who was embarrassed over the lack of cleanliness of the gym.

    2. Anon*

      Austin represent! I would NOT be shocked for a second that this biker is an Austinite… we are an interesting city!

      1. WorkingMom*

        When it comes to the triathlete biker, I just *have* to say that you’re not supposed to wear underwear with bike shorts. I realize that part of the story was about a 10th of the weirdness. But I cannot help myself. I feel the need to point this out, haha.

        1. Nikki T*

          I sort of read it as an assertion that he was just standing, naked, bathing at the sink, rather than the fact that he wore no underwear under his bike shorts.

          1. Mabel*

            What happens? I used to ride about 20 miles every Sunday morning, and I wore underwear because I didn’t know I shouldn’t. I don’t think that was a long enough ride to cause problems. What happens if you wear underwear under bike shorts?

        3. anita*

          bike commuting isn’t weird. I ride 18 miles each way because it takes just as long to drive. totally normal not to wear underwear under your bike stuff. i guess the sink part is unfortunate, but if more employers encouraged alternative modes of transportation this would not have been an issue.

          1. CTO*

            Biking to work isn’t weird (I do it every day, too) but it’s super weird to strip down and bathe in the middle of a multiperson bathroom. That’s definitely a line no one should cross, even if their employer doesn’t offer a bike-friendly alternative.

            1. Erica*

              Well, when it comes to not biking at all vs. being a little “weird,” I’m going to go for weird. Then again, reasonable bike-commute-friendliness is a hard limit for me when it comes to jobs.

    3. Cog*

      Definitely had a “You know you’re a triathlete if…” moment here, because my reaction was “Huh? That’s perfectly normal!” (I’ve never been to Austin and my workplace thankfully has an actual shower, but… yep, triathletes are weird. :-) )

  11. Jake*

    I went out in the field and came back to my bare footed boss kicked back in my chair with his bare feet on my desk. He also had a block of cheese and a knife sitting on my desk, indicating he had been using my desk as a cutting board.

    He asked me earlier that day not to go in the field unless it was an emergency. Well I went out to the field to solve an emergency, but I lingered an extra half hour to observe the concrete pour right next to the emergency, so I had my hard hat covered in concrete splatters.

    When I walked in the door he was facing away from me and said, “where you been?” With a mouth full of cheese. I told him about the emergency but not the concrete. Without turning around he said “so… When I turn around your hardhat is gonna be clean. ”

    At this point I gave up and said, “that’s not accurate.” He laughed and said, “get your ass to work on that proposal.”

    I then had to help my bare foot boss out of my chair because it was too low to the ground and he couldn’t get out himself.

    To this day I have no idea how long he was there or how he knew I’d stopped by that concrete placement.

    2. MR*

      Well, concrete does have a distinct smell…so he probably smelled the concrete on you without actually needing to see you…

      1. Jake*

        While concrete does have a distinct smell, how did he know it would only be on my hard hat? I had taken precautions to keep my clothes clean, so the only concrete on me was small specks on my hard hat and a small chunk on my boot.

  12. Zach*

    To the original commenter:

    Umm, you *don’t* wear underwear under cycling shorts. If you do, you’ll have all sorts of problems.

    I guess I’m one of those weird people, too. I go for long road/mountain bike training rides before or after work and will wear my cycling kit for those rides. For pre-work riding, I’ll shower at home, get sweaty during my workout, then freshen up in the work bathroom.

      1. Zach*

        Now that I don’t do!

        Some folks treat bathrooms like locker rooms. If you are a bike commuter/jog commuter and your office doesn’t have good places to change, the bathroom is your only alternative. it sucks.

            1. fposte*

              Why should I care?

              I mean, he can bring water into the stall and rinse over the bowl if he’s determined, but the default isn’t “it’s important to allow people to bike in and wash,” it’s “you don’t get to stand around nude in the bathroom.” If you can’t figure out how to bike in and wash without standing nude in the bathroom, that’s not work’s problem.

          3. Wren*

            When I was a student, I changed out of my cycling clothes in the bathroom outside of the stall, but then, student life has different customs than work life. I don’t think I’d do that now in my work life.

            In any case, people seldom entered while I did my quick change (other than the other cycle commuting student my class,) and if they did, I’d just say a quick, “pardon me,” and quickly get on with it.

      2. Kevin W.*

        I do (after morning runs, not bicycling), but it’s a single bathroom with a locking door that I use, so perhaps not that weird. Coincidentally, that bathroom has a shower in it as well (part of Green certification for our building)…but said shower hasn’t worked for the past 4 months, so it’s been all ShowerPill wipes and no-rinse shampoos for me in there.

    2. fposte*

      I believe Joey’s point about the underwear was that this guy was therefore standing naked in the shared space of the work bathroom. If this is you, I think people would like you to move that into the stalls.

        1. Fact & Fiction*

          I would think the professional thing to do would be to go in the stall, put at the very least pair of underwear on, and then take the birdbath by the sink.

        2. Molly*

          …not your coworkers’ problem. No one wants to walk into the bathroom and see their marketing manager stark naked. Awkward!

          Also, I think damping a washcloth at the sink then bringing it into the stall would be very easy, as would just packing and putting on some underwear.

          1. Traveler*

            There are also wipes and things you can buy and keep in a bag you bring with you to take a quick wipe down.

            2. anita*

              none of these suggestions work for women who are susceptible to infections. it’s the management’s fault for not encouraging multi-modal transportation.

              1. Shell*

                If a terry-cloth wipe isn’t suitable for cleaning off, then perhaps biking to work isn’t the mode of transportation for you. Take the bus?

                I’m all for multi-modal transportation, I can but don’t drive, but come on. While it’d be great if every workplace has a shower, if that option isn’t available the answer is NOT to subject coworkers to naked bodies.

                1. Karowen*

                  Let’s just make a general rule: Unless you are (a) a sex worker (b) on fire or (c) in an actual shower where people at least know to avert their eyes, you should never be naked at work.

              2. Molly*

                Several of those options would be fine if you were through, but that’s hardly management’s problem. Your work isn’t really obligated to provide you with showers or a locker room. I wish I could bike to work, but it’s not possible in my area. I don’t blame my management; I take the bus then bike later. It’s great when management can provide those things, but it’s far from an obligation.

              3. phxchic*

                There are witchhazel wipes that comes individually wrapped just for this. You can also buy anti-bacterial wipes at a home health store or larger pharmacy if so inclined. I’ve done both with success.

                OT – best way I’ve found to prevent nasty infections in my bike shorts is taking acidolphilus supplements daily. That helps regardless of ride length.

    3. Lizabeth*

      Yes, you can…the trick is to find very, very, very flat seamed underwear. Never had a “problem” yet.

    4. Gene*

      Underwear under cycling shorts is a quick route to ER quality chafing. I had a seam come loose in a set of cycling shorts on the second day of STP (Seattle To Portland ride) one year and had to take the next three days off work because I couldn’t wear pants while the hole in my inner thigh healed.

          2. Gene*

            Many of the regular commenters here have seen a photo or two of me in a kilt. Sadly, safety requires that I wear long pants.

        2. Who are you?*

          There’s probably a manager somewhere in the world who would insist that this isn’t a good reason for calling in sick though. Probably the same manager who told me, hours after my grandfather died, that work needed me more than my grandfather did now.

        3. louise*

          My husband almost called in “no pants” once after he forgot to move his load of work clothes from the washer to the dryer. I think he ended up a little late and with damp seams, IIRC.

        4. Anonymous*

          I just read that while scrolling through without reading the context first, I choked on my coffee.

      2. Cristina in England*

        If you’re just commuting, you probably don’t need all the special gear. Triathletes would, of course, but it is possible to commute to work by bike wearing pretty normal clothes, not even bike shorts. Or bike shorts with underwear.

        1. ella*

          I realize I’m posting this so late that nobody will see it, but I agree. Not so long ago I was commuting almost 40 miles per day by bike. I had a couple of pairs of mountain bike shorts that I always wore (loose shorts with a gusset so I wasn’t sitting on seams), but I didn’t wear padded shorts underneath. I definitely wore underwear, and not flat-seamed underwear, either. I never had a problem.

          Maybe all y’all need new saddles that don’t tear up your inner thighs. ;)

          1. Rebecca*

            Agreed, as well! I commuted about 20 miles a day by bike for years in a hilly city and did it all in my work clothes. Never had an issue other than needing about 5 minutes to cool down on warm days.

            1. PoisonIvy*

              Everyone’s body composition and temp is different. My commute is 16 miles round trip and if I wore my work clothes, I’d be spending my entire morning in damp, sweaty dresses. I don’t even want to think about the underwear situation. I wear full cycling gear, then I change (in the single bathroom, not the communal one). My manager (who also cycles) always marvels that I come in looking like a sweaty mess, yet 10 minutes later I’ve done a “glamourous transformation” (her words).

  13. Jenn*

    When I worked in TV news we were across the street from a bar. One year, during a drinking holiday (Cinco de Mayo or St. Patrick’s Day- something like that) everyone went to get drinks. One guy got drunk, came back to work to bug the overnight crew and peed himself. He then slept in his car rather than driving home drunk (points for that, I guess) and came into work the next day with his pee-dried pants and worked a shift.

    2. Rose*

      +points for never driving drunk even when you’ve peed yourself, -points for not just taking a cab home to change out of your pee pants

  15. Eric*

    I once worked at a pretty buttoned-up real estate management office. One random afternoon, one of the older women that worked there was wandering around the office with an open can of Coors Light… and as far as I know, no one said anything.

    2. E.T.*

      I used to work in commercial real estate. Yeah, it was pretty normal for brokers in my old office to drink in the afternoon. Usually at 4:00pm, brokers start bringing their wine and glasses out of their desk drawers, and we all would do a little wine tasting. Or we would go to a bar or happy hour somewhere. Most clients gifted us wine, some of the brokers had the wine from their wine clubs delivered to the office, and we’re in Northern CA (one big wine country), so there was always wine around.

      I later heard via office gossip (so not sure how accurate it is, but that’s people said) that half of the brokers in my old office had DUIs.

      1. BTownGirl*

        Yup! When I worked in commercial real estate, one of my coworkers used to bring up Slurpees on Friday and mix them with Patron. Classy, I know. However, it tastes glorious and it, frankly, I probably owe my marriage to my then-coworker-now-husband to the 800 oz of liquid courage known as the Patron Slurpee.

      1. Chinook*

        When I worked for a weekly newspaper, we would crack open various alcoholic drinks once the paper was put to bed. The stash was under the coffee machine where anyone coming in could see it.

        2. JournalistWife*

          My husband is a weekly editor and his old boss/paper would do that, too! Lots of times they worked until midnight finishing the paper (since the weekly came out the morning after night-council meetings) so I guess it made sense that they’d want a beer (or many) after, but the owner was also a raging alcoholic and I was relieved when hubs found a better job where that wasn’t part of the office culture.

    4. Anonyby*

      Sounds about right to me. My real estate company will often have beer and/or wine at office parties and lunch meetings. And with my current office, you can pretty much count on not being able to find the manager and administrator after such events if they’re at one of the local restaurants, because they’ll still be there nursing beers.

  16. nep*

    Mine’s not related to a co-worker. More like a co-critter. Thought it was pretty weird till I read some of these. Jeeeeeez.
    Anyway — after some super heavy rains in West Africa, a huge frog in the office toilet when I lifted the seat to use it. And it was a fairly posh little office building– not some makeshift space.

    1. Frances*

      Heh, that just reminded me that mine is probably the time my boss’s pet ferret (she was a family therapist and brought him in to relax her younger patients) was wandering around my desk, climbed into the wastebasket and somehow got under the trashbag (which was tied around the rim). Thankfully I heard him thrashing around trying to get out and ripped open the trashbag before he suffocated.

    2. Kirsten*

      I worked in the Florida panhandle for a while, and our building dated back to the Seminole wars (think pre-Civil War). Capturing lizards and releasing them outside was a regular part of the job. A little traumatic at first for a Midwestern girl like me…

    3. MaryMary*

      We had a snake problem in an office I worked at. I never saw one myself, but I’m told they were of the garter snake variety. We also had a rodent problem, which was probably related to the snake problem. An exterminator solved both problems.

    4. ThursdaysGeek*

      We had an door to the outside next to my office, and we’d open it on nice days to get some fresh air. Right outside was a sage rat colony (Washington ground squirrels, like a little prairie dog), and one time one came in, down the hall, and was by the HR and owner offices before I discovered it and captured it. After that, I made a barrier in the door so they couldn’t get in.

    5. Judy*

      One day in my office I heard some scritchy scratchy noises. I happened to be looking up when the raccoon lifted the ceiling tile and peered down at me. I banged on my desk really quickly, and it went away.

      Building maintenance put a live trap above the ceiling tiles in a nearby hallway and baited it with vienna sausages. They caught a raccoon 2 hours later. I did hear the next week that several people in my area of the office had heard something in the days before I saw it.

      This was office space in a building with lots of warehouse space, I’m sure it got into the building through a large door and found its way up.

      1. Meg Murry*

        Oh, the raccoon just reminded me! I worked in a factory that used lots of water in its processes, enough that we had to run a water treatment section to remove most of the chemicals in the water before sending it to the sewers for further treatment. That section of the plant never smelled very good, especially in summer when the solid sludge truck hadn’t picked up in a while. The factory had giant ovens too, so it was usually at least 80 degrees in the winter, and could get to 110 in summer. But one week it was smelling especially bad. My coworker kept saying “It smells like something died in here.” and I kept telling him, “yeah, I know – please go do a more thorough cleaning of the water treatment area and I’ll call for an extra sludge pickup.” Even after extra cleaning, it still smelled there. Finally, the coworker started hunting down the smell, and found a family of dead baby raccoons under a pallet that must have gotten in the dock doors, eaten some of the chemicals and died under there. I felt bad for not listening when he kept telling me that something was wrong, but I was glad I wasn’t the one who found them and had to clean it up.

        Then there was the day the live raccoon came into the plant in the night and the second shift manager called the police wanting them to send animal control over. The police were not amused, and didn’t send anyone over. The raccoon finally disappeared, and the next day I got a call from one of our customers saying that he apparently hitched a ride in one of the open top containers of products we shipped to them and ran a muck in their plant too until he disappeared – possibly in a container to one of their customers?

        1. Chinook*

          “Then there was the day the live raccoon came into the plant in the night and the second shift manager called the police wanting them to send animal control over. The police were not amused, and didn’t send anyone over”

          Lucky police. DH’s job with the national police force includes the title of “conservation officer” which means they do get called to random wildlife and farm critter calls. One of them involved a goat and they told a rookie that he had to put him in the back of the cruiser (while the rest of them held back laughter – normally they just shoo them off the road until the owner comes). Rookie, a farm boy, managed to catch the goat and put him in the back seat to take him back to the owner. Unfortuantely, no photos were taken.

          2. Aisling*

            My boyfriend also put livestock in the back of his patrol car once: it was a calf. He knew who it belonged to, and it was the easiest way to transport!

    6. fposte*

      We have bats. What I don’t understand is why, in a three-story building, they’d end up in the basement.

      1. Mander*

        I used to work in a university museum in a historic building that was home to some sort of endangered bat species. One day I came to work to find an upended trash can with some books on it in the middle of the main hallway — the curator had trapped a bat that had managed to get inside, and she was waiting for the bat specialist to come over from the biology department to pick it up.

      3. Liina*

        Bats like an environment that is extremely stable. And basements are – stable in humidity, temperature etc. At least here in Europe bats hybernate and live in caves and tunnels – pretty similar conditions to a basement.

    7. Peep!*

      I used to work at a library for a while that was an old fancy building complete with drawing rooms and fireplaces and weird nooks and crannies… my coworker rescued two baby possums from the window wells, three birds from the fireplaces, and a baby raccoon somewhere else.

      There was also the random jackass who dumped a pet cockatiel on the grounds… I found him sitting on a car and popped him in the purpose-built bird aviaries leftover from when security guards used to live on the property! Luckily one soft-hearted employee took him home. :)

      1. Fish Microwaver*

        Had a possum fall through the accostic tile ceiling one night after heavy rain, in front of a co-worker from Africa. She screamed the place down. So funny.

        1. Peep!*

          Ha! I think I would’ve freaked out, but laughed — possum was probably as scared as she was. Hee.

    8. Helena*

      I once attended a conference in a remote mountain location (think ski chalet). It was a nice day outside, so we had the door to the outside open to let in the fresh air. Apparently attracted by the smell of our morning bagels and cream cheese, a bear wandered in. Shouting by the people closest to the door scared him off.

      The guy who was talking did not see the bear, and thought we were making the whole thing up to get out of his talk. When several of the more foolhardy people ran after the bear and snapped a picture, the lecturer grudgingly accepted the bear’s existence, but he insisted on getting his 15 minutes of bear-disrupted lecture back.

      1. Cath in Canada*

        My friend’s seminar was once interrupted by a massive spider that ran through the audience, making everyone squeal and lift their feet off the floor; she thought we were pulling a prank, too! But the bear story is a whole other level of awesome

  17. Alter_ego*

    My male boss sometimes makes my male coworkers follow him to the bathroom while he pees if they go to him to ask a question. So like:

    Coworker: *walks into boss’ office* “hey boss! Can I ask a question?”

    Boss: “sure! Follow me!” *gets up, walks down hall to bathroom. Begins to pee* “so what’s up coworker?”

    So happy that because I’m a woman, this has not happened to me.

      1. Cat*

        I used to work with a woman who had gone to law school back in the ’60s when the profession was 99% male. She made a point of having business conversations with other women in the bathroom because men had done that as a way of excluding her for so many years. I thought it was kind of cool.

      3. Eric*

        Uh, well, sort of.

        LBJ was infamous for making his staff stay in the (stall-less) bathroom while he pooped.

        2. Molly*

          I think I’m comfortable saying there is no version of that, regardless of inclusion, that deserves to be called “good.” It’s 100% terrible and shameful behaviour no matter who he was doing it to.

    2. MsMollyD*

      I worked in book publishing and the office was mostly women. Our editor in chief would do exactly this. Start a conversation, and have one of us follow her to the bathroom to continue it while she peed. This office also had my boss who once sat down on the floor in front of my desk and cried because a FedEx shipment was late. She also reportedly threw her phone across the office once just as the company’s CEO walked by. He just looked at her, said “bad day, huh?” and kept walking.

    3. Nina*

      I had a coworker who would follow me to the bathroom when he had a question. And this was a one stall, small office situation. So he’d be standing right outside the door. I would tell him “Uh, can you give a minute and I’ll answer your question once I’m done?”

      What a weirdo.

    4. Loose Seal*

      I had a male co-worker follow me into the Ladies’ Room and stand near the sinks to continue his conversation while I peed in the stall. To be fair to him, we did have a unisex bathroom with three stalls in our building but the one I went in wasn’t that one.

    5. LV Ladybug*

      That reminds me of the movie Working Girl, where Tess goes into the men’s restroom to tell her boss about a possible deal. He stands in the stall and demands for her to give him more toilet paper.

    6. Ornery PR*

      I was working on a movie once, and during a short lunch break, I accidentally spilled soda on my boss’s shirt/tie. He was the writer/producer, but also the lead actor and had a scene coming up for which he was already in wardrobe. So the two of us ran into the bathroom and started trying to wash his shirt and tie in the sink. So, not only was his shirt off, but he thought it was appropriate to pee right there, since we were in the bathroom and all (no stalls, just a toilet and sink). I was pretty mortified, and yelled at him to stop, but he didn’t care. He just told me to turn around. Us walking out all flustered together from the bathroom, him topless and me carrying his shirt, into a busy courthouse (we were filming on location), must have been quite a hilarious scene to watch. Though the continuity girl didn’t think it was so funny.

      1. AIP*

        Aww and for a second there I was thinking it was Tommy Wiseau and you worked on The Room *”Oh, hi Ornery!”*

  18. ExceptionToTheRule*

    We have a male employee (with all sorts of personal hygiene issues) who has more than once missed the urinal in the men’s room (which is in a stall) and peed on the shoes of the guy standing at the sink.

    2. Amy B.*

      I have at least 3 teenaged boys in my house every weekend and I am very familiar with “misses.” (Shivers) That’s not a miss! That’s a malfunction.

    5. Mints*

      Omg! How far away is the sink? Is he even trying? Does he have an anatomical anomaly?
      (I’m just wondering out loud)

      1. ExceptionToTheRule*

        If it’s anything like the women’s room, we’re talking about maybe 24 inches from center mass of the toilet to center mass of the sink, but again, it’s a stall, so I don’t begin to know how the geometry on that works…

    6. Jen*

      We’ve had a person here just leave a load in the middle of the hallway. I ain’t kidding. They have such horrible hygiene issues that they’ve been talked to multiple times about it by HR and supervisors, but doesn’t do any good (and no its not an issue related to health or disability of some sort, they really just are that disgusting). The company wants to let them go but are afraid to do so (rumor is this person threatened to sue), so it just continues. You can tell when they’ve been in the vicinity by the smell.

      A person in another division was caught using towels from the locker room to clean himself up after #2, and rather than thrown them away put them with the other work clothes/dirty towels to be shipped to laundry. And I can’t tell you how many women don’t wash their hands after using the facilities which drives me nuts. I think we need to start requiring company wide training on basic hygiene!

      1. Anonymous*

        For a little while we had a mysterious mad pooper. He would stuff the men’s room toilet full of paper towels, then “ice the cake” and flush a few time to make it extra special. He apparently would also save some poop and leave it in random places – hallways, conference room tables, microwaves, under the printer, anywhere that was not locked up. I say save because the poor unfortunates who had to clean it up reported it was always cold, and there’s no way we would fail to notice poop staying in the microwave for long enough to get cold during prime lunch hours.

      2. Jean*

        Haven’t these people read the memo?! The only appropriate extracurricular place to poop is in the potted plants!

    6. Rose*

      Someone did this at my summer job in college. We all worked there for like three summers in a row. No accent, no accent, SUDDEN BRITISH ACCENT. We were all baffled. Last year you had a Chicago accent and we all knew you then!

        1. Chinook*

          Yeah, but changing your accent after being abroad is a sign of someone with a good ear for accents. It took me 6 months back in Canada before I stopped talking “ESL English.” And don’t even get me started on the Scottish accent that kept slipping when the only English I read or heard outside the classroom was in the form of Diana Gabaldon books.

          1. Mabel*

            Sometimes I’ll come across words that I don’t know how to pronounce or spell in U.S. English. There are a couple of words I learned in Spanish, and I never knew the English version. And there are a couple of words that I first saw spelled out in Australia, so I always get mixed up with how they should be spelled here (U.S.). And then there are the words I mispronounce (or more likely, avoid saying until I can look them up on m-w.com and listen to the pronunciation) because I have only read them, never heard anyone say them out loud.

      2. Biff*

        It’s possible they studied in England for a year. I pick up accents very easily (natural mimic), and if you left me in England for a year…. I’d sound like a brit.

        1. Rose*

          Nope, she hadn’t, and I know that is a thing, but this was a very strong, very forced accent.

          We had a bunch of British employees and she claimed it was from spending so much time around them.

          1. UK HR Bod*

            I’m a northern Brit exiled to the south east. My accent is pretty indeterminate, but a few days back up north (or even spending time with northern colleagues), and it starts heading back up the M6.

        2. Elizabeth West*

          I tend to do that as well. When I came back from four years in California, people here in the Midwest were saying I sounded like a surfer chick. I still don’t call soft drinks “pop” anymore; the soda thing stuck.

          1. From the Midwest btw*

            That’s because the soda thing is correct. I’ll never be convinced otherwise.

        3. Girl Thursday*

          I worked in international education for years where most of my colleagues had spent several years abroad. No one had affected speech and we would have thought it was really weird if someone claimed to have this gift for picking up accent just by listening. No one just picks up accents. Nor did our international students suddenly start sounding like Americans, even in the English speaking classes. If you want to speak with an accent, you’re going to have to practice it.

          I know people who’ve tried to drop their accents. Most of them think they have just because their friends no longer mention it. But in most cases the accent is still there, and fairly obvious. And they still say things like, “I’ve gotten rid of my accent, but….”

          1. Bea W*

            Some people do have a gift for it. I would pick up very quickly as a teenager any time I traveled and it was actually frustrating because people thought it was weird. I spent a week in Alabama and it was only days before my accent had acclimated. Calling home waa not fun. Same when I went away to boarding school, and then coming back home for a couple weeks, I would be back in in my native accent. I remember talking to friends on the phone during breaks and not being understood at times because I lived just outside of Boston with native Boston family in an area with a ridiculously thick accent. I really did not have control over that, and it was’t a concious decision.It just happened.

            I don’t think I’m as susceptible as an adult but I work and spend most of my time around people who are not from here, and people are surprised I am from here because they don’t hear that accent. Then if I happen to be talking to family or have to say a local place name (or the word drawer) it flies out in my full native accent and shocks people. I’m not exaggerating. People have slammed the breaks on conversation right there and asked me to repeat what I just said because it’s just really jarring to hear someone speaking fluently in some non-descript accent with full command of the letter R completely lose it in a split second over a word or two. Put me in a room with my dad, and it’s all over. If I’m in a mixed group I’ll flip flop back and forth.

            Language came easily to me as well half my lifetime ago. I flunked most classes in high school except foreign languages. That was a no effort A+. I wish I still had that ability today!

            1. anon-2*

              I grew up in New England – with a New England accent – but intentionally lost it when I spent some time in Canada. I wanted to fit in there. I have never lost my Canadian accent. And the “native Boston” accent now is irritating for me to hear at times.

              When I’m on the phone with someone from another part of the world – Australia, South Africa, England, etc. , after a short period of time, my accent adapts to theirs. It’s somewhat deliberate, as I want to be able to be understood by whomever I’m talking with.

              It just happens.

            2. LostYankee*

              I do the exact same thing! Grew up outside of Worcester, but went to school in the South and stayed here. My accent has mellowed over the years, but put me on the phone with someone from back home or get me talking about New England (…or give me some alcohol) and I become incomprehensible to my coworkers. There’s some words that I’ll never lose the accent on — ‘water’ being one of them. I get friends all the time making me repeat myself because they think how I say ‘water’ is the funniest thing they’ve ever heard

          2. Little Mermaid*

            Hmm…I’d say that that depends on the people? English is my first foreign language and I guess first I had a very clear accent from my native language. Then I moved abroad and spent a lot of time with Americans (from Wisconsin), so my English got quite American. Then I dated an English guy (from the South East) for over a year and spent a lot of time there and my accent changed again. Then there were a lot of Aussies (first flat mates, then a boyfriend) and my accent, again, changed. It had changed to an extent that random Aussies would come up to me and very excitedly ask, if I was Australian, too (I live in Europe).
            I never “worked” for these changes. I just pick up the way people talk around me.

          3. DMented Kitty*

            I’m half Filipino, my dad is Chinese, but we converse in (US) English usually as it’s the common language understood with me and my mom. My first language was English, then I started learning Tagalog. Tagalog then became my most used language with my school friends. Tag-lish (blend of Tagalog and English) is more common with younger generations, and that’s what I officially used through grade school up until college and work.

            My English is not bad to start with, but my pronunciation got rusty, as you typically develop some sort of accent using Taglish, and people kind of look at you funny if you actually try to speak the ‘perfect’ English — it’s some sort of a thing where “oh you’re speaking ‘States-side’ and you’re not at our level anymore” (because developing country vs. first world country).

            When I went to the US for work, I wasn’t the type of person who hung out constantly with Filipino coworkers (I do occasionally), so I was actually able to get back into speaking regular English without feeling weird. Although I still switch back to the Filipino accent when I talk to my family or people from the Philippines. A lot of US coworkers, including my now husband, have asked me where I learned to speak English without so much of a Filipino accent — it’s my first language, and I read books, and sometimes I read it aloud in my head in perfect English, and sometimes I talk to myself in English too, so that helps.

            I think I went way off-topic, but the talk of the ‘accent’ just make me think it’s all interesting how we learn to adapt.

          4. The Bookworm*

            I grew up in the Midwest, but went to college in the deep south. I quickly picked up a southern accent. For a while it was so thick my mother couldn’t understand what I was saying.

            I’ve tried to drop the accent, but years later I’ve only partially succeeded. To this day, if I’m around someone with a thick southern accent, I’ll start talking with one too. And no, it isn’t intentional.

            1. LostYankee*

              I come from New England, but came to university in the Deep South and the Southern accent mellowed my native one pretty quickly. I’ve heard it’s the easiest American accent to pick up, since it softens so many sounds.

          5. LawBee*

            responding SUPER LATE but just to say that I used to sound like Scarlett O’Hara, and now I sound like I’m from Ohio. People from Ohio have even argued with me about where I was born. It does happen.

        1. HRC in NJ*

          I totally have this. If I go to the South, it’s “all y’all”. It matters not who is around. And I’m not making fun of y’all blokes, nytha!

    8. TK*

      I had a suitemate in college who was an obsessive Anglophile. He would occasionally fake a British accent just because– he wasn’t trying to convince people he was British, it was just like… a hobby. But he wouldn’t do it jokingly, it would just temporarily become the normal way he carried out conversations.

      That was perhaps the least odd thing about him.

    10. Natalie*

      My cousin of some degree (1st cousin once removed, I think) did this to me one year at a family reunion. It was baffling.

    11. Red Stapler*

      One of my classmates in college did that too, though hers went in and out. She did try to convince a few people that she grew up in England. She also brought tea to seminar every morning and when she finished she’d wipe the bag all over her face cause “it’s good for the pores”. She was an odd duck.

    12. Mints*

      Haha I have a friend who did this at a party (there was drinking involved).
      And another friend who picks it up when she’s talking about Britain, or like Dr. Who. But she also just likes accents and isn’t actually trying to convince anybody.

      Doing it at work doesn’t seem like it could end well at all. Oh, actually, if you were assigned a temp job for like a week it might be fun

    13. Peep!*

      Argh, me too — except she was a student in my grad school program as well as being a sort-of-coworker at my work study job.

      The worst part was, my classmates BELIEVED her and were all impressed with her (HORRIBLE) accent. I was more annoyed with them for being fawning over the “British” person, really… it was so bad, how could you not know?

      I never understood why she did it — especially because the place we worked had a TON of international scholars coming in for research, and many were from the UK. Hello, they’re not going to be impressed, if anything, they’ll run far away from the crazy accent person.

    14. Anonymous just in case*

      I had a friend fake *speaking* other languages…she’d say some make up gobbeldygoop and try to pass it off as different languages. I don’t know if she convinced someone, somewhere, and tried to spread this idea to others or what. It was bizarre. Unfortunately, she kept picking languages that I either speak, or have heard spoken a lot and understand pretty well. I finally called her on one, and she said, Oh, that’s Russian. Forgetting that was my major. When I pointed this out, she said, I get so mixed up! I meant German. It was a kind of Frenchy/Spanishy-sounding gibberish.

      1. Urban_Adventurer*

        Did your friend do this on Ellen? Because I saw a segment in this when I was trapped in a doctors waiting room.

    15. First Time Commenter*

      I currently have a co-worker faking a Southern US accent. It just appeared one day. It’s not any particular type of Southern US accent. Just a generic I-think-this-is-what-Southerners-sound-like accent.

  20. Anonasaurus Rex*

    A user called the IT helpdesk with an issue, but all us techs were out doing stuff so he left a voicemail. When I got back I tried to call him to take a look at his computer with our remote viewing software, but he didn’t answer. The department was very close to my office area so I took a little walk down there to see if he was around and what I could do. I walked in on him looking at “singles ads” except the singles were topless women on an adults seeking adults for adult activities type of site.

    1. JAM*

      We had a site like that as a customer once, so my team were looking at it for purely work related reasons. A higher up came by when one of the team was looking at a much tamer dating site (also work related) and got very concerned, good thing he didn’t come by when we were working on the other one!

      1. Dani X*

        I had a friend who worked for a company that did advertisements for adult websites. Which led to a statement in a department meeting

        “when i walk by your computers all I want to see is porn”

        (part of the job involved making sure the ads were on the sites and working properly)

    2. Jen RO*

      My boyfriend’s brother develops websites for a porn streaming company… so he gets to do fun stuff like watch a 5-minute porn video at all available resolutions to see how it looks better. It stops being exciting after the first five minutes… (But apparently he shocked the cleaning lady who had no idea why there was a bored looking programmer looking at porn all day.)

      1. Stephanie*

        When I worked at the Patent Office, I met someone who was a reviewer for the adult toys patents. He said something similar–“Every once in a while, you get something crazy, but the novelty and excitement ends pretty quickly and you realize you just have a bunch of vibrator applications you need to review to make quota.”

    3. Former Professional Computer Geek*

      I just have to say – people who work in IT-help/support fields see this kind of stuff alllll the time.

      I’ve heard of places that have told their employees, “We give you a laptop/computer to use at home. Please do your adult viewing there.”

      I worked one place that had a fairly laid back attitude about many things but no formal statement about what could and could not be viewed at work. One day a senior manager’s laptop broke. The tech who worked on it told me, “I know our policy is ‘if it’s not illegal we don’t see it’ (where illegal meant things like kiddy porn which, thank god, we never had to deal with), but that laptop had so many pictures of fake boobs that I thought all the silicone would make the laptop 10 lbs heavier!”

  21. Muriel Heslop*

    I was working at a high-end restaurant frequented by celebrities. Aerosmith was dining there one night and as I was working the front desk, a woman charged by me in pajama pants, slippers, and a t-shirt, one pink sponge roller dangling from her hair, and two school-aged kids in tow. I asked if I could help her and she shouted, “my husband is eating here” and she continued up the stairs so she could find her husband…or Steven Tyler, who was seated at a neighboring table. He was really nice about it but it was totally bizarre. This was the pre-cellphone era so the husband had obviously used a pay phone to notify his wife.

    The race is close between this and the time I caught a mom and her boyfriend making out before a parent conference. That was really just awkward.

    1. Traveler*

      Oh wow. I feel like that probably happens a lot to celebrities. It must be difficult to ever go anywhere in peace.

      1. Deedee*

        Muriel said that the lady’s husband was sitting at a “neighboring table” to Steven Tyler. The husband had called her to tell her he was sitting near Aerosmith.

  22. The Other Dawn*

    When I worked at a grocery store as a teen, I worked with a very nice woman. I think she was about 50 yrs. old. One afternoon, as I was leaving, I noticed her waiting outside the store for a cab. She was standing near the carriages with an intent look on her face. I said, “goodbye and hope you have a nice weekend,” but she didn’t answer. Then I realized why: she was standing by the carriages, peeing. When she came out, her clothes were absolutely soaked. She got her groceries and got into her cab like nothing happened. I felt so bad for the cab driver to have to deal with that.

    Another time she came through my line with her groceries and paid with money she took out of her shoe. She didn’t have any socks on. Yeah.

    1. Diet Coke Addict*

      Oh my god, my dad worked at a grocery store as a teenager and told me two stories over and over again. The first was a woman who took a wad of sweaty cash out of her cleavage, licked her finger and peeled off two bills to pay with. (This was the story I heard as to Why You Never Put Money In Your Mouth.) The second was a man who was waiting in line to buy a package of hot dogs, got hungry, opened the package and started eating the hot dogs like popsicles in line.

      1. The Other Dawn*

        Yeah, it’s amaing to see where people pull money from. Lots of money lives in the cleavage of mature women. And that’s why I don’t put it anywhere near my mouth!

        I’ve never seen anyone eating hot dogs in line, but many times people would eat grapes throughout the store. They could never understand that this was stealing because grapes had to be weighed. If the bag weighed one pound when they picked it up, and 1/2 a pound when they checked out, they only got charged for 1/2 a pound. I always estimated the extra weight and charged accordingly.

        1. Fact & Fiction*

          I can understand eating one or two grapes to make sure they don’t taste like crap (I am a persnickety grape eater haha), but that is just plain wrong. Some people!

          1. L McD*

            As someone who worked in grocery stores for years you’d think the stealing part would bother me more than anything, but for some reason all I can think about is how incredibly gross and dirty grapes are before you wash them. I have to imagine they taste horrifying, based on the average color of the runoff water when I wash my grapes at home.

            1. Fact & Fiction*

              Yeah…when I do this, it’s a battle between my OCD “ewwww!” side and my “grapes are too darned expensive to waste X-bucks on a bunch of gross grapes I won’t eat) side! I grew up poor so my thrifty side usually wins out.

            2. bearing*

              Last spring my four year old sat at the counter while I was putting groceries away and not paying attention, and ate a number of the newly-bought grapes that had not yet been washed.

              6 hours later he was in bed clutching his stomach and wailing and wailing and wailing. 4 hours after that the vomiting started. He vomited so forcefully that he ruptured capillaries in his face; probably not coincidentally, a few months later, we discovered an inguinal hernia.

              We wound up taking him to the ER for rehydration, twice.

              Yeah, neither he nor I will ever eat unwashed fruit ever ever again.

          1. H*

            Hey, if they would put POCKETS in my clothes, I wouldn’t have to tuck cash in my cups. I got change for a $20 a couple of weeks ago, bought a Diet Coke, folded up the remaining singles and fives and tucked them under my bra strap because no pockets. Then I went on about my day and completely forgot the money was there. Got a good laugh later that night at bedtime when a wad of cash fell off my person and onto the floor. Husband wanted to know if I was switching careers…

      2. Kimberlee, Esq.*

        My old boss eats those vegetarian hot dog things, right out the package, regularly. Doesn’t refrigerate them, either. Just keeps them on his desk.

        He also eats lentil soup right out of the can.

        I think those two things, plus tater tots and cheese pizza at bars, were the only things I *ever* saw him eat.

      3. Loose Seal*

        I was working as a teller in a bank when a regular customer who worked at the nursing home came in to make their business deposit. When I pulled the money out of the bag, it was wet. I didn’t think that much about it because a lot of our business deposits had wet or damp money (we were the primary bank for a lot of whitewater rafting places) and we were used to drying it out. So I started peeling it apart and counting it when she said, “I hope it’s all right. One of our residents peed on it and I tried to wash it.” I dropped it like a hot potato, went to get the gloves we had for that sort of thing, and then proceeded with the transaction. (We had biohazard bags to put biologically-soiled money in to ship it to the Fed to be destroyed.) I just wished she had told me up front that it had urine on it so I could have started out with the gloves on.

        1. Lizzy May*

          One time as a bank teller, I had a client come in to deposit a bunch of twenties. This woman was in her 20s, put together and friendly. About four or five bills in, I get one that is covered in what had to have been dried blood. I asked her about it and she was like “what? I didn’t even notice.”

          Seriously people, never put money in your mouth. Money is disgusting.

          1. Bender B Rodriguez*

            My ex is a numismatist (especially paper money) and a germaphobe. It baffles me how one can collect something covered in that which is feared.

    2. Us, Too*

      I worked in the drive thru of McDonald’s as a teen and had a number of strange things happen with people and money. A few highlights:

      – the woman who retrieved her money from her bra. She was very busty and really had to dig around to find what she wanted. Then she handed me not only bills, but the change. So she apparently kept bills and coins in her bra and the coins filtered down to the bottom of the cups over the course of the day.

      – I had someone mumble something to me once after I told them their total. It sounded like “Hold on, I have exact change”. I put out my hand to accept the money and she she leaned over and spit the coins out into my hand! I know it’s rude to shout, but I was so shocked that I stood there speechless.

      1. Fact & Fiction*

        … … …

        I am just trying to process this one. That is one of the WEIRDEST things I have ever heard. That is way weirder than the keeping money in your bra thing…

        … … …

      2. Adam*

        What is it that makes certain women decide to keep money in their bra? For safety? For the giggles? Really I’m kind of confused why anybody would do that aside from the occasional joke.

          1. littlemoose*

            Yes. I got handed many sweaty dollar bills from an older woman’s bra when working retail as a teenager, and it was so repulsive! This is why God gave us purses, ladies.

        3. Anonsie*

          Everyone I’ve ever seen do it did it because what they were wearing had no pockets and they didn’t want to carry a bag for some reason or another– either because that was their “thing” or they had their hands full and it would have been awkward. I have also heard of people doing it avoid being robbed or pickpocketed though.

          1. Adam*

            These are all possibilities I considered, but if you’re doing it to ward of potential robbers might a lot of them watch you long enough to figure out where you’re storing things anyways? As The Other Dawn said, it became plainly obvious to her where the money was being stored.

            ….My apologies. This got more uncomfortable then I was originally anticipating it would…

            1. Fact & Fiction*

              Well, as far as pickpocketing goes, you are MUCH more likely to notice someone trying to “casually” lift money from, you know, your chestal region than a really good thief going after your wallet in your pocket. =)

            2. Anonsie*

              If they know where it is then they know where it is, but most pickpockets or muggers or whathaveyou won’t have watched you long enough to know it’s in your bra– unless you go rifling around in there a lot, I suppose. The one day I did it to avoid being pickpocketed (I was going somewhere really notorious for that) I put it in there at home and took it out when I needed it later by pretended to rifle through my bag but actually quickly snatching it from my shoulder (it was under the strap on my shoulder) instead. I have always wondered if anyone noticed or if I was as slick as I thought I was.

              In my defense 1) it was my shoulder shoulder so it wasn’t in a… Terribly gross place? 2) it seemed like a good idea at that exact moment?

          2. Michele*

            My friend is a bartender and at the end of the night she would put all of her tips in her bra before getting on the subway. If someone is going to rob you they are going for your bag or pocket not down the front of your shirt.

        4. Marina*

          Because far too much women’s clothing doesn’t have pockets. My aunt keeps her cell phone and keys in her bra too.

            1. Natalie*

              Keys, I can’t fathom. Cell phones are fine, though – I’ve tucked my cell into my bra before when I’m just running down the hall or whatever.

                1. S from CO*

                  The receptionist (she is busty) at my office keeps her cell phone in her bra. It was really odd the first time her bra started ringing while I was having a conversation with her! Now I am used to it.

              2. Jess*

                I do this, particularly when I go running in clothing that doesn’t have any pockets (most running shorts/leggings do but not all). I always stick my phone in my bra and the keys when there’s no other alternative. Honestly, I have large breasts and very little feeling in them. I don’t feel the keys once they’re in there. I also keep money in there from time to time. When I do while running, I usually stick the money and an ID in a plastic baggie so it doesn’t get that sweaty and gross.

        5. Bend & Snap*

          I sometimes keep my debit card in my bra, if I need to be hands free and don’t have pockets.

          1. Meg Murry*

            Yup, definitely put my ID and debit card in my bra in college one night for going out to a bar, and woke up the next morning with it still stuck to my skin even though I had taken off the bra to sleep.

        6. Jen RO*

          Wouldn’t it… hurt? I mean, I wouldn’t like something that is not soft fabric near my boobs…

          1. L McD*

            No more than a pokey underwire, that’s for sure.

            I do this with my phone in rare circumstances – almost never in public – and you don’t really feel it. People can see it, though, which is one of the main reasons I only do it if I’m listening to music while I walk my dog or something. Out and about, I’m carrying a purse.

            Incidentally I’ve found it’s a spectacularly unreliable place to store things. If you bend or twist or move your arms in just the wrong way, stuff starts falling out. Or maybe that’s just me.

          2. Aunt Vixen*

            I only ever tuck things in the top corner, where the strap meets the cup. It’s the most flexible place – everywhere else the bra is, like, up against skin and actually doing work, and foreign objects wouldn’t be comfortable if they even fit at all.

            1. KJR*

              My sister has a mini gun and holster that hooks onto the center of her bra. She uses it when she goes running. I’d be scared to death to do this, but to each his own I guess!

        8. Betsy Bobbins*

          If you don’t carry a purse and have no pockets it’s the logical next place. :)
          It works best for credit and key cards, but lipstick is not advised.

            1. Smilingswan*

              It doesn’t get all melty? That would worry me. I sometimes carry my cell in my bra, and it’s only visible when I’m putting it in or taking it out. I am well-endowed, and have to use a padded bra for lift, so it’ll hide anything.

        9. SA*

          Women’s pants don’t have pockets that are sized to actually carry anything – which is why women have to carry purses to hold their cell phones and wallets – so if a woman is going somewhere where she doesn’t want to carry a purse, it’s sometimes necessary. (That said, the only circumstances I’ve ever done it in – and I think this is true for most women – is going to a bar or a club, where carrying a purse can be unsafe, either because you might hit someone with it on the dance floor or because there may be pickpockets. Doing it at the grocery store or something like that??? Ew.)

          1. Natalie*

            Even if they are big enough to carry things, they are the stupid ramp pockets and everything falls out the second you sit down.

          2. Any Mouse*

            For awhile the only bras I could find that were comfortable had the added plastic air packets to push the boobs up that could be removed, I didn’t need the extra padding but I need some padding. But I found that the pockets made a great holding place for money, ID, and my keys when I was going out and I could put that all in my bra without it ruining the shape of my bust or being to uncomfortable. Actually I’d put just my car key (and leave my house key locked in my car). I’d show my ID to get into the club, go to the bahtroom, stick the ID in my bra, and then when I needed money go to the bathroom to retreive it. The money wasn’t sitting directly againt bare skin and I never tried to fish anything out in public.

        10. Arjay*

          I think it’s generally a lack of pockets and a desire not to lug their gigantic purse around. I’ll confess that I’ve tucked a little money purse in there before, but the money isn’t against my skin, both for my skin’s sake and the cashier’s sake. And I will take it out, hopefully surreptitiously, before I approach the checkout stand.

        12. Cari*

          My sister does it on nights out. Well convenient if it’s not practical to carry a bag or purse, but at least she acknowledges it’s sweaty boob cash :D

          Women’s clothes tend to not have pockets, even trousers (jeans being the exception, but even then they’re ususlly to small to be functional).

          1. Kelly L.*

            My mom taught me about shoe money before a junior high dance. She didn’t tell me that only works for bills. Yes, after I bought my soda, I was trying to dance with quarters clinking around in my shoe. Don’t do this.

            1. Meg Murry*

              You can do 1 coin. In college we used to go to Mexico to party, and there was a toll bridge you had to walk back across to get into the US. It cost 25 cents at the time, so you always put a quarter in your shoe so that even if you got pickpocketed or somehow lost your wallet or purse you could still get back into the US.

        13. Cath in Canada*

          One of my doctor friends has told me stories of elderly women having medical difficulties after keeping their money, um… elsewhere. Apparently it’s A Thing in countries that were occupied during WWII.

          1. The Real Ash*

            That’s an urban legend, and it’s always from a “friend of a friend” or something.

        14. HR Diva*

          Silly Sally laughed and laughed when her boyfriend tried to take off her bra – she kept her money in her shoe!

        15. Nat Fish*

          I’m late to this party, but I love telling people about my time working in a certain theme park in the South.
          I had to take plastic cards for my role, and the places those cards would come out of would astound you. Being plastic didn’t help the cards – they’d still be wet and gross and just…warm. Women routinely pulled them out of their bras and tank tops, waist bands (those shorty shorts pockets just weren’t big enough), babies’ mouths (true story), etc. I got at least 5 shoe cards per day from both men and women. Absolutely disgusting. All of us kept hand sanitizer in our pockets.

        16. Observer*

          Lack of pockets and safety / avoiding pickpockets. As others have noted, it’s relatively easy to pick a shallow pocket. And it’s also relatively easy to grab a purse from someone’s hand. Also, having a pocketbook can be a pain.

          When I was young, and we didn’t have pocketbooks, we would either wrap the money in a paper napkin or use a plastic baggy. My favorite was a napkin outside of the baggy. That kept the money reasonably fresh, but avoided the yucky feel of the plastic on skin (especially in hot weather, when you are less likely to have a pocket.)

        17. Molly*

          If I’m going dancing or to a concert and don’t have pockets, I can easily carry the minimum requirements that way (house key, cash and cards, ID).

          Rarely, it’s because I’m in a suit (women’s suits sometimes have pockets, but you’re supposed to leave them sewn shut) and don’t want to haul my whole briefcase on an errand.

          That said, I always palm the cash discreetly BEFORE approaching the bartender/merch seller/etc. Just rude to dig through one’s underwear in front of someone.

          1. helix_luco*

            why are you supposed to leave them sewn shut? if you’re supposed to leave then sewn shut, why were they put there in the first place?

          2. Morgan*

            No, you are not supposed to leave them sewn shut. They are *basted* shut (sewn with long stitches, so not strong and meant to be taken out), so they hang better while on store racks and tried on. But customers remove the stitches after purchase. Kind of like removing the mattress tags! I used to crack up when riding escalators in DC area metro stations, as I’d often see women who left the basting stitches on the rear vents of their overcoats.

        18. Lizzie*

          I used to keep money in my bra all the time when I was in Peace Corps. Most of my clothes (stuff made by the local tailor) didn’t have pockets, and pick pocketing was a big problem in the capital city, so I was reluctant to carry a purse. I would carry my cellphone in my bra too. Sports bras work best for this.

        19. LadyTL*

          My solution to avoid putting money in sweaty places was I got a fancy dress utility belt. It has a bunch of pockets but I can strap it over anything. And since it looks so nice no one gives me any funny looks over it. Win-win!

          1. Eden*

            No choice? Only if you refuse to carry any sort of bag, purse, pouch, pack, sling, clutch, tote, satchel, or sack, sure. There are plenty of small, easily carried, unobtrusive bags out there, so I see no reason anyone needs to be subjected to sweaty boob money.

          2. ella*

            Apparently I’m the only woman who’s thought to just not wear women’s pants. I wear nicely-fitting boys’ pants and put everything in pockets.

            1. Hapax Legomenon*

              I have too much butt for boys’ pants but not enough of anything else for men’s pants. I’ve tried men’s pants on before and have developed jean envy…men’s jeans feel like they’d last more than six months without developing holes.

            2. Jessica (the celt)*

              Nope, I’m there with you! I wear guys’ pants all of the time (even dress pants sometimes), and it’s great to have nice, deep pockets to keep things in when I don’t want to carry my purse. It’s easier to find pants that fit my height and waist than to wear women’s pants, which are more generic to size differences.

            3. Bender B Rodriguez*

              Sometimes I plan my attire for a metal concert around whether it would be okay or awkward to have a purse with me. Headbanging and standing around for death metal or black metal? No restrictions on pants/skirts, and a purse on my shoulder. Dancing my butt off to folk metal? Pants with large deep pockets, and no purse with which to accidentally smack someone including myself.

        21. Ewwwwww*

          I had a boss once who kept EVERYTHING in her bra. She always had money (bills and change) in there, along with lipstick, notes to herself, and occasionally, feminine hygiene products. She also wore a lot of low-cut blouses. Once in a meeting with her boss, she leaned over and accidentally dropped a maxi pad on the floor. Being a polite sort, he picked it up and handed it back to her, with no comment. After that, she did quit overloading her bra, at least.

          She also used to climb under her desk to talk on the phone with her friends. You’d see the phone cord trailing across the desk and underneath, and hear a kind of low buzz, with an occasional cackle. She’d stay there for an hour at a time.

        22. Natalie Anne Lanoville*

          I do it all the time, and it’s because… no pockets, and wherever I’m going I don’t feel comfortable hauling my purse out of my backpack, or my wallet out of my purse.

          It doesn’t get sweaty tho. :)

      3. MaggietheCat*

        Oh my goodness! I just had an uncontrollable laughing fit in my very quiet workspace reading this.

      4. LBK*

        I can’t believe there are so many comments about keeping things in your bra and none about the person that was KEEPING COINS IN THEIR MOUTH AND THEN SPIT THEM INTO YOUR HAND. BARF.

        2. fposte*

          Barf but don’t accidentally inhale–those would be one hell of a choking hazard. I guess at least you could collect the change in compensation for a Heimlich.

    3. I'm on lunch*

      Super late on this, but in college I worked in an office where part of the job was accepting returned keys at the end of the school year. One kid returned his room key, and it smelled SOOOO BAD we literally had to put it outside. It wasn’t dirty or anything, we tried washing it, but the metal had been permeated with his sweat from being next to his skin while running all the time. After that I don’t know if I could force myself to knowingly handle cash from anyone’s underclothes …

  24. Oryx*

    At ExJob I was a prison librarian. Oh the stories.

    Inmates frequently masturbated in front of me, another guy gave himself a tattoo with a regular ink pen and it got infected (the pictures were not pretty), but this one time I was sitting at my desk and at the back of the library saw movement and this…*thing* come heading straight for me in the air. Thank god for wheelie chairs because I never moved so fast in my entire life.

    It was a bat that was making beeline for the picture window behind me, thinking it was open (it wasn’t) and knocked itself out. So then it’s on its back on a big pile of books and trying to move but can’t and it’s daytime and I’m all WTF there’s a BAT and one of the inmates came over and wrapped it up in his coat and took it outside. For months afterwards, my workers continued to make fun of me for how fast I moved out of the way in that chair but I swear that thing woulda hit me right in the fact if I hadn’t.

    3. SnoopyDance*

      I briefly worked as a librarian and have a boatload of stories. My two favorites…

      – When we would find random empty bottles of wine in the children’s library restroom

      – The customer who was an aspiring rapper (who also worked at a fast food restaurant and was living with a lady old enough to be his mother) who brought me a dozen red roses one day at work. I was out for lunch when he came by to deliver them, and my boss flat out told him I couldn’t accept them. He later got banned from the library for using the computer lab “inappropriately.”

      1. SnoopyDance*

        Oh and another great story…

        A couple once got amorous in the computer lab and I had to kick them out. About a month later, I saw them in Walmart and the woman said to her man, “Look, there’s the witch that got us kicked out of the library!” She ran over to me and punched me. I literally had to tell myself that I had more class than to get in a fist fight with a library patron in the middle of Walmart.

        1. Diet Coke Addict*

          I am trying so, so, SO hard to restrain myself from laughing hysterically in my office that I’m tearing up. That is amazing.

        3. SerfinUSA*

          Sometimes I search keyword “library” in our local craigslist casual encounters ads. And yes, plenty of people are looking to hook up in the public library, and also in the university library where I work. Ugh!

        4. Suzanne*

          I used to work in a public library, and one of my co-workers told me about wandering down a row of books and finding a flasher in all his glory. She told him, “Put that thing away. Nobody wants to see that!” He did. I have to admire her quick thinking.

          At another library, there was a very obvious cross dresser that would come in every few months, dressed to the nines with glowing make-up, walk around the main section of the library never looking at any material or speaking to anyone, and then leave. Kind of our own one person fashion show.

      3. Liz in a Library*

        I can’t hold a candle to some of these stories, but things I’ve found in my former library include:

        -A plastic chair full of urine, no longer warm (I got the honor of cleaning it; I’m not a sicko)
        -A pair of shoes, perfectly aligned facing the wall in a blind corner, far from any furniture
        -Nail clippings, so many times
        -Paper products covered in blood, by the computers
        -An epilator
        -Security tags from stolen books, everywhere you would think of and several places you wouldn’t (such as behind the faceplates of electric sockets)
        -Steak

      4. squid*

        I worked in an academic library for a couple of years.
        Favourite story: someone took down hundreds of books from the shelves and made a fort one day.

        1. anon-2*

          Radio stations often pull promotional “stunts”.

          A station somewhere claimed that they had placed $100 bills in books in a certain library, to encourage people to read.

          You can imagine what people did next.

      5. Jessilein*

        I worked in a public library years ago, and my favorite stories there were about the guy who crawled around on his hands and knees licking the electrical outlets, and another guy who claimed to be Jesus and tried to get a library card with his name on it (he was turned down because he didn’t have anything to show to prove his identity).

        I also worked in Barnes & Noble around that time, and people did all manner of disgusting things in the bathrooms there, like taking books in to read for their longer bathroom visits. One woman used to come in and trim her bangs in the sink…and leave the trimmings there. Blechh.

    4. Kirsten*

      I worked as a therapist in forensic psych (and now regular psych). I totally get these stories. I can’t think of any specific stories I could share without breaking confidentiality, but you know any job that involves delusions, six page dress codes, and specific precautions so you don’t end up being the cautionary story they tell at orientation is not going to be boring.

      2. Not So NewReader*

        Always be careful when the first day on New Job you have to sign a paper saying you will not write a book.

        1. Liz*

          I genuinely don’t think I could ever take that job. The first sign of disenchantment with a workplace, for me, is using it as a setting for a murder mystery.

      1. Oryx*

        I’m probably closer to Andy, although obviously without having been incarcerated :)

        People always ask if we had a little cart the inmates push around like in Shawshank. They ask it kind of jokingly, but we actually DID that the inmate works would take around on Sundays when the actual library was closed.

          1. Oryx*

            I don’t think I got far enough into watching Oz to see the librarian! I will say I love how in the 2nd season of OITNB they had a ton of scenes in the library.

    6. Library Staff*

      I work in a public library in an average-sized city. A few highlights:

      – We have an entire wall of photos of banned patrons. Most were banned for drug use (usually heroin) or sex acts (usually prostitution) in the bathrooms.

      -The lady who ranted for several minutes about how we were “abusing” the plant by the radiator, and shook a handful of dead leaves in my face

      -The lady who likes telling racist jokes to staff

      -The guy who tried to destroy one of the public computers because “Jesus told him to do it”

      -The guy who said he would “press charges” because we wouldn’t let him access his account without an ID

      And the “winner”…

      -The computer user banned for alternating between porn sites and photos of children receiving medical exams

    7. Another Damn Librarian*

      At my old library job at a for-profit college (I know, but I was stupid and fresh out of grad school) we had an older gentleman who would sit at a library computer all day – literally 8am to dinnertime. Eventually we got complaints that he was looking at porn, and had IS take a look at his computer. Lo and behold, he had two folders, labeled as follows: ASS and JESUS.

      The former was all really gross porn, and the latter was pinterest-y inspirational quotes about being a Christian.

  25. some1*

    I worked as a cashier in a convenience store during high school and the summer after, one town over from my high school. My high class was less than 300 students; I knew everyone in my class at least by their face.

    Summer after graduation, a girl comes into my work wanting cigarettes and I card her. She says she doesn’t have a license but has a school ID and she just graduated. She shows me an ID from my high school. I tell her I know she’s lying, take out *my* school ID, lay it out side by side with hers and point out where on the IDs mine read “12” (for grade) and her’s read “09”.

    1. Alexa*

      Similar thing happened to me. I was a cashier at a gas station one summer and a girl comes in to by cigarettes, I ask for an ID and she puts down one for a girl I graduated with (not her). I say, “You’re not Laura. I went to school with her.” She grabbed it and ran out the door.

    2. Anonymous*

      More license fun!

      I once had someone who came in when I was working at a store that sold cigarettes. She gave me her license and had scratched out part of the 8 to make it a 3. The scratching was fairly obvious.

      She also missed the part where the date of birth is actually a part of the license number for this particular region.

      1. Liane*

        Yet more license fun! In my state, the state alcohol & tobacco agency uses underage agents to check whether retailers are “carding” (checking IDs) of purchasers. One day, an older cashier, Rita, told us about a transaction she’d just had with 2 agents. Customer A was a young woman who asked to purchase cigarettes & tried to use a piece of paper with her name & (supposed) birthday written on it as ID. Yes, a plain old piece of notebook paper! Of course, Rita refused the sale & A went on her way. Customer B, an older man, was next in line. He told Rita, “Good thing you didn’t let her buy those–she was Tobacco Control Board.” Rita, no fool, replied, “Yes, & so are you.”

    3. Prague*

      I got Elvis once years ago, from a guy with a Tennessee license in Pennsylvania all the time while underage. I’m not talking about him dressing up like Elvis – he actually had made a copy of Elvis Presley’s driver’s license, picture, name, and all. He said he got away with it all the time by flashing his wallet quickly.

  26. Adam*

    In high school I worked for a family style pizza restaurant. At one point I found out that a certain group of fellow employees were taking breaks to go smoke pot. Thing is they would light up in our walk-in freezer. Knowing nothing about pot, I’ve always been curious if the cold enhanced the experience or not.

    Honorable mention 1: Worked at a bar/restaurant in a casino during college for a bit. The cashier position was the most boring as you stood in one spot for the whole shift and did nothing but people watch. This made it all to obvious when people would sneak away to a not-so-secret corner and start making out, as in speeding past second base making out.

    Honorable mention 2: Worked at the college library while in school as well. A woman came in with her baby to complain about the overdue fines levied against her for un-returned books. She was entirely in the wrong and no matter who explained that to her she just got more and more angry. Finally we had to close for the day. So to make a point (the point being that she was an absolute pill of a human being) she sat down in the middle of the library in the prime foot traffic location and proceeded to change her baby’s diaper, and grew quite indignant at our request that she do that somewhere else.

      1. Adam*

        I know that now. For me doing it in the walk-in freezer was the interesting part. Most of them claimed they couldn’t be in there for more than a few minutes at a time because of the chill.

        1. AVP*

          I wonder if it’s a hot-box effect because you’re locked in a small enclosed space that’s presumably very well sealed.

          I also wonder if it affects the food being stored in there?

          1. Adam*

            I don’t know about the physics of pot smoke, but I think they’d have had to stay in there for quite a while and smoke quite a bit to get any sort of affect like that. Plus the refrigeration fans were pretty high and could get the air up top circulating pretty fast. Really I think they did it because there were enough windows that they could see out to know if any customers came in but no one on the outside would have been able to tell what they were doing.

            Also none of the food was stored open air, but in plastic bags or sealed containers. I think the health department would have docked for that, so fortunately that wasn’t a concern.

            1. Kimberlee, Esq.*

              Yeah, I bet it’s the fact that there was enough air circulation in there that it would whisk away the smell, and probably fairly low-traffic, so they didn’t have to go outside to smoke, could see customers, and be relatively certain that the smell/smoke would be gone by the time someone else went to pull something from the freezer.

        2. Natalie*

          From what I remember it’s nearly universal to smoke in the walk-in. I always assumed it was because the walk-in is sealed, so the restaurant won’t end up smelling like smoke.

      2. Snork Maiden*

        It’s common here too, to the point where one restaurant (allegedly) was keeping it in the cooler and selling it out the back door. A handy sideline for delivering food, as well.

        1. Eden*

          My first job was a server at a Western Sizzin’–I did all the jobs because I found out later, all the other employees were in the back, smoking pot. It’s really hard to keep up with the workload of five people.

          At this same job, when I went to pick up my paycheck, the person in charge of handing them out tried to convince me I had already picked it up, and he didn’t have it. I insisted, and finally got it. I lasted there maybe a month.

      4. Not So NewReader*

        It’s been going on for over 30 years. One of my first jobs everyone went in the back room to smoke pot. Even people who did not work there. Under the heading of trying to get along with people, I would chat with them but I did not partake.
        When that police officer walked in, I was voted most “straight” and I had to go wait on the officer. Back then MJ was a felony charge. I have no clue why the officer got what he wanted and left. I thought for sure we were caught. He had to have smelled the pot smoke on me.

      5. Mouse of Evil*

        In high school, I worked at a dollar theater for a while. All my friends worked there too. Every night after the early rush was over, the owners and their friends would vanish into the office to smoke pot, leaving the theater in the hands of a bunch of teenagers until close. Nobody ever wanted to go bother them, but if you had to go knock on the door and ask a question, they’d open it and smoke would just pour out.

        After a few months, they “laid off” the three of us who probably seemed the most likely to tell our parents or the police. And yes, I really did just figure that out–30 years later. :-)

    2. Traveler*

      Ugh. I have experienced the changing baby in the middle of the floor in a busy place of business. So gross.

      1. Morgan*

        Yes, it is gross. But I finally noticed, after having my babies when I was in my late 30s, that many, many places of business lack changing tables in their restrooms. It is incredibly difficult to accomplish routine errands while also caring for infants, and I happened to have twins.

        So when I read such posts, my first thought is to wonder how the business’s restroom was equipped.

        1. SweetSweetBerryWine*

          Actually due to the fact that many people having kids nowadays are the type who shouldn’t most places stopped having changing tables installed. I’ve worked a seasonal job and asked the manager because a customer complained about her screaming baby having no place to be changed. The parade of screaming infants and angry moms made me roll my eyes. Where were the men? Goofing off?

          Why? Well because a baby supposedly DID fall off a changing table and the crappy excuse for a mother sued and won. Now sane people busy with kids had to deal with this like the men do by having no access to changing tables in public bathrooms.

          My own personal reaction to all of this was why not have the husband watch their own kid to begin with so a woman wouldn’t have to waste a whole day shopping with a screaming infant in tow? I don’t get it.

    3. Molly*

      I wonder if there exist pizza places where no one smokes pot. I mean, statistically I suppose they must exist, but common sense says no.

      1. Pennalynn Lott*

        ::raises hand:: I once worked at a Round Table Pizza in San Francisco for over a year and no one smoked pot on the premises.

  27. sjw*

    Once hired a woman who asked if she could “move some stuff” into her new office the weekend before she started, to which we agreed and issued her a key ahead of her start date. We arrived the following Monday (she didn’t start for another week) to an office PACKED, floor to ceiling, with, among other things:
    -a vacuum cleaner
    -a microwave
    -a mini fridge
    -a toaster oven
    -a coffee maker
    -several suitcases (old style hard side ones
    -boxes and boxes and boxes
    -what appeared to be a collection of some sort of collectible nonsense

    The above list is only the stuff I can remember. Fast forward about six months, she was terminated. She couldn’t leave until her husband came with the truck to load her stuff. It took, I’m not kidding, six HOURS. (and as HR I had to hang around until they finished). I think they slowed down on purpose to keep me waiting. I think I left about 9 that night.

    2. Karowen*

      So many questions…Did she ever give an explanation as to WHY she had all that stuff? Did she ever use all of it? Did she think this was normal?

      1. Adam*

        Total armchair psychology here, but maybe this person’s behavior is some sort of subset of a hoarder mentality? Like she needs all that stuff there ‘just in case’?

        1. Abby*

          I worked next to a woman who was a hoarder. She had an office with a door and could barely get to her desk. Her office, no sweat but I got bugs in my office because of nasty stuff in hers. I didn’t have food or even a plant in my office but I still got bugs.

    4. C.*

      This one is kind of sad – sounds like she was a hoarder. I’m curious as to what she was fired for.

      1. sjw*

        Well, the real irony here, she was hired as a licensed clinical COUNSELOR. (I did find that a large number of mental health professionals were a little bit cracked themselves). Honestly, I can’t remember why she was fired. It was a good dozen or more years ago.

        1. Molly*

          My most neurotic and troubled university friend (who once ended a friendship because the friend got intentionally pregnant, and “she knows that I hate babies”) is now a therapist. That worries me so much about her poor patients. (She and I haven’t talked in years, though, so maybe she turned it around.)

        3. CA Anon*

          My crazypants childhood neighbor is now a child psychiatrist–I am truly frightened for her patients. She was my babysitter when I was a kid and she was nuts then, but everyone thought I was making stuff up or being dramatic because my little sister loved her. Fast forward 20 years and she’s still living at home (she claims that she can’t afford to move out because of her student loans) while abusing her parents for not loving her enough (her parents are wonderful, lovely people–she’s a narcissist who can’t understand why her parents couldn’t pay for her medical school after fully funding her undergrad at a stupidly expensive private school that they couldn’t afford).

          She claims that she wants to treat children so “they don’t have to grow up damaged and unloved by their parents the way she did”. OMG. And she shoved her hands through a window while yelling at her mother a few years ago. I can’t imagine letting her within 100 yards of kids, let alone those with mental health issues.

    6. HistoryChick*

      I work in the museum/historic site field. At a previous job in a city, we had a parking lot next to the museum (a historic building) and behind one of our 18th century historic buildings. I was walking out to my car and I see someone up in the corner of the parking lot in a hooded sweatshirt and layered clothing. When he saw me he left – quickly, running. (Sidenote: It was not uncommon in this area of the city to see drug deals in enclaves and once I saw someone drop his gun on the sidewalk in front of me.) Well I thought I should check out what was going on in the parking lot. When I got up there, there was a fire that the person had set – at our historic structure. Thankfully it was small enough at the time that I could stomp it out with my foot. And it turned out to be a bag full of poo. Apparently (according the police who answered the 911 call) sometimes homeless people light their poo on fire. What a day!

    7. Mary*

      Ugg, I had to wait until 6 pm last night for one of my staff members whose contract was completed to clear out her office. I thought she would never finish and all the time she kept telling me how much she loved working there and how she hoped we would take her back on again etc etc. Sad but I just wanted to get home.

  28. Heather*

    I worked in a place where a staff member wore the same thing every day: blue cords, a blue checked long sleeved shirt, and a blue cardigan with leather patches. Now I don’t know if he had multiple versions of each item or if it was literally the same article of clothing every day, but for the three years I worked there his appearance never varied once.

    2. Mrs. Badcrumble*

      I used to have a coworker who had this pair of tan-and-white-striped seersucker pants she wore in the summer time day after day. Her record was 19 days straight, if I recall. She never smelled, but she had *plenty* of other issues (obsessively rearranging the Keurig pods…doing yoga handstands in the bathroom…laying on the floor faking chest pains while being escorted out of her last day….) I think it possibly stems from the fact that her grandmother kidnapped her for witchcraft purposes when she was 3. (According to her.)

      1. Heather*

        Wow! He was peculiar, but his oddness is sort of a known trait of people also in that particular line of work.

    6. Bimmer Guy*

      I thought that only cartoon characters could get away with wearing the same thing every day…lol

      1. mirror*

        My co-worker does this as well! I found it a little odd when I first started, but he’s actually a really nice and totally normal guy. His outfit is a black long sleeve button down shirt and black jeans with big black military-style boots. He wears this outfit 99% of the time–once I saw him wear a dark green button down shirt!

        1. Wren*

          I had an instructor that always wore a black t-shirt and black jeans. I wasn’t consciously aware that this was his “uniform” until one day, I thought someone in my peripheral vision was him and was startled that it was someone else and realized that the only reason I thought it was that instructor was that the person standing in my peripheral was wearing an all black outfit.

    7. Lori*

      I had a coworker who did the same thing actually! He was always dressed nicely, but it was always khaki pants and a short-sleeved blue dress shirt. But was always clean, well-groomed, and never smelled.

      We finally asked him about it one day. Turns out he was just sick of having to figure out what to wear each day and he hated shopping. One day he finally found an outfit he liked and that fit him. Then he purchased 20-some identical shirts and pants and just rotated them through the laundry. He said it was great because he never had to worry about what to wear. He said that eventually the day would come when the shirts would get too worn to wear, and then he would just find a similar shirt and order more.

      He was an engineer. In hindsight it was actually quite brilliant and no one really seemed to mind.

      1. blu*

        I think Engineers are a special type of person. We had one who wore what appeared to be the same denim skirt every day (we are business casual) and two Cindy Brady style pony tails. She had to be near 50.

        2. Molly*

          I love pigtails and kind of wish they were remotely acceptable at any time other than, possibly, “alone at home lifting heavy things.”

      2. Artemesia*

        That is pretty much what I do — I have 5 pair of black jeans that fit well and a dozen or so fitted black t shirts (and in winter a dozen or so cotton turtlenecks — and that is the base most of the time — topped with jacket, or dressier sweater capey thing, or travel shirt with the roll sleeves and hidden pockets — 90% of the time.

        When I was working, I had a few more things, but mostly built everything around basic black.

        I hate to shop for clothes and have no interest in clothes — envy the fact that men have always been able to buy clothes that fit and can wear the uniform every day.

        1. Kelly L.*

          This is me with black dress pants. Right now I actually do only have one viable pair because the other has a broken zipper. I need to shop. But ideally, I have about 3 pairs of black slacks, and I always buy about the same fabric texture and they’re all flare leg. No one but me ever knows how many pairs there are at any given moment! :D

        2. Molly*

          This is what I like about wearing suits to work. A few black/gray/black pinstripe suits and a bunch of cheap cotton ~fancy tank tops and ta-da, professional uniform, no effort. I wear the same pearl set every day, and the same shoes, but clients and coworkers see the shirt colours changing and that seems to be enough!

      3. Jillociraptor*

        Did y’all watch Doug, the Nickelodeon cartoon? They ran with the un-reality of cartoon characters always wearing the same clothes and sometimes showed Doug’s closet, which was just row after row of his signature cargo shorts, white t-shirt and green vest. It sounds very efficient.

        1. Natalie*

          Yeah, I’m pretty sure mine is going to think of this at some point. As long as he picks a good outfit, I guess I’ll live.

          1. Jen RO*

            I usually go shopping for him, and I make sure that he has a variety of t-shirts. He only likes plain t-shirts, so I just get a lot of colors and models, where possible… At least he won’t look like he wears the same one every day!

      5. TK*

        My mom used to work with a guy who did much the same thing. He apparently ordered all his clothes from a catalog (this was the early 90’s, before buying online was really a thing) and had blue shirts and yellow shirts, and just wore one or the other every day.

        About a year before he left her office, he got married, and I think his wardrobe got significantly more diverse then.

      6. Mints*

        This sounds like a Sheldon Cooper move. Mr. Mints actually did buy several identical shirts and pants when he stared this business casual job. HOWEVER, they’re in assorted matching colors, so he can switch up various shades and patterns of grey, white, blue, and black without much thinking

      7. Doug*

        I have the same setup going, but I take this thread into account and instead it goes:

        4 pair pants of varying cuts, khaki and dark blue jeans
        5-10 shirts, all of which goes with any pair of pants

        I don’t spend any time choosing what to wear. Underwear, socks, undershirt (white crewneck tee), shirt, pants. Enough variation in shirt and pants so maybe people don’t notice unless they’re trying, but enough similarity in shirt and pants to let me just collect one of each and put them on. Pants get two days, everything else gets one.

        With all the little ways that we spend our time, collecting, maintaining, organizing, and selecting clothing just does not seem like a way I want to spend mine.

      8. BeBe*

        Sounds like Steve Jobs. This also mostly seems to be an engineer type trait. They just really don’t want to think about mundane things like clothes.

      10. RecruiterM*

        Had a co-worker like that. He simplified to black jeans and white t shirt. And a $5 meal at McDonalds every day. And, 2 years after buying a condo and using plastic flatware from cafeteria at work, deciding to ‘invest in soup spoon’.
        One Halloween we were all going to dress like him, do not remember why we had not.

    8. Traveler*

      Interesting. There is a movement in some parts of the business world (mostly entrepreneurial) that you wear a “uniform” everyday – because it is a waste of time and energy to pick out an outfit each day. Considering he didn’t smell bad and the clothes were clean – maybe that was his thing?

    10. Mary (in PA)*

      Awww, if this is weird, then I am super weird. I wear a black T-shirt, dark jeans, Chuck Taylors, and a hoodie if it’s cold. (I work for a T-shirt company and this uniform is actually on the more formal side.) I am a child of two engineers and my dad does the same thing with his own “uniform” – white shirt, khaki pants, brown loafers, every day. Though he does change up his tie.

      1. Mints*

        I think if it’s black, white, or jeans, it’s not really noticeable, because it can be a uniform (even a self imposed uniform). The weirdness is when it’s a distinct outfit (blue cardigan with leather patches? not really a staple)

    11. Jennifer*

      Hah, we had an instructor at my volunteer job who always wore the same outfit. We were flabbergasted when he changed from black to khaki pants.

    13. Megan A.*

      I had a coworker who did the same thing, but he was color blind and lived alone. He said he was worried he’d put together some weird combination of colors, so he just bought multiples of the same thing.

    14. Another Heather*

      Whoa. I worked with a guy like this, too.
      He wore the EXACT same clothes (not the same style clothes, the SAME exact clothes) every single day.
      He would wear them daily until his twice yearly vacation time came up. By this point, his clothes would be ratty, his shoes worn, and he smelled like a homeless person.
      When he came back from vacation, he’d have a fresh version of the same outfit and the cycle would begin again.
      I think people tolerated it because he was the smartest person in any room, awesome at his job, a great teacher and one of the nicest people on the planet. But still. Come on, man.

    15. EAnonymous*

      We have one software developer who always wears a black shirt and khaki pants. Always. I’ve seen him a couple of times out and about on the weekends, and he’s always wearing the same thing. He never smells, so it’s probably that he has multiples of each, but it’s still kind of strange.

    16. TychaBrahe*

      I have this weird issue where my two eyes see different shades of red. I have a horrible time matching colors, like does this shade of red clash or not with this particular shade of blue. As a result I have found it easiest to have five identical black twill drawstring waisted skirts and a variety of solid colored tops.

    17. coconut water*

      Oh that reminds me of one. A coworker who was known for antics to draw attention to herself, wore the same jeans
      and red & white checkered shirt to work frequently. Once someone counted and said the longest stretch was nearly every day for like nine weeks straight.

  29. CheeryO*

    When I worked fast food, a group of possibly high young guys came through the drive through with a crocodile puppet. The puppet ordered, presented a credit card, and accepted the food. I heard them howling with laughter as soon as they pulled away from the window, and I have to admit that it made my day too.

      1. A Non*

        She said “possibly high”, not “high school”, but yes – I wish this was more people’s idea of causing trouble!

    3. Amy B.*

      I did this when I went through the drive thru with my teenage daughter. I threatened to do it, she said I wouldn’t, so of course I had to. She was mortified and tried to melt into the seat. The clerk appeared to enjoy it though.

      1. A. D. Kay*

        That’s hilarious! I might need to kidnap one of my teenage nieces or nephews just to do that.

    4. AB*

      I worked as a cashier/ customer service at a local hardware store in high school. I kept a monkey puppet at my register and would make it dance and make faces at kids when their parents weren’t looking. The store owner would use it to talk to employees when he wanted to get us to do something we didn’t want to (like cleaning the bathrooms), he even had his wife make a little store apron for it.

    6. manybellsdown*

      I was a drama geek in high school, and we were rehearsing a production of “Wait Until Dark”. The main character in that play is a blind woman, so one of our props was a white cane courtesy of a legally blind student who loaned it to us. One day we went out for lunch, through the drive through of a fast food place, with the driver of the car holding the white cane and tapping it on the wall of the building as we went through. The poor employee was so confused: four people in the car and we let the “blind” guy drive.

  30. Lore*

    I did not witness this in person, but I’ve seen the pictures (and several coworkers were there) so I know it really happened. At an in-office Halloween party, our CEO did karaoke to “Sexual Healing” while wearing lederhosen.

    3. Chloe*

      Wow thats awesome, I heard that song for the first time in years on the radio yesterday, and was kind of amazed at how….raunchy it is. Normal now for songs to be very sexually explicity, but this was ahead of its time. Funny/disturbing to think of a 6 year old me singing along to it…

  31. Steve*

    Like Joey, I worked with a guy who biked to work and felt the need to clean up before going to his office. We had a showroom with lots of plumbing displays including whirlpools filled with water, working sinks, showers, and toilets. There was even a water heater since some of the displays featured temperature related features. They were set in mock ups of real rooms, so full bathroom suites were set up in rooms that would look like a typical customer’s bathroom.

    He got there a full hour or more before the showroom opened to the public, so he used one of the bathrooms for his morning routine. The kicker was that this wasn’t plumbed potable water. It was all connected to a recirculator so that we didn’t have massive water bills from running the displays every day. He showered in his own filthy grey water for months before anyone caught onto what he was doing. God only knows if he was using the toilet in there as well.

    4. A.*

      I thought the first post about the manager and his wife living in an office bedroom would be the winner, but this takes the cake. WOW.

    7. supernoob*

      Winner winner, chicken dinner. Poor ignorant rule-breaker showering in his own urine- that mental picture just kills me

  32. Sadsack*

    I don’t think this beats Joey’s story, but anyway…I used to work in a cubicle across from a guy who brushed his teeth at his desk. He would go fill a coffee mug with water, then brush his teeth, dipping his toothbrush into the mug, and spitting into it. I was so shocked I couldn’t even say anything at all. I couldn’t figure why, since he was getting up to put water in his cup and then getting up to dump it out, couldn’t he just go in the bathroom to brush? I didn’t know him very well and wasn’t sure how to tell him to quit it because it was revolting. I have no idea what the other cubicle dwellers nearby thought about it. We all didn’t sit near each other for very long because we all got laid off.

    1. TK*

      People have weird hang-ups with hygiene routines. I had a roommate in college who very obsessively and thoroughly brushed his teeth at the same time every night. He had a whole very specific routine to how he did it. On the other hand, he’d wear the same pair of gym shorts to bed every night (and this being college, often for a good part of the day) for literally months on end without ever washing them.

    3. eemmzz*

      I had a coworker I once sat next to who liked to keep mouthwash at his desk and would swill it around his mouth for about 10-15 minutes before he’d go and spit it out. I could hear it as it was quite loud

  33. Anonymous For This*

    At a prior job, the CEO was known for social faux-pas an inappropriate behavior (for which he’d been sued in the past). During a company holiday party, he asked a particular employee to stand on the chair, so everyone could see “how great she look(ed) in that dress.” At another party, he made a comment during his speech on a coworker’s recent boob job (again–pointing this employee out and asking folks to admire her). Of course, this is the same guy who threw post trade show parties at bars and would show up with 3+ call girls in tow. And there was the time he got veneers and laser hair removal and wandered around the office asking people to admire his hairless chest and arms, while grinning madly. Oh! And the time he had a nude poster of himself in the office. True story, folks. I could write a novel about this man.

    1. LBK*

      Oh! And the time he had a nude poster of himself in the office.

      I don’t know if you watch Parks & Rec but this reminds me of the enormous nude self-portraits hanging in Jessica Wicks and Nick Newport’s house. Hilarious.

      2. Anonymous For This*

        It was apparently a gift he gave to his wife. They got divorced, and he had been cleaning out their shared house and brought a bunch of stuff–that included–into the office. Our on-site cafe workers convinced him to leave it in the cafe (it was short-lived).

  34. First Job Problems*

    So when I was in high school and college I worked for a grocery store chain. Now the store I worked at for a few years was in….a unique location. Half of the customers were nice, normal suburban people. The other half…I don’t know, maybe they lived in the sewer system and were inhaling fumes or something. I seemed to run into a lot of the weird ones but my co-workers had the “I met the nicest little old lady today” stories.
    Anyway, there was this family of a grandmother, two daughters and like half a dozen children that came in once or twice a week. This is unrelated to this particular story, but the grandmother had an electric wheelchair that she had modified the seat from a normal seat to a RECLINER. Like a living room recliner. She also didn’t wear clothes, just had a BED sheet wrapped around her. She smelled and looked like her flesh was rotting off her bare feet.
    So one day, one of The Recliner Woman’s daughters took her own approx 3 year old daughter to the bathroom(which was, very unfortunately, right next to my storage room). I watch them walk in, NBD. Few minutes later, 3 year old RUNS out giggling. NBD, right??? WRONG. She was pantsless. Her mom follows, laughs and says to me, “aren’t kids the darndest things?” I just nod, hoping the pants are somewhere in a pocket I can’t see.
    Ten minutes later, she walks back by and says, “SHE LEFT HER PANTS IN THE BATHROOM! Can you believe THAT?”
    I still can’t believe it took ten minutes to notice, but what do I know?

    2. Rat Racer*

      The first part of the story is horrifying, but to the part about the 3-year-old running out of the stall pants-less: I could totally see my 3-year-old doing something similar, although the scene would been me running after her and desperately trying to catch her. 3 year olds have no sense of modesty or propriety, I tell you!

      1. Emily, admin extraordinaire*

        My 3-year-old niece loves nothing more than to get naked (or as close to it as mom and dad will allow). When you go over to their house, you never know what she will be (or won’t be) wearing. If she’s not running around in her underwear, she’s got on a swimming suit (usually over the underwear). Yesterday she came to my mom’s wearing underwear, a swim suit, shorts, a skirt, and the owl shirt my mom had given her for her first day of preschool.

        I wonder if she’s tried to take her clothes off in preschool yet. She just started on Monday. . .

      2. Lynn Whitehat*

        My 3-year-old did this to me at the airport. He insisted on using the men’s room by himself, and then came out with his pants around his ankles. “I did it, Mommy!” Yay! Are you SURE you didn’t miss a step?

    3. Anoners*

      My bf works in retail. Someone used their baby stroller to steal merchandize (with the baby in the stroller). Turns out they were also an illegal immigrant, so probably got deported. SMH.

      1. littlemoose*

        Hiding merchandise in strollers is a very popular way to shoplift, actually. I saw it a lot in my retail career. The worst are the ones who put the merchandise (clothes at my store) under their kid to steal it. It’s so gross to use your children like that.

        1. Newb*

          Or, sending their child to pick items up and walk out of store so the mother can blame the child if she gets caught. Months and months later the mother was finally banned from the shop. The terrible thing is that the child doesn’t know any better and will grow up thinking that this sort of thing is totally ok!

  35. Amanda*

    I used to work front desk for a library/archive in Boston. We had a patron come up to the desk one day and when I asked her what I could help her with that day, she explained that she believed she was the incarnation of the Duchess Sophie, wife of Archduke Francis Ferdinand (the one whose assassination sparked WWI). She believed it was her calling to start an international police force to right the world’s wrongs, and she felt called to our space (both the library and the public plaza it adjoined) because she knew that’s where she’d complete the manuscript that would summarize her philosophy and create her global police force. She was immaculately put together, wearing flashy jewelry, a nicely tailored suit, excellent haircut, the works. If she hadn’t come back repeatedly over the course of the summer I would have guessed she was dared by someone to try the story out on unsuspecting strangers.

    1. Frances*

      Oh man, when I worked for a program that specialized in ancient history we used to get some weird inquiries but they thankfully stuck to emails and phone calls.

    2. BRR*

      Everyone I know who works in a library has the best stories, I was listening to two people go back and forth and it was insane.

    3. So Very Anonymous*

      I worked in a library that had the papers of a notorious occultist/magician. We could generally always spot the people who were coming to look at that collection.

    4. Girl Thursday*

      Friend of mine worked at a consular office and dealt with a breakdown of a woman visiting an ashram. The woman refused to sign anything with the name on her passport because that wasn’t who she was anymore.

  36. JAM*

    The first thing that came to mind is several members of the team I was part of phoning round local sex shops to find out if any of them stocked blow-up cows. It was one of the guys birthday and they wanted to buy him this for some bizarre reason that I don’t remember. They didn’t find one sadly – the AAM letter that could have provoked would have been a corker!

    1. SerfinUSA*

      I purchased a blow-up sheep (called the Love Ewe) for party/band room decor when I was but a youth. It always wound up under the christmas tree, posed indelicately in front of the vintage plastic light-up Santa. I think the ex got custody in the divorce divvy.

      1. Windchime*

        I once got a Toy Story “Woody” doll from a fast food restaurant. I had him pinned to my bulletin board at work. Co-workers used to make fun of me for having him because of his name (grow up, people!).

        One day I came to work and he was off the bulletin board and posed in a very compromising position with a Barbie, who had her skirt up around her waist. I had to admit that was pretty funny. (We were all a bunch of women and it was just a silly joke; no harassment).

        1. fposte*

          We used to do what we called the Holiday Litigation Scene, with Santa’s sleigh mowing down various toy animals and action figures.

  37. jag*

    The apartment provided by a school I worked at had a couple tarantulas come visit one night. That was not pleasant.

  38. steve g*

    Not as weird as some of the others but weird/funny nonetheless – about seven years ago at previous job, my weird coworker who made it clear she had anxiety and had no friends came back after christmas wearing a sweatshirt with a big guady cat on it…at a place where ladies whore dresses and men ties….the funny part was, she didn’t wear it ironically, she seriously thought it was a nice shirt and asked us if we liked it.