You’re best office story
Posted by Large_Relation_3650@reddit | Xennials | View on Reddit | 33 comments
Could be from early 2000s or recent, I’d love to hear perspectives from the office environment as a xennial. I never had an office job per se, I usually worked jobs doing smaller work (but at tech companies) but always found the environment hilarious.
Timmonidus@reddit
Worked for a company that did an annual retreat for the top half of employees; basically all the managers and the top analysts. I never expected to go bc I was new. The emails would randomly come out and you have to contact marketing, book your flight to Florida and pick your free time activity FCFS. It was basically a 3-day party with another trip awarded to the best team that year (to Europe).
This company also had a lot of spouses working together….
This one year, apparently a wife went, but the husband didn’t get invited. I was at work when he all of a sudden loses it and trashes the whole office, security called, etc…..
Turns out his wife got drunk (as everyone does on this trip) and was banging her boss in a hot tub in the middle of everyone who was still up late one night.
It didn’t take long for that info to get back to him.
She ended up getting fired, her manager got moved around, and the husband was given a leave of absence given the circumstances and eventually came back (everyone felt really bad for him and he’s a super nice guy).
Never got too many details beyond that bc HR got involved and I didn’t have too many friends there that would tell me anything.
Fast forward about 12 years, I ran into one of my ex coworkers from then and apparently after the divorce she married her old manager and then he cheated on her and they got divorced.
switheld@reddit
SHE got fired????
Ms_Rarity@reddit
I (44F) have a really weird, conservative, religious co-worker (65F). A few years ago, one of the lieutenants (~50M) (whom I'd met maybe 3 times) complimented my hair color (rose gold). Co-worker is always trying to pry into my life and make chitchat to me, so I casually mentioned it to her at some point. About two weeks later, co-worker calls me and says, "Rarity, I need to let you know that you made me VERY uncomfortable when you mentioned LT likes your hair color. I shouldn't have to hear about that in the workplace, so I don't want to know about what's going on between you and LT. LEAVE ME OUT OF IT."
I calmly said "Okay" to everything she said. She ended the call. I then walked across the hallway to ask the captain WTF. He said co-worker had spent the past two weeks complaining that I had sexually harassed her by mentioning the hair compliment, but command had repeatedly refused to support her in a complaint against me. She also said things to LT like, "Well do you not like my hair?? Should I change something about my hair??" It seemed like the real issue was jealousy. They had finally counseled her to go ahead and let me know she hadn't liked the comment.
I knew she was kind of odd, but I hadn't realized she was . . . Well . . . Whatever the hell that was.
switheld@reddit
the new CAD draftsman that was sat in the corner of the office (but right by the door to the hallway with the bathrooms) was caught surfing p*rn and jacking off in the middle of the work day 😬
changopdx@reddit
I worked at a very small insurance brokerage about 30 years ago. I was the web designer/developer guy, and we were interviewing for the office manager job since our amazing office manager moved to Arizona because her chef husband found a great head chef gig in the state.
My boss was showing one of the candidates around and they came into my office, which I shared with our outgoing office manager, and they had their backs to me while I was coding away. They were chitchatting about things and she made the off hand remark that she was very detail oriented and anal about things. Then my boss said "that's perfect,. because this is an anal position!!"
The silence that followed was deafening.
Friends, I learned a lot about myself that day. I reached deep into my will and pulled out a fortitude I didn't know I had to not walk out of that room howling with laughter. She did not take the job.
Firebolt164@reddit
Lol maybe it's just me but I don't find office life hilarious - it's just sad.
For me, office life is watching the company lay off really good employees all to make their earnings look a fraction of a percent better and then rehire all new people is 6 months..
Office life is watching GM and car execs show up TJ Washington to beg for a bailout and being grilled on flying on private planes and then seeing more layoffs because my office was in an aircraft factory..
AJ14847414@reddit
Always had a don’t shit where you eat policy with work, except the day I got blackout drunk at my local pub and woke up with a coworker. 3 years of her sending me emails and finding any reason to walk by my office.
When my company at the time was going through monthly layoffs in 2008 there were separate signs in the bathrooms, in the woman’s there was one asking not to leave used tampons on the floor and in the men’s asking that they don’t shit on the floor.
Then there was a manager using his T&A money to hire hookers and printing out porn.
The other manager that banged pretty much all the single women in the company apartment when there wasn’t an executive in town.
xt0rt@reddit
"Company apartment"?
AJ14847414@reddit
Corporate was in Europe, the execs had a company apt right by the office they could stay at when they were in town.
RJRoyalRules@reddit
Years ago I worked at an extremely dysfunctional company and have a book's worth of insane office stories. Just a few:
Not long after that was Labor Day weekend, and Monday night I started to get a really bad sore throat, by Tuesday morning it was on fire. However, because of the warning I still went into work and suffered through the day but was barely able to talk or eat. I went to urgent care early the next morning, where they told me I had strep. I emailed the HR email to tell them I wouldn't be coming in and that I had unwittingly spread strep around the office in part due to their stupid meeting. The COO, who was copied on the HR emails for some reason, replied and said "the meeting wasn't addressed to everyone" so I asked him "why was everyone in the meeting?" He never responded.
A few weeks later, the deliverables he prepared were all rejected by the client, and we had to re-do them ourselves. I asked my manager when we could inform the CEO about his colossal fuck-up, and she said we couldn't because it would hurt his feelings.
One of its broken features was generating a piece of metadata that accompanied a deliverable, so we had to make the metadata manually with templates and copy/paste, which is just asking for user errors.
In the interim, someone with some programming acumen had created automated scripts that would pull this information and generate the metadata, which saved everyone time and energy. We were then forbidden from using the scripts because the company wanted us to use the broken software, which didn't do the thing we needed it to do. So we had to keep making the metadata manually for years.
Dwayne_@reddit
A geriatric co-worker, who I have known since childhood, accidentally printed roughly 200 pages of black and white pornography to a shared printer, and I managed to successfully block every single person from accessing the printer until it was done and disposed of said printed out hardcore pornography without anyone, aside from one co-worker, who thought it was hilarious, ever finding out about it.
shmelse@reddit
One summer I scanned contracts for the legal division of a pretty big company.
It was incredibly dull most of the summer. The building was always super cold and I remember the blast of heat stepping out of the door. The most exciting part of the job was going to the company gym, where I met a British guy who I didn’t like very much but dated for a while. I read a bunch of books while I waited for the contracts to scan and I remember one of the lawyers giving me a bag of pretzels he had bought in the vending machine because he’d decided pretzels had too many carbs (the Atkins diet was big then) so he ate a vending machine cinnamon roll instead.
One day while scanning documents I found an internal memo about how the company should really consider bribing officials in Mexico because basically everyone else was doing it and we would lose the competitive edge if we didn’t. I remember laughing that someone thought it was a good idea to type that out and memorialize it. I didn’t scan the memo, I took it to my boss, and I can’t remember what he said when I gave that to him; I think he just buried it and that was that.
420medicineman@reddit
Hired into a large government agency for a new unit they created a few months prior. 2 months in, the manager they brought in to run the thing got into an argument with the executive team and got fired. They never replaced her, just shuffled us 'on paper' under another manager
Spent almost 3 years doing literally nothing. Watched a LOT of netflix. Occasionally napped in my car. I went every day and put in a full day...of nothing. It got to be soul crushing, honestly.
-Cool_Ethan-@reddit
Jeremy Stephens fucked the receptionist in the breakroom restroom in the middle of the work-day.
knivesofsmoothness@reddit
Is that friend upon?
deowolf@reddit
Legend
JeffTS@reddit
I got a job straight out of college as a website maintenance person in upstate NY. I started out working in my boss’s house as her first employee. But, she ended up hiring other employees so there just wasn’t space in the home office. Instead, her husband fixed up an old chicken coop to fit 3 or 4 of us.
And my fellow employees were pranksters. One was right near the phone line that my computer received internet from. He’d randomly disconnect it on me. Another time, I had to go down to the home office. When I came back, my computer wasn’t working. Nothing would open. Turned out, they took a screen capture of my desktop, moved the icons to the trash, and set the background as the screen capture.
s-multicellular@reddit
Social services office. Mid 2000s. I was frustrated by the wall of poorly copied forms. Crooked, hard to read, especially for clients that often were not up to date on glasses Rx.
I started visiting or calling all the places they were from, some colocated, some federal, some city, and I put the digital files on our shared drive.
After having a training on what the shared drive was…..sigh
We took down that wall.
Regional director suggested I cut the local forms out and send to HQ. Apparently we had walls like that all over.
Emailed to Employee Suggestion Box. They told me suggestions had to come by fax.
I screenshotted the zip file and faxed it.
BeeswaxingPoetic@reddit
I worked at an office during college right when eBay was amazing, back in 2000. We all pretty much shopped eBay all day long and had piles of packages cluttering our cubicles and would show each other our purchases over lunch. It was actually a pretty lovely job now that I think about it.
jaywinner@reddit
Worked in an office with terrible computers. They were slow and would often crash or need IT help. One guy had his computer die on him again and instead of sitting there getting paid while they fix it, he storms out saying he'll come back when they get their shit together. He goes down to the coffee shop waiting for his PC to be fixed.
They didn't let him back in.
This_hoe_dumb@reddit
Worked for a company back in the day. Company brought in a new guy, wouldn’t officially give him a title. The guy made my skin crawl. Turns out he was a convicted embezzler, having stolen upwards of a million from retirement accounts. He served seven days in jail.
epidemicsaints@reddit
After a woman was fired and walked out, the boss found huge rubbermaid totes under her cubicle - one of popcorn kernels and one of Skittles. Like 5+ gallons of each. We have no idea wtf.
-threefeetoffun@reddit
A guy used to go around shitting in random places. One time he shit next row over and ate just a bite of a cookie someone left on their desk.
DavePeesThePool@reddit
You're right, I am the best office story.
DoubleRightClick@reddit
Murphy_Dropkick410@reddit
Mr-Brown-Is-A-Wonder@reddit
You're = You are
You are best office story.
Large_Relation_3650@reddit (OP)
The satire is in the post, figured, it might spark a memory by being stupid lol
HopelessMagic@reddit
So you were illiterate on purpose?
Large_Relation_3650@reddit (OP)
Gotta add the cheese to get the pizza lol I’m only interested in stories, digging back 20+ years, you need to grease the wheels to get stories lol
Door_Number_Four@reddit
Early on in my career, I worked for a bank.
One day, we were advised that if we had any pictures with an “ attractive” wide ( always loved thy qualifier!) or teenage daughter to remove them from our desk.
Someone was coming in , stealing them , and then um…returning them a few days later….used.
Janitoral staff were interrogated, but the culprit was never caught.
I left that job, but about a year later I found out through the grapevine that it was a female managing director that was doing this with her husband as a way to keep their marriage fresh.
awesomecubed@reddit
In 2002 I worked in an office environment. I had a role that necessitated me being very knowledgeable about the technical details of a product we sold. As a result, the sales reps would constantly come to me and ask questions. The problem was, it wasn’t my job to educate them. They had ALL the resources they needed to educate themselves, and were supposed to. Didn’t matter though. I still got interrupted like 3 or 4 times an hour, which impacted my own productivity that I was goaled on.
My cubicle was directly across from the main office printer. I printed and laminated a sign that said “This printer has been upgraded with HP’s ‘Voice2Print’ technology. Simply use the following commands…” followed by a huge list of commands. Then at the end it said, “Please note, printer may need calibration. If your voice is not recognized please say ‘Calibrate Printer’ at increasing volume until calibration mode is activated”
I got A LOT of laughs out of watching sales reps scream “CALIBRATE PRINTER!”
awesomecubed@reddit
Oh, and then maybe a month later I bought a can of air and made a label that said “Anti-dumbass Spray”. The next time a sales reps came over, I sprayed her with the air, which naturally made her back away. I then pointed to the label and said, “Huh, this stuff really DOES work!”
That got me written up. Worth it though. The sales reps finally stopped bugging me.