Unless you're self-employed and work alone, you've dealt with coworker drama.
Sometimes a coworker is difficult to work with and sometimes they're wildly incompetent, leading everyone wondering why they haven't been fired.
Reddit user lcasey14 asked:
"Who’s your 'how tf have they not been fired‽' coworker and what have they done to earn that title?"
Layoffs
"Worked for a company that tested soil samples for mining companies."
"Each test had to be given 0.002 (within .0001) of a gram of a white substance (can't remember what is was called)."
"So the company wins a MASSIVE contract and there is a lot of work to be done, too much for the lab so they start falling behind. The manager/accountant tells everyone that to speed things up you are to put 0.02 (within 0.005) of a gram instead (do you know how long it takes to measure out 0.002 of a gram??).
"But the results all come back WRONG and the mining company wastes $300m mining for copper(?) that wasn't there, and successfully sue us."
"300 people lost their jobs, which was 50% of the companies work force. Manager who made the bad call didn't lose his job as he denied he told everyone to make the gram change, even though there were about 30 witnesses who said he told them directly."
"I started work at this company about 2 years after this event; I have NEVER heard so much abuse and vitriol about a person as this manager, nobody in the company had any respect for him and treated him with absolute disdain."
"There were signs on the doors of some labs telling him he was banned from entering; people used to tell him to 'F off' in the corridor as they walked past him.
"I tried to stay neutral but when I heard what happened..."
~ Captain_Coco_Koala
Quit
"My boss at Walgreens."
"When she took the position from the prior shift she promptly canceled the overnight shift which was a problem because that was when we got things like cleaning and restocking *done*. She then shoveled those responsibilities onto the evening shift but didn't increase their staffing numbers."
"Instead she *fired* people on that shift for having the audacity to use vacation time. So even though the store had a 'three employee minimum' we often had two, occasionally dipping down to one if, for any reason, the other person couldn't make it in (like being sick)."
"Even if both people were in, it wasn't a small store and they were expected to clean and restock it while dealing with the large amount of customers that only petered off around 9-10ish. Since the store closed at 11 that only left about 1 hour when *everything* had to get done, and there were still customers, just not as many."
"She then routinely ignored vacation time requests even if they had been filed months in advance, threatened people with firing if they didn't come in while sick, and harassed any employee who wasn't working with 100% uptime."
"So if you, say, took a moment to sit down cause you had been on your feet for 8 hours, or if you weren't facing the store despite seeing a customer blatantly coming up to check out, she'd get furious."
"It was next to impossible to avoid write-ups, her chewing you out, ignoring requests, and everything. At least if you weren't on her shift."
"Oddly, not only was her shift properly staffed *always*, but every employee on it got a favorable review complimenting their 'hard work' even if they were entirely inept. My bosses boss worked at another Walgreens nearby and I got sent over to help with the Halloween rush."
"He was utterly baffled how the 'lazy and inept' employee had completely restocked the entire store and cleaned it and everything two hours before the shift was scheduled to be done leaving no work *to* be done.
"Even when I explained to him what was going on, he didn't believe me."
"When I finally moved away and had to quit, she asked how much time I needed off and said she could give me two weeks at most. I laughed and told her I was giving her a two weeks notice."
"My sole regret is that now, four years later, I had to move again and the only large employer in the area is a different Walgreens and I'm too scared to apply because they'll probably have me on file saying I did a bunch of horrible stuff."
"I'm completely baffled as to how she didn't get fired. Our store was struggling, but her response was to effectively shift the blame to everyone who wasn't her."
"Had she even hired one more person for the evening shift we could have gotten at least most of the work *done*, but even then that doesn't excuse how horribly she treated us."
"I'm glad to be free of her, but it did convince me that I should *never* hold any loyalty to a place of employment that doesn't show any degree of respect for me."
~ Snowtwo
Closure
"I worked for a plant that manufactured large steel pipes for oil companies. Without getting too technical there was a machine that plays a major part in the process and that machine needed to be fixed and adjusted otherwise it would ruin the pipe."
"The guy who was over our pipe mill told them to continue running the batch. He had several senior mill guys in various positions that advised him to hold off, but he refused because the fix was going to take a lot of time, and every hour the mill isn't running it's losing 'x' amount of dollars (I don't remember the actual figure)."
"So they run the batch and every pipe coming out is f*cked up. Every single one, but they just keep running it."
"Well eventually the guy over the whole plant finds out and puts a stop to it. By that time they had already run about 12 million dollars worth of pipe."
"None of it was usable and it was all turned into scrap metal. After that the mill I worked in was shut down and we were all laid off (this was a huge plant with several mills), but not the boss over my mill."
"He kept his job and just got moved somewhere else. At least until he got a DUI a couple of years later and went to prison."
"Apparently he had already had a couple of them."
~ GuiltyGlow
Health Hazard
"I work in a hospital. She frequently touches patients with unclean gloves. She unleashed a fart so bad in a patient's room that the patient actually asked her to leave and not return to their room."
"Aside from that instance she has been fired from numerous patients' rooms for a variety of reasons. She doesn't manage her time well at all and fails to get her assigned patient baths done."
"Most recently she was caught touching a patient with a known communicable disease without gloves, and she was interacting with an unclean specimen collection pan from the same patient, again, without gloves."
"I felt bad for her at first because it felt like everyone mercilessly bullied her, but she sorta deserves it at this point."
~ Schaabalahba
By Comparison
"I have a useless colleague that everyone in my team bi*ches about and I keep reminding them that we'll miss her when she's gone, because she makes us all look good by comparison."
~ Ravenser_Odd
Annoying
"I work in a cash industry with someone who refuses to lock their cash drawers. When I pointed out to her that she is on camera and can get fired from stepping away from her cash drawers without locking them, she said, 'Well then, I'll just pretend'."
"Lady, they can see on camera that the drawer is obviously unlocked."
"She also keeps offering to search the building with her gun—that she is absolutely not allowed to have on premises—every time there is a security issue because she wants to shoot someone. Needless to say we tell her no."
"She once credited the wrong account because the account number on the payment didn't match any account numbers we had—the person had transposed some digits. Instead of looking up the customer or contacting any of her coworkers, she just punched in random numbers until something popped up and credited that random account."
"She then blamed the people whose account she credited—people who had nothing to do with the payment that was made and were honest enough to tell us that they had been mistakenly credited—for giving her the wrong account number."
She once asked me if an email was domestic or international and if it was international what would she have to do to send and international email."
"She's genuinely surprised that no one else agrees with her racist mentality."
"Constant loud personal phone calls about private things that no one needs to hear especially as we are not allowed to have our phones out while working due to security and privacy issues."
"Drinks exclusively energy drinks and cannot figure out why she has some severe stomach issues.
"Keeps going to her car to 'grab something' every 15-20 minutes as if we can't see through the large glass window to the parking lot that she's a chainsmoker and the reason why our nice flower garden is full of cigarette butts."
"Will talk to people as if they are in the middle of a conversation with her even though they have just arrived or are walking by and will continue that conversation for five to ten minutes after the person has left."
~ choaoctopus
The Peter Principle
"I worked in corporate America, Fortune 500. I have too many stories to tell, but one stands out to me."
"Corporate headquarters in a 80 million dollar building has a master electrician who has been there 40 years and knows where all the bodies are buried. I install a bunch of UPS dual back up off line battery systems in server closets (40) at about 5k a pop."
"The units required a 30 amp breaker and receptacle with correct gauge wiring. The master electrician changes my spec without saying a word, calls out for 20 amp breakers since that's what was already there and available, and after my install is complete, he goes back in, whacks the 30 A cable ends off the UPS and installs a 20 A Hubble."
"Now the UPS won't provide maximum run time under load, and he has voided the warranty on $200K worth of UPS systems. The a**hat spends a month arguing with higher ups that his opinion supersedes physics, and I finally get the manufacturer to send a 'you bought it, you name it' letter."
"I eventually have to yank all 40 units, replace the correct cable end, and get a sign off from the maunfacturer they will still honor their five year warranties. Problem solved."
"Three months later, same site, a $400,000 end loader goes missing. Vanished. It pops up at the master electrician's farm parked in the back forty, and he explains that he took it home to do some maintenance, despite having no heavy machinery experience, and staying silent while everyone was frantically looking for the end loader."
"No one fires the guy. Two months later, he gets arrested for his third DUI, and the C Suite crowd intervenes with the courts and cops and he gets probation. Kept his job another year and then retired with full benefits and a huge pension."
~ filledonut
Slacker
"When I worked in the nursing home laundry room, my co-worker literally refused to do the job she was hired for—she actually told the supervisor she wasn't going to do it. Not just that, but she didn't do anything else, either."
"She spent more time on the smoker's porch than in the laundry room. She drove her friends home while she was on the clock."
"She refused to pick up the soiled laundry more than once or twice per shift, even though she was supposed to pick it up four or five times. People would tell me that they didn't see her for hours at a time and quite often questioned whether she was actually there or not."
"She once called the supervisor and told her that she wasn't coming in to work that day because she was too drunk. She was also working in the nursing home kitchen and would leave the laundry room to go work in the kitchen, because they paid her more to work in the kitchen."
"Even after she was told (multiple times) to change into clean scrubs before going in the kitchen, she would still wear the scrubs she had on while working in the laundry room, then go into the kitchen to prepare food."
"This woman got the same evaluation score that I got and the same raise that I got, even though I was doing 99% of the work."
~ rosesforthemonsters
Language Barrier
"I work for a hospital. A few years ago I transferred out of scheduling and into a different area of the hospital (radiology)."
"Before I left, they gave me a new hire to train to be my replacement. My specific job in scheduling was transcribing paper orders from doctor’s offices who were outside of our specific hospital system into our EMR software, into the patient’s chart, and then call them to set up their appointments for any outpatient testing (imaging, cardiology, etc...)."
"This job required more medical knowledge than some of the other scheduling jobs, since they were working from orders were all already entered correctly into the patient’s chart directly by the ordering doctor."
"Often the way the outside doctors would order things didn’t 100% match the way exam names were worded in our computer system, so I’d have to do some interpreting based on understanding the nature of the tests and medical terminology know how."
"They gave me this specific new hire because they thought she had medical experience. She had been an office manager for a doctor’s office, I was told."
"Turns out she hadn’t worked in a doctor’s office at all, but in a dental office. Big difference. Teeth are like the one thing hospitals don’t work on."
"She had no knowledge of human anatomy outside of the mouth. She could barely name organs, let alone know where they were or what all they did."
"Aside from that, she was just generally dumb. She said she’d been let go from her managerial position because the dental office did a lot of downsizing during COVID. I imagine she was just equally incompetent there and they used COVID as an excuse to get rid of her."
"After only a couple of days, I went to the scheduling boss and asked for someone else to train, saying that this new lady just could not do the job. That’s when my boss said 'but she has medical experience!' and I had to break it to the boss that it was only in a dentist’s office, prompting a big facepalm from the boss."
"But they didn’t have anyone else to put into the job, so we were stuck with her."
"Still, I had a couple more weeks to train the new lady, so I did my very best. I provided her with lists and resources. I wrote out medical abbreviations for her."
"I explained to her over and over again that when a doctor orders an 'RUQ' ultrasound, that that means 'right upper quadrant' of the abdomen and that in our specific software we had to enter it as a limited ultrasound of the abdomen and just specify in the freetext area that it was an RUQ."
"Still, every time she came across one (and there would be multiple per day), she would stop and ask me what it meant. She had shoved all the notes and resources I’d given her into a binder and never looked at them, she’d just ask me instead."
"But it was about to (mostly) not be my problem anymore, so I did my best and then went on to my new job."
"Of course in my new job in radiology, many of our patients ended up being scheduled by her, so I still had to deal with her f*ck-ups. She’d schedule the wrong test, give the patient the wrong instructions, etc..."
"And she never seemed to get in trouble for it. When we’d catch her mistakes, we’d call her and she’d apologize profusely and say she didn’t know and would never make that mistake again. But I knew she knew better because I had taught her those specific things."
"Fast-forward three years, and she still hasn’t learned. She’s still f*cking up patient orders and appointments."
"Most recently, she scheduled a patient for a regular CT scan when the ordering doctor actually wanted the kind of CT scan where we inject contrast directly into the patient’s spinal canal, rather than just in an IV."
"She realized at nearly the last minute and tried to cover up her mistake by changing the appointment to the correct test about an hour before the patient was to arrive. And she didn’t call to tell anyone."
"Luckily, our department saw the test pop up on the schedule, and we all went 'WTF' because those procedures have to be planned in advance."
"When we’re going to be jamming huge needles into people’s spines, we like to have a bit of notice so we can make sure we have a doctor (interventional radiologist) that can do it, and a nurse available, and there’s special prep for the patient as well."
"They have to be off blood thinners, and they have to bring a driver. We called her and her excuse was that she didn’t know it wasn’t like a regular cat scan."
"It has the word 'intrathecal' in the test name. And yeah, a layman might not know what that word means, but if you’re going to be involved in planning patient care you should probably not be a complete layman and at least try to learn the language."
~ Sapphires13
Unacceptable Behavior Isn’t A Reasonable Accommodation
"Some b*stard in his 60s."
"Caught screaming at coworkers multiple times, has been banned from entering 3 of the buildings we’re supposed to work in (one of them 3 times over), screamed at and threatened to harm a female worker because 'she reminded him of his mother' when all she did was silently walk by (he even admitted to everything he said in the police report), physically grabbed a female coworker and shoved her out of a room with a witness overhearing everything over the phone, constantly accuses everything of being woke, always goes on long winded rants and conspiracy theories about how women only exist to have kids regardless of other workers or the general public being around to hear him, and simply doesn’t do the job he’s paid to do at all."
"But it’s okay guys—he has bipolar disorder so there’s nothing wrong with it!"
"When I first got into federal government work they told me I’d never be fired for anything short of murder. Like everyone else I rolled my eyes thinking it was just an exaggeration. I’m now telling you all a federal employee will never be fired for anything short of murder."
~ dpj2001
Yelling
"Well most recently he got chewed out by the department manager and HR for yelling at a customer and smelling like booze."
"He was explicitly told he could not help with any front counter customers."
"The only reason he hasn't been fired yet is because of health issues."
~ AtinWichap
Boss' Buddies
"It’s been a few years, but I worked at a warehouse and this 19-year-old kid taught me how important it is to be liked. More than working hard."
"Him, our lead, and our supervisor would leave early in the shift and get wasted and would come back just to clock out. Only reason they didn’t do that every day is because he would miss 2/3 days of work every single week."
"I was the hard worker who picked up the slack even for our supervisor. I voiced my complaints, but they never cared."
"They’d get so wasted sometimes our supervisor would call us and we’d drive out to them to drive them back to their places."
"Eventually the kid took a position in another area for like 50 cents more and got fired after a week. The supervisor that got drunk with him got promoted, and then the lead that would join them got his supervisor position even though I was more qualified."
"Learned my lesson and left."
~ Jac1596
Zzzzzzz...
"Sleeping on the job. Sleeping within half an hour of arrival, mid morning nap until lunch, afternoon napping."
"Sleeping through closing time and left sitting to wake up hours after everyone leaves (people drive by and report the car is still in the parking lot two-three hours after closing."
"False documentation that things were done that weren't, because of sleeping. Missing documentation of things that were done, but forgot about, because of sleeping. Promises to customers with no delivery because they fall asleep after the conversation."
Part of it is health-related, and part of it is choices. Stay up all night watching TV, sleep through the workday so you can stay up late the next night, rinse, lather, repeat."
"We also have an enabling work culture—show us you'll drop the ball, demonstrate you can't be counted on, and you won't get extra assignments or be tasked with anything that requires any effort or talent."
~ moot17
Chaos Creator
"Girl who worked for the bar I worked in, got wasted every shift, used to scream (literally scream) at customers because they wouldn’t leave after last call, once ripped her top off in the restaurant when she was wasted."
"Once randomly started smashing glasses and laughing hysterically on the restaurant floor with customers in the building, used to date a bartender and ended up cheating on him with a customer, and utter chaos ensued."
"I’m sure there’s stuff I'm forgetting."
"Didn’t get fired because the owners thought she was hot."
"Eventually got fired for taking 3 customers to the office and getting in to the back up liquor supply."
~ Art
Overall Unpleasant
"She’s currently on leave sulking after she got written up from me reporting her."
"She’s wildly incompetent, I’ve taken over part of her job while she’s been gone and the issues I’ve found are astounding."
"She’s also extremely unpleasant. She works from home 3 days a week because she’s so unpleasant to everyone our boss doesn’t want her in the office."
~ uarstar
What's your nightmare coworker story?