OT - Wacky Coworker Stories Thread

A former coworker of mine, at an engineering firm, moonlights as an amateur wrestler. Same guy had about a two week marriage to a stripper who apparently had cut somebody's throat with a knife.

This wasn’t a co-worker in the usual sense. It was a cast member in a community theater production I was in many years ago.

It was one of those comedies where people are running in and out of closets and at least one character is going to be down to his underwear by Act Two. In one scene, I and another guy had shoved a girl into a closet to keep her hidden. And just as the door shut and there was two seconds of silence …

RIIIIIP! She cut one of the longest farts in the history of theater. Seriously – it sounded like somebody had dropped dead on the bass valve of a tuba. My partner and I looked at each other with widening eyes, realized what we’d heard, and struggled to maintain our composure.

We might have made it, too - except she did it again. I blew my line, mostly because I had to turn away from the audience and they never heard it. We got out of that scene and safely off stage before we died laughing. When she came out of the closet, I half-expected her to be trailed by a plume of green smoke.

Important safety tip, actors: If you must eat dinner before a show, go somewhere besides Taco Bell.

working at this bar/sports complex in windsor (anyone from Essex County will remember the ice park) we had this one kid that was apart of the rink crew (rink rats) and before that he was one of my cooks when I was the kitchen manager there... while he was a cook he did the following: worked an entire shift with a back pack on with his play station in it because he was afraid that if he took it off someone would steal it, some song came on in the kitchen and he started bawling because it reminded him of a girl, decided to jump into the cardboard dumpster to break down cardboard... which would have been fine if the patio wasn't full of people, on fireworks night he decided to climb up on the roof to watch them while he was working (he was the only cook) and orders were being put in... and the topper was when he nearly burnt the kitchen down, when he put 100 par cooked chicken wings into one fryer basket in the fryer next to the grill... needless to say grease started shooting onto the grill and lit it up and then caught both fryers on fire... I showed up to work right after they got done cleaning it all up and was informed of what happened... I might have been slightly hungover still and went back into the kitchen and read him the riot act... from what I was told after, I was so loud that people in the bar stopped and listened to it and other employees were cheering as I did it... now there is another former ice park employee that reads mgoblog and will know exactly who I am talking about and vouch for all of this... sorry for the formatting on mobile...

Great stories, great thread idea...

I can't tell all of the stories about this guy, because they pile on so fast that they seem impossible, but I can tell two...

He was a systems programmer, which, no disrespect intended, breeds some true weirdness. I'm the new nerd, so folks lined up to watch the manager introduce me to him. 

I walk around the corner of the cube wall, ready to stick out my hand in the traditional form of male greeting. He has his shoes and socks off, digging beneath his toes with a screwdriver, wiping the shit that comes out on his pants. 

He sticks out his hand. What do I do?  I shake it, and plan the most pain-free way of ridding myself of the obviously now diseased appendage as quickly as possible.

About a week later, I walk to the print room to get my latest botched attempt at writing a master file update. He's standing there, peeking over the cube wall, into a room full of young, female data entry clerks. He's snorting like a bull (after ducking behind the wall), and clearly enjoying himself. On my way back from the print room, I see him do a final snort, run into the bathroom, and emerge looking very happy ten minutes later.

He did lots of other stuff, and I eventually transferred to a different branch, so I have no idea what becomes of him. I only hope that there is a bullpen of data entry clerks and newbs wanting to shake hands wherever he is now...

I was 19 and a welder at a construction firm. We built high rises, Boston Tunnel, schools, you name it. Base on Long Island. Urban was my superior who had no drivers license because DWI's. He took me under his wing and I advanced in the company. He started asking me to pick him up for work and drop him off. Then he started asking me to party with him. This guy made Tony Montana look like a baby. On Thursdays we had an hour for lunch to cash our checks, he would make me drive him to the bar, drink 8 rum and cokes, do 5 lines of cocaine and go back to swing a 100 ton crane over my head. SCARY!!!!! I had to bail when he made me weld outside in the pouring rain in the middle of January 20 feet up on a lift. Grounded out when I slipped and got 220v running through me. Puking sick, I said "See yah!"

I work with a woman from China that doesn't walk. It's really bizarre. No, she isn't paralyzed or in a wheel chair she just doesn't walk. Everywhere she goes she runs. Even if it's from her desk to someone else's desk 5 feet away. She runs. Runs to the bathroom. Runs to and from the elevator. It's bizarre.

This thread delivers hope it stays a while

I never worked with this woman nor ever even met her, but I heard enough about her from multiple sources from her pre-Irish as well as post-Irish days (this will make sense later). So this woman was happily married and her husband was on the fast track to a huge promotion.  Then there were allegations of infidelity on his part with the wife of someone he worked with or with a married woman he worked with (I don't remember exactly)--The allegations were either true or were believed by enough people that the effect was the same: he ended up losing the promotion (I think he might have actually taken early retirement) and they ended up divorced.  She was American born, but changed her name to an Irish name, started speaking with an Irish accent, and claimed that she was from Ireland. This was all told to me by one person and confirmed by a second person (who I trust as one of the most forthright people I know).

A few months later, my wife started talking about this interesting Irish woman she met at work. I asked what her name was; bingo, it was the same woman.  I tried explaining to my wife that she wasn't from Ireland and had just recently acquired an Irish accent.  My wife didn't believe me and neither did one of her colleagues who is a close family friend.  They defended her and were convinced someone was either confused or trying to disparage her for some reason. She was so sincere and open, they really didn't believe me.  

A short time later, my wife and her colleague were being told by this woman that she had cancer, and later they were told that it was incurable and that she didn't have long to live. My wife's colleague literally spent hours with her, listening to her and providing moral support. I still couldn't convince them that she might just be inventing the cancer story as well.  After more back and forth with them, they eventually conceded to me that perhaps there was a chance the Irish thing was the result of a traumatic divorce, but they were 100% convinced that her cancer story was legitimate.  Then she disappeared, and my wife and it seemed that she had been telling the truth, and she had passed away. That is, until a year or two later she reappeared.  My wife's colleague asked about her miraculous recovery from cancer, and she claimed to not know what he was talking about.

Was hired, as a contracted Tech Writer, for a special project with one of the big three credit card companies. Seemed like a pretty boring, but decent gig. This all changed at the end of my first week. 

On my very first 'casual Friday,' which pretty much meant wearing a company golf shirt with your Levi's, one of the contracted programmers (a rather portly fella with serious man boobs) showed up in a way-too-small short-sleeved shirt that was unbuttoned in the front. When he moved in practically any way, his shirt would open enough to show his nipple rings, which protruded through the holes he'd cut in his wife-beater undershirt. 

He was ushered out the front-door before 10 A.M., but not before almost all of us (men and women) had some sort of awkward encounter with him, doing our best to act as if we didn't notice. Turns out he had a serious coke issue going on, along with some obvious emotional issues. He made a comment to the manager on the way out the door that he felt like he was a peacock on a chicken ranch, which was an odd thing to say, but hard to argue under the circumstances. 

He set the contractor (and casual Friday) bar so low, that he made the rest of us look deceptively normal. I was subsequently hired as a FTE, but three years later his name was still the first thing mentioned whenever a new contractor was hired. 

Not sure he ever got the help he so obviously needed, but he was a real mess. 

I had a co-worker who confessed that until some time in her 20s she had thought Jabba the Hutt was a historic figure.

"You know...Atilla the Hun? Jabba the Hutt?"

In my previous job there once was an associate in the dept I managed, that literally had a tinfoil hat that he wore at home. He believed all these crazy conspiracies about aliens and how the gov't was trying to read our brains with microwaves. To make matters worse when he talked, it was a very low mumble so it was pretty hard to understand him.

It gets crazier. He would stop at this sandwich shop everyday to purchase his lunch before work. One day he stops, orders his sandwich and then tells them he's not paying and walks out with the sandwich. Unfortunately for him they knew him since he stopped everyday and he also had his work shirt on that has the company name. It wasn't too long after that 2 of our highly dedicated public servants who happen to wear badges show up at our place of employment inquiring to speak with this individual. He of course was removed in handcuffs and was never seen again.

Years later I caught up with him on FB. Seems he was diagnosed with a mental disorder, was sent to be treated and never served any time. Too bad the treatment didn't seem to work because he was still a loon on FB. 

Not long after I left advertising for good, my former boss holed up in a Chicago hotel room for a week and then jumped out the window to his death. It was just incredibly tragic, as he had a wife and two daughters. He was not a well-liked guy which somehow made him an even bigger tragic figure. He did it in the hotel right next to the agency's building. His body landed on the street and from all accounts, was unrecognizable. 

To +1 the, turlington tattoo remover, lol