Coworkers: Our Hidden Resource of Madness
Sep. 26th, 2003 12:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
substituteThe following is a list of coworkers that I, or people I know, have had. Without comment. I think one of the best reasons to work at jobs instead of getting money some other way is meeting maniacs. Please add your own if you wish to do so!
1. Lived on fatty meat and generic package cookies. Frequently said he would not live past fifty. Would ask for extra fatty meat from the work cafeteria, and drank at least 1.5L of Dr. Pepper per day. Once was written up for cooking goat meat in microwave at work. Slid slowly into schizophrenia during his tenure at this job. What was in the chili he brought to pot luck?
2. Called everybody "Chief", "Big Guy", or "Killer"; women were "Gal" or "Babe". Wore really tight shirts. Would poke you and say "Hey Ace!" before asking a question.
3. Made speaker cabinets out of depleted uranium. They glowed at night and you were not supposed to get too close to them.
4. Was obsessed with Star Wars to the point that he had a tableau of figurines on his desk that no one was allowed to touch. Wore odd-looking scifi shoes with space hardware on them. Lost his scifi sunglasses once and sent an all company email begging for them back.
5. Showed up at the office drunk every day, holding a coffee mug of Jack. Drove an ice cream truck for his regular transportation. Threw up in his wastebasket regularly.
6. Worked naked in his office. Liked to go home and have some "Conan Powder" and then lift a heavy weight to feel strong. Was a rather freaked-out "furry".
7. Always carried Tabasco, real maple syrup, and a gun in her car. Would sexually harass the other women on the night shift. Told me she was going to kill me; I quit. Would punch a hole in the wall if you called her by her real name.
8. Greeted everyone with "Howdy-Hi!" and left saying "Cyah-bye!". Worshipped disk jockey Rick Dees, and wished to be him. Was a Mormon but wanted to fit in, so drank Martinelli's Sparkling CIder at parties. Ended up as a professor of career counseling.
9. Was a "professional writer" on a business communications course, but could not find the asterisk key on his keyboard. Often slept at his desk. When at the urinal, he would clap his hands in childish glee after he completed "number one".
10. Began every sentence with "Be advised that" and ended it with "at this time" like a cop or an airline pilot. Apparently owned only one shirt. Kept cases of candy at his desk. Eventually left with no notice after saying he had to "take care of some stuff".
11. Was terminated from his employment and taken away by the police for spying on women in women's bathrooms on several floors in the building. He had been married three weeks.
12. Typed at 120 wpm with perfect accuracy while dead drunk, and after smoking huge quantities of the weed. Flew into a rage when anyone questioned his reports, and was almost always right. Disappeared one New Year's eve and never came back.
13. Loved firing people, preferably in the middle of a sales meeting ("YOU! CLEAN OUT YOUR DESK AND LEAVE!"). Wrote restaurant reviews in longhand which staff had to retype. Was once seen dancing about in the bathroom saying to himself happily "Lucky, lucky, lucky!" Paid his coke dealer in company checks.
14. Told everyone in her first week that she was a witch, and that if other employees were not nice to her she would hex them. Was not joking about this. Did nothing at all, not one thing, as an employee. Quit with no notice and then asked for a reference.
15. Told the same story, all day long, in a loop, about her ex boyfriend leaving a message on her voicemail. Showed her coworker horribly blurry pictures of her cat that she was going to enter in a cat photography contest. Never, ever stopped talking. Ever. Security guard informed coworker that "you shouldn't be polite, just walk out of the room while she's talking."
1. Lived on fatty meat and generic package cookies. Frequently said he would not live past fifty. Would ask for extra fatty meat from the work cafeteria, and drank at least 1.5L of Dr. Pepper per day. Once was written up for cooking goat meat in microwave at work. Slid slowly into schizophrenia during his tenure at this job. What was in the chili he brought to pot luck?
2. Called everybody "Chief", "Big Guy", or "Killer"; women were "Gal" or "Babe". Wore really tight shirts. Would poke you and say "Hey Ace!" before asking a question.
3. Made speaker cabinets out of depleted uranium. They glowed at night and you were not supposed to get too close to them.
4. Was obsessed with Star Wars to the point that he had a tableau of figurines on his desk that no one was allowed to touch. Wore odd-looking scifi shoes with space hardware on them. Lost his scifi sunglasses once and sent an all company email begging for them back.
5. Showed up at the office drunk every day, holding a coffee mug of Jack. Drove an ice cream truck for his regular transportation. Threw up in his wastebasket regularly.
6. Worked naked in his office. Liked to go home and have some "Conan Powder" and then lift a heavy weight to feel strong. Was a rather freaked-out "furry".
7. Always carried Tabasco, real maple syrup, and a gun in her car. Would sexually harass the other women on the night shift. Told me she was going to kill me; I quit. Would punch a hole in the wall if you called her by her real name.
8. Greeted everyone with "Howdy-Hi!" and left saying "Cyah-bye!". Worshipped disk jockey Rick Dees, and wished to be him. Was a Mormon but wanted to fit in, so drank Martinelli's Sparkling CIder at parties. Ended up as a professor of career counseling.
9. Was a "professional writer" on a business communications course, but could not find the asterisk key on his keyboard. Often slept at his desk. When at the urinal, he would clap his hands in childish glee after he completed "number one".
10. Began every sentence with "Be advised that" and ended it with "at this time" like a cop or an airline pilot. Apparently owned only one shirt. Kept cases of candy at his desk. Eventually left with no notice after saying he had to "take care of some stuff".
11. Was terminated from his employment and taken away by the police for spying on women in women's bathrooms on several floors in the building. He had been married three weeks.
12. Typed at 120 wpm with perfect accuracy while dead drunk, and after smoking huge quantities of the weed. Flew into a rage when anyone questioned his reports, and was almost always right. Disappeared one New Year's eve and never came back.
13. Loved firing people, preferably in the middle of a sales meeting ("YOU! CLEAN OUT YOUR DESK AND LEAVE!"). Wrote restaurant reviews in longhand which staff had to retype. Was once seen dancing about in the bathroom saying to himself happily "Lucky, lucky, lucky!" Paid his coke dealer in company checks.
14. Told everyone in her first week that she was a witch, and that if other employees were not nice to her she would hex them. Was not joking about this. Did nothing at all, not one thing, as an employee. Quit with no notice and then asked for a reference.
15. Told the same story, all day long, in a loop, about her ex boyfriend leaving a message on her voicemail. Showed her coworker horribly blurry pictures of her cat that she was going to enter in a cat photography contest. Never, ever stopped talking. Ever. Security guard informed coworker that "you shouldn't be polite, just walk out of the room while she's talking."
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Date: 2003-09-26 08:28 am (UTC)1. Would hold pagan rituals in the office, often because his machine was malfunctioning. Once set fire to the carpet after dropping a candle. Often would make "messes" as a result of said rituals. I think the carpet in one room of the office still has a very visible pentagram from such a "mess".
2. Spent 90% of his time downloading mp3s off of napster. When I silently started blocking napster ports at the router, he just quietly quit one day. Three weeks later, he tried hacking into his account on the file server from home: later found out that he never took any of the mp3s home, and wanted access to them, even to the point of calling the "big boss" and asking to come in one afternoon and copy them. I copied them for myself.. and then deleted them. Yeah, I'm a BOFH sometimes, too.
3. One guy had an odd version of Tourette's Syndrome. He would quietly sit there and code all day, and then out of nowhere he'd stop and shout out exactly one word, loudly. It was never the same word, and it rarely made sense. I created an Intranet page to log the words, BTW. (Note that this guy was probably the best Visual Basic programmer I've ever seen.. I don't know exactly what that means)
4. Then, there was the transsexual who defecated in a stairwell...
5. One government cow-orker got his jollies off of destroying random papers in people's files. He'd take one every day and burn it in the bathroom. I don't think anyone ever noticed.
6. I'm sitting at my desk one day, when one of the ladies from the sales department quietly walks over to my desk, stands there for a couple of seconds, and when I turn to her and start to ask "Can I help you?" starts yelling incoherently at me. Now, what's odd about this (hey, I'm in IT and often do "help desk", getting randomly yelled at incoherently is common, but usually they exchange some kind of formalities first) is that it literally happened that way.. she walked over, quietly stood there for about 30 seconds while I finished composing the E-Mail I was working on, and literally started yelling incoherently once it was apparent that she had my attention. Now, when I say yelling, she was literally red-faced, shouting at the top of her lungs, and not saying anything that made sense. I kept asking her (when I could get a word in between her breaths), "What's wrong?" "What do you need from me?", but she kept babbling. Eventually, others started coming over (including the building security guard), and nobody could make any sense of what this person was so upset about. She had to be forcibly removed. Turns out that somebody told her that I was "a witch", and this set her off into some possessed rage. And I'm not kidding about this part: it turns out that there IS such a thing as big young men in clean white coats who can "come and take you away ah hah!" The plus side of that is I got three days of paid leave for having to be "traumatized". I think she's still, to this day, in Langley-Porter Hospital in San Francisco.