I won’t say this is the craziest thing that ever happened, just the first thing I thought of. I once had a short-term contract job at a place that didn’t have a sink in the office so to make coffee you had to get water from a drinking fountain in the hallway and dump it out/wash it in a bathroom sink–which was already gross enough. Also, whoever took the last cup was supposed to make the next pot–but the boss would never make a new pot, just wait until someone else did.

One day after I’d been there a couple months, one of the employees went around telling everyone “Stop drinking the coffee unless you want to drink <boss>'s backwash!” She’d seen the boss walk up and grab the coffee pot, dump his leftover cold coffee out of his coffee cup into the pot, pour himself a new cup and put the pot back. He was too lazy to go dump his cup out in the sink or fountain.

And that was the end of making coffee in that office. People would buy it elsewhere or bring a thermos.

Oh! And another thing that happened when I worked there was someone killed themselves by jumping off the roof. Funny how I remembered the coffee thing first.

Went to the bathroom for 3 minutes, came back and my co-worker had been arrested for gooning joggers that morning public masturbation.

EDIT: This guy would park his car, start jerking off, then ask women for directions. That morning someone recognized him, and he freaked out and drove away. He got sober after that and turned things around.

The company I used to work at sometimes rented out their conference room to other companies for large conferences.

One day some people rent the room, and start bringing in some suitcases. Thinking they might have some involved presentation, nobody asked questions. A few more people came and went, until suddenly the police raids the place.

Turns out those people robbed a museum a few weeks earlier and tried to sell the stolen historical art pieces in that conference room.

Christmas party, of course. We had an Indian dude join the company. Really nice lad that I got on great with.

There’s a company meal kicking off at 7pm not far from where we work so the entire office (about 40 odd people) decide we’ll get a few scoops in beforehand.

Well this lad was quite small and very obviously not used to drink. He was fairly toasted before we even got to the restaurant. He kept drinking then became belligerent.

Proceeded to puke all over the place half way through the meal. He went out to get some fresh air and the CEO went out to have a chat with him and suggested he head home.

Promptly told the CEO to fuck off and leave him alone.

My bestie was his boss and at that point basically wrestled him into a taxi. The CEO took it well in fairness. It was totally out of character so he kept his job (and his visa which was dependent on the job).

An employee pissed into a co-workers potted plant and the coffee machine’s water tank, right in front of a security camera.

First day on a job and a coworker took a pistol out of his briefcase/bag and began cleaning it/wiping it down. It was a small office of 5ish people. I was just basically there to help play a tech support role for some outdated software they were running. My coworker was an older sales rep for the company and he was responsible for hiring me (don’t ask me why). Anyways, first official day I was working he brandished his pistol. I don’t know why. He looked a bit like Kelsey Grammer which bummed me out because I love Frasier. (Shout-out to /c/Frasier ) He had other hangups and ultimately quit a few weeks later.

When he pulled that gun, time slowed down. With all of these mass shootings I just didn’t know what to expect. My mind raced but my body froze. I wish I could say I said something but I didn’t. I kept my mouth shut and pretended like nothing was happening.

People can be so unhinged. That was almost 10 years ago now.

I’m a manager at a small laid back warehouse. It’s not uncommon for coworkers to all go out as a group for drinks from time to time.

A subordinate and I became genuine friends at one of these outings and hung out for a couple of months. They caught feelings, I didn’t reciprocate and backed away from social time with them outside of work. Fast forward a few months and they tried to kill themselves in the parking lot one day after I said I didn’t want to hang out with them anymore because of our work dynamic.

I don’t go to work hangs off the property anymore.

The computer that controlled all the doors refused to open any of them, including the door to the room in which it was physically located.

It wasn’t quite HAL 9000 because doors could still be opened from the inside, but control over the computer was regained only with the help of a locksmith.

Boss was arrested for ordering expensive toner cartridges for “store use” and reselling them. He had racked up around 80k and a felony charge.

Also, the absolute horrors that occurred in another job’s bathroom were biblical.

I was working part time as a software developer while a grad student and was assigned under a full time employee. We were the only ones working on that project. I came back after the Christmas break to be informed I was the new project lead because the full time employee i was working under got fired after he sexually assaulted one of the female employees after getting drunk at the company Christmas party.

Before my time, but they tell tales of the “Phantom Shitter”. Someone had… issues, physical and/or mental, and would leave streaks of waste both going to and from the bathroom. Very liquid waste. Sometimes stepped in. “Phantom” because initially no one knew who was doing it. They just found the results. Eventually he was found out, sent home for a bit, and then fired when it happened again after he came back.

Since I worked there: Guy came in for an interview. I don’t know if he was already having a bad day or what, but he got upset that his first interviewer wasn’t there to greet him at the front door. It escalated, rapidly, leading to threats of violence, an arrest, and a couple of cops searching his car.

I saw a dude lose a hand because they ignored everything about passing through the water tight doors when they were moving.

My place of work used to have a fairly large “data entry” department until they… did… something to make that job kindof unnecessary. They laid off pretty much all of that department. And I’m told the boss who was over them before they were laid off returned to his office to find a sizeable human shit directly atop his desk.

Another story. My own boss (actually my boss’s boss) was a massive asshole. Committed the team to a completely unreasonable deadline in conversations with the C-level folks above him, and then threw temper tantrums when the deadline wasn’t hit. He turned the daily standup into a 7:30am (in-person) daily demo to prove we were making progress and weren’t… I dunno… slacking off or whatever. Many a temper tantrum was had in those demos as well.

I quit and made no secret of why. After I left, I heard through the grapevine that in a meeting with the CTO, the asshole boss accused the CTO of being incompetent and said that he was gunning for the CTO’s job. The CTO, sensibly, told the asshole boss to do not pass go, do not collect $200, security will escort you out of the building and we’ll ship you your personal effects from your office.

And then I quit the place I’d gone to and went back to where the asshole boss had been and I’m still working there. Definitely would not have considered coming back if he was still there.

Ok. One more story about the other place. They switched from one chat provider to another. But they never actually shut down the one they were migrating away from. Several folks never left the old chat. When it was discovered that on the old chat service, said folks were trading really really inappropriate holocaust jokes, the whole office got a talking to in very vague terms. It wasn’t until like a month later that someone explained to me what had precipitated that.

Had a guy bring in a sandwich baggie full of hair, put it in front of me and asked “Do those look like crabs to you?”

Nope’d the fuck out of that situation.

we hijacked a conference room on a shared floor for a week and built a three-phase high-voltage line in there by hunting around the building for which sockets were on which phase, then plugging them into industrial transformers.