Terrible coworkers aren’t anything new, and when you’re an HR professional, it’s your duty to keep the peace. However, sometimes it doesn’t always work—just be thankful the following accounts don’t come from your office!
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Protecting.co.uk—a national health and safety law consultancy in Great Britain—reached out to bosses and employees all over the country and asked them to talk about nightmare employees they’ve encountered. Here are a few of the more horrifying examples they’ve come across!
- One guy breaks the toilet at least once per week. We’ve no idea how he did it, but he’d come walking out of the lav clutching a smashed toilet seat. He’s costing us a fortune, and it’s not funny anymore.
- We work in a biggish office, and we like to think we’re a happy team. But everything came tumbling down because of one person who wouldn’t stop stealing from the fridge. HR literally took months to deal with it, and by then we were virtually at war. Terrible days, we lost some great people who quit in disgust.
- The interview should have been a clue because he asked us how many breaks he was allowed every day. We didn’t realize he was expecting 3 hours on the toilet ringing his bookie every day. He’s phoning in his bets in his own time now.
- Every now and again we still catch a whiff of her even though she got the boot months ago. We didn’t call her BO [body odor] Billie for nothing, you know. You could smell her coming from the other end of the warehouse. (Editor’s note: This type of conduct could be considered discriminatory, especially if body odor is a result of a disability. It would be wise to not follow this company’s lead!)
- We don’t mind our employees having another job. What I did object to was him dropping tools and running off to do his taxi job on my company time. The final straw was when he crashed his BMW into one of our delivery vans in the car park. Gross misconduct, but we should have sacked him months before.
- Let me tell you about Fighty Dave. He liked fighting, and most of the time with his own workmates. He only lasted 2 weeks with us, and that was about 2 weeks too long. It was like Fight Club round here—nobody’s ever forgotten Fighty Dave.
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