Human Resources employees deal with a lot of bullsh*t. Between interviewing newcomers, upholding employee policies, and doing all of that paperwork, HR has it tough. Sometimes can be exceptionally bad, and these guys on Reddit experience it firsthand.
u/Kristoff___ asked:
Human resources employees. What are your best "HR nightmare" stories?
That's one way to avoid work.
I am on the HR team that supports a wide variety of US cities for our company, including our colorful Florida locations. This is the best story I heard.
We had some woman trying to avoid doing work by sitting out in her car in the parking lot. While she was hiding out there, she needed to use the restroom. Well, instead of going back inside (or doing literally anything else) she decides to pee out her car window. Even though I am also a woman, I was impressed and disgusted by the physics behind this feat. She had stuck her bare ass outside the window and just went for it. Unbeknownst to her, her male co-worker had arrived at work late due to an appointment. He drove past to find a parking spot as this was happening, and got full view. He then reported the incident to us.
One of our HR people had to investigate this, and sure enough, parking lot cameras could corroborate his story. Our HR person confronted the woman. Her response: "Well how did he know it was me?? It could have been anyone." We thought, ok fair enough. The cameras aren't CSI grade zoom, so we only saw the ass part. It was harder to completely identify the face. So we went back to the male peer and asked how he knew it was her. His response? "Oh it was definitely her. The face tattoos are pretty recognizable."
We definitely don't get paid enough for this.
....seriously?
GiphyI had one employee submit a form to increase her own salary, she also forged her manager's signature.
Like, for real?
You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.
Oops.
My friend was doing hiring for a staffing agency during college. A guy who we went to high school came in looking for a job. He told the candidate that he had two jobs. One paid 10 an hour and the other paid 11. The only thing was that the 11 an hour job requires a drug test. And if you fail the drug test you can't get either.
He said that he wanted the 11 an hour job. Now we knew him well enough to know that he liked smoking. So my friend reiterated the drug test fail rule. Dude said he was good on Friday to take the test Monday.
Come Monday he took the drug test. Pissed hot for weed, cocaine, amphetamines, and some other sh*t that gets out of your system in ~48hrs.
Big yikes.
Not an HR employee, but a manager who was handed an HR nightmare to help 'resolve'. Someone will get a kick out of this.
Background: I was working as a Teller Manager in a small regional bank. My branch had six small colleges within a 30 minute drive. The company liked to hire college students to work as tellers, because they usually didn't want to work full time (no benefits, therefore cheaper to employ), and with their somewhat random availability, it was easy to schedule even the unpopular shifts. All of the tellers in my branch are college students.
I get a call from the regional HR Manager, he is transferring a teller to my location from another branch (across town) who has been nothing but a headache. I am to document every single thing that this teller does wrong, no matter how minor the infraction. Apparently she had ticked off all of her coworkers there by filing HR complaints against all of them. I'll call her TT (Transferred Teller) from here on.
I was able to get more detail out of one her managers. TT was a student at one of the local colleges, but her only hobbies were riding her horse and going to her church. The only things she ever wanted to talk about were her horse, her beliefs, and trying to convert coworkers to her religion. Talk about anything else and she'd find a way to connect the topic to violating her beliefs. Criticize her, or talk about something that she wouldn't do, and she'd file a harassment complaint.
TT was transferred to my branch., and on her first day, she went off on another teller for talking about a date said teller's boyfriend had taken her on.
The next day, she filed her first HR complaint, sexual harassment, against one of my staff for talking about using a certain famous dating app. Speaking to TT while taking the complaint, discovered she's very socially conservative.
The employee handbook said, in summary, on the topic of sexual harassment, what counts depended on what offended the most easily offended person present, so watch your mouth and where you talked. I pulled each teller into a one-on-one meeting, walked them through the sections of the handbook on harassment, and warned them to be careful of what they discussed where. I did not call out TT, but everyone guessed who we were talking about. Word about her had made it's way around the grapevine.
Over the course of the next couple weeks she filed a new complaint roughly every other day. All of the complaints were for coworkers talking about, or doing, normal things for 18 - 22 year-olds, such as: a coworker went to a party and had a one-night stand; saw a coworker hug her boyfriend when he brought her lunch; a coworker wore a blouse that showed a bit of cleavage; a coworker refused to get up early on Sunday to come to church with her.
Morale was low, everyone is stressed coming in every day, most of the staff are refusing to talk to TT. I'm grumbling to HR Manager, who just answers everything with 'document her infractions'. So I'm writing up every minor mistake, categorizing them, and for each category I think I have enough, composing a formal write-up and submitting it to HR for approval. I wish I could remember how many I wrote.
Was sure we'd be stuck with TT for months before I had enough Tardies or Drawer Errors for HR to be willing to fire her. But after about a month, she made the error we needed. There's a religious group that's well known in our state, and the group's HQ is in our city. The group's religious leader occasionally would come into my branch, for some reason he liked dropping off deposits and transfers himself. It didn't take much to get him preaching on a topic. Everyone would just smile and nod along while finishing his transaction. But, TT couldn't do that. Apparently her church takes some issues with what his church teaches.
He came in to run a transaction. She called him next out of line. While running his transaction, she recognized the name of the church. They started talking, then arguing, then she was yelling at him. Unfortunately, I was in the back, so I missed this. Fortunately, I was in the bank, so it went on long enough that her customer took offense. She was dragged into the back to separate them. He filed a complaint, which I wrote up as an official customer complaint. Those get reviewed by a VP and the Operations Director, but I also CC'd HR Manager. Religious harassment of a commercial customer with a few million on deposit was sufficient for HR to terminate her the next day.
NOPE.
GiphyThere was a dude in our other facility that was going around and wiping their a** and shoving the poop back up into the toilet paper dispenser so that when the next person goes to reach...
It's a trap!
Once-upon-a-time I was an HR Manager. This is my worst story:
Once I had a dude who looked great on paper for a mid-level role at the large non-profit I worked for (we were a houselessness & addiction rehab shelter). Easily the type of resume for our operations dept which made us all think "oooh this guy looks good; he could be management material someday with these type of credentials." I phone interviewed him and thought "oh yeah, the team's gonna love him." We set up an in-person interview.
I wasn't able to sit in on the in-person interview, so the director of that dept and his best / longest-standing employee did it. Apparently when the guy first showed up and was asked if he'd like anything to drink, he asked for "a bourbon on the rocks...kidding!" and everything went downhill from there.
According to the dept director and the other employee, the interview went IMMEDIATELY TERRIBLE and the guy kept floating things like "...but I bet you're not going to hire me because of _____." They felt like every answer from the guy and every question was meant to be some sort of verbal trap he was laying, so they cut it pretty short.
Later, the guy called me back directly (he had my office # because I had used it to phone interview him) and left a VM. He started by saying essentially "thank you for the opportunity, but I really didn't appreciate how you guys clearly didn't want to hire me because I'm a male / I'm too old / I'm a father / I have a chronic medical issue / I was an alcoholic 10+ years ago / I was once homeless / etc etc." All of these are verbal traps, and I am 100% sure he was trying to trap us so he could disparage the organization and sue us. I can say DEFINITIVELY that none of these were true, we weren't thinking of any of these things, and we were damn-near ready to hire him before the interview had he done as well as he did on paper and in the phone interview. The only reason we didn't hire him was because he was clearly a malicious psychopath, and it was pretty clear he wanted the organization's money but had no intention of doing any real work (besides ~ an hour of interviewing) to get it.
I had to bring the issue up with our CEO and CFO, and we drafted a very clear statement in return, which I left by voicemail and email. "Dear Mr. ____, thank you for the opportunity to interview you. In response to your prior communication, we feel it very important to clarify that we have not yet decided on a final candidate for this role, and as we discussed in both your phone interview and your in-person interview, the only consideration we will make when deciding on a final candidate is whether one's professional qualifications match the needs of this role. Thank you for your time. We will keep you informed on our final decision. Sincerely..."
F--- that guy.
No demonstration needed.
Came in to work early for a morning shift (work in an industrial lab). Heard noises from the back corner of the office portion of the building but can't make out what they are because of distortion.
Head that way to see what was going on as I was the only one there (so I thought) at 3 am. See my lab manager f*cking the district manager (her boss) while the HR Rep for the district is sitting there...enjoying the view.
I NOPED and went to the lab and tried to forget what happened.
To be fair, relationships between direct reporters needs to be brought to HR's attention. I just didn't realize a demonstration was also required.
That's a lot of bullsh*t.
Giphy- I had a bookkeeper that paid himself two checks every week. We did not catch it for a year.
- Another bookkeeper quit and files for unemployment. He then claimed a claim with EEOC that he had a disability and we failed to make accommodations for him. The disability was alcoholism, and the accommodations were leaving early to attend AA meetings. Seriously, we had to hire a lawyer to fight that.
- A guy I hired hurt himself on the first hour of the first day of work, he claimed he fell and hit his head on the wall. He was out for weeks on workman's comp for the concussion. Then when he came back on light duty, he could only do desk work but managed to fall again in the bathroom and hit his head again. It took me 9-months to get rid of him. It turns out this was not his first rodeo, when I called his former employer the lady I spoke to made an offhand comment about workplace accidents and head injuries and the importance of cameras in the workplace
- While doing a remodel of a museum, one of my employees helped himself to a gun that was on display. It was very ugly and embarrassing for everyone. My company was kicked off the job and banned from ever working for them again. I fired the guy and he filed a discrimination claim with EEOC because I did not fire the whole crew, just him. I got more..
That's bad management.
I had a friend working a GM when HR thought it was a good idea to test everyone on the skill set needed for their department regardless of how long they were in their position. Long careers, 15, 20, 25 years were ruined because even though they worked there for a long time with a long string of great performance reviews, they didn't pass the test that measured what HR thought was required for the department.
Say your a materials expert working in a design department. You may know barely enough in the CAD system to draw a cylinder. On the other hand, given a cylinder, you can whip out all the properties that cylinder would have if it were made from aluminum, cold rolled steel, fiber glass etc. You'd be out of your job because HR said you had to have a certain level of CAD expertise even if it wasn't relevant to your role in the design process.
That's just awful.
My friend who worked in HR told me about her old job where the boss had drilled a hole from his office through to the ladies changing rooms. They found out because someone saw the light through the hole as he took the cover off for a peek.
He denied everything and they had to take a DNA sample from the carpet under the hole which confirmed it was him.
Experiencing death is a fascinating and frightening idea.
Who doesn't want to know what is waiting for us on the other side?
But so many of us want to know and then come back and live a little longer.
It would be so great to be sure there is something else.
But the whole dying part is not that great, so we'll have to rely on other people's accounts.
Redditor AlaskaStiletto wanted to hear from everyone who has returned to life, so they asked:
"Redditors who have 'died' and come back to life, what did you see?"
Sensations
Happy Good Vibes GIF by Major League SoccerGiphy"My dad's heart stopped when he had a heart attack and he had to be brought back to life. He kept the paper copy of the heart monitor which shows he flatlined. He said he felt an overwhelming sensation of peace, like nothing he had felt before."
PeachesnPain
Recovery
"I had surgical complications in 2010 that caused a great deal of blood loss. As a result, I had extremely low blood pressure and could barely stay awake. I remember feeling like I was surrounded by loved ones who had passed. They were in a circle around me and I knew they were there to guide me onwards. I told them I was not ready to go because my kids needed me and I came back."
"My nurse later said she was afraid she’d find me dead every time she came into the room."
"It took months, and blood transfusions, but I recovered."
good_golly99
Take Me Back
"Overwhelming peace and happiness. A bright airy and floating feeling. I live a very stressful life. Imagine finding out the person you have had a crush on reveals they have the same feelings for you and then you win the lotto later that day - that was the feeling I had."
"I never feared death afterward and am relieved when I hear of people dying after suffering from an illness."
rayrayrayray
Free
The Light Minnie GIF by (G)I-DLEGiphy"I had a heart surgery with near-death experience, for me at least (well the possibility that those effects are caused by morphine is also there) I just saw black and nothing else but it was warm and I had such inner peace, its weird as I sometimes still think about it and wish this feeling of being so light and free again."
TooReDTooHigh
This is why I hate surgery.
You just never know.
Shocked
Giphy"More of a near-death experience. I was electrocuted. I felt like I was in a deep hole looking straight up in the sky. My life flashed before me. Felt sad for my family, but I had a deep sense of peace."
Admirable_Buyer6528
The SOB
"Nursing in the ICU, we’ve had people try to die on us many times during the years, some successfully. One guy stood out to me. His heart stopped. We called a code, are working on him, and suddenly he comes to. We hadn’t vented him yet, so he was able to talk, and he started screaming, 'Don’t let them take me, don’t let them take me, they are coming,' he was scared and yelling."
"Then he yelled a little more, as we tried to calm him down, he screamed, 'No, No,' and gestured towards the end of the bed, and died again. We didn’t get him back. It was seriously creepy. We called his son to tell him the news, and the son said basically, 'Good, he was an SOB.'”
1-cupcake-at-a-time
Colors
"My sister died and said it was extremely peaceful. She said it was very loud like a train station and lots of talking and she was stuck in this area that was like a curtain with lots of beautiful colors (colors that you don’t see in real life according to her) a man told her 'He was sorry, but she had to go back as it wasn’t her time.'"
Hannah_LL7
"I had a really similar experience except I was in an endless garden with flowers that were colors I had never seen before. It was quiet and peaceful and a woman in a dress looked at me, shook her head, and just said 'Not yet.' As I was coming back, it was extremely loud, like everyone in the world was trying to talk all at once. It was all very disorienting but it changed my perspective on life!"
huntokarrr
The Fog
"I was in a gray fog with a girl who looked a lot like a young version of my grandmother (who was still alive) but dressed like a pioneer in the 1800s she didn't say anything but kept pulling me towards an opening in the wall. I kept refusing to go because I was so tired."
"I finally got tired of her nagging and went and that's when I came to. I had bled out during a c-section and my heart could not beat without blood. They had to deliver the baby and sew up the bleeders. refill me with blood before they could restart my heart so, like, at least 12 minutes gone."
Fluffy-Hotel-5184
Through the Walls
"My spouse was dead for a couple of minutes one miserable night. She maintains that she saw nothing, but only heard people talking about her like through a wall. The only thing she remembers for absolute certain was begging an ER nurse that she didn't want to die."
"She's quite alive and well today."
Hot-Refrigerator6583
Well let's all be happy to be alive.
It seems to be all we have.
Trying to lose weight is a struggle understood by many people regardless of size.
The goal of reaching a healthy weight may seem unattainable, but with diet and exercise, it can pay off through persistence and discipline.
Seeing the pounds gradually drop off can also be a great motivator and incentivize people to stay the course.
Those who've achieved their respective weight goals shared their experiences when Redditor apprenti8455 asked:
"People who lost a lot of weight, what surprises you the most now?"
Redditors didn't see these coming.
Shiver Me Timbers
"I’m always cold now!"
– Telrom_1
"I had a coworker lose over 130 pounds five or six years ago. I’ve never seen him without a jacket on since."
– r7ndom
"140 lbs lost here starting just before COVID, I feel like that little old lady that's always cold, damn this top comment was on point lmao."
– mr_remy
Drawing Concern
"I lost 100 pounds over a year and a half but since I’m old(70’s) it seems few people comment on it because (I think) they think I’m wasting away from some terminal illness."
– dee-fondy
"Congrats on the weight loss! It’s honestly a real accomplishment 🙂"
"Working in oncology, I can never comment on someone’s weight loss unless I specifically know it was on purpose, regardless of their age. I think it kind of ruffles feathers at times, but like I don’t want to congratulate someone for having cancer or something. It’s a weird place to be in."
– LizardofDeath
Unleashing Insults
"I remember when I lost the first big chunk of weight (around 50 lbs) it was like it gave some people license to talk sh*t about the 'old' me. Old coworkers, friends, made a lot of not just negative, but harsh comments about what I used to look like. One person I met after the big loss saw a picture of me prior and said, 'Wow, we wouldn’t even be friends!'”
"It wasn’t extremely common, but I was a little alarmed by some of the attention. My weight has been up and down since then, but every time I gain a little it gets me a little down thinking about those things people said."
– alanamablamaspama
Not Everything Goes After Losing Weight
"The loose skin is a bit unexpected."
– KeltarCentauri
"I haven’t experienced it myself, but surgery to remove skin takes a long time to recover. Longer than bariatric surgery and usually isn’t covered by insurance unless you have both."
– KatMagic1977
"It definitely does take a long time to recover. My Dad dropped a little over 200 pounds a few years back and decided to go through with skin removal surgery to deal with the excess. His procedure was extensive, as in he had skin taken from just about every part of his body excluding his head, and he went through hell for weeks in recovery, and he was bedridden for a lot of it."
– Jaew96
These Redditors shared their pleasantly surprising experiences.
Shopping
"I can buy clothes in any store I want."
– WaySavvyD
"When I lost weight I was dying to go find cute, smaller clothes and I really struggled. As someone who had always been restricted to one or two stores that catered to plus-sized clothing, a full mall of shops with items in my size was daunting. Too many options and not enough knowledge of brands that were good vs cheap. I usually went home pretty frustrated."
– ganache98012
No More Symptoms
"Lost about 80 pounds in the past year and a half, biggest thing that I’ve noticed that I haven’t seen mentioned on here yet is my acid reflux and heartburn are basically gone. I used to be popping tums every couple hours and now they just sit in the medicine cabinet collecting dust."
– colleennicole93
Expanding Capabilities
"I'm all for not judging people by their appearance and I recognise that there are unhealthy, unachievable beauty standards, but one thing that is undeniable is that I can just do stuff now. Just stamina and flexibility alone are worth it, appearance is tertiary at best."
– Ramblonius
People Change Their Tune
"How much nicer people are to you."
"My feet weren't 'wide' they were 'fat.'"
– LiZZygsu
"Have to agree. Lost 220 lbs, people make eye contact and hold open doors and stuff"
"And on the foot thing, I also lost a full shoe size numerically and also wear regular width now 😅"
– awholedamngarden
It's gonna take some getting used to.
Bones Everywhere
"Having bones. Collarbones, wrist bones, knee bones, hip bones, ribs. I have so many bones sticking out everywhere and it’s weird as hell."
– Princess-Pancake-97
"I noticed the shadow of my ribs the other day and it threw me, there’s a whole skeleton in here."
– bekastrange
Knee Pillow
"Right?! And they’re so … pointy! Now I get why people sleep with pillows between their legs - the knee bones laying on top of each other (side sleeper here) is weird and jarring."
– snic2030
"I lost only 40 pounds within the last year or so. I’m struggling to relate to most of these comments as I feel like I just 'slimmed down' rather than dropped a ton. But wow, the pillow between the knees at night. YES! I can relate to this. I think a lot of my weight was in my thighs. I never needed to do this up until recently."
– Strongbad23
More Mobility
"I’ve lost 100 lbs since 2020. It’s a collection of little things that surprise me. For at least 10 years I couldn’t put on socks, or tie my shoes. I couldn’t bend over and pick something up. I couldn’t climb a ladder to fix something. Simple things like that I can do now that fascinate me."
"Edit: Some additional little things are sitting in a chair with arms, sitting in a booth in a restaurant, being able to shop in a normal store AND not needing to buy the biggest size there, being able to easily wipe my butt, and looking down and being able to see my penis."
– dma1965
People making significant changes, whether for mental or physical health, can surely find a newfound perspective on life.
But they can also discover different issues they never saw coming.
That being said, overcoming any challenge in life is laudable, especially if it leads to gaining confidence and ditching insecurities.