We've all known that one coworker who tried to show up as late as possible to work, or who looked for ways to take longer lunches or breaks.
Fortunately, most of us weren't in situations where a coworker was actively breaking the law.
Ready to stir up some drama, Redditor Autistic_chickpea asked:
"Redditors of HR: What are the biggest office scandals or dramas you’ve experienced?"
The Origin of the Stereotype
"Normal scandal. The owner left his wife for his secretary. BUT the wife owned 50% of the company and she made him pay through the nose for it."
"He was a total stereotype! The company had become really prosperous, he started working out, and got a really expensive sports car (Lamborghini, I think). Then he dumped his wife, was publicly involved with the secretary, left his company to be run by other people, and ran off to California, married, and had kids."
"He was kind of a s**thead before that anyway."
- LimeSkye
Report It to Someone Else
"The second or third Human Resources lady got drunk at the holiday party and groped a bunch of people, stuck her tongue in someone’s ear, and fondled a guy’s wife."
"The head of HR swept it all under the rug and told all the witnesses and people she grabbed to 'manage it properly.'"
"I quit pretty soon after that. F**k that place."
- SemiAutomnemonicIful
Quite the Miracle
"The receptionist and the land administrator had an affair and she got pregnant. Her husband had had a vasectomy years earlier. The office affair ended, and the receptionist and her husband maintained that it was a miracle from God."
"It’s a small town and everyone knew about the affair. It was a big scandal. The receptionist and the land administrator were both kicked out of the church they belonged to."
"Publicly, the receptionist and her husband pretended nothing had happened and that this was a wonderful surprise. But everyone knew it was not likely to be the husband’s child."
- Binky103
The Story Doesn't Add Up
"I worked in HR for a small fast food franchise. It somehow managed to be wild all the time but the most drawn out was one of the store managers called out of work because she had carbon monoxide poisoning and was in the hospital."
"Of course, we wished her well and that was that for a while."
"Then she disappeared for a few days. She showed back up and said she was having some personal issues. Yadda yadda. Fine."
"Well, then she called and said she had gotten arrested because she was giving someone a ride and they had gotten pulled over and found meth on the other person. Hm."
"We just had a sneaking suspicion so we googled this woman. And she had been arrested multiple times for drug-related charges, including the time that she had just disappeared. Apparently, they were transporting a f**kton of meth to sell when they got busted the last time."
"Oh yeah, and the time she got carbon monoxide? It was because she was cooking meth."
- PrairieBunny91
It's My Job
"I wasn’t in HR, but I was in management, and you would be surprised at how many people actually think this way. These are the type of people who tend to think they’re setting boundaries with their workplace, which would be a good thing, if that’s what they were doing, but they think this extends to what their boss can do."
"You can’t tell me I’m fired."
"You can’t tell me I need to come in on time."
"You can’t tell me what my schedule is."
"You can’t write me up. The only reason you’re writing me up is because someone ratted me out."
"You can’t tell me what to do, I’m an adult."
"That may sound ridiculous but people really do think like this. They actually think they run the show."
"And this is why you should be wary of workplace advice, too. You have some good advice about how to maintain healthy boundaries at work, but if you’re seeing sh*t like, 'Never work for a company that has a disciplinary policy, you’re a girl boss, not a child, YOU’RE in charge not them,' then you should probably ignore that advice."
- Zestfullyclean87
Just Won't Quit
"Oh dear Lord, I am friends with an HR attorney for a large agency. So so many stories but possibly my favorite is one where they walked in and fired one woman for dereliction of duty soon as she showed up for her shift. Like she was horrible at her job and barely performed, she was probational and it was clearly not working out."
"She and her boss left for lunch and when they return, they discover the employee was back on campus and working as if nothing happened. Even greeted them at the gates."
"They were shocked and asked why she was there when she’s been terminated."
"The employee answered, 'I’m working. You can’t just fire me. This is my job,' and proceeds to turn around, ignore them, and keep working."
"They again repeated she’d been terminated and she needed to go."
"She said, 'I reject that. I don’t accept your termination.'"
"She literally had to almost be dragged out. It was quite entertaining."
- Similar_Candidate789
Collection of Affairs
"Two concurrent office dramas that resulted in a mass firing."
"First, my boss (Male, late-thirties), an ex-middle school teacher, hired and then knocked up an 18-year-old he used to teach. This is after he showed up to work a month before with a black eye, a gift from the baby daddy of the other teenage employee he was sleeping with. He was fired, divorced, and estranged from his own teenage children."
"Meanwhile, his office enemy, another department director, was fired for paying her own employee to be her child surrogate."
- Diabolicaldessert
Waste Management
"Not Human Resources but recruiter here. Found out a potential candidate was fired from his previous job because he threw his boss into a dumpster. The dude was 6'5, so yes, he picked his boss up over his head and threw him into the dumpster. Had to admit I'm envious."
- Chewie8291
Pick a Terrible Option
"We had a team building day and the CEO made it so his team won. The three married people (not to each other) had sex in the hot tub."
"There was also the VP that was having an affair with his secretary so he beat and stabbed his wife to death and threw the evidence in the company trash."
"Or you could go with the guy that was trying to bankrupt a division of the company so his equity company could buy it. When caught he threatened to kill everyone."
- diegojones4
An Expensive Relationship
"Not HR myself but at the organizations I have been with, HR itself has always been the dumpster fire drama group."
"Here is my best one."
"This was 2016. I am a Quality Manager and was hired by a little capital equity group to go in and try to help out struggling businesses that they buy. Great job."
"I'm working with a pump company, a big manufacturing group that makes pumps for city water suppliers, chlorine mixers, big machines to add chemicals and filter sewer lines, public pools... big stuff."
"On paper, the company should have been profitable, but they were losing crazy amounts of money. Sales were strong, and margins were high, but they couldn't make ends meet."
"We go in and start digging. We uncovered a LOT of s**t, borderline fraud, and just incompetence."
"One thing we found was the HR Manager and the Engineering Manager were going to trade shows, conferences, and trainings together every three weeks or so. We thought it was weird to take an HR lady to a trade show or a conference on pump design."
"We did some digging and found expense reports and airline receipts that didn't match up and hotels near conferences that were canceled or didn't exist. Basically, they were taking romantic getaways to have an affair and writing up close to $175k on company expense reports by claiming bogus business trips."
"Things like a romantic week in Maui, a 4-day weekend at the Waldorf-Astoria in NYC, Skiing in Vermont, Cancun, so many trips to Miami we couldn't even keep them straight, Cottage in Park City, Utah, a dude ranch in New Mexico... it was insane. All with fake conferences nearby or conferences that they paid for but never even showed up and signed in."
"And this is the messed up part. As soon as it all came out, HR fired the engineering manager and was like, 'Oh yeah, that was all his idea,' and then kept the HR Manager on for another year or so."
"And this lady is now an HR Director for a major aerospace manufacturing company!" - Angelfire150
Can't Pick Just One
"My mother was in HR for about 35 years. She has some wild ones, including:"
"The guy who didn’t turn up to work for 2 or 3 days, when it was finally flagged for HR they went over to his house, convinced a family member to unlock it for them (a spare key), and found him face down on the floor of his bedroom having had a stroke (the dude survived)."
"Or the air-con engineer who got blown up while doing some work. His workmate was on the roof and put the wrong rod in the wrong hole, causing an explosion. Fortunately, an employee found him while he was literally on fire in the corridor and dragged him to some showers, saving his life."
"The creep who set up spycams in the women’s locker room, caught him because he was on his own video placing the camera in its hiding spot after they found the cameras, and footage was reviewed."
"There are so, so many more stories."
- Hughesybooze
Caught in the Act
"Security footage showed my manager rummaging through a computer he had no reason to be on. IT checked out the computer, and they found he deleted some security footage... so they recovered it."
"He was fired for having sex with one of the employees at work. She was fired, too."
- Nemo68v2
Consequences
"Guy didn’t come to work because his wife was chasing him with a knife and got arrested."
"She was chasing him with a knife because she found out the early morning of work was meeting up with another married coworker and banging in a relaxation room at work."
"It ended with two divorces, a fine, unemployment, and a new lock on the relaxation room that you had to ask HR for the key to use."
"She also ran over his work laptop and phone with the car after he refused to give her the password to check for more deets about the affair. Those couldn’t be repaired. The MacBook had tire tracks and was bent like a banana."
- GlamourousPickle
History Repeating Itself
"Not HR, tech/software company were tipped off by their bank and discovered a financial analyst was embezzling funds (progressively more monthly for 2 years totaling $500k) he was fired and sued. As part of the settlement the company got his fancy BMW, condo, and his girlfriend’s engagement ring."
"Within about three months, he landed a top government job, having lied in his cover letter and interview, claiming he still worked for the software company. His girlfriend posed as a reference via telephone."
"He got promptly fired and charged. He was sentenced to one year in prison and three years probation."
"In the time between being fired by the government and sentencing, he had landed another corporate job (who were aware of both criminal incidents)!"
- McStau
To say that people working in higher-up positions have seen some things would be an understatement.
But even still, the things people try to get away with while on the clock is startling.
The Weirdest Things Human Resources Employees Have Ever Seen On The Job
People who work in the human resources department are tasked with overseeing how efficiently businesses are run.
Their duties range from job recruitment, doing background checks on prospective employees, job performance, and ensuring employers are paying employees the proper amount of vacation pay and sick pay.
Being a link between workers and their superiors, human resources reps have seen their share.
But nothing can prepare you for what anonymous social media users witnessed when Redditor Dankuser2020 asked:
"People who work in Human Resources, what is the weirdest sh*t you have seen?"
The thread began with peculiar comments.
Breaking The Monotony
"Worked in HR for a couple years now, mostly for large firms managing facilities within properties. One of the strangest cases was brought about because a Client asked us to review CCTV footage as he'd driven past the office late at night and noticed the motion sensor lights inside going on and off and was concerned there had been a break in."
"Turned out our night security officer who's primary role is to monitor cameras from the control room was skipping up and down the corridors cause 'he felt too full of energy" and had to get it out of his system somehow."'
"Watching the footage of him skipping featuring the occasional star jump through vacant corridors for 20 minutes at 1am really made my day."
– Wiwig
Safety Precaution
"I no longer work in HR or at this company, but it's my favorite story from my time there."
"Our benefits team made the decision to eliminate reserved parking as lots of employees were frustrated when they walked past dozens of empty spots in the reserved lots every day. This new policy applied to all of the company's locations."
"Of course, the benefits manager received hundreds of complaints in the first few days from people insisting they needed an exception for their own personal spot. The best reason by far was from one person who 'needed a spot close to the door because they were terrified of bobcats.' No other context. We didn't have bobcats near the corporate office so at first we thought they meant construction equipment? Turns out there actually were sightings of bobcats, like the animal, near this person's location."
"Last I heard they were told to arrive earlier to get a closer spot and didn't get an exception."
– Amia262
Stirring The Pot
"I once had a temp job in HR. I was scanning lots of old personnel files, and the one perk of the job was reading old complaints against people. The best one I came across was a mediation caused by one member of staff accusing another of witchcraft."
– thedarlingbuttsofmay
Romantic Manipulator
"I got a call from a woman I'd never spoken to, asking when she could start. She'd received a job offer after interviewing with a manager for a customer service position, she told me, but no one ever contacted her about a start date or pre-employment processes like a background check, and it had been a month."
"After a lengthy investigation, it came out that this manager had fabricated a job opening and offered it to this woman in an attempt to impress her. She quit her job (but, it should be noted, did not respond to the manager's romantic overtures) with the expectation of joining my company. She got a settlement (with an NDA) and the guy who 'hired' her got fired."
"There was also a guy who faked his son's death for some extra PTO."
– drinkthecoffeeblack
Some people were up to no good and were asking for termination.
That's Not Kool-Aid
"One of the dumbest things, an employee that worked night audit at a hotel parked his car at the entrance and would occasional go out there to drink a bottle of vodka in full view of the cameras. He didn't even sit in his car to drink! Just grabbed the bottle out of the car each time and drank in the open. Seriously, he could have put it in a water bottle and drank at the desk and would have not been caught as soon as he was. If at all!"
– tanttrum
The Second Shift
"Got a call from our office in India that staff who supported the night shift were running a brothel from the office. They didn't know they couldn't do that."
"Still fired. They tried to appeal the decision. Did not work."
– gay_flatulent
The Smear Campaigner
"I’m not in HR but my sister-in-law used to be one for a large Canadian tech firm. An executive at the company got very drunk at a conference in Vegas and the company got a call from the hotel saying they’d have to pay for outside contractors. He had rubbed his poop all over the walls of his hotel room and the hotel cleaning staff refused to deal with it."
– WhiteyMcBrown
Relieved Himself Of His Duty
"Call center employee calls HR to complain about their supervisor: 'He’s abusive... he won’t even let me leave my desk.' Supervisor calls HR to complain about employee: 'can you please tell ____ that she’s allowed to leave her desk. Oh my god... she’s sh**ting in her trashcan!' "
"It may sound humorous, but there was significant mental issues at the heart of this."
– JayArlington
It's not an easy job trying to manage everyone's expectations.
Dark History
"Worked for a large trucking company. Every employee would get a present on their birthday (in the mail) and their names on the video board (this weeks birthdays are:)."
"A guy called to ask if his name could not be on the board. Reason : his twin brother murdered his parents and he did not want to be reminded of his birthday."
– _ana_banana__
Mass Exodus
"My dad works in HR. He just told me about a day when they had to layoff about half of the company. It was crazy and there were a whole lot of moving parts that day. Unfortunately, in all the craziness, no one remembered to tell this one new hire that sadly the position he was hired for was no longer affordable. So he came in to the office only to see everyone clearing out their desks and leaving. And then...he got laid off. An hour into his first day."
"He said the guy understood, but it was the most horrible he ever felt for someone in his life."
– Stopman
How Not To Get The Job
"Not HR but have been on teams to interview and have input on possible hires."
"One standard question: 'What would you do if your were having problems with a coworker?' "
"Answer's can include: 'I would try and work it out' or 'I would take it to a manager' etc."
"His answer: 'I'd take him out back and beat the sh*t out of him.' "
"He was surprised when he didn't get the job."
– MeGrendel
While health benefits are the best perk of any job, an added bonus is being privy to the plethora of gossip and other privileged, scandalous information that many people who work behind the scenes get to experience.
We'd love to hear of all the odd happenings and situations you've been witness to as a worker in HR or any position that oversees the operations of a business or organization.
You would not believe the amount of people that poop inappropriately at work.
These stories come from the belly of the beast, where reports of truly bizarre behavior at work are voiced and documented, to become oral tradition on a Reddit thread.
Insane Human Resources issues like these give the sense that because work is the very last place to act inappropriately, people go to great lengths to do so on the sly. And those attempts at subtly make things even stranger.
Strange living arrangements, ceiling tile secrets, and misplaced sexual energy are apparently not uncommon complaints to the HR Department.
Dankuser2020 asked, "People who work in Human Resources, what is the weirdest sh*t you have seen?"
Finger Pointing (No. 2 Version)
"Call center employee calls HR to complain about their supervisor: 'He's abusive... he won't even let me leave my desk.' Supervisor calls HR to complain about employee: 'Can you please tell ____ that she's allowed to leave her desk. Oh my god... she's shi**ing in her trashcan!' "
-- JayArlington
'Unravel"
"Caught a site manager with like 50+ pairs of panties hidden all over his office in Ziploc bags, a multitude of sex toys, and over 100k in cash stuffed in ceiling tiles. Took awhile to unravel all of that." -- kimurasftw
"So what did you do with the $75K?" -- Stunt_the_Runt
"Who would leave their Ziploc bags? Those things are expensive as f*ck." -- Hammer_Jackson
The Perfect Crime
"Guy came in to the interview in sweatpants and a hoodie, and said he didn't need the job because of how much money he was making illegally, but he wanted to have a job so the IRS didn't get suspicious."
"Weirdest part is I don't live in America, I very much doubt the IRS cares about Canadian tax returns."
-- Canuckleball
A Legal Nightmare
"The family of the guy who passed away came to speak to us (it was in a factory environment). To get pension docs etc. We sent them away with a to do list."
"1 hour later reception pinged us saying Mr Xs family was here. Strange. The documents take a few days to get."
"Nope. New family."
"Yup. The guy had 2 different families, who were about to have a fun surprise."
-- meg_w1111
Nick of Time
"My dad works in HR. He just told me about a day when they had to layoff about half of the company. It was crazy and there were a whole lot of moving parts that day."
"Unfortunately, in all the craziness, no one remembered to tell this one new hire that sadly the position he was hired for was no longer affordable."
"So he came in to the office only to see everyone clearing out their desks and leaving. And then...he got laid off. An hour into his first day."
-- Stopman
Glorious Lunch Breaks
"Two people had cut a hole in the wall between their offices. They pushed their filing cabinets to hide the hole on both sides. Cleaning staff was asked to deep clean the offices one day and they found the hole."
"Both parties involved were married, not to each other. They were having sex through the wall."
Just Trying to Get Ahead
"The maintenance guy had been living up above the ceiling of the building. He had built a little cubby living area with electricity and a small fridge and everything." -- StaceysDad
"I respect that hustle so hard."
"Imagine how far ahead you could get in life if you didn't have to pay rent/utilities for just 1 year. I could afford a reasonable down payment on a house and stop this rent hell feedback loop." -- Neat_On_The_Rocks
What Luck!
"I used to work at a staffing agency that placed people at manufacturing positions. Everyone had to be drug tested at the office as part of the orientation."
"One guy failed his drug test at the lab. He came back to the office claiming that it wasn't his fault."
"He explained that he he was riding in a car and he stuck his head of the the window. Then, when the car passed under a bridge, someone threw a bunch of cocaine off the bridge, it hit him in the face, and he accidentally inhaled it."
A Digital Classroom of Sorts, I Suppose
"One of the candidates I was interviewing via Skype had a porn site up and open during a shared screen trial (to see how well he can use the digital classroom)."
"I had to remind him I can see his screen he goes, 'Oh yeah, sorry.' Next, instead of just closing it from the corner of his partially hidden window, he clicks open the window in full view and THEN closes it."
"That was nice."
-- SoBreezy74
Gotta Keep it Fresh
"Guy that carried a cooler every day was wiping sh!t on random walls and desks. It was his sh*t in his cooler. We thought it was his lunch. He got caught when he wiped it on the front desk directly in sight of the camera."
"Another guy had a colostomy bag that he refused to empty when it got full. You would find these trails of liquid poo randomly and we had to throw out four chairs that he ruined. He was fired quickly and tried to claim discrimination because he was a veteran."
-- cincyfan04
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.
Human Resources is definitely not the most fun department to work in, but the intra-office conflicts do result in some great stories.
Reddit user u/sgy00003 asked:
"HR employees of reddit; what was the most ridiculous/hilarious complain you ever received?"