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

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.

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.

A patient escaped his police escort through a crawlspace above the showers. The whole building went on lockdown (with loudspeaker announcements about not interacting with any naked men you come across) before they eventually found him a mile away, still starkers.

1. Open up new area for increased storage.

2. Bear.

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

Worked at an absolutely soul-crushing gig after a new micro-manager took over and the next gig was slow coming. The micro-manager didn’t like one smart but blunt underling correcting him so he took away the OT and standby the underling had depended on - and us; the underling was smart as fuck - and financially ruined the underling by timing it right after a new car and house purchase based on that 10 year financial history.

Underling attempted suicide-by-hanging in front of our main dev area.

Company had counsellors for a whole day, and the micro-manager immediately focused on how unstable someone must be to commit to suicide instead of on how awful a workplace it must be.

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.

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.

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).

I used to do dispatching for night-shift security for a large computer-related company in a western state in the U.S. (sorry for vagueness).

One foggy night/early morning as we were nearing the end of our shift, one of the patrol guys calls in from his vehicle and says he found a dead cow on one of the roads that ran adjacent to company property. Our building was surrounded by fields that sometimes had cattle on them, so we figured one must have gotten loose somehow and got hit by a car, probably because it was so foggy and hard to see. The officer was on his way back to dispatch anyway, but 3 minutes later, as he’s on his way back and on another road (the company site was several acres), he calls in again to say there are MANY LIVE cattle all over the road and running into one of the parking lots in front of the main building. Turns out they all busted a fence and escaped, and were now freely running around the campus. We have no idea who they belong to, so we call the head of security (who was on his way in as by now it was like 6am), then call the cops to see if they can tell us who owns the land the cattle escaped from.

Meanwhile, other people who work in the building are arriving for the day, and they are calling in to dispatch saying they cannot leave their cars because they’re surrounded by cattle. The herd (we later learned it was about 100 head) split into several groups, and started blocking the entrances to the building, and people were just afraid to get out of their cars with them roaming around. The fog made everything worse because you couldn’t see very far across the lot before you were suddenly up against a herd of spooked cattle.

Eventually we got ahold of the owners, and they had to come out to the campus with horses and literally round the cattle up with lassos and herd them back into the fields. The cops came to redirect traffic on the highway to avoid the worksite entirely while our patrol assisted with the Jeeps. It was utterly ridiculous. Thankfully the only casualty was the 1 dead cow.

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.

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.

A coworker that got pissed when things didn’t work and threw them across the shop floor was getting fired. He was getting fired mostly because the owner of the company–hereafter referred to as Asshole Boss–was a dick, and the coworker scared him. (Note that the coworker was never violent towards people. Just machines.) Anyway, the Asshole Boss got a bunch of cops there on the day that he was gonna fire him, but the employee heard what was going to happen and just… Didn’t show up.

This is the same Asshole Boss that fired me maybe a year, year and a half later. He fired me because I had a ‘bad attitude’ because my partner of ten years had said that they wanted a divorce two days earlier. I got driven straight to the hospital and checked in after telling my supervisor that I was going home to commit suicide. Yeah, the suicide part didn’t work out after all. (The divorce was ugly; they tried to bankrupt me and saddle me with all of their debt.)

…But it all ended well. Asshole Boss fired the management team that was making the whole business work in a fit of pique; the management team got some funds together and started a company that was in direct competition with Asshole Boss. I ended up being their first hire. Asshole Boss ran his business into the ground in less than a year and a half, and the company the management team started is growing and expanding a decade later.

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.