People who work in human resources see some crazy sh*t. For one, their job requires regular interactions with humans—a species of animal known for bizarre, erratic, shady and insane behavior. And humans are not necessarily at our best in a work environment, which is why we need HR people to make sure we do our jobs, abide by the rules, and don't put ourselves or our co-workers or our company at risk. Honestly working at a zoo is probably less challenging than working in HR.
Someone on Reddit asked people who work in Human Resources: "what is the weirdest sh*t you've seen?" These 22 brave HR employees shared their weirdest, most insane stories of human behavior they've witnessed or had to deal with at work:
1.) From thedarlingbuttsofmay:
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.
2.) From StaceysDad:
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.
Edit: For years.
3.) From dailysunshineKO:
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. If the pee cup came back as “inconclusive”, we’d send the potential hire to a medical lab. They would take another drug test and the lab could determine if the person was on a prescription or using illegal drugs (and therefore, not eligible for hire).
So 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.
4.) From TenDollarTicket:
Years ago I worked HR for a retail store. A manager would always clock out on time however the alarm wouldn't be set until about 30-45 min after he clocked out. Since we had a lot of trouble with internal theft we assumed he was stealing. Loss prevention approved the installation of cameras across all stores but we were told not to talk about it to see if we could catch any internal theft. The way the ceiling was set up,the cameras weren't too obvious but if you knew what to look for it was quite noticeable. Anyway turned out this dude was banging a co worker who was 16 (he was 25 expecting his first child with his wife). I didn't see the footage but our regional manager of loss prevention did and had to turn it over the the police. The real kicker is the girls dad was a captain on said police force.
5.) From shepanator:
I used to work in HR at a large corporation.
There was a big HR back-office team doing a lot of processing and data entry including employee's bank info for their salary. It just so happened that on the same day two employees with the same name started, and a huge clusterfuck ensued.
First the banking information was entered for the wrong person, one of them realised and had it corrected, but the other wasn't fixed so both salaries went to one person
The unpaid guy started refusing to come to work, but payroll said that the payment cleared and the account was in his name, so he was terminated for refusing to come to work.
He kept calling and the HR support team kept misidentifying him as the other guy who was still working for us, so when they raised a ticket to get his bank information changed they changed the info of the wrong guy, so now the guy who doesn't work for us is getting paid the salary of a guy who does.
When this was finally worked out the first guy was given his job back, but on his first day back security misidentified him and issued him a badge of the other employee, so now he was clocking hours for the other guy and not getting paid again because he never clocked in for himself.
It took about 3 months for all this to be worked out. Moral of the story is use a fucking email address to identify people
6.) From Blueiguana1976:
I was a recruiter, and you would be shocked to see what some people actually have as their personal email. Most people have come around to using just their name, but then every once in a while you'll have to verify that "brownglitter69" is in fact how they would like to be contacted.
7.) From Vandelay222:
An IT guy who worked the overnight shift (because he was doing support for our Asia/Europe regions) got written up for improper use of company systems. He had dozens of not hundreds of Google image searches related to foot fetish stuff. Like insert celebrity here feet along with other random stuff like “cute toes”, etc
Like dude...YOU’RE IN IT. You KNOW this stuff is tracked and that your boss could easily monitor it.
8.) From Garimasaurus:
One of my relatives worked in tech support for a really high-profile company in Silicon Valley during the height of the dot com boom. Some guy who desperately wanted to work there was emailing his resume to HR one thousand times every day. Several times a day, the number of emails would get too overwhelming. So the people in HR would just select everything in the inbox and delete all of it, whether it was from the applicant or not. My relative had to show them how to filter emails from the applicant.
9.) From smokefrog2:
I work HR for a call center. Entire company has around 500 employees, maybe 250 of them are in the call center. Entry level work, tiny bit more than minimum wage. A girl started her first week doing really well and then week two got really weird. She walked into the CEO's office (on another floor in the building) WHILE HE WAS MEETING WITH SOMEONE, to demand that he buy her a dog because she thought having a companion would improve her work performance. That was the entirety of her rationale.
Edit: Many are asking. No she did not get the dog. I wasn't in the room with the CEO so I don't know exactly how he handled it. He is an exceptionally nice human being so I assume he handled it kindly. Though, I mean it made its way back to HR pretty quick so he definitely told some people about it. My colleague spoke with her about it and was just like, no, thats not a thing wtf. she was fired soon after for unrelated reasons (attendance I believe). Also many are questioning if she had some kind of mental disorder. I have no idea.
10.) From McNugget_Princess:
The new receptionist was coming in every morning and opening up programs/documents to make it look like they were busy, and they'd sit with one hand on their mouse and one hand on their keyboard and stare blankly at their screen for 8 hours a day and not do anything. They'd also consistently pick up the phone and hang it up without saying anything so that it would stop ringing.
I sat in on their termination, and the employee started screaming at the manager about how they were doing an amazing job, and they had to give them another chance... I was 100% confident that they were just trying to get some easy money and wouldn't be surprised that they were finally getting fired, the whole thing was just bizarre.
11.) From cincyfan04:
I worked closely with HR in a call center. You'd get some crazy stuff.
Guy that carried a cooler every day was wiping shit on random walls and desks. It was his shit 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.
You'd also get a crazy amount of period stains on chairs. Look, it happens, but when it's the same few people (and we have free sanitary supplies in the bathroom!) you know they just don't care.
12.) From spoonythirtywon:
Female GM banging 3 co-workers at the same time. Fight broke out once everyone found out about it.
13.) From SoBreezy74:
One of the candidates I was interviewing via Skype
answered the phone while in his boxers and a tank top then stood up to grab his blazer that was probably about 3ft away. I had to see him in his stretched out boxers
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 THEN closes it
That was nice
14.) From Canuckleball:
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.
15.) From T469:
I work at my family's business in the industrial sector, and HR is one of the hats I wear.
2018 was insanely busy for us, so we had to hire a staffing agency to get some General Labor guys in. It's a simple wax-on, wax-off kind of job.
The most memorable part of that hectic summer was one temp that the agency sent over for 3rd shift (Midnight-8AM). We will call him Bobby for this story. Bobby shows up wearing nothing but a pair of cargo shorts, so we had to provide pants, shirt, and steel toes. Come break time at 4, he decided to go out to the parking lot and scale the building (about 30 feet, probably climbed a tree or something), had a smoke and managed to turn the security camera away from the parking lot.
Bobby then walked away from the job and went home in the uniform and boots we provided for him. We assumed he wanted to break into some of the cars, but nothing was gone. Ended up costing probably $300 for training, uniform and just wasting our time.
TL;DR temp employee scaled the 30 ft building and played with the security cameras on his first day.
16.) From riverguava:
Not in HR, but hiring manager. The candidate made a remark that made me do a double take (don't remember exactly what, just a small cue that i picked up on). I made sure he understood that we will not tolerate any racism at all, and he proceeds to rattle off multiple racial slurs to show how he can't be racist if he is comfortable enough to use those words. Obviously didn't get hired, so he proceeded to contact our HR department to complain that I somehow tricked him into saying what he said. Smh...
17.) From Markovitch12:
We had a woman who was terrible at her job, always off sick, never met a deadline. Any way protocol was followed. Because some people had given her half decent staff reviews to get rid of her she called in the union to support her. This dragged the process. Then when she got the final papers she sent them back saying she couldn't be fired, she was pregnant. This woman was 54. It turned out she had frozen eggs so she defrosted them etc. The process proving no discrimination then began. Six months go by, she gets served again. We worked at an organisation, big building in manhattan hence terrible beaurocracy. Papers come back, that isn't me you've sent the documents to. Turns out she had provided a false passport when hired, she was actually in her 60s. In the end they gave her early retirement to get it over with
18.) From sudo_grep:
While firing someone and listing off the reasons they were being termed the person goes, "Yeah, I mean I did that but you dont have to fire me yo? I didnt violate a procedure and it doesnt say no sex in our code of conduct" -exact quote. What was he being fired for? Having sex with a building sec guard in the parking lot of our building - and it was all recorded on surveillance.
19.) From salientlife93:
I was an HR manager for a small company that shared an office with a mid-sized business. Their HR manager really disliked us, mainly because our company cultures really clashed. It wasn't a big deal for a long time, maybe just a little tense, until one day they decided to terminate one of the shared administrative staff members. I wasn't part of this decision, though I agreed with it, and technically that was their employee. The other HR Manager (let's call her Cheryl) calls me into her office to inform me the next morning that this admin had been let go. Cheryl made it clear, I was not to e-mail our companys employees and inform them of the change in employment status. As she put it "They'll find out when they get in and she isn't here, and if they don't, well that's not my problem." Lovely. That is not how handle communication matters in my company, and I was completely uncomfortable with it.
So I go to a VP and discuss what we should do. He says to hold off for a day, let everything settle, then go back and work out a strategy with Cheryl on how to redirect employees who used the old admin until we can hire a new one. Most of our employees, unlike theirs, work out in the field, so it would be important to communicate with those individuals specifically, but it could hold a day. We knew that the old e-mail for the admin was being forwarded to Cheryl, so at least someone was watching the e-mails in case something critical came through. Ok, cool.
Not two hours later Cheryl comes barreling into the cubical area of our office screaming about how our employees are idiots. They clearly are too dumb to understand that the employee who was terminated the night before was no longer with the company. She was sick of getting our stupid e-mails, and didn't want to have to deal with our incompetent employees e-mailing her non-stop. I was a horrible HR manager, I didn't know how to control my people. I clearly wasn't able to handle my job. Just insulting me, our employees, the entire company at the top of her psychotic lungs.
I was clearly to blame, and she was going to get me in so much trouble. She goes running into the CEO's office, and starts flipping out about me. It was a complete clusterfuck. She had friggin set me up as a scapegoat in case her lovely approach to HR went wrong, and when it did immediately, tried to throw me under the bus for something she did! I believe that someone had sent the admin a time-critical e-mail the night before, and Cheryl hadn't caught it, and the deadline had passed for the item maybe 15 minutes before she actually opened the request.
Thankfully I'd already talked to the VP, who was a life saver. Cheryl was reminded that whatever had happened was her damn fault, and she was told behind closed doors that if she ever did that again, our company would be logging major complaints with her company, and the CEO's of the two companies were close friends.
She told every new hire they had that our company was full of lazy, entitled assholes, and actively encouraged hostility between people in each company. She forbid our company from going into their part of the office, despite the shared (and partially paid for by us) soda fridge being over there. Would host "office lunches" for her company, and bring the leftovers across the hall to other companies so that our employees couldn't get some. It was the most petty, childish reaction to her attempt to slander me and get me in trouble.
We moved offices in under 6 months.
20.) From stihgnob511:
Im not in HR but I did conduct interviews at a previous job.
Literal blood on his resume. I think it was from picking a scab rather than a decent wound but 100% handed me a bloody resume.
21.) From technos:
HR stole me for a couple weeks after an angry prostitute tried driving through one of our gates looking for 'Anthony'. She'd met him on a dating site and he owed her $350 and a car for her abortion.
We didn't have an Anthony working there, but many of the other details she gave the police in her statement led the company to believe she wasn't totally delusional.
HR picked on me because my last job, before becoming management, was IT.
I spent two days walking around to every PC at my location, updating proxy settings, telling my coworkers that I'd figured out how to make email 'faster'.
I felt like an idiot, but it worked.
The next twelve days I watched a squid proxy. I nailed 'Anthony' on day one, but HR kept me at it.
The company had a guy looking for pictures of animal feces on plates. He claimed it was for a college art project, but the man was over sixty and not having the company pay for any courses.
"Mixed-breed Terrier on Corelle Saucer", one of the images he looked at, officially counts as the weirdest shit I've ever seen.
22. From -eDgAR-:
I'm not in HR, but I have a weird HR related story involving this 6 pairs of brand new Levi's jeans I have.
My best friend works for this pretty big company and one day he gets approached by one of his bosses, who is in his late 40s. He asks my friend where he got his jeans because he liked then a lot and my friend tells him that they are just Levi's he got at the store in Wicker Park here in Chicago. He says cool and then my friend doesn't think about it.
That weekend he actually ends up at the Levi's store looking for a denim jacket. He spots his superior there shopping and they say hi. He told him that he came down to check out the jeans because he liked my friend's so much. They chat a little and my friend introduced his girlfriend and then they left the store leaving his boss to shop.
That Monday his boss approaches him and hands him a bag full of jeans. He bought a bunch of them at the Levi's store for my friend when he was there and wanted to give them to him. Keep in mind this is at the store itself so these jeans are full price of about $60 each. My friend said he couldn't accept but he insisted, so he reluctantly took them.
He gets back to desk and his coworker sees the jeans and asks what was the deal. He tells him about what happened, not saying who it was, and his coworker was like, "Was it_____?" My friend confirmed and his coworker said, "Oh yeah HR has a whole file on him. He's done this before with other guys. He bought me a bunch of jerseys last year."
So apparently this guy liked to buy gifts for his coworkers, all male and made most of them feel uncomfortable enough they went to HR about it, but he was big enough in the company and he never really did anything totally inappropriate, so nothing was ever done about it.
My friend didn't know what to do with the jeans, because he didn't feel okay with wearing them himself, plus only a couple of them sorta fit him, so I said I would take them. As you can see they are various sizes because the guy wasn't sure his exact size and just guessed around, but hey they were free for me.