Has anyone ever totally *lost their shit* where you work?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Has anyone ever totally lost their shit where you work?

I’m not talking disgruntled ex-workers returning and going postal with a gun, but people in continued employment that have such an emotional reaction to working circumstances that they are unable to control their behaviour.

My experiences:

  1. A courier company. The MD and the VP have a ‘discussion’ in the MD’s office that gets louder and louder until they’re both screaming. Then there’s the sound of scuffling, and the MD’s office door flies open, to reveal the MD pushing the VP over and kicking him as hard as he can in the ass, sending him sprawling onto the floor of the waiting area, where we were sitting around waiting to be despatched on our next job.

  2. A software company. A sales executive disagreed with his commission structure, and his rant about this got louder and louder and louder and shriller until it became a howling scream that reverberated around the entire office so we could hear every word. He resigned soon after.

  3. An advertising agency. Two female executives found out about each other’s affair with the CEO. Cue catfight with pulling hair and slapping, until one of them had a ‘heart attack’ (turned out actually to be a panic attack) and I had to call an ambulance. The other exec was fired soon after, then a week or so later started calling me in the office and making erotic suggestions in an attempt to get me to steal her some headed paper. I declined.

While quite traumatic at the time, all of these make me giggle in retrospect.

2

Yes, the president of the company I worked for once had a total spaz in a meeting with two managers. Yelling and screaming and throwing things at these two seated across his desk. They just had to quietly sit there and take it while he whipped things off his desk at them.

3

Me, actually.

I was working for a small startup. We’d gone through a couple of investors who gave us enough money to keep the company going, but who pulled out when they realized our project wasn’t going to immediately make them multimillionaires.

Our last investor took the cake, though. He actually represented a group of investors, and our theory is that they decided they’d make more money writing us off as a loss than if we became successful. To that end, he began to starve us. Each month, they financed the project… but not so much that any of us could, you know, get paid. Around month six, we were all getting really tired of living off our credit cards- but we had to keep going, because we’d already invested so much sweat into the project.

One Friday, we had a meeting with the guy, where he told us that yet again, we’d all be going without paychecks. The strange thing was that he ducked out of the meeting really quickly, like he had somewhere else he needed to be. We found out where, a few weeks later- he had to catch a flight for a two-week vacation in Hawaii.

If I was a grenade, he had just pulled my pin.

The next month, he came in to tell us that, sorry, we wouldn’t be getting paid again… and the next thing I remember was thinking, “Hey… who’s doing all the screaming?” It turns out that it was me.

I don’t remember all the things I said, but I remember the gist of it was that I didn’t want to see him in the studio anymore and that, while I could handle him screwing with me, nobody fucks with the welfare of my family and friends. Everyone else was just sitting there staring at me as I exploded all over the guy.

He never came into the office again. Eventually, his group pulled out and we got bought by a larger company. We never did get paid back for that time, though.

4

Former boss of mine was so frustrated by the phone being out (they were doing construction around the corner and apparently cut a line) that he ripped the phone out of the outlet and threw it across the room. (This was before the days of cell phones, so he couldn’t just use his cell.)

This seems pretty minor compared to the stories in the OP, of course.

5

This happened at the company I work for a few years ago.

The manager of a department had an office near my cube, while the people who worked for him were based in a separate room.

One day the manager called into his office the most senior of his people. Behind the closed door the two of them immediately got into an extended, very loud, shouting and bellowing argument over what level of authority the non-manager had over the other people in their department. (The closed door didn’t dampen their mutual vocal level at all.)

The non-manager resigned about a month later.

6

I know these are all anecdotes, but I’m sensing a trend that the people losing their shit tend to be managerial types, confirming my suspicions about just who the sort of folks drawn into that line of work really are.

7

It was my last day on the job at a mailroom. We had a database of all of the employees at that company, over 1000 of them, and what floor and location their mail needed to be delivered to. As there was a lot of turnover there (as in massive layoffs), we made changes to the database almost daily. About once per week, we’d print the thing out and make enlarged copies of it to tape up above the mail sorting area. Several of us came up with this system and it worked like a charm.

On the day in question, our manager, a complete moron whose job it was to make everything harder on us for no other reason than to throw her weight around, decided that we didn’t really need a computer. The database would be kept at another facility. When we had a change to make, all we had to do was call the other facility and they would type in the changes. Then once a month, they’d make a printout and have a courier deliver it to us. And if we ever needed to look up an employee on the spot, all we had to do was call the other facility and they could look it up for us.

The woman was a dunderhead.

I was muttering about this when I walked by Sue, someone who worked with us but as a part time temp. I told her about the boneheaded decision that was made. She marched right down to the manager to give her a piece of her mind. I and a few others followed. This was something we couldn’t miss. It was 30 minutes of Sue lecturing the manager in a rather forte tone of voice. The only word I remember from that is “asinine”, but I know that much profanity ensued. The manager just sat there with a stunned look on her face.

Shortly thereafter, I called her manager’s manager to tell him what I thought of her. He said that the decision to remove the computer was his. Keep in mind that this is a guy who visited our facility exactly once, for ten minutes. That’s when I lost my shit on him. That was pretty much a 30 minute chewing out session on my part.

Then Sue and our other coworkers took me out to a lunch that lasted about 2 hours. Much beer was consumed.

8

I’ve had two incidents. The first I didn’t get to witness, and I don’t really know what caused it. All I know is that I was working for a defense contractor at the time, and some guy ended up completely losing it to the point where he took all of his clothes off, locked himself in a secure document vault, and demanded an ice cream cone. I found out about it when I went to get a document from the vault and found that the vault was sealed off and security wasn’t letting anyone in or out.

The second incident was when we had a round of layoffs. They sent out an e-mail listing everyone who got laid off. One of the field engineers had been out on site, and didn’t get into the building until about 11 am. As he was walking down the hallway to his office, someone shook his hand and told him it had been nice working with him. At that point he had no idea he had been laid off. He went into his manager’s office, slammed the door, and proceeded to yell for a good ten or fifteen minutes straight. This was one of those tall cubicle offices where the walls were just that typical cubicle material (not like a real office with drywall walls) so the walls didn’t dampen the sound much at all.

9

Damn, you meant employees. My library patrons lose their shit all the time. Last week we had a pimp and a ho get into such a fight the cops had to be called and three people besides the original pair get thrown out for life. Thrill a minute.

10

A guy and his wife (they were separated) worked in the same building. They guy had been dating yet another woman who worked for the same company. I guess even though they were separated, the wife thought there was still a possibility of reconciliation, but she found out that he had taken the new girlfriend to the same place where they had gone for their honeymoon. They were both in his office one afternoon and despite the closed door, dozens of people heard her scream, “YOU TOOK THAT **BITCH **TO [honeymoon destination]?!?!?!” and then, “I WILL **NOT **BE QUIET! I DON’T CARE **WHO **HEARS ME!”

11

I used to work direct care and program management positions where the clients were adults with DD/MI and behavioral problems.

I’ve seen people literally lose their shit.

12

I worked once with a woman in her twenties who was going on two. She would have temper tantrums if she didn’t like what people said to her, or asked her to do. As in, fists clenched, stamping her feet and crying.

The first day was quite an eye-opener. It spurred me to send an email to my mother, thanking her for teaching me how to be a grown-up!

13

My opinion about the two guys who had the argument I wrote about was they were both hotheads, but the manager was more so - he tended to be somewhat abrasive. (Using the past tense about him because he resigned himself late last year, though not over any disagreements to the best of my knowledge.)

14

I worked in a Japanese engineering company. A guy they hired started his project. When they were discussing it ,he would pull his eyelids to make them look oriental when they turned their backs. Often I would hear a spitting noise. He actually spit all over his paperwork and dwgs before he left. One day he came in and put a gun on his desk. He didn’t threaten anyone.
They asked me if I would tell him to leave. I said no thanks, we can do it when a gun isn’t on the table. He came in without the gun the next day are we broomed him. Every now and then i looked out the window expecting him to pull up with a pile of guns. Luckily he never did. It was very scary.

15

A friend of mine – one of the sweetest and most soft-spoken women I know – worked for her brother-in-law’s father’s scrap iron business for a summer. She would be reduced to tears every day because everyone there, including BIL, would shout at her all day. “Fucking fix it, you stupid fucking cunt!” was what she heard all day, every day. Then one day she had enough and answered back “Fucking fix it your fucking self, asshole!” She fit right in after that. That’s just the way they communicated there. When they clocked out, they were civil to each other again.

I guess it was kind of like that Bugs Bunny cartoon with the wolf and the sheepdog, only the abuse was verbal instead of physical.

16

Years ago I worked for a boss in the software industry. He is a good man and currently a good friend. But he was not an easy man to work for. To quote him: He didn’t always know what he wanted, but he always knew what he didn’t want once he saw it.

This isn’t too bad, but he had a way about him of making you feel like *you *did it wrong - instead of *him *asking for the wrong thing.

It may have been because he was from a different culture and english was his second language, it may just have been his way. But when I was young and less secure he made me feel like I did it wrong.

Anyway, it was not uncommon for a programmer to quit and start screaming at him. People who worked for him totally lost their shit often. I never did, but I saw more than one melt down.

I think he has gotten better about this, but maybe not. I know he has some very loyal workers, but he has some turnover too.

17

A systems analyst/programmer I worked with at a large financial company got into such a snit with a fellow empoyee that he started throwing furniture around. Narrowly missed another guy. He was eventually sent for anger management classes. It was well-known that he carried a knife in his high-top boots. Good programmer, scary dude. We also knew he had a bunch of guns hidden in the bed of his SUV that he drove to work.

In another small software company a guy had a complete temper tantrum over being required to learn a new word processing utility.

18

Nope.

The only person I’ve seen lose his shit completely (outside of the Army, where it’s not that uncommon) was Al, a co-worker I once wrote a lengthy rant about. We were having a meeting on the scheduling function, which Al felt belonged to him even thought seven people were involved and he was not a supervisor of any kind, and he just wigged out, throwing paper and yelling. Al was not much longer for the company.

19

Oh, we have that too. We always find it for them, though. Eventually.

20

In my youth, I worked for a few years for a technical production company.

The general atmosphere of the place was one of drug-fueled insanity most of the time. Our shops and offices were located in a converted townhouse.

So one day at the end of the day the office manager tells me I need to get in a cab and drop off some equipment at a job site before I go home. I didn’t want to do this, I had somewhere else I wanted to go after work and this errand would take me out of my way. So I claimed to be broke and demanded cab fare.

The woman got a bunch of quarters from the soda machine ( this was in the 1980’s when you had to use quarters) and gave them to me for cab fare.

This displeased me immensely so I screamed something to the effect of “I’m not going to pay a freaking taxi fare with quarters you stupid bitch”, take your g*d damn quarters and shove them" then I began to throw the quarters at her one at a time as hard as I could.

Then a merry chase ensued through the 5 story townhouse, with me yelling and throwing quarters ( one at time, as hard as a could) at this woman.

I can’t remember if I ended up running the errand or not, I probably did.

Two points

The place was very dysfunctional and temper tantrums were the rule, not the exception…although this one drew some comment because of the money-throwing aspect.

No one liked this woman much, actually no one liked her at all, so I got some serious props over the next few days from other coworkers.