IANIHR but I was close to the boss. Sometimes he’d share things with me and sometimes other employees would come to me because they didn’t want to go through official channels.
Here are a few things I remember:
An employee who adjusted his package in front of female co-workers.
A supervisor who trolled for dates by putting want-ads in the paper, going through the motions of interviewing candidates, rejecting them all, then asking the women to go out.
Four different employees with eating disorders, several of whom were purging while at work.
A secretary who augmented her income by selling Tupperware, Avon, etc. in the office.
A secretary who augmented her income by selling cocaine.
Two different employees who came to work drunk.
A young female employee who was sexually harassed by a client.
A supervisor who didn’t come into work after an evening event. No big deal, until his wife called looking for him. We had some friends with the police, so they started looking for him. When he finally surfaced, he never explained what happened, but was extremely pissed that we’d tried to find him.
The worst of all was when our office manager was abducted at knifepoint from the parking lot at high noon. For months we tried to keep her by letting her work from home, picking her own hours, etc., but in the end she quit and to my knowledge never came downtown again.
As manager of a night shift in a small manufacturing facility I had to talk a drunken employee into giving me the shotgun he was waving around. Turned out to be not loaded so I guess he just needed some attention.
The shitty company my hubby used to work for used to pawn off HR responsibilities on supervisors (like him). He also had to deal with a smelly employee and explain to the older gentleman that he was expected to shower every day before work, wear deodorant and clean clothes. Hubby was mortified but the employee handled it reasonably well.
The worst? A surly middle aged female employee who liked to put her feet up on her desk while wearing skirts…and no underwear. She had a fit when confronted and said she had a medical problem that precluded wearing underwear and produced a doctor’s note! She didn’t seem to understand the problem was that her coworkers did not want to be exposed to, uh, that view. No, she wasn’t fired.
My dad isn’t in HR, but one day right after the lunch whistle blew he was called out to the parking lot by the security guard. An employee was outside waving a small handgun at some employees; the rest of the employees were starting to crowd around to watch as they left the plant. The police had been notified, but hadn’t arrived yet. Dad and some other staff members started moving the rest of the employees back into the plant; then, with some of the guys from the shop for backup, Dad started talking to the gun-toting employee and managed to keep him fairly calm until the police arrived.
Turns out that the gun was a very realistically-styled cigarette lighter. The employee had a history of problems, and was fired after this incident.
It happened in a petrochemical plant’s admin. offices: the coffee break talk turned to guns, and a guy said “hey, you should see what I’ve got!” He went to his car, got a pile of guns out of the trunk and brought them into the office to show off. No, he wasn’t fired. He was transferred into the yard.
(I didn’t work there, but it was told to me by two different groups of people in two places. The second time, I mentioned the guys name and a friend groaned and started into the story.)
This is a bit similar to the most uncomfortable conversation I ever had to have back when I worked HR. We had a brand new nursing mother (well endowed to begin with, but extra well-endowed after the birth) who wouldn’t wear a bra. After the fifth complaint from her co-workers I had to pull her aside and explain that although the dress code didn’t specifically state bras were required, it was implied in the phrase “business attire.” I was about 20 times more embarrassed than she was. She actually took it quite well.
Others include firing a guy for drawing a knife on a co-worker, reprimanding a male employee who greeted all of the female employees with kisses on the cheeks or lips (depending on how well he knew the woman), firing an employee for stealing from petty cash. The usual.
Yeah, we had to fire someone for compulsively downloading porn. Eventually, we found about 80 GB’s on his hard drive and various CD’s. The first time we caught him, I assumed that he just didn’t realize what the big deal it was, and I explained to him about bandwidth, sexual harassment liability, etc. Very embarrassing for both of us.
Then he did it again about a week later, and this was a computer programmer who should have known to download from home, or how to at least cover his tracks.
It makes me wonder if there isn’t actually something to the “porn addiction.”
I spent a number of years in HR (I’ve since switched to IT) and I thought I saw it all, but:
That’s a new low, I think.
Weirdest moment from my HR career was when we suddenly had to sprint to the lobby because a pair of federal agents was arresting one of our employees. I didn’t see the badges, but someone who says they did reports they were ATF, which makes me wonder what the hell the guy was being arrested for.
Proselytising to students, and then complaining that she was being denied freedom of religious expression.
Not wearing a bra {different woman, but similar attitude - radical feminist with a shoulder underneath her chip who believed that she was being repressed}.
Sexually harassing a teenage female student with feelthy txt messages {you better believe that’s a firin’}.
Selling dope to teenage students {ditto, but that one got real ugly when the cops were called}.
Habitually turning up drunk, late, unshaven, stinking and surly {individually these weren’t uncommon, but this guy managed to combine them all - he used to get stinking drunk until the bars shut and then sleep on the school steps until it opened in the morning}.
Breaking a student’s arm while arm-wrestling {to be fair, it was an accident}.
Dislocating a child’s arm {that was also an accident, and she was utterly mortified}.
Telling students that the school he worked at sucked, and handing out fliers for the establishment he was about to open {this bozo couldn’t even understand why that was a firing offence}.
The crowning one, though, had to be the guy who offered a 15 year old student “help with her homework” in the comfort and safety of her own home, and then got her pregnant. I’m not sure if it was fortunate or unfortunate that he skipped the country shortly before the cops came knocking on his door: took the matter out of my hands, but I would have liked to have seen this clown end up in a Japanese prison for statutory rape.
Not HR but I’ve got some stories from the first place that I worked. That place was a nut house.
-Guy sees a job advertised that is exactly his job function. Assumes he is going to get fired so destroys $20,000 worth of equipment in retaliation. It turns out, of course, not to be his job and then perception became reality.
-A woman newly hired on the grave yard shift was turning tricks in her van in the parking lot during breaks.
-Different department but also grave yard shift with maybe 12 employees. The swing shift finished all of the work that needed to be done so grave yard had nothing to do. The supervisor had everyone punch in and then they all went to the local casino for the night and then went back to work to punch out.
-Two guys score some very crystally marijuana and decide to see what it looks like under one of the very expensive lab microscopes.
-Guy brings in a thermos full of coffee spiked with kaluha every day. Says he didn’t realize the kaluha was alcoholic.
-Sex in the clean room. Mulitple instances of this.
-Yet another grave yard shifter. Guy has his family and friends call the 1-800 number for the company and then hit the extension for the clean room. He has 6 hour conversations on the phone, charged to the company, three times a week.
-Guy takes his girlfriend to Mexico for a week on the company credit card. When confronted he says it was an accident and he won’t do it again. Does it again. Amazingly he isn’t fired. He also charged several long calls on a 900 sex line on the company card while in Asia on business. He owed so much that he had to get his paychecks docked for two years to pay the company back.
There are more but I can’t remember them at the moment.
Holy crap, I don’t know what’s wrong with me but this little story & your company’s compassion just brought tears to my eyes. I can’t imagine her fear, poor lady.
I’m not HR (thank God), but this happened at my first full-time job after college.
Small subunit of a large social service agency; this unit does vocational counseling/short-term job training/job placement for mostly Soviet refugees. Our office was perpetually at loggerheads with the main agency office; our placement results rock, but we have been hired for our language skills rather than our social service training, so we do things that are unconventional by agency standards. They work, however, so the boss doesn’t care.
One afternoon, I leave early to get my wisdom teeth out. The next morning, I come in and see a guy with whom I studied in Russia, sitting in our waiting room. I am surprised, because he lives several states away and I haven’t heard from him since we got back. We chat briefly, and he tells me he is there to interviewfor the open job, with my boss. I wish him luck and give him my home number in case he wants the scoop later.
Walk in. Receptionist pulls me aside, interrogates me about the friend and our conversation, and says she doesn’t know what to tell my friend; apparently my boss was fired after I left for the dentist the day before. Nobody had his calendar to cancel the day’s appointments, so my friend has been sitting in the waiting room for over an hour because nobody knew what to do with him, because nobody knew who he was or why he was there.
Eventually the guy who fired my boss interviewed and hired my friend, and he worked there long after I left.
We once had a male employee who had been caught masturbating while at work. The story, needless to say, quickly spread around the entire facility. I was the one who had to sit him down, discuss the incident, and explain what options were available to him if he felt that he was being sexually harassed due to a hostile work environment.
There’s a “Seinfeld” for everything. Didn’t Jon Lovitz pretend to have cancer to get sympathy, and a free hairpiece?
