I work in a call center, so as you might guess, we get all types. The anti-social weird ones don’t usually last long, fortunately.
Lessee here.
OCD Lady. All the agents share desks with someone on the opposite shift. For that matter, they may get a different desk every day, though of course people tend to adopt one as ‘their’ desk. At any rate, we have one lady who is so completely anal about “her” desk that she’s been known to write notes to the night crew about how they need to keep their junk neatly organized, in the area she marked on the desk. She literally took masking tape and divided the desk, including cube walls, in half. Problem is, she doesn’t seem to grasp that it’s not one person using her desk at night, but potentially anybody. She’s complained at least once every week since the day she started about how they keep messing up “her” desk. Her work area resembles a Japanese stone garden in it’s preciseness… it’s creepy.
Happy Man. This guy is great on the phone, he’s smart, he’s capable, he works hard… and he has this compulsion to say “Happy <x>!” to everyone he sees, where X could be any day of the week, a holiday, or someone’s birthday – usually someone completely unknown to the person he’s talking to. And if you don’t respond to him, he keeps saying it, exactly the same way – intonation, pitch, you name it – until you acknowledge him in some way. Then he wanders off again, mission completed, until the next poor victim enters his sights.
One guy who used to work with us was the biggest whiner I have ever met. The guy was in his forties but whinge and whinge if he had to tutor a kid who was hard to control. Nobody at my work enjoys working with ‘problem kids’ but we have much more professional ways of coping with it. He would do back stretches in an unused conference room. All the conference rooms have windows everywhere, so you’d intermittently see the guy’s head bob up as he sat up, then disappear back down. he also left the lights off in the room while he did this, making it creepy. He tended to abuse ‘prep time’ which was the time we were paid for putting together lesson plans, getting/returning textbooks from the shelf, etc. Most of his ‘prep’ involved plugging his computer into a nearby internet jack and running his other job, some online business. After a while he got busted for it but quit before they could fire him. Not surprisingly everybody else had to sign this affadavit stating that we promise not to misuse resources bla bla bla…
Another fella still works with us. He’s not that odd aside from the fact that he is very slow. Not slow as in dumb, slow as in his work gets done too slowly. Normally at the end of the day we put together lesson plans for the following day. I’ve gotten extremely efficient at this, and actually usually leave as soon as I’m finished with teaching classes. This guy, however, will spend hours at it. You might think maybe he’s just doing it to milk more hours, but actually our prep time pays almost nothing (barely above minimum wage) so if you work two jobs like most of us its actually more cost effective to minimize prep work so you’ll have more time to work at a second job that pays more for the same time. If left to his own devices, he’ll be in there from 8 when we close to 10 PM, and often have to come in on his days off to get caught up. Its rather annoying because we often share students so often the lesson plans are unfinished, and he steadfastly refuses help when he’s behind. I think the only reason he hasn’t gotten fired yet is because our managers have a turnover rate of about 8 months, so by the time the managers realize that this guy isn’t pulling his weight they quit/get promoted/etc. That, or they let it happen because we’re constantly shorthanded so having a guy that is too slow is slightly better than being a whole body short.
I feel like I should elaborate on my boss’s shoe-less-ness a bit. By themselves, feet aren’t necessarily too weird. But these!
My boss wears a suit every day (weird enough by itself because the main office dress code is “don’t look like a student”) and then walks around in it with no shoes on. And he has freakishly hairy hobbit feet. He also has a habit of drumming his toes on the floor as he talks to you. Creepy AND distracting!
It has gotten to the point where people are openly mocking him for this, but he continues anyway.
Naked feet? Feh. My old boss used to give instructions for the day (we worked out of his apartment) while he floated naked in his bathtub. Saw more of his cock that summer than I did my boyfriend’s.
Ha! You just reminded me of a former coworker who we all thought was a little bit unusual…one time he slipped up and said, “Greetings, earthlings,” to us when we passed him in the hallway.
The weirdest co-worker I ever had was very loud-mouthed and flamboyant, and extremely religious. A lot of my co-workers apparently were, because they asked me about my religion, and when I told them I was a Buddhist, they all gave me looks of utter disbelief.
From that point on, my loud-mouthed flamboyant co-worker made it a point to sing church hymns at the top of his lungs right in my ear. And if I snapped at him, he’d ‘‘tsk,tsk’’ and say, ‘‘Come on, now. We’re all in this together. PRAISE THE LORD!’’
Although one of the salesmen insists on singing all the time, even though everyone else tells, nay, begs him not to. But that’s more annoying (and murder-inducing) than anything else. No, he doesn’t sing well, by any stretch of the term.
There was the one that channeled alien transmissions.
And the one that doesn’t pay taxes and frantically searched for shield bedrock to escape the Planet X (Minnesota is apparently safe from rogue planets)
And the guy that sterilized his cubicle twice a day while saving used apple cores on his shelf. Washed his hands until they were raw, chapped, red. But was the first into the conference rooms to eat leftover food.
But this one guy has the soundtrack to the latest Shrek movie on his iPod (he has no kids) and plays it loudly.
This was a private office where no outside clients could enter, so even if she was in purchasing (which I doubt, not sure what her actual job duties were), nobody external to the company would have seen what pen she was using.
A former co-worker was an engineer. He was quite a nerd. The dress code was casual. Most people wore dress pants and a button-up shirt or polo shirt. This guy was the only one who wore a tie. He came in every day with black shoes, white socks, black pants (high-waters), white shirt (with pocket protector), and black tie. Every single day. He was about 5’5", about 35 years old, greasy hair, coke-bottle glasses, and walked hunched over.
Every couple of days, he would approach one of the pretty ladies in the office and ask to borrow a pen, tape, or something. The next day the guy would have flowers delivered to the lady who loaned him something. The card would say something like, “It was very kind of you to loan me your pen while I was in need. I sincerely appreciate your generosity. Thank you for being my friend.” Needless to say, he was creeping them out. He must have been spending $75 a week just on flowers (& that was for the work place. Who knows what good samaritans had flowers delivered in his personal life.)
One day the guy called in. Most people in odd circumstances would just call in sick, but not this guy. He explained to the boss that he woke up in the back seat of his car in New York City (a two-hour drive from home/work) and his pants were missing.
For beneficiaries on his insurance forms, the guy listed the Pope, WWII military heroes and celebrities (many of whom were already deceased.) The guy didn’t last long.
I had a coworker who had a number of characteristics we all found to be statistically unlikely.
He lived in a tree house. (Illegally it turned out, it wasn’t his tree house.)
He used the money he saved to send his dog to the Bahamas to get laid.
He was an exotic dancer.
He left our employment to become an EMT, after which he got a job as a traveling companion for a very wealthy woman he met while accompanying his dog to a dog show.
Nice guy, but weird.
Of course, he told me attempting to cold sight read to my coworkers from Paradise Lost was weird, so go figure.
Thought of another one. Another boss. I’m sure I had tons of weird coworkers, but but the commie in me tends to take it out on the boss.
My manager. Bookstore. I don’t believe she ever actually read a book in her life. Came there from selling vaacums. We were doing my yearly evlauation, and for some reason she segued into a story about how she grew upon on farm and would pull out the calfs with her hand. I did not need to know that. Not a bad thing, but I *I did not need to think of this this obnioxios illiterate bureaucrat * with her hand up some poor cow. Not when I was feeling like a poor cow to begin with.
A crazy paranoid woman worked with me in a lab. She wore a face shield all the time, and wiped down every surface a million times before sitting down to work. I’d believe that maybe she was immunocompromised and wanted to be careful, except that she brought the shield home with her every night. I asked her why she did that and she said it’s because she was afraid someone might take it. Right. The spongy bit at the forehead is covered in stains from her foundation, one of the arms is cracked, and her name is written all over it. Definitely the first thing I’d steal from the locker room. And we all had lockers. Why not leave it in hers? Definitely some kind of paranoid germophobe stuff going on there - why did she choose to work in a hospital lab, of all places? Medical techs work with poop on a daily basis! Test sputum for TB!
Besides all this she was antisocial to a frightening degree. Nobody knows anything at all about her life outside of work. Someone told me she was married, but I just can’t picture it, unless maybe she has a second personality in there. She never went to outings, and wouldn’t even join in when we ordered takeout - even when it was paid for by the lab.
I used to work with a woman who was pleasant enough, but decidedly strange. She’d talk to herself all the time, and, apparently, answer herself, although she’d talk to you quite normally if you were in conversation.
One morning I was walking down a corridor and she was behind me, and I heard her say, "Oh, that’s Blackhobyah. We like her’.
