At a veterinary hospital I used to work with, there was a lady in her mid-fifties with an English-y accent. I think she was from New Zealand but she was real vague about where she was from. Sometimes she’d just nod if you asked her if she was from England, New Zealand, Australia, etc. but never give you a truly straight answer. That was just a mild tic compared to the rest of it…
If one of our patients had an poop accident, she’d pick it up with her bare hands. I am no baby about cleaning up stuff but I’ll use a plastic bag at least. She’d also keep dog kibble in her pocket and snack on it during the day. She’d get the most horrendous dog food breath too. I’d offer to buy her a candy bar from the snack machine but she’d refuse. All of this with her chirpy, wherever it was from, accent just still gives me the shivers ten years later. She’d also refuse to tell the doctor that she was overwhelmed on the days she worked alone, even though clients would ask me what was wrong with her because she’d spend those days in tears.
My coworkers now are pretty normal - but she may have set the bar too high in that regard.
I work with a couple of people that I wish to gods were plants. I mean, there is just no way they could be this…stereotypically ditzy/predictable/whatever. One lady has incredible stories of her younger years, when she was a criminal kingpin’s wife <and never really thought about it…doesn’t everyone just have bodyguards around them all the time?> and is apparantly dealing with a bit of early-onset Alzheimer’s or something, as she’s so…I don’t know, annoying sometimes, but seems to have NO clue. I am getting GREAT hints as how to act like a ditzy old broad from her, should the time come I just want people to shake their heads and dismiss me without a third thought. And one guy…holy crap, cannot believe he’s not barely 14. That’s how he acts, in just about every way. And he’s SERIOUS about it. Yet he’s twice that age; it’s kind of literally just jaw-dropping.
Unfortunately this is a very small area, everyone knows everyone else, and unless the entire 200 square miles around me is some kind of camp set up just to trip my mind out, these folk are verifiably just…wow. I need to write stories down that people tell me 'cause some of it is just incredibly out there yet unfortunately quite believable.
Oh, dopers. Dopers, dopers, dopers. It’s cute, you know? Throwing your “weird” co-worker stories onto the boards? It’s cute. All the stories so far seem “quirky”, not genuinely weird or odd. But I’ve not seen any genuinely disturbing persons described so far. Let me add two.
Beforehand, you should know - I work with chemists. I’m an engineer. These are both first-hand stories.
Chemist “Chad”:
Chad: “That waitress was pretty.”
GameHat: “Yep, she is definitely an attractive older woman.”
Chad: “She has small hands.”
GameHat: :eek:
Chad: “It gives me ideas.”
…
Chad, again. Chad has come into work early and showered in the employee men’s room.
GameHat: “sup, Chad”
Female receptionist: “Hi, Chad!”
Chad: “It feels good.”
Female receptionist: “Uh, what now? What feels good?”
Chad: grins
Female receptionist: :eek:
Chad: “It just feels good to be clean”
Female receptionist: pales, quickly exits the room
…and Chad is married and isn’t a bad guy. Very, very smart (in narrow areas.) It’s just that his social skills fall somewhere between Sling Blade and Rainman.
These sound like things I might do, but I would do them ironically weird. Now I just wonder if people think I’m weird. :smack: And yes, I’m an engineer.
A supervisor I had at a previous job was different, he had been [or claimed he was] an elephant wrangler for a big national circus, had been the rare hells angels biker that never did drugs or anything illegal, and physically had a dotted line tattooed on his neck with the words cut here under it.
He believed that to navigate through the Bering Strait to the North Pole you needed to keep the constellation The Southern Cross over your left shoulder, that it was called ‘down south’ because sea level was lower at the poles, and that unless it was turned off at the breaker box or something was plugged in, electricity leaked out of the wall sockets/power points.
What I don’t understand, and maybe it’s my lack of social skills talking, these annoying co-workers, couldn’t you just talk to them and tell them to stop? Best result is that they stop, worst result is that they are sooo oblivious that they keep going. Unless this is a direct wo-worker, somebody who you depend on in order to do your work, what is the harm in speaking up for yourself?
I had to do that at a former employer, she was quite cold with me after, but she never harassed me like she did the other employees. She was inappropriate with everybody else, with me she was coldly professional. Mission accomplished.
It may be mean, but you deserve to work in a comfortable environment. If HR can’t help, then do it yourself.
Oh I forgot to add - this guy, when talking to his family on the phone (wife, kids, anyone), will put on a “talking to a cute puppydog or baby voice”. No shit, he really does this. The whole time he’s talking to them. No matter the subject, no matter the time of day. Same voice to the wife as to either kid. And it’s not a joke voice either. He’s sincere.
So try to put that into your head…Butthead talking to a cute puppydog.
I think he’s probably the most socially maladjusted individual I’ve ever met. How on Earth he got married I will never understand. :dubious:
I have a coworker whose life is so unspeakably tragic that I’ve actually stopped believing it. It’s like once every three months or so she has what I think of as a major life tragedy: immediate family member diagnosed with a terrible disease (strange kidney disease, heart tumor, diabetes, stroke, MS . . those are just the ones I remember), a couple deaths, or a lost job, or endless problems with her special-needs son. Her own medical issues have been epic: weekly migraines and anxiety attacks, two sexual assaults, more weeks out with the flu or strep than I can count (a couple a year, on average), a still birth, fertility treatments, and there’s been a painful marriage collapsing for years and years. This is just the stuff I can remember off the top of my head. This is over a decade, of course, but even over that time span it has come fast and furious. Some of it I know happened because there has been outside evidence, but I can’t bring myself to believe all of it. It’s just too much, and it’s steadily escalated, as if she has to raise the stakes. But then I feel like I am a total bitch because here is possibly this woman whose had more tragedy than any ten people should have to face, and I am dismissing her pain. I dunno.
I work with a woman who goes to the parking lot at lunch time and exercises with a hula hoop. She turns on music in her car and stands next to it and starts hula hooping like nobody’s watching. But people are watching. When I see small groups of people at the windows that face the parking lot, it’s a safe bet that hula hoop girl is at it again.
I’m not actually seeing anything overly strange about that. It seems to be a reasonable snack and better than a lot of the crap people usually eat at their desks. The only odd part is the amount of space it would take up.
This is something that particularly irritates me. I am reminded of a scene in The Office where Michael is calling a client and looks in his Rolodex and sees that the client’s daughter is interested in horses, or some such, and so he asks the client about it, and the client is flattered that Michael remembers, and this is supposed to demonstrate why Michael is such a good salesman.
I call bullshit. This is such obvious pandering. And it’s annoying, and yet people fall for it.
One day one of my co-workers was eating lunch at his desk doing some paperwork. A woman came in from another department – I think she was picking up some mail – and saw that he had gotten a little bag of Doritos from the vending machine. She said, “Oh, I’ll bet you like those Doritos!” He just nodded, and she continued, “MMM! Yes, Brian sure likes Doritos!”
And this seemed to flip some kind of switch, because from then on, she could not come into our office without the Doritos harangue. “Where are your Doritos? Did you eat them already? Are you buying them by the case now? Did you leave any for the rest of us?” I don’t think I ever saw him eating them again, and he probably never did lest she catch him in the act. :rolleyes:
moejoe, I know what you’re talking about, because I wear purple a lot. It flatters my complexion, but I’m not a freak or anything. If I see a shirt I like and it comes in five colors, I’ll probably buy either the pink or purple, because those are the colors I look good in. But I buy blue and black and brown, too. If I wear purple, I get “Oh, there’s Sigmagirl, in her purrrrple.” If I don’t, it’s “Oh, Sigmagirl, why aren’t you wearing your purrrrple today.”
I hesitate to post this, because it’s pretty nasty. You’ve been warned…
This one’s for the ladies. How many of the ladies here have heard of the old wives’ tale where you shouldn’t bathe while you’re on your period or you’ll get sick or something? I had a co-worker who apparently still believed this. (Emphasis on had, thank God) You could always tell when it was her time, and she would get progressively nastier looking and smelling as the days went on. She wasn’t the freshest smelling person to begin with, and by day 4 you couldn’t hardly be in the same room with her.
I could tell a story about how she managed to make the whole office sick one time, but I’m at work… and I don’t know if y’all really want to read that…
When I was in the Navy, we had a fundraiser where you could purchase a “civilian clothes voucher” for like 3 bucks and wear regular clothes instead of your uniform on Fridays. We had one guy in our dept. that would wear a straight jacket for his civvies. That went on for about a month, before the powers that be told him he couldn’t do that anymore…so he started wearing a full body leotard, a tuxedo jacket with tails, and ninja boots (like these) every Friday. Maybe he was trying to do the Klinger from M.A.S.H. thing and get kicked out or something, but he was truly an odd duck. He wore the straight jacket on his off time too, and once followed one of the girls on base back to her barracks room to ask her if she would please buckle it up in the back for him.
Okay, the giant stockpile is a little weird, but I probably consume that much fruit in a day. Not all the same fruit, I like diversity, but it probably works out to about the equivalent of 6 oranges or so. I don’t think one orange an hour is any weirder than my former officemate who went to the coffee station 6-8 times a day.
And in my office place, we have Stompy, the guy who can’t do anything, no matter how mundane, gently. If he was a card dealer it would sound like he was playing patty-cake because he’d slap each card hard onto the table.
Am I missing something here? How is this guy’s behavior disturbing? It sounds like of weird, but I know a lot of people who say off the wall stuff just to get a reaction. So he likes small hands; maybe he has a small dick.
