Perhaps you could spoiler-tag the storey for the squeamish, Dr. Girlfriend?
This is about a fellow who works across the aisle from me and over one one space who is quite the eccentric
- From time to time he does this soft, low toned “evil” laugh for just a few seconds.
- When he walks past chairs that are occupied, he’ll randomly grab the top of one and give it a shake.
- He frequently listens to music at his desk (through earphones), during which I have at times heard him singing along in what I’d call a semi-loud whisper.
- He has the most explosive sneezes I think I’ve ever heard; very sudden, very loud, and very startling. (Obviously sneezing is not a function of eccentricity.)
- Sometime he’ll overhear others in the area say they’re going to do something, and he speaks up with “That is not an approved function at this firm.”
- He shoots rubber bands at just one particular person. (Not me)
- Sometimes the moment he arrives at his desk at the start of the day he says “Is it time to go home?”
Despite his eccentricities, I’m glad he’s with the company; he’s an excellent contributor.
Obvious man-pig question: so, she’s not hot? They aren’t watching because it’s like Sofia Vergara on a bicycle?
My story: I was a consultant being taken to the out-of-the-way spot that my client was stashing our project team (standard operating procedure, unfortunately). As I got settled, I was speaking to a key manager we needed to interview - as I was describing where to find us, he cut me off and said “oh, the Naked Guy spot,” hung up and headed over.
Umm, excuse me?
He shows up giggling - apparently a few weeks before, some programmers had showed up for work on Monday to find one of their colleagues had been there all weekend, coding in the nude :eek: Dude apparently noted their arrival, said Hi and went back to coding until he was approached by some…professionals and helped out of the building.
My team were the first folks using the area since that episode.
Joy.
Sure it’s odd, but how I wish I had the self confidence to do something like that. To be able to think “I feel like hula hooping so I’m going to hula hoop” without worrying about what other people think. I actually admire that.
No, no. These statements weren’t ironically weird. They were genuinely weird.
I made the reference in my post about this dude being somewhere between Sling Blade and Rain Man - I’d throw in another reference. He reminds me a bit (in demeanor, not the whole serial killer thing) of Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs.
More evidence - the chick to whom he said, “It just feels good to be clean” - she was legitimately creeped out.
He’s really not a bad guy, but he’s missing several social genes. And he’s weird. And smart, no doubt. But really, really weird, edging in on creepy.
EEEWWWWWW! :eek:
To be fair, depending on the dress for your office, purple might be a really weird choice. Like if you worked here, people would be calling you Barney behind your back. Honestly, I’ve never seen people wear much besides black,gray, navy, and some shade of brown (I’m including nude/bieges with brown). Even khaki is kind of :dubious:. If people dress causually, I don’t really see a problem. Even when going out, I notice people in reds and purples. Those colors do call a lot of attention to themselves.
It’s more like I’ll wear a berry-colored knit shirt with a black skirt and a black cardigan. I don’t own any purple dresss or purple suits.
It was cold in the office on Thursday and I was unprepared so I had to grab a sweater out of my car. I mentioned to another coworker that it might smell a bit like eau de trunk of my car (it really didn’t) and she must have overheard because sure enough I came in Friday morning to a greeting of hey moejoe, is that another trunk sweater you’ve got on there?
So, I have that to look forward to for another eternity.
Ok here’s the story of the woman who doesn’t bathe on her period making the whole office sick, I apologize in advance for length and grossness. 
Let’s call this lady “Kay”. On day one she was bad enough, by day four you wanted to follow her around with a can of Lysol. It’s hard to describe the smell, sort of like fish guts rotting in the sun maybe. Sometimes you could even see dirt on her.
This was several years ago, I was the head teller at the credit union’s branch office, and for some reason I was coming into work late that day. I walk in the back door and am immediately greeted with the aroma of Kay on day four. It was so strong I expected to see her standing right there, but she was nowhere to be seen.
I head into the building and I hear a strange noise coming from the bathroom. The door is open and the light is on so I poke my head in. “Jessie”, one of the tellers who was about six months pregnant at the time is gasping and choking and looking like she’s trying not to hurl. I ask if she’s ok, and she says she’s fine, but I need to do something about Kay. Oookay… moving on.
As I walk past the cash counting room the smell is getting stronger, and I hear a “psst!” from inside the room. It’s “Lesley”, another teller, and she looks a little ill. She asks me if I’ve been up to the teller line yet. I said no, I just got here, and she makes some comment about needing the air freshener.
I get up to the teller line and the smell is worse than ever. There’s poor “Jerry”, our part time teller, looking extremely green and trying to wait on a customer who has a look of utter disgust on her face. I turn to see what the customer is looking at and I finally see Kay.
Here’s the gross part…
Kay is perched on a teller stool with her legs spread wide and a box fan on full blast positioned where it’s blowing up her skirt. She’s just barely managing to keep her skirt from going up over her head from the breeze which is polluting the whole building.
Jerry’s customer leaves, and another person walks into the building. Jerry turns to me and mouths “do something please!” So I go into the branch manager’s office and shut the door. We’ll call him “Scott”.
Scott looks up from his desk and asks if I smell something… Now in his defense he has really bad sinus problems and almost zero sense of smell. But he was getting a whiff of this and he was hearing the customers complain about the smell. I asked him if he had seen what Kay was doing. He has a one-way mirror window in his office where he can see the teller line, so he stands up to see what’s going on. He sees Kay and starts to ask what the heck she’s doing when he figures it out.
He asked how bad it really was. I still remember what I said. “Well, Jerry’s gonna suffocate up there, Lesley is hiding in the back room and Jessie is dry-heaving in the bathroom.” He said he’d take care of it. Scott asks why no one else said anything. I said I think they’re afraid of Kay.
I go about my business and Scott comes out of his office a minute later and tells Kay she’s gotta turn the fan off because it’s interfering with the phone lines. Now that sounds really lame but that office has terrible phone issues and the littlest thing will cause the phones to cut out. Kay gives Scott this dumb cow look, and Scott repeats the request to turn off the fan. So Kay shuts off the fan and storms back to the back room, flushing out Lesley in the process. Kay spent the rest of the day pouting back there, but the next day she was actually clean when she came in.
Here’s the kicker. Kay was our marketing contact. The credit union would send this nasty, dirty woman with a blue cloud of funk around her out to other companies to try to get their employees to sign up with the credit union. And they wondered why it didn’t work.
Oh. I hate people like that. That harp on every little thing.
I was leaving work Wed and a man stopped me and said: Please don’t cut down my aisle.
I looked at him funny and he repeated himself. I said: I heard you but… and he interrupted and said: good and walked away.
I work on an army depot, so I thought maybe that area was restricted. I asked my supervisor the next morning and she said: Oh, you’ve met Rod. No, the area isn’t restricted, Rod is just territorial. You may go down the aisle anytime you want. You may skip down it if you want.
A younger me might have started going down the aisle on purpose, but the more relaxed me figures that there is enough anger in the world.
There was one exceedingly strange woman in her mid-20’s who worked in my office building. (we were mostly a group of young women). She seldom spoke, kept to herself, and had no sense of humor. None. None whatsoever. Intelligent enough, good at her job (accounting, of course), not unfriendly, just very odd. She used to get a ride to work from another girl in the office (they lived in the same apartment complex) and Another Girl said Odd Girl would be waiting silently, in the back seat of her car, every morning. She never spoke unless spoken to on the way to work. Never watched TV. Never listened to popular music. She would join us for lunch on occasion, silently munching away, never speaking unless someone asked her a question, perfectly at ease. Asked, what did you do this weekend, she said poker faced, “cleaned the apartment. I clean. Constantly, all the time, all weekend.” She was married to the most flaming gay man I ever saw in my life, for years. I was surprised to hear some years later she had divorced him and found someone ELSE to marry, in a big wedding in the park! The fact that she got married twice boggles my mind, but maybe she was different outside the office? Kindred spirits? Folie au deux?
Sounds like a South African.
“The Gorgon”.
A woman of a certain age (around 65 coff), who, despite all attempts to the contrary looks every bit of it and then some - mainly because of her (lack of) personality and apparently, the same condition vis a vis basic human kindness.
Her hair is that shade of red not found in nature. She’s a pack-a-day dame, at least, and sounds like it.
She’s been with the company since Hector was a pup - literally about 35 years.
She’s never married, but was the “companion” of a married Teamster named “Manny”, who apparently had a lot of money. She has a fur coat with her monogram on the inside. She wears designer clothes, and does have some nice jewelry. “Manny” went to that great union meeting in the sky about 3 years ago, and she’s bitter beyond belief that his estate went to someone as undeserving - as his never-divorced wife and their kids. :rolleyes:
She’s a fishwife of the highest caliber, and just a nasty, back-stabbing bitch. She’s Mrs. Wiggins - without the charm or the naïveté.
She’s the dictionary personification of the term “you end up with the face you deserve”.
UT
While living in Egypt, I was the boss of an extremely scary woman for a while. She was a naturalized Australian citizen who had been born and mostly raised in South Africa. I did not hire her; she was hired by another department and when they decided she was unpleasant to work with, the big boss transferred her to my department. Thanks, boss!
Anyway. This woman wore a permanent scowl and was sullen and bitter all the time. She seemed to have an enormous reservoir of rage just waiting to boil over. There was nothing you could discuss with her without it turning into a disagreement. Her movements were angry - she couldn’t set a book on her desk, she’d slam it. She couldn’t push a chair out of the way, she’d hurl it. Since she was nearly 6 feet tall and fairly athletic, she was genuinely frightening. Once she had a fight with the poor little clerk, a gentle and wizened old man. His job was to bring us tea and snacks, which we had to pay for, and she got into a fight over how much she owed him. She ended up throwing the money on his feet, an extremely insulting gesture in the local culture.
Plus she had odd personal habits. When we had down time at work, she’d pull out a mirror and tweezers and start plucking her eyebrows at her desk. This was doubly weird because she was completely unfeminine, did not wear make-up, and seemed indifferent to her appearance. In fact Egyptians in the office talked about her manner of dress behind her back - she had a tendency to wear “tourist clothes”, i.e. cheap rayon dashikis with hieroglyphics, pyramids, and the word “EGYPT” in big letters. She’d sometimes wear them as dresses, and since she was so tall they were rather short on her. It’s inappropriate to wear revealing clothing in Egypt, so that was pretty dismaying.
After a couple of months I decided to fire her, as she was a real management problem - she would pick arguments with me about my decisions in front of the other staff I supervised, and while this didn’t cause the other staff to turn against me as a boss (they knew she was a rage-filled lunatic), it wasn’t behavior I felt like putting up with. I was prepared to deliver the news myself, but she was considered so unstable that the owner of the business did it personally with security standing by to escort her out. (And “security” in an Egyptian office where foreigners work is pretty serious stuff.)
Thankfully, by utter chance I was in the middle of moving household, so although she had previously been to my house, after she was fired she did not know where I lived. Otherwise, I would have been seriously concerned that she might have done something to me, my family, or my pets.
Her past and future are kind of interesting too. She told us that she had worked as a journalist in Palestine before coming to our office, and at one point had been severely beaten by police there. I have always wondered if she suffered a head injury that could explain her tendency to get angry constantly.
What happened to her after she left us? Well, she has an unusual name, so she’s easy to Google. For several years she pretty much vanished, but she ultimately showed up as a fanatical anti-Israeli “journalist” who writes pieces for hate-filled websites about how the Israelis are systematically poisoning Arab children, plotting to annihilate Palestine, etc.
There’s a woman that I work with that I’ve dubbed The Human Car Alarm. She whistles while she works. But it’s never anything even remotely musical. Just random long whistle noises. Like one long, long note. Did I mention how loud this whistly crap is? It’s damn loud!
I worked for a Japanese company in the US. We hired a designer who apparently needed the job, but hated the Japanese. He would work on his job keeping to himself. When the Japanese leaders would talk to him about the work, every time they turned their back he would stretch his eyes flat and try to make fun of them. Some of us saw it but the Japanese did not notice.
When he got too frustrated he would spit all over the drawings and the work and then punch out and go home.
They finally figured out he was nuts and asked me if I would lay him off. I walked over to his cubicle and he had a gun sitting on his desk. Needless to say, i was not going to do it that day.
Win.
Ah yes, MBO #15 according to my daughter who’s a former hairstylist.
(MBO=monkey butt orange)