Nice one!
I worked with a moon hoaxer once. The guy was also a 9/11 truther, believed in chemtrails, and thought that aliens/lizard people were among us. I argued with him constantly about 9/11, because it’s kind of hard to have an intelligent conversation if the phrase ‘lizard people’ comes up more than 3 times. Two or three times a week, I would debunk one of his points (I didn’t see him everyday) and he would give me another point, which I would research and debunk the next day I saw him. I’m a little embarrassed that I never thought of saying, ‘So, you think that the government is competent enough to secretly carry out the 9/11 attacks, but not competent enough to land on the moon?’ I ended up leaving before I could convince him that he was wrong, but I tried.
At a later job, there was a pair of coworkers who where completely normal. When they not together. Let’s call them ‘Bill’ (who was from East Asia) and ‘Mike’ (who was from East Europe). Bill worked in the cubicle next to mine, and once or twice a day, Mike would come over to talk about some project they were working on. As soon as the conversation would start I could count down from 15. When I hit zero the shouting would begin. There was no ramp up from normal volume to shouting, no slightly raised voices, just BAM shouting. It made me jump the first few times it happened. Both of these guys had thick accents, but it wasn’t too hard to understand them if they used normal conversational tones. When they had these shouting matches I could understand maybe three words total. Also, I’m pretty sure I heard some Russian and Mandarin in there. The weirdest thing is not that they never shout at anyone else, nor that if they were talking about anything other than work it would be calm and subdued. No, the weirdest thing is that these high-decibel, high-tempo arguments actually resolved the issue at hand. Somehow, it worked.
Not to derail the thread, but most white Zimbabweans have ancestors who were born in South Africa, so pretty easy to get citizenship. In my case my grandfather was South African.
I don’t have any odd coworkers. That must mean… gasp:eek:… I’m the odd one.
Where I used to work, we had a coworker that we called the human database. He read all the documentation so whenever we had an issue, we’d go to him and he could answer us before anyone could look it up in the documentation. We would literally race him. If someone asked a question, we’d all try to pull up the relevant docs from the company’s intranet, but we could not beat him.
He also had all of our birthdays memorized and would get us birthday cards on or near our birthday.
He was Indian. India Indian, not Native American Indian. I was never quite clear on the polytheistic nature of Hinduism, but I guess he had a personal or family god, or quite possibly, just a god that he particularly liked. He kept a picture of this god in the back pack that he always carried where he also kept his notebook, pens and pencils, and other assorted stuff.
Every time he opened his back pack, the picture of his god was right there and he would pause, say a quite little prayer and do some gesture with his hands, kind of like how Catholics will cross themselves but different. He did it every time he opened his backpack. Open the backpack, pray, pull out the notebook. Forgot the pen. Open the backpack, pray, pull out the pen. Forgot the calculator. Open the backpack, pray, pull out the calculator. I’m guessing it was an OCD thing, but still rather weird.
He was a really nice guy. Rather shy and softspoken, but that endeared him to us. But he sometime left us scratching our heads.
I’ve worked with several internationals in a lab before. It was very entertaining to watch them argue with each other because as they got more and more angry, their English (the only common language) would get worse and worse. By the time they got to shouting, we could barely understand any of it. Which goes to show you how much the other side doesn’t listen because I don’t think they understood either.
One of my co-workers is a very obnoxious woman. I think she’s obnoxious on purpose. She sits in another row and I know what she looks like and where she sits, but that’s it. She will sing the “wheem-o-what” song low, but high-pitched so it carries (I have to pop on headphones, often, to avoid getting it stuck in my head). And she frequently whistles tunelessly. And sings along to rap music that she’s listening to on her headphones (I can also hear her headphone music from 20 feet away). This is in a call center, where generally people are polite enough not to bug everyone around them by making extraneous noise. Low conversations happen on people’s break times, of course, but nothing like this. This chick is a piece of work.
I also think that loud-yelping-jesus-are-you-dying-or-something-sneezers are attention whores. I have two within earshot. Not bad, considering I have about 45 coworkers within earshot. But there is NO need to squeal when you fucking sneeze. Turn off the vocal cords, bitches! /rage
My wife is pretty much the opposite of an attention whore, always has been, and she does this. I don’t like it either, and I think she’s trying, sort of, to stop doing it.
But I do understand the rage…
My dad is a “gunshot sneezer”. He says he’s just not holding it back, but I find that hard to believe, because there’s clearly vocalization going on in there, and anyway, it’s rude. But he’s not the kind of guy to stop just because it’s kind of rude.
One place I worked had a loud sneezer. You could hear her across the whole office. She claimed she couldn’t help it. Problem is, after normal hours when she didn’t know someone else was within range, she could sneeze quite normally. Why she wanted to do the loud sneeze I have no idea.
Same company – a person with a cubicle near mine used to hum, then sing, and sometimes make weird outbursts, sometimes making animal noises (WTF?). He was a very odd person and we thought he really didn’t know he was doing it. We would holler at him to shut up and stop moo-ing and he would be really embarrassed.
Same company again – one of the several Asian women had a bad cold. She would hock up gobs of phlegm from what sounded like deep within her lungs and then spit into the trash can, only sometimes she missed the trash can. She also had no idea about covering one’s mouth when couging or sneezing and liberally sprayed others with the result. Very gross and disgusting. She was told about all of this and was surprised that anyone would find these practices offensive.
I always have a very forceful sneeze, to the point that my strongest ones have caused my chest and sides to ache. However, I rarely vocalize at all during the sneeze, and managed to stop one during a meeting at work yesterday to the point that you wouldn’t know anything was wrong if you weren’t looking at me - aside from a small noise like I swallowed hard. If you were, you’d notice that I looked worried, flinched a bit, then reached up and pinched my nose between thumb and forefinger while closing my eyes, then the swallowing sound, and me removing my hand and looking relieved.
I can’t always suppress them that much, but even when I can’t, there is no squeal or yell. Even if I’m alone and not stifling, there’s just the explosion of air. So I always feel my BS detector go off when I hear these loud-sneezers who claim they have no control.
I’ve been told that the Chinese government went on a anti-spitting campaign before the Beijing Olympics. Disgusting from the point of view of a Westerner. Is she an immigrant from there? My guess is she didn’t know any better…?
How can China be a superpower, with more than a billion people, and they have to be told about spitting? 
You?? I’m wearing a purple dress today!
That sounds like Tourette’s Syndrome to me.
On topic: I can’t think of any particularly egregious co-workers I’ve had over the years, except this one guy when I worked at McD’s in high school asked me to be the mother of his future children. He was creepy to begin with and I was all, “I’m only 15!!” :eek:
Yes, she was definitely foreign born, I believe Chinese, but am not sure if she was from some part of mainland China, Hong Kong, or Taiwan. We had a fairly large number of Asian workers from various locations, Viet Nam to Korea, and I don’t recall anyone except her being so unsanitary.
She was also a little dense about other people’s feelings. For example, the parents of one of our employees died in a plane crash. A couple of weeks later the Rude Employee commented that Bereaved Employee seemed inattentive to her work. Others responded, [golly gee] R.E., she just lost both her parents! To which R.E replied, “So what?” :smack:
I have some loud coworkers. A conversation with them usually goes like this:
Incubus: Hi Reggie!
Reggie: OH HAI INCUBUS HOW WUZ UR WEEKEND YEW SCORE SOME FINE BOOTAY?
Incubus: No, not this time, Reggie.
Now if they were hollering from across the street or in a vehicle trying to get my attention while I’m operating a vehicle this volume is acceptable. However, in an enclosed room I’m almost knocked over from the sound waves. And they always talk at the top of their lungs. Most of them are black, but the non-black friends also often talk loud (to them), but normal volume to others. I dunno if there is some cultural thing going on where talking at the top of your lungs is to show how friendly you are (its always neutral/pleasant conversation). It gets pretty annoying if I just want to read a book or take a nap between shifts at work. They are LOUD! :mad:
You should chill out and do something fun together, like go see a movie.
The best part would be having the whole theater to ourselves, since everyone else would be annoyed out of the entire building 
Similar to Regallag_The_Axe Regallag_The_Axe’s story I had two pessimistic coworkers who were fine on their own but toxic together. One would start with “I found a bug in the code”. The other would chime in with “I found a bug too! The code is rubbish!”. The pessimism feedfack loop would end with both declaring that the product was shit, the company was doomed, and we’d all be laid off.
It turns out that the product was shit (the quality wasn’t bad, it was just solving a problem that didn’t need solved), we did all get laid off, and eventually the company was doomed and was bought out.
He might have social phobia. I suffer from social phobia and find it particularly difficult greeting people and making small talk.
And it does make me the weird guy at work.