I **AM **the weird co-worker. One Hallowe’en I wore leopard-spotted spandex jeans and rollerskated around the office. I give my co-workers treat bags filled with dollar-store goodies for Valentine’s Day, Easter, Hallowe’en, and Christmas. I do all sorts of wacky things here and nobody is surprised. Right now I’m wearing a foam Statue of Liberty hat that my best-friend-at-work brought me back from his vacation to NYC.
And my co-workers wouldn’t change a thing. 
One of my last assignments was at the kind of company where the probability that any given worker (including line operators) will have some sort of engineering degree does its best to approach 1 - if it wasn’t for those pesky folks at HR, it might 
My supervisor, who was part of the Comptrolling and Process Improvement team, once told to the intern and me “isn’t people in this company strange? People in this company are strange, am I right, Nava?”
“
Not in my book… they’re pretty normal engineers, as far as I can tell.”
“But they’re all into math and spaceships and stuff like that”
“They’re engineers and this company makes plane parts. You don’t like spaceships and stuff like that?”
Later the CaPI team, minus my boss, was having coffee (the coffee machine is the Spanish equivalent of the American water cooler - we like our water flavored). The intern, whose degree is in Mechanical Engineering, asked
“what degree does Boss have anyway”
coworker (Industrial Engineer): “she’s an Organizational Engineer”
intern: “what the heck’s that?”
me (Chem E): “halfway between Business School and Engineering”
intern: “oh, a fake engineer! That explains why she’s so strange!”
We toasted the intern.
I used to work with this guy:
Crazy days.
For a really juicy (hee! hee!) tale about a co-worker, check out the thread below. Before you click, though, I am giving you fair warning: It is really, really gross. How gross on a scale of 1 - 10? About a 37.
So gross, I have put it in a spoiler box, with the thread’s original title. As all New-York-City-actors-working-as-waiters-till-they-get-their-big-break-say:
ENJOY!
Don’t you mean Bon Appetit?
I once had someone work for me who was, ahem, kind of slow on the uptake. In his performance review I spent 45 minutes explaining how he did not perform to expectations. I recounted one example after another of his deficiencies, how he failed each and every time. I discussed how our clients and his co-workers were all negative about him. I told hm what he had to do to come up to expectations or else, that his job was on the line. So after I reamed him out I asked if he understood everything that I had told him. He said yes. I then asked if he had any questions for me. Yes, he said, with that confused look that’s usually on his face: “How much is my raise?” I almost fired him on the spot.
We have a woman who wears a miniskirt and high heels EVERY SINGLE DAY.
This is in a software development office.
Your coworker is a lolcat? 
“Fine bootay” reminds me: I once had a conversation with a coworker who thought “get your freak on” just meant to party or have a good time. And then, after I told him about about the New Year’s Eve party my friends and I had:
Coworker: Hey Boss, Amanda’s telling me about how she’s got her freak on!
Boss: :dubious:
Me: So then we networked our computers together for the LAN party and… wait, what did you just say? :eek:
It was a rather awkward conversation.
Why?
Because it’s fun and it brightens up the office. If I’m going to spend 8 hours a day, 5 days a week somewhere I’m going to be happy there and do my best to make my co-workers happy.
Some of these mega-sneezers have the delusion that if they impede the sneeze in any way, the internally directed force will blow out their antrums or otherwise cause damage. Maybe your sneezer and others like her think, at least subconsciously, that their sneezes will be viewed as positive evidence of their uninhibited natures. :dubious:
I once worked with a really odd guy. Everyone had stories about him. He especially liked to corner female employees and talk about ridiculous stuff, like how he was trained as a ninja by the CIA. It was worse than conspiracy theory, it was “I know who killed JFK because I was there, man, but if I told you, they’d kill you” stuff. But I’d only guess his age to be late 40s and this was about 5 years ago, so it didn’t make sense. He wore a trenchcoat all year long, all the time, and literally had the crazy-eye. Not sure how to describe it, but his eyes were askew and he got the weirdest looks when you were talking to him.
He told one manager who had trouble with her wrists (and wore a brace) that he could heal her with his ninja healing arts. Laying on hands, and all that. She declined.
Many people felt threatened by him but I always figured he was pretty harmless. I volunteered to sit near him because he didn’t bother me, and he told me the weirdest stuff. Like one day, he’ll go:
“Good morning. Did you know you have a lemony aura?”
“Uh, no, I did not know that.”
<meaningful expression> “That’s very typical. Very… average.” <turns away>
Rather than telling him to go back to work like the rest of management, I made small talk with him a lot. The employees shunned him so I figured he was mostly just lonely, and I knew he lived alone, so I figured what the hell. Plus, it was always an interesting conversation, at least! Finally one day he brought me a bunch of bizarre books about UFOs and stuff, all with post-its and notes telling me what to read. I thanked him, returned the books a week later, and dreaded him asking me about it… but he never did. I’m not sure he remembered that he did it. He also got into this thing that the company executives were all watching and monitoring him specifically, like that there were cameras pointed at his desk and stuff, and that they communicated with the US government about him. Whenever there would be desk moves, he’d bring this up, but he never seemed very upset by it. More of a “wink wink, I get it, too much glare on the lens in this seat, right?”
This was a call center, and since he showed up to work and didn’t insult the customers, he was employed there a long time. As I recall, they finally uncovered some fraud on his part and got rid of him, some years later, but unlike so many others, he showed considerable restraint such that it took a long time for anyone to notice.