At a previous employer, my office sat directly across from the elevator. Every day the same woman would plunder her nose, inspect the result (for color and clarity?) and then lovingly lick her finger clean while waiting for the elevator. Honestly made my lunch back up on me.
Why on earth couldn’t she duck into the bathroom, like decent folks do? And use a tissue, for godsakes!
It always made me a bit queasy when I had to handle any paper I knew she had handled first.
There was a fella here who didn’t do anything irritating per se, but there was potential. In Accounting, nebbishy-looking in a chunky sort of way, mid 30’s, still lived with his mom. Went home for lunch - every day. Right before he left our company, I found out he was really into guns and shooting as a hobby. Gotta admit - freaked me out a little.
The other story that comes to mind for this thread is when I was working as a consultant. My team was just starting at a new client and we needed space to use for the duration of the project. Our client contact walked us to our spot and said “here - you can have the Naked Programmer’s old spot.” After the requisite awkward silence and “excuse me?” on my part, the story came out - a few months earlier, that space was used by IT. One morning, some folks showed up and found a colleague of theirs, apparently up all night on a manic programming binge, cheerily greeting them, yes, naked. He went on disability…and back on his meds.
One of my former bosses was easily frustrated by the little things, and would overreact in a major way. My favorite example (and a frequent occurrence): whenever his stapler jammed, he would slam it on the desk and shout, in a totally outraged tone, “What the hell is this? It’s a fucking conspiracy!” He’d blow up too if anyone touched his brass dinosaur collection.
The same boss used to keep a collection of large old-fashioned vitamin bottles on his bookshelves, each labeled with the contents. I made the mistake once of looking closely at the contents. One bottle labeled “dust bunnies” held just that; another bottle labeled “shower daisies” held what looked like soap-scum covered hairs from the bath <insert barfing smiley>… I never did look at the rest.
Another guy in the office was totally convinced that he had a major bug infestation in his office, and that invisible bugs were crawling up his legs. We later found out that he was so concerned about the bugs that he was constantly spraying Raid over every last thing in his office, including the mug he used to get coffee from the lunchroom.
Yet another guy was something of a social predator… near retirement age, and apparently bisexual, he would latch onto the new hires by doing nice things for them, and then demanding “favors” in return - up to and including asking guys to pose nude in his apartment.
All three of those guys were in the same office. Now that I think about it, I worked with a lot of… unique… people there.
I don’t have any annoying co-workers…but for some reason I LOVE reading these stories.
People absolutely fascinate me. Especially the weirdos.
You work with my mother?
I don’t have any co-workers stories along the lines of y’all’s, of course, I’m only twenty-one and haven’t had any office type jobs yet. I was an Assistant Camp Director last summer and we did have some rather odd people on staff though. One of our life guards didn’t seem to understand why it would make the other staff members in her cabin uncomfortable when she’d walk around the cabin naked. She’s sixteen, so, before you ask, no cite. Another staff member always made sure to put on her “clean crown” after she showered. It was a plastic tiera. Most of the other random stuff they did was actually pretty normal for the camp environment. Weirdos fit in well at Girl Scout Camp; that’s why they let me help run the place. 
We’ve got one lady who’s one of those people who claim to be extremely sensitive to anything that smells and isn’t shy about letting you know. She also believes that the print shop located one floor above our office is releasing toxic fumes throughout the building and causing her chronic pain syndrome. Because of this, she wears a surgical mask all day every day…except for when she’s sitting outside during her break on a large planter/seat thingie that contains the smelliest flowers ever.
We have another “extremely sensitive to fragrances” lady who sent my supervisor a long note complaining that my perfume aggravated her asthma and she couldn’t breath easily for an hour after I was at her desk for two minutes helping her with a problem. I was shocked…I don’t wear much perfume, nobody has ever complained before, and I asked another coworker, who is also very asthmatic and sensitive to perfume, if she could smell me at all (we worked in a small, enclosed office), and she said she couldn’t smell anything. Apparently she got her “severe asthma” cured somehow, because a year later, she bought two of my intensely perfumed candles at the office craft sale. And it’s not like they were packaged so that she could give them as gifts and not deal with the fragrance herself.
Then there’s the woman who is so intensely sensitive to anything and everything that might have a hint of scent, she’s been given her very own tiny office in an entirely different building far, far away.
Ooooh, and the lady who is also sensitive to scents who, upon meeting a new employee who was seated in the cubicle next to hers, demanded, “WHAT KIND OF DEODORANT ARE YOU WEARING???” in place of, “hi, nice to meet you!” and then continued on with, “OH MY GOD, YOU ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO SWITCH TO SOMETHING ELSE, YOU CANNOT USE ANY KIND OF SCENTED SHAMPOO, DEODORANT, OR ANY OTHER TOILETRY!”
And I hit a wrong button and submitted too soon, then took too long editing. :mad:
As I was saying…I used caps to illustrate the fact that she was actually yelling, rather than asking nicely.
I understand that some people are sensitive to smells, I am too lately, after quitting smoking, but if someone is THAT sensitive to everything where they have to alienate people who are simply washing their hair with regular shampoo, maybe they shouldn’t work somewhere where you’ll be sharing a room with lots of other people.
My office finally created a “fragrance free zone” where everybody who are sensitive could sit together, and there was extra ventilation, and finally there was peace. Mostly.
Well, there’s the toenail clipping guy.
I’m the weirdo. I’m the one who mutters to herself while performing a task, sings along with the radio (making sure there are no customers around first), and decorated her cubicle in Hello Kitty. :o
I work with several soccer moms, 2 or 3 IPod nuts (one of them turned me on to Jenny Lewis and Rilo Kiley), a few people who I suspect are closeted LGBT, though I would never dream of asking, a couple of very religious folks (one former supervisor of mine actually prayed the rosary on Friday afternoons in her cubicle, loud enough for others to hear), and one lady who would sometimes sing and dance in the break room when she was off her meds. She did a mean rendition of “Tea For Two.” I don’t know what happened to her. 
My current supervisor is very nice and one of the hardest-working women I’ve ever met, but she has the habit of wearing a large red rubber band around her forehead when she gets headaches.
I had a colleague whose handwriting was so bad that after a couple of hours she was absolutely unable to understand the notes she had taken. Yet she made a point of keeping all her note-books in her drawers for years.
I might say that she was also known for speaking to herself in a strange way.
That might be the cutest thing I’ve ever heard.
I myself have one co-worker who speaks as if on a quota for speech length - the simplest answer or story from her is repeated many times in succession, with slightly different wording. If I ask where the stapler is I’ll get “Oh, we keep it over there. Yeah, the stapler goes there so we can find it when things get busy. I’ll get it. It’s right over here. We keep it here so it’ll be easy to find. gives Here you go. So yeah, the stapler is kept over there usually. We used to keep it way over there but it wasn’t as easy to find when we got busy. So now it’s here…”
A very nice person otherwise. But one who literally answers all questions like that.
And this other guy has a gigantic adam’s apple that jumps and wiggles around as he talks. I know it’s not that weird, and the guy can’t really do anything about it, but it makes me shiver inwardly.
A car did careen out of control and crash through the front of my house. No one was hurt except the bathroom, which had a mini-van in it. So it’s not such an unreasonable fear, Elza B!
Stop it, you’re feeding her. 
We’ve seen some chronic destructive tendencies here too.
Someone went through all the open rooms at night and smashed all the cover plates on the light switches. I had to replace about 75 of them the next day.
One fellow would piss all over the bathroom floor and another (or maybe the same guy) would rip the motion sensors off the ceiling of the bathrooms so then the lights would never turn off automaically. Maybe he took naps in the crapper and needed the lights to stay on so he wouldn’t wake up in pitch-blackness, I dunno.
Then you have to OCD people that do the same thing every day the same way. Makes you giggle in side when you see it.
We have a “team leader” here who, distraught over not having an actual office and being forced to use a cubicle (uh - like all the OTHER team leaders) has done the following to “officize” her cube:
taken over the vacant cube adjacent to hers
put a small dorm-sized refrigerator in that cube
installed shelving in her cube
put down Pergo wood flooring in her cube - I swear to God. Her husband came in one Saturday while she was on duty & put down the what - 6x6 or whatever it is - piece of Pergo.
She’s done everything but the Les Nessman piece of masking tape on the floor at the entrance to her “office”
VCNJ~
Many years ago we had a receptionist who had some food issues. I should mention that the boss was really mean to her and one of the other girls wouldn’t shut up about weight and dieting, so it may be that’s what caused it,but…
One morning, the day after someone in the office’s birthday, she greeted me at the door by saying “so and so’s cake was stale so I threw it out!” Okay, fine, whatever.
It was a temp agency and she would bring applications to the diet girl and me before we interviewed. I got several with chocolate smears and I saw her sneaking M & M’s at her desk. But, when the sales guy came out saying he needed something sweet and I told him I thought the receptionist had some candy, she denied it vehemently.
One day she had to give the diet girl some money and accidentally brought out a candy wrapper. She slipped it up her sleeve in an amazingly smooth motion.
One day we had another birthday cake. It got smaller and smaller during the day. Then there was some frosting on the floor and, at the very end of the day it was gone. Meanwhile, it was a giant cheesecake piled with four inches of chocolate mousse and covered in ganache and more than half was left. So, she left and we found the box all flattened and hidden in a cupboard.
Soon after, she was found sleeping at her desk with her head back and her mouth open and the boss fired her. Very weird.
BTW, I don’t think she threw out that first cake.
I had one co-worker whose mother would call everyone in the department if she couldn’t get ahold of her daughter. She might have forwarded her phone to voice mail so she could work, she might have been in the bathroom, but by God, if her mom couldn’t talk to her RIGHT THEN, she was going to track her down.
We had a couple of conversations with her, and she got her mom to back off.
I strongly suspect that I am the weird coworker. So you’d have to ask around my office to find out what strange things I do.
Oh, I probably should mention that Co-Worker’s Mom called her about 20 times a day.
I remember another coworker who was flown from northern California to the Los Angeles area, to our office, for training. She took a 3 hour lunch her very first day! Came back obviously drunk, we were all too shocked to say anything the first day.
The next day, she never even came back from lunch!
This went on for a week and we’d ask our boss why she wasn’t sent packing. He said that the home office told him not to (WTF!?!) so we had to put up with her for 2 weeks. Turns out she’d go across the street to her hotel room at lunchtime, drink until she passed out then come back when she woke up. She was then sent back up north to the office she was hired for, then fired 3 weeks later for the same behavior.
I never did figure out why the company wasted so much time and money on her.
I used to have a coworker who would sing what he thought were apropriate song snippets during conversations. He thought it was funny, but it was just really, really odd.
YOU: "Bob came back from New York yesterday – "
HIM: “*Start spreadin’ the neewws . . . *”
YOU: ". . . and he said the new guy was really young – "
HIM: “We are young! Heartache to heartache we stand!”
YOU: ". . . and he’s not sure he likes working in downtown Manhattan – "
HIM: “When you’re alone and life is making you lonely you can always go – downtown!”
Bizarre.