tell me about your oddest colleague?

There was a chef I worked with when I was a waitress, who was AWFUL. Really awful. All the waitressing staff bar one muppet hated him.

He would smoke constantly (though not unusual for a chef) and hardly ever changed his chef top, so it was covered in food stains and general grossness; he stank of ash. The kitchen was a state - he hardly ever cleaned, and one day he was having a go at me for wearing nail polish (said that we'd get a massive fine if environmental health saw me wearing nail polish) so I said "and how big would the fine be if they saw your kitchen?" He was gob smacked and couldn't respond. He then got ill with lung cancer - still continued to smoke and would turn up to work with tubes in his nose and down his throat, would walk through the restaurant like this in front of customers. He then asked a waitress who was a medical student to buy some medicines for him while she was on vacation in Spain. Being a lovely, caring individual she did, and when she came back he said "ha! If you'd been caught you would have been arrested".

He was going to go off to law school apparently and train to become an employment lawyer. He now has a hotdog stand in a small town in Scotland, so achieved his ambitions I see ...

Oh god. I'm self-employed now and work at home, and this sort of thing is partly why.

The IT support who stole loads of computer equipment, wore sexist t-shirts, stank, swore, took endless sickies and then when he was finally sacked, staged a dirty protest on the office doorstep!

The utter loon who was off work with a burn on her stomach because she tried to iron her jumper while wearing it. She was mad in many, many other ways too, too many to list.

The senior manager who never did any work, dressed like a hooker (really - teetering heels, fishnets, micro-mini, birds-nest hair, tonnes of slap), pissed off all her staff yet somehow kept getting promoted by the board.

If anyone else on here worked there in the 90s, maybe you recognise them!

Team leader who had the very worst dandruff I have ever seen and would announce around 11am each day that he was "Going to wave a brown one off to the sea" and then meander off to the lav

My DSis had a workplace where while the boss was overseas , her husband came in to the office and put pressure on junior staff to lend him money. Including walking one to the ATM and standing over her while she got out quite a large sum. Turned out he had a gambling problem.

Oh I forgot one deeply unpleasant man I shared an office with once. I politely enquired whether his three children were boys or girls and he said "two girls and a boy. Took the wife three tries to get it right."

notalone the Phantom Crapper stopped abruptly. We never found out if it was someone who left or just had enough of winding everyone up. Our office had three floors of a five storey block and the toilets were in a common area by the stairs, so it could have been someone from the other offices (also they were unisex - each was an individual lockable room rather than just a cubicle) so it could have been a man or a woman.

Well, had a thread whinging discussing one last week. To recap, this colleague:

• only talks about cricket or gardening. That's all he ever talks about. Until I started working with him I had no idea there was such a thing as county cricket matches (and I was a happier person for it).
• cuts his nails at his desk in the morning
• refers to looking after his own child as "baby sitting" and
• is always right, and the best at everything, ever.

There was the guy who lied about everything. He had greenish teeth (nice), was skinny and grubby looking, but would come out with stuff like "I used to date Ashley Simpson. I dumped her as she wasn't good enough for me". or "I'm getting a knight rider car; it's being shipped from the States on a catamaran". I think he also allegedly dated Shakira at one point. I don't think so.

then your usual group of useless people, and my line manager who would have a go at us about writing Business Appropriate emails (meanwhile, I was editing her boss's emails before they went out) and who sent a NOTORIOUS email to senior individuals saying they couldn't do something because of legal reasons "so hard cheese".

Grumplestilskin - The front of some people! What happenned after?

pawsandclaws - The paranoia is awful isn't it? The thing is everyone seemed so normal there, yet one was capable of doing that. I left shortly after and never found out if they were caught. Did yours get caught?

(as sick cover for herself )

one who called in sick then turned up to same place to do an agency shift!

Notalone that's awful - with our Phantom Crapper the sense of paranoia was so bad that we started going to the loo in pairs and getting each other to sign off that we'd left it in a clean state!

One less than charming colleague used to loudly announce "off for a dump" or some such graphic expression ...... every single day. Mind you, he also used to ask every female colleague if they wanted to see his "one eyed trouser snake" - he was a real catch.

One of the secretaries in her 40s told everyone she was a virgin. She was desperate not to be, and married a man she didn't know in the hope of finally getting some action. Sadly the marriage was never consummated because he was a gay Russian ballet dancer who needed a visa. The marriage was annulled.

Where do I start.....

We used to have a phantom crapper in our office in the female toilets. This person used to smear it all over the walls and door, always in the same cubicle and always between 9am - 10am. It was so bad HR sent an email around warning us this person when caught would be sacked. They then fitted CCTV outside the toilets to monitor who was going in an out, and asked people to be vigilant. The thing is I started work at 10am and always used the toilets around the same time as I had a long bus journey to work and was always bursting for a wee on arrival. I was that worried I would be blamed that I stopped going on arrival and got a water infection as a result of holding on too long.

In the same place we had a guy who was seriously unhinged. If anyone looked at him wrong or slighted him he would hold a grudge forever and would tell anyone who would listen what he would do in revenge and that he wouldn't care if the person died. He used to go on holiday by himself and would attach himself to random groups of people without seeing anything wrong in this. The worst occasion was when he had been off work sick for ages and when he came back I asked if he was feeling better. His reply was "Don't worry I am not going to hurt anyone anymore". I still fully expect him to appear in the news one day.

There was the guy who never washed, always reeked of alcohol and was eventually sacked for downloading porn featuring dwarves.

The girl who found out she was 8 weeks pregnant and declared she was too heavy to fetch her own drinks and tried to get everyone to run round after her.

The older guy who would sleep in his car at lunchtime and would never wake up on his own. We had an informal rota to wake him up at 1pm after lunch. He would come into work regularly with a talking toy parrot on his shoulder and would dress as Santa nearer Xmas. Mad as a box of frogs that one but lovely with it

Mine.

I worked with a man who had 2 toupees. One short & 1 longer. He'd wear the shorter one & then change it for the longer one for a few weeks. And then back to the shorter one.

I also worked with some football holligans. I went nuts at them one day when they said they'd been to a rival town & followed a local girl down the street threatening to rape her. They seemed chuffed that she ran off crying. They never dared tell their vile stories in front of me again.

I also had a boss who had no idea who I was. I got her in one of those christmas present things & when she got the present from me she had to ask other people who I was.

I worked with a man who would take a 30 minute dump at 11am each day.

The woman who turned up high as a kite after an all nighter with a 'famous man', got on all fours on the md's desk and asked him to please fuck her now! All before morning tea

I assume he declined her offer?

Did she manage to keep her job?

My office manager cooked hot dogs by boiling them in the kettle. Didn't bother emptying the water and let people make coffee and try and work out why it tasted revolting.

But his worst ever joke in the office was to take a colleague's Slimfast powder that he bought in bulk and tip it in the bin. He then replaced it with "Weight Gain" body building powder and didnt tell said colleague. Only a month later when colleague couldnt work out why he was putting weight on did he actually confess.

I could go on about his antics.

Such a massive loss when he died in the Tsunami. He would still be doing these crazy things other wise.

Pawsnclaws - yes completely vile. The place I used to work were considering asking everyone for a specimen to DNA test and compare to the samples taken from the walls/floor/cupboards etc. They gave up on that idea in the end as lots of people refused, so there was really no point.

Unfortunately, no specialist cleaner employed to remove it where I worked - but that's the NHS for you!

-I have a colleague that eats chicken bones. Occasionally we'll have KFC and she'll sit and crunch her way though the entire thing, no waste at all.

She's from South Africa, maybe it's normal there? It makes me

-I used to work with an alcoholic with a penchant for getting his penis bitten by prostitutes.

Some of these are amazing

Agatha this was in London. Vile isn't it though? It was clearly deliberate and every time it happened they had to get a specialist cleaner in.

Pawsnclaws - your Phantom Crapper story - used to work with one of those too. I had assumed it was the same one as yours - at a certain NHS Trust in the Midlands. But after seeing your last post, I realise that there must be more than one in existence....

bearskinwoolies you don't happen to work in journalism do you?

The colleague who used to have his hands down his trousers most of the time - helped him think apparently.

Oh, and the female colleague who shagged the office hunk at the christmas party, after taking a load of coke, then appeared back in the bar "dripping" (eugh, sorry) spunk everywhere, slagged everyone off and eventually stumbled off to god knows where (minus her knickers).

She phoned the next day to resign.

The lurker - A man i used to work with, we had an earthquake at night and he came in to the office when i was on my own and said "Did the earth move for you last night?" WTF!

Then everytime i went to make the coffee he would come out of his office and just look at me in a creepy way. I would say he was socialy impeared but i think he was just creepy.

The colleague who used to warn us she was going to be off sick. She used to say "I've updated the bla bla file, just in case I'm not here for some reason ". Two days later? Off sick.

Happened as regular as clockwork, she was SOOO predictable. I kept dropping hints to the boss that we knew Miss X was going to be off sick, then she was, but boss either didn't notice or didn't care. Mind you, Miss X had her head so far up boss's arse.... .

I love these!

:( Paws, some people are awful.

at "come feel the warmth of my silken beaver" though.