tell me about your oddest colleague?

The post much higher up about the guy who carried a photo of Gillian Anderson reminded me of my old colleague.

It was my first job and this man was 40 years my senior, and we were both entry-level admin assistants. He'd had an 'important' job before he retired, and then his wife made him go back to work as he was getting under her feet. He always wore a suit, even though it was a closed office and everyone else was in jeans - but he also carried this briefcase. Inside he kept his sandwiches and a framed photograph of his friend's house. At every opportunity he would take out this photo and tell us all that his friend was a millionaire, and had this massive house. He'd go on and on about this bloody friend.

A couple of years ago this friend shot dead his entire family and burned that house to the ground because he was having money trouble, couldn't believe it when it was all over the news. Often wonder if old colleague still has that photo in his briefcase

Woman in her 30's, self announced virgin. Spent all day sharing info on her personal life, including the fact her and her Dad shared a room whilst Mum slept elsewhere and everyone got naked in the evening. She would also spend at least 8 hours a day in S&M internet chat rooms and tell us all what various loons had got her to do over webcams. One day she returned from lunch clutching a sandwich bag full of pubes which she proudly displayed, having been instructed to shave by one of her chatting loons. When I dared object, she reported me to management for bullying her.
Eventually, she met someone in said chatting that was apparently THE ONE. In the space of a month he had flown in from the US and they got married. On his first night, he was discovered sitting on top of a toilet with the lid down, having a crap - claimed he didn't know how English toilets worked. Last I heard, they still living with her parents, he had taken to naked nights with enthusiasm and they were trying for a baby.

I used to work with a guy who would turn the lights off and make all his students sit in the floor and chant. They were supposed to be studying the history of an academic discipline.

In the 80's I worked in the head office of a Major high Street retailer. At the time we used to get breakfast, morning coffee, lunch, afternoon tea and 'high tea' after work all for £12 per month taken directly from our wages

I worked with a guy who had such a large mortgage that he had so little left after paying it he used to have all his meals there and on a Friday would take sandwiches for the rest of the weekend away with him from 'high tea'. Nobody minded.

NeopremeMermaid when I was newly pregnant I used to feel like eating rocket out of the bag like a bag of crisps. (But I never did and I have never been anyone's boss)

There was the one who lived in a house filled with floor to ceiling newspapers. Literally. And there was the one whose leg moved of its own accord. The more excited he became, the more it jiggled. There was one who looked like Basil Fawlty and wore a bow tie as if it were not strange. There was another who slept in his clothes in his office.

HandsOffOurLand I think you might work where I work, was the man who slept in his office 'entertaining' students in there too?

My others over the years are:

The girl who always ate her lunch in the toilet. With hindsight I do wonder if she might have had issues.

Once worked for a very posh management consultancy where the board members would take all the new lowly admin staff out for the evening as a 'welcome to the company' night, then all pick one each to go back to their hotel with them. I was 17 but luckily had enough sense to tell them to get stuffed. One of the others ended up married to hers some years later. I always wondered what she was thinking when he went out with work and stayed out overnight.

There are more...

So many.

Bosses:

1. Restaurant manager sat in her office doing lines of coke during a major event.
2. Director got so drunk at a client dinner that he passed out and fell face-first into his food.
3. Current manager eats rocket from a bag like it's crisps.

Colleagues:

1. Student who sat in seminars picking bits off himself (skin, scabs, spots, dandruff) and eating them. Best Worst was when he blew his nose in a tissue then gnawed the contents out and ate them.
2. DH (scientist) works with a very smelly guy. One day, they were testing a thermo-imaging camera in the office and the smelly guy disappeared on it completely, apart from his eyes. He was so sweaty that his skin was too cool to show up.

You've just reminded me about our mystery Christian! One day we started finding Christian texts in the form of leaflets in some of the books - Harry Potter and such. Over the next few months it started getting worse with leaflets left all over the shop and very visible. Some of them started to upset some of our customers but we couldn't figure out who was leaving them. We did a sweep every 30 mins at its worst and as soon as we took them all down they almost instantly reappeared. After watching hours of CCTV to try to work out who it was the manager realised it was actually a member of staff. Bizarrely he was actually quite vocally atheist. He stopped after he was confronted but never explained it...

I thought I'd worked with a few rather odd people... then I read this thread and my somewhat odd former colleagues have started to look barely quirky by comparison to some of these horrors.

So I can only think of one remotely worthy candidate from my working past.

Office job. Lots of case files being passed about.

My heart used to sink if I looked on the system and saw J. Jones* had the file I wanted. He wasn't a bad guy and would helpfully produce the desired file quite swiftly, but he had the most awful faceful of acne and pimples you ever saw in your life, which was not a problem in itself... but he had a bad tendency to fiddle with his face and pop squirty juicy pustules at his desk.

So any files obtained from him inevitably had spatters of pus and smears of blood on them and his fingernails always had a lovely rusty bloody tinge to them from all the picking and squeezing he did [boak]

He also had a tendency to drink too much and would often come back after lunch quite boisterous and inclined to be hilariously borderline rude on the phone to arsey clients who usually deserved it, the slimy twatwaffles.

*name changed to protect the guilty.

Had many but these were the most interesting:
This strange woman (her father had been a teacher at my school - small world ! he was weird. Explains it). Who was in her late 30's (looked/dressed like a 50 year old), was determined to find a partner - dragged everyone out to a cheap student bar frequented by 18 year olds ! I had stopped going there years before and felt old there, yet was about 23 at the time. I don't think she found anyone there.

• She tried to come onto my boyfriend at the work Xmas party - in front of everyone. He was terrified ! it was soooo funny. He didn't come to anymore parties after that.
• Was convinced people were stealing off her - got back from lunch one day to find her searching everybody's rubbish bins (?). Then she sent an email to the whole building (about 500 people including MD, CEO, CFO etc) accusing someone of stealing her museli bar and that she hoped whoever took it 'choked'. Lovely.
• My boss at the time was psycho - (he later got asked to leave) he used to ring bank, insurance etc places and yell at them down the phone in full view of everyone (open plan workplace). It was awful. His name was Christopher, if anyone called him 'Chris' watch out ! one poor person he was ringing made the mistake of doing so and he went off at them yelling 'did i give you permission to call me Chris ? my name is Christopher ! I don't like your attitude ! I want to speak to your manager ! ' was so awful

Slug, I would have thought that a fundamentalist type would not work in cutting-edge genetics for anti-evolutionary reasons.

Our office had a chap who set up a "Christian Group", bombarded everyone with emails and posters about lunch-time talks and films such like "How to have a Christian marriage" etc.

I made a spoof "pagan group" poster at home - inviting everyone to dance at dawn in the nude on midsummers, bring pan-pipes etc, but I was too chicken to pin it up amongst his posters!

In the end he gave up as nobody went to his meetings.

I used to work in an office of weirdos interesting characters.

• the one in his 50s living at home with his mum with long finger nails, terrible dandruff and evil breath (boss told us to turn away, take a deep breath and then put our hand over our noses)

• the red faced, overweight, old soak who went on frequent visits to Amsterdam

• the really quite sweet one but who was having an affair with his childhood babysitter (he was single, she was married and her husband use to know they sat in the car outside their house)

• the one who used to pretend to be on the phone but was actually sleeping

• the slightly creepy one who (will be outing myself now possibly!) used to sing 'your as cold as ice' in my vicinity because I didn't like him touching me.

Oh we had a lady who'd bring her dog with her to work.
When it got very old it crapped all over the carpet, and she cleaned it up using nothing other than paper towels and water. The place absolutely stank and we complained but management did nothing about it, and important customers were coming in and out for meetings all the time

I worked in an office with a lady who had a bad back. For a while she brought in a hotwater bottle. On about the third day I saw her empty it into our kettle, heat up the water & re-fill it. The kitchen was miles away so this was the water we were using for making coffee!

I am crying laughing at this thread.

I worked in bar for a while. The manager clearly had a drink problem. His drinks of choice were carlsberg larger and vodka. He would often hold 'stay behinds' for regulars when he would get absolutely hammered. The Brewery apparently did regular stock takes and low and behold we were always down on carlsberg and vodka. So, he would ask all staff into a meeting on a Sunday morning and tell us that heads would roll if he found out who was drinking the stock away! It was strange, like nobody would mention the elephant in the room. I was only 18 and found the whole thing ironically amusing.

When I was a trainee solicitor there was this male lawyer who kept 3 dogs that he would show at Crufts etc. He loved his dogs. When 1 of them sadly died he thought the others would be grieving so he brought them in the office, sat them with the secretaries who were given the job of walking them through a very busy business district of the city at lunchtime. It was quite a sweet if not liberty taking thought really, but walking into this busy secretarial office and seeing these two terrier dogs lolling on the floor really made me giggle. This went on for about a month until some of the partners had 'a word'.

LimburgseViaai - you just reminded me of the colleague who gave one of the men in our office a daily supply of what he thought were hay fever tablets and which turned out to be contraceptive pills.

When he finally realised she muttered something about her fiance being away and them having a placebo affect on him.

The couple that had been having an affair for 20yrs, He was divorced and she was married to a nasty bully of a man, but neither was brave enough to get together properly. If you happened to share the staffroom the same time as them it was like watching nine and a half weeks-they fed each other desserts .

Another couple who had a brief affair (it was rampant at our place for a while) he used to play Kenny Rodgers loudly whille wooing her. She was delighted when he said he was taking her out for a romantic meal one night, went and bought a beautiful evening dress, had her hair done. He took her to a little chef on the motorway. They are no longer an item I hear!

The very prudish spinster of 60 something boss, who wore american tan tights, knitted cardis and who did nothing more than go to church and enjoy walking holidays, had a visit from strapping 6 foot Jamaican toy boy who announced in front of all of us, much to her utter shame, that he had enjoyed their break together and was happy to carry on where they left off

I worked in US law firms for many years and all these stories are from there:

• One secretary used to go around the corner to a bar at lunch, smoke cigars and drink and come back to the office trashed and stinking of cigar smoke

• During the anthrax scares, someone left a pile of white powder on one of the attys. desk. The police came out and everything to investigate. It turns out it was another atty and he got in huge problems with the partners!

• At Xmas, one of the attys was giving out smoked hams to several people. I guess his scertary took offense to this gift and took the whole ham and put ot back on his desk. I still can't figure out why she disliked it so much, I thought it was a lovely gift, and perfect for the holidays. And no, she wasn't muslim.

• My boss was a notorious cheapskate, even though he is worth millions. He gets unwanted holiday presents and regifts them to the "little people". He did this to his boss's assistant, with an new ipod he didn't want. Nice gift right? When she opened it, the ipod was clearly engraved with his name. Ooops!

Oh I forgot one!! I think it is on a par with the phantom crappers!!

We had women/woman leaving soiled sanitary towels behind the pipes on the loos! Sometimes when I went in a cubicle, I would get a whiff of 'that' smell that there is with towels etc and would be in a panic checking for them. Thankfully never found one!

Paws - Aaah! That might explain it!

I used to work night shifts in a computer room (in pre-desktop days when computers were huge and operated by a team of about 6) and one guy used to sing filthy songs at the top of his voice half the night. He was also prone to pick me up and turn me upside down to see what colour pants I was wearing. One summer night I wore a skirt with nothing underneath... It was the first time any one of us had seem him blush... Stopped him doing it too.

Portofino I used to do that every day (the pushchair bit, not wearing the same clothes and smelling). I used to drop ds1 and ds2 at nursery then walk home with the (double) pushchair - then do the whole thing in reverse picking them up. The nursery wasn't able to store the pushchair during the day.

I used to get the same comments day in day out - "haven't you forgotten something?"! I realise it looked a bit strange but it was the only way to get them there and back!

Oh and at the beginning of the week I saw a reasonably, mature woman - must be 60s and white haired - pushing an empty pushchair through reception. I figured maybe she had bought said item from a colleague for the grandkids. The next day I saw her AGAIN with it. Well maybe she was bringing it back....??? The next day, yep, I saw her again strolling through the lobby....I double checked for small children, but nope, empty still. I am a bit