tell me about your oddest colleague?

ooh, too many to mention, but the one who stands out was the very religious girl i used to find by herself, singing and dancing and clapping out religious songs in the ladies.

used to go up a floor when i really needed to wee but couldn't bear the embarrassment of interrupting her.

Found the tuna can photo:
Beyond all reasonable thought someone frequently puts a 'tuna' can in the toilet bowl knowing that it will cause the toilet to block and overflow.
Whilst extremely childish it is defined as an act of vandalism. Anyone with information...

travail - would be too weird to think this was a common occurance - unless they moved on and tried it elsewhere of course. Did bump into a schoolfriend who knew my crazy cat lady boss from a description of her having worked with her elsewhere too. It's a small world!

Portofino - I used to work with someone who worked with Dennis Nilsen. She became a vegetarian after the story came out about him. Apparently he used to wear clip on ties - all of his normal ones had gone on strangling his victims.

some of these make me laugh outloud, esp the police one and the bagels:)

mine are pretty tame by comparison.
chairman of big public company when very young used to storm out of the boardroom during board meetings if the crisps weren't salt and vinegar. he would scream for the catering manager, who would appear and have to be shouted at and apologise for not providing the right crisps. he then would be shouted at for not removing his shoes to save the carpet.

same company- we all had to face the front in the office, like a big classroom, and the manager would sit at the back and shout, no chatting if anyone spoke.

another huge company, run by twin brothers who wouldn't employ catholics as they could 'smell them' bananas. i also got shouted at for wearing trousers to work as i wasn't a proper woman.

another plc- barking mad boss who was a drunk and turned up for work every day in glittery gold puffy tracksuit reeking of lager. She was incredibally scary and huge.. she towered over us all, and we would cower at one end of the table during meetings and when she asked us to move up we would all kick each other under the table. she once told someone they were pyschotic as they bit their nails (understandable) and reported them to hr for cannabalistic tendancies

boss in another company in the city, he was a well known director-once asked me to book him a prostitute then threatened to sack me when i refused. when i resigned he phoned me at home endlessly shouting abuse

married boss in well known household name company(!) used to receive womens underwear in his size from vv expensive brands and swear me to secrecy about it. he offered me huge bonus as i opened it by accident when it was put on my desk by mistake. i took the bonus:)

a friend of mine was obsessed with what his secretarys said about him behind his back so he purchased spy equipment and tapped their desks and phones. still doing it i think....

another co worked, very senior, and quite famous, used to tell tall stories about his exploits , ie being a passenger on a jumbo jet and being asked by the stewardess if he could help land it as the pilot was ill, he actually described how he banked the jet over london with everyone clapping, having never flown a plane before. lots of brown nosers just went wow, thats amazing:)

minicorrect, I do believe we may have worked in the same office ... surely the tuna can thing is not so common .....

Working with post and having to put the letter in the file, all the files were then given to an officer to work the post. Again, a casual worker, put the letters in the files and then put the files back in the filing range! When it was realised someone had to go through the officers range of numbers to find the files with bits of post stuck in the front!

These are getting better by the day.

I forgot the trainee (lovely chap, First in History at Oxford) who complained that the printer was faulty because it was printing out two copies of each letter (one for signature and one file copy). When I explained that the file copy was for - er - the file (?) he cheerfully admitted he'd been throwing them away for two weeks.

It suddenly became clear why so much paperwork was missing. I asked him how he thought each client file I gave him contained up to date file copies of all outgoing correspondence. "Oh I thought the secretaries did all that" he chirped!

oh someone's comment has reminded me of one....in an office where files have a 5 digit number for every individual, and we needed to find one to work an item of post. I think there was a casual worker said something like 'I know we are looking for file 12345, I haven't got that one, but I have 12346...will that not do...?' errr no, because it for a totally different person!!

I had to have dealings via phone with a man who was, thankfully, in a different branch of the company.

He seemed nice enough and we sent a few purely platonic messages on the works email system. I soon discovered he had a bit of an obsession with Austin Powers, he sent me a long 5 page austin power style script with him as the main character and me as some sexy vixen type character. Main issue was he sent it via internal post so the post room had a good read of it before it reached my desk.

oh god and once (somewhere else i worked) i was sat in the staff canteen having my lunch when some bloke walked in, got a spoon out of the drawer and STARTED EATING SPOONFULS OF INSTANT COFFEE OUT OF THE JAR. wtf was that all about? my face was exactly like this >>>

haha i have loads, will come back with more but here's one to start with to mark my place :o

when i was about 16 i worked in a chippy after school. it was basically staffed by various teenage girls and the (male) boss who must have been at least 50. it was always really hot in there and the boss used to buy us ice lollies from the shop next door to eat when it was quiet, and naive me thought "awww how nice" until one of the older girls pointed out it was always things like calippo's or ice poles, he just liked to perv at us girls licking phallic objects

he was a fucking right dirty perv anyway, he used to sell hardcore porn DVDS out the back as well.

Not so much weird, just a PITA
we had a YTS boy who always put coffee in the tea to annoy us
he did not know his alphabet so filed stuff randomly
so one day my colleagues got fed up, gaffer taped him to an office chair and wheeled him into the INCREDIBLY public car park - I'll not name it as you'd all splatter your screens

same office
colleague who stuffed letters he did not like behind the drawers in his desk till they would not close

same office
a visiting driver had two wives, one French, one italian. One day they both turned up at the office . . . . .

same office
KGB men blocking the coffee machine were a real nuisance

same office
another driver got banned from france for threatening a customs officer with an axe

MrsSchadenfreude
Were you ovulating?

"I also have a photo of a sign put up in the toilets asking the person who kept putting their empty tuna cans in the toilet to stop."

Now I've heard it all, minicorrect.

I mean - the phantom shitters on this thread have left me absolutely aghast, I've never heard of anything like that. But people who put empty tuna cans down the can ... well ... how bonkers can you get?!

DH worked at a company where somebody was doing dirty protests in the toilets, both the women's and men's. They would wipe poo on the toilet walls and door, and balance turds on the top of those big molnlycke toilet rolls so when some poor unsuspecting victim pulled the paper it would land in their hand.

They eventually caught the culprits; a married couple who happened to both work for the company.

We can only imagine what their conversation over dinner was like in the evenings...

I've got nothing to add to this thread SADLY but BY Gum it's kept me amused!

It is truly frightening how many bizarre people there are out there holding down normal jobs - this thread has made me laugh and barf on equal measure and I feel it's only right to contribute.
Have had lots of jobs in my life and met some great people and some weird ones - especially some of the passengers when I worked down the ports, but my favourite experience was working in a central London uni where it seemed like the whole department was bonkers.
There was the secretary who we were convinced was a hooker on the side as she would regale us with stories of being picked up by men in flash cars walking home from work and the gifts they would shower on her. She called in sick more often than she turned up and among her excuses was that her iron had blown up.
The IT guy was asexual but loved to openly perv over my cleavage and would boast about his sexual exploits with prostitutes (which we doubted actually happened). He wore open toe sandals with long toe nails and shorts in all seasons and lived with his mum still. He and the deaf data entry guy had a fist fight in the office one day and then wouldn't speak to each other. There were some other characters but the best was my boss who was a crazy cat lady, opera singing, predatory lesbian (she didn't fancy me though thankfully as I saw how she stalked the girls she did). She reminded me of that crazy lady that all the Americans loved on that talent show a few years ago. At our boss's birthday drinks she sang happy birthday opera stylee so his dogs howled along. But her best was taking a photo of her cats arranged on her bed after they died and having it as her PC wallpaper. She was a nightmare to work with but me and my GBF there had an absolute ball laughing at everyone and generally taking the pee as we could get away with it. We kept a bottle of rum in the cupboard, played hot or not and regularly snorted coke in the disabled toilet to make the days more fun. I also have a photo of a sign put up in the toilets asking the person who kept putting their empty tuna cans in the toilet to stop. That was a fab place to work and I still laugh about these people 8 years later.

The horrible bullying lech I had to work with in confined spaces and isolated areas. He used to squeeze past me, making sure his crotch tocuhed me, all while saying, 'Sorry, but there's just not room in here.' There was, the filthy perv.

He used to spin me all these lines too, about how I could always talk to him, even about stuff I couldn't tell my df. Then he'd tell me stories about how one of the other (female) workers had disagreed with him so he'd physically thrown her off the (parked) vehicle, more or less in the middle of nowhere. He'd also tell stories bout how popular he was at work. Clever stuff really as it made it very hard to talk to anyone else about his behaviour. Grooming, really.

As well as being horrible to be around, he wasn't easy to be with simply on a work level. If I used my initiative, he would complain about me to the boss (see next paragraph!) and I'd get told not to do whatever it was I'd done (helping a customer - very much what I was paid to do). He didn't like it if he wasn't in total command.

I complained about him but his wife was my boss so that got me nowhere. I should have gone higher but was young and scared. Instead I left and got another job where the weird ones were also kind-hearted. I still see him working sometimes, the bastard.

In my next job I worked with someone who was decidedly quirky but very sweet. She always, always parked in the same spot - even at Christmas when the car park was virtually empty and her spot was miles from the office. She also always lined up her stationery on her desk. Then she'd get up to go and get a coffee and we'd rearrange it sometimes. She'd come back and line it all up again. Bless her. She also printed out every email to read later. This took at least twice the time it could have done and meant that the pile of paper on her desk was huge. She was lovely, though.

Haven't been in my new job long enough to spot the oddities. Hey - maybe they've all identified me as the one!

psychiatric nurses/doctors are some of the oddest people I've ever met.

I don't see anyone from MNHQ posting on the thread. Or have they all name changed.

the trainee(psychiatric) doctor who used to turn up to on-call wearing a full lenght cape, top hat and cane.....whatever the time of day/night/weather.

I used to work with a bloke who had a thing about breastmilk. Creepy bastard

This will probably out me, but a very young colleague once sent an email round to all the under-30s in the office asking if we wanted to sit at the roundabout during our lunch break and share her magic mushrooms.

Most of us were too shocked to reply to the mail. Others thought she was joking and replied jokingly to the mail. She was dead serious, and really couldn't understand why it would be frowned upon to return to the office stoned. Never mind how anyone was supposed to cross the roundabout after having magic mushrooms, office time or not!

Same colleague brought a meat cleaver to the office to slice her sandwiches (I kid you not!) and kept it in the fridge sharp end facing out. I innocently reached in to get my lunch out and got my hand sliced for my troubles. Silly me, I should have checked the fridge for sharp objects