Ever been accused of something ludicrous at work?

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Inspired by a current thread.
I was once accused , by another regional admin, of leaving to do the school run every Friday. She emailed the GM and cc'd me in. All because I wasnt avaliable on to take her call on 2 occasions.
I didn't get into trouble because -
I was office based in sight of our GM.
My DC were both in Uni at the time.
The reason I wasnt at my desk was because this was the era of manual tape computer backups and 3pm on a friday was when the secure storage came to collect them.
...and as it turned out SHE was the one sneaking out early !

We had some new software and I offered to train another department how to use it. The other department's office manager, let's call her Carol, gave me a massive bollocking for sending A, B, C and D a calendar invite, because it was a secret that D was starting a new role, and my invitation had revealed it to A, B and C. I was baffled and showed Carol the email she'd sent me, explicitly asking me to send a calendar invitation to A, B, C and D.

I didn't know any of them and wasn't aware D was new, let alone party to their confidential HR information.

I worked with Carol a couple of years later and unfortunately she made a habit of this sort of thing.

I'd just started at a new company - still there now. They had changed a process in the company due to a complaint which meant two people had to do something and not one.

I had to go and ask a bloke in another department to do this job with me. He told me he'd do it. I said no it's fine company policy says two people now - he was a bit arsey but I didn't say anything

Two days later pulled in by manager and Hr and accused of physically assaulting him. Apparently he had form for this when he thought people were being patronising to him. Was bloody awful.

Thankfully if didn't go any further but I didn't sleep for weeks and because I was new they extended my probation to investigate.

My friend used to work as a cleaner for an elderly woman. The woman constantly accused her of stealing bizarre things, cleaning products, toilet paper, food items like butter and sugar, toiletries etc. She would follow her around checking on her as she cleaned and insisted on counting the toilet rolls and things like that before she left in the evening. My friend was doing extra jobs like collecting the women’s prescriptions from the chemist’s. When she wanted to leave because of how she was being treated, the woman’s daughter begged her to stay but it just wasn’t worth it.

I was told in a review in one of my first jobs that I yawned too often. I hadn't noticed that I yawned much at all. I asked how many yawns per day were allowed but it wasn't a fixed number apparently, just less than I did.

Teaching in primary school. Accused of swearing at the children. The offending word? Sod. I explained that I had not said the word but sang it along with the children. We were practicing Christmas carols and in verse 3 was the line 'In his master's steps he trod. Where the snow lay dinted. Heat was in the very sod. Which the saint had printed'. The headmaster preferred to believe the complaining parent's version. Each day I thank the good Lord that I am out of it.

Part of my job at a care agency was training and observing staff in medication procedures and carrying out audits of medication charts on a monthly basis.

Amongst other things I was accused of over a couple of years included deliberately erasing someone’s signature on a medication chart so that they would fail in the monthly audit and lose their bonus - with the added accusation that I would get a bigger bonus by doing so (I hadn’t!);
Someone else said I was bullying them because I wouldn’t sign them as competent in medication administration when they failed the assessment carried out by a colleague - apparently I should have ignored their errors and signed them off;
another colleague who accused me of racism
because I didn’t work with her - although we covered different working areas and had different days off and weekends off so we’re rarely down to work together

Well there are some that I can’t share haha but one that I can was about taking too much sick leave. This was when DD was just over a year old and had just started nursery, and admittedly I had had quite a bit of sick leave dealing with all of the usual nursery illnesses, but the Head of HR had done a summary of all my absences showing both sick leave and annual leave (including the Christmas closedown) but counting it all as sick leave, and then proceeded to lecture me about how this level of sickness couldn’t continue. I resigned the next week, she thought it was because of our chat, but it was actually because I got a better job.

I used to work in NatWest as a cashier when there were more branches. I got hauled into to explain myself to the manager as apparently I had been heard boasting on a bus that I nicked till floats to use for my bus fare. He was pretty angry. Once I could get a word in edgeways I explained that of course I didn't nick till floats, and neither did I catch a but to work as I lived close by.

My husband was accused of singing too loudly & aggresively. He was a performing arts teacher and was demonstrating something.

I got accused of stealing a set of screwdrivers in a plastic case.

I have no idea what happened to the screwdrivers but I had recently inherited all my Dad's tools. He had been an engineer and I had more screwdrivers than I could shake a stick at.

I was the only person prepared to provide cover for the millennium because the person whose job it was to cover as a result of sheer hard luck, refused point blank to do it.

I Said I would do it provided I got double time if I got called in. £200 cash in any case and the doorknocker from a door that was being removed from the premises the following month due to building work. This was agreed ahead of time.

I took the knocker when the door was removed and was then accused of being unreasonable by one of the partners as they claimed it was valuable (it wasn't).

It took them three months to actually pay my £200 too. Tossers.

Asked how I was going to make sure my sickness didn't happen again and how I was planning to improve it

Wasn't sure how to reply given it was for a herniated disc, I developed cauda equina and needed emergency surgery

They queried if it really WAS an emergency or could I have waited. The consultant/neurosurgeon wrote a very scathing support letter which might have included "she could have waited for this operation but then would have required many adjustments as she would have been paralysed, so we did in fact consider it an emergency"

Throwing a walkie-talkie radio at my manager. I absolutely did NOT.

There's a whole backstory which I won't go into but this woman had been bullying me for a couple of days whilst I was on light duties as a result of a mental health problem. All certified by my GP.

She told me she was doing me for insubordination after I refused to attend a Back To Work interview without an advocate like a union rep or trusted colleague (as was my right). My head was in six different places at the time, I needed someone to help me remember how the interview was panning out. She said she was sending me home. I burst into tears, and as I turned to leave she asked for my radio back. I slammed the radio on the desk in frustration at me not getting the support I needed, but I NEVER threw it at her. She wrote a fake incident report too. Funnily enough, she didn't ring the police.

My union managed to appease her and my ultimate boss and get it buried but it added months to my recovery. A lesson in how NOT to handle someone with already a lot of fears, pain and sadness to deal with.

I did a 6 week teaching practice in a school of faith during my training, and needed to have time off for a gynae op. I was told by the hospital to take a week off to recover, but was told by my uni that if I took that much time off I would fail my teaching practice and therefore fail the year. So I went back the next day, still bleeding heavily and with a duvet of san pads between my legs. My class teacher asked me how I was, and I told her honestly that I was still bleeding and feeling a bit fragile. My then bf met me from the school gates at the end of the day to make sure I got home ok as he was concerned. The following morning when I arrived I was hauled into the Head's office to be told I wasn't fit to be a teacher - my class teacher had complained to her that I was living in sin (I wasn't) and had clearly had an abortion. I finished my course but never went into teaching because of that.

I was lecturing in academic theology to a mixed group including a few students who were training for ministry in the church. One chap made a formal complaint to the uni that I behaved indecently when delivering lectures. In his written statement for the inquiry which followed, he explained that he was objecting to me wearing heels and lipstick. Turned out he was one of those people who take some bits of the Bible a wee bit too literally, and thought women shouldn’t be allowed to teach men at all, really. He was suspended for making a malicious accusation and when his fiancée found out what he’d complained about, she dumped him. And the church decided to drop him from the ministry training.

I took out a grievance against a bullying manager. Unfortunately for me, bully manager was in favour at the time as the CEO's attention was on getting rid of bullying manager's manager!

There were three of us fighting our corner. We were apparently running a brothel!!!!!!! Absolutely NOT!

I was accused of distributing porn on work networks.

I was preparing a server for migration new hardware, so thought it a good opportunity to clear out old files. I was checking a file called "calendar" was a current on-call or outage list or anything, and it opened a naked woman on my screen. We were expected to report porn we found, so I dutifully did so, after deleting it, and sent a request for the backup to be deleted as well, as I didn't have enough access to do so.

Next thing I know is a disciplinary for gross misconduct. Fortunately my union rep was brilliant, pointing out it was right to investigate, but shouldn't have gone any further than that.

I'm still bitter they thought I'd be that stupid, especially as I have previously been involved with HR investigations to gather log evidence for people who actually were looking at porn at work.

It was also noticeable that I, the only woman in the department, had to go through this. I never got an apology, nor any acknowledgement of my right to work in a respectful, porn-free environment, and the main culprit had previously left the company. Plus a colleague who had used the n-word in a call at the time this was going on, in front of witnesses, just got a mild discussion with his manager not to do it again. No disciplinary for him.

All the fuss they make about things like a respectful work environment, and wanting to attract more women to work in tech... and the next day was a focus on mental health in the workplace. That felt a bit hollow, after they had unnecessarily put me through about the most stressful thing I'd had to deal with at work.

behaved indecently when delivering lectures

The mind boggles! They must have been quite disappointed when they found out what he meant 😂 Glad to hear his fiancée had some common sense.

I was suspended for personal use of the Internet. I periodically went on to a website connected to my job, and this site had a background link to PayPal. I don’t know how, but my PC connected to PayPal and remained connected even after I’d left the website.

They produced paperwork showing I’d spent over 40 hours on the PayPal front page. As you do when you’re skiving.

When I was a teenager I got my first admin job and we had a free coffee machine we maintained ourselves, if something ran out we filled it. I once filled the coffee beans up and the next day loads of people in the office were violently ill, vomiting like something from a horror film. A particularly mean older woman said she saw me putting a powder into the coffee beans, they literally called the police and everything.
After being suspended and police investigating me, turned out everyone had gotten food poisoning from a canteen chicken pasta that was out of date. The older woman faced disciplinary action for lying and I was given a pay rise, so it was worth it.

I owned a small business with 4-5 staff. After a miscarriage I had to have a D&c so couldn’t work for a couple of days. Apparently one of the staff commented that I was probably making it up so I could throw a sicky. She wasn’t the brightest spark I got rid of her not long after for theft and misuse of the telephone. She had no idea that you could get itemised phone bills.

My colleague told me her manager warned her at a performance review meeting against going drinking with me as she would get a bad reputation and lose out on opportunities (she said I could get away with it because I was on a higher bracket but she should think of her career). Both my colleague and her manager were much MUCH bigger drinkers than me but it seemed like she made an assumption that all Irish people are drunks (likely with big potato heads) and I must be because I went to the pub once a week with the (predominantly male) work crowd. When my colleague told us all what her manager had said the weekly pub crew were divided on whether she had singled me out because of my nationality or my gender (everyone agreed I was the biggest lightweight). Her boss never came to the pub with my colleagues but every Monday would come in complaining loudly that she felt rotten because of how much she drank at the weekend and telling us all her drunken antics and how much she drank. It was bizarre!

It honestly left me with a sour feeling because the colleague I drank with did drink crazy amounts in a short period (two of the pub crew I would class as problem drinkers and another two were apparently doing coke and other stuff) but now I don’t think I would have a drink at work socials again after being singled out like that. Several people approached me to make an official complaint but they all disliked this woman and I did not want the stress of it!

Oh the other incredibly bizarre thing I overheard in an office (over 15 years ago) was a colleague telling the CEO of the company I worked for that I was trying to end her marriage. I was in charge of scheduling shift work where I would ask people to let me know their availability by Monday for the following week and if there were any changes after that point to swap shifts among themselves and inform me of changes - I got an email from this woman on a Sunday night saying she couldn’t work x day - I emailed back and said “find someone to swap and let me know any changes” (lots of back and forth with her trying to make me sort it). Then on the Monday I overheard her CRYING to the CEO that I was trying to break up her marriage and had deliberately scheduled her to work when her husband was free. She heavily implied I was pursuing her husband (hence why I was free when he was free) - I had never met her husband! The woman was very manipulative, there were many more lies and manipulations - she would also link arms and stroke arms of board members 40 years older than her, gazing at them like they were geniuses and giggling at their jokes. It was disturbing and creepy - she is now incredibly successful - so yes, sometimes shit does float to the top!

Using the wrong toilets. How dare I want to use the nice ones upstairs that actually flush and I don’t need to walk in to poop and blood still in the toilet bowl each time I need to attend to a call of nature.

This was fairly recent and I can’t get over the stupidity. It honestly sounds like a made up parody.

I got called in to HR about a “racial micro aggression”. Apparently I accosted a random Chinese looking woman in the hallway outside our office and demanded to know what Chinese New Year animal it is in 2025.

What actually happened is that I ran into a very old friend who is of Chinese heritage. She runs our small city’s annual Chinese New Year festival and I asked how it was going. She said it was going really well and was very happy it wasn’t as crazy as last year‘s Chinese New Year festival, being the year of the dragon. I asked what this year is Chinese New Year animal was and she told me it is the snake.

I offered to call my friend right then in the HR office and ask her whether I committed a microaggression or if we were two old friends having a perfectly normal conversation. The matter ended there. I know who would have complained. He is an absolutely obnoxious mid twenties bearded woke bro. Ricky Gervais could make a TV show based on him but it would be too crazy to be believed.