Worst colleague you've ever worked with?

[ThoseArentSpiritFingers]

Some of the stories popping up in the leaving work early thread have got me thinking about this, and thought we could share stories here to give me something to read

Worst person I've worked with was a guy in a bar who thought it was ok to serve underagers half pints because it wasn't a full pint.

Or the person who told me on one of his first shifts that he had a major come down. I was his supervisor at the time.

Or the person who arrived for a shift steaming, dropped and smashed 4 glasses in a row and had to be taken home. (Lived nearby so didn't take too long, but still)

Any stories to share?

The Head who bullied everyone who dared to disagree with her. She would demand to do lesson observations and then deliberately find the lesson inadequate, even if it was a teacher whom OfSTED had found good or even outstanding a few weeks before. It was a really rough school and those of us who weren't one of her favourites always had the roughest classes (and it was a really academic subject I taught). Half the kids wouldn't turn up and if they did there was often a lot of disruption - mostly because the Head and my Head of Department had made it known in the school that they didn't rate me (even though I had been a Head of Year for several years by then). Believe me, the kids there knew who they could play up for because, basically, if one of the kids on one of our classes did something that in another's class would lead to exclusion, they were let off because the Head made it clear that it wasn't the kids fault, but the teachers. Several of us made formal complaints to the LA and, when I left, the Unions were heavily involved. 5 of us left and we all met with the Chair of Governors and told him everything. In the end the Head was given an ultimatum - leave or go through capability. Not fair really, as we had gone through capability ourselves for incredibly spurious reasons and it caused one hell of a lot of stress at a time when my DP was dying.

The worst was a backstabbing, shit-stirring admin person who wasn't even good at her job and would spend hours on youtube instead of doing what she was supposed to. Manager tried to get rid of her and she eventually quit but it was too late, she had already poisoned the workplace and turned people against each other.

I work with a pathological liar, she tells the most outrageous lies, totally ridiculous.
She's also a nasty, vindictive piece of work.

I was pregnant with DC1 and this withered old bitch in my office said "oh, I'm glad I never had children!".

These are AWFUL!

(though I am still giggling at the bloke who ate nothing but Trackers and wind tablets).

I once worked with with a pathological liar as well. He was the director of our department, and could literally say one thing to you in one room, then walk into a meeting with other managers, and completely say something else! He was a well practiced liar well - his expression and demeanor would never change while he was lying. It was evident that he had spent a lifetime lying to people. I think of him as the one true corporate psychopath that I have ever met.

When I was new to the department, I mistakenly told the corporate psychopath what I really thought of some of the people he had hired. He ended up putting me on a 'performance improvement program' (ie a trumped up measure so that he could get rid of me) and had me written up on various false misdemeanors. Cue lots of angst and tears on my part as I was falsely accused of things I had not done. In one instance the tears happened in a meeting with him and another manager from another department who was worried that I was so upset. I got the last laugh on him though, as I stuck it out, and in the end, they had to pay handsomely to get rid of me .

His favourite in the group was also a shitty piece of work - this arsehole would purposely ostracize all new people in the group, especially those who didn't have a similar career background. He had a reputation for being extraordinarily difficult to work with, but because his tongue was so firmly up the director's arse, no one dared do anything about him. Both of them were true nightmares to work with. It was a wake up call that I needed to stop working for shitty people - so glad I am not there any more! I now have a 'no arsehole' rule in my life .

My current ones. all of them. without exeption. come to work, at best, ...hungover and vile. at worst, still jittery and off their faces off the previous nights drugs am a 43 year old married woman working with a bunch of mainly unsupervised spoilt little brats, who couldnt give a shit about their jobs, and i cannot wait to get out of there.

And as for the owners.... again.. spoilt little rich kids who havent got a clue about running a business. they think that spunking endless amounts of money makes them sucessfull business people. i, in fact. beg to differ..

I worked with someone so pompous he would have made Gove look normal. I hated him with a burning passion, he came out with total crap about where he had been educated and places he'd worked. I have an exceptionally good memory and the snippets never quite added up.

We shared an office So one night one of my friends and i rifled through his desk happened upon a copy of his CV. all the stories he had told were total lies. But the best, funniest bit is yet to come

He had blithered on about at all the celebritites he had looked after, includi g, pricelessly Mr Meat Loaf [sic]. The fucking pompous dick.

Have read this through to remind me why I got out of large organisations 20 years ago and set up on my own. It hasn't disappointed.

Pombear that makes me feel really sick.

I worked with an awful self-important man, nearing retirement age, who had been a manager in a company that went bust and then had to take a job as a lowly admin officer like me. He thought he was better than all of us. He was always regaling us with tales of his glittering career in insurance, of his fabulous son and daughter in law who was apparently 'no oil painting' but earned a lot of money, and of his conservatory and the temperature therein that morning...he had a habit of miming along when anyone spoke to him, and if it was a woman his eyes would flick constantly up and down from their breasts to their face as he mouthed their words; it was most disconcerting. With his mouth wobbling away as he furtively eyed my boobs, it always felt like he was asking to breastfeed from me!

So sorry you had to go through that, josephine.

I worked with a teacher, who for some strange reason, filled the fridge in our office with small bottles of water. We soon learned that it was not actually water - it was vodka. My head of department had to go and collect him from the pub a few times when he hadn't turned up for class. The last straw was when he was incredibly pissed in class and fell over.He was asked to leave.

I once had another colleague take out a grievance against me because I was friends with the other woman in my office and we "left her out" of our conversations. She was barking mad and also took a grievance out against another colleague because he called her "Mrs" instead of "Ms". She left before she was pushed, thank god, she was horrible.

Unfortunately she was replaced with another mad cow who just last week threw chairs around the staff room because whilst she was up out of her chair another member of staff sat in it She literally picked up several chairs, and starting throwing them, just barely missing members of staff's heads. This same teacher had pulled chairs out from under students, shouted at them constantly, and left my class and me waiting outside,in the rain, to use the classroom, for ten minutes whilst she ranted at her class. When she eventually let them go, and let me in, she wouldn't speak to me. Very odd.

She is now on paid leave whilst her psychological assessment is being done.

GingerBeer sorry I am so late to respond.

I worked with SS at a well known publication. She is loud, snobbish, hugely self important, melodramatic and prone to fantasy. A textbook narcissist, infact.

She has one theme - woe is me (Poor me I'm so ugly, poor me my husband doesn't love me, poor me my mother doesn't speak to me, poor me my father left me, poor me my second father gave up on me, poor me I spend more than I earn and now I have no money) yet fails to deduce that she is the common denominator.

A highly toxic individual.

GB I am so sorry that you are signed off because of your toxic collegues! Awful.

Is there any way at all yu could move to another workplace?

I had a woman boss who put feminism back by decades. She really was like the woman off The Fast Show, who would turn into a simpering twat if there was a penis in the room. She drank too much too, and as we worked away a lot we often had to stay in the same hotel. She would invariably get slaughtered but insist on talking about work including setting targets etc whilst pissed.
She was probably a clever woman but let herself down so badly, and was hugely intimated by other women and tried to micromanage to compensate.

Back in the late 1990s, Shona S took part in a documentary series on childbirth. I remember it well. Her birth was filmed and her mother attended. It was only when she wrote an article a year or so moaning about the experience that I realised it was her.

In my first teaching job there were two classes in the year, and the other teacher was an older teacher who was literally waiting for retirement. She would show up in the morning and take my lesson planning folder because she never prepared anything, even try and steal any materials I had prepared. When I protested, she tried to tell me that I was 'bottom of the rung" and had to do all the lesson planning. She went to the head on several occaisions and complained about students with special needs, and they were all switchwd to my class (and the more academically able students switched to hers, or children who had parents that could be useful to her (one parent owned a car dealership and she got herself a discount on a new car, and even used the holiday house of another parent. She would put her nose in to my classroom and say she was going to the toilet, leaving me to supervise two classes, then come back twenty minutes later smelling of cigarette (banned on school premises here). And miraculously, just after exams each term she would go off sick, leaving me to mark all her classwork. She spent most of her time screaming at the students, or leaving them to work on their own while sitting at her desk. She refused to differentiate any lessons, so the students who were excelling weren't extended at all. She'd always have a doctors appointment when she was on lunch duty, so I always had to do that as well. Horrible, horrible woman.

When I was working in a call centre, I had a team leader who gave me all of her work and just sat there doing nothing but gassing, belching, eating and watching the internet. If I said anything to her she did'nt like, such as confronting her (in a very tiptoey, non aggressive way) about my caseload she would have a massive tantrum - grabbing the sides of her table and shaking it, screaming at the top of her lungs, saying really nasty things to me, getting right in my face, finger pointing etc. She turned into this "little girl" in front of the male bosses when they questioned her about anything and seemed to always side with her. It was actually an open plan office so how they did not see her behaviour is beyond me but I guess they were not very on the ball tbh. I think everyone was really intimidated by her and did'nt want to upset her. When the phone rang, she would just pick it up quickly, not answer and slam it down again to get rid of them. She would change the status of her files one way and then put them back to how they were originally to make it look like she had done more work than she had (we were judged by how many phonecalls we took and also a changed status on a case constituted a job done-the person who took the most phonecalls and had the most changed statuses won a bonus every month). She would get really arsey with me if I had to take time off work to go the dentist or have a pre natal appointment at the doctors. On a work night out she got so drunk, she started a fight with some random people at another table and ended up getting thrown out of the pub.

Since leaving, I have subsequently found out that she got fired after using a work phone to buy some weed. Obviously not a very smart thing to do in any event - particularly in a call centre where all calls are recorded - but it happened on a day the company had an auditor in from one of their clients who had been sat in another room listening to phonecalls from the floor.

Thanks for answering. Am not surprised. She admitted somewhere on line that she makes up half what she writes. Infuriating that she gets paid so much for the crap she gets printed.

No, I'm not in a position to change workplace for the moment. One day soon.

Several spring to mind.
The cokehead waiter who constantly told me a pack of lies about his life (orgies etc) and was stealing from the till and the tips jar.
A female colleague who spun an elaborate lie about her mother dying, emotionally leaching off all in the department, including spending hours talking to someone whose mother really had died, turning up on the doorstep of another colleague in the middle of the night and crying on his shoulder, taking time off work for the 'funeral'. When someone got suspicious and called her parents home the mother answered the phone. I realise that she had terrible mental health issues, but I could never look her in the eyes after that.
Most recently, a deputy head with sociopathic tendencies and a drink problem. He smoked dope with a Yr 11 pupil (in his house, not school) Took credit for my work and tried to get off with me. Foul lecherous man.

Wow, mine really can't compare!

I did have a boss who would boast about how tough she was to everyone else until she had a breakdown just after she handed in her notice she boasted to me and a few other colleagues about how she'd got so angry during another colleague's appraisal that she told him to "fuck off" like it was something to be proud of. She was constantly showing off about the (not brilliant) university she had attended many years ago and how she'd made younger colleagues faint from fear of her in the past (wtf?). She would burst into temper tantrums for doing things like signing off a form with the wrong coloured pen. Then the next moment she would be hugging you and asking you to come with her on holiday.

She'd constantly lose vital paperwork so we had to keep copying our copies of the paperwork and getting her to sign it over and over again, by which time the deadlines would usually have gone past. Her memory was seriously flawed and she usually recalled the opposite of what was originally agreed. If we referred to minutes of meetings, she would say that we were conspiring against her!

She was a weird, weird woman. We basically found it near impossible to get any work done for her.

colleague who on first day of job said they'd be starting two day later because in scotland with broken car - transpired they had no car as no licence.

Then puts everything on me.

Then takes more than their leave entitlement. Then so confident in in their 6 weeks of very bad illness (with gp notes) returns to work very sick but has their facebook page open saying that they are not truly sick so are now taking the antibiotics that they'd stockpiled from gp while not really sick.

And worse. Much worse - I think this person never did a full week in their entire company work history.

I worked for a sales manager at a mobile phone company who used to call the admin assistant 'big tits' instead of her name, gave the muslim salesman an entire postcode area database. . that mysteriously only had 200 companies on it (should have been over 20, 000) who called me into his office every month to tell me I was the worst salesrep (my results were the second best in the company), who read 'men's magazines' all day and who regularly circulated jokes about men raping other men in various power plays.

When he joined the team.. nine staff left from a team of twelve in three months and he used to burst into productive sales meetings just to shout at people in turn and try to get them to say things he could then shout at them for saying them.

He was reported after I stood up for the muslim sales person and got targeted. This meant he would stand in my way in corridors, stand behind me when I w a s closing deals by telephone and try to put me off by calling me names and saying I didn't know where my desk was when the IT guy came in and I used another desk to keep working. He falsified document s that suggested he had presented reward certificates to staff that he hadn't and followed someone out into the car park at the end of the day in order to threaten him.

HR did nothing and he kept his job. Astonishing

Worked with a girl while we both coached young children. She was a escort prostitute , would be coked out her face. Be wearing rabbit slippers and pajama bottoms when she came in to work looking like she had just been dragged through a bush. Hideous amounts of make up . Overly tight clothes do rolls of flesh would be hanging out.

Screamed hysterically when told off and pulled her hair extensions out and scratched her arms and face and would sit in cupboard and cry. Turn up late so I had to take her classes. Regularly just didn't turn up for work.

Her mother was the boss . She eventually got the sack but reinstated at another site ! [shocked]