tell me about your oddest colleague?

[StealthPolarBear]

Past or present.
We used to have one who would pick his ears and then make the coffee, it used to have bits floating in the top.

It is not exactly on topic, but after seaweedhead and FrusStefanLindman's comments I remembered one by my sister's boss who, on finding a CD room on the floor said "You need to be more careful with this stuff, now I know why we get so many computer viruses!"

Going back to the 80's, working for a Northern Police force, we used to have an Inspector who was untypically lovely, but mad as cheese. He once radio-ed into the control room, asking for one of the PC's to fill his works car with petrol, currently parked in the station yard. Off she went, trying not to panic when the car was NOT there...had it been stolen? A Police car? How embarassing....she gathered her courage, and said on the radio, "Sir, your car doesn't appear to be there". Radio on, everyone inside and outside the station hearing both parts of conversation within a 3 mile radius. He replies, "Oh", and continues to transmit 'dead air' via his radio. Another couple of "Oh! Followed by pause sequences, then "Oh......cancel that. I'm driving it. Over." Salad days of yore.....

sloggies my BIL is a police officer. On one occasion there was a visit to the station by a number of local dignitaries and the Inspector ordered a tray of sandwiches and tempting nibbles from M and S. Unfortunately because they were left unmarked in the communal fridge several of the officers decided to help themselves to a few items.

The entire station received a memo from the Inspector to say that unless the culprit owned up the entire station staff would be arrested and charged with theft. Not surprisingly everyone laughed in his face and then went round arresting each other for fictitious offences such as possession of a mini smoked salmon and cream cheese bagel.

Worked as a waitress and the three chefs would urinate out of the back door rather than taking the trouble to go to the loo. I loved that job but would never eat there.

First nightshift in newsroom. Senior journalist gave me some change to get two cokes from slot machine. I dutifully did that. He reached into bottom drawer of his desk to retrieve half bottle of vodka (in a brown paper bag) and poured a large dose into both. The odd thing was that he didn't ask me if I wanted vodka. He had to answer various calls about how to pronounce certain words and he would just make them up and mutter to me, 'How do they think I should know'.

(hope this one does not offend) Friend worked as a cleaner in Gloucester. One of the team went off for a week with personal problems and they had to reorganise the rota temporarily. The 'personal problems' began to appear in the press. The following Monday they had a meeting to organise rotas and the manager said, 'I don't think Rose will be coming back'. Understatement. It was Rose West. Apparently she was v meek and mild and work.

My worst was a woman in an open plan office who appeared to be unable to do any thing without saying it. I started to monitor her. If someone came in, she would say, 'door'. It was like a toddler learning to speak trapped in the body of a fifty year old woman. She was in love with the word, 'chitty'. If I bought a pint of milk or a 24p packet of aspirin she would talk for an hour about the receipt going in the chitty box. I think that the fact that chitty rhymed with kitty gave her some sort of comfort.

We had a kitchen porter at my first job who was the oddest person I ever came across. He claimed he was an ex male prostitute and could tell by looking at me that I had a "high clitoris". He was obsessed with horse racing

Another KP used to talk to himself all day and wore waders to work. He was mad as a box of frogs. Apparently he had been something really high powered like a barrister, his wife left him and he had a nervous breakdown.

I have worked with some very strange people, kitchen porters usually tend to be the oddest people you will ever meet.

I worked with a whole department of nutters on more than one occasion (it was a field that seemed to attract them). One in particular was always in the office by about 7.30 am, despite living miles and miles away - we were in central London and he lived somewhere like Hastings, so he must have got up practically in the middle of the night.

He was obsessed with hoarding newspapers, to the point where there was barely space for him to sit in his (very small) office. He never had lunch with anyone, but would go to the staff canteen daily and return with a tray which he would take into his newspaper-stuffed lair. However, he was paranoid about anyone seeing what he was about to eat, so would carry the tray above head height to frustrate prying eyes.

Eventually, there was an office reorganisation and he was told he had to be moved to another room, with consequent loss of the beloved newspapers. On the day he was supposed to go, security had to be called to physically drag him from the room. Everyone else huddled in their offices down the same corridor, listening aghast to his screams as his fingers were pried from the doorframe.

Believe me, he wasn't the weirdest

Great thread.

I used to work with a consultant psychiatrist who was very ecentric. He had a long grey beard and hair like dumbledore and was really skinny. He used to sit in the staff canteen everyday with a peanut butter sandwich (one slice folded in half and cut into half again) it took him the full hour to finish - each tiny bite was chewed 100 times exactly.

The poor patients

Wasn't it Dennis Nilssen that used the same pan for boiling body parts and then knocking up a chilli at work for his colleagues?

Terpsichore There are some epic weirdos on this thread but I am crying with laughter at paranoid lunch tray man.

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

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

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

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

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!

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.

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

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 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?!

MrsSchadenfreude
Were you ovulating?

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

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.

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 >>>

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.