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.

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!!

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!

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!

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

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:)

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.

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!

Good point MardyBra....MNHQ, we want some input please!

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.

I don't know which ex colleague it was but one of them used to smear shit all over the toilet Walls.

Blimey - so many weirdos!

Mine would have to be the alcoholic, middle aged lady with an eating disorder. We all felt very sorry for her but she would get very aggresssive with anyone who tried to help her so we all steered clear as best we could.

She used to bring in containers of random foot items - such as boiled mince and lettuce or cottage cheese and fiish - and heat it up in the microwave making the communal kitchen absolutely honk. No one wanted to go near her desk due to the stink of rancid butter, yoghurt and pate that she kept in her drawer.

She was also a smoker and back in those days the smoking room was also the teapoint. We would go in regularly to find her asleep with a lit fag in her hand. How she didn't burn herself to death or set the building on fire I have no idea.

What was worse though was when she vomited in the toilets. Her drink was red wine that she kept in a large coke bottle. You only had to open the toilet door to know she'd been in. The stink of alcoholic vomit hit you like a brick wall and there was bright pink puke all over the seat and the floor. The cleaners ended up refusing to clean up after her and a few disgruntled staff put up some fairly abusive notices on the toilet door.

Her managers had all been too chicken to deal with it until a friend of mine was promoted over her. He was desperate to sort it as he could see how it was affecting all her colleagues who had to cover her work. After their first 'chat' she flounced out and went off sick with stress. About two months later a woman sounding suspiciously like her rang in to report that our member of staff had died suddenly and would we mind awfully paying her death in service payment as soon as possible. For some reason the death certificate just wasn't available due to a 'cock up at the coroner's office.' Needless to say no such payment was made and nothing more was heard. And I last saw my former colleague in a newspaper photo about a year ago receiving an award for her local Neighbourhood Watch Group. About five years after her sudden death!

Mrs S, as I recall (reading) they were all in total shock as Dennis was so quiet and unnassuming. Some people are just SO strange. There are some shockers on here without even taking the serial killers into account!

You know what the really worrying thing is? These are people that someone, somewhere, way back in the distant past, selected ovr a load of other people to give a job to :o

I too worked with someone who had worked with Dennis Nilsen when based in London. He remembered him bringing in curries to share when they had office parties. My former colleague never had any as he was already a veggie but even now he cannot eat veg curry because of the thought of what might have been in it! He does say that Dennis always seemed very pleasant though....

Yep. I don't think even Peter Sutcliffe gave his boss any cause for concern!

I had a colleague who would always complain that she had overslept a migraine, so would be in late. She'd dramatically shuffle in wearing tiny dark glasses and ask if we could turn the lights off - in a basement office.

She also once argued in a staff meeting that she should be given a travel subsidy as she lived in the home counties whereas we all lived in London, so it wasn't fair that her travel costs were higher. We told her that she knew where the office was when she first applied for the job. This did not seem to compute for her.

At another job, I sat near an irritating woman who never lifted her feet when she walked (instant death penalty when I rule the world) and once merrily announced to us all that she'd caught crabs from a waiter while she was on holiday, so wasn't able to wear any knickers that week

And finally, there was the woman who would spend hours on the phone to her sister on the other side of the world. She would mutter away in French in a very low tone of voice that you could hear across the whole office and would drive me you absolutely mental. Why the managers didn't do anything about it I will never understand.

I shared an office with a man who played his answering machine messages over and over and over again, at top volume, all day long. He literally sat there with his finger on the Playback button of his answering machine, while getting on with his work on the computer with the other hand. He only had one or two messages on the average day too. He had an equally socially skilled PhD student who he supervised who used to appear a couple of times a week, and they used to sit on chairs a metre apart and SHOUT INCREDIBLY LOUDLY at each other. I seethed quietly and then had the wonderful idea of asking our joint line manager to pop in for meetings with me, and she put up with the background din for about 30 seconds before saying, "John, could you please BLOODY STOP PLAYING THAT ANSWERING MACHINE MESSAGE? I've now heard it so many times that I have learnt it off by heart, surely you must have?". He stopped until she'd gone, then he was off again. Arrrgggghhh!

I was in the office with him when 9/11 happened, and as I gasped and turned my computer screen round to try and share the incredible shock of the Twin Towers collapsing with the only other human being in my immediate vicinity, he said that he really wasn't interested, and got back to playing his answering machine messages to himself. Freak.

Some of these stories are just especially the hundreds of phantom shitters all over the UK. Who knew it was such an epidemic?

My weirdest colleagues are:

1. The 50 year old man who still lives with his parents and has never had a girlfriend. He gets up at 5.30am every morning to get to work for 8.30am, he has to have a bath every morning before work because thinks showers are a stupid foreign invention. He leaves work at 16.38 every day without fail. I actually started monitoring how many seconds after 16.38 he left, and it was usually between 20 and 30 seconds (I plotted the results on a chart and everything) He eats the same food on each day, so Monday is pie and chips, Tuesday is jacket potatoes etc. He freaks out if you go into the (very small) kitchen at work at the same time as him, even saying to me that he thought our boss (a 60 year old happily married man with 5 grown up children) was gay because "what kind of man would go into such a small room with another man? It's not natural, he was trying to brush up against me". I like to go into the kitchen when he is there, just to freak him out, he freezes and tries to flatten himself against the wall. He got wise to me though, and started making his tea in the kitchen doorway, so he could jump out of the kitchen when he heard my footsteps across the office.

1. The thief who was booking herself down for 12 hours overtime every saturday and sunday for months. When she eventually got found out she handed her notice in quickly before she could be fired, and told her partner and father (who both worked at the same place) that the company had set her up. We later read about her in the local newspaper, she'd had a job at Boots and had been caught smuggling money out of the tills in her knickers.

1. The elderly doorman at a building i was temping at was a real 'salt of the earth' character. He told me that he used to drive HGV's in the middle east, and told me that he'd been driving in Iran/ Saudi Arabia, when he'd accidentally forced a car off the road, into the desert and the car had burst into flames. His exact words "Obviously they were dead, and i didn't want to get into trouble so i just hurrieed up to finish my delivery. Do you know in those countries they'd expect you to pay compensation to the family of the person you'd killed?"

My old boss from years ago who used to use the circular saw at work to cut up his huge blocks of dope. He was never short of offers to clean up the workshop on those days. He'd get employees to take cups of tea to the drug squad who would park obviously hide out in the car park.

He was a very laid back boss and he didn't sack me when I turned up from dinner break on my 2nd day of work totally ratfaced with a glass of brandy in my hand on the arm of his friend who was more than twice my age.

I just had a horrible thought.

Is there, anywhere on the thread, someone saying they used to work with a woman who occasionally called her own answer machine and left a message for the dog, something along the lines of "Good dog Stinky, good dog. Sit...sit...sit...good girl! Alright then bye."

That was me! I swear I was only doing it occasionally, and only to make DH laugh on days when I knew he would be home before me. The messages played out loud as they were recorded, so the dog could hear me, but it really was just for the look I knew would be on my DH's face as he played it back later on.

It's only just occurred to me that colleagues were listening too.

Would it be too strange to ring my ex-colleagues and explain this?

The ex army guy who used to write everything down in his journals. He took copious notes and if you said anything, he'd go ahhhh, but on x date and y time you actually said abc. Even though he'd been a civilian far longer than in the service he was very institutionalized. He kept all his gear in an army duffel bag. Every day his work outfit was black suit, white shirt, black tie. And off duty, black trousers and black fisherman jumper*

(I know this as We worked on a construction site and lived in camp with him)

When asked by work to learn he language of the country we were in, he said, I only speak one language and I speak it correctly, then proceeded to lecture the language tutor about the language he had no interest in learning but seemed to know all about.

He intimated that he was a C I a agent. Went ballistic at me, falsely accusing me of sending an email from his computer when he left it unlocked. (it was iT doing a security check).

Sadly I was the only one who stood up to him. He was a weird f&@ker and the reason I quit my job, he quit later the same day, the Prick.

PrivateBenjamin, I expect your co-worker is going to add to this thread in due course:

I work with this woman who is obsessed with me. Ob. Sessed. She logs my movements and plots my departure time on a spreadsheet. How bonkers is that? She watches what I eat - I bet she could tell you what i had for lunch every day this week!

I try and avoid her, but we only have a tiny kitchen at work and every time I try and make a cup of tea or something she comes in as well, just so she can brush against me. I've made pointed comments about how small the kitchen is, I've been really obvious about not wanting her there (tbh it's got to the stage where I flatten myself against the wall to try and avoid contact), these days I make my tea in the doorway so I can make my escape.

Also at DH's work: they discovered a hole in the wall of the women's toilets. On further investigation they found a little cubby hole behind the wall containing porn magazines and sex toys.

After some sort of sting operation they caught the culprit: one of the senior, women managers.

Well.............there was the one who got so blindingly drunk at Christmas dos and get up to such mischief - from snogging the waiter at a Greek restaurant to hijacking a taxi (taxi driver got out to get sth from a shop, she jumped into the driving seat and drove off with another colleague in the back) - that she chose to make a formal apology to us at a meeting ......

There was this guy who called in sick once because he had 'jet lag' but the funny part is that he just got back from Malaga

Another colleague was always having a close relative die, hence needing to go to a funeral at last minute. We once counted his grandmother died at least 6 times