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.

My boss in a previous organisation was a raving alcoholic - swigging vodka from a lemonade bottle at 10.00am in the morning. We'd be sitting in a client meeting and he'd suddenly get up, leave the room and turn the lights out leaving us sitting in the dark, or he'd aim for the door, miss and walk into the wall.

He was completely useless. Everything we'd done he'd done bigger and better or all of a sudden you'd find him recounting a story that you'd told him, but he was in the starring role.

I've no idea how he got the job - the rumour was that he had something on the Chief Exec. The leeway he got was quite incredible, but once the Chief Exec had left his luck ran out, but it took him being done for drunk driving (again) to get him.

Oh yes and lord knows how he got the job in the first place - his CV had huge gaps in it, but apparently he couldn't tell anybody what he was doing because he'd signed the Official Secrets Act and had been doing stuff for 'the Government'. He even phoned in a few times to say that he wouldn't be in the office because he'd been summoned to see somebody in London, but couldn't discuss it

I am really loving the stories here, and very grateful to not have (yet) encountered a Phantom Shitter....
Had a colleague who was a narcoleptic and who would drop off to sleep at inopportune moments. That wasn't so bad but very occasionally he would wake up with a blood-curdling scream! (think Russell Brand in Bedtime Stories.)
That was bearable. I just wish he hadn't first informed me of his condition when getting behind the wheel of a car I was the passenger in, with the comment "if I start to nod off, just prod me before we veer into the central reservation"

Phantom shitters!!!!!! We had one who used to do neat little pellet poos arranged in a circle all around the toilet seat. For clarity (in case this is the same individual travelling from place to place) our shitter was active in an office on Jewry Lane 2000-2002 (women's toilets)

I really need to know why people do this.

A man with a twitching problem in his crotch. He'd sit there talking to you, doing pelvic thrusts. it was awful. A colleague had this story about him, where he had had to be driven by him. In order to block out the air-humping, he pretended to be asleep, but he could still hear it, as the thruster's thigh made contact with the car keys every time.

A really awful woman who had many idiosyncrasies. The funniest one was that she kept a Vittel bottle full of water in the loo cubicle, with "Do not remove" written on it in eyeliner. I'd seen her put it there, and three of us spent several afternoons winding her up by going on about the strange bottle in the loo, and whether we should call bomb disposal. She never admitted what it was, but after each pisstake session, regular as clockwork, she'd check it was still there. I think it might have been for swooshing out a mooncup.

A man who farted, constantly. Every time he shifted in his chair, or moved around. He never ever acknowledged it or apologised. I suspect he couldn't help it, but he should have at least apologised. They were smelly farts as well.

My offerings;

1. The one who thought that she was being poisoned by radiation so used to put tin foil at the windows of the office to deter the "death rays". She also believed that another colleague was a ITN newsreader. She also maintained that all her clothers were high end designer but that someone had cut out all the labels whilst they were hanging in her wardrobe.

1. The one who wore the same clothes everyday - a navy/white polka dot dress with no spots left on the patch over the bum

1. The one that made a pan of stew on Sunday, kept it on the stove and rang her husband every lunch time to add another bizarre ingredient (lettuce, curry powder, eggs) to make it go further.

1. The one who permanently smelled of TCP and had his parent in a vat of acid in the cellar

1. a guy who used to stratch his bum and then try and sneakily sniff his finger(he would pose as if he was carefully thinking with his finger under his nose)

2. guy who used to pick bits out of his beard and save them in his keyboard

3. woman who used to go for a kip under her desk at lunch time

4. couple who used to go for a shag in the cleaning disabled toilet at lunchtime..we soon stopped that one by giving them a round af applause hen they came out...

5. woman who had THE noisiest laugh you could hear her on the floor below

6. Woman I work with now has a not for the cleaner WARNING her not to touch her desk or else!! ...I like to go and mix it up now and again :)

7. Guy ho used to site and eat chopped up raw cabbage for his lunch EVERY DAY!!!

8. Lady in reception reckoned she was a millionaire (in her head)

I could go on.........

DH had a colleague who farted constantly. Apparently his office was so fugged up the smell would drift ominously down the corridor.

He also used to lift his cheeks to let rip. DH said they would be in meetings and this guy would lean towards him as if to say something .... and then almost blow the person on the other side of him off their chair.

He also used to leave his wet, fart-filled swimming trunks to dry hanging inside out in his office. DH showed me once - the net lining of them was blown full of gaping holes!

ooh yes I used to work for a bum scratcher! Had forgotten that one

Oh I worked somewhere with a millionaire receptionist. Long time ago though, would have been mid to late '90's.

oh yuk at a bum scratcher/sniffer!

know of 2 people that do the most ridiucously loud sneezes, no way is that natural. Attention seeking sods!

We were all looking at a colleagues new baby pics in an album,i turned the page to be greeted with a pic of his naked wife legs akimbo baby at her massive swinging breast and umbilical cord protruding from her bleeding fanjo ugh,we hardly knew him and had never met her.He showed everyone even the students and patients.To this day ive never known how i kept a straight face.

One of the Partners of the company I worked for was a real perv. He could not have a conversation with a female member of staff without being salacious. He would email totally "wrong" jokes (and I consider myself pretty open minded ). He looked at porn on the internet and had magazines in his desk. He was the only one who has his door closed to his office and had his secretary ring through before anyone was allowed in.

When he was finally sacked left, there were some very dubious spunk stains all over the carpet under his desk. He was a wanker in every sense of the word

In the early 90s I worked for a now-defunct stationery company, it was very much like Wernham Hogg in The Office.

I was in the accounts department and our boss, Roy, was a bit peculiar.

He had many quirks but his favourite trick was asking us to fetch him a particular invoice from the filing cabinet. Unbeknown to us, he'd already removed the invoice he wanted, so in the end everyone in the department would have hunted through the filing cabinet to no purpose. Then we'd tell him we couldn't find it, so he would go into the cabinet himself (sneakily returning the missing invoice) and then announce "You lot are hopeless, it's been here all along." He was thwarted in the end because eventually we caught him at it.

He once asked me to sort out his desk drawer and I found a pair of pants and a load of glossy black and white photos of Japanese rope bondage. I always wondered if I he'd forgotten they were in there, or if I was meant to find them.

We had a phantom shitter a while back where I work now. But it was one of the customers...

on of my colleagues who finding out i was pregnant asked if he could have my placenta so he could eat it

I worked with a total fantasist. She was, she told us, a qualified pilot, and regularly flew sick children on charity trips. One weekend she took children horseriding with William Shatner in America and another time she went to Switzerland. She brought us Swiss chocolate back from that one, Swiss chocolate that was also coincidentally sold in the shop next to the office. She lived a fair bit away from the office but was occasionally allowed to fly her plane from her local military airfield to the city airport nearest our office. That really cut down her commute.

There were so many bonkers folk, we never had a dull moment in that office. The CEO who constantly had a paperclip in his ear, cleaning. The co secretary who took lunchtime naps in one of the meeting rooms. The exec who treated us all to a daily rendition of Andrew Lloyd Webbers finest. Happy days!

God I love this thread!

I was a temp for two weeks at Railtrack working for this man who bore an unfortunate resemblance to Butch the Dog from Tom and Jerry. He had a hatchet-faced secretary with a face like boiled ham who called herself the Office Manager. When I arrived H-F S spent half an hour lecturing me on the importance of discretion in the job before telling me about the woman on the floor above who was 'still a virgin at 65.'

Two days later we were supposed to have a visit from Princess Anne which meant us staff were not allowed to use the toilets on the second floor - the whole second floor! On the day of Princess Anne's visit, someone sneaked into the second floor toilets and left a large steaming turd on the gleaming floor.

H-F S actually sent round a memo saying the 'building would be locked until the culprit confessed.' !

There was also a nice man who worked in the Post Room who every single morning said to me: 'Never mind it's nearly Friday.'

PS: Forgot to add that when I was filing, H-F S told me not to look at the papers closely because they were 'confidential'. When I asked how I could file them properly if I didn't LOOK at them, she told me off for being 'cheeky' !

DH has been reading this. He wishes to add in the fantasist at his work. This man claims to have been the secret long-term boyfriend of Samantha Fox, who is of course gay. He also claims to own two companies offering prestigious car-related services to the rich and famous, even though he works in a fairly ordinary job full-time.

DH's boss also wears platform boots to work, and apparently looks like "that creepy little fucker who played Eugene Tooms in The X Files."

I've just reread the thread and noticed the huge number of phantom shitters! Maybe we should start another thread just about Covert Crapping. There seems to be a lot of it about.

The girl who, on her very first day, got up from her desk at lunchtime, turned to the rest of the office and said "And you bastards can fuck off" before walking out for good, leaving her shoes under her desk. We have no idea why, she seemed quite happy up to that point.

The person who used to send one piece of blank paper to our manager, every single week, in a typed envelope without a stamp on it, requiring me to walk to post office to pay the postage, plus a £1 fee. We think this was because the manager accidentally sent an email to everyone in our office, instead of to colleagues at another branch, saying "can anyone send me some paper, I've run out" when our stationary order didn't come on time. It was genius, but very odd. It drove the manager mad.

We had someone who used to go to the loo after lunch and leave it covered in skid marks. I discovered who it was and shocked it was her.
Another one does stuff like join all the paper clips together to piss people off.

purpleknittingmum - I sneeze very loudly sometimes. i certainly don't do it for attention. I can't control it.

I have lots, all from my last job. We seemed to attract oddballs.

The gravy drinker - used to drink Bisto every day. It was always really thick and made the office stink.

The psycho one - told us all that the best time to shoot someone would be bonfire night so we better 'watch out'. Also that he knew how to create the perfect crime. We used a tracing service in our job and we had to ban it from it because he used to look up people who he thought had 'wronged' him.

The Woo one - She used to see orbs all the time. We would be sitting in the office and she would just shout 'Orb' like some kind of odd golfer. When she started doing it in important meetings I had to fire her and she told me that bad karma would make my teeth fall out.

The Smelly One - didnt wash as all and he stunk. We had to have the windows open and it was bloody freezing in winter, but the cheesy smell was too much.

We also had a temp who would take a 'natural break' every day at 12.30. You could set your clock by him.

The man who used to ring in sick and then tell you he had diarrhoea and was phoning you on his mobile from the toilet. And then say "Listen..." and make a farting noise to prove it.

The man who used to randomly accuse people of stealing his cat.

why has this moved?