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We have all been around for a workplace meltdown. It happens in every office. It’s fantastically cringe-worthy. It’s brutal. It’s death.
Some meltdowns are worse than others, of course. There are major differences between a rant and a tantrum, as evidenced below. Sometimes, when the workday is long and the week is too slow, a nice little workplace meltdown is just what you need to heighten your spirits. Below are some of the best office meltdown stories the internet has to offer, courtesy of Reddit.
From Reddit:
I’ve posted this before, but it still makes me laugh. I wasn’t the one that got fired, but I watched it happen. I was at Publix getting a sub when I hear this:
Manager: What the hell are you doing?! You know I have to fire you for doing this again.
Worker: What is the problem? I didn’t do anything wrong.
Manager: You are allowed to get something to eat on your break, not eat while you’re packing food.
Worker: So I had a couple chicken wings, it’s not that big of a deal.
Manager: THERE ARE 50 WINGS IN THE BOTTOM OF THAT TRASH CAN!!!!
Nothing else was said and the manager escorted the wing eater out. The guy was making baskets of wings and was basically going ” 1 for the basket, 1 for me” and eating his way through the batch of wings. Best part was the two people making subs just start laughing and one goes “if the manager knew how much that guy has eaten in the 2 weeks he has worked here, he would shit a brick. The other day he just sat there eating a whole container of potato salad while he was working the fryer.”
Publix. America’s No. 1 grocery store chain.
I saw two stone masons get in a fist fight when I worked construction. I was laying electrical underground pipe, and they were laying block wall. One threw a hammer at the other one and hit him in the head. Cracked his eye socket. Cops came and took our statements and the guy got arrested for assault.
Blue collar workplace meltdowns are typically more violent in nature.
I didn’t actually witness this, I did it. I was working at a Wendy’s my senior year of high school with that being my second job, the first was the McDonald’s across the street. McDonald’s taught me drive thru, and Wendy’s got 1/10th the business so i was a drive thru god there. One night there was a football game we didn’t know about, and when it let out we got absolutely slammed. I was working 3 positions in drive thru, which i could handle, but when i had to do fries i couldnt deal with it. I asked the guy who was working front counter, who hadnt had a customer in about an hour, to hop on fries and help me out, he mumbled something and walked over there. I relax and go back to drive thru, and when i go to bag my order i see all this kid did was drop a basket of fries, not make any of the 20+ orders we had. At first i was like fuck him i got this, and made a large fry. I then turned and threw it at him calling him a lazy incompetent asshole you cant even work a fast food job, walked back to the office and tossed my head set at the manager and told told him i quit
Quitting in the middle of a crisis. Classic.
I got into a screaming match with my boss. He was furious, and after the altercation, I saw him head to the elevator. I knew he was going to Human Resources, so I ran down the stairs and beat him to the HR office by about 20 seconds. He had to sit in the HR waiting room for half an hour until I was done speaking to them which made him even more furious.
Uh, I have a feeling he’s going to win that battle.
We worked in a business casual office, most of us just wore button up shirts, decent pants and dress shoes every day. However, Suit Guy showed up as a new hire and wore the same exact tan suit every day for the three months he was there, which is what earned him the nickname.
He also drank a large coffee, a Monster energy drink and a can of Mountain Dew in that order between when he walked in at eight and when he had lunch at noon. Apparently he was going through a divorce that was getting pretty contentious and the combination of caffeine and rage put him over his boiling point one morning when he began screaming at his phone while at his desk and then broke his cell phone in half. This was 2012, so it was a full screened smartphone that he somehow bent until it broke. I don’t know how he did it, my friends and I tried to replicate it using one of my old phones a couple days later and we could cause some bending, but no break.
He came in the next day with a new phone and acted like he hadn’t made a scene the day before.
Reminds me of the Larry David quitting story. Act like it never happened and maybe everyone will just forget.
I worked in a building with a cafeteria in it, we noticed that one of the everyday cashiers had stopped showing up to work and found out that she had passed away. My coworker asked who we were talking about and upon finding out, stood up from her desk, flung herself to the ground, and proceeded to roll back and forth crying as loud as she could. We all freaked out, we had customers on the phone we had to put on hold until we could get her to her feet and someone could escort her somewhere else so she could calm down. She took the next few days off, including the day of the funeral. Assuming she had gone to the funeral, we asked her how it was, she answered with, “Huh? I didn’t go, I barely knew her…”
Women are the emotional being.
I didn’t witness this myself, but a former co-worker did. She worked at a law firm in one of the upper floors of the Empire State Building. She was in a office with another co-worker interviewing a client when the co-worker just mumbled something, got up, walked over to a window and jumped out to his death.
You shouldn’t be able to open a skyscraper window. Here is the backstory, by the way.
I work in hospitality. Our old head of housekeeping was a small Polish woman with a spitfire personality. She refused to hire minorities or heavier woman (even though some of the best cleaners we’ve ever had were one of those two). She worked 7 days a week at least 50 hours total. She was burning herself out hard core. She was very paranoid and always afraid someone was out to get her position.
Well, one morning she got into it with one of our best housekeepers. She grabbed the woman’s wrist and gave her an indian burn. Then she came to the front desk, yelling and screaming, and threw herself to the floor, like a toddler having a tantrum, kicking her arms and legs. This was in the middle of a busy check in window as well, and here she is rolling on the ground crying and yelling.
I looked at her and said, “get your ass to the office if you’re going to have a melt down”. So she picked herself up, then threw herself down in the office and finished her tantrum there. She was fired that day.
That’s the way to go.
While I was at college learning metalworking, our teacher got so pissed off with the complete lack of respect/attention by his students that he stormed out of the engineering lab and got in his car then drove off, only to hit a lampost at nearly 30mph. He got out of his car, pushed it off the lampost, which fell over and nearly took him out. He drove off with steam coming out of the bonnet of his new Porsche.
Meanwhile, he had left an Aluminium crucible on full heat which literally went into meltdown. Molten metal started bubbling and bursting out of the crucible like a volcano. Where the molten metal touched anything flammable, it started a fire.
When molten metal starts erupting, you know your having a bad day. He was remarkably not fired, and all of his students made rapid life adjustments and never disrespected him again.
That kind of power move commands respect.
was interning at a local ABC news station for awhile. one day, I was alone on the set sitting on one of those couches you always see anchors sitting on in morning shows (I was waiting for my boss to come down and tape something for his show.)
enter the weatherman. he walks over to his desk, looks at something on the computer, stands up, slams his hand on the table and yells at the top of his lungs “THIS IS SO FUCKING OUT OF CONTROL! ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?? GOD DAMNIT!”, then straightens up his tie, calmly and coolly walks by me again and says “pardon my French” and walks out the door. I sit for a minute in shock and then go upstairs.
turns out the national weather service was trying to get him in trouble because someone reported a live tornado in a distant corner of the state, when there actually wasn’t a tornado at all, and caused the sirens to go off. I think, that’s at least what I got out of what him & the other weatherman were talking about.
Weathermen answer to no one.
This crazy lady they hired as a cashier didn’t take getting fired too well. After they fired her, she told the owner to fuck off and proceeded to ram his truck with her car as she left…
And it’s funny because it barely dented the owner’s bumper, but her car got really fucked up. I don’t even think he pressed charges.
A for effort, F for execution.
When I was a teenager, I worked at a job where the general manager’s husband was sleeping with the assistant manager. The assistant manager flaunted it too. She would go around saying things like “He told me I give better head than you do.” and “No wonder your husband cheats. I would cheat if I were married to you!”
Anyway, one day, the general manager finally snaps and they get into a full on cat fight right in front of the entire store. We had to call the police to break them up.
It is pretty bad when the teenage crew can act more civilized than the adult managers.
She should have kicked the shit out of that bitch.
Freshman year of high school, Sales and Marketing teacher. Wrote my name on the board for acting up but spelled it wrong, so I said “Well when [wrong name] show’s up I’ll tell him he’s in trouble”
Flipped out, started screaming at me and another kid that was being a smartass, threw his stool across the room where it broke on the opposite wall, tried to pick up this huge folding table Hulk-style but slammed it back on the ground when it was too heavy to lift, and then just glared at me for like three minutes straight.
Teaching high school is just never the right move.
There was an Arab man named Ahmed that delivered food to the factory I worked at a few years ago. He was the nicest guy I ever met. Always gave me free food just for being respectful to him. One day he was delivering food to employees who had to work on Sunday and they were all whining and complaining about how unfair it is, even though they were being paid double time. Apparently, Ahmed had heard enough because in front of the whole plant, he began to scream at all of them for being ungrateful crybabies, and reminded them how good they have it in America. I had never seen the factory so quiet. I asked him what was up as he left and he explained to me how he had come here from the Middle East to escape famine and terrorism and he started with nothing and worked all day everyday to get where he is now. It was one of the most motivating things I’ve ever witnessed.
Ahmed straight laying down the law.
One morning my manager called me and asked me to switch shifts with him, meaning I would open and he would close. Cool, no big deal. I go in early, open the store and receive a phone call in the middle of a consultation with a customer. It’s my manager and he tells me that he just resigned. That was it. He came by about three months after his resignation and was looking pretty frail and skinny. He told me it was from eating healthy, but I wasn’t sure. About 8 months later, after I moved to a different store, he held up my old store at knife point and stole the money from the safe. He got caught a few months later during a traffic stop. It all came about because his ex wife refused to let him see his daughter and he just went off the absolute deep end. It was a slow breakdown, but nothing that we ever expected from him.
Of all the stores to rob, don’t rob the one with all your friends working there.
Worked with a sales rep who was about to get fired for faking his expense reports. He knew it was going to happen because corporate called the restaurant where he was pulling his scam from and they did some research and found it all out and got the law involved.
He took his company car (a Saab 9000CD) and left it in the worst part of town with the keys in it, hoping it would get stolen. Pure spite on his part. Unfortunately, he didn’t plan for how he was going to get out of this part of town so he got mugged and the crap kicked out of him. Ambulance came and took him to the ER. I should add here that he was about 25 or so and a complete jackass.
The interesting part: He tried to go out on work comp due to his “injuries” and stayed away from the office, because he knew he was going to get fired. I had to visit him at his home and explain that he was going to be fired and that he could keep the law out of this if he paid the money back. It was $2500. He said he was on pain pills due to his injuries and couldn’t understand what I was saying. He stays at home for 2 weeks, recovering from his “injuries”.
Here’s the meltdown: after the doctor releases him, he comes back to work. The day he comes back, the legal team and the police are waiting for him. He gets formally fired and the police arrest him. I should add that the whole thing was being recorded by the legal team on video. After they put the cuffs on him, he immediately drops to the ground screaming that he is “injured” and “in severe pain” and “doesn’t deserve to be treated like this.” The police grab him and throw him in the back of the police car while he is screaming like a baby the whole time. What he didn’t know is that there was a video camera in the police car. Once the police put him in the back of the car and then went back inside leaving him alone in the car, he stopped crying and started laughing.
This dragged on for years. My firm refused to back down and we prosecuted him for everything we could.
Best one yet.
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[via Reddit]
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I witnessed a complete meltdown of a co-worker and it was glorious. I knew he was trouble when I was training him and he had a nose bleed. He also mentioned he was in a frat that got kicked off campus for coke and rape problems. At first, I figured to each his own, I just wouldn’t let him buy me drinks at happy hour. He progressively got weirder throughout his employment, he was a true believer in the illuminati and he told me really weird stories about things he did back in his home town. I… I can’t even get into those details. He was a real violent bastard. There was an annoying (but harmless) girl at my work that he couldn’t stand, like he had a real hatred for her that no one understood. He immed me one day that he wanted to curb stomp her and mentioned fantasies of punching her in several different occasions. He didn’t say it in a funny or sarcastic way. He had a real sinister tone and a shit eating grin that gave me the creeps. He also loved using the C word. I told him that the curb stomping was a bit aggressive and he stood up out of his cube and screamed “F*CK THIS, F*CK YOU”. Okay…. He was super delusional and was telling people I was in the illuminati and spying on him…. Seriously. I got kinda nervous, I could literally imagine him kicking me in the back of the head while filling out the equivalent of a TPS report in my cube. I didn’t want to go down like that. I grabbed one of my managers and walked into the conference room to voice my concerns. I flipped on the lights and as my manager asked me “what’s going on” , I saw the crazy coworker waking up from a nap in the corner of the conference room (this wasn’t even a lunch break). He looked so confused like he didn’t know where he was, like he had come off a 5 day bender. I just casually said “I think there’s something wrong with Todd” and pointed at him and left the room. He didn’t come back the next day. It scares me he knows where I work. I should of played along with being an illuminati spy…
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I was working in a sales office. There was a guy there who was a veteran sales guy and had been working there 5 years or so. Nice guy, worked decently hard, and had a good relationship with his customers. For some reason the upper management treated this guy like complete shit. They talked to him like he was a 6 year old. I was only a couple years out of college with much less experience and found out that I made over 20k more than this guy. (Not like I was going to give it back or something, fuck that shit amirite). One day he’s sitting in the office with our boss trying to negotiate a pay raise. I KNOW they can pay this fucker more money but they just basically tell him to fuck off. HE GOES BALLISTIC. He barrels into the bullpen, turns into he hulk and starts breaking the shit out of every cubicle in the office. It was a real “daddy hit mommy at the dinner table” kind of moment. He called me later just to touch base and was working a job that was much closer to his kids and paid substantially more. I’m kind of proud of him.
This story gives me hope
I was working at an auto parts store. One day my boss pulls me aside and asks “what’s up chief?” I’m already pissed. “What do you mean by that?” “You tell me.” What follows is a 45 minute argument about my bad attitude (he had a point) and me telling him that he was bad at his job (he was, more on that in a moment). Anyway, I tell him I’m done. I’ll work what he has scheduled to not screw over my coworkers (4 days) and then I’m out. My last day of work I get a call from an irate customer. Turns out my boss sold him the wrong parts and he is furious. After some ass chewing, I just bluntly ask “what do you want me to do to fix this”. He tells me he wants the store to pay for his gas because he lives an hour away. I glance at the clock, see that I only have a half hour left and then laugh at him and tell him I can’t do that. If you’ve ever laughed at anyone that is already super pissed you know what happens next. He starts screaming at me “So is it still funny?!” I reply, ” well it wasn’t at first but now that you’re making a huge deal about it, it is. The parts will be waiting for you on the counter.” I check out and leave. Apparently the guy filed a complaint against me and my boss which was one too many strikes against him. He was moved to a smaller, shittier store and was fired/quit a month or so later. Guess he should have listened to me.
A guy in my department at a former employer did contract / temp work for us and he spent the majority of his day spying on everyone and reporting back to the managers what he saw, which was the usual stuff of reading the news online, checking personal email, etc. He’d use this information to prove how worthless we all were as he was trying to get hired on full time for the benefits. Fast forward a year and the company finally lets him go because he creeped out one of the young female workers in the department by showing up to her house unannounced on a Sunday. Dude gets a new job in the same industry, falls in love with a co-worker who is engaged, she rebukes him, he quits and disappears for a few months only to come back to claim he’d been away because “if he can’t have her then he doesn’t want anyone else” so he decided to become a eunuch, i.e. had himself castrated.
Seems rational
That’s actually better that he can’t kids to pass his genes to.
*have kids
These stories….what the fuck?….