Asklemmy

I had a brief stint in a shit hole during COVID lockdowns. This old dude started and it turned out his wife and the lady in charge were friends. He was one of the dumbest people I've ever met. He legit had someone else's glasses on and didn't know until the other guy was trying to find his. He said he thought it was weird that he couldn't see properly. He also seen a few guys with face screens rather than masks and he wanted one. We told him you can get them from health and safety, so off he goes. Comes back and says they're awful, you can't see shit out of them. He hadn't removed the protective covering...

I've worked with some apes in my time but I've no idea how this guy got so far in life without dying or something

I once worked with a Puerto Rican. I'm not being racist, he literally couldn't go more than an hour without reminding someone he was from Puerto Rico. He tried playing it like some kind of race card at least once a day. One time I heard one of my coworkers say loudly from across the room "No, being Puerto Rican has nothing to do with it. I don't like you because you're stupid."

New guy at my job, polish dude. He seemed decent enough, just a bit.... odd... but most of us were; after all, we were the kind of people who are willing to work on ships on the wrong side of the world for weeks, sometimes months at a time.

I trained him to do the job I did, so he could run opposite of my shift, with some assistance from the chief tech and various others. The rest of the crew were pretty experienced, so it made it easier when he needed help with the more complex stuff. He did reasonably OK for a newhire. Nothing spectacularly good, but nothing spectacularly bad either.

Until the crewing department told us he had been arrested back home, multiple counts of murder, and we were unlikely to have him onboard again, so we needed to train his replacement.

Turned out he was a serial killer who killed people for their properties. He's in prison now, and I'm sure you can google the person. I'm not sure what his actual name was, but we called him Winny. Any poles here who happen to remember the case and could link a news article? This happened roughly 10 years ago.

I worked with John Doe, who said no woman could tell him what to do, not even his wife. His new boss was a woman who wasn't having his shit. He quit after a few months.

A moron who was hired to be my boss, even though they didn't tell me that was the case -- who, with a straight face, dead serious, and with an undeserved authority befitting a piece of shit, told me that Object-oriented programming was a fad. This was in 2008, 30-40 years after OOP was first introduced to the world.

I once worked for a small ISP that decided to enter the calling card business. I built them a voice prompt system on top of Asterisk that made received PSTN calls over PRI and made outbound VoIP calls, all metered to cards with a unique number and a balance, and a UI to activate them. The business got boxes of physical cards printed, with a plan to sell them to convenience stores.

They hired a salesperson (AKA worst coworker) to sell the boxes of cards. This coworker then sold many boxes of activated cards to many small stores at an unauthorised discount (below the level of profitability), for cash rather than the approved methods for retailers to buy them, and then apparently spent said cash at the casino. The business had to honour the cards (i.e. not deactivate them) at a big loss to avoid ruining their reputation, since the buyers apparently did not know the deal was dodgy. His tenure was, suffice to say, not long, but in his short time there, he managed to put the business under financial strain and it eventually went into liquidation.

Brian

A wannabe manager / story teller type.

He couldn’t tell the truth to save his life. He would tell stories all day within earshot and you could hear the story morph through the day.

He’s a director of IT now I think. I can’t be sure because he never told the truth.

Worked with a murderer who was living under a fake name, back in the 90s. But he was actually fine.

There were probably terrible people at that job, but I don't remember... Oh, the first actual real, live creationist I ever met was at that job.

Long time ago my boss

tells me to make an SSH account called "companyname" with password "companyname123"

I refused, that's stupid, it's a security nightmare waiting to happen. I'll happily make a different account and you know, make you use a good password

No, you MUST do this.

Okay, I protest, but orders are orders

Fast forward 2 months. Servwr gets hacked, through that account. Boss tales awayy year bonus because of this.

YOU FORCED ME TO DO THIS! !

yes I did but you are still responsible for the security of all the servers. This server was hacked, and because of that you will be denied your bonus

The stupidity that some people can display is amazing, really

Some annoying dumb fuck I don't even remember the name anymore. That was almost a decade ago.

Dude was a compulsive liar, he would brag about being some sort of super genius, but couldn't even understand basic instructions.

When he wasn't slacking off, he was failing at doing the most basic tasks and annoying other people into doing it for him.

I think he didn't even last three months on the job. Given his lack of shame, ability to confidently lie and over hype his non existent qualities, I imagine he must be a successful politician or CEO nowadays.

I worked with Aaron Barr

He went on to be CEO of HBGary, a federal contractor. He claimed he could dox Anonymous. It didn't go well for him.

I think I've blocked out most of the bad ones, and most of my coworkers have been good or okay.

This one guy I remember though. This might only be relevant for people who live in software.

He refused to name his tests. Normally with jest or mocha you have tests like

describe("user settings page", () => { it("allows the user to change their name", () => { etc

But he refused. He'd put empty string in both spots. So you'd open a test file and there'd just be a dozen anonymous unlabeled tests and you'd have to puzzle out what they were trying to do.

He was a reasonably nice person when we talked, at least. But this drove me crazy.

My boss by a long shot. It seemed like he'd been promoted past his realm of competency and wanted to be demoted, but didn't want to take the pay cut associated with it. The result is that there was a lack of communication on his part which left me guessing as to how I was supposed to be doing my job. Then he'd complain because I didn't do something right, or I didn't get something done when he was expecting it. He seemed nice, aside from the fact that he seemed to be unintentionally sabotaging any effort I tried to make to be a productive worker; except that I always felt like I was talking to someone who was trying to decide if I'd taste good. I ignored it and tried to do my job, but as a projectionist, you're locked in a dark, very noisy room by yourself for hours on end.

My mental health started slipping, I got written up a couple times, and then I asked for accommodations. I figured I was pretty safe doing that, everyone at the theater was nice, the chain was small, had a good reputation with customers and staff, staff felt comfortable being gay, trans and/or enby in front of customers in Texas so I thought, they shouldn't have a problem with making accommodations for my depression, anxiety and adhd, right? That's when I found out why I felt like he was trying to decide if I tasted good or not. He did the whole song and dance of "okay, we can work something out" while suddenly seeming annoyed (as opposed to his normally somewhat happy, albiet potentially cannibalistic demeanor).

Two weeks later I get fired for something he'd never asked me to do and he comes up to the booth with the theater manager while wearing the most triumphant look on his face, before announcing to me that it's a shame that I'm not a good fit for the company and that we'll have to be parting ways. I asked if there was anything I could do to fix the situation and the theater manager seemed apologetic and genuinely upset and started to say something only to get cut off by my boss who told me that there was absolutely nothing that could be done (as a projectionist, I was kinda in a pseudo-managerial role, the managers technically couldn't tell me to do anything, nor could they fire me, but I had to have a good reason if I ignored them or wasn't properly communicating with them). The manager apologized while he was escorting me out and told me he knew it was bullshit, but he couldn't do anything because neither of us were under him. He also mentioned that he'd been frustrated with my boss since the chain began reopening after COVID, but that he had seniority and been with the company since it's founding, so it was basically impossible to remove him.

Yay.

Back in high school, I worked with a girl who simply would not do her job. She’d walk away from her cash register at will. She’d go on break without telling anyone (never mind asking, like she was supposed to), and wouldn’t answer her radio, so people were constantly asking where she was. She wouldn’t follow instructions from anyone except the general manager - as if she outranked everyone else (which, of course, she didn’t). Everyone who actually had to work with her couldn’t stand her. From her perspective, though, she was always the victim. Nothing was ever her fault.

She would also talk your ear off. It was impossible to work with her and not hear several stupid, irrelevant, boring stories every hour. Fortunately, I didn’t have to work full shifts with her very often. If I had, I probably would have quit long before I had to leave for college.

I strongly suspect that the main reason she wasn’t fired is because it had taken months to fill her position, and filling it again would take months more. Plus, she only annoyed management; she didn’t completely exasperate them like she did the rest of us.

Wow. It’s been years. I’m surprised I still remember this so clearly.

The preschool I work at was in the news because one of the other teachers hit a child

Kevin. "I thought you knew I wasn't serious about the instructions I just gave you." Also: "I hate you. Just kidding." I hope you're even more miserable than you were, Kevin.

I wish I had an answer besides it being a tie between all of them, but sadly they're all that bad.

When I worked in the south we had a fellow that decided because he got fired by a black woman that everyone was a racist despite there being zero racial tension in the store other than his personal vendetta. He came back and tried to murder the most patently inoffensive skinny white dude in the the parking lot. He throttled him and was yelling he was an ___ lover because he was friendly with everyone. So its 1AM at Walmart and I go charging across the parking lot with zero plan. I ended up getting his attention then backpedaling at which point his victim had fled and he realized there was nothing else to do and ran off himself. I tried to give the cop the shirt that somehow rednecks feel like they need to shed before they "get physical" with someone and got only an offended look in return. They didn't even take a statement.

Same Walmart we had a fellow that was very clearly a recovering addict of some kind who want from hyper religious praise Jeebus to sullen and increasingly angry. He got to the point where he was showing up to get paid but wouldn't do much work and would ride his bike around the backroom. I remember him becoming convinced we were all Satanic because we were talking about a fantasy setting. He told us we need to find Jesus I quiped "Does he provide an experience bonus" Not long after that we had cops monitoring the exit to ensure nobody got murdered on the way out. I'm not sure exactly what he said when they fired him but I understand threats were made.

Same store there was the boss who turned on the electic door motor while I was fixing it causing the little hand crank to go flying across the room like a spear.

Then there was the fellow who would just NOT stop stealing shit like blatantly who was eventually at long last fired for stealing root beer.