In most organizations, the HR department is the most intriguing one. On one hand, people who work in HR are the bridge between the working class and management so they get to hear all the juicy and crazy stories. On the other hand, employees have been in situations where the HR department was the cause of the drama and not the solution. Juicy isn’t it?
These people from all walks of life and from both sides of the HR/Employee divide share their own dramatic experiences. Read on and be entertained.
1. Awful stench
At one place I used to work, one of the upper management guys who was in charge of the warehouse would hop on the forklifts and do donuts. He had colon cancer and was always having surgeries to remove another section of the colon so he had a colostomy bag.
He would like to squeeze air out of his colostomy bag while he was doing donuts on the forklifts. It would waft this awful stench everywhere. Everyone thought it was hilarious and would immediately run outside for a smoke break until the scent dissipated. The smell was bad enough that it made a coworker puke.
peefster
2. “Sultan”
My BF and I work for the same small business and were filling out paperwork for something or other. He listed his job title as "sultan" and I was horrified because I didn't catch it in time.
Sure enough, official items start coming into the "sultan." He thinks it's hilarious while I'm busy being nervous about what's going to happen when the boss starts getting mail and finds out.
As it turns out, we got some of the boss's papers before he got ours, and his "official" title was "Grand Poobah."
On that day I was happily reminded how little I miss working in an office/cubicle.
MaritMonkey
3. Old habits die hard
My friend was doing hiring for a staffing agency during college. A guy we went to high school with came in looking for a job. He told the candidate that he had two jobs. One paid 10 an hour and the other paid 11. The only thing was that the 11-an-hour job required a drug test. And if you fail the drug test you can't get either.
He said that he wanted the 11 an-hour job. Now we knew him well enough to know that he liked smoking. So my friend reiterated the drug test fail rule. Dude said he was good on Friday to take the test on Monday. Come Monday he took the drug test. The drug tests came out positive.
[deleted]
4. It's a no mate
A guy had applied for a job that required a DBS check (police check). He filled out the DBS and all his other checks flew through. The DBS came back as he had committed a crime in the past. Now on our end, only the guy who will be the applicant's manager and a senior in our department can see the DBS result.
He called the department unhappy the job had been withdrawn. He then sent a long email begging for another chance, he said when he was 17 he beat two women up and then threatened the cops with a gun. We're in the UK so guns are pretty rare, especially in the 1970's. He went into detail about the attempted rape this dude wanted a job in a hospital......... it's a no mate.
Dirk_diggler22
5. I can’t unsee it
I came in to work early for a morning shift (work in an industrial lab). I heard noises from the back corner of the office portion of the building but couldn't make out what they were because of distortion. I headed that way to see what was going on as I was the only one there (so I thought) at 3 am.
I saw my lab manager being intimate with the district manager (her boss) while the HR Rep for the district was sitting there ... enjoying the view. I NOPED and went to the lab and tried to forget what happened.
Uranoscopy7
6. I was doing yoga
This happened in the executive boardroom just before the start of business. There is a meeting booked by high-level officers in the company meeting clients first thing that morning. The admin in charge of setting up is notorious for being early to make sure the meeting setup is perfect and everything goes seamlessly.
She walks in on a naked man on the table. Thinks but is not entirely sure someone else just slipped out. She freaks out and the naked man is canned. (He was even a contractor, not full time)
The suspicion is he was not as fast to get dressed as the person he was sleeping with. Rumor says it was an exec who knew full well that the admin would be in earlier than expected and used the incident to shed a now inconvenient lover. Surprisingly, the naked man continued to insist he was alone and doing naked yoga to the end.
Debbieae
7. Unrelated incident
My very first job was in a warehouse with these big pallet jacks (like forklifts, but only raises a few inches) that we had to stand on. We used to race the pallet jacks to settle disputes once in a while.
That finally stopped because of an unrelated incident in which a co-worker crushed another's ankle against a support beam with one of them for driving too fast and not paying attention.
SXOSXO
8. Test on skills set
I had a friend working as a GM when HR thought it was a good idea to test everyone on the skill set needed for their department regardless of how long they were in their position. Long careers, 15, 20, 25 years were ruined because even though they worked there for a long time with a long string of great performance reviews, they didn't pass the test that measured what HR thought was required for the department.
Say you're a materials expert working in a design department. You may know barely enough about the CAD system to draw a cylinder. On the other hand, given a cylinder, you can whip out all the properties that the cylinder would have if it were made from aluminum, cold rolled steel, fiberglass, etc. You'd be out of your job because HR said you had to have a certain level of CAD expertise even if it wasn't relevant to your role in the design process.
AmazingPass0
9. No discrimination
I was sitting in the HR office with one of the members of HR, I was waiting for her to finish a form so that we could go eat lunch. Suddenly, this guy comes in, he was a young temp employee and had only been there a week or so, and says he has something he needs to talk about.
I start to get up to leave when he blurts out that he doesn't like the fact that there are so many gays and lesbians working in the company.
Once he says that I sit right back down. The HR employee asks him to clarify and he goes on about how his trainer was gay, his team lead is gay and his manager is a lesbian (all true) and he doesn't feel comfortable working around all these gays and lesbians.
The HR employee asks him if anyone has ever sexually harassed him, which he says they haven't. She then says 'So you want me to fire these employees, strictly based on their sexual orientation, just so you don't feel uncomfortable?' He says yes, after which she tells him to leave the office. She then calls in his manager and talks with her about it, he ends up quitting by the end of the week.
Whirligig44
10. No Boundaries
My friend who worked in HR told me about her old job where the boss had drilled a hole from his office through to the ladies changing rooms and was self-helping himself every chance he could get. They found out because someone saw the light through the hole as he took the cover off for a peek.
He denied everything and they had to take a DNA sample from the carpet under the hole which confirmed it was a) him and b) that he had indeed been helping himself.
Dr_Kintobor
11. Really man?!
We had a guy in one of our stores submit a grievance to us about how we were discriminating against him because we were giving a female 7 months pregnant colleague some extra breaks (she had a medical note confirming the reasonable adjustments needed) so she could sit down for an extra 5 mins every so often because he was unable to get pregnant so could not take advantage of the same extra breaks.
I didn't really know where to start with that one!
Evelyntothestars
12. Arrogant coworkers
I worked in a call center which tends to attract crappy, low-intelligent jerks. Granted not everyone was like that, but I've never seen such a concentration of them at one job before, and when one left another would be hired to take his place. They got pissed off because HR transformed a little storage room, that was previously unused, into a room for new mothers to pump their breast milk.
They acted like it was the most sexist practice in the world for HR to deem a room only acceptable to women (even though it was just a few women) and acted like it affected their work to know that a woman was in a closed-off room nearby with her titties out.
Also, there was an older woman who had cancer and lost her hair so HR let her be the exception to the "no hat, no bandana, etc" rule because obviously, it can be very traumatic for someone to go through, and they flipped out because apparently regular male pattern baldness had the same negative emotional effects that going bald due to chemo so they should have been allowed to wear hats and bandannas.
[deleted]
13. Why not find a better use for your time
I used to work in a cubicle farm. I worked an odd shift, started at 4 am, and left when I was done with my work. I'd be one of the only people there until around 8 am. There was usually 1 other guy there as early as me.
I was a software engineer working in an editorial business. We had explicit images in our database. It wasn't abnormal to have an explicit site up because we would have to index those and have captions and images for various explicit films. This wasn't the focus of the business, it was just something that occasionally had to be done.
This one guy would start every morning slowly scrolling through the explicit images in our database on the other side of the cubicle farm. I could see it when I walked by to my desk.
[deleted]
14. Nightmare in the office
My job is a constant HR nightmare. Boss has slept with coworker A. Coworker A is married to coworker B. Coworker B and coworker A have been married (unhappily), for 10 years or something now, B has no idea, even though B invites boss over for dinner once every other week.
Boss is now dating a new coworker (my best friend), and has already "gifted" her 2000$, despite another coworker suffering from cancer and barely being able to pay the bills when he was still working.
My other boss, who owns the other lesser half of the company has called me a narcissist in a meeting, and told me literally "There are no such things as business ethics". That's barely the past couple of months, been there for four years.
Asdaaaaaaaa
15. That was awkward
My sister works in HR for a utility company and almost all her horror stories are about the engineers. Most are completely normal but a few live up to the stereotype of having no social awareness.
One day, the worst of these engineers was giving a presentation to some higher-ups. One of these executives came from a nontechnical background and mispronounced "gigawatts". I guess the engineer immediately interrupted with "No, it's GIGA watts.
Rjeanp
16. Criminal employee
We had to terminate someone after 8 days of employment for very serious misconduct issues including sexual harassment. When I notified the employee, he started threatening me, the manager, and the entire company. He went on to send threatening emails to the VPs and other senior leadership threatening a lawsuit.
His manager was concerned for her safety and the company had to hire additional security. Come to find out that the guy we terminated had recently sued his previous employer.
This whole thing is still happening so I don’t have an ending to this nightmare yet.
_captaincool
17. “Batman”
As an office manager, I hired an employee and on the first day, he was told to fill in his new hire paperwork. I put him in an office and came back in a while later and asked for the papers. He hands them over, and I scan them off to our HR dept. About twenty minutes later I got a call from our HR rep who thought it was pretty funny that he filled out their name as "Batman" on all his paperwork. So I had the guy re-do the paperwork, and he wrote his name as Batman.
By the end of the day, I had to get this new hire on a call with HR to have them explain to him that if he didn't fill out the paperwork correctly he'd be out of the job. I had him in my office about once a week for one ridiculous thing after another until one day he came in and announced that he'd changed his name, officially, to Batman.
So, I get him the W-4 and paperwork, he fills it out and off we go. He's Batman now. HR comes back and says they need the proof of name change so that they can update his withholdings. I tell Batman he needs to provide that so we can finish updating him in the system. No problem, I'll bring it tomorrow he says. Three weeks go by where he's telling me and HR he forgot again, then it got lost, etc. Turns out, he'd never actually changed his name.
Theouterworld
18. Alex Hamilton
A friend of mine who did HR for a museum told me this story. It was a history museum, dealing with famous people from American history, and one of the senior museum guys was an expert on Alexander Hamilton.
Gradually, over a couple of years, it became clear that at some point this guy had started believing he was Alexander Hamilton. Either literally, or reincarnated, or possessed, I have no idea. His e-mails only used words and phrases that appeared in Hamilton's writing (which made for high hilarity when they wanted to talk about an interactive online exhibit)
When people insulted him/Hamilton he would start calling them 18th century names and get pissed they were impugning his/Hamilton's honor. He started getting angry at the other museum guys if they tried to put "wrong" things in the Hamilton exhibit (things that didn't suit his preferred narrative of Hamilton).
When he challenged another employee to a duel because he was angry at the verbiage on a sign explaining an exhibit item, they had to call the police and have him escorted off the premises and get a restraining order. It was INSANE.
The figure was not Alexander Hamilton, but this guy did literally challenge another employee to a duel and appeared extremely ready to follow through, to the death. The police put him in the hospital with a psychiatric hold, I don't know what happened after that.
AliMcGraw
19. Pick Pocket
My dad encountered a lot of dumb things working as a manager of a shipping company. For example, his star employee, employee of the Month was a common occurrence to him, a really well rounded off guy. One day my dad left the centre for the morning because he had a horrible toothache that needed to be pulled that day.
While he’s gone, the star employee begins to slip small packages into his pockets. With this company, most packages have insurance, but most items have monetary value. So star employee stole over 20k worth of jewelry and items over his career with this shipping company.
Leahbpl
20. Gas problem
One of my employees bought an industrial air freshener like the ones you would see in a public restroom. When I asked her about it, she informed me that the guy in the cube next to her (also my employee) had a gas problem.
I went back to my office and an hour later got a call from our HR resolution team that there had been a formal complaint logged anonymously against my employee because of his gas issue.
So I had to sit there and try to have a professional conversation about my employee’s constant barrage of farting with the HR professional. We both were struggling to keep it together.
I pulled the individual aside to talk to him about it. He and I are both males around the same age so I tried to play it cool and not embarrass him. I told him he needed to stop blowing gas all the time and he thought I meant his work performance sucked.
kidselvage
21. A hug
I had an employee put in a complaint because another employee didn't want to hug them. There was no reason for a hug. The other employee was very sympathetic when I spoke to them (because I had to!!!) and just didn't want to hug people.
The original employee was insistent and complained to anyone who would listen. Most of the staff took her side and thought he was a jerk for not wanting a hug. I kinda wanted to hug him for the things he was given for wanting the basic human right of autonomy.
Mdg_roberts1
22. Mystery of the pictures
My last job BOY HOWDY. A guy came to me with pictures of private parts on his phone claiming another worker was sending him the pictures. He had zero proof of a coworker sending them, but I do believe that he wasn't pulling my leg when he said they were sent to harass him.
The dude had at least a dozen pics from a few different numbers, I suspect someone was using an app to mask their actual phone number. I told my supervisor but nothing ever really came of it because he couldn't prove where exactly the pictures were coming from.
Disgustipated2
23. Extreme overtime
I process payroll for my company. We had an employee submit a timesheet for more than 200 hours over two weeks, including at least 15 hours per day including weekends, and even a few 17-hour shifts back to back.
We’re in manufacturing, so I’ve seen instances where an employee covers half of someone’s shift for a whole week giving them 5 12-hour days. But never have I seen 14 straight 15+ hour days. All told it was 100+ hours at OT time and a half, plus nearly 30 Sunday doubletime.
The HR manager is currently investigating, checking with security for building access reports, etc to see if those hours are in any way legitimate. But one way or the other, the supervisor is going to get his guy reamed because he approved the timesheet.
Either he approved fraudulent hours, or he authorized someone to work those awful hours during a time when the business is pressing managers to curb OT whenever possible or to at least distribute it equally. This dude signed off on what ended up being a nearly $12k paycheck for an hourly team member.
Vandelay222
24. A cover-up story
My first job was admin in HR and one of my duties was making sure all new hires were drug tested. Lots of locations around the country and many positions involved the use of heavy machinery so drug tests were taken seriously. I had to deal with a lot of managers who straight-up hated me because someone thought it was great to have the 22-year-old tell people who they could and couldn’t hire.
Anyway, a guy applies for a fairly senior position at a location where the top-ranking person was set to retire in a few years, this guy would be the one trained to replace him. He does great in the interview, the references are good, but the guy fails the drug test for a substance that stays in your system for such a short time. Like he knew he was going to have to drug test, he couldn’t have gone a few days without taking drugs?
Anyway, I have to tell him he failed and he acts shocked and asks if he can test again, which we can’t allow because of the short time it spends in your blood and also nothing really false positives for the drug.
A few hours later I got the most insane email from the guy that he and his wife decided to take in a relative who was having problems, and that guy must have put the drug in his cereal the morning he took his drug test. He thought it tasted weird but just ate it all anyway and that must be why he failed the drug test.
Carlyv22
25. The office dress code
We had a woman show up to work in a fishnet shirt and a black bra, which basically meant she was wearing a bra around the office because the fishnet did nothing to hide her skin. Her male manager came to me with an exhausted look on his face and asked me to come talk to his employee about the dress code. I had to take the 40+ year-old woman into an office and explain she had to go home and change, and no, she wouldn’t be paid during her time away from the office because she violated the dress code.
She demanded I call my boss (regional HR director) because she said I was lying and being a racist. We made the call, she got sent home for the full day without pay, and we wrote her up for it. She left shouting about how I was a racist and she was going to file a complaint.
This lady eventually got fired for a bunch of other insanity, including having sex with a coworker in our parking lot with the door open. I’m very glad I no longer work in HR.
Xeroxbulletgirl
26. For the love of bacon
My dad was pretty high up in HR for an F500 company, he had some great firing stories. They had to fire one of their VPs because he was stealing bacon from the cafeteria every morning.
He'd get his tray, put his newspaper over the bacon, and then go through the cashier line. He lost a $200k/yr job over 60 cents worth of bacon every day.
ChesterMcGonigle
27. After Bankruptcy
I worked in corporate hell for close to five years in my late teens and early twenties. Quite honestly, I wasn’t qualified to work at the level of HR that I did but, it was great money and I had a dope office. Anyway, our company filed for bankruptcy and it was like all moral principles went out of the window.
I walked in on a VP losing it, throwing trash everywhere, destroying anything in her path. She threw a chair into our conference room TV. I witnessed the accounting office shred paper until the shredder caught fire, my boss the HR Director, came to work high on pills constantly worried about finding another job “in this freaking recession”
Felipefadora
28. A love affair
I work in HR. Had an employee refer her bf (not 100% sure anyone knew they were dating, but they had a baby). So they work in the same building but in different areas. One day a new girl starts and he cheats. Find out he and the new girl disappear at times.
The new girl harasses the old gf (not sure if they really even broke up) and so the gf gets a peace order against the new girl. So we have to move the new girl to a different site. She quits and then the guy throws a fit and quits too. The gf eventually gets fired shortly as her work performance changes drastically.
A few weeks later I got an employment verification request for the gf and the guy for a different state. I’m like....ok...
A year later he ends up murdering her, drives across numerous state lines with the toddler, and drops the little one off with family back in our state. They eventually find him in a wooden area with a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Before they found him or the toddler I was made to deal with the FBI and local police as most of HR was new. This is when we discovered the managers had concerns about him. Might have been the one time I lost my cool with a manager. They never mentioned anything to HR about possible domestic violence.
Celtic_Dragonfly17
29. A sudden resignation
I'm in HR with the federal government and while my old office had so many antics that you could let a film crew go and get the next big sitcom, one event in particular stands out.
Out of the blue, an employee at the office resigns. Her resignation letter was five pages long and went into lengthy detail about how her supervisor, one of the assistant directors, even went as far as to say that the supply room people treated her unfairly and ended it with some comment about how women in general were treated poorly there.
While her supervisor wasn't exactly the best person to work for she was a known problem employee and blew the events in question completely out of proportion and libeled everyone she named.
Somehow a copy of this letter made it all the way to DC and at the office of the Secretary. As in a member of the President's cabinet Secretary. Shortly after that happened a series of ER meetings took place and EVERYONE had to be questioned on this, sometimes more then once. No one was fired or reprimanded.
Skunkdog1
30. Abuse of work facilities
I had a report of a male supervisor and a female employee who were sending inappropriate photographs to each other while at work using company equipment. I interviewed both as to the validity of the accusations. Of course, both denied it but the male took it a step further by letting me know that if any of this got back to his Wife, (which there was no plausible way it could) he’d sue the company and “own us”.
He was just so unbelievably upset about it. I totally understand some level of being upset about a false accusation if it really is false. We do not forbid inter-office relationships, he was not her direct supervisor and he was not being accused of sexual harassment. It just seemed like a knee-jerk reaction to me at the time so I dug a little further.
I asked my IT guy to dig and see if there was any proof that they exchanged photos or any other inappropriate emails etc. using company property. The next day the IT guy came into my office and tossed me a thumb drive and said, “I’ll send you the bill for my therapy sessions” and walked out of my office.
I plugged the thumb drive in and there it all was! Just about 20 pictures of private parts that the male supervisor had sent the female employee. Some with his face clearly in the picture, some you could tell were in his office, some while he was sitting in his car in our parking lot..... just ridiculous. Not a single picture from her though so guess she was smart enough not to use the company IM service to send her explicit pictures.
Mikeymac2016
31. False education record
I used to work for a reference checking agency. It was their practice to hire people as temps before taking them on full-time. Yes, they actually did take on anyone who could do the job after 3 months - odd, I know
Anyway, one man had been working there for three months and so was interviewed for a full-time position. Part of the process was to fill out an application form.
He lied in the application form and falsified his education record. He knew that this was going to happen, and he knew that they would check. He must have known they’d find out. This was what he’d been doing for three months at that point.
The worst part was that if he hadn’t lied they would have hired him anyway, failed exams and all, because he could do the job. They just couldn’t hire someone who lied to the company...
Psimo-
32. An affair that ruined lives
I was new at a company helping our head of HR as a temp. Rad company with a great culture. We used Slack as a chat service internally and everyone would use it after hours when we needed to help clients. It was a tech company.
One night our marketing coordinator was sending messages to a bunch of public channels. It was her husband, and he essentially called out her and the director of marketing for having an affair. He essentially said “screw you (director of marketing) for being a home wrecker and I hope my wife enjoys your tiny manhood” etc etc.
The next day neither of them showed up. They were having an affair and were publicly outed for cheating. We had to fire both of them and the owner of the company made a public announcement about their termination as though EVERYONE didn’t read her husband's messages. Rough Christmas for them, she had two kids and one on the way.
Taylorink8
33. Unqualified employee
I worked in HR for an organization that had not previously had an HR position but had grown to the size that it was necessary. When I realized that not a single person in upper management (aside from my immediate supervisor) cared nor wanted an HR department because it interfered with “how they had always done things” (I hate that phrase so much) I ran as fast as I could.
The organization hired a woman for the business department. Candidates were limited as it was a smaller town. On paper, her resume looked pretty reasonable and her experience looked as if it would fit well for the vacant position. Her interview was mediocre, if not sub-par. When asked about her knowledge of Microsoft Office she wasn’t aware of what that was. Had to explain it was a suite of programs used frequently in business settings such as Word, excel, access, etc. She then explained she was familiar with said programs.
The hiring manager still thought she would be a good fit, went against my advice, and hired her. After a month of training, she still couldn’t figure out how to handle email attachments, excel, or basic computer functions. Had to be let go due to her inability to perform even the most basic job functions.
[deleted]
34. An uncomfortable encounter
My wife is HR for a Healthcare company and oversees clinics etc. One of the doctors brought an employee to her office and told her that she needed her pants.
Apparently, the doctor had poopped her pants and needed a new pair so she thought she would ask the employee. On top of that, the doctor took her pants down to show her that she pooped in her pants.
Boozeville13
35. The last straw
I was doing some consulting at a company. The HR chief was telling me about her previous gig at a manufacturing place. Highly dysfunctional. The final straw was an employee was defecating and smearing feces all over the facility.
They couldn’t catch him. The perp was quite depraved. Poop was being discovered on door handles, eating areas, finished product, etc. It was all ‘on her’ to solve it, without hiring a security contractor and/or placing cameras. She just quit.
furn_ell
36. Human rights
Employee: I would like to make a human rights violation complaint
HR: Wow, okay, this is pretty major. Please let me know the nature of your complaint.
Employee: There are no tampons in the first aid kit...
The employee was in her late 30s, in an office that was 60% women. I had to investigate if this was even a violation... It is not.
Ohnex
37. He had to go
I oversaw a guy who worked for the same company for 27 years. One day he gets the idea to try out a dating app, he gets a hit and they text for months. The “girl” confides to him that she’s only 16 and if that would be a problem, he proceeds to go meet her at the local Taco Bell. When he arrives it’s apparent that it’s one of those Chris Hansen stings by the local PD.
He proceeds to fight this charge in the court system. ONE YEAR LATER, he comes to me to tell me ALL of what happened. He had won his case. He gives the story to our divisional HR rep who asks him why he didn’t notify us earlier and why he hid this from us for so long. His answer was “I was too embarrassed.” We proceed to let him go. It was brutal and one of the meanest things I’ve had to deal with as a manager.
robotdanny
38. The “John” mix-up
Pulled into a meeting with two HR reps in the middle of my shift. Taken to this really nice boardroom, which was confusing because I was just a grunt and this was literally floors above where I should ever be. They sat me down and said basically what do you have to say for yourself. I, still confused, tell them I have no idea what they're talking about.
Everyone is really quiet and serious and I'm so scared. And they say you know what you did, this is cause for termination, blah blah. I'm literally thinking this is really excessive for being a few minutes late sometimes. I insist I don't know what's going on. One of them maybe realized something was wrong and flipped open a file and said you're “John Doe” right? Turns out they got me mixed up with someone else who has the same name. On the elevator ride down by myself I was still sweating. Don't know what that other person did but man, HR does not play.
Gysser
39. The justice I deserve
I went to HR to report that my team's manager was illegally shorting all of our paychecks. HR's response was to adopt a new, company-wide policy addressing the paycheck issue and back-paying most people for a certain amount, and also to frame me for work avoidance. HR and IT disabled part of my login account to a tool we used, and then fired me a few months later after failing to fix the problem and allowing me to actually do my job.
They tried to deny my unemployment claim afterward. Told the unemployment rep that they "had logs" showing that I did something to break the tool I didn't even have access to break in the first place. They also didn't think to disable my email access on time, so I was able to back up all my emails with IT documenting exactly what went down. Unemployment approved my claim and hit them with a major penalty to their insurance.
D14BL0
40. So much for speaking up
The HR/Payroll manager at a small hospital I worked at had a bad habit of not paying out the sign on bonus that was paid out incrementally in three payments through the course of a year and sign on bonuses for picking up extra shifts. After repeated request to be belatedly compensated, I took it to corporate who addressed my issue immediately.
A couple of weeks later I was terminated on what amounted to a technicality where I forget my badge one shift and my relief was late to take over sitting with a patient, causing me to receive more points against me than if I had called out for that shift.
When I was called in to receive my notification, the director of nursing was shocked but ultimately not much she could do.
Postmodernfinn
41. He ruined my track record
Overall I've been able to get along with HR departments with one exception. I was working a help desk job for a company during college and the head of HR called in for help. He was making an Excel spreadsheet and couldn't figure out how to make a formula do what he wanted.
I offered to come take a look as we were in the same building and he told me I couldn't because the spreadsheet was full of confidential information. So I asked then if he could describe what exactly he was trying to do without giving away any specific info, and he told me that what he was trying to do was confidential. So I clarified that he wanted me to tell him how to do something but I couldn't see it and he wouldn't even tell me what it was he was trying to do.
At that point, he agreed that I wouldn't be able to assist him since he couldn't divulge anything. As soon as we hung up he called my boss to complain that I was useless.
[deleted]
42. Silence in the company
HR hired consultants to run morale-building employee input sessions. Basically saying "We're not from the company. You can tell us all the things you don't like about working here and would like to see changed and we'll put it all into a report for management. Don't worry, everything is anonymous, we just need material for our report and you guys get to have your say in improving things around here."
Turns out HR and the consultants recorded all the sessions and played the highlights for management. People were disciplined for criticizing the company or their immediate superiors and any shred of faith or trust in management that the employees may have had was instantly incinerated.
Managers now complain that they don't know what's going on in their teams because nobody tells them anything. I wonder why.
SagaciousElan
43. Oversharing
I worked at a smallish company that grew big enough to hire an HR person. Her office was down from mine so in the mornings I'd swing by and say hi. That turned into grabbing a cup of coffee she had just made, then into having a pastry and talking about life.
I found that if I mentioned someone's name in passing, a few minutes later she would spill the beans about that person's life, what work issues they had, health issues, family issues, etc. I learned really quickly any issues I had not to take them to her. She made it like 6months before she got fired.
Danobing
44. Dangerous goods
I worked in a warehouse that regularly concealed the shipping of dangerous goods to save money. This went on for years. As time went on, I bubbled up through the ranks and was eventually made manager of the warehouse.
I outright refused to ship anything anywhere until we started to claim our dangerous goods shipments properly. Their solution? The boss started to sign his name instead. This went on for a few weeks until HR found out. (They knew how much trouble the president could have gotten into).
The next time a shipment had to go out, they got the newest guy in the warehouse to start signing his name instead, claiming they were training him how to do paperwork but the poor kid had no idea so when the driver showed up to pick up his shipment I told him that there were a bunch of dangerous substances concealed in the shipment. So he refused it and left.
I got told later that my actions were "damaging to the company image" and it had to stop. I told HR exactly what was going on and how I would not be a part of it. Less than a week after that, I was removed from my position due to "company restructuring" and laid off. Some of the most crooked things I've ever seen. My rough estimates ballpark the money they saved at about $250,000/year.
Part_Time_Priest
45. Injustice
At my job we used to hire a few special needs individuals who would do some cleaning and light-duty things. One day one of them did something wrong (it was very minor but I can’t remember the specifics) and the manager said out loud, right next to this guy, “Why do we keep hiring these retards?” And referred to his job coach as his “handler”.
One of the girls that saw it happen was rightfully pissed off and reported it to HR. The next day she was put on unpaid leave for “creating a hostile work environment”. The same manager is still here... she is not.
rvidxr22