10 Outrageous Office Stories That Will Make You Grateful for Your Job
Whether it’s a non-responsive boss, a terrible feud with a coworker, or a mounting pile of impossible to-dos, we all have days when we feel like our nine-to-five is getting the best of us. Luckily, while it may feel like we’re going through our work drama alone, founder of the popular workplace Q&A blog Ask a Manager Alison Green has created a handy resource to give every working gal a place to vent their frustrations and get actually helpful answers to their most burning work-related questions.
“I figured I’d just do it for a few months, no one would read it, and that would be the end of it,” Green says about starting the site. “But it turned out that there’s a real hunger out there for help figuring out how to navigate workplace issues. The site’s been around for 10 years now and I get more and more letters and more and more visitors each year — currently, I get about 60 letters a day and 2.2 million visits a month!”
While Green responds to as many letters as she can by offering job seekers and employees helpful tidbits about their particular situation, she admits that there have been some letters that have been downright bizarre. Here are 10 of our favorite outrageous office stories that have been sent to Ask a Manager — read on at your own risk!
1. “An employee is putting magic curses on her coworkers.” HR representatives have to deal with a lot of unusual workplace drama, but this one in particular might be the weirdest of the bunch. After a few complaints, an HR representative for a school division was asked to interview a member of the cleaning staff because she had been putting magic curses on her coworkers. “When people make me angry, or cross me, I don’t worry because I have ways to get rid of them,” she is quoted as saying in the HR interview. “And I’ve cursed them. I have a place in my house with candles and other items and I know how to do that.” Probably best not to get on this lady’s bad side…
