From a man searching for his dagger at a wedding reception, to a call centre randomly calling NASA, 23 employees share the most bizarre events they witnessed on their job.
[Source can be found at the end of the article]
1. Worked in a Natural History museum in the gift shop. Our second floor was prehistoric life and as such full of dinosaurs. Family with two elementary school aged kids comes into the gift shop and I ask if they enjoyed the dinosaurs, because seriously you are 8 you came to see dinosaurs. The mother of the family tells me that they don’t believe in dinosaurs and brought their children to see the museum to prove to them that fossils are a lie. I’ve yet to wrap my head around this learning opportunity.
MaybeImTheNanny
2. I was a mechanic for 10 years. I did a complimentary oil change for a customer and was later informed I was being sued because ” changing the oil caused the front main, rear main and oil pan gasket to leak. I tried to save them the embarrassment of taking it to court because I had records of it leaking prior to this, as well as multiple reminders and quotes to get it fixed. The judge laughed it out of the courtroom. I’ve never seen anyone try so hard and fail so miserably.
chilifngrdfunk
3. I was working at a frozen yogurt store, a store that typically parents come in with their young children, and sure enough an all-black biker gang of 30 comes in and gets frozen yogurt. Incredibly nice people, it was a fun time.
platinumsombro
4. I was a bartender/manager for a dozen years. Normally when someone comes up to a bar and says “I have a strange question…” it’s something really banal, like “What’s the song that just played?” Or “Can I have a couple of straws?”
So, we’re hosting a wedding reception and a Scottish guy comes up to the bar. “I’ve got a weird question…”
Yeah, go ahead, shoot.
“…has anyone handed in a dagger? I’ve lost one…”
Turns out the dagger was a ceremonial one that was a part of his kilt, but I felt a complete mixture of “Hey! That IS an unusual question!” and “Oh, this wedding is about to be on the local news…”
(He found it in the end. Mercifully, not in anybody.)
SomeonesDrunkNephew
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5. Worked in a convenience store. Girl came in and wanted to buy smokes. I ID’d her and she said she didn’t have any on her but her sister was in the store next door and that she had ID.
I told her that didn’t matter and I wouldn’t sell either of them smokes as we can’t sell to someone we think is a minor.
She comes in 20 minutes later with her identical twin sister.
I accepted her sisters ID.
orochi
6. I’ve been a nursing assistant for 10 years. One of my first wards was a 95 year old woman whose children had neglected her for years until adult protective services intervened. When she was first admitted she had pressure wounds on her back and buttocks so severe that parts of her pelvic bone had become exposed and maggots were crawling in them.
NiimuraToonTown
7. I’ve work in car rental for a little over 5 years, but my boss has been in it for 20-ish and my dad over 30.
We see a lot of licenses, and there for lots of legal names. One of those legal names happened to be Ding Dong Wang. None of us had seen or have seen since a name that tops that.
TheMysteriousMid
8. I am a store manager and in our store we sell electronic devices. I saw tons of incredible things but my top 2 are:
-A young guy bought a new camera. The next day he comes back saying that camera is terrible and not working. We test it and the memory card is not recognized. We take a closer look and we realized that he cut his old memory card (a regular Sd)into the shape of a microsd so it could fit the reader.
-Owner of a Panasonic plasma tv asking where was the hole on the tv to refill plasma because colors were not looking good anymore.
scardeMx5
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9. I worked in retail for thirteen years. I’ve seen poop, vomit, cursing, blood, fights, drugs, you name it. But it was never weirder than a time someone came into my store with a 50 gallon fish tank, angled into a shopping cart, with the pebbles inside.
We weren’t a pet store.
THECapedCaper
10. I’ve helped out with necropsies for almost 4 years now. Not a super long time, but I have removed hundreds and hundreds of organs so I get used to what they usually look like.
One day I’m cutting into some chickens and it’s going just like normal. Then I grab one, slice into her abdomen, grab her intestines, and they’re hard. Like, rock solid and bumpy. I pull them out and whatever pellet food she was eating had gone the entire way through completely undigested. The intestinal lining was stretched out and super thin so you could see every detail of the food. It was like the world’s thinnest sausage casing stretched over a Nerds Rope. Never saw it happen again.
greychem
11. Been working as a dev for a few years now. Part of my job is training some of the older devs on newer tech. So I schedule a training session on some basic enterprise concepts.
The training gets derailed by a 30 minute discussion on how to zip/unzip files. You would think that would be something that might take 30 seconds, but not for this crew. They refused to believe their systems could do it via right-click shell and the logistics of it. They wanted full explanations because it blew their minds how shortcuts work.
Some of these people have been developers for 10-15 years at this point. I need a raise.
Dolrath
12. I’m a tour guide and barman in Scotland, near Edinburgh castle. Selling a ticket with some difficulty and a major language barrier to a Chinese lady, she eventually comes back looking for what I assumed was a refund. It comes to light that she thought we were Edinburgh Castle. I get that there was a culture barrier but in no way shape or form do we look like a castle or have a close enough proximity to the castle for me to wrap my head around her thinking.
See that commanding structure with turrets at the top of the hill? That’s your castle.
Also, honourable mention to the guy in the restaurant who claimed to have a phobia of plates.
silverman96
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13. I’ve been an archaeologist for the past three or four years.
One of the things I saw during my first year of work was several fresh “graves” where the land owner (on whose land we where doing an excavation) had buried his dead sheep.
Also, during the same excavation, suddenly a horse gave birth right in the middle of our dig site.
McHvalros
14. Software engineer for 7 years. Pretty sure this is almost a weekly occurrence – someone will encounter some insane new bug in some years-old code that we will all swear is totally impossible to have occurred or made it into production. It will baffle Senior and Junior engineers and managers alike.
Then we usually just shrug and go back to work because trying to fix it will almost certainly introduce a far worse bug.
AnthonyMJohnson
15. When I was working at a call center, my computer would automatically call random business numbers all over the country and I had to try and convince the people on the other end of the line to buy our product. It called NASA during the week I had to try and sell safety/OSHA pamphlets. Neither NASA nor my manager were amused when I brought up the Challenger as a reason for them to consider a subscription. (Note: they did not buy a subscription)
My computer also called the FBI three times during my very brief employment at said call center. They were not happy about it.
DiglettUsedFly
16. 7 years retail/hospitality. I work in a restaurant that sells chicken. Someone ordered a half chicken meal – that generally comes as breast and leg, but if you have a preference of meat we can accommodate it, stock permitting. He then called my manager back over. Hey man you see my half chicken ye? Make sure it’s both BREAST not leg ye? I’m allergic to the leg pieces init.” Manager took over his two breast chicken and said, “just so you know, the chicken these breasts came from, they also had legs – I just want to warn you dude. Wouldn’t want you to get sick.
annaelizabeth26
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17. I work in luxury retail and last summer some guy couldn’t find the toilet fast enough and pooped himself on the shop floor. To make things worse 2 tourists who had no clue what was going on stepped in it and smeared it another 10m. Made my day a whole lot more interesting.
raphthimonss
18. One of the private ambulance companies I worked for had a contract with county corner so we handled most body removals. Got called to a DOA at a hotel, guy was like 87. As we went to roll him into the body bag a butt plug fell out of his butt. This thing had to be like 8 inches around, it was the size of a coke can. As we’re wheeling him out the cops tell us they found a pound of cocaine in his suitcase and the hotel staff saw at least 4 different prostitute’s leaving his room the night before.
Star_fox69
19. Years back I worked in fast-food for a summer job. You can probably guess which company. One of the last days before I was finally fed up and quit, this happens.
Some homeless looking ‘person’ comes in around the start of the lunch rush. Normally I’d go up to them, say Sir, or Madam, you need to order before you can use the restrooms, but since we were busy enough to have all registers open this wasn’t an option. So the lunch rush comes and goes, and I don’t think much about the person until I see them leaving… at 4PM.
I immediately feared what I’d find when I went to the bathroom. This wouldn’t be the first time someone had defecated on the floor, or otherwise spent time where they made a mess. So I got the mop and bucket and went to check the damage. One of our bathrooms had a poop mural painted in it. A terrible attempt to paint starry night.
But the person had to have had a brush, and probably smuggled in extra poop given it covered the entire wall.
ThrowAway-47
20. I was interning with a maritime lawyer (boat law) and was looking up some cases to establish precedent for our case. I was reading through a case and it was looking like they were going to rule in a way that backs up our case. Then I read that one of the panelists died. Like the case was like a week in and he just died. They appoint a new panelist and they vote against our precedent. So that sucked. At lunch, I bring this up to my boss and he gives me a confused look. Apparently in his 25+ years of law he had never encountered a panelist straight up dying in the middle of a case. After lunch I went back to work and guess what happens in the next case? Two of the panelists die. I look over to my boss and tell him. I think he thinks I am cursed or something now. He went from zero deaths in 25+ years to three in an hour. I don’t work with him anymore.
Erastus_Bacheldor
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21. Just started contracting for this company. New accountant got me in to help sort out the mess the previous guy had left.
Transactions had been put through Sage but not through the bank and vice versa. He had sent out remittances to suppliers then not actually paid them. Sage shows all these bills paid by BACS on a certain date….but they weren’t actually paid.
I have spent the last week dealing with debt recovery agencies and pissed off creditors. Not being able to trust your computerised records in Accounts is just….a nightmare. Literally no clue what we have paid and what we haven’t without trawling through months and months of bank statements reconciling everything.
Obviously previous guy hadn’t bothered doing bank recs either so there is no point you can say “OK everything up to this day is reliable”
It’s great for me as I bill hourly but I really feel sorry for my boss.
brsmith77
22. Worked at a go kart track for 6 years. No major crashes. Little spin outs and off road excursions but nothing bad. Then one day a kid in a kart went airborne and landed on his mom. She hit her head and got a small cut. He broke his arm. Couple weeks later another kid somehow went airborne, bounced off a tire and flipped landing upside down. I ran over and flipped the 700 lb kart right side up expecting to see a dead 10 year old. Instead I saw the happiest kid in my life giggling with pleasure. His dad ran over and said “good job boy.” I was still shaking. A month later I quit.
Gam3ov3r
23. Facilities Engineer:
-receiving a request to install a skylight over someone’s desk. They were on the 1st floor of a 3 story building… unless they wanted to look up someone in APs butt all day, I’m not sure what they were thinking.
-got called into the women’s restroom by a tech because he had a horrible toilet clog and couldn’t resolve it. After hours of trying to plung and snake the beast, I had him remove the toilet all together and check the drain line, only to pull out an arm length, 4in thick mass of napkins/tampons/paper towels that a lady had flushed. Disturbing to no end.
-had to setup the gym area into a large video conference room for an all hands meeting. Went to get the AV equipment out of the storeroom that was a closet off to the side of the gym (with no ceiling), opened the door only to be greeted by 2 feet dangling in front of my face. Apparently someone in product engineering was pissed at their boss for not letting him relocate back to be with his family in Europe and had hung themselves from the closets rafters. I called my Manager and promptly took a week off.
SYN_BLACK_XS
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