We spend spend about 25% of our jobs, so we're bound see some strange stuff while on the clock, right? Depending on the industry, the scenarios we encounter in the workplace can range from incredibly awkward to downright disturbing. No matter what the scarring situation is, one thing is certain: going to work will never be the same after it's been experienced.
Read on to see what happened when these folks walked in on some seriously messed up situations while at work. Content has been edited for clarity.
You See Some Crazy Things While Working In A Nursing Home
“I work in a nursing home. I’ve seen a lot. Two of my favorites:
When I first started there, a resident’s call light was on. I went in to see what the resident needed. He didn’t say anything, just watched me. So I turned off the call light, and went to readjust his call bell since it looked like it was out of reach. But it was stuck on something. I pulled on the cord, he said ‘Ouch.’ I lifted up the covers…and the call bell was up his butt. Like pretty far up. He just said, ‘What?’ like it was nothing.
We had a married couple living with us for awhile, staying in the same room. The man was in his 90s. The woman in her 80s. The mister was unable to walk any longer, while the misses was physically healthy, but very confused and unable to do her own care. One night, I walked by their room and the husband had pulled the bedside curtains around both beds and I could hear him saying ‘aw crud, I’m gonna fall.’ So of course, I knock and go in, and this man had stripped his poor, confused (and probably cold) wife, taken off his own clothes as much as he could, and was trying to heave himself into bed with her. He looks up at me and says, ‘Well, don’t just stand there and stare! Help me up there so I can play poke-and-tuck!'”
The Smell Kept Getting Worse And Worse
“One day at work I got a call to go repair or replace one of our hospital beds that was malfunctioning at a nursing home. Most of these assisted living facilities have a locked wing designated for their residents with medical conditions affecting their memory. So after I speak with the receptionist, she leads me to their memory care wing and lets me through the door.
I’m immediately met with a strong smell of feces as I walk in. This wing of the building is shaped like the letter T with the entrance at the bottom. As I’m making my down the first hall, the smell is just getting worse. I turn left and go down a long dead end hallway towards the room and the smell is just getting stronger with every step I take. I find the door to the room I am going into is ajar and seems to be the source of the smell. After a brief moment to prepare myself, I knock and walk in.
I retched and dry heaved at what I found. There is the bed I’m here to fix with this poor man sleeping in it who is covered in his own excrement. He is wearing nothing but a very full and spoiled diaper that’s leaking at it’s seams. Feces is smeared all over his legs, back, stomach, and some parts of his arms. I was horrified! Luckily, the issue with the hospital bed was easy to spot and only took a few seconds to reattach the part that fell off of the footboard.
I almost got sick again after I got out of that room. I booked it down the hallway to the nurse’s office and told her what I walked into and that she need to get down there quickly. She signed the order for fixing the bed and I ran out of there to go bleach my eyes. Thinking back, I should have called the cops or whom ever deals with case of abuse like that. In the moment I was so completely mortified it never crossed my mind. It was easily the most messed up thing I’ve seen in the countless nursing homes I’ve been to for my job.”
A Fight At The Gas Station
“I used to manage a gas station. It was small inside. Not a lot of space. This older lady comes in to grab a soda or what have you. As she comes up to pay, another lady comes in to the store in a huff, clearly not happy. She is storming around a bit when her boyfriend/husband comes in and they start screaming at each other like mad people. The poor elderly lady is at the counter looking at me with the most petrified look in her face. After the shock of the couple yelling at the top of their lungs and cursing at each other, she pays and bolts out the door.
After a few more seconds of these two shouting goes by, I try to calm the situation down. No luck. The lady picks up a glass commemorative mug we were selling and swings at the guy’s head, but misses. She was seriously gunning at his head with this mug too. He, to his credit, mostly kept his stuff together and didn’t advance on her. I ran back to the counter to call the cops. The screaming continued.
I got 911 on the phone, with them yelling in the background. It’s a fun night. Eventually it boils up and she swings again and connects with the side of his head. Mug shatters. He goes down. She looks stunned for a moment, drops the glass handle on the ground and walks out of the store and sits in their car. He is surprisingly not bleeding and is recovering in the floor. He doesn’t say much. Finally the cops show up, an interrogation takes place, and they are taken away. I’m stuck cleaning up glass from the floor and all the candy bar boxes. Luckily, there’s no blood.
Next day their car wasn’t in the parking lot anymore, so one of them must have been released from custody. Never found out what they were fighting about or what the end result was.”
It Was Just Like A Scene Out Of “Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas”
“I was at work and the company accountant told me I needed to drive the vice president of the company home as he had too much to drink. I asked where he was and it turned out he was at a hotel across the street with the owner of the company and the top sales woman in the company. I knew they liked to party, but I was surprised what I walked into.
Do you remember that scene in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas where the hotel room was trashed and just covered in every body fluid you could think of? That was pretty close to what I saw. It smelled awful, and he and the owner looked like they had gone through crud. Remarkably, the saleswoman actually looked just fine.
Anyway, I took him home which was only about 10 minutes away. He could barely walk, so other than getting him in the car, he wasn’t too obnoxious. The smell on the other hand was bad. It took almost a month to get it out.”
Roaches, Roaches, And More Roaches
“I worked at a fast food place when I was in my teens. Everyone called out of work one night and I had to call the the store owner (a very cheap prick) to come help. So it was just me and him doing the work of 4 people. Technically, I did the work of 3 people while he just took orders up in the lobby.
So drive-thru runs out of straws right in the middle of dinner rush and I go grab a new box from the top shelf in storage. Out of the corner of my eye, I see a couple things fall from the top of the stack but I’m in a rush and ignore it. I open the box and dozens of roaches just pour out and then run back in.
So I holler at my boss who has a long line in the lobby to come look and he just yells ‘I’m busy, just tell me.’ I thought about yelling roaches, but just insisted that he come look.
He gets to me and I thump the box and the roaches pour out again. He asks if all the boxes are like that, so I take a broom handle and tap the stack of over a dozen boxes, and more roaches just start running out and falling to the floor.
He tells me to go to the lobby and check if we have any straws up front. So I do and of course there are only three straws there. So I head back and the owner is freaking shaking out the straws in the trash can trying to get all the roaches out so he can still use all the boxes even though all the straw wrappers are dotted with roach crud. He looked at me and said “they have wrappers, they are still good”
I walked out the door in the middle of dinner rush. I can only assume he closed the store since he has no idea how anything works and when I came in the next morning everything was wiped down and there were new straws that had been purchased from a supermarket stocked in the drive thru and lobby. For whatever reason, he grabbed multi-color bendy straws. He also gave me a raise.
There are a number of other examples of how he cut corners that should not have been cut at all, but this was by far the worst.
A few years later, I saw him at Best Buy with his son trying to negotiate down the price the Xbox which had just been released.
Forget you, Ron. I sincerely hope you are miserable.”
“You See Real Weird Stuff As A Firefighter”
“I worked for a few years as a firefighter for a small city in New Hampshire. We would routinely go to lift assists (‘Help! I’ve fallen and can’t get up’).
This one day, we went to a local motel that is kinda run down. It was known as being a place people go to get their fix and things like that. We got dispatched for a lift assist in one of the rooms. We walked in to find a roughly 65 year old man on the floor, except it appeared he was just growing out of the ground. He was around 400 pounds and his legs we gone at the hip. Because of that, he looked like a body just forming out of the floor.
He said he fell out of bed and needed help. No problem. Then I heard a noise from the bathroom. I turned to see a very young looking female walk out in nothing but a school girl mini skirt. I asked who she was, to which she replied casually ‘Oh, I’m his cousin’ and walked out of the room. Topless and all. I looked at the guy on the floor, he shrugged his shoulders.
It took us about a half hour to get him into the bed since he was so heavy. Then we left.
You see real weird stuff as a firefighter.”
A Wild Night At The Casino
“I work in a casino as a security guard. This high roller wanted to be walked to his room, so myself and a female officer took him up there. She didn’t need to come along, but we’re friends and there wasn’t much going on, so she tagged along.
We get this 65 year old dude to his room, and as soon as the door opens, he just starts peeing his pants. He’s shaking our hands saying thanks for the help, and just urinating an excessive amount. He finally goes into his room, and shuts the door, and it looks like someone poured a 2-liter of Mountain Dew on the tile. My friend goes to get a couple of housekeeping towels, and calls our cleaning service to mop once we’ve got it all soaked up with the towels. I stand there so that the adjacent room doesn’t walk out and slip in this mans enormous puddle of pee.
As I’m standing there, I hear this old guy start yelling. This dude just starts beating the absolute heck out of his wife while calling her every name in the book, for who knows why? I let my friend know on the radio, she comes running back. We throw down the towels and we go to knock on the door, so we can stop the beating. Before we can knock, the door swings open, and there is the guest, fully nude and hard.
He goes, ‘Do you freaking mind? I’m having a go at my wife!’ I ask if he’s hitting her, and he says ‘Yeah, she loves it.’ Next thing I know, naked wife is at the door explaining how this is how they get off, and how it’s fine, sometimes you just have to get creative in your old age…
My friend and I just didn’t talk for a day or two after that.”
So Much For A Clean Port-A-Potty
“It was my third day as an electrician, I was working on a construction site that would become a H&M store in Walnut Creek, CA. I was always at least 30 minutes early since I was paranoid I would get there late and be fired. Anyways, while I am waiting for the crew to show up, my stomach begins rumbling something fierce from the large coffee I drank. I beeline it down to the port-a-potty’s. I knew they had been cleaned yesterday so figured I would take a nice pre work dump in a decent smelling port-a-potty.
Since it was 5:30 or so in the morning, it was pretty dark out. I was in a hurry and had to GO, so I did not think to check the seat. Well, I sat in poop. I didn’t know what it was at first, I go ‘huh?!’ Then push my work light on my hardhat and see that the port a potty is covered in disgusting smelling dark poop. All over my butt and legs. I start to gag, but can’t do anything since I am crapping like no ones business. I go to grab some toilet paper, only to discover that somehow there was poop smeared there too. My left hand is now covered in poop. I have poop all over me and am gagging, but can’t do anything about it.
So I walk out pants down, get into the next port-a-potty. It is thankfully clean and take close to an hour wiping myself. I walk in, late, and walk up to my glaring foreman and tell him about my situation. He laughs, shakes his head and tells me he will give me 8 hours and to go home. That sucked.”
He Was Cool At First…Then Things Got Really Weird
“For a long time, I was a security guard. I worked for a company, and that company was contracted by a very wealthy man who had a very serious problem with skaters and homeless people on his property. Of course, his property was in an area that had a very large homeless population. This specific man didn’t even want skaters or the homeless on the sidewalk. He had enough pull in the city to where he could do that, despite the fact that people on the sidewalk are well within their legal right to be there. The police backed us up on this.
Needless to say, most of my interactions were with homeless people. One day I got a call about a vagrant rifling through the trash. I went to check it out and run him off, and the dude was actually quite together and didn’t look like he had been homeless long. He tried to bond with me, which was something I kind of avoided. I tried not to dehumanize him, but I was also there to do a specific job. Well, I kept running into this specific individual. And we were cool, we both understood what it was and there was no hostility. We both knew what the other had to do. Neither of us were pricks about it.
So, me and this guy built a repertoire with one another. I’d been seeing him for months and we laughed and joked. One day, I saw the guy and he was out of his mind wasted and possibly on other substances. He’d mentioned earlier he had a toothache, and this day I saw him, he was drenched in blood and had pulled his front teeth out with a pair of pliers. That was when I knew it was about to get weird.
So about a week later, I’m on an overnight and I get a call on the radio to go to one of our buildings. They didn’t say what the problem was, and when I asked, they wouldn’t elaborate, so I had no idea what I was walking into. The building was an apartment building I was familiar with, and they told me the problem was downstairs in the fitness center. So I go into the building and go downstairs. I didn’t hear any noise, so I assumed it was some sort of false alarm. I walk into the fitness center and hit the light, and this same person was on a weight lifting bench doing the dirty with another homeless man. When I hit the lights, they panicked. You know those sliding glass doors that usually lead to backyards in homes? They panicked so hard, the dude jumped up and crashed through one of those and kept going. There was blood EVERYWHERE. That was the last time I saw that individual.
I quit that job shortly after that.”
Not Your Average Business Trip
“I worked for the US office of a Canadian company. This company had a bunch of offices across the major Canada, from Vancouver to Toronto to Montreal. Each office had a director, and we would hold quarterly group meetings that would be hosted by the different cities. For this messed up story, this time we came together in Montreal. Usually we went to a sporting event (almost always Hockey), out to dinner, bars. It really was more to get together and have fun than anything else. All normal bro stuff.
Well, the director of Montreal was known for really liking nude bars. And on this night, his favorite place was on the itinerary, about 45 minutes outside of town in some seedy location. I’m along for the ride, I’ve had a few drinks, not totally into the whole nude bar scene, but we’re out and about.
We pull up to the nude bar and walk in. A little weird, not the usual attire for bouncers, but whatever. We check in with bouncers, coats handed over. Once we are through the door, we walk down the aisle, tables and twin bars on either side. I start noticing all the staff and the various outfits. It finally dawned on my that it was Halloween weekend, and it was definitely full costume themed night.
We get down to the front of the stage, grab a table, order drinks. At the front of the stage there are two poles with girls on either one, doing their thing. Ten feet behind them were large flat screen TVs playing smut. Typical dancers abound, a DJ is playing in the background. The rest of the interior looks like freaking vintage moulin rouge on acid.
About a half hour in, the DJ announces he’s going to take a break and be back in an hour. From behind the curtain, between the two giant flat screen TV’s, theatrical smoke begins to emanate. Stage lights begin to rotate, that disco flash is going, and Hard Rock music begins to play.
Out from the curtain, coming out of the smoke, between the giant flat screen TV’s and the nude girls on the poles comes freaking MIDGET KISS.
JESUS IN A FREAKING HAND BASKET. FOUR FOOT TALL versions of Gene, Stanley, Ace & Peter Criss. I swear to God, I thought I was tripping Canadian Acid.
Four little people in FULL KISS makeup come out and start doing full-on KISS Covers. For all that is holy, I will never, ever forget MINI Kiss on the nudie bar stage, rocking out with adult content on giant tv’s in the background and half naked girls on pole a foot away from me. Mini GENE is sticking his tongue out, people are getting lap dances, nothing on God’s Earth prepared me for the most messed up (and as noted enlightening) thing I saw in my life.”
“What I Saw Was Literally A Freaking Nightmare”
“I worked in a cinema a few years back. During a Harry Potter release on a Saturday night all the floor staff were exhausted after the last shows went in. Anyway, we heard a bit off commotion coming from one of the corridors that just had a movie finish. A nice lady had just projectile vomited a huge load of popcorn up outside the disabled toilets on the carpet. This wasn’t the bad part. She kept pointing and waving towards the toilet. We thought she wanted to go in, so I opened the door and nearly heaved myself. I literally saw a freaking nightmare and the first thing that came to my mind was I was going to have to clean it. The rule at our cinema was who ever spotted it cleaned it. So yeah, that disabled toilet was covered in feces from the toilet seat, floor, walls, mirror and yes, there was a pair of jeans and am assuming white boxers covered in poop.
I refused to clean and so did everyone working so the manager comes over with some straws and whoever got the shortest had to clean it. I got away and the new guy who was also new into the country got the biggest straw, but didn’t know what was going on. The prettiest girl got the shortest so we were all happy, whilst she started crying. My manager turned to the new guy and said sorry mate you got the biggest so you have to clean it. The freaking manager changed the rules and everyone else walked away and we left him to it.
The new guy worked there for a few more years and when ever there was sick, he got a pass from cleaning it, which he deserved.
I stopped working there myself. One night I was getting an Uber home and it was the new guy who was the driver. The first thing he said to me after hello was how he learnt what the short straw meant now. We had a good laugh about it.”
Someone Call HR!
“Back in the mid 80s, I worked at a large and powerful Ad Agency in a large city in the South West. We were tied into the state’s political muscle, our clients were the state’s tourism, GOP candidates, police, sheriff and judges, etc. Lots of loose political money flowed and I was getting more than my share.
Working through a weekend, I stopped by my office to pick up a few things. Hearing loud noises and music, perhaps another small party in our conference room, I opened the door to discover the CEO, who was my boss, and the ‘big local celeb’ governor’s daughter, both buck naked and fully going at it on top of our large conference table. He was older, she was quite young, etc. I made my excuses and quickly exited.
A week later I received my walking papers, a huge payoff and a contract to keep my mouth shut on threat of pain. A month later, this same former boss announced his candidacy for governor (he lost).
Hey Robert (if you’re still alive), I still have photograph copies with your fingerprints of that check, a recording of your threats from that last meeting, and I’m sure you later found out that I figured out that her first kid is yours. Thanks for that nice second check payoff. I used most of that to set myself up here in Europe.”
