What's the craziest thing that ever happened at your workplace?

The computer that controlled all the doors refused to open any of them, including the door to the room in which it was physically located.
It wasn't quite HAL 9000 because doors could still be opened from the inside, but control over the computer was regained only with the help of a locksmith.
- A company I worked for announced that it had come to management attention that staff were socialising in the office, and that wasn't allowed. To prevent it the doors would be locked until ten minutes before our official start time in the morning. I showed up at 7:30 the next morning for my shift and the whole team were milling around the front door because they couldn't get in. Seems like they never delegated a manager to open up for us.
  The policy was never rescinded, but they never tried enforcing it again either.
- Facebook, 2021?
  
  Was it that long ago? Wow.
- That was the day the locksmith changed his job title to physical penetration tester.

Boss was arrested for ordering expensive toner cartridges for "store use" and reselling them. He had racked up around 80k and a felony charge.
Also, the absolute horrors that occurred in another job's bathroom were biblical.
- Christ.
  You reminded me that I had to waste like an entire hour of my day a couple of weeks ago convincing my boss that yes, we absolutely can eBay off the four or five unopened toner cartridges we have lying around here for a printer we no longer have. It's fine. Just let them go. We can use the money for some other operational expense. "But already paid for them and that means we'll take a loss on them."
  Sure, genius. Versus what, exactly? Leaving them mouldering on the supply room shelf until the day the sun burns out? An 80% return is better than 0% return.

I was working part time as a software developer while a grad student and was assigned under a full time employee. We were the only ones working on that project. I came back after the Christmas break to be informed I was the new project lead because the full time employee i was working under got fired after he sexually assaulted one of the female employees after getting drunk at the company Christmas party.
- Congrats on your field promotion

The company I used to work at sometimes rented out their conference room to other companies for large conferences.
One day some people rent the room, and start bringing in some suitcases. Thinking they might have some involved presentation, nobody asked questions. A few more people came and went, until suddenly the police raids the place.
Turns out those people robbed a museum a few weeks earlier and tried to sell the stolen historical art pieces in that conference room.
- Now that is definitely a crazy thing.
- They never show that part in the heist movies. "Nice work boys, we've pulled off the job! Now, we just need to book that corporate conference room..."

I used to do dispatching for night-shift security for a large computer-related company in a western state in the U.S. (sorry for vagueness).
One foggy night/early morning as we were nearing the end of our shift, one of the patrol guys calls in from his vehicle and says he found a dead cow on one of the roads that ran adjacent to company property. Our building was surrounded by fields that sometimes had cattle on them, so we figured one must have gotten loose somehow and got hit by a car, probably because it was so foggy and hard to see. The officer was on his way back to dispatch anyway, but 3 minutes later, as he's on his way back and on another road (the company site was several acres), he calls in again to say there are MANY LIVE cattle all over the road and running into one of the parking lots in front of the main building. Turns out they all busted a fence and escaped, and were now freely running around the campus. We have no idea who they belong to, so we call the head of security (who was on his way in as by now it was like 6am), then call the cops to see if they can tell us who owns the land the cattle escaped from.
Meanwhile, other people who work in the building are arriving for the day, and they are calling in to dispatch saying they cannot leave their cars because they're surrounded by cattle. The herd (we later learned it was about 100 head) split into several groups, and started blocking the entrances to the building, and people were just afraid to get out of their cars with them roaming around. The fog made everything worse because you couldn't see very far across the lot before you were suddenly up against a herd of spooked cattle.
Eventually we got ahold of the owners, and they had to come out to the campus with horses and literally round the cattle up with lassos and herd them back into the fields. The cops came to redirect traffic on the highway to avoid the worksite entirely while our patrol assisted with the Jeeps. It was utterly ridiculous. Thankfully the only casualty was the 1 dead cow.
- With the fog this sounds like some amazing zero context photos. Did you get any photos of the Cows of the Fog that you can share?
  
  This was over 20 years ago, and I have no pics, sorry!
  
  I agree, that would have been fantastic. In my head, it looks absolutely beautiful and crazy
- This is the story I came to this thread for. Amazing! Thanks for posting!
- Did they determine the cause of death of that cow? I would think any car that hit it would have received a lot of damage.
  
  I don't remember if they ever figured it out (it happened 20 years ago at least). We certainly didn't receive any calls into the dispatch center for a car wreck, but then again we were just local security for the one company. Also, the person might have been driving drunk and didn't want to call the accident in to the police. People loved to speed on that back road, too.
- It was no ordinary night. It was the Night of the Cow.

Christmas party, of course. We had an Indian dude join the company. Really nice lad that I got on great with.
There's a company meal kicking off at 7pm not far from where we work so the entire office (about 40 odd people) decide we'll get a few scoops in beforehand.
Well this lad was quite small and very obviously not used to drink. He was fairly toasted before we even got to the restaurant. He kept drinking then became belligerent.
Proceeded to puke all over the place half way through the meal. He went out to get some fresh air and the CEO went out to have a chat with him and suggested he head home.
Promptly told the CEO to fuck off and leave him alone.
My bestie was his boss and at that point basically wrestled him into a taxi. The CEO took it well in fairness. It was totally out of character so he kept his job (and his visa which was dependent on the job).
- Holy shit that guy is incredibly lucky he got to keep his job. Being belligerent drunk at work functions usually do not end well.
  
  Yeah to be honest I feel like there was a decent bit of social pressure that he felt. The CEO was a fairly hard character in general but the lad in question was well liked. The "fuck off" did shock us all though.
  Like none of us would have been surprised if he'd been let go but it would have affected morale generally, laws here are generally worker oriented and he was a good worker, plus the added effect of visa removal has to be part of the decision process.
  The guy who wrestled him into the taxi definitely put in a good word too. He's a good soul.
  Edit: the belligerence was only half the story on the negative side. We were all very embarrassed that the staff had to clean up the puke but they were absolute champions about it. I've worked as a waiter for a good few years in college and you do tend to just pass these things off as best you can, especially for large groups that are going to leave a solid tip.
- I remember a very similar thing happened with one of our visitors. It was explained to me that some of these folks grew up with very strict parents and just get absolutely CRUNK when they have that opportunity. I can understand that. :)
  
  Yeah definitely. There was an urban legend in the same company about Saudi visitors before my time and they went WILD. Strip clubs, 5am finish, the works.
  And yeah yer man just was not used to drink in any way. Poor bastard. I'd say the fear and hangover combo must have been something else to wake up to.

I saw a dude lose a hand because they ignored everything about passing through the water tight doors when they were moving.
- Holy fuck that's terrifying
- what line of work?
  
  Crewman on a cruiseship. I was basically room service/janitorial. The guy who lost his hand was one of the kitchen people for one of the several restaurants onboard.

I’m a manager at a small laid back warehouse. It’s not uncommon for coworkers to all go out as a group for drinks from time to time.
A subordinate and I became genuine friends at one of these outings and hung out for a couple of months. They caught feelings, I didn’t reciprocate and backed away from social time with them outside of work. Fast forward a few months and they tried to kill themselves in the parking lot one day after I said I didn’t want to hang out with them anymore because of our work dynamic.
I don’t go to work hangs off the property anymore.
- That's awful, I'm sorry that happened. Also just be aware that's a classic dv abuser tactic.
  
  Absolutely. I had a stalker once. Was terrifying, and that sounds just like what they do.

My place of work used to have a fairly large "data entry" department until they... did... something to make that job kindof unnecessary. They laid off pretty much all of that department. And I'm told the boss who was over them before they were laid off returned to his office to find a sizeable human shit directly atop his desk.
Another story. My own boss (actually my boss's boss) was a massive asshole. Committed the team to a completely unreasonable deadline in conversations with the C-level folks above him, and then threw temper tantrums when the deadline wasn't hit. He turned the daily standup into a 7:30am (in-person) daily demo to prove we were making progress and weren't... I dunno... slacking off or whatever. Many a temper tantrum was had in those demos as well.
I quit and made no secret of why. After I left, I heard through the grapevine that in a meeting with the CTO, the asshole boss accused the CTO of being incompetent and said that he was gunning for the CTO's job. The CTO, sensibly, told the asshole boss to do not pass go, do not collect $200, security will escort you out of the building and we'll ship you your personal effects from your office.
And then I quit the place I'd gone to and went back to where the asshole boss had been and I'm still working there. Definitely would not have considered coming back if he was still there.
Ok. One more story about the other place. They switched from one chat provider to another. But they never actually shut down the one they were migrating away from. Several folks never left the old chat. When it was discovered that on the old chat service, said folks were trading really really inappropriate holocaust jokes, the whole office got a talking to in very vague terms. It wasn't until like a month later that someone explained to me what had precipitated that.

I won't say this is the craziest thing that ever happened, just the first thing I thought of. I once had a short-term contract job at a place that didn't have a sink in the office so to make coffee you had to get water from a drinking fountain in the hallway and dump it out/wash it in a bathroom sink--which was already gross enough. Also, whoever took the last cup was supposed to make the next pot--but the boss would never make a new pot, just wait until someone else did.
One day after I'd been there a couple months, one of the employees went around telling everyone "Stop drinking the coffee unless you want to drink
<boss>
's backwash!" She'd seen the boss walk up and grab the coffee pot, dump his leftover cold coffee out of his coffee cup into the pot, pour himself a new cup and put the pot back. He was too lazy to go dump his cup out in the sink or fountain.
And that was the end of making coffee in that office. People would buy it elsewhere or bring a thermos.
Oh! And another thing that happened when I worked there was someone killed themselves by jumping off the roof. Funny how I remembered the coffee thing first.
- I think the coffee thing was just out of band its the most prominent story to tell.

An employee was angry about an unfair policy and was being punished for not complying, and in his anger he threw a chair. This was before my time, but security had to escort the employee out of the building and he was fired on the spot. That story still circulates even though it's been over a decade.
At another workplace some employees were caught having sex.
At another workplace a manager and employees were running a drug operation out of a drive-thru.
There were other things, but honestly humans are so predictable, they're usually:
fucking one another
threatening, fighting, or trying to kill one another
trying to get high or stay high
stealing, cheating, or otherwise trying to enrich themselves
So a lot of the stories are of one form or another - employee who always came in extremely drunk and worked her shift drunk for years, only fired after some violent incidents and indecent exposure because of excessive drunkenness.
One employee was homeless and sleeping on the roof of the store, he was caught climbing down one morning.
Another guy was peddling drugs outside the store.
Another employee was stealing stock from the store after hours and was fired after getting caught.
Anyway - poverty is fun, y'all!
- At another workplace a manager and employees were running a drug operation out of a drive-thru.
  They really wanted to be Gus Fring so badly
  
  honestly I think they just wanted to make money - it went for a while without being caught

Worked at an absolutely soul-crushing gig after a new micro-manager took over and the next gig was slow coming. The micro-manager didn't like one smart but blunt underling correcting him so he took away the OT and standby the underling had depended on - and us; the underling was smart as fuck - and financially ruined the underling by timing it right after a new car and house purchase based on that 10 year financial history.
Underling attempted suicide-by-hanging in front of our main dev area.
Company had counsellors for a whole day, and the micro-manager immediately focused on how unstable someone must be to commit to suicide instead of on how awful a workplace it must be.

An employee pissed into a co-workers potted plant and the coffee machine's water tank, right in front of a security camera.
- Errrrm....why?
  
  I’d wager it was because they had a full bladder.
  
  Partly because they weren't aware of the camera, I'm guessing.

Pharmacy got robbed with a crossbow back when I was managing a Shoppers Drug Mart in the bad part of town back in the day.
- Literally got medieval on yo ass.
  Did he have an accomplice with a halberd behind him? :o
  
  That situation could have got so much worse if there were a mage in the party.

First day on a job and a coworker took a pistol out of his briefcase/bag and began cleaning it/wiping it down. It was a small office of 5ish people. I was just basically there to help play a tech support role for some outdated software they were running. My coworker was an older sales rep for the company and he was responsible for hiring me (don't ask me why). Anyways, first official day I was working he brandished his pistol. I don't know why. He looked a bit like Kelsey Grammer which bummed me out because I love Frasier. (Shout-out to /c/Frasier ) He had other hangups and ultimately quit a few weeks later.
When he pulled that gun, time slowed down. With all of these mass shootings I just didn't know what to expect. My mind raced but my body froze. I wish I could say I said something but I didn't. I kept my mouth shut and pretended like nothing was happening.
People can be so unhinged. That was almost 10 years ago now.
- He did it in an office with five people in it, not his garage around his drinking buddies.
  Something tells me your account won't make it to anonMay2025@lemmy.zip
  
  if you brought a gun to my house and family i would ask you to leave and never talk to you again. if you acted like a pussy about it i would kick your ass

A patient escaped his police escort through a crawlspace above the showers. The whole building went on lockdown (with loudspeaker announcements about not interacting with any naked men you come across) before they eventually found him a mile away, still starkers.
- Barring a very specific set of circumstances or two, "don't interact with any naked men you come across" is probably good advice.

we hijacked a conference room on a shared floor for a week and built a three-phase high-voltage line in there by hunting around the building for which sockets were on which phase, then plugging them into industrial transformers.
- Okay -
  1, that's awesome;
  2, for what purpose?
  3, is it normal for buildings to have 3-phase in split into different single-phase sections? That feels like you could get some iffy stuff from wildly different loads on the different phases.
  
  we were recording the magnetic fields generated by a high-energy short circuit. we hung a mouse trap from one of the lines, with a lead going to one of the others, so that they fused together when it sprung.
  it is normal here, yes. larger appliances get three phases, and single-phase outlets are split between them as evenly as possible.
  
  Sounds like an industrial setting, they typically get three phases. Probably also explains the desire.
  
  First off, instead of using bullets and then manually enumerating then, try putting "1. " at the the start of every item in the list. Don't increment the "1".
  Around me the only homes without 3phases are older small apartments. Most houses have a 35A 3phase supply, although 63A may become the norm on account of EVs. It's quite normal to have a 3 phased fuse where each phase is used for something different. Say a fuse box is used for lighting and outlets, but L1 is ground floor, L2 is upstairs and L3 is outdoors.
  BTW if you ever move into a house where someone has put outdoors on the same rcd as the rest of the house, then do yourself a favor and get a separate combo rcd/fuse for outdoors. When the rcd trips, it's always the outdoor usage, and it sucks when all the lights go out, because a gasket died in an outdoor lamp.
- Did you build Tesla coils or something? Were there intentional sparks involved?
  
  no, and yes. i'm not going into more detail for fear of doxxing myself but basically we wanted the waveforms generated by a high-voltage short circuit.
  later tests involved help from a power company and actual high-voltage lines.

Before my time, but they tell tales of the "Phantom Shitter". Someone had... issues, physical and/or mental, and would leave streaks of waste both going to and from the bathroom. Very liquid waste. Sometimes stepped in. "Phantom" because initially no one knew who was doing it. They just found the results. Eventually he was found out, sent home for a bit, and then fired when it happened again after he came back.
Since I worked there: Guy came in for an interview. I don't know if he was already having a bad day or what, but he got upset that his first interviewer wasn't there to greet him at the front door. It escalated, rapidly, leading to threats of violence, an arrest, and a couple of cops searching his car.

Not super crazy and this was a long time ago, but there was a guy who was just around 3 months with the company who was causing a ruckus.
We only knew about it because he went live on social media while he was at the reception floor of the building claiming the company was engaged in fraud or something. It wasn't intelligible to be honest and I couldn't really understand what he was specifically accusing them of. I think he was fired on that day, and he went live shortly after he was told. He also claimed he was not being allowed to leave, but I think the reason was he refused to give up the company mobile phone that was issued to him, claiming it contained evidence and he wanted to take it with him.
I never heard anything about it since, and I don't know what happened to the guy and if the claims were true.

I knowingly stalled a counterfeiter for ~20 minutes while we're waiting for police to arrive.
I just well full inept dipshit worker on the guy and he believed my act.
Guy could have just walked out and been free but he stuck around over less than 200 dollars of fake money he was trying to wash through us.

Had a guy bring in a sandwich baggie full of hair, put it in front of me and asked "Do those look like crabs to you?"
Nope'd the fuck out of that situation.
- Just for clarity.... The lad shaved his pubes, lobbed them in a bag then brought them into work and sought your counsel on whether or not he had crabs? Is that right? because I'm rolling around here picturing the absurdity of it.
  
  Yeah that's the gist of it 🤢

A coworker that got pissed when things didn't work and threw them across the shop floor was getting fired. He was getting fired mostly because the owner of the company--hereafter referred to as Asshole Boss--was a dick, and the coworker scared him. (Note that the coworker was never violent towards people. Just machines.) Anyway, the Asshole Boss got a bunch of cops there on the day that he was gonna fire him, but the employee heard what was going to happen and just... Didn't show up.
This is the same Asshole Boss that fired me maybe a year, year and a half later. He fired me because I had a 'bad attitude' because my partner of ten years had said that they wanted a divorce two days earlier. I got driven straight to the hospital and checked in after telling my supervisor that I was going home to commit suicide. Yeah, the suicide part didn't work out after all. (The divorce was ugly; they tried to bankrupt me and saddle me with all of their debt.)
...But it all ended well. Asshole Boss fired the management team that was making the whole business work in a fit of pique; the management team got some funds together and started a company that was in direct competition with Asshole Boss. I ended up being their first hire. Asshole Boss ran his business into the ground in less than a year and a half, and the company the management team started is growing and expanding a decade later.
- Good grief! I'm glad you made it through all that.

Went to the bathroom for 3 minutes, came back and my co-worker had been arrested for ~~gooning joggers that morning~~ public masturbation.
EDIT: This guy would park his car, start jerking off, then ask women for directions. That morning someone recognized him, and he freaked out and drove away. He got sober after that and turned things around.
- when will the oppression end
- I’m afraid to lookup what “gooning joggers” means.
  
  Gooning is apparently edging for hours. What I don't understand is how the joggers comes into this.
  
  Same. It’s a thing. I’m willing to accept that and not press it any further.
- Cool guy club 😎🎸

Massage Therapist here had a client come in with a live tick on his back that my coworker removed successfully. And then carried on with his massage

In orientation i was the demo for using the wheelchair safety straps and the guy giving the demo grabbed my dong in front of like 50 people
- Follow up questions:
  Intentionally?
  Consentually?
  What happened next?
  
  I was just so shocked i blocked it out until i was in my car lol. I have no idea why he did that.

I work in 911 dispatch, so this is going to depend a bit on if we're counting incidents that we've handled as dispatchers, or if we're only counting incidents that physically happened at our dispatch center.
For the former, I'm going to just leave it at- we've handled a little bit of everything. If you can imagine it we've probably had something similar happen. I'm not going to go into any detail because our craziest incidents would probably be googleable and point you to my workplace.
Limiting it to things that happened here, we had one of the local crazies call in a bomb threat to our dispatch center. We weren't taking it too seriously, he's a known party and mostly harmless, but out of an abundance of caution our breaks were postponed while the sheriffs swept our building.
Our dispatch center shares a big campus with the county prison, and a few other county offices and facilities, we're at the end of a long hilly driveway/private road with a guard shack at the top and the driveway for a few neighboring businesses branching off from it. It's not totally uncommon for various people to be walking up our driveway, people from those other businesses out for a walk, people going to visit an inmate at the prison, the occasional person with business at one of those county offices, etc.
Anyway, one day one of my coworkers is driving into work and sees an older guy walking up the driveway, the weather was pretty shitty that day, so he decides he's going to be nice and give him a lift up to the guard shack. He comes into work and by the time he's logged in there was a call for a disturbance at the guard shack, the old guy was some sovereign citizen type trying to pull some first amendment audit bullshit at the prison. So we all got a memo about not giving anyone rides.
Shortly before I started, there was a small fad of people making s'mores in the lunch room microwave. One of the newer trainees was a younger guy, still lived at home, was a little clueless, and decided to make himself a s'more. He microwaved it way too long and smoked up the building, it was probably about as close as they've ever gotten to having to evacuate to our backup center. So we now have a "no s'mores" rule.
There was also one new guy that honestly probably shouldn't have made it through our background checks who was a real piece of work. He is probably the only person in living memory to use the shower here, we suspect he may have been living out of his car. He had some weird shit on his record, some strange domestic bullshit, he was a volunteer firefighter and had been in trouble a few times for trying to pull people over with the lights on his personal vehicle (basically impersonating an officer) and was just generally a really strange dude. He nearly got into a fist fight with his trainer and that was the final straw. There's been a few other weird stories involving him since we got rid of him but those are pretty googleable.

Kathleen brought salmon and nuked it in the microwave.

Girl did dabs for first time on break with gf she was trying to impress. Came back and slapped the manager and got taken away by ems. Showed up next week to no repercussions.
Retirement home kitchen server. This is who feeds your grandma.