'He announced to the office that unhealthy snacks were banned': Office employee shares tales of their always-late coworker who 'failed upward' into management

Author image for Remy Millisky
Remy Millisky • Writer and Editor
Sep 12, 2023 5:00 PM EDT

Imagine being late for work every single day, and still keeping your position. This guy, Kevin, did exactly that — and as one of his coworkers shared, he had a lot of really strange and irritating habits around the office. 

"I had the deep misfortune of working with a Kevin for almost 2.5 years," writes u/aspiriningpugowner. They write that Kevin (a shorthand for extra-goofy people with no common sense) had numerous bad habits that ended up making his coworkers laugh at him. For example, he was late to work each and every day, but he always had an excuse for it, with his excuses growing more ridiculous over time (sure, Kevin, I'm sure a wasp flying into your bathroom is totally why you're late again). 

Some jobs are so strict about clocking in on time that you're punished if you're even ten seconds late. But for this guy, somehow his numerous failures resulted in him moving up in the company. At least this OP only had to work with Kevin for a little while — who knows what he's like now that he has power over other employees! 

Up next, here's an update on this story of a woman whose boss hated her haircut… so she got the worst possible hairstyle imaginable just to stick it to that manager. 

Advertisement
  • 01
    Font - 'He would use the PA function on his desk phone to talk to us... We sat next to each other in the cubicle space and we could see each other over the walls.'
    via Tim Gouw on Unsplash
  • 02
    Font - Kevin and his attempted office snack ban XXL Several years ago, I had the deep misfortune of working with a Kevin for almost 2.5 years. At the time we were coworkers, he was in his early 30s and I was in my mid-20s. Before I get to my main story about him, here are some highlights from our time together to set the scene:
    via u/aspiringpugowner
  • 03
    Font - • Kevin was late to work every single day. And he would text me his excuses. I still have a folder full of his message screenshots. He would always follow the excuses up with "tell [boss/big boss] that I'm in the bathroom." My personal favorites were that a wasp flew into his bedroom window when he was getting ready one morning or the multiple mornings he either cut himself shaving or overslept.
    via u/aspiringpugowner
  • 04
    Font - • He was TERRIFIED of our big boss, "Dan." Dan was kind of a di, but was fine with you if you had a spine. He liked to sniff out fear and weakness in people, so that made Kevin a natural target of his comments. Kevin was so afraid of Dan that one time when he called Dan, he said, "Hi Kevin, this is Dan...I mean, uh...hi Dan, this is Kevin."
    via u/aspiringpugowner
  • 05
    Font - • We had a semi-open office plan. Three of the senior staff had their own offices that had doors and the rest of us were in the open office that had four cubicles. This office space was small. You could easily walk wall-to-wall in fewer than 20 steps. But that was too much for Kevin. Instead of getting up to ask us questions, he would use the PA function on his desk phone to talk to us. He would do that to me and WE SAT NEXT TO EACH OTHER IN THE CUBICLE SPACE AND WE COULD SEE EACH OTHER O
    via u/aspiringpugowner
  • 06
    Font - • He was obsessed with the speech-to-text function on his Apple Watch that he'd literally respond to messages out loud in the office, even personal ones.
    via u/aspiringpugowner
  • 07
    Font - • Kevin didn't have many friends, but he was desperate to prove that he had a social life. He announced to the office that he was meeting an old college friend for lunch who was in town for work. Kevin was supposed to meet his friend at the InterContinental that the friend was staying at, but he came back from lunch early because he had gone to the wrong InterContinental. There are two InterContinentals in the city we worked in and he didn't bother double checking which one he needed to g
    via u/aspiringpugowner
  • 08
    Font - • I worked in this office pre- pandemic, which meant going in every day and logging into a desktop. We worked with somewhat sensitive material, so I would sign out of my computer every night I left, just for good measure. Kevin never did that and only ever turned off his monitor. When it came time for a long overdue software upgrade, it logged all of us out to install. Kevin could not remember his password and spent almost an entire morning on the phone with IT, who had to remotely access
    via u/aspiringpugowner
  • 09
    Font - His piece de resistance, however, deserves a full story. One day, I brought some donut holes in for our interns and left them in the kitchen for them and the rest of the office to help themselves to. Kevin came into the office late that morning and went into our direct boss's office to chat. Kevin and our boss "Craig" had no concept of an indoor voice, so we could all hear them talking, even with Craig's office door closed.
    via u/aspiringpugowner
  • 10
    Font - Apparently Kevin had seen a nutritionist in the morning, which is why he was late. Kevin lived an incredibly unhealthy lifestyle. He never cooked and ate Subway foot longs for almost every lunch. So he wanted to change that, which was fine. Well, he was gonna find a way to make it miserable for the rest of us.
    via u/aspiringpugowner
  • 11
    Font - Kevin walked into the kitchen, saw the donut holes, and marched right back into Craig's office to alert him of the deep fried confectionaries that he felt so personally attacked by. He said something along the lines of, "I feel like having junk food around is going to hinder my new goal of living healthy." Craig agreed with him, and he announced to the office that unhealthy snacks were banned from the kitchen and we could only bring healthy snacks to share, but we could still bring unheal
    via u/aspiringpugowner
  • 12
    Font - If you assumed that the snack ban ended rather quickly, it did. It lasted less than a week before Kevin started eating Subway foot longs again after eating salads that had fried chicken filets and buckets of ranch on them. My favorite effort of him cooking for himself and bringing lunch instead of eating out was making a huge salad and bringing it in one of those 5 lb Costco potato salad containers. He maybe ate that for 2-3 days before he got tired of it and threw it out for something el
    via u/aspiringpugowner
  • 13
    Font - I haven't worked with Kevin in several years now, but I know he's somehow failed upward into a management role, so I pity his direct reports and anyone that ever has to speak to him. Oh, and did I mention that this guy was an Ivy League graduate?
    via u/aspiringpugowner
  • 14
    Font - dystyyy That last sentence was quite unexpected.
    via u/dystyyy
  • 15
    Font - olddragonfaerie. I mean, you can graduate with an A or a D, either way, you're a graduate lol
    via u/olddragonfaerie
  • 16
    Font - cuavas When you mentioned that he left his computer unlocked, it reminded me of a kind of running prank at a place I worked. Like a lot of places, you weren't supposed to leave your computer unlocked, for obvious reasons. If you found someone had forgotten to lock their PC, you'd send a humorous e-mail to their team, and then lock it for them. Some very funny e-mails went around from that.
    via u/cuavas

Want More? Follow Us and Add Us as a Preferred Source on Google.

Tags

jobs job work stories-about-kevin Office snacks workplace junk food kevin cubicle terrible coworkers coworkers big boss coworker
Scroll Down For The Next Article