'I'm not allowed to talk about turtles anymore': 20+ Employees who had HR step in for the silliest reasons

Author image for Remy Millisky
Remy Millisky • Writer and Editor
Nov 13, 2024 5:00 PM EST

Doing human resources work isn't always serious. Sometimes, it can be very funny, as the people of the internet will tell you!  

Though they're sometimes known as the company boogeyman, the human resources department is sometimes needed to step in and sort out employee relations. They have a broad range of job duties, from managing an office to hiring and firing to mediating employee disputes. This can result in some awkwardness at times. As these HR professionals can tell you, it can be very awkward to try and figure out which employee is the one stinking up the office with their BO or talking to an employee about wearing appropriate office attire. 

Still, these HR professionals managed to make the best out of their situations. U/sgy0003 asked people to share the "most ridiculous/hilarious complaints you ever received," and more than 2,700 people replied with their funniest tales. One person had to deal with an executive assistant who claimed her high heels prevented her from walking to the copier. Another got in trouble for their drawing of a stingray! You can check out all of these very silly tales down below. 

Up next, read about what happened when this 15-year-old called out her Grandmother for constantly missing her school concerts, leaving the whole family reeling. 

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    Cheezburger Image 10428177152
    via Sebastian Herrmann on Unsplash+

    This image is for illustration only, and the subjects are models; the image does not depict the actual subjects of the story.

  • 02
    HR employees of reddit; what was the most ridiculous/hilarious complain you ever received?
    via u/sgy0003
  • 03
    BunnyBunny13 She wanted to lodge a complaint against a colleague who had a new TV delivered to the office instead of home, and she thought her colleague's spending money on the TV was irresponsible.
    via u/BunnyBunny13
  • 04
    anywherebutari... Hr Consultant for 10+ years. You won't believe the amount of times I've had to shut people down for trying to sell their pyramid scheme "side hustle" in the office.
    via u/anywherebutarizona
  • 05
    steelie34 Not HR, but I have a story about an HR person that I will never forget. The company I worked for hired a new girl in the HR dept. She was young and very enthusiastic. I'm sure this was probably her first job out of college. Cut to a week or so later, and I'm riding in the elevator on the way up to the executive floor, and she steps in with me. A
    via u/steelie34
  • 06
    couple floors later we stop, and an older gentleman wearing a polo shirt and jeans gets on. Before I could greet him, she says, "pretty casual for a workday, huh?" | had to stifle my laughter when he replied with, "that's one of the benefits of owning the company." She turned an amazing color of red that I haven't seen since... it was all in good fun though, she ended up working there a long time.
    via u/steelie34
  • 07
    thefuzzybunny1 My HR department once fell for a phishing email and sent everyone's W2s to a random hacker. HR then informed everyone via a mass email, with no read receipts, at 9 p.m. on a Friday... even though multiple people were on vacation and had left instructions to be called in an emergency.
    via u/thefuzzybunny1
  • 08
    When I got back from my trip a week later and expressed my concern. about her not actually notifying me about this, she totally brushed it off. I said "do you realize that I need to freeze my credit, and I'm 7 days late in doing so?" She said "no, don't freeze your credit, you won't be able to use your credit cards if you do!"
    via u/thefuzzybunny1
  • 09
    Another time, during a worker's comp claim, I needed to speak to our claims adjuster and she said "an adjuster doesn't get assigned until after the claim is settled." (That's the exact opposite of how that works.) She was my stupid complaint.
    via u/thefuzzybunny1
  • 10
    rainbowLena My partner is in HR. Someone took a sh on the job site. He was given a photo complete with measurements. The people that complained wanted DNA testing done. He's still not sure why they measured it.
    via u/rainbowLena
  • 11
    tahituatara I told my coworker as professionally as I could that it wasn't appropriate for her to be using her phone while at work, teaching kids (supposedly). She spent all her time on Facebook, little kids would be screaming and whaling on each other literally 10 feet away and she was totally oblivious.
    via u/tahituatara
  • 12
    She complained by email to HR that I was r de and confrontational. They pulled me aside and told me to be more careful about how I spoke to coworkers. I told them my side of the story, they spoke to her again. She got a written warning, they didn't tell me what happened but I gather from office gossip that she lost her sh and started shouting at the HR staff. R de and confrontational perhaps?
    via u/tahituatara
  • 13
    Anyway she's on her final warning now and she has a habit of hitting on the married dads of our kids, involving children in adult matters ("why hasn't your mummy paid your fees yet? Don't you want to come to daycare?") and generally being an un professional self-absorbed PITA so... Can't wait until she gets fired
    via u/tahituatara
  • 14
    danetrain05 I worked in HR and my coworker hated me. She wanted someone else to get the job I did and she would complain about me to management for anything. The final straw for everyone was when I sneezed and she slammed her keyboard on her desk, basically ran out of the room and didn't come back for 30 minutes.
    via u/danetrain05
  • 15
    Management called me in and said I was making too much noise. I told them I sneezed and they said she would complain about me every day so they didn't believe her but had to make it look like they were doing. something. She left shortly after
    via u/danetrain05
  • 16
    mdg_roberts1 She came in with a complaint that she tried to give one of the younger guys a hug and he refused. His story was that he basically had to run away.
    via u/mdg_roberts1
  • 17
    I had to explain to a middle age woman that it was not her right to hug people who didn't want to be hugged. She still didn't get it and left thinking she was still in the right.
    via u/mdg_roberts1
  • 18
    GonnaBeTrulyHo... Not HR but my company is too small to have one, so it just falls on me. Used to have an A/R clerk who would snack at her desk all day long. We are a pretty casual, laid back company so it's not a big deal as long as she was getting her work done. But, then it escalated to having food constantly being delivered; tacos in the morning, pizza at lunch,
    via u/GonnaBeTrulyHonest
  • 19
    Chinese in the afternoon. It was bizarre, and made it difficult for her to work when she's eating full meals all day. I was on the fence about saying something until she brought in an Instant Pot. She plugged it in and cooked a freaking pork roast at her desk, poured in BBQ sauce she brought and ate on it all day. I was dumbfounded, it was so
    via u/GonnaBeTrulyHonest
  • 20
    strange. I pulled her aside the next day and told her how unprofessional it was. She was shocked and told me I was being unfair because I never specifically said no one was allowed to bring in an Instant Pot. She truly seemed genuinely surprised that she wasn't allowed to do that. She scaled it down after that, but
    via u/GonnaBeTrulyHonest
  • 21
    I sometimes wonder how much further she would have gone if I never said anything.
    via u/GonnaBeTrulyHonest
  • 22
    igotmyliverpierc... I was the complainer. My buddy was dating a girl that worked in HR at my company. Their relationship starting was totally unrelated to me (they had gone to college together). He dumped her and she didn't take it well and started threatening my job since I was still friends with him. I lodged a complaint
    via u/igotmyliverpierced
  • 23
    just through the main email (hrcomplaints at company dot com or whatever it was). My complaint was assigned to...guess who! I ended up having to independently schedule a meeting with the VP of HR because the regular reps and middle managers were protecting their rep rather than believing me.
    via u/igotmyliverpierced
  • 24
    .... I'm not in HR, but someone called HR on me. I work with a few people that aren't that fluent in english. One of my coworkers was trying to explain to me what kind of tacos he ate and could not rememeber the word for stingrays. So he took my notebook and drew a picture of a stingrays and wrote the word turtle. So it looked like this: crudely drawn
    via u/nennern
  • 25
    stingray+the word turtle. A lady I work with went through my notebook, saw the picture of the stingray plus the word turtle. She called HR because she thought I was writing notes about her in my notebook. She said that horribly drawn stingray plus the word turtle meant that I want to punch her in the face because she is slow like a turtle. Definitely a reach. I didn't
    via u/nennern
  • 26
    get in trouble, I was just told by my boss that I'm not aloud to talk about turtles anymore in case it upsets her. I rarely talk about turtles, so this isn't really a problem for me. ****Edit: I'm still relatively new to reddit, so I'm not sure if this is an acceptable way to do this, but I am just going to edit the original post to answer everybody's
    via u/nennern
  • 27
    burning question: He was not eating stingray/turtle tacos at work. He was telling me that was his favorite type of tacos to eat when he was at home. He is originally from Mexico and is in lowa on a TN visa. Maybe in his coastal Mexican town it is normal to eat stingrays and turtles. I have no idea, really. All I know is I couldn't help him in the slightest when he asked me if I knew where to get stingray meat.
    via u/nennern
  • 28
    captaincool Someone complained about another employee smelling of rotten chicken and feet. The scent was bad enough that no one wanted to work with that guy around. Had to put on a hygiene fundamentals in the
    via u/captaincool
  • 29
    workplace presentation for that entire group since I couldn't single out Smelly. I think he got the hint because he also got a haircut
    via u/captaincool
  • 30
    BlondieMeliss After 20 years in HR, I have too many to remember. The most recent was on Monday when an employee emailed me with a request to remind everyone to be careful with scented lotions. Her area reeked from something that smelled like Moroccan oil. These kind of emails are a bomb waiting to go off.
    via u/BlondieMeliss
  • 31
    Everyone gets paranoid, and I end up replying to 50 people that they smell fine and, yes, please keep wearing your deodorant. I told her that I would rather address it with the individual, so let me know who it was. After literally sniffing our way through the cube farm, we discovered the smell was coming from
    via u/BlondieMeliss
  • 32
    her own desk drawer. We couldn't find the stinky culprit, so she ended up throwing everything out. Case closed.
    via u/BlondieMeliss
  • 33
    TyRyansaurus-R... Not HR, but Worker's Comp. We just had an associate file a claim this week because they burnt their mouth on their lunch. A lunch they brought from home and heated up in the microwave.
    via u/TyRyansaurus-Rex
  • 34
    SemiPseudoFina... It was lunch time, a client came in. My colleague was eating a sausage roll and had it on his desk. Next day a formal complaint came through about my colleagues sausage roll and how unprofessional it was of him to have a sausage roll he was eating on his desk.
    via u/SemiPseudoFinance
  • 35
    LibraryLuLu I recently had HR tell me that one of my staff had been under supplied in his annual leave over the past few years, and he needed to take at least ten days off over the next six months to correct the leave liability. Paid at a higher rate than usual to make up for the error, of course. He could take a two week block or, say, a day off a week until
    via u/LibraryLuLu
  • 36
    he'd used the leave - his choice. He was so enraged over being given extra paid holidays that he wrote to our General Manager to complain, screamed at me (his boss) "I know my rights!" refused the leave or even to discuss why he wouldn't take it.
    via u/LibraryLuLu
  • 37
    Anyway, I wrote his performance review this week and there are multiple goals about professional, respectful behavior that need to be reached in order for him to get a raise this year. Yeah, not so much. Oh, and he still has to take the ten days off.
    via u/LibraryLuLu
  • 38
    y... You wouldn't believe the headaches that I received when management signed a new copier/printer lease which reduced the overall number of printers in exchange for centrally located multiplex copiers. Evidently, people feel their social standing is signified by if they have a printer (or two) in their office.
    via u/yankee-white
  • 39
    My favorite was an Executive Assistant who stated that, because she wears heels to work she couldn't walk to the new copier and requested that a reasonable accommodation would be to replace the printer she had in her office.
    via u/yankee-white
  • 40
    hymie0 I don't know if this story fits, but I'll tell it anyway. I went to HR once to complain that my manager refused to give me a couple of vacation days. The HR lady reminded me about the boilerplate rule that "vacation time must be mutually acceptable to the employee and the company.".
    via u/hymie0
  • 41
    I then pulled out six more vacation requests that had all been denied, including one that was denied -- in writing -- for a reason that was not permitted. I asked. her if the company is allowed to say that it's never acceptable? My last request was un- denied.
    via u/hymie0
  • 42
    jimmydushku Not HR, but my friend who is recently told me about a VP at his company making a post on LinkedIn with one of the new employees as his #WCW (Woman Crush Wednesday). The WCW lady was happy about it. The complaint came from two women who didn't get the promotion to that position.
    via u/jimmydushku
  • 43
    themastermatt I was once summoned to HR. When i got there, one of my employees was already sitting in the head HR lady's office with a" look on his face. , Really?" HR lady goes into a diatribe about how this employee is a chauvinistic pig that doesnt respect women and thinks he is better than all women. On and on about
    via u/themastermatt
  • 44
    just how awful this guy is. Employee was my lead software dev and was awesome at his job and a great guy otherwise. Turns out, HR lady had asked him to write a spreadsheet full of formulas. to calculate Open Enrollment dollar values for withholding based on all the available options and individual pay rates.
    via u/themastermatt
  • 45
    He told her that "i can help, but ive got this payment gateway project thats due and dont really have a ton of time. Can i just show you how to get started instead?" - and thats how the argument started. My response was "OK employee, you can leave. Thank you" then i told her that if Excel didnt open -
    via u/themastermatt
  • 46
    thats IT. Custom sheets with formulas and pay data for employees - thats HR and that i could recommend some resources for learning Excel. That b was constantly trying to get IT to do her job for her.
    via u/themastermatt
  • 47
    rubbersoul-93 We had an employee walk out in the middle of 3rd shift, leaving 1 person alone to do all the work. He came back a week later and asked us to "write it up like he'd been let go" because he wanted to file unemployment. Obviously we wouldn't do that.
    via u/rubbersoul-93

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