15+ Employees who had petty coworkers: 'An employee dropped every item... then quit'

Author image for Remy Millisky
Remy Millisky • Writer and Editor
Jan 4, 2026 11:00 AM EST

Some coworkers will be 45 years old, yet act like they're in kindergarten. They don't want a peaceful work environment; they want to be a menace to everyone around them. They can't seem to do anything without starting a fight with the person next to them, which makes them pretty hard to work with on a day-to-day basis. Just ask these people: they shared the details about who their most immature coworker was and what they did to earn said title. 

It's an exaggeration to say that some workers act like kindergartners, but a lot of them have truly never progressed past a high school attitude. I suppose those catty high schoolers have to go somewhere once they turn 18 — some of them become other people's dreaded coworkers! It really only takes one bad apple to spoil the bunch. A single gossiper can wreak havoc on an otherwise calm working environment. They can spoil longstanding friendships or sour relations with clients and customers alike. 

But…but… sometimes the immature coworker is the funniest person in the building. I can't help but love the person who suggests putting people's staplers and pens in Jello for an April Fool's prank, or who tries to get everyone to have a race across the office in rolling desk chairs. There's levity to be had if one looks for it, and having at least one silly goose per office is a true delight. Perhaps your office has one silly goose, as well as one evil goose like described above (that description is more accurate anyway. Have you ever met a goose? They are decidedly not silly creatures. They are actually full of ire and easily provoked, much like your least favorite colleague in accounting). 

Where do you fall on the goose scale? If you've never pondered such a question until today, now's your chance. If you tend to be one of the more lighthearted members of your workplace, you can also get some fun ideas to break out at your own workplace, as you can read all about down below. And if you're on the more serious side, you'll also find stories about the worst coworkers ever. Two sides of the same coin! 

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  • 01
    Man pushes another man in gray suit on office chair as he flings papers, to the right a man in short sleeve shirt pinches nose while laughing
    via Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash+

    The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.

  • 02
    Kaylinwriter14 Call their mom because they weren't scheduled like they wanted. Mom came down and yelled at the manager.
    via u/Kaylinwriter14
  • 03
    [deleted] When I was in high school eating lunch in the courtyard I saw construction workers racing each other on these table rolling things down the hallway of a building that was being renovated. Funny to witness.
    via u/[deleted]
  • 04
    Cplcoffeebean I have one who complains that she doesn't get enough hours, yet will ask to leave early. Every. Single. Day.
    via u/Cplcoffeebean
  • 05
    Lizzythelizzard122 I had a female coworker downright HATE me and refuse to talk to me for literally no reason. My boss. stepped in when she realized there was clearly a problem. Turns out this girl claimed I didn't say hi to her one morning after she said
    via u/Lizzythelizzard122
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    hi to me. I am not that kind of person whatsoever. If I didn't say "hi" back...it's because I didn't hear you. Ridiculously immature. Grow up, you're almost 30.
    via u/Lizzythelizzard122
  • 07
    [d….. We have a coworker who routinely pretends not to hear people when they ask for help with something.
    via u/[deleted]
  • 08
    Beachy 5313 I had one coworker who was angry that I got assigned to run a project that she applied for (note: I was assigned, despite the fact that she applied and I didn't). She was so pissed off about it that she created a spreadsheet to document the exact times I came into work and every time that I left my desk and came back
    via u/Beachy 5313
  • 09
    so then she could "get me in trouble with my boss". She did this for two months, and then brought the "evidence" that I'd been showing up to work between 8:15 and 8:30am instead of 8am, and was taking breaks closer to 20 minutes than 10. My boss laughed her out the door- we had an agreement that I could show up when I felt like it and could take the break lengths I wanted since
    via u/Beachy 5313
  • 10
    she knew I was working a minimum of 60 hours a week and would be there way past 5pm even if I took no breaks. Partially because I had to pick up the slack of the other employees, partially because we got so many contracts in at once, that they were willing to give me what I wanted to get it completed. You probably shouldn't create your own project to get another employee in trouble when
    via u/Beachy 5313
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    you have no idea what their situation is AND you didn't get the project you wanted to run because you already waste too much time at work and can't be trusted to stay on task or use fair judgment regarding fellow employee roles. Well. She certainly proved their analysis of why she wouldn't be a good leader true.
    via u/Beachy 5313
  • 12
    emjaybe Work with a girl who could have been Regina in Mean Girls. She will purposely walk by 5 girls at the front desk in the morning and only say hi to 1 or 2. She loves to come up front and make 'plans for the office'
    via u/emjaybe
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    that excludes a quarter of the office, and usually the ones within earshot. She is almost 40 but still treats the office like senior year in high school.
    via u/emjaybe
  • 14
    pm_me_yo_ji We had someone, a librarian in fact, who had two voice levels: silence and SCREAMING. She would scream at coworkers, she would scream at children, she would scream at technology that wasn't working, she would scream at her boss. It's unreal how long it took to get her fired.
    via u/pm_me_yo_j***
  • 15
    tilton9 I'm obviously a bit biased because I was so offended by this, but... Several years. ago, the receptionist at a company I worked for brought her husband in on a Friday morning to discuss with the company CEO/president (small firm, ~15 employees) why she should be allowed to take PTO the following week instead of me. Her husband
    via u/tilton9
  • 16
    demanded of the CEO that I move my vacation by a week because that was "only fair," given that she'd worked there 10 years longer than I had. SHE BROUGHT HER HUSBAND IN TO TALK TO HER BOSS. I was going out of the country to visit a college friend and had put it on everyone's calendar two
    via u/tilton9
  • 17
    months in advance. She wanted to go on a self- described "spontaneous trip to the beach" with her daughter and infant grandchild, who lived next door to her.
    via u/tilton9
  • 18
    Bodymindisonewo... Pretend to faint
    via u/Bodymindisoneword
  • 19
    [deleted] I was assistant store manager in retail at 19 after working there for 3 months. One of the older ladies who was working there for about 15-20 years told me she wasn't going to listen to me because I was incompetent so I told her to go home for the night and had the store manager remove her from any of my shifts. Well the next day her husband was
    via u/[deleted]
  • 20
    up at the store questioning me and pissed off at me because i was there for only three months and I told him "I've been here a short period of time and got 2 promotions and 2 raises. Your wife has been here 10+ years and hasn't moved anywhere, so please tell me again who is the incompetent one here"
    via u/[deleted]
  • 21
    [deleted] A disgruntled co-worker deliberately parked his pick- up truck directly in front of the dumpster to prevent access to it - and all because the company sent out a memo stating the dumpster was off-limits to employees and "solely for business use."
    via u/[deleted]
  • 22
    Before the notice, this employee would frequently be seen arriving with his pick-up truck carrying personal junk which he threw into the company dumpster.
    via u/[deleted]
  • 23
    Outrageous_Claims back when I worked at Target an employee dropped every item in every location. in the backroom and then just quit. basically what this means is that he deleted the entire inventory from the backroom. so we didn't know where anything was or how much we had in stock.
    via u/Outrageous_Claims
  • 24
    It fucked up replenishment, it fucked up in stocks, it fucked up logistics, it pretty much fucked every metric up one way or another, and it was done just because some teenager was pissed off. The backroom team leader and a few of us worked over time getting everything back stocked.
    via u/Outrageous_Claims
  • 25
    [deleted] Not a coworker but something I did. Oddly proud of it, though. I worked in a clothing company's call center taking orders at the time. The environment was slightly casual but still fairly professional. One day the servers went completely down but our phones were still working. (Servers were
    via u/[deleted]
  • 26
    housed off site in another city.) We were required to continue taking calls and apologize that we couldn't process any orders/returns/et cetera at that time. I was starting to get frustrated explaining to people how I could answer the phone and not be able to process any transactions, so I took a longish bathroom
    via u/[deleted]
  • 27
    break just to get off the phones for a while. The bathrooms were near a product room. The room had one of nearly everything we sold and we were allowed to put customers on hold and grab the item so we could answer their questions about it better.
    via u/[deleted]
  • 28
    I decided to grab a sheet set and several pillows. I then proceeded to turn the cubby (area where your feet go) under my desk into a pillow fort and crawled in. I took my headset in with me and continued to answer calls. It wasn't like I needed access to my computer at the time. HR was more confused than anything. "You built a... pillow fort?"
    via u/[deleted]
  • 29
    Macabalony Was an RA and saw my coworker pitch a tantrum about a situation despite being on call for that evening. We are talking. Foot stomping. Yelling. Crying. Anger. It was a sight to behold.
    via u/Macabalony
  • 30
    bomb_ninja I was working in a machine shop and one of the guys in the milling department (Phil) loved pulling pranks on a guy named steve. Phil discovered that if you take a can of Pepsi to a belt sander very carefully you can remove the top. He would refill the can with water, apply a little bit of super glue and put the top back
    via u/bomb_ninja
  • 31
    on. Then he would get the vending machine guy to put it on the bottom so it came out next. Unsuspecting Steve would buy a Pepsi every day at 3:00 break. Steve buys the pepsi opens it and discovers it is filled with water. This happened every couple of weeks. Steve called Pepsi to complain about them putting water in the cans of Pepsi. Immature yes, also hilarious.
    via u/bomb_ninja
  • 32
    TRex_N_Truex Had a bad supervisor from a long time ago that didn't like for any of us to jump the chain of command when dealing with an issue. He always felt doing so was a threat to his job. At the end of the first year of service, we're supposed to get a sit down evaluation with HR which also determines our performance based raise.
    via u/TRex_N_Truex
  • 33
    After 13 months I had to pester the supervisor about setting up my review. He kept telling me HR was busy but they'll get to me eventually. After almost a half a year of wait for my evaluation, I finally went directly to HR to ask them why the hell I haven't had my review yet. HR told me this is the first they heard I was up for my evaluation (small company of about 50
    via u/TRex_N_Truex
  • 34
    people so not everything was electronic). Turns out my supervisor was lying to me about setting up the meeting because he felt I was going to let them know about all of the times I found my supervisor leaving work early or hiding or anything. during a shift.
    via u/TRex_N_Truex
  • 35
    I confronted the supervisor about all of this and his response was to start crying. 40 year old man crying to someone almost half his age because he felt betrayed I no longer trusted him. He was soon reassigned to a different department.
    via u/TRex_N_Truex
  • 36
    [deleted] an ex-coworker of mine once threw a cutie orange at me with enough force for it to explode all over my favorite aqua button-down shirt. The last work day before our Christmas vacation, I was rushing to get my deliverables done for a project while this same guy was poking me in the ear with a small Christmas tree. He would occasionally
    via u/[deleted]
  • 37
    come up behind me at my desk and push me and my chair into the desk, tilt it forward, and yank it out from underneath me. I would sometimes throw my exercise ball at him, or hit him with exhausted plotter roll tubes, but he always got me better. I miss working with that guy sometimes.
    via u/[deleted]
  • 38
    BromanJenkins I have a co-worker who pretends I don't exist. We were put in the same cube when my department moved offices and every morning I would say hi to her when she got in and get no response. She would then pointedly say hello to the other two people in the cube, and call people passing the cube in to talk to her. I tried joining in on
    via u/BromanJenkins
  • 39
    conversations, but anything I said was ignored. The funniest one was when she, our boss and I were in a meeting room and she would ask all her questions. for me through our boss I'm thankfully not in that cube anymore.
    via u/BromanJenkins
  • 40
    Man in white shirt and gray vest wearing headphones sits in front of computer monitor and pinches nose while laughing
    via Getty Images For Unsplash+

    The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.

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