19 Employees Reveal The Jaw-Dropping Moments A Toxic Coworker Made The Entire Office Go SILENT, And These Are An HR NIGHTMARE

No matter where one works or what kind of job they have, there's always that ONE coworker who makes everything, well, awful. Whether they're nosy, obnoxious, or simply rude, they constantly ruin the mood of the entire office...
That's why when Redditor u/MommaOnHeels143 asked, "What's something a toxic coworker did that made the whole office go silent?" thousands of people shared stories about their unhinged coworkers who left the entire office bewildered. Here are 19 of their most jaw-dropping stories:
If you've ever dealt with a toxic coworker who left the entire office speechless, you can tell us about it anonymously using this form.
Content warning: Death, weight-shaming, animal abuse, firearm usage, and misogyny.
1."I started my career at a federal agency and worked with a guy who was just weird. He did all kinds of unhinged stuff, but the thing that shook the whole office was an email he sent out one morning..."
"Evidently, he had been dating another employee in a different division of the agency, but they broke up, so he sent an email to around 200 coworkers with the subject line: 'Please Respect Our Privacy.' He then rattled off three pages of narrative explaining every detail of his relationship with this woman who broke up with him, and concluded with 'So we will no longer be getting married.'
I will never forget the morning that email went out. The entire office went silent for five minutes — no typing, no phone calls, no small talk, just a bunch of people trying to wrap their heads around what they had just read.
Nobody knew they were dating, and nobody cared they broke up; it was never going to become a topic of office conversation until he brought it to everybody's attention in the weirdest way possible. Then, to make matters worse, the woman he had been dating found out and said, 'Married? We went out five times!' Somehow, this guy thought casual dating was a guaranteed path to marriage, and that he had to announce to everyone that the 'marriage' was off. So f*cking weird."
—[deleted]
2."One morning, we were in the women's bathroom when a co-worker walked in after her extended maternity leave. Everyone greeted her and asked her how her baby was doing. She smiled at first, but as soon as we mentioned her baby, her face fell, and she went pale before telling us it had died."
"Before anyone could say anything, one of our coworkers told her, 'My baby is gorgeous, she's four months old and laughs beautifully.'"
—u/mischiefkar28
3."The head of HR was judgmental about nearly everything, but especially people's weight and eating habits. She hated potlucks in particular because there would be so much food. Once, when we held a potluck for a holiday, she came down to examine all the food options..."
"She then sent an office-wide email with the calorie count on everything at the potluck to inform us of how many thousands of calories we'd be consuming that day, and spent the rest of the day sulking in her cubicle.
She did lots of other crappy stuff, but this one angered a lot of people and ultimately led to the boss telling her to back off and let everyone enjoy their lunch."
—u/spider_speller
4."I once had a coworker whom I didn't speak to often because we had different jobs, but I still thought we were on friendly terms as we had gotten coffee together a few times..."
"One day, both of us came into work wearing the exact SAME green shirt with a slight cutout near the neck. One of our male colleagues joked that we were twins and asked if we had gone shopping together. This wasn't in great taste, but I laughed and said 'Great minds think alike.'
What my coworker did next caused everyone in the office to go quiet: She. LOST. HER. SH*T. She started accusing me of copying her, and claimed I always tried to be 'exactly like her' by stalking her when she went to get coffee, etc.
Everyone went silent, and I just sat in my chair and cried. She apologized a week later with a letter and a necklace, but I never talked to her again. My contract was up two months later, and I was glad to get out of there."
—u/Geekygreeneyes
5."This happened about seven years ago on the anniversary of 9/11: I work in one of New York's neighboring states, and my coworkers and I were talking about 9/11 when I mentioned that my dad, who works in Manhattan, was there when it happened."
"A problematic coworker casually said she didn't understand why 9/11 was made out to be such a big deal since people die every day anyway.
My coworkers and I were so perplexed by her comment that we just walked away. It wasn't worth it to argue with someone who thinks like that."
—u/breebree934
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6."Our new boss called a full staff meeting to introduce herself. She kicked things off with an icebreaker game: everyone says their name, where they were born, and a fun fact about themselves."
"She went first, and her fun fact about herself was that as a child, she hugged her cat to death. The room was totally silent as we all realized that we worked for a sociopath. To this day, I am more disturbed by the choice to tell that as a funny anecdote than the story itself.
She went on to be exactly as toxic as you'd think."
—u/bjr0che
7."A first-year principal who was definitely not a people person absolutely botched the end-of-year celebration at our school. Normally, we had a slideshow that honored those leaving and those retiring..."
"She presented a basic slide, rapidly named everyone leaving, and said, 'Thank you for your service.' Then clicked to the next slide for the sole person retiring. This beloved woman had worked in the district her entire adult life, but the slide was blank with only her name on it. It had other boxes that said 'Achievements,' 'Plans for Retirement,' 'Pictures,' 'Funny Memories,' but they were all blank.
The new principal said, 'Oh, whoops…anyway, thanks for your service,' wrapped up the meeting, and immediately walked to her office. The whole celebration, which normally takes 20 minutes, took maybe three.
You could have heard a pin drop. The first sound was made by a teacher who started hysterically crying because she felt so bad for the retiring teacher."
—u/SinfullySinless
8."One of our coworkers carried his shotgun into our cubicles, racked it, and asked, 'Which one of you is first?'"
"He claimed he was 'joking,' so the owners of the company let him get away with it."
—u/REALtumbisturdler
9."I work in IT for a site that sells products. Once, there was a messed-up account that had somehow assigned the account ID to multiple different names and emails."
"We were all trying to fix it when a 56-year-old male coworker shouted on the recorded call, 'Oh, I see why this account is broken...A woman made it!'
It was silence. I asked him to explain his 'joke' and he crumbled like a granola bar."
—u/kejky93
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10."One of our managers was a total a-hole; the kind of manager who sets unreasonably high standards and then openly berates people who couldn't live up to them while threatening jobs and questioning competence. However, when her child and husband passed away in a tragic accident, we all felt terrible for her."
"The day before the accident, she deservedly wrote up a guy for a major screw-up. When we were talking about her tragedy at lunchtime, the guy who received the write-up said she deserved it for being such a b*tch. We all hated her, but her child and husband were innocent, and no matter how much of an a-hole she was, she didn't deserve that.
After that comment, no one really wanted to hang out with him, and he eventually left while complaining that everyone hated him. When you make the whole office side with the a-hole boss over you, you went too far."
—u/ThePeasantKingM
11."I work at a school and one of my coworkers dumped a student who has both Down syndrome and autism out of a chair and said, 'Act normal!'"
"One of the teachers ran to the student to aid them, and I stepped outside the room and called the admin. There was silence from everyone.
To this day, he denies any wrongdoing. I believe he thinks he is innocent and a skilled professional working with people with disabilities, even though he was so much worse than that one situation. It's sad that it took a student getting physically hurt for the admin and the board to make a move. He had already been transferred for grabbing a student's wrist at another school.
He is likely still employed and working somewhere else, though. It's infuriating."
—u/Dailia-
12."My office used to take on externs from a local medical billing school. One was assigned to my cubicle section and she was A LOT to deal with — there had already been complaints about her behavior."
"One of the women who also sat in my section was a nursing mom, and she had hung a curtain up at her cube to close when she was pumping (this was before pumping rooms were required).
Her pump made a noise that wasn't loud, but you could still hear it. One day, I heard the extern ask, 'What's that noise?' Quickly followed by the sound of the curtain opening and my coworker screaming. It all happened so fast, I couldn't warn either one of them.
The extern was dismissed that afternoon."
—u/JuanaBlanca
13."One day, we all heard a guy who was hired to work on a trading desk start to argue with his trainer. The trainer asserted himself, and the trainee (on his third day) stood up, started shouting, and pushed papers and supplies off his desk. The entire floor went silent and watched as he was fired and escorted out."
"I later discovered the trainee had been given a company-sponsored credit card to pay for moving expenses that would be reimbursed. The paperwork emphasized that the card's owner was responsible for the bill, not the company. It seems he didn't read that and went straight from his firing to an electronics shop to buy thousands of dollars in film, stereo, and TV equipment, which he claimed he needed for work. The joke was on him when he got the bill. We found out because he refused to pay the bill and stated the company would pay it. The company refused and stuck him with it.
After multiple incidents of attempted fraud like this, the credit card program was ended. The number of attempts to fraudulently charge personal items to the company FAR exceeded everyone's expectations."
—u/InterruptingChicken1
14."About 15 years ago, I was working in telecom. At a staff meeting, the project manager was telling us to put our time off requests in for the holidays, so he said to my coworker, 'When is Black Christmas this year? Do you need off for that?'"
"She blinked a few times and answered, 'What? Black Christmas?'
He replied, 'Yeah, isn't it near Christmas but different every year?'
She said, 'Do you mean Kwanzaa? I don't celebrate Kwanzaa.'
He was pleased she didn't need extra time off while the rest of us cringed from the inside out."
—u/Time_Ocean
15."My sister-in-law, who was in her 20s, was dying of heart failure over the course of a few weeks, however, my boss didn't like that I wasn't answering his texts on a SATURDAY, so on Monday, in a team meeting, he told me to 'Just put a pillow over her head and get it over with.'"
"There were three seconds of silence, but being construction workers, all of my coworkers started laughing afterwards."
—u/Pale-Upstairs7777
16."I have a story that actually involved me: With my job, I work away from home for weeks at a time, and during the pandemic, I was classified as an essential worker, so I didn't have any restrictions."
"I had been away from home for over 12 weeks. For the last two of those, I was working at a site, completing all the required urgent scopes, and counting the days until I got to see my kids because I had a cut-off date. The site supervisor asked if I could slip in one more job, but told me it was okay if I couldn't. I let him know that it wasn't possible since it would take longer than we had, but he was cool about it and told me he would get it deferred.
The day I was preparing to fly out, the site manager was there listing tasks and said to me, 'You'll do that vessel scope this week,' and I told him that wasn't possible because I was flying out. He told me I had to stay because he had promised the client it would be done. I insisted and told him that I would NOT be doing it because I hadn't seen my kids in 12 weeks, and I was leaving regardless.
His response was: 'Well, maybe you shouldn't have had kids.' The whole room of 24 guys went dead silent and looked at each other before I said 'How about you f*ck off?' and stormed out the door.
I heard my coworkers directing a fair amount of verbal abuse towards him before the supervisor came out, apologized to me, and said he had no idea the manager was going to do that. About 30 minutes later, the manager himself called me in for a meeting to grovel, claiming that he thought he was making a joke and should have read the situation better since everyone had been away from their families for so long."
—u/psiren66
17."I didn't work in an office but at an electronics retailer. We had a big team meeting coming up, and the manager bought a Nintendo Wii (which had been recently released) on his own time and with his own money. He designated it as a fundraiser prize, with all the proceeds going to the local food bank."
"One coworker had been bragging about his success with selling stuff online. When the fundraiser was announced, he wasn't interested, so the rest of us bought a few raffle tickets at $1 each, talking about the different Wii games we wanted to try.
On the day of the drawing, the 'entrepreneurial' coworker suddenly got very interested and bought $50 of tickets on his own, ten times more than most other employees. His name was drawn, and he accepted the console from the manager, then announced, 'This will be listed online in a couple of hours.'
He tried to use a charitable event to turn a profit. We were all stunned into silence. Fortunately, the manager talked to him and explained why that was a bad idea. A few weeks later, he said he'd given it to his nephew instead."
—u/HawaiianShirtsOR
18."Back in the day, I ran the phone board for a mid-priced hotel. Most of my coworkers were amazing, with the exception of a security guard who loved to show off his gun and twirl it around his index finger. He also drank on the job and bragged about cheating on his girlfriend with various guests in their hotel rooms, which was VERY much against hotel policy."
"One night, this guard came down to warn me that there was a bat in the hallway near the pool and gave me a heads up that the hotel guests might be calling down to the front desk to complain about gunfire because he was going to shoot the bat.
By the time the front desk finished gaping, we managed to come to our senses and stop him. He was escorted out by management soon after that, and was apparently blacklisted by the hotel chain. Our other security guard was relieved that he was let go.
As for the bat, I grabbed a cardboard board out of an old tabletop game we kept in the lobby for guests and an empty garbage can, went upstairs, caught it, and let it loose in the parking garage near the exit so it could fly off once night fell."
—u/NoeTellusom
19."I had a colleague with anger issues, I'll call him 'Angerman,' and another colleague, whom I'll call Vicky. Vicky was the only person in her department due to a freakish string of others leaving. This meant that although she was experienced in her area, she wasn't caught up on our team's particular workflows. At that time, we were a start-up with around 15 members total..."
"One day, Vicky dared to ask Angerman politely, but publicly, for an update on his project. His desk was in the corner and he turned around to face the rest of the office before screaming: 'For F*CK'S sake Vicky, if you just use your eyes and find the link, you can check on updates yourself! Do you want me to come click it for you? Want me to hold your hand, so we can find the link with our eyes, and then use our hands to click it? Do you want me to read it to you as well? Like a bedtime story? Does Vicky want a widdle bedtime story for lunch?'
He turned around again to face his screen and muttered something I don't remember. There was dead silence in the office — no typing, no clicking, nothing.
Vicky somehow held it together for a few minutes before saying she was grabbing coffee for anyone who wanted one. I went with her to 'help carry them' and let her know that it wasn't his first outburst. It was his WORST, but she did nothing wrong.
I believe Angerman got a slap on the wrist, not even a formal warning. He was talented at what he did, and I think he got away with a lot because of it. Vicky chose to message him in the future, but I still wonder if he had the same kind of outbursts via text."
—u/WalkingSilentz
Did any of these stories surprise you? Have you ever dealt with a toxic coworker who did something shocking? Tell us in the comments or answer anonymously using the form below!
Note: Some responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.
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