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Break Room Nightmares

On LinkedIn I asked the question, "what's the worst break-room behavior you've seen?"

Here's a summary of the answers. I love hearing stories like this.

• A view of someone's ugly bare-naked feet on a counter -- please understand that it is a common area!
• Someone late at night randomly distributed chicken throughout the office in the potted plants, desk drawers, light fixtures etc.
• One of my bosses farted in the middle of a meeting multiple times and remained completely stoic. You can't make shit like this up.
• I saw a guy melt a thermal cup in the microwave and his hot coffee was pouring out of the microwave door.
• At a former employer, an idiot who was cleaning the break room mixed bleach and ammonia. The toxic gases from this mixture caused an evacuation!
• I prepared my lunch, a salad, and someone comes along and starts taking things straight out of the bowl and eating them, LOL.
• Leaving leftover greasy food on the table thinking someone else may want the leftovers and not checking back later on to clean it up. The smell of pepperoni pizza at noon is no longer pleasant at 6 PM
• People who refill their water bottles at the water cooler and stick the entire nozzle into their bottle thus exposing the rest of us to their germs and cooties.
• Some people, likely those with adult ADD, who leave items like used coffee cups on the table and forget to throw them away, take the creamer and don't put it back, and press the "brew" button on the coffee machine when the pot is still half full, thus causing coffee overflow onto the counter (and by then they are usually off to a meeting).
• At one place I worked, free pretzels and chips were offered in the break room. My consumption stopped abruptly after noticing one individual digging into the tub with his hands as if he were playing in the sand at the beach...this same individual having been regularly observed to ignore use of the hand washing facility after visiting the men's room. Lovely. And then there were the stockpilers...those who would fill up their own buckets to ensure an adequate supply for the coming week's lunches.
• Whenever we would have cake at employee functions,a senior manager would cut the cake. Great, he's pitching in that sort of thing, right? Well, he would use his (unwashed) fingers to slide each piece of the cake onto people's plates. This meant he got frosting on his fingers, and would then lick the frosting off his fingers before going on to cut and touch the next piece. I could never bring myself to eat the cake. Yuck.
• A person I used to work with brought his jar of "Colon Cleanser" to the office and stored it in a cabinet in the breakroom. He put it right next to the coffee mugs. One morning I couldn't resist, so I suggested that this was a little too much information, and maybe he could keep it in his office or even just leave it at home. He looked at me like I was crazy. Then he told me "it works really fast" so he couldn't leave it at home; it might "work" during his commute (which was only about 5-10 minutes).
• Blocking where I need to get in the break-room really bothers me and when i see people coughing all over the place like they would be in their own house. Yuck!!
• How about showing off your tattoos?
• It isn't funny, but when I worked in a large office, I'd read MY newspaper. The number of people that would walk up and just TAKE a section of my paper was incredible.

Labels: diversions

posted by Ron @ 2:29 PM