Ever had a coworker who thinks they're all that and a bag of chips, and deserve to be treated as such? They think everyone should do what they want, and are used to getting it. Although when they get to the real world, they learn that's not the case.
People on Reddit share the most entitled coworker they've ever worked with. Content has been edited for clarity.
She Couldn’t Take No For An Answer
“About 15 years ago, the office I worked in instituted a scent free policy. One woman, who was already insufferable, was so offended by it that she snuck in her perfume collection.
She’d walk down the halls and spray perfume into empty offices or cubicles when no one was looking, or before everyone arrived in the morning.
This went on for well over a month or two, and we had no idea who was responsible. My coworkers and I started referring to this mysterious person as the ‘Chanel Bandit.’
She was finally caught on camera in the act. She’d left for three weeks vacation and was unaware that we had installed cameras after a break in. Some of us already suspected her, as the Chanel Bandit mysteriously stopped spraying while she was away.
She quit right after she was caught. None of us were sad to see that cedar scented psycho leave.”
Way Above Her Pay Grade
“About two years ago, I started work as a receptionist in an audiology clinic. So we do hearing aids and hearing tests. The only thing I knew about hearing aids before I took this job was that my grandpa had one.
Eight months after I started – so at this point I have eight months of experience with anything related to hearing – they hired a new provider, who I would later discover knew nothing about anything. Not hearing aids, not basic you-should-know-this-if-you’ve-had-a-job-ever, not how to handle talking to bosses, patients, people over the phone, etc.
Example: we had one patient who left her hearing aids with us to be fixed. She would call every once in a while to check on them, and I would say ‘I’ll ask the provider to call you and update you,’ which I did.
Four months later, the same patient calls and I discover the provider had been ignoring me every time I told her to call the patient. She just straight up didn’t call her ever.
Another example: she could NEVER, EVER remember to clock in and out. Ever. It was a daily struggle with her. She would have to send in time card adjustments like every day, and then complain to me when our boss was annoyed.
She didn’t know to fill out repair forms. Every time we had to send something out, I would have to double check and make sure everything was filled out correctly and legibly- again, she is the provider who is credentialed in this field, and I’m the receptionist who has eight months experience with hearing aids.
She wouldn’t do chart notes for weeks, literally. She would have patient charts stacked in the corner of her office for days, forget to make chart notes, put in the incorrect dates and spell the patients name wrong. So I would have to double-check every chart before putting it back on the shelves.
If she didn’t know what to do with a patient (which was common), she would just do nothing. So I would have to pick up all of that slack; deal with the patients, take their complaints, talk to manufacturers over the phone. There were even times where I had to recommend hearing aids to patients because she just wouldn’t.
She would constantly forget to have patients sign paperwork. I would put a post it on the chart ‘Patient must sign.’ I would tell her beforehand, and yet she would still let them leave without signing purchase agreements and medical waivers.
She could not keep track of the time. She would be going 10-30 minutes over appointment times and I would have to deal with the angry patient.
I would tell her ‘Hey, time warning,’ and she’d say okay and then ignore me.
She would keep elderly patients in for her new patient appointments for like two or more hours- usually an hour and a half appointment. Sometimes, patients would have to tell her they needed to leave because they were tired or their feet hurt. These people are in their 80s.
And the best: everything that went wrong was my fault. She would blame me for her poor job performance, her inability to retain patients and sell hearing aids, everything.
After six months of this, I finally spoke up. I hadn’t said anything up to this point because she was a really nice person apart from work, and I felt bad for her. But everyone has their limits, and also our company was starting to zero in on her because she wasn’t making them any money.
She was put on daily Zoom meetings with our boss and trainers. When this happened, they finally realized why she was making almost zero money (she was super incompetent), and they fired her. They told her they were shutting down the clinic altogether, but instead they hired a new provider with loads more education, experience, someone who is confident and young and knows how an iPhone works.”
The Hidden Meaning Of The Words
“My coworker was incapable of using anything more technologically advanced than a calculator without serious, intensive training. We worked in an office where everything was done on computers. She was slow, rude, unproductive, horrible with clients, expected preferential treatment for the same work as everyone else in the same job, and always looking for a way to push her workload on to someone else.
When I started my job, she cottoned on that I was'”technical’ (had a decent understanding of Office/Windows) very quickly, and would head straight for my desk if she had any issues. I worked with her for 10 years and showed her more times than I can count how to put an ‘Out-of-Office’ message on. Never remembered anything she was shown.
By the time she quit, hearing her say ‘Hey, can you help me?’ made me die inside, because what she really meant was ‘Can you do it for me while I mess around on my phone?’
She’d also yell at you if you couldn’t drop everything and do it right now.
I once watched her spend 10 minutes trying to understand why the printer she was using wasn’t printing. It was one of the big office ones with multiple trays that helpfully tells you on the little screen the tray is empty, and shows you how to refill it. She was putting the paper on the little tray that folds up and not understanding why it still wouldn’t print.
I went to the canteen, made a coffee, came back to my desk and she was still huffing and puffing at it before eventually… ‘Hey,can you help me?‘
She’d put in her notice by now, and I was done with her nonsense because she was so unpleasant to work with. So I got up, walked over to the printer, put a ream of paper in the right tray, shut it, and walked back to my desk without a word.
The best thing I can say for her is that when I trained people on software or processes, I’d write the guide, check back over it, think Where would she stop me and start yelling about not understanding? I’d make it even simpler. Just in case.”
He Was Put In His Place
“I work in a large company, but the office group I work in is small. One of the leads on the factory floor has a crush on this woman that works in my office. He stops by multiple times per day, even though his shift and hers only overlap by four hours. She’s about 15 years younger than she is. They’re both married (not to each other, obviously).
She is Facebook friends with his wife. She has no interest in him at all, but he thinks we all believe he’s just being social. She doesn’t want to rock the boat by complaining about him, so we all have to put up with him stopping by to flirt and make small talk. If she’s there he won’t speak to me at all, maybe just mutter hi. He won’t attempt to socialize with me at all if there is any other woman around. The last time he did deign to chat with me it was to tell me how bad it smelled on the pig farm where he grew up. I was eating lunch at the time.
Once, she was reassigned to work in another city. We knew she would be gone for weeks or months and told everyone so–there’s a company wide daily newsletter that goes out every weekday and includes announcements about who is working offsite. For the first two weeks she was gone, he still stopped by every day to see if she was back.
Finally, he came in once and I was the only one there and I snapped at him, ‘She’s still working there and she’ll definitely be there at least through the end of next week, probably longer. We’ll make sure to let you know when she comes back.’
I didn’t raise my voice or anything, just used a firm tone and cut out all the nicely-nice social niceness he’s used to getting.
After that he stopped coming around every day. I would see him slow down when he walked past our office windows. If it looks like I am the only one there, he won’t stop in.”
“You’re Supposed To Be Fired?”
“I was still in college, and interning at a small company in my chosen field. Someone got hired who was friends with one of my coworkers, and got hired with zero experience or qualifications. I only worked three days a week because I was still taking classes full time, which is relevant later.
She was really condescending and manipulative. This was when the How I Met Your Mother series finale aired, and when I told her I didn’t like it she told me I couldn’t understand it because my mom is still alive.
She was only a year or two older than me but was always like ‘You’re not old enough to understand.’
I honestly forget what specifically happened to cause this, but one time she treated me so unprofessionally that I had to excuse myself and went into an empty conference room. My coworker who was friends with her came in and asked me what happened, and then suggested I confront her at work but without HR? I was 21 and didn’t know anything and trusted my coworker, so I said okay.
So we brought her into the conference room and I told her, very calmly, what she had done that upset me.
I remember I literally said, ‘it’s not okay to treat me like that, especially in a professional environment.’
And because I am who I am, I started to tear up a little. They both burst out laughing.
So anyway like a month later, this terrible coworker tells the owner of the company that I’m skipping work to work another job (I was going to class…because I was still in college) and he fired me for it. I somehow negotiated two more weeks of work after being fired (??) but when I got back into my shared office she had all my things packed for me.
When I didn’t take it all with me she said, ‘You’re supposed to be fired?'”
“It Was Really Stranger”
“I worked with a guy who wouldn’t want to do work. He was hired on as an Engineer, and none of his references would call us back when we tried reaching to them. He came into the office around 10:30am or so on his 1st day. He then came in later and later, coming in at like 1:30pm like his 2nd or 3rd week of work, which was very strange since he had just started and the person who showed up the latest to work typically came in around 11:30pm, so this new guy was the coming in way after him.
He then would come into work and be given easy tasks to do that engineers of our profession should be able to do in five or 10 minutes. He’d let these tasks sit around for weeks on end. And people depending on his work would then get behind on their work. It was pretty bad.
Throw in there like 2 or 3 times he went completely AWOL (Away Without Official Leave), by just not showing up or contacting our boss, saying he was out for personal reasons, or saying he was sick we wouldn’t know why he was missing. He would tell people different stories about why he was AWOL like he was sick, but then he’d tell our boss he had a doctor’s appointment.
At some point, he told me he would go out to bars by himself and he had no friends. He came into the office before smelling of drinks according to one of my coworkers.
The thing that tripped me out is that he would drink three or so 5-Hour Energy Drinks within a four-hour period when I was in the office with him. Because by the time he came into the office, I was about half-way done with my workday. The guy told me he had insomnia, which makes kind of sense, but then he kept coming up with different excuses why he had insomnia. It was really strange. It was his apartment was too loud, then he was sensitive to blue light, then it was the overall brightness of his apartment at night was too bright. Very strange stuff.
The last weird thing was he came into the office and had some burn and bruise on his foot like maybe his foot got run over by a car. He walked around the whole office with just one shoe and some strange shiny cream on his foot to help the healing. It was the oddest thing to see him walking around like that. One coworker thought he had been in a fist fight with someone to have gotten that injury. He did live in a rougher area than us, so that is a possibility.
He ended up getting fired after just 4 months of work. It really shows you that you have got to vet your contractors / employees thoroughly. If someone does not have references you can talk to then by no means you should not hire that person. If we had seen the oddity that none of the guy’s references called us back, then we should have known he would have given us problems from the very start.”
Oh David
“In college, I worked in an office that converts material for people with disabilities. ‘David’ was hired as a temp, and was in his mid 50s ‘starting over.’ He was brought on mostly to do grant writing and to work full time at a job previously held by a student.
He quickly started showing up very late and came in one day covered in dirt, because he’d stop to pick flowers along the highway and ended up rolling down the hill with them. They still had the roots attached and got dirt everywhere. Eventually he’d take a 10-minute break and would disappear across campus for an hour plus at a time only to come back with weird excuses about being gone so long.
We worked in a very small shared space with one phone. Despite the supervisor telling him not to rearrange it multiple times, he did in a very impractical way so you couldn’t see his computer and had the phone moved to his desk. I basically ran the office and the phone most often rang for me. He’d been in the office well over an hour when I got a phone call and had to go behind him to take it. He was still on the login screen, and preceded to move the mouse back and forth for the entirety of the phone call.
He decided to sell his mom’s 1980s wood paneled van, and brought the owners manual with him everywhere to try to entice buyers. He redesigned the cover for materials we sent out and put it on a wood panel background and asked me what I thought. When I told him it reminded me of a van, he asked me if I was interested in buying one and showed me the owners manual for the 19th time. I’m still convinced that was on purpose to bring up the van.
He always had money problems. He’d call his boyfriend on the office phone and would ask for $50 which would start an argument.
He’d then raise the amount he needed and would repeatedly say ‘I didn’t call to argue’ until he won out.
He was also always on the phone to the bank asking who had authorized an amount titled ‘car payment’ or ‘city utilities’ as he wanted to cancel them.
He didn’t bother to learn who anyone was. We’d worked together for four months and a call came in for me but I wasn’t there.
He proceeded to repeatedly shout my name incorrectly at another employee until she said ‘I’m Phoebe? Are you asking for correct version of my name?’
When he finally applied for grants, he submitted two of them late so they weren’t accepted and then applied to one through Nintendo that wasn’t remotely related to our work. There were multiple ones through large tech companies in our state that were highly applicable but he refused to apply for them because they ‘weren’t a good fit.’ For the one grant he did submit, they made a campus visit and he had to arrange lunch. He spent a half hour arguing with a local restaurant about whether they could update their PDF menu daily to reflect the special before announcing he had to go downtown to speak to them in person.
My personal favorite was when we had to watch a video about experiences by people with disabilities and a man who is blind was featured. We were talking about it afterwards and things we took away from it. David chimed in that he thought the man who was blind should have been wearing sunglasses because he was just trying to draw attention to himself and ‘his weird eyes.’ You could have heard a pin drop.
At the end of his six months, he was not rehired and everyone despised him. Our supervisor made his going away party mandatory and we were required to sign his card. He teared up and gave a long speech about how much he liked everyone and that we should request him on Facebook to stay in touch but that he was very selective and wouldn’t accept everyone.”
“A Complete Nutcase”
“My supervisor at my last job. She was a complete nightmare to work for. I had very little training in an extremely high volume office. By very little, I mean about a week? I’d ask questions, and she would make me feel like I was bothering her. We would have conferences to see how I was getting accommodating, and they would end in me crying. After I’d cry, she’d completely contradict herself and would reassure me that she was there for me and that I was doing great.
She would be in a great mood one minute, then the next minute, I’d be walking on eggshells and she wouldn’t be speaking to me. She would get upset with any employee and would tell other employees that she would fire that one employee just because they made her mad. She was a complete nutcase. I lasted there four months before she wrote me up for not doing her a favor and completing one of her assignments.
I quit the very next morning and wrote a detailed resignation letter. Complained to our HR department. Nothing happened to her. Go figure. But, happy ending! I was offered an amazing job opportunity TWO days later.”
She Had Them Fooled
“Most recent office assistant. In her interview, she was charismatic, friendly, engaging and had a lot of the skills we were looking for. After a couple of weeks she’d decided the quiet guy in the office was a threat because he wouldn’t look her in the eye (he had his own set of interpersonal issues but had been with the firm for years and was harmless. He felt victimized by her harsh, confrontational attitude). A painful he-said-she-said ensued where either one of them were in my office at least twice a week for months, but there was no evidence of wrong doing, just two people who have different ideas of how people should interact and things getting blown out of proportion. They couldn’t be in the same room. We are a very small office.
She got mad at anyone who didn’t take her side, talked behind folks backs, and blew up at our managing partner (and me) on several occasions. I called a mediator and she refused asking if I ‘Would expect someone that was physically assaulted to face their abuser.’ The most offensive thing he did was walk away from her while she was talking. When I explained in another meeting with her that there wasn’t much I could do in terms of punishment because it wasn’t harassment or abuse, and there weren’t witnesses , she threw up her hands and compared it to an assault trial, because I wouldn’t take her side over his and refused to fire him for being different.
She ended up being laid off due to lack of work. Needless to say that conversation didn’t go over well either.”
He Was Grasping At Straws
“One that sticks out was an IT manager at a company I worked for. We were actually friends until I was refused a move into the IT department, because I was ‘too valuable elsewhere.’
This guy then went out of his way to try to get me fired. For example, we weren’t supposed to use the company email for personal emails… but of course, everybody did.
One day, I was called into my line manager’s office. Standing there was my boss, the deputy CEO and this IT manager. They presented me with a wad of printouts. Personal emails that I’d sent from my work PC. I was asked to explain myself, and of course I just played the ‘everybody does it’ card and said I’d stop. I received a verbal warning. To be honest, I felt violated that my personal emails had been read by these people but fair enough, I shouldn’t have been using company property to email friends.
A few weeks later, I got pulled in again. The IT manager was standing smugly by and I was asked by the deputy CEO why I was still sending personal emails. I wasn’t, I said.
Part of my job was dealing with customers in Belgium, France and Germany so occasionally I’d fire off an email in French or German. In one of these, to a French-speaking Belgian client who I got in well with, I’d written (in French) ‘Have a great weekend, and go easy on the Bacardi Breezers’!
The IT manager was now obviously scrutinizing every email I sent, and had seen this, ignored the business content of the bulk of the email, printed it out, gone running to management, who had then FAXED the printed email to the company’s French office, had it translated and faxed back.
I was now being confronted with ‘Why are you discussing Bacardi Breezers with a client?’
I had another job lined up by that point, so basically just laughed in their faces and spent my two weeks’ notice emailing all and sundry.”
