what’s the strangest first impression you’ve seen a new hire make?

by Alison Green on April 24, 2025

Most people try to make a good impression when they start a new job. Others … do not or, perhaps, cannot. Think, for example, of the new hire who was already badmouthing the business on Twitter, the employee plotting a coup on her second day, and the new hire who brought their mom to orientation. And then there were these:

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I was asked to see if I could find the brand new student worker who was supposed to be staffing a front line desk, as everyone who walked past noticed no one was sitting there. I happened to go around the desk — and discovered her sitting underneath the desk, absorbed with her phone. (She’d taken off her shoes, for an added touch.) I politely asked her to sit in the chair. She climbed out from under the desk, said something about not feeling “people-y” today, and sat in the chair, eyes never leaving her phone.

•     •     •     •

Working as Corp Trainer at a call center. CEO comes storming down to our offices asking who owns a car with a car wrap on the hood that says “Cocaine Queen.” We find out whose car it is and tell them they can’t park the car in the office parking lot because it isn’t appropriate. She gets indignant and tells us that it is her “stage name” she worked nights as an exotic dancer. When we tell her that is fine, but it can’t be parked in the parking lot, she tells us that she picks her kids up from school and no one has ever said it wasn’t appropriate.

•     •     •     •

This wasn’t their fault at all but I’ve never forgotten it. I happened to look out the window as one of the new hires was walking towards the building. He noticed that there were geese in the fountain and detoured to go look at them. They had nested and if you know anything about Canadian geese, they can be vicious! The geese started chasing him, he freaked out, ran around to get away from them, slipped on the geese poop, landed on his back in the grass, and had 4 geese honking at him. Poor guy came in covered in poop and wet grass. I told him to go home and we would try again tomorrow.

•     •     •     •

We had a guy apply for a staff job. His very first day he was helping clean up brush along the edge of a mountain biking course. One of the other staff said “when you’re done with that axe, I need it,” and the new guy proceeded to say “OK” and THROW THE AXE AT HIM. It went within a yard of his torso. New guy’s first day was his last day. He protested that he didn’t mean to hurt anyone, he just didn’t think about the risk, and was told “Look, we know you didn’t mean it, but you’re so stupid you’re dangerous.”

•     •     •     •

Let’s talk about the most surprising first impressions you’ve seen made by new coworkers. Please share your stories in the comments.

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  1. Fluffy Fish*

    I’ve talked about this gem before, but the guy who wore a straight out of f*cks shirt. To a gov office job. Because he was mad abotu senior staff giving him very normal guidance like – please don’t take secure plans off-site to be reviewed by your mom.

    It was the last straw of the most straws I’ve ever seen in 4 weeks.

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      3. Fluffy Fish*

        absolutely just as qualified. there is just so much lore for a guy who lasted as long as he did.

        so he was exmilitary. whatever happened with that he was not eligible to get on bases or at least some bases. and sometimes we work with military locales.

        but he and his boss (who was aware and also a nightmare) just thought they would not say anything and the base would magically let him on.

        dear reader – it did not work that way.

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        1. RIP Pillowfort*

          The “oh no” chorus is playing in my head. Having had to deal with getting people onto bases for work all I can do is scream into the void at someone that thinks they can get someone ineligible onto the base.

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        3. Le Sigh*

          Ah yes, military bases. Famously chill places.

          A former coworker took a similar approach when he was banned from a local casino (too much drunken nonsense, as I understand it). He thought if he just showed up at different times or doors, they wouldn’t notice who he was. Apparently he forgot about the existence of printers and didn’t realize they’d posted his picture at every entry way. According to him, the last bouncer he encountered literally looked at him and said, “dude, come on.” My coworker thought it was quite funny.

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    3. wendelenn*

      That makes me think of a certain First Lady’s less vulgar but still horrible “I really don’t care, do u?” jacket.

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    4. Zona the Great*

      Whoa! This reminds me of the woman who wore a shirt featuring a fellatio-ing woman with a black block over the…thing. She wore it to the children’s ski school we worked at. She was incredulous that we told her to leave.

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      1. Fluffy Fish*

        our friend was also surprised when he was let go. i swear there people who just operate in a completely different reality than the rest of us.

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  2. HeyAnnonnyNonny*

    I’m assuming the new guy wanted to make a big impression on the CEO, so he sat right next to him in an all hands meeting. But the guy had just imbibed in his car and you could smell the weed across the table. (This was before canabis was legal anywhere.) As soon as the meeting was done, the CEO told the manager to walk the guy out.

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    1. HeyAnnonnyNonny*

      Oh! I just remembered! The same guy also “didn’t do email.” He refused to open Outlook to check his email.

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      1. ScruffyInternHerder*

        re: Didn’t *do* email

        Seriously HOW is it acceptable for an employee to just opt out of something as basic as email (or any other basic program that is required for a position)????? Yes. Dealing with that currently, and my flabbers are gasted that this is just overlooked?

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        1. NotAnotherManager!*

          We have had to tell people very specifically in orientation that they have to both check their voicemail AND respond to them. (And our VM system emails you the message and (sometimes hilarious) auto-transcription of the message, so you don’t even have to touch the phone.)

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          1. AnotherOne*

            In all fairness, these days I can appreciate that. Most of my office has managed to just opt of that.

            As in, there is currently a red light flashing on my work phone and I honestly don’t know what it means. However, they did move us to a system where we get our phone calls and voicemails digitally, so the phone just seems to exist to take up space on my desk.

            But we are expected to be constantly on email.

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          2. Kevin Sours*

            I think there is a difference between having to be told what communication channels are required — especially in this day and age where there are so many options that it can be exhausting and trying to limit them to a reasonable number is understandable — and taking “I’d prefer not to” approach to communication channels that are primary in a given office culture.

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        3. Dolphins*

          I have a coworker (senior to me but I don’t report to her) who frequently has days where she will not check emails at all, let alone respond to them. And generally makes it known that she is impossible to reach by email. So then people try to reach out to her through me even though I am not her assistant (we just work together on certain areas).

          I wish I could just NOT deal with my inbox for the bulk of my job. Must be nice.

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          1. Zona the Great*

            I once made a flowchart for people who came to me asking where my senior-yet-not-boss colleague was. It said, “Do I know where John is? A Flowchart” and then had the question, “Is he at his desk? Yes or No” and then the Yes would lead to “there he is!” and the No would lead to “I don’t know”. So when people came to me, I simply pointed to the flowchart and said nothing.

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            1. swanjun*

              I made something similar when I sat near our admin assistant and affixed it to my mini fridge with a magnet. It read ‘I do/do not know where Aras is.” And I’d cover whichever one was inapplicable at the moment with the magnet.

              Once, Aras took a family trip overseas, so I printed out a map of his destination and hung a new sign saying, “Aras is here.”

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          2. Dancing Queen*

            I had a former manager who refused to answer emails. They would not put anything in writing. So if you emailed them a question, they would not answer and you eventually had to ask them in person. They wanted plausible deniability. Eventually they were terminated and it was discovered they had well over 1000 emails they had neither read nor responded to, plus more they had read but had never answered.

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        4. It's Marie - Not Maria*

          Sadly, we have people who try to not do parts of their work all the time. We are a call center (checks notes) Yes, answering the phone is literally your job, now log back into the queue please.

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        5. Jaydee*

          I had a coworker at my old job who “didn’t do email.” Couple of key differences though….
          – She had worked there for almost 45 years.
          – She was really good at what she did, good with clients, well-connected and respected in the community, and an overall delightful person to work with.
          – She did actually check her email and would send an email if necessary, she just strongly preferred not to, so if she could mail something or make a phone call she would do that instead.

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      3. Not The Earliest Bird*

        I had a guy like that! He claimed email during the work day was “too disruptive to his flow.” So he’d take his laptop home, and “read” his emails at home. Except what he was doing was having his wife take care of the emails for him. I don’t think he knew how email actually worked? He was gone in 3 weeks, when he found out deadlines were not arbitrary for us.

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    2. Observer*

      But the guy had just imbibed in his car and you could smell the weed across the table. (This was before canabis was legal anywhere.)

      Even now, this can get you walked out the door. An employer may not care what you do on your own time, but you don’t bring that stuff into the office.

      As for “don’t d email”? How was he allowed to get away with that for even one day?

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      1. AnonAcademic*

        Academic Dean at my workplace got away with this for eight years. I mean, I presume she read emails from important people but definitely not from people she managed. She did send emails but always put URGENT READ IMMEDIATLY in the subject line because I guess she thought everyone else also just didn’t read email?

        She would occasionally laugh about how she “need[ed] to get better about email!” but after like year three it was a bitter reminder for everyone how little she did vs. how much power she wielded.

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  3. Mrs. Met*

    We’re hiring a whole bunch of new people on our campus to staff a Student Success Center that is being built. A was hired and started in January in a kind of student life position that was covered under the grant for the SSC. Because this team is going to have to work together quite a bit, A was asked to sit in on a Zoom interview for 2 candidates for a remedial math teacher (so, under the same grant but very very different roles) in February, about 3 weeks after she started. There were probably a dozen people on these zoom interviews because higher ed, but toward the end of the first interview, A unmuted herself to say, with no context and without identifying herself “that was so amazing, I’m so excited, I think you’re going to be such a great fit here!!”

    She was not present for the second (much stronger) candidate’s interview.

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    1. Landry*

      I think you guys put her in a bad position by having her sit in on interviews as a new person, especially someone who sounds young and maybe unfamiliar with the working world.

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      1. Samwise*

        Eh, having new and/or young employees sit in on interviews is good for the new/young employee’s professional development. As long as you make it clear they are observing only

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        1. metadata minion*

          Why? I hope I wouldn’t have done that, but it seems like a pretty understandable mistake to me. It’s normal to compliment people on a good presentation, and it’s also not unusual to get *some* sort of positive feedback during a job interview, and I can absolutely see someone combining norms and coming out with something that’s extremely not done.

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          1. Boof*

            Oooo I hope most people know a little better than to act like interviewees already have the job their applying to, especially if they’re not the hiring manager!

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            1. I'm just here for the cats!!*

              she said ““that was so amazing, I’m so excited, I think you’re going to be such a great fit here” I don’t see that as her saying the candidate had the job!

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        2. becca*

          People are just supposed to intuit working norms right out of the gate, now? It’s very possible that something similar was said *to her*, so she didn’t think very hard about doing the same.

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        3. I'm just here for the cats!!*

          I’m in hiring ed and I’ve never heard of being on a hiring panel or part of the panel and not giving your feedback or being able to talk with the candidate. Maybe I misunderstand what the problem was? Was it that she said that the candidate would be a good fit or was it because she spoke up at all?

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    2. SolarPowered*

      Hopefully procedure was updated to say that these are informative and under no circumstances are new staff to unmute themselves until after the candidate has left the zoom room.

      Reply ↓
  4. Irish Teacher.*

    Nothing as exciting as these, but I do have a coworker who was complaining about our school on…maybe her second day. Stuff like complaining about the laptop she got – admittedly, not a great one because the school was short of good ones – criticising the principal for not telling us she was starting – “didn’t you know I was starting today? I can’t believe the principal didn’t tell you. He ought to do that.” That sort of thing.

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      1. But Of Course*

        The way to handle that is without badmouthing the person who was responsible for doing it, though. Talk about setting yourself up for the perception you’re a perpetual complainer.

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      1. Irish Teacher.*

        They probably were, but it’s not really a good idea on your second day to start talking to complete strangers about your criticisms of their boss/other colleagues. Even if the complaints are valid, you don’t know who is good friends with him or likely to report your words back or who has beef with him themself and might use what you say to start a row.

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    3. Wallaby, Well I'll Be*

      Those are good things to complain about. It IS weird that your principal didn’t tell anyone she was starting. Maybe you’ve become complacent with poor treatment and support tools? Sometimes it takes an outsider’s perspective to show us how dysfunctional a situation is.

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  5. AnonymooseToday*

    The person in an entry level job who told everyone that they would have the department head’s job in 3 years. Dearest Reader they did not and whenever their resume turned up again for a couple years, most knew not to interview them.

    I’d been there a couple years, and they knew within the first week that our personal office key opened all the office doors on our side of the building, most of us had no idea because you know, we didn’t go around unlocking other people’s offices.

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    1. fluffy*

      On the other hand it’s probably good to know how insecure your office actually is, in case you have a rogue employee going around stealing things.

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      1. Works in IT*

        This. Part of my job, at one point in time, was to literally go around trying to open every door. Because you don’t find doors where the lock is broken such that the door can be forced open by shoving it unless you actually shove the doors.

        That was a fun discovery to make. I was showing interns what my day to day looked like, leaned on the door, and went AHHHHHHH

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        1. MigraineMonth*

          Depends why you’re searching for security holes, whether there is a benefit to pointing out those security holes, and what you plan to do with the information. If you’ve been asked to test the security? Go for it. If you want to test the security of a public website and then report any issues back to the host? Sure!

          If you want to walk around a neighborhood and try breaking into houses to test various security systems, even though no one asked you? That’s creepy and a violation, even if you are just proving that it’s easy to do or that someone left their door unlocked.

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      2. Glitsy Gus*

        I mean, I wouldn’t do it with other people’s offices, but I might try it on closets and utility rooms and stuff. I like to know what is and isn’t accessible to me so I don’t go bothering people for help if I don’t need to.

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  6. Percy Weasley*

    On our new supervisor’s first day, she did not come around and introduce herself. I had to seek her out to meet her. During ger first week, she fell asleep at her desk a couple of times. She did turn out to be a good supervisor, though we certainly didn’t expect that back in week 1!

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  7. Juicebox Hero*

    Oh, man, I feel for the guy who was attacked by the cobra chickens. The college I went to was infested with those monsters, and there was a whole part of orientation dedicated to Stay Away from the Geese.

    The worst first impression was a new secretary, who on her first day working solo waited for the boss to come into her office, let out a huge floor-shaking belch, and yelled, “Well, excuse YOU!” at him. He kind of froze up for a minute and then acted like it didn’t happen.

    During the 18 months of her doing zero work and the at least 5 second chances our wimpy management gave her, things got worse.

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    1. Dust Bunny*

      Yeah, I would not actively harm a Canada goose but by far my favorite place to see them is flying overhead on their way to somewhere else. When I was a kid, there were whole parks in our city that were rendered basically unusable by goose poop and aggression. They even attacked small kids at the zoo.

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        1. FSU*

          Oh, that’s interesting. I live in a rural spot in the northern US and we have a pond where the geese will come and raise their families each year. We also have ducks, and the ducks hunker down next to one of the goose nests, and mama goose doesn’t bat an eye. They swim around with the geese and the geese act like they don’t even exist.

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          1. LingNerd*

            I tend to see ducks and geese cohabiting peacefully pretty often. My guess as to why is that ducks are smaller and they aren’t interested in eating goslings, so the geese don’t really care. Also I’ve heard of people having guard geese instead of livestock guardian dogs for their domesticated flocks. With a bit of googling, it also seems that they eat some similar foods (hence the shared habitat), but without tons of actual overlap, which means geese won’t usually be competing with ducks for food. Geese mostly eat grasses, but will eat berries and seeds when grasses aren’t as abundant. But ducks have a pretty diverse diet! They eat lots of aquatic plants, some terrestrial plants, some berries and grains, and a fair number of bugs and aquatic invertebrates. And some some species like mergansers specialize in small fish.

            Humans, meanwhile, are big and look like scary predators, because we kind of are. And unfortunately, places that we like to build for our own enjoyment just so happen to also be exactly the kind of habitat that geese love. So of course they’re going to move in and then threaten to fight us when we show up. From the perspective of the goose, their home is being invaded by a predator. Meanwhile from our perspective, our community spaces have been overtaken by aggressive squatters

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      2. FashionablyEvil*

        In the US, Canada geese are protected under the Migratory Birds Act so you also can’t hunt/catch/remove/transport them. (My company periodically sends out notices when they are nesting near certain buildings to remind people to park/walk elsewhere. Those things are MEAN.)

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      4. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

        Geese once chased my mom’s 90lb labradoodle into a pond in a public park! To be fair, I’m not sure if he HAD to go towards the water or if he was just like “get these things away from me” and ran the wrong way, but the geese were definitely more aggressive than the giant fluff ball of a dog. (He was a very sweet boy, and very cute, and also very dumb.)

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      5. MusicWithRocksIn*

        My hometown has specially trained dogs that basically chill at the park and chase away the geese all day. I always thought it was an awesome idea. There are always people who work for the parks there though, so it only works with enclosed monitored parks.

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    3. JustCuz*

      Cobra Chickens haha. At my last company, the geese were very annoying, mean, and pooped everywhere. Would block traffic on the main road – sitting on the pavement in the mornings lol – just typical protected Canadian geese behavior every business had to deal with in the area.

      The owner hated the geese so much he would chase them around the property with an RC car lol. Every time he would see them land, he would race outside with his RC and the chase started! Once this became too time consuming, he bought all these fake wolf dupes and put them around the property. These weren’t effective, so he went to the township and applied to hunt and kill them all. He came into so proud he got this approval (which I doubt he ever did), and spent an entire day trying to enlist people to help him kill them. The outcry over his literal murderous rage of geese didn’t go over well. There were then meetings, and protests, and consternations that then too got to be too time consuming, so he gave up his quest. That was a weird place.

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      1. MusicWithRocksIn*

        My daycare is on an isolated road with wetlands on one side, and I’ve had to explain to three different people that if you stop your car to wait for the geese you’ll be waiting forever. You have to slowly roll the car forward, and they’ll do the ‘I’m not moving because of YOU, I’m moving because *I* want to’ waddle and get out of your way. How people can live around here and not learn that is beyond me.

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    4. bamcheeks*

      I was an RA on a campus which had a big lake in the middle, and many, many waterfowl. I once came down to find twelve undergraduates cowering by the door, going, “there’s a goose outside the door! We have classes! We don’t know what to do!”

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      1. MusicWithRocksIn*

        We have some great Blue Heron that like to come eat our Fall displays (stalks of wheat and corn and pumpkins) and those suckers are BIG. We’ve spotted new people hovering uncomfortably at the edge of the parking lot before when they were about. They aren’t mean like geese, but when they are almost as tall as the shorter people in the office people get extra cautious.

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    5. Beyond the sea*

      We have a flock of cobra chickens at work. They come year after year. A group them held some of us at hostage and wouldn’t let us leave the building. I tolerate them bc in May, June and sometimes July there are large numbers of baby cobra chickens. They are sooo stinking cute.

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        1. MusicWithRocksIn*

          The problem with baby geese is that geese are terrible parents, and they loose the baby geese, then walk around honking up a storm all day long looking for the lost baby geese.

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    6. Just another commenter*

      Geese hang around in random parking lots near where I live. I’ve never seen one be aggressive, but I also haven’t gone too close to them. Didn’t want to find out the hard way.

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      2. Jay (no, the other one)*

        My office used to be in a corporate park that had turned a retention basin into a decorative pond right next door to our building. It was, of course, colonized by geese. One day I walked out of the building to see a line of geese waddling over to a truck where someone was sitting eating his lunch. Lunch-eater ignored the geese. They stood there for about a minute and then waddled off. It doesn’t sound funny in the retelling but it had me giggling for an hour.

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      3. MusicWithRocksIn*

        Do you live in Europe? I’ve heard that mother goose geese are much nicer than the Canadian variety.

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      4. Boof*

        somehow despite having many geese around, I’ve never really aggroed one – I distinctly remember being a child on my dad’s shoulders (so, what, 4-5?) and us going down a park path, with a goose family (yes, with baby fuzzy geese) walking the same path opposite; and us passing by eachother – the adult geese hissing warnings sure but not doing anything other than being a bit dramatic about us passing close.
        Maybe it is worse if you run from the geese? I just kind of ignore them or slow roll past them if they’re in the way.

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        1. YetAnotherAnalyst*

          This is my experience. If you run, they’ll chase you. If you approach the nest, they’ll attack you. But if you’re just passing by, they might hiss and flap their wings and make a bit of a show, but that’s it. They’re not stupid, and they’re not going to risk their lives against an opponent 10-15 times their size unless they have to.

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    7. bananners*

      Okay if we are talking about cobra chickens, two stories:

      -we were hiring for a position during nesting season and had a pair that chose right outside the door to do it. I was the first in to talk to the interviewee and mentioned the geese. Every. Single. Team. Member. that walked in after said the exact same thing to the interviewee. I did end up hiring her, possibly in part to how graciously she managed us all talking about the effing geese.

      -Just Monday I was walking to the parking lot when I see a Canada goose also walking toward the intersection. Just as the walk sign came on, the goose sauntered across the intersection IN the crosswalk. All that saw were delighted at its adherence to traffic laws.

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    8. Zona the Great*

      Gross! I would have had a hard time not responding to that in a not-so-nice way. That’s really gross.

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    9. Trillian*

      I think it was someone on Reddit who characterized the geese as Canada’s Id, the repressed side of Canada’s niceness.

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      1. learnedthehardway*

        This is very accurate (Canadian here). We’re nice right up until we’re not. Elbows up!

        The business where my dad worked had a flock of Canada geese that had colonized a large lawn area around the main office building. The geese would NOT let anyone cross that area. More effective than guard dogs.

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    10. skadhu*

      I am probably in a truly miniscule minority, but I am always baffled by references to how dangerous Canada geese are. As a kid and young adult I spent a lot of time at a migratory bird sanctuary (which did warn people about coming to close to them when they were nesting, as I recall). The geese certainly got (more) hostile in nesting season, but it was almost always just threat. Even on the couple of occasions in all those years when I was actually attacked, I never got so much as a bruise. If you offered them seed (the sanctuary sells packages of it so you can feed birds in the inner areas) they pecked HARD but again, not painfully so. I actually found it highly amusing when they simultaneously accepted food and hissed at me.

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      1. Boof*

        Yes same! Sure they’ll bluff and they have strong wings but I’m not sure how they could really injure a person who decided to take one on (vs person injuring themselves panicking about aggressive goose).

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      2. FrogEngineer*

        They aren’t really dangerous, but most people aren’t used to having a wild animal walk towards them, behaving aggressively and hissing.

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      3. MusicWithRocksIn*

        I think there are just so many more geese, so more people have encountered them during bad times. Swans are the truly mean giant bird. Do not mess with a Swan, they will straight up plan your murder, or the murder of your dog.

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  8. The Wizard Rincewind*

    We had a new communications guy start at my organization and he was maybe in his 40s. I do not know what he told people during the interview, but it became clear that he was way out of his depth doing really simple parts of the job.

    Part of his duties was putting together the weekly newsletter. His writing and grammar were atrocious and when he tried to link to press releases, he just copied the “view this message in HTML” link from the press release email. I tried to let him know that this was not going to work and that he needed to create a web page with the press release text to link to it. He sent an updated newsletter…with the wrong link, again. He seemed baffled by the concept of building a web page, even though I know he must have received some kind of training on our CMS.

    Editing that newsletter, which normally took maybe 20-30 minutes of my day, became a huge timesink because he was just…bad at it. He did not seem to grasp anything I was telling him.

    I’m not part of the communications department so I can’t report exactly what went down, but I think he was just as hopeless at the rest of his duties because on day 4, he said he couldn’t take it anymore, walked out of the office in a huff, and never came back.

    When I leave this job (or when the current director leaves hers), I’m going to press her for any details she can tell me because it was so strange!

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    1. Emily Byrd Starr*

      Please tell me this was in the late 90’s or early 00’s, when the internet was just a little baby netling, and we were all figuring out how to use it.

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    2. CubeFarmer*

      We work in a professional non-profit (if that’s not an oxymoron.) About three years ago we hired someone to replace an experienced grant writer. This person, let’s call him Morton, had…no experience with grant writing, so I don’t know why we hired him (I was not involved in the process.)

      Morton was so clearly in over his head. This wasn’t entirely Morton’s fault–the person who managed him, Bernard, couldn’t train him because Bernard was one of those people who somehow always failed up. Bernard relied extensively on the prior grant writer’s experience and work, and it became super obvious that he also had no idea what he was doing.

      Morton ended up quitting by…ghosting us. He simply stopped showing up for work. It took Bernard a few days (!!!) to decide that he needed to reach out to Morton’s emergency contacts. I’m not sure what went down exactly, but he was fired.

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        2. CubeFarmer*

          Morton was fired after he ghosted us. Bernard, unfortunately, is still with us (every place I’ve ever worked has a colleague who does f-all and still manages to get paid for it.)

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    3. bananners*

      We hired someone with a masters in strategic communication (I think, I mean, I guess we didn’t ask for transcripts/diploma) for a general comms role – department of one. They couldn’t do any of the basic writing tasks (nor the design tasks they told us they knew how to do, which we hadn’t asked for but was a major plus!).

      Found out far too late their specialty (the only thing they could really do) was e-newsletter analytics. Unfortunately, we had about 148 newsletter subscribers so this wasn’t actually a full-time responsibility.

      Reply ↓
    4. Jay (no, the other one)*

      I started a mostly remote job the same week as the new part-time IT guy. I wasn’t impressed at the time and became steadily less impressed as the months went on. At one point the company upgraded our phones. He Emailed me and informed me I had to come to the office during his work hours. I forwarded that to my boss and asked politely if I had his authorization to spend over three hours on the clock to do as I was asked. IT guy then sends me another Email saying that one of our other employees who lived near me would bring me the phone. I was supposed to swap my SIM card into the new phone and give the old one back to my colleague.

      Turned out this was not possible because the new phone had no tray for the SIM card – that slot was empty – and it was a different model so the tray from my old phone didn’t work. I called the main IT number and after twenty minutes of a circular conversation when they didn’t believe I knew what I was talking about (yes, I’m a woman, why do you ask?) they asked me to text them a picture. I did. Surprised voice says “Oh! There’s no tray.” Yes, I know that. So I sent the new phone back to the IT guy who informed me the next day that he took the tray out on purpose to “make it easier” for me. Did he realize my old phone was a different model? “How was I supposed to know what kind of phone you had?” Dude, you are IN CHARGE OF OUR DEVICES.

      We put up with him for two years. Every time I called the national IT help line they asked where I worked and then heaved a great sigh. IT guy eventually resigned to take a full-time job at another healthcare org. No idea what our management was thinking.

      Reply ↓
  9. Nusth*

    Just a few months ago, we had a new hire quit within a week because he realized the work we were doing wasn’t right for him. We’re a big law firm representing sovereign clients that some people would understandably find unsavory (US allies, but … still). The field he realized he actually wanted to work in? Human rights.

    More power to him for bowing out when he realized the job was fundamentally misaligned with his values – but we were all baffled that he got that far.

    Reply ↓
    1. Will "scifantasy" Frank*

      If this was a movie, I’d suspect espionage.

      More practically, I wonder if the hire (curious: associate, para, or non-legal staff?) wanted to cut their teeth (and maybe bank some cash) working for the “other side” for a while so theyr could bring some additional skills/experience to the human rights side. (Which would be a different setup if it was someone bound by the Rules of Professional Conduct or not…)

      Reply ↓
      1. GovtAtty*

        That might’ve been it and they just couldn’t go through with it. I’d bet it was a young attorney trying to get into the field. I don’t see any conflict issues in general so long as you avoid appearing directly against a former client (these side-switches happen all the time), and I wouldn’t be surprised if they found out that their personal bugbear was one of the clients. (E.g. if their particular Issue–and idealistic young law grads who both want to work in human rights and can land a job at a big firm always have an Issue–is Palestine, and the firm represents Israel.) Or they just didn’t have the stomach for it.

        Reply ↓
        1. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

          When I practiced law my firm primarily did plaintiffs’ work, but we had a few defense cases (admittedly, to get hourly billable funding in the door while we waited for big contingency awards). It wasn’t unethical, but it did give me a bit of whiplash as a young attorney, particularly because there were a few other firms that were co-counsel in some cases and opposing counsel in another. Oh, I see Mr. So-and-So from Firm X coming down the hall, should I smile or not?

          Reply ↓
          1. Will "scifantasy" Frank*

            I never dealt with that directly, as patent work has solidly moved into the NPE defense age. Occasionally though, I would note the number of computer/electronics companies that were setting up Joint Defense Agreements against Round Rock or some other troll. It was the embodiment of “the family squabbles among itself, but if an outsider gets involved, close ranks and build barricades.”

            But, you know. For justice.

            (I asked before but I don’t know if you saw it, can I assume that username is a reference to Newsflesh by Mira Grant?)

            Reply ↓
      2. Nusth*

        I assume that was it – while nothing really would have been a surprise to him (the major client he’d be supporting was disclosed at the offer stage, for example) knowing and experiencing are definitely two different things. We’re non-attorney analytical staff, so while there were no binding conduct issues to consider, I’m sure he worried his time with us would reflect poorly on him.

        The whiplash of hearing him resign because he actually needed to be in human rights will never not be a little amusing to me, though. It was like someone interviewing at a butcher, accepting the job, and then after a week saying sorry, I’m a vegetarian, I have to leave! Totally justifiable but how did you get past the sign on the door?

        I just googled him out of curiosity and he’s gotten a job at a pro-democracy think tank. All’s well that ends well!

        Reply ↓
        1. Arrietty*

          I was vegetarian when I applied for an administrative role at a meat packing plant. I was desperate for work. I didn’t get the job.

          Reply ↓
        2. MigraineMonth*

          If I hadn’t already given up red meat, I would have after a month working at a sandwich shop that was known for its steak sandwiches. Handling pounds of raw shredded meat every shift was only possible if I mentally disconnected it from food.

          Reply ↓
    2. jjax*

      I understand where this person is coming from. I once took a job at an environmental consulting firm which was described to me in the interview as helping the disenfranchised groups in our area be taken care of by the resource extraction industries and the governments who often ignored or exploited them. But once I started the job, I realized that, because we were paid by those industries/by the government, we were essentially a mouthpiece for them, doing PR work in the guise of “fair” duty to consult practices.

      When I took the job, I had convinced myself that I could be impartial and ethical because my intention was to help the minority groups through my work. When I got further into the work, I realized that my idealism wasn’t realistic and that the thought of helping these industries made me deeply unhappy. But it was a realization I don’t think I could have had without actively doing the work and seeing what it entailed. There’s no better teacher than experience!

      Reply ↓
      1. Nusth*

        Yeah, I harbor no ill will toward this hire – I actually just googled him and he’s landed a job at a pro-democracy think tank, so all’s well that ends well. It was just baffling – and thus a bit funny – to the team that he interviewed for and accepted the job (with the full details – we told him the client at the offer stage) and didn’t realize the job was completely at odds with what he wanted to do with his career. He was a newish grad, too, and I think the job search desperation vibe probably influenced him to overlook what should have been dealbreakers for him.

        Reply ↓
      2. a perfectly normal-sized space bird*

        I once had a job in housing that I thought was supposed to be about helping poor, disenfranchised, and disabled people find affordable housing. Turns out it was really set up as a tax shelter for wealthy investors. There were a lot of terrible things going on there, the least of which was the tax and insurance fraud being committed by the parent company. I tried really hard to help the people I thought we were supposed to be helping but in the end I couldn’t do it anymore. On the plus side, I now know what red flags to look for when I’ve helped acquaintances find housing.

        Reply ↓
  10. Keymaster of Gozer (she/her)*

    A new guy on helpdesk who creeped on every woman under 40 in the office. It was a rather baffling loop of ‘will you go out on a date with me? No? Okay, how about you?’ until he’d worked his way through about 20 of us.

    On his first day. Not a great impression mate.

    Reply ↓
    1. Emily Byrd Starr*

      I’d guess that his favorite song was “Creep” by Radiohead.

      “I’m a creep
      I’m a weirdo
      What the hell am I doing here?
      I don’t belong here”

      Except the narrator of the song is at least self-aware enough to recognize that he’s a creep, unlike the man you worked with.

      Reply ↓
      1. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

        I used to sing this for karaoke! I’m a middle-aged, asexual cis woman, but I don’t have a lot of range and I’m kind of mumbly, so I like most of the lower part. (I can’t hit the top note, but I thought I could when I was drinking.)

        Reply ↓
      2. Keymaster of Gozer (she/her)*

        Oh he thought he was god’s gift to women. Major ‘I’m owed a girlfriend’ vibes off that one.

        He once brought our manager a big bottle of expensive perfume and tried to ask her out. We’d warned him not to do that!

        (Niether her nor her wife liked perfume anyway :p )

        Reply ↓
      3. Boof*

        Nonono, I refuse!
        Haha, I love that song but I always interpreted it more as imposter syndrome / internal angst type vibe not “I’m actually going to creep on others”

        Reply ↓
    2. MsM*

      Reminds me of the dude I met at a convention who asked me out after three sentences of the least informative small talk imaginable, and then informed me he’d already tried this on a dozen other women who were similarly uninterested. I am very glad he was not a coworker.

      Reply ↓
      1. But Of Course*

        I gave a (adult, probably late 40s) student directions to the admissions office once; his next question was whether I was married.

        Why are men.

        Reply ↓
      1. Keymaster of Gozer (she/her)*

        Not for that, no. He was put on suspension and then fired some years later when he deliberately set off an epileptic seizure of another coworker.

        Reply ↓
        3. MigraineMonth*

          I’m sorry, he *didn’t* get fired for trying to ask our every woman in the office, including his *own manager* who was married to another woman? WTF was your HR even doing?

          Reply ↓
          1. Slow Gin Lizz*

            Why do I doubt, though, that this actually was his last impression? Like, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d sued them to try to get his job back, or kept showing up at the company’s public events, or something totally un-self-aware like that.

            Reply ↓
    5. Getta load of this!*

      We had a similar guy at a former job (Fortune 100 company, so very structured and a large HR team). He was there for a little over a year and anytime a younger woman was hired, he would not only ask them out, he would proceed to “flirt” with them in the office. Obviously, it was super uncomfortable for everyone.

      He ended up getting fired because he was opening doing interviews with other companies during work hours and at his desk, which was in an open floor plan.

      He was a nepotism hire, which is why he lasted as long as he did.

      Reply ↓
      1. MusicWithRocksIn*

        We should have a thread of the most uncomfortable ways everyone has been hit on at work. Mine was when I was in my 20’s and worked at a very small company late on Wednesdays, which is the day the cleaning service came in. The woman who was our cleaning service brought her boyfriend to work with her, and he would hit on me, right in front of his girlfriend, the cleaning lady, who was emptying my trash basket. It was so deeply uncomfortable, and then later he would hang around the lobby around the time we all went home. I started calling friends just to be on the phone when walking out of the building.

        Reply ↓
  11. WeirdChemist*

    I once worked a job where one role involved analyzing soil samples shipped to us from various places (including out of state, and islands such as Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and Guam). As you can imagine, there is significant regulation on shipping biological materials across state lines in order to prevent the spread of invasive species.

    A new hire, during orientation, was given training that said that we were required to kill any live bugs found in samples immediately. To which she exclaimed “oh, I’m such a nature lover, I don’t kill bugs! I would just take them outside and release them in the wild if I found them :)”

    It was explained to her that no, this was a stringent requirement, but she wouldn’t budge, and was confused when we let her go. Maybe don’t suggest breaking federal law on day one?

    Reply ↓
    2. Jonathan MacKay*

      Australia’s regulations regarding such things are fascinating once you read into the reasons behind them. As I recall, someone decided to introduce rabbits to their property so they could hunt them…. and within a decade, they’d filled in an entire ecological niche!

      Biodiversity protections should probably require the same level of measures as Cybersecurity experts apply to their personal devices!

      Reply ↓
    2. A large cage of birds*

      It really is.

      Also if I were him, it would give me about 24 hours to get over my embarrassment. That moment would live rent free in my brain forever, but the day would help.

      Reply ↓
  13. Lauren*

    A new hire who had been told by the CEO her job was to find weaknesses in the organization and fix them. A very broad request and she obviously was way out of her depth. She joined an all hands company wide zoom call and every time someone made an update on a project she had something to say. “Explain this to me like I’m a 4th grader” and “why aren’t we charging them more” and “we need to get better results”. These are all things that get addressed in smaller project meetings and has nothing to do with her. This meeting is just an hour long touch base to update the whole company on our clients current needs. It is not a Q&A. I had multiple people texting me during that meeting to just say “what the hell is she doing”. She did not join any meetings after that.

    Reply ↓
    1. kiki the bee*

      I am always curious how some new employees pick up on what the vibe, goals, and audience of meeting are and others don’t. Or maybe it’s that some people feel like they need to jump in hot right away rather than observe for a few weeks?

      I have a newer coworker who, even 6 months in, seems to have no regard for the purpose and audience of meetings and will just jump in with stuff that’s irrelevant or actively confusing to 80% of the group. He’s above me in the hierarchy so it’s not on me to coach him on this and his manager is very MIA, so it persists. And part of me loves mess, so it’s a little treat to have somebody ask about how Teams works in a status update meeting with directors.

      Reply ↓
      1. Slow Gin Lizz*

        Same. I have been at my job almost a year and I think I am a fairly quiet new employee, just asking questions when I think they’re very relevant to my job (although not hesitating to make a joke now and then). I have a newer coworker who has been here FT for a couple of months but was also a contractor on a specific project before I started, so it’s kind of weird b/c she’s been working with my team for longer than I have but is a newer employee. Anyway, she bursts into a lot of mtgs with stuff I don’t think is very relevant, or with questions I know are confusing to others and then they have to stop what they’re doing and sidetrack to answer her questions. She was doing this when she was a contractor too. One of the bosses is very good at saying, “Jane, that’s something we’ll answer further down the road, we don’t need to get into that now/at this mtg” etc., and I’m supremely grateful to him. I’m all for asking questions in mtgs, but I do find it really distracting when someone is in the middle of a presentation and she interrupts with a question that really, honestly, and truly, could have been saved until the end when they ask, “Anyone have any questions?”

        Interestingly, part of why I find this really distracting is that I have ADHD and I have a hard enough time focusing without someone interrupting the flow of a conversation, and she has admitted to me that she thinks she also has ADHD…and interrupting to ask irrelevant questions is definitely an ADHD symptom.

        Anyway, it really is fascinating how different brains work, ain’t it?

        Reply ↓
    2. MigraineMonth*

      A new hire who had been told by the CEO her job was to find weaknesses in the organization and fix them.

      Unless the mandate was far more specific (or she was extremely experienced), that just sounds like she was set up for failure. Imagine being told your job is to be disruptive from day 1; how on earth would you calibrate correctly or get the political lay of the land?

      Reply ↓
  14. CubeFarmer*

    Cocaine Queen: school staff sure as sh*t are talking about how her car is inappropriate, they’re just not talking about it to her face.

    I guess the axe guy got…axed.

    Reply ↓
    1. cat herder*

      What I can’t figure out is how is she not constantly getting pulled over?? There’s no way cops have seen that and gone “ope, definitely not suspicious at all”.

      +1
      And I’m going to steal “you’re so stupid, you’re dangerous” when someone deserves it.

      Reply ↓
      1. Delta Delta*

        As a criminal defense lawyer, I’m familiar with many of my local police officers. I know they know whose cars are whose. Likely every cop in the city and outlying cities knows about the cocaine queen car and knows she’s an exotic dancer at night, and that this is part of her marketing. Chances are very good she’s not doing anything illegal and everyone knows she just drives that car.

        Reply ↓
      2. NotRealAnonForThis*

        See, I assumed small town w/ the Cocaine Queen. Would’ve been a topic of conversation for a minute, then just shrugs.

        Reply ↓
      3. Calamity Janine*

        if i were a cop who saw that, i would probably have the thought of “oh that’s so obvious, that’s GOT to be a Honeypot operation in progress. i don’t want to embarrass someone working undercover by pulling them over… plus i’m sure that will be more paperwork and i’ll get teased for it at the station. just smile and wave!”

        Reply ↓
      4. metadata minion*

        Not that there aren’t people out there who would do this, but I would assume most people who actual deal in illegal drugs are a bit more subtle about it.

        Reply ↓
    2. A large cage of birds*

      Yeah, I don’t know that I’d want to approach the Cocaine Queen face to face to log my objection.

      Reply ↓
    3. GammaGirl1908*

      Coming to say exactly this. Maybe no one has told her to her face how wildly inappropriate she is, but I assure you she has been DISCUSSED at that school, and a few other places.

      Just, wow.

      Reply ↓
  15. More anon than usual*

    Not a new hire, but within his first year — a youngish adult but like 30, not 22, fresh out of his Masters in Library Science after having worked in another field, submitted a deliverable for review that was fully plagiarized from various places on the web, not an original sentence in the document. I initially assumed he had used AI, but apparently he had hand-plagiarized it all. When asked about it, he said that it made sense to copy and paste because these sites were able to express these ideas in writing better than he was.
    My boss then wanted me to coach this person who had a Masters in Library Science on how not to plagiarize. It’s one of the reasons I left, although I was already job searching by then for similar, also boss-related reasons.

    Reply ↓
    1. WeirdChemist*

      I had a former coworker who complained that he wasn’t formally trained in a certain policy, therefore it was unfair for anyone to complain about him breaking it.

      The policy? Don’t falsify data. You needed specific training not to do that my dude??? (This policy was obviously documented somewhere he had access to, but because no one specifically sat down and told him “Don’t do this” how was he supposed to know??)

      Similarly, my boss then wanted someone to sit down and formally train him on this. Extremely frustrating that this wasn’t a final straw! (He did eventually get fired after far too long)

      Reply ↓
    3. FashionablyEvil*

      When asked about it, he said that it made sense to copy and paste because these sites were able to express these ideas in writing better than he was.

      I had a colleague who did something very similar! When I asked her about it, she said, “Oh, you didn’t think I wrote that myself, did you?” and when I said that, yes, I did expect that she had written it herself since it had no quotations and no citations, she was just confused. (She was eventually fired.)

      Reply ↓
    5. Lacey*

      I worked with a writer who started plagarizing his articles.

      We noticed immediately, because the quality jump was… dramatic.
      When he was called out he explained that we actually were uninformed, it didn’t count as plagarism because he’d changed a couple words in each sentence.

      Reply ↓
    6. Also even more anon than usual*

      Either I went to library school with this guy, or (more likely) there’s two of them, because I distinctly remember a final project where I had to lecture someone about citations and not plagiarizing, an hour before we were supposed to submit the thing. You’d think getting a grad degree in Not Plagiarizing would teach people to not plagiarize!

      Reply ↓
      1. But Of Course*

        I gave my web design and programming students free permission to use the computer during their tests (since the tests were on the computer; I try not to cause myself high blood pressure when I can avoid it). My stated goal was that I cared less whether they could write the code from memory than that they knew where to find it; the tests were also time-limited.

        I did fail anyone who just retained the exact code structure and formatting of where they got the code. Some people think you’re real stupid and will believe that the student who’s never used a line break in their life is now writing beautifully indented code. (Then again, I also had a student visibly dealing with meth addiction claim that it was actually heavy metals poisoning, so.)

        Reply ↓
        1. Boof*

          Er, I hope you told them you did expect them to edit the code or something – because the instructions “I don’t care where you get it from as long as you know how to use it” and “failed people because they reformat the source code style” aren’t adding up to me right now?

          Reply ↓
    8. Dr. Wes Abernathy*

      This reminds me of the time a former employee sought legal representation to argue that because it wasn’t written in any policy that employees couldn’t sleep during work hours, he shouldn’t have been fired for sleeping during work hours.

      Reply ↓
  16. Rage*

    I was recently told about this rather interesting exchange that occurred during a first interview for a director position with my organization. The candidate spoke for 40 of the 60 minute meeting. At that point, one of the HR team gently tried to redirect the conversation so that they could get a few of their questions in.

    The candidate held up her hand and said, “I am talking right now.”

    She still got the job, so…. *shrug*

    Reply ↓
    1. Yankees fans are awesome!*

      I don’t know what’s making me giggle: the gumption, or that she got the job. Both, perhaps. :D

      Reply ↓
    2. Lemonaider*

      This happened to me! Had a 45-minute first interview with a candidate, opened with a quick introduction to myself and my role (I managed the open position). Asked the candidate to tell me a little about themselves and their experience, and that was the only question I got to ask. She talked without taking a breath for the next 45 minutes. I’m usually not shy about interrupting, but there wasn’t even a potential pause long enough for me to start a word. Eventually, I had to talk over her to let her know our time was up, and we’d be in touch.

      Reply ↓
    3. FSU*

      I had an opposite experience. I was called in for an interview with a panel of people that lasted for about an hour. I spoke for a cumulative total of 90 seconds. Maybe 2 minutes.

      It was the most bizarre interview I have even been in. I left wondering why they even bothered. I got the job, though.

      Reply ↓
      1. Turquoisecow*

        My husband worked at a small start up and the CEO had no idea how to hire. One person said that the interview was basically just the the guy talking at him for roughly an hour, explaining all facets of the company and how to do it.

        When they had to hire a new CTO they all had an opportunity to ask questions (privately on zoom, not all together) and talk to the candidates and the guy they hired said my husband was basically the only one he thought asked any relevant questions. The rest just kind of…talked for a half hour or so.

        Reply ↓
      2. Junior Assistant Peon*

        I had an interview like this once. My interviewer spent the entire time telling me all about the company and hardly let me get a word in edgewise. I didn’t get the job. I wonder how the heck they figured out which candidate to pick.

        Reply ↓
  17. BlueWolf*

    I worked at a small medical office for a while and we hired a new receptionist. She seemed fine in the interview. On her first day she talked about herself almost constantly, including telling us about how she married her roommate who was in the military just so they could take advantage of the housing and other benefits. Considering the discretion needed to deal with people’s personal and medical data, we decided an admitted fraudster would not be a good fit and she was let go.

    Reply ↓
    1. Alice*

      I mean — is it fraud if they got married for practical reasons instead of love? They were still married. Fraud would be if they told the base housing office they were married when they weren’t.
      But the endless chatter would get on my last nerve too.

      Reply ↓
      1. Lacey*

        Yeah, historically MANY people have been married for utilitarian or strategic reasons – and not love. The marriages still count.

        Reply ↓
        1. Junior Assistant Peon*

          My aunt and uncle hated each others’ guts for most of the years they were married. There are plenty of bad marriages that no one questions!

          Reply ↓
      2. Kelly*

        From what I know, the military does consider “sham” marriages for benefits fraudulent and will crack down hard and prosecute people who are found to have married just for benefits access.

        Reply ↓
        1. BlueWolf*

          Yes, considering the benefits can be quite extensive and are funded by taxpayer dollars, I think the standard is a bit higher than a regular civilian marriage.

          Reply ↓
      4. A.P.*

        There’s a difference between a couple who got married for practical reasons but consider themselves in a committed relationship, versus a couple who’s marriage is solely for government benefits, with them still carrying on as if they were both single.

        Reply ↓
      5. AnneCordelia*

        They’re even living in the same house. It says “roommate.” Is it really the military’s business whether or not they’re sleeping together?

        Reply ↓
    2. Observer*

      Considering the discretion needed to deal with people’s personal and medical data, we decided an admitted fraudster would not be a good fit and she was let go.

      Why is it fraud. People get married for money all the time, and it’s a practice with a loooong history.

      The fact that she has a big mouth is a different issue.

      Reply ↓
      1. WellRed*

        Where does it stop? Is it ok to collect benefits by lying and saying your partner moved out? Green cards? Not notifying the govt that mom died and collecting her SS?

        Reply ↓
        1. metadata minion*

          I would say that it stops when you lie. If two people get a marriage license, they are not lying about being married. I understand that the military does watch out for people trying to get married for convenience, but outside of edge cases like that there is no law saying I can’t marry some random person for the health insurance benefits so long as we both consent to it.

          And why should there be? Plenty of people who ostensibly married for love now can’t stand each other, and there’s no requirement for them to divorce. Other married people have fallen out of love but are still friends and life partners. Some married people don’t live together for one practical reason or another, regardless of their feelings for each other. Lots of people decide to marry the person they love because now one of them needs health insurance or the taxes work out better that way, when they might have gone on happily not being married for a while longer otherwise.

          Reply ↓
        2. Alice*

          I know someone who got married for practical reasons — because the Peace Corps would only send them to the same posting if they were married, not just dating.
          I don’t know if you would think that was a fraudulent marriage, but they went on to have three kids and the marriage lasted 40 years.

          Reply ↓
      2. Names are Hard*

        The military considers it fraud because they pay more for married than unmarried. It’s even considered a military crime in the US.

        Reply ↓
    3. Tippy*

      And beyond the fraud issue (morally justifiable or not, the military does consider it fraud), discretion doesn’t seem to have been her strong suit either.

      Reply ↓
  18. Political consultant*

    I was the bad first impression. I was starting a new internship and the intern coordinator offered to meet me outside the building to help me navigate to their hard-to-find parking garage. I was a lousy driver with minimal parking garage experience. I picked him up out front and preceded to badly scrape my car against a pole in the garage. He was…alarmed. It took months to overcome that impression. Fortunately, he wasn’t my supervisor, but he did occasionally give me minor tasks, like making copies, always with copious instructions and a wariness that I’d somehow screw it up.

    Reply ↓
    1. Fluff*

      Oh I feel for you.

      Though, you seemed to do well in an extreme challenge. You had to park, you scraped up your car badly, AND you kept your composure together enough to KEEP the internship!

      Now, that’s what I call being calm, cool and collected.

      Reply ↓
  19. Targ*

    I’m based in New York, in a building situated at the southwest corner of Central Park. A new hire was being walked around the floor and I brought her over to the window. She, a native New Yorker, asked me “Oh, is that Central Park??”

    She didn’t last long.

    Reply ↓
    1. I should really pick a name*

      I’m not really seeing the connection between recognizing Central Park and job performance.

      Reply ↓
      1. Will "scifantasy" Frank*

        Yeah, this isn’t the best of examples–I think Targ is trying to say the woman wasn’t intelligent, but it’s a leap.

        Reply ↓
        1. Triplestep*

          Not a leap. The newbie had no situational awareness, nor the self-awareness not to demonstrate it. I am from NYC but I don’t think you have to be to get this.

          Reply ↓
        2. Targ*

          I gave her the benefit of the doubt at first, thinking “oh she’s nervous and just thinking out loud.”

          Then I worked with her and had her ask me a few months later “oh, is Central Park nearby?”

          To be a native New Yorker who got off the subway at 59th street that very morning to ask that question is…..to be not at all aware of the most basic geographic points of their own city.

          Reply ↓
      2. ZSD*

        I don’t see the connection, either. New York is big enough that even as a native, she might just never have been to that part of the city before, right? Or she might have meant, “Wow, I didn’t realize we’d have a view of the park from our building!”

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        1. Will "scifantasy" Frank*

          It’s hard to never have been to Central Park–New York is big but Central Park is, well, central, culturally as well as geographically to Manhattan.

          That said, the “Oh, nice view!” explanation is far more likely and probably how I’d have taken it.

          –Signed, a New Yorker

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          1. londonedit*

            Yeah, I can imagine she might have meant it more as ‘Wow! I didn’t realise you could see Central Park from here!’ rather than ‘OMG what is that big park over there?’.

            I can also imagine there are parts of New York that even New Yorkers won’t be hugely familiar with – there are parts of London that I’m less familiar with and I’ve lived here for over 25 years! If I was in a less familiar part of the city I can imagine myself looking out of the window and saying (for example) ‘Oh wow, is that Hyde Park??’ and then someone could possibly think I was a complete idiot – ‘NO, it’s St James’s, OBVIOUSLY’.

            Reply ↓
            1. Aww, coffee, no*

              I worked at my last location for 17 years. About 15 years in I was amazed to discover there were six darkrooms opening off the main workshop, not three. One of the darkroom staff took me over and counted off the six doors, all in a row, with ‘Darkroom #’ on each door, where # ran from 1 to 6.
              I mean, I’d walked past those doors hundreds, if not thousands of times. Sometime brains just have weird blind spots.

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            2. Cynthia*

              I think that the most likely interpretation is yours: that she was saying, “Oh, wow, there’s the view of Central Park,” rather than really truly being unfamiliar with what Central Park looked like.

              If her new job made sweeping conclusions about her based on that single sentence, I think she is the one who actually dodged the bullet.

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              1. Targ*

                That’s what I thought at first when I gave her the benefit of the doubt, something like “oh she’s nervous and just thinking out loud.” Then I worked with her and had her ask me “oh, is Central Park nearby?”

                To be a native New Yorker who got off the subway at 59th street that very morning to ask that question is…..to be not at all aware of the most basic geographic points of their own city (that, plus other things she did at work…..if it quacks like a duck, it’s a duck, know what I’m saying?)

                Reply ↓
          2. Government Person in NYC*

            I’d agree with you if I didn’t have the following happen once:

            I was in-person interviewing someone who was born in NYC and lived there all their life, except during their time in an Ivy League college, from which they graduated two years prior. They were from Brooklyn, we were in Midtown Manhattan. To get to our office, you have to know we’re in Manhattan, and it’s pretty obvious to anybody from the area. I asked them about a project they had worked on, and asked what borough it was in, which would help be understand the project better. They didn’t know what borough it was in, despite having worked there for over a year. In fact, they said they didn’t know what borough they were in right now, or that Brooklyn was a borough and not a city. Any native of NYC who has lived there for over a decade very unlikely not to know any of this, so I decided not to hire them, despite their stellar academic background.

            I must have made the right call. Another group within my agency hired them. They are now trying to figure out how to get rid of them, as they have revealed themselves to be a troublemaker (and still oblivious as to where anything is located in NYC).

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        3. Triplestep*

          New Yorkers know where central park is. She should have known from walking to the building that she was adjacent to it in the unlikely even that she had never been to a park that spans 51 city blocks.

          Reply ↓
        4. Targ*

          Midtown Manhattan, which famously has a HUGE park in the middle of it?

          No, a native New Yorker missing that is… unobservant, to put it kindly.

          Reply ↓
      3. Morgan*

        If you go to a building on the corner of Central Park, you look out the window, and you see a big green space, but you don’t realize that the big green space you see is Central Park, that suggests either you’re remarkably unaware of where the building you just traveled to is located (being beside Central Park is a pretty noticeable feature on any map, and clear based on street numbers too), or you’re remarkably slow at putting basic information together.

        This could be interpreted in a way forgiving to the new hire (the building wasn’t right beside the park, she knew what she was looking at but hadn’t expected it to be visible, she was more commenting “oh neat, a nice view!” than genuinely asking a question about what she was seeing) but I take Targ to be saying (based on how the question actually read in the moment) that this was the first indicator of the new hire being oblivious, incurious, and/or a bit dim.

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      5. Triplestep*

        I’m from New York City so I get it. She would have to have zero situational awareness not to know that the building she just walked into would offer a view of Central Park, and it should not have seemed like such a novelty to her.

        Her reaction was a red flag for sure.

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    2. pally*

      I’m thinking this person was employed where I work for about a decade. We had to endure all manner of clueless statements like that.
      She did it because she thought it was cute. It was anything but.

      I had to leave the room on several occasions it was so annoying.

      Reply ↓
      1. Slow Gin Lizz*

        Man, I hate when people try to be cute-clueless. I worked with someone like that for a couple of years and she tended to hijack meetings with pointless stories like a long one realizing someone she was on a blind date with was an uber driver she’d stood up (her point being “how embarrassing!” but my almost 40s-self thought “nbd, guy probably didn’t even realize it and if he did he’d probably find it amusing”) and distracted her officemates by asking their opinions about a silver shiny romper she wanted to buy. Her stories drove me nuts but other people thought they were hilarious so I didn’t say anything until one time I made a dry remark (along the lines of “huh, how interesting” or something, while sounding completely disinterested) and one of the officemates she was always distracting told me afterwards how she loved that I spoke up.

        Reply ↓
    3. Alex*

      Aw I can imagine myself saying something dumb like that. OK, let’s face it, I don’t have to imagine–I’ve said lots of dumb things like that!

      Reply ↓
    5. NotAnotherManager!*

      I will see your potentially not recognizing Central Park and raise you an insisting vehemently that the National Mall was a shopping center.

      Reply ↓
    6. HannahS*

      The first time I went to New York, I was baffled when we passed what was clearly a large concrete building that the tour guide called “Madison Square Gardens” which I, naturally, assumed was a series of square gardens.

      In my defense, though, I was 16 and visiting from Canada.

      Reply ↓
        1. Targ*

          Yeah, if it had been mixing up what was Penn Station and what was MSG, that’s an understandable mistake.

          Asking “is that Central Park” as if there’s another huuuuuuuuuuuuuuge park in Midtown Manhattan? About as dumb as asking if the huuuuuuuge river running through the center of London is the Thames. Even if you’ve never seen it as a Londoner, you’ve presumably seen a map of your city before and are aware of the huuuuuuge river.

          Reply ↓
      2. metadata minion*

        I had assumed until this second that it was a garden/park in Madison Square, and apparently it’s neither?

        I am pretty much as bad at situational awareness and geographic sense as the person in Targ’s example, but I usually try not to let other people know unless they ask me for directions. (No. Seriously. Especially if you’re in a car; I don’t drive. If I give you driving directions, you will find yourself going the wrong way down a one-way street in Guam.)

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        1. ThatGirl*

          No, Madison Square Garden is a famous arena/sports/entertainment venue. It used to be in Madison Square, but no longer is. It was never a garden in the plant-based sense.

          Reply ↓
          1. New Yorker*

            But there is a Madison Square Park, which is not the same as Madison Square Garden. :-)

            I mean, I could kind of understand if this person grew up in the outer reaches of an outer borough (e.g. Staten Island or the Rockaways or something) and really didn’t come to Manhattan often. Especially if they were in their 20s. But! If I went to Brooklyn and saw a huge park I would assume it was Prospect Park because, even though I may have never seen or been to Prospect Park, as a New Yorker I know that Prospect Park is essentially the Central Park of Brooklyn. But I wouldn’t know anything about parks in the Bronx or Staten Island.

            Reply ↓
            1. Will "scifantasy" Frank*

              Van Cortland Park is the Prospect Park of the Bronx–but it’s less central, it’s basically at the Yonkers/Bronx border (and also separates rich Riverdale Bronx from not-rich everywhere-else Bronx).

              Staten Island is a park, by comparison to the rest of the boroughs. And that’s all I’m going to say because I’m trying to be nicer to the Island.

              Reply ↓
        2. HalJordan*

          Right, and if you don’t live in New York not knowing what MSG is is totally reasonable, but presumably you would know if you were “downtown” in your own city/town, regardless of how you got there. Targ’s new coworker was effectively looking out a window and say “Oh! We’re downtown?” which is only a reasonable question if you’ve been kidnapped.

          Reply ↓
  20. Shelly*

    I overheard an intern loudly talking about how he paid someone to do his schoolwork for him while he was in Hawaii.

    Reply ↓
  21. soontoberetired*

    We got a new hire recommended to my boss by another manager. He just up and disappeared within 3 hours. In fact, he kept disappearing for the year it took my boss to get him fired which is whole nother story dealing with an HR who at the time hated firing anyone. Nearly 11 months on the job, and we saw him maybe 20 times.

    oh, and my manager stopped talking to the other manager after all of this. the other manager couldn’t get the guy fired either. this was 25 years ago our HR is much better now.

    Reply ↓
  22. Prof*

    I was remembering this just the other day. I’m a university professor. A few years ago, we hired a new faculty member who had previously worked at a very famous institution in a different country. Let’s say it was Oxford, that will get the point across.

    When she was introduced to me, she said:

    -Nice to meet you, I’m Jane Smith. I used to work at a university named ”Oxford University”.

    This was the first instance of what turned out to be someone who will, for no reason and completely unprovoked, CONSTANTLY take ANY opportunity to throw a jab, try to belittle people, and create conflict. It’s awful.

    Reply ↓
    2. Shellfish Constable*

      I also work at a university. I also know a Jane Smith. In fact, I know several of them. They are…exhausting.

      Reply ↓
    3. Anon for this one because Reasons*

      Tangentially related, I knew someone who threw around all day long in team meetings that he had a MBA. He would use his MBA to explain why we were wrong about everything.

      Gentle readers, his MBA was from a diploma mill for-profit institution.

      Reply ↓
    4. Zona the Great*

      Reminds me of the kindergarten teacher I worked with who was mediocre at best. She constantly said, “my alma mater, Cornell” just like the guy from the office. That is until a new hire said, “HA! Then what are you doing here?!”

      Reply ↓
      1. Jay (no, the other one)*

        I spent my 20s and early 30s trying desperately not to tell people where I went to college because I hated the “oh, you must think you’re soooo smart” response. Eventually I decided life was too short and stopped avoiding it. Still don’t drop it randomly into conversation in place of “when I was in college.”

        Reply ↓
      2. a perfectly normal-sized space bird*

        My mother’s husband has a STEM degree from Cornell. He likes to remind us of this point. At one point, I was working on my first undergrad degree in the same STEM field from a different institution. He absolutely loved telling me I was wrong about everything related to that field because he went to Cornell and therefore knows better than I do. He went to Cornell in the late 50s and never once worked so much as an hour in that field or any adjacent to it. I was working in the field as a summer job before my senior college year during the start of the 21st century. But I’m also a woman and he does not listen to women ever. Because you see, he went to Cornell.

        Reply ↓
    6. Putting the "er" in "Higher Education"*

      I would never have the presence of mind to think of suitable replies in the moment, but if someone warned me in advance that Jane Smith was an arrogant blowhard, I’d be ready!

      Jane: Nice to meet you, I’m Jane Smith. I used to work at a university named “Oxford University”.
      Me: Oh, nice. Is that the one in North Dimvale, Saskatchewan?

      Other people’s ignorance is candy to such Janes; I will happily keep feeding her!

      Me: Do a lot of students go there?

      Me: They must have some really old buildings.

      Me (many anecdotes later): Wow, it sounds like a really impressive place.

      The key is to keep it plausibly deniable. It would be tempting to add “I’m surprised more people haven’t heard of it,” to that last one, but that would give the game away. Nope, let Jane go right on thinking I’m a simpleton (assuming I have accumulated the necessary political capital to pull this off).

      Ah, fan fiction…

      Reply ↓
    7. SAR*

      Reminds me of several episodes of Frasier where he’s called out for constantly bringing up the fact that he went to Harvard.

      Frasier: Yes, well I did not spend eight grueling years at Harvard to be mocked by that juvenile jackass!
      Kate: Shameless!
      Frasier: Oh, he’s beyond shameless!
      Kate: I’m talking about the way you manage to get Harvard into every conversation.

      Frasier: I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with a man who’s favorite t-shirt reads “Seattle Hooter Inspector”!
      Kate: Afraid of the competition?
      Frasier: I am a doctor! I went … to medical school!

      Reply ↓
  23. FaintlyMacabre*

    Ah, the guy who was carving a ring for his fiancee… who, as it turns out, didn’t know she was his fiancee, because they hadn’t started dating… “yet.” He also claimed to be one-sixth black, because, error, his genitals were black. He was let go, but not as quickly as one might hope. Both those gems were from his first day and it just kept getting worse.

    Reply ↓
      1. Juicebox Hero*

        A college friend of mine and I (both biology majors) did spend an idle afternoon once trying to figure the Gilgamesh one out using Mendelian genetics. We had to throw in a few lethal alleles but we got there in the end.

        Reply ↓
        1. Will "scifantasy" Frank*

          “Look, I’m Zaphod Beeblebrox, my father’s Zaphod Beeblebrox the Second, my grandfather’s Zaphod Beeblebrox the third…there was an accident with a contraceptive and a time machine. Now concentrate!”

          Reply ↓
      4. Karo*

        Eh, you can make it work if you assume that no one is 100% anything. For instance: My dad was 3/8 German so I’m 3/16 German. With my 1/2 German husband we had a 1/3 German son.

        Reply ↓
    3. SB*

      I am going to regret asking this BUT

      was he saying his genitals were black in color? Or was he leaning hard into a stereotype about size?

      And I don’t know if the clarification makes any of this better – in fact, it may make it worse. but I am trying to determine what particular flavor of awful this is….

      Reply ↓
      1. GammaGirl1908*

        Yeah, I took two steps down this thought path, turned around, and fled screaming.

        I’m sure I could make some headway on the math on the one-sixth if he was serious about his ancestry (a black great-grandparent and a biracial great-grandparent? Or something?), but I don’t want to.

        Reply ↓
      3. Magnolia Clyde*

        I’m glad somebody else asked this.

        I’d like to think most people wouldn’t volunteer even a whiff of information about that to begin with — but I imagine that if he was bold enough to mention it, he offered more details. (You’re so right that it’s horrific, either way!)

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      4. FaintlyMacabre*

        Both? He also said a black friend had looked at the appendage in question and allowed him to say that. I do wonder if his perceived size was where the one-sixth figure came from, but as I was trying to not encourage this particular conversation, I did not ask follow up questions.

        Reply ↓
  24. Jennifer Strange*

    So this wasn’t one I witnessed, but at a previous job we had an employee for about a year who came off as a bit of a flirt/creeper. Let’s call him Casanova. Casanova would pompously strut down the hallway like he was the lead in his own movie, and would look in on the offices of women, leaning against the door frame like he was a male model in a sexy photo shoot, saying, “Hey, how’s it going?” in what I’m sure he thought was a sultry, sexy tone. We all thought he was a joke, though he obviously assumed we were swooning over him.

    Casanova eventually left the role in what I can only describe as a mutual firing and ended up getting another role elsewhere. Coincidentally, the person who had previously held his role at our company (and was still friends with a number of folks there) also worked at his new company. She told us that she and another (female) employee were together when Casanova was being given a tour and introduced to folks. She and the other employee were introduced to him and after greeting them he took a moment to very obviously scan the other employee up and down, to the point that she said, “Dude, are you seriously checking me out on your first day here?”

    I don’t think he lasted long there either.

    Reply ↓
  25. 52girl*

    Recently at my weekend bar job, a new bartender got drunk during a really busy shift. During this shift he asked me if I was single and then if my husband would be mad that I was talking to him because he’s had jealous men try to fight him for talking to female colleagues. Then he was starting to miss drink orders and by the end of the night he was really confused about simple things, wasn’t making a lot of sense, and kept telling us that he really respected us. We just wanted to clean up and go home.

    Reply ↓
    1. Rainy*

      I worked as a manager at a furniture and home decor store for a few months during my job search post grad school and we were routinely scheduled in twos, a manager and an associate, after 6 pm. One night my associate told me he was taking his break and needed to run to the grocery store (same shopping center) and grab a snack and an energy drink, and I said it was okay because, jeez, food, right?

      He came sprinting back in just at the end of his 15 minutes, said that the SM had given him a list of lamps to bring out from the storeroom on his sidework and he was going to grab a cart and do that. This guy was a Kevin, and one of the Keviner Kevins I’ve ever met, so I didn’t think it was too weird that I didn’t see him for a while, but when I started counting down registers preparing to close, I still hadn’t seen him, so I went looking. That store had two different storerooms, so of course I went to the one with the lamps in it first, and saw a cart with a single boxed lamp and a sidework card on it. No Kevin. So I went to the other storeroom, where we kept the furniture pieces. I had to do some hunting, but I did eventually find him.

      He had not gone to the grocery store, he’d gone to the liquor store (also in the same shopping center), and bought a bottle of booze. Apparently at some point he’d snuck across the store from one storage to the other while my back was turned, drank his fifth, and fallen asleep on a loveseat in the back corner, where I found him. I refused to be scheduled with him ever again, but he wasn’t fired for another few weeks, when he pulled the same thing on a different manager except he decided to make his own 4 Loko, got belligerent, and tried to fistfight a wicker swing chair.

      Reply ↓
  26. Kaylee Frye*

    New hire broke her only pair of glasses on the morning she started at our org. Had to take an extra long lunch for an emergency optometry appointment on her first day, then spent her first week wearing prescription sunglasses (indoors sitting at a computer). Every now and then, a colleague would look up at her, sigh, shake his head then get back to work

    Reply ↓
      2. Observer*

        Agreed. Not having spare glasses is not uncommon, even for people who have been in the workforce for a long time.

        Reply ↓
        1. MsM*

          I have spare glasses, but they’re my old prescription since I can’t really afford to drop hundreds of bucks on a backup, so I don’t know how much work I’d be getting done if I had to rely on them.

          Reply ↓
        2. Pay no attention...*

          Exactly, if someone even has vision insurance, it likely only covers one pair of eyeglasses every 2 years OR contacts. I wear contacts so I don’t have a backup pair of glasses.

          Back up eyeglasses is one of those things that people should have in case of emergency, like storage of water, food, and extra prescription medications. That sounds good in theory, but is nearly impossible to accomplish with the way our healthcare system is structured. I’m covered for a 30 day supply of my medication, having a spare (ha!) would be 100% out-of-pocket, if the pharmacy will even fill it, so I better not have an emergency at the end of my 30 days.

          Reply ↓
          1. StressedButOkay*

            Yeeeep. I keep getting reminded by my eye doctor it’s time for my eye appointment (way past) but then also told that, whoops, new frames won’t be covered until after June – but you need your eye appointment ASAP. (I do, they aren’t wrong.)

            So I either need to stick with my current frames or buy frames out of pocket. Either way, I’m not going to be able to afford to get two sets of frames and two sets of lenses.

            Reply ↓
      3. GammaGirl1908*

        Poor thing. This was unfortunate, but out of her hands. She did the best she could. I don’t wear glasses, but I would have been very sympathetic.

        I once was teaching an aerobics class where a man was wearing sunglasses. I was very confused and asked about them, and he said they were prescription. That did not clear up my confusion. I was relaying the story to a friend, who said something similar — he probably had lost or broken his glasses and was getting by on his sunglasses until he got the replacements.

        Reply ↓
        1. metadata minion*

          He may also have had some kind of light sensitivity or other condition that meant he had to wear sunglasses indoors.

          Reply ↓
          1. Jay (no, the other one)*

            I once had an emergency eye appointment the morning of a choir concert and they dilated my eyes. I sang in sunglasses.

            Reply ↓
      4. Glitsy Gus*

        Agreed. I’ve been that girl, fortunately not on my first day at a job. She wasn’t happy about it either, but when you can’t function without your glasses and they break, it can easily take 2 weeks to get a new pair, so what was she supposed to do during that time?

        Reply ↓
    2. A large cage of birds*

      If it comes to either not being able to see, or being able to see but things being slightly dark, I’d go with dark and wear the sunglasses, so I don’t blame her.

      Though I see that with no context, wearing sunglasses like that might not be a good look.

      Reply ↓
    4. StressedButOkay*

      As a person who only has one pair of prescription glasses, and one for sunglasses, this is my nightmare

      Reply ↓
      1. Admin of Sys*

        The online stores like zenni make for /great/ backup pairs of prescription glasses. Single focus, mind you, but I got the computer-distance glasses for like $40 and I have a complicated astigmatism in both eyes. I bought a set of distance glasses for the car, too. Would I want to lose my very expensive multifocus main pair? No! But this way I can manage without them if worse comes to worse.

        Reply ↓
        1. Glitsy Gus*

          Depending on your prescription, the frames might be cheap, but the lenses can still be $100+. Yeah, it’s a great option if you can afford it, but given that she was just starting a new job, that may not be in the budget.

          Reply ↓
          1. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

            Yea, for backup I’d go with one box in each prescription of contact lenses. Not free, but still pretty low cost. The optometrist might have even had samples for her to try that would get her through 2 weeks.

            Reply ↓
        2. Beans*

          Zenni etc are good for some things – I use them for sunglasses. But with my prescription, it’s minimum $100 and usually closer to $200. Cheap frames only go so far when you need high-index lenses.

          Reply ↓
          1. metadata minion*

            And with very strong lenses it’s particularly important to get accurate facial measurements (pupillary distance, etc.) so the center of your lens is actually over the center of your eye. Even a slight mismatch there makes everything all skewed.

            Reply ↓
          2. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

            I love the nice, relatively inexpensive frames that are available now. However, without a vision plan, my lenses are $500+. My eyes are super terrible AND terrible in different ways; I joke that I got one of my mom’s semi-functional eyes and one of my dad’s. I have backup pairs of glasses and sunglasses, but I probably wouldn’t if I didn’t have vision insurance, like someone in a brand new job.

            That is to say: I don’t think your new hire did anything wrong except suffer a bit of clumsiness or bad luck. Unlike the person who kept looking at her and sighing, who was acting like a jerk.

            Reply ↓
            1. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

              Also, as far as I can tell, the real savings with the online glasses companies is when they can do the frame and the lens. I haven’t tried Zenni, but Warby-Parker couldn’t make anything as complex as my prescription.

              Reply ↓
        3. StressedButOkay*

          Sadly, I inherited my fathers eyesight and if technology hadn’t advanced in eye ware would need lenses/frames the size of the Hubble. So my glasses tend to be very pricey because I need them to be as thin as possible, my eyes are complicated and I have intractable headaches on top that bad glasses make worse – like I REALLY want to get those that you can just change the front of them every day but alas.

          So my assumption is that most people can’t easily afford multiple pairs for a variety of reasons.

          Reply ↓
        4. Quixoticcat*

          My personal experience says that Zenni and other similar online stores do not work for me. My prescription is so extreme that they cannot get them right – there are measurements that need to be done in person that cannot be handled online. It took me numerous pairs of glasses to figure this out. They are great for others, but very much not great for everyone.

          I feel for the person who broke their glasses – I’ve been through it and because of my prescriptions it is guaranteed that it will be at least two weeks before the labs will have finished new glasses for me. I had to take FMLA because I didn’t have even a pair of sunglasses so I spent two weeks completely (literally) blind.

          Reply ↓
          1. Ccbac*

            hard agree– I wore Zenni glasses for several years (extended by the pandemic) and they messed up my eyes so much.

            they work best for very simple prescriptions but not for anything complex.

            Reply ↓
    6. Owl-a-roo*

      Oh no, I feel so bad for her and her terrible eyesight! Pre-LASIK, my eyes were so bad that I could only see clearly up to twelve inches in front of my face. If I’d broken my glasses, I’d absolutely be stuck wearing prescription sunglasses indoors and dying on the inside.

      Even though I’ve had 20/20 vision for three years, I still have nightmares about my contacts falling out of my eyeballs while I’m driving and causing me to crash the car. I bet this employee still has nightmares about her horrible first week at that job.

      Reply ↓
    8. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

      I have such sympathy for that- my purse was stolen and my regular Rx glasses were in them. I was wearing my Rx sunglasses at the time. Unfortunately, due to scheduling, I couldn’t get new glasses for another week. I was in college at the time and luckily, we started a break mid-week, so I only had to wear them to classes until Wednesday. It was still a pain in the ass to try to do anything in them, especially in the evenings.

      Reply ↓
    9. Ccbac*

      gosh! it seems you are confused. this post is about bad impressions made by new hires. but it was very nice of you to include one about how an existing hire was made a bad impression to a new hire when new hire was dealing with a medical situation.

      Reply ↓
    10. Jackalope*

      In my first month at my current employer I managed to lose my glasses on my afternoon break. I only needed them for reading at the time, and forgot to take them off before I went outside. Stuck them in my sweatshirt pocket and thought I was good, but they fell out somewhere. My boss came and helped me look up and down the entire area I’d walked but to no avail; I hadn’t brought a car, so he drove me home to get my spare set. When we got back from this (much appreciated but slightly embarrassing trip), the coworker across the aisle from me, who’d heard about the issue, said brightly, “After you left I went on a walk and found these glasses; are they yours?” They were. I was very happy and also super embarrassed to have managed this so close to when my employment started.

      Reply ↓
  27. Roy G. Biv*

    It was a temp, who was hoping to become a permanent employee at a tiny ad agency I worked at in the early 90’s. Her job was receptionist, and her first answer to any question or request, was a long, drawn out “F**************ck…… I don’t know.” Said in a lowkey, drawn out, vocal fry voice that could have been from a character in a Cheech & Chong movie. The VP came in on day three and asked where his managing partner was. It was her last time to give her stock answer.

    Reply ↓
    1. The Prettiest Curse*

      Wow. Was this person actually trying to get fired, or were they just worried about having their milk stolen from the office fridge?

      Reply ↓
      1. Opaline*

        He didn’t want other people using his milk, but he was supremely odd in a lot of ways. He kept a 2kg bag of sugar and a filter coffee set up in the drawer with the milk, despite the office having it’s own coffee maker. He frequently wandered off and got lost in closets. He talked about his career plans to work in a completely different industry, and in the same breath he’d shower effusive praise on colleagues he had “so much to learn from”.

        In the end he was let go for taking confidential process documents home and showing them to a friend who worked in government. Allegedly to get tips on improving them.

        He was a weird guy in a lot of ways, but the milk was what everyone remembered him for.

        Reply ↓
        2. AnneCordelia*

          I mean…shelf stable milk exists. It’s much more common in Europe than in the US. But it’s only shelf stable until it’s opened. After that it needs to be refrigerated. This guy sounds gross.

          Reply ↓
  29. Elle Woods*

    Our department had hired a new employee, “Carol.” As part of her onboarding procedure, our boss took her around the department so she could see how things were laid out and meet her colleagues. One of the people Carol met was “Heather” who was leaving at the end of the week to move across the country. Boss introduced the two of them to one another and Carol quipped, “Oh, you’re leaving at the end of this week? Great. Then I don’t have to bother to learn your name or what you do.”

    Awkward.

    Reply ↓
    1. A large cage of birds*

      omg this happened to me in a work-adjacent context. I had a co-worker who was having a baby so I offered her some old baby stuff. She came by with her boyfriend to pick it up. She told me at the same time that she was moving across the country, but she hadn’t announced it at work yet (remote job). I wished her well and told the boyfriend it was nice to meet him. He said “I’m never going to see you again!” Ok, well enjoy that free car seat and stroller there anyway, buddy.

      Reply ↓
      1. London Calling*

        Oh that reminds me of a time when I introduced myself to a new downstairs neighbour. I knocked on the front door and when he answered I said ‘hello, I’m London Calling from the flat upstairs.’ He looked me up and down and said ‘I’m and I’m not looking to date right now.’

        I’m afraid my response was ‘No me neither, like anyone gives a shit.’ And walked off. Readers, the neighbourly relationship did not get better from that low point.

        Reply ↓
    2. metadata minion*

      Oh noooo…that could have come off as a self-deprecating “oh man, I’m not going to remember any of these names”, but your first day is exactly when you can’t do that, because nobody knows your sense of humor yet and you aren’t close enough to anyone to make that kind of joke without risking it coming out mean.

      Reply ↓
    3. Innie*

      Ouch. I worked for a company that was stratified into scientists/engineers, technicians, and tradespeople (plus administrative of course.) We hired an engineer who carried around a list of employees. When he met a person for the first time he’d ask what your role was. If you answered technician or trades he’d cross your name off his list and never speak to you again.

      Reply ↓
  30. CzechMate*

    At my husband’s old company, a new hire took a three hour lunch on his first day. When a coworker asked where he’d been, new hire said he’d been at the strip club with his friends celebrating his new job. He reasoned that this was fine because “it’s just syllabus week right now.”

    He did not last long.

    Reply ↓
    2. GammaGirl1908*

      Entry number 245 under “ways in which work is not like school.”

      Also entry number 459 under “ways in which you’ll flunk out of school.”

      Reply ↓
  31. ScruffyInternHerder*

    So this one was actually me:

    1. Started new job. Was not advised of working hours, nor did I inquire. Its the same field that I came from, so why wouldn’t the hours be the same between employers? We both assumed that I knew the hours of work.
    2. As happens in the Midwest of the USA, snowstorm overnight.
    3. My leaving extra early because of significant snow so as to be on time at 8 a.m. meant I actually got to work a half hour late my first day.

    Yet, somehow my first day was probably the least dramatic first day of dang near everyone at that place!

    Reply ↓
    1. bamcheeks*

      First day of one of my jobs I had completely forgotten my keys, which was a bugger because I was on my bike and had no way to lock it up. So I had to find my brand new manager and ask if there was a cupboard I could put it in.

      Then at the end of the second week, my mum died (expected, but obviously still awful), so I took the next week and a half off. And I was kind of in a daze for most of the next six months.

      I did love that job and I stayed there for three years, so I think I made up for it!

      Reply ↓
  32. the new hire*

    It was me – I was the embarrassing new hire. My new job wouldn’t budge on my start date, and I had surgery ONE week into my new job (it had been planned for months at that point and I had been up front about it, it wasn’t something that I could delay longer than the system already had). I had tried to negotiate to start two weeks postop, but they wouldn’t hear of it for some reason and it was awful! I was a department of one and the role (and department) were new so there weren’t any deadlines or deliverables, I have no idea what they were thinking. Anyway, the worst part was, I came back and couldn’t remember anyones name. We didn’t have name tags or badges, and I was too embarrassed to ask since everyone knew ME at that point. For like two months I didn’t know anyone’s name!!! Several times I accidentally called people by the wrong name. I made such a bad impression on everyone there because of it. Hands down the worst start to a job I have had.

    Reply ↓
    1. Fluffy Fish*

      Oh nooooo – you didn’t make a bad impression! The employer and apparently everyone in it were awful.

      Reply ↓
    2. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

      That is NOT on you. And, it wouldn’t have been if you hadn’t just come off a major medical procedure! In any company larger than, like, 5 people you are going to get bombarded with names when you start, along with tons of other info for onboarding. I know it can be mortifying when a name doesn’t come to you, so when someone is getting walked around my office to meet everyone on their first day, I often say “good to meet you, I’m [GCM], but you’re going to hear 500 names today so please don’t worry if you forget!”

      Reply ↓
  33. Tradd*

    Can we count a phone call on morning of first day, not even coming in? Guy contacted us saying he wouldn’t be starting after all as he really wanted a remote position (not offered at all and we made it very clear during interview process multiple times that remote would never happen). Several weeks later, he contacted us saying he wasn’t able to find a remote position and asked if the job was still open. We declined as we knew he would bail immediately if he found something remote.

    Reply ↓
  34. Medium Sized Manager*

    We hired a person with the intention that she would be trained into escalated customer complaints – she had the experience and her interview indicated she had a knack for people and de-escalation. On her first day, she spent 20 minutes arguing with me about language on the website saying it was confusing and it needs to be changed immediately [reader – it was two words]. I had made a point in training to say that new hires have good perspective and that I am happy to get their feedback, so I had tried to hear her out/explain why it’s that way and can’t be changed immediately. Finally, I had to tell her it was not changing and that we needed to move on, and she didn’t talk for an hour (a lot for her).

    Fast forward to her first day actually taking calls, she was sitting with another training who listened to her calls and offered coaching. She snapped at the trainer, called her names, made her cry, and was escorted off the premises immediately.

    Reply ↓
  35. StressedButOkay*

    I currently don’t have anything to add except that I am WHEEZING at the poor guy and the geese. The idea that they were just screaming at him while he was flat on his back is sending me

    Reply ↓
  37. A large cage of birds*

    At my previous job we were training two new people remotely over Zoom. One guy was visibly holding his phone throughout training sessions in his first week. He was holding it up near the screen presumably so his eye line would be somewhere near the screen? It could not have been more obvious. Whenever he had to go off mute (which he would only do if you addressed a question to him directly by name) he would have to mute whatever he was watchin on his phone and wouldn’t always remember to do that.

    He did not improve over time. I wish he could say he got fired, but it was a government job and years later he’s still there. (I’m not, but his manager is my best friend so I still have to hear about him. )

    Reply ↓
  38. Cat Lady in the Mountains*

    I used to hire/manage a lot of temps in a customer service role. Three gems from first days:
    – The guy who tried to convert callers asking for receipts for their purchases into leads for his private cruise-sales business.
    – The woman whose job was database administration, who did not know how to turn on a computer, answer a telephone, or type numbers into a database. (Honestly I felt really bad for her – she was super embarrassed and the temp agency clearly didn’t vet her at all. But also, wow.)
    – The guy who arrived on a day that a major ~situation~ was going down at more senior levels, immediately befriended a VP, and instead of doing his job decided to spend the day in the break room drinking whiskey with the VP and loudly disrupting people who were trying to deal with the situation.

    Reply ↓
  39. Dust Bunny*

    Thwarted re-hire actually: I used to work at a small business whose staff were mostly young women, and since it was located in a small town a lot of them knew each other through school/jobs/mutual friends/were literally related. There was a girl who worked there before I was hired who was competent at the work but had, like, zero filter. She reapplied while I was working there and our bosses were going to rehire her–less training, right?–until everyone who had worked with her before mutinied. Apparently she only bathed weekly and had a habit of discussing the tastes of various . . . intimate bodily secretions. At work.

    She did currently have access to functional bathing facilities, she just didn’t feel she needed to use them that often. She was mistaken, and we live in a warm, sweaty climate. We also collectively had some deep concerns about what kind of home life she may have had as a child. I didn’t know her, but I hope someone who did encouraged her to maybe go into that with a therapist.

    Reply ↓
  40. Frodo*

    I work in an elementary school and we got a new para to work one on one with students on IEPs. He (according to himself) is trained in a variety of acronyms that paras need to properly de-escalate a volatile situation, calming a student, how to use language, etc. On day one he sits next to his student and showed him games on phone. Day 2 he’s taking 10 minute breaks every two hours. Day 3 he leaves his gym bag in classroom all day and the custodian needed to figure out where the smell was coming from.

    We’re at day 60 now and we can’t get rid of him because he came over on a grant. At this point he’s being used for playground duty.

    Reply ↓
  41. Drago Cucina*

    One stands out. We hired a new cleaning person for the library. Hours were very flexible. Employee benefits. The person we hired was very excited that it would work with her children’s school schedule.

    The first day she announced that she was allergic to all cleaning supplies and would only use water. Not soap and water. Not vinegar and water. Only water. Her first day was her last day.

    Types of cleaning supplies became interview questions.

    Reply ↓
    1. Alex*

      This reminds me of a friend who used to clean her house with apple cider vinegar.

      Which in her house, was just Motts apple juice that she left out on the counter for a few weeks.

      Her house was very sticky, and full of ants. I refused to go to it after the first time….

      Reply ↓
      1. PokemonGoToThePolls*

        I always find it so interesting when I learn of a new weird thing people do. And this is one of those.

        Reply ↓
  42. Dadjokesareforeveryone*

    Not surprised the guy in the last example got fired. If you don’t know how to give an axe, you’re going to get the axe.

    Reply ↓
  43. shocked*

    Don’t remember how new she was at the time this happened as there were a lot of issues with her, but had an intern in a mental health setting teach a client with a fire setting history how to use a magnify glass to set a leaf on fire to, according to her “redirect his interest into something more appropriate”. She was genuinely shocked we had concerns about this.

    Reply ↓
  44. Kathy Foreman*

    Hired a warehouse worker; she showed up on day 1 then asked if she could have the next day off to hit garage sales with her daughter. Was told no and failed to show up on day 2. She got all the rest of the days off.

    Reply ↓
    1. Percy Weasley*

      At a call center, a newish (couple of months?) employee decided to call out for a week-long trip, thinking it would just be a “strike” on his attendance record and he’d just hope he didn’t get sick and accrue more strikes. Oops, management and HR decided to call it job abandonment and, like your former employee, he got all the rest of the days off.

      Reply ↓
  45. Anonymous Canadian Fed*

    There is a person I definitely did not end up hiring in the end but I have referred to in my head as “the red flag candidate”.

    She was an internal candidate to our agency but had worked at several other sites in the last decade in the same entry level role as what she interviewed for with me. After a rough interview (her answers to the scenario questions were not, um, how we would talk about members of the public in this role in a professional way), she sent follow up documentation well beyond what was initially asked (copy of driver’s license, proof of education, and contact info for three references). She only listed coworkers, not any former supervisors, as references, “because my supervisor was never on site anyway so they don’t know anything, really, about how good I am at my job.” Which, on the face of it, okay, some sites have small teams with a supervisor split between several locations, so I’m fine with one of your references being a longtime coworker… but not a single former supervisor, from your entire time at our organization, is willing to attest to the quality of your work?

    She also sent me all number of certifications irrelevant to the job, as well as her official performance documents from her last several years of work. When I actually looked at the performance documents that she sent (again: unprompted), it contained this line from her boss: “[so and so] needs to learn to see her supervisor and manager as colleagues and not enemies.” I have no idea why she thought sending me this document would strengthen her candidacy.

    This was a person who was trying to put their best foot forward in an interview. In the end, I didn’t end up qualifying her for a position that she’d previously worked in at other locations for a decade. Would not recommend her.

    Reply ↓
  46. CPANON*

    This was actually my stellar first impression.
    When I was interviewing for my first professional job at the end of my senior year in college, my standard answer to the “Tell us about a challenge” question was always “I really hate stupid people. I just can’t deal with people who don’t get it. etc. etc. etc”. As the quintessential Smartest Kid in the Room, I truly had no clue how horrible this sounded coming out of my mouth. Eventually, I accepted a job offer. The week before I started, the Big Boss called to ‘coach’ me in professionalism, dealing with a variety of people, etc. At the time, I thought it was such an odd call, it took a few years for the purpose of her call to sink in…. (That job was horrible and I only stayed for 2 years but I did learn how stupid I was!)

    Reply ↓
    1. metadata minion*

      I remain glad that one of my default nervous reactions is “people pleaser”, because that is 100% something I would have said otherwise. However horrible the job was otherwise, I have to give Big Boss a tiny kudo for hiring and then coaching you that way!

      Reply ↓
    2. Innie*

      A journalist friend told the story of being hired as a new journalism grad to the local newspaper. Naturally he thought of himself as a big deal and told the editor what work he should be assigned. The editor asked what work he DIDN’T want and new hire said “I hate doing man on the street interviews.”
      The editor had him doing nothing but man on the street interviews for six months.

      Reply ↓
  47. Delta Delta*

    I was a lawyer in a small law firm that often had interns from the local law school. I didn’t know we were getting an intern one semester, and was surprised to find an earnestly-dressed young man sitting in our front lobby one morning just before 8 a.m. He introduced himself and said he was going to be the “point person intern” for The Big Boss (this made no sense, as The Big Boss didn’t handle the interns and let Underboss do it). He then told me to get him a cup of coffee. I basically said “lol no” and didn’t work with him at all that semester.

    Reply ↓
    1. Pro Bonobo*

      Such a vast world of difference between “Get me a cup of coffee” and “Can you point me to where I could get a cup of coffee?”

      Reply ↓
      1. metadata minion*

        Yes! Or even “hey, where’s the nearest coffee shop?” or “is there a coffee machine here?” would have been fine.

        Reply ↓
  48. bananners*

    Hired a communications intern in 2010. Day two, she emailed 20 minutes before her start time and asked to work from home. We… did not have a work from home policy, nor had we assigned her any work that she could work on from home.

    Reply ↓
  49. Lead Macrodata Refiner*

    I used to lead a team of technical writers, made up largely of English majors and book lovers. One Monday morning, which happened to be a new-hire’s first day, we were having a spirited discussion of a popular book series we all enjoyed before settling in to work for the day. Our new hire, in the very first hour of his very first day, interjected into the conversation, voice dripping with condescension, to ask one of his brand new teammates, “You like those books? I thought you said you liked *literature.*”

    Suffice to say, no one was too broken up when he ended up resigning before the end of his second week.

    Reply ↓
  50. Orchestral Musician*

    My first day at an educational and foreign language publisher/distributor, I was being trained with one other new hire. After about a half hour or so, I (and the bewildered manager training us) looked over to see that the other new hire was asleep in her chair, snoring softly. I don’t remember much except that he very politely managed to wake her up and ask if she was ok; she continued to be a little weird the entire time I worked there; I ended up quitting (on good terms and for unrelated reasons) and heard that she didn’t last very long after I left.

    Reply ↓
  51. AVP*

    We had an entry-level part-time job open that was really meant for a college student, more like a paid internship type of thing. A woman in her 30s, friends with the CEO, ended up taking the job on his insistence.

    A few weeks in, she came to me literally crying about the pay. I commiserated but didn’t have any power to fix it. But I did say, you know, we warned you upfront a million times that this salary is really low for your level, why didn’t you say something when the CEO offered it to you?

    Her answer was, “I didn’t know you’d take taxes out! At my old job I never paid any taxes, they just gave it to me in cash. So I didn’t realize that the number the CEO told me wasn’t the real number, you need to adjust it so my take-home pay is that number.”

    A 30-something American with a masters degree. At a real business with an office and clients and a CFO. Did not think we were going to pay taxes or report wages.

    Reply ↓
    2. Squaredler*

      Once we had a bunch of new hires at my old job, for most of them it was their first professional job. They get their first paychecks and I hear them all complaining about “FD” and why it was taken out of their paychecks, I had to pop out of my office and inform them that those are federal taxes!

      Reply ↓
    3. Heirloom Tomato Heiress*

      I had a coworker age off her parents’ insurance – we got paid okay but not great, but the insurance benefits made up for it in my case. She was SHOCKED how much her take home pay dropped (in the neighborhood of $200 a pay period…).

      Reply ↓
  52. pet-shelter-manager*

    My most memorable new hire because of how normal it was. I hired a (white) guy for a public-facing animal care position, and when he came to pick up his prehire paperwork he was wearing orange monk robes. No problem, I was just a little surprised. Our HR manager and I had a long discussion about how to accommodate and respect his religious needs and balance them with our (safety-based) uniform policy, we talked to our attorney, and we had planned out the possible conversations we would have on the day he started. So when he came in on Day 1 I was fully ready to have some discussion, but he showed up in jeans and sneakers and I never saw the robes again.

    Reply ↓
    2. pet-shelter-manager*

      Oh yeah, and then there was the girl we had to part ways with because she was terrified of cats. Not great if your only job is to interact with cats.

      Reply ↓
      2. Dust Bunny*

        I used to work for a veterinarian. We had a couple of applicants who were either afraid of or very allergic to animals, and a couple more who said they fainted at the sight of blood or puked if they had to be around either vomit or feces. Yup. No idea what they thought this job entailed.

        Reply ↓
      3. Jay (no, the other one)*

        I spent four years doing medical home visits. I replaced a woman who was hired for that position, got through three weeks of orientation, and then quit after her first day in the field because she was allergic to both cats and dogs and couldn’t go into the homes of anyone who had pets. Apparently she thought the schedulers would only send her to homes without pets. We didn’t have the presence or type of pets in our database and would have no way to do that and she never asked about it during the hiring or onboarding process.

        I found out about this because on of the first questions they asked me was “How do you feel about cats and dogs?” and they were visibly relieved when I lit up and said that meeting people’s pets was one of my favorite parts of the work.

        Reply ↓
  53. Tylord*

    I had this entry level coworker who we took out to a team get to know lunch. He was on his phone the entire lunch…

    Later we had a group lunch with our work friend group trying to include him in it. He asked if he could take the day off during our company retreat to go volunteer at his old elementary school which we advised was a terrible idea. He asked anyways and got a talking to by both HR and his boss.

    Needless to say he was fired three weeks later.

    Reply ↓
    1. Anne*

      I’ve been guilty of the first offense. Thankfully, not at a team get to know lunch (that I recall, anyway). However, the team routinely ate lunch together and, while eating, I would read quietly on my phone or play a game (with the volume off). Pretty sure I did it first day/week and didn’t stop until someone said something months later. I was still paying attention to the conversation and would answer questions when asked.

      Reply ↓
  54. Nat20*

    Young woman hired to be a breakfast attendant at a hotel, which generally means a 5 or 6am start and usually alone. Did just fine during training, if a little (understandably) tired and bleary-eyed.

    First day working breakfast on her own, she showed up still drunk from the night before. Guests very much noticed the state she was in, and the breakfast itself was a disaster. So that was also her last day.

    Reply ↓
  55. Nell Gwynn*

    It was either the new CS guy’s first or second day. He offered to brew the coffee. After the coffee would be ready, another person in the front office went to grab some, and noticed it was very weak. Opened the lid, and the dude didn’t realize he had to grind the beans before brewing. He wasn’t the brightest crayon in the box, couldn’t grasp simple procedures, and was eventually fired for sharing inappropriate pictures with other staff members.

    Reply ↓
  56. Jodi*

    Years ago we held an orientation for some new hires in the boardroom and one of them chose to carve his name into the table-top. It was his first and last day.

    Reply ↓
    1. Anne*

      I had a friend who hosted a C-level executive leadership program. At the break, they had to coach one attendee that it was not appropriate to draw/scribble on the brand-new conference table. He was just going to town, practically drawing a mural, writing phrases. These were mature executives. Boggles the mind. At least it was not carved. Cleaning staff were able t remove it.

      Reply ↓
  57. BigBird*

    My new boss was hired over my strenuous objections and proved me right. We are in a heavily-regulated field and were submitting a highly technical, 500+ page compliance document to a government agency for their approval. During her first week she “replied all” to an email that included outside counsel and bosses three levels above her, insisting that the document needed to be revised because our employees would never be able to understand it. She thought it was an employee communication and not a legally-mandated submission to the people who had actually written the government regulations that we were demonstrating compliance with. She was fired before the end of her probationary period, but only after she terrorized one of our outside service providers to the point where senior leadership became involved.

    Reply ↓
  58. Mouse named Anon*

    I graduated from college in December. By the time I found and started a job it was the end of Jan. My first week at the job there was a huge snow storm and I was about 4 hours late on my 3rd day. I did have a cell phone, but this was way before smart phones. I had to call 411 (LOL) to get my company’s number (bc why save the number? That would have been smart!) and call them. I was mortified.

    Reply ↓
  59. Nell Gwynn*

    Another one:
    We once had a new intern burst into one of the offices like Kramer from Seinfeld, look around with a surprised look on their face, visibly realize they didn’t know anyone in the room, and turn and skitter out without saying a word. It was like watching a cat when they have the zoomies.

    Reply ↓
    1. Observer*

      Well, at least they realized that they was in the wrong place. Unlike the employee who tried to “trick or treat” the CEOs of a possible client.

      Reply ↓
  60. Generic Name*

    Maybe this isn’t in the spirit of the question, as I was the new coworker but here goes. I’ve just started a new job and it’s my first day. I’m being introduced to my new coworkers, and one coworker says (in the same breath as her name) that she is an Instagram lifestyle influencer. I glance around the room and I see heads nodding. I’m not huge into Instagram, so I just nod and say something like “oh wow how cool”. She then elaborates that I’m not allowed to follow her, and none of her coworkers can follow her. I look around the room again, and more heads nod. Now that I’ve been here a while, I’ve noticed she is rarely in the office and we are an in-person company. And I’ve also noticed that she’ll have to “hop off” various departmental meetings. I can’t help but wonder if she’s busy influencing while also “working”.

    Reply ↓
  61. XX*

    The new intern, right after starting his first day, told our supervisor and manager that he actually couldn’t work the days he committed to, and instead offered two half-days which basically made it impossible to actually learn the job. I was assigned to train him and he just would not stop derailing the training (which tbf was long and overwhelming, but you just took notes and got through it) with the stupidest comments. He did not get better with time.

    Also, his first impression to the building manager was in the rec area, when he loudly regaled our other interns (who did not like him at all) with the story of all the “bitches” he’d partied with the night before. The manager demanded to know what department he was in and filed a complaint with our manager.

    He managed to stay on for a few months because our strict supervisor left for another job and was replaced with someone a lot more laid back, just around the time we got busy and a bunch more people to train. He quit 20 minutes after he heard the strict supervisor was returning.

    Reply ↓
  62. The north remembers*

    I worked at a casual restaurant in college (order at the counter but we bring it to you and there’s real utensils). The first day I worked with the new guy, he didn’t show up to the first of his double shift, leaving us slammed. When he did show up, he… stood in the middle of the dining room reading a game of thrones book. I have no idea why no one in charge did anything about this guy but that colored my opinion of him from then on.

    Reply ↓
  63. NotJustTheMrs*

    I was training a new hire in an admin position. She had something like 30 years of experience in our industry. We learned pretty quickly that the only computer work she had done was Quickbooks. I have to teach her the most simple things like how to change the name of a document in OneDrive. It would take her all day to print the weekly reports that took me 30 min after being with us for a month.

    Reply ↓
  64. An American(ish) Werewolf in London(ish)*

    This isn’t a first day story, but a first…six weeks, maybe? Our company hired a new helpdesk guy (we’ll call him Cyril) for the software we managed (a Software as a Service company). He was chatty and friendly – over friendly. I was outside on a smoke break with a number of colleagues, including Cyril … and our internal recruiter who worked in the HR department. Cyril turns to me and exclaims ‘you’re the company MILF!’

    He did not get fired for that (he made a MASSIVE mistake whilst practising on the software – one which could have had dire ramifications) but after he did get fired, it came out that he was sending inappropriate emails to young, female members of staff (not me – though I’m female, I was in my 40s at the time, and indeed a mother to a teen)

    Reply ↓
  65. Nola*

    I live in New Orleans and work a white collar office job downtown in the Central Business District. There’s a local supermarket location near our office that sells sandwiches, hot plates, etc during lunch.

    At the end of new coworker’s second week he goes to the supermarket to pick up lunch and comes back with a couple of pounds of boiled crawfish. CW proceeds to peel and eat crawfish at his desk.

    Now crawfish are delicious but they are both 1) fragrant and 2) messy. I love a good weekend crawfish boil where you’re eating outside with family and friends and wearing old clothes. You could smell the crawfish as soon as you got off the elevator. He rolled up his shirt sleeves and wore several napkins as bibs to keep from getting anything on his shirt. Finished and did the surgeon just scrubbed in walk to the bathroom so he could wash his messy, messy hands. We had to call maintenance to come empty the garbage cans because the smell permeated the office and we couldn’t work that way that afternoon.

    I know he got a firm talking to by management but, four weeks later, he’s still here.

    Reply ↓
    1. Jennifer Strange*

      I grew up in New Orleans, and I adore crawfish, but there is no way I’d peel and eat them at my desk! You need the outdoor table with newspaper on it!

      Reply ↓
    2. Dust Bunny*

      SE Texas: HEB is currently running their ad with the zydeco version of “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year”. It works a lot better than you’d expect.

      But I cannot picture eating crawfish at work unless they were already shelled, etc. Also, the smell is kind of the ultimate “microwaving fish”.

      Reply ↓
      1. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

        LOL, my org actually had a crawfish boil/dinner a couple weeks ago that was supposed to be outside, but it rained so they brought everything inside. It smelled like crawfish for at least a week, even with every fan and air purifier we had running in that room. Every time I go to HEB now if I see one of those booths, I take the other door!

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  66. CanadianAccountant*

    We hired a guy at our accounting firm who had come from another firm in a different province. Despite the fact he “had worked in a big firm for 2.5 years” he did not know how to make a journal entry, or how debits and credits worked. He would ask the junior staff for help to try to hide the fact he was in way over his head.

    He was also caught multiple times lying to different people about the most ridiculous things such as his age, how he went to school in a castle, and was locked out of his CRA account (an account that is an absolute necessity in our industry) because he had too much money (?). Safe to say he did not last very long.

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  67. A large cage of birds*

    We once got a new director that made a horrible first impression with the rest of the leadership in her first week.

    Long story short all of the top leadership had left the organization. Myself and the other two senior llama groomers kept the day to day work moving in the absence of leadership. The assistant director of grooming was hired first (our immediate boss). He decided to restructure the org chart so he didn’t have 13 direct reports and instead the llama groomers would report directly to the three seniors. The wheels of the government HR turn slowly so by the time it was actually going to go into effect officially, it was the new director’s first week. When she heard about it, she immediately put a stop to it and never brought it up again. She didn’t even tell us, we just heard it through our boss.

    Within six months, three leadership members had left because of her.

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  68. Jared Carthalion, True Heir*

    This one was me. First week of one of my first lab jobs out of college, I argued with the EHS guy training me and the other new hire that skirts should be allowed (provided they fully cover all your skin and won’t catch on anything, like pants). Over 10 years later I still think the standards in some labs feel reminiscent of femininity being considered unclean, but I cringe now to look back and realize the kind of first impression I gave at the time.

    Reply ↓
    1. SweetCider*

      While arguing with EHS on the first day is not great, that sounds like a problematic policy. (And possibly discriminatory unless they make accommodations for religious modesty dress codes.)

      Signed,
      The EHS trainer!

      Reply ↓
    2. Dust Bunny*

      I think the problem is that to fully cover all your skin they’d have to be long, and skirts that are long but don’t catch on stuff are actually pretty restrictive to walk in because they don’t have much sweep. Skirts with enough sweep to walk in easily are full enough to catch or trip on. (I prefer skirts myself but am pretty convinced they’re a bad idea safety-wise in a lot of situations.)

      Reply ↓
  69. gourd emperor of dune*

    New guy in fabrication at the custom medical teapot manufacturer showed up on day 2 with his entire collection of Warhammer 40K figurines and spent over an hour trying to show them off to the team he was on.

    The team was visibly not interested, and already behind on their workload, so also pretty annoyed about this interruption. New guy did not read the room and missed all the cues. He tried it again the following day.

    He lasted about 6 weeks, but that was the first sign he was not a good fit.

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  70. Pajama Mommas*

    I work in a middle school. We have a number of “therapeutic behavioral aides” whose job is to work with students who have a lot of behavior problems. The aides are supposed to be trained in de-escalation techniques so they can help students who are in crisis. It’s a poorly-paid hourly position, so turnover is high and the quality of the aides varies considerably. One woman who had just started at our school decided to play basketball with students during recess. She got into a verbal altercation with a petite 6th grade girl (NOT the student she was supposed to be supervising, who was in a completely different part of the playground) and threatened to turn it into a physical altercation. Her first week with us became her last week.

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  71. EventPlannerGal*

    When I was a receptionist/admin, the company hired a second receptionist to help me out. This was a very standard reception job, including the very standard reception task of answering the phone. The person they hired said that she had plenty of experience on reception.

    When this girl started, I trained her on all the usual stuff, including answering the phone. After a little while the phone rang while I was in the middle of doing something, and I said “are you okay to get that?” She looked at me with the most abject expression of fear that I’ve ever seen on a human being and said “no.”

    After that, she would not answer the phone. She would not even consider answering the phone. If I couldn’t answer the phone, she would just sit there pretending to busy herself with something else while the phone rang and rang and rang and other people would pop their heads out into reception to see if something was wrong. I was as patient as I possibly could be with her, I went over the whole phone system with her many many times, but she just could not bring herself to answer the phone. She was at that company for, like, three months (when I explained the issue to my boss they gave her admin stuff to do instead) and I don’t think I ever saw her once answer the phone.

    Reply ↓
  72. L*

    My first day on the job at a small town newspaper many, many years ago: I lived within walking distance and it was a chilly morning, so I broke into a run the last couple blocks, to warm up. Arrived and discovered the front door was locked. Hustled around to the back, got in, found my new supervisor. She and I were discussing job duties when we heard an “ahem!” behind us. Turned around to see a policeman in the doorway. He asked if I was the “young lady running down Union Street”. I admitted it, explained that I was trying to warm up, and he said he just wanted to make sure I wasn’t being chased. Yes. Embarrassed to the max – but grateful for the concern.

    Reply ↓
  73. Jake from Not State Farm*

    I worked at a place that was a camping resort, so a restaurant, bar, pool, RV spots etc. while also being a co-op that had permanent residents and the requisite HOA.

    We hired on an office admin. Within the first month, she asked how to apply for funds from the employee assistance program. I had worked there over a year at that point and didn’t even know that existed. On her second week, she went home sick. We overheard the second coming of her breakfast, so we believed her. However, after going home that day, she went MIA for three days before finally reaching out to say she would be back the next week. There were other smaller issues, so she was let go as she was told she was on a 90 day trial period.

    A few weeks later, our Facilities manager’s personal credit card was compromised. His brand new credit card. Fun fact #1. He lived in the co-op. Fun Fact #2. Office Admin did a couple mail runs during her brief tenure to “be helpful.” Fun Fact #3. When Facilities manager reached out to Dollar General to investigate some of the charges, guess who we saw on the cameras? The Admin. Shortly after, mysteriously all of our company cards were compromised one by one.

    Reply ↓
    1. Observer*

      Shortly after, mysteriously all of our company cards were compromised one by one.

      Someone on your staff messed up big time. Sure, not because she stole the *first* time. But because the minute they found out about this, all of the card numbers should have been changed. Also, look into what other security can be applied.

      Reply ↓
      1. Jake from Not State Farm*

        I may have phrased that a bit dramatically. Our cards were reviewed monthly for receipts so we did catch these fairly quickly in our processes. We only had three cards. Only the cardholders and the 3 office staff (at the time, the GM, myself the bookeeper, and any 1 office admin we had on staff).

        Reply ↓
    2. KateM*

      I am more worried about you not knowing about the employee assistance program after over a year than the new hire asking about using it.

      Reply ↓
      1. Jake from Not State Farm*

        Yes I was less than thrilled that they seemed to have gone out of their way to keep that under wraps. It was a small organization. 35 employees, only 3 would be considered admin/back office. The remainder were kitchen/facilities/front desk.

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  74. Orchida*

    Not the first day, but within the first week, we had an employee who cycled to work, wearing full athletic cycling kit. He then changed into business clothing in his office. Our offices have glass doors. They also have shades, but he did not close the shade. The first time, we thought he might have simply made a mistake — maybe his old office had a regular door and he started changing out of habit. (I could maybe see someone doing this, realizing that the door is glass, and then thinking it would be faster just to keep getting dressed instead of stopping to close the shade?) However, this continued to happen frequently so we figured it wasn’t a mistake. He didn’t last long in the position for other reasons but we were the most relieved about the changing clothes.

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  75. satin*

    I worked at a nonprofit, and my department hired an assistant, Maggie, from another department. We were kinda surprised, because she came off as a pretty difficult person. But apparently, Maggie interviewed so well that our manager gave her a shot.

    This was a lateral move, so she was still an assistant – the most junior role in our office. On her first day, she walked into our offices and said “I’m so happy to work with all of you! There are so many changes needed in this department, and coming from [old department], I have a great perspective on how, honestly, you’ve been making their jobs harder. We have so much room for improvement!”
    We all just kind of sat there, confused and stunned. One person obviously thought she was joking (she was not) and started laughing. Our manager was not yet in the office, so one of the associates started showing Maggie around the space, explaining where to find things and where equipment lived, etc. Maggie literally snorted at almost everything, and made many comments along the lines of “Yeah, we can do SO much better here” or “Oh my gosh, [old department] had a MUCH better system. You guys are so backwards.”
    The final straw was a little later in the day, when the guy training her gave her very clear, explicit instructions on a simple (but important) process. Maggie pursed her lips, walked to her desk, and proceeded to do the exact opposite of what her trainer had instructed. An hour later, when the trainer checked up on her work, he was completely dumbfounded. He asked what had been unclear, and Maggie simply replied “I have a master’s degree, and my way is better.”
    Maggie had actually really messed up the entire process, creating HOURS of extra work for herself and multiple other coworkers. When the trainer explained this, Maggie argued with him, saying that her old department did it *this way* and there was never an issue. The trainer explained that this was actually an entirely different process (one that she would have never seen in her old office) and it seemed to finally dawn on her that she’d really, really messed up.

    Shockingly, Maggie quickly found that she did not actually like her new role, and went back to her old department.

    Reply ↓
    1. MsM*

      I don’t know whether to feel worse for the old department that they had to take her back, or for everyone else who has to put up with them if they were happy about that.

      Reply ↓
  76. Squaredler*

    My old company was adding a slightly different service to the ones we already provided – let’s say we were a llama grooming company and wanted to move into llama training as well. We hired a woman with her own llama training business for a hybrid position where she would train llamas for 20 hours and then help train our other staff to also provide llama training for the other 20 hours. Between when she was hired and when she started, her own llama training business took off so she decided she no longer wanted to train llamas for us, and only wanted to do the education piece. We had a bunch of meetings about this since we didn’t have 40 hours of trainer training for her to do, in the meantime she went around to all the other staff she barely knew and badmouthed the company, saying we were under-utilizing her and not having her do what she was hired to do. She then quit in a dramatic fashion by marching into HR (in a totally different building when normally she would just tell her direct supervisor she was resigning) and making the same complaints to them. They were…not impressed.

    Reply ↓
  77. Sleeping Panther*

    I had a new coworker join my team shortly before COVID vaccines became available. She dragged out a call I’d scheduled to train her on a shared task with lots of social chat, including how she and her boyfriend tested positive for COVID but it was fine because her boyfriend was going to go buy them some ivermectin.

    Reply ↓
    1. AnnaMaria Alberghetti Spaghetti*

      There are plenty of directions to go with this but one could do that with all sorts of COVID related actions, one way or the other. Best to tread carefully ….

      Reply ↓
  78. Action Heroine*

    About 20 years ago, I worked for a news show. We had just hired a new executive producer. In a meeting with junior staff on his first day, he decided to express how much he wanted to be an EP for our show by saying “I left a job where big-breasted women would bring me cookies.” (He had previously been a producer on a cable show known at the time for bro humor.) Since I carpooled home with one of the senior staff, I was asked to communicate to him the junior staff’s discomfort, anger, and offense at his remark, which I did. That night the senior staff had an emergency phone call with the host of the show and the EP never set foot in the building again. Even though it might be the most dysfunctional and toxic workplace I’ve ever experienced, I remain grateful to the senior staff and host for taking our concerns seriously and acting quickly–especially given how much has since come out about how that’s an exception in TV news, not the rule.

    Reply ↓
  79. Bunny Girl*

    Not by a new coworker, but on a new coworker. I have volunteered in wildlife rehabilitation for years and a couple of my coworkers knew that. One of them approached me one day and said there was an injured bird in the parking lot. So I went down and grabbed it, and then went up to my office and was on the phone calling a vet’s office when a new professor came in, first day. He started out with “Excuse me” and I turned around, on the phone, holding a bird in my hand. He just went blank, said “Oh sorry” and left. He didn’t come back in my office for like three weeks.

    Reply ↓
    1. Dust Bunny*

      At one of my vet jobs we had a killdeer nest in our gravel parking lot. We put up cones and signs but still got a constant stream of people concerned about the “injured bird” and indignant that we insisted she was fine.

      Reply ↓
      1. Jay (no, the other one)*

        There’s a tiny farm in a residential neighborhood near here and they keep a couple of horses. Last spring they had a foal. It was adorable! A few weeks after the foal appeared, I drove by and saw a large, hand-lettered sign on the fence that said WHEN YOU SEE THE FOAL LYING DOWN, HE IS SLEEPING. HE IS NOT ILL. HE IS NOT DEAD. YOU DON’T NEED TO KNOCK ON OUR DOOR AND TELL US. THANK YOU FOR CARING ABOUT OUR FOAL!

        Reply ↓
        1. Dinwar*

          Reminds me of a relative, who had something of the opposite experience. She was a middle school science teacher, and a bald eagle set up a nest in her neighborhood. Someone set up a webcam to watch the chicks, and she had the video stream going in the background. With the sound on. It wasn’t really relevant most of the time–the chicks were relatively quiet, occasionally they’d chirp and the class would go “Oh, the mommy’s back!”, and then they got back to work.

          Then the chicks got old enough to learn how to hunt. Which involved Mommy and Daddy Eagle bringing live prey to the nest. Yeah….those middle schoolers got a very rapid education on what the term “predator” means in the wild. I’ll spare the details, but suffice to say it was unpleasant.

          My relative’s response was to turn the sound off, explain that this is part of the life cycle of these animals, and go back to teaching.

          Reply ↓
      2. Bunny Girl*

        Oh killdeers lol. This bird actually was injured unfortunately. If memories recalls it was a starling or a grackle and I was able to grab it easily and could see the injury.

        Reply ↓
  80. It's Marie - Not Maria*

    I am HR Director for a group of 9 separate partner companies. New Hire, had been with the largest company out of the nine partner companies for a couple days. I was helping our Recruiter scrub resumes one morning, and found that New Hire had applied for the same type of position with three of the partner companies THE DAY BEFORE. When confronted about this, they lied and said they had applied to the partner companies a couple weeks prior. This was literally their third day of employment, and also their last day of employment – don’t lie to the HR Director. And no, they weren’t interviewed for any of the other companies either.

    Reply ↓
    1. Limepink22*

      ….why are you “confronting” them? You’re HR- you’re supposed to be professional in your demeanor. They obviously saw red flags in the behavior (possibly in leadership) in the company, applied to others not knowing they were linked. Then, when “confronted” and faced with being immediately termed and losing their livelihood, lied. You then decided to not interview someone you thought good enough to hire at 3 other locations near their homes.

      Maybe you look at any of that situation from an employee perspective, with the power dynamics and how leadership should behave and not as a fun “gotchya” moment and reflect.

      Reply ↓
  81. foobar*

    This predates my time at the company, but my last job had a worker show up at 9am for his first day of work. He was assigned some fairly simple work to get them started on the first day; it was on the level of ‘changing some colours’.

    He left ‘for lunch’ at noon, with his bag, and never returned.

    On their computer was a PDF for “basics of [simplest technology we use]”. I think he realized he was in over his head (and had lied on the resume and/or in the interview) and metaphorically bailed out of a moving car.

    Reply ↓
  82. Anon in Academia*

    I work in academic IT. A department hired a new professor. On his first day, he set his computer up as a child porn server. Our cybersecurity team found it within in minutes of it being set up. There’s nothing like being arrested on your first day of work.

    Reply ↓
    1. Dadjokesareforeveryone*

      What in the actual F. Revolting, I hope that’s the 1st and last time you ever have that happen in your workplace.

      Reply ↓
  83. WorkerJawn*

    A few of us were hired at the same time and about a month in, there was a department happy hour/social. On our way there, my coworker loudly complained we would only get 2 drink tickets because they “needed at least 10 drinks to feel anything.”

    Reply ↓
  84. Weenie*

    I was HR, and the CEO and I took our new hire to lunch. New hire told a story about oral sex at lunch and used her hands to simulate the act (I guess so we’d be sure of what she meant?).

    Gone by end of day.

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  85. Fluff*

    I was the strange first impression. Timing was everything.

    Years ago I was the new faculty on staff at local hospital. This hospital was built over several decades with various areas added on over time. It was like the Winchester Mansion – quirky but nice. It is my first night on call. I did an evening admission for a little kiddo and then take a shortcut down to the doctors lounge to get a snack. Or so I thought. Welp, the staircase I chose was one that NO ONE used or probably even knew about. I got locked in the stair case. I could not get out. And I could not go back to the floor I came from. So here I was. Locked in this staircase. Probably a huge fire code violation right there. I was stuck.

    It was a Friday night. It was winter. The stairwell was not heated and I was freezing. I had left my cell phone sitting at the computer (since I was zipping down for a snack). I knocked, yelled, tried everything on every floor. No one heard me.

    Then the overhead pages started. “Dr. Fluff, call the peds floor.” Hospital overheads have to repeat the page three times. So three times, “Dr Fluff, call the peds floor.” And it did not end there, “Dr. Fluff to the ed.” Rinse and repeat. Oh, the stuff of nightmares. Now I was a bad doc, a bad faculty to the residents and everyone in that hospital knew it.

    I was shivering and desperate. I heard muffled sounds at the lower floor and made as much noise as I could. Finally, A guy in a tuxedo opens the door. Turns out, the door led to the cafeteria. The cafeteria was the decked out for a gala. The gala that was going on that night. Full of people. People in sequins and tuxedos. The guests all got quiet as they stared at me, shivering in my scrubs – I must have been pathetic. The guy in the tux, never lost a beat and gestured broadly, “And this is our new doctor, Dr. Fluff.” I chirped something and did the shivering walk of shame out of the cafeteria. While the chiefs and other staff mumbled “I never knew where that door led” “Heck, I never realized that door actually opened.”

    The guy in the tux. The CEO of the hospital. Yes, I kept the job.

    Reply ↓
    1. Fluff*

      Probably not a fire violation. There was probably a door somewhere that led out – by the time the overheads started, I was not in the state of mind to go the darkest spot and hunt for a door to an ally or something.

      Reply ↓
      1. sb51*

        There should probably be emergency lighting/lit exit signs by code most places, though, so you wouldn’t have to find a door in the dark, even if you did end up randomly on the street somewhere.

        Reply ↓
    2. MsM*

      Hey, at least the CEO knew your name. Although I imagine that couldn’t have been very comforting in the moment.

      Reply ↓
    3. Juicebox Hero*

      My freshman year in college I went through a wrong door and ended up locked in an unused dorm. It was totally dark except for what light came through the windows, which mostly had their shades down, and the rooms were still full of old furniture and junk. It was like a haunted house. I wandered around looking for an exit and eventually found the door I’d come in through, which had locked behind me, but I managed to brute force it open. This was pre cell phone so I don’t know how I’d have gotten out otherwise.

      Over the next few years it got remodeled into offices and classrooms, but I still got the willies anytime I had to enter that building.

      The high school I went to also had a Stairway to Nowhere. It was a four-floor building and this stairway only had a landing on the fourth floor. It was considered a freshman right of passage to get confounded by the thing.

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    4. Jay (no, the other one)*

      Ohhh. I am cringing and shivering with you.

      Much more benign related incident: we were leaving a seaside AirBnB and I took the garbage out. The garbage cans for the complex were in a shed by the parking lot gates. I opened the door, disposed of the garbage, and discovered that the door I had used locked automatically and couldn’t be opened from the inside. The only way out took me outside the locked gates. I didn’t have my phone because I was just running out with the garbage. I stood there for a while wondering how long it would take my husband to come looking for me – and then realized that I could walk around the side of the building and go in the patio doors to our first-floor unit.

      So the locked gates didn’t provide all that much security after all.

      Reply ↓
  86. Green Goose*

    One of my paid interns no-showed no-called on her first day of work and didn’t respond until the following day saying very casually that it was an emergency but when I asked if she didn’t have access to her phone she couldn’t really give an answer. I couldn’t fire her since the internship was for a nonprofit helping students get through college and graduate employable.
    She ended up doing that three times during her ten week internship, always citing an “emergency” with no other information provided and never providing an explanation for why she did not have 30 seconds to send a text. I had to explain the difference between an emergency and a trend but I never will know why she just didn’t come to work multiple times.

    Reply ↓
    1. Observer*

      I couldn’t fire her since the internship was for a nonprofit helping students get through college and graduate employable.

      Someone who doesn’t understand why they cannot “No call No show” is going to have a hard time getting or keeping employment. Did anyone explain this to her?

      Reply ↓
  87. Babs*

    I was a kitchen manager for a corporate dining room and I’d brought in a temp staffer to cover my full time dishwasher’s vacation time. I get to the kitchen a couple minutes late due to traffic and the temp is sitting at my desk, on my computer, watching porn. It’s the fastest I’ve ever fired anyone

    Reply ↓
  88. Zarniwoop*

    Guy shows up for his first day of work wearing a t- shirt that says “I’m not a gynecologist but I’ll take a look.” I mention to the company president that he might want to check out the new guy’s shirt. Guy was gone by morning break.

    Reply ↓
  89. Bananapants*

    I was training our very sweet but visibly nervous new hire at the office. Partway through her first day, she mentioned her eyes were sensitive to the light and then stood on top of her desk and started trying to unscrew the lightbulb hanging from the light fixture, but couldn’t quite reach it and gave up. Note that our office is an open-plan loft setup so it made a bit of a scene. Later that day, she asked if there was a place to nap. There was not. Then, on the way out, I told her it was my birthday soon and she sang happy birthday to me, in full, in the stairwell. She didn’t work out long-term but I hope she’s doing well.

    Reply ↓
  90. AustenFan*

    A number of years I was in my first year as the department chair of a communication studies program that had hired a number of new full time faculty to teach public speaking. One new faculty member, during his orientation meeting with the other new hires, asked me if he could take individual students to his office and hypnotize them to reduce their public speaking anxiety. That was not one of the issues I expected to face in my first week as department chair. And, no, he could NOT hypnotize his students.

    Reply ↓
  91. Xannie-Do*

    On New Guy’s first day, we had a dept ≈ 10 people training. Our boss was a notoriously bad person in the organization, so the Underlings planned on going to happy hour afterwards to destress. New Guy came. Granted, we weren’t that careful with our frustrations, but this guy came in hot! He was the first one to open his mouth and badmouth the boss. Pink flag, but not very noticeable because we all felt the same way. Then he asked “what kind of fun stuff do you do to relax? I do Xannies and smoke pot.” Now I’m not prude, and I do self medicated with some herbs here and there, but I certainly don’t announce it on my first day of work, with people I don’t know well.

    While we had our issues with the boss, we were a high achieving team, and we did care about doing our jobs and doing them well. He spent a lot of his time coming over to my desk to complain about how much work he had to do. Turns out, if he did his work, he wouldn’t have “so much work to do”. He lasted maybe 2 months before he abruptly quit. If he would have held on maybe 5 more days, he would have been COVID laid off with unemployment.

    Reply ↓
  92. Casual Observer*

    Several years ago, I was a barista at a beachside café. Summer was always our busiest season, so we’d bring on additional staff for those 3 months. One summer, we hired a young Irish lad on a temporary working visa who planned to return home in September. Since he was only in Canada for a short while, he wanted to make the most of it, which meant he’d party every night, but still manage to show up for his early morning shifts.

    During his second week, he came in after going particularly hard the night before. He could barely stand and kept running to the washroom to throw up. After one of his trips, I noticed he’d been gone a while, so I went to check on him. When he didn’t respond to my knock, I opened the door and found him on the floor with blood pouring from his head.

    He had passed out and hit his head on the corner of our metal safe, which we kept in the washroom since it was the only room with a lock. An ambulance arrived and took him to the hospital, but he was back at work the next day with just a nasty gash. I worked at that café for an additional 4 years after he left, and new hires were still being told that story to deter them from trying to work hungover.

    Reply ↓
  93. Corvus Corvidae*

    We had a new girl who in her first week, got called to the front by security for parking in a handicapped spot. Three hours later, her manager doesn’t know where she is, and security is mad because her car is still in the handicapped spot. Turns out she figured she’d take a nap in the car before she moved it, and she was still in there asleep. Fired on the spot.

    Reply ↓
  94. Spicifer*

    I was the bad first impression. It was partly due to not being set up for success, and a lot due to being a clueless 18-year-old with high anxiety and no situational awareness.

    The summer after I graduated from high school, I got an internship working on a local organic farm. There were a handful of full-time employees and a larger crew of interns doing the “work for your room and board” deal. On my first day, I struck up a friendship with another volunteer, Joe (mid-20s), who confided in me that he didn’t know where he was going to live once his internship was up at the end of the week. I told him he could stay with me on the homestead farm I was housesitting for that summer. It was only later that I realized: don’t invite strangers to live with you in isolated locations.

    Also in my first week, I was assigned the task of painting the new canvas sign that would be hung on their farmer’s market booths. The letters had been traced, and I just had to fill them in. They had set it up on the table in the farm kitchen where everyone eats lunch. I did a great job on it and was almost finished when an employee came in and said, “You need to move that outside now; the men are about to come in to eat lunch. They’re hungry and will be angry if they have to wait because of you,” and then left. Mind you, the paint was still wet, and she didn’t offer to help me move it. Stressed by the impending deadline, I attempted to gently fold up the sign and move it outside on my own. Obviously, the paint got everywhere and it looked like shit. Why didn’t I wait for someone else to arrive and ask for help moving it? I still kick myself about this.

    Needless to say, the next morning, I got a voicemail from the farm saying they’re extending Joe’s internship and therefore don’t need my help anymore. First and only job I’d ever been fired from. I can’t say I blame them.

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  95. cs-bs*

    Had a new employee start at around 9 AM. Everything seemed perfectly fine. During lunch he apparently tweeted about his new job. This was not a great idea as the cops were monitoring his social media accounts. A short time later a SWAT team showed up and arrested him. He was carrying an unregistered concealed gun. Later he plead guilty to a whole bunch of felonies including robbing an elderly couple at a park.

    (He had also faked his resume to hide the fact that he was in prison for three years. The owner of a local shop had given him a fake reference. Our owner made sure the entire town knew about this guy.)

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  96. Fergus*

    I was offered a job in 2013. On the day before I started I had a cordial conversation with someone at the new job I was supposed to start with the next day. She highly misheard what I said to her. instead of asking for clarification or having me repeat it she went to HR and complained about me. so in the great wisdom of the HR dumbass he wrote me and email reprimanding me, someone who was still not an employed. I decided to not go. I didn’t like their pre first day impression of HR asshole

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  97. Desert Blues*

    Shortly after college, I got hired for an internship in the desert and bought a couple pairs of nice, lightweight pants. During my second week, I decided to wear one of the new pairs of pants. About an hour in to the field day, I bent down to pick something up and felt the seat of my pants tear. The only other people around were my coworkers and we were an hour from the field house, so I decided to roll with it. For the rest of the day, every time I bent down or got up, the tear would get longer, until it was over a foot long and half my butt was hanging out. About half way through the day, my supervisor admitted that at first he felt quite bad for me, but after a while it was just funny. I think I earned his respect that day.

    This is second hand, but during the same internship I heard stories about a technician who quit after a week. Apparently she threw out her back and vetoed seeing a doctor in favor of wandering in to one of the intern bedrooms, lying on the ground, and asking them to walk on her back.

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  98. FuzzBunny*

    New director of a summer program for teens, held on a college campus. Within the first few days, he accidentally misplaced his master key. When he realized it was gone, he did not tell anyone for over a day, meaning whoever took them could have gotten into any room on campus—labs, dorms, you name it. They spent I-don’t-know-how-much-money installing new locks on every door, only for him to DO IT AGAIN a couple of days later. He was gone within about a week and a half, but not before coming to a staff party drunk, and telling us it was no big deal if underage staff wanted to drink.

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  99. London Calling*

    Posted this one before – I was working in the securities and collateral dept of a major American bank in London. We had billions of pounds worth of bearer CDs we handed out and took in as security, and obviously we reconciled at close of business every day to let the securities dealers know what we had and what was out.

    Come the day we’re £ 50 million down on the closing balance. To say there was consternation is a gross understatement. I checked. The manager checked me. He watched me check again. We looked under desks, in drawers, down the side of the public counter, in bags and briefcases. We practically ripped the carpet up and did body searches. Nope, that 5o mill was missing.

    Turned out a very new member of staff had taken the – I repeat, 50 million bearer CD – home to show her mother.

    She was invited to get another job somewhere where she couldn’t cause heart attacks in her co-workers. Or walk out with a 50 million bearer CD in her bag.

    Reply ↓
    3. Dinwar*

      That one…. I mean, the new hire demonstrated criminally bad judgment, sure. And they pretty obviously weren’t a good fit. There are jobs where you simply cannot allow your excitement to overrule your common sense.

      On the other hand, how were they able to walk out with 50 million pounds? This seems like a pretty major failure on the part of security. I know bearer CDs aren’t huge and are relatively easy to tuck into a bag, but on the other hand I’d have thought there would be systems in place specifically to prevent that.

      If I were in charge I’d be annoyed at the (now former) employee, but I’d be FURIOUS at the security team.

      Reply ↓
      1. Pay no attention...*

        I agree on the failure of security. At the very least, no one leaves until the reconciliation is finished.

        Wow

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  100. Little Bobby Tables*

    I’ve worked with a lot of odd ducks, but they usually saved their real craziness for well after being hired instead of diving into the deep end of the weirdness pool on day one. The exception was doozy. A new hire who asked a co-worker to check if a rash down there was an STD. No, the co-worker had no medical qualifications.

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  101. CL*

    New hire straight out of college. Day 1 wore a three-piece suit and saw most people wearing jeans, khakis, and polo shirts/sweaters. He asked if shorts were acceptable and I think he was told they were ok on super hot days if there were no clients around. Day 2 he wore basketball shorts and flipflops. Day 3 was his last day.

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  102. aarti*

    I hired a woman from a temp agency. To make phone calls. I was very clear the job entailed making lots of boring repetitive phone calls. Often leaving voicemails. She started, I gave her a script and the list, made two calls in front of her, sat with her for the next two calls. Left her to it and came back in 30 minutes to see she had made no calls. I asked her what was going on. She said, and I quote, “I don’t really feel like doing this.” I said if you don’t feel like doing this, I am afraid I will have to let the temp agency know, we don’t have really have anything else for you to do. She said, “Ok,” packed up her stuff, got up and left!

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  103. Megshell*

    At an all-hands meeting, the new guy that most of us hadn’t met yet talked about how he was planning to go to a toga party that weekend (this was just last year BTW), hadn’t decided yet if he would be going commando under his toga and didn’t know if was going to be a “teacups and scones” type of party or “cigarettes in the pool.” Then when he was introduced to the rest of the team, his “fun fact” was that he went to high school with a famous director whose name he couldn’t remember, but he did remember that she was a goth theater kid.

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  104. That’s Johnny Paycheck*

    This is probably petty but… employee (Q) started on the same day we had our summer office party. During the festivities my boss and I were talking about some Johnny Cash recordings that had been released posthumously, I think? And Q chimed in, “Oh, I LOOOVE JOHNNY CASH!!! ‘Take This Job and Shove It’ is one of my favorite songs!!!”

    It could have been a charmingly awkward moment had a fulfilling professional relationship emerged, but alas she turned out to be a disaster. My last impression of Q is when I went with her and another colleague to pick something up at Target during lunch – “Oh, we can park in a handicap spot, I have my dad’s tags! I always get a good spot!” she said as we pulled in. I know you can’t judge who parks in those spots because people have invisible issues, etc, but I KNEW and I was so embarrassed. She was let go the next day for completely unrelated reasons…

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  105. Aloysius*

    One time, my Division was having a day-long all employee engagement day. There is a group of four large event rooms in that building with a large lobby/hallway/open space running alongside them – we had three of the rooms and rotated through in groups for various events, and the fourth was being used for new hire orientation. In between our engagement events, they were giving us ice cream sundaes as an afternoon snack, served in the open space outside the conference rooms. Well, the new hire orientation had a break about 10 minutes before we did, and they thought the ice cream was for them and ate almost all of it before anyone stoped them. I later heard a couple new employees who were towards the back of the line were stopped from getting ice cream once catering staff finally noticed they weren’t us, and complained it wasn’t fair that they didn’t get any. So not just one new hire but a whole group of them, and we didn’t get the ice cream they promised us.

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    1. Unpopular Opinion*

      To be Fair unless the New Hires had been told the ice creams were NOT for them, it’s understandable that they would think they could….

      Reply ↓
  106. Lucy*

    I work in academic libraries (which if you’re a regular reader of the comments you know are wildly dysfunctional). On a new entry level reference librarian’s first day they were set to meet with several more established faculty and learn more about the org etc. I was tenured and coordinated our instruction program – when this brand new person met with me they proceeded to lecture me about what we could be doing better for instruction (mostly stuff we already do but they are brand new and don’t know about) and ask me all about my job instead of theirs because they would be “taking over my job” any day now. Reader, they didn’t even last the full academic year. They did similar things to every other librarian and truly felt above the job they had interviewed and been hired for. Everyone loves a know-it-all who knows nothing ;-)

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    1. Dust Bunny*

      Academic library person here . . . we had an intern like this. She had a lot of opinions about pretty much everything. She survived the internship–her work was good, at least–but I think our supervisor was not sorry to see her go.

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  107. Dadjokesareforeveryone*

    At a gas station I worked at for a couple years we hired a new employee, and she was paired with me for training on the morning shift. On her first day she told me that her dad beat her as a kid, and at her last job that she had sex repeatedly with a coworker, while looking at me in a way that made me feel uncomfortable beyond how wildly inappropriate her story was. I told the owners, who for some reason did not fire her immediately, but did move her to the night shift after I refused to work with her.

    She was fired a couple weeks later, for locking the store with a customer inside and going into the cooler with the customer for sex. Still icked out by it years later.

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  108. Landry*

    Our main office has an ongoing geese problem that has taken sent even the most veteran employees flailing and running. The company even put in a couple of coyote statues to scare them away. I kid you not. The geese are still around but don’t seem to come as close anymore.

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  109. Jonathan MacKay*

    At a previous job, we had hired someone to work with the inventory team as a forklift driver. This was in the middle of our monthly cycle count, so we had asked him to help out with that. It wasn’t even an hour into the first day before he upped and vanished. As far as we could tell in retrospect, he came from a unionized shop to us, and thus just expected to hop into a forklift and get going.

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  110. biscuit*

    I worked for a small family-owned company where the name of the company was the founder’s last name, let’s say Rizzo (not the actual name). In this example, it would be pronounced REE-tzo but frequently mispronounced as RYE-zo. We had a temp receptionist whose main job was to answer phones. In the initial training on their first day, they were told how to pronounce the company name and warned to pronounce it correctly when answering phones. Well, around 10:30 in the morning, who should call but Mr. Rizzo himself? (We didn’t have extensions so all calls went through the receptionist – don’t ask why.) Of course, the temp mispronounced the company name. Fine, these things happen, Mr. Rizzo explained the correct pronunciation. But when he called back 15 minutes later and the temp STILL mispronounced the name, well, that was the end of the temp! Lasted less than 2 hours on their first day.

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  111. AG*

    On a new guy’s first day, he took the Kurig, all the coffee pods, and the paper cups from the break room and set them up next to his desk. Couldn’t understand why everyone was pissed.

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  112. Persephone*

    Our HR director once led a new HR manager through our relatively small office to introduce him to everyone on his first day. He proceeded to shake hands with all of the men… and then enthusiastically embrace all of the young women, even those of us who very firmly stuck a hand out to shake. To make matters worse, he only shook the hand of one woman – the only woman over the age of 40 in the office at the time.

    Needless to say, we didn’t see him again.

    Reply ↓
    1. Whale I Never*

      Did anyone say anything?? Or was everyone just frozen in shock/horror the entire time? If a strange man tried to hug me at work–and the HR director watched it happen–I don’t think I’d be able to restrain myself to just pointedly going for a handshake.

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  113. The Coolest Clown Around*

    I’m not in the military, but I work for the Air Force. About a month after I was hired, our team got a shiny new second lieutenant (just finished officer school, this is his VERY first commission), and so on his second day we had a get-to-know you meeting with everyone he would be working with. This kid stands up in front of a group of fairly stiff, no-nonsense, mostly older government civilians and proceeds to list out what each of them were doing the year he was BORN. He’d searched through LinkedIn, Facebook, public announcements, etc. of everyone who’s name he knew and listed out things like awards they’d received, the births of several children, previous deployments, even one divorce! It seemed like the entire room had been paralized as he worked his way allllllll the way around the room, which included a number of high level supervisors, reminding each and every one of them how very, very young and inexperienced he was. When he was finished, the division chief just pretended he hadn’t said anything and moved on with the meeting. Absolutely no one in that room had any sense of humor about anything ever, but I had to excuse myself afterward to go laugh hysterically in the bathroom.

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  114. Mallory Janis Ian*

    We had a new administrative start in my office at a university department, and we had heard from the department head that he was impressed with her interview because he had never seen anyone be able to elaborate so specifically about what it is that they do well and what strengths they would bring to the team.

    So a few other staff members and I who always lunched together invited her to join us, and she talked nonstop about herself for the whole entire hour-long lunch period! It was like we got an hour-long infomercial about her, all her personal strengths, all her work strengths, etc., etc. I think every one of us was worn out by the end of her TED talk.

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  115. Melyn*

    My company paid for a table at an annual charity luncheon. Normally C-suite/ those higher up on the ladder than me attend but every once in a while I get to go (charity is directly involved with my department). One year, I attended and they let our new admin asst (Jenn) go as well. When one of the execs sat down at the table, she introduced herself to Jenn “Hi! I’m Sarah, I don’t think I know you.” Jenn looks at her and snidely says “you should”.
    I about died.

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  116. ADHD HR Lady*

    One that made me giggle: I hired a new employee in the healthcare sector, she showed up for her first day and I met her in our lobby. Right before I shook her hand, her pants fell down! She quickly pulled them back up and we pretended like it never happened. I giggle whenever I think about it, because it was just so random!

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  117. Suz*

    The dress code at my office is pretty casual. We had a new hire for a project manager position show up on her 1st day wearing a tutu.

    Reply ↓
    2. Mallory Janis Ian*

      In the area of strange garb, a newly hired receptionist for the dean’s office came to work wearing a white satin pageant sash that had “WWJD” written on it in large gold-glitter letters.

      I was standing in the kitchen with her and normally I chat or make a little small talk with whoever else happens to be in there, but I was so distracted by wondering about the pageant sash that I didn’t even think to say anything.

      Reply ↓
  118. NotmyUsualName*

    New Student worker – our university uses Single Sign-on with dual authentication for everything. Turns out this student’s parent had required him to set up the SSO authentication for his mother’s phone. So every single time he logs in to anything school related, he has to call his mom so she can authenticate it.

    This is both against university policy and impossible to work with. For the job he has to log into a minimum of 5 portals. And some of them if you close them they force a relog with authentication each time. After he called his mom 10 times the first 20 minutes of training, I hauled him down to IT to fix it.

    But she wouldn’t let it go so they had to install a secret second option for dual authentication so he can pick his own devices and not hers.

    Reply ↓
    1. Mallory Janis Ian*

      What the heck?! What was she up to, or what did she think her son was up to, that even with a phone call from IT she wasn’t at least *embarrassed* into letting it go?

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  119. KToo*

    New guy joined our sales team. At the time – about 25 years ago – we had an intranet where we could write about ourselves on our own profiles, like an ‘about me’. He went through the pages for everyone on our team copying all the information to his own personal website he built, adding all their information, photos, info about their kids and lives that he’d glean from conversations, etc… and then wrote his own impressions of everyone, which were for the most part very poor and extremely judgmental. On his own ‘about me’ page internally he wrote that his goal was to have multiple wives and start a harem and went into some detail about sexual stuff to do with that.
    He was fired as soon as the personal website was discovered.

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    1. KToo*

      To clarify on the information he’d add to his site, it wasn’t just professional info. If he found out that ‘Steve’ was divorced from ‘Barbara’ but living with his new girlfriend ‘Hannah’ and her 3 year old daughter and he had joint custody of his 7 year old twin sons, that would be there, including the kids names, schools, occupations of partners, town they lived in, prior work history, etc… if he could find that out. It was complete doxxing.

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  120. Meep*

    My manager was training two guys on cash and because I worked the front desk at a small science center and there was limited space, it was my register. Instead of paying attention, both guys decided to flirt with me. You know… instead of pay attention. I was not flattered.

    One married his long term girlfriend last year, though!

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  121. Susie QQ*

    It was the Friday of New Hire’s first week, and she showed up to the morning team stand-up Zoom meeting wearing Very Fancy clothes. Dress, make-up, jewelry, etc. It was a departure from her make-up-less, jeans-and-a-t-shirt style (which is normalized at our remote, very casual company) that we had seen from her Monday-Thursday. Naturally people on the team asked her about it.

    She told us that Fancy Fridays is one of her traditions, and she enjoys doing it because “you don’t have to look like trash _every_ day.”

    Another teammate immediately DM’d me: “… is she saying that she thinks we all look like trash?”

    Reply ↓
  122. Handmaid's Tale in Real Life*

    A product designer moved cross-country to work at my company. In his first three days, he took a nap under his desk, walked around the office in Pokemon slippers while covered in a blanket, and proceeded to ask out the owner’s daughter (the owners belong to a very conservative religious sect so all the female family members wear skirts, headbands or hairbows to indicate they are brides of Christ). He didn’t make it the week.

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  123. AnotherLadyGrey*

    It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me. I was the one who made a wild first impression, but it actually ended up helping me. It was my first day and my coworkers very kindly invited me to go with them to get coffee at the place across the street. I promise I am usually very chill and normal in coffee shops, but I was shy and incredibly nervous, and the very first thing I did was spill my entiiiiiiiiire coffee all over the counter, myself, and at least two of my new colleagues. I was absolutely mortified and truly horror struck that this would be their first impression of me. However! It did masterfully break the ice – there’s no time to be shy when you’re pouring coffee all over a stranger (oh god) – and later I found out it was a blessing in disguise. The only thing my coworkers knew about me was that I had recently moved from NYC, and they had all assumed I would be rude or perhaps just very snobby and stuck up. I, uh, quickly disabused them of that notion. They were all wonderful and I loved my time working there.

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  124. Irish Teacher.*

    Oh, not something I saw personally, but there was an Irish politician who on their first day in the Dáil (our parliament), took a wrong turn driving out of government buildings and accidentally drove down the pedestrian steps. That was a…bad first day captured on national media.

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  125. Rory*

    New hire arrived into supposedly a lab based role (R&D for major beauty company) with arm in a sling so couldn’t do lab work. Moved to a more desk based role but was visibly spending his time at his desk playing games on the internet (in an open plan office)

    Somehow survived that and moved quickly into my team (not working for me) – was consistently late, lazy and made basic errors again and again. Final straw was when he messed up making a batch (again) and using the common control panel for the whole room, managed to empty his colleague’s tank of product instead of his own. 2 batches ruined for the price of one

    A week later he was gone, 6 months in total (very fast for our notoriously slow to fire incompetents company)

    Reply ↓
  126. VivKeill*

    In the early 2000s my company still had an in-house temp pool. My department got one of the temps assigned for our busy season. He was not new to the company nor the industry – he had been assigned to our cash management team for months before starting with us. His first day, he showed up at 9am, clocked in, then went on break for 20 minutes. He missed his first training after lunch because he took a 2 hour lunch. When he was packing up to go home, we mentioned that he might want to wait until closer to quitting time – we still had 30 minutes of our shift! He ignored us and walked out. The rest of the week he pulled similar shenanigans, including telling our VP that he was more qualified than she to run our department because he went to a better university than she did. Shockingly, they waited until the end of his week to send him back to the temp pool.

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  127. jj*

    Years ago, my company hired someone who could not stop talking about his foot fetish and asking to see people’s feet. He lasted about a month.

    Reply ↓
  128. ADHD HR Lady*

    I thought of another one. I work in HR and was onboarding a new employee on her first day. The US requires employees to submit evidence to their employer that they have authorization to work (I-9 form). Employers must obtain this documentation within 3 business days. I asked New Lady for her documentation and she proceeded to hand me documents with 4 DIFFERENT first and last names (sometimes the first name was consistent across identities, or it used to be her middle name, etc.)… none of them had matching names and none of them were from Column A (i.e. a passport) or matched the name she had provided on a social security card. That was quite a mess to figure out, but we did it and she turned out to be a fairly successful employee.

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  129. Pickles at a Potluck*

    My husband had to call out on his first day at a new job. He had a good reason though — I went into labor six weeks early. Thankfully he was able to mollify any hard feelings with baby pictures.

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    1. Innie*

      One of my colleagues got appendicitis on his very first day on the job. He was at a remote location and had to be flown to a hospital in another city.

      Reply ↓
      1. mreasy*

        I got COVID for the first time (this was 2023, I was a late adopter) the first week of my new job and had to be out for most of my first month!

        Reply ↓
  130. Innie*

    A particular big company used to hire multiple graduates from our college every year. One year four graduates went for interviews, travelling together (the company was out of town). Each was asked what they would bring to the company and one answered “My wit, charm, and good looks.” Three of the four graduates were offered jobs.

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  131. Fly on The Wall*

    A few years ago a new hire was brought in to take over my role. He had a 2 week schedule of training meetings sitting with me and my counterparts to learn our job. But most of the time when he was scheduled to meet with someone he was no where to be found. Or would get up half way thru the time and not come back. It was so odd. The manager at the time was next level awful so did nothing to address it. The guy proceeded to be miserable in his job, didn’t do anything half-way correct and was often MIA. They kept him on for over a year before he quit (a whole other problem for another discussion).

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  132. Nannerdoodle*

    I was the new hire. It was my first job out of college, and the dress code was listed as “business professional/business casual”, so I (and the rest of the new hires that day) came in with slacks, button downs, and blazers. Everyone in my department wore jeans and t shirts, so that was awkward part 1.

    They gave us pizza for lunch. Thankfully, I’d taken my blazer off by that point because as I attempted to take my first bite of pizza, somehow all the cheese, toppings, and sauce slid off the pizza and down the front of my white dress shirt. I put the blazer back on in hopes that it covered it all. Alas, it did not, and I looked like I was trying to cover up some sort of medical emergency the rest of the day. My coworkers all called me “pizza girl” for 3 months.

    Reply ↓
    1. Cabbagepants*

      The part about the pizza is mortifying! OMG!

      The part about being overdressed is not a big deal, though, even if it felt awkward at the time. I worked at a “T-shirt and jeans” engineering company. Whenever we saw someone dressed in a matching suit, it meant that they were there for an interview, and everyone would wish them good luck.

      Reply ↓
    2. NotmyUsualName*

      Business casual is one of my pet peeves. Because I have seen it mean everything from “you don’t have to wear a tie today but you still need a long sleeve button down shirt and dress slacks” to “just make sure the holes aren’t too big in your jeans and t-shirt”

      Reply ↓
  133. a perfectly normal-sized space bird*

    A new coworker introduced himself to me as a “dark magic warlock” and as proof of his “amaziiiiing powerzzz” he informed me that he was the one who turned the full moon red the night before and would do it again that night. He was 1000% serious. Yet, the moon was neither full nor red the night before and it remained a white waning crescent that night.

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  134. Crystal Smith*

    I was holding a training session for a group of new student employees in the campus library, and a new employee raised her hand, stood up, and asked what job this was for because she didn’t remember. She’d applied for a few different jobs and didn’t recall which one she’d accepted. Oh…kay?

    Reply ↓
  135. ElenP*

    Intern who, on his second day, said very gravely that he’d been looking at our client contracts (he was doing filing), didn’t think the language was very clear, and did we want his lawyer mom to check them over?

    Same person was asked to alphabetize some book shelves and did it so the spines faced in and the blank pages faced out “because it was neater”.

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  136. Cabbagepants*

    When I was a grad student we had a group dinner at a restaurant, paid for by the professor leading the group. A new student in our group ordered two dinners, with the explicit intention of having the second boxed up, untouched, to take home. (we were all paid a respectable stipend and lived in a LCoL area)

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  137. S*

    I was in an intensive language course funded by the US Department of State in Bangladesh, and the instructor (who was our age and our educational level generally, so more a colleague than a teacher, really) started the first class session with an attempt to pique our curiosity about Bangla. His big question was: “Have you ever seen a cock?”

    We were all quiet for a second, because we were taken aback by the inadvertent sex talk (which is very verboten in Muslim-majority Bangladesh). Then we all started giggling.

    He very notably did NOT ask what was funny. Instead, he asked the question again to me specifically. I (female) said, “Well, I mean, yeah, I’ve seen one. I’m 28 years old…”

    At that point, the whole class started laughing, and kept it going at an even higher pitch when he said he would show us a picture of the cock (!) after we guessed correctly what it was.

    If it had been me, I would’ve been like, “Oh, man, I’m not saying that word until I figure out what it means to them,” but he STILL didn’t ask what was funny.

    To throw him a bone (pun intended), I said, “Is it a rooster?” (My friend booed me.)

    It was not a rooster, but he took the opportunity to give in and show us the photo.

    It was a crow. The Bangla word for crow is “kak,” more or less after the “caw caw” sound they make. (I’ll never forget it until the day I die.)

    The instructor never did ask what was so funny, not even when the sole male student said one morning, “Can you help me with my ‘kak’?” and spent a good five minutes saying the word over and over, with the instructor at one point telling him “you have to open your mouth wider” (!!), while we all nearly pissed our pants laughing.

    The last I saw of that instructor, he was accidentally sharing porn on Facebook, so insert your final joke here. At least he meant well.

    Reply ↓
  138. Hotdog not dog*

    We had someone show up on her first day clearly impaired (maybe a prescribed medication, maybe not?) with her wig on sideways and wearing a wool cardigan that was inside out AND buttoned wrong. Her resume had been impressive and the manager who hired her said that she was very professional in the interview, so we gave her the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, she turned out to be incapable of performing any of her job duties, including that she needed someone to help her turn on the computer each day. We let her go after about 4 days. About a month later we got a call from another company asking about her- she had put us down as a reference and told them she had been a high-level employee for several years! My educated guess is that the impressive resume our manager saw was just as fictional as the one she gave the company asking for a reference. (spoiler: she didn’t get a good review from us.)

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  139. L.H. Puttgrass*

    Maybe it’s just that I’ve been reading about the California Bar Exam AI debacle, but my first thought on reading the goose story was to wonder: if the new hire had been injured, could he have filed a workers comp claim?

    Reply ↓
      1. L.H. Puttgrass*

        Well, that’s the interesting part. He was reporting to work on his first day. Is that enough for workers comp? Does it depend on whether he was on company property at the time (the snippet mentions “the fountain,” which sounds like something that would be part of the company campus)? If he can’t file a workers comp claim, does he fall back (er, as it were) to negligence?

        Just all kinds of little edge issues here.

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  140. Jay (no, the other one)*

    In a thread above I mentioned the woman I replaced who quit after her first day doing full-time home medical visits because she was allergic to dogs and cats and didn’t realize that she would have to go into home where the patients had pets. I heard about her at my interview. I heard about the other doc later one from the nurses and support staff. He didn’t quit; he was fired after about three months – and that org never fired *anyone.* It was an informal all-first-names office that was staffed mostly by NPs and PAs with a few docs, and nobody stood on ceremony. On his first day when he was asked to introduce himself, he said “I am Dr. Lastname. You will call me Dr. Lastname. Do not forget that I am the doctor.” Didn’t get better from there and finally he walked into the new GMs office and informed him that he really didn’t deserve the job.

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  141. Whale I Never*

    One time, on our lunch break, one of my coworkers mentioned that she had to take her cat to the vet and got hit with an unexpectedly high bill. She was on a pretty tight budget already, so she was a bit stressed and joked about how we might see him bringing in ramen for the next few lunches. A new hire who had known us all for about three hours chimed in with “Have you considered applying for food stamps?” Everyone in the room was in the same entry-level role, making roughly the same hourly wage, which was not GREAT but not low enough for a single, childless adult to qualify for benefits. There was a long, awkward pause before the original speaker gave a nonchalant no and someone quickly asked for a photo of her poor brave cat in his cone of shame, and the casual chatting resumed.

    I later got to know the new hire very well and they are a wonderful, thoughtful person who remains a personal friend long after we’ve left that job. But man, that was an awkward moment.

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  142. SW*

    I was hiring student workers and took 4 of the 5 I interviewed, but not the 5th as she had a bunch of red flags imo, including being late.
    My former boss needed a student assistant, quickly, and so took her on without even interviewing her himself. Despite knowing my misgivings about her.
    The first day that she started, he waited in the lobby for her for 2 hours before she finally showed up, with the excuse that something had come up with one of her extracurricular activities. And she continued to be late for her shifts the rest of the semester! Because he didn’t fire her!
    Yes, he no longer manages people.

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  143. Viv*

    We hired a new director based on a strong recommendation from another director. On her first day, New Director started bad mouthing her old job and said the people she managed bullied her and how relieved she was to quit. I gave her the benefit of the doubt, but kept my distance and was cordial when needed.

    Months pass and New Director constantly talks about herself, saying other peoples’ personal business, and was repeatedly bad mouthing her supervisor (the CEO) to me. Turns out she’s also been bad-mouthing the CEO to the CEO’s other direct reports: the director that recommended her and my supervisor.

    She was hoping that the things she said about the CEO wouldn’t get around despite knowing that she is venting to the CEO’s other direct reports.

    She didn’t last long.

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  144. Old Hat*

    I worked in a small department that did concentration-intensive detail work against tight deadlines. New hire came in and got the orientation and the test assignment we all did on our first day (so our manager could learn a little about our strengths and weaknesses). He said, “I’ll do it this afternoon. I’m not great at stuff until around two.” NH got himself a big cup of coffee and sat down at his computer, where he turned on Spotify (giant no-no in our office because of the concentration thing) and went right to the sports news. Then, as everyone around him worked quietly and intently on a project due at the end of the day, he read various things from the many sports websites he visited out loud to us. Even after he was repeatedly asked to stop. I went to work in the hallway because it was quieter there.

    Our manager had two private conversations with NH and then sent him home forever at noon, so we never even got to see what he was like after two in the afternoon.

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  145. Pauli*

    New person at my job showed up to a team meeting from the beach, in a bikini, all casual like it was the most normal thing in the world.

    Unsurprisingly, she didn’t last. It became clear that she took a remote job so she could avoid working as much as possible. She lasted the couple months it took to build a strong enough case to let her go.

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  146. Idiot intern*

    It was our first day as interns at an ad agency; I’m the copywriter, my best friend is the art director. We get our first assignment to lay out a print ad for a certain sweet, tangy not-mayonnaise with the headline/tag that another team has already written—great, nothing for me to do here.

    After a while, she comes over to me to ask if the tagline is punctuated correctly. I look at it, think “huh, that’s kind of a weird tagline,” but tell her that yes, the punctuation is correct.

    We turn it in to our creative directors.

    We get called into their office.

    The tagline for this product at the time was “It’s ‘yes’ food.”

    The tagline that we had misread and proudly displayed on the ad? “Yes, it’s food.”

    We thought it was hilarious and printed it out to put up on our cubicle; the next morning when we came in, it was gone. We still got hired on at the end of our internship, though!

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  147. The Rural Juror*

    I used to be a sales showroom manager. The showroom was on one end of a large warehouse building. The showroom area that was open to the public had tall ceilings the same height as the warehouse – so like 25 feet floor to ceiling. Our offices were at the end of the showroom, with 2 desks open to the showroom, 2 private offices downstairs, and 2 private upstairs in a loft. Mine was upstairs and I had a habit of coming in the front door after lunch, hanging my jacket and purse on the end of the stair rail, popping into the restroom (which was downstairs) and then collecting my items to head up to my office.

    We hired a man to work in the warehouse and part of his job was to deliver samples or other items to the showroom when we had clients in for appointments. His first day we didn’t have very many appointments and he spent a lot of time onboarding in the showroom with us. I came back from lunch, hung my stuff on the rail as usual, but when I came back from the restroom my items were gone. I asked where they went and he said something like, “You really shouldn’t leave your personal items out like that. I took them upstairs for you.”

    I told him he might have thought he was being helpful but he shouldn’t move anyone’s personal belongings without their permission. He responded something about it not being safe and anyone could take my things. I said, “Look, anyone who enters this space has to walk through the front door and all the way through the showroom, in front of these two desks facing the area, to reach this stairway where my items are located. They’d have to do all that unnoticed before I came out of the restroom. They’d have to be very brazen to successfully steal my items. Plus, there was a door chime and we rarely had anyone besides delivery drivers come in without appointments.

    He still argued it wasn’t safe for me to leave any personal items unattended. He seemed miffed when I told him I had weighed the risks and still felt safe leaving my items unattended for a few minutes, especially so I wouldn’t have to go up and down the stairs unnecessarily or take items into our teeny tiny restroom with me.

    Turned out to be a pattern where he regularly disagreed with instructions or any established process. He rarely had any constructive criticism or anything of value to add, just scoffing and seeming dissatisfied with any instructions given to him by anyone, especially women. He lasted less than a month.

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  148. AnneCordelia*

    A couple days before I began a new job, I had a horrible coughing fit and burst a blood vessel in my eye. I had to spend my first couple weeks with a red demon eye of death. This was a position working with kindergartners, so no one was politely ignoring my eye!!

    The only saving grace was that I’d been photographed for my official staff ID just before the incident occurred, so it wasn’t permanently memorialized. (These were the keycard ID’s that open doors, so they were expensive and the district was very reluctant to ever replace them).

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  149. Names are Hard*

    I realized I actually have one for this! I was training a new hire to do payroll. The position was advertised as doing payroll, but I was not involved in the hiring process so I’m not sure how much this was covered during interviews. We spend a day together processing payroll and as we are wrapping up, she says to me that she doesn’t know why she is learning this. That she has never done payroll and doesn’t know why she should be the one doing it.

    Let me assure that it took everything I had to just calmly reply that she would need to discuss concerns with the director. I don’t think she lasted another more than another week or two.

    Reply ↓

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