HR Employees Reveal the Most Bizarre Moments from Their Careers

33. Attention to Detail

An employee applying for a promotion accused me of racism for not selecting her. Our conversation “Not that it matters but I didn’t know you weren’t white.” (to then be told she was white but had a small amount of Native American ancestry). Followed by the very uncomfortable; “The reason I didn’t interview you is because you spelled the company name wrong in 6 different places on your resume and we are looking for someone with a greater attention to detail.”

34. Catch Up

Hi. I’m not in HR but my mom has been for quite a while. A few years ago when my mom worked at an automotive plant, my mom had an issue with an employee who would clock in on time and then disappear. She asked another of the floor employees if they had seen him and was told “he’s in the parking lot.” So, my mom and one of her co-workers went out to the parking lot and found the employee asleep in his car. Apparently, he’d been clocking in and immediately going out to his car for another hour or so of sleep for two weeks (I can’t remember why it took this long for HR to find out). He didn’t see a problem with it if he was clocked in and still on company grounds. Needless to say, they fired him but I’m sure he was fine with it since he could catch up on sleep now that he didn’t have a pesky job getting in the way.

reddituser

35. This is America

Former HR here. A woman once complained that someone in her department kept meowing and it was getting on her nerves. I asked the meowing woman to come to my office. I said, “you’re not in trouble but apparently you keep meowing and an employee asked us to address it with you”. Her response: “This is America, I have freedom of speech” and “what happens if she sees a cat in a commercial and the cat meows, does she get mad at the cat?!” To which I replied, “well no because it’s a cat. It’s expected to meow”. This went on for some time until she agreed to stop meowing. There was no reason for the meowing. She was just meowing.

36. Frozen on Demand

I worked as an intern in HR and we found out that a president of a small bank had been stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars and making fake “loans” to clients.

It only came to light after his wife and kids ordered Frozen on demand (charged to the bank) so many times that it was flagged in the system as potential fraud.. where we found the actual fraud.

37. Inappropriate Calendar

One of the more recent ones and the one I personally found to be the weirdest:

I had taken a contract job in between jobs, still in my primary field of employee/labor relations. The only difference–and it is a huge one–is that this job was in an office atmosphere rather than a factory atmosphere.

During my 2nd week on the job, I am approached by one of the women ( “Kate”) from another department. She is coming to me because there is a ‘very inappropriate’ calendar down in the lower level break room and since I’m HR she thought that I should address it.

I thank Kate for bringing it to my attention and head down to the break room to find the inappropriate calendar. When I get into the break room I see two calendars: one of those large write-on ones with just the days and another one with scenes of the Great Lakes. No bikini calendars, no calendars with anything that remotely could offend anyone. I look around a bit and see nothing I figure that someone must have gotten wind that HR was coming and removed whatever the offending calendar was.

About two hours after I had come back upstairs after determining that there were no offensive calendars, Kate bursts into my office and accuses me of not taking care of removing the offensive calendar. I calmly tell Kate that she needs to calm down and that there were no inappropriate calendars in the downstairs break room when I checked. Kate shakes her head ‘no’ and says that she will show me where the offensive calendar is.

I follow Kate down to the break room and when I open the door still see the same two calendars and for a second think I am on an episode of ‘Punked’. Kate runs over to the calendar with the scenes of the Great Lakes and points to it, announcing that the calendar needs to go because it ‘triggers’ her.

What?!

It gets worse. She gets ‘triggered’ when people say the word ‘lake’. Kate wants the business cards co-workers put up for their side businesses for lake charters because she can’t stand to see the word ‘lake’.

By sheer coincidence, we hire a guy with the last name Lake. Kate throws a fit over that as well and says she is going to sue for emotional trauma because we are being cruel.

None of us understands why she lives in this city since we are right next to Lake Erie and the company is literally a couple of blocks from it. She says we need to accommodate her and build a wall so she doesn’t have to see the lake while she’s at work.

Yup, no problem. The total piece of the cake is building a wall around Lake Erie.

The funniest thing about it is that she had a boss who catered to this.

He did not believe me that being ‘triggered’ by a lake was NOT something that we had to accommodate.

Don’t miss that job at all.

jjellison319

38. Eyeball Icon

Not so much weird as it is funny. I was eating lunch one day when an employee bursts into my office. She was visibly shaken so I asked her what was wrong. She proceeded to ask if the government was doing surveillance on her work computer. When I asked her to clarify she said she noticed an eyeball icon that she’d never seen before appear when she was typing in her password. As in the thing you click on when you want to check that you typed in your password correctly. She’d worked there for almost 20 years and never noticed. Bless her heart.

40. It Depends

We had an employee that would constantly be 15 minutes late. Always strolled in at 8:15.

So after a conversation with the employee, the supervisor changed her schedule so that her start time was 8:30.

She started coming in at 8:45.

When the supervisor confronted her about this about a week later by saying she was late again, the employee responded by saying that “it depends on which clock you look at” as to whether she was late

There is only 1 clock on the wall in the office and it is controlled by the same server that pushes the time out to the phones and computers…so they all read exactly the same.