While workplace etiquette has become less formal and more relaxed over the years, there are still some faux pas that should be avoided so everyone can have a respectful, clean, and calm environment to work in.

You can find a whole list of them below, courtesy of people who had to go through the most intolerable colleague behaviors themselves. And while you’re scrolling through, do add some of the things your colleagues do that drive you up the wall so we can all compare notes.

#1

My former boss literally threw a printer at another employee full force for leaving it on his desk without putting in a help desk support ticket.

Image credits: hauntedyew

#2

A coworker still falls asleep from time to time during IT meetings and org wide meetings. Usually scares himself awake, you know because the pen goes flying.

Image credits: Doodleschmidt

#3

My friend’s ex boss broke a computer on a desk and literally destroyed the laptop and everything on the desk all because the employee couldn’t take a joke and asked why.

Image credits: Mindless-Theory-5472

#4

A former fellow admin was caught spying on HR’s emails.

Image credits: sed_ric

#5

User was phished. They changed their password back to the same password only changing a symbol. There were compromised again in under a week. Which I had to deal with on a Friday afternoon. Wasn’t pleased.

edit: oh yeah and no 2fa because I can’t convince the boss otherwise.

Image credits: Zlayr

#6

CEO called new place where I got a job offer from to ask them to rescind the job offer. Managing partner at new place had to explain the request was illegal. They did accounting services for a lot of companies and unfortunately let the company were they’re poaching an employee know. I was not thrilled to find this out.

I took a thankfully second job offer I had and nope’d out.

CEO drove company into ground, they went bankrupt within two years.

Image credits: ExcitingTabletop

#7

I once had a tech that screwed up a task, not that significant a thing mind you but enough that another staff member emailed my boss to complain about it.

The tech logged into my bosses mailbox and deleted the email… after she had already read it and was talking to HR

30 seconds of pulling logs later he was fired.

You could have just gotten a slap on the wrist dude, but no you needed to turn it into an RGE didn’t you?

Image credits: DarkAlman

#8

I once worked at an MSP that provided on-site and remote support for a couple of, major, hotel chains. The, mostly married, guys that I worked with used to brag about being “King of the [help] Desk”, in relation to how many people they’d managed to have an affair with. They even had a rule, requiring them to prove they’d done the deed, via a WhatsApp group (so, again, not only were they doing this behind their families backs, but they were taking photos/ videos for ‘bro-points’). A really, scummy, outfit.

I stayed for 2 months before high-tailing it out of there.

It was a family-run business, too.

Image credits: Twattybatty

#9

This was a few years ago, about… 14 years to be approximate. Feels like a life time ago though. I was a support contractor at a call center, and the company we were doing work for would occasionally send some of the senior support individuals to our office to teach us things, socialize, etc. During our team meeting that week, our manager… who was questionable in behavior at times said “now our visitor (by name) is going to get up on the table and dance for us”, My brain automatically went to “nope, bad nightmare, that did not just happen”. The following week those of us in the meeting had interviews with other management about the incident, HR reports were filed from the visitor with BOTH our company, and the parent company. it came to light that this wasn’t the first series of HR reports for sexual misconduct. I’m unclear to this day – but he kept his job. At any respectable place of employment, pretty sure he would have been fired at that point. The Visitor said as long as he was employed there, she would Never under any circumstance come back to visit.

Image credits: Daneyn

#10

Was told a story about a previous exec who was 1000% certain that his laptop was faulty. When he was told that, “No, I can’t just give you a new one” he violently slammed it to the ground in front of the IT Manager at the time and walked away. He was eventually fired, but for other performance based reasons.

Image credits: Decantus

#11

I had a coworker brag to me that one of our clients that he did some web dev work on the side, separate from our MSP SLA paid him twice for the same work and didn’t notice. I was like dude…that’s basically stealing, you know they’ll eventually find out right? He was super proud of himself. My first thought was alright well this guy can’t be trusted.

Image credits: bpusef

#12

Worked at an SMB, and we would give managers and directors and partners’ company phones, tablets, and essentially anything they needed if reasonable.

During my last year there, we were trying to lower costs with cell use. We wanted to stop buying and setting up phones for people. Anyways, if someone broke their phone, we would get them a replacement. Except one time, right in the morning, this manager comes in walking fast, pissed off, vein popping out of his forehead. I’ve never seen him like that, always a funny chill, dude. As he walks towards his desk, he’s on the phone having an argument with someone else, and it’s getting louder, and people are noticing. This is a modern open layout office, too. People are looking and wondering what’s going on. Gets quiet.

He yells at someone on the phone and then chucks the company phone at the floor, and it violently smashes, and you can hear what’s left of the phone thud against the desk wall separators. Everyone is kinda shocked and like, “what the f**k”. The guy realizes his mistake and you can tell he regretted it.

My manager, who sits behind me, takes his headphones off, turns around and looks at me with disgust, and despises and says, “If he asks for a phone replacement, we’re not doing it. And just in case if he asks you, tell him to talk to me.” A couple weeks later, he was let go for drinking on the job after getting a warning. Yeah, that was interesting and unprofessional.

Image credits: hestolethatguyspiza

#13

I worked for a call center where several employees would regularly do h****n in the bathroom.

Image credits: CaptainWilder

#14

A co worker was an absolute perv. Constantly talking about female colleagues in a sexual manner, values by them by their appearance. I’m no SJW, but people deserve respect according to their ability. I left. He’s now a regional managing director…….

Image credits: magneticpyramid

#15

Had a guy that worked for our company and he was in charge of getting rid of previous employee’s company credit cards. His job was to log into the system, deactivate the card than shred it. Instead of shredding it he would use the dead card to go open bar tabs on the weekend and obviously never pay for his drinks.

It only caught up to him when he was long gone and had left the company.

Image credits: fun_crush

#16

The Tier 1 manager at my job would regularly shame and belittle his staff when they made a mistake, even stuff that didn’t have any negative consequences. He’d make you stand up in full view of everyone in the NOC and ask you questions like “What was going through your head when you did X? You didn’t think that doing X would result in Y? Are you sure this job is a good fit for you?” etc etc We all got the impression he really got off on humiliating other people.

The ironic part is he himself wasn’t even technologically literate. His background was in finance or something, literally only hired to be a middle manager. Thankfully I was promoted to Tier 2 after only 5 months so I didn’t have to work under him long. He was eventually fired and replaced with one of our Tier 2 Admins who was actually far better with people and actually knew his s**t.

Image credits: anon

#17

First boss at my first job was the sales director of a small MSP, who also part owned the company. He basically ran the place though and would read every single ticket looking for things to b***h at us about.

One day, one of the senior engineers is sat eating his lunch at his desk and gets sent pretty quickly to an emergency callout for an entire office being offline. Leave his dirty bowl at his desk. Big Boss comes in a few minutes later and asks where Senior Engineer was, gets told, then calls him up. Tells him to turn around and come back immediately and put his dirty bowl in the dishwasher. Senior Engineer is halfway to the client at this point so says no, but Big Boss gets more irate, to the point where Senior Engineer hangs up on him. Big Boss then walks over to his desk, grabs the dirty bowl and then smashed it all over the floor in the middle of the room where we all worked (not a big room). Then walked out and didn’t come back for the rest of the day – leaving us lowly 1st liners and the service desk manager to clean up the mess.

There was never any fallout from this either. They both just pretended like it never happened, as did we.

Image credits: Ryukai

#18

A doctor threw a binder full of paper at a nurse’s head. She reported him to HR and SHE was fired because apparently whatever she said to him to provoke him was worse than physical violence.

Yes, I still work here, thankfully it wasn’t that bad. But it’s on that track again.

Image credits: OtisB

#19

When I got started in help desk, they laid someone off. He walked back to his desk screaming profanities. When he got to his desk he tossed EVERYTHING. He was a big a*s dude too. Never seen anything like it before or since.

Image credits: PrincipleExciting457

#20

Well, I am hot headed too and talk in a bad mood often, so I maybe should not complain too much ?

but when I was in training, it was my first year working….
I was on a call with a customer, doing support
then my boss next door started yelling and screaming and threw his keyboard, he was unsatisfied with (was not working) out of the office
it was just a few inches behind my head… it could have hit me

well… that was one of the good starts into IT! btw I hated that company then and now. I left as soon as I finished my training.

Image credits: One_Leadership_3700

#21

I was a new IT sysadmin at a software company. My immediate manager got unreasonably pissed at a young programmer who was just asking for some info on the status of a server that was being worked on. He was worked up to the point where he physically blocked the doorway to prevent the kid’s escape and poked him in the chest to emphasize his point. The kid laughed at the ridiculousness of the situation. IT manager decided he didn’t like being laughed at, escalated to shoving, then erupted when the kid continued to laugh out of nervousness, took the kid to the ground, straddled his chest and started punching him in the face with both hands while screaming at the top of his lungs. The door between us wedged closed in the struggle and I was only able to helplessly listen to the screams from both of them after that. The entire floor watched stunned and unable to react. (See: “normalcy bias”) Took several guys to get them eventually separated.

He wasn’t even fired, but left a few weeks later anyway because nobody wanted to deal with him any more.

Software companies are weird places to work.

Image credits: radiumsoup

#22

Worked with some people who found out my Reddit name and would stalk my account. Then bring up my posts to harass me in the office.

Image credits: abyssea

#23

It’s also really fun if they treat my male assistant like the boss and me like the assistant even after it has been made clear who is who.

Image credits: Meretneith

#24

Had a guy get drunk on a dry DoD camp in Iraq by having a local interpreter go out to the trade free zone to buy booze and smuggle it back in by going to the parking lot and picking the poor guy up.

Later that same day, while drunk, he sexually harrassed two of our female interpreters who were also US citizens (one naturalized, one born in the US).

He also had five IG complaints hanging over his head.

Image credits: BalderVerdandi

#25

One guy didn’t like me knowing more than him so he would copy all Senior leadership when he wanted to jab something in my eye or argue about something ridiculous via email.

He would even resort to name calling.

It still baffles me that he’s not been fired yet.

Image credits: billiarddaddy

#26

My old boss thought Elon was a genius, had very little IT experience so we’d confuse him with basic networking. Wanted to use a dlink modem instead of a firewall. Bought random things on Amazon to test on the network. Purposely disabled antivirus despite the org getting ransomware. Wanted to mint his own crypto currency on company servers. Bent over to anyone above him and threw tantrums about it.

By the time I left, none of us really worked. He hired a squad of young kids with minimal experience for helpdesk and they spent more time playing cod, maplestory, and watching anime.

I heard from a coworker it’s gotten worse as one of the kids plays online cs2 matches with voice. Why nobody is fired? Small local government with a lot of nepotism.

Image credits: TheCitrusFox

#27

A group of employees were big gun enthusiasts and would bring fully loaded AK-47s and AR-15s into work. This was in a place that already had regular fist fights and screaming arguments, as well as rampant d**g use. A corporate memo was issued not long after reminding people that they couldn’t bring loaded weapons into the building due to insurance reasons. After that, it was just unloaded a*****t rifles.

Image credits: astronautcytoma

#28

70 year old sitting at his desk, not touching his keyboard or mouse and literally staring at the wall all day between napping while sitting up at his desk.

We were a team of 4 and we were super busy. They wouldn’t fire him and they wouldn’t hire anyone else to do the work he was refusing to do.

Whenever the manager assigned him a ticket, he would put a “.” in the response field (it couldn’t be left blank) and close the ticket without doing *any* work on it.

He retired at his desk and refused to lift a finger for anything, ever.

That went on for 4 years before the company was bought out. The new owners fired him shortly after they finished their assessment of everyone’s roles and jobs.

Image credits: Humble-Plankton2217

#29

We had a CTO that was an absolute monster. He demanded wet signatures on change controls and in person CAB. Zero typos or any mistakes. The change control form was a poorly designed form and spell check didn’t work right.

I watched him throw binders at engineers and coworkers if they had errors but he wouldn’t do it to me. It was hard to sit through. People stormed out and cried after the meetings. Sometimes he didn’t say what the error was. English wasn’t his first language, so that was difficult too.

I was done and no one was sticking up for the team. I called him out on it and asked why he was so rude and he said he found spelling and grammatical errors to be disrespectful. So I found an error on his document and threw it at him. He was mad but why would he be any different? He didn’t cancel his change, but spellcheck was fixed in the forms next week.

I left some errors on my changes after and he never took the bait. You want to yell at someone, chickens**t, yell at me.

Image credits: fonetik

#30

The most memorable one was this super bizarre guy that got hired in around the same time I did: He would openly work on stuff for the company he personally owned instead of the job he was being paid to be at, was super loud, supposedly looked at p**n, and tried to demonstrate a chokehold on his manager (who was a tiny lady that was very much *not* interested in participating in the “demonstration”.

They were eventually fired after months of bizarre shenanigans, not sure what the exact reason was, but I suspect it was actually a lot of reasons.

Image credits: _haha_oh_wow_

#31

The first MSP job I was working for (I was 20-21) I got via a connection with a really good friend of mine. Lets call her Sara. Sara was married to Tom who I ended up working under. While I did what I could on help desk he did projects and handled escalations.

Due to my existing relationship with Sara, I considered Tom to be a form of extended family. I would go above and beyond being a good coworker and tried to be a good friend as well. We were a tiny company so it was really just us. Tom unfortunately had/has anger issues, like see red and not remember the things you did anger issues.

I was lucky enough to never have that pointed at me but I definitely seen him come unglued at vendors and our management team. I was genuinely worried that he was going to hurt someone eventually.

I was let go from that MSP a few years in (For daring to actually use my vacation with 3 months notice.) and not long after Sara and Tom separated. As far as I know he never put his hands on her but its not something she likes to talk about and I don’t press it.

We live on separate sides of the state now and its been a few years since ive seen her, but Sara is currently married to a great guy that is a chemist for a large pharma company. They are happy and have a few kids together now.

#32

I’ve seen it throughout companies. Usually there’s one guy that’s a hot head/bully. No one wants to deal with him because he’ll cry to C-level if anyone so much as looks at him funny yet will yell, berate, bully folks. Most people don’t realize if you just push back and don’t just go along with them. They tend to avoid you at all costs.
Had a coworker everyone hated he was a supervisor that would start verbal conflicts, belittle people, etc. Eventually he tried to run another employee off his motorcycle and was caught on camera. Then was fired. Luckily these days those guys don’t survive that long.

#33

These French dudes got into a fist fight in front of the main office once.

A receptionist with a m**h habit left a trail of poops in the office at my first IT job, that was weird.

#34

Two guys, named Zack and Cody, got into a literal fist fight in our server room. I’m not even sure the full scope of what they were arguing about, but it was something about the move we were making from on prem to hybrid. Neither got fired

Edit: GCC vs GCC high was the argument. Defense contractor.

#35

I caught a manager moonlighting for another company, documented it, and reported it to the higher-ups and they did nothing. He eventually got let go during a layoff, but I can’t help but think how much money they basically paid him to work for another company the whole year he remained at the company.

#36

To me the most frequent and frustrating, has been: I propose an idea. I get told, “No, that won’t work because XYZ”. Frustrating but, it happens. Male coworker proposes an idea, it gets put into action.

I’ve started calling it out? “Okay, that sounds like a great idea, it’ll definitely help boost ABC. To confirm – I had brought this up as an idea previously and we had decided not to do it at that time because XYZ. Have we changed our position on XYZ?”

#37

Passive aggressive emails. I had a boss who would send me an email criticizing my work or questioning me on why I did something and cc’d everyone else in my office when it was clearly directed at me. Plus, they would do it while sitting in their office that was 10 feet from my desk when I was at my desk. Finally at a staff meeting I said to the person, in front of everyone: “if you need to discuss a work related issue with me, please come talk to me about it in person because cc’ing everyone in an email directed at me is extremely passive aggressive.” He never acknowledged the issue, but never did it again.

Plus being mansplained to or treated like I’m incapable multiple times: I once had someone tell me at a training that the training wasn’t for someone in my position in the company and they started telling me I wouldn’t understand the subject matter and it wouldn’t be relevant to me… I was actually the trainer, they just didn’t know it yet.

#38

Last month someone asked me if I would drive on site (I’ve worked from home since I was hired and I live over an hour from my job site) to scan some documents for them, and referred to me as the intern in the email chain requesting my assistance.

I’m 25 years old, have a master’s degree, have a lot of work experience, etc..Gotta love being a woman working with engineers.

#39

My least favourite thing aside from overt harassment and bullying is when someone (for me it’s always been a man 40+ years old but I’m sure there are women who do this too) calls me a diminutive, overly familiar nickname. There is no cultural excuse where I live for calling a 30 year old woman “sweetheart”, “little lady”, “hun”, or “dear”. I feel like it’s often innocent (still not ok) but there are those times you know the other person is trying to pull a power move by making you feel small. Joke’s on you, Jeremy, for you are only making me see you as a doddering old ninny at age 45.

#40

I work in administration and the most annoying rude thing that repeatedly happens to me is IT staff talking down to me. I’m a millennial, my husband is a network engineer, and I’ve been working in admin for 14 years, a role which has always included some level 1 / desktop tech support. It’s beyond condescending to refer to the Ethernet cable as the Ethernet cable for a whole conversation and then have the person you’re talking to describe the “internet cable” to you in intricate detail and then say “actually whoever is working at will know what you need if you just ask for a new internet cable, you can always call me and I can explain it to him”

#41

Yelling. I had a boss years ago who thought it was appropriate to close his office door and yell at employees. He was shocked when HR paid him a visit and explained this was not acceptable behavior.

#42

Taking a dump in a co-worker’s trash can. This actually happened at my wife’s office. Several times. Yes, the person was fired when management found out who it was.

#43

Not putting your phone on silent / vibrate.

#44

Nothing that up front. I would respect people having it out face to face a lot more than what I’ve seen.

The politicking. The backstabbing. The throwing others under the bus instead of taking personal accountability.

Most of my career has been shared with folks with high integrity and I’m grateful for that. But my early years in the industry were spent surrounded by salesholes who believed the table scraps thrown to them by small companies as a reward for saying the right jargon made for a better life than actually delivering value (newsflash: actually doing things pays way more). I’m sure you can extrapolate from there. None of those people would have the backbone to carry out a confrontation in the flesh.

#45

The amount of p**n people watch at work. And highly specialized. And illegal. And that think no one will find out…

#46

You mean like the owner of the company calling you a r****d.

Or telling a guy who started 2 hours before that it was OK if he wanted to physically a*****t a female coworker because it was her last day.

Or when he threatened an employee to cancel his PTO (2 hours) before he left.

He got so pissed when I left he refused to give me my last pay check for over a month.

#47

Passive aggressiveness, gaslighting, questioning or playing contrarian whenever a female colleague says anything. 

This has actually been super common behavior and it doesn’t seem all that bad but when it is every single day it’s draining… It’s why women are leaving tech in droves.

#48

Lol I’m as bad as it gets around me :p. I was doing an office move for a business when I was an MSP. The building was empty and my coworker and I were just gathering up the straggler tech and the network equipment on the weekend before the users came back

And I was singing S’pose: I’m Awesome lol. And just as I was singing “m********a I’m awesome no youre not dude don’t lie I’m awesome driving around in my mom’s ride!”

One of their clients walked in the door we left open. And I had to be like. Uh. They moved shop and we don’t work for them :p

….WHOOPS!

#49

I do light BJJ/Muay Thai and I worked in an environment that (obviously this an MSP) would want to fight after work sometimes.

I reeaaaaally had to walk a very thin line, any semi much less pro would demolish me, but in my mid/late 20s back then, watching them almost start fights on concrete scared me.

One trip/slam/takedown/head kick and I’m, believe it or not, straight to jail.

Weird, weiiiiiird environment. Have no idea why all these people wanted to fight constantly, much less with zero experience.

Thankfully I deflected the one or two times it got sent my way, and then they eventually found out about my background. Which to the sport is nothing, to regular IT nerds… wouldn’t have gone well.

It helped that though I’m only 5’8-9ish, but my build (from lifting, been ragdolled by guys half my size) did prove what I would talk about in their eyes.

It did reaaally irk me, I saw it as a form of bulling to those that were scared, which is what got me into the very few situations like this I was in.

*I would get my a*s beaten to death by pro fighters, I did this as a hobby. Imagine a mediocre local circuit fighter and I was a tier below them, no bad assing to be done here*.

#50

I’ve seen two service desk employees get into a full-on brawl in the office. Started out as a bit of banter back and forth then something was said that didn’t go down well. Shouting then shoving, then throwing haymakers.

Took a few of us to break it up because they were both big guys.

It was insane, some of us were on the phone at the time and had to make our excuses and end the calls.

#51

My boss was so angry once he threw a keyboard into a monitor… I was kinda scared and impressed, it seemed to be stuck in it for just a few seconds.

#52

Being assumed to be a lower level worker, having everything explained to me (particularly noticeable in meetings where none of the men are offered help but I’m selected by name to explain things to), creepy flirt ‘joking’, it being assumed that if there’s a party I’ll organise it because women are good at that apparently, I’ve had it pointed out if I wear the same blouse twice in a week but men can wear the same suit all the time and no one cares.

#53

To name a few: Numerous times being assumed I was an assistant. Being asked if they need to call my male boss so that he could tell me I was wrong about something when it was a decision fully within the purview of my role (and my boss and I were also aligned on the decision, not that it should have mattered since it was my call). Being called by my first name while everyone else in the room is called Mr. then last name.

#54

I work at a medical factory and just a few days ago another employee got increasingly aggressive and insulting when he claimed the products I was inspecting and passing along to him were defective. Eventually he very disrespectfully spat “I’m just asking you to do your job”. We were equals. He was not my supervisor. And also later that night I was rejecting samples based on his criteria, thinking that since he’s been here longer he was probably right, and an actual supervisor came and asked me why I was throwing out perfectly good products. I’m considering asking if I can assigned to separate areas from him from now on, since he was very unprofessional and his aggression actually gave me flashbacks to being assaulted earlier, an assault that gave me diagnosed PTSD. Don’t want to be a bother but it can’t hurt to ask.

#55

Replying to patients’ negative google reviews with a long, patronizing rant in which you publicly release so much personal, insurance-related information that it may potentially be a HIPAA violation. Hello, former employer. Glad I left after 5 days.

#56

NON-STOP F**KIN’ TALKING WHEN YOU WERE HIRED TO DO A THING THAT ISN’T NON-STOP F**KIN’ TALKING!
I’m looking at you, Markus.

#57

Emailing the office to solicit sales for your pampered chef or arbonne hobby. I am ok with girl scout cookies or if someone brings in something the kids are selling. But when it’s you and clearly for profit, don’t bother coworkers.

#58

I know a lot of people meet their future spouses in the workplace, so I’m not necessarily against workplace dating, but I am against people who continually fish off the company pier. I work in a company support department and my female, mid-30s colleague is dating our 24 year old student admin assistant. They get into weekly fights to the point that she’s actually tried to communicate orders to him through me, because they “aren’t talking.”

When they’re on a break, she’ll start a flirtation with a man outside our department, only to ghost him a week later, expecting me to deal with them if they call for support.

I’ve told her I was done with being put in the middle of her nonsense, so now she ignores me and I’m thankfully left out of the drama. My boss won’t do anything about it and I already have plans to leave next year.

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