Who’s your favorite character on The Office? Maybe you’re partial to Michael’s hilarious antics or Jim’s wit. You might even love Dwight and his dedication to rules and authority. But I’m willing to bet that your favorite character is not Toby. Regardless of how you feel about Toby as a character, though, you have to admit that his job would not be for the faint of heart. And as ridiculous as the scenarios on this beloved sitcom seem, it appears that real life HR reps encounter shockingly similar situations.

Human Resources employees have been sharing the most outrageous occurrences they’ve had to deal with at work on Reddit, so we’ve gathered some of the most sitcom-worthy moments down below. Be sure to upvote the tales you can’t believe actually happened, and remember to thank your lucky stars that you’re not responsible the next time something wild happens in your office. (Unless you are HR, in which case, you should definitely get a pay raise.)Read More: 30 Spicy, Wild, And Disturbing Workplace Incidents That HR People Had To Sort Out

#1

I had one employee submit a form to increase her own salary, she also forged her manager’s signature.

Like, for real?

Image credits: VoidDrinker

#2

I work for the civil service in the HR department, and I’ve heard some crazy things. A lot comes to mind, but I suppose the first thing that I thought of was the time that we were clearing out room old paperwork and I was relatively new. Some of the older colleagues were commenting on some of the files we were finding as they remembered the cases. Things like “Oh I remember this woman, she got married to this guy in the Post Office” or “This guy go through Stage 4 cancer, good for him”.

One of the files they picked up they just said casually “Remember this job? He’s the one that stabbed his manager in the face and ended up with a promotion. Crazy.” … and just moved right on past. I was like woooah hold up, I need the end to that story please.

Turns out they were out for a Christmas dinner and this guy had a fight with his manager, grabbed a steak knife and stabbed him in the cheek. Because of some strange circumstances at the time in government and who he was connected to, they couldn’t or wouldn’t fire him so they decided to transfer him to a different department. Only that there were no more positions left at his grade, and he wouldn’t settle for a lower grade so they ended up promoting him to a higher position including all benefits and pay. Civil service eh?

Image credits: AmzeyWamzey

#3

My dad was pretty high up in HR for a F500 company, he had some great firing stories.

They had to fire one of their VPs because he was stealing bacon from the cafeteria every morning. He’d get his tray and put his newspaper over the bacon and then go through the cashier line. He lost a $200k/yr job over 60 cents worth of bacon every day.

He also handled the on the job deaths since it was a utility company. Since it was a power company, many of the power plants were cooled with water from natural bodies of water. The plants would have a water intake pipe submerged in a river for this purpose. They were big too, easily seven or eight feet in diameter.

The intakes would fill up with debris from time to time and they’d have to send a diver down into it to clean it out. The intakes used an impeller to pull in the water, which is basically just a big fan blade. The impeller would have to be stopped for the diver to go down in there. One time they sent a diver down there thinking the impeller was stopped, but it wasn’t. The diver was dead before they could pull him out. Evidently, there wasn’t much left of him and the company ended up having to shell out a lot of money for psychotherapy for the guys that had to go down in there and recover what was left of him.

Image credits: ChesterMcGonigle

#4

I was sitting in the HR office with one of the members of HR, I was waiting on her to finish a form so that we could go eat lunch. Suddenly, this guy comes in, he was a young temp employee and had only been there a week or so, and says he has something he needs to talk about. I start to get up to leave when he blurts out that he doesn’t like that fact that there are so many gays and lesbians working in the company. Once he says that I sit right back down. The HR employee asks him to clarify and he goes on about how his trainer was gay and his team lead is gay and his manager is a lesbian (all true) and he doesn’t feel comfortable working around all these gays and lesbians. The HR employee asks him is anyone has every sexually harassed him, which he says they haven’t. She then says ‘so you want me to fire these employees, strictly based on their sexual orientation, just so you don’t feel uncormfortable?’ He says yes, after which she tells him to leave the office. She then calls in his manager and talks with her about it, he ends up quitting by the end of the week.

Image credits: Whirligig44

#5

1) I had a bookkeeper that paid himself two checks every week. We did not catch it for a year.

2) Another bookkeeper quit and files for unemployment. He then claimed a claim with EEOC that he had a disability and we failed to make accommodations for him. The disability was alcoholism, and the accommodations were leaving early to attend AA meetings. Seriously, we had to hire a lawyer to fight that.

3) A guy I hired hurt himself on the first hour of the first day of work, he claimed he fell and hit his head on the wall. He was out for weeks on workman’s comp form the concussion. Then when he came back on light duty, he could only do desk work but managed to fall again in the bathroom and hit his head again. It took me 9-months to get rid of him. It turns out this was not his first rodeo, when I called his former employer the lady I spoke to made an offhand comment about workplace accidents and head injuries and the importance of cameras in the workplace

4) While doing a remodel of a museum, one of my employees helped himself to a gun that was on display. It was very ugly and embarrassing for everyone. My company was kicked off the job and banned from ever working for them again. I fired the guy and he filed a discrimination claim with EEOC because I did not fire the whole crew, just him.

I got more..

Image credits: Phat3lvis

#6

I had a friend working a GM when HR thought it was a good idea to test everyone on the skill set needed for their department regardless of how long they were in their position. Long careers, 15, 20, 25 years were ruined because even though they worked there for a long time with a long string of great performance reviews, they didn’t pass the test that measured what HR thought was required for the department.

Say your a materials expert working in a design department. You may know barely enough in the CAD system to draw a cylinder. On the other hand, given a cylinder, you can whip out all the properties that cylinder would have if it were made from aluminum, cold rolled steel, fiber glass etc. You’d be out of your job because HR said you had to have a certain level of CAD expertise even if it wasn’t relevant to your role in the design process.

Image credits: AmazingPass0

#7

Saw a guy blatantly lie in his recruitment form….(watching him fill it out in front of me!)…it was total bollocks….apparently he was 15th in line to the throne, went to Eaton, studied at Oxford and served in the Army for 9 years after training at Sandhurst….not bad for a 21 year old! Who had in fact spent 3 years in a Young Offenders institute, battling a drug problem……

Image credits: StanMarsh01

#8

My friend who worked in HR told me about her old job where the boss had drilled a hole from his office through to the ladies changing rooms and was perv whacking it every chance he could get. They found out because someone saw the light through the hole as he took the cover off for a peek. He denied everything and they had to take a dna sample from the carpet under the hole which confirmed it was a) him and b) that he had indeed been whacking away.

Image credits: Dr_Kintobor

#9

I once asked a candidate to tell me about a time your attention to detail paid off. I hate that question, but it’s a standardized one that our department had to use for all positions.

The candidate said completely stone-faced: “I worked at Sears and would follow the black customers around to make sure they didn’t shoplift anything.”

There were 3 of us on the hiring committee, we all just looked at each other in disbelief and wrapped up the interview there. It’s been a running joke now about the worst possible answer you could give to a question. This person has actually applied to about 5 other positions since.

Image credits: anon

#10

I had an applicant list JESUS as her references.

Image credits: Pin-Up-Paggie

#11

We had a guy in one of our stores submit a grievance to us about how we were discriminating against him because we were giving a female 7 months pregnant colleague some extra breaks (she had a medical note confirming the reasonable adjustments needed) so she could sit down for an extra 5 mins every so often because he was unable to get pregnant so could not take advantage of the same extra breaks.

Didn’t really know where to start with that one!

Image credits: Evelyntothestars

#12

As an office manager, I hired an employee and on the first day he was told to fill in his new hire paperwork. I put him in an office and come back in a while later and ask for the papers. He hands them over, and I scan them off to our HR dept. About twenty minutes later I get a call from our HR rep who thought it was pretty funny that he filled out their name as “Batman” on all his paperwork. So I have the guy re-do the paperwork, and he wrote his name as batman.

By the end of the day I had to get this new hire on a call with HR to have them explain to him that if he didn’t fill out the paperwork correctly he’d be out of the job. I had him in my office about once a week for one ridiculous thing after another until one day he comes in and announces that he’s changed his name, officially, to Batman. So, I get him the W-4 and paperwork, he fills it out and off we go. He’s Batman now. HR comes back and says they need the proof of name change so that they can update his withholdings. I tell Batman he needs to provide that so we can finish updating him in the system. No problem, I’ll bring it tomorrow he says. Three weeks go by where he’s telling me and HR he forgot again, then it got lost, etc. Turns out, he’d never actually changed his name.

Image credits: theouterworld

#13

Manufacturing, long story short, the company uses some pretty dangerous equipment and machines. The manufacturing floor and warehouse had started to have some safety issues, so they decided to start doing random drug tests.

60% failed, including the best friend of the owner. This same person was responsible for several of the safety issues mentioned above and was directly responsible for two people being injured while on the job due to negligence on his part. So what did HR do?

Nothing. The owner was one of the people that failed.

Image credits: UniqueConstraint

#14

My job is a constant HR nightmare. Boss has slept with coworker A. Coworker A is married to coworker B. Coworker B+A have been married (unhappily), for 10 years or something now, B has no idea, even though B invites boss over for dinner once every other week.

Boss is now dating new coworker (my best friend lol), and has already “gifted” her 2000$, despite another coworker suffering from cancer and barely being able to pay the bills when he was still working.

My other boss, who owns other lesser half of company has called me a narcicist in a meeting, told me literally “there are no such things as business ethics”.

Image credits: asdaaaaaaaa