I hurt my back. The good news is that it’s not bad enough to need surgery; the bad news is that means the doctor won’t write off a note requiring medical leave. So, hopped up on painkillers and muscle relaxers, I head to work where I spend the day hunched over at my desk, doing as little physical effort as I can. My boss and all my coworkers understand, and I get a lovely day of folks doing the walking around for me and being polite and kind… except for one coworker.

She’s a self-described “medical know-it-all” despite not having any education past high school health class and general Google information. And she’s apparently decided that my bad posture is causing the pain, not the other way around, regardless of my actual normal practices or anyone else backing (heh) me up. She offers and/or threatens to “fix me” herself with a knuckle in the back and a hand on the shoulder.

Me: *Bluntly* “If you so much as try it, Human Resources will be the nicest part of the rest of the day.”

Several times that morning and afternoon, she hovered around me, making comments and “offers”, but I always brushed her off.

Then, at one point, she made her move, swooping in behind me when I was in the middle of trying to let a spasm settle. I vaguely recall feeling her grab me. I do remember hearing the cracking; my joints tend to stiffen up when still too long and then loudly pop or crack when stretched. I do not remember how I ended up on the floor, nor the noise I made that was later described as “trying to scream through a mouthful of wet cement.” But I was in more pain than I ever remember feeling, openly sobbing and shuddering, and there was a LOT of noise from my coworkers above.

That area of the office was cleared out and EMTs were called. Aside from some ugly bruising, I wasn’t much worse than I had been, and once the initial flare started to settle, I declined a trip to the hospital. I did accept when my boss’s boss came up to me in the break room and gave me an override to the normal PTO rules, letting me take the rest of the day and the following Thursday and Friday off without worrying about any notes.

By Monday, I was still sore but able to move around at least, and my first stop getting back to work was at Human Resources to fill out my side of the report. Thankfully, there was no pleading or arguing by this point; a half-dozen witnesses and a camera shut up Miss “Medical Genius” in a hurry, and rumor is that she only escaped getting fired by signing an agreement basically stating she’d never so much as touch another employee again without permission.

I work as a data analyst. My whole job is to dig information out of a couple of databases and put it together into easy-to-read documents with statistics or charts. This exchange took place by email over the course of about two weeks.

Coworker: “Hey, [My Name], we need a report that has [list of requirements]. Can you do that?”

Me: “Sure.”

I develop a report.

Me: “How’s this?”

Coworker: “Looks good. Can you change this small detail?”

Me: “Can do.”

Coworker: “And this other small detail?”

Me: “Yep.”

Coworker: “And one more small detail?”

Me: “Done.”

Coworker: “That looks great. But what we actually need is a report with [completely different list of requirements]. How come what you just showed me doesn’t have that?”

During the worldwide health crisis, my city set up one of the largest emergency homeless shelters in the country. Over the eighteen months that it operated, the services offered expanded from basic shelter, hygiene, and meals to include navigation services to help our clients connect with service providers and employment and housing programs.

As a member of this navigation team, all my teammates and I were required to test for the infamous contagious illness every week. If we tested positive, we were not permitted to work for at least two weeks. This story happened a few months before we shut down.

On the day after our mandatory testing, [Coworker #1] came in coughing and complaining about being tired because she couldn’t get any sleep. Our manager told her that, since she was having symptoms, she could go home and rest. She refused.

Shortly after we opened the doors to the office, I heard this exchange between her and another coworker. [Coworker #1] had her mask down to her chin, and [Coworker #2]’s nose was sticking out of their mask.

Coworker #1: “It’s all bulls***, anyway. I took one of those at-home tests a few days ago, and it gave me a false positive. There’s no way I have the [slang for illness].”

Coworker #2: “Right, those tests are so inaccurate, always giving false results. I don’t know why anyone is still testing.”

Coworker #1: “Because they get a whole bunch of money from every test. I bet they get more from positives, too — which is f***ed because, of course, then the people they’re lying about have to miss work.”

Coworker #3: “Wait… Did you say you tested positive?”

Coworker #1: “It was a false positive! It was probably because my son sneezed on it while I was waiting for the results. He had it last week.”

Coworker #3: “Wait, your son had it?! And he’s not quarantined?!”

[Coworker #1] coughed directly into her hand.

Coworker #1: “Relax, he’s not even sick. It’s not like you can get it from someone who’s not even sick.”

At this point, [Coworker #3] joined me in the far back of the office, where we wiped down and sanitized everything and kept carefully away from everyone else for the rest of the day.

The next morning our manager — who missed that exchange due to never being in the office when we were actually open — told [Coworker #1] that she had tested positive and needed to stay home.

[Coworker #3] and I worked in the shelter as a whole for over a year, and in the navigation office for almost six months. Neither of us ever tested positive, despite almost certainly being exposed almost every day.

A group from work decides to go to a major theme park. [Coworker]’s native language is not English, but he knows it well enough that he’s very comfortable speaking it. I am learning his native language, so he often throws random non-English words or phrases into conversations to give me real-life practice.

As we are waiting to get into an attraction, [Coworker] leans over to me. 

Coworker: *In his language* “How long do you think this wait is?”

Me: “Not long, I hope.”

Manager: “[My Name], your language skills are getting really good!”

Me: “I’m trying.”

Manager: “I have no idea what [Coworker] just said.”

Me: *Confused* “He said, ‘How long is the wait?’ You didn’t hear him?”

Manager: “You two have been spending too much time together.”

Coworker: *In English* “Why?”

Manager: “He said whatever he said in [His Language] and you answered in English.”

[Coworker] and I look at each other.

Coworker: “I don’t remember.”

Manager: “It wasn’t English.”

Coworker: “Good work, [My Name]! I don’t even know what language I speak anymore, but you got it!”

I work in a Swiss city police dispatch department. It’s a Sunday morning, around 6:30 am when I start my shift, when someone rings our doorbell. Whenever someone does that, our observation screen switches to the camera at the front door. The guys from the night shift recognize him from ringing about an hour before, demanding that we find him a hotel room. This time, he’s here asking for his car keys, which we don’t have.

I tell the guys from the night shift to leave and I take over. I ask the visitor to come in and send a couple of officers out to talk to him since he’s clearly inebriated. Meanwhile, I do some digging in our systems to figure out if we even have his keys; we confiscate them in the case of drunk driving, for example, and tell people to come pick them up once they’re sober. I can’t find him in our records, unfortunately. However, we have the ability to look at entries of another police organization. As I said, I work for city police, but there’s also cantonal police, which is akin to state troopers in the US. 

I find an entry in their records about our visitor, but it’s not at all what I imagined happened. Turns out that he was on his way from his home to a campsite around twenty minutes out from our city where he has a permanent spot. His license plate was scanned on the way over and our colleagues received an alert because it was registered that the owner of the vehicle was missing and possibly suicidal. Once they arrived at the campsite and found him, he told the officers that he wasn’t suicidal but that he had been drinking before driving over, and also after arriving. Because he also claimed to have been drinking after arriving, they had to bring him to the hospital to extract some blood for analysis and to make sure he really wasn’t suicidal. So far, pretty much standard operating procedure.

Once they were done with everything, however, at around 11:30 pm, the officers were radioed to head out to another case. Instead of driving the suspect home (remember, they got him there from his campsite a mere twenty minutes away), they dropped him off in front of a hotel in the city. Now, to be fair, this is a hotel where you can randomly pop in and ask for a room and they’ll let you stay if they have a vacancy, even in the middle of the night.

You can already guess that that wasn’t the case and the hotel was completely occupied. But by that point, the officers had already driven off. So this poor fellow was left stranded in our city, still somewhat drunk and without a cellphone, and wandered around for hours until 6:30 am when I finally managed to get him some help.

I organized a taxi for him to get him home while cursing my colleagues for not making sure the suspect was safe.