(We are all celebrating a colleague discovering they are pregnant. We are all eating cake when a phone rings.)

Coworker: *mumbles incoherently into the receiver*

(Swallows the cake.)

Coworker: “Sorry, we’re all enjoying cake!”

(Pause.)

Coworker: “No, it doesn’t!”

(Pause.)

Coworker: “WELL, F*** YOU, [homophobic slur]!” *hangs up*

Pregnant Coworker: “Umm, what happened?”

Coworker: “F****** a**-hole saying it sounds like I’ve got a good mouth for giving blowjobs! Disgusting [slur]!”

Me: “Well, I can’t say it was an appropriate call, but maybe tone it down on that sort of language?”

Coworker: “Why, you aren’t a [slur] are you?!”

Pregnant Coworker: “No, he isn’t. I, on the other hand, am!”

(Coworker went pale and ran out of the office. For the next month he refused to be in the same room as her. Shortly after he was fired for discrimination.)

(I work for a large technology corporation that’s a little… weird. First of all, we all have to use in-house software called the Master Control Program (MCP), and I swear that thing is alive… and evil. It talks back, displays Turing-test beating intelligence at times, and threatens you when you don’t provide it Chinese translation software. A coworker of mine comes running into the office, looking panicked.)

Coworker: “The grid! The grid!”

(I run up and stop his careening through the office, trying to calm him down.)

Me: “Calm down! What’s the matter?”

Coworker: “The grid! It’s real!”

Me: “What’s the grid?”

Coworker: “It’s a digital world that lives in our mainframe! It’s full of programs that look like people! I was just zapped into it and I only now managed to escape!”

Me: “Oh, cool! Like The Matrix?”

Coworker: “No! It’s like a giant videogame. The evil overlords force you to compete in games.”

Me: “Oh, so like Gladiator?”

Coworker: “No! They’re all futuristic games, but rendered in 1980’s style graphics. The bad guys don’t just have you killed, they put you through elaborate setups that luckily allowed me to escape.”

Me: “Oh, so like James Bond?”

Coworker: “No, it’s not like any of those!”

Me: “Huh, sounds like it would be a dumb movie then.”

I phone through a daily lunch order for my coworkers, which gets delivered to our office by the sandwich company. They are supposed to deliver between 12:30-13:30, but have recently started coming later and later. Fair enough; they have a lot of orders. But when my boss is growling because he doesn’t get his lunch until after 2:00 pm and the sandwich company is completely unapologetic, that tends to leave me in a bad mood. One day I mention to the delivery driver that my directors were getting tired with the late deliveries, to which the driver replied, “If he doesn’t like it, he can f*** off.”

Naturally, that angered me slightly — after all, their company makes about £500 a month off us. The next day I looked up a new sandwich bar in my town and started ordering from them. The next week, the first sandwich bar called me to say they’d been having issues with their phones and weren’t sure if I got my order through.

My reply? “I took your advice and f***** off.”

(There are two of us in my department. I am the one in charge while the other handles more clerical work. We have two security guards that need to attend a meeting every other week. They usually come in two or three times a week for a report. Because the other guy is closest to the door, we have always assumed they just go to him because it’s easier. He however doesn’t know how to do the report and doesn’t have the computer privileges to do it, so he simply hands the request onto me and I drop it in their pigeon-hole as I walk past. He has been on holiday for the past week so they have instead been coming to me. Up to now I wouldn’t have thought they had an issue. I am in a store cupboard retrieving some paperwork when they come in. I can hear everything they say, but they cannot see me. This is my coworker’s first day back. He is white, while I am of mixed descent, with my father’s side being black.)

Guard #1: “[Coworker]! Thank God you’re back! We need that report literally now!”

Coworker: “Has [My Name] not been doing it for you?”

Guard #2: “He’s been trying, but you can’t expect [racial slur]s like that do handle something this important. He could barely understand a word we said, and his reports were just drivel. Your work actually makes sense.”

Coworker: “Actually, I have nothing to do with the report. I don’t know to do it and just hand it on to [My Name] after you leave. Every report you have ever had from this department was made by him. If they didn’t make any sense to you then you asked for the wrong information.”

Guard #1: “He doesn’t understand us! F****** foreigners!”

Coworker: “And on that, [My Name] has lived in Manchester all his life. He’s a ‘manc’ just as much as you are. As for me, I’m from Norway, so I’m the ‘f****** foreigner’ here!”

(They left and I came out of the cupboard. My coworker is looking at me, visibly angry.)

Coworker: *says something in Norwegian about them being c***s or something*

(He put in a complaint and we both decided to switch desks to see if that fixed anything. It didn’t, and only caused them to jump the first time seeing me there. They still come in and go directly to him for the report. He instead now directs them to me, and they sheepishly trundle back and quietly speak to me. Instead of them waiting now, though, I just print it right there. They’ve never made any other racist comments to either of us. Nothing else has changed in over a year, so I assume the complaint was either ignored or just resulted in a slap on the wrist. With that being said, though, you would think that after a year they would have taken the hint and just come to me, but no, they still go to my coworker, hoping to only deal with him.)

(We’ve just had a lawyer move out of our six-room law office, leaving a rather massive room that the rest of us have discussed putting a couch into for naps. I should note that, aside from the remaining lawyer, the rest of the staff is female.)

Me: “I think we should put one of the front office couches in there, then get a black leather couch to put up front.”

Coworker #1: *snickering* “Can you imagine the looks we’ll get?”

Coworker #2: “What? Why? I don’t get it.”

Me: “Apparently, there’s some p*rno where people walk into an office with a black leather couch and have sex on it in front of the camera. It’s become some kind of a known thing, there’s memes of people with black leather couches and the saying ‘You know where this is going’ on the picture.”

Coworker #2: “Oh! That’s disgusting! But it would definitely pick the perverts out out when we have clients.”

Me: “That’s why I want to put one of those in the front room, just to see the reaction they get.”

(A week later, we have a handful of clients in the waiting room, when Coworker #2 comes walking by my desk.)

Coworker #2: *to me* “So, are you still looking for that black leather couch?”

(One of the male clients, who is in his 40s, got a shocked look on his face almost immediately. My coworkers and I had a good laugh about his reaction.)