the warlock, the desk carving, and other memorable impressions made by new hires

Last week we talked about memorable impressions made by new hires. Here are 20 of my favorite stories you shared.

1. The celebration

At my husband’s old company, a new hire took a three-hour lunch on his first day. When a coworker asked where he’d been, new hire said he’d been at the strip club with his friends celebrating his new job. He reasoned that this was fine because “it’s just syllabus week right now.”

He did not last long.

2. The carving

Years ago we held an orientation for some new hires in the boardroom and one of them chose to carve his name into the table-top. It was his first and last day.

3. The Keurig annexation

On a new guy’s first day, he took the Keurig, all the coffee pods, and the paper cups from the break room and set them up next to his desk. Couldn’t understand why everyone was pissed.

4. The poorly planned get-to-know-you

I’m not in the military, but I work for the Air Force. About a month after I was hired, our team got a shiny new second lieutenant (just finished officer school, this is his very first commission), and so on his second day we had a get-to-know you meeting with everyone he would be working with. This kid stands up in front of a group of fairly stiff, no-nonsense, mostly older government civilians and proceeds to list out what each of them were doing the year he was born. He’d searched through LinkedIn, Facebook, public announcements, etc. of everyone whose name he knew and listed out things like awards they’d received, the births of several children, previous deployments, even one divorce! It seemed like the entire room had been paralyzed as he worked his way allllllll the way around the room, which included a number of high level supervisors, reminding each and every one of them how very, very young and inexperienced he was.

When he was finished, the division chief just pretended he hadn’t said anything and moved on with the meeting. Absolutely no one in that room had any sense of humor about anything ever, but I had to excuse myself afterward to go laugh hysterically in the bathroom.

5. The warlock

A new coworker introduced himself to me as a “dark magic warlock” and as proof of his “amazing powers,” he informed me that he was the one who turned the full moon red the night before and would do it again that night. He was 1000% serious. Yet, the moon was neither full nor red the night before and it remained a white waning crescent that night.

6. The fugitive

Had a new employee start at around 9 am. Everything seemed perfectly fine. During lunch, he apparently tweeted about his new job. This was not a great idea as the cops were monitoring his social media accounts. A short time later, a SWAT team showed up and arrested him. He was carrying an unregistered concealed gun. Later he pled guilty to a whole bunch of felonies, including robbing an elderly couple at a park.

(He had also faked his resume to hide the fact that he was in prison for three years. The owner of a local shop had given him a fake reference. Our owner made sure the entire town knew about this guy.)

7. The crawfish

I live in New Orleans and work a white collar office job downtown in the Central Business District. There’s a local supermarket location near our office that sells sandwiches, hot plates, etc during lunch.

At the end of new coworker’s second week, he goes to the supermarket to pick up lunch and comes back with a couple of pounds of boiled crawfish. He proceeds to peel and eat crawfish at his desk. Now, crawfish are delicious but they are both 1) fragrant and 2) messy. I love a good weekend crawfish boil where you’re eating outside with family and friends and wearing old clothes.

You could smell the crawfish as soon as you got off the elevator. He rolled up his shirt sleeves and wore several napkins as bibs to keep from getting anything on his shirt.

Finished and did the surgeon just-scrubbed-in walk to the bathroom so he could wash his messy, messy hands. We had to call maintenance to come empty the garbage cans because the smell permeated the office and we couldn’t work that way that afternoon.

I know he got a firm talking to by management but, four weeks later, he’s still here.

8. The embraces

Our HR director once led a new HR manager through our relatively small office to introduce him to everyone on his first day. He proceeded to shake hands with all of the men … and then enthusiastically embrace all of the young women, even those of us who very firmly stuck a hand out to shake. To make matters worse, he only shook the hand of one woman – the only woman over the age of 40 in the office at the time.

Needless to say, we didn’t see him again.

9. The fast exit

We had a new joiner who showed up at 8 am, about an hour early. A colleague noted that he was visibly nervous and was trying to shuffle something under a keyboard.

Another colleague and I took him into a room to welcome him — and, without a word, he handed us an envelope and bolted from the room and out of the building. It contained a resignation letter!

According to my watch, we had employed him for -36 minutes, as the working day contractually began at 9 am.

10. The fire starter

We had an intern in a mental health setting teach a client with a fire setting history how to use a magnify glass to set a leaf on fire to, according to her, “redirect his interest into something more appropriate.” She was genuinely shocked we had concerns about this.

11. The belch

The worst first impression was a new secretary, who on her first day working solo waited for the boss to come into her office, let out a huge floor-shaking belch, and yelled, “Well, excuse YOU!” at him. He kind of froze up for a minute and then acted like it didn’t happen.

During the 18 months of her doing zero work and the at least five second chances our wimpy management gave her, things got worse.

12. The agent of change

A new hire had been told by the CEO her job was to find weaknesses in the organization and fix them. A very broad request and she obviously was way out of her depth. She joined an all-hands company-wide Zoom call, and every time someone made an update on a project, she had something to say. “Explain this to me like I’m a 4th grader” and “why aren’t we charging them more?” and “we need to get better results.” These are all things that get addressed in smaller project meetings and had nothing to do with her. This meeting is just an hour-long touch-base to update the whole company on our clients current needs. It is not a Q&A. I had multiple people texting me during that meeting to just say, “What the hell is she doing?” She did not join any meetings after that.

13. The cruise salesman

I used to hire/manage a lot of temps in a customer service role. One guy tried to convert callers asking for receipts for their purchases into leads for his private cruise-sales business.

14. The stock answer

A temp was hoping to become a permanent employee at a tiny ad agency I worked at in the early 90’s. Her job was receptionist, and her first answer to any question or request, was a long, drawn out “F**************ck … I don’t know.” Said in a low-key, drawn out, vocal fry voice that could have been from a character in a Cheech & Chong movie. The VP came in on day three and asked where his managing partner was. It was her last time to give her stock answer.

15. The personal website

New guy joined our sales team. At the time – about 25 years ago – we had an intranet where we could write about ourselves on our own profiles, like an “about me.” He went through the pages for everyone on our team, copying all the information to his own personal website he built, adding all their information, photos, info about their kids and lives that he’d glean from conversations, etc. … and then wrote his own impressions of everyone, which were for the most part very poor and extremely judgmental. On his own “about me” page internally, he wrote that his goal was to have multiple wives and start a harem and went into some detail about sexual stuff to do with that.

He was fired as soon as the personal website was discovered.

16. The coffee

I was a lawyer in a small law firm that often had interns from the local law school. I didn’t know we were getting an intern one semester, and was surprised to find an earnestly-dressed young man sitting in our front lobby one morning just before 8 am. He introduced himself and said he was going to be the “point person intern” for The Big Boss (this made no sense, as The Big Boss didn’t handle the interns and let Underboss do it). He then told me to get him a cup of coffee. I basically said “lol no” and didn’t work with him at all that semester.

And this wasn’t, “Hey, do you guys have coffee?” It was, “I’m going to be working for The Big Boss, now go get me some coffee, sweetheart.” He probably would have smacked me on the tush, as well, if he had thought of it. Luckily, I am terrifying and that never came up again.

And the fun postscript is that a few years later he was arrested for a Very Serious Federal Crime and I got to point out to my colleagues that I Was Right about that guy being a jerk.

17. The literary critic

I used to lead a team of technical writers, made up largely of English majors and book lovers. One Monday morning, which happened to be a new hire’s first day, we were having a spirited discussion of a popular book series we all enjoyed before settling in to work for the day. Our new hire, in the very first hour of his very first day, interjected into the conversation, voice dripping with condescension, to ask one of his brand new teammates, “You like those books? I thought you said you liked literature.”

Suffice to say, no one was too broken up when he ended up resigning before the end of his second week.

18. The change agent, part 2

I worked at a nonprofit, and my department hired an assistant, Maggie, from another department. We were kinda surprised, because she came off as a pretty difficult person. But apparently, Maggie interviewed so well that our manager gave her a shot.

This was a lateral move, so she was still an assistant – the most junior role in our office. On her first day, she walked into our offices and said, “I’m so happy to work with all of you! There are so many changes needed in this department, and coming from [old department], I have a great perspective on how, honestly, you’ve been making their jobs harder. We have so much room for improvement!”

We all just kind of sat there, confused and stunned. One person obviously thought she was joking (she was not) and started laughing. Our manager was not yet in the office, so one of the associates started showing Maggie around the space, explaining where to find things and where equipment lived, etc. Maggie literally snorted at almost everything, and made many comments along the lines of, “Yeah, we can do SO much better here” or “Oh my gosh, [old department] had a MUCH better system. You guys are so backwards.”

The final straw was a little later in the day, when the guy training her gave her very clear, explicit instructions on a simple (but important) process. Maggie pursed her lips, walked to her desk, and proceeded to do the exact opposite of what her trainer had instructed. An hour later, when the trainer checked up on her work, he was completely dumbfounded. He asked what had been unclear, and Maggie simply replied “I have a master’s degree, and my way is better.”

Maggie had actually really messed up the entire process, creating hours of extra work for herself and multiple other coworkers. When the trainer explained this, Maggie argued with him, saying that her old department did it *this way* and there was never an issue. The trainer explained that this was actually an entirely different process (one that she would have never seen in her old office) and it seemed to finally dawn on her that she’d really, really messed up.

Shockingly, Maggie quickly found that she did not actually like her new role, and went back to her old department.

19. The plagiarism

Not a new hire, but within his first year — a youngish adult but like 30, not 22, fresh out of his Masters in Library Science after having worked in another field, submitted a deliverable for review that was fully plagiarized from various places on the web, not an original sentence in the document. I initially assumed he had used AI, but apparently he had hand-plagiarized it all. When asked about it, he said that it made sense to copy and paste because these sites were able to express these ideas in writing better than he was.

My boss then wanted me to coach this person who had a Masters in Library Science on how not to plagiarize. It’s one of the reasons I left, although I was already job searching by then for similar, also boss-related reasons.

20. Not a morning person

I worked in a small department that did concentration-intensive detail work against tight deadlines. New hire came in and got the orientation and the test assignment we all did on our first day (so our manager could learn a little about our strengths and weaknesses). He said, “I’ll do it this afternoon. I’m not great at stuff until around 2.” He got himself a big cup of coffee and sat down at his computer, where he turned on Spotify (giant no-no in our office because of the concentration thing) and went right to the sports news. Then, as everyone around him worked quietly and intently on a project due at the end of the day, he read various things from the many sports websites he visited out loud to us. Even after he was repeatedly asked to stop. I went to work in the hallway because it was quieter there.

Our manager had two private conversations with him and then sent him home forever at noon, so we never even got to see what he was like after two in the afternoon.

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