the printer destruction, the metronome denial, and other dysfunctional behaviors you’ve been driven to by a toxic office

Last month we talked about what dysfunctional behavior you’ve been driven to after a toxic office warped your norms, and here are 15 of the best stories you shared.

1. The printer destruction

At a past job, management was extraordinarly cheap. My printer was over a decade old and was slowly dying. Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal but it was my job to print payroll and A/P checks and every few checks would jam. It would take me hours to complete this task that should have only taken a few minutes. Multiple times I requested a new printer or a repair but was told it “wasn’t in the budget” and they could only make an exception if it was completely dead and unable to print checks at all. I was just supposed to put in the extra hours to get it done (I was salaried, of course).

When the budget for the new fiscal year came out with another $0 in Equipment & Repair for my department but multimillion increases for executive salary and bonuses, I kind of lost it. I smashed the printer to bits in plain view of everyone, then submitted another request for a new printer stating this one was now dead and completely unable to print checks.

It was approved and I never got in any trouble. I’m normally a pretty shy and quiet person and now that I work in a sane environment, I can’t imagine that I ever did something like that. But that place was a dumpster fire x 10. It took me about three years after leaving to recover my mental health.

2. The metronome

I put a metronome in my desk because I wasn’t allowed to listen to music (even with headphones) (they said it was a safety thing but there was no reason we couldn’t have headphones). I was alone in the room but even stuff like tapping my fingers on the desk when the boss was in earshot would get me talked to. I just needed some kind of noise before I went nuts from total silence. I had it for months and whenever anyone asked me what that noise was I told them I couldn’t hear anything and had no idea what they were talking about.

3. The badgers

I sent coworkers photos of increasingly angry badgers.

My toxic company assigned projects that needed input by at least four teammates in various roles. Rather than go through the hassle of figuring out who missed deadlines, the project owner was always held responsible despite having zero authority. To enforce deadlines, were expected to “badger” our coworkers into prioritizing the work we needed them to do (often over work that affected their metrics).

Every project owner had different strategies. Some bribed via cookies/chocolate. Some went the target’s office and stood there. Some called incessantly. I had a folder of badger photos, ordered from sweetest (sleeping baby badger) to angriest (snarling adult) that I would email to my target depending on how close the deadline was. Emailing my coworkers a giant picture of a badger that looked about to bite them as a deadline reminder was considered completely normal in that culture.

4. The box

I would start each day by looking around the office for a box that could easily be emptied, so that I could quickly pack up my desk in case I rage-quit in the middle of the day.

5. The work stoppage

I worked on a highly dysfunctional healthcare team where the manager of the team had no control or knowledge of what was happening within the team. It was in injury prevention and we consulted to health facilities across a large geographical area.
The most experienced person on the team was well liked by our clients (health care workers) but he was very competitive and a know-it-all. His wife was the executive in charge of our funding, which he let me know within seconds of being introduced to him. He threatened the manager and manipulated her to do his bidding because of his wife’s power. The other team members had control issues, were always busy but were actually under-performing, and were also competitive. I joined the team as a high-achieving go-getter and I out-performed everyone in my initial metrics, and the clients loved me.

My fellow team members were outraged that I would drop onto the team and out perform them and so they systematically froze me out. I got moved to an office that was an annex of an extremely old building, in a dodgy part of the city, with terrible heat in winter and no A/C in summer, leaky roof, and at least 45 minutes from our main office. Most of the projects I was working on were re-assigned. I got tasked with busy work (e.g., copying a protocol from one document to another, moving a pile of supplies from the right hand corner of the storage room to the left hand corner of the room). It got so bad that any work I did was re-written by the other team members, not because it was wrong, just out of principle and so they would have something to complain about.

So, I stopped doing the work It turns out that my office was a few blocks from a pool and a beautiful park. I would go into work in the morning, make sure my was presence was known, and then go workout and hangout in the park for the day. Or, I would go into the office, send an email making sure the team was attached, head to the beach for the day, have some drinks and cannabis, then go home. I couldn’t be fired because I am unionized and they moved me to a part of the city where nobody would ever go, so why not?

Overall it was an extremely stressful and terrible experience, I hated every minute of it, and I eventually quit before my contract was up, which caused a scandal. But at least I got to spend one summer getting paid to be high at the beach!

6. The root canal

Went in for a root canal and told the dentist I was looking forward to a relaxing afternoon.

7. The costly bathroom breaks

A coworker told me that he was working an extra unpaid half hour each day to make up for bathroom breaks, and this is what he’d been directed to do at his last job. He was early career and I’m pretty sure that prior job was his first one out of school so he didn’t realize this wasn’t normal or legal.

8. The disappearances

I work in an office with fairly high turnover for normal reasons (young staffers go to grad school, people move across the country for a spouse’s job, best people get poached by higher paying private industry). This is generally met with congratulations, a farewell happy hour, and a rather frequent rate of return years later!

Except two bosses ago: she took every person transferring to another department, going to school, or moving away as a deep, personal betrayal. She reacted with raging, then silent treatment, and often told people they couldn’t tell anyone they were leaving so during her tenure people just …disappeared. Without a transition plan, never mind the happy hour! I took to noting who she was ignoring and sidling up to ask if they were leaving and if so could we secretly work out a transition plan and a happy hour? Which resulted in scheduling turn-over-your-project meetings on other floors and sneaking out in batches to hit the bar. And then no one mentioning that person in Crazy Boss’s hearing again. The delight when she was fired!

9. The bingo card

I once had an obnoxious, incompetent, noisy coworker. He worked in marketing and was genuinely terrible at it. He was rude to clients and coworkers alike, had a very weak grasp of what our small company did, and talked at his intern officemate loudly and unceasingly. My (then undiagnosed) neurodivergence often manifests as auditory processing issues and a keen awareness of when other people are being treated unfairly. We did not get along.

Alas, he could do no wrong in the eyes of our (also terrible) CEO, and he was there to stay. So my only option was to play bingo.

Since I had no trouble hearing this guy from my office, I created a long list of this guy’s audible offenses. Every morning I had the list randomly populate onto a bingo card, and I’d start checking off boxes as he fulfilled the conditions. Some memorable entries included: yelling “oh come ON” at his computer, blaming the intern for his mistakes, complaining about the website design that he insisted on, threatening to report something to the CEO, trying to say something “politically correct” but somehow looping back around to something wildly racist instead; it was a very, very long list.

It … sort of helped? I was able to redirect my aggravation away from the guy and instead get weirdly excited to check off a bingo box, or annoyed that he did something that wasn’t on my card that day. And it was always fun/depressing to get five in a row. But I absolutely spent way too much time and energy on Asshole Bingo.

(In case anyone is wondering, the free space was “Blew up the Bathroom”. Because he did, every. single. day.)

10. The book

The director of the org decided that their drop-off in client interest and some failed programs were the result of internal communication failures (spoiler: they were not) and assigned all ~200 of us a book on effective communication and required us to attend a two-day in-person training. But the publisher of the book had a strong religious association, and the material was presented via a long, convoluted story about a man who was having trouble in both his marriage and at work because he was stuck in a “communication box.” The story referred to this “box” multiple times on every page.

We were all pissed off about this assignment and, because I am petty (and I was leaving two months later), I scanned a page of the book that was especially box-heavy and replaced every instant of “box” with “penis.” Then I sent it to the multiple printers in my unit, so whoever went to get their print job had to look at a doc that had phrases like, “But to communicate effectively, he would have to overcome his penis.” Another one of my colleagues took the book home for the weekend and brought back a vase of gorgeous paper flowers that she’d made from all 200 pages.

The irony? My unit was the comms staff.

11. The contrarian

I had a coworker who was so argumentative that I started asking her for the opposite of whatever I needed from her because it was the only way I could get anything done.

12. The coveted meeting invitations

In my old job, there was a big premium placed on being invited to meetings, as you would lack key context and info if you weren’t at certain meetings, and I think some were weirdly like a status symbol. I would look at my colleagues’ calendars and when I would see a meeting that I was interested in would try to snag an invite. Depending on the colleague and the meeting, I might be direct about it and just ask if it’s something I could attend, or might say something more indirect like,” Hey, do you know if there’s a meeting planned to discuss X? I very much would like to join if so because that would help me with my work in Y [thing that was tangentially related to X].”

Others did similar things, including a colleague who would just show up to meetings even if they weren’t on an invite. I remember one meeting where the person facilitating basically asked everyone except the core team to leave because there were way too many people there that didn’t need to be.

The whole thing was bizarre and I think a sign of how poorly communication flowed and probably some other toxic traits, but glad to not be a part of that anymore. I didn’t even realize how odd this was until joining other jobs and seeing that this was not normally the case.

13. The budgetary authority

Previous non profit job where my manager would not give me answers to anything, from what supplies to order to how something should be managed, so I stopped asking and would make decisions I had no business making (I was 22!) and in my next job my manager had to remind me to not make major budgetary decisions without them.]

14. The spreadsheet

I worked in a division that devolved into an insanely toxic, backstabbing culture within a few months. It was completely out of step with the rest of the company, and when it was clear that the source of the problem wasn’t going to be dealt with, we all started looking for ways to get transferred to other divisions. Internal politics being what they were, we had to be extremely careful not to leak anyone’s transfer plans before the ink was dry, but also, us underlings were all trying to help each other find spots. Every conversation was a minefield of trying to remember what secrets I was keeping for whom and from whom.

I used to keep a spreadsheet of what I “officially” knew vs what unofficially (but much more accurately) really knew about everyone’s long term plans.

I don’t miss it.

15. The long walks

My last job was 95% pointless little tasks because my supervisor insisted on doing all the actual work completely by herself, so I was really struggling with motivation and focus. She eventually disciplined me for wasting time online (she had screen surveillance software installed without telling me) but I could not for the life of me do a full day of email bullshit and office supplies inventory without losing my mind.

So while applying for everything I found to get out of there, I started taking long walks. I would pretend I was just going to make tea and just disappear (my supervisor never noticed). Our building was the kind with multiple smaller companies inside and was gigantic. There were lots of places one could go without an access card. I found several nice little spaces with comfy chairs and plants and windows, unsupervised kitchenettes with free coffee, and even a storage room from a theater company with giant paper mache dinosaurs.

By the time I actually got an offer somewhere else, I was enjoying this new life so much I almost didn’t take it. I’m glad I still did, though, because it’s still so much more rewarding doing the actual work I studied for.

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