What's the most legendary work meltdown you've seen?

1. I work for my local municipality. Coworker was driving one of those sidewalk plows. He was ready to retire any day (65+) and it was garbage day. What a lot of people don't realize is when you place your bins on the sidewalk that the guy plowing the sidewalk has to stop, get out and move the bins then continue. More often than not you're doing this for EVERY driveway. He was ready to retire and was having a bad day. He said fuck it. Drove down the sidewalk and crushed every single blue box that was on the sidewalk. He did one street, drove the machine back to the depot and parked it. Got in his car and drove downtown and quit. Didn't tell the foreman or any of us, just said fuck it and quit. I miss him.
   — w-rx


2. writing financial software in the 80s. The systems analyst sitting at her desk near me suddenly burst into tears and wailed "it's all so pointless - money doesn't mean anything!"
   — downvolt


3. This happened only a couple of days ago at my work. I didn’t see it but everyone’s been talking about it. Apparently girl A game up behind girl B and slapped her on the hard hat and said “learn how to do your fuckin job”, and girl B just fuckin lost her shit and went full ufc on girl A. Choke hold, face punches, regular choking. Girl A tried defending herself with various building parts as weapons. Both are now fired, but I don’t really blame girl B. Girl A is a fuckin annoying bitch and has been pushing everyone’s nerves since she started, and I wouldn’t want someone like that walking around treating co workers that way. Someone was bound to take her down a peg eventually
   — Xecron050






4. Fellow pool guy threw a table into the pool we were cleaning. Apperantly he got a text from his cousin that he was "borrowing" his N64. Edit: I had to pull the table out of the pool
   — Deathisrebirth


5. Working a retail summer job. A forklift driver was moving a skid of pickled eggs that wasn't wrapped properly. It fell, and a shitton of juice and eggs went everywhere. Manger comes out and does the "takes off hat and throws it on the ground while yelling GAAAWWWWDAAAAMN IT." After he went full Gunnery Sergeant Hartman on the dudes ass for fucking up. It was enough to make him cry and quit the next day. edit: Some follow up. Mr. Manager was with HR the next day. Lost his manager position for a few months. When he got his manager position back he was pretty chill from now on. Some of us younger guys don't like it as much because his outburst were quite funny. (I remember one time I was getting an earful and I could hear some of my friends trying to contain their laughter in the next aisle.) As for the forklift guy, he did come back and is now working mornings instead of evenings.
   — MicolashCaged


6. This guy in a restaurant kitchen got in a fist fight with a younger guy, punched him in the face, backed up, started shaking his face and doing the Scooby-Doo voice. He was nuts. I broke it up and took the other guy out of the kitchen to separate them and came back ten minutes later and the crazy guy had perfectly cleaned his area - like freaking spotless - and clocked out early and never returned. Never seen or heard from him. Never picked up his last paycheck. Weirdest shit I’ve ever seen. Edit: typo
   — torku






7. I wasn’t there to see it, but my coworkers have talked about “the cabinet incident.” Last year was my first year of teaching, and I was working in a low-income inner city school. People kept saying to me “there’s no way you could possibly be worse than the last girl we had.” When I asked what they meant, I was told that a few years prior the principal had hired a first year teacher. Apparently one day she got so overwhelmed and upset by the behavior of her class that she chucked a ream of paper out the window and then ran into the back room, shut herself in a big cabinet and cried. Her class was unsupervised for a while (apparently none of the kids had told anyone what happened) and when the principal found her, she was curled up on the floor of the cabinet, rocking back and forth and sobbing. Clearly, she was fired soon after that. I didn’t stay at that school longer than a year because the principal was the equivalent of Satan, but when I left she said to me “despite all the shit you were put through this year from your kids, you’re the first teacher I can remember who I never saw cry at school.” I’ll take that as a compliment, I suppose.
   — MysteriousPlatypus


8. New hire in her first week rubs coworkers the wrong way, acting as though she's the hottest thing to hit our restaurant since food its self. When told her schedule for the next day, she argued with the manager about her availability. Threats of litigation start coming out of no where. She approaches two police officers who are trying to enjoy their meal completely in tears, breaking down and begging them to arrest our manager for firing her unjustly. The helped escort her out of the building.
   — Avachiel


9. 9th grade, my english teacher had a breakdown in front of the class. kept silent but started crying whilst writing on the overhead projector her complaints about the disrespectful kids in her class.
   — murrieta123






10. First, this involves the new £5 notes. For those who don't know, they're polymer notes, and if you fold them up they tend to stay folded. Its important for the story. I served a customer, a friendly old man with white hair, who paid with a folded £5. I put it in the till. A few minutes later my boss was in the till and saw the folded note. He decided that the folds meant it had been rolled up into a tube to snort coke with. He was absolutely adamant. I said no, I just took that note, from an old man. He started yelling, rolling the note up in his fingers to make a tube, shouting at me, "Look! It rolls up like this! Don't tell me I don't know what I'm talking about! Don't tell me I'm wrong!" He kept shouting at me, basically waiting for me to apologise and back down, say I was wrong. But I wasn't so I didnt. He wound up storming off, throwing things and slamming things. He's fucking insane and I should have complained but there would be no point, everyone knows what he's like and no one cares.
    — QuoyanHayel


11. I worked at Taco Bell while in high school. One of my coworkers was this guy who was really friendly, but also really strange. He was obsessed with being a "straight edge" kid and drew the Xs on his hands, and the whole nine yards. He had a high pitched, but pleasant voice, and spoke in an overly polite manner. Anyway, he had put in his two weeks and on his last day he was working the front counter register. This lady walks up to order and he just stares at her. After a few seconds she says "Umm... can you take my order?" In his very calm and polite voice he says "Oh, I am sorry ma'am, but I cannot." There was another awkward pause and she says "Ummm... well why not?" He responds with "....BECAUSE I AM A DINOSAUR!!!" He immediately started growling and roaring at her, and he walked back and forth behind the counter like a T-Rex. He did this until the GM who was back making food realized what was going on. On her way up to the counter he calmly clocked out and left. The GM had to apologize over and over again to the poor woman trying to order. That kid was a Taco Bell legend for several years. Edit: I forgot to add that he was a 6’3” 250lb...ish burly guy who wore eye liner and had blue hair.
    — Nathann4288


12. My orchestra conductor threw a metal hole puncher at the cello section after the basses kept on fucking around during a rehearsal for an international competition. Apparently chalk trays make great launching pads. [Picture of said projectile](https://target.scene7.com/is/image/Target/15838352?wid=488&hei=488&fmt=pjpeg) Edit: for you cello sympathists no cello were harmed during the Flight of the Holepuncher. Just a broken baton.
    — SpammityCalamity






13. During grad school a professor in my department had a doctoral student who’d been there a few years, had passed candidacy exams and was writing up the dissertation. I still don’t know what truly caused the argument, but they ended up having a shouting matching in the hallway in our academic building one day. Allegedly student wanted to publish results and prof said no because they actually corrected a previously published theory he had first authored. Major fireworks. Student ends up switching to a new lab, refuses to let professor have the lab / research notes, and wrote up his dissertation using the original data funded by the original prof under a different prof (a big deal, again). Huge drama. That professor submitted his tenure packet one year later. It was unanimously approved by the dept and college.... the provost rejected it, because this former student went to the provost with the prof’s original paper, student’s data, the still-unsubmitted manuscript the student had written up...everything. The uni had a rule that if you don’t get tenure you have to leave....prof never could get hired in the states after that and had to go back to his home country in the Middle East. Edit: dammit maybe I should’ve been more vague for privacy’s sake oh well
    — SlothMaster223


14. I had a coworker freak out on a customer at Wal-Mart. I used to be a cashier, and people used to tend to treat us like shit. Anyway, the lady got pissy because she couldn't price match some doritos because it was the wrong size or something. Anyway it escalates, we cant find the csm and a few minutes later they are screaming at each other. The cashier's parting words were "I ain't fucking price matching your doritos! You don't even need those doritos, with your fat ass!" Needless to say, that was her last day. Edit: never would I have thought my most commented and liked comment would be something from Wal-Mart. I'm currently dying right now.
    — darklight33