Halloween is still far ahead of us, but HR horror stories happen all the time. For the month of March, we’ll share with you some of our strangest and scariest HR experiences. No one wants to deal with an HR nightmare in their office, but sometimes they’re unavoidable. Hopefully your employees (or employee hopefuls) know to behave better than the people in these stories!
Zero Lifting Above Sea Level
I’m sitting in my office and suddenly an employee comes running in, telling me that I need to get to the lunch room IMMEDIATELY. This concerns me, assuming the urgency means that one of my employees is seriously injured and there’s been a terrible accident. I rush to the lunch room, only to find it the same as always. I shoot a look at the employee who insisted I get to the lunch room that second. “No, no, look in the freezer!” he says. I open up the freezer, expecting a frozen body part from whatever accident there must have been, but all I find is a freezer full of 10lb boxes of shrimp. I look at my employee again. After a round of questioning, the story finally makes sense. This union employee was trying to show me that a fellow union co-worker had sold many other co-workers the boxes of frozen shrimp from his catering business. The big deal about this was, the shrimp-selling employee was off due to a workers’ compensation injury with a zero lifting restriction. Even though he was supposedly unable to lift anything, the employee had somehow managed to lift and deliver an entire freezer full of 10lb boxes of shrimp. After being terminated from the company, the former employee had a miraculous recovery from his injury. Looks like he had better start selling some more of those shrimp.