His name was Dan. Quite a few years ago, he sat a few seats away from me in a trading office. He never shut his mouth, and 90% of the time what came out was childish schoolyard insults toward anyone in the room just to get a laugh, which he never got. The guy was in his 40's, had a wife and kids, but acted like he was an extremely undisciplined 9 year old. Thing is, he couldn't trade his way out of a wet paper bag to save his life, and everyone knew it. It wasn't a surprise when he came up behind me one day, and in a very serious somber whisper, said "I'm done. I just blew out." It politely acted as though I felt for him, wished him luck, and sent him on his way.
When I was a construction manager for a residential homebuilder, I used to drive by a Temp Agency on my way to work to pick up day laborers for doing stuff like digging, picking up trash, etc. Although the laborers had enough motivation to get their asses up and be ready to be picked up at 6:30AM, a good portion of them really didn't feel like working when they actually got to the job site. I had picked this one scrawny black guy up for about a week straight because he was actually doing ok from day to day, but after that, he started to really get lazy on me. Then he started coming to work shitfaced. I told him he better tighten up or he was going home for good, and I would never select him from the group of available laborers again. He said it wouldn't happen again, and that he had "kids to feed". Well, the next day I picked him up and as soon as he got in the car, he stunk like Mad Dog 20/20. I said to myself, "Well, this will be his last day but I'm not going to say anything until the end of the day because I need his ass to dig out a footer first. " At around lunch time, I drive back to the job site to check his progress only to find that he's sitting on a drywall bucket with a crack pipe in his hand. I lost it. I said, "That's it. Your ass is going home.... now!" Then he stared me right in the eyes and said, "Mutha fucka, you send me home and I'll hunt you down and pull an O.J. Simpson on your ass." That was the first time in my life that I had ever been threatened like that. I grabbed the pipe out of his hand and through that thing as far as I could. He started crying like a baby! I called a buddy of mine who was there on the job site as well, and we literally grabbed the laborer and threw him in the bed of the truck. I jumped in and took him back to where I got him and never saw him again after that.
When i first started trading in a prop office we had this guy who would throw a hissy fit every time he lost money, and im not just talking about big losses, i mean every single time he had a losing trade no matter how big or small, and it was funny because he never ever cheered or showed even the slightest bit of emotion on a winning trade. The guy had this really high pitched whiny way of whining to so he sounded like he was 2 years old. He was already there when i started, and it was quite the scene to walk in to, because he would be sitting there whining all day like a two year old girl, finally i asked the manager one day if the guy ever makes money and he said the frigging guy made money like every day, he could be up a thousand dollars and if he lost like 40 bucks he would start having a seizure in his chair, slamming his hat on the desk and throwing a hissy fit like a little girl, everyone just assumed he was getting killed all the time cause he wouldnt make a peep when he had a winning trade. It was quite the spectacle, on days where you were losing your ass it got quite annoying listening to him crying over fourty dollars while he was still positive, but after we had all been there for a bit on days where everyone was up money we would start egging him on, just to get him even more pissed off, it was hilarious to watch, but i cant imagine what new people who joined the firm must have been thinking when a guy is flailing out all over the place, and having a temper tantrum over losing like 40 dollars. All the new people would ask the same question and ask how much the guy was losing, and inevitably it came back the same way, the guy made money consistently almost every single day, but just could not handle losing even the smallest amount of money. The guy ended up quitting eventually, which was probably good for him, because im sure if he stayed in trading for life he would have eventually had a stroke or something from the stress he was causing himself.
Probably not going to believe this one but I hired this one kid occasionally and he was strong as hell. I had a pick up truck full of 8ft logs (they were only about 6 - 8 inches in diameter). I left him alone to unload the truck and when I came back I couldn't find him. He climbed almost to the top of this big old oak tree and yelled to me to call 911. Geesus fucking chirst is all I gotta say. He wouldn't come down. I went and got his girlfriend and she convinced him to climb down. What a fking yo yo.
In college I was paired up with a guy named Roger to complete a project. At first it looked as though he knew what he was doing and he said he would do this this and that. He continuously spat out one liners that I thought were really dumb and childish. I never laughed. One day before the deadline I found out he didn't have anything ready... Needless to say, I had to do all the work. I made sure the ass hole never got credit.
When I was in college, I was doing some temporary work for a big computer hardware firm, mostly moving furniture between offices, cleaning... We were 2 workers together that were used to the factory and our 2 bosses would just say "Move everything from this room to this one...". One day, one of the bosses, the asshole, came and said: "nobody's going anywhere, we have a webcam missing"...A webcam, WTF? Who steals a webcam seriously?. We were undoubtedly guilty and I think he suspected me more than the other( I'd talked to him about the "trading" thing I was doing on computers, you need a webcam for this, right? LOL ). We just said someone from the company may have used it and it was in an other room. One week later, we learned that he had called the temporary work agency we were working for to tell them we had probably stolen something, which pretty much meant there wouldn't be work for us anymore with this agency. We were furious, we told him :"When you will find it back in an other room, you will call back the agency to tell them it wasn't us". 3 months after our work was finished, I heard that they had found the webcam in an other office as expected. The guy never called the agency and even told the guy that had the webcam not to talk about it. Of course we never got calls for work anymore, it wasn't much of a deal for me as I was a student but for my coworker, he had nothing else as this agency was providing him most of his work. The boss got a visit once on the parking lot. Poor response to a poor behaviour. Sad story indeed.It was the first time I was wrongly accused of something and it's hard to deal with when you are the "little guy"...
On a funnier note, I was at one time working for a company that was cleaning places after disasters( flood, fires...). My boss was an arabian guy who showed up at 9 when I was supposed to be there at 7, was just telling me what to do in 5 minutes, got back to his car and then proceeded to sleep the rest of the working day. He even missed lunch sleeping, narcolepsy at its finest. He just randomly woke up in the day and asked me if I had some funk CDs for him. I told him I wasn't much into funk but he kept asking almost every day, like he couldn't compute the only interaction I had with him. A nice boss.