This week’s Pissing Contest comes from a suggestion by bananabunny, and its one I’m genuinely shocked we haven’t done before: I want to know about the worst house guest you’ve ever had. Surely a pal stole something from you or broke your couch (just me?) and I want to hear all about what went down. Do you still talk to said person? Did you stay at their house and “accidentally” break their couch in an obvious gesture of retribution? Do you joke about it now? Drop those stories in the comments below.
But first, it’s time to look at last week’s winners. Here’s is a short collection of the grossest things you’ve ever seen at work:
how much our ceo makes.
lord of the dense, I will never buy anything again:
You asked for booger-related. I used to work for a certain orange big box home improvement center as part of the overnight restocking crew. One of the summer college kids we had once was just gross right from the jump. He reeked from bad hygiene in general, often wore the same clothes all week, chewed with his mouth open in the breakroom, etc. But the point of this tale...he would pick his nose while restocking merch and wipe the boogers...on the products. Fortunately, he didn’t last very long. Man, I hated working retail.
TamTams, this is repulsive:
I work freelance so I get new bosses and work in new offices basically every other month. This particular month I was stuck with a person in what was basically a closet with one large U-shaped desk running around the back and one door. If you were facing it from the doorway I was sitting on the right part of the U and my boss was sitting directly in front of you. Basically, tight tiny quarters, no real escape.
This particular boss had a horrible habit of smacking his food when he ate; he basically snarfed with his mouth open, took these great rasping breaths between bites like he couldn’t get enough air and gulped loudly when he swallowed.
One day he did something truly repulsive. He grabbed a large hard candy out of his pocket and went to town on it for the next couple of hours. Any time he had to talk on the phone, he took it out of his mouth and put it on the desk right near me. No napkin or wrapper beneath, just straight on the desk in a pool of his spit. And when he was finished on the phone he’d pick it up and put it back in his mouth and keep on loudly slurping and heaving in breath.
When he left that day, he didn’t clean up the sticky spot.
The Ghost of James Madison’s Rage Boner, fuck you for ruining brownies for me?
In Navy boot camp, everyone spends a week or so working in the base mess hall cooking food for all the other recruits. When Seaman Recruit Ghost had to take his turn, he was assigned to the mess hall bakery. This bakery was run by this tall, rangy guy who had been in the Navy for 16 years, yet was only a third-class petty officer as a result of repeated screwups that either got him busted down in rate or prevented him from getting promoted. He was kind of Jeckle-Hyde in that most of the time he was amiable enough and not too bad to work for, but he was forever trying too hard to get us to like him in a seriously creepy fashion. Put another way, if you told me he was later arrested for being a serial killer, I would not have been that surprised. We and everyone else called him Lurch, so I’ll continue with that.
Now, working in the mess hall bakery mean roughly 14-hour days cooking biscuits, pies, brownies, and other stuff for the chow line, cleaning it all up, then starting all over again. I cut up so many cherry pies that to this day I still cannot stand the smell of them.
One day, in an effort to combat the mind-numbing boredom, I and a couple of other recruits discovered that residue left behind on the giant brownie tins we used could be scraped up and rolled together into something that strongly resembled shit. Making a bunch of fake turds was good for about 15 minutes of amusement before Lurch realized what we were doing and chewed us out for goofing off. As we got back to work, we wondered if we could do something else with our turds.
So one of the other guys says, “Let’s stick one in the milk locker.”
The milk locker was a big refrigerated space right around the corner where the mess hall stored all the blocks of milk. As this was the middle of summer and bakery was usually around 90 degrees because of the ovens, we often went in there to cool off. So, ha ha, one of us surreptitiously left one of our brownie-turds in there on our next break.
Naturally, there was a big uproar when it was discovered because no one wanted to inspect it closely enough to realize it was fake. The Master Chief in charge of the mess hall announced at our morning meeting the next day that we had Phantom Shitter on our hands. Whoever was responsible was going to the brig, because goddamnit he was going to find him.
The bakery crew spent the rest of the day trying to keep our heads down and not laugh too hard about what we’d done, because the Master Chief was royally pissed off and stalking around barking at everyone.
Shortly after lunch, he comes stalking into the bakery and bellows at the top of his lungs:
“LURCH, THERE’S ANOTHER GODDAMN TURD IN THE MILK LOCKER AND THEY TELL ME YOUR GUYS ARE IN THERE ALL DAY GRAB-ASSING AND WASTING TIME. YOU PEOPLE ARE GOING TO TELL ME WHO THE FUCK IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS!”
As we scattered away from him, I realized the MC was holding a plastic bag with some kind of brown mass inside it. Now, several things immediately occurred to me: First, we hadn’t made any brownies that day. Second, everything from the previous day had been long since cleaned up. The end of every shift included an inspection of our space before we turned it over to the night crew, and everything had to be spotless. So there were no fake turds left over. We’d left only one fake turd in the milk locker anyway, and they’d found it.
But none of this registered with Lurch. He groaned loudly and rolled his head around.
“Oh, chief, that’s no turd. These boots were making fake ones from the brownies yesterday. Here, let me show you.”
He took the bag from the disbelieving Master Chief. A more socially well-adjusted person would have stopped with opening the bag and inspecting it. Lurch did not. Instead, as I and everyone in the bakery watched in horror, he extracted the turd and took a bite out of it.
The look on his face as he began to chew and slowly realized his error will be etched into my memory until I go to my grave.
Where this turd – which was most definitely a turd – came from I do not know. I can only imagine that our prank inspired some copycat to deposit a real one in the milk locker.
After a few horrible seconds, Lurch suddenly began coughing and spitting and then ran to the nearest sink to rinse out his mouth. The Master Chief, who had probably spent 25 years in the Navy by that point and had surely witnessed horrors no human should ever see, was standing there slack-jawed at what he’d just witnessed. When Lurch leaned back from the sink, his face turned to stone.
“Lurch. Come with me.”
We never saw Lurch again. Fifteen minutes later, another chief arrived and ordered us to stop cooking and sterilize the entire bakery. Later that day, another petty officer took over Lurch’s job. We learned only that he’d been relieved and would not be back.
To this day, I can’t eat box brownies.
Blow up your former friends in the comments below.