Let’s discuss tantrums at work. To start us off, here are some stories that have been shared here in the past:
• “Paraprofessional quit her job (totally normal!) but then kept coming in just to do the parts of the job she liked, and had a MELTDOWN when she was told to stop because she doesn’t work there anymore. Rants on Facebook, rants on her personal blog (linked to from her Facebook) and on and on. The drama went on for months, if not years.”
• “Someone was fired and sent an email detailing their grievances with the firing from their personal email to the office location distribution list. It was a wild ride of vague claims of discrimination that seemed to be based on not being promoted yet and ‘I gave my whole life to this company’ when he’d been there maybe 3-5 years. It ended with his contact information ‘in case anyone wanted to know the truth.’ IT deleted it from everyone’s inboxes — and then the next day he managed to send a SECOND one, with a similar level of wild ride that this time included claims that the company was censoring him. IT deleted that one too and blocked the sender from being able to send emails to that distro list, and that was the last time we heard from him.”
• “The summer after my first year of college, I worked at a call center doing cold-call sales. One of my coworkers ripped off his headset one day, screamed ‘I QUIT THIS PLACE SUCKS’ and stalked out. He got in his ancient Nissan minitruck, put it in gear, and attempted to drive over the landscaping between his parking spot and the driveway. He bottomed out trying to drive over a bush, got stuck, and ended up having to come back in and ask for help pushing his car off the landscaping from the coworkers he’d just staged his great exit from, his face a particularly remarkable shade of vermilion.”
We need to hear more stories like this. Share your own accounts of extraordinary tantrums you’ve witnessed at work in the comments below.
