These Are the Secrets Your Office Doesn't Want You to Know, According to People Who Work There

Offices are... interesting places. You spend 40 hours of the week there, try to be friendly with your coworkers while attempting to maintain a handle on office politics that don't involve you (on the DL, obviously) — all so you can tell yourself you're definitely "plugged in" to your work culture. 

And the longer you stay in any place, the more complex and convoluted those politics get. Maybe it all started when you found the secret closet no one uses and set up a pile of jackets and blankets to innocently nap there mid-afternoon. But then all of a sudden, you heard your coworker flirting with your boss, and the lady from HR saying mean things behind your back — and now your 9-to-5 has turned into a sitcom that you can't tell anyone about.

Below, workers with office secrets finally found a spot to spill all their beans. Thank God! This is the workday drama we didn't know we needed.

"I work in education.

My former chairman allowed a female employee to embezzle money from the school. I found out and blew the whistle. I assumed the woman would be fired and the chair would be demoted. Instead, the woman was asked to quit and given a package, and the chair stayed in his position because of his status as a coach. He proceeded to make my job very difficult for the next five years until he gave up the chairmanship to someone competent. The woman was his work wife and mistress, who also used to be his student, at our school."

- mikeymikeymikey1968

"Casino worker. There are a disturbing amount of suicides that happen on property. Almost none are reported to the public."

- MrFnClean

"Boyfriend is a casino floor manager up on a reservation, he talks about this too. He helps out whenever he hears those calls for security, because it still has to go in his report, but it’s very hush hush from what he’s told me. Same thing with how many people have to be escorted from the property because they’ve been banned. The gambling addiction is real for a lot of people."

- Ms_Nutmeg

"Bed bugs infesting one room means the room directly above, below, left, right, and across the hall are all shut down and deep-cleaned, mattress and all cloth in the room incinerated, including the carpet. My favorite is when one room is infected, the housekeepers don’t know yet, and then carry them to another room all the way at the end of the hall with the vacuum so now instead of 6 rooms out you’re 12 rooms out.

You can pick up bed bugs anywhere, from Motel 6 to the Four Seasons. You can also pick them up from having your cloth suitcase on top of someone else’s (infected) cloth suitcase at the airport. People can bring bed bugs into their house if they picked it up with their suitcase.

Best bet is to just check mattresses as soon as you get in the room, and leave your luggage in the entryway right by the door until you’ve checked and know it’s clear.

Bed bugs are literally one of my biggest fears and I’ve worked in hotels for 10 years 😅"

- pearsmir13

"Not a current job but at a past job, my manager quit and the CEO gave me access to his emails so I could find information about how to do projects he only knew about.

I started looking for all the salary information from all the coworkers on my team. Found out I was being paid significantly less than the person who previously had my position.

I went and negotiated about a 40 percent raise with the CEO based on that information."

- Artemis084

"My office purposely messes up people's wages to see if A) they're honest about receiving extra or B) they can save money by not paying it all. It's such a scum thing to do just glad it never happened to me."

- JamRel

"Only one of the security cameras actually works. The rest are for show."

- PrinceVarlin

"The chiefs on my ship and others in our home port are being investigated for wife swapping. Maybe sounds harmless, but adultery, even mutually agreed upon, is technically illegal in the military."

- Hi_Im_nobody

"That at my 'zero drug tolerance' workplace the CEOs executive assistant and the head of HR do coke on weekends together. So I know when they’re not going out that weekend there’ll be a workplace drug test the end of the next week."

- popsludge

"At a place that I used to work I was the only person with any IT smarts. I set up the spam filter to forward to my inbox any 'maybe' emails that it caught which I would then look at and forward on if they weren't spam.

On two occasions I was forwarded an email receipt for Viagra, which one of my colleagues had purchased with his work email address. I just deleted them rather than forward on because, well, because it's just easier that way."

- PhilBabbsBalls

"My boss makes more than $6m annually but likes to pretend he's only making 100-200k so the low-level employees don't ask for more. I make more than everyone solely based on the fact that I run the books and know how much he actually makes so I can ask for more."

- Beeardo

"There is a removable panel in the restroom that allows access to various pipes in the wall. It also allows you to perfectly hear meetings in the superintendent's office. I've learned lots of juicy things I'm not supposed to know about:

1) Some coworkers were having sex on company property on company time they thought management wouldn’t find out. Management found out.

2) My top boss has anxiety and would practice his speech to my direct supervisor before giving it to everyone.

3) My boss isn’t nice behind closed doors. I heard him talk so much s--t about my coworkers."

- Lostremote-

"Not really something I’m not meant to know but more something the public aren’t meant to know about an old place of work: the vegetarian roasts aren’t vegetarian."

- TRFKTA

"So I used to work for an NGO in a government-funded program. Shortly before I quit I found out that the higher ups were actually taking government funded money that was meant for our program and using it on their own non-government funded programs. So essentially they were stealing millions of dollars from the government!"

- mrtropicalcrush

"Manager fired one of my coworkers (lets call him Billy) because her good friend, who works with Billy, didn't like him.

It didn't matter that he was never late, was dedicated, smart, hardworking, and didn't gossip.

Manager also promoted her other friend (who was our billing person and previously worked retail) to HR manager. People's insurance through the company started lapsing and vacation days were taken without warning. Said people were not in the office those days when people had a full workdays' worth of emails to show for it."

- Eatmycucumber

"At a previous job we had an HR manager get fired right after returning from maternity leave. She was replaced by the guy that she trained to fill in for her while she was gone. She sent a company wide email with the pay rate of everyone from the plant manager on down. It was a s--t show. A lot of pay rates were wildly different in management/supervision and maintenance. There were talks of work-stop strikes and slowdowns, even threats of unionizing. I believe that this one act lead to the eventual closure of the plant. It was a crazy time."

- Buwaro

"Learnt on a closing shift at one place I worked that if you can convince the higher ups that you smoke, you get a 10-minute paid smoke break every hour on top of your break."

- IMainBenji

"I’m a nanny. Short answer: everything. I hear all of the whispers you think I can’t hear from the next room. Your kids know/talk more than you think. Google fills in your search history when I’m ordering more diapers. I pull the receipts out of the dryer that fell out of your pants pockets. The iPad the kids use has the photo account linked across all of your devices.

I don’t snoop intentionally, but just as a byproduct of being in the home all day and working with a family so intimately I definitely know most/all of the family secrets. Even the secrets that Momboss and Dadboss may be keeping from each other. I just pretend not to know anything at all until I’m directly told. I would never tell these things to anyone, but make sure you really trust your nannies. And/or have a non-disclosure clause in their contract."

- platypuslost