Co-workers fighting

proper fisticuffs or just playground arguing?

long angry argument that kept restarting.

anyone got fisticuffs stories? that'd be funny, especially in an office.

yeah, i've seen it but the office consisted of a 65 year old, a 58 year old, and 15 guys between 23 and 33. two sales dude's got into a scrap and when their boss went to break it up the ceo said "no, i wanna see how this turns out".

i miss working there sometimes.

I rode with a coworker (let's just call him Lance) to a client presentation once. The drive was from chicago loop to far north suburbs (lake forest maybe? I can't remember now..)

Lance was all driving logan square style on the freeway, all cutting people off with inches to spare & no signal, etc. As he was driving, he was on his cell phone trying to contact someone at the dmv to complain about the traffic. First he spent five minutes yelling at the person from directory service who didn't think he was being specific enough when he kept repeating "just give me the number of the person I can talk to about all this traffic, I need to complain because this is just bullshit! No, I don't know the goddamn name, why don't you learn to do your goddamn job and give me the number!" Then he spent a few minutes yelling at the first person who answered the phone at the dmv before they hung up on him.

As he was talking on the cell, a cab pulled into the lane in front of us swearing at us through a closed window. He had apparently been cut off a few minutes back. Lance changed lanes to get alongside the cabby, then casually waved as he cut the guy off again. The cabbie started yelling and gesturing wildly, spitting inside his own cab. Lance found this highly amusing that the guy was spitting in his own cab, but the amusement died instantly when the guy rolled down his window as he passed us, chucking an empty paper cup at our car. The cup bounced off the closed window.

Lance pulled around the guy to again cut him off, putting the brakes on as he did so. The cabbie tried to get around to the left and then to the right as Lance slowed to a stop, parking across two lanes with a huge line of cars piling up behind. Lance got out of the car and walked back to the cab. He then reached inside the cab's open driver side window and both guys were flailing around, slapping at each other through the window. After a few seconds, the cabbie started closing his window while lance was still slapping at him through it. Eventually the cabbie got his window closed and both guys were just glaring at each other as people behind us were leaning on their horns.

It occurred to me to mention that a possible cause of the horrible traffic could be more to do with douchey asshats slapping at each other with their cars parked in the middle of the fucking freeway, but I couldn't find the right words. People didn't really use the word douchey back then.

People like the cabbie and your boy Lance are responsible for the decline of Western Civilization.

- one assistant attacked with hat-stand
- another assistant found fork jammed in back of chair

same asshole associate

Also...
My friend worked at the goodwill for several years, much awesome fighting came out of there.. One of her co-workers was fired for threatening an old lady who he caught putting a kitchen knick knack onto a bookshelf by the front register. He said this in the same kind of voice you would use to gently scold a three year old:

"Now you'd better put that back where it belongs, or- slap-py slap-py!"

The old lady's eyes just welled up with tears as she put the knick knack away and walked out without a word. She came back a half hour later and had much loud words with the supervisor, who had much loud words with the employee. Fired on the spot.

Dude, a fork in the chair! That's the white-collar horse's head!

yup, some lawyers be wound-up assholes

I had a job in the diplomatic mailroom at the foreign office when I was not long out of school - it was an awesome job, we worked in a huge basement where no one came by or saw us so we blasted Blue Oyster Cult and Frank Zappa and the Cocteaus and the Clash and oi music all day while we sorted mail (we had a stereo roster).

Anyway, after about a year this girl started working there who I'd gone through high school with. In school we hadn't got on all that well - we didnt actively have issues with each other, it was just heavily negative indifference really. She still unnerved me because of this though (I never did anything to her - she just hated me) so to see her appear in the room one day was pretty upsetting. But I thought hey - we're all adults now, we'll get on fine, no need to be alarmed!

So it was fine for a while. Until one day, for no reason whatsoever, she decided to laugh in this unhinged, sarcastic, very directed way at me ovr some dumb throwaway thing I'd said. I mean she really piled it on, like Neslon if he was on coke or something. Eventually out of bewliderment I just snapped "Oh jesus, shut up!". And she stopped suddenly and her face fell, and this evil, horrible glare came over her face.

And then she came barrelling across the room at me waving a fist going "YEAH VERY FUNNY BITCH, COME ON, I'LL FUCKING TAKE YOU ON, DON'T YOU FUCKIN TELL ME TO SHUT UP YOU SLUT" really angrily. Woah nelly!

I just backed up, turned around, said "I dont need this" and left the room and went home.

No idea if she got into trouble. All the boys thought it was hilarious and had started yelling "fight! fight! fight!". Working with 20 year olds sucks.

i've had many stand-up yelling marches with workmates. many of my other workmates have done likewise. i think it's par for the course in newsrooms. fuck's sake, legend has it that an old dude brought a gun in one day and threatened to shoot the then editor. (he was taken to the pub and rendered paralytic, as a safety measure.) i also tried to fight -- properly -- a sports editor one night in a club. luckily for me, i think, he was less pissed and talked me out of it.

best office fight ever: a seemingly good-natured tussle between two (now very respected) hacks, some years ago, that suddenly became truly vicious and involved one of them twatting the other over the head with a 12" record. (no, i can't remember what it was.)

actually, the more i think about this, the more i remember a load of fights. i broke one up once and got an email the following day thanking me for "saving my life".

ah, journalism. how i shan't miss it.

A guy in that same mailroom I mentioned threw a chair at his sup's head one day. I wasn't in, I missed the fun. He didn't get fired either, just told to "take a rest for a few weeks". Ahhhh civil service jobs =)

I got punched in the face by a drunken co-worker one night because I was talking to a (non-co-worker) mate of mine in the pub and she fancied him and was jealous that I was monopolising him (obviously not noticing the fact that he was only talking to me because he wasn't part of the work night out). I got a free couple of days off work and she was excluded from every work night out ever. Also, she sent me a massive bunch of flowers.

Woah thats pretty bad. Suprised she didn't get fired.

I used to have two bosses who spent about 50% of their time having big shouting matches in meeting rooms and about another 20% of their time with one of their employees in the room having a bitch session about said fight. There was one particularly amusing moment when one of them came in, the first word he said to the other was "morning" and the second, following a particularly sarcastic reply, was "cunt".

There are some people in my working life that I wish I had punched out.

At my last job, after I'd been there about two months I witnessed the culmination of apparently years of mutual antipathy between my mag's editor and one of our news reporters - two such intelligent, belligerent, arrogant men locking horns with such ferocity was quite energising.

The phrase "do you want to take this outside?" was actually genuinely snarled by the editor, followed by the pair retreating to a side office and a muffled thump.

Both emerged separately; editor walked back to his desk in silence, news reporter went out for a fag and didn't come back for two months...

Turns out news reporter had taken a swing at editor, missed and punched a hole in the wall!

I work with these two girls who are also roommates. I know they're fighting when one asks me to lunch to bitch about the other.