HR Besties: Our Top Ten Most Memorable (and Cringe) Watercooler Stories
HR BESTIES
HR Besties LLC
4.8 • 586 Ratings
🗓️ 28 May 2025
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today's agenda:
- The a** itch salad bar
- The pantless employee
- Motion lotion
- Hide your kids at work day
- The (broken) decorative periscope
- Malicious salsa
- Growling at work
- The world's greatest email subject line
- Plan B receipt
- Ear licking
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Leigh, Jamie & Ashley
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Tune in to "HR Besties," a business, work and management podcast hosted by Leigh Elena Henderson (HRManifesto), Ashley Herd (ManagerMethod) and Jamie Jackson (Humorous_Resources), where we navigate the labyrinth of corporate culture, from cringe corporate speak to toxic leadership. Whether you're in Human Resources or not, corporate or small business, we offer sneak peeks into surviving work, hiring strategies, and making the employee experience better for all. Tune in for real talk on employee engagement, green flags in the workplace, and how to turn red flags into real change. Don't miss our chats about leadership, career coaching, and takes from work travel and watercooler gossip. Get new episodes every Wednesday, follow us on socials for the latest updates, and join us at our virtual happy hours to share your HR stories.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We have a lot on the agenda today. Shall we dive in? I think we shall. |
| 0:11.0 | Ass itching hands. I once had somebody come into my office very, very upset because at lunch, they were in the salad bar line. And the person in front of |
| 0:23.5 | them, using the tongs, took his hand, stuck it down the back of his pants to itch his ass, |
| 0:30.1 | and then proceeded to put his salad together. And this person is watching this in absolute |
| 0:36.3 | horror, absolute horror. And then proceeds to come to my office to freaking tell me about it. Like, what can I do about someone's ass-itching hand, right? I mean, come on. I mean, that is HR. What did you do about someone's ass-itching hand, Lee? I said, what the fuck you want me to about about someone's ass itching hand, like 20 minutes in the future? I mean, did you continue to eat the salad? Yeah, ass itching hands in the workplace. Have you ever experienced an ass itching hand in the workplace? Well, you guys know from season one, I had someone who I had to tell to wash their ass. Exactly. Their nooks andies. But I would think, like, the person who complained probably immediately lost their appetite. Like, I couldn't. Let's play this out. How's this going to go? So let's say that the person had told you Lee. And then you go to this individual in either two things. One, they're going to deny it and be like, I didn't niche my ass. Or, and then |
| 1:28.2 | then what? Get the security camera footage because that's exactly, that's going to be the next step. Let's pull the footage. And so all of a sudden, it is Encyclopedia Brown. Let me smell your hand. What I've learned work in an HR and how I did handle that situation is that, no kidding, 90% of the time. People just want someone to talk to, right? They just want someone to listen. So it's like me just there like, oh, okay, so then what happened? He stuck his hand down the back of his pants. He itched his ass. He dug in deep. Okay, great, thanks for that visual. And he pulled it out. And then he grabbed the tongs for the spinach. So you decided to have |
| 2:02.5 | romaine. Okay, got it. Thank you so much for that beautiful visual. |
| 2:10.3 | Manager catches employee pantsless on video. Oh, my God. Lee, is this you? |
| 2:20.3 | No, I wasn't pantless that day. Not that day. |
| 2:21.3 | At work. |
| 2:22.3 | You were, but you were not caught on camera. |
| 2:24.3 | No, I wasn't caught. |
| 2:25.3 | That's it. |
| 2:26.3 | I wasn't caught. |
| 2:27.3 | Exactly. |
| 2:28.3 | I'm more clever for them than that. |
| 2:29.3 | So the manager got a motion-detected notification around 2 a.m. and started reviewing footage because |
| 2:38.4 | there was no sign of like a break-in or anything that had happened. So as reviewing, he sees |
| 2:44.6 | one of his female, who's a lead, pantsless, walking around at 2 a.m. Come to find out. When he starts having a conversation |
| 2:54.8 | asking why she was at work at 2 a.m. Pantless, she had been out drinking that night before at the |
| 3:01.0 | bar. And she was pretty wasted and unfortunately made a terrible decision to get in her car. And on her way home, |
| 3:09.7 | she hit a deer and totaled her car. In that moment, she decided that work was close enough |
... |
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