Office workers of Reddit, what's your best office story?

Before I found a far more lucrative opportunity branching out on my own, I was a prisoner at a corporate headquarters housing roughly four to five thousand inmates forty hour a week. The workload was menial and dull, sitting behind screens manipulating nonsense numbers and soul-sucking spreadsheets day in and day out. Watching the company grow by leaps and bounds while blood clots built in your legs from sedentary positioning. Heading into the office as the sun rose in your eyes and heading home as the sun set in your eyes, taunting you with how wonderful the outdoors was today and how you missed it all from your padded cell.

The job found me two months after graduating from college. With no other prospects on the horizon, there was no chance to be picky. After a few months of this data-churning labor, I figured out how to automate the majority of the tasks my contractual obligations required me to fulfill. What took forty to fifty hours over the course of a workweek now was complete in twenty minutes a day. I was lost in a sea of cubes. My supervisor rarely bothered to grab his machete and venture into the thicket to check on me. I was getting paid to surf the Internet for the vast majority of the day.

Boredom soon took hold as all links slowly started turning purple. I asked my supervisor for more tasks, and the few he threw my way were automated and blended in with the current workload. Something had to change before I brought a shotgun with me one morning and shot up the place, so I started walking. We were in a secured area, and were not permitted to leave the prison until our daily sentence was complete, so I would typically grab a stack of papers and hurriedly walk the halls for a few hours. This made me look busy, but all I was accomplishing was a short calorie burn and eavesdropping on some of the office gossip.

I didn't interact with my co-workers, but I started to learn everything about them. Cheryl in finance was going to court Tuesday because her husband beat the living shit out of their son while she was at a conference in Seattle. Wanda in business engineering was getting fired after her higher-up got word of an unreported DUI charge from a few years ago. Derek in regulatory compliance had daily meetings with Scott in Construction. Their departments were completely independent from one another, but the closed-door sessions always took a while. I knew it all.

Eventually an idea popped into my head to start a private anonymous message board that only employees in the building had access to. A place to relax, vent, and share the wealth of information and knowledge. I registered a domain and built the message board, then I used a throwaway email account to send an email to every employee at the headquarters. Within a few weeks, the large majority of my fellow prisoners were actively posting, spreading rumors, talking amongst themselves, and wreaking general havoc. Everyone posted anonymously, but I went by the handle "FromFloor14", because my cube was located on the sixth floor. Nobody suspected a thing. The lackadaisical IT department tried to block the address a few times, but I just moved the board to a different domain name and sent out another email to my fellow inmates with the new address. Eventually they simply stopped caring.

There was no title for the message board. The web address was always a jumbled-up string of letters and numbers. Someone, at some point, started referring to it as The Well, and the phrase caught on. Passing by padded cells on my daily strolls through the hallways, I always saw people conversing on The Well. Everyone loved the anonymity of it. Secrets came out, names were dropped, people were dismissed and promoted based on what was written and posted on The Well. Whispers rose up about who FromFloor14 could be. Most of the sheep were under the impression that it was Carl in IT. They were way off base.

Everything was running smoothly until the morning shit hit the fan in the worst way. At around 9:30, once everyone was at their desks hating their lives, a post came up on the message board that was titled "Tune in at 9:45 for a surprise!". Inside was a link to a webcam stream. Clicking on the link led you to the stream of the CEO's office. He was a paranoid middle-aged man, and insisted on having a wireless security camera in his office. The stream of the camera was somehow being broadcasted live through the web link. People started replying, excited that the CEO had an announcement to make, and was going to make it via The Well. I was mildly excited as well, that my brainchild had bubbled up to the leader of the swarm.

There was a line of changing text underneath the video feed: "Current viewers 591". It changed every ten seconds, and each time it grew. I left the feed up on one of my monitors, and checked a few news sites on the other, casually waiting for whatever the big announcement and surprise were. As the time grew closer to 9:45, a few people noticed through the CEO's window reflection that he wasn't on The Well. "Odd", one person wrote, "that he would have a surprise for us and wouldn't be gauging our responses. Did he post the video feed link and then log out?" It was an interesting question indeed. "Current viewers: 2,759".

9:45. He suddenly looked up from his work, stood, and walked over to his closed office door. His office was one of four on the top floor, shared with the CFO, COO, and CIO. "Current viewers: 3,102". What happened next took place in an amazingly short timespan. One second he was opening his thick mahogany office door. The next second he was spread-eagle on the floor with a gaping hole in his head, vomiting up blood and writhing furiously. Around the sixth floor, you could hear screams and audible gasps. I stared at the screen in shock as a man entered the frame. It was Carl from IT. He grinned a maniacal grin and pulled the camera from it's base. It was now broadcasting his movements.

A few people sprinted past my cubicle, headed for the elevators and stairs. Carl from IT entered the penthouse hallway, a sawed-off shotgun smoking in one hand, the wireless security camera in the other. The security camera spun to look down the hallway. The CIO and CFO were both advancing on Carl from IT, who must have hidden the gun from view. Frame one, two men running towards the camera, looks of concern and confusion on their faces. Frame two, both men sputtering on the ground, drowning in one anothers' blood and bits of brain and skull. The inmate in the cube next to me vomited.

Coworkers were on the phone with 911 now, pleading them to "get over here fast", explaining that they were watching murders take place. Other were running past, heading to the stairs to get out of the building. Carl from IT moved down the hall to the COO's office, which was closed and locked. He knocked several times. A response to the video popped up: "Please help me." The camera was thrown down and a few forceful blows to the doorknob got the door open. Onscreen, we could see legs moving towards the desk. The COO must have panicked and turned the intercom on, and it crackled to life. "Carl, I-", and then a loud pop. Screams echoed through the halls from the other prisoners. I grabbed my jacket and laptop and ran for the stairwell. There was another pop as I got to the ground floor and moved out into the parking lot, never looking back.

They found five bodies on that top floor. In the following months, the company experienced massive resignations. Carl was tagged as the creator of The Well, and nothing else of it was mentioned or traced back to me.

/r/AskReddit Thread