Crazy Workplace

Wait 'til you see what they did to the door greeter.

"Who's the one who didn't bring lice into the office? Meredith. Sure, I gave everybody pink eye once, and my ex keyed a few of their cars, and yeah, I BMed in the shredder on New Year's. But I didn't bring the lice in. That was all Pam."

— Meredith Palmer,The Office (US)

In the wacky world of this employment opportunity, just going to work is an adventure. This can be because of the workplace's purpose — something like herding unicorns, building customized planets, or exterminating a sleeping populace's nightmares. (Safety is rarely ever part of the job description.) More realistic WorkComs may have mundane work being done by weird employees, like the Boxed Crook, Bunny-Ears Lawyer, or adult Chuunibyou. Either way, it will be as different from ordinary work as possible. Sometimes, both the job and employees are equally eccentric. In the worst cases, there's No Such Thing as H.R.

Not to be confused with Wacky Startup Workplace (which is quirky only in the way it treats its workers) or Quirky Work, which is a piece of media considered strange. A Heroes "R" Us might qualify for the trope if the setting doesn't skew towards Mundane Fantastic. Noodle Implements are often used to establish the workplace as an environment where weird and wonderful things are happening, whether the viewpoint character is aware of them or not. Decadent Court, Celestial Bureaucracy, Time Police, Area 51, and The Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday are their own subtropes.

What this trope is not: A workplace where the story's focus is not on the employees or leaders of such a workplace. (For example, canon Hogwarts would not be a Quirky Workplace because the focus is on its students.) A workplace employing only a single person, like a tutor or amateur detective. A snowclone of Ragtag Bunch of Misfits who share a workplace. However, if a crazy workplace is the main focus of at least one plot, this trope can be in play. When adding entries, please try to explain how the employees are quirky beyond having narrative-worthy personalities.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You: Hahari Hanazono, whose family owns a large number of successful companies, buys out Rentarou's school to become the new chairwoman in order to spend time with him. Her fetish for anything she finds cute led to her implementing hiring policies based on applicants' cute factors, with at least one of her personal maids, at least one of the school's teachers, and at least one of her company's employees being hired for their respective positions because she thought they were cute.
• Aggretsuko: Retsuko's defining trait is Suppressed Rage, in which she sings her frustrations with Death Metal in private. With the likes of Kabae, Tsunoda, Komiya, Tsubone and Ton in her office, and her boss who asks for tea nonstop, it's clear to see why she would be stressed out all the time.
• Africa no Salaryman: The main trio has the kinda-hearted Lion with a Face of a Thug, the lazy Toucan who is a Manchild, and the hardworking Deadpan Snarker Lizard. And these are the sanest of the coworkers, topped with President Turtle, who's very open about treating the employees as corporate slaves.
• Fairy Tail: When Lucy Heartfilia first comes to the Fairy Tail Guild, she is utterly amazed to be there, among some of the best wizards in the world... and then she finds out that Natsu works for them too, and that everyone there is seemingly as mad as he is.
• Heaven's Design Team is about a design agency contracted by God to create all the different species of animals.
• In Magilumiere Co. Ltd., every single employee of the titular organization is a Bunny-Ears Lawyer. For instance, the president, Shigemoto, is constantly dressed in silly anime-style magical girl outfits even while pushing pencils and giving orders. Despite employees' quirks, the small startup quickly makes a name for itself through its stellar track record and unique method of handling Kaii.
• Martian Successor Nadesico. Nadesico is a quirky privateer vessel, crewed by "extreme personalities".
  • Captain Yurika Misumaru is a tactical genius who is more interested in rekindling a romance with her childhood friend, Akito.
  • Jun Aoi is her long-suffering second-in-command, who wants her to notice him, to no avail.
  • Akito Tenkawa is a fry cook turned giant-robot pilot, trying to find out why his parents were murdered on Mars while enjoying his favorite series, Gekigengar III.
  • Ruri Hoshino is a genetically modified Deadpan Snarker child who operates the ship's computer while wondering why she's surrounded by idiots.
  • Seiya Uribitake is a skilled, but unlicensed, mechanic who is also a womanizer.
  • Inez Fressange is a "dried-out walking encyclopedia" who takes great offense if someone other than her tries to give explanations. She also designed the Nadesico.
  • Megumi Reinhard is a voice actor turned communications officer, and in the middle of a Love Triangle vying against the captain for Akito's affections.
  • Haruka Minato is a former secretary turned navigator, who has made some modifications to her uniform.
  • Prospector is the man who hand-picked this crew and is constantly arguing with them about the terms of their contracts (such as the non-fraternization clause.
• In Nanatsu No Taizai, the ex-Praetorian Guard of Liones was a squad of, essentially, whatever supernatural creature was not wanted by their own race. They were easily the strongest soldiers in the kingdom, but they did not have the patience or gentility to police civilians, much less aristocrats. After their exile, Meliodas formed a bar notable for the inedibility of its food and for being carried on the back of a giant pig, and the rest of the members eventually joined (and this happened to begin with because a princess of the kingdom stumbled upon the bar while looking for them).
• WORKING!!. Family restaurant Wagnaria has a high school girl who looks like she's in elementary school, a waitress who carries around a katana and goes on lengthy speeches about her crush on the manager, a cook who's hopelessly smitten with said waitress, and takes out his frustrations by messing with the Token Mini-Moe and her hair, another cook who manipulates every one around him, a androphobic waitress with a Megaton Punch, a manager with a bottomless pit for a stomach and all the charm of a thug, and a waiter obsessed with small, cute things.

Comic Books

• The X-Men comics that focus on "graduated" members often depict the Xavier Institute as one of these. Amenities include a mindreading device of global scope, a combat simulator for those who want to tear up robots in the middle of the night, and social exposure to people from cultures and belief systems all over the world (if not the galaxy; a few aliens have studied there). Just don't touch people when you pass them in the hallway, one of them might suck your soul out.

Fanfiction

• In The Infinite Loops, the World Tree Yggdrasil is staffed by various deities/computer programmers tasked with preserving every fictional universe.
• Shipping And Handling: This is a large draw of why Ditzy Doo enjoys her work at Equestria Speedy Shipping Service. The cast is just so zany and gets along so well that no two days are the same, and each day is more interesting than the last.
• In Uninvited Guests, the Gotei 13 has all the ruckus and noise you'd expect of 100+ soldiers whose barracks are right next to each other. And the worst troublemakers have no compunction about using their superpowers to avoid work or discipline. Ukitake openly admits that he can't control his subordinates, just keep them within the bounds of important laws. Also, all of them are dead.

Film — Animation

• Monsters, Inc.: The titular organisation has scary monsters as employees, whose job it is to scare children at night in order to use their screams to generate electricity to power the monster world. At the end of the film when it is discovered that children's laughter is 10 times more powerful than scream energy, the company switches formats to where the employees make children laugh instead.

Literature

• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: Willy Wonka owns the world's largest chocolate factory. In that place where he has a race of little people as his workers. He has a chocolate river to mix chocolate, an inventing room to make and test experimental candy, squirrels that crack open nuts, and a TV room that transports chocolate bars to a TV screen.
• In Cooking With Wild Game, there's "Kiba", a food stall operated by the local barbarian village. Despite its small size, it employs a lot of people — partly to keep up with demand (the food is very good), partly to familiarize villagers with urban folk, and partly to ward off the racists and rival clans that want to attack it. Because villagers so rarely enter the city, Kiba has also become an unofficial HQ for all manner of diplomatic negotiations, information gathering, and interclass conversations.
• The Feline Wizards are a band of technicians who go to whatever place and time they are needed to fix strings — the dimensional strings that comprise existence. Yet despite their intelligence, they are still cats, love of yowling and pouncing on rats included.
• In Magian Company, the eponymous NGO was created by someone who might be uncharitably referred to as a "demon lord" (he's certainly killed enough people to qualify), and employs several troubleshooters to fight against terrorists and thieves trying to steal the MacGuffin that fuels company operations. It also teaches people how to make magical nuclear reactors.
• In There Was No Secret Evil Fighting Organization, the bar Amaterasu is a front organization for the eponymous group of superhero LARPers (and their monkey mascot), most of whom don't know they're LARPing.
  Policeman: Any reason why you have a CLOSED sign hanging on the door?
  Sato:...The more curious customers like it that way.

Live-Action TV

• Are You Being Served?
  • Mrs. Slocombe, senior assistant on the Ladies' counter. She sported exotically colored hair and made constant comments about her cat, which she always called "her pussy". An evidently artificial posh accent was undercut by a propensity for malapropisms and a tendency to revert back to a working-class Blackpool accent when surprised or angry.
  • Mr. Humphries, associate (later senior) assistant on the Men's counter. Ambiguously Camp Gay: the general confusion about his sexual orientation made up much of the show's jokes. Among his perennial gags was the substitution of a deep baritone for his usual effeminate voice when answering the telephone.
  • Mr. Lucas, junior assistant on the Men's counter. A borderline Casanova Wannabe, often in trouble for minor violations of the store's baroque codes of conduct (for example, his failure to display a properly fluted pocket handkerchief). Mr. Lucas was well-known for being almost predictably late — he usually attempted to cover it by signing false names in the work register, but this backfired when Captain Peacock dryly pointed out that the majority of the names Mr. Lucas chose were either celebrities, fictional, dead, or a combination thereof. He was later substituted in favor of Mr. Spooner, essentially the same character reduced to a secondary role.
  • Miss Brahms, the sexy Deadpan Snarker ladieswear junior, noted for her sometimes incomprehensible Estuary accent.
  • Captain Peacock, the floorwalker. Due to his (somewhat exaggerated) military background (he served in the RASC, Royal Army Service Corps) and higher position, he considers himself above the assistants and flaunts his greater social standing. Constantly in trouble with his wife for supposed improprieties, although it is not clear whether he ever actually crossed the line into outright infidelity.
  • Mr. Grainger, the elderly, cantankerous senior assistant in menswear. He was later replaced by the progressively younger and less cantankerous Mr. Tebbs, then Mr. Goldberg, then Mr. Grossman, and finally Mr. Klein. For the final few seasons, this role was removed, reducing the core cast to a Five-Man Band.
• Better Off Ted's Viridian Dynamics is a blatantly Evil, Inc. that can invent anything, and specializes in things that make the world worse. Among its products are bombs, spy drones, and weaponized pumpkins (engineered to carry a fungus that feeds on human flesh). Much of the show's Black Comedy comes from this.
• In The Brittas Empire, among the things that have happened to Whitbury Newtown Leisure Centre are an attack by an army of Roman war re-enactors, an emu running loose inside, and a cow delivering in the squash court. This is not accounting for its employees, who include a Pointy-Haired Boss with no social skills, a receptionist who lives in the Centre (and keeps her children in the drawers behind the reception desk), and a Deputy Manager Wet who should not even be near a pool for hygienic reasons.
• Brooklyn Nine-Nine:
  • The main character Jake is either the best or the worst detective in his squad. His great intellect, creativity, and ingenuity allow him to solve the most difficult and even unsolvable cold cases, however, his childishness, short attention span, and petty (but innocent) agendas make him a liability at times.
  • Rosa is hot-blooded and reserved, to the point not a single co-worker knows where she lives and the life she has outside work and tends to carry knives, daggers, and other extra weapons aside from her standard sidearm.
  • Charles has plenty of silly interests that he likes to show off in the office and is proud of his love for food, even the very exotic and unusual.
  • Terry, the Big Guy is a close second to Charles in terms of quirkiness, despite being appearing as the strong and serious brute he is one of the hammiest in the squad.
  • Amy is a nerdy overachiever, who often takes work-related bets and goes wild during wacky office games.
  • Gina the office admin who describes herself as "the human form of the 100 emoji", is a snarky troll who loves to crack wise about her co-workers.
  • Hitchcock and Scully are the old and lazy detectives in the precinct who eat and sleep most of the day, but surprisingly have a lot of Hidden Depths.
  • The captain, Raymond is a stoic man whose personal life can be described as plain, his interests are boring, his favorite food is bland, his husband is as unenergetic as he is, and his work is mostly in the office.
• Community: The staff at Greendale Community College are as eccentric as their students, if not more so:
  • Dean Pelton is an eccentric “pansexual imp” with a love for wearing extravagant costumes for any reason, and who is generally somewhat competent at running a community college.
  • Señor Chang is a semi-psychotic Spanish teacher with fake credentials and no social skills, who ends up going from teacher to student to head of security to evil overlord to janitor to teacher again across 6 seasons.
  • Vice Dean Labourne of the air conditioning repair school is the latest of a conspiracy that has purportedly lasted since Ancient Egypt dedicated to the ideals of the superiority of air conditioning repair.
  • When Jeff Winger becomes a professor, he’s just as snarky and maladjusted as he was as a student, only with more day drinking.
  • Elroy Patashnik is brought on in Season 6, a semi-cantankerous old guy who lives in his RV and created an entire VR world in the 90s because he thought a simple desktop was too inelegant.
• Chuck: The Buy More is a big-box electronics store where Chuck is the Only Sane Employee on account of all his coworkers being nuts, especially the duo of Jeff and Lester. One episode turns the delivery cage into a full cage fight arena where Anna uses a camera tripod as a Telescoping Staff to beat up a Jerk Jock from a neighboring store.
• Dead Like Me: For unusual jobs *and* quirky workers, nothing beats the small band of "grim reapers", people who died but have been drafted to work in the Bureau of External Influences for people scheduled to die (often in freak accidents.) Their meeting place is a diner, their assignments come on Post-It notes, and their supervisor dispenses philosophy along with the black comedy.
• NewsRadio takes place in a New York AM news radio station staffed by eccentrics. When the new newsreader, Max Louis, thinks he's too weird to work there, Dave shows him around.
  Dave: Here we have Lisa, who today very nearly gave up a career in journalism for a life in the fast food industry. Over here we have Beth, who dresses like a barmaid from Blade Runner. Mr. James, a billionaire who has spent the entire day eating food he knows for a fact to be spoiled. Joe, who earns upwards of 11 dollars working as an amateur surveillance expert — albeit half of it in Monopoly money. And, of course, Matthew (cut to Matthew peeking from under a desk), who appears to have taken the surveillance into his own hands.
• Night Court
  • Judge Harry Stone is almost the textbook example of a Bunny-Ears Lawyer. The Assistant District Attorney, Dan Fielding is a Handsome Lech. Bailiff Nostradamus "Bull" Shannon is a shaven-headed giant. Many of the Public Defenders who come through are unprepared for the assorted oddballs and loons whom they have to represent, or they are the Love Interest for Judge Stone. A trio of cantankerous Bailiffs served as Bull's partners over the years, two of them being cases of Actor Existence Failure, and many of their clients were very reasonably "held over for psychiatric evaluation". The common sentence for the plethora of Hooker with a Heart of Gold characters that came through was "Fifty dollars and time served". And, at one point, this was described as the most realistic law show on television.
  • In addition to the regular cast, whose characters are, at best, eccentric, and at worst, Bunny Ears Lawyers, the defendants brought through include Yakov Korelenko, played by Yakov Shmirnov, who once tried to light himself on fire, a pair of rival gangs... based on Star Trek: The Original Series and then new Star Trek: The Next Generation, with the latter literally beaming out, and Wile E. Coyote.
• Odd Squad: The titular organization is full of oddities that range from balls of fluffy creatures that multiply when exposed to light, to floating people, to glowing people, and lots more. In spite of it fighting oddness, however, it is odd itself — episodes feature threats such as a popcorn flood, tornadoes made out of pies, and characters gaining lemon and pickle heads, among a slew of other things.
• The Office (both the American and British versions of the show) revolve around a branch of a paper company full of crazy people, including a Pointy-Haired Boss (Michael Scott/David Brent), a borderline psychotic and power-hungry "second in command" (Dwight Schrute/Gareth Keenan), an Only Sane Man who is the aforementioned power-hungry employee's Sitcom Arch-Nemesis (Jim Halpert/Tim Canterbury), and many others. Both versions of the series even go on to show that the branches, for all of their on-camera silliness, are examples of the Bunny-Ears Lawyer because they are the branches that sell the most products.
• Scrubs has a plethora of Bunny Ears Lawyers serving in the medical profession. Dr. Cox is The Nicknamer, usually of the unflattering variety (and he gives J.D. a wide variety of Girl's Names). Dr. Kelso, Chief of Medicine, is a cantankerous bastard (and proud of the fact) who cares more about money than the patients. Eliot Reid, Trope Namer for Moment Killer, is a bundle of neuroses inflicted on her by her mother's prudishness and her father's high expectations. There's a surgeon who's a Third-Person Person as well as a very blatant case of Extreme Omnisexual.
• In Sonny with a Chance, the TV studio the characters work at is populated almost exclusively by Drama Queens who consider the rivalry between their shows Serious Business. Even its backstage areas resemble a giant prop room, with costumes, ill-fitting furniture, and gag items scattered everywhere.
• Superstore has employees who use the barcode scanners and labels to play pseudo-laser-tag, to give just one example.

Newspaper Comics

• Dilbert The strip centers itself on the absurdities occurring at Dilbert's workplace, featuring Dilbert himself, his Pointy-Haired Boss, and a gaggle of rotating co-workers and even absurd creatures like Funny Animals.

Roleplay

• Things Bob Is Not Allowed to Do on TV Tropes involves everyone at Trope Co. trying to keep Bob (of Alice and Bob fame) from committing insane shenanigans. This is such a time-sink that most of them have forgotten their actual jobs. While 90% of employees are normal people, employees also include anthropomorphic cats, robots, sentient polygons, and no less than three demons. The building contains a meth lab-come-brewery adjacent to the employee breakroom/video game arcade and a giant spider breeding ground, and is made up of Alien Geometries (including a portal to a full-blown World of Weirdness in the all-gender bathroom).

Tabletop Games

• In Exalted, the fabric of reality is maintained by a Celestial Bureaucracy in which the majority of employees don't look remotely human or even need to eat, which is why most of them prioritize selfish power games over actually doing their jobs. Jobs that range from "kill a demon about to destroy the world" to "record which trees should get woodlice this century". Even the Sidereal Exalted, who are higher up on the totem pole than anybody but the gods who chose them, don't always know the point of an assignment they're given.

Web Comics

• Shortpacked! is based around the misadventures of the eponymous toystore's employees, who include two superpowered abductees, a superhero, a car-turned-android, the historical Jesus of Nazareth, and their megalomaniac-bordering-on-supervillain boss.

Video Games

• Monster Hunter: World has the Research Base, a colony of scholars who were stranded in the wilderness after a giant-pterodactyl-thing attacked their airship. They're surprisingly okay with this turn of events, and have spent the past few years in comfortable exploration of the region. The Base itself is no ordinary building, but a tower of candles and books converted from the airship's wreckage.

Visual Novels

• Ace Attorney:
  • The Wright Anything Agency, where people can hire stage magicians and lawyers. The magicians are legit; the lawyers might not be, since their careers revolve around bluffing, quasi-magical lie detectors, and tactics that more serious lawyers would never even consider. Most of the office is taken up by circus memorabilia.
  • The Shipshape Aquarium, where a penguin hands out flyers and employees don pirate personas for work.

Web Original

• BIGTOP BURGER is about the misadventures of the employees of a clown-themed burger truck (the three employees are just humans in clown makeup, but their Cloudcuckoolander boss is implied to be a "real" clown. Their rivals, the zombie-themed food truck Zomburger, are even weirder.
• Protectors of the Plot Continuum: The organisation is about people entering bad fanfiction and reverting it back to the canon portrayal. PPC HQ is well-known for being hard to navigate and having many insane or weird agents, and it's run by sentient flowers.
• The SCP Foundation is a covert prison network dedicated to catching Eldritch Abominations and keeping them in their pens. And those abominations can be anything, from a serial-killing teddy bear to a box of infinite pizza. For obvious reasons, the vast majority of Foundation employees are disposable.

Western Animation

• The Amazing World of Gumball: The Rainbow Factory where Nicole Watterson works seems normal at first, as Nicole works in the office cube farm. When Gumball and Darwin sneak into her workplace, they explore the production floor, where their illusions of a Willy Wonka wonderland quickly get shattered.
  Darwin: Say, Mister, are you a real gnome?
  Worker: Naw, kid, the lack of sunlight has stunted every bone.
  Gumball: Are the rainbows made with sunbeams, love, and fairy dust?
  Worker: Naw, it's gasoline and arsenic, and latex, lead, and rust.
• Archer works at ISIS (no, not the real one), a mercenary/spy agency in which inebriated agents, gunfights, and holographic sex dolls are common sights. A certain event drove the FBI to shut it down and blacklist everyone involved...after which it reformed as a privately-owned drug cartel.
• Futurama's Planet Express is a delivery company in the year 3000 that makes deliveries to every location in the universe, no matter how dangerous or life-threatening it is. Among the employees, there are a senile Mad Scientist, a Jerkass robot, a lobster-like alien doctor who doesn't quite understand human anatomy, a not very bright delivery boy from the 20th century, and a hot-blooded cyclops who captains the ship.
• Human Resources (2022) is about a society of monsters who work in an office handling various aspects of human emotions and afflictions, such as depression, shame, logic, love, sexual drive, and addiction. The show's comedy often comes from these weird monsters working in a mundane office setting, leading to things like Hormone Monsters having sex in the break room.
• Inside Job (2021) focuses on the employees of Cognito, Inc., the organization that upholds The Masquerade and is behind all government conspiracies. Aside from the nature of their job being inherently weird, the main characters include a human-dolphin hybrid and a Mushroom Man.
• The weather factory in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. The ponies there have the fantastical jobs of making snowflakes by hoof and producing clouds and rainbows. Justified because ponies are responsible for the weather in their world, so they must do this as the weather doesn't handle itself.
• In Phineas and Ferb, the O.W.C.A directs "secret agents" — vaguely Intellectual Animals who foil a designated supervillain daily. One especially bad mishap at headquarters ended with a goat eating documents and Carl (one of the few human employees) locked in a dog cage.
• The Robot Chicken Star Wars sketches often turn the Empire into a goofy workplace, due to Palpatine and Darth Vader being rewritten into Pointy Haired Bosses.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: The Krusty Krab only has two employees plus their boss, yet these three characters are enough to make the place quite the interesting dining experience. The boss, Mr. Krabs, is as Greedy as one can possibly be, and will do anything and everything just to get some cash, even if it involves harming his customers. The cashier, Squidward, is an Apathetic Clerk who couldn't care less about his job or his life, which makes him act extremely rude to almost everyone that he serves. The cook, SpongeBob, is a Cloudcuckoolander who is not only really good at his job but is overly passionate about it. Together, these three will always guarantee that Hilarity Will Ensue whenever the Krusty Krab is open.
• Winx Club: In the fourth season, the Winx start their own pet shop (plus vet) business on Earth. The thing is, the animals are created out of nothingness by a magitek program and they are all tiny and with fairy (aka insect) wings on them. Basically, stuffed animals that are given life. Adoption is free but healthcare, training, and cosmetic products are charged. The staff themselves are not humans but fairies from another dimension.

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