Anyone who has ever been managed people in a work setting knows that there's always going to be a few bad seeds. Some are so bad that they get the boot within the first few hours of being on the job! These managers took to Reddit to spill about their worst employees and the horrible offenses they did to get them fired. Perhaps good help IS hard to find. Content has been edited for clarity.
Fired And Deported
“I had this girl working for me as a lab technician. She was this little Chinese girl, 7 months pregnant, really nice. One day she comes up to my office crying. Her purse had been stolen from her locker. The lock had been cut. It contained her cell phone, car keys, green card, money – everything. Apparently it is very expensive to replace a lost green card; she said it was 400+ dollars. Also, since her car keys were now gone she had no way to drive home. She lived 50 miles away. Keep in mind, she was 7 months pregnant.
So her husband had to leave his job to bring her the spare keys so she could drive her car home. Meanwhile, I reviewed the security tapes with HR and, lo and behold we caught a girl on camera with a freaking pair of bolt cutters going into the locker room. The girl we saw on the tape was one of the other lab technicians. She was my employee and someone the victim worked with every single day.
We used the company bolt cutters to get into her locker and we found the bolt cutters she had used. We also found food and a bunch of other stuff she was not allowed to have in her locker. At that point, we didn’t need to prove the theft to fire her but we were going to try anyway.
The next day she came in to get her check and we brought her into HR and showed her the bolt cutters. She admitted that she took the purse, took the money and credit cards, and threw the rest in the trash. We told her that she was fired and to please wait while we wrote her another check so she wouldn’t have to come back in next week to pick up her last check.
While she was ‘waiting,’ we called the cops who came and arrested her. She took the cop back to her apartment where she gave them the purse which she had not thrown in the trash after all. She ended up getting deported.”
“Total Employment Time: 10 Minutes”
“I used to work retail and every holiday season, we would bring on a bunch of new sales staff to keep up with the crowds. This particular new-hire (let’s call him Bob) aced the interview. He was well-dressed, well-informed, affable, etc., and to be honest, when you’re hiring seasonal staff, you’re not looking for the best of the best, just warm bodies to fill space, so Bob was a dream.
Bob shows up for his first day at 9 am, a full hour before the store opens. Pre-open generally involves a bit of tidying, making change for the registers etc. As the only manager in the store, I was in charge of the registers. While I’m busy flipping fifties for twenties and tens, Bob’s a few feet away folding shirts.
I drop a roll of pennies and then bend over to pick them up. When I stand back up, Bob’s on the other side of the counter stuffing the stack of $50s I had just pulled from the registers into his pocket.
He didn’t even try to make an excuse, just gave me a ‘whoops’ look and silently put the stack back on the counter. Within 5 minutes, he had signed his termination papers and was out the door. Total employment time: 10 minutes.”
Dad Had No Time For His Entitled Son
“The boss’s son decided he wanted to be a graphic designer, but he had this problem – he always had other things to do on deadline day. Once a week, we put out the paper, and it usually involved 10-12 grueling hours of work. He always had some lengthy errand to run, and because his father was never around, he kept doing this, leaving me to do all the work.
Finally, his dad told him he had to stay at work and could only leave if I gave him permission. The very next deadline, he asked to leave for the afternoon.
‘Call your dad,’ I told him.
‘I’m not asking dad, I’m asking YOU,’ he said.
‘Then the answer is no.’
He got highly ticked off and finally yelled at me, ‘Your attitude SUCKS!’
Two days later, he waltzed in, sat down, put his feet up on his desk and his hands behind his head and said, ‘We need to talk about your attitude.’
Somehow, I refrained from killing him, but I told him I would never speak to him again. His father backed me up and he was done. Last I heard, the entitled little brat manages a Radio Shack. Perfect fit.”
It’s Always The Quiet Ones
“I was supervising a call center where the agents did market research surveys. One of the new guys from the recent training class had been working for a few days and had yet to even get decently into a survey with anyone. Like, he’d sit there for four hours at a time doing nothing but occasionally throwing out an intro. But, since he was a quiet kid and didn’t complain, I spent more time with the others in his training group and didn’t focus on his lack of production until about his third day.
I wanted to hear how he was pitching the survey to give him some pointers, so I tapped in (they can’t tell if we are listening in and I was on the other side of the room).
First call: goes to the answer machine.
Second call: an old man answers. ‘Hello?’
The trainee says, ‘I know where you LIIIIIVE, loser. Hahahahaha!’ and hangs up.
It took me a minute to compose myself… but I asked him to come into my office and told him, ‘Yeah, you can’t work here anymore.'”
“WHERE DA CAMERAS AT!?”
“A gentleman we hired wooed us with his charisma and selling power at the register and gained our trust. We come to find out over a period of two months he had managed to create several dozens of fraudulent transactions with gift cards to his friends and managed to steal over $10k in merchandise before the alarms with loss prevention went off. He had clearly understood the ins and outs of retail law, for when confronted, he gave the ballsiest response to such a serious charge we’ve ever heard: ‘WHERE DA CAMERAS AT!?’
This surprisingly left us dumbfounded, for in fact, we did not have any cameras of any kind nor any type of surveillance or tracking equipment. The registers did show that ‘someone’ using his login at each terminal coincided with each transaction, so he knew he could use that reasonable doubt logic. He promptly walked out of the store and our company decided not to waste its time filing charges. In an act more ballsy but less thought-out, he tried to get other jobs within the same mall. Needless to say, word spread quickly and he, to our knowledge, never got hired anywhere near here.”
They Left Him Alone For Five Minutes
“I was working in a manufacturing facility and had just brought in some temporary labor. This particular temp was someone I’d only worked with a couple of times before, but he seemed like a switched-on guy. Math student doing graduate work, if I remember correctly. Anyways, I bring the guy in, go over the related safety talk with him, and walk him to where we will be working in the welding area of the plant. Our parts weren’t there yet, so I asked him to stay and wait for a few minutes while I went to go get them.
5 minutes go by and my phone rings – it’s a superior in the plant telling me I have to see something, to meet them at their office, and that we’ll be walking back to where I had left the temp.
We get there and he managed to stack some empty totes into a nice lounge chair for himself. He removed his safety glasses, held his cell phone in one hand texting (cell phones were banned on the floor, as I had just finished explaining to him), and had his other hand picking between his toes. Yes, he had taken off his safety boots and socks, in the middle of a welding shop, and was picking his toes. He even tried to start walking like that when we approached him.
Needless to say, I ushered him out of the building and never worked with him again.”
Can’t Fool People Forever
“I hired this older guy for a customer service position in a call center via a temp agency. Well after two weeks, he calls me to tell me he had a heart attack and was going to be out for a while. Seeing as how he works for a temp agency and not directly for us, my response is ‘Ok, just let the agency know and let me know when you can come back in.’
The guy would call me about once a week just to let me know he was alive.
After about 6 weeks, I happen to be looking at a report of payouts from the temp agency, and I see this guy’s name on there claiming 40 hours. After some digging, we figured out that he had been forging my signature on them since the day he had a ‘heart attack.’
I ended up waiting at the temp agency for him to come pick up his ‘check’…and by check I mean two cops with handcuffs.”
His First Day Was Also His Last Day
“I had a guy come in every day and beg me for a job for almost a month straight. He came in every day at 9 am, pleading for a job. I didn’t have any open spots, but when I did, I thought, ‘This guy has determination,’ so I hired him.
His first day on the job, he worked for 10 minutes, and then came into the office to use the bathroom. I stepped out for a few minutes to check on the yard, and when I came back, I assumed he had already went back out to the shop. A few hours later, one of the shop guys came in and said, ‘I guess the new guy quit. He went to the bathroom and never came back.’
I checked to see if he was in the bathroom, and sure enough, he was passed out on the floor in the fetal position sleeping. I woke him up and asked what his problem was, and he said, ‘I took some bad stuff last night, and I don’t feel good.’
To top it off, he stole TEN rolls of toilet paper and stuffed them down his pants. I told him to keep them and just get out. The next day, he tried to return to work like nothing happened. He though it was his first day. He didn’t remember anything about the day before.”
Bob’s Not Actually Sick
“An employee (let’s call him ‘Bob’) is out for a week, allegedly with an infection of some sort. Bob is a young guy in his early 20s and his mother called several times while he was out to keep me in the loop.
One day, Bob unexpectedly returned to work about three hours past the start of his normal shift. He tells me he is feeling better and wants to get back to work. He looks awful and I try to convince him to go home, but he insists on working, so I walk with him to his cubicle and ask him if he needs anything. Bob asks for a glass of orange juice and I happily run to the break room to get it for him.
A half hour passes and another employee enters my office looking a bit concerned. He suggests I go check on Bob, saying he doesn’t look well. Upon entering the area where Bob sits, I find him slumped over his desk, head down and eyes closed. I wake him up and tell him he needs to go home. He agrees, takes a sip of his orange juice, and tells me he just feels awful that he’s been out of work for so long. I realize that letting him take the train home alone wouldn’t be safe, so I grab a nearby phone and call him a town car.
I watch as Bob tries to stand up and collect his stuff. He can barely hold himself up so I offer to help him down to the car. With Bob leaning on my shoulder, we begin to leave when I realize his backpack is still sitting under his desk. I suggest he hold onto the cubicle wall while I grab the backpack and about two seconds after I walk away he stumbles, falls and slams his head hard on the corner of the cubicle. In a frantic moment, I grab his backpack and rush back to help him up. As I’m investigating the massive red mark on Bob’s forehead, which soon turned into a very impressive swollen mess, an empty bottle of Tito’s falls out of his backpack. Bob isn’t sick…Bob is wasted and I had given him the mixer for his screwdriver.
Trying to stay calm and get Bob out of the building without the whole office knowing he is hammered, I help Bob down the hall to the elevator and we ride together to the lobby. His car is waiting for him at the curb and I ask a security guard to help me get him in the car since I can barely hold him up myself.
Bob takes a seat behind the driver and immediately starts pulling on the drivers seat belt and spitting on the seat next to him. The driver quickly gets out and tells me he won’t be taking Bob anywhere. I open Bob’s door and try to help him out of the car, just to be greeted with ‘Don’t freaking touch me, you fairy! I’ll kill you if you touch me!’
I walk away, unsure what to do next, and watch as Bob falls out the car door and sprawls out on the sidewalk as a high-level executive from my company walks by and says, ‘Come to my office as soon as you’re done here.’
Lovely.
I hail a cab, but the driver takes one look at Bob and peels away. I can’t blame him. I see a police officer across the street and I run over asking for advice. The officer suggests I call 9-1-1, so I do. The cavalry arrives; ambulance, police cars, fire truck included. Bob is angry, screaming at the cops and EMT’s while they strap him to a gurney and secure him in the back of the ambulance. They tell me what hospital he’s going to and take him away.
I head back inside to call Bob’s mother and let her know what happened. She’s not surprised at all and admits she was fully aware of his drinking problem. I walk up to the high-level execs office and he immediately starts laughing as I enter. He just wanted the gossip.
Obviously, Bob was fired. My boss actually had me send a courier with a termination letter to his hospital room, which I felt awful about. I only heard from Bob once after that day… he was in rehab and doing better, and he had called to ask if he could use me as a reference.”
He Couldn’t Wait Just 10 Minutes
“We had a sales incentive my team hit their target for, so we all went to an island resort for a day to hang out, play volleyball and ride quad bikes. At lunchtime, we put on a modest bar tab for our 50 person team. The company paid for everyone to have two drinks each.
People started buying their own beverages and having a good time, without going over the top. One of the top sales guys, we’ll call him Marky, was mingling with the team. Five meters away from his boss, with hundreds of meters of beautiful deserted beach in both directions, Marky pulled out the biggest doobie I’ve seen in my life and went at it like it was the last one on earth. Really, his gusto was impressive.
I gave him the ‘Really? You’re gonna do that right now’ eyes, and so I had to fire the guy.
The kicker is that he booked a room in the resort on the island for the night, and we were 5 minutes away from catching the ferry home. If he’d waited 10 minutes to blaze, it wouldn’t have been on work time and he’d still have a job.”
Four Man Firing Spree
“I was working as a duty manager at an arcade to which I had been transferred to help get it into shape with the new manager they sent there. I had started at another site as an attendant and got made supervisor within a few months. The place previously had one supervisor who didn’t give a hoot, 8 lazy attendants, and 1 really over the top hard-working girl.
A lot of the machines were down on cash and I was told by my boss to find out who was stealing and to simply get rid of them. So one by one I start fixing the machines so the meters read correctly so that only I or my boss can get into them. The machines started to register what they were taking and everything seems to be going well.
I walked into the office in the back of the arcade to hear the guys complaining in the tea room about how hard it was to steal from the machines. One or two of them made suggestions on how to get round the new locks and the working meters. Another made jokes about ‘giving me a kicking,’ which actually progressed into a conversation about how they would.
This went on for about 10 minutes with me making a fair few mental notes. As they obviously weren’t going to go do their jobs and were just mooching, I decided to ask them about it. So I went into the office to take a seat and call them in.
The four of them come out with a look of uncertainty and ask what the problem was. I then tell them off the bat. They were facing disciplinary action for stealing from the company, for intentionally damaging company property, taking unscheduled breaks, and for one guy for falling asleep at the cash desk.
They initially denied it, but when I stated various methods and repeated parts of their conversation, they buckled. I passed it onto my boss who raged out and fired them.”
Fired Before She Even Started
“I was a manager in a bank. We had a mandatory 3-day training before the person could start working in the branch. I got a call in the middle of the first day of training for my new hire and the trainer was asking where she was. I call her cell and she said, ‘Well it snowed a lot last night, so I assumed the training would be canceled. I’ll just show up tomorrow.’
I told her that we would need to have her start the following week because all three days needed to be completed in order. She told me that wouldn’t work because she had a 5-day Vegas vacation set next week (she never told me that when we told her the start date). I should have fired her right there, but we didn’t have many good applicants so I gave her one more chance. I told her that NO MATTER WHAT, be at training.
Next week, I got a call from the trainer asking where she was again. I call her and she said, ‘My flight back from Vegas got delayed and I only had like 3 hours of sleep. I didn’t want to show up tired and make a bad impression.’ So I fired her.”
Good Thing They Fired Him!
“I once worked as a general manager of a construction company. I had a tile installer that worked for me for a couple of years. Near the end, he developed a few bad addictions. He once asked for extra money from a client because he said that I didn’t pay him (not true). The client told me, and I told him I was going to have to remove him from the job site.
He stole $400 in cash and possibly a watch (they weren’t sure) from one of the clients’ purses before he left, and I had to cut a check to her and apologize. We were nearly done there, so she let us finish the last few trimmings and shower door installation. It was a big, 3-month-long remodel, and there had not been a hint of an issue with any of the other (roughly) 20 guys I had sent to her house. She wrote it off as one of those things and accepted my apologies.
The worst part is, he was building a custom shower, which he did not waterproof, we later found. The customer could have fallen through the second story floor as the boards rotted. Luckily she called us because a tile was coming loose. I came out and just about had a heart attack when I saw nothing but tar paper under the tile…under ALL THE TILES. I began pulling them off with ease, one by one, and I was so mad that I tried to set up a meeting with the guy (his phone was disconnected).
We had to redo an $18,000 Moroccan style shower room at our own cost. If I could find that guy, to this day (5 years later), I would beat him senseless.”
Well, At Least She Couldn’t Accuse Them Of Discrimination
“I let myself get pressured by my boss into hiring a copywriter essentially because she had a huge rack. She did a couple of writing tests that came back ok and her attributed work on other sites and magazines was passable, so I didn’t fight it too much.
First day on the job, she announces that she is both dyslexic and suffers from adult attention deficit disorder and will need all sorts of special equipment to work with and longer deadlines to complete her work. Not really what you’re looking for in a wordsmith. When I pointed that out, she rattled off a list of other companies that, she was in the process of suing for unfair dismissal.
Happily for me, she also began stalking someone else at work, ultimately sending him hundreds of explicit text messages, so we were able to get rid of her that way.”