Trying To Get Fired Got Him Promoted
n_defender/Shutterstock
“The facilities maintenance company I worked for got taken over by a new company.
The new company was terrible to work for. One of the guys was getting really stressed out and since his wife made big bucks, she told him to quit. Instead of quitting he decided to just come and go as he pleased, stole whatever he wanted, used the shop area and company supplies to work on personal projects for his house, all kinds of stuff. This went on for over a year.
They promoted him out of his position into management.”
He Cost The Company $4 Million But Still Had A Job
LightField Studios/Shutterstock
“I was on a big project where Clueless Manager (CM) was required to coordinate delivery of cement to a remote site. The remote site had its own deep water jetty but otherwise all of the equipment required to pump the cement off the ship needed to be in place so that the cement could be received.
The ship shows up to the site and it is a mess. The trucks, crews, pumps and storage containers were either not ready, still in transit or sitting around on site not ready for unloading.
Time passes and the ship captain is having a freaking fit and they’re charging $25,000/day for failing to unload the cargo.
11 days pass! The owner of the shipping line calls our project director and screams at him for a while, then threatens to pump the cement out and dump it if the unloading doesn’t start within 36 hours.
Several plane flights of equipment and crew later, unloading commences within 36 hours.
Total cost to the project was over $1,000,000.
The same or similar event happened 3 more times on the same job. The final settlement went to lawyers & mediation and ended up over $4,000,000.
CM was never sacked. I figured he must have had compromising pictures of the project director or something.”
This Guy Used Up All The Rope
Dave Clark Digital Photo/Shutterstock
“Let me start by saying I used to work for an extraction company. We worked with flammable gasses– if safety procedures are followed it’s safe, but if you mess up it, it could lead to an explosion.
We had a guy who should have been fired ten times over, but these are the worst of his transgressions:
He showed up hours late, on days where we had time sensitive work that couldn’t be completed without him, still hammered from the night before. We knew that not only from the smell but because he TOLD us (including his bosses, the owners)! Oh and one of those times he was coming down from rolling the night before and again he told us! Another one of those times he thought it was ok because, ‘Hey it was Cinco De Mayo’ (it fell on like, a Monday that year). This happened THREE freaking times and he didn’t even get written up!
Then another time he left for a delivery that should have taken an hour and fifteen minutes, tops. After a couple of hours, we started to get worried so we gave him a call. No answer. We even checked traffic accident reports we were so concerned. Then we called the gas dispensary he delivered to and they said he made it and had left long ago…
Ok so he’s not answering his phone, he has $14,000 something in cash and the company debit card. He better have a great excuse or (hopefully) this idiot will finally get fired. 5 HOURS later he calls our boss back and says that he had some personal things to work out so he took off for the day. Like it was no big deal.
They decided that was worth writing up, but decided not to fire him since he dropped off the cash and card at like 8 at night in their home mailbox. Are you freaking kidding me?!
Finally, a few days later they ‘fired’ him when he just didn’t show up ever again and told them he was looking for another job, but not quitting yet.”
A Big Scared Security Guard
“I work for a security company that supplies doormen to a few different pubs in my town as well as having the contract to have a guard various stores.
One day, one of our guards turned away a middle-aged woman early in the day for being too wasted. 2 hours later the same woman returned even more trashed with the broken neck of a bottle which she was using as a weapon.
She entered the store swinging the bottleneck around, pushing over a few cartons of bottles and two store displays before she turned the glass on herself. She started to cut her arms and flick the blood around, then aggressively approached the counter behind which the three store employees were hiding.
Our guard was standing at the end of the counter and the woman would have had to pass him to get to the staff. Would have. But he basically ran to the other side of the store to get away from her, leaving the manager of the store to tackle her and hold her down. The guard ended up coming over and helped hold her down until police arrived, but still, he ran when he could have done something to help.
Our boss had to do a lot of work smoothing things over with the store owners and their manager. They banned that guard from working at their store, but he still works for us as a bouncer which he’s basically useless at as well, but he keeps his job by being big and mean looking.”
A Total Bender Doesn’t Get Him Fired
WAYHOME studio/Shutterstock
“This guy I worked with got caught getting a bj from a 16-year-old high school girl in the company car, on the way to deliver a part for a downed plane. This was after dropping off his boss and within 100 yards of work, so everyone in the company (about 200 people) saw it happening. Lucky for him, the age of consent is 16 in my state, but still.
When he walked in he smelled of weed. He then took two pills and disappeared for the rest of his shift. The supervisor found him totally wasted and asleep under an airplane’s engine.
He worked for another 10 years after until he ‘retired’ when his supervisor retired.”
Murder Attempt Is Apparently Cool At This Company
stefanolunardi/Shutterstock
“He was GM, the owner was his college roomie. The owner thinks needing to fire someone is his own personal failure for not being able to manage someone into success. So he doesn’t fire anyone. If he wants them gone he makes their work environment 100% toxic until they quit out of frustration.
The owner wanted the GM gone but wouldn’t fire his ‘friend, ‘so he started making his work life completely toxic. GM starts to crack. He’s losing his mind and just generally starting to go crazy. Making bad decisions, not making decisions, etc. In my frustration over the GM’s greatly deteriorated performance, I call him out in a multi-recipient email among the executives.
Unbeknownst to me, he goes across the street down into the plant in his company truck and waits…for me. I leave the plant and step into the plant road to go back to my office and I hear a few hundred feet away an engine rev to the red line and tires spinning in the dirt and gravel. I look to the right and he’s aiming his truck right for me full speed. I step off the other side of the road just as he zooms right behind my heels. I was about half a second and 12″ from getting flattened by that maniac.
I go directly to the CFO, my boss, and tell her the maniac GM just tried to run me over in his company truck. She told me to go straight to HR. So I grab a camera, go take pictures of the 100′ of fresh peel out marks down in the plant lot and grab a worker who was outside and saw it happen and go straight to HR.
He doesn’t get fired. He gets his company truck taken away from him and that’s it. He worked there for another 6 months before getting the boot for other unrelated issues.”
He Finally Lost His Job
Dimedrol68/Shutterstock
“My dad tells this story of his friend that drove a Semi for the pipeline company he used to work for. His name was Kenny.
Now Kenny is a friendly guy, got along with the boys, and did no harm to anyone, except maybe the company’s financial department. They would go out to these areas and have to transport all kinds of expensive equipment, dig up huge rocks, and transfer them via flatbeds.
Well Kenny here, in all of his three years at the company, had had two accidents already. Both where he totaled two people’s cars parked on their property while they were removing rocks/boulders from the ground. He dropped one on some guy’s new Ford F-350, that he got that same morning (and for which the company bought the guy a brand new one, immediately) and another time, he accidentally backed over the front of somebody’s vehicle as well.
Kenny was going for Strike 3.
They had just craned this pipeline equipment onto his flatbed. We are talking a $250-$300K piece of equipment. He drives out of the lot, and swings out too far, and hits a ditch, where his tractor and flatbed tip over on their sides. All you see is Kenny’s hands pulling himself up out of his passenger side window, and you hear him yell ‘Can somebody go get me my check?!’
He knew, we all knew.”
Somehow The Idiot Kept His Job
Bennian/Shutterstock
“We were delivery drivers for appliance store, I was with my partner for the day, a guy that none of us liked one bit. He was a completely useless idiot. We get to our first delivery, and ONE of us forgets to close the back door and we send a $1200 appliance dolly flying as we pull away. We didn’t notice until our next delivery and the dolly is gone. We drove back to where we lost it but we didn’t find it, and we both thought he was going to be fired for sure.
We thought wrong, I was fired instead, but he was fired a couple months later.”
This Guy Can’t Wait Til After Work?
welcomia/Shutterstock
“A guy I work with has been caught with a lot lizard (truckstop streetwalker) in his work truck, on company time.
Twice.
One of them was underage.
I don’t know how he still has a job or is not in jail! This happened long before I started, but even if it had, having not witnessed it, there’s pretty much nothing I could do beyond thinking the guy is a complete and utter prick (which I do) and avoiding contact with him (which I also do).”
This Guys Makes Everything Worse
Denys Kurbatov/Shutterstock
“I have a coworker who somehow convinced the owner to let him work from home as a salesman. He had gone 6 months without making a single sale but is still getting paid full-time wages.
On the odd occasion, he’d come help out (we’re a landscaping company). He was useless and would usually stop doing anything remotely physical after first coffee break citing a ‘bad back.’
He finally made his first ‘sale,’ which was to sign up our company as a franchise of some sort for a painting company. What kind of painting? Parking lot lines. We had to do this work after 10:00 pm so the parking lots would be guaranteed empty, so this meant we had to give up basically 2 days of regular work to work the sometimes 12 hours it would take to do these huge parking lots, and usually not finish and need to come back the next night.
This guy had a talent for underquoting by about 200%, so he’d promise the job would be done in like 6 hours, and it would end up taking up to 18 sometimes. The first night out we were all so mad at him, we just let him do most of the work and let him call all the shots, so basically we were on break most of the time. Then at the end of the night, we find out he didn’t buy any paint thinner, so the paint all dried inside the tubes and the pump of the sprayer and ruined it. We were sure he’d be fired. He ruined the $5000 piece of equipment he made the owner buy, rendering the thousands of other equipment needed for this venture useless. But, he dropped the thing off at the owner’s house and went home to sleep, then claim he got up and worked a full sales shift.
The next time he quotes like 8 hours for 2 guys to do a massive parking lot in the ghetto. Him and me. He friggin’ leaves a bucket of paint sitting on the ground between the truck and the trailer, so when I had to run and drive the truck over to quickly clean up a spill, I ran over the bucket and paint went freaking everywhere. We were there from like 10 pm to 9 am cleaning up the spill and painting the lines, but the paint ran out and the compressor started malfunctioning so the place looked like crap and was barely finished.
We get back to the owner’s house and drop off the equipment, and he says to the owner ‘I’m not going back tonight, and I’m not helping put this stuff away. I have a family bbq later.’ So then the client was out of his mind angry (one of our bigger landscaping clients, remember) and we had to get the whole crew minus the salesman back there that night and re-do the whole place free of charge.
He still wasn’t fired.”
This Guy Just Doesn’t Seem To Care At All!
Lisa F. Young/Shutterstock
“I’m a corrections officer so some of these things may not seem bad unless you take into account where I work. These are a few of things another CO did and someone never lost his job.
-He was caught on body cam playing Candy Crush, while ignoring emergency alarms.
-He got caught stealing supplies.
-He locked trustees in corridors or outside for 20-45 minutes (WAY too long).
-He lost inmates’ razors.
-He used all the ink in the printer to print out reams of pictures of random crap.
-He messed up inmates medications.
I’m really not sure how this guy still has a job.”
He Almost Flooded The Whole Place!
Kzenon/Shutterstock
“I have one about the time I should have been the one that got fired for doing something stupid. 19-year-old me back in 2008 got a job at a pharmaceutical company as a tablet coater. I had been there maybe 4-5 months and work was slow. A guy in another department asked me to help move some pallets of calcium tablets with an electric pallet jack.
Being the young, curious man I was, I decided to see how high the jack went after double stacking some pallets. I was pretty impressed with how high up this thing went, so impressed I forgot to bring it back down before moving. After going forward like 5 feet I took out a sprinkler head and was shocked when I got hit in the face and upper body with dirty water that hadn’t been purged in 10 years (at a pharmaceutical company, which is questionable).
Water just kept coming out, the maintenance guy told me after the fact it was spraying 90-110 gallons per minute. I ended up costing the company around $200,000 dollars by shutting down several packaging lines and one manufacturing process. There were 2 inches of water on the ground. It took me and two other guys 3 hours to direct the water into the drains placed throughout the plant.
This was all at from 6 pm to about 11 pm.
At the end of it, I sent a huge apology email to the directors of manufacturing and packaging who were one level below the president. They wrote me up and let me keep my job. I have no freaking clue how, because I was on probation from being a new hire. The only thing that changed was the training on the electric pallet jack. It now includes checking the height of your load, not just the width of the load for any obstructions.”
TWO Very Expensive Cars Are Wrecked
Dmitry Kalinovsky/Shutterstock
“I’m not sure which one is better. I work on exotic cars, for clarification.
The old dealership I worked for, the car sales manager got caught taking a Lamborghini (without company permission) to pick up a date for a baseball game and ended up rear-ending someone, yet he still works there.
A subsequent dealership where I worked, a guy went to move an exotic race car and thought the big red button on the dash was to start the car.
It was the mobile fire extinguisher button and the entire car filled up with fire extinguisher fluid. He wasn’t fired either.”
A Driving Disaster!
“The company I worked for hired a new warehouse manager. A prerequisite for working in our warehouse was you had to have a valid forklift license.
The boss asks the new manager if he has a license and he replies that he was in charge of giving the license exam at his old job.
OK, great! I was kinda stoked because I was the only employee at the time that was certified to administer forklift licenses and it was a huge pain in the butt that took me away from my normal duties.
The new manager did indeed issue licenses at old employer, he failed to mention however that in his 35-year career, he had exactly zero seat time on a forklift.
This alone would get someone canned usually, but they let it slide.
I had to fail him 4 different times on the driving part of the test and not for little things either. The boss still let it slide.
After a year of working there, he had hit and damaged 2 vertical racking supports, 16 horizontal supports, he hit the freaking wall and put a hole in it and he rubbed paint with a $750k machine (I saw this one happen, it puckered my behind up tighter than a snare drum.)
He’s still working there! I have no clue how, be he is still there.”
Ignoring The Warnings
“Hydrogen was being transferred from the truck to the storage tank, which is the most probable time for a leak. Hydrogen explodes. My friend’s job is to put up a perimeter and be ready to respond if anything goes slightly wrong. Well, a security guy was doing his rounds and his rounds went through the perimeter. So he moves the barricade, gets back in his truck, and drives through the restricted area.
My friend stops him and chews him out. The security guy doesn’t really get what the big deal is. ‘If there had been even a tiny leak in that hose, you would literally have just killed every single person at this facility!’
Oh.
So he reports it to security guy’s superiors. But the security guy is still around.”
Seniority Has It’s Privileges
Alexandru Logel/Shutterstock
“I had a summer job working in a factory on an assembly line. A friend was working there too and the guy next to him on the line was driving him crazy.
I remember him telling me at lunch one day that he was going to punch him in the face before the summer was over which of course I thought was just talk.
Sure enough, a month or so later, in the middle of a shift he punches the kid in the face. Not only did he not get fired but the kid who he punched got moved to a different part of the factory.”
This Guy Got Promoted!
tostphoto/Shutterstock
“A guy I worked with got caught drinking and driving in a company-owned car with used car dealer plates on it, doing 75 in a 35 with 5 people in the car. He’s is now the used car manager.”
Setting The Bar Low
Odua Images/Shutterstock.com
“A guy showed up to his first night at UPS smelling like he just left the bar. Considering we had to be in at 4 am it’s possible. So he’s putting packages into trucks when all of a sudden he just starts throwing up between two trucks.
He never got fired and was still there when I left.”