There are horrible bosses but there are also downright awful employees too. These managers share the dumb thing a worker said that gave them no choice but to terminate them on the spot.
Martin Is An Idiot Alright
“My brother owned a small family stereo shop and I managed the books. The shop had been in the family for years and had grown through my dad initially starting with a little TV repair shop in 1970. It morphed with time to include CB repair and then car sound system installations and sales after my brother began working there. My brother actually won a few awards in Las Vegas at annual car shows for his custom automobile sound systems; so, he had a bit of notoriety going on for a while. Many of our customers were multi-generational families we’ve known throughout the last 50 years. Dad had passed away and my brother, not quite the businessman dad was, preferred the technical aspects, not the business end of the shop. I helped out doing the books when I retired from my Federal government career. With the absence of Dad’s expertise, it was very apparent the shop needed to hire a full-time floor salesperson.
My brother hired Martin, a local guy who frequented the shop over the years and had quite an extensive grasp on how to configure sound systems for vehicles. All the guys knew Martin could be rather crass at times; but, hey, that’s just when he’s out drinking with the boys, right? Although he was probably a solid four on the handsome scale, Martin held a very high opinion of himself as a some big heartthrob that women couldn’t resist. The guys all thought it was funny and endearing.
About two weeks after Martin was hired, two long-time customers arrived at the shop. The absolutely beautiful wife came in the shop to browse while her husband stayed outside for a few minutes measuring his car interior for the expensive automotive speakers and sound system he anticipated purchasing from the shop. My brother had been working over the phone with this long-time customer for weeks trying to land this sale. The customer was finally ready to take the big plunge and have a custom sound system installed in his car. My brother was also hoping that this sale would trigger additional sales from this guy’s large and influential family. So the pretty wife was mulling around at the sound system display wall in the showroom area killing time until the husband came in from outside.
Martin immediately spotted this man’s wife inside the store and had been hound-dog admiring her from the cash register area for five minutes or so. Why, as a salesperson, he didn’t approach her to offer assistance, we don’t know. I personally think he was tongue-tied because this woman was very lovely. He did not connect that this woman’s husband was still outside and would be entering the shop a few minutes later. When the husband finally came in, he walked directly up to the cash register to ask for my brother. For some crazy reason, we still don’t understand; Martin decided he needed to share his admiration over the beautiful woman looking at the sound systems wall. He never connected that this woman was the man’s wife.
I was sitting at the service window located back behind the cashier area and you can hear everything that goes on in the cashier area from that vantage point. Martin pointed his finger to the woman and told the husband, ‘Dang, I’d love to tap that!’ The husband’s mouth dropped open and he couldn’t believe his ears. He asked Martin, ‘Excuse me, what?’ Still clueless, Martin went on to announce to the husband, ‘I could hump that leg all day long.’
I couldn’t believe Martin had just said that to a customer. Frankly, I still don’t know why the man did not smack Martin sideways on Sunday. Before I could get up and say anything, the husband stomped over to the sound wall, quickly snatched his wife by the arm, and marched her out of the shop. They both got in their car and peeled out and away very angry.
I looked at Martin and yelled at him, ‘You imbecile! That woman was his wife!’ Martin, continuing to be oblivious, responded, ‘Well, she was one hot mama!’ Hearing the yelling between me and Martin, my brother emerged from the installation garage area and asked what was going on. When I told him what had happened, my brother immediately fired Martin. He told Martin that he didn’t hire his shlong to work the salesroom floor.
My brother called the husband on the phone and apologized within the hour. The guy told my brother that there was absolutely no way anyone in his family would ever buy anything from his business again. Because of Martin’s mouth, my brother’s small business lost a $5,000 car sound system installation complete with custom speaker boxes (my brother had already purchased the lumber). There really is no way to gauge how much future business from the rest of their family was lost on that day too.
Yeah, I think this was definitely grounds for immediate dismissal.”
Loose Lips Get You Fired
“Well, this is going back a few years when I was supervisor of a company that dealt with customers on a very personal basis. We hired a new woman. She had a fair degree of responsibility in dealing with customers. Her problem was she didn’t have the personality for it. She was nice on the phone, but every time she hung up, she would say something nasty about them.
For example… hangs up ‘That was Mrs. Jones – the bottle blonde. She dyes her hair but thinks nobody knows.’
She did this all the time. I finally spoke to her and said ‘These people are our customers. And human beings. Let’s be a little more respectful.’
So one day she’s on the phone with a valued customer. She hangs up and goes on a tirade about his customer.
‘That was Mrs. Abernathy – I hate dealing with that old bag.’ and she continued on, calling this woman several names, and disparaging her family.
I was a little ticked off by her attitude. However, turns out that when she put the phone down it didn’t hang up properly and Mrs. Abernathy was still on the other end. She heard everything this woman said.
The next day, She came into the office and asked to see me. She rattled off everything this woman said. I apologized to Mrs. Abernathy and told her she was a valued customer, and that personally I thought she was a beautiful person.
I then went into the next room and promptly fired the offending woman.”
An Unacceptable Excuse
“I was managing long-haul truck drivers in the 1990s. At the time, just-in-time transcontinental freight transit was common. What that means is manufacturers were not warehousing parts and raw materials. Such things were delivered to the factory just-in-time for assembly or manufacturing at many plants.
That type of motor freight transportation required driver teams rather than solos to keep freight moving just in time. I had been a team driver and had managed teams for a few years when I paired up the two drivers. They were l unknown to each other but matched based on the best common denominators, in my experience.
These two drivers were about the same age. They both had strong work ethics. Those two factors alone made them likely to be a fairly successful match.
One was retired from the US Army, unmarried, and without family. The other was a former factory worker whose job had been exported to a third-world country. He had a family and needed a steady income comparable to what the factory had provided him.
The two worked with each other successfully for a couple of months. I made a habit of questioning team drivers about their matches from time to time to ensure that all was still well. One day they came into the office together.
The family man said he needed a different co-driver. Both the retired Army man and I were caught completely off guard. When questioned as to the problem, the family man insisted that his co-driver was a great guy and easy to work with.
When I pressed the family man it came down to race. ‘How could he possibly team with a black man? What would happen to his children when people in his small hometown found out about this?’ The black co-driver was as stunned as I was.
The family man refused to team any longer with a black man. I had no choice but to fire him. The black co-driver was more upset than I was. He was not upset at his co-drivers candor. He was upset because he felt responsible for the family man losing his job. I assured John that he had nothing to feel guilty about.
I teamed John up with another white fellow of about the same age and the same strong work ethic. The other fellow was divorced, with adult children, and from a white-collar background. The two stayed together for several years.
Eventually, the second white fellow was forced to quit for reasons outside of his employment with us. John went solo at that time and continued to be one of our finest drivers.”
He Walked In On The Wrong Time
“Well, it was a combination of what the employee was DOING and saying.
I was the regional manager of a number of computer stores at the time, and I was delivering some equipment over to one of the stores I was managing.
Well, I arrived at the store and saw a sign that read: ‘OUT TO LUNCH: BE BACK SOON!’
As the shop was managed by only one person with a new assistant (whom he hired with my permission), we received a lunch allowance, and a quick shutdown was OK with me so long it was in an off-hour (like 2–3 p.m), but it was 11:30 a.m., or during a time when people with lunch hours like to stop by. More importantly, now that he had an assistant, he didn’t need to ever close in the first place.
I just thought to myself that I would wait until the staff get back, deliver the stuff and man the store in the meantime. I was already working out what I was going to say to the two as a lecture when I entered the store and heard screaming, and pretty vulgar screaming too like ‘floozy, tramp’ and the like.
I dropped everything and rushed to the back room to see what was going on. And saw my employee forcing a girl down, screaming for him to stop, while face forward over a table, and well… you can guess the rest.
Needless to say, I tore him off of her and screamed about what the heck was going on. I was just about to grab him again when the girl stopped me saying who the heck I was. My employee just stuttered telling me that it’s OK and repeated over and over to stop.
Things kind of froze for a moment while she then pulled up her pants, still angry and asking who I was. I then said that I was the manager here and who the heck was she. My employee then told me that it was his girlfriend and that they were play-acting the boss (him) violating his naïve young assistant (her). A bit of perverted fantasy. It was also when I met the employee he hired for the first time, incidentally his girlfriend.
I just counted up to 10, and calmly asked them to give me one good reason not to fire them both. They were both mute right there and then, unsurprisingly. So out they went, and I was stuck manning that store for a few weeks.”
No, You’re Not Supposed To Nod Yes
“My Factory Manager finally admitted to me a rather stupid thing.
I would hear him on the phone to customers saying ‘Err yes Smith here General Manager how may I help you?’
Then if it was something simple he would sort it out in a fairly pleasant manner.
However, if it was a complaint he would immediately say, ‘Ah this is not really my job to sort you need to speak to Mr. Morgan the owner.’
So after a while, I began to wonder ‘Why I was employing the guy?’
Finally, I had enough and sat him down for a discussion about where he was fitting into the organization. He went into a long ramble about how he found it difficult to accept responsibility and how he needed to rely on me blah blah….
So I just asked him, you know what your job would be a lot easier if we had no customers wouldn’t it?
How about if I got rid of all the customers and we just focussed on making the stuff we do?
Unbelievably he smiled and nodded enthusiastically.
It did cross my mind for a few seconds that he might have thought I was making a joke but then I realized he was serious. He wanted a business and job without all those pesky customers so he could have a nice life.
We parted company about 30 seconds later and he was never seen again.”
He Gave Him An Opening And He Took It!
“This was more of an accidental resignation than an outright firing.
Way, way back in the day, I used to manage a small corporate retail store in a mall, with about ten employees, and I had an assistant manager who was a slacker, but very sly about it. He mostly did his job, but he also managed to not do just enough of it to be a pain, but still not quite bad enough to outright fire him.
Nevertheless, his slacking started to add up, and I was getting complaints from the team about excessive smoke breaks and other such occurrences when he’d leave the store for extended periods of time (which he wasn’t really supposed to do).
Then he started copping attitudes toward co-workers and being generally mean to a few of them and deliberately favoring others. The thing was, he was always careful enough to not quite cross the line, and it became a contest of having enough issues documented that it would allow me to fire him. Corporate was very, very careful not to allow managers to fire someone without clear due cause, and he was a master at walking that line just on the side of safety.
A few times I managed to catch him at something, wrote him up, and put him on probation. He would be a stellar worker until his probation was over and then go right back to slacking and being mean. It was frustrating.
Finally, I decided to be very strict about him doing his job and gave him goals and tasks to complete with clear instructions on when and how. I would leave him specific lists of things to do when he worked opposite shifts from me, and then carefully check for completion when I came in on my shift (either later in the day or the next day).
One day I had to fill in a closing shift for my second assistant manager and come in on my day off, which he had not anticipated because the second assistant had called me directly instead of calling into the store. Needless to say, he was quite surprised when I showed up, and when I checked his list for his morning tasks, none of them had been done, of course.
I asked the part-time salesperson who was working with him what the morning had been like (being busy was the only excuse I would accept) and it had been dead all morning, leaving the assistant manager ample time to at least do his morning tasks (and frankly, all his tasks for that day, if he’d been inclined). But no, he had spent the morning mostly taking smoke breaks and kibitzing with employees in the other stores nearby.
He had clearly intended to have the second assistant do his work for him so it would look like he had done his tasks himself when I came in the next day under my originally scheduled shift.
When I took him into the back office to write him up, he got angry and said, ‘If you don’t like the way I’m doing my job, I’ll just quit, then.’
Without missing a beat, I replied, ‘Offer accepted. Please give me your keys and go home. We will notify you when you can come in for your separation paperwork.’
Of course, he spluttered and tried to walk it back, saying he wasn’t serious, it was ‘just a joke’ and he ‘didn’t mean it that way.’ I replied that it was quite clear what he had said and I had decided to take him at his word. He reluctantly handed over his keys and left.
Naturally, he tried to go above my head to reverse it, but my own boss, the district manager, had also wanted him gone if we could do it, so I knew he wouldn’t get anywhere. In fact, she told him quite bluntly that she had total confidence in me, that she supported me fully and trusted me to manage my people fairly. She was a good boss.
One of my more satisfying terminations, to say the least.
Never give your boss an opening like that when he wants you gone.”
Two Words: “You’re Fired.”
“I was working as a manager of a town centre bar/restaurant. Long hours for a lousy owner with zero ideas of how to communicate with people in a professional manner… but that’s another story.
One very busy night, someone spilt a drink across a number of menus (the menu changed regularly enough that professional printing and/or laminating was cost prohibitive compared to occasionally reprinting some every now and then), so I went to the computer on the reception desk by the front door and began the process of printing a bunch more.
While I’m doing this, up walks the most useless piece of trash ever employed by the place. Roughly 6′ 3″ of lard and bad attitude, but still thought he was the greatest waiter and barman on the face of the earth. He wasn’t.
‘What you doing?’
‘My job. I’m printing menus.’
‘Why don’t you try working for once?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Why don’t you try working? You never do anything. You’re just a lazy loser.’
‘Here’s something. Take off that apron, get your stuff and get out. You’re fired.’”
Back From The Dead
“I had an employee who had been terminated for cause before I was hired. After the case went to arbitration, 5 years later, we were forced to rescind the firing and take her back.
And she came back.
Who returns to a workplace that has made it abundantly clear she is unwanted? It was not a tight labor market and she had skills that would have ensured a job elsewhere.
For the next three years, I was caught up in arbitration. Every time she was written up for a clear violation (hiding uncompleted work in her desk, stealing mail and hiding it, not meeting deadlines, hanging around other’s cubicles and threatening staff in creepy, subtle ways) the union took it to arbitration because ‘we were targeting her’.
Believe me, I was not. I knew her job description and her contract backward and forwards. I had 50 other employees who rarely to never got written up. She was incompetent and creepy. Every conversation was a battle.
After one session, she came over to gloat. The company HR rep was there. Trying to be ‘casual’, she said ‘oh, I have no problem with my direct supervisor. It is just that he is a hot-headed Latino, like me. We don’t control our tempers and sparks will always fly’.
We looked at her and the HR Rep said ‘Are you serious?’ and the employee waxed on about hot Latinos and their temper. The HR Rep terminated her. Again. I would not have terminated her for that, frankly, because for her, that was actually a mild statement.
It did go to arbitration where eventually arbitration agreed with the union reps and the decision was made to ‘allow her to resign’ and she got years back pay. But she was gone. Gone!
The union posted fliers about their ‘great victory’. When my staff approached me, I said ‘Hasn’t it been nice since she’s gone?’ They readily agreed. ‘Well, she’s gone for good and it did not cost me a penny.’ Then I laughed and laughed.
I hated having a union shop. Before this job, I was a big fan of unions, but at this job, the union made me keep terrible employees. I had one employee who was chronically 45 minutes late to their shift, and I had to document 3 months of this, with almost daily counseling and adjustment of her schedule before I could terminate her without repercussions.”
Can’t Fire You? Watch Me!
“I had repeatedly counseled my Admin Manager on her poor attitude, late arrivals into the office, and uncooperative performance and decided that she needed a final warning.
I called her into a meeting room and said that this was her last chance and if her punctuality, job performance, and attitude didn’t immediately improve, we were going to have to let her go.
She then said, ‘You can’t fire me – I report to XXX’
I said ‘You do realize that XXX reports to me — and I am the Managing Director?’
She said, ‘I don’t care — you can’t fire me…’
I had my HR rep with me, and he knew exactly what I was thinking and just looked at me and nodded… So I took a deep breath and said,
‘Let’s see, shall we? YOU’RE FIRED!’
She screamed and carried on really crazy. She proceeded to completely trash her office — which we stood back and let her do — and then called security and unceremoniously tossed her out the front door.
As a postscript — quite remarkably — I got a phone call about three weeks later from a prospective employer looking for a reference for her. I declined to provide any reference — good or bad — and would simply confirm the dates that she worked for us.
I was asked, ‘Would you rehire her?’
I replied, ‘Ummm, probably not!’…”
An Employee Gets Back At The Boss Who Fired Him
“I was the one who refused to leave. I had a boss who had serious contempt for me. He wrote absurd recommendation memos and put my name on them. He intercepted the reports I wrote and never let them circulate, then put in my performance evaluation that I didn’t do any engineering work. In the meantime, I scored four inventions that were patented, won various industry awards for my technical innovations, and was assigned to a project where I reported directly to the board of directors. I was instructed specifically to not tell my boss what project I was working on in addition to my normal assignment.
I made copies of everything I did for my normal assignment and personally took it down to the company library for filing under some oil field correspondence file, then hand-carried copies to the engineering manager. One day we were in a meeting and the operations manager asked why the field I was responsible for was performing so far below its forecast. He pulled out a graph of a forecast submitted by my boss in my name. Fortunately, I had given a copy of my forecast to the field superintendent, who opened his notebook and said, that is not the forecast Walter gave us, it is perfectly on target. MY boss turned red, then white. Nothing more was said, The Engineering manger figured out what had happened.
I worked there for five more years, constantly watching my back and worried about covering my butt. Then, my ex-boss was moved to the head office and when there was a round of layoffs, he made sure my name was on the list. I was paid one year of severance pay to leave a job I was miserable in.
After about two months, he called me to ask if I could come in as a consultant and do a project because there was no one left there who could do it.
I went in for a week and sent a normal consulting bill of $20,000 and it was paid just fine.
In the next round of layoffs, he was let go. Karma. He lost his retirement, I kept mine which is still paid to this day.”