Not every employee works out for every job, but after getting to know some individuals it's hard to imagine a job where they would actually do well. Working just doesn't work for them! And no wonder why. People can do some crazy things that would leave you absolutely speechless, and they see no issue with it.
What goes on in these people's heads? More importantly, what is someone thinking when they catch an employee doing something terrible? We wanted to hear these stories, so we looked through Reddit and found the worst of the worst, and here they are. This content was edited for clarity.
Who Uses Security Cameras Anyways?

“I worked at a music store that tended to get pretty slow over the summer and often had no real manager working. A couple of years ago, some coworkers of mine brought an Xbox and hooked it up to the security camera monitor. They played for a full shift and decided to leave it there overnight, the same night there was a robbery and $40,000 worth of band instruments were stolen. Anyways, the store owner came, and he and the cops turned on the security monitor to find the GTA 4 pause screen and no footage of the robbery recorded. I didn’t see my coworkers again until they came in to pick up their last cheque and their Xbox.”
She Thought She Got Away With It…

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“I was an art director and had to hire an assistant. She had an impressive portfolio, a decent but not overly incredible résumé, and when I called her references, they sang her praises. HR seemed to think that was enough and approved her for the position.
About a month later, I was smoking with a guy from IT and he said how funny it was that my assistant constantly Googled ‘How to [insert action here] in Adobe Illustrator.’ I thought it was funny too, so I went to her desk, told her to save the page as a PDF, and she just froze and started trembling. Excuses, excuses, excuses, I walked away. Sure enough, I got a PDF five minutes later.
I found her portfolio and did a reverse image search. Every last image was stolen. I called back one of the references and the number was ‘not in service.’ I contacted HR, they did a background check, and it turns out she had just gotten out of prison for felony identity theft. She also had two gross misdemeanors for theft. She had never been a graphic designer and never even went to college.”
Unfriended And Unhired

“One person got fired for posting ‘I hate my new job’ on his first day, on Facebook, using an office computer, while he was supposed to be working.
Of course, this was also right after he added his boss on Facebook that first day.”
He Though That Was Fair Retaliation?

“I’m a nurse, first job was in a nursing home. One resident told me there was a devil in the window and it kept scaring her. I thought she just had dementia. I walked in the room just as a person in a devil mask slammed themselves against the window. I ran outside and tackled them and pulled off the mask. It was one of the CNAs. He thought that giving her a heart attack would be fair retribution for her being a little cranky when he took vital signs.
I fired him on the spot even though I didn’t have the authority to do so. It stuck.”
He Wanted A Throne To Call His Own

“I used to manage a store. The weirdest firing I ever had to do was also the fastest.
We hired a rather rotund young man to be an evening clerk. Being a portly fellow myself, I saw no reason he couldn’t manage the stocking and other physical parts of the job as well as I did. Evidently, he didn’t share that opinion.
I knew there was going to be trouble when he started off his first day by trying to tell me what to do. And I mean within the first few minutes of his shift. When I asked him why he thought he was in charge, he explained that since he was older than me, I should do what he says. I was 22 at the time. He was 23.
After explaining to him that, actually, the person with three years of experience and the position of manager does get to tell the new hire how to do his job, I proceeded to list out his duties, then asked him to restock our coolers. These were about nine doors wide, with a walk-in refrigerated area behind.
Thirty minutes into what should have been a ten-minute job, I went to see how he was doing. I discovered that not only had he not stocked any of the drinks, but he had also rearranged the cases into a makeshift chair, complete with a back and arms, and was just sitting in the 33 degrees cooler like he was the Cold Miser in a Christmas special. When I asked what the heck he was doing, he explained that he needed to rest because he was tired from moving all the cases. The ones he had rearranged to make a thirty pack throne.
I called the owner, explained I thought I’d be better off finishing the shift on my own, and gave the Lord of the Cooler his walking papers. To this day, he’s still the weirdest employee I’ve ever had or seen.”
That Was For Clients!

“Our company had a corporate apartment we used mostly for out of town clients when they came in for meetings. I usually handled the maintenance of it, like monitoring the cleaning service, setting up fresh flowers, fruit basket, and more for whenever it was going to be used. Eventually, I got promoted and assigned those duties to my new assistant. One day she called in sick so, when I found out a client was in town last minute, I offered him the apartment for the night, and met him there to show him where everything was. Imagine my (and his) surprise when I opened the front door to find my assistant and her boyfriend engaging in a little friendly game of ‘hide the pickle’ on the living room carpet.
After I slammed the door shut and hurriedly got him in a cab to a hotel, I went back to work and listened to my voicemail. She had called to apologize for having lied about being sick. No apologies about the live hookup show we’d just witnessed. Just, ‘Sorry, I wasn’t really sick, I just wanted a day off.’ Needless to say, that was the first of many days off for her.”
She Didn’t Like His Gift…

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“I used to be a supervisor at a large national grocery chain, and you know how hard it can be to keep help at those places, so we’d get some real winners.
We hired this one guy, I’d say he was around 50 years old. He spent all his breaks and lunches in the break room with a notebook in front of him, working on his mathematical formula for solving the lottery. He walked to work and always seemed to be a bit off, so I always tried to at least generally entertain his ideas when I was in the break room with him, and man they were out there.
Being a grocery store, we were also a major employer of underage people. One, in particular, was a 16-year-old girl named Heather. Heather was a sweet girl, fairly average looking, who was always quite nice to this guy. One day, I’m standing behind the registers supervising, when a bagger comes up to me and hands me a note, saying, ‘Uh, this was just given to Heather.’
I take a look and it’s a horrible, fairly explicit poem signed by this creep. I practically ran up to the manager’s office and they called the girl’s parents and rang up HR to let them know they were getting the creep out of there, today. Heather got called upstairs as well, and we kept her there while escorting creepy guy off the store grounds. He proceeded to go through the union and appeal his firing all the way up to the district manager level, and each time they’d just pull out the poem and turn him down. For a while after that, I’d just see him wandering around town, no idea what he’s up to now.
I suppose it’s perhaps not supposed to be funny, but the first few words of the poem make me giggle every time I think about them…’Heather, Heather, dressed in leather…'”
Where Did He Work?!

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“Where to start:
A guy claiming our Mexican store manager planted a fake $20 in his drawer because he wanted to give his job ‘to another Mexican.’
Left my energy drink out in my office and came back to it spiked (It tasted DRASTICALLY different and sharp when I came back). Only other guy in the store stunk like that same cheap drink.
A girl never showed up to open the store because she was on an impromptu road trip with her new ‘man.’
A guy was skimming ATM cash backs by selecting cash back on debit and pocketing it, people in that area were so rich they never noticed. Eventually, he did it to two mall employees and refused to give them receipts and got canned. He got caught over $20. He said on his way out the door that he had made $6k.
Another guy I caught lying about his felony; when we fired him, he tried to run me over in the parking lot.”
Where’d That Leak Come From…

“For many months, our IT guy kept urinating in the server room. The office started to smell horrendous.
It was discovered when one of the partners needed to retrieve some software from the room. When he walked in, his shoes squished in the floor.
At first, nobody realized what had been occurring. They called in a carpet cleaning service. Shortly after, the same partner checked the floor a few more times. Once again, it started to get wet. They thought there might be problems with the foundation, so they got someone in there to check it out. Nobody could find a reason the floor would get soaking wet and smell.
Eventually, after almost an entire year, the IT guy got caught. The secretary went to change the backup tape. She was supposed to do it first thing every morning, but she’d forgotten until almost time for the firm to close. When she walked in, the door hit the IT guy, which startled him to spin around, resulting in him peeing on her leg. She screamed and it caused everyone in the building, including me, to run and see what happened.
The managing partner fired him the next day.”
Guys Gotta Eat!

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“I was working at the McDonald’s at the time and there was this guy I’ll call Frank. He was this overly relaxed type of guy.
Frank was working on the drive-in section. He had to fill the bags. Frank got hungry, so he decided to eat a chicken nugget. Now instead of doing this in a quick and stealthy way, Frank decided to open an already packed chicken-nugget box and take a nugget out. He did this right in front of the window. So the customer could clearly see Frank was eating his stuff. The manager also noticed, so I heard this scream from the back going:
‘The heck do you think you are doing?!’ Frank’s reaction was priceless. He had a nugget halfway up his mouth. He just stared at the manager. Not angry, not defiant, just this dead stare. And he bit down. Eating half of the nugget. Still staring at the manager he proceeds to chew agonizingly slow, while putting the other half of the nugget BACK INTO THE BOX and closed it.
He then, still staring at the manager, put the freaking box into the customer’s bag. And that was Frank’s career at McDonald’s.”
A Real Momma’s Boy

“I had a new employee I had trained for about a week straight. We’ll call him Bob. His first day came around and it’s time for his shift, but no Bob. I tried to call Bob, no answer. Thirty minutes later, still no Bob. Finally, an hour and a half later, he called the shop. His excuse: ‘My mom wanted to take me shopping and said you would understand. I’ll be there in thirty minutes.’
I said, ‘Oh no rush, turn in your apron and name badge whenever.’ Click.”
He Looked Familiar

“I witnessed an amazing termination. I work for a staffing agency with two different divisions – one industrial temporary and one more managerial level.
I was in the middle of interviewing a guy who had just walked in claiming to have been laid off from a company the industrial temporary side works with.
During the interview, one of my coworkers from the temporary side walked through and screamed ‘Dang it, Ray! We fired you this morning! Get out of the building!’
Apparently the day before, the guy pulled a knife on his boss, and his boss defended himself with a piece of lead pipe. They kept fighting and ran into the parking lot, going at each other until quite a crowd formed. No one was seriously hurt, but you can’t just try to knife people in the parking lot.
When I asked him why he pulled a knife, he said it was because his new boss was ‘acting like he was better than me when I’m twice his age.'”
A Familial Scandal

“My sister had to fire my aunt. She got her a job at a call center for a cable provider. My aunt decided she didn’t want to work for a few days, called in and said her husband died. My sister found out when she learned coworkers were pooling money to send flowers…It did not end well. My uncle never knew he died!”
They Should’ve Called The Cops

“Way back in the day, like in the 90’s, I worked as a manager at a movie theater. The company I worked for owned two movie theaters that were across the street from each other. It was a weird setup, but whatever. The manager at the theater across the street was kind of a pushover. One day, he called me up and asked me if I could come over and fire one of his employees for him. He told me that one employee had been threatening another with stabbings and death for several weeks. Now back then I was young and didn’t give much thought to personal safety. So I agreed to come over and fire the guy. The other manager told the soon-to-be employee to come see me in the office. I laid it out for the guy very plainly. ‘Look man, you can’t tell other people you’re going to stab them to death. I’m letting you go. You will get your last check in the mail.’
Holy crap! That guy flipped out! He was yelling and spitting in my face. He swore several times on all that was holy that he would come and kill me someday. I told him we already called the police (total lie) and he needed to leave. A few months later, I found out that he had been picked up by the police for assault. He ended up being sentenced to prison for several years due to a combination of prior offenses and the latest assault charge. So I dodged a bullet on that one.”
The Spa’s After Hours

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“I worked at an upscale hotel spa as a spa coordinator. The general manager was about 40 years old. He seemed like a nice guy but always came off a little weird to all the girls who worked there. He was overly friendly and would say some pretty suggestive and inappropriate things. He seemed harmless, so we just kind of took it in stride and tried to ignore it. Anyway, this guy had a young son at home and a wife. His wife had frequently called the spa asking sketchy questions about him to the other girls who worked there and would freak out on him over the phone to the point that we could hear her yelling from outside the office.
We generally closed the spa around nine, but the manager’s shift would end at six. The other employees and I would notice that he would leave when his shift was over, but left his jacket and briefcase behind. Often, whoever was opening in the morning would come in at 7:30 to open for 8, and the manager would already be in the office even though his shift was supposed to start at 10. We all thought this was really sketchy and rumors started to fly around about what he was up to. This strangeness all continued for a while. A couple of weeks later, the hotel security called and told us that there had been some strange entry times to the spa and was becoming a pattern. They sent us a list of the previous six months of entries. Going through the list, we realized that my manager was accessing the spa before/after hours, often entering and exiting many times, as early as 5 am and late as 2 am. We went through the entire list and highlighted every before/after hours entry and it was occurring nearly every night. This is where it became a sticky situation.
After getting permission from the spa owner, we contacted hotel security again and requested the security tapes. We went through the tapes, going back a few months, and found out that my manager was meeting many random girls off the internet and bringing them to the spa after hours. He was bringing them to the spa since he couldn’t bring them home to his wife and was hooking up with them on the massage beds. It still grosses me out to this day.
We also found out later, after Google searching him, that he owned a spa about 45 minutes away that he kept entirely secret. On top of that, his spa carried the same product lines. After doing inventory, it was made clear that he had also stolen thousands of dollars worth of products from our spa to sell at his. Obviously, he was called and told not to come in the next day. This was around Christmas of last year and because he had a son, he lucked out and the owner decided against pressing charges for any of this.”
Terry Had Some Terrible Troubles

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“There was an old guy named Terry that was always hanging out in this cafe I used to work at. The owners liked Terry so much that they gave him a part time job cleaning up and busing tables.
Terry had some emotional and mental issues. Often he would just vanish in the middle of his shift and we wouldn’t see him until the following day. The owners of the place never really minded, they just let him come and go as he pleased.
Terry also wore the same clothes every day, blue sweatpants, sneakers, a heavy green sweater and a brown leather jacket. It was summer and the sweat just poured out of him. One of the owners of the place sent Terry a bag of clothes – a couple t-shirts with the cafe logo and some trousers, but Terry never wore them. He always said the clothes didn’t fit and when they gave Terry money to go get his own clothes, he said that he wasn’t given enough money.
The owners (an oblivious husband and wife team who were never around much anyway) went out of the country for three months and left me in charge of the cafe. My first night as acting manager, the whole staff sat me down and aired all of their grievances about Terry.
There was the obvious body odor/hygiene issues, but there were other issues as well – Terry stole food, Terry stole money, Terry stole items out of purses, Terry stole tampons, Terry stole knives from the kitchen, and most troubling, Terry would show up at employee’s houses late at night. A girl who lived on campus at the local college told me that Terry was wandering around her dorm building one night. The campus police removed him from the premises. When the girl complained to the owners, they told her that whatever happens outside of the cafe, they have no control over.
Needless to say, I was enraged that they let this get so far out of hand. The owners felt like they were being good samaritans by giving Terry a job and they were always quick to defend him at every turn. I told my staff that I would talk to Terry and the next day, I sat him down in the office for a conversation. I told him that if he wanted to continue to work at the cafe, he needed to correct certain behaviors. I went down the whole list. The whole time while I am talking to him, I notice he’s fidgeting with something in his lap. Finally, I asked him, ‘What are you doing?’ Terry held up a model train that he had been polishing with a napkin. He told me all about the train and how model trains were his hobby and he needed this job to be able to buy model trains. I told him that he could have his job and buy trains, he just needed to make sure that he did what was expected of him.
He said he could only work on Mondays and Fridays and that was fine with me. For a couple weeks, when Terry did show up to work, he was (reasonably) clean and professional and the staff noticed the improvement. There weren’t any more stories of him knocking on doors in the middle of the night or creeping around college campuses.
One Monday morning, I came into the cafe and Terry was sitting there in the dining room with this big book about model trains. It was really slow on Monday mornings and I was helping one of the cooks in the back with the lunch prep.
I heard a customer come into the cafe, so I went up front and helped this lady with her young son. The kid was probably four or five. I made the lady her coffee and the kid found Terry’s train book. Terry had left it there when he went to the restroom. The kid was flipping through it and yelling about it while his mom was at the counter.
Terry came out of the restroom, saw the kid standing on the chair looking at his train book, and went nuts. He shoved the kid, who fell to the ground, screaming. Terry picked up the book and started yelling, ‘THIS IS MY BOOK! MY BOOK!’ The mom freaked out and started screaming at Terry. Terry started sobbing, loud, and he peed himself – the dark stain spreading over his sweatpants. He screamed, ‘LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO! LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO!’ over and over. The mom picked up the kid and ran out of the cafe. She yelled that she was coming back with the police. Terry started yelling, ‘I’LL CUT YOU! I’LL CUT YOU AND YOUR BRATTY KID OPEN!’ or something equally as horrible. I told Terry to have a seat and calm down. The cops came and took Terry away. When the cop interviewed me, I told him that we had some issues with him in the past, but this was his first violent outburst.
I talked to the owners and let them know what happened. They told me that I needed to go bail Terry out and help him find a lawyer. I told them that they could blow me. I was running their cafe, ten hours a day, six days a week, and also going to school at night.
They never did a background check on Terry. His application for work just had his social security number and address. I later learned that Terry had done time in the 1970s for assaulting women and for battery. All of his trains had been stolen from the hobby store in the same strip mall as the cafe.
When the owners returned from their trip, Terry came back, too. I walked in one morning and there was Terry, mopping the floor. The owners told me that if I wanted Terry gone, I would have to do it. I walked into the dining room and said, ‘Terry, you’re fired.’
He put the mop down and walked out. I never saw him again.”
He Could’ve Just Left The Books A Bad Review?

“I used to work in a bookstore and we would always find books in the toilet. We had no idea if it was a staff member or customer, but someone, at least every few weeks, would take a book into the bathroom, put it in the toilet bowl and crap on it. He would just leave it there, unflushed and slightly above water level (hardcover books could rest across the bowl without touching the low water line). This was back when Dr. Phil was really popular and also apparently really good to crap on, since we found that one in the bowl multiple times. We also found a few George Bush books and various other books he apparently wasn’t a fan of.
It was actually a customer who caught him. He was waiting to use the stall and the employee just walked out and didn’t even acknowledge anything. The customer went in the stall and of course found a crapped on book just sitting there. When we asked the staff member why he was doing it, he just said those books ‘annoyed’ him and seemed a little shocked he was being fired because of this.
On a slightly related note, a customer actually ended up taking and buying one of the crapped on books that a staff member had set aside on a table to finish drying. I can’t even imagine if they ever ended up noticing, but it was never brought back for a refund. Aside from the one we accidentally sold, they were cleaned up and returned to the publisher, who probably just sent them to another store.”
That Escalated Quickly

“I worked at a pizza place and drivers got tips based on write-ins on tickets. One guy was taking a really long time to get out of his car. He was idling in the parking lot and we had about 3 to 4 deliveries waiting to go out. So I went out to see if he was OK. He was using white-out to cover the original tip on both sides of the ticket to try and hide that he was writing in tips.
On seeing me watching him do this, he rolled his driver side window down, threw the bottle of white-out at me which got all in my hair and proceeded to try and run me over with his car trying to escape. I kicked one of his headlights out in the confusion and the cops arrested him a half-mile away.”