There are bad employees then there these sorry workers. It's one thing to be terrible at your job, but it's another to be so inept that you actually manage to get fired on the spot shortly after getting hired. These workers share the times they've seen fresh new hires terminated for reasons that will make you roll your eyes.
This Guy Is BEYOND Creepy
“We hire through a temp agency with little background checks. I pretty much got a guy fired within three days.
I am the only female on the shop floor and at the time the youngest team member by around 15/20 years.
At the time I was 19 and this guy who was 40 had just started. I instantly got a bad feeling when he just would not stop staring at me (several co-workers mentioned it to me). As well as asking personal questions within 10 minutes of meeting me.
Anyway, I could not get over this creepy vibe no matter what and it did not help that the guy kept screaming about conspiracy theories (did you know there is apparently an ice wall surrounding the flat earth and there are special guards with lasers that will shoot on site???).
Anyway, I had mentioned it to both my manager and my co-workers that he absolutely terrified me with the vibes he was giving off. They agreed to keep an eye on me (we are a small team in a very old, large building with a LOT of hiding spaces, and we are expected to do a lot of our work on an individual basis).
By the second day, the guy waited till we were alone and started saying ‘You’re not like other girls, you’re so nice and perfect and you would make an amazing wife’ in a very creepy tone.
Cut to a few hours later the guy is shouting about how his current girlfriend is useless and a moron and how much he hates her to the rest of the team on the break.
By the third day, the guy starts screaming about his conspiracy theories again on the break but starts acting aggressively towards those who question him. After the break, another supervisor asks why I’m laughing and I quote what the guy said.
Long story short, the guy lasted another 3 hours before he was told he would not be coming back the next day.
Turns out the guy had also gone into the main offices and tried to convert people towards his branch of religion and would not stop the subject when asked by several staff members.”
Sweet, Naive Jeremy
“Moving company, midwest.
Most people didn’t make it through the first week, they will hire literally anyone who can pass a substance test. Turnover was terrible, but I guess that’s the nature of the job. I’ll never forget Jeremy.
Jeremy was 18, did not apply for colleges, so his parents made him get a job. He was hired as a mover, as is everyone. He shows up the first day to roll-call in a full suit and tie, asking where his desk is. This was a group full of former convicts, high school dropouts, and generally rough dudes trying to make a living. We laughed so hard. Jeremy went right back home.
The next day, Jeremy’s mom shows up to give the manager a piece of her mind. We laughed even harder.”
The C Stands For Crazy
“The fastest? The new girl took a bathroom break less than an hour into her first shift/training period and never returned. When we called to follow up / see if she was returning, she said she “didn’t think working was her thing”. She was 30.
The most entertaining quick turnaround? New girl, C, started at my old job (a hybrid retail shop and salon). I trained her day one (on a Tuesday, only a 4 hour shift) and she was nice but I got some really strange vibes. She kept making comments about how much she loved her old job that she was fired from but would ’settle’ for this one and also made remarks that it would be weird to have me (25 at the time) as a manager as she was nearing 40. I blew that off and hoped for the best because we were so short-staffed at that time and genuinely needed the help.
C’s second shift is on Saturday (four days after the first one) and she no shows. A couple of hours into her shift, she texts me that she’s at the hospital having surgery. I figure this was an emergency, and tell her to take the time she needs to get well, but that in the future, I need her to call out BEFORE her shift whenever humanly possible. She responds by telling me she’s been in the hospital since Thursday but forgot to tell me. (Why not lie at this point? I would have been none the wiser).
The next day rolls around and C was NOT scheduled to work, I’d tentatively marked her out the next few days and communicated this both via text and email. She comes in anyways high on pain meds, with a bandage around her abdomen, wearing ripped up sweatpants and a shirt that looked like it had blood on it. She went to clock in on the floor (not allowed) without making eye contact with me. I quickly pull her into the back and ask what’s going on, reiterate I’d like her to be at home resting and that she does NOT need to be at work, nor is she scheduled. C then says she wants to work and begins crying that she needs the money. I give her a hug and tell her that I understand, but she’s in no condition to work right now. She leaves with the promise of checking in and working a shift that next week.
3rd shift rolls around, she arrives, all is well. Three hours into this shift, she leaves the store and does not return. At this point, she’s done with us; walking out mid-shift is a big no-no (as proven by the first gal). I follow up by calling C, below is our convo:
Me: ‘Hi C, I know you went to lunch at 12, and it’s now 1:45…are you coming back to the store?’
C: ‘Oh! Yeah, no. I’m so happy though, I got my old job back! Aren’t you so happy for me?! I know you just must be over the moon!’
(She said this in the MOST sincere, non-sarcastic way imaginable)
Me: dumbfounded ‘Well, actually, no C, I’m not happy, you just left us without communicating anything. Just to be clear, because you walked out, we are considering this your resignation.’
C: ‘Yeah sure! That’s fine boss, no worries! I didn’t like you as a manager anyway!’
The whole interaction was bizarre, but we followed standard exit procedures and I thought that was the end of it. NOPE!
Less than two months later, C walks into our store with a job application. Asks to speak with a manager (me, duh). I approach her and tell her we cannot rehire her after the last ordeal and guess what she does? Tries to convince me that she’s a totally different person, but messes up and calls me by name. Then tries saying she’s C’s twin and was recommended by her. I tell her we aren’t hiring anymore and ask her to leave the store, because holy cow, this is insane. She leaves, then walks back in and right up to me, falls to her knees, and begs me to hire her because that other job fired her again. We had to get the cops to led her out eventually. I quit a few months later, best call of my life.
Sorry, Paul
“Storytime.
Sometime around 2003, I was on a business trip and at the hotel the night before preparing for the client presentation.
Seven of us including, myself, and a new sales director named Paul. We’re projecting the slide deck onto the wall using Paul’s laptop. Paul has to take another call so he leaves and we continue. Someone wants to add a slide with some of our company’s background so we open up a browser window to go to our company’s site and, of course, some adult videos open up. The lady driving the laptop frantically tries to close the window but that just spawns two or three new windows with new lewd material. She tried to stay ahead of it for like 10 seconds before just unplugging the laptop from the projector.
Dead silence for a few seconds. After the shock wears off, one of the women (60ish-year-old lady) stammers our ‘I’ve never seen anything like that my entire life.’
I’m the only guy in the room at the time and I’m getting strong ‘men are pigs’ vibes from everyone else so I don’t say anything and try to look at small as possible.
Later, Paul rejoins is not knowing what had transpired. The most senior person in the room (a VP) asks everyone to step out and give her a min to speak with Paul. We come back like 30 mins later, Paul is understandably paler than he was earlier. No one mentions the adult stuff and we continue with prep and presentation the following day (using someone else’s laptop for the actual client meeting).
The following week, each of us is asked by HR to provide our summary. Paul sends out an apology email saying his 14-year-old son must have gotten on his computer.
Anyway, Paul “resigned” before the end of the week and that was less than a month after he started.
Sorry, Paul. The videos really weren’t that bad but you can’t do that kind of stuff on a work laptop, bro.”
Lots Of Four-Letter Words That Day
“Spent my summers in college working as a laborer for a construction company. Anyway, we were doing a bunch of renovations in an active hospital, so noise and dust were a huge concern. We were a small crew and just starting renovations on an area with a super tight schedule, so the company hired a subcontractor for some of the work.
Enter these two clowns who show up to do some demolition work. Foreman gives them the talk about how they may be used to doing things a certain way, but this is an active hospital so he’d rather the work take longer than for them to make a huge mess or a lot of noise. An hour later, we apparently got multiple complaints about the noise and the mess, so the foreman calls me up and says to go over there and clean up NOW, and that he’d be by shortly to see what the heck was going on.
These dudes had dust and broken wall everywhere. I could hear them halfway down the hall, just smashing away without a care in the world. The foreman shows up and we walk into the room to witness this dude standing on a pile of rubble swinging a sledgehammer over his head at a brick wall that he’s removed the bottom from. Somehow the rest of this wall is still hanging from the ceiling, I have no idea how. The guy wasn’t even wearing a hard hat, apparently oblivious that at any moment that wall might give way and crush him.
The foreman lost his mind on these guys. Kicked them out immediately, and got on the phone with their company, and told them he didn’t want to see these guys on site again. Lots of choice four-letter words were used, even threatened to fire the subcontractor entirely and get someone else to do the work.”
Eff This F Guy!
“Let’s call the guy, F, for Forgot because I don’t remember his name.
We had a group orientation in our first week at a new job. The first day there is a blizzard, it wasn’t a surprise we all knew it was coming so we all plan accordingly and are 5-10 minutes late. Even our boss was 15 minutes late. F shows up two hours late! F claims there was an accident and he had to help a woman and child out of a car. Boss rolls his eyes and gives him the benefit of the doubt, we proceed with orientation. F is constantly interrupting the presentation since he worked with a similar company previously and he felt he knew everything. In between his interruptions, he kept constantly needing to go to the bathroom.
We are taken out to lunch, where F makes everything about him and belittles the female moderators who took us to lunch.
After lunch we have individual training on our computers that will take a couple of hours, F falls asleep. Moderator wakes F up and he can’t focus on any of the tasks, yells at her that it’s nonsense and there’s no way she’d be able to do it. F demands she prove that she can do the work, she tells him she doesn’t need to prove anything to him and that everyone else is well past where he is at.
F continues to yell and is led out. When another employee comes to get his things for him, they open his water bottle and it stinks of spirits. He’s fired that afternoon.
The next day, Day two, our boss tells those of us who were early how F called him the night before crying and arguing that he did nothing wrong. Shortly after telling us this story, F shows up! He has no memory of the previous day or more importantly being fired! He again is led out.”
Awkward…
“Had a new guy that got hired and was here for MAYBE a week. He would take long bathroom breaks, but no one thought much of it originally.
He sat right at the doorway to the department’s area (We had probably 10 people in a large room for this particular department), and one day his boss went to the bathroom, and when he came back the guy just had adult videos playing on his iPad that was propped up on his desk. The guy turned and looked at him, reached over and hit the lock button, and said ‘Can we just pretend this didn’t happen?’
No, no we can’t. Gone pretty much immediately.”
He Did WHAT?
“Where to begin.
One person didn’t show up for their second day citing culture shock and then spent at least an hour each day complaining about everything to HR. They were gone inside of a month.
Some other bloke refused to follow processes and called his manager ‘an irrelevant woman’ in team meetings. Gone within a week.
My ‘favorite’ was technically a new coworker from my perspective only as I’d only just become aware of their existence. They interpreted ‘We’re going to retire that server from production’ as ‘We’re going to throw the hardware off the roof’ and proceeded to head down to the data center, power the thing off in the middle of the day, drive to his friend’s office, plug the box in and deploy a bunch of IVR scripts he’d derived from our proprietary scripts so they could run a bunch of psychic and naughty hotlines.
He was gone within 10 minutes of getting that server back.”
To Catch A Thief
“I worked at an arcade/restaurant for a few years. I picked up a Sunday morning front desk shift, and someone lost their brand new iPhone in the arcade. I put it in the drawer because when she called, she said she’d be back in a couple of hours to get it. I informed my manager of all of this.
My shift ends, the second shift desk employee comes in and has a second-day trainee. Nothing unusual there. The manager I told about the phone walks out with me and there are two different managers in charge now.
I get a phone call around 8 pm from a manager I’m pretty good friends with (we’ll call him K), asking me what the f I did with the woman’s phone. I tell him, and offer to go up there and search the security footage for when it may have gone missing. He agrees and I go back to work.
So watching the footage from when I put the phone in the drawer to when the woman finally arrived (about seven hours after our phone call) takes a while. Apparently, the other manager on duty had decided to cut the employee at the desk, and allow a second-day trainee to work on her own, using a cash drawer signed out to somebody else, and a swipe card that wasn’t even hers. All around chaos on that one. K is off doing manager things, and I’m sitting in the office watching the footage with a couple of kitchen guys who are bored since it was a slow night. Finally, we see the trainee pick up a receipt VERY carefully from the drawer and slide it into her bag.
K comes up and watches the footage, and asks if I’m available to close the front desk that night depending on what goes down when he talks to her. I say yes because hey, I’m already there and money is money. The girl apparently says that she thought it’d been there long enough for it to be considered free game. We would donate items that were left longer than 3 months, but not anything expensive, that always gets returned somehow otherwise it’s left in the safe.
She got walked off the property by K and never came back. She was crying up a storm after being told that unless she returned the phone that night, the woman was pressing charges. When she brought it back she acted ticked off as if it was somehow all of our faults.”
Gone In 35 Minutes
“About 35 minutes.
I hired a guy to work for me as a quality inspector for merchandise headed to Walmart and Target. He bragged about everything he stole from his last job during training and how they paid him more than I did. Well, I’m not holding him back from all that money so I had some big guys lead him off the property.”
Not Even Trying To Make A Good Excuse, Huh?
“Four or so hours. When I was 18 I got a job at a grocery store, along with three others. We all started training together. On the first day, we were training in the evening, and one girl asked to go home, she said her head hurt. They said fine, she clocked out, went to grab a grocery cart, and started filling it with spirits and drinks. The store manager walked over and asked her if she was having a party. She said yes. Didn’t even try to come up with an excuse. Just, ‘Yeah, I am, so I needed to leave early on my first day.’ Fired her right on the spot.”
A Human Tire Fire
“We were working for a photocopier company. The turnover rate was ridiculous meaning while there were 33 territories in our major city, we often had a few new hires ready to go for when someone quit or inevitably was fired. We referred to these new hires exclusively as being on the bench.
For the final quarter of the year our boss had a promotion in a place where if we sold a million dollars in copiers, he was taking all of us to the Bahamas. Sure enough and against what this manager believed to be possible, we hit the million and he booked a flight to take us all away.
The catch was there were two guys who were scheduled to start the day before we were to leave and so the manager decided to bring them on the trip with us and also decides to bring along the CEO of the entire company
The first day we get there and the 35 of us waste zero time getting it going and we’re clearing out the open bar. At this time we collectively get pulled aside and told we would be having a nice dinner that night and we should shut it down, sober up, put on some nice clothes, and meet back in two hours.
34 of us did as we were told. I noticed things were going south pretty quickly when everyone was dressed nicely with the exception of the new guy. And he wasn’t shy about it based on the decision to strike up a conversation with the CEO. It’s clear to all of us he’s an absolute puddle. So he’s chatting the CEO up and his pants start to lower a little bit. Turns out he forgot to pack a belt. As his pants are dropping lower and lower, his junk eventually emerged from his pants and was shown to everyone in the place, including the CEO.
The dude literally never worked a day on the job and was fired for exposing himself to the head of the company.
But we were there for three days, and did he ever make it count. Everywhere I went on the paradise island of the Bahamas you would find him passed out. In the morning for breakfast? He’s passed out in the lobby. 3 am after the club? He’s passed out upright in the casino information booth. His roommate goes home one day and the dude’s shoes were neatly put together on the bed and the guy is unconscious laying on the waist-high dresser.
He was tire fire and I will never forget the 24 hours he technically was my colleague.”
These Folks Just Outed Themselves So Bad
“I owned a construction business and we recently hired 3 new employees due to expansion. I didn’t get to meet them yet as my business partner was the one who interviewed them and watched them get started on the first day and would check in on them most mornings. Along with the new hires, we promoted one of our best workers to the manager to oversee them.
So after a few days, I noticed that we were behind schedule on the job, this wasn’t all that surprising because we had the new hires but I decided it’s best go in and check it out to make sure everything was going well. So I call up my manager and tell him to go to a different site (we did multiple sites each day) and that I will take over at the place with the new guys.
I arrive at the site half an hour late due to traffic and everyone is already hard at work, and in fact, they are working efficiently and correctly on everything. I asked them a few questions about what they are doing and so on and get all the right answers. I figured the delay was just the first two days of learning and am very pleased that everything was picked up and seemed to go well. Now it is important that at this point I didn’t actually introduce myself and nobody asked who I was so it seems everyone just assumed that I was just another worker from the company they never met before.
So two hours before we are supposed to finish for the day, a guy comes over and says ‘Hey, just so you know, we’re all gonna head out now, but the clock in that we worked the whole day. [manager] allows it, and the owners never notice.’
So that is the story of how I fired 3 new hires on the first day I met them… and also how I had to fire our best worker.”
What An Idiot
“Call center job. Escalated customer service for a cell phone company.
Initial new employee training.
After the initial new hire paperwork was done, we were shown some of the various tasks we’d be doing.
One task involved customer bill complaints, that if a customer was being miss-billed, then we would need to correct their bill. They gave an example of the biggest case that that had ever hit the call center. Lufthansa, the German airline, apparently was exempt from certain taxes on their American cell phone accounts due to some treaty or something, but that hadn’t been implemented in our billing, so someone had to go through every account in their name and every bill, going ALL the way back to the creation of those accounts, and credit off tens of thousands of dollars worth of taxes.
This middle-aged guy, who had already established himself to be snarky and bitter and sarcastic, makes some quip about:
‘Oh great, our job is to give money back to the Nazis!’
The instructor spins around, stares straight at him, and asks him to repeat what he said.
He sheepishly said it was nothing and he didn’t say anything of note.
The instructor just glared at him. For context, The instructor was a woman in some kind of conservative Islamic dress. I don’t know the proper term for it, but it wasn’t one of those full burqas. She was clearly very uptight and formal and proper. She didn’t like joking or cutting up in class, insisted on being addressed as Mrs. Mohammed instead of her first name, and was generally pretty stern.
We went on a scheduled break about a half-hour later. When he was walking back from the breakroom, he was intercepted by a security guard and someone that I would later learn was the General Manager of the whole site, and they took him to a side meeting room while the rest of us were filing into the training room. The guy was never seen again.
He worked for the company for all of about three hours.”
Please Leave. Now.
“My document processing clerk was getting married and going on his honeymoon so I got a short-term temp. It wasn’t a temp-to-hire, everything was out in the open through a legit temp agency who generally did pretty good screenings. The temp’s very first day, they show up with a box of things; photos, mugs, office equipment (pen cup, task light, etc.), stuff to decorate a cubicle with. I advised them not to unpack, we were getting right into training. Within two hours after I cut them loose on a computer with a ‘Let me know if you need anything or have any questions,’ they said, ‘This mouse is hurting my wrist. It gave me carpal tunnel. I’m going to need worker’s comp paperwork.’ I made an immediate call to the agency ending this contract, then told the temp, “Your paperwork is at the temp agency office, go ahead and go see your rep there.” They left their box of stuff behind; I had to have the temp agency come pick it up.”
Fired For A Fender Bender?
“Before their first day on orientation.
I got hired for a manufacturing job through Manpower (a temp agency). Me and a friend of my wife were both supposed to start on Monday at the plant for a week-long orientation.
She got into a fender bender on her way to orientation and called them to say that she’d be a bit late, that she just needed to wait on the police to give a statement.
The manager told her not to bother ever coming in.
The girl was torn up. She took pictures and gave the police report to the hiring manager, tried to explain things to the company HR managers, but no dice.
She was fired before ever clocking in.”
Fired By Your Own Dad
“My sister was fired on day one. My dad had his own small medical practice and would hire me and my sisters as our first job to be his receptionist and file insurance claims, so we could get some work experience before we went job hunting in the larger world. My older sister worked for him in high school for a year. I worked for him for two years, then it came time for my younger sister to take over. I brought her to work to start training and said the number one rule in the office was, ‘At work, he’s not dad, he’s the doctor and the boss.’
She sassed him in front of a patient her first day, with all the venom and sarcasm a teenage girl can muster when dealing with a parent asking her to do something. He fired her on the spot and I dragged her out of there. Mom told her at least she’d get paid for the couple of hours she managed to be employed.”
70 Minutes Is All It Took.
“Took me about 1 hour and 10 minutes.
Took a job in sales for a company that hosted and ran various industry seminars. Was told in the interview all leads were prequalified and there’d be zero cold calling.
He pointed out this bell that everyone rang when they got a sale. My interview was 3 hours long and I didn’t hear the thing once. First major red flag.
Stupid me took the job. On the first day, we had our 9 am orientation meeting, a guy starts going through expectations. He said we needed to show up to work every day with 20 leads of our own – asking friends, calling old coworkers, anyone by any means. Second major red flag.
Then, he started teaching us how to use Goggle to dig for leads to cold call and literally described how to open a browser, find the URL bar, enter search phrases… like the new hires were complete morons. Third major red flag.
After an hour, we took a break. I found the guy who hired me and asked ‘What gives?’ and he said, ‘I never said that to you’ (about the no cold calling and prequalified leads).
I grabbed my coat and went home.”
More McDonalds Madness
“Co-worker’s first day at McDonald’s. While walking through the kitchen, the manager handed him his uniform. He stopped dead in his tracks in the middle of the kitchen and stripped down to his underwear to change into the uniform. First the shirt, then the pants. He was fired by the manager who had handed him the uniform before he stepped out of his pants. It was the only time I’ve seen someone fired publicly. All of the crew members and anyone waiting in line to order food saw this happen within about 90 seconds.”
He Was Hired For Some Pretty Weird Reasons
“I was fired on my second day as a line cook at a Mitzel’s Restaurant in Washington State back in the 90s. Turns out I was hired just to threaten the job security of a long-time line cook with an attitude problem; to keep him in line. He got the message and apologized to the manager, and I was fired for ‘breaking a yolk when flipping fried eggs’ one time. I’d been a line cook for a few years by then and thought I was doing pretty good. I was taken out the back door and terminated on day two.”
Liar, Liar!
“This happened last week. The new girl is hired and right off the bat starts telling me that she regrets taking this job (despite being unemployed for 4 months) because there are so many new people so it must be a bad job because of high turnover. (Not really true. We just got bought by a large company and they are hiring more people because we have more business). She tells us all about how its her birthday and shes going drinking after work. Does a no call no show the next day which is her third day.
We all assume she quit. But the next day she comes in and starts just trying to work like nothing happened. The supervisor asked what happened and she said she got in a minor car accident. He asked why she didnt call and she said she doesn’t have a cell phone. Despite being on her cell phone constantly in the office. He decided to give ger one more chance but gave her a lecture about how she needs to communicate properly about missing work, and one more incident will be an automatic firing.
Next day she pulls another no call no show.”
A Good Story About A Troubled Employee
“We got a new contract for two receptionists to sit at our front desk. The company did not send their sharpest knives in the drawer because it was a low-dollar contract for only one year. You could consider the positions temporary.
They sent a guy that my security manager called Sticks. He was incredibly malnourished and thin.
We had a front door that was double door paned glass. I always exited through the side door and would look in through the glass doors every day when I left for home.
On Stick’s second day, I looked in through the glass at the dark reception area and saw one of the office chairs behind the reception counter as it slowly spun.
I entered back in through the side door and came into the back of reception.
I found Sticks laying on the floor with an ergonomic office chair that had fallen on top of him. His head was bleeding from where he struck the floor or some other object. Also, in my peripheral vision, I saw a can of compressed air (the type for cleaning keyboards).
Sticks said he was perfectly fine. I helped him up and sent him home.
Over the next few days, other admin folks reported to me that they kept finding Sticks collapsed in the reception area when no one had been around. I finally called his corporate supervisor to come take him away. When the supervisor arrived, Sticks had locked himself in the supply closet and refused to talk to me. I could hear him huffing air behind the door. The supervisor talked to him through the door and finally led him back to company headquarters.
They fired him.
I called the company, and I learned that Sticks was a former service member who had served in combat. Looking at his résumé, I knew he was also a former EOD team member. I suspected he had substance abuse problems stemming from PTSD and head trauma.
I still had his contact information, so I contacted him a week later. From then on, I coached him every day until I finally got him an appointment with a volunteer from AMVETS who got him and his family help and care.
Today, I wish I knew where he was (this was more than five years ago). I hope that he took advantage of the help offered to him.
Because of this thread, I am going to text him right now and see how he is doing.”
This Guys Was Going To Be There FOREVER
“I worked in the signage industry for many years. One day some guy walks in looking for work claiming to be a signwriter.
My boss asks him if he has brushes, he says absolutely.
So my boss says ok we need someone to go and paint a 5-meter logo on the wall at the gym. It’s basically a couple of circles with Helvetica text in between and a stylized dancing man. Pretty basic stuff. We give him the layout and the paint and off the guy goes.
Four or five hours later we get a call from the owner of the gym. He tells my boss to come and fetch this guy before he has some kind of breakdown inside the gym.
We get there and he has literally got two tiny little artists brushes. A number 1 and a number 4 or something and he is trying to freehand this freaking huge 5-meter circle with them. I almost cracked a rib trying not to laugh at this guy. He was sweating bullets trying to get this done.
No mahl stick, no tape, no chalk line. Not even a normal 2-inch paintbrush. Just this little, puny 4 mm round paintbrush and he’s painting this 50mm thick circle by eye.
Holy cow we laughed about that for days.”