Should Have Been Fired And Brought Up On Charges!
“Worked with an older doctor that pulled his junk out to show a nurse. A day later we all get called in for the investigation. Then 12 of us have to do HR mandatory harassment training and role play. The dude who pulled it out doesn’t even show up.
He gets a week suspended for being a no-show. He never does the class and then gets moved to department chair a few months later. I learned then that sometimes the world makes no sense.”
The Fish Killer
“I worked at a pet store for a long time. We had a disease outbreak and we were bleaching individual tanks and then dechlorinating the tanks and testing them before putting them back in with the main system.
We had been undergoing the process for about a week at that point, but apparently ‘Red’ hadn’t been paying attention at all during that time period.
She reattached a tank half-full of bleach to the main tank system. As I walked into the store (it was my day off; I was just there for lizard food), I just see the majority of the fish moving around listlessly. Then they started death-spiraling. I point this out to my coworkers and they start freaking out. One of them starts dumping bottles of dechlorinator into the system.
Meanwhile, ‘Red’ fishes out her favorite fish, blood parrot cichlids, and starts blowing into their gills, trying to do some weird approximation of CPR. She ends up throwing them into the separate sick tank in hopes of saving them.
Anyway, she killed 99% of the fish and I had to help shovel out their corpses while crying the entire time.
She didn’t get fired and never took responsibility for the event.”
This Is Not Cool AT ALL
“I work on a therapeutic campus and I run a unit that specializes in patients with severe learning difficulties, psychosis, paranoid schizophrenia, and other mental illnesses. Some of our patients are known for being quite aggressive and extremely dangerous when they are unsettled.
We found out one shift that we would be having a new nurse with us on the shift who isn’t familiar with the patients/staff at all. How the shift works is that each staff gets given a patient that they stick with for a few hours before everyone rotates to different patients.
My coworker had just got his patient into the bath, so in the meantime, he was cleaning that patient’s room. That’s when the new nurse came into the room with that patient’s morning medication. Having not seen the patients or the staff before, she thought that the staff member cleaning the room was the patient that she was supposed to be giving meds to.
My coworker quickly realized that she was confused and started playing along, answering all of her questions and trying to imitate the patient’s behavior. When she approaches my coworker to give him the patient’s meds, he put his arms up in the air and screamed ‘GET AWAY FROM ME’ and started to run at her (which is something this patient use to do all the time). She instantly screams and drops the medication, she turns around and runs down the corridor screaming whilst my coworker was still chasing her.
After management had heard about all of this, he just had to apologize and luckily she saw the funny side of it. But holy smokes, places of care are usually super strict with that kind of thing, so I’m surprised I’m still working with him to this day.”
Murder Attempt Is Apparently Cool At This Company
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“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.”
The Laziest Man In The Rotation
“I have a lot of stories from when I was a lifeguard manager. This one concerns a certain ‘Garth.’
Garth was a high school jock in every sense of the word. He was rather popular (in the sense that girls would always hang around with him during his lunch breaks, and he was constantly texting). He was quite charismatic, and of course, he had the unfortunate characteristic of being entitled. I had learned from some of the other lifeguards who had gone to school with him that he had been a rather lazy student, taking the easiest classes needed to pass, and still needing ‘assistance’ in order to pass his courses, thus keeping him on the various sports teams he was a part of. Thus, because he was a decent athlete, people simply excused his lousy performance, and like a pig in the mud, he reveled in it.
Garth was openly rude to customers, and would quickly make comments or snide remarks to people, especially teenagers in the park who he saw as less than himself ‘Oh, something nerdy, hahaha what a loser!’ I remember how he loved making fun of obese people for some reason. But his worst crime as an employee? The one that earned my scorn? The one thing that I simply refused to forgive him for?
He ran on his own timescale. He would quite literally leave a shift where he was expected to rotate somebody (though he had the decency to stay until somebody replaced him) and simply go to lunch, leaving some poor sap high and dry. This royally messes up the rotation. It is against policy, and against the instincts of most people who want to keep their jobs. He did this constantly. His attendance record was spotty, and other park managers had noted he simply left for the day when the mood struck him, during break time of course. In some ways, he was a lot like sporty Homer Simpson. I remember how he left for an hour and a half getting lunch. He tried to bribe me with some that he bought me. I refused. That was three rotations of confusion and annoyance that a 5 dollar burrito could not forgive.
And for all this, he never got fired. Others had been disciplined formally with threats of termination for far, far less than the stunts he ever pulled. I never figured out why he was so successful at getting away with that, but I learned to quickly trade him off to another location come the latter half of the season. The sad part was that some of the leads actually liked this guy, and would trade a less socially popular, but more hardworking lifeguard for him. What was his deal? Despite my best investigative efforts and my protests, I never found out.
That kid must be rather successful. I envied him and reviled him at the same time for his antics. His mastery of the art of laziness was exponentially greater than anyone I have yet to meet.”
The Couldn’t Get Their Stories Straight
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“I use to work for a company that did inventory audits and we frequently traveled all over the state to do audits. There was that guy EVERYBODY hated because he was a giant moron who I will call JD (Jumbo Dummy).
One night we had an audit in a city around 3 hours away, in the evening, so by the time we got done it was around 1 am. Pretty much everyone was tired, and only certain people are allowed to drive the company vehicles we take to out of town audits. Well, all the other people who were approved to drive were too tired, so JD said he would. After about half an hour on the road, everyone in the van fell asleep. Around this time JD thought it would be the perfect time to pull out the bottle he bought when he was filling up on gas and start lining up shots on the passenger seat.
Fast forward an hour and everyone in the van gets woken up by JD swerving back and forth on the road and nearly hitting the guardrail ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE ROAD. Everyone in the van calmly and politely asked JD to pull over, then 2 guys politely pulled JD out of the van and attempted to calmly kick his head in. When we got back to the office no one wasted time to call our district manager to try to get JD fired/arrested, only everyone in the van was telling different stories with each person exaggerating the events more than the previous person in the attempt to make his punishment worse. Since the stories were so different our DM couldn’t use this as grounds for termination.
JD did eventually get fired because he would show up to audits and refuse to work because he had an injured shoulder… he injured his shoulder when the 2 guys in the van from the incident jumped him after work and dislocated his shoulder.”
This Guy Is Allowed To Work Around Kids?
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“I heard this story through someone who worked there prior.
I once worked at a kid’s camp. We weren’t paid well, and it was pretty hard to get fired there since there wasn’t much in the way of replacements and pretty much nobody wanted to work full time for less than minimum wage.
One particular area of the camp was the BB weapon range. Elementary aged kids would come to this area, several groups of kids per day, every day, and shoot BB weapons at targets. There was a dedicated staff to this area with a rigorous set of rules so that nobody got hurt.
Kneel on the mat, weapon facing right.
Pull the forearm up, push it back in.
Lay the BB weapon to your side.
Lay down on the mat.
Once you are laying down on the mat, not moving or adjusting anymore, you can pick up your weapon at the counselor’s command.
Once the counselor says fire, you may fire your one shot.
Set the weapon back to your side.
Kids would spend half their time there laying on these mats, lining up a shot, and shooting BBs at targets downrange. The staff there were really good about safety, and they had this routine down to a science. Anything goes wrong, they shut it down immediately.
Most of the staff there all gather to eat lunch at the main dining area while kids and their parents go to a separate picnic area to eat. One of the BB weapon staffers would regularly leave lunch to go set up the range and get things prepared for when the next group of kids would come. It was a pretty nice thing for him to do, seeing as some of these areas take a long time to set up and this one has some pretty dangerous stuff to put in the hands of children.
A coworker decided at one point to also head back a little early from lunch to help him set up (though he had already left a few minutes prior), and discovered that he wasn’t really setting things up early. He was pleasuring himself onto the mats that the children had been and were again going to be laying on.
He wasn’t fired.”
Yelling At All The Bosses At Once!
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“It was actually me, I still have no idea what I was thinking.
The owners of the company all showed up for a company meeting and gave this 30-minute long speech about how much they value our work and they wanted to reward us. They started handing out checks, I open it up and see $2,000. Now, I don’t make a ton of money and I was having health issues and been to the ER a few times in the last few months. So this money would literally save me.
Everyone’s all excited and very surprised our management who were known to be penny pinchers that didn’t care at all about employees would do this.
Then I see it.
The checks were all dated for 2 years from now. They said if we stayed with the company with no write ups and never miss a day of work we could cash those checks in 2 years.
I just lost it. I walked up to the front of the presentation, held my check-up, ripped it into shreds, and said ‘This is some serious bullcrap.’ and threw the shreds at the owners.
Surprisingly I wasn’t fired. Probably because I am the highest producing employee in the company. or maybe they realized toying with people like that really wasn’t a good idea. Who knows.”
Actually, This Guy Is A Hero
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“A guy accidentally emailed the salaries of about 1,000 employees to those employees, so everyone got to see how much more money the new guy who was worse than them made.
Cost a lot of money to level all those salaries.”
This Guys Makes Everything Worse
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“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.”
Kid Had It Coming
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“Back when I was doing my student teaching, a teacher punched a student in the face and did not get fired.
In his defense, the kid was 17 and thought it would be funny to rip the wig off of a female teacher who was going through chemo. The teacher who did the punching was right there and it was pretty much an immediate reaction. Not a single person in that school blamed that teacher for what he did.”
Cheap Sunglasses Cause Big Drama
“I was a counselor at sleep-away summer camp and I have quite a few great stories about this one kid, but here’s the one that I think takes the cake.
So obviously, we’re told at the beginning of camp that if a kid breaks anything, oh well, nothing they’ll do about, bad luck. So one day around lunchtime, this guy’s (AJ) sunglasses disappear. Shortly before lights out that evening, as we come back to the dorms, his sunglasses turn up, broken. One of the campers that I am responsible for was at fault, but I have no idea when it happened.
AJ isn’t pleased one bit. He finds my co-counselor (Tim), the one who shares responsibility for my kids with me. AJ tells Tim that our camper owes him for the sunglasses somewhere in the neighborhood of $100. Tim promptly tells AJ that which we all know: tough luck. This ticks AJ off quite a bit, he tells Tim that if the kid won’t pay that Tim ought to cover it, and since they were in Tim’s room when this happened, he grabbed Tim’s car keys as if to hold them for collateral until the debt is paid. Tim gets his keys back and the situation diffuses. I believe at one point in this encounter, Tim also gives AJ trouble about how they are like 5 dollar sunglasses that he probably bought at a gas station. Anyway, everything’s resolved now.
OR SO WE THOUGHT.
Shortly thereafter, I come upstairs, not knowing what had happened. I go to Tim’s room and find AJ in there, alone. I ask what’s up, and AJ tells me about his sunglasses. He then tells me that he’s taking $20 from the camper’s envelope of spending money which is stored in Tim’s room. He tells me that while he’s owed much more, that’s all that was there, and since my camper was out at that moment, he’d hold onto the $20 and confront my camper about the rest later.
The money is only given to the campers during one of the off-site trips when they have an opportunity to spend it. Then it goes back into Tim’s lockbox in his room, to stay there until the kids get picked up.
I tell AJ it’s a terrible idea. He thinks on this, then leaves. With the money. Thankfully, a few minutes pass and he returns and replaces the money. No harm, though there was certainly a major foul. To get the envelope, I should add, AJ had to reach through a small hole in the back of the lockbox and feel around until he got it.
But there’s one final twist to this story. Later on, that evening, after all the campers are in bed, a few of us counselors are up shooting the bull, all talking about what had happened with AJ. Several of us had our own chunks of what happened, but nobody had the whole story. So I tell the story from my perspective, and when I get to the part about reaching through the hole in the back to take the envelope from Tim’s lockbox, Tim stops me for a second. He says, ‘Wait a minute–I left the key to the lockbox sitting right on top of it!’
Somehow he never got fired, even for stealing from a camper.”
Profanity On The Air!
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“I worked at a small radio station. The guy who was on air before me would record the local news for me to play at 6 pm. It was recorded so if he messed up he would just start over and edit that part out. Well, one day he forgot that he messed up so he doesn’t edit it. I play the news on-air at 6 and in the middle I hear ‘OH [CENSORED] NOW I HAVE TO DO THIS [CENSORED] THING AGAIN!’ Then in his pleasant radio voice: ‘Hi I’m Jim Thomas with your 6 o’clock news update.’ Not sure why he didn’t get fired.”
Badmouthing The Owner
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“I worked in a really small department (4 people), and I was the youngest by 30 years and also the newest employee, but I picked up things quickly, which wasn’t hard as 2 out of 3 of my coworkers could barely run a computer.
About 6 months after I started, my manager went on a 2-week vacation, and during that time the owner had a sit-down talk with me and the other 2 guys. I had to leave about 6 times to answer the phone/counter and every time I walked back in things were more and more tense.
I finally pieced together that the meeting was the owner telling these two guys 3 times my age and with seniority to me that I was in charge of them, even when the manager came back.
One guy was grumbling and cursing and the owner called him out on it. The guy told the owner he didn’t want me in charge and if he and the other guy were such failures then he should just fire him because he was not going to get any better and he certainly wasn’t going to listen to me.
I could see the words about to come out of the owner’s mouth, but he refrained and didn’t fire him.
He did get fired for being incompetent a few months down the road though.”
The Worst ‘Oops’ You Can Imagine
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“A guy in IT deleted all bills of the previous five days. The accountant came in and yelled at him for 40 minutes straight, went home and couldn’t speak for nearly three days.
Our CEO didn’t fire the guy because he was one of his friends. Other coworkers and I had to call about 200 other companies to ask them if they have received a bill from us. At the end, somebody got the glorious idea to ask the mailman where the post sent those bills and saved our butts. If the taxman had found out about this incident…”