Getting fired is no fun, but some people deserve it for all the dumb things that they got up to on the job. Seriously, how do these people function in normal society if this is how they behave at work? No wonder they got canned!
(Content has been edited for clarity)
Her Daily “Habit” Took Her Coworkers By Surprise
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“Every day at lunch, she would drink roughly half of her Jimmy Johns soda, then take it with her to the bathroom to fill it back up with something a little stronger. She did a pretty good job covering up the smell, and since she did it from day one, it wasn’t immediately apparent that she was getting wasted.
We all found out on day four when she knocked her full cup over, and we all got punched with the smell of strong drink in the afternoon.”
She Never Seemed To Work, So He Did A Little Snooping
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“This happened at my current place of work. We had a secretary, about whom we were all curious. None of us knew what she did during the day since it seemed like nothing got done. I ended up giving her lists to complete, but she would throw them in the trash.
I got fed up and looked at her computer at the end of the day, which was probably bad on my part.
But we also found out she was advertising her body using her company email.”
He Helped Her Find A Phone, Then He Helped Himself
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“I work at a retail store of a very well known technology company. Customers very often trade in their old smartphones for credit when they buy a new one. Protocol is to erase the old phone in the customer’s presence. One employee didn’t erase the phone, went through the camera roll, found some pictures he liked (the customer was female) and emailed them to himself, using the customer’s email account that was logged into the phone. The customer found the emails in her sent box and complained to management. He was several levels of fired.”
He Checked The Cameras And Saw The Whole Thing
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“There was a secretary who would come in just to answer phones, clean up a little, and do some filing in the evening. She worked maybe four hours a day. It was just a side gig for her.
The broker at that office was (and still is) paranoid about security. He had many rental properties, and everything he had was wired up so he could see and hear everything (well, not inside apartments, but hallways and yards and garages). The office was wired up for video and audio.
Anyway, during tax season, he’d rent out our small conference room to an accountant. During this time, the accountant would usually be there from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Most of us would be gone by 6 or 7 p.m., so it was just him and the secretary.
I went in one afternoon, and the secretary showed up, looking obviously distressed. She went into the broker’s office and started crying. He got on the computer, she came out, other ladies in the office were comforting her, and I saw the broker through the window put his head in his hands, just shaking his head.
A minute or two later, he came out, and he looked furious. He looked at me and another realtor (we’re both pretty solid guys) and said, ‘This won’t be pretty, but if it gets ugly, I need you to back me up.’
We didn’t know what was going on, but we were ready for anything. He marched over to the small conference room, flung the door open, and yelled, ‘GET YOUR CRAP AND GET THE EFF OUT!’ The accountant had a client in the room at the time, and the client went running for the door. Now, keep in mind that this broker was always very soft spoken. In the 15 years I’ve known him, this is the only time I’ve ever heard him yell and the only time I’ve ever heard him swear.
Anyway, the accountant played dumb and was like, ‘What did I do?’ The broker was talking to him, but we couldn’t hear what he’s saying. The account was saying stuff like, ‘She’s lying!’ and, ‘That never happened!’
The broker grabbed the guy, slammed him against the wall, got in close and said something right into the guy’s ear. The guy went white as a sheet and said, ‘Ok, I’ll go,’ and he packed up and left.
So, what happened? I finally got the full story about 10 years later. I went to work for another office, but I was doing a deal with my old broker, and I asked him about it. Instead of telling me the story, he pulled up the video.
The guy came out of his little office and made small talk. He made a comment about her blowing him, and she just laughed it off. A few minutes later, he flat out asked her if she’d blow him for $100. She said no and started putting on her coat. He pulled out his Johnson and asked, ‘Maybe this will change your mind?’ The guy was hung like a horse. She grabbed her purse and made a move to run. He grabbed her arm and said, ‘You’re not going to tell anyone about this.’
She said, in the most terrified tone, ‘I won’t. I promise.’
He let go and said, ‘You better not or it’s the last thing you’ll ever tell anyone.’ She ran out.
I knew nothing about the accountant. I’d never even spoken to him, but apparently, he had a wife and a few kids. This is what the broker whispered to him after he slammed him against the wall: He said he’d send the video to the guy’s wife if he ever came back or ever approached the secretary. And here’s where it gets even better.
I found out that the secretary was the broker’s niece (but they kept that quiet), so he had a little more of an emotional investment in this. The accountant was a sort-of friend (the broker’s wife and the accountant’s wife were casual acquaintances at the country club gym).
After about a week, the secretary went to the police and told them about the video. The broker provided the video, and the guy was arrested. His wife saw the video and filed for divorce. The broker’s wife and accountant’s wife end up talking somewhere down the road, and basically, the guy never went to jail or anything, but he’s not doing well. She was a successful doctor, and the accountant was basically an accountant for three months per year. When tax time came around, he’d advertise like crazy in poorer neighborhoods because ‘[racial ephitets] are too stupid to know how to do their taxes.’ And apparently, he just worked for a few months so he could buy toys that she refused to finance (like a snowmobile and a boat). After April, he’d just sponge off her and be a lazy prick for the next nine months.
After the divorce, she got just about everything. He pays child support and lives off his elderly mother. He works full time, but can’t find decent work because he’s a crappy accountant. He did everything halfway and just isn’t very good at what he does, so the wife said he’s like an entry level bean counter for some auto parts warehouse.”
She Had The Nerve To Act Surprised
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“It was the 90s, I still had hair, and was working as an assistant manager at a Natural Wonders store in the mall (the company no longer exists, as with every retail job I’ve held). We hired high school students almost exclusively, it was a typical low paying, after school retail mall job.
There was one girl who was always late, routinely failed to get the most simple task done, and sulked whenever I called her on the behavior. She switched shifts with another girl and was scheduled to work Thursday 4 p.m. to close. The shift came up and she hadn’t shown. Finally, after she was 30 minutes late, I called her at home.
Me: ‘Hi Susie, you’re late for your shift. Are you going to make it in?’
Her: ‘I want to finish watching this episode of Jerry Springer.’
Me: ‘Okay, I hope it’s a good episode, but we’re going to have to let you go.’
Her: ‘What? But?’
Me: ‘Are you comfortable with us sending your check in the mail?’
Her (really quiet): ‘Okay.'”
The Odds Weren’t In This Criminal Couple’s Favor
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“I hired a cashier to help with shifts (and give me days off) at the gas station where I was the assistant manager. After about a week, the big boss and I noticed that our lottery tickets counts were off and one was even messed up (crinkly, scraped, torn). My boss had to go through our security tapes with management to find out the problem. So a bit of backstory before the next bit, the cashier we’d hired had a boyfriend who used to have my job, and back when he worked here, the cameras were positioned differently. When he left, my boss had them moved to eliminate blind spots. So when big boss and bigger boss opened up the tapes, they found this smart guy casually ‘dropping’ large stacks of lottery tickets and then kicking them over to spots of the cashier area that USED to be blind spots. Not only did he get caught doing this, but because of the exact positioning of where he thought the blind spot was, his boyfriend was charged too. Needless to say, he was fired immediately. Oh, and every ticket stolen is counted as a felony. Each. Ticket.”
A Case Of Mistaken Bagels Led To Her Ouster
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“My boss had to fire a lady in our office because she lost her marbles when someone ate her bagel from the fridge. She had a tantrum, like a toddler. Also, the girl who’d eaten it had eaten it by mistake. She thought it was a bagel from the office breakfast we’d had earlier that same morning (it was in the same packaging as the office stuff). Now, I hate it when people eat my lunch, but the girl who ate the bagel profusely apologized. She even stated she would go and buy the lady a new one right on the spot. But tantrum lady couldn’t let it go. So, that ended up being her last night.”
The Register Was Always Short Such A Specific Amount
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“I had an assistant manager who would short the till $3.64 every single day. Day or night. It was always the same amount, and we could never prove it was him, even though it lined up with only his shifts. Until one day when he came back from picking up his lunch at Taco Bell, and my other assistant saw his lunch and thought to herself, ‘That looks good!’ Then she walked across the street on her break and ordered the same thing. Her total? $3.64! She immediately came back and told me. I pulled all the drawers, and sure enough one was short that exact amount!
The kicker… when he was sat down by our district manager to be terminated, all they told him was, ‘We know what you’ve been stealing!’
His response was, ‘Oh! You finally figured out I was stealing all those Skechers Shape-Ups?!’ For those that don’t remember, those shoes were $130 a pair!”
He Soon Realized That He Hadn’t Muted The Phone As He’d Thought
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“Fresh out of college, I worked in a call center for a mutual fund company. The job wasn’t hard, you just placed trades all day and occasionally had to deal with a jerk here and there.
An older guy who sat around the corner from me was kind of sad looking and hated being there. He would put customers on mute and curse under his breath from time to time.
Well, one day he had an older lady call in to place a trade to cash and she wasn’t that pleasant. He hit his mute button, but the phone didn’t mute. He proceeded to call her an old, nasty cow who will die alone. He would have gone on, but she interrupted him and said, ‘Excuse me?’ to the old guy’s surprise. He asked her what she was talking about and said she heard things.
The call got escalated, and she wound up hanging up on him but calling back. His boss pulled the call and pulled him aside. He was told to just be honest and he wouldn’t be fired. Instead of coming clean, he kept denying it and the call was played back to him. Security walked him out right from the conference room. I’ll never forget a Caesar salad sitting on his desk for the last five hours that day. Rumor has it they put the salad in his box of belongings and mailed to his home address but I like to think it’s still sitting on that desk as a reminder.”
The Cashier Was Scooping A Little Something For Themselves Out Of The Till
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“We kept finding stock discrepancies, but we couldn’t figure out for a while what was happening. The count on certain items was off (system said we had stuff that wasn’t on the shelf). Eventually, we found out that when a customer bought something with cash, later that same day the same cashier would refund the transaction for cash with no customer around.
They were fired on the spot, but they couldn’t be charged because the way the camera sat, they’d been able to block the view of the cash drawer with their body and you couldn’t see them take the money out of the till. Even though we knew exactly when the false transactions were posted, footage placed them right there doing ‘something’ and intentionally blocking the view at that exact time, there’s only one way everything added up, but they still got away with it.
If they’d just been pulling cash out, we would have caught it right away, but the counts were never off because there was a transaction in the system, so they’d been doing this occasionally for a couple of months, we figured they’d gotten away with a couple of grand.
Return procedures changed after that.”
They Asked Him To Do One Little Thing
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“I was working in retail. A merchant order was coming in, so I asked an employee to perform a specific task related to the order. I went to follow up on a few other things. I came back and saw him eating Cheetos while walking around the store. I asked him how he was doing with his task. He told me hadn’t started it. I explained why it was important to do it at that moment. He then cursed me out in front of both our co-workers and customers. The general manager fired him next day due to complaints about the incident. That employee was also my best friend. He was married, had a baby and all that jazz. I haven’t heard from him since that day.”
He Was A Thoroughly Unsatisfactory Employee
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“He took two-hour lunches, even though he was told that lunch was only for an hour.
He also manipulated the documents so that he could use the company account to go to a resort with the entire marketing team and order food, drinks, etc. to their hearts’ desire. No, this was not part of any incentive program, at all. Apart from using the company’s money for this, he also jacked up the actual value of the expenses, making the company pay more.
We also found out that he had been bringing product demos our clients had sent us home with him. This amounted to roughly $15,000.
He tried to bypass me on signatures and decision making.
He’d bribed random people in my team to keep an eye on me so that he’d know what I’m up to since he thought I was sabotaging his career. I wasn’t. I was too busy with work and was out of the country most of the time for business trips. The people that he spoke with, however, were my direct subordinates and were loyal to me. So they told me everything.
In the end, someone told HR about everything that he had done. In a single day, he was removed from his post, and the industry association was informed about his misdemeanor to make sure that he wouldn’t use the company’s name for any unofficial transactions. He kept on pointing fingers at random people for getting him fired, without him knowing that it was me, his boss, who did it.”
He Was A Junior Member Of The Team, But He Expected To Be Able To Do As He Pleased
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“I had a guy that worked for me that was very junior; he’d just graduated college. His communication skills were poor, his coding skills (we were in IT) were not good, he had never written a program for money, and his ability to transfer requirements from people/paper to software was not yet there. He needed mentoring, big time.
The problem was, he liked to work from 4 p.m. until whenever (never knew when that was – everyone else was home by the time he left the office). This is before broadband in the house, so he had to come into the office, but we never knew for how long.
So, I introduced the concept of mandatory ‘core hours.’ Everyone must be in the office (with time off for lunch) between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. on workdays. You could come in early, you could stay later, but you should be in by 10 a.m. and leaving for the day no earlier than 3 p.m. (of course, exceptions could and would be made for doctor appointments/etc.).
It did not work. He said, ‘I like to be out with friends and family until 4/5/6 a.m., so I cannot be at work at 10 am. I am not a banker.’ That’s a direct quote. I told him it didn’t matter, that is the way it was.
Someone even set up an office pool where you could pick the time that the guy would show up. They gave him the 10 a.m. box for free; everyone else paid a buck.
He never won the pool. Not once, not even close. I shut down the pool after a short while.
He argued with me about core hours up and down. End users hated him because whatever he turned out was useless, he never made core hours and got straight zero’s on the employee yearly evaluation.
And he had the nerve to look surprised after I took a paper trail a mile long to HR asking if we can get rid of him, not to another group within the company, but from the company itself. They were thankful for all of the emails, the employee evaluation, all of the documentation. We were an ‘at will’ employer, so technically they did not need it all, but with people thinking ‘I was discriminated against,’ and suing, they liked having it all.
He was gone by the end of the week.”
It Was A Stinky Situation
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“I had to fire an employee because they refused to shower/wash their clothes. We warned her over and over and over again. We moved her away from other people. She’d just try to cover the stench of bum clothes and dead cats with enough vanilla scented crap to make your eyes water.
I’d just talked to her, even though she didn’t report directly to me. The next day I was walking to my office with my breakfast burritos, and she walked by me. I just couldn’t eat anymore and threw it out. The burrito was the last straw. It was sausage and red Chile. I’ll miss that burrito it deserved better than to have a life cut short by vanilla scented roadkill.”
Her Name Tag Was The Breaking Point
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“We put a girl on a final warning and told her explicitly that ANY infraction would lead to her termination.
Next shift we pass by, and she wasn’t wearing a nametag on her sweater. We asked her to put it on. She peeled back her sweater to reveal her name tag on the t-shirt underneath. We asked her to put it on the outside where it’s visible. She refused and wouldn’t offer a reason. She just said no. Goodbye.
Stupid rule. Stupider reason to be fired.”
He Refused To Follow Anyone’s Directions
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“I still remember the first guy I ever had to fire, and I wasn’t even that much older than him. He was some dumb kid hired straight out of college.
A few flags popped up during training. For one, we kept telling him if he had any questions about anything, he could feel free to ask. He never asked anything.
I told him to help clean up a lab, but DON’T throw away that binder of notes. I told him that VERY clearly and made him repeat it. I left for an hour, came back, and he’d thrown it away. When asked why he said it was old notes, so it didn’t seem useful.
You little twit, you don’t have enough experience or authority to decide what is useful or not.
I made him go out to the dumpster and dive in to get it out. It turns out there was important info in there.
This wasn’t the last straw.
The last straw was asking him to test a few parts, get them cleared by QA, and take those parts directly to shipping with a CoC. Three step direction, pretty simple right? We’d supervised him doing it before a few times, and he seemed to get it.
He managed the first two. Then somehow brought down the WRONG box of parts with the RIGHT certificate of conformance (HOW DOES THAT EVEN HAPPEN?) to be shipped out and we didn’t catch it until too late.
That was pretty bad. It was terrible. But when we asked what happened and if he made a mistake, he kept denying it. I told him there were only two people in the office who regularly tested those parts, and it was either him, or the other girl (who I know was meticulous as heck, AND she wasn’t testing it for the last few weeks since I wanted him to learn how to do it). He tried to pin it on the girl.
Like, if he’d at least been honest and apologized, I don’t know. Maybe I would’ve given him a second chance. But this sucker kept denying it, saying it wasn’t him when basically everyone knew it was him. Even the guys at shipping had a record of him coming down, and the girl’s weekly report had noted that she wasn’t doing testing that week.
A guy who can’t listen to direction, messes up and won’t admit it, then tries to pin his mistakes on his coworker is scum. If he’d shown any remorse or tried to improve himself at any point, I wouldn’t have minded as much.”
All He Had To Do Was Park In The Correct Spot
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“A guy hired to manage a store in a mall REFUSED to park in employee parking.
Mall employees have designated parking places, far from the choice spots near mall entrances. This guy refused to park there, and every time he parked illegally, the store got fined $100. And he parked in customer parking every day.
He was called out on it, and the policy was explained over and over. He got written up. He was told that on the next infraction he would be fired. And he did it the very next day.
He was blindsided when we fired him.”