Some people go out with a bang. Letting an employee go doesn't always go as smoothly as a company hopes. These employees share all the details about their former coworkers who were fired in dramatic ways.
Can’t Fire Me If I’m Not There
“A VP at my company caught wind that she was going to be fired. Her secretary told her that the higher ups were on their way. The VP told her secretary that she was going to the bathroom. After waiting for 30 minutes, they had someone check the bathroom. The VP never went to the bathroom. She went home to try to avoid being fired.”
Gym, Tan, Unemployment
“Once I knew my manager was being fired (for doing a terrible job – I was documenting his terribleness and doing all the work so I knew it was coming) but he decided (like he often did) that he wasn’t going to come in until 1:30.
I had the president of the company and HR and a few other people coming by my desk every 15 minutes asking if he was in yet. Every time I was like, look, obviously not.
Apparently he had been getting a tan and then went to the gym before coming in.
It was a pretty awkward 5 hours.”
Blackmail Fail
“Many years ago, an architect in my firm hooked up with a secretary after a party. One thing led to another, and they end up hooking up on the main conference table in the center of the office in the middle of the night. The next day, the architect is confronted by the head of security, who had CCTV footage of the event, which he threatened to reveal to the firm leadership. Instead of being blackmailed, the architect went directly to the leadership himself. The head of security was fired immediately.”
At Least He’s Dedicated?
“This was my dad’s company rather than mine, but it’s a good enough story that it’s worth sharing anyway.
The boss goes into the office of one of my dad’s co-workers to discuss some kind of technical issue. They disagree about the proper corrective measure, it escalates into a screaming match, and the boss fires the co-worker on the spot. Tells him to take his stuff and get out.
The co-worker comes back the next morning, just like nothing happened. Nobody’s really sure what’s going on, and since the boss had to go out of town for a meeting, they can’t get a hold of him to ask. He doesn’t seem to be causing any problems, though, so they just kind of do their thing and leave him alone. The co-worker keeps coming in and doing work, and a couple of days later, the boss walks past his door and does a double-take.
‘Co-worker, didn’t I fire you?’
Without looking up from his desk, the co-worker replies, ‘You can’t fire me – I have too much work to do.’
The boss thinks about that for a minute, shrugs, and walks off. Dude kept working there for another couple of years after that.”
Weird Car Buying Hack
“Was buying a car and one of the salesmen at the dealer was arguing with the manager over $50. All glass walls in this place so I can see everything. The guy walks into the manager’s office, slams his fists down on the manager’s glass desk shattering it into a million bits. Computer, phone, paperwork, all go flying. Without so much as a flinch while the whole thing happened, the manager, still sitting where his desk used to be, calmly said, ‘Get out. Do not come back’. Being the only customer there at the time, the manager then apologized for what I’d witnessed and said he’d knock $2500 off whatever price I’d already haggled my own salesman down to if I continued my business with them. Ended up with a nice car for a good price.”
Starting Now
“Mine was pretty simple but hilarious.
Big box retail electronics store. All hands meeting, so probably 60ish employees.
Management fired a guy right before the meeting (seems like a dumb decision), and before he walked out, he stood up in front of the crowd and said ‘Well I’m going to miss you all. These idiots fired me because they think I’ve been stealing stuff, and I haven’t!’
Right then, an iPod touch came tumbling out of his hoodie’s pocket and hit the floor. Sealed in a box with the company’s inventory and anti-theft stickers still on it.”
Tiger Blood
“I work in IT and have seen a few crazy exits.
1. There was a gastro-pub in a building with a bunch of tech companies. I was picking up lunch whilst this guy was getting wasted. The guy orders a shot to go. He says, ‘I’ve got to go to a meeting where I know I’m going to get fired, so I’m going out big.’ Tiger blood, indeed.
2. I’m not sure if he did this intentionally, but a DevOps guy set up a bunch of huge EC2 instances on Amazon Web Services and didn’t tell anyone about it. Upon a monthly audit of AWS charges, it was discovered and ended up costing the company over US$10,000. The company had to eat that expense.
3. A developer had access to the master code repository. Upon leaving, he deleted ALL of his contributions to a project he was working on, replaced it with gibberish, and had it pushed to the server.”
Stinky Revenge
“A coworker at an IT company took a dump in a bowl, placed it in a microwave, set it for 99 minutes and left. The microwave was no longer suitable for use and the smell got us the rest of the day off.
A group of us tracked him down and bought him drink later that night.”
Congratulations. You Played Yourself
“She screamed at me in front of customers, calling me names for moving some things on the store shelves. She had blackmail material on the head manager, so she didn’t get fired for her 10-minute screaming fit.
But then! Months later, I was quitting to go to college. Everyone was tearfully hugging me goodbye, and the manager on duty was remarking how they’ll miss me and all that good stuff. Her eyes practically turned green, she was so envious of all the attention. She hated when the focus wasn’t on her. So she loudly announced, ‘Yeah, I’m quitting too. This place just isn’t right for me.’
The manager on duty got this big Cheshire cat grin on his face and said, ‘Oh I’m so sorry to hear that. Let’s get you started on the paperwork right now.’
She shamefacedly followed him into the office and actually signed the paperwork to quit.
They did not rehire her.”
Team Outing
“I worked at a company that was going through layoffs. I was in HR, sitting next to the girl who checked the anonymous HR tip-line (3rd party company that employees could call without being identified to report HR issues)
Turns out a manager had been feeling down about the lay-offs, and decided his team needed a morale boost. He piled them all in a company van and took them to an adult club, including 2 women.
The women said they were uncomfortable and wanted to leave. He said ‘find your own ride home’
This was literally one day after the harassment training was completed.”
Selling Secrets
“Back when I got my first FT job as a developer, I was with a start-up that I’m sure nobody will really know even 5 years later. They had one Web Developer at the time, and I was brought on with a few other people to round out the team, making us 4 people strong.
What we were working on was an LMS.
We had one woman there who would be in & out of the office, and have the door closed a lot of the time if she was even in. She was generally nice if we did pass by, but if she needed something, she was always very specific about it. Turned out she was leaking company data, and proprietary info to a key competitor and was fired on the spot.
For those of you wondering how she was found out, the CEO was a well-connected guy (and remains so) and heard by some rumblings amongst his peers, from what I remember. It’s been a while, and all we got was the filtered explanation and strict orders to not divulge anything if she ever tried to contact us.”
“Whatever”
“I was an assistant manager for McDonald’s way back in the day. Had a drive thru customer come inside, furious because instead of a Filet-O-Fish in her packaging, there was nasty, dirty, grill towel. The store manager happened to be there that day, and handled this customer. She asked of the people working in the grill area, ‘Who did this?’, and this one guy proudly takes credit for it. She was in the process of telling him he was fired, when he just yells out, ‘I quit!’ and marches out with a big old smile on his face.
Also, when I ended up quitting, I was at that time a 1st asst manager, and pretty much ran the store. We had just had an evaluation done on our store and the manager was not happy with the grade, so he took it out on me, even though the grade was bull, they give you 3 reviews, and the first one is always bad. Anyway, I got sick of him yelling at me, so I told him I would quit right now. He just said, ‘Whatever…’, so I did. I handed him my keys and walked out. To show just how out of touch with his job he was, I was scheduled to open the next day. Nobody ever covered that shift, so when he pulled up to work at 9am, all the opening crew was across the street at a donut shop. It’s a pretty big offense to not open a McDonald’s (especially a corporate one) on time.”
Not The Bagels!
“When I was in high school, I worked at this local coffee shop. One night when I was going through the necessary closing procedures, I return to the kitchen area to bring the dishes to the back only to find my very peculiar coworker completely undressed and climbing into one of the giant sinks. If that wasn’t alarming in itself, he stood up when he saw me come in to show me that he had ‘hilariously’ put one of the leftover bagels on his ‘sausage’. It was pretty freaking weird. I remember being speechless and just walking away. I finished my nightly tasks, called my boss up and told her and just left. The next day I heard he had been fired.”
Big Man
“It was about three years ago. An employee, we’ll call him Dave, was working at my retail store when two customers walk in at about the same time, one black, one white. Dave was being trained on register after being there for only a month or so with the manager standing behind him. The two customers get to the register at about the same time, but the black man beat him there. The black man asks how good the product was before he bought it, and the white man behind him said,’Do I really have to wait for this freaking idiot to be done?’ The black man was unfazed, but Dave said ‘Sir, please don’t use slurs like that or I am going to have to ask you to leave.’
White man: ‘Oh, big man? You’re going to make me leave, big man? Because I called this guy a slur?’
Dave(6″5′): ‘Yes, I am a big man, and you have to leave now.’
White man: ‘Fight me then, big man! I’ll destroy you!’
Dave: ‘Alright, I will. Let me clock out and grab my stuff and I’ll meet you outside.’
The white man was a little surprised by the fact that he accepted. Dave turned to the manager and said, ‘Thank you so much for the opportunity, but I’m afraid I have to quit.’
Manager: ‘Dave, I get it, but you don’t have to do this.’
Dave: ‘Yes I do.’
The white man was getting himself pumped up outside as Dave clocked out, grabbed his coat and his Pepsi, and walked outside where he sucker-punched the white man in the cheekbone, sprawling him out onto the curb. Dave drove off.”
Nepotism Was His Downfall
“Sort of a nasty story, but it happened to a manager I had working at another company.
They hired someone’s nephew as a fork truck driver. Shortly after, they noticed a lot of stuff showing up as damaged and questioned him about it. He refused to admit it was him, and they asked him if he hit anything or noticed damage, to just report it.
3 weeks later, more damaged showed up around the place, such as poles being hit or clipped and product with fork holes in it. My manager was pushing the paperwork though to terminate him because he was a poor fork truck operator.
2 days prior to the paperwork being signed and him being terminated, he drove off the end of a loading dock and tried to jump from the fork truck. He didn’t clear it and it fell on him and crushed him.
They warned him multiple times about putting pallets on loading dock plates and common sense should say not to put pallets in front of an open dock door. Sadly, if this was any other person and not a relative, he would have just been fired. Getting his uncle’s permission to fire him ended up costing him his life.”
Walk Of Shame
“I used to work as a slot machine attendant at a casino. Every now and then, a co-worker would start stealing tips. Tip money was shared by all department employees, so they were literally taking money out of our pockets. In my five years, I saw three get busted, and heard of a few others
They all would hide $10 or $20 at a time, and surveillance always caught them. Surveillance would notify the gaming regulators, in my state they were highway patrol officers on gaming assignment. Gaming would order a constant monitor, which meant for their entire shift, that employee was recorded. They (surveillance and gaming) would allow the employee to keep stealing until the grand total reached in excess of $500, which was a state felony.
Every time, gaming would call the manager on duty and security. They’d let the employee count into their bank, and as soon as they were on the floor working, would come in, place the person under arrest – in front of their co-workers and customers – and walk them out thru the casino floor in handcuffs.
It was meant to be a lesson for us, but I couldn’t imagine the shame and embarrassment of being called out as a thief and a liar in front of my friends. The looks of hate those people got were awful.”
“Poop-Handed”
“Guy went nuts when he heard he was going to be fired so he took a poop on the floor of the bathroom and proceeded to smear poop all over the walls, the toilets, everywhere except the sink, so unless he had a set of gloves with him I can only imagine that he left the building poop-handed. The cleaners threaten to quit on the spot rather than clean up the mess he made.”
Arm Wrestling
“Had a co-worker who was into arm wrestling. We’re talking arm wrestling competitions and everything. He would take anybody on, and almost always won. Most people just stayed pretty far away from him, he’s pretty nuts.
The cleaning crew didn’t know how nuts he was, as they only came in at night, shortly before the regular employees left.
Our arm wrestling buddy was working one night when the cleaning crew arrived. I was on the sales floor by myself. The store is quiet. All of a sudden, there is an audible POP that comes from the backroom, and seconds later, one of the cleaning crew comes running onto the floor, crying and clutching his broken elbow.
Arm wrestling buddy comes out a second later. ‘I feel bad for the guy, but he had terrible form.’
Never saw him again.”
A Cover Up
“So a couple years ago my husband worked for a security company. One of his main security sites was a very secluded equipment yard for the gas and electric company.
He worked a 12 hour graveyard shift by himself every night out at the yard. Strange things started happening around the yard, namely a few of the big (and very expensive) generators started to go missing.
Then one night, my husband and I are sitting on the couch watching a movie (on one of his rare days off) and he gets a call from his boss. Apparently, some woman had just called my husband’s boss from my husband’s phone number, claiming to be my husband’s girlfriend and chewing out his boss. His phone had been on the table right in front of us the entire time, and he wasn’t on it at all.
So then we find out that my husband’s coworker had been calling his boss telling him that my husband was doing all this stuff that he wasn’t doing at all.
The climax of this all happened when the boss finally started getting suspicious of the coworker, and decided to search Craigslist for the generators that had gone missing from the job site.
Lo and behold! They were listed for sale, and the contact name and number were none other than the coworker himself.
The next day, they had police waiting for him at the job site when he arrived.
We found out that this guy had been plotting and working over the boss and my husband the entire year, hoping to cover his tracks and make my husband look guilty and like he was the one that was stealing equipment.”
A Bit Paranoid
“A woman started insisting that we were all sneaking up on her so she bought a mirror and taped it to her monitor. Then another and another. Then every time someone walked by her cubicle and she noticed she would yell,’YOU SCARED ME!’. All of this was mostly ignored. She was getting her work done I guess.
One fateful day she slapped and pulled the hair of one of the cafeteria workers because she was certain that cafeteria worker was poisoning her soup. She was walked off of the premises by a police officer and we never heard from her again.”
Living In The Closet
“When I was in college, I worked dorm security over the summer. A guy who had just graduated who had been a senior RA in the building was working staff with us too. He knew where an unused, unlocked closet was, and decided to secretly move in over the summer. Most of us on staff knew about it but didn’t tell our boss.
As it turns out, he was doing more than that. He also stole a meal card for the dorm cafeteria that was intended for use by kids at summer campers, and he and a couple other people on staff were using it. They got caught and all banned from the building. Not coincidentally, there were a lot more hours available for those of us who were still there.”
He Called It
“We had been noticing a lot of tools going missing at work, like thousands of dollars worth of drills, batteries, sawzalls, that type of stuff. We are a pretty large manufacturing facility but our processes hadn’t caught up to our size yet so nothing was really tagged or identified which made it hard to track.
I was working in one of our shops and the supervisor came in and grabbed one of the apprentices and asked him to come with him. Now this kid was always a pretty decent guy, pretty funny and not a bad worker. We all knew he was kind of a mess though and had a lot of bad habits so when he got asked to go we started to put it together that he must have been the one stealing stuff to pay for illegal substances and that he was getting let go.
He comes back a little bit later and confirms that he was fired and grabs a couple of things but doesn’t touch his tools. Very odd considering that’s how we make our living. One of the guys asks if he’s going to take them and all he said was ‘Nope, don’t need em…but watch for me in the news.’ Then he left.
We kind of looked at each and laughed, figured he was just mad and that he’d come back and grab them when he calmed down.
Nope.
It turns out he had some relationship issues going on along with the rampant substance abuse which he had even more time to enjoy now that he had no job. He ended up assaulting the girlfriend and when she split in her car he ran down the street to a convenience store and carjacked some poor lady’s ride (she managed to get out before he took off).
The 4 days following were pretty crazy, apparently he was randomly committing crimes with no real idea of what the heck he was doing. Lots of random B&E’s and at one point he was confronted by a home owner to which our hero whipped out a meat cleaver and threatened to kill him. It was pretty crazy seeing someone’s face that you just worked with a few days prior plastered all over the news although I guess he called it right?
It all came to a head when an undercover officer spotted him in yet another stolen vehicle on the highway. The cop flashed his badge to try and get him to stop and stop he did…by ramming the police car and forcing them both onto a side road.
The poor officer was assaulted with a baseball bat before getting everything under control via taser and some backup . Mr. Namewitheld received a decently long jail term for his efforts and I’ve never heard from him since.”
Too Cold
“Dunkin’:
I was one of three people who opened the store at 5am, which meant we had to be there at 4:30 for prep. Let me describe the other two. One was a weed dealer who also cooked for the Applebee’s across the street on most nights, pretty chill guy, customers liked that he played Frank Sinatra on his phone which drowned out the soul-sucking pop radio station that was on repeat. The other person was a 30-year-old addict who was horribly abrasive to absolutely everyone and had a two-year old with a deadbeat Baby’s Daddy.
Anyways, a combination of two of us opened the store. On days that these two people opened, there was always a shortage of hash browns at 6 am. No one knew why. Until one day, when I show up to work (had a later shift) and neither Jessie nor Jaime were at work. Apparently, no one had unlocked the door to let customers in at 5am. This led to the manager being phoned and she came in early to find Jesse and Jaime passed out, fully unclothed in the freezer located in the basement. They would both get in at 4:30am, cook the hash browns, go downstairs in the freezer where there were no cameras, smoke and then bang.
They were hired back a week later because no one wants to open Dunkin Donuts.”