What does a person have to do to get fired after only two hours of working? Apparently a lot, as these employees were wreaking havoc all over their workplace! I kinda wish I could have seen these hot messes in person! Content has been edited for clarity.
Fear The Mighty Frank!
“We had this group orientation on our first week at a new job. On the very first day, this huge blizzard hits. We all knew it was coming, so we planned accordingly and still ended up five or ten minutes late. Even our boss was fifteen minutes late! Frank somehow showed up two hours late! Frank claimed that there was an accident, and he had to help a woman and child out of a car. My boss rolled his eyes and gave Frank the benefit of the doubt, and we proceeded with the orientation. Frank was constantly interrupting the presentation, since he had previously worked with a similar company, and he felt like he knew everything. In between his constant interruptions, he kept needing to go to the bathroom. We were taken out to lunch, where Frank made everything about him, and he even belittled the female moderators who were hosting the lunch!
After lunch, we had individual training on our computers that would take a couple hours, Frank fell asleep. The moderator woke up Frank, but he couldn’t focus on any of the tasks. He yelled at her that it was nonsense, and there was no way she herself could be able to do it. Frank demanded she prove that she could do the work. She told him she didn’t need to prove anything to him, and that everyone else was well past where he is at. Frank continued to yell and was taken out. When another employee came to get his things for him, they opened his water bottle and it stank of something strong. He was fired that afternoon. The next day, on Day 2, our boss told those of us who were early how Frank called him the night before, crying and arguing that he did nothing wrong. Shortly after telling us this story, Frank showed up! He had absolutely no memory of the previous day, or more importantly, being fired! He was again taken out.”
The Most Fun Anyone Can Have Being Fired
“So this new guy drove a forklift into a fire hydrant, in front of a safety rep for the company. His supervisor was called over, and he immediately tells the supervisor that he won’t pass a urine test, as he used his only bottle of clean urine earlier that day when he was initially hired. Everybody standing there immediately burst into laughter, which continued as security (who was also laughing) took him off site. Even the supervisor was all smiles. He just gave him a pat on the back and wished him the best of luck. It was wild.
We are a specialty welding company that primarily does oil and gas turnarounds, so sometimes the entire job could be as little as seven days from the word ‘go’. Obviously, there isn’t an orientation period, so our hire-in and vetting process is very extensive. Here’s the caveat…we actually employ very few forklift drivers (like none), so this guy was a new-hire who was loaned to us by the plant. He was thoroughly vetted on their end. They conduct urine tests, and we do hair follicles. He held a current OSHA operator card, and he actually had completed his refresher course the week prior.
In all fairness, he seemed to be a solid operator, and he was in the process of a fairly tight reverse maneuver when he hit the hydrant, and his entire story was verified by his spotter (who apparently didn’t see it either). If he had been clean, he would have been back at work in three days.”
What A Nightmare Of A Coworker
“I worked in a restaurant for my first job in high school. I was about sixteen when we hired on my coworker’s little cousin. This kid was a year younger than me and a total loser. No one liked him because of his attitude and behavior issues. So this kid gets hired and at first he’s chill. He and I both LOVED the same band, so we had a mutual bond and common thing to talk about. Other than that, I couldn’t stand him very much. But during his first week, he started to step on people’s toes quite easily. He noticed some of us who are friends liked roasting each other, and he thought he could join in. But the comments he made weren’t silly banter, they were full blown rude comments that made some of us mad and get selective over being so friendly around him. We also started to notice how this kid didn’t do his job properly either when working alone. His lack of proper cleaning of our cooking utensils and dishes threw everyone behind on their closing tasks. We would have to ask him to re-wash everything due to food chunks still being all over things. It was so nasty!
After two or three weeks, a number of us complained to the management. This kid’s older cousin even complained about him, it got so bad. I think the last straw for him was taking our dishwasher sprayer and spraying people as they walked into the kitchen. He got screamed at by a number of us and was fired a few days later, when it was brought to management, who noticed how angry all of us were with this kid.”
“You Can’t Fake Faking It”
“I got hired as a long-term temp with one other person to do some basic data entry work at a major brand that pretty much everyone has heard of. And it was at their corporate headquarters, so it felt pretty prestigious. Anyway, we went through all of this onboarding stuff in the morning that required us to get photo IDs and figure out parking and all that stuff. Then after two or three hours, we were introduced to one of the employees in our new department, who began going over what we were going to be doing. None of it seemed overly difficult, and I figured that while it was new system I had never used before, I’d be able to work it out in a few days as long as I asked questions and took notes. And that was the thing that made me realize that the other person who got hired with me probably lied on her resume and was completely out of her depth. She didn’t take any notes and didn’t ask any questions. And whenever I glanced at her, I could see flashes of panic on her face. Well, lunchtime came, and when we came back, she said that another company had called her and offered her a permanent position, and she couldn’t work with us any longer. Both me and the person training us knew what was going on, but I’ll give the other lady credit for finding a way out without losing face too badly. The takeaway here is yes, ‘Fake it Until You Make it’ can and does work. But you got to be able to fake it. You can’t fake faking it.
We came into the company as sort of a stop-gap because they had just suffered a major layoff. The company, while being extremely well known, had just had a major downshift in their previous two fiscal years, so they lost a lot of people. We were brought in to sort of act as a band-aid while they restructured the whole corporate workforce. Anyway, about 70% of the work was basic data entry using an old school system that utilized key prompts rather than your typical drop-downs and buttons. The other 30% of the work was basic analytics: taking information from what were inputting and then putting it into spreadsheets and charts. Then transferring those charts to Power Point slides. Nothing all that difficult, but certainly something you should have some experience with before accepting a job. Basically, if you spend a couple of afternoons with Google and YouTube and you asked the right questions during training, you would probably be okay.
There was some analytics involved. Basically they needed us to have some (slightly) advanced Excel skills and be able to take information from the database and put it into different types of charts and then put those charts into a Power Point presentation. But mainly the database they used had an old school input system rather than being a typical Windows based system with drop downs and stuff. Everything was type-command, sort of like a DOS system.”
Too Much Fun With A Jackhammer Can’t Lead To Anything Good
“I spent my summers in college working as a laborer for a construction company. Anyway, we were doing a bunch of renovation 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. The 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 would 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 would 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. This 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. He kicked them out immediately, and then got on the phone with their company and told them he didn’t want to see these guys onsite again. Lots of choice four letter words were used, he even threatened to fire the subcontractor entirely and get someone else to do the work.
It’s not about being silent, it’s about being quieter. So for example, a jackhammer makes more noise than hand tools. Similarly, if you take the wall down in smaller pieces rather than big chunks, you minimize the noise from the rubble dropping. As far as the mess, there’s always going to be a mess. The trick there is to keep the mess small and contained. Lots of trips to the dumpster with a covered container, lots of sweeping and mopping, making sure you walk across the sticky floor mat to get the dust and such off your boots, etc. The room was isolated from the building HVAC, and we ran a filtered negative pressure unit to keep away as much dust as possible outside the area we were working. It adds a bunch of time to the process, but it’s absolutely necessary when you’re in a building full of sick people.”
How Long Was He Keeping This Secret From Everyone?
“So my company had hired a new engineer. He was a PhD and had really hit it off with all of the other guys in management. He had some female colleagues working under his direction, and he was an absolute monster towards them. he demeaned their work and blamed them constantly for things that weren’t working. Now these female colleagues were excellent formulation chemists. He was brought on to lead this new formulation project, and it wasn’t working. He would tell them how to do it and it never worked, so he kept blaming them for doing it wrong. My coworker got fed up and called him on his nonsense during a big meeting, with a prepared presentation describing what they tried, how thoroughly they tried it, why what he proposed would never work, and an alternative solution.
He was upset, but the management guys were extremely knowledgeable and started asking him questions, and it was clear that he couldn’t answer them. It turns out that his wife has a PhD too, and she pretty much did all of his degree work for him. They were both from a culture where women are not treated equally. He knew absolutely nothing. Not only that, but once everyone got to talking, it was clear just how massive of a nightmare this guy was. Sadly, my colleagues had to deal with this for months before everything was said and done.”
She Acted Like Nothing Was Wrong
“This happened just 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 four months, because there are so many new people, so it must be a bad job because high turnover. That was 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 it’s her birthday, and she’s going drinking after work. She 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 didn’t call. She said she doesn’t have a cell phone, despite being on her cell phone constantly in the office. He decided to give her 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 was a no call no show once again! I could not believe this woman.”
The Cringiest Ten Minutes Of His Life
“This was a while ago at my old job. The new guy gets hired as a bus boy. He was super annoying and tried to insert himself into everyone’s conversation, whether they wanted him there or not. It only took a couple of hours for the whole restaurant to hate him. I was working the bar and he kept eating the bar fruit. I personally didn’t care, but the manager did. Manager comes over and tells him to stop eating the fruit. He looks the manager in the eye and eats another piece of fruit. The manager replied, ‘Really? Come with me to the office.’
The new guy promptly said, ‘Alright man, calm down. I can tell you got that uptight energy for a good reason,’ followed with a cliched wink and a nudge from his elbow. This happened in front of me and like four other employees, and thankfully not with any customers around. I wanted to slam my face into the ice bin to escape the secondhand embarrassment I was feeling right then.
He promptly walked out the front door ten minutes later without his uniform on anymore. The worst thing about it was the manager was an insanely laid back guy. Heck, the whole restaurant was insanely laid back. You really had to try hard to get fired from this place. Had he not thrown in that uptight line, I’m almost positive he would have just gotten a slap on the wrist and kept the job. It wasn’t that he ate the fruit. It was his blatant disrespect towards the manager after being directly told to not eat the fruit that got him fired. Under normal circumstances, the manager didn’t even make people who ate the fruit cut more. Heck, if he liked you, he wouldn’t say anything at all. But this guy was new and rapidly failing to make a good impression.”
Undercover Boss
“I owned a construction business, and we recently hired three 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. He would check in on them most mornings. Along with the newly hired, we promoted one of our best workers to a manager position 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 was best to 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. 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, were all gonna head out now, but clock in that we worked the whole day. The manager allows it, and the owners never notice.’
So that is the story of how I fired three new hires on the first day I met them, and also how I had to fire our best worker.”
Not Even Family Can Stop This Savage Response
“My sister was fired only on day one. My dad had his own small medical practice and would hire me and my sisters as our ‘first jobs’ to be his receptionists and file insurance claims, so we could get some workplace 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 had drag her out of there. Mom told her at least she would get paid for the couple of hours she managed to be employed. The lesson she learned helped indeed. She is all grown up now and, by every definition, a professional in the workplace. There wasn’t any aftermath, Mom supported my dad, but she did remind him over dinner to make sure to pay my sister for the 2-3 hours she worked at his office. My sister pouted over the dinner table, but that was that. My dad was the boss of what happened at his practice, so tough cookies!”
Firing Was The Best Thing That Happened To Him
“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 also sent me this new guy that my security manager nicknamed ‘Sticks’, due to how alarmingly thin he was. 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 Sticks’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 spinned. I entered back in through the side door and came into the 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 took 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. Maybe I’ll text him right now and see how he is doing!
So I texted him. He didn’t remember me at first because it was six years ago now. He told me that because of me, he went and got help from the veteran volunteers. According to him, ‘I ended up in in Richmond, got my problems figured out, and I am infinitely better now. Thanks again!’