Worker Share What Caused A Coworker To Be Fired On The Spot

He Got Every Chance So He Only Has Himself To Blame

“This guy was continually late to work. This was back when I was working fast food. We’re talking 10 shifts in a row where he’d stroll in 10 or 15 minutes late. The manager gave him every chance, kept telling him he couldn’t look past it much longer, and finally, he was on his last chance.

He came in on time for about a week, then came late one day. The manager changed the schedule to his shift so he wasn’t technically late and then reamed him in the break room. The manager told him no more freaking chances, get his stuff together. The manager had a real soft spot for this kid because even though he was always late, he was a decent worker and fun to be around.

The NEXT DAY, he didn’t show up on time. The manager was furious and watching for him out the window. We saw him turn into the store’s parking lot, and park in back and start strolling in. The manager grabbed the drive-thru headset (he had to walk past the speaker to get in, we watched it unfold on the drive-thru camera) and said, ‘Don’t bother walking any further, you’re fired,’ through the speaker.

The kid just dropped his head and turned back to his car. Never even bothered to pick up his last check, apparently.”

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Politically Incorrect And Fired (How Political Incorrectness Led To A Firing)

“I was working at an Amazon warehouse when a clerk came up to me and asked, ‘Is Melissa “special?”‘ Melissa was our co-worker who seemed developmentally slow and she clearly annoyed him. I laughed awkwardly at his question and immediately turned back to my work. A short while later, I saw the clerk roll his cart with a laptop on top of it towards Melissa. On the screen was a picture of a kid with down syndrome and the clerk was saying, ‘Are you “special?” This is you.’ She reported him to our supervisor and he was fired on the spot.”

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From The Creepy To The Stupid To The Sad To The Scammer

“I hire contractors for large teams and I’ve had a few:

-The most common: being wasted at work. It happens way too much.

The creepiest: a girl complained a guy was stalking her at work. I talked to him and said he needed to stay away from her. Walked in on him licking her computer mouse and touching himself.

The most impressive: There was a team of attorneys working on a document review and privilege log. She was absolutely the best attorney I had: smart, competent, super friendly, knew the law backward and forwards. Her agency showed up with a security guard from the firm. The woman had lied on her background check and was using someone else’s name. She was not an attorney and had never gone to law school. She already had a history with the law of impersonating other professionals including an accountant, a locksmith, and a freaking doctor. I don’t know the full story but I’d like to believe she was as good at those positions as she was at being a lawyer.

The saddest in retrospect: The guy came highly recommended but was constantly messing everything up. Just terrible mistakes, completely missing meetings, leaving tasks undone, just all around completely incompetent. I worked with him to try to get him to do better and he was genuinely trying. When I pointed out the mistake, it was obvious to him and he couldn’t believe he made it and couldn’t explain his thought process. He was so frustrated to the point of tears because he was trying so hard. I eventually called him in after a very public mess up and said we had to let him go. I found out later that shortly after I fired him, he found out he had a brain tumor which ultimately killed him. Apparently, before this, he was really sharp and really good at what he did. There but for the grace of God go I.”

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Fired On His Second Day For Being Really Stupid

“This happened about six years ago. This dude started on a Monday and on Tuesday, we had our department holiday party and the dude got pretty lit up. During a group photo, for whatever reason, this guy got the brilliant idea to reach his arm around the woman standing next to him and grab and ‘honk’ her chest. She loudly protested, he claimed he was just joking and that she was not who he thought she was. Well, who she was was the CMO of the company, and despite his repeated protestations that it was ‘all a joke,’ he was promptly informed that he would have to leave the party immediately and to not bother coming back to work the next day. I will never forget that example of sheer, wasted stupidity till the day I die.”

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They Can’t Fire Him, He Quits! (He Was “Too Good” For That Podunk Shop)

“While he wasn’t exactly fired on the spot, I did see a guy mess himself out of severance.

In Canada, they have to give you an advanced warning or pay out a certain amount if they fire you on the spot. Well, this one idiot was going to get fired for being generally incompetent. The final straw was when he offered his own backyard service to a lady for a car problem she didn’t actually have. (Her problem was foam on the oil filler cap, he claimed it was a head gasket but it was just some moisture from a cold day).

Anyways the boss went to fire him and he panicked. He went on this speech about how he could run the shop better than the owner and manager and demanded that the manager be fired, and he replace him, or else he’d quit.

So the boss just said that he accepted his resignation and wished him the best in the future.”

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She Struggled With Everything

“I worked in a doctors office and we had a nurse on maternity leave that was being covered by temp. Well, one temp who came to help cover the office had been passed from office to office because she couldn’t do anything right: she couldn’t take a patient back in under 20 minutes, she couldn’t file paperwork, it was just bad.

So she arrived at our office and we put her answering phone calls, she answered the phone, ‘This is Doctor X’s office, can I take your order.’ My manager lost it and told her to leave and never come back.

The worst part, she called the boss and asked for a new assignment, he had to repeat three times that she was fired and there was no new assignment. She genuinely did not understand what you’re fired meant.”

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How A Few Flurries Shut Down An ENTIRE Department

“The department manager asked to go home early because of snow flurries. We said she and anyone else who was worried about getting home safely could leave, but if the roads were open the next day, we expected them to come in.

The next day came and her ENTIRE department called in. They all had variations of, ‘I can’t get my car out of the driveway.’

Day three comes. One of her underlings admitted that on the day of the flurries, the department manager told all her people to meet in a local parking lot, and told them that they all better call in the next day or she would make their lives miserable. This was apparently to ‘teach the owner a lesson.’

Once we got another employee to confirm the story, she was fired on the spot.”

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Fired For Firing

“The fired party did nothing to warrant termination and the manager who fired her was dismissed.

A young accountant (around 24) made an appointment to see her manager. Both parties agreed that she informed him that she would be having surgery the following day to remove and biopsy a tumor. She wanted to discuss the status of her projects and develop a coverage plan for while she was on medical leave. He wanted her to delay her surgery until after a certain project was complete.

While she was walking to Human Resources to apply for a medical leave of absence, her manager followed her and screamed at her about being insubordinate and insisted that he would fire her if she didn’t return to her desk immediately. She calmly stated that this was a medical emergency and the timing of the surgery was non-negotiable, so he fired her. In front of the director of Human Resources.

He was terminated the next day.”

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Why People Should Never Hire Friends

“I made the mistake of hiring a friend who was going through a difficult time.

I was going through a separation and I had to leave every couple of weeks or so to spend time with the kids.

One day, upon getting back, I found out they’d been leaving hours early all week to set up a competing business. When I asked them about it, I withheld some information I already knew, and they lied to me. Breach of fiduciary duty. Instant termination.

In the following week, I took over their work email and found she’d contacted at least two of our clients with suggestions that they leave with her.

Apparently, I’m the jerk though. She either legitimately can’t grasp why she was in the wrong, or she’s intellectually dishonest about it.”

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Talk About A Short Fuse!

“I tossed some stuff into a bin next to the guy in the warehouse during a summer job in college. He thought I was throwing it at him and started yelling and coming at me. I ignored him and went on to the next shelf that I needed to put stuff away on and he kept after me. At this point, he was yelling so loudly that the shop boss heard him from the other side of the massive warehouse and had made his way over from behind the guy. The boss looked at me and asked what was going on and I told him. The other guy was still yelling.

He was gone in less than 10 minutes. It was his first day.”

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Stealing…And Drinking…And Crashing, Oh My

“This was in the Army, so it wasn’t a ‘fired on the spot’ as much as a ‘relieved for cause’ and immediate removal from their position.

A Lieutenant had already made himself a reputation as an irresponsible idiot. Overseas, he’s given a nice office job with a very, very responsible NCO in the hopes that he can’t mess things up too badly. But the NCO can’t babysit during off-hours.

LT proceeds to get trashed (big no-no right there when deployed). He stole a atorG (think ATV) from the motor pool and crashed it into his Battalion Commander’s door.

The idiot was on a plane back to the States within 48 hours.”

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She Didn’t Want Her Coworkers To Know Her Dirty Secret

“I used to work in a pharmacy. There was a lot of a specific prescription that went missing over like 6 months. Everyone assumed someone was looking into it, but there were rumors in the team that somehow corporate forgot or didn’t care. Turns out, it was delayed because they kept trying to get the act on camera, but the perp kept evading somehow. When they finally caught it happening, they called the police, and walked her to the manager’s office to see the video. She confessed and asked if she had to finish her shift. I guess she told the manager that she was really embarrassed about the whole thing and didn’t really want to see her coworkers right now.

The law enforcement informed her that she confessed to theft and distribution of illegal substances, and she was leaving with them immediately.”

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When He Checked The Payroll, His Jaw Dropped

“I ran a 5-staff nonprofit. My first week or two, the payroll information came from ADP and it was left sealed on the office assistant’s desk. I was at work early the next morning and opened it; I discovered the office assistant (who was responsible for entering staff hours online every payroll) had given herself a raise. She got there a couple minutes later, I asked her about it, and she said it had been promised to her (you’d think the board or my predecessor would have told me that, huh?). She was also cheesed off that I’d opened it. Hello? I’m the boss. I get to look at the payroll.

It wasn’t a giant raise, but you increase your own pay without permission, you’re going to be fired, and she needed some strong encouragement to remove her person from the office, too. She went down the block to where our board chairman worked and told him I was a prejudiced (she was black, I’m Asian, the chairman was Latino), but he was pretty clear with her about why you don’t go giving yourself a raise no matter what you think you were promised. Further investigation revealed, of course, that she wasn’t promised anything.”

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“He’d Needed Firing For A While”

“I fired a guy for failing to meet a visiting team from another branch of our company and get them to their hotel. He’d needed firing for a while but my boss wouldn’t let me. So when my boss called, crying, and asked why I hadn’t met the group, I had to call another guy whom I had specifically given the day off and got him to do it. I would have myself and was walking toward the car, but I was an hour and a half away.

So the next morning I met the guy at the gate and demanded his keys. The worst part was that his 7-year-old son was there. He claimed I hadn’t told him to meet them but I had, in writing, and had a witness.”

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Don’t Take Substances At Work

“I work in a hospital. A code blue (someone not breathing or without a pulse) was called to our front entrance. It was a contractor walking in with his boss and co-worker who was now unconscious and barely breathing. We hit him with Narcan and he woke right up and immediately went into his clearly well rehearsed, ‘I didn’t take nothing’ dialogue. His co-worker/ex-buddy blew him off and his boss canned him on the way to the ER.”

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Why Drinking And Ladders Don’t Mix

“I actually had to fire an employee on the spot after he returned from his lunch break 30 minutes late and was trashed. I suspect he was high as well but the overpowering smell of drinking really gave it away. He was on a ladder attempting to put up a shelf when an employee brought him to my attention. When I went to confront him about coming back to work late AND showing up wasted, he dropped the very heavy shelf on my head.

FIRED. GET OUT.”

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Smut And Work Is Never A Winning Combination

“I worked at a hospital for children and came in one morning to find the security guard, who was one of my work buddies, waiting for me at my desk (I worked really early in the morning at either 5 am or 6 am). He was kind of shaken up and it took some coaxing to get him to tell me what was wrong.

Apparently, this old guy who worked overnight at the switchboard operator desk, who I always thought was really nice since we’d sometimes cross over by an hour or two and would just chat about the world, had been caught by the security guard looking up child smut on the work computer. Keep in mind, we worked at a hospital for children, not that child smut is okay in any other scenario, but it was particularly frightening to know that this guy had access to patient areas and was surrounded by kids all day, some of whom did not have the cognitive capacity of normally functioning kids and tend to be targeted more frequently by those with nefarious motives. According to my security friend, he actually wasn’t certain if the children in the pictures he happened to see were still alive. I want to throw up just typing that out.

I had to cover the switchboard that morning when HR called him in. I never saw the old guy again and my security guard buddy had to speak with a bunch of people to verify (along with the IT department) what he had seen.”

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All Kinds Of Shenanigans At This Workplace

“I only saw one of them get walked out, but there are four I was aware of:

One guy punched his boss (this is at an engineering firm where a technician of over 10 years with the company didn’t agree with decisions on experiments from his boss… like the nicest guy in the world… and decked him. Totally bizarre).

Another guy had adult material at work in a cubicle environment.

The Feds came to arrest a guy who had been assigning contracts to a company he had ties with and had been padding the purchases. I actually saw the Feds walking him out. Even the site executive VP wasn’t let in on what was happening until about an hour before it happened. The agents stayed with the VP so he couldn’t pre-warn or do anything in case there were ties up the chain. A couple other people overseas were involved and also fired.

Another case of corruption, this time with a facilities director where, even though there was a bidding process & oversight, he would find reasons to need certain contracts extended and such and would take a cut of that. He got around the oversight by giving the companies he had ties with information on what to bid so they could win the contract, then he’d make sure those specific projects would run into issues that would require contract extensions that he could pad without so much oversight.

This was over a time period of like 20 years.”

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He Couldn’t Figure Out Why No One Liked Him

“A low-level employee, who had knowledge of a very specific system, but not much else, annoyed everyone to no end for being high-drama prima donna. The client finally decommissioned the last instance of that system, so that employee immediately lost his worth. He refused to work on tickets he was assigned. He only wanted to pick and choose tickets. We told him no, you will join the regular queue.

He got angry, ‘What if Customer X calls about System Y,’ and wouldn’t listen when everyone told him that System Y is no longer in use at our entire client base.

He went to complain to COO about it. For some odd reason, he thought COO was his best buddy. He threw everyone under the bus. ‘Manager X is mean to me! Manager Y told me to work on other tickets. Manager Z told me that I should be working, not chatting with the secretary about the metaphysics book I am writing!’

The COO was really tired of this guy’s nonsense since day one. He yelled, in front of others, ‘(Insert name), get your stuff and get out of this office. You are done working for us!’

For some time, we spotted this guy standing on the corner of our block. Just standing there, staring towards our office. He attempted to chat with people leaving our office, asking how’s everyone doing. If COO is back in the office so he can discuss things with him. For some time, we were legit worried that he would shoot up the place.

After some time, he just disappeared. He’s still around. He writes some out-there articles about metaphysics and runs a small web dev shop, where all he does is install WordPress themes.”

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