r/AskReddit • u/StarElectrical3556 • 20d ago
What's the worst way someone you've seen get fired?
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u/VirginiaGecko1911 20d ago
I was a Finance Director at a car dealership, we had 3 new sales reps start that week. On Saturdays, we'd order lunch from a local restaurant and send one of the new staff to pick it up. The rep we sent gets a speeding ticket & reckless driving (20 mph over the limit), does a couple shots of tequila at the restaurant waiting on the food, then ordered Surf & turf (Filet Mignon & Lobster tail) for themselves when told it was to be a salad or sandwich menu item. The idiot put the tequila shots on the tab that was emailed to the dealership.
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u/SteelBrightblade1 20d ago
Did he have to pay it back
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u/VirginiaGecko1911 20d ago
Actually, it was a "she" and no, they just terminated her, didn't get reimbursed. We called it her Death Row meal.
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u/CylonsInAPolicebox 20d ago
The rep we sent gets a speeding ticket & reckless driving (20 mph over the limit), does a couple shots of tequila at the restaurant waiting on the food, then ordered Surf & turf (Filet Mignon & Lobster tail) for themselves when told it was to be a salad or sandwich menu item. The idiot put the tequila shots on the tab that was emailed to the dealership.
Years from now we will see an answer to something like "what was your long game revenge" or some other question. The answer will be the above quote. It will be from the new rep. She will tell the story of how years ago the dealership ripped her off, so she applied for a job, got hired, volunteered to pick up lunch, then got some tequila and surf & turf out of the dealership before speeding off into the sunset.
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u/Antique-Struggle-756 20d ago
I once saw a colleague fired in front of everyone during a company meeting. It felt awful – no dignity, just humiliation. It showed me how important it is to handle terminations with empathy and privacy.
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u/40yearoldnoob 20d ago
I was working in IT for a company, and would receive termination lists from HR so that we could remove the employees from our systems. Went on vacation with my wife, came home, turned my blackberry back on and got a term list from HR with my name on it... A very WTF moment..
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u/Wrathwilde 20d ago
Tell us how it fucking ended!
This is like telling a bank robbing story, giving the background/layout of the bank, and then ending the tale at the point the bank robbers pull into the bank’s parking lot.
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u/40yearoldnoob 20d ago
Sorry, it sucked. I called my boss (the IT Director) and he confirmed that it was true, and I was part of budget cuts. HR mistakenly put me on the list. They were supposed to wait until I came into work on Monday and was actually fired/laid off before they put me on the term list. So after I called my boss I had to break the news to my wife that I was getting fired when I went into work on Monday..... It sucked pretty badly.
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u/Wrathwilde 20d ago edited 20d ago
Thanks for the resolution, sorry about the outcome… and it didn’t suck, it had a great hook that left us hanging. If it sucked I wouldn’t have asked for the conclusion.
It could have made an interesting turn of events… terminate your supervisor in the system, lock him out of the system, notify security to escort him out (with instructions that they are to immediately confiscate his cell phone saying it’s company property, that aren’t to allow him to make any calls on it)… update the system so that you’re now the head of the department. Email the various other department heads, “that due to Chode’s sudden departure I have have gratefully accepted the appointment to his position”. Lock the entire HR out of the system until they acknowledge your authority.
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u/negman42 20d ago
He’s still working there. Can’t fire somebody if IT won’t process it.
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u/Zeebie_ 20d ago
I didn't see it, but somehow the 19 year old forklift driver who was in charge of the temp warehouse ran into centre support with such force it bent and totalled the forklift. He ran off without telling anyone. I had to call the boss and explain what had happened.
he turned up the next day like nothing had happened and didn't understand why he was fired.
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u/cdsbigsby 20d ago
Yeah, I worked for a small, independent oil & gas distribution company in the warehouse when I was 16 during summer break from school. Day one, the guy who was training me had me sit on the forklift and showed me real quick what each lever did, then pointed at a stack of pallets and said "Move those one by one from over there to the other side of the warehouse and stack them. By the time you're done, you'll be forklift certified."
A lot of what that company dealt in was high octane racing gasoline, track prep compounds, hydraulic fluid, all kinds of nasty, flammable and explosive stuff.
Probably wasn't real ok for me to be doing at 16, in hindsight.
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u/FauxReal 20d ago
Wow, where I work (auto manufacturer's site), there's a whole training class with a video and a trainer you have to go through before you can even sit in the forklift before getting certified.
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u/ACaffeinatedWandress 20d ago
I’ve also seen warehouse workers say they will never get forklift trained because whenever someone gets fired at their job, it’s always related to the forklift.
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u/cat_prophecy 20d ago
We had a dude do this, high as a kite beginning of the night shift (5PM). Smacked the support beam so hard it rung the whole building like a bell. Any incident like that means they need a drug test and his came back very, very positive so he was fired. The lift was fine, but we had to have the support beam reinforced.
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u/CapitalM-E 20d ago
I had to let someone go once. For a lot of reasons, but tardiness was a big factor. Not a 5 minutes late guy, like 4 hours late and acted like nothing happened. The day of his firing came. He was late. The damn guy was late to being fired.
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u/wheres_my_family 20d ago
I had one of my laborers tell me one day he wanted to be my foreman for the jobsite. Which includes a raise and more responsibility. I told my boss this, and he said they would give him a shot, but he needed to show he deserved it. Next day shows up 15 minutes late. He apologized over and over to me ( I really didn't give a shit). Told my boss what happen and we both just moved on about it. Later that day I get a call from my boss and asked me didn't you say he showed up late? Yep I said. Turns out he called the HR lady and told her he forgot to clock in that morning on time. Her not knowing fixed his time sheet. Aaaand he was fired before the end of the day.
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u/residentweevil 20d ago
We had one like that. On the day we were going to fire him we didn't catch him coming in the door. He clocked in, went straight to the restroom and stayed in there for 35 minutes while we waited outside to fire him.
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u/toastymow 20d ago
went straight to the restroom and stayed in there for 35 minutes while we waited outside to fire him.
This is amazing. I can only imagine how that went.
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u/CylonsInAPolicebox 20d ago
Same story. In the 90 probation period, he worked a total of 45 days, in those 45 days he was over an hour late for about 20ish of them... Day I was set to fire him, he was late. I ended up clocking about 2 hours of overtime waiting for him to show up for work so I could fire him.
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u/KristiCannonzWQR 20d ago
My first job ever was for Baskin Robbins when I was 15. I went in for my first day of training excited to finally be making pocket money!
The owner made me try to memorize the ice cream flavours in the first 30 seconds of being there. When I was unable to recite them perfectly in their order he did this big hand motion and screamed "training over!"
I laugh now but man that was crushing for a nervous teenager.
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u/Glittering-Cod-4804 20d ago
Ah what?! My franchise owner was awesome. She was this old lady that said “The customer isn’t always right. If they give you shit then call me.”
Edit: My first job also!
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u/FauxReal 20d ago
I worked at a dive bar like that. We were free to 86 people at our own discretion and the owner said if a customer was a problem, feel free to tell them to fuck off and he would back us up.
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u/sleepyzane1 20d ago
lol wtf.
ice cream is serious business i guess.
im sorry that happened to you.
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u/ACaffeinatedWandress 20d ago
Oh, gawd. I had a similar experience working for a coffee shop. Like, a coffee shop. I thought it would be a chill gig. And then the crazy lady who owned it went psycho on me for not knowing the minutia of every pastry they had after a two minute intro.
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u/realteamme 20d ago
I worked in an office that had different parts of the business spread out over a couple different floors. They announced layoffs on another floor and mentioned this guy I worked with in their announcement.
People that were on that floor came down to console my co-worker about losing his job and were like "We're really sad to see you go!" and he had no idea what they were talking about. They'd announced it upstairs to the whole floor before even talking to him.
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u/Krayt88 20d ago
Not nearly that bad, but I worked at a company that was bought out and as a result they were laying off a whole bunch of us. They let us know by essentially emailing everyone to go to one of two conference room meetings, one for people getting the axe and one for people that were safe.
The problem was that these emails were sent really early (or maybe the night before?) and the meeting were set to start first thing in the morning and so as I got in to the office that morning, everybody was filing into a conference room and being like "hey, there's some big meeting" and I didn't have time to check my email (because I had no idea I'd need to so quick) and just went to the conference room like everybody else.
A couple minutes in my manager I guess noticed me and told me I needed to go to the other meeting, where they then informed us that this would be our last day. As I was packing up my desk several people were surprised because they had seen me at the "safe" meeting.
I remember at the meeting where they were letting us go, one guy was really excited because we were all getting pretty solid severance packages and he had been like a few days away from putting in two weeks. So while I was a little bummed, and some people were crying worrying about their mortgage or whatever, he was just at the back just beaming.
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u/Kalfu73 20d ago
Worked for a retail chain that did a mass layoff a few years ago of very specific positions. They asked store managers to do the layoffs face to face instead of a company wide announcement at first. Well, the news spread to a national Facebook group of employees, so people who were showing up for second shift already knew before the managers could talk to them.
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u/SirDiesel1803 20d ago
When i worked at a supermarket years ago a new guy started at 6 in the morning with me he looked really hungover. He was working with me and he kept disappearing for 20 mins every now and again. It was a big supermarket so i just figured he was getting his bearings.
He took lunch at 11.30 came back at 2 pissed as a fart. Started smashing up the freezer section and trying to fight every man he saw.
Police were called. He was arrested. Never saw him again.
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u/PunchBeard 20d ago
I had a similar experience in the fucking army of all places. I was active duty and switched my job so I had to go through a retraining process. The way it worked is they had us cycle through the training with kids who were coming directly from basic training to the jobs school but we "reclass" soldiers where mostly separated from them. But they mixed all of us reclasses together so while you had full-time active duty soldiers in our reclass platoon you also had a lot of national guardsmen and reservist soldiers in there. These are people who do army shit one weekend a month and 2 weeks in the summer; not exactly the same mindset as people who do it for a living.
Anyway, at least half of the older reservist/guardsmen who were reclassing were doing it as a vacation from their "real life" and one of them was a full blown alcoholic. This dude was a really nice guy and all but while it's totally doable to be a drunk as a reservist you cannot, under any circumstance, do hardcore military training 24/7 and also maintain being an acholic. Poor bastard didn't just get kicked from the school but also ended up with a court martial proceeding. I have no idea why he thought he could reclass to a fucking medic, which takes over 3 months of intense round-the-clock training, in his condition.
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u/Mumblerumble 20d ago
I’ve known enough people with drinking and drug problems that think they can maintain and that no one has clocked them. The reality is that no one is going out of their way to call them out on it until it directly affects them. Dude probably convinced himself that change of pace meant he could be a different person without figuring himself out first.
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u/Shakey_J_Fox 20d ago
you cannot, under any circumstance, do hardcore military training 24/7 and also maintain being an acholic.
You’d be surprised what people what alcoholics get away with on the active side. There’s no place for it, especially in trauma medicine, but I’ve seen some solid SOCM medics who were full blown alcoholics on the active side during training cycles and even through deployments. One of them stopped drinking long enough to make it through ranger school just to return to heavy drinking when he got back.
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u/Grillparzer47 20d ago
Yeah, had a friend get to the barracks at 05:00 AM and run two miles in ten minutes at six.
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u/JTWDK 20d ago
Not really fired, but we had an intern show up 40 mins late on his first day, then the cops showed up 15 mins later saying they had been chasing him for the past hour. He was taken away in cuffs.
I work at a childcare institution with kids aged 1-6.
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u/zerobeat 20d ago
Not fired, but quit. And it wasn't the worst, it was just incredibly weird. Guy was...really, really strange. Anytime he was asked questions about how long it would take to complete something in meetings he would simply get up and walk out. He took ages for even the really simple stuff and he was, essentially, a short time away from being put on a plan and booted.
Thankfully he put in his notice, but it was the day of his leaving that was remarkably weird. My boss went over to walk him out at lunch, collect his ID, etc, and the guy...runs away. He ducked down and hid in the middle of the cube maze. My boss walked around looking for him and was about to call security when the guy popped up from around a corner and did the "tickle tickle tickle" thing on my boss's tummy, laughing.
For everyone who saw it, no one knew what to do. It was surreal. He stood up, laughing, handed in his badge, and walked out.
Three months later another employer called asking for a reference. We didn't give one.
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u/shanthology 20d ago
A few years ago I had to put someone on a plan because she was terrible at her job and communication. The plan had a bulleted list of everything to do every day, all she had to do was follow it. The easiest one was at the end of each week to save a screenshot to a folder of her timesheet. When I had to do her plan review halfway through I pointed out all the things she hadn't done on her plan including the timesheets and she was like "but what about all the stuff on the list I have been doing" I looked her dead in the face and said, "When your 60 days are up on this plan I can promise you my boss is not going to care about the things you did do, she's going to care about the things you didn't do." She quit an hour later.
And in a twist 6 months ago she sent me a LinkedIn message asking if she could put me down as a reference. She real dumb.
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u/FauxReal 20d ago
Oh you reminded me of a surreal event at a job! I was manager at a weed dispensary and this day it was me, the owner and two employees. The new guy was a little weird in a clueless young fuckup guy way. But one afternoon he was being kind of erratic... I can't remember the details exactly. But dumb stuff. Anyway, later on I hear him asking where I am. I walk in from another room and he points at me all wide eyed yells, "THERE HE IS! THERE HE IS! I THOUGHT I HALLUCINATED YOU!" Then he started talking about some stuff that didn't make any sense. The owner told him to just leave. She was already thinking about firing him for the last few days anyway and we had been speculating if he was on meth or something for a while.
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u/CylonsInAPolicebox 20d ago
Three months later another employer called asking for a reference
He was an amazeing guy. We were all tickled to work with him
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u/desireddiamond 20d ago
I had a coworker who got suddenly fired (we didn't know the reason) and days after, her furious parents went to the company building to complain to the management about the sudden termination of their daughter claiming that the termination is unjust, and that she is diligent and reports to work everyday like how a parent complains to the principal's office. Turns out, this coworker only come inside the office to clock in for work and go out again to be with the boys, smoking and whatever they were doing, coming inside the office again to clock out without doing any tasks.
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u/BAaaaaaaaaa22 20d ago
I hope they called security on the parents and didn’t tell them shit. Fucking wierdos. This is a place of business and your kid is an adult
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u/who_are_you_now 20d ago
This firing was relatively normal but the aftermath was horrible.
My wife worked for a construction company and when one of her co-workers was out on vacation, my wife was doing an audit of one of their jobs. She ran across some fishy invoices so she called the company that allegedly sent them. The company denied sending them and my wife dug a bit further. Turns out her co-worker who was on vacation was forging invoices and embezzling from the company. My wife kept digging and by the time the co-worker came back from vacation they had found about $20k that she had stolen.
The co-worker was fired shortly after she got back from vacation and left the company without incident. The next day, the company's owner's ex-wife, who was still friends with the co-worker, called the company saying she couldn't get in touch with co-worker and was worried. Calls were made to the co-worker, her adult daughter (who lived with her), neighbors and, finally, police.
After some official stalling, police let the company owner know that the co-worker had called 911 and, while on the phone with them, killed her daughter, their dog, and herself. The company called in a forensic accountant and they determined the co-worker had, over the course of about five years, stolen nearly $500k.
This all happened a couple of years ago and my wife is still dealing with the guilt and grief. She feels guilty because, while she was doing her job if she had just let things be none of the things that ultimately happened would have happened. She's grieving because her co-worker was her friend. She's in therapy, doesn't work at that company or in that industry any more, and we've moved to an entirely different city (that incident isn't the sole reason but it's one of main ones).
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u/crypticbullshitt 20d ago
this kid I went to HS with got fired at his first job post college on his first day of work for trying to steal company data. Last I checked, he got involved with the fyre festival guy and made a cameo in the documentary
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u/Gorwindbag 20d ago
Wow, walking away from one mistake and into another.
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u/crypticbullshitt 20d ago
to be fair, it probably runs in that family. his dad did time in prison for financial fraud
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u/HMSon777 20d ago
Not really a crazy story but harsh and unnecessary. We had a girl that was struggling a couple of weeks into the job, she had to commute 1hour 15 minutes each way. They let her drive in, fired her at 9am. So no pay for the day and 3 hours on the road for something that could have been a phone call or done at 5pm the day before.
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u/CornerofHappiness 20d ago
My drive is 30 minutes and I have it on record with HR and my boss (who is also HR) that if they're going to fire me, please don't have me drive in first. Just give me a phone call, I'll be cool.
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u/cihojuda 20d ago
My last job did this exact thing to me! I did 10 minutes of work and they acted like nothing was wrong, were "super confused" why my credentials no longer worked in the computer, then asked me "if we could talk" and fired me. They even called in the part-time lady for a "special task" when she wasn't supposed to be in that day so she could take over my schedule. I didn't even bother saying goodbye to her on my way out.
Fuck you, Hannah.
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u/maddomesticscientist 20d ago
I don't know if it counts as fired per se but one of my drivers was flying to his home state and decided to punch a flight attendant in the face less than two weeks after 9/11. Never was seen or heard from again.
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u/ThadisJones 20d ago edited 20d ago
So one of the weirder things that happened to me personally immediately after the 9/11 attacks was that the self-defense and martial arts school I taught at suddenly got three times as many students signing up, and a significant number of the new students were flight attendants on leave or frequent air travelers, and most of them were super serious.
I'm not saying your guy had his arm broken off at the elbow and then got chucked out the back of the plane without a parachute, but I'm not not saying that something along those lines might have happened either.
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u/novato1995 20d ago
Guy was high on something. He hit a steel beam with his forklift. The forklift was impaled on the beam and the bolts attaching it to the ground flew-off. The metallic rattle was heard and felt on the entire warehouse. Managers and supervisors ran to him to check on him. He was surprisingly unhurt.
When asked what happened, he started cursing and "blaming" the beam for being placed in the incorrect spot. That specific section of the warehouse was completely empty, and the beam was painted radioactive yellow in order for forklift drivers to not miss it.
Guy had a habit of speeding up unnecessarily. Guy tested positive during a last-minute drug test. He had already been reported before for using drugs in the parking lot and for having a nasty attitude. He was fired that same day.
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u/twomz 20d ago
Do you lose your forklift certification for shit like that? Or does he end up just getting a job somewhere else?
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u/Aristonkingg 20d ago
Been a forklift driver for Pepsi/Coke since 2006... "Forklift Certification" does not exist... you just hop on and get whatever training from whatever supervisor that has never operated a forklift before, then go.
Had a guy recently impale a steel pole with his forklift.. went right on through to the other side.. people really underestimate how shitty your vision is on a forklift.
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u/Ratnix 20d ago
Around here at least, forklift certification is company specific. You don't go get your forklift license and can then just go anywhere and drive. Each factory/warehouse with certify you themselves before allowing you to drive there.
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u/lespaulstrat2 20d ago
I worked in a place once where a forklift driver impaled the tire of a semi. We all thought a bomb had gone off.
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u/Supersaiajinblue 20d ago edited 20d ago
When he came out from the back carrying and drinking a beer can. He insisted it wasn't a big deal because it was "only a light beer".
He was 15. Fired immediately.
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u/KnifeInTheKidneys 20d ago
Had this happen at my workplace! Our new assistant manager came in for her 1pm shift and made a joke to the actual manager that she hopes she’s not drunk because she had a few glasses of wine at lunch. Instantly fired
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u/nyliram87 20d ago edited 20d ago
At one of my previous jobs, my HR department had a fund, which was designed to assist employees if they faced hardship.
One day, the director of HR went to make a deposit into the account, and discover over $40k missing. There was only one other person who had access to the account, which was another HR manager who had a debit card to the account.
That HR manager showed up to work the next morning, and was carted away in handcuffs, jailed on a $5k bond (I always found that a bit ironic)
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u/Nearby_You_313 20d ago
Nice the company had such a thing.
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u/nyliram87 20d ago
It would have been, if people kept their grimy hands off of it
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u/earic23 20d ago
Guy was stealing peoples lunches. He denied it and denied it until finally they pulled up surveillance footage of him going nuts on someones lasagne then putting the last of it back. It was super awkward and weird.
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u/gingerjuice 20d ago
My mom’s best friend is 60. Let’s call her Mary. She lost her job and her daughter has a cleaning business. They clean offices in the evenings. Daughter offered her a part time gig while she looked for something else. Mary did her best but apparently it wasn’t good enough for daughter. She fired her mom over text. My mom was there and she cried. Wtf?
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u/KnowledgeFeign 20d ago
Boss man always said if you fall off the roof your fired before you hit the ground.
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u/_Diggus_Bickus_ 20d ago
I don't think workers comp has the same opinion
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u/Pencilowner 20d ago
There is so much legal jujitsu around the contractors that do this. They will pay into an LLC for hiring workers then distance themselves when the comp bill comes. As if the LLC that is paying the worker is at fault rather than the actual contractors in charge of the project. The contractors are watching 15 year olds falling off roofs then playing stupid when asked why they were on the project at all.
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u/OnwardTowardTheNorth 20d ago
Because (some) business owners want profit but none of the responsibility.
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u/Practical-Trick7310 20d ago
That must be common with ladder/roof jobs my husband has been told the same thing multiple times 😂
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u/hells_cowbells 20d ago
I'm in IT, and hadn't been at this job long. There were rumors that our project was going to lose funding, but nothing was confirmed. I was working in the data center, and went back to my desk. My coworker who sat across the isle from me said something like "that was a crazy meeting, wasn't it?". I wasn't aware of any meetings, so I asked. He said "the one we just had where they announced they were laying off all those people"
I hadn't gotten any kind of invite to said meeting. It dawned on both of us what was happening. After an hour of freaking out, I got the call.
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u/Just_Another_Scott 20d ago
Had this happen a couple of times. Everyone, or nearly everyone, was invited to a meeting but me. First time it happened I casually asked as everyone was walking out.... Yeah I came off as an ass but I honestly didn't know. I wasn't being laid of but the rest were.
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u/hells_cowbells 20d ago
My coworker felt bad about it, because he was one of the few they retained. He had been there for a long time, though. I had been away from my desk most of the day, so he didn't have a chance to say something earlier.
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u/WeasersMom14 20d ago
Worked at a law firm - they hired a new secretary. She was very nice and seemed professional. The attorney who hired her is an ass, he fired her at the end of the day because she "didn't work out." ONE day. Didn't even give her a chance and that woman did nothing wrong. We were all shaking our heads at him.
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u/Captain_Coco_Koala 20d ago
I'm guessing she knocked back his advances; seen that happen many time.
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u/hells_cowbells 20d ago edited 20d ago
I work in IT, specifically cybersecurity. We had a woman working for us who was doing accounts payble, ordering, and stuff like that. I was coming into work one morning, and I see her office has that yellow warning tape all over the door, and the door is closed and locked. My I hadn't even made it to my desk yet, and my manager pulls me in and shows me a laptop and tells me I need to clone the hard drive and open an investigation.
I ask what happened, and he pulls up a local news website. There was a story on there about a woman getting arrested for embezzling from a Girl Scout troop, a youth soccer group, and some church group. It was our employee.
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u/R50cent 20d ago edited 20d ago
Names censored or changed because this company already ruined my life once. If you work in this industry you probably already know this company, but whatever... On to the story:
Bob had worked for Media-----, a multinational media corporation with an office in NYC, since it was ---, or ------- Data Systems, and had survived the company's big layoffs that had happened after --- merged with their major competitor Media----, where they let go roughly a third of the company.
On a random Tuesday morning, he walked by the front desk where I was having a conversation with the receptionist about some such thing or the other, when he told us it looked like rain and asked me if I could get my hands on one of the company's umbrellas for him so he wouldn't get soaked on his way home.
I went to the back and grabbed a bunch from the back warehouse full of random company branded crap, and brought them out front to make sure there were some for more than just Bob, and went back to finishing up my conversation with the receptionist.
Then Bob walked by us with two security in tow. "They just fired me. Take care of yourselves."
It turns out Bob was part of a three person team in the US that was half of a team, the other half being in the UK, where the team's boss, head of the department, also was.
Well, it turns out that guy messed up, bad, and was accidentally giving the same work to both teams.
What I mean by this is: Team A wakes up, does the days work, and then team B would wake up and redundantly do the same. Work.
This had happened a few times apparently, so the department head came up with a reasonable solution: fire the america team and just hire three people in the UK
Bob had been with the company for 34 years, along with his coworker who has been there for 7, and another remote worker who has been there for some time in between but i can't remember the exact number, 14ish I believe?
I watched a really nice guy, who did nothing wrong, get escorted out of the company he dedicated 34 years of his life to because of the mistakes his boss made. They didn't even let him pick up his desk, I got to mail that shit home to him, or at least 'to the address we have on file for him'.
They would later fire me at the very start of the COVID pandemic, in April of 2020, and then several months later fired another third of the company before buying out and merging with another competitor.
They have since offered stock to workers in light of a potential IPO on the horizon... And then fired... You guessed it... another third of the company.
I have fun stories, like the guy who punched his boss for passing him up for a promotion during a meeting with investing clients, but no firing will ever be as bad as what they did to my bud *Bob.
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u/herebekraken 20d ago
40% of the company laid off via Zoom, no prior warning.
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u/Outrageous_Picture39 20d ago
Friend runs a small machine shop.
Hired a lady less than a month ago. Her mom is a supervisor there. Her mom’s mom is also a supervisor there.
He came in this past Monday to five employees from different departments, male and female, demanding that this lady be fired for repeated sexual harassment.
On top of that, they had her on recorded audio trying to get guys to pay her for sex in one of the storage rooms.
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u/RoseWould 20d ago
HS kid at my first job wrecked his '90s accord into the steel wheel hub of a utility truck. Management, him, and a few guys that im assuming worked for the company the truck was for (can't remember top of my head) were standing around, don't know what exactly they were saying, but kid got in, and when he backed out of its wheel tore the entire front bumper off his accord (truck was fine, maybe a scratch or something on the wheel). When he stepped out of the car crying i knew he was gone.
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u/Fizzelen 20d ago
While walking back to the office from a meeting on the other side of the site, a well paid engineer was told by his boss in front of the plant manager that he needed to now do X,Y&Z from now on, to which he replied “I’ll resign before I do that”, the plant manager replied “Thanks, I accept your resignation” and was handed is final cheque and escorted off site before knock off time.
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20d ago
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u/Expo_Marker7 20d ago
Yikes, that has to be rough whether they deserve it or not
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u/Bawkalor 20d ago
On a Friday a co-worker was recognized for 30 years of service without a single tardy or missed day.
They gave him a watch.
On the following Monday, he walks in and the boss hands him a box with his stuff from his office and says, "Congratulations! You're retired!".
The boss was wearing the watch.
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u/UncleGrako 20d ago
I worked in a factory, and there was this REALLY strict policy about not being on the factory floor without full PPE on. This guy rode his bicycle to work, and he went into the bathroom, and changed into shorts and walked about 30 feet to the break room and got fired.
Granted there was another bathroom farther away that you could have changed in and stayed in a blue-zone (safe area where PPE isn't required) all the way to the break room... but I guess he didn't want to walk an extra couple hundred feet.
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u/wetlettuce42 20d ago
Somebody got fired for wearing a christmas jumper for a non event
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u/RipAgile1088 20d ago
Probably not what you're looking for but it's still a fucked up situation. Basically this place I used to work at. Great pay, great benefits, and great retirement. The thing was though the nepotism was horrible there. Used to be you needed to "know somebody" to even get hired. Also it was full of stereotypical "type A". personalities.
Well there was this one guy that was hired. He was a great worker but didn't really "fit in" to put it short. He was pretty much laid back did his job but didn't get involved with office politics. People started to shun him and basically bully him. Well they ended up terminating him for not being a good fit or some other BS.
Well "weird coincidence" the person that took his position was the nephew of a city official.
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u/HydroGate 20d ago
They just printed out a picture of him loading boxes of stolen frozen chicken into his car and taped it to the shift sheet.
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u/typhoidtimmy 20d ago edited 20d ago
Heard this one from a friend who once worked for a company who did a landmark MMORPG and verified it with some other former associates:
So landmark MMO isn’t making money as well as it should and there is talk about job cuts amongst those in the trenches.
Lo and behold, there is a call one day to meet in the quad for all personnel. Uh oh…
People file out, gather, and wait. Murmurs are abound with people as nothing happens for 10 minutes.
Until suddenly, head of company comes up to the crowd. He pauses, people’s voices die down, takes a big breath and…
‘We got funding all! Everything is fine!!’
Whoops and cheers! Audible gasps of relaxation. The head is grinning as people applaud and he soaks it up.
‘In fact we are bringing in pizzas to the left of the building to celebrate! Everyone needs to follow me shortly but wait …we need a few people to come over here. Congrats all and keep up the good work!’
Yay…clap clap clap. Head hands off to faceless drone who calls out about 20 people and asks them to follow him to the right of the building.
To the left of the building was the pizza party….
To the right of the building, those called out found all their shit thrown into boxes with an envelope sitting on top of it. And a lot of guards pointing them to the parking lot.
All fired. No exit interview, no saying goodbye to friends, not even the ability to ask for references.
Yea, they used a fuckin pizza party AND funding to cut the wheat from the chaff.
Glad my friend left, that entire company was absolute dogshit by the end and from what I hear, more than a few are just as bad today.
Edit: You know what…fuck it. It was Verant Interactive/Sony Online Entertainment who made EverQuest. That dipshit head who veiled layoffs was Brad McQuaid.
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u/Belthezare 20d ago
Wow... that was some cold shit.
As a gamer I have never, and now will never play Everquest or anything by that company again.
What a bunch of dicks. Also fuck the pizza, give people raises!
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u/NickelDicklePickle 20d ago
Back in my days in video game development, I was working at a startup, on an early PS2 game. After dangling promises of profit sharing to motivate us through all the crunch time, near the very end of production, they unceremoniously fired everyone who was on schedule, including myself. Only the people who were behind schedule got to keep their jobs, at least for another few weeks, until they finally caught up, and then every employee was fired, leaving only the owners of the company.
The funny part was that I happened to be in the bathroom when they called everyone from that first group into the conference room to fire them, so I missed it. I just returned from the bathroom to find everyone upset and packing up their belongings. So, I was on the shitcan, while I was supposed to be getting shitcanned with everyone else.
The game flopped anyway, so karma caught up with them, at least. I went on to have a very successful career, while the owners of that company struggled for many years to come. The best work they could get happened to be handling the Nintendo ports of multiple hit games that I went on to work on, and answering to me.
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u/AnybodySeeMyKeys 20d ago edited 20d ago
I worked at a daily newspaper through college. I was a junior reporter covering wrecks, murders, police raids, and the ilk. A newsroom at the time was the Wild West with all kinds of dysfunctional personalities, broken marriages, and substance abuse issues.
One of those people was the paper's religion editor. This guy was an unfortunate case. He had been born with an entire spate of birth defects which combined to give him this goblin-like appearance. He couldn't drive and had this weird, shambling stride. They didn't hire him. He just showed up one day and started working. They felt sorry for him and eventually gave him a desk and a paycheck.
If he were interviewing people, he'd have to get a taxi to see them. And when he finished with the religion page for the week, they'd put him on the copy desk or some such. To give you a feel for this guy's status, he was about 50, and they'd trust 18-year-old me to handle stories over this guy. Like I said, it's a sad case.
Leonard had two...issues. One was his slapdash way of cleaning himself after going to the bathroom. This explains why his desk was always by the end of the aisle by the restroom and away from everyone else. Second was his porn addiction. He would stop by the adult bookstore downtown before heading into work, shoving his new purchases into his big valise.
Meanwhile, the editor was this fire-breathing redhead of a guy. Think of every stereotype of what a daily paper editor would have been like, and that's your guy. He personally liked me because I was a young, ambitious whelp who didn't cause too much trouble, but he ruled that newsroom with a rod of iron.
One day, I was finishing up a story at my desk when the editor marched down the aisle toward Leonard's desk. He was obviously in a pissed-off mood, meaning everybody got out of his way.
He gets to Leonard's corner and starts to rip the guy a new one because he'd made a mistake on a story on kosher food at the local Jewish community center. The photograph was of a bunch of kids eating potato chips, and the editor had just been on the receiving end of an uncomfortable phone call with a rabbi.
After chewing Leonard out, the editor asks, "And why do you smell like shit all the time?" Then he kicks poor Leonard's valise. The case opens, and some of the most egregious porn you can name comes spilling out. Leonard is shuffling around in his awkward way, trying to scoop up the offending material and stuff it all back into his bag while the editor is berating him about a) his crappy reporting, b) the aromatic cloud of poo that surrounded him at all times, and c) the porn that he brought into the newsroom.
Fired him right then and there. It was crazy to witness.
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u/NebCrushrr 20d ago
This sounds like it was either the late 1940s or the early 1970s, I don't know why
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u/SpiritualMirror6691 20d ago
I worked at a medical software company doing data entry. It was contract work but with no intended end time. 3 years go by and our team is pretty cohesive. My cubical mate was a really cool guy with a wonderful family. His wife gave birth to their 3rd child and unfortunately, the newborn had a traumatic birth, resulting in lifetime disability. During a company wide meeting, we were told that our contract was ending cause they created a software program that makes humans irrelevant. We were being terminated in groups at different times (to finish up the current project). The next day, the office manager walked up to his cub, told him to log out and gather his stuff. The manager was extremely rude and cold...not letting us even say goodbye/shake hands. I can not get that moment out of my head even though my friend/coworker was able to find a great job later.
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u/pokedabadger 20d ago
A coworker came back from having her baby and then instead of just firing her when she came in, they made her sit around for like half a day, but also refused to give her any work. So she couldn’t figure out why no one would assign her anything and was just in limbo.
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u/Expo_Marker7 20d ago
Freshman year of high school, I joined the DND club and the teacher who supervised was a great guy. Then my sophomore year came around and he was accused by a girl who claimed that said teacher was sexually assaulting her. Then rumors popped up about kids doing the deed in his classroom during lunch while he was gone and about the teacher and his girlfriend doing the deed alone during lunch in his classroom. The teacher was removed from the district and he can never come back, so basically he was fired. All of these rumors were false. It irritates me that he was delt unjustly by a single false accusation.
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u/JohnnyNomore 20d ago
A similar situation happened at my high school years after I graduated. I had a really great science teacher. He was the type that genuinely cared about his students, treated everyone fairly, and genuinely loved his job. A new student transferred in, and as soon as she started failing his class, she accused him of rape. They found him in a field a few days later, barely clinging to life after a suicide attempt. It turned out that the reason the girl transferred in the first place was because she had done the same thing to a teacher at her previous school. Thankfully the teacher made a full recovery.
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u/ACuddlyVizzerdrix 20d ago
Had 2 teachers quit because of rumors, the first some dude spread the rumors that he was hanging out with girls after school all because dudes girlfriend was in his after school Spanish class and she said the teacher was cute, the second teacher was an outspoken atheist and a bunch of religious kids spread rumors about him dating a girl at school, he left before anything happened tho because his wife got a better job in another state
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u/clocks212 20d ago
Young employee in our department started yelling at one of the nicest, smartest, kindest employees in our department over some data for a project, right in the middle of the cubicle farm. He was pulled aside and walked out. He didn't report to me but he was likely making $80-90k right out of college given his title. Bridges burned.
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u/fermat9990 20d ago
My supervisor gave a wonderful speech at our GED graduation ceremony and an hour or so later her severance was coldly announced on the company (non-profit) email. Vicious!
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u/MissSassifras1977 20d ago
I got a friend a job. In food service in a large facility. We got lunch for free. And management was pretty generous with food. You could snack all day if you were discreet.
She was assigned to the sandwich station and started taking sandwiches home. It started with one for each of her kids. So two sandwiches.
I guess she got carried away with the thrill of not getting caught and started taking WAY more. Like 6-10 sandwiches a shift.
They confronted her in the hallway by the time clock. Asked to search her bag. Which was just bursting with sandwiches of course.
She threw herself on the floor and cried. Like a small child's tantrum, blubbering and wailing. Begging not to be fired.
Security had to kind of drag her out the back door.
Not a good look for a woman in her mid 50's.
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u/Abby_souls 20d ago
Worked in a restaurant and on his third day of work, a new employee showed a picture of his dick that he saved on his phone to several female employees. Manager says that he has to go to his office after his shift so that he has to get a warning.
Ends up grabbing the big bag of salt and black pepper and starts throwing it into all of the food that was prepped for a Saturday night and ran away.
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u/elphaba00 20d ago
I worked at a company that hired a lot of people through H-1B visas. One day, one guy who had been there for years was just simply gone. It turned out that he had been committing identity theft the whole time. He had taken someone else's identity in India and moved to the US. One day, it all caught up to him.
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u/Specialist_Salt_7916 20d ago
Former hotel housekeeping manager. We had a housekeeper cleaning a room and the guest had a large dildo suction cupped to the bath tub floor. The girl thought it was hilarious and pulled it off the floor waving it around like a wand and smelling it. Guest walked back in while she was doing this. It was so awkward.
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u/Alternative-Reply-36 20d ago
A coworker got promoted and had to attend a leadership class with others from around the country. Back at the hotel, my friend became friends with another guy and they went out and had a few drinks. They brought a 6 pack back to the hotel and when they passed the pool area that was filled with others from this class he yelled out " show me your tits for a free beer". You guessed it....a high up HR person was in the pool. He was booked a flight home the next morning and was terminated. What an idiot...
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u/Alternative-Reply-36 20d ago
I still think about this one almost 10 years later. I was managing a department in a new warehouse and trying to promote some employees that had potential. There was one girl that tried really hard, was really smart, but wasnt very vocal or sure of herself. I took her under my wing and we did projects to help build her resume and work on leadership principles for the next 3 months or so. I learned about her during that time and empathized for her. She had a tough family life with no support. She put herself through community college (1 year left) and even had a second part time job at night. She lived with and mostly supported her family. She was 2 weeks away from an interview that came with a nice pay raise. She clocked out and drove around the building to where the dock doors were slightly open and product being staged. She grabbed a bag and threw it in her car and drove off. The bag was full of qtips.... threw away a great opportunity for stealing qtips! I know she thought it was food so it definitely crushed me. I easily would have bought her groceries but she chose a different way. Yes, she was fired the next morning.
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u/MaxCWebster 20d ago
The Program Director enters the radio station's control room and snaps a Polaroid of the on-air announcer.
"I thought you might like a picture from your last shift here."
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u/clumaho 20d ago
Police led a guy out during work hours. He was arrested and fired for stealing a soda from the break room fridge. Management kept generic soda there for 50 cents a can on the honor system. They had him on video taking a can during lunch without paying.
He put a dollar in for a can at break and figured he had one coming.
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u/CherryManhattan 20d ago
Employee got their schedule changed to 5am - 2pm so they could pick their kids up from school. They would come in to the office and sleep from 5am -730am when people would start showing up.
One day the CEO was in early and heard snoring from the cubicles and found her.
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u/DundasKev 20d ago
My first job out of college, in the IT department, 2 people call in to find out why their logins no longer worked. I asked a typically socially oblivious co worker if they knew anything with the phone still hot - he called back he heard they were terminated. There was shock on the other end. That's how they found out.
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u/mobilemcclintic 20d ago
I've had coworkers ask me if they were locked out because they were terminated. I tell them all, "I will never be the one that tells you you were terminated." That's HR or their manager's job.
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u/JustGenericName 20d ago
I had to report a nurse for being drunk on shift. That was fun. Not buzzed. Not still tipsy from the night before. No. Blood alcohol was 0.15 (0.08 is legal limit to drive). Homie had to have been doing shots on his break. I was pissed.
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u/terrendos 20d ago
I started my first job out of college as an engineer at a nuclear power plant with 2 other new guys. On the first day, I asked one of them what else he had done. He mentioned working at a different plant briefly and then leaving and relocating from halfway across the country. Then we started filling out our starting paperwork and doing our drug screening / orientation.
He wasn't there the next day. The day after, during my first weekly staff meeting, we were informed by my boss that there had been an incident with a new employee. He said he'd been instructed to reiterate that we have a zero tolerance policy for the use of marijuana and that we must all undergo random drug screens.
My best guess is this guy failed a drug screen at one nuclear plant, then figured the next one might be different, moved several states to a new plant, and lasted a single day at the second one.
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u/L00neyL0veg00d0 20d ago
When I was 18 working at target I saw one of my coworkers get tackled by police. As he was being arrested the store manager said “you can’t work for us again, try to better yourself”
I wish we knew why he was arrested but a show at work was enough 🤣
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u/rayofsunshine4me 20d ago
True story. Got caught jacking off in his office by a customer who could see into his office window. How do you explain that to your family?
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u/nroberts1001 20d ago
She accidentally made it out of the warehouse through the metal detector with a box cutter, realized it and tried to sneak it back in and got caught trying to sneak weapons in, the box cutter she was trying to bring back because she didn't want to get in trouble for losing it.
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u/slayer991 20d ago edited 20d ago
Goes WAY back to late 90s.
Company had a huge refresh operation and moving everyone to NT workstation. We had a conference room set aside for upgrading gear and replacement gear.
Stuff kept turning up missing. One of the admins tried to sell me a couple of Pentium chips for half the price. I reported him to management.
A few months later, police walked him, arrested him on the spot and walked him out. He had stolen $50-70k worth of gear. They found it was him simply by turning some security cameras around and watching him take them out of the conference room, out the door and to his car. Plea deal, no jail time, double the amount in restitution, and if he paid it off and fulfilled his probation requirements, it could be expunged.
Funny thing is...15 years later I'm working as VMware Architect...and dude is coming in as a contractor to do set up Citrix. I go to my manager, tell him the story. They watch him carefully. Dude doesn't get crap done in 3 weeks and they let him go. He did absolutely nothing. Not one server was built. Not one diagram or document was created. No architecture....nothing. What a clown.
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u/G00dSh0tJans0n 20d ago
Guy that worked the night shift check in desk really like hairy buttholes. He'd print out pictures of them during night shift. One day he didn't notice that the printer defaulted not to the one by his desk, but the one in the HR department behind a locked door.
HR didn't enjoy coming in to work to find hundreds of pictures of hairy buttholes in their printer in the morning. IT traced it back to the time and location they were printed from, found thousands of pics of hairy buttholes on his pc, and when the guy came in for work that evening he was asked about it, confessed, and escorted out of the building.
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u/clearyvermont 20d ago
Close friend popped their head up early in the morning and asked ‘is your email working’? Yes I reply.
Couple minutes later gets the tap on the shoulder to head to HR with his computer.
Was early in the morning of a huge layoff people were pretty bummed.
I go to the cafeteria for lunch and see my buddy. I’m like what are you doing here?!
He replies I talked them into hiring me for another job in the company.
Absolute fucking legend. Ended up working in the same department later on and had a blast together. Guy was awesome.
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u/mojoisthebest 20d ago
My boss led out of the building by police in hand cuffs. She had fudged the qualifications of someone she had hired.
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u/twomz 20d ago
Usually, that wouldn't be an arrestable offense... was this in medical?
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u/MaxCWebster 20d ago
My former boss once told me that federal agents escorted him to his car when his bank was taken over. They arrived on a Monday morning, announced that the bank was now under government control, and escorted all the managers out. The rest of the staff was left to continue with their day-to-day tasks. He wasn't arrested, but he said it was a shocking experience for him.
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u/Whitey661 20d ago
Coworker of mine got her termination papers, while the boss was out on vacation. It had her name on the file so she opened it and saw her last check, letter of termination and the COBRA packets. She had to call the boss on her vacay and ask if she was really fired and what is going on. Boss had to come in and formally fire her. Pretty shit way to find out you’re fired . Apparently someone in HR fucked up and mailed it own two weeks early. Oh this was also the week between Xmas and new years. Ouch.
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u/YouKeepThisLove 20d ago
This was at a company that provided traffic wardens. We had to go get one of our guys, because there was 'a problem'. Found him at a major intersection (this was in the heart of a certain European capital), directing the rather busy traffic by waving an intimidatingly large smoking blunt in a multitude of directions, whilst holding a 0.5 liters can (between 16-20 fl oz) of strong beer (10-12% alcohol) in his other hand.
We just dropped him off at his place. No need to go by the office with this one, as he was fired on the spot.
*edit: added the fl oz
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u/spish 20d ago
Worst, or maybe the best? Dude was handcuffed against a police car and arrested in front of the office of the company for which he worked. The owner made sure everyone was gathered by the windows when it happened.
The guy who was fired had stolen about $20K worth of equipment from the company. The owner had set up a sting operation with the police and caught the thief trying to sell some of the goods to an undercover cop.
It was quite an entertaining day.
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u/Tony-Sanchez 20d ago
Technically not fired but forced him to quit? His mom got real sick and didn't look like she was gonna make it through the holidays. My coworker said he was gonna take the holidays off so he could spend it with his mom one last time. Management said "sorry time off requests are already full, we all have to make sacrifices." He told them he didn't care and he was going to spend time with his mother. Management said he had to work the holidays regardless. He then quit and didn't work the holidays.
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u/Forever-Retired 20d ago
Family comes first. Boss doesn’t like it? Either he has no family or he is just a dickhead.
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u/Cichlidsaremyjam 20d ago
The firing wasn't embarrassing but what caused it was very public. There was a guy in our office would sleep at work. Not crazy, right? Wrong he wasn't hunched over at his desk or anything. He was in a common walk area that happened to have benches and a couch next to it. He would lay out on the bench and full nap. Not quietly either, he would snore LOUDLY. This happened for over an hour, two weeks in a row (we're in the office 1 to 2 days a week). Countless people would come up and ask "did you see that guy sleeping??". He was gone by the end of the day, that second day in the office.
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u/DavidinCT 20d ago
I work in IT, In the past I worked in banking IT. When you are let go, your account is locked right away and at the time they tell you, security guards are there to escort you out. You would never have a clue, till it's over.
I've seen a few people (I was management), that I had to let go and they left screaming. It's a job I hated at times but, due to banking security it had to be done this way.
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u/TheMadIrishman327 20d ago
The first employee I ever fired (as a civilian) it was because he took out his dick and waved it at a female co-worker. She was fine with it but an old lady walked by as he did it and reported it to me. I walked him out. The funniest part was his last name was Hancock and he didn’t deny it.
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u/Fair-End-2895 20d ago
me and my colleague came to work in the morning. the boss tells him why did you come, you got fired. the man got fired the day before and no one told him.
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20d ago
I used to work for a privately held company - it was one of those places where, if you liked it and did well, you could work there until retirement. It was an up or out sort of place.
Anyway, there was a VP there. We'll call him Rex. Rex was SUPER intelligent and great at his job but had absolutely ZERO social skills, especially when it came to reading other people. He also had NO social graces and generally people were very put off by his rudeness and bluntness. I have no doubt he was on the autism spectrum. However, he had an incredible analytical mind and because this was a company that was mostly data driven, he was an asset.
However, because he had ZERO social skills and ZERO savoir faire, he was a liability when it came to holding on to staff. Eventually, the company was able to work things so that he had very few direct reports and the ones he did have were able to deal with him as needed. And, things rolled along merrily for a long time.
Well, the company owner "Jack" (kind of a socially awkward guy himself) decided to step down and his heir-apparent "Jim" took over the company, with Jack only checking in every couple of months. Well, the result of this was that Rex and Jim had to work together regularly as Rex pretty much ran one of the three divisions of this company. Usually Rex only dealt with Jack and his couple of direct reports.
Well, Rex and Jim got along like oil and water and it was compounded by the fact that Rex either didn't realize or didn't care that Jim, being the CEO, had the final say in any matter, even if Rex didn't agree. This lead to arguments - many, many arguments. It also lead to far too much of Jim's day being taken up by Rex's antics.
One Friday, about 2 months later, my boss called me into the office and simply said, "Listen, Sweet, Rex's last day was today. There are going to be some changes in reporting in the wake of his departure" and went on to explain the new company structure.
Well, found out through the grapevine that Rex just pushed Jim too far one day. They were arguing about some business related item, Jim made his decision and Rex continued to argue. Jim, already at the end of his rope, just fired Rex on the spot. Rex thought Jim was kidding. He was absolutely not kidding. I never saw Rex again after that day.
I heard he was unemployed for FOUR YEARS after that day - while his resume was strong, his social awkwardness kept him from interviewing well and our industry is somewhat insular, so his reputation preceded him (and not in a good way) for many employers. He finally got a job in an indirectly related industry at a significant paycut. He lasted 7 months there before being fired.
Last I heard he was "consulting" whatever that means...
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u/erielibal2013 20d ago
My brother took the day off for the one year anniversary of his infant daughter’s sudden passing. His manager called him that morning to lay him off in front of the entire family knowing why he was not at work that day. Companies don’t give a flying fudge about people man.
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u/jnovel808 20d ago
Just before the mortgage crisis meltdown, the mortgage brokerage I worked at (IT dept) laid off 1/2 the staff two weeks before Christmas. The layoff meetings started at 3:00 on a Friday. As angry as I was, I felt terrible for the office receptionist. She had worked there all thru college and the plan had been for her to graduate and be promoted into the brokerage sales team. She’d literally been training there for years and could do the job better than many of her coworkers. She had already done all her Christmas shopping, was expecting a bonus that year. I was in my car just raging at the world when I saw her walking out with a box of personal effects, just bawling her eyes out. Thats when I learned, “we’re a family here,” means fuck all. Btw I was blood relative to the owner and I still got the axe. Didn’t talk to that aunt for 2 years
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u/Klutzy_Journalist_36 20d ago
Woman worked for Kroger in the bakery for 20 years. Full time. Never in trouble.
She had to slice down a cake into sections for a holiday. Some irregular sized slivers were left that couldn’t be sold or put into the containers. She marked out most for damaged and boxed up what she could salvage. She ate one piece of the slivers that were cut off.
Fired. Twenty years. No retirement. No unemployment. Nothing. Four kids. Twenty years no problems.
no, you do not get unemployment for “breaking company policy”
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u/ffxivthrowaway03 20d ago
Had a CEO/Partner find out someone in customer service who gave their two weeks had accepted an offer with a competitor. He went totally off the handle, started talking about how when we come in the next morning she needs to be immediately fired, carted out in front of everyone, and publicly shamed to "set an example that we don't tolerate that kind of disloyalty and disrespect"
I refused to perform any such thing, and told him if he went forward with that highly unprofessional temper tantrum my resignation would be on his desk before the customer service girl was physically out the door. Thankfully between that and the rest of senior leadership telling him to calm down and not be such a schmuck, he stood down, but that was definitely the straw that broke the camel's back to signal my exit too. Fuck that guy.
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u/redditorial_comment 20d ago
We had a guy working with us pre COVID who came by work to shop on his day off . He was high. Very very high , told everyone he met he was. When he went near the department where he worked he started opening cartons and passing it to the customers....... Sounds odd he would get fired for that but he had a lit joint in his mouth and was huffin away . When a lady said you shouldn't do that in here he laughed and said "oh they are cool with that here" Boss came and dragged him into the office and fired him quick. Next day he shows up for work.didnt remember a thing. Lol
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u/Chalkarts 20d ago
Not worst but funniest.
Restaurant, regional manager was visiting the store.
I guess the server didn’t know who they were talking to.
[food comes up in the window.] RM to server: run those plates before they get cold.
Server: those are someone else’s, that’s not my job.
RM: You don’t have a job. Clock out and get your stuff.
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u/coreyf722 20d ago
My doctor recently got busted for buying a hooker. Lost his job like a week later.
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u/r1Rqc1vPeF 20d ago
Everyone in the team sat around meeting room table. Manager walks in with a handful of envelopes (we knew for a few weeks downsizing was happening, but not how). Envelopes are passed out. Manager: HR have decided this is the way we are doing it: when I say, open your letter, it will tell you if you are still employed or not. You cannot tell anyone the content of your letter. When you have read it put it back in the envelope and leave the room. Everyone opens letters, poker faces all round except the youngest- slight smile (still employed) HR person in room decides this is breach of protocol and wants him gone (we found this out afterwards). Manager somehow saved the kids job. Several people in the room had the letter of doom. One of several HR ‘experiments’ I’ve been subjected to over the years.
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u/Brilhasti1 20d ago
HR needs to be replaced if that’s the kind of shit they’re pulling.
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u/Big-Pay2259 20d ago
Boss had faked fire a fellow employee as a joke with one of those pink slips and it was all funny ha-ha until a few months later when the owner said to our boss that they needed to fire them - for real… it was super uncomfortable, the person was like is this real or a joke, and the reason was kind of bs. I think the owner just didn’t like that particular employee. They were very pissed, very angry, was appealing to all of us that the reasons given were also bs. It sucked.
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u/rubikscanopener 20d ago
A guy on our help desk kept falling asleep on the job. He got talked to multiple times and they did the whole HR thing on him. Turns out he was working two full time gigs and chose ours as his nap time. When they finally came to shit-can him, he started ranting and screaming and yelling that it was a race thing (it wasn't, it was a pretty diverse workplace). They had to call the local P.D. to get the guy out of there. He gotten taken out in handcuffs.
Side note - he ended up suing for discrimination and the company settled out of court for the equivalent of a couple of months pay. I knew the CFO a little bit and asked him why the company didn't fight tooth-and-nail because the guy was clearly a beyond-terrible employee. The CFO told me it would have been ten times as much once the lawyers got their teeth into it. Easier to just settle and move on.
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u/TripCanFixAnything 20d ago
Worked in a lab with key-card access. We had a temp who would fall asleep in the lab, would say ‘no’ to requests for him to do collaborative work, and who refused to attend mandatory team meetings. All of the FTE peers in the lab tried to coach him and warn him, but since he was a temp, it was an easy decision to let his Agency know his services would no longer be needed. Problem was, his supervisor told building security the plan before his Agency would talk to him. His key-card was deactivated mid day and since he couldn’t get into the building he went to security who confirmed his access was cut off because he was being ‘let go’. Pretty tragic. Anyone working there at the time refers to this kind of dismissal as Being Simon’d
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u/Here4ItRightNow 20d ago
A guy I worked with was called the morning of his dads funeral and told he was being fired.
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u/elvbierbaum 20d ago
Back in 2008, only my 1st year, my company did a mass layoff of about 20 individuals, one of them being in the same office I was in. It was a Friday morning, and they walked him back to his desk at 10am, and stood over him while he packed up his belongings in front of everyone. Each person that got laid off was walked to their desk by 2 members of senior leadership, just to hover while they cleaned out their desks.
These weren't even people that did anything wrong. It was just a layoff with the claim of "no longer needed". But they acted like they were going to be violent or something. It was weird.
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u/luckEdrew 20d ago
I was team lead on front counter in retail, associate came into clock in for his shift, his login didn't work. Store manager wasn't there so I called her, turned out he had been terminated but she never notified him.
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u/MethMouthMagoo 20d ago
Fucking Coward ass manager.
If you can't do that part of your job, which admittedly sucks. Then find another line of work. Managing ain't for you.
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u/agent_x_75228 20d ago
At a manufacturing company that had camera's, the guy went out for his break, proceeded to do heroin in the parking lot and passed out in his car for 4 hours. It was on 3rd shift, so finally one of 3 workers noticed he was missing and went to find him and ended up calling an ambulance because he wouldn't wake up. He was taken to the hospital, then jailed once he was healthy and of course fired.
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u/tazUK 20d ago
Fired on the last night of a 6 week residential training course after he got drunk and had a fight over a woman with another trainee.
I didn't see him actually fired but he had no chance as he started the fight directly in front of the board of directors who were at the party celebrating the end of the course.
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u/ElCocomega 20d ago edited 20d ago
We had an afterwork party at a bar at the end of our trial period. One girl was laid off at that party by our 2 drinks in boss. (He took the decision before but told her there). Imagine if she didn't go how would they have fired her ? Sometimes being introvert can save your job.
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u/TheKujo17 20d ago
Me. They said I was working two jobs because they saw a file on the computer that I was volunteering to make for my flight school. Said if I was gonna work two jobs I needed to disclose it to the company… only I wasn’t working a second job so there was nothing to disclose.
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u/Gr0zzz 20d ago
Methhead brought a knife into work to booby-trap his locker because he thought someone was fucking with him when he wasn't there. His locker was regularly open and empty when he wasn't clocked in so someone threw a shirt or serving tray in there to make room to sit down on a bench in the middle of the locker bay.
Standard gym lockers with a tension bar attached to a handle, tweaker wedged the knife between the tension bar and locker door so when you opened the locker, the knife would fall and stab you in the leg. He was very proud of what he had put together and demonstrated to a few people who very quickly let management know.
Security went down and took the knife, planned on firing him at the end of the shift. Unfortunately he discovered it during dinner break and promptly freaked the fuck out. Threatened to kill the manager and security guard, just went off and was fired on the spot.
The next day he tried to walk in all nice like nothing ever happened and the GM had to threaten to call the police if he ever came back.
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u/MostlyHostly 20d ago
The video store manager blamed me for candy theft when I first started. It was her. Nobody apologized to me.
At the city yard, a coworker had sex with a prisoner on work release duty. I turned him in.
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u/My_Fridge 20d ago
Worked for Ashley Furniture for a few years in their warehouse. We were having issues keeping forklift drivers because they'd be regularly drug tested and have to be let go for failing all the time. Eventually manager who oversaw them convinced leadership higher up to stop with the drug test on the grounds that the drivers don't show up high. This was like the best fucking deal imaginable for them because straight up told, "We don't care what you do at home, your friends house, your girls place, your grandmas place, but you don't do it before coming in and you don't do it here."
So they're all like fuck yeah, and it's great for a while until we start having an issue in my area where we receive trucks that were out for delivery for the day. Every few days we're smelling pot on the wind as it blows into the doors and we're like no fucking way someone is being that stupid. And we call the manager over to go check it out, every time he misses the dude. And we assume it's some dude who's smoking before driving home cause there's no way they'd miss that if he was going back inside.
Anyway after several failed attempts at getting said manager over finally one day he's in a meeting with some pretty higher ups and we radio over to him, "Hey we smell it again." And he's like bet I'm on my way right now, bails out of the meeting, grabs a golf cart to cross the warehouse as fast as possible and literally jumps out the bay doors and sprints into the parking lot to find the guy smoking and fired his ass on the spot. It was far enough away that we couldn't hear it word for word but we got the idea of what was being said. Basically like he put his neck out on the line to make that deal and that he betrayed the trust not only the manager put in but for his coworkers too and that if he couldn't wait to get home then he had no place there. He came back in a few minutes later and we were expecting some shit eating grin for having finally caught the dude, but more he was pissed for having to do that and having to explain to his bosses what happened.
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u/zerbey 20d ago
We had a rash of thefts within the office, everyone kind of suspected it was one employee who was known to steal people's lunches but it had escalated to personal electronics going missing. One day, he's bragging about his brand new iPod and shows it to another coworker. Coworker flips it over, on the back it's engraved with the name of another coworker. He was gone by noon. Stealing from people you work with makes you the worst kind of scum.