People often joke around and say that good employees are a miraculous gift from God, and well, these bosses from today's stories are inclined to agree. Despite having had hopes of a lifetime of dedicated work, these people have had their hands forced and have had to let go of certain workers, all because of reasons that one would find, unorthodox.
Read these 40+ stories and learn the wild reasons why these bosses fired their employees.
1. You Were What?!
I had a driver go missing for a few days. When he resurfaced, his truck and thousands of dollars worth of material were missing. He claimed he'd been kidnapped and held at a motel.
He courageously escaped when his captors lowered their guard. The truck was later found stripped of everything of any value.
He refused to file a police report because the "kidnappers were still out there". I later found out the other guys called him "The Methketeer".
spackledealer
2. Employee Of The Month
Not sure if the question is asking what's the most ridiculous thing I was required to fire someone for or what's the most ridiculous thing someone has done to get fired. I'm going with the second...
I was an assistant manager at a Halloween costume store and we were short-staffed. An employee was required to open the store and then I would arrive 2 hours later, they would take their break and I would count the register.
One day I arrived and the opener had shopping bags from Hot Topic and other stores around the mall and began showing me all of these cool new things he had purchased.
He goes to break, I count the register to be $80 short, call in the manager and when the kid gets back from lunch they talk. The kid admitted that he took $80 from the register and left the store unattended to go shopping.
That being said he was fired and informed, to his shock, that the money would be deducted from his last check. So much for not seeing it coming.
Jon3laze
3. Seriously, Man?!
A few years back, I used to work at the mall unloading delivery trucks. Once a week, the delivery would include a large, plastic tub filled with jewelry, easily ten or twenty grand worth of gold and diamonds.
For a year, that plastic tub was a huge temptation. For the first two hours of the day, I was the only person in the store. Also, while the store was closed, the idiot store manager kept the security cameras off to save electricity.
Unfortunately, my parents raised me with morals, so I never stole anything. However, two months after I quit, the guy who replaced me got fired for theft.
However, his plan was a little different than mine.
Instead of stealing the $20k tub of jewelry, he took an $80 set of luggage. Instead of doing it in the morning, before the store was open and cameras were switched on, he waited until noon. And instead of taking it out the back door, he'd rolled the luggage through the store, past dozens of people.
To this day, I have no idea how he thought that would work. The only way his plan could have been dumber is if he had asked the security guard to help load the luggage in.
captainmagictrousers
4. All For A Movie
I had to fire my best friend while I working at a university helpdesk. He came in for the Sunday morning shift and he brought an external hard drive with a bunch of movies.
A friend of his came in to work the Sunday evening shift and begged and pleaded for him to leave the hard drive so he could watch movies too, and the guy caved and did so.
Unfortunately, the second guy was not smart enough to move the hard drive over to the PC he was stationed at and instead, he decided to stream the movies over the network which triggered every alarm imaginable for the network admin to observe the next morning.
My manager called me into her office at noon on Monday and told me it was super cut and dry, she could fire them or I could. So...I fired them.
My real good friend, the first guy, just laughed and went home. The second guy got really belligerent and angry. All because the twat was too lazy to unplug and move an external hard drive.
caustic_banana
5. Sticky Fingers Gardener
My mother hired a guy to mow the lawns for her rental properties. One night the majority of the tools went missing. He showed up for work acting strange.
It was immediately apparent that he had either stolen the tools or knew who had stolen them. When I outright accused him, he made up a story that "You are not the only person who got broken into last night. A bunch of people had their tools stolen."
I asked how he could possibly know that, and he honestly had not thought that far ahead. He ran away on foot when I started calling the police, but we knew where he lived so we just waited and filed a report.
Sad to say, our super-effective police force did not follow up or do anything about it. So much for justice, law, and order hey.
root66
6. Don’t Show Up Again
I was not this particular employee’s boss because he worked in a different department. He asked me if I could change his email password for him (I was the only person with access to this feature).
The default password for everyone was their last name, so many employees made this same request. After I changed the password to what was desired, he emailed me back from the email account to confirm that the change had worked.
The next day, he did not show up for his shift. He told his supervisor that he was unaware that he had to work (he had worked the same schedule for 5 months) because he could not check his company email, which is how schedule changes are communicated.
He said someone mysteriously changed his password and he lost access. I assume he didn’t expect our departments to interact and that he could put the blame on me without any follow-up. He was told not to show up for any of his other shifts.
bear_with_antlers
7. “Boys Gotta Eat”
On my first day as an assistant store manager for a major retailer, I came in and had to receive a written note from an associate as to why they needed to keep their job.
Basically called a "Decision making" day. They had been written up 2 times before that, this third time, they get sent home, paid a full day's work, and then have to have a letter the next day as to why they should not be fired.
As this was my first day, I sat him down and talked to him and explained how I was new and would be treating everyone equally regardless of prior write-ups. He says thank you and proceeds to go back to work.
I walk to the backroom by the breakroom and see him sitting down eating Chicken McNuggets laughing. He had just punched in, was on the clock, and left his area unattended.
I looked at him and asked him what he was doing. His exact words were: "Freaking boys gotta eat." I fired a kid for eating chicken McNuggets... Plus abusive language in front of other employees.
Twigsnapper
8. Dynamite Shannon
I worked with a woman, let's call her Shannon because that was her name, which had this same "redeeming" quality. She would just let them rip while working and thought no one could hear or smell them.
Additionally, she ate stinky food so when she wasn't crapping her pants she was still smelling up the place.
Also, she was super religious and said great gems to me like, "I can't wait to get married so I can text in the car and my husband can drive," and, "You should be more subservient to your brother since you are a woman. Do his laundry without asking."
FURTHERMORE, she was like 5 feet tall and 4 feet wide, I'm also pretty sure she was a virgin, and the only place she would meet a man is at church which I guess would work out well for her.
twistedfork
9. Swimming Pool Shenanigans
So I used to work as a lifeguard manager at a pool in a marginal area of the city. No one -ever- came to this pool. Ever. Not even once. Which was fine, I guess.
Anyway, I was off for the night and this new kid who just started was there...and I got a call from the police saying that the alarm in the pool building had gone off and that they were at the pool.
So I head over there with the police, we wander around and everything is fine. I go to take a leak before I leave and I open the door to the bathroom and two things immediately pop up.
Firstly, the room reeked of smoke and secondly, my lifeguard employee is there (I figured he had just taken off early, it was raining).
Long story short, this dummy decided to get high on the job, went into the bathroom to do it, opened the window, set off the alarm, hid in the toilet, and then told me the whole story.
OldUserNewName
10. Impatient Trainee
I once worked in a retail store where we all had our own access codes that allowed us to do stuff, and if our code didn't allow us to do it, we weren't supposed to be doing it.
On his first day of training, he managed to catch the General Manager's code as he was typing it in and used it for about a week. Pretty much gave away thousands of dollars of equipment in the manager's name.
It was particularly stupid. After all, he did it because he still had his trainee position which required somebody to look over most of what he did if he wanted to give discounts, etc.
If he had waited another couple of days he would have been moved up to full staff member and could have given out most of those discounts anyway without anybody noticing or caring. He just couldn't wait to give his friends all the free swag.
overusesellipses
11. The Facade
I got a great one. My friend and I were both district managers for a vendor company that worked in Home Depot building displays and merchandising.
One day one of the workers was on the store phone talking with one of the owners of the company. The owner hears in the background an in-store page for a manager he knows had been fired a month before.
Turns out this guy had made an hour-long recording of the inside sounds of a Home Depot and would play it on his stereo anytime someone would call him! Fooled everyone for months!
My buddy and I drove to his house, parked outside, and called him. My friend asked him where he was, and he said "I'm at the store." We tell him, you might want to look out your window.
We see his curtain part a little bit and close fast. We told him don't bother coming out, you're fired. You have to give him credit for the courage and ingenuity though.
Poker_Fingers
12. Subtle Symbols
I was an editor of my college's student daily newspaper. We had a photography staff that would photograph events, sports games, etc.
Sometimes, they'd also have to do stupid stock photo-type things for feature or trend articles. (Think like a photo of someone filling out a college application for a story on college admissions, or something.)
Anyway, we had two photographers who were apparently in a group of friends that had formed some kind of... snake... cult. (probably had another name that they used, but we called it the snake cult when we found out about it.)
The way we found out about it was that we started noticing this weird symbol in the background of some of our feature article photographs -- on a post-it-note in the background of a shot of some library books, or in the shape of the food in a photo of some dining hall food for an article about meal plans.
Once we discovered it, we looked back and saw it had been going on for months. So yeah, we had to fire some photographers for slipping cult symbols into our student paper on a regular basis.
afeastforgeorge
13. Dumb and Dumber
I own a catering company. Two quick stories. One time I asked one of my employees to fill a cooler with bottles of water and ice.
When I came to check on her an hour later she had filled the cooler with ice and had opened every individual water bottle and dumped it into the cooler. She also didn't understand why that was wrong.
A few weeks later I gave the same lady the task of melting some butter for a clambake. She put about 25 pounds of butter in a double boiler pot and turned on the burner.
She decided it would be a good idea to walk away from the pot of melted butter to go have a cigarette. When she came back the butter was burnt and boiling. In a panic, this woman decided to take a bucket of ice and dump it into the pot so the "butter wouldn't be burnt anymore"
The ice mixed with the boiling butter caused the molten butter to basically explode and cover the entire kitchen. Everyone was standing there in disbelief that she had sprayed hot butter over everyone.
She also dared to tell me that it was my fault that I didn't tell her not to put ice in molten burnt butter. Now that I think about it I don't know why I hired her in the first place.
EatTheBooty
14. Should Have Known Better
This is more sad than stupid, but he should have known. One of my programmers was working with a customer and during his lunch break decided to visit the website of a friend.
The website had the option to leave a message. Smart programmer as he was, he left a message that was actually some code and would pop up a new window with a "hello" message.
Technically, this is hacking a website. The Internet provider of the website caught the hack and determined what IP address this came from. They then called that company (my customer) and threatened to shut down their internet.
All alarm bells went off and this was escalated to the CIO (this was a BIG company) and within a few minutes, they found out what workstation was used and who was using it.
I was called and threatened to "do something" about it, or we would lose the contract. This was a 7-figure contract. I had to inform corporate and tried to explain what happened, but the only action acceptable was to "fire the idiot".
So, before he could finish his lunch, my programmer was fired for pulling a prank on his friend's website. He was a very good programmer, so, the next day I made some phone calls, and within a week he had a new job. But he learned his lesson.
comicsnerd
15. You Can’t Quit…You’re Fired
One of the girls who worked for me when I managed a Blimpies came in, clocked in, and told me it was her last day. I was not too sad to see her go, but I knew I'd have to cover all her shifts and train a new person.
You may say to yourself now "Uh, Cern, we asked about firing not quitting?" Yeah. She not only refused to work her last shift, she refused to pretend to work.
She stood IN THE WAY in the narrow lane I walked up and down to make sammiches. This was 1998 so she did not have a cell, so she either kept making calls on the business phone/fax, or waiting for calls.
I told her if she wasn't going to work, she should just leave. So she made more phone calls looking for a ride. And then continued to stand, in the work area, in uniform, staring at customers but not helping them.
I told her to go wait in a booth for her ride, and she said something rude. She continued to be hostile and scare away customers, so I told her she had to leave, NOW, or I would call the cops and tell them she was trespassing.
That got her off the property. Then I went back to the office and erased her punch-in for the day. Felt good man. That is the one time I fired someone. I may have been responsible or witnessed others. But that is the one I did.
CernONeill
16. Framed
I had to fire a cleaning machine operator for being accused by four security guards of a hospital of being intimate in a storage room with one of the housekeepers.
He was 22~23, rather fit and handsome, she was 30 but looked 40, about twice his weight and half his size, and was the mother/granny type. Both denied it and I was certain it was false, but by hospital policy had no choice.
Months later one of the guards admitted they had framed him because they didn't like him, so I made such a fuss they had to fire the guard that planned the frame, and the housekeeper was fired too, inexplicably.
I hired her later for another customer and I asked the first guy to come back but he refused. It's one of the things I regret in my career.
beer demon
17. Super Murray
Bit late to the party, but this story is a legend in my hometown. There was a strange dude named Murray, a local kid, who had something wrong with his thought-spot. Never fired on all cylinders.
Murray got a job at a pizza place as a pizza maker. Which was a good job for him - stays in the back and doesn't face the public. All was well, until a driver called in sick.
Murray decides it's his night to shine, and offers up his services as a delivery driver. Unbeknownst to the company, Murray didn't have a driver's license. That didn't stop him - this was his big night.
Murray got pulled over beside the elementary school. Well, that won't stop him either. Murray grabs the pizzas and makes a run for it through the soccer field. It's around midnight, and dark out.
Murray turned to see if the police were chasing him, and proceeded to run into a large, white, metal pole that I call a "soccer net". The pizza went flying. Murray got arrested and fired.
shorthanded
18. Addict Cook
At Fudd Rucker's we serve hand-dipped blue bell shakes/malts with whipped cream on top. For months our food distributor was sending us "dud" cases of whipped cream that was shooting out like heavy whipping cream.
I called the other Fuddruckers in the area and all of their whipped cream cans were working fine. I called the distributor/manufacturer to ask questions and see if there was a problem, nope.
Well, apparently I'm the only one in the world who didn't try "whip its" as a kid and therefore didn't know I had a druggie cook sucking all nitrous oxide out of the cans.
I wish we had cameras to see my face when I caught him red-handed with a can of whipped cream in his mouth. I just thought the guy loved whipped cream.
cbass12088
19. Cruelty Doesn’t Pay
My favorite event happened right after Christmas in 2012. The grooming salon needed some extra help washing dogs so I hired a sweet young red-headed girl we will call Lizzy.
Now the head groomer and her assistant were a pair of mean freaking idiots and decided they didn't like Lizzy so they came up with a plan to make Lizzy leave.
Lizzy had just gotten a nice new purse for Xmas, so the head groomer and her assistant decided "Hey let's ruin Lizzy's purse!" When Lizzy found out what they did she came running to me crying with the most awful-smelling purse in the world.
Thankfully the groomer idiots weren't too smart and did it in front of a camera... Lizzy and I both sat horrified as we watched it. When I was firing the two girls they told me the whole process...
They decided to collect dog feces, anal gland secretions, and old rotten Chinese food, mix it all in a baggie and let it ferment for a week then poured it in the poor girl's new bag. Both of these women were in their early 30s with children... Sigh
aliceinenchantment
20. Genius Waiter
I've worked in the restaurant business for 20 years. The craziest crap I’ve seen the people do is the stuff they didn't get fired for. But there was one guy, I'm not sure if it was stupid or brilliant.
I say stupid because he was guaranteed to get caught, or brilliant because it took them over a year to catch him. Each waiter had their own card key to swipe into whatever computer was available and ring the customer's orders in.
Well, one day this guy realized if he jiggled his key, it would switch from his name to the name of a manager that opened the store. One that didn't even work there anymore.
So what he would do is open his checks and ring stuff in throughout the night, and if he didn't get a good tip he would jiggle the key, open up a customer's check under the manager's name, void some of the food, and keep the extra money.
He did this every shift for over a year before he got caught. Like I said, hard to tell if it was stupid or brilliant.
TripleSkeet
21. What The Heck Man
This was during my time in the military so we can't "fire" anyone, but: a kid who worked showed up to work in the custody of base police. The gate guard "detected alcohol metabolites" on the breath of my guy.
The gate guard gives him a breathalyzer test, and it reads .049. Standard procedure here: I give him one after I take custody, and it's .070-ish. This struck me as odd.
You can't take an official statement from a drunk person so I wait. One hour after I take him in: 0.093 One hour thirty: 0.115 One hour forty-five: 0.13, so naturally, I explode with rage.
I had a conversation with the kid about what was going on. Here is his story: he drove to work with a bottle of Whiskey, pulled over 5 minutes from the gate, and drank the entire bottle. He was upset about working a Saturday and decided this was the best recourse.
I had a patrolman continue breathalyzing him until he got back to zero. It took over 8 hours. I had to stay at work an extra 2 hours to finish waiting for the zeros. If I could fire anyone: it would have been him.
Vroonkle
22. Flimsy Excuses
This guy that my boyfriend supervised would call or text in with these half-baked excuses. “I can't come in because my girlfriend is sick (no kids)” or “I can't come in because I have to go to the DMV to renew my license.” Wouldn't you know that ahead of time, not the morning of?
My boyfriend was not actually in the position to fire him, he would have to run it by my uncle, the owner of the company. So a week after the sick girlfriend's excuse, the guy texts my boyfriend and says he can't come in because he ripped one of his contacts and needs to go buy more.
My boyfriend sarcastically texts him back, "You’re fired." Later the guy texts back that he will bring in his shirts when he gets his last paycheck. My boyfriend didn't see the text till the end of the day.
So he tells my uncle, and he's like, “Oh good, well now we're rid of him. No one wanted to be the one to fire him, but everyone wanted to get rid of him.” So my boyfriend fired some guy for "ripping his contacts."
eyeofdelphi
23. Pictures by day, wallets by night
I was assistant manager for a photo company that worked in the zoo of a rather large city. We were "those" people who stopped your family at the gate, pressured you into taking a photo, and then did our most to get you to purchase it on the way out.
We had hired a gentleman that will be referred to as "Benedict". Benedict was an aspiring rapper, and let everyone around him know it, and barely fell short of handing out demo mixtapes with customers' photos.
Now I was in charge of teaching him how to approach families and make sure they would stop (or walk slower) while we tried to take their photos. He started to get the hang of it after watching me stop and chat with a few families, and I started to let him do his thing.
While leaving, I noticed he had let one family start to slip by which I brought up to him.
Me: "Benedict, go stop that family going by."
Benedict: "Naw TeenLaQueefah, I can't do that."
Me: "Why not Benedict?”
Benedict: "I mugged him a few weeks ago."
We pretty much had to fire him almost immediately after hearing that. I mean, there was no option or saving grace left for him.
TeenLaQueefah
24. Wing It
I once worked for a company that manufactured industrial equipment that went into other machines, like bearings, chains, sprockets, etc.
We were all training to be salespeople. It was six months of learning fine details of thousands of products from manufacturing, to materials, to pricing, to design specs.
At the culmination of our training, we had a week-long project of designing, pricing, and presenting a machine that incorporated many components - with premium design (for harsh conditions) and value design (for competitive circumstances).
One of my classmates misunderstands her assignment. She was asked to design a vibratory conveyor - a machine that conveys by vibration. Something we'd see several times in the course of our training.
She instead spent a week designing a belt conveyor that would convey fiber...a FIBRATORY conveyor. I guess like breakfast cereal.
I will never forget the looks on upper management's faces when it became apparent that she had completely misunderstood the assignment, had spent an entire week on the project, and had rather than do something that is known and had been taught, fabricated a word and designed a ridiculously simple machine.
Scuttle_craft
25. Family Over Everything
This was years ago, before mobile phones. I worked for a large corporation....over 100k employees. The employees were provided with calling cards to use when they were traveling.
All the cards had an individual passcode that you needed to use with the card. One of the guys I worked with....a manager making close to $100k/year....had access to the list of or over 50,000 card numbers and passcodes.
He also had an extended family all over the U.S., Canada, and several islands in the Caribbean. He shared the specific card information with his extended family and they used the company calling cards like personal calling cards for about 2 years before anyone caught on.
It was really messy and the FBI was involved (not sure why). So this guy threw away a $100k job to save a few hundred bucks on long-distance calls.
mission_transition
26. Office Party-ish
A girl who worked for me for 4 years used her key to have an all-out drunken party at our business after hours with a bunch of boys. She got violently ill only two hours into the party, and one of the boys called his mom to come help.
So when she got there, she called me (she knows me personally) and told me to come down and see. This girl's passed out on the floor, and there's a huge mess to clean up.
All the boys took off. After spending three hours cleaning up their bottles, props for their drinking games, and scraping Jell-O shooter puke off the walls, I booted her awake and took her home.
She was actually surprised that she was fired. She thought it would be okay to have a party so long as she cleaned up afterward.
Scrabbleloser
27. Weirdo Librarian
Not me, personally, but when I was working at my public library, one of the librarians there had rearranged the books near the young adult's area so that there would be a small hole where he could peek out, but it was dark enough that nobody could see there.
He put bookshelves on all sides, so it was essentially a cave where he could see out, but nobody could see in. A mother came by to complain of a funky smell coming from that area.
When I informed my manager and we went to investigate, it turned out he had been watching girls (who would sit there reading) from his hiding spot.
I even found two toilet paper rolls there and a dirty rag (I'm not even going to guess what it was used for). He was fired and reported to police. Still have no idea how he was allowed to work there in the first place.
ohanian
28. Official Creeps
I work at a small college and my department handles the campus tours for prospective students. We also make the student IDs in our office as well.
We have a software program that can pull the information on a student so that we can their student ID number, name, and class schedule. Also, it has a lot of personal information like address, email address, and phone number.
We employ a few students throughout the year to help run the office, give tours, and make IDs. I had one male student give a new female student a tour of campus and he was obviously attracted to her so our secretary in our office thought it would be brilliant if he looked up her personal info and called her and offered a "private" tour of our campus…
Needless to say, I got a phone call about how creepy our staff was and how we shouldn't be giving out personal information about our students. I played as much damage control as I could but it ended up with us finding new a part-time student worker and a full-time secretary at the beginning of the fall semester.
I couldn't believe how stupid they both were. So I now include, you shouldn't be a creeper with our software, in my orientation to all my workers…
Sevenlego
29. From Airtime To JAilTime
Worked for a national video rental chain. We sold Tracfone airtime cards that were already active, so they were kept as part of the cash drawer.
A customer purchased one of the cards, and when they went to activate the time on their phone, it said the card was already used. Corporate sends an investigator to the store, and they call the number that the card had been activated on.
My co-worker's phone starts ringing, and then she gets all red-faced, sits down, and starts crying. Police are called because more than $1500.00 worth of Tracphone minutes had been stolen.
All I could think of was why the heck would you bring the phone you used to work with you. Sounds pretty dumb to me.
skiboy352001
30. Disappointed In Him
A few years ago I had a guy who opened my shop on a Sunday without my knowledge. It's a printing business so we would normally be closed on Sundays.
We do a lot of student printing and my staff member was also a student- he had actually gone to the trouble of advertising the fact that we would be open on that day, so I drove past and the shop was filled with customers.
Not a penny had gone through the till so it was pretty obvious what was going on. He was irate when I sacked him and threatened to sue me for unfair dismissal. It's upsetting because I don't know how many times he did this.
Billorama
31. How to Ruin Your Life 101
I didn't fire this person, in fact, they were my manager, but this story is fantastic. He was a store manager for a very large retailer who bled the company.
He had been there for his entire career, working his way up from the floor to management, 20+ years to get there. He had won all sorts of awards and ran one of the most successful stores in the country.
One day, he goes to an awards ceremony at corporate and steals a toy car off the table at the entrance. He thought they were giveaways, but they were actually supposed to be auctioned off for charity.
Poor bastard didn't even make it back to the store before he was fired. To put this clearly; a guy making around $80k+/year got fired for stealing a toy car worth no more than $50.
rnienke
32. Ms. Stuborn
My manager had to fire someone because they refused to tuck their shirt in. I work at a restaurant, and part of the uniform is having your shirt tucked in. Obviously, since they have a very detailed dress code, nobody is in the "correct" uniform 100% of the time.
It's no big deal if you show up with your bangs extending below your hat, the wrong shade of khaki pants, or socks that go below your ankle. Nobody really cares.
However, on audit days, it's understandable that the manager has a decently strict expectation regarding the dress code. This girl just didn't have her shirt tucked in on an audit day, no biggie. She was just told to tuck it in.
Ten minutes later, her shirt was untucked. She actually went out of her way to untuck it. The manager didn't want to lose points, so the girl was kindly told "Please, keep your shirt tucked in. Even if it's uncomfortable, just wait an hour until she's gone. I really would hate to fire you because of that".
Well, Ms. Stubborn decided she didn't like that. I don't know if it was because she wanted to "defy authority", didn't care about the audit, or just really didn't want her shirt tucked in.
So after a few minutes passed, she was caught with her shirt untucked. The manager told her "Seriously, tuck in your shirt or I will have to fire you". She was fired within 30 seconds after that.
My manager still lost points, even though it wasn't the manager's fault. That girl caused the store to not get the highest score in our region and lost her job because she refused to just tuck her shirt in.
Jdibs77
33. I Believe I Can Fly
I used to be a General Foreman at a meat packing plant. Lots of conveyors and trolley lines literally all over a floor, a couple of football fields big. Well, I worked nights and I got a call one morning right before Christmas.
The trolley line for the big boxes burned out its clutch and was dead to the world when the dayshift started up. It was working just fine when we finished our shift and honestly, I had never ever experienced any problems with it.
Well, the dayshift was screwed because of it. 2000 head of cattle and no efficient way to get the big boxes from the box-making room to the packaging department. Huge crap show.
They chartered a jet to Hotshot in the replacement from Nebraska I believe. Just a disaster. Literally, a couple million in costs. So after my next shift was done, everything eventually got fixed and by the time we left that day, things were back to normal.
Well, I normally had a chat with the graveyard cleaning crew foreman over a smoke and was venting about this crap show of a day and he mentions he saw one of the night shift cleaners literally hanging from this trolley line using it like a "flying fox" zip line but super slow lol.
I knew who he was talking about. Nice guy actually, not all that there upstairs but nice. I find him and sit him down with a union rep and then, ask him if he knew anything or saw anything happen with the big box line last night.
He says nope he didn't see anything unusual but he did use it to carry himself to the door and stretch out his back. See, he was dog-tired and he needed the break. I had to fire the poor bastard right at Christmas because he was too stupid to just walk to the doors.
PsycGirl
34. Party Time On Work Hours
Managing a restaurant and it was a slow night. The waiter thought he would be cut early so he dropped some acid. The restaurant filled up and he continued to "work" his shift, ordering huge quantities of random food and letting it all pile up in his section.
I was the junior manager that night and my boss did not notice the crapstorm going on and conveniently left me to deal with it. When I asked the waiter what the heck was happening, he just looked at me with pie-plate pupils and said everyone had eaten and they were all about to leave.
I informed him NO ONE had eaten a THING, and dragged him into the waiter station where there were about 60 plates, all covered up with cloches and stacked all over the place. I grabbed his folder to try and figure out which table needed what food, and his tablet was filled with doodles.
I had to retake the entire room's order, a few of the items previously ordered were now 86'd and comped the whole room's dinner to boot. Cost about $1,000.
The best part was, the next day, he actually showed up to work. The restaurant had a long hallway, and I was standing at one end, and he entered the door at the other.
He stepped in, holding his uniform, and our eyes met. He immediately turned back around, and walked out, never to be seen again. He knew better than to try me.
lapsedatheiest
35. Circus Restaurant
I was a head server at my last job. Where it wasn't my place to fire him I was told to deliver the news anyway. That whole restaurant was messed up.
Anyway one of my servers decided to open a to-go order, in front of customers. As he was packing it up, he started reaching in with his fingers to pull out a potato slice and shove it into his mouth while moaning.
Needless to say, 10 minutes later I received a phone call from the owner's wife telling me that I would have to work the rest of the night and close by myself (4 hours still remained) and that I was to tell the server to leave.
Thankfully the hostess that night was also a server and offered to help finish the night out with me. Much later that night I received a text from the now-former employee apologizing for his behavior and stating that he was not in the right mind at the time of the event.
He has a known felony related to hard substances and I can only assume that he was under the influence as he had relapsed a few months prior.
ZooQueen
36. Do My Work
Just happened today, about to fire this person. Discovered a staff member had redesigned a rather complicated reporting process (essentially that person's entire job), to effectively make the customer do the work for them.
The rationale was so ingenious it was made it through middle management approvals, based on the false premise of risk management and financial risk to the business.
But since the process went into action 4 months ago, the business has lost customers (who didn't complain and just walked) and revenue to the tune of $100k.
The only reason the plan failed was that one customer became confused with how to do the work and was reported to have cried over the phone to a sales rep who reported the incident up the chain of command.
ButDoesItReally
37. Drunk Rage
We had one guy who was always drinking alcohol while at work. He would come in with 500ml Coke bottles that were half Coke and half vodka.
We processed compensation claims and had certain policies for dates when an exact date wasn't known (splitting the year dead in half), but he would just enter random dates, like his ex-wife's birthday or their wedding anniversary.
When we told him he had to drop back to the training group again for a refresher (this was before we knew for certain about the booze), he started throwing chairs around and flipping tables in a crazy rage.
One PC monitor went out an open window, luckily missing people walking on the street below. He got fired on the spot, yet he came back every day for the following week to sit down and work like nothing had happened.
Every time he was escorted out by security and by the end of the week the police were waiting for him when he turned up. It was wild.
Rhinne
38. Festival Mood
We had a new hire a few years back. The first few weeks went great, then one day she called in sick. The next day she's back but doesn't look well. Tired, red-faced, etc.
Works for the day, then the next day she isn't there. Comes the day after that and explains that this time she was robbed, had no way of contacting us, etc. She was fired that day.
Oh, not for being sick or losing her phone. But for the festival armband that had miraculously appeared on her arm after her first sick day, and from one of our coworkers seeing her at the festival (the other coworker was perfectly able to perform his job in the day, and then went to party every evening for the festival).
The armband is required to get back into the festival, so she obviously wouldn't take it off. She didn't think to at least wear a long-sleeved shirt.
Qieth
39. “Flight 68 Boarding”
I used to work with someone who got fired for calling in sick, from the airport. My boss could hear boarding calls in the background, and to be honest he wasn't really fired he was just told if you don't have a note from a doctor don't bother coming back.
He rang up to complain a few weeks later when he didn't get a full month's pay. I also worked with a guy who was fired for never filling in his time sheet, he was a real nut about online security and used to rant about Facebook, etc. he hated the idea that someone out there could see what he was doing, hence why he never filled in his time sheet for 6 months.
HR set a few meetings with him, he ran out of the building and didn't come for hours. So HR told his manager that's it. They got his manager to fire him, they didn't even show up to the meeting.
The guy had problems, I felt a bit bad for him until I was assigned to look over the code he was doing for the past 6 months. There was another reason why he hadn't filled in his time sheet he hadn't actually done any work.
Last one: The guy was asked not to come into work anymore after the police showed up to arrest him, never found out why he was arrested, his manager did but she never told anyone as she said it was not our business.
RobotIcHead
40. Sociopath
There was a strange guy I worked with when I worked in retail. He was 19 but had a 2-year-old kid and a girlfriend he lived with. He was also a bit weird and smelt terrible, no one liked him that much but everyone would keep the peace and talk to him.
One day, the kid passed. Everyone felt really bad for him especially seeing as not a lot of people were very nice to him. He naturally took a bunch of compassionate leave time for it.
Halfway through the compassionate leave, his girlfriend and kid came into the store looking for him. It really freaked me out because I've never met a proper sociopath before, I wonder to this day if anything he ever told me was true.
sheslikebutter
41. Master Of Disguise
I worked in a bar/disco at some point and did pretty much everything. One particularly annoying dude I barely knew from high school somehow brainwashed me into getting him to work there, even though I knew he was as dumb as they came.
I thought, he's only picking up stuff from tables, so no harm there, right? Two weeks later, I was getting complaints from people who thought he was my boss (and everyone else's boss), as he kept telling people he was the owner in disguise.
He even tried to give an interview to a TV reporter on a particular day we had like a Big Brother show going on there. A security dude we had, found out on the same day when a girl he was after told him some guy was walking around and saying he owned the place, and even invited her to leave with him.
The security went up to him, provoked him into a fight, beat the crap out of him, and humiliated him in front of everyone. He never came back, nor have I heard of him since, and it was like 10 years ago.
impatientbastard
42. The Smoker And The Crapper
Two firings popped into my head. One was the lady who took a smoke break. That's right. It was advertised as a non-smoking position.
She said she didn't smoke when interviewed even though she reeked of smoke. Claimed it was from riding the bus. But in her second week, as things got a bit more intense, she couldn't handle it and went outside to smoke.
Sorry. Fired. Turns out she didn't have the qualifications to do that job anyways clued on her resume about more than just smoking.
Second was the guy who would go to the bathroom a couple of times a day for long periods of time. It eventually escalated into 3-4 trips for 30-45 minutes at a go.
He was losing 2 hours a day of work doing whatever he was doing in there. After repeated warnings, he got fired for taking long dumps, basically.
Actionjack7
43. It’s Not Allowed!
Had to fire many people as an assistant manager and general manager for Domino's Pizza back in the day. One of the most memorable happened during lunch shift in Ft. Washington, MD, I kid you not when an extremely irate G. Gordon Liddy came into the store yelling about a driver who he saw drinking a beer while driving.
The driver had apparently thrown the bottle out the window of his car when finished, and G. Gordon fished the bottle out of the weeds and brought it into the store.
He was on a rampage and asked if I knew who he was. I did. He demanded I fire the driver immediately, and I said I was not promising anything until I talked to him when he got back from his delivery and got his side of the story.
When he came back I got really close to him and sure enough, could smell beer on his breath. When I fired him, he sounded surprised and said he didn't know that wasn't allowed…
UrsaPeter
44. Chief Complainer
Not a boss, but my friend got fired for what I believe to be dumb. He wanted to spend a weekend camping with his girlfriend on Memorial Day weekend, which was a busy weekend at his store.
He requested the weekend about 4-5 days in advance. Due to such short notice and it being a holiday weekend with other people asking off, he didn't get off. He went to talk to his manager and told him he couldn't work, he wasn't gonna come in, etc.
The boss specifically told him, if he didn't show up, he would be fired. What did he do? He didn't show up. Yet who's the villain of the story? His boss. He moans about it constantly.
Whenever it comes up in conversation he tries to make it sound like the boss was in the wrong and made a bad move. This kid's dad even showed up at the store and whined to the manager about how his son shouldn't have lost his job, blah blah blah.
amberbmx
45. Took Me To The Cleaner’s
I fired a cleaning lady for stealing my eight-year-old daughter's savings. She'd saved $160 and was going to buy herself an iPod. One day after the cleaning lady had been, the money disappeared.
My kid was pretty careless back then, and I admit that I assumed she'd just misplaced it. Plus, I didn't want to accuse the cleaner without proof. So, the following week I left a $5 bill under a chair and found the cleaner sticking it in her pocket.
I confronted her, and she claimed she thought the five bucks was hers - "I thought I'd dropped it." Riiiiight. I then accused her of stealing my little girl's savings. She denied it, then she offered to pay back half of it. Wtf?
Make up your mind, lady. Either you're guilty or you're not. I fired her, not without regret (she was a really good cleaner). But you do NOT rob my kid.
Shalamarr