Early in my career, a co-worker was fired for (among other things), frequently sleeping at his desk when he was supposed to be working. The entire company was half a dozen people in a single room. I have no idea what he was thinking.
Well, in his dreams it did work out…
I was working in the IT admin office for a time while doing software development, and got to witness this guy who came in to have his laptop fixed/swapped; and he said “You guys don’t like, check the laptops for files and stuff, right?”.
And the IT guy was legendary, didn’t skip a beat, was like “Nah, nah, we don’t have time for that crap.”.
As soon as the guy was out of the room, we checked his laptop’s files.
Porn. So much porn. Like, gigs of it, and this was in the early 2000’s when that meant a lot.
We went to HR, and they called him up and reviewed, and SOMEHOW, he dodged the bullet and they retained him. The reason? It was his porn. You read that right. He had gigs of porn of him banging his stripper GF on his laptop, and because it wasn’t “downloaded” porn, he got off.
Then a month later he was let go when he was found taking pictures with his cell phone over the cubicle wall of a female employee without her knowledge.
But I’ll never forget the mental gymnastics that happened to convince HR that porn only meant pictures of “other people” being naked, not himself and his GF.
I have a similar story. One of the security guards was found to have a hard drive full of BDSM porn. When interrogated about it, she said “It’s not pornography. Those are my holiday photos.” And sure enough, she was the one holding the whip.
The compromise reached was that she wouldn’t put her holiday photos on her office computer any more.
in the early 2000s*
this mother fucker got fired on his day off! something about stealing boxes or some shit.
Someone got hired as an IT Support Desk Technician. On his 5th day, he told the CEO that this job was temporary and he had no intentions of staying as he wanted to work in IT in a school.
5 minutes later he was fired.
That’s not a silly thing though. Pretty much all jobs are temporary.
I’m at an MSP that services quite a few school districts. We lose techs to them somewhat regularly.
That is stupid from both of them.
Dont tell your boss you dont expect to be there long.
Dont expect your workers to want to be there long unless you offer good options to advance and educate themselves. Especially for a help desk job… that’s very often an entry job to get a foot into the IT door.
There was an ice cream party for the company. Those who attended were laid off.
Why??? I’m very confused!!
What the hell? And how didn’t it ended in a massive lawsuit?
Assuming not-Montana US, you can be fired for any reason other than membership in a protected class (race, religion, etc). Attending an ice cream social, even a company one, is not a protected class.
I’ve heard of similar things. Boss wants to see who is the least busy, so they do something like open an employee gym. Then anyone who uses it is fired, because “if you have time to use the gym, you’re not working hard enough.”
Exactly. There was also a puzzle table once. The higher boss said he loved to see people building teamwork and closer relationships and liked the puzzle. I luckily knew the whole time that even though he said this he fucking hated the puzzle. I winced everytime he’d catch someone working on it. Some people are just oblivious AF. “He said he likes the puzzle!” Yeah he said that, but he absolutely does not and you’re probably on the shit list now
I feel like I need more context. What???
It was a frozen yogurt company. The ice cream was a ruse to smoke out those not committed to the cause.
So it doesn’t exactly fit but the first job I got after my training was, as I found out later, just a stand-in for someone else who had more experience but couldn’t join until about a month or two later. So I was supposed to be fired during probation once he joined. My coworker, who was already unhappy with his job, found out about it and quit right before the arrival of the other guy to make room for me (my hero!). So I took his place and my boss was stuck with me being there. A few months later my coworker and me (and a few others) quit at around the same time because it became unbearable to work at this place.
Watched a guy with an iPad stuffed down the front of his pants walk out through a metal detector. The outline and part of the box were very visible.
We were a small team canvassing for a nonprofit. So we would go out to markets and busy areas and talk to people all day trying to get donations.
Well one time we were out during election times and this guy from our team spent the majority of the day campaigning for a local candidate. That was his last day on the team.
I fired someone for ignoring their work, falsifying the records, and instead driving around all day in the company van playing Pokémon Go. Yes, the van has GPS. Yes, they were aware of this fact.
I should add, they had worked there for nearly 30 years, and transferred to my team. The individual had probably been shirking their duty in this way for their entire career, but the Pokémon Go thing was going on for several years at least. Their previous manager didn’t look into why someone with barely any customers was always so busy.
This reminds me. My work relies on items coming from a courier service. Most of our couriers are pretty timely, coming when they are supposed to and only being late on occasion. One of our couriers just decides to occasionally randomly come 1-1.5 hours late (or longer…occasionally he has come 2 hours late which is insane…you could probably walk to the facility and back in that timeframe)…despite the place he’s supposed to be coming from being the closest of all the other couriers. Based on the time he is supposed to arrive to pick up his items at that facility, there should be plenty of time for him to get here. Hell, I could probably ride a bike back and forth to that facility and still make it with ample time.
Somehow, he is often the same level of lateness arriving from a facility 15 miles away than he was when he used to courerir things to us from a facility 90 miles away. The other couriers don’t do this.
He gets repeated complaints but nothing ever happens and he continues to stay employed. They switched his route to be the closest facility to try and help combat his lateness. I always wonder what in the fuck he is doing when he is crazy late like that. My guess is that he is always sitting down for a bite to eat somewhere when he is supposed to be working, but who knows what the fuck he’s doing. Pokemon Go is a funny possibility. One time he admitted to someone that he gets more money the later he arrives. So I’m thinking whenever he wants an extra buck then he arrives at some crazy time like an asshole.
Not quite fired but close enough. I know a guy who had gotten his 100% disability from the military during his first enlistment (basically only worked for about 2 years and then medical said he was borked so he was going to collect a paycheck for the rest of his life)
Then he popped positive for smoking weed on a random drug test and lost it all. Now he’s being discharged on an ‘other than honorable’ which means he loses all his benefits.
I have a co-worker (in an open, shared office) who
- doesn’t react to tickets, Teams messages or emails
- refuses to answer the phone even when the call is specifically for him
- has only one specific task assigned to him, which he regularly fucks up but doesn’t care
- sleeps under his desk for an hour every day during work time
- watches porn on his work computer
- walks over to co-workers, farts, then walks back to his chair
- plays music with offensive lyrics loudly, while others are on phone calls with customers
- shouts racist jokes involving the N-word through the office
He’s been with the company for 20 years.
walks over to co-workers, farts, then walks back to his chair
Lmao
George Costanza meets Peter Griffin.
The trick is within the company for 20 years. If you’re the guardian of some ancient forgotten but critical knowledge, you become impossible to fire
He’s the guardian of some secrets about a very high profile company, involving some of the higher-ups.
And also has an officially recognized disability, in a unionized company. It is big enough for them to hide him away from public view, rather than risk him airing their dirty laundry in the court case that will come if they fire him.The best move for management in this situation is to “promote” him, into a new role that segregates him from the rest of the team. No office space work in the basement thing, but something that makes him distinctly a different role/title, and physically gives him a small office down the hall.
It doesn’t sound like much, but any physical distance will be nice for you and others like you. It also removes depression when you know he’s the same role but not held to the same standards. Eventually all that crap takes its toll, and good people quit…or worse, they stop caring and don’t quit.
The saying one bad apple can ruin the bunch is very true in work situations.
This guy sounds like a straight shooter with upper management written all over him. Legend.
Some office administrative was going to be fired, but due to timezone confusion all her accounts were terminated before HR got to the office.
For half of the morning somebody had to pretend to be checking with IT why her computer didn’t work.
Wow, that’s uncomfortable.
I worked with a guy who’s wife had just had a baby and the baby was sick. The guy was very good at his job but was working from home without really asking permission. We have some leeway in this matter but technically he didn’t clear it. His supervisor really had it in for him and was trying very hard to get him fired for falsifying his time card. I don’t know why he didn’t like him, but the supervisor was a real ass. It may have been racist motivation, but I’m not sure.
I should point out that I had asked this guy to do some work for me that I didn’t have the capability to do and this guy approached it in such a unique way that the customer and some universities were really interested in his work. This is a defense contractor environment where every working hour has to be accounted for. Whenever I asked the guy a question whether via email or telephone, he always responded immediately. It was all computer code so I didn’t see a problem with this.
When he came into work and told me what was going on I immediately contact the manager on his behalf.
Well bottom line is that management pretty much dropped the subject and the supervisor was walked out of the facility. Turns out he had been falsifying his own time card the whole time. How’s that for hypocrisy?
Justice served.
A salesman for the company forged sales orders. As soon as the company started billing the supposed customers he was discovered and asked to leave immediately. No severance (which you by law are entitled to), just leave, and we won’t file charges. I have no idea what possessed him to do something so stupid…
No severance (which you by law are entitled to)
Not when you’re terminated with cause.
Committing crimes on the clock is more than enough reason to fire someone. Dudes incredibly lucky he was asked to resign instead of being fired and charged.
I worked in a call center for an internal support team. We had a group that started early in the morning since our headquarters was on the West Coast and calls would come in really early from the East Coast offices. Every Friday we would organize a group order for breakfast from a local diner and I usually was the one who would go and pick it up (long before DoorDash). One particular morning the order was missing a side of bacon for one of the team members. This person got so angry that they didn’t have their bacon, they decided it would be a good idea to call the diner from the middle of our office while most agents were on the phone with end uses. They proceeded to yell at and lecture the poor diner worker who answered the phone saying things like “You forgot my damn bacon, I think you did it on purpose” and “What are you gonna do to fix this?” The call lasted a couple minutes as most of us were looking at one another in shock. Unsurprisingly, they did not return on Monday and we all couldn’t believe someone was fired for missing bacon.
