Breaking up is hard to do…but for some scorned employees, getting fired is way too easy. These Redditors came together to share tales of watching a co-worker get the boot in record time—like, blink and you’ll miss them.
1. Everyone Has A Limit
6 hours. Call center job. She showed up to orientation on day 1 about an hour late. Hey, stuff happens. Then we go on a 15-minute break. She goes out to take a phone call and comes back in after about 45 minutes. We go to lunch, it's 30 minutes.
She comes back over an hour later. We go on an afternoon break, when the 15-minute break is up, one of the trainers gets up and steps out into the hall, and closes the door behind him.
We hear her arrive and argue with him about 20 minutes after that. He comes back in and gets the stuff she left at her desk, and we never see her again.
2. Excuses, Excuses
On the first day, her grandmother passed on. Understandable. On the second day, her car broke down. Bad luck. On the third day, she had no electricity and couldn’t blow dry her hair. She was told not to bother coming in at all.
3. Put That On The Special Skills Section Of Her Resume
I worked for start-ups for the past couple of years before I recently took a new gig. Once, we had to hire about 100 people in the span of two weeks which I told my boss was a bad idea, but the CEO insisted.
We hired a young lady. She had a spotty resume but was very cheerful and friendly in the interview and my boss's instructions were if they are nice and friendly "pass them on to me".
We oversaw the customer service relations for this company.
On her first day, she came in 15 minutes late, then got into an argument with a customer on her first training call—but she didn’t stop there.
She then took the mic and farted into it as loud as I'd ever heard a human being toot.
We paid her for the full day.
Best hire ever.
4. First And Last Warning
A guy at my work was caught playing World of Warcraft for hours each day. The boss called him in and told him that was wholly unacceptable, and he had to stop immediately or he'd be canned.
Less than an hour later, IT calls the same boss and says the guy is back in his office playing again. He was let go that day.
5. (Former) Employee Discount
In high school, I worked at a clothing store as a cashier. The guy working next to me has his sister come through with a huge pile of merchandise.
He scans one item that was on clearance for like $2 over and over again for everything she had, which was likely hundreds of dollars. But there was one thing he didn’t realize.
The manager was standing right behind him. “Go clock out and give me your name tag, you’re gone". He didn’t argue or anything, just put his head down and walked off.
The manager jumps on the register to clear the transaction out and the sister takes out her card, “This is going to be a credit".
The manager says, “Not for $2 it’s not, get out of here". The sister actually tried to complete the purchase like nothing had happened.
6. Irreplaceable
I used to work night audit/front desk at a motel adjacent to major highways. It was a super chill job, I loved my boss, and it was cool by me.
But God, trying to hire and train someone to take over my hours—once for maternity leave, and then when I was moving away—was a nightmare.
One lady claimed to be computer literate and then tried to use the mouse to physically touch the correct spot on the monitor when I asked her to click on a field.
Another got extremely confused when I mentioned that sleeping with a guest was completely out of bounds. A guy got thrown behind bars—and fired of course—for selling illicit substances to someone out the night window. It was just an absolute mess.
Before I moved, I gave my boss a 2-month notice, because I knew hiring and training was going to be a nightmare.
About a week before my final shift, we finally got someone in place. She was more than a bit strange and could certainly have used a spot of mental health care, but hey, I can't throw stones. She showed up, grasped the basics of the job, etc.
About a week after I left, I learned that she had quit because she didn't realize that the position of “night audit” was purely overnight job.
7. He Took “30 Minutes Or It’s Free” Way Too Seriously
Day 1, delivering pizzas. I was the trainer. This dude wasn't familiar with the town at all, and this was before GPS was a thing.
Second delivery, he gets in the car and proceeds to floor it in the parking lot, showing off all 80 horsepower for the 30 feet before slamming on the brakes to turn onto the main street, nearly hitting a customer and her young child.
I say whoa, slow down in the parking lot, you almost hit that kid".
Who cares” was his response.
That was his last delivery, he lasted all of about 90 minutes.
8. Head In The Clouds
Worked in a sales call center about 10 years ago, real braindead work. The new guy starts on a Monday morning, after he gets trained up on the basics (which takes about an hour), he gets assigned a desk and sets off to work.
30 minutes later, it looks like little puffs of steam are rising from his computer monitor. Turns out he was vaping on one of those disposable e-cigs, the kind that sort of tried to look like real ones.
He gets told by the boss that we can't vape indoors, and if he wants to, he'll have to go outside to do it on a break.
About 30 minutes later again, the same thing happens. He gets caught again and is told in no uncertain terms that if he wants to keep his job, he'll stop vaping at his desk.
An hour later, he gets caught hiding under his desk vaping and is promptly fired, all before lunchtime. The dude could have just gone outside.
Krakenimages.com, Shutterstock
9. Caught In The Act
When I was in college working at Walmart (cashier), I trained a girl on the register one evening. Maybe a week later, she comes through my lane buying groceries.
I ask her how she's been since I haven't seen her since the day after I trained her, and she tells me, unprompted, she's waiting on her court date. When she explained further, my jaw dropped to the floor.
One of her friends went through her checkout lane, but she only actually scanned about a third of the items. About $1,500 of merchandise went out the door free of charge.
My response out loud was, "Oh". My response in my head was, "Did you seriously not see the camera mounted above every single register”???
10. Facing Your Fears
I was working as a stable boy, and I was showing the new girl around the stables. As I introduced her to the horses, she was very apprehensive to come near them, refusing to even step into the stall. She signed on to help care for the horses.
Later that day, she admitted that the horses terrified her, so the boss let her go.
11. Fired Before He Even Got In The Door
Our boss hired a new person as a contractor, and he was available to work immediately, so he was scheduled to start work the day after his interview. The next morning my boss turns up, very annoyed, and shows me his phone. I looked at it—and burst out laughing.
The new hire had sent several rambling and confused texts that could be summarised as "had a few drinks last night, won't be able to come into work today, you know how it is".
My boss told him the contract was canceled.
12. In Your Dreams
A co-worker sent an email to a female team member that he had a dream the night before that they had gotten married and he "impregnated her".
She sat across from me and I saw her face as she read the email. A strange look came across her face, then she walked into the manager’s office.
She left the office, and he got called in and less than a minute later was packing his things.
I believe from start to finish it took less than 5 minutes for him to send the email and get fired.
13. The Early Bird Gets The Worm
I worked the second shift at a factory. Late in the evening, we would prop open the doors along the side street to try to catch a breeze in the summertime. One night, this guy stumbles in through the side door and just starts striking up conversations with everyone like he owns the place.
I run over and try to tell him that he can’t be in there—but I was in for a surprise. He starts telling me he’s supposed to start work that night. We kind of argue for about 5 or 10 minutes about the fact that I didn’t have anyone new starting that night, and I finally tell him that he needs to contact someone in the office the next morning.
When I came into work the next day, the first shift supervisor told me that he was supposed to have a new guy start that day, but he never showed up. I told him that the guy had shown up…12 hours early and quite intoxicated.
In a way, he was fired before his first day on the job.
14. Bait & Switch
I work in software engineering and a couple of times I've seen people let go after like two weeks because they just couldn't do the job at all.
Not me personally, but a former co-worker told me about an incident at a prior job where the person who showed up to work was not the same person they interviewed. They were immediately let go.
Krakenimages.com, Shutterstock
15. He Was Semi-Knowledgable
New guy offered to pull a semi-trailer to a dock for unloading. Said he did it in the Army all the time. I told him, nah, you got to get tested out by the safety guy first, someone else will handle it. Five minutes later, I see him pulling the trailer around anyway. OK, I got to go tell this dude he's fired 2 hours in.
Before I could advise him of his updated employment status, the darn trailer came loose from the tractor. Slid right off the back. He did know how to drive a semi. He did not know how to check the trailer was locked in.
aleksandarlittlewolf , Freepik
16. You Had One Job
When I was 14, I worked a summer job for cash, delivering furniture. Barely a week into the job another new guy started. During our first delivery, he dropped a couch and broke a leg on it, so we had to go back to the warehouse and get a different couch and have him explain what happened.
The owner was angry but because the guy was so new, he told him "Just don't damage anything else". He had no idea what he was in for.
Our next delivery after the couch was a huge dresser. As we moved it off of the truck, he once again dropped his end, and the force from how heavy it was caused it to break into multiple pieces upon hitting the concrete.
We didn't have any other dressers like that in stock so the customer would have to wait who knows how long for one to show up.
When we got back to the warehouse he was fired on the spot. I still remember my boss saying, "You hire someone to deliver furniture, and then all they do is break the furniture". Yep.
17. Hot Fries, Hotter Temper
He attempted to attack a customer who had a very mild complaint about their order during the second hour of their first day working the front. They seemed fine with doing computer training, so I was shocked.
I was training them at the register, and an old man kindly let us know that he asked for fries with no salt—we were right across from a dialysis center—but he were salty.
The trainee accused the old man of trying to just get hot fries—a cook was telling him that’s the only reason people order unsalted fries—snatched his bag out of his hand and tried to throw it at his face.
I managed to catch his arm before he could and ripped the bag away from him.
The first time I’ve ever had to pull someone by their ear to an office, but it was literally like dealing with one of those 80s middle school movie villains, except he was 18.
18. Mutiny Material
We hired a woman who turned out to be pretty abrasive. How she got hired, I have no idea. Our secretary was the sweetest lady in the office and never complained until this new hire talked with her for a few minutes.
Right after talking to this horrible person, she approached the boss and said she would walk off the job if this new worker stayed with us. By lunch, half the office was ready to walk off the job because of this abrasive person.
She just had an utterly horrible way of talking to people that made them feel degraded and enraged. She was let go at the end of the day.
19. Moving On Down
This new guy was a senior research scientist, and that position was filled after having difficulty finding the right guy. Usually, our company offers 5K for moving expenses. Him, since he was moving from North Carolina, he was offered 10K.
When he started his first week, he gave a 10K receipt from a moving company—but something was weird about it. Our financial and accounting team looked at this single 10K receipt and called the moving company asking them why they charged 10K to move a couple of couches and a TV.
They got flustered and said, “Look we don’t want any trouble. This guy offered us $1,000 to give him a made-up receipt of 10K, so we did". He was fired immediately.
The VP was like let’s put this as an infraction and not fire him since it took so much time to fill this position. The CEO put his foot down saying this doesn’t look like he was doing this for the first time and more importantly, what if he starts manipulating research data?
This idiot’s salary was $120K. And he lost this gig for 10K.
20. Doing Double Duty
This dude showed up for his first night shift, clocked in, walked out, and allegedly drove an hour across the border to a different state and clocked in for another job there. It took Walmart management a month to realize they were missing someone every night he was on the schedule.
If anything, the dude said was true, I felt for him. Supposedly his mom was terminally ill, and he was doing this to try to make more money for her medical bills.
21. What, I Worry?
He hopped on the forklift with no one else around. "Been doing this for years," he'd told us.
The lift started leaking hydraulic fluid. The dude just goes about his business unloading a truck, handling orders, and so on. Told no one. He sprayed that oily mess all over the entire warehouse until there was none left, then went to lunch. There was a lake of it.
We had to shut down the warehouse for a week to clean it up. Tens if not hundreds of thousands in damaged products and late/canceled orders. We asked him if he knew it was leaking.
"Yes". We asked him why he didn't stop or tell anyone. "I wanted to get my work done so I could go to lunch".
Even after being fired, he still didn't think he had done anything wrong.
22. The World’s Greatest Scam
Pizza delivery gig. There’s a new guy on his first shift. He claims he's got previous experience, so doesn't need training. He clocks in and grabs a few pizza orders ready for delivery. Leaves with his car to deliver.
An hour later, the calls start coming in about the status of their order. They haven't been delivered. That’s when we realized what had happened.
The guy just grabbed himself a bunch of free pizzas and left! I secretly admired him.
23. Don’t Let The Door Hit You On The Way Out
One morning, my co-worker, "Jane", came in looking upset. Naturally, I asked her what was wrong. She complained that some weirdo on the bus rubbed on her and said all kinds of weird things to her.
She pushed him away and found a different seat on the bus. But understandably, she was still upset about what happened.
Then she froze in terror as she looked across the office. The guy had just gotten off the elevator. He rode the bus to our office too. Turns out, he had a job interview scheduled with Jane's boss.
So, Jane informed her boss what happened and said if he hired the jerk, she was quitting instantly.
The guy probably would've gotten hired too, because he knew someone higher up the food chain. But Jane's report to her boss made certain he never got the job.
24. Work For The Job You Want, Not The One You Have
At my husband’s office, they hired a girl for sales, and she immediately interjected herself into every other department, telling them how to run things, and even making marketing decisions behind my husband’s back—he’s director of marketing.
She was calling vendors about marketing and creating a secret chat room that discussed marketing…without my husband in it. She never did any sales duties. She was fired within the week she was hired.
25. He Was Going Through It
On his first day, he mostly wandered around the office in a semi-distraught state and swore under his breath when his supervisor assigned him a task.
The last straw was when he stood at the floor-to-ceiling windows staring out at the ocean and then punched the glass. He was then escorted out. This was all before 10:30 am on his first day.
26. Lucky 13
I work in diplomatic security, and we rotate out for 35 days home after 105 days in the country. While I was out, there was a guy that showed up and made a heck of a name for himself and was fired before I even got back.
I came back to everyone talking about some guy called “Ben Ghazi”. Turns out they called him that because he only lasted 13 hours.
This dude showed up to a group of 10+ year (minimum) veterans of the trade and started running his mouth and acting like a total jerk.
The final straw of the day was when he started drinking at a local establishment even though there is a strict no-drinking policy overseas on these jobs.
He then started hitting on this woman, bragging about being this big bad special operator and being very obnoxiously flirtatious with her—but there was something that he didn’t know.
Well, turns out that Ol’ Ben was hitting on the ambassador’s wife. The dude was on a plane by morning. I still don’t even know what he looked like.
27. Directed Straight To The Door
A director joined our company on Monday and promptly told everyone he would never speak directly to a woman, only have her speak through a male intermediary that he would answer. He was fired by 11 am.
28. Treasure Hunt
I worked maintenance on a golf course. The owner hired this hot girl to be the beverage cart girl.
She had no experience, but I guess it doesn't matter when you're hot. After about an hour of training, she gets sent out on the course in a cart full of booze. Later on, that day, we make a bizarre discovery.
We start finding random trash across the golf course, consisting of empty airplane bottles and both full and empty bags of chips. We follow the empty airplane bottles like Hansel and Gretel until we find the beverage cart half submerged in a pond.
By the time we figured out what had happened, she had jumped in her car and left.
29. Sleep Tight
I work in IT on a proprietary program. We got a new employee a couple of years back that lasted maybe a month. He was very old, which itself isn't a problem, but he constantly fell asleep in our lab where anyone walking by could see him.
One of our other colleagues sat with him every day to train him, but he kept doing weird things like deleting interfaces from the software we were working on.
My manager at the time had a soft spot for him because he was a nice old man, but when it became clear that he was not only doing damage through his actions but using up additional resources by requiring one of us to babysit him while he worked each day, they fired him.
30. Conflict Resolution
This guy lost his job before he even had it. An opening in an entry-level position. Nepotism was big in this company. The current worker got his friend a job...all he had to do was go through the motions of the interview and check all the boxes.
He was asked a standard interview question: "What would you do if you disagreed with a co-worker that you are unable to resolve"?
The acceptable answer is: "I would take it to my manager or HR". His answer was unforgettable.
He said: "I'd take him out back and beat the tar out of him".
31. Timing Is Everything
We hired an older guy to backfill a QA tech position. Everything was great all morning, he knew a lot of our systems from prior work, etc. and he had the right answer to every question. First break, he follows a bunch of us out to the break area.
The first thing out of his mouth was some rant about his Asian boss at his last job and didn't hold back on the colorful language.
Thankfully one of our VPs was in town, was standing two feet behind him, and happened to be Chinese.
It saved me a lot of paperwork having to walk the guy myself.
32. Red Flags Were Flying
She transferred to my pharmacy from another store and acted like she was the best thing that ever happened to that place.
Bossing everyone around, being condescending and disrespectful to everyone including those with doctorate degrees when she failed out of community college, being loud enough you could hear her outside—even with patient info which is a major HIPAA violation—making mistakes constantly, refusing to accept the correction, lying about both important things and irrelevant stuff no one asked her about. You name it, she did it.
She lasted just under three weeks before she got caught stealing controlled substances. She’d take 1-3 bottles in varying quantities of different pills home with her every couple days and act like the distributor messed up.
33. Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire
I worked as a trainer for a call center the size of a supermarket. 1,000+ employees and a new line of business opened up for me to train. This new batch of hires only needed 1 day of training because it was a cakewalk.
I was walking around supervising when a new hire came up to me saying she smelled smoke. My heart jumped but she said it smelled like cig smoke.
Now we were near the entrance doors, so I told her that it was probably smoke wafting in from outside. Thought nothing of it until another new hire said he saw this guy light up at his desk. This guy was kind of a problem in class, so I believed the new hire.
I waited for him to go to lunch. I checked his drawer. Boom, half a burnt smoke. He came back and checked his drawer. The face goes white. I had it in a baggie. I’d never had to walk someone out of the building before.
The thing is, because this was a new line of business, if he just put himself in AUX and walked 50ft outside every hour, none of us would have been the wiser.
34. Safety First
I told a new guy on his first day to put his safety glasses on. An hour later, I had to tell him again. Two hours after that they were off once more, and I walked up and said "If I have to tell you one more time to wear those glasses I’m escorting you outside and firing you.
They're not optional. Put those glasses on right now and don't let me catch you without them again or you're done here".
His reaction was chilling. The dude swung on me. Hit me in the chin. He lasted 5.5 hours. Fastest I've ever fired someone. First time got punched at work.
The dude just didn't listen when it came to safety and wanted to ignore the "under no circumstances can safety glasses come off your face while in the shop" rule.
35. Short And Sweet
I was a temp at a warehouse. A very unsafe one. They had pallets of canned fruit stacked on top of each other. He was dropping one on top of a stack and turned too early which set off a domino effect. Probably like 40 pallets ended up getting wrecked covering the whole area in fruit and syrup.
The dude just turned the forklift off and left. He wasn't exactly fired but I'm pretty sure on day 2 dumping a couple grand of products like that would have gotten him fired.
36. She Made An Example Of Herself
I worked in a telecommunications call center. Before you start on the phones you go through two weeks of training, so you know the systems, you do pretend phone calls, etc. The first day off of training new group comes onto the floor.
Everything seems to be going smoothly when one woman screams at the top of her lungs "YOU CAN'T TALK TO ME LIKE THAT" All of us slam mute as fast as we can because she hasn't finished.
She continues screaming and swearing. Her manager is standing looking dumbfounded, but thankfully our manager rushes over and ends the call to which this woman turns to our manager with daggers in her eyes "WHAT THE"... she starts.
Our manager quietly says, "Pack up, you need to leave now and quietly". As the security walks up behind her. "Don't make us call the authorities". "NO ONE TALKS TO ME LIKE THAT”!
Everyone in our office is now frantically dropping our calls through to other centers and taking ourselves out of the queue, to not get any more calls.
Some people are trying to do warm transfers by emailing the consultant who picks up but it's chaotic. She's just screaming expletives now. The authorities have been called but she's not calming down.
Everyone in the center is just waiting, watching. No one can leave either; our floor is locked down. She's now brandishing the keyboard like a sword. It's just pure insanity. A group of officers finally arrives and escort her out.
Managers go in for a brief meeting as we are told to stand by. The meeting ends and we are told we can all leave with pay. Next shift, counselors are waiting in the break room.
The next group of training now changes to 3 weeks, and they now bring in operators to pretend to be abusive callers to see how the trainees react to ensure this never happened again.
Krakenimages.com, Shutterstock
37. Going Rogue
We were on an out-of-town job and the new hire shows up at the hotel. The next morning he’s late getting to the car and smells like he bathed in booze. He gets trashed and belligerent at dinner that night. On day 3 of the same behavior, he is fired.
The boss does not fly him out immediately and instead wants to wait for the weekend to save some money and leaves the guy at the hotel. Big mistake.
The guy takes a taxi to where we are working and steals the three-month-old company car with a bunch of tools. He dumps the tools in a dumpster and then totals the car by driving over a bunch of medians in the industrial park and hitting a tree.
They put him behind bars, but the guy makes bail and disappears. He never showed up for the property damage trial date. I asked the boss if he saved any money. He wasn’t happy with the question.
Jelena Stanojkovic, Shutterstock
38. That’s A No For Me, Dawg
I had a new hire join me on a call floor. I was in a veteran call queue that dealt with special permissions and usually averaged 3 calls a day. The pay wasn't great, but you could watch whatever you wanted on the computer as long as it wasn't during a call.
A new guy was hired and promoted to join the team. He was supposed to shadow me for his first week. On day 1, I get a call 2 hours into showing him the ropes, when he takes off his headset and disappears.
I thought he had to go to the bathroom or something but eventually, I assumed he left. My boss had no clue as well. He eventually returned about 4 hours later and told me he got bored and went to go watch American Idol and other shows in the break room.
I lost it and told his trainer who was a buddy of mine what happened. My trainer was debating on firing him as he caught this same dude faking taking calls during his hiring process. The guy was gone the next day.
39. There’s No “I” In Team
We had an office manager at an engineering firm. She was nasty to all other admin workers and to our clients on the phone, she wouldn’t teach us anything and tried to keep her position by her being the only one to know how to do certain tasks.
She didn’t delegate any tasks as she didn’t want us to know how to do them so to her detriment, work piled up, and reports were at least a month overdue.
Anyway, in Melbourne, Australia every second Tuesday in November is a public holiday for a horse race the Melbourne Cup, so we had the weekend off, worked Monday & had Tuesday off.
I had expressed that I wanted the Monday off to spend with my children, but she wouldn’t let me and took the day off herself so she’s away the day before the public holiday.
My boss starts questioning why there are so many reports, why have there been so many complaints against her, etc., etc., and why wasn’t she at work ensuring the backlog was being worked on.
The other administrators dared to speak up—she was fired that day and paid out accordingly—and it was a much happier place when she left. We worked as a team from that day onwards.
40. Take One For The Team
My worst job to date. I was working as a game tech for an arcade. My job was supposed to be simple things like fixing ticket jams and token counters, but since I had a basic knowledge of computers and electronics, I was usually asked to do the more elaborate things that we normally left for my supervisor who was responsible for actual repairs.
It was our busy season and unfortunately, we were understaffed. I was asked to work a lock-in after having worked an open and close shift, but I need the money, so I agreed. Before the lock in I was charged with setting the games to free play for the people who paid to stay overnight.
By 3 am, the owner of the arcade could see that I was physically and mentally exhausted and sent me home early knowing I had the next few days off.
I reminded him about the games on free play and he assured me my supervisor would fix them in the morning. Fast forward to 2 days later, I come in for my opening shift to find 4 games still set to free play.
I ask the owner what other game techs worked while I was off (since I had trained several on how to change games to and from free play).
He informs me that only my supervisor worked while I was off. He asked why and I showed him the games still set to free play. Irate, the owner then confronted my supervisor reprimanding him for the obvious oversight.
Jump forward 5 minutes. The owner went back to his business, but my supervisor calls me to his office and tells me that since I can't be a team player he was going to fire me. He continues that I should have taken the blame since I was the one who changed them in the first place.
Fast forward a few months later I find out that the owner immediately fired my supervisor for firing me and wanted to hire me back since I could do the supervisor’s job anyway, but I had already found a better job.
41. Psych!
Where I used to work—night shift so not as many people around—a woman had several hundred dollars stolen from her purse which was in a desk drawer. There was a guy who was a suspected pill head who managers figured was the one that did it.
They questioned him and he denied it. They brought him to near where the desk was and pointed out the small, tinted bubble and told him that there was a camera in it and that this was his last chance to confess before they brought in the authorities.
He confessed.
The kicker was that the camera was a fixed camera aimed at the door to the stairwell and the desk was 180 degrees behind it so there was zero chance they had captured it.
42. The Decision To Fire Him Was Crystal Clear
I’m a teacher. My principal hired a new 8th-grade science teacher to replace a lovely older woman who had retired the year before. The new hire was a man in his late 20s or early 30s.
As a teacher, we do about two weeks of work on campus before the school year starts and the students return. On the first day, I, along with two of my coworkers, met this gentleman at around 10:00, when he chose to show up for work, roughly three hours late.
He immediately opened his bag and handed my department head a crystal to “help correct his negative energy". By noon, the new hire had handed out four or five more crystals to other teachers he felt were “impeding the school’s positive energy". At this point, people were getting offended, and my principal was getting complaints.
My principal decided to confront the new hire about his tardiness in the morning, as well as ask him to refrain from giving out any more crystals. When my principal reprimanded him for being late, the new hire informed my principal he could not arrive at school before 9:30 each day or it would “misalign his chakras".
The school day begins at 7:30. He was promptly fired when he refused to budge on this matter.
He then gave both my principal and the head of HR who arrived to walk him out crystals as well. All the crystals have now been displayed on a shelf in my principal’s office for almost two years.
43. First Impressions Are Everything
At the time, I worked in a cubicle farm call center environment. A new employee started in a neighboring department and sat across the aisle and down a cube from where I was.
She talked to anyone and everyone around her quite loudly, regardless of whether or not they were on the phone. This was all in the first few hours of her shift.
She had been instructed to quiet down and wait for the trainer to come to meet with her to get her started. About 20 minutes later the trainer comes over to her cubicle and introduces himself and pulls up a chair next to her. What she did next was so offensive, it’s unforgettable.
She looks at him and says loudly "Oh THAT'S why you're late! You're running on Black people's time!"
The whole office was silent, and you could hear phones ringing that were going unanswered, everyone was waiting to see what happened next.
The trainer quietly excused himself to the manager's office as the prejudiced new employee started asking what she did to make him walk away. No one answered her or bothered to acknowledge her in any way.
About 10 minutes later the manager called her into the office and only a few minutes after that she was escorted out by security, still acting confused about the whole thing. All this before lunch.
44. Getting Asked To Work Makes Me Uncomfortable Too
The (unfortunately) only female software engineer I've worked with spent her first day texting from clock-in to clock-out. When asked questions or assigned tasks, she would either grunt instead of a verbal response or not even acknowledge anyone was speaking to her.
After this pattern carried on for two weeks straight, on her tenth “working” day I was tasked with helping her get her workstation set up because she was "having trouble". She never touched the mouse/keyboard once that I saw, and we shared office space.
I started working on it and explaining why I was doing the things I was doing, and after a few minutes of silence from her, while she continued tapping away at her phone I said "Hey, I need you to set your phone down if we're going to go any further".
She immediately, still without responding verbally, got up and walked out of the office and never came back. CTO got hold of her eventually for an exit interview and she said she "quit"—though of course she never notified anyone of that—because she was uncomfortable working around men.
I don't think I'll ever understand that person.
45. Sit, Speak, Leave
At a dog training facility, we hired a girl for kennel-staff work.
A dog threw up and she refused to clean it. She went on break soon after it happened to avoid it. She would take her break, then when my coworkers and I would take breaks together, she would take a second break with us—but then she got even weirder.
While we ate on our break, she once went and got a spoon and took a huge piece of our food. We were all stunned. Then, she met a dog that she became obsessed over. Trying to do training sessions with her when she wasn't a trainer.
When we joked about how her owner has had the dog there for a while, she asked for the owner's contact info to see if she could take the dog.
Yea, she didn't last long.
46. The Class Clown
One of my co-workers at a call center was training a new hire class of mostly college kids and it's a super every-level job, so if you can legally work in the USA and can convert oxygen to carbon dioxide, you're hired.
But then, halfway through day 1, the new group is treating this trainer like trash, like she's a substitute and we're in middle school, etc. One guy spent most of the time distracting the girls next to him and just providing a running commentary...Let's call him Andy.
The trainer was fairly new to training, so she asks if I'll go talk to them after they get back from lunch. I go introduce myself, welcome them to the job, just very basic day 1 stuff like "Listen to the trainer so you can do your job, try and be on time, don't disrespect others in your training class, unlike school, you're getting PAID to be here".
This girl in the back looks over her shoulder at "Andy" and goes "Yeah...YOU" and Andy chose this moment to stand up and yell something VERY explicit and then start laughing. So, I fired him on the spot...obviously.
Except it wasn't obvious to Andy...He had never considered that he could get fired. He even asked, "Wait, a teacher can't fire someone can they?" I clarified that, uh…again, I'm not a teacher and you're not in school, we're trainers for a business... so yes, sure can. Grab your stuff and you'll get a call from HR tomorrow.
He'd spent all day being a jerk and had he just been a normal kind of idiot he could've worked there for a while and summer of the roles paid pretty good money but nope.
He got 4 hours of pay and I'm sure a great story about how some call center trainer treated him unfairly at some dumb job he didn't want in the first place.
47. Worth It
A buddy and I worked at a movie theater. He was working one day as a floor supervisor, which meant he was in charge of cleaning stuff up. So, this really old woman trips in the hallway and breaks her hip. It's a big ordeal and the ambulance has to come—but then it got crazier.
This woman starts claiming that she stepped on a Raisinet and that it was the theater’s fault. WHO TRIPS ON A CHOCOLATE-COVERED RAISIN?
So, the manager, who was new to the theater, gets worried and decides to suspend my buddy to hopefully make the woman feel better.
My friend was really angry about the whole situation and was already getting sick of our new boss, so he decides to take a box of Raisinets and pour them all over the floor in the manager’s office.
He then starts stomping around yelling "Do you see this?! Do you see how they smash when I step on them? It's impossible to trip on a RAISIN!"
He was fired on the spot.
48. An Elephant Never Forgets
I worked at a water agency. One fellow decided to share a humorous image with a female co-worker. Via email. Of a man with only body paint. Made to look like an elephant’s face. Long hanging trunk and all.
He was gone in hours.
The problem was that he was in several safety videos about what to do in an emergency. It became my job to “cut him out” of all media. Like he never existed. We “disappeared “him.
49. But Who’s Counting?
Within the one week, the guy was a temp, he refused to learn how to do the job, constantly got locked out of his computer, and had to be shadowed when stuffing letters, the final couple of straws were him finishing a pile of mail and just went for a nap at the desk till the manager found him.
But the final straw was hilarious. He disappeared for over an hour around 10 am (long before lunchtime) when he came back, he said he was in the toilet. The manager said, "You were in there for an hour”, to which the guy replied, "It was only like 50 minutes". He was fired by the end of lunch.
50. Shape Up Or Ship Out
This one driver and their helper would start their delivery route fine but would slowly get later and later until they would abandon their last stops and we in dispatch would have to clean up the mess with apologies and rescheduled deliveries.
No contact, no texts, no explanations. This went on for about three weeks, with no reprimand from the logistics bosses, and it drove us nuts.
One day, I got a call from a lady expecting a bedroom set at 11 AM. Predictably, these guys had abandoned the route around 2, and their bosses finally listened to us and told them if this (repeat rescheduled) delivery didn't show today, their heads would meet the bandsaw. So, they showed—but there was a twist.
This lady informed us they stomped through her little boy's birthday party in muddy boots, reeking of pot, just to dump a single mattress in her hallway and then leave.
They didn't have a route anymore after that.
Sources: Reddit,
