Everyone has a story of a terrible coworker, but it's a special blessing when you get to watch that coworker get fired—and sometimes, the reason behind their dismissal can be absolutely jaw-dropping. Grab the popcorn, 'cause these stories are juicy.
1. Goodbye To You
I was promoted to VP of a struggling company. There were tons of employee issues, so I arranged for a random drug test. All employees, including the CEO. When we got the results back, we were shocked. We had to fire everybody in the company except for myself and the CEO, because we learned that we were the only clean people on the entire team. Goodbye team.
2. Great Party, Gang
He worked at the company for two weeks, came to the Christmas party on Friday, got plastered, told the HR manager that she was an awful person, and would die alone. They had some previous vague romantic history, went on a couple of dates or something. Then he tried to fight two of the customer service managers who asked him to calm down.
While being escorted out, he turned to the CEO and COO and told them to go screw themselves. He showed up to work on the Monday talking about how fun the party was and how he had seen some people who would probably be called into HR that morning. He was the first and only employee to be called and was sacked on the spot.
3. The Customer Is Trash
I worked at a pet store and was the lead cashier so I had to train this girl who didn’t think she had to abide by the uniform because it doesn’t count as a real job. That was a warning that despite her thinking, she did need to follow the uniform rules. Then, when ringing up customers, she actually told them they couldn’t buy certain items.
She said they were running low and she planned on getting a pet soon and wanted these items. I apologized and rung them up. Second warning with me explaining how that’s not how it works and she could shop when she’s off the clock. Finally, my manager fired her when she tried to take one of the cats that were up for adoption.
She was told she needed to wait for approval after they do a home visit and make sure she can care for the cat. Her excuse for trying to take the cat? Her landlord doesn’t allow pets so she wouldn’t be approved, and she’d be a much better pet parent than anyone else who wanted the cat, and much better than any of the customers we got. The girl didn’t even last a week.
4. Stealing His Own Money
My dad and I ran a business together cleaning out foreclosed homes for a real estate agency as I was finishing high school. I was a senior, so I got out at lunchtime, and we could usually get a house done in a half-day. Sometimes we’d get some bad ones, and we had a few guys that we would call to see if they wanted to make a quick hundred bucks for a day’s work.
On my literal last day of class, my Dad picked up one of our usual guys and got one house about 90% done by lunch. He was a pretty regular guy, and we had never had any trouble with him before. Well, the guy went out to the truck for something, came back into that house, and robbed my dad of his wallet. He also took his keys and left with our vehicle.
The funny thing is, my Dad only had the cash he was about to give him an hour later for finishing up the house. The state Sheriff got the guy’s number from us, and they came up with an ingenious plan. They told him some bogus story about how my dad was being investigated for not paying his workers, and if he met them with the truck, they would get his statement and let him go. Idiot pulls up and gets detained on the spot. He got eight years in prison.
5. No Stalling
I asked an employee to check the public bathrooms to make sure they were clean and stocked. When he asked about the women's restroom, I said just to knock and make sure nobody was inside. Well, he chose to do it his own way. He banged on the door and screamed, in an intense voice, “Who is in there? Everybody get out!” He then entered the bathroom where a poor little elderly woman was inside the stall, and he continued to bang on the booth, yelling, “Get out!”
He was screaming so loud I heard him and went to investigate. The poor woman was whimpering and terrified. He just was the kind of person who had no idea how he came across. There were many weird issues, but this topped the cake, and I told him he was done and needed to go home. The poor older woman was so upset that she refused to leave the bathroom, and I had to call her son for her.
6. Artistic License
I worked in the signage industry for many years. One day, some guy walks in looking for work and claiming to be a sign writer. My boss asks him if he has brushes, and he says absolutely. So my boss says ok, we need someone to go and paint a 5-meter logo on the wall at the gym. It's basically a couple of circles with Helvetica text in between and a stylized dancing man.
Pretty basic stuff. We give him the layout and the paint and off the guy goes. Four or five hours later, we get a call from the owner of the gym. He tells my boss to come and fetch this guy before he has some kind of breakdown inside the gym. We get there, and he has literally got two tiny little artists’ brushes. A number 1 and a number 4 or something, and he is trying to freehand this freaking 5-meter circle with them.
I almost cracked a rib trying not to laugh at this guy. He was sweating bullets trying to get this done. No tape, no chalk line. Not even a normal 2-inch paintbrush. Just this little 4mm round paintbrush and he's painting this thick circle by eye. We laughed about that for days.
7. What A Weiner
I don’t own a business, but I work on employee claims and lawsuits. A guy filed a discrimination complaint against the company after getting fired for taking hot dogs from the refrigerator. This warehouse kept a stock of hot dogs for employee appreciation picnics. No one knew why they were disappearing, so announcements were made, and all employees were asked not to eat the hot dogs, and if they wanted some, they could ask but couldn’t have several packs.
That didn’t work, so warnings were announced. Finally, a camera was installed near the refrigerator, and the guy got caught red-handed. He was just practically inhaling the hot dogs directly from the fridge by the packs. After he was fired, he filed a discrimination claim based on disability due to his weight. I sent the response with a video of him eating the hot dogs.
He couldn’t prove his weight was a disability and weight is not a protected class. We won that claim.
8. Got Milk?
My coworker at a coffee shop. She told a customer she didn't feel like making x drink and that the customer should go elsewhere. She also wore Cookie Monster PJ pants every day. We had a very strict "black or khaki pants, no jeans, no leggings" policy at the time. But that wasn’t the worst part. To top it all off, she just couldn't figure out the concept of milk.
This still baffles me to this day. I was trying to show her how to steam milk properly and she was off in la-la land. When she snapped back into the conversation, she asked, "What are we doing again?" so I reminded her. She quite literally asked what was in the gallon jug that I poured into the metal pitcher. I told her it was milk and she just looked at me, her eyes saying, “???!??!!?"
She was there for two days.
9. A Light Misunderstanding
I worked in an office and they hired a girl from a temp agency to help me. She wouldn't do a darn thing unless I walked her through each step after telling her she had to do it. Hey, an estimate just arrived on the fax RIGHT NEXT TO YOU, complete the quote and send it back. Come to find out she was playing spider and solitaire on her computer.
She was also sneaking out back and the warehouse guys thought she was using an illicit substance or something out there. I told my boss to get rid of her, I would rather work alone than babysit her, so he called the temp agency and told them to stop sending her. The next day, I couldn’t believe my eyes. She showed up, so the boss sent her home and called the agency saying, “Hey, she is useless, stop sending her.”
Then, she showed up again the next day! This went on for over a week. The people at the temp agency said they told her to stop showing but she kept coming in every morning, mind you usually 10 to 20 minutes late. My boss wouldn't say anything to her face so finally, I said, “Hey, we can't afford to pay you so we had to let you go through the temp agency. They should have told you.” She was all, “Oh I thought they were joking.” I was so glad she was gone.
10. Flying Fists
I worked for a boutique hotel as an operations manager. Unless the area manager had to come in, I was the law. I get a frantic call on my downtime from an employee claiming our overnight guy tried to assault him. I have a sigh, as the guy freaking out is notorious for being a drama queen. I load up the security camera on my home PC, go to the time frame, and I was shocked by what I saw.
Our night guy legitimately lunged at his coworker. Luckily, a desk was between them, and that gave the victim time to bolt. I instantly felt like a jerk for doubting him. Well, this is when I call in the area manager. We show up at the crack of dawn and speak with the dude who made the attack, and he claims he didn't do it. We show him the video, and he responds with: “I don't recall the events of that evening.”
We fired him on the spot. Later, when I learned the reason for the fight, my jaw dropped. Well, the victim had done extra work to make the attackers shift easier. The attacker felt like this was an insult to his work ethic. Oh, and I got multiple reference requests from similar hotels asking for a reference for the guy I fired. I simply said I couldn’t provide a positive reference, as that was all I could legally say.
11. Driving Me Mad
We had a driver that refused to drive at night, claiming it wasn't safe. She was on the third shift. Her role was a driver. This was all that was expected of her. Do the three to seven trips a month that happen between 9 PM and 5 AM This was after her pleading with us to be put on the third shift. Our director at the time was shady and incompetent, so this went on for six months longer than it should have.
12. Looking For Trouble
This happened last week. This new girl is hired, and right off the bat she starts telling me that she regrets taking this job, despite being unemployed for four months, because there are so many new people so it must be a bad job because of the high turnover. For one, this is not really true. A large company just bought us, and they are hiring more people because we have more business.
She then tells us all about how it’s her birthday and she’s going drinking after work. Well, she does a no-call no-show the next day, which is her third day. We all assume she quit. But the next day, we get a surprise. She comes in and starts just trying to work like nothing happened. The supervisor asked what happened, and she said she got in a minor car accident.
He asked why she didn’t call, and she said she doesn't have a cell phone…despite being on her cell phone constantly in the office. He decided to give her one more chance, but gave her a lecture about how she needs to communicate properly about missing work, and one more incident will be an automatic firing. Next day, no call no show.
13. I Laugh In The Face Of Robbery
I worked at a large bank as a teller through school. The branch was at a not-so-great side of town and had large bulletproof glass separating the tellers from the customers. One day, a man came up to my co-worker’s window and slid a note through the tray saying he had a piece and demanded the money in his drawer.
My friend looked at the note, laughed, threw it in the trash, and continued counting, processing a transaction for the drive-through. The man was so confused. He stood there another 20-30 seconds and left. I didn't know any of this was taking place. After he left I asked my co-worker what that guy wanted. "Oh, he just tried to rob us." It turned into a whole big deal at the branch.
Surprisingly enough, that was not the policy for handling a robbery. A full investigation was done, and my co-worker was fired.
14. The Stories of My Demise Are Greatly Exaggerated
One fellow contractor had a safety guy for six months. One weekend, he took a trip out of town for non-work-related reasons, but used the company truck and charged it all on the company credit card. On his way up there, he ran a random person off the road, who just so happened to be one of the owners of another contracting company who worked closely with the one who employed this guy.
Shortly after he was fired. I'm sure charges were being brought against him. A couple of weeks later, his wife calls his former employer saying that he had called her randomly and ended his own life in his truck on the side of the highway. Me and another colleague went searching for records of this guy, but couldn’t find anything.
No stories in the paper. Thought it was weird, but whatever. It turns out this guy falsified all his qualifications and job experience. Fast forward a month later, and I heard through the grapevine that the original contractor who had employed this guy received a call. It was from some contractors across the country because the so-called deceased guy applied for work there and put them down on his resume as his previous employer.
That’s right, he faked his own demise to get out of trouble with the company, then proceeded to put them down on his resume not expecting anyone to check his references. Not exactly the brightest move.
15. A Family Affair
My wife's cousin worked with her father and me at our landscaping company for a couple of months. He had previous experience, and we needed the help, so we hired him, despite warnings to the owner from my father-in-law. To name a couple of things: We were putting fresh mulch in one of the industrial parks that we maintained, and he had me close the doors to the bed of the truck, after which he raised the bed so all the mulch would slide to the back.
Except the doors weren't designed for that type of load and immediately sprang open. If they hadn't hit the ground while swinging open, they would have badly damaged the cars on either side of us. He then proceeded to call the owner of the company and tell him what happened, placing all the blame on me for "not closing the doors right."
Then, I took him on a paver job, and he insisted that he could cut paving stones with our wet saw. Except he didn't use gloves, so the material from the pavers being cut (which includes some nasty stuff) destroyed the skin on his hands, and he called out for the next two days because he couldn't move his fingers. This was not the first time that he had made this mistake.
But oh, it didn’t end there. On the same paver job, he decided it would be a good idea to mix the mortar and the sand for the base on the owner's freshly paved driveway and use it as he needed it. Except it rained the day he did so, and he ended up with a 3/4 ton block of what was essentially concrete in the middle of their freshly paved driveway.
On multiple occasions, we got reports from the grass cutting crew that he went out with them and that he did nothing all day except sit in the truck, text his wife, and smoke. He thought he could get away with this because neither myself nor my father-in-law was with him. Eventually, he was fired, and we got a couple of extremely nasty but entertaining phone calls from his wife, calling all of us some choice names while vowing that we were no longer part of his family.
16. Some Men Just Want To Watch The World Burn
I spent my summers in college working as a laborer for a construction company. Anyway, we were doing a bunch of renovation in an active hospital, so noise and dust were a huge concern. We were a small crew and just starting renovations on an area with a super tight schedule, so the company hired a subcontractor for some of the work.
Enter these two clowns who show up to do some demolition work. Foreman gives them the talk about how they may be used to doing things a certain way, but this is an active hospital so he'd rather the work take longer than for them to make a huge mess or a lot of noise. An hour later, we apparently got multiple complaints about the noise and the mess.
So the foreman calls me up and says to go over there and clean up NOW, and that he'd be by shortly to see what the heck was going on. These dudes had dust and broken wall everywhere. I could hear them half way down the hall, just smashing away at everything without a care in the world. But it was about to get so much worse.
The foreman shows up and we walk into the room to witness this dude standing on a pile of rubble, swinging a sledgehammer over his head at a brick wall that he's removed the bottom from. Somehow, the rest of this wall is still hanging from the ceiling, I have no idea how. Guy wasn't even wearing a hard hat, apparently oblivious that at any moment that wall might give way and crush him.
The foreman lost his mind on these guys. Kicked them out immediately, and got on the phone with their company and told them he didn't want to see these guys on our site ever again. Lots of choice four-letter words were used in the call, and he even threatened to fire the subcontractor entirely and get someone else to do the work.
17. Heads Will Roll
This guy got fired just three hours into his first shift. He lost it serving an annoying Karen customer in a grocery shop, and his response was legendary. He threw a cabbage at her. The manager came and told him to go home because he was finished there. He wasn't surprised. I was standing next to him; that was an entertaining day.
18. Fake It Till You Break It
This engineer my company hired was a PhD and really hit it off with the guys in management. We had some female colleagues working under his direction, and they said he was an absolute jerk, demeaned their work, and blamed them for everything. Now, my colleagues were excellent formulation chemists, and he was brought on to lead a new formulation project and it wasn’t working.
He would tell them how to do it and it never worked, and then he kept blaming them for doing it wrong. My co-worker got fed up and called him on it during a big meeting. They even had a prepared presentation describing what they tried, how thoroughly they tried it, why what he proposed would never work, and an alternative solution.
The guy was so angry, but the management guys were extremely knowledgeable and started asking him questions, and it was clear he couldn’t answer. That’s when all his lies unraveled. Turns out, his wife has a PhD too, and she pretty much did all of his degree work for him, as they were both from a culture where women are not treated equally.
He knew absolutely nothing. Not only that, but once everyone got to talking, it was clear just how massive a jerk this guy was. Sadly, my colleagues had to deal with this for months before everything was said and done.
19. Through The Cracks
When I was working at Burger King, our restaurant manager was away on maternity leave, so we had someone from another store come in over that time to fill the role. He ended up hiring someone who had worked there five to six years previously. The few staff that had known her before she’d left had hated her but had no idea why she left.
She even passed all the checks from head office before she was hired. The restaurant manager comes back about a month after this new girl been hired, takes one look at her, and RAGES. Like my RM is yelling at this girl, she’s yelling at the manager that hired her, and all the crew that had known her when she was here last.
Obviously, none of us knew what was going on, but then the crazy story came out. It turns out this girl hadn’t left way back when. She’d been fired, and management at the time hadn’t told anyone that, just that she’d quit. This girl had scammed BK by pretending to be pregnant. She had fake ultrasounds, a baby shower, the whole lot. She then took paid maternity leave so she could go work somewhere else.
I have no idea how she got through the head office checks, but she was fired that very day.
20. Expired Relish
An employee CONSTANTLY pleasured himself in his cubicle, under his desk. The reason I say constantly is because when he was actually caught by a female employee and reported, another boss went to look at his cubicle. What he found was absolutely appalling. Under his desk, there was residue LITERALLY EVERYWHERE.
The guy always shot his gentleman’s relish right under his desk so that it would hit the wood. He worked there for over 10 years. The substance was so thick after all the countless times of release that parts of it were black and growing mold. He covered the smell by always having some type of air freshener going. We should have taken the hint sooner.
In the end, he was fired.
21. The Facebook Warrior Slays
I used to work at a hotel near an airport, so pretty much-guaranteed business 24/7/365. The housekeeping supervisor was a straight-up sadist: Putting a pregnant housekeeper in the smoker’s section on purpose, refusing to resupply, and even taking from one housekeeper for having the audacity to ask for a schedule change…
She berated and laughed at another employee battling obvious mental health issues. She even let her adult stepdaughter "move into" rooms listed as "vacant" without paying for them. What finally got her evil behind fired? A former employee making a social media post describing ALL OF THIS. The day she got canned, everybody celebrated.
One of the housekeepers even started singing.
22. Weeding Out The Losers
I own a small construction company, and there is one guy in particular that sticks out the most. I am very laid back when it comes to how people medicate themselves or choose to unwind. I’d much rather have someone use something natural for back pain or something while they are at home than take an opiate. If you want to drink, go ahead.
My only two rules are not to use anything before work or during, and nothing hard. It’s pretty simple, and it’s not hard to follow. Everyone has an understanding. I explain this to all my new hires, and everyone appreciates it because every construction company in my state will fire someone for using any substance at all.
Now, something I offer my guys is, if they want, I set them up to take courses at a community college to get a better education in our trade. It's a great win for everyone. I get smart guys who know the trade and are more efficient, and it’s a tax write-off. If they pass, I pay them more, and they can always take this education somewhere else if they want to.
I only take a tiny portion of their pay (about a dollar an hour) and foot the rest of the bill. I like doing this with “second chancers,'' I call them, guys getting out of the clink who are looking for a job. I believe everyone deserves a second chance, hence the name. My No. 1 guy was incarcerated for ten years, and you wouldn’t even know it unless he told you. The schooling and the stable job turned his life around—his words.
Now with all that out of the way, let’s talk about the kid I had to fire. We just needed a helper, someone to get tools and materials for the guys working and clean up, you know the basics. It’s a straightforward job, and every apprentice starts out doing it. I offer him $20 an hour to do this job, which is very good for where I live.
He’s a young guy with a new family, so I figure I’d throw him a bone, but he’d have to show he wants more by taking the classes. I made it very clear if he wanted more, he could have it. He just had to follow my two straightforward rules I mentioned earlier. I’m giving this high-school dropout a free education, an effortless and well-paying job, and the opportunity of a great career. How does he thank me?
By not going to the classes, leaving early frequently, and showing up late and high. Anyone who thinks it isn’t apparent when they do that is just sadly mistaken. It’s super obvious. And you smell like it too. If I can smell it, my customers can smell it. I gave him the warning to clean up his act because he won't find another job like this because of his lack of education and background.
The very next day shows up 20 minutes late to the job site with bloodshot eyes and smelling of pot mixed with cologne. I just told him to get back in his truck, and I’ll send him his check. I’m a super understanding guy, but even I have my limits.
23. Shallow Talent Pool
I had to fire my brother. He would tell me he cleaned a bunch of pools, and then a week later, I have a dozen messages from clients about how the pools were dirty and were turning green. The jerk would sit in the truck and play on his phone and drive circles around the area.
24. Caught Off Guard
I used to manage a store in the shopping mall. I'm pretty sure that one of my employees was cheating on her husband with a mall security guard. I would come by on my days off, and he'd scurry out in a fluster. I never mentioned it, but the guy was coming by all the time to the point that it kept her from doing her job, so I finally had to do something.
Finally, we had a work meeting, and I said in a very non-accusatory way, something like this: I know it gets slow here during the week, and I'm guilty of it myself, but from now on, I need everyone to keep personal visits to a minimum or during your lunch break. Her reaction was unbelievable. She stands up and starts screaming at me. How dare I accuse her. She quits. She continued to call me and leave me harassing voice-mails for a while too.
25. Reply All
This guy hadn't even started yet and just sent this bizarre introductory email out to the whole entire company, which ended with incredibly explicit details about himself. In it, he started off by claiming he liked anime and semi-embarrassing stuff like that, but ended up confessing to all his intimate bedroom preferences by the wrap-up.
To the whole company. He got fired before he even started. He supposedly apologized profusely, saying his friend played a prank on him, but the damage had already been done.
26. Smart Alec
This was a while ago at my old job. This new guy gets hired as a busboy. He was super annoying and tried to insert himself into everyone's conversation whether they wanted him there or not. It only took a couple of hours for the whole restaurant to hate him. I was working the bar and he kept eating the bar fruit. I personally didn't care, but the manager did.
The manager comes over and tells him to stop eating the fruit. His response left me flabbergasted. He looks the manager in the eye and eats another piece of fruit. The manager says "Really?" followed by "Come with me to the office." The new guy promptly replies with "Alright man, calm down” in a really testy, petulant voice. In front of me and like four other employees.
I wanted to slam my face into the ice bin, it was so cringey to witness. He promptly walked out the front door 10 minutes later without his uniform on. The worst thing about it was the manager was an insanely laid-back guy. Heck, the whole restaurant was insanely laid back. You really had to try hard to get fired from this place.
Had he not been a total idiot about the reprimand, I'm almost positive he would have just gotten a slap on the wrist and kept the job.
27. Through the Firewall
I didn't do the firing, but a company I worked for was growing rapidly and needed people quickly. So, they weren't too picky about who they hired. They hired this one guy, "Rick" who was kind of strange. He seemed harmless enough but was just kind of weird and socially awkward. He started off okay, but after a couple of months, his work started trailing off.
His supervisor spoke to him to find out why, thinking maybe something at home was going on or there was some other issue. Rick said all was okay and left it at that. However, there was no change in his work. Long story short, the LAN guys started looking into his computer usage and found that he was trying to log into smut sites at work.
Like, all day long, and he was being repeatedly thwarted by the firewall. Then he started doing searches on how to get around the firewall, then tried getting around the firewall and then tried logging into the smut sites again. He did all of this on his work-issued computer on the company's network, on company time.
Yes, after that all came to light, he was quickly shown the door for "misuse of company property." Looking back, I kind of feel sorry for him. I'm guessing he was either just that stupid or battling some kind of addiction if he couldn't abstain for 40 hours per week. Poor dude, but you gotta do what you gotta do.
28. Hate Never Wins
My parents owned a café and had just hired a new employee. On his first training shift, my mum had introduced herself as the boss. Although my dad owns the business, my mum is just as much one of the bosses. My mum is British and my dad is Spanish. My dad was working in the back kitchen and my mum was teaching the guy the table numbers and introducing staff.
When she explained that some of the kitchen staff hadn't got really strong English skills the bloke went off on one saying, "Well I am glad you are finally giving the British a chance, foreigners that come to Britain need to speak English or they should be deported immediately!" My dad steps in and explains that he moved to this country without knowing a word of English, built his business up from nothing, and now speaks five languages—much more than this British guy who could only speak English.
My dad explains everyone should be given a chance but that this British guy had blown his chance to work at my dad's establishment. He fired him on the spot and banned him from coming back. He was replaced by an Italian lady that my dad speaks to on occasion in Italian just to brush up his language skills.
29. Regretting This Hire
I was just having a conversation with my grandad about when he used to own a business. He told me the only employee he regrets hiring was an Army NCO’s son during the Vietnam years. This guy was a great candidate and seemed enthused to be applying for his first job. He was 18 at the time. My grandad offered him a job starting the next day but warned him if he drove, he’d have to move his car every two hours to avoid the street parking fine.
Anyway, he showed up to work the next day and set about learning the ropes. After two hours, my grandad tells him to move the car, so he doesn’t get in trouble. This kid goes to move his car and never comes back. My grandad was annoyed. Anyway, being the son of an army man himself, grandad tracks down this kid’s father.
He tells the guy what happens and gets the kid’s address. He goes over to find this guy sitting there with his girlfriend and drinking. The only explanation he offered was that he was “bored.” Needless to say, he didn’t have a job and never got paid for those two hours.
30. What Happens In Vegas...
I’m a former retail manager, and we had a female employee who wanted to go to Vegas for the weekend. She didn’t ask with enough notice and couldn't find coverage for her shift, plus it was going to be a busy holiday weekend, so I denied it. She ended up calling in sick but posted all sorts of pictures on social media of her in Vegas. She was surprised when I let her go upon her return.
31. Not In The Cards
I had an incredibly nerdy co-worker who was obsessed with Pokemon, Magic the Gathering, and Yu-Gi-Oh. They were the only things he would ever talk about and would talk about them for as long as you'd let him. One day I'm on the register, I witness something that made my blood run cold. I see him being dragged out of the store in handcuffs. It turns out he had been shoplifting tons of playing cards of those above-listed games.
He had taken at least $500 worth of merchandise, as our store policy was to let an employee "get away with it" up to that amount before busting them, I think because the charges stick harder or something.
32. Day By Day
Here is a day-by-day account of a disaster of an employee: Day 1: His mom calls and says he got carried away with last night’s holiday celebrations and woke up and found himself in the slammer. Day 4: He’s free and shows up to work for the first time. Then, on day 16, he advised me if he ever doesn’t show up for work, call the county lockup.
If he’s there, then there is a roll of 20-dollar bills in his drawer labeled bail fund. Please get him out. A few weeks later, he took some Xanax he had obtained somehow without telling us. I gave him the job to use the tractor’s front end loader and load my dump trailer with debris we're cleaning. While he is working, the Xanax kicks in, and he runs into the same house five times with the tractor.
He finished the job and parked the tractor inside the barn (mostly). Ten days later, at 3 AM, a tenant calls about the maintenance guy (our employee) having Fire and Rescue at his house. He had gotten inebriated while vacuuming behind the couch, and he managed to flip it over on himself. He couldn’t get out from under it but could reach his cell phone and called Fire and Rescue to get him out, and they did.
Honestly, I didn’t believe it could get worse—but it did. Less than two months after we hire him, he dresses up in a KKK outfit and starts walking through town and the park in his outfit with a shovel for a flag pole with a Confederate flag on it as his Halloween costume. Somehow makes it home covered in eggs. Finally, we had to fire him.
33. Give Me Just One Reason
I was the sous chef at a small, quaint New England country inn. We had a dishwasher we were pretty sure was drinking at work named Jim. He'd show up with a quart bottle of orange juice that was a little too full and not quite the right color. He would also get pretty sloppy by the end of the night. The chef and I both knew he was drinking.
I told the chef we should just grab his bottle and check it. The chef said he checked with the owner and she told him we couldn't, though I’m not sure why. Even so, we were looking for a reason to get rid of him…and then that moment happened. One day, I slipped in the bake shop and completely wiped out in front of everyone.
I dropped a couple of cheesecakes I was carrying out of the oven and spilled the water bath all over myself. Burned the heck out of myself and I was angry, I'll admit as much. I carried the remains of my cheesecakes into the dish pit, just cursing a blue streak. The dishwasher said to me: "You kiss your momma with that mouth?"
I turned around and said, "I kissed yours." He then started challenging me to a fight and said he was going to kick my butt. Which I found pretty funny, so I yelled to the chef, "Hey chef, Jim says he's going to kick my butt.” Chef asked him if that was true, and Jim said "Yeah, I’m going to ruin him.” The chef simply said, "Great, you're fired."
He stormed off and left his "orange juice" behind.
34. Cheap Cryotherapy
Around 2005 or 2006, I worked in a supermarket. An extremely irate customer returned a five-liter tub of ice cream THAT HAD A FACE IMPRINTED IN IT. Unfortunately, the perpetrator had extremely "unique" features. It looked exactly like our staff member. He had cracked the lid of an ice cream tub, imprinted his face in it, somehow managed to get the lid back on tight enough for no one to notice, and then somebody purchased it.
Not gonna lie, I did giggle at the sheer audacity of it, but still had to fire him. He denied it. "It's literally your face in the ice cream, man." To this day I still think about it and am just a tiny, tiny bit disappointed when I open an ice cream tub and it doesn't have a face imprinted in it. I hope the customer didn't get any mild PTSD and can open ice cream tubs with confidence nowadays.
35. Thinking Backwards Ahead
When I was a bank teller, a fellow teller got fired for stuffing her purse with a strap of $100s every morning. That’s $10,000. But here’s the most interesting part. She didn’t take it home. At the end of the day, she would put the strap back into her teller drawer. She did this for months and months apparently, without anyone noticing a thing. And why would they? The drawer always balanced.
When the camera auditors finally did catch it on tape, she was confronted and fired. When they asked her why she put a strap of money in her purse each day but always put it back, she said that if the bank were ever robbed then she could just take the money home because everybody would’ve assumed it was taken by the robber.
36. Duct Tape: The Infinite Solution
I hired a tech for my PC service shop after months of searching for someone who could keep up with the pace of a very busy shop. On day three, a regular customer came in, set his newly upgraded PC on the bench, and motioned me over. He has just had a new motherboard installed and wanted me to take a little look.
The new guy had installed his motherboard with freaking DUCT TAPE. I asked him where he even found duct tape in my shop and he said he brought it from home. I told him, "Grab your tape and the rest of your junk and go." He responded with, "But I’m a good technician!" and all I could do is shake my head. I still feel bad about how I handled that, firing him on the spot in front of a customer.
It was just SO wrong, I could not even begin to think how he thought that was the right thing to do.
37. A Late Show
I worked with a girl in retail who just could not arrive on time. Even with a five-minute leniency rule, she still couldn’t get there on time. We had a pretty generous tardy system, eight tardies in six months and then termination after that. We had pretty high turnover, so this girl had more than 10, and no one had said anything to her.
She even admitted she was usually “on time” but would sit in her car and talk on the phone and end up late. Or decide to hit a drive-thru knowing she didn’t have time and end up late. One day she comes in, late as usual, and immediately gets called to the store manager's office. We assumed she was getting fired, but it turned out she was simply getting “warned.” At that moment, she decided to ask the manager if her tardy from that day counted. He fired her on the spot.
38. Not Rocket Science
I was a job site crew chief when this happened. I worked in restoration; for fire losses, we would pack out an entire house or affected area (soot, smoke, and burned items). In this one job, the woman was a hoarder, and one of my techs, who was 37, finds bottle rockets from the late 80s and thinks it was a great idea to shoot them off in the customer’s yard.
Since they are so old, they are duds, but he fires like five or six before I tell him to stop. The next day we had a part-time kid come to work who was like 17. He shot one off, even after I told him not to. So the neighbor tells the homeowner, and the homeowner calls our owner to complain. When he writes up the 37-year-old, he tries to justify himself because the 17-year-old, young, new, and stupid, did it after shooting them off.
So they both ended up getting fired. Don't mess with customers' stuff. It’s not worth it.
39. It All Falls Down
A 19-year-old kid got hired to work the seafood counter at my store. I see him twice and then never again, so I asked a co-worker what happened. They revealed the whole, brilliant story. He had closed seafood one night and was walking out of the store when the five pounds of crab legs he'd stuffed down the back of his pants fell out in front of the closing manager.
40. Out Of Her League
I got hired as a long-term temp with one other person to do some basic data entry work at a major brand. It was also at their corporate headquarters, so pretty prestigious. Anyway, we went through all of this on-boarding stuff in the morning that required us to get photo IDs and figure out parking and all that kind of stuff.
Then after two or three hours, we were introduced to one of the employees in our new department, who began going over what we were going to be doing. None of it seemed overly difficult and I figured that while it was a new system I had never used before, I'd be able to work it out in a few days as long as I asked questions and took notes.
And that was the thing that made me realize that the other person who got hired with me probably lied on her resume and was completely out of her depth. She didn't take any notes and didn't ask any questions. And whenever I glanced at her, I could see flashes of panic on her face. In hindsight, it could have only gone one way.
So, lunchtime came, and when we came back, she said that another company had called her and offered her a permanent position and she couldn't work with us any longer. Both me and the person training us knew what was going on, but I'll give the other lady credit for finding a way out without losing face too badly. The takeaway here is: Yes, "Fake It Until You Make It" can and does work. But you gotta be able to fake it.
41. Family Feud
My sister was fired on day one. My dad had his own small medical practice and would hire me and my sisters as our "first job" to be his receptionist and file insurance claims, so that we could get some work experience before we went job hunting in the larger world. My older sister worked for him in high school for a year.
I worked for him for two years, then it came time for my younger sister to take over. I brought her to work to start training and said the number one rule in the office was, "At work, he's not dad, he's the doctor and the boss." She sassed him in front of a patient her first day, with all the venom and sarcasm a teenage girl can muster when dealing with a parent asking her to do something.
He fired her on the spot and I had to drag her out of there. Mom told her at least she'd get paid for the couple of hours she managed to be employed.
42. Not A Good Fit
My document-processing clerk was getting married and going on his honeymoon, so I got a short-term temp. It wasn't a temp-to-hire, everything was out in the open through a legitimate temp agency who generally did pretty good screening. Well, not this time. On the temp's very first day, they show up with a box of things: Photos, mugs, office equipment, stuff to decorate a cubicle with.
I advised them not to unpack since we were getting right into training. Within two hours after I let them go independently on a computer with a "Let me know if you need anything or have any questions," they said, "This mouse is hurting my wrist. It gave me carpal tunnel. I'm going to need worker's comp paperwork." Uh...what?
I made an immediate call to the agency ending this contract, then told the temp, "Your paperwork is at the temp agency office, go ahead and go see your rep there." They left their box of stuff behind; I had to have the temp agency come pick it up.
43. Wined & Fired
Someone I worked with got fired for having a BAC of 0.33 while on the job. She had stolen boxed wine from the grocery store where she was a pharmacist, hid the wine in the bathroom trash can, took many, many bathroom trips, and was caught on a fluke because a higher-up came to wish a tech good luck on their last day of work.
Her keys were taken away, and somehow she took her pants off. She was prancing around the waiting room in her underwear, then she put her pants back on and escaped to a nearby Starbucks when asset protection came by to scoop her up to be fired. Later, I found out the heartbreaking truth. She turned out to be pregnant during this incident and was facing a divorce.
Something finally cracked, I guess.
44. Just Put It On My Card
An employee had a corporate credit card. She charged a vacation, purse, Fossil watch, and take-out meals on it. This was along with the fact that she was overall miserable to work with. She “lost” her company laptop within weeks of joining. So we fired her, and a few days later, a watch catalog from Fossil showed up at the office with her name on it.
We now have active court cases for all the theft.
45. Gotcha!
We had a young IT intern helping with some hardware inventory tasks. It wasn’t uncommon for laptops not to make it back to us as projects would hoard them from terminated employees, but we noticed his backpack open and a computer of a model we used sticking out one day. I sent him to the other side of the building and checked the serial number, and yep—it was one he reported as missing during a recent inventory.
Opportunistic theft is one thing, but bringing it back into the office every day... just...wow.
46. With Friends Like These…
I met a dude through another dude, and he and his pregnant girlfriend had nowhere to go. I had an insane amount of acreage and I felt bad for the guy, so I let him stay in his RV on my land, and I even hooked him up to running water and electricity, all of which I paid for. He had a part-time job delivering furniture and never made enough to pay me the paltry 100 bucks he promised to pay me every month for helping them out.
When I'd confront him, he'd tell me he just never worked enough hours to provide for his girlfriend and pay me. So, proactively I got him a job at the hardware store I was assistant manager at until I finished my degree. This was 11 years ago. He came to work, and after two hours on his first day, just left. Like completely walked out.
He went back to the RV, which was parked next to my house, and never said anything and never returned. Told me it was a bad job that was beneath him. It seriously ruined my reputation at that store and luckily that wasn't my career path or anything.
47. A Happy Ending
We got a new contract for two receptionists to sit at our front desk. The company did not send their sharpest knives in the drawer because it was a low-dollar contract for only one year. You could consider the positions temporary. They sent a guy that my security manager called "Sticks." He was incredibly malnourished and thin.
We had a front door that was double door paned glass. I always exited through the side door and would look in through the glass doors every day when I left for home. On Sticks's second day, I looked in through the glass at the dark reception area and saw one of the office chairs behind the reception counter as it slowly spun.
I entered back in through the side door and came into the back of reception. I found Sticks laying on the floor with an ergonomic office chair that had fallen on top of him. His head was bleeding from where he struck the floor or some other object. Also, in my peripheral vision, I saw a can of compressed air, the type for cleaning keyboards.
Sticks said he was perfectly fine. I helped him up and sent him home. Over the next few days, other admin folks reported to me that they kept finding Sticks collapsed in the reception area when no one had been around. I finally called his corporate supervisor to come take him away. When the supervisor arrived, Sticks had locked himself in the supply closet and refused to talk to me.
I could hear him huffing air behind the door. The supervisor talked to him through the door and finally escorted him back to company headquarters. They fired him. I called the company, and I learned that Sticks was a former service member who had served in combat. Looking at his résumé, I knew he was also a former EOD team member. I connected the dots in a tragic way.
I suspected he had substance problems stemming from PTSD and head trauma. I still had his contact information, so I got in touch with him a week later. From then on, I coached him every day until I finally got him an appointment with a volunteer from AMVETS who got him and his family help and care. Today, I wish I knew where he was (this was more than 5 years ago).
I hope that he took advantage of the help offered to him. Because of this , I am going to text him right now and see how he is doing.
48. Unfriendly Competition
The one that always boggled my mind was the guy who wore a hat to his shift that had a large logo from a competing brand. I told him to take it off and he complied while whining, "But my hair is awful today." I told him he could buy one of ours or he could go home. A few minutes later, he was wearing it again.
I had the handbook at the ready and pointed out that he was violating policy and I would be writing him up—HR would've been proud. He huffed and went back to the break room, but when he emerged onto the sales floor, he had his hat on again. I told him to go home. He threw a couple of obscenities at me in front of witnesses and slinked out of the store.
I put the paperwork together and was ready to fire him in person but he never showed up to another shift.
49. The Proof Is In The Spit
My friend knows a guy he used to work with that got fired from a fast food joint for spitting in two hamburgers that were going to be served to his ex-wife and her new husband. So, the story goes, the guy's ex-wife with her new husband walked in and ordered a burger. The ex-wife happened to see her former husband making the hamburgers in the back of the restaurant.
The guy noticed his ex-wife was there and looked very jealous when her new husband emerged, too. They were smiling at each other, which apparently made the guy very angry—he was apparently abusive to his ex-wife. They got their order a few minutes later and left the restaurant. The husband, however, then had a gut feeling that the guy had messed with the burgers.
So, he opened the burgers to check, and indeed the guy had spat right in the burgers, plain as day. He marched back into the restaurant and demanded to see the manager, and pointed the finger at the guy, saying, "He did it." The manager immediately fired the guy on the spot. Don’t know what you expect, really.
50. Beware Of Receptionist
My best story was from back in the day when I worked at a veterinary clinic. A woman got fired for hating cats and dogs. She said as a receptionist, and she thought she would only have to talk to people. She didn’t even like people. Thank goodness that manager switched into a different role because that wasn’t even her worst hire.
51. Bad Mouthing The Boss
My dad owned his own business working as a color corrector/editor. He had this one employee who had been there since day one and became an assistant manager. My dad owned that company for more than ten years and, just recently, he had to fire the assistant manager. The assistant told employees and customers that my dad hates gays, people who aren’t white, his kids, his whole family, that he’s a terrible person.
He was driving all business away, pushing my dad’s company towards bankruptcy. It turns out he was a narcissistic sociopath. My dad is just sad his employees never trusted him enough to tell him about what this guy would say to them.
52. That Hurts
We had a guy on a location fake an injury. Now mind you, he did injure himself severely accidentally, but that wasn't his plan. His plan had been to fake a minor injury and get placed on workers comp. The problem was he screwed up how to do it and ended up hurting himself severely. You ask how did I know he was trying to fake-injure himself? Well, that's very easy to explain.
We had a 20-minute tape of him hiding behind one of the trucks on the worksite practicing his fall. Then a written confession from friends saying that he'd been planning it since the day we hired him.
53. Read The Room
Within minutes of being hired, shown to his desk, and given a company email address, this new dude emails the entiiiiiire company (500+ employees) that he has pre-screeners on DVD for movies that were not even in theaters yet. I think that at the time, one of the ones he offered was Spider-Man 2. And one of the Resident Evil movies, I think.
Lots of titles, he said, $10 each. Anyway, he was fired, out the door, in under two minutes, it was pretty amazing. After all, we were a game software company, and someone looking to make fast money on pirated stuff was, well...incompatible with corporate culture, let's say.
54. No Good Deed Goes Unpunished
I worked at an Arby's during college. This customer came in and ordered some food. They told the cashier they were new in town and asked, "Where's a good place to eat in town?" The correct answer was, according to the manager, "Arby's is the best place in town." The answer the cashier gave was not that...and she was fired shortly after for “promoting the competition.”
55. Losing The Popularity Contest
I worked in a restaurant for my first job in high school. I was about 16 when we hired on my co-worker’s little cousin. This kid was a year younger than me and a total jerk; no one liked him because of his attitude and behavior issues. Anyways, the kid gets hired and at first he's chill. Him and I both LOVED the same band, so we had a mutual bond and a common thing to talk about.
Other than that, though, I couldn't stand him much. During his first week, he starts to step on people’s toes quite easily because he notices some of us who are friends liked roasting each other, and he thought he could join in. However, the comments he was making weren’t silly banter, they were full-blown rude comments that made some of us mad.
We also started to notice that this kid didn't do his job properly, either. He worked the dish pit, and when working alone, his lack of proper cleaning of dishes, cutlery, and etc. threw everyone behind on their closing tasks because we'd have to ask him to re-wash literally everything due to food chunks being all over things.
After two to three weeks, a number of us complained to management. This kid’s older cousin even complained about him it got so bad. The last straw, I think, was him taking this dishwasher sprayer and starting to spray people as they walked into the kitchen. He got screamed at by a number of us and was fired a few days later when management noticed how angry all of us were with this kid.
56. For the Guild
We had a new guy who was pretty quiet, not the best worker ever, but good enough. Another guy was talking hobbies with him to try to get him out of his shell a bit. Turned out they both played WoW. The new guy lit up. Great, right? They talked a bit more and then it came out they played different factions. Suddenly, things weren’t so good, but I couldn’t have predicted what would happen next.
The new guy had an absolute meltdown on the spot. I mean, it was so dramatic that we thought he was joking, but it became apparent he wasn’t. The next couple of days he refused to talk to the other guy. He got told that wasn’t okay, especially over an incident like this. The next couple of days after that, the new guy just didn’t show up.
It was a pretty easy decision to terminate him.
57. Rain Delay
I fired a guy because he said he couldn't come to work because it was raining and he had just washed his car the day before.
58. Food For Thought
I'm an operating room scrub nurse. Work provides us labels to label our food. We have vending machines, too, for snacks and juices and a water fountain. There is also a hot water urn, and free coffee and tea and milk. A canteen lady comes with hot foods and sandwiches etc. at lunchtime during the day. Or there are microwaves and fridges and freezers to keep food employees bring from home.
When I do night shifts, I do an entire week of them. Monday - Sunday. You eat, sleep, nightshift, repeat for seven nights. Yet even marking my food with my name and "Nightshift" beside it, it still gets taken! That's folk knowing I'm there for 12 hours with no canteen lady coming. I was not allowed out of the dept at all during the shift.
Still, they don't care that they're potentially leaving a colleague without food for their 12-hour shift. Not eating leads to fainting potential in operating rooms. It's no wonder many of us have stashes of random long-lasting foods in our lockers. Tinned soup and granola bars for the times we've had our food taken. When I started here and saw this happen here, in operating rooms, it kind of boggled the brain.
This sure isn’t high school, but sometimes it feels like it.
59. Special Delivery
We had an employee who had been fired, it was one of those contentious firings, and he was physically removed from the building. After he was fired, he used the company FedEx to deliver his eBay sales. The company brought charges against him. There weren't one or two sales here and there. He had a whole, huge operation and was shipping out more than 20 shipments a week.
I guess he thought it was too big a corporation for anyone to be reviewing the FedEx bills, which was true until one of the prominent executives hired a family member, and we had to find something for him to do!
60. Under New Management
I owned a construction business, and we recently hired three new employees due to expansion. I didn't get to meet them yet, as my business partner was the one who interviewed them. He also watched them get started on the first day and would check in on them most mornings. Along with the new hires, we promoted one of our best workers as manager to oversee them.
So after a few days, I noticed that we were behind schedule on the job. This wasn't all that surprising because we had the new hires, but I decided it was best to go in and check it out to make sure everything was going well. So, I call up my manager and tell him to go to a different site and that I will take over at the place with the new guys.
I arrive at the site a half an hour late due to traffic, and everyone is already hard at work. In fact, they are working efficiently and correctly on everything. I asked them a few questions about what they are doing and so on and get all the right answers. I figured the delay was just the first two days of learning and am very pleased that everything was picked up and seemed to go well.
Now, it is important that at this point I didn't actually introduce myself and nobody asked who I was, so it seems everyone just assumed that I was just another worker from the company they never met before. So, two hours before we are supposed to finish for the day, I discover something that makes all the problems make sense.
A guy comes over and says, "Hey, just so you know, we're all gonna head out now, but clock in that we worked the whole day. The manager allows it, and the owners never notice." So that is the story of how I fired three new hires on the very first day that I met them... and also how I had to fire our best worker. Not a good day for me.
61. Slow And Steady Loses The Race
The IT crew at my large government office worked on a ticket system, meaning that the government workers submitted their problem online and one of the IT guys would pick it up on their end. The new guy just started his first day, logged into a computer at an empty office, and submitted a "reinstall entire OS" request so he could spend all day there.
The manager decided to check in on him before lunch to see how he was doing, and he was completely asleep. Fired before they even finished his hiring paperwork.
62. Not A Cat Person
One and a half hours into my shift as an animal care worker, I was showing my trainee how to clean the kitten rooms and started him on the easiest cage. We’re talking neonatal, six-day-old bottle feeder kittens. I explained how to set up the kennel, clean them up, etc. I turned around to grab some towels and a fresh hot water bottle when I heard a thump.
And then another thump. Turned around, and he was tossing the kittens to the other side of the kennel to move them. Like, underhand lobbing a softball, just tossed three kittens out of his way. I freaked out and yanked his butt down to the supervisor’s office. His excuse was the kittens were “attacking” him, and he felt threatened? So he threw them!!
No warnings, fired on the spot. The kittens all were fine and got adopted out a few months later.
63. Dishonest Mistake
She was hired because the manager thought she was hot. It turned out she was 15 and unable to actually work there.
64. The Old Days
My dad, now in his 70s, started work in the late 50s/early 60s. Like a lot of boys in post-conflict Britain, he was taken on as an apprentice, in his case as an electrician at a local engineering factory. A lot of the “skilled men” there had seen service during WWII. One of my father's mentors had been captured during the siege of Singapore and had spent several years as a POW under the Japanese.
Sometime during his apprenticeship, my father remembers a group of Japanese engineers and managers visiting the factory, probably to discuss the purchase of one or another of their products. On their tour of the factory, the chap I mentioned above calmly walked up to this group of Japanese, picked one up by his lapels, and tried to beat the life out of him.
The whole time, the dude was screaming his old army rank and serial number at him. He was dragged off by a bunch of his mates and fired right there, right on the spot. Obviously, a case of PTSD, the chap had spent several years being held by the Japanese and had been in a terrible state.
65. Canceled
I wasn't the boss, but I helped my boss get a co-worker fired. I was working in a record store at the time. Had this slacker kid that was all sorts of cocky for a co-worker. Always bragging about something. But, he did his job, so we dealt with it. Now, before I go further, know this. Record stores have a metric ton of regulars.
More than any other job I've ever had. You get to know your customers. We had a young woman come in all the time that was slightly special. She was good enough to go out on her own on the bus and be on her own for hours. Super sweet. She loved pop music. Each Tuesday, she'd come in and buy whichever new album came out.
We started to put one aside for her each week. Then, we didn't see her for a month or so. I wanna say NSYNC had a new album come out. Or someone like that. I saw her come back in, no smile. No cheeriness. She snuck in and came over to me and asked for the CD. I asked her what's up and where she had been and if she was okay.
She turned red and told me that it was embarrassing. I, not wanting to pry, told her about her stack of pop CDs and told her sorry she's sad. She asked about the slacker, to make sure he wasn't here today. "What did he do?" is the first thing I said. I knew he did something, in that moment. She wrote it down because she didn't want to say it out loud.
He had told her, "Hey, after work, we could meet up and if you give me a suck, I'll return the favor." I asked her to wait there, then I went and got the boss-man. He came out and apologized profusely for what happened and bought her CDs personally. Corporate was called. Not only did they flip out, they actually flew in to deal with it.
The next day when the slacker came in, they took him in the office and flipped out hard on him. He was escorted out and they told us they'd handle things. We never heard any more about it, but our customer was never sad again. I’d call that a job well done.
66. Bridge Over Troubled Waters
One of our truck drivers called our office and said he couldn't complete his route. He couldn't bring himself to drive over a long, suspended bridge because he thought it was going to collapse as soon as he got on it. I drove two and a half hours to pick him up and found him blocking almost all traffic going over the bridge with a line more than one-mile long backed up behind him.
He screamed in absolute terror when I told him we were going over the bridge, as there was nowhere to turn around anyway, and that we were completing his run. That was a fun five hours of him crying—mostly because he knew he was fired at this point—mixed with long periods of uncomfortable silence.
67. Touchy Subject
One woman was fired on her second day of a call center training course for a truly disturbing reason. She wouldn't stop touching herself. I am not sure how she got through HR screening. This was for a wireless phone company, too, not a chat line or anything. It was somewhat sad. She was in her late 30s, early 40s and I don't think this was an employment scam or anything of the like and more likely just a mental compulsion or substance misuse.
It was not that subtle but done under a shawl draped over her lap. She was politely and quietly asked to stop by the trainer, then stopped momentarily but started up again 15-20 minutes later.
68. Burning Bridges
Our pawn shop employee took $400 from the cash register, then realized that there were video cameras. He had no idea where the security footage was stored, so to cover his tracks he set the store on fire. He ended up getting pretty badly burned in the process and spent time incarcerated right after he was released from the hospital.
69. Bad News
An employee quit recently because she “could not handle Notre Dame’s burning.” That’s the church in Paris. She said she felt like she needed to be with her mom during this time. We live in Mississippi. She has never been to Notre Dame.
70. Balls Out
As a teenager, I worked at a bowling alley. Within an hour, a new girl was fired on the spot for dropping a ball on the foot of a complaining patron.
71. Honesty Isn’t The Best Policy
When I was 18, I got a job at a grocery store along with three others, and we all started training together. On the first day, we were training in the evening, and one girl asked to go home because she said her head hurt. They said fine and she wandered off and clocked out. Then we watched her do something supremely stupid.
She went to grab a grocery cart and started filling it with liquor. The store manager walked over and asked her if she was having a party. She said yes. Didn't even try to come up with an excuse. Just, "Yeah, I am, so I needed to leave early on my first day." Well, he fired her.
72. Working At Work
The guy had somehow hung on by the skin of his teeth when caught making funny plastic model cars at his desk—pro tip: throwing a newspaper over the model doesn’t hide the smell of the glue—but when a client called complaining about our hero trying to sell him golf clubs out of the trunk of his car, he was gone.
73. Coffee And A Bet
In the early 2000s, I managed a coffee shop that required the customers' names to be put on the cup. One guy looked like he was doing it but upon closer inspection on some cups, he was writing an IP address. Turns out he was running an illegal sports betting operation out of the shop. He did quit before I had to fire him because he found out I knew.
74. A Big Mouth
My wife and I started a small software company 20 years ago. She's the manager and does sales and HR. I do the programming. Anyway, we hired a programmer one time, and the first day on the job, I spent the whole morning with him going over our development philosophy, how we do source control etc., and then showed him an overview of our applications and how we build them. Along the way, he was highly critical, pointing out what he considered flaws in everything.
After lunch, he goes back in to see my wife. He didn't know we were married. We don't share a surname, and we keep pretty much to ourselves. He says to my wife, "you know how to fix this company? You need to fire that other guy." We still laugh about that one.
75. If You Have Nothing Nice To Say…
One of our crews was on the job, and the client was very angry over something they'd done wrong. Ten minutes later, a guy turns up, and as he is wearing a work vest, they assume he is also working on the project. So one guy on the crew who was as dumb as a bag of rocks goes up to the newcomer and starts talking about "this fat woman who needs a good slap" and how dare she complain when she doesn't know anything about construction. Big mistake.
It turns out the newcomer was "that fat woman’s" husband.
76. “Complete Idiot”
The company I work for is a contractor for a giant corporation, and we go to different stores to do work. This new guy we hired seemed normal at first, but it turned out he was a complete idiot. So one day, he goes on-site with one of the senior employees to shadow him. This genius thought that we could just eat anything off the shelves and from the refrigerators free because we did work for the giant corporation.
The employee saw this and told him that he needed to pay for the food and called the manager. This guy then started fighting with the manager then got in his car after, and drove off. He was fired the next day.
77. Dress For The Job You Want
This was a moving company in the Midwest. Most people didn’t make it through the first week, as they will hire literally anyone who can pass a substance test. Turnover was really bad, but I guess that’s the nature of the job. Still, I'll never forget Jeremy. Jeremy was 18 and did not apply for colleges, so his parents made him get a job.
He was hired as a mover, as is everyone. He shows up the first day to roll-call in a full suit and tie asking where his desk is. This was a group full of former convicts, high school dropouts, and generally rough dudes trying to make a living. We laughed so hard. Jeremy went right back home. Next day, Jeremy's mom shows up to give the manager a piece of her mind. We laughed even harder.
78. Casual Mondays
I worked for a small company in LA for many years. I was on the board that interviewed for a new intern for the recreation department. We went through the process, made our choice, and made the job offer to a nice, smart girl fresh out of college. She was a little bit of a hippy, casual, relatable, but it was all fine, and all accepted.
Well, the girl showed up with her gigantic pet PYTHON wrapped around her neck on the first day. She took “casual” to a whole new level, right back out the door. We hired candidate #2 instead.
79. Pick Up After Your Humans
The hospital where I work has a dog park kinda thing where people can go hang out with their dogs outside. I ended up getting lots of really large poops out there that the "owners" weren't picking up. I posted bigger "pick up your poop" posters and set up a camera. When I checked out the footage, I was stunned.
I found out it was a night shift nurse going out there and pooping in the dog park at night. She was fired, in relatively short order.
80. No Joke
Someone at my old job taped a battery and many wires to a calculator to make a fake explosive device. She then planted it at someone else's work station. The other person reported it to management, who then called the authorities. When it came out who had made the “device,” she was fired.
81. Can’t Play With The Big Boys
I worked at a Doggie Day Care. For group play, dogs were put in rooms according to size, and we would rotate through the rooms during our shifts. They hired a new girl and on her first day, she went into the big dog room and cried hysterically because she was afraid of them. Unsurprisingly, I don’t think she made it two hours.
82. Special Sauce
A friend from high school got fired from his job at McDonald's after his long-time crush complained of having mounds of hair in her Big-Mac. With such a disturbing complaint on hand, the manager decided to take a look at the CCTV—and made a chilling discovery. He found that my friend had walked to the back, reached down his pants, and pulled some hair out and placed it in the sandwich.
He got fired on the spot, then came over to my house and told me the story. He was told to leave my house on the spot. People do weird things when they’re in love.
83. Not In The Job Description
I was the person who got fired. Many moons ago, when I was a kid, I got a job at Wal-Mart. The position was called "stockman," so I assumed (incorrectly) that I would be stocking shelves. On my first day, during my first five minutes, my boss handed me a normal-sized broom. My response was: "On what shelf does this go?"
He told me to go sweep the entire parking lot, which was roughly the size of a football field. I laughed heartily into his confused face. Oh, did I mention it was raining? So again, he tells me to go sweep the parking lot and not to come back in until it was complete. I just kept laughing and said, "screeewwww that!" I was fired by about my 10th minute, which is still too long to work for that place.
84. Bon Voyage
My co-worker didn't show up the first day, second day, or third day. This means that I had to work a double shift for three days straight. Not fun, I’ll tell you that much. As it happened, I answered the phone when he finally “called in” on the fourth day of his absence. That’s when I learned his ridiculous reason for ditching.
He said, "I'm going to be honest with you, I've been in Orlando. My parents paid for a small vacation as a reward for me getting the job. Would it be okay to start next week instead of this week?"
85. Can’t Be Tamed
One of the programmers on my team was sitting at his desk looking at smut. And this is cubicle land. No offices. My director walked into the area to talk to me and saw it. Then it was the first thing he told me about, so I got up and walked over for a look myself and there it was. Me and the director looked at each other and I said, “I gotta take care of this.”
So, we walked back to HR, I told them what was going on, and what we saw, and they told me to fire the dude. So I did exactly that. He lost a $110K job for looking at smut on his computer at work. There’s a lesson in all this. Keep it in your pants, dudes.
86. Pottery Banned
I work at an art studio where we teach classes and sell pottery that our artists make for others to paint. I'm one of the artists and the manager of the place. I started getting a funny feeling about one of my employees one day. She wasn't doing anything blatantly wrong, just seemed to work really slow sometimes.
She would request insignificant but kinda odd schedule changes and have different break habits from the other staff. I started feeling like she was taking pieces from the studio, but this is a really small business so I didn't have her on camera or any way to really prove it... Until she accidentally sent me a video of herself painting pieces that I MADE from her home!
87. Mired By Munchies
I worked in a hotel. I only worked with this waitress one day and she must have been on something. She took a half-full plate off a table in front of a guest, excepting to clear it. However, the guest wasn’t finished, so the guest reached for the plate. The waitress’s reaction was hilarious. The waitress slapped the guest on her hand, saying, “You don’t get to touch that anymore.”
88. Dabbling In The Dark Arts
I had to fire a guy for looking to pay someone to cast black magic on the owner and the owner’s family to bewitch them into giving him a raise, and ironically, never firing him. The only reason I found out was that he asked someone else in the office for help in finding a witch doctor to cast the spells and word got around.
No one wanted to be in the same room as him after that. When I confronted him he said the devil made him do it so it wasn’t his fault. I definitely did not wake up expecting to fire someone for black magic that day.
89. I Don’t Do Fire
I am a chef at an upscale restaurant, the sauté cook has to prepare one lobster dish on his station that involves a technique called deglazing, which uses alcohol. The pan catches on fire briefly and flames up. When you do it correctly—it’s hard to do it incorrectly—the alcohol is cooked off and the flame goes out.
Every time he made this dish, he would deglaze the pan, catch it on fire, and then blow it out, blowing his own germs and nastiness all over someone’s food and everything in the blast radius. That was a week ago. I fired him after he did it multiple times after being asked not to. Maybe it’s because of the current state of affairs, but I couldn’t believe a trained cook would do that.
90. Sent
I'd have to go with the guy who in the span of 24 hours did three of the most irresponsible things I’ve ever seen. He started a genuine fistfight with another employee. On top of that, it was on camera, with witnesses. He then called the authorities and said the other guy did it, trying to press charges. I just sent along the video—but it gets worse.
He trespassed on the property the following day and slurred at my boss—once again on camera, with witnesses—then called the authorities and said my boss did it. I just sent the video. And it didn’t even end there. Finally, he hurt himself somehow and went to the hospital, where he told the doctor he'd been attacked at work.
The doctor found no injury consistent with his story and well yeah, camera...
91. Forgot Your Password?
At my work, one of the operations managers would change the login password to some of the women he found attractive so he would be the one to help them and flirt with them. All the women pretty much turned him down, and then he got nasty with them. A few of them reported him to HR, and that's when they noticed that he was the one changing all the passwords and fired him.
92. Hairy Situation
A teacher sent a text message to a co-worker stating that a black student’s hair looked like a Troll doll. Word got around to the principal, and the dude was fired immediately. Then his sister, who was the gym teacher, quit in solidarity.
93. The Naked Truth
When I had my translation business, I hired a guy to seek out contracts for me, and I’d pay him a 20% finder's fee. Instead of sending the finished project to a client, he accidentally sent naked pictures of himself. Of course, I only learned about it later, when my client forwarded me the mail half an hour later, I learned of it, including the (multiple) glorious photos.
94. Up In The Air
I called a temp agency to get someone to help me count inventory. They sent a guy over with a cast on his arm...that was my first red flag. Still, I went with it because we were just counting parts and I thought hey, he can handle this. So we get started, and then I go out to lunch. I came back to a completely inexplicable sight.
This dude was in my office chair zoned out and drooling on himself with a can of air duster in his lap. I kicked him awake and escorted him out of my warehouse. Never used that temp agency again.
95. Out With A Bang
I worked in a bar and a new girl started. At work, she seemed a little rough, but was fine. One day, she finished a shift, sat at the bar, and ordered a cabernet with lemonade and ice in it—not really relevant to the story, it just shows she is clearly insane. What really did her in was this: Her boyfriend came in, they had a huge fight in front of my manager and several customers, and she threw her drink over her boyfriend and dramatically stormed out.
96. Nowhere Is Safe
I had a food and beverage manager that brought a coffee to his female assistant manager on inventory day when the two of them would be alone performing inventory. She drank about half the coffee, started feeling dizzy, and saw there was a heavy table pushed up against the door. She freaked out and got out of the area. But it didn’t end there.
She went to HR and they tested the coffee and it was roofied. Definitely the most interesting firing I was involved in.
97. Expensive Tastes
First week, a customer called over my co-worker to the unstaffed truffle counter. He hasn't been trained in truffles, so he just grabs one from the display case and sells it to the customer. This turned out to be a massive mistake. See, what he didn’t know was that the display "truffles" aren’t actually real truffles; they are made of plastic.
By the time he realized, the customer had already left and paid $90 for it. Fired.
98. This Guy’s A Little Slow
Years ago, my husband worked for a small company. He did a little bit of everything, and one of his jobs, along with a co-worker, was keeping all the computers running. Now, this was a sales-based company, so all of the salespeople had laptops for themselves. If there were an issue or problem, they'd bring them in to be looked at.
So one day, one of the non-local sales guys was in for a meeting. He said, "Hey, my computer is running slowly. Can you take a look at it?" My husband says, "Yeah, sure, no problem." The sales guy leaves the computer and goes to whatever meeting he was off to. My husband and his colleague took a look and saw that the disk was nearly full and figured that was slowing things down. That’s when they made a disturbing discovery.
They dig deeper and see the computer is filled with adult-material and like filled with it—all sorts. Now, mind you, the salespeople signed an agreement that their assigned computer was for business use only, not personal use. So, we have a slight problem here. My husband and his colleague, not wanting to make a mountain out of a molehill and not wanting the guy to lose his job over a fixable problem, just wiped the drive clean, reformatted it, got things set up again, and the computer was working great.
The guy comes back the next day, and my husband explains things to him very diplomatically, "Hey, we took a look at your computer. It was running slowly because the disk was nearly full with personal files, so we wiped it clean, reformatted things, and you're good to go. You know, just a reminder that company-issued computers are for business use only. If you're looking for something for personal use, here are some relatively inexpensive laptops with a lot of storage space.”
“You can put whatever you want on it. A small investment for privacy, you know." And with that, they gave him a printout list of some good, reasonably-priced laptops he could purchase for himself. Excellent approach, yes? The sales guy just kind of mumbled something, grabbed his computer, and was on his way without so much as a thank you. Well, the guys figured that was that, but guess who was back six weeks later with the same problem. Yep, idiot. Problem? Yes, the computer was again filled with the same stuff.
They were done at this point. The two of them went straight to the President's office, showed her what was on the computer (well enough to give her an idea) and explained what had happened previously. She was a very no-nonsense lady, so needless to say, by 3 PM that afternoon, that sales guy was no longer employed. What an idiot.
99. Writing On The Wall
I am an operating room nurse. We had a patient who was getting a mass removed from her underarm and breast area. This other genius male nurse takes a medical marker and writes, "Solid. Call me." with his cell phone number on her breast while she was under anesthesia.
100. Office Offence
I used to do some consulting work and hired a woman to help out: mostly clerical stuff and whatnot. I flew down to St Thomas for a meeting and got a call from my office alarm company at 10:30 PM. She had keys to my building but didn't know about the alarm. She and her boyfriend brought another couple down to have a foursome in one of my offices I had converted to a bedroom where I could crash if I worked late. So, I came up with a plan.
I called her. She answered mid-coitus and acted normal, albeit a little tipsy. I talked about a few mundane details I needed to relay to her anyways. I then mentioned how she only was ever at the office between 7 AM and 7 PM, and casually brought up how there was a silent alarm that would call me with audio of activities in the building.
When I got back in town, her keys were sitting on my desk.
101. Bad Medicine
I worked in a hospital. I worked with an RN for a while who gave me a bad feeling—and when I found out the truth about her, I was utterly horrified. She had been pilfering patients' narcotic medication and hoarding it. The patients were given half of their regular doses and were complaining of extreme pain. This lasted about a month.
To top it off, she took the medication while on the job and was high most of the time. She was terminated, reported to her College and ended up being charged criminally.
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