We've all had that one co-worker who we can't believe hasn't been fired yet. Whether because of plain old incompetence or something more sinister, it's a miracle that any of these people still have jobs. While these stories are infuriating, at least they can give us some small comfort: No matter how bad we are at our jobs, we aren't as bad as THESE people.
1. He Doesn’t Need The Money
The facilities maintenance company I worked for got taken over by a new company. The new company was terrible to work for. One of the guys was getting really stressed out and since his wife made big bucks, she told him to quit. Instead, he did something insane. He didn't quit, he decided to just come and go as he pleased and took whatever he wanted.
He used the shop area and company supplies to work on personal projects for his house. This went on for over a year. And the craziest part? They promoted him out of his position into management.
2. Mandated Nap Time
A teenage coworker was told to go check and pull any expired or near expiration date canned pet food. It was an easy job. Said coworker was not heard from for hours. When the manager finally found him, he couldn't believe his eyes. The teenager is sleeping, propped up against the food racks, while kind of half sitting in a carriage. I mean sound asleep! Manager gathers all other employees to come and look.
We all laugh and make noise and he never wakes. Finally, the manager shakes him and he falls off the cart. The manager tells him to go nap in his car. The teenager then proceeds to nap in his car for another hour, all while still punched in. Not fired!
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3. She Knows Nothing
I worked at a pet store for a long time. We had a Cyanobacteria outbreak and were bleaching individual tanks and then dechlorinating the tanks and testing them before putting them back in with the main system. We had been undergoing the process for about a week at that point, but apparently this one coworker hadn’t been paying attention at all during that time period.
She reattached a tank half-full of bleach to the main tank system. We didn't know what was happening until it was too late. As I walked into the store (it was my day off; I was just there for lizard food), I just see the majority of the fish moving around listlessly. Then they started spiraling. I point this out to my coworkers and they start freaking out. One of them starts dumping bottles of dechlorinator into the system.
Meanwhile, the coworker fishes out her favorite fish, a parrot cichlid, and starts blowing into their gills, trying to do some approximation of CPR. She ends up throwing them into the separate sick tank in hopes of saving them. Anyway, she slaughtered 99% of the fish and I had to help shovel out their corpses while crying the entire time.
She didn't get fired and never took responsibility for the event.
4. A Bookkeeping Nightmare
This one IT guy deleted all bills of sale from the last five days. The accountant came in and yelled at him for 40 minutes straight, then went home and couldn't speak for nearly three days. Our CEO didn't fire the IT guy because he was one of his friends. Other coworkers and I had to call about 200 other companies to ask them if they have received a bill from us.
At the end, somebody got the glorious idea to ask the mailman where the post sent those bills and saved our souls. If the taxman had found out about this incident it would have been serious bad news for the company.
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5. Well, That Tactic Backfired
My terrible coworker was actually the general manager, and the owner of the company was his old college buddy. The owner thinks needing to fire someone is his own personal failure for not being able to manage someone into success. So he doesn't fire anyone. If he wants them gone he makes their work environment 100% awful until they quit out of frustration.
Eventually, the owner wanted the manager gone, but he wouldn't fire his "friend." So he started making his work life completely awful. The manager starts to crack. He's losing his mind and just generally starting to go wild. He was making bad decisions, or not making decisions at all. My frustration over the manager's greatly deteriorated performance started to grow.
I called him out in a multi-recipient email sent to the company executives. His reaction was deranged. Unbeknownst to me, the manager saw the email and went across the street, then down into the plant in his company truck to wait. For me. I leave the plant and start walking to go back to my office and I hear an engine rev a few hundred feet away and tires spinning in the dirt and gravel.
I look to the right and he's aiming his truck right for me full speed. I step off the other side of the road just as he zooms right behind my heels. I was about half a second and 12 inches from getting flattened by that maniac. I go directly to the CFO, and my boss, and tell them the manager just tried to run me over in his company truck.
She told me to go straight to HR. So I grab a camera, go take pictures of the fresh peel-out marks down in the plant lot and grab a worker who was outside and saw it happen and go straight to HR. He STILL doesn't get fired. He gets his company truck taken away from him and that's it. He worked there for another six months before getting the boot for other unrelated issues.
6. That’s A Waste Of Perfectly Good Food
I used to work at a fast-food chain restaurant as a cook. One Sunday, it was extra busy around lunchtime and one of the cashiers kept messing up orders. My assistant general manager, who at the time was cooking with me, got so frustrated with the cashier that he took all the food that was on the grills and fryers and threw it against a wall. He faced zero repercussions.
7. Why Work If You Don’t Have To?
We have a girl who calls out sick for almost every single one of her shifts. When she doesn't call out, she begs everyone to take her shifts. Out of every 10 shifts she is given she only ever actually shows up for one or two. Whenever she does show up she almost always asks to leave early anyway for any of the many excuses she has up her sleeve.
She has received seven serious write-ups for her attendance and lack of reliability. Most people are sacked after three serious write-ups. Somehow she keeps sneaking on by. Every time she gets another one I think "Okay this will be the one" but she still somehow works here. She was actually fired once in the past for these very same patterns.
For some reason they let her come back only for her to pull the same stunts all over again. But her latest stunt was insane even for her. Right in the middle of our busy season, she asked for three weeks off. She was told that they would give her one week but anything more than that would be considered her resignation. So she took the three weeks off anyway.
During that time all of her scheduled shifts were left uncovered. That's at least 15 no-call no-shows and we were always left understaffed and busy because of it. Yet after her little vacation, she resumed working with no repercussions. Nothing was ever said about it. We've had to let people go for far, far less. I don't understand it.
8. Don’t Play With Fire
One coworker liked throwing ice cubes into the deep fryer. He'd stand far enough away that he wouldn't get splashed, which made it a complete surprise to the person working the fryer. If you've never done this, it kind of causes a mini-explosion of bubbles in molten grease, which splashes everywhere and, at the very least, makes a mess.
When this got too boring, he started stealing kids’ meal toys and chucking them into the fryer. It took longer for them to start melting, and if he couldn't get them out, we had to turn the thing off for the rest of the day because it takes hours for it to cool off long enough to retrieve something, and then at least another hour to heat back up.
I can't remember what it was that he threw, but it caught on fire and he ended up pulling it out with a pair of metal tongs and threw it in the sink. Then he turned on the water and made (to his surprise) a BIGGER FIRE. Did he get burned? Yes. Did he get fired? No. Did he do it again? Sort of. I think he went back to ice cubes after that.
9. Potentially Huge Disaster
I worked for a really big gaming company that was just about to ship a major title. Like, MAJOR. Because of beta testing, there was code in the game that would disable the beta copies the day after the game officially dropped. My coworker’s job was to make sure that code was removed before they burned all of the official CDs for the game's release.
Guess who forgot to remove the code? The company had already burned tens of thousands (maybe more) of game discs and boxed them up for shipment before my buddy realized his mistake and came clean to his boss. They had to re-burn, replace, and re-box every copy of the game and do it in time to meet the launch date.
It cost a lot of people a lot of extra time and grief but, ultimately, my buddy got to keep his job.
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10. Hubris Is The Downfall Of Many
I used to work in instrument manufacturing. There were these tiny heater parts that needed to be glued together. Well, one of the employees (sweetest lady) was new to that particular station that involved the heater part. All of her heaters kept leaking. Nobody knew why. They assumed that it was faulty parts. I had worked at that station before her and I came over to take a look. I immediately saw the problem.
She was gluing the parts wrong. She was placing the heavier part on the bottom and the lighter part in top. To get a good seal, you obviously place the heavy part on top when you lay it to dry. Well, they got the engineers over to take a look. They told me I was wrong because that’s not in the instruction booklet. I told them I had been building these for months.
I never had any problems, and they might want to consider changing it in the manual because it seems to be common sense. They continued to tell me I was wrong because god forbid they take the advice of a young woman. This one engineer was super discriminatory and he was, to my disappointment, in charge of this problem.
They continued to trash thousands of dollars’ worth of perfectly good parts and this guy continued to blame the manufacturer of the parts. Sometimes I would work weekends with my boss. I asked him if I could please just work on one batch to prove I was right. He let me and guess what? No leaking! My boss tells the higher ups and the instructions are changed.
I get zero acknowledgement in solving the case. Since thousands of dollars in product have been ruined, someone needs to take a hit. And that someone was the kind little older woman who had only been doing what the engineer told her to do. The person who should have been fired was that jerk who didn’t want to listen to me.
11. Should Have Been Paying Attention
My coworker had to substitute for me to do some technical services at a petrochemical plant. He instructed the customer to pump some chemical into the system to boost the pH. He however never told them to stop and they ended up pumping the entire 14,000-gallon container of chemicals into the unit which stopped production for 2 days.
They had to dump the solution in the process, which costs like $75,000 or so to make. The customer was angry and refused to pay for his visit. I am just glad they didn't sue us. Meanwhile, he continues to sit in his office and mess up everything he touches.
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12. Hidden Injuries
I worked in child care. One day this 16-year-old volunteer (the daughter of one of the other teachers there) was watching the toddlers when one boy accidentally trips and hits his chin on the little table they eat at. His top teeth ended up piercing completely through his bottom lip. This girl did NOT fill out an incident report about it (a huge no no). But that's not the worst part.
She also doesn't TELL anyone it happened until hours later when the boy's mom shows up to pick him up. The mom is furious and immediately rushes her boy to the doctor only to find out it's too late to put stitches in his lip that he needed right after the accident occurred, so he'll have a nasty scar on his lip for life. But nothing was said to this girl. Not a darn thing.
Yet I was pulled into the director's office and screamed at because I poured too much milk into a 6-month-old's cereal so I had to add more cereal to get it the right consistency. I was accused of overfeeding the child, regardless of the fact that I didn't even feed the child all the cereal in the bowl.
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13. Risking Everyone’s Safety
Hydrogen was being transferred from the truck to the storage tank, which is the most probable time for a leak. Hydrogen is explosive, by the way. My friend's job is to put up a perimeter and be ready to respond if anything goes slightly wrong. Well, a security guy was doing his rounds and his rounds went through the perimeter.
So he moves the barricade, gets back in his truck, and drives through the restricted area. My friend stops him, and chews him out. The security guy doesn't really get what the big deal is. "If there had been even a tiny leak in that hose, you would literally have just endangered every single person at this facility." He reports it to security guy's superiors. Security guy is still around.
14. There’s Always Three Sides To The Truth
I use to work for a company that did inventory audits and we frequently traveled all over the state to do audits. There was that guy EVERYBODY hated because he was a giant tool who I will call JD. Well, one night we had an audit in a city around three hours away in the evening so once we got done it was around 2 am so pretty much everyone was tired.
Only certain people are allowed to drive the company vehicles we take to out-of-town audits. Well, all the other people who were approved to drive were too tired, so JD said he would. After about half an hour on the road, everyone in the van fell asleep. Around this time JD thought it would be the perfect time to start drinking... It was even worse than you'd think.
Fast forward an hour and everyone in the van got woken up by JD swerving back and forth on the road and nearly hitting the guard rail ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE ROAD. As predicted, everyone in the van calmly and politely asked JD to pull over, then two guys politely pulled JD out of the van and attempted to calmly injure him severely.
When we got back to the office no one hesitated at all to call our District Manager and try to get JD fired and locked up, only everyone in the van was telling different stories with each person exaggerating the events more than the previous person in the attempt to make his punishment worse. Unfortunately, this all backfired.
Since the stories were so different, our manager couldn't use this as grounds for termination.
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15. Incapacitated By Poor Decision Making
I used to work at a store that specialized in selling video games but basically has since turned into a toy store. Well like everywhere Black Friday is a super busy day and this year especially since we had some really good deals. The idea was to have three people working throughout the day so we don't get overwhelmed by the number of customers. Things did NOT go as planned.
One of our supervisors, who I call Tony, was supposed to be on the opening shift at 6 am but decided that it would be a great idea to go out drinking all night on Thanksgiving with his brother until 5 am. Well, when Tony's 6 am shift came around, he stumbled into work still tipsy. As expected the store was nonstop busy since opening.
To make matters worse, the third person on that shift decided he would rather sleep in and go shopping instead of coming into work, so the shift was only being covered by our Store Manager and an inebriated supervisor. My shift was meant to be from 2 pm to closing but they begged me to come in early so they can send Tony home.
When I got there the Store Manager told me that Tony would frequently just stare at the customer if they asked him a question, got "lost" in our tiny backroom looking for an Xbox, fell asleep on the toilet for 10 minutes, and tried to sell multiple customers the 100-mile warranty for their games. He finally sent Tony home once he got Assistant Manager to come in at 8 am.
16. Aggressive Laziness
I work with this woman who should have been fired over a year ago, based on the company's policies. She was hired by her friend (surprise) and quickly figured out she doesn't have to do her work because of it. We work in an express restaurant, so lots of rules for good reason. Just in the past 6-month mark, she has caused multiple customers to complain about her specifically.
She also caused other customers to call corporate to complain about her rudeness, broke a fryer, two thermometers, a sink, and 4 knives. She opened the store with no paper towels or sanitizer and left the safe wide open and the doors unlocked for the entire night. And when she was actually pretending to work, she was in the back texting or talking on the phone.
No one knows how she isn't fired let alone demoted. But that's not even the part that makes me furious. Another coworker and I were "promoted" to her spot with the promise that we would take her place when she was fired. We happily took on the responsibilities and waited for the actual promotion so we could have the titles and matching pay. Yeah she's still here, and I haven't gotten that raise.
17. Cleaned Up His Own Mess
At a previous job, we had an "employee" that was called in to clean on an as-needed basis. The employee, who we will call Fred, owed a lot of child support. After an unusually long break of not working, we called Fred in to clean the work place. I think he expected to be paid under the table, because when he was given a paycheck, he got a nasty surprise.
It was nearly zero because of all the back-due child support he owed that we were forced to take from his paycheck. He literally started screaming, swearing, calling the boss every name you can think of, punching walls and threatening to wreck the place. The boss still calls him back to work as needed to clean because he "is really good at cleaning."
18. Much Needed Support
I worked at a really small company where a longtime employee was always using in the bathroom. She would always go into the bathroom for an hour or so, and sometimes would show up for work looking half asleep. We all knew it and it was always kind of something that we just joked about. One day after she went home for the day we decided to snoop in the bathroom.
We found her huge stash of illicit substances hidden in an envelope under the sink. My supervisor found out and informed our boss. But, for once, there's a happy ending. Because she had been an employee for so long and the owner of the company liked her so much, he ended up helping her out and sending her for treatment. She was gone for a year, and when she came back she looked amazing like a totally different person.
To this day she's totally clean, she still works here with us and she's a totally different person. I'm really happy she was able to get help because honestly the day she left for treatment; she was not doing well. It's great to have an employer that actually cares about their employees like a family.
19. The Clumsy Thief
When I was a barista we could take home a bag of coffee or tea for free each week. Just one though. My coworker was not a very nice person and one day, she got caught trying to take one of our other coworker's weekly bags of coffee at one of our stores in another town. When she was caught, she threw a massive tantrum, destroying the store.
I felt relieved because I assumed I would never have to see her again. I was quite wrong and unfortunately, she showed up to work the next day like nothing happened.
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20. Opportunities Open Up With Just A Little Leverage
I worked with a young lady that was hired above her capabilities and continued to perform below expectations on a daily basis. We were a professional consulting firm, yet she'd arrive to work in sweatpants and a top that would freely expose her midriff. For months she completely stood out as under-dressed, under-qualified, and with no upside for the future. I felt like I was going crazy! Then one day, I finally realized what was happening.
At the first Christmas party she went to, the married CEO/owner ended up dancing with her and spent an inordinate amount of time grabbing her curves on the dance floor while all of us drones looked on. She was the talk of the office for weeks. A few months later she pulled a real terrible move that would cost the company tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.
This was the type of mistake that would inevitably result in a swift firing or resignation. I asked her if she felt her job was in jeopardy. Her reply was, "They can't fire me, the boss grabbed me at the Christmas party." A couple years later she was made a project manager. Yikes.
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21. We All Make Mistakes
I work at a golf course and a coworker of mine flipped a brand-new golf cart onto its side. It was raining out and the asphalt was slippery and he was driving it down a slope. He hit the brakes and tried to drift but just put the cart on its side. My boss who was out golfing came in to see the damage (not extensive but a bit more than a scratch).
My boss didn't even raise his voice at my coworker, just told him to be more careful next time. We all thought for sure that this coworker was going to get canned on the spot.
22. Not In Front Of The Customers
I worked at Starbucks for about 4 years as a shift manager. During the last 8 months of working there we got a new manager who was absolutely horrible. She hired a bunch of new baristas that had no idea what they were doing and then basically left running the store to me and another manager. The worst new hire happened to be this incredibly air-headed girl named Katie.
I hated Katie with a burning passion. She was seriously the most clueless person that I've ever worked with. I can't remember what I asked her on that fateful day, but her response broke me. I absolutely lost my cool and shouted at her before leaving through the back door. All in front of customers. I didn't come back until thirty minutes before close so I could count down the tills.
Miraculously, I didn’t even get written up for it, but I left a month later. Those last eight months were really getting to me mentally though so I'm glad I quit.
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23. A Failure In Logic
During the first week of camp, while we were still in counselor training mode, one of the counselors was injured with a particularly hard hip thrust during a game of footy. Cue my co-nurse running off to find her a Claritin (allergy med) for the swelling. My other coworkers and counselors all exchanged confused, worried, glances, wondering if she was joking.
She honestly believed that it would work to "reduce the swelling," despite me explaining the difference between pathogen-related swelling and blunt trauma. She was furious with me for "overruling" her when I said no and instead grabbed an ice pack. Due to bureaucratic reasons we weren't allowed to fire/switch her out.
Instead my co-workers and I had to keep a close eye on her for the rest of the summer terrified that she would poison someone.
24. Cutting Costs Can Be Expensive
Our HR dept had to cut so many employees for a layoff, and the person in charge of making sure they weren't laying off essential personnel just picked names at random from a list based on pay. She accidentally laid off myself and the only other person in the company that supported the system we lovingly call "the core product".
When we told them it had to be a mistake, they just took it as us begging for our jobs and disregarded our warnings. This resulted in the company having to request emergency training services from the vendors, who were more than happy to fly across the country and charge roughly double our yearly salaries to do a two-week seminar.
But I got the last laugh. Turns out, you can't learn everything you need to know about a system so complex in two weeks, especially if you haven't ever used it before. They ended up rehiring both myself and the other person into positions where we earn more money and have less overall responsibility. I found out specifically who made the mistake after being rehired.
Despite costing the company about half a million dollars, she did not get herself terminated.
25. Mandatory Is A Figure Of Speech
One guy I work with took a city dump truck through the drive-thru with the bed up. It ripped everything up and he just drove off. He drove back to the office and told his superior he was going home sick. He was long gone by the time any of us heard what happened. In the event of a crash, it's city policy that the driver has to take a substance test.
By going home, he avoided that. Over the next few weeks, he burned up all of his paid time off which allowed him to postpone the test. He just didn't show up for a few more weeks after the vacation time was expended. Then one day, decides he's ready for the test. He passed and was cleared for work.
26. Stumbling Through Life
I worked at a Target during my later years of High School and had a lovely coworker named Kevin. His parents were rich and essentially forced him to apply for a job to get a sense for the service industry since he would never have to work a day in his life. The whole "mommy and daddy are rich and I can sue you" cliche is true with this dummy.
It was a regular day in the store, but at one point our manager asked Kevin to help stock the shelves for Valentine's Day. Apparently, Kevin bought some grass with his parent's money and decided to go to work with a somewhat altered brain. Kevin and I were stocking the shelves when I looked over at him. There he was, doing something rage-inducing.
He was breaking open the Valentine's heart-shaped chocolate things and slurping out the cream filling. By the time I saw him doing this, it was too late. He slurped at least twenty hearts dry. At this point I am pretty upset, so we get the manager over to knock some sense into him. Kevin is still not sober, but now decides to actually try to stock the shelves, since the manager was here.
Kevin is short, so he needed a ladder for stocking the top layers. In Kevin's intoxicated waltz, he knocked a bag of candy off the top shelf and went down to get it before tumbling right off the ladder. The manager never filed a drug report to corporate for some reason, although I highly suspect it was because his family was rich and influential in the area.
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27. She Makes Her Own Schedule
My one coworker was late EVERY shift she had. There was not a single time I remember her being on time, and it wasn't a couple of minutes. She was at least 30 minutes late every day. Sometimes it was more than an hour late, and this was one of those jobs where the person from the previous shift couldn't leave until they were relieved.
Usually that person was me, and one morning, the normal 30 minutes passed and she wasn't here. So I had another co-worker call her to see where she was so I could leave. The coworker states she just woke up, and said she'd be into work in an hour like it was no big deal. With that, I was finally fed up. I said, "I'm leaving, someone needs to relieve me now.”
Someone did, and I told the higher-ups that I could not be expected to wait 30-90 minutes after my shift was over every single day because this one woman could never be on time. It wasn't just that she was never on time, she called in sick quite often (and she usually was not sick, just hung over). It was at least once a week that she'd call off work.
Eventually, the higher-ups got sick of everyone else having to relieve me on her shifts so they called a meeting threatening to write up people that are late more than 3 times and that call in more than 3 times (quarterly). Still, this girl wasn't fired. She kept on like she was until she quit on her own...to accept a much better job.
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28. A Series Of Complicated Mistakes
The lead engineer on a project calls me in a panic saying that the storage for a web server "had gone back in time". This is not a thing that can happen. I find no evidence of low-level issues. All the storage cluster stuff (which I had designed and deployed) was working just fine. There was evidence that files had somehow been restored to a prior state.
But there was nothing to suggest it was a problem with the underlying system. We did have daily snapshots, something most people at the company did not know. So I dig them up and find out exactly when the rollback occurred. And there it was, in the history file. Some idiot had re-run the initial user migration we ran a month ago, overwriting a month's worth of changes.
But mysteriously, that history entry disappeared the next day. Not so mysteriously, there was a vim editor info entry saying that the history file had been opened and the last cursor position was exactly where that line had been. So I dig up the SSH logs and find out who was logged in at the time. Then I start comparing history files and notice an odd pattern.
Long story short, after a couple days of investigation, I conclude that this idiot had been logged in to multiple servers via an SSH client with a "broadcast" feature that sends keypresses to multiple sessions. He left it logged in overnight, then came back the next day and forgot about that feature. When he performed an action on one screen, he performed it on them all.
The thing is, had he owned up to it immediately, I would've just restored the snapshot, told customers we lost a few hours’ worth of data, and life goes on. Instead, this moron tried to fix it by digging up some other backups, failed, then tried to cover his tracks, then said nothing and left everyone else to discover the mess.
Now it was several days later and we had a mix of customers who had restored data themselves, plus added new data, and customers that hadn't done anything so we couldn't just restore from the known good backup.
29. A Bizarre Anomaly
Once, my coworker came into the office last winter with a tattered, dirty, pink bathrobe with holes and stains all over it. She was 45 minutes late and sat at her desk mumbling to herself not doing any work. She became increasingly worse throughout the day, slurring her words with one eye closed and one open. She admitted to taking Xanax and NyQuil before coming in.
Her sister came and picked her up early. She was back to normal the next day as if nothing ever happened.
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30. The Teacher’s Odyssey
A fellow teacher in a small town in Northern Maine had some drinks, went to a bar, hit on many former students, started taking shots, punched the female bar owner in the face, was reprimanded for disorderly conduct, resisted arrest, and caused two officers to need minor first aid, then bailed himself out. And he STILL wasn't done.
He walked across the street to a convenience store, took a bottle of vino, somehow got home, drank the bottle, drove his truck to the same convenience store, swiped a second bottle of vino, drove home, and got busted before he made it home. While the school board was made aware of the entire sordid tale, he still teaches at the same school.
Also, the woman who he punched in the face didn't press charges because she felt bad for him because he was getting a divorce.
31. At Least He Made The Food
So I worked for a year at a steakhouse and one of the cooks who closed with me did not like customers too much. One night we were 10 minutes away from closing and we get told a table was just sat. We were annoyed but it was nothing we were not used to. The order comes through it’s 2 steaks and 2 salads, I make the salads he makes the steaks.
The server comes back about 5 minutes after dropping the food off and says the man thought his was overcooked and wanted a new one. We had already started closing but the grill was still on. It didn't seem like too big of a deal to me but the other cook goes ballistic. He starts screaming in Spanish and throws tongs and other things around. Then he came up with an insane revenge.
He takes one of the raw steaks and just throws it on a plate and pops it in the nearest microwave and puts it on for 8 min and sends it out, the server argued a bit but just got told to stop talking and take it out. The kitchen manager saw and didn't say a word. The cook never got in trouble at all, and even still works there.
32. Shady Dealings
I work at an estate brokerage and there is this one coworker who has been caught going through people's files. He was looking for information on other people's clients. He had also tried to write up a deal for someone else's client under his name. On multiple occasions, specific items from his transactions have come up missing.
He once went on a trip to another state to sign a deal for a supposed $500 thousand and never even left the city. He also had some special gold coins to give the guy as a bonus for making a deal that he very conveniently lost. It’s insane really. Dude still works here doesn't write any new business and is just worthless. I have no idea how he has not been fired honestly.
33. A Sheer Disregard For Others
After he somehow convinced the owner to let him work from home as a salesman, my coworker went 6 months without making a single sale but was still getting paid full-time wages. On the odd occasion he'd come help out (a landscaping company) he was useless and would usually stop doing anything remotely physical after the first coffee break citing a "bad back."
He finally made his first "sale," which was to sign up our company as a franchise of some sort for a painting company. What kind of painting? Parking lot lines. He then managed to get three, that's right a whole three, contracts over the course of a few months, most of them were already landscaping clients. This guy also had a talent for underquoting by about 200%.
He'd promise the job would be done in like 6 hours, and it would end up taking up to 18 sometimes. The first night out in the parking lot, we were all so mad at him, we just let him do most of the work and let him call all the shots, so basically we were on break most of the time. But he still managed to screw up even worse. At the end of the night we find out he didn't buy any paint thinner.
The paint all dried inside the tubes and the pump of the spray nozzle, which was now ruined. We were sure he'd be fired. He ruined the $5,000 piece of equipment he made the owner buy, rendering the thousands of dollars of other equipment needed for this venture useless. Anyway, he dropped the stuff off at the owner's house and went home to sleep.
The owner had to dig the 50-foot hoses clean over the course of a week. The next time this coworker gets a contract, he quotes eight hours for two guys to do a massive parking lot. He scheduled just him and me. Then he leaves a bucket of paint sitting on the ground between the truck and the trailer, so when I had to run over to quickly clean up a spill, I ran over the bucket.
Paint went everywhere. We were there from like 10 pm to 9 am cleaning up the spill and painting the lines, but the paint ran out and the compressor started malfunctioning so the place looked like garbage and was barely finished. We get back to the owner's house and drop off the equipment, which again was pretty messed up.
He then says to the owner, "I'm not going back tonight, and I'm not helping put this stuff away. I have a family BBQ later." The client was out of his mind angry and we had to get the whole crew minus the salesman back there that night and re-do the whole place free of charge. He wasn't fired.
34. Caught Red-Faced
When I worked at an amusement park, we had a woman demand to speak to the highest-level manager and assumed it was some of the usual petty nonsense. It was far, far worse than that. Turns out she had witnessed one of our notoriously mean supervisors screaming at a group of lower-level employees (all teenagers) and generally just laying into them and demeaning them in plain view of guests.
She basically told us that no person deserved to be treated the way those kids had been by their boss and she and her family would be leaving the park and not returning. She didn't want a refund or anything, she just wanted to let us know that she couldn't support a company that allowed that kind of harassment to take place.
The supervisor was talked to (for the umpteenth time) but wasn't fired, and was basically told to make sure it didn't happen in front of guests anymore.
35. The Simplest Scam
I was temping for a few days at a sales company with sales people coming in and out all day long, phones constantly ringing, lots of craziness going on. At lunch one day, some service guy came in and said he was there for the fax machine. The receptionist pointed him to the fax machine and he went to work on it. Eventually, he said he was going to take it to his van to do the repairs.
The office manager came back from lunch to pull the oodles of faxes that came in during the lunch hour and the fax machine was gone. GONE! She asked the receptionist where it was and then started screaming, "We didn't call for service! You just let someone walk out the door with our fax machine!”
36. Couldn’t Have Tasted Very Good
A restaurant I worked at made kilos of aioli a week and would keep it in piping bags. We went through a lot and it would never be older than a week by the time we used it, so no one ever labeled what it was or the date. One day, we had a special that included a scallop mousse. We would cook it to order from raw.
We would keep the raw scallop mousse in piping bags as well. The sous chef, and also my boss, who was not liked in our kitchen, served raw scallop mousse instead of aioli to several customers that day. When asked why it looked so different than usual, he replied, "It's just over-whipped." He could have potentially made a lot of people sick, but no, he wasn’t even reprimanded.
37. Hindrance, Not Help
I work retail. We have this thing called in-store pick up where you basically place an order online and pay the online price but you get to pick it up at a nearby store instead of waiting for it to be shipped from states away. Black Friday comes along and for some reason, in-store pick-up was still available—which turned out to be a huge problem.
All day before and all day of Black Friday, we have about 3 managers picking up items off the sales floor to place on hold for the people placing the orders online. Totaling about 300-400 online orders in two days. A different manager from another department decided it would be nice to help and cancel the orders that we were out of stock for.
Little did she know, she toggled the section where all the orders were and she deleted A-T (by last name). When she realized she'd made a mistake, it was too late. A majority of the orders were canceled. Even the ones that were completed and paid for. The next day people start showing up to pick up their orders to find that we didn't have them in our system.
Their orders were canceled and it would take 72 hours for the money to be refunded to their cards, leaving them with no money for three days...after the Black Friday sales were long gone. I had several people screaming that they had spent $2,000 on gifts and that now they didn't have the gifts, or the money to buy them from the floor.
All in all, she was promoted later to a higher position, I don't know how she kept the job.
38. The Power Of Social Media
My one coworker turned out to be a spy for a competitor, leaking information from strategy meetings and the like. I actually fired him once I got him to admit to it, but then he went to someone above me and got re-hired into another department because he claimed he would talk poorly about the company on Twitter.
The exec was terrified of being disparaged on social media and that was more important than the fact the guy was trying to sabotage the company. I can't make this up. He ended up getting fired a month later after someone filed a harassment complaint against him. He finally became enough of a liability that Twitter didn't matter, I guess.
39. She Does Whatever She Pleases
I worked at Subway for six months. My assistant manager, following a long list of minor infractions, decided she wasn't going to show up one night, without calling in. The problem being that this particular night was Halloween and she didn't bother getting anyone else to cover for her. So I was there alone and dealing with a lot.
My boss (the manager) apologized profusely and went on and on but ended up not punishing the assistant manager at all (they were longtime friends). I put in my 2 weeks’ notice about a month after that.
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40. All Bark, No Bite
I work for a security company that supplies doormen to a few different pubs in my town as well as having the contract to have a guard at all but 1 adult beverage store in town which has its own security. One day one of our guards turned away a middle-aged woman early in the day for being too intoxicated. That wasn't the last we saw of her, though. Two hours later the same woman returned.
She was even more intoxicated...wielding the broken neck of a bottle. She entered the store swinging the bottle neck around, pushing over a few cartons of vino and two displays before she turned the glass on herself. She started to cut her arms and flick bodily fluids around, then aggressively approached the counter. It was like a horror movie.
Our guard was standing next to the end of the counter and the woman would have had to pass him to get to the staff. Would have. But he basically ran to the other side of the store to get away from her, leaving the manager of the store to tackle her and hold her down. The guard ended up coming over and helped hold her down until help arrived.
He ran when he could have done something to help. Our boss had to do a lot of work smoothing things over with the store owners and their manager. They banned that guard from working at their store, but he still works for us as a bouncer where he's basically useless, but he keeps his job by being big and mean-looking.
41. Absolutely Clueless
An assistant manager at a photography studio I worked at was in the studio alone. It was one of those mall studios. She got a call that her kid was sick and she needed to pick her up. So she left the studio without closing the doors or calling anyone else in. She left the cameras out and the computers were out for anyone to mess with or take.
She left the cash in the register with her ID logged in so all anyone need to do was hit the button that said "open drawer" on it to get all the cash. She left thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment open for anyone to take but because she got lucky and nobody took anything, she didn't get fired.
42. Second Chances Are For People Willing To Change
I worked for a company where they didn't believe in firing people and loved giving them multiple chances to do better before they would even consider it. My favorite instance would be when I was managing and I wouldn't let an employee seat a large party in her section because she was a terrible server and was an angry person.
She shouldn't have been hired but my manager felt sorry for her and the restaurant got a kickback because she had a record. She approached me and asked why they hadn't been sat in her section and I told her that her strength wasn't with large parties and I didn't want to put her in a situation where she was overwhelmed. That was the WRONG answer.
She lost her mind and went through the kitchen letting everyone know she would be waiting out back to beat me up when I got off work. I was six months pregnant. I don't know if she ended up waiting out back or not, I had my husband come pick me up in the front of the building. My manager promised to take care of the situation.
But guess what, this girl was back as usual the next day. I was told to suck it up and pretend it didn't happen and treat her as such. Even though she threatened not only me but my unborn child. I've seen cooks punch each other in the face over garlic bread. Nothing ever happened. So glad I don't work for that company anymore.
43. It Doesn’t Add Up
When I was teaching at an academy in Seoul, I took over teaching a math class for a colleague who was actually promoted. When I took over, he never told me what page they were on or anything, so I asked the kids and they were utterly confused. It took an entire class for me to work it out. Somehow, they were all on different pages.
And it wasn't that he was all avante garde and "letting the children work at their own pace," helping them out as needed. The kids told me he would come in, tell them to get out their math books, and then he would just sit there and they would work. He would mark randomly and not every page they finished had been checked to see if it was correct.
When class was over, he would tell them to pack up and then just go. Some of them were on unit 9, some unit 7, one poor boy was on unit 2. It was a mess. When I told my boss about it (because I had absolutely no idea how I was supposed to teach a class like that), she just gave me a new math book to work through with the kids and nothing happened to him.
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44. Mistakes Don’t Count If You’re Hot
Many years ago an attorney I worked with falsified an affidavit to make it look like she had received a ruling on a certain date that would have made her appeal timely. I pointed it out to the boss, who literally had hired the other attorney for her body. He did nothing because I guess breaking the rules didn’t make her less pretty.
I left the firm not long after that. I probably should have reported it to the state disciplinary counsel but it turns out you can't do that if it will negatively impact the client, which reporting it would have done. I found out later that she left the practice of law entirely after getting married and thus becoming undesirable to the boss.
45. Sweeping It Under The Rug
I worked at a webhosting tech support company and a coworker accidentally deleted another customer's website. This was on a Unix system, so it wasn't possible to undo the delete. He deleted the command history to cover his mistake and then told the customer that the website was lost due to a hard drive failure.
The customer hadn't been keeping backups and said that he lost his entire livelihood. It was devastating. The employee told management about the situation and they ran with it to avoid getting sued. They told the customer that hardware issues sometimes happen and because he hadn't opted into our managed backup services, the data loss was on him.
They offered the customer several months of free webhosting as compensation and the problem went away. A week after seeing this play out, I put in my two-weeks’ notice.
46. Time To Retire
I worked at the corporate office for a small theater chain. The manager of the office is old and has a hormone imbalance on top of being of German ancestry, so he was always cranky and had an explosive temper. It seriously got so bad. There were only 4 or 5 people working in the office including me, and getting into shouting matches with him was a common occurrence for all of us.
Sometimes we'd storm out, and he was always right behind us or calling us apologizing and begging us to come back. Outside of the stressful atmosphere of the office when he could relax a bit, he was a genuinely nice guy; always took us out to lunch/dinner, gave us comps and freebies at his theaters. He had a genuinely kind heart, he just couldn't handle stress at all.
47. Calling Out Injustice
It was actually me; I still have no idea what I was thinking. The owners of the company all showed up for a company meeting, and gave this 30-minute-long speech about how much they value our work and they wanted to reward us. They started handing out checks, I open it up super excitedly and see the total was $2,000.
Now, I don’t make a ton of money and I was having health issues and had been to the ER a few times in the last few months. So this money would literally save me. Everyone is all excited and very surprised at our management who were known to be penny pinchers that didn’t care at all about employees would do this. Then I see it.
The checks were all dated for 2 years from now. They said if we stayed with the company with no write-ups and never miss a day of work we could cash those checks in 2 years. I just lost it. I walked up to the front of the presentation, held my check up, ripped it into shreds, and said, "This is some serious nonsense", and threw the shreds at the owners.
Surprisingly I wasn’t fired. Probably because I am the highest producing employee in the company, or maybe they realized toying with people like that really wasn’t a good idea. Who knows.
48. All You Need Is A Little Charm
I had a coworker named Ron. Ron was a laid-back guy and you could tell that right away when talking with him. He was a very likable guy and to this day I'm pretty sure that's the only reason he was able to stick around. Anyway, Ron loved to talk. Like, non-stop. It was all or nothing for him: either he sat there quietly or he just kept on going until somebody stopped him.
Well, our manager was the micromanagement type and would constantly get irritated with Ron not only for talking but for distracting the rest of us. She would yell at any of us for talking but she always let Ron get away with it a little bit more. One day, Ron was feeling especially chatty. He loudly admitted that he was high on Percocet.
After a few of us laughed, he told us that he gets high on Percocet every single morning before work. He told us that we had never seen him sober. We just stared at him with blank faces. Cue my manager walking over. She tells us to keep it down and get back to work, making no mention of Ron's comments. But Ron just keeps on talking. About superhero movies, Netflix docs, and Michael Jordan.
Basically just a bunch of stuff that had no relation to our work. The manager comes back over, tells him to be quiet again. This happened three more times before lunchtime finally rolled around. Ron gathered his things and went to lunch. After 30 minutes, he hadn't come back. After an hour, he still hadn't come back.
In fact, he still hadn't come back by the time I was ready to leave. After clocking out and walking downstairs, I see Ron passed out on one of the tables in the cafeteria. He showed up to work the next day and my manager never said a word, and everything went back to normal. I no longer work that job but just before I left, Ron had been promoted. My mind was blown.
49. I Told You So
I work as a bank teller, and at the time I was working in a drive-thru with Tom. Now our building basically was a tiny lobby for customers and our vault room, which is where we would view the customers in the drive-thru. There were two people in the lobby, an older woman and a man, probably earlier 30s. I took care of the old lady's deposit.
Before I could send her on her way, she asked if she could use our restroom. Our restroom was in the vault room with the tellers, so I wasn't able to let her in from the lobby, especially when there was another customer in there. I apologized and pointed her to where another business who would let her use the bathroom.
But Tom let her in saying, "She's just a little old lady, we can take her if she tries something." He could not have been more wrong. The other dude pulled out a gun. And we got robbed. For the second time in two weeks. Tom still works for the company.
50. Whose Mistake Was It?
I got my buddy CJ a job at my gas station and it's his first day. He was working a register and was doing pretty good. My manager was messing with the lottery tickets or something behind us. I hear CJ say from his register, "C'mon, Grandma, hurry up. You've used a debit card before." My manager was too shocked to even respond.
Both of us just look at him. I'm FURIOUS that he just messed up the job that I vouched for him to get. He looks confused for a second, then starts to chuckle. It was his actual grandmother. We all had a good laugh and it was a good day.
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