I was working in the IT admin office for a time while doing software development, and got to witness this guy who came in to have his laptop fixed/swapped; and he said “You guys don’t like, check the laptops for files and stuff, right?”.
And the IT guy was legendary, didn’t skip a beat, was like “Nah, nah, we don’t have time for that crap.”.
As soon as the guy was out of the room, we checked his laptop’s files.
Porn. So much porn. Like, gigs of it, and this was in the early 2000’s when that meant a lot.
We went to HR, and they called him up and reviewed, and SOMEHOW, he dodged the bullet and they retained him. The reason? It was his porn. You read that right. He had gigs of porn of him banging his stripper GF on his laptop, and because it wasn’t “downloaded” porn, he got off.
Then a month later he was let go when he was found taking pictures with his cell phone over the cubicle wall of a female employee without her knowledge.
But I’ll never forget the mental gymnastics that happened to convince HR that porn only meant pictures of “other people” being naked, not himself and his GF.
I have a similar story. One of the security guards was found to have a hard drive full of BDSM porn. When interrogated about it, she said “It’s not pornography. Those are my holiday photos.” And sure enough, she was the one holding the whip.
The compromise reached was that she wouldn’t put her holiday photos on her office computer any more.
OK, so we were having a Christmas luncheon at work. HR made the flyer. It said “Holiday” party. Somebody felt that was part of the war on Christmas, and crossed out Holiday and wrote Christmas. That wasn’t the issue. Another guy took offense to that guy, and made a counterfeit flyer for the company Cthulu summoning. It said that the human sacrifice would be at 12, lunch at 1 so bring a change of clothes. He posted those all over.
That’s a firing.
Watched a guy with an iPad stuffed down the front of his pants walk out through a metal detector. The outline and part of the box were very visible.
Not quite fired but close enough. I know a guy who had gotten his 100% disability from the military during his first enlistment (basically only worked for about 2 years and then medical said he was borked so he was going to collect a paycheck for the rest of his life)
Then he popped positive for smoking weed on a random drug test and lost it all. Now he’s being discharged on an ‘other than honorable’ which means he loses all his benefits.
I worked in a call center for an internal support team. We had a group that started early in the morning since our headquarters was on the West Coast and calls would come in really early from the East Coast offices. Every Friday we would organize a group order for breakfast from a local diner and I usually was the one who would go and pick it up (long before DoorDash). One particular morning the order was missing a side of bacon for one of the team members. This person got so angry that they didn’t have their bacon, they decided it would be a good idea to call the diner from the middle of our office while most agents were on the phone with end uses. They proceeded to yell at and lecture the poor diner worker who answered the phone saying things like “You forgot my damn bacon, I think you did it on purpose” and “What are you gonna do to fix this?” The call lasted a couple minutes as most of us were looking at one another in shock. Unsurprisingly, they did not return on Monday and we all couldn’t believe someone was fired for missing bacon.
There was a car wash service nearby where I lived, it was places at the end of supermarket parking lot. They got luxury Dodge Challenger car to polish its rims. An employee of that car wash decided to take a ride and crashed the car on a tree. He didn’t even have driving license.
Link in Polish, there are pictures, use translator for details: https://wroclaw.naszemiasto.pl/pracownik-myjni-rozbil-na-drzewie-luksusowe-auto-klienta/ar/c1-7527497
I worked in a glasshouse for a while. Since everything is glass, and the temperature is pretty high, the new guy went to change his pants from long ones to short ones. The son of the boss, who just started recently, decided he did not like it and fired him on the spot.
I thought it was really stupid. Unfortunately there was no talking him out of it. The guy was hard to work with, and part of the reason I quit that job later.
the new guy went to change his pants from long ones to short ones.
Wait so was he fired for wearing short pants, for leaving with the intention of changing his pants, or because (the reason I initially thought the glass was relevant) the new guy changed his pants within view of the boss’s son through the glass walls?
It was because he went to the changing rooms to change his pants. So he was away from work like maybe 10 minutes.
Oh boy, I’ve seen a few:
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At a startup, one dude had obviously lied about his credentials. He was hired as a writer, but couldn’t write shit. He spent the entire day hitting on women and bitching about how his ex wanted support for a child he wasn’t convinced was his. He was fired about 3 days in…
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When I was a student, I worked at a sports store. One girl there was, let’s say, packing in the chest compartment. She was also about 17, maybe 18. Most people were nice enough to not hit on her, but one day the security guard (who was maybe late thirties at the youngest) made a comment to me to say “I would absolutely destroy her back door, you know?” (but slightly more graphic). I told management, and she was brought in. She broke down, and went over all the off-hand comments he’d made to her. The manager immediately walked out, told him he was fired, and apologised to her.
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An old employer hired this guy who was a Microsoft MVP nominee. The guy was one of those types that could talk brilliantly, but couldn’t take criticism. He listened to me, as I was senior, but ignored anything from managers or people at his level. To cut a long story short (I could write a book on this guy, and it would be hilarious) he lied about a project he worked on solo for six months. After checking in on his work we found he had bypassed our PR system and had been accepting all of his own requests, so no one has verified his code. It was an absolute mess. It cost the company a quarter of a million, for a project that should have brought in £50k. We later found out he was a nominee because he was so active on some Microsoft support forums, and mostly got that through posting “yeah I had the same problem” or from supplying easy or wrong answers. That loophole was closed shortly after…
That reminds me of a guy at a company party that was making lewd comments about the head of HR. He told the guy next to him he’d f her so hard, sparks would fly out of her vagina. Didn’t realize he was talking to her fiancé. Then, proceeded to grope another female employee. When they called him I to the front office the next day, he honestly had no idea he was getting fired. He thought he was getting a promotion.
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I once long ago worked in the incoming mail department for are insurance company. It was basically data entry.
Thing was, there wasn’t enough work.
There were two teams of five, plus a supervisor for each team, and a manager above them.
So what would happen was, we would arrive in and go to our spots, a few minutes later the main would arrive. Most days there was 100 pieces of mail to process, a really busy day may have twice this amount.
Even the most complex items would take me 10 minutes to process. The bulk was around 3 minutes, given the above, could personally have processed all the mail on an average day, with 3hrs to spare for complications.
On an average day, I got in the order of 30-40 minutes of work.
On slow days, it was more like 20.
I started coming in late, sleeping at my desk. Wandering around, going up to the upper management offices and the roof.
I eventually got fired, after months of this behaviour. Not because I was underperforming, no! I got fired, because I was “effecting the moral of the team”
I can see the point of why I was fired. I was an arse, I wasn’t suitable for the role.
What did your other coworkers do all day?
Pretend to work, or were incompetent.
Similar things happened to me too. Could finish day’s work in an hour. It was a small company, didn’t have extra work they could give me, didn’t like I was idle most of the time since we had co-working space. And didn’t increase my salary even through they said they’d increase based on performance on provisional period.
They finally increased salary after 9months (said they’d do it in 3-6), and it was nominally higher like everyone else. Resigned the next day. When I went back few months back to get something every face was new one except the upper management and their family.
So basically they count on people to leave in a year or two, so they can hire other batch of fresh graduates in low salary again.
Working in IT - Desktop support. One of my co workers picked up a ticket to go replace a keyboard in HR. HR was in a different building and it was mid winter and really cold out. He grabbed his coat and walked over there to replace the keyboard. Apparently he had a fat stanky bag of weed in his coat pocket. It was apparently very noticeable. A phone call was made before he even got back, and he was immediately let go.
This was before any kind of legalization existed in the area.
What kind of HR rat snitched on him?
It’s HR. That’s basically their job. They pretend they are there to protect the employees, but they are mostly there to protect the company.
Ugh the war on drugs is so stupid.
Guy tried to enlist the boss’s brother in law to falsify work. “We don’t have to walk all the way up the mountainside to do the work, the client will never check it”. Then he went home, leaving said brother in law to do all the work by himself.
A week after getting fired, he called the boss about the performance bonus that was promised at the start of the contract.
We had one new guy getting fired for “refusing to talk to people who don’t have a university degree”.
That’s not a firing offense, that guy has HR Director of Hiring written all over him!
Work in a warehouse where boxes open all the time and fall out on the floor. This supervisor found a box of spilled pens and used one of them to write something down and they fired him for stealing 😂. I think they were looking for a reason cuz he was kind of uncontrollable.
There’s a linux command, called “touch” which sets the timestamp on a file. It’s used for several things, including testing that the user has write privileges and that the filesystem is working.
I heard of a sysadmin who used to use “touch kids”, creating or updating the file ‘kids’. Some sort of internalised joke, I assume. His boss told him not to because it was inappropriate. Then again formally when he kept on doing it. Dude couldn’t stop, like some form of muscle memory. Kept on using kids as a test filename.
So yeah, he got sacked pretty quickly.
One of my current co-workers. In his previous job, his company had him managing a warehouse by himself. Doing all the work, including the jobs that by the company handbook required two people and protective gear that they also didn’t provide. When they were finished with that place they fired him for ‘working unsafely’.
Not his responsibility, but still a dumb way to get rid of an excess employee.
