Article created by: Saulė Tolstych
Employment – love it or loathe it, it is a necessity that takes over our lives, and it just so happens that sometimes we have no other choice but to endure it.
Not everybody has the luxury of loving their job. Some folks were unfortunate enough to get positions in toxic work environments, where they have to deal with the unethical approaches of their management; others might have learned that the field they chose is not their cup of tea, yet quitting on the spot is not something they can afford to do.
For having a criminal record. From a crime he committed 30 years ago. He was 50, had a rough childhood and had just managed to get his life back together. He had worked for this company for close to two year and was by far the hardest worker in that factory, he would output at least twice as much product per day as the next best person. He took time off to get married and regional management enacted a blanket rule and the branch management said nothing. I learned a hard lesson that day, companies have no loyalty towards their employees.
He went on to work for their competitors two blocks away and was given a pay rise so at least it worked out ok for him.
Guy was fired for stealing from the register. We were all surprised since he was well liked, and a hard worker. Few months later I was helping the manager clean behind the cash wrap. When we got to the register that employee used most often and popped out the cash drawer we found a handful of 20s behind it. Turned out that bills were getting caught and dragged behind the till.
I worked at a phone store. When I was hired they very clearly stated that client privacy is super important. The guy i was hired to replace had been fired on the spot because he had sold a contract to a client, thought the girl was pretty and later that evening called her to ask her out. I'd say that's such a massive breach of privacy he deserved to get fired over it.
A client's wife made a scene that one of our receptionists was sending her husband nudes. She came with printouts. Was fired that day. I've never seen a woman so hell-bent on destroying another.
Many years ago, when I was working at a Wall Street bank...
Dude got drunk at the office Christmas party, and knocked one of his female coworkers out cold. He had no memory of this. Monday AM he calls security because his badge doesn't work. They come down with a box containing his personal items, and hand it to him with a letter from legal stating that he'll be arrested if he ever shows up on their premises again.
Okay this is going to sound crazy but it JUST happened to me like an hour or two ago.
I'm training with a work at home call center right now and we use a zoom like program to communicate and like we typically mute our mics when we're not actively talking. So we are in kind of a just back from break lul before we got started and someone forgot to remute thier mic and like we could hear her talking to her husband (which is a nono because you're technically supposed to be in a room alone because credit info)
So we hear them talking and we're like "Yoooo mic check."
And then she said it y'all.
She said the n word. Not with a soft a, it was a hard r. A really hard r.
She was fired by the end of the hour.
Sleeping on the job.
The kicker is, he was doing it every day, but nobody important noticed. But then they talked about his performance and how he needed to get more done, he said that he cant, cause he needed his mid day nap.
The person was lying about doing their job. When we go to locations we have to get the signature of the person in charge on logs and submit them daily. Apparently this person was just walking into places, getting the signature of some random employee or just putting fake names, then immediately walked out without doing the job. They would hang out in their vehicle (work cars have GPS trackers) for the amount of time they said they were there on the inspection and repeat. Got away with it for months.
Only way anyone found out was one of the places called called complaining they hadn't gotten an inspection all year. Supervisors pulled logs and went to the places and verified that the person had not done any of their work.
Guy at a big retailer drank a bottle of wine in his car during his break and then returned to work. He got the wine sleepies, and decided it was a good idea to nap in one of the display beds in the furniture dept. that probably would have been bad enough, but the thing is…. Nobody noticed him there. Security locked and armed the building and everyone went home. Fast forward to 3am and the alarms are going off and security was called in for an intruder. He had woken up and started wandering through the store. Security and cops just let him leave. Fast forward again until 8am and I (then the loss prevention manager) get called upstairs because the managers found a pair of shoes at the foot of a slept in bed. Which was also soaked through with urine. $4k in damages and the most awkward conversation later, he denied being drunk and almost got to keep his job on a technicality.
She had head lice so bad they were laying eggs in her hair and inside her eye sockets. She refused to stay home and get medical attention and eventually had to be terminated because she kept coming to work and causing the rest of the line to be quarantined and tested, disrupting production on 4 different occasions.
I'm a Director at a zoo here.
More people than you might think (mostly interns and one or two full-time hires) have been fired for being unable or unwilling to deal with the stench/foulness of the job.
Mechanic of 32 years got fired for disabling the RF entry card readers on the back side of the warehouse, so he could throw parties in it after warehouse hours, nobody batted an eye until they mistakenly invited the plant manager to it.
One woman got long covid and a note from her doctor saying she couldn't come into the office for some respiratory sensitivity thing (we have all worked from home for two years and are now coming back full time). Bosses said she had to come in. They can't fire her for being sick, so they wrote her up for insubordination because she was using too much bold font in her emails and it came across as rude. They are now firing her because she has a record of insubordination.
Social worker here.....one lady was fired for falsifying case notes.....said she was "pre-documenting" her work.
He was in bad financial straits, and had debt collectors harassing him at work. We had a department-shared phone line, so about five or six of us would randomly get calls intended for him.
He got fired because we couldn't get work done under those circumstances. But you know, he couldn't pay back his debts if he was harassed out of his paycheck.
She couldn't count. She was a cashier.
My brother was hired at a bakery, as a baker. He got fired his first day cuz he couldn't decorate a cake
Neighbor’s babysitter got fired because she left the kids (3 kids under 10) alone in the house when she was scheduled to leave. Apparently she thought the Dad was still upstairs and she got paid weekly so she didn’t have any reason to talk to him after she had put all the kids to bed. But Dad had left and the Mom was late coming home. The Mom about had a heart attack. I could hear her yelling from my house.
Edit: counts for the prompt because I also babysat for them occasionally
Stole a ton of money from our workplace
We worked at a gas station and he would incorrectly count the money in the till and pocket the rest. Also would delete security footage off the computer. Took a long time for them to figure out it was him. There was a warrant out for his arrest after and I'm not sure what happened after that. What's crazy is he was always super nice and you would never suspect him of it.
Waked in on a guy chugging from a fifth of Smirnoff in the break room at the movie theater we worked at. He told me he had drank a bit more than half of it. I didn’t rat on him but I didn’t really have to after he vomited in the concession booth…
She was drinking on the job. Would frequent a local bar/restraunt every day on her lunch. The owner went for lunch one day and saw her belligerent at the bar. Instantly fired, packing her office by the time lunch was over.
scammers called and asked for $2k, she pulled it outta the safe and handed it to them no questions asked
Back when I was 21, I got fired from the green apron coffee company because I was drinking during the overnight shifts when we were drive thru only. Fair's fair.
From my current company, I've seen two people fired for six-figure overruns on projects. One was due to the person not really understanding any of the technical details of what they were managing, but they'd gotten by for years on having really good technical staff underneath them so they only had to do admin. The other was supposedly a senior subject matter expert but burned through over $100k of project budget to fill in a 3-tab worksheet that should have taken 2 weeks tops... and none of it was even correct.
In both cases there were some obvious issues with higher up leadership as well that let those situations get to that point, but no one came out a winner.
