33 Of The Quickest Ways People Have Seen A Coworker Get Canned
While some play video games to relax or experience a good story or whatever, speed-running games takes it to a whole new level.
Speed-running a game takes skill, commitment, perfect reflexes, and a whole lot of practice. Many people commend speed-runners for their sheer aptitude to run through a game like no other. It’s impressive to say the least.
Now, apply the same formula to folks who got fired from a job more or less as soon as they got hired for it. A recent AskReddit dealt with this very question of what’s the quickest way you saw a coworker get fired? and you’d be surprised to learn how many folks attempted a world record at this point. It’s actually impressive.
Now, apply the same formula to folks who got fired from a job more or less as soon as they got hired for it. A recent AskReddit dealt with this very question of what’s the quickest way you saw a coworker get fired? and you’d be surprised to learn how many folks attempted a world record at this point. It’s actually impressive.
It’s hard to explain why some employees choose to do intellectually questionable things at work. Heck, it’s often hard to pinpoint why people do stupid things in general.
Some venture to say that it’s stress. Even the smartest of people can succumb to the pressures of it. You see, stress inhibits your brain from working in unison with all of the other faculties. In turn, it can’t coordinate well and so bad decisions happen.
Others suggest deeper causes, like bad habits or self confidence. In the case of the former, unlearning things is harder than learning, and bad habits embedded through poor practice or lack of it altogether (among other things) can lead to equally bad results.
As for the latter, humans have a tendency of turning confidence into arrogance whenever it’s about defending ideas instead of pursuing what’s best.
This is besides things like success promoting stupidity (because it’s easier to learn from failure), reacting being easier than focusing (as folks tend to lose sight of long-term goals in favor of reactions making folks feel important), and knowing blocking learning (as you do need to be confident enough to believe what you know and humble enough to admit you were wrong).
And sometimes it’s by design. Sometimes when you work for, say, a bank, that has a set goal of, say, X number of accounts opened per person, which is more than what the current average is, and then the bank starts putting so much pressure on employees to get this done, that the employees start doing absolutely anything to get it done—like cheating the system and opening accounts and juggling money among them without anyone knowing, but the coins still clink in the bank’s favor. And then they got axed anyway while management got payouts for a job well done.
But even smart people can get fired. After all, a business is subject to things like market fluctuations and supply and demand and other economic forces. So, this can inevitably lead to mass firings.
Other times, smart people become victims of a “CFO budget target” mentality where the most effective way to cut costs is to let people go. People who cost the most, regardless of their actual benefit.
This is besides factors like bosses being incompetent narcissists who exploit crises to cover their own mistakes by finding scapegoats. Nobody’s safe from that.
So, if even the smart people don’t stand a chance sometimes, the chances are even thinner for those who don’t even have the mental capacity to stand up or even see it coming.
Well, unless, there’s one reality that might just save them.
Sometimes—sometimes—bad employees don’t get fired.
Maybe the manager can’t bring themselves to have the hard conversation that should lead to letting the employee go. They might also be hoping that the employee leaves on their own without a need to tackle the situation altogether.
If conditions are different, the manager might not let someone go because having any employee is better than having no employee. Hiring new people takes a lot of time, money and energy, and sometimes it’s just not worth it.
But it can be as simple as just feeling sorry for the employee. It’s normal for people to feel compassion for someone who’s about to lose their job. But while that is good, it shouldn’t mean that everyone else who also has to deal with the bad employee has to suffer through it.
Worked at a bank, we were robbed at gun point. One of the tellers was quick to tweet out “woooo get the rest of the day off!! Feel free to visit me at work with a gun and ski mask anytime!” Fired upon walking in the next morning.In my old law office, a firm wide email was sent out announcing the arrival of a new employee. We will call him Paul. So Paul decided to reply all to let all of us know that he was aware of our recent legal defeats, that many people should be fired for these failures, and that his hiring was the first good thing our firm had done in years.
The dude was a legal assistant right out of college with no experience.
A minute after the email went out, I heard a crazy shout and then watched one of the senior partners run past my office towards HR. And 5 minutes later Paul walked past with the HR manager and a security escort. He lasted less than 45 minutes.Coworker got promoted to team lead. He poached an employee from my team. Once the employee was reporting to him, he starts threatening the employee’s immigration work visa status. Employee goes right to HR. He is Indian, but he’s not on a visa. He’s a citizen. Dude went from promoted due to excellent performance to fired for being a racist f**k in about two days.Evidently robbed a bank on their lunch break. Came back like nothing happened then the cops showed up and took him down, it was crazy.As a teenager, I worked at a bowling alley. Within an hour, a new employee was fired because she dropped a ball on a complaining patron’s foot.Idiot pressed the emergency stop for fun on his second day at work.
The emergency stop that he hit switches off all drives on the 100m long paper machine. This means there is a loss of production for 3-4 hours for the entire paper mill.
He was immediately escorted from the factory premises by two colleagues.I was working at a Denny's. They hired a new manager, they were on-boarding her for her first day. Then I never saw her again and nobody had even mentioned her.
After a couple of days, I asked what happened to her; I figured she was working a different shift or she had possibly gotten covid. Nope; they just caught her smoking crack on camera.I saw a barista brushing his teeth in front of the espresso machine. I made a gesture to the mgr as she walked in, and they both walked out together. Like instant fire.When I was in high school I used to do seasonal work at haunted houses which I did for four years. A new guy that they hired was supposed to help with parking. Now, in the three years that I worked at this haunted house, they never once charged people for parking (it was a very dark parking lot off of a cliff so had to make sure no one drove off of it trying to park). This cheeky son of b***h started charging people $5 to park.
It was only found out after someone complained because they didn't have the money to go in with their friends because they had to pay for parking. I think the guy was only there a couple of hours before he got fired.Pulling into the parking lot on the first day.
Ran into a light pole that took out electricity to the whole site. Wasn't wearing a seat belt and was thrown into the front window. When we went out to see what had happened she reeked of booze and there were empty liquor bottles in the back of the car.
She never even made it to the front door, got a guest badge or started her orientation training.They got hired and then fell asleep during a meeting their first day and was asked not to come back.Early in my career I was an engineer on a refinery in the UK, and I was in charge of the QC lab. By law we had to have external independent testing on the refinery fuel products to confirm they complied with government regulations. It seemed getting a job for the testing company was that you had to be an adult and had a driving license. The lab had a lot of very nasty chemicals either being tested or used in the testing or cleaning of the oil products. A new young girl turned up for the testing company and was dipping her finger into a chemical called phenol and stating that "it makes your hand and arm go numb". Phenol is a severe muscle relaxant (including your heart) and can [end] you at very low concentrations. One hour into her employment we had paramedics on scene monitoring her vitals and was released after 8 hours. She didn't last the first hour of the first day and the testing company was fined pretty heavily.I had a coworker get picked for a random drug test. She went back to her desk to grab her purse, and just left the building, never tj return.A server and regional manager are standing at the pick up window.
RM: Run those plates that just came up.
Server: Those aren’t my plates, not my job.
RM: You don’t have a job. Get your stuff and go.New line cook thought it’d be funny walk around like Edward Scissorhands with all the knives.
He was around the corner right as a server was coming through, and she almost got *got*. New Line Cook just chuckled and waved his knife-hands around more until the GM strode right up behind him, grabbed him by the collar, and marched him right out the back door.
All this happened in under 5 minutes.The boss sat her down to talk about her recent behavior at work. She whipped out her phone and started taking a video, saying that it was her right to record for “when it goes to court.” The boss said “okay, this is the kind of stuff I’m talking about, you’re fired.” This was at a Domino’s Pizza.Someone finally lost their s**t at the photocopier (it was fairly new but regularly caused issues, lost jobs, printed on the wrong paper etc).
They unplugged it at the wall, opened the door to the fire stairs, and pushed the photocopier down the stairs - the noise and the mess (coloured toner spread over 5 floors worth of stairs) - caught everyone's attention.
They were escorted out by security immediately.
Its always the quiet ones you have to watch out for - nobody expected it from her.Was training this teenage guy, who on his first day came super high. On his first customers he said to the lady he was helping, “Maaaan, these are some huge knockers you’re carrying!” Yeah he was fired immediately!I fired someone who decided her second day that she was going to go out to lunch and not come back. The next morning she told everyone all about the shopping she did. She seemed confused about the expectations.When I was a teen I worked at a restaurant as a hostess and they hired this guy who was 20 to work with me as another host.Anyways first day he comes in works his 1 hour training shift and ask the manager to use his cellphone so he can call his mom to get him(this was around 2004 so cell phones weren’t as common as now). Manager thinks nothing of it and gives him his phone. He then just walked out immediately and left with his phone. Manager had to call his mom and she brought it back a few hours later saying he has a bad habit of forgetting things and not to fire him and he got fired anyways. Was the quickest I’ve seen anyone get fired.One day Tim announced that he wasn’t paid enough and was going to basically sit at his desk doing nothing until he was paid what he wanted.
20 minutes later the boss walked in and ask Tim if he could have a word with him.
5 minutes later the boss walked back in and announced that Tim no longer worked there and if there were any questions.
There were no questions.We have a set of movable stairs like they have in supermarkets. Goes about 2.5m in the air.
Old mate decided to vigorously shake and move it while another coworker was on it as a joke.
He went on suspension immediately and stayed there until he was officially fired and the two weeks notice ran out.Working at Domino's and one of the late night drivers bought their ps4 in and started playing mortal kombat on the security camera monitor.I worked at a lotteries company. A guy working in testing got access to production data and printed off some test tickets with some unclaimed winning numbers. He only did low amounts, like $500, and claimed 3 of them in 3 completely different locations around town. Of course the company was really really interested in the story of someone who found a 6-month old lottery ticket and claimed it, but they were even more interested to find it was the same person going to 3 locations. Needless to say when they realised the guy actually worked in the company, he got pulled into a room with cops a-waiting him.I worked at a bar and there was a bartender everybody liked. she made herself a drink while working which was not allowed. manager walks up, “what’s that?”, “my drink”, “you’re fired”.Guy at my job went on vacation the Friday before Thanksgiving and the whole week of Thanksgiving, only he wasn't approved. The boss literally told him if you don't come in tomorrow, you'll be fired because your vacation was never approved. Guy didn't show up Friday.
He walked into the office today like nothing happened and was told to hand over his keys and company phone and to get off the property immediately. He didn't understand why he was fired.At my first job, the dishwasher walked out into the dinner parlor and announced to all customers that “a contagious disease has been making its way through the kitchen.” Owner was in the building, dragged the guy out the front door by the wrist, and apologized to customers.
This was 2008.
Edit: left out the crucial tidbit that it was fabricated. Nobody was sick at all.Interviewed a guy that was replacing someone who was leaving. Offered the job and was supposed to start the next day.
Just so happened that we were having a going away party for the leaving dude that night so new guy was invited as a chance to “get to know the team.”
New guy shows up and proceeds to get absolutely s**t faced and asked the head of HR is she wanted to go back to his place because he “got a vibe” during the interview process.
Next day, new guy is a no-show so we were thinking bullet dodged. He shows up just before lunch clearly hung over making up some excuse for being late. Big boss came out and told the guy to gtfo.I was working at a place that made food items. You could have as many of these as you liked while at work but can only take one home with you.
A guy gets hired and takes advantage of this and consumes a bucket load of these items at work, which is fine, that's the deal.
He then goes to leave for the day and security asks to check his bag. He hesitates and asks security if they could just check it tomorrow instead. They say no, and he says "I do have some items in there, I haven't left the site yet, can I put them in your fridge?". Security relents and let's him do this.
Security then checks the fridge and there's 18 items in there that weren't before. The guy is immediately terminated. Lost his job over $8 worth of products.Showed up to work 2 hours late laughing about how she’d overslept as she’d been partying the night before. Tried to just start working like that was ok, and like she hadn’t been consistently “over sleeping” for a while. Same coworker also ruined her company computer by spilling iced coffee all over it. I think it was just over a month into employment before she was let go. She told everyone she left as “it wasn’t the right environment for her mental health”. Hasn’t worked since.A guy got hired in the first firm I ever worked for, turns up for first morning at work, and within an hour has emailed the entire company (6,000 people) about his band and their availability for birthdays, weddings, etc. He was dismissed by lunchtime.
Edit: answering the questions in the replies about how anyone junior could have access to the ‘All Users’ address. This was back in about ‘94, shortly after email (it was called MS Mail, I think - I assume the precursor to Outlook) was rolled out within the company. I remember not having a work email address when I joined. I don’t think the IT department had yet got up to speed on what could go wrong letting everyone have access to everything!A server I worked with was adding in her credit card tips and adding a quarter to every tip to charge on the card. A couple people every now and then would notice on their bank statement and it got to a point where management vetted her receipts one night and the tips she would enter in and sent her packing asap.He found a stray cat while on break. Proceeds to put said cat into a box. Places it under his desk to take home. We were working at a call center so people were questioning where the meowing was coming from. When management found him with with cat, his excuse was "I didn't know I couldn't have pets here". Was gone before lunch on his first shift.
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