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.
in the early 2000s*
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.
Oh boy, I’ve seen a few:
-
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…
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
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.
I got fired for reading the newspaper during my lunch break. Once a week this newspaper came with a for hire section that also included career advice and al that stuff. I was reading that part but the CEO called me into his office to tell me off. I called his bluff and he fired me.
I was scheduled to lead a team in China for a few weeks and after that had to go to the US for some other job. Sadly people that are fired can’t work off premises anymore so the staff manager begged me to accept their withdrawal of my discharge.
I kindly declined and got payed out a years’ wage. Took the time to reorientate into less toxic work environment. I now work with politicians, don’t know what happened there.
I think the CEO firing you meant that he wasn’t bluffing.
He first lade a threat. Then I called his bluff and then he pushed through.
In that way I got my full year off.
The stupid thing was that I was fired for reading a newspaper. I didn’t take it up to court because I knew I was getting a full years pay if they fired me that way.
How do you get a full-year’s pay after getting fired?
Contractual and lawfiul reasons.
You can’t be fired without proper cause so when they fire you without proper cause the wil have to keep you on board for a while or choose to pay you out for that amount of time. I was sort of a foreman with a teal of about 20 technicians and I also had to work directly with our customers. They deemed me a liability because I was fired so they chose to pay out.
Same with salesmen. When you fire them without proper cause they want you out of their network as soon as possible and won’t take the risk of letting you work with costumers anymore so they just pay out the amount of time that is needed.
In Canada. If I get canned my severance is 1.5 years salary. (Based on length of emplyment.) It’s even better in Europe. It’s what happens when a country doesn’t flipflop between two right wing parties and actually has a party focused on the working class.
Cries in American
Yeah like, lol
This CEO thought that someone who was going to lead a team in China for his company would look for work through the newspaper?
This is about 20 years ago. Anyway, the absurdity of the situation still strikes me today. I was reading the newspaper provided by the company and mister manager was angry that I read something he didn’t like so he tried to force me into submission.
Worked at IBM. Co-worker was in the datacenter, saw a bluescreened machine, and rebooted it. Much chaos ensued. Machine was part of a stability testing project, team running it was OTW to the DC to look at the machine, and were very confused when they arrived that it was running. “Helpful guy” was chastised, given a warning about touching machines that weren’t his responsibility.
Two weeks later. Same guy. Same machine. Same bluescreen. Guess what he did? He rebooted it. Again.
Walked to the door that day.
First time was an honest mistake. Second time… That’s all on him.
Exactly. Always wondered what he was thinking the second time, lol!
I worked with a guy who’s wife had just had a baby and the baby was sick. The guy was very good at his job but was working from home without really asking permission. We have some leeway in this matter but technically he didn’t clear it. His supervisor really had it in for him and was trying very hard to get him fired for falsifying his time card. I don’t know why he didn’t like him, but the supervisor was a real ass. It may have been racist motivation, but I’m not sure.
I should point out that I had asked this guy to do some work for me that I didn’t have the capability to do and this guy approached it in such a unique way that the customer and some universities were really interested in his work. This is a defense contractor environment where every working hour has to be accounted for. Whenever I asked the guy a question whether via email or telephone, he always responded immediately. It was all computer code so I didn’t see a problem with this.
When he came into work and told me what was going on I immediately contact the manager on his behalf.
Well bottom line is that management pretty much dropped the subject and the supervisor was walked out of the facility. Turns out he had been falsifying his own time card the whole time. How’s that for hypocrisy?
Justice served.
deleted by creator
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.
A kid got fired for finding a pen on the ground. Person returned for the pen and then called corporate claiming the kid stole the pen
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.
Posting a selfie of himself holding a burger and a pop next to the “No food, no drinks, no photographs” sign in the secure datacenter?
I love this one
Omg, that’s hilarious!
Harvey’s Hamburgers counted the times I punched in 1-3 minutes past my official start time (despite me being there 20 minutes in advance all times) as being “late” and fired me based off of this.
The two other employees were both pregnant with the manager so I have a suspicion that I got fired because at that time I couldn’t get pregnant. I still can’t get pregnant now because I’m a man, but I also couldn’t get pregnant back then.
I glanced at your username after reading this and thought it said PregoBoi lol
Finally after all these years I learned that u actually can get pregnant as a man as long as you eat so many perogies. It’s a food baby and mines named Samantha.
And if it’s a boy?
Thasaman.
Samantha.
That managers name? Elon Musk.
Dudes name was Clint. Imagine giving birth to a human child and then looking down at the pink noisemaker and thinking “that’s a Clint”.
Now that there are no other men around I can impregnate all the women. Oh wait, I already did that.
Homie out here flexing with his extremely motile sperm.
Working at a call center and we had bonuses for people that could book the most hotel rooms (hotels.com). This one lady suddenly started winning all the bonuses day after day. This went on for almost 2 weeks. Then the FBI showed up. Turned out she was just stealing people’s CC numbers and booking them hotel rooms without them knowing.
Uh… That’s gotta be the lowest possible profit way to steal someone’s credit card funds. She could have just spent the money on the cards.
I did this briefly years ago for a hotel chain (the booking, not the stealing). We got an extra quarter for everyone we transferred to another department for deals or some shit. We were supposed to ask people if they would like to hear about it but I found out that as long as it transferred they could immediately hang up and I still got my bonus. After that every caller I had got transferred to the other department for the rest of the time I worked there.
I made an extra few hundred bucks and got canned about the same time I found a job in my field. No FBI involved, though.
Let’s be honest, corporate was just mad they didn’t think of it sooner! :p
I got fired when the company decided to downsize.
“How is that dumb?” you ask? That happened less than two weeks after I was hired. The boss man’s speech indicated that that was the result of a long deliberation by corporate. So if you knew there could be layoffs any moment, why the fuck were you hiring?
This is usually done to keep things going as normal as possible for as long as possible. Once people start noticing something is wrong, the best people start looking elsewhere. Before you know it, not only is the company in financial trouble, but it can’t recover because some of the best people left. At least one time I witnessed, the company was working on layoff plans and even limited bankruptcy, but at the same time negotiating with the investment firm that owned part of the company to get more money. If they got the money, everything would be fine. It wasn’t till that fell through, they had to start laying people off.
As if the best people won’t leave once the layoffs start
Right but you’re trying to avoid them leaving before that in case you get a win and don’t need to make the lay-offs. If they leave earlier the win you’re hoping for may no longer be enough to save you.
Exactly. Companies are typically working on multiple conflicting scenarios because you don’t know which it’s going to be
Yup, I worked for a company that was laying off but they were still hiring because, “they had a hiring policy.” Absolutely nonsensical.
What do you think would happen if the C-suite called HR and told them “we’re about to announce a downsizing in 2 months, stop hiring people”?
I worked for a company that did just that and it was the best way to do it because a lot of people left on their own.
The problem is that this way, your best people with the most options leave first.
Those you want to keep long enough to do the re-structuring and make the numbers on the books look good, so you can sell the company before it disintegrates completely.Aren’t those people also the first to be let go? They’re the most expensive and you can maximize short term profits by letting go to expensive employees and hiring on cheap ones.
Not always. I think the best people think they WON’T be let go and some others who don’t perform, figure they are on the chopping block.
In our case it didn’t matter because they wound up having four rounds of layoffs before shutting that location down entirely. So it really wound up being WHEN you were fired, not IF.
Because they’re heartless.
This is technically fired, but it’s more like quitting. It doesn’t perfectly fit this thread but I love telling this story.
A few months into my first real job, the engineers got their raises (not me, I was new). 0%, after record profits, the team busting their ass and working insane hours, and promises of good raises. I think they got some gift cards or something.
One of my coworkers goes back to his desk, packs some stuff, walks to his car, and doesn’t come back. He got paid for a full month before they finally fired him. We got a beer after and he was like “oh I don’t think I’m gonna go back” in the most Office Space way
Did they not realize he wasn’t coming in anymore? How did he continue getting paid for a month?
Our boss was like “I’m sure he’s mad but he’ll cool off” for way too long lol
We also worked some insane hours across many locations so it wasn’t abnormal to not see your office mates for weeks at a time
There was a woman who was a retail store manager who just upped and left for the Congo. (Yes, really) Corporate didn’t fire her for a year. (Yes, really)
