58 Times People Got Fired In Ways They Might Never Forget

People get fired for a multitude of reasons, most of which are commonplace. It could be due to consistently subpar performance, attendance issues, or simply a poor cultural fit. 

But there are employees who get terminated from their companies for the wildest reasons. These are the stories you’re about to read, courtesy of a lengthy Quora thread. Here, someone asked, “Have you ever had a co-worker who you worked closely with get fired for something truly shocking that you never saw coming?

From inappropriate behavior towards a patient to being falsely accused of stealing meat, you simply can’t make these stories up.

#1

I had a co-worker who was moving up a bit. His ex just had their baby, he was a proud father, getting in as many hours as he could so the baby would have a roof and food. And then one day, he stopped coming in. There was speculation as to his leaving, but none of us knew for sure. We knew he wouldn’t have just quit.

Then a couple weeks later, I see him at a furniture store. He tells me what happened, and told me I could tell the others as well. He had been waiting in the queue to pay for his food on his break. He was getting thirsty, and there were several people ahead of him. So he decided to take a sip of the drink he was about to purchase. Well, one of our other coworkers saw this and turned him in…FOR STEALING! He didn’t steal; he was going to pay. But did he have proof he was going to actually pay? He got fired. It pissed all of us off, and we came to dislike the one who turned him in.

Image source: Marissa Pond, Illia Horokhovsky/Unsplash (not the actual photo)

#2

A woman at our company was an executive assistant whom everyone liked and respected. She was professional, efficient, friendly, and physically attractive to boot. One day, there was an article cut out from the police blotter of the local PennySaver making its way around the company.

“Jane,” the assistant, had been arrested and charged with embezzling a huge amount of money from our company. It turned out that there was a system for entering expenses, where if someone at her level needed to purchase something, they were required to enter it somewhere in the computer before the purchase was made. She figured out that no one was checking these expenses. So she was creating fake purchases, such as office supplies, for large amounts of money and actually purchasing American Express Travelers checks instead.

She was having the checks delivered to her right at the company. Somehow, somebody finally figured out what she was doing, and she had actually quit just before they arrested her. The girl who wound up replacing her got a bunch of mail one day and opened an Express envelope addressed to “Jane,” and it was jammed with traveler’s checks. She handed the checks over to the head of HR, who already knew why they were showing up in the mail. No one there ever saw that coming.

Image source: Bob Smith, Curated Lifestyle/Unsplash (not the actual photo)

#3

Yes, and I got him fired. I was the night, Trauma charge nurse at the hospital where I worked. About midnight we were finishing up an emergency appendectomy.

The patient was a very attractive young lady who had had a chest augmentation. (this is important later in the story) As we were cleaning the betadine off of her abdomen, and placing the dressing. The young man who had assisted the surgeon reached up and groped her chest.
Aghast I asked him: What the hell do you think you are doing??
He replied: I wanted to see what they feel like.

I asked him: Do you realize you just committed a crime?

His answer: She is asleep she will never know.

My answer: Yes but we will.

After the patient was safely in recovery, the anesthetist and I wrote up the incident. Then called the head of HR at three AM. At six thirty the guy arrived back at work and was taken directly to the OR directors office where the head of HR, the Director, and myself were waiting. Security escorted him to his locker, then to the door. I asked about getting the police involved, but HR nixed that citing liability issues.

Image source: William Rieske Rieske, National Cancer Institute/Unsplash (not the actual photo)

#4

When you go to work at The Home Depot, one of the first things you are told is, “never follow a shoplifter out of the store. You will be fired immediately if you do.”

We had a rather scary-looking woman working our contractor sales desk – scary not because of her face, but because she looked like she could lift 500 pounds with one hand while she was punching you out with the other. However, she was really nice. We’ll call her Mary.

I come in from my two days off and my manager told me, “you’ll never believe why Mary got fired.” Obviously she didn’t beat anyone just for making her mad, because I WOULD have believed that. Nope, and this was a classic one: we were selling a cordless tool set that cost $500. We had them locked to the racking with cables and padlocks, just like Corporate told us to do. Two shoplifters figured out how to defeat the locks, and stole two of them along with some other stuff. Mary followed these geniuses out to their pickup, jumped in the bed while they were driving away at a high rate of speed and threw all the stolen merchandise out of it before jumping out herself.

Image source:  Jim Mowreader, Nienke Burgers/Unsplash (not the actual photo)

#5

He was fired. It was shocking. But I personally saw it coming a mile away. So I’m cheating a bit.

Sean was a fellow delivery driver at a pizza restaurant. He was the epitome of the go-getting, happy-go-lucky type of guy who always saw the best in everyone around him. In our restaurant (and most fast food restaurants in the country) the staff is overwhelmingly women. As a male employed in a fast-paced female environment, us male delivery drivers knew that you had to be firm and assertive with the female coworkers otherwise they’d take advantage of you.

Sean didn’t seem to get the cue. He would mop the floors, refill ice bins, sweep, go out and pickup lunch, lift heavy boxes of meat etc for any female who had the ability to remember his name. He loved to make people happy. Us drivers would warn him to stick with his job specs otherwise he’d be doing favours all day and not get any deliveries done. He paid us no heed.

One fateful day, the Assistant Manager held a meeting. She noticed for the past few weeks the meat stocks were going missing. Every week she did a quick audit of the remaining stocks and usually the figure would be off by a package or two. However her audit revealed entire cases of meat were vanishing with no possible explanation other than in-house theft.

After viewing the security cameras for a lengthy period she finally discovered the culprit. Sean was fired promptly. Everyone was shocked. Nobody expected Sean, with his heart of gold, to be a petty meat thief. Sean passionately declared his innocence. However the camera footage revealed that he kept entering the chiller where meat and other food ingredients were kept. Delivery drivers had no reason to go in the chiller unless it was busy and they were asked to help bring out stock.

The footage also revealed Sean exiting the chiller several times with a mysterious bag just before his shift ended. Sean passionately declared his innocence but management would hear nothing of it. He was fired and blacklisted from ever working at any of the branches again.

However meat still continued to go missing at an alarming rate. The assistant manager was at her wits end trying to solve the mystery. The head office warned that any further loss of meat stocks would be deducted from everyone’s salary. These were the magic words that made everyone on the alert for the thief.

In a few days a breakthrough came when one of the workers confided to the manager that one of the newer workers (I’ll refer to her as Janet) kept bringing lunch and putting it in the chiller. However Janet would never be seen eating the lunch that she brought. Instead she would always return the bag home. This was indeed suspicious.

Upon inspecting Janet’s lunch bag they found a pack of ham. Janet was the culprit all along. She admitted to her crime and with the threat of criminal proceedings, management got her to confess that Sean was innocent.

She admitted that Sean had a crush on her and would give her a ride home when both of their shifts ended the same time. Before they left she would ask that he retrieve her ‘lunch’ from the chiller for her. Sean never suspected a thing and innocently and unwittingly assisted in her theft.

Feeling guilty the assistant manager called Sean to ask if he wanted his job back. Sean declined the offer. He had gotten a much more lucrative position working for a cable company as a technician. Had he still been working at the restaurant he wouldn’t have known that they were hiring.

Some things happen for the best. I was very happy for Sean. Unfortunately for us we were no longer allowed to keep our lunches in the chiller from the that moment on.

Image source: Elijah Williamson, Jonathan Borba/Unsplash (not the actual photo)

#6

I worked in the OR with a guy that was just a little “off” at times. I was setting up a sterile field for a procedure, he walked behind me and ground his pelvis against my behind. I was sterile gloved so I didn’t hit him, but I turned to him and told him to get the hell away from me. This was done in front of other employees who knew me very well and knew I meant it.

His reply to me was to the effect of, you want it. The department supervisor was out day (Friday,) but I planned to speak with her personally on Monday. Unbeknownst to me, he continued the to make inappropriate actions and say inappropriate things to patients the rest of the day.

Monday morning I didn’t get to see the manager first thing, because I was assigned to an OR, but was planning on speaking to her as soon as I was free. Well, by the time I was free, he was GONE!

My co workers had already reported him to the supervisor, who took him directly to HR, who called security to be escorted out of the hospital. Apparently, they had a file started on him and this was just the icing on the cake.

What really shocked me was when an acquaintance from another department said, ““I can’t believe you got him fired.” Correction! He got him fired! It was all done before I had the opportunity to file my report.

Image source: Lori Allen, Getty Images/Unsplash (not the actual photo)

#7

What I am about to tell you is absolutely true. One morning, I went to work and during a short break was sitting with a co-worker in my department (we were site services guys), enjoying a quick cup of coffee. About ten minutes later, a third member of our team walked in and sat down, joining us for a few moments. We exchanged “Howdy” and commenced in some small talk before the third guy got up and went to his office.

Here is what we found out two weeks later…

That very morning I just described… a few hours earlier, this third member of our team had awakened at around 3am and gone to his mother-in-law’s home. He was having major financial issues, and was demanding help from her. She refused, having helped them in the past, but now deciding her help was over and they needed to deal with their financial problems on their own without her involvement.

This got him really agitated, to say the least. So much so, he picked up a lamp and struck her over the head. Well, as if that wasn’t enough, he then took a pillow off her bed, upon which she now lay bleeding and unconscious, and proceeded to smother her to d**th.

He then took her cell phone, wallet and some other things and left, and drove across town (about 20 miles or so) to work, where my co-worker and I were already. Along the way, he changed out of his bloodied clothing, put everything in a bag (the cell phone, wallet, his clothing), and found a dumpster in an apartment complex about two miles from work.

He then proceeded the rest of the way to work, just a few minutes late.

Image source: Geoff Arnold, Andrej Lišakov/Unsplash (not the actual photo)

#8

Years ago I was a single parent trying to get my college degree, and I worked several jobs to make ends meet. One job was at a popular chain restaurant waiting tables at lunch, nights, and weekends.

The restaurant had two of my co-workers who did the bookkeeping from the previous day’s transaction each morning. When one of the co-workers quit, I was asked if I wanted to take on the extra work. It was good money, and the early morning hours worked well around class and my son’s school schedule.

The bookkeeper still on the job really went out of her way to make sure I had the training I needed and checked in regularly to answer questions or make sure I could finish the work on time each day. I really appreciated all her support. All her co-workers loved her because she was always so helpful and nice to everyone. She also waited tables in the evening and acted as a back-up manager when needed. With all she did, she never got riled up about anything.

She was amazing because she could handle working many hours to support her child and put her husband through his final year of college.

A few months into the job, I found the books didn’t balance on occasion. My boss stated that it was not unusual with so many transactions happening each day, and we wrote it off. But it started happening more often, and being the analytical person I am, I kept digging in to find out why.

We eventually confirmed that someone was stealing, but it was not clear how. A girl that waited tables was always in money trouble, and it was pretty common knowledge. At work, she constantly received calls from collection agencies and grabbed any extra shifts she could get. She was a friend outside of work, so I knew the situation.

My boss was convinced she was the one stealing because she was so vocal about her desperate need for money to pay the bills. Since I knew her, I wanted to be absolutely sure she was the one and did extra work to identify the source of the balancing issues.

It was a total shock to everyone when it was finally learned that it was not her at all.

It turned out to be the nice, helpful, and amazing bookkeeping partner who never got riled. She confessed that she couldn’t pay her bills, and her husband in college was not working. She was using her authority as back-up manager to void tickets when customers paid cash and then pocketed the money. She helped others with voids and was able to spread those voids across many wait staff, making it difficult to track it.

When her co-workers started hearing through the grapevine what had happened, they really took it hard. People were so disappointed because of the trust they had in her. It was such an impact that my boss had to turn psychologist and meet with workers to help them get a handle on why this would happen.

This was a lesson for me and why it has stuck with me. An outgoing worker who made it known she was having money trouble was automatically assumed to be the one stealing. The person who seemed to have it all together was the one really in trouble and did not know how to ask for help.

Image source: Lu Holt, Rendy Novantino/Unsplash (not the actual photo)

#9

I had a co-worker, a UX designer, who was called “Ursula” around the office, because she both looked and acted like the villain from the Little Mermaid. She was generally rude and abrasive, and I don’t think there was a single person in the office who could tolerate her, much less like her. If she had eventually been let go due to conflict in the workplace, no one would have been surprised, and it probably would have been a lot better for her, too.

The company I worked for at the time had clients primarily in the Fortune 500 space: Lowes, Home Depot, Mariott, Delta, etc. All of these clients generally had their contractors (us) sign detailed Non-Disclosure Agreements, basically prohibiting us from sharing information about the work done in detail, leaking Intellectual Property, or in some cases even disclosing we worked for them for a set period of time after our contracts were terminated. These are taken very seriously in my industry, as Intellectual Property is the name of the game, after all.

There was one particular client at the time, though, who was FAR more strict. Any employee of the company not directly engaged on the project was not even told who the client was, what kind of work was being done, nothing. And one of the members of the team was Ursula.

About two months into the project, my team was sh**ting the breeze in our own area when someone decided to start looking people up on LinkedIn. Good way to pass the time, right? Well, we stumbled across Ursula’s profile and found that she has linked DETAILED information about the client and project in her profile. Screenshots of designs depicting unreleased new content, including the client’s logo, photographs of closed-door white-boarding sessions covering UX flows, a written description of the project goals and timelines.

We’d been laughing and joking with each other, but when we saw this, the whole room went dead quiet. I don’t think any of us had ever seen a NDA breach this bad before.

So we walked over to the office of the Head of Delivery, laptop in hand, and showed him what we found. He just said, “Okay, I’ll take care of this,” and ushered us out of his office.

Five minutes later, a secretary escorted Ursula into his office, and we heard muffled yelling for about an hour. When the door finally opened, she was escorted to the elevator and never seen again. Didn’t even stop by her desk to grab her things.

Image source: Caleb Eades, Getty Images/Unsplash (not the actual photo)

#10

It wasn’t “truly shocking” in the sense of being lurid tabloid fodder, it was shocking in the sense of being really, really stupid, and brought about by breathtaking arrogance.

Let me set the scene. This was a large company HQ, with a pretty decent and somewhat subsidised restaurant. A lot of it was self-service, and then once through the tills, there was a station with cutlery and condiments etc. It mainly worked on trust.

Enter Jared, a systems analyst who thought he was cleverer than anyone else. It turns out that he hadn’t paid for a lunch in over a year — his own colleagues ratted him out.

He’d go and fill a tray, then walk past the tills and double back as though he’d forgotten something — basically he just walked around confidently with a tray and nobody really noticed (he’d go when it was busiest).

When his manager was told about this behavior, he was initially skeptical, but eventually a surveillance operation showed that it was true.

He was summarily dismissed for theft, without a reference, and told the police would be involved and the caterers would sue him in civil court if he didn’t go quietly — and of course there was a week of solid video evidence.

So he blew off a £60K job with excellent benefits to save a fiver a day.

Image source: Marc Wilson, Getty Images/unsplash (not the actual photo)

#11

This has been 25 years ago. I was working for a nationally known shoe chain. I noticed that our till was coming up short whenever the manager worked, yet anytime I was by myself it would balance either to the penny or close to it. Absolutely nothing I could prove, and I really wasn’t suspicious at first.

As time went on, however, he got quite paranoid. We were expecting upper management in and he was telling me how they were sitting in the parking lot of the gas station watching us, he just knew it. If they asked anything about him, tell them I knew nothing.

The next day loss prevention was in. After a ton of back and forth, the LP guy told me they had hidden cameras in the store and had him in tape stealing money and sleeping with employees in the backroom.

Image source:  Ron Reagan, TSD Studio/unsplash (not the actual photo)

#12

Briefly worked at a small meat packing factory, only four other employees. The self appointed “supervisor” kept offering me meat off-cuts to take home for free. Lucky (see why soon), I checked that this was ok with the owner before accepting—it was.

I was able to take home enough meat (and cheese) each day to keep the family well fed. The youngest was very keen on cheese and was known as the cheese baby at the local supermarket, where the women used to give her “free” samples.

One day the owner called the “supervisor” up to the office, and soon after he was dismissed and walked out of the building.

It turned out he was trimming meat, packing it, and loading it into his car to sell on. The off-cuts he was giving me were from the stolen meat and given to me to conceal the theft.

Someone had told the boss, while he was out delivering, about “someone” selling cheap meat. So the boss had secretly installed hidden cameras both inside and on the outside of his building and saw what was going on.

If I hadn’t checked with him about the meat I was taking home, I would have been implicated in the thefts.

Image source:  Steve Twigg, Getty Images/Unsplash (not the actual photo)

#13

I was awakened by a phone call early one morning by my favorite co-worker, whom I was integrating into my real life, saying “It’s not true, I need you to know it wasn’t me!” I was very confused and couldn’t get them to explain any further.

When I arrived at work, the company owner pulled me into his office and explained that B had been fired for skimming money out of the registers. He had the giant green bar binders of the accounting print outs and the staff time cards for the past 6 months. I was asked to go through it and document anything strange. It was the 90’s, so this was our low-tech version of forensic accounting.

It didn’t take long to see that on days when we were busy there was a return of a product we manufactured, but in a quantity that we didn’t make. Think of it like returning a five-gallon bucket of toothpaste at the Crest company store. I checked the inventory for that product and, per the inventory, we had hundreds of these items—but our factory didn’t produce it in that size.

I ran a sample return for the item and the final return price was an even $100. That’s not a lot of money, but in the early 1990’s that would cover a night out for you and friends.

After hours and hours of looking to find these returns, I captured the employee number on each transaction and, with one exception, it wasn’t B. However, the employee whose account it was under was not a regular front-end person, so the next step was to recreate the staff schedules.

Oddly enough, B was the only person whose schedule overlapped with all transaction times. The employee whose account was being used to make these transactions was largely out of the office and sometimes even on vacation when these events occurred.

Perhaps it wasn’t always B, but as the primary person who cleared the registers at the end of the night it wasn’t possible that she was completely innocent.

The boss and I met with the city of Seattle’s Prosecuting Attorney to review our evidence. While the loss to our company was significant and the evidence was damning, the PA declined to take the case. He was correct in stating that we couldn’t prove it was just B doing the skimming.

A few things changed after that event. B never called me again, and was forever known in the circle of friends that I had introduced her to as “the embezzler.” Everyone had their passwords rotated, and it was made clear that sharing of accounts would result in the termination of both parties without hesitation.

We ran a more thorough inventory from that moment on, and returns required a second person sign off.

I don’t believe that B intended to take thousands of dollars from the company, but an extra $100 here and there didn’t feel like a big deal. If B wasn’t solely responsible and the entire front-end staff was participating in the skim, firing B made a difference.

From that moment on, everything balanced.

Image source: Terri Latendresse, Nathan Anderson/Unsplash (not the actual photo)

#14

I wasn’t working that closely with him—it’s just that we started the same week, so we’d been talking a lot. I had already left at the time, but…

We were localisers at a big software company, translating their software packages into various languages. My colleague B. had been promoted to Project Manager, so he had a number of people from various countries working for him.

Some people got curious when they started to get assignments that weren’t strictly speaking for the company they worked at. B. told them that they were in the process of acquiring this or that other company, and the software would soon be distributed globally—only they needed to keep quiet about it so as not to spook the stock markets.

As it turned out… he was running an entire translation company on the side. His employer paid for all the equipment and all the salaries of the translators—his company’s expenses were zero. He just pocketed the invoices and never had to pay anyone anything at all.

And he was fired for… drum roll, please… having p**ography on his work computer. The theory was that it was less embarrassing for the software company, and he got out of it without having the police involved.

Image source: Mats Andersson, visualsoflukas/Unsplash (not the actual photo)

#15

I didn’t work closely with her, but I knew her and her husband outside of work because they were friends with my fiancé at the time (as a side note, she and her husband were older than us and in the “old enough to know better” category).

Almost 20 years ago, I worked for a staffing agency—actually in the staffing agency as the receptionist/switchboard operator/general clerical. She was someone we sent out on clerical temp jobs. She also had a side business with her husband as a vendor of collectors’ knives and swords, some personal defense devices (like pepper spray, legal versions of night sticks, etc.), and medieval-style costuming bits like cloaks, tunics, etc.

One Monday, I came into work and was a bit confused because there was a flurry of tense activity amongst the managers and staffing agents—talk of formal apologies and worry about legal action.

Turns out, the current temp job she was on had a company car that didn’t get used a lot. Welp, she and her husband decided it would be okay to borrow that car for the weekend. She had a lot of trust there and was allowed to work late and shut down the office for the night. They used it to help transport their merchandise to a convention where they were vending, then planned to get in early Monday morning and return the car.

Things didn’t go quite as planned because that weekend, the owner of the company returned from a business trip and had the airport taxi drop him off at the office so he could drive the company car home instead of paying for a taxi all the way to his house, since he lived way out in the “country.”

Only, the car wasn’t there. He quickly determined it had to be someone from within the company because the keys weren’t on their hook, but there were no signs of a break-in. It took hours for him to call other employees, deal with the police, and also find someone to come get him and take him home—not a good end to a long, tiring trip.

So Monday rolls around, and my acquaintance just rolls up to the office in the vehicle, thinking she got away with it, having no clue about the angry hornet’s nest she was about to walk into.

Needless to say, she was immediately fired, banned for life from our agency, and is super lucky no one pressed charges.

Image source: Jennifer Bak, Karolina Grabowska/Unsplash (not the actual photo)

#16

I had a co-worker who was out unexpectedly one day. Things seemed different when he came back. He wouldn’t talk about it directly, but he was no longer living with his wife, and she had initiated divorce proceedings. All he would say was that when there was something to know, we’d all know it.

Well, the big reveal came the day he was sentenced to six months in jail for possession of child p***ography. He applied for a leave of absence to do his jail time, but he was fired instead.

What neither he nor any of us saw coming was the reason used to fire him. The police had seized all the computer equipment in his house, including an outdated older-generation laptop that he’d been allowed to permanently take home to handle on-call issues during off-hours.

When the police seized the PC (and contacted the company after tracing the serial number), he failed to notify the company that the PC was no longer in his possession and under his control. This was a violation of company policy, and they fired him for it.

To be clear, no contraband material was found on this work PC, and there was no content on the PC that could have compromised company information. It was simply used as a portal to company mainframes and required typical login and authentication to do even that.

To all involved, the company had clearly used this technicality to fire him in order to distance themselves from someone with that behavior. The effect was that some people felt sorry for him, some didn’t, and many were conflicted because they felt two wrongs don’t make a right.

Image source: Marty Duchow, LARAM/Unsplash (not the actual photo)

#17

When I was 20 and a third-year university student, I worked part time at a large department store. There was another student there, also in third year. He and I hung out. One day, he was no longer there. I asked the department manager if he was coming today. Apparently, he got fired for stealing from the cash register. $2! What an idiot. Who steals $2! Who steals anything?!

A few days later, some guy walked up and wanted to buy something that cost $.40. Anyway, he put $.40 cents down and walked away. So I then entered it in the cash register, put the cash in the drawer and threw the receipt away. It turns out that he was a security guard and was testing me to see if I was stealing, too.

Image source: John, Nathan Anderson/Unsplash (not the actual photo)

#18

It was a work from home job. She was one of our best and most dedicated folks.

One night I was working as a shift supervisor, and got a PM from her that she needed to go to lunch early, and that it might run over. I told her, “Of course, sure thing. Is there a problem or anything I can help with?” She told me the police were there to question her and laughed it off. She didn’t mention what it was about.

She never came back.

About 2 hours later I noticed she wasn’t clocked back in yet, and wasn’t logged in on the VPN even. I pinged her private messenger, and when I got no response, I went ahead and called. I got voice mail.

I let my boss know what was up, and that she had been approved for a late lunch return, but it looked like she wouldn’t be back that day. I let them know I had tried, but been unsuccessful reaching out to her.

About a week later word came down she was gone. I spoke with her husband later, and he confirmed she had indeed k***ed both of his parents. He had been away on work and they were staying with them, and she apparently snapped.

They had an acrimonious relationship apparently, and after a week of constant harassment from her in-laws, she was apparently done. Truly a gruesome story. Absolutely unexpected.

Not just because she didn’t seem “the type,” but also because she absolutely wasn’t behaving like you would expect someone who had bodies in her tub that day. She was chipper and very active in team chat—more so than she had been in a while.

In retrospect, that does track.

Image source: Westley D Willis, Ladislav Stercell/Unsplash (not the actual photo)

#19

Yes, it was me!

I had worked at a doughnut shop. It was a small business with just two locations at the time. I had started as a night manager and within the year had moved into Operations Manager, while also working as a store manager for the smaller location. Because the smaller store wasn’t as busy during the week, I worked alone most days.

I ran the store while simultaneously running the operations part of the business as well. I averaged 55–60 hrs a week. That was fine with me. I loved my customers and I loved my work. And the overtime was great too.

On the weekends, I had two workers that helped during the day. The night shift had three or four people every night of the week because that is the shift that made the doughnuts and decorated them. I made the menu every week which changed nightly. We also often had special orders that sometimes were ordered weeks in advance.

The night manager had been there almost as long as I had but still could not seem to learn how to do the job without making almost daily mistakes. Since he didn’t know the job, the people he trained didn’t learn how to properly do things either. It started to become so bad that my shift went from an 8 hr shift to a 10 hr shift because I would have to fix their mistakes. We were bleeding money due to inventory and labor costs.

The owner came in a couple of times a week and we had a meeting every Monday. I expressed my concern to him. He wanted to take care of it. He was my boss so I couldn’t say no. He had a very “that’s good enough” mentality so he just kind of brushed it off.

During the last 8 months of my employment, I began to have stomach pains. I chalked it up to my gallbladder because it was intermittent at first. The pain became increasingly painful and I began to have a distended abdomen. I finally made a dr appointment and was sent for an emergency cat scan. They discovered a mass and scheduled me for a surgery two to three weeks later. There was no way to tell if it was cancer until I had it removed, but my tumor markers came back high so my surgeon was fairly certain it was.

I was obviously upset and still came to work every single day. I would often break down and cry in between my customers.

Because we were a small company, no paid medical leave or FMLA was available, but my boss and I had a meeting and I expressed concern about my 8 week recovery. I was worried who was going to take over my responsibilities because we had a hard time keeping employees. I also expressed concern about not having an income during that time.

My boss told me that I didn’t need to worry about that, that we were “family” and the company would take care of me, and all I needed to focus on was getting better. He and I had agreed that after my initial two week post-op appointment that I would resume the operations aspect of my job from home. Everything was agreed upon, and I went into surgery feeling that my job was something I didn’t need to worry about.

My surgery went smoothly. I had a complete hysterectomy plus a 10lb tumor removed. Thankfully, it was benign.

At two weeks, I told him my doctor released me to desk work. He told me he had no work for me at this time. I was taken aback because of our previous agreement. We had a small disagreement and he called me. I didn’t answer because I was crying. I sent him a text and told him that I would call him in the morning when I wasn’t upset.

I woke up the next morning and texted him that I was available to talk. He informed me that I was being let go. I was astounded. I asked why, and he said for being negative, referring to the night shift never completing their jobs.

I was so upset and felt betrayed.

Three days later, two of the night shift workers, including the manager, were arrested for trafficking m*th while at work. My negativity was founded. But he would not let me come back.

I filed for unemployment. My claim was in fact-finding for months. I finally received a letter that he was fighting my unemployment.

Image source: Cat Reilly, Getty Images/Unsplash (not the actual photo)

#20

I can answer this. My coworker (we’ll call him Burk) stole $5,800 from the register between May 2022 and August 2022. Our boss found out that Burk wasn’t ringing up the cash sales, using one minute cash in to pop the register open and only putting back what he was short on. Company that we both worked for should’ve pressed charges, but left it up to the franchise owner to see if he wanted to press charges. Franchise owner refused, since Burk has kids. Franchise owner just asked for the money back. Burk’s mother took the money that Burk owed from Burk’s grandmother. Who has dementia. So Burk’s grandmother doesn’t know where her money went. Shocking, isn’t it? The whole family are a bunch of thieves.

Image source: Angelica Black, Viacheslav Bublyk/Unsplash (not the actual photo)

#21

When I started a new job, there was one man who was very friendly with me. At the time, I was thrilled that the culture within the company was to be friendly and welcoming.

The friendliness from this man quickly got over the top—calling all the time, asking why I didn’t answer, etc. Then it got a little creepy. He would show up in places I was eating, pass me when I was walking my dog. He was calling me and yelling at me for talking to a man at work.

I asked him several times to back off. Finally, I went to my boss about it. His behavior changed for a while but quickly went back to how he was before. Again, I went to my boss, and the man was fired.

I was shocked. I didn’t think he should be fired for it, just a stern warning.

Later I found out I wasn’t the first person to report his behavior. While I was relieved it wasn’t all due to me that he was fired, I also felt my first complaint should have been taken more seriously.

Image source: Sarah Goff, Af Hfmn/Unsplash (not the actual photo)

#22

There was a woman, Jay, who worked in the supermarket with us. A lovely person, and very well liked by all. Very kind, and used to collect for children’s charities—raffle tickets and sponsored walks, etc. She worked on the checkouts.

The practice at the time was that you could do your shopping for yourself, pay for it, and keep it in the back of the shop in a designated area until you were going home. So you could shop in your lunch hour and then make a quick exit to go home.

I’m sure you can guess what happened next…

It turns out that Jay never paid for her shopping—she just pushed her trolley out the door. Some money was missing from the tills, and it was every till she had been on, but at irregular intervals so it hadn’t come to light. Then we checked the charities, and they hadn’t received all of the money we had donated.

This had been going on for months and no one had suspected a thing. Everyone was shocked and couldn’t believe it, and really thought there had been a ghastly mistake—until the other offences came to light.

She was fired but never charged with any offences, as she paid back some of the money. Also, the company took pity on her as she had a young family. Possibly they didn’t want any bad publicity either.

Image source:  Margaret Forrest, Getty Images/Unsplash (not the actual photo)

#23

This didn’t happen to me but to my spouse who managed a restaurant. One day the police came in demanding to see “Peaches”. Peaches was a very sweet, chubby girl of about 18 who wasn’t the sharpest tack in the box but a consistent worker who never gave anyone trouble. Why did the police want to speak to Peaches? Because they believed her boyfriend had brutally m***ered someone by bashing them to d**th. They wanted to put the squeeze on Peaches to give up her boyfriend. Off to the police station went poor, scared little Peaches, willing to take one for her man. Several weeks later, I asked how that had all turned out. As it happens, Peaches was arrested. She’d bashed the dude to d**th at the request of her boyfriend who didn’t want to go to jail. Dear, sweet, little Peaches….

Image source: Ellison1983, Matthew Ansley/Unsplash (not the actual photo)

#24

Not me but my friend. She was a co manager at a prominent Sydney (Australia) restaurant. The other manager was a guy in his mid 40’s early 50’s, divorced, pretty average kind of guy. The only thing she really didn’t like about him was how he used to talk about his ex wife (he remarried and was with a second wife) and how he said sexist things about some of the female dining guests. Sadly pretty normal for a guy that age, especially in hospo work… Then one day the police came and arrested him on the spot. There has been a string of attacks and r**es of Women in Sydney over a few months… It was him. He had been coming to work, going home, kissing his wife goodnight and then putting on a ski mask and stalking and r**ing women. The kicker was all his victims looked like his ex wife… he had been studying them and selecting them based off that. He was sentenced and sent to prison. Makes you think twice about all those guys who casually say inappropriate things about women. You never know what people do in private.

Image source: Jess Minda, Curated Lifestyle/Unsplash (not the actual photo)

#25

Five or six years ago I arrived at my office a bit late one morning, only to learn that I had missed all of the excitement that morning.

About an hour before I arrived, either a federal marshal or an FBI agent—depending on which version you heard—had come to the office and arrested a co-worker for running a child-p**nography website that was actually hosted on one of the office’s servers.

He had gotten away with doing so because he was a system administrator and had repurposed an old server which was otherwise unused. He had also turned off all office-network access to the machine, so there was no backup and no chance of being discovered through normal access.

I’m omitting the company name because the company is national and very well known around the world.

We were all shocked. Nobody had any idea that he would even think about doing what he did, and several people there couldn’t believe it. Knowing him, I could hardly believe it myself.

In any case, all of his personal information on the company employee directories was scrubbed about 90 minutes after he was arrested. So far as I know, he was still in prison three years ago.

He had always seemed to be a “good” person and had been helpful to anyone who needed access to machines or data storage. I later learned that he had actually taught a Sunday school class at his church. So I guess you don’t always know what someone does in their so-called “spare time.”

Needless to say, he was also fired that day, and the security people cleaned out his office and delivered his personal belongings to his wife later that afternoon.

Image source: William Austin, Curated Lifestyle/Unsplash (not the actual photo)

#26

Yes as working as a detective in Germany, My boss lived upstairs from me, we each had a separate shed pretty big that went with our duplex. I thought he was well off by this job, Him and his wife wore very expensive clothing every day, and they had the best of everything. One day I was off and watched as many police as well as other law enforcement came and arrested him. At night, he was going into the military store and taking new cloths as well as everything else he could. When they opened his shed, there were cloths stacked from floor to ceiling. I believe they took out like 36 bicycles he had taken. Some suits were around 300 and more dollars. It was crazy. They took him to jail. I remember him being very mean to his kids and would recite quotes from the bible at them, just yelling the quotes. You could hear them crying. So I was happy to see him go.

Image source: Cindy Curtis, Larry Farr/Unsplash (not the actual photo)

#27

Many years ago I worked on a veterinary clinic. One of the young women there was very close with the owner’s family. She was the pet employee. She vacationed with the family. She was blatantly favored but that was just accepted given her close relationship with the owner’s family.

Until they caught her stealing money.

How she was caught was the oddest part.

A relief veterinarian must have been closely tracking his paycheck because he reported that he was being underpaid. He earned a portion of the money he brought in.

An investigation yielded that the young woman had been going in the to computer late at night and deleting invoices from cash transactions, then pocketing the cash. Cameras were installed. Evidence was collected over time.

The young woman left the clinic in tears and the owner was crushed. Had the relief vet not paid such close attention to his own paychecks there is no telling how long she would have gotten away with it.

Sad to think she was so deceitful and cunning at such a young age. I wonder what she ever made of herself.

Image source:  Allison Jackson, Getty Images/Unsplash (not the actual photo)

#28

Oh, Lord, YES! I was a inside sales manager for a cellular company and this guy was an outside sales manager. Perfect family, perfect wife, church on Sundays. You know the type. He was in his late 40’s having an affair with one of his 20-something sales rep. Our phone system then allowed you to construct a message, listen to it, alter it if needed and then send. Instead of him sending it to just his girlfriend, he sent it accidentally to his entire team. It was early in the morning and I started seeing his folks stand up in their cubicles and look shocked at each other. He had named his love interest and everyone heard his “dirty talk”. I listened too. When he came in that morning, I was the one that broke the news to him. He “left of his own volition” that day. The love interest was married to a manager in another department. Had to break it to him as well. It wasn’t a great day for me, but I immediately became an outside sales manager to 13 major account sales reps that never spoke the beast’s name.

Image source: Chris Holliday, Alejandra Quiroz/Unsplash (not the actual photo)

#29

She was the accountant and had worked for the company for 25 years. She befriended me when I came to work and I enjoyed her company. We were of an age, both divorced. She had a son and I was childless. I gave her a cat I had who wasn’t happy with me — that’s how much I trusted her. Then one day the police were in the office, taking her away, and a forensic accountant was going through the books.

She had been embezzling money from the company, redirecting it to her son’s business, keeping him afloat in bad times. She had stolen more than $50,000 from the company. Nobody suspected her, she always had an explanation and the bosses trusted her.

It shocked me. I guess I had never considered that a person I liked and trusted could be a thief.

Image source: Psam Ordener, Ahmet Kurt/Unsplash (not the actual photo)

#30

Yes. I remember working in a law firm many years ago. One of the ladies in the accounting department very openly “flaunted” her faith/Christianity. Her husband was in charge of another department — maintenance, I believe. I did not realize they were living pretty high on the hog. It was discovered that she was stealing from the company to the tune of six figures a year. Apparently the husband was buying things for their house, and saying it was being spent on supplies for the office. Never saw it coming, and it took a while for the situation to come to light. But that was quite eye-opening.

Image source:  Paul Cain, Eduardo Ramos/Unsplash (not the actual photo)

#31

Two long-term co-workers were clocking each other in and out when not there, increasing their overtime. One was a supervisor who had worked his way up from entry level. They were caught on camera.

Another coworker and his ladyfriend went into the exercise room and turned out the lights, not knowing or remembering that the camera had infrared.

After another coworker got caught trying to smuggle inkjet cartridges out in his pants, I made a joke that if I wanted to steal something I wouldn’t carry it out the door, I would ship it to myself (figuring they wouldn’t see one transaction in the hundreds we shipped a day). I would never do this in reality. However, another co-worker heard and started shipping all sorts of stuff to his home address. He got caught too.

A manager in our returns department found a laptop misdelivered to our company (back when laptops were less common and really expensive). He also walked out the door on camera. He was told if he returned the laptop he wouldn’t be prosecuted, just fired. His employees turned him in.

Another supervisor called an employee and left a voicemail that if she wanted a raise she needed to meet him behind the skate rink and perform a sexual act.

My manager, at one point, disappeared for most of the workday (second shift), would come back shortly before finish, and tell us we could all go home and he would finish up loading the trucks and getting the paperwork signed. He was buddies with the truck driver and would add an expensive big printer or two onto the truck—again, caught on camera.

Another couple of guys—one a supervisor on second shift and his employee in charge of loading trucks—hid a couple of bottles of vodka in the employee fridge next to our office and periodically took nips all night. Again, caught on camera.

There have been a bunch who thought threatening to quit would get them what they wanted because they thought they were irreplaceable. I always wonder what they go home and tell their wives about why they got fired.

Image source:  Susan Harrington

#32

I worked as a receptionist at a phone company and my line manager was a pretty cool guy. He was also a volunteer youth pastor so he was a very “Christian” dude. Everybody loved him and he was a wonderful manager, loyal dependent reliable and just a great guy. One day armed motorcade of police just showed up to our office premises and arrested him. Turns out he was a fugitive wanted for m***er, dr*g smuggling and money laundering. He had stolen the identity of a d*ad man and blended with our little community. I definitely never saw that coming.

Image source: Jelly Baby

#33

Yes…she was one of the department managers like I was. She had been with the company since she graduated high school, and it was her first and only job. She was a good manager, constantly made her sales goals, was well liked, and everyone thought she was going to be groomed for bigger things. There was no reason to ever believe what was going to happen.

One day we were all called into a manager meeting, and there was a somber feeling in the room. We were told that they had no choice but to terminate her and that they were not at liberty to tell us anything until the investigation was concluded. If there was an investigation, you knew it was serious.

We found out through the grapevine (I was friends with a detective in town) that she was taking the free gifts with purchase that some companies give out—free bag if you spend $100, for example—hiding them in a secret compartment under her car seat, and selling them at a local flea market with her boyfriend.

It was discovered after inventory, when a lot of the items were missing. She simply claimed she never received them.

She was arrested and led out a secret door in handcuffs an hour before the meeting. I’m still shocked about it.

Image source: Janos Brushteckel

#34

About 20 years ago I worked for Fred Meyers. I had a store director (highest position in the building, in charge of 100+ employees) get fired for stealing the change out of the store brand pop machine in the employee break room. I don’t know how long he was stealing for, but I’d be surprised if he got even 100 bucks from the machine. At the time, the director was making a bit above 100k in base salary and potentially tens of thousands in bonuses depending on sales at the store. Easily the dumbest theft story I’ve known about.

Image source: Gornface McGornface

#35

I worked with a very nice guy who was an excellent clinician in a hospital I worked at previously. He was also an excellent teacher and trained students and interns very well. Many others were horrible at having patience with students and interns, but he was great.

He trained me when I first started, and as a new graduate in the field I was still a little unsure of myself, but he helped me a lot—gave me confidence and helped me do well.

One day at a department meeting we were told by one of our managers that he no longer worked there. They refused to tell us why and just said he was told to leave. Many of us liked him and were shocked to hear this, since he was a good clinician and an overall really good person. I really felt bad for him, especially since he had helped me so much when I first started out.

He isn’t on social media or anything like that, so unfortunately I’m not sure where he is or what he’s up to now.

It later turned out that the manager who fired him was the one with the problem, as she was likely trying to get rid of the few men working in our department in an effort to bring in more women clinicians. I have no problem at all with trying to get good representation, but manipulating people and their livelihoods to achieve that goal is reprehensible.

Later, I was glad to hear she no longer worked there, probably because some of the corporate leadership saw what she had done to many people. I hope the guy who was such a great teacher to me is doing well now. People like him deserve to do well, and people who manipulate others like that manager did don’t deserve to succeed.

Image source:  HealthcareGuy

#36

Yes, me. I was the co-worker. worked for a family run company, and I found out that one of their family friend’s over-zealous return Mormon missionary son asked our IT guy (whom I was close with) for access to my work emails/inbox/chat messages, so that he could monitor my activity. I told the owners. He even admitted to this! His excuse was “I was just trying to make sure you are not being overworked.” I got fired after telling on him because I also told some of my co-workers about it and a meeting was also held immediately after where the owners told my co-workers not to listen to me. That I was exaggerating and creating chaos. I had good relationships with many of the clients and I found out a couple of months after my termination that said co-worker was still using my logins/passwords to various portals because he did not have his own login credentials. They all cut the switch on him. I have no regrets. He was later fired for some other stuff

Image source: Carli Brianne

#37

Not a Co-worker but Me . Yes I was fired one day notice. The funny thing, I just finished all my tasks on that day then after informing my boss through text that all of my assortments were done , cubicle phone room rung then I answered it . Surprised! It was the Human resources employee head calling me out for quick meeting telling me . Sir blah blah , this is your last day , pack up your things because you will no longer work in this company starting tomorrow.

I was speechless and shocked … so I went to the bathroom and cried then left the office after an hour with box of office supplies I had , just like you saw commonly in the movies…

Image source: Dale Lendl

#38

In the early days of the Internet, we had a guy whose job was to monitor Bulletin Boards for technical performance (we were a Telco). He just sat there all day quietly getting on with his job until the police suddenly entered the office and removed him and his computer. Turns out he had been trading child p**ography on the boards in company time and with company equipment. This was in the 1990’s when most people didn’t even know there was such a thing and he was one of the first people to be convicted in the country. So shocks all round – not least to those who remembered how he would strangely blank his screen when they went near to his desk.

Image source:  Ian Briant

#39

An office admin with three small kids had check-writing privileges to pay bills, and created a fake company to pay bills to, but got greedy by writing a $30,000 check that got noticed. $52,000 was taken in total.

The company wanted the money back, and she was pretending like she didn’t know what happened when she was confronted. She was told to “pay the money back, or someone else will be raising your children while you’re in jail.” So she broke down and confessed. Asked why she did this, she said she was taking the kids to Disney, buying a big screen TV, and starting a side business “because I thought I deserved it.”

She was obviously fired immediately, and she signed a payback agreement drafted by an attorney with “go to jail” consequences if she did not pay it back. She did end up paying back all the money.

Image source: Bill Rawlins

#40

Worked retail when I was a young kid with an Assistant Manager named “Brad” who was super religious.

Brad was an “ok” coworker—efficient, knowledgeable, well-behaved, and rarely made mistakes—but if you happened to cuss around him or talk about something he felt was immoral, he would scold you for it in front of other employees. I didn’t let it bother me. I was probably 20 years old and wasn’t about to let anyone lecture me about anything. I blew it off and didn’t let him get to me, even though he was annoying at times.

He had other qualities that made him come across as the typical “holier-than-thou” person, and his smug, morally superior attitude was quite the turn-off to others that worked with him. Nonetheless, we tried to respect his vibe and make an effort to watch our language around him. Even still, he always made snide comments to others if we talked about things that didn’t fit his beliefs. As much as we didn’t like the guy, we had to deal with him.

I remember one time talking to coworkers about a Halloween party we’d been at. After hearing about it, he really tried to dress us down, telling us that we were promoting and celebrating evil and filling our bodies with evilness because we consumed alcohol. By then, we weren’t taking anything he said seriously, and we all just basically ignored him.

One morning we arrived at work, and the Manager, District Manager, and some big-shot corporate loss prevention guy greeted us at the door. This was very unusual.

It turned out Brad was stealing money—a lot of it. He was arrested that morning when he arrived to open the store and was taken to the police station before we got there.

As much as we disliked Brad, we couldn’t believe that he would do such a thing, based on his behavior—and how dumb and arrogant he was to think he could get away with it.

Oh well… busted.

I learned a lot about others that day. It’s too bad Brad’s “act” reflected negatively on other people of faith, as I have worked with religious people before and never had any issues. They were actually terrific people to deal with.

Image source: Eddie V.

#41

A well respected co-worker with many years with the company had recently got a big promotion. One day senior management seemed troubled by something but no one was talking. Next thing we knew that guy was no longer with the company. Some time later I was told he was changing his company paid plane tickets for cheaper flights to a different city and pocketing the fare difference. Claimed to have been working at his original destination but was instead shacking up with his mistress in an apartment he paid for with money from plane fare rebates. Apparently happened more than once.

I think his wife divorced him, but last I heard he did get a similar job with another firm.

It was quite the shock.

Image source: Gary

#42

Once upon a time, in the 1990s, I worked as a customer service manager at an office supply store. As a retail chain worker, I had seen my fair share of managers come and go, but this guy took the cake.

Vinnie (not his real name) was loud, obnoxious, often late to work, and extremely sexist. He constantly brought up unpleasant things like how expensive we were to the company to insure—especially me, since my position as an assistant manager was being phased out. He always had comments about how women looked or smelled, and he had issues with customers, even running into some of them outside the store.

None of us really concerned ourselves with him. Most of us just wanted to get through the day, get paid, and go home.

One day I came to work and things felt off. People were whispering, and finally someone told me they had all seen Vinnie in the local paper—in the police blotter section. Apparently, he had gotten into an altercation at a bar, shoved a woman, then tried to flee when police arrived. He drove drunk, crashed into a telephone pole, jumped out of the wreck, and tried to run before being tackled by officers.

More details surfaced later about him fighting with police, yelling about ex-girlfriends, and even trying to file a brutality complaint—but the situation was already bad enough.

What really surprised me was that he came into work afterward and acted cold or ignored everyone for two days like nothing had happened.

On the third weekday after the incident, four corporate representatives showed up. None of us had met them before. They had already been in the store early that morning, organizing things with another assistant manager.

Vinnie came in late as usual. After a brief and very loud conversation in the office, he stormed out with a few belongings. We never saw him again.

After a new, by-the-books manager took over, we were all called into a meeting about how things would be handled going forward. No more ignoring policy, and any improper behavior was to be reported immediately.

That’s when we learned something much worse. Vinnie had been keeping files on each of us—holding important paperwork hostage, like health insurance forms and tax-related documents, in exchange for “favors” or things he expected us to do for him. Many of us were young women in our 20s or 30s, and he had notes about us, referring to it as “mining the assets.”

Those were the documents he used to sit and smirk over in his office while we handled long lines of customers.

Thank goodness he imploded and only lasted a few months. My own situation—being in my 20s, diabetic, unmarried, and facing a deadline for medical insurance paperwork—had put me near the top of his list.

Yuck.

Image source: Karla Toper

#43

Ok, I guess 2 instances. i found out that a mailroom clerk at my former employer got fired for having s*x with a co-worker, somewhere at work. Unsure about her, but he was married to someone else. Didn’t care for the guy but would not have seen that coming. Ok, maybe the better story is that years ago I was a temp and the director to whom I directly reported as his secretary, he used to flirt with me and I guess I kind of let him and flirted back…this eventually got to me though since he was married with kids, so I eventually left that (rather large) employer. A few months later, I found out that he had been fired and security escorted him out, for having embezzled something like $750k from the company. Apparently, though, that company did not press charges since they did not want the publicity, so they just fired him. He served no time and is doing fine nowadays, so I hear. Even though he got away with it, I was very glad that I had never actually gotten involved with him.

Image source:  Rosa Walker

#44

Yes. I worked very closely with a phenomenally bright woman back in the 90s. We were hired at the same time to put together a shelter for adolescent girls who had been taken away from their homes and were in transit from one residential program to another. We had them for brief periods of time. Both my co-worker and I managed shifts and looked after them at the house. There was a similar program run by the same organization upstairs.

When my co-worker found out that one of the girls there had been s*xually ab**ed by an overnight staff member’s boyfriend, she began talking to the Directors, presenting a list of that and other offenses. She then decided to go to the top and held a meeting with the Executive Director.

This was an organization meant to keep adolescent girls who had already been in violent situations safe. In an office between the two of them, the Executive Director told her, “Why should I report any of this to the Office for Children? We are going to do exactly what they would tell us to do anyway.”

But it is the law to report any incidences of a**se, and my co-worker reminded our boss of this. Soon after that conversation with the Directors, she was inexplicably fired. It was pretty clear they needed to get rid of her in order to protect the organization.

I was shocked. She was fired for threatening to report the offenses to the authorities and for trying to do the right thing for the sake of the girls involved.

After she was fired, I kept my mouth shut, and unfortunately, the list of offenses grew through that summer.

On the day I walked out, I went straight home and called the Office for Children and gave them the full list. They thanked me, conducted an investigation, and afterwards not one but three shelters were closed down because they were not in compliance.

Image source: Jill Uchiyama

#45

Many times. So many, in fact, it no longer shocks me.

The two “low-level” violations that stick out most are these.

One coworker was known for his devout religious convictions, including active volunteer work with troubled teens. Then one day, HR walked to his desk escorted by U.S. Marshals. She went through the formalities of termination without explaining why. After he signed the paperwork, the Marshals immediately placed him under arrest and seized his workstation. The charges were child p**ography. About a year later, he was sentenced to eight years in federal prison.

Another coworker, at a different company, lost his composure when a new team lead was hired—a position he felt he deserved. One morning, I arrived at the office to find that nothing worked. I couldn’t log in. No one could. Websites were down, badge scanners weren’t functioning so doors were unlocked, and VoIP was offline. Essentially, anything dependent on the network had failed.

Sometime after lunch, systems slowly came back online. The next morning, a post-mortem was released to IT. The disgruntled coworker had gained admin-level access to corporate servers. In retaliation, he logged into each one, configured system-level firewalls to block all traffic in both directions, and reset passwords for all users and services. We never heard his side of the story.

At a higher level of violation, I was once contacted by my home state’s investigations bureau while working out of state. I used all of my PTO to return home and assist in an investigation into a former employer’s illegal activities. Apparently, some of the software I had written was being used as a primary tool in those crimes.

I had to produce detailed documentation for all the code I wrote—still the most exhaustive documentation I’ve ever created—and was later subpoenaed as a witness in multiple criminal trials.

Nearly ten years later, those individuals have been convicted and are serving time, and additional people connected to the case continue to be identified and indicted.

Image source:  Tony Gingrich

#46

I had a co-worker that on her break went to the parking garage and had s*x with the security guard. They were caught by the building security on a hidden camera. The building manager played the video for the company manager and her managers. I had a co-worker that downloaded poop p**n into the company computer. There was one of a guy pooping into a girls mouth. I didn’t know him. there was a claims adjuster at the insurance company I worked at that made a fake repair shop and would make fake a auto policies then submit claims to his fake repair shop. Then he would approve the claims. He was arrested. Not sure if he did time. then there was a guy that pretended to be judge and he would sell u s citizen applications. He would give people fake papers and have big swearing in ceremonies. The FBI showed up at the office. They would not tell the owners who they were looking for so the FBI got a tour of the company until they found the guy and arrested him. There were a ton of charges I don’t remember how much time he did.

Image source: Julie

#47

I worked in the Post Office. There was a guy there who was the most laid back easy going, nicest guy. One of those people that everyone likes.

He was a window clerk.

One day, the Postal Inspectors came in, walked right up to him in front of everyone, told him ’You’re under arrest’ and cuffed him and took him out of the place.

Myself, and everyone else was in shock.

Since then, we learned that he was fudging money orders in some way. The Postal Inspectors always make a show of arresting someone, as a sort of ‘we have our eyes on you’ to the other employees.

Once they arrest you, you’re pretty much toast. They have something like a 98% conviction rate. They do not follow through on hunches, they have you dead to rights when they arrest you.

He lost his job (and he had about 20 years on the job at that point, so bye bye pension) and I believe he had to pay restitution of some sort also.

All that being said, to this day I find it hard to believe this guy was doing this

Image source: Herb Fellows

#48

I used to be a supervisor in an office. We had employed a lady who was older than me—very capable, very presentable, and genuinely nice. All was well for several months before things started to unravel. Let’s call her Jenny.

I had been off with flu and came back with a really bad cough. The cough medicine I took had strict limits on usage because of the dr*gs it contained. Soon after, Jenny had a bottle of the same medicine and was swigging from it constantly. I raised concerns, telling her she was taking too much—especially since she didn’t even have a bad cough.

A week or so later, she started keeping a juice drink in her desk drawer and sipping from it frequently. When we asked why she didn’t keep it on her desk, she said she was worried about knocking it over.

One day after lunch, I came back to find her upset. I was alone with her, and she unloaded about another coworker for quite a while. Let’s call that coworker Sue. Then Sue walked in with our boss, who wanted a group discussion to “get to the bottom of it.”

Sue explained her issues, but Jenny denied everything she had just told me. Then she turned on me and repeated those same complaints—this time directing them at me instead. I was stunned. I tried to respond, but the boss said he wanted to be fair and told me to let her speak—ironically not letting me speak at all.

I left that meeting furious—with Jenny, with my boss, with the whole situation. I nearly walked out. Afterward, I had zero trust in Jenny. Sue and I compared notes, and it became clear how contradictory Jenny’s behavior had been.

That Friday, a group of us—including my boss—went out for lunch as usual. When he made a joke about the meeting, I lost my temper and told him exactly what had happened. He apologized, but at the time I wasn’t ready to accept it.

Eventually, everything made sense. Jenny turned out to be a severe alcoholic who had been hiding it extremely well. You wouldn’t have known from her appearance or behavior—until things started to slip when she had problems at home.

We had begun to suspect something, but it all came to light when she collapsed at work after coming back from a heavy lunch. A bottle of vodka was sticking out of her bag. We called her husband to pick her up, and she never returned.

It changed how I saw things. I had always assumed alcoholism was obvious, but it really isn’t always.

I’m still friends with my former boss, and I still bring this up whenever he jokes about being a great manager. It still irritates me when I think about how that situation was handled.

Image source: Julie Salt

#49

I used to work at a local grocery store (Giant, it’s a regional chain) and a girl who was 23 or so at the time, had obvious personal issues and really bad skin but seemed to always try to keep a good attitude and did her job. She wasn’t so much directly fired while I was there, but stopped showing up 1 day and management just rolled with it and didn’t say much. Then on the news after a couple weeks, she pops up on the news for aiding a mother in the “ritualistic” sl***hter of her children (2 or 3, I can’t fully remember), believing that they were possessed by the devil and an imaginary boyfriend, my coworker was also st**bed. There’s much more to the story but yeah that happened.

Image source: Tae Simpson

#50

I once worked in an office that was predominantly young men, and the culture was quite toxic. There was one man in particular who liked to gossip and would regularly rally “the boys” for heavy nights out. I thought his behavior was immature but relatively harmless, assuming he’d grow out of it.

One morning I came into the office and everything felt off. It was quiet, tense. Senior leadership looked concerned, speaking in hushed tones before disappearing into meeting rooms.

Later, I found out what had happened. The night before, he had taken a group out drinking as usual. But instead of going home when the bars closed, he brought them all back to the office. They raided the fridge for beers—normally reserved for Friday afternoons—and started partying. At some point, they began using dr*gs and then went further, writing abusive personal notes and placing them specifically on the women’s desks.

They left in the early hours, leaving the office in a mess—beer cans everywhere, and those notes still sitting out. The first employees who arrived had to clean everything up before others came in.

Fortunately, there was security footage at the entrance. It clearly showed him returning with the group. When confronted, he denied everything and claimed the footage must have malfunctioned.

No one backed him up.

It was a well-paid role at a respected company, and he was fired on the spot. He wasn’t even allowed back into the office—he had to hand in his pass at the front door and was given his belongings there.

It was honestly unsettling how far someone could take things.

We’re still connected on LinkedIn and work in similar circles. I avoid him entirely, and if I see he’s joined a new company, I steer clear—and quietly warn others if it seems relevant.

Image source:  Samantha UX

#51

Yes. I worked as a recruiter for a manufacturing plant and there was a well liked manager there. Well, it turned out that he was having affairs with several women who worked for him and would adjust the time for them. He allowed them to come in late or miss days of work but still get paid. In order to keep up with production numbers, he would threaten, insult and generally intimidate the remaining workers. None of upper management knew how hated he was until someone stepped up and told them what he was doing. They began tracking dates, times and names and turned it in to management. It was such a shock.

Image source: Janet Chapin

#52

While not exactly a co-worker, we both worked for the city back in the 1980s. This woman was nice, attractive, well liked, and worked in the office of the Clerk of the Court.

Her job included accepting fine payments for civil and traffic violations, entering them into the system, and marking citations as paid.

What she was actually doing was taking the cash—since most fines were paid that way—and then deleting the citation entirely from the system as if it had never existed. She had been doing this for years without anyone noticing.

The only reason she got caught was a simple mistake. One day, building maintenance came in to fix a minor leak. When they removed ceiling tiles, thousands of old citations came raining down—paper everywhere.

She had been hiding the tickets in the ceiling instead of properly destroying them.

The amount she took was never fully determined, but it was estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands, possibly as high as two million dollars.

Her husband, also a city employee, claimed he knew nothing about it. But it was hard to explain how they managed to afford a lavish home with an indoor heated pool, along with luxury cars like a Porsche, BMWs, and Corvettes, all on city salaries.

Image source:  Terrance Riley

#53

My husband works for a large home improvement store. His supervisor was a decent enough fellow and everyone seemed to like the guy. The guy did his job better than other sups. But he was fired suddenly for taking energy drinks out of the drink fridges near the cashiers (these are ubiquitous in America as retailers hope you will buy a very expensive soda or drink on your way to pay for your items, and the price for these drinks is stupidly high). Anyway, the guy would take up to 3 drinks a day and never pay for them. What a dumb reason to get fired.

I never understand people: you can buy a case of those drinks at walmart for much cheaper and just bring several a day to put in the (many) fridges in the break room. But you’re going to steal $10 worth of drinks a day instead. What a shame. Now hubby’s supervisor is never around and offers no support.

Image source: Abbey Ferguson

#54

Fourty plus years ago, I worked for a company that made bank security equipment. We knew that the cameras in banks result in a near 100% arrest / conviction rate for bank robbery. One day my boss went to the dentist for a filling. He had a local anesthetic. Afterwards, he went to a bank, and gave them a note asking for all the money. No mask. No g*n. Drove his own car. They gave him the money. He drove home and shaved off his beard. The police arrested him at home within an hour of the robbery. Obviously never returned to work. We all found out the next morning. It was a total WTF moment. The guy was a Mr. Rogers type. Nice family and all. No one saw it coming. He was less than a year in the job. The company began search for his replacement. He was convicted in a slamdunk trial. His replacement was a dud. And about a year later I got the promotion.

Image source: Dave Velzy

#55

When I was working at the Fullerton College bookstore in the mid-1990s, helping put myself through college, I worked closely with a guy on the sales floor. He always had a habit of scratching the back of his neck, where there was what looked like a five-inch scarred, slightly raised patch of skin.

One day, while we were talking face to face and he was scratching it again, I finally asked if it was an old burn scar that itched. He shocked me by casually saying no—it wasn’t a burn scar, it was ringworm he’d had for years. I told him that was easily curable with creams and highly contagious. He said “really?” and, smiling, brought his scratching hand down and hit me on the inside of my elbow. I pulled back too late and told him if I got ringworm, I was going to beat the crap out of him. He laughed and walked away.

About a week later, I was hiking in the San Gabriel Mountains when my friend noticed something on my arm. I looked down and saw a two-inch round mark with a red ring and pale, slightly scaly center. I immediately knew he had given me ringworm.

The next day at work, I went straight to the store manager’s office and explained everything. He gave me his business card and told me to go immediately to the emergency room, saying it would be covered by worker’s comp. At the hospital, they treated it very seriously. A nurse followed me around with bleach, wiping down everything I touched and discarding items as biohazard waste. They gave me antifungal cream and told me to use it twice daily for three months.

When I returned to work about a week later, the manager told me the guy had admitted what he did and had been fired. Apparently, four other employees had also developed ringworm, likely from him sitting in their chairs and shedding infected skin.

I later ran into him on campus. He said he had finally gotten rid of the ringworm because of me. I was angry enough to stand up, but he ran off before anything happened.

The infection, unfortunately, kept coming back every summer for 15 years, and I had to keep treating it for most of the year during that time before it was finally gone for good.

What really stuck with me, though, was something from earlier. Months before the incident, he had asked me about an itchy mole that wouldn’t stop bleeding. I told him that sounded like skin cancer and to see a doctor immediately. Later, I overheard him telling someone he had indeed been diagnosed with skin cancer and needed surgery to remove a large section of tissue. The doctor had told him that if he had waited another six months, it likely would have become incurable.

I never got a thank you for that, but I let it go at the time.

Image source: Doug Simpson

#56

I worked in the corporate offices of a national broadcasting company, and my desk was close to the CEO’s clerical assistant’s workstation. The CEO traveled several times a year to the various TV, radio, and cable stations around the country. When he left town his assistant would go to professional conferences to improve her skills. Thought nothing of it.

She lived in the Seattle area (where the corporate offices were) and her husband had recently moved back to NYC after he lost his job in Seattle. Well….seems all the conferences she was going to were in NYC. After she booked her conferences and air/hotel, she would go down to the accounting office to get a travel advance, and at the end of her travel she would sign off on behalf of the CEO (she signed his name better than he did).

This went on for over a year, and the CEO never knew about her trips. He found out by accident, and when he did he sent her home so he could think about what to do about it. Next day she was fired. Damn, pretty shocking to the rest of us.

Image source: Marianne Bigelow

#57

I only worked with the woman a few times, but we were in very close proximity each time. She was the classified message center operator for the military base where I was working. Both of us were U.S. federal civil service employees with Top Secret clearances.

Because I wasn’t busy for a while with my technical specialty, management looked for another role on the base that required a clearance and assigned me to train with her. She worked in a tiny locked room with four computers on separate desks, one wheeled chair, and a phone. There were no windows, and even the heavy door had a small sliding panel to check visitors.

Her job was to monitor classified and unclassified messages coming in from all over the world, filter out what was relevant to people on the base, and route it appropriately. Most of the time, it was just moving between computers, sometimes with no visitors at all. You could play music loudly because the room was so well shielded, as long as you noticed the doorbell.

After several training sessions, I became the backup operator when she was on leave. I would occasionally cover a day or a week here and there over several months. It wasn’t exciting work for someone in my field, but it was a change of pace.

One day I was suddenly called in to cover the position, but this time it was urgent. Instead of the usual advance notice, I got a voicemail and email telling me to report there immediately and work until further notice. I assumed she had gotten sick or something unexpected had happened.

When I arrived, things were clearly off. Tasks that should have been completed were left unfinished, and one process that should have run for only about 30 seconds had been running for over 15 hours. I reported this to base security, but surprisingly, they showed no reaction.

After a few days, a rumor circulated that explained everything. She had been caught letting her boyfriend—who was not a government employee and had no clearance—into the classified message center. Apparently, she had been meeting him there while on duty.

How she thought she could get away with sneaking him past armed guards, through security checkpoints, and into a secured vault remains hard to understand.

Needless to say, she was gone immediately, and I ended up covering the role unexpectedly.

Image source: Peter Karsanow

#58

I used to work security at a small hospital years ago. There was a surgeon who assisted in the operating room closing up patients and other procedures to help the surgeons. He was very nice guy. Then for a while I see him wearing a neck collar, the ones your wear when you injure your neck. Seems like this Doctor was in a car accident and was suing the other driver. The other driver’s lawyer started to look into this Doctor and found out he was not a real Doctor. He had forged some sort of document called a “get”, which I think was some sort of a degree or something from Ireland or Scotland. Turns out this guy was not a Doctor, just had some kind of medical training. Of course the hospital fired him.

Image source:  JOSE MARRERO