Getting fired from a job is rarely a pleasant experience, but some workplace stories are so bizarre they sound like they were written for an episode of The Office. Most employees know the usual reasons someone might get the boot, but every now and then, a worker does something so outrageous that even seasoned HR professionals have to wonder how they got there.
HR departments have a front-row seat to the strange, messy, and sometimes downright unbelievable side of office life. From spectacularly bad decisions to behavior that crosses every possible workplace boundary, some cases are impossible to forget. So when someone asked HR professionals to share the worst cases they had seen that resulted in someone getting fired, the responses naturally delivered plenty of jaw-dropping stories.
#1
A news photographer for the television station I worked for had a habit of taking one of the news vans, with our station logo prominently displayed, to the adult entertainment club.
Image source: DuffMiver8, Annie Spratt
#2
Lol I just had a pretty egregious one recently. I manage a team of field employees across a region, so I’m not in their face every day, I visit them once in a while – there’s a lot of trust in people’s integrity (and geotagging) in this industry.
I go to visit my guy. He’s having some IT issues with his work equipment, I sit down with him and we get it sorted out, do some coaching, say our goodbyes.
I go to my car and hop on the phone with my boss to tell them how it went. While we’re talking, homeboy walks out to his car, gets in, drives away. *While parked across from me.*
While on the phone, I go, “Hey, is he on lunch?” “No, why?” “…Because he just got in his car and drove off. Still clocked in. Oh my god, he’s been stealing time.”
Dude couldn’t even wait for me to be out of the parking lot. Idiot. I went back in and finished his shift for him, apologized profusely to the store leadership. Turns out he’d only been showing up on days he thought I would, and when he thought he was in the clear, he’d bounce. He’s been in this industry a LONG time and came with a lot of experience, so he likely knew all the little ‘tricks’ to fly under the radar, and is now blacklisted. If he had just been patient enough to wait more than 10 minutes after I ‘left’ I would have never caught him! Time theft happens a lot more in this field than others in my experience and I’ve caught it quite a bit, but only ever on surprise visits, not like this!! What a dummy.
eta: just to clear up some confusion, my bad. This is a retail sales floor job. They are paid to be present on the sales floor assisting our retail partners in sales, finance apps, etc. and are also asked to train retail employees on the product when they can. He cannot do this job from home or his car. His numbers WERE waning, which was one of the reasons I visited, in addition to his equipment troubles.
Image source: tehpoorcollegegal, drobotdean
#3
A salesperson threw the prospective buyer’s keys on the roof of the building to prevent them from leaving. He was still insisting it was to make a point about the quality of the item for sale. He had 20 years at the company. It was wild.
Image source: tcrispina, prostooleh
A workplace firing can look sudden from the outside, especially when the incident that finally leads to termination seems relatively minor. However, Stratus HR explains that progressive discipline is designed to address problems before they reach that point. In cases like this, employees may begin with verbal feedback or warnings, move to written warnings or other corrective measures.
Eventually, the employer terminates the worker’s employment if the behavior continues. The idea is not simply to punish an employee, but to make expectations clear and give them a reasonable opportunity to improve. At the same time, particularly serious misconduct can justify immediate termination rather than going through every stage of the process.
#4
While standing outside the office building, we had a worker push another worker – special needs, no less – then hit her. The she started bellowing “why’d you hit me!?!?!? WHY’D YOU HIT ME?!?” which of course, drew attention from inside.
People arrived outside and the woman starts going off about how the special needs employee just WENT OFF and got all violent.
Coincidentally, our security guy happened to be looking up at the monitors, saw it all go down, and was outside before the woman was done screaming about how she got attacked.
I don’t think it was 15 minutes later that they hauled her freshly-fired a*s away in a squad car.
Image source: Tapingdrywallsucks, Fellipe Ditadi
#5
I know a woman that works for head of HR . She got called in to a warehouse .
A woman that works there adopted a child. Then had a house fire: the place collected money for her. She received good amount.
Then the child mysteriously d**d: and she again got donation money.
Everyone found out it was all a lie. Never was a child , fire or anything.
Image source: Dr_LilithSternin, inkakot
#6
Manager went into the office on a weekend to pick up something he’d forgotten there and found another employee downloading the entire contents of the company server to personal hard drives. That guy was fired with prejudice.
Image source: maybenomaybe, magnific
That also helps explain why an employee might be dismissed over an incident that looks surprisingly minor on its own. Face2Face HR discusses the idea of a “last straw,” where a relatively small event can become significant because it follows a series of earlier problems.
Previous issues may not always have resulted in formal disciplinary action, but a pattern of ongoing difficulties can still matter when an employer assesses what has happened overall. In other words, the final incident may be less about its individual severity and more about whether it confirms that previous problems have not been resolved.
#7
He took a shower in the kitchen. like, it was an industrial kitchen that had a floor drain, so he soaped up in front of the sink BUCK N***D, and then rinsed down with the detachable faucet thing.
he had a whole a*s house that he lived in with his parents. this was a part time summer job… but he wasn’t like ‘working homeless’ sort of situation. he just wanted to go straight to a party after work without going home to shower.
it was so crazy.
Image source: vivrant-thang, fxquadro
#8
Worked in a bank. We hired a new teller. Young guy, 19 years old. Really personable, actually listened and wanted to learn.
Got through his training. Made it two weeks in the branch when we fired him. Had to call the police because he wouldn’t leave.
He spent that two weeks harrassing one of my coworkers. First asking her out on a date. (She has a boyfriend and two kids!). She said no. He kept asking she kept saying no.
Eventually he got threatening and started saying all kinds of gross s****l s**t to her at work. She finally told us and we fired him that day. He refused to leave hence the police.
He made threatening statements when he was removed so we had an armed security guard posted for six months after.
I wonder whatever happened to him. There usually isn’t much hope for men like that.
Image source: Intrepid_Advice4411, Drazen Zigic
#9
I’m not HR, but was involved with the firing of an individual contributor. Pretty funny story…
So this was at a customer support desk for a mid cap software company, he was on our graveyard shift, which is basically a trusted shift because no management was in office and it’s a skeleton crew of like 3 people and it’s a boys club basically. One day I get a call from a customer in the middle of the night (I’m on call) saying they keep calling into the help desk and no one is answering. My VP is closer to the office so I call him and ask him to check out what’s happening since we can’t reach anyone in the office. We come to the office and homie is *asleep on the floor in a sleeping bag*. Straight up catching zzz and was clocked in for hours. I wasn’t there but the word is when my VP showed up it was a huge commotion and dude started freaking out. We checked the security and sure enough he was asleep all shift. But then we noticed something else, dude arrived in the office 1 hour after his shift started. So I checked another day, same thing. Sure enough, dude was clocking in remotely from his phone and arriving *hours* later to his shift routinely. We obviously had to terminate him, and the company did a claw back for the missing hours and he actually signed off on it in lieu of formalizing it as wage theft.
Image source: Werealldudesyea, DC Studio
Before reaching that point, however, an employer should ideally establish what actually happened rather than making a decision based on an angry reaction or a single accusation. Employment attorney Aaron Hall emphasizes that workplace investigations involve gathering evidence, speaking with relevant people, documenting the findings, and approaching the situation objectively.
This gives the employer a better basis for deciding whether misconduct actually occurred and what response is appropriate. It also helps prevent a bizarre-sounding allegation from automatically becoming a bizarre firing without the facts being properly examined.
#10
My coworker who I’ll call Brian, got fired over a hat after this bizarre meeting with our manager, I’ll call Mr. Andrews.
Brian was wearing this fedora with safari flaps in the back.
Mr Andrews made Brian take off his hat. He said it was distracting. He said if anyone disagreed, he’d let Brian keep the hat on. Nobody said s**t dude. Nobody said s**t.
He took the hat off and he hid his head in his hands. You could tell he was crying. He kept saying under his breath, “you can’t f*****g do that”. Then Mr Andrews said “what’s that, Brian?” and he said nothing. And then a minute later, he said “it’s not a distraction. The guy at the store said I’m the only guy he’s ever seen pull it off”.
Mr Andrews asked him how much it cost, and he said “it’s illegal for you to ask me that.” And Brian said “I’m putting the hat back on, I don’t care what happens to me. Mr andrews said “just take the hat off Brian”. “No I’m not taking the f*****g hat off”. Then he stood up and said “I’ve never fought for anything in my entire life. I’m fighting for this hat.”
He went to slam his hand down on the table but he hit his water bottle and it spilled all over his laptop and then I swear to f*****g god, he tried to roll the hat down his arm like Fred Astaire but the back flap got trapped around this coworker ( Rick’s) wheelchair, and then it took him forever to get the flap out of the wheelchair. He was f*****g beet red. I thought he was going to have a heart attack. One of the flaps got wheel grease on it and he said “what the f**k is all this stuff? You have to grease these wheels?” And Rick said “yea you have to keep the wheels lubricated”. And he said “yea well I’m not supposed to get grease on this hat.”
Another coworker was just sitting there slightly in his way towards the door, and as he walked towards her he said “move” and right when he said it, he realized he had gone too far. So he said in a jokey voice “WHO SAID THAT?”.
Image source: Dingerdongdick, senivpetro
#11
I had a guy who was caught watching p**n at work he had his speakers on. we told him hey don’t do that. the next day he did it again and i had to fire him.
also i had a crazy woman who shadowed our people who had been around for a while. she was with woman A for a couple days and then woman B for a few and then back to woman A. she told woman B that woman A talked so much s**t about her and told woman A that woman B talked s**t about her. woman A and B were in their 30s and had been best friends since they were like 5. we didn’t technically fire her we just didn’t let her passed her initial training period. .
Image source: Jaggs0, https://kaboompics.com/
#12
I was a manager
supporting another manager that was firing a guy for s****l harassment.
Everything is lined up, every process followed, none of this is a surprise to anyone attending. Appropriate support all around (strong employee protections in my country), things have been calm and negotiated clearly the entire time.
Final meeting and the Dude getting fired suddenly loses it, goes on an a rant defending his behaviour which accidentally outs him doing worse behaviour we didn’t have on camera. Before anyone can say anything he realises he’s f****d up, throws a punch at my head and runs for the door.
Image source: Unhappy-Lengths, Drazen Zigic
And there is another reason some of these cases can be confusing: being excellent at a job does not necessarily compensate for serious problems with conduct. Workplace expectations involve more than productivity, and Experian’s own corporate reporting illustrates this distinction by noting that concerns about potential policy or ethical violations are investigated and can lead to disciplinary action, including dismissal.
An employee can therefore be highly productive while still creating problems involving trust, safety, ethics, or workplace standards. Ultimately, keeping someone employed is not simply a question of whether they get good results, but whether their overall behavior allows them to remain a reliable and safe part of the organization.
#13
Not HR, but I remember watching HR and Security cornering people from both ends of their desk rows during the GM Salary Layoffs in 2019. As people started realizing what was happening, a bunch of people started leaving before HR hit their area, only to get stopped and checked against lists by security at the exits.
The most f****d up though was when they cornered the sweetest 60-ish yr old man in our department, and listening to him weep about how he was only 2yrs from a pension.
Edit: For those asking about the pension, I’ve got no f*****g clue about those details just that he was devastated about it. At GM the only people that qualify for pensions are the old timers with 30-40+ yrs who were grandfathered in before GM stopped offering it to new hires. So, I have no idea what legalese might be in their salary contracts that f***s them over if they dont stay X amount of years.
Image source: JackFlack91, RDNE Stock project
#14
Not HR but this is the worst I saw.
Work in a warehouse with a cold side and a dry side. One of the guys from the dry side had to go to the cold side’s freezer to do some work. Maybe 20 minutes in under freezing temperatures. Being as he works dry side, he doesn’t have a coat which is not unusual for the place. He sees a random hoodie on a safety pole (yellow concrete pylon) and wears it into the freezer.
Guy who’s hoodie it was comes over for it while the first guy is working. Instantly assumes someone stole it and went up to HR. While he’s up there complaining and they’re going to check cameras he finishes his work and puts the hoodie back on the same pole he got it from.
They identified him and about an hour later pulled him up to chat and let him go for stealing the hoodie he put back after he was finished working in that area.
Like yeah he technically stole but it’s also not too far out there to assume someone left their stuff and he put it back. Guy just didn’t want to freeze his a*s off.
Image source: CaffineFuledGamer, cottonbro studio
#15
HR manager here, I haven’t really had any bad ones, they are usually pretty simple since most terminations are for obvious reasons which are hard to refute or argue with, and I’d like to think I do a good job of gathering relevant evidence.
One that does stand out to me was a termination for a mouse jiggler he was using to make it look like he was working on remote days which we discovered after his manager came to us saying he wasn’t producing any work when he wasn’t in the office. I brought him in and basically said we know you are using a mouse jiggler, and he immediately said something like, “No, I would never do that,that’s not me.” yadayada.
So I bring out the screenshots of him sitting on the same screen for hours a day multiple remote days in a row, after that he finally just says, “okay, that’s fair enough.”
Was a pretty quick about face from “no, I would never do that” to “ok, you got me”.
Image source: jedidude75, The Yuri Arcurs Collection
At the heart of these stories, workplace firings aren’t always about one dramatic mistake. Rather, they’re often the result of decisions, patterns, and moments that finally push a situation too far. Whether it’s blatant misconduct, repeated bad judgment, or behavior that leaves everyone wondering what they just witnessed, these cases show just how quickly an ordinary workday can turn into an HR headache.
Sometimes, the strangest part isn’t that someone was fired, but that things somehow went on for as long as they did. Of course, every workplace has its own rules, policies, and circumstances, so what earns one employee a warning might earn another a one-way trip out the door.
#16
Not HR and this is my sibling’s old job but I HAD to share this even if it lives in the dungeon of this post.
Two of his coworkers could never see eye to eye. Don’t want to get into the backstory but it culminated in one employee coming up behind and LICKING the bald head of the other guy.
There are reasons for those weird “you cannot lick your coworker” items in your employee handbooks.
Image source: BeginningMotor8836, magnific
#17
Not HR but I was fired one time in my life. The reasons:
1. Not 5′ 10″ or a size 2.
I saw a note about me written in the office, “she is only 5′ 8, maybe size 4. The girls from Miami should be a bit taller and slimmer. Have her train them first.”
2. Not f-ing the owner’s 60 yr old business associate from out of town and having “no sense of adventure.”
I was young, a host at a trendy restaurant in NYC, and did not understand the lawsuit I should have filed.
Image source: BakedBrie1993, cottonbro studio
#18
I am not HR but this happened in a job I had about 7 years ago.
On International Women’s Day there was an email sent to everyone as part of the celebration/acknowledgement of this day.
The IT Director or one of the IT higher ups did a reply all with a “When’s International Men day”
Chaos ensued. He got fired. He got a ton of direct replies.
Image source: maaseru, CoWomen
HR professionals are often left balancing fairness, company policy, and the impact an employee’s actions have on everyone around them. So, which of these cases do you think would have been an instant firing in your workplace, and which ones would have earned a second chance? We would love to know!
#19
I was working for a big tech company… let’s call it HAL… doing IT support at night for hospitals. When I was still pretty new, one of the guys who trained me just want there one day. I found out later that they tried to promote him to FTE but when they did his background check he has a criminal record. Something minor I think. Because the staffing agency hadn’t checked when they hired him, he had no idea he was about to go from finally getting benefits and salary directly to fired.
Any time someone got fired at that place they’d just disappear save the management wouldn’t say why . I used to joke that since guys in suits would put a black bag over your head and wheel your office chair out of there.
Anyway yeah “YouTube been a great employee for a couple years but we just found out we never should have hired you” ranks high for me.
Image source: CttCJim
#20
While I was in college, I worked as a Security Supervisor for a UPS facility at an airport. I was employed by a separate company contracted for security, neither UPS nor the airport. It didn’t pay much, but was a good job for people who needed to spend 10 hours of a 12 hour weekend shift studying for class.
I don’t know how the agency hired people, but we hired a lot of people who couldn’t manage the simple tasks and expectations that come not with the job, but general society.
I fired several people for showing up high for a shift, and not on w**d. Ive fired people twice for hooking up while at their post and fired one guy for j*****g off at his post. I’ve fired three people for having fistfights with UPS drivers and would fire someone at least every few months for taking d***s **at work, on their shift.** I fired so, so many people for sleeping. The turnover was so high that I gave people second chances for things that would have you tossed out most anywhere else.
That being said, I’ll never forget the day that one of my tenured guards, Darryl, managed to get jobs for both his fiancé and his side chick. At the same site. Working the same shift. Darryl was reliable, but about as sharp as a sack of wet mice. When I brought it up to them that they might not be happy to see each other, he mumbled out a reply that gave me the distinct impression that he hadn’t thought this far ahead. Cool. Cool
Their first goes surprisingly uneventful; they’re stationed at opposite sides of a large facility, so no interaction. Darryl is posted up with me because I can trust him to do his job if I need to step away. The shift was smooth enough that I had forgotten about the possible conflict in favor of studying for an administrative analysis exam.
And then the guards of my shift came to clock out.
I was expecting a shouting match, maybe break up a shoving match. I wasn’t prepared for the fiancé for waiting for the side chick in the break room, and swinging on-sight. Suddenly, I’m catching manicured haymakers with my ribs and collar, trying to break these two apart. Darryl is standing at the side of the room, staring at this whole situation without a thought in his head. I call him over to help me separate them, and we manage to get them clocked out, and out of the building without having to see each other.
So, the fiancé decides to wait for the side chick in the parking lot. In her car. I don’t know what was happening in this woman’s head, but she tried to run the side chick down in the parking lot, damaging 5 cars in the process of missing her. She drove off without a front bumper, and left a license plate on the asphalt. The next few days were spent giving dozen statements and retell the same details over and over again for police, insurance, my bosses, and attorneys. We had an all-hands-on-deck attitude for a few weeks and I met some people high up on an admittedly-stout corporate ladder.
I worked there for a few months to finish my last semester, but got the hell out of there as soon as I got a better offer from posting that required a degree. I still think about Darryl, wondering how he made it as far as he had.
Image source: EchoesAndSpecters, magnific
#21
Not HR, but I am his manager. Recently, my HR manager contacted me and asked me to pull one of my employees and meet her in my office, because we had a very serious issue to address.
She filled me in. He is from Haiti, and his TPS has expired. He’s been working here for over 2 years, and he’s not only a great employee, but a great man. He hasn’t been able to secure new documentation, so I had to pull him from the schedule and his employment will be separated on the 27th of this month, 30 days from the date that his TPS expired. The company does not offer sponsorships.
He will ultimately be deported back to Haiti, along with his wife and their daughter.
That was the f*****g worst. The only time I’ve become emotional in any type of situation regarding separation of employment.
Image source: LeftToWrite
#22
Sears had a policy that if you clocked out late for lunch you’d get termed after three strikes, they never reset.
The best salesman in electronics clocked out a minute late while finishing a very large sale, turns out that it was his third overrun in many years and was fired the next day.
Top sales metrics, worked there for years, trained most of the staff, really nice guy too, not sleazy like a lot of sales people. My supervisor (who he had trained when she started) cried while she let him know.
His response was great “okay, bye”, then he walked out the door.
Image source: Forgotmyaccount1979, Tuur Tisseghem
#23
Not HR but i was working at a place that wrote software that handled the federal government’s money, we went through trainings often about what would happen if we broke security. Anyway one guy decided he like some code he wrote so much he wanted to upload it to his Google Drive for his portfolio. DLP caught it immediately and the bosses made sure we all saw him get cuffed and walked out by police. I heard later he was sentenced to 5 years. Moral of the story the federal government does not like it when you f**k with their money.
Image source: seanprefect
#24
Not HR but IT.
Few years ago I get a short message from our dept head, “hey, I need you to disable X’s account immediately per HR”
Yes sir, not going to argue with you or HR.
A while later, I hear through the grapevine they’d been suspected of corporate espionage and charges were being filed.
Folks, show up, do you job, and go home. Don’t get greedy. Don’t steal coworkers food, from the tip jar, or process knowledge. Sometimes you get fired, sometimes you get charged with multiple felonies.
Image source: paishocajun
#25
My first job was Subway, eventually worked up to being store manager. Owner called me one day asking why so many orders were edited. After I would leave for the day, staff member was going in and editing my orders and rerunning them to collect the Subway points.
We didn’t have HR, and obviously I wasn’t there when these edits were happening.
Had to let him go.
Another was deleting orders and taking the cash from the till. Just because you can’t see them on the POS anymore, doesn’t mean they aren’t logged lol.
Image source: Blitz6969, Erik Mclean
#26
Not HR but I had to terminate an assistant manager because he would walk by employees and fart.
We warned him that it was harassment and to stop but he kept doing it so we terminated him.
Image source: cadff, Vitaly Gariev
#27
Obligatory not HR but:
Was working as an engineer on a Navy shipyard a long while ago. The rigging crew managing one of our largest cranes managed to brush against a building as they were going around. No real damage but definitely a s**t show since we had nuclear tech on base, so EVERYTHING ground to a halt.
Policy after a crane accident of any kind is to d**g test EVERYONE involved, immediately. Well if you know anything about riggers you know absolutely none of them are passing an unplanned d**g test. We lost 80% of our rigging crew that day, and training riggers is a LONG process on a nuclear base.
Image source: NoShameInternets, https://www.pexels.com/photo/infrastructure-in-military-harbor-11376669/
#28
Had a sales guy book multiple trips to Alaska. While we did business there, we didn’t do that much. Turns out he was booking trips to watch the start of the Iditarod and do some fishing. Talked to a few customers up there and they didn’t even know he was their sales guy. That got him fired pretty quick.
Had an employee that hauled our oversized equipment and delivered rock in a quarry I used to manage. Guy got a DUI and lost his license but didn’t tell anyone, management caught it in a safety audit and amazingly did not fire him, but made him an equipment operator. He was getting ready to go to jail and was convinced if he managed to hurt himself he would make disability the whole time he was in jail. He even told me this and management wouldn’t let me get rid of him. After he staged several small “accidents” that didn’t get it done for him, I let him know if he hurt any of my guys, he would be answering to me man to man, not man to boss. He never came back.
To this day, I do not know if the employee’s or senior management’s misconduct in the matter was more appalling. A quarry is a dangerous f*****g place without someone trying to stage and accident “just bad enough to get on workman’ comp”
Threw a biohazard container in a fit of rage. It was only full of pipettes, nothing that toxic.
Took me a while to figure out that was why everyone in the lab was so dour. When I found out what happened, I confirmed with her and told her that was unacceptable so I had to fire her. She cried and said it was only one time, I told her this was so unacceptable it was a 1 strike kind of situation. The rest of the lab celebrated, turned out she was a big grumpus and ruling the whole vibe I was going for.
Also, same lab, I caught a senior scientist falsifying results which resulted in him being let go.
Conference call. One of the guys on the call was working from home that day. His kid wandered into his office and he lost his s**t. Yelling, profanity, thumping/smacking noises, screaming kid, screaming adult woman.
911 was called. He was fired immediately.
Had a contract employee manning our IT help desk at a small hospital. Logs showed him spending a LOT of time doing stock trading during the day. He was pulled aside the next day and told that was unacceptable but was given another chance. The next week’s logs? P**n.
Had an admin girl take a scalpel, lignocaine, suture kit home from our clinic to perform her own mole removal at home. It got infected, she saw our doctor, our doctor reported it. No idea why she decided to do it at home, she was very proud when confronted and happily showed videos of it that her daughter filmed had no idea why she would be getting fired.
We had a candidate attorney who we sent to court one friday afternoon in our company car, on the way back we receive a call from him saying that he had been pulled over by the police and was too trumatized to come back in that afternoon, fine whatever. Come monday he had still not returned, remember he still had our car. After multiple calls his partner contacts us saying that he was still extremely trumatized after Friday’s “ordeal” with the police. Whatever, he is entitled to some leave anyway, but we want our car back. After a long while we eventually make a plan to get it back. Turns out that he had been pulled over on a minor offence on Friday (speeding) and WAS trumatized, in fact so trumatized that he had gone on a d**g binge over the whole weekend, using our company car in the process. When we got the car back it had lots of evidence of d**g use, the kicker was the baggie that was under the driver seat. He was not asked to return to the office.
There was a guy at my company who was a field supervisor. He let go of 2 of his guys go but didn’t tell HR. Instead he changed their banking info for their direct deposit to a his own credentials. And he kept them active on payroll as field personnel while he collected their paychecks until he got caught.
Image source: JJDoes1tAll, YL Lew
#29
Not HR but I had to navigate their absurd policies to fire a piece of s**t employee I had under me.
Once I started the disciplinary process, I quickly figured out this employee knew how to game the process. It took me 4 years to get everything lined up to fire him, only for him to quit the morning of the day I had scheduled for the meeting with HR to terminate this person’s employment.
I will say, their policies forced me to get really good at documenting stuff and keeping good records. I even had an “after action” meeting to go over how much BS HR had baked into their policies.
The only good to come of it is when the employee quit, he tried to sign up for unemployment. For whatever reason, I got a call from the state regarding his claim stating that he had been fired. I got the pleasure of emailing that person a handwritten note that said: “F**k You, you ain’t getting the pleasure of firing me. I QUIT!” Which the employee wrote out and signed before he left.
Image source: hsh1976, Sora Shimazaki
#30
We tried to lay off this tech manager. The minute we told her, she ran out of the room and hid in the warehouse for 2 hours, then fought 3 of the biggest dudes we had in the warehouse all the way to the door, scratching, clawing, screaming. (All 3 of our small town cops were busy with a big rig accident on the highway so they couldn’t get there.) The lay off ended up in a firing and a quick trip to the ER for the guys she scratched. Oh god, the paperwork mountain that created was insane, and some of the other employees were pretty shaken up.
Image source: EntertainerOk9552, AI25.Studio AI GENERATIVE
#31
Was the IT guy for a big telecom company in the early 2000s. One day I got asked by the executive director of one of the groups I was supporting to make an excuse for taking one guy’s work laptop to send to corporate security. I was 22 at the time.
Turns out he was running his own travel agency from his work laptop for over a year. He didn’t come back the next day. I liked the guy, so I felt bad for having to lie like that.
That group was part of the HR organization!
Edited for typo.
Image source: gabe12345, Nataliya Vaitkevich
#32
Guy built up a huge bill on the company mobile phone calling those *adult hotlines*. Don’t know how he thought he would get away with it. If it happened now we’d probably support him through therapy but this was 15 years ago and plus he was so embarrassed I think he was happy to just get out and start over.
Image source: Lesleyfifi, Tran Nhu Tuan
#33
Not sure if the question asking for “the most extreme” reason like, they did something bad… or if it’s some lame reason they had to “fill in the blanks” for because upper management dropped the ball.
On the receiving end (and not HR), I was let go recently due to the “company going through changes and they need someone more senior for the role.”
There were talks of investors, the owner retiring, growing, expanding, etc etc. Because we get weekly reports about how well the company is doing despite this trash market, I thought I was relatively safe. This was reinforced by how busy I was and how much work I was doing, namely, a major biannual project was also now in full effect.
To my surprise I was let go with that above lame excuse, and I went from being deeply involved with work in this major project to having a
Despite the reason, something about this felt personal. And the process by which I was let go actually made me feel like a criminal.
After a week of poking and prodding other people (that I’m friends with) in the company, it turns out the real reason was that the VP of my department was going through one of her manic episodes and strong-armed my direct boss (who was also on the call with HR when I was let go) into firing me. The main reason cited? I resisted her AI generated work some months ago and during another one of her manic spurts, and she apparently never got over it.
Turns out, they were about to repost my same job description with a slightly altered title (and an additional bullet point) because, again, I was super busy and my job is actually needed across multiple departments (I found out people were actually freaked tf out after they found out I was let go this week because of this), but HR said we couldn’t. Maybe because of some sort of state laws and the fact that I was let go under an involuntary layoff, complete with severance?
I’m not in California but I’m originally from there and I know that’s true for CA labor laws. Basically they can’t lay you off and then post the same job description again without getting into trouble.
They are trying to pawn off my work to a senior member of the team who is VERY not happy about it.
But the VP I worked under is related to another VP through marriage and the nepotism is real there so I’d imagine everyone will just have to bear the brunt of it.
But it feels like the “worst case” for the other people at the company and putting HR into a tight spot with having to effectively “alter” the true reason as to why I was fired. But there ya go.
Image source: bbusiello, TienDat Nguyen
#34
A employee in a retail fashion warehouse bought an engagement ring and showed off at a company dinner her boyfriends purchase turns out it was purchased by all the cash sales that wernt logged through the retail pos . The story was they would tell customers the pos was down and not write up a receipt
Stupid . stocktakeup caught her in the end.
Image source: Existing-idontknow2
#35
Not HR, but I was a Sr Ops Manager at Amazon and handled appeals for writeups and terminations. My absolute favorite was for a woman who was accused of hate speech and threatening a coworker. I don’t remember the exact quote, but lots of racial slurs & attacking his sexuality, threatening to end him and such.
Well as part of the appeal process, we would call the employee. When she answered I said who I was, why I was calling and asked “is this a good time to call?” even though it was pre-scheduled. She said, “sure, I’m just in the hospital” and I said “we can reschedule. This is an extenuating circumstance that we move” and she said “nah, I’m good. Just laying here anyway”.
“Ok, ma’am, you’ve been accused of hate speech and threatening another coworker…” and she interrupted me saying “ain’t no accusing, I said that stuff. I hate that m**********r”. I sat there for a second and then said “well, in this instance, it seems like the policy was applied correctly and the termination will stand”. Then she had the confidence to ask me “can I reapply next week?”.
Image source: captcraigaroo
#36
Not HR but I used to manage a company that provided round the clock cna’s and LPN’s in patients homes. One day a cop shows up and informs me that we need to send another nurse to the patient’s home because they arrested the one that was there. Turned out that she was running a brothel out of the patient’s home. And apparently the patient’s son was a client.
Image source: hateifyoumust
#37
Not HR but I was at one of the facilities in the aftermath.
I worked for a short time for a big computer company that had a facility up in Canada. The way they closed the complex is they brought in 1/3 of the employees into an auditorium had a big spiel about whatever they talk about and, at the very end, told everyone to grab their pink slips on the way out.
Next they brought in another 1/3 of employees. Had a similar spiel but this time, told them they had a choice. If they chose one door, they could continue working for the company but would have to relocate to wherever the company sent them. The other door was pink slips.
Last group had their own spiel congratulating them for keeping their jobs. Get back to work.
The person I got this from was part of that second group. They transfered her from Canada to the U.S. Had to sell her home, uproot their family and do all the relevant visa work to keep her job.
They “laid off” people at my facility shortly after. I was in the first wave. I didn’t have seniority. Second wave was laying off anyone who had a partner who also worked for the company. So if a married couple or a parent/child worked for the company, one would be laid off, the other stayed.
To add insult to all of this.
I found out very shortly after that I was permanently blacklisted. I can never work for, or enter any complex, for that company again. That was 25 years ago.
Image source: Savannah_Lion
#38
When I worked for Kroger all of the coupons we took from customers were placed into a locked drawer under out till. Usually once or twice a week a front end manager would collect them, bundle them and then they were sent off.
One of the store managers was then taking them and instead of them being sent off for reimbursement, she was going through the stacks, finding ones she wanted and then sending the others back. She would then use the coupons like one of them extreme couponing people and walk out of the store with hundreds of dollars of product for free since Kroger had double coupon weekends. She was also going to stores outside our district so the chances of someone knowing her were less likely. In the end they got her for over $10k of coupons and product and that’s only what they could approve.
She didn’t think it was a big deal because “they were just coupons” even though she knew that the coupons were sent back to another place so that the company could be reimbursed.
Image source: AnatidaephobiaAnon
#39
Things I heard from HR in past jobs (no, not me. Other people).
* Call agent on the phone “Ma’am, I’m speaking to you on a recorded line. Everything I say we have to do. So yes, we’re going to give you a bunch of money because the company can afford it.”
* “So while you were gone yesterday, a dude from another team came and yelled ‘Don’t talk about my family!’ to someone here and started punching him. He’s gone now.”
* A Senior role above me (literally, one level above me on the team) didn’t do work for at least 6 months. Whenever her deadlines came close, she would cry and the work would be reassigned to the rest of us. She spent her days just talking on her phone to her mom and sister and being loud and obnoxious. She was fired in front of me on my last day.
EDIT: One more:
* A couple higher ups (Male and Female) were hooking up in the office. At some point during the day they would go into his office and lock the door and touch naughty bits. The building was in the shape of an E and was all glass facing outside. They were literally seen plain as day by everyone.
Image source: Mintyphresh33
#40
I manage a hotel. There’s a breakfast attendant who talks to herself a lot, very nice and likeable but annoyed a lot of the staff for being bubbly. The owner included.
She worked here 4 years and recently the owner finally had enough and fired her over text, no cause. She was an extremely hard worker and was the reason we were able to survive serving breakfast in the busiest part of the season (it’s now falling apart).
Almost all of the staff here (myself excluded) hated her for being annoying and they all complained and the owner agreed and they fired her. She’s 66 years old. Worst case of workplace bullying I’ve ever seen.
Good news is I heard she’s going to the labor board now.
**EDIT:** *Thank you so much for the award. Years on reddit and this is my first one.*.
Image source: itsjehmun
#41
A guy who was not particularly bright had bad money management skills and had a habit of blowing his paychecks pretty quickly. Fine, whatever. I suspect he got up to some funny business with his bank too, because he started complaining they were holding his checks.
Then he gets the brilliant idea to get a buddy of his to deposit *his* paycheck (this was back when endorsing your check over to someone else was still more or less accepted by banks) and then withdraw the money.
Only – oopsieshit! – *that* check gets held for a bit. (but would’ve been less than his own bank, so… win?)
Does our man suck it up and deal?
No, he does not.
He gets the brilliant idea to tell our boss (small company, so we all had the same boss) he *lost the check*.
The owner of the company overhears this, smells something sketchy going on, and says, “if you cash that check and we find out the other one also got cashed, you’re fired.”
And that was when the balloon went up and Mr. Genius With Check Cashing did, indeed, get fired.
[ While the cause for firing was legit, I feel like this was so self-inflicted it comes around to being one of the worst reasons to have to fire someone. ].
Image source: alvarkresh
#42
We had this driver that would walk around with his hat backwards while he was in the loading area. It was stupid as hell but backwards hat was technically a uniform standard violation and we were due for an inspection. We also had a newly hired inspector that was trying to make a mark I guess but she was really just playing games with the people trying to make the business money (ie she would outright tell the manager of the last location she was at where she was going next, so that location would go into high alert and then she wouldn’t actually hit that location for two weeks), I genuinely hate the woman, but she had us all stressed to the max at this point.
Anyways, we just asked the guy that while he is at location, wear your hat normal, the second you leave on your route you can do whatever the hell you want. Hell I even had a driver that would change his hat out for a steelers beanie the second he left the lot and that was 100% fine. But he just couldn’t do it, and we all worked with him on it for weeks, so I fired a 40 year old man for wearing his hat like an a*****e.
Image source: Warden_of_rivia
#43
Not HR but a girl I used to work with got fired for being very unhygienic. She smelled really bad, didn’t shower regularly, and would do things at her cubical that was not normal. Like clipping her toe nails and hawking luggies in the trash bin.
After many conversations and not changing they eventually walked her out.
Image source: LusciousHam
#44
Had to fire a guy because I caught him jumping on the back of a forklift in operation, riding around on it for fun? Even when the forklift operator was telling him to get off. Just after I had previously warned him about his complacency around forklifts and ironically, my first warning came only a month earlier when a young local man d**d in a horrific forklift accident at another local business.
I’m a pretty laid back and calm when it comes to managing people, will show grace, understanding and use mistakes as teaching opportunities, but when it comes to safety, this type of behaviour absolutely sends me and will get me red with anger.
Image source: SolarAU
#45
Not HR but worked as an attorney for a municipal Union. They fired an employee for clocking in literally 5 seconds too late (he admittedly had been warned not to clock in late). We took that to arbitration and won. Another time an employee was fired for sick time a***e. He took two weeks off after an on the job heart attack. We won that it arbitration as well.
It’s a good reason why we should all unionize. These guys would have been fired with no recourse if they weren’t unionized.
Image source: Ziplockmoneybags
#46
Not HR but a company I worked at had to fire a guy because he kept p****g on the keyboard of someone he didn’t like. It took months to find out.
Image source: Accomplished-Ad3250
#47
I worked at a European subsidiary of a Japanese company. My boss SVP) was a nightmare. He was a bully and terrible to work for. One day I was forlornly looking out of the office window into the carpark, which gave me a view of the main entrance. I saw a police car there, which I thought was unusual, but then I saw my boss being taken out in hand cuffs and put into said police car. I was shocked. He was never seen again at the company. Quite a thing for a senior manager!
Image source: DrWYSIWYG
#48
Not HR, but I had to work with them on this one. I’m in IT, and this happened in my first year on the job.
We had an older gentleman, at least in his 60s, who would spend his lunch hours at his desk, browsing websites with little boys in their underwear or speedos.
HR called him into their office and while he was there, I had to confiscate his PC. We then pulled the drive and kept it in case there was ever a lawsuit for wrongful termination, or against him and any evidence might be needed.
I found out later that this behavior had been brought up to his manager by several coworkers and the manager didn’t act on it. So the coworkers went straight to HR. That manager was removed from his position not long after the employee was terminated.
That was 13+ years ago and we only recently destroyed that hard drive during an office relocation.
Image source: hidperf
#49
2013-2014 IBM: this was the era of the “Stock Price 2X by 2010, Stock Price 4X by 2020” promise. Company was ruthlessly pruning staff, for eleven quarters in a row, so as to make its numbers and preserve the “illusion of quantitative prosperity.”
Newest staff-cutting mandates went out, with particular focus on those employees with 27-28-year seniority, who were highly paid, and who were coming dangerously close to pension maturity (technically 30 years, various “vacation bridges” were permitted at 29 or 29.5 years).
HR was of course aware that purely targeting a single age/class demographic would result in legal difficulties, so the formula was mixed up (some younger/middles thrown in with the 27-28-year seniors, a number of gender + ethnicity candidates added for optics), **and managers started picking through old records, such as expense reports, so as to retroactively change employees’ prior-year reviews from “2” (average performer) to “3” (warning of low performance)**, so that a termination could occur in the coming year, without much risk.
There was, predictably, a class-action legal reprisal, and it went on for about a year, but didn’t result in much. That was probably the dirtiest corporate trick I’ve seen to date, and it permanently changed my view of how these institutions operate.
Image source: sskoog
#50
One of the warehouse guys at my first job broke his leg and was supposed to be out for eight weeks. He was only there for a few months and the company wanted to get rid of him anyway. One of the geniuses in HR realized that the family medical leave act doesn’t apply if you’ve worked there less than a year and that set things in motion for an easy fire.
They told him that he could take all his PTO and come back to work in three weeks, knowing full well that he couldn’t physically do that. At the end of the three weeks, they let him go, 100% legally.
I was already looking for a new job but that made me look harder.
Image source: goat_penis_souffle
#51
Worked at a summer camp and had several under minors working (legal age to work is 16). Part of our mission as an organization was if an employee was a minor we would have their parent sit in during disciplinary action – it made our lives harder but generally was better development for the kids and also covered us better if there was an adult in the room.
Found out one of these teenage staff said some s******y harassing things to another staff member, which is instant termination. Dad came in ready to go to war with us about how his kid would never. I started the meeting and read several quotes word-for-word that was reported directly to us by multiple witnesses. You could see the kids face turn (not a great poker face) and one look at dad you could see his expression change to “oh s**t, yeah I can see him saying that”. Didn’t fight the termination, and the dad told the kid they would be “having some serious words and consequences for future jobs” as they left.
Image source: Rorako
#52
At one point I was working for a company that made large industrial equipment. It was a small company, not many employees, no HR, so it was the boss who did the firing but as the fastest typist of the two admin staff, I was taking minutes of the meeting. Yay? Anyway, the shop floor had a new piece of equipment that the supervising engineer had trained externally to use. He was then the only person using it for a month to get used to it and improve his own skills, so that when the time came to train the rest of the shop floor staff, he knew how to do that. Well, one of the shop floor guys wasn’t too eager to learn new tech; he’d previously told me to f**k off directly to my face when I’d asked him, very politely, for an email address as we’d changed our payroll system and payslips would now be email rather than paper.
Anyway, back to the incident with the supervising engineer and the new equipment. Our shop floor guy didn’t want to learn to use it, even though it was functionally similar to previous equipment he’d used happily, just with more bells and whistles. He refused the training, claiming that the supervising engineer was “barely even 20” and “not competent” to train him. (Engineer was 28, had a degree he’d obtained while working there, and had been there for a decade, twice as long as shop floor guy).
So the meeting I was in was a disciplinary-short-of-firing, last chance sort of thing, initially, but shop floor guy went OFF about supervising engineer’s youth, lack of competence, called him controlling, called him all sorts of names. At one point I stopped typing for about 5 seconds as I tried to parse what he was saying in minutes language (you don’t write this stuff word for word, you say something like “SF claimed SE lacked expertise”), and he started shouting at me about covering it all up because I wasn’t typing. It got worse from there.
Anyway by the end of the meeting he was fired.
Image source: chilari
#53
I worked for Barclays bank in their head office as a Business Analyst. One of my co-workers signed my name on a bunch of reports that were never sent – She got fired and I got put on a “Performance improvement plan” which effectively ended my career at Barclays as you would be graded very low at appraisal time. Not so long after that redundancies came around and I was let go, because someone forged my signature!
Image source: Dorsetgoat
#54
I work in IT and one of the termination reports that was sent to me had accidentally included the HR termination form with it. I read the report and a guy at one of our plant locations who worked third shift was not able to be located after he was supposedly going on a bathroom break.
After 20 minutes the manager went looking for him and found him sleeping in his car. When the manager told him to just go home for the night and that he was going to be disciplined, the guy got out of the car and shoved the manager as hard as he could, resulting in the manager hitting her head pretty hard on the ground.
Image source: HoboJerkdown901
#55
Not HR but an assistant manager for a fast food place. We offered catering that was platters of food worth about $150-$200 each. Had another AM that was closing that night get a scam call asking them to ring up a number of platters and then refund them to “check our system.” It ended up being over $3,000 of refunded orders she got scammed out off. I came in that next morning say all the receipts for it. She tried to explain it and I knew it was bs. I just pretended to be too tired to understand it and walked out as I didn’t want any parts of it. She had worked for the company for 10 years and new better. I was only there a half a year.
The GM asked me about it the next day and I told him straight up she messed up and that I didn’t really have a hand in it. She was fired that same week. Honestly none of us other managers could figure out how she could fall for it so the rumor was that it was her girlfriend on the other side making the call. I personally think she was just to high from w**d to think clearly.
The messed up part was that every big manager meeting we went to after that with all the other stores, that situation was used as an example when scam calls came up in the presentation. It was embarrassing knowing that came out of our store.
Image source: Low_Environment_9069
#56
My uncle worked for Nortel. His favorite story was black Friday. Normal business day and all the sudden the fire alarm goes off and everybody has to evacuate. After the evacuation is complete, people are noticing that none of the standard fire procedures are being followed. Rather, an influx of security and police both showed up out of nowhere.
About 5 minutes after this human resources gets on a bullhorn and loudly tells everyone the current status, all doors have been locked and security and police will allow individual access back to the building, 1 by 1 — if your swipe card works you have a job. If not your stuff will be mailed to you.
Ever since then, I make sure to bring my wallet/keys/steal a box of pens anytime there is a fire drill.
Image source: thebigshoe247
#57
When i was working at a construction company, we had a guy charge a butterfinger to the company at Lowes and swore up and down he paid for it with his own money and that Lowes must’ve charged us twice. The dummy even swore on his kid’s life that he paid for it. The store’s LP showed us overhead video footage that he never went in his wallet and just gave PO number. Fired.
Image source: syrupeatingcontestan
#58
Not HR but saw a co-worker finally fired after so many idiotic things.
He got written up when he had a work trip to Arizona, we were in the SE. He was gone a week and the local employees mentioned that they hadn’t seen Rod, they thought he was coming to do some work. He was in finance. Turned out he spent like 4 hours on site after hours and spent the rest of the week visiting his kid (divorced) and just screwing around. Take PTO or a long weekend man, don’t just skip out.
He got fired when his boss came in one Monday and had a voice mail from Rod stating he would be “out of contact” for 2 weeks. No advance notice, just out of contact. Turns out he had been on a business trip to Michigan previously and gotten a DUI. He had to return at a later date and spend 2 weeks in jail as part of his sentence.
There were so many other things he did that we just shook our heads at. Just waiting for another big dumb event.
Image source: nebelhund
#59
I manage HR for a very large global engineering and construction company. So many ridiculous things happen. A few come to mind – about 10 years ago we were building tanks for an energy company in Baytown and one of the foreman left a bag of d***s in a company truck. Dude was so high he came and filed a compliant with the onsite HR for theft. That SOMEONE stole his property. When asked what property he wrote “my h****n” on the form. He was fired and then arrested.
Another one more recently was our communications manager (female) was having an affair with someone on the HR team (also female). She got in trouble and fired because she sent a n**e image of herself to the HR affair partner on teams. The hr person submitted her resignation knowing they’d both be fired since an investigation would kickoff and during IT discovery we’d find s*****g type messages on teams that led to the photo being sent.
Image source: Dangerous_Purpose645
#60
Worked in HR for a few years. Worst one was an employee who submitted fake bereavement paperwork to get time off. Turned out the same relative had apparently “died” three separate times. That was an awkward termination meeting.
Image source: Traditional-Try5174
#61
I’m a “recent” senior partner at one of the MBB consulting firms and while HR handles the details, Partners give the news. In my first few months, had an interesting one. A guy (remember he’s making $200k+ a year), was based out of Connecticut but on a project in Boston. He was claiming mileage expenses saying he drove, but booking a flight out of his own pocket – pocketing the difference. Our expense team caught him since he wasn’t expensing parking at the hotel or client site. .
Image source: FloridaGolferHappy
#62
Not HR, during the down turn in 2009, HR used the building I worked at to lay off about 80 people over a three day period. The last day, double security with off duty police was used to lay off problematic individuals that were deemed possible dangers. The HR girl was a wreck by the end of the process. Her manager showed up before she was finished and sat in on the last two individuals. The manager then terminated the poor girl as a last act of “s***w you”.
Image source: Grendal54
#63
He burned the garlic while trying to make a pasta saus four times in a row while cooking with the chef, who came down from the office to check if the guy was really bad like we all said to him. Only time in my life I saw someone fired on the spot (legal in the trial period).
Image source: islanda_1973
#64
I’m not HR, and they didn’t wind up getting fired thanks to being recently unionized, but my last job attempted to layoff the entire night production crew of over 20 people (about 10% of our staff). My manager told me about the company’s original plan, and I had to explain to him that the union requires anyone who is laid off to get first right of refusal to any new job openings. Meaning that HR would have to extend an offer to a couple of dozen people for every single hire they wanted to make. Apparently nobody in the company had a clue before they started announcing this plan, and HR had to review the contract with them. Which happened with pretty much everything because upper management had zero respect for the union.
Anyway, they next tried offering a severance pay of a couple weeks’ salary to anyone who willingly resigned. Exactly zero people took that offer. 2 weeks’ pay or have a job for the foreseeable future? Hmmm, tough call! They all got moved to day crew or took a job in another department.
Image source: NativeMasshole
#65
Another not HR story. Out of college I worked for a mail fulfillment company. There was this young, pretty woman who worked there who was always dressed like she was going clubbing. She must have misunderstood the industry because she was fired for male fulfillment; she was getting paid to do intimate things to guys during her lunch break.
Image source: aDirtyMartini
#66
Work in HR, but this was my job in college in the service industry.
Co-worker got drunk after his shift on the rooftop bar and p**d off it when other customers were around. He cause a lot of issues, but that was the last straw.
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#67
Worked in home health. Had a provider claim she did a home visit. The patient had d**d. She didn’t know that. We found out because another coworker who knew the patient happened to see the clinical note.
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#68
When the head of IT Security is arrested at work and walked out in front of the entire office in handcuffs, you don’t even want to know what dude was up to.
Image source: ekimlive
#69
Fired her from software support help desk for being rude to clients. She was an entitled jerk to work with too. She files for unemployment and as her manager I had to participate in a conference call hearing with her and a judge about her firing.
After being sworn in, the first thing the judge does is ask everyone if the are alone and not on speakerphone. She says yes, the judge tells her it sounds like she is on speaker and she denies again and it’s getting heated and finally she admits she is and gets off speaker. You can tell the judge is pissed and it’s not a good start for her.
Judge then says first order of biz is why she did not attend her initial appearance or fill out the basic X and Y that she was required to do for her unemployment hearing. She began alternately arguing that he had and then making up excuses why she did not and was using her rude tone with the judge.
Judge stopped arguing, there was about 7 seconds of silence and then she immediately ruled against her, end of hearing. I never even got to say a word besides swearing to tell the truth.
Image source: paul_stanley_armada
#70
Not HR, but ran a group in an academic setting. Hosted a 16 year old and a non-traditional 34 year old student as RAs one summer. 34-year old hit on the 16-year old. I fired him the day I found out. He asked straight-up if I thought this would make it harder for him to get a job in the same academic group in the future.
“Yes. Yes, it probably will.”
(a*****e stalked the 16-year old when they started school, because said a*****e also managed to get admitted the same year. but then got trespassed for a couple of years. jfc, what a nimrod.).
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#71
I always feel bad about this one dude who I managed. It was like June of that year and he’d already burned through all of his sick/vacation days *and more*. I wasn’t even a hardass about PTO back at that job. We had to keep track of it manually, so I just had a little Excel spreadsheet and only ever checked it if someone was being egregious about calling out.
I sat this dude down with HR to ask what was going on and give him his options if he needed to take medical leave or something. He says no, insists that he just kept on getting sick, so we work out a plan where he’s going to cover some weekend shifts to make up the extra days that he’d called out.
Then the first weekend comes that he’s supposed to work an extra shift and he proceeds to no call/no show. Had to let him go that following Monday.
Nice guy but you can’t be unreliable like that… and tbh, part of me wonders if maybe it wasn’t a d**g issue.
Image source: Hrekires
#72
Had a very aspirational senior level manager that loved to serve on boards and committees to build his resume. He was up for election for a particular board that our agency had an org-level membership to. He learned that many of the staff didn’t regularly check their membership and that the org used generic credentials to access resources, including voting for the board. He used this knowledge to log in as other staff and stuff the ballot so he could serve on the board. The board got wise to it, and notified our CEO. I’ve never seen such a buttoned up professional turn into a stammering teenager as quickly as he did when confronted about it with evidence.
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#73
I got a call one day from a remote site that they had sent one my direct reports home for “hostile behavior”. He threw a chair into a wall so hard the legs went all the way through the dry wall into the next office. Me and the site GM started looking at surveillance video of the equipment storage space it happened in and the camera was off. We went back over a week to see the employee unplug the camera. Well that’s a bad sign. So we went back a couple more days to see him snorting d***s off a counter in the storage room.
It totally explains why he really got through his workload in the afternoon and was consistently a top performer in the metrics. But yeah we can’t have people doing d***s like that in the office. We would have never known except he got a bad batch.
Image source: punksmurph
#74
I run a small construction company in London. The building industry is full of rogues, some loveable some not so. Its usually the lower ranked members of the team that are the biggest pain in the a**e. Had to sack one for smoking ket on a landscaping job in a £3.5m house. Had one caught rifling through the customers drawers and cupboards because he thought she had left the house. Had a painter that tried to book an extra half a days work but was stupid enough to go to pick his kids up at the same school my nephew was at. Funny thing with that is he was on for a bonus on that job he was on and f****d it for half days money. Had my brother’s brother-in-law taking pictures of our jobs and used them to get flyers printed to promote his private work. He actually had the balls to show me the leaflets. “They’re your jobs, but its my work” was his reasoning. Which I get, but be a bit subtle about it.
Yeah, all fun and games.
Image source: fuckmyoldboots
#75
I was an office admin for a small hvac/plumbing company, and I basically did everything so I was as close to HR as it was gonna get. We would hire some real characters from time to time… idk what it is about those tradesmen but they’re either wholesome family men or absolute menaces, no in between.
My most memorable firing was because the guy was using his work phone like it was his own personal cell phone, so it had all of his dirty laundry in there for me to find when I was doing an update on it. I discovered that he’d been making a habit of taking our work van to the bar his daughter worked at to take hits of her w**d pen before going on jobs. I also found photos of him posing in women’s lingerie and a video of him receiving a b*****b. All on a work phone! I am still traumatized lol.
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#76
We had a guy who was super professional and good worker, charming, nice to work with, no red flags. After his training, he asked to stay after his hours because he was going to college online and wanted to use his work computer to study – we said yes because he was such a great employee. So for weeks he would sit in the back office working after hours, he was always the last to leave late at night.
One day I came in and was told he’d been let go, I was surprised, he was everyone’s favourite. Turns out the reason he was staying late was not to study, but to run a p**n website empire.
He did not quietly, he started stalking us and that was terrifying. The company acted though so that didn’t last long.
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#77
While working in IT – P**n on work laptops – it was so endemic the company sent group wide emails out 5 times and only then were the service desk allowed to just block the sites (board didn’t listen to IT very often).
In 2 separate places guys have been caught j*****g off at work too, one was in a supermarket store cupboard, the stock in there was just sold as normal….
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#78
Worked at a factory that had a batch of new hires go through orientation and afterward while HR was giving them the floor tour showing them where the cafeteria, bathrooms, and work areas would be, one of the new guys taking the tour was walking around watching straight up hardcore p**n on his phone with the volume on. Our HR rep was absolutely dumbfounded at his behavior, walked him to security, and terminated him immediately.
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#79
Had a new trainee (like maybe a week on the job) not show up to work. Not unusual.
I tried to call and text but nothing. Chalked it up to either quitting or something.
Around 10 am, I get a knock on my office door from the police. My employee had been arrested when they broke up a s*x ring operation at a massage parlor.
I thought that was the craziest part. Nope, the police were there because another employee was doing s*x work as a side hustle and she’s the one who told the newbie about the place. He ratted her out.
Lost two employees that day.
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#80
Not hr but one of our hr was let go because of incompetence. She was supposed to hire developers and managers noticed only incompetent people made it to manager interviews. After rewatching the tapes of initial interviews with hr, it was noticed that she rejected all geeks, even slightly introverted people even though some of them were programming gods. It was found out she lied on her cv and didn’t have any experience in recruiting technical people. .
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#81
Not HR but a PM and I used to have this cyber engineer who had a god complex and was a pathological liar. Still he’d do his tickets and complete all his work but was just absolutely miserable to work with. Well one day he accidentally infected our entire test system with a virus (that’s the vanilla version, I won’t get into details) because he was contacted by a “recruiter” about a new opportunity and when the recruiter sent him a link to apply it mysteriously wouldn’t work on his home system, so he emailed it to his work account and opened it on company systems. We had to get a 3 letter agency involved and last I was told he was not cooperating with the investigation so not sure where it landed.
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#82
I’ve had an employee out of work for 9 months now for “a medical procedure.” Theyre out of FMLA time, had no PTO going into it because they called out three days per pay period before hand. They have a nasty attitude, don’t do their job, and everyone else I work with has come to me and said how much nicer it is without this person around. We’ve had to restructure everyone’s schedules around their absence and because they still “occupy the position” we can’t hire extra help. I was just promoted to
HR has been useless. Won’t help us move forwards with letting them go, all theyve done is had her management write out on paper that we denied her extension request so if and when she returns she’s just gonna be even more sour than she was before. S**t s***s.
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#83
I’m not HR…but the suddenly fired our IT tech. Come to find out he was hosting a white supremacist website from the company server. The funny thing is I went to a store nearby that day, stepped out of the car and saw a bunch of business cards with his name all over the parking lot. LOL.
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#84
Not sure what you mean by worst, but when I worked in an HR department this was an interesting one:
Basically we were a charity and one of the support workers was using a service users laptop while caring for him. Shouldn’t have been doing that as it wasn’t hers, but the fact they were doing it to have some very in depth and explicit cyber s*x on MSN was a shocker. We had to have the full transcripts and everything. I can only imagine how embarassed the woman must have been once she knew she was caught.
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#85
Working for Home Health Care start up and taking part in an investigation of a hha writing checks to herself and cashing them – close to $5OK stolen— HHA denied it but she was caught in by the ATM cameras depositing the checks — mind you the client was bed ridden on hospice and couldn’t write.
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#86
I’m not in HR, but my roommate is in the funeral industry. One of their drivers who would go to familys’ homes and pick up bodies had a drinking problem. One night he turned up drunk, picked up someone at an apartment, had the body in the van, and passed out in the driver’s seat in the parking lot to sleep it off.
The family member he’d just seen in the apartment caught him and called the funeral home. It was a big, big deal, that guy was fired straight into orbit.
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#87
We had a 15 minute break and I fell asleep for a few seconds because I finally got to sit down. They said this was a “bad look” even though I was on a break. I told them I had sleep apnea and the VA hadn’t delivered my cpap machine yet. They told me to go home and wait to be called back, but they ghosted me after that. I hadn’t actually done anything wrong on the job though.
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