Firing for cause is one thing, but canning someone over minutia is another. Some bosses are on a power trip, and getting unemployment can become impossible if they're out to get you.
slayer19901 asked: What is the stupidest thing that someone has been fired for in your workplace?
Submissions have been edited for clarity, context, and profanity.
10. Time is money, or something.
Recently there was a married couple fired for clocking each other in/time card fraud. I've also had to let people go for avoiding work.
Used to work at a McD's. Got the Restaurant Manager 'asked to resign' when I sent information through to the Area Manager as to how the RM's wife suddenly had more hours on her sheet than what I had seen when doing end of day for my closing shift, for times she hadn't been working.
RM had been doing the sneaky for a while, I only noticed it because for whatever reason it was last day of the pay week and I was held up after doing EoD by a worker for a 10 minute discussion. I re-opened the end of day stuff to verify the hours he had worked for the week only to discover the total for the day had changed. RM was doing it remotely after thinking we had finished for the day.
9. It's just business.
My company does CSR work. We had a lady take offense to a consumers complaint. She then drove to the consumers home after work hours to fight them.
Hey, what the employee does when they aren't at work is their own business!
(please tell me the consumer won the fight)
Not gonna lie, I laughed like hell at this. I mean, no, it's terrible, should never happen, but holy crap it's hilarious! Just imagining a CSR turning up, jumping up and down piping 'Fite meeeee!'
8. Seems unfair but okay.
My twin brother and I used to work for the same company. My twin got into an altercation with a client, and although the matter was resolved, that client had enough clout with the manager that he demanded my twin be let go. And because we were twins and happened to look enough alike, I was also let go.
That's the best case I've ever heard for milking every cent from unemployment ever.
7. Those little charges add up.
I had to fire a guy from my gas station about 5 years ago. He worked the night shift and was great for over a year. He was 35ish recovering alcoholic. One day he started playing some game on his phone and it quickly became a problem. He wouldn't do anything else, not even look at the customers he was ringing up. I told him countless times. I need you to focus on customers, if the store is empty then play on your darn phone!! Anyways he couldn't, so I let him go. A few days later his mother comes to me crying. Turns out she was in the hospital for the past month and he had ranked up $50,000 in credit card debt on Clash of Clans. CLASH OF CLANS!! He spent $50,000 just to get fired.
How does a dude that works at a gas station have 50k of credit?
It was his moms credit card. She had to sell her truck just to pay it off. It was a while ago but I think it was split between multiple cards. Also she had a successful commercial lawn mowing business so she was financially okay.
She knew enough not to have him working for her.
6. Well done.
Someone sent an anonymous email to our client's VP complaining that their agent was rude to our agent.
Our company decided that our agent was the person who sent the email. There's no way in hell she sent the email. She's always been super polite, worked there for over a year, never hint of trouble.
She was fired.
The person who was far more likely to have sent the email remained a troublemaker for months. Finally, when she was being corrected, again she stood up and yelled the classic line, "You can't fire me, I quit!"
And then we had no one in that position.
5. When you totally fail at anonymity.
Dude hated his workmate, who happened to be in the army reserves at the time. Dude writes an anonymous email to the army stating that his workmate was mentally unfit for the army. Dude signs of the email as anonymous however the email address was his full name @ his ISP. Dude got fired shortly after for bullying.
That's going to be difficult to explain to the family, hahaha.
4. Toxic work environment.
Me and my former coworker worked at a semi-large law firm doing basically paralegal work in a very specific field. This firm was bankrupt and was going to close shortly after we were both hired there, so I jumped ship to another, much smaller firm that specialized in the exact same field.
I referred my friend for a job at the second firm because he was super qualified, hardworking, and a genuinely nice guy. I knew his gig at the first firm was coming to an end because that office was closing, so I thought it was a good fit.
My boss at the second firm was a bit of control freak, especially about time, and fired my friend days after hiring him for being approximately 5 minutes late on his second day. He was late because there was a car fire on the bridge he was driving on (only 2 bridges he could use anyhow), and my boss didn't even see him that day, just told one of the managers to escort my friend back to his car. I had to get his personal belongings from his desk and give them back to him later. Utter BS.
Btw that office was super understaffed and undertrained. 🤷🏻♀️ we really needed a trained person at the time, and I ended up quitting bc the work-life balance was horrible.
Fires an important asset to the company over being 5 minutes late (with a legitimate reason as well)... how do people that stupid even end up in positions that high? HOW!?
3. Accidents happen, but being a jerk is intentional.
At my old job, an IT guy and his boss were setting up a new cubicle. The IT guy dropped a monitor and it was destroyed. Out of nowhere, he went into this rant at his boss about how he wasn't going to pay for this and included all kinds of curse words. The manager just stood there stone faced, waited for him to finish and said something like "legally, we can't make you pay for that since it was an honest mistake, but since you just cussed me out, you're fired"
I've dropped, and destroyed, about $5k in electronics in the four-ish or so years I've been working at my company. Our repair techs love me because I just tell that that I f*cked up, exactly how I f*cked up, and then we all just move on with our lives.
These same repair guys build strong cases for firing other techs who damage stuff because the other techs never admit to it.
2. That's not how hemp works (unfortunately).
Not me but a friend of mine was fired from her job for having hemp lotion. No joke, the owner of the cafe was convinced it made her high on the job. That guy was weird AF.
1. Greedy and on a power trip.
I worked for a small consultancy. During my first week I discovered that no one had been there for more than a year save for senior management. It was unsettling to hear especially since they claimed that the company was nearly 15 years old. In the second week there I began to understand why no one lasted longer than a year. The wife of the CEO decided, whenever it suited her, that she could change anyone's job title from developer to dish washer at the drop of a hat. One of the ladies that had started with me refused and she was easily let go.
The cleaning lady was fired because she didn't smile enough. A guy was fired for having had his laptop stolen out of his car, another for spilling coffee on the laptop and another was almost fired because his wife went on a Facebook rant about how unfair the company was for threatening to fire him from work if he did not check himself out of hospital and come back to work. They'd cited that his stay at hospital was purely observational and not because his life was in danger.
This place was and probably still is the worst place that any human being could ever work. I went back to my previous employer after just 3 months because the constant threat of being fired in conjunction with the horrendous working conditions were too much for me.
I will never understand employers who fire the people who are doing the best they can to make their money for them.
Control freaks. They like asserting power over other people they deem inferior, even if it's for no real reason.
